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upstart writes:

A new study presents an innovative approach to CO2 removal that addresses two environmental crises at once:

Experts estimate that the global production and disposal of plastics emits nearly 2 billion tons of greenhouse gases per year. The vast majority of these materials end up in landfills, but what if we could repurpose some of that waste to remove planet-warming emissions from the atmosphere?

A team of researchers in Denmark has discovered a way to do just that. In a new study, published September 5 in the journal Science Advances, they transformed decomposed #1 plastic—also known as PET (polyethylene-terephthalate) plastic—into an efficient carbon capture material.

"The beauty of this method is that we solve a problem without creating a new one," lead author Margarita Poderyte, a chemistry PhD candidate at the University of Copenhagen, said in a release. "By turning waste into a raw material that can actively reduce greenhouse gases, we make an environmental issue part of the solution to the climate crisis."

As global temperatures rise, the need to mitigate planet-warming pollutants—such as carbon dioxide—is increasingly urgent. This has led scientists to develop ways to actively remove CO2 from the atmosphere in addition to cutting emissions. At the same time, the growing amount of plastic waste in landfills, oceans, and pretty much everywhere else on Earth has led to a global microplastics crisis that threatens human and ecosystem health.

Poderyte and her colleagues hope their new approach to carbon capture can kill two birds with one stone. Through a chemical reaction known as aminolysis, they upcycled PET plastic—mainly used in plastic bottles and food packaging—into a CO2 sorbent called BAETA.

This material has a powdery structure that can be made into pellets that are very effective at grabbing CO2 molecules. One pound of BAETA can absorb up to 0.15 pounds of CO2, which is quite efficient compared to most current commercial systems.

BAETA is also more heat-resistant than other amine sorbents, remaining stable at temperatures up to 482 degrees Fahrenheit (250 degrees Celsius). However, it requires a greater thermal energy input to reach maximum CO2 absorption and to release the captured carbon for storage or conversion to other resources. This may lead to greater energy costs, but the researchers believe BAETA can provide a scalable, cost-effective carbon capture system.

Journal Reference:https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.adv5906

Original Submission

As per The Register, many frustrated users on Reddit and other forums, and my own experiences, accessing Ubuntu's software repositories was very difficult during the weekend. According to the Ubuntu status page, security.ubuntu.com and archive.ubuntu.com began experiencing an outage during the evening (for US time zones) of September 4. Following the initial major outage, both also experienced intermittent periods of maintenance and additional outages that persisted through the weekend. Despite Canonical indicating the outages had been resolved, many users including myself experienced very slow software updates or could not access the servers altogether. From The Register's article:

When is an outage not an outage? According to Canonical's forum, it's when a 36-minute server disruption creates a multi-day backlog that leaves users unable to install or update Ubuntu systems.

Canonical's status page shows that both security.ubuntu.com and archive.ubuntu.com experienced brief issues on September 5 and 7. The incidents appeared short-lived, ending with the reassuring "All components are Operational" message. Case closed, right?

Not exactly. While Canonical's servers came back online quickly, the real problems were just beginning. Users flooded the company's forums throughout the weekend, reporting failed installations and frozen updates. The brief server outages had created a processing backlog that left Ubuntu's repositories effectively broken for days.

"They say the outage was only 36 minutes, but two days later it still isn't working, a frustrated user told The Register yesterday.

Our source wasn't alone. A look at Canonical's forums indicated plenty of users encountering the same issue, prompting terse responses from Canonical representatives who eventaully shut down the discussion.

The Ubuntu Studio Project Leader, Erich Eickmeyer, posted: "We don't need a bunch of 'Can Confirm' and 'me too' posts. Instructions were given as to what needs to happen as 1) a workaround, and 2) what you need to do to get the repos working (you can't)."

There are a large number of Ubuntu mirrors, many of which seemed to function properly during the outage. Tools like mirrorselect can find the fastest mirror for a user, and GUI users can select a mirror from a dropdown list using the "Software & Updates" tool. However, it's still up to command line users to manually update their Apt sources file to the mirror.

