The iPhone and iOS are not messy. Throughout their nearly 20-year life they’ve embodied precision and consistency, with no design element left to chance. There’s never a detail unexplained or unaccounted for; and one thing you absolutely will not find, on either the phone itself or in its operating system, is wasted space.
According to fresh rumors from Apple soothsayer Mark Gurman of Bloomberg, the anticipated update to iOS, which we expect Apple to unveil in June at WWDC 2024, will remove the shackles of rigid conformity and allow iPhone owners to move app icons wherever they like – and even introduce blank spaces.
This is not the first time that Apple has messed with one of the core living spaces on your best iPhone. Two years ago, Apple redesigned the lock screen, calling it an “Act of love.” It was a good update because it introduced information, innovation, and flexibility to the first thing you see when you pick up your iPhone, but without breaking the mold that makes the iPhone display special.
Apple’s fantastic lift subject from background adds a sense of drama to even the most mundane family portrait by allowing you to pop a head or two on top of the iPhone’s clock readout. I also appreciated the introduction of customizable widgets, a feature found on the best Android phones, and which took far too long to arrive on iOS.
Intentional sloppiness
These rumored iOS 18 changes don’t appear to offer any of those benefits. They’re more or less about choice, though I’d argue that with customizable widgets on your iOS 17 home screen you already have more than enough customization options.
If you’d rather not look at a gridded wall of icons, or even some kind of calming organization, you could with the rumored iOS 18 introduce vast swaths of blank space. Maybe you’ll place just a few apps at the bottom of the screen (just above the dock), a few at the top, and one random floater in the middle. It’s something you can do right now with, say, the Samsung Galaxy S24. I just tried it on a Samsung Galaxy S23 Ultra, but I don’t really like the look of it.
All the customization I need (Image credit: Future)
You know who else might not like it? Jony Ive. That’s right, the genius industrial designer responsible for most of Apple’s iconic product designs (iPod, iPhone, iMac, iPad, original Apple Pencil – okay, they can’t all be winners), might not have much use for Apple all but discarding the iconic iPhone grid.
Ive might have been a little obsessed with grids. Back in 2013. Daring Fireball’s John Gruber noticed that you could overlay Apple’s then-new Ive-designed iOS 7 app icons on top of some Apple hardware products, including the Apple TV, the trashcan Mac Pro, and the bottom of the Mac mini. The visuals he provided were uncanny. Ive never admitted as much, but considering his affinity for uniformity and clean design, such an approach wouldn’t be surprising. Even if it was coincidental (it wasn’t), Apple’s secret sauce was, for decades, Ive’s eye.
No space is good space
There’s little doubt that the reason why the iPhone’s apps are not tossed about willy-nilly on the home screen (nor any other page on the device) is because of Ive’s strict adherence to the grid aesthetic. It’s not just about elements living on a grid; it’s about them filling dead space. If you grab one app icon from an app page and move it to another screen, it never leaves space behind. Instead, the surrounding apps snap to attention, and march in to fill the gap. The iPhone is the king of cleaning up after itself, at least when it comes to app placement.
Ives’ obsession with eliminating dead space might have been informed by the late Steve Job’s take on unnecessary space or air in any Apple product. Apple’s cofounder and former CEO reportedly once threw an iPod prototype into an aquarium to show his designers that there was still too much space, and too much air, in the device; while the music player didn’t float, it did release telltale air bubbles.
Unnecessary space was technology’s enemy, and Jobs and Ive worked in tandem to eliminate it, along with any disorganization that might have resulted from it.
Is it just me? (Image credit: Future)
Ive left Apple in 2019, and reportedly ended his consulting relationship with the company in 2022. Since then, whatever influence Ive has had on the Apple aesthetic is likely diminishing. If I had to find one example, it would be the MacBook Air M3 Midnight’s lovely woven grey MagSafe power cord, which somehow terminates in plastic white on the side where it plugs into a white power adapter. That, to me, is messy, and very un-Ive-like.
To be fair, there’s no confirmation from Apple that it plans to offer iPhone owners almost unlimited home-screen control in iOS 18, but I could see it happening.
Customization is not a bad thing; but for everyone who’s cheering that Apple is catching up to where Android has been for years, I’d suggest that this is a retrograde change that, while possibly bringing the iPhone more into alignment with its Android competitors, will make it somewhat less than what we expect from the best of iOS and Apple.
A docking stations has become particularly useful – essential even – in office settings where users often need to switch between laptops and desktops.
JCH462 Wormhole Switch, from j5create, takes this convenience a notch higher. The multi-function docking station lets you connect two Windows devices via USB-C (there’s an attached USB-A adapter if required) and duplicate or extend their displays.
The Wormhole Switch lets users control the connected devices using a single keyboard and mouse, great news for anyone who routinely gets confused by which peripheral belongs to which computer. The keyboard works on whichever PC the mouse pointer is active on, or you can use the Alt+S keyboard shortcut or mouse wheel to swap manually between devices. If you have a touchscreen laptop, you can turn its display into a graphics tablet for your desktop.
