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Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

Not to kill the human, of course – to kill the antibiotic-resistant bacteria causing their infection:

Researchers have administered AI-designed, bacteria-targeting viruses to a person in what they claim is a first, but don't press them for results: They're not ready to say how it went quite yet.

Radical Numerics, a San Francisco-based AI lab developing AI models for bioscience, announced the treatment this week, claiming it marks the first time a cocktail containing AI-designed bacteriophages has been administered to a human patient under a compassionate-use arrangement.

These aren't just any viruses, mind you: Omnii-1, the AI model publicly unveiled by Radical Numerics this week, was used to design viable bacteriophages, a type of virus that specifically infects bacteria.

Therapeutic use of phages isn't novel in and of itself, with the bacteria-targeting viruses being sought as an alternative to combat the rise of antimicrobial-resistant bacteria that are increasingly rendering antibiotics ineffective. 

Phages have a number of potential advantages over antibiotics, most notably their ability to target specific bacterial strains – a big plus when it comes to sparing beneficial gut bacteria that can be affected by broad-spectrum antibiotics.

AI has already shown promise in speeding up phage engineering, as we reported last year when a group of researchers from Stanford University and the Arc Institute created AI-designed phages that targeted E. coli bacteria. The phages, designed using the genetic sequence of a well-studied natural E. coli phage, included several variants that outperformed their biological predecessor in laboratory tests.

Similar to the Stanford work, which is referenced in Radical Numerics' write-up, the company used its own AI model to design bacteriophages, which it then tested against bacteria isolated from the antibiotic-resistant infection its patient was suffering from.

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

The Russian official who called commercial satellites "legitimate targets" now says concerns are "unfounded":

Four years ago, a senior official in Russia's foreign ministry painted a bullseye on commercial satellite networks that assist Ukraine in its fight against invading Russian military forces.

On Wednesday, several days after a Russian military spacecraft moved within striking distance of one of those commercial satellites, the same Russian diplomat assured the world there's no reason to worry.

There's a sharp incongruity in those statements from Konstantin Vorontsov, deputy head of Russia's delegation to the United Nations. Vorontsov's comments Wednesday in the UN General Assembly's First Committee came moments after a US official called attention to recent maneuvers by Kosmos 2612, a Russian military craft that approached a US-registered commercial satellite some 340 miles (550 kilometers) above Earth.

"Just last weekend, Russia's Ministry of Defense Kosmos 2612 exhibited threatening behavior by intentionally maneuvering dangerously close to a commercial satellite," Brian Hardesty, a US State Department official, told the UN committee. "These behaviors appear consistent with an on-orbit weapons operation. The decision to conduct these activities was deliberately reckless and violated long-established safety thresholds in low-Earth orbit."

[...] Vorontsov said the US government's concerns, echoed by European officials, were "unfounded" distractions. "Western countries headed by the United States continue to use loudspeaker diplomacy repeating absurd accusations about Russia's space activity."

All Russian activity in space is "purely peaceful in character," Vorontsov said. "This applies to the activity related to Kosmos 2612."

Vorontsov's statements in 2022 were more provocative. At that time, as Ukraine ramped up its reliance on commercial satellite communications and surveillance, Vorontsov said that commercial space infrastructure used by Ukraine's military, including Western satellites, could be a "legitimate target for a retaliatory strike."

It is no wonder, then, that the Russian military's unprecedented maneuvers near one of those satellites raised alarms. Since its launch in April, Kosmos 2612 performed a series of carefully choreographed rocket burns to match orbits with ICEYE-X36, a radar surveillance satellite owned by the US subsidiary of the Finnish remote sensing company ICEYE.

"Ingar" writes:

Walter Koenig, actor best known as Chekov on Star Trek, dies aged 90:

Walter Koenig, the actor known for playing Pavel Chekov throughout the Star Trek franchise, has died, his representative confirmed to the Hollywood Reporter . He was 90.

Koenig died at his home in North Hollywood surrounded by his daughter and niece, according to a Facebook post by Zachery McGinnis, the founder of Galactic Productions, an appearance agency that counted the actor as one of its clients. His death was attributed to "old age", with no other details provided.

"Today we mourn the passing of Walter Koenig, whose talent, warmth, and unforgettable performances left a lasting mark on generations of fans around the world," McGinnis wrote. "Walter's legacy extends far beyond the screen. Through countless convention appearances and interactions with fans, he shared his kindness, wit, and appreciation with everyone fortunate enough to meet him. He understood what Star Trek meant to people and embraced the community that grew around it."

