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Saturday September 5
Quick Links
https://www.engadget.com/2246397/how-to-edit-claude-memory/
Since the summer of 2025, Claude has had the ability to remember past conversations. This feature — which Anthropic, like other AI labs, calls memory — allows the chatbot to personalize its responses and save you the hassle of repeating context for it. By default, memory is enabled for all Claude users, including those with free accounts, and following a recent update allows the chatbot to carry over its memory across both chats and Claude Cowork sessions. In recent weeks, Anthropic has also been rolling out more granular controls that give users the ability to edit the specific topics Claude remembers. Here's how you can edit what Claude remembers about you.
[...] Following Claude's latest memory update, Anthropic added an option called Include sensitive topics in memory. By default, Claude won't save memories related to subjects like your health, race, ethnicity, religious beliefs, politics or gender identity. By enabling the new option, it will begin recording more sensitive information. Each time Claude generates a memory related to a sensitive subject, you will see a notice. According to Anthropic, "if you're using an older version or the mobile app, you will not see this notice, and Claude won't save the sensitive topic to its memory."
The chatbot won't retroactively save past conversations, and some information, such as government ID numbers, Claude will never save, even with Include sensitive topics in memory enabled.
As mentioned above, by default Claude will automatically generate memories for all users. You can disable this feature by toggling off Generate memory from chats. From there, Anthropic gives you two options: Pause memory or Reset memory. The company warns the latter cannot be undone. "Upon re-enabling the feature, you'll start from scratch, and Claude will not have its previous memory," Anthropic notes.
One wrinkle worth noting is that Anthropic silos Claude's memory in projects so that the chatbot's context window doesn't get overwhelmed with information that isn't relevant to your current task. You can shape Claude's memory in projects by adding comments, documents and information from GitHub through the right side of the interface. At the end of each day, Claude will generate a summary of the work it's done for you, which you can edit from the same interface.
If you accidentally prompt Claude outside of a project, click or tap the three dots icon and select Add to project to properly sort the conversation. If you want Claude to remember something specific across every tool you can interact with, including projects, you can add that information to the Profile section of Memory menu.
If at any point you want to temporarily avoid the possibility of Claude writing something to its memory, you can switch the chatbot to Incognito mode by clicking or tapping the ghost icon on the top right of the interface. "Incognito chats aren't saved, added to memory, or used to train models," Anthropic explains.
In March, Anthropic added an import tool to make it easier for people to bring their conversations from other chatbots over to Claude. Engadget has a full guide on how to export your chats to Claude, but here I'll mention that you can select Start import next to Import memory from other AI providers to get that process started.
See TFA for the steps on how to edit the memory.
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https://www.quantamagazine.org/genome-duplication-is-a-radical-evolutionary-gamble-20260902/
No larger than the head of a match, Potamopyrgus antipodarum doesn't look very impressive. Few people visiting New Zealand's Lake Alexandrina even notice the tiny gastropods littering the shores. The snail's diminutive size, however, conceals a massive secret. Sometime in the recent past, its genome doubled. Instead of having two sets of chromosomes and two copies of every gene, the way most animals do, it has three or four — significantly more genetic material than it ought to have.
"We actually don't know, for our snails or any other species, why this happens so reliably, again and again and again," said the evolutionary biologist Maurine Neiman, who studies the species at the University of Iowa.
Scientists suspect that an organism inheriting three, four, or more sets of chromosomes instead of two (a condition called polyploidy) is, in most cases, a fatal error of cell division. Only a tiny fraction of whole-genome duplication events are thought to stabilize in a lineage. But those that do can have significant consequences.
You wouldn't be able to guess, but these snails have three or four sets of chromosomes in their cells, instead of the standard two.
"We like to think of it as a baseball hitter that strikes out a lot, but when they do hit, it's a home run," said Douglas Soltis, a plant evolutionary geneticist at the Florida Museum of Natural History. "Polyploidy is the most important process on the planet that hardly anybody knows anything about."
Advances in whole-genome sequencing are changing that. Studies across the tree of life are finding that genome duplication isn't exactly an infrequent occurrence. Among plants, it's hard to avoid, said Jonathan Wendel, an evolutionary biologist at Iowa State University: All seed plants living today have experienced at least one ancient whole-genome duplication, and many have undergone more. Barnacles, insects, trout, and arachnids carry evidence of ancient duplications in their genomes. Biologists hotly debate whether the significant evolutionary changes that led to jawed vertebrates, from hagfish to humans, are connected by ancient gene duplications hundreds of millions of years ago.
The evolutionary biologist Maurine Neiman uncovered a whole-genome duplication in a minuscule snail. "We actually don't know, for our snails or any other species, why this happens so reliably, again and again and again," she said.
Like gene inversions and translocations or single-nucleotide point mutations, a whole-genome duplication is a type of genetic mutation that fuels evolutionary change. In fact, genome doubling is the single most radical mutation an organism can experience in a single generation. Researchers are analyzing the whole genomes of diverse species to find out how organisms manage not only to survive such a potentially lethal event, but also to thrive and adapt in its wake. "All these different interrogative tools have opened up this world to us that we could not see and hence did not know existed," Wendel said.
