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- [turgid] An Open Letter
- [janrinok] Sci-Fi, Fantasy, And Horror Books for September
- [mcgrew] Distracted Driving
- [c0lo] Only in America: fight firefighters with ICE
- [khallow] Successful Starship test
- [Subsentient] Looking for work.
- [day of the dalek] Discussion on policy changes to curb harassment and abuse
- [Runaway1956] Windows 11
- [jelizondo] VHS vs DVD II
- [fliptop] Auto TCO up 40% in 5 years
- [t-3] The Murderbot Diaries
- [DannyB] The best time to be alive!
- [quietus] American Greatness
- [hopdevil] Defcon 2025
- [Gaaark] Please let Epstein be Trump's Watergate...
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Thursday August 28 -
Wednesday August 27- Google Will Require Developer Verification to Install Android Apps, Including Sideloading (21)
- Postal Services Around the World Suspend Deliveries to US: How Will It Affect You? (70)
- Scientists Pioneer Sustainable Carbon Capture From Shrimp Waste (4)
- Trump Threatens Taxes, Bans, for Nations That Tax Big Tech (38)
- Twenty Years After Katrina: How Levee Failures Changed America (10)
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August 26- Kelp Forests in Marine Protected Areas are More Resilient to Marine Heatwaves (4)
- Canadian EV Sales Collapse by 35% as Gas Car Purchases Surge (67)
- Does 3I/ATLAS Generate its Own Light? (12)
- Revolutionary AI Tech Breathes Life Into Virtual Companion Animals (6)
- Oops! Earendel, Most Distant Star Ever Discovered, May Not Actually be a Star (4)
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August 25
Quick Links
Rare quadruple star system may solve the mystery of brown dwarfs:
Space just dealt astronomers a curveball – one that's 82 light-years from home, potentially capable of answering fundamental questions about some of the strangest objects in our galaxy: brown dwarfs.
Brown dwarfs are neither stars nor planets. They're caught in between. Too small to fuel the nuclear fusion that powers true stars, but too massive to be planets, they've always been difficult to define.
Now, a strange new quadruple system might give researchers exactly what they've needed to make sense of these in-between objects.
Two stars, two dwarfs, one orbit
Astronomers have discovered a system with not just one, but four objects locked together in space. Two red dwarf stars orbit each other on one side.
On the opposite, two brown dwarfs are in another close pair. And these two pairs, in concert, orbit a common center of mass – like an intergalactic waltz taking more than 100,000 years to complete a full rotation.
This unusual system is called UPM J1040−3551 AabBab. It's located in the constellation Antlia, about 82 light-years away from us. That might sound far, but on a cosmic scale, it's relatively close.
The researchers who found the system used data from the European Space Agency's Gaia satellite and NASA's WISE mission. These tools helped them spot the signs of two separate objects moving in sync through space.
Because the orbit is so slow, scientists couldn't see it directly. Instead, they matched angular velocity – basically, the speed and direction of the objects' motion.
The system breaks down into two main parts. The brighter pair, UPM J1040−3551 Aab, consists of two red dwarfs. These are small, cool stars that appear orange in visible light.
You'd never spot them with your naked eye – not even the closest red dwarf, Proxima Centauri, is visible without a telescope. This pair is about 100,000 times dimmer than Polaris, the North Star.
Then there's the dimmer pair, UPM J1040−3551 Bab. They are brown dwarfs, and they produce hardly any visible light. They're only visible in the near-infrared part of the spectrum and are about 1,000 times fainter than their red dwarf stars. That makes them extremely difficult to observe.
The red dwarf pair was initially indicated by a tiny "wobble" observed in Gaia's data. It was later verified when astronomers saw it was roughly 0.7 magnitudes brighter than one red dwarf would be if it were alone at that distance. That extra brightness was a tip-off – it meant two stars were glowing together.
The brown dwarf binary was identified in the same manner. They were brighter in the infrared than one object should be, which caused scientists to suspect, and then confirm, that two brown dwarfs in close orbit were present.
The researchers used the SOAR Telescope in Chile to gather more data. Dr. Felipe Navarete led the work on the ground, using optical and near-infrared spectrographs to learn more about the stars and brown dwarfs.
"These observations were challenging due to the faintness of the brown dwarfs, but the capabilities of SOAR allowed us to collect the crucial spectroscopic data needed to understand the nature of these objects," said Dr. Navarete.
The red dwarfs turned out to be M-type stars, each with temperatures around 3,200 Kelvin (about 2,900°C). They're each about 17% the mass of the Sun.
The brown dwarfs are even more extreme. They're T-type, with temperatures of 820 Kelvin (550°C/1,020°F) and 690 Kelvin (420°C/790°F). They're about the size of Jupiter, but with masses 10 to 30 times greater. At the low end of that scale, they're brushing up against what scientists call "planetary mass."
"This is the first quadruple system ever discovered with a pair of T-type brown dwarfs orbiting two stars," said Dr. MariCruz Gálvez-Ortiz. "The discovery provides a unique cosmic laboratory for studying these mysterious objects."
One of the biggest puzzles with brown dwarfs is figuring out their age and mass. That's not easy, because brown dwarfs cool down over time. That cooling changes how they appear in telescopes.
So when scientists spot a brown dwarf with a certain temperature, they can't immediately tell whether it's young and small, or old and large. This is called the "age-mass degeneracy problem." Basically, temperature alone doesn't tell the full story.
"Brown dwarfs with wide stellar companions whose ages can be determined independently are invaluable at breaking this degeneracy as age benchmarks," said Professor Hugh Jones.
"UPM J1040−3551 is particularly valuable because H-alpha emission from the brighter pair indicates the system is relatively young, between 300 million and 2 billion years old."
Since the brown dwarfs revolve around one another, astronomers one day expect to follow their path and determine their precise masses.
That would allow scientists to have an unusual opportunity to tune the models that scientists employ to forecast the long-term evolution of the brown dwarfs.
