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upstart writes:

Black hole analogs are one of our best tools for understanding how they work:

Researchers have created the first laboratory analog of the 'black hole bomb', a theoretical concept developed by physicists in the 1970s.

If there's one thing black holes are known for, it's their insatiable, inescapable gravity. Stuff goes into a black hole. You're not really going to get much out.

From beyond the event horizon, this is, as far as we know, true. But from the space around a black hole, you might be able to get something. As Roger Penrose proposed in 1971, the powerful rotational energy of a spinning black hole could be used to amplify the energy of nearby particles.

Then, physicist Yakov Zel'Dovich figured out that you didn't need a black hole to see this phenomenon in action. An axially symmetrical body rotating in a resonance chamber, he figured, could produce the same energy transfer and amplification, albeit on a much smaller scale.

Later work by other physicists found that, if you enclose the entire apparatus in a mirror, a positive feedback loop is generated, amplifying the energy until it explodes from the system.

This concept was named the black hole bomb, and a team of physicists led by Marion Cromb of the University of Southampton in the UK now claim to have brought it to life. A paper describing their experiment has been uploaded to preprint server arXiv.

It doesn't, just to set your mind at ease, pose any danger. It consists of a rotating aluminum cylinder, placed inside layers of coils that generate magnetic fields that rotate around it, at controllable speeds.

[...] We can't experimentally replicate this gravitational effect; what the team's experiment does is simulate it, using magnetic fields as a proxy for the particles, with the coils around the system acting as the reflector to produce the feedback loop.

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

The Times has seen plans indicating that the British government will soon announce a roadmap for installing solar panels on virtually all newly-built houses. If the legislation passes this year, the requirements might come into force in 2027.

According to experts, the plan will require 80% of new homes to cover 40% of their ground area with solar panels. Another 19% of new builds would have lower requirements due to factors such as roof angle, orientation, and shade. About one percent might be exempt from including panels.

Although the plans would make building new properties up to around £4,000 more expensive, the panels could help families save up to £1,000 on energy bills annually, potentially paying off the extra building costs in four years.

If implemented, the initiative would bring the UK closer to its goal of decarbonizing its electric grid by 2030.

Part of the strategy involves installing up to 47 gigawatts of solar power capacity by the end of this decade. The government is also expected to announce government loans for installing solar panels on existing homes, but building scaffolding and rewiring old buildings for solar is far more expensive than building it into new structures.

Although panels can dramatically reduce (and sometimes erase) energy bills, mass adoption can also throw power grids off balance. In Australia, which has adopted solar energy with remarkable speed over the last two decades, the technology sometimes generates more power than grids can withstand.

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/hackers-abuse-ipv6-networking-feature-to-hijack-software-updates/

A China-aligned APT threat actor named "TheWizards" abuses an IPv6 networking feature to launch adversary-in-the-middle (AitM) attacks that hijack software updates to install Windows malware.

According to ESET, the group has been active since at least 2022, targeting entities in the Philippines, Cambodia, the United Arab Emirates, China, and Hong Kong. Victims include individuals, gambling companies, and other organizations.

The attacks utilize a custom tool dubbed "Spellbinder" by ESET that abuses the IPv6 Stateless Address Autoconfiguration (SLAAC) feature to conduct SLACC attacks.

SLAAC is a feature of the IPv6 networking protocol that allows devices to automatically configure their own IP addresses and default gateway without needing a DHCP server. Instead, it utilizes Router Advertisement (RA) messages to receive IP addresses from IPv6-supported routers.

The hacker's Spellbinder tool abuses this feature by sending spoofed RA messages over the network, causing nearby systems to automatically receive a new IPv6 IP address, new DNS servers, and a new, preferred IPv6 gateway.

This default gateway, though, is the IP address of the Spellbinder tool, which allows it to intercept communications and reroute traffic through attacker-controlled servers.

"Spellbinder sends a multicast RA packet every 200 ms to ff02::1 ("all nodes"); Windows machines in the network with IPv6 enabled will autoconfigure via stateless address autoconfiguration (SLAAC) using information provided in the RA message, and begin sending IPv6 traffic to the machine running Spellbinder, where packets will be intercepted, analyzed, and replied to where applicable," explains ESET.