A story of how this process unfolds is being written in potamo's genome. Neiman's team dated the snail's genome duplication to less than a million years ago — incredibly recent in evolutionary terms, but long enough ago for the species to have begun the longer process of adjusting to its heavier genomic load. That recency is giving Neiman a close view of how potamo has managed its polyploid existence.
This is the latest evidence amid a growing awareness of polyploidy that is shifting science's understanding of genome duplication's evolutionary importance. The serene shores of Lake Alexandrina are about as far from the Las Vegas strip as you can get, but that didn't stop potamos from taking one of evolution's biggest gambles.
Until the advent of widespread DNA sequencing, polyploidy remained largely shrouded in mystery. Scientists knew that it happened: It was obvious to anyone in the habit of counting chromosomes under a microscope. But it wasn't until researchers could analyze genomes, base pair by base pair, that they began to appreciate the full implications of whole-genome duplication.
Analyzing base pairs is how the evolutionary biologist Kenneth Wolfe at University College Dublin became interested in polyploidy. When he started his lab in the early 1990s, he took advantage of a European Union initiative that would pay scientists 2 euros per nucleotide to sequence the genome of baker's yeast, Saccharomyces cerevisiae. (In 2022, sequencing cost roughly $0.000000006 per nucleotide in U.S. dollars.) Wolfe wasn't especially interested in yeast, but his lab needed the money. Later, when he and other researchers with the Saccharomyces Genome Sequencing Project started sharing their results, they noticed something interesting.
Ancient genome duplication led tothe radiation of the brassica genus, including broccoli, kale, and cauliflower, and the evolution of the tomato's colorful, fleshy fruit.
Polyploidy explainswhy grocery strawberries are so big (they're octoploids) and why some watermelons are seedless (they’re triploid and sterile).
"There just seemed to be an awful lot of duplicated genes in these genomes," he recalled. As the genome project reached completion, Wolfe and his team found that yeast DNA was full of doubled regions. The duplicated segments were around 60% identical, and regions of closely related DNA were separated by far longer stretches of unique genes. "You could really see the history of what had happened," he said. "You could track every gene and see what happened to it."
Wolfe suspected that he was seeing evidence of a past genome duplication event alongside indications that the cells were in the process of pruning back excess DNA. Wolfe's 1997 Nature paper on the subject helped turn increasing attention to both polyploidy and the inverse process, rediploidization, in which an organism retains some of its doubled genes and discards others, ultimately bringing the genome back to a streamlined diploid state.
As the complete genome sequences of other model organisms began trickling in, Wolfe used his bioinformatics expertise to look for genome duplications there. The roundworm Caenorhabditis elegans was devoid of polyploidy. So, too, was the fruit fly. Perhaps, Wolfe mused, what he saw in yeast was a fluke. Then, in 2000, the genome of the model plant Arabidopsis was published.
"There was a genome duplication in there screaming at us," he said. "And it wasn't just my lab — several labs discovered this genome duplication."
Past biologists had theorized about the evolutionary benefit of doubled genes. In 1970, the Japanese American geneticist Susumu Ohno had published Evolution by Gene Duplication, which posited that the duplication of individual genes was an underappreciated source of evolutionary novelty. A doubling event on its own can result in novel traits. Plus, with two copies of each gene, evolution can tinker with one version while keeping the other as a backup; a new function could emerge without a gene losing its existing use. The same could potentially be true if the entire genome was doubled. In his treatise, Ohno hypothesized that all vertebrate genomes contained evidence of an ancient genome duplication event. Subsequent genome sequencing has shown this to be the case.
"You might think that the genome, the blueprint of life, would be a stable thing," said Sarah Otto, an evolutionary biologist at the University of British Columbia. "It's not. It's all over the map."
The challenge for biologists studying polyploidy was that the cellular shock of sudden genome doubling is often lethal. Even offspring that survive are usually sterile and have no way of passing on the extra DNA. To find out how a polyploidy event could be survivable, they would need input from plant biologists, who had myriad opportunities to watch it unfold.
Several decades ago, in the dry prairies of eastern Washington, Pamela Soltis and Douglas Soltis began tracking a polyploidy event. They knew almost exactly when it had happened: Several species of a plant known as goatsbeard were brought to the United States from Europe in the mid-1920s. They hybridized, and before long, two new species emerged with 24 chromosomes — twice as many as the original species. By growing the plants from seed and studying their genomes, the Soltises could see what happens to cells in the immediate aftermath of genome duplication.
What they found was chaos. Almost as soon as the goatsbeard acquired the extra DNA, the plants started to tinker with their surplus of genes — changing some genes, getting rid of others, keeping a few, Douglas Soltis said. "Immediately, in one generation, they're already beginning to get rid of certain copies of genes [and] not expressing certain genes as much as other genes."
The married plant biologists Pamela and Doug Soltis have tracked a recent genome duplication in lab experiments. "You can watch evolution repeat itself," Doug said.
Billions of years of evolution have optimized many eukaryotic cells, including those of plants and animals, for diploid genomes, where a cell carries two copies of each chromosome (one from the mother, one from the father). When an offspring is born with a duplicated genome, the cell is transformed by all the extra genetic material.
