Amazon "has submitted plans for a large-format store near Chicago that would be larger than a Walmart Supercenter," reports CNBC: As part of the plans, Amazon has proposed building a one-story, 229,000-square-foot building [on a 35-acre lot] in Orland Park, Illinois, that would offer a range of products, such as groceries, household essentials and general merchandise, the city said on Saturday. By comparison, Walmart's U.S. Supercenters typically average 179,000 square feet... The Orland Park Plan Commission approved Amazon's proposal on Tuesday, and it will now proceed to a vote from the full village board. That meeting is scheduled for January 19. In a statement cited by CNBC, an Amazon spokesperson called it "a new concept that we think customers will be excited about."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"Scientists in China have made a breakthrough with fusion energy that could finally overcome one of the most stubborn barriers to realising the next-generation energy source," reports the Independent: A team from the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) said its experimental nuclear reactor, dubbed the 'artificial Sun', achieved a plasma density that was previously thought impossible... Through a new process called plasma-wall self organisation, the CAS researchers were able to keep the plasma stable at unprecedented density levels. By pushing plasma density well past long-standing empirical limits, the researchers said fusion ignition can be achieved with far higher energy outputs. "The findings suggest a practical and scalable pathway for extending density limits in tokamaks and next-generation burning plasma fusion devices," said Professor Ping Zhu from Huazhong University of Science and Technology, who so-led the research. Professor Zhu's team now plan to apply this new method on the EAST reactor to confirm that it will work under high-performance plasma conditions. The latest breakthrough was detailed in the journal Science Advances in a study titled 'Accessing the density-free regime with ECRH-assisted ohmic start-up on EAST'.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

This week Meta announced several new features for "Meta Ray-Ban Display" smartglasses: - A new teleprompter feature for the smart glasses (arriving in a phased rollout) - The ability to send messages on WhatsApp and Messenger by writing with your finger on any surface. (Available for those who sign up for an "early access" program). - "Pedestrian navigation" for 32 cities. ("The 28 cities we launched Meta Ray-Ban Display with, plus Denver, Las Vegas, Portland, and Salt Lake City," and with more cities coming soon.) But they also warned Meta Ray-Ban Display "is a first-of-its-kind product with extremely limited inventory," saying they're delaying international expansion of sales due to inventory constraints — and also due to "unprecedented" demand in the U.S. CNBC reports: "Since launching last fall, we've seen an overwhelming amount of interest, and as a result, product waitlists now extend well into 2026," Meta wrote in a blog post. Due to "limited" inventory, the company said it will pause plans to launch in the U.K., France, Italy and Canada early this year and concentrate on U.S. orders as it reassesses international availability... Meta is one of several technology companies moving into the smart glasses market. Alphabet announced a $150 million partnership with Warby Parker in May and ChatGPT maker OpenAI is reportedly working on AI glasses with Apple.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Soyons de suite honnêtes : nous étions passés à côté de cette information, il faut bien le dire très peu mise en avant par AMD. La firme a peut-être finalement décidé, un peu à la dernière minute, de ne pas vraiment communiquer dessus. Mais en y regardant bien, l'information dont nous allons parler...

