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I didn't bring my son to a museum to look at screens

When I was a kid in the ’80s, one of my two favorite places on Earth was The Franklin Institute (TFI) in downtown Philadelphia. We lived a couple hours away so a visit was a rare and precious thing. I think I only visited two or three times but it left an indelible impression on me. I remember wandering in amazement through its enormous spaces getting to actually play with amazing and interesting things. I remember sweeping off a table and then filling an overhanging funnel pendulum with sand, s

Spotify peeved after 10,000 users sold data to build AI tools

For millions of Spotify users, the "Wrapped" feature—which crunches the numbers on their annual listening habits—is a highlight of every year's end, ever since it debuted in 2015. NPR once broke down exactly why our brains find the feature so "irresistible," while Cosmopolitan last year declared that sharing Wrapped screenshots of top artists and songs had by now become "the ultimate status symbol" for tens of millions of music fans. It's no surprise then that, after a decade, some Spotify user

Save $60 on the DJI Mic Mini Kit—Price Drops to Just $109 Today

Looking to upgrade the audio for your phone or action camera footage? Amazon is offering $60 off the DJI Mic Mini kit. Our reviewer gave DJI's lavalier mic a 7/10 and this kit includes two mics, a receiver, and a handy charging case. That's the lowest price yet for this bundle at just $109, and a great value on this easy to use and lightweight microphone. These little mics and their fuzzy windscreens have become increasingly popular over the last year, popping up on collars and in the hands of

Inverting the Xorshift128 random number generator

CVE-2025-7783 is a very recent vulnerability affecting a lot of applications in the Node.js ecosystem including those which use axios or the deprecated request library. In all honesty, this vulnerability is really an edge case that is extremely unlikely to be exploited: it is dependent upon a number of events that are not normally present. One of those events is the attacker having access to five consecutive outputs of JavaScript Math.random( ) , which allows the attacker to predict future outpu

Creating a qubit fit for a quantum future

A topological alternative For the team at Nokia Bell Labs, the solution lies in better qubits rather than bigger machines. Specifically, rather than information encoded in individual elementary particles, the team is focused on qubits that hold this same information in the way matter is spatially oriented—what is known as a topological qubit. This alternative approach uses electromagnetic fields to manipulate charges around a supercooled electron liquid, triggering the qubits to switch between

European banks hit by rogue PayPal payments worth 'billions'

European banks hit by rogue PayPal payments worth 'billions' The BBC has approached PayPal for comment. The DSGV confirmed to the BBC there had been "incidents involving unauthorized direct debits initiated by PayPal against various credit institutions". It said payments were paused on Monday when lenders reported millions of suspicious direct debits from the payment firm. The German newspaper Sueddeutsche Zeitung (SZ) says payments worth in the region of 10 billion euros (£8.6bn) have had t

Tiny-tpu: A minimal tensor processing unit (TPU), inspired by Google's TPU

A minimal tensor processing unit (TPU), reinvented from Google's TPU V2 and V1. tinytpu.mp4 Table of Contents Architecture Processing Element (PE) Function : Performs a multiply-accumulate operation every clock cycle : Performs a multiply-accumulate operation every clock cycle Data Flow : Incoming data is multiplied by a stored weight and added to an incoming partial sum to produce an output sum Incoming data also passes through to the next element for propagation across the array : Syst

A minimal tensor processing unit (TPU), inspired by Google's TPU

A minimal tensor processing unit (TPU), reinvented from Google's TPU V2 and V1. tinytpu.mp4 Table of Contents Architecture Processing Element (PE) Function : Performs a multiply-accumulate operation every clock cycle : Performs a multiply-accumulate operation every clock cycle Data Flow : Incoming data is multiplied by a stored weight and added to an incoming partial sum to produce an output sum Incoming data also passes through to the next element for propagation across the array : Syst

Colorado Residents Are Spotting Weird-Looking Rabbits With Black Horns and Mouth Tentacles

People in Fort Collins, Colorado, are seeing rabbits with black horns and tentacles that wouldn’t look out of place in a horror movie. Though frightening, their appearance is caused by a known virus that’s harmless to humans. Journalist Amanda Gilbert documented the town sightings in an article for local outlet 9NEWS last Friday. Colorado Parks and Wildlife officials say the rabbits are afflicted with a virus that causes wart-like projections to emerge from their faces—a condition that likely e

What's the Difference Between Megabits and Megabytes? Here's What You Need to Know

Knowing how your home internet works may rely on understanding these two key terms: Megabits and Megabytes. Internet terminology is often maddeningly confusing. Case in point: Megabits and megabytes. Both refer to units of digital information, but the difference is subtle enough to cause plenty of confusion. Knowing the difference between the two terminologies can make all the difference when picking out an internet plan or figuring out how quickly you can download a file. Don’t worry -- we’ll c

