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upstart writes:

A Cracked Piece of Metal Self-Healed in Experiment That Stunned Scientists:

File this under 'That's not supposed to happen!'. In an experiment published in 2023, scientists observed a damaged section of metal healing itself. Though the repair was only on a nanoscale level, understanding the physics behind the process could inspire a whole new era of engineering.

A team from Sandia National Laboratories and Texas A&M University was testing the resilience of a small piece of platinum suspended in a vacuum using a specialized transmission electron microscope technique to pull the ends of the metal 200 times every second.

They then observed the self-healing at ultra-small scales in the 40-nanometer-thick wafer of metal.

Cracks caused by the kind of strain described above are known as fatigue damage: repeated stress and motion that causes microscopic breaks, eventually causing machines or structures to break.

Amazingly, after about 40 minutes of observation, the crack in the platinum started to fuse back together and mend itself before starting again in a different direction.

"This was absolutely stunning to watch first-hand," said materials scientist Brad Boyce from Sandia National Laboratories when the results were announced.

"We certainly weren't looking for it. What we have confirmed is that metals have their own intrinsic, natural ability to heal themselves, at least in the case of fatigue damage at the nanoscale."

These are exact conditions, and we don't know yet exactly how this is happening or how we can use it. However, if you think about the costs and effort required for repairing everything from bridges to engines to phones, there's no telling how much difference self-healing metals could make.

Qatar reserves the right to respond to the attack

Pentagon says there is no information of any casualties.

Iran claims that they have fired 6 missiles, one in response for each bomb dropped on Fordo. It appears that Qatar (and possibly the US too) were pre-warned.

All missiles were intercepted before hitting their targets.

Al Udeid is the the home of the Combined Air Operations Centre (CAOC) which is manned primarily by the US but also by UK and other allies. It is also a major military air hub in the region and would have had some responsibility for oversight of the recent US attack on the nuclear sites.

President Trump's Response

[paraphrasing] The Iranians have made a weak response and we were warned by them in advance. I thank Iran for the warning which gave us the ability to ensure that no lives were endangered. We hope that discussions can now be restarted. I will encourage Israel to also enable negotiations to be restarted. [end paraphrasing].

looorg writes:

50 Years of JAWS.

Fifty years ago on Friday, director Steven Spielberg's Jaws was released in theaters. The terrifying shark movie came to be defined as the first summer blockbuster, of course, but that was just the beginning.

It has been 50 years since jaws swam around eating people for fun and profit. Scaring people away from the beach and water.

Time to share some of your Jaws memories or sharkinfestedfantasies.

For me it's mostly the music, as I was to young to watch movie when it was released. So I only saw it about a decade later, the sequels were all horrible. Bigger shark, less good.

https://variety.com/2025/film/features/jaws-50th-anniversary-steven-spielberg-summer-blockbuster-1236436040/
https://www.forbes.com/sites/timlammers/2025/06/20/jaws-by-the-numbers-50-years-of-merch-media-and-money/
https://www.fangoria.com/50-years-jaws-horror-movie/

(At the time of its release, JAWS was probably the most realistic technology available and I wonder how it would fare in comparison to the computer manipulated films that we see today. We have reached the stage where 'seeing is believing' is obviously untrue. In addition to the questions which looorg poses above, which cinematic effects and/or computer manipulated films on general release have impressed you the most?--JR)

Original Submission

canopic jug writes:

Netzpolitik has an English language article about the EU Commission's vague plans for open source via its Open Stack programme. An internal paper calls on the Commission to support Free and Open Source Software in public administrations – and think about a new legal form. However, many questions remain open. The crux of the matter, which would be the role open protocols and open standards play in enabling vendor independence, remains unnamed in the article and is almost but not quite named in the acutal report [warning for PDF].

The EU Commission has been funding open source projects for years. A programme called Next Generation Internet (NGI) is central to this by distributing money quickly and without red tape to promising projects – such as the decentralised microblogging service Mastodon, the video software PeerTube or Jitsi for videoconferencing.

