Theft is almost universally considered an exploitative behavior. The conventional view underlying judicial systems is that the act of taking resources from others without offering compensation stems from moral and personal failings. As a result, these systems rely on the assumption that the threat or imposition of punishment will motivate criminal offenders to adjust their future behavior. Yet the outcome is not always success.

Most of us spend much of our day staring at organic light-emitting diodes, or OLEDs, which convert electricity into light to produce the colorful displays on smartphones, computer monitors and televisions. Although metal-free light-emitting materials that produce all colors are in demand, it has been difficult to make ones that efficiently emit orange-to-red light. Now, researchers led by the University of Osaka have shown that such materials do not need to be held in a rigid shape to work well: flexible molecules that can change shape can also emit orange-to-red light.

Reddit’s new AI-powered reviews summarize what users like and dislike about 10,000 products, helping shoppers research purchases ahead of the holidays.

Get up to 30 percent off and save an extra $60 on orders over $100.

Scientists examining lunar soil collected by China’s Chang’e-6 mission have discovered an unexpected form of iron preserved within microscopic impact glass. Tiny particles of iron trapped inside lunar glass may preserve evidence of the Moon’s ancient magnetic history. Scientists studying soil returned by China’s Chang’e-6 mission have identified face-centered cubic γ-Fe, an unusual form of […]

The average person might be willing to pay a 10% premium for vehicle tires labeled as “salmon safe,” according to a new study led by Washington State University.

Cobalt phosphide (CoP) is a promising alternative to platinum for producing hydrogen from water. However, scientists have struggled to explain why it performs so well. Computer models have suggested that CoP should become unstable under the conditions used to produce hydrogen, yet experiments show that it remains active and durable in acidic, neutral and alkaline environments.

In 2031, Japan’s Hayabusa2 spacecraft will arrive at the near-Earth asteroid 1998 KY26: a tiny body that is accelerating in a way that astronomers have struggled to explain. Some studies have suggested that the asteroid is pushed along by water escaping from it as gas, making it an as-yet theoretical “dark comet.”

As Flock Safety looks to expand its already massive network of automatic license plate readers (ALPRs) throughout the US, political lobbying has become a key tool for the extremely unpopular company to achieve its aims. As the Chicago Sun Times reported in the wake of the US midterms, the controversial AI surveillance company Flock Safety has given nearly $500,000 to campaigns for local and state candidates in Illinois alone over the past two-odd years. The political spending spree in Illinois comes as a result of two contracts with lobbying firms including Cozen O’Connor Public Strategies, which the Chicago Sun reports was first retained by the surveillance company in early 2024. Cozen O’Connor represents other startups-turned-tech-dynasties like Lyft, as well as facilitating loans between lenders and data center developers. Flock has also contracted the firm Mercury Public Affairs to lobby federal politicians on both sides of the aisle, including the successful Democrat senate nominee from Illinois, Juliana Stratton. The company’s total lobbying spend on this election came out to more than $2 million across the country, as its surveillance network has ballooned to include nearly 150,000 ALPRs. Despite all of Flock’s spending in races across the US, voters loudly rejected the…

Adobe is taking on Figma with a new prototype builder tool in Firefly.

The company could end up being worth a hefty $1.404 trillion if its shares list at the top of the price range, on a fully diluted basis.

There’s a chance that if you visited southern Italy during the Middle Ages, you might happen upon a port town where people were dancing uncontrollably in the streets. You’d find them frantically spinning, jumping…even crawling on the ground. But unlike the broader “dancing mania” that was taking place across Europe at the same time, this dance, dubbed the “tarantella,” was more than a sickness. It was also a cure.  “Some people say that the bite of a spider caused people to tremor and shake,” Anna Harsh, a professional dancer and founder of the Allegro Dance Company, which specializes in Italian folk dances, tells Popular Science. They’d then continue moving to sweat out the poison.  Tarantism is distinct from other dancing plagues Tarantism, a historical psychological and social phenomenon that led to anxiety, melancholia, and uncontrollable movement, ran rapidly throughout southern Italy from the 11th to the 17th century.  The epicenter of tarantism was Taranto, a coastal city in southern Italy’s Puglia region, which occupies the “heel” of the country’s boot shape. Each summer harvest season, local residents would spend long days working in the fields where large, hairy wolf spiders burrowed. Most people believed that these wolf spiders carried a…

The scale, quality and regional coverage of public cryo-electron tomography (cryo-ET) data resources have been insufficient, severely limiting data reuse, cross-regional comparisons and the development of automated analysis methods. A new resource aims to help fill that gap, providing 1,413 reconstructed tomograms and associated data from wild-type C57BL/6J mouse sperm.

