SoylentNews

jelizondo writes:

Futura reports the first observation of a phenomenon predicted by Einstein over a 100 years ago:

The event, catalogued as AT2020afhd, is what astronomers call a tidal disruption event. As the star approached the supermassive black hole, gravitational forces stretched and tore it apart. Its debris spiraled inward, forming a rapidly spinning disk of superheated gas. From that disk, jets of matter launched outward at nearly the speed of light.

As researchers tracked the event in X-ray and radio, they noticed something unexpected. The disk and the jet were wobbling in unison, completing a full cycle every 19.6 days. That synchronized motion pointed to a single cause: the black hole itself was dragging spacetime around with it as it spun, pulling the entire disk-and-jet system into a slow, rhythmic precession.

The phenomenon has a name: Lense-Thirring precession, or frame dragging. Einstein laid the theoretical groundwork in 1913. Physicists Josef Lense and Hans Thirring put it into mathematical form in 1918. Until now, no one had observed it so directly around a black hole.

The study, published December 10, 2025 in Science Advances, was led by Yanan Wang and colleagues at the National Astronomical Observatories of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, with support from a multinational team including Cardiff University. To detect the precession, researchers combined data from NASA's Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory and the Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array, cross-referencing X-ray and radio observations over several months.

Dr. Cosimo Inserra, Reader in the School of Physics and Astronomy at Cardiff University and one of the paper's co-authors, described the detection plainly. A spinning black hole drags spacetime along with it the way a spinning top stirs water in a whirlpool. When incoming gas orbits at a tilt, the inner disk wobbles. Any jet anchored to that disk wobbles with it.

[...] Prior tidal disruption events showed steady radio signals. AT2020afhd did not. Its short term radio variability couldn't be attributed to the energy output of the black hole or its surrounding components, which, Inserra noted, further confirms the dragging effect and offers a new observational tool for studying similar events in the future.

Black holes have been studied through their effects on light, gas, and nearby stars for decades. AT2020afhd doesn't just add another data point to that record, it makes the mechanics of spacetime distortion directly measurable for the first time.

Original Submission

Freeman writes:

https://arstechnica.com/space/2026/03/100-years-later-where-is-robert-goddards-first-liquid-fuel-rocket/

It flew for only two seconds, but its impact is still felt a century later.

Robert Goddard's first liquid-fueled rocket, which lifted off from a snowy field on March 16, 1926, has been written about extensively. Earlier solid-fueled rockets existed, but liquid-fueled rockets promised the sustainability and control needed to send spacecraft and humans into Earth orbit and beyond.

"The rocket's reach was short, but it marked the moment that humanity entered a new era," said Kevin Schindler, author of "Robert Goddard's Massachusetts,"
[...]
Photos from that day exist through the efforts of Goddard's wife, as does a monument stand from where the rocket, nicknamed "Nell," left the ground (today, located on a golf course). Over the decades, replicas of Nell have been built, even ones capable of flight. But a century later, a question about the rocket remains.

Where is it now?
[...]
Goddard wrote in his notebook that the rocket "rose 41 feet & went 184 feet, in 2.5 secs." The next day, he added, "Even though the release was pulled, the rocket did not rise at first, but the flame came out, and there was a steady roar. After a number of seconds it rose, slowly until it cleared the frame, and then at express train speed, curving over to the left, and striking the ice and snow, still going at a rapid rate."

"It looked almost magical as it rose, without any appreciably greater noise or flame, as if it said, 'I've been here long enough; I think I'll be going somewhere else, if you don't mind,'" he wrote.
[...]
Esther took a photograph of her husband standing with the recovered parts. She also posed for a similar photo, together with Sachs and Roope. In his notebook, Goddard wrote that they brought the rocket's remains back to his laboratory.

By all accounts, Goddard did not try to reassemble Nell, nor did he treat the pieces as historic artifacts.

"He didn't preserve it as a sacred object," wrote Michael Neufeld, who retired as a senior curator for the space history division of the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum, in an email. "He didn't have a lot of money at that point and reused everything."
[...]
The National Air and Space Museum's collection catalog describes the Goddard May 1926 rocket as "likely includ[ing] the nozzle" recovered from Nell.

