[…] He was able to grasp, move and drop objects just by imagining himself performing the actions.
The device, known as a brain-computer interface (BCI), worked for a record 7 months without needing to be adjusted. Until now, such devices have only worked for a day or two.
The BCI relies on an AI model that can adjust to the small changes that take place in the brain as a person repeats a movement — or in this case, an imagined movement — and learns to do it in a more refined way.
[…]
The study, which was funded by the National Institutes of Health, appears March 6 in Cell.
The key was the discovery of how activity shifts in the brain day to day as a study participant repeatedly imagined making specific movements. Once the AI was programmed to account for those shifts, it worked for months at a time.
Location, location, location
Ganguly studied how patterns of brain activity in animals represent specific movements and saw that these representations changed day-to-day as the animal learned. He suspected the same thing was happening in humans, and that was why their BCIs so quickly lost the ability to recognize these patterns.
[…]
he participant’s brain could still produce the signals for a movement when he imagined himself doing it. The BCI recorded the brain’s representations of these movements through the sensors on his brain.
Ganguly’s team found that the shape of representations in the brain stayed the same, but their locations shifted slightly from day to day.
From virtual to reality
Ganguly then asked the participant to imagine himself making simple movements with his fingers, hands or thumbs over the course of two weeks, while the sensors recorded his brain activity to train the AI.
Then, the participant tried to control a robotic arm and hand. But the movements still weren’t very precise.
So, Ganguly had the participant practice on a virtual robot arm that gave him feedback on the accuracy of his visualizations. Eventually, he got the virtual arm to do what he wanted it to do.
Once the participant began practicing with the real robot arm, it only took a few practice sessions for him to transfer his skills to the real world.
He could make the robotic arm pick up blocks, turn them and move them to new locations. He was even able to open a cabinet, take out a cup and hold it up to a water dispenser.
Problems with Outlook.com are continuing, with users reporting being unable to access their emails or authenticate themselves.
Part of the issue appears to be related to the initial wobble over the weekend. Some of the users affected by that outage were locked out of their accounts after repeated login failures, and Microsoft’s status center for Microsoft 365 continues to report that users might be unable to access their email using the native mail app on iOS devices.
As of today, issues persist, and Microsoft has promised another update by 2300 UTC. On the plus side, the current status has changed from “We’re analyzing available data and attempting to determine the underlying source for users’ problems” to “Our analysis of available data is ongoing as we attempt to determine the underlying source of users’ problems.”
Unlike most OCR APIs, Mistral OCR is a multimodal API, meaning that it can detect when there are illustrations and photos intertwined with blocks of text. The OCR API creates bounding boxes around these graphical elements and includes them in the output.
Mistral OCR also doesn’t just output a big wall of text; the output is formatted in Markdown, a formatting syntax that developers use to add links, headers, and other formatting elements to a plain text file.
LLMs rely heavily on Markdown for their training datasets. Similarly, when you use an AI assistant, such as Mistral’s Le Chat or OpenAI’s ChatGPT, they often generate Markdown to create bullet lists, add links, or put some elements in bold.
[…]
Mistral OCR is available on Mistral’s own API platform or through its cloud partners (AWS, Azure, Google Cloud Vertex, etc.). And for companies working with classified or sensitive data, Mistral offers on-premise deployment.
[…]
Companies and developers will most likely use Mistral OCR with a RAG (aka Retrieval-Augmented Generation) system to use multimodal documents as input in an LLM. And there are many potential use cases. For instance, we could envisage law firms using it to help them swiftly plough through huge volumes of documents.
RAG is a technique that’s used to retrieve data and use it as context with a generative AI model.
In the study, published in Nature, the scientists say that discovering the mechanism will support ongoing clinical trials, and could lead to the targeted use of aspirin to prevent the spread of susceptible types of cancer, and to the development of more effective drugs to prevent cancer metastasis.
The scientists caution that, in some people, aspirin can have serious side-effects and clinical trials are underway to determine how to use it safely and effectively to prevent cancer spread, so people should consult their doctor before starting to take it.
Studies of people with cancer have previously observed that those taking daily low-dose aspirin have a reduction in the spread of some cancers, such as breast, bowel, and prostate cancers, leading to ongoing clinical trials. However, until now it wasn’t known exactly how aspirin could prevent metastases.
[…]
The researchers previously screened 810 genes in mice and found 15 that had an effect on cancer metastasis. In particular, they found that mice lacking a gene which produces a protein called ARHGEF1 had less metastasis of various primary cancers to the lungs and liver.
The researchers determined that ARHGEF1 suppresses a type of immune cell called a T cell, which can recognise and kill metastatic cancer cells.
To develop treatments to take advantage of this discovery, they needed to find a way for drugs to target it. The scientists traced signals in the cell to determine that ARHGEF1 is switched on when T cells are exposed to a clotting factor called thromboxane A2 (TXA2).
This was an unexpected revelation for the scientists, because TXA2 is already well-known and linked to how aspirin works.
TXA2 is produced by platelets — a cell in the blood stream that helps blood clot, preventing wounds from bleeding, but occasionally causing heart attacks and strokes. Aspirin reduces the production of TXA2, leading to the anti-clotting effects, which underlies its ability to prevent heart attacks and strokes.
This new research found that aspirin prevents cancers from spreading by decreasing TXA2 and releasing T cells from suppression. They used a mouse model of melanoma to show that in mice given aspirin, the frequency of metastases was reduced compared to control mice, and this was dependent on releasing T cells from suppression by TXA2.
[…]
In the future, the researchers plan to help the translation of their work into potential clinical practice by collaborating with Professor Ruth Langley, of the MRC Clinical Trials Unit at University College London, who is leading the Add-Aspirin clinical trial, to find out if aspirin can stop or delay early stage cancers from coming back. Professor Langley, who was not involved in this study, commented: “This is an important discovery. It will enable us to interpret the results of ongoing clinical trials and work out who is most likely to benefit from aspirin after a cancer diagnosis.
“In a small proportion of people, aspirin can cause serious side-effects, including bleeding or stomach ulcers. Therefore, it is important to understand which people with cancer are likely to benefit and always talk to your doctor before starting aspirin.”
Rutgers Health researchers have made discoveries about brown fat that may open a new path to helping people stay physically fit as they age.
A team from Rutgers New Jersey Medical School found that mice lacking a specific gene developed an unusually potent form of brown fat tissue that expanded lifespan and increased exercise capacity by roughly 30%. The team is working on a drug that could mimic these effects in humans.
“Exercise capacity diminishes as you get older, and to have a technique that could enhance exercise performance would be very beneficial for healthful aging,” said Stephen Vatner, university professor and director of the Cardiovascular Research Institute in the medical school’s Department of Cell Biology and Molecular Medicine and senior author of the study in Aging Cell. “This mouse model performs exercise better than their normal littermates.”
Unlike white fat, which stores energy, brown fat burns calories and helps regulate body temperature. This study revealed brown fat also plays a crucial role in exercise capacity by improving blood flow to muscles during physical activity.
The genetically modified mice produced unusually high amounts of active brown fat and showed about 30% better exercise performance than normal mice, both in speed and time to exhaustion.
