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upstart writes:

Evidence for 'Planet Nine' lurking on the fringes of the Solar System is building. So why can't astronomers spot it? - ABC News:

A huge unknown lurks in the far reaches of our Solar System — something massive enough to pull distant space rocks into extraordinarily long, thin loops around the Sun.

At least, this is what US astronomer Michael Brown believes.

In 2016, he and a colleague at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) proposed something almost unfathomable: a huge planet, up to 10 times heftier than Earth, way out on the edge of our Solar System.

[...] Those that are convinced Planet Nine is out there are waiting for the new Vera Rubin Observatory to come online in Chile early next year.

The telescope has an 8.4-metre mirror, which makes it the largest camera ever built for astronomy.

"It's going to be doing something called the Legacy Survey of Space and Time, which is a massive survey — taking images of the sky every single night," Swinburne University of Technology astrophysicist Sara Webb says.

[...] "If Vera Rubin doesn't find it by reflected sunlight, the next best thing is to find it not as reflected sunlight, but by using radio telescopes," he says.

"They're not designed to look at little planets; they're designed to look at the whole sky at once. It'll take a while for the telescopes to be able to see that this planet has moved from one place to the other, so it'll be a couple of years of those surveys before we know it's there.

Original Submission

hubie writes:

The Roman massacre that never happened according to a new study of an iconic archaeological site:

A new study by archaeologists at Bournemouth University (BU) has revealed that bodies recovered from a 'war-cemetery' previously attributed to the Roman Conquest of Britain at Maiden Castle Iron Age hillfort in Dorset, did not die in a single dramatic event.

A re-analysis of the burials, including a new programme of radiocarbon dating, has revealed that, rather than dying in a single, catastrophic event, individuals fell in periods of lethal violence spanning multiple generations, spread across the late first century BC to the early first century AD. This is suggestive of episodic periods of bloodshed, possibly the result of localised turmoil, executions or dynastic infighting during the decades leading up to the Roman Conquest of Britain.

BU's Dr Martin Smith, Associate Professor in Forensic and Biological Anthropology, who analysed the bodies said: "The find of dozens of human skeletons displaying lethal weapon injuries was never in doubt, however, by undertaking a systematic programme of radiocarbon dating we have been able to establish that these individuals died over a period of decades, rather than a single terrible event".

The 'war-cemetery' of Maiden Castle Iron Age hillfort in Dorset is one of Britain's most famous archaeological discoveries. Discovered in 1936, many of the skeletons unearthed had clear evidence of trauma to the head and upper body. Dig director at the time, Sir Mortimer Wheeler suggested, were "the marks of battle", caused during a furious but ultimately futile defence of the hillfort against an all-conquering Roman legion. Wheeler's colourful account of an attack on the native hillfort and the massacre of its defenders by invading Romans, was accepted as fact, becoming an iconic event in popular narratives of Britain's 'Island Story'.

Principal Academic in Prehistoric and Roman Archaeology at BU, and the study's Dig Director, Dr Miles Russell said: "Since the 1930s, the story of Britons fighting Romans at one of the largest hillforts in the country has become a fixture in historical literature. With the Second World War fast approaching, no one was really prepared to question the results. The tale of innocent men and women of the local Durotriges tribe being slaughtered by Rome is powerful and poignant. It features in countless articles, books and TV documentaries. It has become a defining moment in British history, marking the sudden and violent end of the Iron Age."

Dr Russell added: "The trouble is it doesn't appear to have actually happened. Unfortunately, the archaeological evidence now points to it being untrue. This was a case of Britons killing Britons, the dead being buried in a long-abandoned fortification. The Roman army committed many atrocities, but this does not appear to be one of them."

[...] The study has also raised further questions as to what may still lie undiscovered at Maiden Castle. Paul Cheetham commented that "Whilst Wheeler's excavation was excellent in itself, he was only able to investigate a fraction of the site. It is likely that a larger number of burials still remains undiscovered around the immense ramparts."

