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hubie writes:

The ship wasn't designed to withstand the powerful ice compression forces—and Shackleton knew it:

In 1915, intrepid British explorer Sir Ernest Shackleton and his crew were stranded for months in the Antarctic after their ship, Endurance, was trapped by pack ice, eventually sinking into the freezing depths of the Weddell Sea. Miraculously, the entire crew survived. The prevailing popular narrative surrounding the famous voyage features two key assumptions: that Endurance was the strongest polar ship of its time, and that the ship ultimately sank after ice tore away the rudder.

However, a fresh analysis reveals that Endurance would have sunk even with an intact rudder; it was crushed by the cumulative compressive forces of the Arctic ice with no single cause for the sinking. Furthermore, the ship wasn't designed to withstand those forces and Shackleton was likely well aware of that fact, according to a new paper published in the journal Polar Record. Yet he chose to embark on the risky voyage anyway.

Author Jukka Tuhkuri of Aalto University is a polar explorer and one of the leading researchers on ice worldwide. He was among the scientists on the Endurance22 mission that discovered the Endurance shipwreck in 2022, documented in a 2024 National Geographic documentary. The ship was in pristine condition partly because of the lack of wood-eating microbes in those waters. In fact, the Endurance22 expedition's exploration director, Mensun Bound, told The New York Times at the time that the shipwreck was the finest example he's ever seen; Endurance was "in a brilliant state of preservation."

[...] Once the wreck had been found, the team recorded as much as they could with high-resolution cameras and other instruments. Vasarhelyi, particularly, noted the technical challenge of deploying a remote digital 4K camera with lighting at 9,800 feet underwater, and the first deployment at that depth of photogrammetric and laser technology. This resulted in a millimeter-scale digital reconstruction of the entire shipwreck to enable close study of the finer details.

It was shortly after the Endurance22 mission found the shipwreck that Tuhkuri realized that there had never been a thorough structural analysis conducted of the vessel to confirm the popular narrative. Was Endurance truly the strongest polar ship of that time, and was a broken rudder the actual cause of the sinking? He set about conducting his own investigation to find out, analyzing Shackleton's diaries and personal correspondence, as well as the diaries and correspondence of several Endurance crew members.

janrinok writes:

https://phys.org/news/2025-09-forensic-recovers-fingerprints-ammunition-casings.html

A pioneering new test that can recover fingerprints from ammunition casing, once thought nearly impossible, has been developed by two Irish scientists.

Dr. Eithne Dempsey, and her recent Ph.D. student Dr. Colm McKeever, of the Department of Chemistry in Ireland's Maynooth University have developed a unique electrochemical method which can visualize fingerprints on brass casings, even after they have been exposed to the high temperature conditions experienced during gunfire. The study is published in the journal Forensic Chemistry.

For decades, investigators have struggled to recover fingerprints from weapons because any biological trace is usually destroyed by the high temperatures, friction and gas released after a gun is fired. As a result, criminals often abandon their weapons or casings at crime scenes, confident that they leave no fingerprint evidence behind.

"The Holy Grail in forensic investigation has always been retrieving prints from fired ammunition casings," said Dr. Dempsey. "Traditionally, the intense heat of firing destroys any biological residue. However, our technique has been able to reveal fingerprint ridges that would otherwise remain imperceptible."

The team found they could coat brass casings with a thin layer of specialized materials to make hidden fingerprint ridges visible. Unlike existing methods that need dangerous chemicals or high-powered equipment, the new process uses readily available non-toxic polymers and minimal amounts of energy to quickly reveal prints from seemingly blank surfaces.

It works by placing the brass casing of interest in an electrochemical cell containing specific chemical substances. When a small voltage is applied, chemicals in the solution are attracted to the surface, coating the spaces between fingerprint ridges and creating a clear, high contrast image of the print. The fingerprint appears within seconds as if by magic!

"Using the burnt material that remains on the surface of the casing as a stencil, we can deposit specific materials in between the gaps, allowing for the visualization," said Dr. McKeever.

Tests showed that this technique also worked on samples aged up to 16 months, demonstrating remarkable durability.

The research has significant implications for criminal investigations, where the current assumption is that firing a gun eliminates fingerprint residues on casings.

"Currently, the best case of forensic analysis of ammunition casings is to match it to the gun that fired it," said Dr. McKeever. "But we hope a method like this could match it back to the actual person who loaded the gun."

The team focused specifically on brass ammunition casings, a substance that has been traditionally resistant to fingerprint detection and is the most common type of material used globally.

The researchers believe that the test for fingerprints on brass they have developed could be adapted for other metallic surfaces, expanding its range of potential forensic applications, from firearm-related crimes to arson.

