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Industry experts have warned that the reclassification would amount to a "retroactive ban on drones used by thousands of American businesses and public safety officials," the Times reported. If passed, it would be an "industry-killing ban," an aerial photographer, Vic Moss, told the Times. And one official coordinating a city's drone program, David Hood, urgently alerted the FCC in a comment that the plan to recategorize any drone with Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) sensors as military-grade would be particularly disastrous for society.

"LiDAR is a safety and navigation technology, not a military capability," Hood wrote. His city relies on LiDAR-equipped aircraft to help avoid crashes. That "civilian use—collision avoidance—is a safety function, not a combat function," Hood wrote.

He recommended that the FCC either remove LiDAR-equipped drones from the list of potential new categories of military-grade technologies or, at a minimum, narrow the "category so that it reaches only equipment genuinely tied to the identified national-security risk."

"Prohibiting LiDAR would undermine the very safety the proposal seeks to protect," Hood wrote. "Removing access to these platforms would push operators—including public agencies conducting inspections and public-safety missions over populated areas—toward less capable aircraft with inferior collision avoidance, increasing the risk of crashes over people and property."

Dale Hylton of Blue Skies Drones suggested in a comment that the FCC "should evaluate the actual risk presented by a system, not classify equipment as military grade simply because it contains a sensor that is widely used in civilian transportation, robotics, surveying, construction, and industrial applications."

Cops in red states like Texas and blue states like New York agree that cutting off Chinese drones will impact public safety.

Jason Lee, a Texas police officer, told the FCC that "there is currently no economically viable domestic replacement" for DJI drones. That's why, he said, "more than 80 percent of state and local law-enforcement drone programs surveyed in 2024 used DJI aircraft."

"This widespread adoption did not occur because law-enforcement agencies are seeking military equipment," Lee said. "It occurred because these systems provide dependable capabilities at a price that municipal agencies can actually afford."

As the manager of his police department's drone program, Lee explained that he relies "heavily on DJI platforms because they provide a combination of reliability, capability, ease of use, and cost that is difficult, if not impossible, to replicate with currently available domestic alternatives."

He's also concerned that tariffs will make it harder to affordably fix minor repairs on drones that public safety officials have already purchased. Right now, he said, US-made drones can't fill that gap.

"The fact that a domestic product exists does not necessarily mean it is a viable substitute," Lee said. "A replacement must be operationally comparable, economically obtainable, supported by an adequate supply chain, and accepted by pilots who must rely on it during real-world incidents."

Both Lee and Hood noted that the impact extends beyond public safety, affecting hobbyists, professional photographers, farmers, construction workers, and many others who rely on affordable access to capable drones. The American Gas Association, which represents energy groups serving 74 million US residences, noted that it relies on 55-pound drones with thermal imaging and LiDAR to "execute a range of operations common to natural gas utilities, including vegetation management, pipeline inspections, security responses, and disaster recovery."

The AGA argues that the US should give Americans at least two years to transition from Chinese drones or risk disrupting critical infrastructure.

"A prohibition that eliminates the affordable, capable option without a proven equivalent substitute does not have a minor impact; it strands public agencies with aging fleets and no compliant replacement path, forcing either a loss of capability or substantially higher costs borne by local taxpayers," Hood said.

New York State Police officer Michael W. Deyo suggested that the US could establish a pathway to exempt state and local police and public safety agencies from paying tariffs or, at the very least, allow them to apply to import components needed for repairs. Hood similarly requested that the FCC extend exemptions for federal authorities to "state, local, and tribal government operators" that use drones to deliver essential public services.

Mlakar told the Times that Trump's tariffs appear to be more about "protectionism" than national security. He suggested that lobbying by US manufacturers seeking to eliminate foreign competition was a primary factor in Trump's decision to impose the tariffs. The Times also noted that Trump's sons, Eric and Donald Trump Jr., have investments in US drone companies. Both are shareholders and advisory board members of Dominari Holdings, which has invested in Florida-based drone maker Powerus. Don Jr. also sits on the advisory board of Unusual Machines, a top US manufacturer of drone components. On Thursday, Unusual Machines was among the US drone stocks reportedly rallying after the tariffs took effect.

