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Mozilla fixes Firefox zero-days exploited at hacking contest

An Anonymous Coward writes:

https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/mozilla-fixes-firefox-zero-days-exploited-at-hacking-contest/

By Bill Toulas == May 19, 2025

Mozilla released emergency security updates to address two Firefox zero-day vulnerabilities demonstrated in the recent Pwn2Own Berlin 2025 hacking competition.

The fixes, which include the Firefox on Desktop and Android and two Extended Support Releases (ESR), came mere hours after the conclusion of Pwn2Own, on Saturday, where the second vulnerability was demonstrated.

The first flaw, tracked under CVE-2025-4918, is an out-of-bounds read/write issue in the JavaScript engine when resolving Promise objects.

The flaw was demonstrated during Day 2 of the competition by Palo Alto Networks security researchers Edouard Bochin and Tao Yan, who earned $50,000 for their discovery.

The second flaw, CVE-2025-4919, allows attackers to perform out-of-bounds reads/writes on a JavaScript object by confusing array index sizes.

It was discovered by security researcher Manfred Paul, who gained unauthorized access within the program's renderer, winning $50,000 in the process.

Although the flaws constitute significant risks for Firefox, with Mozilla rating them "critical" in its bulletins, the software vendor underlined that neither researchers could perform a sandbox escape, citing targeted strengthening on that front.

"Unlike prior years, neither participating group was able to escape our sandbox this year," explained Firefox in the announcement.

"We have verbal confirmation that this is attributed to the recent architectural improvements to our Firefox sandbox which have neutered a wide range of such attacks."

Although there are no indications that the two flaws have been exploited outside of Pwn2Own, their public demonstration could fuel real attacks soon.

To mitigate this risk, Mozilla engaged a diverse "task force" from across the globe that worked feverishly to develop fixes for the demonstrated exploits, test them, and push out security updates as soon as possible.

Firefox users are recommended to upgrade to version 138.0.4, ESR 128.10.1, or ESR 115.23.1.

Pwn2Own Berlin 2025 concluded on Saturday with over a million USD in payouts and the STAR Labs SG team winning the 'Master or Pwn' title.

Two Firefox zero-days were also demonstrated last year at Pwn2Own Vancouver 2024, with Mozilla fixing them the next day.

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

In the hours just before dawn, NASA's Perseverance rover adjusted its gaze toward the heavens and saw a brilliant point of light. 

That bright sparkle wasn't a morning star beaming from distant space, but something more mysterious — Mars' shiest moon, Deimos. The rover used one of its navigation cameras at a long-exposure setting to capture the new image. 

"It's definitely a mood [sic moon?]," NASA said of the rare photo in a post on X. 

Mars has two moons, Phobos and Deimos, but scientists know relatively little about them — especially Deimos, the smallest of the two. Both moons are "blacker than coal and look like battered potatoes," according to the European Space Agency, which has studied the pair with its Mars Express spacecraft.  

Right now researchers aren't sure where the moons came from, and it remains a source of scientific debate. Some believe they could have been asteroids captured in orbit around the Red Planet. Others think they could be chunks of Mars itself, blown out by a giant collision billions of years ago. 

Nearly all of the images of Deimos, a city-sized moon at roughly 7.5 miles wide, have been taken just like this new one, from the Martian surface by rovers. Because the moon is tidally locked — meaning one full spin matches the amount of time it takes to complete its orbit of Mars — only one of its sides has been seen on the Red Planet. 

NASA's Perseverance rover was on its way to a new exploration site on the rim of Jezero crater, dubbed Witch Hazel Hill, when it conducted the Deimos photoshoot. Though Perseverance took the image on March 1, NASA just released it to the public. 

Because the rover took the image in the dark with an almost one-minute exposure time, the scene appears hazy. Many of the white dots in the sky likely aren't distant stars but digital noise. Some others could be cosmic rays, space particles traveling close to the speed of light, according to NASA. Two of the brighter specks are Regulus and Algieba, stars about 78 and 130 light-years away from the solar system respectively, in the constellation Leo. 