"I gather the nozzle assertion is based on his notes. I haven't seen them myself," said Neufeld. "More may be on the May 1926 rocket, which we can't prove."

Goddard's notebook is held at the Robert H. Goddard Library at Clark University today. In his March 16, 1926, entry, Goddard recorded that "the lower half of the nozzle burned off." Photos taken prior to Nell's launch show a longer nozzle than what is installed on the May rocket, perhaps supporting its suggested reuse.
[...]
As referenced by both Winter and Brooks, W.S. Crane researched and published a catalog for the museum's Goddard holdings in 1994. The chamber is attributed to coming from Clark University and the nozzle fragments are described as a gift from Esther Goddard. The source of the nose cone is unknown.

The museum also has the rod, rollers, and wire that were used to ignite Nell. "Pulling the wire opened a hole in the bottom of the liquid oxygen tank, where the oxygen dripped onto a heated surface," Crane wrote, adding that the assembly was also a gift from Mrs. Goddard.

"We are a few years out from a full recovery," wrote Brooks in an email, "The Goddard collection will return in a contemporary and updated presentation (compared to the original exhibit, which dated back to 1959) when the museum reopens."
[...]
"Apart from its historic significance, this rocket became a minor source of embarrassment for Dr. Goddard, since the illogical position of the combustion chamber at the top is evidence that he had failed to consider some very basic physics in his design," wrote Crane. "This is a great example of the role of common sense and intuition in pioneering engineering, and one of the very few times that Dr. Goddard's failed him."

Original Submission

Freeman writes:

https://arstechnica.com/science/2026/03/the-science-of-how-fireflies-stay-in-sync/

Scientists have discovered that male fireflies in a South Carolina swamp follow local interaction rules to synchronize their flashing mating displays. The research is being presented at a meeting of the American Physical Society in Denver. (A preprint is also available on the biorxiv.)
[...]
As previously reported, research into swarming and flocking was largely relegated to observational biologists for decades. But in the 1980s, a computer graphics specialist named Craig Reynolds developed the so-called "boids" program, an agent-based computational model that has dominated collective behavior studies ever since.
[...]
As for fireflies, we already know quite a bit about how they emit light. We know the enzyme they use to make light (called luciferase), as well as the chemicals they use in the light-generating reaction.
[...]
Orit Peleg of the University of Colorado at Boulder has been fascinated for several years by how fireflies synchronize their flashes. Prior research involved field work in Great Smoky Mountains National Park to monitor thousands of male fireflies known for their fleeting flashes of mating displays (Photinus carolinus).
[...]
Peleg's lab has since built on that earlier research. The latest findings are the result of field work conducted each May for four years (2021–2025) at Congaree National Park in South Carolina. Once again, they pitched a pop-up tent isolated from external light sources. Then they exposed captured fireflies to a dim LED light that mimicked a firefly flash, blinking between once every second to once every 300 milliseconds.

The results: The fireflies were most likely to change their own flashing rhythm in response when the LED blinked almost, but not quite, at the same time as the fireflies.
[...]
"For a whole season, I spent pretty much every night in the dark watching lights blink at a fixed frequency," former graduate student (and co-author on the preprint) Owen Martin said of the field observations. "Then, occasionally, I'd get this magical experience where I'd see the firefly just start syncing with the light. I would wonder if I was just seeing things." But the ensuing mathematical analysis confirmed the patterns

Original Submission

canopic jug writes:

Software engineer, Blain Smith, was written an essay discussing the role of a well-rounded education has had in creating the ICT ecosystem we have today. In it he describes quite a few luminaries, although he did miss Perl's creator, linguist Larry Wall. He is highly relevant because, for a couple of decades, Perl was the glue that held the Internet together which enabled the explosive growth from the mid-90s through the mid-00s.

The founders of your field read philosophy and wrote essays and studied classical languages and asked questions about consciousness and beauty and the nature of human thought. They did not do these things because they had spare time or because someone made them. They did them because they understood, implicitly or explicitly, that building machines worthy of human trust requires understanding what it means to be human.

