The number of doctoral graduates globally has grown steadily over recent decades, creating a massive imbalance between PhD holders and available academic positions. Among the 38 OECD countries, new doctorate holders almost doubled between 1998 and 2017.

China's doctoral enrollment has exploded from around 300,000 students in 2013 to more than 600,000 in 2023. This growth has forced PhD graduates into non-academic careers at unprecedented rates. A 2023 study of more than 4,500 PhD graduates in the United Kingdom found over two-thirds were employed outside academia.

In South Africa, 18% of more than 6,000 PhD graduates reported difficulty finding jobs related to their expertise. Some countries have begun adapting their doctoral programs. Japan, Germany and the United Kingdom now offer training and paid internships during doctoral studies, including "industrial PhD" programs where students conduct research in collaboration with companies.

A new benchmark assembled by a team of International Olympiad medalists suggests the hype about large language models beating elite human coders is premature. LiveCodeBench Pro, unveiled in a 584-problem study [PDF] drawn from Codeforces, ICPC and IOI contests, shows the best frontier model clears just 53% of medium-difficulty tasks on its first attempt and none of the hard ones, while grandmaster-level humans routinely solve at least some of those highest-tier problems.

The researchers measured models and humans on the same Elo scale used by Codeforces and found that OpenAI's o4-mini-high, when stripped of terminal tools and limited to one try per task, lands at an Elo rating of 2,116 -- hundreds of points below the grandmaster cutoff and roughly the 1.5 percentile among human contestants. A granular tag-by-tag autopsy identified implementation-friendly, knowledge-heavy problems -- segment trees, graph templates, classic dynamic programming -- as the models' comfort zone; observation-driven puzzles such as game-theory endgames and trick-greedy constructs remain stubborn roadblocks.

Because the dataset is harvested in real time as contests conclude, the authors argue it minimizes training-data leakage and offers a moving target for future systems. The broader takeaway is that impressive leaderboard jumps often reflect tool use, multiple retries or easier benchmarks rather than genuine algorithmic reasoning, leaving a conspicuous gap between today's models and top human problem-solvers.

Doom: The Dark Ages just launched on May 15. But it's already received "difficulty" balance changes "that have made the demons of Hell even more dangerous than ever," writes Windows Central: According to DOOM's official website Slayer's Club, these balance adjustments are focused on making the game harder, as players have been leaving feedback saying it felt too easy even on Nightmare Mode. As a result, enemies now hit harder, health and armor item pick-ups drop less often, and certain enemies punish you more severely for mistiming the parry mechanic.
It reached three million players in just five days, which was seven times faster than 2020's Doom: Eternal," reports Wccftech (though according to analytics firm Ampere Analysis (via The Game Business), more than two million of those three million launch players were playing on Xbox, while only 500K were playing on PS5.") "id Software proves it can still reinvent the wheel," according to one reviewer, "shaking up numerous aspects of gameplay, exchanging elaborate platforming for brutal on-the-ground action, as well as the ability to soar on a dragon's back or stomp around in a giant mech."

And the New York Times says the game "effectively reinvents the hellish shooter with a revamped movement system and deepened lore" in the medieval goth-themed game... Double jumping and dashing are ditched and replaced with an emphasis on raw power and slow, strategic melee combat. Doom Slayer's arsenal features a brand-new tool, the powerful Shield Saw, which Id Software made a point to showcase across its "Stand and Fight" trailers and advertisements. Used for absorbing damage at the expense of speed, the saw also allows players to bash enemies from afar and close the gap on chasms too wide to jump across. While previous titles allowed players to quickly worm their way through bullet hell, The Dark Ages expects you to meet foes head on. "If you were an F-22 fighter jet in Doom Eternal, this time around we wanted you to feel like an Abrams tank," Hugo Martin, the game's creative director, has told journalists.

And Doom Slayer's beefy durability and unstoppable nature does make the gameplay a refreshing experience. The badassery is somehow ratcheted to new heights with the inclusion of a fully controllable mech, which has only a handful of attacks at its disposal, and actual dragons. Flight in a Doom game is entirely surprising and fluid, and the dragons feel relatively easy to maneuver through tight spots. They can also engage in combat more deliberately with the use of dodges and mounted cannons...

One of my favorite additions is the skullcrusher pulverizer. Equal parts heinous nutcracker and demonic woodchipper, the gun lodges skulls into a grinder and sends shards of bones flying at enemies. The animation is both goofy and satisfying.
Another special Times article notes that Doom's fans "resurrect the original game over and over again on progressively stranger pieces of hardware: a Mazda Miata, a NordicTrack treadmill, a French pharmacy sign." But what many hard-core tech hobbyists want to know is whether you can play it on a pregnancy test. The answer: positively yes. And for the first time, even New York Times readers can play Doom within The Times's site [after creating a free account]...

