Using network science, study shows music has become less complex

A team of Italian computer scientists from Sapienza University of Rome and the University of Padova reports that network science can be used to measure the complexity of a piece of music, allowing for comparison between genres. In their study, reported on the arXiv preprint server, the team used network science techniques to compare the complexity of types of music over time.

Phys.org > Computer Sciences Using network science, study shows music has become less complex

Initiative Aims to Enable Ethical Coding LLMs

AI coding assistants are quickly becoming indispensable tools for developers. But the provenance of the code they’re trained on is often murky, leading to concerns around transparency and author rights. A new initiative launched yesterday by the nonprofit Software Heritage hopes to change this by providing the world’s largest repository of ethically sourced code for training AI. The large language models (LLM) that underlie chatbots and coding assistants are trained on vast reams of data scraped from the Internet. But AI developers rarely provide details of what’s included in their training datasets, says Roberto Di Cosmo, director of Software Heritage. This makes it hard to reproduce ..

IEEE Spectrum > Computing

Mice with two dads have been created using CRISPR

Mice with two fathers have been born—and have survived to adulthood—following a complex set of experiments by a team in China.  Zhi-Kun Li at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing and his colleagues used CRISPR to create the mice, using a novel approach to target genes that normally need to be inherited from both…

MIT Technology Review Mice with two dads have been created using CRISPR

New Neural Network Slashes Sensor Data Overload

Modern technology collects vast amounts of data from sensors, with one estimate placing global data from Internet of Things devices at about 73 zettabytes (or 73 trillion gigabytes) in 2025. And as more data are collected, the infrastructure required to store, transfer, and run compute on that data also grows. But what if, instead of collecting all possible data from a sensor, we could be more selective, collecting just enough data to accurately identify whatever we’re looking for? That’s the approach proposed by researchers at Pennsylvania State University and MIT. Their paper, recently published in Nature Scientific Reports, demonstrates how a neural network can achieve an accuracy of ..

IEEE Spectrum > Artificial Intelligence

The Download: China’s DeepSeek, and useful quantum computing

This is today’s edition ofThe Download,our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology. How a top Chinese AI model overcame US sanctions The AI community is abuzz over DeepSeek R1, a new open-source reasoning model.  The model was developed by the Chinese AI startup DeepSeek, which…

MIT Technology Review The Download: China’s DeepSeek, and useful quantum computing

Useful quantum computing is inevitable—and increasingly imminent

On January 8, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang jolted the stock market by saying that practical quantum computing is still 15 to 30 years away, at the same time suggesting those computers will need Nvidia GPUs in order to implement the necessary error correction.  However, history shows that brilliant people are not immune to making mistakes.…

MIT Technology Review Useful quantum computing is inevitable—and increasingly imminent