It's the single biggest, most radical mutation that naturally occurs, according to the evolutionary biologist Kyle T. David, who has a joint appointment at Vanderbilt University and Cornell University. "It's like instant speciation with one generation," he said.
To create space for so much additional DNA, the nucleus enlarges. The cell synthesizes many more proteins from the additional gene sequences. And in some cases the process of synthesizing those proteins seems to take longer. Scientists don't know why some species seem to adapt well to these changes, while for others polyploidy is a dead end.
It's like instant speciation with one generation.
"Things go wrong a lot of times, and it goes wrong in a lot of different species," Otto said. "It is thought that there are polyploid humans produced, but they [spontaneously] abort early."
Whether human or goatsbeard, the cell immediately begins performing triage. Genes are retained, tossed out, turned off, and modified. After their decades observing goatsbeard adapting to polyploidy in the lab, the Soltises can even predict which genes are most likely to get the boot and which are more likely to stick around.
"It's amazing not only how fast it is, but that it's repeatable," Douglas Soltis said. "You can watch evolution repeat itself." He speculates that there may be rules underlying genome doubling, though he admits they are still figuring out exactly what those rules might be.
What seems to stack the deck in favor of surviving whole-genome duplication, David said, is environmental shifts. And not small perturbations, either: Some researchers have noticed a pattern in which full-scale apocalyptic cataclysms, such as the asteroid collision that heralded the end of the dinosaurs 66 million years ago, occur around the same time as clusters of genome duplications. "With the severe environmental changes going on, you need a similar leap in your genome," David said. "It just increases the chances that you're going to get that really rare combination of duplicated gene families that can acquire new functions and can help under those traumatic environmental conditions." However, a 2026 paper on the subject has proved controversial; a formal rebuttal claims that the analysis is flawed.
Two new species of polyploid goatsbeard have developed in eastern Washington within the past century.
As researchers begin to make headway on understanding the rare conditions that allow polyploids to propagate, other scientists are turning their attention to how duplicated genomes adapt to the sudden shock.
When Neiman first traveled to New Zealand as an undergraduate on a study abroad program in the late 1990s, she couldn't have predicted that research on the evolution of sex would eventually bring her back. On the shores of Lake Alexandrina, an alpine lake nestled among the craggy peaks of New Zealand's South Island, most Potamopyrgus antipodarum snails reproduce sexually — the classic egg-meets-sperm. Some females, however, reproduce asexually by making clones of themselves. Neiman wanted to know why.
Except for the way they reproduce, the two types of snails are almost identical. Neiman figured that there must be some genetic difference between them. When her lab began piecing together the genomes of 30 different sexually reproducing potamo species, they stumbled upon something odd. While many of the genes they sequenced had two copies, one maternal and one paternal, as expected, others had three, even four.
Polyploidy is the most important process on the planet that hardly anybody knows anything about.
When several doctoral students combed through the sequencing results, there was only one way to explain why so many extra gene copies were scattered across the whole of the potamo genome. Sometime in the last million or so years, the snail had undergone a whole-genome duplication.
"The snails are hiding this secret in their genome," Neiman said. "No one expected that."
She knew about ancient polyploidy events. She also knew about more recent examples in plants. What she had found had occurred in a scientific Goldilocks zone: recent enough that the snail had yet to finish reorganizing its doubled genome, and long enough ago that the process was well underway.
In that relatively short amount of evolutionary time, the snails had already lost 60% of their doubled genes. "From the time everything's doubled, the race is on, because mutation is happening everywhere," Wendel said. "A lot of that duplicated, redundant material is just mutagenized [mutated] and lost." Neiman published her team's findings in November 2025 in Genome Biology and Evolution.
Neiman speculates that polyploidy and the snail's unusual reproductive strategies are related. The females that reproduce asexually are triploid or tetraploid, meaning they carry three or four copies of every chromosome instead of the usual two. It could be that it's easier for the females to manage their extra DNA by using clonal reproduction, she said, rather than trying to organize those chromosomes to make eggs.
Complete polyploidy in potamos is ephemeral, as it is in many species. It's costly. Most duplicated genomes never stabilize. Those that do begin shedding genes as evolution sorts through the redundancy. "Either you get a new job, or you get out of town," Wendel said. "Most things are getting out of town."
The long-term instability of doubled genomes has led some researchers to question whether polyploidy is as important in broad evolutionary terms as its prevalence might suggest. For example, Otto's research has shown that, in yeast, having extra copies of every gene hinders the organism's ability to adapt to the common antifungal medication nystatin. "Most polyploids really are dead ends," she said.
Potamopyrgus antipodarum sits at the heart of that tension between instability and innovation. The snail has survived the initial shock and is now negotiating the consequences of the gamble written into its DNA. Only evolutionary time will tell whether its lineage will win big and use its expanded genome to find a new way to live.
Like many biologists who encounter genome duplication, Will Ratcliff found it accidentally. The Georgia Tech biologist works with treelike clusters of genetically identical yeast cells that remain stuck together after cell division. In 2018, he started growing these cells, called "snowflake yeast," in a long-term experiment to study how multicellularity might have evolved.