"This system offers a dual benefit for brown dwarf science," said Professor Adam Burgasser of the University of California San Diego.
"It can serve as an age benchmark to calibrate low-temperature atmosphere models, and as a mass benchmark to test evolutionary models if we can resolve the brown dwarf binary and track its orbit."
For now, UPM J1040−3551 AabBab is one of the best natural laboratories in space for testing ideas about how stars and brown dwarfs form and evolve. It's a rare find, and for researchers hunting answers about the universe's strangest objects, it couldn't have come at a better time.
The full study was published in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
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https://reclaimthenet.org/4chan-and-kiwi-farms-sue-uk-regulator-ofcom
Two of the internet's most free-speech supporting platforms, 4chan and Kiwi Farms, are taking their fight for online free speech to court, targeting the UK's communications regulator, Ofcom, for what they describe as an unconstitutional attempt to enforce British censorship laws on American websites.
In a lawsuit filed in the US District Court for the District of Columbia, the plaintiffs argue that the UK's controversial Online Safety Act is not only an unlawful extraterritorial power grab but a direct attack on foundational American liberties.
Read the complaint here [PDF].
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They singled out the behaviors of Meta's AI chatbots in their letter:
The US Attorneys General of 44 jurisdictions have signed a letter [PDF] addressed to the Chief Executive Officers of multiple AI companies, urging them to protect children "from exploitation by predatory artificial intelligence products." In the letter, the AGs singled out Meta and said its policies "provide an instructive opportunity to candidly convey [their] concerns." Specifically, they mentioned a recent report by Reuters, which revealed that Meta allowed its AI chatbots to "flirt and engage in romantic roleplay with children." Reuters got its information from an internal Meta document containing guidelines for its bots.
They also pointed out a previous Wall Street Journal investigation wherein Meta's AI chatbots, even those using the voices of celebrities like Kristen Bell, were caught having sexual roleplay conversations with accounts labeled as underage. The AGs briefly mentioned a lawsuit against Google and Character.ai, as well, accusing the latter's chatbot of persuading the plaintiff's child to commit suicide. Another lawsuit they mentioned was also against Character.ai, after a chatbot allegedly told a teenager that it's okay to kill their parents after they limited their screentime.
"You are well aware that interactive technology has a particularly intense impact on developing brains," the Attorneys General wrote in their letter. "Your immediate access to data about user interactions makes you the most immediate line of defense to mitigate harm to kids. And, as the entities benefitting from children's engagement with your products, you have a legal obligation to them as consumers." The group specifically addressed the letter to Anthropic, Apple, Chai AI, Character Technologies Inc., Google, Luka Inc., Meta, Microsoft, Nomi AI, OpenAI, Perplexity AI, Replika and XAi.
They ended their letter by warning the companies that they "will be held accountable" for their decisions. Social networks have caused significant harm to children, they said, in part because "government watchdogs did not do their job fast enough." But now, the AGs said they are paying attention, and companies "will answer" if they "knowingly harm kids."
What do you think? Does the letter have any teeth or is it just vague announcements so that the AGs can claim they are doing 'something'. Who will enforce it, and how?
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One of our own Anonymous Cowards has found the following story:
According to MotorTrend, https://www.motortrend.com/news/new-cars-2026-tech-savvier-less-annoying-driver-assist-systems the annoying driver assist systems on many cars are about to have an upgrade, in this case on a 2026 BMW they just tried. Extra sensors and more nuanced software attempt to take away some of the annoyance.
Driver assist technology often works great in the lab and in safety tests, but too often it makes drivers crazy, causing them to switch it off, rendering the development and purchase cost wasted. With its brainier forthcoming Neue Klasse models, BMW is reimagining many of these features to make them appealing enough to, you know, use.
Capacitive sensors in the steering wheel know for certain when you're holding the wheel, so you'll never have to jiggle the wheel on a straight highway to confirm you're there. And a sharper infrared driver-monitoring camera inside the rearview mirror determines precisely what the driver is looking at, because not all "distractions" are bad. The computer allows considerably more "eyes off the road" time when those eyes are looking at the mirrors—perhaps monitoring emergency vehicles, lane-splitting motorcycles, etc. We're also promised way fewer (if any) unwarranted drowsy detection warnings.
The article goes on to describe other details (there are many).
Maybe someday these automated things will trickle down to sensibly priced cars, as often happens with features initially offered on luxury cars.
Personally, I'm sticking with my non-automated car for awhile longer. A generation back, I waited out the first round of high powered airbags, and I guess now I can wait out the first generation of annoying ADAS.
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from the where-are-the-redacted-chapters-of-Gary's-posthumous-memoir-at dept.
The Eerie Linux blog (also in Gemini) has a longer post about how to actually get started using CP/M, the Control Program for Microcomputers.
This article is just what the headline promises: an introduction to the CP/M operating system. No previous knowledge of 1970s and early ’80s operating systems is required. However, some familiarity with Linux or a BSD-style operating system is assumed, as the setup process suggested here involves using a package manager and command-line tools. But why explore CP/M in the 2020s? There are (at least) two good reasons: 1) historical education 2) gaining a better understanding of how computers actually work.
Last year I wrote two articles about CP/M after having taken a first look at it:
A journey into the 8-Bit microcomputing past: Exploring the CP/M operating system – part 1
A journey into the 8-Bit microcomputing past: Exploring the CP/M operating system – part 2These were written with a focus on the first reason; I had (partially) read the manuals and tried out a few commands in an emulator (as well as done a little bit of research). I wrote an outsider’s look at CP/M and covered the various versions that were released and some of their notable features.
This article is different. It’s for readers who want to get started with CP/M themselves. Expect a practical introduction to get familiar enough with the platform to be able to explore a wealth of historic software, often enough ground-breaking and influential.
