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Maxon has released an update to Cinema 4D that introduces procedural scattering tools, more realistic liquid simulation, and performance improvements aimed at faster rendering. The update also continues integration with Redshift, Maxon's GPU-accelerated renderer, to streamline the move between 3D animation and final rendering.
Penn State scientists have reconstructed what the Liberty Bell likely sounded like before it cracked, using acoustic data gathered from one of its replicas. The research was presented at an Acoustical Society of America meeting in Philadelphia and later detailed in Physics Today, timed to the nation's upcoming 250th anniversary. The bell itself has not been rung since 1846, when a prior crack worsened during a February 23 ringing.
A Hacker News 'Ask HN' post from a hobbyist woodworker who currently uses Shapr3d to manually design projects asks whether large language models can speed up 3D modeling for woodworking. The poster is soliciting recommendations from the community for AI tools or workflows suited to this use case.
Developer Matt Keeter has published Halfspace, an experimental IDE for solid modeling using distance fields, along with a browser-based WebGPU demo. The app serves as a showcase for his Fidget kernel, which handles rasterization and meshing, letting users view real-time renders and export models as images or triangle meshes.
Researchers analyzed 20 years of three-hourly wave data at 400 sites worldwide, split evenly between coastlines with and without mangroves, drawing on Global Mangrove Watch records and 2025 satellite imagery. The sites were chosen to represent mangroves' full latitudinal range while excluding locations shielded by dunes, reefs close enough to block wave models, or heavily developed shorelines. Wave conditions came from the EU Copernicus Marine Service's Global Ocean Waves Reanalysis dataset.
A technical write-up describes RLCD (Reinforcement Learning from Calibrated Decisions) as an evolution of reward modeling, moving from scalar reward scores to pairwise preference models like PPRM, and finally to a schema-conditioned, multiway probability distribution. It explains that Jev implements this RLCD objective by adding typed outputs and parallel inference, effectively turning the reward model itself into the primary decision-making system rather than a hidden scoring layer behind a generator.
Researchers combined century-long river chemistry records, reconstructed acidity and alkalinity inputs, and reactive transport modeling to assess whether agricultural liming in the Mississippi River Basin has released or absorbed CO2 over time. Using discharge and alkalinity data, historic Ca/Mg/SO4/nitrate measurements, and a model called SCEPTER, they built a spatial budget comparing acid inputs from fertilizer, manure and atmospheric deposition against alkalinity from lime application.
Researchers analyzed geolocated outbreak data for 32 environmentally linked emerging infectious diseases, combining these with global datasets on socio-environmental factors such as land use, climate and biodiversity. Using disease-specific driver hypotheses developed with experts across virology, ecology and public health, they built geospatial statistical models to identify common human-caused patterns behind where outbreaks occur.
A blogger demonstrated that gzip, primed with a corpus of Shakespeare text, can 'continue' a prompt by finding byte sequences that compress most efficiently against its sliding window, producing text that is semi-coherent but clearly reflects patterns from the source material. The experiment was inspired by a paper arguing that prediction and compression are mathematically equivalent, since both rely on assigning probabilities to what comes next.
Researchers describe Delphy, a phylogenetics tool that encodes evolutionary trees as timed nodes carrying explicit mutation and 'missation' (missing-data) annotations relative to a reference sequence. This design lets the software efficiently reconstruct full sequences at any tree point and handle uncertain tip collection dates, aiming to make Bayesian phylogenetic analysis fast enough for near-real-time outbreak response.
Executives from Nord Quantique and QuSecure discussed how quantum computing is moving from theoretical research toward real-world application, with heavy investment from governments and companies. They highlighted potential across drug discovery, materials science, finance and logistics, alongside the parallel risk quantum poses to current encryption standards.
Autodesk has introduced a new AI-powered tool designed to help teams navigate and manage the complex 3D models used throughout building projects. The assistant aims to reduce errors that occur when architects, engineers, contractors, and consultants collaborate on the same detailed digital model, catching issues like misaligned structural elements before they become costly problems.