Theia crashed into earth and formed the moon, the theory goes. But then where did Theia come from? The lead author on a new study says "The most convincing scenario is that most of the building blocks of Earth and Theia originated in the inner Solar System. Earth and Theia are likely to have been neighbors." Though Theia was completely destroyed in the collision, scientists from the Max Planck Institute... Read more ›
6
In October cryptologist/CS professor Daniel J. Bernstein alleged that America's National Security Agency (and its UK counterpart GCHQ) were attempting to influence NIST to adopt weaker post-quantum cryptography standards without a "hybrid" approach that would've also included pre-quantum ECC. Bernstein is of the opinion that "Given how many post-quantum proposals have been broken and the continuing flood of side-channel attacks, any competent engineering evaluation will conclude that the best way... Read more ›
2
"Three years ago, Google removed JPEG XL support from Chrome, stating there wasn't enough interest at the time," writes the blog Windows Report. "That position has now changed." In a recent note to developers, a Chrome team representative confirmed that work has restarted to bring JPEG XL to Chromium and said Google "would ship it in Chrome" once long-term maintenance and the usual launch requirements are met. The team explained... Read more ›
20
"Fresh from announcing it is building an AI browsing mode in Firefox and laying the groundwork for agentic interactions in the Firefox 145 release, the corp arm of Mozilla is now flexing its AI muscles in the direction of those more likely to care," writes the blog OMG Ubuntu: If you're a developer building AI agents, you can sign up to get early access to Mozilla's TABS API, a "powerful... Read more ›
0
Long-time Slashdot reader jenningsthecat shared this article from IEEE Spectrum: By dropping a nuclear reactor 1.6 kilometers (1 mile) underground, Deep Fission aims to use the weight of a billion tons of rock and water as a natural containment system comparable to concrete domes and cooling towers. With the fission reaction occurring far below the surface, steam can safely circulate in a closed loop to generate power. The California-based startup... Read more ›
18
With some animated graphics, CNN "reimagined" what three of America's busiest air and road travel routes would look like with high-speed trains, for "a glimpse into a faster, more connected future." The journey from New York City to Chicago could take just over six hours by high-speed train at an average speed of 160 mph, cutting travel time by more than 13 hours compared with the current Amtrak route... The... Read more ›
12
"Security, development, and AI now move as one," says Microsoft's director of cloud/AI security product marketing. Microsoft and GitHub "have launched a native integration between Microsoft Defender for Cloud and GitHub Advanced Security that aims to address what one executive calls decades of accumulated security debt in enterprise codebases..." according to The New Stack: The integration, announced this week in San Francisco at the Microsoft Ignite 2025 conference and now... Read more ›
83
"On the slopes of an Oregon volcano, engineers are building the hottest geothermal power plant on Earth," reports the Washington Post: The plant will tap into the infernal energy of Newberry Volcano, "one of the largest and most hazardous active volcanoes in the United States," according to the U.S. Geological Survey. It has already reached temperatures of 629 degrees Fahrenheit, making it one of the hottest geothermal sites in the... Read more ›
15
"The internet did transform work — but not the way 1998 thought..." argues the Wall Street Journal. "The internet slipped inside almost every job and rewired how work got done." So while the number of single-task jobs like travel agent dropped, most jobs "are bundles of judgment, coordination and hands-on work," and instead the internet brought "the quiet transformation of nearly every job in the economy... Today, just 10% of... Read more ›
0
"Copilot Actions on Windows 11" is currently available in Insider builds (version 26220.7262) as part of Copilot Labs, according to a recent report, "and is off by default, requiring admin access to set it up." But maybe it's off for a good reason...besides the fact that it can access any apps installed on your system: In a support document, Microsoft admits that features like Copilot Actions introduce " novel security... Read more ›
72
A promotional video for Amazon's Kiro software development system took a unique approach, writes GeekWire. "Instead of product diagrams or keynote slides, a crew from Seattle's Packrat creative studio used action figures on a miniature set to create a stop-motion sequence..." "Can the software development hero conquer the 'AI Slop Monster' to uncover the gleaming, fully functional robot buried beneath the coding chaos?" Kiro (pronounced KEE-ro) is Amazon's effort to... Read more ›
