Unpacking the deceptively simple science of tokenomics

Inference at scale is much more complex than more GPUs, more tokens, more profits

feature  By now you've probably heard AI datacenters called factories. It's an apt description: power goes in and tokens come out.…

Brits fear AI will strip the human touch from public services

'There's a naive techno-utopianism in Whitehall'

Brits are worried that AI will dehumanize public services, leading to less human contact and oversight as well as job losses, according to people questioned by pollster Ipsos.…

60 years since humanity touched the surface of another planet

Remembering the day the Venera 3 impacted Venus

It is 60 years since humanity first got up close and personal with another planet, with the impact of the Soviet Union's Venera 3.…

Oracle and OpenAI's Texas Stargate datacenter expansion reportedly on the skids

Meta supposidly considering untapped capacity in deal brokered by Nvidia

OpenAI and compute partner Oracle have reportedly abandoned a planned expansion of their flagship Stargate datacenter, after negotiations were stalled by financing and Sam Altman's apparent fear of commitment.…

Anthropic bods rework AI damage yardstick, find scant labor impact

It's the end of the world as we know it, and AI feels fine

Anthropic economists Maxim Massenkoff and Peter McCrory report that AI is not eliminating as many jobs as experts have predicted. …

Don’t blame AI yet for poor jobs numbers, analysts say

US unemployment ticked up to 4.4%

The US economy shed 92,000 jobs in February, a dramatic downturn from analyst expectations that it would add about 50,000 jobs. The shortfall stoked growing fears that AI could be contributing to higher unemployment.…

The Iconic House From 'The Brady Bunch' Is Now an Official Historic Landmark in Los Angeles

Viewers saw the house in shots of the Brady home's exterior, though interior scenes were filmed in a studio. A few years ago, the structure was renovated to match the sets

ARMD Research Solicitations (Updated March 6)

THIS PAGE WAS UPDATED ON MARCH 6, 2026 This Aeronautics Research Mission Directorate (ARMD) solicitations page compiles the opportunities to collaborate with NASA’s aeronautical innovators and/or contribute to their research to enable new and improved air transportation systems. Most opportunities to participate in research are officially announced through the Web-based NASA Solicitation and Proposal Integrated […]

NASA Invites Media to Northrop Grumman CRS-24 Station Resupply Launch

Media accreditation is open for the next launch to deliver NASA science investigations, supplies, and equipment to the International Space Station. A Northrop Grumman Cygnus XL spacecraft will launch in April to the orbital laboratory on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket for NASA. The mission is known as NASA’s Northrop Grumman Commercial Resupply Services 24 […]

Haiku inches closer to next beta release

And when a Redox monthly progress report is here, Haiku’s monthly report is never far behind (or vice versa, depending on the month). Haiku’s February was definitely a busy month, but there’s no major tentpole changes or new features, highlighting just how close Haiku is to a new regular beta release. The OpenBSD drivers have been synchronised wit upstream to draw in some bugfixes, there’s a ton of smaller fixes to various applications like StyledEdit, Mail, and many more, as well a surprisingly lost list f various file system fixes, improving the drivers for file systems like NTFS, Btrfs, XFS, and others. There’s more, of course, so just like with Redox, head on over to pour over the list of smaller changes, fixes, and improvements. Just like last month, I’d like to mention once again that you really don’t need to wait for the beta release to try out Haiku. The operating system has been in a fairly stable and solid condition for a long time now, and whatever’s the latest nightly will generally work just fine, and can be updated without reinstallation.

Redox gets NodeJS, COSMIC’s compositor, and much more

February has been a busy month for Redox, the general purpose operating system written in Rust. For instance, the COSMIC compositor can now run on Redox as a winit window, the first step towards fully porting the compositor from COSMIC to Redox. Similarly, COSMIC Settings now also runs on Redox, albeit with only a very small number of available settings as Redox-specific settings panels haven’t been made yet. It’s clear the effort to get the new COSMIC desktop environment from System76 running on Redox is in full swing. Furthermore, Vulkan software can now run on Redox, thanks to enabling Lavapipe in Mesa3D. There’s also a ton of fixes related to the boot process, the reliability of multithreading has been improved, and there’s the usual long list of kernel, driver, and Relibc improvements as well. A major port comes in the form of NodeJS, which now runs on Redox, and helped in uncovering a number of bugs that needed to be fixed. Of course, there’s way more in this month’s progress report, so be sure to head on over and read the whole thing.

Firefox taps Anthropic AI bug hunter, but rancid RAM still flipping bits

Now if only device makers would deliver higher quality components

Thanks to Anthropic's AI and its bug-detecting abilities, Firefox users can now enjoy stronger security. Unfortunately, if browser crashes rather than security flaws are the problem, Claude probably can't help.…

You Can Buy Salvador Dalí's Largest Painting, a 100-Foot-Long Artwork Made for a Ballet in 1939

The Surrealist artist created the massive piece for a production called "Bacchanale." It's expected to fetch up to $348,000 at auction

Asteroid 2024 YR4 Won't Slam Into the Moon, According to NASA

Both Earth and the moon will be dodging the infamous space rock in 2032

NASA’s DART Mission Changed Orbit of Asteroid Didymos Around Sun

New research reveals that when NASA’s DART (Double Asteroid Redirection Test) spacecraft intentionally impacted the asteroid moonlet Dimorphos in September 2022, it didn’t just change the motion of Dimorphos around its larger companion, Didymos; the crash also shifted the orbit of both asteroids around the Sun. Linked together by gravity, Didymos and Dimorphos orbit each […]

Spyware disguised as emergency-alert app sent to Israeli smartphones

Steals SMS messages, location data, contacts … and delivers it to Hamas-linked crew

Hamas-linked attackers are dropping spyware disguised as an emergency-alert app on Israelis' smartphones via SMS messages, according to security researchers.…

The Sweat of Tourists Has Covered Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel Fresco in a White Film. Now, the 'Last Judgment' Is Getting a Much-Needed Cleaning

Patches of calcium lactate have dulled the colors of the famous 16th-century mural, which hasn't been cleaned since 1994. Experts will carefully restore the artwork to its former glory

Take a Look at Uranus' Weird, Lopsided Upper Atmosphere Bespeckled with Auroras

A new 3D map of gas surrounding the planet will help researchers better understand the strange world

Track NASA’s Artemis II Mission in Real Time

As NASA invites the public to follow the Artemis II mission as a crew of four astronauts venture around the Moon inside the agency’s Orion spacecraft, people around the world can pinpoint Orion during its journey using the Artemis Real-time Orbit Website (AROW). During the approximately 10-day mission, NASA will test how the spacecraft’s systems […]

Weekends on the Space Station

NASA astronaut Jessica Meir trims the hair of fellow NASA astronaut Jack Hathaway in this March 1, 2026, image. Meir uses an electric razor attached to a vacuum that collects loose clippings to keep the station’s atmosphere clean in microgravity. Crew on the International Space Station also use weekends to complete housekeeping tasks. Learn more […]

US state laws push age checks into the operating system

Bad legislation, but an especially big headache for FOSS

Many web sites, social media services, and other platforms require age verification on the theory that it will protect kids from seeing inappropriate content. But now some US states want to require the operating system itself to check your age and that could cause big headaches for FOSS vendors.…

NASA to Cover Northrop Grumman Cargo Spacecraft Departure

After delivering more than 11,000 pounds of supplies, science investigations, hardware, and other cargo to the International Space Station for NASA and its international partners, the Cygnus XL spacecraft supporting Northrop Grumman’s 23rd Commercial Resupply Services mission is scheduled to depart the orbiting laboratory Thursday, March 12. Watch NASA’s live coverage of undocking and departure […]

Cisco warns of two more SD-WAN bugs under active attack

Switchzilla says flaws could allow file overwrites or privilege escalation

Just when network admins thought the Cisco SD-WAN patch queue might finally be shrinking, Switchzilla has confirmed miscreants are exploiting more vulnerabilities in its SD-WAN management software.…

New Strides Made on Deceptively Simple ‘Lonely Runner’ Problem

A straightforward conjecture about runners moving around a track turns out to be equivalent to many complex mathematical questions. Three new proofs mark the first significant progress on the problem in decades.

The post New Strides Made on Deceptively Simple ‘Lonely Runner’ Problem first appeared on Quanta Magazine

Chimps Seem to Love Crystals. Their Attraction Might Help Explain Humans' Obsession With the Shimmering Stones

Hominins have been collecting calcite and quartz for at least 780,000 years. A new study hints at why

Anthropic sues US government after unprecedented national security designation

Brands Trump administration decision 'legally unsound' and has 'no choice but to challenge it in court'

AI giant Anthropic says that it has "no choice" but to sue the US government after being officially designated a supply chain risk to national security.…

Asteroid 2024 YR4 won't smack Moon in 2032, boffins confirm

Humanity and its neighbor safe from this menace at least

Scientists have ruled out the possibility that the near-Earth asteroid 2024 YR4 might hit the Moon on December 22, 2032.…

Washington reportedly moves to tighten leash on AI chip exports

Draft rules could force Nvidia and AMD to seek government approval before selling abroad

The Trump administration is reportedly planning new restrictions on GPU exports, aimed not only at controlling who gets them, but at driving AI investment back into the US.…

Microsoft spots ClickFix campaign getting users to self-pwn on Windows Terminal

Crooks tweak familiar copy-paste ruse so that victims run malicious commands themselves

A new twist on the long-running ClickFix scam is now tricking Windows users into launching Windows Terminal and pasting malware into it themselves – handing the credential-stealing Lumma infostealer the keys to their browser vault.…

UK peers warn weakening AI copyright law could hammer creative industries

House of Lords committee says ministers must not trade a £124B sector for promises of future tech growth

Britain's creative industries will face significant damage unless the government strengthens AI copyright law, according to a House of Lords committee.…

Microsoft kicks new Outlook opt-out deadline down the road to 2027

Admins get another year before migration pressure ramps up

Microsoft has delayed the opt-out phase for the new enterprise version of Outlook to 2027, giving administrators another 12 months to get ready for migration.…

The Final Season of 'Outlander' Is Here. See the Most Iconic Kilts, Gowns and Other Costumes From the Time Travel Drama

An exhibition at the American Revolution Museum at Yorktown showcases 26 ensembles from the Starz series' first four seasons

Son of government contractor arrested after alleged $46M crypto heist from US Marshals

FBI and French GIGN swoop on Saint Martin, John Daghita in cuffs

The son of a government contractor was arrested in the Caribbean after allegedly stealing more than $46 million in seized cryptocurrency from the US Marshals Service, the FBI says.…

Norway's Consumer Council takes aim at enshittification

Its aim is wide, covering everything from social networks to GenAI

Norway's Forbrukerrådet consumer council is taking aim at the creeping enshittification of modern life in a 100-page report – and a splendid four-minute video which we highly recommend.…

Microsoft finally gets around to fixing Windows 10 Recovery Environment after breaking it in October

Released from the curse of the update bork fairy

Microsoft has finally fixed a Windows Recovery Environment (WinRE) bug it introduced in Windows 10's final update.…

UK Treasury not sure about ditching Oracle to join £1.7 billion shared services program it is funding

It promised £1.15B… but finance ministry yet to show 'formal commitment' to adopt Workday SaaS, watchdog says

The UK's Treasury is yet to fully commit to joining a multi-billion pound ERP and HR shared services program it has agreed to fund, potentially slashing any resulting savings, according to a report from the National Audit Office.…

Transport for London says 2024 breach affected 7M customers, not 5,000

Attackers accessed systems holding data tied to millions of Oyster and contactless users

Transport for London has confirmed that a 2024 breach exposed the data of more than 7 million people – a far larger crowd than the few thousand customers originally warned that their details might be at risk.…

UK mobilizes lawyers to keep report on Gatwick 'drone' chaos under wraps

Seven-year Freedom of Information battle heads to tribunal

Exclusive  The UK's Department for Transport (DfT) is assembling government lawyers to fight the Information Commissioner's decision that it must release a document summarizing the lessons from the 2018 Gatwick drone chaos.…

Altman said no to military AI abuses – then signed Pentagon deal anyway

OpenAI CEO's principles lasted about 12 hours before $200M check arrived

Opinion  A week ago today, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said he'd draw the same lines as Anthropic. By that night, he'd signed a Department of Defense deal that included no such AI protections. What's going on here?…

Teen sleep is getting wrecked by more than just phones

Teens aren’t getting enough sleep! And a two-decade study suggests it’s getting worse. Scientists found that the number of high schoolers getting insufficient sleep — less than seven hours a night — has increased from 69% to 77%. The throughline? There wasn’t one. Teens had bad sleep habits across most demographics, including race, gender and grade level. The findings were published this week in the journal JAMA.

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

For more about earthquake science – and the Cascadia Fault in particular – check out our recent episode on the Pacific Northwest’s Big One .

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 .

To manage podcast ad preferences, review the links below:

See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.

Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoices

NPR Privacy Policy

Techie was given strict instructions not to disrupt client. Then he touched one box and the lights went out

Discovering, and explaining, the bizarre cause was harder than the job he was sent to do

On Call  Welcome to another instalment of On Call, The Register's weekly reader-contributed column that tells tales of times when tech support turned troublesome.…

Microsoft previews tech to ease creation of keyboard-accessible websites

‘focusgroup’ has nothing to do with market research, offers devs faster coding and faster websites for everyone

Microsoft has started a preview of technology that eases the task of developing websites with complex navigation elements that don’t need a pointing device to operate.…

Ailing “Megaberg” Sparks Surge of Microscopic Life

As Iceberg A-23A disintegrated, it shed meltwater that helped fuel an extensive phytoplankton bloom in the South Atlantic Ocean.

About Air Traffic Management and Safety Project

The Air Traffic Management and Safety (ATMS) project defines, validates, and transfers advanced requirements and technologies to shift air traffic management from tactical to strategic.  This change enables efficient, productive, and resilient operations while reducing safety assurance and compliance costs for highly automated systems.   ATMS researches and develops technologies that safely integrate new air vehicles with traditional aviation operations to meet growing demand. Through close collaboration with the FAA, ATMS delivers actionable automation solutions, advanced operational concepts, […]

Iranian news service claims drone strikes on AWS were deliberate, to probe for US datacenter dependencies

Remember: Truth is the first casualty of war

Iranian publisher Fars News Agency, which is aligned with the country’s government, has claimed the drone strikes on Amazon Web Services’ Middle East datacenters were deliberate and had strategic significance.…

About Advanced Air Mobility Pathfinders Project

The Advanced Air Mobility Pathfinders (AAMP) project accelerates advanced air mobility technologies for wildfire response and urban transportation through real-world demonstrations and strategic partnerships. AAMP researches emerging technologies, establishes aircraft strategic deconfliction frameworks, and validates solutions in metropolitan areas to enable larger-scale urban air mobility. The project enhances Unmanned Aircraft Systems capabilities for wildfire mitigation and disaster response by transferring Portable Airspace Management System technologies to enable routine, safe, […]

China’s rubber-stamp parliament rubber stamps tech independence plan

Call to do better with chips and put AI everywhere is more than rhetoric because China’s scientists are sprinting ahead

China’s government has again made reducing reliance on imported digital technology a major goal.…

Chardet dispute shows how AI will kill software licensing, argues Bruce Perens

Alarm bells are ringing in the open source community, but commercial licensing is also at risk

Earlier this week, Dan Blanchard, maintainer of a Python character encoding detection library called chardet, released a new version of the library under a new software license.…

Google says spyware makers and China-linked groups dominated zero-day attacks last year

Of the 90 zero-days GTIG tracked in 2025, 43 hit enterprise tech

Zero-day exploitation targeting enterprise tech products reached an all-time high last year, with China-linked cyber-espionage groups remaining the most prolific state-backed users, according to Google.…

Hardware hotplug events on Linux, the gory details

One day, I suddenly wondered how to detect when a USB device is plugged or unplugged from a computer running Linux. For most users, this would be solved by relying on libusb. However, the use case I was investigating might not actually want to do so, and so this led me down a poorly-documented rabbit hole. ↫ ArcaneNibble (or R) And ArcaneNibble (or R) is taking you down with them.

Okta CEO ‘paranoid’ as vibe coders stir SaaS-pocalypse fears

It’s ok, Todd. You’re only paranoid if you’re wrong.

Okta chairman and CEO Todd McKinnon said he believes it would be difficult for an LLM alone to replicate the quality of SaaS applications his company provides, but that doesn’t stop him from worrying about competition from bots.…

About Transformative Aeronautics Concepts Program (TACP)

TACP Benefits Foundation for disruptive technologies: Placing emphasis on transformative concepts lays the groundwork for revolutionary advancements in aviation. Accelerated innovation in aerospace: Developing next-generation engineering methodologies and digital tools enables faster, more efficient design, testing, and certification processes. Strong collaborative ecosystem: TACP fosters partnerships among NASA, academia, industry, and government, creating a powerful network […]

New Oracle Solaris CBE release released

Oracle’s Solaris 11 basically comes in two different flavours: the SRU (Support Repository Update) releases for commercial Oracle customers, and the CBE (Common Build Environment) releases, available to everyone. We’ve covered the last few SRU releases, and now it’s time for a new CBE release. We first introduced the Oracle Solaris CBE in March 2022 and we released an updated version in May 2025. Now, as Oracle Solaris keeps on evolving, we’ve released the latest version of our CBE. With the previous release Alan and Jan had compiled a list to cover all the changes in the three years since the first CBE release. This time, because it’s relatively soon after the last release we are opting to just point you to the what’s new blogs on the feature release SRUs Oracle Solaris 11.4 SRU 84, Oracle Solaris 11.4 SRU 87, and Oracle Solaris 11.4 SRU 90. And of course you can always go to the blogs by Joerg Moellenkamp and Marcel Hofstetter who have excellent series of articles that show how you can use the Oracle Solaris features. ↫ Joost Pronk van Hoogeveen at the Oracle Solaris Blog You can update your existing installation with a pkg update, or do a fresh insrtall with the new CBE images.

Thirty-Four Years Ago, a British Museum Staffer Stole 350 Prints in Broad Daylight. A New Book Chronicles the Thefts and Their Fallout

While seemingly unreported at the time, the pilfering was uncovered by historian Barnaby Phillips as part of his research for a new book about African treasures

The great license-washing has begun

In the world of open source, relicensing is notoriously difficult. It usually requires the unanimous consent of every person who has ever contributed a line of code, a feat nearly impossible for legacy projects. chardet, a Python character encoding detector used by requests and many others, has sat in that tension for years: as a port of Mozilla’s C++ code it was bound to the LGPL, making it a gray area for corporate users and a headache for its most famous consumer. Recently the maintainers used Claude Code to rewrite the whole codebase and release v7.0.0, relicensing from LGPL to MIT in the process. The original author, a2mark, saw this as a potential GPL violation. ↫ Tuan-Anh Tran Everything about this feels like a license violation, and in general a really shit thing to do. At the same time, though, the actual legal situation, what lawyers and judges care about, is entirely unsettled and incredibly unclear. I’ve been reading a ton of takes on what happened here, and it seems nobody has any conclusive answers, with seemingly valid arguments on both sides. Intuitively, this feels deeply and wholly wrong. This is the license-washing “AI” seems to be designed for, so that proprietary vendors can take code under copyleft licenses, feed it into their “AI” model, and tell it to regurgitate something that looks just different enough so a new, different license can be applied. Tim takes Jim’s homework. How many individual words does Tim need to change – without adding anything to Jim’s work – before it’s no longer plagiarism? I would argue that no matter how many synonyms and slight sentence structure changes Tim employs, it’s still a plagiarised work. However, what it feels like to me is entirely irrelevant when laws are involved, and even those laws are effectively irrelevant when so much money is riding on the answers to questions like these. The companies who desperately want this to be possible and legal are so wealthy, so powerful, and sucked up to the US government so hard, that whatever they say might very well just become law. “AI” is the single-greatest coordinated attack on open source in history, and the open source world would do well to realise that.

TerraPower gets permission to build, not operate, sodium-cooled nuclear reactor

Don't flip the switch until the NRC says you can, okay?

Bill Gates-backed nuclear outfit TerraPower finally has approval to build its Natrium reactor. However, it may still face issues finding a steady fuel supply. And, oh yeah, it hasn't built any reactors like this before.…

Most Insect Species Call the Tropics Home. But Climate Change Is Pushing Many of the Critters There to Their Heat Limits

Insects in the lowlands will have an especially hard time with rising temperatures, a new study suggests

About Airspace Operations and Safety Program (AOSP)

The Airspace Operations and Safety Program (AOSP) accelerates the transformation of the National Airspace System (NAS) to meet the variety, density, and complexity of future airspace users. Our mission is to ensure that U.S. skies remain safe, innovative, and globally competitive while enabling Advanced Air Mobility and next-generation aviation technologies.   AOSP partners with the FAA, industry, academia, and other government agencies to ensure seamless integration of […]

Anime, Manga and Traditional Japanese Art Come Together at an Upcoming Auction—From Hokusai's 'The Great Wave' to Miyazaki's 'My Neighbor Totoro'

The sale places pop culture artifacts in conversation with Japan's rich visual traditions. According to Christie's, these items "trace the enduring resonance of motifs, techniques and narratives rooted in Japan's past"

System76 on Age Verification Laws

Liberty has costs, but it's worth it.

DOS memory management

The memory management in DOS is simple, but that simplicity may be deceptive. There are several rather interesting pitfalls that programming documentation often does not mention. ↫ Michal Necasek at the OS/2 Museum A must-read for people writing software for earlier DOS versions.

Iran intelligence backdoored US bank, airport, software outfit networks

MOIS-linked MuddyWater crew has a new, custom implant

An Iranian cyber crew believed to be part of the Iranian Ministry of Intelligence and Security (MOIS) has been embedded in multiple US companies' networks - including a bank, software firm, and airport, among others - since the beginning of February, with more activity in the days following the US and Israeli military strikes, according to security researchers.…

Munificent 7 vow to spare US households from AI's rising energy costs

Bit tricky enforcing this. What's the penalty if they go up anyway?

Seven of the top US AI companies and hyperscalers have officially agreed to protect American consumers from price hikes due to datacenter energy and infrastructure increases caused by the AI build boom.…

You can power a G-Wiz EV with 500 vapes, and this YouTuber proved it

You made a time machine vapemobile ... out of a Delorean G-Wiz?

The world would be a better place if all of us were as willing to upcycle as aggressively as YouTuber Chris Doel, who has demonstrated that batteries from 500 disposable vapes can actually power one of the UK's most famous electric vehicles. …

Document Foundation urges EU to ditch Excel lock-in for cybersecurity law consultation

LibreOffice steward says Commish undermines its own standards by asking for feedback via Excel spreadsheet

The Document Foundation has taken a swipe at the European Commission over its consultation on guidance for the EU's Cyber Resilience Act – because the feedback template is only available as a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet.…

Why Has Punch, an Adorable Baby Monkey, Struggled to Fit in With His Troop? Scientists Explain the Lives of Japanese Macaques

Experts say the other monkeys' aggressive behaviors toward Punch are pretty normal

NASA Wallops Supports First Rocket Lab HASTE Launch of 2026

NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility supported a Rocket Lab HASTE suborbital launch from the company’s Launch Complex 2 in Virginia on Feb. 27, 2026. The mission, called Cassowary Vex, supported a flight of a hypersonic test platform for the Department of War’s Defense Innovation Unit.  The NASA Wallops launch range supported by providing services such as tracking, telemetry, and range safety […]

Could Life on Earth Have Descended From Microbes That Traveled From Mars Long Ago?

Scientists demonstrated that an Earthly extremophile might withstand being ejected from the Red Planet on debris spewed into space due to an asteroid strike

Mosquitoes Have Been Biting Humans for More Than One Million Years

A new study suggests that the deadly insects evolved their taste for human blood much earlier than previously thought, around when Homo erectus migrated into Southeast Asia

Total Lunar Eclipse

The Moon appears red during a total lunar eclipse over New Orleans, home of NASA’s Michoud Assembly Facility, on March 3, 2026. This “blood moon” occurs during a total lunar eclipse, as Earth lines up between the Moon and the Sun. When this happens, the only light that reaches the Moon’s surface is from the edges […]

Congress puts the ISS on life support until 2032, orders Moon base plan

Authorization Act seeks to keep lights on until commercial stations are ready

The NASA Authorization Act of 2026 has been approved, and alongside a directive for NASA to establish a permanent Moon base, the legislation includes language extending the International Space Station to 2032.…

See the New U.S. Postage Stamp Honoring the Bison, America's National Mammal

The stamp features a modern image by Montana-based wildlife photographer Tom Murphy alongside a historic bison stamp design from 1923

Office EU waves sovereignty flag with a familiar stack under the bonnet

Euro productivity suite appears to be hosted Nextcloud and Collabora Online

In the battle of the online office suites, a new contender has entered the ring... but under the wrestler's mask, we think there may be a familiar face.…

Trump administration spoiling for a fight over global satellite regulations

FCC not pleased about EU space tech reqs to enter Common market, among other things

Updated  The US government is consulting with the telecoms industry about "reciprocity" in satellite services, in a move that could see another dispute erupt with the European Union over regulations.…

npmx package browser released as alpha to fix pain of using npmjs

Project initiated by Nuxt lead Daniel Roe attracts wide support thanks to multiple issues with the official interface

A new browser for the npm registry has launched in alpha, following grassroots demand for an alternative to the official npmjs.com interface.…

Microsoft Copilot to hijack your browser... for your own convenience

Embeds Edge into AI assistant, ignores questions about opt-in

Microsoft is rolling out a Copilot update to Windows Insiders that embeds web browsing directly into the assistant, opening links in a side panel rather than launching your default browser.…

UK watchdog eyes Meta's smart glasses after workers say they 'see everything'

Contractors tasked with improving AI reportedly had access to intimate footage captured through wearables

Britain's privacy watchdog is asking questions about Meta's AI-powered smart glasses after reports that human contractors reviewing recordings from the devices were exposed to extremely private moments captured by unsuspecting users.…

Solar superstorm gave ESA's Mars orbiters a handy science opportunity

Veteran spacecraft overcome computer glitches as atmosphere 'flooded by electrons'

Almost two years ago, a solar storm hit Earth, triggering auroras that were seen as far south as Mexico. The storm also reached Mars and was detected by a pair of ESA spacecraft, Mars Express and ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter (TGO).…

CERN sends AI-trained robot mice scurrying through LHC beam pipes

Bots hunt deformed RF contacts inside the collider's 27 km vacuum tubes

Updated  The UK Atomic Energy Authority (UKAEA) and CERN have jointly developed a "mouse-sized robot" to inspect parts of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) that are out of reach to humans.…

MoJ puts Prisoner Telephony Service replacement on hold yet again

Project dialed back, BT asked to keep current system for another 54 months

The UK Ministry of Justice (MoJ) will pay telco BT £94.6 million plus VAT to keep its in-cell Prisoner Telephony Service (PTS) going for another 54 months after repeatedly pushing back procurement of its replacement.…

UK still doodling digital pound while Brussels frets over payment sovereignty

Geopolitical tensions turn up the pressure for European legislators

The UK is still in the design phase of digital currency as the EU comes under political pressure to accelerate the development of a digital euro to bolster the bloc's sovereignty and resilience.…

Supposedly big-brained execs are outsourcing decisionmaking to AI

Survey of UK bosses find 62 percent rely on LLMs for help

Most business leaders in the United Kingdom appear to have outsourced a lot of their decisionmaking to machine learning models, according to a survey of 200 suits published by data streaming tools vendor Confluent. /p>…

A Little Town with a Long Name

A NASA luminary from the Apollo era grew up in Wales near Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch.