My favorite accessory kit for tinkerers has 180 modifications - and an unbeatable price tag

Jakemy Smart 3 Kit ZDNET's key takeaways This high-quality screwdriver kit has everything for both the budding enthusiast and professional repairer. This 180-piece kit has 160 quality screwdriver bits and a range of other useful tools, such as plastic prybars, a suction cup, and tweezers. There's no LED light on the front of the screwdriver, so working in dark, cramped spaces can be tricky. $69.99 at Amazon I often get asked about tools, and I genuinely enjoy these conversations because I'm a

LA’s Museum of Jurassic Technology damaged by fire

One of the quirkier cultural gems in Los Angeles is the Museum of Jurassic Technology (MJT), featuring an eclectic collection of exhibits (of varying authenticity) inspired by historical Renaissance "cabinets of curiosities" (wunderkammers). It hasn't been broadly reported, but earlier this month, a fire broke out late at night, gutting the museum's gift shop and inflicting smoke damage on several exhibits, with lost revenues estimated to be around $75,000 until the doors reopen sometime next mo

Hiding messages in a deck playing cards

hiding messages in playing cards I was recently thinking about the huge number of ways you can shuffle a deck of 52 cards and wondered if it would be possible to store arbitrary data, which I explore in this blog post. This blog post will go into the detail of how I found a way to store text inside the order of a deck of cards. If you want to play around with the tool, go here. How many different ways can we shuffle a deck of 52 cards? We can think of it like picking one card from 52, then one

Topics: 52 bits cards deck number

Astronomers use colors of trans-Neptunian objects to track ancient stellar flyby

This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies . Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: This artist's illustration shows two trans-Neptunian objects in the distant reaches of the solar system. New research examines how a stellar flyby in the early solar system set TNOs on their unusual orbits. Credit: Southwest Research Institute Trans-Neptunian objects (TNO) are some of our solar system's lesser-known

This accessory kit was made for tinkerers and has 180 modifications

ZDNET's key takeaways This high-quality screwdriver kit has everything for both the budding enthusiast and professional repairer. This 180-piece kit has 160 quality screwdriver bits and a range of other useful tools, such as plastic prybars, a suction cup, and tweezers. There's no LED light on the front of the screwdriver, so working in dark, cramped spaces can be tricky. $69.99 at Amazon I often get asked about tools, and I genuinely enjoy these conversations because I'm a tool enthusiast. O

This accessory kit was made for tinkerers and has180 modifications

ZDNET's key takeaways This high-quality screwdriver kit has everything for both the budding enthusiast and professional repairer. This 180-piece kit has 160 quality screwdriver bits and a range of other useful tools, such as plastic prybars, a suction cup, and tweezers. There's no LED light on the front of the screwdriver, so working in dark, cramped spaces can be tricky. $69.99 at Amazon I often get asked about tools, and I genuinely enjoy these conversations because I'm a tool enthusiast. O

A Century of Quantum Mechanics

Lieber Pauli... Read the translation of the letter sent by Werner Heisenberg to Wolfgang Pauli on 9 July 1925. The original letter is preserved in CERN’s Wolfgang Pauli Archive. (Copyright: Heisenberg Society) Dear Pauli, If you believe that I read your letter laughing mockingly, then you are gravely mistaken; quite the contrary – since Helgoland, my views on mechanics have become more radical with each passing day, and it is my firm conviction that Bohr’s theory of the hydrogen atom, in its pre

‘Lord of the Rings Online’ Players Successfully Get Small Hobbit Army Lost Inside Mount Doom

MMORPG players love making challenges for themselves beyond the actual challenges offered by their games. Setting artificial level caps, soloing content designed for groups, empowering yourself through ways outside of the typical grind—you name it, someone has probably tried it in an MMO. But a group of Lord of the Rings Online players have managed an impossibility that triumphantly shows the source material’s thematic heart of hope in the face of despair so perfectly Tolkien could’ve come up wi

Record-Setting Qubit Performance Marks Important Step Toward Practical Quantum Computing

The promise of so-called “quantum advantage” is simple. By harnessing the counterintuitive rules of quantum mechanics, quantum computers should be able to—in theory—surpass the computational potential of any classical supercomputer. But before quantum advantage drastically changes information technology as we know it, researchers have yet to address the many hurdles that are preventing quantum computers from entering into the mainstream. That said, quantum computing as a field has evolved drama

I found the ultimate accessory kit for tinkerers with 180 modifications, and it's $20 off for Prime Day

