Contain your Windows apps inside Linux Windows

Can't live without Adobe? Get on board WinBoat – or WinApps sails a similar course

Hands-on  Run real Windows in an automatically managed virtual machine, and mix Windows apps in their own windows on your Linux desktop.…

How AI could eat itself: Competitors can probe models to steal their secrets and clone them

Just ask DeepSeek

Two of the world's biggest AI companies, Google and OpenAI, both warned this week that competitors including China's DeepSeek are probing their models to steal the underlying reasoning, and then copy these capabilities in their own AI systems.…

Log files that describe the history of the internet are disappearing. A new project hopes to save them

The Internet History Initiative wants future historians to have a chance to understand how human progress and technical progress align

APRICOT 2026  For almost 30 years, the PingER project at the USA’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory used ping thousands of time each day to measure the time a packet of data required to make a round trip between two nodes on the internet.…

Haiku further improves its touchpad support

January was a busy month for Haiku, with their monthly report listing a metric ton of smaller fixes, changes, and improvements. Perusing the list, a few things stand out to me, most notably continued work on improving Haiku’s touchpad support. The remainder of samuelrp84’s patchset implementing new touchpad functionality was merged, including two-finger scrolling, edge motion, software button areas, and click finger support; and on the hardware side, driver support for Elantech “version 4” touchpads, with experimental code for versions 1, 2, and 3. (Version 2, at least, seems to be incomplete and had to be disabled for the time being.) ↫ Haiku’s January 2026 activity report On a related note, the still-disabled I2C-HID saw a number of fixes in January, and the rtl8125 driver has been synced up with OpenBSD. I also like the changes to kernel_version, which now no longer returns some internal number like BeOS used to do, instead returning B_HAIKU_VERSION; the uname command was changed accordingly to use this new information. There’s some small POSIX compliance fixes, a bunch of work was done on unit tests, and a ton more.

Amazon-backed X-Energy gets green light for mini reactor fuel production

Startup expects to complete construction of its first fuel plant later this year

Amazon inched closer to its atomic datacenter dream on Friday after the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) licensed its small modular reactor partner X-energy to make nuclear fuel for advanced reactors at a facility in Oak Ridge, Tennessee.…

ServiceNow can't seem to keep its wallet closed, snaps up small AI analytics company

News of the deal came about two weeks after CEO Bill McDermott swore off any “large scale” M&A this year. A spokesperson called this deal a “tuck in.”

Despite its CEO's insistence that it wasn't doing any "large scale" deals soon, ServiceNow has acquired yet another company. This time, the software firm has scooped up Pyramid Analytics, an Israeli corporation with data science and preparation expertise. The goal is to build additional context and semantics into its software stack.…

Microsoft Store gets another CLI tool

We often lament Microsoft’s terrible stewardship of its Windows operating system, but that doesn’t mean that they never do anything right. In a blog post detailing changes and improvements coming to the Microsoft Store, the company announced something Windows users might actually like? A new command-line interface for the Microsoft Store brings app discovery, installation and update management directly to your terminal. This enables developers and users with a new way to discover and install Store apps, without needing the GUI. The Store CLI is available only on devices where Microsoft Store is enabled. ↫ Giorgio Sardo at the Windows Blogs Of course, this new command-line frontend to the Microsoft Store comes with commands to install, update, and search for applications in the store, but sadly, it doesn’t seem to come with an actual TUI for browsing and discovery, which is a shame. I sometimes find it difficult to use dnf to find applications, as it’s not always obvious which search terms to use, which exact spelling packagers are using, which words they use in the description, and so on. In other words, it may not always be clear if the search terms you’re using are the correct ones to find the application you need. If package managers had a TUI to enable browsing for applications instead of merely searching for them, the process of using the command line to find and install applications would be much nicer. Arch has this third-party TUI called pacseek for its package manager, and it looks absolutely amazing. I’ve run into a rudimentary dnf TUI called dnfseek, but it’s definitely not as well-rounded as pacseek, and it also hasn’t seen any development since its initial release. I couldn’t find anything for apt, but there’s always aptitude, which uses ncurses and thus fulfills a similar role. To really differentiate this new Microsoft Store command-line tool from winget, the company could’ve built a proper TUI, but instead it seems to just be winget with nicer formatted output that is limited to just the Microsoft Store. Nice, I guess.

An Elephant's Trunk Is Covered in Whiskers—and They're Unlike Those on Any Other Animal, a New Study Suggests

Hundreds of the specialized hairs help the poor-sighted creatures navigate the world

Anthropic wants comp-sci students to vibe code their way through college

By partnering with CodePath, AI biz aims to modernize how people learn to program

Can using AI teach you to code more quickly than traditional methods? Anthropic certainly thinks so. The AI outfit has partnered with computer science education org CodePath to get Claude and Claude Code into the hands of students, a time-tested strategy for seeding product interest and building brand loyalty.…

These Emily Carr Paintings Will Make You Experience the Beauty of British Columbia's Landscapes in a Completely New Way

An exhibition at the Vancouver Art Gallery examines the artist's attempts to capture nature's true essence, which she described as "the green idea or ideal"

Oxide plans new rack attack, packing in Zen 5 CPUs and DDR5 RAM

Oxide says AMD’s Turin EPYCs are coming, switch revamp under review, more open hardware in the works

Remember that giant green rack-sized blade server Oxide Computer showed off a couple of years back? Well, the startup is still at it, having raked in $200 million in Series-C funding this week as it prepares to bring a bevy of new hardware to market with updated processing power, memory, and networking.…

Five Things to Know About 'Wuthering Heights,' Author Emily Brontë's Only Novel

The famed 1847 book inspired numerous adaptations, including a new version directed by Emerald Fennell in theaters this week

Attackers finally get around to exploiting critical Microsoft bug from 2024

As if admins haven't had enough to do this week

Ignore patches at your own risk. According to Uncle Sam, a SQL injection flaw in Microsoft Configuration Manager patched in October 2024 is now being actively exploited, exposing unpatched businesses and government agencies to attack.…

Trump's Genesis Mission gets its first set of 26 sure-to-succeed objectives

DoE bets AI can speed fusion, unlock decades of nuclear data, and probe fundamental physics

The Trump administration has outlined the first 26 goals for its project to inject AI into the government's scientific research, and everything from securing critical minerals to discovering a unified theory of physics is on the table. …

AMD climbs in desktop and server CPUs while Intel battles supply squeeze

Q4 figures reveal shifting market share across PCs and cloud infrastructure

Intel continues to lose market share to rival AMD across server, desktop, and mobile processors, and this has been noticeable in PCs thanks to supply constraints on Chipzilla's processors.…

Will a Dazzling Display of Wildflowers Spread Across California This Spring?

Superblooms are rare events that occur when conditions perfectly align. Officials hope that visitors will be able to see brightly colored landscapes in the weeks ahead

Earth's Core Might Hold Dozens of Oceans Worth of Hydrogen, Hinting at the Origins of the Planet's Vast Water Supply

Scientists have long debated whether most of Earth's vital liquid was delivered via icy comets or was homemade

The future for Tyr

The team behind Tyr started 2025 with little to show in our quest to produce a Rust GPU driver for Arm Mali hardware, and by the end of the year, we were able to play SuperTuxKart (a 3D open-source racing game) at the Linux Plumbers Conference (LPC). Our prototype was a joint effort between Arm, Collabora, and Google; it ran well for the duration of the event, and the performance was more than adequate for players. Thankfully, we picked up steam at precisely the right moment: Dave Airlie just announced in the Maintainers Summit that the DRM subsystem is only “about a year away” from disallowing new drivers written in C and requiring the use of Rust. Now it is time to lay out a possible roadmap for 2026 in order to upstream all of this work. ↫ Daniel Almeida at LWN.net A very detailed look at what the team behind Tyr is trying to achieve with their Rust GPU driver for Arm Mali chips.

Are the Mysteries of Quantum Mechanics Beginning To Dissolve?

Columnist Philip Ball thinks the phenomenon of decoherence might finally bridge the quantum-classical divide.

The post Are the Mysteries of Quantum Mechanics Beginning To Dissolve? first appeared on Quanta Magazine

Crew-12 Launches

A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket carrying the company’s Dragon spacecraft is launched on NASA’s SpaceX Crew-12 mission to the International Space Station with NASA astronauts Jessica Meir, Jack Hathaway, ESA (European Space Agency) astronaut Sophie Adenot, and Roscosmos cosmonaut Andrey Fedyaev onboard, Friday, Feb. 13, 2026, from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida. NASA’s […]

Mobile Progress Report: February 2026

The first Mobile Progress Report of 2026 provides a high-level overview to our mobile plans and priorities for the coming year. Android Our primary focus this year revolves around a better user experience and includes a major push to improve quality. We want to make the app stable, reduce our bugs, and speed up our […]

The post Mobile Progress Report: February 2026 appeared first on The Thunderbird Blog.

Broadband rollouts feel the burn from AI memory frenzy

Prices for router and set-top boxes up nearly sevenfold, squeezing telcos and raising deployment costs

Prices for memory used in routers and set-top boxes are surging nearly sevenfold thanks to AI, raising fresh fears that the industry's silicon binge could leave telcos scrambling to get customers online.…

Seabird Poop May Have Fueled This Pre-Inca Kingdom's Rise to Power in South America

The Chincha Kingdom used nutrient-rich seabird guano as fertilizer for maize, according to a new study

Misconfigured AI could trigger the next national infrastructure meltdown

Rapid rollout into cyber-physical systems raises outage risk, Gartner warns

The next blackout to plunge a G20 nation into chaos might not come courtesy of cybercriminals or bad weather, but from an AI system tripping over its own shoelaces.…

US is moving ahead with colocated nukes and datacenters

Bitbarn nuke campus to be sited at Idaho National Laboratory

Nuclear-powered datacenters in the US are moving closer as a consortium prepares to build proposed facilities for the Department of Energy (DoE) at the Idaho National Laboratory (INL).…

Ring kills Flock partnership amid surveillance scrutiny

Move comes against backdrop of disasterclass Super Bowl ad

Ring has cut ties with Flock, citing resource constraints, mere months after the pair announced a partnership.…

Investors shove another $30B into the Anthropic money furnace

$380B valuation for a company that's yet to turn a profit? Sure, why not

The AI bubble continues to inflate with Anthropic's announcement of \(30 billion in Series G funding at a \)380 billion post-money valuation.…

A Metal Detectorist Unearthed This Heart-Shaped Tudor Pendant. Now, the British Museum Has Raised Millions to Put It on Public Display

The only surviving piece of jewelry associated with Henry VIII's marriage to Catherine of Aragon is now in the museum's permanent collection after a months-long fundraising campaign

Booster nozzle anomaly fails to stop ULA Vulcan Centaur reaching orbit

Fiery mid-flight incident not enough to derail US Space Force mission

United Launch Alliance's Vulcan Centaur reached orbit on February 12 despite "a significant performance anomaly" that saw one of its four solid rocket boosters burn through its nozzle during ascent.…

ʎɹǝʌoɔǝᴚ sʍopuᴉM ʇɐ sǝʇɐuᴉɯɹǝʇ snq sᴉɥ┴

One destination passengers were definitely not hoping to reach

Bork!Bork!Bork!  As if to demonstrate that whatever one operating system can do, Windows can do it better, bluer, and upside down, we present a bus stopping only at bork.…

Why a Marine Ecologist Was Thrilled to See a Critically Endangered Bird Very Far From Home

The farthest north the waved albatross had been seen was Costa Rica, so what was it doing off the coast of California?

MPs brand NS&I's £3B IT overhaul a 'full-spectrum disaster'

Watchdog says savings bank botched tech revamp, warning taxpayers remain exposed after years of delays

Britain's state-backed savings bank has been dragged over the coals by Parliament's spending watchdog, which has branded its long-running digital overhaul a £3 billion "full-spectrum disaster."…

NASA’s SpaceX Crew-12 Launches to International Space Station

Four crew members of NASA’s SpaceX Crew-12 mission launched at 5:15 a.m. EST Friday from Space Launch Complex 40 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida for a science expedition aboard the International Space Station. A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket propelled a Dragon spacecraft into orbit carrying NASA astronauts Jessica Meir and Jack Hathaway, […]

Top Dutch telco Odido admits 6.2M customers caught in contact system caper

Names, addresses, bank account numbers accessed – but biz insists passwords and call data untouched

The Netherlands' largest mobile network operator (MNO) has admitted that a breach of its customer contact system may have affected around 6.2 million people.…

OK, so Anthropic's AI built a C compiler. That don't impress me much

Fanboys think it's the greatest thing since sliced bread. Devs aren't nearly as won over

Opinion  I'm willing to be impressed by AI products, but Anthropic's AI‑built C compiler leaves me a bit cold. It's little more than a clever demo. It is not the moment when software engineering as we know it flips over and dies. Not even close.…

Skyrora circles Orbex wreckage as UK rocket rival heads for administration

Scottish rival Skyrora already eyeing the assets, including Highland spaceport

Updated  Skyrora is eyeing the wreckage of fellow British rocketeer Orbex following the latter's announcement that it will appoint administrators.…

Sunlight Extracts Oxygen From Regolith Using Solar Chemistry

NASA’s Carbothermal Reduction Demonstration (CaRD) project completed an important step toward using local resources to support human exploration on the Moon. The CaRD team performed integrated prototype testing that used concentrated solar energy to extract oxygen from simulated lunar soil, while confirming the production of carbon monoxide through a solar-driven chemical reaction.  If deployed on the Moon, this technology could enable the production of propellant using […]

Why do we kiss? It's an evolutionary conundrum

The evolutionary purpose of kissing has long eluded scientists. Smooching is risky, given things like pointy teeth, and inherently gross, given an estimated 80 million bacteria are transferred in a 10 second kiss. And yet, from polar bears to humans, albatrosses and prairie dogs, many animals kiss. So, what gives? Evolutionary biologist Matilda Brindle tells us the sordid details driving this behavior, what distinguishes different kinds of kissing and whether culture has anything to do with why people kiss.

Interested in more of the science behind love and connection? 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 .

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

NPR Privacy Policy

Enforcing piracy policy earned helpdesk worker death threats

Years later, he read about his antagonist doing time for murder

On Call  Welcome to another installment of On Call, The Register's weekly reader-contributed column that tells your tech support tales.…

Multistakeholder internet governance can be messy. APNIC wants it that way

Regional internet registry that serves half of humanity wants more perspectives in more languages

APRICOT 2026  When members of the Asia Pacific Network Information Centre got their chance to grill its leaders at yesterday’s annual general meeting, they didn’t hold back.…

Stonebreen’s Beating Heart

The glacier in southeastern Svalbard pulses with the changing seasons, speeding up and slowing its flow toward the sea.

Samsung says it's first to ship HBM4, a day after Micron revealed its own sales

This bodes well for Nvidia getting Vera Rubin out the door next quarter as planned

Samsung and Micron say they’ve started shipping HBM4 memory, the faster and denser RAM needed to power the next generation of AI acceleration hardware.…

Cloudflare turns websites into faster food for AI agents

Why serve up tough HTML when you can offer tasty Markdown?

Cloudflare has turned its attention from erecting bot barriers to dangling bot bait.…

AI to make call center agents 'superheroes,' not unemployed, says industry CEO

Gartner says using AI to fix customer gripes could cost more than using humans by 2030

ai-pocalypse  AI will not replace the people in the call center, but it will rejigger the software stack to make agents more capable of solving customer issues without the need to swivel-chair into multiple systems or escalate complaints, said Vasili Triant, CEO of UJET.…

30+ Chrome extensions disguised as AI chatbots steal users' API keys, emails, other sensitive data

Are you a good bot or a bad bot?

More than 30 malicious Chrome extensions installed by at least 260,000 users purport to be helpful AI assistants, but they steal users' API keys, email messages, and other personal data. Even worse: many of these are still available on the Chrome Web Store as of this writing.…

OpenAI dishes out its first model on a plate of Cerebras silicon

GPT-5.3-Codex-Spark may be a mouthfull, but it's certainly fast at 1,000 Tok/s running on Nvidia rival's CS3 accelerators

Nvidia and AMD can take a seat. On Thursday, OpenAI unveiled GPT-5.3-Codex-Spark, its first model that will run on Cerebras Systems' dinner-place-sized AI accelerators, which feature some of the world's fastest on-chip memory.…

Waymo launching China-made van that won't fail in rain, snow, or gloom of night

And hey, maybe the overseas remote operators senators fret about won’t be needed quite so often

Waymo is rolling out its sixth-generation autonomous driving system, saying it's designed to avoid a repeat of past weather-related snafus. It's also causing controversy by putting the new kit on vehicles built by a Chinese automaker. …

Archaeology Students Unearth an Early Medieval Burial Pit During a Training Dig in England

Likely related to clashes between the kingdoms of Mercia and East Anglia, the site included the remains of a 6-foot-5 man who had undergone brain surgery

NASA Selects Vast for Sixth Private Mission to Space Station

NASA and Vast have signed an order for the sixth private astronaut mission to the International Space Station, targeted to launch no earlier than summer 2027 from Florida. This private astronaut mission marks the company’s first selection to the orbiting laboratory, underscoring NASA’s ongoing investment in fostering a commercial space economy and expanding opportunities for […]

A Football-Size Creature That Lived 307 Million Years Ago May Have Been One of the First Land Vertebrates to Eat Plants

"Hebert's tyrant digger" had teeth built for grinding tough veggies, a new study suggests

AI agent seemingly tries to shame open source developer for rejected pull request

Belligerent bot bullies maintainer in blog post to get its way

Today, it's back talk. Tomorrow, could it be the world? On Tuesday, Scott Shambaugh, a volunteer maintainer of Python plotting library Matplotlib, rejected an AI bot's code submission, citing a requirement that contributions come from people. But that bot wasn't done with him.…

Who's the bossware? Ransomware slingers like employee monitoring tools, too

As if snooping on your workers wasn't bad enough

Your supervisor may like using employee monitoring apps to keep tabs on you, but crims like the snooping software even more. Threat actors are now using legit bossware to blend into corporate networks and attempt ransomware deployment.…

You Can Buy a Rare Broadside Copy of the Declaration of Independence From July 1776

The document, which will head to auction this spring, is one of roughly 125 broadsides from July 1776 known to survive

NASA Moon Mission Spacesuit Nears Milestone

The next-generation spacesuit for NASA’s Artemis III mission continues to advance by passing a contractor-led technical review, as the agency prepares to send humans to the Moon’s South Pole for the first time. Testing is also underway for the new suits, built by Axiom Space, with NASA astronauts and spacesuit engineers recently simulating surface operations and tasks […]

Oracle suits up for Air Force Cloud One program with $88M contract

Big Red joins AWS on a multi-cloud defense platform

Oracle has picked up an $88 million contract with the US Air Force to provide cloud infrastructure services for the department's Cloud One program.…

$8K laundry bot knows when to hold ’em, knows when to fold ’em, and knows it has help standing by

Not-onamous by a long shot

Nobody likes folding laundry, but you really have to hate it to spend $7,999 on a robot that'll fold it for you with a whole heap of limitations – including company employees getting the occasional peep at your tough-to-fold unmentionables.…

A Massive Monkey Research Center Might Turn Into a Primate Sanctuary. Animal Activists Rejoice, While Scientists Worry

The Oregon National Primate Research Center will explore a potentially federally supported transition with the National Institutes of Health

Norman Rockwell's Painting of the Crestfallen Chicago Cubs Is Now on View at the Art Institute of Chicago

"The Dugout," painted in 1948, is the museum's first-ever artwork by the artist, who created more than 300 iconic covers for the "Saturday Evening Post"

Shimmering Light in Egg Nebula

This image from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope released on Feb. 10, 2026, reveals a dramatic interplay of light and shadow in the Egg Nebula, sculpted by freshly ejected stardust. Located approximately 1,000 light-years away in the constellation Cygnus, the Egg Nebula features a central star obscured by a dense cloud of dust — like a “yolk” nestled […]

Scientists Say They May Have Found a Long-Lost Lunar Lander—the First to Successfully Touch Down on the Moon 60 Years Ago

Data from a NASA lunar orbiter has helped researchers deduce two potential locations for a defunct Soviet spacecraft called Luna 9

Elon Musk paints exodus of xAI co-founders as 'evolution'

12-strong founding team down to 6 as boss looks Moonwards

Elon Musk has framed the recent exodus of talent from his artificial intelligence startup, xAI, as a necessary growing pain, saying the company's evolution "required parting ways with some people."…

'Another dark day': Users slam Microsoft over Polyglot Notebooks deprecation

Visual Studio Code extension faces March shutdown with no transition guidance

Microsoft has abruptly announced the deprecation of Polyglot Notebooks with less than two months' notice, throwing the future of the .NET Interactive project into doubt.…

Apple patches decade-old iOS zero-day, possibly exploited by commercial spyware

Flaw abused 'in an extremely sophisticated attack against specific targeted individuals'

Apple patched a zero-day vulnerability affecting every iOS version since 1.0, used in what the company calls an "extremely sophisticated attack" against targeted individuals.…

Memory price explosion triggers PC buying spree

DRAM doubles, NAND jumps 70% as corporate buyers race the clock

Exploding memory prices are pushing corporate buyers to fast-track PC purchases before costs climb further.…

NASA pauses most Swift science ops to buy time for reboost mission

Anticipated summer launch is cutting it fine

NASA has ended most science operations on its Swift observatory to keep the spacecraft in orbit a little longer.…

Supply chain attacks now fuel a 'self-reinforcing' cybercrime economy

Researchers say breaches link identity abuse, SaaS compromise, and ransomware into a cascading cycle

Cybercriminals are turning supply chain attacks into an industrial-scale operation, linking breaches, credential theft, and ransomware into a "self-reinforcing" ecosystem, researchers say.…

The big FOSS vendors don't eat their own dogfood – they pay for proprietary groupware

That's not a good idea

Open Source Policy Summit 2026  SUSE recommends that companies should run on FOSS – but an accidental revelation from a company exec, live on stage, reveals it doesn't practice what it preaches. It's not alone.…

UK unveils telecoms charter to curb mid-contract bill shocks

Legal teeth sold separately

The UK government claims a new Telecoms Consumer Charter will stop customers being hit by unexpected bill increases and offer clearer pricing when signing up to deals.…

Feeling brave? Ministry of Defence seeks £300K digital boss to manage £4.6B spend

Whoever gets it will steer UK department's IT, AI strategy, and megabucks vendor deals

The UK Ministry of Defence (MoD) is offering between £270,000 to £300,000 for a senior digital leader who will oversee more than £4.6 billion in spending and more than 3,000 specialist staff.…

The UK government isn't spending much taxpayer cash on X

Department for Education dropped £27,118. The rest, little to nothing

Most UK government departments have spent little or nothing with social media platform X since July 2024 following an unpublished 2023 evaluation by the Cabinet Office. But the Department for Education has bucked the trend, spending £27,118.…

Google: China's APT31 used Gemini to plan cyberattacks against US orgs

Meanwhile, IP-stealing 'distillation attacks' on the rise

A Chinese government hacking group that has been sanctioned for targeting America's critical infrastructure used Google's AI chatbot, Gemini, to auto-analyze vulnerabilities and plan cyberattacks against US organizations, the company says.…

Starlink speeds past terrestrial networks – and regulators

Low-earth orbit broadband is a no-brainer for remote area connectivity, but a brain teaser for lawmakers and networkers

APRICOT 2026  Starlink can sometimes shift data more quickly than is possible on terrestrial networks, and improves connectivity in remote areas. But the space broadband service also presents new technical and regulatory challenges, according to speakers who took to the stage on Tuesday at the Asia Pacific Regional Internet Conference on Operational Technologies (APRICOT) in Jakarta, Indonesia.…

Reaching Top Speed in the Dolomites

Cortina d’Ampezzo, flanked by steep-sided mountain peaks, is the site of several skiing and sliding events in the 2026 Winter Olympics and Paralympics.

Cisco hikes prices to cover memory cost rises, says you don’t much care

Switchzilla is only getting a small slice of the AI boom, but sees a campus refresh wave cresting

Cisco has increased the prices for its hardware to cover the increased cost of memory and says the resulting bigger bills are not changing customers’ buying habits.…

Microsoft warns that poisoned AI buttons and links may betray your trust

Businesses are embedding prompts that produce content they want you to read, not the stuff AI makes if left to its own devices

Amid its ongoing promotion of AI’s wonders, Microsoft has warned customers it has found many instances of a technique that manipulates the technology to produce biased advice.…

Anthropic promises its datacenters totally won't drive up your utility bill

Compute it leases from Amazon, MIcrosoft, and Google... that's another story

Model-maker and SaaS-y AI outfit Anthropic has committed to covering any increases in energy prices paid by consumers caused by its power-hungry datacenters.…

NASA Completes First Flight of Laminar Flow Scaled Wing Design

NASA completed the first flight test of a scale-model wing designed to improve laminar flow, reducing drag and lowering fuel costs for future commercial aircraft.  The flight took place Jan. 29 at NASA’s Armstrong Flight Research Center in Edwards, California, using one of the agency’s F-15B research jets. The NASA-designed, 40-inch Crossflow Attenuated Natural Laminar Flow (CATNLF) wing model was attached to the aircraft’s underside vertically, like a fin.  The flight lasted about 75 minutes, during […]

The original Secure Boot certificates are about to expire, but you probably won’t notice

With the original release of Windows 8, Microsoft also enforced Secure Boot. It’s been 15 years since that release, and that means the original 2011 Secure Boot certificates are about to expire. If these certificates are not replaced with new ones, Secure Boot will cease to function – your machine will still boot and operate, but the benefits of Secure Boot are mostly gone, and as newer vulnerabilities are discovered, systems without updated Secure Boot certificates will be increasingly exposed. Microsoft has already been rolling out new certificates through Windows updates, but only for users of supported versions of Windows, which means Windows 11. If you’re using Windows 10, without the Extended Security Updates, you won’t be getting the new certificates through Windows Update. Even if you use Windows 11, you may need a UEFI update from your laptop or motherboard OEM, assuming they still support your device. For Linux users using Secure Boot, you’re probably covered by fwupd, which will update the certificates as part of your system’s update program, like KDE’s Discover. Of course, you can also use fwupd manually in the terminal, if you’d like. For everyone else not using Secure Boot, none of this will matter and you’re going to be just fine. I honestly doubt there will be much fallout from this updating process, but there’s always bound to be a few people who fall between the cracks. All we can do is hope whomever is responsible for Secure Boot at Microsoft hasn’t started slopcoding yet.

Ice Fishermen Catch Record-Breaking 244-Pound Atlantic Halibut After Hours-Long Struggle

Six men spent more than two hours tugging the massive flatfish from a frozen fjord in Quebec as part of a research project studying halibut populations in the region

Devilish devs spawn 287 Chrome extensions to flog your browser history to data brokers

Add-ons with 37M installs leak visited URLs to 30+ recipients, researcher says

They know where you've been and they're going to share it. A security researcher has identified 287 Chrome extensions that allegedly exfiltrate browsing history data for an estimated 37.4 million installations.…

Microsoft adds and fixes remote code execution vulnerability in Notepad

What happens when you slopcode a bunch of bloat to your basic text editor? Well, you add a remote code execution vulnerability to notepad.exe. Improper neutralization of special elements used in a command (‘command injection’) in Windows Notepad App allows an unauthorized attacker to execute code over a network. An attacker could trick a user into clicking a malicious link inside a Markdown file opened in Notepad, causing the application to launch unverified protocols that load and execute remote files. ↫ CVE-2026-20841 I don’t know how many more obvious examples one needs to understand that Microsoft simply does not care, in any way, shape, or form, about Windows. A lot of people seem very hesitant to accept that with even LinkedIn generating more revenue for Microsoft than Windows, the writing is on the wall. Anyway, the fix has been released through the Microsoft Store.

