Good morning! This is your daily ☕️ Techpresso.
In today's Techpresso:
🍄 Engineers gave a mushroom a robot body and let it run wild
📉 Over 25% of advertisers planning to reduce spending on X
📚 Internet Archive loses court appeal in fight over online lending library
⚖️ Nvidia denies DOJ antitrust investigation claims
🛍️ US safety regulators say it’s time to investigate Shein and Temu
🎁 + 7 other news you might like
🔮 + 6 handpicked research papers and tools
🍄 Engineers gave a mushroom a robot body and let it run wildLINK
Researchers from Cornell University and the University of Florence used the king oyster mushroom's root-like structure (mycelium) to control robotic vehicles by converting its natural electrical signals into commands that guide the robots' movements. The team successfully demonstrated how the mushroom's natural signals, triggered by stimuli like UV light, could guide the movement of robots, creating a biohybrid system that responds to environmental cues. This innovation suggests potential future applications in agriculture and environmental monitoring, where fungal networks could help automate responses to various environmental cues.
📉 Over 25% of advertisers planning to reduce spending on XLINK
A Kantar report reveals that 26 percent of marketers plan to reduce their advertising expenditure on X next year due to historically low trust levels.
The study, involving 18,000 consumers and 1,000 marketers worldwide, underscores a decline in X's advertising business since Elon Musk's acquisition of the company.
Only 4 percent of advertisers consider X safe for brands, as many have halted or minimized spending amid concerns about hate speech and other negative content.
📚 Internet Archive loses court appeal in fight over online lending libraryLINK
The Internet Archive lost its appeal to lend scanned ebooks without publisher approval, as the Second Circuit Court of Appeals stated that doing so would deprive creators of compensation and reduce the incentive to create new works.
Four major publishers sued the Internet Archive in 2020, claiming its Open Library constitutes "willful digital piracy" and that the expanded National Emergency Library project triggered the lawsuit.
The court acknowledged both the benefits of increased access to creative works and the authors' rights to compensation, ultimately siding with publishers and upholding the balance mandated by the Copyright Act.
⚖️ Nvidia denies DOJ antitrust investigation claimsLINK
Nvidia stated it has not received a subpoena from the U.S. Department of Justice concerning an ongoing antitrust investigation, as confirmed in a statement to Bloomberg.
A Nvidia representative emphasized that the company wins on merit and is ready to respond to any inquiries from regulators about their business practices.
Despite reports of subpoenas, Nvidia clarified that it received civil investigative requests instead, which are often mistaken for subpoenas, according to Bloomberg.
🛍️ US safety regulators say it’s time to investigate Shein and TemuLINK
US safety regulators are urging the Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) to investigate Shein and Temu due to concerns about hazardous products, particularly baby and toddler items.
Commissioners Peter Feldman and Douglas Dziak suggest examining how Shein and Temu comply with the Consumer Product Safety Act and evaluating the role of Chinese manufacturers in producing these goods.
As Shein and Temu's popularity grows, government officials are paying attention to safety issues, with the EU enforcing strict regulations and Arkansas suing Temu over its app's extensive data access.
Other news you might like
Bill Gates has a good feeling about AI.LINK
Anthropic launches Claude Enterprise Plan with GitHub integration and 500K context window.LINK
X is hiring staff for security and safety after two years of layoffs.LINK
ASML CEO: Export curbs on China are more about US economics than security.LINK
Andreessen Horowitz shutters its ‘Wall Street South’ office after 2 years because nobody was showing up.LINK
'Founder mode' is the latest fault line in Silicon Valley.LINK
How the Wayback Machine is trying to solve the web’s growing linkrot problem.LINK
Latest research and tools
Ligo's open-source AlphaFold3: an open-source tool that advances biomolecular structure prediction by providing the full AlphaFold3 model and training code, primarily aimed at the biotech community for free use.LINK
Laminar: an open-source tool combining features of DataDog and PostHog for LLM apps, offering automatic instrumentation for LLM/vector DB calls, function tracking, and semantic events-based analytics, all built in Rust for scalability and performance.LINK
Tinystatus: a simple, customizable status page generator that monitors various services' statuses, displaying them on a clean, responsive web page with features like history tracking and minimal HTML size.LINK
Desed: a tool for demystifying and debugging sed scripts through a user-friendly terminal interface, offering features like step-through debugging, previewing variable values, and hot code reloading.LINK
Hacker League: an open-source version of Rocket League for Linux, specifically designed for debian-based distributions on x86_64 architectures, that requires external GPU drivers for optimal performance.LINK
Qustar: a Node.js ORM that allows querying SQL databases through an intuitive, array-like API, simplifying the process of interacting with databases such as PostgreSQL by using connectors and expressions for operations.LINK
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