"Fresh from announcing it is building an AI browsing mode in Firefox and laying the groundwork for agentic interactions in the Firefox 145 release, the corp arm of Mozilla is now flexing its AI muscles in the direction of those more likely to care," writes the blog OMG Ubuntu: If you're a developer building AI agents, you can sign up to get early access to Mozilla's TABS API, a "powerful web content extraction and transformation toolkit designed specifically for AI agent builders"... The TABS API enables devs to create agents to automate web interactions, like clicking, scrolling, searching, and submitting forms "just like a human". Real-time feedback and adaptive behaviours will, Mozilla say, offer "full control of the web, without the complexity." As TABS is not powered by a Mozilla-backed LLM you'll need to connect it to your choice of third-party LLM for any relevant processing... Developers get 1,000 requests monthly on the free tier, which seems reasonable for prototyping personal projects. Complex agentic workloads may require more. Though pricing is yet to be locked in, the TABS API website suggests it'll cost ~$5 per 1000 requests. Paid plans will offer additional features too, like lower latency and, somewhat ironically, CAPTCHA solving so AI can 'prove' it's not a robot on pages gated to prevent automated activities. Google, OpenAI, and other major AI vendors offer their own agentic APIs. Mozilla is pitching up late, but it plans to play differently. It touts a "strong focus on data minimisation and security", with scraped data treated ephemerally — i.e., not kept. As a distinction, that matters. AI agents can be given complex online tasks that involve all sorts of personal or sensitive data being fetched and worked with.... If you're minded to make one, perhaps without a motivation to asset-strip the common good, Mozilla's TABS API look like a solid place to start.

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Long-time Slashdot reader jenningsthecat shared this article from IEEE Spectrum: By dropping a nuclear reactor 1.6 kilometers (1 mile) underground, Deep Fission aims to use the weight of a billion tons of rock and water as a natural containment system comparable to concrete domes and cooling towers. With the fission reaction occurring far below the surface, steam can safely circulate in a closed loop to generate power. The California-based startup announced in October that prospective customers had signed non-binding letters of intent for 12.5 gigawatts of power involving data center developers, industrial parks, and other (mostly undisclosed) strategic partners, with initial sites under consideration in Kansas, Texas, and Utah... The company says its modular approach allows multiple 15-megawatt reactors to be clustered on a single site: A block of 10 would total 150 MW, and Deep Fission claims that larger groupings could scale to 1.5 GW. Deep Fission claims that using geological depth as containment could make nuclear energy cheaper, safer, and deployable in months at a fraction of a conventional plant's footprint... The company aims to finalize its reactor design and confirm the pilot site in the coming months. [Company founder Liz] Muller says the plan is to drill the borehole, lower the canister, load the fuel, and bring the reactor to criticality underground in 2026. Sites in Utah, Texas, and Kansas are among the leading candidates for the first commercial-scale projects, which could begin construction in 2027 or 2028, depending on the speed of DOE and NRC approvals. Deep Fission expects to start manufacturing components for the first unit in 2026 and does not anticipate major bottlenecks aside from typical long-lead items. In short "The same oil and gas drilling techniques that reliably reach kilometer-deep wells can be adapted to host nuclear reactors..." the article points out. Their design would also streamline construction, since "Locating the reactors under a deep water column subjects them to roughly 160 atmospheres of pressure — the same conditions maintained inside a conventional nuclear reactor — which forms a natural seal to keep any radioactive coolant or steam contained at depth, preventing leaks from reaching the surface." Other interesting points from the article: They plan on operating and controlling the reactor remotely from the surface. Company founder Muller says if an earthquake ever disrupted the site, "you seal it off at the bottom of the borehole, plug up the borehole, and you have your waste in safe disposal." For waste management, the company "is eyeing deep geological disposal in the very borehole systems they deploy for their reactors." "The company claims it can cut overall costs by 70 to 80 percent compared with full-scale nuclear plants." "Among its competition are projects like TerraPower's Natrium, notes the tech news site Hackaday, saying TerraPower's fast neutron reactors "are already under construction and offer much more power per reactor, along with Natrium in particular also providing built-in grid-level storage. "One thing is definitely for certain..." they add. "The commercial power sector in the US has stopped being mind-numbingly boring."