None of this happened by accident, of course. Ports were not incidental to Doom's development. They were a core consideration. "Doom was developed in a really unique way that lent a high degree of portability to its code base," said John Romero, who programmed the game with John Carmack. (In our interview, he then reminisced about operating systems for the next 14 minutes.) Id had developed Wolfenstein 3D, the Nazi-killing predecessor to Doom, on PCs. To build Doom, Carmack and Romero used NeXT, the hardware and software company founded by Steve Jobs after his ouster from Apple in 1985. NeXT computers were powerful, selling for about $25,000 apiece in today's dollars. And any game designed on that system would require porting to the more humdrum PCs encountered by consumers at computer labs or office jobs.

This turned out to be advantageous because Carmack had a special aptitude for ports. All of Id's founders met as colleagues at Softdisk, which had hired Carmack because of his ability to spin off multiple versions of a single game. The group decided to strike out on its own after Carmack created a near-perfect replica of the first level of Super Mario Bros. 3 — Nintendo's best-selling platformer — on a PC. It was a wonder of software engineering that compensated for limited processing power with clever workarounds. "This is the thing that everyone has," Romero said of PCs. "The fact that we could figure out how to make it become a game console was world changing...."

Romero founded a series of game studios after leaving Id in 1996 and is working on a new first-person shooter, the genre he and Carmack practically invented. He has no illusions about how it may stack up. "I absolutely accept that Doom is the best game I'll ever make that has that kind of a reach," he said. "At some point you make the best thing." Thirty years on, people are still making it.
And in related news, PC Gamer reports... As part of a new "FPS Fridays" series on Twitch, legendary shooter designer John Romero streamed New Blood's 2018 hit, Dusk, one of the first and most influential indie "boomer shooters" in the genre's recent revitalization. The short of it? Romero seems to have had a blast.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica, written by Nate Anderson: Don't worry about the "mission-driven not-for-profit" College Board -- it's drowning in cash. The US group, which administers the SAT and AP tests to college-bound students, paid its CEO $2.38 million in total compensation in 2023 (the most recent year data is available). The senior VP in charge of AP programs made $694,662 in total compensation, while the senior VP for Technology Strategy made $765,267 in total compensation. Given such eye-popping numbers, one would have expected the College Board's transition to digital exams to go smoothly, but it continues to have issues.

Just last week, the group's AP Psychology exam was disrupted nationally when the required "Bluebook" testing app couldn't be accessed by many students. Because the College Board shifted to digital-only exams for 28 of its 36 AP courses beginning this year, no paper-based backup options were available. The only "solution" was to wait quietly in a freezing gymnasium, surrounded by a hundred other stressed-out students, to see if College Board could get its digital act together. [...] College Board issued a statement on the day of the AP Psych exam, copping to "an issue that prevented [students] from logging into the College Board's Bluebook testing application and beginning their exams at the assigned local start time." Stressing that "most students have had a successful testing experience, with more than 5 million exams being successfully submitted thus far," College Board nonetheless did "regret that their testing period was disrupted." It's not the first such disruption, though. [...]

College Board also continues to have problems delivering digital testing at scale in a high-pressure environment. During the SAT exam sessions on March 8-9, 2025, more than 250,000 students sat for the test -- and some found that their tests were automatically submitted before the testing time ended. College Board blamed the problem on "an incorrectly configured security setting on Bluebook." The problem affected nearly 10,000 students, and several thousand more "may have lost some testing time if they were asked by their room monitor to reboot their devices during the test to fix and prevent the auto-submit error." College Board did "deeply and sincerely apologize to the students who were not able to complete their tests, or had their test time interrupted, for the difficulty and frustration this has caused them and their families." It offered refunds, plus a free future SAT testing voucher.

Across high-income countries, humans' ability to reason and solve problems appears to have peaked in the early 2010s and declined since. Despite no changes in fundamental brain biology, test scores for both teenagers and adults show deteriorating performance in reading, mathematics and science. In an eye-opening statistic, 25% of adults in high-income countries now struggle to "use mathematical reasoning when reviewing statements" -- rising to 35% in the US.

This cognitive decline coincides with a fundamental shift in our relationship with information. Americans reading books has fallen below 50%, while difficulty thinking and concentrating among 18-year-olds has climbed sharply since the mid-2010s. The timing points to our changing digital habits: a transition from finite web pages to infinite feeds, from active browsing to passive consumption, and from focused attention to constant context-switching.

Research shows that intentional use of digital technologies can be beneficial, but the passive consumption dominating recent years impairs verbal processing, attention, working memory and self-regulation.