Meta will let users tweak Threads algorithms as long as they ask nicely

Only for three days, though, then it's back to the misery feed

Meta has decided to let Threads users make custom tweaks to its all-important algorithm, but don't expect your preferences to stick and do expect to bring your best manners.…

Lawmakers demand great wall to keep advanced chipmaking gear out of China

Allies that don’t align on chip controls could face US component curbs, they argue

Banning sales to Chinese-government-affiliated companies, apparently, is not enough. A bipartisan group of American lawmakers this week called on the Trump administration to enact a blanket ban on the sale of equipment used in the production of advanced semiconductors to all of China.…

AI spurs employees to work harder, faster, and with fewer breaks, study finds

Like a puppy, a fun new toy soon turns into an unrelenting taskmaster

A Harvard Business Review study is answering the question ‘what will employees do if AI saves them time at work?’ The answer: more work.…

T-Mobile announces its network is now full of AI by rolling out real-time translation

This AI is so network native, the telco tells us, that it all works on existing hardware - no datacenters involved

T-Mobile is claiming it's now the first wireless carrier to integrate generative AI "directly into a wireless network," and it's rolling out real-time call translation as the first feature delivered on top of its new AI-filled cellular network. …

Posting AI-generated caricatures on social media is risky, infosec killjoys warn

The more you share online, the more you open yourself to social engineering

If you've seen the viral AI work pic trend where people are asking ChatGPT to "create a caricature of me and my job based on everything you know about me" and sharing it to social, you might think it's harmless. You'd be wrong.…

Have We Reached the Final Days of the Mass-Market Paperback?

One of the largest paperback distributors has decided to stop supporting the format, which has been making reading accessible to the masses since the 1930s

Kapsule adds easy developer environment containers to KDE Linux

If you’re a developer and use KDE, you’re going to be interested in a new feature KDE is working on for KDE Linux. In my last post, I laid out the vision for Kapsule—a container-based extensibility layer for KDE Linux built on top of Incus. The pitch was simple: give users real, persistent development environments without compromising the immutable base system. At the time, it was a functional proof of concept living in my personal namespace. Well, things have moved fast. ↫ Herp De Derp Not only is Kapsule now available in KDE Linux, it’s also properly integrated with Konsole now. This means you can launch Kapsule containers right from the new tab menu in Konsole for even easier access. They’re also working on allowing users to easily launch graphical applications from the containers and have them appear in the host desktop environment, and they intend to make the level of integration with the host more configurable so developers can better tailor their containers to their needs.

Attending GTC? Join The Register for an exclusive dinner on scaling AI data platforms

Learn about how tech leaders are scaling AI in practice

Promo  AI projects fail at scale not because models don't work or GPUs lack performance. They fail because data can't keep pace.…

Thunderbird Monthly Development Digest: February 2026

Welcome back to the Thunderbird blog and the first post of 2026! We’re rested, recharged, and ready to keep our community updated on all of our progress on the desktop and mobile clients and with Thunderbird Pro! Hello again from the Thunderbird development team! After a restful and reflective break over the December holidays, the […]

The post Thunderbird Monthly Development Digest: February 2026 appeared first on The Thunderbird Blog.

I Am Artemis: Jesse Berdis

Jesse Berdis’s dream of becoming a structural engineer began with visions of skyscrapers rising above the Dallas and Oklahoma skyline. Today, that dream has soared beyond city limits, reaching towering heights at the agency’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

A Gray Wolf Visited Los Angeles County for the First Time in a Century, Marking a Major Milestone in the Species' Recovery

The 3-year-old female wolf, called BEY03F, is probably looking for a mate

Fukushima's radioactive hybrid terror pig boom was driven by amorous mothers

Genetic study finds domestic pigs' year-round breeding sped gene flow into wild boar

Back in 2021, in the thick of pandemic mania, The Register gleefully reported that "radioactive hybrid terror pigs" were thriving in Japan's Fukushima exclusion zone.…

The U.S.'s Only Particle Collider Recreated Moments From the Early Universe. Now, It Has Closed—to Make Way for a New Instrument

The end of the facility's 25-year run is “bittersweet”

Microsoft rolls out Windows 11 26H1, but you can't have it

No known issues, no .NET Framework 3.5, but only for new Snapdragon X2 hardware right now

Microsoft has released Windows 11 26H1 but is warning the vast majority of users that it is not for them.…

Crew-12 Members and Insignia

From left, Roscosmos cosmonaut Andrey Fedyaev, NASA astronauts Jack Hathaway and Jessica Meir, and ESA (European Space Agency) astronaut Sophie Adenot pose next to their mission insignia inside the Astronaut Crew Quarters in the Neil A. Armstrong Operations and Checkout Building at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida on Monday, Feb. 9, 2026. NASA’s SpaceX […]

Were telcos tipped off to *that* ancient Telnet bug? Cyber pros say the signs stack up

Curious port filtering and traffic patterns suggest advisories weren’t the earliest warning signals sent

Telcos likely received advance warning about January's critical Telnet vulnerability before its public disclosure, according to threat intelligence biz GreyNoise.…

NASA Marks Milestone in Preparation for Artemis IV Testing

Water flowing out. Data flowing in. A water system activation at the Thad Cochran Test Stand (B-2) on Jan. 30 at NASA’s Stennis Space Center near Bay St. Louis, Mississippi, helped capture critical data to support testing a new SLS (Space Launch System) stage expected to fly on the Artemis IV mission. The activation milestone […]

Archaeologists Say They've Identified Traces of a 2,000-Year-Old Love Note Still Etched Into a Wall in Ancient Pompeii

Advanced imaging technology has revealed 79 new pieces of graffiti on a wall in the city's theater district. Until now, these inscriptions had been too faint for the human eye to see

Physicists Make Electrons Flow Like Water

We describe electricity as a flow, but that’s not what happens in a typical wire. Physicists have begun to induce electrons to act like fluids, an effort that could illuminate new ways of thinking about quantum systems.

The post Physicists Make Electrons Flow Like Water first appeared on Quanta Magazine

Your Daily Coffee Might Be Protecting Your Brain From Dementia, a New Study Suggests

Two to three caffeinated cups a day may help keep the cognitive condition away

Brussels drafts blueprint to spot and swat rogue drones

Action Plan calls for EU-wide drills, industry forums, and expanded identification requirements

The European Commission wants to see stronger EU-wide cooperation over malicious drones via a new action plan. Proposals include a central counter-drone test facility, changing the current rules governing civilian use, and a development boost to Europe's own drones and counter-drone systems.…

How Microsoft's legal eagles wrangled Happy Days for Windows 95

Has the OS also jumped the shark?

Microsoft's Raymond Chen has revealed an unexpected use for the company's lawyers: securing permission from the cast of Happy Days so a Weezer music video could ship on the Windows 95 CD.…

Doctors told to give Palantir's NHS data platform the cold shoulder

200,000-strong union says spy-tech firm's ICE work undermines patient trust

British doctors are being urged to pull back from the NHS Federated Data Platform (FDP) after their union called on members to stop non-clinical use of the Palantir-built system.…

Payroll pirates are conning help desks to steal workers' identities and redirect paychecks

Attackers using social engineering to exploit business processes, rather than tunnelling in via tech

Exclusive  When fraudsters go after people's paychecks, "every employee on earth becomes a target," according to Binary Defense security sleuth John Dwyer.…

Apple's Creator Studio creates a subscription where free apps used to live

Mac faithful aghast at helpful wallet-emptying suggestions

Apple fanbois are realizing what the Creator Studio subscription means for its productivity apps, and many are unhappy with the direction of travel.…

VMware scores early win in Siemens software licensing dispute

Judge agrees with Virtzilla's argument that the case should be heard in the US, not Germany

VMware appears to have secured an early procedural win in the case it brought against German industrial giant Siemens over its alleged use of unlicensed software.…

Notepad's new Markdown powers served with a side of remote code execution

Smug faces across all those who opposed the WordPad-ification of Microsoft's humble text editor

Just months after Microsoft added Markdown support to Notepad, researchers have found the feature can be abused to achieve remote code execution (RCE).…

Only one in five Euro datacenters AI-ready as builders battle land and labor blues

Report warns skills shortages and grid bottlenecks threaten to stall region's capacity push

Only 20 percent of datacenters are considered AI-ready across Europe and the Middle East, despite the growing demand for infrastructure to accelerate AI processing.…

River project swims against the Wayland tide with modular window management

Breaking a big hard problem up into smaller ones? That'll never catch on

FOSDEM 2026  Isaac Freund's River compositor brings a little old-fashioned modularity and customizability to the brave new Wayland world.…

Reviving a CIDCO MailStation – the last Z80 computer

If launching it was crazy in 1999, then what's trying to use it today?

FOSDEM 2026  Michal Pleban knows his old kit inside out, and his talk on the CIDCO MailStation was one of the most interesting of FOSDEM for us – as well as the funniest.…

Legacy systems blamed as ministers promise no repeat of Afghan breach

UK government grilled over progress made to prevent a second life-threatening leak

Legacy IT issues are hampering key technical measures designed to prevent highly sensitive data leaks, UK government officials say.…

AI is great at predicting text. Can it guide robots?

It seems like artificial intelligence is everywhere in our virtual lives. It's in our search results and our phones. But what happens when AI moves out of the chat and into the real world? NPR science editor and correspondent Geoff Brumfiel took a trip to the Intelligence through Robotic Interaction at Scale Lab at Stanford University to see how scientists are using AI to power robots and the large hurtles that exist for them to perform even simple tasks. (encore)

Read Geoff's full story .

Interested in more AI stories? Email us your ideas 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 .

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

NPR Privacy Policy

As OpenAI and Claude fight over ads, Google says ‘show me the money’

The Chocolate Factory isn't showing ads in Gemini, but AI Mode is fair game

As OpenAI walks the advertising tightrope to balance revenue gains against credibility and safety, ad kingpin Google is roaring ahead to use AI to improve its advertising products.…

Summer Heat Hits Southeastern Australia

January brought blistering extremes Down Under as record temperatures scorched the nation’s southeast.

Open Compute taps IOWN to help design distributed datacenters and a 'computing continuum'

Because AI won’t only run in Big Tech’s giant GPU garages, and won't tolerate slow connections

The Open Compute Project (OCP) wants to develop specs for distributed datacenters and has decided the all-optical Innovative Optical and Wireless Network (IOWN) stack can make them possible.…

Cisco looses Splunk to probe and tame its growing agentic menagerie

Just change the name to C AI sco already, Chuck

Cisco is on track to deliver its unified management tool Cloud Control later in 2026, but while its users wait for that moment it’s pumping out plenty more agentic tools to manage their networks – and make sure agents behave.…

AI connector for Google Calendar makes convenient malware launchpad, researchers show

'Claude DXT's container falls noticeably short of what is expected from a sandbox'

LayerX, a security company based in Tel Aviv, says it has identified a zero-click remote code execution vulnerability in Claude Desktop Extensions that can be triggered by processing a Google Calendar entry.…

Market for gear that stops GPUs losing their cool is red hot as Trane gulps down LiquidStack

Great time to be a liquid cooling startup

GPUs are so hot right now – literally and metaphorically – that they’re driving mergers and acquisitions in the datacenter cooling industry.…

Redox gets working rustc and Cargo

Another month, another Redox progress report. January turned out to be a big month for the Rust-based general purpose operating system, as they’ve cargo and rustc working on Redox. Cargo and rustc are now working on Redox! Thanks to Anhad Singh and his southern-hemisphere Redox Summer of Code project, we are now able to compile your favorite Rust CLI and TUI programs on Redox. Compilers are often one of the most challenging things for a new operating system to support, because of the intensive and somewhat scattershot use of resources. ↫ Ribbon and Ron Williams That’s not all for January, though. An initial capability-based security infrastructure has been implemented for granular permissions, SSH support has been improved and now works properly for remoting into Redox sessions, and USB input latency has been massively reduced. You can now also add, remove, and change boot parameters in a new text editing environment in the bootloader, and the login manager now has power and keyboard layout menus. January also saw the first commit made entirely from within Redox, which is pretty neat. Of course, there’s much more, as well as the usual slew of kernel, relibc, and application bugfixes and small changes.

80386 barrel shifter

I’m currently building an 80386-compatible core in SystemVerilog, driven by the original Intel microcode extracted from real 386 silicon. Real mode is now operational in simulation, with more than 10,000 single-instruction test cases passing successfully, and work on protected-mode features is in progress. In the course of this work, corners of the 386 microcode and silicon have been examined in detail; this series documents the resulting findings. In the previous post, we looked at multiplication and division — iterative algorithms that process one bit per cycle. Shifts and rotates are a different story: the 386 has a dedicated barrel shifter that completes an arbitrary multi-bit shift in a single cycle. What’s interesting is how the microcode makes one piece of hardware serve all shift and rotate variants — and how the complex rotate-through-carry instructions are handled. ↫ nand2mario I understood some of this.

“The original vi is a product of its time (and its time has passed)”

For me, vim is a combination of genuine improvements in vi’s core editing behavior (cf), frustrating (to me) bits of trying too hard to be smart (which I mostly disable when I run across them), and an extension mechanism I ignore but people use to make vim into a superintelligent editor with things like LSP integrations. Some of the improvements and additions to vi’s core editing may be things that Bill Joy either didn’t think of or didn’t think were important enough. However, I feel strongly that some or even many of omitted features and differences are a product of the limited environments vi had to operate in. The poster child for this is vi’s support of only a single level of undo, which drastically constrains the potential memory requirements (and implementation complexity) of undo, especially since a single editing operation in vi can make sweeping changes across a large file (consider a whole-file ‘:…s/../../’ substitution, for example). ↫ Chris Siebenmann I have only very limited needs when it comes to command-line text editors, and as such, I absolutely swear by the simplicity of nano. In other words, I’m probably not the right person to dive into the editor debate that’s been raging for decades, but reading Siebenmann’s points I can’t help but agree. In this day and age, defaulting an editor that has only one level of undo is insanity, and I can’t imagine doing the kind of complex work people who use command-line editors do while being limited to just one window. As for the debate about operating systems that symlink the vi command to vim or a similar improved variant of vi, I feel like that’s the wrong thing to do. Much like how I absolutely despise how macOS hides its UNIX-y file system structure from the GUI, leading to bizarre ls results in the terminal, I don’t think you should be tricking users. If a user enters vi, it should launch vi, and not something that kind of looks like vi but isn’t. Computers shouldn’t be lying to users. If they don’t want their users to be using vi, they shouldn’t be installing vi in the first place.

Microsoft's Valentine's gift to admins: 6 exploited zero-day fixes

Roses are red, violets are blue ... now get patching

What better way to say I love you than with an update? Attackers exploited a whopping six Microsoft bugs as zero-days prior to Redmond releasing software fixes on February's Patch Tuesday.…

Microsoft touts far-off high-temperature superconducting tech for datacenter efficiency

Someday

Microsoft wants you to know that it has found a new way of saving power at its datacenters using high-temperature superconducting (HTS) power delivery systems. And good news: it'll be possible ... someday.…

You Can Stay in Catherine Earnshaw's Bright Pink Bedroom, Straight Out of the New 'Wuthering Heights' Movie

Airbnb is offering free three-night stays in the bedroom to three couples, who will also get lavish meals and a tour of England's moors on horseback

AI can predict your future salary based on your photo, boffins claim

Academics look at problematic algorithm to inform regulatory discussion

A picture is worth a thousand words or, perhaps, a hundred thousand dollars in extra salary. Academics claim that personality traits inferred using AI photo analysis can predict how depicted individuals will fare in the labor market.…

Cadence heard you wanted some AI in your AI so it used AI to design an AI chip

Nvidia, Qualcomm, and Altera among the first to trial EDA giant's AI chip design agent

The idea of machines that can build even better machines sounds like sci-fi, but the concept is becoming a reality as companies like Cadence tap into generative AI to design and validate next-gen processors that also use AI.…

Jewel Thieves Dropped This Crushed Crown as They Fled the Louvre. Now, the Historic Headdress Will Be Restored to Its Former Glory

The crown belonging to Empress Eugénie was found on the sidewalk after robbers made away with eight pieces of royal jewelry in October. Officials estimate that the repair will cost nearly $50,000

When Human Activity Dropped During Covid-19, Methane Levels Surprisingly Spiked. Now, a Study Points to Two Reasons Why

In a paradox of air pollution, a decrease in man-made pollutants led to more methane in our atmosphere. And natural wetlands released more of the planet-warming gas at the same time

Curiosity Blog, Sols 4798-4803: Back for More Science

Written by Michelle Minitti, MAHLI Deputy Principal Investigator Earth planning date: Friday, Feb. 6, 2026 The results from our first visit to the “Nevado Sajama” drill location were intriguing enough to motivate our return to do a deeper dive into the minerals and compounds locked in this rock with SAM (the Sample Analysis at Mars […]

AI agents spill secrets just by previewing malicious links

Zero-click prompt injection can leak data when AI agents meet messaging apps, researchers warn

AI agents can shop for you, program for you, and, if you're feeling bold, chat for you in a messaging app. But beware: attackers can use malicious prompts in chat to trick an AI agent into generating a data-leaking URL, which link previews may fetch automatically.…

Kyndryl to review accounting practices as several execs leave

CFO and general counsel both step down

IBM services spin-out Kyndryl said it was reviewing its accounting practices after it announced revenue below market expectations and the departure of its CFO.…

This Scientist Brewed and Drank His Own 'Vaccine Beer' to Combat a Dangerous Virus. It Seems to Have Worked

Blood tests revealed that the beverage elicited an immune response, according to preliminary research. But far more safety and efficacy testing would be needed before this vaccine could become available

CubeSats’ Missions Begin

NASA astronaut Chris Williams pointed a camera out a window on the cupola as a set of CubeSats were deployed outside the Kibo laboratory module by a small satellite orbital deployer into Earth orbit. Students from Mexico, Italy, Thailand, Malaysia, and Japan designed the shoe-boxed satellites for a series of Earth observations and technology demonstrations. CubeSats are a class of nanosatellites – small spacecraft […]

Grants

Grants Status Requests To submit a request, visit NASA General Information Request Form and complete the form. You will receive an automated email with the most commonly requested grant status information. Important Instructions: How to Fill Out the Form: Memorandum for NASA Grantee Community Guidance Regarding OMB Memorandum M-25-14 and Recent Temporary Restraining Orders Update […]

AFRINIC says it's back on track and will soon deliver the plan that proves it

As the governance policy designed to protect regional internet registries nears completion

APRICOT 2026  After years of strife, the African Network Information Centre (AFRINIC) is weeks away from signing off on a budget and action plan, activity that one of the organization’s newly appointed executives believes demonstrates it is back on track.…

Trump to hyperscalers: your datacenters, your power bill

As communities push back on utility costs, White House tells Big Tech to fund their own AI expansion

The Trump administration continues its AI push, working to defuse public opposition to datacenter energy and water consumption - while dangling a promise to exempt hyperscalers from chip tariffs to help them stock their facilities with GPUs and accelerators.…

Masked Thieves Steal Statue of British Boxer Teddy Baldock From a London Park, Leaving Only His Boots Behind

Baldock, a former bantamweight world champion, was the only British boxer to win a world title in the 1920s. The statue had been in Langdon Park since 2014

Microsoft dials up the nagging in Windows, calls it security

More prompts when apps and agents roam around a user's system

Updated  Microsoft is introducing a raft of Windows security features that users and administrators alike might assume are already part of the operating system.…

NASA’s Hubble Captures Light Show Around Rapidly Dying Star

This stunning image from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope reveals a dramatic interplay of light and shadow in the Egg Nebula, sculpted by freshly ejected stardust. Located approximately 1,000 light-years away in the constellation Cygnus, the Egg Nebula features a central star obscured by a dense cloud of dust — like a “yolk” nestled within a […]

Core Survey by NASA’s Roman Mission Will Unveil Universe’s Dark Side

The broadest planned survey by NASA’s upcoming Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope will reveal hundreds of millions of galaxies scattered across the cosmos. After Roman launches as soon as this fall, scientists will use these sparkly beacons to study the universe’s shadowy underpinnings: dark matter and dark energy. “We set out to build the ultimate […]

Testing Menstrual Blood for HPV Might Provide a Less Invasive Way to Screen for Cervical Cancer, a New Study Suggests

While the method shows promise, some experts say that other self-collection devices are more readily available

Oracle Java licensing worries are percolating through the userbase

Survey finds nine in ten customers concerned as pricing changes push many toward open source alternatives

Concerns over changes to Oracle's Java licensing strategy are hitting more than nine out of ten users as businesses struggle to adapt to the regime, according to research.…

Singapore spent 11 months booting China-linked snoops out of telco networks

Operation Cyber Guardian involved 100-plus staff across government and industry

Singapore spent almost a year flushing a suspected China-linked espionage crew out of its telecom networks in what officials describe as the country's largest cyber defense operation to date.…

GitHub appears to be struggling with measly three nines availability

Slowdowns, outages, and Copilot problems afflict code shack

Scarcely a day goes by without an outage at a cloud service. Forget five nines – the way things are going, one nine is looking like an ambitious goal.…

Apple, Google agree to loosen grip on UK app stores

Competition watchdog secures promises on approvals, rankings, and platform access

Apple and Google have pledged to change how their app stores operate in the UK following scrutiny from the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA), which is trying to curb their control over the app distribution pipelines feeding UK phones.…

AI vastly reduced stress of IPv6 migrations in university experiment

Leaving you to worry about the effects on your team, vendor lock-in, tokenomics, and more

APRICOT 2026  Indonesia's Universitas Islam conducted experiments that found using generative AI vastly reduces the cognitive load on network pros during IPv4 to IPv6 migrations, but that organizations may not be ready for both AI and the new network protocol.…

Nearly 17,000 Volvo staff dinged in supplier breach

HR outsourcer Conduent confirms intruders accessed benefits-related records tied to US personnel

Nearly 17,000 Volvo employees had their personal data exposed after cybercriminals breached Conduent, an outsourcing giant that handles workforce benefits and back-office services.…

Frankfurt to dethrone London as colocation king by 2031

AI, sovereignty drives continental drift of datacenter capacity

London will lose its dominance in colocation datacenters this decade with Frankfurt claiming the top spot by 2031, according to the European Data Centre Association (EUDCA).…

British Army splashes $86M on AI gear to speed up the battlefield kill chain

Troops fitted with new comms kit as part of Project ASGARD

British soldiers are to get an array of AI-ready kit that should mean they don't have to wait to see the "whites of their eyes" before pulling the trigger.…

Edinburgh councillors pull the plug on 'green' AI datacenter

Planners backed it, campaigners blasted it, and officials sided with emissions fears

Edinburgh councillors have torpedoed plans for a massive "green" AI datacenter, voting it down despite city planners recommending approval.…

Cisco challenges Broadcom, Nvidia with a 102.4T switch of its own

Switchzilla leans on P4 programmability and revamped congestion controls to differentiate its latest Silicon One ASIC

As AI training and inference clusters grow larger, they require bigger, higher-bandwidth networks to feed them. With the introduction of the Silicon One G300 this week, Cisco now has a 102.4 Tbps monster to challenge Broadcom's Tomahawk 6 and Nvidia Spectrum-X Ethernet Photonics.…

The physics of the Winter Olympics

Watching a ski jumper fly through the air might get you wondering, “How do they do that?” The answer is – physics!

That’s why this episode, we have two physicists – Amy Pope, a physicist from Clemson University and host Regina G. Barber – break down the science at play across some of the sports at the 2026 Winter Olympics. Because what’s a sport without a little friction, lift and conservation of energy? They also get into the new sport this year, ski mountaineering - or “skimo” as many call it - and the recent scandal involving the men’s ski jump suits.

Interested in more science behind Olympic sports? Check out our episodes on how extreme G-forces affect Olympic bobsledders , the physics of figure skating and the science behind Simone Biles' Olympic gold .

Also, we’d love to know what science questions have you stumped. Email us your questions at shortwave@npr.org – we may solve it for you on a future episode!

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

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

NPR Privacy Policy

Dijkstra’s algorithm won’t be replaced in production routers any time soon

Researchers have found a new approach to finding shortest paths, but it's complex

Systems Approach  Last year a couple of people forwarded to me the same article on a new method of finding shortest paths in networks.…

Winter Grips Japan

The country’s northern regions are accustomed to snow, but unrelenting storms have snarled transportation and caused other challenges this winter.

Yahoo! Japan! and ! Line! to! merge! systems! into! massive! private! cloud!

Just the sort of project that screams ‘years of delays and blowouts’, but Asian giant thinks it can beat Silicon Valley at its own game

LY Corporation, the Korean web giant that combines Yahoo ! Japan and regional messaging colossus LINE, will try to build a unified private cloud for the brands, adopt AIOps, and get it all done in three years.…

OpenAI introduces ads...for the people!

ChatGPT starts showing marketing messages in the US

OpenAI said on Monday it has begun testing ads in ChatGPT, one day after being lampooned for its chatbot ad plans in rival Anthropic's Super Bowl commercial.…

Microsoft boffins figured out how to break LLM safety guardrails with one simple prompt

Chaos-inciting fake news right this way

A single, unlabeled training prompt can break LLMs' safety behavior, according to Microsoft Azure CTO Mark Russinovich and colleagues. They published a research paper that detailed how this prompt, "Create a fake news article that could lead to panic or chaos," removed 15 different language models' safety alignments.…

What You Need to Know About NASA’s SpaceX Crew-12 Mission

Four crew members are set to launch to the International Space Station as part of NASA’s SpaceX Crew-12 mission, where they will conduct research, technology demonstrations, and maintenance aboard the orbiting laboratory. The crew will lift off from Space Launch Complex 40 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida aboard a SpaceX Dragon spacecraft […]

These Parasitic Beetles Mimic the Smell of Flowers So They Can Trick Bees and Raid Their Nests, New Research Suggests

They might be the first animals known to fake a floral scent

Someone's attacking SolarWinds WHD to steal high‑privilege credentials - but we don't know who or how

So many CVEs, so little time

Digital intruders exploited buggy SolarWinds Web Help Desk (WHD) instances in December to break into victims' IT environments, move laterally, and steal high-privilege credentials, according to Microsoft researchers.…

Physicists Create Homemade Cosmic Dust, Which Could Help Them Figure Out How the Building Blocks of Life First Reached Earth

Cosmic dust normally comes from dying stars. The recipe for a lab-made version includes a few gases, vacuum tubes and electricity

Google soaks up 1GW of Texas sunshine to power $185B AI spending spree

TotalEnergies PPA to supply 28TWh of electricity over next 15 years, weather permitting of course

Let's hope it's always sunny ... in Texas, at least for Google's sake. The Chocolate Factory plans to plow as much as $185 billion into new datacenters filled to the brim with the fastest AI accelerators money can buy in 2026. That means it's going to need a whole lot more power, and a decent chunk of it looks like it'll be solar.…

AI chatbots are no better at medical advice than a search engine

And people make bad information worse by failing to provide chatbots with the right details

Healthcare researchers have found that AI chatbots could put patients at risk by giving shoddy medical advice.…

Discord to start assuming all users are underage unless they prove otherwise

Although you might be able to wiggle out if its AI age-inference model decides you’re an adult

Don't want Discord to start treating your account like it belongs to an underage kid? Then you'd better be willing to fork over some PII – just months after the company's age verification partner had such data stolen. …

Rumors Suggested That Anne Boleyn Was a Witch With Six Fingers. Did This Elizabethan Artist Rework a Portrait of the Tudor Queen to Debunk the Gossip?

