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An Anonymous Coward writes:

Prego's Connection Keeper is a screen-free voice recorder designed to capture and preserve dinner table conversation:

As if there weren't already enough devices listening in on everything being said in your home, Prego, the pasta and pizza sauce brand, is releasing a device designed to record everything said around the dinner table for posterity. The Connection Keeper, which looks like an oversized pasta jar lid, was created in collaboration with StoryCorps, the nonprofit organization focused on preserving the stories of Americans in a collection housed at the Library of Congress' American Folklife Center. There's no AI, Wi-Fi, or Bluetooth, but you can optionally upload recordings to StoryCorps' website to make them easier to share with family.

Prego says the goal of the device is to encourage families to make memories through conversation during dinner instead of staring at their phones — but only for a small number of families. The company is only planning to make less than 100 of them. The Connection Keeper will be available for purchase online starting on April 27th for $20 as part of a bundle that includes the device, a jar of Prego sauce, spaghetti noodles, and a deck of cards featuring conversation prompts and ideas.

Using the device is as easy as plopping the Connection Keeper down in the middle of everyone at the table and pressing one button to start recording. Using a pair of microphones, it captures CD-quality audio to a 16GB microSD card for up to eight hours when fully charged.

When dinner's over, the recordings can be transferred to a computer over USB-C and then uploaded to a dedicated microsite created by StoryCorps where they're preserved and accessible only by the uploader, unless they choose to share them with other StoryCorps users or the general public. You even have the option to archive them within the Library of Congress, which makes them public automatically, so hopefully your family talks about more than just stealing brainrots.

The recordings can be accessed on a smartphone through the StoryCorps app, but Prego intentionally left phones out of the rest of the process to discourage their use at the table. It's also why the Connection Keeper lacks a screen. The goal was to minimize interactions with the device so family members instead focused on talking with each other.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

Dud contracts, proprietary designs, and zero-experience supplier make for quite the mess:

The NASA Office of Inspector General, the aerospace agency’s auditor, fears that work on next-generation spacesuits won’t finish in time to use them for the planned Artemis III Moon landing mission in 2028.

In a report [PDF] published on Monday, the Inspector General points out that NASA kicked off its quest for next-gen spacesuits with 2022’s Exploration Extravehicular Activity Services (xEVAS) program, which called for private suppliers to develop two suits: one to handle microgravity at the International Space Station (ISS) and another to wear on the moon.

NASA allocated $3.1 billion to the contracts and selected Axiom Space and Collins Aerospace to work on the project. The latter dropped out in 2024 after deciding it couldn’t hit the required deadlines.

The report says NASA’s delivery dates “were overly optimistic and ultimately proved unachievable” and warns that past experience of spacesuit development suggests Axiom Space won’t have even demo suits ready before 2031.

That’s bad because NASA’s plans call for a moon landing in 2028, while the ISS will end its mission in 2030.

The Office of Inspector General blames the xEVAS contracts for the mess.

“NASA’s choice to use a firm-fixed-price, service-based acquisition strategy for xEVAS aligns with the Agency’s strategic decision to shift the risk of cost overruns to the contractor, as well as help foster a commercial space economy,” the report notes. “However, in this case, the firm-fixed-price contract approach conflicted with the developmental nature of next-generation spacesuits, which carry higher levels of technical, financial, and schedule risk.”

[...] NASA might have a way out of this because it can appoint new suppliers under xEVAS, and three companies – SpaceX, Genesis Engineering Solutions, and ILC Dover – are already working on suitable spacesuits.

But if Axiom Space doesn’t succeed, the report warns NASA may need to revert to its current spacesuits which are much less capable than those planned for use in future, and therefore “significantly adjust its lunar plans.”

Those plans currently call for 2027’s Artemis III to test docking in space, and for 2028’s Artemis IV mission to land astronauts on the Moon.

Work on the vehicle that will make that landing is under way, with SpaceX and Blue Origin competing to win the gig. There’s no guarantee either company will be ready for 2028. And as another recent Office of Inspector General report found, both designs have potential flaws.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

Good news for those working with Windows, bad news for Paragon Software:

The feature list for Linux kernel 7.1 is taking shape, and a standout addition has already landed: a new read-write NTFS driver.

