hopdevil writes:https://ludic.mataroa.blog/blog/ai-mania-is-eviscerating-global-decision-making/Are companies actually seeing massive productivity gains from their AI adoption? Does any of this sordid affair make sense?This should be an easy question, but it is surprisingly hard to get a straight answer to it. Executives that tell the press that their company has gone insane will quickly find themselves removed from their positions. Employees who are honest will find themselves fired in short-order, or "randomly" selected for a round of layoffs. In fact, it is in the interests of almost every actor in the space - boards, executives, employees, vendors, consultants - to obfuscate and misrepresent the success rate of AI projects. Many publicly traded companies are putting out announcements about their AI productivity gains when I know for a fact that the businesses have done nothing other than purchase Copilot licenses and declare victory.Yet we need to know if these projects are panning out - if the total focus on AI as a core tenet of business strategy is succeeding at a reasonable rate, then a discussion about the relative risk and reward is warranted.Original SubmissionRead more of this story at SoylentNews.
fliptop writes:Under Helsinki, there is a network of over 5,500 bomb shelters capable of sheltering nearly a million people in the event of a nuclear attack or Russian invasion. The shelters are equipped with autonomous systems and are used in peacetime as sports complexes:
Linus Torvalds Puts His Foot Down, Tells Anti-AI Programmers To 'Fork It'Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:https://www.zdnet.com/article/linus-torvalds-puts-his-foot-down-tells-anti-ai-programmers-to-fork-it/
darkfeline writes:"Mathematicians are challenging the idea that dark energy is responsible for the accelerating expansion of the universe. In a new paper published in Proceedings of the Royal Society A, mathematicians from the University of California, Davis, provide mathematical proof that instabilities inherent in the Einstein-Euler equations imply that the current model of the expanding universe is not viable. The Einstein-Euler equations are a union of general relativity and fluid dynamics equations used to model astronomical phenomena such as galaxies, black holes and cosmic expansion."https://www.ucdavis.edu/blog/taking-dark-energy-out-equationBasically, mathematicians provide an explanation for accelerated universe expansion that doesn't require fudging our equations with magical energy so that it fits our data.Original SubmissionRead more of this story at SoylentNews.
Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/data-centers/cheyenne-suspends-data-center-fill-and-flush-and-closed-loop-discharges-after-meta-contractor-contaminated-its-reuse-water-systemSystem Offline For Months For Cleaning, Closed-Loop Cooling
Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/storage/rampocalyse-pricing-prompts-maker-to-construct-his-own-memory-using-ancient-apollo-era-tech-usb-drive-resurrects-hand-threaded-magnetic-core-memory-using-salvaged-russian-computer-parts
fliptop writes:Buying a car is only the beginning. Every year afterward, drivers face a steady stream of expenses-from insurance and fuel to repairs and taxes-that can add up to thousands of dollars:
"mrpg" writes:AI coding agents can be tricked into installing malware via 'clean' GitHub repositories - Mozilla's 0din team shows how Claude Code can be exploited by its own helpfulness:
Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:https://www.theregister.com/public-sector/2026/07/09/mps-tell-nhs-to-start-packing-palantirs-bags-ahead-of-2027-contract-break/5269146
Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:https://www.techradar.com/pro/an-electric-drone-just-set-a-new-world-air-speed-record-434-mph-device-could-be-ideal-for-anti-aircraft-interceptor-actionhttps://www.aerospace-and-defence.com/quantum-systems-chases-speed-records-a-52dd697b273097c2c264fdab161e0b47/https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/drones/electric-drone-breaks-world-air-speed-record-at-434-mph-designed-for-anti-aircraft-interceptor-roles-german-firm-convincingly-smashed-the-official-409-mph-record-hopes-to-get-stamp-of-approval-from-guinness-soon
mrpg writes:https://medicalxpress.com/news/2026-07-higher-blood-glucose-linked-faster.htmlThe human brain is known to naturally change with age, shrinking in size and volume after people reach their 30s or 40s. In some cases, however, it can age faster than expected, which can increase the risk of early memory loss, cognitive decline and some brain-related disorders.Faster brain aging has been linked to various neurological and psychiatric disorders, as well as some neurodegenerative diseases. The factors that influence the speed at which the brain ages, however, have not yet been clearly and comprehensively elucidated.Researchers at Jilin University and China Medical University recently analyzed available neuroimaging, genomic and biological data to better understand the contribution of metabolic processes (i.e., the chemical reactions that transform food into energy) to brain aging. Their findings, published in Molecular Psychiatry, suggest that higher levels of glucose in the blood are associated with accelerated brain aging.Publication details:Zhirong Li et al, Metabolomic signatures of brain aging: A multimodal and genetic study, Molecular Psychiatry (2026). DOI: 10.1038/s41380-026-03703-3Original SubmissionRead more of this story at SoylentNews.
