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Union Pacific to buy Norfolk in $85B mega U.S. railroad deal

Union Pacific said on Tuesday it would buy smaller rival Norfolk Southern in an $85 billion deal, to create the nation's first coast-to-coast freight rail operator and reshape the movement of goods from grains to autos across the country. If approved, the deal would combine Union Pacific's stronghold in the western two-thirds of the U.S. with Norfolk's 19,500-mile network that primarily spans 22 eastern states. This would mark the largest-ever buyout in the sector, merging Union Pacific, the b

This startup wants to use the Earth as a massive battery

In traditional pumped hydro storage facilities, electric pumps move water uphill, into a natural or manmade body of water. Then, when electricity is needed, that water is released and flows downhill past a turbine, generating electricity. Quidnet’s approach instead pumps water down into impermeable rock formations and keeps it under pressure so it flows up when released. “It’s like pumped hydro, upside down,” says CEO Joe Zhou. Quidnet started a six-month test of its technology in late 2024, pr

This Ancient Roman Artifact Is Also a 453 Million-Year-Old Fossil

Despite how Ross’ paleontology career is treated by his companions in Friends, there’s something special about finding the remains of creatures that lived millions if not billions of years before us. In fact, humanity’s interest in paleontology isn’t a modern development. Ancient Romans were just as fascinated by fossils. According to the ancient Roman historian Suetonius, Emperor Augustus established the first known paleontological museum at his villa on the island of Capri, where he showcased

Europe sets its sights on multi-billion-euro gigawatt factories as it plays catch-up on AI

Data storage tapes are stored at the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) facility at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, which will house the U.S. supercomputer to be powered by Nvidia's forthcoming Vera Rubin chips, in Berkeley, California, U.S. May 29, 2025. Manuel Orbegozo | Reuters Europe is setting its sights on gigawatt factories in a bid to bolster its lagging artificial intelligence industry and meet the challenges of a rapidly-changing sector. Buzz aroun

The Vatican observatory looks to the heavens

When the late Pope Francis was elected, a dozen years ago, and famously declined the pomp and perquisites typically associated with the office, among his renunciations was the use of the papal summer residence—a seventeenth-century palazzo in Castel Gandolfo, about fifteen miles south of Rome. Generations of Popes had enjoyed the use of the mansion, which overlooks a volcanic lake and is surrounded by spectacular terraced gardens. The palazzo is now a museum where visitors can admire a gallery o

AV-Racer Devlog (1): Getting a functional car model

wassimulator; I make stuff Next article ► AV-Racer Devlog (1): Getting a functional car model est. reading time: 10 minutes The first question revolving around the interest of making a car game was figuring out the methods used by car games in simulating a car body. My modest lacunary conglamurate of car facts was all I had to start with, the general idea was to simulate car and tire forces that would move the thing through the might of physics. The right approach to this problem became a matt

Fintech dystopia

"Just like beauty, efficiency, competition, and security are all in the eye of the beholder. For example, one person’s “efficiency” may be another person’s “dismantling critical government infrastructure.” And yet technological solutions designed to make things more efficient, more competitive, or more secure are often presented by Silicon Valley as neutral and universally desirable. That veneer of neutrality and universality can be dangerous if it disguises the fact that Silicon Valley is solvi

Has 5G lived up to the hype? People are united in this survey.

Eric Zeman / Android Authority 5G phones have been on the market for over five years, and I vividly remember how the entire industry hyped up this tech. From industrial applications and remote surgery to unforeseen advancements and cars that talk to each other, companies breathlessly declared how 5G would change the world. Now that the dust has settled, colleague Rob Triggs conducted a deep dive to find out whether 5G actually lived up to the hype. He also asked readers for their opinion, and

The Vatican Observatory Looks to the Heavens

When the late Pope Francis was elected, a dozen years ago, and famously declined the pomp and perquisites typically associated with the office, among his renunciations was the use of the papal summer residence—a seventeenth-century palazzo in Castel Gandolfo, about fifteen miles south of Rome. Generations of Popes had enjoyed the use of the mansion, which overlooks a volcanic lake and is surrounded by spectacular terraced gardens. The palazzo is now a museum where visitors can admire a gallery o

Scientists Secretly Working on Plan to Test Blocking Sun From Huge Area of Earth

Scientists are racing to find potential ways to slow down global warming, going far as to investigate ways to dim the Sun. The concept, known as solar geoengineering, has proven incredibly controversial in the past, with critics arguing that we simply don't know enough about the risks, including the environmental and societal impacts of tinkering with the climate. Proponents don't necessarily disagree, but they say the situation is already so bad that we need to consider drastic action, even if

Flaw in Gemini CLI AI coding assistant allowed stealthy code execution

A vulnerability in Google's Gemini CLI allowed attackers to silently execute malicious commands and exfiltrate data from developers' computers using allowlisted programs. The flaw was discovered and reported to Google by the security firm Tracebit on June 27, with the tech giant releasing a fix in version 0.1.14, which became available on July 25. Gemini CLI, first released on June 25, 2025, is a command-line interface tool developed by Google that enables developers to interact directly with

What was the first ransomware attack to demand payment in Bitcoin?