The post concluded: "Thank you, Walter, for the memories, the inspiration, and for boldly going where few have gone before."

"My heart is heavy," wrote Koenig's Star Trek co-star George Takei on Facebook on Monday. Takei first met Koenig in the 1960s, "on the bridge of the Enterprise" and remained friends for six decades; Koenig served as Takei's best man at his wedding in 2008.

"Walter was more than Chekov. He was a writer, a teacher, a thoughtful man, and a loyal friend," Takei wrote. "To the fans who loved him for so many years, thank you. He loved you too. Rest well, my dear friend. Keep navigating a steady course."

Jesse Thorn, the host of the NPR show Bullseye, also confirmed the news on Bluesky , citing his friend Danielle Koenig, the late actor's daughter. "Something I was struck by knowing Danielle, her husband and her late brother Andrew (and talking with George Takei) was the very sincere love those Star Trek cast members had for each other," he wrote. "That whole thing was thrust upon them and their obvious deep friendship was so clear. What a gift."

hubie writes:

Researchers at the Max Planck Institute of Geoanthropology criticise how the decision to reject the Anthropocene as a geological epoch was reached and call for an independent review:

In a recent article in Earth's Future, researchers at the Max Planck Institute of Geoanthropology criticise the process by which the Anthropocene was rejected as a new geological epoch in 2024. They call on the International Union of Geological Sciences (IUGS) to disclose relevant documents and submit the decision-making process to an independent review.

The term Anthropocene was coined in 2000 and describes humans as a major driver of changes in the Earth system. Since then, the concept has gained importance in science, society, culture and law. The Anthropocene Working Group (AWG) proposed formally recognising the Anthropocene as a geological epoch. This proposal was rejected by the IUGS in 2024.

Now, a new commentary paper by authors from the Max Planck Institute of Geoanthropology calls on the IUGS to fully disclose the relevant documentation, as well as for an independent procedural review of the decision.

The paper documents procedural violations that cast doubt on the legitimacy of the IUGS' decision, the authors argue.

"Our main concern isn't the rejection itself. A proposal can legitimately be rejected," says Georg Schäfer, lead author of the paper. "The issue is that no adequate scientific justification for it was ever published, and serious allegations on procedural inconsistencies remain unaddressed."

Those procedural concerns include a compromised evaluation, in which the Anthropocene Working Group could not address comments or make revisions, and an invalid voting process, in which the majority of votes cast were invalid under the body's rules. An internal ethics report investigating these violations, which the IUGS executive committee did not act upon, remains publicly inaccessible.

"The Anthropocene epoch proposal demands transparency and procedural legitimacy," says Professor Jürgen Renn, founding director of the Max Planck Institute of Geoanthropology. "If decisions regarding a humanity-induced planetary crisis can be made behind closed doors, with key documents withheld and public communication vague or contradictory, then geoscience's capacity to inform societal understanding of Earth system change is diminished."

Previously:
    • Geologists Reject Declaration of 'Human Era' in Earth's Timeline
    • For the Second Time, We Are Witnessing a New Geological Epoch: The Anthropocene

Journal Reference: Science or Strategy? The Rejection of the Anthropocene Epoch Demands Transparency: https://doi.org/10.1029/2025EF007638

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

https://www.theregister.com/security/2026/10/22/max-severity-gitlab-bug-allows-remote-code-execution-over-12-years-of-releases/5304854

GitLab on Wednesday patched a maximum-severity flaw that could allow unauthenticated attackers to execute arbitrary code on self-managed servers under certain conditions. Affected software releases date back a full 12 years - so upgrade to a fixed version now.

The integer overflow bug, tracked as CVE-2026-110264, affects regular-expression compilation in GitLab Community Edition (CE) and Enterprise Edition (EE), including versions dating back to GitLab 7.0, released in June 2014.

The flaw, "under certain conditions, could have allowed an unauthenticated user to execute arbitrary code on the GitLab server due to integer overflow when compiling a specially crafted regular expression," the vendor said in its release notes.

GitLab released fixes in versions 19.5.1, 19.4.3, and 19.3.6, and backported the patch to versions 19.2.9, 19.1.9, 19.0.10, and 18.11.13. The vendor "strongly recommends" that all organizations running vulnerable software upgrade to a fixed version "as soon as possible." 