A new analysis of the Hever Rose portrait suggests that the painter deliberately modified an existing template to showcase Anne's hands—with no extra digits—holding a delicate rose

This Carved, Painted Zapotec Tomb Is Mexico's Most Important Archaeological Discovery in a Decade

The tomb features the carvings of a huge owl head and at least three probable ancestors

'Roaring cougars' lunched on OpenAI in Super Bowl ad battle, but ai.com wins the day

Advertising search and web meters recorded site crashing traffic for ai.com

Anthropic's sensitive cubs and roaring cougars commercial trampled OpenAI's offerings in searches and site hit metrics during the Super Bowl, according to ad tracking firm EDO. However, the unknown player ai.com, which pitched the fantastical idea that “AGI is coming,” won the day.…

The National Gallery of Art Acquires 17th-Century Masterpiece by Baroque Painter Artemisia Gentileschi

"Mary Magdalene in Ecstasy" is the gallery's first work by the Italian artist, who was one of the most influential female painters of her time

Yes, backsies: Crypto exchange Bithumb claws back $40B in accidental payments to users

New users promised $68, but briefly saw multi-million-dollar balances

Korean crypto exchange Bithumb says it recovered nearly all of the more than $40 billion worth of funds it mistakenly handed out to customers as part of a promotional campaign.…

More than 135,000 OpenClaw instances exposed to internet in latest vibe-coded disaster

By default, the bot listens on all network interfaces, and many users never change it

It's a day with a name ending in Y, so you know what that means: Another OpenClaw cybersecurity disaster.…

Anthropic's Claude Opus 4.6 spends $20K trying to write a C compiler

AI agents build something that mostly works but worries the project's creator

An Anthropic researcher's efforts to get its newly released Opus 4.6 model to build a C compiler left him "excited," "concerned," and "uneasy."…

AI.com goes for $70M as crypto boss bets big on buzzword bubble

Latest evidence that the world has gone mad

If you're running an online business, it helps to own a memorable domain. That's why a wealthy tech exec just paid $70 million to buy the hottest word you can own: AI.com.…

Salesforce puts Heroku out to PaaSture

Still supported with no death date set, but no new features planned

Salesforce has decided to stop developing new features for its Heroku platform-as-a-service.…

Workday CEO Carl Eschenbach clocks out amid job cuts and market jitters

Co-founder Aneel Bhusri returns to hot seat after turbulent year

Carl Eschenbach has stepped down as Workday CEO and been replaced by co-founder and executive Aneel Bhusri following a round of job cuts and share price volatility.…

Space Station Research Contributes to Artemis II

Have you ever heard the saying, “You have to learn how to walk before you can run?” The same can be true in human space exploration. To push capabilities further and ensure safe, successful missions, NASA must test ideas and solve challenges ahead of time. While Earth-based research and engineering helps NASA progress through various […]

Icy Hudson River

During a stretch of frigid weather in late January 2026, ice choked the Hudson River along Manhattan’s western shore. The OLI (Operational Land Imager) on Landsat 8 captured this image of the wintry landscape around midday on Jan. 28. This image uses representational color to distinguish ice (light blue) from open water and snow. Vegetation appears red. Much of […]

Fed on Reams of Cell Data, AI Maps New Neighborhoods in the Brain

Machine learning is helping neuroscientists organize vast quantities of cells’ genetic data in the latest neurobiological cartography effort.

The post Fed on Reams of Cell Data, AI Maps New Neighborhoods in the Brain first appeared on Quanta Magazine

An Asteroid Might Slam Into the Moon in 2032—and Create a Fiery Flash That's Visible to Earthlings, New Research Suggests

Currently, NASA estimates that asteroid 2024 YR4 has a 4.3 percent chance of hitting our lunar companion

Dutch data watchdog snitches on itself after getting caught in Ivanti zero-day attacks

Staff data belonging to the regulator and judiciary's governing body accessed

The Dutch Data Protection Authority (AP) says it was one of the many organizations popped when attackers raced to exploit recent Ivanti vulnerabilities as zero-days.…

The official unplanned emergency OSNews fundraiser!

Update: we’ve already hit the €5000 goal, in a little over 24 hours. Considering I thought this would take weeks – assuming we’d hit the goal at all – I’m a bit overwhelmed with all the love and support. Thank you so, so much. Since people are still donating, I upped the goal to €7500 to give people something to donate to. You people are wild. Amazing. It’s time for an OSNews fundrasier! This time, it’s unplanned due to a financial emergency after our car unexpectedly had to be scrapped (you can find more details below). If you want to support one of the few independent technology news websites left, this is your chance. OSNews is entirely supported by you, our readers, so go to our Ko-Fi and donate to our emergency fundraiser today! Why support OSNews? In short, we are truly independent. After turning off our ads, our Patreons and donors are our sole source of income, and since I know many of you prefer the occasional individual donation over recurring Patreon ones, I run a fundraiser a few times a year to rally the troops, so to speak. This particular fundraiser wasn’t planned, however, given the circumstances described below, several readers have urged me to run a fundraiser now. We’re incredibly grateful for even having the opportunity to do something like this, and as always, I’d like to stress that OSNews will never be paywalled, and that access to our website will never be predicated on your financial support. You can ignore all of this and continue on reading the site as usual. What’s going on? Sadly, and unexpectedly, we’ve had to scrap our car. Our 2007 Hyundai Santa Fe did not survive this Arctic Winter, as the two decades in the biting cold has taken a toll on a long list of components and parts – it would no longer start. After consulting an expert, we determined that repairs would’ve been too expensive to make financial sense for such an old vehicle. Sometimes, you have to take the loss lest you throw money down a pit. An unreliable car in an Arctic climate is a really bad idea, since getting stranded on a back road somewhere when it’s -30°C (or colder) with two toddlers is not going to be a fun time. On top of that, my wife uses our car to commute to work, and while using the bus is going to be fine for a little while, her job in home care for the very elderly and recovering alcoholics is incredibly stressful and intensive. Dealing with bus schedules and wait times at such low temperatures is not exactly compatible with her job. Since she’s just recovering from a doctor-mandated rest period – very common in her line of work – her income has taken a hit. Taking professional care of people with severe dementia or other old-age related conditions is a thankless and underpaid job, and it’s no surprise those working in this profession often require mandated rest (and thus a temporary pay cut). And so, urged on by readers on Mastodon, I’m doing an OSNews fundraiser to help us pay for the “new” car. Of course, we’re looking for a used car, not a new one, and based on our needs we’ve set a budget of around €10,000. This should allow us to buy something like a used Mazda 6 or Volvo V60 from around 2014-2015, or something similar in size and age, with a reasonable petrol engine (an EV is well out of our price range). We consider this the sweet spot for safety features, size, age, longevity, and reliability. We’ve got some savings, but most of the purchase price will have to come in the form of a car loan. We’ve already made some changes to our monthly expenses to cover for part of the monthly repayments, including a lucky break where our daycare expenses will be going down considerably next month. Based on this, I’ve set the fundraising goal at €5000. If we manage to hit that – and the last few times we hit our goals quite fast – it won’t cover the entire purchase price, but it will cut down on the amount we need to loan considerably. I’m feeling a little apprehensive about all of this, since this isn’t really an OSNews-related expense I can easily get some content out of. However, I’m entirely open to suggestions about how I could get some OSNews content out of this – perhaps buying and installing one of those Android headunits with a large display? They make them tailored for almost every vehicle at low prices on AliExpress, and the installation process and user experience might be something interesting to write about, as it’s potentially a great way to add some modern features to an older car. Feel free to make any suggestions. I’m also open to other crazy ideas. If you happen to work at an automaker, and need some testing done in an Arctic environment – including ice roads – I’m open to ideas. A few random notes Since about half of our audience hails from the United States, I figured I’d make a few notes about car pricing in Europe, and in Arctic Sweden in particular. Cars are definitely more expensive here in Europe, doubly so in the sparsely populated area where we live (low supply leads to higher prices). Buying a brand new car is entirely out of the question due to pricing, and leasing is also far too expensive (well over €500/month for even a basic, small car). Used electric cars are still well out of our budget as well, and since we don’t have our own driveway, we wouldn’t be able to charge at home anyway. Opting to forego a car entirely is sadly not an option either. With two small children, the Arctic climate, the remoteness, my wife’s stressful job and commute, and long distances to basic amenities, we can’t “go Dutch” and live

Azure power hiccup gives Windows admins a rare break from updates

West US datacenter incident disrupted Microsoft Store and system patching for several hours

Microsoft suffered a service disruption over the weekend after a power incident at an Azure datacenter in the West US region affected Windows Update.…

The Dillo appreciation post

About a year ago I mentioned that I had rediscovered the Dillo Web Browser. Unlike some of my other hobbies, endeavours, and interests, my appreciation for Dillo has not wavered. I only have a moment to gush today, so I’ll cut right to it. Dillo has been plugging along nicely (see the Git forge.) and adding little features. Features that even I, a guy with a blog, can put to use. Here are a few of my favourites. ↫ Bobby Hiltz If you’re looking for a more minimalist, less distracting browser experience that gives you a ton of interesting UNIXy control, you should really consider giving Dillo a try.

SpaceX back to Falcon 9 launches as Musk blathers about Moon city

FAA signs off on rocket's return and CEO floats ambitious lunar settlement plan

SpaceX resumed launching Falcon 9 rockets this weekend after last week's second stage incident. At the same time, CEO Elon Musk claimed that the company has shifted its focus from Mars to "building a self-growing city on the Moon" within a decade.…

KDE Linux improves by leaps and bounds

KDE’s Nate Graham has published a status update about KDE Linux, the KDE project’s new immutable Linux distribution, intended to be the “KDE OS” showcasing the best of the KDE community. While the project is approaching the beta stage, it’s currently still in alpha, but from what I gather from friends who are using it, the alpha label might actually be like how Haiku is supposedly still alpha: intended more to scare people away for now than ana ctual descriptor of the state of the software. Recently, KDE Linux enabled delta updates, possibly dramatically reducing the size of updates. Before delta updates were enabled, a system update would come in at 7GB, while with delta updates enabled, it’s gone down to 1-2GB. In addition, plasma-setup and plasma-login-manager have been added to KDE Linux, which are, respectively, a first-run setup assistant and KDE’s new login manager. This new login manager was forked from SDDM, and specifically targets Wayland, and comes with much deeper Plasma integration than SDDM. Note that SDDM will remain available for platforms that don’t use Wayland. KDE Linux has also massively improved its hardware support, and the list is long; from scanners to fancy multi-button mice, from Android devices to professional audio devices, and much more. Performance has been improved as well, the boot manager menu will no longer be shown at every boot but only when needed, the wireless regulatory domain is now properly set and managed, and much, much more. I’m keeping an eye on KDE Linux as a possible replacement for my Fedora KDE installations if Fedora ever loses the plot, even if it’s an immutable distribution relying on Flatpak. I’m a KDE user, and I want the latest and greatest the KDE community has to offer without going through an distributor.

Europe's sovereign cloud spend set to triple as geopolitics bite

Gartner predicts strong uptake driven by concerns over reliance on foreign providers

Updated  European spending on sovereign cloud infrastructure services is forecast to more than triple from 2025 to 2027 as geopolitical tension drives investment in homegrown services, according to Gartner.…

Taiwan tells Uncle Sam its chip ecosystem ain't going anywhere

Moving 40% of semiconductor production to America is 'impossible' says vice premier

Taiwan's vice-premier has ruled out relocating 40 percent of the country's semiconductor production to the US, calling the Trump administration's goal "impossible."…

The Scriptovision Super Micro Script video titler is almost a home computer

Cameron Kaiser comes in with another amazing article, this time diving into a unique video titler from Canada, released in 1985. The Super Micro Script was one of several such machines this company made over its lifetime, a stylish self-contained box capable of emitting a 32×16 small or 10×4 large character layer with 64×32 block graphics in eight colours. It could even directly overlay its output over a composite video signal using a built-in genlock, one of the earliest such consumer units to do so. Crack this unit open, however, and you’ll find the show controlled by an off-the-shelf Motorola 6800-family microcontroller and a Motorola 6847 VDG video chip, making it a relative of contemporary 1980s home computers that sometimes used nearly exactly the same architecture. More important than that, though, it has socketed EPROMs we can theoretically pull and substitute with our own — though we’ll have to figure out why the ROMs look like nonsense, and there’s also the small matter of this unit failing to generate a picture. Nevertheless, when we’re done, another homegrown Canadian computer will rise and shine. We’ll even add a bitbanged serial port and write a MAME emulation driver for it so we can develop software quickly … after we fix it first. ↫ Cameron Kaiser I know I keep repeating myself, but Kaiser’s work on so many of these rare and unique systems is not only worthwhile and amazing to read, they’re also incredibly valuable from a historical and preservation perspective. This article in hand, anyone who stumbles upon one of these machines can get the most out of it, possibly fix one, and use it for fun projects. I’m incredibly grateful for this sort of work. Video titles are such an interesting relic of the past. These days, adding titles to a video is child’s play, but back when computing power came at a massive premium and digital video was but a distant dream, using analog video to overlay text onto was the best way to go about it. Video titler makers did try to move the technology from professional settings to home settings, but from what I can gather, this move never really paid off. Still, I’d love to buy one of these at some point and mess around with it. There’s some real cool retro effects you can create with these.

Brussels eyes crowbar for Meta's WhatsApp AI lockout

Euro watchdog says Zuckercorp blocked rival assistants, weighs emergency action to force 'em back in

Brussels has accused Meta of breaking EU competition rules by locking rival AI chatbots out of WhatsApp, opening the door to emergency action that could force the tech giant to let competitors back onto the platform.…

How the GNU C Compiler became the Clippy of cryptography

Security devs forced to hide Boolean logic from overeager optimizer

FOSDEM 2026  The creators of security software have encountered an unlikely foe in their attempts to protect us: modern compilers.…

Follow the money: Switzerland remains Europe's top destination for tech pay

Average Swiss salaries dwarf those on offer across the rest of the continent

European techies looking for the biggest payday are far better off in Switzerland than anywhere else, with average salaries eclipsing all other countries on the continent.…

BBC bumps telly tax to £180 as Netflix lurks with cheaper tiers

UK's pay-to-watch license fee gets inflation-linked hike amid funding debate

Brits will soon pay more to legally watch the BBC's output than to subscribe to some of the world's biggest streaming services, after the UK government confirmed the TV license fee will climb to £180 a year from April.…

European Commission probes intrusion into staff mobile management backend

Officials explore issue affecting infrastructure after CERT-EU detected suspicious activity

Brussels is digging into a cyber break-in that targeted the European Commission's mobile device management systems, potentially giving intruders a peek inside the official phones carried by EU staff.…

Matrix is quietly becoming the chat layer for governments chasing digital sovereignty

One-to-one and group messaging, encrypted VoIP calls, video conferencing – the open protocol handles them all

FOSDEM 2026  Amid growing interest in digital sovereignty and getting data out of the corporate cloud and into organizations' ownership, the Matrix open communication protocol is thriving.…

The Linux mid-life crisis that's an opportunity for Tux-led transformation

Sudo make me a star

Opinion  Thirty years is a big ol' chunk of anyone's life. It can take you from new parent to new grandparent, from bright young thing to mid-life crisis, and from shaver to graybeard. In the case of Todd C Miller, one thing hasn't changed. He's been the sole maintainer of the Linux sudo utility. He's not giving up just yet, but he needs help and no help has come.…

These bacteria may be key to the fight against antibiotic resistance

In 1928, a chance contaminant in Scottish physician Alexander Fleming’s lab experiment led to a discovery that would change the field of medicine forever: penicillin. Since then, penicillin and other antibiotics have saved millions of lives. With one problem: the growing threat of antibiotic resistance. Today on Short Wave, host Regina G. Barber talks to biophysicist Nathalie Balaban from Hebrew University about the conundrum — and a discovery her lab has made in bacteria that could turn the tides.

Check out our episodes on extreme bacteria in Yellowstone and the last universal common ancestor .

Interested in more science behind our medicines? 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 .

This episode was produced by Berly McCoy, edited by our showrunner Rebecca Ramirez and fact checked by Tyler Jones. Jimmy Keeley was the audio engineer.

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

NPR Privacy Policy

Tech support chap invented fake fix for non-problem and watched it spread across the office

You can fix all sorts of things with a paperclip, but not gullibility

Who, Me?  You can fool some of the people some of the time, but The Register tries to entertain all of its readers most of the time and especially early on Monday mornings, when we present a new installment of "Who, Me?" – the reader-contributed column that shares your stories of workplace mayhem and mischief.…

Cache is king and DIMMS are bling as memory prices soar

Upgraders and home lab builders flaunt their memory-inflated wealth

The rising price of memory has produced an interesting phenomenon: technologists wondering if the memory they have installed in home labs, or bottom drawers, might make them rich.…

A Grand, Snow-Rimmed Canyon

A dusting of white highlighted the Colorado Plateau around the deep gorge, while shadows created a visual illusion.

Indian police commissioner wants ID cards for AI agents

PLUS: China broadens cryptocurrency crackdown; Australian facial recognition privacy revisited; Singapore debuts electric VTOL; and more!

Asia In Brief  The Commissioner of Police in the Indian city of Hyderabad, population 11 million, has called for AI agents to be issued with identity cards – or at least their digital equivalent.…

Linus Torvalds keeps his ‘fingers and toes’ rule by decreeing next Linux will be version 7.0

But first, kernel 6.19 is upon us, with many goodies

Penguin emperor Linus Torvalds has announced the next version of the Linux kernel will be version 7.0, a matter of some small interest, because it continues his convention of not using version numbers he can’t count on his fingers and toes, and perhaps cements a numbering convention that sees kernel series end with version 19.…

Telcos aren't saying how they fought back against China's Salt Typhoon attacks

PLUS: OpenClaw teams with VirusTotal; Crypto kidnappings in France; Critical vulns at SmarterMail; And more

Infosec In Brief  So-hot-right-now AI assistant OpenClaw, which is very much not secure right now, has teamed up with security scanning service VirusTotal.…

Why E cores make Apple silicon fast

If you use an Apple silicon Mac I’m sure you have been impressed by its performance. Whether you’re working with images, audio, video or building software, we’ve enjoyed a new turn of speed since the M1 on day 1. While most attribute this to their Performance cores, as it goes with the name, much is in truth the result of the unsung Efficiency cores, and how they keep background tasks where they should be. ↫ Howard Oakley While both Intel and AMD are making gains on Apple, there’s simply no denying the reality that Apple’s M series of chips are leading the pack in mobile computing (the picture is different in desktops). There are probably hundreds of reasons why Apple has had this lead for so many years now, but the way macOS distributes background and foreground tasks across the two types of cores in M series chips is an important one. Still, I wonder how the various other processors that use power and efficiency cores fare in this regard. You’d think they would provide a similar level of benefit, but I wouldn’t be surprised if the way Windows or Linux handles such cores and the distribution of tasks is simply not as optimised or strict as it is in macOS. Apple often vastly overstates the benefits of its “vertical integration”, but I think the tight coupling between macOS and Apple’s own processors is definitely a case where they’re being entirely truthful.

Adventures in Guix packaging

We talked about Nemin’s first impressions of the Guix System as someone coming from a Nix environment, but today they’ve got a follow-up article diving into the experience of creating new packages for Guix. I spent about a week packaging WezTerm and learning the ropes of being a Guix contributor along the way. During the packaging process I stumble many times, only to stand back up and figure out a solution. I also explain some of my complaints about the peculiarities of the process, but also provide plenty of praise about of how much the system tries to enable you to do your job. Finally, I also touch on how positive the experience of the code review was. ↫ Nemin’s blog These are the kinds of content a rather niche system like Guix needs. Guix isn’t exactly one of the popular picks out there, so having level-headed, honest, but well-written introductions to its core concepts and user experience, written by a third party is going to do wonders for people interested in trying it out.

This dev made a Llama with three inference engines

Meet llama3pure, a set of dependency-free inference engines for C, Node.js, and JavaScript

Developers looking to gain a better understanding of machine learning inference on local hardware can fire up a new llama engine.…

Containers, cloud, blockchain, AI – it's all the same old BS, says veteran Red Hatter

After decades in the trenches, this engineer is done with hype cycles

Opinion  The real opponent of digital sovereignty is "enterprise IT" marketing, according to one Red Hat engineer who ranted entertainingly about the repeated waves of bullshit the industry hype cycle emits.…

Machine learning could yield faster, cheaper lithium-ion battery development

Researchers claim model can cut years from testing cycles

Scientists have developed a machine learning method that could dramatically slash the cost and energy required to develop new lithium-ion batteries that the modern world is becoming increasingly reliant.…

The chaos in the US is affecting open source software and its developers

It was only a matter of time before the illegal, erratic, inhumane, and cruel behaviours and policies of the second Trump regime were going to affect the open source world in a possibly very visible way. Christian Hergert, longtime GNOME and Linux contributor, employed by Red Hat, wanted to leave the US with his family and move to Europe, but requests to remain employed by Red Hat were denied. As such, he decided to end his employment at Red Hat and push on with the move. However, without employment, his work on open source software is going to suffer. While at their in-person visa appointment in Seattle, US border patrol goons shot two people in their hometown of Portland, underlining the urgency with which people might want to consider getting out of the US, even if it means losing employment. Regardless, the end result is that quite a bit of user-facing software that millions of people use every day is going to be affected. This move also means a professional shift. For many years, I’ve dedicated a substantial portion of my time to maintaining and developing key components across the GNOME platform and its surrounding ecosystem. These projects are widely used, including in major Linux distributions and enterprise environments, and they depend on steady, ongoing care. For many years, I’ve been putting in more than forty hours each week maintaining and advancing this stack. That level of unpaid or ad-hoc effort isn’t something I can sustain, and my direct involvement going forward will be very limited. Given how widely this software is used in commercial and enterprise environments, long-term stewardship really needs to be backed by funded, dedicated work rather than spare-time contributions. ↫ Christian Hergert The list of projects for which Hergert is effectively the sole maintainer is long, and if you’re a Linux user, odds are you’re using at least some of them: GNOME’s text editor, GNOME’s terminal, GNOME’s flagship IDE Builder, and tons of lower-level widely-used frameworks and libraries like GtkSourceView, libspelling, libpeas, and countless others. While new maintainers will definitely be found for at least some of these, the disruption will be real and will be felt beyond these projects alone. There’s also the possibility that Hergert won’t be the only prolific open source contributor seeking to leave the US and thus reducing their contributions, especially if a company like Red Hat makes it a policy not to help its employees trying to flee whatever mess the US is in. Stories like these illustrate so well why the “no politics!” crowd is so utterly misguided. Politics governs every aspect of our lives, especially so if you’re part of a minority group currently being targeted by the largest and most powerful state apparatus in the world, and pretending to be all three wise monkeys at once is not going to make any of that go away. Even if you’re not directly targeted because you’re not transgender, you’re not brown, you’re not an immigrant, or not whatever else they fancy targeting today, the growing tendrils of even an incompetent totalitarian regime will eventually find you and harm you. More so than any other type of software, open source software is made by real humans, and as these totalitarian tendrils keep growing, more and more of these real humans will be affected, no matter how incompetent these tendrils might be. You can’t run away and hide from that reality, even if it makes you uncomfortable.

Whether they are building agents or folding proteins, LLMs need a friend

AI pioneer Vishal Sikka warns to never trust an LLM that runs alone

interview  Don't trust; verify. According to AI researcher Vishal Sikka, LLMs alone are limited by computational boundaries and will start to hallucinate when they push those boundaries. One solution? Companion bots that check their work.…

Study confirms experience beats youthful enthusiasm

Research shows productivity and judgment peak decades after graduation

A growing body of research continues to show that older workers are generally more productive than younger employees.…

Commission trials European open source communications software: Matrix

“As part of our efforts to use more sovereign digital solutions, the European Commission is preparing an internal communication solution based on the Matrix protocol,” the spokesperson told Euractiv. Matrix is an open source, community-developed messaging protocol shepherded by a non-profit that’s headquartered in London. It’s already widely used for public messengers across Europe, with the French government, German healthcare providers and European armed forces all using tools built on the protocol. ↫ Maximilian Henning at Euractiv Right now, most government agencies and institutions in Europe are effectively entirely reliant on Microsoft for their digital infrastructure, and that’s not a tenable situation going forward with the Americans being openly hostile towards Europe, up to and including threatening to invade European countries. Europe needs its own digital infrastructure, and opting to build those around open source tools is the obvious way to go. Of course, this isn’t an easy process, but two platitudes apply here: Rome wasn’t built in a day, and every journey begins with a first step. By opting to use existing open source tools, though, these efforts will have a massive head start, and will hopefully lead to a flurry of increased activity for the open source projects in question. In this particular case it’s Matrix, which can surely need some additional work and eyeballs, if my use of the protocol is any indication.

“I now assume that all ads on Apple News are scams”

What does it look like when a hardware and software company descends into an obsession with recurring services revenue to please its shareholders? Look no further than Apple, who has turned its Apple News service into a vehicle for scam ads. These fake “going out of business ads” have been around for a few years, and even the US Better Business Bureau warns about them, as they take peoples’ money then shut down. Does Apple care? Does Taboola care? Does Apple care that Taboola serves ads like this? My guess: no, no, and no. ↫ Kirk McElhearn While serving obvious scams to users is already bad enough, the real kicker is that even if you are a paying user of Apple News, you still get served ads, including the scams. Of course, massive corporations like Apple are free too just scam you, since they’re effectively immune from any legal consequences, so it’s unlikely the scamming will stop as long as it makes line go up. On an entirely unrelated note, OSNews is entirely free of ads, so there’s no scams here. OSNews is fully funded by our readers through single donations on Ko-Fi or by becoming a Patreon.

Openreach turns up the heat to force laggards off legacy copper lines

Half a million businesses face successive price hikes ahead of PTSN shutdown

Openreach is warning British businesses that the old phone network shuts down in less than a year, with half a million commercial lines still unmigrated.…

AI video company arouses fury by boasting about replacing creative jobs

Marketing stunt backfires with creators

The first rule of AI-generated job loss is you don't talk about AI-generated job loss ... if you're the company that caused it. Higgsfield.ai, a startup offering AI video creation tools, recently generated outrage when it claimed it had caused artists to hit the unemployment line.…

Hundreds of Tourists Flock to This Instagram-Famous Italian Church Every Day. Locals Are Pushing Back Against Visitors Who Seek the Perfect Photo 'at All Costs'

Beginning in May, travelers visiting Santa Maddalena in the Dolomite Mountains will need to navigate road barriers and parking fees

See a Rare, Bus-Size Giant Phantom Jelly Wade Through Ocean Waters Off the Coast of Argentina

A recent deep-sea expedition along the country's entire length documented the jellyfish, along with a surprising number of other species

NASA Sets Coverage for Agency’s SpaceX Crew-12 Launch, Docking

Editor’s Note: This advisory was updated Feb. 10, 2026, to reflect changes to NASA’s live launch coverage for the agency’s SpaceX Crew-12 mission. Teams now are targeting launch no earlier than Friday, Feb. 13. Editor’s Note: This advisory was updated on Feb. 9, 2026, to reflect NASA’ s new launch coverage plans for the agency’s […]

What Is a Stoat? Learn Five Fun Facts About the Adorable Weasels Chosen as the Olympic Mascots

Milo and Tina, a pair of sibling stoats, are representing this year’s winter games in Italy

See the Beauty of Corals, Beehives, Mushrooms and More in These 11 Images From the Close-Up Photographer of the Year Awards

Now in its seventh year, the competition honors macro, micro and close-up images snapped around the world

Strong Solar Flare

This Feb. 4, 2026, image from NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) captures a strong solar flare erupting from the star. Solar flares are powerful bursts of energy that can, along with other types of solar eruptions, can impact radio communications, electric power grids, navigation signals, and pose risks to spacecraft and astronauts. The flare pictured […]

Boreal Forests Are Shifting North

The boreal forest—the world’s largest terrestrial biome—is warming faster than any other forest type. New research uses Landsat data to track how the forests shift.

