Claude, the de facto mascot for a local museum, was the subject of a children’s book and regularly received fan mail
Claude, at the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco, on 24 April 2025. Photograph: Jeff Chiu/AP
Claude, the beloved albino alligator who called the California Academy of Sciences home for the better part of two decades, has died at age 30.
The San Francisco museum announced his death on Tuesday and said that the reptile had in recent weeks received treatment for a “suspected infection”. Claude, with his unusual white scales, had become a sort of mascot for the academy and the city. He was the subject of a children’s book and regularly received fan mail and gifts from around the world, the museum said.
“He brought joy to millions of people at the museum and across the world, his quiet charisma captivating the hearts of fans of all ages,” a statement from the museum read. “Claude showed us the power of ambassador animals to connect people to nature and stoke curiosity to learn more about the world around us.”
In September, the museum celebrated his 30th birthday with a month of festivities in honor of the “iconic swamp king”. (snip-MORE)
The owner of the shuttered Three Mile Island nuclear plant has been awarded a $1 billion federal loan guarantee that will enable it to shift onto taxpayers some of the risk of its plan to restart the Pennsylvania facility and sell the electricity to Microsoft for its data centers. Amid rising energy demands, the taxpayer-backed loan will go toward the unprecedented effort to reopen a mothballed U.S. nuclear plant that suffered a partial meltdown decades ago.
You’ll note that brave patriot Jake Lang wore a Kevlar vest to address the Dearborn City Council
Heavily armed Mexican Navy personnel came to investigate the scene and discovered that the men had landed in Mexico by mistake and intended to plant the signs in South Texas. The situation was resolved without violence, and the Mexican Navy removed the signs
If this were reversed, Mexican contractors would have been shot or had a bomb dropped on them by drone.
Last week, a judge handed down a 223-page opinion that lambasted the Department of Homeland Security for how it has carried out raids targeting undocumented immigrants in Chicago. Buried in a footnote were two sentences that revealed at least one member of law enforcement used ChatGPT to write a report that was meant to document how the officer used force against an individual.
The ruling, written by US District Judge Sara Ellis, took issue with the way members of Immigration and Customs Enforcement and other agencies comported themselves while carrying out their so-called “Operation Midway Blitz” that saw more than 3,300 people arrested and more than 600 held in ICE custody, including repeated violent conflicts with protesters and citizens. Those incidents were supposed to be documented by the agencies in use-of-force reports, but Judge Ellis noted that there were often inconsistencies between what appeared on tape from the officers’ body-worn cameras and what ended up in the written record, resulting in her deeming the reports unreliable.
More than that, though, she said at least one report was not even written by an officer. Instead, per her footnote, body camera footage revealed that an agent “asked ChatGPT to compile a narrative for a report based off of a brief sentence about an encounter and several images.” The officer reportedly submitted the output from ChatGPT as the report, despite the fact that it was provided with extremely limited information and likely filled in the rest with assumptions.
“To the extent that agents use ChatGPT to create their use of force reports, this further undermines their credibility and may explain the inaccuracy of these reports when viewed in light of the [body-worn camera] footage,” Ellis wrote in the footnote.
Per the Associated Press, it is unknown if the Department of Homeland Security has a clear policy regarding the use of generative AI tools to create reports. One would assume that, at the very least, it is far from best practice, considering generative AI will fill in gaps with completely fabricated information when it doesn’t have anything to draw from in its training data.
The DHS does have a dedicated page regarding the use of AI at the agency, and has deployed its own chatbot to help agents complete “day-to-day activities” after undergoing test runs with commercially available chatbots, including ChatGPT, but the footnote doesn’t indicate that the agency’s internal tool is what was used by the officer. It suggests the person filling out the report went to ChatGPT and uploaded the information to complete the report.
No wonder one expert told the Associated Press this is the “worst case scenario” for AI use by law enforcement.
Physicists from research groups at the University of Stuttgart, Saarbrücken, and Dresden conducting an experiment on quantum teleportation (left to right: Tobias Bauer, Marlon Schäfer, Caspar Hopfmann, Stefan Kazmaier, Tim Strobel, Simone Luca Portalupi). Credit: Julian Maisch
Everyday life on the internet is insecure. Hackers can break into bank accounts or steal digital identities. Driven by AI, attacks are becoming increasingly sophisticated. Quantum cryptography promises more effective protection. It makes communication secure against eavesdropping by relying on the laws of quantum physics. However, the path toward a quantum internet is still fraught with technical hurdles.