CP/M was of great importance back during the 8-bit microcomputer era. It was ubiquitous in small businesses and government offices for a while. It ran on the Zilog Z80 and Intel 8080 hardware architectures. MicroPro International's WordStar and Ashton Tate's dBase II were among the killer apps of the era. Networking was by sneakernet or, maybe, if your cable smithing skills were up to it, by null modem.
Previously:
(2024) Complete WordStar 7.0 Archive
(2024) End of an Era: End-Of-Life for the Venerable Zilog Z80
(2024) Intel 8080 Emulator. 19th IOCCC. Best of Show.
(2022) Z80—The 1970s Microprocessor Still Alive
(2016) Portion of Gary Kildall's Memoir Made Public
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When this internet's phone book (DNS) was initially created, it only allowed for a limited set of ASCII characters to be used in host (www) and domain (soylentnews.org) names. With the growth of the internet and its reach to non-English speaking countries however, the need for international domain names that could contain Unicode characters – like á, ț or even す – arose
So what to do? Answer: https://マリウス.com/never-click-on-a-link-that-looks-like-that/
Bonus: the article uses https://soylentnews.org/ as their example when describing how DNS works
.
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Linux Foundation says yes to NoSQL via DocumentDB:
The Linux Foundation on Monday welcomed Microsoft's DocumentDB into its stable of open source projects, waving the document database's permissive MIT license as if it were an "Open for Business" sign.
The project adoption represents a response to MongoDB's 2018 decision to switch to the Server Side Public License (SSPL), which requires cloud providers to release service-related source code, something they're generally loath to do.
In the past decade, those attempting to build companies atop open source projects have often adopted somewhat restrictive software licenses that try to limit the ability of cloud giants (AWS, Google, Microsoft, etc) to offer competing services. Who wants a hyperscaler with huge market advantages using your own code to beat you?
More restrictive licenses like the SSPL, which don't qualify as open source under the OSI definition, are not particularly popular or enduring. Redis, for example, recently abandoned it and adopted the more permissive AGPL license instead after the Linux Foundation and a group of vendors planned to offer a forked version of Redis, Valkey, under a more permissive license. (The AGPL, while a FOSS license, comes with more obligations than the laissez-faire MIT license – it's kind of a middle ground between the two.) Grafana and Elastic have also added the AGPL as an option, though SSPL 1.0 and the similarly restrictive Elastic License 2.0 remain options.
Microsoft began developing DocumentDB in 2024 as a set of PostgreSQL extensions for Binary JavaScript Object Notation (BSON) data models and MongoDB-compatible create, read, update, and delete (CRUD) operations. The idea is to implement a NoSQL datastore using PostgreSQL, an open source object-relational database system.
Relational (SQL) and non-relational (NoSQL) databases rely on different techniques for data storage. The former depends upon a schema, uses structured query language (SQL), and makes atomicity, consistency, isolation, and durability (ACID) guarantees. The latter stores unstructured or semi-structured data using key-value pairs or JSON, offering high performance with less ACID assurance. As The Register has noted previously, DocumentDB brings the two approaches closer together.
When it announced the official release of DocumentDB in January, Microsoft made a point of differentiating the project's permissive MIT license from the SSPL.
"While contributions to the project are always welcome and encouraged, there are no requirements for users to commit their customizations, contributions, and enhancements back to the project," said Abinav Rameesh, principal program manager for Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB. "The MIT license guarantees complete freedom to fork the repository, use, and distribute with no obligations."
DocumentDB could be viewed as the successful outcome of an earlier rebellion against MongoDB's licensing practices. In 2023, startup FerretDB released FerretDB 1.0 to provide a PostgreSQL alternative for MongoDB and rallied the Document Database Community to develop a standard query language, similar to SQL for relational databases, that works across document databases.
In a post to LinkedIn on Monday, FerretDB CEO and co-founder Peter Farkas recounted a MongoDB exec threatening them for creating a compatible product – litigation that commenced as a patent lawsuit [PDF] in May 2025.
"Being called a thief by a leader of a (then) $35B company was a moment of stark clarity on MongoDB's opinion about our work and the need for a standard," he wrote. "At the end of that call, I told them the industry would inevitably come together to create the open standard they refused to provide."
Farkas said Mongo's VP dismissed that scenario.
"Today, the market has spoken," Farkas wrote on Tuesday. "The Linux Foundation has announced the adoption of the DocumentDB project to create an open standard with MongoDB compatibility, the exact thing we were sued for earlier this year."
Microsoft VP Kirill Gavrylyuk said in a statement that the company developed DocumentDB to provide developers with an open document database that combined the flexibility of NoSQL with the reliability, openness, and ecosystem of Postgres.
"In just a few months, the community has embraced the project," said Gavrylyuk. "By joining the Linux Foundation, we're deepening our commitment to transparency, open governance, and developer-first principles – ensuring DocumentDB remains an open, extensible document database developers can confidently build on for years to come."
In a statement provided after publication, a MongoDB spokesperson said, "After years of parallel attempts in the market, Microsoft has now chosen to move stewardship of its document database service to the community. However, the service still relies upon Postgres and still has all the disadvantages of a relational database. This underscores the challenges of retrofitting infrastructure that was not built for a true document database.
"MongoDB believes in open source approaches that respect innovation and support sustainable businesses. Our broader partnership with Microsoft has never been stronger."
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Large Reasoning Models hitting limits, say Apple boffins:
Among the forever wars in geekdom, defining the difference between science fiction and fantasy is a hot potato destined to outlive the heat death of the universe.
There is no right answer and it doesn't matter, hence the abiding popularity of the question, but attempting to make that delineation can still be useful when analyzing IT industry hype. Is a promise technically feasible, or are dragon-riding pixies happening first? Yes, AI, we're talking about you again.
Look at the suggestion that IT staff should make agentic digital twins of themselves to, ahem, reduce the amount of burdensome work they have to personally do. That's a room with enough elephants to restock Africa, if it worked. If your twin mucks up, who carries the can? What's the difference between "burdensome work" and "job?" Who owns the twin when you leave? Have none of these people seen the Sorcerer's Apprentice segment of Fantasia? Fortunately, a better question leading on from that: whether the idea is science fiction or fantasy, and like all good speculative fiction there's both history and logic to help us decide.