But the Commission has been set on ending funding NGI for some time – despite prolonged criticism. Involved organisations have said that NGI works well and efficiently. Open source also plays a key role in protecting Europe from foreign actors – particularly important in the current geopolitical environment.

The Commission responded that the end of NGI is not meant to be the end of its open source funding. That is set to continue under a new name – initially the “Open Europe Stack”, now the “Open Internet Stack”. Important distinction: In spite of the new name, the programme is only indirectly related to the “EuroStack”.

Some of these plans include the EU Commission leading by example through improving procurement and use of Free and Open Source Software in practice. They also include phasing out proprietary and/or overseas services in favor of more local services specifically those which are more amenable to using Free and Open Source Software.

Previously:
(2025) Euro Techies Call for Sovereign Fund to Escape US Dependency
(2022) The EU's AI Act Could Have a Chilling Effect on Open Source Efforts, Experts Warn
(2021) European Commission's Study on Open Source Software
(2018) German Documentary on Relations Between Microsoft and Public Administration Now Available in English
(2014) EU Spending €1M for Security Audit of Open Source

Original Submission

upstart writes:

"The 'missing' matter may truly be lurking in hard-to-see threads woven across the universe":

Astronomers have discovered a vast tendril of hot gas linking four galaxy clusters and stretching out for 23 million light-years, 230 times the length of our galaxy. With 10 times the mass of the Milky Way, this filamentary structure accounts for much of the universe's "missing matter," the search for which has baffled scientists for decades.

This "missing matter" doesn't refer to dark matter, the mysterious stuff that remains effectively invisible because it doesn't interact with light (sadly, that remains an ongoing puzzle). Instead, it is "ordinary matter" made up of atoms, composed of electrons, protons, and neutrons (collectively called baryons) which make up stars, planets, moons, and our bodies.

For decades, our best models of the universe have suggested that a third of the baryonic matter that should be out there in the cosmos is missing. This discovery of that missing matter suggests our best models of the universe were right all along. It could also reveal more about the "Cosmic Web," the vast structure along which entire galaxies grew and gathered during the earlier epochs of our 13.8 billion-year-old universe.

The aforementioned models of the cosmos, including the standard model of cosmology, have long posited the idea that the missing baryonic matter of the universe is locked up in vast filaments of gas stretching between the densest pockets of space.

Though astronomers have seen these filaments before, the fact that they are faint has meant that their light has been washed out by other sources like galaxies and supermassive black hole-powered quasars. That means the characteristics of these filaments have remained elusive.

But now, a team of astronomers has for the first time been able to determine the properties of one of these filaments, which links four galactic clusters in the local universe. These four clusters are all part of the Shapley Supercluster, a gathering of over 8,000 galaxies forming one of the most massive structures in the nearby cosmos.

"For the first time, our results closely match what we see in our leading model of the cosmos – something that's not happened before," team leader Konstantinos Migkas of Leiden Observatory in the Netherlands said in a statement. "It seems that the simulations were right all along."

[...] Revealing this hitherto undiscovered tendril of hot matter connecting galaxy clusters has the potential to aid scientists' understanding of these extreme structures and how they are connected across vast cosmic distances.

This could, in turn, aid our understanding of the Cosmic Web, filaments of matter that acted as a cosmic scaffold helping the universe to assemble in its current form.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

The 16-pin power connector, used in many of today’s best graphics cards, continues to be a headache with multiple reports of melting connectors on both the GPU and PSU ends. To address the ongoing issue, graphics card maker Galax has introduced a new solution aimed at warning users of potential failure. Its latest Hall of Fame (HOF) series GPUs, including the RTX 5080 and RTX 5070 Ti variants, feature ARGB lighting that also functions as a debug LED.

