It’s a pretty good bet that the Google Pixel 8a is going to break cover at Google I/O 2024 on May 14, and as the day approaches, we’ve seen a pile of new leaks turn up that give us a better idea of what we can expect from this mid-ranger.
First up is well-known tipster Evan Blass, who has posted an extensive set of pictures of the Pixel 8a. You can see the phone from the front and the back, and at an angle, and in its four rumored colors: Obsidian (black), Porcelain (white-ish), Bay (blue), and Mint (green).
These designs have previously been leaked, so there’s not a whole lot that’s new here, but it’s more evidence that this is indeed what the Pixel 8a is going to look like. The images are sharp and clear too, giving us a good look at the design.
It appears this phone will look a lot like the Pixel 8 and the Pixel 7a, with the recognizable camera bar around the back. It does seem as though this year’s mid-range Pixel is going to sport a more curved frame than its immediate predecessors, however.
To no one’s surprise, the Pixel 8a will feature AI (Image credit: @OnLeaks / MySmartPrice)
Onward to the next leak, and MySmartPrice has managed to get hold of a promotional video for the Pixel 8a. It was briefly available to view on YouTube before being pulled – and as YouTube is owned by Google, we’re assuming someone higher up had a word.
If you want to see some stills taken from the video before it disappeared, you can find some over at Phandroid. There’s actually not too much that’s new in this video, besides seeing the Pixel 8a itself – a lot of the AI features the clip shows off, like instant photo edits and live text translations, are already available in newer Pixel phones.
Our final leak for now is over at Android Headlines, where there are some promotional images showing off some of the capabilities of the Pixel 8a: capabilities including tools like Circle to Search. The images suggest all-day battery life, the Tensor G3 chipset, IP67 protection, and seven years of security updates.
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The same source says the on-sale date for the Google Pixel 8a is going to be May 16, and there are some pictures of the official silicone cases that’ll come along with it. Expect to hear all the details about this upcoming phone on May 14.
All being well, the Samsung Galaxy Watch 7 should be with us at some point during July – and if there were any doubts that Samsung‘s next flagship wearable is indeed coming soon, a new leak may have dismissed them for good.
As spotted by SamMobile, a Samsung wearable with the product code SM-L305U has just appeared on the Bluetooth SIG (Special Interest Group) database, as all Bluetooth-capable gadgets must do before they’re released to the public.
That code is thought to refer to the US version of the 40mm Galaxy Watch 7 with LTE. This doesn’t tell us very much about the watch, besides Bluetooth 5.3 LE support (as the Samsung Galaxy Watch 6 had), it does indicate a launch is imminent.
We certainly haven’t been short of Samsung Galaxy Watch 7 rumors to date. The thinking is that we might get three models this year, for the first time: the Galaxy Watch 7, the Galaxy Watch 7 Classic, and possibly a cheaper model as well.
A significant chipset upgrade has been rumored for this year too, as well as a squarer design – a bit like the Apple Watch, then. There’s also been talk that sleep apnea detection will be added to the Galaxy Watch 7.
Other leaks point to improvements in battery life – always welcome when it comes to wearables of course – and so it looks like there are going to be plenty of reasons to choose these smartwatches over, say, Samsung’s new smart ring.
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A study suggests that researchers are using chatbots to assist with peer review.Credit: Rmedia7/Shutterstock
A study that identified buzzword adjectives that could be hallmarks of AI-written text in peer-review reports suggests that researchers are turning to ChatGPT and other artificial intelligence (AI) tools to evaluate others’ work.
The authors of the study1, posted on the arXiv preprint server on 11 March, examined the extent to which AI chatbots could have modified the peer reviews of conference proceedings submitted to four major computer-science meetings since the release of ChatGPT.
Their analysis suggests that up to 17% of the peer-review reports have been substantially modified by chatbots — although it’s unclear whether researchers used the tools to construct reviews from scratch or just to edit and improve written drafts.
How ChatGPT and other AI tools could disrupt scientific publishing
The idea of chatbots writing referee reports for unpublished work is “very shocking” given that the tools often generate misleading or fabricated information, says Debora Weber-Wulff, a computer scientist at the HTW Berlin–University of Applied Sciences in Germany. “It’s the expectation that a human researcher looks at it,” she adds. “AI systems ‘hallucinate’, and we can’t know when they’re hallucinating and when they’re not.”