Quick copy and paste
You will need to install the driver on both connected computers for this trickery to work, and doing so will display a control bar that will let you manage your screens, switching between extend and duplicate modes, and shifting displays left and right (or up and down, depending on how your computers are arranged).
Users can effortlessly drag and drop files from one computer to another, eliminating the need for external storage devices or cloud-based solutions, and also cut/copy and paste clipboard content between PCs.
It’s worth pointing out that if one computer goes into sleep mode you won’t be able to use the other one to wake it, but that’s a small inconvenience.
Wormhole Switch comes with two USB Type-A ports and one USB-C 5Gbps port on the side, so you can connect any compatible peripherals, including a mouse, keyboard, external drives, and webcams, although this only works with the PC1 host. If, for example, you want to work on files from an external flash drive on PC2, you’ll need to copy them via PC1 first.
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Wormhole Switch is an incredibly handy piece of kit and surprisingly affordable too. You can currently buy it on Amazon priced at $69.99.
How doomed are we? It’s a question I have been asked as a climate scientist many times over the years, sometimes with “doomed” replaced by less printable synonyms.
I struggle to answer it every time. It’s not a scientific question, because the terms are not well defined. What does it mean to be “doomed”? And who is “we”?
Maybe some people really mean it in the most extreme and literal sense: whether global warming is going to single-handedly wipe out the human species in the near future. In that case, it’s easy to talk them down. The evidence doesn’t support that prediction.
But I think that they mostly mean to ask a more subtle question. Something like, “as someone who understands the science on climate change better than most people, what is your emotional reaction to it? How scared are you?”
Fear is an emotion. No scientist, nor anyone else for that matter, can tell you the right amount of it to feel. If you knew that you were going to die in six months, how much fear should you feel? And what should you do in response? You wouldn’t go to a scientist for the answers to these questions.
Scientists under arrest: the researchers taking action over climate change
But having facts to inform our feelings can nonetheless be helpful. Scientists can at least provide some of those. We know that the planet is warming because of human-caused greenhouse-gas emissions. We can project the rate of warming with some confidence over at least the next few decades. At a broad level, we know what many of its effects will be. But when we look more closely, and ask about the societal consequences, things get blurrier.
The global increase in temperature is the simplest and most predictable dimension of climate change. It is also the one that scares me the most, partly because the direction of change is so certain and partly because heat is such a persistent and widespread hazard. For the large proportion of the world where it’s already hot during some or all of the year, just a couple of degrees of warming will cause great societal harm. In places with cooler climates, such as much of Europe, severe heatwaves can sometimes be even more deadly, because people there are less accustomed to heat1.
Sea-level rise is another area in which we can be certain about how things are changing, even if we are uncertain about how fast. Extreme rainfall events are becoming heavier and hydrological droughts are worsening owing to faster evaporation of water from hotter soils and plants. Wildfires are becoming more frequent and severe for similar reasons, although they are also affected by forest-management practices.
With some other hazards, however, even the direction of change is uncertain. Individual hurricanes are getting more dangerous, because of strengthening winds and rains, and worsening coastal flooding as sea levels rise. But we don’t know whether hurricanes will become more or less frequent — if the latter, the overall risk they pose might decrease2. We also don’t know whether meteorological droughts — lack of rain — will become more or less prevalent, or what changes we should expect with severe convective storms that produce tornadoes and hail3.
This scientific uncertainty itself is scary, because it means that some things might well get worse faster than we expect. Scientists always expected warming to exacerbate wildfires in the western United States, but I don’t think anyone predicted that it would happen as soon and as badly as it has.
Threat multiplier
Particularly disturbing is the possibility of ‘tipping points’ — large, possibly abrupt and irreversible changes with planetary-scale consequences4, such as the loss of large chunks of the Antarctic or Greenland ice sheets, the emission of large amounts of methane from melted permafrost or sea-floor sediments, or the shutdown of the Atlantic thermohaline circulation. The probabilities of such changes happening soon are all low, but they are hard to estimate with confidence.
Despite all the facts, and the uncertainties in the facts, climate change itself is not really what keeps me up at night. Maybe that’s because my professional training has disconnected me from my emotions on this score. But I think that there is a bigger reason. If we care about climate change because we care about human well-being, then climate change can be only one part of the story.
Humanity faces many existential risks. Wars are being fought today that are already catastrophic for those in the places involved. They could become catastrophic for many more if they expand, especially in a world with many nuclear-armed nations. Loss of biodiversity and ecosystems, for example in the Amazon rainforest, is an immediate, global-scale disaster. The rise of artificial intelligence creates species-level risks, even if our assessment of them is highly speculative. What I personally find the most disturbing is the democratic backsliding in my own country — the United States — as well as in others. This threatens society’s ability to responsibly handle crises, and also tends to create other crises, as authoritarian regimes consolidate and express their power in harmful ways.
The transition towards cleaner energy sources provides glimmers of climate hope — but citizens must prevail on governments to speed it up.Credit: Getty
Climate is coupled to all these problems, in one way or another. But as scary as many direct consequences of climate change will be at 2 °C of warming or more, the greatest harm, at least in the short term, comes from its role as a ‘threat multiplier’. For example, high rates of migration from low-income countries to the United States and Europe has already been weaponized politically by far-right groups. If warming increases rates of migration, and democracies slide into authoritarianism, is that a result of climate change, or of already polarized and dysfunctional political systems? I don’t know — but I do fear this scenario deeply.
