179340118
submission
alternative_right writes:
Anthropic's Claude
is increasingly writing the code to build future versions of itself, CEO Dario Amodei said at the Axios AI+ DC Summit on Wednesday.
Why it matters: "Terminator" isn't real yet, but AI's ability to grow itself is accelerating exponentially.
179339054
submission
alternative_right writes:
On September 15, 2025, an engineer discovered a supply chain attack against the NPM repository. Unlike previous NPM attacks, this campaign used novel, self-propagating malware (also known as a worm) to continue spreading itself. At the time of this writing, approximately 200 infected packages have been identified, including several repositories such as the popular @ctrl/tinycolor and multiple owned by CrowdStrike.
Once executed, this novel worm — dubbed Shai-Hulud — steals credentials, exfiltrates them, and attempts to find additional NPM packages in which to copy itself. The malicious code also attempts to leak data on GitHub by making private repositories public.
179337958
submission
alternative_right writes:
Astronomers have discovered the secret of a strange star system that has baffled them for years, finding it contains a dead star about to erupt after overfeeding on a stellar companion. The supernova explosion of this cosmic cannibal could be as bright as the moon, making it visible with the naked eye over Earth even in broad daylight.
The system in question is the double star V Sagittae located around 10,000 light-years from Earth, containing a white dwarf stellar remnant and its victim companion star, which orbit each other roughly twice every Earth day.
179323148
submission
alternative_right writes:
In social species, there is individual variation in sociability—some individuals are highly social and well-connected within their society, whereas others prefer less social interaction. This variation can be driven by many factors, including mood, social status, previous experience, and genetics. However, the genetic and molecular mechanisms that influence sociability are poorly understood.
Sociability is a complex characteristic, controlled by many genes, but these shared genomic features suggest there are ancient molecular building blocks of social life that have been conserved through millions of years of evolution, even if humans and bees evolved social life independently, the authors say.
The authors add, "It is a central feature of all societies that group members often engage with one another, but vary in their tendency to do so. Combining automated monitoring of social interactions, DNA sequencing, and brain transcriptomics in honey bee colonies, we identified evolutionarily conserved molecular roots of sociability shared across phylogenetically distinct species, including humans."
179321740
submission
alternative_right writes:
Some people taking Ozempic, Wegovy, or Mounjaro notice that food suddenly tastes sweeter or saltier, and this subtle shift in flavor perception appears tied to reduced appetite and stronger feelings of fullness. In a study of more than 400 patients, roughly one in five experienced heightened taste sensitivity, and many reported being less hungry and more easily satisfied.
179319940
submission
alternative_right writes:
Scientists from Taiwan have developed a new material that can stretch up to 4,600% of its original length before breaking. Even if it does break, gently pressing the pieces together at room temperature allows it to heal, fully restoring its shape and stretchability within 10 minutes.
179317692
submission
alternative_right writes:
Banned ‘bushmeat’ smuggled into the UK is being sold for home delivery via social media, Countryside Alliance claims.
Concerns have been raised over a rise in the easy availability of potentially dangerous illegal meat – including monkeys, porcupines, African cane rats and lizards – as accounts on TikTok, Facebook and Instagram offer ‘doorstep delivery’.
The meat could be carrying serious infectious diseases, including foot-and-mouth, anthrax, the Ebola virus, TB or cholera.
179298768
submission
alternative_right writes:
"I won’t go as far as to call it stagnation, but I believe directors and producers hold too much power in their hands even when it comes to the music," said Uematsu, according to Automaton's translation. "Even now, game composers aren’t in a position to speak their opinion freely, and no matter how much musical knowledge or technical skills they possess, they’re still in a position where it’s difficult to speak their mind.
"There are almost no game producers who are well versed in worldwide entertainment and are familiar with a wide variety of musical genres, so anything goes for them as long as you make it sound like a John Williams movie soundtrack."
179261824
submission
alternative_right writes:
Scientists announced Wednesday they have discovered the oldest-known member of the lizard family in southwest England, a tiny creature that used its surprisingly large teeth to hunt cockroaches 242 million years ago.
The ancient reptile, which lived during the Middle Triassic epoch shortly before the rise of the dinosaurs, was so small its entire body could fit in the palm of a human hand.
"The new animal is unlike anything yet discovered and has made us all think again about the evolution of the lizard, snakes and the tuatara," the latter of which is a New Zealand reptile, Dan Marke of the University of Bristol said in a statement.