According to the company's global website, the HOF series GPUs feature a triple-fan configuration, with the central 92mm fan surrounded by LEDs that extend to the edge of the shroud. In addition to delivering dazzling ARGB lighting effects, these LEDs serve a functional purpose. When powering up your system, these may turn yellow to indicate an improperly installed power connector or red to signal abnormal power delivery to the GPU.

What makes this development absurd is that it reflects just how far GPU makers are going to compensate for a design flaw that should've been solved by Nvidia long ago. The fact that an entire graphics card now needs to act as a warning beacon with a red ring of death (reminiscent of Xbox's famed 360 flaw) when something goes wrong speaks volumes about the 16-pin connector's reliability issues. Despite updates like the revised 12V-2x6 standard, real-world problems persist, raising the question: at what point do GPU makers and power supply vendors stop treating the symptoms and actually fix the root cause?

If you recall, Zotac introduced a somewhat similar solution earlier this year with its RTX 50 series GPUs, which feature an LED indicator near the power connector. While it serves the same purpose of alerting users when the power cable isn't properly connected, Galax's HOF graphics cards take it a step further. In their case, the entire GPU glows, providing a more prominent visual warning.

MSI also introduced its own solution by adding yellow-colored tips for its 16-pin connector on cables and adapters supplied with its GPUs and power supply units. The idea was to make it easier for users to see whether the cable is completely inserted or not, potentially preventing meltdowns. Despite the company's efforts, though, the issue persists as a user reported thermal damage using MSI's preventive yellow-tipped 12V-2x6 power cables.

Have you added, or if not, would you have any reservations adding one of these GPUs to your machine?

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

Speaking at the firm’s Data & Analytics Summit in Sydney, Australia, today, Brethenoux said he didn’t have time to read summaries of meetings two or five years ago, before the creation of such documents became a key application of generative AI.

“I don’t have time to do the five actions in the summary,” he added. “I know what I have to do.”

Brethenoux also questioned why AI-generated meeting summaries list action items from a meeting instead of AI just doing the work itself.

“Just go and do it already,” he said, and called for AI to simplify users’ lives by automatically performing tiresome tasks.

He cited a use case at US healthcare company Vizient where the CTO asked employees what tasks bother them on a regular basis – the sort of thing everyone dreads having to do when they arrive at work on Monday morning. Armed with feedback from thousands of employees, the company automated the most-complained-about chores.

The result? “Instant adoption, zero change management problems,” Brethenoux said. Employees then bought in to AI and started to make good suggestions for further AI-enabled automation.

[...] Brethenoux thinks tech buyers must take that vision with a large pinch of salt, for two reasons.

One is that AI agents are not new. He said industrial companies have used them for decades in relatively closed systems. While they now rely on agents for certain tasks, they have seldom found the software can handle very complex tasks.

Yet vendors are suggesting personal AI agents will easily work with many sources of data across an enterprise and do things like automatically decide a worker should attend a meeting, then place that meeting in their Outlook or Google calendar.

“Now you have 50,000 agents running around the enterprise,” he posited. “How do you orchestrate this? How do they negotiate?”

Brethenoux said he’s asked vendors how such automated scheduling would consider competing needs of an employee’s boss, partner, or kids. Their response, he said, is “silence.”

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

A review of the book Strangers and Intimates, which asks Are we killing off the idea of private life?

Whatever happened to good old-fashioned privacy? Nowadays, practically everything about us is known, traded and exploited by social media platforms, even when we aren’t opening the curtains on our inner lives ourselves. Click. There’s the sourdough your smug uncle made this morning. Click. There’s your friend crying about a missed promotion. Click. There’s a stranger inviting you – for a fee, of course – into their bedroom.

You would expect a book called Strangers and Intimates: The rise and fall of private life to have views on all of this – and it does, except that they are less straightforward, more considered and much richer than most others in this area.

As its author, the cultural historian Tiffany Jenkins, puts it: “Many blame this situation on narcissistic individuals who broadcast their lives online or on tech companies that devour personal data, but this overlooks the deeper changes at play.” And hers is a text about those deeper changes.