Hood warned that the plan to restrict access to drones with LiDAR sensors would achieve the "opposite" of Trump's goal to "protect the safety and security of United States persons."

And the 100 percent tariffs on drones with thermal imaging will likely shift how communities respond to disasters and other scenarios where drones help protect civilians. If public safety officials lose access to DJI drones due to budget constraints, they'll lose valuable advanced thermal imaging technology that "assist officers and the public in situations where speed, accuracy, and reliable aerial information can directly affect safety," Lee wrote.

"A thermal-equipped drone can locate a person who cannot otherwise be seen, assist officers searching large or wooded areas, provide information during dangerous incidents, identify heat sources, and support operations where sending an officer into an unknown environment would create unnecessary risk," he wrote. "These are not military missions. They are routine public-safety applications intended to protect American citizens."

Original Submission

Citation: Matilda Brindle, Catherine Talbot, and Stuart West for devising a more precise definition of kissing—"non-agonistic interactions involving directed, intraspecific, oral-oral contact with some movement of the lips/mouthparts and no food transfer"—in ants, birds, polar bears, and humans.

You'd think it would be relatively straightforward to define the act of kissing. At least one study defined it as involving "protruded lips and suction movement." But Brindle et al. argue that this is not a helpful definition from an evolutionary standpoint, since it merely describes the physical movements common to human beings. They prefer a less anthropocentric definition—after all, some form of mouth-to-mouth contact can be seen across the animal kingdom—one that includes oral-oral contact "with some movement of the lips," but does not include things like mouth-to-mouth feeding behavior or, say, dogs licking their owners' lips. Hence, they produced the rather convoluted definition in the citation above.

With that definition in hand, the authors concluded that most large apes engage in some form of kissing, although the researchers lacked the data to determine how many times kissing has been involved in Afro-Eurasian monkeys and apes. Eastern gorillas, however, seem to have lost that evolutionary feature at some point. And the authors concluded that our Neanderthal ancestors also engaged in kissing. As for why and how kissing evolved, that will be the subject of future research, although the researchers note there is some evidence that kissing in a sexual context may increase mating success—and every species in which kissing evolved also engages in premastication.

Citation: Paul Piff, Daniel Stancato, Stéphane Côté, Rodolfo Mendoza-Denton, and Dacher Keltner, for amassing evidence that upper class people are more likely to snatch from a children's supply of candy, and engage in other kinds of unethical behavior.

Does one's social status have any bearing on a given person's tendency to engage in unethical behavior? To find out, the authors conducted seven related studies to examine this issue from multiple angles. For example, one field study assessed whether upper-class drivers (as adjudged by the type of car driven) were more or less likely to cut off other vehicles at a busy four-way intersection. Another one looked at whether such drivers were more likely to cut off pedestrians at a crosswalk. Yet another study tested whether subjects in a lab-based setting were more or less likely to help themselves to wrapped candies intended for children in another lab—a test of entitlement. And so forth.

Again and again, the upper-class participants proved more likely and willing to engage in various kinds of unethical activity, whether it be cutting off cars or pedestrians, taking candy from babies, or lying about their scores in a series of random dice rolls. They were also more likely to view greed as a positive attribute. That said, the authors also acknowledged the likelihood of exceptions: there are several notable examples of philanthropic and/or ethical wealthy individuals, for example, and past research has shown a correlation between concentrations of poverty and violent crime. Still, their experiments do suggest that "the pursuit of self-interest is a more fundamental motive among society's elite," they concluded.

Citation: Sanchari Banerjee, Nathan Coussens, François-Xavier Gallat, Nitish Sathyanarayanan, Jandhyam Srikanth, Koichiro Yagi, James Gray, Stephen Tobe, Barbara Stay, Leonard Chavas, and Subramanian Ramaswamy for discovering that milk proteins from viviparous cockroaches pack three times as much energy as milk proteins from cows.

I confess that I was unaware that one species of cockroach (Diploptera punctata) in particular has the ability to nourish its embryos directly by producing milk during development in the brood sac wall, a type of reproduction known as "viviparity." This has the benefit of substantially cutting down the time scale for the embryos to reach full maturity. There is a bit of yolk in the earliest stages, which the embryos use until they develop throat muscles and a gut, at which point they gorge themselves on a protein-rich liquid milk secreted by the brood sac. Once ingested, the liquid milk crystallizes in the gut.

