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Submission + - First Nuclear Clocks Start Ticking in Vienna and Beijing (phys.org)

Submitted by necro81
necro81 writes: Two groups, one in Vienna and one in Beijing, have successfully demonstrated the world's first nuclear clocks. Standard atomic clocks, like the caesium clocks that define the second, operate by observing the transition of electrons between different orbits about the nucleus. The resulting radiation is usually in the microwave range, and can produce clocks accurate to one second in 100 billion years.

Nuclear clocks go a step further, and probe energy transitions within the nucleus itself. Nuclei can arrange their protons and neutrons into different configurations, called isomers. The isomer with the lowest energy is the one usually found; higher-energy ones are only metastable and decay quickly. Usually it takes serious energy — x-rays and gamma rays — to excite a nucleus into a higher-energy arrangement. It so happens that thorium-229 can be excited using UV light with a wavelength of 148 nm — just within the capabilities of some exotic lasers.

It's still been quite a challenge. For one thing, Th-229 is not found in nature; it must be extracted from the decay chain of uranium-235. The Beijing team used just a microgram mixed in a crystal of calcium fluoride.

Although these prototype nuclear clocks are not yet more accurate than existing atomic clocks (one second in millions, rather than billions, of years), they show the way towards what may be possible. Because the energy transition is in the nucleus, rather than the electron cloud, it is less susceptible to outside disturbances like magnetic fields. And the fundamental frequency is much higher (five orders of magnitude), which should yield more precise timing. This development could lead to smaller and more reliable time standards across the world (and solar system).

Submission + - AI Male Agents paid more than their Female counterparts. (the-independent.com)

Submitted by williamyf
williamyf writes: If you tought the Gender Pay Gap was not real, and that there were no biases in the workplace, think again:

A recent study from the University of Limerick found out that, in a VR office setting, AI agents (not even humanoid robots) that presented themselves as "Male" were paid more per task AND perceives as more "human like" than their "female" counterparts, even though both were using the same underlying technology (LLM model, agent, guardrail and Harness). The pay-gap was aprox 10%

The study was done on 189 people. Small sample, but still, food for tought.

Submission + - Wisconsin U–Madison Prof Francis Halzen named 2026 Nobel laureate in physi (wisc.edu)

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: Halzen is the principal investigator of the NSF IceCube Neutrino Observatory, the world’s largest — and perhaps strangest — telescope. The U.S. National Science Foundation-funded observatory is operated by an international collaboration of scientists led by the Wisconsin IceCube Particle Astrophysics Center based at UW–Madison.

Embedded in a cubic kilometer of Antarctic ice, IceCube uses thousands of light sensors to survey the universe for neutrinos, nearly massless particles that rarely interact with other matter. Neutrinos provide information about the workings of black holes, galaxies and other objects in the cosmos.

“IceCube is like no other telescope in the world,” says UW–Madison interim Chancellor Eric M. Wilcots. “And there is no other scientist quite like Francis Halzen, whose idea to create a neutrino detector under almost a mile of ice has led to a remarkable multinational and multi-institutional scientific collaboration and a fundamental shift in how we think about the universe.”

Comment Migrating is not so easy. (Score 5, Interesting) 85

1.) VMware had (and still has) a lot of goodies on vSphere that were (and some still) are not on competing products. If your Virtualization strategy depended on any of these, migrating is hard.

2.) Take point #1 and multiply by 20x if you have (private/public/hybrid) cloud foundation.

3.) If you were a single-virtualization or single-(private)cloud vendor based shop, you probably want to migrate to a multivendor stack as part of THIS migration, so that, if one of your new vendors goes rogue (just like VMware/broadcom did) you are not trapped again. This complicates even more the migrations, as, you will need to handle a multivendor environmet, and more so, for a while you will have to juggle 3 vendors (WMware + the other 2)

4.) For ages VMware was a model citizen, which means everyone certified agaist them. Before the migration you need to make sure all your workloads are certified. This is 4x valid for purposes of regulation, certification, compliance, and (cyber) insurance

Is a very complex issue, for many an organization is not as simple as "I migrated the VMs in my homelab in an afternon so how hard can it be?". And the timelines are heavily compressed.

