Ranga Dias, a physics professor who made headlines with claims that he had discovered a room-temperature superconductor and then was found to have engaged in research misconduct, is no longer employed by the University of Rochester. WSJ: A spokeswoman for the university confirmed on Monday that Dias is out but declined to comment on the terms of his departure. The Wall Street Journal previously reported that Rochester President Sarah Mangelsdorf had called for terminating his position in an August letter to the chair and vice chair of the university's Board of Trustees.

Dias leaves the university after years of accusations that he had misrepresented data in multiple papers. He is a senior author on at least five papers retracted in just over two years. One of those, which identified a material that functioned as a superconductor at room temperature, was pulled by the journal Nature after several co-authors told the journal that Dias had misrepresented information in the paper. Dias didn't respond to requests for comment. He has previously denied manipulating or misrepresenting data.

His departure follows a monthslong university investigation completed in February that was led by three outside experts who reviewed documents and data from Dias's laboratory computers and interviewed Dias and his collaborators. The investigative panel found evidence of misconduct in four papers in which Dias is a senior author and in a grant proposal he submitted to the National Science Foundation. Then-provost David Figlio accepted the conclusions and referred his case to a faculty committee "for potential removal." Dias sued the university in February claiming that the probe into his work was biased and didn't follow university policies.

WhatsApp's newly unsealed court documents have exposed the extensive reach of NSO Group's Pegasus spyware operation, which targeted "between hundreds and tens of thousands" of devices, according to testimony from the company's head of research and development. The Israeli surveillance firm charged government customers up to $6.8 million for one-year licenses, generating at least $31 million in revenue in 2019 alone, TechCrunch first reported.

The documents detail previously unknown hacking tools named "Hummingbird," "Eden," and "Heaven," developed specifically to compromise WhatsApp users' devices. The revelations emerge from WhatsApp's ongoing 2019 lawsuit against NSO Group for alleged violations of U.S. anti-hacking laws.

Further reading: NSO, Not Government Clients, Operates Its Spyware.

Bhutan, the tiny kingdom that introduced Gross National Happiness to the world, has a problem: young people are leaving the country in record numbers. CNN: The country boasts free health care, free education, a rising life expectancy and an economy that's grown over the last 30 years -- still, people are leaving. Prime Minister Tshering Tobgay believes it is ironically the success of Gross National Happiness that has made young Bhutanese so sought after abroad. "It is an existential crisis," he said.

Bhutan, which is about the size of Maryland, was largely isolated from the rest of the world for centuries. The kingdom was so protective of its unique Buddhist culture that it only started allowing foreign tourists to visit in the 1970s and didn't introduce television until 1999. Buddhism is the country's national religion. Bhutanese, especially older men and women, spend hours spinning prayer wheels full of Buddhist scriptures. Prayer flags flutter on hillsides and in forests, turning nature itself into a shrine. Bhutan's capital city of Thimpu still has no traffic lights. The nation's roads are shared by cars and cows.

Spirit Airlines has filed for bankruptcy protection and will attempt to reboot as it struggles to recover from the pandemic-caused swoon in travel, stiffer competition from bigger carriers, and a failed attempt to sell the airline to JetBlue. From a report: Spirit, the biggest U.S. budget airline, filed a Chapter 11 bankruptcy petition after working out terms with bondholders.

The airline has lost more than $2.5 billion since the start of 2020 and faces looming debt payments totaling more than $1 billion in 2025 and 2026. The airline said it expects to continue operating normally during the bankruptcy process.

Spirit told customers Monday they can book flights and use frequent-flyer points as they ordinarily would, and said employees and vendors would continue getting paid.

Microsoft is planning to launch a new purpose-built miniature PC for its Windows 365 cloud service next year. The Verge: Windows 365 Link is a $349 device that acts like a thin client PC to connect to the cloud and stream a version of Windows 11. The Link device is designed to be a compact, fanless, and easy-to-use cloud PC for your local monitors and peripherals. It's meant to be the ideal companion to Microsoft's Windows 365 service, which lets businesses transition employees over to virtual machines that exist in the cloud and can be streamed securely to multiple devices. Windows 365 Link cannot run local apps.

Coca-Cola's latest AI-generated Christmas advertisement has sparked criticism from creative professionals who say the promotional video lacks authenticity and artistic merit.

The video, which depicts Coca-Cola trucks in snowy landscapes and people drinking the beverage, reimagines the company's 1995 "Holidays Are Coming" campaign using AI. Three AI studios - Secret Level, Silverside AI and Wild Card - produced different versions using four generative AI models, according to Forbes.

Critics, including "Gravity Falls" creator Alex Hirsch, have condemned the company's decision to use AI instead of human artists. The controversial video has garnered over 56 million views on social media platform X. Coca-Cola defended the campaign, stating it combines "human storytellers and the power of generative AI."

In a technical blog post, Microsoft veteran Raymond Chen has explained why Windows 95's installation process required users to pass through three different operating systems -- MS-DOS, Windows 3.1, and Windows 95. The design choice stemmed from the need to support upgrades from multiple starting points while maintaining a graphical user interface throughout the process.