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With some animated graphics, CNN "reimagined" what three of America's busiest air and road travel routes would look like with high-speed trains, for "a glimpse into a faster, more connected future." The journey from New York City to Chicago could take just over six hours by high-speed train at an average speed of 160 mph, cutting travel time by more than 13 hours compared with the current Amtrak route... The journey from San Francisco to Los Angeles could be completed in under three hours by high-speed train... The journey from Atlanta to Orlando could be completed in under three hours by high-speed train that reaches 160 mph, cutting travel time by over half compared with driving... While high-speed rail remains a fantasy in the United States, it is already hugely successful across the globe. Passengers take 3 billion trips annually on more than 40,000 miles of modern high-speed railway across the globe, according to the International Union of Railways. China is home to the world's largest high-speed rail network. The 809-mile train journey from Beijing to Shanghai takes just four and a half hours... In Europe, France's Train a Grand Vitesse (TGV) is recognized as a pioneer of high-speed rail technology. Spain soon followed France's success and now hosts Europe's most extensive high-speed rail network... [T]rain travel contributes relatively less pollution of every type, said Jacob Mason of the Institute for Transportation and Development Policy, from burning less gasoline to making less noise than cars and taking up less space than freeways. The reduction in greenhouse gas emissions is staggering: Per kilometer traveled, the average car or a short-haul flight each emit more than 30 times the CO2 equivalent than Eurostar high-speed trains, according to data from the UK government.

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"Security, development, and AI now move as one," says Microsoft's director of cloud/AI security product marketing. Microsoft and GitHub "have launched a native integration between Microsoft Defender for Cloud and GitHub Advanced Security that aims to address what one executive calls decades of accumulated security debt in enterprise codebases..." according to The New Stack: The integration, announced this week in San Francisco at the Microsoft Ignite 2025 conference and now available in public preview, connects runtime intelligence from production environments directly into developer workflows. The goal is to help organizations prioritize which vulnerabilities actually matter and use AI to fix them faster. "Throughout my career, I've seen vulnerability trends going up into the right. It didn't matter how good of a detection engine and how accurate our detection engine was, people just couldn't fix things fast enough," said Marcelo Oliveira, VP of product management at GitHub, who has spent nearly a decade in application security. "That basically resulted in decades of accumulation of security debt into enterprise code bases." According to industry data, critical and high-severity vulnerabilities constitute 17.4% of security backlogs, with a mean time to remediation of 116 days, said Andrew Flick, senior director of developer services, languages and tools at Microsoft, in a blog post. Meanwhile, applications face attacks as frequently as once every three minutes, Oliveira said. The integration represents the first native link between runtime intelligence and developer workflows, said Elif Algedik, director of product marketing for cloud and AI security at Microsoft, in a blog post... The problem, according to Flick, comes down to three challenges: security teams drowning in alert fatigue while AI rapidly introduces new threat vectors that they have little time to understand; developers lacking clear prioritization while remediation takes too long; and both teams relying on separate, nonintegrated tools that make collaboration slow and frustrating... The new integration works bidirectionally. When Defender for Cloud detects a vulnerability in a running workload, that runtime context flows into GitHub, showing developers whether the vulnerability is internet-facing, handling sensitive data or actually exposed in production. This is powered by what GitHub calls the Virtual Registry, which creates code-to-runtime mapping, Flick said... In the past, this alert would age in a dashboard while developers worked on unrelated fixes because they didn't know this was the critical one, he said. Now, a security campaign can be created in GitHub, filtering for runtime risk like internet exposure or sensitive data, notifying the developer to prioritize this issue. GitHub Copilot "now automatically checks dependencies, scans for first-party code vulnerabilities and catches hardcoded secrets before code reaches developers," the article points out — but GitHub's VP of product management says this takes things even further. "We're not only helping you fix existing vulnerabilities, we're also reducing the number of vulnerabilities that come into the system when the level of throughput of new code being created is increasing dramatically with all these agentic coding agent platforms."