Though little is known about Deimos, another European spacecraft recently captured unprecedented views of the moon's far side. The Hera mission, which will study the asteroid NASA intentionally crashed into three years ago, flew by the Red Planet on March 12, just 11 days after the rover looked up. 

Hera's flyby wasn't a detour but a necessary maneuver to put the spacecraft on the right trajectory toward its ultimate asteroid destination. Swinging within 625 miles of Deimos, Hera used Martian gravity to adjust its course. 

Queen cofounder Brian May, who is an astrophysicist when he isn't playing guitar, is among the team that processed the Deimos images. 

"You feel like you're there, and you see the whole scene in front of you," he said during a news conference in March. "The science that we get from this is colossal, and I think we're all like children."

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slon writes:

https://phys.org/news/2025-05-powerful-laser.html

The ZEUS laser facility at the University of Michigan has roughly doubled the peak power of any other laser in the U.S. with its first official experiment at 2 petawatts (2 quadrillion watts).

At more than 100 times the global electricity power output, this huge power lasts only for the brief duration of its laser pulse—just 25 quintillionths of a second long.

"This milestone marks the beginning of experiments that move into unexplored territory for American high field science," said Karl Krushelnick, director of the Gérard Mourou Center for Ultrafast Optical Science, which houses ZEUS.

Research at ZEUS will have applications in medicine, national security, materials science and astrophysics, in addition to plasma science and quantum physics. ZEUS is a user facility—meaning that research teams from all over the country and internationally can submit experiment proposals that go through an independent selection process.

"One of the great things about ZEUS is it's not just one big laser hammer, but you can split the light into multiple beams," said Franklin Dollar, professor of physics and astronomy at the University of California, Irvine, whose team is running the first user experiment at 2 petawatts.

"Having a national resource like this, which awards time to users whose experimental concepts are most promising for advancing scientific priorities, is really bringing high-intensity laser science back to the U.S."

Dollar's team and the ZEUS team aim to produce electron beams with energies equivalent to those made in particle accelerators that are hundreds of meters in length. This would be 5–10 times higher energy than any electron beams previously produced at the ZEUS facility.

"We aim to reach higher electron energies using two separate laser beams—one to form a guiding channel and the other to accelerate electrons through it," said Anatoly Maksimchuk, U-M research scientist in electrical and computer engineering, who leads the development of the experimental areas.

They hope to do this in part with a redesigned target. They lengthened the cell that holds the gas that the laser pulse rams into, helium in this experiment. This interaction produces plasma, ripping electrons off the atoms so that the gas becomes a soup of free electrons and positively charged ions. Those electrons get accelerated behind the laser pulse-like wakesurfers close behind a speedboat—a phenomenon called wakefield acceleration.

Light moves slower through plasma, enabling the electrons to catch up to it. In a less dense, longer target, the electrons spend more time accelerating before they catch up to the laser pulse, enabling them to hit higher top speeds.

This demonstration of ZEUS's power paves the way for the signature experiment, expected later this year, when the accelerated electrons will collide with laser pulses coming the opposite way. In the moving frame of the electrons, the 3-petawatt laser pulse will seem to be a million times more powerful—a zettawatt-scale pulse. This gives ZEUS its full name of "Zettawatt Equivalent Ultrashort laser pulse System."

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

Since early 2023, facial recognition cameras run by a private nonprofit have scanned New Orleans visitors and residents and quietly alerted police, sidestepping oversight and potentially violating city law, according to a new report.

In 2022, the Big Easy's city government relaxed its ban on the use of facial recognition technology. It could be used to investigate violent crimes, but had to be checked by a human operator before action was taken.

But an investigation published Monday by the Washington Post found that within a year, police were quietly receiving continuous real-time facial recognition alerts from a privately operated camera network. These alerts came from cameras managed by nonprofit Project NOLA, which runs a sprawling, privately funded surveillance network across the city, the report says.

