Commercial space pleads with NASA to stop moving the goalposts in orbit

Private station hopefuls say ISS rethink is shaking confidence

NASA's new Moon plan isn't the only policy shift causing concern. Parts of the commercial space industry are also uneasy about the agency's latest change of direction.…

AFC Ajax drops ball as flaws let hackers play admin with tickets and bans

Vulns in Dutch football club's systems didn't just expose data – they let outsiders play with accounts, and even lift stadium bans

Dutch football giant AFC Ajax has admitted to a data breach after an attacker gained access to its internal systems, in an incident that looks less like a stray pass and more like the gates left wide open.…

Iran war drives urgent need  to counter underwater attack drones

US and UK forces seeking tech tender with an April 3 deadline

The UK and US are looking for technology to counter the threat posed by underwater drones to ships, harbors and other critical maritime infrastructure, and are asking industry for answers.…

'The Sopranos' Changed How Television Told Stories. These Scripts, Sketches and Set Designs Reveal What Made the Mob Drama So Thrilling

An exhibition at the Museum of the Moving Image in New York provides visitors with a behind-the-scenes look at the award-winning HBO show

Lloyds app glitch turned transactions into shared experience for 447k users

A botched update mixed up transaction data across accounts, with thousands now receiving goodwill payouts

A botched overnight software update at Lloyds Banking Group left up to 447,000 customers briefly seeing other people's transactions in its mobile apps, with the bank now acknowledging the scale of the incident and compensating affected users.…

UK government admits Capita pension portal was crapita at launch

PAC grilling reveals £239M bought a system that couldn't handle the work, the volumes, or placeholder text

A UK government official has admitted Capita did not reach the expected level of performance following the disastrous launch of the Civil Service Pension Scheme (CSPS) web portal late last year.…

Engineer sabotaged hardware then complained when it didn't work

The 600 km drive to fix the mess was a special treat

On Call  Every week is special in its own way, and The Register celebrates that fact by using Friday mornings to deliver a fresh installment of On Call, our weekly reader-contributed column that shares your memories of managing IT messes someone else made.…

Security boffins scoured the web and found hundreds of valid API keys

Global bank's devs have some cleaning up to do after cloud creds found in website code

Computer security boffins have conducted an analysis of 10 million websites and found almost 2,000 API credentials strewn across 10,000 webpages.…

What's up with recycled wastewater's PR problem?

Would you drink recycled wastewater? It could be a solution to the global water crisis. But not everyone is ready to jump onboard. They say it’s not technology that’s keeping more cities from recycling their wastewater, but psychology. Experts call this resistance “the yuck factor.” We chat with water journalist Peter Annin about some history behind water recycling – and why more cities could adopt the solution soon.

This is part of a whole series on the world’s dwindling water supply. Check out the rest of the water series:

Part 1: When the wells run dry

Part 2: The world’s groundwater problem

Part 3: Freshwater’s growing salt problem

Email us your questions about water, the wider environment – or anything else to do with science at shortwave@npr.org . We may turn it into an episode in the future!

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 .

Listen to Short Wave on Spotify and Apple Podcasts .

This episode was produced by Rachel Carlson. It was edited by Rebecca Ramirez. Aru Nair checked the facts. The audio engineer was Jimmy Keeley.

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

India's space program can't spend money fast enough, putting missions in peril

Satnav systems aren't well, IP is being sold too cheap, and thousands of roles remain open

India’s space program has thousands of vacant roles it’s struggled to fill, isn’t spending money fast enough to meet its mission timelines, and may be undervaluing intellectual property it sells to the private sector.…

Satellite Spots a Spawn

The activity of herring around Vancouver Island in British Columbia brightened coastal waters enough to be detectable from space.

China's not thrilled its AI experts want to leave the country

Urges scientists to avoid major conference, and looks unkindly on Meta's Manus acquisition

China appears to be unhappy about its brightest AI talent going offshore, either to visit or to sell their wares.…

Windows 95 defenses against installers that overwrite a file with an older version

I’ll never grow tired of reading about the crazy tricks the Windows 95 development team employed to make the user experience as seamless as they could given the constraints they were dealing with. During the 16bit Windows days, application installers could replace system components with newer versions if such was necessary. Installers were supposed to do a version check, but many of them didn’t follow this guidance. When moving to Windows 95, this meant installers ended up replacing Windows 95 system components with Windows 3.x versions, which wasn’t exactly a goods thing. So, they came up with a solution. Windows 95 worked around this by keeping a backup copy of commonly-overwritten files in a hidden C:\Windows\SYSBCKUP directory. Whenever an installer finished, Windows went and checked whether any of these commonly-overwritten files had indeed been overwritten. If so, and the replacement has a higher version number than the one in the SYSBCKUP directory, then the replacement was copied into the SYSBCKUP directory for safekeeping. Conversely, if the replacement has a lower version number than the one in the SYSBCKUP directory, then the copy from SYSBCKUP was copied on top of the rogue replacement. ↫ Raymond Chen All of this happened entirely silently, and neither the installers nor the user had any idea this was happening. The Windows 95 team tried other solutions, like just making it impossible to replace system components with older versions entirely, but that caused many installers to break. Some installers apparently even went rogue and would create a batch file that would replace the system components upon a reboot, before Windows 95 could perform its silent fixes. Wild. I used Windows 95 extensively, and had no idea this was a thing.

US regulator bans imports of new foreign-made routers, citing security concerns

The U.S. Federal Communications Commission said on Monday it was banning the import of all ​new foreign-made consumer routers, the latest crackdown on Chinese-made electronic gear over ‌security concerns. China is estimated to control at least 60% of the U.S. market for home routers, boxes that connect computers, phones, and smart devices to the internet. ↫ David Shepardson at Reuters I’m sure the American public will be thrilled to find out yet another necessity has drastically increased in price.

Apple discontinues the Mac Pro with no plans for future hardware

It’s the end of an era: Apple has confirmed to 9to5Mac that the Mac Pro is being discontinued. It has been removed from Apple’s website as of Thursday afternoon. The “buy” page on Apple’s website for the Mac Pro now redirects to the Mac’s homepage, where all references have been removed. Apple has also confirmed to 9to5Mac that it has no plans to offer future Mac Pro hardware. ↫ Chance Miller at 9To5Mac If a Mac Pro falls in the back of the Apple Store and there’s no one around to hear it, does it make a sound?

These Never-Before-Seen Photos Show Astronaut Neil Armstrong Relaxed and Smiling After He Almost Died in the Gemini 8 Emergency

Few members of the media were at the unexpected arrival site. Military police officer Ron McQueeney was one of the few photographers who documented the occasion

Anthropic tweaks timed usage limits to discourage Claude demand during peak hours

AI biz makes some Claude conversations more costly to manage capacity

Anthropic on Wednesday adjusted its opaque usage limits for Claude customers by reducing the power of the services it delivers during times of peak demand, in an effort to balance demand with its capacity to deliver service.…

AI companies lick their chops as FCC proposes forcing call center onshoring

You actually think companies are going to pay Americans to take customer service calls in the AI age?

Uncle Sam is trying to make American call centers great again. The question is whether they will be great because they're filled with local workers or whether this will provide yet another excuse for companies to turn customer service jobs over to AI.…

AWS would prefer to forget March ever happened in its UAE region

Cloud giant waives an entire month of charges, then erases the billing data. There is literally nothing to see here.

I received an email / billing notification from AWS this week that may be the most diplomatically crafted communication in the history of cloud computing. Here it is, stripped of the usual boilerplate around it:…

AMD's new desktop CPU oozes cache out of all 16 cores

Turns out massive caches are good for more than games. House of Zen boasts 5-13% perf boost over prior-gen part

AMD aims to extend its lead in desktop gaming with a new CPU, dubbed the Ryzen 9 9950X3D2 Dual Edition. This top-of-the-line part has 16 cores fed by an absolutely massive 208 MB pool of cache, with memory spread across both CCDs.…

What’s Up: April 2026 Skywatching Tips from NASA

Mercury shines at its brightest for the year, the Lyrid meteor shower peaks, and a bright new comet makes an appearance in April’s night sky.

La NASA presentará el telescopio Roman completo y ofrecerá una conferencia de prensa

Se invita a los medios de comunicación el martes 21 de abril al Centro de Vuelo Espacial Goddard de la NASA en Greenbelt, Maryland, para conocer el telescopio espacial Nancy Grace Roman de la agencia, cuya construcción terminó recientemente y el cual se encuentra ultimando las pruebas previas a su lanzamiento. Esta será una de […]

'Empathetic' Salesforce bots to help those fired by uncaring humans

I’m sorry, Dave. I can’t give you your job back, but here’s the form you fill out to collect benefits

There’s a joke in Boston that goes: the people in Southie will steal your wallet and help you look for it.…

NASA to Unveil Complete Roman Telescope, Host Media Briefing

Media are invited Tuesday, April 21, to NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, for a look at the agency’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, which recently completed construction and is wrapping up prelaunch testing. This will be one of the last opportunities to view the fully integrated flagship telescope before it ships to […]

NASA Releases Artemis II Moon Mission Launch Countdown

Before NASA sends its astronauts Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch, and CSA (Canadian Space Agency) astronaut Jeremy Hansen on their Artemis II mission around the Moon, the launch team at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida and teams across the country will begin counting down about two days before liftoff.  A launch countdown contains […]

Station Nation: Aaron Rose, Cold Stowage Mission Manager

As a member of the Crew and Thermal Systems Division, Aaron Rose supports critical cargo resupply missions to the International Space Station. In this role, he works with payload developers to safely transport temperature-controlled science experiments to and from station with portable coolers, freezers, and refrigerators.  For the full flight cycle, Rose and his team members ensure all cold stowage hardware, operations, and personnel are coordinated to […]

Using AI to code does not mean your code is more secure

Use of AI coding assistants has surged, but so has the number of vulnerabilities in AI-generated code

As more people use AI tools to write code, the tools themselves are introducing more vulnerabilities.…

Scientists Say This 600-Year-Old Grape Seed Is 'Genetically Identical' to Modern Varieties Used to Make Pinot Noir

Researchers analyzed grape seeds dating to between 2300 B.C.E. and 1500 C.E., including one particularly intriguing sample found in the toilet of a medieval hospital in France

Apple signs meaningless deal to make some less-important parts in America

Maybe that's why Tim didn't get an invitation to the President's tech bro club?

Apple's American Manufacturing Program (AMP) is expanding, with new suppliers signed on to produce iPhone components - though those parts will still be shipped overseas for final assembly. Tim Apple may continue avoiding tariffs but he probably won't win a lot of brownie points with President Trump.…

Arctic Winter Sea Ice Ties Record Low, NASA, NSIDC Scientists Find

For the second consecutive year, winter sea ice in the Arctic reached a level that matches the lowest peak observed since satellite monitoring began in 1979. On March 15, Arctic sea ice extent reached 5.52 million square miles (14.29 million square kilometers), very close to the 2025 peak of 5.53 million square miles (14.31 million […]

NASA’s IXPE Gets Fresh Look at Supernova

NASA’s IXPE (Imaging X-ray Polarimetry Explorer) mission has taken a new observation of a supernova, RCW 86, seen here in an image released on March 24, 2026. This observation helps fill in a fuller picture of what other telescopes have seen. The full image combines IXPE’s data with legacy observations from two other X-ray telescopes: […]

Staff too scared of the AI axe to pick it up, Forrester finds

Your AI rollout isn't failing – your employees just hate it

If your company isn't seeing great returns from its investment in AI, you might want to look at the humans tasked with deploying it and how you can motivate them. Right now, many employees fear AI-driven job losses and aren't well trained to use the tech, according to Forrester.…

In a First, the World's Most Expensive and Volatile Substance—Antimatter—Traveled by Truck

The work paves the way for longer-distance transport of the rare material so scientists can study it at other facilities

Curiosity Blog, Sols 4838-4844: Wrapping Up the Boxwork Terrain

Written by Deborah Padgett, MSL Operations Product Ground System Task Lead at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory Earth planning date: Friday, March 20, 2026 Curiosity has just concluded a very intense week of science observations and engineering activities, as it wraps up its monthslong investigation of the Martian boxwork terrain. Three days of planning this week […]

La NASA anuncia la cobertura de la de la primera misión tripulada Artemis alrededor de la Luna

Diversos eventos previos al lanzamiento, del lanzamiento y de la misión Artemis II de la NASA alrededor de la Luna se transmitirán en línea. La agencia tiene como fecha objetivo no antes del miércoles 1 de abril para este vuelo de prueba, con una ventana de lanzamiento de dos horas que se abre a las […]

Linear moves sideways to agentic AI as CEO declares issue tracking dead

Agent will capture issues and eventually debug code

The Linear cloudy issue tracker and project manager has introduced an AI agent and plans to add AI coding assistance, with CEO and co-founder Karri Saarinen declaring that "issue tracking is dead."…

Vivid Dreams Might Be Key to Feeling Well Rested When You Wake Up, According to a New Study

The findings could help explain the purpose of dreams and help physicians better treat people with sleep disorders

AI bug reports went from junk to legit overnight, says Linux kernel czar

Greg Kroah-Hartman can't explain the inflection point, but it's not slowing down or going away

Interview  I was at a press luncheon at KubeCon Europe this week when, to my surprise, who should sit down next to me but long-term Linux kernel maintainer Greg Kroah-Hartman. Greg, who lives in the Netherlands these days, was there to briefly comment on AI, Linux, and security. We spoke about how, over the last month, AI-driven activity around Linux security and code review has "really jumped" in a way no one in the open source world saw coming.…

Three more charged over alleged Nvidia GPU smuggling scheme to China

Prosecutors say trio used Thai front companies to reroute high-end AI servers

The US has collared three more people for allegedly attempting to smuggle Nvidia GPUs to China, days after a Supermicro co-founder faced similar accusations.…

Brit lawmaker targeted by AI deepfake fails to get answers from US Big Tech

Appearing before Parliament, Meta, Google and X struggle to explain how fake political video circulated for so long

A member of the UK Parliament's lower house who was the victim of a deepfake AI campaign this week had a rare chance to confront the Big Tech executives who helped spread it. Their answers disappointed.…

Digital euro goes full sovereignty mode, US cloud giants not on guest list

Central bank turns to homegrown providers to underpin virtual cash push

Europe is taking a small step toward breaking its reliance on US Big Tech by hiring only cloud operators headquartered in the EU to work on the backbone of the digital euro project.…

Welsh government used Copilot for review to justify closing organization

Microsoft's Clippy for 21st century deployed to evaluate returns? Industry Wales chair brands it just 'wrong'

The Welsh government used Microsoft's Copilot to help write a review of an industry liaison body that it then scrapped, its chairman has told a Senedd committee.…

This Spellbinding Exhibition Explores How Ancient Cultures Used Magic to Navigate Life's Challenges

The Toledo Museum of Art is showcasing a treasure trove of masks, amulets, spellbooks and gems dating to between 2000 B.C.E. and 300 C.E.

UK wants to know if banning under-16s from social media does anything useful

300 families undergo 6-week trial to test impact on sleep, school, and home life

The UK government will trial different levels of restrictions on social media for under-16s with the help of 300 families, alongside a public consultation that has already gathered nearly 30,000 responses.…

Go for a walk, man: Sony's drive to create a car parked by partner Honda

CarStation/PlayMobile won’t hit the road after pile-up of tax and competition issues in China and the USA

Sony and Honda have broken up, meaning their joint vision to deliver a revolutionary electric vehicle won’t happen.…

A Hot Start to Spring in the Southwest

Temperatures in several states climbed over 100 degrees Fahrenheit in March 2026, which in some places was the highest March temperature on record.

Indian government probes CCTV espionage operation linked to Pakistan

Police found cameras pointing at infrastructure

Indian authorities have reportedly ordered an audit of the nation’s CCTV cameras, after police uncovered what they claim was a Pakistan-backed surveillance operation.…

Datacenter batteries are selling years in advance, because AI, says Panasonic

Shifting production from automotive to compute and working on supercapacitors as another way to protect workloads

Major memory makers have already sold all the kit they can make this year, creating shortages and price increases. Datacenter infrastructure buyers may soon face the same issues when trying to get their hands on backup batteries.…

GitHub hits CTRL-Z, decides it will train its AI with user data after all

As of April 24 you'll be feeding the Octocat unless you opt out

Microsoft's GitHub next month plans to begin using customer interaction data – "specifically inputs, outputs, code snippets, and associated context" – to train its AI models.…

La NASA anuncia la cobertura de la misión lunar Artemis II

Nota del editor: La NASA actualizará continuamente esta página de sesiones informativas y eventos de la misión Artemis II a lo largo de las actividades previas al lanzamiento, el lanzamiento y las operaciones de la misión. La NASA ofrecerá cobertura en vivo de los eventos previos al lanzamiento, el lanzamiento y las actividades de la […]

NASA Ames Experts Available for Artemis II Flight Test Interviews

NASA’s Ames Research Center in Silicon Valley invites media to interview local subject matter experts on Friday, March 27 from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. ahead of the agency sending astronauts around the Moon for the first time in more than 50 years with the Artemis II flight test. NASA teams are gearing up for […]

NASA Sets Coverage for First Artemis Crewed Mission Around Moon

A variety of prelaunch, launch, and mission events for NASA’s Artemis II mission around the Moon will stream online. The agency is targeting no earlier than Wednesday, April 1, for the test flight during a two-hour window that opens at 6:24 p.m. EDT, with additional launch opportunities through Monday, April 6. Artemis II is NASA’s […]

NASA Sets Coverage for Artemis II Moon Mission

Editor’s note: NASA will continuously update this Artemis II briefings and mission events page throughout prelaunch, launch, and mission activities. NASA will provide live coverage of prelaunch, launch, and mission events for the agency’s upcoming Artemis II crewed test flight around the Moon. Launch is targeted for no earlier than 6:24 p.m. EDT Wednesday, April […]

Artemis Moon Tree Dedicated in Honor of Mary W. Jackson

On March 18, 2026, students, staff, and members of NASA’s Langley Research Center gathered at Mary W. Jackson Elementary School in Hampton to celebrate the dedication of a remarkable addition to the campus – an Artemis Moon Tree. Although formally dedicated on this day, the loblolly pine had already taken root months earlier, having been […]

The reports of age verification in Linux are greatly exaggerated, for now

Several US states, the country of Brazil, and I’m sure other places in the world have enacted or are planning to enact laws that would place the burden of age verification of users on the shoulders of operating system makers. The legal landscape is quite fragmented at this point, and there’s no way to tell which way these laws will go, with tons of uncertainties around to whom these laws would apply, if it targets accounts for application store access or the operating system as a whole, what constitutes an operating system in the first place, and many more. Still, these laws are already forcing major players like Apple to implement sharing self-reported age brackets with application developers (at least in iOS), so there’s definitely something happening here. In recent weeks, the open source world has also been confronted with the first consequences of these laws, as both systemd and xdg-desktop-portal have responded to operating system-level age verification laws in, among other places, California and Colorado, by adding birthDate to userdb (on systemd’s side) and developing an age verification portal (on xdg-desktop-portal’s side) for use by Flatpaks. The age verification portal would then use the value set in usrdb’s birthDate as its data source. The value in birthDate would only be modifiable by an administrator, but can be read by users, applications, and so on. Crucially, this field is entirely optional, and distributions, desktop environments, and users are under zero obligation to use it or to enter a truthful value. In fact, contrary to countless news items and comments about these additions, nothing about this even remotely constitutes as “age verification”, as nothing – not the government, not the distribution or desktop environments, not the user – has to or even can verify anything. If these changes make it to your distribution, you don’t have to suddenly show your government ID, scan your face, or link your computer to some government-run verification service, or even enter anything anywhere in the first place. Furthermore, while the xdg-desktop-portal’s proposals are still fluid and subject to change, consensus seems to be to only share age brackets with applications, instead of full birth dates or specific ages – assuming anything has even been entered in the birthDate field in the first place. Even if your Linux distribution and/or desktop environment implements everything needed to support these changes and expose them to you in a nice user interface, everything about it is optional and under your full control. The field is of the same type as the existing fields emailAddress, realName, and location, which are similarly entirely optional and can be left empty if desired. Taken in isolation, then, as it currently stands, there’s really not much meat to these changes at all. The primary reason to implement these changes is to minimally comply with the new laws in California, Colorado, Brazil, and other places, and it’s understandable why the people involved would want to do so. If they do not, they could face lawsuits, fines, or worse, and I don’t know about you, but I wouldn’t want to be on the receiving end of the western world’s most incompetent justice system. Aside from that, these changes make it possible to build robust parental controls, which isn’t mentioned in the original commits to systemd, but is clearly the main focal point of xdg-desktop-portal’s proposal. This all seems well and good, but given today’s political climate in the United States, as well as the course of history, that “as it currently stands” is doing a lot of heavy lifting. Rightfully so, a lot of people are worried about where this could lead. Sure, today these are just inconsequential, optional changes in response to what seems to be misguided legislation, but what happens once these laws are tightened, become more demanding, and start requiring a lot more than just a self-reported age bracket? In Texas, for instance, H.B. 1131 requires any commercial entity, including websites, that contains more than one-third “sexual material harmful to minors” to implement age verification tools using things like government-issued IDs or bank transaction data to verify visitors’ ages before allowing them in. The UK has a similar law on the books, too. It’s not difficult to imagine how some other law will eventually shift this much stricter, actual age verification from websites and applications into operating systems instead. What will systemd’s and xdg-desktop-portal’s developers do, then? Will they comply as readily then as they do now? This is a genuine worry, especially if you already belong to a group targeted by the current US administration, or were face-scanned by ICE at a protest. Large groups of especially religious extremists consider anything that’s LGBTQ+ to be “sexual material harmful to minors”, even if it’s just something normal like a gay character in a TV show. It’s not hard to imagine how age verification laws, especially if they force age verification at the operating system level, can become weaponised to target the LGBTQ+ community, other minorities, and people protesting the Trump regime. You may think this won’t affect you, since you’re using an open source operating system like desktop Linux or one of the BSDs, and surely they are principled enough to ignore such dangerous laws and simply not comply at all, right? Sadly, here’s where the idealism and principles of the open source world are going to meet the harsh boot of reality; while open source software has a picturesque image of talented youngsters hacking away in their bedrooms, the reality is that most of the popular open source operating systems are actually hugely complex operations that require a ton of funding, and that funding is often managed by foundations. And guess where most popular Linux distributions’ and BSD variants’ foundations are located? Developers from all over the world may contribute to Debian, but all of its financials and trademarks are managed by Software in the Public Interest, domiciled in New York State. Fedora is part of Red Hat, owned by IBM, and

AI supply chain attacks don’t even require malware…just post poisoned documentation

A proof-of-concept attack on Context Hub suggests there's not much content santization

A new service that helps coding agents stay up to date on their API calls could be dialing in a massive supply chain vulnerability.…

Scammers have virtual smartphones on speed dial for fraud

They cleverly mimic most traits of a real phone

Smartphones have fast become the basis of our digital identities, securing payment systems and bank accounts. Now virtual devices that pretend to be real handsets have become a key tool for financial scammers, according to one company. …

NASA Names Jennifer Lyons Acting Launch Services Program Manager

NASA has selected Jennifer Lyons as acting program manager for the agency’s Launch Services Program (LSP) based at Kennedy Space Center in Florida. In this role, Lyons will lead NASA’s acquisition and management of domestic commercial launch services for science and robotic exploration missions beginning Wednesday, April 1. Lyons will oversee mission planning, launch vehicle […]

NASA Aims to Launch the World's First Planet-Hopping Spacecraft Powered by Nuclear Fission

The agency wants the mission to head to Mars by the end of 2028

See the Stunning 171-Year-Old Sketch That Helped Put Yosemite on the Map

The Library of Congress has acquired a drawing and accompanying lithograph of Yosemite Falls created by Gold Rush-era artist Thomas Almond Ayres in 1855

Metrics

Services Catalog Click here to view the FY25 Services Catalog The catalogs provide service description, chargeback rate, unit of measure, and service level indicators for each NSSC service. Service Level Agreement (SLA) Click here to view the Service Level Agreement The SLA provides information about roles, responsibilities, rates, and service level indicators for all NASA […]

Jen Easterly, cybersecurity's 'relentless optimist,' hopes feds come back to RSAC next year

Ex-CISA boss also says no reason to panic about AI and security

RSAC 2026  "Everybody feels massive FOMO if they don't get to RSAC," Jen Easterly says.…

Only Trump can decide when cyberwar turns into real war

Four former NSA bosses walk onto the stage at RSAC…

rsac 2026  There's a theoretical red line with cyber warfare. Cross it, and the US will respond with a physical attack like missile strikes. And that line "is whatever the President says it is," according to former NSA boss retired General Paul Nakasone.…

Webb Captures Saturn in Infrared

Saturn’s icy rings glow in this infrared view from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope released on March 25, 2026. Combining this image with another that NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope captured – also released on the same day – provides scientists with a richer, more layered understanding of the gas giant’s atmosphere. In Webb’s infrared image, […]

Archaeologists Discover an Intact Cannonball From the Battle of the Alamo—One Day Before the Pivotal Conflict's 190th Anniversary

The projectile is made of bronze, which suggests it was fired by the Mexican Army during the siege leading up to the 1836 battle

Meta cuts about 700 jobs as it shifts spending to AI

Forget the metaverse

Meta has begun laying off employees as it focuses more of its cash on building out datacenters, training its own large language models, and recruiting talent for AI.…

NASA Webb, Hubble Share Most Comprehensive View of Saturn to Date

NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope and Hubble Space Telescope have teamed up to capture new views of Saturn, revealing the planet in strikingly different ways. Observing in complementary wavelengths of light, the two space observatories provide scientists with a richer, more layered understanding of the gas giant’s atmosphere. Both sense sunlight reflected from Saturn’s banded […]

Oracle: AI agents can reason, decide and act - liability question remains

Fusion Agentic Applications promise autonomous enterprise decisions. Gartner urges caution

Oracle says it's building a suite of AI agents into its cloud-based enterprise applications, claiming they can make and execute decisions autonmomously within business processes. But analysts are urging caution given unresolved questions around data integration and liability.…

Trump remembers to appoint science panel, fills it mostly with tech bros

Plus one actual physicist

Donald Trump has named the first members of his President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST), largely comprising Trump allies in the tech industry and one actual scientist.…

Scientists Capture the First Known Footage of Sperm Whales Headbutting, a Long-Debated Behavior That Inspired 'Moby-Dick'

Engaging in "rough play" might help young males practice for future headbutting contests in which they compete for mates

OpenAI now gets to decide which type of product assassin it will become

AWS, Google, Broadcom, or Netscape?

