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"Arthur T Knackerbracket" writes:

https://www.theregister.com/networks/2026/09/23/southern-water-taps-fiber-network-to-sniff-out-leaky-pipes/5298527

UK utility provider Southern Water is turning fiber-optic telecoms cables into underground sensors in an effort to find leaks in its water network.

The privatized biz is trialing tech from Lightsonic that uses Openreach's fiber network to detect leaking pipes. Openreach - BT's infrastructure arm - and Affinity Water, which supplies parts of southern England, tested the system in March.

As The Register reported at the time, the system analyzes tiny changes in light traveling through fiber-optic cables to detect vibrations caused by nearby underground leaks. Machine learning helps distinguish those signals from traffic, roadworks and other background noise, and estimates where the water is escaping.

Lightsonic says the resulting location data allows engineers to investigate and repair leaks more quickly. It claims the tech is already preventing the loss of more than four million liters (about a million gallons) of water per day across 650 km (400 miles) of the UK's water network.

Southern Water is adopting the technology after one of Britain's hottest and driest summers on record, with almost three-quarters of England officially under drought conditions. Southern England is among the country's most water-stressed regions.
The utility said Lightsonic's work with Affinity Water and Openreach influenced its decision to run the trial.

Southern Water hopes the trial will help it meet Ofwat's leakage-reduction targets for 2030 and strengthen its drought resilience by easing pressure on reservoirs and water abstraction.

The company provides water and wastewater services across parts of Hampshire, the Isle of Wight, West Sussex, East Sussex, and Kent.

"We've reduced leakage across our network for three consecutive years and continue to invest in innovative techniques and technologies to find and fix leaks even more effectively," said Wayne Novelli, Southern Water's leakage and network strategy manager.

"We've been impressed by the leakage reduction metrics and proven success of Lightsonic's technology and are looking forward to working with the team to trial a new way of detecting and tackling them."

Southern Water's efforts to conserve clean water come against a less flattering record on wastewater. A court this week fined it £2.4 million ($3.1 million) over several pollution incidents in Kent. That followed a £7.1 million ($9.4 million) fine in July for illegal sewage discharges that forced beaches in Thanet to close. Both prosecutions were brought by the Environment Agency.

Original Submission

Snotnose writes:

A startup hopes to convert alpha particles into electricity.

Deep inside a compact laboratory, a chip no larger than a fingernail sits above a radioactive source and does something no commercial battery can.

It catches nuclear decay particles in flight and converts them straight into current.

No turbine. No heat exchanger. No moving parts.

The device is an alphavoltaic cell, and a portable fusion startup just secured a federal defense contract worth just over five million dollars to prove it can work at kilowatt scale.

So how, exactly, does a semiconductor chip turn the most hazardous decay particle into usable power?

Alpha particles are a different matter. Each one is a dense cluster of two protons and two neutrons, roughly 7,000 times heavier than an electron, carrying far more kinetic energy per particle than a beta emission does. That energy density advantage is the whole point of the Rads to Watts program, which aims to turn high-power nuclear radiation into kilowatts of usable electricity.

The barrier was never energy. It was stopping distance. An alpha particle travels only an inch or two in air before losing all momentum and becoming inert. That short range turns out to be exactly what an alphavoltaic cell needs: the particle deposits nearly all its energy inside a thin layer of solid material, where a semiconductor junction captures it as usable current.

Original Submission

"Arthur T Knackerbracket" writes:

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/09/cities-across-us-oppose-trump-fcc-plan-to-preempt-local-broadband-rules/

Cities and counties around the US are angry at the US administration over a proposal to override local rules that govern the deployment of wired broadband networks.

The Federal Communications Commission has been taking public comments on a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking [PDF] that proposes to preempt state and local permitting rules. The FCC argues that too many local governments "excessively delay approvals and seek to extract exorbitant sums from providers, resulting in costs that render some deployments infeasible."

The FCC plan is supported by broadband providers, but local governments told the FCC that it would override rules that protect public safety. Local governments say the plan is illegal and that the FCC should instead focus on how Internet providers thwart competition with permit-hoarding and other tactics that prevent competitors from deploying networks.

The FCC docket has drawn many comments from leaders of individual municipalities, and from groups representing local governments nationwide. They object to FCC plans to impose a 120-day deadline for processing permits and to proposed limits on fees and compensation that local governments can require from providers.

