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Design sent to TSMC as startup wraps €130M funding round and targets 2026 silicon

Euro chip designer SiPearl has finally taped out its Rhea1 processor destined for Jupiter, the first European exascale supercomputer, just as its Series A financing round ends with an injection of cash from a new investor.…

Monmouthshire schools have launched what they believe is the first countywide policy in the UK asking parents not to give smartphones to children under 14, affecting more than 9,000 students across state and private schools. The initiative follows rising cyber-bullying reports and concerns that some children spend up to eight hours daily on devices, with students reportedly online at 2, 3, and 4 in the morning. Hugo Hutchinson, headteacher at Monmouth Comprehensive, said schools experience "much higher levels of mental health issues" linked to smartphone addiction, noting that children's time is largely spent outside school where many have unrestricted device access despite existing school bans.

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Nvidia shares jumped more than 2% on Wednesday, topping a $4 trillion market cap for the first time as investors scooped stock in the tech giant building the hardware for the generative AI boom. From a report: The chipmaker is the first company to ever achieve this market value. Nvidia is the world's most valuable company, surpassing Microsoft and Apple, both of which hit the $3 trillion mark before Nvidia. Microsoft is also one of Nvidia's biggest and most important customers. The California-based company, which was founded in 1993, first passed the $2 trillion mark in February 2024, and surpassed $3 trillion in June. Nvidia has profited heavily off of growing demand for artificial intelligence hardware and chips since the launch of ChatGPT in late 2022. The company has positioned itself as the decisive leader in the creating the graphics processing units that power large language models.

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But Chocolate Factory love-in sorely lacks detail

The UK government has signed a pact with Google Cloud to "upskill" as many as 100,000 civil servants in the latest tech by 2030.…

No word on who pressed the 'MechaHitler' button

xAI is scrambling to contain the fallout after its Grok chatbot went – and there is no other way of putting this – full Nazi in its X (formerly Twitter) posts.…

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Gizmodo: WIMPs (weakly interacting massive particles) are one of the most serious contenders for dark matter -- the "missing" mass supposedly constituting 85% of our universe. Given its elusiveness, dark matter tests the patience and creativity of physicists. But the latest results from LUX-ZEPLIN (LZ), the South Dakota-based detector, may have brought scientists a small step closer to catching WIMPs in action. In a recent Physical Review Letters paper, scientists analyzed 280 days' worth of data from LUX-ZEPLIN, reporting the tightest ever upper limit on the interaction strength of WIMPs. The result -- a near fivefold improvement -- demonstrates how physicists are increasingly getting better at circumventing the problem that dark matter is, well, dark; the elusive stuff evades any detection method that depends on materials interacting with visible light or other types of radiation. The LUX-ZEPLIN experiment, located one mile underground in a decommissioned South Dakota gold mine, employs nearly 15,000 pounds (7 tons) of liquid xenon. The chemical element's high atomic mass and density make it potentially easier for scientists to detect any unknown particles that may pass through the detector. Also, liquid xenon is transparent, preventing any unwanted noise -- usually arising from radioactive matter around the detector -- from spoiling an experiment. "These results firmly establish that LZ is the world's most sensitive search for dark matter heavier than 10 GeV, that's about 10 times heavier than a proton," explained Scott Haselschwart, a physicist at the University of Michigan and LZ physics coordinator, in an email to Gizmodo. "To put our result in perspective: we have ruled out dark matter that would interact only once in a single kilogram of xenon every four millennia!" "LZ is the most sensitive search for WIMP dark matter to date, but we still have another two years of data to collect," Haselschwart said. "This means that a discovery of dark matter in LZ could come anytime now. We are truly looking for dark matter where no one has ever looked before and that is extremely exciting!"