GitLab-managed infrastructure, including GitLab.com and GitLab Dedicated, remains patched, and the vendor also released two threat detections (here and here) for customers with self-managed instances.

Bug hunter Johan Carlsson reported the vulnerability through GitLab's HackerOne bug bounty program.

"For organizations running self-managed GitLab infrastructure, the potential impact is severe," warned threat-detection firm SOC Prime. "GitLab repositories frequently contain source code, CI/CD configuration, deployment secrets, access tokens, infrastructure definitions, and connections to production environments. Server-level compromise could therefore create opportunities for credential theft, repository manipulation, supply chain attacks, persistence, or lateral movement."

While there's no indication - yet - of any in-the-wild exploitation attempts, we'd expect criminals to start scanning for vulnerable instances soon.

The ongoing PHP chaos may have given defenders a short head-start on this one, but considering the perfect 10 CVSS severity rating and GitLab's reach into the enterprise - it claims 50 million registered users and more than 50 percent of the Fortune 100 - that's not going to last long.

Last month, attackers started battering another max-severity flaw in the same GitLab CE and EE products just days after the vendor issued a patch, according to the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency and private researchers.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/10/comcast-loses-more-customers-claims-other-isps-cheap-prices-are-irrational/

Comcast reportedly plans significant job cuts in its cable division as the firm continues to lose residential broadband and TV customers. Comcast lost 144,000 residential broadband customers in Q3 2026, up from a 91,000-customer loss in the same quarter a year ago, the company said in its earnings report today.

Comcast historically capitalized on a lack of competition for high-speed wired broadband. But now it faces stronger competition from fixed wireless providers and from fiber providers in parts of its cable territory.

"Fixed wireless remains aggressive and continues to take share, while fiber construction remains elevated, with pockets of irrational pricing and promotional activity," Comcast co-CEO Mike Cavanagh said today in an earnings call.

Comcast CFO Jason Armstrong said "irrational pricing" from fiber operators includes $30 to $40 monthly broadband offers "in specific markets in the third quarter." He said $30 to $40 pricing is irrational because deploying fiber costs $1,500 or more per home, and is "getting more expensive with construction costs up as you get into more suburban and rural areas."

"As we look at the return profile of that, to us, that is irrational competition," Armstrong said. While he didn't name any specific competitors, Verizon has been pitching FiOS fiber plans that start at $30 a month. Comcast's network is a mix of fiber and cable, and it offers fiber-to-the-home in only small portions of its cable territory.

Armstrong said more Comcast customers are leaving when they face "pricing transitions," apparently referring to the price hikes customers get when promotional offers expire. "We've been refining our offers and retention strategies to better manage these transitions and strengthen customer retention," he said.

Cavanagh said that "satellite is not yet a material factor" in the competition Comcast faces, but that Comcast is focused on "anticipating emerging forms of competition and positioning our business to respond as the market evolves."

After the latest quarterly drop, Comcast has 28.3 million residential broadband customers in the US. Comcast said it has a plan to turn things around.

"We've embarked on the most significant operating and cost transformation in our company's history, with an opportunity we believe will ultimately amount to billions of dollars over time," Cavanagh said. The organizational changes will result in a "significant charge" of over $1 billion to be applied in the fourth quarter earnings report, Armstrong said.

It appears likely that job cuts will affect Comcast's famously frustrating customer service division, replacing some number of humans with AI agents that already handle some customer interactions. "As personal AI agents reshape how consumers discover, purchase, and manage services, we're positioning Comcast to capitalize on that shift," Armstrong said.

As is typically the case when companies announce layoffs, Comcast said the goal is not merely reducing salary. Cavanagh said Comcast's plan "goes well beyond cost savings" and will "create a more agile, efficient organization that can compete more effectively and invest more decisively in growth."

Comcast lost 274,000 video customers in the quarter, up from a 257,000-customer loss in the same quarter last year. Total video customers are down to 10.4 million. Comcast added 368,000 wireless lines, down from a 414,000-line gain last year. It now has 10.6 million wireless lines in its business of offering mobile service to broadband subscribers.

"mrpg" writes:

Alzheimer's damage may begin outside the brain:

Destructive immune cells tied to Alzheimer's disease may get their marching orders from cells outside the brain rather than within it.

