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NASA has been monitoring an anomaly in Earth’s magnetic field, growing 40,000 miles above the planet’s surface between South America and southwest Africa.

This behavior highlights a critical issue: even systems designed for seemingly harmless tasks can produce unforeseen outcomes when granted enough autonomy.

The challenges posed by AI today are reminiscent of automated trading systems in financial markets. Algorithms designed to optimize trades have triggered flash crashes —sudden, extreme market volatility occurring within seconds, too fast for human intervention to correct.

Similarly, modern AI systems are built to optimize tasks at extraordinary speeds. Without robust controls, their growing complexity and autonomy could unleash consequences no one anticipated—just as automated trading once disrupted financial markets.

Using the X-shooter instrument at ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT), German astronomers have detected three new pre-white dwarfs, which turned out to be strongly hydrogen-deficient. The finding was reported in a research paper published December 20 on the pre-print server arXiv.

White dwarfs (WDs) are stellar cores left behind after a star has exhausted its nuclear fuel. Due to their high gravity, they are known to have atmospheres of either pure hydrogen or pure helium. However, a small fraction of WDs shows traces of heavier elements.

Although WDs have a relatively small size, comparable to that of the Earth, they are a few million times more massive than our planet. Pre-white dwarfs (PWDs) are a few times larger and slated to shrink in size, eventually becoming WDs within about a few thousand years.

Rous sarcoma virus, a pioneering discovery in cancer research, sheds light on how certain viruses can trigger uncontrolled cell growth, a hallmark of cancer.