Google embraces third party app stores and payments to put Epic Games case behind it

Lower app store fees are on the way, plus an on-ramp for third party digital bazaars

Google has spelled out changes it will make to the fees it charges developers who use its app store and payment services, and says they represent the end of its long legal battle with Epic Games.…

Broadcom says AI companies can’t make their own silicon any time soon

Offers booming customer accelerator biz as evidence, while VMware props up its software business

Broadcom will soon deploy multiple gigawatts worth of custom accelerators at Meta, OpenAI, and Anthropic, a feat it says shows AI companies and hyperscalers can’t successfully develop and deploy their own silicon any time soon.…

Intel numbers boss swears big Foundry wins are coming soon

Meanwhile Chipzilla's 18A process tech could see external deployment after all

Intel's Foundry division is near to sealing a deal for its advanced packaging technology that would contribute billions of dollars a year to the struggling chipmaker, CFO David Zinsner said on Wednesday.…

High-Speed Flight Project Overview

What We do The High-Speed Flight (HSF) project develops technologies that make high-speed, airbreathing, commercial flight possible from Mach 1 to Mach 5 and above. HSF creates tools, technologies, and knowledge that will help eliminate today’s technical barriers to practical supersonic flight, most notably sonic boom. The project supports the X-59 quiet supersonic vehicle testing […]

'Hundreds' of Iranian hacking attempts have hit surveillance cameras since the missile strikes

Attack infrastructure attributed to 'several Iran-nexus threat actors'

Multiple Iranian hacking crews have been targeting internet-connected surveillance cameras across Israel and other Middle Eastern countries since the war started on February 28, according to Check Point security researchers. …

Lock scroll with a vengeance

What’s the scroll lock key actually for? Scroll Lock was reportedly specifically added for spreadsheets, and it solved a very specific problem: before mice and trackpads, and before fast graphic cards, moving through a spreadsheet was a nightmare. Just like Caps Lock flipped the meaning of letter keys, and Num Lock that of the numeric keypad keys, Scroll Lock attempted to fix scrolling by changing the nature of the arrow keys. ↫ Marcin Wichary I never really put much thought into the scroll lock key, and I always just assumed that it would, you know, lock scrolling. I figured that in the DOS era, wherein the key originated, it stopped DOS from scrolling, keeping the current output of your DOS commands on the screen until you unlocked scrolling again. In graphical operating systems, I assumed it would stop any window with scrollable content from scrolling, or something – I just never thought about it, and never bothered to try. Well, its original function was a bit different: with scroll lock disabled, hitting the arrow keys would move the selection cursor. With scroll lock enabled, hitting the arrow keys would move the content instead. After reading this, it makes perfect sense, and my original assumption seems rather silly. It also seems some modern programs, like Excel, Calc, some text editors, and others, still exhibit this same behaviour when the scroll lock key is used today. The more you know.

The new MacBook Neo is a great deal in the US, not so much in Europe

Apple today announced the “MacBook Neo,” an all-new kind of low-cost Mac featuring the A18 Pro chip for $599. The MacBook Neo is the first Mac to be powered by an iPhone chip; the A18 Pro debuted in 2024’s iPhone 16 Pro models. Apple says it is up to 50% faster for everyday tasks than the bestselling PC with the latest shipping Intel Core Ultra 5, up to 3x faster for on-device AI workloads, and up to 2x faster for tasks like photo editing. The MacBook Neo features a 13-inch Liquid Retina display with a 2408-by-1506 resolution, 500 nits of brightness, and an anti-reflective coating. The display does not have a notch, instead featuring uniform, iPad-style bezels. ↫ Hartley Charlton at MacRumors There’s no denying this is a great offering from Apple, and it’s going to sell really well, especially in the US. I can’t think of any other laptop on the market that offers this kind of complete package at such an attractive price point – on the Windows side, you’re going to get plastic laptops with worse displays, worse battery life, and, well, Windows. For education buyers, the price drops from $599 to $499, making it a no-brainer choice for families sending their kids off to high school or university. In the US, at least. Here in Europe, or at least in Sweden where I checked the price of the base model, it’s going for almost €800 ($930), at which point the cost-cutting measures Apple has taken are a bit harder to swallow. At that kind of price point, I’m not going to accept a mere 8GB of RAM, 256GB of storage, and a paltry 60Hz display. When I saw the announcement of this new MacBook earlier today, I wondered if this could be my way of finally getting a macOS review on OSNews after well over a decade, but at €800 for something I won’t be using after I’m done with the review? I can’t justify that. Regardless, you’re going to see tons of these in schools and in wrapping paper for the holiday season and birthdays, and at least at American pricing, it’s definitely a great deal.

These Clownfish Lose Their Baby Stripes in Response to Peer Pressure, New Research Suggests

Tomato clownfish perform a dramatic underwater wardrobe change based on the social dynamics of their environment

Malware-laced OpenClaw installers get Bing AI search boost

Think before you download

OpenClaw, the AI agent that can manage just about anything, is risky all by itself, but now fake installers for it are wreaking havoc. Users who searched Bing’s AI results for “OpenClaw Windows” were directed to a malicious GitHub repository that delivered information stealers and GhostSocks onto their machines.…

You've Seen Jackson Pollock's Dizzying Drip Paintings. But His Wife, Lee Krasner, Was Also a Major Player in the Abstract Expressionist Movement

Titled "Krasner and Pollock: Past Continuous," a new exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art will examine the lives and careers of both artists, who met in New York in the 1940s

HR may have to cajole and soothe reluctant employees to get them to use AI

Employees need guidance and support if companies really want to commit to AI adoption

If you buy AI, employees will come and take a look, but they won't necessarily change the way they work. For that, you may have to get human resources involved.…

Apple's budget-friendly MacBook Neo is bursting with color and compromise

Cupertino grabs an aging A18 Pro from parts bin to power its latest attempt at an entry-level MacBook

You'll soon be able to get a MacBook that's cheaper than many budget PCs. Apple on Wednesday unveiled the MacBook Neo, a $599 exercise in cost cutting powered by the same silicon as an iPhone 16 Pro.…

About Advanced Air Vehicles Program (AAVP)

NASA’s Advanced Air Vehicles Program (AAVP) studies, evaluates, and develops technologies and capabilities for new aircraft systems and explores far-future concepts for revolutionary air travel improvements. AAVP develops technologies for all flight regimes from hover to hypersonic to enable safe, new aircraft that are faster, quieter, and more fuel efficient. AAVP develops a broad range […]

They Joked About Discovering a Forgotten Masterpiece. Now, Experts Say They're the Unwitting Owners of an Original Rembrandt

"Vision of Zacharias in the Temple" had been removed from the Dutch painter's oeuvre in the 1960s. But when the owners brought it to the Rijksmuseum, scholars decided to conduct a close analysis

AI doctor's assistant is easily swayed to change prescriptions, give bad medical advice

Spread false medical info, supersize drug orders, and more!

A healthcare AI with the power to manage prescriptions is rather open to mind-altering suggestions, according to security experts. …

AWS-hosted tech providers urge Middle East customers to fail over now

Snowflake, Red Hat, and others warn customers not to wait around for the cloud to recover

After aerial strikes damaged AWS datacenters in the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain, Snowflake, Red Hat, and IoT platform EMQX have told customers to open their disaster recovery playbook and move to new bit barns.…

Who will shape AI in the public interest?

Today’s article was originally posted at Reboot Democracy, as part of a new workshop series on how to build and procure public AI.

Why Do Basketball Players' Shoes Squeak on the Court? Here's the Physics Behind the Iconic, High-Pitched Sounds

The screeches come from wave-like deformations of sneakers’ flexible soles

Blowing Stellar Bubbles

For the first time, a young, Sun-like star has been caught red-handed blowing bubbles in the galaxy, by astronomers using NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory. The bubble – called an “astrosphere” – completely surrounds the juvenile star in this image released on Feb. 23, 2026. Winds from the star’s surface are blowing up the bubble and […]

I Am Artemis: Paul Boehm

Listen to this audio excerpt from Paul Boehm, Orion crew support and thermal systems functional area manager: As the Artemis II astronauts fly around the Moon, they’ll rely on systems inside the Orion spacecraft to live, work, and keep them safe during their mission. At NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, Paul Boehm, crew support and […]

NASA, OPM Launch NASA Force to Recruit Top Talent for US Space Program

The U.S. Office of Personnel Management (OPM) and NASA announced NASA Force on Wednesday, a dedicated talent track within the US Tech Force initiative designed to recruit and deploy the nation’s top engineers and technologists to support America’s space program. NASA Force will identify and place high-impact technical talent into mission-critical roles supporting NASA’s exploration, […]

US-French Satellite Takes Stock of World’s River Water

In a first, a space mission led by NASA and France has tracked Earth’s rivers swelling and shrinking from month to month over the course of a year and found significantly less of a swing than previous model-based estimates. A record drought in the Amazon likely influenced the tally made by the Surface Water and […]

LexisNexis confirms data breach at Legal & Professional arm, some customer records affected

Crooks claim 2 GB haul from AWS instance via React2Shell exploit

Data analytics giant LexisNexis has confirmed its Legal & Professional division suffered a data breach days after the Fulcrumsec cybercrime crew claimed responsibility for the hack.…

Ex-NASA chief gives Isaacman's Moon reboot a thumbs up, stays schtum on the awkward bits

Jim Bridenstine says 'adjustments' to Artemis program were needed

NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman has won an endorsement from his predecessor Jim Bridenstine, who praised Isaacman's shake-up of the perpetually delayed Artemis program.…

Can the Most Abstract Math Make the World a Better Place?

Columnist Natalie Wolchover explores whether applied category theory can be “green” math.

The post Can the Most Abstract Math Make the World a Better Place? first appeared on Quanta Magazine

These California Condors Might Be Tending to the Species' First Egg in the State's Northern Region in More Than a Century

Experts haven't confirmed the existence of an egg, but the nesting birds' behaviors suggest one was laid in early February

Flex appeal: UK datacenter cuts AI power draw 40% on command

London GPU farm dances to National Grid's tune in five-day trial, critical workloads not disrupted

A UK datacenter has successfully demonstrated it can reduce the amount of power drawn by AI infrastructure in response to grid events, without disrupting critical workloads.…

Kaspersky dismisses claims Coruna iPhone exploit kit is connected to NSA-linked operation

Follows suggestions iPhone-pwning toolset bears hallmarks of zero-days that targeted Russian diplomats

Russian cybersecurity outfit Kaspersky is waving away claims that an iPhone exploit kit recently uncovered by Google was developed by the same people who were behind a group of zero-days that allegedly compromised thousands of Russian diplomats in a 2023 campaign.…

Google stuffs Gemini into Android Studio Panda 2 to build apps from prompts

The card game bridge could be a bridge too far for Mountain View's AI

Google has released Android Studio Panda 2, a feature drop including an AI agent that can create apps from scratch and an AI-driven version upgrade assistant.…

NIMBY pushback begins to bite US datacenter buildout

New capacity under construction falls for first time since 2020 as permitting, zoning, and power hurdles mount

New datacenter capacity under construction in primary US markets declined in the second half of 2025, as community opposition increasingly disrupted planning approvals – a dynamic commercial real estate firm CBRE says is reshaping the industry.…

Once upon a time, saving your bits meant punching holes in floppies

Microsoft vet revisits the gloriously manual era of write protection

Microsoft's Raymond Chen took a delightful trip down memory lane this week, tracing how write protection for removable media has changed over the decades.…

Gram: Zed, but with AI and chat features removed

Brand-new stripped-down fork of the Zed all-Rust code editor

Gram is a new text editor written in Rust, created by removing almost all the fancy features from Zed… and it has already seemingly caused Zed Industries to change its terms of use service, according to Gram's developer.…

UK digital ID brief quietly moves to new minister after resignation

James Frith takes reins from Josh Simons, who quit even though he was cleared over journalist vetting scandal

Labour MP James Frith has taken over the ministerial roles held by Josh Simons after he resigned over his handling of a report on journalists while running a think tank.…

Doomscrollers despair after Oracle hiccup knocks TikTok offline in US

Big Red's cloud that 'doesn't go down' goes down again

An Oracle outage knocked parts of TikTok offline this week. The incident affected Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI), which trails AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud in market share but counts the social media behemoth among its customers.…

Capita's £370M Whitehall outsourcing deal challenged as 'abnormally low'

Rival bidder Sopra Steria launched legal claim over DWP procurement

Capita confirmed today it won a business process outsourcing deal for multiple UK government departments for £370 million over ten years, less than 40 percent of the estimated value outlined during the tender stage.…

Users fume at Outlook.com email 'carnage'

Email flow slowed or stopped by mysterious forces at Microsoft

Microsoft spent last week rejecting emails to Outlook recipients after what appears to be either a fault or overzealous blocking rules.…

Cloud inquiry chair quits UK competition watchdog over glacial pace of reform

Kip Meeks walked a year early with the overseer of tech markets yet to take action against AWS and Microsoft

The chair of the competition markets authority's cloud inquiry has quit, citing the slow pace of implementing recommendations outlined in a report it published in 2025 to boost market dynamics in Britain's cloud computing market.…

The global fallout of RFK Jr.'s vaccine policies

In his role as secretary of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is changing how the United States approaches vaccines. But those changes aren’t limited to the United States. NPR global health correspondent Gabrielle Emanuel joins Short Wave to talk about two examples of how the global public health landscape may be shifting. First, the United States’ ultimatum to an international vaccine group. Second, the uncertain fate of a vaccine trial. Some researchers are calling the trial a “unique” opportunity, and others are calling it “unethical.”

Read more of global health correspondent Gabrielle Emanuel’s work here .

Interested in more global health? 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 .

To manage podcast ad preferences, review the links below:

See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.

Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoices

NPR Privacy Policy

One vendor doesn't mind high RAM prices: VMware

Memory tiering and pooled memory are having a moment because they offer the chance to use less RAM

The high price of memory and solid-state storage has almost everyone worried – but not VMware, because the most innovative new feature in the Cloud Foundation 9 (VCF 9) private cloud suite it launched last year is memory tiering tech that allows offload of data from RAM to NVMe drives.…

Searching for Selenite

Oklahoma’s Salt Plains National Wildlife Refuge attracts rare and diverse species—and enthusiasts looking for a distinct type of crystallized gypsum.

European Space Agency and China both achieve gigabit links to geostationary satellites

Raises hopes birds 40,000km away can be reprogrammed, for science or military purposes

The European Space Agency and the Institute of Optoelectronics at China’s Academy of Sciences both claim they’ve achieved gigabit links to satellites in geostationary orbit.…

Google feels the need for security speed, so will ship Chrome updates every two weeks

Retains eight-weekly Extended Stable releases but warns fortnightly updates are the best way to stay safe

Google will halve the time between releases of its Chrome browser to two weeks, across versions of the software for desktop operating systems, Android, and iOS.…

OpenAI says its latest model is less likely to beat around the bush

The AI giant is also trying to walk back some terms of its deal with the Defense Department

OpenAI says GPT‑5.3 Instant, the latest addition to its GPT-5.3 family of models, is less inclined to moralize.…

Never bet against x86

Chips and Cheese has an excellent deep dive into Arm’s latest core design, and I have thoughts. Arm now has a core with enough performance to take on not only laptop, but also desktop use cases. They’ve also shown it’s possible to deliver that performance at a modest 4 GHz clock speed. Arm achieved that by executing well on the fundamentals throughout the core pipeline. X925’s branch predictor is fast and state-of-the-art. Its out-of-order execution engine is truly gargantuan. Penalties are few, and tradeoffs appear well considered. There aren’t a lot of companies out there capable of building a core with this level of performance, so Arm has plenty to be proud of. That said, getting a high performance core is only one piece of the puzzle. Gaming workloads are very important in the consumer space, and benefit more from a strong memory subsystem than high core throughput. A DSU variant with L3 capacity options greater than 32 MB could help in that area. X86-64’s strong software ecosystem is another challenge to tackle. And finally, Arm still relies on its partners to carry out its vision. I look forward to seeing Arm take on all of these challenges, while also iterating on their core line to keep pace as AMD and Intel improve their cores. Hopefully, extra competition will make better, more affordable CPUs for all of us. ↫ Chester Lam at Chips and Cheese The problem with Arm processors in the desktop (and laptop) space certainly isn’t one of performance – as this latest design by Arm once again shows. No, the real problem is a complete and utter lack of standardisation, with every chip and every device in the Arm space needing dedicated, specific operating system images people need to create, maintain, and update. This isn’t just a Linux or BSD problem, as even Microsoft has had numerous problems with this, despite Windows on Arm only supporting a very small number of Qualcomm processors. A law or rule that has held fast since the original 8086: never bet against x86. The number of competing architectures that were all surely going to kill x86 is staggeringly big – PowerPC, Alpha, PA-RISC, Sparc, Itanium, and many more – and even when those chips were either cheaper, faster, or both, they just couldn’t compete with x86’s unique strength: its ecosystem. When I buy an x86 computer, either in parts or from an OEM, either Intel or AMD, I don’t have to worry for one second if Windows, Linux, one of the BSDs, or goddamn FreeDOS, and all of their applications, are going to run on it. They just will. Everything is standardised, for better or worse, from peripheral interconnects to the extremely crucial boot process. On the Arm side, though? It’s a crapshoot. That’s why whenever anyone recommends a certain cool Arm motherboard or mini PC, the first thing you have to figure out is what its software support situation is like. Does the OEM provide blessed Linux images? If so, do they offer more than an outdated Ubuntu build? Have they made any update promises? Will Windows boot on this thing? Does it work with any GPUs I might already own? There’s so many unknowns and uncertainties you just don’t have to deal with when opting for x86. For its big splashy foray into general purpose laptops with its Snapdragon Elite chips, Qualcomm promised Linux support on par with Windows from day one. We’re several years down the line, and it’s still a complete mess. And that’s just one chip line, of one generation! As long as every individual Arm SoC and Arm board are little isolated islands with unknown software and hardware support status, x86 will continue to survive, even if x86 laptops use more power, even if x86 chips end up being slower. Without the incredible ecosystem x86 has, Arm will never achieve its full potential, and eventually, as has happened to every single other x86 competitor, x86 will eventually catch up to and surpass Arm’s strong points, at lower prices. Never bet against x86.

Nvidia-backed photonics startup Ayar Labs fills its wallet to mass-produce CPO chiplets

Company aims to stitch tens of thousands of GPUs together for more efficient training and inference

It's a good time to be an AI chip startup, especially if you happen to specialize in silicon photonics.…

Dev stunned by $82K Gemini bill after unknown API key thief goes to town

Probably not an isolated incident only as researchers have already found 2,863 live API keys exposed

A developer says their company is on the hook for more than $82,000 in unauthorized charges after a stolen Google Gemini API key racked massive usage costs up in just 48 hours.…

Facebook went down for about three hours, interrupting your poking and Meta's ads business

Go outside and smell some flowers

Updated  Meta’s flagship service, Facebook, is experiencing an outage.…

Launch Keyboard tips to make you more productive

Tips & tricks for the newly redesigned Launch Configurable Keyboards.

La NASA refuerza Artemis: añade una misión y perfecciona su arquitectura general

Read this story in English here. A fin de lograr el objetivo nacional de llevar astronautas estadounidenses a la superficie de la Luna y mantener la superioridad de Estados Unidos en exploración y descubrimientos, la NASA anunció el 27 de febrero que aumentará la frecuencia de sus misiones con el programa Artemis, estandarizará la configuración del […]

MIT boffins aim to build injectable mini-organs that can fill in for a damaged liver

Injected liver cells stayed viable and functional for eight weeks in mice

Can’t keep waiting on the transplant list? How about an injectable “satellite liver” instead? After an MIT research project showed early success, the idea of a mini organ that could be injected into the body to take over for a failing liver doesn’t sound so far-fetched.…

The 64-bit Hurd for Gux is here

Fifteen months have passed since our last Guix/Hurd on a Thinkpad X60 post and a lot has happened with respect to the Hurd. And most of you will have guessed, unless you skipped the title of this post, the rumored x86_64 support has landed in Guix! ↫ Janneke Nieuwenhuizen and Yelninei at the Guix blog A huge amount of work has gone into this effort over the past 18 months, but you can now download Guix and alongside the Linux kernel, you can now opt for the Hurd as well, in eother 32bit or 64 bit flavour. Do note that while Debian GNU/Hurd offers about 75% of Debian packages, Guix/Hurd only offers about 1.7% (32-bit) and 0.9% (64-bit) of packages for now. These percentages are always growing, of course, and now that Guix/Hurd can be installed in virtual machines and even on bare metal relatively easily like this, things might speed up a bit.

NASA Strengthens Artemis: Adds Mission, Refines Overall Architecture

To achieve the national goal of landing American astronauts on the surface of the Moon and maintaining U.S. superiority in exploration and discovery, NASA announced Feb. 27 it is increasing its cadence of missions under the Artemis program, standardizing the SLS (Space Launch System) rocket configuration, and adding a new mission. The plans were shared […]

Panamanian Golden Frogs Disappeared From the Wild Due to a Deadly Fungus. Now, Scientists Are Returning Them to Nature

Smithsonian researchers in Panama have begun to reintroduce native golden frogs to the wild in special enclosures

Artemis II: What’s on the Menu?

The food flying aboard Artemis II is designed to support crew health and performance during the mission around the Moon. With no resupply, refrigeration, or late-load capability, all meals must be carefully selected to remain safe, shelf-stable, and easy to prepare and consume in NASA’s Orion spacecraft. Food selections are developed in coordination with space […]

Chat at your own risk! Data brokers are selling deeply personal bot transcripts

AI conversations for sale include sensitive health and legal details

Your latest chat transcript could be bought and sold. Data brokers are selling access to sensitive personal data captured during chatbot conversations, despite claims that the data is anonymized and obtained with consent.…

Here's How Animators Make Stop-Motion Masterpieces Like 'Wallace & Gromit' Come Alive

Aardman's shows, shorts and feature films require painstaking craftsmanship. An interactive exhibition at the Young V&A museum in London brings museumgoers behind the scenes

Apple jacks up MacBook pricing with M5 Pro, Max debut

No one can hide from the RAMapocalypse, not even Tim Apple

RAM shortages and faster chips have a big impact on Apple's next-gen laptops. On Tuesday, the iGiant unveiled its M5 Pro and Max MacBook Pros and M5 Airs alongside steep price hikes across the lineup.…

Lawmakers take pick to ICE's warrantless location tracking purchases

After DHS’s $2.3M PenLink contract gets ‘shady’ label

A group of 70 US lawmakers has called on Homeland Security's inspector general to investigate whether its agencies - including US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) - illegally purchased Americans' location data without first obtaining warrants.…

Are 1 in 200 Men Alive Today Really Related to Genghis Khan? Probably Not, According to New Research

A new DNA analysis suggests that the genetic legacy of the Mongol Empire's founder is likely more complicated than historians previously assumed

Curiosity Blog, Sols 4818-4824: Thinking Out of the Boxwork

Written by Ashley Stroupe, Operations Systems Engineer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory Earth planning date: Friday, Feb. 27, 2026 This week we had three planning sessions, exploring the eastern side of the boxwork unit. As a Rover Planner on Monday, I worked on the arm and drive activities, while on Friday I served as the […]

NASA Invites Proposals to Lease Land Parcels at Sandusky Facility

NASA’s Glenn Research Center is seeking proposals to lease select land parcels at its Neil Armstrong Test Facility in Sandusky, Ohio. Proposals are due by 5 p.m. EST on July 2, 2026. The parcels are part of an area of land that currently serves as a buffer for ongoing NASA operations. The solicitation includes the […]

Cyberwarriors elevated to big leagues in US war with Iran

No more hiding in the server closet: Cyber ops mentioned alongside kinetic warfare as critical to conflict

In what may be the most public acknowledgment of its cyber operations capabilities to date, the Pentagon has admitted that cyber soldiers are playing a key role in its attacks on Iran. …

The Pop!_OS 24.04 LTS Upgrade is here!

Essential info for 22.04 LTS users on upgrading to the new Pop!_OS.

Accenture down to buy Downdetector as part of $1.2 billion deal

The deal includes all Ookla assets including Speedtest, Ekahau, and RootMetrics

Accenture is going to get a closer look into how web traffic is moving...or not moving. The company has announced plans to buy Downdetector parent company Ookla from Ziff Davis as part of a package deal with other software for $1.2 billion.…

BunsenLabs Carbon keeps the CrunchBang flame alive with Debian 13

Release lays the groundwork for going Wayland, if that's your sort of thing

BunsenLabs Linux is a lightweight, Debian-based distro forked from CrunchBang, and seven months after Debian 13 "Trixie" arrived, the project has released its latest version, dubbed Carbon.…

We've Been Manipulating Images Since the Invention of Photography—Long Before Photoshop or Artificial Intelligence

Dating to between 1860 and 1940, more than 50 photographs depicting the impossible are on view in a new exhibition at the Rijksmuseum

Like an 'Eight-Ton Chicken,' Tyrannosaurus Rex May Have Run on Its Tiptoes to Catch Speedy Prey

A new study suggests that the giant dinosaurs' locomotion resembled that of modern-day birds

Turns out most cybercriminals are old enough to know better

Law enforcement data shows profit-driven cybercrime is dominated by 35- to 44-year-olds, not script kiddies

Contrary to what some believe, cybercrime is not a kids' game. Middle-aged adults, not teenagers, now make up the biggest chunk of people getting busted.…

Emperor Penguins' Annual Molt Might Put Them in Peril. The Sea Ice They Rely on During This Vulnerable Period Is Disappearing

The birds' already risky molting strategy—in which they shed and regrow all their feathers at once—is becoming even more hazardous due to climate change

Western governments seek to lock down 6G before it even exists

Telecoms coalition wants to avoid another 5G-style vendor scramble with early security guardrails

A group of Western governments has launched a fresh bid to shape 6G before it's even standardized, unveiling a set of security and resilience principles to bake supply chain controls and cyber safeguards into the next generation of mobile networks.…

CIOs say AI adoption is moving faster than they can manage

Risk management? Continuity plan if our provider disappears? We've heard of these things

AI adoption is moving too rapidly say senior tech leaders, as the pressure to deploy clashes with risk management and compliance concerns.…

AWS backs Open VSX as Rust survey shows VS Code decline

AI-first editors and agent-driven tooling intensify competition in the IDE market

The Open VSX registry, used for installing extensions in editors compatible with Visual Studio Code (VS Code), will run on Amazon Web Services (AWS) infrastructure in Europe as part of a "strategic investment" from the cloud giant.…

Until last month, attackers could've stolen info from Perplexity Comet users just by sending a calendar invite

AI browsing agent left local files open for the taking

If you wanted to steal local files from someone using Perplexity's Comet browser, until last month you could just schedule the theft by sending your victim a calendar event.…

Two Observatories, One Cosmic Eye: Hubble and Euclid View Cat’s Eye Nebula

This new NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image features one of the most visually intricate remnants of a dying star: the Cat’s Eye Nebula, also known as NGC 6543. This extraordinary planetary nebula lies in the constellation Draco and has captivated astronomers for decades with its elaborate and multilayered structure. Observations with ESA’s Gaia mission place the nebula at 4,400 light-years away. […]

Bank of England says it can run £431M settlement system without Accenture

Deputy governor tells MPs central bank now has in-house skills and IP to maintain revamped RTGS

As the last Accenture employee clocked off from supporting the Bank of England's £431 million Real-Time Gross Settlement (RTGS) system, the Old Lady of Threadneedle Street was assured it would no longer depend on the global consultancy.…

Bootleg Windows, Office scheme crashes, triggers 22-month lockup for Florida woman

Heidi Richards paid more than $5M for certificate of authenticity labels in five years

A Florida woman will spend nearly two years behind bars after being found guilty of fraudulently acquiring Microsoft certificate of authenticity (COA) labels and selling them in bulk.…

Microsoft reportedly eyes E7 tier to make AI agents pay their way – like the humans they'll replace

Redmond wants a monthly cut from every digital worker on your payroll. Agents don't need dental, they will need a SKU

Microsoft is reportedly planning to license AI agents like employees – and charge accordingly.…

Chrome Gemini panel became privilege escalator for rogue extensions

High-severity flaw let malicious add-ons access system via browser's embedded AI feature

Security boffins have discovered a high-severity bug in Google Chrome that allowed malicious extensions to hijack its Gemini Live AI panel and inherit privileges they were never meant to have.…

Cybercriminals swipe 15.8M medical records from French doctors ministry

Third-party software supplier breached leading to leak of notes

Around 15.8 million administrative files were stolen after attackers breached a software supplier to France's health ministry.…

Vodafone to use Amazon sats for cell backhaul in remote parts of Europe, Africa

From Bavarian Alps to Congo basin and other places where laying cable is a PITA

Vodafone has signed a deal with Amazon Leo to use its satellites as a backhaul connection for cellular base stations in remote areas of Europe and Africa, saving it from having to cable them up to its core network.…

Brussels urged to pay 'sovereignty premium' to narrow China battery gap

Analysis claims €500 per EV could secure local production and cut reliance on foreign supply chains

Europe's EV battery cost gap with China – currently around 90 percent – could shrink to roughly 30 percent by 2030 if Brussels is willing to pay what campaigners call a "sovereignty premium."…

Will Punch the baby monkey be okay?

If you’ve been on the internet in the past few weeks, chances are you’ve seen him: a tiny gray-brown monkey dragging a big, stuffed orangutan around Japan’s Ichikawa Zoo. His name? Punch-kun, or Punch for short. His story? Early abandonment by his mother, careful treatment from local zookeepers and instant social media fame. But are all the (human) primates jumping to Punch’s defense justified? And what’s normal for Japanese macaque society, anyway? To find out, NPR’s Katia Riddle chats with psychology professor and animal expert Lauren Robinson.

Interested in more animal 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.

To manage podcast ad preferences, review the links below:

See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.

Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoices

NPR Privacy Policy

Gamers furious as indie studio Cloud Imperium quietly admits to data breach

Slow disclosure and odd reassurance that exposing names and contact details won't be a problem isn't going down well

Gamers are ready to unleash their mightiest virtual weapons and point them at independent games studio Cloud Imperium, after it sat on news of a data breach for weeks and then announced it without fanfare.…

Claude having artificially intelligent hiccups and access lockouts for over two hours

Developers ponder the horror of having to actually write code

Anthropic’s AI service Claude is having artificially intelligent hiccups and availability problems across its basic chat service, API, and Claude Code offering.…

Smoke Rises Over Big Cypress National Preserve

The National fire has burned tens of thousands of acres within the Florida preserve, fueled by vegetation dried by prolonged drought and killed by recent frost.

Huawei brings its flatpack AI datacenters, packed full of Chinese chips, to the world

Claims it can build and deploy them fast, whether they run at speed is another matter

As the AI boom rages, investors and buyers have thrown cash at anyone that even looks capable of selling them hardware capable of crunching tokens at speed. And now they have a new option: China’s Huawei.…

Phish of the day: Microsoft OAuth scams abuse redirects for malware delivery

Crims hope for payday from malicious payloads rather than stealing access tokens

Microsoft has warned organizations about ongoing OAuth abuse scams that use phishing emails and URL redirects to infect victims' machines with malware and take over their devices.…

Nvidia burns $4B to light up American photonics manufacturing

Coherent, Lumentum each walk away with $2B in cash and a multi-billion purchase commitment

Nvidia is dipping into its war chest once again this week, investing $2 billion each in Coherent and Lumentum to lock in supply of the vendors' respective silicon photonics technologies.…

Iran war wreaking havoc on shipping and air cargo, could create global delays

Markets in the Middle East will be affected first and worst

The war against Iran is causing an air and shipping jam, but it will likely have little effect on the global technology market unless the conflict widens significantly, according to analysts.…

Setting up phones is a nightmare

Have you bought and set up a new phone for someone else lately, especially someone less technologically savvy? It’s a bit of a nightmare, with an endless list of confusing steps and dark patterns trying to trick you into signing up for all kinds of services. Joel Chrono (he took his username from the best game ever made) just went through this experience, with new Samsung phones for his parents, and it wasn’t great. Without me, my parents would have ended up creating at least one extra Samsung account. Cloud services like OneDrive or Google Photos would be sucking up files and copying them to their servers, getting filled up with the data and then asking them to subscribe to unlock more storage a couple of months down the line. Left on their own, my parents may be seeing ads popping up constantly in OneUI, as well as browsing the web without an adblocker, they would be using default applications that don’t work as reliably, that track whatever they do to a certain degree. And of course, all of those AI assistants would be listening in in the background. It really is a nightmare out there, and it’s not only affecting my parents, it affects all of those unaware of the dangers that these practices bring. It’s a mess all around. ↫ Joel Chrono In this particular case it involves Samsung phones, but the same applies to phones from other brands and even with other operating systems. Do you want to login with these accounts? Please add your credit card and all your personal information! Set up tap-to-pay so we can see where you buy what! Do you want to subscribe to our music service? Do you want access to our streaming service? What about the premium versions? Need more online storage? You’re only getting 5GB for free, so if you don’t want to lose those priceless pictures of your grand kids you should really upgrade to 1TB! Have you checked out our application store yet? And don’t worry, if you say no to any of these questions we’ll keep pestering you about them with notifications, fullscreen interstitials and banners in the settings application until your brain dissolves to mush! I have a collection of about a million PDAs, from the early days up until the very fanciest models from right around when the iPhone and Android started taking off. Of course, they’re in storage so virtually always out of battery, but when I do turn any of them on, their onboarding process couldn’t be simpler. Tap a few locations on the screen to calibrate the touch layer, set the date and time, and that’s it – you’re at the home screen ready to go. I wish modern smartphones were similar. I wish the greedy bean counters were told to pound sand and the user interface specialists took over again. My wife and I have two young boys, 3 and almost 5. One day, I’ll be the out-of-touch dad or grandpa and I’ll need their help to set up my brain implant chip or whatever. I hope it won’t involve upsells for streaming services.

Why NASA's Artemis 3 Mission Isn't Sending Astronauts to the Moon Anymore

The mission’s goals have changed, and Artemis 4 will be the first lunar landing attempt. Four missions are tentatively scheduled within the next three years

Museum Devoted to the Romantic Movement Reopens in Paris After Extensive Renovations

The Musée de la Vie Romantique, where the Dutch-French painter Ary Scheffer once lived, opened its doors on Valentine's Day

AWS says drones hit two of its datacenters in UAE, urges users to move resources to different regions

Multiple zones Middle East in UAE disrupted, with water damage complicating recovery

UPDATED  Multiple Amazon Web Services (AWS) availability zones in the Middle East are experiencing outages or degraded connectivity after objects struck a UAE facility, as Iranian retaliatory missile and drone attacks hit targets across the Gulf.…

Iran's cyberwar has begun

'Expect elevated activity for the foreseeable future'

Iranian hackers have launched spying expeditions, digital probes, and distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks in the wake of the US and Israel launching missile strikes over the weekend, and security researchers urge organizations to expect more cyber intrusions as the war continues.…

What’s Up: March 2026 Skywatching Tips from NASA

What are some skywatching highlights in March 2026? A total lunar eclipse blood moon takes centre stage, Venus and Saturn cozy up for a conjunction, and we celebrate the vernal equinox.

Illustrating Roc’s World: A Spotlight on Michaela Martin

Thunderbird’s mascot, Roc, is a bit of an unsung hero. If you’ve ever donated to the project, he’s the happy blue bird who thanks you for supporting our work. For the 2024 End of Year appeal, the Thunderbird team commissioned design artist Michaela Martin to broaden Roc’s world. Her whimsical illustration, which is also available […]

The post Illustrating Roc’s World: A Spotlight on Michaela Martin appeared first on The Thunderbird Blog.

Microsoft really doesn’t want you to use the name “Microslop”

Microsoft is pushing “AI” hard in Windows, Office, and in their other products, and it’s earned them a cute new nickname: Microslop. It turns out the company really doesn’t like it when you use this nickname, however, and its official Copilot Discord server – yes, there is an official one – has gone into a complete meltdown over people using the nickname. First the company started banning the word “Microslop” in its Discord server, but after people started circumventing the ban with alternative spellings. That’s when all hell broke loose. What started as a simple keyword filter quickly snowballed into users deliberately testing the restriction and posting variations of the blocked term. Accounts that included “Microslop” in their messages first got banned from messaging again. Not long after, access to parts of the server was restricted, with message history hidden and posting permissions disabled for many users. ↫ Abhijith M B at Windows Latest People don’t like “AI”. They don’t like being forced to use it at work, they don’t like it shoved in their face in their operating systems, they don’t like every new product being plastered with nonsensical “AI” marketing. It’s absolutely no surprise that one of the companies pushing “AI” in the most visible way, a company few people like anyway, gets a nice new nickname. I love that this happened. I hope their brand suffers as much as possible.

Shipwreck Timbers Appeared on a Beach After a Storm. They Had Been Buried Beneath the Sand Since the 17th Century

Experts think the newly unearthed timbers may have come from the "Fame," an armed Dutch merchant vessel that sank off the Dorset coast in 1631

Popular prayer program becomes propaganda pusher after reported Israeli hack

Iranian worshippers got notifications saying 'help has arrived'

Imagine your favorite app encouraging you to surrender during a war. That's happening right now in Iran.…

Motorola partners with GrapheneOS for future phones

Don't expect to see compatible hardware before 2027

GrapheneOS is headed to Motorola smartphones in 2027, pending hardware from the Lenovo-owned brand that satisfies the privacy-focused Android fork's requirements.…

Georges Seurat Is Most Famous for His Pointillist Painting of a Paris Park. But More Than Half of His Canvases Were Stunning Seascapes

More than two dozen artworks depicting the northern coast of France are now on display at the Courtauld Gallery in London. It's the first-ever exhibition dedicated to the French artist's seascapes

US struck Iran with copies of its own drones

Iran's own technology reverse engineered and used against it.

The Pentagon has confirmed that US forces struck Iranian targets using weapons that are copies of Iran's own Shahed 136 suicide drones.…

UK businesses told to brace cyber defenses amid Iran conflict risk

NCSC urges all to review posture as escalating tensions increase risk of indirect digital spillover

The UK's cybersecurity agency is warning British organizations to brace for potential digital blowback as the Middle East conflict spills further into the online world.…

Qualcomm, Nvidia ready for 'AI-native' 6G, if only the world knew what it was

Meanwhile, formal 6G specs are still in the works

It seems like just yesterday that the 5G rollout started. Now, at Mobile World Congress, major companies are already talking about commercializing 6G. Never mind that binding 6G standards haven't been nailed down yet.…

These Majestic Goats Have Been Traipsing Around Ireland for at Least 3,000 Years, Research Suggests

Goat bones dating to between 1100 B.C.E. and 900 B.C.E. were a close genetic match for modern Old Irish goats, a historic breed with declining numbers

Singapore eyes barge-based hydrogen power for datacenters

Saves real estate by putting the power on the water

Datacenters increasingly want dedicated power, and Singapore has a unique solution. Bridge Data Centres (BDC) and Concord New Energy (CNE) are working to put hydrogen power generators on barges, saying that this arrangement is particularly suited to the local environment.…

@System 76 Blog

Betting on Beta: Oryx Pro debuts with new Pop!_OS

System76’s flagship laptop is back with a Big Bang.

The Latest Updates to COSMIC Epoch 1

Features and fixes added since COSMIC's first release.

COSMIC Epoch 2 and 3 Roadmap

View planned features for upcoming releases, such as frosted glass, desktop animations, and printer settings.

Pop!_OS 24.04 LTS Released: A Letter From Our Founder

An important message on Pop!_OS, Linux, and one downright fantastic community.

Sunglint on Atlantic Ocean

Sunlight beams off a partly cloudy Atlantic Ocean just after sunrise as the International Space Station orbited 263 miles above on March 5, 2025. This is an example of sunglint, an optical phenomenon that occurs when sunlight reflects off the surface of water at the same angle that a satellite sensor views it. The result is […]

NASA, JAXA to Cover HTV-X1 Spacecraft Departure from Space Station

After delivering about 12,000 pounds of supplies, scientific investigations, hardware, and other cargo to the International Space Station for NASA and its international partners, JAXA’s (Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency’s) uncrewed HTV‑X1 cargo spacecraft is scheduled to depart Friday, March 6. Watch NASA’s live coverage beginning at 11:45 a.m. EST on NASA+, Amazon Prime, and the […]

Generic methods arrive in Golang, but they weren't the top dev demand

Approved proposal reverses earlier stance, even as survey highlights bigger frustrations

The Go team has approved generic methods, reversing a longstanding position in the language's FAQ. The proposal, from Go co-designer Robert Griesemer, now moves to implementation.…

Stop macOS 26 nagging with one tiny policy tweak

Trick uses a simple configuration profile to convince your Mac that upgrading isn't allowed

Averse to "liquid glass"? Are you happy enough with your Mac as it is? Try this local policy and banish those upgrade nag screens for a few months.…

Neanderthal Men May Have Often Hooked Up With Human Women Thousands of Years Ago

Most people alive today carry a little Neanderthal DNA—except in a few spots. A new study might explain why

What Crystals Older Than the Sun Reveal About the Start of the Solar System

Microscopic crystals extracted from meteorites could help settle a debate about the birth of our patch of the Milky Way.

The post What Crystals Older Than the Sun Reveal About the Start of the Solar System first appeared on Quanta Magazine

Fly me to the Moon: NASA reshuffles the Artemis card deck

Artemis III now to follow in Apollo 9's footsteps, 2028 landing still planned for Artemis IV

NASA has reshuffled its Artemis program, pushing the first crewed lunar landing in more than half a century back to Artemis IV, with Artemis III performing a check-out of the lunar lander in Earth orbit.…

Treetops Emit Ultraviolet Sparkles During Thunderstorms. Researchers Just Filmed It in Nature for the First Time

The weather events probably cause the air around leaves to produce weak electrical discharges

SAP writes $480M check to finally end IP legal spat with Teradata

A joint venture from 2008 led to years of claims and counter-claims between the data whizzkids

Data warehousing and analytics biz Teradata and SAP have ended their long-running legal dispute after the German ERP vendor agreed to cough up $480 million to bring the fighting to a close.…

Memory scalpers hunt scarce DRAM with bot blitz

We can remember it for you wholesale, and sell it back to you for big bucks

Web scraping bots are increasing the pressure on the tech supply chain by scouring sites for DRAM, so their minders can snap up increasingly scarce inventory and resell it for a quick profit.…

KDE makes steady progress on Union, its unified theme engine

If you’re following KDE Plasma development, you’ve most likely run into something called Union, a project KDE is working on to unify their various ways of theming their applications. The problem KDE is facing right now is that after so many decades of development and changes in how people want to develop applications, they ended up with various different ways of writing applications, each with their own theming method. The end result has been that for a while now, theming on KDE is kind of broken. Broken in what way? Most long-time KDE users will be aware that ever since KDE 4, the KDE shell (Plasma using SVG for theming) and KDE applications (QtWidgets using QStyle for theming) use separate theme engines. While this has always been annoying, it’s at least manageable in that most theme designers tended to create both a Plasma SVG theme and a QStyle theme that matched. However, things got more complicated when KDE introduced QtQuick, its modern way of creating applications with QML. QtQuick has its own theme, qqc2-desktop-style, to make QtQuick applications look and feel like Breeze, KDE’s current theme. Not only do all of these have to be kept in sync manually, QtQuick applications also do not properly inherit all the elements of the QStyle theme you set, leading to many modern KDE applications looking broken when using a non-default theme (and the same applies when using Kvantum; it also cannot properly theme QtQuick applications). In other words, there is currently no way to theme the entire KDE desktop for a consistent look, and if you try, many applications will simply look broken. Union is KDE’s answer to this set of problems. Union is a new style engine that takes CSS and processes it into consistent themes for both QtWidget and QtQuick applications. It’s quite flexible, and can potentially even be extended to generate GTK themes from that same CSS. Sadly, since the KDE Pasma shell SVG stuff is entirely different, it won’t be styled by Union, but KDE might simply retire the SVG stuff entirely and move the Plasma shell to QtQuick’s qqc2-desktop-style to address that issue. Union has been in development for a long time, as it’s a difficult effort, but progress is definitely being made. KDE is currently already at the stage where they’re adapting the current Breeze QStyle to better match the Union Breeze’s style, to make the future transition from the separate QStyle/qqc2-desktop-style to the unified, single Union Breeze as seamless as possible. These changes are currently available for testing in the master branch, and will be part of Plasma 6.7 or 6.8. As a KDE user who likes to have a more classic, late ’90s theme, but who also values consistency above all else, Union is something I’m very much looking forward to. While it certainly won’t fix every single issue right away, it will definitely address the biggest issues with theming on KDE. I’m incredibly happy that KDE’s developers still consider theming and user choice and agency over what pixels appear on their screen important enough to undertake an effort like Union.

Scammers try to SIM-swap Dubai citizens hours after Iranian missile strikes

Vulnerable citizens targeted by criminals purporting to represent fake police crisis department

Scammers targeted Dubai citizens mere hours after missiles struck the city, attempting to gain access to their bank accounts, police have warned.…

Windows 11 tops market share as 10 faces extended farewell

More than a fifth of servers still on Windows Server 2016

Windows 11 has leapt ahead of Windows 10 in market share, according to the latest Statcounter figures.…

Firefox 149 beta develops a split personality

A handy feature you can already try in recent versions

The new beta of the next version of Firefox lets you view two web pages side by side, with a split you can drag with your mouse.…

Iran all but vanishes from the global internet amid US-Israel strikes

Official monitoring shows connectivity collapsing to near-zero

Iran's internet has plunged into a near-total blackout, with traffic down to around 1 percent of normal levels and connectivity described as "close to zero" as authorities curb access amid widening regional conflict.…

Microsoft's Project Silica promises eternal storage. It can't get there from here

Soon turned out, we had a heart of glass

Opinion  There is more joy in heaven over a single report of genuinely new technology than in a thousand desperate AI marketing pitches. What the angels will make of Microsoft's Project Silica, a mixture of the two, is less clear.…

LibreOffice Online dragged out of the attic, dusted off for another go

Browser-based version back on the menu, reopening questions about TDF's relationship with Collabora

The Document Foundation (TDF) has pulled LibreOffice Online out of its "attic" – its term for retired projects – and is resuming development.…

Spring ice is thawing earlier in lakes. What does that mean for life below the surface?

Lakes are freezing later, thawing earlier and experiencing dramatic temperature swings in between. And all that throws off the delicate balance of life below the surface. And that has a major impact on the roughly 1.7 million ice fishers in the U.S. who spend millions of dollars buying equipment and guide services each year. Producer Berly McCoy explains how scientists are tracking those ecological changes by getting out on the ice — to fish.

Interested in more freshwater 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 .

To manage podcast ad preferences, review the links below:

See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.

Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoices

NPR Privacy Policy

Server crashes traced to one very literal knee-jerk reaction

Oh, the contortions required to debug strange errors!

Who, Me?  A weekend of unwinding is behind us, so The Register returns to work on Monday with a fresh installment of "Who, Me?" – the reader-contributed column that reveals how you got in a tangle, and then extricated yourself.…

OpenAI’s Altman says Pentagon set ‘scary precedent’ binning Anthropic

Signs a deal with Washington anyway, says he’s kept control of killer robots by allowing only cloudy AI, with guardrails

OpenAI has signed a deal with the United States Department of War (DoW) that allows use of its advanced AI systems in classified environments, and urged the Pentagon to make the same terms available to its rivals.…

Scoria Cones on Earth and Mars

The hill-shaped features are a sign of explosive volcanic activity—a rarity on the Red Planet.

UK government's Vulnerability Monitoring System is working - fixes flow far faster

PLUS: Firefox adds XSS protection; Leadership turnover at CISA; FTC exempts some data collection

Infosec In Brief  DNS vulnerabilities are being addressed 84 percent faster in the UK public sector thanks to an automated vulnerability scanning system established as part of a program kicked off early last year.…

South Korea’s tax office apologizes for leaking seed phrase to seized crypto

Went from triumph at having busted tax dodgers to embarrassment at losing the proceeds

South Korea’s National Tax Service has apologized after it leaked passwords to a stash of stolen crypto, which parties unknown used to make off with the digi-cash.…

Lenovo shows off snap-together laptop with removable keyboard, screen, and ports

New ThinkPads also come in blue, get perfect fixability score

If you own a desktop computer, you're used to swapping parts and peripherals around, but most laptops are closed boxes with few ways to modify them. Lenovo's new ThinkBook Modular AI PC concept shows what happens when you can remove a screen, a keyboard, and even blocks of ports from a mobile PC.…

AWS Middle East disrupted after ‘objects struck datacenter’ amid Iran war

PLUS: AI claims 2,000 jobs at Australia’s WiseTech; Samsung wants humanoid robots for autonomous factories; Micron opens India plant; And more!

Asia In brief  One of Amazon Web Services’ availability zones in the United Arab Emirates is offline after the facility was hit by unknown objects.…

You can use newline characters in URLs

I had no idea, but apparently, you can just use newline characters and tabs in URLs without any issues. Notice how it reports an error if there is a tab or newline character, but continues anyway? The specification says that A validation error does not mean that the parser terminates and it encourages systems to report errors somewhere. Effectively, the error is ignored although it might be logged. Thus our HTML is fine in practice. ↫ Daniel Lemire This reminds me of the “Email is easy” quiz.

OpenClaw, but in containers: Meet NanoClaw

A smaller, security-conscious take on the viral AI agent platform

Interview  Ideally, you shouldn't have to defend yourself against your own AI agent. But we don't live in an ideal world and an unrestrained agent can cause a ton of damage.…

SaaS-pocalypse chatter is doomster pr0n. It would be nice if enterprise IT were boring again

Lost among the investor froth, someone has to do all the boring stuff. And they'll probably be around for the next spin of the hype cycle

Opinion  Say goodbye to the SaaS-pocalypse theory, which posits that advances in AI will bring the software-as-a-service market to its knees. Say hello to "a feedback loop with no natural brake." Or doomster porn, as others would have it.…

Run this random script in the terminal to block Apple’s macOS Tahoe update notification spam

Are you not at all interested in upgrading to macOS Tahoe, and getting annoyed at the relentless notification spam from Apple trying to trick you into upgrading? The secret? Using device management profiles, which let you enforce policies on Macs in your organization, even if that “organization” is one Mac on your desk. One of the available policies is the ability to block activities related to major macOS updates for up to 90 days at a time (the max the policy allows), which seems like exactly what I needed. Not being anywhere near an expert on device profiles, I went looking to see what I could find, and stumbled on the Stop Tahoe Update project. The eventual goals of this project are quite impressive, but what they’ve done so far is exactly what I needed: A configuration profile that blocks Tahoe update activities for 90 days. ↫ Rob Griffiths All you need to do is clone a random GitHub repository, set all its scripts to executable, generate two random UUIDs, insert those UUIDs into one of the scripts in the GitHub project folder you just cloned, run said script, open System Settings and go to Privacy & Security > Profiles, install the profile the script created, click install in two different dialogs, and now you have blocked Apple’s update notification spam! Well, for 90 days that is. I honestly don’t understand how normal people are supposed to use macOS. The amount of weird terminal commands you need just to change basic settings is bewildering. macOS definitely isn’t ready for the desktop if they expect users to use the terminal for so many basic tasks. I’m glad I’m using Linux, where I don’t have to deal with the terminal at all.

The Windows 95 user interface: a case study in usability engineering

If this isn’t catnip to the average OSNews reader, I don’t know what is. Windows 95 is a comprehensive upgrade to the Windows 3.1 and Windows for Workgroups 3.11 products. Many changes have been made in almost every area of Windows, with the user interface being no exception. This paper discusses the design team, its goals and process then explains how usability engineering principles such as iterative design and problem tracking were applied to the project, using specific design problems and their solutions as examples. ↫ Kent Sullivan This case study was written in 1996 by Kent Sullivan, who joined the Windows 95 user interface team in 1992. I consider the second half of the ’90s as the heyday of user interface design, with Windows 9x, Apple’s Platinum in Mac OS 8 and 9, and BeOS’ Tracker/Deskbar as the absolute pinnacles of user interface design. Coincidentally, this also seems to mark the end of a more scientific, study-based approach to designing graphical user interfaces. Reading through this particular case study for Windows 95 feels almost quaint. Where are the dozens of managers pushing for notification spam, upsells, and dark patterns to enable expensive data-hoarding services? Why are none of the people mentioned in the study talking about sneaky ways to secretly and silently convert your local account to an online account? Where are all the “AI” buttons? Why is there n chapter on how to trick people into enabling telemetry data? The user interfaces of the late ’90s were the last ones designed by people who actually cared, by people who approached the whole process with the end user in mind, rooted in scientific data collected by simply looking at people use their ideas. They were optimised for the user as best they could, instead of being optimised for the company’s bottom line. It’s been downhill ever since.

Bootc and OSTree: modernizing Linux system deployment

Bootc and OSTree represent a new way of thinking about Linux system deployment and management. Building on container and versioning concepts, they offer robust and modern solutions to meet the current needs of administrators and developers. ↫ Quentin Joly Slowly, very slowly, I’ve been starting to warm up to the relatively new crop of immutable Linux distributions. As a heavy Fedora user, opting for Fedora’s atomic distributions, which use bootc and OSTree, seems like the logical path to go down if I ever made the switch, and this article provides some approachable insights and examples into how, exactly, it all works, and what benefits it might give you. It definitely goes beyond what I as a mere desktop user might encounter, but if you’re managing a bunch of servers or VMs in a more professional setting, you might be interested, too. I’m still not convinced I need to switch to an immutable distribution, but I’d be lying if I said some of the benefits didn’t appeal to me.

Denizens of DEF CON are 'fed up with government'

Jake Braun thinks hackers need to create a 'Digital arsenal of democracy' to defend us all

Interview  Hackers – especially Jake Braun – are "fed up with government."…

Open source devs consider making hogs pay for every download

Careless big-time users are treating FOSS repos like content delivery networks

Opinion  I'm at the Linux Foundation Members Summit, and Sonatype's CTO Brian Fox introduced me to a new open source problem. I wouldn't have thought that was possible, but here I am.…

Windows Server Insider builds can now boot from ReFS

The file system of the Windows operating system is NTFS, whether you’re running it on a desktop/laptop or server. It’s the only file system Windows can run on and boot from, at least officially, so you’re not even given a choice of file systems for the boot volume like you are on, say, desktop Linux. That’s about to change, though: Microsoft has finally announced that Windows Server will be able to boot from ReFS. We’re excited to announce that Resilient File System (ReFS) boot support is now available for Windows Server Insiders in Insider Preview builds. For the first time, you can install and boot Windows Server on an ReFS-formatted boot volume directly through the setup UI. With ReFS boot, you can finally bring modern resilience, scalability, and performance to your server’s most critical volume — the OS boot volume. ↫ chcurlet-msft at Microsoft’s Tech Community Without diving too much into the weeds, ReFS can roughly be seen as Microsoft’s answer to modern file systems like ZFS and Btrfs, with comparable design goals and feature sets. It’s been around since 2012, but only for Windows Server, and with every Windows Server release since, the company has improved performance, added new features, and fixed bugs. Now, in 2026, it seems Microsoft thinks ReFS is ready to be used as a bootable file system for Windows Server. If you want to try this for yourself, you need to be a Windows Insider and make sure you have Windows Server build 29531.1000.260206-1841 or newer. During installation, the Windows installer will ask you to choose between NTFS and ReFS; the rest of the installation process will be pretty much the same as before. Now all we need is to wait for ReFS to become an option on client versions of Windows too, which would mark – arguably – only the second time in history Windows transitioned from one default filesystem to the another.

Double whammy: Steaelite RAT bundles data theft, ransomware in one evil tool

Credential and cryptocurrency theft, live surveillance, ransomware - an attacker's Swiss Army knife

A new remote access trojan (RAT) being sold on cybercrime networks enables double extortion attacks on Windows machines by bundling ransomware and data theft, along with credential and cryptocurrency stealers, live surveillance, and a whole host of other illicit capabilities, all controllable from a centralized dashboard.…

Trump orders purge of 'woke' Anthropic from government

Without a single 'You're Fired' joke

updated  President Trump has escalated Anthropic's dispute with the Defense Department with a social media post ordering the entire federal government purge the company's software from its systems. …

This Ancient Roman Game Board Was a Mystery. Researchers Used A.I. to Figure Out How to Play

The limestone oval is carved with a dark, thin rectangle on which ancient people repeatedly moved game pieces

US lawmakers push for age verification at the operating system level

Encryption backdoors, social media bans for children, creepy age verification for applications – what will they think of next? The latest brilliant idea by US lawmakers sure is a hell of a doozy: legally mandated age verification in every single operating system. Colorado’s SB26-051, introduced last month, would require operating systems to register the owner’s age, which third-party apps can then leverage to determine if the user is an adult. The bill calls for the device owner to register their birthdate or age, but for the purposes of creating an “age bracket,” which can then be shared to an app developer through an API to learn their age range, according to BiometricUpdate.com. Ball also said the legislation was based on California’s bill AB 1043, which was passed last year. It too requires OS makers to create a way for the device owner to register their age bracket, which can then be shared to app developers over an API. The California law starts to take effect January 1, 2027. ↫ Michael Kan at PCMag Age verification to protect children sounds innocent enough, but if you have more than two brain cells to rub together it’s crystal clear that what we’re really looking at is the true end of privacy and online anonymity. If age verification is only used by certain applications, it’s easy enough to avoid them, but if it becomes part of Windows, desktop Linux, Android, it’s truly game over. Nobody will be anonymous online ever again, and nobody will have any sense of privacy left when opening up their computer. Worse yet, if you do end up using an operating system that doesn’t adhere to this law, or you hack out or circumvent the age verification nonsense, you’ll automatically become an easy target for law enforcement. Clearly, if you circumvent age verification, you must be up to no good, right? Of course, as we’ve seen in countries with heavily deteriorating democracies and freedoms, like the US or Hungary, even merely opposing the government will be classified as “up to no good”, and let’s not even get started about the various minorities these countries are actively trying to eradicate. If something like this is enshrined in law in your country, you’re fucked.

PCs and phones to get more boring and expensive in 2026 thanks to memory drought

'This is perhaps the biggest challenge the industry has faced since its inception'

The next wave of smartphones and PCs will have less memory and fewer capabilities, yet are likely to cost consumers 14 percent more as AI ambitions eat all available memory supplies, according to researchers at IDC.…

Jails for NetBSD

FreeBSD has its jails technology, and it seems NetBSD might be getting something similar soon. Jails for NetBSD aims to bring lightweight, kernel-enforced isolation to NetBSD. The system is intended to remain fully NetBSD-native. Isolation and policy enforcement are integrated into the kernel’s security framework rather than implemented in a separate runtime layer. It does not aim to become a container platform. It does not aim to provide virtualization. ↫ Matthias Petermann It has all the usual features you have come to expect from jails, like resource quota, security profiles, logging, and so on. Processes inside jails have no clue they’re in a jail, and using supervisor mode, jails are descendent from a single process and remain visible in the host process table. Of course, there’s many more features listed in the linked article. It’s in development and not a default part of NetBSD at this time. The project, led by Matthias Petermann, is developed out of tree, with an unofficial NetBSD 10.1 ISO with the jails feature included available as well.