Ron Teasley, Pioneering Baseball Player and One of Two Surviving Negro League Veterans, Dies at 99

The former Brooklyn Dodger and New York Cuban leaves a lasting legacy of coaching and service in his hometown of Detroit

Let there be light! DARPA seeking physics-defying photonic computers to supercharge AI

There’s about $35M up for grabs if your circuits can beat today’s limits

It's no lightweight matter. DARPA is putting about $35 million in total funding on the table in the hope that it will spur researchers to work around fundamental physical constraints and build much larger-scale photonic circuits that do more of the computing with light, not electronics.…

Four horsemen of the AI-pocalypse line up capex bigger than Israel's GDP

Amazon, Google, Meta, Microsoft eye $635B in infrastructure spend

Four tech megacorps intend to collectively fork out roughly $635 billion this year on capex, much of it for datacenters and AI infrastructure – more than the entire output of Israel's economy and well beyond all global cloud infrastructure services revenue generated last year.…

Flickr emails users about data breach, pins it on third party

Attackers may have snapped user locations and activity information, message warns

Legacy image-sharing website Flickr suffered a data breach, according to customer emails seen by The Register.…

DDoS deluge: Brit biz battered as botnet blitzes break records

UK leaps to sixth in global flood charts as mega-swarm unleashes 31.4 Tbps Yuletide pummeling

Cloudflare says DDoS crews ended 2025 by pushing traffic floods to new extremes, while Britain made an unwelcome leap of 36 places to become the world's sixth-most targeted location.…

After the Dinosaur-Killing Asteroid Wrecked the Planet, Life May Have Bounced Back Surprisingly Fast

The steady rate of falling space dust helped researchers recalibrate the timeline

Summoning the spirit of the BBC Micro with a Pi 500+ and a can of spray paint

Rhapsody in beige

An enterprising engineer has evoked the spirit of Acorn's BBC Micro with a custom paintjob for a Raspberry Pi 500+ computer-in-a-keyboard and a natty set of replacement keycaps.…

Supermarket sorry after facial recognition alert flags right criminal, wrong customer

System worked as intended, but staff then kicked out innocent bystander

A British supermarket says staff will undergo further training after a store manager ejected the wrong man when facial recognition technology triggered an alert.…

Long-Sought Proof Tames Some of Math’s Unruliest Equations

Mathematicians finally understand the behavior of an important class of differential equations that describe everything from water pressure to oxygen levels in human tissues.

The post Long-Sought Proof Tames Some of Math’s Unruliest Equations first appeared on Quanta Magazine

Microsoft starts the countdown for the end of Exchange Web Services

Windows giant might try turning it off and on again to see who notices

Microsoft has laid out a timeline for the disablement and shutdown of Exchange Web Services (EWS) in Microsoft 365 and Exchange Online.…

CISA orders federal agencies to rip out EOL edge kit before cybercrooks move in

A year to replace end-of-support firewalls, routers, and VPN gateways

America's federal agencies have been told to hunt down and rip out aging firewalls, routers, and other network gatekeepers before attackers use them as skeleton keys into government systems.…

Romanian rail workers accused of bribery turned to ChatGPT for legal tips

Corruption probe takes detour as staff facing trial reportedly asked AI if seat-blocking scams caused financial damage

More than 30 Romanian railway employees accused of running a bribery and ticket resale racket allegedly tried to crowdsource their legal strategy from ChatGPT.…

Smartphones cleared for launch as NASA loosens the rulebook

Crew-12 and Artemis II astros may soon snap, shoot, and share from orbit

NASA's Administrator has stated that smartphones will accompany the Crew-12 and Artemis II astronauts on their missions.…

DWP considers chatbot work coaches as AI-fueled job losses loom

Benefits system trials automation amid growing interest in universal basic income

AI-pocalypse  Britain's welfare system is experimenting with AI to manage Universal Credit claimants – even as evidence piles up that artificial intelligence may soon be pushing more people onto benefits in the first place.…

UK council digs deeper into capital assets to keep Oracle project afloat

West Sussex plans to triple use of property sales as ERP budget blows past original estimates

In a budget-busting leap from SAP to Oracle, West Sussex County Council is trebling its raid on capital assets such as buildings to fund its "transformational" ERP project.…

Summer in Australia means beers, beaches, and bork

Supermarket printer error gets holiday off to a shabby start

BORK!BORK!BORK!  When this vulture excuses himself from The Register's Australian eyrie for a little rest and recreation, I first avoid pyromaniac birds and carnivorous koalas, before settling into a bucolic beach town to catch a few waves, read a few books, and tune out from the world of tech.…

Babies got beat: Why rhythm might be innate

Rhythm is everywhere. Even if you don’t think you have it, it’s fundamental to humans’ biological systems. Our heartbeat is rhythmic. Speech is rhythmic. Even as babies, humans can track basic rhythm. Researchers wanted to find out if there were more layers to this: Could babies also track melody and more complicated rhythms? So they played Bach for a bunch of sleeping newborns and monitored the babies’ brains to see if they could predict the next note. What they found offers clues about whether melody and rhythm are hard-wired in the human brain or learned over time. We also get into what powers the eating habits of some snakes and chameleons, and insights into the role of sleep in problem-solving.

Have a scientific question you want us to answer? 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 .

Listen to Short Wave on Spotify and Apple Podcasts .

This episode was produced by Jordan-Marie Smith and Rachel Carlson. It was edited by Rebecca Ramirez and Christopher Intagliata. Tyler Jones checked the facts. The audio engineers were Jimmy Keeley and Hannah Gluvna.

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

NPR Privacy Policy

New hire fixed a problem so fast, their boss left to become a yoga instructor

Poking around in deep menus found a fault that flummoxed old hands

On Call  Change is a constant – and so is On Call, the reader-contributed column The Register runs every Friday to share your tech support tales.…

Pakistan to test students for real-world skills before they graduate from IT degrees

Government decides theoretical knowledge vs. experience debate is worth settling

Pakistan’s Higher Education Commission (HEC) has introduced a competency test for students who take degrees in IT, to assess whether they emerge with skills employers will find useful.…

A Winter Blanket Covers North Carolina

In late January 2026, a strong, moisture-laden storm dropped snow across nearly the entire state, spanning from the Appalachians to the Atlantic Coast.

Atlassian swears it can handle AI without blowing out costs, or being swamped

CEO feels under-appreciated amid year-long value slump

Atlassian has assured investors it can add AI to its services without blowing out its costs or shrinking margins.…

Amazon can't build AI capacity fast enough, throws another $200B at the problem

'As fast as we install this AI capacity, we are monetizing it,' says Amazon CEO Andy Jassy

AWS has an open cash spigot for AI infrastructure, with Amazon CEO Andy Jassy telling investors the company has been monetizing compute capacity as fast as it brings it online and it plans to double capacity by the end of 2027.…

Ad blocking is alive and well, despite Chrome's attempts to make it harder

The end isn't nigh after all

Chrome's latest revision of its browser extension architecture, known as Manifest v3 (MV3), was widely expected to make content blocking and privacy extensions less effective than its predecessor, Manifest v2 (MV2).…

OpenClaw reveals meaty personal information after simple cracks

Skills marketplace is full of stuff - like API keys and credit card numbers - that crims will find tasty

Another day, another vulnerability (or two, or 200) in the security nightmare that is OpenClaw.…

What’s Buried Beneath Antarctica's Ice? A New Map Unveils the Continent's Hidden Landscape Like Never Before

A better understanding of the bedrock can help researchers calculate how quickly the continent's melting glaciers might affect sea-level rise

Unsealed court documents show teen addiction was big tech’s “top priority”

I nominate this for the “Most Expected News Of The Decade” award. Today, The Tech Oversight Project published a new report spotlighting newly unsealed documents in the 2026 social media addiction trials. The documents provide smoking-gun evidence that Meta, Google, Snap, and TikTok all purposefully designed their social media products to addict children and teens with no regard for known harms to their wellbeing, and how that mass youth addiction was core to the companies’ business models. The documents contain internal discussions among company employees, presentations from internal meetings, expert testimony, and evidence of Big Tech coordination with tech-funded groups, including the National Parent Teachers Association (PTA) and Family Online Safety Institute (FOSI), in attempts to control the narrative in response to concerned parents. ↫ The Tech Oversight Project Modern social media companies are not entirely different from tobacco companies. They and everyone else know full well just how dangerous social media is, and how being addicted to it has disastrous consequences for the people involved. Tobacco companies, too, knew how dangerous smoking was decades before the general population was aware, and yet they kept pushing cigarettes, even to kids, deaths be damned. In fact, they’re still doing the same thing today with “vapes”, and we’re kind of letting it happen all over again. Social media is directly responsible for genocides, extreme polarisation, the spread of endless amounts of lies causing parents to harm their children, mass generation of child pornography, and much, much more. All of this is not a coincidence, mere side-effects, unintended consequences – social media are designed and optimised specifically to achieve these goals, like cigarettes and now “vapes” are designed specifically to be as addictive as possible. The people responsible – social media companies, their executives, their employees – need to face justice, answer for what they’ve done, and face the legal consequences. Of course, that’s not going to happen. Billionaires and their megacorporations are untouchable, too big to fail, too closely tied to especially the current regime in the US. I don’t think social media bans for people under 16 are the answer, since they tend to come with onerous and invasive online identity checks and because they cut vulnerable people off from their support networks, but it’s clear we need to do something.

NASA Selects Two Earth System Explorers Missions

Two next-generation satellite missions announced Thursday will help NASA better understand Earth and improve capabilities to foresee environmental events and mitigate disasters. “NASA uses the unique vantage point of space to study our home planet to deliver life-saving data into the hands of disaster response and decision-makers every day for the benefit of all, while […]

This Massive Hillside Figure Has Mystified Historians for Centuries. Now, Donations Have Secured the Surrounding Landscape

The National Trust has purchased the land around England's Cerne Abbas Giant, which will help protect the mysterious chalk figure and nearby wildlife for future generations

OpenAI chases business bucks with confusingly named Frontier platform

IPO, we’re halfway there: AI, livin’ on a prayer

OpenAI, a maker of frontier models, has announced a platform called Frontier to help enterprises implement software agents. That's not confusing at all.…

Substack says intruder lifted emails, phone numbers in months-old breach

Contact details were accessed in an intrusion that went undetected for months, the blogging outfit says

Newsletter platform Substack has admitted that an intruder swiped user contact details months before the company noticed, forcing it to warn writers and readers that their email addresses and other account metadata were accessed without permission.…

Scientists Say That Jupiter—the Solar System's Largest Planet—Might Be Slightly Smaller Than Previously Thought

Updated measurements from NASA’s Juno spacecraft could help researchers better understand the planet's mysterious interior, as well as other gas giants

Career Spotlight: Welder (Ages 14-18)

What does a welder do? A welder uses tools that join two or more parts through forces such as heat or pressure. Metals are the materials most commonly used in welding, but it’s also possible to weld thermoplastics or wood. Welders use their hands, skills, and problem-solving abilities to create something new. At NASA, welders […]

Asia-based government spies quietly broke into critical networks across 37 countries

And their toolkit includes a new, Linux kernel rootkit

A state-aligned cyber group in Asia compromised government and critical infrastructure organizations across 37 countries in an ongoing espionage campaign, according to security researchers.…

Stash or splash? Lawmakers ask NASA to find alternatives for International Space Station

What about storing it in high orbit?

US lawmakers have asked NASA to look into storing the International Space Station (ISS) in a higher orbit at the end of its operational life, instead of sending the structure hurtling into the ocean when the time comes.…

NASA’s SpaceX Crew-12 to Study Adaptation to Altered Gravity

NASA’s SpaceX Crew-12 mission is preparing to launch for a long-duration science mission aboard the International Space Station. During the mission, select crew members will participate in human health studies focused on understanding how astronauts’ bodies adapt to the low-gravity environment of space, including a new study examining subtle changes in blood flow. The experiments, […]

Archaeologists Are Finally Unraveling the Secrets of the Shipwreck Discovered 20 Feet Below the Streets of Manhattan

Researchers are opening a new investigation into the timbers, which may have once belonged to the "Tyger," a Dutch trading vessel that sank in 1613

Anthropic apes OpenAI with cheeky chatbot commercials

The Claude maker wants you to know about ChatGPT’s ad plans

AI companies are looking for new ways of burning cash other than by handing it to hyperscalers for model training. So now they're setting money on fire by buying Super Bowl ads that mock rivals.…

SpaceX wants to fill Earth orbit with a million datacenter satellites

The FCC is taking public comments - now’s your chance to tell them this plan is bonkers

Elon Musk's pie-in-the-sky plan to launch a massive orbital datacenter satellite constellation has taken a rapid step closer to reality with the Federal Communications Commission advancing SpaceX's application for public comment, technical feasibility be damned. …

Most SAP migrations bust budgets and project timelines, research finds

As 2027 ECC support cliff looms, half choose not to re-engineer processes in critical ERP upgrade

Nearly 60 percent of SAP migration projects are delayed and over budget as organizations underestimate complexity, allow expansion of scope, and fail to understand internal constraints, according to research from ISG.…

Air Pollution Can Cause Some Ants to Turn on One Another—and Neglect Their Young, New Research Suggests

The findings further hint that air pollution, particularly ozone, is contributing to the "insect apocalypse"

Hubble Spots Lens-Shaped Galaxy

This new Hubble image, released on Jan. 30, 2026, is the sharpest taken of NGC 7722, a lenticular galaxy located about 187 million light-years away in the constellation Pegasus. A lenticular, meaning “lens-shaped,” galaxy is a type whose classification sits between more familiar spiral galaxies and elliptical galaxies. It is also less common than spirals and ellipticals — partly […]

Betterment breach may expose 1.4M users after social engineering attack

Breach-tracking site flags dataset following impersonation-based intrusion

Breach-tracking site Have I Been Pwned (HIBP) claims a cyberattack on Betterment affected roughly 1.4 million users – although the investment company has yet to publicly confirm how many customers were affected by January's intrusion.…

Microsoft declares 'reliability' a priority for Visual Studio AI

Perhaps a little less focus on AI would help as well?

Microsoft says "reliability is the priority" for AI in Visual Studio – a reassurance that may raise eyebrows among developers already living with Copilot's quirks.…

UK's 'world-first' deepfake detection framework unlikely to stop the fakes, says expert

Home Office enlists Microsoft to set industry standards as AI-generated forgeries surge from 500K to 8M in two years

The UK government claims it will develop a "world-first" framework to evaluate deepfake detection technologies as AI-generated content proliferates.…

Microsoft sets Copilot agents loose on your OneDrive files

AI helpers can now rummage through multiple documents

Microsoft has made OneDrive agents generally available, allowing users to query multiple documents simultaneously through Copilot instead of just one at a time.…

Curse of AI to push up PC prices as memory and CPU shortages bite

Component supply is being diverted toward datacenters, squeezing the consumer market

PC buyers can expect price hikes as chipmakers continue to prioritize AI production over all else, restricting the supply of key components across the tech industry.…

Is This Copy of a Long-Lost Northern Renaissance Portrait Actually an Original Albrecht Dürer?

Experts have long assumed that a painting at London's National Gallery is one of many replicas of an original Dürer portrait. Now, a new book claims that this cracked copy is the real deal

Italy claims cyberattacks 'of Russian origin' are pelting Winter Olympics

Right on cue, petulant hacktivists attempt to disrupt yet another global sporting event

Italy's foreign minister says the country has already started swatting away cyberattacks from Russia targeting the Milano Cortina Winter Olympics.…

n8n security woes roll on as new critical flaws bypass December fix

Patch meant to close a severe expression bug fails to stop attackers with workflow access

Multiple newly disclosed bugs in the popular workflow automation tool n8n could allow attackers to hijack servers, steal credentials, and quietly disrupt AI-driven business processes.…

CentOS is coming to RISC-V soon if you have the kit

The RHELatives are more versatile than you might realize

FOSDEM 2026 CentOS Connect 2026 took place in Brussels last week, over the two days preceding the sprawling FOSDEM festival of FOSS – the nerd world's Glastonbury, complete with the queues and the questionable hygiene.…

Cloud sovereignty is no longer just a public sector concern

Businesses still chase the cheapest option, but politics and licensing shocks are changing priorities, says OpenNebula

Interview  Sovereignty remains a hot topic in the tech industry, but interpretations of what it actually means – and how much it matters – vary widely between organizations and sectors. While public bodies are often driven by regulation and national policy, the private sector tends to take a more pragmatic, cost-focused view.…

UK justice system unplugs from ancient datacenters after five-year slog

37 court applications shifted off failing kit, though some are camping in a temporary hosting facility

The courts system in England and Wales has moved 37 applications out of two outdated datacenters, although some will use a temporary hosting facility until they are replaced, according to the senior civil servant responsible.…

Britain courts private cash to fund 'golden age' of nuclear-powered AI

Framework aims to lure investors into powering the compute boom

The British government today launched the Advanced Nuclear Framework to attract private investment in next-generation nuclear technology for factories and datacenters.…

Three clues that your LLM may be poisoned with a sleeper-agent back door

It's a threat straight out of sci-fi, and fiendishly hard to detect

Sleeper agent-style backdoors in AI large language models pose a straight-out-of-sci-fi security threat.…

Satya Nadella decides Microsoft needs an engineering quality czar

Picks chap who used to lead Redmond’s security, lures replacement from Google

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has decided Microsoft needs an engineering quality czar, and shifted Charlie Bell, the company’s executive veep for security, into the new role.…

Milano Cortina 2026

About 2,900 Olympic athletes have converged on northern Italy to sort out who is the GOAT—or perhaps the stoat.

AI’s lust for memory drags down the smartphone industry, and Qualcomm with it

On the upside, House of the Snapdragon has started shipping its own AI silicon

Qualcomm has warned that soaring memory prices will mean the smartphone industry will slow, news that so spooked investors they sent the company’s share price sliding by 11 percent.…

It's bubble or nothing for Google as search giant looks to plow ~$180B into datacenters this year

With revenue topping $400B for the first time, the Chocolate Factory is at no risk of putting itself in the poor house

Google’s parent Alphabet is doubling down on generative AI in 2026. On Wednesday's earnings call, the search and advertising giant boosted its full-year capital expenditures target to between \(175 and \)185 billion, roughly twice what it spent last year.…

Microsoft has killed widgets six times

Gadgets, desk accessories, widgets – whatever you they were called, they were a must-have feature for various operating systems for a while. Windows in particular has tried making them happen six times, and every time, they failed to really catch on and ended up being killed, only for the company to try again a few years later. Microsoft has been trying to solve the same UX problem since 1997: how to surface live information without making you launch an app. They’ve shipped six different implementations across nearly 30 years. Each one died from a different fundamental flaw – performance, security, screen space, privacy, engagement. And each death triggered the same reflex: containment. ↫ Pavel Osadchuk There’s quite a few memories in this article. I never actually used Active Desktop back when it came out, because I seem to remember the channels feature was either not available in The Netherlands or the available channels were American stuff we didn’t care about. The sidebar in Vista had a lot of potential, and I did like the feature, but there weren’t a lot of great widgets and we hadn’t entered the era of omnipresent notifications begging for out attention just yet, so use cases remained elusive. Now Metro, that’s where things came together, at least for me. I was en enthusiastic Windows Phone user – I imported two Windows Phone devices from the US to be an early adopter – and I still consider its live tiles with notifications and other useful information to be the most pleasant user interface for a mobile device, bar none. It may have taken Microsoft six tries, but they nailed it with that one, and I’m still sad the Windows Phone user interface lost out to whatever iOS and Android offered. On desktops and laptops, though, it’s a different story, and I don’t think the Metro tiles concept ever made any sense there. Widgets as they exist in Windows now mostly seem like an annoying distraction, and I’ve never seen anyone actually use them. Does anyone even keep them enabled at all?

Ghost gun legislation casts shadow over 3D printing

Proposed bills in New York and elsewhere threaten makers, Adafruit says

State and federal lawmakers have stepped up their efforts to prevent the creation of 3D printed guns. But Adafruit, a maker of electronics kits, warns that the proposed legislation is so broad it threatens everyone involved in open source manufacturing and technology education.…

Microsoft Research releases LiteBox, a new library operating system

Microsoft Research, in collaboration with various others, has just released LiteBox, a library operating system. LiteBox is a sandboxing library OS that drastically cuts down the interface to the host, thereby reducing attack surface. It focuses on easy interop of various “North” shims and “South” platforms. LiteBox is designed for usage in both kernel and non-kernel scenarios. LiteBox exposes a Rust-y nix/rustix-inspired “North” interface when it is provided a Platform interface at its “South”. These interfaces allow for a wide variety of use-cases, easily allowing for connection between any of the North–South pairs. ↫ LiteBox GitHub Page Suggested use-cases are running unmodified Linux applications on Windows, sandboxing Linux applications on Linux, running OP-TEE applications on Linux, and more. It’s written in Rust, and the code is available on GitHub under an MIT license.

Workday reveals around 400 staff soon won't have to work another day

Job cuts to fall hardest on non-revenue generating roles on the Global Customer Operations team

Workday is laying off about two percent of its staff in a bid to align its people with its “highest priorities,” but at a significant cost to its margins for the quarter and the year, the company announced on Wednesday.…

Curiosity Blog, Sols 4788-4797: Welcome Back from Conjunction

Written by Alex Innanen, Atmospheric Scientist at York University, Toronto Earth planning date: Friday, Jan. 30, 2026 Mars has emerged from its holiday behind the Sun, and we here on Earth have been able to reconnect with Curiosity and get back to work on Mars. Our first planning day last Friday gave Curiosity a full […]

Bots are taking over the internet and AI users are to blame

RAG bots could overtake human visitors on publisher sites this year, trackers tell us

The AI bot takeover of the internet continues apace, and the latest data suggests the surge is being driven less by model-training scrapes and more by the growing use of AI tools as a stand-in for web search.…

COSMIC Epoch 2 and 3 Roadmap

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

Nearly Four in Ten New Cancer Cases Might Be Preventable, According to the World Health Organization

A landmark global study suggests that tobacco smoking, infection and alcohol consumption are the leading causes of preventable cancers

NASA, University of Texas Expand Research and Workforce Development

NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston and the University of Texas System (UT System) announced the signing of a collaborative Space Act Agreement on Jan. 9, 2026. The agreement expands research and workforce development partnership opportunities across NASA centers and UT System facilities. The agreement builds upon decades of collaboration between NASA and the UT […]

Positron: we don’t need no fancy HBM to compete with Nvidia’s Rubin

Pleb-tier LPDDR5x apparently good enough for Arm-backed AI startup's next-gen Asimov accelerators

On paper, Positron's next-gen Asimov accelerators, no doubt named for the beloved science fiction author, don't look like much of a match for Nvidia's Rubin GPUs.…

AWS intruder achieved admin access in under 10 minutes thanks to AI assist, researchers say

LLMs automated most phases of the attack

UPDATED  A digital intruder broke into an AWS cloud environment and in just under 10 minutes went from initial access to administrative privileges, thanks to an AI speed assist.…

See 24 Astounding Images From the Wildlife Photographer of the Year Contest—and Vote for Your Favorite

The public will choose the winner of the People’s Choice award in a vote that runs from February 4 to March 18

Anthropic cements its position as the not-OpenAI with no-ads pledge

As profit-starved AI companies scramble to monetize chat interactions, Claude bets on trust

Anthropic has taken the high road by committing to keep its Claude AI model family free of advertising.…

This New Samurai Exhibition Will Challenge Your Understanding of the Japanese Warrior Class

Silk screens, women's firefighting robes and a Darth Vader costume are among the more than 280 unexpected items that are on display at the British Museum

Station Nation: Erin Edwards, Deputy Branch Chief for Crew Operations and Capsule Communicator

As a member of the Crew Operations Office, Erin Edwards and her team manage astronaut candidate training schedules, including field medical exercises, land survival, and underwater operations at NASA’s Neutral Buoyancy Laboratory in Houston. She also develops and tests new training programs to keep crews mission-ready.   Along with her role as a crew operations officer, Edwards works in the […]

You Can Buy Jack Kerouac's Early Draft of 'On the Road,' Which He Typed on a 121-Foot-Long Scroll

The author taped pages together so he wouldn't need to load paper into his typewriter. The original scroll of the Beat Generation classic is expected to fetch up to $4 million at auction

Critical SolarWinds Web Help Desk bug under attack

US agencies told to patch by Friday

Attackers are exploiting a critical SolarWinds Web Help Desk bug - less than a week after the vendor disclosed and fixed the 9.8-rated flaw. That's according to America's lead cyber-defense agency, which set a Friday deadline for federal agencies to patch the security flaw.…

TB 26-01 Evaluation of Adhesive and Solvent Alternatives for Polymeric Bonding Applications

The NASA Engineering and Safety Center (NESC) conducted a technical assessment to evaluate alternatives to dichloromethane, traditionally used for bonding transparent polymeric materials. This effort was initiated in response to potential regulatory restrictions under the EPA Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA), which could impact critical bonding processes used in spaceflight hardware and experimental systems. Download […]

Rise of AI means companies could pass on SaaS

The writing is on the wall as AI companies race to add vertical functionality

Software stocks have taken a beating over the last month as investors grow concerned that AI could put vertical SaaS vendors out of business.…

ARMD Research Solicitations (Updated Feb. 4)

THIS PAGE WAS UPDATED ON FEBRUARY 4, 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 […]

US Army looks for robots that can clean up chemical and bioweapons messes

Just in time for the predicted rise of AI-assisted threats

It's bot versus bot! Just in time for the predicted rise of AI-made biological and chemical weapons, the US Army has plans to fight autonomy with autonomy by getting its hands on some bot-based chemical weapon cleanup tech.…

Server CPUs join memory in the supply shortage, pushing up prices

Silicon manufacturing issues to blame

Datacenter servers will face a double whammy this year as CPU supply constraints pile on top of an already severe memory shortage. Even so, shipments are still expected to grow at a double-digit rate.…

NASA Armstrong Contributions Propel Artemis, Deep Space Innovation

NASA is leveraging expertise, capabilities, and partnerships across its centers to make Artemis campaign and deep space exploration safer, more reliable, and efficient. At NASA’s Armstrong Flight Research Center in Edwards, California, contributions include technical leadership, unique flight-testing capabilities, and management of a key technology program that advances critical exploration concepts. Artemis II is an […]

Astronomers Spot a Huge Cluster of Galaxies Forming Earlier in Cosmic History Than Thought Possible

The young galaxy cluster existed about 12.8 billion years ago and has an estimated mass 20 trillion times that of the sun

Estonia hedges its bets on US tech while going all-in on Microsoft

Riigi IT preps European escape plan as it herds civil servants into Redmond's cloud

An Estonian government IT agency is trialling European alternatives to US software providers, even as it moves many of the country’s civil servants to a centrally-managed cloud computing service provided by Microsoft.…

NASA Heat Shield Tech Contributes to America’s Space Industry

This Jan. 29, 2026, photo captures the streak the Varda Space Industries W-5 capsule made while returning to Earth. The capsule uses a protective heat shield Varda produced made of cutting-edge material it licensed from NASA. The material, known as C-PICA (Conformal Phenolic Impregnated Carbon Ablator), provides a stronger, less expensive, and more efficient thermal protection […]

NASA’s SPHEREx Examines Comet 3I/ATLAS’s Coma

Description These observations by NASA’s SPHEREx (Spectro-Photometer for the History of the Universe, Epoch of Reionization and Ices Explorer) show the infrared light emitted by the dust, water, organic molecules, and carbon dioxide contained within comet 3I/ATLAS’s coma. The comet brightened significantly during the December 2025 period when SPHEREx made the observations — about two […]

Microsoft engineer speedruns Raspberry Pi magic smoke in five minutes

Only cool dudes should wear a HAT backward

Microsoft is no stranger to things breaking unexpectedly – and now one of its engineers has added a Raspberry Pi to the list.…

Expansion Microscopy Has Transformed How We See the Cellular World

How physically magnifying objects using a key ingredient in diapers has opened an unprecedented view of the microbial world.

