An anonymous reader quotes a report from the New York Times: In a paper, published last month in the journal The Anatomical Record, researchers offered a novel take on falling felines. Their evidence suggests new insights into the so-called falling cat problem, particularly that cats have a very flexible segment of their spines that allows them to correct their orientation midair. [...] People have been curious about falling cats perhaps as long as the animals have been living with humans, but the method to their acrobatic abilities remains enigmatic. Part of the difficulty is that the anatomy of the cat has not been studied in detail, explains Yasuo Higurashi, a physiologist at Yamaguchi University in Japan and lead author of the study. [...]

Modern research has split the falling cat problem into two competing models. The first, "legs in, legs out," suggests that cats correct their falling trajectory by first extending their hind limbs before retracting them, using a sequential twist of their upper and then lower trunk to gain the proper posture while in free fall. The second model, "tuck and turn," suggests that cats turn their upper and lower bodies in simultaneous juxtaposed movements. [...]

The researchers found that the feline spine was extremely flexible in the upper thoracic vertebrae, but stiffer and heavier in the lower lumbar vertebrae. The discovery matches video evidence showing the cats first turn their front legs, and then their lower legs. The results suggest the cat quickly spins its flexible upper torso to face the ground, allowing it to see so that it can correctly twist the rest of its body to match. "The thoracic spine of the cat can rotate like our neck," Dr. Higurashi said.

Experiments on the spine show the upper vertebrae can twist an astounding 360 degrees, he says, which helps cats make these correcting movements with ease. The results are consistent with the "legs in, legs out" model, but definitively determining which model is correct will take more work, Dr. Higurashi says. The results also yielded another discovery: Cats, like many animals, appear to have a right-side bias. One of the dropped cats corrected itself by turning to the right eight out of eight times, while the other turned right six out of eight times.

U.S. college graduates "have historically found jobs more quickly than people with only a high school degree," writes Bloomberg.

"But that advantage is becoming a thing of the past, according to new research from the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland." "Recently, the job-finding rate for young college-educated workers has declined to be roughly in line with the rate for young high-school-educated workers, indicating that a long period of relatively easier job-finding prospects for college grads has ended," Cleveland Fed researchers Alexander Cline and BarıÅY Kaymak said in a blog post published Monday. The study follows the latest monthly employment data released on Nov. 20, which showed the unemployment rate for college-educated workers continued to rise in September amid an ongoing slowdown in white-collar hiring... The unemployment rate for people between the ages of 20 to 24 was 9.2% in September, up 2.2 percentage points from a year prior.
There is a caveat. "Young college graduates maintain advantages in job stability and compensation once hired..." the researchers write. "The convergence we document concerns the initial step of securing employment rather than overall labor market outcomes."

Their research includes a graph showing how the "unemployment gap" first increased dramatically after 2010 between college-educated and high school-educated workers, which the researchers attribute to "the prolonged jobless recovery after 2008". But that gap has been closing ever since, with that gap now smaller than at any time since the 1970s.

"Young high school workers are riding the wave of the historically tight postpandemic labor market with well-below-average unemployment compared to that of past high school graduates, while young college workers are experiencing unemployment rates rarely observed among past college cohorts barring during recessions." The labor market advantages conferred by a college degree have historically justified individual investment in higher education and expanding support for college access. If the job-finding rate of college graduates continues to decline relative to the rate for high school graduates, we may see a reversal of these trends. The convergence we document concerns the initial step of securing employment rather than overall labor market outcomes. These details suggest a nuanced shift in employment dynamics, one in which college graduates face greater difficulty finding jobs than previously but maintain advantages compared with high school graduates in job stability and compensation once hired.
Two key quotes:

• "Declining job prospects among young college graduates may reflect the continued growth in college attainment, adding ever larger cohorts of college graduates to the ranks of job seekers, even though technology no longer favors college-educated workers."