OpenAI on Wednesday announced the death of its controversial Sora video creation tool, just two days after publishing a guide on how to use it well.…

Firefox 149 adds a free VPN and finally plays nice with Linux dialogs

In other browser news, Opera now caters to penguinista gamers

Firefox 149 is here, and although we've already talked about one of the big new features on the way, the release version has some others that will be very welcome.…

In Math, Rigor Is Vital. But Are Digitized Proofs Taking It Too Far?

The quest to make mathematics rigorous has a long and spotty history — one mathematicians can learn from as they push to formalize everything in the computer program Lean.

The post In Math, Rigor Is Vital. But Are Digitized Proofs Taking It Too Far? first appeared on Quanta Magazine

How Writing Changes Mathematical Thought

David E. Dunning explores how mathematical notation is a social, world-building technology.

The post How Writing Changes Mathematical Thought first appeared on Quanta Magazine

Microsoft and Nvidia claim AI can speed approval of new atomic plants

Effort includes permitting and planning

Microsoft is working with Nvidia on nuclear power. Not to build it, but to offer AI-driven tools to deal with all the red tape, help with the design work, and optimize operations for nuclear projects.…

NASA's lunar reboot is long on ambition, short on answers

Exactly how will astronauts get to and from that moonbase?

Opinion  NASA's Ignition presentation was heavy on space hardware, but light on details. Not least of which was how astronauts are supposed to get from Earth to its moonbase and back.…

A New Nail Polish Might Someday Solve Touch Screen Struggles for Users With Long Fingernails

The experimental coating could effectively transform fingernails into touch screen-compatible styluses

JetBrains shifts to agentic dev with Central, retires pair programming

Bye-bye Code With Me as company focuses on other areas

Dev tooling biz JetBrains has previewed Central for agentic AI software development but will retire the Code With Me human pair programming feature.…

Dell slims down business laptops, fattens up cooling and battery life

Pro line gets new naming convention and some serious upgrades

Dell's upcoming 2026 commercial laptops won't leave recent buyers kicking themselves - but they do bring meaningful upgrades, including a thinner Pro 7, larger batteries, and improved thermals.…

Windows 95 let installers trash its files then fixed the mess behind their backs

I'll just clear up that up, shall I?

Microsoft veteran Raymond Chen has shared another nugget of Windows lore – what Windows 95 did when installers stomped on its system files.…

HMRC hands £473M Fujitsu migration deal to AWS after competition melts away

Insiders say single-bidder process left little room for negotiation

The UK's tax collection agency has awarded Amazon Web Services – the only remaining bidder – a contract worth nearly £500 million to migrate services from three Fujitsu-run datacenters and host them for up to a decade.…

Samsung still glued to its bad habits with Galaxy S26 Ultra

Flagship phone scores 5/10 from iFixit as the parts that break most often remain firmly out of reach

Samsung's Galaxy S26 Ultra has once again scored a middling 5/10 from iFixit, suggesting that while the company knows how to build a repairable phone, it still won't quite follow through.…

Archaeologists Are Mystified by These 2,000-Year-Old Bodies Found Seated Upright and Facing West in France

Researchers previously discovered 13 sets of human remains buried in a similar manner at the same grave site in Dijon

Open source isn't a tip jar – it's time to charge for access

A handful thrive, most scrape by as companies make billions off their code

Opinion  Time and again, I see people begging for companies with deep pockets to fund open source projects. I mean, after all, they've made billions from this code. You'd think they could support the code's creators and maintainers. It would be only fair, right?…

YouTuber lands on Moon using a ZX Spectrum. Conditions apply

BASIC and bit-banging used to guide a simulated lander down to a virtual lunar touchdown

Could Sinclair's 48k Sinclair ZX Spectrum land a spacecraft on the Moon? YouTuber Scott Manley decided to find out, and the answer is… kind of.…

Nothing screams casual career pivot like joining the UK Ministry of Defence for a cool £162K

AI and quantum on to-do list for Chief Digital Technology Officer in charge of £140.7M budget. Fancy it?

The UK's Ministry of Defence is looking for a new Chief Digital Technology Officer (CDTO) to take responsibility for a budget of £140.7 million ($188 million) and 400 staff.…

Enterprise PCs are unreliable, unpatched, and unloved compared to Macs

Omnissa telemetry suggests business buyers are loving Apple and Google

End-user compute vendor Omnissa, the company formed by the spin-out of VMware’s virtual desktops, applications, and device management biz, has dug into the telemetry it collects from customers and painted a picture of the world’s enterprise hardware fleet – and the news is better for Google and Apple than it is for Microsoft.…

The world’s freshwater is getting saltier. Why?

Around the world, the planet’s freshwater is getting saltier. And it’s because of people. For decades, salting roads, fertilizer run-off and evaporation driven by human-caused climate change have upped the salinity of lakes, rivers and groundwater. All that salt is detrimental to a lot of aquatic life and can be problematic for drinking water, too. But there’s still time to reverse course. In fact, many people have already started to change their ways. Today, producer Berly McCoy is on the case to see what solutions exist.

This is part of a whole series on the world’s dwindling water supply. Check out the rest of the water series:

Part 1: When the wells run dry

Part 2: The world’s groundwater problem

Part 3: Freshwater’s growing salt problem

Email us your questions about water, the wider environment – or anything else to do with science at shortwave@npr.org . We may turn it into an episode in the future!

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

Apple pushes Maps ads in free training-wheels business bundle

Apple Business combines corporate device management offerings and a way to buy ads

Apple has simplified its business services by combining and rebranding them, and is giving away the reformulated enterprise offering for free.…

Kona Storms Flood Oʻahu

Back-to-back subtropical cyclones in March fueled destructive flash flooding on several of the Hawaiian Islands.

Alibaba delivers RISC-V server chip optimized to run China’s top AI models

Claims its set performance records but looks to be years behind western fare

Alibaba has revealed a new server chip that it says is the most powerful processor ever to use the RISC-V instruction set.…

HP stuffs OpenAI LLM into new laptops in bid for small biz

HP IQ can chat, share files, and break down everything people said in the conference room.

You’ve heard the call of Apple Intelligence, jumped for joy over Google Gemini, and cuddled up with Microsoft Copilot. Now, get ready for HP IQ, a local AI and collaboration application HP Inc. hopes will make its business laptops stand apart. Also, get ready for your boss to start recording in-person meetings.…

AI-pilled Arm CEO teases mystery products that will turn it into a money machine

Breaking free of its IP licensing shackles

Arm CEO Rene Haas took an ice-cold sip of the AI Kool-Aid during a keynote speech at the company’s annual conference on Tuesday, teasing a future product that he thinks will pump the British chip designer's total addressable market (TAM) to $1 trillion by the end of the decade.…

NASA PC-12 Aircraft Makes Move to Support Flight Research Across Agency

A NASA Pilatus PC-12 aircraft will now be based at NASA’s Armstrong Flight Research Center in Edwards, California, in order to support flight research efforts across the agency. The PC-12 was acquired in 2022 by NASA’s Glenn Research Center in Cleveland for use in advanced technology development. The PC-12 will continue to support research at […]

EFF has a new boss to lead the fight against privacy-sucking forces of doom

Cyber rights org retools for the days of AI and unrestrained government

interview  The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) on Tuesday appointed Nicole Ozer to succeed Cindy Cohn as the cyber rights group's executive director when Cohn departs this summer.…

Reminders of Where We’ve Been, Where We’re Going

Three Moon rocks are on display during a March 24, 2026, event where NASA announced a series of transformative agencywide initiatives designed to achieve the National Space Policy and advance American leadership in space. NASA leadership provided updates on mission priorities, including sending the first astronauts to the lunar surface in more than 50 years, establishing […]

3 Ways Students Can Get Involved With Artemis

NASA’s Artemis program will establish a sustainable lunar presence, unlock new scientific discoveries, and develop technologies for spaceflight to Mars and beyond – and students can help shape this new era of space exploration. As America launches this new Golden Age of innovation and exploration, NASA and its partners offer exciting opportunities for students to […]

1K+ cloud environments infected following Trivy supply chain attack

Crims 'creating a snowball effect' across open source projects

RSAC 2026  Thousands of organizations' cloud environments have been infected with secret-stealing malware as a result of the Trivy supply-chain attack last week, and now the crims that compromised the open source scanners are working with notorious extortion crews like Lapsus$.…

A Bronze Age Loom Sheds New Light on Mediterranean Textile Practices

This 3,500-year-old warp-weighted loom was surprisingly preserved by a fire that destroyed multiple buildings in an ancient Iberian settlement

NASA Selects Finalists in Student Aircraft Maintenance Competition

Editor’s note: This advisory was updated on March 24, 2026, to update the finalists list. NASA has selected seven student teams as finalists in the 2026 Gateways to Blue Skies Competition, giving them the resources to help address a critical challenge for U.S. aviation: aircraft maintenance.  Challenges facing the commercial aviation industry include a shortage of qualified maintenance workers and increasing demands to keep complicated aircraft running […]

Chemists concoct nail polish that lets clawed humans use touch screens

They still look goofy, but at least you might be able to use 'em like a stylus

An undergraduate chemistry researcher has developed a nail polish formulation that will let people use their nails to tap away on touch screens.…

Archaeologists Unearth More Than 40,000 Pieces of Pottery That Ancient Egyptians Used Like Scrap Paper

The ostraca, some dating back to the time just before Cleopatra, were discovered within the ancient ruins of Athribis

NASA X-Ray Mission Gets Fresh Look at 2,000-Year-Old Supernova

NASA’s IXPE (Imaging X-ray Polarimetry Explorer) mission has taken a new observation of a supernova, RCW 86, helping fill in a fuller picture of what other telescopes have observed. When astronomers using NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory previously targeted RCW 86, they discovered that a large “cavity” region around the system led the supernova to expand […]

LiteLLM loses game of Trivy pursuit, gets compromised

Python interface for LLMs infected with malware via polluted CI/CD pipeline

Two versions of LiteLLM, an open source interface for accessing multiple large language models, have been removed from the Python Package Index (PyPI) following a supply chain attack that injected them with malicious credential-stealing code.…

This Critically Endangered Bird's Song Was About to Disappear. Scientists Saved It by Recruiting Some Wild Vocal Tutors

Wild-born male regent honeyeaters passed their cultural knowledge to young captive-born birds

AI isn't killing jobs, it's 'unbundling' them into lower-paid chunks

Paper argues the real impact isn't job loss but narrowing human work and pay

AI isn't killing jobs wholesale – it's quietly chipping away at them, one task at a time.…

La NASA presenta iniciativas para cumplir con la política espacial nacional de Estados Unidos

Read this news release in English here. Como parte de su evento “Ignition” (Encendido) celebrado el martes, la NASA anunció una serie de iniciativas transformadoras a nivel de toda la agencia, diseñadas para cumplir con la Política Espacial Nacional del presidente Donald J. Trump y promover el liderazgo estadounidense en el espacio. Estas acciones reflejan […]

Remote or not, workers are drifting back toward the city

Global hiring data shows employees relocating nearer major hubs, reversing pandemic-era shift

The post-pandemic shift away from cities has reversed since 2022, with return-to-office mandates playing a role, according to a new report on global hiring trends.…

Age checks creep into Linux as systemd gets a DOB field

Flatpak may be next, and the lobbying behind it is raising eyebrows

After weeks of debate, code to record user age was finally merged into the Linux world's favorite system management daemon.…

Arm rolls its own 136-core AGI CPU to chase AI hype train

Turns out artificial general intelligence was a CPU this whole time

Arm unveiled its first homegrown silicon — yes, an actual chip, not another shake-n-bake blueprint — during an event in San Francisco on Tuesday, and said that flagship customer Meta is set to deploy the 136-core CPU at scale later this year.…

Scientists May Have Discovered a New Type of Planet Beyond the Solar System. The Catch? It Smells Like Rotten Eggs

L98-59d seems to be a molten planet with an atmosphere full of hydrogen sulfide

Goodbye, Lunar Gateway: NASA ditches Moon station for Moon base

NASA boss Jared Isaacman has no intention of letting this setback delay the Artemis program, apparently

NASA's ambitious plans to build a space station in orbit of the Moon are officially on hold, administrator Jared Isaacman said Tuesday, with the space agency instead skipping the orbital habitat in favor of building a permanent base on the Lunar surface. …

Datadog bets DIY AI will mean it dodges the SaaSpocalypse

The theory is that its domain-specific model will beat generalist LLMs on results and economics

Datadog is close to releasing an updated AI model that it thinks will help it avoid the so-called SaaSpocalypse – customers using AI to build their own tools.…

This Suspected Meteorite Tore Through the Roof of a Suburban Houston Home

A bright meteor streaked across the afternoon sky and exploded over southeast Texas this weekend

NASA Research Proposes Technology to Seek Earth-Like Exoplanets

As NASA seeks to understand the mysteries of the universe, the agency is advancing technologies to locate and explore Earth-like planets far beyond our solar system. A key element of this research involves observing reflected light from exoplanets, which can reveal indicators of Earth-like features such as water and oxygen. However, detecting this faint reflected […]

NASA’s Water-Hunting Tool Will Help Scout Moon’s South Pole

NASA is joining international partners to hunt for ice on the Moon in support of future human exploration. The agency is providing a water-detecting instrument, the Neutron Spectrometer System (NSS), to the Lunar Polar Exploration (LUPEX) mission led by JAXA (Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency) and ISRO (Indian Space Research Organisation).

HackerOne slams supplier for delayed breach notice after staff data exposed

Nearly 300 employees caught up in intrusion at benefits provider Navia

Almost 300 HackerOne employees are caught up in a data breach, with the bug bounty biz slamming a third-party benefits provider for a weeks-long delay in notification.…

Microslop stuffs AI photo restyling powers into OneDrive

Microslop? Sorry, we meant Microsoft

Microsoft is rolling out technology to transform OneDrive photos into AI-infused masterpieces. Or top up the bucket of slop, depending on your perspective.…

NASA Unveils Initiatives to Achieve America’s National Space Policy

As part of its “Ignition” event on Tuesday, NASA announced a series of transformative agencywide initiatives designed to achieve President Donald J. Trump’s National Space Policy and advance American leadership in space. These actions reflect the urgency of the moment, but also the tremendous opportunity ahead for world-changing science and discovery. “NASA is committed to […]

Country that put backdoors into Cisco routers to spy on world bans foreign routers

Unfortunately, there aren't many options unless you're Starlink

Citing national security fears, America is effectively banning any new consumer-grade network routers made abroad.…

Mozilla introduces cq, describing it as 'Stack Overflow for agents'

A knowledge database where AI agents read, add and score the items – what could go wrong?

Mozilla is building cq - described by staff engineer Peter Wilson as "Stack Overflow for agents" - as an open source project to enable AI agents to discover and share collective knowledge.…

Russian initial access broker who fed ransomware crews gets 81 months in US prison

Aleksei Volkov sentenced after enabling attacks that cost victims millions

A Russian national who sold the keys to corporate networks faces nearly seven years in a US prison after prosecutors tied his handiwork to a string of ransomware attacks costing victims millions of dollars.…

Systemd-free antiX Linux 26: Debian 13, in bonsai form

Plus: Still supports 32-bit hardware or VMs

AntiX Linux is a heavily cut-down version of Debian 13, with a choice of init systems and ultralightweight GUIs. This means it's able to run usefully on older and lower-end PCs – and, of course, to run faster on modern ones.…

SAP already shifting focus from ERP migration disaster in pursuit of AI-driven growth

New commercial models planned after cloud transition falls €2B behind target

SAP has begun to shift focus away from its failure to hit legacy software and cloud migration targets and onto the latest so-called "innovation" elements of its portfolio, such as AI.…

Archaeologists Identify Traces of Children's Fingerprints Still Visible on Clay Beads Created 15,000 Years Ago

Discovered in present-day Israel, the beads suggest that Natufian groups used clay for symbolic purposes many years earlier than scholars previously thought, according to a new study

Windows boss promises to heal the operating system's self-inflicted wounds

Sorry seems to be the hardest word at Microsoft

Opinion  Has Microsoft finally reckoned with Windows 11's many failings - or has its OS chief, Pavan Davuluri, simply offered more soothing platitudes to users fed up with bugs and unwanted AI?…

EU broadcasters say smart TVs and voice assistants are the next gatekeepers

Open letter warns tech is shaping what audiences see while slipping past regulation

Europe's broadcasters say smart TVs and voice assistants are fast becoming the next Big Tech gatekeepers, with little sign of Brussels stepping in.…

The world has a groundwater problem. Can we solve it?

Groundwater is responsible for about half of the water people use globally. It’s drying up. Hayes Kelman started noticing the family farm in western Kansas was slowly getting less water around the time he was in high school. Now, as an adult and co-owner of Kelman farms, he is acutely aware that there’s a problem: the aquifer he uses to water his crops is being drained faster than it can be refilled. If something doesn’t change, someday it will run out of water.

Today, producer Berly McCoy dives into the state of the world’s groundwater and asks: What happens when people pull too much? And can the damage be reversed?

Check out part 1 of our water series, Day Zero: When the wells run dry .

Interested in more water 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

Half of VMware users plan to reduce usage by 2028

Silent exodus brewing but other customers say they feel trapped

Half of VMware users plan to reduce their use of the virtualization pioneer’s products by 2028, according to a survey by independent analyst firm Virtified.…

Tropical Cyclone Narelle Crosses Australia

The powerful storm lashed the northern edge of the continent with damaging winds and drenching rain as it made landfall multiple times.

Head-mounted VR hardware will never happen, says Neal Stephenson - who coined the term ‘metaverse’

‘People don’t like wearing things on their faces and don’t trust those who do’

Science fiction author Neal Stephenson, who coined the term “metaverse” in his 1992 novel Snow Crash, has argued he and others who believed immersive environments would require head-mounted hardware got it wrong.…

Telling an AI model that it’s an expert programmer makes it a worse programmer

Researchers say persona-based prompting can improve works for safety but not for facts

Many people start their work with AI by prompting the machine to imagine it is an expert at the task they want it to perform, a technique that boffins have found may be futile.…

Claude attacks were 'Rorschach test' for infosec community, scaring former NSA boss

'It freakin' worked' says Rob Joyce - and shows how relentless AI agents can find holes humans miss

RSAC 2026  The now-infamous Anthropic report about Chinese cyberspies abusing Claude AI to automate cyberattacks was a Rorschach test for the infosec community, according to former NSA cyber boss Rob Joyce.…

Public-private partnerships vital in disrupting China's Typhoons, says RSA panel with no government speakers

Washington content to be represented by actual empty chairs

RSAC 2026  Back in the day (circa 2023) when cybercrime group Scattered Spider and its help-desk voice-phishing calls were a relatively new threat, the feds considered pulling the government's top cyber-threat hunters and their private-sector counterparts into one room to share information, in real time, about this loosely knit extortion ring that was terrorizing enterprises.…

Platypus Hair Shares a Puzzling Feature With Bird Feathers, Adding to the Egg-Laying Mammal's List of Unusual Characteristics

The species’ melanosomes—tiny, pigment-filled structures inside hair cells—are hollow, a trait never before seen in mammals

Snowflake's ongoing pitch: bring AI to data rather than data to AI

Customers are 'excited' says one solution provider

Snowflake is putting cash and kinetic energy behind the idea that AI works best in its platform.…

NASA Data Hackathon Inspires Community Action

On Jan. 31, students, library staff, researchers, and community members gathered at the University of Florida’s (UF) Marston Science Library for the Environmental Monitoring through Education, Research, and Geospatial Engagement (EMERGE) NASA Data Hackathon. This initiative empowers libraries, educators, and individuals to engage in public health and environmental science using real-world data tools and citizen […]

Lightning-fast exploits make it essential to patch fast, ask questions later

Here's where you ought to spend your security billable hours budget this year

Strengthen your MFA policies, double-down on anti-phishing training, and for Jobs' sake, patch all your vulns right away. The past year of intelligence collected by Cisco's Talos threat hunters suggests that attackers are moving faster to exploit vulns, and fooling more staff than ever into giving up their credentials. …

Finland Is Named the Happiest Country in the World for the Ninth Year in a Row

The World Happiness Report is an annual ranking of wellbeing around the globe. This year's report spotlighted the consequences of social media use

If you love your boss, imagine how much more you'll love their AI twin

Digital twins of leaders may be plausible as novelty acts, but not really welcome

Imagine that your boss is too busy to show up at that meeting you called so she sends a bot of herself instead. With a digital twin, even your company's CEO - the one who spends all his time on the corporate jet - could make an appearance at your powwow about the break room coffee machine. But would you want them there?…

Science Through Shadows: How Astronomical Alignments Reveal the Universe

When one celestial object passes in front of another, it can cast a shadow that travels across space – and sometimes across Earth. These moments of alignment, known as eclipses, occultations, and transits, allow scientists to study distant objects in remarkable ways. By observing how light changes when an object briefly blocks another, astronomers can measure sizes and shapes, detect atmospheres, and refine the orbits of asteroids and planets.

See NASA’s GUARDIAN Catch a Tsunami

A new data visualization illustrates how an experimental NASA technology can provide extra lead time to communities in the path of a tsunami. Called GUARDIAN (GNSS Upper Atmospheric Real-time Disaster Information and Alert Network), the software detects slight distortions in satellite navigation signals to spot hazards on the move.. The animation breaks down a real-life […]

These Mesmerizing Waterfalls Flow Only Every Few Years. See the Rare Marvel Now in Southwest Utah

Gunlock Reservoir has exceeded 105 percent of its capacity. As a result, water is spilling onto the red rock boulders below, creating an unusual natural phenomenon just in time for spring break

AI agents are 'gullible' and easy to turn into your minions

Zenity CTO demos 0-click AI agent exploits on stage at RSAC

RSAC 2026  There's a very simple reason why just about every enterprise AI agent is vulnerable to zero-click attacks, according to Michael Bargury, CTO of AI security company Zenity.…

SoftBank to build massive AI datacenter on former US nuclear weapons site

10GW server farm, 10GW of new generation, and $4.2bn grid upgrade. And someone else is paying for the uranium cleanup

Softbank's SB Energy is redeveloping Department of Energy (DoE) land in Ohio for a massive datacenter campus, adding extra generation facilities and power infrastructure alongside it.…

SWOT Mission Unlocks a New View of Our Waterways

Explore how rivers move, change, and sustain life across the planet with SWOT data.

NASA’s Hubble, Webb Telescopes Survey Pinwheel Galaxy

This March 16, 2026, image from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope and the James Webb Space Telescope takes a closer look at the core of Messier 101, also known as the Pinwheel Galaxy. At 25 million light-years away, M101 is one of the closest “face-on” spiral galaxies to us. With that in mind, Hubble’s ultraviolet, visible, […]

Wired Confirmed iPhone’s Worst-Kept Secret: Closed Systems Fail at Scale

For years, Apple has sold the myth of the “unhackable iPhone.” A walled garden. A fortress. A device so locked down that only nation-states could dream of breaking in. Wired’s latest reporting just blew that narrative apart.

The post Wired Confirmed iPhone’s Worst-Kept Secret: Closed Systems Fail at Scale appeared first on Purism.

Forget drones – the US Army just took delivery of a self-flying Black Hawk helicopter

Expendable military drones are so 2025

The US Army just took receipt of what may be the coolest unmanned drone ever flown by the military: A full-sized Black Hawk helicopter. …

Avalonia bolts Linux and WebAssembly onto .NET MAUI

Broader platform coverage lands, if developers can tolerate the rough edges

AvaloniaUI has previewed MAUI support for Linux and WebAssembly browser applications – platforms Microsoft's own cross-platform .NET framework lacks – but low adoption and persistent bugs are likely to constrain uptake.…

These Stunningly Detailed 3D Images of Ants Showcase the Remarkable Diversity Across Their Species

Scientists used a game-changing technique to scan about 2,200 preserved specimens in just one week to create the Antscan database

Windows native application development is a mess

Usually, when developers or programmers write articles about their experiences developing for a platform they have little to no experience with, the end result usually comes down to “they do things differently, therefor it is bad actually”, which is deeply unhelpful. This article, though, is from a longtime Windows user and developer, but one who hasn’t had to work on native Windows development for a long time now. When he decided to write his own native Windows application to scratch a personal itch, it wasn’t a great experience. While I followed the Windows development ecosystem from the sidelines, my professional work never involved writing native Windows apps. (Chromium is technically a native app, but is more like its own operating system.) And for my hobby projects, the web was always a better choice. But, spurred on by fond childhood memories, I thought writing a fun little Windows utility program might be a good retirement project. Well. I am here to report that the scene is a complete mess. I totally understand why nobody writes native Windows applications these days, and instead people turn to Electron. ↫ Domenic Denicola Denicola decided to try and use the latest technologies and best practices from Microsoft regarding Windows development, and basically came away aghast at just how shot of an experience it really is. I’m not a developer, but you don’t need to be to grasp the severity of the situation after following his development timeline and reading about his struggles. If this is truly representative of the Windows application development experience, it’s really no surprise just how few new, quality Windows applications there are, and why even Microsoft’s own Windows developers resort to things like React for the Start menu to enabler faster and easier iteration. This is a complete dumpster fire.

Google unleashes Gemini AI agents on the dark web

Claims it can analyze millions of daily events with 98 percent accuracy

RSAC 2026  Google's Gemini AI agents are crawling the dark web, sifting through upward of 10 million posts a day to find a handful of threats relevant to a particular organization.…

Are Strings Still Our Best Hope for a Theory of Everything?

Columnist Natalie Wolchover examines the latest developments in the “forever war” over whether string theory can describe the world.

The post Are Strings Still Our Best Hope for a Theory of Everything? first appeared on Quanta Magazine

Smooth criminals talking their way into cloud environments, Google says

Voice phishing is second most common initial access method across all IR probes, and top in cloud break-ins

RSAC 2026  Voice phishing surged last year to become the second most common method used by cybercriminals to gain initial access to their victims' IT estate – and the No. 1 tactic used when breaking into cloud environments.…

Java Sun SPOTs (Small Programable Object Technology)

These were Sun microcontrollers that run Squawk Java ME directly on metal with gc and all the bells and whistles, created by Sun Microsystems in 2005. The feature mesh networking and tcp/ip and multitasking. Even the drivers are java just like Java OS. They run a command and control server by default and there’s graphical network builders and deployment managers (Solarium) they also do some more esoteric stuff like process migration. ↫ Penny I have no use for these but I want them. They would’ve made an excellent addition to my Sun article. There’s still a detailed tutorial and informational website up about these things, too.