The authors extracted milk crystals from the guts of D. punctata roach embryos harvested from a brood sac and then performed X-ray diffraction experiments, augmented with free-electron lasers, to determine the protein structure of the crystals—achieving atomic-level resolution. They found that just one roach embryo crystal contained more than three times the energy of an equivalent amount of dairy milk because of its tightly packed crystalline lattice structure, which allows a higher concentration of food to be stored. "This unique storage form of nourishment for developing embryos allows access to a constant supply of complete nutrients," they concluded. That's yet another reason why cockroaches will likely inherit the Earth.

Citation: The late Tokuji Unno, for the study called "How to Blow the Nose—An Aerodynamic Study of the Nose Blowing"

This study is almost entirely in Japanese, and the translated abstract is lacking in details. But Unno was cognizant of cultural differences between Europeans and Japanese people when it comes to proper nose-blowing and wanted to quantify key aspects of the practice "to give good instructions to those who do not understand how to blow the nose." It's honestly not a bad idea, since blowing one's nose incorrectly, or over-enthusiastically, has been known to lead to sinus infections—and in one rare memorable case, a woman who fractured her left eye socket.

Unno used a pair of pneumotachometers (instruments to measure volume flow of respired gases) in parallel for his experiments to determine the velocity, volume, and time scale of blowing through each side of the nose over 60 trials. He also used a balloon catheter connected to a pressure transducer to monitor pressure changes in the auditory canal. He concluded that the faster the "expiratory thrust" of the blow, the more efficiently one can expel any mucus, and pressure changes in the ear canal were not high enough in his experiment to carry a high risk of ear infection. Unno concluded that "a big and long nose blow is therefore recommended to prevent upper and lower respiratory tract diseases."

Citation: João Miguel Alves-Nunes, Adriano Fellone, Selma Maria Almeida-Santos, Carlos Roberto de Medeiros, Ivan Sazima, and Otavio Augusto Vuolo Marques, for gently stepping on various parts of various venomous snakes—repeatedly, at various temperatures at various times of day—to try to learn what does and does not induce a venomous snake to bite a human.

Snakebites are unpleasantly painful at best, and they can potentially be fatal if the snake in question happens to be of the venomous variety. That's why the authors honored above wanted to learn more about the various factors that may influence the likelihood of a snake biting a human—in this case, a particular species of pit viper (Bothraps jararaca) native to Sao Paulo, Brazil. They focused on evaluating the impact of body size, sex, body temperature, environmental temperature, time of day, and type of human interaction, among other factors. And yes, they really did stage confrontations with 75 venomous pit vipers in the lab, stepping on the head, mid-body, and tail while wearing safety boots, as well as merely stepping near the snakes.

The team identified a number of relevant contextual factors influencing whether a pit viper is likely to bite. For instance, they are more likely to bite during the day and during warmer temperatures—and if a human steps on their head. Young snakes, especially of the female persuasion, are more likely to bite, and body size also seems to be a factor, particularly for male snakes (smaller males are more likely to bite). These observations are consistent with existing epidemiological data on snakebites in the region.

Citation: Randy Hurd, Zhao Pan, Tadd Truscott, Kaveeshan Thurairajah, for theoretical and experimental attempts to design a splash-free urinal.

Honestly, Hurd et al. are long overdue for an Ig Nobel prize for all their hard work developing the optimal design for a splash-free urinal, dubbed the Nautilus (aka the "Nauti-loo"). We first covered this unusual research back in 2022, when the researchers presented preliminary results at a fluid dynamics conference. Their final findings formally appeared in a 2025 paper published in PNAS Nexus.

According to the authors, the key to optimal splash-free urinal design is the angle at which the pee stream strikes the porcelain surface. Get a small enough angle, and there won't be any splashback. Instead, you get a smooth flow across the surface, preventing droplets from flying out. (And yes, there is a critical threshold at which the urine stream switches from splashing to flowing smoothly because phase transitions are everywhere—even in our public restrooms.) It turns out that dogs have already figured out the optimal angle as they lift their legs to pee, and when the team modeled this on a computer, they pegged the optimal angle for humans at 30 degrees.