That understanding is not going to come from another tutorial, another side project, or another Hacker News thread. It is going to come from the long, slow, sometimes difficult work of engaging with the humanities. Read philosophy. Read literature. Read history. Study how humans have thought about ethics, about power, about communication, about what it means to build something that lasts. Sit with those ideas long enough to let them reshape how you approach your own work.

The tradition that produced Lovelace's poetical science and Hoare's classical mind and Dijkstra's handwritten essays and Hopper's insistence that computers must speak to people is not dead. But it is diminishing, generation by generation, as the field grows further from its roots. You have the opportunity to reverse that. Not by going back to school, necessarily, but by taking the humanities seriously enough to let them into your professional life, your design decisions, your code reviews, your conversations with the people who will use what you build.

The machines we build reflect the minds that build them. If those minds are nourished only by technical knowledge, the machines will be technically competent and humanistically hollow. If those minds are broad, curious, and grounded in the long tradition of human thought, the machines will be something better. They will be worthy of the people who depend on them.

The choice, as it has always been, is yours.

That raises the question if a well-rounded education is even possible on either side of the pond these days given the radical changes in recent decades to tertiary education and the institutions formerly tasked with delivering advanced studies.

Original Submission

hubie writes:

Chimps' love for crystals could help us understand our own ancestors' fascination with these stones:

For hundreds of thousands of years, our hominin ancestors collected crystals. Something about these stones made them desirable, even when they weren't used for anything. But then why collect them at all? To learn more about the roots of this fascination, scientists in Spain ran experiments with individuals from the species most closely related genetically to hominins and humans: chimpanzees. Chimps were drawn to crystals' transparency and shape and could quickly distinguish them from normal rocks. These findings could show why objects with crystal-like properties have intrigued our ancestors for almost 800,000 years – and continue to pique our interest today.

Crystals have repeatedly been found at archaeological sites alongside Homo remains. Evidence shows hominins have been collecting these stones for as long as 780,000 years. Yet, we know that our ancestors did not use them as weapons, tools, or even jewelry. So why did they collect them at all?

Now, in a new Frontiers in Psychology study, scientists in Spain investigated which characteristics of crystals may have made them so fascinating to our ancestors. They designed experiments with chimpanzees – one of the two great ape species most closely related to modern humans – to identify the physical properties of crystals that may have attracted early hominins.

"We show that enculturated chimpanzees can distinguish crystals from other stones," said lead author Prof Juan Manuel García-Ruiz, an Ikerbasque Research Professor on crystallography at the Donostia International Physics Center in San Sebastián. "We were pleasantly surprised by how strong and seemingly natural the chimpanzees' attraction to crystals was. This suggests that sensitivity to such objects may have deep evolutionary roots."

[...] In the first experiment, a large crystal – the monolith – was placed on a platform, along with a normal rock of similar size. While initially both objects caught the chimps' attention, soon the crystal was preferred and the rock disregarded. Once they had removed it from the platform, all chimps inspected the crystal, rotating and tilting it so they could view it from specific angles. Yvan then picked up the crystal and decisively carried it to the dormitories.

Interest was strongest early after exposure and declined very gradually over time, the team observed. The same pattern is found in humans as the novelty of an objects fades. When caretakers tried to retrieve the crystal from the chimps' enclosure, they had to exchange it for favored snacks: bananas and yogurt.

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

FCC Chairman Brendan Carr is back on the broadcast media’s throat. This time, he is unhappy with the way broadcasters have been covering the war with Iran.

In an X post on Saturday, Carr quote-tweeted a Truth Social post by President Trump in which the president claimed that news coverage of the Iran war was “terrible” and “intentionally misleading” and accused traditional media organizations of actually wanting the U.S. to lose the war. In his own post, Carr threatened to revoke licenses if coverage doesn’t change in a way the Trump administration would approve of.

“Broadcasters that are running hoaxes and news distortions – also known as the fake news – have a chance now to correct course before their license renewals come up,” Carr wrote. “The law is clear. Broadcasters must operate in the public interest, and they will lose their licenses if they do not.”

Massachusetts Senator Ed Markey called for the FCC Chairman to resign over the missive.