ZDNET's key takeaways This high-quality screwdriver kit has everything for both the budding enthusiast and professional repairer. This 180-piece kit has 160 quality screwdriver bits and a range of other useful tools, such as plastic prybars, a suction cup, and tweezers. There's no LED light on the front of the screwdriver, so working in dark, cramped spaces can be tricky. $69.99 at Amazon During Amazon Prime Day, the Jakemy 180-Piece Smart Cordless Screwdriver Kit is $13 off its usual $63 pri

New proof dramatically compresses space needed for computation

Once upon a time computers filled entire rooms, reading numbers from spinning tapes and churning them through wires to do chains of basic arithmetic. Today they slip into our pockets, performing in a tiny fraction of a second what used to take hours. But even as chips shrink and gain speed, theorists are flipping the question from how much computation space we can pack into a machine to how little is enough to get the job done. This inquiry lies at the heart of computational complexity, a measu

New Proof Dramatically Compresses Space Needed for Computation

Once upon a time computers filled entire rooms, reading numbers from spinning tapes and churning them through wires to do chains of basic arithmetic. Today they slip into our pockets, performing in a tiny fraction of a second what used to take hours. But even as chips shrink and gain speed, theorists are flipping the question from how much computation space we can pack into a machine to how little is enough to get the job done. This inquiry lies at the heart of computational complexity, a measu

Transmitting data via ultrasound without any special equipment

There are secret messages flying all around you all the time, being transmitted via, most of the time, electromagnetic waves going from antenna to antenna. ELOs “Secret Messages” is a song about posting conspiracy theories via WiFi. But what if you need to get a few bytes from device A to device B (one of the hard problems in computer science!) and you don’t feel like making sure they’re both connected to the same network? Well, fortunately, another channel is available to us - sound, or for a

Changing one gene can restore some tissue regeneration to mice

Regeneration is a trick many animals, including lizards, starfish, and octopuses, have mastered. Axolotls, a salamander species originating in Mexico, can regrow pretty much everything from severed limbs, through eyes and parts of brain, to the spinal cord. Mammals, though, have mostly lost this ability somewhere along their evolutionary path. Regeneration persisted, in a limited number of tissues, in just a few mammalian species like rabbits or goats. “We were trying to learn how certain anima

Show HN: A Tool to Summarize Kenya's Parliament with Rust, Whisper, and LLMs

Bunge Bits Bunge Bits provides convenient summaries of Kenyan National Assembly and Senate proceedings, making legislative information more accessible and digestible. Motivations The driving force behind Bunge Bits is to strengthen Kenya's democracy by making legislative processes more transparent and understandable to all citizens. The aim is to bridge the gap between complex government proceedings and the average Kenyan, fostering increased civic engagement and political awareness. By offer

Microsoft lays out its path to useful quantum computing

On Thursday, Microsoft's Azure Quantum group announced that it has settled on a plan for getting error correction on quantum computers. While the company pursues its own hardware efforts, the Azure team is a platform provider that currently gives access to several distinct types of hardware qubits. So it has chosen a scheme that is suitable for several different quantum computing technologies (notably excluding its own). The company estimates that the system it has settled on can take hardware q

Conserving Qubits by Using Dissipative VQAs for Thermal Prep

Variational quantum algorithms (VQAs) play a significant role in improving the efficiency and accuracy of quantum computers. However, they come with high noise levels, which degrade their performance. Even though current techniques can mitigate their noise, they involve excessive computational overhead, which limits their feasibility. However, in a paper written for IEEE Transactions on Quantum Engineering, Yigal Ilin and Itai Arad propose incorporating dissipative operations to alleviate the e

Quantum Hardware Readiness for Two-Step Quantum Search Algorithm

The traveling salesman problem (TSP) has challenged computer scientists for decades. Finding the shortest route that visits all cities exactly once sounds simple, but it becomes computationally explosive as the number of destinations grows. With applications spanning logistics, manufacturing, and network optimization, any breakthrough in solving TSP efficiently could transform entire industries. A recent paper published in IEEE Transactions on Quantum Engineering by Rei Sato, Cui Gordon, Kazuhi

Is gravity just entropy rising? Long-shot idea gets another look

Isaac Newton was never entirely happy with his law of universal gravitation. For decades after publishing it in 1687, he sought to understand how, exactly, two objects were able to pull on each other from afar. He and others came up with several mechanical models, in which gravity was not a pull, but a push. For example, space might be filled with unseen particles that bombard the objects on all sides. The object on the left absorbs the particles coming from the left, the one on the right absorb

Is Gravity Just Entropy Rising? Long-Shot Idea Gets Another Look

Isaac Newton was never entirely happy with his law of universal gravitation. For decades after publishing it in 1687, he sought to understand how, exactly, two objects were able to pull on each other from afar. He and others came up with several mechanical models, in which gravity was not a pull, but a push. For example, space might be filled with unseen particles that bombard the objects on all sides. The object on the left absorbs the particles coming from the left, the one on the right absorb