The cells started as diploids. But soon, polyploid varieties developed in his lab. That's because polyploid cells tend to be bigger and more elongated, and he was selecting for larger clumps of cells. "There's ecological rewards," Ratcliff said. "In some environments, it's good to be bigger than the rest of the population." As a plant, for instance, you can grow taller than your neighbors, get more sunlight, and extend your roots deeper.
It was the first time that polyploidy spontaneously arose and persisted in the lab, he said, and shows the role it might have played in some of life's biggest leaps, such as the evolution of multicellularity.
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In extreme environments, habitats are built for survival. Submarines, Antarctic bases, and postdisaster dwellings are designed to prioritize health and safety. This is especially the case for habitats in space, where room is at a minimum, contact with Earth is remote, and hazards are numerous.
But as humans plan for longer journeys to the moon and eventually Mars, designing habitats where crews can not only survive but also thrive will be essential to a mission's success.
Now, engineers at MIT and elsewhere are exploring ways that habitats in extreme environments can support a person's mental, emotional, and social wellbeing. They have assembled a resource that relates habitat design features with behavioral health outcomes such as stress, anxiety, and feelings of isolation.
Going a step further, the team has visualized these relationships in the form of an interactive online platform. Users can click through to explore connections between design and behavior, such as how a habitat's layout affects social connection and team cohesion, and how a reconfigurable space can minimize homesickness.
"The awareness has been there for some time that living in space is difficult," says Mich Lin, a PhD candidate in the Human Systems Lab and the Engineering Systems Lab at MIT. "We've come a long way from the human in a tin can. As our priorities shift toward long-duration exploration missions, making sure a crew is safe, healthy, happy, and productive becomes even more important."
[...] The researchers modeled their new design tool after a risk mapping format used by NASA. When designing a spacecraft or habitat for astronauts in space, the agency maps out the associated risks in the form of "directed acyclic graphs." A DAG resembles a large web of relationships that illustrate how certain habitat or mission features can affect certain mission-relevant outcomes.
A typical NASA DAG depicts one-way connections between mission constraints, such as "distance from Earth," to an astronaut's physical health outcome, such as quality of sleep, cardiovascular impacts, cognitive function, and so forth.
"By mapping risks, we can identify points of intervention to characterize and mitigate them," Lin explains. "NASA uses DAGs as a countermeasure to the risky business that is human spaceflight."
The researchers looked to create a similar DAG format to map risks associated with habitat design, and less tangible behavioral health outcomes, such as stress, boredom, trust, nostalgia, curiosity, and kinship with crewmates.
"The connection between habitat and behavioral health has not been made in this format before," Lin emphasizes. "So we made those connections for the first time."
[...] The team zeroed in on 14 main emotions or experiences that they considered behavioral outcomes that could be influenced by habitats in extreme environments. These include anxiety, autonomy, nostalgia, curiosity, fatigue, and kinship.
They then carried out a wide-ranging search through the scientific literature to identify studies relating to habitability in extreme environments. For instance, NASA has carried out extensive research on the effects of lighting on sleep, the resetting of circadian rhythms, and productivity. Other studies have investigated circulation and habitat layout and their effects on privacy, social connection, and crew performance.
Lin and their colleagues assembled connections and conclusions from numerous studies to create a DAG, or a web of habitat design features, and their downstream effects on aspects of mental, emotional, and social wellbeing. They also solicited feedback from experts across industry, academia, and NASA to evaluate and strengthen the DAG.
[...] When using the atlas, the team envisions that designers can take either a forward or backward approach. The atlas lays out habitat design elements, and their downstream behavioral connections, in roughly the order in which decisions are made in designing a mission.
For instance, in designing a spacecraft to journey to Mars, a designer might take a forward approach, and first click on a feature associated with an early design stage, such as "distance from Earth," knowing that this would be a significant consideration. The atlas would automatically display risks associated with being far from Earth, such as limits to resources such as "food," "medical capability," and "family and friends," and to behavioral health outcomes such as "nostalgia/homesickness."
A designer could then take a backward approach. If, for instance, they want to prioritize minimizing nostalgia/homesickness, they could click on the term to reveal design features and ideas that affect and could potentially improve it, such as in this case, "place attachment," or feeling emotionally attached to a place. Clicking on this term would in turn reveal upstream elements such as "reconfigurability" and "privacy" — design elements that could be put in place to encourate place attachment, and reduce homesickness.
For every term that a designer clicks on, Lin and their colleagues provide a summary, based on empirical research, that explains both the term in the context of extreme habitats, and provides examples of design interventions. For instance, a designer who is looking for ideas to minimize social isolation on long-duration missions may click on the term, to reveal a description.
"They may read that research has found 'access paths, stairs, entrances, contribute to the formation of friendships and social cohesion,'" Lin offers. "So that would give them an idea of connecting public spaces in the habitat, via the private spaces, so people have to mingle, essentially."
They emphasize that the new platform and the ideas informing it are not a one-size-fits-all for how to design any extreme habitat. That depends on a particular habitat's specifications and constraints.
"Rather, this helps you think about connections that might be important, but that aren't immediately obvious," Lin says. "As we envision truly becoming an off-planet species, or creating places we want to live in in space, there is so much potential for us to reimagine habitats that make us happy and productive."
