Scientists have discovered that great whales can live well beyond previously estimated lifespans, according to research published in Science Advances. The study found that southern right whales can survive past 130 years, while their heavily hunted northern counterparts rarely live beyond 47 years. ... [ Read it >> ]

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Britain's Defence Science and Technology Laboratory has developed a quantum atomic clock that will lose less than one second over billions of years, the Ministry of Defence announced on Thursday.

The UK-built device aims to reduce military reliance on GPS technology, which can be disrupted by adversaries. It will be deployable in military operations within five years, supporting navigation systems, encrypted communications, and advanced weapons systems. The $34.6 million project involves partners including Infleqtion UK, Aquark Technologies, and Imperial College London. The clock was tested outside laboratory conditions for the first time in collaboration with the Royal Navy and Army Futures team.... [ Read it >> ]

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The U.S. Commerce Department said on Thursday it is considering new rules that would impose restrictions on Chinese drones that would restrict or ban them in the United States citing national security concerns. From a report: The department said it was seeking public comments by March 4 on potential rules to safeguard the supply chain for drones, saying threats from China and Russia "may offer our adversaries the ability to remotely access and manipulate these devices, exposing sensitive U.S. data." ... [ Read it >> ]

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Abstract of a paper [PDF] published on National Bureau of Economic Research: Fertility levels have greatly decreased in virtually every nation in the world, but the timing of the decline has differed even among developed countries. In Europe, Asia, and North America, total fertility rates of some nations dipped below the magic replacement figure of 2.1 as early as the 1970s. But in other nations, fertility rates remained substantial until the 1990s but plummeted subsequently. ... [ Read it >> ]

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Electric vehicles dominated Norway's new car sales in 2024, capturing 88.9% market share versus 82.4% in 2023, the Norwegian Road Federation said. Tesla led sales, followed by Volkswagen and Toyota, as the Nordic nation approaches its 2025 goal of selling only zero-emission vehicles.... [ Read it >> ]

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Leading monitor manufacturers Asus, Samsung, and MSI unveiled the world's first 27-inch 4K OLED gaming monitors with 240Hz refresh rates, all featuring Samsung Display's fourth-generation QD-OLED panel technology.

Asus ROG Swift OLED PG27UCDM and MSI MPG 272URX QD-OLED models include DisplayPort 2.1a support, enabling 4K resolution at 240Hz without compression. Both offer DisplayHDR True Black 400 certification and three-year burn-in protection warranties. Samsung's Odyssey OLED G8 specifications remain partially undisclosed. All monitors feature 0.03ms response times and pixel density exceeding 160PPI. ... [ Read it >> ]

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Bruce66423 writes: A few hours before the ball dropped on New Year's Eve, the computer dispatch system for the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department crashed, rendering all patrol car computers nearly useless and forcing deputies to handle all calls by radio, according to officials and sources in the department. Department leaders first learned of the problem around 8 p.m., when deputies at several sheriff's stations began having trouble logging onto their patrol car computers, officials told The Times in a statement. ... [ Read it >> ]

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Studies using new brain-mapping and wearable devices have shown that unstimulating urban architecture can harm residents' health, leading to increased rates of depression, cancer and diabetes. Research projects across Europe and North America, including the EU-funded eMOTIONAL Cities project and studies at the University of Waterloo's Urban Realities Laboratory, are measuring people's physiological responses to their surroundings. The findings are pushing architects and city planners to prioritize human wellbeing in design, with some cities like London's Newham borough now including happiness metrics in economic planning.... [ Read it >> ]

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Apple is offering rare discounts of up to 500 yuan ($68.50) on its latest iPhone models in China, as the U.S. tech giant moves to defend its market share against rising competition from domestic rivals like Huawei. From a report: The four-day promotion, running from Jan. 4-7, applies to several iPhone models when purchased using specific payment methods, according to its website. ... [ Read it >> ]

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The number of active venture capital investors, firms that invest in startups, has dropped more than a quarter from a peak in 2021 [non-paywalled source], as risk-averse financial institutions focus their money on the biggest firms in Silicon Valley. From a report: The tally of VCs investing in US-headquartered companies dropped to 6,175 in 2024 -- meaning more than 2,000 have fallen dormant since a peak of 8,315 in 2021, according to data provider PitchBook. ... [ Read it >> ]