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"On the slopes of an Oregon volcano, engineers are building the hottest geothermal power plant on Earth," reports the Washington Post: The plant will tap into the infernal energy of Newberry Volcano, "one of the largest and most hazardous active volcanoes in the United States," according to the U.S. Geological Survey. It has already reached temperatures of 629 degrees Fahrenheit, making it one of the hottest geothermal sites in the world, and next year it will start selling electricity to nearby homes and businesses. But the start-up behind the project, Mazama Energy, wants to crank the temperature even higher — north of 750 degrees — and become the first to make electricity from what industry insiders call "superhot rock." Enthusiasts say that could usher in a new era of geothermal power, transforming the always-on clean energy source from a minor player to a major force in the world's electricity systems. "Geothermal has been mostly inconsequential," said Vinod Khosla, a venture capitalist and one of Mazama Energy's biggest financial backers. "To do consequential geothermal that matters at the scale of tens or hundreds of gigawatts for the country, and many times that globally, you really need to solve these high temperatures." Today, geothermal produces less than 1 percent of the world's electricity. But tapping into superhot rock, along with other technological advances, could boost that share to 8 percent by 2050, according to the International Energy Agency (IEA). Geothermal using superhot temperatures could theoretically generate 150 times more electricity than the world uses, according to the IEA. "We believe this is the most direct path to driving down the cost of geothermal and making it possible across the globe," said Terra Rogers, program director for superhot rock geothermal at the Clean Air Task Force, an environmentalist think tank. "The [technological] gaps are within reason. These are engineering iterations, not breakthroughs." The Newberry Volcano project combines two big trends that could make geothermal energy cheaper and more widely available. First, Mazama Energy is bringing its own water to the volcano, using a method called "enhanced geothermal energy"... [O]ver the past few decades, pioneering projects have started to make energy from hot dry rocks by cracking the stone and pumping in water to make steam, borrowing fracking techniques developed by the oil and gas industry... The Newberry project also taps into hotter rock than any previous enhanced geothermal project. But even Newberry's 629 degrees fall short of the superhot threshold of 705 degrees or above. At that temperature, and under a lot of pressure, water becomes "supercritical" and starts acting like something between a liquid and a gas. Supercritical water holds lots of heat like a liquid, but it flows with the ease of a gas — combining the best of both worlds for generating electricity... [Sriram Vasantharajan, Mazama's CEO] said Mazama will dig new wells to reach temperatures above 750 degrees next year. Alongside an active volcano, the company expects to hit that temperature less than three miles beneath the surface. But elsewhere, geothermal developers might have to dig as deep as 12 miles. While Mazama plans to generate 15 megawatts of electricity next year, it hopes to eventually increase that to 200 megawatts. (And the company's CEO said it could theoretically generate five gigawatts of power.) But more importantly, successful projects "motivate other players to get into the market," according to a senior geothermal research analyst at energy consultancy Wood Mackenzie, who predicted "a ripple effect," to the Washington Post where "we'll start seeing more companies get the financial support to kick off their own pilots."

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"The internet did transform work — but not the way 1998 thought..." argues the Wall Street Journal. "The internet slipped inside almost every job and rewired how work got done." So while the number of single-task jobs like travel agent dropped, most jobs "are bundles of judgment, coordination and hands-on work," and instead the internet brought "the quiet transformation of nearly every job in the economy... Today, just 10% of workers make minimal use of the internet on the job — roles like butcher and carpet installer." [T]he bigger story has been additive. In 1998, few could conceive of social media — let alone 65,000 social-media managers — and 200,000 information-security analysts would have sounded absurd when data still lived on floppy disks... Marketing shifted from campaign bursts to always-on funnels and A/B testing. Clinics embedded e-prescribing and patient portals, reshaping front-office and clinical handoffs. The steps, owners and metrics shifted. Only then did the backbone scale: We went from server closets wedged next to the mop sink to data centers and cloud regions, from lone system administrators to fulfillment networks, cybersecurity and compliance. That is where many unexpected jobs appeared. Networked machines and web-enabled software quietly transformed back offices as much as our on-screen lives. Similarly, as e-commerce took off, internet-enabled logistics rewired planning roles — logisticians, transportation and distribution managers — and unlocked a surge in last-mile work. The build-out didn't just hire coders; it hired coordinators, pickers, packers and drivers. It spawned hundreds of thousands of warehouse and delivery jobs — the largest pockets of internet-driven job growth, and yet few had them on their 1998 bingo card... Today, the share of workers in professional and managerial occupations has more than doubled since the dawn of the digital era. So what does that tell us about AI? Our mental model often defaults to an industrial image — John Henry versus the steam drill — where jobs are one dominant task, and automation maps one-to-one: Automate the task, eliminate the job. The internet revealed a different reality: Modern roles are bundles. Technologies typically hit routine tasks first, then workflows, and only later reshape jobs, with second-order hiring around the backbone. That complexity is what made disruption slower and more subtle than anyone predicted. AI fits that pattern more than it breaks it... [LLMs] can draft briefs, summarize medical notes and answer queries. Those are tasks — important ones — but still parts of larger roles. They don't manage risk, hold accountability, reassure anxious clients or integrate messy context across teams. Expect a rebalanced division of labor: The technical layer gets faster and cheaper; the human layer shifts toward supervision, coordination, complex judgment, relationship work and exception handling. What to expect from AI, then, is messy, uneven reshuffling in stages. Some roles will contract sharply — and those contractions will affect real people. But many occupations will be rewired in quieter ways. Productivity gains will unlock new demand and create work that didn't exist, alongside a build-out around data, safety, compliance and infrastructure. AI is unprecedented; so was the internet. The real risk is timing: overestimating job losses, underestimating the long, quiet rewiring already under way, and overlooking the jobs created in the backbone. That was the internet's lesson. It's likely to be AI's as well.