The issue seems to be mostly resolved, though I have not been able to find an official explanation from Canonical about the reason for the extended inaccessibility and slowness of their servers. Transparency would be very welcome to this Ubuntu user, especially to provide authoritative information about whether the issues were due to an attack of some sort.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

JetBlue planes will start using Project Kuiper satellite Wi-Fi in 2027:

Amazon's new broadband satellite constellation just scored a big win.

The company announced on Thursday (Sept. 4) that JetBlue will start using Wi-Fi provided by Project Kuiper satellites on its flights in 2027. It's the first such commitment Amazon has received from an airline, a number of which have already signed up to use the services of a competitor — SpaceX's Starlink megaconstellation.

[...] Project Kuiper is still in the early stages of construction; just 102 of its planned 3,200 satellites have reached low Earth orbit (LEO) to date.

But all 102 of those spacecraft have gone up in the past four months, on four separate rocket launches. And the company plans to move even faster going forward.

"We're continuing to accelerate our production, processing and deployment rates," Amazon representatives said in the same statement. "Our goal is to begin delivering service to our first customers later this year, and to roll out more widely as we add coverage and capacity to the network."

Amazon's Announcement

JetBlue's Announcement

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Congress and Trump may compromise on the SLS rocket by axing its costly upper stage:

There are myriad questions about how NASA's budget process will play out in the coming weeks, with the start of the new fiscal year on October 1 looming.

For example, the Trump administration may seek to shut off dozens of science missions that are either already in space or in development. Although Congress has signaled a desire to keep these missions active, absent a confirmed budget, the White House has made plans to turn off the lights.

Some answers may be forthcoming this week, as the House Appropriations Committee will take up the Commerce, Justice, and Science budget bill on Wednesday morning. However great uncertainty remains about whether there will be a budget passed by October 1 (unlikely), a continuing resolution, or a government shutdown.

Behind the scenes, discussions are also taking place about NASA's Artemis Program in general and the future of the Space Launch System rocket specifically.

From the beginning, the second Trump administration has sought to cancel the costly, expendable rocket. Some officials wanted to end the rocket immediately,  but eventually the White House decided to push for cancellation after Artemis III. This seemed prudent because it allowed the United States the best possible chance to land humans back on the Moon before China got there, and then transition to a more affordable lunar program as quickly as possible.

Congress, particularly US Sen. Ted. Cruz, R-Texas, was not amenable. And so, in supplemental funding as part of the "One Big Beautiful Bill," Cruz locked in billions of dollars to ensure that Artemis IV and Artemis V flew on the SLS rocket, with the promise of additional missions.

Since the release of its budget proposal in May, which called for an end to the SLS rocket after Artemis III, the White House has largely been silent, offering no response to Congress. However that changed last week, when interim NASA Administrator Sean Duffy addressed the issue on a podcast hosted by one of the agency's public relations officials, Gary Jordan:

Here is my one concern. If Artemis I, Artemis II, and Artemis III are all $4 billion a launch, $4 billion a launch. At $4 billion a launch, you don't have a Moon program. It just, I don't think that exists. We have to bring the price down. And so I have to think about and work with members of Congress. What does Artemis IV, V, and VI look like? But to spend that much money in thinking about what we have to do to have a sustained presence, I think becomes very, very challenging.

And so what? What is the answer? I don't know, but those are things that I think about, because you look at what the private sector has done for access to space. For the private sector, again, you can, you can have a satellite and get it into space for, you know, a million, little over a million dollars, like that was unheard of 20 years ago. What's happening to drive the price down of these, of these vehicles. That's what we have to think about, because the $4 billion figure just is too massive to think we can be sustainable at that number.

upstart writes:

Brain scans reveal a common neural signature when people see red, green or yellow:

It's a late-night debate in college dorms across the world: Is my red the same as your red? Two neuroscientists weigh in on this classic "Intro to Philosophy" puzzler in research published September 8 in the Journal of Neuroscience. Their answer is a resounding maybe.