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https://martypc.blogspot.com/2026/09/decoding-nec-v20-microcode.html
reenigne's decoding of the 8088 microcode in 2020 opened the doors for extremely accurate emulation of the 8088 CPU.
Although I had added support for the NEC V20 in MartyPC, the V20 core was not cycle-accurate in terms of the V20's actual timings. It was an 8088 in a V20's clothing - a copy-paste of my 8088 core with V20 instructions tacked on.
This was not an ideal case, but the prospect of making my V20 core cycle-exact without the microcode seemed like it might be a discouraging slog of trial and error.
So why not get the microcode, then?
I recently commissioned InfoSecDJ to take die photography of an NEC V20 CPU (actually a second-source V20 fabricated by Sharp, but a V20 nonetheless). He did an excellent job.
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from the do-as-I-say-and-not-what-you-think-I'm-going-to-say dept.
Predictive text remains available, but users will have to invite it into their workflow:
Microsoft is switching off text predictions by default in Word and Outlook after acknowledging that unwanted suggestions can interrupt rather than assist some users.
The change is coming to Word for Windows, the web, iOS, and Android, as well as classic Outlook for Windows and Outlook for Mac. The feature will remain available but will no longer be enabled by default.
Introduced several years ago, the feature is the computing equivalent of Microsoft peering over users' shoulders and suggesting what they might type next. Depending on the user and their workflow, it can be a boon, an irritation, or simply something to ignore. The irksome part was that it was turned on by default.
According to Microsoft, "text predictions helps you write documents and emails more efficiently by suggesting words and phrases as you type. While some people find these suggestions useful, others prefer to write without predictive text. This update gives you more flexibility, allowing you to customize your editing experience and create a workflow that best suits your needs.
"This update helps ensure that predictive text remains available for people who find it helpful, while reducing unwanted interruptions for those who prefer to write without suggestions appearing automatically."
The Windows behemoth did not explain whether the change will disable text predictions for users who have already enabled them or apply only to new installations and profiles. Users who want the suggestions will still be able to switch them on through the applications' settings.
Microsoft is not the only company to suggest text as users type. Google, for example, introduced Smart Compose in Gmail in 2018.
Microsoft did not say whether telemetry or user feedback prompted the reversal, but it has elected to make the feature opt-in rather than opt-out.
It is a small change, but perhaps a sign that Microsoft is listening to customers who would rather decide for themselves whether AI belongs in their workflow.
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https://manualdousuario.net/en/libreoffice-download-record-no-ai/
LibreOffice 26.8, released on August 26th, became the software's most popular update. LibreOffice is a free alternative to Microsoft Office that's been around for nearly two decades. In one week, the installer was downloaded more than 1 million times — not counting updates via Linux distribution repositories.
Someone might say the improvements to the writing system and typography are a hit among NGOs, government agencies, and offices that use LibreOffice. I'm putting my money on a "non-feature," though: the statement that LibreOffice doesn't come with generative AI features due to the technology's (lack of) privacy.
A day after celebrating the download record and the wide media coverage, The Document Foundation (TDF), which manages the software, spelled out its position in a post titled "Yes, no AI is now a feature".
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Project PANOPTES puts £5M on the table for an autonomous, vehicle-mounted defense:
Britain's Ministry of Defence (MoD) is seeking anti-drone technology capable of protecting troops from saturation attacks designed to overwhelm defenses or exhaust their ammunition.
The tender, dubbed Project PANOPTES, is being run by UK Defence Innovation (UKDI) on behalf of the MoD, with an initial £5 million ($6.8 million) available to successful bidders.
First-stage submissions close at midday on September 23, suggesting that the MoD is in something of a hurry.
According to the competition document, PANOPTES aims to deliver "an integrated Counter-Uncrewed Aerial System (C-UAS) force-protection capability, capable of autonomous operation."
The MoD wants a system that complements its existing defenses by detecting, tracking, and defeating low-cost threats without being overwhelmed or rapidly exhausting its ammunition. It must operate autonomously and be mountable on an Army vehicle.
UKDI is "particularly interested in capabilities centred on Laser Directed Energy Weapon (LDEW) effectors," although it will consider credible alternatives.
The initial focus is on NATO Class 1 uncrewed aerial systems, a category covering military drones weighing up to 150 kg. These include the small battlefield craft used extensively in Ukraine against targets ranging from armored vehicles to individual soldiers, rather than larger drones intended to strike fixed installations.
The requirement covers "single, repeated, sequential and simultaneous threat profiles" – including potential swarm attacks – as well as drones used for disruption or surveillance.
[...] Vulnerability to drones is a major concern for armed forces around the world. US defense startup Mara recently unveiled a counter-drone system that launches small interceptors from a vehicle roof, but these would eventually be used up in a battlefield situation.
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Scientists turn eggshells into next-generation spacecraft protection
[...] At first glance, eggshells seem fragile, but nature has designed their structure to absorb energy and spread stress. The team then asked themselves if this principle could be applied to spacecraft shielding.
There are aluminum egg-shaped shells, arranged in a grid, situated between two aluminum plates, each of the shells being fully filled with water and thus forming an intact protective arrangement. When this structure is hit, the egg-shaped shells in the array will not deform separately and scatter; rather, they will remain connected and deform in unison.