Spotify Premium users can now customize their AI DJ with new voices with different personalities, or turn off the commentary between songs.

Kora is set to launch as a free-to-use alternative to Windows, targeting users who rely heavily on AI models and agents.

Aura is unveiling a new product: a 10-inch digital e-ink frame that can blend in seamlessly with printed photos.

The new Mini Mini holds 12 cans and fits on a countertop. And if you buy a full-sized Rocco fridge, you can take $50 off the little one.

From Heated Rivalry to Wicker, the movie format that embraces thrusting chairs and splashing the crowd is catering to those who want a horny communal theatergoing experience.

Built by Cyanogen’s cofounder, Kora is a next-gen alternative to Windows and macOS built for power users running local AI models.

As neurotechnology aims to restore seamless speech to those who can no longer talk, what’s next for the science, and for the people it promises to help?

Physicists at the ALPS II collaboration have reported the first results from the Any-Light-Particle-Search (ALPS) II experiment: the most sensitive instrument of its kind in the search for hypothetical “axions.” Headed by Axel Lindner at the DESY Research Centre in Germany, the collaboration found no evidence for axions in this initial campaign, but its results offer valuable guidance for future runs: tightening the search for one of the most promising candidates for dark matter.

Amazon-owned Ring is pushing into robotics with the launch of a home security drone and a rolling robot designed to patrol and protect businesses.

This $250 Drone Cam flies around your home to monitor threats. There’s also the Rover Cam for businesses, featuring the guts of Amazon’s former Astro robot.

This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology. Nancy Pelosi’s replacement is ready to regulate AI —Grace Huckins As a California state senator, Scott Wiener authored legislation aimed at curbing the risks of advanced AI. Now, after winning a tight congressional race for Nancy Pelosi’s open San Francisco seat, he could play a key role in setting federal AI policy. I spoke with Wiener only a few hours after he had been declared the victor. But he was already thinking about AI risk: during our 20-minute conversation, he used the phrase “recursive self-improvement” half a dozen times.  “We need to slow this down,” he told me. “Because it’s moving very quickly, and we could sleepwalk into a disaster.” Still, he describes himself as only “cautiously optimistic” about Congress’s ability to rein in AI. Here’s what he plans to do about it. The backlash about data centers might really just be about electricity  —James O’Donnell As voters went to the polls across the US last week, I was in Ashburn, Virginia, part of what’s known as Data Center Alley—the world’s largest data center hub. It’s…

NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) captured a giant planet two years ago without anyone being able to spot it in the images. Now, researchers at Northwestern University have found a way to pull the planet out of the glare of its star. Their new technique makes the telescope up to 15 times more sensitive to faint planets, without changing a single piece of hardware. Even a telescope as powerful as James Webb has trouble photographing planets around other stars. The problem is simple: stars are incredibly bright, while the planets orbiting them are much fainter. Their light often gets lost in the glare, even when the telescope is pointing in exactly the right direction. That is what happened with 51 Eridani b, a giant exoplanet already known to astronomers. Its signal was buried in old JWST observations until a team led by Northwestern University developed a new way to process the images. Why Some Planets Remain Invisible Even To Webb? Seeing a planet next to its star is a bit like trying to spot a firefly beside a floodlight. Some young giant planets are 100,000 times fainter than their stars, making them extremely difficult to photograph directly. James Webb…

The midterms were in no small part a searing repudiation of the AI industry, and in particular data centers. In fact, of 41 ballot proposed measures that would crack down on data center development, Americans voted for all but one. The lone exception: the town of Harwood, North Dakota, population 845. According to reporting by The Washington Post, a lot of residents were hesitant to approve the $3 billion, 1.8 million square foot facility for the same reasons as their peers across the country: noise, environmental impact, and the shady backroom dealmaking that facilitated it. But all the same, they still voted against a measure demanding additional reviews and public hearings for big new industrial projects like this one, by a 3-to-1 majority — albeit, it sounds like, reluctantly. The reasons why are both charmingly parochial and unremittingly bleak. One 40-year resident, Mark Kerkvliet, was on board once he was assured that the data center wouldn’t drive up power costs. But he stopped short of endorsing the technology. “As soon as I was comfortable with the power use, I was on board,” he told WaPo. “Not because I like data centers or I like artificial intelligence or anything like that,…

Hugging Face executive Irene Solaiman warns that growing cyberattacks on open AI platforms could force tighter security restrictions, threatening the accessibility that makes open-source communities valuable to developers worldwide.

