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hubie writes:

Examining the use of expressions like "recent studies" or "recent data" in different medical specialties:

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the word recent is defined as "having happened or started only a short time ago." A simple, innocent sounding definition. And yet, in the world of scientific publishing, it may be one of the most elastic terms ever used. What exactly qualifies as "a short time ago"? A few months? A couple of years? The advent of the antibiotic era?

In biomedical literature, "recent" is something of a linguistic chameleon. It appears everywhere: in recent studies, recent evidence, recent trials, recent literature, and so forth. It is a word that conveys urgency and relevance, while neatly sidestepping any commitment to a specific year—much like saying "I'll call you soon" after a first date: reassuring, yet infinitely interpretable. Authors wield it with confidence, often citing research that could have been published in the previous season or the previous century.

Despite its ubiquity, "recent" remains a suspiciously vague descriptor. Readers are expected to blindly trust the author's sense of time. But what happens if we dare to ask the obvious question? What if we take "recent" literally?

In this festive horological investigation, we decided to find out just how recent the recent studies really are. Armed with curiosity, a calendar, and a healthy disregard for academic solemnity, we set out to measure the actual age of those so-called fresh references. The results may not change the course of science, but they might make you raise an eyebrow the next time someone cites a recent paper from the past decade.

turgid writes:

The Register reports that Microsoft wants to replace all of its C and C++ code bases with Rust rewrites by 2030, developing new technology to do the translation along the way.

"Our strategy is to combine AI and Algorithms to rewrite Microsoft's largest codebases," he added. "Our North Star is '1 engineer, 1 month, 1 million lines of code.'"

The article goes on to quote much management-speak drivel from official Microsoft sources making grand claims about magic bullets and the end of all known software vulnerabilities with many orders of magnitude productivity improvements promised into the bargain.

Unlike C and C++, Rust is a memory-safe language, meaning it uses automated memory management to avoid out-of-bounds reads and writes, and use-after-free errors, as both offer attackers a chance to control devices. In recent years, governments have called for universal adoption of memory-safe languages – and especially Rust – to improve software security.

Automated memory management? Is the magic not in the compiler rather than the runtime? Do these people even know what they're talking about? And anyway, isn't C++2.0 going to solve all problems and be faster than Rust and better than Python? It'll be out Real Soon Now(TM). Plus you'll only have to half-rewrite your code.

Are we witnessing yet another expensive wild goose chase from Microsoft? Windows Longhorn, anyone?

Original Submission

hubie writes:

Swearing boosts performance by helping people feel focused, disinhibited, study finds:

Letting out a swear word in a moment of frustration can feel good. Now, research suggests that it can be good for you, too: Swearing can boost people's physical performance by helping them overcome their inhibitions and push themselves harder on tests of strength and endurance, according to research published by the American Psychological Association.

"In many situations, people hold themselves back—consciously or unconsciously—from using their full strength," said study author Richard Stephens, PhD, of Keele University in the U.K. "Swearing is an easily available way to help yourself feel focused, confident and less distracted, and 'go for it' a little more."

Previous research by Stephens and others has found when people swear, they perform better on many physical challenges, including how long they can keep their hand in ice water and how long they can support their body weight during a chair push-up exercise.

"That is now a well replicated, reliable finding," Stephens said. "But the question is—how is swearing helping us? What's the psychological mechanism?"

He and his colleagues believed that it might be that swearing puts people in a disinhibited state of mind. "By swearing, we throw off social constraint and allow ourselves to push harder in different situations," he said.

To test this, the researchers conducted two experiments with 192 total participants. In each, they asked participants to repeat either a swear word of their choice, or a neutral word, every two seconds while doing a chair push-up. After completing the chair push-up challenge, participants answered questions about their mental state during the task. The questions included measures of different mental states linked to disinhibition, including how much positive emotion participants felt, how funny they found the situation, how distracted they felt and how self-confident they felt. The questions also included a measure of psychological "flow," a state in which people become immersed in an activity in a pleasant, focused way.

Overall, and confirming earlier research, the researchers found that participants who swore during the chair push-up task were able to support their body weight significantly longer than those who repeated a neutral word. Combining the results of the two experiments as well as a previous experiment conducted as part of an earlier study, they also found that this difference could be explained by increases in participants' reports of psychological flow, distraction and self-confidence—all important aspects of a disinhibition.