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"Copilot Actions on Windows 11" is currently available in Insider builds (version 26220.7262) as part of Copilot Labs, according to a recent report, "and is off by default, requiring admin access to set it up." But maybe it's off for a good reason...besides the fact that it can access any apps installed on your system: In a support document, Microsoft admits that features like Copilot Actions introduce " novel security risks ." They warn about cross-prompt injection (XPIA), where malicious content in documents or UI elements can override the AI's instructions. The result? " Unintended actions like data exfiltration or malware installation ." Yeah, you read that right. Microsoft is shipping a feature that could be tricked into installing malware on your system. Microsoft's own warning hits hard: "We recommend that you only enable this feature if you understand the security implications." When you try to enable these experimental features, Windows shows you a warning dialog that you have to acknowledge. ["This feature is still being tested and may impact the performance or security of your device."] Even with these warnings, the level of access Copilot Actions demands is concerning. When you enable the feature, it gets read and write access to your Documents, Downloads, Desktop, Pictures, Videos, and Music folders... Microsoft says they are implementing safeguards. All actions are logged, users must approve data access requests, the feature operates in isolated workspaces, and the system uses audit logs to track activity. But you are still giving an AI system that can "hallucinate and produce unexpected outputs" (Microsoft's words, not mine) full access to your personal files. To address this, Ars Technica notes, Microsoft added this helpful warning to its support document this week. "As these capabilities are introduced, AI models still face functional limitations in terms of how they behave and occasionally may hallucinate and produce unexpected outputs." But Microsoft didn't describe "what actions they should take to prevent their devices from being compromised. I asked Microsoft to provide these details, and the company declined..."

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A promotional video for Amazon's Kiro software development system took a unique approach, writes GeekWire. "Instead of product diagrams or keynote slides, a crew from Seattle's Packrat creative studio used action figures on a miniature set to create a stop-motion sequence..." "Can the software development hero conquer the 'AI Slop Monster' to uncover the gleaming, fully functional robot buried beneath the coding chaos?" Kiro (pronounced KEE-ro) is Amazon's effort to rethink how developers use AI. It's an integrated development environment that attempts to tame the wild world of vibe coding... But rather than simply generating code from prompts [in "vibe mode"], Kiro breaks down requests into formal specifications, design documents, and task lists [in "spec mode"]. This spec-driven development approach aims to solve a fundamental problem with vibe coding: AI can quickly generate prototypes, but without structure or documentation, that code becomes unmaintainable... The market for AI-powered development tools is booming. Gartner expects AI code assistants to become ubiquitous, forecasting that 90% of enterprise software engineers will use them by 2028, up from less than 14% in early 2024... Amazon launched Kiro in preview in July, to a strong response. Positive early reviews were tempered by frustration from users unable to gain access. Capacity constraints have since been resolved, and Amazon says more than 250,000 developers used Kiro in the first three months... Now, the company is taking Kiro out of preview into general availability, rolling out new features and opening the tool more broadly to development teams and companies... During the preview period, Kiro handled more than 300 million requests and processed trillions of tokens as developers explored its capabilities, according to stats provided by the company. Rackspace used Kiro to complete what they estimated as 52 weeks of software modernization in three weeks, according to Amazon executives. SmugMug and Flickr are among other companies espousing the virtues of Kiro's spec-driven development approach. Early users are posting in glowing terms about the efficiencies they're seeing from adopting the tool... startups in most countries can apply for up to 100 free Pro+ seats for a year's worth of Kiro credits. Kiro offers property-based testing "to verify that generated code actually does what developers specified," according to the article — plus a checkpointing system that "lets developers roll back changes or retrace an agent's steps when an idea goes sideways..." "And yes, they've been using Kiro to build Kiro, which has allowed them to move much faster."

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A week ago Bitcoin was at $93,714. Saturday it dropped to $85,300. Late Thursday, market researcher Ed Yardeni blamed some of Thursday's stock market sell-off on "the ongoing plunge in bitcoin's price," reports Fortune: "There has been a strong correlation between it and the price of TQQQ, an ETF that seeks to achieve daily investment results that correspond to three times (3x) the daily performance of the Nasdaq-100 Index," [Yardeni wrote in a note]. Yardeni blamed bitcoin's slide on the GENIUS Act, which was enacted on July 18, saying that the regulatory framework it established for stablecoins eliminated bitcoin's transactional role in the monetary system. "It's possible that the rout in bitcoin is forcing some investors to sell stocks that they own," he added... Traders who used leverage to make crypto bets would need to liquidate positions in the event of margin calls. Steve Sosnick, chief strategist at Interactive Brokers, also said bitcoin could swing the entire stock market, pointing out that it's become a proxy for speculation. "As a long-time systematic trader, it tells me that algorithms are acting upon the relationship between stocks and bitcoin," he wrote in a note on Thursday.

