Maggie Harrison

Maggie Harrison

Tiny Amounts of Plastic Cause Horrifying Problems in Chicken Embryos

In more terrible news from the nanoplastics front: a recent study from researchers at the Netherlands' Leiden University has confirmed that tiny plastics cause absolutely horrid development problems in forming chicken embryos, leading to extensive malformations and birth defects in newborn chicks. "Polystyrene nanoplastics cause a wide spectrum of severe congenital malformations in the chick […]

AI Company With Zero Revenue Raises $150 Million

Profit, Shmofit With the help of a brand-new $150 million dollar cash infusion from Andreessen Horowitz, a 16-month-old AI chatbot startup called Character.ai just reached a $1 billion market cap — despite having yet to generate any revenue. Founded by two ex-Googlers, the app is pretty much exactly what it says it is. Character.ai's platform […]

Clueless Congressman Bewildered That TikTok Connects Using WiFi

TikTok CEO Shou Chew finally took the stand in Congress yesterday to, as many tech CEOs have done before him, defend his company against an hours-long stream of sometimes fair, sometimes flawed, and sometimes just outright ridiculous questions from American representatives. Among the ridiculous was a line of questioning from North Carolina Republican Richard Hudson, […]

New Videogame Facial Animation Is So Realistic It’s in the Uncanny Valley

Next-Level MetaHuman Animator, the next-gen version of Epic Games' MetaHuman avatar tool, is here — and we gotta say, it's pretty remarkable. Epic's MetaHuman tool, which was first unveiled back in 2021, was already impressively good at generating hyperrealistic avatars from photographs of real people. Before, however, actually animating those characters was still a difficult, […]