Some of the cited research in the story:
New PIAAC results show declining literacy and increasing inequality in many European countries â" Better adult learning is necessary;
Have attention spans been declining?;
Short- and long-term effects of passive and active screen time on young children's phonological memory;
Efficient, helpful, or distracting? A literature review of media multitasking in relation to academic performance.

Slashdot reader rikfarrow summarizes an article they wrote for Usenix.org about the Open Source Python compiler Codon: In 2023 I tried out Codon. At the time I had difficulty compiling the scripts I most commonly used, but was excited by the prospect. Python is essentially single threaded and checks the shape (type) of each variable as it interprets scripts. Codon fixes types and compiles Python into compact, executable binaries that execute much faster.

Several things have changed with their latest release: I have successful compiles, the committers have added a compiled version of NumPy (high performance math algorithms), and changed their open source license to Apache 2.
"The other big news is that Exaloop, the company that is behind Codon, has changed their license to Apache 2..." according to the article, so "commercial use and derivations of Codon are now permitted without licensing."

Magnus Carlsen "announced this week that he is auctioning off the Italian luxury brand jeans that started a dress code dispute at December's World Rapid and Blitz Chess Championships," reports the Associated Press. ("Condition: Pre-owned," says the listing on eBay, where by Friday night bidding on the charitable auction was up to $14,100.)

But Carlsen drew more attention on The Joe Rogan Experience last week — partly by saying "I have no chance against my phone." (Although he'd also described beating a fan's computer program, according to Firstpost, by playing "some kind of anti-computer chess, where I just closed up the position as much as possible and gave it as few possibilities as possible to out-calculate me.") Carlsen admitted that he rarely plays against chess engines due to their overwhelming strength, but acknowledged their value as training tools. "I rarely play against engines at all because they just make me feel so stupid and useless. So, I think of them more as a tool than anything else."
And this led Carlsen to add "If I started cheating, you would never know," reports Indian Express: It's not just a throwaway line about cheating either. On a two-hour-long podcast, where he touches on mostly everything under the sun, Carlsen fixates on cheating in chess. He also details how a player of his calibre would need very little to cheat in chess. "I would just get a move here and there (from an aide). Or maybe if I am playing in a tournament I just find a system where I get somebody to signal to me when there's a critical moment: a certain moment where a certain move is much better than the others. That's really all I would need to go from being the best to being practically unbeatable. There's so little you need in chess (to cheat). It really is a scary situation," Carlsen said before pointing out how in 2010 the captain of the French chess team was helping a teammate decide his next move at the Olympiad just by standing in specific spots around the table...

"If you're not cheating in a dumb way, there rarely is going to be a smoking gun. And without that smoking gun it is going to be really hard to catch people," Carlsen admits on the podcast... "As long as there are monetary incentives for people to cheat, there will be cheating in chess," says Carlsen on the podcast.
The article adds that Carlsen does not believe Hans Niemann used anal beads to cheat — and that he thinks Niemann has become a much better chess player since the incident. But... "Top level chess has been based on trust a lot. I don't trust Niemann. Other top players still don't trust him and he doesn't trust me," says Carlsen. "There is still something off about him now. We played an over-the-board tournament in Paris last year where there was increased security and he didn't play at nearly the same level there."

For over a decade Karol Herbst has been a developer on the open-source Nouveau driver, a reverse-engineered NVIDIA graphics driver for Linux. "He went on to become employed by Red Hat," notes Phoronix. "While he's known more these days for his work on the Mesa 3D Graphics Library and the Rusticl OpenCL driver for it, he's still remained a maintainer of the Nouveau kernel driver."

But Saturday Herbst stepped down as a nouveau kernel maintainer, in a mailing list message that begins "I was pondering with myself for a while if I should just make it official that I'm not really involved in the kernel community anymore, neither as a reviewer, nor as a maintainer." (Another message begins "I often thought about at least contributing some patches again once I find the time, but...")

Their resignation message hints at some long-running unhappiness. "I got burned out enough by myself caring about the bits I maintained, but eventually I had to realize my limits. The obligation I felt was eating me from inside. It stopped being fun at some point and I reached a point where I simply couldn't continue the work I was so motivated doing as I've did in the early days." And they point to one specific discussion on the kernel mailing list February 8th as "The moment I made up my mind."

It happened in a thread about whether Rust would create difficulty for maintainers. (Someone had posted that "The all powerful sub-system maintainer model works well if the big technology companies can employ omniscient individuals in these roles, but those types are a bit hard to come by.") In response, someone else had posted "I'll let you in a secret. The maintainers are not 'all-powerful'. We are the 'thin blue line' that is trying to keep the code to be maintainable and high quality. Like most leaders of volunteer organization, whether it is the Internet Engineerint Task Force (the standards body for the Internet), we actually have very little power. We can not *command* people to work on retiring technical debt, or to improve testing infrastructure, or work on some particular feature that we'd very like for our users. All we can do is stop things from being accepted..."