In Jenkins’s account, these mostly took place in the 20th century – and they were multifarious. Chapters are devoted to everything from the prying capabilities of smaller cameras – “Kodak fiends” were a particular turn-of-the-century nuisance – to the broader implications of Bill Clinton’s trysts with Monica Lewinsky – the private suddenly became fiercely political.

[...] Scientific thinkers aren’t exempted from this narrative. The behaviourist trinity of Paul Lazarsfeld, Edward Bernays and Ernest Dichter receive special attention for their collective work, in the first half of the 20th century, to turn humans into data and data into marketable insights. None of them acted maliciously, but they helped erode the sense that certain parts of life should be off-limits, rather than grist for corporate interests. Much the same could be said of biologist Alfred Kinsey’s famous surveys of people’s sex lives. Is nothing sacred?

We have allowed our two worlds to become compromised and blurred. The private is increasingly public

canopic jug writes:

Digital Music News and Radio Insight are observing that comedian Barret "Dr. Demento" Hansen is hanging up his top hat later in October this year. The last of his regular shows aired the other day and the countdown has begun.

Dr. Demento wraps up with an October countdown of the show's all-time Top 40 songs. In between, there will be bi-weekly historical recaps alternating with flashback shows from the period in question. Check out the show archives here.

The final episode will coincide with the 55^th anniversary of his radio program which launched in 1970. His odd humor gained quite a large following over the years. He started at a local station in Pasadena, California. The show gained more or less its current focus on comedy and novelty records by 1972 and national syndication by 1974. It moved to a subscription-based Internet platform in 2010.

This is definitely one for our North American community. I've never heard of him. But who do you think has made the biggest radio impact over the last few decades in your region? JR

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

Astronomers are puzzled by a strong burst of radio waves traced back to a NASA satellite that had been inactive since the 1960s

So Clancy James at Curtin University in Australia and his colleagues were perplexed when, nearly 60 years later, they detected a brief, powerful burst of radio waves coming from the satellite’s apparent location.

James and his team were scanning the sky with the Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder (ASKAP), an array of 36 radio telescopes in Western Australia, for signs of fast radio bursts, mysterious pulses of radiation that come from other galaxies.

On 13 June last year, they saw a signal that seemed to be coming from within our galaxy. “If it’s nearby, we can study it through optical telescopes really easily, so we got all excited, thinking maybe we’d discovered a new pulsar or some other object,” says Clancy.

But on further inspection, the signal appeared to be so close to Earth that ASKAP couldn’t focus all of its telescopes at once – like how a phone camera struggles to focus on nearby objects. This meant it must have come from within 20,000 kilometres of Earth, says Clancy. The researchers also found that the signal was very short lived, lasting less than 30 nanoseconds. “This was an incredibly powerful radio pulse that vastly outshone everything else in the sky for a very short amount of time,” says Clancy.

When they traced the signal to where it came from and compared it with known satellite positions in the sky, they found just one plausible explanation – the Relay 2 satellite. Since the satellite is no longer functional, Clancy and his team think it must have come from an external event, such as an electrostatic discharge – a build-up of electricity that results in a spark-like flash – or a micrometeorite that struck the satellite and produced a cloud of charged plasma.

It would be very difficult to differentiate between those two scenarios, says Karen Aplin at the University of Bristol, UK, as the radio signal produced by both would look similar. However, it could be useful to monitor future electrostatic discharges from satellites, she says. “In a world where there is a lot of space debris and there are more small, low-cost satellites with limited protection from electrostatic discharges, this radio detection may ultimately offer a new technique to evaluate electrostatic discharges in space,” she says.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Man's health crashes after getting donated kidney:

About two months after receiving a donated kidney, a 61-year-old man ended up back in the hospital. He was tired, nauseous, and vomiting. He was also excessively thirsty and producing too much urine. Over the next 10 days, things only got worse. The oxygen levels in his blood began to fall. His lungs filled with fluid. He kept vomiting. He couldn't eat. Doctors inserted a feeding tube. His oxygen levels and blood pressure kept falling. He was admitted to the intensive care unit and put on mechanical ventilation. Still, things kept getting worse.