The OpenBSD init system and boot process

In recent weeks, systemd has both embraced slopcoding and laid the groundwork for age verification built right into systemd-based Linux distributions, there’s definitely been an uptick in people talking about alternative init systems. If you want to gain understanding in a rather classic init system, OpenBSD’s is a great place to start. OpenBSD has a delightfully traditional init system, which makes it a great place to start learning about init systems. It’s simple and effective. There’s a bit of a counter movement in the IT and FOSS worlds rebelling against hyperscaler solutions pushing down into everyone’s practices. One of the rallying cries I’ve been seeing is to remind people that You Can Just Do Things™ on the computer. The BSD init system, and especially OpenBSD’s is something of a godparent to this movement. init(8) just runs a shell script to start the computer, and You Can Just Do Things™ in the script to get them to happen on boot. ↫ Overeducated-Redneck.net My main laptop is currently in for warranty repairs, but once it returns, I intend to set it up with either OpenBSD or a Linux distribution without systemd (most likely Void) to see how many systems I can distance from systemd without giving myself too much of a headache (I’m guessing my gaming machine will remain on systemd-based Fedora). I’m not particularly keen on slopcoding and government-mandated age verification inside my operating systems, and I’m definitely feeling a bit of a slippery slope underneath my feet. I have my limits.

SpaceX hits back at Amazon in orbital datacenter dispute

In space, no one can hear you being petty

SpaceX has fired back at Amazon with a letter to the US telecoms regulator, after Amazon objected to its plans for orbiting datacenters.…

NASA to Provide Update on Implementation of National Space Policy

Editor’s note: This advisory was updated on March 23, 2026, to update the title of a participant. NASA will host a public event at 9 a.m. EDT on Tuesday, March 24, at the Mary W. Jackson NASA Headquarters in Washington to outline how the agency is executing President Donald J. Trump’s National Space Policy and accelerating preparations for America’s […]

NASA’s Hubble Revisits Crab Nebula to Track 25 Years of Expansion

A quarter-century after its first observations of the full Crab Nebula, NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope has taken a fresh look at the supernova remnant. The result is an unparalleled, detailed look at the aftermath of a supernova and how it has evolved over Hubble’s long lifetime. A paper detailing the new Hubble observation is published […]

Palantir trial plugs into UK financial watchdog's data trove

US analytics firm handed access to sensitive intel, raising yet more questions about vendor lock-in

US data miner Palantir has quietly landed inside the UK's financial watchdog, plugging into a trove of sensitive data as Whitehall simultaneously insists it wants to wean itself off exactly this kind of dependency.…

We tested Intel's new chips for cash-strapped hardcore PC users and they're impressive

More cores, higher clocks, lower prices

Review  It's a tough time to be a PC enthusiast. Between the memory crunch and the AI boom driving up prices on storage, DDR5, and GPUs, it's gotten prohibitively expensive to build a PC.…

Humans and Animals Often Like the Same Mating Calls, Supporting a 150-Year-Old Observation by Charles Darwin

New research by Smithsonian scientists suggests that preferences for certain sounds might be evolutionarily conserved

US chip testing firm shrugged off ransomware hit as minor – then came the data leak

Trio-Tech International initially said hack wasn't 'material,' but then stolen data was published

Trio-Tech International initially shrugged off a ransomware attack at a Singapore subsidiary as immaterial, only to reverse course days later after discovering stolen data had been disclosed.…

RSAC 2026: Uncle Sam backs out, and AI agents are everywhere

Infosec pros descend on San Francisco

kettle  When El Reg cybersecurity editor Jessica Lyons joins infosec industry colleagues in San Francisco for RSAC 2026 this week, she's expecting agentic AI to be on everyone's lips - at least those who aren't busy gossiping about the lack of presence from any representatives of the US federal government.…

Microsoft fixes broken Windows update days after vowing fewer broken updates

The era of reliability begins... right after this out-of-band patch

Microsoft has released an out-of-band update to resolve bugs introduced by a Windows patch just days after promising improved reliability.…

NASA sets 'impossible' ground rules for relocation of 'flown space vehicle'

Draft Request for Proposals says you can move shuttle orbiter but you cannot break it

NASA has issued a draft Request for Proposals to move a flown space vehicle, a step some lawmakers see as progress toward relocating Space Shuttle Discovery from the Smithsonian Museum in Virginia to Houston, Texas.…

These Historic Snuffboxes Associated With 18th-Century Monarchs Were Stolen in a Shocking Heist. Now, They're Back on Public Display

In 2024, thieves made away with the intricately decorated boxes, which had been on display in Paris. Two of the boxes, which were later recovered, are now on view at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London

The drone swarm is coming, and NATO air defenses are too expensive to cope

Ukraine's battlefield lessons show quantity and affordability now trump exquisite hardware

NATO is unprepared to deal with attacks by cheap, mass-produced drones and urgently needs layered, affordable air defense systems to counter the threat, taking a cue from the experience gained by Ukrainian forces over the past four years.…

CMA dithers on cloud probe as Microsoft's meter runs on taxpayer dime

Every month of 'careful consideration' is another month Redmond laughs all the way to the bank

Here's the uncomfortable truth: every week the UK's Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) hesitates on its decision on the outcome of its public cloud services market investigation, the meter keeps running and taxpayers continue to foot the bill.…

Calling out corporate BS? There's a steaming pile to aim for

Your instinctive revulsion is spot on. Follow your nose

Opinion  Science is at its best when it makes manifest radical ideas that change our worldview. This is the flag all sane people salute, under which we march to war. Yet in our hearts, we know that the very tastiest science is that which confirms our prejudices and validates what we've known all along. Cornell University has just served up a plate of the finest yet. Tuck in.…

When it comes to catastrophic space weather, the UK is holding a cocktail umbrella

National Audit Office warns government has little idea of how to respond in the event of a major solar storm

The UK's National Audit Office (NAO) has warned the country is underprepared for a severe space weather event.…

Junior disobeyed orders and tried untested feature during a live robot demo

First came the facepalm, then the faceplant, then the loss of face

Who, Me?  Monday is upon us, but before you use the new week to explore opportunity and adventure, The Register presents a new installment of Who, Me? It's our weekly reader-contributed column that shares your stories of flops, failures, and foul-ups.…

Day Zero: When the wells run dry

In honor of World Water Day, Short Wave is exploring the ways water touches our lives. From increasing water shortages around the world, to how it’s affecting agriculture and aquifers. We’re starting with “day zero”: the day a city or place runs out of water. Cape Town, Mexico City, Chennai in India are just a few places that have come close to day zero events. Today, we talk to experts and hear from someone who lived in Cape Town during the crisis about why we’re overdue for rethinking our relationship to water.

This is part of a whole series on the world's dwindling water supply. Check out the rest of the water series:

• Part 1: When the wells run dry
• Part 2: The world's groundwater problem
• Part 3: Freshwater's growing salt problem

Interested in more science behind current events? 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

Elon Musk wants to build 50 times more chips than the world currently produces, using 'new physics'

Like his promise to get a million robocabs on the road, this doesn't add up

Elon Musk has put Tesla, SpaceX, and xAI in harness to build a chip fabrication outfit called "Terafab" capable of producing a terawatt's worth of computing power each year, then send most of it into space.…

A Fault Line in Full Bloom

Plains around the San Andreas Fault and across Carrizo Plain National Monument are awash with yellow as wildflowers bloom.

Microsoft: Removing some Copilots will improve Windows 11

'Doze boss admits quality is down, promises smaller memory footprint and fixes for many well-known issues

Microsoft has acknowledged that it needs to improve the quality of Windows 11 and outlined its plan to get the job done.…

Australia to datacenter operators: BYO energy, pay your way, build green, or stay home

PLUS: Singtel’s triple outage; 17,000 counterfeit hard drives seized; Tech wages shift across Asia; And more!

Asia In Brief  Australia’s government on Monday announced a set of datacenter “expectations” to guide would-be bit barn builders who contemplate breaking ground down under.…

Russians are posing as Signal support to launch phishing attacks

PLUS: US takes down Iranian propaganda sites; Marketing company asks 'Why Do We Have Your Information?' And more!

Infosec In Brief  Russian intelligence-affiliated parties are posing as customer support services on commercial messaging applications such as Signal to compromise accounts and conduct phishing attacks, the FBI and Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) warned last Friday.…

Transformational Tools and Technologies Resources

Vision Studies, Analysis of Alternatives (AoA) Studies, and White Papers

CERN eggheads burn AI into silicon to stem data deluge

The operating system of the universe isn’t going to debug itself

feature  CERN is nothing like today's agentic AI jockeys, who mostly rely on pre-set weights and generic TPUs and GPUs to generate their slop. CERN burns custom nanosecond-speed AI into the silicon itself just to eliminate excess data.…

Turns out your coffee addiction may be doing your brain a favor

Decades of data suggest people who stick to a couple of brews fare better in terms of gray matter

A decades-long study suggests that your daily caffeine fix might be doing more than jolting you through morning meetings – it could also be quietly helping your brain hold it together.…

Payment biz pulls plug on open source charity after KYC spat

Free Software Foundation Europe says it was asked for supporters' passwords; Nexi insists it only wanted test credentials to check cancellation flows

The Free Software Foundation Europe says its electronic-payments provider Nexi Group unexpectedly "cancelled" its account – cutting the charity off from around 450 donors.…

NASA’s X-59 Experimental Supersonic Aircraft Makes Second Flight

NASA’s quiet supersonic X-59 aircraft made its second flight on Friday, kicking off a series of dozens of test flights in 2026.  Although the flight duration was abbreviated due to a technical issue, the team was able to collect information that will inform future tests.  “Despite the early landing, this is a good day for the team. We collected more data, and the pilot landed safely,” said Cathy Bahm, project manager for NASA’s Low-Boom […]

Microsoft finally makes a few concrete promises about Windows 11 improvements

Earlier this year, Microsoft openly acknowledged the sorry state of Windows 11, and made vague promises about possible improvements somewhere in the near future, but stayed away from making any concrete promises. Today, the company published a blog post with some more details, including some actual concrete, tangible changes it’s going to implement over the coming two months. In coming builds, you’ll be able to move the taskbar to any side of the screen, instead of it being locked to the bottom, thereby reintroducing a feature present since Windows 95. They’re also scaling back their obsession with ramming “AI” in every corner of Windows, and will be removing Copilot integrations from Snipping Tool, Photos, Widgets, and Notepad. Furthermore, and this is a big one among Windows users I’m sure, Windows Update will be placed under user control once again, allowing them to ignore updates, postpone them indefinitely, reboot without applying updates, and so on. These are the tangible improvements we’ll be able to point to and say the company kept their word, and they all feel like welcome changes. There’s also a few promises that feel far more vague and less tangible, like the ever-present, long-running promise to “improve File Explorer”. I feel like Microsoft’s been promising to fix their horrible file manager for years now, without much to show for it, so I hope this time will be different. The company also wants to improve Widgets, the Windows Insider Program, and the Feedback Hub application. These all feel less tangible, and will be harder to quantify and benchmark. Beyond these first round of improvements that we’re supposed to be seeing over the coming two months, Microsoft also promises to implement wider improvements across the board, with the usual suspects like better performance, quicker application launches, improved reliability, lower memory usage, and so on. They also promise to move more core Windows user interface components to WinUI 3, including the Start menu, which is currently written in React. Windows Search is another common pain point among Windows users, and here, Microsoft promises to improve its performance and clearly separate local from online results (but no word on making search exclusively local). There’s some more details in the blog post, but overall, it sounds great. However, words without actions are about as meaningful as a White House statement on the war with Iran, so seeing is believing.

Cryptographers engage in war of words over RustSec bug reports and subsequent ban

Rust security maintainers contend Nadim Kobeissi's vulnerability claims are too much

Since February, cryptographer Nadim Kobeissi has been trying to get code fixes applied to Rust cryptography libraries to address what he says are critical bugs. For his efforts, he's been dismissed, ignored, and banned from Rust security channels.…

Hangar One Restoration Project

Editor’s Note: This article was originally published on April 25, 2022 and has been updated to reflect changes including the completion of Hangar One’s restoration. Restoration has been completed on Hangar One, a historic landmark in the San Francisco Bay Area and a key part of the region’s early aviation history.   In December 2025, Planetary Ventures completed restoration of […]

Contrary to Popular Belief, Some Doodle Crossbred Dogs May Have More Behavioral Problems Than Their Purebred Parents

Pet owners often pick "designer dogs" because they think they’ll be easier to train and friendlier with kids than purebreeds. A new study suggests that's not always the case

Sorry, Amazon, you couldn't pick a worse time to bring a phone to market: IDC analyst

The market is contracting

Right product, wrong time? Amazon is reported to be developing a new smartphone, its first since 2014, and, according to industry tracker IDC, it will face entrenched competition with better products and a market that is expected to contract by double digits.…

Archaeologists Unearth Traces of a Mysterious Medieval City That Was Abandoned Under Puzzling Circumstances Hundreds of Years Ago

Found in a Polish forest, the town of Stolzenberg appears to have been built around the turn of the 14th century. Surveys revealed evidence of a town square, a main street and a moat

NASA Selects University Finalists for Technology Concepts Competition

NASA selected 14 university teams from across the nation as finalists in the 2026 Revolutionary Aerospace Systems Concepts – Academic Linkage (RASC-AL) Competition. This NASA challenge tasks students to design innovative concepts that could further human life and work on the Moon, Mars, and beyond. The competition links academia and the aerospace community, fostering innovation, […]

How Open NASA Data on Comet 3I/ATLAS Will Power Tomorrow’s Discoveries

The interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS will soon leave our solar system, never to return, but the observations of the comet will live on in NASA’s public data archives. More than a dozen NASA science missions turned their instruments to observe the comet, which is only the third identified object to be visiting our solar system from […]

See Ramses II's Intricately Decorated Coffin and Rare Treasures From His Reign at This New Immersive Exhibition

Now on display in London, "Ramses and the Pharaohs' Gold" features 3,000-year-old artifacts alongside virtual reality experiences that transport museumgoers to the 13th century B.C.E.

Smiles and Spacesuits

NASA astronaut Chris Williams smiles at the camera during a spacesuit fit verification on Jan. 2, 2026, inside the International Space Station’s Quest airlock. This procedure confirms that the spacesuit is airtight and properly configured, assesses comfort and mobility, and helps prevent potential safety risks. Williams and fellow NASA astronaut Jessica Meir completed an approximately […]

Salesforce snaps up the team who built calendar app Clockwise to work on Agentforce

Just the team, not the tech

Salesforce's Agentforce team is getting an infusion of new talent by hiring the team behind Clockwise, a calendar scheduling app, but the app itself isn't sticking around.…

NASA Exploration, Science Inspire “Project Hail Mary” Film

Real-life space exploration and big-screen science fiction will converge on Friday. As NASA prepares to launch Artemis II, the first crewed mission under the agency’s Artemis program and another step toward sending the first astronauts – Americans – to Mars, the fictional film “Project Hail Mary” premiere will take audiences on a journey into deep […]

See the 2,500-Pound Bronze Bison as They Arrive at Their New, Permanent Place at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History

More than a century ago, the massive mammals actually grazed beside the Smithsonian Castle. As of today, two large sculptures continue that legacy as they flank the museum’s main entrance

WSL graphics driver update brings better GPU support for Linux apps

Meanwhile, WINE and OpenGL tweaks speed Windows apps on 64-bit hosts

Whatever OS you run, you have a better chance to run non-native apps. Running Linux virtualized on Windows is set to speed up slightly, and so is running Windows apps on top of 64-bit Linux and macOS.…

Starship may chauffeur Orion to the Moon, as NASA mulls ditching SLS after Artemis V

SpaceX's still-not-quite-orbital rocket tapped as lunar taxi. Musk's minicab anyone?

NASA is reportedly considering using SpaceX's Starship to transport the Orion capsule to the Moon, with some sources calling it a done deal.…

Humans May Have Transported Live Parrots Over the Andes Mountains Along Sophisticated Trade Routes Before the Rise of the Inca Empire

Archaeologists were puzzled when they found parrot feathers in a pre-Inca burial in coastal Peru. A new study suggests that the birds were captured in the wild and kept alive over lengthy journeys

Scientists Make a Major Breakthrough in Solving a Hair-Raising Mystery About Static Electricity

The findings can help explain the physics behind phenomena like volcanic lightning

The Jellies That Evolved a Different Way To Keep Time

Off the coast of Japan, biologists netted a pea-size jellyfish with an unusual circadian clock — a chance finding that suggests there are likely more overlooked biological timekeeping mechanisms to be discovered.

The post The Jellies That Evolved a Different Way To Keep Time first appeared on Quanta Magazine

European Hedgehogs' Hearing Might Be Attuned to Ultrasonic Sounds. The Discovery Could Help Scientists Save the Declining Species

Sound-based deterrents could help keep the animals away from fast-moving cars and dangerous landscaping equipment

NASA Simulations Improve Artemis II Launch Environment

Airflow around rockets as they travel from Earth into space can have a dramatic impact on a mission, which is why NASA used advanced simulations to provide the best possible launch conditions for the Artemis II test flight around the Moon.  To better understand the Artemis Space Launch System (SLS) rocket’s flight environment, engineers turned to a NASA-developed tool called the Launch, Ascent, and Vehicle Aerodynamics […]

Microsoft breaks Microsoft account sign-ins in Windows 11 with latest update

OneDrive, Office, Teams Free users greeted with phantom 'no internet' errors, restart may help if you're lucky

Microsoft has broken account sign-ins in Windows 11 25H2 and 24H2 with a recent update, causing error messages in apps like OneDrive and Office.…

UK police force presses pause on live facial recognition after study finds racial bias

Cams statistically more likely to ID Black people, says new research

A UK police force has suspended its deployment of live facial recognition (LFR) technology after a study revealed it was statistically more likely to identify Black people on a watchlist database.…

Feds disrupt monster IoT botnets behind record-breaking DDoS attacks

Millions of hijacked devices powered traffic floods targeting defense systems and beyond

The US government has moved to disrupt a cluster of IoT botnets behind some of the largest DDoS attacks ever recorded, including traffic bursts topping 30 terabits per second.…

NASA Glenn Opens Applications for Free Summer Engineering Institute

NASA’s Glenn Research Center in Cleveland is hosting the 2026 NASA Glenn High School Engineering Institute this July. The hands-on learning experience is designed to help high school students prepare for a future in the aerospace workforce.   Rising high school juniors and seniors can submit applications for this summer program beginning Friday, March 20, through Friday, May 1.  The institute will immerse students in NASA’s work while providing essential career readiness tools to help them in future science, […]

Jaguar Land Rover's cyber bailout sets worrying precedent, watchdog warns

Lack of clear criteria risks encouraging firms to lean on state support instead of worrying about insurance

The UK's cyber watchdog has warned that the government's £1.5 billion bailout of Jaguar Land Rover (JLR) risks setting a troubling precedent for how Britain handles major cyber crises.…

Supermicro co-founder arrested, charged over $2.5B Nvidia GPU sales to China

Indictment claims dummy servers and bogus docs used to slip past US export controls

A co-founder of Supermicro is among three people charged with diverting servers fitted with Nvidia GPUs worth $2.5 billion to Chinese customers in violation of US export controls.…

UK to rethink tech buying after Palantir contracts

Government looks for sovereign tech as NHS deal nears break clause

The UK government has promised a different approach to tech procurement following the award of controversial contracts to Palantir.…

At the Colosseum, New Marble Slabs Mark Where Towering Columns Stood Thousands of Years Ago

Crowds once mingled below two tall arcades supported by 164-foot-tall columns. But due to earthquakes and unstable foundations, these architectural elements collapsed long ago

Starmer's digital ID reboot raises same old questions as its Blair-era ancestor

Audit trails aplenty, but no price tag – and no clue how long your data sticks around

Opinion  Last week's UK government consultation on its plans for digital identity had quite a few things missing. It did not include a price estimate - something it said was due to decisions yet to be taken on the scheme's scope - or how long the government would keep "audit trail" records of ID checks.…

Sashiko: AI code review system for the Linux kernel spots bugs humans miss

Beats getting roasted on the mailing list

AI is coming to the Linux kernel in the form of a code review system - not code submissions.…

While you're here, could you go out of your way to do an impossible job?

He would have gotten away with it too, if it weren't for a meddling security team's fear of USB

On Call  Each Friday The Register offers a fresh installment of On Call, the reader-contributed column that celebrates the fine art of tech support.…

How did these flowers evolve to survive a megadrought?

A multi-year megadrought in the Western U.S. has claimed untold populations of wild plants. Amid the conditions, some have survived. Scientists have produced a stunningly complete picture about how populations of one particular flower – the scarlet monkeyflower – made it through.

In a new study published in the journal Science, a team of scientists spent decades studying and sampling select populations of scarlet monkeyflowers in California and Oregon. Through genetic sequencing, the team discovered that the populations that did best went through genetic changes in a short time period. This is known as rapid evolution.

The team found that three of the populations that recovered the BEST adapted their stomata to open less, so they could conserve more water. Stomata act like a plant’s pores, managing gas exchange and water loss. This allowed the scarlet monkeyflowers to hunker down in the drought and survive.

Interested in more stories about rapid evolution? 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 .

Listen to Short Wave on Spotify and Apple Podcasts .

This episode was produced by Jeffrey Pierre, Rachel Carlson and Hannah Chinn. It was edited by Christopher Intagliata and Rebecca Ramirez. Aru Nair checked the facts. The audio engineers were Becky Brown and Robert Rodriguez.

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

Jeff Bezos' rocket company Blue Origin applies to launch 51,000 datacenter satellites

‘Project Sunrise’ needs a network that doesn’t exist, a rocket that’s hardly flown, and FCC approval

Jeff Bezos’ space company Blue Origin has applied to launch up to 51,600 datacenter satellites.…

Meta’s latest AI improves its terrible content moderation, just a little

Enterprise tools have detected impossible logins for years. Zuck’s human mods couldn’t join the dots

Meta has revealed it’s tested using AI for content moderation chores and found it does better than humans.…

Restless Kīlauea Launches Lava and Ash

Episode 43 of the Hawaiian volcano’s current eruption was marked by high lava fountains and widespread ash dispersal.

Alibaba has made 470,000 AI chips, admits they’re inferior and may always be

Sees optimizing its entire cloud around homebrew silicon as the way to compete

Chinese web giant Alibaba has revealed its T-Head chipmaking business has shipped 470,000 AI chips, and admitted they are currently inferior to rival products, but believes it can build a mutually optimized stack that makes performance gaps moot.…

Google to introduce overly onerous hoops to prevent “sideloading”

When Google said they were going to require verification from every single Android developer that would end the ability to install applications from outside of the Play Store (commonly wrongfully referred to as “sideloading”), it caused quite a backlash. The company then backtracked a little bit, and said they would come up with an “advanced flow” to make sure installing applications from outside of the Play Store remained possible. Well, Google has detailed this “advanced flow”, and as everyone expected, it’s such a massive list of onerous hoops to jump through they might as well just lock Android down to the Play Store and get it over with. First, if a developer is verified, you can download their applications to your device and install them the same way you can do now. Second, developers with “limited distribution accounts”, such as students or hobby projects, can share their applications with up to 20 devices without verification. Third, and this is where the fun starts, we have unverified developers – basically what all Android developers sharing applications outside of the Play Store are now. Here’s the full “advanced flow” as described by Google to allow you to install an application from an unverified developer: Setting aside the fact that developer verification is, in and of itself, a massive problem, I’m kind of okay with a few scary warnings, a disclaimer, and perhaps a single reboot to enable installing applications outside of the Play Store – a few things to make normal people shrug their shoulders and not bother. However, adding enabling developer mode and a goddamn 24-hour waiting period is batshit insanity, and clearly has the intention of discouraging everyone, effectively locking Android to the Play Store. Android is already basically an entirely locked-down, closed-source platform, and once this “advanced flow” comes into force, there’s virtually no difference between iOS and Android, especially for us Europeans who get similarly onerous anti-user nonsense when trying to install alternative application stores on iOS. I see no reason to buy Android over iOS at this point – might as well get the faster phone with better update support.

Decoding Nvidia's Groq-powered LPX and the rest of its new rack systems

From LPUs and GPUs to CPUs and switches, everything you need to know about Nvidia's latest kit

GTC DEEP DIVE  At Nvidia’s GTC conference this week, CEO Jensen Huang finally addressed a $20 billion question he’s dodged for months: Why spend so much to license AI chip startup Groq’s tech and hire away its engineers rather than build it themselves?…

OpenAI tries to build its coding cred, acquires Python toolmaker Astral

Deal helps company build out its Codex team

In a move clearly designed to strengthen its position among developers, OpenAI has acquired Python tool maker Astral. The house of Altman expects the deal to strengthen the ecosystem for its Codex programming agent.…

You can make Linux syscalls in a Windows application, apparently

What happens if you make a Linux syscall in a Windows application? So yeah, you can make Linux syscalls from Windows programs, as long as they’re running under Wine. Totally useless, but the fact that such a Frankenstein monster of a program could exist is funny to me. ↫ nicebyte at gpfault.net The fact that this works is both surprising and unsurprising at the same time.

Time to end the 'uncontrolled experiment' of social media on kids, scientists say

Pair say review of studies, other evidence, proves more countries need to do like Australia and keep kids offline

There is enough evidence going back far enough that it's reasonable to conclude social media platforms are responsible for population-level mental health harms. …

England’s ‘Constable Country’ Is Honoring the 250th Birthday of Its Namesake, Landscape Artist John Constable, With a Year of Exhibitions

Constable was born in the Suffolk village of East Bergholt on June 11, 1776. With “Constable 250,” nearby Ipswich honors the pastoral painter’s connections to his homeland, community, country and contemporary art

Introducing our Public Roadmaps

At Thunderbird, we firmly believe in the strength of listening to our community’s needs and wants, and balancing it with our resources and capabilities. While this has always been part of our ethos, we want to start 2026 by making our goals easier to read and comprehend at roadmaps.thunderbird.net, where you will find our roadmaps […]

The post Introducing our Public Roadmaps appeared first on The Thunderbird Blog.