Rather than creating separate installers for MS-DOS, Windows 3.1, and Windows 95 users, developers opted for a unified approach using three chained setup programs. The process began with installing a minimal version of Windows 3.1 when starting from MS-DOS, followed by a 16-bit Windows application that handled core installation tasks, and concluded with a 32-bit Windows 95 program for final configuration steps.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: Perplexity is rolling out a new feature that will let Pro subscribers purchase a product without leaving its AI search engine. When searching for a product using Perplexity, Pro members based in the US can now choose a "Buy with Pro" button that will automatically order the product using saved shipping and billing information. Perplexity says all products purchased through Buy with Pro come with free shipping. For products that don't support Buy with Pro, Perplexity will redirect users to the merchant's website to complete their purchase. [...]

Users who aren't subscribed to Perplexity's $20 / month Pro option will still see other updated AI shopping features, including new product cards that will appear for product-related searches. For users in the US, these cards show a product image and its price, along with AI-written summaries of key features and reviews. Perplexity is also launching a new AI-powered "Snap to Shop" search tool that will let all users take a picture of a product and ask questions about it, similar to Google Lens. This feature will only be available to Pro users at launch. Perplexity also already lets Pro users make visual searches unrelated to shopping.

India plans to build a moon-orbiting space station by 2040 that will support crewed missions to the moon and serve as a hub for scientific research. Space Magazine reports: If all goes according to plan, the lunar space station will be completed around the same time the nation's astronauts land on the moon, with construction of a permanent base on the surface before 2050. The lunar space station appears to be the third and final phase of India's moon exploration efforts. [...]

The lunar space station may be similar to the one India plans to build in Earth orbit, known as the Bharatiya Antariksh Station, or BAS. The development of this station's first module, BAS-1, was greenlit by the Indian government in September. Officials have said the first module will be launched to low Earth orbit by 2028, and the entire station will be operational by 2035.

China has activated the world's most advanced hypergravity machine to advance studies in geological processes, material behavior, and deep-sea energy exploration. Located in Hangzhou, The Centrifugal Hypergravity and Interdisciplinary Experiment Facility (CHIEF) will be able to produce forces thousands of times stronger than Earth's gravity. Interesting Engineering reports: The facility will house three primary hypergravity centrifuges and 18 onboard units. These centrifuges, machines designed to spin containers rapidly, force heavier materials to the edges or bottom by creating hypergravity conditions, as reported by the South China Morning Post (SCMP). The first centrifuge's main engine, resembling two massive arms holding experimental baskets, has been installed. According to the Hangzhou government, the fabrication of the remaining two centrifuges and 10 onboard units is underway.

[...] CHIEF will surpass the capabilities of the US Army Corps of Engineers' hypergravity facility, which has a capacity of 1,200 g-t (gravity acceleration x ton). Once completed, CHIEF will feature a capacity of 1,900 g-t, making it the most advanced facility of its kind, reports SCMP. The project includes six hypergravity experiment chambers, each dedicated to a specific area, such as slope and dam engineering, seismic geotechnics, deep-sea exploration, deep-earth studies, geological processes, and materials processing.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: For the past couple of years, the startup has been iterating on a brand-new CRM platform and making everything available on GitHub under a permissive AGPLv3 license. While Twenty doesn't have all the features that you can find in Salesforce [comparison], the company is slowly building a community of CRM and open source enthusiasts around it, with more than 300 contributors in the last year and 20,000 stars on GitHub. [...] Twenty is trying to build a flexible platform that can be tweaked to every company's needs and that can serve as a basis for other tools and use cases. Each entry in a CRM is an object. It can be a standard, pre-defined object like a person or a company. But customers can also create their own custom objects.

If you're a conference organizer, you can create a conference object. If you're a restaurant chain manager, you can create a restaurant object. As you may have guessed, Twenty also lets you create custom fields for each object. This way, it's easier to capture and compare data across multiple entries. This customer data can be viewed in Twenty directly in list or Kanban views. People can sort and filter entries, add tasks and notes, all the usual CRM stuff. But data in Twenty can also be reused with GraphQL and REST APIs. And that's how you can extend Twenty beyond its CRM roots. Eventually, Twenty hopes there will be an active ecosystem of developers working on extensions and plugins to build a proper alternative to the Salesforce product suite. But we're not there yet. "Building a CRM is a daunting task, especially for us because of the way we've chosen to do it. We're building a platform, and we're not taking any shortcut. In fact, we still need to work on workflows, on automation and more," [said Twenty co-founder and CEO Felix Malfait]. "People often don't understand why Salesforce is so big, so powerful," Malfait said. Salesforce's platform utilizes a flexible data model -- a programming language called Apex to execute code on Salesforce's servers and a front-end customization framework.

"So when you have these three bricks you can store data, do logic on the back end, and display the result as you like," Malfait said. "It means that you can do everything. And that's what we want to enable in the long term."