There were two possibilities when it comes to how brains perceive color, says Andreas Bartels of the University of Tübingen and the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics in Germany. Perhaps everyone's brain is unique, with bespoke snowflake patterns of nerve cells responding when a person sees red. Or it could be that seeing red kicks off a standard, predictable pattern of brain activity that doesn't vary much from person to person.

The answer is overwhelmingly the second option, the new study suggests. "There are commonalities across brains," Bartels says. Along with colleague Michael Bannert, Bartels first monitored the activity of nerve cells spread across visual brain areas as 15 people saw shades of reds, greens and yellows. The team then used those benchmarks to predict what color a person was looking at, based solely on the individual's pattern of brain activity.

The results show that neural reactions to colors are somewhat standard and don't seem to vary much from person to person. But these neuroanatomical findings can't answer the question of how it feels to see red, Bartels says. How brain activity creates subjective inner experiences is a much bigger and thornier question about consciousness, one that will no doubt continue to be debated for a long time.

Journal Reference: Michael M. Bannert and Andreas Bartels, Large-scale color biases in the retinotopic functional architecture are region specific and shared across human brains, J. Neuro Science, 8 September 2025, e2717202025; DOI: 10.1523/JNEUROSCI.2717-20.2025

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Microsoft software reselling dispute heads back to UK court:

Microsoft's tussle with UK-based reseller ValueLicensing over the sale of secondhand licenses returns to the UK's Competition Appeal Tribunal this week, with the Windows behemoth now claiming that selling pre-owned Office and Windows software is unlawful.

ValueLicensing's representatives say this week's trial - due to start tomorrow - will "address whether the entire pre-owned license market was lawful – with Microsoft arguing that it was not lawful to resell pre-owned Office and Windows software at all."

This stems from a May 2025 agreement that the scope of copyright issues now central to Microsoft's defense needs to be determined.

The case has the potential to blow a hole in the European reselling market. According to ValueLicensing, "if Microsoft's argument is correct, it would mean that the entire resale market in Europe should not exist."

The ValueLicensing case has rumbled on for years, beginning with allegations that Microsoft stifled the supply of pre-owned licenses by offering attractive subscription deals to public and private sector organizations in return for the surrender of perpetual licenses. ValueLicensing (and companies like it) operated a business model based on organizations selling their perpetual licenses and resellers selling them on to customers at a discount.

ValueLicensing alleged that Microsoft added clauses to customer contracts aimed at restricting the resale of perpetual licenses. In return for accepting those contracts, customers were given a discount.

Judging by the case so far [PDF], it appears that this practice was a policy at Microsoft.

According to ValueLicensing, Microsoft's allegedly anti-competitive antics and attempts to eliminate the secondhand software license market have cost it £270 million in lost profits.

Microsoft's argument [PDF] is that it owns the copyright to the non-program bits of Office – the graphical user interface, for example – to which rules around software reselling (the European Software Directive) do not apply.

ValueLicensing boss Jonathan Horley noted the timing of the copyright claim. "It's a remarkable coincidence that their defense against ValueLicensing has changed so dramatically from being a defense of 'we didn't do it' to a defense of 'the market should never have existed,'" he said.

Microsoft's contention is not without precedent. The Tom Kabinet judgment drew a line between the secondary market for software programs and e-books. Reselling a software program isn't a problem, while reselling something like an e-book is. Microsoft's argument for its software appears to be similar.

The tech giant is facing other actions before the UK's Competition Appeal Tribunal. Alexander Wolfson has brought a similar claim against Microsoft, potentially worth billions, regarding the purchase of certain licenses for specific products. Dr Maria Luisa Stasi has brought another regarding the cost of running Microsoft software on platforms like AWS and GCP compared to Azure.