The discovery emerged from broader research into healthy aging. The modified mice, which lack a protein called RGS14, live about 20% longer than normal mice, with females living longer than males — similar to the pattern seen in humans. Even at advanced ages, they maintain a healthier appearance, avoiding the typical signs of aging, such as loss of hair and graying that appear in normal elderly mice. Their brown adipose tissue also protects them from obesity, glucose intolerance, cardiovascular disorders, cancer and Alzheimer’s disease, in addition to reduced exercise tolerance.
To test whether the brown fat — rather than some other result from the missing genes -accounted for the benefits, the researchers transplanted the brown fat to normal mice. They noted that the recipients gained similar benefits within days. Transplants using regular brown fat from normal mice, by contrast, took eight weeks to produce much milder improvements.
The discovery could eventually improve human lifespans — the total time when people enjoy good mental and physical health.
“With all the medical advances, aging and longevity have increased in humans, but unfortunately, healthful aging hasn’t,” Vatner said. “There are a lot of diseases associated with aging — obesity, diabetes, myocardial ischemia, heart failure, cancer — and what we have to do is find new drugs based on models of healthful aging.”
Rather than develop a treatment that addresses aging broadly, which poses regulatory challenges, Vatner said his team plans to test for specific benefits such as improved exercise capacity and metabolism. This approach builds on their previous success in developing a drug based on a different mouse healthful longevity model.
“We’re working with some people to develop this agent, and hopefully, in another year or so, we’ll have a drug that we can test,” Vatner said.
In the meantime, techniques such as deliberate cold exposure can increase brown fat naturally. Studies have found such efforts to produce short-term benefits that range from enhanced immune system function to improved metabolic health, but Vatner said none of the studies have run long enough to find any effect on healthful aging.
He added that most people would prefer to increase brown fat levels by taking pills rather than ice baths and is optimistic about translating the newest finding into an effective medication.
The world’s first “biological computer” that fuses human brain cells with silicon hardware to form fluid neural networks has been commercially launched, ushering in a new age of AI technology. The CL1, from Australian company Cortical Labs, offers a whole new kind of computing intelligence – one that’s more dynamic, sustainable and energy efficient than any AI that currently exists – and we will start to see its potential when it’s in users’ hands in the coming months.
Known as a Synthetic Biological Intelligence (SBI), Cortical’s CL1 system was officially launched in Barcelona on March 2, 2025, and is expected to be a game-changer for science and medical research. The human-cell neural networks that form on the silicon “chip” are essentially an ever-evolving organic computer, and the engineers behind it say it learns so quickly and flexibly that it completely outpaces the silicon-based AI chips used to train existing large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT.
“Today is the culmination of a vision that has powered Cortical Labs for almost six years,” said Cortical founder and CEO Dr Hon Weng Chong. “We’ve enjoyed a series of critical breakthroughs in recent years, most notably our research in the journal Neuron, through which cultures were embedded in a simulated game-world, and were provided with electrophysiological stimulation and recording to mimic the arcade game Pong. However, our long-term mission has been to democratize this technology, making it accessible to researchers without specialized hardware and software. The CL1 is the realization of that mission.”
The CL-1: a large housing contains all the life support systems required for the survival of the human brain cells that power the chip
Cortical Labs
He added that while this is a groundbreaking step forward, the full extent of the SBI system won’t be seen until it’s in users’ hands.
“We’re offering ‘Wetware-as-a-Service’ (WaaS),” he added – customers will be able to buy the CL-1 biocomputer outright, or simply buy time on the chips, accessing them remotely to work with the cultured cell technology via the cloud. “This platform will enable the millions of researchers, innovators and big-thinkers around the world to turn the CL1’s potential into tangible, real-word impact. We’ll provide the platform and support for them to invest in R&D and drive new breakthroughs and research.”
These remarkable brain-cell biocomputers could revolutionize everything from drug discovery and clinical testing to how robotic “intelligence” is built, allowing unlimited personalization depending on need. The CL1, which will be widely available in the second half of 2025, is an enormous achievement for Cortical – and as New Atlas saw recently with a visit to the company’s Melbourne headquarters – the potential here is much more far-reaching than Pong.
The team made international headlines in 2022 after developing a self-adapting computer ‘brain’ by placing 800,000 human and mouse neurons on a chip and training this network to play the video game. New Atlas readers may already be familiar with Cortical Labs and its formative steps towards SBI, with Loz Blain covering the early advances of this self-adjusting neural network capable of adjusting and adapting to forge new, stimuli-responsive pathways in processing information.
“We almost view it actually as a kind of different form of life to let’s say, animal or human,” Chief Scientific Officer Brett Kagan told Blain in 2023. “We think of it as a mechanical and engineering approach to intelligence. We’re using the substrate of intelligence, which is biological neurons, but we’re assembling them in a new way.”
Cortical Labs has come a long way since that important first step but now-obsolete DishBrain, both in technology and name. Now, with the commercialization of the CL1, researchers can get hands-on with the the technology, and start exploring a vast range of real-world applications.
When New Atlas visited Kagan and team at Cortical Labs’ Melbourne headquarters late last year in the lead-up to this launch, we saw first-hand how far the biotechnology has come since the DishBrain. The CL1 features relatively simple, stable hardware, new ways of optimizing “wetware” – human brain cells – and significant strides towards being able to grow a neural network that works like a fully functional brain. Or, as Kagan explained of a work in progress, the “Minimal Viable Brain.”
In the lab, the early CL1 model is put through its paces as the team monitors its response to stimuli (prompts)
New Atlas
In 2022, the team demonstrated how rodent- and human-induced pluripotent stem cells (hiPSCs) integrated into high-density multielectrode arrays (HD-MEAs) based on complementary metal–oxide–semiconductor (CMOS) technology could be electro-physiologically stimulated to forge autonomous, highly efficient information-exchange paths.
To do so, they needed a way to reward the brain cells when they exhibited desired behaviors, and punish them when they failed a task. In the DishBrain experiments, they proved that predictability was the key; neurons seek out connections that produce energy-efficient, predictable outcomes and will adapt their networks in search of that reward, while avoiding behaviours that produce a random, chaotic electrical signal.
But, as Kagan explained, that was just the start.
“The current version is totally different technology,” Kagan told Blain and I. “The previous one used something called a CMOS chip, which basically gave you a really high-density read, but it was opaque, you couldn’t see the cells. And there were other issues as well – like, when you stimulate with a CMOS chip, you can’t draw out the charge; you can’t balance the charge as well. You end up with a build-up of charge at where you’re stimulating over long periods of time, and that’s pretty bad for the cells.
“With these versions, they’re a much simpler technology, but that means they’re much more stable and you’re much more able to actively balance that charge,” he added. “When you put in two microamps of current, you can draw out 2 microamps of current. And you can keep it more stable for longer.”
Chief Scientific Officer Brett Kagan assesses some stem cells cultivated in the lab
New Atlas
Inside the CL1 system, lab-grown neurons are placed on a planar electrode array – or, as Kagan explained, “basically just metal and glass.” Here, 59 electrodes form the basis of a more stable network, offering the user a high degree of control in activating the neural network. This SBI “brain” is then placed in a rectangular life-support unit, which is then connected to a software-based system to be operated in real time.
