Perplexity Making A Move To Acquire Chrome

Perplexity, the emerging force in artificial intelligence, has offered a staggering US$ 34.5 billion for Google’s Chrome browser, according to the Wall Street Journal.

The unsolicited bid, which Perplexity confirmed to the newspaper, is far in excess of Perplexity’s own US$ 18 billion valuation and comes at a pivotal moment for both companies: Perplexity recently unveiled its own AI-native search browser, called Comet, last month, an explicit move to take on Google Chrome.

Meanwhile, Google’s own fate is up in the air as a federal judge weighs what remedies should follow from the 2024 ruling that Google had illegally monopolized the search market.

Perplexity said in a statement to the Journal that its bid is "designed to satisfy an antitrust remedy in highest public interest by placing Chrome with a capable, independent operator."

The Justice Department’s antitrust case against Google, which began in 2020, accused the company of unlawfully suppressing competition by locking in default search deals with device manufacturers and browser developers.

Last year, U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta ruled that Google had, in fact, monopolized the search market through anticompetitive tactics. Among the most consequential is exactly what Perplexity is proposing: whether Google should be compelled to divest Chrome, a browser installed on billions of devices and accounting for well over 60 percent of global browser usage.

Chrome, of course, is more than just a web browser; it’s a strategic linchpin connecting users to Google Search and a treasure trove of data fueling Google’s US$ 2 trillion advertising apparatus. Chrome’s size—about 3.5 billion users—positions it at the fulcrum of both user data collection and default search engine placement. The sale of Chrome is one of the Department of Justice’s top recommendations as a Google remedy.

For what it’s worth, DuckDuckGo CEO Gabriel Weinberg recently testified in court that Chrome could be worth upwards of US$ 50 billion; some analysts offer more conservative estimates for its valuation, around US$ 20 billion. Perplexity’s bid, at US$ 34.5 billion, lands squarely within that range.

Perplexity, which has evolved from a little-known startup in 2022 to a high-profile competitor with an US$ 18 billion valuation, now hosts about 30 million monthly active users and generates roughly US$ 150 million in annual revenue. Its core product—a real-time AI-powered search engine with source citations—is positioned as a challenger to traditional search engines and leading AI assistants such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Anthropic’s Claude. Perplexity has partnered with several publishers, including Time, the Los Angeles Times, and, Fortune.

Perplexity allows you to choose from many of those popular models, including GPT-5, Gemini 2.5 Pro from Google, and Claude Sonnet 4.0, which has attracted major investors including Nvidia, SoftBank, and Jeff Bezos. Perplexity has also been a prime acquisition candidate, with industry analysts suggesting Apple should buy Perplexity to strengthen its currently lagging AI portfolio and rely less on Google for search.

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Patrick 'Starbutt' Found Without Squarepants

The sea floor is home to all sorts of weird and wonderful creatures. However, there is one creature in particular that become an online sensation, thanks to its impressive "buttocks".

A big–bottomed sea star has been spotted more than 1,000 metres (3,280ft) below the waves.

And it appears to have a backside that will make even the most avid gymgoer jealous.

This has led many baffled viewers to compare the creature to Patrick from the animated series Spongebob Squarepants.

Commenting on a YouTube live feed, one user wrote: "Patrick's lost his pants!" while another demanded: "We want the big–bottomed Patrick".

Other hilarious comments included: "There's a gym at the bottom of the sea", "Baby's got back", "This butt looks better than most" and "That *peach emoji* needs to be studied".

The orange creature was captured on camera as part of an Argentine–American scientific mission to explore the Mar del Plata canyon.

This is one of Argentina's largest and deepest underwater canyons that plunges to 3,500 metres (11,482ft) deep.

Researchers are using a remotely–operated vehicle (ROV) to explore its depths while transmitting a livestream of what they come across.

So far they have broadcast a range of amazing animals including a bright red sea cucumber, octopus, king crab and incredible coral – but none have generated as much interest as the sea star.

The creature features two symmetrical bumps on its back, bearing an uncanny resemblance to buttocks.

Its vibrant colour also means it looks like Patrick, a naïve and overweight pink sea star that is best friends with a yellow sea sponge in the famous Nickelodeon series which first aired back in 1999.

The sea star now even has its own account on X, with the username "Starbutt", where users have been sharing memes about the creature.

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Robot Crab Flexes Muscles Against Real Crabs

A new robot posing as a tough male crab recently challenged real crabs to a showdown during mating season — and the videos are hilarious.

The robot, nicknamed "Wavy Dave," infiltrated fiddler crab (Afruca tangeri) communities on the mudflats of southern Portugal and participated in claw-waving contests, during which males wave one oversized claw to attract females. However, Wavy Dave's mission had problems from the get-go, a new study revealed.

"The females realised he was a bit odd, and some of the males tried to fight him," study first author Joe Wilde, a statistician and modeler in ecology and environmental science at Biomathematics and Statistics Scotland, said in a statement. "One male broke Wavy Dave by pulling off his claw. We had to abandon that trial and reboot the robot."

Claw waving is an important part of fiddler crab reproduction. If a male successfully attracts a female during these displays, then the female enters the male's burrow and allows him to fertilize her eggs, so the stakes are high.

Despite the claw-breaking incident, Wavy Dave proved to be enough of a contender that researchers gained insight into how male crabs respond to rivals. The researchers published their findings Wednesday (6 August) in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B Biological Sciences.