"These findings help explain why swearing is so commonplace," said Stephens. "Swearing is literally a calorie neutral, drug free, low cost, readily available tool at our disposal for when we need a boost in performance."

Journal Reference:Stephens, R., Dowber, H., Richardson, C., & Washmuth, N. B. (2025). "Don't hold back": Swearing improves strength through state disinhibition. American Psychologist. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1037/amp0001650 [PDF]

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

Study finds built-in browsers across gadgets often ship years out of date

Web browsers for desktop and mobile devices tend to receive regular security updates, but that often isn't the case for those that reside within game consoles, televisions, e-readers, cars, and other devices. These outdated, embedded browsers can leave you open to phishing and other security vulnerabilities.

Researchers affiliated with the DistriNet Research Unit of KU Leuven in Belgium have found that newly released devices may contain browsers that are several years out of date and include known security bugs.

In a research paper [PDF] presented at the USENIX Symposium on Usable Privacy and Security (SOUPS) 2025 in August, computer scientists Gertjan Franken, Pieter Claeys, Tom Van Goethem, and Lieven Desmet describe how they created a crowdsourced browser evaluation framework called CheckEngine to overcome the challenge of assessing products with closed-source software and firmware.

The framework functions by providing willing study participants with a unique URL that they're asked to enter into the integrated browser in the device being evaluated. During the testing period between February 2024 and February 2025, the boffins received 76 entries representing 53 unique products and 68 unique software versions.

In 24 of the 35 smart TVs and all 5 e-readers submitted for the study, the embedded browsers were at least three years behind current versions available to users of desktop computers. And the situation is similar even for newly released products.

"Our study shows that integrated browsers are updated far less frequently than their standalone counterparts," the authors state in their paper. "Alarmingly, many products already embed outdated browsers at the time of release; in fact, eight products in our sample included a browser that was over three years obsolete when it hit the market."

According to KU Leuven, the study revealed that some device makers don't provide security updates for the browser, even though they advertise free updates.

An Anonymous Coward writes:

https://events.ccc.de/congress/2025/infos/index.html

The 39th Chaos Communication Congress (39C3) takes place in Hamburg on 27–30 Dec 2025, and is the 2025 edition of the annual four-day conference on technology, society and utopia organized by the Chaos Computer Club (CCC) and volunteers.

Congress offers lectures and workshops and various events on a multitude of topics including (but not limited to) information technology and generally a critical-creative attitude towards technology and the discussion about the effects of technological advances on society.

Starting in 1984, Congress has been organized by the community and appreciates all kinds of participation. You are encouraged to contribute by volunteering, setting up and hosting hands-on and self-organized events with the other components of your assembly or presenting your own projects to fellow hackers.

Find infos how to get in contact & chat with other participants and the organizing teams on our Communication page.

= More Information:

- Chaos Computer Club at Wikipedia
- Media
- 2025 Hub

Interesting talks, upcoming and previously recorded, available on their streams page --Ed.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

"The vast majority of Codex is built by Codex," OpenAI told us about its new AI coding agent writing code:

With the popularity of AI coding tools rising among some software developers, their adoption has begun to touch every aspect of the process, including the improvement of AI coding tools themselves.

In interviews with Ars Technica this week, OpenAI employees revealed the extent to which the company now relies on its own AI coding agent, Codex, to build and improve the development tool. "I think the vast majority of Codex is built by Codex, so it's almost entirely just being used to improve itself," said Alexander Embiricos, product lead for Codex at OpenAI, in a conversation on Tuesday.

Codex, which OpenAI launched in its modern incarnation as a research preview in May 2025, operates as a cloud-based software engineering agent that can handle tasks like writing features, fixing bugs, and proposing pull requests. The tool runs in sandboxed environments linked to a user's code repository and can execute multiple tasks in parallel. OpenAI offers Codex through ChatGPT's web interface, a command-line interface (CLI), and IDE extensions for VS Code, Cursor, and Windsurf.

The "Codex" name itself dates back to a 2021 OpenAI model based on GPT-3 that powered GitHub Copilot's tab completion feature. Embiricos said the name is rumored among staff to be short for "code execution." OpenAI wanted to connect the new agent to that earlier moment, which was crafted in part by some who have left the company.

"For many people, that model powering GitHub Copilot was the first 'wow' moment for AI," Embiricos said. "It showed people the potential of what it can mean when AI is able to understand your context and what you're trying to do and accelerate you in doing that."