This technique uses a device called a potentiostat, which controls voltage and can be as portable as a mobile phone, making it possible to create a compact forensic testing kit.

"With this method, we have turned the ammunition casing into an electrode, allowing us to drive chemical reactions at the surface of the casing," said Dr. McKeever.

While promising, the new technology faces rigorous testing and validation before it could potentially be adopted by law enforcement agencies worldwide.

More information: Colm McKeever et al, Electrodeposition of redox materials with potential for enhanced visualisation of latent finger-marks on brass substrates and ammunition casings., Forensic Chemistry (2025). DOI: 10.1016/j.forc.2025.100663

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Guess how much of Britain's direct transatlantic data capacity runs through two cables in Bude?:

Feature The first transatlantic cable, laid in 1858, delivered a little over 700 messages before promptly dying a few weeks later. 167 years on, the undersea cables connecting the UK to the outside world process £220 billion in daily financial transactions. Now, the UK Parliament's Joint Committee on National Security Strategy (JCNSS) has told the government that it has to do a better job of protecting them.

The Committee's report, released on September 19, calls the government "too timid" in its approach to protecting the cables that snake from the UK to various destinations around the world. It warns that "security vulnerabilities abound" in the UK's undersea cable infrastructure, when even a simple anchor-drag can cause major damage.

There are 64 cables connecting the UK to the outside world, according to the report, carrying most of the country's internet traffic. Satellites can't shoulder the data volumes involved, are too expensive, and only account for around 5 percent of traffic globally.

These cables are invaluable to the UK economy, but they're also difficult to protect. They are heavily shielded in the shallow sea close to those points. That's because accidental damage from fishing operations and other vessels is common. On average, around 200 cables suffer faults each year. But as they get further out, the shielding is less robust. Instead, the companies that lay the cables rely on the depth of the sea to do its job (you'll be pleased to hear that sharks don't generally munch on them).

The report praises a strong cable infrastructure, and admits that in some areas at least we have the redundancy in the cable infrastructure to handle disruptions. For example, it notes that 75 percent of UK transatlantic traffic routes through two cables that come ashore in Bude, Cornwall. That seems like quite the vulnerability, but it acknowledges that we have plenty of infrastructure to route around if anything happened to them. There is "no imminent threat to the UK's national connectivity," it soothes.

But it simultaneously cautions against adopting what it describes as "business-as-usual" views in the industry. The government "focuses too much on having 'lots of cables' and pays insufficient attention to the system's actual ability to absorb unexpected shocks," it frets. It warns that "the impacts on connectivity would be much more serious," if onward connections to Europe suffered as part of a coordinated attack.

"While our national connectivity does not face immediate danger, we must prepare for the possibility that our cables can be threatened in the event of a security crisis," it says.

An Anonymous Coward writes:

https://www.abortretry.fail/p/the-qnx-operating-system

Gordon Bell and Dan Dodge were finishing their time at the University of Waterloo in Ontario in 1979. In pursuit of their masters degrees, they'd worked on a system called Thoth in their real-time operating systems course. Thoth was interesting not only for having been real-time and having featured synchronous message passing, but also for originally having been written in the B programming langue. It was then rewritten in the UW-native Eh language (fitting for a Canadian university), and then finally rewritten in Zed. It is this last, Zed-written, version of Thoth to which Bell and Dodge would have been exposed. Having always been written in a high-level language, the system was portable, and programs were the same regardless of the underlying hardware. Both by convention and by design, Thoth strongly encouraged programs to be structured as networks of communicating processes. As the final project for the RTOS course, students were expected to implement a real-time system of their own. This experience was likely pivotal to their next adventure.

A very deep and excellent dive into the world/history of QNX:

Original Submission

janrinok writes:

https://phys.org/news/2025-09-human-skin-cells-fertilisable-eggs.html

Scientists said Tuesday they have turned human skin cells into eggs and fertilized them with sperm in the lab for the first time—a breakthrough that is hoped to one day let infertile people have children.

The technology is still years away from potentially becoming available to aspiring parents, the US-led team of scientists warned.

But outside experts said the proof-of-concept research could eventually change the meaning of infertility, which affects one in six people worldwide.

If successful, the technology called in-vitro gametogenesis (IVG) would allow older women or women who lack eggs for other reasons to genetically reproduce, Paula Amato, the co-author of a new study announcing the achievement, told AFP.

"It also would allow same-sex couples to have a child genetically related to both partners," said Amato, a researcher at the Oregon Health & Science University in the United States.

Scientists have been making significant advances in this field in recent years, with Japanese researchers announcing in July they had created mice with two biological fathers.

