SUNDAY, 17 MAY 2026, 21:38
“We may have accidentally detected dark matter back in 2019,” writes ScienceAlert. “What if instead of trying to see dark matter, scientists attempted to hear it instead?” asks Space.com:New research suggests dark matter could leave a tiny but discernible imprint in the cacophony of ripples in spacetime called “gravitational waves” that ring through the cosmos when two black holes slam together...
Test scores “are lower than they were a decade ago in school districts across the U.S.,” reports Times magazine, citing new data released Wednesday by Stanford researchers. “Reading scores were down roughly 0.6 grades in 2025 compared to 2015, and math scores were down about 0.4 grades. This means that students were 60% of one school year behind where their peers were in reading a decade...
An anonymous reader shared this report from Electrek:When Fisker Inc. filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in June 2024, it left roughly 11,000 Ocean SUV owners holding the keys to vehicles that cost them anywhere from $40,000 to $70,000 — and that were rapidly losing the software brains that made them work. No more over-the-air updates. No more connected services. No more warranty. The...
Long-time Slashdot reader internet-redstar shares an interestging response to “the recent wave of Linux kernel privilege escalation vulnerabilities like ‘Copy Fail’ and ‘Dirty Frag'”:Belgian Linux sysadmin and Tesla Hacker “Jasper Nuyens” got tired of the idea of manually blacklisting dozens or even hundreds of obscure kernel modules across large fleets of Linux systems in the near future.So he...
Are statistical programmers coalescing around a handful of popular languages? That’s the question asked by the CEO of software assessment site TIOBE, which every month estimates the popularity of programming languages based on their frequency in search results:This month, the programming language R matched its all-time high by reaching position #8 in the TIOBE index once again. This is not a...
It is hardly a surprise that outbreaks can occur and experts say many of the factors involved are not easy to change
It was a voyage that promised such stuff as dreams are made of, yet within weeks the Atlantic expedition of the MV Hondius had become a nightmare, with three passengers dead from hantavirus and more showing symptoms.
Meanwhile, an outbreak of norovirus is under investigation on...
xAI has launched Grok Build, “a coding agent of its own to serve as competitor to its rivals’ products, such as Anthropic’s Claude Code,” reports Engadget:As Bloomberg notes, xAI has been trying to catch up to its rival companies like Anthropic and OpenAI. Elon Musk, the company’s founder and CEO, previously admitted that it has fallen behind its competitors when it comes to coding. A couple of...
The Oto Smart Sprinkler makes it easy to keep your lawn watered—as long as it gets three hours a day of direct sun to stay charged.
Experts say slashed funding and growing misinformation are some of the greatest challenges facing public health
The hantavirus outbreak, while unlikely to spark the next big pandemic, is shining a spotlight on the ways public health has deteriorated in the US: its ability to test for rare diseases, its expertise on outbreak prevention and response, its ability to battle misinformation and...
I grilled, smoked, seared, cleaned, and synced digital temp controllers to find the best grill option for every cookout and tailgate.
These free debt calculators help you set up payment plans to get back in the black.
Bowling centers apply oil to their lanes using a machine that works like a giant inkjet printer. The pattern in which it’s applied can change everything about how the ball travels.
The discovery from the Trinity nuclear test site shows how extreme conditions can result in materials never before seen in nature or in the lab.
As reconstruction materials remain blocked, Palestinians are crushing debris into interlocking blocks to build shelters from destruction.
Computer Weekly reports on “the long-awaited reform of Britain’s outdated Computer Misuse Act of 1990 — which has hamstrung the work of the nation’s cyber security professionals and researchers for years.” The Computer Misuse Act was passed 35 years ago in response to a high-profile hacking incident involving no less than the King’s father, the late Duke of Edinburgh. It defined the offence...
Today Amazon ends support for first- and second-generation versions of Kindles and Kindle Fire tablets, along with the Kindle Touch, the 9.7-inch Kindle DX, and other devices released in 2012 or earlier. Owners can continue reading ebooks that they’ve already downloaded, and they can also still sideload books using a USB cable (from, for example, Project Gutenberg). And PCMag points out that...
An anonymous reader shared this report from Electrek: A Nevada utility just told 49,000 Lake Tahoe residents that it’s redirecting 75% of their electricity supply to data centers, and they have less than a year to find a new power source. It’s one of the starkest examples yet of the AI boom’s impact on everyday Americans… NV Energy needs the capacity for data centers being built by Google,...
“Every link leads to an entry that does not exist yet,” explains the GitHub page for a Wikipedia-like site called Halupedia. “Until you click it, at which point an LLM pretends it has always existed and writes it for you, in the deadpan register of a 19th-century scholarly press…”Every article is invented on demand. The footnotes are also lies… The hardest problem with an infinite, on-demand...
Former Microsoft programmer Keith Curtis “wrote and self-published After the Software Wars to explain the caliber of free and open source software,” according to his entry on Wikipedia, “and why he believes Linux is technically superior to any proprietary OS.” He’s also KeithCu (long-time Slashdot reader #925,649), and has written a blog post on “How I added an LLM-based grammar checking + TeX...
Bloomberg reports that Apple’s two-year-old partnership with OpenAI “has become strained, according to people familiar with the matter.” Bloomberg describes OpenAI as “failing to see the expected benefits from the deal and now preparing possible legal action.”OpenAI lawyers are actively working with an outside legal firm on a range of options that could be formally executed in the near future,...
“Most of the plastic waste in California is about to lose the recycling symbol,” writes the Washington Post’s “climate coach.”The “chasing arrows” symbol, created in 1970 by a college student inspired by the burgeoning environmental movement, has been stamped indiscriminately on plastic bottles, clamshell takeout containers, chip bags and more for decades. The majority of the items emblazoned...