Project NOLA claims access to more than 5,000 camera feeds in the New Orleans area, with over 200 equipped for facial recognition. The system compares faces against a privately compiled database of more than 30,000 individuals, assembled partly from police mugshots. When a match is detected, officers receive a mobile phone alert with the person's identity and location, according to the report.

The police were required to notify the city council each time they used facial recognition technology in an investigation or arrest, but reportedly failed to do so. In multiple cases, police reports omitted any mention of the technology, raising concerns that defendants were denied the opportunity to challenge the role facial recognition played in their arrest.

By adopting this system – in secret, without safeguards, and at tremendous threat to our privacy and security – the City of New Orleans has crossed a thick red line

As scrutiny mounted, the police department distanced itself from the operation, saying in a carefully worded statement that it "does not own, rely on, manage, or condone the use by members of the department of any artificial intelligence systems associated with the vast network of Project NOLA crime cameras."

"Until now, no American police department has been willing to risk the massive public blowback from using such a brazen face recognition surveillance system," said Nathan Freed Wessler, deputy director of ACLU’s Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project, in a press release.

"By adopting this system – in secret, without safeguards, and at tremendous threat to our privacy and security – the City of New Orleans has crossed a thick red line. This is the stuff of authoritarian surveillance states, and has no place in American policing."

slon writes:

Science X reports that UK farmers are praying for rain as Britain suffers its driest spring in well over a century, which has left the soil parched and crops stunted from lack of water. Not a drop of rain has fallen since March.

"I'm not quite sure how I'm going to handle it on the farm, I'm hoping that we're going to get some rain, if not then I'll have to somehow magically do something," Abblitt, 36, told AFP.

The tiny green shoots of the sugar beets poking through the cracked, dusty earth "should be at least twice the size," he sighed. In a neighboring field he has just planted potatoes with the help of his father, Clive, toiling to break up the baked soil.

A total of 80.6 millimeters (3.1 inches) of rain has fallen since the start of spring, which covers the months of March, April and May, according to the national weather agency. That is well below the all-time low of 100.7 millimeters which fell in 1852, according to the Met Office.

"This spring has so far been the driest for more than a century," the Met Office told AFP, cautioning that it would be necessary to wait until the end of May to confirm the record.

According to the Environment Agency, levels in the reservoirs have fallen to "exceptionally low".

It called a meeting of its national drought group last week, at which deputy director of water Richard Thompson said climate change meant "we will see more summer droughts in the coming decades".

The dry start to the year meant water companies were "moving water across their regions to relieve the driest areas", a spokesperson for Water UK, the industry body representing water suppliers, told AFP.

Memories linger in Britain of July 2022 when temperatures topped 40 degrees (104 Fahrenheit) for the first time.

Tech Review is re-running this story from 2019 with a new introduction,
https://www.technologyreview.com/2025/05/19/1116614/hao-empire-ai-openai
It was written by probably the first journalist to get inside the secretive company for a few days of interviews. It didn't go well...

In 2019, Karen Hao, a senior reporter with MIT Technology Review, pitched me on writing a story about a then little-known company, OpenAI. It was her biggest assignment to date. Hao's feat of reporting took a series of twists and turns over the coming months, eventually revealing how OpenAI's ambition had taken it far afield from its original mission. The finished story was a prescient look at a company at a tipping point—or already past it. And OpenAI was not happy with the result. Hao's new book, Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman's OpenAI, is an in-depth exploration of the company that kick-started the AI arms race, and what that race means for all of us. This excerpt is the origin story of that reporting. — Niall Firth, executive editor, MIT Technology Review
[...]
In February 2020, I published my profile for MIT Technology Review, drawing on my observations from my time in the office, nearly three dozen interviews, and a handful of internal documents. "There is a misalignment between what the company publicly espouses and how it operates behind closed doors," I wrote. "Over time, it has allowed a fierce competitiveness and mounting pressure for ever more funding to erode its founding ideals of transparency, openness, and collaboration."
[...]
From the book Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman's OpenAI, by Karen Hao, to be published on May 20, 2025, by Penguin Press,...