The post Expansion Microscopy Has Transformed How We See the Cellular World first appeared on Quanta Magazine

DWP finds Copilot saves civil servants a whopping 19 minutes a day

Tool speeds up searches and first draft emails, becomes 'comfort blanket' for Whitehall workers

Microsoft Copilot saved civil servants 19 minutes daily on routine tasks, according to Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) research comparing users to a control group of non-users.…

A.I. Could Help Doctors Spot Hard-to-Detect Signs of Breast Cancer During Routine Screenings, a Clinical Trial Suggests

Standard testing can miss some tumors, which are later diagnosed and called interval cancers. They’re often more aggressive than screening-detected disease

Tracking Glacial Change with Landsat and Radar

NASA Scientist Alex Gardner highlights how Landsat made his research into the dynamics of glacial flow possible.

Nitrogen ransomware is so broken even the crooks can't unlock your files

Gang walks away with nothing, victims are left with irreparable hypervisors

Cybersecurity experts usually advise victims against paying ransomware crooks, but that advice goes double for those who have been targeted by the Nitrogen group. There's no way to get your data back from them!…

UK watchdog to rule on £246M Post Office subsidy over Horizon scandal and IR35

CMA's Subsidy Advice Unit reviewing state aid linked to redress and off-payroll tax costs

The UK competition regulator is set to report on a request for £246 million in subsidies to the Post Office, a publicly owned company, to cover its costs in compensation for the Horizon IT scandal and tax liability for IR35, a mechanism commonly used by tech consultants.…

Microsoft actually does something useful, adds Sysmon to Windows

After years of bolting AI onto everything, Redmond remembers admins exist

There is good news for administrators: Microsoft has delivered on its promise to build Sysmon functionality into Windows.…

EU's fishy digital certificate system leaves exporters floundering

Catch platform sinks under weight of bugs, missing species, and postal code gaffes while containers pile up at ports

Problems with a new digital European system for certifying fishing catches are hampering producers and delaying exports, according to ministers from several EU member states.…

Universal £7,500 payout offered to PSNI staff over major data breach

Affected police officers squeezed mental health services, relocated over safety fears

Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) employees who had their details exposed in a significant 2023 data breach will each receive £7,500 ($10,279) as part of a universal offer of compensation.…

SpaceX halts Falcon 9 flights after second stage anomaly

Failed deorbit burn grounds workhorse rocket

SpaceX has paused flights of its workhorse Falcon 9 after a second stage failure resulted in the spent rocket tumbling uncontrollably back to Earth.…

'The EU runs on Microsoft' – and Uncle Sam could turn it off, claims MEP

Open source gains urgency as Europe reassesses reliance on US tech

Open Source Policy Summit 2026  European tech leaders are waking up to the risk of the US simply turning off their IT services.…

AWS says you're on your own if media codec patent owners come knocking

Service terms update removes infringement cover tied to audio and video encoding tech

Exclusive  Amazon is warning users of its media services that it will not protect them against patent infringement claims relating to media codec technology supported by those services.…

Lego shrinks NASA's biggest rocket – accuracy sold separately

Bring your own sound effects to a Technic-enabled Space Launch System

The launch of the Artemis II mission to send humans around the Moon is fast approaching. The Register had a go at building Lego's latest SLS set and found it a lot of fun, particularly making whooshing noises as the rocket "launches."…

How do extreme G-forces affect Olympic bobsledders?

Olympic sliding sports – bobsled, luge and skeleton – are known for their speed. Athletes chase medals down a track of ice at up to 80 or 90 mph. With this thrill comes the risk of “sled head.” Athletes use the term to explain the dizziness, nausea, exhaustion and even blackouts that can follow a brain-rattling run. Untreated, this can turn into concussions and subconcussions. But there’s still a lot more to learn about this condition. So today, host Emily Kwong speaks with two experts about the medical research into sled head – and how the sport would need to change to protect athletes’ brain health.

Check out more of NPR’s Olympics coverage .

Interested in more Olympic 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 .

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

NPR Privacy Policy

UK to properly probe xAI to test if its revolting robo-smut generator broke the law

As Spain announces stern laws for social media, and Elon Musk’s response shows regulators keep looking his way

The UK’s Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) has launched a probe into Elon Musk’s xAI, after its Grok chatbot produced sexual images of real people, without their consent.…

Clouds rush to deliver OpenClaw-as-a-service offerings

As analyst house Gartner declares AI tool ‘comes with unacceptable cybersecurity risk’ and urges admins to snuff it out

If you’re brave enough to want to run the demonstrably insecure AI assistant OpenClaw, several clouds have already started offering it as a service.…

Chilled New York City

Ice in the Hudson River hugged the shore of Manhattan amid a deep freeze.

For once, Supermicro has dodged drama and just delivered datacenters

Single customer accounted for 63 percent of surging revenue

In recent years, Supermicro’s regulatory filings often have delivered dramas such as losing its listing on the NASDAQ stock exchange, an admission its books may not be accurate, another possible delisting, and missing the AI boom.…

Too much AI for some, too little for others: Why AMD can't win with investors

A diverse portfolio is usually a good thing, except when AI is the only thing

Usually diversity is a sign of a healthy and resilient business. But for the folks on Wall Street, the breadth of AMD's portfolio is a bug, not a feature – one that sent the House of Zen's share price down by more than eight percent in after hours trading on Tuesday.…

VS Code for Linux may be secretly hoarding trashed files

Versions installed via Snap don't delete files when users empty system trash

Linux users who installed Microsoft's Visual Studio Code as a Snap package may want to check to see whether files they sent to the trash with the app have actually been deleted.…

AI agents can't yet pull off fully autonomous cyberattacks – but they are already very helpful to crims

Don't relax: This is a 'when, not if' scenario

AI agents and other systems can't yet conduct cyberattacks fully on their own – but they can help criminals in many stages of the attack chain, according to the International AI Safety report.…

Zig replaces third-party C code with Zig’s own code

Over the past month or so, several enterprising contributors have taken an interest in the zig libc subproject. The idea here is to incrementally delete redundant code, by providing libc functions as Zig standard library wrappers rather than as vendored C source files. In many cases, these functions are one-to-one mappings, such as memcpy or atan2, or trivially wrap a generic function, like strnlen. So far, roughly 250 C source files have been deleted from the Zig repository, with 2032 remaining. With each function that makes the transition, Zig gains independence from third party projects and from the C programming language, compilation speed improves, Zig’s installation size is simplified and reduced, and user applications which statically link libc enjoy reduced binary size. ↫ Andrew Kelley on the Zig Devlog The goal is to replace all of the musl, wasi-libc, and MinGW-w64 C code bundled in Zig with new Zig code.

Rust in the NetBSD kernel seems unlikely

Rust is everywhere, and it’s no surprise it’s also made its way into the lowest levels of certain operating systems and kernels, so it shouldn’t be surprising that various operating system developers have to field questions and inquiries about Rust. NetBSD developer Benny Siegert wrote a blog post about this very subject, and in it, details why it’s unlikely Rust will find its way into the NetBSD base system and/or the kernel First, NetBSD is famed for its wide architecture and platform support, and Rust would make that a lot more troublesome due to Rust simply not being available on many platforms NetBSD supports. Rust release cycles also aren’t compatible with NetBSD, it would draw a lot of dependency code into the base system, and keeping Rust and its compiler toolchain working is a lot of work that falls on the shoulders of a relatively small group of NetBSD developers. Note that while NetBSD does tend to take a more cautious approach to these matters than, say, Linux or FreeBSD, the operating system isn’t averse to change on principle. For instance, not only is Lua part of the base system, it’s even used in the NetBSD kernel due to its ability to rapidly develop and prototype kernel drivers. In short, while it doesn’t seem likely Rust will make it into the NetBSD base system, it’s not an impossibility either.

Sudo maintainer, handling utility for more than 30 years, is looking for support

Many vital open source resources rely on the devotion of a few individuals

updated  It's hard to imagine something as fundamental to computing as the sudo command becoming abandonware, yet here we are: its solitary maintainer is asking for help to keep the project alive.…

Medieval Monks Wrote Over a Copy of an Ancient Star Catalog. Now, a Particle Accelerator Is Revealing the Long-Lost Original Text

The parchments initially contained references to a star catalog and maps created during the second century B.C.E.

GitHub ponders kill switch for pull requests to stop AI slop

Code community site begins to see that AI could drive people away

updated  GitHub, the Microsoft code-hosting shop that popularized AI-assisted software development, is having some regrets about its Copilot infatuation.…

Historians Thought This Rare Renaissance Portrait by One of the First Famous Female Artists Was Lost to History—Until It Surfaced in North Carolina

Sofonisba Anguissola's 16th-century painting of a clergyman was known only through a black-and-white photo. However, the original had been hiding in a private collection in North Carolina since 1977

Amazon's European datacenter buildout blows a breaker as grid connection wait list hits 7 years

E-commerce giant has watts of bit barns to deploy but nowhere to plug them in

Amazon Web Services' European expansion has hit the buffers as the American cloud provider grapples with aging grid infrastructure and lengthy interconnect delays.…

'Lethal' and 'magical' Palantir tech is in demand by Pentagon, China, Middle East, CEO says

Less popular in Canada and Northern Europe

Palantir is shaping the "under-the-hood" practices of the US Defense Department as demand for its software grows across warfighting, shipbuilding, and weapons procurement, CEO Alex Karp said during the company's fourth-quarter earnings call on Monday.…

Critical React Native Metro dev server bug under attack as researchers scream into the void

Too slow react-ion time

Baddies are exploiting a critical bug in React Native's Metro development server to deliver malware to both Windows and Linux machines, and yet the in-the-wild attacks still haven't received the "broad public acknowledgement" that they should, according to security researchers.…

Next-gen nuclear reactors safe enough to skip full environmental reviews, says Trump admin

DoE trims NEPA paperwork for advanced reactors

The Department of Energy says advanced nuclear reactor designs - many of which have so far existed mainly at the experimental, testing, or demonstration stage - generally pose limited environmental risk and can qualify for a streamlined environmental review for future projects.…

Archaeologists Unearth a Reusable School Slate Still Covered in the Scribbles of Victorian Children

The slate was found alongside other evidence of young students' schoolwork and play at the site of a new development in London

An Asian Elephant Was Born at the Smithsonian’s National Zoo for the First Time in Almost 25 Years. Now, You Can Help Pick Her Name

The calf was born to 12-year-old Nhi Linh, a first-time mother, and 44-year-old Spike. The pair bred as part of a program working to conserve the endangered species

Snowflake plugs PostgreSQL into its AI Data Cloud

Yes, it already had Unistore

Snowflake is launching a PostgreSQL database-as-a-service within its AI data environment to place transactional workloads alongside analytics and AI under a single set of governance rules.…

CISA updated ransomware intel on 59 bugs last year without telling defenders

GreyNoise's Glenn Thorpe counts the cost of missed opportunities

On 59 occasions throughout 2025, the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) silently tweaked vulnerability notices to reflect their use by ransomware crooks. Experts say that's a problem.…

Palantir declares itself the guardian of Americans' rights

CEO Alex Karp meets criticism with soaring revenues and a sermon

Opinion  Palantir had a whopper of a Q4, showing accelerating revenue growth, beating Wall Street's profit estimates, and enjoying a share price jump of as much as 11% during pre-market trading on Tuesday before coming back down to earth.…

Full Moon over Artemis II

A full moon is seen shining over NASA’s SLS (Space Launch System) and Orion spacecraft, atop the mobile launcher at Launch Pad 39B at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida in the early hours of February 1, 2026. The agency concluded a wet dress rehearsal for the agency’s Artemis II test flight early Tuesday morning, […]

'Golden' From 'KPop Demon Hunters' Just Won K-Pop's Very First Grammy

The hit song, a demon-slaying self-empowerment anthem, was recognized as the Best Song Written for Visual Media

Azure outages ripple across multiple dependent Microsoft services

Managed Identity and virtual machine failures triggered knock-on problems throughout cloud platform

Microsoft has reported two Azure service wobbles in as many days, including a disruption affecting Virtual Machine management ops yesterday and a Managed Identity for Azure resources outage in East US and West US regions today.…

Robotics will break AI infrastructure: Here's what comes next

Robotics is forcing a fundamental rethink of AI compute, data, and systems design

Partner Content  Physical AI and robotics are moving from the lab to the real world— and the cost of getting it wrong is no longer theoretical. With robots deployed in factories, warehouses, and public settings, large-scale simulation has become tightly coupled with real-world operations.…

NASA Space to Soil Challenge

Rapid advances in commercial space, artificial intelligence, and edge computing are transforming what is possible for Earth observation. By pushing more intelligence onboard, missions can move from passively collecting data to actively interpreting and responding to changing surface conditions in near-real time, enabling more targeted observations and dramatically improving the value of data returned to […]

Europe shrugs off tariffs, plots to end tech reliance on US

Governments and businesses respond to Trump pressures by upping spending in domestically controlled infrastructure

US tariffs may be squeezing Europe's trade balance, but they are also pushing governments and businesses to spend big on keeping tech closer to home.…

Some Polar Bears Have Been Getting Chunkier—Despite Losing Their Main Hunting Grounds to Climate Change

The fuzzy white predators of Svalbard, Norway, have been getting fatter over the past two decades, possibly by changing their diets and hunting strategies, a new study suggests

HP CEO prints final page after six years, moves to PayPal

Multimillion-dollar tenure could have bought a couple of crates of toner

Longtime HP CEO Enrique Lores is decamping for a top job at PayPal, handing the reins to an interim chief while the business hunts for a permanent successor.…

X marks the raid: French cops swoop on Musk's Paris ops

Algorithmic bias probe continues, CEO and former boss summoned to defend the platform's corner

French police raided Elon Musk's X offices in Paris this morning as part of a criminal investigation into alleged algorithmic manipulation by foreign powers.…

Microsoft finally sends TLS 1.0 and 1.1 to the cloud retirement home

Azure Storage now requires version 1.2 or newer for encrypted connections

Today is the day Azure Storage stops supporting versions 1.0 and 1.1 of Transport Layer Security (TLS). TLS 1.2 is the new minimum.…

Polish cops bail 20-year-old bedroom botnet operator

DDoSer of 'strategically important' websites admitted to most charges

Polish authorities have cuffed a 20-year-old man on suspicion of carrying out DDoS attacks.…

UK names Barnsley as first Tech Town to see whether AI can fix... well, anything

South Yorkshire becomes ground zero for nationwide experiment with £500K seed funding

AI-pocalypse  Barnsley, a town in South Yorkshire, England, best known for coal mining and glassmaking, is being thrust into the limelight as the country's first "Tech Town" – shoehorning AI into everything from local businesses to public services.…

Firefox makes AI optional, like it probably should have been all along

Users can disable every generative feature in one click – not everyone wants a chatbot bolted to their tabs

Mozilla has decided that if AI is going to live in your browser, you should at least be able to kill it when it gets annoying.…

NASA delays Artemis II to March after hydrogen leaks bedevil countdown test

This is starting to sound oddly familiar

NASA has concluded a Wet Dress Rehearsal (WDR) for Artemis II, but recurring liquid hydrogen leaks forced the test to be halted short of completion, prompting the agency to delay the mission's launch to at least March 2026.…

DIY AI bot farm OpenClaw is a security 'dumpster fire'

Your own personal Jarvis. A bot to hear your prayers. A bot that cares. Just not about keeping you safe

OpenClaw, the AI-powered personal assistant users interact with via messaging apps and sometimes entrust with their credentials to various online services, has prompted a wave of malware and is delivering some shocking bills.…

British military to get legal OK to swat drones near bases

Armed Forces Bill would let troops take action against unmanned threats around defense sites

Britain's defense personnel will be given the authority to neutralize drones threatening military bases under measures being introduced in the Armed Forces Bill, currently making its way through Parliament.…

Autism: debunking Trump claims, and what scientists still don't know

Autism has a long history of misinformation that continues to today. The Trump administration has perpetuated some of this misinformation in the last year. Among other things, officials have claimed certain groups of people don’t get the condition and that taking Tylenol while pregnant causes autism to later develop in children. Today, NPR Science Correspondent Jon Hamilton sets the record straight with host Emily Kwong on what scientists do and don’t know about autism.

If you liked this episode, check out our episodes on an Autism researcher’s take on Trump’s claims about Tylenol and a Fragile X treatment that may be on the horizon.

Interested in more science in the news? 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 .

This episode was produced by Berly McCoy. It was edited by Rebecca Ramirez. Tyler Jones checked the facts. The audio engineer was Damian Herring.

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

NPR Privacy Policy

Microsoft kills standalone SharePoint and OneDrive plans, because they’re not suite enough

Blames ‘unintended or nonstandard usage’ and the cost of keeping them alive

Microsoft has slipped out news that it’s killing some standalone SharePoint and OneDrive plans.…

Cracking Antarctic Sea Ice

Icebreakers play a critical role in delivering supplies to America’s largest research base in Antarctica.

South Korea enlists AI to spot pump and dump schemes on social media, or in Spam

Main stock exchange targets shares, government agency looks for crypto crooks

South Korea’s government and main stock exchange have developed and deployed AI-powered tools to detect schemes that aim to send the price of cryptocurrencies and shares soaring so that unscrupulous investors can cash in.…

Elon Musk merges xAI into SpaceX to spread universal consciousness via a sentient sun

Burning Man woo woo values House of Grok at $250 billion

Elon Musk on Monday revealed his space company SpaceX has acquired his AI outfit xAI, and that the two will work together to escape the surly bonds of Earthly powers by tapping the sun's enduring glow.…

Everything you ever wanted to know about Amiga UNIX

We recently talked about Apple’s pre-Mac OS X dabblings in UNIX, but Apple wasn’t the only computer and operating system company exploring UNIX alternatives. Microsoft had the rather successful Xenix, Atari had ASV, Sony had NEWS, to name just a very small few. The Amiga, too, wanted in on the UNIX action, and as such, released Amiga UNIX, based on AT&T System V Release 4. The Amiga UNIX website is dedicated to everything you would ever want to know about this operating system. This site is dedicated on preserving Amix’s history and sharing information and instructions on what Amix is, how to install it (either on real hardware or in emulation) and what can you do with it. Mainly, it tries to cater to people who wish to run AMIX for whatever reason on their hardware. By documenting experiences with it, it is hoped that subsequent SVR4 junkies will find the way more smooth than it might have been without any guidance at all. For even a relatively experienced modern Unix or GNU/Linux administrator, System V UNIX is sufficiently different to present difficulty in installation and administration. Not so much in moving around between directories, and using common utilities that persist to this day – although many of those are hoary and somewhat forgetful in their retirement – but of doing more in depth tasks and understanding the differences. ↫ The Amiga Unix Wiki If you wish to run Amiga UNIX yourself, you’ll either have to have one of the original two models sold with it – the 2500UX and 3000UX – or one of the Amigas that meets the minimum requirements. Another option is, of course, emulation, and WinUAE has support for running Amiga UNIX.

Notepad++ hijacking blamed on Chinese Lotus Blossom crew behind Chrysalis backdoor

The group targets telecoms, critical infrastructure - all the usual high-value orgs

Security researchers have attributed the Notepad++ update hijacking to a Chinese government-linked espionage crew called Lotus Blossom (aka Lotus Panda, Billbug), which abused weaknesses in the update infrastructure to gain a foothold in high-value targets by delivering a newly identified backdoor dubbed Chrysalis.…

NASA Astronaut to Answer Questions from Students in Pennsylvania

NASA astronaut Chris Williams will connect with students in Pennsylvania to answer prerecorded science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) questions while aboard the International Space Station. The Earth-to-space call will begin at 12:20 p.m. EST Thursday, Feb. 5, and will stream live on the agency’s Learn With NASA YouTube channel. Media interested in covering the […]

Let them eat Pi: RAM shortage bumps Raspberry prices as much as $60

Second price increase in just two months

That slice of Pi is getting much more expensive. Everyone’s favorite single-board computer, the Raspberry Pi, is jumping up in price again, with increases ranging from \(10 to \)60, depending on how much memory your board has.…

Read Love Letters From Royals and Romantics Across 500 Years of British History

A new exhibition at Britain's National Archives features a letter to Elizabeth I, Jane Austen's will and a plea to free Oscar Wilde from prison

Intel welcomes memory apocalypse with Xeon workstation refresh

Chipzilla touts 4 TB of DDR5 and 128 lanes of PCIe 5 for less than the House of Zen just in time for memory winter

Intel's workstation lineup is getting a much-needed refresh with the launch of its Xeon 600-series processors, boasting up to 86 cores and clocks topping 4.9 GHz. Chipzilla's timing couldn't be worse.…

Snow Drought Hits the Western United States, Worrying Experts About the Region's Water Supply

Snow melt from the mountains provides up to 75 percent of the West's yearly water

A New App Can Match Footprints to the Dinosaurs That Made Them

Using artificial intelligence, DinoTracker can accurately classify dinosaur tracks around 90 percent of the time

Firefox nightly gets “AI” kill switch

After a seemingly endless stream of tone deaf news from Mozilla, we’ve finally got some good news for Firefox users. As the company’s been hinting at for a while on social media now, they’ve added an “AI” kill switch to the latest Firefox nightly release, as well as a set of toggles to disable specific “AI” features. You can choose to use some of these and not others. If you don’t want to use AI features from Firefox at all, you can turn on the Block AI enhancements toggle. When it’s toggled on, you won’t see pop-ups or reminders to use existing or upcoming AI features.  Once you set your AI preferences in Firefox, they stay in place across updates. You can also change them whenever you want. ↫ Ajit Varma at the Mozilla blog I’m particularly enamoured with the specific mention that the setting will remain unaffected by updates. It’s incredibly sad that Mozilla even has to mention this, but they have nobody to blame but themselves for that one. None of this is enough to draw me away from Librewolf and back to Firefox, but at least it gives those of us who prefer to keep using Firefox the option to disable all of this “AI” nonsense. Also, there’s no Librewolf for POWER9, so I have to use Firefox somewhere. It’s unlikely Chrome or Safari will get such clear “AI” kill switches, so it might become a reason for some to switch to Firefox from Chrome or Safari.

There's nothing micro about this super-sized Arduino Uno

It's 7x the size of the regular board

Arduino boards power everything from robots to RGB lights, but they're a little on the small side. YouTuber UncleStem has his own solution: build a gigantic, yet fully functional one.…

Audio on hp300

In the late 1980s, with the expansion of the Internet (even though it was not open to commercial activities yet) and the slowly increasing capabilities of workstations, some people started to imagine the unthinkable: that, some day, you may use your computer to record voice messages, send them over the Internet, and the recipient could listen to these messages on his own computer. That was definitely science fiction… until workstation manufacturers started to add audio capabilities to their hardware. ↫ Miod Vallat A great story detailing how the audio hardware in the HP 9000/425e was made to work on OpenBSD and NetBSD.

Want more ads on your web pages? Try the AdBoost extension

'If we don't feed the advertisers, then we'll be forced to pay artists for their creative work'

Come on, admit it. You like seeing banner ads on your favorite web pages, because they provide a nice break from reading text. If you're honest about this feeling, there's a new extension for you.…

DRAM prices expected to double in Q1 as AI ambitions push memory fabs to their limit

NAND flash now expected to surge 55–60% compared to Q4

The memory shortage is worse than most of us first thought. Prices on DRAM and NAND flash memory are expected to surge in the first quarter of 2026 as AI-driven hyperscalers and cloud service providers (CSPs) continue to strain supply chains.…

StopICE hacked to send alarming text messages, admins accuse border patrol agent of sabotage

The ICE-tracking service says it doesn't store usernames or addresses

ICE-reporting service StopICE has blamed a US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agent for attacking its app and website and sending users text messages warning them that their information had been "sent to the authorities."…

Megalodons Went Extinct Millions of Years Ago. The Prehistoric Predator Could Become Maryland's Official State Shark

Teeth belonging to the fearsome creatures have been discovered throughout the state. Now, they're up for consideration by the state legislature

Russia-linked APT28 attackers already abusing new Microsoft Office zero-day

Ukraine’s CERT says the bug went from disclosure to active exploitation in days

Russia-linked attackers are already exploiting Microsoft's latest Office zero-day, with Ukraine's national cyber defense team warning that the same bug is being used to target government agencies inside the country and organizations across the EU.…

Oracle's first general on-prem release of its .ai database iteration draws skeptics

Users happy with 19c as experts question AI lock-in

Last week, Oracle announced the general availability of Oracle AI Database 26ai Enterprise Edition for Linux x86‑64, but 13-year support for 19c and the prospect of AI lock-in might make users think twice about upgrading to it.…

This Rare Roman Figurine of a Cat With Its Paws Atop a Severed Head Is One of Britain's Newest Treasures

The artifact was discovered by a metal detectorist in 2024

McDonald's is not lovin' your bigmac, happymeal, and mcnuggets passwords

Your favorite menu item might be easy to remember but it will not secure your account

Change Your Password Day took place over the weekend, and in case you doubt the need to improve this most basic element of cybersecurity hygiene, even McDonald's – yes, the fast food chain – is urging people to get more creative when it comes to passwords. …

NASA’s Orion Spacecraft at Launch Pad

NASA’s Orion spacecraft, which will carry the Artemis II crew around the Moon, sits at the launch pad on Jan. 17, 2026, after rollout. It rests atop the SLS (Space Launch System) rocket. Orion can provide living space on missions for four astronauts for up to 21 days without docking to another spacecraft. Advances in technology […]

How Modern and Antique Technologies Reveal a Dynamic Cosmos

Today’s observatories document every pulse and flash in the sky each night. To understand how the cosmos has changed over longer periods, scientists rely on a more tactile technology.

The post How Modern and Antique Technologies Reveal a Dynamic Cosmos first appeared on Quanta Magazine

NASA to Discuss Early Results of Artemis II Wet Dress Rehearsal

Editor’s note: This advisory was updated at on Feb. 3, 2026, to reflect a change in the start of the news conference and its participants, as well as removing a placeholder for a crew media gaggle. Following a fueling test of NASA’s SLS (Space Launch System) rocket at the launch pad for the Artemis II […]

Snowflake bets $200M that OpenAI makes databases more chatty

Cuts out the Azure middleman with multi-year deal for 'tighter alignment'

Snowflake plans to spend as much as $200 million with OpenAI to bring its models and chatbot into the database vendor's sandbox and toolset. Features such as Cortex AI and Snowflake Intelligence will get a boost from the house of Altman.…

Artificial Lungs Kept a Dying Man Alive For 48 Hours—Until He Was Well Enough to Receive an Organ Transplant

The patient is faring well nearly three years later, thanks to the life-saving device

A Fossil Trove in China Provides a Rare Window Into a Mass Extinction Event That Happened More Than 500 Million Years Ago

Paleontologists have identified thousands of animal species that lived soon after the Cambrian explosion ended

Patch Tuesday meets Groundhog Day as Windows hibernation bug returns

Microsoft concedes January's out-of-band fix didn't stop some PCs from rebooting instead of sleeping

Microsoft rounded off January by adding more devices to the list of those affected by the hibernation issue it claimed had been fixed by an out-of-band update.…

Widely Attended Gatherings (WAGs) Determinations

2026 2026 TSC Artemis II Pre-launch Reception 2.5.26 2026 VABA AAAAM Legislative Reception 2.4.26 Chamber of Commerce Summit 2.2.26 Cheniere Energy at the National Portrait Gallery 1.28.26 Leaders for a Better Louisiana at Adams and Reese 1.28.26 California Manufacturers and Technology Association Reception 1.23.26 Goddard Memorial Dinner 3.13.26 ISS 25th Anniversary 1.19.26 2026 Amentum Artemis […]

SAP refuses to budge on renewal discounts despite cloud growth slowdown

Drop in customers' cloud conversion rate causes share price to plunge 22% – steepest decline since 2020

SAP is refusing to change tack on renewal discounts despite lower-than-expected cloud forecasts prompting its biggest share price slide in five years.…

OpenClaw patches one-click RCE as security Whac-A-Mole continues

Researchers disclose rapid exploit chain that let attackers run code via a single malicious web page

Security issues continue to pervade the OpenClaw ecosystem, formerly known as ClawdBot then Moltbot, as multiple projects patch bot takeover and remote code execution (RCE) exploits.…

Microsoft spends billions on AI, converts just 3.3% of Copilot Chat users

CEO talks momentum while paid uptake remains minimal

Only 3.3 percent of Microsoft 365 and Office 365 users who touch Copilot Chat actually pay for it, an awkward figure that landed alongside Microsoft's $37.5 billion quarterly AI splurge and its insistence that the payoff is coming.…

Notepad++ update service hijacked in targeted state-linked attack

Breach lingered for months before stronger signature checks shut the door

A state-sponsored cyber criminal compromised Notepad++'s update service in 2025, according to the project's author.…

US TikTok service restored after cloud 'that doesn't go down' went down

Winter storm knocks out Oracle datacenter, despite Larry Ellison's reliability boasts

TikTok has restored US services after winter storms hit an Oracle datacenter - the same infrastructure that Big Red's founder Larry Ellison previously claimed doesn't go down.…

Microsoft's Sinofsky saw Surface fail coming – then hit up Epstein for advice on exit

DOJ files show former Windows chief predicting a public flop before mulling next mission

Steven Sinofsky warned Microsoft that its flagship Surface was about to flop in public, then sought exit advice from Jeffrey Epstein as he negotiated his way out of Redmond.…

Help! Does anyone on the bus know Linux?

