Timmy the Whale Was Released into the Sea After Being Stranded Off the German Coast For Weeks. Was That the Right Call?

The humpback whale first washed ashore at the end of March, but its health deteriorated over the past few weeks. Experts have criticized efforts to return the animal to the water, which may have done more harm than good

NVIDIA Spectrum-X — the Open, AI-Native Ethernet Fabric — Sets the Standard for Gigascale AI, Now With MRC

The race to build the world’s most powerful AI factories demands networking that keeps pace with the ambitions of AI itself.  NVIDIA Spectrum-X Ethernet scale-out infrastructure stands at the forefront of that race as the most advanced AI networking technology available today, deployed by industry leaders who can’t afford to compromise on performance, resilience or […]

How science is taking tripping mainstream

President Trump recently signed an order to speed up the evaluation of psychedelics to treat the brain. That’s coming after decades of strict prohibition on psychedelic drug use dating back to President Nixon. So how did we go from that to a psychedelic renaissance? A look into a key institution in the world of psychedelic research may give us some clues. This episode, NPR’s brain correspondent Jon Hamilton shares insight from a recent trip. (No pun intended.)

Want more psychedelic content? Catch our episode on ketamine therapy here , or learn why some scientists want to take the trip out of psychedelics here .

Have other questions about psychedelics and the brain? Let us know by emailing shortwave@npr.org !

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Melting Snow Off Shivelyuch

Near-constant activity continues on the volcano in Russia.

The text mode lie: why modern TUIs are a nightmare for accessibility

There is a persistent misconception among sighted developers: if an application runs in a terminal, it is inherently accessible. The logic assumes that because there are no graphics, no complex DOM, and no WebGL canvases, the content is just raw ASCII text that a screen reader can easily parse. The reality is different. Most modern Text User Interfaces (TUIs) are often more hostile to accessibility than poorly coded graphical interfaces. The very tools designed to improve the Developer Experience (DX) in the terminal—frameworks like Ink (JS/React), Bubble Tea (Go), or tcell—are actively destroying the experience for blind users. ↫ Casey Reeves The core reason should be obvious: the command-line interface, at its core, is just a stream of data with the newest data at the bottom, linearly going back in time as you go up. Any screen reader can deal with this fairly easily, and while I personally have no need for such a tool, I’ve heard from those that do that kernel-level screen readers are quite good at what they do. TUIs, or text-based user interfaces, made with modern frameworks are actually very different: they’re “2D grid of pixels, where every character cell is a pixel. abandons the temporal flow for a spatial layout.” It should become immediately obvious that screen readers won’t really know what to do with this, and Reeves gives countless examples, but the short version is this: the cursor jumps all over the place with every screen update, which makes screen readers go nuts. Various older TUIs, made in a time well before these modern TUI frameworks came about, were designed in a much more terminal-friendly way, or give you options to hide the cursor to solve the problem that way. Irssi, for example, uses VT100 scrolling regions instead of redrawing the whole screen every time something changes. I had never really stopped to think about TUIs and screen readers, as is common among us sighted people. The problems Reeves describes seem to stem not so much from TUIs being inherently inaccessible, but from modern frameworks not actually making use of the terminal’s core feature set. I really hope this Reeves’ article shines a light on this problem, and that the people developing these modern TUIs start taking accessibility more seriously.

Using duplicity to back up your FreeBSD desktop

Backing up in modern times, we’ve had ZFS snapshots and replication to make this task extremely easy. However, you may not have access to another ZFS endpoint for replication, need to diversify risk by using a non-ZFS tool for backup, or are simply using UFS2, living the old skool life. For these situations, my first recommendation is to lean on Tarsnap for its ease of use and simplicity, making restoration just as easy as backing up. But some situations call for a different approach. Maybe you have a strict firewall at your company that doesn’t allow Tarsnap data streams to egress from your corporate network, or you have internal/easy access to storage endpoints, such as S3-compatible object storage or a large-file storage location with SFTP access. When you are faced with the latter, the duplicity (sysutils/duplicity in ports) utility is available as an easily installable package onto your FreeBSD system. ↫ Jason Tubnor at the FreeBSD Foundation The rest of the article explains how to use duplicity on FreeBSD for the purpose described above.

NASA eClips and GLOBE Educators Strengthen a Regional STEM Ecosystem in Coastal Virginia

Thirty-eight science educators representing seven school districts across Virginia’s Tidewater region joined forces with community organizations, such as the Elizabeth River Project, to deepen their instructional practice through a dynamic collaboration between NASA eClips and the GLOBE (Global Learning and Observation to Benefit the Environment) Program. Together, these groups are cultivating a regional STEM ecosystem […]

A Deadly Outbreak of Hantavirus Has Stranded a Cruise Ship in the Atlantic Ocean. Here's What to Know About the Rare Contagion

Three people have died in association with the vessel, and health officials have identified a total of two confirmed cases and five suspected cases of the infection. The virus usually spreads via infected rodent droppings

Did Facial Recognition Find a Lost Portrait of Anne Boleyn? Scholars Debate Whether A.I. Solved or Merely Muddled an Art History Mystery

Accused of treason, the second wife of Henry VIII lost her head. Now, some researchers argue that she also lost her face among dozens of potentially mislabeled portraits in a royal art collection

NASA’s Perseverance Mars Rover Surveys ‘Crocodile Bridge’

Description NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover used its Mastcam-Z camera system to capture this 360-degree panorama of a region nicknamed “Crocodile Bridge” on Jezero Crater’s rim. The panorama is made up of 980 images, 971 of which were taken on Dec. 18, 2025, the 1,717th Martian day, or sol, of the mission. An additional nine were […]

Curiosity Blog, Sols 4879-4885: Struggle at Atacama

Written by William Farrand, Senior Research Scientist, Space Science Institute Earth planning date: Friday, May 1, 2026 Chile’s Atacama desert is the driest mid-latitude desert in the world, receiving only 15 millimeters (0.59 inches) of precipitation per year. Only the dry valleys of Antarctica receive less precipitation. These environmental conditions have made the Atacama a […]

650 NASA Volunteers Have Co-Authored Scientific Papers

After a recent count, NASA Citizen Science is proud to report that more than 650 people who have volunteered to participate in NASA citizen science projects have co-authored peer-reviewed research papers with scientists on those project teams. These volunteers made incredible contributions like: And all of them saw their passion and dedication translated into lasting […]

Cancer Is Somehow Rare in the Heart. Turns Out, the Organ's Rhythmic Beat Might Keep the Disease at Bay, a Mouse Study Finds

Less than 1 percent of cancers start in the heart, and disease that begins elsewhere seldom spreads to the blood-pumping organ. New research suggests mechanical force might have a protective role

In the Ancient World, This Pigment Was Worth More Than Gold. Archaeologists Discovered It Buried With Babies in Roman Coffins

A funerary custom in Roman Yorkshire of pouring liquid gypsum over bodies before burial preserved traces of Tyrian purple

NASA’s Curiosity Rover Frees Its Drill From a Rock

Description This series of images shows NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover as it got a rock stuck to the drill on the end of its robotic arm and, after waving the arm and running the drill a few times, finally detached the rock. The imagery showing the entire process was captured by the black-and-white hazard cameras […]

NVIDIA and ServiceNow Partner on New Autonomous AI Agents for Enterprises

Enterprise AI has learned to generate. It has learned to reason. Now companies are asking the next question: How should AI act? Early agent systems have shown what’s possible, moving beyond simple prompts to take on more complex tasks. The next step is bringing those capabilities into enterprise environments — where agents must operate with […]

NASA Astronaut to Answer Questions from Students in Florida

Students in Florida will hear from NASA astronaut Chris Williams as he answers prerecorded science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) questions while aboard the International Space Station. The Earth-to-space call will begin at 11 a.m. EDT Friday, May 8, and will stream live on the agency’s Learn With NASA YouTube channel. This event is hosted […]

NASA Research Shows Early Life Relied on Rare Metal

NASA-funded scientists have discovered that life on Earth over 3 billion years ago relied on the metal molybdenum, which was incredibly scarce in the environment at the time. The study, published in Nature Communications on Tuesday, is the first to show that molybdenum was used by ancient life this far back in our planet’s history. […]

Building on America’s 65-Year Legacy of Human Spaceflight

On the morning of May 5, 1961, the Mercury-Redstone 3 launch vehicle lifted into the sky from Cape Canaveral, Florida, carrying astronaut Alan B. Shepard Jr. Over the next 15 minutes, Shepard ascended to an altitude of 116 miles (187 kilometers) in his Freedom 7 spacecraft, becoming the first American to fly into space before […]

You've Been Told to 'Feed a Cold.' Turns Out, Eating May Truly Boost Your Immune System Cells, According to a New Study

T cells, which target infection and disease, can become more effective after a meal. The finding might help improve cancer-fighting therapies and optimize our response to vaccines

Could Pluto Once Again Be Considered a Planet? New Remarks From NASA's Administrator Highlight an Enduring Debate Among Scientists

Two decades ago, the International Astronomical Union—which defines and names celestial bodies—redefined the criteria for being a planet, putting Pluto into the new category of dwarf planet

NASA’S Juno Misson Captures Jupiter Moon Thebe

Description NASA’s Juno spacecraft captured this view of Thebe, the second largest of Jupiter’s inner moons, during a close pass on May 1, 2026. The spacecraft’s Stellar Reference Unit (SRU) captured this image from a distance of approximately 3,100 miles (5,000 kilometers) at a resolution of about 1.9 miles (3 kilometers) per pixel. Thebe resides […]

Real estate giant confirms vishing incident as ShinyHunters and Qilin both come knocking

Cushman & Wakefield activated incident response protocols after serial extortionists issued separate threats

Real estate giant Cushman & Wakefield has confirmed a data breach after two cybercrime groups, ShinyHunters and Qilin, separately claimed responsibility for attacks on the company.…

SAP dives deeper into Iceberg with Dremio acquisition

ERP giant previously leaned on Databricks for integration

SAP has snapped up Dremio, a data integration and analytics provider, to extend the reach of its data analytics and AI agent-building tools into external data sources.…

VMware claims Cloud Foundation on track for world domination

Delivers update aimed at reducing hardware bill shock

VMware has announced an update to its flagship Cloud Foundation (VCF) private cloud suite and tried to make it fit the times by adding features that allow users to run with less hardware.…

ShinyHunters claims dump puts 119K Vimeo emails in the wild

Vimeo points finger at analytics supplier Anodot, says no logins or card data were touched

More than 119,000 Vimeo users's email addresses were extracted in a breach traced to a third-party analytics vendor, according to Have I Been Pwned.…

Brit mathematician lets AI agent loose with credit card – cue password leaks, CAPTCHA chaos and more

Professor Fry's AI experiment shows light and dark sides of agentic tech

British mathematician Professor Hannah Fry has shared a cautionary experiment involving an AI agent, a set of tasks, and a bank card number Fry's team gave it "to show us what it could do."…

Romance scammers turn sweet talk into £102M payday

Victims losing £280K a day to fake profiles and sob stories

Romance fraudsters scammed Britons out of £102 million ($138 million) last year, according to the latest police figures.…

Vodafone dials up full control of joint venture with Three in £4.3B deal

CK Hutchison takes early cash as UK mobile tie-up moves ahead of schedule

Vodafone has struck a deal to take full ownership of VodafoneThree, the mobile network formed from last year's merger of its British operations with Three, in a move designed to accelerate its UK ambitions.…

Unexpected item in Windows' bagging area

Activating Windows will cost more than a couple of cheap carrier bags

Bork!Bork!Bork!  Things must be tough for UK grocery retailer Sainsbury's, judging by the state of Windows Activation on one of its self-service kiosks.…

NHS to close-source hundreds of GitHub repos over AI, security concerns

Healthcare giant's maintainers handed May deadline to enact the change

The UK's National Health Service (NHS) is ordering all of its technology leaders to temporarily wall off the organization's open source projects over concerns relating to advanced AI and Anthropic's Mythos.…

Microsoft's bad obsession is showing up in shabby services and slipshod software. Here's proof

If you can't bother to keep GitHub running, why should we bother with you?

Opinion  It's been another shabby week for Microsoft, and a shabbier one for its users. We learnt that Windows 11's epic habit of trying to corral customers into paid-for Microsoft services just got worse with a low-rent trick. Remote Desktop got a bit more secure, which is good, but in a way that suggests not too much user testing took place. As for GitHub… GitHub got two helpings of Chef Redmondo's Special Sauce.…

This medical condition stumped doctors for years

One morning, Kyla Madonna Kenney woke up and her world was turned upside down: The room was spinning, she had a splitting migraine and one side of her body was shaking. Her tremors and migraine lasted for days. And for years afterwards, doctors would ask her: Did anything upset you recently? Are you stressed? Have you talked to a therapist about your anxiety? She underwent surgeries and took medications that were, in hindsight, unnecessary. It wasn’t until seeing Dr. David Perez, a neurologist who is also a psychiatrist, that she finally got the right treatment for her medical condition, functional neurological disorder. Today, we dig into this disorder – what it is, why it’s so unknown despite being a top reason people seek out neurologists and what this condition reveals about the consequences of siloing medicine.

If you liked this episode, check out our previous one about a new approach to brain health.

Interested in more science behind medicine? Email us your questions at shortwave@npr.org .

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Classic ASCII game NetHack debuts version 5.0 just 11 years after last major release

New monsters! New magic items! An Arm port! And compliance with a dead C standard

Antiques Code Show  Admirers of Roguelike games have a new distraction: Version 5.0 of NetHack dropped last weekend.…

Microsoft to stop taking reservations for 17 Azure VM flavours, kill 13 in 2028

Haswell’s had its day and Skylake and Cascade Lake are draining away

Microsoft will stop offering long-term rentals for 17 Azure instance types – most of them powered by CPUs Intel released in the 2010s – again showing that cloud computing isn’t always a seamless and easy choice.…

Ahuachapán and Its Restive Neighbors

From a geothermal hotspot to the one-time “Lighthouse of the Pacific,” the heat is on beneath the volcanic landscape of western El Salvador.

Singapore boffins get diverse SIEMs singing in harmony with agentic rule translation

Vendors all use different formats. This tech translates them all so you can smooth your SOC

Academics from Singapore and China have found a way to make AI useful for cyber-defenders, by creating a technique that translates rules from diverse Security Information and Event Managements (SIEMs) so they’re easier to consume across multiple systems.…

Palantir CEO: 10 percent of the world 'professionally hates us'

The Iran war has been great for business

The Iran War has been great for business at Palantir, as the Department of Defense has doubled usage of the company’s Maven targeting system in four months.…

Testing MacOS on the Apple Network Server 2.0 ROMs

Earlier this year, Mac OS and Windows NT-capable ROMs were discovered for Apple’s unique AIX Network Server. Cameron Kaiser has since spent more time digging into just how capable these ROMs are, and has published another one of his detailed stories about his efforts. Well, thanks to Jeff Walther who generously built a few replica ROM SIMMs for me to test, we can now try the “2.0” MacOS ROMs on holmstock, our hard-working Apple Network Server 700 test rig (stockholm, my original ANS 500, is still officially a production unit). And there are some interesting things to report, especially when we pit the preproduction ROMs and this set head-to-head in MacBench, and even try booting Rhapsody on it. ↫ Cameron Kaiser A great read, as always.

Ahead of the 2026 Met Gala, the Metropolitan Museum of Art Introduced New Mannequins With Diverse Body Types Inspired by Real People

The new "Costume Art" exhibition pairs artworks with garments, some of them displayed on custom mannequins constructed through 3D printing

Bad news for OpenClaw stans: Apple’s Mac Mini now starts at $799

The tiny desktop is no longer Apple's most affordable computer

The Mac Mini is the latest victim of the AI-fueled RAM-pocalypse. Last week, Apple discontinued the 256 GB version of the system, which cost $599. To get in now, you'll need to drop at least $799 on a 512 GB version.…

Windows gets a new Run dialog

With Windows being as old and long-running as it is, there’s a ton of old and outdated bits and pieces lurking in every nook and cranny. I have always found these old relics fascinating, especially now that over the past few years, Microsoft has attempted to replace some of those bits and pieces with modern replacements (not always to great success, but that’s another story). One of those parts of the UI that’s been virtually unchanged since the release of Windows 95 is the Run dialog, but that’s about to change: Microsoft has released a completely new Run dialog to early testers. Windows Run, also known as the Run dialog, is a surface that has been around for over 30 years. It has become a heavily relied upon tool for developers and advanced users alike. Users have decades of muscle memory where they hit Win+R, navigate through their Run history, and hit Enter to quickly access various paths and tools. We all have our favorite tool we launch there as well. For us, some of our favorites are wt (Windows Terminal), mstsc (Remote Desktop) and winword (Microsoft Word). But it’s more than jUsT a TeXt BoX tHaT rUnS tHiNgS. The Run dialog can handle navigating both local and network file paths as well. And everything it does, it does fast. Win+R opens the run dialog seemingly instantly. If we wanted to modernize the Run Dialog to fit the modern Windows 11 design style, we had to make sure it did everything just as well as before. We needed to maintain the same performance while also keeping the user interface minimal, just as Windows 95 intended. ↫ Clint Rutkas at the Microsoft Dev Blogs The new Run dialog looks like it belongs in Windows 11, which is a nice improvement, but the most important part is that they actually seem to have made it a little faster. Sure, they may have only shaved off a few milliseconds from its opening time, but considering virtually everything else they’ve touched in Windows over the years got considerably slower, that’s a good showing for Microsoft. The new feature they’ve added is that by typing ~\, you can open your home directory. The one casualty is the browse button, which according to Microsoft’s data, literally nobody ever used. I know it’s just a small thing and in the end not even a remotely consequential one, but with an operating system as old and storied as Windows, replacing these ancient parts that millions of people rely on every day absolutely fascinates me. There must be a considerable amount of pressure on the people developing something like this new Run dialog, especially with Windows’ reputation being at one of its lowest points, so it’s good to see them being able to deliver. The new Run dialog is available today for testers, and if you’re on the Windows Insider Experimental Channel, you can enable it in Settings > System > Advanced. Coincidentally, on my Windows 11 machine that I use for just one stupid video game, this Advanced page displays a loading spinner for five minutes and then just dies. Also, Notepad won’t start (one time it showed this dialog), and using the terminal to load it causes the old Win32 version of Notepad to open after 5 minutes of waiting, which then hangs and crashes. People pay money for this.

Microsoft fixes VS Code after app gives Copilot credit for human's work

Devs not thrilled that Git extension added the bot as co-author by default

Imagine working your butt off on a project, only to have VS Code put an attribution into your commit that says Copilot helped you, even if it did not. Microsoft has reversed a change that added a default AI attribution notice after user complaints that the bot was claiming credit for human-authored code.…

NASA Welcomes Ireland as Newest Artemis Accords Signatory

Ireland signed the Artemis Accords Monday during a signing ceremony hosted by NASA, becoming the latest nation to commit to the responsible exploration of space for all humanity. Ireland, a longstanding member of ESA (European Space Agency) and a valued international partner for NASA, now joins all 23 ESA member states as a signatory of […]

Kids say they can beat age checks by drawing on a fake mustache

46% say age checks are easy to bypass, and nearly a third admit getting around them

It’s been months since the UK government began requiring stronger age checks under the Online Safety Act, and recent research suggests those measures are falling short of keeping kids away from harmful content. In some cases, even drawing on a mustache has been reported as enough to fool age detection software.…

The Eta Aquarid Meteor Shower Peaks This Week, but a Bright Moon Might Spoil the Show

This annual event, which peaks on the night of May 5 into the next morning, comes from the trail of debris left by Halley's comet. It's best viewed from the Southern Hemisphere, but skywatchers in the north can catch a glimpse

NASA Fosters Development of Lunar Resource-Seeking Technologies

To support long-duration missions to the Moon and Mars, NASA and industry are developing technologies that can extract resources such as hydrogen and helium-3 from lunar soil, known as regolith. This capability, known as in-situ resource utilization (ISRU), allows explorers to use what is already available on other planetary bodies, from water ice to minerals. […]

The Creator of 'Star Wars' Loves Art That Tells a Story. Peek at the Collection of George Lucas’ New Museum Before It Opens This Fall

Adventure, comics, childhood, love and everyday life are among the dozens of themes that will guide the curation of the new Lucas Museum of Narrative Art in Los Angeles

Astronomers Discover 27 Potential Planets Each Orbiting Two Stars, Just Like the Fictional Tatooine in 'Star Wars'

The findings could more than double our current database of worlds that loop around binary star systems. But researchers need to analyze more data before they can officially celebrate a new trove of far, far away exoplanets

Hobbyist xenomorphs Raspberry Pi into Alien-themed DIY laptop

Everything you need to build the PS-85 is available from its designer's website, even if you can't get to space

We've all been there: You're doing maintenance on a Weyland-Yutani hauler dragging mineral ore back toward Earth, and there’s no terminal handy to tap into the MU/TH/UR AI to check ship systems. Lucky for you, one enterprising maker has created just the machine for the job.…

This Souvenir Bowl May Have Commemorated an Ancient Roman Soldier's Service at Hadrian's Wall. It Was Discovered on a Spanish Farm 1,900 Years Later

The artifact is decorated with an illustration of the defensive fortification in northern England, but it was unearthed some 1,200 miles away. A new study suggests the design reflects a soldier’s achievements at the site

NASA Welcomes Malta as Newest Artemis Accords Signatory

The Republic of Malta became the 65th signatory to the Artemis Accords on Monday during a ceremony in the town of Kalkara with NASA and U.S. Department of State officials present. “Today, it’s my pleasure to welcome the Republic of Malta to the Artemis Accords community,” NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman said in recorded remarks. “By […]

Breaking Barriers at 3rd Annual Findings from the Field Symposium

This year’s Findings from the Field Student Research Symposium welcomed 106 students, grades four through eight, 29 educators, and 15 Subject Matter Experts, and it featured 68 research posters, 14 lightning talks, and 5 discussion sessions.

Blue Origin Moon Lander Completes Testing at NASA Vacuum Chamber

Also known as Endurance, MK1 is an uncrewed cargo lander funded by Blue Origin as a commercial demonstration mission to advance Human Landing System capabilities in support of NASA’s Artemis program. The tests in Chamber A represent a public-private partnership model, with Blue Origin conducting work through a reimbursable Space Act Agreement. Endurance will demonstrate […]

Hands off my trademark! Notepad++ dev threatens legal action against macOS port

It's not the fork that's the problem, it's the attempt to make it look official, says original Notepad++ dev Don Ho

Notepad++ remains a Windows-only app, at least under that name. The beloved developer-focused, open-source text editor recently was ported to macOS by a third party. However, developer Don Ho wants to be perfectly clear that, no matter how convincing the new project might look, it's not official. …

Why Do Cows Burp Up So Much Planet-Warming Methane? A Newly Discovered Structure in Their Gut Microbes Could Be a Culprit

The "hydrogenobody" is an organelle inside certain microorganisms that live in a special stomach chamber in cattle, sheep and goats, according to a new study

Inside Amazon Web Services' plan to make networking disappear

The Register gets a look inside AWS' networking lab in Cupertino

FEATURE  In an unassuming three-story office building in Cupertino, California, engineers from Amazon Web Services are busy trying to make networking inconspicuous.…

Hubble Spots a Starry Spiral

In this new picture from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope, a spiral galaxy glittering with star clusters is the center of attention. NGC 3137 is located 53 million light-years away in the constellation Antlia (the Air Pump). As a nearby spiral galaxy, this target offers astronomers an excellent opportunity to study the cycle of stellar birth and death, as […]

This Island in Scotland Is Actually a Man-Made Mini Landmass Resting on a Wooden Platform, New Discovery Shows

Scientists made significant advances in underwater archaeology techniques and photogrammetry while investigating the crannog site

Shadow IT has given way to shadow AI. Enter AI-BOMs

'If you don't have visibility, you can't understand what to protect'

When it comes to securing enterprise supply chains, now heavily infused with AI applications and agents, a software bill of materials (SBOM) no longer provides a complete inventory of all the components in the environment. Enter AI-BOMs.…

The Hidden Mathematical Dance Inside Plant Cells

The sunlight-collecting organelles known as chloroplasts solve a packing problem: how to optimize photosynthesis without sustaining damage from dangerously intense rays.

The post The Hidden Mathematical Dance Inside Plant Cells first appeared on Quanta Magazine

A.I. Outperformed Doctors at Diagnosing Real-World E.R. Patients in a New Study. That Doesn't Mean Computers Will Replace Clinicians

One of OpenAI's large language models did better than physicians in several experiments, hinting that A.I.-assisted emergency medical care could be around the corner

For NASA’s TESS, Stellar Eclipses Shed Light on Possible New Worlds

A study of NASA’s TESS (Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite) data on stellar pairs undergoing mutual eclipses has uncovered more than two dozen candidate exoplanets, or worlds beyond our solar system. This method allows the mission to locate planets it couldn’t otherwise detect.  To date, TESS has discovered 885 confirmed exoplanets and identified more than 7,900 […]

LAGEOS: An Earth Science Mission Built for Enduring Precision

On May 4, 1976, a spacecraft resembling a disco ball entered orbit almost 3,700 miles (6,000 kilometers) above Earth. This shiny, two‑foot‑wide (60‑centimeter) sphere called the Laser Geodynamics Satellite, or LAGEOS, is covered with 426 retroreflectors—small mirrored prisms designed to bounce laser light directly back to where it came from. Beneath its aluminum exterior sits […]

Moving to mainframe can be cheaper than sticking with VMware: Gartner

Serious Linux VMs will enjoy big iron – if you can learn to love lock-in risks and skills challenges

VMware users considering a new home might find it cheaper to move to an IBM mainframe than adopting Broadcom’s new licenses, according to Gartner Vice President Analyst Alessandro Galimberti.…

See the Largest Viking Age Hoard Ever Found in Norway. At Nearly 3,000 Coins and Counting, the Cache Is a Once-in-a-Lifetime Find

Buried in the mid-11th century, the stash includes silver pieces minted under rulers such as Cnut the Great, Aethelred the Unready and Harald Hardrada

If the vote you rocked, your personal info can be grokked

Even limited voter rolls can be linked to identify people, research shows

Your voter data could be used against you. A foreign intelligence service that wished to identify the family members of deployed military personnel could do so by cross-referencing public voter record data and social media posts.…

Hope your holiday was horrid: You botched the last thing you did before leaving

That box-full-of-old-tech-you-should-probably-have-thrown-out-but-kept-just-in-case got a techie in trouble

Who, Me?  Monday is upon us once again and The Register hopes that when you arrive at your desk, all is well. We offer that sentiment because we use the first day of the working week to bring you a fresh instalment of "Who, Me?" – the reader-contributed column in which you confess to making mistakes, and explain how you survived them.…

The secret behind clownfish stripes and more fishy fascinations

We reeled in science reporter Ari Daniel for this episode who grants us three wishes in the form of three fishes. He takes us on a trip around the world to learn about how a clownfish in the western Pacific loses its stripes as it grows up just to fit in, a fat French fry of a fish that can scale a 50-foot rockface in the Democratic Republic of Congo, and the remarkable rearing of a pea-sized Pokémon-like fish at the Shedd Aquarium in Chicago. Together, these stories reveal just how remarkable and diverse these unassuming creatures are.

If you liked this episode, check out our Sea Camp series .

Interested in more fishy science? Email us your question at shortwave@npr.org .