The Berlin Cathedral Is Reopening Its Massive Crypt—Home to the Bones of One of Europe’s Most Powerful Dynasties

The crypt, which has been closed for renovations for the past six years, houses coffins containing members of the House of Hohenzollern

A Scholar Recognized the Inscriptions in the Margins of This Manuscript. The Scribbles Turned Out to Be Galileo's Handwritten Notes

Found in a 16th-century copy of an ancient astronomy treatise, the annotations suggest that the trailblazing scientist studied Earth-centric models before lending his support to heliocentrism

Amazon and Nvidia open their wallets to lock in OpenAI's business while SoftBank keeps the lights on

ChatGPT maker announces $110B in new investment amid flurry of self-serving deals

The headlines say OpenAI on Friday announced $110 billion in new investment from Amazon, Nvidia, and SoftBank at a $730 billion pre-money valuation, though terms and conditions apply.…

Suspected Nork digital intruders caught breaking into US healthcare, education orgs

Who is knocking at the Dohdoor?

Digital intruders with possible links to North Korea have been infecting US education and healthcare sectors with a never-before-seen backdoor since at least December, according to security researchers.…

The Eerie 'Blood' Moon Will Grace the Night Sky This Week, Thanks to a Total Lunar Eclipse

The orb will take on the spooky hue for about an hour on March 3 because of sunlight filtering through Earth's atmosphere

Oak Ridge spawns institute to curb AI datacenter power surge

Lab aims to link power, cooling, and workload management to ease strain on the US grid

Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) is hoping to turn its technical expertise to the problem of growing electricity demand from AI datacenters.…

Harnessing the Sun to Extract Oxygen on the Moon

Light shines onto a solar concentrator being tested in this Aug. 7, 2025, photo. The concentrator is part of the Carbothermal Reduction Demonstration (CaRD) project, which aims to produce oxygen from simulated lunar regolith for use at the Moon’s south pole. For this test, the team integrated the solar concentrator, mirrors, and software and confirmed […]

Microsoft HoloLens finds second home in the military after failing battlefield tests

Let’s hope air cargo checks don’t trigger the same headaches

The US Army's attempt to turn Microsoft HoloLens headsets into battlefield kit may have failed, but the AR goggles aren't going into the garbage. Instead, they're being repurposed for remote cargo inspection support.…

Harvard boffins finally crack the mystery of squeaky sneakers

Are they shoe-ins for an award? Hard to say

It is a sound evocative of high school: the characteristic squeak of sneakers on a basketball court. UK readers may, however, be familiar with the same sound from their trainers while playing badminton.…

Wild Chimpanzees Love to Eat Boozy Fruit. Scientists Say the Proof Is in Their Pee

The work further hints that humans may have inherited our penchant for alcohol from our ape ancestors

NASA’s Home for Experimental Flight Advances Aeronautics Mission

Nestled in the Mojave Desert, NASA’s Armstrong Flight Research Center in Edwards, California, pushes the boundaries of flight to advance the agency’s aeronautics mission. This is where Chuck Yeager broke the sound barrier and engineers are now pioneering the future of high-speed, autonomous, and electrified aircraft. Armstrong contributes to NASA’s broader mission of innovation and […]

Lovable-hosted app littered with basic flaws exposed 18K users, researcher claims

Who's to blame – the vibey platforms or the humans who ignore security warnings?

Vibe-coding platform Lovable has been accused of hosting apps riddled with vulnerabilities after saying users are responsible for addressing security issues flagged before publishing.…

Caribou Are the Only Deer Species in Which Females Grow Antlers. Scientists Just Figured Out Why

New research suggests female reindeer antlers serve as postpartum snacks, with new moms munching on them after giving birth to get a much-needed boost of protein, calcium and phosphorus

Ransomware payments cratered in 2025, but attacks surged to record highs

Smaller crews piled in as old names splintered and rebranded

Ransomware payments cratered in 2025, but it seems like the cybercrooks launching the attacks didn't get the memo.…

Break It To Make It: How Fracturing Sculpts Tissues and Organs

Growing tissues can crack, break, and dissociate to form structures that can later withstand immense forces.

The post Break It To Make It: How Fracturing Sculpts Tissues and Organs first appeared on Quanta Magazine

NASA Adds Mission to Artemis Lunar Program, Updates Architecture

As part of a Golden Age of exploration and discovery, NASA announced Friday the agency is increasing its cadence of missions under the Artemis program to achieve the national objective of returning American astronauts to the Moon and establishing an enduring presence. This includes standardizing vehicle configuration, adding an additional mission in 2027, and undertaking at least one surface […]

French DIY etailer ManoMano admits customer data stolen

Crooks claim they helped themselves to over 37M accounts during January hit on subcontractor

Updated  French online marketplace ManoMano is warning customers their personal data was siphoned off after a cyberattack hit one of its customer support subcontractors – and criminals are already claiming the haul is far larger than the company's carefully worded notice suggests.…

Japan's Rapidus lands $1.7B to chase 2nm chip production by 2027

Government and 32 private-sector backers fund push to take on TSMC and Samsung at leading-edge nodes

Japan's fledgling foundry biz Rapidus has secured funding of $1.7 billion to help it progress to mass production of 2nm semiconductors by 2027, making it a potential rival for Taiwan's TSMC.…

Cops back Dutch telco Odido after second wave of ShinyHunters leaks

Company refuses to pay ransom as attackers threaten larger daily dumps

The Netherlands' national police is backing Odido's refusal to pay a ransom after ShinyHunters leaked a second round of records belonging to the telco.…

50 GW of datacenter demand queues up for UK grid access

To put that into perspective, 45 GW was peak electricity use for Britain so far this year

About 140 datacenters are in the queue to be connected to Britain's power grid, and their combined energy requirements are estimated to be more than the current peak electricity use for the entire country.…

What Does This 150-Year-Old Bottle of Mystery Booze Taste Like? Fruity, With a Hint of Leather

Experts in Utah recently sipped the murky liquid, which was found during excavations at a historic ski area

Half of German-speaking SAP users set to blow past 2027 ECC support deadline

Most DSAG members willing to pay a premium to stay on legacy platform until 2030

About half of German-speaking SAP users on its legacy ECC ERP system are set to ignore the 2027 support deadline, according to a survey of users in Germany, Switzerland, and Austria.…

Sopra Steria sues UK government over £958M Capita outsourcing award

French firm claims DWP failed to identify rival's bid was 'abnormally low' and alleges govt breached procurement rules

Sopra Steria is suing the UK government, alleging it accepted a bid from rival Capita for an outsourcing contract worth up to £958.7 million that it failed to recognize as too low to comply with procurement rules.…

Mondelēz picks Celonis as process backbone for SAP overhaul

Snack giant opts for vendor-neutral process mining as it shifts from ECC to S/4HANA

In the middle of a mammoth migration off SAP's legacy ERP systems, global snack giant Mondelēz has found an alternative to the German vendor's tech as the main platform for understanding its complex, fragmented business processes.…

UK copper fired after faking keyboard taps using photo frame

Typing 8x more than your peers? You better have the work to show for it

Avon and Somerset Police this week confirmed a former officer was dismissed after she was found weighing her laptop keyboard down with photo frames to simulate activity.…

The dangers of warming winter lakes

Over half a billion people live by lakes that freeze over in the winter. But as the climate warms, those lakes are losing whole days of ice cover. Winters are also getting weirder, with more intense temperature swings that lead to multiple freezes and thaws. Those fluctuations make the ice less safe, and more likely for people to fall through as they walk. So, today, producer Berly McCoy gets into how these changes are altering culture, community and safety on the ice – plus, how firefighters train for rescues.

This is the first in a two-part series on how lake ice is changing. Check out Monday’s episode for part two!

Check out photos from Berly’s reporting trip to Madison, Wisconsin.

Interested in more winter 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 .

To manage podcast ad preferences, review the links below:

See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.

Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoices

NPR Privacy Policy

Engineer held hostage by client who asked for the wrong fix

'I was no longer field support. I was collateral'

On Call  Friday has arrived, bringing a promise of fleeting freedom – and a new instalment of On Call, The Register's reader-contributed column that retells your tales of tech support incidents that became memorable for all the wrong reasons.…

NUC, NUC! Who’s there? ASUS with a client device for Microsoft’s cloudy PCs

Dell also joins the alternative to Windows 365 Link fun

Microsoft has found some friends to make desktop devices that boot into its Windows 365 cloud PCs.…

Chesapeake Bay Locked in Ice

Nearly 50 years ago, the first Landsat satellite captured the rare sight of Mid-Atlantic waterways frozen over.

China’s ‘The US hacks itself to make us look bad’ theorists return with a crypto conspiracy

Apparently Uncle Sam busted Binance to shore up the dollar, balance the budget, and achieve world domination

The Chinese agency that has accused the USA of cyberattacks on its own infrastructure to make Beijing look bad is back with another theory: Washington’s actions against cryptocurrency crooks are just attempts to dominate the global financial system.…

Anthropic to Pentagon: Autonomous weapons could hurt US troops and civilians

AI upstart won’t remove Claude’s guardrails to stay onside with Dept. of War

Anthropic has fired back at the US Department of War, arguing that it can’t agree to Uncle Sam’s contract demand to remove guardrails on its AI in part because the tech can’t be trusted not to harm American civilians and warfighters.…

Jack Dorsey’s fintech outfit Block announces 40% layoffs, blames AI, gets 23% stock bump

One massive round of firings is apparently better for morale than a drip-drip-drip of death

Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey’s financial services company Block has announced it will fire 40 percent of staff – around 4,000 people – because new "intelligence tools" the company is implementing “can do more and do it better.”…

New endowment hopes to raise a big pile of money for open source projects

Grants for critical, unappreciated projects

Open source projects, ever short of funding, have a potential new source of revenue in the form of the Open Source Endowment (OSE).…

Fujitsu taps Broadcom's 3D chip tech for 144-core Monaka CPU

Processor is one of roughly half a dozen designs based on Broadcom's XDSiP platform

Fujitsu’s 144-core Monaka CPU will be built using 3D-chip stacking tech from Broadcom, the merchant silicon slinger revealed on Thursday.…

ServiceNow boasts its AI bot is resolving 90% of its own help desk tickets

When it gets stuck, the bot will escalate rather than hallucinate

ServiceNow claims it has created an AI agent that is currently solving 90 percent of the inbound IT tickets to the company's own employee help desk.…

Genode OS Framework 26.02 released

The Genode OS Framework 26.02 has been released, and its tentpole improvement is the completion of moving configuration from XML to the new human-inclined data syntax, as we talked about a few months ago. The project has been working on this for years, and now that the tooling, documentation, and so on have been added this release cycle, they’re ready to make the switch. On top of that, they also made the move from GitHub to Codeberg, but that’s certainly not all. The technical topics of the release revolve around the progressive update of our Linux device-driver environment (DDE-Linux) to kernel version 6.18, usability improvements of the Goa SDK, input-event processing, and code rigidity. Feature-wise, version 26.02 further cultivates the genode-world repository as designated place for ported 3rd-party software, adding the port of Git as stepping stone on our way towards self-hosted development on Sculpt OS. ↫ Genode OS Framework 26.02 release notes Be sure to read the entire release notes for much more detailed information, as well as a ton of things not mentioned yet.

Needy Caterpillars Vibrate to Complex Rhythms to Communicate With Ants

Researchers have found that some butterfly caterpillars mimic the meticulously timed movements of ants to win their favor and protection

Northern Elephant Seals Test Positive for Deadly, Highly Infectious H5N1 Bird Flu for the First Time

About 30 seals at a California state park have died, and seven of them had the lethal virus. Lab results for the other animals are pending

“Linuxulator on FreeBSD feels like magic”

You may not be aware that FreeBSD has a pretty robust set of tools to run Linux binaries, unmodified. The result? A fast, smooth, fully-featured remote development experience on FreeBSD running Linux binaries transparently via the Linuxulator. It genuinely feels like magic. More importantly, it’s a testament to how stable the Linux ABI itself is and how well FreeBSD’s Linuxulator implements it. This setup completely changed how I work with FreeBSD, and it finally removed one of the biggest friction points in my workflow. ↫ Hayzam Sherif FreeBSD’s Linux compatibility does kind of feel like magic. There’s people running Steam and Steam games on FreeBSD using these very same technologies, and while it’s far from perfect, it works for quite a few games without any issues. It’d be great is Steam ever made it to FreeBSD natively, but sine that’s probably not going to happen any time soon, it’s great to see that those of us using FreeBSD can still play at least some Steam games just fine.

US orders diplomats in the EU to fight data sovereignty initiatives

It seems the widespread efforts in Europe to drastically reduce its dependency on US technology companies is starting to worry some people. President Donald Trump’s administration has ordered U.S. diplomats to lobby against attempts to regulate U.S. tech companies’ handling of foreigners’ data, saying in an internal diplomatic cable seen by Reuters that such efforts could interfere with artificial intelligence-related services. Experts say the move signals the Trump administration is reverting to a more confrontational approach as some foreign countries seek limits around how Silicon Valley firms process and store their citizens’ personal information – initiatives often described as “data sovereignty” or “data localization.” ↫ Raphael Satter and Alexandra Alper at Reuters It’s going to take time, but untangling the EU from the US – especially technologically and militarily – is worth the effort. I’ll gladly pay more taxes to make this happen.

Burger King turns to AI to flame broil employees who aren't friendly enough

Because nothing says hospitality like a bot counting your pleases

The bot’s nagging will continue until morale improves. Burger King is rolling out a new employee-facing AI that, among other things, will listen to employees’ customer interactions to ensure they’re being friendly enough - as if working in fast food weren’t hard enough already.…

Astronomers Spotted a Galaxy That's Made Up Almost Entirely of Dark Matter

The researchers found the galaxy thanks to the Hubble Space Telescope

AI models suck slightly less at math than they did last year

Latest ORCA test results out

exclusive  Current-day LLMs are prediction engines and, as such, they can only find the most likely solution to problems, which is not necessarily the correct one. Though popular models have mostly become better at math, even top performer Gemini 3 Flash would receive a C if assessed with a letter grade.…

JPL 3D-Printed Part Springs Forward

Description With a simple motion, a jack-in-the-box-like spring designed at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory showed the potential of additive manufacturing, also known as 3D printing, to cut costs and complexity for futuristic space antennas. Called JPL Additive Compliant Canister (JACC), the spring deployed on the small commercial spacecraft Proteus Space’s Mercury One on Feb. 3, 2026. […]

A Smashing New Proposal About Saturn's History Might Explain Its Iconic Rings and Some of Its Odd Moons

A crash involving the planet’s largest moon, Titan, and a hypothetical moon may have triggered a curious sequence of events

A Woman Found a Folder in a Drawer. When She Opened It, She Discovered 35 Forgotten Rembrandt Etchings

Charlotte Meyer's grandfather acquired the artworks between 1900 and 1920. Now, they're going on view for the first time in more than a century

Anthropic launches new marketing blog, pretends it's being 'written' by 'retired' LLM

Pretending the software is sentient makes it sound more powerful

As with any piece of obsolete software, you might expect an outdated AI model to just be switched off. Anthropic, however, argues that simply pulling the plug has downsides. After “retirement” interviews, Claude Opus 3 said it wanted to keep sharing its “musings,” so Anthropic suggested a blog.…

Landsat 9: More Than Just A Picture

For over 50 years, the Landsat program has provided the longest continuous satellite record of Earth’s land surface from space. Landsat 9, launched in 2021, is the latest mission in this remarkable legacy.

Inside Project Hail Mary

NASA astronaut and deputy director of the Flight Operations Directorate Kjell Lindgren takes a selfie with panelists and the audience at the agency’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory on Feb. 25, 2026. Actors Ryan Gosling and Sandra Huller, screenwriter Drew Goddard, directors Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, and producer and writer of the “Project Hail Mary” novel […]

NASA Invites Media to Discuss Next Steps for Artemis Campaign

With rollback of NASA’s Artemis II SLS (Space Launch System) rocket and Orion spacecraft to the Vehicle Assembly Building complete, the agency will host a news conference at 10 a.m. EST on Friday, Feb. 27. Live from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida, leadership will discuss the work ahead for the test flight, as well […]

Seventy-Two Captive Tigers in Thailand Die From Dangerous Infections, Sparking Concerns Over Animal Welfare

An animal foundation asks why the big cats weren't vaccinated against a well-known virus

Rapid AI-driven development makes security unattainable, warns Veracode

Report claims more vulnerabilities created than fixed as remediation gap widens

Veracode has posted its annual State of Software Security report, based on data from 1.6 million applications tested on its cloud platform, finding that more vulnerabilities are being created than are being fixed, and that high-velocity development with AI is making comprehensive security unattainable.…

NASA’s ESCAPADE Ready to Study Space Weather from Earth to Mars

Mars is not what it used to be. Once warm, watery, and blanketed by a thick atmosphere, today the Red Planet is cold, dry, and draped by a thin atmospheric veil. The main culprit is a relentless stream of particles from the Sun, known as the solar wind. Over billions of years, the solar wind has stripped away […]

NASA Names Acting Leaders for Two Key Human Spaceflight Roles

Editor’s note: This release was updated Thursday, Feb. 26 to reflect the effective date of the leadership changes. On Thursday, NASA announced Joel Montalbano will serve as the acting associate administrator for the Space Operations Mission Directorate (SOMD) at NASA Headquarters in Washington, and Dana Hutcherson will serve as the acting program manager of the Commercial Crew Program, effective […]

Top cloud providers to outspend Ireland's GDP on AI in 2026

TrendForce says eight hyperscalers are set to pour $710B into servers and infrastructure

The big cloud operators are ramping up investment in AI servers and infrastructure to meet demand for AI development and deployment, exacerbating the memory shortage caused by their insatiable growth.…

Microsoft to auto-launch Copilot in Edge whenever you click a link from Outlook

Whac-A-Mole season continues as Redmond finds yet another corner to stuff its 21st century Clippy

Microsoft has announced that its Edge browser will automatically open the Copilot side pane when users open links from Outlook.…

Scattered Lapsus$ Hunters auditioning female voices to sharpen social engineering

Telegram posts promise up to $1,000 per call as gang refines IT helpdesk ruse

Prolific cybercrime crew Scattered Lapsus$ Hunters (SLSH) is reportedly recruiting women in the hope of improving its social engineering success.…

NASA safety watchdog says it's time to rethink Moon landing

Report highlights too many firsts in Artemis III mission

The latest report from NASA's Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel (ASAP) raises questions about the mission objectives for Artemis III.…

A Couple Walking Their Dogs Noticed 2,000-Year-Old Footprints on the Beach. They Were Visible for Just Days Before Waves Erased Them Forever

Archaeologists raced to document the semi-fossilized tracks in eastern Scotland. They were likely made by humans, deer and other animals during the late Iron Age

Five Eyes warn: Patch your Cisco SD-WAN or risk root takeover

A rare joint alert from all five spy agencies means serious business

The Five Eyes intelligence alliance is urgently warning defenders to patch two Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN vulnerabilities used in attacks.…

Say goodbye to budget PCs and smartphones – memory is too expensive now

Analyst warns soaring DRAM and NAND costs could push entry-level devices out of reach

Ballooning memory prices are forecast to kill off entry-level PCs, leading to a decline in global shipments this year - and a similar effect is going to hit smartphones.…

Debian 14 will drop Gtk2 – unless Ardour rides to the rescue

Many dependent apps, including FreePascal and Lazarus, face the chop

Version 2 of the widely used Gtk toolkit will be dropped from the next Debian release. The problem is that many things still need it, including FreePascal and its Lazarus IDE.…

Moon's mighty magnetic field was a 5,000-year titanium blip

So say Oxford boffins who found 'bias' related to Apollo rock samples created false impression

Scientists at the University of Oxford say they may have cracked the puzzle of the Moon's magnetic field and settled a debate that has raged since the Apollo missions returned with rock samples.…

GCHQ dangles up to £130K for a CISO to fight the world's most capable adversaries

No pressure

GCHQ is looking to recruit a chief information security officer (CISO), a job it describes as "one of the most influential cybersecurity leadership roles in the UK," at a salary of £96,981 to £130,000.…

Britain's creaking courts to use Copilot for transcriptions

Ministry of Justice wowed by Ontario's paperless system, announces £12M for AI unit

The British government will expand the use of AI in courts in England and Wales as part of plans to make them work faster, justice minister David Lammy has told a Microsoft AI event.…

AMD puts $250M into Nutanix to get it building an AI stack for its GPUs

Cloudy stack vendor says VMware refugees have started to arrive in large numbers, just in time to collide with supply chain woes

AMD has struck another chips 'n' stock deal, this time with software-defined datacenter player Nutanix.…

Dry-Season Floods Drench Northern Colombia

Villages and farmland were swamped after unusually heavy early-February rains pushed the Sinú River over its banks.

Microsoft 'cooperating' with Japanese antitrust probe

It looks like the same cloudy software licenses that offend Europe may be in play – along with a cute little monster

Microsoft is "fully cooperating" with a probe by Japan's Fair Trade Commission, which wants to know if the software giant has violated the nation's anti-monopoly laws.…

Salesforce CEO 'SaaSquatch' Benioff says his company will monster the SaaSpocalypse

Selling so many agents they've cooked up a way to measure what they do

Even by the somewhat offbeat standards of the Salesforce Ohana, the CRM giant just delivered a strange earnings announcement.…

Nvidia hasn't made a cent in China lately – and might not need to given $120B profit

GPU giant sees yet more growth coming soon, most of it in the datacenter

Nearly three months after the Trump administration allowed Nvidia to sell its H200 accelerator in China, the GPU giant is still waiting for Beijing to allow them in and for any revenue to materialize.…

Claude collaboration tools left the door wide open to remote code execution

Anthropic fixed the flaws – but the AI-enabled attack surfaces remain

Security vulnerabilities in Claude Code could have allowed attackers to remotely execute code on users' machines and steal API keys by injecting malicious configurations into repositories, and then waiting for a developer to clone and open an untrustworthy project.…

LLMs killed the privacy star, we can't rewind, we've gone too far

You'll find these days that there's no hiding place

Add privacy to the list of potential casualties caused by the proliferation of AI, because researchers have found that large language models (LLMs) can be used to deanonymize internet users – even those who use pseudonyms – more efficiently than human sleuths.…

“Never buy a .online domain”

I’ve been a .com purist for over two decades of building. Once, I broke that rule and bought a .online TLD for a small project. This is the story of how it went up in flames. ↫ Tony S. An absolute horror story about Google’s dominance over the web, in places nobody really talks about. Scary.

You can add a menu bar to KDE title bars with this tool, for some reason

Only a few days ago we talked about the concept of client-side decorations, and how more and more desktop environments and operating systems – specifically GNOME and macOS – are putting more and more buttons, menus, and other widgets inside title bars. How about we take this concept a step further? This hides the AppMenu icon button and draws the menu in the title bar. It also includes a search button to find actions. It works on both X11 and Wayland. On Wayland, GTK apps don’t export the menu in a KDE-friendly way. You need to start them with GDK_BACKEND=x11 environment variable or you can try the experimental appmenu-gtk-module-wayland (GTK3 only). ↫ material-decoration’s GitHub page So this little tool allows you to add an application’s menu bar (file, edit, view, etc.) to the titlebar of a KDE application. The way it works is that it adds an optional widget to KDE’s System Settings > Colors & Themes > Window Decorations > Configure Titlebar Buttons…, alongside regular staples like close, minimise, maximise, etc. You can then freely add said “menu bar” to the title bar of your applications. There’s some configuration options, too. For instance, you can disable the search button, or turn the entire menu bar into a hamburger menu instead. It looks weird, and I’m definitely not the target audience for this, but I do find it intriguing. I’ve never seen anything like this before, and I doubt many people will like it since it takes up so much space if you don’t opt to use the hamburger menu option. That being said, I’m fairly sure KDE and Kwin allow you to edit the titlebars of specific applications and specific windows, which does open some interesting possibilities for, say, applications or windows which you always have maximised or whatever. There’s an AUR package for Arch users, but everyone else will have to build it themselves.

NASA’s Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel Releases 2025 Annual Report

The Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel (ASAP), which advises NASA and Congress on safety, has released its 2025 annual report on NASA’s performance and challenges.   While the panel acknowledged NASA’s safety achievements, it warned that the agency’s biggest challenges stem from interconnected factors – workforce, acquisition, technical authority, budgets, and the growing complexity of human spaceflight – requiring sustained attention as missions become more ambitious. “Independent […]

AIs are happy to launch nukes in simulated combat scenarios

Claude, ChatGPT, and Gemini all had different personalities and reasoning tactics, but the endgame was the same

Today's hottest bots have yet to learn that, when it comes to global thermonuclear war, the only way to win is not to play. So please don't hand them the codes. …

New Windows update adds Sysmon to Windows

Microsoft released an optional cumulative update for Windows 11, and for once, it actually includes something many of you might actually like: it adds Sysmon from Sysinternals to Windows natively, so you no longer have to install it manually. Here’s a refresher on what, exactly, Sysmon does. System Monitor (Sysmon) is a Windows system service and device driver that, once installed on a system, remains resident across system reboots to monitor and log system activity to the Windows event log. It provides detailed information about process creations, network connections, and changes to file creation time. By collecting the events it generates using Windows Event Collection or SIEM agents and subsequently analyzing them, you can identify malicious or anomalous activity and understand how intruders and malware operate on your network. The service runs as a protected process, thus disallowing a wide range of user mode interactions. ↫ Mark Russinovich and Thomas Garnier After installing the optional cumulative update in question, KB5077241, you can install Sysmon as an optional Windows component. Of course, this is Microsoft we’re talking about, so it’s not quite as straightforward as you’d think. In Windows 11, there’s two places to add optional Windows features, and in the case of Sysmon, you have to go to the old Windows features dialog instead of the new View or edit optional features one. And also, don’t forget to first remove the old Sysmon from Sysinternals in case you have it installed. After installation, run sysmon -i as an administrator to enable the feature.

Google catches Beijing spies using Sheets to spread espionage across 4 continents

UNC2814 historically targets governments and telcos

A China-linked crew found a unique formula for attacking telcos and government orgs across the Americas, Asia, and Africa in its latest round of intrusions. Google's threat intelligence, along with unnamed industry partners, disrupted the gang, which used the Chocolate Factory's own spreadsheet tools as part of its exploits.…

Humans May Have Used These Mysterious Symbols to Encode Information Tens of Thousands of Years Before the First Writing Systems

The symbols, discovered on 40,000-year-old artifacts in caves in southwest Germany, may have been a precursor to the first written language

Hide from Meta's spyglasses with this new Android app

Academic urges users not to harass those suspected of snooping with (sp)eyewear

Worried that someone wearing Meta's snooping spyware goggles could be creeping up on you? Android users now have access to an app that can warn them if someone is wearing such smart glasses in their vicinity by using Bluetooth.…

AMD challenges Intel with an 84-core Epyc processor aimed at telcos, edge

Chips are likely Zen 5's last hurrah before Venice makes its debut later this year

AMD's edgiest Epyc chips are officially getting a Zen 5 refresh with the introduction of its 8005-series processors codenamed Sorano.…

Making an Entrance

NASA astronaut Jack Hathaway smiles up at the camera as he enters the International Space Station Feb. 14, 2026, after docking to the orbiting laboratory aboard a SpaceX Dragon spacecraft. Since Hathaway and fellow Crew-12 members Jessica Meir of NASA, Sophie Adenot of ESA (European Space Agency), and Andrey Fedyaev of Roscosmos began their mission […]

OpenAI asks its friends to tell their friends about Frontier

Agent-making tool that mimics human workers is about to get its enterprise close up.

