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Mejor fondo de pantalla nuevo: serie Liminal Spaces de Basic Apple Guy

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En el último mes de 2024, Designer Basic Apple Guy comenzó a lanzar otra nueva e interesante colección de fondos de pantalla para sus dispositivos Apple. Es la serie Liminal Spaces “vibrante, de inspiración cubista”, lanzada el 2 de diciembre. Podrían ser los mejores fondos de pantalla nuevos que he visto este mes.

Definitivamente son una alternativa interesante a los temas navideños. Para mí, la luz, los colores y las formas del papel pintado me recordaron no sólo el arte cubista, sino también las pinturas de paisajes del expresionista abstracto Richard Diebenkorn.

Los mejores fondos de pantalla nuevos: Basic Apple Guy revela la serie Liminal Spaces

Si quieres fresco, Aspecto moderno, angular, colorido y Diebenkorn. En la pantalla de tu Mac, iPhone o iPad, está la nueva aplicación Basic Apple Guy Serie de espacios liminales Puede ser una buena elección.

“Liminal Spaces es una colección de papel tapiz creado jugando con diferentes formas, texturas, patrones y puntos de vista”, dijo. “Cada papel tapiz es una colección de varios diseños y patrones que dan una apariencia de espacio y perspectiva sin dejar de ser misteriosos al mismo tiempo”.

Señaló que su objetivo es crear diseños para sus dispositivos que “lucen vibrantes, ordenados y geniales”. Misión cumplida.

También describió su proceso, como siempre hace con las obras nuevas:

Cada fondo se inició en Sketch, donde un lienzo de 12.000 x 12.000 se dividió en 15 a 20 piezas. Se agregan líneas principales para dar cierta sensación de enfoque y perspectiva, aunque muchas de las formas están esculpidas al azar. A partir de ahí se eligió la paleta de colores. Finalmente, se recopilaron texturas de varias fuentes, incluida fotografía de Unsplash (por ejemplo, arena, nubes, paredes de concreto), mientras que se crearon otros materiales en MidJourney (vidrio estriado, lámina dorada y tela desgastada son algunos ejemplos).

Finalmente, cambia el tamaño de las imágenes para Mac, iPhone y iPad. Puedes elegir tus favoritos a continuación y descargarlos. Y fue considerado Déjale una propinaPorque no le pagaron por estas cosas.

Descarga la serie esencial Liminal Spaces para Apple Guy

Primera versión:

Fondos de pantalla básicos de Apple Guy Liminal I
Liminal i fondos de pantalla
Imagen: Hombre Apple básico

El primer límite: iPad | Impermeable | iPhone

Versión 2:

Núcleo Apple Guy Liminal II
Fondos de pantalla de Liminal II
Imagen: Hombre Apple básico

Versión 3:

Básico Apple Guy Liminal III
Fondos de pantalla de Liminal III
Imagen: Hombre Apple básico

Versión 4:

Núcleo Apple Guy Liminal IV
Fondos de pantalla de Liminal IV
Imagen: Hombre Apple básico

El cuarto límite: iPad | Impermeable | iPhone

Versión 5:

Serie esencial Apple Guy Liminal
Fondos de pantalla de Liminal V
Imagen: Hombre Apple básico

Quinto límite: iPad | Impermeable | iPhone



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Entertainment

Obtén un año del paquete Duo Basic por $36

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Lunes cibernético Los acuerdos de transmisión vuelven a estar vigentes este año y uno de los mejores está en proceso Disney+ y Hulu. El paquete Duo Basic está a la venta por $3 por mes durante todo un año, lo que equivale a $36 durante todo el período. Este paquete le brinda acceso al nivel básico de Hulu con anuncios y al nivel básico de Disney+ con anuncios, y solo los nuevos usuarios o suscriptores que cancelen sus planes con al menos un mes de anticipación son elegibles para canjear el descuento. Si solo está interesado en la parte del trato de Hulu, puede obtener el nivel con publicidad de Hulu por $0.99 por mes por 1 añolo que equivale a sólo $12 durante el primer año. Pero ambos programas terminan esta noche, por lo que te quedan algunas horas adicionales si aún no lo has hecho.