Scientists already knew that many animals change and adapt their display behaviors based on the presence and proximity of their rivals. However, less is known about how animals respond to changes in their rivals' signaling behavior, according to the study.

Wilde used a 3D printer to create a model of a fiddler crab, and then built Wavy Dave's claw-waving mechanism. The robot crab had two interchangeable claw options for its display — one average length and one large — and was controlled from a mobile app using Bluetooth.

The researchers put their robot to the test on the crab-filled mudflats of Ria Formosa Natural Park. Female fiddler crabs typically select males who have larger claws and who wave their claws quickly, according to the statement. When Wavy Dave was around, the researchers found that rival males waved for longer but not faster. In the study, the researchers speculated that the males assumed a female was present because of Wavy Dave, but they waited to actually see the female before going all out with their own display.

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Google Healthcare AI Hampred By 'Hallucinations'

As AI development advance at a rapid pace, many halth practitioners are also becoming increasingly uneasy about the medical community making widespread use of error-prone generative AI tools.

The proliferation of the tech has repeatedly been hampered by rampant "hallucinations," a euphemistic term for the bots' made-up facts and convincingly-told lies.

One glaring error proved so persuasive that it took over a year to be caught. In their May 2024 research paper introducing a healthcare AI model, dubbed Med-Gemini, Google researchers showed off the AI analyzing brain scans from the radiology lab for various conditions.

It identified an "old left basilar ganglia infarct," referring to a purported part of the brain — "basilar ganglia" — that simply doesn't exist in the human body. Board-certified neurologist Bryan Moore flagged the issue to The Verge, highlighting that Google fixed its blog post about the AI — but failed to revise the research paper itself.

The AI likely conflated the basal ganglia, an area of the brain that's associated with motor movements and habit formation, and the basilar artery, a major blood vessel at the base of the brainstem. Google blamed the incident on a simple misspelling of "basal ganglia."

It's an embarrassing reveal that underlines persistent and impactful shortcomings of the tech. Even the latest "reasoning" AIs by the likes of Google and OpenAI are spreading falsehoods dreamed up by large language models that are trained on vast swathes of the internet.

In Google's search results, this can lead to headaches for users during their research and fact-checking efforts.

But in a hospital setting, those kinds of slip-ups could have devastating consequences. While Google's faux pas more than likely didn't result in any danger to human patients, it sets a worrying precedent, experts argue.

"What you’re talking about is super dangerous," healthcare system Providence's chief medical information officer Maulin Shah told The Verge. "Two letters, but it’s a big deal."

Google touted its healthcare AI as having a "substantial potential in medicine" last year, arguing it could be used to identify conditions in X-rays, CT scans, and more.

After Moore flagged the mistake in the company's research paper to Google, employees told him it was a typo. In its updated blog post, Google noted that "'basilar' is a common mis-transcription of 'basal' that Med-Gemini has learned from the training data, though the meaning of the report is unchanged."

In a medical context, AI hallucinations could easily lead to confusion and potentially even put lives at risk.

"The problem with these typos or other hallucinations is I don’t trust our humans to review them, or certainly not at every level," Shah told The Verge.

It's not just Med-Gemini. Google's more advanced healthcare model, dubbed MedGemma, also led to varying answers depending on the way questions were phrased, leading to errors some of the time.

"Their nature is that [they] tend to make up things, and it doesn’t say ‘I don’t know,’ which is a big, big problem for high-stakes domains like medicine," Judy Gichoya, Emory University associate professor of radiology and informatics, told The Verge.

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Legendary Sheriff Brands Trans Prostitute 'Uglier Than A Mud Fence'

Florida's Polk County Sheriff is one of the most admired lawman in America. Results of his performance and treatment of convicted felon has been praised worldwide.

Recently, Sheriff Grady Judd paraded the results of a recent crackdown by his Florida department which saw nearly 250 people arrested for alleged human trafficking. One of those was Jason Balthis, a 43-year-old who Sheriff Judd said was charged with "offering to commit" as part of the "Fool Around and Find Out" crackdown.

Holding a picture of Balthis as a woman up, he said: "This Jason Balthis, when he walks in you think 'well I have set up a deal with an ugly woman', and I think you'd all agree he's an ugly woman."

He then held up a mugshot of Balthis without any makeup on or his wig, showing a bald man with remnants of what appears to be lipstick still on him.

Judd continued: "This is what you really get when the makeup comes off. I want you to think about this, you decide you're gonna hook up with a woman, she comes in and she's already uglier than a mud fence.

"Then as you start to engage you find out this dudette is a dude, and look what he really looks like. He looks like he should have been in the Scarface movie.

"This is what is happening, people think they are getting this, and many times they are getting a really bad guy. This is the before and after."

He added: "When you find them in the bar at night and you try to drink them pretty and you wake up the next morning and you see this, that's what we call Rolex ugly."

Sheriff Judd explained: "You wake up the next morning and they're laying on your arm and your Rolex is there.

"You just chew your arm off and leave the Rolex, you gotta get outta there. You don't care about the Rolex."

According to Polk County data, Balthis has been arrested eight times in the past 11 years.

Some charges include possession of drugs including crystal meth and cocaine, violating a probation, and his most recent for alleged prostitution. His inmate profile states his race and sex as a white male. He is currently being held in custody.

Balthis was one of 244 suspects taken in during the nine-day operation which started earlier this month.

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