ESET said attacks deploy Spellbinder using an archive named AVGApplicationFrameHostS.zip, which extracts into a directory mimicking legitimate software: "%PROGRAMFILES%\AVG Technologies."

Within this directory are AVGApplicationFrameHost.exe, wsc.dll, log.dat, and a legitimate copy of winpcap.exe. The WinPcap executable is used to side-load the malicious wsc.dll, which loads Spellbinder into memory.

Once a device is infected, Spellbinder begins capturing and analyzing network traffic attempting to connect specific domains, such as those related to Chinese software update servers.

[...] To protect against these types of attacks, organizations can monitor IPv6 traffic or turn off the protocol if it is not required in their environment.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

A breakthrough in Hilbert's sixth problem is a major step in grounding physics in math:

When the greatest mathematician alive unveils a vision for the next century of research, the math world takes note. That's exactly what happened in 1900 at the International Congress of Mathematicians at Sorbonne University in Paris. Legendary mathematician David Hilbert presented 10 unsolved problems as ambitious guideposts for the 20th century. He later expanded his list to include 23 problems, and their influence on mathematical thought over the past 125 years cannot be overstated.

Hilbert's sixth problem was one of the loftiest. He called for "axiomatizing" physics, or determining the bare minimum of mathematical assumptions behind all its theories. Broadly construed, it's not clear that mathematical physicists could ever know if they had resolved this challenge. Hilbert mentioned some specific subgoals, however, and researchers have since refined his vision into concrete steps toward its solution.

In March mathematicians Yu Deng of the University of Chicago and Zaher Hani and Xiao Ma of the University of Michigan posted a new paper to the preprint server arXiv.org that claims to have cracked one of these goals. If their work withstands scrutiny, it will mark a major stride toward grounding physics in math and may open the door to analogous breakthroughs in other areas of physics.

In the paper, the researchers suggest they have figured out how to unify three physical theories that explain the motion of fluids. These theories govern a range of engineering applications from aircraft design to weather prediction — but until now, they rested on assumptions that hadn't been rigorously proven. This breakthrough won't change the theories themselves, but it mathematically justifies them and strengthens our confidence that the equations work in the way we think they do.

Each theory differs in how much it zooms in on a flowing liquid or gas. At the microscopic level, fluids are composed of particles — little billiard balls bopping around and occasionally colliding — and Newton's laws of motion work well to describe their trajectories.

But when you zoom out to consider the collective behavior of vast numbers of particles, the so-called mesoscopic level, it's no longer convenient to model each one individually. In 1872 Austrian theoretical physicist Ludwig Boltzmann addressed this when he developed what became known as the Boltzmann equation. Instead of tracking the behavior of every particle, the equation considers the likely behavior of a typical particle. This statistical perspective smooths over the low-level details in favor of higher-level trends. The equation allows physicists to calculate how quantities such as momentum and thermal conductivity in the fluid evolve without painstakingly considering every microscopic collision.

Zoom out further, and you find yourself in the macroscopic world. Here we view fluids not as a collection of discrete particles but as a single continuous substance. At this level of analysis, a different suite of equations — the Euler and Navier-Stokes equations — accurately describe how fluids move and how their physical properties interrelate without recourse to particles at all.

upstart writes:

Seven gas turbines planned to juice datacenter demand by 2027:

Developers on Wednesday announced plans to bring up to 4.5 gigawatts of natural gas-fired power online by 2027 at the site of what was once Pennsylvania's largest coal plant, as part of a proposed datacenter campus running AI and high-performance computing workloads.

Development of the 3,200-acre natural gas-powered datacenter campus is being led by Homer City Redevelopment (HCR) and is expected to exceed $10 billion for power infrastructure and site readiness alone, with additional billions anticipated for the datacenter development.

As we understand it, the plant and server campus will be next to each other, as depicted in this video. The power station site will need rebuilding not only to turn it into a gas-fired system but also because it's pretty much demolished, save for electrical infrastructure such as transmission lines that can be reused.

HCR has yet to disclose a tenant for what's hoped to be a massive datacenter complex, with its emphasis for now largely on building out the energy infrastructure and datacenter shell in anticipation of future demand.

The project's backers, including Knighthead Capital Management, appear confident that demand will follow, with the campus designed to deliver up to 4.5 gigawatts of power to run AI and hyperscale workloads.