Climate change, in fact, might be one of the more certain components of our future. Social and political developments are even more difficult to predict. Can anyone really predict life on Earth in 2050, let alone 2100, well enough to suggest specific outcomes on a planetary scale, with or without climate change?
And again, even if we did know the planet’s future with perfect certainty, there still wouldn’t be a single right way to feel about it. How good or bad is the present moment, for that matter? The answer to that question depends on our position in the world. In other words: who is “we”?
Emotion and action
The writer Amitav Ghosh is one of the world’s most insightful thinkers on climate, and a friend of mine. He has argued that existential fears about climate change are actually Western fears about the end of colonial power, because in much of the rest of the world — especially for Indigenous people — “catastrophe has already happened”. For people in richer countries searching for the right way to feel about the climate crisis, it’s worth pondering this.
But maybe searching for the right emotion is not the best use of our time. Maybe a more pragmatic and constructive question than “how doomed are we?” is “what should we do about it?”
A giant fund for climate disasters will soon open. Who should be paid first?
Emotions and actions are connected, of course. ‘Doomers’ — climate communicators and activists who focus on the potential for catastrophic outcomes — are criticized for their negative messaging, which some say turns many people off and makes them less likely to act. I am sceptical of this. Greta Thunberg’s message has not been limited to expressions of positive emotion, and it’s hard to think of any climate activist who has been more effective. You could plausibly argue that the 2022 US Inflation Reduction Act, which is possibly the most important piece of federal climate legislation in the nation’s history, wouldn’t have happened without the political pressure applied by her and groups that she inspired.
But “what should we do?” is not a scientific question any more than “how doomed are we?” is. It depends on our values, and on the unscientific question of how to effect social change. Again, I don’t claim to have authoritative answers. I do think, however, that climate scientists such as myself should think a little harder about these questions than perhaps we have.
I have a few basic principles that guide my thinking. One is that democracy is crucial to human well-being, and that we should all support political candidates who think similarly, and oppose authoritarianism. In this regard, the United States has a particularly consequential election coming up this November.
Another principle is that, when it comes to the need to stop using fossil fuels, none of the uncertainties that I’ve catalogued really matter. We know that the negative consequences of warming far outweigh the positive, and that we need to cut emissions much faster than we are now5. Future scientific advances won’t change this calculus.
This means that collective, governmental action is essential to speed up the clean-energy transition. As citizens, we should all be politically engaged in ensuring that our countries move further and faster towards this goal. Personal actions that reduce emissions matter too: although insignificant to the global carbon budget on their own, they create a culture that motivates collective action. I am flying less, eating a mostly vegetarian diet and making other low-carbon choices, and I am talking about those choices. I am far from perfect, and I don’t seek to shame anyone else. I know that my steps are largely symbolic. But symbols matter. I take these steps to make climate awareness part of my daily life, and to show to myself and others that I take it seriously.
Treating the symptoms
Climate scientists might consider whether we have a greater responsibility than others, and whether we should seek to bring about positive outcomes through our work. Not all scientific knowledge is relevant to action. As an atmospheric dynamicist, I have come to think that I can have the most positive impact by working not on problems related to climate mitigation — stopping the burning of fossil fuels and other sources of carbon emissions — but on adaptation6.
Mitigation is still absolutely crucial. To make a medical analogy, it’s like treating the underlying cause of the disease. But we already know what needs to be done, and the reasons we aren’t doing it are political, not a consequence of scientific uncertainties.
How effective are climate protests at swaying policy — and what could make a difference?
Adaptation, however, is like treating the disease’s symptoms — the impacts of climate change. These are as diverse and specific as the places and ways in which climate affects society generally. Addressing those impacts requires equally diverse, specific and detailed scientific information. For me at least, this is where it’s possible to work towards answering both “what should we do?” and “how doomed are we?” at the same time.
When a national, state or local government writes a climate-adaptation plan, designs infrastructure or develops a policy that influences development in high-risk areas, it needs specific information about the relevant climate risks. Corporations, non-governmental organizations and community groups need the same, if they are taking any action that accounts for climate risk. Because climate change most sharply manifests in extreme events, information about such events’ probabilities and impacts are needed7.
Most climate information available from academics or governments doesn’t quite meet this need. Climate-risk-assessment tools and data sets developed to inform the insurance and financial industries are expensive and proprietary. As governments face politically difficult decisions regarding adaptation — for example, how much should taxpayers in low-risk areas pay to support protection of those in high-risk areas? — they will need relevant climate information that has been subject to open scrutiny and debate8.
Some uncertainties in climate science are so stubborn that we might not be able to reduce them much in the near term. Scientists such as myself can help by orienting our research towards characterizing the changing hazards, risks and uncertainties, with the granularity and pragmatism needed for decisions on adaptation, in the public domain where all the issues can be hashed out openly.