The Register asked Microsoft to comment and will update the article should the company respond.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Multiple undersea cable cuts in the Red Sea, hampering internet performance:

Microsoft was forced to reroute Azure traffic on Saturday, September 6, after two major submarine cable systems were severed in the Red Sea, triggering latency spikes and degraded performance for cloud users across South Asia and the Gulf. The company confirmed the disruption via Azure system status messages just before 06:00 UTC, saying customers whose traffic normally passes through the Middle East "may experience service disruptions."

Those reroutes currently remain in effect, with Microsoft noting that they expect "higher latency on some traffic" into September 7 as regional carriers continue to triage routes. Cloud operations outside the affected path remain unaffected, but workloads relying on Asia-Europe connectivity may still feel the impact.

The damage occurred on the SEA-ME-WE-4 and IMEWE cable systems, both of which run through the high-risk corridor near Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. The location and systems were first flagged by NetBlocks, which attributed the disruption to a "series of subsea cable outages" causing Internet slowdowns in Pakistan, India, and parts of the Gulf. Microsoft has not named the specific cables involved.

From a technical perspective, these aren't just any cables: They're two of the main long-haul systems connecting Asia to Europe, carrying traffic not only for consumer Internet but also hyperscalers like Google and Meta. Losing just one of these critical pathways can overload alternate routes, spike latency, and increase packet loss across various cloud-dependent applications, such as multiplayer gaming and large file downloads.

Microsoft engineers have rerouted traffic via alternative, longer paths while monitoring network telemetry. Repair ships for undersea cables are scarce, however, and the Red Sea remains a geopolitically sensitive area, making any physical repairs an inevitably slow process. Such repairs can take weeks because repair crews must precisely locate themselves above the damaged cable.

This isn't the first time that the Red Sea has caused headaches. In February 2024, multiple submarine cables, including AE-1, SEACOM, and EIG, were damaged by an unknown cause. Due to the sensitivity of the location, cable operators are currently unable to give a timeline for full repairs, but it was reported in July 2024 that repairs were completed on the AAE-1 cable. In January 2025, the same cable suffered a shunt fault off the coast of Qatar, which was resolved two weeks later.

As of now, Azure remains operational, but enterprises reliant on cross-region connectivity between Europe, South Asia, and the Middle East should brace for slower connections in the meantime.

Original Submission

looorg writes:

Since there is apparently nothing these days that can't be improved by some AI. The Amazon fueled AI-company Fable Studio wants to re-create the chopped 43 minutes of Orson Welles movie "The Magnificent Ambersons". The recreation will be done from set images and other sources. The original was re-cut after RKO thought the movie was too long and that the ending was not happy enough. A new ending was created.

But it won't have any commercial re-release and is purely a noncommercial academic project, due to rights and ownership. Also it might not be Welles more famous work so there might not be anything more then a minor cult following and not any kind of commercial success. So they do it cause they can and "AI" something something.

https://www.indiewire.com/news/breaking-news/lost-ending-orson-welles-magnificent-ambersons-ai-remake-1235148945/

Original Submission

upstart writes:

A spectacular glacial demise, 40 years in the making:

Nearly 40 years after breaking away from the Filchner – Ronne Ice Shelf in Antarctica, the A23a iceberg is finally beginning to melt and merge into the ocean for good. A23a ranks among the oldest and largest icebergs ever recorded and remains the biggest block of frozen freshwater on the planet.

Nicknamed the "megaberg," A23a weighed roughly one trillion tons earlier this year. Although it has since lost more than half its original mass, the iceberg still measures about 1,770 square kilometers in area and spans 60 kilometers at its widest point. Researchers have tracked its decline using satellite imagery from the European Copernicus observatory.

Recent data shows that A23a has begun to fragment into "smaller" pieces, some as large as 400 square kilometers. These chunks are further breaking apart into even smaller icebergs, many of which still pose navigational hazards for ships at sea.

