Hours after Alex Pretti was killed by federal agents in Minneapolis on Saturday, Apple CEO Tim Cook and Amazon CEO Andy Jassy showed up for a movie night at the White House. Along with other business executives and several prominent Donald Trump supporters, they attended a private screening of Melania, a new documentary about the president's wife. The moviegoers were treated to buckets of popcorn and sugar cookies frosted with the first lady's name. Silicon Valley's top executives have seemingly taken every opportunity to cozy up to Trump. During his inauguration a year ago, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, Sundar Pichai, Elon Musk, and Cook sat smiling behind the president in the Capitol Rotunda. The obsequiousness has not stopped since: In August, Cook presented Trump with a custom plaque atop a 24-karat-gold base in the Oval Office. At a White House dinner the next month, the Google co-founder Sergey Brin praised Trump's 'civil rights' work, and OpenAI's Sam Altman described Trump's leadership as a 'refreshing change.' Amazon, Apple, Meta, Microsoft, and Google are among the companies that have made donations to fund the new White House ballroom....

A team based at the University of Vienna put individual clusters of around 7,000 atoms of sodium metal some 8 nanometres wide into a superposition of different locations, each spaced 133 nanometres apart. Rather than shoot through the experimental set up like a billiard ball, each chunky cluster behaved like a wave, spreading out into a superposition of spatially distinct paths and then interfering to form a pattern researchers could detect. Quantum theory doesn't put a limit on how big a superposition can be, but everyday objects clearly do not behave in a quantum way, she explains. This experiment ' which puts an object as massive as a protein or small virus particle into a superposition ' is helping to answer the 'big, almost philosophical question of 'is there a transition between the quantum and classical''' she says. The authors 'show that, at least for clusters of this size, quantum mechanics is still valid'. The experiment, described in Nature on 21 January1, is of practical importance, too, says Giulia Rubino, a quantum physicist at the University of Bristol, UK. Quantum computers will ultimately need to maintain perhaps millions of objects in a large quantum state to perform useful calculations. If nature were to make systems collapse past a certain point, and that scale was smaller than what is needed to make a quantum computer,, 'then that's problematic,' she says....

Humans&, a startup with a philosophy that AI should empower people rather than replace them, has raised $480 million in seed funding at a $4.48 billion valuation, reports The New York Times. Investors in the round include chipmaker Nvidia, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, and VC firms SV Angel, GV, and Laurene Powell Jobs' firm Emerson Collective. The megadeal for the three-month-old company follows a trend of investors throwing money at startups founded by breakaways of major AI labs. Humans&'s founders include Andi Peng, a former Anthropic researcher who worked on reinforcement learning and post-training of Claude 3.5 through 4.5; Georges Harik, Google's seventh employee, who helped build its first advertising systems; Eric Zelikman and Yuchen He, two former xAI researchers who helped develop the Grok chatbot; and Noah Goodman, a Stanford professor of psychology and computer science. The company's 20-odd employees also come from OpenAI, Meta, Reflection, AI2, and MIT, according to the company. The startup aims to use software to help people collaborate with each other ' think an AI version of an instant messaging app. One of their goals is to use existing AI techniques to train AI in new ways, like programming chatbots to request information from the user and store it for later use....

Gemstones like precious opal are beautiful to look at and deceivingly complex. As you look at such gems from different angles, you'll see a variety of tints glisten, causing you to question what color the rock actually is. It's iridescent thanks to something called structural color ' microscopic structures that reflect light to produce radiant hues.Structural color can be found across different organisms in nature, such as on the tails of peacocks and the wings of certain butterflies. Scientists and artists have been working to replicate this quality, but outside of the lab, it's still very hard to recreate, causing a barrier to on-demand, customizable fabrication. Instead, companies and individual designers alike have resorted to adding existing color-changing objects like feathers and gems to things like personal items, clothes, and artwork.Now MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) researchers have replicated nature's brilliance with a new optical system called 'MorphoChrome.' MorphoChrome allows users to design and program iridescence onto everyday objects (like a glove, for example), augmenting them with the structurally colored multi-color glimmer reminiscent of many gemstones. You select particular colors from a color wheel in the team's software program and use their handheld device to 'paint' with multi-color light onto holographic film. Then, you apply that painted sheet to 3D-printed objects or flexible substrates such as fashion items, sporting goods, and other personal accessories, using their unique epoxy resin transfer process.'We wanted to tap into the innate intelligence of nature,' says MIT Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) PhD student and CSAIL researcher Paris Myers SM '25, who is a lead author on a recent paper presenting MorphoChrome. 'In the past, you couldn't easily synthesize structural color yourself, but using pigments or dyes gave you full creative expression. With our system, you have full creative agency over this new material space, predictably programming iridescent designs in real-time.'...