fidzu : nerd

alternative_right shares a report from Phys.org: Optical fibers are already the backbone of global communication systems. Recently, however, physicists have started to explore how their functionality could be boosted further by conveying information via entangled quantum particles -- potentially enabling instantaneous exchanges of information across vast distances. Such a system could eventually be the basis of a future 'quantum internet,' offering a level of security and computing power beyond anything possible today. In new research published in Physical Review Letters, a team led by Xi-Yu Luo at the University of Science and Technology of China in Hefei has pushed that vision further than ever, entangling two quantum memories across 420 kilometers (261 miles) of optical fiber -- more than four times the previous record.

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19 Aug 2026 7:00am GMT

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: The release of a new album by Taylor Swift might be a cause for celebration among her fans, but such events have also been linked to a more sombre phenomenon: an increase in fatal car crashes. The team behind a new study say it sheds light on the impact of distracted driving. Writing in the journal Jama Network Open, [Vishal Patel, first author of the study based at Harvard Medical School] and colleagues report how they focused on the release of 10 major albums, launched between 2017 and 2022, selected for having the highest number of Spotify streams over a single day. [...] The team found streaming volume for the top 200 songs in the US was 43% higher on the date of major album releases compared with the days surrounding the releases -- although such data does not reveal whether the music was being streamed in a car. [...] The researchers used data from a population-based registry of fatal US motor vehicle crashes to look at the number of traffic fatalities on the dates these albums were released, as well as for the 10 days either side. After taking into account the day of the week upon which the album was released, as well as federal holidays, and time of year, the researchers found the number of US traffic fatalities showed a relative increase of 15.1% on the date of major album releases, compared with similar days either side. "This is equivalent to approximately 182 fatalities in the US attributable to the release days of the 10 included albums," the team writes. Patel said the release of a new album could distract drivers because accessing music is a search task, not a single button press. "You unlock the phone, open the app, find the release, read down a tracklist, tap the right song. That's several seconds of looking at a screen," he said, adding unfamiliar music also demands more attention, while research has suggested listening to new, high-energy music measurably degrades driving performance. The researchers add the rise in traffic fatalities was greater among certain groups -- such as younger drivers, male drivers, people who were driving alone, and people driving cars with a built-in infotainment platform. The authors say the results suggest that "online music streaming through smartphones may significantly contribute to distracted driving and traffic fatalities."

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19 Aug 2026 3:30am GMT

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19 Aug 2026 1:58am GMT

Cursor has launched Origin, a GitHub-style code hosting platform built directly into its AI coding environment. The company is initially positioning Origin as a low-risk layer on top of GitHub, keeping GitHub as the "source of truth," but the launch landed just as a major GitHub outage highlighted growing concerns about reliability in the age of AI-generated code. VentureBeat reports: Cursor began rolling out Origin, its own code hosting platform, to paid users on Monday morning. Roughly three and a half hours later, GitHub's status page lit up with what became a six-hour-and-forty-two-minute global degradation -- error rates near 20% across pull requests, issues and the API, and near 50% on archive and raw file downloads, according to GitHub's incident log. Enterprise single sign-on went down with it: SAML, OIDC, SCIM provisioning and Team Sync all failed. So did Copilot. The developer internet did what the developer internet does. "You can now host your repos in Cursor Origin and deploy to Vercel via Cursor Origin which is itself hosted on Vercel," Vercel chief executive Guillermo Rauch posted on X. "And unlike GitHub, it's online [smile emoji]" Asked why he was smiling, Rauch replied: "trying to make light of the situation. We ourselves are stuck because of github rn!" Matt Palmer, who works at Cursor, quote-tweeted his own company's launch with the day's best line: "We were going to ship this earlier, but GitHub was down." A GitHub outage, in other words, delayed the launch of a GitHub competitor. Product launches get locked weeks in advance, and no evidence suggests Cursor timed this one. But the coincidence did the company an enormous favor, because it dramatized the argument Origin exists to make. For eighteen years, choosing where to host your team's source code has been the least interesting decision an engineering organization makes. Cursor is betting that AI agents have made it interesting again -- and for technical decision makers, that is the real news here. Not a new product, but a new procurement question with a governance problem attached.

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18 Aug 2026 11:00pm GMT

US healthcare is broken. Under RFK Jr., the research agency working to fix it is, too.

18 Aug 2026 10:32pm GMT

COSMIC Desktop 1.6 adds per-application sound controls, compositor protocol improvements, terminal enhancements, and fixes across core desktop components.

18 Aug 2026 10:29pm GMT

Tanks with defensive tech for shooting down drones are still proving vulnerable.

18 Aug 2026 10:18pm GMT

"A team of SpaceX engineers is on their way to conduct additional analysis on the vehicle."

18 Aug 2026 7:01pm GMT

Mozilla Thunderbird 154 is now available with optional system tray support, Microsoft Graph integration, improved search behavior, and more.

18 Aug 2026 5:25pm GMT

VirtualBox 7.2.16 is out with Linux FRED support, better Wayland shared clipboard handling, RHEL 9.8 fixes, and improved VMSVGA 3D performance.

18 Aug 2026 4:37pm GMT