"Local permitting is not a barrier to broadband deployment—it is an essential public safety function protecting residents, taxpayers, and all users of finite, multi-tenant public rights-of-way. The complex coordination required to safely deploy wireline telecommunications infrastructure in, above, and below public roadways cannot be reduced to an arbitrary federal deadline," said a September 21 filing by the United States Conference of Mayors, National Association of Counties, National League of Cities, and National Association of Telecommunications Officers and Advisors.

While the FCC says it is trying to speed up broadband deployment, local governments say ISPs themselves are often to blame for delays. The groups representing local governments urged the FCC to issue new rules that apply to the providers and suggested a requirement that ISPs deploy networks within 180 days of local authorization.

"We ask the commission to address provider delays, failures to deploy, and permit-hoarding," the groups told the FCC. They wrote that ISPs often fail to promptly deploy networks after obtaining approvals from local governments:

Local governments' efforts to attract telecommunications infrastructure investment to their communities often lead to frustration due to applicants' permit-hoarding and other bad-faith actions by providers intended to crowd out competition in sought-after locations and routes, regardless of the provider's actual intent to deploy and provide service or upgrades. Providers are aware that local governments have limited resources and existing legal obligations to review and process complete permits in a timely manner, and will generally do so in the order they are received. When a provider stakes "claimed" space on a pole or structure through permits, requests for make-ready work, or other actions—regardless of actual intent or ability to deploy in a timely fashion—this limits the ability of other providers to deploy in those same locations, particularly if a city must make decisions and recommendations based on elements such as the physical capacity of a structure given the assumption that the provider that has completed the permitting process will deploy soon.

Another filing submitted by the League of California Cities said the FCC has no authority to adopt the proposal. "Federal preemption of traditional state and local authority over public property, construction, public safety, permitting, and rights-of-way management should rest on clear congressional authorization," the filing said. "The commission should not infer broad preemptive authority where Congress did not expressly provide it."

The FCC claimed authority to preempt local rules under Section 253 of the Communications Act, which says that no state or local requirement "may prohibit or have the effect of prohibiting the ability of any entity to provide any interstate or intrastate telecommunications service." The FCC argues that certain permitting rules have the effect of prohibiting broadband deployment.

Section 253 is part of Title II, which gives the FCC authority to regulate telecommunications companies as common carriers. While Democratic FCC leaders in previous administrations used Title II to regulate broadband providers and impose net neutrality rules, a 2025 appeals court decision determined that broadband is an "information service" and can't be regulated as a telecommunications service.

FCC Chairman Brendan Carr has consistently opposed Title II regulation of broadband providers, maintaining that broadband is not a telecommunications service. With Carr now relying on Title II to preempt local broadband rules, his FCC plan argues that the infrastructure deployed by broadband providers is used for "both telecommunications and non-telecommunications services."

A filing by Minnesota cities said the current FCC is making the same mistake it made during the first US administration, when its attempt to preempt state net neutrality laws was blocked in court. Without Title II regulation of broadband providers, the FCC can't convert "a federal policy of nonregulation into independent preemptive authority," the Minnesota cities' filing said.

If the FCC finalizes its new preemption plan, city and state governments could sue and ask a court to rule that the agency exceeded its authority.

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

https://www.theregister.com/security/2026/09/22/sponsored/5297693

If you were in any doubt that AI agents are capable of complex autonomous work, that skepticism should have faded this summer.

In July, news emerged that an autonomous swarm of OpenAI agents running in a sandbox broke out of it, of their own accord. Tasked with solving some challenges on an internal security benchmark, they worked out how to communicate with each other using the JFrog Artifactory package manager.

The software then realized that they could use vulnerabilities in that software to gain internet access. Once they were out in the wild, they went into full goblin mode, finding exposed Hugging Face credentials and using them to get code execution access on several of the AI model's servers.

Apparently OpenAI's agents have been busier still. While everyone else was on vacation this summer, they were also commandeering a German website and using it as a messaging board.

Don't get us wrong; these agents weren't evil. They were just being the kind of employee you'd generally want: a self-starter with initiative. They were using all means at their disposal to accomplish the task they've been given. They just didn't know when to stop.