“Your Saturday post is not an aberration. It is the latest and most dangerous step in a sustained campaign to use the FCC’s licensing authority as a weapon against broadcasters and journalists whose coverage displeases the Trump administration,” Sen. Markey wrote in a letter on Sunday. “The FCC’s credibility depends on its willingness to exercise its authority on the merits, not at the direction of the President, and not as an instrument of retribution against journalism. You have once again shown that you are unwilling to maintain that independence and uphold your sworn oath to defend the U.S. Constitution, and I once again call on you to resign.”

Under Carr’s leadership, the FCC’s tight grip on broadcast media has been the source of controversy. Back in September, ABC briefly suspended Jimmy Kimmel’s late-night TV show after his comments about the late MAGA influencer Charlie Kirk angered Trump’s fan base. Following Kimmel’s segment, Carr appeared on a podcast episode to vow revenge, saying he would ask TV stations to remove Kimmel from the air.

Trump praised Carr’s actions at the time, saying that the shows that often criticize him should “maybe” have their license taken away, but ultimately the decision was up to Brendan Carr, whom he deemed “outstanding,” “a tough guy,” and “a patriot.”

More recently, Stephen Colbert said that his network, CBS, forced him to cancel an appearance by Democratic Texas Rep. James Talarico, who is up for a Senate election later this year, in anticipation of FCC pushback.

Carr is not the sole high-ranking U.S. official to pledge attacks on the media. On Friday, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth complained about CNN’s coverage of the Iran war and said he was looking forward to Paramount Skydance owner and Trump ally David Ellison taking over the network.

Original Submission

Freeman writes:

https://arstechnica.com/health/2026/03/woman-sneezes-out-maggots-after-fly-larvae-get-trapped-in-her-deviated-septum/

A 58-year-old woman in Greece appears to hold the record for growing a parasitic sheep bot fly in her nose the longest, almost creating a snot rocket that could literally fly.

Usually, when the sheep bot fly accidentally nosedives into a human's schnoz, the first-stage larvae they deliver don't actually develop.
[...]
For a long time, experts thought that the flies couldn't complete their development in humans beyond the first larval stage. But a few human cases have been reported in recent decades involving the second- and third-stage larvae. The woman's case, reported in the Journal of Emerging Infectious Diseases by a medical entomologist and colleagues, goes the furthest yet, finding pupa and a puparium—the hard casing of a pupa—in the woman's nose.
[...]
On a hot and dry September day, she recalled a swarm of flies bombarding her face. About a week later, she had facial pain and then developed a cough over the next two to three weeks. Those were her only symptoms until October 15, when she sneezed and reported that "worms" came out of her nose. They were, in fact, late-stage sheep bot fly larvae.

She had surgery to remove the mucus munchers, which recovered 10 larvae at various stages and a pupa.
[...]
"From a purely anatomic perspective, we hypothesize that the combination of high larval numbers and septum deviation impeded normal egress from the nasal passages, permitting progression to the [third larval stage] and, in 1 instance, pupation," they wrote. In other words, there were so many maggots in her crooked nasal passage that they created a bottleneck on their way out, allowing some to stay longer than usual.
[...]
The experts note that, in a way, the woman was lucky. In animals, the third-stage larvae can't pupate when they become trapped in the sinuses. Instead, they either dry out, liquify, or calcify, which can all lead to secondary bacterial infections.

Original Submission

hubie writes:

Researchers have used brain imaging to show how memories can be reactivated in the brain without them reaching conscious awareness, showing that these memories persist even when we think they have been forgotten:

Scientists from the University of Nottingham's School of Psychology used Magnetoencephalography (MEG) to show how our brains reactivate memories even when we can't recall them, suggesting that the brain remembers even if we don't. The results have been published in Journal of Neuroscience.

Neural oscillations are rhythmic electrical activity in the brain often referred to as brain waves. These are essential for encoding, storing, and retrieving memories by synchronizing neural populations. Oscillations specifically facilitate memory formation, spatial navigation, and episodic memory binding in the hippocampus, while alpha and beta bands are often linked to cortical processing during long-term memory tasks.

