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sciencehabit shares a report from Science Magazine: A physicist has put a definite date on Doomsday," The New York Times wrote on November 4, 1960. "He calculates that it will come on Friday the Thirteenth in November, 2026 A. D. On that date, or thereabouts, the human population will have expanded so far as to approach infinity and thus will automatically annihilate itself." The newspaper was right -- but the prediction was wrong. That week, Austrian American physicist Heinz von Foerster and t…

"Margaret Hamilton, the groundbreaking researcher who helped create the field of software engineering and whose code helped land NASA's Apollo astronauts on the moon to win the 20th century space race, has died," writes longtime Slashdot reader Veeru. "She was 90." MIT News reports: A computing pioneer who authored over 130 publications, Hamilton helped to establish software engineering as a dedicated discipline. She worked at MIT from 1959 until the mid-1970s, after which she became a successf…

Researchers in Vienna and Beijing have independently built the first nuclear clocks based on oscillations inside thorium nuclei, marking a major milestone for a field that could eventually produce highly portable, ultra-precise timekeepers. The clocks are already precise enough to lose only about a second over millions of years. The New York Times reports: The first nuclear clocks are not going to immediately supplant the worldwide network of atomic clocks, whose steady ticking we rely on for G…

Amazon Prime Video will become the exclusive global home of the Emmy Awards under a six-year deal beginning in 2027, the Television Academy announced on Tuesday. The Emmys will stream live for free to viewers in more than 240 countries and territories without requiring a Prime subscription. From the report: In the release, Prime Video was named as the "permanent home" for the Emmys, in contrast to the rotating agreement in place years prior. The switch ends the traditional "wheel-deal" setup to…

Ancient Slashdot reader williamyf writes: If you thought the gender pay gap was not real, and that there were no biases in the workplace, think again: A recent study from the University of Limerick found that, in a VR office setting, AI agents -- not even humanoid robots -- that presented themselves as "male" were paid more per task and perceived as more "human-like" than their "female" counterparts, even though both were using the same underlying technology (LLM model, agent, guardrail, and ha…

Google has released Chrome 155 with support for decoding JPEG XL images, a format that offers 30-50% better compression than JPEG along with lossless compression, JPEG transcoding, HDR, animation, and progressive decoding. From a blog post: We expect that JPEG XL is most helpful for high-fidelity or lossless compression, especially of photographic images or in cases in which fine-grained progressive decoding is preferred. In this post, we share why we brought JPEG XL to Chrome, how we used Rust…

OpenAI says an unreleased internal model has produced 372 results that either resolve or make substantial progress on open problems in mathematics and theoretical computer science. The company says almost all were generated by a single AI agent from a single prompt. "This would be a striking difference from OpenAI's earlier blockbuster solution to the Navier-Stokes problem, which was produced through the collective efforts of a 10,000-strong agentic swarm that cost millions of dollars in comput…

Slashdot reader carlk22 writes: In February 2001, Slashdot readers asked Carl Kadie about censorship and privacy at colleges, and he answered. Now Kadie, who founded the Computers and Academic Freedom project at EFF in 1991, has written its history. In Part 1, Ohio State kicks a student off its network, then out of school, after a prank routes his "fuck you" into rec.aquaria, and a supercomputing center fires a student over an email from saddam@iraq.bunker.gov. In Part 2, Nebraska bans the proj…

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: Alphabet's Google and gaming tools developer Unity Software announced a new platform that will allow people to create video games from simple text prompts, marking the latest incursion of generative artificial intelligence into artistic and creative industries. The initiative, called Playground, will "put game creation in the hands of millions of new creators, and bring new experiences to billions of players worldwide," the companies said in a…

Microsoft has reportedly secured exclusive cloud-streaming rights for Grand Theft Auto VI, meaning Xbox Cloud Gaming will be the only service able to stream the game at launch. "Rockstar Games still hasn't announced a PC version of Grand Theft Auto VI, so this deal will allow Xbox to market its Xbox Cloud Gaming service to PC players who would otherwise need an Xbox Series X / S or PS5 console," reports The Verge. From the report: News of the streaming rights comes around a month after Microsof…

University of Wisconsin-Madison physicist Francis Halzen has been awarded the 2026 Nobel Prize in Physics for his contributions to understanding astrophysical neutrinos. Halzen led the development of the IceCube Neutrino Observatory beneath the Antarctic ice, which has helped trace high-energy neutrinos back to cosmic sources such as supermassive black holes and opened a new era of "multi-messenger" astronomy. Longtime Slashdot reader schwit1 shares a report from UW-Madison: Embedded in a cubic…

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: Google has contracted for 3,590 megawatts of power from Constellation Energy on the largest US power grid, with new nuclear energy accounting for about a quarter of that supply, the companies said on Tuesday. Constellation will make more than $4.3 billion of new investments in its fleet as part of the agreement, which involves adding capacity at several of the power company's nuclear reactors in the Midwest and Mid-Atlantic regions, the companie…

South Korean President Lee Jae Myung says there are signs AI models may have been used in recent cyberattacks against several major banks. "In some hacking incidents, signs have emerged of AI being used, causing considerable public concern and anxiety," Lee said during a cabinet meeting. "Please establish the circumstances swiftly and clearly, and concentrate personnel and resources on minimizing the damage." Reuters reports: South Korea's police have launched a full-scale investigation into th…