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Half a century later, there's a Moon rocket behind those same doors

It is 50 years since the very last Saturn rocket rolled out from NASA's Vehicle Assembly Building (VAB) to launchpad 39B at the Kennedy Space Center.…

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Gizmodo: Scientists scrutinizing the seafloor beneath a calving iceberg found a remarkable array of living creatures, switching up notions of how the giant chunks of ice affect their immediate environs. The scientists investigated a region of seafloor recently exposed by the calving of a gigantic iceberg -- A-84 -- which is as large as Chicago. The team found a surprisingly vibrant community of critters on the seafloor below where A-84 was once attached to an ice shelf attached to Antarctica. Without the 197-square-mile (510-square-kilometer) iceberg in the way, the team was able to scrutinize the seafloor at depths of 4,265 feet (1,300 meters) using the remotely operated vehicle (ROV) SuBastian. The team found large corals and sponges supporting other lifeforms, including icefish, giant sea spiders, and octopus. [...] With the icebergs covering the seafloor, organisms below the shelf cannot get nutrients for survival from the surface. The team hypothesized that ocean currents are a critical driver for life beneath the ice sheets. The team also collected data on the larger ice sheet, whose shrinking size spells concern for the animals that live beneath it.

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Meanwhile, Apple is lining up '$1B' of Nvidia Blackwell Ultra kit

Schneider Electric plans to spend $700 million through 2027 to expand its US operations and bolster the supply of its power equipment necessary to sustain the proliferation of AI datacenters.…

Who knew social media stars had a role to play in building national cyber resilience?

The world's biggest brands have benefited from influencer marketing for years – now the UK's National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) has hopped on the bandwagon to preach two-factor authentication (2FA) to the masses.…

At last, cell service from SPAAAAAACE

Britain's telecoms regulator could authorize satellite-to-smartphone services in the UK before the end of this year.…

wiredmikey shares a report from SecurityWeek: Google late Tuesday rushed out a patch for a sandbox escape vulnerability in its flagship Chrome browser after researchers at Kaspersky caught a professional hacking operation launching drive-by download exploits. The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2025-2783, was chained with a second exploit for remote code execution in what appears to be a nation-state sponsored cyberespionage campaign [dubbed Operation ForumTroll] targeting organizations in Russia. Kaspersky said it detected a series of infections triggered by phishing emails in the middle of March and traced the incidents to a zero-day that fired when victims simply clicked on a booby-trapped website from a Chrome browser. The Russian anti-malware vendor said victims merely had to click on a personalized, short-lived link, and their systems were compromised when the malicious website was opened in Chrome. Kaspersky said its exploit detection tools picked up on the zero-day, and after reverse-engineering the code, the team reported the bug to Google and coordinated the fix released on Tuesday.

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Spending watchdog says digital professionals need seat at top table to ensure 'transformation'

The parlous state of UK government legacy IT systems is hampering attempts to adopt AI, a report from MPs has warned.…

PC-size ML prediction model predicted to be as good as a super at fraction of the cost

Aardvark, a novel machine learning-based weather prediction system, teases a future where supercomputers are optional for forecasting - but don't pull the plug just yet.…

Firefly Aerospace choses Amazon boss's Honeybee Robotics to supply vehicle for 2028 mission

Elon Musk may have launched hundreds of rockets and sent his own Tesla Roadster into space, but rival billionaire Jeff Bezos will soon be able to boast he’s built a moon rover.…

In an op-ed for MIT Technology Review, authors Carsten T. Charlesworth, Henry T. Greely, and Hiromitsu Nakauchi make the case for human "bodyoids" that could reduce animal testing, improve drug development, and alleviate organ shortages: Why do we hear about medical breakthroughs in mice, but rarely see them translate into cures for human disease? Why do so few drugs that enter clinical trials receive regulatory approval? And why is the waiting list for organ transplantation so long? These challenges stem in large part from a common root cause: a severe shortage of ethically sourced human bodies. It may be disturbing to characterize human bodies in such commodifying terms, but the unavoidable reality is that human biological materials are an essential commodity in medicine, and persistent shortages of these materials create a major bottleneck to progress. This imbalance between supply and demand is the underlying cause of the organ shortage crisis, with more than 100,000 patients currently waiting for a solid organ transplant in the US alone. It also forces us to rely heavily on animals in medical research, a practice that can't replicate major aspects of human physiology and makes it necessary to inflict harm on sentient creatures. In addition, the safety and efficacy of any experimental drug must still be confirmed in clinical trials on living human bodies. These costly trials risk harm to patients, can take a decade or longer to complete, and make it through to approval less than 15% of the time. There might be a way to get out of this moral and scientific deadlock. Recent advances in biotechnology now provide a pathway to producing living human bodies without the neural components that allow us to think, be aware, or feel pain. Many will find this possibility disturbing, but if researchers and policymakers can find a way to pull these technologies together, we may one day be able to create "spare" bodies, both human and nonhuman. These could revolutionize medical research and drug development, greatly reducing the need for animal testing, rescuing many people from organ transplant lists, and allowing us to produce more effective drugs and treatments. All without crossing most people's ethical lines. Although it may seem like science fiction, recent technological progress has pushed this concept into the realm of plausibility. Pluripotent stem cells, one of the earliest cell types to form during development, can give rise to every type of cell in the adult body. Recently, researchers have used these stem cells to create structures that seem to mimic the early development of actual human embryos. At the same time, artificial uterus technology is rapidly advancing, and other pathways may be opening to allow for the development of fetuses outside of the body. Such technologies, together with established genetic techniques to inhibit brain development, make it possible to envision the creation of "bodyoids" -- a potentially unlimited source of human bodies, developed entirely outside of a human body from stem cells, that lack sentience or the ability to feel pain.