Saturday Herbst wrote: The moment I made up my mind about this was reading the following words written by a maintainer within the kernel community:

"we are the thin blue line"

This isn't okay. This isn't creating an inclusive environment. This isn't okay with the current political situation especially in the US. A maintainer speaking those words can't be kept. No matter how important or critical or relevant they are. They need to be removed until they learn. Learn what those words mean for a lot of marginalized people. Learn about what horrors it evokes in their minds.

I can't in good faith remain to be part of a project and its community where those words are tolerated. Those words are not technical, they are a political statement. Even if unintentionally, such words carry power, they carry meanings one needs to be aware of. They do cause an immense amount of harm.
The phrase thin blue line "typically refers to the concept of the police as the line between law-and-order and chaos," according to Wikipedia, but more recently became associated with a"countermovement" to the Black Lives Matter movement and "a number of far-right movements in the U.S."

Phoronix writes: Lyude Paul and Danilo Krummrich both of Red Hat remain Nouveau kernel maintainers. Red Hat developers are also working on developing NOVA as the new Rust-based open-source NVIDIA kernel driver leveraging the GSP interface for Turing GPUs and newer.

According to Downdetector, PlayStation Network (PSN) has been down since 6 PM ET, with Sony assuring users that they're working to fix the problem "as soon as possible." For gaming specifically, Sony says that "you might have difficulty launching games, apps, or network features."

"We are aware some users might be currently experiencing issues with PSN," Sony said in an 8:46PM ET post on X. No further details were made available.

An r/PlayStation thread has more than 10,000 comments. As of 11:35 PM PST, the service remains down.

Facebook has banned posts mentioning Linux-related topics, with the popular Linux news and discussion site, DistroWatch, at the center of the controversy. Tom's Hardware reports: A post on the site claims, "Facebook's internal policy makers decided that Linux is malware and labeled groups associated with Linux as being 'cybersecurity threats.' We tried to post some blurb about distrowatch.com on Facebook and can confirm that it was barred with a message citing Community Standards. DistroWatch says that the Facebook ban took effect on January 19. Readers have reported difficulty posting links to the site on this social media platform. Moreover, some have told DistroWatch that their Facebook accounts have been locked or limited after sharing posts mentioning Linux topics.

If you're wondering if there might be something specific to DistroWatch.com, something on the site that the owners/operators perhaps don't even know about, for example, then it seems pretty safe to rule out such a possibility. Reports show that "multiple groups associated with Linux and Linux discussions have either been shut down or had many of their posts removed." However, we tested a few other Facebook posts with mentions of Linux, and they didn't get blocked immediately. Copenhagen-hosted DistroWatch says it has tried to appeal against the Community Standards-triggered ban. However, they say that a Facebook representative said that Linux topics would remain on the cybersecurity filter. The DistroWatch writer subsequently got their Facebook account locked... DistroWatch points out the irony at play here: "Facebook runs much of its infrastructure on Linux and often posts job ads looking for Linux developers."

UPDATE: Facebook has admited they made a mistake and stopped blocking the posts.

CERN's particle accelerator is being used in a pioneering cancer treatment called Flash radiotherapy. This method delivers ultra-high radiation doses in less than a second, minimizes side effects while targeting tumors more effectively than conventional radiotherapy. The BBC reports: In a series of vast underground caverns on the outskirts of Geneva, Switzerland, experiments are taking place which may one day lead to new generation of radiotherapy machines. The hope is that these devices could make it possible to cure complex brain tumors (PDF), eliminate cancers that have metastasized to distant organs, and generally limit the toll which cancer treatment exerts on the human body. The home of these experiments is the European Laboratory for Particle Physics (Cern), best known to the world as the particle physics hub that developed the Large Hadron Collider, a 27 kilometer (16.7 mile)-long ring of superconducting magnets capable of accelerating particles to near the speed of light.

Arguably Cern's crowning achievement was the 2012 discovery of the Higgs boson, the so-called "God Particle" which gives other particles their mass and in doing so lays the foundation for everything that exists in the universe. But in recent years, the centre's unique expertise in accelerating high-energy particles has found a new niche -- the world of cancer radiotherapy. Eleven years ago, Marie-Catherine Vozenin, a radiobiologist now working at Geneva University Hospitals (Hug), and others published a paper outlining a paradigm-shifting approach to traditional radiotherapy treatment which they called Flash. By delivering radiation at ultra-high dose rates, with exposures of less than a second, they showed that it was possible to destroy tumors in rodents while sparing healthy tissue. Its impact was immediate. International experts described it as a seminal breakthrough, and it galvanized fellow radiobiologists around the world to conduct their own experiments using the Flash approach to treat a wide variety of tumors in rodents, household pets, and now humans.

