SATURDAY, 21 FEBRUARY 2026, 09:48
Researchers at the Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility are advancing Accelerator-Driven Systems (ADS) that use high-energy proton beams to transmute long-lived nuclear waste into shorter-lived isotopes. “The process also generates significant heat, which can be harnessed to produce additional electricity for the grid,” reports Interesting Engineering. The projects are supported by...
An anonymous reader quotes a report from NPR: NASA could launch four astronauts on a mission to fly around the moon as soon as March 6th. That’s the launch date (PDF) that the space agency is now working towards following a successful test fueling of its big, 322-foot-tall moon rocket, which is standing on a launch pad at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. “This is really getting real,” says...
The president signed an executive order implementing 10 percent global tariffs after calling the justices who struck down his signature trade policy a “disgrace.”
LOS ANGELES, CA (PinionNewswire) — Seedance2ai.online today announced the launch of its Seedance 2.0 AI video generation platform, giving creators worldwide direct access to ByteDance’s Seedance AI technology through a browser-based interface with no software installation required. The platform offers both free and paid tiers, with Seedance Pro plans starting at 9 USD per month. […]
Backlash intensified against Discord’s age verification rollout after it briefly disclosed a UK age-verification test involving vendor Persona, contradicting earlier claims about minimal ID storage and transparency. Ars Technica explains: One of the major complaints was that Discord planned to collect more government IDs as part of its global age verification process. It shocked many that...
Users say Pinterest has become flooded with AI-generated images and heavy-handed automated moderation, with artists reporting wrongful takedowns and their hand-drawn work mislabeled as “AI modified.” As the company doubles down on AI features and layoffs, longtime users argue the platform’s creative ecosystem is being undermined. 404 Media reports: “I feel like, increasingly, it’s impossible to...
Meta is pivoting Horizon Worlds away from its original VR-centric metaverse vision and toward a mobile-first strategy, “explicitly separating” its Quest VR platform from the virtual world. TechCrunch reports: By going mobile-first, Horizon Worlds is positioning itself to compete with popular platforms like Roblox and Fortnite. “We’re in a strong position to deliver synchronous social games at...
Despite Friday’s SCOTUS ruling, many tariffs affecting the auto industry will remain. So will the other dynamics that have led to today’s historically high car prices.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: Shares of cybersecurity software companies tumbled Friday after Anthropic PBC introduced a new security feature into its Claude AI model. Crowdstrike Holdings was the among the biggest decliners, falling as much as 6.5%, while Cloudflare slumped more than 6%. Meanwhile, Zscaler dropped 3.5%, SailPoint shed 6.8%, and Okta declined 5.7%. The...
What scientists thought were four separate star clusters are actually part of one nearly invisible system.
Goldman Sachs has launched an “S&P ex-AI” index (SPXXAI) that tracks the S&P 500 stocks not related to AI, offering investors a way to “hedge their exposure to the AI trade,” reports Axios. From the report: “Excluding ‘AI enablers’ from the passive benchmark would eliminate the noise introduced by the AI hype,” Louis Miller, head of the firm’s equity custom basket desk, wrote in a note to...
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: The English-language edition of Wikipedia is blacklisting Archive.today after the controversial archive site was used to direct a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack against a blog. In the course of discussing whether Archive.today should be deprecated because of the DDoS, Wikipedia editors discovered that the archive site altered...
Xbox chief and Microsoft Gaming CEO Phil Spencer is leaving Microsoft after nearly 40 years at the company. “Meanwhile, Xbox President Sarah Bond, “long thought by many both inside and outside of Microsoft to be Spencer’s heir apparent, has resigned,” reports IGN. From the report: The new CEO of Microsoft Gaming will be Asha Sharma, currently the President of Microsoft’s CoreAI product....
Self-driving vehicle companies are revealing new details about their safety-critical “remote assistance” programs—but questions remain.
Microsoft pulled a year-old blog post this week after a Hacker News thread flagged that it had encouraged developers to download all seven Harry Potter books from a Kaggle dataset — incorrectly marked as public domain — and use them to train AI models on the company’s Azure platform. The blog, written in November 2024 by senior product manager Pooja Kamath, walked users through building Q&A...
After the US Supreme Court struck down President Donald Trump’s tariff regime, investment firms are in line for a whopping return on a niche trade.
This Samsung OLED comes loaded with features specifically for gamers.
OpenAI faces four fundamental strategic problems that no amount of fundraising or capex announcements can paper over, according to analyst Benedict Evans: it has no unique technology, its enormous user base is shallow and fragile, incumbents like Google and Meta are leveraging superior distribution to close the gap, and its product roadmap is dictated by whatever the research labs happen to...
An anonymous reader shares a report: Meta product managers are rebranding. Some are now calling themselves “AI builders,” a signal that AI coding tools are changing who gets to build software inside the company. One of them, Jeremie Guedj, announced the change in a LinkedIn post last week. “I still can’t believe I’m writing this: as of today, my full-time job at Meta is AI Builder,” he wrote....
Homeland Security aims to combine its face and fingerprint systems into one big biometric platform—after dismantling centralized privacy reviews and key limits on face recognition.
A 2023 law championed by Republicans requires the CDC have a director confirmed by the Senate. For months, though, it’s had only acting directors—and the White House won’t say when that will change.