An anonymous reader shares a report: Earlier this year I had one of those encounters which, afterwards, I just couldn't stop thinking about. Eight months and some digging later, I have decided to write about it. My meeting was with an American businessman called Tom Kearney, who was on a pavement in central London one Christmas when he was whacked on the head so hard that he fell to the ground, spent weeks in a coma, and only just survived. Had he been mugged? Not quite. He'd been hit by the giant wing mirror of a London bus.

[...] The most recent data show that 86 people died or were badly injured in bus collisions in London between 10 December 2023 and 31 March 2024. Kearney's analysis of TfL data suggests that around three people a day are hospitalised after bus safety incidents. That doesn't feel good, even though it's tiny in comparison to the 1.8bn annual passenger journeys. Compared with other world cities like New York and Paris the capital's buses rank in the top quartile for financial efficiency but the bottom quartile for collisions per kilometre. And the number of collisions in London has increased in the past couple of years, despite buses travelling fewer miles.

Could this have anything to do with the way that bus contracts prioritise speed? Last week, hundreds of bus drivers marched to TfL headquarters to demand better working conditions and the right to report safety concerns "without fear of retribution from TfL or employers." Drivers described the pressure of long shifts, few breaks and having to drive in sometimes blistering heat, all while being shouted at over a monitor by controllers who want them to make up the time to the next stop, and keep the right amount of distance between their bus and next. It's not surprising that a third of bus drivers, before the pandemic, reported having had a "close call" from fatigue.

With the government about to export the London franchise model to other parts of the country, someone in Whitehall needs to take a look. Michael Liebreich, a former McKinsey consultant who sat on the TfL board for six years, believes that TfL's contracting out model is "institutionally unsafe." Bus drivers are under such pressure, he thinks, that some may break the speed limit and overtake cyclists dangerously.

Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory's "El Capitan" supercomputer is now ranked as the world's most powerful, exceeding a High-Performance Linpack (HPL) score of 1.742 exaflops on the latest Top500 list. Engadget reports: El Capitan is only the third "exascale" computer, meaning it can perform more than a quintillion calculations in a second. The other two, called Frontier and Aurora, claim the second and third place slots on the TOP500 now. Unsurprisingly, all of these massive machines live within government research facilities: El Capitan is housed at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory; Frontier is at Oak Ridge National Laboratory; Argonne National Laboratory claims Aurora. [Cray Computing] had a hand in all three systems.

El Capitan has more than 11 million combined CPU and GPU cores based on AMD 4th-gen EPYC processors. These 24-core processors are rated at 1.8GHz each and have AMD Instinct M1300A APUs. It's also relatively efficient, as such systems go, squeezing out an estimated 58.89 Gigaflops per watt. If you're wondering what El Capitan is built for, the answer is addressing nuclear stockpile safety, but it can also be used for nuclear counterterrorism.

Roblox has introduced stricter safety measures for users under 13, including restricting direct messaging outside of games and experiences, regardless of parental permission. These updates aim to address criticism over child safety and regain trust, following a Bloomberg investigation highlighting predator risks on the platform. TechCrunch reports: During a press briefing, the company explained that users under the age of 13 will still be able to access in-game chats because Roblox believes that communication is fundamental to gameplay on the platform. Parents can change this setting if they wish. In addition, Roblox is age-gating certain experiences for users under 13. The new restrictions apply to games and experiences that are designed for socializing with people outside of a person's friends list, such as experiences that allow free-form writing or drawing.

"The reason that we've made this decision is that we've seen that some of both the content and the conduct in these experiences is more appropriate for older users and teens," said Dina Lamdany, Roblox's product lead for user settings and parental controls, during the press briefing. Although Roblox already offers some parental controls, it previously only allowed them to be managed from a child's account. Now, the company is introducing remote management, which allows parents to adjust controls and see their child's activity from their own devices. To do so, parents can link their Roblox account to their child's account after verifying themselves using an ID or credit card. Parents can now also see their child's average weekly screen time and set daily time limits. They can also see their child's Friends list.

According to Bloomberg, the U.S. Justice Department wants Google to sell off its Chrome browser as part of its ongoing search monopoly case. The recommendations will be made official on Wednesday. 9to5Google reports: At the top of the list is having Google sell Chrome "because it represents a key access point through which many people use its search engine." There are many questions about how that works, including what the impact on the underlying Chromium codebase would be. Would Google still be allowed to develop the open-source project by which many other browsers, like Microsoft Edge use? "The government has the option to decide whether a Chrome sale is necessary at a later date if some of the other aspects of the remedy create a more competitive market," reports Bloomberg. Google, which plans to appeal, previously said that "splitting off Chrome or Android would break them."

Bloomberg reports that "antitrust officials pulled back from a more severe option that would have forced Google to sell off Android." However, the government wants Google to "uncouple its Android smartphone operating system from its other products, including search and its Google Play mobile app store, which are now sold as a bundle." Meanwhile, other recommendations include licensing Google Search data and results, as well as allowing websites that are indexed for Search to opt out of AI training.