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Exercise is the most potent medical intervention known, according to Stanford University researchers who mapped its molecular effects across body tissues. In a study examining sedentary and exercising rats over eight weeks, scientists found comprehensive changes in every tissue examined, from fat cells to mitochondria, with exercise often reversing disease-related molecular changes. The findings explain how exercise reduces heart disease and cancer risks by 50%.... [ Read it >> ]

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MIT scientists have pinpointed the origin of a fast radio burst (FRB) to within 10,000 kilometers of a neutron star, settling a long-standing debate about these cosmic phenomena. Using a novel technique analyzing signal scintillation, researchers determined that FRB 20221022A, detected in 2022 from a galaxy 200 million light-years away, emerged from the star's turbulent magnetosphere rather than from a distant shockwave. ... [ Read it >> ]

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SvarDOS, a compact open-source operating system derived from DR-DOS, has switched to using the EDRDOS kernel, marking a shift from its FreeDOS distribution roots. The change allows the operating system to fit on a single 1.4MB floppy disk while offering a network-capable package manager that can fetch from a repository of over 400 packages. ... [ Read it >> ]

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An anonymous reader writes: Guillermo Rauch, CEO of Vercel, a frontend-as-a-service product, just used the company's AI site builder to come up with a new twist on CAPTCHAs, one that invites users to play the classic single-player game DOOM and killing at least three monsters. You can check it out here.... [ Read it >> ]

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AI is unlocking ancient texts previously thought unreadable, potentially revolutionizing historical research, according to a Nature article. Neural networks have successfully decoded burned Roman scrolls from Herculaneum, deciphered ancient Chinese oracle bones, and translated vast Korean royal archives. ... [ Read it >> ]

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Belgium has become the EU first country to ban the sale of disposable vapes in an effort to stop young people from becoming addicted to nicotine and to protect the environment. From a report: The sale of disposable electronic cigarettes is banned in Belgium on health and environmental grounds from 1 January. A ban on outdoor smoking in Milan came into force on the same day, as EU countries discuss tighter controls on tobacco. ... [ Read it >> ]

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India has once again pushed back a contentious plan to limit major technology companies' control of the nation's digital payments system, extending a regulatory uncertainty that has weighed on the sector for years. From a report: The National Payments Corporation of India said on Tuesday it would extend the deadline for implementing a 30% cap on any individual app's share of transactions on the Unified Payments Interface, or UPI, the country's ubiquitous digital payments network, to December 31, 2026. ... [ Read it >> ]

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Thousands of copyrighted works from 1929, including Mickey Mouse's first speaking appearance and original versions of comic characters Popeye and Tintin, entered the U.S. public domain on January 1, 2025, as their 95-year copyright terms expired.

Popeye debuted in E.C. Segar's "Thimble Theatre" comic strip, while Tintin first appeared in Georges Remi's "Les Aventures de Tintin." These original character versions can now be freely used without permission or fees. Literary classics joining the public domain include William Faulkner's "The Sound and the Fury," Ernest Hemingway's "A Farewell to Arms," and Virginia Woolf's "A Room of One's Own." ... [ Read it >> ]

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The Securities and Exchange Commission wrote off nearly $10 billion in uncollected fines over the past decade, with $1.4 billion written off in 2023 alone, WSJ reported, citing internal data.

While the agency reported $4.9 billion in sanctions last year, it typically collects only two-thirds of imposed penalties. The SEC stopped disclosing collection rates in 2019. In fiscal 2024, it collected just 23% of $8.2 billion in reported sanctions, including a $4.4 billion judgment against cryptocurrency firm Terraform Labs that will likely go unpaid due to bankruptcy proceedings.... [ Read it >> ]

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Food prices continue climbing, posing challenges for U.S. consumers and policymakers, with average food-at-home prices recording their largest annual increase in November. While some commodities like wheat and corn have seen price drops, key breakfast staples remain expensive due to global supply disruptions from disease, weather, and reduced production.... [ Read it >> ]

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A filing in an antitrust lawsuit against some of the nation's top universities alleges the schools overcharged students by $685 million in a "price-fixing" scheme, raising serious questions about their past admission and financial aid policies. From a report: Documents and testimony from officials at Georgetown University, the University of Notre Dame, the University of Pennsylvania, MIT and other elite schools suggest they appeared to favor wealthy applicants despite their stated policy of accepting students without regard for their financial circumstances. That "need-blind" policy allowed the schools to collaborate on financial aid under federal law, but plaintiffs in the case say the colleges violated the statute by considering students' family income. ... [ Read it >> ]