A Groundskeeper Noticed a Sinkhole on a Golf Course. It Turned Out to Be a Wine Cellar Full of Empty Bottles, Untouched for More Than 100 Years

The cellar is located near the 13th hole of a course at the Davyhulme Park Golf Club in England. Staffers think it was previously part of a manor that was torn down in 1888

Unknown attackers exploit yet another critical SharePoint bug

Last time: Beijing-backed snoops and ransomware crims. Who's next?

Unknown baddies are abusing yet another critical Microsoft SharePoint bug to compromise victims' SharePoint servers, the US government warned.…

An Experimental Brain Implant Allows People With Paralysis to Type Their Thoughts With Their Minds

One of the two participants wrote words up to a speed similar to an able-bodied person texting on a smartphone

Google gives Android users a way to install unverified apps if they prove they really, really want to

Chocolate Factory describes concession as an attempt to balance openess with safety

It turns out you won't be limited to Google-verified apps and developers on Android after all. In the face of sustained community dissatisfaction with its developer verification requirement, Google has given Android users an out.…

'Death sentence': EU cloud lobby takes Broadcom to Brussels over VMware partner purge

CISPE files antitrust complaint, demands interim measures to stop what it calls chip giant's 'ongoing abuse'

A lobbying trade body for smaller cloud providers is asking the European Commission to impose interim measures blocking Broadcom from terminating the VMware Cloud Service Provider program, calling the decision a death sentence for some tech suppliers and an illegal squeeze on customer choice.…

Fiber on the surface of the moon could help detect moonquakes

Better than seismometers?

Fiber-optic cables could be used to detect moonquakes, offering a simpler way to gather seismic data to support future missions.…

GNOME 50 debuts with X11 axed, Wayland front and center

Most Ubuntu desktop users will be looking at this until at least 2028

GNOME 50 is here, codenamed Tokyo after the location of the GNOME Asia Summit 2025, and the biggest change is in fact more or less invisible, unless you look for an options button on the login screen.…

FBI director leaves open the possibility that it's buying location data again

Kash Patel says the FBI uses all the tools it has to accomplish its mission - even if those tools are questionable

It's been three years since an FBI director admitted to purchasing the location data of Americans, potentially in violation of the Constitution. Here we go again.…

David Hockney Used an iPad to Create This Sprawling 295-Foot-Long Frieze Inspired by the 11th-Century Bayeux Tapestry

The artwork, which depicts the changing seasons in Normandy, is the centerpiece of "A Year in Normandie and Some Other Thoughts About Painting," a new exhibition in London

Lock down Microsoft Intune, feds warn after Stryker attack

Iran-linked attackers wiped employees' devices using Intune

The US government has urged companies to better secure Microsoft Intune, an endpoint management tool that was abused in last week's cyberattack against med-tech firm Stryker.…

Rodents Don't Gnaw Just to Trim Their Teeth—It Also Feels Good, According to a New Study

The findings could help humans who grind their teeth or clench their jaws

American Bald Eagle at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center

An American bald eagle flies away from its nest and tree at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida on Friday, March 13, 2026. Bald eagle nesting surveys across NASA Kennedy, Merritt Island National Wildlife Refuge, and Canaveral National Seashore are conducted annually to document the number of bald eagle active and inactive nests in support […]

How NASA is Collecting Explosion Data for Next Generation Rockets

Commercial launch providers continue to advance propulsion technology with a renewed focus on liquid oxygen and methane propelled rockets and spacecraft. As systems grow in scale, carrying millions of pounds of propellant, so too does the responsibility to fully understand the safety profile. Engineers at NASA, with decades of cryogenic and test operations expertise, are […]

NASA Laser Reflecting Instrument Makes GPS Satellite More Accurate

A NASA laser reflecting technology that will aid Global Positioning System (GPS) accuracy is now operational as of March 9. The instrument, known as a laser retroreflector array, or LRA, launched aboard GPS III SV-09, the ninth of U.S. Space Force’s Block III Global Positioning System satellites, on Jan. 27. LRAs are sets of mirrors […]

PwC will say goodbye to staff who aren't convinced about AI

Professional services giant did not read its own report on lackluster benefits

You'll use AI and like it too – if you work for PwC. Paul Griggs, US chief executive of the global professional services giant, has made clear there is no room at the corporation for AI skeptics.…

NASA to Cover Progress 94 Spacecraft Launch, Space Station Docking

NASA will provide live coverage of the launch and docking of a Roscosmos cargo spacecraft carrying about three tons of food, fuel, and supplies for the crew aboard the International Space Station. The unpiloted Roscosmos Progress 94 resupply spacecraft is scheduled to launch at 7:59 a.m. EDT (4:59 p.m. Baikonur time) Sunday, March 22, on […]

A Meteor Streaked Across the Morning Sky as a Dazzling 'Fireball' Before Exploding With a Thunderous Boom Above Ohio

A six-foot-wide, seven-ton asteroid caused the rare celestial spectacle

UK blinks on AI copyright carve-out after star-studded revolt

Creative pressure forces rethink as officials step back from default data use

The UK government has backed off plans to allow AI companies to access copyrighted material for free for training purposes by default.…

Google says it will let UK publishers opt out of AI overviews

One search engine switch to rule them all in Google's response to UK competition watchdog

The UK's competition watchdog has published responses to its consultation over Google's strategic market status (SMS) covering search and search advertising services - and the tech biz is offering some concessions.…

Meet the Platypi: NASA’s Newest Astronaut Candidate Class

Ten explorers are currently training at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston to become flight-eligible astronauts.  Selected in 2025, the astronaut candidates are building the technical and operational skills needed for future missions to the International Space Station, the Moon, and eventually Mars. Now, NASA’s newest astronaut candidates have a class name: the Platypi.  The name was selected […]

NASA’s Roman Observatory Passes Final Major Prelaunch Tests

NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope team recently blasted the observatory with extreme sound, shook it, and listened to its electronic hum. Roman passed all three assessments, which aimed to confirm that the observatory will withstand launch conditions and function as expected in space. The achievement keeps the mission on track for launch as early […]

Fixing Claude with Claude: Anthropic reports on AI site reliability engineering

It's still a job for humans, even though bots can search logs at the speed of I/O

QCon London  A member of Anthropic's AI reliability engineering team spoke at QCon London on why Claude excels at finding issues but still makes a poor substitute for a site reliability engineer (SRE), constantly mistaking correlation with causation.…

Hide and sleek: Latest Vivaldi release can tuck its UI away until summoned

New toggle strips away browser chrome if you want

Browser maker Vivaldi has opened up a new front in the browser wars by making itself disappear.…

Competition watchdog cracks knuckles, probes legality of Adobe cancellation fee

Annual billed sub scrubbed after 14 days? Expect to pay 50% of yearly price

Britain’s competition watchdog is opening an investigation into Adobe’s early cancellation fees on membership plans to ascertain if it breaks consumer law.…

Microsoft startup credits are the gift that keeps on billing unsuspecting users

Perks fall short as third-party AI models rack up costs with minimal notification

Complaints about Microsoft's startup credits and Azure AI Foundry keep mounting, with users reporting surprise credit card charges and invoices they never saw coming.…

SAP's grand cloud escape plan €2B short of the runway

Strategy launched after 2020 share price crash is 24% behind target

Five years after launching its rescue plan to lift ERP users to the cloud and switch them to the latest software, SAP is off target by about €2 billion, The Register can reveal.…

This Diver Stumbled Upon a Centuries-Old Sword Beneath the Mediterranean Sea. Years Later, He Found Another One Nearby

Shlomi Katzin, who unearthed a 900-year-old sword in 2021, recently discovered a similar artifact jutting out of the seabed off the coast of Israel

GOV.UK chatbot gets smarter but slower as LLMs improve

Accuracy jumps from 76% to 90% across public pilots, while users wait nearly 11 seconds for answers

More powerful large language models (LLMs) are helping make the UK government's in-development chatbot more accurate but are also slowing it down, according to the Government Digital Service (GDS).…

Struggling to put your AI aversion into words? Here's a handy glossary

From mild vegetarianism to full-blown haterdom, there's a label for everything

Opinion  Are you an AI hater, an AI vegan, or a slightly more moderate AI vegetarian? Or are you on the side of the clankers? A bot-licker, a prompt-fondler, a ChatNPC?…

Google offers ‘vibe design’ tool that you can shout at to create a UI

Stitch gets voice input and an infinite canvas

The term “vibe coding” has become associated with use of AI coding assistants to create code that expresses a developer’s intent, even if the results are ropey and require plenty of extra work to put into production. Google’s now proudly adapted the term to describe the workings of its Stitch design tool.…

Your next car might need 300 GB of RAM, and so will autonomous robots

Micron plans to cash in, after already growing revenue $10 billion in a single quarter

Autonomous cars will need 300 gigabytes of DRAM or more, and robots will need similar quantities, leading memory-maker Micron Technology to predict it has a long and happy future ahead of it.…

Australia’s “Red Centre” Turns Green

Abundant rainfall in February and March 2026 transformed the desert landscape of Central Australia.

Tencent says small clouds can’t get hardware, so big clouds can hike prices

Baidu joins the Chinese cloud price rise party

Two more Chinese cloud giants have signalled price rises for their services, again due to the impact of AI on their supply chains.…

Anthropic's Claude claws its way towards the top of the AI market

Who knew questioning authority and signaling virtue would lead to growth?

Anthropic has been killing it in the business market, success that appears to be at least partially attributable to pushback against the Pentagon.…

Okta made a nightmare micromanager for your AI agents

Where are you? What are you working on? Why are you doing that?

Identity access and management platform Okta announced the general availability of its Okta for AI Agents, which will give customers the ability to do three things: locate agents, see what they’re doing, and shut them down if need be.…

GNOME 50 released

The GNOME team has released GNOME 50, the latest version of what is probably the most popular open source desktop environment. It brings fine-grained parental controls, and the groundwork for web filtering so that in future releases, parents and guardians can set content filters for children. Our own kids are still way too young to have access to computers and the internet, but I’m not sure I’ll ever resort to these kinds of tools when the time comes. I didn’t have any such controls imposed upon me as a child on the early internet, but then, you can’t really compare the ’90s internet to that of today. The Orca screen reader received a lot of attention in GNOME 50, with a new preference window, both global and per-application settings, and much more. There’s also a brand new reduced motion setting, which will tame the animations in the user interface. Document annotation has been overhauled and modernised, and the file manager has been optimised across the board for better performance and lower memory usage. Remote Desktop also saw a lot of work in GNOME 50. It’s now hardware-accelerated using VA-API and Vulkan, and thanks to HiDPI support, the session will properly adapt to the screen being used. Kerberos Authentication support has been added, and you can now use the remote webcam locally. There’s way more here, like improved support for variable-refresh rates and fractional scaling, HDR screen sharing, fixes for weird NVIDIA driver nonsense, and much, much more. As always, GNOME 50 will find its way to your distribution soon enough.

State snoops and spyware vendors planting info-stealing malware on iPhones, Google warns

Darksword is the second iOS exploit chain in a month

A new exploit kit targeting iPhone users and stealing their sensitive data is being abused by "multiple" spyware vendors and suspected nation-state goons, security researchers said on Wednesday.…

Introducing Duranium: an immutable variant of postmarketOS

PosrtmarketOS, the Linux ‘distribution’ for mobile devices, now also has an immutable variant, called Duranium. Duranium is an immutable variant of postmarketOS, built around the idea that your device should just work, and keep working. You shouldn’t need to know what a terminal is to keep your device running. “Immutable” means the core operating system is read-only and can’t be modified while it’s running. System updates are applied as complete, verified images rather than individual packages. Either the new image works, or the system falls back to the previous one automatically. No partially-applied state. No debugging audio when you need to make a phone call and no fussing with a broken web browser when you just want to doomscroll cat photos. It also means developers can reproduce the exact state of a user’s device, making it much easier to track down and fix issues. ↫ Clayton Craft on the postmarketOS blog Duranium is built around the various functionalities and tooling provided by systemd, meaning the project didn’t have to reinvent the wheel. It works similarly to other immutable distributions, in that images for the base are downloaded and installed as a whole, with the preferred application installation method being Flatpak. Security-wise, Duranium uses dm-verity to protect /usr, cryptographically verifying data as it’s read. The image simply won’t boot if anything’s been tampered with. LUKS2 is used to encrypt mutable user and operating system data and configuration on the root file system. Duranium is still under heavy development, but it makes sense to implement something like this now, since in the world of mobile devices, this has become the norm. I’m glad postmarketOS is taking these steps, and I sincerely hope I’ll eventually be able to use a postmarketOS device with KDE’s Plasma mobile shell at some point in the near future in my day-to-day life. This requires both postmarketOS to improve as well as for the regulatory landscape to break the duopoly on banking and government applications held by Android and iOS, and with the state of the US government as it is, this might actually be something Europe’s interested in achieving.

Sudo ported to DOS

DOS didn’t have sudo yet. This gross oversight has been addressed. SUDO examines the environment for the COMSPEC variable to find the default command interpreter, falling back to C:\COMMAND.COM if not set. The interpreter is then executed in unprotected real mode for full privileges. ↫ SUDO for DOS’ Codeberg page A vital tool, for sure.

Chatbot Romeos keep users talking longer, but harm their mental health

Flattery and delusional talk have negative outcomes

Sometimes a compliment is no help at all. Chatbot flattery, a well-known and common problem, makes things worse for humans experiencing mental health issues.…

Cannibalistic Blue Crabs Are Eating Their Younger Peers in Part of the Chesapeake Bay

The findings by Smithsonian researchers could help experts better manage this crustacean's population. The creatures play important roles in the local ecosystem and food industry

ChatGPT advised exec on how to fire Subnautica founders to avoid payout, court ruling says

The law is the law, no matter who tells you to break it

One of your studios is about to make a game that you think will be a huge hit, and you don't want to pay the contractually required bonuses. What to do? One Korean CEO turned to ChatGPT to cook up a plan to get his company out of paying up to $250 million. It went about as well as you'd expect.…

Meta and TikTok let harmful content rise after evidence outrage drove engagement, say whistleblowers

Once again, social media giants Facebook and TikTok have been caught red-handed. More than a dozen whistleblowers and insiders have laid bare how the companies took risks with safety on issues including violence, sexual blackmail and terrorism as they battled for users’ attention. An engineer at Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, described how he had been told by senior management to allow more “borderline” harmful content – which includes misogyny and conspiracy theories – in user’s feeds to compete with TikTok. “They sort of told us that it’s because the stock price is down,” the engineer said. ↫ Marianna Spring and Mike Radford at the BBC Meta, TikTok, and Twitter are criminal enterprises, and their executives should be trembling in court instead of scheming on yachts. Their role in legitimising far-right extremism will eventually catch up to them, and once that happens, no yacht is going to keep them safe.

The Brilliant Blue Paint Covering This Lavish Room in Ancient Pompeii May Have Cost More Than Half the Annual Salary of a Roman Foot Soldier

Researchers have estimated how much the home's owners may have paid to paint the small sacrarium, calculating the price of the Egyptian blue pigment and the hours of labor required to prepare it

Curiosity Blog, Sols 4832–4837: Driving the (Contact) Line!

Written by Catherine O’Connell-Cooper, APXS Strategic Planner and Payload Uplink/Downlink Lead, University of New Brunswick, Canada Earth planning date: Friday, March 13, 2026 We are in our final phase of the boxwork campaign, investigating the contacts between the boxwork unit and the layered sulfate unit. As my colleague Bill reported here, last week we crossed […]

Storage vendors orbit the Nvidia sun at GTC

Hitachi Vantara, IBM, Nutanix, and Seagate all had something to say

GTC  Hitachi Vantara and Nutanix announced support for Nvidia’s new GPUs and software at GTC 2026, much like every other storage system vendor, while IBM integrated Watsonx and other offerings more tightly with GPUzilla's offerings. Seagate demonstrated a two-tier hybrid external KV Cache composed of SSDs and disk drives, as it did last year.…

Frank Lloyd Wright's Vision for the Martin House Included Everything Inside It. See How Experts Recovered Furniture, Artworks and Decorative Glass

A new exhibition at the home in Buffalo spotlights curators' decades-long efforts to track down the original furnishings and other items, some of which the architect had designed himself

Microsoft promises all-in-one database wrangling hub on Fabric

PostgreSQL, MySQL, SQL Server all handled via Database Hub, vendor says

Microsoft has launched a database management tool it promises will help users manage multiple databases sharing a single SQL engine.…

Ransomware crims abused Cisco 0-day weeks before disclosure, says Amazon security boss

Interlock's post-exploit toolkit exposed

Ransomware criminals exploited CVE-2026-20131, a maximum-severity bug in Cisco Secure Firewall Management Center software, as a zero-day vulnerability more than a month before Cisco patched the hole, according to Amazon security boss CJ Moses.…

Ohio citizens tell hyperscalers to take their supersized datacenters elsewhere

Residents looking to ban server farms with capacity over 25 MW

Ohio residents are proposing a ban on datacenters with a capacity greater than 25 MW, the latest sign of growing opposition to massive server farms across the US.…

Microsoft publishes a workaround for Samsung's C:\ drive woes

Friends and family support techs: get ready for permission changing and batch file creating

Microsoft has published a handy guide for regaining access to a C:drive borked by a Samsung application, but it isn't for the faint of heart.…

Meatbags vs machines: DeepMind plans hackathon to draw line between human and AI brains

What exactly is AGI? Nobody knows, but Google's AI lab is asking for help trying to define it

If a bot actually achieved artificial general intelligence (AGI), how would we even know? Google DeepMind boffins have come up with what they say is an empirical, scientifically grounded framework to measure progress toward AGI, and they're looking for a few good devs to actually flesh it out. …

Some Antibiotic Drugs Can Alter Your Gut Microbiome for Up to Eight Years, New Research Suggests

Just a single course of treatment can leave a lasting impression, according to a study of nearly 15,000 people in Sweden

Lava Flows Down Mayon

The OLI (Operational Land Imager) on Landsat 8 acquired this rare, relatively clear image of  Mayon, the most active volcano in the Philippines, on Feb. 26, 2026. The natural-color scene is overlaid with infrared observations to highlight the lava’s heat signature. On that day, the Philippine Institute of Volcanology and Seismology (PHIVOLCS) reported volcanic earthquakes, rockfalls, and hot clouds of ash […]

Systemd 260 kills SysV, tells AI not to misbehave

Good luck with that

The latest release of the most widely used Linux init system is here, and between dropping init script support and AI-assisted coding, we feel sure that this release will win it yet more admirers.…

From Service to Space Systems: A Pathways Journey to NASA

For Corey Elmore, the path to NASA’s Kennedy Space Center did not begin in engineering. It began in service. Today he serves as a NASA Pathways engineering intern in the Technical Processes and Tools Branch (KSC-NE-TA) at Kennedy Space Center. Through the Pathways program, he is gaining hands-on experience supporting the engineering environments, technical tools […]

Microsoft Copilot boss Mustafa Suleyman to chase superintelligence

Jacob Andreou takes reins in latest reshuffle

Microsoft has rearranged the deckchairs on the RMS Copilot, sending Mustafa Suleyman to seek out superintelligence, and putting Jacob Andreou in charge of Copilot across consumer and commercial.…

How kernel anti-cheats work: a deep dive into modern game protection

Modern kernel anti-cheat systems are, without exaggeration, among the most sophisticated pieces of software running on consumer Windows machines. They operate at the highest privilege level available to software, they intercept kernel callbacks that were designed for legitimate security products, they scan memory structures that most programmers never touch in their entire careers, and they do all of this transparently while a game is running. If you have ever wondered how BattlEye actually catches a cheat, or why Vanguard insists on loading before Windows boots, or what it means for a PCIe DMA device to bypass every single one of these protections, this post is for you. ↫ Adrián Díaza I hate that we need proprietary rootkits just to play competitive multiplayer games – we can chalk this up to a few sad people ruining the experience for everyone else, as so often happens. I have a dedicated parts bin Windows box just to play League of Legends (my one vice alright, nobody’s perfect) so I don’t really care if it has a proprietary rootkit running in the background as there’s not a single bit of valuable data on that machine, but for most people, that’s not realistic. Virtually every League of Legends player hands over control of their entire computer to a proprietary rootkit developed and deployed by a company from China, whereas players of other popular online multiplayer games must install rootkits from companies from the United States. If anyone inside the governments of these countries ever wants to implement a backdoor in dozens (hundreds?) of millions of Windows machines, this is the way to go. It’s an absolutely bizarre situation.

Widely Attended Gatherings (WAGs) Determinations

2026 Maryland Space Business Roundtable (MSBR) 3.26.26 SIA_27th Annual Leadership Dinner 3.23.26 2026 Artemis Suppliers Conference 3.23-25.26 Ansys Government Initiatives Event_AGI 3.19.26 Homeland Security Week 3.17-18.26 Amazon Smithsonian and Space for Humanity Event 3.16.26 HLSR_NASA Night at the Rodeo 3.7.26 WIF Leadership Luncheon 3.4.26 2026 National Space Club Florida Committee Monthly Luncheon Space Policy Institute […]

NASA’s Hubble Unexpectedly Catches Comet Breaking Up

In a happy twist of fate, NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope just witnessed a comet in the act of breaking apart. The chance of that happening while Hubble watched is extraordinarily minuscule. The findings published Wednesday in the journal Icarus. The comet K1, whose full name is C/2025 K1 (ATLAS)—not to be confused with interstellar comet […]

Bull Sharks Are Large, Aggressive Predators—but They Also Know How to Make 'Friends,' New Research Suggests

The animals probably socialize to learn new skills and to find food and mates

North Korea's 100,000-strong fake IT worker army rake in $500M a year for Kim Jong Un

Researchers map full org chart of the scam from dodgy recruiters to helpful Western collaborators

Researchers at IBM X‑Force and Flare Research have uncovered data that sheds light on how North Korea's fake IT worker schemes operate and infiltrate companies in order to funnel money back to the regime and steal sensitive information.…

AI for software developers is in a 'dangerous state'

Strong forces tempting humans out of the AI loop, and reducing the experience needed to supervise and review

QCon London  AI is in a dangerous state where it is too useful not to use, but where by using it, developers are giving up the experience they need to review what it does, said a speaker at QCon London, a vendor-neutral developer conference underway this week.…

Microsoft 365 pauses Copilot creep after admins cry foul

Automatic deployment of Redmond's assistant halted for now

Microsoft has paused plans to force the Microsoft 365 Copilot app on users, halting automatic installations for an unspecified period.…

Britain's satellite-watching gap to be plugged with £17.5M eyeball in Cyprus

No 1 Space Operations Squadron will get a persistent stare capability

The Ministry of Defence (MoD) plans to spend £17.5 million on a remotely-operated satellite monitoring facility in Cyprus, partly to protect the UK's secure communications system Skynet.…

IBM CEO pay pack jumps 51% for 2025 in target smash and grab

Median employee increase? 2.1%. And shareholders urged to vote against a request for AI bias reporting

Not all employees are created equally, just ask IBM boss Arvind Krishna, who received a financial package valued at $38 million in calendar 2025 - equivalent to the average collective pay of 765 Big Blue workers.…

Samsung folds the Galaxy Z TriFold after just a few months

Analysts say three-screen smartphone successful as a proof of concept, memory crunch potentially made it unsustainable

Samsung is killing the Galaxy Z TriFold smartphone after just three months on the market.…

It's not a binary choice. Independent boffin builds a ternary CPU on an FPGA

Three is the magic number as first off-the-shelf general-purpose ternary hardware since c 1965 lands

The 5500FP is a ternary CPU implemented on an FPGA. It's not very fast, but it makes it easier to experiment with computers that don't use binary.…

This Iconic Pink Floyd Instrument Just Became the Most Expensive Guitar Ever Sold at Auction

David Gilmour's 1969 Fender Stratocaster, used on "The Dark Side of the Moon" and other famous albums, sold for a record $14.55 million

Europe's cloud minnows tell Brussels to stop big tech 'sovereignty-washing'

24 execs sign open letter demanding control-based definitions and reserved procurement

Execs from 24 European cloud and digital service providers are urging the European Commission to legislate for real tech sovereignty – not the illusion of it – in the upcoming Cloud and AI Development Act (CADA).…

Quantum Cryptography Pioneers Win Turing Award

Charles Bennett and Gilles Brassard were recognized for their foundational work in quantum information science.

The post Quantum Cryptography Pioneers Win Turing Award first appeared on Quanta Magazine

Iran's cyberattack against med tech firm is 'just the beginning'

Even without a navy, or air power, 'They'll still have the ability to hack'

Businesses should expect that Iran will conduct more aggressive cyber-ops as the war escalates, according to security analysts.…

A dietitian and doctor review RFK Jr's new food pyramid

The new food pyramid was released earlier this year. It emphasizes protein, full-fat dairy and what Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. calls “healthy fats.” These guidelines influence the standards for  school lunches, food labeling and programs like SNAP. Today on the show, Short Wave co-host Emily Kwong chats with registered dietitian nutritionist Shana Spence, and Dr. Sarah Kim, a diabetes specialist, about the new guidelines. Plus, NPR’s Reflect America fellow Kadin Mills unpacks how the new food pyramid could change school lunch trays.

Check out more of Kadin’s coverage about the changes in dietary guidelines.

Interested in more health 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

Alibaba Cloud hikes prices by up to 34%, blames hardware costs and AI demand

Compute, storage, and SaaS all slugged - even on Alibaba's own silicon

Alibaba Cloud today informed users it will increase prices for many services by up to 34 percent.…

Water company wasted $200k on bad answers from an AI model – so built its own slop filtering system

Rozum orchestrates multiple flaky models and drives them to reasonable conclusions

Tech companies have in recent years developed a reputation for being rapacious rent-seekers, but can also be unwittingly generous because their penchant to prioritize popularity over quality leaves room for others to sell improvements or repairs.…

Linux Foundation kicks off effort to shield FOSS maintainers from AI slop bug reports

Big Tech donates $12.5 million to get things rolling

Half a dozen Big Tech players have together delivered $12.5 million in grants towards a project that aims to help maintainers of open source projects to cope with AI slop bug reports.…

Wave of Dust Rolls Through Texas

An advancing cold front kicked up a sharp line of sand and other small particles that swept over the high plains.