Now that kernel 7.0 is out, the all-seeing Eye of Torvalds has shifted its gaze to the future kernel 7.1, which is likely to appear in a couple of months. One standout feature has already been merged: a new in-kernel read-write driver for Windows' default disk format, NTFS. Linus referred to it as the ntfs resurrection from Namjae Jeon. Some of the more excitable Linux blogs are getting breathless about this – but in our humble opinion, they're missing the real message.

This will not represent a massive shift in performance or anything like that. The existing in-kernel NTFS support is quite quick already. The real lesson to take from this is about clean, maintainable, thoroughly commented code, which means that one developer can take it over from another even decades later.

The Reg FOSS desk described the driver in October 2025, and we recapped its history back then. It's from Korean developer Namjae Jeon, formerly of Samsung but now working with Samba. He's on his way to being one of the Linux filesystem gurus: as we reported in 2022, back then he contributed the code to allow Linux to fix corrupted exFAT volumes, which we are sure by now has saved the data of many users of large flash storage media.

This is not a huge new Linux feature. As this archived copy of the Linux-NTFS Project web page shows, Linux got the ability to read NTFS volumes with kernel 2.1.74 in 1997. Just over a decade later, that was joined by the FUSE NTFS-3G driver, which is sponsored by Tuxera. Because it runs as a user-mode program, not inside the kernel, NTFS-3G isn't as fast and is a little more limited: you can't boot from it, for instance.

That changed in 2021, when Paragon Software donated a new read-write GPL NTFS driver to the kernel. After considerable effort and discussion, that made it into kernel 5.15 shortly before this vulture joined The Register team. Donating a large and complex driver to the Linux kernel isn't a one-off project, though: it needs to be constantly maintained, and within some six months, this started to become a problem.

Around that time, Namjae started work on modernizing the original 1990s read-only NTFS driver, adding write support as well as revising it to use modern kernel filesystem handling features such as large folios.

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

It's an important step towards managing large and complex genetic data:

In time for World Quantum Day, teams from the Wellcome Sanger Institute and the universities of Oxford, Cambridge, and Melbourne encoded the full Hepatitis D virus genome into quantum hardware.

The genome was loaded onto an IBM quantum computer using its 156-qubit Heron processor.

Successfully encoding the sequence required compressing the genetic information into quantum states that could fit within available qubit limits.

Traditional computers have struggled to keep pace with the surge of genomic data, creating processing bottlenecks that limit how quickly scientists can analyze variation across populations. The move toward pangenomes, which combine sequences from many individuals, adds additional complexity.

Instead of relying on a single reference sequence, pangenomes branch into multiple paths representing genetic diversity. Finding useful patterns inside those branching paths quickly becomes computationally demanding, especially as datasets grow.

“Our goal has always been to push the boundaries of what’s possible in genomics,” said Dr Sergii Strelchuk of the University of Oxford. “When we work with pangenomes, the information is presented in a form of a tangled maze, but we are building quantum algorithms to help find the best path through this maze when regular tools, such as classic computers, just get hopelessly stuck.”

Quantum computing offers a possible path forward by representing many possible outcomes at once inside qubit states. That capability could allow certain genomic calculations to run far faster than classical approaches.

Researchers involved in the project are targeting a future benchmark of processing full human pangenomes up to 100 times faster than traditional tools. The Hepatitis D test does not deliver that speed itself but demonstrates a pathway toward achieving quantum advantage at larger scales.

Some scientists remain cautious about how quickly that transition could happen. As Science.org reports, until quantum systems handle larger genomes and perform full analyses, it's unknown whether they will outperform well-established classical methods.

Even with those limits, loading a complete genome into quantum hardware marks an impressive technical milestone. The next phase focuses on scaling the approach and turning experimental workflows into tools other researchers can use.