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"PHP 8.5 landed on Thursday with a long-awaited pipe operator and a new standards-compliant URI parser," reports the Register, "marking one of the scripting language's more substantial updates... " The pipe operator allows function calls to be chained together, which avoids the extraneous variables and nested statements that might otherwise be involved. Pipes tend to make code more readable than other ways to implement serial operations. Anyone familiar with the Unix/Linux command line or programming languages like R, F#, Clojure, or Elixir may have used the pipe operator. In JavaScript, aka ECMAScript, a pipe operator has been proposed, though there are alternatives like method chaining. Another significant addition is the URI extension, which allows developers to parse and modify URIs and URLs based on both the RFC 3986 and the WHATWG URL standards. Parsing with URIs and URLs â" reading them and breaking them down into their different parts â" is a rather common task for web-oriented applications. Yet prior versions of PHP didn't include a standards-compliant parser in the standard library. As noted by software developer Tim Düsterhus, the parse_url() function that dates back to PHP 4 doesn't follow any standard and comes with a warning that it should not be used with untrusted or malformed URLs. Other noteworthy additions to the language include: Clone With, for updating properties more efficiently; the #[\NoDiscard] attribute, for warning when a return value goes unused; the ability to use static closures and first-class callables in constant expressions; and persistent cURL handles that can be shared across multiple PHP requests.

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In a 2023 pitch to investors, a "well-financed, highly credentialed" startup named Stardust aimed for a "gradual temperature reduction demonstration" in 2027, according to a massive new 9,600-word article from Politico. ("Annually dispersing ~1 million tons of sun-reflecting particles," says one slide. "Equivalent to ~1% extra cloud coverage.") "Another page told potential investors Stardust had already run low-altitude experiments using 'test particles'," the article notes: [P]ublic records and interviews with more than three dozen scientists, investors, legal experts and others familiar with the company reveal an organization advancing rapidly to the brink of being able to press "go" on its planet-cooling plans. Meanwhile, Stardust is seeking U.S. government contracts and quietly building an influence machine in Washington to lobby lawmakers and officials in the Trump administration on the need for a regulatory framework that it says is necessary to gain public approval for full-scale deployment.... The presentation also included revenue projections and a series of opportunities for venture capitalists to recoup their investments. Stardust planned to sign "government contracts," said a slide with the company's logo next to an American flag, and consider a "potential acquisition" by 2028. By 2030, the deck foresaw a "large-scale demonstration" of Stardust's system. At that point, the company claimed it would already be bringing in $200 million per year from its government contracts and eyeing an initial public offering, if it hadn't been sold already. The article notes that for "a widening circle of researchers and government officials, Stardust's perceived failures to be transparent about its work and technology have triggered a larger conversation about what kind of international governance framework will be needed to regulate a new generation of climate technologies." (Since currently Stardust and its backers "have no legal obligations to adhere to strenuous safety principles or to submit themselves to the public view.") In October Politico spoke to Stardust CEO, Yanai Yedvab, a former nuclear physicist who was once deputy chief scientist at the Israeli Atomic Energy Commission. Stardust "was ready to announce the $60 million it had raised from 13 new investors," the article points out, "far larger than any previous investment in solar geoengineering." [Yedvab] was delighted, he said, not by the money, but what it meant for the project. "We are, like, few years away from having the technology ready to a level that decisions can be taken" — meaning that deployment was still on track to potentially begin on the timeline laid out in the 2023 pitch deck. The money raised was enough to start "outdoor contained experiments" as soon as April, Yedvab said. These would test how their particles performed inside a plane flying at stratospheric heights, some 11 miles above the Earth's surface... The key thing, he insisted, was the particle was "safe." It would not damage the ozone layer and, when the particles fall back to Earth, they could be absorbed back into the biosphere, he said. Though it's impossible to know this is true until the company releases its formula. Yedvab said this round of testing would make Stardust's technology ready to begin a staged process of full-scale, global deployment before the decade is over — as long as the company can secure a government client. To start, they would only try to stabilize global temperatures — in other words fly enough particles into the sky to counteract the steady rise in greenhouse gas levels — which would initially take a fleet of 100 planes. This begs the question: should the world attempt solar geoengineering? That the global temperature would drop is not in question. Britain's Royal Society... said in a report issued in early November that there was little doubt it would be effective. They did not endorse its use, but said that, given the growing interest in this field, there was good reason to be better informed about the side effects... [T]hat doesn't mean it can't have broad benefits when weighed against deleterious climate change, according to Ben Kravitz, a professor of earth and atmospheric sciences at Indiana University who has closely studied the potential effects of solar geoengineering. "There would be some winners and some losers. But in general, some amount of ... stratospheric aerosol injection would likely benefit a whole lot of people, probably most people," he said. Other scientists are far more cautious. The Royal Society report listed a range of potential negative side effects that climate models had displayed, including drought in sub-Saharan Africa. In accompanying documents, it also warned of more intense hurricanes in the North Atlantic and winter droughts in the Mediterranean. But the picture remains partial, meaning there is no way yet to have an informed debate over how useful or not solar geoengineering could be... And then there's the problem of trying to stop. Because an abrupt end to geoengineering, with all the carbon still in the atmosphere, would cause the temperature to soar suddenly upward with unknown, but likely disastrous, effects... Once the technology is deployed, the entire world would be dependent on it for however long it takes to reduce the trillion or more tons of excess carbon dioxide in the atmosphere to a safe level... Stardust claims to have solved many technical and safety challenges, especially related to the environmental impacts of the particle, which they say would not harm nature or people. But researchers say the company's current lack of transparency makes it impossible to trust. Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader fjo3 for sharing the article.

