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Tech News
A retrospective catalogs obsolete HTML snippets that were never part of the official specification but emerged from browser wars, vendor extensions, and third-party integrations. Examples include the X-UA-Compatible meta tag used to force Internet Explorer into specific rendering modes, and the chrome=1 directive tied to Google's now-defunct Chrome Frame plugin that let IE 6-9 users render pages using Chrome's engine.
A Nature retrospective highlights the scientific career of William Thomson, later Lord Kelvin, noting that his contributions extended well beyond the temperature scale that bears his name. The piece surveys his broader body of work in physics and engineering during the 19th century.
An editorial in Nature argues that prediction markets allowing wagers on the outcomes of clinical trials pose risks to research integrity and public trust in science. It calls for limits on such betting activity to prevent interference with ongoing trials.
The Internet Archive is asking supporters to start recurring monthly donations of $25 or more in September, with each new gift matched 2:1 during the campaign. The nonprofit says it relies on donor funding to maintain its own servers and infrastructure, which store 210 petabytes of freely accessible material without ads or paid subscriptions.
A visitor to nature.com attempting to access an archived piece titled 'Catching Crumbs from the Table' from 2000 instead encountered a generic browser-compatibility notice rather than the article's actual content. The page indicated the site was being displayed without full styling or JavaScript because of the outdated browser being used, leaving the substance of the original 2000 piece inaccessible in this instance.
A Fast Company opinion series on corporate AI argues that current AI systems are being built and controlled at far too low a level of abstraction, comparing the state of the field to the internet in 1991 before the web existed. The author contends that the core issue holding back enterprise AI isn't a lack of intelligence in the models themselves, but the primitive 'programming language' or interface layer through which businesses interact with and direct that intelligence.
Scientists used a citizen-science method of burying cotton underwear in soil for several months as a low-cost way to assess microbial activity, since healthier soil decomposes cotton fabric faster. Volunteers around the world dug up roughly 1,000 pairs and reported how much material had degraded, generating a broad dataset on soil condition.
Senator Ron Wyden sent a letter to NSA Director General Joshua M. Rudd asking the agency to update its public guidance on VPN configurations. He argued that current recommendations don't help Americans facing foreign surveillance—including government staff, contractors, journalists and human rights defenders—choose which VPNs actually protect their communications.
A blogger writes that the rise of generative AI has made much of the internet harder to use, citing AI-generated summaries cluttering search results and bot-produced 'slop' overwhelming social platforms like X. In response, they've deactivated most social accounts and shifted toward RSS feeds, Substack newsletters, and a curated list of YouTube channels.
Most international internet traffic actually travels through physical fibre-optic cables buried beneath ocean floors, not through the air as commonly assumed. One such cable emerges from the sea near La Línea de la Concepción, Spain, crossing the Strait of Gibraltar to Ceuta, a Spanish enclave on Morocco's coast that until recently relied on a single ageing cable link to the mainland.
PeopleFinders has introduced a new service called Stud or Dud that lets users run background checks on people they're dating or considering dating. The tool aims to automate the online research many people already do informally, pulling together public records and digital footprints into a single report.
Loudoun County, Virginia turned to former AOL infrastructure and empty fiber-optic networks left after the dot-com crash to attract data center investment, led by economic development official Buddy Rizer. The strategy shifted the county's tax base from over 80% residential to just over half commercial revenue, transforming it into a hub handling a large share of global internet traffic.