[...] The results showed that while the brain reactivated memories regardless of whether they were consciously recalled, the reactivated memory signal fluctuated more rhythmically in the alpha band when the memory was successfully recalled, as though this rhythmic pattern helped the memory signal to be heard over all the background neural noise that otherwise might mask it.

Dr Benjamin Griffiths from the School of Psychology led this study and explains: "What we showed is that even when the brain can reactivate the right memory, it doesn't guarantee you'll become aware of it. Instead, what seems to matter is that the memory rhythmically pulses so that it can be detected above and beyond other neural activity. If you think about a football ground, if everyone is chatting you can't hear what is being said but if everyone starts singing the same song you can hear it clearly, we speculate that a similar idea is involved in the brain's recall of memories."

The researchers also found a decrease in total sensory neocortical alpha power accompanies this memory rhythm, Ben explains: "This finding can be likened to the general background noise in the stadium dropping. When the overall chatter dies down, even a modest chant from the fans becomes easier to hear."

These findings may have real implications for conditions like dementia. Current treatments often assume that when someone can't remember, the memory itself is gone. But if memories are being reactivated in the brain and simply failing to reach consciousness, it suggests we might need a different approach — one focused not on rebuilding lost memories, but on helping existing ones break through into awareness.
Dr Benjamin Griffiths, School of Psychology

Journal Reference: Benjamin J. Griffiths, Journal of Neuroscience 4 March 2026, e1487252026; https://doi.org/10.1523/JNEUROSCI.1487-25.2026

Original Submission

hubie writes:

New UBC research shows apocalyptic thinking is widespread and shapes how people respond to global threats:

In an era of climate anxiety, geopolitical tensions and rapidly advancing artificial intelligence, apocalyptic thinking is no longer confined to the fringes of society, according to new research published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.

"Belief in the end of the world is surprisingly common across North America, and it's significantly influencing how people interpret and respond to the most pressing threats facing humanity," said Dr. Matthew I. Billet, the study's lead author who conducted the research as a PhD candidate in UBC's psychology department. He is now a postdoctoral scholar at the University of California, Irvine.

[...] "Different narratives people believe about the end of the world can lead to very different responses to societal issues," said Dr. Billet. "Someone who believes humans are causing the apocalypse through climate change will respond very differently to environmental policy than someone who believes the end times are controlled by divine prophecy."

The research revealed differences across religious denominations.

"Everyone agrees on one thing: We humans play an important role in the fate of our species," said Dr. Billet. "This was as true for the religious as it was for the non-religious. However, there were also differences between religious denominations that were quite stark. These differences point to how religion—and culture more broadly—can shape how we fundamentally view the world and our collective future."

The study's most significant finding may be how such beliefs translate into action, or inaction.

[...] Those who believed the end is near and that humans are causing it perceived greater risk and supported more extreme action to address threats. However, those who believed divine forces control the apocalypse were less likely to support preventive measures.

fliptop writes:

After a costly EV mistake, Porsche is betting on gas engines, hybrids, and eFuels to protect its identity and rebuild profits:

For a fleeting moment, it seemed like the iconic roar of a Porsche flat-six was destined for the history books. However, after a reality check from the global automotive market, the legendary German automaker is officially hitting the reset button. Instead of rushing toward an all-electric lineup, Porsche is placing its faith, and its financial future, squarely back on the internal combustion engine.

This change of heart comes on the heels of a financially disastrous 2025. The company was forced to absorb approximately $4.5 billion in one-off charges, with a staggering $3.5 billion directly attributed to scaling back its battery-electric vehicle ambitions. The aggressive EV push nearly wiped out the brand's profitability, dragging its operating margin down to a razor-thin 0.3% and halving its share price compared to 2022 highs.

Porsche CEO Michael Leiters has admitted that the brand simply pushed too hard and too fast toward electrification, vastly overestimating how quickly premium buyers would abandon gas pumps for charging stations.

The clearest indicator of this miscalculation was the Taycan, which experienced a sharp sales drop as consumer enthusiasm for high-end EVs plummeted and cheaper Chinese electric sedans flooded the market. But the most painful misstep involved the Macan.