In recent years, animal studies have repeatedly shown that Flash makes it possible to markedly increase the amount of radiation delivered to the body while minimizing the impact that it has on surrounding healthy tissue. In one experiment, healthy lab mice which were given two rounds of radiation via Flash did not develop the typical side effects which would be expected during the second round. In another study, animals treated with Flash for head and neck cancers experienced fewer side effects, such as reduced saliva production or difficulty swallowing. Loo is cautiously optimistic that going forwards, such benefits may also translate to human patients. "Flash produces less normal tissue injury than conventional irradiation, without compromising anti-tumor efficacy -- which could be game-changing," he says. An additional hope is that this could then reduce the risk of secondary cancers (PDF), resulting from radiation-induced damage later in life, although it is still too early to know if that will be the case. [...] But the next phase of research is not only about testing whether Flash works in people. It's also about identifying which kind of radiation is the best one to use.

Computer scientists are using hypothetical devices called "oracles" to advance the field of computational complexity theory, exploring fundamental questions about problem-solving difficulty. These theoretical tools, which instantly provide correct yes-or-no answers to specific questions, help researchers understand relationships between different classes of computational problems.

Oracles have proved particularly valuable in studying quantum computing, leading to breakthroughs like Peter Shor's 1994 quantum algorithm for factoring large numbers. The technique has also helped researchers rule out certain approaches to solving the longstanding P versus NP problem, a central question in computer science.

Long-time Slashdot reader theodp writes: In an Op-ed for The Huntington News, fourth year Northeastern University CS student Derek Kaplan argues that real pedagogical merit is what should count when deciding which language to use to teach CS fundamentals (aka 'Fundies'). He makes the case for Northeastern to reconsider its decision to move from Racket to Python and Java later this year in an overhaul of its first-year curriculum.

"Students will get extensive training in Python, which is currently the most requested language by co-op employers," Northeastern explains (some two decades after a Slashdot commenter made the same Hot Languages = Jobs observation in a spirited 2001 debate on Java as a CS introductory language)...

"I have often heard computer science students complain that Fundies 1 teaches Racket instead of a 'useful language' like Python," Kaplan writes. "But the point of Fundies is not to teach Racket — it is to teach program design skills that can be applied using any programming language. Racket is just the tool it uses to do so. A student who does well in Fundies will have no difficulty applying the same skills to Python or any other language. And with how fast the tech industry changes, is it really worth having a course that teaches just Python when tomorrow, some other language might dominate the industry? Our current curriculum focuses on timeless principles rather than fleeting trends."

Also expressing concerns about the selection of suitable languages for novice programming is King's College CS Prof Michael Kölling, who explains, "One of the drivers is the perceived usefulness of the language in a real-world context. Students (and their parents) often have opinions which language is 'better' to learn. In forming these opinions, the definition of 'better' can often be vague and driven by limited insight. One strong aspect commonly cited is the perceived usefulness of a language in the 'real world.' If a language is widely used in industry, it is more likely to be seen as a useful language to learn." Kölling's recommendation? "We need a new language for teaching novices at secondary school and introductory university level," Kölling concludes. "This language should be designed explicitly for teaching [...] Maintenance and adaptation of this language should be driven by pedagogical considerations, not by industry needs."

While noble in intent, one suspects Kaplan and Kölling may be on a quixotic quest in a money wins world, outgunned by the demands, resources, and influence of tech giants like Amazon — the top employer of Northeastern MSCS program grads — who pushed back against NSF advice to deemphasize Java in high school CS and dropped $15 million to have tech-backed nonprofit Code.org develop and push a new Java-based, powered-by-AWS CS curriculum into high schools with the support of a consortium of politicians, educators, and tech companies. Echoing Northeastern, an Amazon press release argued the new Java-based curriculum "best prepares students for the next step in their education and careers."

ZipNada shares a report from Phys.org: In a paper published today in Nature, a team led by Columbia Engineering researchers and collaborators report that they have invented new nanoscale sensors of force. They are luminescent nanocrystals that can change intensity and/or color when you push or pull on them. These "all-optical" nanosensors are probed with light only and therefore allow for fully remote read-outs -- no wires or connections are needed. They have 100 times better force sensitivity than the existing nanoparticles that utilize rare-earth ions for their optical response, and an operational range that spans more than four orders of magnitude in force, a much larger range -- 10-100 times larger -- than any previous optical nanosensor. "We expect our discovery will revolutionize the sensitivities and dynamic range achievable with optical force sensors, and will immediately disrupt technologies in areas from robotics to cellular biophysics and medicine to space travel," said Jim Schuck, associate professor of mechanical engineering.