El paquete Duo Basic le brinda el nivel básico de Hulu y Disney+, ambos con anuncios, y solo los nuevos usuarios o nuevos suscriptores que cancelaron sus planes con al menos un mes de anticipación son elegibles para canjear el descuento. Tenga en cuenta que no se incluye ESPN Plus, pero si no es un fanático de los deportes, aquí es un buen ahorro.

Este paquete con anuncios contiene contenido de Disney+ y Hulu. El contenido sigue siendo el mismo que con los planes sin publicidad, incluidas películas y series similares. Lobezno Deadpool, Congelado, madrina y Star Wars: Tripulación esqueletola esperada serie de Star Wars solo en Disney+. Si no le gustan algunas de estas nuevas ofertas, probablemente haya clásicos antiguos que valga la pena visitar en la biblioteca.

disney

Oferta Hulu Cyber ​​​​Monday: obtenga un año del paquete Disney+ Hulu por $ 36. El acuerdo sólo es efectivo para nuevos suscriptores o aquellos que cancelaron sus suscripciones hace al menos un mes.

$36 en Disney+/Hulu

Después de 12 meses, la suscripción se renovará al precio normal si la renovación automática está habilitada. Disney+ es uno de Los mejores servicios de transmisión Allí, con un enfoque en brindar contenido apto para familias, pero también con contenido más para adultos. Si quieres más programas y series para adultos, Hulu es para ti. Ambos tienen contenido original también.

Todavía hay otras ofertas de transmisión de Cyber ​​​​Monday disponibles ahora como parte de Ofertas de suscripción al Cyber ​​​​Monday. Entre los más importantes se encuentran los descuentos por un año de Peacock y seis meses de Max. Aquí hay más detalles:

Mira todas las novedades viernes negro y Lunes cibernético Ofertas aquí.

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Disney+ Basic cuesta solo $6 por tres meses en esta oferta por tiempo limitado

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Puedes ahorrar mucho dinero al suscribirte a Disney+ si puedes tolerar algunos anuncios. Los clientes nuevos y recurrentes pueden recibir Suscripción Disney+ Básica (con anuncios) por $2 al mes Durante tres meses. Este nivel actualmente cuesta $8 por mes e incluye todo el contenido de Disney+.

Las suscripciones a Disney+ Basic (con anuncios) te dan acceso a todas las series y películas que la plataforma tiene para ofrecer. Esto incluye originales de Disney, Pixar, Star Wars, Marvel, Los Simpson y National Geographic (entre otros). También contiene Taylor Swift: Eras Tour (Versión de Taylor) Para el Swifty en tu vida.

disney

En cuanto al meollo de la cuestión, la suscripción se renovará automáticamente al precio completo después de tres meses, a menos que la canceles primero. Esta categoría es Está a punto de volverse más caroaumentando a $10 por mes a partir del 17 de octubre. Entonces, configura un recordatorio para cancelar la suscripción si solo quieres continuar. Andorel Wanda Visión escindir Agatha todo el tiempo o discípulo En primer lugar Y la única temporada Antes de que se acaben tus tres meses baratos.

La oferta solo está disponible para mayores de 18 años y vence el 27 de septiembre. Si la transmisión en vivo por $2 te suena más, dirígete a Sitio web de Disney+ Para registrarte o reactivar tu suscripción.

el sigue @engadgetdeals en Twitter y suscríbase al boletín Engadget Deals para conocer las últimas ofertas tecnológicas y consejos de compra.



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Titan OS is a new smart TV platform that’s interesting because it’s basic – it’s faster and simpler than others, and drops all the needless extra features

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The world of smart TV software options on the best TVs is only getting more complicated over time. Some TV makers use their own software and keep it strictly on their own TVs, but you’ve also got the likes of LG webOS, Roku TV, Google TV, and Amazon Fire TV all competing to be on TVs from other manufacturers. And now there’s another name in the ring: Titan OS.

