Feed aggregator

SpaceX conducted its seventh test flight of the Starship rocket on Thursday with mixed results. The upper stage was lost nine minutes after launch, but the Super Heavy booster successfully landed back at the launch site, marking a second successful recovery. CNBC reports: SpaceX said in a post on X that the ship broke up during its ascent burn and that it would "continue to review data from today's flight test to better understand root cause." After the rocket lost communication, social media users posted photos and videos of what appeared to be fireballs in the sky near the Caribbean islands. Starship's launch trajectory takes it due east from Texas, which means the fireballs are likely debris from the rocket breaking apart and reentering the atmosphere. Starship launched from SpaceX's private "Starbase" facility near Brownsville, Texas, shortly after 5:30 p.m. ET. A few minutes later, the rocket's "Super Heavy" booster returned to land at the launch site, in SpaceX's second successful "catch" during a flight. It did not catch the booster on the last flight. There were no people on board the Starship flight. However, Elon Musk's company was flying 10 "Starlink simulators" in the rocket's payload bay and planned to attempt to deploy the satellite-like objects once in space. This would have been a key test of the rocket's capabilities, as SpaceX needs Starship to deploy its much larger and heavier upcoming generation of Starlink satellites. You can watch a recording of the launch here.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

RedNote's Chinese users say it is the first time they have been able to speak directly to Americans online.

Freeport-based consultant Cynthia Flores helps farmers and their employees reduce injuries that cost the U.S. about $11.3 billion annually.

A recent 200-page report published by Epyllion reveals that PC gaming has been outperforming consoles over the last decade, "breezing past console platforms and generating more content spending and revenue," reports Insider Gaming. From the report: One slide revealed that since 2011, PC's content spend has dominated 'living room' console revenue by more than 65%, and it has earned 225% more than 'combined console' spend. That's a total of $30 billion if you want to put a number on it. Those numbers exclude hardware and accessories. The report also showed that mobile gaming is leagues ahead of both PC and console platforms, representing the number one money maker in the games industry. This stat has been recorded despite an $18 billion increase in spending on console platforms in 2024 compared to 2011. That 75% increase is still trumped by content spend on PC platforms. But why is PC becoming increasingly popular and much more profitable? Epyllion suggested it boils down to a few core reasons: - PC platforms have a much larger library of games and 'near-full backwards compatibility' - On a PC, you can multi-task (stream, communicate, alt+tab, multiple monitors) - Lower entry price point than consoles - Higher top-end performance - Better for esports and competitive gaming - Able to play more early-access games - More annual game releases - Console 'exclusives' are now finding their way to PC

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNN: Apple is temporarily pulling its newly introduced artificial intelligence feature that summarizes news notifications after it repeatedly sent users error-filled headlines, sparking backlash from a news organization and press freedom groups. The rare reversal from the iPhone maker on its heavily marketed Apple Intelligence feature comes after the technology produced misleading or altogether false summaries of news headlines that appear almost identical to regular push notifications. On Thursday, Apple deployed a beta software update to developers that disabled the AI feature for news and entertainment headlines, which it plans to later roll out to all users while it works to improve the AI feature. The company plans to re-enable the feature in a future update. As part of the update, the company said the Apple Intelligence summaries, which users must opt into, will more explicitly emphasize that the information has been produced by AI, signaling that it may sometimes produce inaccurate results.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

David Lynch, a four-time Oscar-nominated filmmaker known for the 1984 sci-fi epic Dune and the Showtime drama Twin Peaks, has died. "In January 2025, Lynch evacuated his Los Angeles home due to the Southern California wildfires," writes longtime Slashdot reader Z00L00K. "According to Deadline, these events preceded a terminal decline in his health, and on January 16, 2025, Lynch's family announced that he had died at the age of 78." Deadline reports: Lynch had been diagnosed with emphysema. Sources told Deadline that he was forced to relocate from his house due to the Sunset Fire and then took a turn for the worse. In an interview with Sight & Sound magazine last year, Lynch revealed that due to Covid fears and his emphysema diagnosis, he could no longer could leave the house, which meant if he directed again, it would be remote. He then followed up the interview with a post on social that he "will never retire" despite his physical challenges.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Why mess with what works?

The Democrat says his proposal, first introduced in September, would make the U.S. more equal with trading partners that for years have protected their industries and workers.