According to Andrew Meijers, a physical oceanographer with the British Antarctic Survey, the changes underway in A23a can be described as nothing short of "dramatic." The megaberg is essentially nearing the end of its life, "rotting" from beneath as it drifts into waters that are simply too warm to sustain it. Constant melting is now unavoidable.

The process will continue in the weeks ahead, Meijers said, until A23a is no longer clearly identifiable. The iceberg originally calved from Antarctica's massive ice shelf in 1986, before "grounding" in the Weddell Sea, where it remained stuck on the seafloor for more than 30 years.

It finally broke free in 2020, carried by Antarctic currents into the South Atlantic Ocean. In March 2025, A23a briefly posed a threat to penguin and seal colonies after becoming stranded in shallow waters off South Georgia Island, though it moved on a couple of months later.

Together with parts of the Arctic ice pack, Antarctica's icebergs contain some of the planet's largest reserves of frozen freshwater. But they are melting slowly and inexorably, with profound consequences for human activity and natural habitats worldwide.

Original Submission

looorg writes:

https://carbuzz.com/mazda-6-stroke-hydrogen-combustion-engine/

This time, though, Mazda has outdone itself. The company just obtained a patent for a six stroke engine. What does it do with the extra strokes, you're wondering? It separates the hydrogen and carbon in gasoline so it can burn just the hydrogen, thus taking the carbon out of the system. Easy, right? No, not easy. And it gets even wilder from there.

It works like this: The engine makes hydrogen from gasoline using its own heat and a catalyst. It then burns that hydrogen and stores the carbon to be removed later. The result is that you can burn gasoline with zero CO2, at least most of the time.

The patent is called "fuel reforming system for vehicle," which does almost nothing to describe the magic going on here. Mazda's engineers describe it as a way to recover carbon, improve thermal efficiency, and give you a car that runs carbon-neutral.

The engine only stores small amounts of hydrogen, so it doesn't need complex tanks. If there isn't enough hydrogen ready for use, it can just run the old-fashioned way on gasoline until hydrogen is ready. It could save the internal combustion engine from eventual extinction, but there's just one problem. This is pretty much the most complex solution from Mazda we've ever seen. And that's saying something.

A normal engine works like this: In cycle one (aka the intake stroke), air is pulled in on a piston down stroke, and fuel is added. Cycle two (compression stroke) sees the piston move up, compressing the mix so that the spark plug can ignite it and push it down (the power stroke) through cycle three. Cycle four, the exhaust stroke, pushes out the exhaust gases as the piston moves up. And the process repeats from there.

This engine has those four, with some changes, and two extras. On the first cycle, air is pulled like normal. It can also open an exhaust valve to pull exhaust air in, for simpler EGR.

The next two cycles are standard – compression followed by power. Cycle four is called the re-compression stroke. In this cycle, the exhaust air is pushed out through a different valve. This valve routes the exhaust air through what's called a decomposer.

Mazda's decomposer is like a catalytic converter without expensive metals. Right in front of it is a fuel injector that squirts gasoline into the hot exhaust air.

The hot exhaust and fuel mixture enters the reformer and the carbon – pure carbon, it's not CO2 yet – sticks to the catalyst. Gasoline is a mix of hydrocarbons like octane (C8H18). The reformer separates and stores both.

A carbon recovery unit holds the carbon that comes out of the reaction. It would be emptied or removed when you go in for service. The carbon that comes out can be used in steel or for pigments (and other uses) or simply stored.

Cycle five, the re-expansion cycle, pulls the remaining air back into the cylinder. Then it's pushed out through the exhaust valve in cycle six, which is cycle four in a normal engine.

Mazda's patent includes some variations. Two of them use slightly different methods in the catalyst, and one uses a four-stroke cycle where the fourth is a "scavenging cycle" that has the intake, exhaust, and reformer valves all open at the same time. Think of it like an even more complex two-stroke engine.