At that point, he was transferred to the ICU of Massachusetts General Hospital, where he had received the transplant. He was in acute respiratory failure and shock.

In a case report in this week's issue of the New England Journal of Medicine, doctors at Mass General explained how they determined what was wrong with the man. Their first steps were collecting more information about the man's symptoms from his wife, reviewing his family medical history, and contacting the regional organ-procurement organization that provided the kidney.

The man's condition and laboratory tests suggested he had some sort of infection. But as a transplant recipient who was on a variety of immunosuppressive drugs, the list of infectious possibilities was "extensive."

Dr. Camille Kotton, Clinical Director of the hospital's Transplant and Immunocompromised Host Infectious Diseases division, laid out her thinking. She started with a process of elimination. As an immunosuppressed transplant patient, he was also on several medications to proactively prevent infections. These would rule out herpesviruses and cytomegalovirus. He was also on a combination of antibiotics that would rule out many bacterial infections, as well as the fungal infection Pneumocystis jirovecii that strikes the immunocompromised and the protozoan parasite Toxoplasma gondii.

One feature stood out: The man had developed elevated levels of eosinophils, white blood cells that can increase for various reasons—including parasitic infections. The man also had a reddish-purple rash over his abdomen. Coupled with the severity of his illness, Kotton suspected a widespread parasitic infection.

USA bombs Fordow, Natanz, and Isfahan
US President Donald Trump says American forces have conducted "very successful" strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities at Fordow, Natanz, and Isfahan and that all US planes are now out of Iranian airspace.

Trump's Truth Social
"We have completed our very successful attack on the three Nuclear sites in Iran, including Fordow, Natanz, and Esfahan. All planes are now outside of Iran air space. A full payload of BOMBS was dropped on the primary site, Fordow. All planes are safely on their way home. Congratulations to our great American Warriors. There is not another military in the World that could have done this. NOW IS THE TIME FOR PEACE! Thank you for your attention to this matter."

[Updated 22 Jun 1313z - following statements by Secretary of Defence and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff--JR]

Operation Midnight Hammer

75 x TLAMs - Precision Guided Weapons (PGW), 14 x MOPs GBU-57 used by 7 B2s, operational feint by sending 6 x B2s westward into the Pacific area, 7 x B2s continued eastwards. The B2s are still airborne and were observed refuelling over the Azores a few hours ago on FlightRadar24 (at least 18 tanker aircraft operating racetracks but the B2s were still radio silent). TLAMs were also fired by USN assets in the southern Persian Gulf. Over 120 aircraft involved in the mission including F16, F22, F35, ISTAR, AAR. Battle damage assessment will take time to collect and analyse.

US forces involved in the attack were not engaged and appear to have achieved total surprise. All assets are accounted for but some are still airborne.

Original Submission

Freeman writes:

https://arstechnica.com/ai/2025/06/why-one-man-is-archiving-human-made-content-from-before-the-ai-explosion/

Former Cloudflare executive John Graham-Cumming recently announced that he launched a website, lowbackgroundsteel.ai, that treats pre-AI, human-created content like a precious commodity—a time capsule of organic creative expression from a time before machines joined the conversation. "The idea is to point to sources of text, images and video that were created prior to the explosion of AI-generated content," Graham-Cumming wrote on his blog last week. The reason? To preserve what made non-AI media uniquely human.

[...] ChatGPT in particular triggered an avalanche of AI-generated text across the web, forcing at least one research project to shut down entirely.

That casualty was wordfreq, a Python library created by researcher Robyn Speer that tracked word frequency usage across more than 40 languages by analyzing millions of sources, including Wikipedia, movie subtitles, news articles, and social media. The tool was widely used by academics and developers to study how language evolves and to build natural language processing applications. The project announced in September 2024 that it will no longer be updated because "the Web at large is full of slop generated by large language models, written by no one to communicate nothing."