"The importance of developing new force sensors was recently underscored by Ardem Patapoutian, the 2021 Nobel Laureate who emphasized the difficulty in probing environmentally sensitive processes within multiscale systems -- that is to say, in most physical and biological processes," Schuck notes. "We are excited to be part of these discoveries that transform the paradigm of sensing, allowing one to sensitively and dynamically map critical changes in forces and pressures in real-world environments that are currently unreachable with today's technologies."

Accidental missile attacks on commercial airliners have become the leading cause of aviation fatalities in recent years (Warning: source paywalled; alternative source), driven by rising global conflicts and the proliferation of advanced antiaircraft weaponry. Despite improvements in aviation safety overall, inconsistent risk assessments, political complexities, and rapid military escalations make protecting civilian flights in conflict zones increasingly difficult. The Wall Street Journal reports: The crash Wednesday of an Azerbaijan Airlines jetliner in Kazakhstan, if officially confirmed as a midair attack, would be the third major fatal downing of a passenger jet linked to armed conflict since 2014, according to the Flight Safety Foundation's Aviation Safety Network, a global database of accidents and incidents. The tally would bring to more than 500 the number of deaths from such attacks during that period. Preliminary results of Azerbaijan's investigation into the crash indicate the plane was hit by a Russian antiaircraft missile, or shrapnel from it, said people briefed on the probe.

"It adds to the worrying catalog of shootdowns now," said Andy Blackwell, an aviation risk adviser at security specialist ISARR and former head of security at Virgin Atlantic. "You've got the conventional threats, from terrorists and terrorist groups, but now you've got this accidental risk as well." No other cause of aviation fatalities on commercial airliners comes close to shootdowns over those years, according to ASN data. The deadliness of such attacks is a dramatic shift: In the preceding 10 years, there were no fatal shootdowns of scheduled commercial passenger flights, ASN data show. The trend highlights the difficulty -- if not impossibility -- of protecting civilian aviation in war zones, even for rigorous aviation regulators, because of the politics of war. Early last century similar woes plagued sea travel, when belligerents targeted ocean transport.

Increasing civilian aviation deaths from war also reflect both a growing number of armed conflicts internationally and the increasing prevalence of powerful antiaircraft weaponry. If a missile was indeed the cause of this week's disaster, it would mean that the three deadliest shootdowns of the past decade all involved apparently unintended targetings of passenger planes flying near conflict zones, by forces that had been primed to hit enemy military aircraft. Two of those incidents were linked to Russia: Wednesday's crash of an Embraer E190 with 67 people aboard, of whom 38 died, and the midair destruction in 2014 of a Malaysia Airlines Boeing 777 flying over a battle zone in Ukraine, on which all 298 people aboard died. The other major downing was the mistaken shooting in 2020 by Iranian forces of a Ukraine International Airlines Boeing 737 departing Tehran, killing all 176 people onboard. Iran's missile defense systems had been on alert for a potential U.S. strike at the time.

Honda sketched plans for a drawn-out deal that amounts to a takeover of Nissan in all but name, as Japan's automakers struggle to keep up in an increasingly competitive global car industry. From a report: The two announced a tentative agreement Monday to set up a joint holding company that will aim to list shares in August 2026. While their executives called the transaction a merger, Honda will take the lead in forming the new entity and nominate a majority of its directors.

Nissan's partner Mitsubishi may also participate in the deal. Honda and Nissan both are having trouble contending with ascendant domestic automakers in China, which surpassed Japan as the world's largest car-exporting nation last year and is pulling further ahead in 2024. Honda Chief Executive Officer Toshihiro Mibe spoke to the level of level of difficulty ahead for the companies when he said during a press conference that their goal is to be competitive by 2030.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: There's a general consensus that we won't be able to consistently perform sophisticated quantum calculations without the development of error-corrected quantum computing, which is unlikely to arrive until the end of the decade. It's still an open question, however, whether we could perform limited but useful calculations at an earlier point. IBM is one of the companies that's betting the answer is yes, and on Wednesday, it announced a series of developments aimed at making that possible. On their own, none of the changes being announced are revolutionary. But collectively, changes across the hardware and software stacks have produced much more efficient and less error-prone operations. The net result is a system that supports the most complicated calculations yet on IBM's hardware, leaving the company optimistic that its users will find some calculations where quantum hardware provides an advantage. [...]

Wednesday's announcement was based on the introduction of the second version of its Heron processor, which has 133 qubits. That's still beyond the capability of simulations on classical computers, should it be able to operate with sufficiently low errors. IBM VP Jay Gambetta told Ars that Revision 2 of Heron focused on getting rid of what are called TLS (two-level system) errors. "If you see this sort of defect, which can be a dipole or just some electronic structure that is caught on the surface, that is what we believe is limiting the coherence of our devices," Gambetta said. This happens because the defects can resonate at a frequency that interacts with a nearby qubit, causing the qubit to drop out of the quantum state needed to participate in calculations (called a loss of coherence). By making small adjustments to the frequency that the qubits are operating at, it's possible to avoid these problems. This can be done when the Heron chip is being calibrated before it's opened for general use.