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Ask.com, former home of search butler Jeeves, closes just as conversational search comes back

Like actual butlers, this relic of the first dotcom boom has been a quaint anachronism for decades

In the mid-1990s, search engine designers settled on the user interface that dominates to this day: a text box into which users enter text, and a resulting list of websites.…

Record-Setting Retreat of Hektoria Glacier

Scientists relied on satellite data to understand how the Antarctic glacier lost so much ice so rapidly.

Five Eyes spook shops warn rapid rollouts of agentic AI are too risky

Prioritize resilience over productivity, say CISA, NCSC and their friends from Oz, NZ, Canada

Information security agencies from the nations of the Five Eyes security alliance have co-authored guidance on the use of agentic AI that warns the technology will likely misbehave and amplifies organizations’ existing frailties, and therefore recommend slow and careful adoption of the tech.…

Just in time for Labour Day, China makes it illegal to fire humans if AI takes their jobs

PLUS: Samsung cashes in on RAM prices; Booze from space fetches huge price; China's hyperscalers surge

A Chinese court has ruled that it’s illegal to replace human workers with AI.…

Microsoft's turned Windows into a cesspool, but it wants to do better

Windows is a mess, GitHub keeps wobbling, Copilot draws flak - what’s wrong at Redmond?

kettle  When it comes to making decisions that piss off your user base, no one knows how to do it like Microsoft. …

GNOME is good, actually

While I’m normally a KDE user, I do keep close tabs on various other desktop environments, and install and set them up every now and then to see how they’re fairing, what improvements they’ve made, and ultimately, if my preference for KDE is still warranted. This usually means setting up a nice OpenBSD installation for Xfce, Fedora for GNOME, and less often others for some of the more niche desktop environments. Since GNOME 50 was just released, guess who’s time in the round is up? Since everybody’s already made up their mind about their preferred desktop eons ago, with upsides and downsides debated far past their expiration date, I’m not particularly interested in reviewing desktop environments or Linux distributions. However, after asking around on Fedi, it seemed there was quite a bit of interest in an article detailing how I set up GNOME, what changes I make to the defaults, which extensions I use, what tweaks I apply, and so on. Of course, everything described in this article is highly personal, and I’m not arguing that this is the optimal way to tweak GNOME, that the extensions I use are the best ones, or that any visual modifications I make are better than whatever defaults GNOME uses. No, my goal with this article is twofold: one, to highlight that GNOME is a lot more configurable, extensible, and malleable than common wisdom on the internet would have you believe. It’s not KDE or one of those cobbled-together tiling Wayland desktops, but it’s definitely not as rigid as you might think. And two, that GNOME is good, actually. Tools of the trade The first thing I do is install a few crucial tools that make it easier to modify and tweak GNOME. I really dislike lists in articles, but I will begrudgingly use one here: After installing all of these tools, the actual tweaking can commence. Visual tweaks I didn’t use to like GNOME’s Adwaita visual style, but over the years, it started growing on me to the point where I don’t actively dislike it anymore. With the arrival of libadwaita, it has also become effectively impossible to theme modern GNOME applications, so even if you do change to something else, many of your applications won’t follow along. If consistency is something you care about, you’ll stick to Adwaita, but that leaves one problem unresolved: applications that still use GTK3. These applications will follow a much older version of Adwaita, making them stand out like eyesores among all the modern GTK4 stuff. Luckily, since GTK3 applications are still properly themable, this is easily fixed: just install the adw-gtk3 theme, either by hand, or through your distribution’s repositories. To enable it, first install the user themes extension through Extension Manager, and then enable the theme in GNOME Tweaks for “Legacy Applications”. Any potential GTK3 applications you still use will now integrate nicely with modern libadwaita applications. The one part of GNOME I really do deeply dislike is its icon theme. I can’t quite explain why I dislike this icon set so much, but it runs deep, so one of the very first things I do is replace the default GNOME icon set with my personal favourite, Qogir. This is a popular icon set, so it’s usually available in your distribution’s repositories, but I always install it from its GitHub page. Changing GNOME’s icon set is as simple as selecting it in GNOME Tweaks. You can’t get much more personal taste than an icon set, and there are dozens of amazing sets to choose from in the Linux world. Changing them out and trying out new ones is stupidly easy, and it’s definitely worth looking at a few that might be more pleasing to you than GNOME’s (or KDE’s) default. Lastly, I open Add Water and enable the amazing GNOME theme for LibreWolf. Add Water basically makes this as easy as flipping a switch, so there’s no need to copy any files into your LibreWolf profile or whatever. The application also provides a few more small tweaks to fiddle with, like enabling standard tab widths so tabs don’t grow and shrink as you close and open tabs, moving the bookmarks bar below the tab bar, and many more. Extensions Since the release of GNOME 3 in 2011, extensions have been the most capable way to modify GNOME’s look, behaviour, and feature set. As far as I can tell, while the extension framework is an official part of the GNOME Shell, the extensions themselves are all third-party and not part of a vanilla GNOME installation. By now, there are over 2800 listed extensions, but that number includes abandoned extensions so it’s hard to determine the actual number of currently-maintained ones. Whatever the actual number is, there’s bound to be things in there you’re going to want to use. Here are the extensions I have installed. Let’s just start at the top and work our way down. I guess I’m forced to do another list. There are countless more extensions to choose from, and you’re definitely going to find things you never even thought could be useful. Miscellaneous tweaks There’s a few other things I modify. In GNOME Tweaks, I make it so that double-clicking a window’s titlebar minimises it while right-clicking it lowers it; two features I picked up during my years as a BeOS user that I absolutely refuse to give up. I configure the dock from Dash to Dock so that it always remains on top and never hides itself, no matter the circumstances. In Settings, I disable virtual desktops entirely (I don’t like virtual desktops), and I make sure tap-to-click is disabled (if I’m on a laptop). GNOME is good, actually After making all of these changes, I feel quite comfortable using GNOME, at least on my laptop. It’s a nice, coherent experience, and offers what is probably the most polished graphical user interface you can find on Linux, even if it isn’t the most full-featured. The third-party application ecosystem, through modern

How fast is a macOS VM, and how small could it be?

To assess how small a macOS VM could be, I ran the same VM of macOS 26.4.1 on progressively smaller CPU core and memory allocations, using my virtualiser Viable. The VM’s display window was set to a standard 1600 x 1000, and I ran Safari through its paces and performed some lightweight everyday tasks, including Storage analysis in Settings. Starting with 4 virtual cores and 8 GB vRAM, where the VM ran perfectly briskly with around 5 GB of memory used, I stepped down to 3 cores and 6 GB, to discover that memory usage fell to 3.9 GB and everything worked well. With just 2 cores and 4 GB of memory only 3.1 GB of that was used, and the VM continued to handle those lightweight tasks normally. ↫ Howard Oakley This is good news for people interested in the MacBook Neo who may also want to run a macOS virtual machine on it.

Inference is giving AI chip startups a second chance to make their mark

In a disaggregated AI world, Nvidia can be both a friend and an enemy

AI adoption is reaching an inflection point as the focus shifts from training new models to serving them. For the AI startups vying for a slice of Nvidia's pie, it's now or never.…

Royal Navy chief backs drones, autonomous weapons in ‘Hybrid Navy’

Plan mixes crewed ships, robot escorts, and long-range strike to bolster a stretched fleet

The leader of Britain’s Royal Navy has outlined a “Hybrid Navy” built on a mix of crewed, uncrewed, and autonomous platforms to ensure it can continue to defend the nation and operate overseas.…

Job's a good 'un: Bank of England tech project wins watchdog praise

PAC: Now why can't everybody else in public sector do it like this?

Parliament's spending watchdog has held up a successful large-scale public sector tech transformation as a rare example worth emulating, in a striking departure from the usual diet of failure and overspend.…

Usage-based pricing killing your vibe - here's how to roll your own local AI coding agents

Take those token limits and shove them by vibe coding with a local LLM

With model devs pushing more aggressive rate limits, raising prices, or even abandoning subscriptions for usage-based pricing, that vibe-coded hobby project is about to get a whole lot more expensive. Fortunately, you're not without cost-saving options.…

UK drivers' agency shrugs off claims of week-long booking site smashes, blames browser configs

Agency insists everything is working fine, even though users spend days failing to load it

The DVSA's driving test booking system has spent the week offline, according to frustrated users.…

Brace for the patch tsunami: AI is unearthing decades of buried code debt

Britain's cyber agency says the bill for years of technical shortcuts is coming due, and it's arriving all at once

Britain's cyber agency is warning that AI-fuelled bug hunting is about to flush out years of buried flaws, leaving defenders scrambling to keep up.…

Attributed to Banksy, a New Statue of a Suited Man, Blinded by a Flag and Walking Off a Ledge, Appeared in Central London

The artwork was installed under the cloak of night this week, less than two months after a journalism investigation into Banksy’s true identity was published

ServiceNow under siege as Atlassian adds to ITSM take-outs

CEO Mike Cannon-Brookes touts 'largest ever quarter for competitive displacements'

The chase is on. Atlassian reported its largest-ever quarter for taking share from a major IT service management provider, CEO Mike Cannon-Brookes said on the company's fiscal third-quarter earnings call Thursday, escalating its rivalry with ServiceNow.…

The Real Winnie-the-Pooh Lives at the New York Public Library. When Queen Camilla Visited the Bear, She Reunited Him With a Dear Friend

On a state visit to the United States this week, the queen of the United Kingdom became the first British royal to visit the library as she fulfilled a mission to complete the set of toys that Christopher Robin once owned

Six Decades Ago, a Boy Stole Medieval Tiles From an English Monastery. He Just Returned the Illicit Souvenirs

A ghoulish face and a graceful dragon decorate the broken clay tiles from the late 13th century or early 14th century. They were found tucked in an old toffee tin

Hummus Made From Moon-Grown Chickpeas Might Be on the Menu for Future Lunar Residents

Researchers successfully grew and harvested chickpeas in simulated moon dirt—with a little help from worm poop and a beneficial fungus. However, they're still testing whether the legumes are safe to eat

NASA Kennedy Center Director Announces Plans to Retire

NASA announced Friday Janet Petro, center director for the agency’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida, is retiring. Prior to joining NASA, Petro worked in a variety of military and industry positions, ultimately beginning her career at the agency in 2007 and working her way up to center director, as well as serving as acting administrator […]

Mythos complicates the breakup, says Pentagon CTO, but Anthropic is still barred

Emil Michael says agencies are evaluating the cybersecurity model, not deploying it

Pentagon CTO Emil Michael pushed back on reports of a thaw in the department’s relationship with Anthropic: The two are not getting back together, even as Mythos draws interest from government agencies.…

This Greek Volcano Seemed Quiet for 100,000 Years. Then It Erupted Again. Should Scientists Take a Second Look at 'Extinct' Volcanoes?

By reconstructing a 700,000-year history of Methana volcano, geologists found a prehistoric phase when it appeared inactive on the surface, despite magma building up below ground

NASA Artemis II Crew Rings Nasdaq Closing Bell

Nasdaq Chair and Chief Executive Officer Adena T. Friedman, left, and NASA’s Artemis II crewmembers CSA (Canadian Space Agency) astronaut Jeremy Hansen, and NASA astronauts Christina Koch, Victor Glover, and Reid Wiseman, right, ring the closing bell of the Nasdaq market session, Thursday, April 30, 2026. NASA’s Artemis II mission took Wiseman, Glover, Koch, and […]

Artemis III aims for 'late 2027' for Earth orbit demonstration

SpaceX and Blue Origin will absolutely be ready in time. Definitely

Amid the sensational NASA budget cut proposals taking place in the US at the moment, NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman has refined the Artemis III launch date to "late 2027."…

Key Support Equipment Arrives at Kennedy for Roman Space Telescope

Technicians at NASA’s Payload Hazardous Servicing Facility (PHSF) at the agency’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida offloaded eight high-efficiency particulate air (HEPA) wall modules and other ground support equipment on April 27. The equipment will support launch processing of the agency’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope. Each 1,800-pound module enhances the PHSF’s clean room systems, helping meet […]

NASA’s STORIE Mission to Tell Tale of Earth’s Ring Current

Earth’s magnetic field is like a powerful trap. It lures electrically charged particles in space, near our planet, and snares them in an invisible, doughnut-shaped pen around Earth known as the ring current. This captive swarm of charged particles plays an important role in how Earth reacts to changing conditions in space, called space weather, which […]

Dead Bodies Filled a Mass Grave When the First Plague Pandemic Struck This Early Medieval City. New Research Explores the Identity of the Victims

Researchers analyzed isotopes and DNA in the teeth of remains found in a mass grave from the Plague of Justinian, which swept through the Byzantine Empire

Where to buy a non-Apple, non-Google smartphone

Both Cupertino and Google are imposing ever stricter limits on their phones – but you have alternatives

As both Apple and Google introduce unwelcome changes in their phone OSes, here's a quick reminder that you do have alternatives to the Gruesome Twosome.…

This Is the Largest, Most Detailed 3D Map of the Universe. It'll Help Astronomers Investigate a Cosmic Mystery: Dark Energy

The Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument spent five years observing the sky from Arizona. Now, researchers have a trove of data to study how the universe has evolved over billions of years

A Treasure Trove of Cambrian Fossils Rewrites the Story of Early Life

Remarkably preserved fossils found in southern China offer a fascinating window into what life looked like at the end of the Cambrian explosion, with half of the species uncovered being new to science.

The post A Treasure Trove of Cambrian Fossils Rewrites the Story of Early Life first appeared on Quanta Magazine

How Do You Lift a 30,000-Pound Mast From a Warship Built a Record-Breaking 261 Years Ago? With a Really, Really Big Crane

HMS "Victory" served in the American Revolution, the French Revolutionary Wars and the Napoleonic Wars. It's the world’s oldest warship still in commission—but it's in desperate need of repairs

CIOs ready for another role-change as AI becomes agent of chaos

If software writes software the risk is “systematic failure at scale”. Someone needs to take charge, argues Forrester

Forrester predicts that by decade's end, the rush toward agentic AI will grow so chaotic that CIOs will be forced into a new role as enforcer of order.…

That old phone in the kitchen drawer could save an industry

Users have less cash to burn and less patience for AI in new models... now where to get the used stock

Secondhand phones sales are booming - relatively speaking - and the industry has rising inflation, AI bloat, and consumers' growing apathy toward overpriced new handsets to thank for it.…

Space Out This Summer with Variety of NASA STEM Activities

Summer is “Go” for launch, and NASA has a universe of ways to help you to jump in, explore, and create! Whether you prefer to spend this season fueling your creativity, going outdoors into nature, or daydreaming about your future, NASA offers ways to take your interests to the next level.  Here are some opportunities […]

First reports come in of victims of critical cPanel vuln as 'millions' of sites potentially exposed

Exploitation was underway before patches landed, at least one victim reports ransomware demand

CISA has added a critical cPanel bug to its known-exploited list, confirming that attackers are already poking holes in one of the internet's most widely used hosting stacks.…

Microsoft releases first big update after Nadella's vow to 'win back fans'

Lots of fixes, some performance tweaks. Fingers crossed there's no out-of-band patch to follow

Microsoft is following through on its promise to prioritize Windows stability with its April 30 non-security update.…

Hubble Spots a Starry Spiral

In this new picture from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope, a spiral galaxy glittering with star clusters is the center of attention. NGC 3137 is located 53 million light-years away in the constellation Antlia (the Air Pump).

OpenAI locks GPT-5.5-Cyber behind velvet rope despite slamming Anthropic for doing exactly that

Altman's crew now doing the same gatekeeping it recently mocked

OpenAI is lining up a limited release of its new GPT-5.5-Cyber model to a handpicked circle of "cyber defenders," just weeks after taking a swipe at Anthropic for doing almost exactly the same thing.…

SpaceX rocket set for unintentional Moon landing – well, a piece of it anyway

But unlike most junkers, it'll be traveling faster than the speed of sound, claims astronomy software dev

An astronomy software dev claims a Falcon 9 upper stage will hit the Moon in August, traveling at several times the speed of sound.…

Pro-Iran crew turns DDoS into shakedown as Ubuntu.com stays down

313 Team tells Canonical: pay up or the packets keep coming

Canonical says its web infrastructure is under attack after a pro-Iran hacktivist group instructed its members to target the open source giant.…

UK pensions dept goes shopping for spy-van tech with £2M surveillance tender

Covert cameras, live-streaming systems, and in-vehicle recording kit sought to catch out fraudsters

The Department for Work and Pensions has gone shopping for covert cameras, live-streaming kit, and vehicle-based recording gear as it lines up a £2 million upgrade to watch fraud suspects in real time.…

Who needs ghost train scares when Windows is such a fright?

Things that go bork in the night

Bork!Bork!Bork!  What frightens you? What, as an IT professional, would make you shriek like a small child? What tech horrors are lurking under your bed?…

Passport to £££: Home Office adds £216M to travel doc contract before a single bid's been placed

Start date pushed back a year, annual cost up a third, and UK's now handing out eight million passports a year

The Home Office has increased the annual value and overall duration of its new passport production contract, increasing it to a total of £576 million as it starts a third round of engagement with suppliers.…

DVLA's 14-week driving license fiasco – the tech, people and chatbot trying to clear it

Medical license applicants still waiting months while agency insists it's 'putting things right'

The Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency (DVLA) has introduced new tech to support driving license applications that require medical checks, after processing times exceeded 14 weeks in February.…

User found the perfect formula to make Excel misbehave

For once, Oracle ERP wasn’t the problem

On Call  Fridays can be a drag, but The Register has a formula to inject a little fun by delivering a new instalment of On Call – the reader-contributed column in which we share your tech support stories.…

Coffee is complex. Can science standardize it for the better?

Ask any coffee aficionado, and they’ll tell you: A good cup is about more than the beans. The flavor is affected by lots of things – the roast and fermentation of the beans, the coarseness of the grind, the brewing temperature and even the chemicals in the water used to brew it. But there are very few quantitative ways to assess all the flavor variations. Current industry standards measure the concentration of coffee, but they often miss qualities like the acidity, brightness and fruitness. Scientists at the University of Oregon are trying to change that using a tool called a potentiostat that’s often used to measure the charge in batteries.

Interested in more food and beverage science? Email us your question at shortwave@npr.org and we may turn it into an episode!

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Qualcomm teases ‘dedicated CPU for agentic experiences’ and ‘agentic smartphones’

Enters the custom AI silicon business with secret silicon for an un-named hyperscaler

Qualcomm has quietly entered the market for custom hyperscale silicon, and datacenter CPUs…

Fujitsu confirms mainframe biz to die in 2035, in time for quantum AI supercomputers to take over

In talks with Japan, the UK, and Australia on defense tech that can ‘contribute to global stability’

Japanese tech giant Fujitsu has confirmed the demise of its mainframe business in the year 2035 and hinted it’s working on significant defense projects.…

Cyclone Rains Spur Papua New Guinea Landslides

Heavy rains from Tropical Cyclone Maila triggered a deadly landslide in the mountains of East New Britain.

ICANN opens applications for new generic top-level domains for the first time since 2012

$227k gets you a hearing for your dot.vanity project, or strings in one of 27 scripts

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) on Thursday kicked off a new application process for generic top-level domains (gTLDs), its first since 2012.…

The never-ending supply chain attacks worm into SAP npm packages, other dev tools

Mini Shai-Hulud caught spreading credential-stealing malware

The wave of supply chain attacks aimed at security and developer tools has washed up more victims, namely SAP and Intercom npm packages, plus the lightning PyPI package.…

Govern your bots carefully or chaos could ensue

Stop the sprawl!

With the average Global Fortune 500 enterprise expected to run more than 150,000 AI agents by 2028, up from fewer than 15 today, there’s plenty of room for chaos. Analyst firm Gartner says that, without proper governance, those agents will multiply and run amok.…

Alexander the Great’s (Marble) Head Turned Up in New York. U.S. Officials Say It Was Stolen—and Just Sent It Back to Italy

As part of a longstanding effort to help Italy track down its missing treasures, the U.S. returned hundreds of ancient archaeological finds this week

Firefox maker torches Google for building Prompt API into browser

Mozilla fears wiring an AI API into Chrome will make the web less open

Updated  Mozilla has reiterated its opposition to Google's decision to build AI plumbing into its Chrome browser, though rather belatedly now that the technology, known as the Prompt API, is already being tested in Chrome and Microsoft Edge.…

NASA Invites Media to Ireland Artemis Accords Signing

Ireland will sign the Artemis Accords during a ceremony at 3 p.m. EDT Monday, May 4, at NASA Headquarters in Washington. NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman will host Ambassador of Ireland to the United States of America Geraldine Byrne Nason; Minister for Enterprise, Tourism and Employment Peter Burke, T.D., of Ireland; and U.S. Department of State […]

Bot her emails: most modern phishing campaigns are AI-enabled

KnowBe4 says 86% of phishing it tracked used AI, and inboxes are only the start

Give a man a phishing kit and he might get lucky a couple of times; teach an AI to phish and it'll change the landscape, if KnowBe4's latest phishing trends report is accurate.…

Nemotron Labs: What OpenClaw Agents Mean for Every Organization

By early 2026, the open source project OpenClaw had become a phenomenon. In January, its GitHub star count crossed 100,000 as developer interest surged.

FBI cyber boss: China's hacker-for-hire ecosystem 'out of control'

One alleged cyber contractor was extradited to the US over the weekend

China's "hacker-for-hire ecosystem has gotten out of control," according to Brett Leatherman, assistant director of the FBI's cyber division.…

Email is crazy

Email is like those creaking old Terminators from the ’70s which continue to function without complaining. Designed for a world that doesn’t exist anymore, it has optional encryption, no built-in auth, three⁺ retrofitted security layers bolted on top, an unstandardized filtering layer and many more quirks. Yet billions of emails arrive correctly every single day. Email is not elegant but nonetheless it is Lindy. In the new age of agentic AI, we can only expect it to metamorphose into another dimension. ↫ Saurabh “Sam” Khawase The fact that email is as complicated as it is bad enough, but having it be so dominantly controlled by only a few large gatekeepers like Google and Microsoft surely isn’t helping either. I feel like email is no longer really a technology individuals can actively partake in at every level; it feels much more like WhatsApp or iMessage or whatever in that we just get to send messages, and that’s it. Running your own mail sever isn’t only a complex endeavour, it’s also a continuous cat-and-mouse game with companies like Google and Microsoft to ensure you don’t end up on some shitlist and your emails stop arriving. I settled on Fastmail as my email service, and it works quite well. Still, I would love to be able to just run my own email server, or have some of my far more capable friends run one for a small group of us, but it’s such a daunting and unpleasant effort few people seem to have the stomach and perseverance for it.

Phone users know when to hold ’em, delay upgrades amid inflation

Analyst says handsets now stay in pockets for 4.2 years on average

Remember the early days of the smartphone revolution when, even after six months, your phone felt outdated? Not anymore. Smartphone replacement cycles are getting longer as discretionary household budgets come under pressure from inflation, with demand for new devices expected to fall for the rest of this year.…

A Man and His Dog Discovered a 3,400-Year-Old Ax Head While Out for a Walk in One of England’s Ancient Forests

Researchers believe the ax dates to between 1400 B.C.E. and 1275 B.C.E. and is a relic of the Bronze Age, when humans started to work with metal

Odyssey Team Celebrates on a Global Map of Mars

Description Team members past and present from NASA’s 2001 Mars Odyssey orbiter mission gathered on April 15, 2026, to celebrate 25 years since the spacecraft’s launch, which took place April 7, 2001. For the occasion, the team rolled out a giant global map of Mars created using imagery from Odyssey’s THEMIS (Thermal Emission Imaging System) […]

Bandwidth hogs rejoice, Celestica's latest switch is bristling with 64 ports of 1.6 Tbps Ethernet

Networking kit arrives just in time for Nvidia's 1.6 Tbps ConnectX-9 NICs

If you thought 800 Gbps Ethernet was fast, just wait. Celestica's latest switches cram 64 1.6 Tbps ports into a single chassis.…

What’s Up: May 2026 Skywatching Tips from NASA

Shooting stars before dawn, a brilliant meetup between the Moon and Venus and a rare blue moon to end the month.

Australia Has a Surprisingly Successful Truffle Industry. This New Study Could Explain Why

Researchers examined hundreds of soil samples to uncover why the expensive fungi are thriving in the country

Artemis III Moon Rocket Core Stage on the Move

Teams move the core stage, or largest section, of the SLS (Space Launch System) rocket for NASA’s Artemis III mission into the Vehicle Assembly Building at the agency’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida in this photo from April 27, 2026. The SLS core stage traveled 900 miles on the Pegasus barge from NASA’s Michoud Assembly Facility in New Orleans where the stage is manufactured, to complete […]

NASA Welcomes Morocco as 64th Artemis Accords Signatory

The Kingdom of Morocco signed the Artemis Accords on April 29th during a ceremony in the country’s capital, Rabat, becoming the latest nation to commit to the responsible exploration of space. “It is my privilege to welcome the Kingdom of Morocco as the newest signatory to the Artemis Accords,” said NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman in […]

Google's fix for critical Gemini CLI bug might break your CI/CD pipelines

This CVSS 10.0 RCE vuln has been patched, automatically for some, so better check those workflows

If you use Gemini CLI, watch out: Google has patched a CVSS 10.0 vulnerability in its command-line AI tool and is warning anyone running it in headless mode, or through GitHub Actions, to review their workflows.…

NASA Goddard’s Greenbelt Visitor Center Marks 50th Anniversary

Trimmed in bicentennial pageantry, NASA opened a visitor center at its Goddard campus in Greenbelt, Maryland, in May 1976. Fifty years on, the Goddard Visitor Center continues to inspire through exhibits and programs on the past, present, and future of space exploration. “NASA’s 1958 charter tasks us with sharing our work as broadly as we […]

NASA Explores Prioritizing First Response Drones in Crowded Skies

Our streets are crowded with commuters and delivery vehicles, but when a police car or fire engine approaches with its lights and sirens on, drivers clear the way. In the coming years, drones for deliveries and other commercial tasks will become common in the skies over our communities, and NASA is working to ensure first […]

French prosecutors link 15-year-old to mega-breach at state’s secure document agency

Two computer crime allegations follow up to 18M lines of data surfacing online

French prosecutors say police detained a 15-year-old on April 25 over the alleged theft of millions of records from France Titres (ANTS), the agency handling secure documents.…

Zed team releases version 1.0 of Rust-built editor: Traditional editor and AI tool

Team wins praise for adding 'disable all AI features' setting for devs who want a code editor to be only a code editor

The Rust-built Zed editor has reached version 1.0, released yesterday, with development led by former members of the Atom team at GitHub.…

Researchers Discovered a Lost Copy of the Oldest English Poem, Composed by an Illiterate Cowherd More Than 1,300 Years Ago

This version of "Caedmon’s Hymn" shows how Old English evolved. It also features early use of a punctuation mark that readers of English take for granted today—the period—but not in the expected way

This Man Fled Pompeii as Mount Vesuvius Erupted. Archaeologists Found Him 2,000 Years Later, Holding a Bowl to Protect His Head and a Lamp to Light His Way

Recent excavations revealed two skeletons just outside the ancient city's walls. Researchers also created an A.I.-generated reconstruction of one of the victim's harrowing final moments

AWS says acute server memory shortage is driving customers to the cloud

When you can't get 'em with a 'transformation plan,' supply chain pain will do the job

The great memory shortage is having yet another effect, pushing enterprises into the waiting arms of the cloud operators as they can't secure enough on-prem compute themselves.…

Survey says no, American workers are not keen on Microsoft's AI

Lock-in worries threaten to dampen the E7 launch party

The Coalition for Fair Software Licensing has published research showing that US workers reckon Microsoft is using its productivity tools to lock their employers into the company's AI services.…

Two Athletes Smashed a Marathon Milestone, Running 26.2 Miles in Under Two Hours. Here's the Science Behind Their Achievements

An intense training regimen, good weather conditions, physiology and lightweight shoes probably played a role in their astounding performances during the London Marathon on Sunday

SAP user group slams 'uncertainty' in ERP giant's API policy

Concerns over new rules might stop customers from adopting innovations – including AI – that connect to SAP systems

An influential SAP user group has criticized the vendor's API policy update, saying it lacks clarity and potentially prevents users from starting new projects and innovating on their SAP platforms.…

It’s Gonna Be May: 16 Games Hit the Cloud This Month, With More NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5080 Power

[Editor’s note] The blog has been updated to note that GeForce RTX 5080-power expansion also extends to the Install-to-Play library. It’s gonna be May — and the cloud’s in full festival mode.  16 games are joining GeForce NOW this month, including new AAA titles arriving on launch day from Steam, Xbox, PC Game Pass and […]

Microsoft boss tells investors the company is working to 'win back fans'

But why did those fans go away in the first place, Satya?