In mice, suppressing a small population of immune cells located in lymph nodes protects against neurodegeneration, researchers report September 3 in Nature Neuroscience. The findings raise the possibility of treating Alzheimer's disease while bypassing the brain's siege defenses.

For years, researchers have gone all in on efforts to remove toxic tangles of proteins like amyloid and tau from the brain as a way of halting Alzheimer's, with limited success. But the immune system also plays an important role in neurodegeneration. What exactly that role is — protector or antagonist — has been unclear.

In 2023, neurologist David Holtzman and colleagues showed that immune system T cells accumulate around tau tangles — implying that they might cause damage. Halting these cells' entry into the brain reduced inflammation, and also reduced neuronal damage, says Holtzman, of Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis.

Still, it wasn't known how these T cells accessed the brain in the first place. "A big question has been whether the T cells passively enter the brain or are primed ... to do so," says Rudolph Tanzi, a neurogeneticist at Harvard Medical School who wasn't involved in the study.

During priming, T cells are ordered to rally and multiply. The generals that bark out these orders are called dendritic cells, which capture signatures of cellular threats called antigens and present them to T cell infantry.

No one had looked closely at what dendritic cells in lymph nodes were doing during neurodegenerative disease, Holtzman says. So in the new study, he and his colleagues compared two groups of mice engineered to have tau-linked neurodegeneration, one of which lacked dendritic cells.

In old age, mice without dendritic cells still had brains packed with tau. But compared with the other mice, they were protected against neurodegeneration and performed better on cognitive tasks like nest building.

They also had far fewer T cells in their brains. This suggests that tau tangles aren't working alone in driving neurodegeneration, Holtzman says. "A lot of the damage that tau is causing is due to the inflammatory response that it's eliciting." The results would need to be replicated in human brains, he adds.

Despite this seemingly important role, the researchers found few dendritic cells in the mice's brains. Instead, they detected threat-mimicking brain proteins traveling to the lymph nodes, where dendritic cells used them to rally T cells. The team bred mutant mice with demoted dendritic cell generals that could no longer give commands to T cells. These mice also had fewer T cells in their brains and better-preserved brain structures.

It isn't practical to disable dendritic cells from birth in people at risk of Alzheimer's. But Holtzman says his colleagues are working on cellular targets that could suppress them in adulthood. The real promise of the study may be a dementia treatment that bypasses the nervous system's locked vault — the blood-brain barrier, Holtzman says. "If this panned out, potentially you wouldn't have to get [therapeutics] into the brain."

Journal Reference:
Hu, Hao, Lin, Peter Bor-Chian, Zeng, Carisa, et al. Priming of CD8+ T cells by peripheral dendritic cells exacerbates tau [open], Nature Neuroscience 2026 (DOI: 10.1038/s41593-026-02427-5)

Original Submission

hubie writes:

Surprising discovery suggests that Mars and Earth formed through different processes. The finding could help scientists understand whether planets in other galaxies are habitable:

Four and a half billion years ago, Earth and Mars were born in the rotating cloud of gas and dust that would eventually become our Solar System.

Yet exactly how the planets formed remains one of the most disputed questions in planetary science.

Now, researchers at the University of Copenhagen are adding new evidence to the debate. Using a novel approach, they have reconstructed the earliest stages of the planets' formation by analysing their chemical composition.

And the results surprised them.

"The most surprising result was that Earth and Mars appear to have formed in different ways. You might have expected that two planets formed side by side in the same solar system would share a more similar formation history," says Professor Anders Johansen, who studies planet formation at the Globe Institute, University of Copenhagen. He co-led the new study with Assistant Professor Haiyang Wang.

Today, researchers broadly agree that planets are formed primarily in one of two ways, or through a hybrid of both processes:

Planets either emerge when giant space rocks, known as planetesimals, collide, or when these large rocks accumulate smaller particles, a process known as pebble accretion.

Planetary scientists have not settled on which of the two processes or a combination thereof would best explain how rocky planets such as Earth and Mars formed.

The researchers behind the new study believe that their findings support the so-called hybrid model. However, the study takes one step further and offers a more explicit explanation of how Earth and Mars formed 4.5 billion years ago.