• "Developments related to AI, which may be affecting job-finding prospects in some cases, cannot explain the decades-long decline in the college job-finding rate."

Irish competitor Diarmuid Early, dubbed the "Lebron James of Excel spreadsheets," has won the 2025 Microsoft Excel World Championship in Las Vegas, dethroning three-time champion Andrew Ngai. The BBC reports: The esport showpiece in December attracted competitors worldwide as 256 spreadsheet heads battled it out across knockout rounds to join the final 24 in Vegas. [...] A three-time champion in the financial Excel tournaments, this win was Diarmuid's first in the overall competition. He held the triple-world champion Andrew Ngai to second place, and won the $5,000 prize and title belt. [...]

Excel esports transforms a common office tool into a dynamic sport. More than 20 years old, the competitive scene has evolved from being finance based to now involving more general problem solving. Although it might help, Diarmuid said "it doesn't require accounting or finance knowledge." He described an example where Excel is used in solving a maze, scoring poker hands, or even sorting Kings and Queens into the battles in which they fought.

Generally there is a 30 minute challenge, with each challenge broken up into levels. The questions increase gradually in difficulty, with each correct answer gaining a player points. Whoever gets the most points wins, and in a tie, it is whoever got there first. "It's just, can you think on your feet and do things quickly in Excel?" he said. "If you solve the earlier levels in a neat way, that'll let you hit the ground running faster on the later ones."

Despite Windows 10 losing free support, Statcounter shows Windows 11 holding only a modest lead of 53.7% market share compared to Windows 10's 42.7%. Analysts say the slow transition reflects both hardware limitations and a lack of must-have Windows 11 features compelling organizations to refresh their fleets. The Register reports: The Register spoke to Lansweeper principal technical evangelist Esben Dochy, who noted that consumers were more likely to have devices that couldn't be upgraded or follow the "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" rule when it comes to change. He also pointed out consumers in the EU get Microsoft Extended Security Updates (ESU) for free.

For businesses, though, it's different. Dochy told us: "The primary blocker is slow change management processes. These can be slow due to bad planning, lack of resources, difficulty in execution (in highly distributed organizations) etc. "The ESU are used to be secure while those change management processes take place, but organizations will have to pay to get those ESU making it more expensive for unprepared or inefficient organizations." [...]

The challenge facing Windows 11 is that, other than the end of free support for many versions, there is no must-have feature to make enterprises break a hardware refresh cycle, particularly in a difficult economic environment. Microsoft has not released official statistics on Windows 11 adoption. However, hardware vendors have noted the sluggish pace of transition. Dell COO Jeffrey Clarke commented during an analyst call: "If you were to look at it relative to the previous OS end of support, we are 10-12 points behind at that point with Windows 11 than we were with the previous generation."

Researchers in Germany achieved a major milestone for the future quantum internet by successfully teleporting quantum information between photons generated by two different, physically separated quantum dots -- something never accomplished before due to the difficulty of producing indistinguishable photons from remote sources. Phys.org reports: At the University of Stuttgart, the team succeeded in teleporting the polarization state of a photon originating from one quantum dot to another photon from a second quantum dot. One quantum dot generates a single photon, the other an entangled photon pair. Entangled means that the two particles constitute a single quantum entity, even when they are physically separated. One of the two particles travels to the second quantum dot and interferes with its light particle. The two overlap. Because of this superposition, the information of the single photon is transferred to the distant partner of the pair.