After an in-depth demo session, I found Titan OS interesting not because of the new features it brings to the table but because of the lack of them – or, rather, the lack of complexity in the system. The focus here is on making it take less time to get you actually watching something by making a fast operating system with fewer clicks on the remote needed to find the stuff you like. 

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Nvidia asserts dominance over ‘basic AI PCs’ running NPUs with its GPU hardware

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As the AI computing revolution hits its Apex, Nvidia has confidently stated that GPU technology is the way forward instead of dedicated NPUs in a new meeting. 

As reported by Videocardz, a new meeting held by Nvidia about the “Premium AI PC” has seen Team Green confidently back its GPU technology against the current crop of NPUs hitting the scene. While “Basic AI” NPU-based machines are capable of up to 45 TOPs, through RTX, that can be expanded to 1,300+ TOPs (a 2,788% increase). 

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Computers

Audien Hearing Atom One Hearing Aid Review: Über-Cheap and Too Basic

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What the Atom One does do is make things louder—and by default, it makes all the things louder. Tuning is fairly blunt: A lone button on the back of each aid lets you cycle through five volume levels. Since the aids don’t talk to one another, each has to be controlled individually. The units also include three environmental modes that are designed respectively for conversation, noisy environments, and in-vehicle operation. To cycle through these—again, separately for each ear—you hold down the button on the back of each unit for a few seconds and wait for a lower frequency tone to alert you to which mode it has engaged.

If you’re prone to fiddling with hearing aids, you’ll probably accidentally hit the control button more than you’d like, inadvertently changing the volume and requiring you to cycle back through the five levels again to return to the volume you want. This is a bit of a pain, but a little hassle is perhaps to be expected at this price level.

As for performance, the amplification effect is, to put things plainly, rather blunt. Around the house, when at max volume, it sounded like everyone was screaming, and even the slightest sound was deafening. Typing this review with the aids in was nerve-racking, even at more moderate volumes, like tiny firecrackers popping beneath my fingers. My voice became an echoing boom from the heavens that drowned out everything else.

Eventually, I found better luck in more intimate environments at lower volume settings and was able to see some value in hearing television audio and one-on-one conversations with a modest amount of added clarity—but in busy, noisy environments, the Atom One couldn’t keep up. In a bowling alley test, the aids were effectively useless no matter how I configured them.

Ugly Hiss

In all mode settings and at all volumes, there’s ample background hiss that makes it feel a bit like you’re sitting on an airplane. I found it more difficult to concentrate with them in my ears even if I was in a silent room. Combined with the booming reports of keyboard taps, footsteps, and crinkling wrappers, I found the Atom One to be significantly more nerve-racking than I’d like. (Which is none at all.)

On aesthetics, I wouldn’t call the Atom One ugly—the mostly in-ear design is at least less obtrusive than behind-the-ear models—but the beige color palate doesn’t feel very modern. Perhaps this is something Walmart requested, but a more modern white or black earbud-like design would probably go over better with most wearers.

Small rounded closed case beside two beige incanal hearing aides

Photograph: Audien Hearing

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AI now beats humans at basic reading and maths

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Hello Nature readers, would you like to get this Briefing in your inbox free every day? Sign up here.

Animation of a coring bit descending from the base of a rover to drill into a sandy surface.

NASA’s Perseverance rover collects a sample from a Martian rock using a drill bit on the end of its robotic arm.Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

NASA is seeking fresh ideas for delivering Mars rocks collected by the Perseverance rover to Earth. With its up to US$11 billion price tag, the current plan is “too expensive” and its schedule is “unacceptable”, said NASA administrator Bill Nelson. In the agency’s original vision, a spacecraft would carry a lander and a rocket to Mars. The rocket would launch the lander plus samples into Martian orbit, where they would meet another spacecraft that would then return the samples to Earth.

Nature | 5 min read

With average global sea surface temperatures breaking records every day for more than a year, corals have been pushed into the fourth planet-wide mass bleaching event. Over the past year, more than half of ocean waters home to coral reefs have experienced heat stress high enough to cause bleaching, in which coral turn white and sometimes die. And that number is increasing every week, says ecologist Derek Manzello, head of the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Coral Reef Watch program. Within a week or two, “this event is likely to be the most spatially extensive global bleaching event on record”.