"At least 75 percent of Earth's mass appears to originate from two young planets, known as protoplanets, that grew large by accreting pebbles, while planetesimals contributed up to 25 percent. In contrast, roughly three-quarters of Mars' mass appears to come from planetesimals, with the remaining quarter originating from pebble accretion," says Haiyang Wang.
Planetary chemistry reveals the past

jelizondo writes:

The Observer has an article about mathematician Terence Tao and his take on AI solving math problems:

If tech bros don't understand why Terence Tao, probably the world's leading mathematician, is horrified that OpenAI published the answers to 722 unsolved maths problems, they should think about Douglas Adams.

In Adams's book The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, the Deep Thought supercomputer took 7.5m years to answer the ultimate question of life, the universe and everything and came up with 42. Then it asked for another 10m years to work out what the question was.

Adams's joke has become an accidental satire on AI because Tao and his colleagues are now wading through OpenAI's answers to work out how it reached them.

At 51, Tao could be forgiven for not wanting to tidy up after Silicon Valley, although he has worked with OpenAI and still has contacts there. The Australian, speaking via video from California where he is professor of mathematics at UCLA, is one of the youngest winners of the Fields Medal (the maths Nobel), and has a slew of other prizes honouring his contributions. He attempts to distil the field in his book, Six Maths Essentials: How to Model the World, which is published on Tuesday.

But perhaps the worst part for Tao is that he believes OpenAI didn't even make a new model to solve these difficult problems. Conundrums that people have spent careers addressing were merely raw material for training its models.

AI companies are "racing towards the most powerful model", Tao says, so they need to "train and benchmark and give the AI lots of tests to see whether what they're doing is improving their capability". The practical problem is that the newest AI models are beating every test.

"Maths problems are almost the only thing left for them to train on, so suddenly all the big prizes and goals in our profession are benchmarks for them," Tao says. "And as a byproduct, they're generating these terrible proofs. Great results, but they don't care how elegant the solutions are, or who understands them, or what to do next."

The dump of mathematical "toxic waste", as Tao calls it, began when rumours surfaced online that Anthropic researchers were close to solving one of the seven $1m Millennium Prize Problems set by the Clay Mathematics Institute.

"My contacts at OpenAI said this became code red priority number one," Tao says. "They dumped tens of millions of dollars. They set up this 10,000 AI agent swarm to attack these problems." OpenAI focused its agents on the problem of the Navier-Stokes equations, which seem to perfectly describe the motion of a fluid, yet might fail in some conditions.

On 8 September, OpenAI published a proof that seemed to show that Navier-Stokes did fail, although reviews suggest there may be some errors. The backlash from the maths community left OpenAI with a problem, Tao says. "They had been testing their models on these problems for quite a while, and they actually had accumulated a bunch of very badly polished solutions to these problems. They didn't know what to do with them."

"[When] you generate toxic waste, you have no good options. You can sit on it forever, or you can just dump it out all at once, or you can dole it out in drabs, or you can pay people to process it."

Anthropic is taking a different approach, by paying mathematicians to write up results to its "trove of questions", he says.

That creates a different problem. For years maths was a field with equality of arms; practitioners needed only some chalk and a blackboard, unlike their scientific counterparts – think of Cern or the Hubble space telescope. Now doing cutting edge maths research means getting access to a super-AI model. "They get to pick who writes up the paper."

"Maths is half science, half humanities," he says. "We care about the outcome but also the process, how we got there, what we learned on the way." He still uses theorems discovered by Euclid and Pythagoras 2,500 years ago. The story of solving a problem, the history of the arguments and the elegance of the solution are essential to the beauty of mathematics. Otherwise, "you can go to the gym and get a robot to lift your weights, but what's the point?"

An OpenAI spokesperson said: "Our work in mathematics is part of a longstanding effort to accelerate scientific discovery. We've worked on maths for years because better reasoning can make AI a stronger research partner, helping scientists tackle harder problems in biology, medicine and engineering.

"We are already working with leading mathematicians to improve how we share results, and we've committed $5m to help the maths community examine, understand and build on discoveries made with AI."

Original Submission

"Arthur T Knackerbracket" writes:

https://www.cnet.com/news/privacy/proton-hosts-flock-surveillance-map/

A powerful, free Flock surveillance-tracking platform is now hosted by Proton, the creator of Proton Mail and Proton VPN. The move provides extra technical and legal protection for the interactive mapping tool, which Flock has repeatedly attempted to shut down through legal threats.

The deal, announced on Wednesday, gives the public access to a free database of Flock Safety's automated license plate readers and AI surveillance cameras across the US.