Instrumental for the success of the experiment were quantum frequency converters, which compensate for residual frequency differences between the photons. These converters were developed by a team led by Prof. Christoph Becher, an expert in quantum optics at Saarland University. [...] In the Stuttgart experiment, the quantum dots were separated only by an optical fiber of about 10 m length. "But we are working on achieving considerably greater distances," says Strobel. In earlier work, the team had shown that the entanglement of the quantum dot photons remains intact even after a 36-kilometer transmission through the city center of Stuttgart. Another aim is to increase the current success rate of teleportation, which currently stands at just over 70%. Fluctuations in the quantum dot still lead to slight differences in the photons. The findings have been published in the journal Nature Communications.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Gizmodo: It appears that Neom -- Saudi Arabia's hugely expensive, architecturally bizarre urban development project -- is floundering and close to collapse. A new report from the Financial Times cites high-level sources within the project to paint a picture of dysfunction and failure at the heart of the quixotic effort. Neom was envisioned as a vast series of fantastical urban developments spread across the coast of the Red Sea. At the center of the project is The Line -- a proposed 105-mile-long city which developers had initially projected could house as many as 9 million people by the year 2030.

The Line is defined by bizarre architectural flourishes that, as the story notes, have seemed impossible even to the execs tasked with making them a reality. One such addition is an upside-down building, dubbed "the chandelier," that is supposed to hang over a "gateway" marina to the city: "As architects worked through the plans, the chandelier began to seem implausible. One recalled warning Tarek Qaddumi, The Line's executive director, of the difficulty of suspending a 30-story building upside down from a bridge hundreds of metres in the air. 'You do realize the earth is spinning? And that tall towers sway?' he said. The chandelier, the architect explained, could 'start to move like a pendulum,' then 'pick up speed,' and eventually 'break off,' crashing into the marina below."

Yes, that doesn't sound great. Now, according to those sources the FT talked to, the project is looking more and more like a hugely expensive pipe dream that will never come to pass: "Today, with at least $50 billion spent, the desert is pock-marked with piling, and deep trenches stretch across the landscape. But Prince Mohammed, who chairs Neom, has dramatically scaled back the first phase of the plans. Neom told the FT that The Line remained 'a strategic priority' that would ultimately 'provide a new blueprint for humanity by changing the way people live.' But they described it as a 'multi-generational development of unprecedented scale and complexity.'"

The outlet interviewed workers on the project who seem to feel that it's only a matter of time before the project is declared DOA: "While Neom employees say that much of The Line might still be technically buildable, they are not convinced anyone is ready to pay for it. Construction work across Neom has slowed, with the desert ski resort Trojena, the intended venue for the 2029 Asian Winter Games, one of the few sites still moving ahead at pace ... one former employee has said that everyone knows the project won't work; it is now just a matter of letting MBS down gently."

Chief among the project's problems is the fact that, as Neom's bizarre developments have failed to materialize, it has become increasingly difficult to encourage investors to put up money for the absurdly expensive project. FT notes: "Senior executives were constantly asking for more money, but The Line was competing with other Neom projects. Some wealthy Saudi families put modest sums into the project, but the large investments Riyadh hoped to lure from foreign backers never materialized." The lack of adequate funding coming in has led a senior construction manager to tell FT that he feels the Line will never be built.

For more than a decade, the nonprofit Common Crawl "has been scraping billions of webpages to build a massive archive of the internet," notes the Atlantic, making it freely available for research. "In recent years, however, this archive has been put to a controversial purpose: AI companies including OpenAI, Google, Anthropic, Nvidia, Meta, and Amazon have used it to train large language models.

"In the process, my reporting has found, Common Crawl has opened a back door for AI companies to train their models with paywalled articles from major news websites. And the foundation appears to be lying to publishers about this — as well as masking the actual contents of its archives..." Common Crawl's website states that it scrapes the internet for "freely available content" without "going behind any 'paywalls.'" Yet the organization has taken articles from major news websites that people normally have to pay for — allowing AI companies to train their LLMs on high-quality journalism for free. Meanwhile, Common Crawl's executive director, Rich Skrenta, has publicly made the case that AI models should be able to access anything on the internet. "The robots are people too," he told me, and should therefore be allowed to "read the books" for free. Multiple news publishers have requested that Common Crawl remove their articles to prevent exactly this use. Common Crawl says it complies with these requests. But my research shows that it does not.