The New York Times | 6 min read

Artificial intelligence (AI) systems can now nearly match — and sometimes exceed — human performance in tasks such as reading comprehension, image classification and mathematics. “The pace of gain has been startlingly rapid,” says social scientist Nestor Maslej, editor-in-chief of the annual AI Index. The report calls for new benchmarks to assess algorithms’ capabilities and highlights the need for a consensus on what ethical AI models would look like.

Nature | 6 min read

Reference: 2024 AI Index report

Researchers have identified three new giant kangaroo species that lived around 5 million to 40,000 years ago. One of them, Protemnodon viator, weighed up to 170 kilograms — about twice as much as the largest living kangaroos. While most Protemnodon species were thought to move on four legs, viator had long limbs and could probably hop long distances. “People often think we have a pretty weird modern ecosystem in Australia … but our animals are comparatively non-freaky compared to things we used to have in the past,” says palaeontologist Gilbert Price.

The Guardian | 4 min read

Reference: Megataxa paper

A near-complete fossil skeleton of the extinct giant kangaroo Protemnodon viator from Lake Callabonna, missing just a few bones from the hand, foot and tail (Flinders University).

Features & opinion

Many clinicians think that people who take obesity drugs such as semaglutide (sold as Wegovy and Ozempic) should take them for life. But the medications’ cost, brutal side effects and many other factors can force people off them. Those who quit usually regain a substantial amount of body weight, and often see a rebound in negative health effects such as high blood pressure, and increased blood glucose and cholesterol levels. So much work has gone into developing the drugs, says clinician-scientist Jamy Ard, “we need just as much — if not more — work to be done on what happens after people reach that goal in that weight-reduced state for the rest of their lives”.

Nature | 9 min read

Researchers often have to rely on rumours when deciding how to interact with a peer accused of harassment or bullying. Closed misconduct investigations ensure privacy — both for the accused and the accusers — but can also mean that harassers can continue their behaviour by simply moving institutions. Many advocate for semi-transparency, for example an information-sharing scheme for employers or institutions reporting anonymized misconduct statistics. Proactive policies are needed, such as conference codes of conduct, says astrophysicist Emma Chapman, who campaigned to ban non-disclosure agreements in disciplinary processes. “There is no easy answer, but that doesn’t mean that we default to having no answer,” she says.

Nature | 12 min read

Researchers have mapped the tens of thousands of cells and connections between them in one cubic millimetre of the mouse brain. The project, which took US$100 million and years of effort by more than 100 scientists, is a milestone of ‘connectomics’, which aims to chart the circuits that coordinate the organ’s many functions. Identifying the brain’s architectural principles could one day guide the development of artificial neural networks. Teams are now working on mapping larger areas, although a whole-brain reconstruction “may be a ‘Mars shot’ — it’s really much harder than going to the Moon”, says connectomics pioneer Jeff Lichtman.

Nature | 12 min read

3D rendering of thousands of individual neurons

A network of thousands of individual neurons from a small subset of cells in the Machine Intelligence from Cortical Networks project data set.Credit: MICrONS Explorer

QUOTE OF THE DAY

Expanding the story of space beyond well-known icons is key to inspiring the next generation of innovators and explorers, says planetary scientist Ellen Stofan, who oversees aspects of the Smithsonian Institution including the US National Air and Space Museum. (Nature | 7 min read)

Today, I’m considering ten of the more unconventional reasons for publishing a paper, including ‘symbolic immortality’ and revenge. The authors, career researcher William Donald and organizational psychologist Nicholas Duck, explain that their paper fulfils their own unconventional motivation: creating the citation “Donald and Duck (2024)”.

Please tell me about your unusual motivation for research — alongside any feedback on this newsletter — by sending an email to [email protected].