It's no secret that the current command-line version of Codex bears some resemblance to Claude Code, Anthropic's agentic coding tool that launched in February 2025. When asked whether Claude Code influenced Codex's design, Embiricos parried the question but acknowledged the competitive dynamic. "It's a fun market to work in because there's lots of great ideas being thrown around," he said. He noted that OpenAI had been building web-based Codex features internally before shipping the CLI version, which arrived after Anthropic's tool.

OpenAI's customers apparently love the command line version, though. Embiricos said Codex usage among external developers jumped 20 times after OpenAI shipped the interactive CLI extension alongside GPT-5 in August 2025. On September 15, OpenAI released GPT-5 Codex, a specialized version of GPT-5 optimized for agentic coding, which further accelerated adoption.

It hasn't just been the outside world that has embraced the tool. Embiricos said the vast majority of OpenAI's engineers now use Codex regularly. The company uses the same open-source version of the CLI that external developers can freely download, suggest additions to, and modify themselves. "I really love this about our team," Embiricos said. "The version of Codex that we use is literally the open source repo. We don't have a different repo that features go in."

What happens when a computer can do your job better than you can? What happened to all those people who studied in school and trained to draft designs on huge desks with filing cabinets that would kill you if it fell? What happened, well, to any job that could be done faster, cheaper, or more effectively? Gone like the dodos. So, in this vein, how long do lawyers have before their profession is made redundant? If an LLM can find which law applies, how it applies, and write the legal argument needed, then why pay tens of thousands for a human to do this? Have lawyers had their day in sun and are now the buggy whip makers of the 21st century?

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/texas-sues-tv-makers-for-spying-on-users-selling-data-without-consent/

The Texas Attorney General sued five major television manufacturers, accusing them of illegally collecting their users' data by secretly recording what they watch using Automated Content Recognition (ACR) technology.

The lawsuits target Sony, Samsung, LG, and China-based companies Hisense and TCL [PDF files] Technology Group Corporation. Attorney General Ken Paxton's office also highlighted "serious concerns" about the two Chinese companies being required to follow China's National Security Law, which could give the Chinese government access to U.S. consumers' data.

According to complaints filed this Monday in Texas state courts, the TV makers can allegedly use ACR technology to capture screenshots of television displays every 500 milliseconds, monitor the users' viewing activity in real time, and send this information back to the companies' servers without the users' knowledge or consent.

Paxton's office described ACR technology as "an uninvited, invisible digital invader" designed to unlawfully collect personal data from smart televisions, alleging that the harvested information then gets sold to the highest bidder for ad targeting.

"Companies, especially those connected to the Chinese Communist Party, have no business illegally recording Americans' devices inside their own homes," Paxton said.

"This conduct is invasive, deceptive, and unlawful. The fundamental right to privacy will be protected in Texas because owning a television does not mean surrendering your personal information to Big Tech or foreign adversaries."

[...] Almost a decade ago, in February 2017, Walmart-owned smart TV manufacturer Vizio paid $2.2 million to settle charges brought by the U.S. Federal Trade Commission and the New Jersey Attorney General that it collected viewing data from 11 million consumers without their knowledge or consent using a "Smart Interactivity feature.

The two agencies said that since February 2014, Vizio and an affiliated company have manufactured and sold smart TVs (and retrofitted older models by installing tracking software remotely) that captured detailed information on what is being watched, including content from cable, streaming services, and DVDs.

According to the complaint, Vizio also attached demographic information (such as sex, age, income, and education) to the collected data and sold it to third parties for targeted advertising purposes.

In August 2022, the FTC published a consumer alert on securing Internet-connected devices, advising Americans to adjust the tracking settings on their smart TVs to protect their privacy.

Related:
    • Smart TVs Are Like "a Digital Trojan Horse" in People's Homes
    • Vizio Settles With FTC, Will Pay $2.2 Million and Delete User Data

Original Submission

jelizondo writes:

Recently Popular Mechanics published a report titled Who sets the doomsday clock?. It is a very interesting report and while a bit lengthy, it is perfect to reflect, as we approach a new year, on the fragility of our civilization and indeed, our very existence. Enjoy!