“A simple way to describe it would be like a body in a box, but it has filtration for waves, it has where the media is stored, it has pumps to keep everything circulating, gas mixing, and of course temperature control,” Kagan explained.
In the lab, Cortical is assembling these units to construct a first-of-its-kind biological neural network server stack, housing 30 individual units that each contain the cells on their electrode array, which is expected to go online in the coming months.
The team aims to have four such stacks running and available for commercial use through a cloud system before the end of the year. The units themselves are expected to have a price tag of around US$35,000, to start with (anything close to this kind of tech is currently priced at €80,000, or nearly US$85,000).
An entire rack of CL1 units uses only around 850-1,000 W of energy, is fully programmable and offers “bi-directional stimulation and read interface, tailored to enable neural communication and network learning,” the team noted in their launch release. Incredibly, the CL1 unit doesn’t require an external computer to operate, either.
Kagan and team testing the CL1 units, which are built to maintain the health of the cells living on the silicon hardware
New Atlas
The complex, ever-evolving SBI neural networks – which, under a microscope, can be seen forming branches from electrode to electrode – have, to start with, the potential to revolutionize how drug discovery and disease modeling is researched.
“We’re aiming to be significantly more affordable, and we do want to bring that pricing down in the long-term, but that’s the much longer term,” Kagan said. “In the meantime, we provide access to people from anywhere, anyone, any house, through the cloud-based system.
“So even if you don’t have one of these [units],” he added, “you can access one of these from your home.”
Taking us through the Physical Containment Level, or PC2, laboratory – a mix of computer hardware and more traditional biological specimens and equipment – Kagan showed us some of the all-important induced pluripotent stem cells (IPSC) under the microscope. IPSCs, cultivated in the lab from blood samples, are essentially blank slates that can grow into different types of cells.
“What we do is take those, and we start to use two different methods to differentiate them,” he explained. “One, we can either apply small molecules, which is called an ontogenetic differentiation protocol, where we essentially try to mimic the molecules that happen in utero or, rather, in the foetus’ developing brain. The other method is where we directly differentiate them, where we choose to up-regulate specific genes that are involved in neurons.”
One of the team’s methods is quick and produces a high level of cellular purity, however, the downside is that it isn’t exactly representative of the human brain.
“The brain is not a high-purity organ; it has a lot of different cell types, a lot of different connections,” Kagan said. “So if you only have one cell type, you might have that cell type, but you don’t have a brain.”
Just one section of the CL1 stack, with each unit housing living cells
Cortical Labs
The second method, “the small molecule approach,” produces diverse populations of cells, but it’s often unclear as to exactly what they’re working with. And understanding this is critical to Cortical’s ambitious ongoing pursuit of building the Minimal Viable Brain. While the CL1 launch is the first step, the team is also hard at work on the next stage of SBI.
“You can categorize the main cells, but there’s always a lot of sub-cell types – and that’s really good, as we’ve found out, but we’d really like to have fully controlled direct differentiation,” he explains. “We just haven’t resolved that problem yet: What is the ‘Minimal Viable Brain?’”
The MVB is an intriguing concept: How to bioengineer a human-like “brain” with the least amount of superfluous cell differentiation, but one that would have the complexity that growing a neural network made up of homogenous cell types doesn’t have. This kind of tool would be a powerful model, allowing for even more control and nuanced analyses than what is currently possible in research conducted on a real brain.
“It would basically be the key biological components that allow something to process information in a dynamic and responsive way, according to underlying principles,” Kagan explained. “A single neuron can do a lot of stuff, and while it can respond to some degree of dynamic behavior, it can’t, for example, navigate an environment. The smallest working brains we know of have 301 or 302 – depending on who you ask – neurons, and that’s in the C. elegens. But each of those neurons are really highly specified.
Actual human brain cells, living on a silicon chip among an array of input/output electrodes
Cortical Labs
“And another question is: Is the C. elegens brain the minimal viable brain? Do you need all of those neurons or could you achieve it with, you know, 30 neurons that are all uniquely circuited up?” he continued. (The organism is, of course, the science world’s favorite nematode, Caenorhabditis elegans.)“And if that’s the case, can you build a more complex network of those with 100,000 of the same 30? We don’t know the answer to any of this yet, but with this technology we can uncover it.
“We’re starting to add more and more cell types to this culture as we go, but one thing that’s holding us back is the tools,” he said. “The [CL1] unit didn’t exist until we built it, and you need a tool like that to answer questions like, ‘What is the minimal viable brain?'” If you have 120 units, you can set up really well-controlled experiments to understand exactly what drives the appearance of intelligence. You can break things down to the transcriptomic and genetic level to understand what genes and what proteins is actually driving one to learn and another not to learn. And when you have all those units, you can immediately start to take the drug discovery and disease modeling approach.”
This is particularly important for research into better treatments or even cures for conditions such as epilepsy and Alzheimer’s disease, and other brain-related illnesses. In the meantime, the CL1 system, is expected to advance research into diseases and therapeutics considerably.
“The large majority of drugs for neurological and psychiatric diseases that enter clinical trial testing fail, because there’s so much more nuance when it comes to the brain – but you can actually see that nuance when you test with these tools,” he explained. “Our hope is that we’re able to replace significant areas of animal testing with this. Animal testing is unfortunately still necessary, but I think there are a lot of cases where it can be replaced and that’s an ethically good thing.”
The ethics of this technology has been front and center for Cortical – that breakthrough 2022 paper sparked plenty of debate around it, particularly in the area of human “consciousness” and “sentience.” However, guardrails are in place, as much as they can be, for the ethical use of the CL1 units and the remote WaaS access.
The cells form an entirely new kind of artificial intelligence
New Atlas
“There are numerous regulatory approvals required, based on location and specific use cases,” the team noted in its launch statement. “Regulatory bodies may include health agencies, bioethics committees, and governmental organisations overseeing biotechnology or medical devices. Compliance with these regulations is essential to ensure responsible and ethical use of biological computing technologies.”
But as a global frontrunner in this ambitious technology, Cortical knows that – much like the rapid advancement of non-biological AI – it’s not easy to predict the broad applications of SBI. And one other challenge the company faces is funding – something that the realization of CL1 as a tangible, usable technology might change.
“The difficulty I keep hearing [from investors] is that we don’t fit into a box,” Kagan told us, as we took off our lab coats, hair nets and masks, and relocated to a couch by the computer room upstairs. “And we don’t – we’re a technology that crosses a number of different boundaries. If you look at the priority sectors, we can cover everything from the enabling capabilities of biotechnology, robotics, medical science, and a range of other things. We’re not quite AI, we’re not quite medicine – we can do both AI and medicine, but we’re not either. So we often get excluded.”
The complex life-support system inside each CL1 unit
New Atlas
As such, the launch of the physical CL1 system and the Cortical Cloud for WaaS remote use is a huge achievement, with Kagan and team excited to see where SBI can go once its in people’s hands.
“The CL1 is the first commercialized biological computer, uniquely designed to optimize communication and information processing with in vitro neural cultures,” the team noted. “The CL1, with built-in life support to maintain the health of the cells, holds significant possibilities in the fields of medical science and technology.