There are many other answers, of course. The important thing is to remain engaged. That means recognizing that doom is a state of mind, and that uncertainty about the planet’s future is now just part of the human condition. It means doing our best to keep both the climate crisis and the many other dimensions of human and planetary well-being in our view at the same time, both in their global and local dimensions. It means trying to live our values in ways consistent with those realities, as well as we can understand them. And it means recognizing that science has a crucial part to play — but that science can only take us so far.
In his Power On newsletter today, Gurman said the new “Apple Account” branding will start to be used later this year both online and in Apple’s next major software releases, such as iOS 18 for the iPhone and watchOS 11 for the Apple Watch.
Apple already refers to funds added to an Apple ID as an “Apple Account balance,” and Gurman said there is an “Apple Account” team within the company. With the full rebranding later this year, the term Apple ID is expected to be completely phased out, over two decades after the company started using it. Apple’s reasoning behind the decision is not known, but “Apple Account” would be more straightforward branding.
Apple will preview iOS 18 and its other major software updates at its developers conference WWDC in June, and the rebranding to “Apple Account” will likely be announced then. The updates should be widely released in September.
Resale value trends suggest the iPhone SE 4 may not hold its value as well as Apple’s flagship models, according to SellCell. According to the report, Apple’s iPhone SE models have historically depreciated much more rapidly than the company’s more premium offerings. The third-generation iPhone SE, which launched in March 2022, experienced a significant drop in resale value, losing 42.6%…
In just four U.S. states, residents can add their driver’s license or ID to the Apple Wallet app on the iPhone and Apple Watch, providing a convenient and contactless way to display proof of identity or age at select airports, businesses, and venues. Adoption of the feature has been slow since Apple first announced it in September 2021, with IDs in the Wallet app only available in Arizona,…
The iPhone is Apple’s top-selling product, and it gets an update every year. In 2024, we’re expecting the iPhone 16 and iPhone 16 Pro lineup, with an arguably more interesting feature set than we got with the iPhone 15 and iPhone 15 Pro. Subscribe to the MacRumors YouTube channel for more videos. Capture Button All four iPhone 16 models are set to get a whole new button, which will be…
While the iPhone 16 Pro and iPhone 16 Pro Max are still around six months away from launching, there are already many rumors about the devices. Below, we have recapped new features and changes expected so far. These are some of the key changes rumored for the iPhone 16 Pro models as of March 2024:Larger displays: The iPhone 16 Pro and iPhone 16 Pro Max will be equipped with larger 6.3-inch…
Apple registers many patents most of which never see the light of day as consumer products – officially, that is. One burgeoning knock-off merchant in China has apparently taken cues from an idea Apple had in 2021 for AirPods featuring a case with a built-in touchscreen display. Pictures and video shared on X (Twitter) by occasional leaker @lipilipsi show production units of counterfeit…
Apple acquired Canada-based company DarwinAI earlier this year to build out its AI team, reports Bloomberg. DarwinAI created AI technology for inspecting components during the manufacturing process, and it also had a focus on making smaller and more efficient AI systems. DarwinAI’s website and social media accounts have been taken offline following Apple’s purchase. Dozens of former DarwinAI …
The iPad Air will be the next Apple tablet to adopt OLED display panel technology following its upcoming OLED iPad Pro models, according to an updated forecast from research firm Omdia (via The Elec). “In 2028, we expect the iPad Air to go OLED as well, with the iPad Air using single-stack and the iPad Pro using two-stack tandem OLEDs,” said Omdia researcher Kang Min-soo, speaking on…
Walmart today announced that it has started selling the MacBook Air with the M1 chip in the U.S., with pricing set at a very reasonable $699. The laptop can be ordered now on Walmart.com, and it will be available soon at select Walmart stores. This is the first time that customers can purchase a Mac that is sold directly by Walmart, the company said in a press release. Some other retailers…
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Sora is one of several AI tools that generates video from text promptsCredit: OpenAI
The release of OpenAI’s sophisticated video-generating tool Sora has been met with a mix of trepidation and excitement. Some observers worry that the technology could lead to a barrage of realistic-looking misinformation. “We’re going to have to learn to evaluate the content we see in ways we haven’t in the past,” says digital-culture researcher Tracy Harwood. Others see positive potential: such systems could help to simplify and communicate complex scientific findings, and speed up the process of illustrating papers, conference posters or presentations. In some cases, for example when reconstructing extinct lifeforms, AI illustrations could mislead both scientists and the public. For now, many scientific journals prohibit AI-generated imagery in papers.
Researchers have laid out safety guidelines for AI-powered protein design to head off the possibility of the technology being used to develop bioweapons. The voluntary effort calls for the biodesign community to police itself and improve screening of DNA synthesis, a key step in translating proteins into actual molecules. “It’s a good start,” says global health policy specialist Mark Dybul. But he also thinks that “we need government action and rules, and not just voluntary guidance”.