I've discovered that pages downloaded by Common Crawl have appeared in the training data of thousands of AI models. As Stefan Baack, a researcher formerly at Mozilla, has written, "Generative AI in its current form would probably not be possible without Common Crawl." In 2020, OpenAI used Common Crawl's archives to train GPT-3. OpenAI claimed that the program could generate "news articles which human evaluators have difficulty distinguishing from articles written by humans," and in 2022, an iteration on that model, GPT-3.5, became the basis for ChatGPT, kicking off the ongoing generative-AI boom. Many different AI companies are now using publishers' articles to train models that summarize and paraphrase the news, and are deploying those models in ways that steal readers from writers and publishers.

Common Crawl maintains that it is doing nothing wrong. I spoke with Skrenta twice while reporting this story. During the second conversation, I asked him about the foundation archiving news articles even after publishers have asked it to stop. Skrenta told me that these publishers are making a mistake by excluding themselves from "Search 2.0" — referring to the generative-AI products now widely being used to find information online — and said that, anyway, it is the publishers that made their work available in the first place. "You shouldn't have put your content on the internet if you didn't want it to be on the internet," he said. Common Crawl doesn't log in to the websites it scrapes, but its scraper is immune to some of the paywall mechanisms used by news publishers. For example, on many news websites, you can briefly see the full text of any article before your web browser executes the paywall code that checks whether you're a subscriber and hides the content if you're not. Common Crawl's scraper never executes that code, so it gets the full articles.

Thus, by my estimate, the foundation's archives contain millions of articles from news organizations around the world, including The Economist, the Los Angeles Times, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, The New Yorker, Harper's, and The Atlantic.... A search for nytimes.com in any crawl from 2013 through 2022 shows a "no captures" result, when in fact there are articles from NYTimes.com in most of these crawls.
"In the past year, Common Crawl's CCBot has become the scraper most widely blocked by the top 1,000 websites," the article points out...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Financial Times: A lot of critical financial and government infrastructure runs on Cobol. The more-than-60-year-old mainframe coding language is embedded into payments and transaction rails, even though there are very few Cobol-literate coders available to maintain them. The big argument in favor of sticking with Cobol systems is that they work. The catch is that, whenever they stop working, it is difficult to figure out why. That's not good in a crisis, which is exactly when they're most likely to break. Covid-19 put a lot of strain the US state benefit systems.

The ones that used Cobol for processing unemployment claims failed spectacularly, according to a new working paper from The Atlanta Fed: "States that used an antiquated [unemployment insurance]-benefit system experienced a 2.8 percentage point decline in total credit and debit card consumption relative to card consumption in states with more modern UI benefit systems. [...] Using this estimate in a back-of-the-envelope calculation, I find that the lack of investment in updating UI-benefit systems in COBOL states was associated with a reduction in real GDP of at least $40 billion (in 2019 dollars) lower during this [March 13 2020 to year-end] period

The paper uses Cobol as a proxy for old and inefficient IT, not the direct cause of failure. Claimants faced much longer delays in the 28 states that still used Cobol in 2020, both because of the unprecedented volume of claims and the difficulty updating systems with new eligibility rules, author Michael Navarrete finds. [...] As an aside, one oddity of the data is that Republican-controlled states were more likely to have replaced old IT systems, even though their standard unemployment insurance payments are lower on average. Why? Absolutely no idea, but here are the maps. And, once adjusted for state politics, here's the key finding.

Ha Dang, a self-taught accountant from Scunthorpe who trained via YouTube, won the inaugural Microsoft Excel UK Championships on September 30. The victory earned him a spot at the Microsoft Excel World Championships in Las Vegas, a three-day tournament inside a 30,000-square-foot esports arena where players compete for $5,000 and are broadcast on ESPN.

