Emory University theorists propose that light can reveal anyons, exotic quasiparticles that emerge from collective electron behavior, via an energy shift when an exciton binds to one. The Physical Review Letters work is purely theoretical, and the authors hope experimentalists will test it as a step toward topological quantum computing.
The New York Times reports that Trump was briefed on intelligence that a Megaspeed executive, Alice Huang, had access to Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang and may have been relaying information to Beijing, but he reportedly took no action, partly out of concern for Nvidia sales and the US-China trade truce. Nvidia and China deny wrongdoing.
The Justice Department asked the 9th Circuit to rule quickly on its bid to keep California from counting ballots of up to 20,000 alleged noncitizens, after Judge David Carter rejected the request as a likely Voting Rights Act violation and a risk of disenfranchising citizens.
Dream researchers found artifacts of a likely AI-assisted campaign that chained a custom PHP2Shell exploit with a Linux kernel privilege-escalation flaw to root 25 PAN-OS firewalls across four countries, then pivoted into a US government-affiliated Active Directory environment.
Mistral has released the weights of Mistral Large 4, a 1-trillion-parameter multimodal model trained in Europe, after further reinforcement learning. It reports leading open-weight results on coding and defensive cybersecurity benchmarks, with token efficiency gains and three selectable reasoning modes.
Hubble coronagraphic imaging of the Beta Pictoris debris disk detected the Cat's Tail in visible light for the first time, previously seen only by JWST. The structure is attributed to a collision of two dwarf-planet-sized bodies, each roughly 1–3 times Ceres in mass, producing dark, porous organic dust.
An explainer on how H.264 achieves dramatic compression. It covers lossy quantization in the frequency domain, chroma subsampling, and motion compensation with I-, P- and B-frames, illustrated by an Apple homepage clip that is far smaller than a single PNG frame.
University of Washington biologists report in Current Biology that permanent Daylight Saving Time would produce over two billion predawn school commutes yearly in the U.S., raising pedestrian collision risk, especially for lower-income children. They suggest permanent standard time as the better option.
European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said the Canada-EU Summit in Montreal opens discussions on making Canada the EU's first "associate member," though several EU members, including Germany, rejected the term. Talks cover supercomputing access, critical minerals, Arctic cooperation, and education and research ties.
Miami-Dade County signed a $3.9 million deal with Rockstar Games for extra "Grand Theft Auto VI" advertising at the airport, seaport and on traffic boxes, beyond the Kaseya Center rooftop display. The mayor says funds are allocated to the long-delayed Dan Paul Plaza park, though which funds remains unclear.
Competitive gaming has become an arena of geopolitical rivalry, with Saudi Arabia using it for economic diversification, China using mobile games for soft power, and wars and sanctions determining who competes and where tournaments are held.
Israel's election left Netanyahu's Likud as the largest party, with his bloc leading Gadi Eisenkot's roughly fifty-three seats to forty-eight, but neither is close to sixty-one. Haredi conscription and broken campaign pledges loom over coalition talks, and prolonged deadlock may favor the incumbent.
After the Cuban Missile Crisis deal, nearly one hundred Soviet tactical nuclear weapons remained undetected in Cuba. Anastas Mikoyan blocked their transfer to Castro, and the weapons left on December 1; their existence only became public in 1992.
In this podcast episode, Honeycomb co-founder and CTO Charity Majors discusses applying immutable infrastructure ideas to code, treating it like cattle rather than pets. The talk also covers adapting system specifications to AI-generated code and the ethical line between observability and surveillance.
NixOSBuilder is an unofficial, GPLv3-or-later static website that walks users through a wizard and generates a flake-based NixOS configuration with Home Manager and optional disko layouts. Its tests run nix eval on generated configs for each channel, though that only confirms they evaluate.
astroterm is an open-source, C-written terminal tool that renders real-time ASCII star maps showing stars, planets, constellations and moon phases. Users can choose date, time and location, with install options for several Linux distributions, Homebrew, Nix, Guix and Windows.
Explains why common C backward-loop idioms fail: an unsigned index with i >= 0 never terminates, and a signed ssize_t brings conversion and portability problems. Recommends looping with a post-decrement condition, using unsigned wrap-around, which keeps the index in bounds.
Sylphide OS is an early 0.1 open-source operating system for microcontroller-based computers lacking an MMU, aiming to recreate the integrated home-computer experience of the 80s. It runs on FreeRTOS with its own drivers and graphical desktop, targeting boards like the Olimex esp32-p4-pc and Raspberry Pi Pico 2.
Herdr has released a native desktop app for managing terminals and coding agents across spaces, tabs and panes. It shows agent status, keeps terminals running after the window closes, supports remote SSH machines, and offers JavaScript mods and layouts.
The Pico CSS framework has been discontinued, with v2.1.1 as its last release and its repositories archived. The maintainer says AI-generated lightweight HTML reduces the need for such a framework, and staying relevant would demand a full rewrite as a different project. The package, CDN and website remain online, and the MIT-licensed code can be forked under a different name.
A University of Alicante analysis of 325 fiction series released in Spain from 2020 to 2024 finds that streaming platforms have not displaced linear television. The two models increasingly coexist, co-produce and share content, and weekly releases earned slightly higher ratings than full-season drops.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth removed Army Lt. Gen. Brett Sylvia as the Joint Chiefs' head of strategy, plans and policy, with no reason given and no immediate replacement. The firing comes as Trump weighs renewed Iran strikes after the midterms and Hegseth continues cutting the senior officer ranks.
Researchers at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem built BBERT, an AI model that recognizes bacterial DNA in fragments only 100 letters long without needing reference-database matches. It reached roughly 90% accuracy separating bacterial from other DNA and cut genome reconstruction time from about 66 to 25 hours.
Experts at a PBS News and Votebeat Reddit Q&A said illegal voting is extremely rare and that the president cannot declare a national emergency to halt elections. They also covered the planned DOJ monitors, voter roll maintenance and how certification disputes get resolved.
Baylor University researchers artificially aged polyethylene, PET and polypropylene microplastics with chemical oxidation to mimic wastewater treatment. Both pristine and oxidized particles bound copper, though the authors caution that real-world carrier effects may be more limited than in these accelerated tests.