Occasionally erasing part of an AI model’s ‘memory’ seems to make it better at adapting to new languages, particularly those for which not much data is available or that are linguistically distant from English. Researchers periodically reset a neural network’s embedding layer during the initial training in English. When the periodic-forgetting system was retrained on a language with a small dataset, its accuracy score dropped by only 22 points, compared with almost 33 for a standard model. “An apple is something sweet and juicy, instead of just a word,” says AI researcher and study co-author Yihong Chen, who explains that the neural network displays the same high-level reasoning.
Researchers should be careful about projecting ‘superhuman’ abilities onto AI systems, warn anthropologist Lisa Misseri and cognitive scientist Molly Crockett. They characterized four mindsets — AI as oracle, AI as arbiter, AI as quant and AI as surrogate — after reviewing 100 papers, preprints, conference proceedings and books. Scientists should consider these cognitive ‘traps’ before embedding AI tools in their research.
A well-structured prompt increases the likelihood of accurate text prediction in large language models and minimizes the compounding effect of errors, says psychologist Zhicheng Lin. Here are his tips for prompt engineering:
• Break down tasks into sequential components
• Provide examples and relevant context as input
• Be explicit in your instructions
• Ask for multiple options
• Instruct the model to roleplay, for example as a writing coach or a sentient cheesecake
• Specifying the response format such as reading level and tone
The ageing US electricity grid is struggling to keep up with skyrocketing demand from green-technology factories and the data centres that crunch the numbers for crypto, cloud computing and AI. “How were the projections that far off?” asks Jason Shaw from Georgia’s electricity regulator. “This has created a challenge like we have never seen before.” Already, the power crunch is delaying coal plant closures and it remains unclear who should pay for creating new power infrastructure. Some data-centre developers are hoping that off-grid small nuclear or fusion power plants will eventually solve the problem.
Software engineer Chet Haase’s joke sums up the problem of algorithmic recommendations: by guiding what we watch, read and listen to, they influence what gets made in the first place — a self-reinforcing cycle. (MIT Technology Review | 11 min read)
Sora is one of several AI tools that generates video from text promptsCredit: OpenAI
The release of OpenAI’s Sora text-to-video AI tool last month was met with a mix of trepidation and excitement from researchers who are concerned about misuse of the technology. The California-based company showcased Sora’s ability to create photorealistic videos from a few short text prompts, with examples including clips of a woman walking down a neon-lit street in Tokyo and a dog jumping between two windowsills.
Tracy Harwood, a digital-culture specialist at De Montfort University in Leicester, UK, says she is “shocked” by the speed at which text-to-video artificial intelligence (AI) has developed. A year ago, people were laughing at an AI-produced video of the US actor Will Smith eating spaghetti. Now some researchers are worried that the technology could upend global politics in 2024.
OpenAI, which also developed ChatGPT and the text-to-image technology DALL·E, debuted Sora on 15 February, announcing that it was making the technology “available to red teamers to assess critical areas for harms or risks”. ‘Red teaming’ refers to the process of conducting simulated attacks or exploitation of a technology to see how it would cope with nefarious activity, such as the creation of misinformation and hateful content, in the real world.
Sora isn’t the first example of text-to-video technology; others include Gen-2, produced by Runway in New York City and released last year, and the Google-led Lumiere, announced in January. Harwood says she has been “underwhelmed” by some of these other offerings. “They are becoming more and more vanilla in what they present to you,” she says, adding that the programs require very specific prompts to get them to produce compelling content.
Misinformation is a major challenge for these text-to-video technologies, Harwood adds. “We’re going to very quickly reach a point in which we are swamped with a barrage of really compelling-looking information. That’s really worrying.”
Election fears
That poses particular problems with upcoming elections, including the US presidential election in November and an impending general election in the United Kingdom. “There will be colossal numbers of fake videos and fake audio circulating,” says Dominic Lees, who researches generative AI and filmmaking at the University of Reading, UK. Fake audio of the leader of the UK Labour Party, Keir Starmer, was released in October 2023, and fake audio of US President Joe Biden encouraging Democrats not to vote circulated in January.
One solution might be to require text-to-video AI to use watermarks, either in the form of a visible mark on the video, labelling it as AI, or as a telltale artificial signature in the video’s metadata, but Lees isn’t sure this will be successful. “At the moment watermarks can be removed,” he says, and the inclusion of a watermark in a video’s metadata relies on people actively researching whether a video they’ve watched is real or not. “I don’t think we can honestly ask audiences across the world to do that on every video they’re looking at,” says Lees.
There are potential benefits to the technology, too. Harwood suggests it could be used to present difficult text, such as an academic paper, in a format that is easier to understand. “One of the biggest things it could be used for is to communicate findings to a lay audience,” she says. “It can visualize pretty complex concepts.”
Another potential use might be in health care, with text-to-video AI able to talk to patients in place of a human doctor. “Some people might find it disconcerting,” says Claire Malone, a consultant science communicator in the United Kingdom. “Others might find it extremely convenient if they want to ask a medical professional questions multiple times a day.”
Data management
Text-to-video AI tools such as Sora could help researchers to wade through huge data sets, such as those produced by the European particle-physics laboratory CERN near Geneva in Switzerland and other large scientific projects, says Malone. Generative AI could “sift out code and do the mundane tasks of research”, she adds, but also do “much more sophisticated work [such as] giving it data and asking it to make predictions”.