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Meta "is testing a new product that would give Facebook users a personalized daily briefing powered by the company's generative AI technology" reports the Washington Post. They cite records they've reviwed showing that Meta "would analyze Facebook content and external sources to push custom updates to its users." The company plans to test the product with a small group of Facebook users in select cities such as New York and San Francisco, according to a person familiar with the project who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss private company matters... Meta's foray into pushing updates for consumers follows years of controversy over its relationship with publishers. The tech company has waffled between prominently featuring content from mainstream news sources on Facebook to pulling news links altogether as regulators pushed the tech giant to pay publishers for content on its platforms. More recently, publishers have sued Meta, alleging it infringed on their copyrighted works to train its AI models.

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An anonymous reader shared this report from CNN: The universe's expansion might not be accelerating but slowing down, a new study suggests. If confirmed, the finding would upend decades of established astronomical assumptions and rewrite our understanding of dark energy, the elusive force that counters the inward pull of gravity in our universe... Last year, a consortium of hundreds of researchers using data from the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) in Arizona, developed the largest ever 3D map of the universe. The observations hinted at the fact that dark energy may be weakening over time, indicating that the universe's rate of expansion could eventually slow. Now, a study published November 6 in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society provides further evidence that dark energy might not be pushing on the universe with the same strength it used to. The DESI project's findings last year represented "a major, major paradigm change ... and our result, in some sense, agrees well with that," said Young-Wook Lee, a professor of astrophysics at Yonsei University in South Korea and lead researcher for the new study.... To reach their conclusions, the researchers analyzed a sample of 300 galaxies containing Type 1a supernovas and posited that the dimming of distant exploding stars was not only due to their moving farther away from Earth, but also due to the progenitor star's age... [Study coauthor Junhyuk Son, a doctoral candidate of astronomy at Yonsei University, said] "we found that their luminosity actually depends on the age of the stars that produce them — younger progenitors yield slightly dimmer supernovae, while older ones are brighter." Son said the team has a high statistical confidence — 99.99% — about this age-brightness relation, allowing them to use Type 1a supernovas more accurately than before to assess the universe's expansion... Eventually, if the expansion continues to slow down, the universe could begin to contract, ending in what astronomers imagine may be the opposite of the big bang — the big crunch. "That is certainly a possibility," Lee said. "Even two years ago, the Big Crunch was out of the question. But we need more work to see whether it could actually happen." The new research proposes a radical revision of accepted knowledge, so, understandably, it is being met with skepticism. "This study rests on a flawed premise," Adam Riess, a professor of physics and astronomy at the Johns Hopkins University and one of the recipients of the 2011 Nobel Prize in physics, said in an email. "It suggests supernovae have aged with the Universe, yet observations show the opposite — today's supernovae occur where young stars form. The same idea was proposed years ago and refuted then, and there appears to be nothing new in this version." Lee, however, said Riess' claim is incorrect. "Even in the present-day Universe, Type Ia supernovae are found just as frequently in old, quiescent elliptical galaxies as in young, star-forming ones — which clearly shows that this comment is mistaken. The so-called paper that 'refuted' our earlier result relied on deeply flawed data with enormous uncertainties," he said, adding that the age-brightness correlation has been independently confirmed by two separate teams in the United States and China... "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence," Dragan Huterer, a professor of physics at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, said in an email, noting that he does not feel the new research "rises to the threshold to overturn the currently favored model...." The new Vera C. Rubin Observatory, which started operating this year, is set to help settle the debate with the early 2026 launch of the Legacy Survey of Space and Time, an ultrawide and ultra-high-definition time-lapse record of the universe made by scanning the entire sky every few nights over 10 years to capture a compilation of asteroids and comets, exploding stars, and distant galaxies as they change.

