The generative AI boom has driven the cost of memory into the stratosphere, and Google is a key part of that trend. So it's only fitting that Google should offer some less RAM-hungry local AI models. The company has announced the release of a new Gemma 4 model that fills a gap in the lineup that launched earlier this year. The new model is efficient enough that you may be able to run it on a pretty average consumer laptop.

In April, Google released four models in the Gemma 4 family , which also marked the shift to a more open Apache 2.0 license. The initial models included two mobile-optimized options (E2B and E4B) along with a pair of models for more serious work (26B Mixture of Experts and 31B Dense). That left a rather large unserved space in the middle, which is right where the new model falls.

Gemma 4 12B is considerably more capable than the mobile versions, but it won't require a $20,000 AI accelerator to run locally. Google says Gemma 4 12B is unique in that it can run on many consumer laptops without sacrificing quality. As long as you've got a computer with 16GB of system RAM or VRAM, the 12-billion-parameter model will work. That's about half the total memory footprint of Gemma 4 26B MoE, and Google claims the new model is almost as capable, at least as far as benchmarks go.

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On Tuesday, Donald Trump finally signed his executive order expanding the government's efforts to conduct voluntary safety testing of frontier AI models. Now, critics are warning that the order may be short-sighted, offering only performative reassurances that the government is actively monitoring for AI risks, while changing very little about how and when models are deployed.

Last month, Trump abruptly canceled a signing event , where he had hoped to launch an earlier version of the EO with CEOs of leading AI firms in attendance. Invited at the last minute, several CEOs simply couldn't make the signing but still signaled support for the order. Officially, Trump claimed he postponed the event because he worried that the EO might have gone too far and had become a "blocker" impeding AI innovation. Reports indicated there was infighting in his administration as cybersecurity experts clashed with officials committed to deregulating AI.

The watered-down EO that Trump signed promises not "to stifle this innovation with overly burdensome regulation" and establishes no requirements for AI firms. Instead, it sets up a voluntary process for companies to collaborate with the government on safety reviews that Trump's EO claimed would "ensure that the best and most secure technology is deployed rapidly to confront any and all threats to our country."

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Plex is adding new social features to the platform.

As of today, users can make and share "personalized lists on Plex of any movie, show or episode," the company said in an announcement. Later this year, users will be able to import lists from other streaming services and react to other people's lists.

This month, Plex will also launch a community forum that will allow people to "post and comment directly on any movie, show, season, or episode." Later this year, Plex will introduce "Match Scores" based on a viewer's history and past ratings to predict how much they'll like a show or movie, Plex said.

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The age of robotaxis, long the preserve of science fiction, is now a reality, at least in a handful of American cities. It took just over a decade to get from the DARPA Grand Challenges to the start of Waymo's commercial service in California, albeit initially with a safety driver on board.

Proponents of the technology, which has attracted at least $100 billion in investment, say robotaxis will be safer than human-driven vehicles. And last year , Waymo's data showed its cars were involved in many fewer crashes than human drivers, with much lower insurance claims, although recent issues with school buses and flooded roads show the technology isn't perfect .

But safety isn't the only selling point: Autonomous vehicles are said to cut traffic . But data from Waymo's reports to the California Public Utilities Commission shows that, at least in that regard, robotaxis are no better than ride-hailing services like Lyft and Uber.

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A year after Mark Zuckerberg installed Alexandr Wang to jolt Meta’s artificial intelligence efforts into wartime mode, the $1.5 trillion company has produced Muse Spark, its most credible AI model yet.

By handing responsibility for Meta’s AI revival to a then-28-year-old start-up founder rather than a veteran researcher, Zuckerberg bet that an outsider’s urgency and ambition could succeed where the company’s established AI organization had struggled.

According to interviews with current and former Meta employees, and associates of Wang, the billionaire wunderkind has now begun to eke out results, while navigating criticism over his experience, early research challenges, and the esoteric internal politics of working at a Big Tech behemoth.