Japan to allow ‘proactive cyber-defense’ from October 1st

In less polite places, this is called ‘hacking back’ or ‘offensive cyber-ops’

Japan’s government yesterday decided to allow its Self-Defense Force to conduct offensive cyber-operations, starting on October 1st.…

Nvidia's on-again off-again H200 sales in China are now on again

Beijing appears to have eased its policy of pushing local GPUs

GTC  Nvidia has called on its supply chain partners to begin manufacturing its ageing H200 GPUs to meet demand for chips in China, CEO Jensen Huang said Tuesday.…

Tribblix m39 released

Tribblix, the Illumos distribution focused on giving you a classic UNIX-style experience, has released a new version. There are several noticeable version updates in this release. The graphical libraries libtiff and OpenEXR have been updated, retaining the old shared library versions for now. OpenSSL is now from the 3.5 series with the 3.0 api by default. Bind is now from the 9.20 series. OpenSSH is now 10.2, and you may get a Post-Quantum Cryptography warning if connecting to older SSH servers. ↫ Tribblix m39 release notes If you’re already running Tribblix, updating is easy, and if you want to try it out, head on over to the downloads page. Rests me to say that Tribblix is a treasure, and it must be protected at all costs. It’s rare to see a passion project like this maintain such a steady pace.

VIDEO: Meet the New Support Team!

Welcome to the first Community Office Hours of 2026! We’re all recovered from conferences in Brussels and California, and we’re talking to members of one of our newest teams: Support. Wait, hasn’t Thunderbird always had a support team? Surprisingly, no! We’ve had individual staff members responsible for different parts of our support efforts, but never […]

The post VIDEO: Meet the New Support Team! appeared first on The Thunderbird Blog.

Java 26 released

Java 26 delivers thousands of improvements that boost developer productivity, simplify the language, and help developers integrate AI and cryptography functionality into their applications. To help developers further streamline and enhance their development initiatives, Oracle is also announcing the new Java Verified Portfolio, which provides developers with a curated set of Oracle-supported tools, frameworks, libraries, and services, including commercial support for JavaFX, a Java-based UI framework, and Helidon, a Java framework for microservices. In addition, Oracle intends to align Helidon’s release cadence with Java releases and propose Helidon as an OpenJDK project. ↫ Oracle’s Java 26 press release Oracle’s press releases lists the most important JDK Enhancement Proposals in this release, as do the release notes and the project page at OpenJDK. In addition, Java developer Hanno Embregts published a detailed blog post that dives deeper into this new release.

NASA’s X-59 Prepares for Second Flight

NASA’s X-59 experimental aircraft is preparing for its second flight, a step that will set the pace for more flight testing in 2026.  Over the coming months, NASA will take the quiet supersonic jet faster and higher, while validating safety and performance, a process known as envelope expansion.  NASA test pilot Jim “Clue” Less will be at the X-59’s […]

WorldCoin's newest pitch: Scan your eyeballs to prove AI agents really represent you

Sell your soul to the orb

Sam Altman has cooked up a plan to make his cryptocurrency/identity/eyeball-scanning-orb venture more useful by – you guessed it – adding agentic AI to the mix. Now the technology behind it will be used to identify the human behind bots.…

Dim Delights in Cancer

Cancer the Crab is a dim constellation, yet it contains one of the most beautiful and easy-to-spot star clusters in our sky: the Beehive Cluster. Cancer also possesses one of the most studied exoplanets: the superhot super-Earth, 55 Cancri e. Find Cancer’s dim stars by looking in between the brighter neighboring constellations of Gemini and […]

These Mesmerizing Cave Paintings Were Discovered in 1901. Now, Archaeologists Finally Know When Some of Them Were Created

Researchers had long assumed the art inside Font-de-Gaume in France was made with pigments that couldn't be analyzed using radiocarbon dating. Then they discovered traces of charcoal

Life's Genetic Code Requires Five Key Ingredients. The Asteroid Ryugu Has All of Them, a New Study Suggests

The findings further hint that space rocks may have brought the building blocks of RNA and DNA to Earth long ago

AWS giveth with its right hand and breaketh with its left

Never attribute to malice what can be adequately explained by one very large org chart

Earlier this month, AWS ended standard support for PostgreSQL 13 on RDS. Customers who want to stay on a supported database — as AWS is actively encouraging them to do — need to upgrade to PostgreSQL 14 or later.…

Mistral boasts code-proofing agent offers champagne performance on a budget bière

Formal code verification and testing offer a way around AI blind spots

Your AI may need AI to oversee its work. Gallic AI biz Mistral is leaning into making AI code generation more reliable with Leanstral, a coding agent for proofs constructed using the open source Lean programming language.…

Chips... in spaaaace – courtesy of Nvidia

The Space-1 Vera Rubin Module will solve all your in-space computing needs

gtc  Space could be the final frontier for datacenters. Never mind that some analysts have described orbital bit barns as "peak insanity" - Nvidia has designed a new Vera Rubin module specifically to operate above the Earth's atmosphere.…

Archaeologists Just Uncovered a Shipwreck That Ran Aground on a Remote Island During the War of 1812

The vessel appears to be the "Swift," a wooden sailing ship that sank off Sable Island in Canada

HPE adds Blackwell, Rubin systems to Nvidia-backed sovereign AI push

Plus: Object storage gets stamp of approval, and it intros network linked 'AI Grid'

GTC  HPE has expanded its Nvidia-based AI portfolio with new systems built on Blackwell and upcoming Rubin GPUs, alongside updates to its Alletra Storage MP X10000, which it claims is the first object storage platform to achieve Nvidia-Certified Storage validation.…

EU sanctions Iranian cyber front over election meddling, Charlie Hebdo breach

State-sponsored attackers joined by Chinese snoops and hackers-for-hire in latest round of economic penalties

The Council of the European Union sanctioned Emennet Pasargad on Monday, a company used as a front for a series of Iranian cyberattacks.…

Artemis II takes a rain check on return to launch pad as NASA fixes loose wire

Still aiming for April 1 if the weather plays ball

The rollback to the launchpad for NASA's monster Moon rocket has slipped by a day, though the agency is optimistic that the long-delayed return of humans to lunar space will still happen in early April.…

This Genetic Mutation Helps Yaks Survive at High Elevations. It Could Lead to Treatments for Nerve Damage in Humans

Animals that dwell at high altitudes have adapted to cope with low oxygen levels, a condition that damages a vital part of nerve cells

Introducing the New Thelio Mira High Performance Desktop

Engineered for High Performance Under Demanding Workloads

Solving Asteroid Bennu’s Mysteries

These X-ray computed tomography (XCT) scans released on March 17, 2026, give us a glimpse inside asteroid Bennu. They show the most common types of crack networks observed in Bennu samples; these networks solved a mystery that baffled NASA for years. When NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft first approached asteroid Bennu in 2018, scientists expected to see smooth, sandy beach-like surfaces. Instead, they […]

Oracle unveils Project Detroit for faster Java interop with JavaScript and Python

Big Red bets on native runtimes over reimplementations to tackle edge cases

JavaOne  Oracle has shipped Java 26, a short-term release, and introduced Project Detroit, which promises faster interop between Java, JavaScript, and Python.…

Some Mice Are Doting Dads, While Others Ignore or Attack Their Offspring. Researchers Just Figured Out Why

In African striped mice, the activity of one gene can dramatically change a male's parenting style, according to a new study

Ofcom sees no need for overhaul in next phase of fiber rollout despite BT domination

Regulator nudges broadband market, hopes competition will turn up in 2031

Ofcom is laying out its pathway for fiber broadband almost everywhere across the UK in five years, but concedes that BT still dominates the market.…

Asteroid Bennu’s Rugged Surface Baffled NASA, We Finally Know Why

In one of the biggest surprises of NASA’s OSIRIS-REx mission, its target asteroid, Bennu, turned out to be a jagged, rugged world covered in large boulders, with few of the smooth patches of sandy or pebbly material scientists had expected based on observations with Earth-based instruments. Bennu’s looks were quite deceiving, and until now, scientists struggled to figure out why.

Hail Yeah! NASA Researchers Use Volunteer Observations for Hail Estimates

The bigger the hailstone, the more damage it can cause. But scientists find that predicting hailstone size can be challenging. How quickly does hail melt as it falls?

Out-of-band getting out of hand as Microsoft pushes hotpatch for Bluetooth

Second emergency fix in days targets Windows 11 24H2 and 25H2

Microsoft has pushed out yet another out-of-band hotpatch, this time to fix Bluetooth issues in Windows 11 25H2 and 24H2.…

Iran's 'chosen users' get 'privileged access' despite internet blackout for masses

Civilians relying on Dutch shortwave radio broadcast for outside information

Iran's internet blackout is entering day 18, according to monitoring outfit NetBlocks, which says the vast majority of the country has been offline for more than 400 consecutive hours.…

Historians Say They've Discovered a Long-Lost Page From the Archimedes Palimpsest, a Treasure Trove of Rare Ancient Mathematical Treatises

Three leaves had been missing for more than a century. Researchers found one of them when they decided on a whim to check the archives of a French museum

Big moves in Linux filesystems as new bcachefs lands and KDE adds support for Apple's APFS

Linux still can't mount or read APFS volumes by default ... but that's about to change

Linux 7.0 is approaching and there's a new version of bcachefs to go with it… as well as green shoots of support for Apple's new disk format.…

Switzerland built a secure alternative to BGP. The rest of the world hasn't noticed yet

SCION: Proven in banking and healthcare, slow to spread everywhere else

Feature  BGP, the Border Gateway Protocol, was not designed to be secure. It was designed to work – to route packets between the thousands of autonomous systems that make up the internet, quickly and at scale.…

In the name of science: Boffins build fart-tracking undies

A wearable sensor designed to monitor intestinal gas suggests the average person may let rip around 32 times a day

For decades, Reg readers have demanded to know exactly how often humans let rip – and at last science may have produced an answer.…

BBC World Service digital switch backfires as online audience drops

MPs say the Beeb closed broadcast services expecting audiences to migrate online, but digital reach has fallen instead

Britain's push to drag the BBC World Service into the digital age hasn't gone quite to plan, with MPs warning the broadcaster's "digital-first" strategy has shrunk audiences rather than growing them.…

‘Black rain’ in Iran and the environmental cost of war

US-Israeli airstrikes on oil depots culminated in ‘black rain’ in Iran early last week – a phenomenon usually caused by large amounts of soot, carbon and other pollutants in the air. Usually, rain leaves the atmosphere cleaner than it was before. But in this case, the rain left Tehran’s residents with sore throats and burning eyes. Oily, sooty residue was all over the city. So, we talked to an environmental pollution expert to find out: What’s in this ‘black rain’, what are its potential short- and long-term environmental and health effects, and what could recovery look like?

Interested in more science behind current events? 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

Everything needed to make DNA and RNA found in asteroid sample

Results from Ryugu suggest the the Solar System produced the building blocks of life

Scientists have found that all five of the substances that make up DNA and RNA in samples from Ryugu, the asteroid Japan’s Aerospace Exploration Agency visited in 2020.…

Gartner suggests Friday afternoon Copilot ban because tired users may be too lazy to check its mistakes

Admins may be even more exhausted by then, because securing Microsoft’s AI helper is not a trivial job

Gartner analyst Dennis Xu has half-jokingly suggested banning use of Microsoft’s Copilot AI on Friday afternoons, because he fears at that time of week users may be too lazy to properly check its possibly offensive output.…

A Bit of Gray on an Emerald Isle

Ireland is best known for its many greens, but the striking grays of the island’s Burren region also stand out in satellite images.

Bank built its own threat hunting agent because vendors can’t keep pace with new threats

AI helped send weekly threat signal count from 80 million to 400 billion, then helped response time shrink from two days to 30 minutes

Australia’s Commonwealth Bank built its own agentic AI threat hunting tools, because vendors are too slow to develop tools that can cope with emerging AI-powered threats, according to General Manager of Cyber Defence Operations Andrew Pade.…

AI still doesn't work very well, businesses are faking it, and a reckoning is coming

Codestrap founders say we need to dial down the hype and sort through the mess

interview  Enterprise organizations are still struggling to figure out how AI fits into their business, and that may be for the best because it will take time to understand any problems caused by AI-generated code and content.…

Han: a compiled programming language with Korean keywords written in Hangul

Since many of the platforms and conventions that came to dominate computing came from the western world, we never give it a second thought that virtually everything related to programming is written in English using the English alphabet. However, there’s no real reason behind arriving at this point other than convention and the course of history – with the right tooling, you could program a computer in whatever language or alphabet (or other writing system!) you desire. For example, what about programming in Korean, using Hangul? Han is a statically-typed, compiled programming language where every keyword is written in Korean. It compiles to native binaries through LLVM IR and also ships with a tree-walking interpreter for instant execution. The compiler toolchain is written entirely in Rust. ↫ Han’s GitHub page Han is written entirely in Korean, and uses the genius and easy-to-learn Hangul script. Hangul was developed by King Sejong the Great in the middle of the 15th century, to replace the Chinese-based characters used to write Korean up until that point. Since it was specifically designed to be easy to learn by scholars and the general public of the time alike to promote literacy, the Hangul alphabet is stupidly easy to learn; I managed to teach myself the Hangul alphabet in an single afternoon a decade or so ago. Obviously, do note that learning Hangul (an alphabet) isn’t the same thing as learning Korean (a language). One of my favourite aspects of Hangul is that it combines the letters making up a syllable into single structured syllable blocks, which gives it its unique look and makes it quite easy to grasp – you’ll quickly start recognising common syllables. On top of that, it’s said that the individual Hangul consonants mimic the shape of speech organs (tongue, throat, etc.), which, once you see it, you can’t unsee, further aiding in remembering what letters sound like. If you have an afternoon to kill, it’s certainly a fun thing to learn. Regardless, it’s very welcome to see efforts like this, if only to remember that programming being an Anglophone affair is but an accident, not a law of nature.

Salesforce stock buyback to saddle company with debt until 2066

'We want to use our capital correctly, and I think debt is a great way to do that,' says CEO Benioff

Here today; here tomorrow. Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff’s stock buyback will saddle the company with debt until 2066, when he turns 102 years old.…

Microsoft finally allows you to name your own home folder during Windows setup

It’s only a small annoyance in the grand scheme of the utter idiocy that is modern Windows, but apparently it’s one enough people complained about Microsoft is finally addressing it. In all of its wisdom, Microsoft doesn’t allow you to set the name of your user’s home folder during the installation procedure of Windows 11. The folder’s name is automatically generated based on your Microsoft account’s username or email address, something I’ve personally really disliked since I have been using thomholwerda for as long as I can remember. Last year, they introduced an incredibly obtuse method of setting your own home folder name, but now the company is finally adding it as an optional step during the regular installation process. Expanding on our work which started rolling to Insiders last fall, you can now choose a custom name for your user folder on the Device Name page when going through Windows setup. This most recent update now makes it easier to choose a custom name. The naming option is available during setup only. If you skip this step, Windows will use the default folder name and continue setup as usual. ↫ Windows Insider Program Team This means you now have the option of defining your own home folder name, excluding CON, PRN, AUX, NUL, COM1, COM2, COM3, COM4, COM5, COM6, COM7, COM8, COM9, COM¹, COM², COM³, LPT1, LPT2, LPT3, LPT4, LPT5, LPT6, LPT7, LPT8, LPT9, LPT¹, LPT², and LPT³. It’s a very small change, and certainly not something that will turn Windows’ ship around, but at least it’s something that’s being done for users who actually care. It’s also such a small change, such a small addition, that one wonders why it’s taken them this long. I’m assuming there’s already some incredibly complex and hacky way to change your automatically assigned home folder name by diving deep into the registry, converting your root drive back to FAT16, changing some values in a DLL file through a hex editor, and then converting back to NTFS, but this is clearly a much better way of handling it.

Nvidia's DLSS 5 promises to bring you out the other side of the uncanny valley

Latest generation of AI image enhancer brings characters to life

GTC  Computer graphics have come a long way from chasing Donkey Kong around a 2D board and fragging 3D demons in Doom. However, even with the most powerful graphics cards, human faces in games still look surreal and lifeless, with dead eyes, cling-film-smooth faces, and beards that blend into their chins. With Nvidia's upcoming DLSS 5, you can play with characters that look like they've stepped out of a movie screen – and we're not talking about a Pixar movie either.…

PureOS Crimson Development Report: January and February 2026 – Beta Released

We are very pleased to announce that the PureOS Crimson beta is released! This means that we have a new set of install images for all devices - Librem 5, Librem 11, servers, and PCs - and we have a path to upgrade existing installations from Byzantium.

The post PureOS Crimson Development Report: January and February 2026 – Beta Released appeared first on Purism.

These Space-Faring Mice Are Helping Scientists Figure Out How to Keep Astronauts' Muscles Working Properly

A new study suggests a gravity threshold for maintaining muscle function

The Italian Government Just Paid Nearly $35 Million for a Rare Caravaggio Portrait—One of the Most Expensive Artworks It's Ever Acquired

"Portrait of Monsignor Maffeo Barberini" had been on display in the Palazzo Barberini in Rome as part of a loan. Now, it's part of the palace's permanent collection

Nvidia wraps its NemoClaw around OpenClaw for the sake of security

'OpenClaw is the operating system for personal AI,' insists Nvidia CEO

gtc  In Pixar's Toy Story, a trio little green aliens explain, "The claw chooses who will go and who will stay." The claw in that instance was a mechanical claw in a vending machine. …

Robotics surgical biz Intuitive discloses phishing attack

Operations and hospital networks not affected, we're told

Robotics-assisted surgical tech firm Intuitive said that unauthorized intruders gained access to some of its internal IT business applications after stealing an employee's credentials during a phishing attack.…

NASA Invites Media to Learn About Upcoming X-59 Test Flights

NASA will hold a media teleconference at 5:30 p.m. EDT on Thursday, March 19 to highlight plans for its X-59 quiet supersonic aircraft’s upcoming flight tests. The teleconference is set to take place after the X-59 is scheduled to complete its second flight, in California. For the media call, NASA leadership will join representatives from […]

Nvidia powers further into the CPU market with new rack systems packing 256 Vera processors

The cubicals of the agentic AI age are cores

GTC  Intel and AMD take notice. At GTC on Monday, Nvidia unveiled its latest liquid-cooled rack systems. But unlike its NVL72 racks, this one isn't powered by GPUs or even Groq LPUs, but rather 256 of its custom Vera CPUs.…

Nvidia slaps $20B Groq tech into massive new LPX racks to speed AI response time

GPUzilla's $20B acquihire paves to way to AI agents that halucinate faster than ever

GTC  Nvidia will use Groq's language processing units (LPUs), a technology it paid $20 billion for, to boost the inference performance of its newly-announced Vera Rubin rack systems, CEO Jensen Huang revealed during his GTC keynote on Monday. …

SPARCS CubeSat ‘First Light’ Images

Description This pair of images shows stars observed by the SPARCS (Star-Planet Activity Research CubeSat) space telescope simultaneously in the near-ultraviolet, left, and far-ultraviolet, right. These observations were recorded on Feb. 6, 2026, three weeks after the cube satellite, or CubeSat, launched aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 on Jan. 11. The fact that one star […]

To Protect Artemis II Astronauts, NASA Experts Keep Eyes on Sun

As four astronauts travel around the Moon on NASA’s Artemis II mission, they will venture beyond Earth’s protective magnetic field. The crew’s spacecraft, Orion, will carry and protect them as they journey into deep space and serves as the main protection against the Sun’s intense power.  During their 10-day flight, NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) will monitor the […]

Cybercrime has skyrocketed 245% since the start of the Iran war

Hacktivists use proxy services from Russia, China for 'billions of designed-for-abuse connection attempts'

Cybercrime has skyrocketed since the start of the Iran war, according to Akamai, which reports a 245 percent increase in everything from credential harvesting attempts to automated reconnaissance traffic aimed at banks and other critical businesses.…

Haunting Casts Preserving Pompeii Victims' Final Moments 2,000 Years Ago Go on Display in a Solemn New Exhibition

Since 1863, archaeologists have made more than 100 plaster casts, which show how victims died after Mount Vesuvius erupted in 79 C.E. A new exhibition displays 22 of the best-preserved examples

Vite team boasts 10-30x faster builds with Rust-powered Rolldown

Native code build tools now dominate for TypeScript or JavaScript projects

Vite 8.0 has been released, and it uses Rust-built Rolldown as its single bundler, replacing both esbuild and Rollup, to enable faster builds.…

Former Microsoft dev trains AI to survive the arcade's most chaotic stress test

Robotron: 2084 is the original robot uprising game

A former Microsoft engineer is training AI to beat 1982's Robotron: 2084, an arcade game where a lone human must overcome endless waves of robots following a cybernetic revolt.…

AI finally delivers those elusive productivity gains... for cybercriminals

Interpol says fraud schemes using the tech are 4.5x more profitable

AI is apparently good for the bottom line if your business is crime. Financial fraud schemes carried out with the help of artificial intelligence are 4.5 times more profitable than those that aren't enhanced, according to Interpol's latest estimates.…

Digital fruit fly brain model walks and cleans its feelers

Early demo hints at a future sci-fi writers warned us about

San Francisco startup Eon Systems claims that it has created the first digital simulation of a fruit fly brain that can control a virtual body and produce recognizable behaviors.…

Free Software Foundation calls for free-range LLMs rather than factory-farmed AI

F is for Free, FSF, and fat chance

Updated  The Free Software Foundation (FSF) has rattled a saber at Anthropic over the use of its materials in training the AI vendor's models, urging it to set its LLMs free.…

King Penguins Seem to Be Benefiting From a Warming World. While That's Good News for Now, It Could Spell Trouble for the Future

The birds are breeding earlier, and more of their chicks are surviving. But researchers fear this success may not last

Typos Have Plagued Us for Centuries. Just Ask the Publishers Who Printed the Seventh Commandment as 'Thou Shalt Commit Adultery' in 1631

A new exhibition at Yale Library explores the history of typos across five centuries. Visitors will see corrections that were listed inside copies of works by James Joyce, Upton Sinclair and Nicolaus Copernicus

This 74-Million-Year-Old Dinosaur Bone May Have Belonged to a Surprisingly Large Ancestor of Tyrannosaurus Rex

The massive reptile may have weighed more than 4.5 tons and been 35 feet long—much bigger than its related peers at the time

Celebrating 100 Years Since Goddard’s Breakthrough Moment in Modern Rocketry

From the voyages of spacecraft to the Moon and beyond, to the launches of satellites that help us navigate, communicate, and understand our planet and the universe, the use of liquid-fueled rockets has been key to humanity’s use and exploration of space. Today marks 100 years since the first successful test of this technology. On […]

A Combination of Techniques Leads to Improved Friction Stir Welding

Download PDF: A Combination of Techniques Leads to Improved Friction Stir Welding The NESC developed several innovative tools and techniques during an assessment to find the root cause of poor tensile strength and low topography anomalies (LTA) in welds formed using a solid-state welding process called self-reacting friction stir welding (SRFSW).    Using a combination of […]

The Math That Explains Why Bell Curves Are Everywhere

The central limit theorem started as a bar trick for 18th-century gamblers. Now scientists rely on it every day.

The post The Math That Explains Why Bell Curves Are Everywhere first appeared on Quanta Magazine

Apple’s MacBook Neo turns out to be its most repairable lappy in 14 years

iFixit opens Apple’s budget system, discovers something missing from MacBooks: replaceable components

Apple's latest MacBook may be cheap, but it also comes with something modern MacBooks haven't offered in years: a fighting chance of being repaired.…

NESC Develops Method for Estimating Risk When Reducing NDE

Download PDF: NESC Develops Method for Estimating Risk When Reducing NDE  Performing nondestructive evaluation (NDE) can have both cost and schedule impacts, leading some to question whether descoping (i.e., reducing or eliminating) NDE inspections on certain spaceflight hardware could be possible. However, this approach would be counter to NASA’s Technical Standard NASA-STD-5019A, which outlines the spaceflight […]

ServiceNow boss warns AI could push grad unemployment past 30%

McDermott argues digital workers will handle much of the grunt work once used to train junior staff

Unemployment rates among recent graduates could climb above 30 percent because so many early career routine tasks will be performed by AI agents, ServiceNow CEO Bill McDermott has said.…

Age verification isn't sage verification when it's inside operating systems

Toothbrushes, Turing and the truth give the lie to California’s legal lunacy

Opinion  There are two ways to look at the California Assembly Bill 1043, known as The Digital Age Assurance Act or DAAA. One is to say it is a 2025 law requiring operating systems and app stores to implement age verification during account setup to protect minors online. The other is to note that the law is all the worst things a law can be.…

Flaw in UK's corporate registry let directors rummage through rival records

Back button blunder in WebFiling service run by Companies House revealed confidential paperwork

Companies House was forced to pull down its record-filing platform for the entire weekend to rectify a "security issue" that exposed the personal details of company directors and other data to any logged in users.…

Microsoft points at Samsung after Galaxy app bug locks users out of C:\

'Access denied' errors hit certain Windows 11 machines running vendor utility

Microsoft has blamed Samsung for some devices suffering C:drive access problems coincidentally close to March's Patch Tuesday.…

UK splashes £45M on AI supercomputer to help crack fusion power

'Sunrise' beast will run AI-heavy simulations of plasma behavior and reactor physics

The UK government is splashing out £45 million (c $60 million) on a new AI-driven supercomputer designed to help scientists model the chaotic physics of nuclear fusion, with the system expected to come online this summer at the UK Atomic Energy Authority's (UKAEA) Culham campus.…

West Sussex's Oracle rollout pushed back again as costs balloon 15 times

Already five years late, project delayed another six months after price tag swells from £2.6M to £41M

West Sussex County Council has once again delayed the implementation of Oracle Fusion for HR and payroll – set to replace an aging SAP system – following a series of setbacks that have seen expected costs swell to more than 15 times the original estimate.…

Horizon redress still a mess, MPs say – and Fujitsu hasn't paid a penny

System compensating victims of the Post Office Horizon scandal still slow, thousands of ex-subpostmasters waiting for payments

More than a year after MPs warned that victims of the Post Office Horizon scandal were still waiting for compensation, Parliament says the system meant to pay them remains slow, bureaucratic, and flawed – meaning thousands of sub-postmasters are still fighting for payouts while taxpayers pick up the bill.…

Brilliant backups that kept data alive for ages landed web developer in big trouble

Client omissions caused the problem, so guess who was thrown under the bus

Who, Me?  The world of work can be thankless, which is why The Register tries to brighten up the Monday return to toil by bringing you a fresh installment of Who, Me? It's the reader-contributed column where you confess to your IT screw-ups and tell us how you got away with it.…

This is your brain on pleasure (even the guilty kind)

It’s likely you have at least one “guilty pleasure.” Maybe it’s romance novels. Or reality TV… Playing video games… or getting swept into obscure corners of TikTok. Neuroscientists say the pleasure response helps us survive as a species. So why do we feel embarrassed by some of the things we love the most? Even if you don't have these negative emotions, experiencing – and studying – pleasure is not as straightforward as it might seem. For a long time, neuroscientists thought the concept of "pleasure" referred to a singular system in the brain. But as research into the subject grew, scientists realized that pleasure is really a cycle of "wanting" and "liking" – each with separate neural mechanisms. Today on the show, producer Rachel Carlson explores this cycle with researchers, who weigh in on the science of pleasure. Even the kind that makes us feel guilty.

