fidzu : geek

NASA heralded a new study published Friday documenting a first for humanity - "the first time a human-made object has measurably altered the path of a celestial body around the Sun." It was 2022's DART mission where NASA crashed a spacecraft into an asteroid - and the experiment "could have implications for protecting Earth from future asteroid strikes," writes ScienceNews: A spacecraft slowed the orbit of a pair of asteroids around the sun by more than 10 micrometers per second... Within a month, researchers showed that the impact shortened Dimorphos' 12-hour orbit by 32 minutes. Some of the rocks knocked off of Dimorphos fled the vicinity completely, escaping the gravitational influence of the Dimorphos-Didymos pair, says planetary defense researcher Rahil Makadia of the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Those rocky runaways took some momentum away from the duo and changed their joint motion around the sun. To figure out how much that motion was affected, astronomers watched the asteroids pass in front of distant stars, dimming some of the stars' light like a tiny eclipse. These blinks, called stellar occultations, can be visible from anywhere on Earth and are predictable in advance... Calculating how far off occultation timings were from predictions revealed that the asteroids' orbit around the sun was about 150 milliseconds slower than before the DART impact... Didymos and Dimorphos are not a threat to Earth, Makadia says, and weren't before DART. But knowing how a deliberate impact changes one asteroid's orbit can help make defense plans against another, "in case we need to do a kinetic impact for real." The researchers spent nearly two and a half years to collect 22 measurements of the asteroid's post-crash position, relying on amateur astronomers "to go out into the middle of nowhere and observe the necessary stellar occultations," acvcording to their paper. Planetary defense researcher even tells ScienceNews "There was an observer who drove two days each way into the Australian outback to get these measurements."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

08 Mar 2026 12:16am GMT

Long-time Slashdot reader fjo3 shared this report from Agence France-Presse: Japan has approved ground-breaking stem-cell treatments for Parkinson's and severe heart failure, one of the manufacturers and media reports said Friday, with the therapies expected to reach patients within months. Pharmaceutical company Sumitomo Pharma said it received the green light for the manufacture and sale of Amchepry, its Parkinson's disease treatment that transplants stem cells into a patient's brain. Japan's health ministry also gave the go-ahead to ReHeart, heart muscle sheets developed by medical startup Cuorips that can help form new blood vessels and restore heart function, media reports said. The treatments could be on the market and rolled out to patients as early as this summer, reports said, citing the health ministry, becoming the world's first commercially available medical products using induced pluripotent stem cells... In a statement, Sumitomo Pharma said it had obtained "conditional and time-limited approval" for the manufacture and marketing of Amchepry under a system which is reportedly designed to get these products to patients as quickly as possible. The approval is a kind of "provisional license", the Asahi newspaper said, after the safety and efficacy of the treatment was judged based on data from fewer patients than in ordinary clinical trials for drugs. A trial led by Kyoto University researchers indicated that the company's treatment was safe and successful in improving symptoms. The study involved seven Parkinson's patients aged between 50 and 69, with each receiving a total of either five million or 10 million cells implanted on both sides of the brain... The patients were monitored for two years and no major adverse effects were found, the study said. Four patients showed improvements in symptoms. The article notes that "Worldwide, about 10 million people have the illness, according to the Parkinson's Foundation," while also notes that today's current therapies "improve symptoms without slowing or halting the disease progression..."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

07 Mar 2026 11:16pm GMT

In a tweet that's been viewed 1.3 million times in the last six hours, OpenAI's head of robotics announced their resignation. They said they "care deeply about the Robotics team and the work we built together," so this "wasn't an easy call," but offered this reason for resigning: AI has an important role in national security. But surveillance of Americans without judicial oversight and lethal autonomy without human authorization are lines that deserved more deliberation than they got. This was about principle, not people. I have deep respect for Sam and the team, and I'm proud of what we built together. "To be clear, my issue is that the announcement was rushed without the guardrails defined," explains a later tweet. "It's a governance concern first and foremost. These are too important for deals or announcements to be rushed." And when asked how many OpenAI employees had left after OpenAI signed their new Pentagon deal, the roboticist said... "I can't share any internal details." The roboticist previously worked at Meta before leaving to join OpenAI in late 2024, reports Engadget: OpenAI confirmed Kalinowski's resignation and said in a statement to Engadget that the company understands people have "strong views" about these issues and will continue to engage in discussions with relevant parties. The company also explained in the statement that it doesn't support the issues that Kalinowski brought up. "We believe our agreement with the Pentagon creates a workable path for responsible national security uses of AI while making clear our red lines: no domestic surveillance and no autonomous weapons," the OpenAI statement read.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

07 Mar 2026 10:16pm GMT

Werner Herzog directed this evocative NatGeo documentary of an ornithologist's quest to find a new species.

