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Researchers have identified a 10-state, 2-symbol Turing machine, dubbed n1, that halts on a blank tape and produces a number of 1s exceeding Graham's number. The machine's exact halting score and its placement at level ω+1 of the fast-growing hierarchy have been formally verified in Coq without relying on any axioms, surpassing the previous BB(10) champion, which sat at level ω.
Recent polling cited shows that 38 percent of U.S. adults report being estranged from at least one family member, a trend that researchers say has grown more visible since the Covid-19 pandemic. The data suggests this personal rupture is increasingly spilling into workplaces, affecting employees' focus and wellbeing on the job.
Giraffe Bio, a mining biotech startup, has raised a $6.4 million seed round led by Orion Industrial Ventures, with BHP Ventures, Twynam, Air Capital, and Baruch Future Ventures also participating. The company says its mine-specific chemical compounds, produced by engineered microbes in bioreactors, can help mining operations recover up to 5% more copper from heap leaches than conventional methods.
According to a Bloomberg report citing unnamed sources, Epic Games has told developers on its delayed Disney shooter to adopt an 'AI first' workflow, with a game director instructing staff to use Anthropic's Claude instead of hand-writing code and to generate art through 'full AI workflows.' Epic's communications director Jake Jones confirmed the company is pursuing 'AI-accelerated' development, and CEO Tim Sweeney posted on X describing a 'huge pivot' toward retooling developers around AI.
A hobbyist describes using a Matrix CoolRunner Rev D 'glitcher' modchip, bought in 2017, to exploit the Xbox 360's hardware boot process rather than its software. The console's 1BL bootloader is embedded directly in the CPU silicon and verifies Microsoft-signed code at each stage, making conventional software hacks largely ineffective. The author explains that after years of work, the weak point exploited was a fundamental hardware timing flaw rather than any cryptographic key.
Over Sunday night, attackers broke into refrigeration control systems at major French supermarket chains including Carrefour, Intermarche, Monoprix and Cooperative U, raising fridge temperatures as high as 122°F for hours and triggering some fires. Executives estimate losses in the tens of millions of euros, and France's cybersecurity agency ANSSI is investigating, tracing the flaw to outdated firmware in systems made by Danish supplier Danfoss.
A TP-Link EAP770 Wi-Fi 7 access point, bought in 2023 before the standard was finalized, was found to silently corrupt large file transfers over its wireless link. The owner says TP-Link stopped updating the device after its initial 2023 firmware release, leaving a known fix—two sysfs values—unreachable through the device's restricted shell, which led them to write a custom kernel exploit to apply the fix themselves.
OpenAI published 722 manuscripts and proofs addressing longstanding mathematical problems, generated by an unnamed internal frontier AI model, with only 300 results formalized for computer verification. Researchers who reviewed the work told The Verge they found nonsensical explanations, malformed formulas, and results that duplicated existing research, while OpenAI withheld the model's identity and the prompts used to generate the findings.
A new paper describes Minions, a distributed system that aggregates spare GPU capacity from macOS devices running Apple Silicon chips to run large-scale machine learning inference workloads. The authors say the system handles task scheduling, fault tolerance, and resource utilization across these devices without requiring teams to buy additional GPU hardware.
Character.AI, the AI chatbot startup that lets users create and converse with custom characters, has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy after facing lawsuits and operational strain. CEO Colin Adams said the company has assets and liabilities between $50 million and $100 million, and it will sell some assets plus a non-exclusive perpetual technology license to Disney for $20 million. Adams said no buyer has yet emerged for the rest of the company, and the platform will be wound down if a viable bid doesn't materialize.
Paleoartist Mark Witton is developing a speculative biology book, 'Dinosaurs Evolved,' imagining how life might look today had the K-Pg extinction never occurred. In response, an SV-POW! blog post surveys past speculative sauropod designs, including Memo Kösemen's Brontosapiens and Dougal Dixon's creatures from 'The New Dinosaurs' (1988), such as the trunked Lumber and armored Turtosaur.
Backup cameras activate only when a vehicle shifts into reverse, giving a wide-angle view behind the car to help with parking and avoiding obstacles. Since May 2018 the US National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has required these on new vehicles, with a similar EU rule starting in 2022. Rearview cameras, by contrast, run continuously and use a narrower lens closer to normal vision, and are not required by either mandate.