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As rumors swirl about a new 72-core minimum vSphere license requirement

VMware has sued industrial giant AG Siemens’s US operations for alleged use of unlicensed software and accused it of changing its story negotiations.…

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Software developer Xe Iaso reached a breaking point earlier this year when aggressive AI crawler traffic from Amazon overwhelmed their Git repository service, repeatedly causing instability and downtime. Despite configuring standard defensive measures -- adjusting robots.txt, blocking known crawler user-agents, and filtering suspicious traffic -- Iaso found that AI crawlers continued evading all attempts to stop them, spoofing user-agents and cycling through residential IP addresses as proxies. Desperate for a solution, Iaso eventually resorted to moving their server behind a VPN and creating "Anubis," a custom-built proof-of-work challenge system that forces web browsers to solve computational puzzles before accessing the site. "It's futile to block AI crawler bots because they lie, change their user agent, use residential IP addresses as proxies, and more," Iaso wrote in a blog post titled "a desperate cry for help." "I don't want to have to close off my Gitea server to the public, but I will if I have to." Iaso's story highlights a broader crisis rapidly spreading across the open source community, as what appear to be aggressive AI crawlers increasingly overload community-maintained infrastructure, causing what amounts to persistent distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks on vital public resources. According to a comprehensive recent report from LibreNews, some open source projects now see as much as 97 percent of their traffic originating from AI companies' bots, dramatically increasing bandwidth costs, service instability, and burdening already stretched-thin maintainers. Kevin Fenzi, a member of the Fedora Pagure project's sysadmin team, reported on his blog that the project had to block all traffic from Brazil after repeated attempts to mitigate bot traffic failed. GNOME GitLab implemented Iaso's "Anubis" system, requiring browsers to solve computational puzzles before accessing content. GNOME sysadmin Bart Piotrowski shared on Mastodon that only about 3.2 percent of requests (2,690 out of 84,056) passed their challenge system, suggesting the vast majority of traffic was automated. KDE's GitLab infrastructure was temporarily knocked offline by crawler traffic originating from Alibaba IP ranges, according to LibreNews, citing a KDE Development chat. While Anubis has proven effective at filtering out bot traffic, it comes with drawbacks for legitimate users. When many people access the same link simultaneously -- such as when a GitLab link is shared in a chat room -- site visitors can face significant delays. Some mobile users have reported waiting up to two minutes for the proof-of-work challenge to complete, according to the news outlet.

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Binned an e-commerce tax last year so this may not be complete capitulation

India again ditches a tech tax, perhaps to tickle Trump and dodge tariffs Already binned an e-commerce tax last year The lower house of India’s parliament on Tuesday passed the nation’s budget for 2025, after making a last-minute change that removed a tax on digital ads.…

GameStop announced it will invest part of its corporate cash in bitcoin and stablecoins, following MicroStrategy's lead. The meme stock jumped more than 6% in extended trading Tuesday following the news. CNBC reports: The video game retailer said a portion of its cash or future debt and equity issuances may be invested in bitcoin and U.S. dollar-denominated stablecoins. As of Feb. 1, GameStop held nearly $4.8 billion in cash. The firm also said it has not set a ceiling on the amount of bitcoin it may purchase. The company said the move could expose it to volatility associated with cryptocurrency prices. "Bitcoin, for example, is a highly volatile asset and has experienced significant price fluctuations over time. Our Bitcoin strategy has not been tested and may prove unsuccessful," GameStop said in a U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission filing.

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Who needs studies into diseases, virus infections, US mortality rates ... right?

Two academic organizations sued the Trump administration Tuesday for the allegedly unlawful withdrawal of $400 million in federal funding from Columbia University and associated demands for policy changes.…

Chip guru preaches virtues of 'values-aligned' pray-I, sorry, AI

Pat Gelsinger, once CEO of VMware and later Intel, has announced he's taken a new job as executive chair and head of technology at Gloo, a Colorado-based startup offering technology tools for churches and other faith-based organizations.…