The next step was to figure out a design that would offer that optimal urine stream angle for men across a wide range of heights. Instead of the usual shallow box shaped like a rectangle, they landed on the curved structure of the nautilus shell. They conducted simulated urine stream experiments with the prototypes, et voila! They didn't observe a single droplet splashing back. By comparison, the other urinal designs produced as much as 50 times more splashback. The team did come up with a second design with the same optimal angle, dubbed the Cornucopia, but unlike the Nautilus, it does not fit a range of heights, limiting its usefulness.

Citation: Justin Puma, Zhen Yang, Evan Johnston, Zixin Zhang, Xiaoyi Lan, Lingzhi Zhang, Hongyu Hou, Zixin He, Ali Afify, Megan Creighton, Jianyu Li, and Changhong Cao, for pioneering the use of mosquito proboscises as high-resolution 3D printing nozzles, a process called "Necroprinting."

We covered this fascinating paper late last year. Necrobotics is a field of engineering that builds robots out of a mix of synthetic materials and animal body parts. It has produced micro-grippers with pneumatically operated legs taken from dead spiders—a 2023 Ig Nobel winner that we also covered— and walking robots based on deceased cockroaches. But this year's winning team didn't go the robot route; instead, they adapted a female mosquito proboscis to work as a nozzle in a super-precise 3D printer.

The researchers examined stingers of bees, wasps, and scorpions; the fangs of venomous snakes; and the claws of centipedes. All of these evolved to deliver a fluid to the target, which is roughly what a 3D printer's nozzle does. But they all had issues that made them not quite the right choice for high-precision 3D printing. Continuous flow optimization, on the other hand, was a feature of some proboscises that certain insects use to draw blood from their prey. These were usually very thin and robust to enable piercing through thick skin, and straight to make feeding easier. The final choice of nozzle donors came down to a decision between tsetse flies, sandflies, aphids, bed bugs, assassin bugs, and female mosquitoes. The mosquitoes won out.

The team called the device a "3D necroprinter." The necroprinter achieved a resolution ranging from 18 to 22 microns, which was two times smaller than the printers using the smallest commercially available metal dispensing tips. In the future, printers like this could be used to print scaffolds for living cells or microscopic electronic components. The idea is to replace expensive, traditional 3D printing nozzles with more affordable organic counterparts.

Citation: Ilona Croy, Tomasz Frackowiak, Thomas Hummel, and Agnieszka Sorokowska, for collecting evidence that babies smell wonderful to their parents but teenagers do not.

One might associate newborn babies more with stinky diapers than pleasant aromas, but there is in fact a significant body of research indicating that parents find their babies' body odor (diapers aside) very pleasant indeed. It's been known to activate reward centers in the brain, and scientists believe it contributes to parent/child bonding. Mothers have been known to distinguish their newborn's distinctive smell from other babies within days or sometimes hours of giving birth.

But what happens as that same child enters puberty? There is anecdotal evidence that parents tend not to mention enjoying their teens' body odor as the inevitable hormonal changes kick in, and prior research has suggested this might be the case because as children become more independent, there is less need for the same level of bonding. The authors asked 235 parents to complete questionnaires related to this vital issue and found the responses lined up neatly with this hypothesis. Parents of babies or young children generally very much enjoyed their personal odor, and the older the child, the lower the enjoyment. It was still positive, though, compared to children unrelated to them—on par with their appreciation of their partners' personal odor.

Citation: Jaimie Arona Krems, Rebecka Hahnel-Peeters, Laureon Merrie, Keelah Williams, and Daniel Sznycer, for documenting that we value friends who are vicious to people we dislike.

If asked, most of us would say we want kind and trustworthy people as friends and don't care for those who treat us poorly. There's plenty of research to back that up. But Krems et al. noticed that much of that prior research looked specifically at person-to-person friendships in isolation, when in fact, we and our friends also interact regularly with plenty of other people. There's a broader social context to be considered, in other words, and the authors decided to explore how that context might impact the qualities we look for in friends.