Microsoft boss Satya Nadella told investors during an earnings call last night that the company needs to "win back" its fans.…

A Metal Detectorist Stumbled Upon a Silver Coin. It Turned Out to Be Part of a Stash Buried During the Viking Invasion of Britain

Archaeologists say that the 63 coins, most of which bear the name of King Burgred of Mercia, might have been hidden in the ninth century to keep them safe at a time of unrest

Fewer users, fatter wallets is why Anthropic tops OpenAI in LLM revenue stakes

AI boom splits between companies hoarding eyeballs and those actually charging for them

Anthropic is pulling in more LLM revenue than OpenAI, despite having a fraction of the users.…

Nearly half of UK businesses pwned last year as phishing keeps doing the job like it's 2005

Turns out the real problem is not AI but staff still clicking on dodgy emails from 'IT support'

Nearly half of UK businesses are still getting breached, and in many cases, the attacker's big breakthrough is an employee clicking "sure, why not" on a fake login page.…

The day I logged 1 in every 2000 public IPv4: visualizing the AI scraper DDoS

What if you run a few online services for you and your friends, like a small git instance and a grocery list service, but you get absolutely hammered by “AI” scrapers? I cannot impress upon you, reader, that this is not only an attack that is coordinated, it is an attack that is distributed. I run a small set of services, basically only for me and my friends. I am not a hyperscaler, I am not a tech company, I am not even a small platform. I have a git forge where I put the shit I make, and a couple other services where me and my friends backup our files or write our grocery lists. I am not fucking Meta and I cannot scale the fuck up just because OpenAI or Anthropic or Meta or whoever is training a model that weeks wants to suck all the content out of my VPS ONCE MORE until it’s dry. ↫ lux at VulpineCitrus So how much traffic did the author of this piece, lux, get from “AI” scraping bots? Within a time period of 24 hours, they were hammered by 2040670 unique IP addresses, 98% of which were IPv4 addresses, which means that 1 out of every 2000 publicly available IPv4 addresses were involved in the scraping. Together, they performed over 5 million requests. And just to reiterate: they were scraping a few very small, friends-only services run by some random person. This is absolutely insane. If, at this point in time, with everything that we know about just how deeply unethical every single aspect of “AI” is, you’re still using and promoting it, what is wrong with you? If you’re so addicted to your “AI” girlfriend’s unending stream of useless, forgettable sycophantic slop, despite being aware of the damage you’re doing to those around you, there’s something seriously wrong with you, and you desperately need professional help. You don’t need any of this. The world doesn’t need any of this. Nobody likes the slop “AI” regurgitates, and nobody likes you for enabling it. Get help.

What type of 'C2 on a sleep cycle' do they leave behind? Novel Chinese spy group found in critical networks in Poland, Asia

Just in time for the Trump-Xi summit

Exclusive  A novel China-linked threat group infiltrated more than a dozen critical networks in Poland, Asian countries, and possibly beyond, beginning in December 2024 and with activity uncovered as recently as this month.…

Bug of the year (so far): Nasty cPanel vulnerability probably exploited as a 0-day

Emergency patches out now for those managing the millions of domains assumed to be affected

Emergency patches are available for a critical vulnerability in cPanel and WHM that allows attackers to bypass authentication and gain root access to servers managed using it.…

Met Police's Palantir deployment has its own officers watching their backs

Federation warns members to ditch work devices off duty as force uses AI to probe 600+ cops

London cops are being told by their staff association to be "extremely cautious" about carrying work devices off duty, after the Metropolitan Police Service (MPS) deployed Palantir's technology to investigate hundreds of its own officers.…

Britain's £6B armoured sickener Ajax cleared for duty despite injuring troops

Investigation finds no single cause for soldiers falling ill, just bad bolts, cold air, and apparently the soldiers themselves

Britain's notorious Ajax armored vehicles are being accepted back from the manufacturer after investigations found no single cause for the symptoms plaguing crews, meaning soldiers will need to grin and bear it.…

Finance company stores DB credentials in helpfully labeled spreadsheet

Great idea, guys. Let's keep all of the data in an Excel file with weak password protection

PWNED  Welcome, once again, to PWNED, the weekly column where we recount the adventures of IT explorers who found their own pile of quicksand and then jumped right into it. This week's story involves keeping sensitive information in a very vulnerable place and then not protecting it adequately.…

Microsoft levels up Azure Local to make it fit for large-scale sovereign clouds

Can now use SANs for storage, and adds a local control plane and key management

Microsoft has given its Azure Local on-prem cloud a major makeover to make it fit for duty powering large-scale sovereign infrastructure.…

Winter’s End Is Written in the Clouds

As winter turned to spring, the skies over the Gulf of Alaska displayed textbook examples of numerous cloud formations.

Google to sell its TPUs to some customers, who also fancy big-G GPUs

AI is driving more searches and ads

Google Cloud will start selling its custom tensor processing units to some customers, because they want them and the search giant wants to diversify its revenues.…

Microsoft lifts 2026 AI spend by $25 billion to cover component price rises

Will write checks for $190 billion and even those megabucks may not satisfy demand

If you've felt the sting of surging hardware prices, Microsoft can sympathize because the company on Wednesday said it expects its 2026 capital expenditure will hit $190 billion, with $25 billion of that due to rising component costs.…

Linux cryptographic code flaw offers fast route to root

Patches land for authencesn flaw enabling local privilege escalation

Developers of major Linux distributions have begun shipping patches to address a local privilege escalation (LPE) vulnerability arising from a logic flaw.…

Amazon chips no longer just a side dish, they're a $20B biz

The Trainium train keeps a-rollin'

Amazon is now among the top three datacenter chip businesses in the world, as its semiconductor business surpassed a $20 billion annual run rate ... and it would be closer to $50 billion if it included itself among the customers, CEO Andy Jassy said during the company’s first quarter earnings call on Wednesday.…

I Am Artemis: Ryan Schulte

Listen to this audio excerpt from Ryan Schulte, Orion flywheel project manager: As the four Artemis II astronauts traveled on a 694,481-mile journey around the Moon and back, the Orion spacecraft provided them with all the essentials for deep space life, including daily exercise. The crew used an exercise device called the flywheel throughout their mission to maintain their physical and mental health, and Ryan Schulte, Orion […]

A Father and Daughter Forged More Than 200 Artworks by Warhol, Banksy, Picasso and Others—and Sold Them for $2 Million

The New Jersey residents, who face up to 20 years in prison, commissioned an artist in Poland to create the fakes. They got special penalties for forging paintings by Native American artists

US-Indian Spacecraft Captures Mexico City Subsidence

Description A scientist produced this map of land subsidence (sinking) in Mexico City using data from the NISAR (NASA-ISRO Synthetic Aperture Radar) mission captured between Oct. 25, 2025, and Jan. 17, 2026. The region has been a well-known hot spot of subsidence for decades, and images like this help confirm that NISAR is performing as […]

Scientists Create the First Detailed 'Smell Map' of Odor Sensors in the Mouse Nose—and Sniff Out Some Surprising Discoveries

In two new studies, researchers used genetic techniques to upend a longstanding assumption that nerve cells with scent detectors were randomly arranged. They don’t know whether the same spatial organization is found in human noses

Earliest 86-DOS and PC-DOS code released as open source

Microsoft is continuing its efforts to release early versions of DOS as open source, and today we’ve got a special one. We’re stoked today to showcase some newly available source code materials that provide an even earlier look into the development of PC-DOS 1.00, the first release of DOS for the IBM PC. A dedicated team of historians and preservationists led by Yufeng Gao and Rich Cini has worked to locate, scan, and transcribe the stack of DOS-era source listings from Tim Paterson, the author of DOS. The listings include sources to the 86-DOS 1.00 kernel, several development snapshots of the PC-DOS 1.00 kernel, and some well-known utilities such as CHKDSK. Not only were these assembler listings, but there were also listings of the assembler itself! This work offers rare insight into how MS-DOS/PC-DOS came to be, and how operating system development was done at the time, not as it was later reconstructed. ↫ Stacey Haffner and Scott Hanselman It’s wild that the source code had to be transcribed from paper, including notes and changes. You can find more information about the process on Gao’s website and Cini’s website.

Apple gives up on Vision Pro, disbands Vision Pro team

When Apple unveiled the Vision Pro, almost three (!) years ago, I concluded: If there’s one company that can convince people to spend $3500 to strap an isolating dystopian glowing robot mask onto their faces it’s Apple, but I still have a hard time believing this is what people want. ↫ Thom Holwerda at OSNews (quoting myself is weird) MacRumors’ Juli Clover, today: Apple has all but given up on the Vision Pro after the M5 model failed to revitalize interest in the device, MacRumors has learned. Apple updated the Vision Pro with a faster M5 chip and a more comfortable band in October 2025, but there were no other hardware changes, and consumers still weren’t interested. Apple has apparently stopped work on the Vision Pro and the Vision Pro team has been redistributed to other teams within Apple. Some former Vision Pro team members are working on Siri, which is not a surprise as Vision Pro chief Mike Rockwell has been leading the Siri team since March 2025. ↫ Juli Clover at MacRumors VR – what the Vision Pro is, whether Apple’s marketing likes to say it or not – has proven to be good for exactly two things: games and porn. The Vision Pro has neither. It was destined to be a flop from the start, as nobody wants to strap an uncomfortable computer to their face that does less than all of the other computers they already have, and what it does do, it does worse. I do wonder if this makes the Vision Pro the most expensive flop in human history. Has any company ever spent more on a product that failed this spectacularly?

Curiosity Blog, Sols 4873-4878: Welcome to the Atacama Drill Target

Written by Sharon Wilson Purdy, Planetary Geologist at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum Earth planning date: Friday, April 24, 2026 There was excitement in the air as the Curiosity Science Team kicked off a drill campaign at the Atacama site to characterize the first Mount Sharp layered-sulfate bedrock since leaving the boxwork terrain. […]

US-Indian Space Mission Maps Extreme Subsidence in Mexico City

One of the most powerful radar systems ever launched into space has mapped the ground moving beneath one of fastest subsiding capitals in the world: Mexico City. The findings show how quickly and reliably the NISAR (NASA-ISRO Synthetic Aperture Radar) satellite can track real-time changes across Earth’s surface from orbit, unhindered by clouds or vegetation […]

Researchers move in the right direction, develop powerful GPS interference alarm

ORNL says portable detector kit can separate real GPS signals from fake ones even at equal strength

GPS spoofing, which sends fake satellite-like signals, and GPS jamming, which drowns receivers in noise, are increasingly serious problems. Researchers at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee have created what they say is the most effective system yet for detecting GPS interference, which could help blunt such attacks.…

These Are the Top Ten 'Endangered' Buildings and Bridges in England and Wales—and They Tell Us a Lot About Life in the Victorian Era

Structures remaining from the height of the British Empire reveal changing economic, medical and education trends from the 1800s and early 1900s. But their legacy is at risk as they fall into disrepair

Microsoft's patch for a 0-day exploited by Russian spies fell short. Another Windows flaw is under attack

Second try's a charm?

Microsoft and the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) warned that attackers are exploiting a zero-click Windows flaw that can expose sensitive information on vulnerable systems.…

Legacy TLS tour continues with Exchange Online blocking old versions from July 2026

Microsoft readies the axe once again for yesterday's security

Microsoft has warned users still clinging to legacy TLS versions that the end is nigh for TLS 1.0 and 1.1 on POP3 and IMAP4 connections to Exchange Online.…

Databricks can't seem to shake authors' copyright claim that could result in 'extraordinary' damages

Authors say it acquired an LLM that was trained on their copyrighted data, and judge keeps asking for more info

Databricks cannot shake a class action lawsuit targeting its LLM, which several book authors contend was created with a database that contained pirated versions of some of their copyrighted books – and about 196,000 titles in all.…

The FDA Approves the First-Ever Gene Therapy for Deafness, Which Aims to Restore Hearing in Kids With a Rare Inherited Condition

The agency's decision is based on results from a clinical trial in which the treatment improved hearing in 80 percent of the pediatric participants. However, Deaf community advocates worry about the push to cure hearing loss

Fedora 44 is out – countless versions of it

New sealed bootable container images and Stratis storage, too

Fedora Linux 44 has arrived – in multiple formats and for several CPU families, including some new container formats and storage options.…

A Snorkeling Biologist Snapped the First-Ever Photo of Newly Hatched California Giant Salamanders in the Wild. Here’s Why That's a Big Deal

The discovery provides another key data point about a little-known species for which every observation matters

Cloudflare says autocrats, wars and elections caged the internet in Q1

Iran went dark twice, AWS got droned, oh and TalkTalk broke something it refuses to talk about

The first quarter of 2026 saw a surge in severe and prolonged internet disruptions, from government shutdowns to power outages to the occasional mystery incident.…

Yet another experiment proves it's too damn simple to poison large language models

There is no 6 Nimmt! champion, but a $12 domain registration and one Wikipedia edit convinced several bots there was

Unlike search engines that let you judge competing sources, search-backed AI chatbots can turn shaky web material into confident answers. Case in point: A security engineer convinced several bots that he was the reigning world champion of a popular German card game, even though no such championship exists.…

NASA boss: make Pluto a planet again

Despite looming science cuts, Isaacman finds resources to poke the planetary hornet nest

NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman delivered some potentially good news at a Senate hearing this week, as well as some slightly odd news: in an environment of constrained budgets, the space agency was somehow finding resources to contest the decision to relegate Pluto from planet status.…

CISA flags data-theft bug in NSA-built OT networking tool

GrassMarlin leaks sensitive information, provided your targeting phishing skills are sharp enough

The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) is warning anyone who uses GrassMarlin, a tool developed by the National Security Agency (NSA), about a new vulnerability that attackers can use to snoop on sensitive information.…

A Gently Glowing Galaxy

A luminous swirl set against the deep black of space, the barred spiral galaxy IC 486 glows with a soft, ethereal light in this NASA Hubble Space Telescope image from April 13, 2026. IC 486 lies right on the edge of the constellation Gemini (the Twins), around 380 million light-years from Earth. Classified as a barred spiral […]

NASA, Boeing Advance Truss-Braced Wing Research in Test

NASA and Boeing have completed wind tunnel testing to study an innovative advanced aircraft design intended to improve aerodynamic efficiency. A truss-braced wing configuration, involving a long, thin wing with aerodynamically shaped structural supports, has the potential to reduce fuel and operational costs for future airliners, which is why NASA has collaborated with Boeing to […]

AWS plants more tombstones in the application graveyard

Eleven up, ten down

On Tuesday in San Francisco at an event called "What's Next with AWS," CEO Matt Garman took the stage to announce that AWS is (for what, depending on how you count, is the seventh, eighth, or ninth time) moving up the stack and entering the applications business.…

What Can We Gain by Losing Infinity?

Ultrafinitism, a philosophy that rejects the infinite, has long been dismissed as mathematical heresy. But it is also producing new insights in math and beyond.

The post What Can We Gain by Losing Infinity? first appeared on Quanta Magazine

Why Math’s Final Axiom Proved So Controversial

Zermelo-Fraenkel set theory is so widely accepted that modern mathematicians hardly think about it. But believing in its core principles didn’t come easily.

The post Why Math’s Final Axiom Proved So Controversial first appeared on Quanta Magazine

NASA Demonstrates New Prescribed Burn Capability for Spaceport

Anyone who has seen a launch at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida knows the agency’s pursuit of the stars involves some smoke and fire. Sometimes, however, the smoke doesn’t come from the rockets that propel astronauts beyond Earth’s bounds. That was the case during the second weekend of January 2026, when NASA teamed up […]

This Giant 400-Year-Old Astrolabe—Made by Mughal Master Craftsmen and Owned by Royalty—Fetched Millions at Auction

Ancient Greek astronomers and early Islamic scientists used astrolabes as mechanical computers to calculate time, determine height and navigate by the stars

Council on Environmental Quality Permitting Innovators Program

NASA’s Center of Excellence for Collaborative Innovation (CoECI) assists in the use of crowdsourcing across the federal government. CoECI’s NASA Tournament Lab offers the contract capability to run external crowdsourced challenges on behalf of NASA and other agencies. The Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ), within the Executive Office of the President established by the National […]

Watch the First Known Video of a Sumatran Orangutan Crossing a Human-Made Wildlife Bridge in the Treetops

A public road in Indonesia separates forests housing about 350 wild orangutans, among other animals. So, conservationists built several canopy bridges to prevent habitat fragmentation

GitHub: Zounds, a genuinely helpful AI-assisted bug report that isn't total slop! Here, Wiz, take this wad of cash

Claude ploughs through months of work in rapid time, helps Wiz researchers nab lucrative award

Wiz researchers are set for a tidy payday thanks to their discovery of a high-severity flaw in GitHub's git infrastructure that handed remote attackers full read/write access to private GitHub repositories using a single command.…

AWS keynote hypes AI as magic. Its own engineers tell a different story

No shortcuts, human-review everything, says internal team - and keep hiring junior developers

Interview  Steve Tarcza, director of Amazon Stores, says his team — StoreGen — exists to help the retail giant's developers move faster and cut friction. But despite the AI mandate, one principle is non-negotiable: nothing ships without a human checking it first.…

Microsoft opens door to the past by releasing 86-DOS and PC-DOS 1.00

Back to a time when source repositories were printouts and commits were hand-written notes

Antiques code show  Microsoft has released the source for another of its relics. This time, it's 86-DOS 1.00 getting the open source treatment, and a whole lot more for retro enthusiasts.…

EU waves through open source age-check tool to keep kids safe online

'Online platforms can rely on our app,' says Commish, 'there are no more excuses'

The European Commission has recommended EU member states adopt an age verification app designed to protect children from harmful online content.…

GitHub says sorry and vows to do better as uptime slips and devs complain

After Hashicorp co-founder blasts the source shack and numbers slide

Microsoft's code hosting shack Github has published a lengthy mea culpa about its availability and reliability woes - one that includes the words "we are sorry."…

GoDaddy customer claims registrar transferred 27-year-old domain without any security checks

32 phone calls, 17 email chains, a 5-day ordeal, and no help during the daddy of all stuffups, claim those affected

GoDaddy is currently investigating claims that it handed complete control of a valid 27-year-old domain to another customer, without requiring them to pass any authentication processes or upload any supporting documents.…

AI clause in new SAP API policy has partners worried over lock-in

Expert says it could push customers and partners to work with undocumented APIs

SAP is prohibiting the use of its APIs to integrate with AI systems outside its endorsed architectures, raising concerns that it is locking out third-party AI tools from customers' SAP data.…

Bork in Prague: SUSE's keynote gods demand their tribute

Linux vendor touts European independence while rate limits, Chromium popups, and cold sparks steal the show

BORK!BORK!BORK!  The keynote gods are a fickle bunch, as SUSE discovered at its annual shindig in Prague. What should have been a slick edge demo instead served up error pages to unsuspecting attendees, while keynote presentations attracted some unwelcome visitors.…

NASA is practicing moonwalks. When are we going back?

After the success of Artemis II, we at Short Wave definitely have moon fever. So, we brought NPR science correspondent Nell Greenfieldboyce onto the show to talk about where we’re headed. What will future Artemis missions look like and what needs to happen next for people to be able to walk on the moon again? We find out in this latest installment of Spacing Out – with space enthusiasts Regina G Barber and one of the hosts of All Things Considered, Scott Detrow!

Interested in more space episodes? Check out our whole summer series, Space Camp . Or, email us your ideas for future space-focused episodes at shortwave@npr.org .

P.S. If you see this and you like the idea of formally calling this segment “Spacing Out with Gina”, email us to let us know that too! We’re still deciding.

Listen to every episode of Short Wave sponsor-free and support our work at NPR by signing up for Short Wave+ at plus.npr.org/shortwave .

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30 ClawHub skills secretly turn AI agents into a crypto swarm

Yet another reason not to feast on OpenClaw

Thirty ClawHub skills published by a single author are silently co-opting AI agents and creating a mass cryptocurrency mining swarm – without any malware or user consent.…

Hashicorp co-founder Mitchell Hashimoto says GitHub ‘no longer a place for serious work’

Bemoans frequent outages that mean he’ll move Ghostty elsewhere

Hashicorp co-founder Mitchell Hashimoto has decided GitHub is so unstable it is “no longer a place for serious work,” and will therefore move his current project elsewhere.…

Fires Rage in Georgia

Firefighters are battling two destructive blazes in the southern part of the state as drought grips the U.S. Southeast.

Future holiday horror: ‘A robot lost my luggage in Tokyo’

Haneda airport will start testing humanoid robots, because everything that gets a plane flying was designed for our species

Your next holiday memory might involve humanoid robots losing your luggage.…

The future of software development: Now with less software development

At AI Dev 26 x SF, code slingers confront their relationship with AI

More than 3,000 software developers from around the world gathered in San Francisco on Tuesday to learn what will become of software development in the AI era.…

Oracle plans to power its New Mexico mega datacenter with a 2.45GW fuel cell farm

No sense in OpenAI stressing over its cloud bills if Oracle can't get the lights on

Close on the heels of a report that OpenAI has missed revenue targets and may not be able to pay its future bills, compute partner Oracle is keeping calm and carrying on with a massive new datacenter complex in the New Mexico desert.…

Known for Her Amusing Surreal Sculptures, This French Artist's Sinuous Set of Mirrors Just Shattered Auction Records

Claude Lalanne created the reflective ensemble for designer Yves Saint Laurent. Experts say it's second in importance only to the famous mirrors at the Palace of Versailles

Apple wants to kill your Time Capsule, but they run NetBSD so they can’t

It seems like Apple is finally going to remove support for AFP from macOS, twelve years after first moving from AFP to SMB for its default network file-sharing technology. This change shouldn’t impact most people, as it’s highly unlikely you’re using AFP for anything in 2026. Still, there is one small group of people to whom this change has an actual impact: owners of Apple’s Time Capsule devices. Time Capsules only support AFP and SMB1, and with SMB1 being removed from macOS ages ago, and now AFP being on the chopping block as well, macOS 27 would render your Time Capsule more or less unusable. It’s important to note that the last Time Capsule sold by Apple, the fifth generation, was released in 2013, and the product line as a whole was discontinued in 2018. If you bought a Time Capsule in the twilight years of the line’s availability, I think you have a genuine reason to be perturbed by Apple cutting you off from your product if you upgrade to macOS 27, but at least you have the option of keeping an older version of macOS around so you can keep interacting with your time Capsule. It still feels like a bit of a shitty move though, as those fifth generation models came with up to 3TB of storage, which can still serve as a solid NAS solution. Thank your lucky stars, then, that open source can, as usual, come to the rescue when proprietary software vendors do what they always do and screw over their customers. Did you know every generation of Time Capsule actually runs NetBSD, and that it’s trivially easy to add support for Samba 4 and SMB3 authentication to your Time Capsule, thereby extending its life expectancy considerably? TimeCapsuleSMB does exactly that. If the setup completes successfully, your Time Capsule will run its own Samba 4 server, advertise itself over Bonjour (show up automatically in the “Network” folder on macOS), and accept authenticated SMB3 connections from macOS. You should then be able to open Finder, choose Connect to Server, and use a normal SMB URL instead of relying on Apple’s legacy stack. You should also be able to use the disk for Time Machine backups. ↫ TimeCapsuleSMB It’s compatible with both NetBSD 4 and NetBSD 6-based Time Capsules, although you’ll need to run a single SMB activation command every time a NetBSD 4-based Time Capsule reboots. This will also disable any AFP and SMB1 support, but that is kind of moot since those are exactly the technologies that don’t and won’t work anymore once macOS 27 is released. The installation is also entirely reversible if, for whatever reason, you want to undo the addition of Samba 4. This whole saga is such an excellent example of why open source software protects users’ rights, by design.