[...] Until that happens, the site won't exactly be a bright spot on hyperscalers' annual sustainability reports, though HCR claims the gas turbines will cut greenhouse gas emissions by 60-65 percent per megawatt-hour compared to the plant's retired coal units.

Kiewit Power Constructors is expected to begin work on the facility later this year with the first generators installed in 2026; the site is expected to start generating power by 2027 — just in time for Nvidia's 600 kilowatt Kyber racks to make their debut.

Original Submission

DECbot writes:

As first seen in @Day of the Dalek's journal, and suggested to be posted as a Meta story on the Main page by @quietus, here is a call for volunteers:

You've probably seen janrinok's resignation from the staff by now. As he was responsible for large portions of the site's day to day operation, this obviously leaves a big hole to fill. It's unlikely that any one person can step up to take on janrinok's duties. It will certainly require a community effort, probably from many people.

The future of SN isn't really determined by the board or the staff. For better or for worse, the community is really in control. Despite my obvious frustration with some things, I absolutely prefer the "for better" half of that choice.

I emailed admin@soylentnews.org Friday night to discuss the possibility of becoming a staff member, and what my role might be given my time constraints. The three roles suggested to me were: 1) editing an average of 1-2 stories a week, 2) facilitating policy discussions and drafting policy documents, and 3) writing occasional original content for SN such as editorials. These all seem reasonable to me. I've specifically requested that I not be given admin privileges, not now or in the future, only the minimum level of access needed to carry out my specific duties.

Like I said, I don't think any one person is likely to be able to assume janrinok's responsibilities. I cannot. This will work best if many members of the community volunteer a small amount of their time to help. I believe the site will be better off in the long term if responsibilities are distributed among many people instead of having a single person responsible for a large portion of SN's operations.

A user in one of my previous journals asked me to lead by example. I'm doing that, and discussions are already underway with the staff. But this will work best if others join me in volunteering to help a bit.

Who's in?

Original Submission

owl writes:

https://www.atariarchive.org/blog/adventure-march-1980/

Of all the original games Atari put out for the VCS, Adventure may be the one that most people are familiar with today. Warren Robinett's third and final VCS game – though seemingly the second to actually be released – serves as a counterweight to the arcade action of its March 1980 brethren Space Invaders by providing a nearly unique experience on a home console in its day.

[...] Since the VCS isn't designed for full text adventure gameplay, Robinett worked on translating Colossal Cave Adventure's core idea to a graphical interface using the limited capabilities of the system. The VCS's "ball" sprite became the player character.The two high resolution sprites typically used for player objects became the objects located throughout the world, and the system's low-resolution background graphics would be used for screen room designs.

[...] The duck-like dragons themselves deserve a special mention as being one of the first examples of computer opponents exhibiting unique personality traits and goals. Yorgle, the yellow dragon, primarily guards the chalice, but will wander the game world hunting you or assisting his dragon pals provided the golden key is not nearby, as he's terrified of it. Grundle, the green dragon, guards three vital objects: the magnet, the bridge and the black key, and as such will generally stick around wherever one of those is currently located.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Kosmos 482, weighing 500kg, was meant to land on Venus in the 1970s but it never made it out of orbit because of a rocket malfunction:

A Soviet-era spacecraft meant to land on Venus in the 1970s is expected to soon plunge uncontrolled back to Earth.

It's too early to know where the half-ton mass of metal might come down or how much of it will survive re-entry, according to space debris-tracking experts.

Dutch scientist Marco Langbroek predicts the failed spacecraft will re-enter about 10 May. He estimates it will come crashing in at 150mph (242km/h), if it remains intact.

"While not without risk, we should not be too worried," Langbroek said in an email.

[...] Most of it came tumbling down within a decade. But Langbroek and others believe the landing capsule itself — a spherical object about 3ft (1 metre) in diameter — has been circling the world in a highly elliptical orbit for the past 53 years, gradually dropping in altitude.

It's quite possible that the 1,000lb-plus (nearly 500kg) spacecraft will survive re-entry. It was built to withstand a descent through the carbon dioxide-thick atmosphere of Venus, said Langbroek of Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands.

Experts doubt the parachute system would work after so many years. The heat shield may also be compromised after so long in orbit.