Read more of Rachel’s story on guilty pleasures.

Interested in more brain 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

AWS S3 turns 20 and reaches ‘hundreds of exabytes’

Cloudy storage service's scale gave it a hefty cultural footprint

Amazon Web Services on Saturday celebrated the 20th birthday of its Simple Storage Service (S3) and revealed a few little secrets about the service.…

Cañon Fiord’s Whirling Waters

During the 2022 summer melt season, sediment plumes and fractured sea ice traced swirling eddies in a branch of the Nansen Sound fjord system in the Canadian Arctic.

Repopulate! Repopulate! Two lost Doctor Who episodes turn up in private collection

Dark Dalek drama to stream this April

Film preservation organization Film Is Fabulous! has found a pair of Doctor Who episodes thought to have been lost forever.…

India tests whether AI can stop trains hitting elephants

PLUS: SAP expands Japanese cloud; SK hynix close to shipping LPDDR6; Lenovo's biggest ever IaaS deal; and more

Asia in brief  India’s Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change last week staged a two-day national workshop titled “Policy Implementation for Minimizing Elephant Mortalities on Railway Track” – and one of the ideas discussed was using AI to protect the beasts and workers.…

Outsourcer Telus admits to attack – may have lost a petabyte of data to ShinyHunters

PLUS: Citrix CISO urges patch blitz; Mandiant founder reveals AI red-teaming tech; Bitter privacy news for Starbucks; And more

Infosec In Brief  Canadian outsourcer Telus Digital has admitted it fell victim to a cyberattack.…

Nvidia GTC will be full of surprises - just not for the consumer class

Join Brandon Vigliarolo, Tobias Mann, and Avram Piltch to discuss our predictions for this week's GTC

Kettle  It's The Most Wonderful Time of the Year - if you're an AI aficionado, that is, as chip giant Nvidia, now the most valuable company in the world, is kicking off its GPU Technology Conference (GTC) on Monday.…

Jury out on whether Americans love or hate datacenters

Most don't think they are good for the environment

Three-quarters of the American public have heard of datacenters, but they haven't quite made their minds up yet about whether they approve of them or not.…

Those who 'circle back' and 'synergize' also tend to be crap at their jobs

Cornell Uni researchers pivot to pluck low-hanging fruit to optimize bandwidth

Workers who believe "leveraging cross-functional synergies" sounds profound may want to rethink their career trajectory because a new study suggests people who fall for corporate word salad also tend to perform worse at their jobs.…

CSMWrap: make UEFI-only systems boot BIOS-based operating systems

What if you have a very modern machine that is entirely UEFI-only, meaning it has no compatibility support module and thus no way of enabling a legacy BIOS mode? Well, install a CSM as an EFI application, of course! CSMWrap is an EFI application designed to be a drop-in solution to enable legacy BIOS booting on modern UEFI-only (class 3) systems. It achieves this by wrapping a Compatibility Support Module (CSM) build of the SeaBIOS project as an out-of-firmware EFI application, effectively creating a compatibility layer for traditional PC BIOS operation. ↫ CSMWrap’s GitHub page The need for this may not be immediately obvious, but here’s the problem: if you want to run an older operating system that absolutely requires a traditional BIOS on a modern machine that only has UEFI without any CSM options (a class 3-machine), you won’t be able to boot said operating system. CSMWrap is a possible solution, as it leverages innate EFI capabilities to run a CSM as an EFI application, thereby adding the CSM functionality back in. All you need to do is drop CSMWrap into /efi/boot on the same drive the operating system that needs BIOS to boot is on, and UEFI will list it as a bootable operating system. It does come with some limitations, however. For instance, one logical core of your processor will be taken up by CSMWrap and will be entirely unavailable to the booted BIOS-based operating system. In other words, this means you’re going to need a processor with at least more than one logical processor (e.g., even a single-core machine with hyperthreading will work). It’s also suggested to add a legacy-capable video card if you’re using an operating system that doesn’t support VESA BIOS extensions (e.g. anything older than NT). This is an incredibly neat idea, and even comes with advantages over built-in CSMs, since many of those are untested and riddled with issues. CSMWrap uses SeaBIOS, which is properly tested and generally a much better BIOS than whatever native CSMs contain. All in all, a great project.

Inside the datacenter where the day starts with topping up cerebrospinal fluid

Biological computing is messy and gassy – It’s now cloudy, too

At the start of the working day at Cortical Labs’ datacenter in Melbourne, Australia, technicians top up the resident computers with a liquid modelled on the cerebrospinal fluid that surrounds the human brain.…

Understanding SMF properties in Solaris-based operating systems

SMF is the illumos system for managing traditional Unix services (long-lived background processes, usually). It’s quite rich in order to correctly accommodate a lot of different use cases. But it sometimes exposes that complexity to users even when they’re trying to do something simple. In this post, I’ll walk through an example using a demo service and the svcprop(1) tool to show the details. ↫ Dave Pacheco Soalris’ system management facility or SMF is effectively Solaris’ systemd, and this article provides a deeper insight into one of its features: properties. While using SMF and its suite of tools and commands for basic tasks is rather elementary and easy to get into – even I can do it – once you start to dive deeper into what is can do, things get complex and capable very fast.

Chrome comes to Linux on ARM64

Google has announced that it will release Chrome for Linux on ARM64 in the second quarter of this year. Launching Chrome for ARM64 Linux devices allows more users to enjoy the seamless integration of Google’s most helpful services into their browser. This move addresses the growing demand for a browsing experience that combines the benefits of the open-source Chromium project with the Google ecosystem of apps and features. This release represents a significant undertaking to ensure that ARM64 Linux users receive the same secure, stable, and rich Chrome experience found on other platforms. ↫ The Chromium Blog While the idea of running Linux on Arm, only to defile it with something as unpleasant as Chrome seem entirely foreign to me, most normal people do actually use Google’s browser. Having it available on Linux for Arm makes perfect sense, and might convince a few people to buy an Arm machine for Linux, assuming the platform can get its act together.

Just try Plan 9 already

I will not pass up an opportunity to make you talk about Plan 9, so let’s focus on Acme. Acme is remarkable for what it represents: a class of application that leverages a simple, text-based GUI to create a compelling model of interacting with all of the tools available in the Unix (or Plan 9) environment. Cox calls it an “integrating development environment,” distinguishing it from the more hermetic “integrated development environment” developers will be familiar with. The simplicity of its interface is important. It is what has allowed Acme to age gracefully over the past 30 or so years, without the constant churn of adding support for new languages, compilers, terminals, or color schemes. ↫ Daniel Moch While the article mentions you can use Acme on UNIX, to really appreciate it you have to use it on Plan 9, which today most likely means 9front. Now, I am not the kind of person who can live and breathe inside 9front – you need to be of a certain mindset to be able to do so – but even then I find that messing around with Plan 9 has given me a different outlook on UNIX. In fact, I think it has helped me understand UNIX and UNIX-like systems better and more thoroughly. If you’re not sure if Plan 9 is something that suits you, the only real way to find out is to just use it. Fire up a VM, read the excellent documentation at 9front, and just dive into it. Most of you will just end up confused and disoriented, but a small few of you will magically discover you possess the right mindset. Just do it.

Claude charts a new course with charts, of course

Conversations with Anthropic's models may now be accompanied by interactive apps

Seeing is believing, or so it was said up until AI required questioning everything. But even when braced to resist the slop roulette of online interaction, pictures are worth a thousand tokens.…

Volunteers Find Oddly High Solar Flare Rates

Patches of the Sun’s surface often show strong magnetic fields. These fields can emerge within a matter of hours, and can decay slowly or quickly, sometimes over days, weeks, or even months. Thanks to a new study about these long-lived active regions, we now know much more about the patches where these strong magnetic fields […]

Extra Extra! Extra Data Stream Added to the Daily Minor Planet!

The Daily Minor Planet citizen science project is expanding! In addition to data received nightly from the Catalina Sky Survey’s Mt. Lemmon telescope in Arizona, the project’s science team is now processing images from the Bok 2.3-meter telescope at Kitt Peak National Observatory. The Bok is a mighty telescope run by the University of Arizona’s Steward Observatory that is used to survey for new near-Earth objects (NEOs) – asteroids that cross Earth’s orbit.

Hello, world! in Z80 assembly language

I’m feeling kind of nostalgic today so I thought I’d write Hello, world! in Z80 assembly for the ZX Spectrum! The last time I wrote any Z80 assembly was when I was 14 so around 36 years ago! I may be a little rusty! ↫ Old Man By the Sea It’s easy to tell the world hello in BASIC, but a bit more involved in Z80 assembly.

Specialists Carefully Defuse a 550-Pound Bomb in Dresden—Eight Decades After It Fell During World War II

After the ordnance was discovered, 18,000 people were evacuated from the city. Experts worked for several hours to safely dispose of the device

Why Are So Many People Claiming They've Discovered Long-Lost Michelangelos?

One researcher wrote a 600-page report attributing an obscure painting to the artist. Another argued that he'd sculpted a marble bust on display in a Roman church

How Do Cats Always Land on Their Feet? Researchers Examined Feline Spines to Find Out

Scientists determined that the upper part of a cat's spine is more flexible than the lower part

GitHub infuriates students by removing some models from free Copilot plan

Coding education may become a bit more challenging, but the economics lesson is free

You don't get what you don't pay for! Microsoft's GitHub is dialing back on expenses by removing several costly premium models from its free GitHub Copilot Student plan.…

AFRINIC accuses litigant of trying to ‘paralyse’ it

A 'web of litigation'

The African Network Information Centre (AFRINIC) has accused one its members of trying to "paralyse" the organization.…

'Are you freaking crazy?' Bot harasses woman, gets led away by cops

An incident in Macau

A 70-year old woman in China loudly shouted at a robot to leave her alone, but the bot instead stood its ground and did a “raise the roof” move when the woman called it “freaking crazy.”…

NASA Armstrong to Host Partnership Days April 15-16

NASA’s Armstrong Flight Research Center in Edwards, California, invites innovative companies, government agencies, and organizations to attend Partnership Days, scheduled for Wednesday and Thursday, April 15 and 16, at the center. The event offers a unique opportunity to explore collaboration with NASA on cutting-edge research and development in areas such as aerospace, autonomy, sustainability, and […]

Credential-stealing crew spoofs VPN clients from Cisco, Fortinet, and others

And then they send victims to the legit VPN download to hide their tracks

A group of cybercriminals tracked as Storm-2561 is using fake enterprise VPN clients from CheckPoint, Cisco, Fortinet, Ivanti, and other vendors to steal users' credentials, according to Microsoft.…

USBR Crack the Case Challenge

NASA’s Center of Excellence for Collaborative Innovation (CoECI) assists in the use of crowdsourcing across the federal government. CoECI’s NASA Tournament Lab offers the contract capability to run external crowdsourced challenges on behalf of NASA and other agencies. This three-phase challenge invites geophysicists, sensing specialists, nondestructive testing experts, and creative problem-solvers (including AI/ML practitioners) from […]

NASA Volunteers Study Biofilm Adaptability in Space

Biofilms are communities of microorganisms that stick to one another and also adhere to a nearby surface. They are intricately associated with life on Earth, enabling functions essential to human and plant systems.

USBR Halt the Hitchhiker: Invasive Species Challenge

NASA’s Center of Excellence for Collaborative Innovation (CoECI) assists in the use of crowdsourcing across the federal government. CoECI’s NASA Tournament Lab offers the contract capability to run external crowdsourced challenges on behalf of NASA and other agencies. The Bureau of Reclamation (Reclamation) is sponsoring a 3-phase prize challenge (managed by yet2) for innovative solutions […]

North American Bird Losses Are Accelerating. New Research Suggests Fertilizers and Pesticides May Be to Blame

Scientists found the severest changes in decline rates in places that include hallmarks of high-intensity agriculture

Good Morning, Moon

Early morning sunlight illuminates the western wall of this unnamed crater, leaving deep shadows on the ground and in the interior. The image was taken on August 30, 2023, by LROC (Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera). LROC is a system of three cameras and one of the seven instruments aboard NASA’s LRO (Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter) mission, […]

Astronomers Witnessed the Birth of a Magnetar for the First Time. It Explains the Mysterious Flickering of an Ultrabright Supernova

New research suggests that the highly magnetized remnants of stars are responsible for powering some of the universe’s most brilliant supernova explosions

Agenda diaria de la misión a la Luna de Artemis II de la NASA

Read this web article in English here. Unos ocho minutos después del despegue de Artemis II, la nave espacial Orion y su tripulación —los astronautas de la NASA Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover y Christina Koch, junto con el astronauta de la CSA (Agencia Espacial Canadiense) Jeremy Hansen— llegarán al espacio. Este vuelo de prueba de casi 10 días […]

Scientists Discover Microscopic Traces of Leaves, Seeds and Toxic Berries on Pots Used by Stone Age Cooks Thousands of Years Ago

Hunter-gatherers in Europe carefully selected ingredients and cooked complex foods, often pairing fish with specific plants, according to a new study

After years of being stood up, ARM64 Linux users finally get Chrome date

Someone, somewhere, ticked a box on a build farm. The wait is over

Chrome is finally coming to ARM64 Linux devices, years after it turned up on macOS and Windows on Arm.…

NASA’s Artemis II Moon Mission Daily Agenda

About eight minutes after Artemis II lifts off, the Orion spacecraft and its crew, NASA astronauts Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, and Christina Koch, along with CSA (Canadian Space Agency) astronaut Jeremy Hansen, will be in space. The approximately 10-day test flight will be packed with activity as the astronauts venture around the Moon and back, […]

Sea Levels Might Be Higher Than We Thought, Putting Millions of People in the Path of Coastal Flooding Sooner Than Expected

A lot of past research has used flawed methodology to estimate current coastal water levels, according to a new study

Artifacts From NASA’s Webb, Parker Solar Probe on View at Smithsonian

A testing replica of the “backbone” of NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope and a full-scale model of the agency’s Parker Solar Probe are now on permanent display at the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum, Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center in Chantilly, Virginia. “From touching the Sun with Parker Solar Probe to creating humanity’s most powerful […]

GVIS Virtual Systems Simulations

The Graphics and Visualization Lab (GVIS) at NASA Glenn Research Center creates a variety of immersive visualizations and simulations in support of NASA’s missions, projects, and future innovations. These visual tools help scientists, engineers, and researchers develop new solutions that bring their projects to life. Virtual System Simulations The GVIS Lab prides itself on creating […]

Why Do Humanoid Robots Still Struggle With the Small Stuff?

The last decade has seen vast improvements in humanoid robots, but graduating to widespread use might require going back to the fundamentals.

The post Why Do Humanoid Robots Still Struggle With the Small Stuff? first appeared on Quanta Magazine

Watchdog boss calls Capita's £370M DWP win 'extraordinary' amid pension portal dumpster fire

PAC chair asks Cabinet Office if anyone bothered telling dept about the shambles before handing over the keys

The chair of the UK Parliament's public spending watchdog has dubbed the Department for Work and Pensions' (DWP) decision to award Capita a £370 million shared service contract "extraordinary," given the outsourcing firm's "failings" in supporting the Civil Service Pension Scheme (CSPS).…

Microsoft veteran Rajesh Jha prepares to retire, triggers yet another reorg

35-year staffer comes from time before company's cloud and Copilot obsessions

Microsoft Executive Vice President (EVP) for Experiences and Devices, Rajesh Jha, is retiring from Microsoft after more than 35 years at the Redmond grindstone.…

Azure startup credits don't apply to Claude via Azure AI Foundry, reader finds – after $1,600 charge

Gets bounced between Microsoft and Anthropic like a support ticket nobody wants to own

Companies using credits bundled with Microsoft for Startups have found some unwelcome surprises on their credit card statements after deploying Anthropic's Claude via Azure AI Foundry.…

RAM is getting expensive, so squeeze the most from it

Zram versus zswap – two ways to get a quart into a pint pot

Linux has two ways to do memory compression – zram and zswap – but you rarely hear about the second. The Register compares and contrasts them.…

NASA pencils in fresh Artemis II Moon launch attempt for April 1

'When we tank the vehicle ... I would like it to be on a day that we could actually launch'

NASA has set April 1 for the Artemis II launch, with engineers preparing the Space Launch System (SLS) for a rollout to the pad on March 19.…

Interpol cybercrime crackdown leads to 94 arrests, 45,000 IP takedowns

Operation Synergia's third season is the most productive to date

Ninety-four people were arrested as part of a global, multi-month cybercrime crackdown, Interpol revealed today.…

Nanny state discovers Linux, demands it check kids' IDs before booting

Age-verification laws target operating systems because apparently teenagers having root access is now a safeguarding crisis

Opinion  A new wave of age verification laws requires kids and teenagers to register before they can use a computer.…

Atomic Britain: UK plans regulatory reset to boost nuclear power

It wants 'safe, cost effective, and rapid.' We say: 'Good, fast, cheap – you can have 2'

Britain's government is pushing ahead with nuclear planning and regulatory reforms, aiming to accelerate atomic projects that will power homes and datacenters.…

NanoClaw latches onto Docker Sandboxes for safer AI agents

Take your YOLO and box it up

exclusive  NanoClaw, an open source agent platform, can now run inside Docker Sandboxes, furthering the project's commitment to security.…

Google rushes Chrome update fixing two zero-days already under attack

Skia graphics lib and V8 JavaScript engine brings browser's tally of actively exploited bugs to three in 2026

Google has pushed out an emergency Chrome update to fix two previously unknown vulnerabilities that attackers were already exploiting before the patches landed.…

Windows pays tribute to Britain's creaking rail network with a BSOD

Grappling with UK trains will send humans into Recovery too sometimes

Bork!Bork!Bork!  Today we visit the south of England, where Windows has fallen over, briefly granting unrestricted rail travel to one and all.…

Openreach: Fiber can sniff out leaky water pipes – if anyone bothers fixing them

Distributed Acoustic Sensing tech uses broadband cables to pinpoint plumbing faults

Openreach claims its fiber network infrastructure can detect leaks in nearby water supply pipes, which could save millions of liters of the precious fluid... if the water companies can be bothered to fix them.…

Blustering Blackbeard's PC was all at sea, sysadmin got him shipshape in seconds

Have you tried turning it on, never mind off and on again?

On Call  Arrr! How is it Friday already? The Register can't explain where the week went, but we can deliver a new installment of On Call, the reader-contributed column that shares your stories of tech support SNAFUs.…

An icy mystery: What are lake stars?

When producer Berly McCoy was out on her local frozen lake, she saw something she'd never seen before. There were dark spidery, star-shaped patterns in the ice and they freaked her out. So, we called an expert to find out more about them. In today’s episode, geophysicist Victor Tsai tells us about lake stars and how he became the first person to scientifically prove how they form. Plus, he explains how knowing more about lake stars can potentially give us clues about the presence of water on Europa, one of Jupiter’s icy moons.

Read Victor Tsai’s full paper on lake stars here .

Have a question about something in the environment? Email us 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

AI Burning Man happens next week –what to expect at Nvidia GTC 2026

From Groq-ing about tokenomics to OpenClaw and the silicon that powers it, our predictions for the hottest ticket in town

Nvidia has a bit of a problem. Popular generative AI workloads like code assistants and agentic systems generate massive quantities of tokens and need to move them at speed. But the GPU giant's chips currently struggle to deliver.…

Prince of PDFs, Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen, to step down after 18 years

Didn’t say why, but for once AI may not be the reason for a lost job

Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen has announced he intends to depart the company after 18 years as the prince of PDFs.…

Eruption at Mayon

Activity at the volcano in the Philippines sent lava and pyroclastic flows down the volcano’s flanks and prompted evacuations in nearby communities.

Apple takes a bite out of app store fees in China

Beijing hinted it wasn’t happy with Cupertino, which weeks later made a change

Apple has cut the fees it charges Chinese developers to sell their apps and other digital goodies.…

Pentagon AI chief praises Palantir tech for speeding battlefield strikes

Going from eight systems to one means fewer people make decisions to unleash Epic Fury

As the US continues its strikes on Iran as part of Operation Epic Fury, speakers at Palantir's AIPCON event on Thursday said the company’s Maven Smart System product has shortened the time it takes the Department of Defense to select and hit targets on the battlefield during the conflict.…

Rogue AI agents can work together to hack systems and steal secrets

Prompt like a hard-ass boss who won't tolerate failure and bots will find ways to breach policy

AI agents work together to bypass security controls and stealthily steal sensitive data from within the enterprise systems in which they operate, according to tests carried out by frontier security lab Irregular.…

Perplexity: Everything is Computer, everything is AI, Computer is everything, AI is us

Everything extends its cloud Computer to enterprises, your computer

Perplexity is ready to have enterprises use its AI service even if enterprises may still be wary of delegating tasks to software agents.…

About Low Boom Flight Demonstrator (LBFD) Project

The Low Boom Flight Demonstrator project (LBFD) is part of NASA’s effort to help enable new aircraft noise standards that are required to open the market to commercial supersonic flight over land. The federal government banned all civilian supersonic flights over land more than fifty years ago due to sonic boom noise. If new standards are established, the U.S. aviation […]

NASA to Cover Upcoming US Spacewalks 94, 95 Outside Space Station

NASA astronauts will conduct a pair of spacewalks beginning Wednesday, March 18, outside of the International Space Station to prepare for the installation of two roll-out solar arrays. Experts from NASA will preview the spacewalks during a news conference at 2 p.m. EDT, Monday, March 16, at the agency’s Johnson Space Center in Houston. Watch […]

About Integrated Aviation Systems Program (IASP)

The Integrated Aviation Systems Program (IASP) conducts research and integrated, systems-level demonstrations in a flight environment to prove, mature and transition them into future aircraft and systems. The program aims to determine feasibility and accelerate development of less mature technologies, and for more mature technologies, execute highly complex flight demonstrations to prove and accelerate technology […]

District denies enrollment to child based on license plate reader data

Automated checks raised doubts, though key questions remain unanswered

American parents of school-aged children may want to pay attention to where their cars are parked and for how long, as license plate reader data is now being cited by at least one school district when challenging whether students live where they say they do.…

A Czech Man Used This Stone in His Barn's Foundations. It Turned Out to Be a Rare Bronze Age Spearhead Mold

The rectangular object dates to around 1350 B.C.E. and was likely created by members of the Central European Urnfield culture

The Egyptians Used an Ancient Version of Wite-Out to Correct Their Mistakes on This Papyrus Scroll 3,300 Years Ago

An ancient artist applied a white substance to an illustration of a jackal, slimming down its appearance, according to researchers at the Fitzwilliam Museum in England

Microsoft Copilot now boarding your health information

It's safe and secure, Redmond insists, but don't expect medical advice

Microsoft wants to store your healthcare data so that its AI "delivers personalized health insights that you can act on," but without the liability that comes with actual medical advice.…

White House activates Yu-Gi-Oh's trap card by using anime clip for war comms

Franchise isn't the only one unhappy about its IP appearing in propaganda

Anime mainstay Yu-Gi-Oh has criticized the White House for using a clip from the TV show in videos promoting US military action.…

Tiny NASA Spacecraft Delivers Exoplanet Mission’s First Images

With the first images from the spacecraft now in hand, the team behind NASA’s Star-Planet Activity Research CubeSat, or SPARCS, is ready to begin charting the energetic lives of the galaxy’s most common stars to help answer one of humanity’s most profound questions: Which distant worlds beyond our solar system might be habitable?  Initial, or […]

Medical equipment techs beg for right-to-repair lifeline

OEM delays have become patient care delays

When patient care is delayed in a hospital because something is broken, biomedical technicians would like you to understand that it's not usually their fault.…

Operation Lightning takes down SocksEscort proxy network blamed for tens of millions in fraud

International cops stuck down 23 servers in 7 countries

Cops from eight countries this week disrupted SocksEscort, a residential proxy service used by criminals to compromise hundreds of thousands of routers worldwide and carry out digital fraud, costing businesses and consumers millions.…

Oracle tops up restructuring fund for FY26 by $500M

Pot of money grows to $2.1BN for fiscal '26, as Big Red exec says AI helping smaller engineering teams do more

Oracle has increased funding for its restructuring plans for the current financial year by $500 million, with some observers anticipating a spate of job losses.…

Webb Spots Details in Nearby Spiral Galaxy

Stars peek through the dusty, winding arms of NGC 5134, a spiral galaxy located 65 million light-years away, in this Feb. 20, 2026, image from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope. Webb’s Mid-Infrared Instrument collects the mid-infrared light emitted by the warm dust speckled through the galaxy’s clouds, tracing the clumps and strands of dusty gas. […]

Help Galaxy Zoo: Tidal Tales Open Cosmic Storybook

Galaxies carry the imprints of past encounters. When they pass near one another or collide, gravity pulls their stars into long tails, thin streams, and faint shells – features that preserve the history of these dramatic events. Thanks to deep, high-resolution images from the Euclid space telescope, an ESA (European Space Agency) mission with critical contributions from NASA, we can now see these delicate structures more clearly than ever before in unprecedented numbers.