The meetings included in the study are the Twelfth International Conference on Learning Representations, due to be held in Vienna next month, 2023’s Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems, held in New Orleans, Louisiana, the 2023 Conference on Robot Learning in Atlanta, Georgia, and the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing in Singapore.
Nature reached out to the organizers of all four conferences for comment, but none responded.
In the arXiv study, a team led by Weixin Liang, a computer scientist at Stanford University in California, developed a technique to search for AI-written text by identifying adjectives that are used more often by AI than by humans.
By comparing the use of adjectives in a total of more than 146,000 peer reviews submitted to the same conferences before and after the release of ChatGPT, the analysis found that the frequency of certain positive adjectives, such as ‘commendable’, ‘innovative’, ‘meticulous’, ‘intricate’, ‘notable’ and ‘versatile’, had increased significantly since the chatbot’s use became mainstream. The study flagged the 100 most disproportionately used adjectives.
Scientific sleuths spot dishonest ChatGPT use in papers
Reviews that gave a lower rating to conference proceedings or were submitted close to the deadline, and those whose authors were least likely to respond to rebuttals from authors, were most likely to contain these adjectives, and therefore most likely to have been written by chatbots at least to some extent, the study found.
“It seems like when people have a lack of time, they tend to use ChatGPT,” says Liang.
The study also examined more than 25,000 peer reviews associated with around 10,000 manuscripts that had been accepted for publication across 15 Nature portfolio journals between 2019 and 2023, but didn’t find a spike in usage of the same adjectives since the release of ChatGPT.
A spokesperson for Springer Nature said the publisher asks peer reviewers not to upload manuscripts into generative AI tools, noting that these still have “considerable limitations” and that reviews might include sensitive or proprietary information. (Nature’s news team is independent of its publisher.)
Springer Nature is exploring the idea of providing peer reviewers with safe AI tools to guide their evaluation, the spokesperson said.
Transparency issue
The increased prevalence of the buzzwords Liang’s study identified in post-ChatGPT reviews is “really striking”, says Andrew Gray, a bibliometrics support officer at University College London. The work inspired him to analyse the extent to which some of the same adjectives, as well as a selection of adverbs, crop up in peer-reviewed studies published between 2015 and 2023. His findings, described in an arXiv preprint published on 25 March, show a significant increase in the use of certain terms, including ‘commendable’, ‘meticulous’ and ‘intricate’, since ChatGPT surfaced2. The study estimates that the authors of at least 60,000 papers published in 2023 — just over 1% of all scholarly studies published that year — used chatbots to some extent.
Gray says it’s possible peer reviewers are using chatbots only for copyediting or translation, but that a lack of transparency from authors makes it difficult to tell. “We have the signs that these things are being used,” he says, “but we don’t really understand how they’re being used.”
‘Obviously ChatGPT’ — how reviewers accused me of scientific fraud
“We do not wish to pass a value judgement or claim that the use of AI tools for reviewing papers is necessarily bad or good,” Liang says. “But we do think that for transparency and accountability, it’s important to estimate how much of that final text might be generated or modified by AI.”
Weber-Wulff doesn’t think tools such as ChatGPT should be used to any extent during peer review, and worries that the use of chatbots might be even higher in cases in which referee reports are not published. (The reviews of papers published by Nature portfolio journals used in Liang’s study were available online as part of a transparent peer-review scheme.) “Peer review has been corrupted by AI systems,” she says.
Using chatbots for peer review could also have copyright implications, Weber-Wulff adds, because it could involve giving the tools access to confidential, unpublished material. She notes that the approach of using telltale adjectives to detect potential AI activity might work well in English, but could be less effective for other languages.
Right now, Apple’s Vision Pro headset is only available to buy in the U.S. Beyond that, the company hasn’t given many hints as to when customers elsewhere will be able to get their hands on the mixed reality device.
One way to read the tea leaves, however, could be to look at Apple job listings – and in this respect, we might have just gotten a big clue about when the Vision Pro will go on sale outside the United States.
As spotted by MacRumors, Apple has recently posted job listings for a “Briefing Experience Specialist” for the Vision Pro in Australia, China and Japan. The job description states that successful applicants will “design and deliver demonstrations that present the capabilities of the product and its revolutionary new technology.”