The idea is amazing, and certainly interesting. But the implementation is a nightmare, and its actual efficiency is questionable. In other words, it's perfect for Mazda, so perhaps we'll see some sort of production version in the years to come.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Chagas disease, which can be deadly, is now considered endemic in the U.S.:

This article was updated Sept. 2, 2025.

Chagas disease, a potentially deadly condition transmitted by an insect known as the "kissing bug," is now endemic in the United States, according to a September report issued by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The disease is already considered endemic in Latin America, where an estimated 8 million people are infected but most don't know it, the CDC says. Researchers contend that recognizing Chagas disease as endemic here will support more effective education about the condition in medical schools and better prepare physicians to identify it.

Experts estimate about 45,000 people in Los Angeles County are infected — among more than 300,000 in the United States — and fewer than 2% of them know they carry the parasite transmitted by the "kissing bug."

"Most people living with Chagas disease are unaware of their diagnosis, often until it's too late to have effective treatment," says Judith Currier, MD, chief of infectious diseases at UCLA Health.

Also known as the conenose bug, barber bug or vinchuca in Spanish, "kissing bugs" — so named because they bite people on the face — feast on human blood. After they bite, they defecate, which deposits the parasite they carry, known as T. cruzi, onto the skin.

When the bitten person scratches the itchy bite, they inadvertently rub the parasite into the wound, which is how it enters the bloodstream, explains Shaun Yang, PhD, a professor of clinical microbiology at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA.

Many people with Chagas disease are asymptomatic throughout its acute and chronic phases.

During the acute phase, which lasts about two months, some people experience severe swelling of the eyelid, "which is almost a hallmark of acute Chagas infection," Dr. Yang says. Other acute symptoms may include fever, fatigue, body aches, headache, loss of appetite, diarrhea and vomiting. But because these symptoms are similar to those of other illnesses, most people don't immediately consider the source to be infection with the T. cruzi parasite.

During the chronic phase of the disease, which can last a lifetime, about 20% of those infected will develop serious heart or digestive problems. Chagas disease can cause an enlarged heart, heart failure or cardiac arrest; an enlarged colon; or an enlarged esophagus.

Left untreated, Chagas disease "kills the heart very slowly," Dr. Yang says.

upstart writes:

But what goes up will also have to come down:

SpaceX's Dragon spacecraft has successfully reboosted the International Space Station (ISS), raising the perigee of its orbit by approximately one mile and further eroding the complex's reliance on Russian rocketry.

The reboost kit, located in the trunk of the SpaceX CRS-33 Dragon cargo spacecraft, consists of two Draco engines. The system is isolated from the rest of the spacecraft, and the demonstration was intended to show how the vehicle can maintain the ISS's altitude.

The maneuver lasted five minutes, three seconds, and the initial test burn left the outpost in an orbit of 260.9 x 256.3 miles. Managers plan to use the reboost kit again throughout fall and perform a series of longer burns.

The Northrop Grumman Cygnus cargo spacecraft can also perform limited reboosts, and SpaceX demonstrated in 2024 that the Dragon itself is capable of using its engines to nudge the ISS.

With the retirement of the Space Shuttle and the end of the European Space Agency's (ESA) ATV program, Roscosmos Progress vehicles have been regularly used to reboost the ISS.

The extra capability could be timely. Rocket and Space Corporation Energia produces the Progress spacecraft. Last week, CEO Igor Maltev reportedly [source in Russian] told employees that they needed to stop "lying to themselves and others about the state of affairs, convincing themselves and others that everything is fine with us."

The decrepit state of the Russian space program isn't a secret. One paying passenger on the country's Soyuz spacecraft told The Register that having to dodge puddles on the floor from a leaking roof while on his way to inspect his vehicle was eye-opening.

