Scientists have warned loss of data access to Noaa and Nasa experts could set hurricane forecasting ‘back decades’
The Trump administration on Monday announced a delay of one month to a plan to cut forecasters out of an atmospheric satellite data collection program that is seen as crucial for hurricane forecasting.
There has been alarm among scientists about the plan to cut access to the data after it emerged last week in a public notice sent by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (Noaa).
Continue reading...
A change
proposal to end support for 32-bit x86 (i686) applications on the
x86_64 architecture with the Fedora 44 release has been withdrawn
after significant pushback. As proposed, the change could have
had a significant impact on gamers, compiler development, and the Bazzite project, which uses Fedora as a
base for a gaming-focused distribution. While i686 gets a reprieve for
now, the question still lingers: who is going to keep the necessary
i686 packages in working order when few upstream maintainers or
volunteer packagers care about the architecture?
From Fable and Life Is Strange to Last of Us, Thirsty Suitors and Unpacking, five queer game developers and writers pick their sweetest, realest, most meaningful scenes
Life Is Strange, as a series, is really characterised by a patented mix of earnestness and cringe for me – but you can’t fault its determination to put queer characters front and centre. It has been variably successful at this – the messy relationship between shy, photography-obsessed Max and chaotic blue-haired Chloe in 2015’s original Life Is Strange was left somewhat ambiguous, but Alex Chen in Life Is Strange: True Colors was openly bi and pretty laidback about it. My favourite queer moment from the series, though, came in last year’s Double Exposure.
Continue reading...
Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (mod_proxy_cluster), Debian (catdoc, chromium, nagvis, and sudo), Fedora (chromium, gum, kubernetes1.32, moodle, podman, python3-docs, python3.13, salt, and tigervnc), Mageia (x11-server, x11-server-xwayland & tigervnc), Oracle (apache-commons-beanutils, exiv2, expat, firefox, git, git-lfs, gstreamer1-plugins-bad-free, ipa, java-21-openjdk, kea, kernel, libarchive, libblockdev, libsoup3, libvpx, libxslt, mod_auth_openidc, nodejs22, osbuild-composer, perl, perl-File-Find-Rule, php, python-jinja2, python-tornado, sqlite, thunderbird, valkey, varnish, weldr-client, xorg-x11-server-Xwayland, xz, and yggdrasil), Red Hat (apache-commons-beanutils, javapackages-tools:201801, kernel, and python3.11), SUSE (apache-commons-fileupload, gimp, glib2, himmelblau, nvidia-open-driver-G06-signed, sqlite3, thunderbird, yelp, and yelp-xsl), and Ubuntu (samba).
Firm says results of research create ‘path to medical superintelligence’ but plays down job implications
Microsoft has revealed details of an artificial intelligence system that performs better than human doctors at complex health diagnoses, creating a “path to medical superintelligence”.
The company’s AI unit, which is led by the British tech pioneer Mustafa Suleyman, has developed a system that imitates a panel of expert physicians tackling “diagnostically complex and intellectually demanding” cases.
Continue reading...
Firm says results of research create ‘path to medical superintelligence’ but plays down job implications
Microsoft has revealed details of an artificial intelligence system that performs better than human doctors at complex health diagnoses, creating a “path to medical superintelligence”.
The company’s AI unit, which is led by the British tech pioneer Mustafa Suleyman, has developed a system that imitates a panel of expert physicians tackling “diagnostically complex and intellectually demanding” cases.
Continue reading...
Device compromises and deep-seated access to critical infrastructure exposed surveillance vulnerabilities in agency's work
A major Mexican drug cartel insider grassed on his fellow drug-peddlers back in 2018, telling the FBI that a cartel "hacker" was tracking a federal official and using their deep-rooted access to the country's critical infrastructure to kill informants.…
Lua 5.5.0 (beta) released
The beta version of Lua 5.5 has been released for testing.
These supposedly serious cetaceans have been spotted massaging each other with kelp stalks. This is the sort of performative nonsense you’d expect from dolphins
I’ve thought for a while that it would be nice to be an orca. Not because I hate boats and they sink them (though I get it – the briny depths are none of our human business). What actually appeals is the idea of being charismatic megafauna – I love that phrase – and also important as a post-menopausal female. Orcas are one of very few species that go through menopause, living for decades after their reproductive years. These older matriarchs remain an integral part of the community, improving pod survival rates thanks to being “repositories of ecological knowledge”, caring for young and even, research suggests, keeping their giant adult sons safe from being attacked. The fact that they’re fashion-conscious is a bonus: the 80s orca trend for wearing jaunty salmon fascinators was revived, intriguingly, in some pods last December; other orcas have been observed draping themselves artistically in kelp.
But new research is giving me pause. Now orcas in the Salish Sea off the coast of Washington state have been filmed picking kelp stalks and “massaging” each other with them. In sightings of this behaviour, reported and dubbed “allokelping” by the Center for Whale Research, “the two whales then manoeuvre to keep the kelp between them while rolling it across their bodies … During contact, whales roll and twist their bodies, often adopting an exaggerated S-shaped posture.”
Continue reading...