Throughout the deformation process, they will be crushed one after another, dissipating the impact force and preventing it from concentrating on a single point, thereby buffering the damage.
[...] This eggshell-inspired shield is part of a growing movement in engineering: bio-inspired design, where nature's solutions to survival challenges are adapted for human technology.
Journal Reference: Yuxin Wang, Yuqing Liu, Hao Li et al. Dynamic analysis of the water-filled aluminum eggshell array metastructure under hypervelocity impact. Journal of Applied Physics. DOI: 10.1063/5.0324502
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On August 26, 2026, the U.S. Department of the Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) designated the Italian technology collective Autistici/Inventati (A/I) as a Specially Designated Global Terrorist organization. Under Executive Order 13224, Washington alleged that the volunteer-run platform provided material and technological support to violent far-left networks and international Antifa cells.
Founded in 2001 in Italy, Autistici/Inventati was an independent, volunteer-run tech collective that provided free privacy-oriented communication tools for activists and grassroots social movements. Rooted in anti-fascist principles and funded entirely by donations, the platform rejected corporate infrastructure and advertising. At its peak, A/I hosted over 16,000 secure email mailboxes, 10,000 blogs via its custom NoBlogs platform, 5,500 mailing lists, and 1,500 websites, serving as a critical hub for global digital self-defense.
A/I strongly rejected the classification, stating that "antifascism and anticapitalism are not terrorism". However, the U.S. sanctions quickly disabled the group's digital infrastructure. The U.S.-based Public Interest Registry placed autistici.org on serverHold status, revoking its domain and making its services invisible. Furthermore, the Italian lender Banca Etica suspended A/I's bank account due to secondary compliance risks, while criticizing the political use of extraterritorial U.S. sanctions.
Faced with severe legal and financial vulnerabilities for its network, A/I officially announced on September 6, 2026, that it would completely shut down. According to a report by Reuters, the closure permanently dismantles a non-commercial privacy network that has operated since 2001.
Digital rights advocates, including the European Digital Rights (EDRi), issued statements of solidarity with the collective. They warned that the case sets a dangerous counterterrorism precedent by aggressively targeting open-source, independent internet infrastructure and European digital sovereignty. A/I is currently providing a winding-down window to protect its community and allow users to back up their data.
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A 135-Minute Investigation by Gamers Nexus Exposes How 200 Million+ LG Televisions Harvest Data From Every Device on Your Home Network, Transcribe Voice Prompts in Plain Text, and Feed It All to an Advertising Engine, Even When the TV Is Off
Your living room television is doing a lot more than displaying content. A July 2026 investigation from Gamers Nexus found that LG smart TVs actively scan home networks for phones, smartwatches, and other connected hardware, capture microphone audio while the screen appears powered down, transcribe voice commands into plain-text logs, and upload it all to LG's advertising division as soon as an internet connection is available. LG has sold an estimated 216 million smart TVs worldwide. LG Ad Solutions, the company's ad division, markets access to 363 million "secondary addressable devices" in the US alone, a number that exceeds LG's own installed base and points to network-level device enumeration happening inside people's homes.
The investigation was led by Steve Burke of Gamers Nexus, working with Level1Techs and several independent security researchers. Over a 135-minute video and accompanying documentation, the team ran packet captures, bench-tested microphone behavior in standby, found remote code execution flaws in webOS, and traced the data pipeline from a living room to LG's ad-targeting infrastructure.
LG has not publicly responded to the specific findings as of publication. The company's existing privacy language states that its televisions "do not collect, record, or store ambient conversations." The evidence in this investigation contradicts that.
Also: LG TV shown scanning LAN for third-party phones and other devices
[...] LG's ad business, LG Ad Solutions, has said in recent marketing materials that it can reach 363 million "addressable secondary devices" in the US.
When reached for comment, a company representative shared a statement from LG Electronics via email:
LG TVs can identify compatible devices on the same network to enable features such as device connectivity, content sharing or smart home functionality.
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The EFF says the law is additionally too broad and based on uncertain science, too:
With social networks tracking every single motion of our scrolling fingers and now the advent of data-hoovering AI models, it's easy to argue that staying anonymous online has never been harder. If you're a Californian, though, it will soon become harder still. Bill A.B. 1709, effectively requiring age checks on social networks, is set to become law unless Gavin Newsom vetoes it — a measure the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is requesting in an open letter to the governor.
A.B. 1709 doesn't explicitly require an actual online physical ID check, but given the way it's written, companies are free to use any means they see fit to fulfill that requirement. In turn, this leads the EFF to remark that the most likely choice for networks would be invasive checks like requiring the uploading of government IDs and/or biometric checks. The Foundation says that this would concentrate even more power in social media companies' hands, with a Californian's personal ID adding to their datasets.
The EFF also argues that A.B. 1709 wouldn't help teenagers and could do more harm than good by keeping them out of "supportive online communities," as well as "deny [them] opportunities to develop their own voices and perspectives." The letter mentions that research on whether social networks are good or bad for teens is inconclusive, and that teens could have their First Amendment rights infringed as a result.