Journal Reference: https://doi.org/10.1111/ojoa.12324 [open access]

Original Submission

owl writes:

https://archive.is/lhQuY

In November of 2021, Vladimir Dinets was driving his daughter to school when he first noticed a hawk using a pedestrian crosswalk.

The bird—a young Cooper's hawk, to be exact—wasn't using the crosswalk, in the sense of treading on the painted white stripes to reach the other side of the road in West Orange, New Jersey. But it was using the crosswalk—more specifically, the pedestrian-crossing signal that people activate to keep traffic out of said crosswalk—to ambush prey.

The crossing signal—a loud, rhythmic click audible from at least half a block away—was more of a pre-attack cue, or so the hawk had realized, Dinets, a zoologist now at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville, told me. On weekday mornings, when pedestrians would activate the signal during rush hour, roughly 10 cars would usually be backed up down a side street. This jam turned out to be the perfect cover for a stealth attack: Once the cars had assembled, the bird would swoop down from its perch in a nearby tree, fly low to the ground along the line of vehicles, then veer abruptly into a residential yard, where a small flock of sparrows, doves, and starlings would often gather to eat crumbs—blissfully unaware of their impending doom.

The hawk had masterminded a strategy, Dinets told me: To pull off the attacks, the bird had to create a mental map of the neighborhood—and, maybe even more important, understand that the rhythmic ticktock of the crossing signal would prompt a pileup of cars long enough to facilitate its assaults. The hawk, in other words, appears to have learned to interpret a traffic signal and take advantage of it, in its quest to hunt. Which is, with all due respect, more impressive than how most humans use a pedestrian crosswalk.

Cooper's hawks are known for their speedy sneak attacks in the wild, Janet Ng, a senior wildlife biologist with Environment and Climate Change Canada, told me. Zipping alongside bushes and branches for cover, they'll conceal themselves from prey until the very last moment of a planned ambush. "They're really fantastic hunters that way," Ng said. Those skills apparently translate fairly easily into urban environments, where Cooper's hawks flit amid trees and concrete landscapes, stalking city pigeons and doves.

[...] But maybe the most endearing part of this hawk's tale is the idea that it took advantage of a crosswalk signal at all—an environmental cue that, under most circumstances, is totally useless to birds and perhaps a nuisance. To see any animal blur the line between what we consider the human and non-human spheres is eerie, but also humbling: Most other creatures, Plotnik said, are simply more flexible than we'd ever think.

Original Submission

NotSanguine writes:

A Caltech press release details research on the evolution of Jupiter.

From the release:

Understanding Jupiter's early evolution helps illuminate the broader story of how our solar system developed its distinct structure. Jupiter's gravity, often called the "architect" of our solar system, played a critical role in shaping the orbital paths of other planets and sculpting the disk of gas and dust from which they formed.

In a new study published in the journal Nature Astronomy, Konstantin Batygin (PhD '12), professor of planetary science at Caltech; and Fred C. Adams, professor of physics and astronomy at the University of Michigan; provide a detailed look into Jupiter's primordial state. Their calculations reveal that roughly 3.8 million years after the solar system's first solids formed—a key moment when the disk of material around the Sun, known as the protoplanetary nebula, was dissipating—Jupiter was significantly larger and had an even more powerful magnetic field.

"Our ultimate goal is to understand where we come from, and pinning down the early phases of planet formation is essential to solving the puzzle," Batygin says. "This brings us closer to understanding how not only Jupiter but the entire solar system took shape."

Batygin and Adams approached this question by studying Jupiter's tiny moons Amalthea and Thebe, which orbit even closer to Jupiter than Io, the smallest and nearest of the planet's four large Galilean moons. Because Amalthea and Thebe have slightly tilted orbits, Batygin and Adams analyzed these small orbital discrepancies to calculate Jupiter's original size: approximately twice its current radius, with a predicted volume that is the equivalent of over 2,000 Earths. The researchers also determined that Jupiter's magnetic field at that time was approximately 50 times stronger than it is today.