“SBI is inherently more natural than AI, as it utilizes the same biological material – neurons – that underpin intelligence in living organisms,” Cortical added. “By leveraging neurons as a computational substrate, SBI has the potential to create systems that exhibit more organic and natural forms of intelligence compared to traditional silicon-based AI.”
NASA and the Italian Space Agency made history on March 3, when the Lunar GNSS Receiver Experiment (LuGRE) became the first technology demonstration to acquire and track Earth-based navigation signals on the Moon’s surface.
The LuGRE payload’s success in lunar orbit and on the surface indicates that signals from the GNSS (Global Navigation Satellite System) can be received and tracked at the Moon. These results mean NASA’s Artemis missions, or other exploration missions, could benefit from these signals to accurately and autonomously determine their position, velocity, and time. This represents a steppingstone to advanced navigation systems and services for the Moon and Mars.
An artist’s concept of the LuGRE payload on Blue Ghost and its three main records in transit to the Moon, in lunar orbit and on the Moon’s surface.
NASA/Dave Ryan
[…]
The road to the historic milestone began on March 2 when the Firefly Aerospace’s Blue Ghost lunar lander touched down on the Moon and delivered LuGRE, one of 10 NASA payloads intended to advance lunar science. Soon after landing, LuGRE payload operators at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, began conducting their first science operation on the lunar surface.
Members from NASA and Italian Space Agency watching the Blue Ghost lunar lander touch down on the Moon.
NASA
With the receiver data flowing in, anticipation mounted. Could a Moon-based mission acquire and track signals from two GNSS constellations, GPS and Galileo, and use those signals for navigation on the lunar surface?
Then, at 2 a.m. EST on March 3, it was official: LuGRE acquired and tracked signals on the lunar surface for the first time ever and achieved a navigation fix — approximately 225,000 miles away from Earth.
Now that Blue Ghost is on the Moon, the mission will operate for 14 days providing NASA and the Italian Space Agency the opportunity to collect data in a near-continuous mode, leading to additional GNSS milestones. In addition to this record-setting achievement, LuGRE is the first Italian Space Agency developed hardware on the Moon, a milestone for the organization.
The LuGRE payload also broke GNSS records on its journey to the Moon. On Jan. 21, LuGRE surpassed the highest altitude GNSS signal acquisition ever recorded at 209,900 miles from Earth, a record formerly held by NASA’s Magnetospheric Multiscale Mission. Its altitude record continued to climb as LuGRE reached lunar orbit on Feb. 20 — 243,000 miles from Earth. This means that missions in cislunar space, the area of space between Earth and the Moon, could also rely on GNSS signals for navigation fixes.
Fabled RepairTuber and right to repair crusader Louis Rossmann has shared a new video encapsulating his surprise, and disappointment, that Brother has morphed into an “anti-consumer printer company.” More information about Brother’s embrace of the dark side are shared on Rossmann’s wiki, with the major two issues being new firmware disabling third party toner, and preventing (on color devices) color registration functionality.
Rossmann is clearly perturbed by Brother’s quiet volte-face with regard to aftermarket ink. Above he admits that he used to tell long-suffering HP or Canon printing device owners faces with cartridge DRM issues “Buy a brother laser printer for $100 and all of your woes will be solved.”
Sadly, “Brother is among the rest of them now,” mused the famous RepairTuber. With that, he admitted he would be stumped if asked to recommend a printer today. However, what he has recently seen of Brother makes him determined to keep his current occasionally used output peripheral off the internet and un-updated.
[…]
Rossmann has seen two big issues emerge for Brother printer users with recent firmware updates. Firstly, models that used to work with aftermarket ink, might refuse to work with the same cartridges in place post-update. Brother doesn’t always warn about such updates, so Rossmann says that it is important to keep your printer offline, if possible. Moreover, he reckons it is best to keep your printers offline, and “I highly suggest that you turn off your updates,” in light of these anti-consumer updates.
Another anti-consumer problem Rossmann highlights affects color devices. He cites reports from a Brother MFP user who noticed color calibration didn’t work with aftermarket inks post-update. They used to work, and if the update doesn’t allow the printer to calibrate with this aftermarket ink the cheaper carts become basically unusable.
Making matters worse, and an aspect of this tale which seems particularly dastardly, Rossmann says that older printer firmware is usually removed from websites. This means users can’t roll back when they discover the unwanted new ‘features’ post-update.
The UK Online Safety Act passed into law in 2023, and it properly comes into effect in 2025 with the threats of millions of pounds in fines. For Kevan Davis, the solo British dev behind the text-based zombie MMO Urban Dead, the risks presented by this legislation are too great, and his browser game is set to shut down on March 14, 2025.
“The Online Safety Act comes into force later this month, applying to all social and gaming websites where users interact, and especially those without strong age restrictions,” Davis writes in the announcement. “With the possibility of heavy corporate-sized fines even for solo web projects like this one, I’ve reluctantly concluded that it doesn’t look feasible for Urban Dead to be able to continue operating.”
This legislation is billed as a way of protecting individuals – especially children – from harmful content on social media platforms, requiring content providers to “take robust action against illegal content and activity.” The effort has been widely criticized not just by the major tech companies that it would most directly affect, but by security experts who feel that the proposed efforts would undermine privacy.
Nonetheless, the official timetable for the Online Safety Act is continuing to progress. “So a full 19 years, 8 months and 11 days after its quarantine began, Urban Dead will be shut down,” Davis writes. “No grand finale. No final catastrophe. No helicopter evac. Make your peace or your final stand in whichever part of Malton you called home, and the game will be switched off at noon UTC on 14 March.”
If you want to play Urban Dead ahead of its shutdown later this month, the original website is still online.
Those were wild times, when engineers pitted their wits against one another in the spirit of Steve Wozniack and SSAFE. That era came to a close – but not because someone finally figured out how to make data that you couldn’t copy. Rather, it ended because an unholy coalition of entertainment and tech industry lobbyists convinced Congress to pass the Digital Millennium Copyright Act in 1998, which made it a felony to “bypass an access control”:
That’s right: at the first hint of competition, the self-described libertarians who insisted that computers would make governments obsolete went running to the government, demanding a state-backed monopoly that would put their rivals in prison for daring to interfere with their business model. Plus ça change: today, their intellectual descendants are demanding that the US government bail out their “anti-state,” “independent” cryptocurrency:
Big Tech isn’t the only – or the most important – US tech export. Far more important is the invisible web of IP laws that ban reverse-engineering, modding, independent repair, and other activities that defend American tech exports from competitors in its trading partners.
Countries that trade with the US were arm-twisted into enacting laws like the DMCA as a condition of free trade with the USA. These laws were wildly unpopular, and had to be crammed through other countries’ legislatures:
That’s why Europeans who are appalled by Musk’s Nazi salute have to confine their protests to being loudly angry at him, selling off their Teslas, and shining lights on Tesla factories:
Musk is so attention-hungry that all this is as apt to please him as anger him. You know what would really hurt Musk? Jailbreaking every Tesla in Europe so that all its subscription features – which represent the highest-margin line-item on Tesla’s balance-sheet – could be unlocked by any local mechanic for €25. That would really kick Musk in the dongle.
