A Galaxy Composed Almost Entirely of Dark Matter Has Been Confirmed
What scientists thought were four separate star clusters are actually part of one nearly invisible system.
Science/Tech
Goldman Sachs Launches AI-Free Index
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...
Wikipedia Blacklists Archive.today, Starts Removing 695,000 Archive Links
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...
Phil Spencer Retiring After 38 Years At Microsoft
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....
Government Docs Reveal New Details About Tesla and Waymo Robotaxis’ Human Babysitters
Self-driving vehicle companies are revealing new details about their safety-critical “remote assistance” programs—but questions remain.
UK clinical trial into puberty blockers on hold after medicines regulator steps in
Recruitment of children for study delayed after MHRA warns that participants should be no younger than 14
A clinical trial into puberty blockers for children has been paused after the medicines regulator warned it should have a minimum age limit of 14 because of the “unquantified risk” of “long-term biological harms”.
Discussions between the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency...
Microsoft Deletes Blog Telling Users To Train AI on Pirated Harry Potter Books
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...
They Bet Against Trump’s Tariffs. Now They Stand to Make Millions
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.
Our Reviewers’ Top TV Pick for Gamers Is at Its Lowest Price in Months
This Samsung OLED comes loaded with features specifically for gamers.
OpenAI Has No Moat, No Tech Edge, No Lock-in and No Real Plan, Analyst Warns
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...
Several Meta Employees Have Started Calling Themselves ‘AI Builders’
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....
DHS Wants a Single Search Engine to Flag Faces and Fingerprints Across Agencies
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.
The CDC Has a Leadership Crisis
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.
Suspect arrested after Caltech scientist fatally shot at his home outside LA
Authorities suspect renowned astronomer Carl Grillmair was shot by 29-year-old man arrested for nearby carjacking
A renowned California Institute of Technology (Caltech) scientist who studied distant planets and other areas of astronomy for decades was recently shot to death at his home in a rural community outside Los Angeles, authorities said.
Carl Grillmair, 67, died from a bullet wound to...
AMC Theatres Will Refuse To Screen AI Short Film After Online Uproar
An anonymous reader shares a report: When will AI movies start showing up in theaters nationwide? It was supposed to be next month. But when word leaked online that an AI short film contest winner was going to start screening before feature presentations in AMC Theatres, the cinema chain decided not to run the content. The issue began earlier this week with the inaugural Frame Forward AI...
SerpApi Files Suit Against SearchApi for Stealing Proprietary Technology
AUSTIN, Texas, Feb. 19, 2026 — SerpApi filed suit in U.S. District Court for the Western District of Texas against Zilvinas Kucinskas and his company, SearchApi, for systematically stealing SerpApi’s proprietary technology and using its trade secrets to build a product that directly copies and competes with SerpApi. As detailed in SerpApi’s complaint, Mr. Kucinskas, […]
Nasa to launch historic Artemis II moon mission on 6 March after delays
Administrator Jared Isaacman cites ‘major progress’ since earlier discovery of liquid hydrogen leaking from rocket
Nasa said on Friday it was planning to launch its delayed Artemis II moon mission on 6 March after successfully completing a fueling test that had caused it to stand down earlier this month.
Jared Isaacman, the space agency’s newly confirmed administrator, cited “major...
How Streaming Became Cable TV’s Unlikely Life Raft
Cable TV providers have spent the past decade losing tens of millions of households to streaming services, but companies like Charter Communications are now slowing that exodus by bundling the very apps that once threatened to replace them. Charter added 44,000 net video subscribers in the fourth quarter of 2025, its first growth in that count since 2020, after integrating Disney+, Hulu, and...
Metadata Exposes Authors of ICE’s ‘Mega’ Detention Center Plans
Comments and other data left on a PDF detailing Homeland Security’s proposal to build “mega” detention and processing centers reveal the personnel involved in its creation.
The Best Chairs and Desks from Branch Are on Sale (We’ve Tested Them All)
Branch makes excellent office essentials, and our top picks are discounted.
PayPal Discloses Data Breach That Exposed User Info For 6 Months
PayPal is notifying customers of a data breach after a software error in a loan application exposed their sensitive personal information, including Social Security numbers, for nearly 6 months last year. From a report: The incident affected the PayPal Working Capital (PPWC) loan app, which provides small businesses with quick access to financing. PayPal discovered the breach on December 12,...