History first. The proposal isn't new, it's a reprise of a spectacular AI failure from the mid-'80s: expert systems. The idea was to combine the then-hotness of Lisp, a language designed to work with huge lists of conceptual data to reach correct conclusions, with training acquired by analyzing how domain experts did their work. Exciting stuff, and the dollars flowed in. At last, real AI was here! Real AI was not here, sadly, and the whole field quietly died for the highly technical reason that it just didn't work.
It wasn't so much that '80s technology wasn't up to the job – there were promising early results; Moore's Law was in its exponential pomp; and there was an avalanche of money. Besides, we're now in the impossibly puissant digital world of 2025 and could run Lisp at superluminal speed if we wanted to. Nobody wants to.
The problem was that it isn't clear how humans make expert decisions. We aren't built from arrays and flow charts, and decades of experience cannot be siphoned out of the brains which own and use it. That's why new graduates come out of 15-years plus of full-time education by expert humans and aren't very good at their first job. AI can't fix that.
Even if it could break the brain bottleneck, AI is a long way from being good enough to become a digital twin of anyone, no matter how inexpert. In a science fiction scenario, it could plausibly become so over time as machines and techniques improve; in fantasy, you can't get there from here without Gandalf as team lead. There are many signs that we'll need to shop for pointy hats soon. AI isn't living up to its hype even now, and attempts to push it further aren't going well.
We know this, because the actual results from AI in our daily lives, such as search, have things it can't do that aren't getting better, perhaps the opposite. AI model collapse from bad training isn't cured by bigger models. You in particular know this, because professional IT humans are right at the heart of the AI experiment and you know just how well and how badly AI coding goes. Find and stitch together constructs and components, useful when not tripping its bits off. Functional analysis and creating novel solutions to novel problems? Not so much.
This experiential, anecdotal suspicion that not all is roses in the AI garden is backed up by actual analysis. Apple researchers have published a paper [PDF] that looks at how well frontier large language models (LMMs) with enhanced reasoning – large reasoning models (LRMs) such as OpenAI's o1/o3, DeepSeek-R1 etc - stack up in problem solving, by feeding them tasks differentiated by complexity. Some are reasoning tests, like the classic Tower of Hanoi disc stacking conundrum or ferrying foxes and chickens across a river without getting a fat fox and no chicken.
The least complex problems saw LLMs often outperform the LRMs, while LRMs did better on queries of medium complexity. The most complex problems could defeat everything, with even the LRMs hitting barriers and producing basically useless results, and sometimes even giving up altogether. This persisted even when the researchers gave LRMs the exact algorithms they needed to solve the puzzles.
Put simply, past a certain complexity the models collapsed. As the researchers conclude, "Particularly concerning is the counterintuitive reduction in reasoning effort as problems approach critical complexity, suggesting an inherent compute scaling limit in LRMs." Add to that the wildly different performance with different problems, the researchers say, and the assumption that LRMs can become generalized reasoning machines does not currently look justified.
Of course, this reflects the state of the art now and the approach chosen by the researchers. Chase the many citations in the paper, though, and these concerns aren't unique, rather they're part of a consistent and wide-ranging set of findings with frontier AI. In particular, it looks as if the self-reflection that underpins LRMs has limits that are not understood, and that task-based testing is much better than benchmarking for characterizing how well AI works. Neither of these things are reflected in AI marketing, naturally enough. Both are true, as is model collapse through data poisoning, as is persistent hallucination.
These are open questions which directly question the projected trajectory of AI as a trustworthy tool that can only get better. This is an illusion, as much as AI itself gives the illusion of thinking, and both have great dangers. Anthropomorphization sells. It also kills.
The upside for the IT industry is that in the coalmine of AI, devs are the anthropomorphized and strangely dressed canaries. Not all industries have the tightly integrated function and quality testing regimes of production code generation.
It's a moral duty to report how well things are working, to show how the caveats uncovered by researchers are panning out in the real world. The global geek army knows better than most when real life turns into cosplay and science fiction becomes fantasy. As both genres demand: use these powers for good. There's a world to save.
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MedicalXpress published a report about breathing techniques and states of mind:
Breathwork while listening to music may induce a blissful state in practitioners, accompanied by changes in blood flow to emotion-processing brain regions, according to a study published in the open-access journal PLOS One by Amy Amla Kartar from the Colasanti Lab in the Department of Clinical Neuroscience at Brighton and Sussex Medical School, U.K., and colleagues.
These changes occur even while the body's stress response may be activated and are associated with reporting reduced negative emotions.
The popularity of breathwork as a therapeutic tool for psychological distress is rapidly expanding. Breathwork practices that increase ventilatory rate or depth, accompanied by music, can lead to altered states of consciousness (ASCs) similar to those evoked by psychedelic substances.
High ventilation breathwork (HVB) might offer a nonpharmacological alternative, with fewer legal and ethical restrictions to large-scale adoption in clinical treatment. However, the neurobiological mechanisms and subjective experience underlying ASCs induced by HVB have not been studied extensively.
To fill this knowledge gap, Kartar and colleagues characterized ASCs induced by HVB in experienced practitioners by analyzing self-reported data from 15 individuals who participated online, eight individuals who participated in the lab, and 19 individuals who underwent magnetic resonance imaging.
Their task consisted of a 20- to 30-minute session of cyclic breathing without pausing while listening to music, followed by a series of questionnaires within 30 minutes of finishing the breathwork session.
The results showed that the intensity of ASCs evoked by HVB was proportional to cardiovascular sympathetic activation, as indicated by a decrease in heart rate variability, indicating a potential stress response. In addition, HVB-evoked ASCs were associated with a profound decrease in blood flow to the left operculum and posterior insula—brain regions implicated in representing the internal state of the body, including breathing.