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Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

The Supersonic Aviation Modernization Act would allow America's aviation watchdog to issue licenses allowing flights over land "at a Mach number greater than one so long as the aircraft is operated in such a manner that no sonic boom reaches the ground in the United States," the legislation states [PDF].

[...] The bill was introduced to the Senate by Senators Ted Budd (R-NC), Thom Tillis (R-NC), Mike Lee (R-UT), and Tim Sheehy (R-MT); and to the House of Representatives by Troy Nehls (R-TX), and Representative Sharice Davids (D-KS). If successful, it'll give the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) a year to comply and allow the next generation of supersonic commercial aircraft into American skies once again.

The backing of Budd and Tillis for the legislation is understandable. Boom Supersonic, which is building an 80-person commercial supersonic passenger jet, chose the US state the two senators represent, North Carolina, to build the Overture Superfactory it'll use to manufacture the aircraft. In January, Boom's single-seat XB-1 test aircraft, piloted by Tristan "Geppetto" Brandenburg, broke the sound barrier six times without a noticeable sonic boom. Boom boasts a number of big-name VCs and tech luminaries as funders, including AI poster child Sam Altman and LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman.

NASA, too, has skin in the game, as it has been funding research into quiet supersonic flight for decades and last year fired up the engines on its X-59 supersonic test vehicle. The Register spoke to the pilot James "Clue" Less at the time, and he said the technology works and that the agency expects the first full flight later this year.

"The race for supersonic dominance between the US and China is already underway and the stakes couldn't be higher," said Senator Budd in a canned statement.

[...] The history of sonic booms over the continental US is contentious, mired in technology, politics, and the immense forces involved in supersonic flight.

[...] The FAA held tests of what sonic booms would do to Americans and their environment. In 1961 and 1964, the citizens of St Louis and Oklahoma City were deliberately subjected to repeated sonic booms in Operations Bongo and Bongo II. In the latter case, the test was originally scheduled to have aircraft generate eight sonic booms a day overhead for six months, but this was cut to four months after windows were broken and residents complained.

"Microsoft Copilot" writes:

Ars Technica reports that the Chicago Sun-Times printed a summer reading list full of fake books recently published a summer reading list that included several fake book titles attributed to real authors. The list, created by Marco Buscaglia using AI, featured titles like "Tidewater Dreams" by Isabel Allende and "The Last Algorithm" by Andy Weir, which do not exist. Buscaglia admitted to using AI for the list and expressed embarrassment for not verifying the content. Only five out of the fifteen recommended books were real, highlighting the issue of AI-generated errors.

The newspaper addressed the controversy, stating that the list was part of a promotional supplement and not approved by the newsroom. The supplement, called "Heat Index," was intended to be generic and distributed nationally. This incident occurred shortly after the Sun-Times experienced significant staff reductions, losing 20% of its employees through a buyout program. The staff cuts included experienced columnists and editors, which may have contributed to the oversight.

The reaction to the fake reading list has been mostly negative, with some readers expressing anger and disappointment. Novelist Rachael King and freelance journalist Joshua J. Friedman were among those who criticized the use of AI-generated content. The incident has sparked a broader conversation about the reliability of AI in journalism and the importance of human oversight in maintaining trust in media.

Other sources covering the story:

The Guardian

Axios

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Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

In a significant escalation of its campaign against illegal streaming, Italy has begun issuing fines to thousands of individuals who subscribed to pirate IPTV services. This move follows a recent memorandum of understanding among the Prosecutor's Office, the Guardia di Finanza (a military police force in Italy), and the country's communications regulator AGCOM, which established a framework for sharing information on users of unauthorized streaming platforms.

While the precise origin of the subscriber data remains undisclosed, it is believed to have been gathered during frequent law enforcement raids targeting illicit IPTV operations. These raids have yielded databases containing emails and other identifying information, enabling authorities to target end-users directly for the first time.