Original Submission

fliptop writes:

Registrations of battery electric vehicles (BEVs) in Europe's key automotive markets surged by 51% in March as the Iran war pushed gasoline prices to multi-year highs, data published by research firm New Automotive and trade association E-Mobility Europe showed on Monday:

More than 224,000 new electric passenger cars were registered in March alone across 15 key EU + EFTA markets, the analysis found. These sales accounted for as much as 22% of all new passenger car sales across the key European markets.

In another sign that expensive gasoline is pushing drivers to EVs, European Union member states registered more than 500,000 new electric cars in the first quarter of 2026, a surge of 33.5% compared to the same period last year, the data showed.

New BEV registrations accelerated across every major EU market in the first quarter of 2026. Europe's five largest countries — Germany, France, Spain, Italy, and Poland — all recorded BEV growth above 40% year-to-date.

[...] Energy security was the catalyst for change in driver choice in recent weeks, analysts at New Automotive and E-Mobility Europe say.

Previously:

• Honda Hits Brakes On EV Rollout Amid Rising Losses
• Porsche Puts Its Faith Back in Internal Combustion Engines
• After a $26 Billion Hit, Stellantis Shifts Focus Back to What Buyers Want
• Stellantis Drops Jeep, Chrysler Plug-in Hybrids Amid EV Sales Slowdown
• Canadian EV Sales Collapse by 35% as Gas Car Purchases Surge

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

A postcard spy:

HNLMS Evertsen, a Dutch air-defense frigate part of the NATO carrier strike group centered on the French carrier Charles de Gaulle, has inadvertently revealed its position after receiving a postcard containing a hidden Bluetooth tracker. According to The Register, the Dutch Ministry of Defense posted instructions online to make it easier for family and friends to communicate with personnel aboard a navy ship, but didn't fully consider the ramifications for operational security (op-sec).

Bluetooth trackers like the Apple AirTag cost $29 a piece, but there are cheaper, generic versions available on Amazon that cost $10 for two trackers. By allowing a potential adversary to track the ship in real-time, it could put the vessel and the entire strike group at risk, as that information can be used for other operations against the fleet. The fact that it was mailed in meant that spies do not even need to go near the ship to place a tracker on the $585 million Navy ship.

Dutch journalist Just Vervaart, working for regional media network Omroep Gelderland, followed the directions posted on the Dutch government website and mailed a postcard with a hidden tracker inside. Because of this, they were able to track the ship for about a day, watching it sail from Heraklion, Crete, before it turned towards Cyprus. While it only showed the location of that one vessel, knowing that it was part of a carrier strike group sailing in the Mediterranean could potentially put the entire fleet at risk.

Navy officials reported that the tracker was discovered within 24 hours of the ship's arrival, during mail sorting, and was eventually disabled. Because of this incident, the Dutch authorities now ban electronic greeting cards, which, unlike packages, weren't x-rayed before being brought on the ship. This isn't the first time that operational security aboard naval ships has been compromised through carelessness. Just last month, a French officer aboard the Charles de Gaulle posted their running time and route on Strava. This revealed the carrier's location in the Mediterranean, as open-source intelligence could potentially identify the said officer and their position within the French Navy.

VLM writes:

Here's one that's been making the rounds:

https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.21852

"A single two-input gate suffices for all of Boolean logic in digital hardware. No comparable primitive has been known for continuous mathematics: computing elementary functions such as sin, cos, sqrt, and log has always required multiple distinct operations. Here I show that a single binary operator, eml(x,y)=exp(x)-ln(y), together with the constant 1, generates the standard repertoire of a scientific calculator. This includes constants such as e, pi, and i; arithmetic operations including addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, and exponentiation as well as the usual transcendental and algebraic functions."

Discussion ideas:

1) Yes everyone knows there's not one, but two universal logic gates, anything made of NAND gates can be made of NOR gates and vice versa. So there's possibly at least one other "universal computation" for continuous math.

2) Who's playing with the idea of computer/microcontroller FPUs that use nothing but this operation, super optimized? I think this is funny to think about even if impractical.

3) Ditto analog computation. Analog opamp subtraction ain't rocket surgery, and old fashioned bipolar transistors can output logs and exponentials or you can use single chip devices to calculate logs and exponentials. I'm trying to wrap my head around using the AD633 universal multiplier... This could get expensive.