[...] Importantly, these insights were achieved through independent constraints that bypass traditional uncertainties in planetary formation models—which often rely on assumptions about gas opacity, accretion rate, or the mass of the heavy element core. Instead, the team focused on the orbital dynamics of Jupiter's moons and the conservation of the planet's angular momentum—quantities that are directly measurable. Their analysis establishes a clear snapshot of Jupiter at the moment the surrounding solar nebula evaporated, a pivotal transition point when the building materials for planet formation disappeared and the primordial architecture of the solar system was locked in.

Cool research with a novel methodology.

Referenced paper (Abstract)
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41550-025-02512-y

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

In an email posted on Reddit from "The VPN Secure Team" sent to lifetime subscription holders, it's explained that VPNSecure was acquired in 2023. The deal included the technology, domain, and customer database, but not the liabilities.

"Unfortunately, the previous owner did not disclose that thousands of Lifetime Deals (LTDs) had been sold through platforms like StackSocial," reads the mail.

"We discovered this only months later – when a large portion of our resources were strained by these LTD accounts and high support volume from users, who through part of the database, provided no sustaining income to help us improve and maintain the service."

As a result of this, the new owners began deactivating lifetime accounts that had been dormant for six months. While it's claimed that this was "technically fair," – for some reason – the new owners seem shocked that it led to a wave of negative reviews.

[...] Ars Technica reports that a follow-up email from VPNSecure shed more light on the situation. It states that InfiniteQuant Ltd, which is a different company than InfiniteQuant Capital Ltd, acquired VPN Secure in an "asset only deal."

It goes on to say that while the buyers received the tech, brand, infrastructure, and tech, they received none of the company, contracts, payments, or obligations from the previous owners.

It's also claimed the Lifetime Deals sold by the old team between 2015 and 2017 were not disclosed to InfiniteQuant Ltd, but it kept the accounts running for 2 extra years despite never receiving a "single cent from those subscriptions." So stop being ungrateful, basically.

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

While CTO officially stands for Chief Technology Officer, the standard jokes are that it’s either Chief Talking Officer or Chief Travel Officer. I embraced all of those roles, especially the travel part when my territory covered India, New Zealand, China and everything in between. And while I definitely relished having a job that required me to keep developing my expertise in a wide range of technical fields, I also really enjoyed the chance to keep working on my communications skills, whether that was through talking or writing.

In my last year at VMware (when travel was curtailed due to COVID) I put a lot of energy into developing (online) presentations, including one on the art of giving presentations. You can find that talk on Peertube – it is in PechaKucha format, which means 20 slides, 20 seconds per slide, which I find a great source of creative inspiration. You can probably watch it in less time than it takes to read this article.

The longer I worked in technology, the more I came to believe that communications, both oral and written, can be a key differentiator in a technical career. Probably the first time I realized this was when writing my PhD thesis. Engineers as a group are notoriously averse to writing, but I came to see the satisfaction to be had in clearly communicating your ideas on paper. For one thing, by the time I was in the last year of my program, I was pretty happy to be producing something as tangible as a thesis. I had written a lot less software in my course than I’d expected, a result of Edinburgh Computer Science being more of a theory place than one encouraging system building from its students. So watching my ideas grow on the page into something the size of a book was oddly satisfying.

I think the reason I was not as averse to writing as many engineers had a lot to do with the way I was educated in Australia. High school English was a “must-pass” subject if you wanted to go on to university, and I found it much more challenging than my maths and science classes. Not wanting to take chances, I worked disproportionately hard on English in my last year of high school, surprising both myself and my teachers with the highest grade of my life in the final exam that mattered most.