Concerns have also been raised by people working in creative industries. The US actor Tom Hanks suggested last year that AI could enable him to continue appearing in films “from now until kingdom come” after his death. “If you were a young ambitious actor thinking about their future, and you were told ‘I’m sorry, Tom Hanks is always going to play the leading roles’, would you plan a future in that?” says Lees.
Text-to-video AI will throw up broad issues for society to face. “We’re going to have to learn to evaluate the content we see in ways we haven’t in the past,” says Harwood. “These tools put the opportunity to be a media content creator in the hands of everybody,” she says. “We’re going to be dealing with the consequences of that. It’s a fundamental shift in the way material will be consumed.”
In February, megafires ripped through the Chilean central coastal hills, killing at least 132 people, injuring hundreds and destroying 7,000 homes. At the time of writing, more than 300 people remain missing.
These wildfires are not a one-off calamity. You only need watch the news to know that wildfires are becoming more frequent and more destructive. Last year, catastrophic fires in Hawaii, Canada and Greece took hundreds of lives and caused widespread destruction. The 2019–20 Black Summer was the most uncontrolled fire season ever recorded in Australia. California’s 2018 Camp Fire was the deadliest ever in the state, and the most expensive natural disaster in the world that year. As a fire scientist at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro in Brazil, I have lost track of how many times I have scrambled to analyse the deadly consequences of cataclysmic fires worldwide.
Countries need to take megafires more seriously and implement urgent programmes to mitigate the associated risks. That’s doesn’t just mean tackling the root causes of climate change. It means more-effective and consistent land- and fire-management policies, greater efforts to conserve native species and more education for local people on how to minimize risks.
Why is Latin America on fire? It’s not just climate change, scientists say
Climate change is a major driver of wildfires. Rising temperatures have increased the frequency, intensity and duration of extreme events such as droughts, heatwaves and high-speed winds, which fuel longer and wilder fires. The past few years have given us a bitter taste of the future of fires on a warming planet. Hotspot regions might face a tenfold increase in fire risk under future global warming.
But it isn’t just global warming that should be blamed, argues a 2022 report by the United Nations Environment Programme (see go.nature.com/3uwv9np) that I helped to author. Climate and land-cover changes, including deforestation, urbanization, mining and use of land for agriculture and pasture, have all increased the likelihood of extreme wildfires over the past decades.
The 2024 Chilean wildfires resulted from a complex interplay between extreme weather conditions and human behaviour, as we found in an attribution study (see go.nature.com/3tjjscy). Since 2010, central-south Chile has seen more frequent and larger wildfires, as well as a prolonged drought within what was the nation’s warmest decade recorded since 1970.
But, as in many other countries, key factors in boosting megafires are poor land management and the growing proximity of flammable vegetation to populated urban and suburban areas. The wildland–urban interface covers only 5% of Chile’s land surface, but is home to 80% of the country’s population — and 60% of its wildfires.
Land-cover changes have homogenized the landscape, and have increased the likelihood of megafires by removing natural fire barriers — native plants — and increasing the number of informal settlements near forests. Pasture and agricultural areas are typical ignition sources. Either accidentally or through negligence or arson, humans were responsible for around 98% of the known causes of Chilean fires between 1985 and 2018.
How record wildfires are harming human health
Worldwide, land management is underused as a means of reducing fire vulnerabilities and exposure. Prescribed burns are not a new wildfire-prevention technique, but they have been marginalized owing to negative public perception. For this to change, the first step would be to implement proper fire-management regulations that are firmly built on the necessity of prescribed burns. Good regulations, appropriate funding and adequate crew training are essential. Climate change has substantially decreased the number of days that provide favourable conditions for prescribed burns.
Prevention and regulation are a must, because once a megafire begins, it is almost impossible to snuff out, even with sophisticated methods. Policies focusing on reactive responses — such as fire suppression — could result in the ‘firefighting trap’, a positive feedback loop in which fire suppression leads to there being more dry fuel in the landscape, which leads to worse fires, requiring more suppression. Breaking this loop requires effective and continuous science–policy interaction.
Another important concern is human behaviour. Governments must pass and enforce laws that discourage people from starting fires when danger is elevated. But laws count for little without cultural change. To change hearts and minds, local governments, non-governmental organizations and companies can foster community engagement in fire prevention through education campaigns, and the media can systematically disseminate information to raise awareness of the consequences of irresponsible practices. Furthermore, fire-management plans should be embedded in local knowledge, and include the needs and concerns of Indigenous communities and smallholder farms.
Megafires are a humanitarian crisis. As a fire scientist, I always end my talks with a call to action: to implement a resilient fire-management strategy. Decelerating global warming isn’t enough. Nations need a holistic approach to fire governance, adjusting prevention, regulation and planning according to each local and ecological context.
Women and early-career researchers: Nature wants to publish your research.Credit: Getty
Researchers submitting original research to Nature over the past year will have noticed an extra question, asking them to self-report their gender. Today, as part of our commitment to helping to make science more equitable, we are publishing in this editorial a preliminary analysis of the resulting data, from almost 5,000 papers submitted to this journal over a five-month period. As well as showing the gender split in submissions, we also reveal, for the first time, possible interactions between the gender of the corresponding author and a paper’s chance of publication.