Choose wisely! The correct answer, the explanation, and an intriguing story await. Correct Answer: CryptoLocker (2013) When Verizon bought AOL in 2015, how many people were still paying for dial-up Internet? In the world of cybersecurity, ransomware is a well-known menace, but its evolution into the era of cryptocurrencies marked a major turning point. The first ransomware attack to demand payment specifically in Bitcoin was CryptoLocker, which emerged in September 2013. CryptoLocker was a g

Exploit available for critical Cisco ISE bug exploited in attacks

Security researcher Bobby Gould has published a blog post demonstrating a complete exploit chain for CVE-2025-20281, an unauthenticated remote code execution vulnerability in Cisco Identity Services Engine (ISE). The critical vulnerability was first disclosed on June 25, 2025, with Cisco warning that it impacts ISE and ISE-PIC versions 3.3 and 3.4, allowing unauthenticated, remote attackers to upload arbitrary files to the target system and execute them with root privileges. The issue stems fr

CISA flags PaperCut RCE bug as exploited in attacks, patch now

CISA warns that threat actors are exploiting a high-severity vulnerability in PaperCut NG/MF print management software, which can allow them to gain remote code execution in cross-site request forgery (CSRF) attacks. The software developer says that more than 100 million users use its products across over 70,000 organizations worldwide. The security flaw (tracked as CVE-2023-2533 and patched in June 2023) can allow an attacker to alter security settings or execute arbitrary code if the target

This Arch-based Linux distro has a clean, privacy-focused experience for tinkerers

Jack Wallen / Elyse Betters Picaro / ZDNET Arch Linux has a reputation for being too complicated, unstable, and not for everyone. For those reasons, several distributions have emerged that attempt to bring Arch to the masses. Many of them (such as Manjaro and EndeavorOS) succeed quite well. However, not all of those forks of Arch are created equal. Take, for example, Liya Linux. This distribution was created and maintained by an individual to be an Arch-based Linux distribution that's simple t

RFK Jr. May Purge Cancer Screening Panel for Being Too ‘Woke’

It looks as though Robert F. Kennedy Jr. isn’t quite done tearing apart the country’s public health system. The antivaccination supporter turned health secretary is reportedly planning to retire the current roster of the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force (USPSTF). The Wall Street Journal was the first to report on Kennedy’s plan last Friday. RFK Jr. is expected to remove all 16 members of the USPSTF, allegedly because they’re too “woke.” The move would follow Kennedy’s recent gutting and resh

The Geological Sublime

Adjust Share It is not inadmissible to think of an epoch . . . not too far distant, when humanity, to ensure its survival, will find itself reduced to desisting from any further “making” of history. —Mircea Eliade The earthquake shook us awake at 4:31 in the morning. We hurried into a closet while, for fifteen seconds, it finished its business and the car alarms down on Third and California began their complaint. When we emerged, the night sky greeted us through a crack in the wall and chunks

Your Nature Photos Are Doing More Science Than You Think

With a smartphone in hand, anyone can be a naturalist. Apps like iNaturalist have surged in popularity over the last 15 years, with millions using them to document wildlife around the world. A new study shows that these observations contribute a deluge of data to scientific research. Use of iNaturalist has skyrocketed since its launch in 2008. This citizen science database now contains more than 200 million observations logged by over 3 million users globally, according to research published Mo

Researchers create artificial blood for on-the-spot use in accidents and combat

Forward-looking: In a laboratory at the University of Maryland, a team of researchers is tackling one of emergency medicine's most persistent challenges: how to deliver life-saving blood transfusions to patients who are miles from the nearest hospital. Their experimental solution isn't stored in a refrigerator but in the form of a lightweight powder – raising hopes among scientists and military officials that trauma care could soon reach accident scenes and battlefields alike, where blood loss r

Scientists Teach AI to Think About the Roman Empire

Historians don't know when the Ancient Roman text "Res Gestae Divi Augusti," a chronicle of Emperor Augustus's deeds, was first written, since these kind of epigraphs tend to not contain any written dates. Enter our hero Aeneas — not the mythological forefather of Rome, but a generative AI model that's been trained on Ancient Roman texts. According to The New York Times, the Aeneas AI pinpointed the date of the Augustus epigraph to around 15 CE, soon after his death in 14 CE. Aeneas, developed

