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From the underground-oceans department: Evidence is mounting for "a vast reservoir of liquid water" on Mars, according to a new article by Australian National University professor Hrvoje TkalÄiÄ and geophysics associate professor Weijia Sun from the Chinese Academy of Geological Sciences, announcing their recently published paper.
"Using seismic data from NASA's InSight mission, we uncovered evidence that the seismic waves slow down in a layer between 5.4 and 8 kilometres below the surface, which could be because of the presence of liquid water at these depths."
Mars is covered in traces of ancient bodies of water. But the puzzle of exactly where it all went when the planet turned cold and dry has long intrigued scientists... Billions of years ago, during the Noachian and Hesperian periods (4.1 billion to 3 billion years ago), rivers carved valleys and lakes shimmered. As Mars' magnetic field faded and its atmosphere thinned, most surface water vanished. Some escaped to space, some froze in polar caps, and some was trapped in minerals, where it remains today. But evaporation, freezing and rocks can't quite account for all the water that must have covered Mars in the distant past.
Calculations suggest the "missing" water is enough to cover the planet in an ocean at least 700 metres deep, and perhaps up to 900 metres deep. One hypothesis has been that the missing water seeped into the crust. Mars was heavily bombarded by meteorites during the Noachian period, which may have formed fractures that channelled water underground. Deep beneath the surface, warmer temperatures would keep the water in a liquid state — unlike the frozen layers nearer the surface.
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From the breaking-training department: Business Insider tells the story in three bullet points:
- Big Tech companies depend on content made by others to train their AI models.
- Some of those creators say using their work to train AI is copyright infringement.
- The U.S. Copyright Office just published a report that indicates it may agree.
The office released on Friday its latest in a series of reports exploring copyright laws and artificial intelligence. The report addresses whether the copyrighted content AI companies use to train their AI models qualifies under the fair use doctrine. AI companies are probably not going to like what they read...
AI execs argue they haven't violated copyright laws because the training falls under fair use. According to the U.S. Copyright Office's new report, however, it's not that simple. "Although it is not possible to prejudge the result in any particular case, precedent supports the following general observations," the office said. "Various uses of copyrighted works in AI training are likely to be transformative. The extent to which they are fair, however, will depend on what works were used, from what source, for what purpose, and with what controls on the outputs — all of which can affect the market."
The office made a distinction between AI models for research and commercial AI models. "When a model is deployed for purposes such as analysis or research — the types of uses that are critical to international competitiveness — the outputs are unlikely to substitute for expressive works used in training," the office said. "But making commercial use of vast troves of copyrighted works to produce expressive content that competes with them in existing markets, especially where this is accomplished through illegal access, goes beyond established fair use boundaries."
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From the here's-to-the-crazy-ones department: An anonymous reader shared this report from the Verge:
This morning, while summarizing an Apple "product blitz" he expects for 2027, Bloomberg's Mark Gurman writes in his Power On newsletter that Apple is planning a "mostly glass, curved iPhone" with no display cutouts for that year, which happens to be the iPhone's 20th anniversary... [T]he closest hints are probably in Apple patents revealed over the years, like one from 2019 that describes a phone encased in glass that "forms a continuous loop" around the device.
Apart from a changing iPhone, Gurman describes what sounds like a big year for Apple. He reiterates past reports that the first foldable iPhone should be out by 2027, and that the company's first smart glasses competitor to Meta Ray-Bans will be along that year. So will those rumored camera-equipped AirPods and Apple Watches, he says. Gurman also suggests that Apple's home robot — a tabletop robot that features "an AI assistant with its own personality" — will come in 2027...
Finally, Gurman writes that by 2027 Apple could finally ship an LLM-powered Siri and may have created new chips for its server-side AI processing.
Earlier this week Bloomberg reported that Apple is also "actively looking at" revamping the Safari web browser on its devices "to focus on AI-powered search engines." (Apple's senior VP of services "noted that searches on Safari dipped for the first time last month, which he attributed to people using AI.")