Separately, the company has done a rewrite of the software that controls the system during operations. "After learning from the community, seeing how to run larger circuits, [we were able to] almost better define what it should be and rewrite the whole stack towards that," Gambetta said. The result is a dramatic speed-up. "Something that took 122 hours now is down to a couple of hours," he told Ars. Since people are paying for time on this hardware, that's good for customers now. However, it could also pay off in the longer run, as some errors can occur randomly, so less time spent on a calculation can mean fewer errors. Despite all those improvements, errors are still likely during any significant calculations. While it continues to work toward developing error-corrected qubits, IBM is focusing on what it calls error mitigation, which it first detailed last year. [...] The problem here is that using the function is computationally difficult, and the difficulty increases with the qubit count. So, while it's still easier to do error mitigation calculations than simulate the quantum computer's behavior on the same hardware, there's still the risk of it becoming computationally intractable. But IBM has also taken the time to optimize that, too. "They've got algorithmic improvements, and the method that uses tensor methods [now] uses the GPU," Gambetta told Ars. "So I think it's a combination of both."

SFGate spills the secrets of Disneyland's "Enchanted Tiki Room" and its lifelike animatronic singing birds — Jose, Fritz, Michael and Pierre — "whose movements were perfectly synced with the audio track." "Beneath the room, the heartbeat of the attraction is a $1 million installation of electronics equipment, operated by a roll of 14-channel magnetic tape," the Orange County Register wrote upon its opening. "It is the same system which programs the U.S. military's polaris missile." That system also ran very hot. To keep guests from overheating, air conditioning was installed throughout the building, making the Tiki Room Disneyland's first attraction to be fully air conditioned...
Or, as another article puts it, "While Disney did not delve into the speculative science of cryogenics to preserve his life, he did borrow the mechanical brain of a nuclear missile to simulate life, creating a new type of entertainment in the process."

The article remembers how Wernher Von Braun became a technical advisor (and on-camera presenter) for three Disney-produced TV episodes about space travel — at the same time Von Braun was working as technical director for the U.S. Army rocket program that produced the world's first long-range guided ballistic missile, plus the first submarine-launched ballistic missile with its ground-breaking launch control mechanism: An important aspect of the Polaris launch system hinged on the fact that the conditions under which the missiles might be launched were constantly changing. Different underwater currents, temperatures, and flexing of the metal hull all contributed to the difficulty of a successful launch. In order to minimize human errors and to automate the sequence as much as possible, scientists developed an audio control system. A magnetic audio tape with a series of prerecorded cues precisely timed to account for the submarine's movement, controlled the launch machinery.

This new technology, invented to deliver nuclear destruction, proved exactly what Disney needed for his wonderland developed for children.
The article concludes that Disneyland engineering "transformed Von Braun's military technology" to the point today where "what was once controlled by the artificial brain of a nuclear missile is now run by the equivalent of a MacBook."

SFGate delves deeper into the attraction's strange origins — and how it all came full circle 63 years later... At the intersection of Main Street and Adventureland, a restaurant called the Pavillion — now the Jolly Holiday — bridged the gap. Under one roof, it served food to Main Street guests on one side and Adventureland diners on the other. The inelegant transition created an eyesore that Walt despised... The need for the Tiki Cafe "appeared to be less about food and more about aesthetics," Ken Bruce writes in Before the Birds Sang Words , a comprehensive history of the attraction.

In 1961, Walt gathered with park designers about the concept. The sketch made by legendary theme park designer John Hench was remarkably thorough, with much of its design incorporated into the final product... When Walt saw a plethora of birds in the sketch, he famously exclaimed, "We can't have birds in there ... because they'll poop in the food." Hench hurriedly ad-libbed that the birds would be mechanical, a concept that Walt adored...

Although its powerful air conditioning may be its biggest draw today, many attractions you love owe their existence to the flock of singing birds. Disney engineers' work on the talking flora and fauna laid the foundation for much more complex Audio-Animatronics (a word that Walt Disney coined). Without Jose, Fritz, Michael and Pierre, there would be no Haunted Mansion, no Pirates of the Caribbean, no Rise of the Resistance. Next year, in celebration of Disneyland's 70th anniversary, the park will unveil one of its most sophisticated animatronics yet: Walt Disney himself. It will be the first time Walt appears in a Disney attraction anywhere in the world, completing a journey that started with a mechanical bird and ends with an immortal homage.
Their article also reveals that a year after the Tiki Room opened, one of the birds was programmed to say "Come, there's an island there for you in Hawaii. Soaring birds of United Airlines fly there too!" Because Disneyland had signed a sponsorship deal with United Airlines...