Security researcher Joshua Michael [website only available in USA. --Ed] first published the interactive map in September before facing a swift trademark complaint from Flock. Despite Flock’s demands for its removal, the map remains publicly accessible.

Flock's surveillance networks capture license plates, vehicle details, human physical characteristics, and audio signals such as gunshots or shouting. While law enforcement agencies use this data to track and search suspects, privacy advocates warn that the technology enables widespread, unchecked tracking.

Proton also says the map shows far more Flock cameras are active than Flock currently says it has. Flock said this summer that it operates more than 120,000 cameras nationwide, but the tool says there are more than 214,000 Flock devices in service, with more than 80,000 in the planning stages.

A representative from Flock Safety didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

The map is one of the most usable Flock tools I’ve seen. Proton’s Flock tool has better visual clarity, faster search responses and a more intuitive interface than other sites I’ve tried and is available without a subscription to other Proton services.

I searched my own city, which canceled its Flock contact over a year ago. The map accurately reported that no active Flock cameras are currently present, but correctly located decommissioned Flock cams. Since the data is based on Flock’s own reporting, I place more trust in it than in crowdsourced tools like the Deflock app, which are subject to errors or misrepresentation.

“My research on FlockSurveillance.org documents cybersecurity failures with national-security consequences,” map creator Joshua Michael told CNET. “My research argued that Flock Safety could not detect exports of their data and that because they hold data on nearly every American and their pattern of life, they are a national security threat to our country and people.”

Michael said Flock has “promised to take every measure possible to take my research offline,” he said, offering that as one reason why Proton moved to preserve the map in its Swiss servers. Switzerland enforces some of the world’s strongest privacy laws. Proton’s site notes that under Swiss data protection regulations, the company isn’t required to comply with requests that are not supported by a Swiss court order. Flock is a US-based company.

Camera locations are constantly changing, meaning a surveillance map could rapidly become dated.

“If new and reliable data becomes available, then we will update the map,” a Proton spokesperson told me. “We’re committed to keeping the public informed of all forms of surveillance where reliable data can be sourced.”

While Proton's map provides a specialized, point-in-time look at Flock Safety’s network, the Atlas of Surveillance offers a broader, historical catalog of the sweeping technologies US law enforcement agencies have quietly adopted over the years.

Powered by a network of volunteers who analyze public data and official government records, the Atlas database tracks everything from automated license plate readers to cell-site simulators and body-worn cameras. The project continuously updates its findings.

Original Submission

hubie writes:

Your Brain May Be Switching Between Two Versions of Reality 15 Times a Second:

How grounded do you feel in the present moment? It may be a little less than you think.

Even as you fix your gaze on the screen in front of you to read these words, your brain may be flickering between what you're consciously taking in and other visual information that never quite reaches your awareness.

A new preprint study involving both macaque monkeys and humans suggests that the brain may be switching back and forth between conscious and unconscious information around 15 times a second – raising the strange possibility that something other than visual availability is guiding your conscious experience of the world.

"At any moment, only some of the brain's activity reaches conscious awareness, while the rest is processed without ever being experienced," writes a team led by neuroscientists Janis Hesse and Doris Tsao of the University of California, Berkeley.

"How this division arises is among the most basic unsolved problems in neuroscience."

There are many things our bodies just do automatically, and sensing is one of them. We move through the world under a constant barrage of sensory information, and we cannot turn off our ability to take it in.

What our brains can do is deprioritize some of that information. The famous example is your nose. It's always sitting bang in the middle of your field of view, but your brain mostly tunes it out. You know it's there; you don't need your eyes to keep confirming it.

This is obviously extremely useful. Without it, we'd be overwhelmed by the sheer volume of sensory input our brains receive.

But it also raises a huge question: How does the brain determine which information we consciously experience, and which information remains hidden from awareness?

To seek answers, neuroscientists have spent decades studying which parts of the brain become active when stimuli are being consciously perceived. Over time, however, a problem emerged. The same parts of the brain can respond to unconscious stimuli, too.

"Arthur T Knackerbracket" writes:

https://arstechnica.com/space/2026/10/does-anyone-actually-want-to-win-the-medium-lift-race-in-the-united-states/

It has been 13 years since the debut of a new medium-lift rocket in the United States, the Antares vehicle developed by Orbital Sciences Corporation.