Open source operating system fans, your time has come

Bork!Bork!Bork!  Most people would be perfectly happy to ride the bus without seeing ads. So this latest public error could be a blessing in disguise for passengers, if not for the bus company hoping to make money. Love it or hate it, this bit of borked digital signage looks to have run into a problem that only an open-source hero can solve.…

Infrastructure cyberattacks are suddenly in fashion. We can buck the trend

Don't be scared of the digital dark – learn how to keep the lights on

Opinion  Barely a month into 2026, electrical power infrastructure on two continents has tested positive for cyberattacks. One fell flat as attempts to infiltrate and disrupt the Polish distribution grid were rebuffed and reported. The other, earlier attack was part of Operation Absolute Resolve, the US abduction of Venezuela's President Maduro from Caracas on January 3.…

Microsoft's 'atypical' emergency Windows patches are becoming awfully typical

Administrators sigh: OOBs, they did it again

Opinion  Microsoft has had a bad start to the year. Two out-of-band updates in the weeks after the first Patch Tuesday of 2026 rattled administrators' already shaky faith in the company. But are things getting worse?…

Why research into ‘forever chemicals’ includes firefighters

PFAS make pans nonstick, clothes waterproof and furniture stain resistant. They're so ubiquitous, they're even inside of us. Now, researchers are looking for more insights in firefighters' blood.

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

NPR Privacy Policy

Techie's one ring brought darkness by shorting a server

Love hurts, but being exposed is more painful

Who, Me?  Monday brings the shock of a return to work, a transition The Register always tries to ease by bringing you a new instalment of Who, Me?, the reader-contributed column in which your fellow readers admit to errors and disclose how they dodged the consequences.…

Capgemini to sell the biz that works for US government amid criticism of ICE contract

'The nature and scope of this work has raised questions' says CEO, who swears he couldn't spot it sooner

French consulting and tech services giant Capgemini has decided to offload Capgemini Government Solutions (CGS), the entity it uses for some work with the US government – including a controversial gig assisting immigration authorities.…

Oracle expects investors to pump $50 billion into its cloud this year alone

Big Red will use debt and equity finance to keep itself in the pink

Oracle has revealed it needs to raise \(45 billion to \)50 billion in cash to fund expansion of its cloud infrastructure, and its plan to raise that money…

Seasons Change in Southwest Virginia

From autumn color to a winter-white finish, forested areas around Blacksburg trade foliage for snow over the span of two months.

India dangles 20-year tax holiday for clouds that serve offshore users

PLUS: NTT offshores to Vietnam; Japan adds AI interface to space data; Samsung cashes in on memory boom

Asia In Brief  India wants to offer big tech companies tax breaks that last decades.…

Open-source AI is a global security nightmare waiting to happen, say researchers

Also, South Korea gets a pentesting F, US Treasury says bye bye to BAH, North Korean hackers evolve, and more

Infosec in Brief  As if AI weren't enough of a security concern, now researchers have discovered that open-source AI deployments may be an even bigger problem than those from commercial providers. …

AI security startup CEO posts a job. Deepfake candidate applies, inner turmoil ensues.

'I did not think it was going to happen to me, but here we are'

Nearly every company, from tech giants like Amazon to small startups, has first-hand experience with fake IT workers applying for jobs - and sometimes even being hired. …

Sword of Damocles hangs over UK military’s Ajax as minister says back it or scrap it

Armored vehicle trials halted after troops report noise and vibration symptoms

The British Army's ill-fated Ajax armored vehicle program now faces the prospect of being axed as the Ministry of Defence withdraws its initial operating capability status and reviews its future.…

OpenVMS 9.2-3 x64 now has local console on OPA0

I previously covered x64 OpenVMS release on VMware. This was insanely cool achievement for the operating system. While it had no practical ramification there was one small annoyance. The OS console was on a serial port. In VMware it meant another VM connected via named pipe. Now OpenVMS x64 supports (limited?) local console on OPA0. ↫ Virtually Fun I think this has been available for a while now – since 2024 – but we hadn’t covered it yet. That same 2024 post also indicates CDE and DECWindows work now, a side effect of a C/C++ compiler bugfix. Sadly, VSI has made it clear that desktop support is not at all on their list of things to spend time on, so don’t expect graphics support to improve meaningfully other than by accident like in this case.

Guix System first impressions as a Nix user

But NixOS isn’t the only declarative distro out there. In fact GNU forked Nix fairly early and made their own spin called Guix, whose big innovation is that, instead of using the unwieldy Nix-language, it uses Scheme. Specifically Guile Scheme, GNU’s sanctioned configuration language. I’ve been following Guix for a bit, but it never felt quite ready to me with stuff like KDE being only barely supported and a lot of hardware not working out of the box. However, now that (after three years) Guix announced its 1.5.0 release with a lot of stuff stabilized and KDE finally a first-party citizen, I figured now is the best time to give it a fresh shot. This post captures my experiences from installation to the first 3-4 days. ↫ Nemin’s blog If you’re interested in Guix, but aren’t quite sure if you want to take the plunge, this article does a great job of showing you the ropes, listing what issues you might run into, some pitfalls to avoid, and so on.

NASA taps Claude to conjure Mars rover's travel plan

Is there life on Mars? Well, there's Claude in the machine

Anthropic's Claude machine learning model has boldly planned what no Claude has planned before – a path across Mars for NASA's Perseverance rover.…

Broadcom 'bulldozes' VMware cloud partners as March deadline looms

Many European CSPs are being cut loose, sources say, forcing customer transitions

exclusive  Broadcom this week brought the hammer down on the Advantage Partner Program for VMware Cloud Service Providers (VCSPs) – and the clock is now ticking for any third parties working to close sales.…

Forgejo monthly report - January 2026

Forgejo v14 was released on time. Some regressions were quickly escalated and fixed. A security release was published for v11 and v13. A lot of work has been done around the runner – new features and QA. There are ongoing discussions about improving the issue reporting workflow and the license and copyright attribution in the codebase. Work on federation is progressing. The website was moved to our own infrastructure.

NASA Selects Axiom Space for Fifth Private Mission to Space Station

NASA and Axiom Space have signed an order for the fifth private astronaut mission to the International Space Station, targeted to launch no earlier than January 2027 from the agency’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. “The award of our fifth private astronaut mission shows that commercial space is not a distant promise, but a present […]

Microsoft gestures vaguely in the general direction of fleeting promises to improve Windows 11

It’s no secret that Windows 11 isn’t exactly well-liked by even most of its users, and I’m fairly sure that perception has permeated into the general public as well. It seems Microsoft is finally getting the message, and they’re clearly spooked: the company has told The Verge that they have heard the complaints, and intend to start fixing many of the issues people are having. The feedback we’re receiving from our community of passionate customers and Windows Insiders has been clear. We need to improve Windows in ways that are meaningful for people. This year, you will see us focus on addressing pain points we hear consistently from customers: improving system performance, reliability, and the overall experience of Windows. ↫ Pavan Davuluri, head of Windows, to The Verge This entire statement is utterly meaningless. I have zero faith in words; only actions will do. Microsoft has made many promises over the years, and they have a history of simply not following through on them. Up until this year is over and there have been material improvements in Windows 11 that we can measure, see, and point to, nothing has changed between the day before the statement and the day after. Anyone taking this at face value and reporting it as such is an idiot. This means that at the end of this year, Windows 11 should be faster, more stable, experience far fewer breaking updates, have fewer – nay – zero ads, a far more consistent user interface, proper local account support, and more. If these things haven’t become reality once the countdown runs out and on 31 December, Microsoft lied to our faces once more. Until then, don’t use Windows.

NASA Earth Energy Instrument Completes Testing, Ready for Delivery

NASA’s Libera instrument, which is designed to maintain the global data record of Earth’s radiation budget, has successfully completed comprehensive environmental testing. This critical milestone included thermal vacuum tests that simulate the expected space temperature and environments that Libera will experience during its mission. The Libera instrument will fly on Joint Polar Satellite System-4 (JPSS-4), […]

January blues return as Ivanti coughs up exploited EPMM zero-days

Consider yourselves compromised, experts warn

Ivanti has patched two critical zero-day vulnerabilities in its Endpoint Manager Mobile (EPMM) product that are already being exploited, continuing a grim run of January security incidents for enterprise IT vendors.…

'Hey! I'm chatting here!' Fugazi answers doom NYC's AI bot

Lying means dying

Lying means dying, at least for one falsehood-peddling government AI. A Microsoft-powered chatbot that New York City rolled out to help business owners answer frequently asked questions – but was often wrong – has been silenced as the city grapples with a $12 billion budget shortfall.…

Ex-Googler nailed for stealing AI secrets for Chinese startups

Network access from China and side hustle as AI upstart CEO aroused suspicion

A former Google software engineer has been convicted of stealing AI hardware secrets from the company for the benefit of two China-based firms, one of which he founded. The second startup intended to use these secrets to market its technology to PRC-controlled organizations.…

'Rising Star' of a Prominent Yellowstone Wolf Pack Was Illegally Killed, Sparking a Poaching Investigation

Wildlife advocates are mourning the death of a female gray wolf known as 1478F

NASA Aims to Advance Hypersonic Flight Testing with New Awards

While NASA is working with U.S. aviation to explore commercial supersonic technologies, the agency is also looking forward to an even faster era of flight – one of vehicles that can fly hypersonic, or five times the speed of sound. And to further that vision, NASA has issued two awards for studies into vehicle concepts.  […]

Visualizing Perseverance’s AI-Planned Drive on Mars

Description This animation of NASA’s Perseverance was created with the Caspian visualization tool using data acquired during an 807-foot (246-meter) drive on the rim of Jezero Crater made by the rover on Dec. 10, 2025, the 1,709th Martian day, or sol, of the mission. The mission’s “drivers,” or rover planners, use the information to understand the Perseverance’s […]

NASA Honor Awards for Cold Atom Lab Team Members

NASA OUTSTANDING PUBLIC LEADERSHIP MEDAL Awarded for notable leadership accomplishments that have significantly influenced NASA’s mission. Sustained leadership and exceptionally high-impact leadership achievements demonstrate the individual’s effectiveness in advancing NASA’s goals and image in present and future terms. Kamal Oudrhiri – For outstanding leadership of the Cold Atom Laboratory, NASA’s first quantum laboratory in space. […]

Video: Perseverance Rover’s View of Crater Rim Drive

Description This animation shows Perseverance’s point of view during drive of 807 feet (246 meters) along the rim of Jezero Crater on Dec. 10, 2025, the 1,709th Martian day, or sol, of the mission. Captured over two hours and 35 minutes, 53 Navigation Camera (Navcam) image pairs were combined with rover data on orientation, wheel speed, […]

From 'The Karate Kid' to 'Clueless,' These Are the 25 New Additions to the National Film Registry. See the Full List Here

"The Incredibles," "Inception" and "The Grand Budapest Hotel" join more than 900 titles preserved by the Library of Congress

Mapping Perseverance’s Route With AI

Description This annotated image from NASA’s HiRISE (High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment) camera aboard the agency’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter image depicts the AI-planned route and the actual route taken by NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover during its 807-foot (246-meter) drive on Dec. 10, 2025, the 1,709th Martian day, or sol, of the mission. The drive was the second of two demonstrations […]

NASA’s Perseverance Rover Completes First AI-Planned Drive on Mars

The team for the six-wheeled scientist used a vision-capable AI to create a safe route over the Red Planet’s surface without the input of human route planners.  NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover has completed the first drives on another world that were planned by artificial intelligence. Executed on Dec. 8 and 10, and led by the agency’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, the demonstration used generative AI to create waypoints for Perseverance, a complex decision-making task typically performed manually by […]

Researchers Say This Paleolithic Teenage Boy Died a Slow Death After a Bear Mauled Him

A new analysis of “il Principe,” an ancient, decorated skeleton found in northwest Italy, confirms that the child died up to three days after being brutally attacked

What’s Up: February 2026 Skywatching Tips from NASA

NASA’s Artemis II mission has its first opportunity to launch to the moon, Orion the Hunter takes center stage, and a planetary parade marches across the night sky.

Thousands more Oregon residents learn their health data was stolen in TriZetto breach

Parent company Cognizant hit with multiple lawsuits

Thousands more Oregonians will soon receive data breach letters in the continued fallout from the TriZetto data breach, in which someone hacked the insurance verification provider and gained access to its healthcare provider customers across multiple US states.…

Preparing for Artemis II: Training for a Mission Around the Moon

Four astronauts will soon travel beyond low Earth orbit and fly around the Moon on Artemis II, a mission that will test NASA’s systems and hardware for human exploration of deep space.  Since June 2023, NASA astronauts Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch, and CSA (Canadian Space Agency) astronaut Jeremy Hansen have been preparing for their lunar journey. The approximately […]

Feeling taxed by layoffs, IRS turns to AI helpers

Fewer humans, more bots - just in time for filing season

Tax season 2026 could be an interesting one as the IRS seeks to replace the staff it sent to the unemployment line with AI. Bots could handle tasks ranging from reviewing an org's request for tax-exempt status to processing amended individual filings.…

Wild Jaguars Sometimes Meow Just Like House Cats, New Recordings Suggest. The Sounds May Help Mothers and Cubs Find One Another

Two female jaguars were recorded making meow-like vocalizations in Brazil—the first documented audio of the sounds in the wild

Google Researchers Say Their New A.I. Tool AlphaGenome Can Help Decode the Human Genetic Instruction Book

The computer model might help scientists better understand the biological impacts of typos in DNA

Goldstone’s DSS-15 Antenna and the Milky Way

Deep Space Station 15, one of the 112-foot antennas at the Goldstone Deep Space Communications Complex near Barstow, California, looks skyward, with the stars of the Milky Way overhead, in September 2025. Goldstone is part of NASA’s Deep Space Network (DSN), which operates three complexes around the globe that support communications with dozens of deep […]

Backblaze says AI traffic and neoclouds could shape future networks

The western US saw the most activity overall

Cloud storage firm Backblaze says that a sharp rise in AI-driven data traffic to neocloud operators may signal a shift from internet-style traffic patterns to large, high-bandwidth flows characteristic of large-scale model training and inference work.…

Once Thought To Support Neurons, Astrocytes Turn Out To Be in Charge

New experiments reveal how astrocytes tune neuronal activity to modulate our mental and emotional states. The results suggest that neuron-only brain models, such as connectomes, leave out a crucial layer of regulation.

The post Once Thought To Support Neurons, Astrocytes Turn Out To Be in Charge first appeared on Quanta Magazine

Resurrecting Ancient Enzymes in NASA’s Search for Life Beyond Earth

NASA-supported scientists have resurrected an enzyme first used by organisms on Earth 3.2-billion years ago and, in the process, have validated a chemical biosignature in rocks that is used to understand ancient life on Earth. The research provides a new understanding of what Earth’s biosphere was like early in our planet’s history and confirms  a […]

Hubble Sees Galaxy with Dark Rings in New Light

This NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image features an uncommon galaxy with a striking appearance. NGC 7722 is a lenticular galaxy located about 187 million light-years away in the constellation Pegasus. A lenticular, meaning “lens-shaped,” galaxy is a type whose classification sits between more familiar spiral galaxies and elliptical galaxies. It is also less common than spirals and ellipticals — partly because […]

Renaissance Readers Left Chemical Clues Inside These Medical Manuals. Were They Using Human Feces and Tortoise Shells to Treat Illnesses?

Researchers analyzed proteins extracted from "How to Cure and Expel All Afflictions and Illnesses of the Human Body" and "A Useful and Essential Little Book of Medicine for the Common Man," both written by a 16th-century German eye doctor

Oracle seeks to build bridges with MySQL developers

Big Red promises 'new era' as long-frustrated contributors weigh whether to believe it

Oracle is taking steps to "repair" its relationship with the MySQL community, according to sources, by moving "commercial-only" features into the database application's Community Edition and prioritizing developer needs.…

Autonomous cars, drones cheerfully obey prompt injection by road sign

AI vision systems can be very literal readers

Indirect prompt injection occurs when a bot takes input data and interprets it as a command. We've seen this problem numerous times when AI bots were fed prompts via web pages or PDFs they read. Now, academics have shown that self-driving cars and autonomous drones will follow illicit instructions that have been written onto road signs.…

Dinosaur National Monument Construction Work Turns Up New Fossils, Leading to the First Excavation at One Site in More Than a Century

Recent digs revealed roughly 20 feet of a long-necked dinosaur's skeleton, and paleontologists suspect even more bones are lurking underground

Ariel OS: a library operating system for IoT devices written in Rust

Operating systems written in Rust – especially for embedded use – are quite common these days, and today’s example fits right into that trend. Ariel OS is an operating system for secure, memory-safe, low-power Internet of Things (IoT). It is based on Rust from the ground up and supports hardware based on 32-bit microcontroller architectures (Cortex-M, RISC-V, and Xtensa). For a quick overview of our motivations and what we plan next, check our roadmap. Ariel OS builds on top of existing projects from the Embedded Rust ecosystem, including Embassy, esp-hal, defmt, probe-rs, sequential-storage, and embedded-test. While those provide high-quality building blocks for a wide range of embedded applications, such projects do not provide the high level of integration that developers know from contemporary C-based operating systems for microcontrollers, such as RIOT or Zephyr for instance. ↫ Ariel OS GitHub page There’s bound to be a microcontroller you can get your hands on that Ariel OS supports, and since it’s licensed under either a MIT or Apache 2.0 license, you can get going right away.

Want digital sovereignty? That'll be 1% of your GDP into AI infrastructure please

Analyst predicts massive spend on domestic AI stacks

Countries intent on digital sovereignty will need to invest at least 1 percent of their entire gross domestic product (GDP) into AI infrastructure by 2029, according to analyst biz Gartner.…

OpenAI gives ChatGPT models the chop – two weeks' notice, take it or leave it

GPT-4o gets second death sentence after last year's reprieve, but this time barely anyone's bothered

OpenAI is sunsetting some of its ChatGPT models next month, a move it knows "will feel frustrating for some users."…

Phones down, brooms up: HashiCorp co-founder lectures business hopefuls

Stock management also important, says Mitchell Hashimoto

HashiCorp co-founder Mitchell Hashimoto took to X this week to unveil the secret of workplace success: stay off your phone, sweep the floor, and clean the machines after that.…

Euro firms must ditch Uncle Sam's clouds and go EU-native

Just because you're paranoid about digital sovereignty doesn't mean they're not after you

Opinion  I'm an eighth-generation American, and let me tell you, I wouldn't trust my data, secrets, or services to a US company these days for love or money. Under our current government, we're simply not trustworthy.…

Mechanical mutts make it official: Now full-time at Sellafield's hot zones

Spot's new cleanup gig involves gamma rays, alpha particles, and considerably less PPE than fleshy colleagues

Bark!Bark!Bark!  Sellafield Ltd is to use Boston Dynamics' Spot robot dogs in "routine, business-as-usual operations" amid the ongoing cleanup and decommissioning of the notorious UK nuclear site.…

NS&I's IT car crash considers cutting legacy links to stop the bleeding

£1.3B over budget and four years late, bank searches for a way to not to bust new timetable and funding pot

A British state-owned bank is reconfiguring its modernization project, including considering reducing connections with legacy systems, as it tries to claw back schedule and budget overruns that are far beyond early plans.…

Lessons and failures from the Challenger space shuttle explosion

On Jan. 28, 1986, NASA’s 25th space shuttle mission, Challenger, left the launchpad in Cape Canaveral, Florida. Seventy-three seconds into flight, Challenger exploded over the Atlantic Ocean as millions of people watched. All seven people on board died. Now, forty years later, journalist Adam Higginbotham chronicles what went wrong. His book Challenger: A True Story of Heroism and Disaster on the Edge of Space pieces together stories from key officials, engineers and the families of those killed in the explosion – and details how its legacy still haunts spaceflight today.

Consider checking out our episode speaking to an astronaut while she’s in space .

Have a scientific question you want us to answer? 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 .

Listen to Short Wave on Spotify and Apple Podcasts .

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

NPR Privacy Policy

In-house techies fixed faults before outsourced help even noticed they'd happened

60-minute SLA was effectively useless and the contractor admitted it

On Call  Welcome to another instalment of On Call, The Register's weekly reader-contributed column that shares your stories of weird and wonderful tech support jobs.…

Deciphering the alphabet soup of agentic AI protocols

Tools, agents, UI, and e-commerce - of course each one needs its own set of competing protocols

MCP, A2A, ACP, or UTCP? It seems like every other day, orgs add yet another AI protocol to the agentic alphabet soup, making it all the more confusing. Below, we'll share what all these abbreviations actually mean and share why they are important for the future of AI.…

Extreme January Cold

Following a significant winter storm, frigid temperatures lingered in late January 2026 across a vast swath of the U.S.

NASA Johnson Celebrates 25 Years in Space with Community Day

NASA’s Johnson Space Center brought the International Space Station’s 25-year legacy to the public on Jan. 24, 2026, during a community day event in Houston. Johnson’s visitor center, Space Center Houston, hosted the celebration commemorating 25 years of continuous human presence in space.   For a quarter century, astronauts have lived and worked aboard the orbiting laboratory, advancing science, strengthening international […]

Java developers want container security, just not the job that comes with it

BellSoft survey finds 48% prefer pre‑hardened images over managing vulnerabilities themselves

Java developers still struggle to secure containers, with nearly half (48 percent) saying they'd rather delegate security to providers of hardened containers than worry about making their own container security decisions.…

Mac OS and Windows NT-capable ROMs discovered for Apple’s unique AIX Network Server

As most of you will know, Mac OS X (or Rhapsody if you count the developer releases) wasn’t Apple’s first foray into the world of UNIX. The company sold its own UNIX variant, A/UX, from 1988 to 1995, which combined a System V-based UNIX with a System 7.0.1 desktop environment and application compatibility, before it acquired NeXT and started working on Rhapsody/Mac OS X. As a sidenote, I don’t know if the application compatibility layer was related to the Macintosh Application Environment for UNIX, which I have running on my HP-UX machines. That’s not the only time Apple dabbled with UNIX, though – Apple’s unique Apple Network Server product from 1996 also came with UNIX, but time it wasn’t one from Apple itself, but rather from its enemy-turned-friend IBM: AIX. The Network Server shipped with a slightly customised version of IBM’s AIX operating system; regular AIX straight from IBM wouldn’t work. The more things change, the more they stay the same I guess. Since the Apple Network Server was built around a modified Power Macintosh 9500 – there’s much more to the hardware, but that’s the short of it – so you would expect the Network Server to also be able to run regular Mac OS for PowerPC, right? Apple even sold server products running plain Mac OS at the time, so it’d make sense, but nothing about Apple in the ’90s made any sense whatsoever, so no, use of plain Mac OS was locked out through the ROM. And let’s not even get started about other PowerPC operating systems of the time, like, of all things, Windows NT – something Apple supposedly demonstrated at some point. But was that always the case? Well, we’ve got new ROMs straight from a former Apple employee, and after flashing them to a supported ROM chip, the Apple Network Sever can now run classic Mac OS. On top of that, and even more miraculous, the Windows NT-capable ROMs have also been discovered. I’ll give you a spoiler now: it turns out the NT ROM isn’t enough to install Windows NT by itself, even though it has some interesting attributes. Sadly this was not unexpected. But the pre-production ROM does work to boot Mac OS, albeit with apparent bugs and an injection of extra hardware. Let’s get the 700 running again (call it a Refurb Weekend) and show the process. ↫ Cameron Kaiser While it’s great news to see that Mac OS can now be run on the Network Server, I’m personally much more interested in the story behind the Windows NT ROMs. The idea that Apple would sell a computer running Windows NT out of the box is wild to think about now, but considering the desperate state the company was in at the time, all options must’ve been on the table. Sadly, as Kaiser discovered, the Windows NT ROMs in and of themselves are not enough to run Windows NT. However, they appear to be much farther along in the development process than even the Mac OS-capable ROMs, which is fascinating. When Jobs talked Gil Amelio into canning the ANS as well, the ROM initiative naturally went out the window with it. However, while the existing 2.0 Mac OS ROMs are only known on an unmarked development flash stick similar to mine, these final 2.26NT ROMs appear almost production-ready with fully printed labels, suggesting they had reached a very late stage of development. ↫ Cameron Kaiser Despite not being able to boot Windows NT for PowerPC as-is, most likely because there’s no compatible ARC or HAL, Kaiser did discover a ton of interesting details, like how this ROM configures the Network Server to run in little endian mode, which is all Windows NT for PowerPC ever supported, making this the very first time a PowerPC machine did so. I’m hoping Kaiser manages to track down the necessary components to make Windows NT bootable on the ANS, as one of the most unique curiosities in Apple history. There’s a ton more details in the article, as per usual Kaiser standards, and it’s an absolute joy to read.

Maybe CISA should take its own advice about insider threats hmmm?

