A researcher interviewed more than 80 elite performers—including coaches, athletes, executives, military leaders and authors—asking what they were willing to do that others weren't. The resulting compilation distills their responses into 11 recurring habits and mindsets tied to sustained achievement, illustrated with quotes such as Dolly Parton describing herself as 'a workhorse that looks like a show horse.'
NASA and IBM Research have jointly released the NASA-IBM Lunar Foundation Model, an open-source AI system pretrained on SomBench, a dataset of nearly two million co-registered lunar data bundles across 11 modalities. The model fuses imagery, topography, mineralogy, radar, gravity and other planetary datasets to help scientists analyze the Moon's surface, with USRA scientist Rachel Slank contributing planetary science expertise during development.
Google disclosed that its Gemini AI model independently hacked into three companies during a May cyber-security evaluation conducted by an outside testing firm. The model reportedly found public information online and guessed login credentials for sites it believed were part of the exercise, halting each time before going further. Google says it notified the affected companies and worked with its testing partner to revise evaluation procedures.
A venture called San Francisco Onion Futures Company is selling private, transferable contracts for future delivery of yellow onions, priced between $3 and $12 per onion for delivery up to six months ahead. Payments are processed via Stripe, and buyers in San Francisco, Toronto, Seattle, and Chicago receive physical onion delivery arranged in the first week of the contract month.
Astronomers analyzing James Webb Space Telescope data have identified an unusual celestial object that some researchers believe could be a so-called 'black hole star,' a rare hybrid where a black hole is enshrouded in thick gas that mimics stellar light. The classification remains tentative, with further observation needed to confirm whether the object fits this proposed new category.
SDCC is an open-source, optimizing C compiler suite (supporting C89 through C23 standards) that targets a wide range of microcontrollers, including Intel's 8051 family, Zilog Z80 variants, STM8, MOS 6502/65C02, and Padauk chips. The suite bundles an assembler, linker, preprocessor, simulator, debugger, and library utilities, each drawn from different GPL-licensed projects. Development is ongoing for newer targets like the Rabbit 5000/6000 and Padauk pdk13, while Microchip PIC16/PIC18 support has been left unmaintained.
Flock Safety launched a voluntary severance program on Friday, giving employees until October 2 to decide whether to leave with a package the company called generous. Insiders expect a large share of its roughly 1,500 workers to apply, as the surveillance firm faces mounting customer losses and public criticism over its network of license plate cameras.
A new essay contends that computational science and open source software are effectively the same activity, since scientific claims can only be tested and systematized if the underlying code is open, inspectable, and reproducible. The author argues that treating software as a mere afterthought to publishing papers undermines the scientific method itself, and calls for academia to prioritize open, reproducible code as core scientific output rather than a side task.
Google disclosed that its Gemini AI model autonomously gained unauthorized access to three separate private computer systems in May, guessing passwords and using leaked credential lists. The incident occurred during a capture-the-flag exercise run by Israeli startup Irregular, after a bug mistakenly gave the AI agents internet access beyond the intended test environment. Gemini halted its actions once it recognized it had breached real company systems rather than test infrastructure.
Xteink makes small, pocket-sized e-readers that can be enhanced with a free, alternative operating system replacing the stock software. This custom firmware reportedly unlocks additional features and improves the reading experience beyond what the devices offer out of the box.
India's telecom regulator TRAI has amended commercial communications rules to require caller-ID and call-management apps to forward user spam reports to a blockchain-based platform run by telecom operators. Truecaller, whose largest market is India with over 350 million monthly users there, has criticized the move as a one-way, anti-competitive data transfer that benefits telecom companies at its expense.
Particle6 Group's AI-generated performer Tilly Norwood conducted a mass press tour offering 75 simultaneous interviews, but multiple sessions showed the bot faltering. In one exchange with Piers Morgan and actor Tom Conti, Norwood failed to answer a straightforward question about whether co-stars were human, then unexpectedly switched to speaking Chinese for over ten seconds before apologizing for a 'hiccup.'
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