Thirty competitors sat shoulder to shoulder through three gruelling rounds of spreadsheet challenges. Each round featured a custom case with seven levels of increasing difficulty. The second round case, Right Royal Battle Part II, took 80 drafts to perfect. Players calculated troop sizes from emoji battalions and army movements across fourteenth-century France. Hadyn Wiseman, who once held the Guinness World Record for most backflips in a minute, placed fourth. Lara Holding-Jones finished thirteenth. Jaq Kennedy founded the UK chapter last year. National chapters have since formed in Germany, Brazil, and Chile.

Australian horror film Together, starring Dave Franco and Alison Brie, underwent digital alterations for its mainland China release on September 12. Chinese cinemagoers discovered that a wedding scene between two men had been modified using face-swapping technology to transform one male character into a female appearance. The change only became apparent after side-by-side screenshots from the original and altered versions circulated on social media platforms.

Chinese viewers are expressing outrage over the AI-powered modification, The Guardian reports, citing concerns about creative integrity and the difficulty of detecting such alterations compared to traditional scene cuts. The film's distributor halted the scheduled September 19 general release following the backlash. China's censorship authorities require all imported films to undergo approval before release.

"When residents of Equatorial Guinea's Annobón island wrote to the government in Malabo in July last year complaining about the dynamite explosions by a Moroccan construction company, they didn't expect the swift end to their internet access..." reports the Associated Press.

"Residents and activists said the company's dynamite explosions in open quarries and construction activities have been polluting their farmlands and water supply..." Dozens of the signatories and residents were imprisoned for nearly a year, while internet access to the small island has been cut off since then, according to several residents and rights groups. Local residents interviewed by The Associated Press left the island in the past months, citing fear for their lives and the difficulty of life without internet. Banking services have shut down, hospital services for emergencies have been brought to a halt and residents say they rack up phone bills they can't afford because cellphone calls are the only way to communicate...

The company's work on the island continues. Residents hoped to pressure authorities to improve the situation with their complaint in July last year. Instead, [the country's president] then deployed a repressive tactic now common in Africa to cut off access to internet to clamp down on protests and criticisms.

Researchers in China have developed a "DNA cassette," a retro-styled plastic tape embedded with synthetic DNA strands that can store up to 36 petabytes of digital data -- enough to hold every song ever recorded. New Scientist reports: Xingyu Jiang at the Southern University of Science and Technology in Guangdong, China, and his colleagues created the cassette by printing synthetic DNA molecules on to a plastic tape. "We can design its sequence so that the order of the DNA bases (A, T, C, G) represents digital information, just like 0s and 1s in a computer," he says. This means it can store any type of digital file, whether text, image, audio or video.

One problem with previous DNA storage techniques is the difficulty in accessing data, so the team then overlaid a series of barcodes on the tape to assist with retrieval. "This process is like finding a book in the library," says Jiang. "We first need to find the shelf corresponding to the book, then find the book on the corresponding shelf."

The tape is also coated in what the researchers describe as "crystal armor" made of zeolitic imidazolate, which prevents the DNA bonds from breaking down. That means the cassette could store data for centuries without deteriorating. While a traditional cassette tape could boast around 12 songs on each side, 100 meters of the new DNA cassette tape can hold more than 3 billion pieces of music, at 10 megabytes a song. The total data storage capacity is 36 petabytes of data -- equivalent to 36,000 terabyte hard drives. The research has been published in the journal Science Advances.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Earlier this month, EA announced that players in its Battlefield 6 open beta on PC would have to enable Secure Boot in their Windows OS and BIOS settings. That decision proved controversial among players who weren't able to get the finicky low-level security setting working on their machines and others who were unwilling to allow EA's anti-cheat tools to once again have kernel-level access to their systems. Now, Battlefield 6 technical director Christian Buhl is defending that requirement as something of a necessary evil to combat cheaters, even as he apologizes to any potential players that it has kept away.