It would be better if the heat shield fails, which would cause the spacecraft to burn up during its dive through the atmosphere, Jonathan McDowell at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics said in an email. But if the heat shield holds, "it'll re-enter intact and you have a half-ton metal object falling from the sky".

The spacecraft could re-enter anywhere between 51.7 degrees north and south latitude, or as far north as London and Edmonton in Alberta, Canada, almost all the way down to South America's Cape Horn. But since most of the planet is water, "chances are good it will indeed end up in some ocean", Langbroek said.

In 2022, a Chinese booster rocket made an uncontrolled return to Earth and in 2018 the Tiangong-1 space station re-entered the Earth's atmosphere over the south Pacific after an uncontrolled re-entry.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Backstage access: Spotify's dev tools side-hustle is growing legs:

Spotify generates the vast bulk of its income from ads and subscriptions, but for the past few years the music-streaming giant has also been quietly building out a developer tooling business. Backstage, a project it open-sourced in 2020, has been adopted by more than 2 million developers across 3,400 organizations, including Airbnb, LinkedIn, Twilio, and American Airlines.

Backstage helps companies build customized "internal developer portals" (IDPs), bringing order to their infrastructure chaos by combining all their tooling, apps, data, services, APIs, and documents in a single interface.

Want to monitor Kubernetes, view cloud costs, or check your CI/CD status? Enter Backstage.

The Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), which accepted Backstage as an incubating project in 2022, reports that Backstage was one of its top 5 projects last year in terms of velocity and activity. And it's this momentum that is leading Spotify to double down, with various premium tools and services on the horizon.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Microsoft Finally Launches Its Controversial Recall Feature:

After a long delay over security concerns, Microsoft is ready to bring its controversial Recall feature out of beta. It arrives exclusively on Copilot+ Windows 11 PCs as part of a feature update rolling out today.

Recall is designed to help users conveniently pull up old folders, emails, or browser tabs that they've closed or misplaced. However, after its introduction last year, Recall drew comparisons to spyware since it takes and archives screenshots of your PC activity. In the wrong hands, this could be used to surveil users, making it a potent target for malware and even governments.

These privacy and security worries caused Microsoft to delay Recall and develop various safeguards to prevent such abuse. It offered Recall as a beta feature to Windows 11 Insiders, and gathered feedback from actual users before today's mainstream release.

[...] Another concern facing Recall is its potential to save any passwords or sensitive personal information that pops up on your computer. In response, Weston says Microsoft has been introducing "application filters" that promise to detect data, such as Social Security numbers, and stop capturing them from within the screenshots. "We have an initial set of filters that we're committed to continuing to update all the time to get better," he says.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

Diallo says he made a 1MB file that decompresses into 1GB to disable bots trying to break into his system. He also has a 10MB-to-10GB compressed file for bots with more resources, ensuring that their memory is overwhelmed by this massive archive.

This is how this defensive bombing system works: when Diallo detects an offending bot, his server returns a 200 OK response and then serves up the zip bomb. The file’s metadata tells the bot that it’s a compressed file, so it will then open it in an attempt to scrape as much information as possible. However, since the file is at least 1GB when unpacked, it will overwhelm the memory of most simple — and even some advanced — bots. If he faces a more advanced scraper with a few gigabytes of memory, he’ll feed it the 10GB zip bomb, which will most likely crash it.

If you want to try this system for yourself, Diallo outlines how you can create your own bot-targeting zip bomb on his blog. He notes that you should be careful when doing that, though, as you can potentially self-detonate (i.e., accidentally open the zip bomb), and crash your own server. They’re also not 100% effective, as there are ways to detect zip and disregard zip bombs. But for most simple bots, this should be more than enough to cause its server to freeze and take it out — at least until its system is restarted.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Plastic-eating mealworms native to Africa discovered:

Scientists may have discovered an unlikely ally in the fight against plastic waste: the lesser mealworm. Native to Africa but now widespread across the planet, a beetle larvae from the Alphitobius genus can consume and degrade plastic, the researchers found.

The finding could be particularly useful in combating plastic pollution in Africa, the researchers noted. The continent is the second-most plastic-polluted continent in the world, despite producing only 5% of the world's plastic pollution, according to the World Health Organization.

In the study, published Sept. 12 in the journal Scientific Reports, researchers found that the lesser mealworms can digest polystyrene, a type of plastic commonly found in Styrofoam food containers and packaging. The team isn't sure of the species yet, and think it may be a new subspecies that needs to be identified.