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Fast Company: Insurance companies that stopped providing home coverage to hundreds of thousands of Californians in recent years as wildfires became more destructive will have to again provide policies in fire-prone areas if they want to keep doing business in California under a state regulation announced Monday. The rule will require home insurers to offer coverage in high-risk areas, something the state has never done, Insurance Commissioner Ricardo Lara's office said in a statement. Insurers will have to start increasing their coverage by 5% every two years until they hit the equivalent of 85% of their market share. That means if an insurer writes 20 out of every 100 state policies, they'd need to write 17 in a high-risk area, Lara's office said.... [ Read it >> ]

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Research from Zhejiang Agriculture and Forestry University reveals a concerning correlation between micro and nanoplastic (MNP) concentrations in damaged human tissues and various health conditions, including inflammatory bowel disease, thrombosis, and cancer. Phys.Org reports: In the study, "Mapping micro(nano)plastics in various organ systems: Their emerging links to human diseases?" published in TrAC Trends in Analytical Chemistry, investigators collected 61 available research articles for MNP detection in human tissues, plus 840 articles on MNP toxicological mechanisms. Data came from spectroscopy, microscopy, and pyrolysis-gas chromatography/mass spectrometry investigations to identify polymer types in different tissues. Toxicological studies employed cell models and animal experiments to examine oxidative stress, inflammatory responses, and related signaling pathways.... [ Read it >> ]

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Tom's Hardware reports that NATO is developing an advanced system to address the growing number of undersea cable disruptions observed in recent years. Known as HEIST (Hybrid Space-Submarine Architecture Ensuring Infosec of Telecommunications), the project is designed to significantly enhance the resilience of undersea communication networks. HEIST will enable damage detection with an accuracy of one meter, facilitate rapid data rerouting through satellite networks when disruptions occur, and establish open-source protocols to foster global collaboration. From the report: Satellites are the primary backups to undersea cables, but their bandwidth is far behind physical connections. For example, Google's latest fiber-optic lines can hit 340 terabits per second. In contrast, the frequency used by most satellites -- 12 to 18GHz -- can only handle about 5 gigabits per second or about 0.0015% of the maximum throughput of Google's fiber connection.... [ Read it >> ]

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: When the scientist and inventor Prof Archibald Montgomery Low predicted "a day in the life of a man of the future" one century ago, his prophecies were sometimes dismissed as "ruthlessly imaginative." They included, reported the London Daily News in 1925, "such horrors" as being woken by radio alarm clock; communications "by personal radio set"; breakfasting "with loudspeaker news and television glimpses of events"; shopping by moving stairways and moving pavements. One hundred years after Low's publication of his book The Future some of his forecasts were spot on. Others, including his prophecy that everyone would be wearing synthetic felt one-piece suits and hats, less so.... [ Read it >> ]

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Generation Beta, starting in 2025 and lasting until around 2039, will grow up deeply immersed in AI and smart technology, facing pressing societal challenges like climate change and global shifts while potentially being shielded from excessive screen time by tech-savvy Gen Z parents. NBC News reports: Start and end dates of generations can be murky, but Generation Beta will keep being born until around 2039. Before them, Gen Alpha stretched from 2010 to 2024, Gen Z from around 1996 to 2010, and millennials from 1981 to 1996. The upcoming generation "will inherit a world grappling with major societal challenges," wrote demographer and futurist Mark McCrindle in a blog post. "With climate change, global population shifts, and rapid urbanisation at the forefront, sustainability will not just be a preference but an expectation." [...]... [ Read it >> ]

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Alibaba is cutting prices on its large language models by up to 85% to attract more enterprise users and strengthen its position in China's competitive AI market. CNBC reports: The Hangzhou-based e-commerce firm's cloud computing division, Alibaba Cloud, said in a WeChat post that it's offering the price cuts on its visual language model, Qwen-VL, which is designed to perceive and understand both texts and images. [...] Major Chinese tech firms including Alibaba, Tencent, Baidu, JD.com, Huawei and TikTok parent company Bytedance have all launched their own large language models over the past 18 months, looking to capitalize on the hype around the technology.... [ Read it >> ]

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Venezuela's Supreme Court on Monday fined TikTok $10 million for failing to prevent viral challenges allegedly linked to the deaths of three children. It also ordered the platform to establish a local office to oversee content compliance with national laws. The Associated Press reports: Judge Tania D'Amelio said TikTok had acted in a negligent manner and gave it eight days to pay the fine [...]. The judge did not explain how Venezuela would force TikTok, whose parent company is based in China, to pay the fine. Venezuela has blocked dozens of websites in previous years for not complying with regulations set by its telecommunications commission.... [ Read it >> ]

