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18 Jul 2026 11:12am GMT

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18 Jul 2026 11:06am GMT

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18 Jul 2026 11:00am GMT

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: As smoke from hundreds of burning wildfires spread across Canada and the United States, the first three operational satellites in the Google-backed FireSat program successfully launched into orbit. The satellites will begin providing wildfire detection capable of spotting even small fires in the United States, Australia, and Europe before the end of the year. The launch of the microsatellites aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California on July 7, 2026 marks a transition to "initial operational capability" for the FireSat constellation managed by the nonprofit Earth Fire Alliance. After a three-month testing period, the three satellites will begin actively providing data to fire agencies while covering every fire-prone region on Earth at least twice per day. FireSat represents the first satellite constellation purpose-built for detecting wildfires, including spotting smaller fires that other satellites may miss. The satellites were designed by California-based satellite manufacturer Muon Space and have received over $15 million from Google to support initial deployment. Other notable financial supporters include the Bezos Earth Fund that committed $26 million. Each satellite is equipped with multispectral imaging that can peer through smoke and clouds and detect fires as small as five by five meters -- about 16 by 16 feet. That capability was proven by a FireSat Protoflight satellite that launched in March 2025 and collected more than one million images, while showing it could detect low-intensity blazes invisible to existing satellites. The "early adopter" organizations that will start using FireSat data this year include fire agencies in California, Colorado, Australia, and Portugal. As more satellites launch, the FireSat program aims to provide the latest imagery anywhere in the world on an hourly basis by 2029. Such imagery would eventually become available every 20 minutes once the full constellation of more than 50 satellites is launched by the early 2030s. Detection of small wildfires before they burn out of control could prove extremely helpful. The Earth Fire Alliance has projected that even an hourly revisit rate by the FireSat constellation could help save more than $1 billion in fire damage costs and prevent nearly 22 million tons of carbon emissions, along with protecting 3,500 homes and 1.3 million acres of land. To assist with that capability, Google Research plans to use the company's AI models to compare operational FireSat data with historical images in order to accurately identify very small fires and to inform predictive modeling of wildfires. Google celebrated the launch of the first operational FireSat satellites by describing the event as "another tangible step forward in putting practical AI to work for climate resilience."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

18 Jul 2026 11:00am GMT

Microsoft releases Visual Studio Code 1.129 with an experimental modern UI that refreshes the editor's overall look and feel.

18 Jul 2026 10:32am GMT

Researchers say a meteorite that crashed through the roof of a Hillsborough, New Jersey, home in 2024 contains unusually pristine evidence of salty fluids and organic chemistry from near the surface of a primitive asteroid. "A forensic study of the fragments revealed that they contained preserved bits from near the surface of a primitive asteroid, where it experienced concentrated salty fluids -- a process not previously known from this type of protoplanet world," said lead author and meteor astronomer Peter Jenniskens of the SETI Institute and NASA's Ames Research Center in California's Silicon Valley. Phys.org reports: According to paper co-author Mike Zolensky, a meteoriticist at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston, analysis of the Hillsborough meteorite found fragments that were more extensively altered by water on the meteorite's parent asteroid than is typically seen in CM2 carbonaceous chondrites. The analysis classified the specimen as a CM1/2 carbonaceous chondrite, an intermediate classification between petrographic types CM1 and CM2. [...] Zolensky and colleague JangMi Han found small salt-rich CM1 fragments within the Hillsborough meteorite, suggesting they originated from a near-surface region of the parent asteroid where liquid water evaporated and concentrated salts. They are now working to identify the salt minerals for comparison with similar phases found among samples returned to Earth from asteroids Ryugu and Bennu. The high concentration of salt in briny fluids can potentially create molecules crucial to life on Earth. Brines allow phosphate to remain in solution and can catalyze chemical reactions between organics and precipitate minerals. "Isotope studies of carbon and nitrogen suggest that primitive carbonaceous chondrites, including CM types, delivered organic matter to the early Earth," said cosmochemist Queenie Chan of Royal Holloway University of London, England, and biogeochemist Nana Ogawa of the Biogeochemistry Research Center at the Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology. "The Hillsborough meteorite contained 1.8% by weight of carbon and 0.07% of nitrogen, and had carbon and nitrogen isotopes typical for CM-type meteorites." The meteorite contained a wide variety of soluble organic compounds, and its compositional range confirms that the Hillsborough meteorite was more altered by water than most other CM-type meteorites. "A high fraction of compounds were the product of organic chemistry with minerals," said organic mass spectrometry specialist Phil Schmitt-Kopplin of Technical University Munich. "We do not know if these magnesium organic compounds were contributed by brine chemistry or were simply left over from earlier impact shock processes." In living organisms, organometallic compounds are found in blood and used in photosynthesis. Among the soluble organic compounds were many amino acids, similar to those found in more moderately altered CM2 chondrites. Astrobiologist Danny Glavin of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, and his team in Goddard's Astrobiology Analytical Lab concluded that the delivery of amino acids, carboxylic acids and other soluble organic molecules by CM-type bodies may have contributed to the prebiotic organic inventory that preceded the emergence of life on Earth. Their analysis suggests the complex distribution of amino acids observed in the Hillsborough meteorite formed within the parent body, likely assisted by brine fluid chemistry. The findings have been published in the journal Science Advances.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

18 Jul 2026 7:00am GMT

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the New York Times: Australia will require large data centers powering artificial intelligence to generate as much power as they consume, and ensure that creative professionals retain control over work that may be used to train A.I. systems, as the government sets up guardrails over the rapidly growing industry. The announcements on Wednesday in a speech by Prime Minister Anthony Albanese came as Australia draws significant interest from A.I. companies because of its size and the availability of renewable energy, and as resistance to data centers builds in many parts of the United States and Europe. Major A.I. companies have opened offices or announced investments in Australia in recent months. The Australian government is trying to balance capitalizing on the A.I. boom with setting parameters on a fast-changing industry that has sparked backlash over environmental impacts, energy use and lack of contribution to local economies. "Every country on earth is grappling with these challenges right now. Australia will be the first country in the world to bring these issues into a single, national framework," Mr. Albanese said Wednesday, laying out the standards his government will pursue. The details of what exactly the requirements will look like and how they will be enforced remain to be seen, and the government will need to secure the backing of individual states for its plan. The government said it would introduce legislation on the standards early next year, and establish an "Office of A.I." directly reporting to the prime minister to coordinate implementation. The "Australian Standards for A.I." will include a "legal obligation" for companies to ensure they do not drain the power grid and be as water efficient as possible, the government said. Mr. Albanese also said creators of books, music, art or news in Australia should retain control of the price and value of their work when used to train artificial intelligence systems. "Anything less is theft," he said. "No country has got this right yet."

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18 Jul 2026 3:30am GMT

DXVK 3.0.2 corrects rendering and swapchain problems in Halo CE and Overwatch while improving stability in other supported games.

17 Jul 2026 11:45pm GMT

The FireSat program can spot wildfires that other satellites miss.

17 Jul 2026 7:50pm GMT

"Missiles are being launched at the joint force every single day in [Operation] Epic Fury."

17 Jul 2026 7:19pm GMT

"We're turning the clock back on rational healthcare."

17 Jul 2026 6:53pm GMT

Frame is a new dependency-free X11 server for Linux, written entirely from scratch in x86-64 Assembly.

17 Jul 2026 6:45pm GMT