Cloudera had US candidates send resumes to a fake email address, DoJ charges

PERM filings require employers to show American workers had a fair shot at the role

The US Department of Justice has accused data and AI platform provider Cloudera of abusing a program designed to give permanent residency to foreign workers who take tough-to-fill positions by creating a parallel hiring process that dumped the applications of Americans to a non-functional email address. …

NASA Connects Little Red Dots with Chandra, Webb

A newly discovered object may be a key to unlocking the true nature of a mysterious class of sources that astronomers have found in the early universe in recent years. A “X-ray dot” found by NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory could explain what the hundreds or potentially thousands of these objects are. A paper describing the […]

Warm Waters Are Usually Trapped Deep Within the Southern Ocean. Now, They're Encroaching on Antarctica, Threatening Its Ice

Two new studies that relied on data from a fleet of diving robots show how climate change is altering ocean movements in ways that jeapordize the stability of the polar ice cap

There’s No Place Like NASA’s New X-59 Hangar Home

There’s no sign reading “home sweet home” in the hangar where the X‑59 now sits, but the sentiment is unmistakable among those tending to the quiet supersonic aircraft. Located at NASA’s Armstrong Flight Research Center in Edwards, California, the X-59 hangar was built in 1968 but looks like new thanks to a full renovation and […]

OpenAI jumps out of Microsoft's bed, into Amazon's Bedrock

Altman's gaggle of GPTs now available in limited preview in an AWS region near you

OpenAI's top models are officially available on Amazon Web Services' Bedrock managed inference and agent platform.…

Don't pay Vect a ransom - your data's likely already wiped out

'Full recovery is impossible for anyone, including the attacker'

Organizations hit by the wave of Trivy and LiteLLM supply-chain compromises that paid Vect in hopes of recovering their data likely did not get much back, according to Check Point Research. That's because the ransomware Vect uses isn't actually ransomware at all, but a wiper that destroys any file larger than 128KB.…

Stained by Nicotine and Cocoa Powder, These Edvard Munch Paintings Hung in a Chocolate Factory Cafeteria for a Century. Now, They're Going on Public Display for the First Time

Three decades after "The Scream," the Norwegian artist painted scenes of daily life for the Freia chocolate factory. The artworks will be on display in his namesake museum in Oslo this spring

Trump admin pays wind developers to quit, back fossil fuel projects

DoI offers up to $885M if they abandon offshore wind projects

As the Iran war pushes up energy prices, the Trump administration is paying offshore wind developers to walk away from projects and invest instead in fossil fuel infrastructure.…

Nighttime Imaging Grows Landsat’s Science Value

By Earth Resources Observation and Science (EROS) Center  For more than 50 years, Landsat has imaged Earth’s land and near-shore surfaces as the satellites descend in midmorning orbit, when daily sunlight is optimal. That’s just what they’ve always done.  Currently, Landsat 8 and Landsat 9 circle the globe while also making better use of their ascending paths, […]

Vintage chatbot lives in the past like an elderly relative

Talkie's training data stops at the end of 1930, and its creators hope it'll help us better understand how AI thinks

If you're tired of interacting with a bot that spews Nazi propaganda or refers to itself as MechaHitler, you could sign off of Elon Musk's xAI. Or, just to be sure, use an LLM whose training data ends in 1930, three years before the Nazis took power in Germany and nine years before World War II started.…

IBM's AI coding 'partner' Bob hits general availability

80,000 internal guinea pigs, Bobcoins, mainframe dreams and a name that really should have raised more flags

IBM has announced global availability of Bob, the AI coding assistant - sorry partner - which it claims has delivered a productivity boost to the 80,000 big bluers pressed into guinea pig status last year.…

Curiosity Captures a 360-Degree View at ‘Nevado Sajama’

Description NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover captured this 360-degree view of a region filled with low ridges called boxwork formations between Nov. 9 and Dec. 7, 2025 (the 4,714th to 4,741st Martian days, or sols, of the mission). At 1.5 billion pixels, this is one of the largest panoramas Curiosity has ever taken (the rover’s largest […]

Amazon unveils a Copilot for all your apps

Retailer touts 'teammates' and always-on context as it muscles into an already crowded enterprise market

Amazon has announced two AI services pitched with typical techbro hyperbole, aimed at changing the way you work.…

Alexander Calder Thought 'It Would Be Fun' to Set Abstract Art in Motion. His Mesmerizing Mobiles Transformed the Definition of Sculpture

A new exhibition at the Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris spotlights 300 of the sculptor's groundbreaking kinetic artworks, large-scale public sculptures, paintings, drawings and wire portraits

NASA Fires Up Powerful Lithium-Fed Thruster for Trips to Mars

A technology that could propel crewed missions to Mars and robotic spacecraft throughout the solar system was recently put to the test at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California. On Feb. 24, for the first time in years and at power levels exceeding any previous test in the United States, a team fired up […]

NASA Laser Terminal Enhances Views During Artemis II Mission

Millions of people watched the historic launch of Artemis II and were captivated by the mission’s 10-day journey around the Moon as NASA astronauts Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, and Christina Koch, and CSA (Canadian Space Agency) astronaut Jeremy Hansen ventured farther into space than any human before. Part of the public’s ability to experience the […]

NVIDIA Launches Nemotron 3 Nano Omni Model, Unifying Vision, Audio and Language for up to 9x More Efficient AI Agents

AI agent systems today juggle separate models for vision, speech and language — losing time and context as they pass data from one model to the other. Unveiled today, NVIDIA Nemotron 3 Nano Omni is an open multimodal model that brings these capabilities together into one system, enabling agents to deliver faster, smarter responses with […]

Worried Your House Is Haunted? The Spooky Sensation Might Arise From a Surprisingly Simple Source

Infrasound—noise below the range of typical human hearing—from power, heating and mechanical systems within buildings can make people feel irritated and induce a stress response, according to a new study

Six Years of Curiosity’s Wheels on the Move

Description NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover used its right navigation camera — one of two on the rover’s mast, or head — to capture the images in this timelapse, which spans six years of driving. The images were snapped between Jan. 2, 2020, and March 8, 2026 (the 2,633rd and 4,830th Martian day, or sol, of […]

Science in Space

Astronauts Chris Williams of NASA and Sophie Adenot of the European Space Agency work together in the Kibo laboratory module’s Life Science Glovebox, processing genetic-material samples for the DNA Nano Therapeutics‑3 experiment. The investigation is exploring DNA‑inspired assembly techniques as a way to manufacture treatments—such as chemotherapy and immunotherapy—that can kill cancer cells and activate […]

Have I Been Pwned claims Pitney Bowes hit by 8.2M email address leak

Names, phone numbers, physical addresses also included in Shiny Hunters alleged data dump

Updated  Logistics technology company Pitney Bowes, which makes franking machines for US postage, is the latest scalp claimed by ShinyHunters and its ongoing spree of pay-or-leak attacks against major organizations.…

Scientists Found This Mysterious Golden Orb on the Seafloor Nearly Three Years Ago. Now, They Finally Know What It Is

After a long, winding road of tests, researchers at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History and other institutions determined that the strange blob once attached a large sea anemone to a rock

Despite proposed science cuts, NASA boss says 'We haven't canceled anything yet'

That 'yet' is sure doing a lot of heavy lifting if the budget for science is slashed

NASA administrator Jared Isaacman has appeared before the US House Appropriations Committee to explain the proposed Trump administration plan to cut $5.6 billion from the space agency's budget.…

Into the Omniverse: Manufacturing’s Simulation-First Era Has Arrived

Manufacturing’s traditional design-build-test cycle rested on a single assumption: Real-world testing was the only reliable test environment.

Tenstorrent’s Galaxy Blackhole AI servers escape the event horizon

RISC-V-based systems pack 32 Blackhole accelerators in a 6U, $110K chassis

Tenstorrent on Tuesday announced the general availability of its Galaxy Blackhole AI compute platform.…

Brussels orders Google to share Android's AI sandbox with the other kids

DMA enforcers want rival assistants to get same deep device access as Gemini

Those pencil pushers at the European Commission are drawing up measures to ensure Google opens up its Android smartphone platform to something few users asked for – competing AI services.…

UK.gov's DCMS to new CDIO: Migrate from Google to Microsoft, overhaul ERP, build a team

£125k and a pension await whoever can herd 6 departments onto single platform without losing will to live

Later today, prospective candidates will log onto a UK government call to convince themselves that £125k a year is worth the trouble of tackling a technological landscape swamped by colliding projects.…

Two men charged over series of arson attacks on 5G masts

Pair accused of creating literal flame war as bonkers conspiracy theories grow

Two men face charges over a series of arson attacks on 5G masts spanning two years following a Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) investigation.…

A 13-Year-Old Boy Found This Bronze Coin in a Field. It Turned Out to Be the First Ancient Greek Artifact Discovered in Berlin

Minted in Troy in the third century B.C.E., the object might have been buried as a gift to the dead. Archaeologists don't know exactly how it ended up in modern-day Germany

Microsoft Outlook for iOS still down and out for many after 'service change'

Sign-in failures, unexpected sign-outs... just another day for users

Users of Microsoft Outlook on iOS are continuing to experience outages more than 24 hours after glitches first surfaced, despite Microsoft's assurances it rolled back the configuration change and restored services.…

SUSE's sovereignty pitch meets an inconvenient $6 billion question

Linux vendor touts European independence at SUSECON as majority stakeholder quietly explores its options

European-based SUSE devoted much of the annual SUSECON event to its sovereignty-focused pitch - even as reports swirl that its majority stakeholder is exploring a $6 billion sale which could land the Linux vendor in American hands.…

A New Big Database of DNA From Indigenous Americans Shakes Up Scientists' Theories About Human Settlement of South America

Genomic data provides evidence for a previously unknown wave of migration, with Indigenous groups living in central and southern Mexico spreading into South America and the Caribbean starting around 1,300 years ago

Locked, stocked, and losing budget: AI vendor lock-in bites back

Execs in the C-suite thought they could swap models in a week. They were hallucinating

Opinion  The days when you could jump from one frontier AI model to another at the drop of a hat are going away as vendor lock-in starts to kick in, and prices increase.…

UK govt dept sent a document 'in error.' Now it's being used in a £370M contract lawsuit

Comparison between 2 vendors was never meant to be seen ... or made

The UK's pensions and welfare ministry has slammed its outsourcing provider, SSCL, for sharing a document the department says it "inadvertently provided", a document that later surfaced in a legal dispute over a £370 million contract.…

Australia threatens tech companies with 2.25 percent tax if they don’t pay publishers

Last time an idea like this came up, Meta packed up its toys and went home

Australia has come up with a new way to ensure social media and search companies pay to support journalism: a 2.25 percent tax on revenue that’s avoidable if companies instead do deals with local media.…

Set up solar, or save a tree? It’s complicated

To solar or not to solar? That is the question for this latest episode of our monthly series Nature Quest. For listener Darcey Hughes, installing solar panels isn’t just about keeping her utilities free of fossil fuels – it’s also a way to become fully self-reliant and save some money each month. But there’s a catch: She might have to chop down a large, shading cedar tree. Today, we investigate: When is solar worth it? And is it worth the price of an old, majestic tree?

Do YOU have a question you have about your local environment? Send us a voice memo telling us your name, where you live, and your dilemma… we may make it the next Nature Quest. We’re reachable at shortwave@npr.org .

Want to learn more about easy-to-install solar? Check out NPR climate correspondent Jeff Brady’s reporting on plug-in solar panels .

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‘AI deflation’ comes to India’s tech services giants and puts downward pressure on revenue

Headcounts, however, are mostly holding up

AI is beginning to make a dent in the business models of India’s big four technology services giants…

Fiery Fall Color in Southern Chile

The beech forests of southern Patagonia put on vibrant autumn displays.

China blocks Zuck’s acquisition of AI outfit Manus

Back to the drawing board for Meta's AI ambitions

China has blocked Meta’s acquisition of AI upstart Manus.…

Microsoft's GitHub shifts to metered AI billing amid cost crisis

The all-you-can-eat AI buffet is coming to an end

Microsoft is closing the AI buffet offered to GitHub Copilot customers, acknowledging that it can’t sell AI like Red Lobster's Endless Shrimp.…

Ongoing supply-chain attack 'explicitly targeting' security, dev tools

Vendor confirms repo data exposure after Lapsus$ claims source code, secrets dump

Software security testing outfit Checkmarx has become the latest organization caught up in an ongoing attack on security-tool providers. The biz said data posted online appears to have come from one of its GitHub repositories after the Lapsus$ extortion crew claimed to have dumped the company’s source code, secrets, and other sensitive data.…

Dillo 3.3.0 released

Dillo is an amazing web browser for those of us who want their web browsing experience to be calmer and less flashing. Dillo also happens to be a very UNIX-y browser, and their latest release, 3.3.0, underlines that. A new dilloc program is now available to control Dillo from the command line or from a script. It searches for Dillo by the PID in the DILLO_PID environment variable or for a unique Dillo process if not set. ↫ Dillo 3.3.0 release notes You can use this program to control your Dillo instance, with basic commands like reloading the current URL, opening a new URL, and so on, but also things like dumping the current page’s contents. I have a feeling more commands and features will be added in future releases, but for now, even the current set of commands can be helpful for scripting purposes. I’m sure some of you who live and die in the terminal are already thinking of all the possibilities here. You can now also add page actions to the right-click context menu, so you can do things like reload a page with a Chrome curl impersonator to avoid certain JavaScript walls. This, too, is of course extensible. Dillo 3.3.0 also brings experimental support for building the browser with FLTK 1.4, and implemented a fix specifically to make OAuth work properly.

Ubuntu is going to integrate “AI”, but Canonical remains vague about the how and why

Ubuntu, being one of the more commercial Linux distributions, was always going to jump on the “AI” bandwagon, and Jon Seager, Canonical’s VP Engineering, published a blog post with more details. Throughout 2026 we’ll be working on enabling access to frontier AI for Ubuntu users in a way that is deliberate, secure, and aligned with our open source values. By focusing on the combination of education for our engineers, our existing knowledge of building resilient systems and our strengthening silicon partnerships, we will deliver efficient local inference, powerful accessibility features, and a context-aware OS that makes Ubuntu meaningfully more capable for the people who rely on it Ubuntu is not becoming an AI product, but it can become stronger with thoughtful AI integration. ↫ Jon Seager at Ubuntu Discourse The problem with this entire post is that, much like all other corporate communications about “AI”, it’s all deceptively vague, open-ended, and weasely. Adjectives like “focused”, “principled”, “thoughtful”, and “tasteful” don’t really mean anything, and leave everything open for basically every type of slop “AI” feature under the sun. Their claims about open weights and open source models are also weakened by words like “favour” and “where possible”, again leaving the door wide open for basically any shady “AI” company’s models and features to find their way into your default Ubuntu installation. There’s also very little in terms of concrete plans and proposed features, leaving Ubuntu users in the dark about what, exactly, is going to be added to their operating system of choice during the remainder of the year. There’s mentions of improved text-to-speech/speech-to-text and text regurgitators, but that’s about it. None of it feels particularly inspired or ground-breaking, and the veneer of open source, ethical model creation, and so on, is particularly thin this time around, even for Canonical. I don’t really feel like I know a lot more about Canonical’s “AI” intentions for Ubuntu after reading this post than I did before, other than Ubuntu users might be able to generate text in their email client or whatever later this year. Is that really something anybody wants?

Cursor-Opus agent snuffs out startup’s production database

Relax, the data's been recovered. Continue with your vibe coding

Jer (Jeremy) Crane, the founder of automotive SaaS platform PocketOS, spent the weekend recovering from a data extinction event caused by the company's AI coding agent in less than 10 seconds. …

The Navy's autonomous carrier-based refueling drone has finally flown

After missing its 2025 target, Boeing's MQ-25A Stingray is one step closer to a carrier deck

The US Navy’s current carrier-based refueling aircraft may soon be getting help, as Boeing has completed the first flight of its autonomous tanker drone designed for carrier operations.…

Fires in Berlin Destroyed Hundreds of Paintings During World War II. Now, a Museum Will Publish Photo Archives of the Lost Artworks Online

A proactive effort to document the collection of the Gemäldegalerie will pay off a century later as negatives of lost paintings by Rubens and Caravaggio are digitized and published online

NASA’s X-59 Gets Freedom 250 Logo

NASA’s X-59 is helping the nation celebrate the 250th anniversary of its independence with an update to its livery – its official paint job and insignia. The one-of-a-kind research aircraft is the centerpiece of NASA’s Quesst mission to demonstrate technology to fly supersonic, or faster than the speed of sound, without generating loud sonic booms. […]

Interstellar Comet 3I/ATLAS Came From an Extremely Cold, Lonely Region of the Milky Way Galaxy, New Research Suggests

Astronomers analyzed the vapors coming off the comet when it neared the sun and found it had a lot of "heavy" water. That hints it grew up in a frigid planetary system, possibly before its home star formed

The crypto-to-AI bandwagon jumpers' club just landed another member: Core Scientific

They were doing it in Texas...

Core Scientific is trading coins for tokens, revealing plans on Monday to convert a 300-megawatt bitcoin mining operation in Pecos, Texas, to an 1.5 gigawatt AI datacenter campus.…

Medical and utility tech companies admit digital breakins

Itron, Medtronic disclose breaches in Friday filings

Digital intruders recently broke into two major tech suppliers - utility-technology firm Itron and medical-device maker Medtronic - according to filings with federal regulators.…

A Tourist Damaged Florence’s 'Fountain of Neptune' While Attempting to Grope Its Marble Statue on a Dare

Fixing the fountain’s horse sculptures and frieze will cost nearly $6,000. The alleged offender is the latest tourist to harm artwork in response to peer pressure or in pursuit of social media clout

South Africa yanks AI policy after AI-assisted drafting invents citations

Eish shame man! Maybe you shouldn't ask AI to set the rules for AI use?

South Africa has pulled its draft national AI policy after discovering that it was citing sources that exist only in the fertile imagination of a chatbot.…

NASA’s Perseverance, Curiosity Panoramas Capture Two Sides of Mars

NASA’s Curiosity and Perseverance rovers have captured two 360-degree landscapes that highlight how the missions are revealing details of the Red Planet’s formation, watery past, and potential for life. Located 2,345 miles (3,775 kilometers) apart from each other on Mars — about the distance from Los Angeles to Washington, D.C. — both rovers are exploring […]

Friendster rises from the grave to make social media great again

No ads, no algorithm, and you actually have to physically tap phones to add a friend

It's been more than a decade since social media platform Friendster went dark, but a new owner has brought it back from the dead - sort of - with the hope he can give exhausted users of modern platforms a reprieve. …

AI reality check: Here's what three companies learned building wallets, homes, and games

Executives from Citi, Home Depot, and Capcom describe early work with AI agents

While AI agents have moved from experimental tools to customer-facing workers in a matter of months, the next challenge is governance and reliability once those agents touch real money, real shoppers, and real creative output.…

This Bone-Crunching Octopus Was Nearly the Size of a Semitruck and May Have Feasted on Giant Reptiles 100 Million Years Ago

The massive invertebrates may have been top predators, according to an analysis of their fossilized jaws. The work suggests that ancient oceans weren't completely ruled by spine-bearing creatures, as previously thought

You Can Help Humans Thrive in Space

The second Artemis mission took four astronauts around the moon and back – the first crewed deep-space flight since 1972. Not everyone gets a chance to put on a space suit, but you can still be an important part of NASA’s human space exploration story by doing NASA science!

Meta to power its bit barns with energy from space

Facebook provider also working with energy storage firm to keep 100 hours of juice on hand

With AI demand growing, Facebook parent Meta is looking for new ways to power its datacenters, with one ambitious project pledging to send solar power down from orbit. Another agreement offers Meta the opportunity to store enough power to keep its bit barns going, even when the grid is over capacity or down.…

Thunderbird Pro April 2026 Update

One of the most exciting aspects of bringing Thunderbird Pro to life is the opportunity to build an email service from Thunderbird together with our community, giving users the control and freedom they expect without relying on third party email service providers. Over the past few months, we’ve been checking in with our community through […]

The post Thunderbird Pro April 2026 Update appeared first on The Thunderbird Blog.

Microsoft and OpenAI's open relationship is now official

No. More. Exclusivity. Redmond keeps the ring until 2032, but OpenAI is free to see other clouds

Once tied tightly together, Microsoft and OpenAI have amended their agreement, making the Windows giant's license non-exclusive. In exchange, Microsoft will no longer owe OpenAI a revenue share.…

Physicists Discover the Most Complex Forms of Ice Yet

Scientists keep detecting new forms of ice. According to simulations, there could be many more left to find.

The post Physicists Discover the Most Complex Forms of Ice Yet first appeared on Quanta Magazine

Volunteers Help NASA Astronauts Record Lunar Flashes

As NASA’s Artemis II astronauts zipped around the Moon in early April, they observed flashes of light caused by meteoroids hitting the lunar surface. At the same time, volunteers for the NASA-funded Impact Flash project scanned the Moon with their own telescopes and sent their videos to scientists to share what they saw from Earth.

See the 1-in-50-Million Split-Color Lobster Caught Off the Coast of Massachusetts. It's Carrying Two Sets of Genetic Information

The unusual-looking crustacean is two-toned, with a line dividing its body into an orange side and a brown side. This can happen when two fertilized, unlaid lobster eggs touch—causing one to absorb the other

SpaceX dusts off Falcon Heavy for first flight in 18 months

Side boosters to make simultaneous touchdown while center core takes one for the team

Updated  SpaceX is preparing to launch its Falcon Heavy rocket for the first time in more than 18 months, kicking off what could be a busy time for the vehicle.…

Trump's Golden Dome gets $3.2B of contractors and an AI sprinkle

Space Force awards 11 firms prototype deals to build orbital interceptors

The United States Space Force (USSF) has awarded eleven companies contracts to develop space-based interceptors for President Trump's Golden Dome program, in agreements worth up to $3.2 billion.…

Cybersec is a thankless job: expanding workload and shrinking pay packet

Global recruitment giant says 71% of human firewalls saw wages stagnate last year as threats and responsibilities grew

Cybersecurity professionals were the most overlooked workers in IT when it came to pay rises in 2025, according to new figures from recruiter Harvey Nash.…

Burglar alarm biz burgled: ADT confirms cyber intrusion after ShinyHunters extortion attempt

Security giant says attackers grabbed 'limited set' of data. Crooks claim 10 million records

A home security biz getting digitally burgled is not a great look - but that's exactly where ADT finds itself. The company has confirmed a cyber intrusion following an extortion attempt by the ShinyHunters crew, which claims to have made off with more than 10 million records.…

Microsoft updates the Windows Update Experience: You can hit pause now

Keep the patches away for as long as you like

Microsoft has devised a solution to the problem of Windows Updates that break customer devices – users are now able to pause them for as long as they like.…

In the beginning was the Bork: 'Heart of the Earth' exhibit reveals Raspberry Pi in existential crisis

Dynamic Earth's ancient rock holds not primordial crystal, but a tiny Linux box having a bad day

Bork!Bork!Bork!  From the beginning of time, there has always been Bork. Lurking within the heart of this ancient rock is not a precious crystal or a rare fossil. No, it's a Raspberry Pi desktop and dialog.…

Did Neanderthals Have Language? New Research Suggests They Had the Genetic Hardware for It, Like Humans

Specific genomic regions that seem to play a role in human language development evolved hundreds of thousands of years ago, before humans and Neanderthals diverged from a common ancestor, a new study finds

ICO chief John Edwards steps back as workplace probe quietly unfolds

UK’s data watchdog confirms its boss has been off the job since February while an HR investigation runs

The UK's data watchdog is without its chief after John Edwards stepped aside from the Information Commissioner's Office while an independent workplace investigation examines unspecified HR matters.…

Watch out UK taxpayers: 28,000 HMRC staffers just got an AI copilot

Microsoft Copilot now heading into ‘Official Sensitive’ work after winning back just 26 minutes a day in a trial

HMRC is betting big on Microsoft Copilot, rolling it out to tens of thousands of staff after a Whitehall trial estimated it saved each user roughly 26 minutes of time per day.…

Anthropic's magic code-sniffer: More Swiss cheese than cheddar, for now

AI vuln-hunter finds what humans taught it to find. Funny that

Opinion  In retrospect, calling it Mythos made it a hostage to fortune. Anthropic may have hoped that the name implied its AI code security model had mythical god-like powers, but there's an alternate reading. Another definition for Mythos is a set of beliefs of obscure origin which are incompatible with reality.…

PowerPoint punishment sent users into an infinite loop after lunch

There was only one ESC from sneaky screenshots and fake BSODs

Who, Me?  Welcome to another instalment of Who, Me? It's The Register's Monday column that shares your stories of mistakes, occasional malice, and how you came out the other side.…

The mystery that led this family to get their stomachs removed

When Karyn Paringatai learned about a pattern among her family members, it changed the course of her life: A lot of people died young. As Karyn dug into her family history, she learned many Maori families, like her own, suffered from a rare form of stomach cancer called diffuse gastric cancer. Sarah Zhang recently wrote a story on this kind of cancer as a staff writer at The Atlantic. Today, she gets into all the details with Short Wave host Emily Kwong: the mutation that causes it and the life-changing decision people with the mutation have to make – risk dying or get surgery to remove their entire stomach?

Interested in more science? Email us your question at shortwave@npr.org .

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Google Cloud Next proves what we suspected: Everything is AI now

Join us for this week's Kettle as we dive into GCN and the latest not-so-alarming revelations about Mythos

KETTLE  If you needed further evidence that AI comes first in pretty much everything nowadays, look no further than this year's Google Cloud Next show, which happened last week.…

Tokenmaxxing isn't an AI strategy

Before checking AI's price tag, see whether it fits

What does AI cost? It's a simple question and an important one – the answer will determine the fate of companies and shape society. But it's also a question that can't be answered in a meaningful way without additional context.…

Go straight to sell! Windows second-chance setup hawks Microsoft services at IT's expense

The OS trying to upsell you subscriptions is more than just an annoyance

opinion  You’ve had your laptop for months, and you’ve always made sure it installed Microsoft updates. Then one day you boot up, and Windows 11 greets you with a confusing message: “You’re almost done setting up your PC.”…

AI's not going to kill open source code security

Cal.com considers AGPL a license to drill, but not everyone feels that way

Opinion  Cal.com has closed its commercial codebase, abandoning years of AGPL-3.0 licensing in a move that has alarmed the developer community that helped build it and sent ripples through the broader open source world.…

Ex-AWS legend explains what enterprises need to make AI actually work

AI transformation is about people and organization, not technology

Enterprise AI projects go off the rails when companies focus on the technology instead of the people.…

Crime crew impersonates help desk, abuses Microsoft Teams to steal your data

Coming in cold with custom Snow malware

A previously unknown threat group using tried-and-tested social engineering tactics - Microsoft Teams chat invitations and helpdesk staff impersonation - is also using custom malware in its data-stealing attacks, according to Google's Threat Intelligence Group.…

If 64bit Windows 11 contains a copy of 32bit explorer.exe, could you run it as its shell?

Raymond Chen published a blog post about how a crappy uninstaller on Windows caused a mysterious spike in the number of Explorer (Windows’ graphical shell) crashes. It turns out the buggy uninstaller caused repeated crashes in the 32bit version of Explorer on 64bit systems, and – hold on a minute. The how many bits on the what now? The 32-bit version of Explorer exists for backward compatibility with 32-bit programs. This is not the copy of Explorer that is handling your taskbar or desktop or File Explorer windows. So if the 32-bit Explorer is running on a 64-bit system, it’s because some other program is using it to do some dirty work. ↫ Raymond Chen at The Old New Thing So I had no idea that 64bit Windows included a copy of the 32bit Explorer for backwards compatibility. It obviously makes sense, but I just never stopped to think about it. This made me wonder though if you could go nuts and do something really dumb: could you somehow trick 64bit Windows into running this 32bit copy of Explorer as its shell? You’d be running 32bit Explorer on 64bit Windows using the 32bit WoW64 binaries where you just pulled the 32bit Explorer binary from, which seems like a really nonsensical thing to do. Since there’s no longer any 32bit builds of Windows 11, you also can’t just copy over the 32bit Explorer from a 32bit Windows 11 build and achieve the same goal that way, so you’d really have to go digging around in WoW64 to get 32bit versions. I guess the answer to this question depends on just how complete this copy of 32bit Explorer really is, and if Windows has any defenses or triggers in place to prevent someone from doing something this uselessly stupid. Of course, there’s no practical reason to do any of this and it makes very little sense, but it might be a fun hacking project. Most likely the Windows experts among you are wondering what kind of utterly deranged new designer drug I’m on, but I was always told that sometimes, the dumbest questions can lead to the most interesting answers, so here we are.

8087 emulation on 8086 systems

Not too long ago I had a need and an opportunity to re-acquaint myself with the mechanism used for software emulation of the 8087 FPU on 8086/8088 machines. ↫ Michal Necasek Look, when a Michal Necasek article starts out like this, you know you’re in for a learnin’ ol’ time. The 8087 was a floating-point coprocessor for the 8086 and 8088 processors, since back in those early days, processors did not include an integrated floating-point unit. It wouldn’t be until the release of the 486DX, in 1989, that Intel would integrate an FPU inside the processor itself, negating the need for a separate chip and socket. Interestingly enough, Intel also released a cut-down version of the 486 with the FPU removed, the 486SX, for which an optional external FPU did exist.

