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Submission Summary: 0 pending, 4 declined, 17 accepted (21 total, 80.95% accepted)

Submission + - How a power outage in Colorado caused U.S. official time to be 4.8 microseconds (npr.org) 1

Submitted by Tony Isaac
Tony Isaac writes: The U.S. government calculates the country's official time using more than a dozen atomic clocks at a federal facility northwest of Denver.

But when a destructive windstorm knocked out power to the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) laboratory in Boulder on Wednesday and a backup generator subsequently failed, time ever so slightly slowed down.

The lapse "resulted in NIST UTC [universal coordinated time] being 4.8 microseconds slower than it should have been," NIST spokesperson Rebecca Jacobson said in an email.

Submission + - Trump's social media business is merging with a nuclear fusion company (cnn.com)

Submitted by Tony Isaac
Tony Isaac writes: President Donald Trump’s social media and crypto company is making a huge bet on a far different industry – nuclear fusion, a potentially lucrative albeit commercially unproven energy technology that could help power a suddenly electricity-starved economy.

Trump Media and Technology Group Thursday announced a surprise merger with TAE Technologies, in an all-stock deal valued at more than $6 billion that would create one of the first publicly traded fusion companies. News of the deal shares of Trump Media (DJT) 35% higher in early trading Thursday.

Submission + - An independent effort says AI is the secret to topple 2-party power in Congress (npr.org)

Submitted by Tony Isaac
Tony Isaac writes: The rise of AI assistants is rewriting the rhythms of everyday life: People are feeding their blood test results into chatbots, turning to ChatGPT for advice on their love lives and leaning on AI for everything from planning trips to finishing homework assignments.

Now, one organization suggests artificial intelligence can go beyond making daily life more convenient. It says it's the key to reshaping American politics.

"Without AI, what we're trying to do would be impossible," explained Adam Brandon, a senior adviser at the Independent Center, a nonprofit that studies and engages with independent voters.

The goal is to elect a handful of independent candidates to the House of Representatives in 2026, using AI to identify districts where independents could succeed and uncover diamond in the rough candidates.

Submission + - There isn't an AI bubble—there are three (fastcompany.com)

Submitted by Tony Isaac
Tony Isaac writes: AI is experiencing not just one, but three bubbles—speculative, infrastructure, and hype. How businesses respond to these bubbles will dictate their fate, and determine whether they will be able to survive when the bubbles burst.

Submission + - Delta sues CrowdStrike over software update that prompted mass flight disruption (cnn.com)

Submitted by Tony Isaac
Tony Isaac writes: Delta Air Lines on Friday sued cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike in a Georgia state court after a global outage in July caused mass flight cancellations, disrupted travel plans of 1.3 million customers and cost the carrier more than $500 million.

Delta’s lawsuit filed in Fulton County Superior Court called the faulty software update from CrowdStrike “catastrophic” and said the firm “forced untested and faulty updates to its customers, causing more than 8.5 million Microsoft Windows-based computers around the world to crash.”

The July 19 incident led to worldwide flight cancellations and hit industries around the globe including banks, health care, media companies and hotel chains.

Submission + - 45 years ago CompuServe connected the world before the World Wide Web (wosu.org)

Submitted by Tony Isaac
Tony Isaac writes: Silicon Valley has the reputation of being the birthplace of our hyper-connected Internet age, the hub of companies such as Apple, Google and Facebook. However, a pioneering company here in central Ohio is responsible for developing and popularizing many of the technologies we take for granted today.

A listener submitted a question to WOSU’s Curious Cbus series wanting to know more about the legacy of CompuServe and what it meant to go online before the Internet.

That legacy was recently commemorated by the Ohio History Connection when they installed a historical marker in Upper Arlington — near the corner of Arlington Center and Henderson roads — where the company located its computer center and corporate building in 1973.

The plaque explains that CompuServe was "the first major online information service provider," and that its subscribers were among the first to have access to email, online newspapers and magazines and the ability to share and download files

Submission + - Human reviewers can't keep up with police bodycam videos. AI now gets the job (npr.org)

Submitted by Tony Isaac
Tony Isaac writes: After a decade of explosive growth, body cameras are now standard-issue for most American police as they interact with the public. The vast majority of those millions of hours of video are never watched — it's just not humanly possible.

For academics who study the everyday actions of police, the videos are an ocean of untapped data. Some are now using "large language model" AI's — think ChatGPT — to digest that information and produce new insights.

The research found the encounters were more likely to escalate when officers started the stop by giving orders, rather than reasons for the interaction.

While academics are using AI from anonymized videos to understand larger processes, some police departments have started using it to help supervise individual officers — and even rate their performance.

Submission + - Decades-old missing person case solved after relative uploads DNA to GEDMatch (npr.org)

Submitted by Tony Isaac
Tony Isaac writes: Many people are rightly concerned about the potential negative consequences of DNA matching sites. But there is also a positive side of DNA analysis to consider. For some people, such as adoptees and others who are trying to find out more about long-lost relatives, DNA can be a game-changer.

Submission + - Doomsday clock doesn't budge due to AI (bbc.com)

Submitted by Tony Isaac
Tony Isaac writes: The doomsday clock remains at 90 seconds to midnight, the same as last year. Interestingly, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists added "AI" to the list of threats that they consider to be existential threats to humanity, but didn't move the hands of the clock as a result of adding that threat. My take is that they consider AI to be a very low-grade threat, but it makes me wonder why they included it at all.

Submission + - Armed with traffic cones, protesters are immobilizing driverless cars (npr.org)

Submitted by Tony Isaac
Tony Isaac writes: An anonymous activist group called Safe Street Rebel is responsible for dozens of "coning" incidents over the past few months. The group's goal is to incapacitate the driverless cars roaming San Francisco's streets as a protest against the city being used as a testing ground for this emerging technology.

Submission + - The technology behind the new Las Vegas sphere

Submitted by Tony Isaac
Tony Isaac writes: The news about the recent opening of the MSG Sphere in Las Vegas got me wondering how they got such great video on the curved surface of the sphere. It turns out there's a whole lot more than just the exterior that breaks new ground in audio and video technology. An older IBC article goes into detail about how they accomplished both the exterior and interior screens, and the high-resolution audio inside.

Submission + - An overlooked brain system helps you grab a coffee — and plan your next cu (npr.org)

Submitted by Tony Isaac
Tony Isaac writes:

The seemingly simple act of reaching for a cup of coffee requires a lot of effort from the brain. It has to plan a trajectory to the cup, control dozens of muscles, make adjustments based on feedback from the eyes and fingers, and maintain its focus on the goal: a tasty jolt of caffeine. And it turns out that medical textbooks may be wrong about how all this happens. The books show a model of the brain in which the motor cortex is solely controlling movement. But scientists at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis have found that previously overlooked areas of the brain's motor cortex appear to link control of specific muscles with information about the entire body and brain.

This article highlighted for me just how sophisticated our brains are when it comes to controlling and coordinating muscle movements. And, it explains why robots such as those made by Boston Dynamics, as sophisticated as they are, still reach and grab for things clumsily.

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