But the new study, published in the journal Nature Communications, marks a major advance by using DNA from humans, rather than mice.

The scientists first removed the nucleus from normal skin cells and transferred them into a donor egg which had its nucleus removed. This technique, called somatic cell nuclear transfer, was used to clone Dolly the sheep in 1996.

However a problem still had to be overcome: skin cells have 46 chromosomes, but eggs have 23.

The scientists managed to remove these extra chromosomes using a process they are calling "mitomeiosis", which mimics how cells normally divide.

They created 82 developing eggs called oocytes, which were then fertilized by sperm via in vitro fertilization (IVF).

After six days, less than 9% of the embryos developed to the point that they could hypothetically be transferred to the uterus for a standard IVF process.

However the embryos displayed a range of abnormalities, and the experiment was ended.

linuxrocks123 writes:

There have been a lot of recent stories about Google restricting sideloading to apps from developers who have registered with Google. Google has issued the very important clarification that adb will still be able to used to sideload unverified apps: https://support.google.com/android-developer-console/answer/16561738

So, if you own your phone, you can still install whatever you want on it. You just might have to install adb and enable the Developer Options menu first.

Original Submission

janrinok writes:

https://phys.org/news/2025-10-ultra-thin-sodium-alternative-gold.html

From solar panels to next-generation medical devices, many emerging technologies rely on materials that can manipulate light with extreme precision. These materials—called plasmonic materials—are typically made from expensive metals like gold or silver. But what if a cheaper, more abundant metal could do the job just as well or better?

That's the question a team of researchers set out to explore. The challenge? While sodium is abundant and lightweight, it's also notoriously unstable and difficult to work with in the presence of air or moisture—two unavoidable parts of real-world conditions. Until now, this has kept it off the table for practical optical applications.

Researchers from Yale University, Oakland University, and Cornell University have teamed up to change that. By developing a new technique for structuring sodium into ultra-thin, precisely patterned films, they found a way to stabilize the metal and make it perform exceptionally well in light-based applications.

Their approach, published in the journal ACS Nano, involved combining thermally-assisted spin coating with phase-shift photolithography—essentially using heat and light to craft nanoscopic surface patterns that trap and guide light in powerful ways.

Even more impressively, the team used ultrafast laser spectroscopy to observe what happens when these sodium surfaces interact with light on time scales measured in trillionths of a second. The results were surprising: sodium's electrons responded in ways that differ from traditional metals, suggesting it could offer new advantages for light-based technologies like photocatalysis, sensing, and energy conversion.

More information: Conrad A. Kocoj et al, Ultrafast Plasmon Dynamics of Low-Loss Sodium Metasurfaces, ACS Nano (2025). DOI: 10.1021/acsnano.5c04946

Original Submission

mrpg writes:

https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/society-equity/apple-removes-ice-tracking-apps-after-pressure-by-trump-administration-2025-10-03/:

Apple said on Thursday that it had removed ICEBlock and other similar ICE-tracking apps from its App Store after it was contacted by President Donald Trump's administration, in a rare instance of apps being taken down due to a U.S. federal government demand.

Alphabet's Google also removed similar apps on Thursday for policy violations, but the company said it was not approached by the Justice Department before taking the action.

The app alerts users to Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents in their area, which the Justice Department says could increase the risk of assault on U.S. agents.

[...] Apple removed more than 1,700 apps from its App Store in 2024 in response to government demands, but the vast majority — more than 1,300 — came from China, followed by Russia with 171 and South Korea with 79.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

First Dark Matter Sub-Halo Found In The Milky Way:

There are plenty of theories about what dark matter is and how it might be gravitationally affecting the universe. However, proving those theories out is hard since it hardly ever interacts with anything, especially on "small" scales like galaxies. So when a research team claims to have found evidence for dark matter in our own galaxy, it's worth taking a look at how. A new paper from Dr. Surkanya Chakrabati and her lab at the University of Alabama at Huntsville (UAH) does just that. They found evidence for a dark matter "sub-halo" in the galactic neighborhood, by looking at signals from binary pulsars.

A sub-halo is a clumping of dark matter that is brought together inside of a larger "halo" that is thought to form the core of galaxies. Since dark matter primarily interacts through gravity, going theory suggests that it should attract "baryonic" (i.e. normal) matter when it clumps together. This clumping is thought to the scaffolding that galaxies are built on.

Sub-halos are even denser groupings of dark matter that coalesce because of their gravitational attraction. Since they are relatively small compared to the big dark matter halos they are contained in, they can be difficult to detect. To do so, cosmologists would have to find a gravitational signal that deviates from what would be expected given the normal matter surrounding the sub-halo. So far, no one has been able to isolate that kind of signal, despite looking throughout our galactic neighborhood.

