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Orcas Pretend to Drown Each Other in Rare Training Session Caught on Camera

Orcas are called “killer whales” (even though they’re technically dolphins) for good reason. They’re the ocean’s top predators, hunting down everything from great white sharks to blue whales—the largest animal in the world. But orcas aren’t born killers. It’s a skill they learn from their elders and, as new evidence suggests, practice on each other. Parenthood, a new five-part BBC wildlife series narrated by David Attenborough, includes the first known footage of orcas learning how to drown the

Trump says he’ll announce semiconductor and chip tariffs

The semiconductor industry’s rollercoaster year continues with another major development. President Donald Trump said on CNBC’s Squawk Box on Tuesday that his administration is planning to announce tariffs on semiconductors and chips as soon as next week. However, the specifics of these tariffs remain unclear. Such tariffs could cause quite a disruption for U.S. hardware and AI companies. When the U.S. CHIPs and Science Act was signed in 2022 — providing $52 billion in subsidies to boost domes

Cisco discloses data breach impacting Cisco.com user accounts

Cisco has disclosed that cybercriminals stole the basic profile information of users registered on Cisco.com following a voice phishing (vishing) attack that targeted a company representative. After becoming aware of the incident on July 24th, the networking equipment giant discovered that the attacker tricked an employee and gained access to a third-party cloud-based Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system used by Cisco. This allowed the threat actor to steal the personal and user infor

Google Contacts’ new Material 3 Expressive look is rolling out, here’s what’s different

Adamya Sharma / Android Authority TL;DR Google is rolling out the Material 3 Expressive redesign to its Contacts app with v4.61.27. The redesign features prominent card-like UI across tabs like Highlights and Organize, as well as Search and Contact Details pages. Settings and New Contact pages remain unchanged for now, but are expected to follow soon. Material 3 Expressive is the flavor of the season, and Google is trying to bring the new design to all of its apps ahead of the Android 16 QPR

Jeh Aerospace nets $11M to scale the commercial aircraft supply chain in India

Indian startup Jeh Aerospace founders Vishal Sanghavi and Venkatesh Mudragalla have had a front row seat to the commercial aircraft sector and its growing production bottleneck. The two former Tata Group executives spent close to two decades in different positions at the company and worked on projects that included participation from global aerospace companies, including Boeing, Sikorsky, and Lockheed Martin. Now, armed with $11 million in Series A funding, the pair are working to ease global

Facts will not save you – AI, history and Soviet sci-fi

A few days ago Microsoft published a list of the 40 jobs most likely to be replaced by AI. The first two entries are translators and historians, which made me laugh. The two jobs have one thing in common — they are acts of interpretation that are never recognized as such by outsiders. It’s probably self-evident in the tech world that history is a matter of assembling facts. A kind of mechanical curation, like sweeping loose pebbles into neat piles. This delusion reflects a larger hubris— the bel

Foxconn sells former GM factory to mystery buyer after failing to make EVs

Foxconn has sold the former GM factory it has owned for three years after failing to stand up any meaningful, large-scale electric vehicle production there. The pivot marks the second major failure of Foxconn to deliver on its promises to help revive U.S. manufacturing. The iPhone-maker once promised to build a giant LCD factory in Wisconsin — a project that Donald Trump called the “eighth wonder of the world” during his first term — and wound up underdelivering to an extreme degree. Foxconn s

Raven Software gets its union contract with Microsoft three years after voting to organize

Benefits include a 10-percent wage increase over two years and the elimination of crunch time. Employees at Raven Software, known for its work on the Call of Duty franchise, finally have a union contract with Microsoft . This happened nearly years after quality assurance (QA) workers at the company voted to unionize . Workers voted unanimously to ratify the first contract between the company's Game Workers Alliance-CWA (GWA-CWA) members and Microsoft. This contract includes a guaranteed 10-per

Facts will not Save You - AI, History and Soviet Sci-Fi

A few days ago Microsoft published a list of the 40 jobs most likely to be replaced by AI. The first two entries are translators and historians, which made me laugh. The two jobs have one thing in common — they are acts of interpretation that are never recognized as such by outsiders. It’s probably self-evident in the tech world that history is a matter of assembling facts. A kind of mechanical curation, like sweeping loose pebbles into neat piles. This delusion reflects a larger hubris— the bel

A Mystery Killer Wiped Out Billions of Sea Stars. Biologists Just Solved the Case.