Somewhat to my chagrin, the undergraduate engineering degree in those days did not allow any courses to be taken outside of the Engineering department, but there was a mandated “English for Engineers” course, taught by one of the engineering lecturers. (I think the course had a different official name, something like “Engineering Communications”.) I can only remember two things about that course: one is that we read “Voss” by Nobel-prize-winner Patrick White, which was challenging but enjoyable. So they weren’t treating us as complete dummies. And the second was that we had to make a formal presentation in front of the class, which I found both stressful and educational. (My high school debating experience helped a bit here.) While I might have enjoyed an actual English Literature class more, this one was much better than the course name implied.

I continued to make the occasional presentations through my PhD program and into my early career, but a pivotal experience was watching David Clark speak twice at SIGCOMM 1990, at which he won the SIGCOMM award and also presented the paper, "Architectural considerations for a new generation of protocols.” His presentation of the latter was so engaging that I remember thinking “that is how you get people to listen to your ideas.” (That paper’s ideas continue to influence my thinking today.) As a young researcher at Bellcore at the time, I was surrounded by people who had creative ideas, but I had never seen someone get the audience excited about their work the way Clark had done. I resolved to get better at making technical presentations.

At the same time, I was working on my “accidental smartNIC” project as part of the Aurora gigabit testbed. There came a point where I realized that the system was complex enough that I needed to write some sort of design document–hardly a revolutionary idea in industry, but somewhat uncommon in the research group that I worked in. My first audience for this document was me, because I realized I couldn’t keep all the details in my head any more. Later on it would enable me to involve others in the project both as subsystem designers and programmers of the system.

quietus writes:

"The European Union, which was formed for the primary purpose of taking advantage of the United States on TRADE, has been very difficult to deal with. Their powerful Trade Barriers, Vat Taxes, ridiculous Corporate Penalties, Non-Monetary Trade Barriers, Monetary Manipulations, unfair and unjustified lawsuits against Americans Companies, and more, have led to a Trade Deficit with the U.S. of more than $250,000,000 a year, a number which is totally unacceptable. Our discussions with them are going nowhere! Therefore, I am recommending a straight 50% Tariff on the European Union, starting on June 1, 2025. There is no Tariff if the product is built or manufactured in the United States. Thank you for your attention to this matter!"

@realdonaldtrump, Truth Social, May 23.

President Trump announced a 50% tariff on EU exports into the United States.

the Trump administration considers EU food and product standards protectionist and wants the bloc to unilaterally drop tariffs. The EU has proposed that both sides scrap tariffs on all industrial and some agricultural products.

Brussels has also offered to help tackle Chinese overcapacity in sectors such as steel and cars, and to discuss restrictions on exporting technology to Beijing.

But it has refused to discuss scrapping national digital taxes or VAT, key US demands, or weakening EU regulation of US tech companies.

Trump's post on Friday contrasted with his administration's moves to defuse trade tensions with Beijing this month. The US has also recently sealed a trade deal with the UK.

(Source: Financial Times, May 23, Trump warns of 50% tariff on EU imports from next month)

Stock up on bourbon while you still can, mateys.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

You are glowing – no, really:

You, along with all living things, produce subtle, ethereal, semi-visible light that glows until you die, according to a recent study.

You would be forgiven for jumping to the conclusion that this spooky luminescence is evidence that auras exist, or something similar.

But Dr Daniel Oblak, physicist at the University of Calgary and last author of the study, told BBC Science Focus that, while auras are a metaphysical, spiritual, unscientific idea, this light is not. Instead, it's called ultraweak photon emission (UPE) and is a natural product of your metabolism.

"I normally point out that UPE is a result of a biochemical process and in that sense is related to what happens in a glow-stick, which no one suspects of having an aura," he said.

"UPE is so weak that it is not visible to the human eye and completely overwhelmed by other sources of light, unless you are in a completely dark room."

That's not to say that shutting your curtains and turning off your lights will allow you to see your own glow. This light is between 1,000 and 1,000,000 times dimmer than the human eye can perceive.