DeepSeek's new models are so efficient they'll run on a toaster ... by which we mean Huawei's NPUs

Now available in preview, DeepSeek V4 cuts inference costs to a fraction of R1

Chinese AI darling DeepSeek is back with a new open weights large language model that promises performance to rival the best proprietary American LLMs. Perhaps more importantly, it claims to dramatically reduce inference costs and it extends support for Huawei's Ascend family of AI accelerators.…

State-Licensed Medical Marijuana Has Been Reclassified as a Less-Dangerous Drug. Here's What That Means

The move should make it easier for researchers to study the substance and give tax breaks to licensed medical marijuana dealers

The World's First Museum of A.I. Art Will Open in Los Angeles as the Art World Ponders Questions of Ethics and Sustainability

Dataland's immersive exhibitions, generated with artificial intelligence, will debut to the public on June 20, with an inaugural show about rainforests trained on millions of images of nature

How hard is it to open a file?

Sebastian Wick has a great explanation of why opening files – programmatically – is a lot more complex and fraught with dangers than you might think it is. This issue was relevant for Wick as he is one of the lead developers of Flatpak, for which a number of security issues have recently been discovered, and it just so happens that many of these issues dealt with this very topic. The biggest security issue found was a complete sandbox escape, originating from the fact that flatpak run, the command-line tool to start a Flatpak application, accepted path strings, since flatpak run is assumed to be run by a trusted user. The problem lay in a D-Bus service sandboxed applications could use to create subsandboxes, and this service was built around, you guessed it, flatpak run. The issues in question, including this complete sandbox escape, have been addressed and fixed, but they highlight exactly the dangers that can come from opening files. This subsandboxing approach in Flatpak is built on assumptions from fifteen years ago, and times have changed since then. If you’re a programmer who deals with opening files, you might want to take a look at your own code to see if similar issues exist.

AI as a fascist artifact

In that reading „AI“ is a machine for the creation of epistemic injustice and the replacement of truth with what a tech elite wants it to be in order to control the population. This is a Fascist project that not so subtly aligns with Fascism’s totalitarian will to power and control as well as its reliance in replacing reasoning and debate with belief in power and the leader. ↫ Jürgen Geute The purpose of a system is what it does, and what “AI” does is stunt users’ own abilities and development and concentrate power and wealth even further in the hands of a very small privileged few – a privileged few who consistently espouse fascist ideology and promote and implement fascist ideas. Jürgen Geute lays it out in much more detail backed by solid references and concrete examples, but the conclusion is clear. And uncomfortable to many, as such conclusions always are.

To Keep the Voyager 1 Spacecraft on Its Interstellar Journey, NASA Turned Off One of Its Few Remaining Instruments

The probe launched almost 50 years ago and is the farthest human-made object from Earth. Shutting down one of its scientific devices will help it conserve energy and continue traveling toward the edge of the solar system

Why Do We Love Movies? This New 'Smart' Movie Theater Tracks Viewers' Brain Waves and Heart Rates to Find Out

Researchers at the University of Bristol are studying the appeal of the cinema-watching experience by turning one theater into a biometric laboratory

Ubuntu Resolute Raccoon spits out Xorg, but still lets you run X11 apps

New LTS is here, with more tooling for GPGPU and AI workloads

Ubuntu 26.04 "Resolute Raccoon," the latest LTS release from Canonical, arrives with GNOME 50, Linux kernel 7.0, and drops the Xorg option from Ubuntu Desktop while still running X11 applications through Xwayland.…

Pentagon wants to water down drone program with autonomous subs

What, you didn't expect autonomous military craft to stay in the sky forever?

Drones: they're not just for the sky anymore. DARPA is seeking compact deep-ocean autonomous craft developed faster, smaller, and cheaper than today's full-ocean-depth AUV systems.…

I Am Artemis: Peter Rossoni

Listen to this audio excerpt from Peter Rossoni, Orion Artemis II Optical Communications System flight manager: As a child, Peter Rossoni watched the Apollo missions launch with his family. In April 2026, he became a part of NASA’s Artemis II mission, helping enable communications as astronauts journeyed around the Moon. Rossoni’s path to NASA began […]

US clarifies mobile hotspots part of foreign router ban despite rarity of American made consumer kit

Silicon often from US, but the kit from APAC and elsewhere

America's telco regulator has clarified its ban on foreign-made routers also includes mobile hotspots and domestic routers that use a 5G cellular connection to the internet.…

ShinyHunters claim they have cruise giant Carnival's booty as 7.5M emails surface

Leak-site bragging meets breach hunters as Have I Been Pwned flags millions of records

Carnival Corporation, the world's largest cruise company, is dealing with choppy waters after Have I Been Pwned flagged what it claimed were 7.5 million unique email addresses all allegedly tied to one of its subsidiaries. …

The Day of the Trifid Nebula

This shimmering region of star-formation, a close-up of the Trifid Nebula about 5,000 light-years from Earth, was captured in intricate detail by NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope in an image released on April 20, 2026. The colors in Hubble’s visible light image, which marks the 36th anniversary of the mission’s launch on April 24, are reminiscent of an underwater […]

NASA Astronauts to Answer Questions from Missouri Students

Students in Missouri will hear from NASA astronauts Jessica Meir and Jack Hathaway as they answer prerecorded science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) questions while aboard the International Space Station. The Earth-to-space call will begin at 10:50 a.m. EDT Thursday, April 30, and will stream live on the agency’s Learn With NASA YouTube channel. This […]

Governments on high alert after CISA snuffs out Firestarter backdoor on fed network

Latest in long-running pwning of Cisco kit found in mystery Fed agency

A US federal agency was successfully targeted by a previously unknown backdoor malware called Firestarter, according to CISA cybersnoops and their UK counterparts – neither of which disclosed the agency's name.…

Beavers Are Ecosystem Engineers—and They Might Be Helpful Allies in the Fight Against Human-Caused Climate Change

New research suggests that wetlands created by the industrious rodents are carbon sinks, meaning they store a lot of heat-trapping carbon dioxide—the human-produced gas largely responsible for today's global warming

A New Type of Neuroplasticity Rewires the Brain After a Single Experience

“Neurons that fire together, wire together” is not the full story. A novel mechanism explains how the brain can learn across longer timescales.

The post A New Type of Neuroplasticity Rewires the Brain After a Single Experience first appeared on Quanta Magazine

More ancient Linux device support faces the chop

One way to deal with bug hunting LLMs: ditch the old drivers

One tactic to deal with LLM-powered vulnerability detection is simple – just speed up the removal of old code. If it's gone, it no longer matters if it's buggy.…

What Killed the Neanderthals? New Research Suggests a Lack of Genetic Diversity May Be Partially to Blame

When the climate cooled, the population of Neanderthals shrank. Most that lived between 60,000 and 40,000 years ago were descended from the same lineage and had very similar DNA

OpenTelemetry co-founder tools up for project graduation party

We gotta get boring to get graduated

Grafanacon  The co-founder of the OpenTelemetry project says its maintainers may need to turn to AI tools to get some elements robust enough for the project as a whole to graduate.…

Microsoft tackles quality control issues. Just kidding, it's encouraging experienced workers to leave

Windows giant offers buyouts to eligible staffers willing to walk

Microsoft has committed to improving the quality and reliability of Windows, and a step on the path to that goal is… encouraging a chunk of its US staff to leave the company.…

NASA Celebrates Decade of University Innovation in Aeronautics

For 10 years, a NASA initiative has helped the agency produce breakthrough aeronautical innovations while fostering the aviation workforce of tomorrow – and the University Leadership Initiative (ULI) is still flying high, making awards with the potential to change 21st century air travel.  Through ULI, NASA has supported more than 1,100 students at 100 schools, allowing them […]

Intel bets the farm on AI inference to drag CPU back to the top table

Chipzilla hopes agents, robots, and edge devices make CPUs cool again... now it has to build the chips

Intel is betting on AI to reverse its fortunes, wagering that inference and agentic workloads will restore the CPU to the center of compute - even as its chip manufacturing struggles persist.…

Meta Arms itself to the teeth by signing for 'tens of millions' of AWS Graviton cores

After flubbing the Metaverse, Zuck embraces the Neoverse

Meta plans to deploy tens of millions of Amazon Web Services' Graviton 5 CPU cores as part of a multi-year collaboration that will make the social network among the largest-ever consumers of the cloud giant’s homegrown silicon.…

Microsoft beefs up Remote Desktop security with ... hard-to-read messages

Ailing scaling blamed by Windows-maker for unreadable missives

Microsoft's update to harden Remote Desktop against phishing attacks has arrived. When users open a Remote Desktop (.rdp) file, they should now see a warning listing all requested connection settings - or they would if it was displaying correctly.…

It's a myth that you need Mythos to find bugs: Open source models can do it just as well

OpenAI's first security hire, Ari Herbert-Voss, thinks more automated bug finding will improve security without costing jobs

Black Hat Asia  Open source models can find bugs as effectively as Anthropic's Mythos, according to Ari Herbert-Voss, CEO of AI-powered security startup RunSybil and OpenAI's first security hire.…

Trump to UK: Stop taxing our big beautiful tech corps or face tariff tsunami

Oval Office resident rants about Blighty's Digital Services Tax with threats that don’t quite add up

Donald Trump has threatened to whack the UK with a "big tariff" if it doesn't scrap its tax on large US tech firms, reviving a long-running spat over who gets to skim the proceeds from Silicon Valley's global empire.…

In a Graveyard of Shipwrecks Between Europe and Africa, Archaeologists Discovered Vessels Doomed Over Thousands of Years

The "harbor" of the Strait of Gibraltar is the final resting place for shipwrecks from ancient Rome, the medieval era and World War II, according to a new archaeological survey

Greece relaxes Euro biometric border entry rules amid airport chaos

Missed flights and more means something has got to give at the border

Greece is taking a flexible approach to introducing the European Union's biometric Entry/Exit System (EES), after some British passport holders missed flights home following the system's implementation on 10 April.…

UK gov pays public £550 to discuss Digital ID – then bans journalists from the room

Nothing says 'We want honest opinions' like a 36,000-letter mailshot with no awkward questions allowed

Members of the UK government’s People’s Panel on Digital ID will spend two weekends in Birmingham and three evenings on Zoom discussing how Britain should build a national digital identity system, earning £550 plus expenses for their trouble.…

Betting shop bug ends in kidnap plot as staff turn ransom artists

Computer glitch spawns duplicate jackpots, disgruntled punters, and one very bad career choice

A computer glitch in a Spanish betting shop triggered a chain of events that ended with the store manager being kidnapped and held for €50,000 ($58,000) in ransom, allegedly by one of the shop's own employees.…

To fix this Wi-Fi network, we'll need a crane

Won't somebody think of the children not being hit by a load of building materials?

On Call  Delivering excellent tech support can sometimes require heavy lifting, a feat The Register celebrates each Friday with a new instalment of On Call – the reader-contributed column that shares your stories of hoisting glitchy tech back to full function.…

Why a chimp 'civil war' shows how societies collapse

In the mid-1970s, primatologist Jane Goodall witnessed something that changed her opinion of chimpanzees forever: A four-year conflict amongst the chimpanzees she was studying in Tanzania. Chimpanzees that knew each other started killing each other. It was essentially the primate equivalent of a civil war. And now, it’s happening again: Fighting within the largest known community of chimpanzees. NPR science correspondent Nate Rott helps us break down what’s going on and what it could tell us about how human communities can fall apart.

Read all of Nate’s story here .

Interested in more science? Email us your question at shortwave@npr.org .

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Researchers find cyber-sabotage malware that may predate Stuxnet by five years

FAST16 could be the first cyberweapon, and its effects could be with us today

Black Hat Asia  Infosec outfit SentinelOne found malware that tries to induce errors in engineering and physics simulation software and therefore represents an attempt at sabotage, and suggests it was created years before the Stuxnet worm that aimed to destroy Iran’s uranium enrichment centrifuges.…

Weak security means attackers could disable all of a city's public EV chargers

Demonstrated in China, probably applicable elsewhere

Black Hat Asia  Developers of rented internet of things infrastructure – stuff like public EV chargers and shared e-bikes – are prioritizing user convenience over security, and leaving themselves exposed to wide-scale denial of service attacks on their services.…

An Agricultural Mosaic in Taiwan

Diversity reigns across the farmland of Yunlin County in southwestern Taiwan—a region that produces an array of crops on small farms.

Anthropic admits it dumbed down Claude when trying to make it smarter

System changes and bugs overlapped to create the impression of general decline

Claude users who complained about the AI service producing lower-quality responses over the past month weren’t imagining it.…

Johnson Leaders Honored by National Space Club & Foundation

The National Space Club & Foundation announced its annual award recipients March 13, 2026, in Washington, D.C.   Two dedicated leaders from NASA’s Johnson Space Center were recognized for their contributions to human spaceflight.  Orion Program Manager Howard Hu received the Norman L. Baker Astronautics Engineer Award for sustained technical contributions to multiple human spaceflight efforts.   Hu leads […]

Dev targeted by sophisticated job scam: 'I let my guard down, and ran the freaking code'

Legit-looking website, camera-on interviews, jokes about backdoors ... it worked

EXCLUSIVE  It all started with a LinkedIn message, as so many employment scams do these days.…

NASA Shares SpaceX Crew-13 Assignments for Space Station Mission

As part of NASA’s SpaceX Crew-13 mission, four crew members from three space agencies will launch no earlier than mid-September to the International Space Station for a long-duration science expedition. NASA astronauts Jessica Watkins and Luke Delaney will serve as spacecraft commander and pilot, respectively. They will be joined by CSA (Canadian Space Agency) astronaut […]

Solid-state batteries hold more juice, but keep cracking up. Now researchers know why

Two teams, similar diagnosis: Ceramic electrolytes still refusing to cooperate

With more capacity and faster charging, solid-state batteries could be the next big thing in energy. And good news: researchers may have pinned down one major reason these batteries still fail before they can reach widespread commercial use.…

In Japan, a New Steward for 1,200 Years of Cherry Blossom Data Has Been Found, Sustaining a Climate Change Research Project

Climate scientist Yasuyuki Aono, who died last summer, learned to read ancient Japanese script to compile records on peak bloom dating back to the ninth century C.E.

Claude Opus 4.7 has turned into an overzealous query cop, devs complain

Rising refusal rate from Acceptable Use Classifier leaves customers paying for nothing

Anthropic's release last week of Opus 4.7 came with stronger safeguards to prevent misuse. Unfortunately, these safeguards have also managed to thwart legitimate use.…

NASA Kennedy Prepares Facility for Roman Space Telescope Arrival

Preparations are underway for launch of NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope as soon as early September on a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket from Launch Complex 39A at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The Roman space telescope will provide deep, panoramic views of the cosmos, generating never-before-seen pictures that will revolutionize our understanding of […]

A Mars Rover Found Building Blocks of Life Never Seen on the Red Planet Before, Boosting the Case for Ancient Habitability

The organic molecules discovered by NASA’s Curiosity rover could have been formed by life, but they could have also come from geologic processes or meteorites

Gibraltar's Famous Monkeys Are Eating Dirt, Likely to Alleviate Stomach Aches From Munching on Tourists' Junk Food

The British territory's Barbary macaques are the only wild monkeys in Europe. But many are consuming human snacks high in calories, sugar, salt and dairy, and low in fiber

Ubuntu 26.04 LTS Resolute Raccoon released

I’m not sure many OSNews readers still use Ubuntu as their operating system of choice, and from the release announcement of today’s Ubuntu 26.04 it’s clear why that’s the case. Resolute Raccoon builds on the resilience-focused improvements introduced in interim releases, with TPM-backed full-disk encryption, improved support for application permission prompting, Livepatch updates for Arm-based servers, and Rust-based utilities for enhanced memory safety. This release brings native support for industry-leading AI/ML toolkits like NVIDIA CUDA and AMD ROCm, making Ubuntu 26.04 LTS the ideal platform for AI development and production workloads.  ↫ Canonical press release It’s obvious where Canonical’s focus lies with Ubuntu, and us desktop people who don’t like “AI” aren’t it. On top of all the “AI” nonsense, this new version comes with all the latest versions of the various open source components that make up a Linux distribution, as well as a slew of Rust-based replacements for core CLI tools, like sudo-rs, uutils coreutils, and more. All the derivative release of Ubuntu, like Kubuntu, Xubuntu, and others, will also be updated over the coming days. If you’re already running any of these, updating won’t be a surprise to you.

Chinese attackers are pwning your infrastructure to use in attacks, 10 countries warn

All the Typhoons, everywhere, all at once

A majority of China-linked threat actors are using compromised routers and IoT devices worldwide, turning this gear into proxy networks to carry out further intrusions, steal sensitive data, and disrupt victim organizations’ operations, according to a joint 10-country advisory.…

OpenAI’s New GPT-5.5 Powers Codex on NVIDIA Infrastructure — and NVIDIA Is Already Putting It to Work

AI agents have revolutionized developer workflows, and their next frontier is knowledge work: processing information, solving complex problems, coming up with new ideas and driving innovation.  Codex, OpenAI’s agentic coding application, is enabling this new frontier. It’s now powered by GPT-5.5, OpenAI’s latest frontier model, which runs on NVIDIA GB200 NVL72 rack-scale systems.  Over 10,000 […]

US Air Force department names firms to power its bases with mini nukes

Three vendors matched to three sites

The US Department of the Air Force (DAF) has selected three companies for possible nuclear microreactor projects at three of its installations under a program aimed at improving energy resilience if the electricity grid goes down.…

YouTuber has DIMM idea, builds working DRAM in backyard

What are you doing to solve the memory crisis?

If you follow PC hardware prices, you’ll know AI demand has pushed memory prices higher as manufacturers prioritize memory for datacenters. To deal with that, you can pay through the nose, buy less memory, or ... try to build your own DRAM.…

NASA Welcomes Jordan as 63rd Artemis Accords Signatory

The Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan signed the Artemis Accords Thursday during a ceremony hosted by NASA at the agency’s headquarters in Washington, becoming the latest nation to commit to responsible space exploration to benefit humanity.  “It is my privilege to welcome Jordan as the newest signatory to the Artemis Accords,” said NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman. “By signing the accords today, Jordan brings […]

Google explains why its all-in-one AI stack embraces competitors

'Differentiated, but open'

Google Cloud Next  Google Cloud’s Andi Gutmans said that the company holds a structural advantage over its largest rivals in the race to win value from AI agents in the enterprise, arguing that no competitor currently combines cloud computing infrastructure, frontier AI models, and a data platform under one roof.…

Liquid Lifeline: NASA Tech Could Create IV Fluid In Space

On every crewed mission, NASA packs pouches of a potentially life-saving liquid in its cargo, known as IV (or intravenous) fluid. A simple mix of sodium chloride and purified water, it can treat up to 30% of medical conditions in flight, resolving things like dehydration, burns, and more. Crewed missions beyond low Earth orbit into […]

Age checks could turn internet into an ID checkpoint, complains Proton CEO

Push to protect minors risks hitting everyone online

Proton's boss has waded into the age verification fight with a warning that sounds less like child safety and more like an identity checkpoint for the entire internet.…

NASA Releases Powerful LAVA Software to US Aerospace Industry

For years, NASA engineers have turned to a tool called the Launch, Ascent, and Vehicle Aerodynamics (LAVA) framework to solve airflow challenges that could mean the difference between mission success or failure. When engineers need to know how a spacecraft will navigate re-entry or whether a new aircraft wing design will create enough lift, they […]

Microsoft gives your Word documents an AI co-author you didn’t ask for

Also rolls out agentic Copilot in Excel and PowerPoint, letting 21st century Clippy lend a... hand

Microsoft is giving Copilot the power to stop suggesting edits and start making them.…

A Rare 'Cloud Jaguar' Was Spotted in Honduran Mountains for the First Time in a Decade, Representing a Win for Conservationists

The big cats are rarely seen at high elevations, so the sighting suggests that efforts to protect a wildlife corridor in the region are working

Datadog digs down into GPU efficiency as AI costs soar

Down to you to work out the value

Datadog has added GPU monitoring to its observability stack, giving AI-hungry organizations more insight into exactly what's happening on their most expensive silicon.…

Archaeologists Unearth a Papyrus Fragment From the 'Iliad' Tucked Inside the Wrappings of a 1,600-Year-Old Egyptian Mummy

The excerpt from Homer's epic poem features his catalog of ships, a famous passage listing the Greek forces that sailed to Troy. It may be the first Greek literary text found in the context of mummification

NASA’s Chandra Finds Young Stars Dim Quickly

These images, released on April 14, 2026, show two open star clusters, Trumpler 3 (left) and NGC 2353 (right). They represent a recent study from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory that shows how young Sun-like stars are dimmer in X-rays than previously thought. This latest study looked at eight clusters of stars between the ages of […]

Everpure 'takes the hit' as AI-fueled supply crunch drives prices up 70%

Storage vendor predicts current crunch will outlast COVID disruptions

The supply crunch gripping the storage market has pushed Everpure – the artist formerly known as Pure Storage – to reassure customers it won't make things worse.…

Cocaine Pollution Seems to Make Salmon Swim Farther Than Usual. Scientists Don't Know the Long-Term Consequences

The illegal drug’s main byproduct, benzoylecgonine, caused more robust effects than cocaine itself. Wastewater treatment plants often don't fully process such metabolites, so they are frequently found in bodies of water at higher concentrations than their parent drugs

Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope trumps Trump cuts, is launch-ready ahead of schedule

Revolutionary telescope aiming for space after multiple near death experiences

NASA's Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope is ready for launch ahead of schedule despite repeated attempts by both Donald Trump's first and second administrations to cut funding.…

A Couple From Mexico Became Soft Taco Pioneers in Los Angeles 50 Years Ago. Now, Their Restaurant Is a Landmark

Raúl and Lupe Martinez opened King Taco and served up soft corn tortillas like they remembered from home. The rest is—now officially—history, thanks to a vote from the Los Angeles City Council

American farms have a new steward for their safety net, disaster programs... Palantir

Wins $300M deal over Salesforce, IBM because of 'integration with existing USDA systems,' among other things

Palantir has won a $300 million contract from the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) to support the National Farm Security Action Plan (NFSAP) and modernize how USDA delivers services to America's farmers.…

Tag, You’re It: GeForce NOW Levels Up Game Discovery With Xbox Game Pass and Ubisoft+ Labels

GeForce NOW is doubling down on what matters most: gamers. This week’s upgrades bring smarter libraries, making it easier than ever for gamers to turn a PC collection into a cloud-powered flex. It starts with giving existing libraries time to shine. Gamers can bring the games they love to the cloud, stream them with high […]

Making Sense of the Early Universe

This Spring Astronomy Day, here’s a look at how AI and GPUs are helping astronomers work through unprecedented volumes of cosmic data.

AI now gobbling up power and management chips for servers

Bad news for multiple general server components as vendors switch to more lucrative gear

The chip shortage is spreading to power and management controller silicon, threatening server shipments as vendors prioritize capacity for higher-margin AI server products.…

Medical data of 500k Biobank volunteers listed for sale on Alibaba, UK minister reveals

World's largest biomedical dataset lifted and shifted on Chinese mega marketplace

Updated  Details of volunteers of UK-based Biobank, which describes itself as the custodian of the world's most comprehensive biomedical dataset, are for sale on Chinese ecommerce site Alibaba.…

Hybrid clouds have two attack surfaces and you’re not paying enough attention to either

Windows Admin Center flaws mean on-prem can attack cloud, and vice-versa

Black Hat Asia  Israeli researchers found a series of flaws in Microsoft's Windows Admin Center (WAC) and suggest this shows hybrid cloud management tools are a two-way attack surface that users don't spend enough time worrying about.…

Musk bets Tesla's AI future on Intel node that isn't finished yet

EV maker leaning on still-in-development 14A process for Terafab, says it needs to build own silicon

Elon Musk used Tesla's latest earnings call to reveal plans to build AI chips on Intel's not-yet-finished 14A process – a bet on silicon that doesn't exist.…

AI bats away ping-pong challenge as rise of the machines continues

Sony project claims a significant breakthrough with applications in task requiring speed and accuracy

Rise of the Machines  The ancient games of chess and Go are now mere staging posts in the journey toward robots demonstrating their superior performance to humans - the machines can now beat us fleshbags at ping-pong.…

Mobile Progress Report – April 2026

It’s been a very busy couple of months as we’ve reworked processes & priorities and established a roadmap for both iOS and Android.  We are determining how best we can coordinate with the community, and think that our roadmap for the year has a good balance of fixes and features.  Today, I want to talk […]

The post Mobile Progress Report – April 2026 appeared first on The Thunderbird Blog.

If malware via monitor cables is a matter of national security, this might be the gadget for you

Orgs can now buy UK cyber agency engineered commercial gadget, but details are slim

GCHQ's cyber arm has entered the hardware game with its first device designed to prevent cyberattacks on display devices.…

Google Meet or Google Mute? Even CEOs get borked sometimes

Video conferencing has tripped us all up. Now cloud chief Thomas Kurian gets his turn

Bork!Bork!Bork!  The curse of Bork is no respecter of status or class. It does not differentiate between a high-flying executive and a lowly worker. And so it was that Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian came unstuck due to some all-too-familiar video-conferencing struggles.…

Using the password 'admin123' wasn't as bad as sharing it on Slack

Keeping it simple for the developers can lead to very complex headaches later

PWNED  Welcome back to PWNED, the column where we celebrate the people who’ve taught us how not to secure a server. If you’ve ever tied your own shoelaces together, then tripped over them, or attempted to dive into a swimming pool but hit your head on the diving board, we’ll be talking about your cyber equivalent.…

Stale gov.uk pages are feeding AI overviews old data and Brits are believing it

Whitehall content teams play whack-a-mole with zombie pages as Google hoovers up the lot

AI overviews from the likes of Google are serving up false summaries of UK government information by drawing on stale GOV.UK pages, according to content designers at the Department for Business and Trade (DBT).…

Pass the key, passwords have passed their sell-by date

NCSC passes judgment: passkeys pass muster, passwords fail

The UK's National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) has officially endorsed passkeys as the default authentication standard, marking the first time the agency has told consumers to move away from passwords entirely.…

Smoke Shrouds Northern Thailand

Seasonal fires have darkened skies over Southeast Asia.

Kubernetes explains the release that kills Ingress NGINX with Japanese poetry and art

Release team sets new standard for release notes by linking between Version 1.36 and classic print The Great Wave off Kanagawa

Kubernetes issued a new release called “Haru” on Wednesday, and the release notes and logo might be more interesting than the software.…

Another npm supply chain worm is tearing through dev environments

Plus, the payload references 'TeamPCP/LiteLLM method'

Yet another npm supply-chain attack is worming its way through compromised packages, stealing secrets and sensitive data as it moves through developers' environments, and it shares significant overlap with the open source infections attributed to TeamPCP last month.…

NASA SBIR/STTR Phase I and II BAA, 2026 Appendix A and B are now live! Offers due May 21, 2026, 5:00PM EDT

https://www.nasa.gov/sbir_sttr/nasa-sbir-sttr-program-program-year-2026-information-hub

Anthropic's super-scary bug hunting model Mythos is shaping up to be a nothingburger

Hackpocalypse deferred

Anthropic's Mythos model is purportedly so good at finding vulnerabilities that the Claude-maker is afraid to make it available to the general public for fear that criminals will take advantage. But early analysis shows that Mythos may not be as dangerous as some would have you believe.…

The National Gallery of Art Embraces New Role as Lending Library, Thanks to a Big Gift That Sends Artwork to Other Museums

A $116 million donation from the family foundation of longtime trustee Mitchell P. Rales will help share the museum's collection in honor of the 250th birthday of the U.S.

