geek

14 Jul 2026

Slashdot

Scientists Find Sugar Deep In Our Galaxy

Astronomers have detected erythrulose, a sugar found in raspberries and self-tanners, in a gas cloud near the center of the Milky Way. While not essential for life itself, the molecule can convert into a form thought to be important for life's origins, adding evidence that key prebiotic ingredients may be widespread across the galaxy. The Associated Press reports: Using two dish-shaped radio telescopes in Spain, researchers collected data from a large gas cloud near the center of the Milky Way. They identified the sugar in gas form by comparing telescope signals to samples in the lab. It's the latest kind of sugar detected in space -- in a region crossed by NASA's twin Voyager, the farthest spacecraft to ever travel from Earth. Scientists have found interesting chemistry in our galaxy, including building blocks for genetic material and parts of the cell. They spotted a cousin to table sugar near the center of the Milky Way about 25 years ago, and black grains from asteroid Bennu retrieved by NASA's Osiris-Rex spacecraft yielded other sugars, including a key DNA ingredient. The latest sugar isn't essential for life, but can easily convert to a form that's thought to be crucial to kick-starting life on Earth. And it's one of the most complex sugars spotted so far, said astrophysicist Erika Hamden with the University of Arizona. The results were published in the journal Nature Astronomy.

Over 200 Economists Say 'We Must Act Now' On AI's Economic Impact

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Associated Press: Hundreds of economists say in an open letter that institutions "must act now" to address how artificial intelligence could transform the economy and could put many people out of work. The statement released Monday was signed by top economists, along with computer scientists and some executives at tech companies including Anthropic, Google and OpenAI. "AI may become radically more powerful over the next 10 years," says the letter organized by Stanford University's digital economy lab. "This could drive an unprecedented transformation of our economy, larger than the Industrial Revolution, but unfolding over a vastly shorter time frame. It could bring risks, including large-scale job displacement, as well as opportunities such as major gains in living standards." The letter, which has only four sentences, says leaders must "build the incentives, guardrails, and institutions needed to steer AI in a direction that complements humans and benefits society." The Stanford lab says the letter has so far been signed by more than 200 economists and AI researchers, including 16 winners of a Nobel Prize. "We must be intentional and make collective, democratic choices, rather than letting market forces play out and risking leaving most citizens behind," wrote computer scientist and AI pioneer Yoshua Bengio, who was also among the signatories. He said it "it is highly plausible that AI will drastically transform our economies." Other signatories include Google CEO Eric Schmidt, LinkedIn cofounder Reid Hoffman, and Nobel laureates Joseph Stiglitz, Daron Acemonglu, and Simon Johnson.

Ars Technica

SpaceX is gearing up for Starship's 13th test flight later this week

This flight will put Starship under higher pressure and test out new Starlink satellites in orbit.

14 Jul 2026 1:17am GMT

13 Jul 2026

Slashdot

Microsoft Promises To Fix Search With Major Windows 11 Overhaul

Microsoft is overhauling Windows 11 search to prioritize local apps, files, and settings over web results while removing ads, promotions, MSN/Bing clutter, and other distractions. "You've have been asking for search that is faster, more relevant, and easier to use -- whether you're opening an app, finding a file, or changing a setting," Microsoft says in a new blog post. "Because the Windows Search Box is where many people start, we focused first on making results more dependable, easier to scan, and clearer before you click." Windows Central reports: The company is highlighting several key improvements, including clearer results that does a better job at showing why a search result is appearing when a query has been typed, alongside prioritizing local results before reaching out to the web. Search is also getting better at handling things like typos, which should help surface the right results even when the user misspells an app or file. The search home pane will no longer show MSN or Bing content, and promotional content and ads will no longer appear in search results. These upgrades are now rolling out to Windows Insiders in the Experimental Channel, and are expected to roll out to all Windows 11 users later this year. Insiders may not see the changes right away as they are rolling out in waves. The full list of changes can be found here.

Ars Technica

US continues to shun Ebola-infected citizens; second American sent to Germany

The man is said to be doing well in a Frankfurt hospital.