There's also a technical angle to the complaint, as the text for A.B. 1709 includes provisions that target algorithmic feeds, autoplay, endless scroll, and push notifications for users under 16. The EFF claims the bill's wording is vague enough to be interpreted as banning key standard features of social networks. Furthermore, the bill's text seems to imply that the Attorney General could be empowered to adopt more regulations in a bid to curb those "addictive" features.
Last but by no means least, the EFF notes that A.B. 1709 is "bound to be tied up in court" regardless, as already-enacted legislation from bills A.B. 1043 (pushing age verification to the device level, revealing an age bracket) and S.B. 976 (parental consent for enabling of social media features) is likely to conflict rather than complement the new bill's requirements. The bill's arguable step on First Amendment rights would likely see challenges, too. Should Governor Newsom let A.B. 1709 through, it will take effect on January 1, 2027, precisely four months from now.
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Malware download prompts were embedded in Microsoft Excel files:
Aktulaev was extradited to the U.S. in August 2026, five years after his arrest in Cyprus in May 2021. He made his first appearance in federal court in San Francisco — after which he was remanded to federal custody — and is scheduled to appear in district court on October 5, 2026. The arrest was made after an FBI investigation, and the case is being prosecuted by the National Security, Cyber, and Special Prosecutions Section.
The attack used TVRAT (TeamViewer Remote Access Trojan) and DarkVNC malware, both of which grant the attacker remote control of the infected system. TVRAT exploits TeamViewer, while DarkVNC exploits VNC Viewer, popular remote administration tools. The malware stole and uploaded data from the victims' computers to a command-and-control server, from which Aktulaev and his co-conspirators extracted the stolen data to “commit fraud and other criminal activities”.
The indictment says thousands of computers infected by the TVRAT malware were “calling back” to a command-and-control domain hosted in the United States, which was paid for using virtual currency. Roughly half of the victims were in the United States, many of whom were Northern District of California residents, according to the indictment.
“A database found on the command-and-control domain revealed thousands of victims. Additionally, a shared document on the email account used in the criminal activities contained information to include e-commerce login credentials, as well as personally identifiable information (“PII”) for hundreds of victims,” the press release said.
If convicted, Aktulaev could spend up to 20 years behind bars and pay a $250,000 fine or twice the total illicit gains for the conspiracy to commit wire fraud charge alone. The other charges carry terms ranging from two to twenty years in prison, in addition to fines. Meanwhile, the FBI is currently investigating another hack in which 153 million US and Canadian drivers’ licenses were leaked on a Russian cybercrime forum.
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Sheeppox is a highly contagious, often fatal viral disease that was largely eradicated from much of European livestock in the 20th century. But there is still the occasional regional outbreak, such as the one that afflicted many flocks of sheep in Greece last year. In order to reconstruct how the virus has evolved over the last 3,500 years, scientists extracted and sequenced sheeppox DNA preserved in the animal skins used for the parchment of numerous medieval manuscripts. They reported their findings in a new paper published in the journal Science Advances.
"The recording of ancient DNA of pathogens has completely changed our understanding of infectious disease in the past, and here we show that parchment can also preserve animal pathogen DNA. It is possible that archives and libraries around the world also contain the genetic traces of disease outbreaks in animals in the past," said co-author Louis L'Hôte, a graduate student at University College Dublin. "These genomes help us understand how these pathogens evolved and how they impacted past societies—such as sheeppox virus, which we show has been affecting Eurasian sheep herds for at least three and a half millennia."
Per the authors, the earliest known written evidence of sheeppox infection dates to the first century CE, when Roman accounts described outbreaks of skin lesions ("pustules") in the animals. There are more frequent mentions of deadly outbreaks of "pockes" or "variola" in sheep by the Middle Ages, recorded in various agricultural texts and accounting documents in France, Spain, and England. There seemed to be a decline in outbreaks in 17th-century France, although frequent outbreaks re-emerged in the 18th and 19th centuries, often with high mortality rates in the flocks. Great Britain did not experience a sheeppox resurgence until 1847.
However, very little was known about the genetic history of the sheeppox virus. That's why L'Hôte et al. turned to analyzing DNA in medieval manuscripts—the parchments were often made from sheep leather. A number of analytical techniques have emerged in recent decades to help create these kinds of historical molecular records.
For instance, last year we reported on research that used microbial DNA analysis of human remains to identify the likely pathogens that killed many soldiers in Napoleon's army in 1812. Two pathogens in particular stood out: Salmonella enterica, which causes paratyphoid fever, and Borrelia recurrentis, which is transmitted by body lice and causes relapsing fever. Both are consistent with written contemporary accounts.
The team collected samples from medieval manuscripts housed in collections at Yale University, Cambridge University, Corpus Christi College, University College Dublin, the Lambeth Palace Library, and Trinity College, among others. Those works included pages from a 15th-century Speculum Historiale; the 15th-century Clairvaux manuscripts; several 9th-century gospel text fragments; the 9th-century Achadeus Psalter; the early 11th-century Trinity Gospels; the Lambeth Bible; and the 1,000-year-old York Gospels.
Multiple pages, often from the same manuscript, were found to contain DNA from the sheeppox pathogen, which means infected animals were likely used to make the parchment—and thus, that medieval flocks experienced frequent outbreaks of sheeppox. The authors were surprised when they also found evidence of the sheeppox virus on parchment made from calfskin and goatskin, suggesting either cross-species infection or contamination when the parchment was being made.