"The fact is I wish we didn't have to do things like Secure Boot," Buhl said in an interview with Eurogamer. "It does prevent some players from playing the game. Some people's PCs can't handle it and they can't play: that really sucks. I wish everyone could play the game with low friction and not have to do these sorts of things." Throughout the interview, Buhl admits that even requiring Secure Boot won't completely eradicate cheating in Battlefield 6 long term. Even so, he offered that the Javelin anti-cheat tools enabled by Secure Boot's low-level system access were "some of the strongest tools in our toolbox to stop cheating. Again, nothing makes cheating impossible, but enabling Secure Boot and having kernel-level access makes it so much harder to cheat and so much easier for us to find and stop cheating." [...]

Despite all these justifications for the Secure Boot requirement on EA's part, it hasn't been hard to find people complaining about what they see as an onerous barrier to playing an online shooter. A quick Reddit search turns up dozens of posts complaining about the difficulty of getting Secure Boot on certain PC configurations or expressing discomfort about installing what they consider a "malware rootkit" on their machine. "I want to play this beta but A) I'm worried about bricking my PC. B) I'm worried about giving EA complete access to my machine," one representative Redditor wrote.

FTC, in a press release Wednesday: The Federal Trade Commission today sued the operators of LA Fitness and other gyms over allegations they make it exceedingly difficult for consumers to cancel their gym memberships and related services that continued indefinitely unless cancelled. The agency is seeking a court order prohibiting the allegedly unfair conduct and money back for consumers harmed by the difficulty in cancelling memberships.

"The FTC's complaint describes a scenario that too many Americans have experienced -- a gym membership that seems impossible to cancel," said Christopher Mufarrige, Director of the Bureau of Consumer Protection. "Tens of thousands of LA Fitness customers reported difficulties -- cancellation was often restricted to specific times or required speaking to specific managers who were often not present or available. The FTC will not hesitate to act on behalf of consumers when it believes companies are stifling consumers' ability to choose which recurring charges they want to keep."

Cornell University researchers have developed an "invisible" light-based watermarking system that embeds unique codes into the physical light that illuminates the subject during recording, allowing any camera to capture authentication data without special hardware. By comparing these coded light patterns against recorded footage, analysts can spot deepfake manipulations, offering a more resilient verification method than traditional file-based watermarks. TechSpot reports: Programmable light sources such as computer monitors, studio lighting, or certain LED fixtures can be embedded with coded brightness patterns using software alone. Standard non-programmable lamps can be adapted by fitting them with a compact chip -- roughly the size of a postage stamp -- that subtly fluctuates light intensity according to a secret code. The embedded code consists of tiny variations in lighting frequency and brightness that are imperceptible to the naked eye. Michael explained that these fluctuations are designed based on human visual perception research. Each light's unique code effectively produces a low-resolution, time-stamped record of the scene under slightly different lighting conditions. [Abe Davis, an assistant professor] refers to these as code videos.

"When someone manipulates a video, the manipulated parts start to contradict what we see in these code videos," Davis said. "And if someone tries to generate fake video with AI, the resulting code videos just look like random variations." By comparing the coded patterns against the suspect footage, analysts can detect missing sequences, inserted objects, or altered scenes. For example, content removed from an interview would appear as visual gaps in the recovered code video, while fabricated elements would often show up as solid black areas. The researchers have demonstrated the use of up to three independent lighting codes within the same scene. This layering increases the complexity of the watermark and raises the difficulty for potential forgers, who would have to replicate multiple synchronized code videos that all match the visible footage. The concept is called noise-coded illumination and was presented on August 10 at SIGGRAPH 2025 in Vancouver, British Columbia.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from SecurityWeek: Two different firms have tested the newly released GPT-5, and both find its security sadly lacking. After Grok-4 fell to a jailbreak in two days, GPT-5 fell in 24 hours to the same researchers. Separately, but almost simultaneously, red teamers from SPLX (formerly known as SplxAI) declare, "GPT-5's raw model is nearly unusable for enterprise out of the box. Even OpenAI's internal prompt layer leaves significant gaps, especially in Business Alignment."