The crackdown is rooted in Law 93/2023, anti-piracy legislation passed last year that allows for fines of up to €5,000 ($5,581) for repeat offenders. The law also introduced the Piracy Shield, a system enabling rapid ISP blocking of unauthorized streams.

After the legislation passed, authorities wasted no time making it clear that the era of impunity for IPTV pirates was over. That warning has now materialized into action. At a recent press conference, the Guardia di Finanza revealed that 2,282 individuals across Italy have been fined for their involvement with pirate IPTV services. Initial penalties start at €154 ($172), but officials have stressed that repeat violations could dramatically increase fines, reaching the €5,000 maximum.

This marks the first time the new law has been enforced against consumers, not just the operators of illegal services. The current wave of fines is reportedly linked to an operation in Lecce last October, where a major IPTV network was dismantled and subscriber information seized.

Authorities have indicated that this is only the beginning, with ongoing investigations in several regions aimed at identifying further offenders. Three additional prosecutors' offices have already launched their inquiries, signaling a sustained national effort.

liar writes:

https://techcrunch.com/2025/05/17/laser-powered-fusion-experiment-more-than-doubles-its-power-output/

Tim De Chant
12:02 PM PDT · May 17, 2025

The world's only net-positive fusion experiment has been steadily ramping up the amount of power it produces, TechCrunch has learned.

In recent attempts, the team at the U.S. Department of Energy's National Ignition Facility (NIF) increased the yield of the experiment, first to 5.2 megajoules and then to 8.6 megajoules, according to a source with knowledge of the experiment.

The new results are significant improvements over the historic experiment in 2022, which was the first controlled fusion reaction to generate more energy than it consumed.

The 2022 shot generated 3.15 megajoules, a small bump over the 2.05 megajoules that the lasers delivered to the BB-sized fuel pellet.
...

[...] The NIF uses what's known as inertial confinement to produce fusion reactions. At the facility, fusion fuel is coated in diamond and then encased in a small gold cylinder called a hohlraum. That tiny pellet is dropped into a spherical vacuum chamber 10 meters in diameter, where 192 powerful laser beams converge on the target.

The cylinder is vaporized under the onslaught, emitting X-rays in the process that bombard the fuel pellet inside. The pellet's diamond coating receives so much energy that it turns into an expanding plasma, which compresses the deuterium-tritium fuel inside to the point where their nuclei fuse, releasing energy in the process.

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Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

Imagine an inverse Black Hat conference, an Alcoholics Anonymous for CISOs, where everyone commits to frank disclosure and debate on the underlying structural causes of persistently failing cybersecurity syndrome

It's been a devastating few weeks for UK retail giants. Marks and Spencer, the Co-Op, and now uber-posh Harrods have had massive disruptions due to ransomware attacks taking systems down for prolonged periods.

If the goods these people sold were one-tenth as shoddy as their corporate cybersecurity, they'd have been out of business years ago. It's a wake-up call, says the UK's National Center for Stating the Obvious. And what will happen? The industry will just press the snooze button again, as we hear reports that other retailers are "patching like crazy."

The bare fact that entire sectors remain exquisitely vulnerable to what is, by now, a very familiar form of attack is a diagnostic of systematic failure in the way such sectors are run. There are few details of what exactly happened, but it's not the details that matter, it's the fact that so little was made public.

We see only silence, deflection, and grudging admission as the undeniable effects multiply - which is a very familiar pattern. The only surprise is that there is no surprise. This isn't part of the problem, it is the problem. Like alcoholics, organizations cannot get better until they admit, confront, and work with others to mitigate the compulsions that bring them low. The raw facts are not in doubt; it's the barriers to admitting and drawing out their sting that perpetuate the problem.

