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The Washington Post reports: In early July, a wasp nest with a radiation level 10 times what is allowed by federal regulations was found inside the grounds of a sprawling Cold War-era nuclear site in South Carolina that today partly serves as a storage area for radioactive liquid waste. Federal officials said Friday that at least three more contaminated wasp nests were found within the 310-square-mile Savannah River Site, which encompasses an area more than four times the size of the District of Columbia... [F]ederal authorities said that the discoveries were not cause for alarm and experts noted that the discovery of radioactivity in wildlife near nuclear facilities did not necessarily indicate the likelihood of a major leak... In a statement sent to reporters, Edwin Deshong, manager of the Savannah River Site's Office of Environmental Management, said the wasp nests had "very low levels of radioactive contamination" and did not pose health risks to the site's workers, nearby residents or the environment... The Savannah River Site's 43 active underground waste tanks have more than 34 million gallons of radioactive liquid waste. The oldest tanks have previously "developed small hairline cracks" that led to small-volume leaks, the Savannah River Site says on its website. A July report after the first nest was found said there was "no impact" from the contaminated nest, the Post reports, with the nest's high radioactivity level due to "on-site legacy radioactive contamination" rather than "a loss of contamination control." More from the Associated Press: The tank farm is well inside the boundaries of the site and wasps generally fly just a few hundred yards from their nests, so there is no danger they are outside the facility, according to a statement from Savannah River Mission Completion which now oversees the site. If there had been wasps found, they would have significantly lower levels of radiation than their nests, according to the statement which was given to the Aiken Standard. Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader sandbagger for sharing the news.

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After an 8.8 earthquake off the coast of Russia, "weather authorities leapt into action," reports SFGate, by modeling the threat of a tsunami "and releasing warnings and advisories to prepare their communities..." But some residents of Hawaii, Japan and North America's West Coast turned to AI tools for updates that "appear to have badly bungled the critical task at hand." Google's "AI Overview," for example, reportedly gave "inaccurate information about authorities' safety warnings in Hawaii and elsewhere," according to reports on social media. Thankfully, the tsunami danger quickly subsided on Tuesday night and Wednesday morning without major damage. Still, the issues speak to the growing role of AI tools in people's information diets... and to the tools' potentially dangerous fallibility... A critic of Google — who prompted the search tool to show an AI overview by adding "+ai" to their search — called the text that showed up "dangerously wrong." Responding to similar complaints, Grok told one user on X.com "We'll improve accuracy."

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There's now an "influx" of startups fightging wildfires, reports the Washington Post. "More than 100 new wildfire-related technologies have launched in the U.S. and around the world since 2023, according to Lori Moore-Merrell, who served as U.S. fire administrator during the Biden administration... Unmanned lookout poles that use AI to sense smoke have been erected in the West. Swarms of military-grade drones are increasingly used for wildfire detection and management. AI technology also tracks lightning strikes, which can ignite wildfires..." As America contends with what is already a punishing year of wildfires across massive swaths of the country, new, extremely precise satellite images beamed from space from the initiative FireSat. In March, a satellite outfitted with infrared sensors was launched more than 370 miles into space with the sole task of detecting and monitoring fires. With the ability to loop millions of miles around the planet each day, it found active fires and burn scars using bands of infrared light, demonstrating technology that the project's leaders and its early adopters said could be integral to filling technological gaps in the way they fight burns. The satellite initiative was launched by a nonprofit coalition called Earth Fire Alliance (EFA). Its partners include Muon Space, which is developing the satellites; Google, which is using AI to help filter through the images; the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation; and the Environmental Defense Fund. The goal is to have 50 satellites in orbit by 2030 to capture the entire world. At full capacity, the constellation is aiming to sweep the entire Earth every 20 minutes to detect small fires. By spring or summer of next year, it plans to launch three more satellites into space that will coordinate with agencies in states including California and Colorado to help them detect and fight fire.

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"The July 2025 results of the Steam Survey were posted a few minutes ago," Phoronix reported last night, "and show a healthy 0.32% increase to put the Linux gaming marketshare at 2.89%." That's a recent high in percentage terms and while Steam saw around 3% in the early days of Steam on Linux a decade ago, in absolute terms this is likely the largest surveyed figure ever for the Linux gaming population. Linux was at 2.89% for July while macOS was at 1.88% and Windows at 95.23%. There does seem to be a jagged line that's trending upward... November: 2.03% December: 2.29% January: 2.06% February: 1.45% March: 2.33% April: 2.27% May: 2.69% June: 2.57% July: 2.89%

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After it began "peering into the distant universe" in 2022, NASA's James Webb Space Telescope "has discovered a rash of 'little red dots'," reports Science magazine. There's "hundreds of them, shining within the first billion years of the 13.8-billion-year-old universe, so small and red that they defied conventional explanation." "Only in the past few months has a picture begun to emerge. The little red dots, astronomers say, may be an entirely new type of object: a colossal ball of bright, hot gas, larger than the Solar System, powered not by nuclear fusion, but by a black hole..." The objects, which some astronomers are calling "black hole stars," could be a missing link in the evolution of galaxies and help explain the rapid growth of supermassive black holes that lie at their hearts. "The big breakthrough of the past 6 months is actually the realization that we can throw out all these other models we've been playing with before," says astronomer Anna de Graaff of the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy... JWST couldn't resolve the dots into a recognizable shape, which meant they must have been tiny — less than 2% of the diameter of the Milky Way. "It was a mystery ... as to why they were so spatially compact," says Caitlin Casey of the University of Texas at Austin. An impossibly dense packing of stars would be needed to explain their brightness. "I was excited," Casey says... For Mitch Begelman, a theoretical astrophysicist at the University of Colorado Boulder, the observations are a vindication. Earlier this month, he and a colleague posted a preprint on arXiv reviving a scenario for the formation of hypothetical "quasi-stars" that he and others had proposed 20 years ago. The first generation of stars, they calculated, could have grown to colossal size in the early universe, which was made up almost entirely of hydrogen, the raw material of stars. When a giant star ran out of fuel, they said, its core would have collapsed into a black hole, but the outer envelope of hydrogen was so dense it survived the blast, enclosing the newborn black hole. As the black hole chewed at its shroud of gas, the entire system glowed as a quasi-star larger than the Solar System. "That's what the quasi-star envelope is doing, it's force-feeding the black hole by pushing matter into it," Begelman says. Given how common little red dots appear to be in the early universe, theorists are beginning to wonder whether this giant-ball-of-gas phase is an essential part of black hole growth and the evolution of galaxies. "We're probably looking at kind of a new phase of black hole growth that we didn't know about before," de Graaff says. "If the red dots do turn out to be black hole stars, it will be precisely the sort of breakthrough expected from JWST — and the kind of discovery astronomers live for." Thanks to Slashdot reader sciencehabit for sharing the news.

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