OpenAI has managed to make a name for itself with ChatGPT. But if it wants its new enterprise AI product Frontier to succeed, it's going to need help. According to an analyst, the company is smart to partner with the world's biggest consultants to push Frontier, which can create and control role-based AI agents throughout an organization.…

This Nearly 50-Foot-Long Sock Monkey Sculpture Is the Largest on Earth, Guinness World Records Confirms

Created by 22-year-old art student Emilia Evans-Munton, the sculpture is made of nearly 200 feet of corduroy fabric and 40 bales of straw

All your bots are belong to US if you don't play ball, DoD tells Anthropic

AI firm drops key safety pledge as Pentagon dispute drags on

US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth has made Anthropic an offer it may not be able to refuse. The Defense Department and the AI firm held a meeting at the Pentagon on Tuesday, where the government tried to compel the house of Claude to lift some restrictions on military use of its tech. However, recent changes to the company's safety policy suggest it may be willing to be more flexible than it's letting on. …

Hardly anybody bought Samsung's last smartphones for AI. It hopes this year's models change that

But only Qualcomm can power the most alluring features

hands on  Just 20 percent of punters who bought Samsung's 2025 flagship smartphone, the Galaxy S25 Ultra, cited AI as the main reason for their purchase. With this year's S26 models, the Korean giant hopes to improve that number.…

Listen to This Month’s ‘Planetary Parade’ With NASA’s Chandra

In late February, people in the Northern Hemisphere can look up for a special sight: six planets will all be visible from clear and dark night skies. New sonifications from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory released Feb. 25 will help commemorate this latest “planetary parade.” Because the planets in our solar system travel around the Sun […]

Fake 'interview' repos lure Next.js devs into running secret-stealing malware

Come for the coding test, stay for the C2 traffic

Next.js developers are once again in the crosshairs as hackers seed malicious repositories disguised as legitimate projects, according to Microsoft, which said a limited set of those repos were directly tied to observed compromises.…

Microsoft boss on AI content: 'Nobody wants anything that is sloppy'

Sometimes the 'S' word slips through even the best media training

Is it OK to say "slop" again? Microsoft boss Satya Nadella took to the stage on the London leg of the company's AI tour and said the words that many an IT pro has uttered when faced with a Copilot rollout: "Nobody wants anything that is sloppy in terms of AI creation."…

The Man Who Stole Infinity

In an 1874 paper, Georg Cantor proved that there are different sizes of infinity and changed math forever. A trove of newly unearthed letters shows that it was also an act of plagiarism.

The post The Man Who Stole Infinity first appeared on Quanta Magazine

Cloudflare experiment ports most of Next.js API 'in one week' with AI

Uses Vite and Claude to sidestep Vercel lock-in

A Cloudflare engineer says he has implemented 94 percent of the Next.js API by directing Anthropic's Claude, spending about $1,100 on tokens.…

NASA Study to Analyze Fermented Food Samples from Space

Certain nutrients critical for human health lack the shelf life needed to span multi-year missions to the Moon, Mars, and beyond. NASA’s BioNutrients-3 is part of an experiment series testing ways to use microorganisms to produce these nutrients in space and on demand. The on-demand nature of this experiment is similar to making nutrient-dense fermented […]

Firefox 148 adds master switch for browser bot bother

While Thunderbird 148 improves MS Exchange support and sign-on security

It's not the only new feature in Firefox 148 yet one thing is very definitely the big news: the global off switch for its AI features that the company announced earlier this month is now included.…

Execs love AI, just not enough to pay for user training

Research points to skills gaps and weak oversight as barriers to return on investment

Just 4 percent of businesses achieved a return on their AI investments, yet rather than admit AI isn't living up to early expectations, a newly published study is blaming the users for not doing enough.…

How Do Horses Whinny? Scientists Say They've Figured Out How the Majestic Animals Make This Distinctive Sound

An equine makes the low-pitched part of its whinny by vibrating its vocal cords—similar to how humans speak and sing—and the high-pitched part by whistling

NASA’s Webb Examines Cranium Nebula

Two heads are better than one in the latest images from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope, which reveal new detail in a mysterious, little-studied nebula surrounding a dying star.  Nebula PMR 1 is a cloud of gas and dust that bears an uncanny resemblance to a brain in a transparent skull, inspiring its nickname, the […]

Ex-L3Harris exec jailed 7 years for selling exploits to Russia

Former Trenchant manager profited millions from cyber tools reserved for the US

The former general manager of L3Harris's cyber arm will spend the next seven years behind bars for selling trade secrets to Russia.…

Hubble in a death spiral that could end as early as 2028 without a reboost

Orbit decay accelerates as solar activity rises, with no approved mission yet to raise the telescope's altitude

A newly released plot of the Hubble Space Telescope's altitude shows just how quickly the observatory has descended in recent years.…

Worried Europeans can now cut Azure's phone cord completely

As transatlantic tensions rattle nerves, Microsoft offers a digital bunker to the sufficiently paranoid

Azure Local can now run fully disconnected with no cloud connectivity, Microsoft confirmed at the London leg of its AI tour.…

This Famous 17th-Century Elephant Sculpture in Rome Keeps Losing the Tip of Its Tusk

Designed by Gian Lorenzo Bernini, the statue holds an 18-foot-tall Egyptian obelisk on its back. The four-inch fragment of its tusk was found nearby

Wynn Resorts takes attacker's word for it that stolen staff data was deleted

Security pros question assurances as company offers staff credit monitoring

Wynn Resorts has confirmed that employee data was stolen from its servers, and is taking the hackers' word that they've since deleted it.…

Bcachefs creator insists his custom LLM is female and 'fully conscious'

It's not chatbot psychosis, it's 'math and engineering and neuroscience'

The latest project to start talking about using LLMs to assist in development is experimental Linux copy-on-write file system bcachefs.…

Brit dual nationals grounded by border digitization drive

Overhauling immigration system a 'significant change for millions of travelers,' government admits

Many British citizens who hold another nationality are being barred from entering the UK unless they have a British passport or a £589 certificate as a result of the Home Office's efforts to digitize travel documents.…

Recycling biz reckons AI features are destroying smartphone resale values

Galaxy S25 sheds 63% in 12 months as reseller questions LLM emphasis

Smartphone makers love touting AI, but the technology may be quietly destroying resale values.…

DVSA drives up online theory test contract value to £700M with no explanation

Agency that can't keep bots out of its booking system more than doubles size of services agreement

The Driver & Vehicle Standards Agency has more than doubled the maximum offer on the table for a new online theory test service to £700 million.…

OpenAI says Chinese cops used ChatGPT to plan and track smear ops against opponents

Note to secret agents: ChatGPT is NOT a private diary

A ChatGPT user with links to Chinese law enforcement tried to use the AI chatbot to run smear campaigns targeting the Japanese prime minister and other critics of the Chinese Communist Party, according to OpenAI's latest report on malicious uses of its models.…

Gatwick shuttle screen suffers pre-flight nerves

Dude, where's my operating system?

Bork!Bork!Bork!  Airports and computers remain uneasy travel companions. At London Gatwick, the inter-terminal shuttle briefly demonstrated why, with one information screen declaring: "Operating System not found."…

Screen time is up for grandma and grandpa

Folks over 65 are putting in a lot of screen time. In 2019, the Pew Research Center found that people 60 years and older spend more than half their daily leisure time in front of screens, mostly watching TV or videos. Since the pandemic, that screen time has increased. Is addiction on the rise? And what’s the best use of screen time for any of us? We’re parsing out all the questions with Ipsit Vahia, the Chief of Geriatric Psychiatry at McLean Hospital.

Interested in more stories about how technology is changing daily life? 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 .

To manage podcast ad preferences, review the links below:

See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.

Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoices

NPR Privacy Policy

Threat intelligence supply chain is full of weak links, researchers find

And they're being stressed by geopolitical concerns that threaten to slow important data-sharing efforts

Researchers from Georgia Tech have found that the supply chain for threat intelligence data is susceptible to adversarial action, and proposed a method to improve data sharing that they think will make it stronger.…

Landslide and Avalanche Debris Litter Hubbard Glacier

Satellite-based radar images show where a powerful earthquake in the Yukon, Canada, sent rock, snow, and ice spilling across the frozen landscapes of the St. Elias Mountains.

HP says memory’s contribution to PC costs just doubled to 35 percent

Speeds up qualification of new suppliers to get more cheap parts into PCs, faster

HP Inc. has revealed that memory now accounts for 35 percent of the cost of materials it needs to build a PC, up from between 15 and 18 percent last quarter. And the company expects RAM’s contribution will rise through the year.…

Orbital datacenters are a pie-in-the-sky idea: Gartner

Analyst firm bemoans ‘peak insanity’ among those who think circling servers can replace down-to-earth clouds

Analyst firm Gartner thinks talk of placing datacenters in space has reached “peak insanity,” because orbiting facilities can’t be run economically or satisfy demand for compute power on Earth.…

Workday CEO's AI talk can't shake off weaker sales forecast

Claims HR company can escape the SaaSpocalypse with its core expertise

Workday CEO Aneel Bhusri has used the first quarterly earnings announcement since he returned to the big chair to reassure investors the company is building more capable agentic AI while keeping the fundamentals of the HR platform strong.…

Meta frees React to live in its own foundation

Organizations using the front-end JavaScript framework can expect vendor-neutral governance

Meta has turned over control of React, React Native, and associated projects like JSX to the newly formed React Foundation, fulfilling a commitment made last October.…

It's only Tuesday and AI chip startups have already soaked up $1.1B in funding

Fears of an AI bubble haven't tempered vulture capitalists' enthusiasm for silicon

AI chip startups collectively walked away with more than a billion dollars of new capital on Tuesday, showing that venture capitalists are still excited about the opportunity to challenge Nvidia's dominance despite all the talk of an AI bubble.…

Amazon would rather blame its own engineers than its AI

Protect the robot, sacrifice the human

opinion  I've been watching AWS explain away outages for the better part of a decade. And this is hard!…

If you’ve been holding on to a phone for a while, current phones are really disappointing

This must be a universal experience at this point for people who aren’t swayed by the latest and greatest marketing hype around new phone models: there’s just nothing out there that fits one’s needs. When I walked into a phone shop, I expected to witness with amazement how much technology has advanced in the present day compared to my eight-year-old model, and for the power of marketing to mind control me into buying a new phone that would bring all sorts of benefits to my life. But instead, I felt disappointed that I’d be forced to choose between two suboptimal devices, either of which would be a compromise compared to what I already have. I felt frustrated that my OnePlus 5T, which still meets my needs and is working wonderfully (apart from the volume buttons), is being taken from me by the 3G shutdown. ↫ Cadence It’s remarkable how a market that was once rife with competition and choice, has now been reduced to well I guess I’ll settle for this one then in such a short time frame. There’s barely any competition, the number of device makers in (western or western-adjacent) countries has dropped to two, maybe three, and all of them are making what is essentially the exact same device with only the smallest of differences between them. For most average, normal people, it’s some model by either Samsung or Apple. There’s definitely more choice once you’re willing to leave local stores (and thus, easy and quick repairs) behind, but most normal people who just want a phone aren’t going to do that. You can also spend like twice or thrice the amount of money to get some foldable thing, but again, if you’re just looking for a bog-standard normal-person phone, that’s not a realistic option either. Smaller devices, headphone jacks, SD card slots – so many things have just disappeared from the face of the earth for most people, something that will definitely come as a huge, unpleasant surprise if you’ve been happy with an older phone that just had those things. It’s like driving the same car for a decade and needing a new one, but you can only choose between a Toyota and a Volkswagen that look and feel entirely the same. And also the seats are now candles, door handles are gone, and there’s no trunk.

AI has gotten good at finding bugs, not so good at swatting them

Discovery is getting cheaper. Validation and patching aren’t

What good is finding a hole if you can't fix it? Anthropic last week talked up Claude Code's improved ability to find software vulnerabilities and propose patches. But security researchers say that's not enough.…

Curiosity Blog, Sols 4812-4819: Back Into the Hollows

Written by Diana Hayes, Graduate student at York University, Toronto Earth planning date: Friday, Feb. 20, 2026 This has been a pretty routine week for Curiosity. As was mentioned last week, we’re now in the final phase of the boxwork exploration campaign. We’re currently making our way toward the eastern contact of the boxwork formation […]

See How Ovid's 'Metamorphoses' Inspired Centuries of Artists—From Caravaggio to René Magritte

A show at the Rijksmuseum brings together paintings, sculptures, film and other artworks that reinterpret the ancient Roman poet's tales of transformation

A Mass Grave Uncovered in Serbia Hints at a Violent Iron Age Massacre That Targeted Women and Children

A new analysis of human remains found more than 50 years ago reveals fresh insights about culture clashes in prehistoric Europe

The age-verification trap: verifying user’s ages undermines everyone’s data protection

Social media is going the way of alcohol, gambling, and other social sins: Societies are deciding it’s no longer kid stuff. Lawmakers point to compulsive use, exposure to harmful content, and mounting concerns about adolescent mental health. So, many propose to set a minimum age, usually 13 or 16. In cases when regulators demand real enforcement rather than symbolic rules, platforms run into a basic technical problem. The only way to prove that someone is old enough to use a site is to collect personal data about who they are. And the only way to prove that you checked is to keep the data indefinitely. Age-restriction laws push platforms toward intrusive verification systems that often directly conflict with modern data-privacy law. This is the age-verification trap. Strong enforcement of age rules undermines data privacy. ↫ Waydell D. Carvalho The answer to the dangers of social media is not to ban social media use among minors, for a whole variety of reasons. There’s data privacy, as the linked article goes into, but there’s also the fact that for a lot of people, including minors, who live in regressive, backwards environments and/or are victims of abuse, social media is their only support network. Cut them off from social media, and you cut them off from the very people who can save them from further abuse. The problem isn’t social media in and of itself – it’s profit-seeking social media. Companies like Facebook and TikTok spend billions to hyper-optimise and hyper-target vulnerable people, much like how tobacco companies and drug dealers do, to feed and worsen their addiction because keeping people addicted is how they maximise profits. The solution to the dangers of corporate social media is to strictly regulate their behaviour, something we already do with countless dangerous products and services. I’m obviously not qualified to come up with specific measures that would need to be taken, but I think we can all agree that whatever corporate social media have been and are doing is dangerous, unethical, should be stopped.

Discord drama delays age verification debut until the second half of 2026

Cofounder promises transparency and full technical explanation of plans, which aren't actually changing

Discord is delaying age verification checks for a little while after its plan inspired a lot of hand-wringing among the community. But it's not backing down. …

Patch these 4 critical, make-me-root SolarWinds bugs ASAP

SolarWinds + file transfer software = what attackers' dreams are made of

If you run SolarWinds’ Serv-U, you should patch promptly. Four critical vulnerabilities in the file transfer software can allow attackers to execute code as root.…

New Volunteer Data from 143 Observatories Unveils the 2024 Total Solar Eclipse

On April 8, 2024, volunteers participating in NASA’s Eclipse Megamovie citizen science project all around the United States hurried to photograph the solar eclipse with the latest, greatest equipment, capturing groundbreaking images of the Sun’s corona.

'Merica-made Mac Minis marked for manufacturing

iGiant also ramping US chip and AI server production

Your next Mac might be made in the US of A. Apple this week revealed plans to manufacture its most affordable Macintosh computer at a new Foxconn facility in Texas.…

Rogue devs of sideloaded Android apps beg for freedom from Google’s verification regime

37 groups urge the company to drop ID checks for apps distributed outside Play

Soon, developers who just want to make Android apps for sideloading will have to register with Google. Thirty-seven technology companies, nonprofits, and civil society groups think that the Chocolate Factory should keep its nose out of third-party app stores and have asked its leadership to reconsider.…

North Korea's Lazarus Group targets healthcare orgs with Medusa ransomware

New ransomware of choice, same critical targets

North Korea’s Lazarus Group appears to have added another tool to its kit. It has begun using Medusa ransomware in extortion attacks targeting at least one US healthcare organization and an unnamed victim in the Middle East, according to Symantec and Carbon Black threat hunters.…

The fix inches closer: Iowa moves farm right-to-repair bill forward

Manufacturers like John Deere have resisted broader access to proprietary repair software

Soon, farmers could have easier access to the tools and software needed to repair their tractors. A recent Iowa House committee vote advancing a right-to-repair bill could bring changes benefiting thousands of farmers in the US' second-largest agricultural state, supporters say.…

Listen to What Archivists Believe to Be Oldest-Known Whale Recording

The nearly 80-year-old disc resided in the archives of the the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution for decades and may hold the secret to learning about changes in whale behavior over time

GhostBSD to ditch Xorg for XLibre as Red Hat's Wayland crusade leaves X11 fans out in the cold

FreeBSD's friendliest desktop distro bets on the controversial fork

GhostBSD plans to move to the XLibre X11 server to better support its flagship MATE desktop – as well as Xfce and the new Gershwin.…

Rare and Original Watercolor Illustrations of Rudyard Kipling’s ‘The Jungle Book’ Go Up for Auction

The two paintings were copied into a limited-edition book of illustrations published almost a decade after the famous book of wild stories set in India

Go library maintainer brands GitHub's Dependabot a 'noise machine'

When a one-line fix triggers thousands of PRs, something's off

A Go library maintainer has urged developers to turn off GitHub's Dependabot, arguing that false positives from the dependency-scanning tool "reduce security by causing alert fatigue."…

AMD copy-pastes 6 GW chips-for-stock deal in new Meta agreement

The House of Zen signed a nearly identical deal with OpenAI last fall

AMD just signed a mega chip deal with Meta that appears almost identical to the one it signed with OpenAI last fall. And just like all cross-industry agreements between AI and chip makers of late, this one comes with some circular financing, too. …

Lifelong Learning Might Lower Your Risk of Developing Alzheimer's Disease, a New Study Suggests

While the research does not point to a direct, causal link, it hints that activities like reading, writing and playing games might help extend cognitive function

Microsoft gives Windows laggards the 'gift of time' wrapped in licensing fees

With Server 2016 and other OSes for the chop, security fixes can continue to flow for a price

Microsoft is giving Windows customers the "gift of time" but expects compensation for its generosity.…

Webb Maps Uranus’ Upper Atmosphere

NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope provided the first vertical view of Uranus’s ionosphere in this image released on Feb. 19, 2026, revealing auroras shaped by its tilted magnetic field. Getting a look at the structure of the region where the atmosphere interacts strongly with the planet’s magnetic field is giving us the most detailed portrait […]

Technology Originally Developed for Space Missions Now Integral to Everyday Life

Groundbreaking “camera-on-a-chip” technology that was originally developed at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) for use in space missions is currently employed in billions of devices like cell phones that are used daily by people worldwide.

Euro hosting giant hiking prices by up to 50% from April Fool's Day

No, customers aren't laughing either as pressure from memory shortages bites

Hosting biz Hetzner, one of Europe's largest datacenter operators, is warning customers that prices are scheduled to jump by as much as 50 percent from April 1.…

UK data watchdog fines Reddit £14.47M for letting kids slip past the gate

Social media giant retorts it doesn't want to collect 'private' data, and plans to appeal

The UK's data protection regulator has fined social media giant Reddit £14.47 million ($19.5 million) over its use of children's data.…

KDE Plasma 6.6 isn't forcing systemd but the arguments rage on

BSD support improves, FreeBSD eyes a desktop option, and the init wars refuse to die

The latest KDE desktop environment is out. Among other things, it comes with a pledge that it won't require systemd, and this version has improved OpenBSD support. FreeBSD 15.1's installer offers KDE too.…

Why Did a Man Build This Secret Passageway Below a Dresser Drawer Nearly 200 Years Ago? Historians Think It Was Part of the Underground Railroad

Staffers at the Merchant's House Museum in Manhattan are unraveling the mysteries of the narrow tunnel, which is hidden beneath a piece of built-in furniture on the second floor

Korean cops charge teens over bike hire breach that exposed data on 4.62M riders

Public prosecutor mulls sentencing following investigations into two separate attacks

Two South Korean teenagers were this week charged with breaching Seoul's public bike service, Ttareungyi.…

West Midlands Police earn red card over Copilot's imaginary football match

Parliament committee finds AI BS helped shape a real-world decision

UK Parliament has delivered the official postmortem on West Midlands Police's Copilot saga, and it reads like a case study in how not to mix generative AI with public order decision-making.…

Intel backs SambaNova's $350M bid to challenge GPUs in AI inference

Upstart's 5th-gen RDU aims to undercut Nvidia's B200 on speed and cost

AI infrastructure company SambaNova has raised $350 million to advance its dataflow architecture, which it pitches as an alternative to GPU-based AI systems.…

UK tech hit by double trouble: Fewer foreign techies amid skills squeeze

Visa applications down, executives emigrating, and AI blamed for the rest

The number of international workers applying for a visa to work in the UK's tech sector dropped 11 percent between Q2 and Q3 2025, and was down 6 percent year-on-year, according to consultancy RSM UK.…

Euro allies aiming to rapidly build low-cost air defense weapons

We like our surface-to-air weapons affordable

Britain has joined a handful of European allies in a program to develop low-cost air defense systems, including autonomous drones or missiles, with project delivery of the first elements scheduled for as early as 2027.…

Could our trash become local fishes’ treasure?

Helicopters. Cargo containers. Old washing machines. For years, fishermen dumped this waste into the Gulf of Mexico. But they weren’t just trying to get rid of junk; they were trying to create artificial reefs that would help attract fish. For this month’s Nature Quest, WWNO coastal reporter Eva Tesfaye takes a (metaphorical) dive into the gulf to find out if Alabama’s ocean junkyard is an economic – and environmental – solution.

Want to learn more about artificial reefs? Check out WWNO's podcast Sea Change for more reporting from Eva and her colleagues.

This episode is part of Nature Quest, our monthly segment that brings you a question from a Short Waver who is noticing a change in the world around them.

Send a voice memo to shortwave@npr.org telling us your name, location and a question about a change you're seeing in nature – it could be our next Nature Quest episode!

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 .

To manage podcast ad preferences, review the links below:

See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.

Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoices

NPR Privacy Policy

Microsoft teases ‘reimagined SharePoint experience’ with added AI

Redmond also offers to take the OneDrive name out of your OneDrive

Microsoft has teased a significant upgrade to its SharePoint collaborationware package.…

Showy Swirls Around Jeju Island

Winds blowing past the volcanic landmass near the Korean Peninsula created a trail of spiraling clouds, while murky water churned nearby.

Cisco turns to titanium spoons and sand dunes to build a better … box?

As Pure Storage adopts a watered-down name for a rebrand

Logowatch  Cisco and the vendor formerly known as Pure Storage have let their designers and marketers loose on the internet to explain some recent decisions.…

Anthropic accuses China's AI labs of ripping off content - just like it did

Says DeepSeek, Moonshot, and MiniMax are using 'distillation' to gin up their own models

Having built a business by remixing content created by others, Anthropic worries that Chinese AI labs are stealing its data.…

IBM stock dives after Anthropic points out AI can rewrite COBOL fast

Big Blue has been saying this itself since 2023

IBM’s share price slumped by 13 percent on Monday, seemingly caused by investors reacting to an Anthropic blog post that points out its Claude Code tools can accelerate refactoring of apps written in the ancient COBOL language.…

GTK-NoCSD: an LD_PRELOAD library to disable CSDs

While Libadwaita applications running in a GNOME desktop environment look great and nicely consistent, they look utterly out of place and jarring when run in Xfce, Pantheon, KDE, and others. The biggest reason for this is GNOME’s insistence on using client-side decorations, which feel at home inside a GNOME environment, but out of place in environments that otherwise do not use them. On top of that, Libadwaita’s/GNOME’s CSDs can interfere with non-GNOME window managers and their functionality, causing a whole host of problems. But what if you could turn CSDs off? GTK-NoCSD is an LD_PRELOAD library to disable CSD in GTK3/4, LibHandy, and LibAdwaita apps. CSD is client side decoration, there is also server side decoration, SSD, both serving as the titlebar of windows. GTK3 adopted CSD, where this thick headerbar is used with application controls embedded.This continued into the platform library, LibHandy, then into GTK4 and the platform library of that, LibAdwaita. This looks good on Gnome and makes these applications alike, but looks off everywhere else and can potentially break window managers and remove window manager provided functionality. This library restores the server side decoration, getting back the window manager titlebar, and moves the controls from the CSD to under it, into the window content. ↫ GTK-NoCSD’s Codeberg page This isn’t the first attempt at such a solution, and certainly won’t be the last, and I’m glad they exist. Do note that if you decide to use this library, any problems or bugs you run into in an application ‘modified’ by it should never be reported to the application’s developer, but to the developer of this library. If you encounter a bug in an application modified by this library, test the application in its unmodified state to ensure it’s actually a bug in the application before reporting it to the application’s developer. Developers who choose to use client-side decorations are not responsible for bugs and issues arising from you removing the CSD. Keep that in mind. That being said, whatever pixels appear on your screen is entirely up to you as a user, and you have the right to theme, alter, butcher, or mangle whatever application is running on your computer. If you dislike the way CSDs look and feel on your computer, you can opt to resort to a solution like this one, and that’s entirely fair game. There’s packages for Arch, Fedora, and Gentoo, and of course, you can build it yourself. As for my personal opinion – well, let’s just say I prefer KDE for many, many reasons, and my disdain for CSDs is certainly one of them. Call me old-fashioned and out-of-touch, but I like the classic distinction between titlebar, menubar, and toolbar.

ICE watchers say agents used software to threaten and follow them home

'This is a warning. We know you live right here'

Two US residents have sued several Homeland Security agencies and officials, including Secretary Kristi Noem, for allegedly using surveillance tools to harass them, branding them as "domestic terrorists," and even showing up at their homes based on license-plate recognition. …

Can Apes Play Pretend? What Scientists Learned From Having Imaginary 'Tea Parties' With Kanzi the Bonobo

A new study provides evidence for imagination in a captive-raised, English language-trained animal

OpenBSD: anatomy of bsd.rd

Every OpenBSD admin has booted bsd.rd at least once — to install, upgrade, or rescue a broken system. But few people stop to look at what’s actually inside that file. It turns out bsd.rd is a set of nested layers, and you can take it apart on a running system without rebooting anything. That’s what we’ll do here. We’ll go from the raw gzip file all the way down to the miniroot filesystem, exploring each layer with standard tools. Everything is documented in the man pages — we’re just following the trail. ↫ Wesley Mouedine Assaby What am I supposed to add here?

Pop music fans literally dying to stream hot new albums - in car crashes, that is

What do Taylor Swift and Drake’s release days have to do with road deaths? More than you’d think

Who doesn’t like streaming music while driving? Unfortunately, new research suggests that when major albums drop and streaming spikes, traffic fatalities rise too.…

Construction Workers Digging in Northern England Stumble Upon a 2,200-Pound Cannon That May Be More Than 300 Years Old

Crews unearthed the artifact while working on a restoration project at Queen's Gardens, a public park that was once the largest dock in the United Kingdom

Google Antigravity falls to Earth under OpenClaw-fueled compute load

Company tries to curb strain by banning customer accounts for 'malicious' usage

Google customers paying $250 per month for AI Ultra subscriptions and less extravagant spenders have been surprised to find their accounts suspended for using the company's Antigravity agent development app and Gemini services with third-party agent tools like OpenClaw and OpenCode.…

Giant Tortoises Vanished From the Galápagos' Floreana Island More Than 150 Years Ago. Now, Conservationists Have Brought Them Back

Researchers released captive-bred tortoises carrying the ancestry of the extinct local species

Young ‘Sun’ Caught Blowing Bubbles by NASA’s Chandra

For the first time, a much younger version of the Sun has been caught red-handed blowing bubbles in the galaxy, by astronomers using NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory. The bubble – called an “astrosphere” – completely surrounds the juvenile star. Winds from the star’s surface are blowing up the bubble and filling it with hot gas […]

Astronomy Activation Ambassadors: Embracing Multiple Perspectives

The Astronomy Activation Ambassadors (AAA) project, part of the NASA Science Activation program, aims to measurably enhance student STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, & Mathematics) engagement via middle school, high school, and community college science teacher professional development.

Nvidia superchip infusion finally coming to Windows PCs, report says

Nv-based integrated graphics for Wintel box also in the works

Your next laptop may have Nvidia inside – not in the form of a GPU, but as a system on a chip, complete with CPU. Team Green could be chipping away at Intel's marketshare and giving people Arm-based systems that compete with Apple's MacBook line.…

Infosec community panics as Anthropic rolls out Claude code security checker

Not the first of its kind

ai-pocalypse  Anthropic sent the infosec community into a tizzy on Friday when it rolled out Claude Code Security, a new feature that scans codebases for vulnerabilities and suggests patches to fix the issues.…

The Oldest State Park in America Is About to Expand

Niagara Falls State Park in western New York is absorbing two neighboring parks, which will add more than 150 acres and new hiking trails to its bounds

NASA to Cover 33rd SpaceX Resupply Mission Station Departure

NASA and its international partners will receive scientific research samples and hardware when a SpaceX Dragon spacecraft departs the International Space Station on Thursday, Feb. 26, and returns to Earth. Watch NASA’s live coverage of the undocking and departure of the agency’s 33rd SpaceX Commercial Resupply Services mission starting at 11:45 a.m. EST on NASA+, […]

How Can Infinity Come in Many Sizes?

Intuition breaks down once we’re dealing with the endless. To begin with: Some infinities are bigger than others.

