Waymo explained this week that its self-driving car technology is already “designed to handle dark traffic signals,” and successfully handled over 7,000 last Saturday during San Francisco’s long power outage, properly treating those intersections as four-way stops. But while during the long outage their cars sometimes experienced a “backlog” when waiting for confirmation checks (leading them to...

The nonprofit Open Source Initiative offers “enriched” license pages with “relevant metadata to provide deeper insights and better support”. So which pages got the most pageviews in 2025? The MIT license, Apache 2.0 license, BSD licenses (3-clause and 2-clause), and GNU General Public license: mit (1.5M) apache-2-0 (344k) bsd-3-clause (214k) bsd-2-clause (128k) gpl-2-0 (76k) gpl-3-0 (55k) ...

The 2011 meltdown at Fukushima’s nuclear plant “was the world’s worst nuclear disaster since Chernobyl in 1986,” CNN remembers. But this week Japanese authorities “have approved a decision to restart the world’s biggest nuclear power plant,” reports CNN, “which has sat dormant for more than a decade following the Fukushima nuclear disaster.” Despite nerves from many local residents, the Niigata...

The 2011 meltdown at Fukushima’s nuclear plant “was the world’s worst nuclear disaster since Chernobyl in 1986,” CNN remembers. But this week Japanese authorities “have approved a decision to restart the world’s biggest nuclear power plant,” reports CNN, “which has sat dormant for more than a decade following the Fukushima nuclear disaster.” Despite nerves from many local residents, the Niigata...

An astrophysicist at the University of Rochester writes that “many” of his colleagues in physics “have come to believe that a mystery is unfolding in every microbe, animal, and human.” And it’s a mystery that: – “Challenges basic assumptions physicists have held for centuries”- “May even help redefine the field for the next generation”- “Could answer essential questions about AI.” In short,...

On Wednesday (Christmas Eve), the Free Software Foundation announced it had received two major contributions totaling around $900,000 USD — in the cryptocurrency Monero. The two donations “are among some of the largest private gifts ever made to the organization,” the FSF said in a statement. “The donors wish to remain anonymous,” according to the FSF’s statement:The organization is in its...

Those brief freezes and audio hiccups that plague video calls are not the benign nuisances that most people assume them to be, according to a new study published in Nature that found glitches during virtual interactions can meaningfully damage hiring prospects, reduce trust in healthcare providers and even correlate with lower chances of being granted parole. Researchers from Columbia, Cornell,...

Taiwan’s iPass has released a limited-edition prepaid payment card shaped exactly like a 3.5-inch floppy disk. The company, perhaps rightly so, felt the need to include a warning on the product listing: “This product only has a card function and does not have a 3.5mm [sic] disk function, please note before purchasing.” The NFC-enabled novelty card went on sale starting Christmas Eve and comes...

The political polarization of battery-powered cars may have started when Toyota released its first hybrid model 25 years ago.

After the country barred children under 16 from using social media, many parents have been asking whether similarly tough action is needed in their own countries.

Toll roads are expanding across the U.S. as the traditional gas tax funding model for highways collapses. Indiana became the first state to authorize tolls on all of its existing interstate highways when Governor Mike Braun signed legislation in June. The federal gas tax hasn’t been raised since 1993. In fiscal 2024, the federal government spent $27 billion more on road maintenance than it...