42
A week ago Bitcoin was at $93,714. Saturday it dropped to $85,300. Late Thursday, market researcher Ed Yardeni blamed some of Thursday's stock market sell-off on "the ongoing plunge in bitcoin's price," reports Fortune: "There has been a strong correlation between it and the price of TQQQ, an ETF that seeks to achieve daily investment results that correspond to three times (3x) the daily performance of the Nasdaq-100 Index," [Yardeni... Read more ›
26
"PHP 8.5 landed on Thursday with a long-awaited pipe operator and a new standards-compliant URI parser," reports the Register, "marking one of the scripting language's more substantial updates... " The pipe operator allows function calls to be chained together, which avoids the extraneous variables and nested statements that might otherwise be involved. Pipes tend to make code more readable than other ways to implement serial operations. Anyone familiar with the... Read more ›
12
In a 2023 pitch to investors, a "well-financed, highly credentialed" startup named Stardust aimed for a "gradual temperature reduction demonstration" in 2027, according to a massive new 9,600-word article from Politico. ("Annually dispersing ~1 million tons of sun-reflecting particles," says one slide. "Equivalent to ~1% extra cloud coverage.") "Another page told potential investors Stardust had already run low-altitude experiments using 'test particles'," the article notes: [P]ublic records and inte Read more ›
2
Meta "is testing a new product that would give Facebook users a personalized daily briefing powered by the company's generative AI technology" reports the Washington Post. They cite records they've reviwed showing that Meta "would analyze Facebook content and external sources to push custom updates to its users." The company plans to test the product with a small group of Facebook users in select cities such as New York and... Read more ›
41
An anonymous reader shared this report from CNN: The universe's expansion might not be accelerating but slowing down, a new study suggests. If confirmed, the finding would upend decades of established astronomical assumptions and rewrite our understanding of dark energy, the elusive force that counters the inward pull of gravity in our universe... Last year, a consortium of hundreds of researchers using data from the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI)... Read more ›
66
An anonymous reader shared this report from Sky News: A new wind record has been set for Britain, with enough electricity generated from turbines to power 22 million homes, the system operator has said. The mark of 22,711 megawatts (MW) was set at 7.30pm on 11 November... enough to keep around three-quarters of British homes powered, the National Energy System Operator (Neso) said. The country had experienced windy conditions, particularly... Read more ›
9
For nearly three years OpenAI has touted ChatGPT as a "revolutionary" (and work-transforming) productivity tool, reports the Washington Post. But after analyzing 47,000 ChatGPT conversations, the Post found that users "are overwhelmingly turning to the chatbot for advice and companionship, not productivity tasks." The Post analyzed a collection of thousands of publicly shared ChatGPT conversations from June 2024 to August 2025. While ChatGPT conversations are private by default, the conversations... Read more ›
46
In October Zorin OS claimed it had 100,000 downloads in a little over two days in the days following Microsoft's end of support for Windows 10. And one month later, Zorin OS developers now claim that 780,000 people downloaded it from a Windows computer in the space of a month, according to the tech news site XDA Developers. In a post on the Zorin blog, the developers of the operating... Read more ›
51
ScienceDaily reports: Electrons can freeze into strange geometric crystals and then melt back into liquid-like motion under the right quantum conditions. Researchers identified how to tune these transitions and even discovered a bizarre "pinball" state where some electrons stay locked in place while others dart around freely. Their simulations help explain how these phases form and how they might be harnessed for advanced quantum technologies... When electrons settle into these... Read more ›
59
Most popular sources
ScienceDaily
|
0% |
Financial Times
|
0% |
Inc42 Media
|
0% |
The Fintech Times
|
0% |
Ars Technica
|
0% |
| View sources » | |
LIKE us on Facebook so you won't miss the most important news of the day!
17.05.2026 20:36
Last update: 20:15 EDT.
News rating updated: 03:30.
What is Times42?
Times42 brings you the most popular news from tech news portals in real-time chart.
Read about us in FAQ section.