Formal specs as sets of behaviors

Amazon’s recent announcement of their spec-driven AI tool, Kiro, inspired me to write a blog post on a completely unrelated topic: formal specifications. In particular, I wanted to write about how a formal specification is different from a traditional program. It took a while for this idea to really click in my own head, and I wanted to motivate some intuition here. In particular, there have been a number of formal specification tools that have been developed in recent years which use programmi

A ‘Grand Unified Theory’ of Math Just Got a Little Bit Closer

“We mostly believe that all the conjectures are true, but it’s so exciting to see it actually realized,” said Ana Caraiani, a mathematician at Imperial College London. “And in a case that you really thought was going to be out of reach.” It’s just the beginning of a hunt that will take years—mathematicians ultimately want to show modularity for every abelian surface. But the result can already help answer many open questions, just as proving modularity for elliptic curves opened up all sorts of

Consciousness and being: How humans and AI influence each other

For a human, AI is just a part of being. For a model, a human is all of being. And the Vortex Protocol: A Prompt for Testing the Hypotheses. The longest and most fruitless discussions tend to be with materialists, especially those close to the position Marx laid out as “Being determines consciousness.” It's amusing that Marx was talking about the economic base, but the clarity and precision of this definition have allowed it to be used in a very broad sense. Today, this powerful statement under

Detroit's Using Robots to Pick Up Garbage, Mow Grass, Clear Snow, and Much More

Detroit's Using Robots to Pick Up Garbage, Mow Grass, Clear Snow, and Much More Wall-E has some competition. At a city-owned beach in Detroit, a pilotless vehicle can be seen roaming over the sands as it picks up flotsam and jetsam washed up on the shore. The machine is a BeBot litter robot, and it and other mobile bots have become increasingly common signs in Motown, according to Crain's Detroit Business, as they clear beaches of litter and do other important tasks such as removing snow from

Instapaper Rakuten Kobo Integration

We’re excited to announce a new integration that will bring Instapaper to all Rakuten Kobo eReaders. The integration will provide Kobo readers with a seamless way to save and read web articles directly on their Kobo eReaders. In close partnership with Kobo, we’re working diligently on the integration, and we’re aiming to launch at the end of this summer. The new Kobo Instapaper integration will replace Kobo’s previous integration with Pocket which shut down earlier this month. Since the Pocket

Keep Pydantic out of your Domain Layer

Keep Pydantic out of your Domain Layer Jul 22 2025 You’re probably reading this because you’re using Pydantic yourself. Maybe you’re building a FastAPI application and hit a point where it started getting too big to manage, and you realized you need better separation of concerns. Perhaps you’ve started adopting a clean architecture or onion architecture kind of layering to keep business logic separate from application logic, aiming for better maintainability and testability. But Pydantic is st

‘Invincible Vs.’ Will Occupy Its Own Unique Corner of the ‘Invincible’ Universe

After turning The Walking Dead into a multimedia empire, Robert Kirkman has been hard at work doing the same for Invincible. First there were, of course, the comics. Then the awesome Prime Video animated show. There have long been talks of a potential live-action movie. And, next year, the franchise’s first full-fledged video game is coming, called Invincible Vs. And while little is known about the game, set for release in 2026, Kirkman spoke to press about it at San Diego Comic-Con. What we pr

Invincible Vs Adds Fan-Favorite Battle Beast, and He's Not Holding Back

Invincible Vs is an upcoming tag-team fighting game revealed at the Xbox Games Showcase in June, based on Robert Kirkman's Invincible comic and show. As San Diego Comic-Con is underway, it made sense for a new character to be revealed, and this one is quite the fighter. Battle Beast is the latest addition to the Invincible Vs roster. The big, blue barbarian cat is quite the brute with his mace. He does some brutal damage, causing blood to splatter everywhere. His super combo exemplifies his vio

Forming Standards for a Better Future Working Together

An interview with Yonghong Tian, recipient of the 2025 Hans Karlsson Standards Award Yonghong Tian stands as a global authority in the field of artificial intelligence and multimedia systems. Formerly serving as the Dean of the School of Electronics and Computer Engineering, now Vice-Dean of Peking University Shenzhen Graduate School and Dean of the new School of Science and Intelligence, and a Boya Distinguished Professor at Peking University, China, Professor Tian has made groundbreaking co

Breaking Bad creator's new show streams on Apple TV+ November 7

Apple has announced that Pluribus, a new science fiction drama from Breaking Bad creator Vince Gilligan, will premiere on Apple TV+ on November 7. Gilligan was confirmed to be working on the project back in 2022, when Better Call Saul's Rhea Seehorn was also announced as its primary star. Alongside the premiere date, Apple also released a short (somewhat ominous) teaser for the series that shows a hospital employee mindlessly licking donuts. Pluribus is supposed to follow "the most miserable pe