Columbo, eat your heart out: A team of scientists has just solved a massive marine murder mystery, nabbing the culprit behind the deaths of billions of sea stars over the past decade. In a new study, researchers in the U.S. and Canada argue that the bacterial cousin of cholera is behind the epidemic. Through a series of experiments involving both wild and captive sea stars, they found evidence that Vibrio pectenicida is the likely cause of sea star wasting disease—a devastating condition that c

Four radioactive wasp nests found on South Carolina nuclear facility

Wasps living around a Cold War-era nuclear facility in South Carolina have built at least four radioactive nests, raising questions about their source of hazardous material and the extent of environmental contamination, according to a report by The New York Times. Last week, news broke that officials at the site—Savannah River Site (SRS) near Aiken, South Carolina—had found one radioactive nest on July 3. The discovery was documented in a July 22 report by the US Department of Energy, which own

Disney Lorcana's Newest Super Rare Card Gives Your Aliens a Big Boost

I’m lucky here at CNET to get an early look at some of the new Disney Lorcana cards -- and sometimes, I get to share them with you. Disney Lorcana is one of the best card games available right now and one of my favorites to play with a group of friends when you're feeling a little tired of gaming. Every quarter, a new set is released, and with the last set, Reign of Jafar, in the rearview, we’re looking forward to the newest set, Fabled. Fabled, or set nine, includes a lot of reprinted cards fr

KDE Plasma prepares crackdown on focus-stealing window behavior under Wayland

When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission. Here’s how it works One of the most interesting things about Wayland is how it handles window focus, unlike X11, where focus stealing can be frustrating and even a security risk. Its main advantage is a mechanism that prevents focus stealing. The protocol that plays a role in this is known as "XDG Activation." Here's how it works: Say you double-click a PDF file in your file manager. The file manager first asks t

LangExtract: Python library for extracting structured data from language models

LangExtract Table of Contents Introduction LangExtract is a Python library that uses LLMs to extract structured information from unstructured text documents based on user-defined instructions. It processes materials such as clinical notes or reports, identifying and organizing key details while ensuring the extracted data corresponds to the source text. Why LangExtract? Precise Source Grounding: Maps every extraction to its exact location in the source text, enabling visual highlighting for

NASA's latest mission to the ISS features a bacterial experiment

Scientists are sending several strains of disease-causing bacteria to the International Space Station as part of the Crew-11 mission. This experiment isn't the plot to some cheesy horror film, but a scientific investigation from the Sheba Medical Center in Israel and the US-based company Space Tango with the goal of better understanding how bacteria spread and behave under extreme conditions. The experiment includes E. coli, along with bacteria that cause diseases like typhoid fever and the infe

Character Bitmap Graphics on the Pet 2001

Character Bitmap Graphics on the PET 2001 July 30, 2025 How to impress with bitmaps from nothing. In 2022, Genesis Project (that is: Elder0010 and LRNZ) released a very impressive demo for the Commodore PET 2001 (the original machine and the upgraded PET 2001-N), “A Bright Shining Star”. Among a few other experiments, it showed high-res graphics (in animation) and static bitmap graphics in a vertical strip spanning over 10 characters or 80 pixels. As readers of this blog may be aware of alre

Palantir lands $10 billion Army software and data contract

Alex Karp, CEO of Palantir, attending the annual Allen & Co. Media and Technology Conference in Sun Valley, Idaho on July 9th, 2025. Palantir has inked a contract with the U.S. Army worth up to $10 billion to meet growing warfare demands over the next decade. As part of the deal, Palantir will help the military streamline efficiencies while preparing for threats, consolidating 75 total contracts into one enterprise deal, the release states. The agreement creates a "comprehensive framework for

Online Safety Act: What went wrong?

The Online Safety Act recently rolled out in the UK and you’ll be very happy to hear it’s a raging dumpster fire. But this newsletter isn’t about that per se. Instead, in this poorly-considered mire, there’s a kernel of truth, a little glowing nugget that reveals what’s wrong with much technology regulation. Before we get to this little-discussed point, let’s cut up some context into bite-sized chunks and have a good old gobble. So, the Online Safety Act 2023. Theoretically it’s a Pretty Good

Proposed "Click to Cancel" Act tackles subscription traps with clearer cancellation rules (again)