4) You can do this on a slide rule for educational purposes. You need a rule with LL scales or at least L and C/D. I have to think about this some more.

Original Submission

dw861 writes:

As recently reported by CyberAlberta:

A webinar hosting platform known as WebinarTV is actively scraping and redistributing both public and private Zoom webinars without knowledge or consent of organizers. Initial access is typically gained through third-party browser extensions such as AI-powered transcription or auto-join tools. These extensions are inadvertently provided calendar permissions by their users and, in some cases, users are willfully submitting meeting details to the WebinarTV platform without the knowledge or consent of the organizers.

There have been many reports on social media as well as online review boards indicating hidden scraping of not just publicly advertised webinars, but supposedly private meetings as well. Many organizers reported first learning that their webinars had been made publicly available through a notification email from WebinarTV themselves.

Once these tools join a meeting—either with or on behalf of a user—the session content is captured and subsequently published on WebinarTV.us. By analysing previews of uploaded webinars, CyberAlberta validated claims made by online users that WebinarTV uses screen capture to scrape content, rather than using Zoom's built-in "Record" function. The available previews display screenshots consistent with a screen-captured view, rather than the format produced by a native Zoom recording.

WebinarTV appears to operate a business model centered around a promotional service called "Lead Advantage", which it offers for a fee. The platform scrapes webinars en masse and positions itself as a facilitator to help these webinars reach a broader audience, which in the case of private webinars is the opposite intention. According to WebinarTV's FAQs, Lead Advantage enables "hosts" (a term it uses to refer to individuals whose content has been scraped) to "promote their webinars through web placements, email distribution, and higher prominence directory listings". The service encourages these hosts to bid for increased exposure, with bidding starting at USD $20.

hubie writes:

A study introduces an innovative framework for translating biomolecular data from archaeological materials into scent recreations:

Recent advances in biomolecular archaeology have revealed that ancient objects can retain the molecular fingerprints of past aromatic practices. These molecules provide unprecedented insight into ancient perfumery, medicine, ritual, and daily life.

In a new publication, an interdisciplinary research team led by archaeo-chemist Barbara Huber (Max Planck Institute of Geoanthropology and the University of Tübingen), shows how museums can use this molecular evidence to engage audiences with the sensory worlds of the past. The team combined their expertise to create a new workflow for converting biomolecular data into accessible, visitor-ready olfactory recreations.

"This research represents a significant shift in how scientific results can be shared beyond academic publications," explains Huber.

The process began with a briefing, prepared by Huber in collaboration with scent-based storytelling consultant Sofia Collette Ehrich, establishing a crucial link between scientific data and perfumery practice. Building on this foundation, perfumer Carole Calvez developed a series of formulations that translated ancient chemical signatures into a scent suitable for museum environments. Calvez emphasizes that this is not a simple act of replication.

"The real challenge lies in imagining the scent as a whole," she explains. "Biomolecular data provide essential clues, but the perfumer must translate chemical information into a complete and coherent olfactory experience that evokes the complexity of the original material, rather than just its individual components."

To demonstrate, the team developed two formats for presenting ancient scents in public settings. Using The Scent of the Afterlife, a recreation of the aromas that accompanied the ancient Egyptian mummification process, they created a portable scented card and a fixed scent diffusion station integrated into exhibition design.

[...] "The scent station transformed how visitors understood embalming," curator Steffen Terp Laursen observes. "Smell added an emotional and sensory depth that text labels alone could never provide."

This work demonstrates how molecular traces of the past can be transformed into meaningful cultural experiences.

"We hope to offer museums compelling new tools for bringing visitors closer to past environments and practices via sensory interpretation and engagement," Sofia Collette Ehrich concludes.

Journal Reference: Huber, B., Hammann, S., Loeben, C.E. et al. Biomolecular characterization of 3500-year-old ancient Egyptian mummification balms from the Valley of the Kings. Sci Rep 13, 12477 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-023-39393-y

Original Submission

hubie writes:

A state bill is a glimpse of how corporations are limiting people's ability to make their own fixes and upgrades:

Right-to-repair efforts are gaining headway in the US. A lot of that movement has been led by state legislation in Colorado.