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Version 140 has built-in MS Exchange support – and a year's updates ahead

The latest version of the messaging client from Mozilla subsidiary MZLA has a bunch of useful new features, and will get updated until mid 2026.…

Plus: Confirms less serious data points like meal preferences also leaked

Qantas says that when cybercrooks attacked a "third party platform" used by the airline's contact center systems, they accessed the personal information and frequent flyer numbers of the "majority" of the circa 5.7 million people affected.…

Oodles of euros on offer for not accidentally blowing up stuff

Comment The European Space Agency (ESA) is pressing ahead with its European Launcher Challenge (ELC), and the good news is that three of the five pre-selected candidates have yet to explode anything in public.…

The UK police plan to spend up to 75 million pounds ($102 million) to digitize their vast archive of VHS tapes, aiming to preserve evidence by converting analog media into digital files integrated with evidence management systems. The procurement includes both in-house solutions and outsourced services, with additional funding earmarked for converting other legacy formats like microfiche and DVDs. The Register reports: According to a tender notice published last week, Bluelight Commercial - a not-for-profit buyer that acts on behalf of the emergency services - says the police force requires either in-house technology or outsourced services to convert the arcane magnetic tape format to digital storage. The notice, which sets out procurement plans, says the framework agreement will help forces with the "conversion of analog media to digital records, including metadata for integration with a digital evidence management system." In the first lot of the framework, Bluelight asks for in-house VHS media digitization software, hardware, and training to "enable a Police Force to convert VHS tapes to digital files." This chunk of the arrangement could be worth 50 million pounds ($68 million) for four years, excluding VAT. The second lot asks for outsourced VHS media digitization "for the provision of conversion services delivered completely by a third party with electronic files being returned securely to the customer force." The output is also set to be ingested by a digital evidence management solution. It could be worth up to 25 million pounds ($34 million) over the same period. In addition, Bluelight Commercial is looking for a provider to help with more niche media digitization, including converting microfiche, CD, DVDs to an electronic file format, in an arrangement which could be worth a total of up to 25 million pounds ($34 million).

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Customers say things are still far from perfect as lengthy support queues hamper business dealings

Ingram Micro says it is gradually reactivating customer's ordering capabilities across the world, region by region, now its ransomware attack is thought to be "contained".…

Activists argue the resources spent on tech aren't leading to worthwhile numbers

Privacy activists are unimpressed with London's Metropolitan Police and its use of live facial recognition (LFR) to catch criminals, saying it is not effective use of taxpayer money and an overreach by government.…

Akkodis report suggests people skills may be helpful to bring out the best in AI

Executives are losing faith in AI initiatives despite rising investment, according to a study conducted by consultancy Akkodis.…

Two Chinese satellites, SJ-25 and SJ-21, have reportedly completed the first autonomous high-altitude orbital docking. "Although unconfirmed, this is thought to be the first orbital refueling at such a height -- the two satellites are currently over 20,000 miles from Earth," reports ExtremeTech. From the report: Orbital refueling is an important component in keeping satellites and space stations in low Earth orbit flying, but any efforts beyond that have been merely speculative until the past few years, when serious efforts from a range of private and national entities have explored its possibilities. China may have gotten ahead of the curve with this latest docking, though, in an impressive world first that raises serious concerns for satellites from nations and entities that align themselves differently from China's goals and ambitions. In January, a satellite designated SJ-25 was launched "for the verification of satellite fuel replenishment and life extension service technologies," according to the Chinese state-owned designer, Shanghai Academy of Spaceflight Technology (via Ars Technica). Sometime last week, it matched orbits with the SJ-21 satellite, which previously conducted space debris maneuvering tests in 2021 and has remained in a geosynchronous orbit ever since. Last week, the two satellites matched orbits and seemingly docked together. Analysts believe the newer SJ-25 has likely proven refueling is possible even for geosynchronous satellites without the need for a manned crew to facilitate it. In an effort to prove this, two US Space Force's inspector satellites have positioned themselves in closer orbits to SJ-25 and SJ-21 for improved optics. [...] China continues to suggest these missions are part of a debris clean-up program, though it hasn't publicly made any statements about the recent alleged docking and refueling to celebrate its successes. If it doesn't, the only way we'll know if a refueling maneuver was successful is if the SJ-21 satellite unshackles from its younger sibling and performs fuel-demanding maneuvers that its previously estimated fuel levels shouldn't allow for.