The initial 100-series variant of the Antares rocket was kind of a hot mess. The rocket used old Soviet engines built during the era when Apollo astronauts were landing on the Moon. Decades later, in the 1990s, Aerojet acquired the engines and refurbished them for a rocket that would launch in the 2010s. Predictably, on the fifth launch of an Antares rocket in 2014, it exploded.

The Antares vehicle is the last of a dying breed of medium-lift rockets—defined as having a lift capacity of 2 to 20 metric tons—in the United States. Nearly a decade and a half later there is a new generation of medium-lift vehicles coming online, and they are starkly different from Antares, which had not just Russian engines but a core stage manufactured in Ukraine.

Four forthcoming rockets all have engines built by the rocket's manufacturer in the United States. Each of these companies has taken various lessons from SpaceX's successful Falcon 9 rocket, arguably the most important of which is to build as much of one's rocket, and particularly the engines, in-house as possible to control timelines and costs.

Now, with SpaceX pulling the Falcon 9 rocket from the commercial market as soon as 2028, the "race" to bring new medium-lift capacity into service is for more than bragging rights. There are fortunes to be made, and commercial space startups to be saved.

Satellite operators legitimately don't know who to book launches with in the 2027 to 2030 timeframe because of uncertainty over which rockets will be available. The Falcon 9 is no longer for sale. The larger Vulcan and New Glenn rockets have stacked manifests and are expensive for small- and medium-sized satellites. And no one really knows which new medium-lift vehicles will be ready and capable of scaling up their launch cadence.

With all of this in mind, Ars Technica is here to help with a guide to the medium-lift space race in the United States, along with some (almost certainly wrong) predictions on when the rockets may debut. The list below is in our expected order of launch. Disagree? Feel free to shame us in the comments. And if you're an engineer or technician working on one of these projects, keep going. This stuff is really hard and we salute your dedication. Prove us wrong!

The smallest of the medium-lift rockets under development, with a capacity of 3 tons in fully reusable mode and 7 tons in expendable mode, the Nova rocket is also arguably the most ambitious.

That's because the rocket aims for full reusability, with a novel upper stage thruster design and heat shield to solve the difficult problem of protecting a vehicle reentering at orbital velocity. Additionally, the first-stage engines are full-flow staged combustion, which is ambitious for a first engine design.

hubie writes:

Study answers longstanding habitability question:

Scientists have helped solve a longstanding mystery about how Earth remained habitable after oxygen first accumulated in its atmosphere more than 2 billion years ago, providing evidence that an ancient ocean chemistry sustained life-friendly conditions.

The study, published in Nature Communications, was led by researchers including UC Riverside geologist Andrey Bekker. They found that changes in ancient ocean chemistry created a self-sustaining cycle that helped keep oxygen levels high after they first rose. The cycle depended on phosphorus recycling, which fueled biological productivity and helped maintain oxygen in the atmosphere.

Scientists have long known that oxygen became a permanent part of Earth's atmosphere about 2.3 billion years ago during the Great Oxidation Event. Less clear was how oxygen levels then remained high enough over millions of years to support increasingly complex forms of life.

"Living things cannot grow or function properly without phosphorus," Bekker said. "Once more of it became available in the oceans, it allowed more organic carbon to be buried. A side effect of that process is that more oxygen continued to be released into the atmosphere."

The researchers found that as oxygen entered Earth's oceans, sulfate concentrations also increased. Microbes used the sulfate to break down organic matter more efficiently, releasing phosphorus back into seawater, where it fueled new biological growth. More life meant more organic carbon was buried, allowing additional oxygen to accumulate in the atmosphere and reinforcing the cycle.

To test this idea, Bekker and collaborators analyzed ancient rocks from South Africa using a new technique that separates phosphorus based on different types of minerals it is attached to. By dissolving each type of mineral one at a time, the technique shows the researchers whether the phosphorus was available for biological functions or was tied to minerals that made it unavailable for living systems.

Until now, scientists could measure only the total amount of phosphorus preserved in rocks, making it difficult to determine how much had actually been available to support life in ancient oceans.

"We can now separate the phosphorus that was available to organisms from phosphorus that was essentially locked away," Bekker said. "That gives us a much clearer picture of nutrient levels in ancient oceans than we had before."

The findings suggest oxygen levels fluctuated more dramatically after the Great Oxidation Event than scientists once believed. Those swings likely reshaped ocean chemistry over tens of millions of years and influenced how nutrients cycled through the environment.