The data make for sobering reading. One stark finding is how few women are submitting research to Nature as corresponding authors. Corresponding authors are the researchers who take responsibility for a manuscript during the publication process. In many fields, this role is undertaken by some of the most experienced members of the team.
The giant plan to track diversity in research journals
During the period analysed, some 10% of corresponding authors preferred not to disclose their gender. Of the remainder, just 17% identified as women — barely an increase on the 16% we found in 2018, albeit using a less precise methodology. By comparison, women made up 31.7% of all researchers globally in 2021, according to figures from the United Nations science, education and cultural organization UNESCO (see go.nature.com/3wgdasb).
Large geographical differences were also laid bare. Women made up just 4% of corresponding authors of known gender from Japanese institutions. Of researchers from the two countries submitting the most papers, China and the United States, women made up 11% and 22%, respectively. These figures reflect the fact that women’s representation in research drops at the most senior levels. They also mirror available data from other journals1, although it is hard to find direct comparisons for a multidisciplinary journal such as Nature.
At Cell, which has a life-sciences focus, women submitted 17% of manuscripts between 2017 and 2021, according to an analysis of almost 13,000 submissions2. The most recent data on gender from the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), which publishes the six journals in the Science family, is collected and reported differently. Some 27% of their authors of primary and commissioned content, and their reviewers, are women, according to the AAAS Inclusive Excellence Report (see go.nature.com/3t6yyr8). Nonetheless, all of these figures are just too low.
Another area of concern is acceptance rates. Of the submissions included in the current Nature analysis, those with women as the corresponding author were accepted for publication at a slightly lower rate than were those authored by men. Some 8% of women’s papers were accepted (58 out of 726 submissions) compared with 9% of men’s papers (320 out of 3,522 submissions). The acceptance rate for people self-reporting as non-binary or gender diverse seemed to be lower, at 3%, although this is a preliminary figure and we have reason to suspect that the real figure could be higher, as described below. Once we have a larger sample, we plan to test whether the differences are statistically significant.
Sources of imbalance
So, at what stage in the publishing process is this imbalance introduced? Men and women seem to be treated equally when papers are selected for review. The journal’s editors — a group containing slightly more women than men — were just as likely to send papers out for peer review for women corresponding authors as they were for men. For both groups, 17% of submitted papers went for peer review.
Our efforts to diversify Nature’s journalism are progressing, but work remains
A difference arose after that. Of those papers sent for review, 46% of papers with women as corresponding authors were accepted for publication (58 of 125) compared with 55% (320 of 586) of papers authored by men. The acceptance rate for non-binary and gender-diverse authors was higher at 67%. However, this is from a total of only three reviewed papers, a figure that is too small to be meaningful.
This difference in acceptance rates during review tallies with the findings of a much larger 2018 study of 25 Nature-family journals, which used a name-matching algorithm, rather than self-reported data3. Looking at 17,167 papers sent for review over a 2-year period, the authors found a smaller but significant difference in acceptance rates, with 43% for papers with a woman as corresponding author, compared with 45% for a man. However, they were unable to say whether the difference was attributable to reviewer bias or variations in manuscript quality.
Peering into peer review
How much bias exists in the peer-review process is difficult to study and has long been the subject of debate. A 2021 study in Science Advances that looked at 1.7 million authors across 145 journals between 2010 and 2016 found that, overall, the peer-review and editorial processes did not penalize manuscripts by women4. But that study analysed journals with lower citation rates than Nature, and its results contrast with those of previous work5, which found gender-based skews.
Moreover, other studies have shown that people rate men’s competence more highly than women’s when assessing identical job applications6; that there is a gender bias against women in citations; and that women are given less credit for their work than are men7. Taken together, this means we cannot assume that peer review is a gender-blind process. Most papers in our current study were not anonymized. We did not share how the authors self-reported, but editors or reviewers might have inferred gender from a corresponding author’s name. Nature has offered double-anonymized peer review for both authors and reviewers since 2015. Too few take it up for us to have been able to examine its impact in this analysis, but the larger study in 2018 looked at this in detail3.
Data limitations
There are important limitations to Nature’s data: we must emphasize again that they are preliminary. Moreover, they provide the gender of only one corresponding author per paper, not the gender distribution of a paper’s full author list. Furthermore, they don’t describe any other differences between authors.
There are also aspects of the data that need to be investigated further. For example, we need to look into the possibility that the option of reporting as non-binary or gender diverse is being misinterpreted by some authors with English as a second language. We think that ironing out such misunderstandings could result in a higher acceptance rate for non-binary authors.
Nature’s under-representation of women
Most importantly, these data give no insight into author experiences in relation to race, ethnicity and socio-economic status. Although men often have advantages compared with women, other protected characteristics also have a significant impact on scientists’ careers. Nature is participating in an effort by a raft of journal publishers to document and reduce bias in scholarly publishing by tracking a range of characteristics. This is a work in progress and sits alongside Springer Nature’s wider commitment to tackling inequity in research publishing.