The metals industry has experienced transformational moments before: the Bessemer process, flash smelting, electric arc furnaces, and modern continuous casting all changed what was possible. Yet, for more than a century, most extraction processes rely on techniques and pathways that would be familiar to metallurgists from generations ago. Processes have become larger and control systems smarter, but the fundamental science behind separating metals from ores has changed less than many realize. Today’s materials challenges are different from those of the 20th century, but why are critical metals still produced using largely the same scientific foundations? EvoMaterials, a technology platform developed by Outokumpu—the global leader in sustainable stainless steel and the producer of ferrochrome with 67% lower carbon footprint than the industry average—is exploring that question by rethinking how metals can be extracted: “We decided to go beyond the current constraints and look fundamentally at what’s the best way to do this with the benefit of the scientific engineering knowledge and hindsight that we have today,” says Caspar Stinn, technical director for extractive metallurgy at Outokumpu. “We’re looking at how we can reimagine metals production.” A supply chain problem disguised as a materials problem As economies expand and the world becomes…

More than 2,000 years ago, Egyptians offered cats to the gods. Now, a new study published in the Journal of Archaeological Science suggests that even cats destined for the gods did not necessarily live pampered lives.

An interdisciplinary team of students from the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB) is taking part in iGEM, the international synthetic biology competition in Paris (Nov. 13–16), this fall. Using a clever combination of artificial intelligence, a mechanical trap and protein nanofibers, they are presenting a targeted method to efficiently control populations of the Asian hornet.

Drone-mounted lasers helped locate three unregistered Aboriginal rock art shelters in Australia, offering communities another way to document and protect their cultural heritage for future generations. In Australia’s Blue Mountains, rugged terrain and dense bushland make searching for Aboriginal cultural sites slow, difficult, and expensive. More than 200 rock shelters containing cultural and archaeological evidence […]

In the dry valleys of southern Peru, the Nazca people buried many of their youngest children in ceramic jars. Archaeologists have examined dozens of these graves over the years. Most tell much the same story: a child died young and was laid to rest. One jar was different. It held two baby girls, one of whom had been born with an extraordinarily rare condition. Nothing like it had ever been identified in an ancient burial anywhere in the world. A Small Skull With One Eye Socket The urn came from Jauranga, an archaeological site in Peru’s Palpa Valley, in the same desert region where the enormous ground drawings known as the Nazca Lines stretch across the landscape. The burials belong to the Middle Nazca period, roughly AD 325 to 440. Examining the remains of one infant, researchers encountered a tiny skull with a single eye socket at the center of the face. Other bones of the head were abnormal, too. Together, the features pointed to cyclopia, a fatal congenital defect in which a baby develops one central eye, resembling the one-eyed cyclops of Greek mythology. The findings appeared November 9 in PNAS. Archaeologist Elsa Tomasto-Cagigao of the Pontifical Catholic University…

Marine mammals living along the Pacific Coast of North America encounter more than the fish, crustaceans, cephalopods and other marine mammals that live around them. Because contaminants such as mercury can move through marine food webs and biomagnify—becoming more concentrated as they move from prey to predator—fish-eating marine mammals can be exposed to higher levels of these pollutants.

Archaeologists digging at Old Dongola have reached the original floor of the Great Church of Jesus, a cathedral building whose preliminary dimensions are around 47 meters wide and 57 meters long. They have also found a vast staircase and, on an upper level, a smaller church that nobody expected. Old Dongola sits on the east bank of the Nile in northern Sudan, a deserted Nubian town that was once the core of the Makuria kingdom. The kingdom converted to Christianity in the sixth century CE, and the city flourished until the 14th century CE as a mini-metropolis of churches, monasteries, and grand architecture. A team from the University of Warsaw in Poland and Sudan’s National Corporation for Antiquities and Museums is now excavating one of the town’s many monumental buildings, the cathedral. The work is only just getting started, yet the early results already hint at a structure of vast proportions. A Cathedral of Vast Proportions The staircase was the first big surprise. Some walls near it still stand about 11 meters (36 feet) tall, which suggests the surrounding structure was enormous. The team’s preliminary estimates put the cathedral at around 47 meters (154 feet) wide and 57 meters (187…

Syrian archaeologists rescued roughly 30,000 artifacts from a museum threatened by ISIS, highlighting how protecting human history can depend on trust built before a crisis. A narrow, highly vulnerable corridor was the Deir ez-Zor Museum’s only connection to the military airport. Access to the Syrian city was severely restricted, and the Islamic State of Iraq […]