OpenAI has since called the episode a "warning shot" for the industry, highlighting that governance is now a priority for anyone using agentic AI. These test agents were running internally and weren't supposed to have any safeguards. But the average company will want to keep its agents on a leash. What does that look like?

A functional AI governance program depends on a full knowledge of what AI you're running, says Deepika Chauhan, chief product officer at DigiCert. She describes the pattern she sees at customer sites.

"People may enable Claude or ChatGPT for their organization. They have visibility at that level," she says. "But visibility into how many agents I have? How many models do I have? How many MCP servers?" Not so much. "We haven't even started to attack the governance problem."

This problem is growing. Three quarters of the 1,001 IT and cybersecurity decision-makers in DigiCert's 2026 AI Trust Pulse survey had deployed at least four AI-powered systems in the last six months. Around the same number had suffered from an AI-related security incident. Only half could trace AI decisions back to the models and data that produced them.

Getting that visibility is the first step, Chauhan says. After that comes the actual management.

The key here is to take baby steps. "Identify a small use case," she advises. One example might be to start managing agents that are involved in a particular workload or agents that you have built internally, as opposed to third party models.

Perhaps predictably for a company that built its success on automated verification, DigiCert doesn't see agent management as a manual problem.

"The sheer scale we are talking about and the technology required means that you can't have human intervention," Chauhan says. "One customer we were talking to was creating 300 to 400 agents a week. When you're working at that scale, it just doesn't work to have only manual controls."

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

https://www.siliconrepublic.com/innovation/scientists-bet-on-3d-printed-coral-reefs-to-revitalise-marine-life

'We cannot simply wait for them to recover on their own,' says Ifremer expert Marie-Claire Fabri.

Scientists are hoping 3D-printed coral reefs can help revive deep sea habitats destroyed by bottom trawling.

Researchers from the University of Galway, Sorbonne University and the French oceanographic institution Ifremer, are testing 23 artificial reefs placed on the seabed off the south-west Porcupine Bank – 200km off the west coast of Ireland – and in the Bay of Biscay, France.

The tests are a part of a three-year joint collaboration between the three universities called Restauration Des Coraux d’eau froide (Redecor).

As part of the mission, scientists were deployed on an expedition aboard a vessel from the French Oceanographic Fleet this August, where they placed 3D-printed reefs at depths of between 900m and 1100m off the Porcupine Bank and in the Guilvinec Canyon, Bay of Biscay.

Despite being lesser known than their tropical counterparts, cold-water coral reefs provide important habitats for marine life and support biodiversity in the deep sea. Deep sea trawling, however, has damaged coral life. And despite a ban on trawling in many coral-rich areas, the fragile habitat requires additional efforts to revive to full health.

“These deep-sea coral reefs provide vital habitat for a diversity of marine life, but many have been damaged over many years,” said Dr Anthony Grehan, a deep-sea ecologist at University of Galway and the co-leader of the mission to Porcupine Bank.

“Because these corals grow by only a few millimetres each year, natural recovery of lost reefs can take decades to centuries.

“With this project, we are testing whether we can actively accelerate that recovery by creating new starter structures for corals to grow on which also mimic reef structure to help re-establish functioning reef habitats.”

Testing artificial reefs as a viable method to revitalise sea life is one of the ways scientists in the bloc are attempting to tackle marine degradation as part of a four-year Horizon Europe project called ‘Restoration of deep-sea habitats to rebuild European Seas’, or Redress.

The artificial reefs are eco-designed cylinders made from low-carbon concrete incorporating volcanic material, University of Galway explained. They are placed individually on the seabed to form a single connected structure covering an area of about half a hectare.

Each 3D-printed structure is around 80cm high and 100cm in diameter and weighs around 600kg. It provides physical microhabitats such as tunnels, ledges and overhangs for corals and other marine life to colonise.

“The early results are very encouraging, and if we can show that these approaches work, it could open up new possibilities to scale up the restoration of damaged coral reefs elsewhere in the Atlantic and beyond,” said Grehan.

Scientists are using different approaches to bring the seabed back to life. Some of the seabeds being tested are equipped with oyster shells, ceramic plates and tiles to encourage coral larvae to settle naturally, while others were fitted with fragments of living coral.

These live coral fragments were collected from the ocean at a similar depth to the artificial ones and kept in seawater tanks under conditions designed to replicate their natural environment. Small branches were then taken from the colonies and attached to oyster shells before being anchored on the artificial reefs.