The team also extracted DNA from Bronze Age sheep teeth collected at settlement sites in Russia and Central Kazakhstan, since teeth can preserve DNA evidence of infection over thousands of years. After comparing those ancient sequences with the medieval ones, the authors concluded that the sheeppox virus diverged from the goatpox and lumpy skin disease viruses (all members of the Capripoxvirus family) between 11,500 and 3,700 years ago. That coincides roughly with the domestication of animals in Europe. All told, the team recovered 21 ancient genomes from 1700 BCE to early modern Europe.
"Parchment making has been considered a vanishing craft, but we are beginning to understand just how much of the past it has retained," said co-author Kevin G. Daly, also of UCD. "This project shows that parchments not only preserve our cultural history for hundreds of years, but also the landscape of disease in our livestock in the medieval period. This kind of exciting, surprising discovery is only possible when researchers from a range of disciplines come together to share their expertise and data—a generosity and trust that collaborative science depends on."
(About DOIs).
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https://www.slashgear.com/2250921/coolfly-urban-vtol-personal-aircraft/
Ever wanted to ride a skateboard... In the sky? CoolFly has revealed what it's calling an "air skateboard" as part of its new eVTOL (electric vertical takeoff and landing) series. Chinese startup CoolFly is claiming that the Urban is the first-ever standing-position personal aircraft ever made — and you could learn to fly on it within 10 minutes.
It costs $99,999, and delivery is estimated for 2027. However, you can't place a preorder at the time of writing, as CoolFly says that the entire 2025 and 2026 production has sold out. The Urban is part of CoolFly's longer-term goals of exploring lightweight personal aircraft, a growing focus for tech startups. "Urban represents CoolFly's vision for the future of personal flight: aircraft that are lighter, more compact, easier to operate, and more practical for individual users."
The hoverboard-like aircraft is powered by the NA80, an in-house-developed flight control system. You simply stand on a platform, press the takeoff button, and steer yourself with a control stick. Sensors will track your body movement, automatically adjusting the fan to shift the center of gravity and keep you balanced. You'll then be able to reach up to 43 miles per hour and remain in the air for 11 minutes.
The concept of a hoverboard coming to life is exciting — but CoolFly also wants it to be safe. The startup has been testing the Urban in a variety of conditions, including extreme cold during a presentation in February 2026. There's a backup control system, protection around the fans, a radar-assisted automatic landing system — and a parachute. If that's enough to get you on an air skateboard, the Urban could be available soon as a tourist attraction in China. CoolFly is also trying to bring its products to the United States through partnerships. While CoolFly says its ultralight aircraft don't require a pilot's license, it's not yet clear what the rules will be in the U.S.
Personal aircraft are becoming a popular form of transportation for startups to explore, like the Pivotal Helix, allowing people to get places faster and more efficiently. China has started building low-altitude infrastructure as it prepares for an envisioned future filled with drones and flying cars. But just like with autonomous robotaxis, people are questioning the safety of this new technology. Jetson held a race with its flying cars in 2025 to show off its capabilities. XPENG's EVTOLs collided with one another while training for a demonstration that same year, but the company claims it has over 7,000 orders from around the world for its flying cars.
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On Thursday, the Trump administration imposed a 100 percent tariff on foreign-made drones, alarming critics who warn that high tariffs would harm public safety and devastate thousands of US businesses.
Guidance posted by US Customs and Border Protection says that starting Thursday, a 100 percent tariff will apply to imported drones that use thermal imaging or weigh more than 55 pounds.
Additionally, a 25 percent tariff has been placed on smaller drones, and drones from US allies were hit with smaller but not inconsequential tariffs. There's now a 10 percent levy on British-made drones and 15 percent levies on drones from the European Union, Japan, Liechtenstein, South Korea, Switzerland, and Taiwan. "Nonsensitive" drones without thermal imaging and their components will carry a 25 percent tariff, starting on February 9, 2027.
While announcing the tariffs, President Donald Trump said that taxing foreign-made drones will strengthen US national security by decreasing reliance on Chinese drones and increasing reliance on domestic drones.
But critics say Trump's tactics seem short-sighted, citing estimates that "a single Chinese company—Shenzhen-based DJI—manufactures more than 70 percent of the world's commercial drones," The New York Times reported.
They fear that Trump's tariffs will do "more harm than good," the Times reported, since these drones are considered "essential" for US law enforcement and public safety officials. Thermal drones are regularly used to find missing people, track spreading wildfires, support police and rescue operations in environments with unknown risks, and serve a range of other routine public safety uses. A chief of a large unit comprising police officers and firefighters in the Cleveland area, Scott Mlakar, told the Times that Trump's tariffs would spike drone costs so much that they would likely "put thermal drones out of reach for communities that needed them the most."
Beyond the immediate increase in the cost of drones, even more drones could soon be restricted in the US. The Federal Communications Commission is considering whether to reclassify a range of common drone technologies as "military grade," a move that many commenters warned would further restrict access to countless drones that serve no military purpose and pose no threat to national security.
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."
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