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Van Allen spacecraft re-enters over the Pacific with 1 in 4,200 chance of causing injury

NASA's Van Allen Probe A has re-entered Earth's atmosphere eight years earlier than expected, with a 1 in 4,200 chance that its components could cause injury.…

No rest for project maintainers battered by slew of vulnerability disclosures

The US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) has confirmed that hackers are exploiting a max-severity remote code execution (RCE) vulnerability in workflow automation platform n8n.…

Alphabet to remain 'significant minority shareholder'

Alphabet is spinning out its US Google Fiber business and combining it with Astound Broadband as part of a joint venture with private equity investor Stonepeak.…

US spy-tech biz and platform provider retorts that this would be against the current law and a breach of its contract

Medical and legal rights campaigners are warning that the Palantir data platform, designed to be at the heart of England's health system, risks enabling UK immigration and policing departments to access confidential patient information.…

Some account holders see names, salaries, and child benefit payments… just not their own

Updated Customers of three major UK banks woke on Thursday to find incorrect transactions appearing in their apps, a problem later attributed to a technical glitch.…

All aboard the elevator where only Microsoft knows where you're going

Bork!Bork!Bork! Smart mirrors are all the rage. However, rather than a list of headlines and tasks to do today, an unhappy Windows installation can make a smart mirror seem very dumb indeed.…

Google knows asking agents to navigate GUIs designed for humans is ridiculous. Microsoft might notOpinion The command line interface is making a comeback because graphical user interfaces are a poor fit for autonomous agents, which could spell trouble for a lot of software – and software makers.…

Texas Instruments has introduced two new microcontroller families aimed at bringing artificial intelligence processing to low-power embedded systems. The MSPM0G5187 and AM13Ex devices integrate TI’s TinyEngine NPU, a hardware accelerator designed to improve the efficiency of neural network inference on microcontrollers. The MSPM0G5187 is based on an Arm Cortex-M0+ CPU running up to 80 MHz […]

A Pew Research Center survey found that only 53% of U.S. adults went to a movie theater in the past year, while 7% said they've never seen a movie in a theater at all. "The findings reflected a domestic box office still fighting to regain its footing since the COVID-19 pandemic, when ticket sales collapsed 81% in 2020 due to theater closures," reports Variety. From the report: In 2025, moviegoers in the U.S. and Canada bought 769.2 million tickets, less than half of the all-time peak of roughly 1.6 billion tickets sold in 2002, according to data from Nash Information Services. However, an August 2025 study field by NRG/National Research Group showed that 77% of Americans ages 12-74 went to see at least one movie in a theater in the previous 12 months. Box office revenue peaked at an inflation-adjusted $16.4 billion in 2002, and annual ticket revenue held relatively steady through the 2000s and 2010s before falling to under $3 billion in 2020 when theaters closed for months. Last year, U.S. theaters sold just over $9 billion worth of tickets, per media analytics firm Comscore. The number represents a recovery, but nowhere near a full one, as ticket sales have been lagging around 20% below pre-pandemic levels.

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DSTL bets £350K the UK can cook up its own exotic materials

Britain has taken the first steps towards producing its own ultrahigh temperature materials, regarded as vital for applications including hypersonic vehicles, space, and advanced propulsion systems.…

Plan to fast-track bit barn connections leaves housing developers fuming and billpayers on the hook

The British government is consulting on reforms to prioritize "strategically important" grid connections – including datacenters – amid reports of delays stretching more than a decade on some projects.…

Government offers £100K to support software forecasting how travelers choose departure hubs

The UK's Department for Transport is offering up to £100,000 over three years for access to a C++ programmer who can keep a module of its airport usage model up in the air.…

The printenv command is an alternative to the env command used to fetch the value of a specified variable name (key) used as an argument.

OBS Studio 32.1 is now available for this popular cross-platform desktop screen recording app that is also popular with game live-streaming and other uses...

GFiber (a.k.a. Google Fiber) and Astound Broadband announced that they plan to merge into a deal backed by infrastructure investor Stonepeak Infrastructure Partners. The resulting company will be majority owned by Stonepeak, with Alphabet becoming a "significant minority shareholder." Light Reading reports: Stonepeak Infrastructure Partners teamed with Patriot Media to acquire Astound in November 2020 for $8.1 billion. Stonepeak is Astound's largest investor. The deal is expected to close in the fourth quarter of 2026. The combined business will be led by the existing GFiber executive team. GFiber is currently led by CEO Dinni Jain. Jain, a former Time Warner Cable and Insight Communications exec, took the helm of what was then called Google Fiber in 2018. "This agreement advances GFiber's mission of redefining internet connectivity and represents a major step toward its goal of operational and financial independence," the companies said. "GFiber will have the external capital and strategic focus needed to accelerate its next phase of growth, expanding its customer-first approach and pioneering fiber technology across the country." GFiber's combination with Astound represents "a strategic opportunity to scale our customer-focused approach to connect more households to a truly different type of internet service," Jain said in a statement.

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Out of the Copilot and into the fire

Updated Windows shops have something new to worry about: a virtual Xbox lurking inside Windows 11, including the Professional edition.…

Deploying them by the gigawatt but still can’t flag obvious AI slop

Social networking giant Meta has revealed details of four previously unknown custom chips powering its AI services.…

Sigil 2.7.5 has been released today for this free, open-source, and cross-platform e-book editor software designed for those who want to edit books in the EPUB format, supporting both EPUB 2 and EPUB 3.

TrueNAS deprecates its public build repository on GitHub, raising questions in the community about openness and release transparency.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the New York Times: In a paper, published last month in the journal The Anatomical Record, researchers offered a novel take on falling felines. Their evidence suggests new insights into the so-called falling cat problem, particularly that cats have a very flexible segment of their spines that allows them to correct their orientation midair. [...] People have been curious about falling cats perhaps as long as the animals have been living with humans, but the method to their acrobatic abilities remains enigmatic. Part of the difficulty is that the anatomy of the cat has not been studied in detail, explains Yasuo Higurashi, a physiologist at Yamaguchi University in Japan and lead author of the study. [...] Modern research has split the falling cat problem into two competing models. The first, "legs in, legs out," suggests that cats correct their falling trajectory by first extending their hind limbs before retracting them, using a sequential twist of their upper and then lower trunk to gain the proper posture while in free fall. The second model, "tuck and turn," suggests that cats turn their upper and lower bodies in simultaneous juxtaposed movements. [...] The researchers found that the feline spine was extremely flexible in the upper thoracic vertebrae, but stiffer and heavier in the lower lumbar vertebrae. The discovery matches video evidence showing the cats first turn their front legs, and then their lower legs. The results suggest the cat quickly spins its flexible upper torso to face the ground, allowing it to see so that it can correctly twist the rest of its body to match. "The thoracic spine of the cat can rotate like our neck," Dr. Higurashi said. Experiments on the spine show the upper vertebrae can twist an astounding 360 degrees, he says, which helps cats make these correcting movements with ease. The results are consistent with the "legs in, legs out" model, but definitively determining which model is correct will take more work, Dr. Higurashi says. The results also yielded another discovery: Cats, like many animals, appear to have a right-side bias. One of the dropped cats corrected itself by turning to the right eight out of eight times, while the other turned right six out of eight times.

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