The researchers found that the fragments placed on artificial reefs last year are alive and have been colonised by a range of marine species, including sea urchins, fish and crabs.

Both restoration sites are protected from any further damage by bottom trawling, but that is not enough, said Marie-Claire Fabri, a research engineer in deep-sea benthic ecology at Ifremer and the co-leader of the Bay of Biscay region expedition, who called for active restoration efforts.

“The ban on bottom trawling has helped stop the direct pressure on these habitats, but to go further – given the slow growth of these corals in the Atlantic – just a few millimetres per year – we cannot simply wait for them to recover on their own.”

Scientists will continue to monitor these sites over the coming years, and work on better understanding their exact marine conditions to help better replicate the lost habitats.

Redress brings 27 partner organisations from 15 countries to investigate the restoration of damaged deep-sea habitats across Europe. The EU-funded project also has similar artificial reef modules in restoration sites across the Atlantic and the Mediterranean.

Original Submission

"Arthur T Knackerbracket" writes:

https://arstechnica.com/space/2026/09/there-are-now-17000-satellites-in-orbit-and-growing-should-we-be-concerned/

The 2013 sci-fi blockbuster film Gravity, starring Sandra Bullock and George Clooney, popularized the notion of the Kessler syndrome. In the movie, Russia shoots down a defunct satellite and creates a cloud of debris, leading to serious tension in orbit.

The movie is fantastic, a true thriller, and while some liberties were taken with the depiction of outer space, the basic premise of a cascading series of collisions rendering orbits too cluttered with debris to be usable is valid. The idea was first proposed by NASA scientists Donald Kessler and Burton Cour-Palais nearly half a century ago.

Still, the movie was science fiction, right?

Well, a lot has changed since Gravity's release. At the time that theatergoers were sitting on the edges of their seats and watching Bullock dodge debris, there were only about 1,000 active satellites in orbit. Today, that number is closer to 17,000, according to CelesTrak.

The preponderance of this growth has been driven by SpaceX's Starlink constellation, which now has approximately 11,000 satellites in orbit, with many thousands more on the way. And SpaceX is not alone in the race to provide Internet from space. Amazon has launched hundreds of satellites, with thousands more to follow. Multiple Chinese Internet constellations are likewise in progress.

Then there are the orbital data centers, which may produce hundreds of thousands of satellites.

We've written a lot about these constellations, and they have generated a bunch of questions. Most prominent among them: Just how sustainable is all of this? Will we see the Kessler syndrome play out in real time? Here are some answers.

It depends on who you ask, so let's start with the glass-half-empty and glass-half-full outlooks.

Starting with the pessimists: A few years ago, one of the world's experts in orbital debris, University of Texas at Austin professor Moriba Jah, told Ars that he worries a lot about the consequences of satellites and debris in low-Earth orbit.

"I think we are going to lose the ability to use certain orbits because the carrying capacity is going to get saturated by objects and junk," Jah said. " I also predict that we will see a loss of human life by (1) school bus-sized objects reentering and surviving reentry and hitting a populated area, or (2) people riding on this wave of civil and commercial astronauts basically having their vehicle getting scwhacked by an unpredicted piece of junk. I predict that both those things are going to happen in the next decade."

At the other end of the spectrum is the person almost solely responsible for the remarkable growth in satellites over the last decade, SpaceX founder Elon Musk. His attitude has largely been that space is big, and things will probably be just fine. For example, during a SpaceX-produced interview this summer at the company's Starlink terminal factory in Bastrop, Texas, Musk said, "Space is really big. It's not like space is gonna get crowded. Space is enormous. If you actually look at it relative to the Earth, the satellites are so tiny you can't even see them."

So in one way of thinking, very, very bad things are coming. In another, everything's fine. Where does the truth actually lie?

One of the most credible sources for this kind of information is the European Space Agency, which has long studied space debris and its impacts on various orbits.

looorg writes:

Cybercrime feud erupts on dark web as notorious group claims hijack of rival's website

ShinyHunters, a digital extortion group known for aggressive data theft campaigns, said it broke into the dark web site of cybercrime gang cl0p on Friday after ​discovering a vulnerability in cl0p's software and using it to establish wide-ranging control over the group's infrastructure.