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From the saving-your-energy department: Fusion energy "took one step closer to reality," announced the University of Texas at Austin, as their researchers joined with a team from Los Alamos National Laboratory and Type One Energy Group and "solved a longstanding problem in the field" — how to contain high-energy particles inside fusion reactors.
When high-energy alpha particles leak from a reactor, that prevents the plasma from getting hot and dense enough to sustain the fusion reaction. To prevent them from leaking, engineers design elaborate magnetic confinement systems, but there are often holes in the magnetic field, and a tremendous amount of computational time is required to predict their locations and eliminate them. In their paper published in Physical Review Letters, the research team describes having discovered a shortcut that can help engineers design leak-proof magnetic confinement systems 10 times as fast as the gold standard method, without sacrificing accuracy... "What's most exciting is that we're solving something that's been an open problem for almost 70 years," said Josh Burby, assistant professor of physics at UT and first author of the paper. "It's a paradigm shift in how we design these reactors...."
This new method also can help with a similar but different problem in another popular magnetic fusion reactor design called a tokamak. In that design, there's a problem with runaway electrons — high-energy electrons that can punch a hole in the surrounding walls. This new method can help identify holes in the magnetic field where these electrons might leak.
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From the coding-unassistant department: Cybersecurity researchers have flagged three malicious npm packages that target the macOS version of AI-powered code-editing tool Cursor, reports The Hacker News:
"Disguised as developer tools offering 'the cheapest Cursor API,' these packages steal user credentials, fetch an encrypted payload from threat actor-controlled infrastructure, overwrite Cursor's main.js file, and disable auto-updates to maintain persistence," Socket researcher Kirill Boychenko said. All three packages continue to be available for download from the npm registry. "Aiide-cur" was first published on February 14, 2025...
In total, the three packages have been downloaded over 3,200 times to date.... The findings point to an emerging trend where threat actors are using rogue npm packages as a way to introduce malicious modifications to other legitimate libraries or software already installed on developer systems... "By operating inside a legitimate parent process — an IDE or shared library — the malicious logic inherits the application's trust, maintains persistence even after the offending package is removed, and automatically gains whatever privileges that software holds, from API tokens and signing keys to outbound network access," Socket told The Hacker News.
"This campaign highlights a growing supply chain threat, with threat actors increasingly using malicious patches to compromise trusted local software," Boychenko said.
The npm packages "restart the application so that the patched code takes effect," letting the threat actor "execute arbitrary code within the context of the platform."
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From the final-frontier department: 18 years ago Slashdot covered the creation of Spaceport America.
Today Space.com hails it as "the first purpose-built commercial spaceport in the world." But engineer/executive director Scott McLaughlin has plans to grow even more.
Already home to an array of commercial space industry tenants, such as Virgin Galactic, SpinLaunch, Up Aerospace, and Prismatic, Spaceport America is a "rocket-friendly environment of 6,000 square miles of restricted airspace, low population density, a 12,000-foot by 200-foot runway, vertical launch complexes, and about 340 days of sunshine and low humidity," the organization boasts on its website...
Space.com: What changes do you see that make Spaceport America even more viable today?
McLaughlin: I think opening ourselves up to doing different kinds of work. We're more like a civilian test range now. We've got high-altitude UAVs [Unmanned Aerial Vehicles]. We're willing to do engine production. We believe we're about to sign a data center, one that's able to provide services to our customers who want low-latency, artificial intelligence, or high-powered computing. You'll be able to rent some virtual machines and do your own thing and have it be instantaneous at the spaceport. So I think being more broadminded about what we can do at the spaceport is helping generate customers and revenue...
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From the big-Whoop department: Whoop fitness trackers had promised free upgrades to anyone who'd been a member for at least six months — and then reneged. "After customers began complaining, the company responded with a Reddit post, according to a report from TechCrunch:
Now, anyone with more than 12 months remaining on their subscription is eligible for a free upgrade to Whoop 5.0 (or a refund if they've already paid the fee). And customers with less than 12 months can extend their subscription to get the upgrade at no additional cost.