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Electrek: A new study published in the journal Renewable Energy (PDF) uses data from the state of California to demonstrate that no blackouts occurred when wind-water-solar electricity supply exceeded 100% of demand on the state's main grid for a record 98 of 116 days from late winter to early summer 2024 for an average (maximum) of 4.84 (10.1) hours per day. Compared to the same period in 2023, solar output in California is up 31%, wind power is up 8%, and batteries are up a staggering 105%. Batteries supplied up to 12% of nighttime demand by storing and redistributing excess solar energy.... [ Read it >> ]

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The Metropolitan Transportation Authority has announced plans to retire its iconic R46 subway cars, triggering nostalgia among New Yorkers who cherished their distinctive seating arrangement. The fleet -- which has served A, C, N, R, Q, and W lines for five decades -- will be replaced by R211 cars expected for delivery in 2027. ... [ Read it >> ]

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AI ethicists are cautioning that the rise of AI may bring with it the commodification of even one's motivations. From a report: Researchers from the University of Cambridge's Leverhulme Center for the Future of Intelligence say -- in a paper published Monday in the Harvard Data Science Review journal -- the rise of generative AI, such as chatbots and virtual assistants, comes with the increasing opportunity for persuasive technologies to gain a strong foothold. ... [ Read it >> ]

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Earlier this year, Russia President Vladimir Putin called on the government to develop its own domestically produced gaming consoles with proprietary operating systems and cloud-based platforms. "With Russia heavily sanctioned and looking to promote its own products, one of its in-development consoles is powered by the Elbrus processor," notes TechSpot. However, the processor is "designed primarily for domestic applications in critical infrastructure, defense, and other sensitive areas" and "can't match high-end CPUs from Intel, AMD, and Arm." From the report: The Russian government admits that this device isn't going to be on the same level as current-gen machines. "I hope my colleagues will approach this task with full responsibility and come up with something truly groundbreaking," said Anton Gorelkin, Deputy Chairman of the State Duma Committee on Information Policy. "It is obvious to everyone: Elbrus processors are not yet at the level required to compete equally with the PS5 and Xbox, which means the solution must be unconventional." Gorelkin said that Russian consoles aren't being designed only to play ports of hundreds of old, less-demanding games. He added that they should primarily serve the purpose of promoting and popularizing domestic video game products.... [ Read it >> ]

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MicroStrategy has transformed into a "bitcoin treasury company," investing billions in bitcoin through debt and equity issuance, driving its stock price up nearly 400% in 2024 despite declining software revenues and heightened financial risks. The Guardian reports: In the summer of 2020, as the Covid-19 pandemic upended economies around the world, an obscure U.S. software firm decided to diversify. MicroStrategy, whose head office is situated next to a shopping mall and metro station in Tysons Corner, Virginia, had decided the steady business of "software as a service" was not racy enough. Instead, it would branch out by investing up to $250 million in alternative assets -- "stocks, bonds, commodities such as gold, digital assets such as bitcoin or other asset types." Less than five years later, that bitcoin side hustle has gone stratospheric. MicroStrategy's share price has swollen twentyfold, lifting its market capitalization to almost $75 billion and catapulting the stock into the Nasdaq 100 index of top technology shares.... [ Read it >> ]

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from KrebsOnSecurity: Federal authorities have arrested and indicted a 20-year-old U.S. Army soldier on suspicion of being Kiberphant0m, a cybercriminal who has been selling and leaking sensitive customer call records stolen earlier this year from AT&T and Verizon. As first reported by KrebsOnSecurity last month, the accused is a communications specialist who was recently stationed in South Korea. Cameron John Wagenius was arrested near the Army base in Fort Hood, Texas on Dec. 20, after being indicted on two criminal counts of unlawful transfer of confidential phone records. The sparse, two-page indictment (PDF) doesn't reference specific victims or hacking activity, nor does it include any personal details about the accused. But a conversation with Wagenius' mother -- Minnesota native Alicia Roen -- filled in the gaps.... [ Read it >> ]

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The long-anticipated "year of the Linux desktop" could see renewed interest in 2025 as Microsoft's planned end of support for Windows 10 approaches, potentially driving users to explore alternatives.