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An anonymous reader shared this report from Sky News: A new wind record has been set for Britain, with enough electricity generated from turbines to power 22 million homes, the system operator has said. The mark of 22,711 megawatts (MW) was set at 7.30pm on 11 November... enough to keep around three-quarters of British homes powered, the National Energy System Operator (Neso) said. The country had experienced windy conditions, particularly in the north of England and Scotland... Neso has predicted that Britain could hit another milestone in the months ahead by running the electricity grid for a period entirely with zero carbon power, renewables and nuclear... Neso said wind power is now the largest source of electricity generation for the UK, and the government wants to generate almost all of the UK's electricity from low-carbon sources by 2030. "Wind accounted for 55.7 per cent of Britain's electricity mix at the time..." reports The Times: Gas provided only 12.5 per cent of the mix, with 11.3 per cent coming from imports over subsea power cables, 8 per cent from nuclear reactors, 8 per cent from biomass plants, 1.4 per cent from hydroelectric plants and 1.1 per cent from storage. Britain has about 32 gigawatts of wind farms installed, approximately half of that onshore and half offshore, according to the Wind Energy Database from the wind industry body Renewable UK. That includes five of the world's biggest offshore wind farms. The government is seeking to double onshore wind and quadruple offshore wind power by 2030 as part of its plan for clean energy.... Jane Cooper, deputy chief executive of Renewable UK, said: "On a cold, dark November evening, wind was generating enough electricity to power 80 per cent of British homes when we needed it most.

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For nearly three years OpenAI has touted ChatGPT as a "revolutionary" (and work-transforming) productivity tool, reports the Washington Post. But after analyzing 47,000 ChatGPT conversations, the Post found that users "are overwhelmingly turning to the chatbot for advice and companionship, not productivity tasks." The Post analyzed a collection of thousands of publicly shared ChatGPT conversations from June 2024 to August 2025. While ChatGPT conversations are private by default, the conversations analyzed were made public by users who created shareable links to their chats that were later preserved in the Internet Archive and downloaded by The Post. It is possible that some people didn't know their conversations would become publicly preserved online. This unique data gives us a glimpse into an otherwise black box... Overall, about 10 percent of the chats appeared to show people talking about their emotions, role-playing, or seeking social interactions with the chatbot. Some users shared highly private and sensitive information with the chatbot, such as information about their family in the course of seeking legal advice. People also sent ChatGPT hundreds of unique email addresses and dozens of phone numbers in the conversations... Lee Rainie, director of the Imagining the Digital Future Center at Elon University, said that it appears ChatGPT "is trained to further or deepen the relationship." In some of the conversations analyzed, the chatbot matched users' viewpoints and created a personalized echo chamber, sometimes endorsing falsehoods and conspiracy theories. Four of ChatGPT's answers about health problems got a failing score from a chair of medicine at the University of California San, Francisco, the Post points out. But four other answers earned a perfect score.

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In October Zorin OS claimed it had 100,000 downloads in a little over two days in the days following Microsoft's end of support for Windows 10. And one month later, Zorin OS developers now claim that 780,000 people downloaded it from a Windows computer in the space of a month, according to the tech news site XDA Developers. In a post on the Zorin blog, the developers of the operating system Zorin OS 18 announced that they've managed to accrue one million downloads of the operating system in a single month [since its launch on October 14]. While this is plenty impressive by itself, the developers go on to reveal that, out of that million, 78% of the downloads came from a Windows machine. That means that at least 780,000 people on Windows gave Zorin OS 18 a download... [I]t's easy to see why: the developers put a heavy emphasis on making their system the perfect home for ex-Windows users.

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ScienceDaily reports: Electrons can freeze into strange geometric crystals and then melt back into liquid-like motion under the right quantum conditions. Researchers identified how to tune these transitions and even discovered a bizarre "pinball" state where some electrons stay locked in place while others dart around freely. Their simulations help explain how these phases form and how they might be harnessed for advanced quantum technologies... When electrons settle into these rigid arrangements, the material undergoes a shift in its state of matter and stops conducting electricity. Instead of acting like a metal, it behaves as an insulator. This unusual behavior provides scientists with valuable insight into how electrons interact and has opened the door to advances in quantum computing, high-performance superconductors used in energy and medical imaging, innovative lighting systems, and extremely precise atomic clocks... [Florida State University assistant professor Cyprian Lewandowski said] "Here, it turns out there are other quantum knobs we can play with to manipulate states of matter, which can lead to impressive advances in experimental research."

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The Washington Post reports: Scientists in Switzerland have created a robot the size of a grain of sand that is controlled by magnets and can deliver drugs to a precise location in the human body, a breakthrough aimed at reducing the severe side effects that stop many medicines from advancing in clinical trials... "I think surgeons are going to look at this," [said Bradley J. Nelson, an author of the paper in Science describing the discovery and a professor of robotics and intelligent systems at ETH Zurich]. I'm sure they're going to have a lot of ideas on how to use" the microrobot. The capsule, which is steered by magnets, might also be useful in treating aneurysms, very aggressive brain cancers, and abnormal connections between arteries and veins known as arteriovenous malformations, Nelson said. The capsules have been tested successfully in pigs, which have similar vasculature to humans, and in silicone models of the blood vessels in humans and animals... Nelson said drug-ferrying microrobots of this kind may be three to five years from being tested in clinical trials. The problem faced by many drugs under development is that they spread throughout the body instead of going only to the area in need... A major cause of side effects in patients is medications traveling to parts of the body that don't need them. The capsules developed in Switzerland, however, can be maneuvered into precise locations by a surgeon using a tool not that different from a PlayStation controller. The navigation system involves six electromagnetic coils positioned around the patient, each about 8 to 10 inches in diameter... The capsules are made of materials that have been found safe for people in other medical tools... When the capsule reaches its destination in the body, "we can trigger the capsule to dissolve," Nelson said.