So what can Nature do to ensure that more women and minority-gender scientists find a home for their research in our pages?
First, we want to encourage a more diverse pool of corresponding authors to submit. The fact that only 17% of submissions come from corresponding authors who identify as women might reflect existing imbalances in science (for example, it roughly tracks with the 18% of professor-level scientists in the European Union who are women, as reported by the European Commission8).
But there remains much scope for improvement. We know that the workplace climate in academia can push women out or see them overlooked for senior positions9. A 2023 study published in eLife found that women tend to be more self-critical of their own work than men are and that they are more frequently advised not to submit to the most prestigious journals10.
Second, just as prestigious universities should not simply lament their low application numbers from under-represented groups, we should not sit back and wait for change to come to us. To this end, our editors will actively seek out authors from these communities when at conferences and on laboratory visits. We will be more proactive in reaching out to women and early-career researchers to make sure they know that Nature wants to publish their research. We encourage authors with excellent research, at any level of seniority and at any institution, to submit their manuscripts.
Third, in an effort to make peer review fairer, Nature’s editors have been actively working to recruit a more diverse group of referees; 2017 data found that women made up just 16% of our reviewers. We need to double down on our efforts to improve this situation and update readers on our progress. In the future, we also plan to analyse whether corresponding authors’ gender affects the number of review cycles they face, and whether there are differences in relation to gender according to discipline and prestige of their affiliated institution. We need to improve our understanding of the sources of inequity before we can work on ways to address them. Nature’s editors will also strive to minimize our own biases through ongoing unconscious-bias training.
Last but not least, we will keep publishing our data on authorship and peer review, alongside complementary statistics on the gender of contributors to articles outside original research. Although today’s data present just a snapshot, Nature remains committed to tracking the gender of authors, to regularly updating the community on our efforts, and to exploring ways to make the publication process more equitable.
Meta changed how two-factor authentication works for Facebook and Instagram last year. You might have received notifications about this, but it was easy to miss in the platform’s sea of red alerts. OK, so what’s different? “Any devices you’ve frequently used Facebook on in the past two years will be automatically trusted,” reads Meta’s updated settings page. Your smartphone and laptop may not need a 2FA code to log in, unless you go into your settings and opt out.
Enabling 2FA is a basic way to improve the security of any online profile, since it adds an extra layer of difficulty for hackers trying to break into your account. “The role two-factor plays is, basically, to assume that at some point your password is going to be known by someone else,” said Casey Ellis, founder and chief strategy officer at Bugcrowd, a crowdsourced security company that has previously collaborated with Facebook. “You don’t have control over when or how that happens.” For users, this fallback measure is often as easy as copying and pasting a quick code from within a smartphone app, like Google Authenticator.
Anyone with a social media account on Facebook or Instagram needs to turn on two-factor authentication in their privacy settings. No shame if you haven’t, but do it right now by logging in to your Account Center, clicking Password and security, then Two-factor authentication.
Now that you’ve got it all set up, here’s what was changed with Meta’s 2FA process: It’s no longer activated anywhere you often used Facebook or Instagram in the past two years, from previous-generation smartphones to hand-me-down laptops.
What’s the reasoning for this adjustment? “As part of our continuous work to balance account security and accessibility, we’re letting people know that we’ll be treating the devices they frequently use to log in to Facebook as trusted,” said Erin McPike, a Meta spokesperson.
It shouldn’t be too much longer until we see the sixth-generation iPad Air, and another detail about the tablet has leaked: it’s rumored to be getting a landscape front-facing camera, in line with the 10th-gen entry-level iPad launched in 2022.
In other words, the selfie cam is on the top of the tablet when you’re using it in landscape mode, not down the side. This comes from seasoned tipster Instant Digital (via MacRumors), and will apparently apply to both sizes of the new iPad Air.
It certainly makes a lot of sense for video calls, because you can look at the top of the tablet when it’s set up in landscape mode. It’s also something that’s been rumored for the next iPad Pros, so every iPad should soon have the same front-facing camera placement.
As MacRumors points out, this is going to take a bit of engineering know-how: unlike the basic iPad, the iPad Air and iPad Pro have an inductive magnetic charger along the same edge for the Apple Pencil. Presumably Apple has found a way to handle this.
A bigger display, a faster chip
The current generation iPad Air (Image credit: Future)
In our 10.9-inch iPad 2022 review, we called the new camera placement “much more natural” for video calling, so it’s perhaps no surprise that the change is coming – and we should be getting official confirmation before too long.
New iPad Air and iPad Pro models could be announced as early as this week, according to sources. We thought it might happen last week too, but Apple decided to unveil the new M3-powered MacBook Air instead.
As well as a repositioned camera, the iPad Air 6 could well come in a larger 12.9-inch size, alongside the current 10.9-inch one. That means it would match the iPad Pro series in terms of giving consumers a choice of two screen sizes to pick from.
Under the hood, an upgrade to the latest M3 chip from Apple has been talked about as well, and we’ve also seen leaked schematics showing what the next iPad Air might look like. As soon as it’s official, we’ll let you know.