This finding follows similar results with other mealworm species worldwide. "However, this is the first time that the lesser mealworms, which are native to Africa, have been documented to have this capacity," study author Fathiya Khamis, a scientist at the International Centre of Insect Physiology and Ecology (ICIPE) in Kenya, said in a statement.

Journal Reference:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1021/acs.est.9b06501

See also:

• Mitogenomic profiling and gut microbial analysis of the newly identified polystyrene-consuming lesser mealworm in Kenya

Original Submission

upstart writes:

The final farewell for LG's phone business:

Time is running out for people who are still using LG phones to download any remaining Android updates before their devices are fully retired. After closing its Android phone business back in 2021, Android Authority has spotted that LG is now preparing to shut down its update servers for good on June 30th, 2025, advising customers that software updates will be completely inaccessible after this date.

The end-of-service announcement was expected — when LG exited the smartphone industry, it promised existing customers that Velvet, Wing, and G- and V- series phones from 2019 or later would receive three years of Android updates from their year of release.

That means only security patches and upgrades to Android 12 or Android 13 are available, depending on the devices, but LG has left its update servers active for longer than the deadline it promised. Functioning LG phones should still work after the servers are shut down, but this serves as a final death knell, as they'll be unable to receive any future improvements or security fixes.

The LG Bridge PC software is also shutting down at the end of June, which is used to transfer files and contacts from LG phones, alongside support for updates, backups, and device restoration.

Perhaps if one is lucky, one can try an alternative OS for their LG phones.

Grab your official updates: Software, Firmware & Driver Downloads

Original Submission

upstart writes:

China may have achieved a "Sputnik moment" in the clean energy technology race by successfully reloading a nuclear reactor that runs on thorium:

According to Chinese state media, a group of scientists recently managed to refuel a working thorium molten salt reactor without causing a shutdown — a feat never achieved before. The success was announced by the project's chief scientist Xu Hongjie during a closed-door meeting at the Chinese Academy of Sciences on April 8, Chinese news outlet Guangming Daily reported last week.

Such a breakthrough could be transformative to the global energy landscape, as thorium has long been hailed as a far safer and cheaper alternative to uranium in nuclear reactors. While also a radioactive element, thorium produces less waste, and the silver-colored metal, mostly found in monazite, is much more common in the Earth's crust.

According to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), thorium is three times more abundant in nature than uranium, but historically has found little use in power generation due to the significant economic and technical hurdles.

[...] Compared to uranium, thorium can generate a significantly higher amount of energy via nuclear fission. A Stanford University research estimates that thorium's power generation could be 35 times higher. Thorium molten-salt reactors (TMSRs) are also compact, do not require water cooling, cannot experience a meltdown and produce very little long-lived radioactive waste, according to the IAEA.

When announcing the breakthrough, Xu acknowledged that its project was based on previous research by US researchers who pioneered molten salt reactor technology in the 1950s, but abandoned shortly after to pursue uranium-fueled ones.

Xu — who was tasked with the thorium reactor project in 2009 — told Chinese media that his team spent years dissecting declassified American documents, replicating experiments and innovating beyond them.

owl writes:

https://www.righto.com/2025/05/intel-386-register-circuitry.html

The groundbreaking Intel 386 processor (1985) was the first 32-bit processor in the x86 architecture. Like most processors, the 386 contains numerous registers; registers are a key part of a processor because they provide storage that is much faster than main memory. The register set of the 386 includes general-purpose registers, index registers, and segment selectors, as well as registers with special functions for memory management and operating system implementation. In this blog post, I look at the silicon die of the 386 and explain how the processor implements its main registers.

It turns out that the circuitry that implements the 386's registers is much more complicated than one would expect. For the 30 registers that I examine, instead of using a standard circuit, the 386 uses six different circuits, each one optimized for the particular characteristics of the register. For some registers, Intel squeezes register cells together to double the storage capacity. Other registers support accesses of 8, 16, or 32 bits at a time. Much of the register file is "triple-ported", allowing two registers to be read simultaneously while a value is written to a third register. Finally, I was surprised to find that registers don't store bits in order: the lower 16 bits of each register are interleaved, while the upper 16 bits are stored linearly.

Original Submission