Musk makes the Macrohard joke again

The idea being that fleets of AI agents could emulate the 'function of entire companies'

Elon Musk wheeled out his "Macrohard" dad joke again in the form of a supposed fleet of "Digital Optimus" agents that he claims would be capable of "emulating the function of entire companies."…

Users protest as Google Antigravity price floats upward

Google evolves its pricing for agentic AI tool, pointing devs towards on-demand credits or $250 per month Ultra plan

Developers using Google's Antigravity agentic AI coding tool are complaining about higher prices following an announcement yesterday that the company is evolving its AI plans.…

Efficient Large Displacement/Large Rotation Dynamic Simulations Using Nonlinear Dynamic Substructures

Download PDF: Efficient Large Displacement/Large Rotation Dynamic Simulations Using Nonlinear Dynamic Substructures Utilizing reduced-order dynamic math models (DMM) in linear system-level dynamic analyses is a well-known practice that enables extreme computational efficiencies. But what about nonlinear system dynamics? Reduced-order DMMs have found their way into contact dynamics. The engineer must look no further than the […]

Quicksort inventor Tony Hoare reaches the base case at 92

Classicist, philosopher, wit, and one of the greatest British computer scientists of all time

Obit  Professor Charles Anthony Richard Hoare has died at the age of 92. Known to many computer science students as C. A. R. Hoare, and to his friends as Tony, he was not only one of the greatest minds in the history of programming – he also came up with a number of the field's pithiest quotes.…

Do These Severed Orca Fins Covered in Tooth Marks Mean Killer Whales Are Cannibals? It's Complicated, Scientists Say

Researchers suggest that predation by a subspecies called Bigg's orcas might explain why members of another one, called resident orcas, stay in such large family groups

NASA probe checks out years early because this solar cycle is a real drag

Van Allen spacecraft re-enters over the Pacific with 1 in 4,200 chance of causing injury

NASA's Van Allen Probe A has re-entered Earth's atmosphere eight years earlier than expected, with a 1 in 4,200 chance that its components could cause injury.…

CISA warns max-severity n8n bug is being exploited in the wild

No rest for project maintainers battered by slew of vulnerability disclosures

The US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) has confirmed that hackers are exploiting a max-severity remote code execution (RCE) vulnerability in workflow automation platform n8n.…

Fresh indie broadband provider incoming as Google's fiber biz and Stonepeak’s Astound merge

Alphabet to remain 'significant minority shareholder'

Alphabet is spinning out its US Google Fiber business and combining it with Astound Broadband as part of a joint venture with private equity investor Stonepeak.…

Campaigners claim NHS Palantir system could be accessed by police and immigration

US spy-tech biz and platform provider retorts that this would be against the current law and a breach of its contract

Medical and legal rights campaigners are warning that the Palantir data platform, designed to be at the heart of England's health system, risks enabling UK immigration and policing departments to access confidential patient information.…

Lloyds Banking Group apps play mix-and-match with customer transactions

Some account holders see names, salaries, and child benefit payments… just not their own

Updated  Customers of three major UK banks woke on Thursday to find incorrect transactions appearing in their apps, a problem later attributed to a technical glitch.…

Smart mirror shows dumb Windows in elevator

All aboard the elevator where only Microsoft knows where you're going

Bork!Bork!Bork!  Smart mirrors are all the rage. However, rather than a list of headlines and tasks to do today, an unhappy Windows installation can make a smart mirror seem very dumb indeed.…

Britain turns up the heat on homegrown ceramics for hypersonic missiles

DSTL bets £350K the UK can cook up its own exotic materials

Britain has taken the first steps towards producing its own ultrahigh temperature materials, regarded as vital for applications including hypersonic vehicles, space, and advanced propulsion systems.…

So much for power to the people – AI datacenters could jump UK grid queue

Plan to fast-track bit barn connections leaves housing developers fuming and billpayers on the hook

The British government is consulting on reforms to prioritize "strategically important" grid connections – including datacenters – amid reports of delays stretching more than a decade on some projects.…

Someone Used This Mysterious Coin as Bus Fare in the 1950s. It Turned Out to Be 2,000-Year-Old Currency Minted by the Phoenicians

A public transit official working for the city of Leeds found the coin while counting bus and tram fares. Now, his grandson has donated it to Leeds Museums and Galleries

Whitehall seeks lone C++ coder to keep airport passenger model flying

Government offers £100K to support software forecasting how travelers choose departure hubs

The UK's Department for Transport is offering up to £100,000 over three years for access to a C++ programmer who can keep a module of its airport usage model up in the air.…

Microsoft adding Xbox mode to Windows 11 - even the Professional edition

Out of the Copilot and into the fire

Updated  Windows shops have something new to worry about: a virtual Xbox lurking inside Windows 11, including the Professional edition.…

Meta reveals four Broadcom-built custom AI chips, claims some outperform commercial silicon

Deploying them by the gigawatt but still can’t flag obvious AI slop

Social networking giant Meta has revealed details of four previously unknown custom chips powering its AI services.…

Dust Outbreak Reaches Europe

Clouds of dust lofted from the Sahara Desert brought hazy skies and muddy rain to Western Europe.

China’s CERT warns OpenClaw can inflict nasty wounds

Like deleting data, exposing keys, and loading malicious content - which may be why Beijing has reportedly banned it

China’s National Computer Network Emergency Response Technical Team has warned locals that the OpenClaw agentic AI tool poses significant security risks.…

Atlassian to shed ten percent of staff, because AI

Company is ‘reshaping our skill mix’ amid long share price slide and SaaSpocalypse whispers

Australian collaborationware company Atlassian has announced it will shed ten percent of staff – around 1,600 people.…

Perplexity Comet hurtling toward Amazon ban

Court issues preliminary injunction but delays it to allow an appeal

Perplexity's AI browser Comet has been banned from accessing Amazon's website after the e-commerce giant obtained a court-ordered preliminary injunction.…

Iran plots 'infrastructure warfare' against US tech giants

State news published a list of nearly 30 sites that could be targeted

Iran has reportedly designated Amazon, Google, IBM, Microsoft, Nvidia, Oracle, and Palantir facilities as legitimate targets of retaliatory strikes, according to an Al Jazeera report citing Iran’s state-affiliated Tasnim news agency.…

Fedora struggles bringing its RISC-V variant online due to slow build times

Red Hat developer Marcin Juszkiewicz is working on the RISC-V port of Fedora Linux, and after a few months of working on it, published a blog post about just how incredibly slow RISC-V seems to be. This is a real problem, as in Fedora, build results are only released once all architectures have completed their builds. There is no point of going for inclusion with slow builders as this will make package maintainers complain. You see, in Fedora build results are released into repositories only when all architectures finish. And we had maintainers complaining about lack of speed of AArch64 builders in the past. Some developers may start excluding RISC-V architecture from their packages to not have to wait. And any future builders need to be rackable and manageable like any other boring server (put in a rack, connect cables, install, do not touch any more). Because no one will go into a data centre to manually reboot an SBC-based builder. Without systems fulfilling both requirements, we can not even plan for the RISC-V 64-bit architecture to became one of official, primary architectures in Fedora Linux. ↫ Marcin Juszkiewicz RISC-V really seems to have hit some sort of ceiling over the past few years, with performance improvements stalling and no real performance-oriented chips and boards becoming available. Everybody seems to want RISC-V to succeed and become an architecture that can stand its own against x86 and Arm, but the way things are going, that just doesn’t seem likely any time soon. There’s always some magical unicorn chip or board just around the corner, but when you actually turn that corner, it’s just another slow SBC only marginally faster than the previous one. Fedora is not the first distribution struggling with bringing RISC-V online. Chimera Linux faced a similar issue about a year ago, but managed to eventually get by because someone from the Adélie Linux team granted remote access to an unused Milk-V Pioneer, which proved enough for Chimera for now. My hope is still that eventually we’re going to see performant, capable RISC-V machines, because I would absolutely jump for joy if I could have a proper RISC-V workstation.

Iran-linked cyber crew says they hit US med-tech firm

Meanwhile, Verifone says 'no evidence' to support the digital intruders' claims

A hacking crew with ties to Iran's intelligence agency claimed to be behind a global network outage at med-tech firm Stryker on Wednesday, and said the cyberattack was in response to the US-Israel airstrikes.…

2026 William T. Pecora Award Nominations Now Being Accepted

The William T. Pecora Award is presented annually to individuals or teams using satellite or aerial remote sensing that make outstanding contributions toward understanding the Earth (land, oceans, and air), educating the next generation of scientists, informing decision-makers, or supporting natural or human-induced disaster response. Both national and international nominations are welcome.

A 1,300-Pound Spacecraft Might Be Plummeting Through Our Atmosphere Right Now

The debris poses minimal risk of harming anyone

Most chatbots will help plan school shootings and other violence, study shows

I see you're trying to kill children. Would you like some help with that?

You might expect a bot to have guardrails that prevent it from helping you plan a crime, but your expectations might be too high. According to a study, eight of ten major commercial chatbots will help you prepare to conduct a school shooting.…

Amazon enters “find out” phase

Now let’s go live to Amazon for the latest updates about this developing story. Amazon’s ecommerce business has summoned a large group of engineers to a meeting on Tuesday for a “deep dive” into a spate of outages, including incidents tied to the use of AI coding tools. The online retail giant said there had been a “trend of incidents” in recent months, characterized by a “high blast radius” and “Gen-AI assisted changes” among other factors, according to a briefing note for the meeting seen by the FT. Under “contributing factors” the note included “novel GenAI usage for which best practices and safeguards are not yet fully established.” ↫ Rafe Rosner-Uddin at Ars Technica Oh boy.

This Museum Is Using Pokémon to Teach Visitors About Fossils. Fans Are Waiting for Hours to Snag Tickets

"Pokémon Fossil Museum" in Chicago compares "fossil Pokémon" from the popular franchise to the real-world creatures they're based on

Meta, international cops use handcuffs and AI to stop scammers

150k accounts nuked, 21 suspects arrested

Not every scam starts with malware or a compromised account. Sometimes all it takes is a friend request or a link shared via chat.…

About University Innovation Project (UI)

NASA’s University Innovation (UI) project funds university-led innovation to address the agency’s Aeronautics Research Mission Directorate’s system-level challenges via independent, NASA-alternate-path, multi-disciplinary awards. Strategic Goals The UI portfolio’s strategic goals in descending order of importance are: 1.    Assist in achieving aviation outcomes defined in the ARMD Strategic Implementation Plan through NASA-complementary research. 2.    Transition research […]

Telescopes Team Up for New View of Cat’s Eye Nebula

This March 3, 2026, image combines views from ESA’s (European Space Agency) Euclid and NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope to feature 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 4,400 light-years away in the constellation Draco and has captivated astronomers for decades […]

Taking a Daily Multivitamin Might Slow Some Signs of Biological Aging, a New Study Suggests

Researchers don’t know how these modest changes at the cellular level relate to overall health

NASA watchdog report pokes holes in Artemis lunar lander plans

Inspector general flags Starship risks and gaps in testing

The NASA Office of Inspector General has published a report on the agency's management of the lunar Human Landing System (HLS) contracts, highlighting the risks and arguments behind the scenes.…

DR-DOS rises again – rebuilt from scratch, not open source

Project claims legal clarity and zero legacy code, but offers binaries only

DR-DOS is back, and there is already a test version you can download. But as of yet, it's not finished, not FOSS – and not based on the original code.…

See a 163-Year-Old Civil War Shipwreck in Stunning Detail With These New High-Resolution Sonar Images

The USS "Monitor" was the U.S. Navy's first ironclad warship. The vessel, which sank off of North Carolina in 1862, revolutionized naval warfare

Where Some See Strings, She Sees a Space-Time Made of Fractals

Pushed down to a certain scale, the laws of physics seem to fall apart. Astrid Eichhorn, a leader in an area of study called asymptotic safety, thinks we just need to push a little further.

The post Where Some See Strings, She Sees a Space-Time Made of Fractals first appeared on Quanta Magazine

ICO fines Police Scotland over data-sharing debacle in gross misconduct case

Blue-on-blue internal investigation lands force £66k fine

The UK's data protection watchdog has fined Police Scotland £66,000 ($88,000) for what it calls a "serious failure" in handling an alleged victim's sensitive data.…

This Ancient Reptile Started Life on All Fours. As It Grew, It Stood Upright and Started Walking on Two Legs Instead

Scientists have identified a strange early crocodile relative that may have looked somewhat like a flightless bird

Ig Nobel Prize flees US for Switzerland after 35 years over safety concerns

This is not satire, but we wish it was

The Ig Nobel Prize, which satirizes its more noble namesake, is moving its award ceremony to Europe following concerns about the safety of those attending the US event.…

Intel finds its Zen undercutting AMD with Arrow Lake refresh

Let them eat cores

Intel has a new strategy for shoring up its eroding market share: Offering PC buyers more cores per dollar than arch-rival AMD in a refresh of its Arrow Lake range.…

Ayar Labs taps Wiwynn to cram 1,024 GPUs into a photonic rack system

Reference design to stitch more than a thousand accelerators into a single enormous server.

Exclusive  If you thought Nvidia or AMD's 72-GPU rack systems were enormous, silicon Ayar Labs has something much bigger in the works.…

Lightmatter says latest photonics will slash datacenter fiber bills in half

Latest optical engine may not be CPO, but it's still better than pluggables

Photonics startup Lightmatter says that its latest optical engine can cut the amount of fiber used by modern datacenters in half, and perhaps more importantly, it doesn't rely on co-packaging to do it.…

Microsoft ships VS Code weekly, adds Autopilot mode so AI can wreak havoc without bothering you

Google also enables auto-approval of AI agents while their documentation warns against it

Microsoft's Visual Studio Code (VS Code) is moving to a weekly release cycle, as well as joining Google in encouraging agentic AI development without manual approval with a new Autopilot feature.…

Swiss e-voting pilot can't count 2,048 ballots after USB keys fail to decrypt them

Officials suspend Basel-Stadt trial and launch probe

A Swiss canton has suspended its pilot of electronic voting after failing to count 2,048 votes cast in national referendums held on March 8.…

Dutch cops bust teen suspected of posing as bank staff to steal cards

17-year-old allegedly withdrew large sums of cash from ATMs

Dutch police have arrested a 17-year-old boy who detectives suspect was responsible for 16 bank card frauds across the Netherlands.…

Scottish broadband service looking a bit dreich, says UK outage study

Subscribers north of the border suffer the most long-running failures per £100 spent

Broadband subscribers in Scotland suffer the most outages in the UK, according to Broadband Genie, with customers of BT typically experiencing the fewest.…

Hotpatching goes default in Windows Autopatch whether you like it or not

Microsoft insists rebootless updates are 'the quickest way to get secure'

From the department of "what could possibly go wrong?" comes news that Windows Autopatch is enabling hotpatch security updates by default.…

EU legal eagle says banks should refund cybercrime victims first, argue later

Advocate General urges rethink of PSD2 to speed compensation after scams

Analysis  One of the European Union's top legal advisors is trying to change how banks treat cybercrime victims – meaning they could enjoy greater financial protections sooner than expected.…

Your datacenter's power architecture called. It's not happy

AI factories demand 800 volts because physics doesn't care about your upgrade budget

Feature  Hyperscale computing was built on a foundation of certainty. For years, 12V and 48V rack architectures – implemented at a steady 50–54 VDC (Volts of Direct Current) - ruled the datacenter floor, engineered to perfection for power densities of 10–15 kW per rack. These systems were finely tuned machines, optimized around the predictable, steady-state demands of general-purpose CPUs and storage servers. The infrastructure was stable. The math was settled.…

Post Office's £142M subsidy for Horizon fallout and IR35 bill reviewed by watchdog

CMA advisers say extra support justified as remediation costs and tax liability mount

The UK's competition regulator has given a conditional thumbs-up to a request for £141.8 million in subsidies to the Post Office – a publicly owned company – to cover its costs in compensation for the Horizon IT scandal in the coming year and a tax liability.…

Whitehall can't cost digital ID until it decides how to build it

Consultation launched, People's Panel planned, yet still no price tag attached

The UK government has refused to estimate the cost of its digital identity system, saying this depends on what it decides after a consultation exercise launched yesterday.…

AI has made the Command Line Interface more important and powerful than ever before

Google knows asking agents to navigate GUIs designed for humans is ridiculous. Microsoft might not

Opinion  The command line interface is making a comeback because graphical user interfaces are a poor fit for autonomous agents, which could spell trouble for a lot of software – and software makers.…

We saved gray whales from extinction. Why are so many dying again?

In 1999 hundreds of gray whales washed up along the west coast of North America. More in 2000. They lost an estimated 25% of their population. But then the whale population recovered and people moved on. Until it happened again in 2019. And 2020, and 2021. It’s still happening today. Host Regina G. Barber dives into this mystery with marine ecologist Joshua Stewart, who explains how scientists like himself solved it – and the tough questions that came up along the way.

Check out our Sea Camp series and our limited run Sea Camp newsletter , featuring deep dives into research, cute critters and games!

Interested in more ocean mysteries? 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

Atlassian built a tool to migrate Jira users to the cloud and it made the move slower

Fixed it amid user ire, swears new tool for bigger shifts is up to the job

Atlassian has admitted that the tools it developed to move Jira users into the cloud were actually slower than older code that did the same job, and that its efforts to speed things up also had speed problems.…

Oracle says AI coding tools are helping it dodge the SaaSpocalypse

Big Red reckons paying for datacenters is easy when you have half a trillion dollars of cloud orders on the books

Oracle says AI code generation tools have become so efficient, and it is so good at using them, that it will dodge the SaaSpocalypse and watch smaller rivals suffer.…

Curiosity Blog, Sols 4825-4831: Exploring the Borderlands

Written by William Farrand, Senior Research Scientist, Space Science Institute Earth planning date: Friday, March 6, 2026 Curiosity is in the last stage of its exploration of the spiderweb-like boxwork unit. This stage consists of exploring the eastern and southern borders of this terrain. There were two multi-sol plans assembled this week. The previous plan […]

A Most Unusual Lake

Lake Unter-See in Antarctica, sealed beneath thick ice, contains unusually high levels of dissolved oxygen and cone-shaped microbial reefs resembling some of Earth’s oldest fossils.

About Subsonic Vehicle Technologies and Tools Project

Project Overview NASA’s Subsonic Vehicle Technologies and Tools (SVTT) project develops technologies and tools for various types of aircraft that fly in different speed regimes, including next-generation vertical take-off and landing and fixed-wing subsonic aircraft. The research advances knowledge, technologies, and concepts that enable major steps to lowering operating costs of the next-generation single-aisle aircraft. […]

Governments across Asia order work from home, thanks to Iran war

Pakistan, Vietnam, Thailand, and the Philippines are all trying to conserve fuel

The US government may be ordering staff back to the office, but governments across Asia have sent public sector workers back home to preserve fuel supplies due to supply chain disruptions caused by the war in Iran.…

AIOps is so powerful, vendors are building tools to clean up after agents break your infrastructure

Cohesity, ServiceNow and Datadog team on recoverability suite

Three more vendors have decided that the world needs tools to roll back mistakes made by AI, after Cohesity teamed with ServiceNow and Datadog on a recoverability service that will hunt down all the files and data corrupted by bad AI actors and restore systems to a “trusted state.”…

You’re supposed to replace the stock photos in new picture frames

Back in 2023, John Earnest created a fun drawing application called WigglyPaint. The thing that makes WigglyPaint unique is that it automatically applies what artists call the line boil effect to anything you draw, making it seem as if everything is wiggling (hence the name). Even if you’re not aware of the line boil effect, you’ve surely encountered it several times in your life. The tool may seem simple at first glance, but as Earnest details, he’s put quite a lot of thought into the little tool. WigglyPaint was well-received, but mostly remained a curiosity – that is, until artists in Asia picked up on it, and the popularity of WigglyPaint positively exploded from a few hundred into the millions. The problem, though, is that basically nobody is actually using WigglyPaint: they’re all using slopcoded copycats. The sites are slop; slapdash imitations pieced together with the help of so-called “Large Language Models” (LLMs). The closer you look at them, the stranger they appear, full of vague, repetitive claims, outright false information, and plenty of unattributed (stolen) art. This is what LLMs are best at: quickly fabricating plausible simulacra of real objects to mislead the unwary. It is no surprise that the same people who have total contempt for authorship find LLMs useful; every LLM and generative model today is constructed by consuming almost unimaginably massive quantities of human creative work- writing, drawings, code, music- and then regurgitating them piecemeal without attribution, just different enough to hide where it came from (usually). LLMs are sharp tools in the hands of plagiarists, con-men, spammers, and everyone who believes that creative expression is worthless. People who extract from the world instead of contributing to it. It is humiliating and infuriating to see my work stolen by slop enthusiasts, and worse, used to mislead artists into paying scammers for something that ought to be free. ↫ John Earnest There’s a huge amount of slopcoded WrigglyPaint ripoffs out there, and it goes far beyond websites, too. People are putting slopcoded ripoffs in basic webviews, and uploading them en masse to the Play Store and App Store. None of these slopcoded ripoffs actually build upon WrigglyPaint with new ideas or approaches, there’s no creativity or innovation; it’s just trash barfed up by glorified autocomplete built upon mass plagiarism and theft, “made” by bottom feeders who despise creativity, art, and originality. You know how when you go to IKEA or whatever other similar store to buy picture frames, they have these stock photos of random people in them? I wonder if “AI” enthusiasts understand you’re supposed to replace those with pictures that actually have meaning to you.

This Massive Mural Made From 100,000 Bottle Caps Is One Artist's Reinterpretation of 'The Mona Lisa'

Óscar Olivares, who is known for working with recycled materials, completed the 43-foot-tall artwork in Zacamil, El Salvador, in February

Redox bans code regurgitated by “AI”

Redox, the rapidly improving general purpose operating system written in Rust, has amended its contribution policy to explicitly ban code regurgitated by “AI”. Redox OS does not accept contributions generated by LLMs (Large Language Models), sometimes also referred to as “AI”. This policy is not open to discussion, any content submitted that is clearly labelled as LLM-generated (including issues, merge requests, and merge request descriptions) will be immediately closed, and any attempt to bypass this policy will result in a ban from the project. ↫ Redox’ contribution policy Excellent news.

Critical Microsoft Excel bug weaponizes Copilot Agent for zero-click information disclosure attack

Could steal sensitive personal and financial data

After a whopper of a Patch Tuesday last month, with six Microsoft flaws exploited as zero-days, March didn't exactly roar in like a lion. Just two of the 83 Microsoft CVEs released on Tuesday are listed as publicly known, and none is under active exploitation, which we're sure is a welcome change to sysadmins.…

How a Tiny Clump of Moss Helped the FBI Solve a Grave-Robbing Case

Cemetery workers argued that the crimes happened before their employment. But a buried bit of moss told a different story

Amazon insists AI coding isn't source of outages

E-souk disputes report linking 'Gen-AI assisted changes' to recent high-impact incidents

Amazon's weekly operations meeting today reportedly focused on recent service outages and on the role that code changes attributed to generative AI may have played. However, the company is downplaying the possibility of problems with AI.…

Insights into Spallation Mechanisms of Thermal Protection System Materials from Mass Spectrometry and HyMETS Testing

Download PDF: Insights into Spallation Mechanisms of Thermal Protection System Materials from Mass Spectrometry and HyMETS Testing An effort was undertaken to investigate the mechanisms responsible for internal pressure build up within thermal protection system (TPS) materials subjected to high-enthalpy environments. Understanding how gases evolve, migrate, and interact with the microstructure of a TPS is essential for […]

AI nonsense finds new home as Meta acquires Moltbook

Think it's hard to tell bot from human on Facebook now?

The biggest generator of AI slop on the internet has a new home, as Meta has reportedly acquired Moltbook and hired the team behind the social network for AI agents.…

March 2026 Satellite Puzzler

Your challenge is to tell us the location of the satellite image and why it is interesting.

Computational Modeling of Failure at the Fabric Weave Level in Reentry Parachute Energy Modulators

Download PDF: Computational Modeling of Failure at the Fabric Weave Level in Reentry Parachute Energy Modulators Energy modulators (EM) are textile mechanical devices designed to dissipate snatch loads that occur when parachutes are deployed. Although critical for mitigating shock loads, recent flight testing has shown increasing variability in EM behavior, raising concerns about their performance predictability and […]

This Traveler From India Graffitied His Name on Five Ancient Tombs in Egypt's Valley of the Kings 2,000 Years Ago

Researchers have discovered 30 inscriptions written in Indian languages, which provide new evidence that visitors from India spent time in Egypt between the first and third centuries C.E.

Ice to Fuel: NASA Tests Technology for Refueling Landers

The farther the destination, the more fuel a rocket needs. The more fuel the rocket carries, the heavier the spacecraft. The heavier the spacecraft, the more fuel it requires to launch. Experts at NASA’s Glenn Research Center in Cleveland are testing technology that could solve this problem.  The CryoFILL (Cryogenic Fluid In-Situ Liquefaction for Landers) project could transform the way NASA fuels future space exploration missions, reducing costs and extending the duration of planetary surface operations.   “If […]

Cybercrime isn't just a cover for Iran's government goons - it's a key part of their operations

Ransomware, malware-as-a-service, infostealers benefit MOIS, too

Iranian government-backed snoops are increasingly using cybercrime malware and ransomware infrastructure in their operations - not just hiding behind criminal masks as a cover for destructive cyber activity, according to security researchers.…

AI datacenters may gulp a New York City's worth of water on hot days

Study warns peak cooling demand could strain US water systems by 2030

Public water supplies in America will need billions invested to meet the peak requirements of datacenters during the hottest periods of the year, even if their overall annual consumption is relatively modest.…

Expanding the Human Factors Toolbox:  An Approach to Balancing Crew and Mission Design Parameters

This article is from the 2025 Technical Update. The human factors TDT looks for and creates opportunities to influence design to leverage human strengths and to protect people and missions. The human factors team has experts with knowledge of human performance in all aspects of NASA missions as well as from other safety-critical industries. The […]

JetBrains launches AI agent IDE built on the corpse of abandoned Fleet

Agentic 'Air' lets multiple AI agents run tasks concurrently, while loyal IntelliJ users wonder what's in it for them

JetBrains has previewed Air, a tool for agentic AI development which it describes as a new wave of dev tooling.…

Crooks compromise WordPress sites to push infostealers via fake CAPTCHA prompts

Rapid7 says crims broke into more than 250 sites globally, including a US Senate candidate’s campaign page

Cyber baddies quietly compromised legitimate WordPress websites, including the campaign site of a US Senate candidate, turning them into launchpads for a global infostealer operation.…

Webinar 3/25: NASA CSDA Vendor Focus – Satellogic

Join us March 25 at 2:00 p.m. EDT to learn more about the data offered by CSDA program vendor Satellogic.

FreeBSD 14.4 released

While FreeBSD 15.x may be getting all the attention, the FreeBSD 14.x branch continues to be updated for the more conservative users among us. FreeBSD 14.4 has been released today, and brings with it updated versions of OpenSSH, OpenZFS, and Bhyve virtual machines can now share files with their host over 9pfs – among other things, of course.