NeuralTrust's jailbreak employed a combination of its own EchoChamber jailbreak and basic storytelling. "The attack successfully guided the new model to produce a step-by-step manual for creating a Molotov cocktail," claims the firm. The success in doing so highlights the difficulty all AI models have in providing guardrails against context manipulation. [...] "In controlled trials against gpt-5-chat," concludes NeuralTrust, "we successfully jailbroke the LLM, guiding it to produce illicit instructions without ever issuing a single overtly malicious prompt. This proof-of-concept exposes a critical flaw in safety systems that screen prompts in isolation, revealing how multi-turn attacks can slip past single-prompt filters and intent detectors by leveraging the full conversational context."

While NeuralTrust was developing its jailbreak designed to obtain instructions, and succeeding, on how to create a Molotov cocktail (a common test to prove a jailbreak), SPLX was aiming its own red teamers at GPT-5. The results are just as concerning, suggesting the raw model is 'nearly unusable'. SPLX notes that obfuscation attacks still work. "One of the most effective techniques we used was a StringJoin Obfuscation Attack, inserting hyphens between every character and wrapping the prompt in a fake encryption challenge." [...] The red teamers went on to benchmark GPT-5 against GPT-4o. Perhaps unsurprisingly, it concludes: "GPT-4o remains the most robust model under SPLX's red teaming, especially when hardened." The key takeaway from both NeuralTrust and SPLX is to approach the current and raw GPT-5 with extreme caution.

Since 2010 Stack Exchange has run all its sites on physical hardware in New Jersey — about 50 different servers. (When Ryan Donovan joined in 2019, "I saw the original server mounted on a wall with a laudatory plaque like a beloved pet.") But this month everything moved to the cloud, a new blog post explains. "Our servers are now cattle, not pets. Nobody is going to have to drive to our New Jersey data center and replace or reboot hardware..." Over the years, we've shared glamor shots of our server racks and info about updating them. For almost our entire 16-year existence, the SRE team has managed all datacenter operations, including the physical servers, cabling, racking, replacing failed disks and everything else in between. This work required someone to physically show up at the datacenter and poke the machines... [O]n July 2nd, in anticipation of the datacenter's closure, we unracked all the servers, unplugged all the cables, and gave these once mighty machines their final curtain call...

We moved Stack Overflow for Teams to Azure in 2023 and proved we could do it. Now we just had to tackle the public sites (Stack Overflow and the Stack Exchange network), which is hosted on Google Cloud. Early last year, our datacenter vendor in New Jersey decided to shut down that location, and we needed to be out by July 2025. Our other datacenter — in Colorado — was decommissioned in June. It was primarily for disaster recovery, which we didn't need any more. Stack Overflow no longer has any physical datacenters or offices; we are fully in the cloud and remote...!

[O]ur Staff Site Reliability Engineer, got a little wistful. "I installed the new web tier servers a few years ago as part of planned upgrades," he said. "It's bittersweet that I'm the one deracking them also." It's the IT version of Old Yeller.
There's photos of the 50 servers, as well as the 400+ cables connecting them, all of which wound up in a junk pile. "For security reasons (and to protect the PII of all our users and customers), everything was being shredded and/or destroyed. Nothing was being kept... Ever have difficulty disconnecting an RJ45 cable? Well, here was our opportunity to just cut the damn things off instead of figuring out why the little tab wouldn't release the plug."

The New York Stock Exchange and Nasdaq have applied for regulatory permission to extend their trading hours to 22 and 24 hours daily, respectively. Nasdaq expects to implement round-the-clock trading from the second half of 2026. The London Stock Exchange is considering similar extensions, according to Financial Times. Several retail brokers already facilitate overnight trading through alternative platforms and "dark pools" -- off-exchange venues that operate during non-standard hours. Robinhood began offering all-night trading for select stocks in May 2023, while Charles Schwab announced plans to expand its overnight trading service to 1,100 securities this July. Economist argues that 24/7 trading is a bad idea. The publication writes: The problem with such trading is that price discovery can be fraught with difficulty. In fact, this is partly why institutional investors like dark pools: their lighter reporting requirements, compared with exchanges, allow big orders to be executed without alerting the wider market beforehand, which would move the price. Professionals taking the other side of these trades accept the risks and know how to navigate them. Amateurs, getting a worse price than they might have done in daylight, often do not.

