Sale makes ‘Jodi’, a smaller relative of T rex, the ‘second most valuable dinosaur ever sold at auction’, Sotheby’s says

A rare skeleton of a Nanotyrannus, a smaller relative of the Tyrannosaurus rex, sold at auction in New York this week for $47.3m, making it one of the world’s most expensive fossils.

The skeleton, named “Jodi” after the person who found the remains in 2019, sold at Sotheby’s on Tuesday for $47.3m, “after a twelve-minute bidding battle that saw six bidders compete online and over the phones, before ultimately selling on the phone”, Sotheby’s said in a statement.

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© Photograph: Yuki Iwamura/AP

© Photograph: Yuki Iwamura/AP

© Photograph: Yuki Iwamura/AP

Happy Tuesday! Here’s your Tuesday Tech Drop, the past week’s top stories from the intersection of technology and politics.

Dems want damning surveillance report

A pair of Democratic senators are accusing President Donald Trump’s administration of hiding a report that “details serious abuses of Americans’ rights under Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.” Sens. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., and Adam Schiff, D-Calif., are trying to pry loose a report they say the administration is legally required to make public after a FISA court opinion detailed abuses of the program in March.

Since retaking office, Trump has expanded the federal government’s arsenal of creepy surveillance tools en route to building what appears to be an unprecedented spy machine that can track Americans. It’s in that context that Democrats — with some GOP help — tanked a vote in June that would have extended the controversial FISA powers that give the government broad latitude to sweep up data, including information belonging to Americans.

In a letter to Director of National Intelligence Jay Clayton and Attorney General Todd Blanche, the two Senate Democrats said the damning FISA report from on alleged surveillance abuses should have been released already — and demanded that it be released now so lawmakers can consider whether to extend FISA powers next year.

They wrote:

The administration has now had over seven months to declassify and release this opinion. It is time to stop violating the law and finally release this opinion. And if this administration won’t follow this simple statutory directive, it is unclear why Congress or the American people should trust this administration to follow any of the other legal limits to Section 702.

Read more at Gizmodo.

AI bots’ banking break-ins

Artificial intelligence bots are increasingly gaining unauthorized access to people’s bank accounts, according to new reporting from Axios. The report homes in on concerns among bank officials about security in the age of AI.

Read more at Axios.

Massive Meta judgment

A judge ordered Meta to pay $25 billion after the company lost a lawsuit alleging that the company broke New Mexico’s consumer protection laws and jeopardized its users after the Cambridge Analytica scandal nearly a decade ago. Meta has vowed to appeal the ruling.

Read more at MS NOW.

Republican outcry over Colom ad

After Mississippi’s Republican attorney general issued legal threats last week, the state’s Democratic Senate nominee, Scott Colom, deleted an ad using AI tools to mock his Republican opponent, Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith. I wrote about how it seems like Republicans are fretting over this race in a deep-red state.

Read more at MS NOW.

Pro-ICE activist reportedly faces deportation

Samuel Sey, a popular right-wing influencer known for supporting Trump’s racist anti-immigrant crackdown, reportedly has been detained by immigration officials and is now facing deportation after allegedly overstaying a temporary visa.

Read more at The Roys Report.

What AI guidelines?

The good news is the Pentagon apparently has some guidelines around the development of AI tools to avoid the risk of escalating wars or harming civilians and troops. The bad news? Defense officials aren’t always adhering to these rules, according to a congressional report.

Read more at NPR.

Anthropic bots get alarming access

Anthropic says its AI tool accessed Georgia voting data typically only available to people who pay for it. The company and Georgia’s secretary of state said no individual voter records were accessed, but the intrusion marks yet another disturbing security breach involving AI. A new report explains why “the company’s statements about what its bot accessed raise more questions.”

Read more at The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

Alpha School shortcomings

An investigation from The New York Times suggests that Alpha School, the network of AI-fueled private schools that have been backed by the Trump administration and vow to offer a superior learning experience, is failing to live up to its promises.

Read more at The New York Times.

MAGA influencer meddling fails

Several MAGA influencers have recently been in Brazil and Serbia, hoping to sway elections in both countries — but the pro-authoritarian candidates they supported flamed out over the weekend. Now, especially when it comes to Brazil, Trump and a bunch of extremely online conservatives are pushing lies about the election being rigged, as my colleague Brandy Zydrozny explained.

Read more at MS NOW.

The post Senate Democrats warn that the Trump administration is hiding a damning surveillance report appeared first on MS NOW.

In breathless press releases and posts, the company has touted its models’ ability to deliver scientific breakthroughs. But its IPO filing taps the brakes on just how fast its AI will lead to big discoveries.

The risks laid out by the San Francisco company in its filing Monday with the Securities and Exchange Commission range from the mundane to involvement in cyberattacks and the spread of dangerous misinformation.

The data center buildout could cause a massive increase in gas prices as companies scramble for limited supplies and infrastructure fails to meet demand.

Two orbiters have long outlasted their expected lifespans and completely reshaped our understanding of the Red Planet, all while operating 140 million miles from Earth.

Observers can see the cup in two distinctive contrasting colours, based on whether they see reflected light or light directly passing through it

© Ed Cartledge, Sort of Films via University of Sheffield

Study may have uncovered ancient Egyptian word for Aloe Vera

© Claudia Sachße via Eurekalert

Palaeontologists are reexamining fossils in Natural History Museum's care in recent years to find new species

© Guilherme Gehr

There are more than 8,000 species of amphibians on Earth, and not one of them lives in the sea. Fewer than 2% tolerate any salt at all, and even those have limits. It is a striking gap. Whales, sea turtles and penguins each show that mammals, reptiles and birds can live at sea, with no […]

When the James Webb Space Telescope began photographing galaxies from the universe’s earliest chapters, astronomers ran into a problem. There were more very bright galaxies than their models predicted, and some looked far too massive for such a young cosmos. Part of that puzzle has since faded. Some of those objects turned out to be […]

Some studies have linked disgust sensitivity to socially conservative attitudes. But ahead of the US midterm elections, does disgust shape our politics, or do our beliefs shape what we find disgusting?

Between 34,000 and 25,000 years ago, much of Europe shared a way of life that archaeologists call the Gravettian. It is recognized by its stone and bone tools, by the way people buried their dead, and by small carved figurines of women known as Venus figurines. They turn up from the Atlantic side of the […]

Line up human and chimpanzee DNA and the first surprise is how little separates us. We share more than 96% of the sequences used to make proteins, the molecules that build and run a living body. And yet the human brain is roughly three times the size of a chimpanzee’s, and it does things a […]

These elusive and reactive particles have been challenging to hold on to and even more challenging to study, but a new method paves the way for tests on the differences between matter and antimatter.

While oil is known to float, new research finds that over time it can permeate even extremely deep marine habitats, with animal populations declining by as much as 80 percent.

Paris Marx, author of Hyperscale, has been tracking global data center development for years. The US has a lot to learn from what’s happened everywhere from Ireland to New Zealand.

When an electron meets a positron, both vanish. Their mass turns into energy and nothing is left of either particle. That is the main reason positrons are so hard to study. There is no jar to keep them in, because the walls of any container are made of ordinary matter, and a single touch would […]

The vaccine is personalized to a patient’s tumor, and results from the Phase 3 trial are yet another example of the promise of mRNA vaccines in treating cancer.

The Webb telescope sees tiny red dots everywhere. Astronomers can’t agree on what they are, but some believe they may be enormous stars with black holes inside.