An Anonymous Coward writes:

Instagram says it is not listening to users' microphones to serve ads:

Adam Mosseri, the head of Instagram, has shared a video on his account to dismiss the myth that Instagram is actively listening to users, to show them relevant ads. Now, why would you say that? Unless, it was true! Right?

Jokes aside, the timing couldn't be worse. Yesterday, Meta announced that it will be updating its privacy policy by December 16. Why? Because Meta says that it will use the data collected from user interactions with its AI, to sell targeted ads across its social networks. So, how is this going to work, privacy-wise? Well, that's another story.

The story continues at https://www.ghacks.net/2025/10/02/instagram-says/

Original Submission

janrinok writes:

https://phys.org/news/2025-10-track-medicines-hitchhike-cholesterol.html

Researchers at The University of Queensland have developed a test that could change our understanding of cholesterol and its potential to ferry deadly cancer messages and life-saving medicines around our body.

Technology developed by Ph.D. scholar Raluca Ghebosu and Associate Professor Joy Wolfram has been designed to assess how different medicines bind to cholesterol particles in our bloodstream.

Ghebosu said mapping this cholesterol "hitchhiking" was crucial to establishing how long medicines remain active, which organs they travel to and, ultimately, how effective they are.

"The problem is that this process requires costly, complex, and time-consuming techniques," Ghebosu said.

"All are significant barriers to what could be a crucial breakthrough in medicine. Our test seeks to simplify the mapping process while also making it much cheaper to get answers."

The new test, named lipoprotein association fluorometry (LAF), was developed at UQ's Australian Institute for Bioengineering and Nanotechnology (AIBN) under the mentorship of Associate Professor Wolfram from the AIBN and the UQ School of Chemical Engineering.

Ghebosu said LAF works by using a fluorescent signal to detect when a "molecular handshake" occurs between cholesterol particles and test agents such as medicines.

Crucially, each test is low cost and delivers results in an hour instead of a week.

"By predicting cholesterol binding to various synthetic nanoparticles—as well as polymers, proteins, peptides, and small molecules—we are better placed to uncover information beneficial to drug development," Ghebosu said.

upstart writes:

Forget Sparta - Leonidas wiped out all 61 drones in the demo:

Drones have become one of the most important elements of modern warfare, which is why finding effective ways of disabling them is so important. US defense technology firm Epirus has developed a countermeasure that could interest a lot of nations: a high-powered microwave (HPM) weapon that recently demonstrated how it can down 49 drones with a single blast.

[...] During the demo, Leonidas successfully disabled all 61 drones taking part. The headline feat was taking down a 49-drone swarm with a single shot.

[...] Because of how cheaply they can be procured, huge numbers of drones are being used in warfare and for reconnaissance. Leonidas' bursts of electromagnetic energy are designed to disable or destroy the electronics inside hostile drones, including swarms.

The latest second-generation of Leonidas introduces gallium nitride semiconductors. This enables a more compact, reliable, and scalable system compared to legacy microwave weapons that relied on bulkier magnetron tubes.

[...] Leonidas' software-defined architecture allows operators to adjust waveforms on the fly, tailoring effects to different targets and minimizing risks to nearby friendly systems. The modular build also means the weapon can be deployed in multiple configurations, from vehicle-mounted platforms to fixed-site defenses.

Epirus has also developed specialized versions of the weapon, such as Leonidas Expeditionary, optimized for rapid deployment by ground forces, and Leonidas H2O, designed for maritime operations capable of disabling small boat motors.

[...] The latest Leonidas weapon comes at a time when AI-powered drone swarms move closer to frontline deployment. Able to fly and fight as one coordinated force, these drones could overwhelm traditional air defenses, which is why HPM weapons are becoming increasingly important.

Original Submission

janrinok writes:

https://phys.org/news/2025-10-graphene-reveals-dome-superconductivity-electric.html

Superconductivity is a phenomenon where certain materials can conduct electricity with zero resistance. Obviously, this has enormous technological advantages, which makes superconductivity one of the most intensely researched fields in the world.

But superconductivity is not straightforward. Take, for example, the double-dome effect. When scientists plot where superconductivity appears in material as they change how many electrons are in it, the material's superconducting regions sometimes look like two separate "domes" on a graph.

In other words, the material becomes superconducting, then stops, then becomes superconducting again as we keep changing its electron density.

Double-dome superconductivity has been seen before in some complex materials, such as graphene. Graphene is essentially a sheet of carbon atoms just one atom thick linked together in a honeycomb pattern. Still, it has transformed the field of quantum materials research because it features some really strange effects.