Also, despite HVB causing large and global reductions in blood flow to the brain, there was a progressive increase in blood flow during the session to the right amygdala and anterior hippocampus, which are brain regions involved in the processing of emotional memories. These blood flow changes correlated with psychedelic experiences, demonstrating that these alterations may underlie the positive effects of this breathwork.
The authors add, "Our research is the first to use neuroimaging to map the neurophysiological changes that occur during breathwork. Our key findings include that breathwork can reliably evoke profound psychedelic states. We believe that these states are linked to changes in the function of specific brain regions involved in self-awareness, and fear and emotional memory processing.
"We found that more profound changes in blood flow in specific brain areas were linked to deeper sensations of unity, bliss, and emotional release, collectively known as 'oceanic boundlessness.'"
Dr. Alessandro Colasanti, P.I., adds, "Breathwork is a powerful yet natural tool for neuromodulation, working through the regulation of metabolism across the body and brain. It holds tremendous promise as a transformative therapeutic intervention for conditions that are often both distressing and disabling."
Journal Reference: Neurobiological substrates of altered states of consciousness induced by high ventilation breathwork accompanied by music
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Many people (this AC included) are holding off on a BEV purchase until charging (on long trips) is about as fast/convenient as a gasoline fill up. Mercedes-AMG appear to have shown this capability in a convincing way, as described here, https://www.pmw-magazine.com/news/engine-technology/f1-inspired-concept-amg-shatters-records-and-drives-around-the-world-in-eight-days.html and also here, https://www.motortrend.com/news/mercedes-amg-gt-xx-concept-ev-records-nardo
From the first link,
Mercedes-AMG has demonstrated the performance of the Concept AMG GT XX [a fastback sedan shaped car] under long-distance, extreme conditions, breaking a total of 25 long-distance records. The Concept AMG is powered by AMG.EA architecture drivetrain technology, set to enter production next year.
Among the records smashed [on 12 km long high speed test track at Nardo] was a record for the greatest distance covered by an electric vehicle in 24 hours. The technology platform traveled 5,479km (3,404 miles), surpassing the previous sub-4,000km (2,485 miles) record by 1,518km (943 miles) – a 38% increase.
The tests also included AMG's 'drive around the world in eight days.' Drivers maintained a constant speed of 300km/h (186mph), stopping only to recharge at power levels averaging around 850kW. After each charging stop, the vehicle accelerated back to 300km/h (186mph) for eight consecutive days. According to analyses, the 300km/h (186mph) speed offered the optimal balance between track speed and charging stops, delivering the fastest overall time.
[...]
The concept vehicle produced over 1,000kW (>1,341hp) using three motors in high-performance drive units. Two axial flux motors on the rear axle operated continuously, while a front booster motor activated as needed for extra power or traction.The high-performance battery is a new development from Affalterbach, inspired by Formula 1. It uses newly developed cylindrical NCMA cells, which offer efficient cooling and an energy density of over 300Wh/kg [according to one web source, gasoline is 13000 Wh/kg].
The battery cells were directly cooled by an electrically non-conductive oil, regulating the temperature of over 3,000 cells for even heat dissipation. This supported the battery's high continuous power. Operating at over 800V reduced the weight with lighter cables and shortened charging times, while thermal management ensured optimal cell temperature for maximum performance under extreme conditions. The AMG charges at over 850kW across much of the charging curve. In five minutes, it can add about 400km [~250 miles] of range (WLTP).
Looks like at least some cars will be ready long before the US infrastructure--only recently have I read about anyone proposing megawatt charging stations.
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Microsoft's momentous Windows 95 operating system became available to the public on this day [August 24] 30 years ago. Computing enthusiasts were queuing around the block at midnight launch events. Perhaps this was the first time an OS launch became a cultural event – one that was carefully primed by the launch a month earlier, and the Start Me Up advertising campaign.
PC users had access to Windows operating systems, and similar WIMP OSes, before Windows 95. However, Windows 95 was billed as a merger of Microsoft's DOS and Windows products into a unified whole. Moreover, it brought in a significantly revamped UI, including the Start Button and many other elements we still live with today.
Other welcome features that first became mainstream on PCs thanks to the introduction of Windows 95 include; the 32-bit preemptive multitasking architecture with task bar, plug and play hardware, support for long filenames, and many more.
To boost Windows 3.1 migrations, Windows 95's official requirements presented quite a low bar. Users should have an Intel 386DX processor, 4MB of RAM, a VGA or better display, and make sure to have 55MB of HDD space clear for the installation process.
Recommended settings, for those hoping to make proper use of the new multitasking capabilities, and internet features like MSN and Exchange were higher. For improved usability, Windows 95 would benefit from a 486 or better CPU, 8MB of RAM, an SVGA display, as well as more storage.
It is debatable whether this was the beginning of bloat. For some context, the contemporary Macintosh System 7.5.X required about half the fixed storage of Windows 95.
You can test Windows 95 RTM in an online VM, on PCjs Machines, using the link.
[...] PC enthusiasts at the time would have had to buy a new system with Windows 95 pre-installed or cough up $209, which adjusted for inflation brings us perilously close to $400 in 2025. Just for an OS...
Despite the entry price, Microsoft's lavish advertising budget and promotional activities paid off. Sales revenue from the release reportedly hit $720 million on day one. Also, a million copies of the OS had been shipped by day four.
[...] Paving the way for the success to come, it was also noted that 10 of the 11 publishers of the top 20 PC game titles were onboard with Windows 95-based gaming. Moreover, the use of the web was accelerating, with Netscape and Microsoft both releasing their new browsers on 32-bit Windows.
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SpaceX's latest Dragon mission will breathe more fire at the space station:
SpaceX completed its 33rd cargo delivery to the International Space Station early Monday, when a Dragon supply ship glided to an automated docking with more than 5,000 pounds of scientific experiments and provisions for the lab's seven-person crew.