Researchers at the Institute of Semiconductor Optics and Functional Interfaces (IHFG) at the University of Stuttgart have now made a decisive breakthrough in one of the most technically challenging components, the quantum repeater. They report their results in Nature Communications.
Nanometer-sized semiconductor islands for information transfer
“For the first time worldwide, we have succeeded in transferring quantum information among photons originating from two different quantum dots,” says Prof. Peter Michler, head of the IHFG and deputy spokesperson for the Quantenrepeater.Net (QR.N) research project.
What is the background? Whether WhatsApp or video stream, every digital message consists of zeros and ones. Similarly, this also applies to quantum communication, in which individual light particles serve as carriers of information.
Zero or one is then encoded in two different directions of polarization of the photons (i.e., their orientation in the horizontal and vertical directions or in a superposition of both states). Because photons follow the laws of quantum mechanics, their polarization cannot always be completely read out without leaving traces. Any attempt to intercept the transmission would inevitably be detected.
Making the quantum internet ready for the fiber-optic infrastructure
Another challenge: An affordable quantum internet would use optical fibers—just like today’s internet. However, light has only a limited range. Conventional light signals, therefore, need to be renewed approximately every 50 kilometers using an optical amplifier.
Because quantum information cannot simply be amplified or copied and forwarded, this does not work in the quantum internet. However, quantum physics allows information to be transferred from one photon to another as long as the information stays unknown. This process is referred to as quantum teleportation.
Quantum repeaters as nodes for information transmission
Building on this, physicists are developing quantum repeaters that renew quantum information before it is absorbed in the optical fiber. They are to serve as nodes for the quantum internet. However, there are considerable technical hurdles. To transmit quantum information via teleportation, the photons must be indistinguishable (i.e., they must have approximately the same temporal profile and color). This proves extremely difficult because they are generated at different locations from different sources.
“Light quanta from different quantum dots have never been teleported before because it is so challenging,” says Tim Strobel, scientist at the IHFG and first author of the study. As part of QR.N, his team has developed semiconductor light sources that generate almost identical photons.
“In these semiconductor islands, certain fixed energy levels are present, just like in an atom,” says Strobel. This allows individual photons with defined properties to be generated at the push of a button.
“Our partners at the Leibniz Institute for Solid State and Materials Research in Dresden have developed quantum dots that differ only minimally,” says Strobel. This means that almost identical photons can be generated at two locations.
Information is ‘beamed’ from one photon to another
At the University of Stuttgart, the team succeeded in teleporting the polarization state of a photon originating from one quantum dot to another photon from a second quantum dot. One quantum dot generates a single photon, the other an entangled photon pair.
Entangled means that the two particles constitute a single quantum entity, even when they are physically separated. One of the two particles travels to the second quantum dot and interferes with its light particle. The two overlap. Because of this superposition, the information of the single photon is transferred to the distant partner of the pair.
Instrumental for the success of the experiment were quantum frequency converters, which compensate for residual frequency differences between the photons. These converters were developed by a team led by Prof. Christoph Becher, an expert in quantum optics at Saarland University.
Improvements for reaching considerably greater distances
“Transferring quantum information between photons from different quantum dots is a crucial step toward bridging greater distances,” says Michler.
In the Stuttgart experiment, the quantum dots were separated only by an optical fiber of about 10 m length. “But we are working on achieving considerably greater distances,” says Strobel.
In earlier work, the team had shown that the entanglement of the quantum dot photons remains intact even after a 36-kilometer transmission through the city center of Stuttgart. Another aim is to increase the current success rate of teleportation, which currently stands at just over 70%. Fluctuations in the quantum dot still lead to slight differences in the photons.
“We want to reduce this by advancing semiconductor fabrication techniques,” says Strobel.
“Achieving this experiment has been a long-standing ambition — these results reflect years of scientific dedication and progress,” says Dr. Simone Luca Portalupi, group leader at the IHFG and one of the study coordinators. “It’s exciting to see how experiments focused on fundamental research are taking their first steps toward practical applications.”
Scottie's Playtime 