For example, when we stack two graphene layers and twist them at specific angles, the electrons in the graphene behave in new and unexpected ways, creating quantum phases like magnetism, electrical insulation, and, of course, superconductivity.

But there is an even more complex structure of graphene that takes this further by adding a third layer, making the system even more complex and tunable: Magic-angle twisted trilayer graphene (MATTG). With MATTG, researchers can now observe and control a double-dome pattern of superconductivity that was previously only suspected in graphene systems.

In a new study published in Nature Physics, a team led by Mitali Banerjee at EPFL, together with partners in Switzerland, the U.K., and Japan, has shown that MATTG allows direct control of the double-dome superconductivity pattern. By carefully stacking the layers and adjusting the electric field, the researchers could fine-tune the system and track where superconductivity appeared or disappeared as they varied the number of electrons.

Their experiments, supported by theory, revealed that two distinct superconducting regions—the domes—show up as they gradually changed the electron count in MATTG. The work sheds light on how unconventional superconductivity can be created and controlled in 2D materials.

AnonTechie writes:

Harvard researchers hail quantum computing breakthrough with machine that can run for two hours — atomic loss quashed by experimental design, systems that can run forever just 3 years away

A group of physicists from Harvard and MIT just built a quantum computer that ran continuously for more than two hours. Although it doesn't sound like much versus regular computers (like servers that run 24/7 for months, if not years), this is a huge breakthrough in quantum computing. As reported by The Harvard Crimson, most current quantum computers run for only a few milliseconds, with record-breaking machines only able to operate for a little over 10 seconds.

Although two hours is still a bit limited, researchers say that the concept behind this could allow future quantum computers to run for much longer, maybe even indefinitely. "There is still a way to go and scale from where we are now," says research associate Tout T. Wang, "But the roadmap is now clear based on the breakthrough experiments that we've done here at Harvard."

[Source]: The Harvard Crimson

Original Submission

AI Startup Valuations Raise Bubble Fears as Funding Surges

mrpg writes:

https://www.reuters.com/legal/transactional/ai-startup-valuations-raise-bubble-fears-funding-surges-2025-10-03/

Artificial intelligence startups are attracting record sums of venture capital, but some of the world's largest investors warned that early-stage valuations are starting to look frothy, senior investment executives said on Friday.

"There's a little bit of a hype bubble going on in the early-stage venture space," said Bryan Yeo, group chief investment officer at Singapore sovereign wealth fund GIC (GIC.UL), as part of a panel discussion at the Milken Institute Asia Summit 2025 in Singapore.

"Any company startup with an AI label will be valued right up there at huge multiples of whatever the small revenue (is)," he said. "That might be fair for some companies and probably not for others."

In the first quarter of 2025, AI startups raised $73.1 billion globally, accounting for 57.9% of all venture capital funding, according to PitchBook. The surge was driven by funding rounds like OpenAI's $40 billion capital raising, as investors raced to catch the AI wave.

"Market expectations could be way ahead of what the technology could deliver," Yeo said. "We're seeing a major AI capex boom today. It is masking some of the potential weaknesses that might be going on in the economy."

Todd Sisitsky, president of alternative asset manager TPG said the fear of missing out is dangerous for investors, though he added that views were divided on whether the AI sector had formed a bubble.

Some AI firms are hitting $100 million in revenue within months, he said, while others in early-stage ventures command valuations at between $400 million and $1.2 billion per employee. He said that was "breathtaking."

And perhaps a case in point? . . .

Database Startup Supabase Notches $5 Billion Valuation in Funding Round

upstart writes:

Database startup Supabase notches $5 billion valuation in funding round - The Economic Times:

Open-source database startup Supabase said on Friday it has secured a valuation of $5 billion in its latest funding round, as investors continue to back companies riding the wave of the artificial intelligence boom.

[...] Supabase is a backend platform that helps developers build applications quickly and has benefited from the rise in AI-powered coding assistants.

The platform is built on the PostgreSQL open-source database, a system for organizing and managing information online.

The latest capital-raise comes just months after Supabase's Series D round, which reportedly valued it at $2 billion.

[...] Coding platforms such as Lovable and Bolt run on Supabase, which caters to more than four million developers. The company's customers also include enterprises such as PwC, McDonald's and Github Next.

"This new financing aims to accelerate Supabase's efforts to become the backend for everyone, from startups to some of the most demanding, data-intensive enterprise workloads," said Caryn Marooney, general partner at investment management firm Coatue.

Also see:
    • Reuters
    • MSN

Original Submission #1  Original Submission #2