SpaceX's demonstration also shows that when the time comes, the company should be capable of producing the opposite of a reboost capability and send the ISS into the atmosphere for controlled disposal.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Defrauding search with custom malware, Potato-family exploits:

A new China-aligned cybercrime crew named GhostRedirector has compromised at least 65 Windows servers worldwide - spotted in a June internet scan - using previously undocumented malware to juice gambling sites' rankings in Google search, according to ESET researchers.

The infections began in December, although other related malware samples indicate the group has been active since at least August 2024, the security firm's threat intel team noted.

GhostRedirector uses a variety of custom tools, including two never-seen-before pieces of malware that the researchers dubbed Rungan, which is a passive C++ backdoor, and Gamshen, a malicious Internet Information Services (IIS) trojan that manipulates Google search results for Search Engine Optimization (SEO) fraud.

The victim sites then show versions of their web pages to Googlebot that would help certain gambling sites gain rank. For example, they may include fake backlinks to those gambling domains, fooling everyone's favorite search engine into thinking that those sites are highly recommended by others.

While most of the infected servers are in Brazil, Peru, Thailand, Vietnam, and the US, "we believe that GhostRedirector was more interested in targeting victims in South America and South Asia," malware researcher Fernando Tavella said in a Thursday report. Plus, he added, the gang doesn't appear to target a particular sector with victims from this campaign including education, healthcare, insurance, transportation, technology, and retail organizations.

The researchers suspect the criminals gained initial access by exploiting a probable SQL injection bug. They then used PowerShell to download Windows privilege escalation tools, droppers, and the two final payloads, Rungan and Gamshen, all from the same server: 868id[.]com

upstart writes:

The Trump family just became $5 billion richer (on paper) thanks to its latest crypto venture:

The Trumps' new digital currency WLFI began trading on Monday with about $1 billion worth of the tokens changing hands within an hour. Despite the token plunging in price on its first day of trading, the family gained as much as $5 billion in hypothetical wealth following the debut, the Wall Street Journal said in a report.

The launch was sort of a crypto version of an initial public offering: early investors who bought the token from Trump's venture World Liberty Financial were not able to sell any of it until Monday, when they got to do so with high premiums. The token is now available on major exchanges like Binance and Coinbase.

The Trump family and other founders' tokens still remain locked, but now that the digital currency is trading, those token holdings have real-world valuation. The Trump family, including the President, holds just under a quarter of all WLFI tokens, the WSJ reported.

With its current valuation, WLFI is the Trump family's most valuable asset, according to the WSJ, even more so than the property portfolio that the family was originally known for.

But crypto is volatile and prone to crashes, and the value of the tokens can shift at any time.

Monday's news was just the latest in a string of major crypto wins that the President and his family have made headlines for in the past year. Simultaneously, over the past seven months, Trump has overseen deregulatory wins for the cryptocurrency industry that helped install him in office, all the while administration officials cast aside concerns over the ethics and legality of these conflicts of interest.

upstart writes:

Microsoft shows off its latest Analog Optical Computer:

Microsoft researchers in Cambridge have unveiled its latest iteration of an Analog Optical Computer (AOC) and have inevitably incorporated AI into the technology's capabilities.

The AOC harnesses light as a medium for solving complex problems, notably optimization challenges found in the worlds of logistics, finance, and healthcare. It uses different light intensities to perform operations such as addition and multiplication. It's also considerably faster at certain problem-solving activities than traditional computers, we're told.

The prototype is built from commercially available parts, including micro-LEDs, optical lenses, and sensors from smartphone cameras. Since the underlying technology – shunting photons along fiber optic cables – is decades old, much of the hardware does not need to be expensively exotic.

While the aim is for a durable and practical machine that can operate at room temperature, and yet still be 100 times faster and 100 times more energy efficient when solving certain problems than conventional hardware, it's highly unlikely to be appear on a desktop anytime soon.

Francesca Parmigiani, the Microsoft principal research manager who leads the team developing the AOC, said the system is "not a general-purpose computer, but what we believe is that we can find a wide range of applications and real-world problems where the computer can be extremely successful."

Original Submission