07 Mar 2026 9:06pm GMT

A unique head spike and fish-eating jaws help make sense of these dinosaurs.

07 Mar 2026 12:30pm GMT

Research shows apparent Iranian state hackers trying to hijack consumer-grade cameras.

07 Mar 2026 11:30am GMT

And when a Redox monthly progress report is here, Haiku's monthly report is never far behind (or vice versa, depending on the month). Haiku's February was definitely a busy month, but there's no major tentpole changes or new features, highlighting just how close Haiku is to a new regular beta release. The OpenBSD drivers have been synchronised wit upstream to draw in some bugfixes, there's a ton of smaller fixes to various applications like StyledEdit, Mail, and many more, as well a surprisingly lost list f various file system fixes, improving the drivers for file systems like NTFS, Btrfs, XFS, and others. There's more, of course, so just like with Redox, head on over to pour over the list of smaller changes, fixes, and improvements. Just like last month, I'd like to mention once again that you really don't need to wait for the beta release to try out Haiku. The operating system has been in a fairly stable and solid condition for a long time now, and whatever's the latest nightly will generally work just fine, and can be updated without reinstallation.

06 Mar 2026 9:31pm GMT

February has been a busy month for Redox, the general purpose operating system written in Rust. For instance, the COSMIC compositor can now run on Redox as a winit window, the first step towards fully porting the compositor from COSMIC to Redox. Similarly, COSMIC Settings now also runs on Redox, albeit with only a very small number of available settings as Redox-specific settings panels haven't been made yet. It's clear the effort to get the new COSMIC desktop environment from System76 running on Redox is in full swing. Furthermore, Vulkan software can now run on Redox, thanks to enabling Lavapipe in Mesa3D. There's also a ton of fixes related to the boot process, the reliability of multithreading has been improved, and there's the usual long list of kernel, driver, and Relibc improvements as well. A major port comes in the form of NodeJS, which now runs on Redox, and helped in uncovering a number of bugs that needed to be fixed. Of course, there's way more in this month's progress report, so be sure to head on over and read the whole thing.

06 Mar 2026 9:24pm GMT

One day, I suddenly wondered how to detect when a USB device is plugged or unplugged from a computer running Linux. For most users, this would be solved by relying on libusb. However, the use case I was investigating might not actually want to do so, and so this led me down a poorly-documented rabbit hole. ↫ ArcaneNibble (or R) And ArcaneNibble (or R) is taking you down with them.

05 Mar 2026 10:23pm GMT

On Friday, July 18th, 2025, the Arch Linux team was notified that three AUR packages had been uploaded that contained malware. A few maintainers including myself took care of deleting these packages, removing all traces of the malicious code, and protecting against future malicious uploads.

30 Jan 2026 12:00am GMT

While starting this post I realized I have been maintaining personal infrastructure for over a decade! Most of the things I've self-hosted is been for personal uses. Email server, a blog, an IRC server, image hosting, RSS reader and so on. All of these things has all been a bit all over the place and never properly streamlined. Some has been in containers, some has just been flat files with a nginx service in front and some has been a random installed Debian package from somewhere I just forgot.

19 Jan 2026 12:00am GMT

In the recent blog post on the work funded by Sovereign Tech Fund (STF), we provided an overview of the "File Hierarchy for the Verification of OS Artifacts" (VOA) and the voa project as its reference implementation. VOA is a generic framework for verifying any kind of distribution artifacts (i.e. files) using arbitrary signature verification technologies. The voa CLI ⌨️ The voa project offers the voa(1) command line interface (CLI) which makes use of the voa(5) configuration file format for technology backends. It is recommended to read the respective man pages to get …

11 Jan 2026 12:00am GMT