The obvious inference from these job postings is that Apple is gearing up to launch the Vision Pro in the countries listed, meaning they could be next in line for Vision Pro availability.
Coming soon?
(Image credit: Apple)
Predictably, the job listings did not give any clues relating to when the Vision Pro might actually go on sale around the world, but we wouldn’t be surprised if it’s sooner rather than later. Apple analyst Ming-Chi Kuo has previously claimed Apple will expand the product’s availability before its Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) in June, which means we could see some movement over the next few weeks and months.
Australia, China and Japan are not the only places that have been seemingly getting ready for the Vision Pro. In October 2023, our friends at iMore spotted a LinkedIn job listing for another Briefing Experience Specialist, this time based in the U.K. And earlier in March 2024, MacRumors noticed visionOS code that seemed to hint that the headset could be coming to a range of other countries relatively soon.
Of course, there’s no certainty on any of these release dates as long as Apple keeps quiet about them. The aforementioned U.K. job listing went up in October last year but we still don’t have any information on a release date, so the latest news from Australia, China and Japan might not mean the headset is going to land there any time soon.
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Still, given the size of the WWDC event, it would be an excellent opportunity for Apple to reveal more Vision Pro announcements to the world. If we still haven’t heard anything by then, people around the world will be getting impatient.
A star in the process of consuming a planet (artist’s conception).Credit: NG Images/Alamy
Stellar detectives have identified seven stars that recently dined on a rocky planet. The study doubles the number of binary stars known to have consumed a planet, and questions the perception that mature solar systems harbouring Earth-like planets are usually stable.
The findings, published in Nature on 20 March1, show “strong evidence of planet ingestion”, says Jianrong Shi, an astronomer at the National Astronomical Observatories in Beijing. The planets seem to have been eaten during their stars’ relatively stable main-sequence period, adds study co-author Fan Liu, an astronomer at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia.
If this is true, it means these systems have continued to be chaotic long after their formation, with planets disintegrating or falling into their star, says Johanna Teske, an astronomer at the Carnegie Institution for Science in Washington DC. “It’s an inference at this point. We need to look at these systems in more detail,” she says.
Swallowed by stars
Last year, for the first time, astronomers observed a star in the process of eating a planet. But unravelling whether a star has done so in the past is challenging, because planets are tiny compared with their hosts, and their contents soon get diluted.
Different elements absorb and emit light of different wavelengths, so the composition of a star’s surface leaves a fingerprint on the light reaching Earth. But detecting whether a star has eaten a planet is similar to spotting a chocolate chip that’s been swirled into a bowl of vanilla ice cream, says Teske. Stars also vary a lot in their make-up, making it tough to prove that a star has a particular composition because it ingested a planet.
The 2,000 stars where aliens would catch a glimpse of Earth
To hunt for planet-eating stars, Liu and his colleagues performed a cosmic-twin study. Using the Gaia space telescope, they found 91 pairs of Sun-like stars nearby in the Milky Way, whose motions suggested that they were both born in the same gas cloud. The stars in such paired systems should have near-identical compositions and their similar lives should rule out many potential causes for discrepancies.
The team then used three ground-based telescopes to study the abundance of 21 elements in the pairs. If there were notable differences between a pair of stars, the researchers looked at whether this could be explained through noise in the data or other sources of variation. For seven pairs, “the difference has to be explained by one [star] ingesting a planet and the other not”, says Meridith Joyce, an astrophysicist at the Konkoly Observatory in Budapest, and a co-author on the paper.
Secret planet-eaters
The study suggests that around 8% of Sun-like star pairs in our region of the Milky Way harbour a planet-eater, says Liu. He adds that this estimate is conservative, because the team considered only stars ingesting rocky planets, whereas other stars might have eaten gaseous Jupiter- or Neptune-like bodies. The method would also have missed cases in which both stars had eaten a planet of similar composition.
Finding clear signs of planet ingestion in billion-year-old stars is “something unexpected”, he says. Astronomers often consider planet-eating to be a feature of a star’s early life, when planetary orbits are unstable and collisions are probable. But these meals must have been relatively recent, in the last few hundred millions of years, or theory suggests the evidence would’ve been undetectable, says Liu. The planets could have met their fate when their eroding atmospheres caused them to spiral inward, or some stars might have captured untethered rogue planets as they flew by, he adds.