Hot off the heels of a devastating defeat in his attempts to influence the midterm elections, Tesla CEO Elon Musk announced that his EV maker would begin winding down production of its widely-reviled Cybertruck. In a tweet last week, Musk said that the company was looking to “make room for increased Cybercab production” at its massive Gigafactory in Texas in the “middle of next year.” Despite sales circling the drain for years now, Musk said that the number of orders for the pickup “far exceeds” the company’s capacity to build them — meaning, he claims, that Tesla has must “return deposits for a lot of people.” The basic laws of economics dictate that Musk is fudging the details. If demand for the brutalist pickup was really that high, and the company was really able to produce enough for all of them, it would obviously be doing so instead of nixing the entire line. Put simply, the billionaire is almost certainly engaging in some tricky rhetoric to make it sound like buyers are lining up around the corner for one — which couldn’t be further from the truth. Musk appears to be equating deposits with orders, which seems disingenuous at best,…

Colorado wheat—the foundation for flour used in bread, noodles and pastries—has been besieged by the wheat stem sawfly, a native insect that recently developed a preference for wheat over native grasses. This destructive agricultural pest has spread across the state’s Eastern Plains, devastating fields where it takes hold and causing $70 million in direct and indirect losses a year to one of Colorado’s top agricultural commodities.

The gay hookup app’s premium tier Edge rolls out this month. Grindr will limit membership numbers to “preserve exclusivity.”

Researchers created a new map of the fruit fly brain. Then the Internet found it

At first glance, the canal near which Ibrahim Yildiz grazes his sheep in the southern Adana province appears idyllic, framed by rows of clementine trees—until the mountains of plastic shavings come into view.

Catching a rocket as it falls out of the sky with two enormous mechanical arms used to belong in science fiction. SpaceX has since pulled it off several times, grabbing its 70-meter (230-foot) Super Heavy booster as it descends toward the launch pad in Texas. Now comes a much tougher attempt. This week, SpaceX plans to bring the other half of the rocket, the Starship spacecraft, back to the same tower after spending nearly a full day in orbit. No upper stage of an orbital rocket has ever been recovered this way. A Double Catch on Friday the 13th SpaceX is aiming for Friday, November 13, for Starship Flight 15, with a 75-minute launch window beginning at 4:45 p.m. CT (5:45 p.m. ET) from Orbital Launch Pad 2 at Starbase, Texas. The date was initially announced by SpaceX vice president of launch Kiko Dontchev during the UP.Summit, then confirmed by the company on November 7, subject to regulatory approval. As of this week, the FAA had yet to list a launch license for the mission. The rocket consists of Booster 22 and Ship 42, both belonging to SpaceX’s latest Block 3 generation. Testing on both vehicles is complete. In late…

An acrid haze hung over a sprawling dump in Ghana’s capital, Accra, as excavators gouged into mounds of smoldering garbage.

The outspoken consumer rights advocate knows the incoming Democrat-heavy Congress has a lot to get done. But he hopes one of those things is letting you fix your own iPhone.

Ancient DNA is uncovering forgotten migrations that may have shaped the origins of English, German, and Celtic languages, challenging what researchers thought they knew about Europe’s linguistic history. How can researchers trace a language back thousands of years when no one knows exactly what its earliest speakers sounded like? Although DNA cannot reveal the words […]

Quantum computers could curb the vast energy demands of artificial intelligence data centers with their ability to run complex calculations, one of the tech’s pioneers told AFP.

The risk of nuclear catastrophe is real, as is the fallout of the China–US domination game (hi there, spies). But no need to panic about Skynet.

The “abliterators” are flooding the internet with AI models that never say no, making it easier for people to improve their cyberdefenses—or build a bomb.

Nearly 200 countries will participate in this year’s climate talks, held in Antalya, Türkiye

The Huupe Mini 2 can count baskets, stream shows, and challenge strangers, but I’d settle for a working power button.

In 1974, the University of Melbourne’s chemistry professor Richard Robson had the idea of replacing the wooden balls and metal rods used in structural models with molecules and chemical bonds. He began experimenting with copper ions linked by a four-armed organic molecule, creating a structure with a cavity. His work laid the foundation for metal–organic frameworks (MOFs), a class of porous materials formed by linking metal ions with organic molecules. Their pores can capture pollutants, support chemical reactions and store gases, giving MOFs a wide range of potential applications.