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A California judge has shut down a decade-long surveillance program in which Sacramento's utility provider shared granular smart-meter data on 650,000 residents with police to hunt for cannabis grows. The EFF reports: The Sacramento County Superior Court ruled that the surveillance program run by the Sacramento Municipal Utility District (SMUD) and police violated a state privacy statute, which bars the disclosure of residents' electrical usage data with narrow exceptions. For more than a decade, SMUD coordinated with the Sacramento Police Department and other law enforcement agencies to sift through the granular smart meter data of residents without suspicion to find evidence of cannabis growing. EFF and its co-counsel represent three petitioners in the case: the Asian American Liberation Network, Khurshid Khoja, and Alfonso Nguyen. They argued that the program created a host of privacy harms -- including criminalizing innocent people, creating menacing encounters with law enforcement, and disproportionately harming the Asian community. The court ruled that the challenged surveillance program was not part of any traditional law enforcement investigation. Investigations happen when police try to solve particular crimes and identify particular suspects. The dragnet that turned all 650,000 SMUD customers into suspects was not an investigation. "[T]he process of making regular requests for all customer information in numerous city zip codes, in the hopes of identifying evidence that could possibly be evidence of illegal activity, without any report or other evidence to suggest that such a crime may have occurred, is not an ongoing investigation," the court ruled, finding that SMUD violated its "obligations of confidentiality" under a data privacy statute. [...] In creating and running the dragnet surveillance program, according to the court, SMUD and police "developed a relationship beyond that of utility provider and law enforcement." Multiple times a year, the police asked SMUD to search its entire database of 650,000 customers to identify people who used a large amount of monthly electricity and to analyze granular 1-hour electrical usage data to identify residents with certain electricity "consumption patterns." SMUD passed on more than 33,000 tips about supposedly "high" usage households to police. [...] Going forward, public utilities throughout California should understand that they cannot disclose customers' electricity data to law enforcement without any "evidence to support a suspicion" that a particular crime occurred.

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Longtime Slashdot reader fahrbot-bot shares a report from 404 Media: The Ukrainian Army is knocking a once-hyped Russian superweapon out of the sky by jamming it with a song and tricking it into thinking it's in Lima, Peru. The Kremlin once called its Kh-47M2 Kinzhal ballistic missiles "invincible." Joe Biden said the missile was "almost impossible to stop." Now Ukrainian electronic warfare experts say they can counter the Kinzhal with some music and a re-direction order. [...] Kinzhals and other guided munitions navigate by communicating with Russian satellites that are part of the GLONASS system, a GPS-style navigation network. Night Watch uses a jamming system called Lima EW to generate a disruption field that prevents anything in the area from communicating with a satellite. Many traditional jamming systems work by blasting receivers on munitions and aircraft with radio noise. Lima does that, but also sends along a digital signal and spoofs navigation signals. It "hacks" the receiver it's communicating with to throw it off course. Night Watch shared pictures of the downed Kinzhals with 404 Media that showed a missile with a controlled reception pattern antenna (CRPA), an active antenna that's meant to resist jamming and spoofing. "We discovered that this missile had pretty old type of technology," Night Watch said. "They had the same type of receivers as old Soviet missiles used to have. So there is nothing special, there is nothing new in those types of missiles." Night Watch told 404 Media that it used this Lima to take down 19 Kinzhals in the past two weeks. First, it replaces the missile's satellite navigation signals with the Ukrainian song "Our Father Is Bandera." Any digital noise or random signal would work to jam the navigation system, but Night Watch wanted to use the song because they think it's funny. "We just send a song... we just make it into binary code, you know, like 010101, and just send it to the Russian navigation system," Night Watch said. "It's just kind of a joke. [Bandera] is a Ukrainian nationalist and Russia tries to use this person in their propaganda to say all Ukrainians are Nazis. They always try to scare the Russian people that Ukrainians are, culturally, all the same as Bandera." Once the song hits, Night Watch uses Lima to spoof a navigation signal to the missiles and make them think they're in Lima, Peru. Once the missile's confused about its location, it attempts to change direction. These missiles are fast -- launched from a MiG-31 they can hit speeds of up to Mach 5.7 or more than 4,000 miles per hour -- and an object moving that fast doesn't fare well with sudden changes of direction.

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