New study confirms 2024 “momentum flux theory” on how angular momentum of water flows drives rotation. Watering your lawn in the summer can be both pragmatic and fun with so-called “silly sprinklers,” designed to create amusing loops and spirals of water jets. And there’s some fascinating physics at work…
The biggest smartphone makers keep on trucking in the face of component shortages and economic uncertainty. Smartphone shipments started to plateau a few years back, ending the days of guaranteed double-digit growth for any company that wanted to make phones. Fewer smartphone manufacturers exist today, and they’re facing new…
Clever coding and graphical compromises get a classic game on more classic hardware. Last month, we passed along Modern Vintage Gamer’s (MVG) confident assertion that Doom is functionally impossible to run on the Neo Geo, owing to the console’s sprite-based display hardware and lack of a frame buffer. We…
“Context bombing” tricks hacking agents into shutting down before they can do harm. Prompt injections, the malicious commands attackers embed into content to entice large language models to follow them, have been attackers’ go-to tool for turning AI platforms against their users. A well-phrased command sneaked into an email…
New climate evidence adds context to these long voyages. The same question drives both the plot of Moana and decades of archaeological research: Why, after centuries of relative stability, did Polynesian voyagers suddenly begin settling islands thousands of kilometers away across the Pacific? The latest Moana movie is a…
It’s unclear how the planet avoided its star’s bloated red giant stage. WD 1856 b is the only confirmed case of a planet that survived the death of a Sun-like star. It’s a Jupiter-size world orbiting a white dwarf—the burned-out remnant of a Sun-like star. Now, a team of…
For the first time since 1995, the Bureau of Land Management is rewriting its grazing regulations. The federal government is rewriting its rules governing ranching on public lands to increase the number of cattle, sheep, and other livestock grazing on 155 million acres in the West, an area twice…
Reinforcement learning uses error information to adjust control algorithms. There are some obvious big picture issues that stand between us and useful quantum computing. Issues like whether we can make enough high-quality hardware qubits to connect into the error-corrected logical qubits we need, and how we generate the states…
More police and firefighters use drones to catch and deter illegal fireworks. More cities and towns deployed drones to spot illegal fireworks during the Fourth of July celebrations commemorating America’s 250th anniversary—leading to a $100,000 fine in one instance and coming as part of a broader national trend of…
The Quest shipwreck is in worse shape than expected, but it has turned into a thriving marine ecosystem. Back in 2024, we reported on the discovery of the Quest shipwreck, the polar exploration vessel that served Arctic explorer Sir Ernest Shackleton on his last voyage. Shackleton died before reaching…