Longtime Slashdot reader timeOday shares a report from the New York Times: At 2:03 a.m. Eastern time, seven powerful engines ignited at the base of a 320-foot-tall rocket named New Glenn. The flames illuminated night into day at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida. The rocket, barely moving at first, nudged upward and then accelerated in an arc over the Atlantic Ocean, lit up in blue, the color of combustion of the rocket's methane fuel. Thirteen minutes later, the second stage of New Glenn reached orbit. The launch was a major success for Blue Origin, Mr. Bezos' rocket company. The upward flight appeared almost flawless, but Blue Origin's stretch goal of landing the booster stage on a barge in the Atlantic Ocean failed. As planned, the booster fired three of its engines to slow down, but then the stream of data stopped, indicating that the booster had been lost. "We'll learn a lot from today and try again at our next launch this spring," Dave Limp, the chief executive of Blue Origin, said in a statement. In an interview on Sunday, Mr. Limp said that, with a successful inaugural launch of New Glenn, Blue Origin is aiming for a second launch in the spring and that he wanted six to eight launches this year. A recording of the launch is available on YouTube.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

From Portland to Popham to Edgecomb, opportunities to get your sweat on are multiplying across the state.

Google has cut code migration time in half by deploying AI tools to assist with large-scale software updates, according to a new research paper from the company's engineers. The tech giant used large language models to help convert 32-bit IDs to 64-bit across its 500-million-line codebase, upgrade testing libraries, and replace time-handling frameworks. While 80% of code changes were AI-generated, human engineers still needed to verify and sometimes correct the AI's output. In one project, the system helped migrate 5,359 files and modify 149,000 lines of code in three months.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Microsoft has patched a Windows vulnerability that allowed attackers to bypass Secure Boot, a critical defense against firmware infections, the company said. The flaw, tracked as CVE-2024-7344, affected Windows devices for at least seven months. Security researcher Martin Smolar discovered the vulnerability in a signed UEFI application within system recovery software from seven vendors, including Howyar. The application, reloader.efi, circumvented standard security checks through a custom PE loader. Administrative attackers could exploit the vulnerability to install malicious firmware that persists even after disk reformatting. Microsoft revoked the application's digital signature, though the vulnerability's impact on Linux systems remains unclear.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Today, we're looking at a massive manufacturing deal that might have some life in it yet, despite an federal executive order opposing it; fresh return-to-office efforts at a banking titan and a new buyer stepping in to save a bankrupt retailer. First, however, we'll dig into the ways human-resource managers are already using artificial intelligence in the hiring process.

Nvidia has dedicated a supercomputer running thousands of its latest GPUs exclusively to improving its DLSS upscaling technology for the past six years, a company executive revealed at CES 2025. Speaking at the RTX Blackwell Editor's Day in Las Vegas, Brian Catanzaro, Nvidia's VP of applied deep learning research, said the system operates continuously to analyze failures and retrain models across hundreds of games.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The retailer accounted for approximately 87% of Symbotic's total revenue of $1.82 billion in the fiscal year ended in September last year.

The funding would allow ADI to bring some manufacturing to the U.S. from overseas, a goal of the CHIPS Act.

U.S. President Joe Biden has issued a comprehensive cybersecurity executive order, four days before leaving office, mandating improvements to government network monitoring, software procurement, AI usage, and foreign hacker penalties. The 40-page directive aims to leverage AI's security benefits, implement digital identities for citizens, and address vulnerabilities that have allowed Chinese and Russian intrusions into U.S. government systems. It requires software vendors to prove secure development practices and gives the Commerce Department eight months to establish mandatory cybersecurity standards for government contractors.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Nintendo's top intellectual property lawyer has acknowledged that video game emulators are technically legal, even as the company continues to shut down popular emulation projects worldwide. Speaking at the Tokyo eSports Festa, Koji Nishiura, deputy general manager of Nintendo's intellectual property department, said emulators violate the law only when they bypass encryption, copy copyrighted console programs, or direct users to pirated material. The statement comes after Nintendo forced the closure of several major emulation projects last year, including Yuzu, Citra, and Ryujinx.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Raw drinking water sources across England are polluted with toxic forever chemicals, new analysis has revealed, prompting the water sector to demand that ministers ban the substances and polluters pay for the astronomical cleanup costs. The Guardian: The areas covered by Affinity Water and Anglian Water were found to be particularly badly affected, and experts have said they fear "we are drastically underestimating the size of the problem." There are more than 10,000 PFAS in use, known as forever chemicals because they do not break down in the environment. [...] In an unprecedented move, the industry body Water UK has said it "wants to see PFAS banned and the development of a national plan to remove it from the environment which should be paid for by manufacturers." It described PFAS pollution as a "huge global challenge" and said: "The UK's tap water is rated as the safest in the world, and companies are already taking action to reduce PFAS levels further." In an attempt to tackle the problem, the EU is considering a proposal to regulate all 10,000 or so PFAS together, but the PFAS industry is lobbying against it and the UK has no plans to follow suit.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Nubia’s Redmagic 10 Pro delivers magnificent mobile gaming at a midrange price, but nongamers should look elsewhere.