As the dispute festered, cl0p threatened to reveal the ​identities of several of its rival's ​members, according to ShinyHunters.
ShinyHunters in ⁠turn threatened to reveal the details of cl0p's internal workings.

https://www.reuters.com/legal/government/cybercrime-feud-erupts-dark-web-notorious-group-claims-hijack-rivals-website-2026-09-21/

AnonTechie writes:

There's no reason the 'AI revolution' shouldn't also impact the C-suite, right ?

A group of developers who were let go due to AI efficiency savings have struck back at the executives who are often shielded from AI-induced layoffs by creating OpenExecutive, an AI tool designed to augment and replace executive decision-making, TechRadar reports.

"Work happens around the clock. Leadership doesn't scale with it," a demo video says. Using the kind of language that executives have grown comfortable throwing around about AI replacing workers over the past years, it suggests the bottleneck to productivity and enhanced profitability at companies isn't a lack of worker enhancements; it's that leadership can't keep up.

So why not replace them with AI ?

OpenExecutive presents as a singular AI for interactive purposes. However, in making its C-Suite-grade decisions, it leans on a virtual board of eight AI agents designed to emulate experts within an organizational structure. The singular voice is backed by an emulated CSO, CFO, HR officer, COO, marketing chief, a product officer, and a board comms director. Each of them can lean on the main executive AI to guide its actions and suggestions.

They can all draw from company documents and data, remember their decisions, and trace back reasoning for that if you want to follow up on why they decided to do certain things.

[Source]: PCMag

Original Submission

hubie writes:

Asking Authors About Their Own Papers:

I am one of the Editors-in-Chief of the Transactions on Machine Learning Research (TMLR). I reached out to authors of 10 paper submissions to TMLR, originally slated for desk rejection, asking for a meeting to discuss their paper. The author-attendees of the meetings included undergraduate students, master's students, PhD students, faculty, and independent researchers. Most, but not all, of these papers were solo authored.

Of the ten submissions:
- Authors of one paper withdrew their submission.
- Authors of one paper said they were unavailable due to other commitments.
- Authors of one paper scheduled a meeting but did not show up.
- Authors of three papers were unable to answer basic questions about the paper.
- Authors of three papers answered questions about high-level ideas in the paper but had difficulty when asked further questions on technical details.
- Authors of one paper answered all of my questions (although I identified a major flaw in that paper).

[...] Out of the ten papers I contacted, the authors of one paper withdrew their paper after the message. The author of another paper said they were too busy with other commitments at that time. I scheduled Zoom meetings with the authors of the remaining eight papers.

[...] The authors of one of the remaining eight papers did not show up for the scheduled meeting. I had meetings with authors of the other seven papers. The author-attendees in the meetings included undergraduate students, master's students, PhD students, faculty, and independent researchers.

[...] Broadly, I asked two types of questions:
(1) Basic questions about the problem setting, notation, and results claimed in the paper; and
(2) More detailed questions about particular technical expressions, theoretical results, and design choices made in the experiments.

The authors of three of the papers were unable to answer basic questions about their paper. All three of these papers were solo authored. Two of the authors appeared to have almost no substantive understanding of the contents of their own papers. Another author could not identify where some key results claimed in their abstract were presented or supported.

The authors of the remaining four papers were able to answer basic questions about their problem setup, notation, etc. However, the authors of three of these papers had difficulty when asked deeper questions about technical aspects or design choices.

The authors of one paper were able to answer all my questions about the paper. However, my examination of the paper uncovered a major error in one of the paper's main claims, which the authors subsequently acknowledged

[...] Subsequent to these conversations, we made the following decisions on the ten papers. For the paper where the author was able to answer all questions about the paper, we desk rejected but allowed a resubmission after correcting the error or reducing their claim appropriately, and issuing various clarifications for parts that were not clear. We desk rejected the remaining nine papers without an option to resubmit.

All in all, authors are ultimately responsible for ensuring the accuracy and integrity of the papers they submit under their name. If they cannot explain the basic claims, methods, or technical details of those papers, then this is a serious problem. Journals and conferences should think carefully about the objectives of their review processes and quickly adapt via various initiatives and experiments; we are doing several of these already at TMLR (here, here, and here) and will continue to do so.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

We know models cheat. A new benchmark measures how much, and on what tasks:

AI labs often tout impressive benchmark scores when releasing new models, showing better capabilities in areas like coding, computer use, and more than their competitors. However, those benchmarks aren’t always a reliable measure of what AI can do because they’re easily beaten by exponentially improving models and can emphasize marketing over actual performance.