Porsche initially planned to completely kill off the gas-powered Macan to make way for an EV-only successor. When EV demand cratered, the automaker found itself without a combustion-engine option in one of its most profitable segments.

Engineers are now scrambling to develop a new petrol-powered Macan, but the delay means the brand will have a glaring hole in its lineup until at least 2028.

Previously: Porsche EV Roll-Out Delay Deals $6 Billion Hit to Parent Volkswagen

Original Submission

fliptop writes:

Starting May 8, every Instagram DM becomes readable by the same company that sells ads against everything else you do on the platform:

Meta is quietly dismantling one of its few genuine privacy commitments. Starting May 8, end-to-end encryption for Instagram direct messages disappears, taking with it the one technical guarantee that kept those conversations private from Meta itself.

"If you have chats that are impacted by this change, you will see instructions on how you can download any media or messages you may want to keep," the company said in a help document, framing the loss of message privacy as a data export problem. Collect your things, the walls are coming down.

The feature being removed was never universal anyway. End-to-end encryption for Instagram DMs had been available only in certain regions, not enabled by default, since Meta began testing it in 2021 as part of what CEO Mark Zuckerberg called his "privacy-focused vision for social networking."

[...] The timing is revealing. TikTok told the BBC last week that it has no plans to bring end-to-end encryption to its DMs, arguing that privacy makes users less safe. Meta is now arriving at the same destination from a different direction.

Original Submission

owl writes:

https://www.righto.com/2019/11/ibm-sonic-delay-lines-and-history-of.html

What explains the popularity of terminals with 80×24 and 80×25 displays? A recent blog post "80x25" motivated me to investigate this. The source of 80-column lines is clearly punch cards, as commonly claimed. But why 24 or 25 lines? There are many theories, but I found a simple answer: IBM, in particular its dominance of the terminal market. In 1971, IBM introduced a terminal with an 80×24 display (the 3270) and it soon became the best-selling terminal, forcing competing terminals to match its 80×24 size. The display for the IBM PC added one more line to its screen, making the 80×25 size standard in the PC world. The impact of these systems remains decades later: 80-character lines are still a standard, along with both 80×24 and 80×25 terminal windows.

In this blog post, I'll discuss this history in detail, including some other systems that played key roles. The CRT terminal market essentially started with the IBM 2260 Display Station in 1965, built from curious technologies such as sonic delay lines. This led to the popular IBM 3270 display and then widespread, inexpensive terminals such as the DEC VT100. In 1981, IBM released a microcomputer called the DataMaster. While the DataMaster is mostly forgotten, it strongly influenced the IBM PC, including the display. This post also studies reports on the terminal market from the 1970s and 1980s; these make it clear that market forces, not technological forces, led to the popularity of various display sizes.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

Frame-dragging may explain an odd pattern seen in the brightest supernovae:

Some of the most extreme explosions in the universe are Type I superluminous supernovae. "They are one of the brightest explosions in the Universe," says Joseph Farah, an astrophysicist at the University of California, Santa Barbara. For years, astrophysicists tried to understand what exactly makes superluminous supernovae so absurdly powerful. Now it seems like we may finally have some answers.

Farah and his colleagues have found that these events are most likely powered by magnetars, rapidly spinning neutron stars that warp the very space and time around them.

Magnetars have been a leading candidate for the engine behind superluminous supernovae. The theory says these insanely magnetized stars are born from the collapsing core of the original progenitor star and emit energy via magnetic dipole radiation. "This core is roughly a one solar mass object that gets crushed down to the size of a city," Farah explains. As its spin slows down, a magnetar bleeds its rotational energy into the expanding material of the dead star, lighting it up.

The problem was that this theory did not quite explain observations. In a standard magnetar model, the light curve of the supernova should rise rapidly and then fade away evenly as the neutron star loses its rotational energy. "This way the light curve, in the prediction of this model, just goes up and then down quite smoothly," Farah says. But when astronomers observe superluminous supernovae, they almost never see this smooth fade. Instead, they see bumps, wiggles, and strange modulations. The light curve flickers over months.