The only problem is that in 2001, the US Trade Rep got the EU to pass the EU Copyright Directive, whose Article 6 bans that kind of reverse-engineering. The European Parliament passed that law because doing so guaranteed tariff-free access for EU goods exported to US markets.
Enter Trump, promising a 25% tariff on European exports.
The EU could retaliate here by imposing tit-for-tat tariffs on US exports to the EU, which would make everything Europeans buy from America 25% more expensive. This is a very weird way to punish the USA.
On the other hand, not that Trump has announced that the terms of US free trade deals are optional (for the US, at least), there’s no reason not to delete Article 6 of the EUCD, and all the other laws that prevent European companies from jailbreaking iPhones and making their own App Stores (minus Apple’s 30% commission), as well as ad-blockers for Facebook and Instagram’s apps (which would zero out EU revenue for Meta), and, of course, jailbreaking tools for Xboxes, Teslas, and every make and model of every American car, so European companies could offer service, parts, apps, and add-ons for them.
[…]
It’s time to delete those IP provisions and throw open domestic competition that attacks the margins that created the fortunes of oligarchs who sat behind Trump on the inauguration dais. It’s time to bring back the indomitable hacker spirit
Aside from reporting it on Cloudflare’s forum, there appears to be little users can do, and the company doesn’t seem to be paying attention.
Cloudflare is one of the giants of content distribution network. As well as providing fast local caches of busy websites, it also attempts to block bot networks and DDoS attacks by detecting and blocking suspicious activity. Among other things, being “suspicious” includes machines that are part of botnets and are running scripts. One way to identify this is by looking at the browser agent and, if it’s not from a known browser, blocking it. This is a problem if the list of legitimate browsers is especially short and only includes recent versions of big names such as Chrome (and its many derivatives) and Firefox.
The problem isn’t new, and whatever fixes or updates occasionally resolve it, the relief is only temporary and it keeps recurring. We’ve found reports of Cloudflare site-blocking difficulties dating back to 2015 and continuing through 2022.
In the last year, The Register has received reports of Cloudflare blocking readers in March, again in July 2024, and earlier this year in January.
Users of recent versions of Pale Moon, Falkon, and SeaMonkey are all affected. Indeed, the Pale Moon release notes for the most recent couple of versions mention that they’re attempts to bypass this specific issue, which often manifests as the browser getting trapped in an infinite loop and either becoming unresponsive or crashing. Some users of Firefox 115 ESR have had problems, too. Since this is the latest release in that family for macOS 10.13 and Windows 7, it poses a significant issue. Websites affected include science.org, steamdb.info, convertapi.com, and – ironically enough – community.cloudflare.com.
According to some in the Hacker News discussion of the problem, something else that can count as suspicious – other than using niche browsers or OSes – is something as simple as asking for a URL unaccompanied by any referrer IDs. To us, that sounds like a user with good security measures that block tracking, but it seems that, to the CDN merchant, this looks like an alert to an action that isn’t operated by a human.
Making matters worse, Cloudflare tech support is aimed at its corporate customers, and there seems to be no direct way for non-paying users to report issues other than the community forums. The number of repeated posts suggests to us that the company isn’t monitoring these for reports of problems.
Microsoft’s Exchange Administration Center (EAC) has fallen over and appears to be struggling to get up.
The issue affects users trying to access EAC to administer Exchange Online for their users. Users began expressing frustration about the service being down just before lunchtime in the UK. The issue appears widespread in Europe, with users from countries such as Germany, Poland, and Belgium reporting problems.
Canada and the US appear fine, hinting that the issue might be location-based. The Register asked Microsoft for more details, but the company has not responded.
The EAC manages mailboxes, administers groups, and migrates data, among other functions. A lot of its functionality is also accessible via PowerShell, which currently seems to be working fine. However, the company has not commented on the issue or when it will be resolved.
Microsoft is very keen for customers to migrate from on-premises versions of Exchange to the company’s cloud, although one observer on social media remarked: “The amount of downtime they are facing is getting to a point where you can’t even argue ‘Cloud has better availability.'”
Quite. The long-held assertion that the cloud is a cheaper, more reliable option than an on-premises rack of servers has been ringing increasingly hollow in recent times. Microsoft suffered an Outlook outage over the weekend, and some Microsoft 365 users experienced downtime on Monday.
process called Android System SafetyCore – which arrived in a recent update for devices running Android 9 and later. It scans a user’s photo library for explicit images and displays content warnings before viewing them. Google says “the classification of content runs exclusively on your device and the results aren’t shared with Google.”
Naturally, it will also bring similar tech to Google Messages down the line to prevent certain unsolicited images from affecting a receiver.
Google started installing SafetyCore on user devices in November 2024, and there’s no way of opting out or managing the installation. One day, it’s just there.
Users have vented their frustrations about SafetyCore ever since and despite being able to uninstall and opt out of image scanning, the consent-less approach that runs throughout Android nevertheless left some users upset. It can be uninstalled on Android forks like Xiaomi’s MIUI using Settings>Apps>Android System SafetyCore>Uninstall or on Android using Apps/Apps & Notifications>Show System Apps>Show system apps>Locate SafetyCore>Uninstall or Disable. Reviewers report that in some cases the uninstall option is grayed out, and it can only be disabled, while others complain that it reinstalls on the next update.
The app’s Google Play page is littered with negative reviews, many of which cite its installation without consent.
“In short, it is spyware. We were not informed. It feels like the right to privacy is secondary to Google’s corporate interests,” one reviewer wrote.
Research from a leading academic shows Android users have advertising cookies and other gizmos working to build profiles on them even before they open their first app.
Doug Leith, professor and chair of computer systems at Trinity College Dublin, who carried out the research, claims in his write up that no consent is sought for the various identifiers and there is no way of opting out from having them run.
He found various mechanisms operating on the Android system which were then relaying the data back to Google via pre-installed apps such as Google Play Services and the Google Play store, all without users ever opening a Google app.
One of these is the “DSID” cookie, which Google explains in its documentation is used to identify a “signed in user on non-Google websites so that the user’s preference for personalized advertising is respected accordingly.” The “DSID” cookie lasts for two weeks.
Speaking about Google’s description in its documentation, Leith’s research states the explanation was still “rather vague and not as helpful as it might be,” and the main issue is that there’s no consent sought from Google before dropping the cookie and there’s no opt-out feature either.
Leith says the DSID advertising cookie is created shortly after the user logs into their Google account – part of the Android startup process – with a tracking file linked to that account placed into the Google Play Service’s app data folder.
This DSID cookie is “almost certainly” the primary method Google uses to link analytics and advertising events, such as ad clicks, to individual users, Leith writes in his paper [PDF].
Another tracker which cannot be removed once created is the Google Android ID, a device identifier that’s linked to a user’s Google account and created after the first connection made to the device by Google Play Services.
It continues to send data about the device back to Google even after the user logs out of their Google account and the only way to remove it, and its data, is to factory-reset the device.
Leith said he wasn’t able to ascertain the purpose of the identifier but his paper notes a code comment, presumably made by a Google dev, acknowledging that this identifier is considered personally identifiable information (PII), likely bringing it into the scope of European privacy law GDPR – still mostly intact in British law as UK GDPR.