Shi says that astronomers should examine these systems to see if any sibling exoplanets remain. The findings should make Earth-dwellers grateful, he says. The diversity of exoplanets has continued to shock astronomers; now it seems that “our Solar System is not only unique, but also undoubtedly peaceful”.
A stone tool from the archaeological site of Korolevo in western Ukraine.Credit: Roman Garba
Stone tools found in western Ukraine date to roughly 1.4 million years ago1, archaeologists say. That means the tools are the oldest known artefacts in Europe made by ancient humans and offer insight into how and when our early relatives first reached the region.
The findings support the theory that these early arrivals — probably of the versatile species Homo erectus — entered Europe from the east and spread west, says study co-lead author Roman Garba, an archaeologist at the Czech Academy of Sciences in Prague. “Until now, there was no strong evidence for an east-to-west migration,” he says. “Now we have it.”
Prehistoric sites documenting the presence of human ancestors in Europe before 800,000 years ago are extremely rare, says Véronique Michel, a geochronologist at the University of Côte d’Azur in Nice, France, who was not involved in the research. “This new study adds another piece to the puzzle [of] the dispersal of early hominins in Europe.”
The findings were published on 6 March in Nature.
Set in stone
The tools were discovered in the 1980s at the Korolevo archaeological site near Ukraine’s border with Romania, yet no one had been able to precisely date them.
Carbon dating, the archaeological workhorse, is getting a major reboot
To do so, Garba and his colleagues used a dating method based on cosmogenic nuclides — rare isotopes generated when high-energy cosmic rays collide with chemical elements in minerals on Earth’s surface. Changes in the concentrations of these cosmogenic nuclides can reveal how long ago a mineral was buried. By calculating the ratio of specific cosmogenic nuclides in the sediment layer in which the tools were buried, the team estimated that the implements must be 1.4 million years old. The dating analyses, Michel says, “appear highly reliable”.
Until now, the earliest precisely dated evidence of hominins in Europe comprised fossils2 and stone tools3 found in Spain and France. Both are 1.1 million to 1.2 million years old.
Intrepid travellers
The dates of the Korolevo tools lead the researchers to speculate that the human ancestors who made them were H. erectus, the only archaic humans known to have lived outside Africa about 1.4 million years ago. What’s more, the Korolevo tools resemble those found at archaeological sites in the Caucasus Mountains that have been linked to H. erectus and dated to about 1.8 million years ago, says Mads Knudsen, a geoscientist at Aarhus University in Denmark, who co-led the study. However, Knudsen adds, Korolevo’s most ancient layer of sediment didn’t yield any fossilized human remains, so it is impossible to say for sure that the tools were made by H. erectus.
Geographically, Korolevo lies between older archaeological sites at the intersection of Asia and Europe, and younger sites in southwestern Europe. The findings give a fuller picture of the direction of travel probably taken by the first Europeans, supporting the idea that they spread from east to west — perhaps along the valleys of the Danube River, Garba says.
Russia’s war in Ukraine is disrupting studies of ancient life
Korolevo is a treasure trove of prehistoric remains, says study co-author Vitaly Usyk, an archaeologist affiliated with the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine in Kyiv, who visited the site last year with Garba for the first time since the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022. The Korolevo site is relatively safe and hasn’t been damaged during the war, although the area is now overgrown with vegetation, Garba says. “I can imagine doing fieldwork there even now.”
However, Usyk notes, few scientists can participate in field research at Korolevo or anywhere else in the country, because of travel restrictions or because they have fled the conflict. Usyk himself left Ukraine in 2022 and is now working at the Institute of Archaeology in Brno, Czech Republic, with a fellowship that allows him to continue doing his research. “Would I like to go back [to Ukraine]? Yes, of course,” he says. “I would like to organize expeditions to Korolevo to help other scientists reveal how ancient humans came from Africa to Europe.”
After what feels like a very long wait, all the signs are pointing to an imminent launch for the Sonos headphones – and we just got another big clue that points to them arriving within the next few months.
As per Reddit (via 9to5Mac), the headphones just passed through the approval process at the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) in the US, which means they’ve been given regulatory clearance to go on sale.
There isn’t too much information here – other than they’re headphones, with on-ear cups, and Wi-Fi support – but it usually doesn’t take long for products to go on sale after they’ve been given the go ahead from the FCC.