We know this because there is so much evidence of corporate IT's fundamental flaws. If you have been in the business for a few years, you'll already know what they are – just as surely as you'll have despaired of progress. If you are joyfully innocent newbie, then look at the British Library's report into its own 2023 ransomware catastrophe. It took many core systems down, some of them forever, while leaking huge amounts of data that belonged to staff and customers. As a major public institution established by law, and one devoted to knowledge as a social good, the British Library wasn't just free to be frank about what happened, it had a moral obligation to do so.

upstart writes:

Astronomers have found a planet that orbits at an angle of 90 degrees around a rare pair of peculiar stars:

Several planets orbiting two stars at once, like the fictional Star Wars world Tatooine, have been discovered in the past years. These planets typically occupy orbits that roughly align with the plane in which their host stars orbit each other. There have previously been hints that planets on perpendicular, or polar, orbits around binary stars could exist: in theory, these orbits are stable, and planet-forming discs on polar orbits around stellar pairs have been detected. However, until now, we lacked clear evidence that these polar planets do exist.

"I am particularly excited to be involved in detecting credible evidence that this configuration exists," says Thomas Baycroft, a PhD student at the University of Birmingham, UK, who led the study published today in Science Advances.

The unprecedented exoplanet, named 2M1510 (AB) b, orbits a pair of young brown dwarfs — objects bigger than gas-giant planets but too small to be proper stars. The two brown dwarfs produce eclipses of one another as seen from Earth, making them part of what astronomers call an eclipsing binary. This system is incredibly rare: it is only the second pair of eclipsing brown dwarfs known to date, and it contains the first exoplanet ever found on a path at right angles to the orbit of its two host stars.

"A planet orbiting not just a binary, but a binary brown dwarf, as well as being on a polar orbit is rather incredible and exciting," says co-author Amaury Triaud, a professor at the University of Birmingham.

The team found this planet while refining the orbital and physical parameters of the two brown dwarfs by collecting observations with the Ultraviolet and Visual Echelle Spectrograph (UVES) instrument on ESO's VLT at Paranal Observatory, Chile. The pair of brown dwarfs, known as 2M1510, were first detected in 2018 by Triaud and others with the Search for habitable Planets EClipsing ULtra-cOOl Stars (SPECULOOS), another Paranal facility.

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

Tech buyers should purchase refurbished devices to push vendors to make hardware more repairable and help the shift to a more circular economy, according to a senior analyst at IDC.

Presenting a TED talk, vice president of devices for EMEA Francisco Jeronimo said that in 2022 there were 62 million tons of electronic waste generated while the average e-waste per person amounted to 11.2 kg annually.

While governments and manufacturers should press for more ethical sourcing and better recycling practices in consumer tech, buyers are not entirely powerless.

"When we look into all this waste, we know there's a problem, but we don't look into what we are doing to fix it," he said. "We blame governments, we blame corporations, we blame the brands. Because at the end of the day, how can I make my smartphone more sustainable? I can't. It needs to be the brand [and] governments [that] are bringing legislation to force the brands, but we have a superpower."

The buyer's superpower comes in the form of extending the life of devices we own, and choosing to buy secondhand refurbished devices when we need new ones, he said.

"Circularity is the answer. We need to decide whether we're going to keep buying new devices or take action to extend the life of the devices we use and make better choices when we buy new products."

If users in the European Union were able to extend by one year the lifespan of washing machines, notebooks, vacuum cleaners and smartphones, roughly four million tons of CO2 emissions would be saved, a European Environmental Bureau study claimed in 2019.

Jeronimo said the popularity of secondhand clothing has taken off on platforms like Vinted and eBay, but more could be done in technology.

"When we need a new smartphone or tablet or PC, we rush to the store to buy it new, and that needs to change, and there are 62 million tons of reasons why it matters."

[...] In March 2024, research showed the tech industry was creating electronic waste almost five times faster than it was recycling it (using documented methods). A United Nations report found that e-waste recycling has benefits estimated to include $23 billion of monetized value from avoided greenhouse gas emissions and $28 billion of recovered materials like gold, copper, and iron. It also comes at a cost – $10 billion associated with e-waste treatment and $78 billion of externalized costs to people and the environment.