179259900
submission
alternative_right writes:
If you don’t feel like reading that article, semihosting is basically syscalls for embedded ARM microcontrollers. You throw some values/pointers into some registers and call a breakpoint instruction. An attached debugger interprets the values in the registers and performs certain actions. Most people just use this to get some logs printed from the microcontroller, but they are actually bi-directional.
If you are older than me, you might remember a time before Wi-Fi and Ethernet, the dark ages, when you had to use dial-up modems to get online. You might also know that the ghosts of those modems still linger all around us. Almost all USB serial devices actually emulate those modems: a 56k modem is just 57600 baud serial device. Data between some of these modems was transmitted using a protocol called SLIP (Serial Line Internet Protocol).2
This may not come as a surprise, but Linux (and with some tweaking even macOS) supports SLIP. The slattach utility can make any /dev/tty* send and receive IP packets. All we have to do is put the data down the wire in the right format and provide a virtual tty. This is actually easier than you might imagine, pyOCD can forward all semihosting though a telnet port.Link to Original Source
179234898
submission
alternative_right writes:
The research revealed surprising complexity. The sweetpotato genome is a mosaic assembled from multiple wild ancestors, some of which have yet to be identified. About one-third comes from Ipomoea aequatoriensis, a wild species found in Ecuador that appears to be a direct descendant of a sweetpotato progenitor. Another significant portion resembles a wild Central American species called Ipomoea batatas 4x, though the actual donor may still remain undiscovered in the wild.
"Unlike what we see in wheat, where ancestral contributions can be found in distinct genome sections," says Shan Wu, the study's first author, "in sweetpotato, the ancestral sequences are intertwined on the same chromosomes, creating a unique genomic architecture."
This intertwined genetic heritage means that sweetpotato can be tentatively classified as a "segmental allopolyploid" — essentially a hybrid that arose from different species but behaves genetically as if it came from a single one. This genomic merging and recombination gives sweetpotato its remarkable adaptability and disease resistance, traits crucial for subsistence farmers worldwide.
179234170
submission
alternative_right writes:
Although the results of the study have yet to be published, scientists are already reporting a decline in insect cognition in the contaminated area of Fukushima Prefecture. "We can see correlations," Armant says. "However, a causal link with radioactive contamination has not yet been established. But since the area is no longer inhabited, it is unlikely that the effect is due to factors such as pesticides."
179188016
submission
alternative_right writes:
The team achieved this by systematically altering the symmetry of tiny repeating units in silicon photonic crystals. Adjusting the degree of local asymmetry at each point allowed them to "design" pseudomagnetic fields with tailored spatial patterns, without breaking fundamental time-reversal symmetry. Both theoretical analysis and experiments confirmed that these engineered fields can guide and manipulate light in versatile ways.
To demonstrate practical applications, the researchers built two devices commonly used in integrated optics. One was a compact S-shaped waveguide bend that transmitted light with less than 1.83 decibels of signal loss. The other was a power splitter that divided light into two equal paths with low excess loss and minimal imbalance.
In a final test, the devices successfully transmitted a high-speed data stream at 140 gigabits per second using a standard telecommunications modulation format, showing that the technique is compatible with existing optical communication systems.
179187610
submission
alternative_right writes:
Forever chemicals known as PFAS have turned up in an unexpected place: beer. Researchers tested 23 different beers from across the U.S. and found that 95% contained PFAS, with the highest concentrations showing up in regions with known water contamination. The findings reveal how pollution in municipal water supplies can infiltrate popular products, raising concerns for both consumers and brewers.
179186480
submission
alternative_right writes:
Between 2010 and 2013, the radars were upgraded with technology that allows both horizontal and vertical pulses of energy to be emitted. By comparing the returned signals, meteorologists can determine the shape of whatever is in the sky. Raindrops are a bit wider than they are tall, and shaped like hamburger buns; snowflakes are — obviously — flaky; but lofted tornado debris is spiked or jagged.
Birds, meanwhile, appear as somewhat spiked objects, as do insects. But insects appear a bit more round and uniform on radar, and are also lightweight enough to become caught up in the wind. Birds travel higher than most bugs, and also can fly against or perpendicular to the wind. After all, they have places to go — southward. Meteorologists can also determine their direction of motion through their analyses.