The research could also reshape ideas about the evolution of early life. If oxygen remained abundant for extended periods, Bekker said, then other environmental or biological factors, not just a severely limited amount of oxygen, may have slowed the emergence of more complex organisms dependent on oxygen for their metabolism.

Today, climate change is causing parts of the ocean to lose oxygen. If that trend continues, phosphorus could once again become less available, reducing marine productivity and making marine ecosystems less resilient.

The work could also aid the search for life beyond Earth. Understanding how oxygen, nutrients, and life evolved together on our planet may help scientists recognize similar conditions on ocean-bearing worlds elsewhere in the universe.

"Earth's history shows that oxygen, nutrients, and life evolved together," Bekker said. "Understanding those connections gives us a more nuanced perspective on our own planet's future and what we might look for on other planets."

Journal Reference: Alcott, L.J., Mills, B.J.W., Bekker, A. et al. A nutrient control on oxygenation dynamics during Earth's Great Oxidation Episode. Nat Commun 17, 10294 (2026). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-026-76597-y

Original Submission

"Arthur T Knackerbracket" writes:

They might earn more than $200k but who do they work for? Tech buyers need to put some checks in place on FDEs :

During a flight on Marc Benioff's private jet last year, the Salesforce CEO apparently subjected his company's senior execs to a four-hour montage of Palantir CEO Alex Karp holding forth on the value of forward-deployed engineers (FDEs).

The experience — which might have led anyone else to seek the emergency exit — was a lesson for Michael Spencer, Salesforce veep for finance and strategy, about the value of FDEs in boosting sales at Palantir, whose mantra is "land and expand."

He shared the anecdote with the Deutsche Bank 2026 Technology Conference in August, just as the FDE boom was reaching fever pitch.

For the uninitiated, vendors send FDEs to clients without tying them to a project. Effectively consultants-without-portfolio, they are expected to build something valuable, at speed, using their technology. The term is not new — Palantir claimed to have come up with it in 2007 — but the explosive growth of investment in FDEs, and their attachment to AI implementation, provokes questions about the benefits  and risks involved for tech buyers.

Earlier this month, AWS announced a $1 billion investment in a new Forward Deployed Engineering unit which aims to help customers build and deploy AI systems. AI poster-child Anthropic has also announced a $100 million investment in training FDEs. SAP, Salesforce and Workday — in partnership with Accenture — are heavily invested in the idea too. 

Salaries are on a commensurate upward trajectory. According to Levels.fyi's Forward Deployed Engineer salary data, the US median annual total compensation was $216,250, with the 25th percentile at $180,000 and the 75th percentile at $290,000.

The tech industry has an obvious problem to solve with FDEs. It spent around $1 trillion on AI last year, according to Gartner, and is set to see that figure grow by 34.7 percent in 2026. Broadly speaking, it expects to claw at least some of that money back from customers. 

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

Whitehall wants tougher penalties and new powers over telecoms operators as Russian activity raises alarm:

Britain is threatening subsea cable saboteurs with up to 14 years in prison and unlimited fines, having apparently decided that Victorian-era laws aren't quite up to the job of keeping Russian submarines away from critical infrastructure.

The government on Thursday set out plans to overhaul legislation dating back to 1885 and introduce tougher penalties for damaging the underwater cables and pipelines that keep Britain's internet and energy supplies running.

According to Whitehall, subsea cables carry around 99 percent of the UK's international data traffic, while underwater pipelines account for 74 percent of its gas supply. Yet much of this infrastructure is protected by laws written when the telegraph was cutting-edge technology.

The Submarine Telegraph Act 1885 originally imposed a £100 maximum fine for damaging a cable through culpable negligence. That might have been a reasonable deterrent back then, but it's unlikely to give today's would-be saboteurs much pause.

Under the proposals, those who intentionally damage critical subsea energy or telecoms infrastructure could face up to 14 years behind bars. The proposals also set tougher penalties, including unlimited fines, for reckless or negligent damage.

Subsea telecoms operators would face new legal duties to identify and manage security risks, while ministers would gain powers to direct companies and cable repair providers to take action where necessary and proportionate to protect national security.

The government also wants to regulate fiber-optic sensing technology, which uses subsea cables to detect activity at sea but could pose a security risk if sensitive data falls into hostile hands.