The paper details the various other trackers and identifiers dropped by Google onto Android devices, all without user consent and according to Leith, in many cases it presents possible violations of data protection law.
Leith approached Google for a response before publishing his findings, which he delayed allowing time for a dialogue.
[…]
The findings come amid something of a recent uproar about another process called Android System SafetyCore – which arrived in a recent update for devices running Android 9 and later. It scans a user’s photo library for explicit images and displays content warnings before viewing them. Google says “the classification of content runs exclusively on your device and the results aren’t shared with Google.”
Naturally, it will also bring similar tech to Google Messages down the line to prevent certain unsolicited images from affecting a receiver.
Google started installing SafetyCore on user devices in November 2024, and there’s no way of opting out or managing the installation. One day, it’s just there.
Users have vented their frustrations about SafetyCore ever since and despite being able to uninstall and opt out of image scanning, the consent-less approach that runs throughout Android nevertheless left some users upset. It can be uninstalled on Android forks like Xiaomi’s MIUI using Settings>Apps>Android System SafetyCore>Uninstall or on Android using Apps/Apps & Notifications>Show System Apps>Show system apps>Locate SafetyCore>Uninstall or Disable. Reviewers report that in some cases the uninstall option is grayed out, and it can only be disabled, while others complain that it reinstalls on the next update.
The app’s Google Play page is littered with negative reviews, many of which cite its installation without consent.
“In short, it is spyware. We were not informed. It feels like the right to privacy is secondary to Google’s corporate interests,” one reviewer wrote.
We have developed a breakthrough method to convert carbon nanoparticles (CNPs) from vehicular emissions into high-performance electrocatalysts. This innovation provides a sustainable approach to pollution management and energy production by repurposing harmful particulate matter into valuable materials for renewable energy applications.
Our work, published in Carbon Neutralization, addresses both environmental challenges and the growing demand for efficient, cost-effective clean energy solutions.
Advancing electrocatalysis with multiheteroatom-doped CNPs
By doping CNPs with boron, nitrogen, oxygen and sulfur, we have significantly enhanced their catalytic performance. These multiheteroatom-doped nanoparticles exhibit remarkable efficiency in key electrochemical reactions. Our catalysts demonstrate high activity in the oxygen reduction reaction (ORR), which is essential for fuel cells and energy storage systems, as well as in the hydrogen evolution reaction (HER), a crucial process for hydrogen fuel production.
Additionally, they show superior performance in the oxygen evolution reaction (OER), advancing water splitting for green hydrogen generation. By optimizing the composition of these materials, we have created an effective alternative to conventional precious metal-based catalysts, improving both cost-efficiency and sustainability.
[..]
Our research has far-reaching implications for clean energy and sustainable transportation industries. These catalysts can be integrated into fuel cells, enabling more efficient power generation for electric vehicles and energy storage systems. They also play a vital role in hydrogen production, supporting the transition to a hydrogen-based economy. Additionally, their use in renewable energy storage systems enhances the stability of wind and solar power generation.
While our findings demonstrate significant promise, further research is needed to scale up production, optimize material stability, and integrate these catalysts into commercial applications
Apple users noticed a change in 2023, “when streaming platforms like Netflix, HBO Max, Amazon Prime, and the Criterion Channel imposed a quiet embargo on the screenshot,” noted the film blog Screen Slate: At first, there were workarounds: users could continue to screenshot by using the browser Brave or by downloading extensions or third-party tools like Fireshot. But gradually, the digital-rights-management tech adapted and became more sophisticated. Today, it is nearly impossible to take a screenshot from the most popular streaming services, at least not on a Macintosh computer. The shift occurred without remark or notice to subscribers, and there’s no clear explanation as to why or what spurred the change…
For PC users, this story takes a different, and happier, turn. With the use of Snipping Tool — a utility exclusive to Microsoft Windows, users are free to screen grab content from all streaming platforms. This seems like a pointed oversight, a choice on the part of streamers to exclude Mac users (though they make up a tiny fraction of the market) because of their assumed cultural class. “I’m not entirely sure what the technical answer to this is,” tech blogger John Gruber wrote this weekend, “but on MacOS, it seemingly involves the GPU and video decoding hardware…” These DRM blackouts on Apple devices (you can’t capture screenshots from DRM video on iPhones or iPads either) are enabled through the deep integration between the OS and the hardware, thus enabling the blackouts to be imposed at the hardware level. And I don’t think the streaming services opt into this screenshot prohibition other than by “protecting” their video with DRM in the first place. If a video is DRM-protected, you can’t screenshot it; if it’s not, you can.
On the Mac, it used to be the case that DRM video was blacked-out from screen capture in Safari, but not in Chrome (or the dozens of various Chromium-derived browsers). But at some point a few years back, you stopped being able to capture screenshots from DRM videos in Chrome, too — by default. But in Chrome’s Settings page, under System, if you disable “Use graphics acceleration when available” and relaunch Chrome, boom, you can screenshot everything in a Chrome window, including DRM video…
What I don’t understand is why Apple bothered supporting this in the first place for hardware-accelerated video (which is all video on iOS platforms — there is no workaround like using Chrome with hardware acceleration disabled on iPhone or iPad). No one is going to create bootleg copies of DRM-protected video one screenshotted still frame at a time — and even if they tried, they’d be capturing only the images, not the sound. And it’s not like this “feature” in MacOS and iOS has put an end to bootlegging DRM-protected video content. Gruber’s conclusion? “This ‘feature’ accomplishes nothing of value for anyone, including the streaming services, but imposes a massive (and for most people, confusing and frustrating) hindrance on honest people simply trying to easily capture high-quality (as opposed to, say, using their damn phone to take a photograph of their reflective laptop display) screenshots of the shows and movies they’re watching.”
Thousands of buildings across the United States are staying cool with the help of cutting-edge batteries made from one of the world’s simplest materials: ice.
When electricity is cheap, the batteries freeze water. When energy costs go up, building managers turn off their pricey chillers and use the ice to keep things cool.
A typical building uses about a fifth of its electricity for cooling, according to the International Energy Agency. By shifting their energy use to cheaper times of day, the biggest buildings can save hundreds of thousands of dollars a year on their power bills. They can also avoid using electricity from the dirtiest fossil fuel plants.
In places where the weather is hot and energy prices swing widely throughout the day — for instance, Texas, Southern California and most of the American Southwest — buildings could cut their power bills and carbon emissions by as much as a third, experts say.
“That’s huge and absolutely worth doing when you consider how many buildings exist that need cooling,” said Neera Jain, an associate professor of mechanical engineering at Purdue University.
So far, ice batteries have been mostly limited to big commercial buildings with central cooling systems and extra storage space for a giant vat of ice. But new designs could bring the batteries into smaller buildings and even houses.
The cybersecurity outlet The Record originally reported that under Trump’s new Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, U.S. Cyber Command has been ordered to “stand down from all planning against Russia, including offensive digital actions.” The outlet cites three anonymous sources who are familiar with the matter. The order reportedly does not apply to the National Security Agency.
