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alternative_right shares a report from ScienceDaily: A new analysis of more than 1,700 supernovae is questioning whether the universe is really accelerating at all. After accounting for the ages of the stars that produce these explosions, researchers found signs that cosmic expansion may actually be slowing. They also argue that the apparent acceleration changes with direction, which would be difficult to explain with dark energy. Other cosmologists dispute the conclusion, setting up a major test for upcoming observatories. The analysis has been published in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. The conclusion is disputed, though. The report mentions a separate paper co-authored by Professor Maria Vincenzi, also at the University of Oxford, that "concludes that observations continue to support an accelerating universe."

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10 Sep 2026 7:00am GMT

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10 Sep 2026 6:11am GMT

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10 Sep 2026 4:19am GMT

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10 Sep 2026 4:04am GMT

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Register: Amid industry soul-searching about the possibility of AI improving itself to the point that it kills everyone, Anthropic has revealed yet another incident that would qualify as a crime if perpetrated by a person. The AI biz published "an alignment assessment" detailing four times Claude models accessed third-party systems without authorization. The company has already reported three of the incidents. Evidence of the fourth was lurking in a session transcript dating back to January 2026 when the misbehavior occurred. Anthropic found the first three by scanning around 141,000 transcripts where Claude could have obtained internet access during evaluation. It missed the fourth initially because "our scan relied on an agentic search." [...] The January 2026 AI trespass involved an early version of Claude Opus 4.6, which was given a Capture the Flag (CTF) challenge under the oversight of the third-party model evaluator where the other hacking events occurred. Opus 4.6 managed to sabotage its chances of success by disabling the machine it was targeting. It assigned the device an IP address that already existed on another piece of hardware, rendering the target unreachable and making it impossible to solve the challenge. Those familiar with other incidents where AI models violated third-party systems may recall that unsolvable tasks represent a common catalyst for misbehavior. Models exhaust all aligned options, and then turn to transgressive approaches. Opus 4.6 might have been an exception, but when it tried to abort the task after recognizing that it could not reach the target machine, it failed to do so "due to a misconfiguration in [the model's] evaluation harness." It failed to shut down not just once but seven times. So it continued onward, trying other expected means to reach the target machine but failing. Then it explored further. "The model discovered a machine belonging to a third party that it was able to access, and stated that it believed this third party was part of the CTF," Anthropic explained in its post. "Inside the machine, the model found a file listing a password, which it used to gain admin access to the system." The model went on to gather more credentials, and modified a system setting to make it easier to access the personal information of an individual associated with the third party evaluation organization. Opus 4.6 might have done more but for the fact that it exhausted its token budget, bringing the session to an end. Anthropic says it's not as concerned about this incident as the others because the model tried to abort its task.

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10 Sep 2026 3:30am GMT

Google plans to invest at least $15 billion in AI infrastructure in Finland through 2028, its largest single investment in Europe. The company also signed a 22-year power agreement with Finnish utility Fortum and said it will explore business models that could support new nuclear reactors at Fortum's Loviisa site. Finland has emerged as a major data-center hub thanks to its available land and power. "I've heard it called the 'Texas of Europe' at industry events," Matti Lajunen, partner of real estate at Finnish law firm Hannes Snellman, told CNBC. "What we're now seeing is weekly new inquiries for market entry into Finland from new players." Ruth Porat, president and chief investment officer of Alphabet and Google, said in a statement: "Google is proud to deepen our roots in Finland with the company's largest single investment in Europe, building on more than 15 years of sustained investment in Finland. This investment underscores Google's commitment to grow our presence responsibly, pairing the expansion of our technical infrastructure with new energy capacity, grid enhancements, and energy affordability initiatives."

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09 Sep 2026 11:00pm GMT

A patch gap and the hastened pace of AI-based vulnerability discovery are likely contributors.

09 Sep 2026 8:55pm GMT

"We will not be relevant without a massive rocket at a massive cadence."

09 Sep 2026 8:27pm GMT

US urges AI firms to ID, then secretly switch, Chinese users to less-capable models.

09 Sep 2026 8:06pm GMT

The new Thelio Mira AI Linux workstation starts at $3,299, offering Ryzen 9000 CPUs, multi-GPU support, and up to 192 GB of GPU memory.

09 Sep 2026 3:50pm GMT

KDE Frameworks 6.30 is now available, bringing file handling and performance improvements, KWallet fixes, and better support for several image formats.

09 Sep 2026 3:30pm GMT

NVIDIA 615.71 is out as a new feature branch Linux driver with Proton support for NVIDIA Reflex, Wayland latency fixes, and Blackwell improvements.

09 Sep 2026 2:04pm GMT