Since 2022, Colorado has passed bills giving users the tools, instructions, and legal capabilities to fix or upgrade their own wheelchairs, agricultural farming equipment, and consumer electronics. Similar efforts have rippled out through the country, where repair bills have been introduced in every US state and passed in eight of them.

"Colorado has the broadest repair rights in the country," says Danny Katz, executive director CoPIRG, the Colorado branch of the consumer advocate group Pirg. "We should be proud of leading the way."

Manufacturers tend to be less supportive of right-to-repair efforts, as corporations stand to make more money charging for tools, replacement parts, and repair services than if they were to just let people fix things on their own. Some companies have begrudgingly agreed to make their products more repairable. Some have started actively pushing back against new laws intended to enable that.

At Friday's hearing of the Colorado Senate Business, Labor, and Technology committee, lawmakers voted unanimously to move Colorado state bill SB26-090—titled Exempt Critical Infrastructure from Right to Repair—out of committee and into the state senate and house for a vote.

The bill modifies Colorado's Consumer Right to Repair Digital Electronic Equipment act, which was passed in 2024 and went into effect in January 2026. While the protections secured by that act are wide, the new SB26-090 bill aims to "exempt information technology equipment that is intended for use in critical infrastructure from Colorado's consumer right to repair laws."

The bill is supported by tech manufacturers like Cisco and IBM, according to lobbying disclosures. These are companies that have vested interests in manufacturing things like routers, server equipment, and computers and stand to profit if they can control who fixes their products and the tools, components, and software used to make those upgrades and repairs. They also cite cybersecurity concerns, saying that giving people access to the tools and systems they would need to repair a device could also enable bad actors to use those methods for nefarious means. (This is a common argument manufacturers make when opposing right-to-repair laws.)

"IBM supports right-to-repair policies that empower consumers while protecting cybersecurity, intellectual property, and critical infrastructure," wrote an IBM spokesperson in an email to WIRED. "Given the critical and often sensitive nature of enterprise-level products, any legislation should be clearly scoped to consumer devices."

Cisco did not respond to WIRED's request for comment, but in the hearing a Cisco representative said, "Cisco supports SB-90. While it appreciates the arguments offered in favor of the right to repair, not all digital technology devices are equal."

During the hearing, more than a dozen repair advocates spoke from organizations like Pirg, the Repair Association, and iFixit opposing the bill. YouTuber and repair advocate Louis Rossmann was there [videos not reviewed -Ed]. The main problem, repair advocates say, is that the bill deliberately uses vague language to make the case for controlling who can fix their products.

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

https://gizmodo.com/sperm-whales-speak-with-their-own-unique-alphabet-scientists-found-they-even-have-vowels-2000746968

Sperm whales: They’re just like us. An international team of researchers, including marine biologists and linguists, reports that it has detected signs of a “highly complex” phonetic alphabet in the calls of sperm whales—including “vowels” deployed in patterns akin to their use in human languages like Mandarin, Latin, and Slovenian.

The scientists described the whale calls as one of the “closest parallels” to human phonetic speech patterns of “any analysed animal communication system,” according to their new study, published Wednesday in the UK’s Royal Society journal Proceedings B. The research builds on years of deep machine learning analysis of sperm whale calls, organized by the nonprofit Project CETI (short for “Cetacean Translation Initiative,” but a playful allusion to SETI, the “Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence”).

Project CETI, you may recall, is the same group that recently released footage showing adult sperm whales collaborating as doulas to help one of their own give birth. That research, along with CETI’s linguistic efforts, has focused on a community of sperm whales living off the coast of Dominica in the Eastern Caribbean.

“On the surface, [sperm whale calls] sound like this alien, ocean intelligence that has nothing to do with us,” as the new study’s lead author Gašper Beguš, a linguistics professor at the University of California, Berkeley, told Scientific American.

“But when you actually look at it closely,” he said, “you realize, ‘Oh, we’re way more similar.’”