Over a thousand subjects from the US and India participated in six related studies designed to track people's preferences for their friends' behavior in various social circumstances. As expected, the subjects generally preferred friends with positive qualities when assessing how they wish said friends to behave toward them personally.

Wanting friends that are kind and trustworthy (as opposed to mean or indifferent) also held for neutral strangers, although people wanted their friends to be more "prosocial" toward themselves than others, especially if they were deemed best friends. But those dynamics shifted when it came to how people wanted their friends to behave toward their enemies. In those cases, some people preferred their friends to be more vicious towards those people in particular—but not to behave viciously more generally.

Citation: Franz Bender, Marcel van der Heijden, Atlant Bieri, and Pia Viviani, for burying 1,000 identical pairs of underpants in more than 25 countries and then digging them up after two months.

Yes, you read that right: 1,000 people voluntarily buried their cotton underpants for two months—not to keep the Underpants Gnomes from stealing them but as part of a citizen science project to map out soil health in 25 countries around the world. Soil health is critical for agriculture and, by extension, food security, not to mention a healthy global ecosystem, but it has been declining worldwide, according to the authors. One key indicator is decomposition rates of complex organic matter. Commercially available teabags are a common material used to measure decomposition rates, known as the "teabag index" (TBI). However, Van der Heijden et al. felt the TBI could be improved upon.

They sent participants an activity pack: two pairs of organic cotton men's underpants, 12 teabags, and a sampling bag for soil collection, along with detailed instructions. Each volunteer selected a site, dug a hole, and collected a soil sample. They then buried the two pairs of underpants and six teabags in front of each and refilled the hole. Participants dug up the first pair of underpants and associated tea bags after 30 days and the second after 60 days, documenting the condition of the items and mailing all the materials to the scientists for analysis.

The results: Land use was the most important factor. Underpants decomposed the fastest in private gardens, where soil analysis also revealed the highest levels of organic matter. Lawns showed the least activity of soil organisms, with agricultural fields and meadows ranging in the middle. Temperature and moisture levels also affected organism activity, particularly if conditions were too cold or too dry, as did soil nutrient levels. Overall, the authors found that their "underpants index" provided equally meaningful information about soil conditions as the TBI, including chemical and physical properties, elevation, and moisture.

Original Submission

Rewriting applications in Rust seems to be a favorite activity these days, as the language is known for speedy performance unhampered by garbage collection. 

In the Web app ecosystem alone, the Bun framework just got an AI-fueled Rust makeover, Tailwind CSS version 4 got a new Rust engine called Oxide, and the Vite framework now speeds along thanks to a Rust-built JavaScript bundler called Rolldown. 

"It is a bit of [an] indictment on Node for having poor dx" (developer experience), wrote Darcy Clarke, CEO of JavaScript package management platform provider vlt, in an X message, about the Rust rewrite of pnpm. 

"It was faster to rewrite pnpm in rust than to migrate to esm" (ECMAScript modules), replied pnpm's Kochan, agreeing with Clarke's sentiment. 

The software's GitHub page still points at the last major release, pnpm 11.25, so existing users will have to update to the v12 branch specifically ("pnpm self-update next-12" will get you there).

Original Submission

There was a lot of detail in Vaga and Tsipinakis's talk, and we only have space for some of the highlights. Alongside some paid copies of RHEL 7 and RHEL 8, CERN had a lot of CentOS Linux 7 installed. It was planning a migration to CentOS 8, but in 2020, Red Hat cut eight years off CentOS 8's support lifespan. Version 8 was meant to go out of support at the end of 2029, but Red Hat cut it to the end of 2021.

With so much hardware and such very expensive machinery to turn on and off, CERN has to plan as much as 15 years ahead. Obviously, it evaluated CentOS Stream 9 as a candidate, with a view to moving to CentOS Stream 10 as soon as possible.

But there was a big problem. RHEL 9 went into beta in late 2021, and as we mentioned in 2022, RHEL 9, and thus CentOS Stream 9, has a minimum CPU requirement of x86-64-v2. This would eliminate 47 percent of CERN's embedded control computers. In 2025, RHEL 10 moved that to x86-64-v3, which would eliminate another 17 percent of the survivors.

