Forecasters recreate the weather that made D-Day possible
The weather forecast did not inspire confidence for Allied forces ahead of June 6, 1944. The thick clouds blanketing much of France and the English Channel made aerial reconnaissance even…
Tech
The surprising science behind Japan’s vending machine obsession
Japan is synonymous with vending machines. The island-nation has vending machines for everything: fresh flowers, bowls of hot ramen, edible grasshoppers, umbrellas. Want a fresh farm egg or flower bouquet?…
Authorities arrest 2 alleged members of prolific hacking group TeamPCP
Authorities in Australia said Wednesday that they arrested two men accused of participating in cybercrimes for TeamPCP, a prolific group of hackers that, over nine months, has carried out a…
Microduck is a robot built to fall down—and learn new tricks
Sorry, cats and dogs, there’s another goofy pet vying for your owner’s attention, and this one doesn’t have fur or stink up the apartment. In fact, this companion is not…
Why did 1,000 world citizens bury their underpants?
A thousand people voluntarily buried their cotton underpants for two months—not to keep the Underpants Gnomes from stealing them, but as part of a citizen science project to map out…
Scalable robot fish can easily swim in a creek or lake
Robot fish have come a long way from the novelty Big Mouth Billy Bass of the late 90s. Today, marine life researchers worldwide embed various types of more advanced robots…
Traders brought Central American cacao to Georgia 1,000 years ago
A thousand years ago, feasts in what’s now northern Georgia state included cacao from Central America. Potsherds discarded after an 11th-century feast at Etowah—an Indigenous city just north of what’s…
Claude, Codex, and Hermes installed unowned code inside corporate networks
Documentation files on more than 100 websites are referencing potentially dangerous executable content that gets installed automatically when visited by many AI agents. A few dozen companies, some of them…
AI agents meant to replace Meta workers made “large-scale, disruptive actions”
Earlier this year, Meta created a “plan” to reduce some of its teams by as much as 60 percent to make the company “AI native,” Reuters reported today, citing two…
Butterfly wing crystals inspire new eco-friendly glitter
In her 80 years on planet Earth, Dolly Parton objectively made the world a better place, and her legacy will only continue to improve lives. It’s difficult to summarize the…