On a warm day in mid-July, a roomful of Nobel laureates and nuclear security experts, some 80 pairs of eyes, gaze out of the expansive windows of a 10th floor University of Chicago conference room, imagining their deaths by nuclear explosion. A presenter directs the group's attention past the trees and gothic buildings of campus, over the apartment buildings in Hyde Park, and out to the Chicago skyline, hazy with wildfire smoke from Canada. He points out which neighborhoods would vanish in blasts of varying size, estimating casualties, injuries, and radiation effects.

[...] It's the opening session of the three-day 2025 Nobel Laureate Assembly for the Prevention of Nuclear War. The gathering is convened by scientists and nuclear security experts alarmed that a new arms race, eroding global cooperation, and the rise of artificial intelligence in warfare—among other factors—are pushing civilization closer to catastrophe. Timed to the 80th anniversary of the Trinity Test, the world's first nuclear explosion, the assembly aims to produce a declaration urging world leaders to reduce the nuclear threat.

The same urgency drives the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists and its iconic Doomsday Clock, the stark graphic that represents how close we are to self-annihilation. The clock is set yearly by the Bulletin's Science and Security Board chaired by Daniel Holz, PhD, a theoretical astrophysicist at the University of Chicago.

In January, six months before the Nobel Assembly, Holz stood at a lectern at the United States Institute of Peace in Washington, D.C., to announce the time. "It is now 89 seconds to midnight," he said, as four solemn presenters swiveled a turntable to reveal a pared-down quarter clockface, a white wedge rimmed by black dots for numbers, the hands angled so sharply they overlapped. It was the closest to midnight since the clock's inception in 1947.

[...] Humans have been telling stories about the apocalypse for thousands of years, at least—often involving divine punishment by natural disaster. But the nuclear age marked a new reality that our end could be self-inflicted. The Doomsday Clock is an early symbol of that awareness—and it began as an artist's vision. In 1947, painter Martyl Langsdorf, wife of Manhattan Project physicist Alexander Langsdorf Jr., was asked to design a cover for the Bulletin's first magazine-length issue. She sketched her idea on the back of a copy of Beethoven's Piano Sonatas, choosing a minimalist clock to convey the "panicky time" and setting the hands seven minutes to midnight because it "suited [her] eye."

Today the clock-setting is more complicated than when nuclear weapons were the only way we knew we could extinct ourselves. The single time represents the board's analysis of the dangers posed by a set of distinct, complex, and intersecting threats in four focus areas: nuclear weapons, climate change, disruptive technologies, and biological threats.

hubie writes:

Older adults who were awake more during the night performed worse on cognitive tests the next day, no matter how long they slept:

When it comes to sleep, traditional advice has focused on the number of hours a person sleeps. But for older adults, the quality of sleep may affect cognitive performance the following day regardless of their quantity of sleep, according to a new study by researchers from the Penn State College of Health and Human Development and Albert Einstein College of Medicine, Bronx, New York.

In a study published this week (Dec. 17) in Sleep Health, the researchers found that the quality of a night of sleep — rather than the length of the night of sleep — predicted how quickly older adults processed information the next day. The researchers evaluated sleep quality based on how much time someone was awake between when they first went to sleep and when they rose in the morning.

[...] Few studies have examined how poor sleep impacts cognitive functioning the following day, according to Carol Derby, professor of neurology and epidemiology & population health, Louis and Gertrude Feil Faculty Scholar in Neurology at Albert Einstein College of Medicine and senior author of the study.

"Understanding the nuances of how sleep impacts older adults' cognition and their ability to perform daily activities may indicate which individuals are at risk for later cognitive impairment, such as Alzheimer's disease," Derby said.

[...] When the researchers compared performance on cognitive tests not just to participants' own performance but across participants in the entire study sample, they found that older adults who, on average, spent more time awake during their night's sleep performed worse on three of the four cognitive tests. In addition to slower processing speed, participants with more wake time after falling asleep performed worse on two tests of visual working memory.

"Repeatedly waking after you've fallen asleep for the night diminishes the overall quality of your sleep," said Buxton, associate director of both the Penn State Clinical and Translational Science Institute and the Penn State Social Science Research Institute and an investigator in the Penn State Center for Healthy Aging. "We examined multiple aspects of sleep, and quality is the only one that made a day-to-day difference in cognitive performance."

janrinok writes:

Relief for those dealing with data pipelines between the two, but move has its critics:

The EU has extended its adequacy decision, allowing data sharing with and from the UK under the General Data Protection Regulation for at least six more years.

