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Science/Tech
Quebec’s Lake Rouge vanished – but was it a freak natural event or caused by human actions?
Experts and community trying to untangle mystery of outburst that saw water travel almost 10km overland into a bigger lake
Manoel Dixon had just finished dinner one night last May when a phone dinged nearby with a Facebook message.
Dixon, 26, was at his family’s hunting camp near their northern Quebec home town of Waswanipi. They knew the fellow hunter who was messaging Dixon’s father, but...
Country diary: Look up! Tonight’s the night to see Jupiter at its brightest | Nigel Brown
Ynys Môn (Anglesey): The wolf moon is spectacular enough, but look east and you’ll see a celestial titan the size of a pinprick
As unmissable as new year’s fireworks, the wolf moon held the heavens for the first few nights of January, casting an unearthly radiance over everything, night almost as bright as day. Now, as that moon wanes, prepare to be wowed by a true planetary A-lister:...
Volkswagen Suffers More Than Rivals From Auto Industry Woes
The German automaker’s sales in the United States plunged last year, hit by tariffs and the end of tax credits for electric vehicles.
R150 lollipop which plays music in your skull and AI holograms that roast users
The 2026 edition of the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) once again saw many of the world’s leading tech companies and a few upstarts showcase many innovative and peculiar products.
AI Is Intensifying a ‘Collapse’ of Trust Online, Experts Say
Experts interviewed by NBC News warn that the rapid spread of AI-generated images and videos is accelerating an online trust breakdown, especially during fast-moving news events where context is scarce. From the report: President Donald Trump’s Venezuela operation almost immediately spurred the spread of AI-generated images, old videos and altered photos across social media. On Wednesday, after...
Intel Is ‘Going Big Time Into 14A,’ Says CEO Lip-Bu Tan
Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan says the company is “going big time” into its 14A (1.4nm-class) process, signaling confidence in yields and hinting at at least one external foundry customer. Tom’s Hardware reports: Intel’s 14A is expected to be production-ready in 2027, with early versions of process design kit (PDK) coming to external customers early this year. To that end, it is good to hear Intel’s...
OpenAI Is Asking Contractors to Upload Work From Past Jobs to Evaluate the Performance of AI Agents
To prepare AI agents for office work, the company is asking contractors to upload projects from past jobs, leaving it to them to strip out confidential and personally identifiable information.
Microsoft May Soon Allow IT Admins To Uninstall Copilot
Microsoft is testing a new Windows policy that lets IT administrators uninstall Microsoft Copilot from managed devices. The change rolls out via Windows Insider builds and works through standard management tools like Intune and SCCM. BleepingComputer reports: The new policy will apply to devices where the Microsoft 365 Copilot and Microsoft Copilot are both installed, the Microsoft Copilot app...
Grok Is Being Used to Mock and Strip Women in Hijabs and Sarees
A substantial number of AI images generated or edited with Grok are targeting women in religious and cultural clothing.
Google: Don’t Make ‘Bite-Sized’ Content For LLMs If You Care About Search Rank
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Search engine optimization, or SEO, is a big business. While some SEO practices are useful, much of the day-to-day SEO wisdom you see online amounts to superstition. An increasingly popular approach geared toward LLMs called “content chunking” may fall into that category. In the latest installment of Google’s Search Off the Record podcast,...
CES Worst In Show Awards Call Out the Tech Making Things Worse
Longtime Slashdot reader chicksdaddy writes: CES, the Consumer Electronics Show, isn’t just about shiny new gadgets. As AP reports, this year brought back the fifth annual Worst in Show anti-awards, calling out the most harmful, wasteful, invasive, and unfixable tech at the Las Vegas show. The coalition behind the awards — including Repair.org, iFixit, EFF, PIRG, Secure Repairs, and others —...
Latest SteamOS Beta Now Includes NTSYNC Kernel Driver
Valve has added the NTSYNC kernel driver to the SteamOS 3.7.20 beta, laying the groundwork for improved Windows game synchronization performance via Wine and Proton. Phoronix reports: For gearing up for that future Proton NTSYNC support, SteamOS 3.7.20 enables the NTSYNC kernel driver and loads the module by default. Most Linux distributions are at least already building the NTSYNC kernel...
The Samsung Galaxy Watch Is Discounted on Amazon
The Samsung Galaxy Watch8 gets marked down across a variety of colors, sizes, and feature sets.
Italy Fines Cloudflare 14 Million Euros For Refusing To Filter Pirate Sites On Public 1.1.1.1 DNS
An anonymous reader quotes a report from TorrentFreak: Italy’s communications regulator AGCOM imposed a record-breaking 14.2 million-euro fine on Cloudflare after the company failed to implement the required piracy blocking measures. Cloudflare argued that filtering its global 1.1.1.1 DNS resolver would be “impossible” without hurting overall performance. AGCOM disagreed, noting that Cloudflare...
Solawave Wand Fans: Don’t Miss This Buy One, Get One Free Sale
Double up on LED therapy, because sharing is caring.
X could face UK ban over deepfakes, minister says
It comes after government urged Ofcom to use all its powers – up to and including an effective ban – against X.
Microsoft Windows Media Player Stops Serving Up CD Album Info
An anonymous reader shares a report: Microsoft is celebrating the resurgence of interest in physical media in the only way it knows how… by halting the Windows Media Player metadata service. Readers of a certain vintage will remember inserting a CD into their PC and watching Windows Media Player populate with track listings and album artwork. No more. Sometime before Christmas, the metadata...
Meta Is Making a Big Bet on Nuclear With Oklo
Meta will finance Oklo’s purchase of uranium for its reactors. It’s a massive vote of confidence for both the startup and nuclear power, but challenges remain.
Identity and Ideology in the School Boardroom
The abstract of a paper on NBER: School boards have statutory authority over most elementary and secondary education policies, but receive little attention compared to other actors in education systems. A fundamental challenge to understanding the importance of boards is the absence of data on the policy goals of board members — i.e., their ideologies — forcing researchers to conduct tests...
The Golden Age of Vaccine Development
Microbiology had its golden age in the late nineteenth century, when researchers identified the bacterial causes of tuberculosis, cholera, typhoid, and a dozen other diseases in rapid succession. Antibiotics had theirs in the mid-twentieth century. Both booms eventually slowed. Vaccine development, by contrast, appears to be speeding up — and the most productive era may still lie ahead, Works...