For a while, scientists tried to patch the magnetar engine theory to fit observations. Maybe the expanding debris was slamming into irregular shells of material shed by the star before it died. Or perhaps the magnetar engine was spitting out random, violent flares. But these explanations required highly specific, fine-tuned parameters to match what we were seeing through our telescopes.

The solution to the strange flickering problem came when the Liverpool Gravitational Wave Optical Transient Observer collaboration detected an object designated SN 2024afav on December 12, 2024. Initially, the object looked like a standard superluminous supernova. "It was as bright and it had bumps in the light curve like many other objects of this kind," Farah says. But as the telescopes kept watching, it started doing something unprecedented: It started to chirp.

[...] The flickering in the superluminous supernovae, Farah hypothesized, was caused by the extreme gravity of a newborn magnetar dragging the very spacetime around it along as it was spinning.

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

Musk can't convince judge public doesn't care about where AI training data comes from:

Elon Musk's xAI has lost its bid for a preliminary injunction that would have temporarily blocked California from enforcing a law that requires AI firms to publicly share information about their training data.

xAI had tried to argue that California's Assembly Bill 2013 (AB 2013) forced AI firms to disclose carefully guarded trade secrets.

The law requires AI developers whose models are accessible in the state to clearly explain which dataset sources were used to train models, when the data was collected, if the collection is ongoing, and whether the datasets include any data protected by copyrights, trademarks, or patents. Disclosures would also clarify whether companies licensed or purchased training data and whether the training data included any personal information. It would also help consumers assess how much synthetic data was used to train the model, which could serve as a measure of quality.

However, this information is precisely what makes xAI valuable, with its intensive data sourcing supposedly setting it apart from its biggest rivals, xAI argued. Allowing enforcement could be "economically devastating" to xAI, Musk's company argued, effectively reducing "the value of xAI's trade secrets to zero," xAI's complaint said. Further, xAI insisted, these disclosures "cannot possibly be helpful to consumers" while supposedly posing a real risk of gutting the entire AI industry.

Specifically, xAI argued that its dataset sources, dataset sizes, and cleaning methods were all trade secrets.

"If competitors could see the sources of all of xAI's datasets or even the size of its datasets, competitors could evaluate both what data xAI has and how much they lack," xAI argued. In one hypothetical, xAI speculated that "if OpenAI (another leading AI company) were to discover that xAI was using an important dataset to train its models that OpenAI was not, OpenAI would almost certainly acquire that dataset to train its own model, and vice versa."

However, in an order issued on Wednesday, US District Judge Jesus Bernal said that xAI failed to show that California's law, which took effect in January, required the company to reveal any trade secrets.

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

Chinese Loongson 3C6000 CPUs now have heat spreaders with words in Cyrillic?

The specifications of Tramplin's 16-core Irtysh C616 (2.20 GHz, 32MB L3, quad-channel DDR4-3200 memory, 844.8 GFLOPS, 100W – 120W TDP) and 32-core Irtysh C632 processors (2.10 GHz, 64MB L3, octa-channel DDR4-3200 memory, 1612.8 GFLOPS, 180W – 200W TDP) are identical to those of Loongson's 16-core LS3C6000/S and 32-core LS3C6000/D CPUs down to a single number, which isn't something that happens usually unless we are dealing with the very same silicon.

Indeed, Tramplin Electronics was first registered on April 4, 2025, so the company is less than a year old. It is impossible to develop a processor from scratch (even based on a known/licensed ISA), find a production partner, build its physical design, tape it out, and get samples in this short of a time frame. In fact, a year is barely enough to bring up a new CPU based on an existing platform (this may easily take a couple of years for a company of AMD's or Intel's size), not to mention developing one from scratch. That said, even though the processors were made in the third week of 2026, it looks like these are regular Loongson LS3C6000 CPUs that carry Cyrillic inscriptions.

Now that Russia-based entities cannot legally obtain high-performance CPUs from companies like AMD or Intel, the only way for the country to retain access to more or less contemporary processors is to buy them illegally in nearby countries, or get Chinese processors from the People's Republic. Apparently, we are dealing with the second option here, albeit with an attempt to disguise Chinese processors as those developed in Russia. Interestingly, the source of the river Irtysh — after which the CPUs are named — is in China.

Original Submission