The policy shift represents a complete 180-degree turn from America’s posture over the past decade, which has consistently considered Russia one of the top cybersecurity threats. Credible reporting and government investigations have shown that Russia has hacked into U.S. systems countless times.
The Guardian has reported that a memo recently circulated to staff at America’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) established “new priorities” for the agency and, while mentioning the threat of digital incursions by China and other enemies, failed to mention Russia.
“Russia and China are our biggest adversaries. With all the cuts being made to different agencies, a lot of cyber security personnel have been fired. Our systems are not going to be protected and our adversaries know this,” a source, who was familiar with the internal memo, told The Guardian. “People are saying Russia is winning. Putin is on the inside now.”
Another anonymous source, who said that CISA staff had been “verbally informed that they were not to follow or report on Russian threats,” expressed concern for the shift: “There are thousands of US government employees and military working daily on the massive threat Russia poses as possibly the most significant nation state threat actor. Not to diminish the significance of China, Iran, or North Korea, but Russia is at least on par with China as the most significant cyber threat,” they said.
[…]
As far as layoffs go, the NSA purge is a drop in the bucket for America’s signals intelligence agency. One of the intel community’s biggest outfits is reputed to employ at least 20,000 employees but has been estimated to use as many as 50,000. In general, despite Trump’s promise to smash the “deep state,” America’s dark and powerful national security state has remained largely untouched since he took office, with his administration’s wrecking ball DOGE content to spend most of its time smashing agencies that dispense services to the public.
Temperatures, as defined by “climate”, are based on temperatures over longer periods of time — typically 20-to-30-year averages — rather than single-year data points. But even when based on longer-term averages, the world has still warmed by around 1.3°C.3
But you’ll also notice, in the chart, that temperatures haven’t increased linearly. There are spikes and dips along the long-run trend.
Many of these short-term fluctuations are caused by “ENSO” — the El Niño-Southern Oscillation — a natural climate cycle caused by changes in wind patterns and sea surface temperatures in the Pacific Ocean.
While it’s caused by patterns in the Pacific Ocean and most strongly affects countries in the tropics, it also impacts global temperatures and climate.
There are two key phases of this cycle: the La Niña phase, which tends to cause cooler global temperatures, and the El Niño phase, which brings hotter conditions. The world cycles between El Niño and La Niña phases every two to seven years.4 There are also “neutral” periods between these phases where the world is not in either extreme.
The zig-zag trend of global temperatures becomes understandable when you are taking the phases of the ENSO cycles into account. In the chart below, we see the data on global temperatures5, but the line is now colored by the ENSO phase at that time.6
The El Niño (warm phase) is shown in orange and red, and the La Niña (cold phase) is shown in blue.
You can see that temperatures often reach a short-term peak during warm El Niño years before falling back slightly as the world moves into La Niña years, shown in blue.
What’s striking is that global temperatures during recent La Niña years were warmer than El Niño years just a few decades before. “Cold years” today are hotter than “hot years” not too long ago.7
[…] The ThinkPad T14s 2-in-1 is by far the most interesting of the bunch, with a new convertible body that’s similar to Lenovo’s Yoga laptops, and supports the magnetic Yoga Pen stylus. The laptop comes with up to a 14-inch, 400-nit WUXGA touch display, and inside, you can get up to a Intel Core Ultra 7 H or U 200 series chip, 64GB of LPDDR5x RAM and 1TB of storage. If you’re looking for an option without a 360-degree hinge, the ThinkPad T14s Gen 6 and ThinkPad T14 Gen 6 will also now come with either Intel Core Ultra or AMD Ryzen AI Pro chips, up to 32GB of RAM and up to 2TB of storage.
Lenovo
Lenovo describes the new ThinkPad X13 Gen 6 as “one of the lightest ThinkPad designs ever,” at only 2.05 lbs, but that light weight doesn’t mean the laptop misses out on the latest internals. The X13 Gen 6 comes with either a Intel Core Ultra or AMD Ryzen AI Pro chip, up to 64GB of LPDDR5x RAM and your choice of a 41Wh or 54.7Wh battery. The new ThinkPad can also support Wi-Fi 7 and an optional 5G connection, if you want to take it on the go.
You might be surprised to learn that the first laptop with built-in solar panels is nearly 15 years old. But to me, the bigger shock is that with all the recent advancements in photovoltaic cells, manufacturers haven’t revisited this idea more often. But at MWC 2025, Lenovo is changing that with its Yoga Solar PC Concept.
Weighing 2.6 pounds and measuring less than 0.6 inches thick, the Yoga Solar PC Concept is essentially the same size as a standard 14-inch clamshell. And because its underlying design isn’t all that different from Lenovo’s standard Yoga family, it doesn’t skimp on specs either. It features an OLED display, up to 32GB of RAM, a decent-sized 50.2 WHr battery and even a 2MP IR webcam for use with Windows Hello.
However, all those components aren’t nearly as important as the solar cells embedded in its lid. Lenovo says the panels use Back Contact Cell technology so that its mounting brackets and gridlines can be placed on the rear of the cells. This allows the panels to offer up to 24 percent solar energy conversion, which is pretty good as that matches the efficiency you get from many high-end home solar systems. Furthermore, the PC also supports Dynamic Solar Tracking to automatically adjust the cells’ settings to maximize the amount of energy they can gather.
1 / 5
Lenovo Yoga Solar PC Concept hands-on photo
Lenovo Yoga Solar PC Concept hands-on photo
Lenovo says this means the Yoga Solar PC can generate enough juice to play an hour of videos after only 20 minutes in the sun. But what might be more impressive is that even when the laptop is indoors, it can still harvest power from as little as 0.3 watts of light to help top off its battery. Finally, to help you understand how much power it’s gathering, Lenovo created a bespoke app to track how much light the panels absorb.
Unfortunately, Lenovo doesn’t have any plans to turn this concept into a full commercial device
Machine learning has become more and more powerful, to the point where a bad actor can take a photo and a voice recording of someone you know, and forge a complete video recording. See the “OmniHuman-1” model developed by ByteDance:
Bad actors can now digitally impersonate someone you love, and trick you into doing things like paying a ransom.
To mitigate that risk, I have developed this simple solution where you can setup a unique time-based one-time passcode (TOTP) between any pair of persons.
This is how it works:
Two people, Person A and Person B, sit in front of the same computer and open this page;
They input their respective names (e.g. Alice and Bob) onto the same page, and click “Generate”;
The page will generate two TOTP QR codes, one for Alice and one for Bob;
Alice and Bob scan the respective QR code into a TOTP mobile app (such as Authy or Google Authenticator) on their respective mobile phones;
In the future, when Alice speaks with Bob over the phone or over video call, and wants to verify the identity of Bob, Alice asks Bob to provide the 6-digit TOTP code from the mobile app. If the code matches what Alice has on her own phone, then Alice has more confidence that she is speaking with the real Bob.
Note that this depends on both Alice’s and Bob’s phones being secure. If somebody steals Bob’s phone and manages to bypass the fingerprint or PIN or facial recognition of Bob’s phone, then all bets are off.
Blue Ghost, a NASA-funded lunar lander built and operated by the private U.S. company Firefly Aerospace, has successfully touched down on the moon.