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Tells would-be affiliates they don't need to worry because cyberattacks don't violate a cease fire

An Iranian ransomware-as-a-service operation with ties to a government-backed cyber crew has reemerged after a nearly five-year hiatus, and is offering would-be cybercriminals cash to infect organizations in the US and Israel.…

A big bet that RISC-V can make a dent in the AI market

GlobalFoundries has acquired chip design firm MIPS, creating a company that both designs and creates semiconductors.…

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Associated Press: Filmmaker Peter Jackson owns one of the largest private collections of bones of an extinct New Zealand bird called the moa. His fascination with the flightless ostrich-like bird has led to an unusual partnership with a biotech company known for its grand and controversial plans to bring back lost species. On Tuesday, Colossal Biosciences announced an effort to genetically engineer living birds to resemble the extinct South Island giant moa -- which once stood 12 feet (3.6 meters) tall -- with $15 million in funding from Jackson and his partner Fran Walsh. The collaboration also includes the New Zealand-based Ngai Tahu Research Centre. "The movies are my day job, and the moa are my fun thing I do," said Jackson. "Every New Zealand schoolchild has a fascination with the moa." The moa had roamed New Zealand for 4,000 years until they became extinct around 600 years ago, mainly because of overhunting. A large skeleton brought to England in the 19th century, now on display at the Yorkshire Museum, prompted international interest in the long-necked bird. Unlike Colossal's work with dire wolves, the moa project is in very early stages. It started with a phone call about two years ago after Jackson heard about the company's efforts to "de-extinct" -- or create genetically similar animals to -- species like the woolly mammoth and the dire wolf. Then Jackson put Colossal in touch with experts he'd met through his own moa bone-collecting. At that point, he'd amassed between 300 and 400 bones, he said. In New Zealand, it's legal to buy and sell moa bones found on private lands, but not on public conservation areas -- nor to export them. The first stage of the moa project will be to identify well-preserved bones from which it may be possible to extract DNA, said Colossal's chief scientist Beth Shapiro. Those DNA sequences will be compared to genomes of living bird species, including the ground-dwelling tinamou and emu, "to figure out what it is that made the moa unique compared to other birds," she said. [...] The direction of the project will be shaped by Mori scholars at the University of Canterbury's Ngi Tahu Research Centre. Ngi Tahu archaeologist Kyle Davis, an expert in moa bones, said the work has "really reinvigorated the interest in examining our own traditions and mythology."

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Envisions info from your watch informing treatment. What could possibly go wrong?

Samsung has acquired US company Xealth to combine data drawn from its wearable devices and hospital records.…

alternative_right shares a report from Phys.org: Researchers at Princeton University, Boston University and other institutes used machine learning to predict the strategic decisions of humans in various games. Their paper, published in Nature Human Behavior, shows that a deep neural network trained on human decisions could predict the strategic choices of players with high levels of accuracy. [...] Essentially, the team suggests that people behave more rationally while playing games that they perceive as easier. In contrast, when they are playing more complex games, people's choices could be influenced by various other factors, thus the "noise" affecting their behavior would increase. As part of their future studies, the researchers would also like to shed more light on what makes a game "complex" or "easy." This could be achieved using the context-dependent noise parameter that they integrated into their model as a signature of "perceived difficulty." "Our analysis provides a robust model comparison across a wide range of candidate models of decision-making," said [Jian-Qiao Zhu, first author of the paper]. "We now have strong evidence that introducing context-dependence into the quantal response model significantly improves its ability to capture human strategic behavior. More specifically, we identified key factors in the game matrix that shape game complexity: considerations of efficiency, the arithmetic difficulty of computing payoff differences, and the depth of reasoning required to arrive at a rational solution." The findings gathered as part of this recent study also highlight the "lightness" with which many people approach strategic decisions, which could make them vulnerable to parties looking to sway them towards making irrational decisions. Once they gather more insight into what factors make games and decision-making scenarios more challenging for people, Zhu and his colleagues hope to start devising new behavioral science interventions aimed at prompting people to make more rational decisions.

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Senators Tim Sheehy and Elizabeth Warren have introduced the bipartisan "Warrior Right to Repair Act," which would guarantee the military's right to repair its own equipment. The bill builds on a previous Army directive and has broad public support, with nearly 75% of Americans in favor, according to a PIRG poll. Engadget reports: The Department of Defense has not been immune from restrictive practices set forth by manufacturers, and much like the average consumer, has been hamstrung in its ability to repair its own equipment by clauses in its purchase agreements. According to the Public Interest Research Group (PIRG), the current system leads to excessive repair and sustainment costs, and can even impede military readiness. "When our neighbors, friends and family serve in our military, we expect them to get what they need to do their jobs as safely as possible," PIRG Federal Legislative Director Isaac Bowers wrote regarding the newly introduced bill. "Somehow, that hasn't included the materials and information they need to repair equipment they rely on. It's time we fixed that."

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