TUESDAY, 19 MAY 2026, 19:13
The slim arc of a two-day-old moon will pass Venus shining brightly
Keep an eye on the western sky after sunset this week to watch a beautiful sequence unfold over several evenings. A young crescent moon moves first past Venus and then Jupiter, creating a chance to track the moon’s movement through its orbit around the Earth.
The chart shows the view on 18 May looking west from London at 22.00....
Today Linus Torvalds announced another Linux release candidate on the kernel mailing list. But he also highlighted “documentation updates” to address a new problem. “The continued flood of AI reports has basically made the security list almost entirely unmanageable, with enormous duplication due to different people finding the same things with the same tools.” (The new documentation says the...
America’s Library of Congress “is preserving a little piece of Hell,” jokes Engadget, “by inducting the soundtrack to the original Doom into the National Recording Registry.” The album of demon-slaying tracks is joined by several other notable 2026 additions to the registry, like Weezer’s self-titled debut album (colloquially known as “The Blue Album”), Taylor Swift’s “1989,” Beyonce’s “Single...
Today former Google CEO Eric Schmidt “was booed multiple times,” reports NBC News, “while discussing AI during a commencement speech at the University of Arizona.” Schmidt had started by remembering how computer platforms “gave everyone a voice” but also “degraded the public square… They rewarded outrage. They amplified our worst instincts. They coarsen the way we speak to each other, and that...
160 miles north of New York City, a man was convicted of manslaughter “with the help of license plate reader technology,” reports a local news station. In the small town of Troy (population: 51,000), the mayor described the cameras as “a critical tool” in that investigation. But locals and city officials “have raised concerns about who can access the data collected locally, along with data...
For decades, he criticized the industry’s lax attitudes toward both computer security and individual digital privacy. And he developed solutions.
Forbes describes it as “definitely already out there, and under active exploitation according to the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, urging all organizations to prioritize timely remediation as the attack vector poses a significant risk.” “We have issued CVE-2026-42897 to address a spoofing vulnerability affecting Exchange Outlook Web Access (OWA),” Microsoft told...
“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.