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For decades, scientists have understood that plants can release volatile organic compounds—essentially airborne chemical signals—to attract the natural enemies of the things that eat them, like caterpillars. What we didn’t know was exactly how a plant translates the physical act of being eaten into a specific, predator-summoning distress signal.

“[One] thing we didn’t know is how the plant detects the caterpillar in the first place,” says Adam Steinbrenner, a biologist at the University of Washington. Now, after years of experimenting with common bean plants in the lab and in the agricultural fields of Oaxaca, Mexico, Steinbrenner’s team pinpointed a single immune receptor that orchestrates its anti-caterpillar defense system.

Drooling caterpillars

When an herbivorous insect like a caterpillar feeds on a plant, it introduces its saliva straight into the plant's damaged tissues. This saliva contains biological clues called HAMPs: herbivore-associated molecular patterns. One of the HAMPs molecules is a peptide called inceptin, and there’s an 11-amino acid fragment of inceptin named In11, as well. Both of them turn out to be a fragment of the ATP synthase found in chloroplasts—basically a piece of one of the plant’s own proteins. As the caterpillar ingests the leaf, its gut enzymes chop up the plant's cellular engines and their pieces, including In11, are regurgitated back onto the leaf’s surface, albeit at extremely small concentrations.

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A former NASA engineer named John Muratore sat on console as launch director in early September 2016 as propellant flowed onto a Falcon 9 rocket in Florida. Ahead of a planned launch two days later, SpaceX was preparing for a static fire test of the vehicle.

Then, all of a sudden, the rocket exploded. "It came out of nowhere, and it was really violent," Muratore said. This fireball resulted in the destruction of the rocket, much of its launch site, and the AMOS-6 satellite already attached to the vehicle.

Nearly a decade later, on May 28, Blue Origin conducted a static fire test of a new rocket, with its larger New Glenn vehicle a few miles down the Florida coast. The company had gotten further into its test, reaching engine ignition, before its rocket also exploded .

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Male bowerbirds are notorious for their complex mating rituals. They build intricate tunnels out of twigs—the bowers from which they get their name—and then decorate them with random colorful items gleaned from the environment. When a female of the species shows up to check out a male's fancy digs, the male tosses his shiniest objects in her direction and shows off his plumage in hopes of impressing her.

According to a new paper published in the journal Royal Society Open Science by University of Exeter scientists, urbanization and the associated growing availability of brightly colored human-made items have had a significant impact on courtship display behavior in Australian male bowerbirds. There are marked differences in the choice of decorations for bowerbirds in urban versus rural environments. This might be because urban birds simply have greater access to the items than their rural counterparts, since birds in both environments show a marked preference for human items.

The University of Exeter researchers monitored the bowers of 61 male great bowerbirds in two sites in Australia's northern Queensland—the rural Dreghorn Cattle Station and the urban Townsville City—during the prime breeding season (September–December 2023). Then they photographed the bower decorations in situ from above in both visible and UV light (bowerbirds can see in the UV range), using an umbrella to create diffuse lighting.

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Microsoft's Build developer conference kicked off today , and as with almost everything the company has done in the last few years, Microsoft's opening keynote focused overwhelmingly on AI and other closely related technologies. There's Microsoft Scout , an OpenClaw-based "Autopilot" agent that can hook into Microsoft 365 data to perform tasks for users; several new AI models ; an expanded preview of " Codename MDASH ," which is a "multi-model agentic scanning system" meant to detect and fix software vulnerabilities.

A few of those announcements stood out to us as particularly interesting, either for esoteric technical reasons or because they seem like they may have some utility for those who aren't spending their every waking moment using generative AI tools. (Microsoft's recent efforts to make its flagship operating system faster, more reliable, more useful, and less annoying didn't really come up, but there have been plenty of other announcements on that front lately .)

On the hardware front, we didn't get any updates for existing Surface devices (not counting yesterday's Surface Laptop Ultra announcement), but we did get something new: the Surface RTX Spark Dev Box is "a compact developer PC" built around Nvidia's new RTX Spark chip with up to 128GB of built-in memory.

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