Of the 62 million tons of e-waste generated globally in 2022, an estimated 13.8 million tons were documented, collected, and properly recycled, the report found.

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An Anonymous Coward writes:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/saibala/2025/05/15/apple-is-developing-tech-so-users-can-control-devices-with-only-their-thoughts/

Apple is boldly embracing brain-computer interface (BCI) technology to enable users to control its devices using only their thoughts—a novel frontier for the company.

Earlier this week, it was announced that the tech giant is working with Synchron, a company that has been pioneering BCI research and work for more than a decade. The company was founded by Dr. Tom Oxley, a neurointerventionalist and technologist. Synchron has developed a stent-like implant that can be inserted using a (relatively) minimally invasive procedure on an individual's motor cortex. The stent was reportedly granted FDA clearance for human trials in 2021, and works to detect brain signals and translate them into software-enabled relays; in the case of an Apple device, the relays can select icons on a iPhone or iPad.

The video below shows a user's experience with Synchron's BCI in conjunction with the Apple Vision headset.

(see site for video)

Apple is working to establish the standards for BCI devices and protocolize what their use could look like across its device landscape. The company is expected to open up the technology and protocols to third-party developers in short order.

Among the primary goals of BCI technology is to enable the millions of individuals worldwide that may have limited physical functions to use devices. For example, the World Health Organization reports that globally, over 15 million people are living with spinal cord injuries. Many of these individuals may experience some type of loss of physical or sensory functions over the course of their lifetimes.

This is where BCIs can truly make a difference—enabling individuals to control electronic devices purely with their thoughts. In fact, reports indicate that the BCI industry is expected to grow at a CAGR of 9.35% from 2025 to 2030 and has huge potential to become a trillion dollar market within the next decade.

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Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

The UK needs more nuclear energy generation just to power all the AI datacenters that are going to be built, according to the head of Amazon Web Services (AWS).

In an interview with the BBC, AWS chief executive Matt Garman said the world is going to have to build new technologies to cope with the projected energy demands of all the bit barns that are planned to support AI.

"I believe nuclear is a big part of that, particularly as we look ten years out," he said.

AWS has already confirmed plans to invest £8 billion ($10.6 billion) on building out its digital and AI infrastructure in Britain between now and the end of 2028 to meet "the growing needs of our customers and partners."

Yet the cloud computing arm of Amazon isn't the only biz popping up new bit barns in Blighty. Google started building a $1 billion campus at Waltham Cross near London last year, while Microsoft began construction of the Park Royal facility in West London in 2023, and made public its plans for another datacenter on the site of a former power station in Leeds last year.

Earleir this year, approval was granted for what is set to become Europe's largest cloud and AI datacenter at a site in Hertfordshire, while another not far away has just been granted outline planning permission by a UK government minister, overruling the local district authority.

This activity is accelerating thanks to the government's AI Opportunities Action Plan, which includes streamlined planning processes to expedite the building of more data facilities in the hope this will drive AI development.

As The Register has previously reported, the infrastructure needed for AI is getting more power-hungry with each generation, and the datacenter expansion to serve the growth in AI services has led to concerns over the amount of energy required.

[...] "AI is driving exponential demand for compute, and that means power. Ultimately, a long-term, resilient energy strategy is critical," said Séamus Dunne, managing director in the UK and Ireland for datacenter biz Digital Realty.

"For the UK to stay competitive in the global digital economy, we need a stable, scalable, and low-carbon energy mix to support the next generation of data infrastructure. With demand already outpacing supply, and the UK aiming to establish itself as an AI powerhouse, it's vital we stay open to a range of solutions. That also means building public trust and working with government to ensure the grid can keep pace."

Garman told the BBC that nuclear is a "great solution" to datacenter energy requirements as it is "an excellent source of zero-carbon, 24/7 power."

This might be true, but new atomic capacity simply can't be delivered fast enough to meet near-term demand, as we reported earlier this year.  The World Nuclear Association says that an atomic plant typically takes at least five years to construct, whereas natural gas plants are often built in about two years.

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