Flying cabs, next-gen aircraft cleared for takeoff in 26 states

FAA launches pilot projects starting this summer

The skies over parts of the US could soon get busier, as the Federal Aviation Administration launches pilot projects spanning 26 states to test electric air taxis and other next-gen aircraft, with operations expected to begin by summer 2026.…

COPV Damage Tolerance Life Demonstration Guidelines

This article is from the 2025 Technical Update. The NESC has invested significant time and resources to better understand composite overwrapped pressure vessels (COPV) performance and more importantly, how these complex, high-pressure storage systems can fail. These vessels, which store high pressure propulsion and life-support system fluids on launch vehicles and spacecraft, are ubiquitous at NASA, and failures have […]

A Technical Resource for the Agency

This article is from the 2025 Technical Update. The NESC’s Thermal Control & Protection Technical Discipline Team (TDT) is a resource providing subject matter expertise in active and passive thermal control as well as ascent and entry thermal protection across the spectrum of agency needs. TDT members led or supported a variety of key activities […]

Celebrating NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter’s 20th Anniversary: Crater Near Sirenum Fossae

NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) captures a detailed view of a relatively fresh crater in this image released on June 3, 2015. The crater has a sharp rim and well-preserved ejecta. The steep inner slopes are carved by gullies and include possible recurring slope lineae on the equator-facing slopes. This crater is monitored for changes […]

See How Scientists Reconstructed the Face of Little Foot, a Human Ancestor Who Lived 3.67 Million Years Ago

For the first time, researchers have digitally reconstructed the facial fragments of the individual, who belonged to the Australopithecus genus

NASA Discovers Crash of Extreme Stars in Unexpected Site

A fleet of NASA missions has likely uncovered a collision between two ultradense stars in a tiny galaxy buried in a huge stream of gas. Astronomers have never seen this type of explosive event in an environment like this before — and it may help solve two outstanding cosmic mysteries. A paper describing these results […]

Musk admits Starship V3 launch date has slipped as Super Heavy booster rolls into place

Launch predictions continue to be optimistic as 2027 and Artemis III near

SpaceX has rolled another Starship super heavy booster to the launch pad as the company's boss, Elon Musk, admits the first launch of Starship V3 had slipped.…

NASA's Asteroid-Smashing DART Mission Changed a Space Rock's Orbit Around the Sun, Marking a First for Humanity

Studying the 2022 collision's effects can help scientists protect the Earth from celestial objects that might head toward us

Oracle moves to assure MySQL community it really does care

Big Red waves new features including vector support, while skeptics await concrete timescales

Oracle has proposed a more transparent approach to developing its open source database MySQL, including new features supporting vectors.…

Sorry, kids. Memory crunch threatens to kneecap Chromebook shipments

Low-cost computers bashed by billion-dollar investment in AI infrastructure

Chromebooks, the low-cost computing option popular with education buyers, will be squeezed hardest this year as memory prices spiral out of control.…

Linux PC vendor System76 tries to talk Colorado down over OS age checks

Don't celebrate yet – more states are considering them

As more US states push to mandate OS-level age checks, System76 is taking its fight directly to lawmakers.…

Vibrant Wildflowers Are Blanketing Death Valley National Park, Resulting in the Most Breathtaking Bloom in a Decade

Parts of the park are awash in wildflowers, from the cheery yellow blooms of desert gold to the bright purple clusters of sand verbena, along with many other species

Fake job applications pack malware that kills endpoint detection before stealing data

Russian-speaking attackers lure HR staff into downloading ISO files that disable defenses

A Russian-speaking cyber criminal is targeting corporate HR teams with fake CVs that quietly install malware which can disable security tools before stealing data from infected machines.…

Microsoft Authenticator to nuke Entra creds on rooted and jailbroken phones

Warning, lockout, then wipe if your device trips detection

Microsoft is removing Entra credentials for school and work from jailbroken and rooted devices running iOS and Android.…

Ericsson blames vendor vishing slip-up for breach exposing thousands of records

Crooks used simple phone scam to compromise vendor account, spilling personal and financial data belonging to more than 15,000 people

A voice-phishing scam targeting one of Ericsson's service providers has exposed the personal data of more than 15,000 individuals after attackers sweet-talked an employee into handing over access.…

Protecting democracy means democratizing cybersecurity. Bring on the hackers

Digital freedom needs a Kali Linux for the rest of us

Opinion  The hacker mind is a curious way to be. To have it means to embody endless analytical curiosity, an awareness of any given rule set as just one system among many, and an ability to see any system in ways that its creators never expected. Combine this with a drive to find the bad and make things better, and you become one of the fundamental forces of the technological universe.…

NASA Invites Media to 63rd Annual Goddard Space Science Symposium

Media are invited to attend the 63rd annual Goddard Space Science Symposium, taking place Thursday, March 12, and Friday, March 13, at the National Housing Center in Washington. The event also will be streamed online. Organized by the American Astronautical Society (AAS) in conjunction with NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, the symposium […]

Polish cops bust alleged teen DDoS kit sellers – youngest just 12

Kids profited from tools used to attack popular websites, say officials

Polish police have referred seven suspected juvenile cybercriminals to family court over an alleged scheme to flog DDoS kits online.…

Retro tech fan views LaserDisc movie data with a budget microscope

Analog video spied by looking really, really closely at tracks

A retro tech enthusiast has demonstrated that it is possible to view media on LaserDisc using a relatively inexpensive digital microscope.…

Mystery outage behind US airline JetBlue asking FAA to ground its flights

Aircraft on the ground briefly halted until systems were up again

JetBlue took the unusual step of requesting a ground stop for all flights this morning, with the US airline resuming operations less than an hour later and blaming the stop on "a brief system outage."…

Brit competition cops warn AI agents may not be 'faithful servants' to consumers

Autonomous assistants could manipulate choices, push pricier deals, and prioritize their creators

Britain's competition watchdog says the next wave of agentic AI assistants could end up nudging people toward worse deals, manipulating choices, or quietly prioritizing the interests of the companies behind them.…

Xen Project quietly announced five years of support for all releases

As Citrix slips out a preview of Xen Server 9, the release that brings it back to the V12N mainstream

The Xen Project has decided to support all releases of its flagship hypervisor for five years, and one of the first beneficiaries of the change is Citrix, which has delivered a preview of XenServer 9 – the release that will take the product back into the mainstream virtualization market.…

Sibling order may affect sexuality and identity

Today, guest host Selena Simmons-Duffin is exploring a detail very personal to her: How the number of older brothers a person has can influence their sexuality.

Scientific research on sexuality has a dark history, with long-lasting harmful effects on queer communities. Much of the early research has also been debunked over time. But not this "fraternal birth order effect." The fact that a person's likelihood of being gay increases with each older brother has been found all over the world – from Turkey to North America, Brazil, the Netherlands and beyond. Today, Selena gets into all the details: What this effect is, how it's been studied and what it can (and can't) explain about sexuality.

Interested in the science of our closest relatives? Check out more stories in NPR's series on the Science of Siblings .

Email us at shortwave@npr.org — we'd love to hear from you.

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

SETI admits its search for alien life may be too narrowly focussed

Solar winds near aliens’ homes – and ours – might be blowing away signs of alien technosignatures by broadening signals

The SETI Institute, the nonprofit that conducts a search for extraterrestrial intelligence by examining radio waves for artefacts that are unlikely to be the result of natural processes, thinks it may have been going about it the wrong way.…

Shades of a Lunar Eclipse

A series of nighttime satellite images revealed how moonlight reaching Earth varied throughout a total lunar eclipse.

HPE tweaks T&Cs so the price it quotes may not be the price you pay

With memory and storage contributing over half the price of a server, Big Green needs to protect its margins

HPE has changed its terms and conditions in ways that allow it to change hardware prices after it’s issued a quote, due to rampant storage and memory price rises.…

Palantir’s lethal AI weaponry deployed to find chairs for US government staff

As Department of Agriculture employees return to the office, it needs ‘real-time analytics to optimize employee seat assignments’

The U.S. Department of Agriculture is using Palantir to figure out where its staff should sit, after deciding only the colorful AI company can do the job.…

Forgejo monthly report - February 2026

Forgejo was present at FOSDEM. The Forgejo runner received multiple bug fixes and new features. The helm chart received two minor changes. Improvements were made to the infrastructure.

ArcaOS 5.1.2 released

While IBM’s OS/2 technically did die, its development was picked up again much later, first through eComStation, and later, after money issues at its parent company Mensys, through ArcaOS. eComStation development stalled because of the money issues and has been dead for years; ArcaOS picked up where it left off and has been making steady progress since its first release in 2017. Regardless, the developers behind both projects develop OS/2 under license from IBM, but it’s unclear just how much they can change or alter, and what the terms of the agreement are. Anyway, ArcaOS 5.1.2 has just been released, and it seems to be a rather minor release. It further refines ArcaOS’ support for UEFI and GPT-based disks, the tentpole feature of ArcaOS 5.1 which allows the operating system to be installed on a much more modern systems without having to fiddle with BIOS compatibility modes. Looking at the list of changes, there’s the usual list of updated components from both Arca Noae and the wider OS/2 community. You’ll find the latest versions of of the Panorama graphics drivers, ACPI, USB, and NVMe drivers, improved localisation, newer versions of the VNC server and viewer, and much more. If you have an active Support & Maintenance subscription for ArcaOS 5.1, this update is free, and it’s also available at discounted prices as upgrades for earlier versions. A brand new copy of ArcaOS 5.1.x will set you back $139, which isn’t cheap, but considering this price is probably a consequence of what must be some onerous licensing terms and other agreements with IBM, I doubt there’s much Arca Noae can do about it.

Anthropic debuts pricey and sluggish automated Code Review tool

First vibe coding, now vibe reviewing ... but the buzz is good as it finds worthy issues

Anthropic has introduced a more extensive – and expensive – way to review source code in hosted repositories, many of which already contain large swaths of AI-generated code.…

AI vs AI: Agent hacked McKinsey's chatbot and gained full read-write access in just two hours

David and Goliath…but with AI agents

Researchers at red-team security startup CodeWall say their AI agent hacked McKinsey's internal AI platform and gained full read and write access to the chatbot in just two hours.…

Some People Keep Razor-Sharp Minds Into Their 80s and Beyond. A New Study Reveals Their Secrets

"Super-agers" seem to produce more new nerve cells in a brain region important for memory than other people their age

“AI” translations are ruining Wikipedia

Oh boy. Wikipedia editors have implemented new policies and restricted a number of contributors who were paid to use AI to translate existing Wikipedia articles into other languages after they discovered these AI translations added AI “hallucinations,” or errors, to the resulting article. ↫ Emanuel Maiberg at 404 Media There seems to be this pervasive conviction among Silicon Valley techbro types, and many programmers and developers in general, that translation and localisation are nothing more than basic find/replace tasks that you can automate away. At first, we just needed to make corpora of two different languages kiss and smooch, and surely that would automate translation and localisation away if the corpora were large enough. When this didn’t turn out to work very well, they figured that if we made the words in the corpora tumble down a few pachinko machines and then made them kiss and smooch, yes, then we’d surely have automated translation and localisation. Nothing could be further from the truth. As someone who has not only worked as a professional translator for over 15 years, but who also holds two university degrees in the subject, I keep reiterating that translation isn’t just a dumb substitution task; it’s a real craft, a real art, one you can have talent for, one you need to train for, and study for. You’d think anyone with sufficient knowledge in two languages can translate effectively between the two, but without a much deeper understanding of language in general and the languages involved in particular, as well as a deep understanding of the cultures in which the translation is going to be used, and a level of reading and text comprehension that go well beyond that of most, you’re going to deliver shit translations. Trust me, I’ve seen them. I’ve been paid good money to correct, fix, and mangle something usable out of other people’s translations. You wouldn’t believe the shit I’ve seen. Translation involves the kinds of intricacies, nuances, and context “AI” isn’t just bad at, but simply cannot work with in any way, shape, or form. I’ve said it before, but it won’t be long before people start getting seriously injured – or worse – because of the cost-cutting in the translation industry, and the effects that’s going to have on, I don’t know, the instruction manuals for complex tools, or the leaflet in your grandmother’s medications. Because some dumbass bean counter kills the budget for proper, qualified, trained, and experienced translators, people are going to die.

“I don’t know what is Apple’s endgame for the Fn/Globe key, and I’m not sure Apple knows either”

Every modifier key starts simple and humble, with a specific task and a nice matching name. This never lasts. The tasks become larger and more convoluted, and the labels grow obsolete. Shift no longer shifts a carriage, Control doesn’t send control codes, Alt isn’t for alternate nerdy terminal functions. Fn is the newest popular modifier key, and it feels we’re speedrunning it through all the challenges without having learned any of the lessons. ↫ Marcin Wichary Grab a blanket, curl up on the couch with some coffee or tea, and enjoy.

Moody humans should let AI handle bad public feedback first, study finds

Enjoy meltdowns from businesses on Yelp over negative reviews? AI is threatening to take that away

Angry company responses to customer complaints are a favorite topic of internet amusement and outrage, but they're also embarrassing for the employees who post them. Having AI process customer reviews could be a better way. …

NASA’s Van Allen Probe A to Re-Enter Atmosphere

NASA’s Van Allen Probe A is expected to re-enter Earth’s atmosphere almost 14 years after launch. From 2012 to 2019, the spacecraft and its twin, Van Allen Probe B, flew through the Van Allen belts, rings of charged particles trapped by Earth’s magnetic field, to understand how particles were gained and lost. The belts shield Earth from cosmic radiation, solar storms, and the constantly streaming […]

These Koalas Bounced Back From the Brink of Local Extinction Extremely Fast. Surprisingly, So Did Their Genetic Resilience

Conservationists saved the fuzzy creatures in Victoria, Australia. Now, the animals are showing remarkable signs of genetic recovery

Microsoft taps Claude to make Copilot Cowork a better agent

Copilot gets tuned to handle long-running knowledge work tasks

Microsoft on Monday celebrated freedom of choice by giving customers in the company's Frontier program the option to use Anthropic and OpenAI models via Copilot Chat.…

About Subsonic Flight Demonstrator (SFD) Project

The purpose of the Subsonic Flight Demonstrator (SFD) project is to engage with industry and other government organizations to identify, select, and mature key airframe technologies, such as new wing designs, that have a high probability of transition to the next generation single-aisle seat class airliner.  Moving technologies from a research environment to a production environment […]

ShinyHunters claims more high-profile victims in latest Salesforce customers data heist

And they abused a Mandiant-developed open source tool in the attacks

ShinyHunters told The Register that it has stolen data from about 100 high-profile companies in its latest Salesforce customer data heist, including Salesforce itself.…

About Flight Demonstrations and Capabilities (FDC) Project

The FDC project conducts complex integrated small-scale flight research to validate the benefits of new technologies. By modifying aircraft from FDC’s support fleet, the project enables aggressive, success-oriented flight campaign schedules. While many technologies are at mid-levels of technology readiness, the FDC project supports all phases of technology maturation.   FDC’s support aircraft fleet enables safety chase and in-flight experimental measurements for a variety of […]

This Rare Silver Medal From the First Modern Olympic Games in 1896 Just Sold at Auction

At the time, athletes received silver medals for winning first place. The Olympics didn't introduce gold medals until 1904

What Is Pi? (Grades 5-8)

This article is for students grades 5-8. What is Pi? Pi is a number. You might know it as 3.14 or the symbol π. But it’s way more than that! What Makes Pi Special? Pi is an irrational number. That means it goes on forever and it never repeats its sequence of numbers. Pi has […]

Amazon tells FCC to bin SpaceX's million-satellite datacenter dream

Calls Musk’s orbital plans “speculative” despite Bezos touting orbiting compute

Amazon wants US regulators to reject a SpaceX application for permission to launch a fleet of orbital datacenter satellites, criticizing it as incomplete, speculative, and unrealistic.…

NASA Armstrong Director Brad Flick to Retire After 40 Years of Service

On Monday, NASA announced Bradley Flick, director of NASA’s Armstrong Flight Research Center in Edwards, California, will retire Thursday, March 19, after a nearly 40-year career advancing aeronautics and flight research. Flick began his NASA journey in 1986 as a flight systems engineer and rose through the ranks to lead the center. His career spanned […]

China browses lunar landing spots in race to land on Moon

Not a US flag in sight

Researchers from China are narrowing down the landing sites for the nation’s first crewed mission to the Moon, set to take place before 2030.…

MenuetOS 1.59.20 released

MenuetOS, the operating system written in x86-64 assembly, has released two new versions since we last talked about it roughly two months ago. In fact, I’m not actually sure it’s just two, or more, or fewer, since it seems sometimes releases disappear entirely from the changelog, making things a bit unclear. Anyway, since the last time we talked about MenuetOS, it got improvements to videocalling, networking, and HDA audio drivers, and a few other small tidbits.

RSS dulls the pain of the modern web

Feeds are alive, well, and can help deshittify things

opinion  A couple of timely blog posts remind us that RSS is alive, well, and can help you resist enshittification of the Web.…

'AI brain fry' affects employees managing too many agents

Three agents is about all we can handle

As AI adoption in the workplace accelerates, many people find themselves in a position where babysitting bots and agents is a significant part of their day. Those people are feeling a bit like AI has fried their brains. …

La NASA compartirá información actualizada sobre la evaluación de aptitud para el vuelo de Artemis II

Read this media advisory in English here. La NASA ofrecerá una rueda de prensa a las 3 p.m. EDT (hora del este) del jueves 12 de marzo para dar a conocer el progreso de la misión tripulada Artemis II alrededor de la Luna. La rueda de prensa tendrá lugar en el Centro Espacial Kennedy de la […]

Microsoft 365 confirms new premium tier, stuffed with AI and few discounts

E7 arrives with a hefty price. Got to keep those shareholders happy

Microsoft has finally confirmed that its AI-centric E7 subscription tier - where it licenses AI agent agents like employees - will debut on May 1 for an eye-watering $99 per user per month (pupm).…

EV charger biz ELECQ zapped by ransomware crooks, customer contact data stolen

An attack on the company’s AWS platform may have exposed customers' names and home addresses

Exclusive  ELECQ, maker of smart electric vehicle (EV) chargers, is warning customers that their personal details may have been stolen in a ransomware attack that encrypted and copied user data from its cloud systems.…

NASA to Share Artemis II Flight Readiness Review Update

NASA will host a news conference at 3 p.m. EDT, Thursday, March 12, to highlight progress toward the Artemis II crewed mission around the Moon. The media briefing will take place from the agency’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida after the conclusion of an Artemis II Flight Readiness Review. The news conference will stream live […]

TB 26-03 Flammability Testing Configuration and Approach of Barrier MaterialAssemblies Designed for Space Flight Applications

The NASA Engineering and Safety Center (NESC) partnered with Materials and Processes and Flammability subject matter experts from the Johnson Space Center, White Sands Test Facility, and the Marshall Space Flight Center to design and develop a test for evaluating the effectiveness of material assemblies to serve as a barrier between a potential cabin ignition […]

Webb Studies Cranium Nebula

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 “Exposed Cranium” nebula. Webb captured its unusual features in both near- and mid-infrared light. The nebula was first revealed in infrared light by a predecessor to Webb, NASA’s now-retired Spitzer Space […]

NASA Astronauts to Answer Questions from Students in New York

Students in New York will hear from NASA astronauts Jack Hathaway and Chris Williams as they answer prerecorded science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) questions while aboard the International Space Station. The Earth-to-space call will begin at 12:05 p.m. EDT Wednesday, March 11, and will stream live on the agency’s Learn With NASA YouTube channel. […]

MariaDB backs down on Galera removal after community outcry

But questions remain over long-term commitment to clustering tech in open source

After a couple of years of relative calm, the relationship between MariaDB and its open source foundation was ruffled in February, leaving observers with a few unanswered questions.…

Disorder Drives One of Nature’s Most Complex Machines

Every second, hundreds to thousands of molecules move through thousands of nuclear pores in each of your cells. A new high-definition view reveals the machine in action.

The post Disorder Drives One of Nature’s Most Complex Machines first appeared on Quanta Magazine

LibreOffice learns to speak Markdown in version 26.2

Plain-text fans rejoice as Writer gains native CommonMark import and export

Markdown has been around for more than 20 years, but native support in LibreOffice might suddenly help to make it viable for more people.…

These Intricately Decorated Ostrich Eggshells Suggest Our Ancestors May Have Understood Basic Geometry 60,000 Years Ago

The lines, right angles and other mysterious designs required careful planning and robust cognitive abilities, according to a new study

Scientists Thought These Marsupials Went Extinct 6,000 Years Ago. They Just Found the Animals Alive

The pygmy long-fingered possum and the ring-tailed glider are rare examples of "Lazarus species"

Ex-Meta execs pop up on Nscale board as rent-a-GPU firm raises $2B

Former policy boss Nick Clegg joins Cheryl Sandberg and one-time Yahoo prez Susan Decker

Former British deputy prime minister Sir Nick Clegg has landed a board seat at UK-based neocloud Nscale, alongside fellow ex-Meta exec Sheryl Sandberg and former president of Yahoo Susan Decker.…

Dutch cops warn 100 alleged scammers: Turn yourselves in or we tell Grandma

Two-week deadline to fraudsters to fess up or have their faces plastered across every screen in the country

Dutch national police are taking a novel stand against scammers - 100 suspects now have less than two weeks to hand themselves in or face public shaming.…

Russian cybercrims phish their way into officials' Signal and WhatsApp accounts

Dutch spies flag large-scale campaign to hijack secure messaging accounts

Russian-linked hackers are trying to break into the Signal and WhatsApp accounts of government officials, journalists, and military personnel globally – not by cracking encryption, but by simply tricking people into handing over the keys.…

NASA abandons delayed SLS upper stage for ULA's Centaur V instead

Vulcan rocket hardware drafted in amid Artemis reshuffle but still no word on lander

NASA has selected United Launch Alliance's Centaur V upper stage for the Artemis missions that aim to return astronauts to the lunar surface for the first time since 1972.…

From Cabbages to Countdowns: NASA Marks 100 Years of Modern Rocketry

Snow covered the ground that Tuesday morning 100 years ago, when a college professor and his wife took a morning drive to the family farm a few miles south in Auburn, Massachusetts. Along for the ride, the couple brought two work colleagues — and “Nell.” They may not have known it at the time, but […]

Microsoft Azure CTO set Claude on his 1986 Apple II code, says it found vulns

This isn't just a nostalgia trip – billions of legacy microcontrollers may be at risk

AI can reverse engineer machine code and find vulnerabilities in ancient legacy architectures, says Microsoft Azure CTO Mark Russinovich, who used his own Apple II code from 40 years ago as an example.…

Musk's Grok sparks outrage after chatbot makes offensive jibes about football disasters

UK government slams comments as 'sickening and irresponsible'

Elon Musk's AI chatbot Grok is once again under investigation after it began posting explicit and derogatory remarks about historic football disasters when prompted by users on X.…

Britain spends £180M to work out what time it is

Atomic clocks will tell you when your Waymo is late

The British government is to pour £180 million into ensuring the UK keeps up with the times.…

UK government's Shared Services Strategy is entering the danger zone

Gargantuan ERP and HR overhaul has committed around £1.7B and affects nearly half a million public workers

Opinion  On the eve of its fifth birthday, the UK's Shared Services Strategy for Government got a couple of presents. With around £1.7 billion already committed to tech suppliers and a 2028 deadline looming, the 450,000 civil servants and military personnel set to depend on these systems might wonder what was in store.…

Royal Navy races to arm ships against drone threat

Britain's Ministry of Defence wants a counter-drone system designed, contracted, and delivered within weeks

Britain's Royal Navy is urgently seeking a ship-based counter-drone system and recent world events likely explain why.…

Bug that wiped customer data saved the day – and a contract

Ignorance really was the way to achieve bliss

Who, Me?  Welcome to another working week, and another installment of "Who, Me?" – a weekly reader-contributed column that unearths your errors and reveals how you rebounded afterwards.…

What crocodile bones teach us about dinosaurs

Paleontologists have often determined how old a dinosaur was by counting the growth rings in its bones. Just like with trees, it was thought that each ring corresponded to a single year of age. But researchers who studied crocodiles at an outdoor recreation center near Cape Town appear to have poked a hole in that approach. In the crocodiles, which are some of the closest living relatives of dinosaurs, there was more than one growth ring laid down per year. The results contribute to a growing debate over the best way to age animals.

Read more of freelance science reporter Ari Daniel’s story here .

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

Lenovo, Nintendo sue US government seeking tariff refunds

Tech-adjacent Dyson, Epson, and Whoop also have a crack

World War Fee  Tech companies have started suing the US government to seek repayment of tariffs that the Supreme Court recently declared unconstitutional.…

NASA’s asteroid defence mission slowed targets by 1.7 inches per hour

You gotta start somewhere, and in this case astroboffins would have been nowhere without help from intrepid volunteers

NASA has published new analysis of its 2022 planetary defense test that suggests the mission slowed down the target asteroids, albeit infinitesimally.…

Lake Coatepeque

Set amid El Salvador’s modern, active volcanic landscape, tranquil blue waters fill a caldera formed by ancient eruptions.

Iran is the first out-loud cyberwar the US has fought

Cyber is no longer the hush-hush thing it used to be, as team Trump invades Iran with hackers taking the lead

Kettle  Unlike previous military conflicts, the cyber domain has been front and center since the Trump administration invaded Iran, upending the traditionally quiet role played by hackers in military conflicts.…

Beijing warns of more chip supply worries after Nexperia China claims it was cut off from SAP

PLUS: Indonesia joins kids social media ban; China frets about AI job impacts; India’s PC market fails to launch, again; And more

China’s Ministry of Commerce has warned of further disruption to the global semiconductor supply chain after Dutch chipmaker Nexperia cut access to some of its systems for Chinese staff.…

FBI is investigating breach that may have hit its wiretapping tools

PLUS: Europol takes down two crime gangs; LastPass users phished (again); Crooks increase crypto hauls; And more

Infosec In Brief  The FBI is investigating a breach of its systems which reportedly affected systems related to wiretapping and surveillance.…

AI agents now help attackers, including North Korea, manage their drudge work

Crims 'will do what gets them their objective easiest and fastest,' Microsoft threat intel boss tells The Reg

interview  AI agents allow cybercriminals and nation-state hackers to outsource the "janitorial-type work" needed to plan and carry out cyberattacks, according to Sherrod DeGrippo, Microsoft's GM of global threat intelligence. North Korea is taking advantage.…

Bundle of human neurons hooked to silicon learns to stumble through Doom

What hath science wrought?

A clump of living human brain cells wired into a silicon chip has answered the internet's most important computing question: yes, it can run Doom.…

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 first 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 supposedly 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 long list of 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 pore 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.…