David Axe

David Axe

How Disney and Warner Bros. Are Causing Internet Piracy to Boom

Photo Illustration by Elizabeth Brockway/The Daily Beast/GettyIn our digital era, movies and T.V. shows were supposed to get easier to watch, not harder. But it turns out, media companies are fickle—and media distribution can get complicated as it crosses borders.Warner Bros. Discovery has purged a bunch of high-profile movies and shows, either canceling them in post-production or deleting them from the Max platform. The sci-fi show Westworld disappeared from Max after its fourth and final season. WB killed off the completed superhero flick Batgirl without ever releasing it. Hulu, Disney+, and Paramount+ have also conducted their own, smaller purges.So what are a viewer’s options when a studio or streamer abruptly yanks a film or series from distribution or, eyeing a tax writeoff, cancels it right before release? These issues are also compounded as physical media like DVDs and Blu-rays disappear from stores and movie distribution remains fractured by geography.Read more at The Daily Beast.

The Race to Breed ‘Supercoral’ to Save Us From Climate Doom

Carolyn Cole / Los Angeles Times via Getty ImagesA brutal heat wave, intensified by accelerating global climate change, turned the shallow waters around the Florida Keys into the ecological equivalent of hot bathwater this summer—shocking, and possibly killing, entire swathes of the Keys’ fragile coral reefs.The death toll startled marine biologists who were already struggling to protect the reefs, the countless sea creatures they shelter, and the coastal communities they support. The losses lit a fire under the small community of specialists who are racing against man-made climate change to help the reefs adapt to hotter waters.“We need to give reefs the best chance to get over a decades-long period of climate stress,” Andrew Baker, director of the Coral Reef Futures Lab at the University of Miami, told The Daily Beast.Read more at The Daily Beast.

Elon Musk Wants You to Use Neuralink to Lose Weight. That’s a Bad Idea.

Photo Illustration by Erin O'Flynn/The Daily Beast/Getty ImagesNo, you don’t need to drill a hole in your head and implant a microchip in order to lose weight. There are much safer ways of slimming down—including a new class of very promising drugs that make weight-control brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) seem downright perilous in comparison.Conspiracy-peddling billionaire Elon Musk raised the prospect of computer-chip-aided weight-loss back in April, while discussing his Neuralink BCI in a TED interview. “I think you can solve a very wide range of brain injuries,” Musk said, “including severe depression, morbid obesity, sleep [disorders and] restoring memory in older people.”It’s not an outlandish claim. Neuralink, like other experimental BCIs, rewires the nervous system. People suffering from paralysis have used the implants to regain partial control of their limbs. BCIs can even translate neural impulses—thoughts, basically—into radio signals and transmit them to drones, computers, or other devices.Read more at The Daily Beast.

The Horrifying Truth Behind Israel’s ‘Assassination’ AI

Mahmud Hams / Getty Israel’s military has reportedly deployed artificial intelligence to help it pick targets for air strikes in Gaza.There are reasons to worry. The biggest problem with military AI, experts told The Daily Beast, is that it’s created and trained by human beings. And human beings make mistakes. An AI might just make the same mistakes, but faster and on a greater scale.So if a human specialist, scouring drone or satellite imagery for evidence of a military target in a city teeming with civilians, can screw up and pick the wrong building as the target for an incoming air raid, a software algorithm can make the same error, over and over.Read more at The Daily Beast.