What just happened? A court decision temporarily halted the rollout of the FTC's click-to-cancel rule last month, but the drive for greater transparency and simplicity for consumers navigating the subscription economy remains strong. State-level regulations on automatic renewals are still in effect in areas such as California and New York, and now federal lawmakers are once again turning their attention to this issue. Democratic lawmakers have introduced the Click to Cancel Act, a bill designed

Microsoft Predicts These Jobs Are Safe From AI

Much ink has already been spilled about the threat of AI to various labor markets. As new forms of automation seep into industries, folks want to know which jobs are endangered and which are safe. Well, a new study published by Microsoft researchers purports to show which positions have the most AI “applicability,” and which do not. From the research, you might assume you could predict which careers have longevity and which may soon go the way of the Dodo—although the report itself denies that t

AI is a floor raiser, not a ceiling raiser

AI is a Floor Raiser, not a Ceiling Raiser¶ A reshaped learning curve¶ Before AI, learners faced a matching problem: learning resources have to be created with a target audience in mind. This means as a consumer, learning resources were suboptimal fits for you: You're a newbie at $topic_of_interest , but have knowledge in related topic $related_topic . But finding learning resources that teach $topic_of_interest in terms of $related_topic is difficult. , but have knowledge in related topic .

AI Is a Floor Raiser, Not a Ceiling Raiser

AI is a Floor Raiser, not a Ceiling Raiser¶ A reshaped learning curve¶ Before AI, learners faced a matching problem: learning resources have to be created with a target audience in mind. This means as a consumer, learning resources were suboptimal fits for you: You're a newbie at $topic_of_interest , but have knowledge in related topic $related_topic . But finding learning resources that teach $topic_of_interest in terms of $related_topic is difficult. , but have knowledge in related topic .

Design and development shop the Iconfactory is selling some apps — and AI is partially to blame

At one point, an app called Twitterrific was one of the most popular iPhone apps for browsing Twitter. These days, the company behind that app, and the many apps that followed, is struggling. And AI may partially be to blame. On Wednesday, the company known as the Iconfactory admitted it was at a crossroads and was putting up several of its apps for sale due to a lack of resources. While the announcement positioned the matter as a situation where the Iconfactory’s app catalog had simply grown t

Design and development shop the Iconfactory is selling some apps —and AI is partially to blame

At one point, an app called Twitterrific was one of the most popular iPhone apps for browsing Twitter. These days, the company behind that app, and the many apps that followed, is struggling. And AI may partially be to blame. On Wednesday, the company known as the Iconfactory admitted it was at a crossroads and was putting up several of its apps for sale due to a lack of resources. While the announcement positioned the matter as a situation where the Iconfactory’s app catalog had simply grown t

A Deadly Outbreak of Legionnaires’ Disease Is Hitting NYC

A deadly outbreak of Legionnaires’ disease is ripping through Central Harlem in New York City. Local health officials report that about two dozen residents have been sickened by the pneumonia-causing bacteria so far this month. The NYC Health Department issued its latest update on the outbreak Wednesday, following its first report last week. Since July 25, there have been 22 cases of Legionnaires’ disease diagnosed throughout the area, along with one death. Residents in the affected neighborhoo

Spikes in malicious activity precede new security flaws in 80% of cases

Researchers have found that in roughly 80% of cases, spikes in malicious activity like network reconnaissance, targeted scanning, and brute-forcing attempts targeting edge networking devices are a precursor to the disclosure of new security vulnerabilities (CVEs) within six weeks. This has been discovered by threat monitoring firm GreyNoise, which reports these occurrences are not random, but are rather characterized by repeatable and statistically significant patterns. GreyNoise bases this on

Spikes in malicious activity precede new CVEs in 80% of cases

Researchers have found that in roughly 80% of cases, spikes in malicious activity like network reconnaissance, targeted scanning, and brute-forcing attempts targeting edge networking devices are a precursor to the disclosure of new security vulnerabilities (CVEs) within six weeks. This has been discovered by threat monitoring firm GreyNoise, which reports these occurrences are not random, but are rather characterized by repeatable and statistically significant patterns. GreyNoise bases this on

TikTok Introduces Parental Controls, Fact-Checking and AI Moderation Features

TikTok is introducing a suite of parental controls, community notes and AI enhancements that strive to make the short-form video social media platform safer for teens, the company said in a statement on Wednesday. Family Pairing, a feature that allows parents to monitor their teen's TikTok accounts, will now notify parents when their teens upload videos, stories or photos. It also will let parents know which featured topics their teens have chosen to fill their feeds. TikTok has long allowed p