NERD NEWS

WRITERS OF SCI-FI AND AI

Baidu’s Verne Plan， named after the famous sci-fi writer Jules Verne， is attempting to make artificial intelligence with the advice of science fiction authors. According to Xinhua， six people are in the first group of advisers， and it has been highlighted that it is extremely exclusive-with both Liu Cixin and David Brin on the list-both Hugo Award winners. Hopefully， many at Baidu will have read Liu’s “Curse 5.0” in which （spoilers ahead） a jilted woman destroys the whole of planet Earth with a computer virus designed to ruin her ex’s life. Baidu， please keep Liu away from the interface. The other three authors involved are Ken Liu，Chen Qiufan， and Yao Haijun， all giants in the field of sci-fi and most with pretty destructive ideas with what AI could mean. The annoying part of this， however， is that Baidu announced this on April Fool’s Day，and it got dismissed by a number of organizations， but it does appear to be quite real. Liu Cixin told the Chinese news platform The Paper that， “This is an innovative organization...Many ideas will be born here.” - TYLER RONEY

NEW DINO-EGG IN GANSU

Most dinosaur fossils found in China come from the Early Cretaceous period， an age in Paleontology known for its awesomeness of having T-Rexes stomping about. The Late Cretaceous came about 40 million years later and brought with it further awesomeness in the Carcharodontosaurids vein-it means “shark-toothed lizards”just in case you thought that word wasn’t cool enough-which includes the Giganotosaurus， which， scientists agree，would probably have been able to bitch slap a T-Rex. This egg， however， is slightly less impressive， weighing in at just a few centimeters， but the implications for this discovery are quite wide-ranging， not least of which is the concept that China has a horde of Late Cretaceous fauna waiting to be discovered. The egg， “may represent a more basic type of dinosaur egg， which had been extinct in Late Cretaceous，”said author of the paper in Vertebrata PalAsiatica， Xie Junfang， from the Zhejiang Museum of Natural History. China has long been a hotbed of paleontological discovery and evidence from the Late Cretaceous puts new hope in dino-lovers’eyes. - T.R.