Ancient human relatives ran on two legs, like modern humans, but at a much slower pace, suggest 3D computer simulations of Australopithecus afarensis1 ' a small hominin that lived more than three million years ago. The analysis offers a detailed snapshot of the hominin's running speed and the muscular adaptations that enabled modern humans to run long distances, says Herman Pontzer, an evolutionary anthropologist at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina. 'It's a very thorough approach,' he says. The findings were published this week in Current Biology. A. afarensis walked upright on two legs, making its fossils a favourite for researchers looking to unpick how bipedalism evolved in the human lineage. But few studies have explored the hominin's running ability because it requires more than studying fossilized footprints and bones, says study co-author Karl Bates, an evolutionary biomechanics researcher at the University of Liverpool, UK. Bates and his colleagues created a 3D digital model of the 'Lucy' skeleton ' a near-complete 3.2-million-year-old A. afarensis specimen discovered in Ethiopia half a century ago. They used the muscular features of modern apes and the surface area of Lucy's bones to estimate the ancient hominin's muscle mass. The researchers then used a simulator to make their Lucy model 'run' and compared its performance with that of a digital model of a modern human....
Mention the FBI, and many older Americans will likely think of a time when the agency was run by J. Edgar Hoover, who spent much of his nearly half-century tenure at the agency harassing political dissidents and abusing his power. But as former FBI counterterrorism expert Javed Ali explains, the role of both the FBI and its leader have dramatically shifted over time. The Conversation's politics editor Naomi Schalit asked Ali, who now teaches courses in national security and intelligence at the University of Michigan, to explain just what a modern FBI director does as President-elect Donald Trump aims to name his own director to replace current FBI head Christopher Wray, whom Trump appointed in 2017. Wray has said he will resign in January 2025. Javed Ali: The FBI began as the country's lead federal criminal investigative agency in 1909, then named the Bureau of Investigation, or BOI. Previously, organizations like the Secret Service and the U.S. Marshall's Service had responsibility for investigating federal crimes, but the introduction of the BOI began the tenure for what became the Federal Bureau of Investigation in 1935 to now....
AI developers are rapidly picking the Internet clean to train large language models such as those behind ChatGPT. Here's how they are trying to get around the problem....
For instance, VC firm Andreessen Horowitz, and in particular co-founder Marc Andreessen, is repeatedly being mentioned. He, along with Antonio Gracias and Joe Lonsdale, are reportedly being asked to help with Musk's advisory panel, the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, which is examining ways to overcome the technical challenges of collecting data about federal programs, reported the Washington Post on Sunday. Gracias is co-founder of Valor Equity Partners, which has done well backing Musk companies over the years, including SpaceX and Tesla (the latter where he was on the board of directors from 2007 to 2021). Lonsdale is co-founder of VC firm 8VC and an active backer of defense tech like Anduril and other government tech, like financial software provider OpenGov. Lonsdale worked under billionaire VC Peter Thiel and helped co-found Palantir. Andreessen Horowitz has been a big-time investor in SpaceX since around 2022 and buys more stock as it can, TechCrunch previously reported, and Andreessen has been a vocal supporter of Musk....
