Simple games gain rich strategies in the face of noise. Games may be life with all the hard bits removed, but they provide a way to study why people make the choices they make. Traditional games are usually played against a static background: the rewards per outcome are constant.…
The Department of Energy declared an “emergency” when none existed. The use of coal to generate electricity on the US grid has been plunging for nearly two decades, and the first Trump administration was unable to affect the trend. So his second administration has attempted more aggressive interventions to…
Analysis revealed seed proteins from sesame and moringa, which held religious and symbolic significance. Credit: Museum of Mediterranean and Near Eastern Antiquities, Stockholm Credit: Museum of Mediterranean and Near Eastern Antiquities, Stockholm The precise composition of ancient Egyptian paints, binders, adhesives, and similar materials used to make artifacts is…
Renewables pledge won’t change the Oracle and OpenAI data center’s use of gas. Oracle’s proposed investment in 2 gigawatts of renewable energy projects for New Mexico comes as local opposition could delay development of the Project Jupiter data center that Oracle is building for OpenAI. The two tech companies…
Simplicity—combined with the difficulty of getting stuff done—makes ClickFix ideal. It wasn’t that long ago that ClickFix attacks were exotic. Now the technique has become mainstream as attackers reap its simplicity and effectiveness in infecting users of PCs and Macs alike. All that’s required is a compromised website—a painless…
Experiment put atoms in a superposition of trajectories to find out. Almost a hundred years ago, physicists theorized out what free fall should do to a quantum wave. If the solution they came up with is wrong, quantum mechanics and Einstein’s theory of gravity flatly contradict each other. But…
App support is slim right now, but Google says more are coming. As longer, more complex passwords have become a necessity, remembering all those strings of numbers, letters, and special characters has become nearly impossible. Password managers can solve that problem, but what happens when you want to move…
The trick from Next Generation would be even more effective in real life. It turns out Jean-Luc Picard was an even better starship helmsman than the writers knew. A physicist has gone through the details of a warp-speed trick from the first season of Star Trek: The Next Generation…
DJI drones that already supply Mount Everest camps assist Nepal’s flood relief. Chinese-made drones are flying out the bodies of flood victims and delivering food to survivors in the aftermath of devastating flash floods on the border of Nepal and China’s Tibetan region. Nepal’s army has been using four…
A patch gap and the hastened pace of AI-based vulnerability discovery are likely contributors. A nearly identical exploit kit that targets critical vulnerabilities in both Chromium-based browsers and older versions of Windows is being actively used by at least four hacking groups, some of which have ties to the…