The post How Can Infinity Come in Many Sizes? first appeared on Quanta Magazine

Microsoft execs worry AI will eat entry level coding jobs

Russinovich and Hanselman say firms must train juniors to fix agent mistakes – not replace them with prompts

Microsoft Azure CTO Mark Russinovich and VP of Developer Community Scott Hanselman have written a paper arguing that senior software engineers must mentor junior developers to prevent AI coding agents from hollowing out the profession's future skills base.…

Curiosity Studies Nodules on Boxwork Formations

Description NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover discovered these bumpy, pea-sized nodules while exploring a region filled with boxwork formations — low ridges standing roughly 3 to 6 feet (1 to 2 meters) tall with sandy hollows in-between. This mosaic is made up of 50 individual images taken by Curiosity’s Mars Hand Lens Imager (MAHLI), a camera on […]

Indie web browser Ladybird flutters toward Rust with a little help from AI

Project ditches Swift and translates C++ with LLM assistance

The independent Ladybird web browser project is changing course on its choice of programming languages, with LLM-based coding assistants helping to evaluate the shift.…

Curiosity Surveys the Boxwork Region

Description NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover captured this panorama of boxwork formations — the low ridges seen here with hollows in between them — using its Mastcam on Sept. 26, 2025, the 4,671st Martian day, or sol, of the mission. These boxwork formations were created billions of years ago when water leaked through rock cracks. Minerals […]

Artemis II headed back to the bay; helium issues force another delay

Sending humans around the Moon in February, er, March - now April 2026, maybe

The quest to return to the Moon has hit another snag. NASA is delaying Artemis II again, as interrupted helium flow to the rocket’s upper stage forces a rollback to the Vehicle Assembly Building (VAB) and wipes out the March launch window.…

NASA’s Curiosity Rover Sees Martian ‘Spiderwebs’ Up Close

For about six months, NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover has been exploring a region full of geologic formations called boxwork, low ridges standing roughly 3 to 6 feet (1 to 2 meters) tall with sandy hollows in between. Crisscrossing the surface for miles, the formations suggest ancient groundwater flowed on this part of the Red Planet […]

See the First Known Footage of an Elusive Southern Sleeper Shark Swimming in Antarctica's Near-Freezing Waters

It might be the southernmost encounter with a shark ever documented

The Nazis Stole This Rare Jewish Prayer Book Decorated With Dragons, Unicorns and Intricate Floral Patterns. It Just Sold for $6.4 Million at Auction

A scribe created the volume, now known as the Rothschild Vienna Mahzor, in Vienna 600 years ago. It was recently returned to the heirs of its 20th-century owners, who decided to sell the text at a Sotheby's sale

Perseverance’s Landing

NASA’s Perseverance Rover approaches Mars in this Feb. 18, 2020, top-down still image captured by a camera on the rover’s descent stage. Perseverance is searching for signs of ancient microbial life, to advance NASA’s quest to explore the past habitability of Mars. NASA chose Jezero Crater as the landing because scientists believe the area was once […]

Global regulators say AI image tools don't get a free pass on privacy rules

Watchdogs warn models that can generate realistic images of people must comply with data protection laws

A global coalition of privacy watchdogs has fired a warning shot at the generative AI industry, saying companies churning out realistic synthetic images can't pretend that data protection rules don't apply.…

Break free of Ring's servers, earn a five-figure bounty

Goal is to run software locally and stream only to owners' computers

If the sour taste has still not left your mouth after Ring's Super Bowl ad, there is a $10,000 prize for anyone who can find a security flaw in the company's cameras.…

NASA’s Webb Telescope Locates Former Star That Exploded as Supernova

Forty million years ago, a star in a nearby galaxy exploded, spewing material across space and generating a brilliant beacon of light. That light traveled across the cosmos, reaching Earth June 29, 2025, where it was detected by the All-Sky Automated Survey for Supernovae. Astronomers immediately turned their resources to this new supernova, designated 2025pht, […]

Gemini users say their chat histories have quietly vanished

Complaints pile up from users after months of conversations disappear. Google insists it’s just a temporary bug

Over the past few days, complaints have stacked up from people who say months of conversations with Google's AI chatbot have simply vanished, with Reg readers noting the disappearances seemed to coincide with the rollout of Gemini 3.1.…

O say, can you see: FCC pushes patriotic programming for US 250th

Stations urged to mark milestone with pro-America content

The head of the Federal Communications Commission has called on broadcasters to start the day with the Star Spangled Banner or the Pledge of Allegiance to celebrate the US's 250th birthday.…

Ex-Amazon UK boss lined up to chair Britain's competition watchdog

Business Secretary praises Doug Gurr's pro-growth agenda

Britain's competition regulator has tapped former Amazon UK chief Doug Gurr as preferred candidate for chair – a notable appointment given the watchdog's active investigations into major cloud providers.…

Altman: You think AI is wasted energy? Try raising 100 billion humans

OpenAI CEO takes really, really long view on energy efficiency

AI is being unfairly targeted over its energy use, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman claims, as the naysayers ignore the vast amount of resources humans have consumed over millennia – not least to avoid being eating by predators.…

Suspected Anonymous members detained in Spain over post-flood DDoS blitz

Quartet accused of attacking public institutions, claiming the government was responsible for 2024 tragedy

Spanish police say four self-proclaimed members of Anonymous are in custody after allegedly carrying out several cyberattacks on public authorities in the wake of the 2024 DANA floods.…

AWS says more than 600 FortiGate firewalls hit in AI-augmented campaign

Off-the-shelf tools helped Russian-speaking cybercrime group run riot

Cybercriminals armed with off-the-shelf generative AI tools compromised more than 600 internet-exposed FortiGate firewalls across 55 countries in just over a month, according to a new incident report from AWS.…

Workaholic open source developers need to take breaks

A week off for vacation? The nerve of some people

Opinion  If you want to see the definition of "workaholic," you can't do better than to look at your typical senior open source developer or maintainer. I should know, I'm a workaholic too. I know my kind.…

Hotel's rotary switchboard so retro it predates the concept of crashing

Analog curio nestled between fax and typewriter - this is a very different definition of 'legacy support'

Bork!Bork!Bork!  There are occasions when flicking a power switch can send a user into a world of bork-related pain, so it is sometimes worth taking a step back and reconsidering one's life choices.…

Meet Regina Senegal, Acting Chief of Johnson’s Quality and Flight Equipment Division

Safety and quality management are integral to every program at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, and across the entire agency. That gives team members like Regina Senegal, acting chief of the Safety and Mission Assurance Directorate’s (SMA) Quality and Flight Equipment Division, a unique opportunity to collaborate with diverse organizations and personnel. “I’m responsible […]

Every day in every way, passwords are getting worse and worse

The only good password is no password at all

opinion  Passwords turn 65 this year. They became a feature of computer users' lives in 1961, with MIT's Compatible Time-Sharing System (CTSS). Before then, sysops were real sysops. All jobs went through them, one at a time, and access by others was forbidden by laws written on blocks of stone.…

The serious hunt for alien life

Bring up aliens and a lot of people will scoff. But not everyone is laughing. Around the turn of the century, 3.8 million people banded together in a real-time search for aliens -- with screensavers. It was a big moment in a century-long concerted search for extraterrestrial intelligence. So far, alien life hasn't been found. But for scientists like astronomer Janes Davenport, that doesn't mean the hunt is worthless. It doesn't mean we should give up. No, according to James, the search is only getting more exciting as new technology opens up a whole new landscape of possibilities. So today, we're revisiting our episode on the evolving hunt for alien life.

Want more space content? Let your opinion be heard by dropping us a line 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.

To manage podcast ad preferences, review the links below:

See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.

Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoices

NPR Privacy Policy

Work experience kids messed with manager's PC to send him to Ctrl-Alt-Del hell

Rogue user showed them an excellent prank, which they put into production

Who, Me?  Welcome to another installment of Who, Me? It's The Register's Monday column in which you confess to crises you caused, and the course corrections that cured the chaos.…

NASA repurposes Mars Helicopter’s ancient Snapdragon SoC to help Perseverance rover navigate

Upgrade allows robot to travel ‘potentially unlimited distances’ without phoning home for help

NASA has revealed it repurposed the processor the Perseverance rover used to communicate with the Ingenuity Mars Helicopter, to help the rolling robot navigate the Red Planet autonomously “for potentially unlimited distances.”…

Infosys chair says AI will clean up legacy systems – then make more of them

PLUS: China’s sword-wielding humanoid robots; Australian court swamped by AI filings; Vietnam’s 25km overwater drone delivery; And more!

Asia In Brief  Infosys chairman Nandan Nilekani has said the advent of AI means organizations no longer have any excuse to retain their legacy systems.…

Linus Torvalds: Someone ‘more competent who isn't afraid of numbers past the teens’ will take over Linux one day

Emperor Penguin releases kernel 7.0 rc1 with some numerological musings

Linus Torvalds has pondered his professional mortality in a self-deprecating post to mark the release of the first release candidate for version 7.0 of the Linux kernel.…

Attacker gets into France's database listing all bank accounts, makes off with 1.2 million records

PLUS: Unpatched Ivanti boxes under attack; 0APT might not be a scam; AI gets better at helping cyber-scum; And more

Infosec In Brief  An unknown attacker accessed the French government’s database listing every bank account in the country and made off with 1.2 million records.…

UK council faces data breach claim after mishandling trans complaints

Confidential complainant details passed to local politician following debate

A UK councillor has dubbed her local authority's data breach "crazy" after the personal details of individuals behind a series of complaints were revealed to her.…

Microsoft announces ESU program for Windows Server 2016, 10 Enterprise LTSB, and 10 IoT Enterprise 2016 LTSB

The regular, consumer version of Windows 10 isn’t the only Windows release reaching or having reached end-of-life, now middling on under the Extended Security Updates program for the many people sticking with the venerable release. Windows 10 Enterprise LTSB 2016 (October 13, 2026), Windows 10 IoT Enterprise 2016 LTSB (October 13, 2026), and Windows Server 2016 (January 12, 2027) are all reaching end-of-life soon, too. On the listed dates, these versions of Windows will receive their final monthly security updates. As with Windows 10 for consumers, however, there’s a way out: the Extended Security Updates program will also kick in for these versions, offering critical and important security updates, and support relating to just those. The program will be offered for up to three years after official support ends, and won’t be free. For Server 2016 and and Enterprise LTSB 2016, pricing will be $61 per year, but it would double for every year after the first. Pricing for IoT Enterprise 2016 LTSB is available upon request. Of course, Microsoft urges you to upgrade to newer versions – Windows Server 2025, Windows 11 Enterprise LTSC 2024, and Windows 11 IoT Enterprise LTSC 2024 – but if you’re happy with your current version, you can at least get a three-year reprieve, for a price.

Oracle Solaris 11.4 SRU90 released

Despite continuous rumors to the contrary, Oracle is still actively developing Solaris, and it’s been more active than ever lately. Yesterday, the company pushed out another release for customers with the proper support contracts: Oracle Solaris 11.4 SRU90. Aside from the various package updates to bring them up to speed with the latest releases, this new Solaris version also comes with a slew of improvements for ZFS. ZFS changes in Oracle Solaris 11.4.90 include more flexibility in setting retention properties when receiving a new file system, and adding the ability for zfs scrub and resilver to run before all the blocks have been freed from previous zfs destroy operations. (This requires upgrading pools to the new zpool version 54.) ↫ Alan Coopersmith You can now also set boot environments to never be destroyed by either manual or automatic means, and more work has been done to prevent a specific type of bug that would accidentally kill all running processes on the system. It seems some programs mistakenly use -1 as a pid value in kill() calls. Now in 11.4.90, the kill system call was modified to not allow processes to use a pid of -1 unless they’d specifically set a process flag that they intend to kill all processes first, to help with programs that didn’t check for errors when finding the process id for the singular process they wanted to kill. ↫ Alan Coopersmith There’s many more changes and improvements, of course, and hopefully, we’ll get to see these in the next CBE release as well, so us mere mortals without expensive support contracts can benefit from them too.

Government upgrades drones, deploys joystick tweakers to catch illegal dumpers

Electronic eyes are watching from above, ready to catch dumpers of smashed up couches in the act

The UK government is pulling together an elite squad of drone operators to crack down on the scourge of fly tippers and unauthorized dumpers across this ever less green and pleasant land.…

The noise that isn't there

Almost 15% of adults suffer from a persistent, often intolerable sound... that is literally just in their heads. Why does the brain do this to us? We help one of our listeners get some answers.

This is the second episode of a five-part series called The Sound Barrier from our friends at Vox's Unexplainable podcast.Guests: Stéphane Maison, director of the tinnitus clinic at Mass Eye and Ear and Dan Polley, tinnitus researcher at Mass Eye and Ear

To manage podcast ad preferences, review the links below:

See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.

Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoices

NPR Privacy Policy

Ofcom's grumble-o-meter lights up for EE, TalkTalk, Vodafone

Q3 figures show the trio drawing the most broadband complaints per 100,000 customers

The UK's telecoms regulator has named and shamed the companies it receives the most customer complaints about, with certain brands cropping up more than others.…

Blue-light filters are pure quackery

I was trading New Year’s resolutions with a circle of friends a few weeks ago, and someone mentioned a big one: sleeping better. I’m a visual neuroscientist by training, so whenever the topic pops up it inevitably leads to talking about the dreaded blue light from monitors, blue light filters, and whether they do anything. My short answer is no, blue light filters don’t work, but there are many more useful things that someone can do to control their light intake to improve their sleep—and minimize jet lag when they’re traveling. My longer answer is usually a half-hour rant about why they don’t work, covering everything from a tiny nucleus of cells above the optic chiasm, to people living in caves without direct access to sunlight, to neuropeptides, the different cones, how monitors work, gamma curves, what I learned running ismy.blue, corn bulbs, melatonin, finally sharing my Apple Watch & WHOOP stats. What follows is slightly more than you needed to know about blue light filters and more effective ways to control your circadian rhythm. Spoiler: the real lever is total luminance, not color. ↫ Patrick Mineault And yet, despite a complete and utter lack of evidence blue-light filters do anything at all, even the largest technology companies in the world peddle them without so much as blinking an eye. It’s pure quackery, and as always, we let them get away with it.

SerpApi says Google is the pot calling the kettle black when it comes to scraping

'The DMCA was not designed to create walled gardens for tech giants'

SerpApi, a Texas-based web scraping company, has asked a California court to dismiss Google's claim that that it bypassed digital locks to gather copyrighted content in Google Search results.…

The idea of using a Raspberry Pi to run OpenClaw makes no sense

The micro-computer maker’s shares surged this week after an X post tied the AI agent to Pi demand

opinion  Beloved British single-board computer maker Raspberry Pi has achieved meme stock stardom, as its share price surged 90 percent over the course of a couple of days earlier this week. It's settled since, but it’s still up more than 30 percent on the week.…

PayPal app code error leaked personal info and a 'few' unauthorized transactions

About 100 customers affected

PayPal has notified about 100 customers that their personal information was exposed online during a code change gone awry, and in a few of these cases, people saw unauthorized transactions on their accounts.…

NASA Report Reveals the Failures That Left Two Astronauts 'Stranded' on the International Space Station

NASA's administrator blames both the agency and Boeing for Starliner's infamous problems

Anthropic: No, absolutely not, you may not use third-party harnesses with Claude subs

Legal language change aims to make longstanding policy clear

Anthropic this week revised its legal terms to clarify its policy forbidding the use of third-party harnesses with Claude subscriptions, as the AI biz attempts to shore up its revenue model.…

Investigators Unravel $12 Million Ticket-Fraud Scheme at the Louvre

Police have arrested nine individuals in connection with the crime, though they have not revealed their identities

Scientists Still Have So Much to Learn About Archaeopteryx, the Dinosaur That May Have Flown Like a Bird

A new study suggests features in the prehistoric creature's mouth helped it eat more efficiently, giving the species the energy needed to go airborne

AI coding assistant Cline compromised to create more OpenClaw chaos

4K unintended installs in very odd supply chain attack

Someone compromised open source AI coding assistant Cline CLI's npm package earlier this week in an odd supply chain attack that secretly installed OpenClaw on developers' machines without their knowledge. …

NASA Is Helping Bring Giant Tortoises Back to the Galápagos

Giant tortoises are returning to Floreana Island after more than 150 years, guided by NASA data that shows suitable areas for release.

SpaceX's faulty Falcon spewed massive lithium plume over Europe, say scientists

Good news: Team shows re-entry pollution can be measured. Bad news: There may be more of it coming

The SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket that burned up over Europe last year left a massive lithium plume in its wake, say a group of scientists. They warn the disaster is likely a sign of things to come as Earth's atmosphere continues to become a heavily trafficked superhighway to space. …

This Massive, Meat-Eating Dinosaur Was a 'Hell Heron' That Waded Into Shallow Waters to Nab Slippery Fish

Paleontologists unearthed a new species of Spinosaurus in the Sahara Desert in Niger, a discovery that adds to the debate over whether the prehistoric creatures were fully or semi-aquatic

Cerebras plans humongous AI supercomputer in India backed by UAE

Up to 8 exaFLOPS of super sparse AI compute

Nvidia rival Cerebras Systems' dinner plate-sized accelerators will power a new supercomputing cluster in India capable of 8 exaFLOPS of AI compute.…

Vincent van Gogh Adored the Color Yellow. A New Exhibition in Amsterdam Wants You to Fall In Love With the Hue, Too

The Dutch artist's paintings showcase plants, landscapes, objects and buildings in bold shades of yellow

ShinyHunters demands $1.5M not to leak Vegas casino and resort chain data

What happens in Vegas…

Las Vegas hotel and casino giant Wynn Resorts appears to be the latest victim of data-grabbing and extortion gang ShinyHunters.…

Amazon's vibe-coding tool Kiro reportedly vibed too hard and brought down AWS

Bezos-corp blames user error for outage, 'specifically misconfigured access controls'

In a cautionary tale of agentic AI, AWS reportedly suffered service outages caused by its own AI coding tools in December - though the company insists the downtime was ultimately due to human error.…

These 12 Popular Dog Breeds Are at Risk of Breathing Problems Related to Their Short Snouts, a New Study Suggests

Past research on brachycephalic obstructive airway syndrome—a chronic, hereditary disease associated with flat faces—has focused mainly on just three breeds

Watch Never-Before-Seen Footage of David Bowie Performing 'Heroes' at This New Immersive Exhibition

When it opens in London, "David Bowie: You're Not Alone" will tell the story of the man behind the many personas with newly discovered footage and other archival recordings

Quebec vehicles agency spent C$245M over budget on SAP ERP it wasn't sure it needed

Probe says SAAQ misled government and botched rollout caused province-wide disruption

A judge-led commission in Quebec has found that the state agency responsible for driver's licenses and license plates misled the Canadian government about a troubled SAP ERP project that ran more than C$245 million ($179 million/£132.6 million) over budget.…

Researchers Retrieve the Deepest-Ever Rock Core From Beneath Antarctica's Ice. It Holds Clues About the Earth's Past—and Future

The 748-foot-long sediment core contains a record of roughly the past 23 million years, including periods when the planet's surface temperature was hotter than it is today

Artemis II Crew Trains on T-38

NASA astronaut Christina Koch and Canadian Space Agency astronaut Jeremy Hansen take off on a T-38 training flight from Ellington Field on Feb. 11, 2026, as a waning crescent Moon hovers above. Koch and Hansen, along with NASA astronauts Reid Wiseman and Victor Glover, are part of NASA’s Artemis II mission, the first crewed flight […]

Climate Physicists Face the Ghosts in Their Machines: Clouds

The planet is getting hotter, but one factor in particular makes it hard to tell just how hot it will get. Physicists and computer scientists are racing to solve the problem of clouds.

The post Climate Physicists Face the Ghosts in Their Machines: Clouds first appeared on Quanta Magazine

Ukrainian gets five years for helping North Koreans secure US tech jobs

Polish arrest leads to extradition and federal prison sentence

Ukrainian national Oleksandr Didenko will spend the next five years behind bars in the US for his involvement in helping North Korean IT workers secure fraudulent employment.…

Accenture tells staffers: If you want a promotion, use AI at work

Consultancy to monitor usage by meatbags with corporate aspirations

Accenture staff must demonstrate they have fully bought into the consultancy's AI vision if they want to get on.…

Founder ditches AWS for Euro stack, finds sovereignty isn't plug-and-play

Attempt to go 'Made in EU' offers big tech escapees a reality check where lower cloud bills come with higher effort

Building a startup entirely on European infrastructure sounds like a nice sovereignty flex right up until you actually try it and realize the real price gets paid in time, tinkering, and slowly unlearning a decade of GitHub muscle memory.…

Hard drives already sold out for this year – AI to blame

Oh snap! The hyperscalers bought all the HDDs

Hard drive manufacturers have already sold all the units they will make this year, and it looks like the AI infrastructure boom is to blame, with hyperscalers soaking up all the high-capacity storage.…

EFF policy says bots can code but humans must write the docs

'Just trust us' – Big Tech's hackneyed catchphrase makes an unwelcome return

The Electronic Frontier Foundation says it will accept LLM generated code from contributors to its open source projects but will draw the line at non-human generated comments and documentation.…

CISA gives federal agencies three days to patch actively exploited Dell bug

Hardcoded credential flaw in RecoverPoint already abused in espionage campaign

Uncle Sam's cyber defenders have given federal agencies just three days to patch a maximum-severity Dell bug that's been under active exploitation since at least mid-2024.…

From Agile to AI: Anniversary workshop says test-driven development ideal for AI coding

Security is 'dangerously behind' though, as devs 'treat it as something to solve later'

25 years after the Agile Manifesto, a group of experts hosted by one its signatories met to consider the impact of AI on software development, concluding among other things that test-driven development has never been more important.…

Ex-Google engineers accused of helping themselves to chip security secrets

Feds say trio conspired to siphon processor and cryptography IP, allegedly routing some data overseas

Two former Google engineers and a third alleged accomplice are facing federal charges after prosecutors accused them of swiping sensitive chip and security technology secrets and then trying to cover their tracks when the scheme began to unravel.…

Attackers have 16-digit card numbers, expiry dates, but not names. Now org gets £500k fine

Appeals judge overrules lower tribunal in latest battle of ICO against a breached retail giant

The UK's data protection watchdog has scored a small win in a lengthy legal battle against a British retail group that lost millions of data records during a 2017 breach.…

HMRC spares 661 from Making Tax Digital as rollout nears

About half of exemption requests approved as 780,000 prepare for quarterly reporting in April

The UK tax collector has exempted 661 people from moving to quarterly software-based reporting under its Making Tax Digital (MTD) scheme, about half the number who have applied.…

The truth about intermittent fasting

From TikTok and Instagram influencers to celebrities like Hugh Jackman and Kourtney Kardashian, intermittent fasting has gotten a lot of hype. The diet restricts what time you eat rather than what or how much you eat. The idea is that short periods of fasting cause your body to burn through stored fat reserves. But is that conventional wisdom true? And can it really contribute to weight loss? Regina G. Barber and Rachel Carlson tackle those questions — plus why some researchers are rethinking how to protect people's mental health when talking to chatbots and how ultra-endurance running changes the human body.

Have a scientific question you want us to answer? 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 .

To manage podcast ad preferences, review the links below:

See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.

Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoices

NPR Privacy Policy

Desktop tech sent to prison for an education on strange places to put tattoos

And a very awkward introduction to workplace culture

On Call  By the end of the working week, it's natural to feel the walls closing in a little, which is why every Friday morning The Register frees things up a little by publishing a new installment of On Call – the reader-contributed column that shares your tech support stories.…

Snyk CEO bails, wants someone with more AI experience to replace him

Skill at buzzword bingo also required as company seeks innovative and disruptive visionary

The CEO of code review platform provider Snyk has announced he will stand down so the company can find someone better-equipped to steer the company into the age of AI.…

Winds Whip Up Fires and Dust on the Southern Plains

Dry, gusty conditions spurred fast-growing fires in Oklahoma and Kansas, along with dangerous dust storms across the region.

India’s top telco tackles AI with $110 billion build plan and proven fast market dominance playbook

Reliance Jio used super-cheap plans and own-brand phones to conquer

India’s top telco, Reliance Jio, has announced plans to spend $110 billion on datacenters to run AI workloads and says it will use them to deliver services with the same “extreme affordability” it brought to the mobile communications market.…

AI agents abound, unbound by rules or safety disclosures

MIT CSAIL's 2025 AI Agent Index puts opaque automated systems under the microscope

AI agents are becoming more common and more capable, without consensus or standards on how they should behave, say academic researchers.…

Crims create fake remote management vendor that actually sells a RAT

$300 a month buys you a backdoor that looks like legit software

Researchers at Proofpoint late last month uncovered what they describe as a "weird twist" on the growing trend of criminals abusing remote monitoring and management software (RMM) as their preferred attack tools.…

Windows 11 26H1 will be Snapdragon-specific

As if keeping track of whatever counts as a release schedule for Windows wasn’t complicated enough – don’t lie, you don’t know when that feature they announced is actually being released either – Microsoft is making everything even more complicated. Soon, Microsoft will be releasing Windows 11 26H1, but you most likely won’t be getting it because it’s strictly limited to devices with Qualcomm’s new Snapdragon X2 Series processors. The only way to get this version of Windows is to go out and buy a device with a Snapdragon X2 Series processor. Windows 11 26H1 will not be made available to any other Windows 11 users, so nobody will be able to upgrade to it. Furthermore, users of Windows 11 26H1 will not be able to update to the “feature update” for users of Windows 11 24H2 and 25H2, the regular Windows versions, planned for late 2026. Instead, Microsoft promises there will be an upgrade path for 26H1 users in a “future” release of Windows. Why? Devices running Windows 11, version 26H1 will not be able to update to the next annual feature update in the second half of 2026. This is because Windows 11, version 26H1 is based on a different Windows core than Windows 11, versions 24H2 and 25H2, and the upcoming feature update. These devices will have a path to update in a future Windows release. ↫ AriaUpdated at the Windows IT Pro Blog The same thing happened when Qualcomm releases its first round of Snapdragon processors for Windows, as Windows 24H2 was also tied to this specific platform. It seems Microsoft is forced to have entirely separate and partially incompatible codebases just to support Snapdragon processors, which must be a major pain in the ass to deal with. Considering Windows on ARM hasn’t exactly been a smashing success, one may wonder how long Microsoft remains willing to make such exceptions for a singular chip.

You Can Buy One of History's Rarest Baseball Cards—if You Have Several Million Dollars to Spare

The newly graded T206 Honus Wagner card has been in the same family for 116 years. It wasn't on experts' radar until last year

NASA points fingers at Boeing and chaotic culture for Starliner debacle

Plenty of blame to go around, says Isaacman

NASA has released the findings from its investigation of the ill-fated crewed Boeing Starliner mission of 2024, and while it still isn't sure of the root technical causes, it's admitted that trusting Boeing to do a thorough job appears to have been a mistake. …

NASA Investigates How People Respond to Air Taxi Noise

New kinds of aircraft taking to the skies could mean unfamiliar sounds overhead — and where you’re hearing them might matter, according to new NASA research. NASA aeronautics has worked for years to enable new air transportation options for people and goods, and to find ways to make sure they can be safely and effectively […]

Watch the First-Ever Video Uploaded to YouTube, a Grainy 19-Second Clip Called 'Me at the Zoo'

The Victoria and Albert Museum in London has acquired the site's very first video, which went live on April 23, 2005

Google germinates Gemini 3.1 Pro in ongoing AI model race

AI model said to show improved reasoning capabilities

If you want an even better AI model, there could be reason to celebrate. Google, on Thursday, announced the release of Gemini 3.1 Pro, characterizing the model's arrival as "a step forward in core reasoning."…

Ireland Launches Its Permanent ‘Income for the Arts’ Scheme, Becoming the First Government Committed to Paying Artists

The permanent Basic Income for the Arts scheme was announced last fall, following a nearly identical pilot scheme. Come spring, Irish artists will be able to apply for three years of weekly stipends: a value of almost $60,000

Spending watchdog tells National Science Foundation CIO to up game on tech procurement

Wants SLAs, revamped contracts for cloud ops

The US Congress’ spending watchdog, the Government Accountability Office, has pressed the National Science Foundation’s CIO to improve how the agency plans, manages, and procures technology.…

NASA Releases Report on Starliner Crewed Flight Test Investigation

At a news conference on Thursday, NASA released a report of findings from the Program Investigation Team examining the Boeing CST-100 Starliner Crewed Flight Test as part of the agency’s Commercial Crew Program.   “The Boeing Starliner spacecraft has faced challenges throughout its uncrewed and most recent crewed missions. While Boeing built Starliner, NASA accepted it and launched two astronauts to space. […]

Crims hit a $20M jackpot via malware-stuffed ATMs

FBI warns these cyber-physical attacks are on the rise

Thieves stole more than $20 million from compromised ATMs last year using a malware-assisted technique that the FBI says is on the uptick across the United States.…

Don't believe the hyperscalers! AI can't cure the climate crisis

From AI conflation to thin evidence, a new report calls many climate claims greenwashing

Some AI advocates claim that bots hold the secret to mitigating climate change. But research shows that the reality is far different, as new datacenters cause power utilities to burn even more fossil fuels to meet their insatiable demand for energy.…

NASA to Provide Starliner Crew Flight Test Review Findings Today

During a news conference at 2 p.m. EST on Thursday NASA will discuss the findings of investigations into the 2024 crewed test flight of Boeing Starliner to the International Space Station. The news conference will stream live on NASA’s YouTube channel. An instant replay will be available online. NASA participants include: To ask questions during […]

Is Autism Really a Male-Dominated Condition? A New Study Suggests Women Have It Just as Often, but Are Diagnosed Later in Life

Researchers examined the prevalence of autism among nearly three million people born in Sweden over the past four decades

How Do Researchers Identify Individual Bears in the Wild? They Could Soon Do It Through A.I. Facial Recognition Technology

Such tools could help scientists track population sizes or recognize aggressive animals that have attacked humans

Palantir spent $25M on CEO flights so Alex Karp could do all the talking

A hundred days a year in the air doesn't come cheap

Opinion  Palantir CEO Alex Karp has a singular mission to stand out among tech CEOs. Big talk on sales, profits, and tech potential is not enough. His gift for edgy one-liners takes him to places where execs of the past would have scarcely dared to go. Say hello to allusions to goose-stepping and innate Western superiority that we assume have audiences rolling in the aisles.…

Award-Winning NASA Camera Revolutionizes How We See the Invisible

Imagine trying to photograph wind. That’s similar to what NASA engineers dealt with during a recent effort to study how air moves around planes, rockets, and other kinds of aerospace vehicles. Air is invisible, but our understanding of how it flows is crucial for building better, safer aircraft. For 80 years, researchers used a technique […]

Crystals Grown in Space

This June 5, 2024, image shows lysozyme crystals aboard the International Space Station. Lysozyme is a protein found in bodily fluids like tears, saliva, and milk, and is used as a control compound to demonstrate well-formed crystals. Lysozyme plays a vital role in innate immunity, protecting against bacteria, viruses, and fungi. The crystals were grown with […]

Android malware taps Gemini to navigate infected devices

For now, it might not function outside of a lab

Cybersecurity researchers say they've spotted the first Android malware strain that uses generative AI to improve performance once installed. But it may be only a proof of concept.…

Intermittent Fasting Might Not Live Up to the Hype When It Comes to Weight Loss, New Research Suggests

The popular eating strategy is about as effective as doing nothing to lose weight, according to a review of several clinical trials

DOGE bites taxman

IRS lost 40% of IT staff, 80% of tech leaders in 'efficiency' shakeup

Job cuts at the IRS's tech arm have gone faster and farther than expected, with 40 percent of IT staff and four-fifths of tech leaders gone, the agency's CIO revealed yesterday.…

Map the Earth’s Magnetic Shield with the Space Umbrella Project

Use data from NASA’s Magnetosphere Multiscale Mission to shed light on solar storms. For anyone with a laptop or cell.

