Over the past couple years, China has constructed artificial islands on reefs in the South China Sea, and populated them with a military barracks, a lookout tower, and even a runway. In January, the country landed a civilian plane at Fiery Cross Reef. In April, they turned on a lighthouse built at the northeast side of Subi Reef. But China isn’t only interested in building up from the sea – it’s also planning construction of a massive sea lab some 10,000 feet underwater, reports Bloomberg.
Although the project ranked second in China’s list of the top 100 science and technology priorities, the country has remained characteristically tight-lipped about its funding and timeline. However, Bloomberg reviewed a recent presentation by the Science Ministry that suggested the government was accelerating its plans.
Officially, the lab will be designed to help China search for minerals beneath the sea floor. “The deep sea contains treasures that remain undiscovered and undeveloped, and in order to obtain these treasures we have to control key technologies in getting into the deep sea, discovering the deep sea, and developing the deep sea,” President Xi Jinping said in May at a national science conference.
But tensions and territorial disputes surrounding the artificial islands have made some speculate about China’s true intentions. In its report, Bloomberg suggests that the underwater lab “may also serve a military purpose in the disputed waters.”
In fact, even Chinese Academy of Social Sciences’ senior researcher for Southeast Asian affairs, Xu Liping, echoed this sentiment. Xu told International Business Times that the underwater station was not intended as an affront to any nation or region. “China’s project will be mainly for civil use,” he added, “but we can’t rule out it will carry some military functions…Many countries in the world have been researching these kind of deep water projects and China is just one of those nations.”
Google has been finding more ways to make Gemini a part of your daily routine, from putting together playlists to ordering groceries through your favorite apps. Now it's expanding those capabilities to more services, with Google Search joining in, too.
The company has announced a new Connected Apps Platform that makes it easier for developers to bring their services to both Gemini and Search. Alongside this, Google is adding new partners to its growing lineup, bringing more of the apps people already use into its AI ecosystem.
In the broad context of AI and its perceived harms, health and medical risks often pop up in the conversation. The warnings even come from frontier AI labs, such as ChatGPT-maker OpenAI and Anthropic, both of which have warned about misusing AI to cook up bioweapons. Security experts have already spotted a few such incidents in the wild, especially with the usage of AI models without any solid guardrails.
Well, it appears that the risks run deeper. As per an analysis appearing in the British Medical Journal (BMJ), AI bots are now being deployed to influence public policies governing health risks to citizens. In this instance, an attempt was made using AI bots to thwart regulations that aim to restrict the sale of disposable vapes, all while disguising the manipulation efforts as a response from real humans.
What if checking your drinking water for dangerous chemicals were as simple as plugging a tiny gadget into your smartphone? Researchers in Japan have developed a compact sensor that could make that possible, potentially bringing sophisticated water contamination testing out of expensive laboratories and into people's hands.
Scientists at the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology (OIST) have created a portable device capable of detecting extremely low concentrations of PFAS, commonly known as "forever chemicals." The findings were published in the journal Biosensors and Bioelectronics, which demonstrate how an inexpensive sensor and a smartphone could make identifying potentially harmful chemicals in water a lot easier.