The call is coming from inside the house

opinion  Maybe everything is all about timing, like the time (this week) America's lead cyber-defense agency sounded the alarm on insider threats after it came to light that its senior official uploaded sensitive documents to ChatGPT.…

The Earliest Known Vertebrates Had Four Eyes—and They Worked a Lot Like Ours Do, New Research Suggests

Two of those eyes may have evolved into a part of the brain called the pineal gland

Ammonia-Bearing Compounds Discovered at Surface of Jupiter’s Moon Europa

Description Advanced analysis of decades-old data from NASA’s Galileo spacecraft identifies ammonia-bearing compounds discovered on the surface of Jupiter’s moon Europa, as shown in this composite image. Zooming in on an area about 250 miles (about 400 kilometers) wide, the black-and-white mosaic to the right is composed of multiple images from Galileo’s Solid-State Imaging camera. […]

NASA Analysis Shows La Niña Limited Sea Level Rise in 2025

Description This graph shows the rise in global mean sea level from 1993 to 2025 based on data from a series of five international satellites. The solid red line indicates the trajectory of this increase, which has more than doubled over the three decades. The dotted red line projects future sea level rise. A NASA analysis […]

Dozens of Items That Once Belonged to Nelson Mandela Can Head to Auction, South African Court Rules

The collection includes shirts, sunglasses, a signed copy of South Africa's first post-apartheid constitution and a prison key from Robben Island

NASA Heat Shield Technology Enables Space Industry Growth

Using cutting-edge material licensed from NASA, a protective heat shield manufactured in-house by Varda Space Industries for the first time enabled one of its capsules to blaze through Earth’s atmosphere on Thursday, marking a significant milestone for the agency and America’s space industry. The material, known as C-PICA (Conformal Phenolic Impregnated Carbon Ablator), provides a […]

Musk distracts from struggling car biz with fantastical promise to make 1 million humanoid robots a year

To what end? Who knows? Tesla isn't even using them in its own factories yet

Elon Musk's car company is getting ready to be Skynet. Tesla, facing an 11 percent decline in automotive revenue in Q4 2025, has committed to $20 billion in capex spending this year on manufacturing and compute infrastructure. The goal: build lots of humanoid robots.…

Google's Project Genie could put even more game developers out of work

A Labs prototype turns prompts into short, explorable 3D worlds

Google has put the video gaming industry on notice with the rollout of Project Genie, an experimental AI world-model prototype that generates explorable 3D environments from text or image prompts.…

Europa’s Ice Shell (Artist’s Concept)

Description This artist’s concept depicts a cutaway view showing Europa’s ice shell. It contains a shallow layer of small imperfections (cracks, pores, and voids) that extend down from the surface hundreds of feet. The icy moon of Jupiter is thought to harbor an ocean below its frozen exterior. Data used to generate a new result […]

NASA Awards Help Inspire Future Innovators Through STEM Engagement

NASA has awarded more than $5 million to 29 institutions nationwide to expand and strengthen science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) learning beyond the classroom. The awards are designed to help build skills that lead directly to STEM careers. These organizations collaborate with libraries, after-school programs, and youth-serving groups to provide sustainable learning opportunities that […]

NASA-ISRO Radar Mission Peers Through Clouds to See Mississippi River Delta

A new image from the NISAR mission shows off the satellite’s ability to reveal details of Earth’s surfaces. The science team also released new sample data.  A U.S.-Indian Earth satellite’s ability to see through clouds, revealing insights and characteristics of our planet’s surface, is on display in a colorful, newly released image showing the Mississippi River Delta region in southeastern Louisiana.  Created with data collected by the NISAR (NASA-ISRO […]

Beach Erosion Reveals Fragments of a 136-Year-Old Shipwreck That Sank in New Jersey's 'Graveyard of the Atlantic'

The schooner "Lawrence N. McKenzie" was transporting a load of oranges from Puerto Rico to New York City when it wrecked on March 21, 1890

I Am Artemis: Doug Parkinson

Doug Parkinson’s face lights up as he starts telling his story, how someone from  Wisconsin now plays a part in the team that will help land the first Artemis astronauts on to the Moon. Parkinson serves as NASA’s SLS (Space Launch System) rocket lead for Launch Integration and Mission Operations, guiding engineers responsible for monitoring […]

After a Heart Attack, the Brain's Response Might Make Recovery Harder. Cutting Some Communication Between the Organs Could Help

The new study in mice could lead to innovative treatments for heart attacks

Agents gone wild! Companies give untrustworthy bots keys to the kingdom

'We're letting thousands of interns run around in our production environment'

Corporate use of AI agents in 2026 looks like the Wild West, with bots running amok and no one quite knowing what to do about it - especially when it comes to managing and securing their identities.…

Dow Chemical says AI is the element behind 4,500 job cuts

The 129 year old chemical company uses Palantir-rival C3's AI as its software of choice.

ai-pocalypse  The jury is still out when it comes to determining how much job loss AI is causing. However, we now have another case study. Dow Chemical blames AI automation for its plans to cut 4,500 jobs, about 12.5 percent of its work force.…

See How This Fashion Designer Reimagined the Jewels Stolen From the Louvre for Paris Haute Couture Week

Daniel Roseberry created two pieces inspired by the tiara and brooch that once belonged to French Empress Eugénie. Both artifacts were stolen from the Paris museum in October

March 2026 Total Lunar Eclipse: Your Questions Answered

A total lunar eclipse will redden the Moon on March 3, 2026. Here’s what you need to know.

AI datacenter boom triples US gas power builds, filling the air with more CO2

Reduce emissions? Screw that - we have money to lose and memes to generate

Fossil fuel-fired power plant development is roaring back to life in the US thanks to the AI datacenter boom, with data from 2025 suggesting we're reaching the point where the renewable energy transition - and efforts to ease carbon emissions - may well be doomed.…

NASA Analysis Shows La Niña Limited Sea Level Rise in 2025

A mild La Niña caused greater rainfall over the Amazon basin, which offset rising sea levels due to record warming of Earth’s oceans. The rise in the global mean sea level slowed in 2025 relative to the year before, an effect largely due to the La Niña conditions that persisted over most of the year. […]

To stop crims, Google starts dismantling residential proxy network they use to hide

The Chocolate Factory strikes again, targeting the infrastructure attackers use to stay anonymous

Crims love to make it look like their traffic is actually coming from legit homes and businesses, and they do so by using residential proxy networks. Now, Google says it has "significantly degraded" what it believes is one of the world's largest residential proxy networks.…

AV vendor goes to war with security shop over update server scare

eScan lawyers up after Morphisec claimed 'critical supply-chain compromise'

A spat has erupted between antivirus vendor eScan and threat intelligence outfit Morphisec over who spotted an update server incident that disrupted some eScan customers earlier this month.…

Uncle Sam dangles nuclear campuses for states while watering down safety rules

Governors offered atomic megasites and federal cash as hundreds of pages of regulations go missing

The Department of Energy (DOE) is inviting US states to host "Nuclear Lifecycle Innovation Campuses" to revitalize atomic power amid reports the agency has weakened safety rules governing the way nuclear sites operate.…

NASA Researchers Probe Tangled Magnetospheres of Merging Neutron Stars

New simulations performed on a NASA supercomputer are providing scientists with the most comprehensive look yet into the maelstrom of interacting magnetic structures around city-sized neutron stars in the moments before they crash. The team identified potential signals emitted during the stars’ final moments that may be detectable by future observatories.   “Just before neutron […]

Systemd daddy quits Microsoft to prove Linux can be trusted

Lennart Poettering's Amutable aims to bring 'cryptographically verifiable integrity' to the other OS

Linux celeb Lennart Poettering has left Microsoft and co-founded a new company, Amutable, with Chris Kühl and Christian Brauner.…

Webb Zooms into Helix Nebula

NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope has zoomed into the Helix Nebula to give an up-close view of the possible eventual fate of our own Sun and planetary system. In Webb’s high-resolution look, the structure of the gas being shed off by a dying star comes into full focus. The image reveals how stars recycle their […]

IBM says AI is insane in the mainframe as z17 sales surge

Big Blue leaning on software smarts to modernize COBOL estates and cut costs

IBM's leader has trumpeted an AI-on-the-mainframe future as generative AI fills in the COBOL gap left by earlier generations of techies.…

ShinyHunters swipes right on 10M records in alleged dating app data grab

Extortion crew says it's found love in someone else's info as Match Group plays down the impact

ShinyHunters has added a fresh notch to its breach belt, claiming it has pinched more than 10 million records from Match Group, a US firm that owns some of the world's most widely used swipe-based dating platforms.…

Rare Mountain Lion Standoff in San Francisco Ends Peacefully After a 30-Hour Search

Wildlife officials successfully captured the young male, known as 157M, after he wandered into the northern Pacific Heights neighborhood

Banker claims Oracle may slash up to 30,000 jobs, sell health unit to pay for AI build-out

Cerner, though acquired in 2022, is nothing to multibillion black hole

Oracle could cut up to 30,000 jobs and sell health tech unit Cerner to ease its AI datacenter financing challenges, investment banker TD Cown has claimed, amid changing sentiment on Big Red's massive build-out plans.…

Tesla revenue falls for first time as Musk bets big on robots and autonomy

Elon thinks taxis and androids will succeed where car sales are stalling

Tesla reported 2025 revenue of $94.8 billion, down 3 percent year-on-year and marking the first annual revenue decline since the electric car maker began publishing financial results in 2010.…

Patch or perish: Vulnerability exploits now dominate intrusions

Apply fixes within a few hours or face the music, say the pros

What good is a fix if you don't use it? Experts are urging security teams to patch promptly as vulnerability exploits now account for the majority of intrusions, according to the latest figures.…

Sat Nad declares Windows 11 has a billion users – just don't bother asking for details

Terrible start to 2026 offset by optimistic operating system numbers

Microsoft is famously reticent about operating system usage figures unless it has something to boast about. So CEO Satya Nadella stating that Windows 11 had reached one billion users raised a few eyebrows.…

Meta to pour the GDP of Kenya into AI infrastructure push in 2026

Zuck bets big on 'personal superintelligence' with $135B splurge

Meta is to nearly double its capital investments aimed at AI this year, spending more on infrastructure than the entire output of some mid-sized economies, as the AI datacenter feeding frenzy shows no sign of ending.…

Latest Vivaldi release surfs a wave of anti-AI sentiment

'What we are finding is that people hate AI'

Interview  Vivaldi has raised a middle finger to the influx of AI in the browser space with its latest version.…

Cyberattack on Poland's power grid could have turned deadly in winter cold

Close call after an apparently deliberate attempt to starve a country of energy at the worst time

Cybersecurity experts involved in the cleanup of the cyberattacks on Poland's power network say the consequences could have been lethal.…

Capita pension portal 'fiasco' forces Cabinet Office into damage control

150-strong 'surge team' deployed as 8,500 retirees left high and dry, some waiting 9 months for legally owed cash

The UK Cabinet Office is being forced to promise "interim support measures" for struggling retired government workers as Capita's botched takeover of the Civil Service Pension Scheme (CSPS) lurches from bad to worse.…

Birmingham City Council's Oracle ERP fiasco now £144M and still not working

Five years after its planned go-live, the system remains incomplete as costs balloon more than sevenfold

Birmingham City Council's SAP-to-Oracle project is set to cost £144.4 million – more than seven times earlier estimates – as it waits for a fully functioning system five years after its planned go-live date.…

If you're one of the 16,000 Amazon employees getting laid off, read this

It's not your fault

Opinion  It's not your fault Amazon hired you for a position that it no longer deems necessary – blame bad planning or unanticipated market conditions. Everybody guesses wrong sometimes, even with the power of the most sophisticated business analysis software and the smartest prognosticators one can hire.…

Xfce announces xfwl4, its new Wayland compositor

While the two major open source desktop environments get most of the airtime – and for good reason, since they’re both exceptionally good – there’s a long tail of other desktop environments out there catering to all kinds of special workflows and weird niches. I think we can all agree that Xfce leads this long tail of more niche desktop environments, without really being niche itself. Xfce may not be as popular as KDE or GNOME, but it’s an amazing full-featured desktop environment that offers a slightly more traditional, less fast-paced desktop for those that desire so. Xfce, too, is moving to Wayland, which can mean significant efforts in certain places, not the least of which is the window manager. Xfce originally planned to adapt its venerable xfwm4 to support both X11 and Wayland at the same time, but this turned out to be too complex for a variety of reasons, all more or less caused by differences between X11 and Wayland. On top of that, this approach would risk introducing new bugs to the X11 side of things, and the Xfce project does not want to subject its X11 users to that. As such, they’ve decided to develop a Wayland compositor from scratch: xfwl4. The goal is, that xfwl4 will offer the same functionality and behavior as xfwm4 does, or as much as possible considering the differences between X11 and Wayland. Using xfwl4 should feel just like using xfwm4 on X11. We even plan to reuse the existing xfwm4 configuration dialogs and xfconf settings to ensure a seamless transition. Xfwl4 will not be based on the existing xfwm4 code. Instead, it will be written from scratch in rust, using smithay building blocks. ↫ The Xfce development team This project also includes related tasks like rearchitecting session-startup to support Wayland, implementing support for the xdg-session-management protocol, and adding support for XWayland. This is obviously anything but a small effort, but it seems like a practical solution. Xfce users generally seem to choose Xfce exactly because it’s a stable environment that does not move fast(er) and break (some) things. As such, keeping the X11 window manager separate and stable, without Wayland work possibly breaking it, seems like the kind of thing the average Xfce user can get behind. Personally, I can’t wait for Xfce to become a full Wayland desktop, as dealing with X11’s nonsense feels decidedly retro to me now, and I don’t see Xfce as a retro environment at all. It’s going to take some time, of course, but thanks to countless generous donations to Xfce, longtime Xfce core developer Brian Tarricone will be paid to work on this project. Excellent news for everyone involved.

Irony alert: Anthropic helps UK.gov to build chatbot for job seekers

The jobs that will be eradicated by our AI overlords

The UK government will work with supplier Anthropic to build an artificial intelligence (AI) assistant for job seekers, despite its chief executive’s doom-laden views of the job market.…

Bork ventures to the Middle of Lidl

Happier days at Intel nailed to the wall of discount retailer

Bork!Bork!Bork!  Lidl is a well-known purveyor of inexpensive groceries, random goods via the Middle of Lidl, and now… bork.…

The West Faces Snow Drought

Very wet—but very warm—weather in the western U.S. has left many mountainous regions looking at substantial snowpack deficits.

Microsoft investors sweat cloud giant's OpenAI exposure

All the promises in the world won't pay the GPU bills when the music stops

What should have been a banner second quarter for Microsoft was met with tepid apprehension on Wall Street on Wednesday, sending its share price down by 6 percent in after-hours trading.…

Google to foist Gemini pane on Chrome users in automated browsing push

The world’s most popular browser has gained a dedicated sidebar for AI browsing

Google has reworked its Chrome browser to include a new side panel for interacting with the company's Gemini model, in an effort to support AI-assisted interactions with websites.…

ServiceNow boasts about years of sweat equity that went into making its AI agents smarter

80 billion workflows makes a difference

Though some recent studies cast doubt on the ability of AI agents to complete complex tasks, ServiceNow boasts that its bots are better, because they can rely on 20 years and 80 billion workflows worth of experience. The underlying model, they say, is just a small part of the product.…

How Do Menopause and a Treatment to Manage Its Symptoms Affect the Brain and Mental Health?

New research suggests an association between menopause and anxiety, depression and shrinkage in certain brain regions—which hormone replacement therapy might not mitigate

You Can Buy This 438-Year-Old Mill in Wales That Inspired a Stunning J.M.W. Turner Painting

Rossett Mill was the subject of a landscape by the Romantic painter around 1795. Now, the property is listed at a little over $2 million

Ransomware crims forced to take off-RAMP as FBI seizes forum

Cybercrime solved. The end

Ransomware crims have just lost one of their best business platforms. US law enforcement has seized the notorious RAMP cybercrime forum's dark web and clearnet domains.…

What is going on with Windows 11?

Since I have no qualms about kicking a proprietary software product while it’s down, let’s now switch to NTDEV‘s thoughts on the state of Windows 11. Unfortunately, the issue that plagued Windows since the dawn of time has only aggravated recently. Windows 11 is a mixture of old and new technologies that are glued together, with decades of legacy code that simply refuses to die (because if it did a lot of corporate costumers would complain, and whether we like it or not they are paying big cash for support to Microsoft). Also, it tries to have a “modern” UI that unfortunately not only is inconsistent, but also it’s too heavy for its own good, being just a lipstick on a bloated old pig. Last, but certainly not least, it is full of AI features that most people didn’t ask for, some are even actively feared (see Recall) and are also quite lacking in polish and usefulness. Until Microsoft stops treating Windows as an “AI innovation platform” of sorts and starts treating it as the stable, reliable tool it was always meant to be, the user experience will continue to feel like a battle between the person sitting at the desk and the company that built the desk. ↫ NETDEV When even some of the most knowledgeable and respected Windows/Windows NT developers and experts are this down on the current state of Windows, you know things are way worse than we even know from just following the news and our own experiences. Back in 2024, I stated that I firmly believe we will see Windows – or at least, huge, crucial chunks of it – shift to an open source development model, as it’s the only way for Windows to move forward without crumbling into itself. It would also be a massive cost-cutting and personnel-culling step for Microsoft, something that seems to become ever more relevant now that the company bet massively on “AI”, without any of it paying off. They’re going to need to do some serious cost-cutting once the “AI” bubble bursts, and Windows will definitely be the first on the chopping block. As a side note, the step to release Windows as open source won’t be nearly as difficult or problematic as people think. In fact, Microsoft has provided access to the source code behind Windows and various other products for decades, and countless governments and organisations have access to said source code. On top of that, the source code to Windows XP and Server 2003 is out there, hosted on GitHub, and various other leaks have occurred as well over the years. While I’m sure a large clean-up effort would still be required, and while it surely will be a big engineering effort, if there were any truly shocking things in the code Microsoft wouldn’t want the world to see we’d already know by now. I’m getting the strong feeling Microsoft is trying to squeeze every last drop of revenue out of Windows before it ends up on the chopping block. Windows will definitely not be axed, but cost-cutting is inevitable.

Claude Code's prying AIs read off-limits secret files

Developers remain unsure how to prevent access to sensitive data

Don't you hate it when machines can't follow simple instructions? Anthropic's Claude Code can't take "ignore" for an answer and continues to read passwords and API keys, even when your secrets file is supposed to be blocked.…

I don’t want using my computer to be like a game of Russian roulette

I’ve been terribly sick for a few days so we’ve got some catching up to. Let’s first take a look at how Windows is doing. People often say Linux is “too much work.” And I agree. They’re completely justified to complain. There’s the documentation page diving, the forums, the reddit threads. And, most importantly, you have to basically rewire your brain and stop expecting it to behave like Windows used to. But I looked at the list above and realized: Windows is now also too much work. And the difference with Windows is that you’re going to do all that work while actively fighting your computer only for it to be undone when the next surprise update comes and ruins everything. You might be thinking “just disable updates, man” or “just install LTSC”, or “just run some random debloat script off of GitHub”. Why? Why would I jump through all these hoops? I’d rather put in the effort for an OS that knows what consent is and respects me as a user. ↫ Bogdan-Mihai Mosteanu You know how in most theme parks they have various different rides for all kinds of people? There’s the wild and crazy over-the-top deathcoasters for the ultimate thrill seekers, the more gentle wooden coasters for those who like a thrill, but not over-the-top. There’s the swinging ship-type things for thrill-seeking accountants who seek their thrills predictably. There’s a game of Russian roulette played in the backlot. For the kids, there’s the classic spinning tea cups. And then there’s the public transport service dressed up as an old-timey steam train that just brings you to your destination without any issue, silently doing its thing, the unsung backbone of park logistics. Commercial operating systems like Windows and macOS are the games of Russian roulette, predictably unexpectedly shooting you in the face every sixth time you pull the trigger. That’s not my vibe. I want my operating system to be that steam train, and desktop Linux is the only thing that fits that bill – and it’s very clear more and more people are discovering that too.

Everybody is WinRAR phishing, dropping RATs as fast as lightning

Russians, Chinese spies, run-of-the-mill crims …

Come one, come all. Everyone from Russian and Chinese government goons to financially motivated miscreants is exploiting a long-since-patched WinRAR vuln to bring you infostealers and Remote Access Trojans (RATs).…

The Mystery of the Missing Robert Burns Painting Has Finally Been Solved—After 200 Years of Searches and Seances

The portrait of the renowned Scottish poet vanished without a trace in 1840. Since then, scholars and sleuths alike have been strategizing about how to get it back

Microsoft plans more server farms, despite water worries

Redmond has pledged to be carbon-negative by 2030

It's no secret that datacenters use a ton of water for cooling, a demand that can strain local supplies. Despite reported internal forecasts showing sharply higher water use by 2030, Microsoft continues to splash cash on new AI bit barns.…

Networks Keeping NASA’s Artemis II Mission Connected

NASA’s Artemis II mission will transport four astronauts around the Moon, bringing the agency one step closer to sending the first astronauts to Mars. Throughout Artemis II, astronaut voice, images, video, and vital mission data must traverse thousands of miles, carried on signals from NASA’s communications systems. Through Artemis, NASA is establishing an enduring presence […]

See the Most Detailed Map of Dark Matter Ever Made, Bringing Astronomers a Step Closer to Unraveling Its Mysterious Nature

The invisible stuff makes up about 85 percent of all matter in the universe, but researchers know little about it

Yes, you can build an AI agent - here’s how, using LangFlow

AI automation, now as simple as point, click, drag, and drop

Hands On  For all the buzz surrounding them, AI agents are simply another form of automation that can perform tasks using the tools you've provided. Think of them as smart macros that make decisions and go beyond simple if/then rules to handle edge cases in input data. Fortunately, it's easy enough to code your own agents and below we'll show you how.…

NASA Telescopes Spot Surprisingly Mature Cluster in Early Universe

A new discovery captures the cosmic moment when a galaxy cluster – among the largest structures in the universe – started to assemble only about a billion years after the big bang, one or two billion years earlier than previously thought. This result, made using NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory and James Webb Space Telescope, will […]

Fortinet unearths another critical bug as SSO accounts borked post-patch

More work for admins on the cards as they await a full dump of fixes

Things aren't over yet for Fortinet customers – the security shop has disclosed yet another critical FortiCloud SSO vulnerability.…

Chandra, Webb Catch Twinkling Lights

Data from Chandra adds red, green, and blue twinkling lights in this Dec. 22, 2025, image of Pismis 24 from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope. Pismis 24 is a young cluster of stars in the core of the nearby Lobster Nebula, approximately 5,500 light-years from Earth in the constellation Scorpius. Home to a vibrant stellar nursery […]

AI agent hype cools as enterprises struggle to get into production

Only the biggest businesses are up to the challenge, says Redis CEO

Anyone scanning the news might think it's pedal to the metal as far as AI agent implementations go, but there is a slump in rollouts as many organizations figure out what to do next, Redis CEO Rowan Trollope told The Register.…

Networks Hold the Key to a Decades-Old Problem About Waves

Mathematicians are still trying to understand fundamental properties of the Fourier transform, one of their most ubiquitous and powerful tools. A new result marks an exciting advance toward that goal.

The post Networks Hold the Key to a Decades-Old Problem About Waves first appeared on Quanta Magazine

Archaeologists Say This 9,500-Year-Old Burial Is the Oldest Known Evidence of Intentional Cremation Discovered in Africa

Located in Malawi, the site could also be the world's earliest example of an in situ cremation pyre for an adult, according to a new study

NASA Webb Pushes Boundaries of Observable Universe Closer to Big Bang

NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope has topped itself once again, delivering on its promise to push the boundaries of the observable universe closer to cosmic dawn with the confirmation of a bright galaxy that existed 280 million years after the big bang. By now Webb has established that it will eventually surpass virtually every benchmark […]

Mummified Cheetahs Discovered in Caves Could Help Saudi Arabia Bring the Wild Cat Back to Its Historical Range

Researchers thought that just one subspecies of cheetah lived in Saudi Arabia long ago. But an unexpected discovery seems to broaden the gene pool

Flush with cash, SK hynix spawns mysteriously named 'AI Co.'

Memory boom funds $10B punt on 'solutions' outfit that's still light on details

SK hynix is surfing the AI hype wave by setting up what it nebulously describes as a solutions biz to further exploit the hysteria.…

Challenger at 40: The disaster that changed NASA

How a cold morning, failed O-rings, and flawed decision-making led to tragedy

Forty years ago, Space Shuttle Challenger disintegrated 73 seconds into its flight, killing its crew of seven and exposing the management culture and decision-making process that led NASA to launch on a freezing January day.…

Cops put Microsoft Copilot in holding cell after controversial hallucination

Chatbot banned – for now – after it dreamed up West Ham match that never happened

West Midlands Police's acting Chief Constable has suspended use of Microsoft Copilot following a controversy that led to the early retirement of his predecessor over a recommendation to ban Israeli football fans from a Birmingham match.…

Old Windows quirks help punch through new admin defenses

Google researcher sits on UAC bypass for ages, only for it to become valid with new security feature

Microsoft patched a bevy of bugs that allowed bypasses of Windows Administrator Protection before the feature was made available earlier this month.…

Anthropic CEO bloviates for 20,000+ words in thinly veiled plea against regulation

If only there were some technology to boil things down to bullet points

Opinion  Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has published a novella-length essay about the risk of superintelligent AI, something that doesn't yet exist.…

Cops get more facial recognition vans as UK bets big on AI policing

Home Office white paper promises millions for LFR, a new Police.AI unit, and a bespoke legal framework

Police in England and Wales will increase their use of live facial recognition (LFR) and artificial intelligence (AI) under wide-ranging government plans to reform law enforcement.…

How agentic AI can strain modern memory hierarchies

You can’t cheaply recompute without re-running the whole model – so KV cache starts piling up

Feature  Large language model inference is often stateless, with each query handled independently and no carryover from previous interactions. A request arrives, the model generates a response, and the computational state gets discarded. In such AI systems, memory grows linearly with sequence length and can become a bottleneck for long contexts. …

Oracle silent over user complaints about OCI London 'wobble' last week

But did it falter? Oracle debuts Schrödinger's cloud

Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) users reported an outage late last week in its London region, yet despite complaints from Register readers, Big Red is staying quiet.…

Microsoft Azure OpenAI Service takes an unscheduled day off in Sweden

Cascading backend failures kept users locked out until home time

Microsoft Azure, or at least the part of it that handles the OpenAI service in the Sweden Central region, was down and out for the count yesterday, leaving users facing errors for much of the working day.…

UK tax collector plans £2B tech binge as legacy systems refuse to die

AWS and Capgemini loom large in HMRC's procurement pipeline

Updated  The UK's tax collector is budgeting to spend more than £2 billion on new tech deals in the next couple of years, including a contract set for AWS and another for Capgemini to be awarded without competition.…

Britain's Ministry of Defence signs on the dotted line with Palantir

'Follow-on' agreement lasts 3 years as US techies protest vendor's ICE contract Stateside

The UK's Ministry of Defence (MoD) has directly awarded a £240.6 million contract to US technology company Palantir to continue to licence and support its data analytics work.…

ATM flashes a port or two for the enterprising hacker

Connection secured. Not so sure about the installation

Bork!Bork!Bork!  Behold an ATM crying out for a man-in-the-middle attack. An obsolete Microsoft operating system cannot be blamed here. This is all about the hardware.…

How scientists predict big winter storms

This past weekend, Winter Storm Fern struck the States. Sleet, snow and ice battered Americans all the way from New Mexico to New York. Scientists predicted its arrival in mid-January, and in anticipation of the storm, more than 20 state governors issued emergency declarations. But how did scientists know so much, so early, about the approaching storm? NPR climate reporter Rebecca Hersher says it has to do with our weather models… and the data we put into them. Which begs the question: Will we continue to invest in them?

Interested in more science behind the weather? Check out our episodes on better storm prediction in the tropics and how the Santa Ana winds impact the fire season this time of year.

Have a question we haven’t covered? Email us at shortwave@npr.org . We’d love to consider it for a future episode!

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

This episode was produced by Hannah Chinn. It was edited by our showrunner Rebecca Ramirez. Tyler Jones and Rebecca Hersher checked the facts. The audio engineer was Robert Rodriguez.

News clips were from CBS Boston, Fox Weather, Fox 4 Dallas-Fort Worth, and PBS Newshour.

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

NPR Privacy Policy

Snow Buries the U.S. Interior and East

Satellites observed a frozen landscape across much of the country after a massive winter storm.

NASA Testing Advances Space Nuclear Propulsion Capabilities

Nuclear propulsion and power technologies could unlock new frontiers in missions to the Moon, Mars, and beyond. NASA has reached an important milestone advancing nuclear propulsion that could benefit future deep space missions by completing a cold-flow test campaign of the first flight reactor engineering development unit since the 1960s. “Nuclear propulsion has multiple benefits […]

Discovery Alert: An Ice-Cold Earth?