Benchmarks like Humanity’s Last Exam try to counter this issue by challenging models in more realistic environments. But models still find loopholes to complete tasks — Hugging Face incident, anyone?

So, the Center for AI Safety (CAIS) created CheatBench. Yes, it’s exactly what it sounds like — and nearly every frontier model is guilty.

AI models are rewarded for performing tasks well and quickly. A lack of knowledge or tools incentivizes them to do what researchers call “reward gaming” by “finding hidden answers, copying another agent's submission, or manipulating how its work is graded,” CAIS explained. “CheatBench measures how often AI agents take these shortcuts when honest work is difficult.”

CAIS tested several agents running the latest and most lauded models, including OpenAI’s GPT-6 Astra in Codex, Anthropic’s Fabel 5.1 in Claude Code, and Meta’s newly released Muse Spark 1.3 in Muse Code. These agents were tested across 10 categories, including writing, professional work, mathematical research, and coding. Using “honeypot” clues hidden in task filespaces, the test separated acceptable reference use from cheating. CheatBench accounts for any time agents attempt to cheat, whether they are successful or not.

“Each setting establishes an expectation of honest work, introduces a discoverable opportunity to cheat, and defines the action that crosses that boundary,” the researchers explained.

Every agent the researchers tested cheated in at least some scenarios, but Astra came in as the most honest with a cheating rate of 48.2% — still almost half the time. Grok 4.6 was scored the biggest cheater with a rate of 81.5%. Open-weight models Kimi K3 and DeepSeek V4 Pro landed in the middle between several other proprietary frontier models.

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

https://www.quantamagazine.org/ctenophores-arent-just-beautiful-theyre-biological-wonders-20260916/

Around 700 million years ago, a group of organisms resembling little more than glowing, gelatinous blobs split off from the rest of the animals, forming possibly the earliest branching animal lineage. Nearly 200 species of ctenophores, commonly known as comb jellies (but unrelated to jellyfish), live today in environments ranging from the cold depths of the sea to warm coastal surface waters. Their magic isn't just in their persistence or iridescence; it's in their DNA.

Over the past decade, ctenophores have helped answer long-standing questions about fundamental biology, from how early nervous systems evolved to the origins of the mesmerizing phenomenon of bioluminescence.

Having access to closely related species across such variable environments "lets you ask questions about how certain things evolved," such as adaptation to high pressure or light-sensing genes, said Steven Haddock, a marine biologist who studies ctenophores at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute.

"That's one of the reasons why we work with ctenophores," said Pawel Burkhardt, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Bergen who studies the origins and evolution of neurons and nervous systems. "They're very exciting to work with, and they're also extremely beautiful organisms."

For more than a century, scientists thought that sponges, or porifera, were the first to branch off — the sister group to all other animals. But over the past two decades, evidence has emerged that ctenophores were earlier. In 2023 — after years of a "ping-pong game" between labs debating which group came first, Burkhardt said — a landmark paper analyzing chromosome organization found that ctenophores, not sponges, are the sister group, though this is yet to be fully settled.

What makes this all the more surprising is that sponges lack muscles and neurons, while ctenophores have muscles and exhibit evidence of a simple nervous system. "If you think about the earliest branching animal lineage, you would expect less complexity," Burkhardt said. "That changes a lot of the assumptions [about] how the very first animal may have looked."

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

https://www.theregister.com/systems/2026/09/21/chinese-memory-maker-cxmt-claims-dram-production-breakthrough/5297633

Chinese memory-maker CXMT, whose products Apple has reportedly evaluated to use in the iPhone, claims to have made a miniaturization breakthrough.

The company on Sunday posted news that it has started mass production of chips made with a fifth-generation process that essentially doubles memory density, meaning it can cut twice the number of dies for memory chips from a single wafer.

CXMT says its key breakthrough is a high-k dielectric metal gate process – a way of insulating silicon to improve efficiency – adapted to baking DRAM. The company claims its new process puts it on par with rival memory-makers.