The latest rumors suggest that June is the month when the Sonos headphones are going to be unveiled, which would fit with them getting FCC clearance in March. There’s also been talk that Sonos could unveil a party speaker at the same time.
What to expect
Patents have revealed what the Sonos headphones might look like (Image credit: Sonos)
While we wait for the Sonos headphones to be made official, we’ve had plenty of leaks about what to expect. Sonos CEO Patrick Spence has gone on the record as saying that a “new product in a multi-billion dollar category” is on the way – hint hint.
Patents already drawn up by Sonos show that these cans are going to come with Wi-Fi connectivity, and it’s clear that you’ll be able to use them with an existing Sonos speaker system pretty seamlessly – switching audio streams between devices as needed.
Other features mentioned in the patents are support for noise cancelling technology, and possibly a digital assistant you can talk to through the headphones. All of this is to be confirmed of course, and plans for products can always change.
As for pricing, the Sonos headphones are apparently going to cost in the region of $449, which works out at about £350 / AU$675. That would undercut what you pay for the AirPods Max, which the Sonos headphones will be challenging.
The Maya and other ancient Mesoamerican cultures smoked tobacco in the form of cigars. An analysis of ceramic vases suggests that some of these ancient peoples also consumed tobacco as a liquid infusion, probably as part of curative and purification practices1.
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Rivian’s R2 reservations are off to a hot start. On Friday, CEO RJ Scaringe posted on X that the automaker had taken more than 68,000 reservations for the SUV in less than 24 hours. Amid alarmingly weakened demand for electric vehicles, perhaps there’s a latent interest in innovative EV companies when they aren’t helmed by a conflict magnet with a fixation on baseless conspiracy theories and the supposed online “rights” of Neo-Nazis.
Rivian’s 68,000 reservations hold up well against its most high-profile competitors. It took Ford about three weeks to get 100,000 pre-orders for the F-150 Lightning. Tesla’s Cybertruck got 250,000 reservations in less than a week. To be fair, reserving a Rivian R2 only requires a $100 deposit the same as the Cybertruck and F-150 Lightning.Customers plunking down a Benjamin to hold one have no obligation to pay the remaining $44,900 (and up) when the vehicle finally arrives in 2026, and even if they intend to buy one now, that’s plenty of time to change their minds.
You could argue that — like with Tesla and Ford — Rivian chose the low deposit to build hype, knowing full well that many pre-order customers won’t follow through. But it also helps that Rivian’s event on Thursday did everything the company needed. The R2 looks “quite fetching,” as Engadget’s Lawrence Bonk pointed out. On the inside, it has sleek and subtle details like two glove boxes, fold-down rear and front seats, a slide-out cargo floor and dual scroll wheels with dynamic haptic feedback on the steering wheel. It also has a 300-mile minimum range and a $45,000 starting price, which doesn’t hurt.
Overwhelmed by the wonderful response to our new vehicles: R2, R3 and R3X.
In less than 24 hours, we’ve taken more than 68,000 R2 reservations. We are thrilled to see this vehicle resonate so strongly with our community! pic.twitter.com/tEIBhwlJQC
And, of course, the surprise “One more thing”-style reveal of the cheaper, sportier and more compact R3 and R3X could help provide a halo effect for the company when it desperately needs to build excitement around its brand. In February, Rivian announced that it would lay off 10 percent of its salaried workers, and this week, it cut 100 employees at its Illinois factory. Still, the EV market could use a new “hero.” I have no idea if Rivian or its CEO, RJ Scaringe, has potential to be the face of the industry. But Elon Musk, its current poster boy, is a lightning rod for unnecessary turmoil.
In a survey of Americans conducted by The Harris Poll late last year, 45 percent of respondents said they had a lower opinion of EVs “because of the actions of people associated with them.” (I’m pretty sure they didn’t mean Ford’s Doug Field or GM’s Mary Barra.)
Perhaps Rivian’s impressive showing reveals at least some Americans have an appetite for an EV maker that’s neither a traditional auto company nor one helmed by someone who, at times, seems more interested in behaving like a teenage contrarian than a responsible adult serving as the public face of an industry the world desperately needs to grow up — and get people excited about driving electric vehicles — as climate change begins to ravage the planet.