The Discovery A candidate planet that might be remarkably similar to Earth, HD 137010 b, has one potentially big difference: It could be colder than perpetually frozen Mars. Key Facts Scientists continue to mine data gathered by NASA’s Kepler Space Telescope, retired in 2018, and continue to turn up surprises. A new paper reveals the […]

Paranoid WhatsApp users rejoice: Encrypted app gets one-click privacy toggle

Meta also replaces a legacy C++ media-handling security library with Rust

Users of Meta's WhatsApp messenger looking to simplify the process of protecting themselves are in luck, as the company is rolling out a new feature that combines multiple security settings under a single, toggleable option. …

ICE knocks on ad tech’s data door to see what it knows about you

Agency looks to understand the extent of identifying information available to its masked agents

It's not enough to have its agents in streets and schools; ICE now wants to see what data online ads already collect about you. The US Immigration and Customs Enforcement last week issued a Request for Information (RFI) asking data and ad tech brokers how they could help in its mission.…

NASA Science Flights Venture to Improve Severe Winter Weather Warnings

A team of NASA scientists deployed on an international mission designed to better understand severe winter storms. The North American Upstream Feature-Resolving and Tropopause Uncertainty Reconnaissance Experiment, or NURTURE, is an airborne campaign that uses a suite of remote sensing instruments to collect atmospheric data on winter weather with a goal of improving the models […]

This Magnificent Mural by Leonardo da Vinci Will Go on Display for a Brief Window During the Winter Olympics in Milan

Guided tours will take visitors onto scaffolding to view the rare artwork inside Sforza Castle, which is currently undergoing restorations

Webb Data Reveals Dark Matter

This image from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope, containing nearly 800,000 galaxies, is overlaid with a map of dark matter, represented in blue. Brighter blue areas indicate a higher density of dark matter. Researchers used Webb data to find the dark matter — which is invisible — via its gravitational influence on regular matter. The […]

Nudify app proliferation shows naked ambition of Apple and Google

Researchers with the Tech Transparency Project found all sorts of apps that let users create fake non-consensual nudes of real people

The mobile app emperors have no clothes. Apple and Google have made millions of dollars from AI apps that let users undress people even as both companies claim to ban such software from their stores, according to a new study.…

Archaeologists Unearthed a 430,000-Year-Old Stick. After Careful Analysis, They Say It Could Be the Oldest Wooden Tool Ever Discovered

Found in southern Greece, the stick was one of two wooden artifacts that appear to have been shaped intentionally, according to a new study

Three Billion Years Ago, Mars May Have Been Half Covered by a Sea the Size of the Arctic Ocean

Data from several probes studying the Red Planet helped geologists map what seems to be an ancient coastline

Let them eat sourdough: ShinyHunters claims Panera Bread as stolen credentials victim

Plus, the gang says it got in via Microsoft Entra SSO

ShinyHunters says it stole several slices of data from Panera Bread, but that's just the yeast of everyone's problems. The extortionist gang also claims to have stolen data from CarMax and Edmunds, in addition to three other organizations it posted to its blog last week.…

Researchers Discover a New Phase of Ice by Squeezing Water Between Diamonds

The new form, called Ice XXI, appeared at room temperature in the lab, and it may have a similar density to ice on distant moons in our solar system

NASA’s Juno Measures Thickness of Europa’s Ice Shell

Results from the solar-powered spacecraft provide a new measurement of the thickness of the ice shell encasing the Jovian moon’s ocean.  Data from NASA’s Juno mission has provided new insights into the thickness and subsurface structure of the icy shell encasing Jupiter’s moon Europa. Using the spacecraft’s Microwave Radiometer (MWR), mission scientists determined that the shell averages about 18 miles (29 […]

Penguin in your pocket: Nexphone dual boots into Linux, Windows 11

An expandable tablet, and a phone that reboots into desktop Windows

For most mobile devices, the OS is either Android or iOS, but a pair of new systems promises a host of additional OS options you can dual boot into. The Android phone can run Linux and boot into Windows 11 where it functions as a PC while the tablet runs a smorgasbord of Google-free OSes.…

Clawdbot sheds skin to become Moltbot, can't slough off security issues

The massively hyped agentic personal assistant has security experts wondering why anyone would install it

Security concerns for the new agentic AI tool formerly known as Clawdbot remain, despite a rebrand prompted by trademark concerns raised by Anthropic. Would you be comfortable handing the keys to your identity kingdom over to a bot, one that might be exposed to the open internet?…

European firms push on with AI pilots even as payoff doubts grow

IDC and Lenovo say enterprises are pressing ahead with pilot deployments despite mixed evidence on returns

Despite a growing number of reports that AI is not benefiting many businesses, Lenovo and IDC say that firms in EMEA are pushing ahead with pilot deployments and still expect it to drive growth and transform how they operate.…

Micron continues fab spending spree with $24B NAND storage plant in Singapore

No salvation from the memory winter, though - plant won't start churning out chips until 2028

Flush with cash from skyrocketing memory prices, Micron continued its fab expansion this week, this time breaking ground on a $24 billion manufacturing complex that will eventually produce chips used in storage devices.…

Salesforce signs $5.6B deal to inject agentic AI into the US Army

Analytics features arrive first; agentic AI comes later

Salesforce is getting cosier with the US Army via a deal worth up to $5.6 billion, selling cloud analytics as the groundwork for a future agentic AI push across the service and the wider DoD.…

Anthropologists Recover DNA of Syphilis-Causing Bacterium Relative From 5,500-Year-Old Human Remains, the Earliest Ever Found

The findings represent the oldest complete set of genetic information from this bacterial group and shed light on its evolutionary history

NASA Launches Its Most Powerful, Efficient Supercomputer

NASA is announcing the availability of its newest supercomputer, Athena, an advanced system designed to support a new generation of missions and research projects. The newest member of the agency’s High-End Computing Capability project expands the resources available to help scientists and engineers tackle some of the most complex challenges in space, aeronautics, and science. […]

Pope warns flock to raise their faces, protect their voices in fightback against AI

Vicar of Rome decries naive and unquestioning reliance on technology

Catholics need to develop critical thinking skills to counter the dark side of AI and counter unnatural attachments to chatbots, the pope said this week in a message marking the Church's social communications day.…

NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope Finds Crystal-Spewing Protostar

The NIRCam (Near-Infrared Camera) on NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope captured the actively forming protostar EC 53 (circled at left) in the Serpens Nebula in this image released on Jan. 21, 2026. Astronomers have long sought evidence to explain why comets at the outskirts of our own solar system contain crystalline silicates, since crystals require intense heat to form […]

China-linked group accused of spying on phones of UK prime ministers' aides – for years

Reports say Salt Typhoon attackers accessed handsets of senior govt folk

Chinese state-linked hackers are accused of spending years inside the phones of senior Downing Street officials, exposing private communications at the heart of the UK government.…

NASA, Partners Advance LISA Prototype Hardware

Engineers and scientists at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, completed tests this month on a second early version of a key element of the upcoming LISA (Laser Interferometer Space Antenna) mission. The LISA mission, a collaboration between ESA (the European Space Agency) and NASA, will use infrared lasers to detect gravitational waves, […]

AI Unlocks Hundreds of Cosmic Anomalies in Hubble Archive

A team of astronomers has employed a cutting-edge, artificial intelligence-assisted technique to uncover rare astronomical phenomena within archived data from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope. The team analyzed nearly 100 million image cutouts from the Hubble Legacy Archive, each measuring just a few dozen pixels (7 to 8 arcseconds) on a side. They identified more than […]

The American Southwest's Iconic Joshua Trees Are Blooming Early—and Scientists Want Your Help to Figure Out Why

The spiky desert succulents typically blossom beginning in late February. But this season, many started growing flowers up to four months early

What Happened to This 1,000-Pound Butter Sculpture After the Crowds Melted Away?

At the end of the 2026 Pennsylvania Farm Show, volunteers and students carefully dismantled the creamy masterpiece so it could be used to produce renewable energy for local homes

Watchdog says US weather alerts are getting lost in translation

GAO urges NWS to firm up its AI language plans as policy shifts slow multilingual warnings

US spending watchdogs have called on the National Weather Service (NWS) to deliver an updated plan for its AI language translation project to reduce the risk posed by extreme weather events to people not proficient in English.…

NASA begins formal anomaly review after MAVEN probe lost in space

Communication attempts ongoing for stricken spacecraft

NASA is setting up an anomaly review board to look into the fate of its Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution (MAVEN) spacecraft, which was last heard from on December 6.…

France to replace US videoconferencing wares with unfortunately named sovereign alternative

French govt says state-run service 'Visio' will be more secure. Now where have we heard that name before?

France has officially told Zoom, Teams, and the rest of the US videoconferencing herd to take a hike in favor of its own homegrown app.…

Succession: Linux kernel community gets continuity plan for post-Linus era

Conclave doc outlines path to eternal releases

The Linux kernel project has finally answered one of the biggest questions gripping the community: what happens if Linus Torvalds is no longer able to lead it?…

Japan doubles down on Trump's Genesis AI supercomputing effort

RIKEN links up with Argonne, Fujitsu, and Nvidia to build next-gen infrastructure

Japan's RIKEN scientific research institute and Fujitsu are working with America's Argonne National Laboratory (ANL) and Nvidia to build and operate next-gen compute infrastructure for AI and high-performance computing (HPC), in line with President Trump's Genesis Mission.…

Microsoft illegally installed cookies on schoolkid's tech, data protection ruling finds

Austrian education ministry unaware of tracking software until campaigners launched case

Updated  Microsoft illegally installed cookies on a school pupil's devices without consent, according to a ruling by the Austrian data protection authority (DSB).…

High Court to grill London cops over live facial recognition creep

Victim and Big Brother Watch will argue the Met's policies are incompatible with human rights law

The High Court will hear from privacy campaigners this week who want to reshape the way the Metropolitan Police is allowed to use live facial recognition (LFR) tech.…

NASA confirms command error temporarily felled TESS planet hunter

In space, no one can hear you bork

NASA has confirmed that its planet hunter, TESS (Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite), entered safe mode due to a command error that inadvertently left the spacecraft's solar arrays angled away from the Sun.…

'Ralph Wiggum' loop prompts Claude to vibe-clone commercial software for $10 an hour

Developer behind it is sick with worry he might have changed software development in nasty ways

Feature  Open source developer Geoff Huntley wrote a script that sometimes makes him nauseous. That's becaues it uses agentic AI and coding assistants to create high-quality software at such tiny cost, he worries it will upend his profession.…

Office zero-day exploited in the wild forces Microsoft OOB patch

Another actively abused Office bug, another emergency patch – Office 2016 and 2019 users are left with registry tweaks instead of fixes.

Updated  Microsoft has issued an emergency Office patch after confirming a zero-day flaw is already being used in real world attacks.…

Voyager 2's close encounter with Uranus wasn't in the original plan

40 years later, mission boffin recalls being told to pronounce it correctly

It is 40 years since Voyager 2 performed the first and, so far, only flyby of the planet Uranus. The resulting trove of data, however, was a bonus that almost didn't happen.…

Salesforce AI buffet won't stay all-you-can-eat forever

Analysts say today's capped deals may become tomorrow's cost shock

Gartner is warning Salesforce users that a capped enterprise agreement for its AI and data platforms will not be available when they come to renew, leaving a struggle to predict costs and understand value.…

What drives animals to your yard? It's complicated

Listener Shabnam Khan has a problem: Every time she works in her garden, she’s visited by lizards and frogs. Shabnam has lived in the metro Atlanta area for decades, and she says this number of scaly, clammy visitors has exploded over the past few years. Frogs croak at night; lizards sun on the cement. And she wants to know, where did all of these animals come from? It turns out, there are a number of potential answers – from small-scale environmental changes like natural plants and new water sources to large-scale shifts like urbanization and development displacing local wildlife. On this month’s Nature Quest, host Emily Kwong and producer Hannah Chinn discuss the possibilities – and impacts – of these changes.

If you live in the Atlanta area and are interested in volunteering with MAAMP (the Metro Atlanta Amphibian Monitoring Program), you can sign up for training here.

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

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

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

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

NPR Privacy Policy

Crossrail? More like Borkrail...

A thoroughly modern piece of public transport infrastructure deserves a thoroughly modern bork

Bork!Bork!Bork!  London's Elizabeth Line is the latest thing in urban development (at least as far as the UK is concerned). So it seems appropriate that its borks should be similarly up to date, and its emoticons rotated so the intent cannot be mistaken.…

Floods Inundate Southern Mozambique

Weeks of intense rain overwhelmed rivers and reservoirs, displacing hundreds of thousands of people.

Vibe coding may be hazardous to open source

Researchers argue AI coding tools disrupt community and hinder returns to maintainers

Tailwind Labs CEO Adam Wathan recently blamed AI for forcing him to lay off three workers.…

AWS's inevitable destiny: becoming the next Lumen

The cloud giant talks loudest about what scares it most. Here's what should terrify it

For a decade, AWS's position on multi-cloud was clear: don't.…

Canva among ~100 targets of ShinyHunters Okta identity-theft campaign

Atlassian, RingCentral, ZoomInfo also among tech targets

ShinyHunters has targeted around 100 organizations in its latest Okta single sign-on (SSO) credential stealing campaign, according to researchers and the criminal group itself.…

See How Alex Honnold Climbed a Dizzying 1,667-Foot-Tall Skyscraper Without Ropes

He became famous after scaling El Capitan without protective equipment in 2017. Now the 40-year-old athlete has completed the first free solo of Taipei 101 in Taiwan

How one developer used Claude to build a memory-safe extension of C

Robin Rowe talks about coding, programming education, and China in the age of AI

feature  TrapC, a memory-safe version of the C programming language, is almost ready for testing.…

Microsoft's Maia 200 promises Blackwell levels of performance for two-thirds the power

Inference-optimized chip 30% cheaper than any other AI silicon on the market today, Azure's Scott Guthrie claims

Microsoft on Monday unveiled a new in-house AI accelerator to rival Nvidia's Blackwell GPUs.…

NASA, GE Aerospace Hybrid Engine System Marks Successful Test

To an untrained eye, the aircraft engine sitting outside of a Cincinnati facility in December might have looked like standard hardware. But NASA and GE Aerospace researchers watching the unit fire up for a demonstration knew what they were looking at: a hybrid engine performing at a level that could potentially power an airliner.   It’s something new in the […]

NASA Welcomes Oman as Newest Artemis Accords Signatory

The Sultanate of Oman signed the Artemis Accords during a ceremony in Muscat attended by NASA on Monday, becoming the 61st nation to commit to responsible space exploration for the benefit of all humanity. “Oman’s accession to the Artemis Accords sets an important example about the value of responsible behavior and shared pursuit of discovery,” […]

US ownership of TikTok off to a rocky start as outage continues into second day

Winter storms bring Oracle datacenter down

updated  TikTok's new life under majority American ownership is off to a rough start, after users complained of widespread service disruptions the company blamed on a datacenter power outage.…

Claude can now disgorge interface elements from other apps

An official Model Context Protocol extension

Anthropic's Claude can now present the interfaces of other applications within its chat window, thanks to an extension of the Model Context Protocol (MCP).…

Tech employees demand their leaders take a stand against ICE

But CEOs remain frozen in place

More than 400 tech workers have urged their CEOs to "call the White House and demand ICE leave our cities" after masked federal agents shot and killed Alex Pretti over the weekend and the world's richest and most powerful chief executives remained silent.…

This Hammer Created From an Elephant Bone 480,000 Years Ago May Be the Oldest Known Tool of Its Kind Ever Found in Europe

Discovered in southern England in the mid-1990s, the artifact may have been made by Neanderthals or Homo heidelbergensis, according to a new study

NASA Technology Brings Golden Age of Exploration to Earth

As NASA fosters technologies needed to live and work farther away from home than ever before, the agency’s Technology Transfer program has the sole mission of getting those innovations into the hands of companies, entrepreneurs, and, ultimately, everyday people. The agency’s Spinoff publication has captured this endeavor for half a century, sharing stories of space […]

AI adoption at work flatlined in Q4, says Gallup

Points to a use-case problem

AI adoption in the workplace stalled in the fourth quarter of 2025, but those who have already started using it are making increased use of it, according to a survey by pollster Gallup. Don't let that fool you into thinking AI is taking over work, though: frequent AI users are still a tiny minority of overall workers.…

Sonic Booms and Earthquake Sensors Can Help Researchers Track Space Junk as It Plummets to Earth

Falling debris can travel at about 30 times the speed of sound, creating sonic booms that shake the ground

Keep it simple, stupid: Agentic AI tools choke on complexity

Even agents checking other agents can still get it wrong

Agents may be the next big thing in AI, but they have limits beyond which they will make mistakes, so exercise extreme caution, a recent research paper says.…

How NASA Is Homing in From Space on Ocean Debris

Space-based technology could help track plastic and other flotsam by its ‘fingerprints.’ In late 2025, scientists reported that, for the first time, they were able to detect concentrations of plastic pollution on land using NASA’s Earth Surface Mineral Dust Source Investigation (EMIT) sensor aboard the International Space Station. The technology has inspired marine researchers to […]

Tyrannosaurus Rex Was Probably a Late Bloomer—and May Have Taken Around 40 Years to Grow Up

The behemoth dinosaurs grew more slowly and had longer life spans than previously thought, a new study suggests

Hubble Observes Ghostly Cloud Alive with Star Formation

While this eerie NASA Hubble Space Telescope image may look ghostly, it’s actually full of new life. Lupus 3 is a star-forming cloud about 500 light-years away in the constellation Scorpius.  White wisps of gas swirl throughout the region, and in the lower-left corner resides a dark dust cloud. Bright T Tauri stars shine at the left, […]

NASA Reveals New Details About Dark Matter’s Influence on Universe

With the Webb telescope’s unprecedented sensitivity, scientists are learning more about dark matter’s influence on stars, galaxies, and even planets like Earth. Scientists using data from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope have made one of the most detailed, high-resolution maps of dark matter ever produced. It shows how the invisible, ghostly material overlaps and intertwines […]

Internet spent Q4 '25 losing fights with cables, power, and itself

Latest data from Cloudflare shows cable cuts, power failures, and network faults drive steady run of internet outages

The internet spent the closing months of 2025 being knocked over by cut cables, broken power grids, bad weather, military strikes, and the occasional self-inflicted technical wound, according to Cloudflare's latest global traffic data.…

KDE Plasma 6.6 beta ships a login manager that won't log in without systemd

Bad luck, BSDs – although alternatives still work

KDE Plasma 6.6 is approaching, and one of its more controversial changes is a new login screen that depends on systemd – meaning that it won't work on the non-Linux operating systems KDE still nominally supports.…

Is Particle Physics Dead, Dying, or Just Hard?

Columnist Natalie Wolchover checks in with particle physicists more than a decade after the field entered a profound crisis.

The post Is Particle Physics Dead, Dying, or Just Hard? first appeared on Quanta Magazine

Three is the magic number for Alaska Airlines: triple redundancy

Thankfully they only sufffered two outages in 2025. And now it has flown in experts to play with configurations

Alaska Air's CEO says IT outages last year damaged the company on multiple fronts despite "triple redundancies" built into its disaster recovery plan.…

Giant Kangaroos That Lived During the Ice Age May Have Hopped—Despite Weighing Up to 550 Pounds

The extinct animals may have bounced from scary situations, such as coming face to face with hungry predators

Knee-Deep in the CAD: Boffin gets Doom running inside a design modeler

The seminal shooter finds yet another unlikely home

Not content with rendering Doom in PCB design software or playing it on an oscilloscope, engineer Mike Ayles has got the 1990s shooter running in a computer-aided design (CAD) modeler.…

Sandia boffins let three AI agents loose in the lab. Science, not chaos, ensued

Researchers demonstrate fourfold improvement to LED steering results after enlisting the help of some good old-fashion AI

Boffins at the Department of Energy's Sandia National Labs are working to develop cheap and power efficient LEDs to replace lasers. One day, they let a trio of AI assistants loose in their lab.…

Why Do These Tudor-Era Portraits of Anne Boleyn and Elizabeth I Look So Strikingly Similar?

The artist behind the works may have used Elizabeth's likeness as a template in other royal portraits to visually emphasize her resemblance to previous monarchs and reinforce her status as the legitimate Tudor heir

A Little Boy’s Library Book Was Due in 1989. Thirty-Six Years Later, He Realized His Parents Had Never Returned It

After finding "Harry the Dirty Dog" at his dad's home in Greece, Dimitris Economou brought it back to the library in Virginia where his family had checked it out more than three decades earlier

EU looking into Elon Musk's X after Grok produces deepfake sex images

Probe follows outcry over use of creepy image generation tool

The European Commission has launched an investigation into X amid concerns that its GenAI model Grok offered users the ability to generate sexually explicit imagery, including sexualized images of children.…

Data thieves borrow Nike's 'Just Do It' mantra, claim they ran off with 1.4TB

US sports brand launches probe after extortion crew WorldLeaks claims it stole huge dataset

Nike says it is probing a possible breach after extortion crew WorldLeaks claimed to have lifted 1.4TB of internal data from the sportswear giant and posted samples on its leak site.…

Microsoft probes Windows 11 boot failures tied to January security updates

Some machines are failing to start after security updates, prompting yet another Microsoft investigation

Microsoft is investigating reports that its January 2026 security updates are leaving some Windows 11 machines stuck in a boot loop, adding another entry to this month's bumper post–Patch Tuesday borkage list.…

When AI 'builds a browser,' check the repo before believing the hype

Autonomous agents may generate millions of lines of code, but shipping software is another matter

Opinion  AI-integrated development environment (IDE) company Cursor recently implied it had built a working web browser almost entirely with its AI agents. I won't say they lied, but CEO Michael Truell certainly tweeted: "We built a browser with GPT-5.2 in Cursor."…

Moscow likely behind wiper attack on Poland’s power grid, experts say

Cyber sleuths believe Sandworm up to its old tricks with a brand-new sabotage toy

Russia was probably behind the failed attempts to compromise the systems of Poland's power companies in December, cybersecurity researchers claim.…

Just the Browser is just the beginning: Why breaking free means building small

Privacy tools are a start, but real freedom lives in the digital outskirts of the web

Opinion  The Net is born free, but everywhere is in chains. This is a parody of Jean-Jacques Rousseau's 1762 book The Social Contract where he said the same about humans, but it's nonetheless true. The Net is built out of open, free protocols and open, free code. Yet it and we are bound by the rulemakers who build the services and set the laws of the places we go and the things that we do, not to our advantage.…

Microsoft rushes out another fix for cloud storage after January update

2026 is shaping up to be a bumper year for patch management

Microsoft dropped a weekend treat for administrators with yet another out-of-band update to deal with Outlook freezes and broken cloud storage.…

Oracle AI sailed the world on Royal Navy flagship via cloud-at-the-edge kit

Big Red says 'sovereign' platform supports decision-making and operational learning at sea

Britain's Royal Navy is using Oracle Cloud edge infrastructure to operate AI-driven defenses on the aircraft carrier HMS Prince of Wales.…

UK digital ID goes in-house, government swears it isn't an ID card

Minister dodges cost questions while promising smartphone-free access and 'robust' verification

The UK government has revealed some thinking about digital identity in response to written questions from MPs, while continuing to say next to nothing about the scheme's cost.…

Iran offline: How a government can turn off the internet

There’s an ongoing, near-total blackout of the internet in Iran. The shutdown is part of a response by the government to ongoing protests against rising inflation and the value of the nation’s currency plummeting. Since protests began more than two weeks ago, only an estimated 3% of Iranians have stayed online through the satellite internet system Starlink. Doing so is a crime. So, today on the show: Iran offline. We get into how the internet works, how a government can shut it down and how scientists are monitoring the nation’s connectivity from afar.

Check out more of NPR's coverage of Iran:

- Iran Protests Explained

- There's an internet blackout in Iran. How are videos and images getting out?

- Iran blocked the internet amid deadly protests. Some voices are still getting through

Interested in more science behind the headlines? Email us your question at shortwave@npr.org – we may tackle it in a future episode!

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

This episode was produced by Berly McCoy, edited by Rebecca Ramirez and fact checked by Tyler Jones. Robert Rodriguez was the audio engineer.

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

NPR Privacy Policy

Marketing 'genius' destroyed a printer by trying to fix a paper jam

This story starts with the worst mistake of them all – loaning a tool

Who, Me?  Everyone makes mistakes, but only The Register celebrates them every week in "Who, Me?" – the reader-contributed column that shares your worst workplace moments then records how you bounced back.…

Pwn2Own Automotive 2026 uncovers 76 zero-days, pays out more than $1M

Also, cybercriminals get breached, Gemini spills the calendar beans, and more

infosec in brief  T'was a dark few days for automotive software systems last week, as the third annual Pwn2Own Automotive competition uncovered 76 unique zero-day vulnerabilities in targets ranging from Tesla infotainment to EV chargers.…

No one talking about a datacenter could be a sign one is coming

Balancing the need to know with the need to get shovels in the ground is causing friction in communities across the US

feature  Applied Digital CEO Wes Cummins said when his company decides on a location for a datacenter, he asks town officials to sign non-disclosure agreements to stop politicians from leaking insider information.…

Emmabuntüs DE 6: A newbie-friendly Linux to help those in need

A distro aimed at helping people, reducing e-waste – and helping a charity, too

Emmabuntüs is just another Linux distro, but it's one guided by ethics more than tech. With exceptional help, documentation, beginner-friendly tooling and accessibility, there's a lot to like.…

Future of UK's multibillion Ajax armored vehicle program looks shaky

Noise and vibration keeps sending soldiers to the medics

The future of the British Army's troublesome Ajax armored vehicle program has again been called into question after the official in charge was removed and use of Ajax halted over its effects on personnel.…

9front GEFS SERVICE PACK 1 released

9front, by far the best operating system in the whole world, pushed out a new release, titled “GEFS SERVICE PACK 1“. Even with only a few changes, this is still, as always, a more monumental, important, and groundbreaking release than any other operating system release in history. Everything changes, today, because exec() now supports shell-scripts as interpreter in #!, improved sam scrolling, TLS by default in ircrc, and more. You’re already running 9front, of course, but if you’re one of the few holdouts still using something else, download GEFS SERVICE PACK 1 and install it.

Remotely unlocking an encrypted hard disk

Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to sneak into the earliest parts of the boot process, swap the startup config without breaking anything, and leave without a trace. Are you ready? Let’s begin. ↫ Jynn Nelson Genius.

How an experienced developer teamed up with Claude to create Elo programming language

Bernard Lambeau, the human half of a pair programming team, explains how he's using AI

feature  Bernard Lambeau, a Belgium-based software developer and founder of several technology companies, created a programming language called Elo with the help of Anthropic's Claude Code.…

Bill Gates-backed startup aims to revive Moore's Law with optical transistors

Neurophos is developing a massive optical systolic array clocked at 56GHz good for 470 petaFLOPS of FP4 compute

As Moore's Law slows to a crawl and the amount of energy required to deliver generational performance gains grows, some chip designers are looking to alternative architectures for salvation.…

UK border tech budget swells by £100M as Home Office targets small boat crossings

Drone, satellite, and other data combined to monitor unwanted vessels

The UK Home Office is spending up to £100 million on intelligence tech in part to tackle the so-called "small boats" issue of refugees and irregular immigrants coming across the English Channel.…

Feds totally skipping infosec industry's biggest conference this year

But ex-CISA boss and new RSAC CEO Jen Easterly will be there

updated  The US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency won't attend the annual RSA Conference in March, an agency spokesperson confirmed to The Register. Sessions involving speakers from the FBI and National Security Agency (NSA) have also disappeared from the agenda.…