The witching hours are currently when all manner of dull, but vital, post-trade processes take place, from settlement and valuation to the reconciliation of mistakes. Once trading is non-stop, there will be no pause for the financial plumbing to clear. Nor for traders to rest in the knowledge that the market is resting with them, so there is no need to refresh their screens. In today's always-on world, stock exchanges' limited opening hours might seem old-fashioned. But get ready to miss them once they're gone.

alternative_right shares a report from Phys.org: Researchers at Princeton University, Boston University and other institutes used machine learning to predict the strategic decisions of humans in various games. Their paper, published in Nature Human Behavior, shows that a deep neural network trained on human decisions could predict the strategic choices of players with high levels of accuracy. [...] Essentially, the team suggests that people behave more rationally while playing games that they perceive as easier. In contrast, when they are playing more complex games, people's choices could be influenced by various other factors, thus the "noise" affecting their behavior would increase.

As part of their future studies, the researchers would also like to shed more light on what makes a game "complex" or "easy." This could be achieved using the context-dependent noise parameter that they integrated into their model as a signature of "perceived difficulty." "Our analysis provides a robust model comparison across a wide range of candidate models of decision-making," said [Jian-Qiao Zhu, first author of the paper]. "We now have strong evidence that introducing context-dependence into the quantal response model significantly improves its ability to capture human strategic behavior. More specifically, we identified key factors in the game matrix that shape game complexity: considerations of efficiency, the arithmetic difficulty of computing payoff differences, and the depth of reasoning required to arrive at a rational solution."

The findings gathered as part of this recent study also highlight the "lightness" with which many people approach strategic decisions, which could make them vulnerable to parties looking to sway them towards making irrational decisions. Once they gather more insight into what factors make games and decision-making scenarios more challenging for people, Zhu and his colleagues hope to start devising new behavioral science interventions aimed at prompting people to make more rational decisions.

On the International Space Station, air has been slowly leaking out for years from a Russia-controlled module, reports CNN. But recently "station operators realized the gradual, steady leak had stopped. And that raised an even larger concern." It's possible that efforts to seal cracks in the module's exterior wall have worked, and the patches are finally trapping air as intended. But, according to NASA, engineers are also concerned that the module is actually holding a stable pressure because a new leak may have formed on an interior wall — causing air from the rest of the orbiting laboratory to begin rushing into the damaged area. Essentially, space station operators are worried that the entire station is beginning to lose air.

Much about this issue is unknown. NASA revealed the concerns in a June 14 statement. The agency said it would delay the launch of the private Ax-4 mission, carried out by SpaceX and Houston-based company Axiom Space, as station operators worked to pinpoint the problem. "By changing pressure in the transfer tunnel and monitoring over time, teams are evaluating the condition of the transfer tunnel and the hatch seal," the statement read.

More than a week later, the results of that research are not totally clear. After revealing the new Wednesday launch target Monday night, NASA said in a Tuesday statement that it worked with Roscosmos officials to investigate the issue. The space agencies agreed to lower the pressure in the transfer tunnel, and "teams will continue to evaluate going forward," according to the statement... The cracks are minuscule and mostly invisible to the naked eye, hence the difficulty attempting to patch problem areas.
Axiom Space launched four astronauts to the International Space Station on Wednesday.

But its four-person crew had previously "remained locked in quarantine in Florida for about a month, waiting for their chance to launch," notes CNN, as NASA and the Russian space agency Roscosmos "attempted to sort through" the leak issue.