It will be the first medical evacuation from the International space station in its 25-year history. The Guardian reports: An astronaut in the orbital laboratory reportedly fell ill with a "serious" but undisclosed issue. Nasa also had to cancel its first spacewalk of the year... The agency did not identify the astronaut or the medical problem, citing patient privacy. "Because the astronaut is absolutely stable, this is not an emergent evacuation," [chief health and medical officer Dr. James] Polk said. "We're not immediately disembarking and getting the astronaut down, but it leaves that lingering risk and lingering question as to what that diagnosis is, and that means there is some lingering risk for that astronaut onboard." "SpaceX says it's Dragon spacecraft at the International Space Station is ready to return its four Crew-11 astronauts home in an unprecedented medical evacuation on Jan. 14 and 15," reports Space.com: The SpaceX statement came on the heels of NASA's announcement that the Crew-11 astronauts were scheduled to undock from the space station on Jan. 14 and splashdown off the coast of California early on Jan. 15. The Crew-11 Dragon spacecraft will return NASA astronauts Zena Cardman and Mike Fincke to Earth alongside Japanese astronaut Kimiya Yui and Russian cosmonaut Oleg Platanov... NASA officials opted for a "controlled medical evacuation" in order to provide the astronaut better treatment on the ground, NASA chief Jared Isaacman has said... Dr. James Polk, NASA's chief medical officer, has said the medical issue is not an injury to the astronaut afflicted, but rather something related to the prolonged exposure to weighlessness by astronauts living and working on the International Space Station. "It's mostly having a medical issue in the difficult areas of microgravity and the suite of hardware that we operate in," Polk said.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Yes, a federal judge blocked an attempt by Texas at an app store age-verification law. But this year Silicon Valley giants including Google and Apple "are expected to fight hard against similar legislation," reports Politico, "because of the vast legal liability it imposes on app stores and developers." In Texas, Utah and Louisiana, parent advocates have linked up with conservative "pro-family" groups to pass laws forcing mobile app stores to verify user ages and require parental sign-off. If those rules hold up in court, companies like Google and Apple, which run the two largest app stores, would face massive legal liability... California has taken a different approach, passing its own age-verification law last year that puts liability on device manufacturers instead of app stores. That model has been better received by the tech lobby, and is now competing with the app-based approach in states like Ohio. In Washington D.C., a GOP-led bill modeled off of Texas' law is wending its way through Capitol Hill. And more states are expected to join the fray, including Michigan and South Carolina. Joel Thayer, president of the conservative Digital Progress Institute and a key architect of the Texas law, said states are only accelerating their push. He explicitly linked the age-verification debate to AI, arguing it's "terrifying" to think companies could build new AI products by scraping data from children's apps. Thayer also pointed to the Trump administration's recent executive order aimed at curbing state regulation of AI, saying it has galvanized lawmakers. "We're gonna see more states pushing this stuff," Thayer said. "What really put fuel in the fire is the AI moratorium for states. I think states have been reinvigorated to fight back on this." He told Politico that the issue will likely be decided by America's Supreme Court, which in June upheld Texas legislation requiring age verification for online content. Thayer said states need a ruling from America's highest court to "triangulate exactly what the eff is going on with the First Amendment in the tech world. "They're going to have to resolve the question at some point."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Au tout début de ce mois de janvier 2026, juste avant que le CES de Las Vegas ne débute, la marque Acemagic a annoncé sur son blog officiel le lancement d'une nouvelle gamme de minis PC : les Retro X. Le modèle qui attirait le plus le regard était inévitablement le Retro X5, vous allez vitre compren...

The Free Software Foundation's president Ian Kelling is also their senior systems administrator. This week he shared an example of how "the work we put in to making sure a program is free for us also makes it free for the rest of the world." During the COVID-19 pandemic, like everyone everywhere, the FSF increased its videoconferencing use, especially videoconferencing software that works in web browsers. We have experience hosting several different programs to accomplish this, and BigBlueButton was an important one for us for a while. It is a videoconferencing service which describes itself as a virtual classroom because of its many features designed for educational environments, such as a shared whiteboard... In BigBlueButton 2.2, the program used a freely licensed version of MongoDB, but it unintentionally picked up MongoDB's 2018 nonfree license change in versions 2.3 and 2.4. At the FSF, we noticed this [after a four-hour review] and raised the alarm with the BigBlueButton team in late 2020. In many cases of a developer changing to a nonfree license, free forks have won out, but in this case no one judged it worth the effort to maintain a fork of the final free MongoDB version. This was a very unfortunate case for existing users of MongoDB, including the FSF, who were then faced with a challenge of maintaining their freedom by either running old and unmaintained software or switching over to a different free program. Luckily, the free software world is not especially lacking in high quality database software, and there is also a wide array of free videoconferencing software. At the FSF, we decided to spend some effort to make sure MongoDB would no longer make BigBlueButton nonfree, to help other users of MongoDB and BigBlueButton. We think BigBlueButton is really useful for free software in schools, where it is incredibly important to have free software. On the tech team, especially when it comes to software running in a web browser, we are used to making modifications to better suit our needs. In the end, we didn't find a perfect solution, but we did find FerretDB to be a promising MongoDB alternative and assisted the developers of FerretDB to see what would be required for it to work in BigBlueButton. The BigBlueButton developers decided that some architectural level changes for their 3.0 release would be the path for them to remove MongoDB. As of BigBlueButton 3.0, released in 2025, BigBlueButton is back to being entirely free software...! As you can see, in the world of free software, trust can be tricky, and this is part of why organizations like the FSF are so important. Kelling notes he's part of a tech team of just two people reponsible for "63 different services, platforms, and websites for the FSF staff, the GNU Project, other community projects, and the wider free software community..."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Avez-vous pris de bonnes résolutions pour 2026 ? Visiblement, du côté de Noctua, s'il y a eu des résolutions ce n'est pas au sujet de tenir les délais indicatifs de leurs feuilles de routes, qui sortent tous les trois ou quatre mois environ.La marque nous avait proposé en septembre 2025 une roadmap...