That means that tracking future Red Hat releases would mean replacing some 65 percent of what CERN calls its "front end" computers – the ones that live underground, connected to the accelerators. Some of these are specialized hardware: some are VMEbus single-board computers, others use purpose designed and built CERN monitoring hardware, much of which is on parallel PCI cards.

The CERN engineers estimated that to replace all these, they would need to redesign 11 custom boards, which would mean hiring two electrical engineers, two software engineers, and two technicians. Also, installing new racks and new cabling in some places would mean digging new tunnels, 100 metres (330 feet) underground. They estimated the project would cost at least CHF 5.4 million ($6.7M or £5M), and it only had a 20 percent chance of success. (All the custom hardware designs are online and openly available – they just aren't much use to anyone else.)

It started evaluating other distros, placing them along two axes. One is control and maintenance: how much control each distro gives and how much maintenance it takes. The other is the level of integration with CERN's platform, which strongly favors the Red Hat family – so, RHEL, CentOS Stream, Rocky Linux, and AlmaLinux. It looks to us like CERN did some in-depth evaluation, including some less-common distros such as the Civil Infrastructure Platform. Debian and Ubuntu both scored well as relatively low-maintenance options, but their integration with CERN systems would be poor.

The answer was, as Vaga put it, "a software solution for a software problem." If their kit couldn't run more modern RHELatives, then they would not use RHELatives. They would switch the accelerator computers to Debian instead.

[...] This is an interesting study in distro choice. With Red Hat's sudden changes of plan and direction in recent years, we're sure that many other organizations and companies have faced similar problems. The difference here is that CERN is a publicly funded, non-profit hi-tech institution, meaning that it is both willing and able to talk about this in public.

We wouldn't be surprised if CERN chose to move more systems in the direction of Debian in future, but it may not be soon: the current project is already looking towards 2033. For a timeline like this, CERN bought support and training from Freexian and will be using the Freexian-backed Debian ELTS versions of Debian 13, and it's starting to plan for Debian 15.

We cannot help but think that Red Hat made some very bad decisions in almost every aspect of its recent product transitions, although as we have said before, the real original mistake here was adopting CentOS and making it official in 2014. IBM's subsidiary has alienated a lot of non-paying users, but just like CERN, many users of its free distros were also using the paid ones – however, we are confident this is just one of many such large-scale migrations. It's just unusually public. 

Original Submission

[...] The minister rejected several other amendments, including one that would require certain AI vendors to demonstrate that their products could not cross specified red lines, such as evading human oversight or assisting with the development of chemical weapons.

She also dismissed a proposal that would give the Secretary of State last-resort powers to order the shutdown of a datacenter or widely deployed AI system during a security or operational emergency.

Lloyd said the bill would instead allow the government to direct regulated entities, including datacenter operators but not AI vendors, to take or cease specified actions when their systems presented a qualifying risk. A power station could, for example, be instructed to stop using a particular AI model.

"We believe this is a more proportionate and effective response, as datacenters operate in highly complex ecosystems and AI systems are often distributed across different datacenters and jurisdictions," said Baroness Lloyd.

"It's much less desirable to direct multiple datacenters to shut down, and the impact this could have on services that rely on them, than to direct them to cease using an AI model."

Despite rejecting the amendments, Lloyd said the government remained willing to discuss AI regulation because of the technology's economic significance.

Original Submission

Ecosia has leaned hard into the European movement for sovereign technology in light of frustration with American tech giants, citing both the European Commission's decision this year to require Google to share anonymized search data with eligible rival search engines, and what it says is growing dissatisfaction among Europeans over Google's dominance of the search and browser markets.

Separating the EU from Google isn't a new initiative, with Ecosia and French search firm Qwant partnering on an EU-based web index that launched last year. It's not clear whether that initiative has yet benefited from the EC's order to Google to hand over search data. The duo's initiative, the European Search Perspective (EUSP), is currently working to expand its presence to other EU languages to "lay the foundation for genuine European digital sovereignty," though it's not clear from the press release how far along the initiative is.

Ecosia's Linux browser is now available through the App Center on Ubuntu and directly through the Snap store. Ecosia also has browsers available for Windows, macOS, iOS, and Android, all of which can be downloaded by following the link on its website. While based on open-source Chromium, Ecosia's browsers themselves are not open source. We reached out to learn whether it'd be different for the Linux variant, but didn't immediately hear back.