After 45 days in space—and a pulse-pounding semi-autonomous hour-long descent to its landing site—at 3:35 A.M. EST three of the boxy, car-sized spacecraft’s four footpad-tipped legs crunched into the surface of Mare Crisium, a vast and ancient impact basin filled with frozen lava on the moon’s northeastern near side. This marks the second time the U.S. has soft-landed on the moon since the crewed Apollo 17 mission of 1972; the first occurred just over a year ago when another robotic commercial mission, the Odysseus lander from the company Intuitive Machines, made moonfall lopsided but intact in a crater near the lunar south pole.
[…]
Now that it’s on the moon, Blue Ghost is set to spend about two weeks performing a series of scientific and technological studies using a suite of ten experiments provided by NASA as part of the space agency’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) public-private partnership initiative. CLPS is NASA’s effort to save costs by enlisting more than a dozen U.S. firms to ferry cargo and science experiments to the moon, and is tied to the space agency’s ambitious Artemis program meant to return astronauts there later this decade.
[…]
The initiative has funded all three U.S. commercial lunar landing attempts to date, having earmarked up to $2.8 billion for missions through 2028. And its next installment—Intuitive Machines’s Athena lander—is already enroute. Scheduled for a March 6 landing, Athena will target the flat-topped lunar mountain of Mons Mouton just 160 kilometers from the lunar south pole, where it’s planned to function for about ten days.
If all goes well, on March 14 both Blue Ghost and Athena will witness a lunar eclipse as Earth’s shadow briefly passes across the moon. Two days after that, the lunar night will fall, plunging the surface into two weeks of darkness and cold to which both landers will likely succumb.
In the meantime, yet another commercial lunar lander—Resilience, built by the Japanese company ispace—will be preparing for its own appointment with destiny, a landing projected for May at a site called Mare Frigoris in the moon’s far north. This would be ispace’s second lunar landing attempt, after its first mission crashed in 2023.
Resilience, also called HAKUTO-R Mission 2, launched to the moon alongside Blue Ghost on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket in late February. But unlike other landers the Japanese mission is taking a more leisurely, fuel-saving trajectory to reach its lunar destination. Tallying in Blue Ghost as well, the trio of spacecraft marked the first time in history that three landers were simultaneously bound for the moon.
Deep, Dusty Science—Plus a Lunar Sunset
Blue Ghost’s ten NASA payloads include an experiment to gather and analyze samples of lunar soil, investigations of how hazardous moon dust sticks to—and can be cleared from—various materials, a camera to study space weather and another to monitor the dust kicked-up by the spacecraft’s landing, and more. A retroreflector carried onboard will serve as a target for lasers beamed from Earth, allowing determination of the Earth-moon distance to sub-millimeter precision. And another instrument will seek to detect and use GPS signals from Earth-orbiting satellites as a proof-of-principle for future lunar navigation.
The lander’s farthest-reaching experiments, however, may be those that study the moon’s innards to illuminate new chapters of its 4.5-billion-year-history. According to NASA scientists, Mare Crisium is a region that may be more representative of the moon’s average composition than any site studied by the Apollo astronauts.
One of these inward-looking instruments, dubbed LISTER (short for Lunar Instrumentation for Subsurface Thermal Exploration with Rapidity), is a drill capable of reaching a record-setting 3 meters beneath the lunar surface to measure heat flowing up from within—deep enough to give scientists a better idea of how exactly the moon cooled from a ball of molten rock to the cold, inert world we know today. Another, called the Lunar Magnetotelluric Sounder (LMS), will place electrodes across a roughly 700-square-meter swath of terrain. Its measurements of subtle electric and magnetic currents coursing through the moon can probe more than a thousand kilometers into the interior—two-thirds of the way to the lunar center. Scientists hope that the fresh view of our satellite’s inner composition and structure may also shed light on the deep evolution of other rocky worlds such as Venus, Mars and even Earth.
Blue Ghost can endure the frigid lunar night for several hours, but its most poignant final feat on the moon is planned to occur before night falls, during the lunar sunset. Twilight unfolds slowly on the moon, and as the sun slips behind the lunar limb, its light scatters off dust lofted by electrostatic charges and micrometeoroid impacts in the near-vacuum conditions. This creates something called lunar horizon glow, a phenomenon most notably observed by NASA astronaut Eugene Cernan during Apollo 17, the final mission of the Apollo program. Before it passes into darkness, Blue Ghost will beam its high-definition view of the glow back to Earth, offering a fleeting glimpse of this beautiful and rarely seen lunar wonder.
Reddit post detailing how someone took a 27-year-old visual basic EXE file, fed it to Claude 3.7, and watched as it reverse-engineered the program and rewrote it in Python.
It was an old Visual Basic 4 program they had written in 1997. Running a VB4 exe in 2024 can be a real yak-shaving compatibility nightmare, chasing down outdated DLLs and messy workarounds. So! OP decided to upload the exe to Claude 3.7 with this request:
“Can you tell me how to get this file running? It’d be nice to convert it to Python.”
Claude 3.7 analyzed the binary, extracted the VB ‘tokens’ (VB is not a fully-machine-code-compiled language which makes this task a lot easier than something from C/C++), identified UI elements, and even extracted sound files. Then, it generated a complete Python equivalent using Pygame.
According to the author, the code worked on the first try and the entire process took less than five minutes – they link to the LLM chat log for proof.
Totally makes sense that this would work, this seems like the first public/viral example of uploading an EXE like this though – we never even thought of doing such a thing!
Old business applications and games could be modernized without needing the original source code (is Delphi also semi-compiled?). Tools like Claude might make decompilation and software archaeology a lot easier: proprietary binaries from dead platforms could get a new life in open-source too…
Archive.org could add a LLM to do this on the fly… interesting times! – Link.
The best treatment for a hard knock on the head might someday involve a quick sniff of a nasal spray. Researchers have found early evidence in mice that an antibody-based treatment delivered up the nose can reduce the brain damage caused by concussions and more serious traumatic injuries.
Scientists at Mass General Brigham conducted the study, published Thursday in Nature Neuroscience. In brain-injured mice, the experimental spray appeared to improve the brain’s natural acute healing process while also reducing damaging inflammation later on. The findings could lead to a genuine prophylactic against the long-term impacts of traumatic brain injuries and other conditions like stroke, the researchers say.
[…]
Foralumab, developed by the company Tiziana Life Sciences, targets a specific group of proteins that interact with the brain’s immune cells, called CD3. This suppression of CD3, the team’s earlier work has suggested, increases the activity of certain immune cells known as regulatory T cells (Treg). As the name implies, these cells help regulate the brain’s immune response to make sure it doesn’t go haywire.
[…]
n their latest mice study, the researchers found that foralumab—via the increased activity of Treg cells—improved aspects of the brain’s immediate healing from a traumatic injury. The dosed mice’s microglia (the brain’s unique first line of immune defense) became better at eating and cleaning up after damaged cells, for instance. Afterward, the drug also appeared to prevent microglia from becoming chronically inflamed, As a result, relative to mice in a control group, mice treated with foralumab up to three days post-injury experienced greater improvements in their motor function and coordination.