An anonymous reader shared this report from Forbes: Recent headlines have proclaimed that Chinese scientists have hacked "military-grade encryption" using quantum computers, sparking concern and speculation about the future of cybersecurity. The claims, largely stemming from a recent South China Morning Post article about a Chinese academic paper published in May, was picked up by many more serious publications.

However, a closer examination reveals that while Chinese researchers have made incremental advances in quantum computing, the news reports are a huge overstatement. "Factoring a 50-bit number using a hybrid quantum-classical approach is a far cry from breaking 'military-grade encryption'," said Dr. Erik Garcell, Head of Technical Marketing at Classiq, a quantum algorithm design company. While advancements have indeed been made, the progress represents incremental steps rather than a paradigm-shifting breakthrough that renders current cryptographic systems obsolete. "This kind of overstatement does more harm than good," Dr. Garcell said. "Misrepresenting current capabilities as 'breaking military-grade encryption' is not just inaccurate — it's potentially damaging to the field's credibility...."

In fact, the Chinese paper in question, titled Quantum Annealing Public Key Cryptographic Attack Algorithm Based on D-Wave Advantage, does not mention military-grade encryption, which typically involves algorithms like the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES). Instead, the paper is about attacking RSA encryption (RSA stands for Rivest-Shamir-Adleman, named after its creators)... While factoring a 50-bit integer is an impressive technical achievement, it's important to note that RSA encryption commonly uses key sizes of 2048 bits or higher. The difficulty of factoring increases exponentially with the size of the number, meaning that the gap between 50-bit and 2048-bit integers is astronomically large.

Moreover, the methods used involve a hybrid approach that combines quantum annealing with classical computation. This means that the quantum annealer handles part of the problem, but significant processing is still performed by classical algorithms. The advances do not equate to a scalable method for breaking RSA encryption as it is used in practical applications today.
Duncan Jones, Head of Cybersecurity at Quantinuum, tells Forbes that if China had actually broken AES — they'd be keeping it secret (rather than publicizing it in newspapers).

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Washington Post: Brandon Barrett arrived here two weeks ago, sick but hopeful, like dozens before him. Just a few years back, he could dead lift 660 pounds. After an injury while training to be a professional dirt-bike rider, he opened a motorcycle shop just north of Buffalo. When he wasn't working, he would cleanse his mind through rigorous meditation. In 2019, he began getting sick. And then sicker. Brain fog. Memory issues. Difficulty focusing. Depression. Anxiety. Fatigue. Brandon was pretty sure he knew why: the cell tower a quarter-mile behind his shop and all the electromagnetic radiation it produces, that cellphones produce, that WiFi routers produce, that Bluetooth produces, that the whole damn world produces. He thought about the invisible waves that zip through our airspace -- maybe they pollute our bodies, somehow? [...]

Then Brandon read about Green Bank, an unincorporated speck on the West Virginia map, hidden in the Allegheny Mountains, about a four-hour drive southwest of D.C. There are no cell towers there, by design. He read that other sick people had moved here and gotten better, that the area's electromagnetic quietude is protected by the federal government. Perhaps it could protect Brandon. It's quiet here so that scientists can listen to corners of the universe, billions of light-years away. In the 1950s, the federal government snatched up farmland to build the Green Bank Observatory. It's now home to the Robert C. Byrd Green Bank Radio Telescope, the largest steerable telescope in the world at 7,600 metric tons and a height of 485 feet. Its 2.3-acre dish can study quasars and pulsars, map asteroids and planets, and search for evidence of extraterrestrial life.

The observatory's machines are so sensitive that terrestrial radio waves would interfere with their astronomical exploration, like a shout (a bunch of WiFi signals) drowning out a whisper (signals from the clouds of hydrogen hanging out between galaxies). So in 1958, the Federal Communications Commission created the National Radio Quiet Zone, a 13,000-square-mile area encompassing wedges of both Virginia and West Virginia, where radio transmissions are restricted to varying degrees. At its center is a 10-mile zone around the observatory where WiFi, cellphones and cordless phones -- among many other types of wave-emitting equipment -- are outlawed. Wired internet is okay, as are televisions -- though you must have a cable or satellite provider. It's not a place out of 100 years ago. More like 30. If you want to make plans to meet someone, you make them in person. Some people move here to work at the observatory. Others come because they feel like they have to. These are the 'electrosensitives,' as they often refer to themselves. They are ill, and Green Bank is their Lourdes. The electrosensitives guess that they number at least 75 in Pocahontas County, which has a population of roughly 7,500. Literary Hub, the BBC, Slate, and the Washingtonian have non-paywalled articles about Green Bank and the "wi-fi refugees" that shelter there.