VLM writes:For about a century, quantum mechanics, QM, has required the use of complex numbers, but according to a recently published peer reviewed paper in PRL, given a large amount of mathematical fooling around, it's possible to do QM solely with real numbers. That's very unexpected and very cool and the future is going to be very interesting!https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.17307https://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/10.1103/4k13-sdjhThere's been an effort in recent years to formulate quantum mechanics without complex numbers, slowly chipping away at existing QM theory. This paper solves the last remaining problem, and now AFAIK the entire QM system works, or is compatible, or at least not disproven yet, when doing QM calcs using only real number space. The conclusion of the abstract kind of says it all "Thus, we argue that real-valued quantum mechanics cannot be falsified, and therefore the use of complex numbers is a matter of convenience."I read, or tried to read the paper, back in March last year when the free preprint was uploaded to arxiv and I see it successfully made it through peer review and was published in PRL three weeks ago. AFAIK, nobody has successfully shot it down in the last three weeks, so this interesting project is likely to be successfully completed. Apparently, they have done it!Effects:This is one of those accomplishments like when a century ago they proved 1+1=2 solely using set theory. That specific example is not immediately useful, a century later, and note that set theory accomplishment from the 1910s is still pretty useless IRL, but the point of the effort was that they successfully connected two "very large theories" that were not supposed to be connectable. It's not supposed to be possible to QM without complex numbers. A somewhat more famous and wildly profitable theory unification would be when the separate theory of electrical fields and theory of magnetic fields were connected (see Maxwell, etc) I'd say the theory of electromagnetism has had quite an effect on the world since it was discovered... The accomplishment in the paper will probably has an impact in between the two examples above.Trivially, textbooks will need to be updated such that QM does not have a mandatory inherent requirement for complex numbers, although the formulation is simpler if you use them. Sort of like you don't have to use logarithms to multiply numbers, but it sure is easier to manufacture slide rules if you use logarithms to multiply numbers...I always found it philosophically distasteful that the most accurate model we have for subatomic particles IRL, requires imaginary sqrt(-1) math. It only took a century to prove it does not. The main paper itself is only about five pages and seems pretty clear, its the dozen page long appendix thats mathematically a bit of a beast to get thru.There will probably be an unpredictable effect on unification theories. I'd sure be excited to hear a news story in a year or two about some dude who has been sitting on an experimental pet string theory or loop quantum gravity or some other misc theory for years (decades?) that would unify gravity and QM into one theory that "was obviously wrong because it required a QM expressible without complex numbers" well its 2026 and we got one of those now, so really big things might happen really soon. Or maybe not.Original SubmissionRead more of this story at SoylentNews.
mrpg writes:https://www.science.org/content/article/key-arctic-science-outpost-finds-itself-tangled-geopolitical-web[...] The tensions stymieing the UNIS geologists reflect broader changes unfolding across Svalbard, a jagged, ice-cloaked archipelago consisting of nine larger islands and thousands of islets perched between mainland Europe and the North Pole. For centuries the islands, encompassing an area roughly the size of Latvia, were a no-man's land, inhabited mainly by reindeer and polar bears whose ancestors arrived on drifting pack ice. Today, Svalbard has fewer than 3000 human residents but is home to scientific facilities operated by more than a dozen countries, including China, India, and Russia. Many are clustered at Ny-Alesund, a research outpost on the largest island, Spitsbergen, that Norway promotes as a symbol of collaborative Arctic science.Researchers have long journeyed to Svalbard to study everything from glaciers to the northern lights. But in recent years the archipelago has become especially important to science because it provides a front-row seat to some of the fastest warming on Earth; since 1991 the region's mean annual air temperatures have risen at roughly seven times the global rate-and twice the Arctic average.Even as climate change boosts Svalbard's scientific value, however, rising geopolitical tensions in the Arctic are making research more difficult. In its National Threat Assessment for this year, Norway's Police Security Service warned that Svalbard is "especially exposed" to Russian spying, and that "China will try to use research as a gateway to Norwegian territory in the High North."Original SubmissionRead more of this story at SoylentNews.
Rich writes:Chip maker Qualcomm has announced it will acquire software company Modular for $3.9bn in an all share transaction. (https://www.qualcomm.com/news/releases/2026/06/qualcomm-to-acquire-modular) Modular was founded by Chris Lattner, who is best known for the LLVM compiler backend and the invention of the Swift language from Apple. Modular develops a new language called "Mojo", which looks like Python, provides safety guarantees like Rust, and compiles down to highly efficient code to utilize massive parallelism. Mojo targets not only classic CPUs, but can also generate GPU shaders, to cover the full AI stack. It is assumed that Qualcomm will use Modular's offerings to attack Nvidia's proprietary Cuda system to gain traction in the datacenter space.If all goes to plan, and the Qualcomm stock rises to AI bubble levels, Lattner will become the latest tech billionaire through software work alone. If not, he'll just walk away with a few hundred millions. Respect.Original SubmissionRead more of this story at SoylentNews.
Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:Ban lands three weeks after Anthropic accused Alibaba's Qwen lab of running the largest known distillation attack on Claude:
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