Thanks for reading,

Katrina Krämer, associate editor, Nature Briefing

With contributions by Flora Graham, Smriti Mallapaty and Sarah Tomlin

Want more? Sign up to our other free Nature Briefing newsletters:

Nature Briefing: Anthropocene — climate change, biodiversity, sustainability and geoengineering

Nature Briefing: AI & Robotics — 100% written by humans, of course

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Nature Briefing: Translational Research covers biotechnology, drug discovery and pharma

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AI now beats humans at basic tasks — new benchmarks are needed, says major report

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Artificial intelligence (AI) systems, such as the chatbot ChatGPT, have become so advanced that they now very nearly match or exceed human performance in tasks including reading comprehension, image classification and competition-level mathematics, according to a new report (see ‘Speedy advances’). Rapid progress in the development of these systems also means that many common benchmarks and tests for assessing them are quickly becoming obsolete.

These are just a few of the top-line findings from the Artificial Intelligence Index Report 2024, which was published on 15 April by the Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence at Stanford University in California. The report charts the meteoric progress in machine-learning systems over the past decade.

In particular, the report says, new ways of assessing AI — for example, evaluating their performance on complex tasks, such as abstraction and reasoning — are more and more necessary. “A decade ago, benchmarks would serve the community for 5–10 years” whereas now they often become irrelevant in just a few years, says Nestor Maslej, a social scientist at Stanford and editor-in-chief of the AI Index. “The pace of gain has been startlingly rapid.”

Speedy advances: Line chart showing the performance of AI systems on certain benchmark tests compared to humans since 2012.

Source: Artificial Intelligence Index Report 2024.

Stanford’s annual AI Index, first published in 2017, is compiled by a group of academic and industry specialists to assess the field’s technical capabilities, costs, ethics and more — with an eye towards informing researchers, policymakers and the public. This year’s report, which is more than 400 pages long and was copy-edited and tightened with the aid of AI tools, notes that AI-related regulation in the United States is sharply rising. But the lack of standardized assessments for responsible use of AI makes it difficult to compare systems in terms of the risks that they pose.

The rising use of AI in science is also highlighted in this year’s edition: for the first time, it dedicates an entire chapter to science applications, highlighting projects including Graph Networks for Materials Exploration (GNoME), a project from Google DeepMind that aims to help chemists discover materials, and GraphCast, another DeepMind tool, which does rapid weather forecasting.

Growing up

The current AI boom — built on neural networks and machine-learning algorithms — dates back to the early 2010s. The field has since rapidly expanded. For example, the number of AI coding projects on GitHub, a common platform for sharing code, increased from about 800 in 2011 to 1.8 million last year. And journal publications about AI roughly tripled over this period, the report says.

Much of the cutting-edge work on AI is being done in industry: that sector produced 51 notable machine-learning systems last year, whereas academic researchers contributed 15. “Academic work is shifting to analysing the models coming out of companies — doing a deeper dive into their weaknesses,” says Raymond Mooney, director of the AI Lab at the University of Texas at Austin, who wasn’t involved in the report.

That includes developing tougher tests to assess the visual, mathematical and even moral-reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs), which power chatbots. One of the latest tests is the Graduate-Level Google-Proof Q&A Benchmark (GPQA)1, developed last year by a team including machine-learning researcher David Rein at New York University.

The GPQA, consisting of more than 400 multiple-choice questions, is tough: PhD-level scholars could correctly answer questions in their field 65% of the time. The same scholars, when attempting to answer questions outside their field, scored only 34%, despite having access to the Internet during the test (randomly selecting answers would yield a score of 25%). As of last year, AI systems scored about 30–40%. This year, Rein says, Claude 3 — the latest chatbot released by AI company Anthropic, based in San Francisco, California — scored about 60%. “The rate of progress is pretty shocking to a lot of people, me included,” Rein adds. “It’s quite difficult to make a benchmark that survives for more than a few years.”

Cost of business

As performance is skyrocketing, so are costs. GPT-4 — the LLM that powers ChatGPT and that was released in March 2023 by San Francisco-based firm OpenAI — reportedly cost US$78 million to train. Google’s chatbot Gemini Ultra, launched in December, cost $191 million. Many people are concerned about the energy use of these systems, as well as the amount of water needed to cool the data centres that help to run them2. “These systems are impressive, but they’re also very inefficient,” Maslej says.