This will be some relief to techies in the UK and the member state block and beyond whose work or product set depends on the frictionless movement of data between the two, especially as they can point to the 2031 expiration date as a risk managing aspect to backers and partners. But the move does have its critics.

After GDPR was more-or-less replicated in UK law following the nation's official departure from the EU, the trading and political bloc made its first adequacy decision to allow sharing with a specific jurisdiction outside its boundaries.

In a statement last week, the European Commission — the executive branch of the EU — said that it was renewing the 2021 decision to allow the free flow of personal data with the United Kingdom. "The decisions ensure that personal data can continue flowing freely and safely between the European Economic Area (EEA) and the United Kingdom, as the UK legal framework contains data protection safeguards that are essentially equivalent to those provided by the EU," it said.

In June 2025, the Commission had adopted a technical extension of the 2021 adequacy decisions with the United Kingdom – one under the GDPR and the other concerning the Law Enforcement Directive – for a limited period of six months, as they were set to expire on 27 December this year.

The renewal decisions will last for six years until 27 December 2031 and will be reviewed after four years. It followed the European Data Protection Board's opinion and the Member States' approval.

Following the UK's departure from the EU, the Conservative government originally made plans to diverge from EU data protection law, potentially jeopardizing the adequacy decision. In 2022, for example, then digital minister Michelle Donelan said that the UK planned t

These proposals never made it into law. Since the election of a Labour government, Parliament has passed the Data Use and Access Act.

The government promised the new data regime would boost the British economy by £10 billion over the next decade by cutting NHS and police bureaucracy, speeding up roadworks, and turbocharging innovation in tech and science.

The Act also offers a lawful basis for relying on people's personal information to make significant automated decisions about them, as long as data processors apply certain safeguards.

None of this has been enough to upset the EU, it seems.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Science sleuths raise concerns about scores of bioengineering papers:

In December 2024, Elisabeth Bik noticed irregularities in a few papers by a highly-cited bioengineer, Ali Khademhosseini. She started looking at more publications for which he was a co-author, and the issues soon piled up: some figures were stitched together strangely, and images of cells and tissues were duplicated, rotated, mirrored and sometimes reused and labelled differently.

Bik, a microbiologist and leading research-integrity specialist based in San Francisco, California, ended up flagging about 80 papers on PubPeer, a platform that allows researchers to review papers after publication. A handful of other volunteer science sleuths found more, bringing the total to 90.

The articles were published in 33 journals over 20 years and have been cited a combined total of 14,000 times. Although there are hundreds of co-authors on the papers, the sleuthing effort centred on Khademhosseini, who is a corresponding author for about 60% of them.

He and his co-authors sprang into action. Responding to the concerns, some of which were reported in the blog For Better Science, became like a full-time job, says Khademhosseini, who until August was director and chief executive of the Terasaki Institute for Biomedical Innovation in Los Angeles, California. "I alerted journals, I alerted collaborators. We tried to do our best to make the literature correct." In many cases, he and his co-authors provided original source data to journal editors, and the papers were corrected.

Khademhosseini told Nature that investigations into his work have been carried out and have found no evidence of misconduct by him. The Terasaki Institute says that an "internal review has not found that Dr. Khademhosseini engaged in research misconduct".

hubie writes:

This gulf in knowledge could be exploited by a tech industry intent on selling the "next level of AI cleverness":

A University of Cambridge philosopher argues that our evidence for what constitutes consciousness is far too limited to tell if or when artificial intelligence has made the leap – and a valid test for doing so will remain out of reach for the foreseeable future.

As artificial consciousness shifts from the realm of sci-fi to become a pressing ethical issue, Dr Tom McClelland says the only "justifiable stance" is agnosticism: we simply won't be able to tell, and this will not change for a long time – if ever.

While issues of AI rights are typically linked to consciousness, McClelland argues that consciousness alone is not enough to make AI matter ethically. What matters is a particular type of consciousness – known as sentience – which includes positive and negative feelings.

"Consciousness would see AI develop perception and become self-aware, but this can still be a neutral state," said McClelland, from Cambridge's Department of History and Philosophy of Science.

"Sentience involves conscious experiences that are good or bad, which is what makes an entity capable of suffering or enjoyment. This is when ethics kicks in," he said. "Even if we accidentally make conscious AI, it's unlikely to be the kind of consciousness we need to worry about."