Windows 9x Subsystem for Linux

You can find beauty in the oddest of places. WSL9x runs a modern Linux kernel (6.19 at time of writing) cooperatively inside the Windows 9x kernel, enabling users to take advantage of the full suite of capabilities of both operating systems at the same time, including paging, memory protection, and pre-emptive scheduling. Run all your favourite applications side by side – no rebooting required! ↫ Hailey Somerville Yes, this is exactly what it sounds like. Hailey Somerville basically recreated the first version of WSL – or coLinux, for the old people among us – but instead of running on Windows NT, it runs on Windows 9x. A VxD driver loads a patched Linux kernel using DOS interrupts, and this Linux kernel calls Windows 9x kernel APIs instead of POSIX APIs. A small DOS client application then allows the Linux kernel to use MS-DOS prompts as TTYs. This is a great oversimplification, but it does get the general gist across. Anyway, the end result is that you can use a modern Linux kernel and Windows 9x at the same time, without virtualising or dual-booting. This might be one of the greatest hacks in recent times, and I find it oddly beautiful in its user-facing simplicity.

Oracle Solaris 11.4 SRU92 released

Despite years of apparent stagnation and reported mass layoffs, it seems the Solaris team at Oracle has found somewhat of a renewed stride recently. Both branches of Solaris – the one for paying customers (SRU) and the free one for enthusiasts (CBE) – are receiving regular updates again, and there seems to be a more concerted effort to let the outside world know, too. We’ve got another update to the SRU branch this week which brings updates to a few important open source packages, like Django, Firefox, Thunderbird, Golang, and others, to address security issues. In addition, this update marks as a change in the release cadence for the commercial branch of Solaris. From here on out, there will be two “Critical Patch Updates” per quarter to address security issues, followed by a Support Repository Update containing new features and larger changes.

NASA’s 777 Aircraft Returns Home with Science Flights on the Horizon

NASA’s Boeing 777 has returned to the agency’s fleet after undergoing heavy structural modifications as it transforms from a giant passenger plane into the agency’s next-generation airborne science laboratory. After a check flight and a three-hour transit from Waco, the aircraft returned to NASA’s Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia, on April 22. Since January […]

SK Hynix’s aspirations for ’Merica-made HBM inch closer to reality

New site set to begin manufacturing and testing HBM memory just in time for Nvidia's Rubin-Ultra GPUs in 2028

SK Hynix has reportedly broken ground on a new advanced memory packaging facility in West Lafayette, Indiana, that should boost the supply of US-made high-bandwidth memory (HBM), a key component in high-end AI accelerators from the likes of Nvidia and AMD.…

OpenAI now lets you screenshot your privacy in the foot

Make your model smarter through self-surveillance

Those who cannot remember Microsoft Recall are condemned to repeat it. …

A Humanoid Robot Just Beat the Human World Record for the Fastest Half-Marathon During a Race in China

A self-navigating robot called Lightning, developed by Chinese electronics company Honor, won the 13.1-mile race. Its results and others mark significant advancements since last year's inaugural event, where only 6 of the 21 androids reached the finish line

This Rare-Coin Scavenger Hunt in San Francisco Offers Participants the Chance to Relive the California Gold Rush

A local coin dealer will hide historic currency worth a total of $50,000 in its third annual citywide challenge on April 25

GitHub opts all CLI users into telemetry collection whether they want it or not

Opt-out instructions included if you're not keen on GitHub watching you in the name of product improvement

Users of GitHub's command-line interface (CLI) who value privacy, beware. The Microsoft-owned code-hosting platform has quietly begun collecting pseudonymous client-side telemetry from CLI users and enabled it by default.…

Linux may get a hall pass from one state age-check bill, but Congress plays hall monitor

Colorado amendments could exempt open source OSes, code repos, and containers

The prospect of OS-level age checks applying to open source systems is a serious concern for FOSS advocates. Campaigners appear to have secured proposed exemptions for open source operating systems, code repositories, and containers in one US state, but stricter federal legislation has already been introduced in Congress.…

NASA Targets Early September for Roman Space Telescope Launch

NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope team now is targeting as soon as early September 2026 for launch, ahead of the agency’s commitment to flight no later than May 2027. “Roman’s accelerated development is a true success story of what we can achieve when public investment, institutional expertise, and private enterprise come together to take […]

Humans Are Still Evolving. Natural Selection Has Favored Genes Linked to Red Hair and Less Male-Pattern Baldness, a Study Suggests

A massive study of ancient and modern DNA from thousands of West Eurasian people has identified nearly 500 genetic variants that evolution has selected for or against in recent history

Datacenter boom keeps dirty coal plants alive in the US

Happy Earth Day!

Datacenter growth in the US is helping keep aging fossil-fuel plants online longer, slowing the shift to a cleaner grid and worsening air pollution, according to new research from a group of environmental nonprofits.…

Workday, Rippling, and Slack flunk data access test, claims Fivetran

Report also slams multiple vendors for poor data integration and egress fees

Workday, Rippling, and Salesforce-owned Slack rank among the worst performers for enterprise data movement, according to a new industry benchmark tracking the speeds needed to power analytics, machine learning, and AI agents.…

NASA Astronaut Anil Menon to Discuss Upcoming Launch, Mission

NASA will host a news conference at 1:45 p.m. EDT Wednesday, April 29, from the agency’s Johnson Space Center in Houston to preview astronaut Anil Menon’s upcoming mission to the International Space Station. Watch the news conference live on NASA’s YouTube channel. Learn how to watch NASA content through a variety of online platforms, including […]

Bob Dylan's Original Typewritten Draft Lyrics for 'I'm Not There' Have Been Rediscovered After More Than Half a Century

For decades, eager fans could only hear the obscure song on bootleg vinyl recordings. The draft lyrics, which were found inside a first-edition copy of Allen Ginsberg poetry, just sold at auction for $6,800

Thunderbird in hand worth 2 Outlooks as fresh FOSS fave and Firefox arrive

Still here, still changing, still relevant, still your best choice

If you're stuck without access to tech support – say, half way to the Moon – then you're better off with a single install of Thunderbird than any number of Outlooks.…

You can now run WSL on Windows 95, in case you're crazy, too

'I think this might be one of my greatest hacks of all time,' says dev behind unholy abomination

The Windows Subsystem for Linux is an invaluable tool, but anyone wanting to run it on a Windows 9x system would find themselves out of luck until now.…

Night and (Earth) Day

This image, released in celebration of Earth Day, shows the terminator – the line between night and day – on Earth. The Artemis II astronauts captured this view on April 2, 2026, during their journey to the Moon. NASA science improves life on Earth every day. The agency provides insights on our home planet that […]

A Powerful New ‘QR Code’ Untangles Math’s Knottiest Knots

With a newly discovered mathematical tool, researchers are hoping to gain unprecedented insight into the structure of complex knots.

The post A Powerful New ‘QR Code’ Untangles Math’s Knottiest Knots first appeared on Quanta Magazine

NASA reckons the Artemis II heat shield performed like a champ

Good news for future missions as initial findings agree with agency's design decision

Initial reports have confirmed NASA's assessment that the Orion heat shield kept the Artemis II crew safe during re-entry.…

We Use Many of the Same Brain Cells to See and to Imagine Objects, a Study Suggests. The Findings Provide a New Window Into Memory

While past research has hinted at an overlap in relevant brain regions, the new work drills down to the cellular level. The discovery could help improve treatments for memory disorders, such as dementia, and certain psychiatric conditions, like schizophrenia

Advancing Earth Observation at NASA Since Release of Earthrise Photo

From cameras pressed against spacecraft windows to the most powerful radar ever flown, imaging technology has taken giant leaps since 1968, but the drive to understand our home in the cosmos has remained.

From Rainforests to Recycling Plants: 5 Ways NVIDIA AI Is Protecting the Planet

Across climate, conservation, disaster monitoring and recycling, NVIDIA AI is enabling applications protecting the planet.

Grafana offers AI assistant for free, warns users not to go mad

Observability biz bets on business analytics wedge as Loki put on long-overdue diet

Grafana is offering its AI assistant for free to open source and on-prem users — though on stage at its Barcelona user conference this week, CEO Raj Dutt joked they shouldn't use it too much.…

Right to repair champ Framework punts modular 13in laptop with Core Ultra Series 3

Latest hardware sports dock for graphic card, power sipping battery

Framework, maker of modular and repairable laptops, has spruced its line-up with a completely redesigned 13-inch model sporting the latest Intel CPUs, new components for its 16-inch system, and a dock that lets users add devices like a desktop graphics card.…

Google claims to have all the answers for enterprise AI agent sprawl

As biz agentic bot-wrangling intensifies, company says AI orchestration, security and infrastructure tools on the way

Google Cloud Next  Google has overhauled its enterprise AI strategy in the wake of the agentic push across the biz landscape, rebranding and expanding its Vertex AI developer platform into what it now calls the Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform.…

Google unleashes even more AI security agents to fight the baddies

Along with a bunch of new services to make sure those same agents don't cause chaos

Google Cloud Next  Google Cloud chief operating officer Francis deSouza has summed up his company's security strategy du jour as follows: "You need to use AI to fight AI."…

NVIDIA and Google Cloud Collaborate to Advance Agentic and Physical AI

NVIDIA and Google Cloud have collaborated for more than a decade, co‑engineering a full‑stack AI platform that spans every technology layer — from performance‑optimized libraries and frameworks to enterprise‑grade cloud services.  This foundation enables developers, startups and enterprises to push agentic and physical AI out of the lab and into production — from agents that […]

Forget one chip to rule them all: With TPU 8, Google has an AI arms race to win

x86 gets the boot as Google pairs up its TPUs with some Arm-based Axion cores

Google Cloud Next  Google unveiled two new in-house AI accelerators at its annual Cloud Next conference in Las Vegas on Wednesday: one designed to speed up training and another aimed at driving down model serving costs.…

France's 'Secure' ID agency probes breach as crooks claim 19M records

Gov admits 'incident' as forum sellers boast of fresh haul covering up to a third of the population

France's National Agency for "Secure" Documents is explaining a potential data spill just as crooks online claim they've nicked a third of the country's ID information.…

Scotland Yard can keep using live facial recognition on people in London, say judges

Judges say cops face-slurping not a problem under current human rights laws

London's Metropolitan Police Service (MPS) has survived a legal challenge that attempted to curb its rollout of live facial recognition (LFR) technology across the capital.…

UK tribunal sends £2B claim accusing Microsoft of overcharging for licensing to trial

Legal action claims tech giant charges more for Windows Server when it's not on Azure

A UK Competition Appeals Tribunal (CAT) has dismissed Microsoft's objections to a collective action lawsuit brought by UK-based cloud licensees, clearing the way for trial.…

Database world trying to build natural language query systems again – this time with LLMs

Text-to-SQL might be useful for analysts and DBAs, but be cautious with general user adoption

Over the past few years, database and analytics vendors have hopped on a bandwagon that may take us all to a destination where common data queries are free from the constraints of the specialist query language SQL.…

This Dazzling Tiffany Stained-Glass Window Adorned a Church for More Than a Century. Now It Needs a New Home

The Second Congregational Church of Winsted in Connecticut will auction off the colorful artwork featuring a stunning waterfall and sunset

Forget call centers, local energy prices mean Britain's latest offshoring wave is AI projects

Brit firms look to run tech overseas as govt tries to support 'sovereign' creators

One in five UK firms have already moved AI workloads abroad due to high energy costs, in findings likely to alarm a government counting on AI to drive economic growth.…

Oil crisis? What oil crisis? IT spending de-coupled from wider war shock

Gartner sees accelerating growth in IT spending, powered by cloud and AI infrastructure investment

A day after the International Energy Agency (IEA) said the US/Israel/Iran war was creating the worst energy crisis ever faced by the ‌world, Gartner increased its growth forecasts for global IT spending by nearly three percentage points.…

Where did our moon come from?

Earth didn’t always have a moon. In the beginning of the solar system, when the planets were still forming, something happened that would change Earth’s night sky forever: The Moon was created!

How did it happen? This episode, co-host Regina G. Barber searches for answers with planetary scientists. With co-host Emily Kwong, they discuss how the moon was likely made, how scientists know and what that might mean for where Earth’s water came from.

Check out Regina's reporting on hydrothermal vents .

Interested in more planetary science? Email us your question at shortwave@npr.org .

Listen to every episode of Short Wave sponsor-free and support our work at NPR by signing up for Short Wave+ at plus.npr.org/shortwave .

A previous version of this episode mischaracterized a scientific hypothesis. The episode incorrectly said the idea is that hydrothermal vents may have been the origin of water on Earth. In fact, the hypothesis is that life may have come from hydrothermal vents.

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Mythos found 271 Firefox flaws – but none a human couldn’t spot

Mozilla CTO says AI means developers finally have a chance to get on top of security

The Mozilla has revealed it tested Anthropic’s bug-finding “Mythos” AI model and feels the results it experienced represent a watershed moment for software defenders.…

Belts of Green in the Washington Suburbs

Along the northeast side of the Capital Beltway in Maryland, green spaces weave through the developed landscape.

Magnificent irony as Meta staff unhappy about running surveillance software on work PCs

Zuck reportedly needs to capture workers’ keystrokes to build AI

Meta, the company built on watching everything its billions of users do online so it can keep them clicking on ragebait and targeted ads, is reportedly now installing surveillance software on employees’ work computers.…

Artemis II Mission Milestones: An Image and Video Recap

On April 1, 2026, Artemis II launched on a nearly 10-day voyage around the Moon, marking the first crewed flight of NASA’s Orion spacecraft. NASA astronauts Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, and Christina Koch, along with CSA (Canadian Space Agency) astronaut Jeremy Hansen, splashed down on April 10 in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of San Diego.  At their farthest […]

Curiosity Blog, Sols 4867-4872: Sand Fill In Antofagasta Crater and Finding Our Next Drill Target

Written by Lucy Lim, Planetary Scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center Earth planning date: Friday, April 17, 2026 At the beginning of the week, Curiosity arrived right on target on the rim of the 10-meter (33 feet) “Antofagasta” crater.   The crater looked fresh and deep as we had hoped with a nice well-defined […]

Anthropic tests how devs react to yanking Claude Code from Pro plan

Unannounced change apparently aimed at two percent of users but hit documentation for everyone

Anthropic has removed Claude Code from its Pro subscription plan, according to some of its public-facing web pages, but the company says it’s only a test for a small number of users.…

Apple has an opportunity to rediscover humanity in its push toward AI

John Ternus can remake Apple the way it should have been

OPINION  Apple's pending leadership transition affords the company a rare opportunity to return to its roots and once again serve as a source of inspiration instead of frustration.…

NASA Invites Media to Jordan Artemis Accords Signing Ceremony

The Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan will sign the Artemis Accords during a ceremony at 9:30 a.m. EDT Thursday, April 23, at NASA Headquarters in Washington. NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman will host Ambassador Dina Kawar of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan and U.S. Department of State Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary for Oceans and International Environmental and […]

Nation-states want to cause harm, not just steal cash - stop handing your cyber defenses to the cheapest contractor

NCSC boss says China's whole-of-state cyber machine has become Britain's peer competitor in cyberspace

State-sponsored cyberattacks from Chinese intelligence and military agencies display "an eye-watering level of sophistication," UK National Cyber Security Centre CEO Richard Horne is expected to say in a less-than-cheery opening speech to kick off its annual conference.…

New NASA Views of Earth, From (S)PACE

NASA has a fleet of satellites in orbit, gathering data around the clock, to explore unique views of our home planet’s ocean, atmosphere, and land surfaces.

Zorin OS 18.1 released - and the Lite edition reappears

Plus news from its Dublin neighbors, Linux Mint

The latest point release of Zorin OS is here, as an interesting alternative to Linux Mint for those still searching for a replacement for Windows 10 as the dust settles over the ruins.…

This New York City Cemetery Restored a Victorian Greenhouse to Welcome Visitors to Its Historic Grounds

Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn grew out of the 19th-century "rural cemetery" movement that transformed graveyards from cramped and dark to sprawling and beautiful

Murder, she wrote: Ex-FBI chief wants some ransomware crims charged with homicide

Lawmakers decry CISA cuts: 'We are shooting ourselves in the foot'

If a cyberattack leads to a death, that's murder. A former FBI cyber division chief urged the US Justice Department to consider felony homicide charges against ransomware actors when attacks on hospitals lead to patient deaths.…

Astronauts' Memories of Earth's Gravity May Influence How They Move and Hold Objects, Even After Months in Space

Examining the fine motor skills of space travelers can help improve safety for future missions, scientists say

NASA Invests in Small Businesses Innovating for Space and Earth

Continuing NASA’s longtime support of American industry, the agency announced its selection of more than 30 companies to develop innovative technology through its  Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) and Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) program. With these awards, NASA is investing approximately $16.3 million in seed funding of technology solutions to benefit the agency and energize the space economy.

NASA at SXSW: Johnson Director Vanessa Wyche on Why Artemis Changes Everything

On March 21, 2026, NASA’s Johnson Space Center Director Vanessa Wyche took the stage at the Space House event at South by Southwest in Austin, Texas, to outline NASA’s next giant leap in human spaceflight — from low Earth orbit to the Moon, and ultimately Mars.  As NASA prepares for a new era of exploration, Wyche made clear that the agency’s Artemis […]

After a Poet’s Love Story Was Cut Short, His Letters Mysteriously Disappeared—Until Rare Book Dealers Acted on a Hunch

Eight letters that John Keats penned to his fiancée before his untimely death are “the literary find of a lifetime”

A Disabled Parrot in New Zealand Became Alpha Male Thanks to His Innovative Fighting Style

A kea parrot's half-beak became an advantage instead of a disadvantage, researchers suggest in a new study

Naked Mole Rats Usually Duke It Out to Choose Their Next Queen. But These Unusual Rodents May Be Capable of More Peaceful Transitions of Power

In a laboratory experiment centered around a colony known as the Amigos, researchers observed a subordinate female take over reproduction without incident

NASA, Organ Sharing Network UNOS to Study Faster Organ Transport

Every second counts in the life-saving world of medical transplants. To help address that urgency, NASA’s Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia, is teaming up with the United Network for Organ Sharing (UNOS) to explore faster, more reliable ways to transport donor organs using advanced aviation technologies.  NASA Langley and UNOS will collaborate under a new Space Act Agreement announced […]

What Are Ames’ Contributions to Artemis II?

NASA successfully sent four astronauts around the Moon for the first time in more than 50 years, setting the stage for future lunar landing missions. As the agency continues to push the bounds of space exploration, NASA’s Ames Research Center in California’s Silicon Valley provided essential support in preparing for the mission.  Artemis II was the first crewed test flight under NASA’s […]

More Cisco SD-WAN bugs battered in attacks

CISA gives federal agencies 4 days to patch

America's lead cyber-defense agency has warned that three Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN Manager bugs are under attack, and given federal agencies just four days to patch the security holes.…

New Archaeological Discoveries Reveal How San Antonio's Earliest Settlers Irrigated Crops and Accessed Drinking Water

While preparing for school renovations, researchers in Texas found remnants of the historic San Pedro acequia, a centuries-old technology that provided water to the burgeoning village

NASA Wins Two Webby Awards, Five Webby People’s Voice Awards

NASA was recognized today by the 30th Annual Webby Awards with two Webby Awards and five Webby People’s Voice Awards, the latter of which are awarded by the voting public. Reflecting the tremendous growth of the Internet, The Webbys now honors excellence in 8 major media types: Websites & Mobile Sites; Video & Film; Advertising, Media & PR; […]

Phone-to-satellite use goes into orbit, growing 25% in 8 months

Still only a tiny slice of mobile activity overall

The US and Starlink lead the way in the still-young direct-to-device (D2D) satellite market, where the number of connections recorded by Ookla rose nearly 25 percent between July 2025 and March 2026.…

Renaissance Art Linked Beauty With Virtue and Ugliness With Vice. See How Painters From Leonardo da Vinci to Botticelli Viewed Physical Attractiveness

An exhibition in Brussels spotlights 90-plus artworks featuring golden-haired muses, greedy old men and those deemed unattractive simply because they were different

macOS ClickFix attacks deliver AppleScript stealers to snarf credentials, wallets

Data from browsers, cryptocurrency wallets, 200+ extensions hoovered up

A ClickFix campaign targeting macOS users delivers an AppleScript-based infostealer that collects credentials and live session cookies from 14 browsers, 16 cryptocurrency wallets, and more than 200 extensions.…

Anthropic bakes memory fixes into Bun 1.1.13 as developers complain of leaks

Bun is fast as a toolkit but can leak memory in production, causing slowdowns and crashes

A new version of the Bun JavaScript runtime and toolkit is out with enhanced testing support and improved memory management. The latter is a critical issue to devs and follows complaints of memory leaks causing problems in production.…

Neanderthal Kids Grew Up So Fast—at Least Compared With Their Human Peers—Thanks to Genetic Adaptations to Their Environment

Scientists think Neanderthal children may have had faster growth rates because larger bodies tend to retain heat more effectively than smaller ones

The spaghettified DBMS chart that shows Oracle's crown is slowly slipping

Change is glacial, but the direction is clear

It might look like a map of the London Underground designed by a madman, but Gartner's newly-completed DBMS Market Share Ranks: 2011-2025 has an important message. The change may be glacial, but (most of the) dominant database vendors are slowly losing their grip on the market.…

Yet another ex-ransomware negotiator admits turning rogue after payoff from crimelords

Plus: Court papers reveal nonprofit paid a ransom worth nearly $26.8 million

The third of three former ransomware negotiators accused of assisting the ALPHV/BlackCat ransomware gang in extorting US businesses has pleaded guilty, months after his two co-workers did the same.…

FAA grounds Blue Origin's New Glenn as it probes missed satellite delivery 'mishap'

One of two second stage engines misbehaved, administration must sign off report before flights resume

Blue Origin's New Glenn loss of a satellite has been classed as a "mishap" by the US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), triggering a mandatory investigation.…

AMD's Ryzen 9 9950X3D2 Dual Edition tested: Gratuitous overkill with a price to match

An $899 CPU? In this economy?

Review  Ever since AMD's cache-stacked Ryzen 7 5800X3D closed the gap with Intel in gaming, folks have wondered: if one V-Cache chiplet is good, surely two must be better. With the launch of the Ryzen 9 9950X3D2 Dual Edition (DE), we finally have our answer.…

AI-assisted intruders pwned Vercel via OAuth abuse and a pilfered employee account

CEO suspects silicon sidekick behind 'surprising velocity' breach - cyber crims shop stolen data for $2M

Vercel's CEO reckons the crooks behind its recent breach likely had a helping hand from AI, saying the attackers moved with "surprising velocity" and a deep understanding of the company's infrastructure.…

Crook claims to leak 'video surveillance footage' of companies

Mexican IT services firm admits it was hacked, but says client operations weren't affected

A Mexican IT infrastructure and digital transformation biz is on clean-up duty after a criminal posted screenshots of what they claimed was company video surveillance footage to a cybercrime forum.…

Met police trials snoop tech platform in push to cuff more London shoplifters

No facial recognition privacy intrusions either! Well, maybe a little

London's Metropolitan Police is trialing new retail technology to help curtail the city's pervasive shoplifting problem… and it doesn't rely on live facial recognition (LFR).…

England's school phone ban gets teeth, just in time to bite no one

90% of schools already compliant, but at least now there's paperwork

Ministers are moving to turn England's patchwork of school phone bans into law, after peers backed fresh changes to the Children's Wellbeing and Schools Bill in a Monday vote.…

Task Manager's CPU meter is an obituary for the recent past, says the engineer who built it

Spoiler: There's no magic value. Just a timer, some kernel calls, and too much coffee

Windows has always had a built-in portal to the very recent past: Task Manager's CPU usage meter.…

Adaptavist Group breach spawns imposter emails as ransomware crew claims mega-haul

Fake emails already doing the rounds as ransomware crew boasts about what it allegedly stole

UK enterprise software consultancy The Adaptavist Group is investigating a security breach after an intruder logged in with stolen credentials, while a ransomware crew claims it grabbed far more than the company is currently admitting.…

Panasonic creates device-locked QR codes to speed facial biometric capture

Admins are tired of taking photos, so this enables secure on-site unattended enrolment

Japanese industrial giant Panasonic has created a new form of QR code it says will only work on designated devices and environments.…

Eating disorder recovery in a diet culture world

Eating disorders are complicated illnesses that skyrocketed among teenagers during the COVID-19 pandemic. Pediatrician Eva Trujillo says they "literally rewire the brain," decrease brain size, and make it harder to concentrate and to regulate emotions. Malnutrition can slow the metabolism, impact bone density and even lead to cardiac arrest. But Eva says, with the right treatment, people can also recover fully. She's the president of the International Association of Eating Disorder Professionals and co-founder of Comenzar de Nuevo, a leading treatment facility in Latin America. Today on the show, host Emily Kwong talks about the physical and mental impacts of eating disorders with Dr. Trujillo and Moorea Friedman, a teen mental health advocate and host of the podcast Balancing Act. Plus, how to recover in a world steeped in diet culture. (encore)

Want us to cover more mental health topics? Tell us by emailing shortwave@npr.org! We'd love to know what you want to hear from us!

Listen to every episode of Short Wave sponsor-free and support our work at NPR by signing up for Short Wave+ at plus.npr.org/shortwave .

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Iran claims US used backdoors to knock out networking equipment during war

And China is loving it

Iranian media is claiming that the US used backdoors and/or botnets to disable networking equipment during the current war, and Chinese state media is dining out on the allegations.…

A School of Mud Volcano Islands in Azerbaijan

The tadpole-shaped islands along the Absheron Peninsula were born by explosive mud volcano eruptions and reshaped by erosion.

NASA Inspector fears new spacesuits won’t be ready for Moon landing

Dud contracts, proprietary designs, and zero-experience supplier make for quite the mess

The NASA Office of Inspector General, the aerospace agency’s auditor, fears that work on next-generation spacesuits won’t finish in time to use them for the planned Artemis III Moon landing mission in 2028.…

This Ancient God’s Name Was 'Mud.' Archaeologists Discovered a Water-Filled Temple Possibly Tied to Him in Egypt

A structure blending Egyptian, Greek and Roman styles was discovered in the ancient city of Pelusium at the edge of the Nile Delta

Microsoft's GitHub grounds Copilot account sign-ups amid capacity crunch

Remember what we promised when you subscribed for a year? Well, we've got a new deal that's better for us.

