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
“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:
Liminal i fondos de pantalla Imagen: Hombre Apple básico
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.
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:
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 discípuloEn 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.
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.
That includes not just on-demand stuff from the big streaming services, but also making better use of free streaming channels right in the main interface. Based on the time so far, I like the look of it.
Speaking of the look, there’s nothing revolutionary going on here. It looks like nearly every other smart TV software, and I think that’s a good thing. You’ve got a row of advertising for new shows at the top (creating/designing a new TV interface has to pay for itself somehow), then a list of app favorites you can use to launch services, and then rows of recommendations from your apps, or for channels you watch regularly. Easy, works well, and if you’ve used smart TV software recently, you’ll probably be able to transfer your navigation skills to Titan.
Titan will learn what you like, and tweak recommendations to match. (Image credit: Future)
At the top are tabs to switch between a few key options, such as live TV channels, a list of available apps, or over on the right are some options for accessing Settings. It actually reminds me a lot of the PS5 Home screen in that way.
But what impressed me most about this Home screen is the speed. Hitting ‘Resume’ to watch something on Netflix had the movie playing within a couple of seconds, with no extra hassle or time spent looking at a loading symbol. Even my Apple TV 4K, which has the processing power of a lightweight laptop, doesn’t manage that. When I played more with the platform, it became clear that speed is an advantage overall – it seems like it might be just less frustrating to navigate and use than many smart platforms. Even Amazon Fire TV, with such a powerful company behind it, has lag issues, especially on cheaper TVs.
Titan won’t arrive with in-depth smart home integration or anything like that, but I think it’s probably on the right lines with this: I suspect that if you asked most people if they want a faster TV system or one with loads of extra features, they’d say the former.
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However, it does have some extra smarts that sound good – but again, focused on what you’ll watch. For a start, Titan promises that the platform will learn what you watch and get better at making recommendations over time, hopefully making it quicker to actually find something to watch, which is genuinely one of the big hurdles of TV viewing today.
But also, Titan does a smart thing of integrating any free live streaming channels you can access right into the main channel guide, along with any broadcast channels you’ve tuned it into. In the UK, that means you can have channels like Pluto TV alongside your Freeview channels, and they’re all just treated as channels you can scroll through and watch. There’ll be no big distinction between them, so you’ll just have a larger, richer selection of channels to choose from.
Streaming and broadcast channels, together as one. (Image credit: Future)
Titan will also include Freely integration by the time it launches later in the year, with this streaming alternative to Freeview all supported right from the program guide too.
To make all of the above easier. Titan actually comes with all of its available apps pre-installed – you don’t have to hunt in an app store and create an account to find services or to update them. Go to the Apps tab and just browse what’s there – and if anything you don’t like appears on the Home screen, it’s easy to just remove it and put it out of sight.
Again, I think this is a positive move – it might make people more likely to try free streaming services they wouldn’t bother with otherwise.
However, the downside of Titan right now looks to be its range of streaming services. In the UK, the current range of streamers is the following:
Netflix
Prime Video
Disney+
BBC iPlayer
iTVX
ALL 4
My5
Freeview Explore
YouTube
Rakuten TV
Pluto TV
Now, I use Shudder and Mubi to name just two missing from here, and the lack of BFIPlayer and Kanopy, among others, will also be a shame for hardcore movie lovers – while the lack of things like HAYU and Britbox may be a frustration for others. And then there’s no Apple TV or Google Movies for those who have libraries there.
However, Titan is months away from launch, so there’s time for this to be fixed. Some of the services I mentioned above are quite niche, so not everyone will mind – but when I spoke to people behind the development of Titan, one of the big reasons for its existence is to make sure that people who buy TVs from the brands Titan is used on don’t feel disappointed long-term by their TV’s smart platform. If it doesn’t have services they might grow to want, then it may still fall foul of that.
The remote control of the demo TV included shortcut buttons for several services, including the Titan Channels integrated program guide. (Image credit: Future)
There’s also no deep voice control planned currently – if a TV has Alexa support, you could use this to dictate into search fields, but there won’t be the option to say “Titan, play One Piece on Netflix.” Again, some people won’t like the lack of this, some might be delighted to kick voice assistants to the kerb.
Titan is expected to appear on Philips TVs and some JVC TVs in the UK later in 2024. The company is focused on Europe and South America at first but may look to launch in North America in the future.
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).
It’s what’s been described as the “iPhone moment of AI” where the technology has finally broken into the mainstream, much as Apple‘s handsets brought light to the smartphone. That’s because AI has become a part of gaming, video production, productivity, development, and creativity, as well as everyday computing, too.
It’s part of the AI Accelerator Landscape, as leaked by Benchlife.info, which states the company’s intentions for Heavy AI cloud-based GPUs with “1000s of TOPs” and large-language scalable models. As for exactly what the “Premium AI PC” experience entails, it encompasses 500 games and software, and an optimized software stack.
What’s more, Nvidia has cornered the market with an install base of over 100 million users across a myriad of devices. It’s not exactly surprising news given the company’s moves within the AI sector and stock explosion seen in the last year. That’s to say nothing of DLSS which has been core to the user experience since 2018.
Essentially, the company is taking a victory lap over the burgeoning NPU market which is available in everything from Apple M3 silicon to Intel Meteor Lake processors. While the upcoming Intel Lunar Lake is rumored to launch with 100 TOPs with its NPU, that’s simply dwarfed by what Nvidia is claiming from its “premium” user experience.
A glimpse of things to come at Computex
Nvidia has been making moves in the AI field with everything from upscaling in video games to local language chatbots with Chat with RTX, to robots using its tech. While the company has made some bold claims with its massive userbase, and theoretical throughput, these figures are likely just a taste of what’s to come next month at Computex 2024.
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It’s not entirely surprising given the recent unveiling of Nvidia’s Blackwell B200 die which has been dubbed: “the world’s most powerful chip”. Exactly how this factors into gaming remains to be seen with the company’s rumored RTX 50 series coming at the end of the year. One thing’s for sure, however, AI will play a part in the GPU line’s future.
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.
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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.
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”.
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.
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.
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”.
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.
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.
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].
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.”
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.
ChatGPT broke the Turing test — the race is on for new ways to assess AI
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.)
AI ‘breakthrough’: neural net has human-like ability to generalize language
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.”
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.
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.
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.”
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.
As per the report, the attackers are targeting enterprises in Russia and six Commonwealth of Independent States countries – Belarus, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Armenia. Their victims work in government agencies, financial organizations, and educational institutions, and they mostly go for login credentials to various services.
Exfiltration via Telegram
So far, almost 900 accounts have been compromised, the researchers said. It is unclear what the attackers are doing with the information, but it’s likely that they’re either selling it on the dark web, or using it in further, more devastating attacks.
The attacks are simple – they include crafting convincing phishing attacks, often in languages native to the locals, and getting the victims to download and run the attachment. The files being distributed in these phishing attacks deploy a “primitive password stealer malware”.
The infostealer then grabs the files and exfiltrates them via telegram bots. The person handling these bots is called Koala, giving PT ESC the idea behind the name.
“The calling card of the new group is this: ‘harder doesn’t mean better.’ Lazy Koala doesn’t bother with complex tools, tactics, and techniques, but they still get the job done,” said Denis Kuvshinov, Head of Threat Analysis, Positive Technologies Expert Security Center.
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“After establishing itself on the infected device, the malware exfiltrates the stolen data using Telegram, a favorite tool among attackers,” Kuvshinov added.
PT ESC said that it notified the victims, adding that the information stolen in this campaign will most likely be sold on the dark web.