SUNDAY, 29 MARCH 2026, 22:01
Utility-scale solar construction… by robots! It’s “one of the largest real-world demonstrations,” notes Electrek, with 100 MW of capacity installed by the “Maximo” robots from AES, one of the world’s top power companies. Maximo uses AI “to automate the heavy lifting of solar panels and accelerate solar installation,” according to their web page, which shows a video of Maximo at work installing...
“What happens when you can describe the social experience you want and have it built for you…?” asks Bluesky? “We’ve just started experimenting, but we’re sharing it now because we want you to build alongside us.” Called “Attie” — because it’s built with Bluesky’s decentralized publishing framework, AT Protocol (which is open source) — the new assistant turns natural language prompts into...
In many rural areas, America’s online shoppers can wait half a week or more for deliveries. But Amazon started a $4 billion “rural delivery push” last year, reports Bloomberg, and has now cut delivery times to under 24 hours for 1 in 5 rural and small-town households, with 48-hour delivery to 62% of rural households.The payoff could be huge. Rural shoppers in the US collectively spend $1...
The US health secretary says he is a big fan of peptides. Many are promising drugs, but the only way to know their utility is proper clinical trials
Robert F Kennedy Jr, the US health secretary, is a chaotic person, but his Make America Healthy Again (Maha) agenda tends to follow a predictable logic. Large-scale, mandatory public health interventions – such as childhood vaccine requirements...
Apple unveiled new device-level age restrictions in the UK on Wednesday. “After downloading a new update, users will now have to confirm that they are 18 or older to access unrestricted features,” reports Gizmodo. “Users will be able to confirm their age with a credit card or by scanning an ID.”For those underage or who have not confirmed their age, Apple will turn on Web Content Filter and...
How powerful is Jupiter’s lightning? Thick clouds cover the view, notes Science magazine. But using an instrument on NASA’s Juno spacecraft (orbiting Jupiter for the past decade), researchers determined Jupiter’s lightning bolts are 100 to 10,000 times more energetic than earth’s:A single bolt of lightning on Earth releases about 1 billion joules of energy. That means the most extreme bolts of...
Bell Labs “created many of the foundational innovations of the modern age,” writes Jon Gertner, author of The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation — from transistors and telecommunications satellites to Unix and the C programming language. But what was the secret to its success? he asks in a new article for the Wall Street Journal. Start with its lucky arrival in...
Anatomy of one of least studied human organs could improve outcomes for women who have pelvic surgery
Almost 30 years after the intricate web of nerves inside the penis was plotted out, the same mapping has finally been completed for one of the least-studied organs in the human body – the clitoris.
As well as revealing the extent of the nerves that are crucial to orgasms, the work shows that...
The latest research suggests there’s far more to good fortune than mere accident
When the founder of Panasonic, Kōnosuke Matsushita, was asked what quality he valued most in job candidates, his answer baffled everyone: whether they were lucky. Not their credentials, not their intelligence, not their experience. Luck. For years, this anecdote struck me as charmingly eccentric – the kind of...
The incidents in Austin raise questions about how self-driving cars “learn” and adapt to their surroundings.
Shopping for a phone can be an ordeal. That’s why we’ve tested almost every Android phone, from the smartest to the cheapest—even phones that fold—to find the ones worth your money.
Everyone needs a good pair of ANC earbuds. These are the best of the bunch.
All your snaps come with metadata containing more information than you might realize.
Veteran designers in the auto industry—and Jony Ive—tell us how hard it is to make a functional yet beautiful steering wheel.
These chest straps and watches will help you keep your finger on your pulse—and many other heart-related metrics.
This sale spans almost an entire week, and it’s full of fake “deals.” We hunted to find truly good prices on gear we’ve tested.
Just six days ago — and 30 minutes after a Disney-OpenAI meeting about a project with Sora — Disney’s team was “blindsided” with the news Sora was being discontinued, a person familiar with the matter told Reuters, describing OpenAI’s move as “a big rug-pull.” Even some Sora employees were surprised by the cancellation. It was just 14 weeks ago Disney announced a $1 billion investment in...
“Emergency out-of-band fixes issued by enterprise IT giants Microsoft and Oracle have shone a spotlight on issues around both update cycles and patching,” reports Computer Weekly:Microsoft’s emergency update, KB5085516, addresses an issue that arose after installing the mandatory cumulative updates pushed live on Patch Tuesday earlier this month. According to Microsoft, it has since emerged...
An anonymous Slashdot reader writes: ClickFix attacks are ramping up. These attacks have users copy and paste a string to something that can execute a command line — like the Windows Run dialog, or a shell prompt. But MacRumors reports that macOS 26.4 Tahoe (updated earlier this week) introduces a new feature to its Terminal app where it will detect ClickFix attempts and stop them by...
It’s FOSS interviewed a software engineer whose long-running open source contributions include Python code for the Arch Linux installer and maintaining packages for NixOS. But “a recent change he made to systemd has pushed him into the spotlight” after he’d added the optional birthDate field for systemd’s user database.Critics saw it not merely as a technical addition, but as a symbolic...
“IBM says its quantum computer can now simulate real magnetic materials and match actual lab experiment results,” writes Slashdot reader BrianFagioli, “which is something people have been waiting years to see.”Instead of just theoretical output, the system reproduced neutron scattering data from a known material, meaning it lines up with real world physics. It still relies on a mix of quantum...