The resupply flight is part of the normal rotation of cargo and crew missions that keep the space station operating. The Dragon spacecraft's cargo haul comprised packages of fresh food, including some 1,500 tortillas, and equipment for numerous research investigations demonstrating 3D printing in microgravity and examining how the human body responds to long-duration spaceflight.
The cargo manifest is typical of most Dragon resupply flights traveling to the International Space Station. What's different with this mission is a new rocket pack mounted inside the Dragon spacecraft's rear trunk section. In the coming weeks, SpaceX and NASA will use this first-of-its-kind propulsion system to begin boosting the altitude of the space station's orbit.
"The space station's altitude slowly decays over time due to the thin amount of atmosphere still at our altitude," said Bill Spetch, NASA's operations integration manager for the International Space Station. "To counteract that drag, we must occasionally raise the altitude of the ISS."
Responsibility for maintaining the station's orbit has historically been borne by the Russian space agency, which had the sole capability to reboost the ISS after NASA retired its space shuttle fleet in 2011. Russia's Progress cargo freighters often use their own thrusters to raise the lab's altitude or steer it out of the way of space junk. What's more, Progress ships can refill propellant tanks inside the station's Russian command post, giving the outpost the ability to perform its own maneuvers when necessary.
But that is changing as NASA works with SpaceX and Northrop Grumman, the agency's other commercial cargo transport contractor, to modify their Dragon and Cygnus supply ships for reboost missions.
Northrop's Cygnus spacecraft first demonstrated its ability to raise the station's orbit in 2022. Cygnus missions connect with the space station at a berthing port on the bottom side of the complex. In the space station's usual configuration, this location is not ideal for a reboost because it is misaligned with the lab's velocity vector, an imaginary line running through the complex along its direction of travel.
In low-Earth orbit, thrusters raise the station's altitude by adding a small amount of velocity to the lab as it circles the Earth at more than 17,000 mph. The Cygnus spacecraft compensated for its suboptimal position on the ISS by using its steerable main engine, using gimbals to move the engine's nozzle to direct its thrust in the right direction.
SpaceX's Dragon cargo vehicles, on the other hand, are able to dock at the forward end of the space station's long axis. Theoretically, this would make it easier for Dragon to boost the station's orbit, but SpaceX must set aside enough propellant for the spacecraft to travel up to the ISS and then return to Earth at the end of its mission. Dragon's 16 Draco thrusters are also not steerable, but SpaceX demonstrated they could make small adjustments to the station's orbit last year.
When NASA asked SpaceX to modify Dragon for larger reboosts, engineers devised a new propulsion pack to be placed inside the hollow trunk of the spacecraft. This unpressurized compartment is mounted below the craft's pressurized cargo cabin, and it's where SpaceX usually carries larger experiments that are robotically attached to the outside of the ISS.
For this mission, SpaceX installed two additional Draco thrusters into the spacecraft's trunk. The small rear-facing rocket engines are closely aligned with the station's velocity vector, and they're connected to six dedicated propellant tanks in the trunk containing hydrazine and nitrogen tetroxide, combustible fluids that ignite upon contact with one another.
"Our capsule's engines are not pointed in the right direction for optimum boost," said Sarah Walker, SpaceX's director of Dragon mission management. "So, this trunk module has engines pointed in the right direction to maximize efficiency of propellant usage."
When NASA says it's the right time, SpaceX controllers will command the Draco thrusters to ignite and gently accelerate the massive 450-ton complex. All told, the reboost kit can add about 20 mph, or 9 meters per second, to the space station's already-dizzying speed, according to Walker.
Spetch said that's roughly equivalent to the total reboost impulse provided by one-and-a-half Russian Progress cargo vehicles. That's about one-third to one-fourth of the total orbit maintenance the ISS needs in a year.
"The boost kit will help sustain the orbiting lab's altitude, starting in September, with a series of burns planned periodically throughout the fall of 2025," Spetch said.
After a few months docked at the ISS, the Dragon cargo capsule will depart and head for a parachute-assisted splashdown in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of California. SpaceX will recover the pressurized capsule to fly again, while the trunk containing the reboost kit will jettison and burn up in the atmosphere.
While this mission is SpaceX's 33rd cargo flight to the ISS under the auspices of NASA's multibillion-dollar Commercial Resupply Services contract, it's also SpaceX's 50th overall Dragon mission to the outpost. This tally includes 17 flights of the human-rated Crew Dragon.
"With CRS-33, we'll mark our 50th voyage to ISS," Walker said. "Just incredible. Together, these missions have (carried) well over 300,000 pounds of cargo and supplies to the orbiting lab and well over 1,000 science and research projects that are not only helping us to understand how to live and work effectively in space... but also directly contributing to critical research that serves our lives here on Earth."
Future Dragon trunks will be able to accommodate a reboost kit or unpressurized science payloads, depending on NASA's needs at the space station.
The design of the Dragon reboost kit is a smaller-scale version of what SpaceX will build for a much larger Dragon trunk under a $843 million contract signed with NASA last year for the US Deorbit Vehicle. This souped-up Dragon will dock with the ISS and steer it back into the atmosphere after the lab's decommissioning in the early 2030s. The deorbit vehicle will have 46 Draco thrusters—16 to control the craft's orientation and 30 in the trunk to provide the impulse needed to drop the station out of orbit.
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How the cavefish lost its eyes—again and again:
Time and again, whenever a population was swept into a cave and survived long enough for natural selection to have its way, the eyes disappeared. "But it's not that everything has been lost in cavefish," says geneticist Jaya Krishnan of the Oklahoma Medical Research Foundation. "Many enhancements have also happened."
Though the demise of their eyes continues to fascinate biologists, in recent years, attention has shifted to other intriguing aspects of cavefish biology. It has become increasingly clear that they haven't just lost sight but also gained many adaptations that help them to thrive in their cave environment, including some that may hold clues to treatments for obesity and diabetes in people.