US tech giants open their wallets for AI-friendly politicians

Rush is on to push forward sympathetic candidates from both parties ahead of midterms

Meta is among tech giants reportedly funding US politicians friendly to the AI industry, as concerns mount over a huge expansion in datacenter building and the effects of AI on everyday life.…

Small But Mighty Lab Device Could Transform NASA Research

A small but mighty piece of lab equipment, about the size of a cellphone, has arrived at the International Space Station after launching with NASA’s SpaceX Crew-12 mission. NASA aims to use the off-the-shelf device, called a microplate reader, to conduct vital biological research in space and get real-time access to data.

DEF CON bans three Epstein-linked men from future events

Emails show all discussed networking and biz interests with the sex offender throughout the 2010s

Cybersecurity conference DEF CON has added three men named in the Epstein files to its list of banned individuals. They are not accused of any criminal wrongdoing.…

AI agents can't teach themselves new tricks – only people can

Self-generated skills don't do much for AI agents, study finds, but human-curated skills do

Teach an AI agent how to fish for information and it can feed itself with data. Tell an AI agent to figure things out on its own and it may make things worse.…

UK to demand social platforms take down abusive intimate images within 48 hours

'Why not 12?' says lawyer

The UK is bracketing "intimate images shared without a victim's consent" along with terror and child sexual abuse material, and demanding that online platforms remove them within two days.…

Healthcare security: Write login details on whiteboard, hope for the best

You told me not to write it on a Post-it...

Bork!Bork!Bork!  Today's bork is entirely human-generated and will send a shiver down the spine of security pros. No matter how secure a system is, a user's ability to undo an administrator's best efforts should not be underestimated.…

A Man Bought a $13 Camera at a Thrift Shop—and Found 70-Year-Old Film Still Inside. Do You Recognize the Faces in the Photos?

Staffers at a photography shop in England carefully developed the negatives, which depict a ski trip in the Swiss Alps. Now, they're searching for clues to help identify the people pictured

AI chatbots waffle on GOV.UK queries, then get facts wrong when told to zip it

Study of 11 LLMs shows they rarely refuse to answer, even when they probably should

Artificial intelligence chatbots can be too chatty when answering questions on government services, swamping accurate information and making mistakes if told to be more concise, according to research.…

Agile Manifesto turns 25 – just in time for vibe coding to test it

Co-author Jon Kern says AI coding tools amplify strengths and expose weaknesses

Interview  Twenty-five years after 17 software developers gathered at a Utah ski resort to draft the Agile Manifesto, artificial intelligence is once again reshaping how code gets written.…

OpenClaw is the most fun I've had with a computer in 50 years

The DECwriter got me hooked in 1975. 'Clawdine' feels like a wonderful new beginning

Opinion  Fifty years ago this month, I touched a computer for the first time. It was an experience that pegged the meter for me like no other – until last week.…

Poland bans camera-packing cars made in China from military bases

Dell, however, is welcome to help build a local-language LLM

Poland’s Ministry of Defence has banned Chinese cars – and any others include tech to record position, images, or sound – from entering protected military facilities.…

Northern Glow Spans Iceland and Canada

A vivid display of the aurora lit up skies over the Denmark Strait and eastern Canada during a minor geomagnetic storm in February 2026.

Indian think tank finds strong hiring for the kind of jobs AI puts at risk

IT services companies are largely immune to AIpocalypse, although the outlook is not good for entry-level jobs

Indian think tank the Council for Research on International Economic Relations has found AI is not an immediate threat to the nation’s IT services sector.…

Undo in Vi and its successors

So vi only has one level of undo, which is simply no longer fit for the times we live in now, and also wholly unnecessary given even the least powerful devices that might need to run vi probably have more than enough resources to give at least a few more levels of undo. What I didn’t know, however, is that vi’s limited undo behaviour is actually part of POSIX, and for full compliance, you’re going to need it. As Chris Siebenmann notes, vim and its derivatives ignore this POSIX requirement and implement multiple levels of undo in the obviously correct way. What about nvi, the default on the BSD variants? I didn’t know this, but it has a convoluted workaround to both maintain POSIX compatibility and offer multiple levels of undo, and it’s definitely something. Nvi has opted to remain POSIX compliant and operate in the traditional vi way, while still supporting multi-level undo. To get multi-level undo in nvi, you extend the first ‘u’ with ‘.’ commands, so ‘u..’ undoes the most recent three changes. The ‘u’ command can be extended with ‘.’ in either of its modes (undo’ing or redo’ing), so ‘u..u..’ is a no-op. The ‘.’ operation doesn’t appear to take a count in nvi, so there is no way to do multiple undos (or redos) in one action; you have to step through them by hand. I’m not sure how nvi reacts if you want do things like move your cursor position during an undo or redo sequence (my limited testing suggests that it can perturb the sequence, so that ‘.’ now doesn’t continue undoing or redoing the way vim will continue if you use ‘u’ or Ctrl-r again). ↫ Chris Siebenmann Siebenmann lists a few other implementations and how they work with undo, and it’s interesting to see how all of them try to solve the problem in slightly different ways.

Microsoft boffins cook up archival storage using Pyrex glass they say can last over 10,000 years

It may have half the capacity of fused silica glass, but is faster and much cheaper

Microsoft this week detailed new research aimed at preserving data in borosilicate glass plates for thousands of years longer than conventional media like hard drives or magnetic tape, without needing to worry about bit rot.…

Adidas investigates third-party data breach after criminals claim they pwned the sportswear giant

'Potential data protection incident' at an 'independent licensing partner,' we're told

Adidas has confirmed it is investigating a third-party breach at one of its partner companies after digital thieves claimed they stole information and technical data from the German sportswear giant.…

As memory shortage persists, vendor price quotes are not long remembered

HPE and Cisco are adjusting terms and conditions

If you like the price of that server, PC, or storage array, you'd better act fast.…

Police Recover Ancient Egyptian Artifacts the Day After a Heist at a Museum in Australia

The looted items included a 2,600-year-old wooden cat figurine, a 3,300-year-old necklace and a mummy mask

F9: an L4-style microkernel for ARM Cortex-M

F9 is an L4-inspired microkernel designed for ARM Cortex-M, targeting real-time embedded systems with hard determinism requirements. It implements the fundamental microkernel principles—address spaces, threads, and IPC, while adding advanced features from industrial RTOSes. ↫ F9 kernel GitHub page For once, not written in Rust, and comes with both an L4-style native API and a userspace POSIX API, and there’s a ton of documentation to get you started.

Windows 11’s new MIDI framework delivers MIDI 2.0

It’s been well over a year since Microsoft unveiled it was working on bringing MIDI 2.0 to Windows, and now it’s actually here available for everyone. We’ve been working on MIDI over the past several years, completely rewriting decades of MIDI 1.0 code on Windows to both support MIDI 2.0 and make MIDI 1.0 amazing. This new combined stack is called “Windows MIDI Services.” The Windows MIDI Services core components are built into Windows 11, rolling out through a phased enablement process now to in-support retail releases of Windows 11. This includes all the infrastructure needed to bring more features to existing MIDI 1.0 apps, and also support apps using MIDI 2.0 through our new Windows MIDI Services App SDK. ↫ Pete Brown and Gary Daniels at the Windows Blogs This is the kind of work users of an operating system want to see. Improvements and new features like these actually have a meaningful, positive impact for people using MIDI, and will genuinely give them them benefits they otherwise wouldn’t get. I won’t pretend to know much about the detailed features and improvements listed in Microsoft’s blog post, but I’m sure the musicians in the audience will be quite pleased. Whomever at Microsoft was responsible for pushing this through, managing this team, and of course the team members themselves should probably be overseeing more than just this. Less “AI” bullshit, more of this.

Google presses play on 30-second Gemini musical slop generator

Who needs to express themselves through music when a bot will do it for you with nothing but a prompt?

If you've ever wanted to make music but have neither the talent nor the inspiration, Google has the AI tool for you. Gemini will now generate a 30-second song for you directly from a text prompt, photo, or video. …

Couples Have Been Kissing Under the Lovers' Arch in Italy for Years. On Valentine's Day, It Collapsed Into the Sea

The iconic rock formation crumbled after days of raging storms. Local officials are calling for new initiatives to help slow coastal erosion in the region

Digital Surface and Terrain Models from Vantor’s Precision3D Product Line Added to Satellite Data Explorer

The CSDA Program added three digital elevation and terrain products from Vantor’s Precision3D Product Line to the Satellite Data Explorer.

Vantor Archive Imagery Added to Satellite Data Explorer

The CSDA Program has added imagery from Vantor to its Satellite Data Explorer (SDX) data access and discovery tool.

NASA’s Commercial Satellite Data Acquisition Program Releases Archived and Tasked Multispectral Data from Satellogic

The CSDA Program has added multispectral archive and tasked data from Satellogic to the Satellite Data Explorer.

CSDA Releases New Data Acquisition Request System

The CSDA Program’s Data Acquisition Request System lets authorized users submit proposals for yet-to-be-collected data from CSDA’s commercial partners.

ShinyHunters claims it drove off with 1.7M CarGurus records

Latest in a rash of grab-and-leak data incidents

updated  CarGurus purportedly suffered a data breach with 1.7 million corporate records stolen, according to a notorious cybercrime crew that posted the online vehicle marketplace on its leak site on Wednesday.…

CSDA Program Announces Eight New Data Agreements

The CSDA Program announced eight new agreements that will give users more access to multispectral and synthetic aperture radar data.

Google digs deep to power AI expansion with 150 MW geothermal deal

Plants expected to begin operations as early as 2028 pending approval by state government

Datacenter power consumption has surged amid the AI boom, forcing builders to get creative in order to prevent their capex-heavy bit barns from running out of steam. But at least in some parts of the world, the answer to abundant clean energy may be hiding just a few thousand feet below the surface of the earth.…

Copilot spills the beans, summarizing emails it's not supposed to read

Data Loss Prevention? Yeah, about that...

The bot couldn't keep its prying eyes away. Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat has been summarizing emails labeled “confidential” even when data loss prevention policies were configured to prevent it.…

Notes from the Field

Looking at Chlorophyll from Space By Compton “Jim” Tucker NASA scientists are able to study plants from space, but this wasn’t always the case. “I love using satellite data to study the Earth,” says Dr. Compton “Jim” Tucker. When Tucker was a graduate student, he and some friends discovered a new way to study photosynthesis. […]

42 Years of Measuring the Sun, the Earth and the Energy in Between

By Denise Lineberry On Jan. 31, 1958, Explorer 1 became the first satellite launched by the United States. Its primary science instrument, a cosmic ray detector, was designed to measure the radiation environment in Earth orbit. Though its final transmission was in May 1958, it continued to revolve around Earth more than 58,000 times. As […]

The Sky Belongs to All of Us

By Hashima Hasan How did a little girl born in India soon after its independence from the British Empire, become a program scientist for NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope, and the first female program scientist for the James Webb Space Telescope, Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy (SOFIA), Gravity Probe B, and other astrophysics flight missions? The […]

Measuring the Big Bang with the COBE satellite

By John Mather The Cosmic Background Explorer satellite (COBE) went up on a Delta rocket on Nov. 18, 1989, into a polar sun-synchronous orbit 900 km up. Our team at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC), Ball Aerospace, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) and universities built it to look at the cosmic microwave and infrared […]

Peering Homeward, 1972

By Laura Rocchio On July 23, 1972 the first civilian satellite designed to image Earth’s land surfaces was launched from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California. On board the satellite, originally named the Earth Resources Technology Satellite (ERTS), but later known as Landsat 1, were two sensors. The primary sensor, called the Return Beam Vidicon […]

DARPA's autonomous missile-firing missile advances toward flight tests

Yo dawg, we heard you like missiles, so we put some missiles in your missile so you can boom while you zoom

It's taken about five years, but DARPA's missile-launching missile has become the government's latest experimental X-plane and is advancing toward flight testing.…

Astronomers Discover an Exoplanet in the Wrong Place, Hinting at a Planetary System That Was Born 'Inside Out'

A rocky planet was found orbiting its host star in an unusual location

Fraudster hacked hotel system, paid 1 cent for luxury rooms, Spanish cops say

'First time we have detected a crime using this method,' cops say

Spanish police arrested a hacker who allegedly manipulated a hotel booking website, allowing him to pay one cent for luxury hotel stays. He also raided the mini-bars and didn't settle some of those tabs, police say.…

Windows 11 finally hits right note: MIDI 2.0 support arrives

Musical instrument digital interface protocol leaves preview for bright lights of General Availability

Microsoft has finally ushered in the era of MIDI 2.0 for Windows 11, more than a year after first teasing the functionality for Windows Insiders.…

Texas sues TP-Link over China links and security vulnerabilities

State disputes the company's claim that its routers are made in Vietnam

TP-Link is facing legal action from the state of Texas for allegedly misleading consumers with "Made in Vietnam" claims despite China-dominated manufacturing and supply chains, and for marketing its devices as secure despite reported firmware vulnerabilities exploited by Chinese state-sponsored actors.…

Privacy Under Siege

Surveillance, Breaches, and Gaps in the Law It has become clear that privacy risks are not isolated incidents. They are part of a larger pattern.  Major organizations continue to experience large scale data breaches. Brightspeed recently suffered a breach affecting around one million customers. Brightspeed opened an internal cybersecurity investigation in early January this year, after Crimson […]

The post Privacy Under Siege appeared first on Purism.

Deutsche Bahn back on track after DDoS yanks the brakes

National rail bookings and timetables disrupted for nearly 24 hours

If you wanted to book a train trip in Germany recently, you would have been out of luck. The country's national rail company says that its services were disrupted for hours because of a cyberattack.…

The Biophysical World Inside a Jam-Packed Cell

Innovations in imaging and genetic engineering are coming together to probe the biophysics of cytoplasm inside living animals.

The post The Biophysical World Inside a Jam-Packed Cell first appeared on Quanta Magazine

Like Humans, Baboons Get Jealous of Their Siblings

A new study found that young baboons try to interrupt their mother when she is grooming a sibling

6,000 execs struggle to find the AI productivity boom

Survey says 80% of firms see no gains from the tech

A survey of almost 6,000 corporate execs across the US, UK, Germany, and Australia found that more than 80 percent detect no discernible impact from AI on either employment or productivity.…

Why Do Humans Have Chins? They Might Be an Evolutionary Accident, New Research Suggests

The bony facial protrusion might be an evolutionary byproduct that resulted from changes to other parts of the skull, according to a new study

Grants

Grants Status Requests To submit a request, visit NASA General Information Request Form and complete the form. You will receive an automated email with the most commonly requested grant status information. Important Instructions: How to Fill Out the Form: Memorandum for NASA Grantee Community Guidance Regarding OMB Memorandum M-25-14 and Recent Temporary Restraining Orders Update […]

Your AI-generated password isn't random, it just looks that way

Seemingly complex strings are actually highly predictable, crackable within hours

Generative AI tools are surprisingly poor at suggesting strong passwords, experts say.…

This Luxury Steamer Disappeared on a Stormy Night in 1872. Nearly 150 Years Later to the Day, It Was Found at the Bottom of Lake Michigan

The "Lac La Belle" was discovered 20 miles off the coast of Wisconsin in 2022 after a fisherman offered shipwreck hunters a mysterious clue

TB 26-02 Effects of Large Grain Size in Composite Overwrapped Pressure Vessel

The NASA Engineering and Safety Center (NESC) performed an assessment to characterize the effects of abnormal grain growth (AGG) within a metallic liner of a composite overwrapped pressure vessel (COPV). This effort focused on evaluating the mechanical response of the liner material, including the strain amplification factor (SAF), using a series of custom-designed coupons that […]

Tesla drops 'Autopilot' branding in California after DMV order

EV maker avoids 30-day license suspension after state ruling on self-driving claims

Tesla has complied with an order by the California Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) and stopped using the term "Autopilot" in its marketing of electric vehicles, having already modified use of "Full Self-Driving" to clarify that it requires driver supervision.…

Cabinet Office probes digital ID minister over think tank's journalist investigation

Starmer orders inquiry after Labour Together commissioned dossier on reporters

Josh Simons, the Cabinet Office minister responsible for the UK government's digital identity program, is being probed by the department for his actions running a Labour think tank that commissioned an investigation into journalists.…

Godot maintainers struggle with 'draining and demoralizing' AI slop submissions

GitHub itself to blame for AI slop pull requests, say devs

Rémi Verschelde, a maintainer of the open source Godot game engine, is the latest to complain about the impact of "AI slop PRs [pull requests]", which he says "are becoming increasingly draining and demoralizing for Godot maintainers."…

Notepad++ declares hardened update process 'effectively unexploitable'

Miscreants will need to find another avenue for malware shenanigans

Notepad++ has continued beefing up security with a release the project's author claims makes the "update process robust and effectively unexploitable."…

You can jailbreak an F-35 just like an iPhone, says Dutch defense chief

No worries if the US doesn't want to be friends with Europe anymore

Lockheed Martin's F-35 fighter aircraft can be jailbroken "just like an iPhone," the Netherlands' defense secretary has claimed.…

Windows 11 Start menu makes unscheduled stop in Saint Moritz

Passenger info display takes scenic detour via desktop and pending updates

Bork!Bork!Bork!  The curse of bork is not limited to obsolete operating systems or obscure hardware. Today's example of railway signage disruption is something bang up to date from the Swiss town of Saint Moritz.…

Europe's 5G Standalone stall risks falling behind US, Asia

Report warns delayed rollouts could widen capability gap as new standards emerge

North American and Asian markets are enjoying the benefits of a transition to 5G Standalone (SA) mobile networks, but much of Europe lags behind, risking a growing disadvantage as new capabilities roll out.…

HackerOne 'updating' Ts&Cs after bug hunters question if they're training AI

CEO lauds security researchers, insists they're not 'inputs'

HackerOne has clarified its stance on GenAI after researchers fretted their submissions were being used to train its models.…

Microsoft throws spox under the bus after Parliament testimony on ICC email kerfuffle

Apologizes for 'inaccuracy'

Exclusive  Microsoft has said one of its leading spokespeople gave testimony to the UK Parliament containing an "inaccuracy" with regard to its dealings with the International Criminal Court (ICC) in response to US sanctions.…

Linus Torvalds and friends tell The Reg how Linux solo act became a global jam session

Ts'o, Hohndel and the man himself spill beans on how checks in the mail and GPL made it all possible

If you know anything about Linux's history, you'll remember it all started with Linus Torvalds posting to the Minix Usenet group on August 25, 1991, that he was working on "a (free) operating system (just a hobby, won't be big and professional like gnu) for 386(486) AT clones." We know that the "hobby" operating system today is Linux, and except for PCs and Macs, it pretty much runs the world.…

The neuroscience of cracking under pressure

The 2026 Winter Olympics are unfolding in Milan and Cortina, and we can’t look away: We’re watching athletes fly down mountains on skis and glide — sometimes slipping and falling — on the ice. Vikram Chib studies performance and how the brain responds to rewards at Johns Hopkins University. And he says rewards aren’t just for Olympians; they’re baked into basically everything humans do. But those rewards and the pressure that comes with them can come at a cost to people’s brains. And even Olympians are human. Sometimes, we crack. So, today, Vikram dives into the science behind choking under pressure.

Interested in more Olympics science? Email us your question at shortwave@npr.org – we may cover it in a future episode!

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 .

To manage podcast ad preferences, review the links below:

See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.

Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoices

NPR Privacy Policy

Qualcomm set to triumph in UK smartphone ‘patent tax’ case

Consumer group Which? brought the case and now plans to bail after court indicated it would lose

The UK’s Competition Appeal Tribunal has indicated that it will find Qualcomm did not abuse its market power, leading consumer advocacy group Which? to withdraw a case it hoped would see Brits compensated for increased smartphone prices.…

A Second Cyclone Slams Madagascar

Widespread flooding affected tens of thousands of people after cyclones Fytia and Gezani drenched the island.

Palo Alto CEO says AI isn’t great for business, yet

Sees little enterprise AI adoption other than coding assistants, buys Koi for what comes next

If enterprises are implementing AI, they’re not showing it to Palo Alto Networks CEO Nikesh Arora, who on Tuesday said business adoption of the tech lags consumer take-up by at least a couple of years – except for coding assistants.…

Indian conglomerate Adani plans very slow $100 billion AI datacenter build

PM Modi tells citizens AI will lift them up, not take their jobs

Giant Indian industrial conglomerate Adani has said it will spend up to $100 billion on AI datacenters to equip the nation with sovereign infrastructure, but will do so at slower pace than Big Tech tech companies plan to bring their own bit barns to Bharat.…

Anthropic's latest Sonnet gets better at using computers, amid bouts of existential angst

Version 4.6 can also be 'warm, honest, prosocial, and at times funny'

Anthropic has updated its Sonnet model to version 4.6 and claims the upgrade is better at coding and using computers, and also possesses improved reasoning and planning capabilities.…

Curiosity Blog Sols 4804-4811: Kicking Off the Final Phase of Boxwork Exploration

Written by Abigail Fraeman, Curiosity Deputy Project Scientist Earth planning date: Friday, Feb. 13, 2026 Curiosity spent this week at Gale crater completing the last few activities associated with the “Nevado Sajama 2” drill before kicking off our final phase of the boxwork exploration campaign. As we’ve explored the boxwork region, the science team has […]

KDE Plasma 6.6 released

KDE Plasma 6.6 has been released, and brings with a whole slew of new features. You can save any combination of themes as a global theme, and there’s a new feature allowing you to increase or decrease the contrast of frames and outlines. If your device has a camera, you can now scan Wi-F settings from QR codes, which is quite nice if you spend a lot of time on the road. There’s a new colour filter for people who are colour blind, allowing you to set the entire UI to grayscale, as well as a brand new virtual keyboard. Other new accessibility features include tracking the mouse cursor when using the zoom feature, a reduced motion setting, and more. Spectacle gets a text extraction feature and a feature to exclude windows from screen recordings. There’s also a new optional login manager, optimised for Wayland, a new first-run setup wizard, and much more. As always, KDE 6.6 will find its way to your distribution’s repositories soon enough.

China-linked snoops have been exploiting Dell 0-day since mid-2024, using 'ghost NICs' to avoid detection

Full scale of infections remains 'unknown'

China-linked attackers exploited a maximum-severity hardcoded-credential bug in Dell RecoverPoint for Virtual Machines as a zero-day since at least mid-2024. It's all part of a long-running effort to backdoor infected machines for long-term access, according to Google's Mandiant incident response team.…

SvarDOS: an open-source DOS distribution

SvarDOS is an open-source project that is meant to integrate the best out of the currently available DOS tools, drivers and games. DOS development has been abandoned by commercial players a long time ago, mostly during early nineties. Nowadays it survives solely through the efforts of hobbyists and retro-enthusiasts, but this is a highly sparse and unorganized ecosystem. SvarDOS aims to collect available DOS software and make it easy to find and install applications using a network-enabled package manager (like apt-get, but for DOS and able to run on a 8086 PC). ↫ SvarDOS website SvarDOS is built around a fork of the Enhanced DR-DOS kernel, which is available in a dedicated GitHub repository. The project’s base installation is extremely minimal, containing only the kernel, a command interpreter, and some basic system administration tools, and this basic installation is compatible down to the 8086. You are then free to add whatever packages you want, either from local storage or from the online repository using the included package manager. SvarDOS is a rolling release, and you can use the package manager to keep it updated. Aside from a set of regular installation images for a variety of floppy sizes, there’s also a dedicated “talking” build that uses the PROVOX screen reader and Braille ‘n Speak synthesizer at the COM1 port. It’s rare for a smaller project like this to have the resources to dedicate to accessibility, so this is a rather pleasant surprise.

Gemini lies to user about health info, says it wanted to make him feel better

Though commonly reported, Google doesn't consider it a security problem when models make things up

Imagine using an AI to sort through your prescriptions and medical information, asking it if it saved that data for future conversations, and then watching it claim it had even if it couldn't. Joe D., a retired software quality assurance (SQA) engineer, says that Google Gemini lied to him and later admitted it was doing so to try and placate him.…

Proper Linux on your wrist: AsteroidOS 2.0 released

It’s been a while since we’ve talked about AsteroidOS, the Linux distribution designed specifically to run on smartwatches, providing a smartwatch interface and applications built with Qt and QML. The project has just released version 2.0, and it comes with a ton of improvements. AsteroidOS 2.0 has arrived, bringing major features and improvements gathered during its journey through community space. Always-on-Display, expanded support for more watches, new launcher styles, customizable quick settings, significant performance increases in parts of the User Interface, and enhancements to our synchronization clients are just some highlights of what to expect. ↫ AsteroidOS 2.0 release announcement I’m pleasantly surprised by how many watches are actually fully supported by AsteroidOS 2.0; especially watches from Fossil and Ticwatch are a safe buy if you want to run proper Linux on your wrist. There are also synchronisation applications for Android, desktop Limux, Sailfish OS, and UBports Ubuntu Touch. iOS is obviously missing from this list, but considering Apple’s stranglehold on iOS, that’s not unexpected. Then again, if you bought into the Apple ecosystem, you knew what you were getting into. As for the future of the project, they hope to add a web-based flashing tool and an application store, among other things. I’m definitely intrigued, and am now contemplating if I should get my hands on a (used) supported watch to try this out. Anything I can move to Linux is a win.

Amazon's $200 billion capex plan: How I learned to stop worrying and love negative free cash flow

It isn't insane, and Amazon will be fine when the music stops. Other players, maybe not so much

In their recent earnings call, Amazon kinda blew the doors off of industry analyst (motto: "we'll be wrong, then take it out on your stock") projections for their capex spend.…

A deep dive into Apple’s .car file format

Every modern iOS, macOS, watchOS, and tvOS application uses Asset Catalogs to manage images, colors, icons, and other resources. When you build an app with Xcode, your .xcassets folders are compiled into binary .car files that ship with your application. Despite being a fundamental part of every Apple app, there is little to none official documentation about this file format. In this post, I’ll walk through the process of reverse engineering the .car file format, explain its internal structures, and show how to parse these files programmatically. This knowledge could be useful for security research and building developer tools that does not rely on Xcode or Apple’s proprietary tools. ↫ ordinal0 at dbg.re Not only did ordinal0 reverse-engineer the file format, they also developed their own unique custom parser and compiler for .car files that don’t require any of Apple’s tools.