The Register's Richard Speed reports: Baffled by the plethora of Outlook options out there? You aren't alone. Microsoft veteran Scott Hanselman posted a list of some more variants that could be used to do the same thing. It's a problem common to several Microsoft products. A file needs to be opened, but which app should be used? Should it be Outlook New, or Outlook (New)? With tongue firmly in cheek, Hanselman listed some more options: Outlook (Zero Sugar), Outlook (Caffeine Free), and so on. Hanselman, Developer Community veep at Microsoft, also included Outlook '95, although to our mind the peak came with the version of Outlook in Office 97. A happier, more trusting time when security was less important. While users can create multiple Outlook profiles to store email account details and data locations, Hanselman's post on Bluesky highlights an issue facing many users of Microsoft's software: which incarnation of the application to use. Teams users often find themselves presented with a variety of applications -- Microsoft Teams and Microsoft Teams (Personal), for example, can often appear side by side in the system tray. [...] There is a cautionary tale about what happened when a soft drinks company tried to replace a well-liked product with a "new" version and renamed the previous preferred version as "classic." The list posted by Hanselman -- who is also notable for tips on managing Microsoft's personal information manager -- is amusing, but also highlights the perils of having multiple, similarly functioning options to do the same thing, and the potential for confusing users.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from VentureBeat: Chinese AI startup DeepSeek has quietly released a new large language model that's already sending ripples through the artificial intelligence industry -- not just for its capabilities, but for how it's being deployed. The 641-gigabyte model, dubbed DeepSeek-V3-0324, appeared on AI repository Hugging Face today with virtually no announcement (just an empty README file), continuing the company's pattern of low-key but impactful releases. What makes this launch particularly notable is the model's MIT license -- making it freely available for commercial use -- and early reports that it can run directly on consumer-grade hardware, specifically Apple's Mac Studio with M3 Ultra chip. "The new DeepSeek-V3-0324 in 4-bit runs at > 20 tokens/second on a 512GB M3 Ultra with mlx-lm!" wrote AI researcher Awni Hannun on social media. While the $9,499 Mac Studio might stretch the definition of "consumer hardware," the ability to run such a massive model locally is a major departure from the data center requirements typically associated with state-of-the-art AI. [...] Simon Willison, a developer tools creator, noted in a blog post that a 4-bit quantized version reduces the storage footprint to 352GB, making it feasible to run on high-end consumer hardware like the Mac Studio with M3 Ultra chip. This represents a potentially significant shift in AI deployment. While traditional AI infrastructure typically relies on multiple Nvidia GPUs consuming several kilowatts of power, the Mac Studio draws less than 200 watts during inference. This efficiency gap suggests the AI industry may need to rethink assumptions about infrastructure requirements for top-tier model performance. "The implications of an advanced open-source reasoning model cannot be overstated," reports VentureBeat. "Current reasoning models like OpenAI's o1 and DeepSeek's R1 represent the cutting edge of AI capabilities, demonstrating unprecedented problem-solving abilities in domains from mathematics to coding. Making this technology freely available would democratize access to AI systems currently limited to those with substantial budgets." "If DeepSeek-R2 follows the trajectory set by R1, it could present a direct challenge to GPT-5, OpenAI's next flagship model rumored for release in coming months. The contrast between OpenAI's closed, heavily-funded approach and DeepSeek's open, resource-efficient strategy represents two competing visions for AI's future."

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"In a conversation with Tony Yu from Asus China, AMD CEO Lisa Su shared that the Radeon RX 9000 series graphics cards have quickly become a huge hit, breaking records as AMD's top-selling GPUs within just a week of release," writes Slashdot reader jjslash. TechSpot reports: AMD CEO Lisa Su has confirmed that the company's new Radeon RX 9000 graphics cards have been a massive success, selling 10 times more units than their predecessors in just one week on the market. Su also stated that more RDNA 4 cards are on the way, but did not confirm whether the lineup will include the rumored Radeon RX 9060. When asked about the limited availability of the new cards, Su said that AMD is ramping up production to ensure greater supply at retailers worldwide. She also expressed hope that increased availability would help stabilize pricing by discouraging scalping and price gouging.

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World Liberty Financial, a crypto venture backed by Donald Trump and his family, has launched a U.S. dollar-pegged stablecoin called USD1. The token is backed by U.S. Treasuries and cash equivalents and will soon go live on the Ethereum and Binance Smart Chain networks. CNBC reports: The development comes as the market cap for dollar-backed stablecoins -- cryptocurrencies that promise a fixed value peg to another asset -- has been climbing to new all-time-highs this year and has grown more than 46% in the past year, according to CryptoQuant. The market has long been dominated by Tether (USDT) and, more recently, Circle's USDC. "USD1 provides what algorithmic and anonymous crypto projects cannot -- access to the power of DeFi underpinned by the credibility and safeguards of the most respected names in traditional finance," said World Liberty Financial co-founder Zach Witkoff. "We're offering a digital dollar stablecoin that sovereign investors and major institutions can confidently integrate into their strategies for seamless, secure cross-border transactions." Alex Thorn is head of firmwide research at Galaxy Digital, said at the Digital Asset Summit: "Stablecoins are seen as more politically easy to do in Congress but actually will be dramatically more impactful to the United States and the world than market structure [legislation]. Who regulates who is important ... if you're one of the people that's going to be regulated, but the stablecoin bill could solidify dollar dominance for 100 years."

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