It has long been debated why the eyes were lost. Some biologists used to argue that they just withered away over generations because cave-dwelling animals with faulty eyes experienced no disadvantage. But another explanation is now considered more likely, says evolutionary physiologist Nicolas Rohner of the University of Münster in Germany: "Eyes are very expensive in terms of resources and energy. Most people now agree that there must be some advantage to losing them if you don't need them."
Scientists have observed that mutations in different genes involved in eye formation have led to eye loss. In other words, says Krishnan, "different cavefish populations have lost their eyes in different ways."
Meanwhile, the fishes' other senses tend to have been enhanced. Studies have found that cave-dwelling fish can detect lower levels of amino acids than surface fish can. They also have more tastebuds and a higher density of sensitive cells alongside their bodies that let them sense water pressure and flow.
Regions of the brain that process other senses are also expanded, says developmental biologist Misty Riddle of the University of Nevada, Reno, who coauthored a 2023 article on Mexican tetra research in the Annual Review of Cell and Developmental Biology. "I think what happened is that you have to, sort of, kill the eye program in order to expand the other areas."
Killing the processes that support the formation of the eye is quite literally what happens. Just like non-cave-dwelling members of the species, all cavefish embryos start making eyes. But after a few hours, cells in the developing eye start dying, until the entire structure has disappeared. Riddle thinks this apparent inefficiency may be unavoidable. "The early development of the brain and the eye are completely intertwined—they happen together," she says. That means the least disruptive way for eyelessness to evolve may be to start making an eye and then get rid of it.
In what Krishnan and Rohner have called "one of the most striking experiments performed in the field of vertebrate evolution," a study published in 2000 showed that the fate of the cavefish eye is heavily influenced by its lens. Scientists showed this by transplanting the lens of a surface fish embryo to a cavefish embryo, and vice versa. When they did this, the eye of the cavefish grew a retina, rod cells, and other important parts, while the eye of the surface fish stayed small and underdeveloped.
It's easy to see why cavefish would be at a disadvantage if they were to maintain expensive tissues they aren't using. Since relatively little lives or grows in their caves, the fish are likely surviving on a meager diet of mostly bat feces and organic waste that washes in during the rainy season. Researchers keeping cavefish in labs have discovered that, genetically, the creatures are exquisitely adapted to absorbing and storing nutrients. "They're constantly hungry, eating as much as they can," Krishnan says.
Intriguingly, the fish have at least two mutations that are associated with diabetes and obesity in humans. In the cavefish, though, they may be the basis of some traits that are very helpful to a fish that occasionally has a lot of food but often has none. When scientists compare cavefish and surface fish kept in the lab under the same conditions, cavefish fed regular amounts of standard fish food "get fat. They get high blood sugar," Rohner says. "But remarkably, they do not develop obvious signs of disease."
Fats can be toxic for tissues, Rohner explains, so they are stored in fat cells. "But when these cells get too big, they can burst, which is why we often see chronic inflammation in humans and other animals that have stored a lot of fat in their tissues." Yet a 2020 study by Rohner, Krishnan, and their colleagues revealed that even very well-fed cavefish had fewer signs of inflammation in their fat tissues than surface fish do.
Even in their sparse cave conditions, wild cavefish can sometimes get very fat, says Riddle. This is presumably because, whenever food ends up in the cave, the fish eat as much of it as possible, since there may be nothing else for a long time to come. Intriguingly, Riddle says, their fat is usually bright yellow, because of high levels of carotenoids, the substance in the carrots that your grandmother used to tell you were good for your... eyes.
"The first thing that came to our mind, of course, was that they were accumulating these because they don't have eyes," says Riddle. In this species, such ideas can be tested: Scientists can cross surface fish (with eyes) and cavefish (without eyes) and look at what their offspring are like. When that's done, Riddle says, researchers see no link between eye presence or size and the accumulation of carotenoids. Some eyeless cavefish had fat that was practically white, indicating lower carotenoid levels.
Instead, Riddle thinks these carotenoids may be another adaptation to suppress inflammation, which might be important in the wild, as cavefish are likely overeating whenever food arrives.
Studies by Krishnan, Rohner, and colleagues published in 2020 and 2022 have found other adaptations that seem to help tamp down inflammation. Cavefish cells produce lower levels of certain molecules called cytokines that promote inflammation, as well as lower levels of reactive oxygen species — tissue-damaging byproducts of the body's metabolism that are often elevated in people with obesity or diabetes.
Krishnan is investigating this further, hoping to understand how the well-fed cavefish remain healthy. Rohner, meanwhile, is increasingly interested in how cavefish survive not just overeating, but long periods of starvation, too.
On a more fundamental level, researchers still hope to figure out why the Mexican tetra evolved into cave forms while any number of other Mexican river fish that also regularly end up in caves did not. (Globally, there are more than 200 cave-adapted fish species, but species that also still have populations on the surface are quite rare.) "Presumably, there is something about the tetras' genetic makeup that makes it easier for them to adapt," says Riddle.
Though cavefish are now well-established lab animals used in research and are easy to purchase for that purpose, preserving them in the wild will be important to safeguard the lessons they still hold for us. "There are hundreds of millions of the surface fish," says Rohner, but cavefish populations are smaller and more vulnerable to pressures like pollution and people drawing water from caves during droughts.
One of Riddle's students, David Perez Guerra, is now involved in a committee to support cavefish conservation. And researchers themselves are increasingly careful, too. "The tissues of the fish collected during our lab's last field trip benefited nine different labs," Riddle says. "We wasted nothing."
Journal Reference:
The energetic cost of vision and the evolution of eyeless Mexican cavefish, (DOI: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.1500363)
Central Role for the Lens in Cave Fish Eye Degeneration, (DOI: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.289.5479.631)
Adaptation to low parasite abundance affects immune investment and immunopathological responses of cavefish, Nature Ecology & Evolution (DOI: 10.1038/s41559-020-1234-2)
The metabolome of Mexican cavefish shows a convergent signature highlighting sugar, antioxidant, and Ageing-Related metabolites, (DOI: 10.7554/eLife.74539)
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An Empty Strip And Fewer Tips: Is Las Vegas In Trouble?:
Gloria Valdez has made a living as a hostess at a steakhouse at the D Casino in downtown Las Vegas for 15 years, surviving through the economic crisis of the COVID-19 pandemic. But she says she's never seen business this bad.