En voilà un test qui risque de faire jaser, et ce à plusieurs niveaux. Le YouTubeur TrigrZolt a posté en décembre 2025, navré nous avons un peu de retard à l'allumage, une vidéo mettant aux prises six ordinateurs portables identiques d'un point de vue hardware (matériel), mais disposant chacun d'une...

Depuis la mise en ligne des pilotes graphiques GeForce Game Ready 591.74 WHQL, les possesseurs de cartes graphiques GeForce RTX peuvent s'essayer à une composante essentielle du nouveau DLSS 4.5 de NVIDIA : la toute nouvelle itération du DLSS Super Resolution, c'est-à-dire de la technologie de mise...

En ce début janvier 2026, Intel a finalement libéré et délivré Panther Lake. Nous n'avons plus seulement droit aux informations techniques comme ce fut le cas au mois d'octobre 2025, mais bien à l'annonce complète de tous les différents modèles proposés par Intel. Enfin, tous, pas tout à fait, car u...

Lors du CES 2026 qui est sur le point de se terminer, la marque COUGAR présente sur son stand une alimentation PC qui pourrait bien déclencher des sueurs froides à certains, surtout ceux qui ont déjà connu une mésaventure avec un câble d'alimentation pour carte graphique 16 pins, qu'il soit de type...

Il faut parfois savoir tirer son chapeau aux génies du marketing et à leurs grandioses idées, surtout quand tout se fait à la fois dans l'intérêt de l'entreprise, mais aussi en total respect des simples petits consommateurs que nous sommes, nous, de notre côté. AMD vient de réaliser un coup de maitr...

Des boitiers PC pouvant contenir deux configurations, cela n'a rien de nouveau même si cela reste évidemment très rare. Par contre, l'un des points communs à ces modèles "hors nomes" était quasiment tout le temps le fait que l'emplacement pour la seconde configuration se résumait à du Mini-ITX.  Lor...

Début septembre 2025, Thibaut vous parlait sur H&Co du prochain jeu James Bond en préparation du côté d'IO Interactive : 007 First Light. Un jeu qui va avoir la lourde tâche de redorer le blason des jeux de la franchise, qui reste sur un 007 Legends sorti en 2012 et qui s'est fait détruire par l...

À la toute fin 2025, ASRock faisait un peu de teasing sur le hardware que la firme allait présenter au CES 2026. L'information la plus marquante était sans doute le fait que la société ajoutait une corde de plus à son arc en se lançant sur le marché des watercoolings autonomes pour CPU, que l'on app...

Hier, le 6 janvier 2026, nous vous présentions pour l'ouverture du CES une GeForce RTX 5090 particulière à plus d'un titre : la GIGABYTE GeForce RTX 5090 AORUS INFINITY. Son design "arrondi aux deux extrémités" n'est pas commun du tout, mais d'un point de vue technique l'information la plus importan...

Il a rapidement fallu se rendre à l'évidence, puisqu'AMD a levé très tôt le mardi 6 janvier son NDA sur ses nouveautés du CES 2026 : pas de Ryzen 9 9950X3D2 en vue, alors qu'il était attendu de pied ferme par ceux qui espéraient voir en action une double 3D V-Cache pour la première fois sur un CPU g...

La semaine dernière, le 2 janvier pour être précis, nous vous parlions d'un "teasing" de la part de MSI au sujet d'une nouvelle gamme d'alimentations disposant de sécurités pour les soucis récurrents de connecteurs 16 pins et câbles qui brulent. La firme en a finalement dit plus à ce sujet et a décr...