“Scientists have developed a solar desalination system that turns seawater into drinking water without creating environmentally damaging brine,” reports ScienceDaily. “Special laser-textured metal panels use sunlight to evaporate water while automatically moving salt deposits away from the working surface, preventing clogging. The process was successfully tested with water from three oceans and...

ScienceAlert reports:In the molten ocean of iron churning in Earth’s outer core, a section deep beneath the Pacific Ocean suddenly reversed direction and started moving eastward against the planet’s usual westward flow. This happened in 2010, according to satellite measurements of Earth’s magnetic field, and scientists are still trying to figure out what caused it… [I]t seemed to have a large,...

“Around 570 cables (plus a further 80 planned) carry between 95% and 99% of the world’s intercontinental telecommunications data,” reports CNN (since fiber cables offer speeds of terabits per second, carry much more data than satellite links). And “networks of green energy cables carrying electricity are also starting to sprawl across the world’s seabeds.” Now to protect them, the U.S.,...

A historian-turned-software engineer warns that “so little is ever written down” by professional programmers in a new article for Fast Company:Perhaps there’s an early design doc, but then it turns out that everything was substantially revised before work began. Maybe there are a few wiki pages explaining known issues, some of which were solved a long time ago and others that have been left to...

Axios reports:The American Federation of Teachers, the second-largest teachers’ union in the U.S., released a 10-point plan to introduce AI and screen-time guardrails in classrooms. The plan would limit AI use and ban screens for students in prekindergarten through second grade “unless there is a compelling reason,” such as supporting students with special needs. The teacher union’s president...

Disney’s Star Wars: The Mandalorian and Grogu “suffered a catastrophic 70% drop in its second weekend,” reports Variety, suggesting the movie isn’t finding audiences “beyond an aging group of core fans.” “Despite playing on far more screens, The Mandalorian and Grogu landed in third place on weekend charts behind Backrooms and Obsession.” (described as “two buzzy horror films.”) Suprisingly,...

Almost a fifth of the earth’s population lives in Africa. And Africa’s next generation of power projects “is increasingly being built around solar and wind power and battery storage,” reports the Associated Press, “as governments and investors shift away from coal and large hydropower dams in search of cheaper, faster and more reliable electricity.”The shift is visible in a $1.5 billion energy...

“In the future, AI agents will be able to find one another using the Domain Name System (DNS), instead of crawling about and probing ports or checking configured resources,” writes The Register. InfoWorld writes that “numerous proprietary agent registries are on the market, but the Linux Foundation suggests we simply extend the distributed, open Domain Name System (DNS) infrastructure we...

You can try 570 extinct operating systems at a new “virtual museum,” according to a new article by ZDNet. Their reporter downloaded the ancient OS NeXTStep, and was “shocked” by how easy it was to run it, “and by the sheer number of operating systems to choose from.”Essentially, what you do is download a zipped file, unzip it, change into the newly created directory, and run the executable....

The state of Ohio — one of America’s hot regions for data center construction — “is suspending a tax break that has been critical to its competition with other states,” reports the Associated Press. The move “comes as tax breaks for energy-hungry AI data centers are increasingly playing a role in state budgets,” the article points out. But they also note the expanding data center industry...

The Zig programming language wants to be a modern alternative to C (including better memory safety features). It’s maintained by as an open-source project by a 501(c)(3) nonprofit and a network of contributors. But Business Insider notes that Zig bans the submission of AI-assisted code:On the JetBrains podcast, Zig President Andrew Kelley called AI-assisted contributions “invariably garbage.”...

Aviation start-ups and the Trump administration want to replace helicopters with electric aircraft, but the new vehicles still have to pass arduous tests before the public can use them.