Sperm whales spend only a fleeting amount of time near the ocean’s surface—about ten minutes every hour—in between 50 minute bouts of deep-sea dives hunting for squid, their preferred wild caught meal. Fortunately, for Beguš and his colleagues, the surface acts almost like a watercooler where these sperm whales can take a break and trade notes.

The team’s new research worked with recordings of whale vocalizations collected between 2014 and 2018 by the Dominica Sperm Whale Project, which captured conversational series of short clicks, termed codas, communicated between whales usually at very close range, head to head. The CETI team’s prior research used generative adversarial networks (GANs)—machine learning models that can pull patterns out of preexisting datasets—to help them identify sperm whale vowels and vowel combos, called diphthongs, that led to them to dig deeper into whale phonics.

“GANs can discover words and meaningful structure,” Beguš noted in a press statement in November 2025. “We still need human researchers to analyze the details, but they help us look in a specific direction.”

owl writes:

https://bravenewteams.substack.com/p/the-friction-we-forgot

The sales pitch for automating routine work has a pleasing moral clarity. Machines will take the drudgery, humans will do the meaningful bits, and everyone will go home earlier. Few executives wish to defend bureaucracy. Fewer still want to explain why the weekly report exists at all. "Agentic" systems, now able to draft, schedule, reconcile and summarise, promise to do away with the tedious.

The promise rests on a quiet assumption - that routine work is a clean substrate. A set of repeatable steps, stable enough to be lifted from humans and installed in software, like moving from paper invoices to an ERP system. Yet in most organisations "routine" is not the same as "well-defined". It is simply familiar.

Look closely at what passes for routine and one sees something else entirely - a museum of exceptions. The spreadsheet is not tedious because it is trivial; it is tedious because it is doing the job of a broken system. The weekly deck is not a reporting tool; it is an insurance policy against internal misalignment. The procurement workflow is less a sequence of rational gates than a compromise between risk-aversion, politics and habit.

Humans have been hiding this from themselves for decades. They do so by being quietly competent.

In most firms the appearance of smoothness is purchased by people - often the most junior ones - who supply what the process does not. The analyst notices that "active user" changed definition three months ago and silently adjusts the calculation. The paralegal spots a clause that is technically compliant but commercially disastrous and flags it in plain English. The assistant knows that "final" does not mean final and schedules slack into a timeline nobody admits contains slack. The account manager has learned which customer complaint to treat as a siren and which as background noise.

These are not rare flourishes of craftsmanship. They are the operating system.

Original Submission

hubie writes:

Total Solar Eclipse Led to Seismic Quiet for Cities Within its Path:

A seismic hush fell over U.S. and Canadian cities that were in the "path of totality" during the 8 April 2024 total solar eclipse, according to new research presented at the 2026 SSA Annual Meeting.

Johns Hopkins University seismologist and planetary scientist Benjamin Fernando was in an Ohio city when the eclipse occurred "and I noticed that all of a sudden everything went really quiet," he recalled. "So I was curious as to whether that was going to be replicated in the seismic data."

Seismic noise caused by human activity can come from construction and mining activity, crowded concerts or sporting events and the traffic of the daily commute—any activity we produce that causes the ground to shake.

After analyzing seismic noise levels across April 2024 from several hundred seismic stations, Fernando found a clear pattern of urban seismic quiet on the darkened day. First, noise levels peaked slightly before the start of totality began in a city. Noise levels then faded significantly as the sun was completely obscured by the moon. Finally, noise rose again to slightly higher than average levels for the month.

The pattern was only visible in cities, not rural areas, that were directly in the path of totality. The data did not record a hush in cities that were even slightly out of the path of totality, Fernando said. "For example, in New York it was 97% totality, but nothing changed."

The findings suggest that cities in the path of totality experienced the eclipse as a cultural event that was significant enough to disrupt the rhythms of normal life and were also places with enough ground-shaking daily activity to be noticeable when it faded away.

Covid-19 lockdowns in 2020 created one of the most famous cases of global seismic quiet related to human inactivity, dropping anthropogenic seismic noise by 50% between March and May of that year.