Costs and energy use for AI models are high in large part because one of the main ways to make current systems better is to make them bigger. This means training them on ever-larger stocks of text and images. The AI Index notes that some researchers now worry about running out of training data. Last year, according to the report, the non-profit research institute Epoch projected that we might exhaust supplies of high-quality language data as soon as this year. (However, the institute’s most recent analysis suggests that 2028 is a better estimate.)

Ethical concerns about how AI is built and used are also mounting. “People are way more nervous about AI than ever before, both in the United States and across the globe,” says Maslej, who sees signs of a growing international divide. “There are now some countries very excited about AI, and others that are very pessimistic.”

In the United States, the report notes a steep rise in regulatory interest. In 2016, there was just one US regulation that mentioned AI; last year, there were 25. “After 2022, there’s a massive spike in the number of AI-related bills that have been proposed” by policymakers, Maslej says.

Regulatory action is increasingly focused on promoting responsible AI use. Although benchmarks are emerging that can score metrics such as an AI tool’s truthfulness, bias and even likability, not everyone is using the same models, Maslej says, which makes cross-comparisons hard. “This is a really important topic,” he says. “We need to bring the community together on this.”

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India is booming — but there are worries ahead for basic science

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Some 970 million people in India will head to the ballot box starting on 19 April in a general election that polls predict will see Prime Minister Narendra Modi, and his Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), win a third five-year term. Many scientists in India are hopeful that the next five years could bring greater spending on applied science. But some have also expressed concerns. Among these are that funding is not increasing in line with India’s booming economy, and that the government’s top-down control of science, as some researchers see it, allows them little say in how money is allocated.

More money

Modi first became India’s prime minister in 2014. Since then, the total pot of money for research and development has increased. But relative to India’s gross domestic product (GDP), spending on R&D dropped from 0.71% in 2014–15 to 0.64% in 2020–21, the most recent financial year for which data are available (see ‘Stagnant funding pool’). This continues a decades-long trend that began under Modi’s predecessor, Manmohan Singh, and is lower than for some of India’s peers: China spent 2.4% of GDP on R&D in 2021, Brazil spent 1.3% and Russia spent 1.1%.

Public funding that fails to keep up with growing GDP is a particularly acute problem for science in India, because the government is the main funder of research, says Rohini Godbole, a particle physicist at the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore. Government funding accounts for some 60% of R&D spending. By contrast, in the United States, just 20% of total R&D spending comes from the government — with industry and philanthropy contributing the rest.

Stagnant funding pool: Line chart showing India's R&D budget has not grown while the incumbent coalition has been in power.

Source: UNESCO Institute for Statistics (UIS)

The relative lack of funds hasn’t stopped India from making big strides forward: in 2023, the nation became only the fourth in the world to successfully land a spacecraft on the Moon. Scientists note that this was done at a fraction of the budget of other missions. The Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) “is known as one of the most frugal organizations in the world”, says Venni Krishna, a science-policy researcher at the University of New South Wales, in Sydney. They’re “doing a fantastic job”. Researchers in India have also contributed to significant advances in developing drugs and vaccines.

But researchers say that other areas of research have been hampered by funding shortfalls, despite announcements that have suggested the opposite. “The government is serious in terms of their policy pronouncements. But when it comes to putting the money in, it’s been very conservative,” says Krishna.

In August 2023, the government passed a bill to set up the National Research Foundation (NRF), modelled on the US National Science Foundation — a move that many researchers applauded. The government promised 500 billion rupees (US$6 billion) for the NRF over 5 years, 28% of which — some 140 billion rupees — would come from public funds, and the rest from private and philanthropic sources. But the government spent only 2.6 billion rupees on the NRF in 2023–24, according to India’s Ministry of Finance. “This is a very, very negligible amount of money,” says Ramvilas Ghosh, a researcher who studies the diversity of marine organisms at Kerala University of Fisheries and Ocean Studies in Kochi.

For 2024–25, the government allocated 20 billion rupees for the NRF, still short of its initial commitment, and it has not clarified where the private funding will come from, says Ghosh.