Whoop acknowledged that they'd previously said anyone who'd been a member for six months would receive a free upgrade. Friday they described that blog article as "incorrect". ("This was never our policy and should never have been posted... We removed that blog article... We're sorry for any confusion this may have caused.")
TechCrunch explains:
While the company said it's making these changes because it "heard your feedback," it also suggested that its apparent stinginess was tied to its transition from a [2021] model focused on monthly or six-month subscription plans to one where it only offers 12- and 24-month subscriptions...
There's been a mixed response to these changes on the Whoop subreddit, with one moderator describing it as a "win for the community." Other posters were more skeptical, with one writing, "You don't publish a policy by accident and keep it up for years. Removing it after backlash doesn't erase the fact [that] it is real."
Other changes announced by Whoop:
"If you purchased or renewed a WHOOP 4.0 membership in the last 30 days before May 8, your upgrade fee will be automatically waived at checkout..."
"If you've already upgraded to WHOOP 5.0 on Peak and paid a one-time upgrade fee despite having more than 12 months remaining, we'll refund that fee."
"Thank you for your feedback. We remain committed to delivering the best technology, experience, and value to our community."
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From the deal-or-no-deal department: OpenAI is currently in "a tough negotiation" with Microsoft, the Financial Times reports, citing "one person close to OpenAI."
On the road to building artificial general intelligence, OpenAI hopes to unlock new funding (and launch a future IPO), according to the article, which says both sides are at work "rewriting the terms of their multibillion-dollar partnership in a high-stakes negotiation...."
Microsoft, meanwhile, wants to protect its access to OpenAI's cutting-edge AI models...
[Microsoft] is a key holdout to the $260bn start-up's plans to undergo a corporate restructuring that moves the group further away from its roots as a non-profit with a mission to develop AI to "benefit humanity". A critical issue in the deliberations is how much equity in the restructured group Microsoft will receive in exchange for the more than $13bn it has invested in OpenAI to date.
According to multiple people with knowledge of the negotiations, the pair are also revising the terms of a wider contract, first drafted when Microsoft first invested $1bn into OpenAI in 2019. The contract currently runs to 2030 and covers what access Microsoft has to OpenAI's intellectual property such as models and products, as well as a revenue share from product sales. Three people with direct knowledge of the talks said Microsoft is offering to give up some of its equity stake in OpenAI's new for-profit business in exchange for accessing new technology developed beyond the 2030 cut off...
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A lot happened in this week’s episode of The Last of Us, but one moment that has fans all in their feelings was when Ellie (Bella Ramsey) sang half a line of a Pearl Jam song in an empty Seattle theater. If you’re a fan of the Last of Us games, you know how significant “Future Days” (from the grunge band’s 2013 album L…
Joy-Con mouse controls are one of the biggest innovations in a next-gen console that otherwise looks to be just a bigger, more powerful version of its predecessor. On Monday Nintendo showed off how Switch 2 owners will be able to navigate the home screen with a cursor and it looks neat, but raises the question of just…
How big of an effect can review bombing have on a game? According to Moon Studios, the people behind Ori and the Blind Forest, the consequences could be so serious that it could lead to the closure of the studio. At least, that’s what studio head Thomas Mahler said. Before he said the opposite.
The Weeknd has revealed his true life’s passion... and surprisingly, it’s not music. The “Starboy” musician admitted that his rise to superstardom in the music industry was really just “a little detour” he used to pursue his number one passion.
Ellie finally got a little bit of revenge this week. How are we feeling? Not as cathartic as you thought it was gonna be, huh? HBO’s take on The Last of Us is finally back in the trenches after a few weeks of levity, or at the very least with its grisly revenge plot out of sight and mostly out of mind. It’s been…