[...] The website points to several major archives of pre-AI content, including a Wikipedia dump from August 2022 (before ChatGPT's November 2022 release), Project Gutenberg's collection of public domain books, the Library of Congress photo archive, and GitHub's Arctic Code Vault—a snapshot of open source code buried in a former coal mine near the North Pole in February 2020. The wordfreq project appears on the list as well, flash-frozen from a time before AI contamination made its methodology untenable.

[...] As atmospheric nuclear testing ended and background radiation returned to natural levels, low-background steel eventually became unnecessary for most uses. Whether pre-AI content will follow a similar trajectory remains a question.

Still, it feels reasonable to protect sources of human creativity now, including archival ones, because these repositories may become useful in ways that few appreciate at the moment.

[...] For now, lowbackgroundsteel.ai stands as a modest catalog of human expression from what may someday be seen as the last pre-AI era.

Original Submission

_-iNT13- writes:

Over a week ago iStories published a story alleging Vladimir Vedeneev and Roman Venediktov, who own GlobalNet, allow the FSB access to Telegram messages. GlobalNet assigns IP addresses for Telegram and maintains it's networking equipment, and also has/had contracts with a FSB "research computing center" that helped plan the invasion of Ukraine and developed tools to de-anonymize internet users; and a flagship state-owned nuclear research laboratory.

Telegram responded to the allegations the following day - and in doing so made some glaring contradictions with what they told the court in Miami, USA.

More recently Meduza published a detailed story about both those iStories reports - the highlight being the revelation that "as part of a criminal case opened by Russia's Federal Security Service (FSB) in the spring of 2022, security agents have been intercepting Telegram messages."

Security researcher Michał "rysiek" Woźniak published a detailed report titled Telegram is indistinguishable from an FSB honeypot, which provides more information on how Telegram has been compromised.

Original Submission

Processed by jelizondo

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

Gaze into the temporal distance and you might spot the end of the age of silicon looming somewhere out there, as a research team at Penn State University claims to have built the first working CMOS computer entirely from two-dimensional materials.

The team, led by Pennsylvania State University engineering science professor Saptarshi Das, published a paper last week detailing the design and construction of their 2D one instruction set computer (OISC) based on the same complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS) design that's a standard part of modern silicon-based computers. OISC is a minimalist abstract machine model that performs all operations using a single, universal instruction.

Does that mean we can expect to live through a post-silicon, 2D computing revolution? It won't be quite like that, Das told us. Rather, 2D CMOS computers will have specialized uses.

"They could become competitive in specialized domains such as edge AI, neuromorphic systems, or flexible electronics," Das told us.

The 2D machine they built is silicon-free, using molybdenum disulfide for n-type and tungsten diselenide for p-type transistors. The material pair "offer complementary electrical characteristics, relatively high mobility, and have demonstrated scalable growth via metal–organic chemical vapor deposition (MOCVD)," Das told The Register in an email. MOCVD was used to fabricate the team's 2D CMOS platform on sapphire wafers, with transistor channels just one atom thick. 

CMOS systems need both n- and p-type transistors (which move electrons along a circuit by having an excess and deficiency of electrons, respectively) to achieve the goal of CMOS computing - energy efficiency and reusability. That's why the team's 2D CMOS design is such a breakthrough, according to Das.

"We have demonstrated, for the first time, a CMOS computer built entirely from 2D materials," Das said in an announcement on the Penn State website.

[...] "[Scalability] is one of the most critical aspects of our work," Das told us. "While some steps (e.g., layer alignment and transfer) are still manual, most of the process is compatible with industry tools and can be automated."

Also see the Penn State press release

Journal Reference: Ghosh, S., Zheng, Y., Rafiq, M. et al. A complementary two-dimensional material-based one instruction set computer. Nature 642, 327–335 (2025). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-025-08963-7

Original Submission