13 Jul 2026 10:07pm GMT

OSnews

How early SunOS did diskless workstations before NFS

I have a love-hate relationship with Sun's NFS. Since it was so prevalent, it's a go-to for getting stuff on and off the classic UNIX workstations I love to explore, but at the same time, it also never seems to work right away. However, the technology NFS was designed to replace was apparently quite a bit worse. Sun sold diskless workstations before NFS, which used something called nd (network disk). The problems with nd stem from a limitation of SunOS at the time. Since SunOS only provided support for a maximum of eight partitions per physical disk, nd offered the ability to create subpartitions, of which you had to manually create and remember the start and end sectors. That's a recipe for problems. But wait, there's more! For extra bonus problems, you might run out of available partitions to use on your server disk because you needed all of the available ones for regular filesystems and your swap area. If you were in this situation you could take the dangerous but necessary step of specifying your network disks using the special 'c' partition (cf dkinfo(8)), which was conventionally used to provide access to the entire disk. This was extra dangerous because you had to make sure that the nd disks you specified weren't overlapping into any regular partitions that you were using, since as nd(8) says, nd itself did no sanity checking. If you said sectors X to Y were network disk X, that's what they were, and goodness help you if some of them were also something else. ↫ Chris Siedenmann And this isn't even everything. Every part of this sounds horrid, and I can totally understand seeing NFS as a godsend compared to nd. It's depressing that we're in 2026 now, and the basic task of sending a file from one computer to another over your own network often still a total clusterfuck.

13 Jul 2026 9:22pm GMT

Nokia’s 14 years of mobile-phone supremacy ended in an afternoon

OSNews covered the downfall of Nokia extensively back when it was happening, but I must admit that seeing this whole story in "retrospectives" now makes me feel so incredibly old. This story played out roughly between 2007 and 2016 - in the grand scheme of things, the end of Nokia's phone business wasn't that long ago! Zeit, bitte bleib stehen. Anyway, here's another retrospective, but this one I definitely like a bit more than the countless others we've seen, because it ends on the part of the story often left out: Nokia not only survived, it's actually thriving. The company itself ultimately survived, even if the transition wasn't painless. Nokia's revenues, which peaked in 2007, fell sharply through the mid-2010s before the company refocused on a decades-old business line-telecom infrastructure-that many had forgotten Nokia was even in. Nokia now ranks among the world's top three suppliers of 5G network equipment, serving carriers across more than 125 countries, alongside Ericsson and Huawei. Although the company could never quite crack the smartphone, it now plays a key role in providing the network backbone those smartphones run on. ↫ Chris Chinchilla at IEEE Spectrum From a business perspective, I honestly doubt Nokia's phone business could've survived to this day, even if they had responded to the arrival of the iPhone sooner, and even if they didn't do the stupid thing of focusing on Windows Phone first and had just embraced Android right away. Obviously, a Nokia with its own touch-era smartphone operating system would never have survived - none of them did - and even if they went with Android from the onset, I think the eventual onslaught of Samsung, which has killed many a popular smartphone brand, would've trampled Nokia too. In a better version of our world, Nokia would've survived with its own smartphone operating system, based on Symbian or not, and it would've been Europe's strong, consistent answer to the Americans' iOS and Android. While Nokia would've still been a business and would've undoubtedly tried the same anti-user shenanigans as Apple and Google, they'd at least be easier to reign in regulatory-wise. You'd hope. The EU should've never allowed Nokia's smartphone business to be sold to Microsoft.

13 Jul 2026 9:05pm GMT

Ars Technica

The US government warns that Russia state hackers are coming after your router

With residential proxies all the rage, CISA urges router users to be vigilant.

13 Jul 2026 9:03pm GMT

10 Jul 2026

OSnews

Apple sues OpenAI for theft of “trade secrets”

Apple sued OpenAI on Friday, alleging the AI company has stolen the iPhone maker's trade secrets to develop its own yet-to-be-unveiled AI gadgets. In the suit, filed in the District Court of Northern California, Apple accuses OpenAI of trade secret misappropriation and breach of contract. ↫ Lisa Eadicicco and Hadas Gold at CNN I find this about as interesting and watching artificial grass grow, but with the common wisdom being that Apple is behind on "AI", it was honestly only a matter of time before the lawsuits came. After all, that's usually what companies who can't win in the market do. At the very least this will give corporate tech news websites a whole slew of new material. I just hope they both implode. We'd all be better off for it.

10 Jul 2026 10:16pm GMT