Original Submission

The separation of the propulsion module Thursday leaves the European and Japanese orbiters still traveling together. The two spacecraft will release from one another in December, soon after they arrive in their initial orbit around Mercury. The orbiters each have their own instruments for scientific observations at Mercury, while the transfer module is dead mass.

[...] Early indications are everything went according to plan Thursday. The spacecraft executed preprogrammed commands to disconnect the transfer module and four springs pushed the two sections apart. Telemetry downlinked from BepiColombo showed the Mercury Planetary Orbiter's solar arrays were generating power.

[...] "It's a very ambitious mission," said Santa Martinez, ESA's mission manager for BepiColombo. "Mercury is a challenging destination. It's very difficult to reach. It's very difficult to operate at because of the extreme environment so close to the Sun. But what makes this mission really unique is that for the first time in space exploration, we are bringing two spacecraft to the vicinity of the planet, and we are going to put them in orbit around this mysterious body. This is going to bring to humanity and to the scientific community unprecedented views of the Mercury planet, and it's going to open a new chapter in our understanding of the Solar System."

[...] At first glance, Mercury looks a lot like the Moon, with a cratered, almost monotone landscape of gray bombarded by radiation and a near-constant stream of micrometeoroids. The dark floors of craters at Mercury's poles may harbor water ice, like the bottoms of some craters on the Moon. "We want to look at it in new colors beyond what we can see with our own eyes to learn about what it's made of," Jones said.

The European-built orbiter will fly closer to Mercury, with cameras and instruments to study the planet's surface. Japan's smaller orbiter will fly in a higher orbit, with sensors tuned to detect magnetic fields, plasma, and dust. Routine science observations will begin next April, assuming the rest of the arrival sequence goes according to plan.

"Having two spacecraft there is groundbreaking," Jones said. "It makes an enormous difference in understanding the effects that the solar wind has on planets like Mercury, so, fundamentally, we want to learn about the origins of this planet and how it came to be like it is."

Original Submission

[...] Meanwhile, in another cybersecurity incident that has been very publicly claimed by the criminal perpetrator: pharmaceutical and medical supply giant McKesson over the weekend confirmed an intrusion after ShinyHunters on Friday told The Register it broke into the company's Snowflake and Salesforce instances and stole millions of patients' data.

"Based on our investigation thus far, including assessments by leading cybersecurity industry experts supporting our response, we've confirmed that the unauthorized access to certain third-party applications and the exfiltration of certain data was associated with a subset of customers within our Oncology & Multispecialty and Medical-Surgical business units," Francisco Fraga, McKesson executive VP, chief information officer and chief technology officer, said in a Saturday statement. 

[...] The McKesson records, according to the ShinyHunters spokesperson, include patients' full names, home and email addresses, phone numbers, dates of birth, Social Security numbers, appointment dates and notes, and sensitive illness details including cancer locations on people's bodies. The group also claims to have swiped emails containing private information from doctors to patients.

The spokesperson told us they accessed the company's Snowflake and Salesforce instances by voice phishing "multiple employees." This is a tried-and-true method popularized by the data-theft-and-extortion gang, which has victimized other medical providers in recent months. These include pacemaker manufacturer Medtronic in April, and cancer diagnostics business Exact Sciences in July.

Original Submission

"That is the spirit of these principles, and that is how we will expand opportunity for Americans and people around the world. When you bring global leaders together, there's always lots of politics, but the consensus we reached today shows that we all recognise that the next generation of prosperity will be written in the language of innovation," Lutnick said.

Optimistic Vision for Emerging Technologies

OSTP Director Michael Kratsios said that, "In Chapel Hill, G20 countries realized an optimistic vision for the future of emerging technologies, recognizing that flexible policy frameworks crafted to promote innovation will drive economic growth and prosperity. That is the spirit of the Carolina Principles, and that is how we will expand opportunity for Americans and people around the world.

Other deliverables of the Ministerial included the AI Prosperity Objectives and the AI Prosperity Compact, which will further technical workforce development across G20 nations and expand opportunities for private sector partnership.

Original Submission