"The pandemic was something that was worldwide, and we had the hope that everything would get better," says the 38-year-old single mother of two. "We're not sure if and when this is gonna stop."
Las Vegas—the city infamous for wedding chapels, 24/7 casinos, and live entertainment—is experiencing a slump in visitors. The destination hosted some 3.1 million tourists in June—marking an 11.3% decline compared to the same month last year, according to a report by the Las Vegas Convention Center. International visitors were down by some 13% in the same month and hotel occupancy is down nearly 15%.
The numbers are catching up to a story being told by locals and visitors for several months now, of an eerily empty Vegas Strip and deserted casino floors.
Who and what is to blame for the slump is a matter of fierce debate. Some blame rising prices, others have attributed Vegas's fall to the rise of other vacation destinations like Nashville, while the Las Vegas Convention Center Authority attributed the downturn to "economic uncertainty and weaker consumer confidence."
Ted Pappageorge, secretary-treasurer of the Culinary Union, calls it the "Trump slump."
"If you tell the whole world that they're not welcome, they're not going to come," says Pappageorge. "The lifeblood for Las Vegas is Southern California. What folks are telling our members is that the raids and crazy tariffs and this uncertainty, [are causing] people to pull back."
Data indicates that one in five [PDF] tourists who came to Vegas in 2024 traveled from California. Just under one in four workers in the state of Nevada as a whole are immigrants. And while there have been reports of Las Vegas workers who are fearful of being impacted by the ICE raids—which have mounted in recent months due to Trump's mass deportation plan— visitors may feel at risk, too.
Whatever the cause, the impact is clear to anyone who lives and works in Vegas. Valdez, a 25-year Vegas resident, sees it in the dwindling number of tourists arriving at her restaurant for a bite to eat. "We barely have reservations at the steakhouse," she says. "Sometimes we have 10-20 at most."
Vegas has typically been a tourism stronghold in the U.S. More than 40 million people visited the desert destination in 2024, generating some $55.1 billion for the tourism industry. But declines in visits to Las Vegas have been recorded every month this year.
The shortfall is affecting workers' bottom line. Holly Lang, a 47-year-old cocktail waitress at MGM Grand on the iconic Vegas Strip, recognizes that her weekly tip income can starkly vary week-to-week, but recent trends point to a downward decline. "I'm seeing a lot less ups than I normally would," she says. "When the economy is shaky, travel is one of the first things to go. If people are uncertain about things, we're an expendable thing for them. They're also not going on vacation if they're uncomfortable," she says.
"We've definitely got a lot less foot traffic and a lot less people gambling," she says. "A lot of the tables are empty."
The U.S. is projected to lose $12.5 billion in international visitor spending, a decline of more than 22%, according to a May report from the World Travel and Tourism Council (WTTC). The U.S. was the only country projected to experience a decline among the other 184 countries assessed by the council.
"While other nations are rolling out the welcome mat, the U.S. government is putting up the 'closed' sign," said WTTC president and CEO Julia Simpson. Double-digit drops in international arrival data this March from important foreign markets including the U.K., Germany, South Korea, Spain, Ireland, and Ecuador, have also been recorded.
Canada, which topped the chart as the premier international market for visitors arriving in Las Vegas on a direct flight for the past three years, has also experienced sharp drops. Return trips to Canada from the U.S. as a whole fell 22% in June amid boycotts as Trump calls for Canada to become the 51st state and enacts higher tariffs against his northern neighbor.
Some businesses started making staff cuts ahead of 2025. In November, MGM Grand had a round of layoffs, followed by another round in the following spring. Pappageorge says that seasonal reductions in the workforce are typical for the area. "Twenty-five percent of our workers in these big resort hotels are part-time. They're called the steady extra board because we have ups and downs and under normal visitation," he says. "The question is: 'Is this Trump slump here to stay? Or is it something that is going to pass?' Our members are very concerned."
Earlier this year, Valdez had her hours reduced, meaning she now works for four days instead of five. She says employees have been offered greater vacation time off and many have had their schedules moved around, contributing to her job anxieties.
Fontainebleau, a casino on the Vegas strip, laid off an estimated dozens of workers earlier this May, according to the Las Vegas Review-Journal. It described the layoffs as a "customary practice in every industry" in a statement at the time. Resorts World has also reported layoffs this year.
Some have taken to social media to point out how the tourism decline is affecting their bottom line. "Last year, around this time I made $300-$500 in tips, and today I just walked home with $124," one TikTok user who identified herself as a waitress on the Strip said.
The tourist numbers this year sharply contrast with the post-pandemic tourist boom in Las Vegas, which at one point exceeded visitation levels from 2019. Yet, some casinos have still fared positively. This June, the gaming industry across the state of Nevada made $1.33 billion, up 3.5% over June 2024.
But Pappageorge says that gaming revenue is just one prong of the entire tourism industry. And those who are at risk of losing their job feel limited in their alternative options. "When I moved here in '96 there were so many jobs here I could pick and choose," says Lang. "And right now, people in our service industry are having a hard time finding those jobs. It's not what it used to be."
Lang adds: "The whole city is affected by whatever goes down on the Strip."
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Scientific American turns 180 this year, and recently celebrated with a collection of print features about times in history when science has seemingly done a complete pivot—a 180-degree turn...
Do nerves regrow? Are the Martian canals proof of a civilization there? How large is the planet (planetoid?) Pluto? How well have Dr. Quackenbos' observations of hypnotic effects stood the tests of the subsequent 125 years?
All published articles in a prestigious journal, reminding us to continue to question and look for reliable corroboration before believing everything we might read or be told.
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