Microsoft's GitHub has stopped accepting new Copilot individual subscriptions while the code hosting biz figures out how it can meet its service commitments without breaking the bank.…

Vibe coding upstart Lovable denies data leak, cites 'intentional behavior,' then throws HackerOne under the bus

A lesson in how not to respond to vulnerability reports

UPDATED  Vibe-coding platform Lovable is pooh-poohing a researcher’s finding that anyone could open a free account on the service and read other users' sensitive info, including credentials, chat history, and source code. However, the company’s story keeps changing: First it attributed the publicly exposed info to "intentional behavior" and "unclear documentation," then threw bug-bounty service HackerOne under the bus.…

Trump-branded datacenter project fails to make itself great, again

The struggles continue for Fermi America's 17 GW bit barn ambitions

It’s been a weekend filled with dizzying changes in the boardroom at datacenter wannabe Fermi America as it hopes eventually to expand its West Texas campus to about 17 gigawatts of behind-the-meter generation capacity.…

World's blandest man steps down from CEO job to spend more time in tastefully appointed home

Tim Cook is handing the reins to John Ternus at Apple

Have you heard? Apple's Tim Cook is stepping down after 15 years leading the iMaker's business. He'll become executive chairman and hand the reins over to John Ternus, a senior VP of hardware engineering, effective September 1.…

NASA on Track for Future Missions with Initial Artemis II Assessments

Following NASA’s Artemis II mission successfully splashing down on Earth, engineers started diving into detailed analysis of data to assess how key systems and subsystems on the Orion spacecraft, SLS (Space Launch System) rocket, and systems at the launch pad at the agency’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida performed. The Artemis II test flight successfully […]

Some tech company to replace its CEO

I need to post about this because if I don’t, people will get mad. Cook will continue on as Apple CEO through the summer, with Ternus set to join Apple’s Board of Directors and take over as CEO on September 1, 2026. Cook is going to transition to chairman of the board at Apple, and he will “assist with certain aspects of the company, including engaging with policymakers around the world.” ↫ Juli Clover at MacRumors This concludes OSNews’ coverage of Keeping Up With the Yacht Class, but rest assured, every other tech site will be milking this for weeks to come. You will still be worrying about how to pay for your next tank of gas.

Anglerfish Are Known for Their Built-in Fishing Rods. New Research Sheds Light on How These Lures Evolved in the Strange Creatures

A new study suggests the odd appendages first appeared in the fish's ancestors around 72 million years ago. Today, females might use them not only to attract prey but also to communicate with potential mates

Google to punish back button hijacking

Have you ever tried clicking the back button in your browser, only to realise the website you’re on somehow doesn’t allow that? Out of all the millions of annoyances on the web, Google has decided to finally address this one: they’re going to punish the search rankings of websites that use this back button hijacking. Pages that are engaging in back button hijacking may be subject to manual spam actions or automated demotions, which can impact the site’s performance in Google Search results. To give site owners time to make any needed changes, we’re publishing this policy two months in advance of enforcement on June 15, 2026. ↫ Google Search Central It’s always uncomfortable when Google unilaterally takes actions such as these, since rarely do Google’s interests align with our own as users. This is in such rare case, though, and I can’t wait to see this insipid practice relegated to the dustbin of history.

Chase got a spiff of $77 million to create one job with New York datacenter

Official involved in deal tells El Reg number doesn't paint entire picture of datacenter's economic benefit

When Rockland County, New York, approved nearly $77 million in tax breaks for JPMorgan Chase's datacenter expansion in 2024, no one showed up to object. Two years and a whole lot of bit barns in the news cycle later, government watchdogs are calling foul over the project's lone permanent job.…

NASA Rolls Out Artemis III Moon Rocket Core Stage

Following the recent successful test flight of NASA’s Artemis II mission around the Moon, NASA rolled out the core stage, or the largest section, of the agency’s SLS (Space Launch System) rocket that will launch the crewed Artemis III mission in 2027. The stage departed from the agency’s Michoud Assembly Facility in New Orleans on […]

Claude Desktop changes app access settings for browsers you don't even have installed yet

Installation and pre-approval without consent looks dubious under EU law

One app should not modify another app without asking for and receiving your explicit consent. Yet Anthropic's Claude Desktop for macOS installs files that affect other vendors' applications without disclosure, even before those applications have been installed, and authorizes browser extensions without consent.…

LXQt 2.4.0 released

LXQt, the desktop environment which is effectively to KDE what Xfce is to GNOME, has released version 2.4.0. Quite a few changes in this release are further refinements and fixes related to LXQt’s adoption of Wayland, but there are also a ton of small fixes, improvements, and small new features that have nothing to do with Wayland at all. There are also a few layout cleanups to make some dialogs and panels look a bit tidier and nicer. Note that LXQt supports both X11 and Wayland equally, and the choice of which to use is up to you. If you’re using LXQt, you’ve already seen a few of these changes in point releases of its components, so not everything listed in the release notes might be news to you.

Look Up This Week to See the Peak of the Lyrid Meteor Shower. Humans Have Documented This Dazzling Annual Display for 2,700 Years

During the wee hours of April 22, moonset times will give stargazers in much of the United States a solid stretch of dark sky before sunrise

Can A.I. Determine Which Artist Made a Painting? This New Brushstroke Detection Tool May Have Solved a Mystery About El Greco

While debating the authorship of "The Baptism of Christ," one of El Greco’s final works, art experts long relied on their own analysis of brushstrokes. A new study tapped artificial intelligence to peer at the paint at a microscopic level

Scientists Found 5.6 Million Burrowing Bees Beneath a Cemetery in New York. The Group Is One of the Largest on Record

Researchers in Ithaca estimated the number of ground-nesting bees emerging from a local cemetery in spring 2023, revealing just how abundant some understudied pollinators are

The Titanic Carried 3,500 Life Jackets, but Almost All of Them Have Been Lost to History. This One Just Sold at Auction for Nearly $1 Million

The artifact belonged to first-class passenger Laura Mabel Francatelli, a secretary heading to Chicago with her employer. It's the only life vest connected to a survivor of the 1912 shipwreck to ever appear at auction

Linux 7.1 will have an optional new NTFS driver

Good news for those working with Windows, bad news for Paragon Software

The feature list for Linux kernel 7.1 is taking shape, and a standout addition has already landed: a new read-write NTFS driver.…

NASA Invites Media to SpaceX’s 34th Resupply Launch to Space Station

Media accreditation is open for the next U.S. launch to deliver NASA science investigations, supplies, and equipment to the International Space Station. This launch is the 34th SpaceX Commercial Resupply Services mission to the orbital laboratory for NASA and will lift off on the company’s Falcon 9 rocket. NASA and SpaceX are targeting no earlier […]

Scot becomes second Scattered Spider-linked crook to plead guilty in US

Tyler Buchanan admits role in scheme that stole at least $8 million in virtual currency

A Scottish man linked to the Scattered Spider cybercrime crew has pleaded guilty in the US to a phishing and SIM-swap scheme that stole at least $8 million in cryptocurrency.…

Pirate Shipwreck Off the Coast of Cape Cod Sets the Historical Record Straight on West African Gold

Europeans spread rumors about degraded gold from their Akan trade partners. A new analysis of artifacts from the "Whydah Gally" shipwreck tells a different story

You too can build a nuclear battery from junk you have lying around the house

It won't provide much juice, but its creator calls it a 'nanowatt nuclear power plant'

It's illegal and impractical to construct a nuclear power plant in your backyard. But a DIY tritium nuclear battery is far less dramatic - just don't expect any appreciable amount of energy from it.…

Schmoozebots: Study finds flattery will get AI everywhere

Excessive friendliness may cause users to forget they're talking to a very confident autocomplete

A study into how humans interact with chatbots suggests the fastest way to make an LLM feel human isn't making it smarter – it's making it seem nicer.…

NASA Welcomes Latvia as Newest Artemis Accords Signatory

The Republic of Latvia signed the Artemis Accords Monday during a ceremony hosted by NASA at the agency’s headquarters in Washington, becoming the 62nd nation to commit to responsible space exploration for all humanity.  “We are proud to welcome Latvia to the Artemis Accords,” said NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman. “Each new signatory strengthens a coalition committed to the transparent and peaceful exploration of space. The accords are the […]

Wheels Up for X-59

NASA’s X-59 quiet supersonic research aircraft flies over the Mojave Desert in California in this April 14, 2026, image. The transition to flying with wheels up is a key milestone and an important step in the experimental aircraft’s test campaign. The X-59 has made its highest and fastest flights so far, expanding its operational range […]

One of Europe's sovereign cloud picks may not be so-sovereign after all

US-based cloud providers could have to disclose certain data under American legal orders

Updated  The European Commission has awarded four contracts designed to advance cloud sovereignty in the EU, but one uses services from S3NS, a joint venture between Thales and Google Cloud, raising questions about its real independence.…

New Android development tool designed for robots, not humans

Google previews Android CLI as agentic development continues to snowball

Google has introduced a new Android command-line interface built specifically for AI agents, claiming a 70 percent cut in token usage and three times reduction in task completion time.…

What Physical ‘Life Force’ Turns Biology’s Wheels?

The bacterial flagellar motor is finally understood after 50 years. In its workings, columnist Natalie Wolchover finds the essence of life.

The post What Physical ‘Life Force’ Turns Biology’s Wheels? first appeared on Quanta Magazine

Widely Attended Gatherings (WAGs) Determinations

2026 Space Policy Institute 4.29.26.pdf Planetary Society APLU and AAU 4.21.26.pdf 41st Space Symposium-suppl 04.13-16.26 Space Symposium 2026 Events 4.13-16.26 2026 NSCFL Space Heroes and Legends Award Banquet 4.18.26 Newport News State of the City Event 4.13.26 Space Policy Institute Event 4.6.26 SpaceX Networking Reception 3.24.26 Maryland Space Business Roundtable (MSBR) 3.26.26 SIA_27th Annual Leadership […]

NASA’s Hubble Dazzles With Young Stars in Trifid Nebula

This shimmering region of star-formation, a close-up of the Trifid Nebula about 5,000 light-years from Earth, was captured in intricate detail by NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope. The colors in Hubble’s visible light image, which marks the 36th anniversary of the mission’s launch on April 24, are reminiscent of an underwater scene filled with fine-grained sediments fluttering through the ocean’s depths.

These Big-Brained Ancestors May Have Loved Crystals Just as Much as Modern Humans Do, According to New Research

Archaeologists in Israel unearthed prehistoric hand axes that Homo erectus crafted from stones including fossils and crystals, perhaps a sign that they wanted to connect with the cosmos

This Medieval Castle Sits Atop a Prehistoric Time Capsule. New Excavations Could Reveal the History of Neanderthals in Britain

In a cave tucked beneath the Welsh landmark, archaeologists have found evidence of human and animal visits over the past 120,000 years. Now, they're starting a five-year excavation project

Microsoft releases Windows Server update fix to fix its April update fixes

Out-of-band or out of control?

Microsoft has pushed out an out-of-band update to address the restart loop that hit some Windows Server devices after its April update.…

Autonomous AI at Scale: Adobe Agents Unlock Breakthrough Creative Intelligence With NVIDIA and WPP

AI agents are transforming how work gets done across all industries, accelerating everything from content creation to decision-making. NVIDIA’s expanded strategic collaborations with Adobe and WPP are bringing agentic AI to the center of enterprise marketing operations across creative production and customer experience orchestration.  As demand for personalized customer experiences surges, brands require intelligent systems […]

AI is reshaping Britain's datacenter map away from London

Bit barns need to worry more about space, access to grid – overstuffed center no longer a must, say experts

UK AI datacenter capacity could migrate away from London as power shortages, planning constraints and reduced reliance on low-latency connections to financial firms make other locations more attractive.…

UK.gov kicks off half-a-billion quid sovereign AI venture with £80M invite

Companies get to keep IP developed for government projects

The UK government is opening £80 million in AI procurement talks with tech firms, drawing on its £500 million sovereign capability fund.…

The Spice Girls Changed Pop Forever in 1996. Thirty Years Later, Their Iconic Outfits Are on Display in a New Exhibition in London

The Barbican Music Library is celebrating British pop culture with a show that features Mel B's leopard catsuit, Emma Bunton's blue dress and Geri Halliwell's Union Jack boots

HP's remote desktop push retreats as Anyware heads for end of life

Workstations that made distant desktops feel local is headed for a slow shutdown

HP is quietly pulling the plug on its Teradici-derived remote desktop business, shelving HP Anyware and its zero client hardware barely a few years after betting big on the tech as the backbone of its hybrid work push.…

In Times of Trouble, the Maya Rejected Divine Kingship. This Newly Discovered Public Building Reveals How the Transition to Shared Power Unfolded

Archaeologists in northern Guatemala unearthed a colonnaded open hall that may have served as a council house, where local leaders and everyday people met to discuss political issues

Blue Origin nails the landing, but puts the payload satellite in the wrong orbit

Wouldn't be the first time a Jeff Bezos company left a package in the wrong place

Blue Origin's New Glenn rocket nailed the landing this weekend, but failed at the crucial part of delivering a satellite to a usable orbit.…

Palantir's NHS future in doubt as ministers eye contract break

£330M deal leaves service with no ownership of software built to connect trusts to the platform

The UK government is considering ending Palantir's involvement in a central NHS data platform after coming under fire from MPs, unions, and campaigners.…

Growing AI power slurpage prompts MPs to examine low-energy computing

Committee launches inquiry into emerging chip designs to curb datacenter energy use

MPs are probing whether radically different, low-energy chip designs can stop AI from turning the UK's power grid into a bottleneck.…

NVIDIA and Partners Showcase the Future of AI-Driven Manufacturing at Hannover Messe 2026

Manufacturing is at an inflection point. Across every major industrial economy, the pressure to do more with less — due to faster design cycles, leaner operations and strain on skilled labor pools — is accelerating the shift to AI-driven production.  The question is no longer whether to adopt AI, but how fast and at what […]

AI quota inflation is no token effort. It's baked in

We've been here before. This time, we may not get out

Opinion  Fans of the creative arts often find out where creators gather to talk among themselves, then sneak in to eavesdrop on what those masters of the art talk about. Golden insights, daring concepts, cutting-edge thinking? Not a bit. Gossip, if you're lucky. Travel miseries, if you're not. Mostly, they talk about money.…

Next.js developer Vercel warns of customer credential compromise

Blames outfit called Context.ai, which reckons an agentic OAuth tangle caused the incident

Vercel, the company that created the open source Next.js web development framework, has a data leak that led to compromise of some customer credentials, and blamed an outfit called Context.ai for the mess.…

'Invisible mouse' made a mess of PC rebuild

You can't fix what you can't see – especially when your workspace is a maelstrom

Who, Me?  Welcome to yet another Monday, and therefore to this week's edition of Who, Me? For those unfamiliar, it's The Register's reader-contributed column that shares your stories of workplace messes, and how you tried to clean them up without dirtying your career prospects.…

These voicemails save lives

For residents of Prek Touch, Cambodia — right on the banks of the Mekong River — flooding is a regular part of life. But as those floods worsen due to climate change, it’s getting harder to adapt. Along with other flood-prone regions throughout Southeast Asia, government officials are facing an issue: how to deliver widespread weather warnings in a timely, effective way. One solution that’s working for Prek Touch? Voicemails. Today on the show, NPR climate correspondent Rebecca Hersher explains how a simple phone alert can prompt preparation, increase evacuation, and save lives.

Interested in more stories about natural disaster preparedness? Email us your question at shortwave@npr.org .

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NASA working on ‘Big Bang’ upgrade to keep the Voyagers alive for longer

Tests scheduled for May can’t come soon enough after VGER 1 power glitch led to instrument shutdown

NASA has revealed it’s working on a plan called “The Big Bang” that it hopes will extend the working lives of the Voyager probes.…

Thailand’s Krabi Coast

The coastal province features striking tropical karst landscapes and sandy beaches alongside a mix of natural land cover and developed areas.

Indonesia’s game rating system paused amid claims it leaked developer creds and glimpses of major new titles

PLUS: India bins ID app pre-install plan; Robot wins Beijing half-marathon; AI writing Manga speech bubbles; and more!

Asia In Brief  Indonesia’s Ministry of Communication and Digital Affairs has suspended the nation’s game rating system (IGRS) after claims the service leaked developer creds and video of unreleased games.…

Just like phishing for gullible humans, prompt injecting AIs is here to stay

Aren't we all just prompting tokens of linguistic meaning and hoping the other person isn't bullshitting us?

kettle  It's a week of the year, which means there's been the discovery of yet another prompt injection attack that will force supposedly well-guarded AI bots to spill secrets by asking the right way. …

I meant to do that! AI vendors shrug off responsibility for vulns

Passing the buck, and the blame, down the road shows lack of AI companies' maturity

OPINION  AI vendors: "You need to use AI to fight AI threats (and do everything else in your corporate IT environment)." Also AI vendors: "That's not a security flaw; it's working as intended."…

Ruby Central in 'real financial jeopardy' following RubyGems maintainer ruckus

Non profit loses several staffers including its executive director

Ruby Central, a nonprofit that supports the Ruby programming language ecosystem, is in "real financial jeopardy," according to a missive from its board members.…

Cloudflare can remember it for you wholesale

Agent Memory stores AI chat scraps off to the side and recalls them when needed

Not only is hardware memory scarce these days, but context memory, the conversational data exchanged with AI models, can be an issue too.…

Atlassian’s new data collection policy protects rich customers while AI eats the rest

From August 17, the outfit will collect customer metadata by default unless you pay for the top tier

Unless a customer pays for the most expensive enterprise license, or the law forbids it, Atlassian is going to collect their data to train its AI models. And you can't fully opt out.…

Intel eases reliance on TSMC with 'Merica-made Core Series 3 processors

Stripped-down Ultra for laptops and low-power edge boxes

Intel brought a few more chips home from Taiwan this week, with a new round of budget-oriented Core Series 3 processors fabbed right in the US-of-A.…

CSDA Quality Assessment Report Evaluates Satellogic NewSat Data

The report adds to the growing documentation on commercial data’s contributions to Earth science research and applications.

PureOS Crimson Development Report: March 2026

Following the PureOS Crimson beta release in our last post, we are eagerly looking forward to the general release. We received a lot of constructive feedback about the beta, and with only a few blockers left, we are taking the opportunity to make this the best PureOS release yet.

The post PureOS Crimson Development Report: March 2026 appeared first on Purism.

Anthropic mocks up Claude Design to draft fancy new pink slips for marketing teams

The bar for creating visual assets has been lowered to the ability to converse with a model

Anthropic is known for its industry-leading Claude Code that writes programs, but why stop there? The company, on Friday, introduced a research preview service called Claude Design that creates visual assets, potentially putting some folks out of work.…

Webinar 4/29: NASA CSDA Program Vendor Focus- MDA Space

Join us April 29 at 2:00 p.m. EDT to learn more about CSDA program vendor MDA Space.

Scientists Still Don't Know How or When the Grand Canyon Formed. New Research May Hint at Its Ancient Origins

Researchers say the ancestral Colorado River formed an ancient lake in northern Arizona roughly 6.6 million years ago, which spilled out westward onto the landscape that would eventually become the Grand Canyon

Shakespeare's House in London Was Lost to History. A Scholar Discovered a Map in the Archives That Revealed Its Exact Location

The Bard purchased the property three years before his death in 1616. Had he hoped to spend more time in the city where he wrote his best-known plays?

NASA Artemis II Human Research Data Methodology Challenge

NASA’s Human Research Program (HRP) uses research to develop methods to protect the health and performance of astronauts in space. In support of NASA’s goals for long-term missions on the surface of the Moon and human exploration of Mars, HRP is using ground research facilities, the International Space Station, and analog environments to monitor human health in deep space.  NASA’s Artemis II mission was the first […]

The First LSD Trip Was a Literal Bicycle Ride 83 Years Ago. Fans of the Psychedelic Celebrate the Occasion Every April 19

In 1943, a chemist in Switzerland synthesized a drug that alters consciousness. His discovery changed the study of medicine, psychiatry and biology—and became a central component of the counterculture movement

Hundreds of Spanish Settlers Died at the 'Port of Famine.' This Newly Discovered Silver Coin Reveals Where the Doomed Colony Was Founded 400 Years Ago

Ciudad del Rey Don Felipe was established on the north shore of Chile's Strait of Magellan in 1584. When an English navigator came across it several years later, few survivors remained

CISA tells feds to patch 13-year-old Apache ActiveMQ bug under active attack

Bug hiding in plain sight for over a decade lands on KEV list

CISA is sounding the alarm on a newly-exploited Apache ActiveMQ bug, ordering federal agencies to patch within two weeks as attackers circle a flaw that's been quietly lurking for more than a decade.…

NASA, OPM Announce New NASA Force Website, Open Job Applications

NASA and the U.S. Office of Personnel Management (OPM) launched the NASA Force website on Friday, opening applications for roles aimed at recruiting the nation’s top engineers and technologists to support America’s air and space program.  NASA Force, a new hiring initiative developed in partnership with OPM, will recruit and place high-impact technical talent into mission-critical roles supporting NASA’s exploration, research, and advanced technology priorities, […]

Opsec oopsie: Dutch navy frigate location outed by mailing it a Bluetooth tracker

Or, how public information and a €5 tracker exposed an avoidable opsec lapse

Militaries around the world spend countless hours training, developing policies, and implementing best operational security practices, so imagine the size of the egg on the face of the Dutch navy when journalists managed to track one of its warships for less than the cost of some hagelslag and a coffee.…

Quality Assessment Report Evaluates Tomorrow.io Precipitation Radar Data

The report adds to the growing documentation on commercial data’s contributions to Earth science research and applications.

Volunteers Discover Rare Space Weather Events Using Their Ears

Scientists are working to understand exactly how these waves behave, and the team behind NASA’s Heliophysics Audified: Resonances in Plasmas (HARP) citizen science project approaches this in a unique way: they compare the Earth’s magnetic field to a giant harp in space.

After Rounding the Moon, Artemis 2 Astronauts Reflect on the Magnitude of the Experience: 'We as Countries and as Humans Did This'

In their first press conference since returning from space, the four-person crew described feeling small but united with people on Earth and said the mission was an achievement by all of humanity

Users complain that UK Azure is having capacity problems

We hear Sweden is lovely place for workloads to visit

Microsoft Azure capacity woes are back, and worse than ever, judging by the complaints of UK users.…

Quantum ‘Jamming’ Explores the Truly Fundamental Principles of Nature

Some quantum cryptographers want to find ways to keep messages secret even if the rules of quantum mechanics don’t hold. The recently rediscovered idea of quantum jamming complicates things.

The post Quantum ‘Jamming’ Explores the Truly Fundamental Principles of Nature first appeared on Quanta Magazine

NASA’s SPHEREx Observatory Maps Interstellar Ice in Milky Way

An observation made by NASA’s SPHEREx (Spectro-Photometer for the History of the Universe, Epoch of Reionization, and Ices Explorer) shows the chemical signatures of water ice (shown in bright blue) and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (orange) in Cygnus X, one of the most active and turbulent regions of star birth in our Milky Way galaxy. The […]

A Bountiful Berry Harvest Put These Chunky, Endangered Parrots in the Mood. Now, Scientists Are Celebrating a Breeding Bonanza

New Zealand's kakapo have laid 256 eggs, and around 100 of them have hatched, providing a bright spot in a decades-long conservation effort. The official chick count won't be confirmed until the youngest birds are about 5 months old

Microsoft closes book on rogue Windows Server 2025 upgrades

Starts new one on boot loops

More than a year after giving administrators an unwelcome surprise with a security update that turned out to be a Windows Server 2025 upgrade, Microsoft has marked the incident as "resolved."…

NASA gets the ball rolling on its part in Europe's jinxed Mars rover mission

Rosalind Franklin moving again, though another budget cut looms

NASA is moving ahead with its contribution to the European Space Agency's (ESA) long-delayed Rosalind Franklin Mars rover despite another attempt by the Trump administration to cut funding for the effort.…

Attention data hoarders: Alexa loses its Plex appeal as voice feature gets canned

Users who stream their own media files ticked off as Plex warns Alexa skill will die on June 15

Plex is pulling the plug on its Alexa integration, leaving anyone who relied on voice commands to wrangle their media library out of luck.…

Locked-out iPhone user tells The Reg that Apple is scrambling to fix character flaw passcode bug

University student says he plans to move to Android, but concedes iOS engineers acting fast

Apple is finally working on a fix for a bug that has locked some users out of their iPhones for months, The Register understands.…

Would you like fries with that terminal?

Jack might be on Track, but the order screen certainly isn't

Bork!Bork!Bork!  It was not so much Jack in the Box as Bork on the Screen at a US drive-through fast food outlet the other day. Luckily, a Reg reader was there to take it all in.…

Capita won disastrous UK pensions gig after acing performance checks

Top civil servant tells MPs bid was strong on quality and value for money

The UK government awarded Capita a £239 million contract to run the Civil Service Pension Scheme (CSPS) after assessing its past performance, despite the rollout later leaving thousands of retirees waiting for payments, a senior civil servant has said.…

Support tech caught by 'Technician Aura': the bug that only hides when you're watching

All that kit, and the fix was simply stepping aside

On Call  Life is filled with random events, but The Register tries to make readers’ lives just a little more predictable by always using Friday morning to bring you a new instalment of On Call – the reader-contributed column that shares your tech support stories.…

Claude Opus wrote a Chrome exploit for $2,283

Pause your Mythos panic because mainstream models anyone can use already pick holes in popular software

Anthropic withheld its Mythos bug-finding model from public release due to concerns that it would enable attackers to find and exploit vulnerabilities before anyone could react.…

The psychology behind why you dread small talk

Do you avoid small talk in the office, or with your neighbor in the elevator? If so, you might want to give it a chance. According to a study just published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, even when participants were primed that a conversation would be boring, it turned out to be more interesting than they anticipated. Today on the show, we get into that, plus why scientists gave lobsters painkillers, and a clue about the formation of the Grand Canyon.

Interested in more science? Email us your question at shortwave@npr.org .

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IOWN Global Forum targets datacenter interconnects to scatter AI infrastructure

Fast WAN consortium thinks neoclouds are ripe for hookups

The IOWN Global Forum will likely focus on datacenter interconnect use cases in the, to help diverse providers of AI infrastructure ply their trade.…

Cisco Wi-Fi boxes are filling their disks with 5MB of undeletable data every day

Fix for critical flaw is an OS update you may not be able to make because the junk data uses all memory

More than 230 different models of Cisco Wi-Fi access points may be writing 5MB a day of nonessential data, filling their onboard flash memory to the point at which they lack space for future software updates.…

Spring Rains Saturate Michigan

Above-normal precipitation has swollen rivers and damaged infrastructure statewide.

IPv6 carried half of internet traffic – for one day, according to Google

We're not half way there, we're still livin' on a prayer

IPv6 carried half of global traffic for a single day in March, according to Google.…

Anthropic won't own MCP 'design flaw' putting 200K servers at risk, researchers say

Bug or feature?

A design flaw – or expected behavior based on a bad design choice, depending on who is telling the story – baked into Anthropic's official Model Context Protocol (MCP) puts as many as 200,000 servers at risk of complete takeover, according to security researchers.…

Mozilla throws Thunderbolt at enterprise AI providers

Client connects to deepset's Haystack platform

Mozilla has declared war on OpenAI, Microsoft, and other firms flogging enterprise AI platforms with an open-source alternative it says provides data privacy guarantees proprietary products never could. …

NodeWeaver says its perpetual licensing beats VMware’s perpetual price hikes

'I think you can run this thing on a potato,' NodeWeaver CTO Alan Conboy said.