"For example, self-driving cars that experience the road in front of them would be a huge deal. But ethically, it doesn't matter. If they start to have an emotional response to their destinations, that's something else."

Companies are investing vast sums of money pursuing Artificial General Intelligence: machines with human-like cognition. Some claim that conscious AI is just around the corner, with researchers and governments already considering how we regulate AI consciousness.

McClelland points out that we don't know what explains consciousness, so don't know how to test for AI consciousness.

"If we accidentally make conscious or sentient AI, we should be careful to avoid harms. But treating what's effectively a toaster as conscious when there are actual conscious beings out there which we harm on an epic scale, also seems like a big mistake."

janrinok writes:

https://scitechdaily.com/mit-reveals-how-high-fat-diets-quietly-prime-the-liver-for-cancer/

A fatty diet doesn't just damage the liver — it rewires its cells in ways that give cancer a dangerous head start.

Eating a diet high in fat is one of the strongest known risk factors for liver cancer. New research from MIT explains why, showing that fatty diets can fundamentally change how liver cells behave in ways that make cancer more likely to develop.

The study found that when the liver is exposed to a high-fat diet, mature liver cells called hepatocytes undergo a striking shift. Instead of maintaining their specialized roles, these cells revert to a more primitive, stem-cell-like state. While this transformation helps the cells cope with the ongoing stress caused by excess fat, it also leaves them far more vulnerable to becoming cancerous over time.

"If cells are forced to deal with a stressor, such as a high-fat diet, over and over again, they will do things that will help them survive, but at the risk of increased susceptibility to tumorigenesis," says Alex K. Shalek, director of the Institute for Medical Engineering and Sciences (IMES), the J. W. Kieckhefer Professor in IMES and the Department of Chemistry, and a member of the Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research at MIT, the Ragon Institute of MGH, MIT, and Harvard, and the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard.

The team also pinpointed several transcription factors that appear to drive this cellular regression. Because these molecules help control whether liver cells stay mature or revert to an immature state, they may offer promising targets for future drugs aimed at reducing cancer risk in vulnerable patients.

High-fat diets are known to promote inflammation and fat buildup in the liver, leading to a condition called steatotic liver disease. This disorder can also result from other long-term metabolic stresses, including heavy alcohol use, and may progress to cirrhosis, liver failure, and eventually cancer.

To better understand what drives this progression, the researchers focused on how liver cells respond at the genetic level when exposed to a high-fat diet, especially which genes are activated or shut down as damage accumulates over time.

janrinok writes:

https://phys.org/news/2025-12-disaster-raw-materials.html

This Christmas Day marks 21 years since the terrifying Indian Ocean tsunami. As we remember the hundreds of thousands of lives lost in this tragic event, it is also a moment to reflect on what followed. How do communities rebuild after major events such as the tsunami, and other disasters like it? What were the financial and hidden costs of reconstruction?

Beyond the immediate human toll, disasters destroy hundreds of thousands of buildings each year. In 2013, Typhoon Haiyan damaged a record 1.2 million structures in Philippines. Last year, earthquakes and cyclones damaged more than half a million buildings worldwide. For communities to rebuild their lives, these structures must be rebuilt.

While governments, non-government agencies and individuals struggle to finance post-disaster reconstruction, rebuilding also demands staggering volumes of building materials. In turn, these require vast amounts of natural resource extraction.

For instance, an estimated 1 billion burnt clay bricks were needed to reconstruct the half-million homes destroyed in the Nepal earthquake. This is enough bricks to circle the Earth six times if laid end to end. How can we responsibly source such vast quantities of materials to meet demand?

Sudden spikes in demand have led to severe shortages of common building materials after nearly every major disaster over the past two decades, including the 2015 Nepal earthquake and the 2019 California wildfires. These shortages often trigger price hikes of 30%–40%, which delays reconstruction and prolongs the suffering of affected communities. Disasters not only increase demand for building materials but also generate enormous volumes of debris.

For example, the 2023 Turkey–Syria earthquake produced more than 100 million cubic meters of debris—40 times the volume of the Great Pyramid of Giza.

Disaster debris can pose serious environmental and health risks, including toxic dust and waterway pollution. But some debris can be safely transformed into useful assets such as recycled building materials. Rubble can be crushed and repurposed as a base for low-traffic roads or turned into cement blocks .