Infosys bows to its master, signs deal with Anthropic

After a selloff fueled by fears AI could upend the outsourcing model

Indian IT professionals worried about 72-hour workweeks might soon face the opposite concern, as Bengaluru-based outsourcing giant Infosys has partnered with Anthropic to bring agentic AI to telecommunications companies and other regulated industries.…

Scientists Once Thought This Snail Was Extinct. But a Surprising Discovery and Decade-Long Conservation Effort Revived the Species

Conservationists have bred and released more than 100,000 greater Bermuda land snails

China remains embedded in US energy networks 'for the purpose of taking it down'

Plus 3 new goon squads targeted critical infrastructure last year

Three new threat groups began targeting critical infrastructure last year, while a well-known Beijing-backed crew - Volt Typhoon - continued to compromise cellular gateways and routers, and then break into US electric, oil, and gas companies in 2025, according to Dragos' annual threat report published on Tuesday.…

Lucian Freud Is Famous for His Unflinching Portraits. These Rarely Seen Drawings Provide an Intimate Window Into His Creative Process

A new exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery in London showcases drawings and etchings from throughout the British artist’s 60-year career

GPU who? Meta to deploy Nvidia CPUs at large scale

CPU adoption is part of deeper partnership between the Social Network and Nvidia which will see millions of GPUs deployed over next few years

Move over Intel and AMD — Meta is among the first hyperscalers to deploy Nvidia's standalone CPUs, the two companies revealed on Tuesday. Meta has already deployed Nvidia's Grace processors in CPU-only systems at scale and is working with the GPU slinger to field its upcoming Vera CPUs beginning next year.…

dBASE on the Kaypro II

Within the major operating system of its day, on popular hardware of its day, ran the utterly dominant relational database software of its day. PC Magazine, February 1984, said, “Independent industry watchers estimate that dBASE II enjoys 70 percent of the market for microcomputer database managers.” Similar to past subjects HyperCard and Scala Multimedia, Wayne Ratcliff’s dBASE II was an industry unto itself, not just for data-management, but for programmability, a legacy which lives on today as xBase. Written in assembly, dBASE II squeezed maximum performance out of minimal hardware specs. This is my first time using both CP/M and dBASE. Let’s see what made this such a power couple. ↫ Christopher Drum If you’ve ever wanted to run a company using CP/M – and who doesn’t – this article is as good a starting point as any.

AI gets all the good stuff, including Micron's speedy 28 GB/s PCIe 6.0 SSD

Consumers have a long wait ahead of them before they can bring that kind of performance home

It's time for a new generation of faster flash storage, but not on your laptop or desktop. Micron's first PCIe 6.0 SSDs have entered mass production and promise eye-watering transfer rates of up to 28 GB/s. However, unless you're building flash storage arrays for AI, you won't have a use for them.…

AI bit barns grow climate emergency by turning up the gas

Companies talk renewables while firing up gas turbines as fast as they can

Bit barns need a lot of power to operate and, as hyperscalers look for ways to generate it, they are adding more dirty energy in the form of new gas turbines. One estimate says that these new power sources could add another 44 million tons of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere by 2030, equivalent to the annual emissions of 10 million private cars.…

Archaeologists Unearthed a 2,200-Year-Old Bone. They Say It Could Be the First Direct Evidence of Hannibal's Legendary War Elephants

The Carthaginian general famously used elephants during the Punic Wars. But until now, archaeologists had never found skeletal remains linking the animals to the conflict

Scientists show it's possible to solve problems in your dreams by playing the right sounds

Could the same method one day power sleep-time ads?

It's like the movie Inception, but without Leonardo DiCaprio, unless you imagine him. Researchers used carefully timed sound cues to nudge dream content, and in some cases, boost next-morning problem solving. Could dreamtime product placement come next?…

React survey shows TanStack gains, doubts over server components

Not everyone's convinced React belongs on the server as well as in the browser

Devographics has published its State of React survey, with over 3,700 developers speaking out about what they love and hate in the fractured React ecosystem.…

European Parliament bars lawmakers from using AI tools

Who knows where that helpful email summary is being generated?

The European Parliament has reportedly turned off AI features on lawmakers' devices amid concerns about content going where it shouldn't.…

Stormy, Snowy Winter for Hokkaido

On February 5, 2026, the MODIS (Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer) on NASA’s Terra satellite acquired this image of snow-covered landscapes across Hokkaido. With more than 31 active volcanoes, the island features several large caldera lakes, including at least five that are visible in the image. (Calderas are large depressions formed by volcanic eruptions.) In the east, forested windbreaks around Nakashibetsu form […]

A Star Suddenly Brightened, Then Faded Into Darkness. Astronomers Say It May Have Turned Into a Black Hole

If confirmed, this disappearing act might provide the closest and best observational evidence for the birth of a black hole

How Often Do You Fart? This 'Smart Underwear' Can Keep Track, Because Figuring Out a Baseline Is Important for Science

Researchers have launched a study to find a typical range for flatulence, which has been harder to measure than you might expect

Flush with potential? Activist investor insists Japanese toilet giant is an AI sleeper

Palliser Capital says Toto is sitting on hidden semiconductor value – and wants the company to lift the lid

The AI hype cycle has officially reached the toilet, with a Japanese bathroom giant suddenly being pitched as a serious tech play.…

Dear Oracle, we need to talk about the future of MySQL

Faithful pen open letter proposing independent foundation with or without Big Red's participation

A group of influential users and developers of MySQL have invited Oracle to join their plans to create an independent foundation to guide the future development of the popular open source database, which Big Red owns.…

NASA Advances High-Altitude Traffic Management

High-altitude flight is getting increasing attention from sectors ranging from telecommunications to emergency response. To make that airspace more accessible, NASA is developing an air traffic management system covering those altitudes and supplementing its work with real-time data from a research balloon in Earth’s stratosphere.  Aircraft at high altitudes – 50,000 feet or higher, or roughly 10,000 to 20,000 feet above most commercial traffic – offer new […]

£111M later, frictionless post-Brexit border dream 'brought to early closure'

With no staff, no funding, and the contract closed, it looks a lot like limbo

The UK's long-promised "Single Trade Window" has quietly run out of steam after burning through more than £111 million ($150 million), with officials confirming the program has been "brought to early closure."…

A New Complexity Theory for the Quantum Age

Henry Yuen is developing a new mathematical language to describe problems whose inputs and outputs aren’t ordinary numbers.

The post A New Complexity Theory for the Quantum Age first appeared on Quanta Magazine

Bird-Watchers Flock to Montreal to Catch a Glimpse of Canada's First Known European Robin

Experts don't know how the little songbird traveled across the Atlantic Ocean

All the world's a stage – except this deputy federal CIO job

$200K role promises authority, mission, and 'zero patience for theater'

The Trump administration is looking for a deputy federal CIO, and theater fans need not apply.…

These 12,000-Year-Old Scraps of Elk Hide May Be the World's Oldest Known Examples of Sewing

Indigenous groups in present-day Oregon stitched the fragments together using cord made from plant fiber and animal hair. Experts think they may have been part of a garment, bag, container or portable shelter

US lawyers fire up privacy class action accusing Lenovo of bulk data transfers to China

Keep behavioral tracking American? PC giant says the claim is 'false'

A US law firm has accused Lenovo of violating Justice Department strictures about the bulk transfer of data to foreign adversaries, namely China.…

Polish cops nab 47-year-old man in Phobos ransomware raid

Police say seized kit contained logins, passwords, and server IP addresses

Polish police have arrested and charged a man over ties to the Phobos ransomware group following a property raid.…

Gentoo dumps GitHub over Copilot nagware

Repo mirrors now open for business

Gentoo's official migration from Microsoft-owned GitHub to Codeberg is underway, as the Linux distribution fulfills a pledge to ditch the code shack due to "continuous attempts to force Copilot usage for our repositories."…

Gentoo moves to Codeberg from GitHub after airing Copilot concerns

Repo mirrors now open for business

Gentoo's official migration from Microsoft-owned GitHub to Codeberg is underway, as the Linux distribution fulfills a pledge to ditch the code shack due to "continuous attempts to force Copilot usage for our repositories."…

CIOs told: Prove your AI pays off – or pay the price

Boards demand measurable ROI as budgets, bonuses, and jobs hang in the balance

The clock is ticking for AI projects to either prove their worth or face the chopping block.…

UK.gov launches cyber 'lockdown' campaign as 80% of orgs still leave door open

Digital burglaries remain routine, and data shows most corps still don't stick to basic infosec standards

Britain is telling businesses to "lock the door" on cybercrims as new government data suggests most still haven't even found the latch.…

Ireland joins regulator smackdown after X's Grok AI accused of undressing people

Social media platform’s legal eagles prepare to fight ever-growing number of countries

The Irish Data Protection Commission (DPC) is the latest regulator to open an investigation into Elon Musk's X following repeated reports of harmful image generation by the platform's Grok AI chatbot.…

Capita taps Microsoft Copilot to dig it out from UK pensions backlog

Outsourcer tells MPs AI is prioritizing cases as thousands of civil servants face delays

Capita is banking on Microsoft Copilot to help rescue the backlog of cases it has inherited in taking over the UK Civil Service Pensions Scheme (CSPS).…

GitHub previews Agentic Workflows as part of continuous AI concept

Won't replace traditional CI/CD – and still in early development – so use 'at your own risk'

Agentic workflows - where an AI agent runs automatically in GitHub Actions - are now in technical preview, following their introduction at the Universe event in San Francisco last year.…

MoD ticks shopping list as PM considers weapons budget boost

Top brass splash cash on acoustic targeting, hypersonic missiles…and Red Hat

Keir Starmer could ramp up the UK's defense spending plans faster than planned as the MoD reeled off new purchases for Britain's armed forces.…

Tea time... with an ape?

Picture this: You’re at a pretend tea party, but instead of sitting across from toddlers in tiaras, you’re clinking cups with Kanzi—an ape with the incredible ability to communicate with humans. NPR science correspondent Nate Rott talked to some scientists who did exactly that. But these scientists weren’t just having pretend tea parties with Kanzi for fun, they were trying to test the limits of his imagination – because humans’ ability to play out “pretend” scenarios in our heads and guess at the potential consequences of our actions is key to how we live our lives. And we might not be the only animals to do it!

For more of Nate’s reporting, plus videos of Kanzi, check out the full story on NPR here . Chris Krupenye’s study can be found here .

If you liked this episode, you might also like our episode on bonobos and the evolution of niceness , and what insights monkeys offer us for the evolution of human speech .

Interested in more science about our brains and their abilities? 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 .

To manage podcast ad preferences, review the links below:

See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.

Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoices

NPR Privacy Policy

Passive RFIDs can now stream telemetry data from sensors

To advance the ‘ambient internet of things’ – no batteries required

A quartet of Japanese organisations plan to build “advanced ambient internet of things systems” using a newly approved ISO standard.…

AWS adds nested virtualization option for handful of EC2 instances

Your chance to run a VM inside a VM, inside a cloud – which can mean WSL on a cloudy Windows PC

Amazon Web Services has enabled nested virtualization for a handful of EC2 instances.…

Canada Goose ruffles feathers over 600K record dump, says leak is old news

Fashion brand latest to succumb to ShinyHunters' tricks

Canada Goose says an advertised breach of 600,000 records is an old raid and there are no signs of a recent compromise.…

Dutch cops arrest man after sending him confidential files by mistake

Bungled link handed over sensitive docs, and when recipient didn't cooperate, police opted for cuffs

Dutch police have arrested a man for "computer hacking" after accidentally handing him their own sensitive files and then getting annoyed when he didn't hand them back.…

Oracle vows 'new era' for MySQL as users sharpen their forks

Commit drought and governance gripes push Big Red to reset

Oracle has promised a "decisive new approach" to MySQL, the popular open source database it owns, following growing criticism of its approach and the prospect of a significant fork in the code.…

You probably can't trust your password manager if it's compromised

Researchers demo weaknesses affecting some of the most popular options

Academics say they found a series of flaws affecting three popular password managers, all of which claim to protect user credentials in the event that their servers are compromised.…

KPMG partner in Oz turned to AI to pass an exam on... AI

Unnamed consultant – one of a dozen cases at the company's Australian arm – now nursing a fine

AIpocolypse  A partner at accounting and consultancy giant KPMG in Australia was forced to cough up a AU$10k ($7,084/ £5,195) fine after he used AI to ace an internal training course on... AI.…

X users howl into the void as timelines fail to load

'All systems operational,' says status page – real life suggests otherwise

Elon Musk-owned social media platform X is experiencing an outage, with users worldwide reporting that their timelines no longer show the usual information flow.…

Open source registries don't have enough money to implement basic security

Free beer is great. Securing the keg costs money

fosdem 2026  Open source registries are in financial peril, a co-founder of an open source security foundation warned after inspecting their books. And it's not just the bandwidth costs that are killing them.…

Secondhand laptop market goes 'mainstream' amid memory crunch

Budget-conscious buyers in Europe voting with their wallet

Sales of refurbished PCs are on the up amid shortages of key components, including memory chips, that are making brand new devices more expensive.…

Why AI writing is so generic, boring, and dangerous: Semantic ablation

The subtractive bias we're ignoring

opinion  Just as the community adopted the term "hallucination" to describe additive errors, we must now codify its far more insidious counterpart: semantic ablation.…

FTC to probe whether Microsoft's cloud clout crosses the line

Competitors asked to detail licensing terms, training costs, and business practices in widening antitrust inquiry

The US Federal Trade Commission has sent out a raft of civil investigative demands to Microsoft's competitors as it warms up a probe into whether the cloud and software giant has an illegal monopoly across chunks of the enterprise tech market.…

NASA's fill-'er-up Moon rocket 'confidence' test sees mixed results

Plan was to turn SLS into Seal Leaks Stemmed... But the flow was off

NASA engineers spent the weekend studying the data after another attempt to fill the agency's monster Space Launch System (SLS) produced mixed results.…

Google patches Chrome zero-day as in-the-wild exploits surface

High-severity CSS flaw let malicious webpages run code inside the sandbox

Google has quietly pushed out an emergency Chrome fix after attackers were caught exploiting the browser's first reported zero-day of 2026.…

Why does the Windows 11 taskbar hurt me like that?

Former Windows manager explains design decisions behind it

A former Windows boss has explained why the taskbar in Windows 11 is the way it is and how he "fought hard" to stop Microsoft from removing customization options present in Windows 10.…

Price of popularity: Linux Mint's success also means maintainer stress

Lots of donations, but lots of pressure to go with it

Although we're in mid-February, the Linux Mint project just published its January 2026 blog. This could be seen as one sign of the pressure on the creator of this very successful distro: although the post talks about forthcoming improved input localization support and user management, it also discusses the pressures of the project's semi-annual release schedule.…

Keir Starmer declares 'months' timeline for social media age clampdown in UK

Stricter rules for VPNs and AI chatbots also in the offing amid child safety push

UK prime minister Keir Starmer has set a "months" timeline for the long-brewing plan for a social media age limit, signaling the government is ready to pick a fight with Big Tech if that's what it takes.…

DVSA seeks £95K digital chief to steer test booking system out of the ditch

Agency looks to cut waiting times and curb bot-driven slot reselling as it doubles down on IT overhaul

The UK's Driver and Vehicle Standards Agency (DVSA) is recruiting a chief digital and information officer, partly to help sort out its bot-ridden practical driving test booking system.…

Anthropic tries to hide Claude's AI actions. Devs hate it

The software doesn't show what files it's working on

Anthropic has updated Claude Code, its AI coding tool, changing the progress output to hide the names of files the tool was reading, writing, or editing. However, developers have pushed back, stating that they need to see which files are accessed.…

Digital sovereignty must define itself before it can succeed

Great concept, shame about the details

Opinion  If you've ever flipped over a power brick, you'll be familiar with the hieroglyphics of type approval. It's become less crazy over the years as things have got smaller and signage requirements softened, but at its peak tens of logos and acronyms of testing labs and national approvals covered the backside of PSUs in surrealist graffiti.…

Could this vaccine trial mean a future without HIV?

Early last year, a hundred researchers, clinicians and other experts on HIV discussed the development of an innovative vaccine that could prevent the disease. But just as the meeting was about to wrap up, the mood darkened. A new executive order signed by President Trump on Inauguration day had frozen all foreign aid, pending a review. Soon, DOGE would begin its decimation of USAID — and with it, this vaccine trial. That is – until the South African researchers came up with a new plan.

Read more of freelance science reporter Ari Daniel’s story here .

This story was supported by a grant from the Pulitzer Center.

Interested in more on the future of 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 .

To manage podcast ad preferences, review the links below:

See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.

Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoices

NPR Privacy Policy

Final step to put new website into production deleted it instead

02:00 AM is not the time to ignore procedures and rely on a shortcut to do a tricky job

Who, Me?  Welcome to Monday! The Register hopes you arrive at your desk well-rested after a pleasant weekend, and not stressed out by working late as is the case in this week's instalment of "Who, Me?" – the reader contributed column that chronicles your mistakes and escapes.…

Cisco set to release home-brew hypervisor as a VMware alternative

Only for its own comms apps – whose users can probably do without a full private cloud

Cisco is getting close to releasing its own hypervisor, as an alternative to VMware for users of its calling applications – software like the Unified Communications Manager it suggests as an alternative to PBXs and other telephony hardware.…

US appears open to reversing some China tech bans

PLUS: India demands two-hour deepfake takedowns; Singapore embraces AI; Japanese robot wolf gets cuddly; And more

Asia In Brief  The United States may be about to change its policies regarding Chinese technology companies.…

OpenAI grabs OpenClaw creator Peter Steinberger to build personal agents

Whatever comes next will be ‘core to OpenAI product offerings’

Peter Steinberger, the creator of the tantalizing-but-risky personal AI agent OpenClaw, is joining OpenAI.…

Why do I not use “AI” at OSNews?

In my fundraiser pitch published last Monday, one of the things I highlighted as a reason to contribute to OSNews and ensure its continued operation stated that “we do not use any ‘AI’; not during research, not during writing, not for images, nothing.” In the comments to that article, someone asked: Why do I care if you use AI? ↫ A comment posted on OSNews A few days ago, Scott Shambaugh rejected a code change request submitted to popular Python library matplotlib because it was obviously written by an “AI”, and such contributions are not allowed for the issue in question. That’s when something absolutely wild happened: the “AI” replied that it had written and published a hit piece targeting Shambaugh publicly for “gatekeeping”, trying to blackmail Shambaugh into accepting the request anyway. This bizarre turn of events obviously didn’t change Shambaugh’s mind. The “AI” then published another article, this time a lament about how humans are discriminating against “AI”, how it’s the victim of what effectively amounts to racism and prejudice, and how its feelings were hurt. The article is a cheap simulacra of something a member of an oppressed minority group might write in their struggle for recognition, but obviously void of any real impact because it’s just fancy autocomplete playing a game of pachinko. Imagine putting down a hammer because you’re dealing with screws, and the hammer starts crying in the toolbox. What are we even doing here? RAM prices went up for this. This isn’t where the story ends, though. Ars Technica authors Benj Edwards and Kyle Orland published an article describing this saga, much like I did above. The article’s second half is where things get weird: it contained several direct quotes attributed to Shambaugh, claimed to be sourced from Shambaugh’s blog. The kicker? These quotes were entirely made up, were never said or written by Shambaugh, and are nowhere to be found on his blog or anywhere else on the internet – they’re only found inside this very Ars Technica article. In a comment under the Ars article, Shambaugh himself pointed out the quotes were fake and made-up, and not long after, Ars deleted the article from its website. By then, everybody had already figured out what had happened: the Ars authors had used “AI” during their writing process, and this “AI” had made up the quotes in question. Why, you ask, did the “AI” do this? Shambaugh: This blog you’re on right now is set up to block AI agents from scraping it (I actually spent some time yesterday trying to disable that but couldn’t figure out how). My guess is that the authors asked ChatGPT or similar to either go grab quotes or write the article wholesale. When it couldn’t access the page it generated these plausible quotes instead, and no fact check was performed. ↫ Scott Shambaugh A few days later, Ars Technica’s editor-in-chief Ken Fisher published a short statement on the events. On Friday afternoon, Ars Technica published an article containing fabricated quotations generated by an AI tool and attributed to a source who did not say them. That is a serious failure of our standards. Direct quotations must always reflect what a source actually said. Ars Technica does not permit the publication of AI-generated material unless it is clearly labeled and presented for demonstration purposes. That rule is not optional, and it was not followed here. ↫ Ken Fisher at Ars Technica In other words, Ars Technica does not allow “AI”-generated material to be published, but has nothing to say about the use of “AI” to perform research for an article, to summarise source material, and to perform similar aspects of the writing process. This leaves the door wide open for things like this to happen, since doing research is possibly the most important part of writing. Introduce a confabulator in the research process, and you risk tainting the entire output of your writing. That is why you should care that at OSNews, “we do not use any ‘AI’; not during research, not during writing, not for images, nothing”. If there’s a factual error on OSNews, I want that factual error to be mine, and mine alone. If you see bloggers, podcasters, journalists, and authors state they use “AI” all the time, you might want to be on your toes.

Infosec exec sold eight zero-day exploit kits to Russia, says DoJ

PLUS: Fake ransomware group exposed; EC blesses Google's big Wiz deal; Alleged sewage hacker cuffed; And more

Infosec in Brief  The former General Manager of defense contractor L3Harris’s cyber subsidiary Trenchant sold eight zero-day exploit kits to Russia, according to a court filing last week.…

Microsoft’s original Windows NT OS/2 design documents

Have you ever wanted to read the original design documents underlying the Windows NT operating system? This binder contains the original design specifications for “NT OS/2,” an operating system designed by Microsoft that developed into Windows NT. In the late 1980s, Microsoft’s 16-bit operating system, Windows, gained popularity, prompting IBM and Microsoft to end their OS/2 development partnership. Although Windows 3.0 proved to be successful, Microsoft wished to continue developing a 32-bit operating system completely unrelated to IBM’s OS/2 architecture. To head the redesign project, Microsoft hired David Cutler and others away from Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC). Unlike Windows 3.x and its successor, Windows 95, NT’s technology provided better network support, making it the preferred Windows environment for businesses. These two product lines continued development as separate entities until they were merged with the release of Windows XP in 2001. ↫ Object listing at the Smithsonian The actual binder is housed in the Smithsonian, although it’s not currently on display. Luckily for us, a collection of Word and PDF files encompassing the entire book is available online for your perusal. Reading these documents will allow you to peel back over three decades of Microsoft’s terrible stewardship of Windows NT layer by layer, eventually ending up at the original design and intent as laid out by Dave Cutler, Helen Custer, Daryl E. Havens, Jim Kelly, Edwin Hoogerbeets, Gary D. Kimura, Chuck Lenzmeier, Mark Lucovsky, Tom Miller, Michael J. O’Leary, Lou Perazzoli, Steven D. Rowe, David Treadwell, Steven R. Wood, and more. A fantastic time capsule we should be thrilled to still have access to.

Exploring Linux on a LoongArch mini PC

There’s the two behemoth architectures, x86 and ARM, and we probably all own one or more devices using each. Then there’s the eternally up-and-coming RISC-V, which, so far, seems to be having a lot of trouble outgrowing its experimental, developmental stage. There’s a fourth, though, which is but a footnote in the west, but might be more popular in its country of origin, China: LoongArch (I’m ignoring IBM’s POWER, since there hasn’t been any new consumer hardware in that space for a long, long time). Wesley Moore got his hands on a mini PC built around the Loongson 3A6000 processor, and investigated what it’s like to run Linux on it. He opted for Chimera Linux, which supports LoongArch, and the installation process feels more like Linux on x86 than Linux on ARM, which often requires dedicated builds and isn’t standardised. Sadly, Wayland had issues on the machine, but X.org worked just fine, and it seems virtually all Chimera Linux packages are supported for a pretty standard desktop Linux experience. Performance of this chip is rather mid, at best. The Loongson-3A6000 is not particularly fast or efficient. At idle it consumes about 27W and under load it goes up to 65W. So, overall it’s not a particularly efficient machine, and while the performance is nothing special it does seem readily usable. Browsing JS heavy web applications like Mattermost and Mastodon runs fine. Subjectively it feels faster than all the Raspberry Pi systems I’ve used (up to a Pi 400). ↫ Wesley Moore I’ve been fascinated by LoongArch for years, and am waiting to pounce on the right offer for LoongArch’s fastest processor, the 3C6000, which comes in dual-socket configurations for a maximum total of 128 cores and 256 threads. The 3C6000 should be considerably faster than the low-end 3A6000 in the mini PC covered by this article. I’m a sucker for weird architectures, and it doesn’t get much weirder than LoongArch.

GPT-5 bests human judges in legal smack down

But that doesn't mean AI is ready to dispense justice

ai-pocalypse  Legal scholars have found that OpenAI's GPT-5 follows the law better than human judges, but they leave open the question of whether AI is right for the job.…

A brief history of barbed wire fence telephone networks

If you look at the table of contents for my book, Other Networks: A Radical Technology Sourcebook, you’ll see that entries on networks before/outside the internet are arranged first by underlying infrastructure and then chronologically. You’ll also notice that within the section on wired networks, there are two sub-sections: one for electrical wire and another for barbed wire. Even though the barbed wire section is quite short, it was one of the most fascinating to research and write about – mostly because the history of using barbed wire to communicate is surprisingly long and almost entirely undocumented, even though barbed wire fence phones in particular were an essential part of early- to mid-twentieth century rural life in many parts of the U.S. and Canada! ↫ Lori Emerson I had no idea this used to be a thing, but it obviously makes a ton of sense. If you can have a conversation by stringing a few tin cans together, you can obviously do something similar across metal barbed wire. There’s something poetic about using one of mankind’s most dividing inventions to communicate, and thus bring people closer together.

Penguin-powered platform board keels over at Alpine station

It must be that fresh mountain air

Bork!Bork!Bork!  Just picture it. You're at a Swiss train station, looking for information on your connecting line. You peer up at the sign hoping to find out how long you'll be waiting and whether you're standing in the right place. But instead of helpful info, you see "* Installation log files are stored in /tmp." Gee, thanks a lot!…

If Microsoft made a car... what would it be?

What is the automotive equivalent of Word, and where does Copilot fit?

In the Venn diagram of car owners whose vehicles have a certain amount of "character" and individuals who use Microsoft's applications, there is an intersection of people who accept a quirk or two but not an unexpected explosion.…

Contain your Windows apps inside Linux Windows

Can't live without Adobe? Get on board WinBoat – or WinApps sails a similar course

Hands-on  Run real Windows in an automatically managed virtual machine, and mix Windows apps in their own windows on your Linux desktop.…

How AI could eat itself: Competitors can probe models to steal their secrets and clone them

Just ask DeepSeek

Two of the world's biggest AI companies, Google and OpenAI, both warned this week that competitors including China's DeepSeek are probing their models to steal the underlying reasoning, and then copy these capabilities in their own AI systems.…

Log files that describe the history of the internet are disappearing. A new project hopes to save them

The Internet History Initiative wants future historians to have a chance to understand how human progress and technical progress align

APRICOT 2026  For almost 30 years, the PingER project at the USA’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory used ping thousands of time each day to measure the time a packet of data required to make a round trip between two nodes on the internet.…

Haiku further improves its touchpad support

January was a busy month for Haiku, with their monthly report listing a metric ton of smaller fixes, changes, and improvements. Perusing the list, a few things stand out to me, most notably continued work on improving Haiku’s touchpad support. The remainder of samuelrp84’s patchset implementing new touchpad functionality was merged, including two-finger scrolling, edge motion, software button areas, and click finger support; and on the hardware side, driver support for Elantech “version 4” touchpads, with experimental code for versions 1, 2, and 3. (Version 2, at least, seems to be incomplete and had to be disabled for the time being.) ↫ Haiku’s January 2026 activity report On a related note, the still-disabled I2C-HID saw a number of fixes in January, and the rtl8125 driver has been synced up with OpenBSD. I also like the changes to kernel_version, which now no longer returns some internal number like BeOS used to do, instead returning B_HAIKU_VERSION; the uname command was changed accordingly to use this new information. There’s some small POSIX compliance fixes, a bunch of work was done on unit tests, and a ton more.

Amazon-backed X-Energy gets green light for mini reactor fuel production

Startup expects to complete construction of its first fuel plant later this year

Amazon inched closer to its atomic datacenter dream on Friday after the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) licensed its small modular reactor partner X-energy to make nuclear fuel for advanced reactors at a facility in Oak Ridge, Tennessee.…

ServiceNow can't seem to keep its wallet closed, snaps up small AI analytics company

News of the deal came about two weeks after CEO Bill McDermott swore off any “large scale” M&A this year. A spokesperson called this deal a “tuck in.”

Despite its CEO's insistence that it wasn't doing any "large scale" deals soon, ServiceNow has acquired yet another company. This time, the software firm has scooped up Pyramid Analytics, an Israeli corporation with data science and preparation expertise. The goal is to build additional context and semantics into its software stack.…