The new study could also help dispel the myth that the alignment of the sun, moon and Earth during an eclipse increases seismic activity, Fernando suggested.

"Folks for whatever reason sometimes push the narrative that eclipses cause earthquakes," he said. "That's definitely not the case, and this is another demonstration of that."

Original Submission

c0lo writes:

A Fresh Scar on the Moon: Newly Discovered Crater Reveals Recent Impact:

The Moon is constantly being bombarded by traveling space rocks, its surface recording each collision in the form of craters that never fade in the absence of wind or surface water. Most lunar craters that we know of date back millions, if not billions, of years, making evidence of a recent impact a rare glimpse into a process that is shaping the Moon today.

Scientists identified a new crater on the Moon that formed in the late spring of 2024, revealing the violent aftermath of a recent collision on the lunar surface. Using images taken by NASA's Lunar Reconnoissance Orbiter (LRO), the team behind the discovery analyzed changes before and after the impact to study the rare event.

The findings were presented at the 57th Lunar and Planetary Sciences Meeting in March, and can help scientists better understand how craters form on the Moon and elsewhere in the solar system.

The newly discovered crater measures around 738 feet (225 meters) across the lunar surface. That makes it the largest impact crater to have formed during NASA's LRO 17-year-mission. The previous record holder was a 229 feet wide (70 meters) crater, which was discovered in 2013 by comparing before and after images of the same region on the lunar surface.

This fresh scar on the Moon is more than three times as wide. An impact this scale is extremely rare, taking place once every 139 years, according to the researchers behind the discovery. The crater stretches approximately 140 feet deep (43 meters), and is shaped like a funnel with steep walls. Surrounding it are massive blocks of rock that were ejected from the impact, with the largest one measuring at 42 feet (13 meters).

By observing the images captured by LRO, the team was able to observe the direction of the debris and pinpoint where the impact originated from. The space rock may have arrived from the south-southwest direction, traveling fast enough to puncture through the surface and spray a trail of debris northward.

The team also noticed unusually dark material that resembles glass-like rocks inside the crater, which may have been melted by the heat from the impact before instantly solidifying. The melted rocks are an indication of large amounts of energy released upon impact.

NASA's LRO has been orbiting the Moon for 17 years, mapping the lunar surface in detail to aid future missions. During the duration of its mission, the probe has identified hundreds of newly formed craters on the Moon.

LRO's extensive dataset revealed that the Moon is being hit twice as often as previously thought. In 2014, the probe itself survived an impact from a tiny meteoroid as it was capturing images of the lunar surface.

Prior to this recent discovery, LRO images identified a 72-foot-wide (22-meter-wide) impact crater in November 2025, which may have formed sometime between December 2009 and December 2012.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

https://www.techradar.com/pro/security/europol-launches-operation-poweroff-warns-75-000-ddos-users-and-takes-down-53-domains

Europol announced that together with 21 national law enforcement agencies, it launched Operation PowerOFF which, besides the four arrests, also led to the takedown of 53 domains and the issuing of 25 search warrants.

“By seizing these infrastructures, authorities were able to hinder these criminal operations and prevent further damage to victims,” Europol added.

On the confiscated hardware, the police found information on three million criminal user accounts, which led to a series of coordinated actions across the globe.

In the next stage of the campaign, Europol is warning DDoS-for-hire customers to stop what they’re doing or face the consequences. It apparently said 75,000 warning emails, and placed ads on search engines to target people searching for DDoS-for-hire tools on Google.

More than 100 URLs advertising DDoS-for-hire services were removed from search engine results, and warning messages were sent on blockchains criminals use to make illegal payments.

To launch a distributed denial of service attack, a cybercriminal must have access to hundreds of thousands of internet-connected devices. Those offering these services usually first compromise poorly protected hardware, such as home routers, smart TVs, DVRs, and different smart home appliances, with malware.

This malware gives them the necessary access, which they later streamline by creating a simple dashboard. Then, they rent access to the dashboard, effectively facilitating cybercrime.

Original Submission