UPE is produced when chemicals in your cells create unstable molecules known as reactive oxygen species (ROS), basically byproducts of your body's metabolism.

When ROS levels rise, they cause other molecules to become 'excited', meaning they carry excess energy. It's this energy that causes light to be emitted.

A key driver of this effect is oxidative stress – a form of cellular wear and tear caused by factors like ageing and illness. The more oxidative stress the body experiences, the more ROS it produces – and the more light it emits.

"Hence, when an organism ceases living, it stops metabolising and thus, the ultraweak photon emission ends," he said.

To test UPE, Calgary scientists measured UPE produced by immobilised and dead mice, as well as scratched leaves.

Using specialist cameras, they observed much more UPE being emitted by the living mice, compared to their dead bodies. Meanwhile, the leaves gave off much more light where they had been damaged, compared to unscratched areas.

That's because they were experiencing more oxidative stress in scratched regions. But the dead mice did not glow, because their bodies weren't metabolising anymore.

Journal Reference: DOI: https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.jpclett.4c03546

Original Submission

fliptop writes:

AI chatbot that pulled him into what she described as an emotionally and sexually abusive relationship that led to his suicide:

A federal judge on Wednesday rejected arguments made by an artificial intelligence company that its chatbots are protected by the First Amendment—at least for now. The developers behind Character.AI are seeking to dismiss a lawsuit alleging the company's chatbots pushed a teenage boy to kill himself.

The judge's order will allow the wrongful death lawsuit to proceed, in what legal experts say is among the latest constitutional tests of artificial intelligence.

The suit was filed by a mother from Florida, Megan Garcia, who alleges that her 14-year-old son Sewell Setzer III fell victim to a Character.AI chatbot that pulled him into what she described as an emotionally and sexually abusive relationship that led to his suicide.

[...] The suit against Character Technologies, the company behind Character.AI, also names individual developers and Google as defendants. It has drawn the attention of legal experts and AI watchers in the United States and beyond, as the technology rapidly reshapes workplaces, marketplaces, and relationships despite what experts warn are potentially existential risks.

[...] The lawsuit alleges that in the final months of his life, Setzer became increasingly isolated from reality as he engaged in sexualized conversations with the bot, which was patterned after a fictional character from the television show "Game of Thrones." In his final moments, the bot told Setzer it loved him and urged the teen to "come home to me as soon as possible," according to screenshots of the exchanges. Moments after receiving the message, Setzer shot himself, according to legal filings.

Related: Chatbot 'Encouraged Teen to Kill Parents Over Screen Time Limit'

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

A new examination of Apple partner TSMC's Arizona facility shines a spotlight on how the U.S. bet on domestic chipmaking is colliding with labor shortages, cost overruns, and global dependencies.

Just outside Phoenix, a sleek, high-security facility is taking shape. Known as Fab 21, the site is operated by Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) and will soon be one of the most advanced chipmaking facilities in the world.

The microscopic transistors produced here will power Apple devices, artificial intelligence systems and critical infrastructure, representing a significant shift of advanced technology manufacturing to American soil.

TSMC currently makes about 90% of the world's most advanced semiconductors, nearly all of them in Taiwan. That long-standing reliance is now being reexamined amid global supply disruptions and rising tensions in the Asia-Pacific.

[...] TSMC replicated much of its Taiwan production environment in Arizona, but the complexity of the process means the US still relies heavily on foreign equipment, materials and expertise.

[...] Officially, Taiwan's government supports TSMC's global expansion. Privately, there is concern. Taiwan's dominance in semiconductors, sometimes called the "Silicon Shield," is seen as critical leverage in deterring Chinese aggression.

Moving high-end production overseas may reduce that leverage and undermine the island's geopolitical relevance.

Some in Taipei have warned against letting the US or other allies "hollow out" Taiwan's tech advantage. Others view diversification as necessary insurance against supply chain shocks or military threats.

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."

Original Submission

_{Processed by Jelizondo}

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.