Another project affected by a funding shortfall is the National Quantum Mission. In 2023, the government promised 60 billion rupees for this over eight years, in an attempt to build quantum computers and develop quantum communications, metrology and materials. The government spent 50 million rupees on the mission in 2023–24, and committed 4.8 billion for 2024–25.

Nature asked representatives of the Indian government for clarification on funding arrangements, but received no response.

More basic science

Indian scientists are part of some prominent international collaborations, including CERN, which operates Europe’s particle-physics laboratory near Geneva, Switzerland, and ITER, an international nuclear-fusion project based in Saint-Paul-lès-Durance, France. But progress on similar, home-grown initiatives in basic-science has been slow over the past decade. When the international LIGO collaboration announced in 2016 that it had made the first direct detection of gravitational waves, Modi posted on social media that he hoped India would move forwards with a detector of its own. But it took another seven years for LIGO-India to be approved by the country’s cabinet. “Progress is still slow,” says Godbole.

This image provided by the Indian Space Research Organisation shows the Vikram lander, taken by the Pragyan rover, on the surface of the moon on Aug. 30, 2023.

India landed a spacecraft on the Moon at a fraction of the cost of other nations.Credit: ISRO via AP/Alamy

An Indian neutrino observatory, approved in 2015, has stalled because of environmental concerns over the site’s location. “Even if it takes off, its relevance is going to be marginal, because of the number of years that went by,” says Godbole.

Part of that might reflect changing priorities. Science is seen increasingly as a tool for development, Godbole says, meaning more funds for technological innovation and socially relevant research at the cost of basic research. Umesh Waghmare, a theoretical and applied physicist at the Jawaharlal Nehru Centre for Advanced Scientific Research in Bangalore says that the current science ecosystem incentivizes applied research, from funding to new awards for technological innovation and missions focused on developing devices. A Modi win is likely to speed up this push for more applied and translational research, says Waghmare, who is also president of the Indian Academy of Sciences, Bangalore.

More autonomy

But the government could usefully loosen its tight grip over funding decisions, with high-level government officials having more of an advisory role, and more decision-making powers being given to scientific committees, says Waghmare. “Significantly greater autonomy is essential,” he says.

The NRF is headed by the Prime Minister, ministers and secretaries of government departments, as well as representatives of the business and scientific community picked by the Prime Minister.

And when it comes to public funds, the same rules that govern the construction of large projects such as railways or bridges also apply to smaller research projects, which is “rather unfair”, says Shekhar Mande, former director-general of the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research in Pune.

Even when researchers have been allocated money, it’s been difficult for them to spend all of it, says Shailja Vaidya Gupta, who served as a senior adviser at the Office of the Principal Scientific Adviser to the Government of India between 2019 and 2021. That’s because administrative and financial rules for hiring staff, and for purchasing equipment and laboratory supplies, are complex and constantly changing, she explains.

In 2023–24, only an estimated 65 billion of the 106 billion rupees initially allocated for the Department of Science and Technology and the Department of Biotechnology was spent. Gupta hopes that the government will trust researchers more, and will allow them greater flexibility in how they spend their budgets. A large part of ISRO’s success was a result of the decades of administrative and financial autonomy that it was afforded, which offers a model to follow, says Gupta.

As in India’s previous general election in 2019, science has not featured heavily on the 2024 campaign trail. Researchers say they don’t expect to see substantial changes to science policy, whatever the result. “Science is not at all part of the political discourse,” says Achal Agrawal, who founded the Indian Research Watchdog, a volunteer group for investigating research integrity. In that sense, the elections starting next week are unlikely to provide a big turning point for Indian science. “Whether Modi wins or loses, it is going to be more of the same.”

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This cybercrime group uses the most basic tactics around — but they seem to be working just fine

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Hacking techniques don’t have to be particularly advanced to be successful. Case in point – Lazy Koala.

Cybersecurity researchers from Positive Technologies Expert Security Center (PT ESC) recently uncovered a new threat actor, which they dubbed Lazy Koala. Nothing about this group is notably progressive or sophisticated, but it is achieving outstanding results.

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