Comment Re: Finally (Score 1) 104

by BKX (#66361274) Attached to: Reddit Is Killing RSS Feeds, Ending Public API Access

Yes, they can. Like 20 years ago, when CmdrTaco was still running this site, they implemented Unicode support. But then a few weeks later they disabled it because they couldn't figure out how to stop the text direction markers from breaking the site. You could post a comment with a right-to-left direction and reverse all the text that came after, including the next comments, unless you remembered to change it back before the end of the comment. They never did re-enable Unicode, which is quite ridiculous. Everyone else figured this out 20 years ago or more.

Submission + - New Ai-Powered "America.gov" Government Website Uses Gemini and Grok (cnn.com) 3

Submitted by fahrbot-bot
fahrbot-bot writes: CNN is reporting (and others) that President Donald Trump on Tuesday unveiled America.gov, a government website meant to serve as a one-stop shop for people trying to accomplish basic tasks like renewing a passport, enrolling in Medicare or applying for disaster relief.

The site, which launched with some basic functions ahead of a full rollout next year, is designed to serve as an AI-powered guide through the thicket of government agencies that Trump officials pledged would ultimately save people a whole lot of frustration.

The administration’s new initiative aims to allow Americans to access dozens of federal websites through a single point, making America.gov akin to a search tool that pulls information from across the government. And in the same way that people increasingly use AI models like ChatGPT or Google Gemini to compile information and provide customized answers, Trump officials claimed that America.gov would be able to do the same for people’s interactions with the federal government.

Enrolling in Medicare, for example, will become a matter of typing the request into the America.gov AI tool and following its step-by-step instructions. The same goes for applying to a government job — the new tool will now let people upload their resume directly to the site — or answering questions about federal benefits, publicly available documents or other necessities that fall under the federal government’s vast umbrella.

“Our vision is that one day, this type of convenience and simplicity will be across every government service,” said Joseph Gebbia, who leads the government’s National Design Studio.

But the reality is that the most advanced actions won’t be available until some point in 2027, raising questions about how long it will take for the administration to revamp the way the people interact with the government’s websites. The current version of America.gov can only do “answers.”

In related news, Variety notes that America.gov confirms, for now anyway, that Biden won the 2020 election.

Submission + - Microsoft Makes Linux Containers Native on Windows 11 (nerds.xyz)

Submitted by BrianFagioli
BrianFagioli writes: Microsoft has made WSL Containers generally available, giving Windows 11 developers a built in way to build, run, and deploy Linux containers through Windows Subsystem for Linux.

The release includes wslc.exe for managing containers, GPU support, networking improvements, health checks, storage mounts, and integration with Microsoft Defender for Endpoint and Intune. Microsoft also claims up to twice the performance when Linux environments access files stored on Windows.

Docker Desktop, Podman Desktop, and Rancher Desktop are not going anywhere, but developers who only need basic container functionality now have another option built around WSL. One notable feature is still missing: Compose support. Microsoft says adding it is now a priority.

Comment AI first step: Give details about AI design. (Score 1) 90

by Futurepower(R) (#66352592) Attached to: Just How Big is the AI Buildout - and How Risky?
The first step in dealing with AI issues is to give full details about how AI is developed.

A HUGE amount has been written about AI, but apparently there are no books or articles about how AI is developed.

If people knew more, maybe there would be contributions to understanding of how to make AI safe.

Submission + - The Nature of War has just changed forever (telegraph.co.uk)

Submitted by MrBrklyn
MrBrklyn writes: Ukrainiaan land robots have been deployed in combat, killing thousands of Russian troops and changing the face of warfare forever. Leaders accross the globe are sitting up in the seats and paying attention as what started as a localized Russian agression has now turned into a world altering and historic war which the Russians seemingly have no means to win.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/wo...

Comment Re:If canonical is so worried (Score 1) 85

straw man. no one is "worried" except you

Considering I use MacOS 15.8, bootcamp into Windows 10 for gaming, and nowadays my only linuxes are on my NAS (DSM 7.3) and 2 VMs, one with TAILS and one with Kali, I am not worried in the slightest about what happens with Canonical...

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