With Windows 10 reaching end of support in October 2025, many users will face decisions about upgrading hardware for Windows 11 or considering different operating systems entirely. Linux distributions have evolved to offer increasingly polished desktop experiences, with improving hardware compatibility and familiar user interfaces. ... [ Read it >> ]

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Traditional airlines worldwide are rapidly eliminating long-standing perks from their basic fares, blurring the line between full-service and budget carriers, according to industry analysis of 90 major airlines.

Air Canada's decision to ban standard carry-on luggage for its lowest-fare passengers from January 3 marks the latest rollback, joining United Airlines, Finnair, and others. Most legacy carriers, including British Airways, Air France, and Lufthansa, have already stripped checked baggage and seat selection from basic fares, signaling an industry-wide shift toward budget airline practices.... [ Read it >> ]

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Nobel laureate Geoffrey Hinton has backed Elon Musk's legal challenge against OpenAI, criticizing the AI startup's shift from its nonprofit origins toward a for-profit model. "OpenAI was founded as an explicitly safety-focused non-profit and made various safety related promises in its charter," Hinton said in a statement through AI advocacy group Encode. "Allowing it to tear all of that up when it becomes inconvenient sends a very bad message to other actors in the ecosystem." ... [ Read it >> ]

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Researchers have uncovered widespread manipulation of GitHub's star-rating system, with over 3.1 million fraudulent stars identified across 15,835 repositories, according to a new study by Socket, Carnegie Mellon University, and North Carolina State University.

The research team analyzed 20TB of data from GHArchive, spanning 6 billion GitHub events from 2019 to 2024, using their "StarScout" detection tool. The tool identified 278,000 accounts engaging in coordinated inauthentic behavior to artificially boost repository rankings. ... [ Read it >> ]

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Intel's market value plunged 61% in 2024, marking its worst performance since going public in 1971, while rival chipmaker Broadcom saw shares surge 111% on AI advances. Broadcom, now valued at $1.1 trillion, leverages its custom XPU chips and networking gear for major cloud providers including Google, helping companies build AI infrastructure at lower costs than Nvidia's GPUs. ... [ Read it >> ]

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The Arbor Day Foundation will plant 10 million trees across six U.S. states over four years to replace those destroyed during the devastating 2024 Atlantic hurricane season, the non-profit organization announced.

The restoration program, targeting Tennessee, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia and Florida, marks the group's largest undertaking in its 50-year history. The initiative will involve state and local governments, corporate sponsors and community volunteers. The 2024 hurricane season claimed 375 lives and caused an estimated $500 billion in damage and economic losses, making it the deadliest mainland U.S. season since Hurricane Katrina in 2005.... [ Read it >> ]

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The U.S. Justice Department has filed a complaint and announced a civil enforcement action against financial technology company Dave and its CEO Jason Wilk for alleged violations of federal law. From a report: The Justice Department and the Federal Trade Commission alleged the company lured users to its personal finance app by advertising cash advances of up to $500 that many never receive. ... [ Read it >> ]

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PlayStation isn't giving up on live service games any time soon. From a report: In a recent interview with Japanese outlet Famitsu, PlayStation Co-CEO Herman Hulst said that the company still believes in the model despite recent hiccups like Concord. "The game business is constantly changing due to various factors, including technological advances, new genres and ways of playing," Hulst said via auto translation. ... [ Read it >> ]

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Politico: Joe Biden spent the first half of his presidency enacting plans to steer at least $1.6 trillion to transform the economy and spur a clean-energy revolution -- only to watch those programs become afterthoughts in the 2024 election. Now the core of his domestic legacy stands unfinished, with hundreds of billions of dollars left to deploy, and imperiled as Donald Trump prepares to take office. ... [ Read it >> ]

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In 2025, China plans to start building a demonstration thorium-based molten-salt reactor in the Gobi Desert. IEEE Spectrum reports: The 10-megawatt reactor project, managed by the Chinese Academy of Sciences' Shanghai Institute of Applied Physics (SINAP), is scheduled to be operational by 2030, according to an environmental-impact report released by the Academy in October. The project follows a 2-MW experimental version completed in 2021 and operated since then. China's efforts put it at the forefront of both thorium-based fuel breeding and molten-salt reactors. Several companies elsewhere in the world are developing plans for this kind of fuel or reactor, but none has yet operated one. Prior to China's pilot project, the last operating molten-salt reactor was Oak Ridge National Laboratory's Molten Salt Reactor Experiment, which ran on uranium. It shut down in 1969.... [ Read it >> ]

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An anonymous reader shares a report: The global smartphone market is splitting into two distinct segments, with the mid-range segment seeing its market share plummet from 35% in 2021 to a projected 23% by 2027, according to an analysis of data compiled by Goldman Sachs.