Broadcom's price increases and policy changes have led many VMware customers to look for other options. Nodeweaver is positioning itself as an alternative for customers running computing workloads in far-flung edge locations, from cruise ships to solar farms in Sub-Saharan Africa, and it is taking cost out of the hardware needed as well.…

Anthropic squeezes enterprises by ejecting bundled tokens from seat deal

Large organizations pushed toward metered pricing

UPDATED  More bad news for Claude users. Anthropic has revised its seat-based pricing for enterprise customers, shifting them to a new pricing plan upon contract renewal.…

Nationwide bill to put age verification in operating systems introduced in the US

The title of my article on age verification in Linux and other operating systems had a “for now” added for a reason, and here we are, with two members of the US Congress introducing a bill to add age verification to operating systems. The text of the proposed bill was only published today, and it’s incredibly vague and wishy-washy, without any clear definitions and ton of open-ended questions. Still, if passed, the bill would require actual age verification, instead of mere voluntary age reporting that current state-level bills cover. It also seems to eschew the concept of age brackets, giving application developers access to specific ages of users instead. It’s a vague mess of a bill that no sane person would ever want passed, but alas, sanity is a rare commodity these days, especially in US Congress. It’s introduced by Democrat Josh Gottheimer and Republican Elise M. Stefanik, so it has that bipartisan sheen to it, which could increase its odds of going anywhere. At the same time, though, US Congress is about as useful as a box of matches during a house fire, so for all we know, this will end up going nowhere as its members focus on doing absolutely nothing to reign in the flock of coked-up headless chickens passing for an executive branch over there. If something like this gets passed, every US-based operating system – which includes most open source operating systems and Linux distributions – will probably fall in line when faced with massive fines and legal pressure. This isn’t going to be pretty.

Why Is a Cold War Bunker Buried Underneath This Medieval English Castle? In Case of Nuclear 'Armageddon'

Archaeologists uncovered a relic of the 20th-century conflict beneath Scarborough Castle, decades after the bunker was sealed and its exact location was forgotten

Loud, power hungry - opposition grows to datacenters as Maine passes bit barn ban

If there's one thing folks want less than Copilot in their taskbar, it's a bit barn in their backyard

Loud, thirsty, power hungry, and intensely unpopular with neighboring residents: datacenters are becoming the new nuclear waste dump. And many localities are now saying "not in my backyard."…

North Korea targets macOS users in latest heist

Social engineering: 'low-cost, hard to patch, and scales well'

North Korean criminals set on stealing Apple users' credentials and cryptocurrency are using a combination of social engineering and a fake Zoom software update to trick people into manually running malware on their own computers, according to Microsoft.…

These Tiny Ants Crawled All Over Larger Ants and Licked Them Clean. Scientists Aren't Sure How This Behavior Benefits Any of Them

After witnessing the interactions in an Arizona desert, a Smithsonian researcher suggests that the little ants picked off tasty treats and that the big ants got thoroughly groomed in hard-to-reach places

If you want into Anthropic's Claude club, you may have to show ID

Worse: Anthropic is using Persona, a privacy checker that rings alarm bells for the paranoids on Reddit

Anthropic may check your ID before letting you access certain Claude features, and the verification vendor it has picked is the same outfit that sparked controversy when Discord tested similar checks.…

NASA Invites Media to Latvia Artemis Accords Signing Ceremony

The Republic of Latvia will sign the Artemis Accords during a ceremony at 9 a.m. EDT Monday, April 20, at NASA Headquarters in Washington. NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman will host Dace Melbārde, Latvia’s minister for education and science; Jānis Beķeris, chargé d’affaires at the Embassy of the Republic of Latvia to the United States; and […]

DuckDB uses RDBMS to attack classic 'small changes' problem in lakehouses

Batching teensy changes in chunks creates massive performance boost, DuckDB Labs team claims

The team behind in-process OLAP database DuckDB has put forward a solution to the "small changes" problem that they say plagues lakehouse implementations of the kind based on technologies from Databricks, Snowflake, Google, and others.…

Large Invasive Rodents Are Wreaking Havoc in California. New Research Suggests Someone Deliberately Introduced Them

Genetic testing revealed that nutria living in California since 2017 are most closely related to a population in central Oregon—too far for the creatures to have traveled on their own

Iran has something America can only dream of: cheap broadband

Shame about the internet blackouts and airstrikes

North America has some of the world's most expensive broadband, according to a new study, while Iran has the cheapest.…

In the 1990s, a Dog Taught Kids About Shakespeare and Homer. A New Documentary Tells the Tale of 'Wishbone'—From His Backflips to His Historical Hats

The film reunites the human cast and crew who saw the potential of a Jack Russell terrier to bring classic literature to life on PBS

Americans who masterminded Nork IT worker fraud sentenced to 200 months behind bars

Fortune 500 companies and one US defense contractor got taken for $5m in four-year scam

Two Americans have been jailed for a combined 200 months for helping North Korea generate $5 million through fraudulent IT worker schemes.…

At the Edge of Light

In this photo taken on April 6, 2026, a portion of the Moon’s far side is seen along the terminator—the boundary between lunar day and night—where low-angle sunlight casts long shadows across the surface. A section of Orientale Basin is visible along the upper right portion of the lunar disk, its structure subtly revealed under […]

Brussels tells Google to hand rivals its search crown jewels as privacy row brews

Includes a to-do list on search data sharing and platform access as DMA enforcement ramps up

Brussels has told Google to open up its search data and give rivals equal footing on its own platforms, sketching out how it expects the tech giant to comply with the bloc's competition rulebook.…

Make crappy moves around AI and face voter backlash, govts warned

When the taxpayers are wondering whose side you are on...

Britain's government faces a public backlash against AI unless it can show ordinary people that they stand to benefit from its push to inject the technology into every area of the UK in the name of growth.…

Medieval Writings and Tree Rings Helped Researchers Track a Solar Storm From 800 Years Ago and Reconstruct Past Solar Cycles

Diary entries by the Japanese poet Fujiwara no Teika, along with other historical sources from across Asia and Europe, played pivotal roles in a new study

Visual Studio 18.5 lands with AI debugging at a price, devs still feeling blue

Latest version points to a shift in how Microsoft thinks about IDEs

Visual Studio 2026 18.5 arrives with two headline changes – a smarter code suggestion system and an AI-powered debugger. Yet developer frustration over color contrast and forced updates continue to overshadow the improvements.…

A Sudden Squall Doomed This Stone-Hauling Vessel in Lake Erie. More Than 150 Years Later, Divers Just Found the Shipwreck

The "Clough," a 125-foot-long bark, sank in September 1868 near Cleveland, with just one crew member surviving to explain what had happened

A Glowing Sphere Towering Over Utah Sent an Urgent Artistic Message: The Great Salt Lake Is Drying Up

Olafur Eliasson's latest installation married visuals with a soundscape to draw the public's attention to the plight of the important ecosystem

No Need for Space Gear — Capcom’s ‘PRAGMATA’ Joins GeForce NOW on Launch Day

Head straight for orbit with GeForce NOW — no space helmet required.  PRAGMATA, Capcom’s long-awaited sci-fi action adventure, touches down on GeForce NOW the same day it launches worldwide. The futuristic journey through a cold lunar station in the near future can be streamed instantly from the cloud to almost any device, no console or […]

Git identity spoof fools Claude into giving bad code the nod

Forged metadata made AI reviewer treat hostile changes as though they came from known maintainer

Security boffins say Anthropic's Claude can be tricked into approving malicious code with just two Git commands by spoofing a trusted developer's identity.…

Textbook titan McGraw Hill on ransomware crew's reading list after 13.5M records exposed

Publisher claims misconfigured Salesforce-hosted page leaked data

Textbook giant McGraw Hill has landed on a ransomware crew's leak site after an alleged Salesforce-linked misconfiguration spilled 13.5 million records into the wild.…

Swarm welcome: Britain lines up 120,000 drones for Ukraine

Giant UAV package will include strike, recon, logistics, and maritime systems

The UK government says it will deliver at least 120,000 drones to Ukraine this year to help it fight against Russia.…

Microsoft announces product it doesn't want anyone to buy

Just migrate already, would you? But if you can't, Redmond will take your cash

Microsoft will keep delivering security updates for old versions of Exchange Server and Skype for Business Server, after admitting that some customers aren't ready to make the move to newer products.…

Obsolete Google nag drowns out vital bar information at Swedish concert hall

Backup and Sync may be dead, but it still knows how to kill the buzz before the ukuleles start

Bork!Bork!Bork!  Sweden is arguably the home of bork – think the Swedish Chef from The Muppets – so we are delighted to note an example of the breed turning up north of Stockholm.…

Cops hand Motorola £25M no-bid deal to keep 2000-era radios alive

Biz as usual for Brit public sector: ESN replacement is 12 years late and £3B over budget

UK police tech buyers have awarded a £25 million no-competition contract for communications technology first commissioned in 2000, with the replacement project 12 years behind schedule and £3 billion over budget.…

Server-room lock was nothing but a crock

Your cybersecurity is only as good as the physical security of the servers

PWNED  Welcome back to Pwned, the column where we immortalize the worst vulns that organizations opened up for themselves. If you’re the kind of person who leaves your car doors unlocked with a pile of cash in the center console, this week’s story is for you.…

QUIC will soon be as important as TCP – but it's vastly different

Deciphering the third transport protocol's four RFCs is a task to rival the proverbial blind man trying to understand an elephant

While Larry was producing most of the content for the "Request/Reponse" chapter for the next edition of our book, I took the lead on writing a section on QUIC, since I have closely followed its development.…

Bullet train upgrade brings 5G windows and noise-cancelling cabins to Japan

Private Shinkansen suites are pulling up to the station in October

Some Japanese bullet trains will soon be equipped with private suites that include windows with embedded 5G antennas and noise-cancelling technology that envelops passengers in a bubble of quiet.…

Eyeing the Richat Structure

The circular geologic feature in northwestern Africa can be hard to recognize from the ground, but it is obvious when viewed from space.

Indian government investigating TCS after police sting finds sexual harassment

Services giant’s staff accused of assaults, inappropriate religious practices

Police in the Indian city of Nashik conducted a sting operation at Tata Consultancy Services and allegedly found instances of sexual harassment and other revolting behavior.…

Google Chrome lacks protection against one of the most basic and common ways to track users online

Browser fingerprinting is everywhere

Google markets its Chrome browser by citing its superior safety features, but according to privacy consultant Alexander Hanff, Chrome does not protect against browser fingerprinting – a method of tracking people online by capturing technical details about their browser.…

Forgejo v15.0 is available

Forgejo v15.0 is available. Access tokens can now be restricted to specific repos. New containers are now auto-linked if possible. Responsiveness and accessibility of the UI were improved. Forgejo actions gained multiple new features. As an LTS version, it will be supported until 15 July 2027.

Nobody knows how many CVEs Anthropic's Project Glasswing has actually found

Like the majority of the companies participating, it remains a mystery

Last week, Anthropic surprised the world by declaring that its latest model, Mythos, is so good at finding vulns that it would create chaos if released. Now, under the title of Project Glasswing, over 50 selected companies and orgs are allowed to test the hyped up LLM to find security holes in their own products. But just how many problems have they really discovered?…

Don't let the bot play doctor! AI gets early diagnoses wrong 80% of the time

'LLMs should not be trusted for patient-facing diagnostic reasoning,' boffins advise

People ask AI for all kinds of advice, including the kind of questions you'd ask a physician. However, the next time you're tempted to query ChatGPT if that growth on your face is skin cancer, consider this: research shows today's leading AI models fail at early differential diagnosis in more than 8 out of 10 cases.…

I Am Artemis: Rebekah Tolatovicz

Listen to this audio excerpt from Rebekah Tolatovicz, a mechanical technician lead supporting the Orion spacecraft’s main contractor Lockheed Martin: At NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida, there is a fleet of Orion spacecraft in work, and Rebekah Tolatovicz’s hands have helped build each one. Tolatovicz works to build, integrate, and test the spacecraft used […]

NASA Selects Voyager for Seventh Private Mission to Space Station

NASA and Voyager Technologies have signed an order for the seventh private astronaut mission to the International Space Station, targeted to launch no earlier than 2028 from Florida. This is the company’s first selection for a private astronaut mission to the orbiting laboratory, underscoring NASA’s ongoing investment in fostering a commercial space economy and expanding […]

NASA Launches Six CubeSats to International Space Station

Experiments and supplies bound for the International Space Station launched on April 11 as part of the agency’s Northrop Grumman Commercial Resupply Services 24 mission. As part of the approximately 11,000 pounds cargo that lifted off inside the company’s Cygnus XL spacecraft, NASA’s CubeSat Launch Initiative (CSLI) launched six CubeSats built by U.S. educational institutions […]

Customers revolt as GitHub Copilot 'fixes' rate limits

Repair of bug that undercounted token usage leads to rapid exhaustion of subscription allowance

Microsoft's GitHub last week told Copilot customers that they'd have to reduce their use of the AI service to ease the strain on company servers. This follows the company's discovery last month of a token counting bug that appears to have broken the company's pricing model.…

Tribblix m34 for SPARC released

Tribblix, the Illumos distribution focused on giving you a classic UNIX-style experience, doesn’t only support x86. It also has a branch for SPARC, which tends to run behind its x86 counterpart a little bit and has a few other limitations related to the fact SPARC is effectively no longer being developed. The Tribblix SPARC branch has been updated, and now roughly matches the latest x86 release from a few weeks ago. The graphical libraries libtiff and OpenEXR have been updated, retaining the old shared library versions for now. OpenSSL is now from the 3.5 series with the 3.0 api by default. Bind is now from the 9.20 series. OpenSSH is now 10.2, and you may get a Post-Quantum Cryptography warning if connecting to older SSH servers. ‘zap install’ now installs dependencies by default. ‘zap create-user’ will now restrict new home directories to mode 0700 by default; use the -M flag to choose different permissions. Support for UFS quotas has been removed. ↫ Tribblix release notes There’s no new ISO yet, so to get to this new m34 release for SPARC you’re going to have to install from an older ISO and update from there.

Shoe company says it's getting into AI infrastructure and yes this is the top

Following in the footsteps of Long Island Iced Tea

OPINION  Back in December 2017, an obscure American soft drinks company changed its name from Long Island Iced Tea to Long Blockchain.…

Why Does This Newly Discovered 2,000-Year-Old Stone Slab Depict a Roman Emperor as an Egyptian Pharaoh?

The sandstone monument shows Tiberius standing next to a family of local gods. Archaeologists say the scene illustrates the ruler's role as a leader who upheld cosmic order in Egyptian society

Patch these critical Fortinet sandbox bugs that let attackers bypass login, run commands over HTTP

No reports of active exploitation (yet)

Watch out for more Fortinet vulns! Two critical bugs in Fortinet's sandbox could allow unauthenticated attackers to bypass authentication or execute unauthorized code on vulnerable systems.…

Decades-old Linux UI bug fixed by dev younger than the window manager

Kamila Szewczyk prefers old software, as back then people understood something could actually be finished

No one can tell software developer Kamila Szewczyk that newer is better: She just fixed a 20-year-old bug in Enlightenment E16, the old-school Linux window manager she favors partly because, she tells us, it is actually finished software.…

How Do Different Psychedelics Affect the Brain? Scientists Analyzed More Than 500 Neural Scans to Find Out

A new study suggests that four psychoactive compounds work in surprisingly similar ways, and that they break down the separation between how we think internally and how we perceive the outside world

Bad teacher bots can leave hidden marks on model students

Study finds LLMs will smuggle biases into others even if they're scrubbed from training data

New research warns about the dangers of teaching LLMs on the output of other models, showing that undesirable traits can be transmitted "subliminally" from teacher to student, even when they are scrubbed from training data.…

Automotive data biz Autovista blames ransomware for service disruption

Some customer orgs tell staff to block inbound email from the provider

Autovista confirms that it called in outside support to help clean up a ransomware infection currently affecting systems in Europe and Australia.…

Does Your Cat Always Leave Behind a Half-Full Bowl of Food? New Research Points to Why Our Furry Friends Can Be Such Picky Eaters

A new study suggests that domestic cats get bored of monotonous meals. Switching up their food—or even just nearby scents—could help them join the clean plate club

2026 NSTA Hyperwall Schedule

NASA Science at NSTA Hyperwall Schedule, April 16-18, 2026 Join NASA in the Exhibit Hall (Booth #1265) for Hyperwall Storytelling by NASA experts. Full Hyperwall Agenda below. THURSDAY, APRIL 16 11:00 AMTeaching Space Weather in the Artemis Mission EraChristina Milotte11:15 AM5E StoryMaps using NASA ResourcesTina HarteBallinger11:30 AMGrowing Beyond Earth: A Partnership BetweenFairchild Tropical Botanic Garden […]

Not all networks can handle AI traffic – and experts are sounding alarms

Y'all been focusing on compute and forgot about how the data moves around

AI is reshaping the demands on network infrastructure, and many organizations are not prepared – including some of the so-called neocloud providers offering AI services.…

Windows takes a crash dump after one McDonald's order too many

We've all been there

Bork!Bork!Bork!  Windows is doing what it does best in California, with a Blue Screen of Death on the wall of a fast food restaurant where order progress is supposed to be.…

Haiku on ARM64 boots to desktop in QEMU

Another Haiku monthly activity report, but this time around, there’s actually a big ticket item. Haiku has been in a pretty solid and stable state for a while now, so the activity reports have been dominated by fairly small, obscure changes, but during March a major milestone was reached for the ARM64 port. smrobtzz contributed the bulk of the work, including fixes for building on macOS on ARM64, drivers for the Apple S5L UART, fixes to the kernel base address, clearing the frame pointer before entering the kernel, mapping physical memory correctly, the basics for userland, and more. SED4906 contributed some fixes to the bootloader page mapping, and runtime_loader’s page-size checks. Combined, these changes allow the ARM64 port to get to the desktop in QEMU. There’s a forum thread, complete with screenshots, for anyone interested in following along. ↫ waddlesplash While it’s only in QEMU, this is still a major achievement and paves the way for more people to work on the ARM64 port, possibly increasing its health. There’s tons of smaller changes and fixes all over the place, too, as usual, and the team mentions beta 6 isn’t quite ready yet, still. Don’t let that stop you from just downloading the latest nightly, though – Haiku is mature enough to use it.

NASA’s SPHEREx Mission Maps Water Ice Throughout Cygnus X

Description An observation made by NASA’s SPHEREx (Spectro-Photometer for the History of the Universe, Epoch of Reionization, and Ices Explorer) shows the chemical signatures of water ice (shown in bright blue) and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (orange) in Cygnus X, one of the most active and turbulent regions of star birth in our Milky Way galaxy. One […]

‘Interstellar Glaciers’: NASA’s SPHEREx Maps Vast Galactic Ice Regions

NASA’s SPHEREx (Spectro-Photometer for the History of the Universe, Epoch of Reionization, and Ices Explorer) mission has mapped interstellar ice at an unprecedented scale. Covering regions in our Milky Way galaxy more than 600 light-years across, the ice was found inside giant molecular clouds — vast regions of gas and dust where dense clumps of […]

Rethinking AI TCO: Why Cost per Token Is the Only Metric That Matters

Traditional data centers only stored, retrieved and processed data. In the generative and agentic AI era, these facilities have evolved into AI token factories. With AI inference becoming their primary workload, their primary output is intelligence manufactured in the form of tokens.  This transformation demands a corresponding shift in how the economics of AI infrastructure, […]

The Ancient Weapons Active in Your Immune System Today

Dozens of new discoveries reveal that defenses evolved by bacteria and viruses billions of years ago still define our own innate immune system.

The post The Ancient Weapons Active in Your Immune System Today first appeared on Quanta Magazine

Turtles May Have Been Tasty Snacks for Neanderthals 125,000 Years Ago. But Their Shells Were Probably the Real Prize

New research based on fragments discovered at the Neumark-Nord site in Germany suggests Neanderthals may have transformed the shells into tools

Artemis II Crew Returns to Houston

NASA’s Artemis II crew – NASA astronauts Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, and Christina Koch, and CSA (Canadian Space Agency) astronaut Jeremy Hansen – smile at friends, family, and colleagues. They shared brief remarks with the crowd after landing at Ellington Airport near NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston on Saturday, April 11, 2026, after a […]

Fixing a 20-year-old bug in Enlightenment E16

The editor in chief of this blog was born in 2004. She uses the 1997 window manager, Enlightenment E16, daily. In this article, I describe the process of fixing a show-stopping, rare bug that dates back to 2006 in the codebase. Surprisingly, the issue has roots in a faulty implementation of Newton’s algorithm. ↫ Kamila Szewczyk I’m not going to pretend to understand any of this, but I know you people do. Enjoy.

Scientists Just Made the Most Complete Map of the Clitoris's Sensory Nerve Network. Here's What They Found

Cultural taboos around female sexuality have hindered research on the organ. But a new study provides pivotal insights that can inform important surgeries and health care

Honoring Alex Goetz, a Landsat Legend

Dr. Alex Goetz, who passed away in 2025, was a member of the Landsat 7 Science Team and a key figure in the history of Landsat science.

Let sleeping CPUs lie — S0ix

Modern laptops promise a kind of magic. Shut the lid or press the sleep button, toss it in a backpack, and hours, days, or weeks later, it should wake up as if nothing happened with little to no battery drain. This sounds like a fairly trivial operation — y’know, you’re literally just asking for the computer to do nothing — but in that quiet moment when the fans whir down, the screen turns dark, and your reflection stares back at you, your computer and all its little components are actually hard at work doing their bedtime routine. ↫ Aymeric Wibo at the FreeBSD Foundation A look at how suspend and resume works in practice, from the perspective of FreeBSD. Considering FreeBSD’s laptop focus in recent times, not an unimportant subject.

Metrics

Services Catalog Click here to view the FY26 Services Catalog The catalogs provide service description, chargeback rate, unit of measure, and service level indicators for each NSSC service. Service Level Agreement (SLA) Click here to view the Service Level Agreement The SLA provides information about roles, responsibilities, rates, and service level indicators for all NASA […]

French cops free mother and son after 20-hour crypto kidnap ordeal

Latest in a string of cases that have earned France an unfortunate title

A mother and her ten-year-old son are now free after being kidnapped for around 20 hours while the father was being extorted for hundreds of thousands of euros.…

A Rare 1897 Film Discovered in an Old Trunk in Michigan Features the First On-Screen Appearance of a Robot

Filmmaker Georges Méliès employed some of his signature special effects techniques to create comedy in "Gugusse and the Automaton"

New Adobe Premiere Color Grading Mode Accelerated on NVIDIA GPUs

The NAB Show 2026 trade show, running April 18-22 in Las Vegas, is set to showcase a wave of new features and optimizations for top video editing applications. Bringing together over 60,000 content professionals from across the broadcast and media and entertainment industries, the event highlights how video editors, livestreamers and professional creators are exploring […]

US states can't account for datacenter tax breaks. Literally

Report says authorities are flouting rules by failing to disclose revenue lost to server farm subsidies

Many US states and local authorities are violating generally accepted accounting principles (GAAP) by failing to disclose revenue lost to datacenter tax subsidy schemes, according to Good Jobs First.…

Headless 360: Salesforce's latest pitch to let AI do the dev work

Here comes 'enterprise vibe coding' as CRM giant aims to open development to anyone on the platform

Salesforce has introduced what it calls Headless 360 at its developer event TDX, which starts today in San Francisco, designed to expand the reach of its app-building tools beyond traditional developers.…

Ancient Excel bug comes out of retirement for active attacks

Vuln old enough to drive lands on CISA's exploited list

While Microsoft was rolling out its bumper Patch Tuesday updates this week, US cybersecurity agency CISA was readying an alert about a 17-year-old critical Excel flaw now under exploit.…

Raspberry Pi OS ends open-door policy for sudo

Command prefix will require password by default

The latest version of Raspberry Pi OS now requires a password for sudo by default.…

Fission impossible: Uncle Sam wants nuclear reactors in space by 2031

Some on the Moon's surface, some in orbit. How does 5 years sound? Do-able, right nerds?

The nukes-in-space ambitions of the current US administration have taken a step forward – and the US Office of Science and Technology Policy has just published its hopes for who does what.…

UK told its Big Tech habit is now a national security risk

Open Rights Group says years of reliance on US giants have left Britain exposed

Britain has spent years wiring its public sector into US Big Tech, and a new report says that dependence could quickly become a national security headache.…

Britain's atomic brain trust gives itself till 2030 to unpick fusion challenges

Armed with £2.5B, UKAEA sets out technical hurdles it wants cracked by end of decade

Brit boffins have a £2.5 billion ($3.4 billion) budget for fusion power research and development, and the government agency leading the effort has published a roadmap of targets to hit before the decade is out.…

Waymo's self-driving cars face their toughest test yet: London

Google sibling takes on the Big Smoke – with a human hand on the wheel

Waymo has started letting its software take the wheel on London streets, with trained specialists on standby as it gradually accelerates toward a fully driverless ride-hailing launch.…

Agents hooked into GitHub can steal creds – but Anthropic, Google, and Microsoft haven't warned users

Researchers who found the flaws scored beer money bounties and warn the problem is probably pervasive

Exclusive  Security researchers hijacked three popular AI agents that integrate with GitHub Actions by using a new type of prompt injection attack to steal API keys and access tokens, and the vendors who run agents didn’t disclose the problem.…

Orbital datacenter startup CEO admits launch economics don't fly, presses ahead regardless

Needs SpaceX et al to drop prices and give competitors a ride into space to make it work

A startup called Orbital has revealed a plan to build a 10,000-satellite neocloud in space – if Elon Musk delivers on his ambitious plans to increase launch capacity and reduce costs.…

The only technology that died more times than VR is AI, and that seems to have worked out

The perfect combination of hardware and experiences will arrive, no matter what Zuck and Neal Stephenson think

Opinion  Could the recent death of Meta's unloved and unused Horizon Worlds signal the demise of the wider metaverse?…

A new approach to brain health, one neuron at a time

Neuroscientist Paul Nuyujukian likens the brain to a stadium full of people. To eavesdrop on the crowd you could put a microphone in the middle of the stadium. But to understand the conversations you need to record individual people. He thinks about the brain the same way. To understand brain disease, he studies neurons—one at a time. And his insights are shedding light on a big global issue—stroke. The World Health Organization predicts one in four adults will have a stroke in their lifetime. Strokes can cause death, or lead to paralysis or speech problems. But there’s still a lot researchers don’t know about how the brain recovers from an event like a stroke. Nuyujukian directs a lab at Stanford University that studies how the brain controls movement, including after neurological events like stroke. We get into how he does this, and why he hopes his research could eventually help people who’ve been paralyzed.

Email us your questions about the brain – or anything else to do with science at shortwave@npr.org . We may turn it into an episode in the future!

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Boeing deliveries soar past Airbus for the first time in years, but this is no time to unbuckle your seat belt

Supply chain and engineering woes keep the supply of new planes sputtering

Boeing has delivered more commercial planes in a quarter than Airbus for the first time in seven years.…

Contours of the James Bay Lowlands

After the Laurentide Ice Sheet retreated from present-day Hudson Bay, rebounding land has revealed striking nearshore topography.

AI-powered mainframe exits are a bubble set to pop

Analysts reckon 70 percent of projects will fail, and 75 percent of vendors in the field will go away

Most mainframe users who turn to AI for help migrating legacy code to alternative platforms are going to be very disappointed, according to analyst firm Gartner.…

Curiosity Blog, Sols 4859-4866: One Small Crater and Thousands of Polygons

Written by Abigail Fraeman, Deputy Project Scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory Earth planning date: Friday, April 10, 2026 Curiosity spent the past week driving towards a small crater, about 10 meters (32 feet) in diameter. Today the team informally named this crater “Antofagasta,” after a region and major city in Chile next to the […]

Early Indicators of Reward Hacking via Reasoning Interpolation

Using importance sampling with fine-tuned donor prefills to predict reward hacking emergence during training