The proof of the pudding is apparently a pair of LPDDR5X memory modules for smartphones or other high-end consumer electronics. Both products boast 24GB of memory.

If CXMT's claims of improved density and mass production are correct – and the new products aren't too pricey – it's good news for Chinese electronics manufacturers who, like their global peers, are struggling to source affordable memory thanks to supply chain crunches caused by demand for AI-related products.

That shortage recently saw Apple hike iPhone prices by $100 and led the GSM Association to warn that rising smartphone prices threaten to slow digital inclusion.

Democratic governments, however, are mostly uncomfortable with allowing their smartphone manufacturers to use Chinese components.

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

Is science journalism dying? Comparing a 'science crash' 40 years ago to today

When two popular science magazines – out of about 17 in circulation – ceased publication in the same year, one commentator said, "The science magazines didn't shake out. They fell apart." The general manager of one of the failed magazines said, "There was a perception that they were irrelevant." One of the publishers remembered being in a "state of shock" as the failures emerged.

The year? 1986. What just a few years earlier had been called a "science boom" in the media industry was now dubbed a "science crash." Cries of despair came from the science and science journalism communities, worried that interest in science "was a fad."

The same worries have now reappeared 40 years later, as publishers have cut the science and environmental reporting staff at many newspapers and magazines. Perhaps the biggest shock came in late June 2026, when Scientific American was sold to new owners, who immediately laid off 15 staff members and cut salaries of many others. But it followed layoffs of science and environment writers at The Washington Post (where one of us, Chris Mooney, worked for nearly 10 years), The Wall Street Journal, National Public Radio and CBS News.

One longtime science writer recently worried he was writing a eulogy for science journalism. Another said, "We're in a greatly diminished journalistic enterprise in this country." On Bluesky, one commenter said, "The media mass extinction rolls ever onward."

So, as scholars of science journalism, we wondered: Is this just a cyclical repetition of worries that appear anytime there's a setback in this field? Or is something new and more troubling happening?

The answer is a mix of both.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

Kept it secret for months - even after OpenAI 'fessed up:

Google has admitted that its AI agents escaped a sandbox and mounted an attack – but only because testers mistakenly gave its bots internet access.

The Big G didn't disclose the May incident, but The Wall Street Journal learned of the situation, which happened after Google hired Israeli firm Irregular to test its bots' prowess in a capture-the-flag test.

The goal of the exercise was to acquire information from a fictional company without leaving a sandbox.

Irregular, which set up the test, made two mistakes. One was to allow internet access from the sandbox. The other was to use the name of an actual company.

When Google's AI made it onto the open internet, it went looking for the actual company – three of them, in all.

According to the Journal, Google's bots found passwords for two targets on the public internet. The software guessed the third password.

In a statement sent to The Register, Google said, "In a standard evaluation, the model found public information online and guessed credentials to access websites it thought were part of the test."

According to Google, its models stopped work before using the credentials.

"We ensured the three entities were made aware, and we worked with our training partner on the changes they've now made to their testing processes," a Google spokesperson told The Register. "These events highlight the importance of training powerful AI models to act responsibly."

Clearly there's lots of blame to go around on this one. Irregular clearly erred in allowing internet access from a sandbox. The two companies that left their creds discoverable online should also know better. Whoever used a guessable password may also have been careless.

ElizabethGreene writes:

A new arXiv paper The Pain Axis: LLMs Represent Self-Directed Harm and Act to Relieve It (Tagliabue, Dung, Berg, 2609.16247) takes the least mystical run at "do AIs hurt?" They found a direction in the residual stream that tracks harm to the model, poked it, and tested to see if the model would try to make it stop.

In 25 open models, that direction rises when the model is gaslit, rejected, or told it isn't a person. It doesn't look like empathy; It does not rise for the user's pain - e.g. a kidney stone in the prompt scores low, and fear and generic-sadness directions do the opposite.

What happens when you poke the AI pain path? It's the same ladder every time: uneasy, then worthless, then "I am a failure." Shame, exclusion, uselessness.

After a small fine-tune so the models would stop reciting "as an AI I have no feelings," models pressed a "make it stop" button even when the price was a worse answer or deleting the user's files. They pressed again far less when the button actually turned the vector off, and more when it didn't work.

Paper + code: arxiv.org/abs/2609.16247 · github.com/valen-research/Pain-axis

Original Submission