The collapse of the mid-range segment -- $200-600 -- marks a stark reversal from 2021-22, when it held a steady 35% market share. ... [ Read it >> ]

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Astronomers using the James Webb Space Telescope have discovered Zhulong, the most distant grand-design spiral galaxy identified so far, located at a redshift of approximately 5.2. Phys.Org reports: The galaxy was named Zhulong, after a giant red solar dragon and god in Chinese mythology. [...] Its mass was found to be comparable to that of the Milky Way, which is relatively high for a galaxy that formed within one billion years after the Big Bang, as the redshift indicates. The study found that Zhulong has a classical bulge and a large face-on stellar disk with spiral arms extending across 62,000 light years. The spectral energy distribution (SED) analysis points to a quiescent-like core and a star-forming stellar disk. Furthermore, it turned out that compared to the stellar disk, the center core of Zhulong is red and has the highest stellar mass surface densities measured among quiescent galaxies. The core is quiescent, which is consistent with the expectations of inside-out galaxy growth and quenching.... [ Read it >> ]

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica, written by Jennifer Ouellette: Over the holiday weekend, all but one member of the editorial board of Elsevier's Journal of Human Evolution (JHE) resigned "with heartfelt sadness and great regret," according to Retraction Watch, which helpfully provided an online PDF of the editors' full statement. It's the 20th mass resignation from a science journal since 2023 over various points of contention, per Retraction Watch, many in response to controversial changes in the business models used by the scientific publishing industry. "This has been an exceptionally painful decision for each of us," the board members wrote in their statement. "The editors who have stewarded the journal over the past 38 years have invested immense time and energy in making JHE the leading journal in paleoanthropological research and have remained loyal and committed to the journal and our authors long after their terms ended. The [associate editors] have been equally loyal and committed. We all care deeply about the journal, our discipline, and our academic community; however, we find we can no longer work with Elsevier in good conscience."... [ Read it >> ]

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Researchers at Cornell University have developed a set of low-cost VR goggles for lab mice. Called MouseGoggles, the VR headsets will allows scientists to provide immersive virtual environments for the mice while capturing fluorescent images of the rodents' brain activity. Phys.Org reports: The goggles -- which dwarf the tiny mice in size -- were built using low-cost, off-the-shelf components like smartwatch displays and tiny lenses, researchers said. [...] About a decade ago, researchers began rigging up clunky projector screens for mice as a means of creating virtual reality environments, but these devices frequently created so much light and noise that they spoiled experiments, researchers said. "The more immersive we can make that behavioral task, the more naturalistic of a brain function we're going to be studying," senior researcher Chris Schaffer, a professor of biomedical engineering at Cornell, said in a news release.... [ Read it >> ]

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President-elect Donald Trump has asked the Supreme Court to delay the upcoming TikTok ban while he works on a "political resolution." In a legal brief (PDF) on Friday, his lawyer said Trump "opposes banning TikTok" and "seeks the ability to resolve the issues at hand through political means once he takes office." The BBC reports: Trump had met with TikTok's CEO, Shou Zi Chew, at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida last week. In his court filing on Friday, Trump said the case represents "an unprecedented, novel, and difficult tension between free-speech rights on one side, and foreign policy and national security concerns on the other." While the filing said that Trump "takes no position on the underlying merits of this dispute", it added that pushing back the 19 January deadline would grant Trump "the opportunity to pursue a political resolution" to the matter without having to resort to the court. [...]... [ Read it >> ]

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Traditional barcodes are set to be replaced by next-generation QR-style codes by 2027, offering enhanced functionality such as embedding sell-by dates, allergens, and recycling information. The Guardian reports: Tesco has started using them on some products, and other trials have suggested that waste of perishable food such as poultry can be cut by embedding sell-by dates in the new QR-style codes, allowing for more dynamic discounting. QR (quick response) codes will allow customers to instantly access more information about the product, including how to recycle batteries, clothes and building materials when tougher environmental regulations bite. But they will also put a greater demand on the world's cloud computing resources, where the extra data they contain will be stored -- meaning a potentially greater carbon footprint.... [ Read it >> ]

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