Gene Drive Technology Offers Hope in the Fight Against Malaria

2025-03-25
Gene Drive Technology Offers Hope in the Fight Against Malaria

Researchers at Imperial College London, in collaboration with Tanzanian institutes, have developed a gene drive technology that renders mosquitoes unable to transmit the malaria parasite. This groundbreaking technology could significantly reduce the global malaria burden, saving hundreds of thousands of lives annually, particularly among children. The equitable nature of the technology ensures accessibility without economic or social barriers, offering a new weapon in the ongoing battle against this devastating disease. This collaboration highlights the power of international partnerships in tackling global health challenges.

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Transborder Flight Bookings Between US and Canada Plummet Over 70%

2025-03-26
Transborder Flight Bookings Between US and Canada Plummet Over 70%

Recent data reveals a dramatic drop of over 70% in transborder flight bookings between the United States and Canada. Aviation analytics firm OAG shows a 71.4% to 75.7% decrease in bookings for April through September compared to the same period last year. April bookings alone are down 75.7%. While airlines have reduced some flights, it's far from enough to match the massive demand decline. This presents a significant challenge for airline route planning, requiring substantial adjustments to reflect current realities.

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China Unveils Deep-Sea Cable Cutter, Raising Global Concerns

2025-03-24
China Unveils Deep-Sea Cable Cutter, Raising Global Concerns

China has unveiled a new deep-sea cable-cutting device capable of severing the world's most fortified underwater communication or power lines, with a maximum operating depth of 4,000 meters – twice the range of existing subsea infrastructure. Developed by the China Ship Scientific Research Centre, the device is intended for civilian salvage and seabed mining, but its dual-use potential, especially near strategic chokepoints like Guam, raises concerns about its potential to disrupt global communications and escalate geopolitical tensions.

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Next.js Openness and Vercel's Control: A Battle Between Open Source and Commercial Interests

2025-03-26
Next.js Openness and Vercel's Control: A Battle Between Open Source and Commercial Interests

A Netlify engineer exposes the closed nature of the Next.js framework. While open-source, Vercel's tight control hinders other cloud providers from fully supporting Next.js's features. Issues include the lack of adapters, no official serverless support, and Vercel-specific code paths. A recent critical security vulnerability's handling exemplifies Vercel's lack of transparency, failing to promptly notify other providers, harming users. The author urges Vercel to improve Next.js's openness and interoperability for the benefit of the developer community.

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Development

NYU 2024 Admissions Data Leak: Analysis of Admission Standards Post-Affirmative Action Ban

2025-03-22

A top-secret leak of New York University (NYU) 2024 admissions data reveals that NYU may have continued using race-based admissions criteria after the Supreme Court ruled affirmative action in college admissions illegal. The leaked data, including average SAT, ACT, and GPA scores for different racial groups, raises questions about the fairness of college admissions. The data has been mirrored on Proton and MEGA.

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Accidental Leak: Trump Officials' Signal Group Chats Reveal Yemen War Plans

2025-03-26
Accidental Leak: Trump Officials' Signal Group Chats Reveal Yemen War Plans

The Atlantic's editor-in-chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, was accidentally added to a Signal group chat containing top Trump administration officials coordinating a military operation against the Houthis in Yemen. The group chat included Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Vice President J.D. Vance, and others, and detailed discussions of the operation's specifics, including timing, targets, and munitions, were revealed. Initially suspecting a hoax, Goldberg later confirmed the authenticity of the messages. This incident highlights alarming security vulnerabilities within the U.S. government and raises questions about the decision-making process.

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Tech

ESA's Fair Contribution Model: A New Approach to European Launchers

2025-03-26
ESA's Fair Contribution Model: A New Approach to European Launchers

ESA's governance, hampered by a 'geo-return' policy linking member state investment to national benefits, has resulted in slow project approvals and cost overruns. The Ariane rocket program, heavily funded by France, exemplifies this. However, the rise of commercial spaceflight and smaller launchers challenges this model. ESA proposes a 'fair contribution' funding model, to be presented at the November ministerial conference. This model shifts funding responsibility to member states most benefiting from the successful launcher programs, aiming for greater efficiency and cost control in European space exploration.

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PgDog: Open-Source Sharding for pgvector

2025-03-26
PgDog: Open-Source Sharding for pgvector

Scaling pgvector beyond a million embeddings becomes challenging due to slow index building. This post introduces PgDog, an open-source project that shards the pgvector index. Leveraging IVFFlat's inherent clustering, PgDog distributes vector space partitions across multiple machines. Query vectors are routed to appropriate shards based on proximity to centroids, calculated using scikit-learn, significantly improving search speed and recall. The implementation details cover centroid calculation, a custom sharding function, and SQL parsing using pg_query. Experiments demonstrate PgDog's effectiveness, offering optimizations like parallel cross-shard queries and refined centroid allocation. Future work includes supporting more distance algorithms and SIMD instructions for faster calculations.

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Development sharding

Polypane: Build, Debug, and Test Websites All in One Place

2025-03-25
Polypane: Build, Debug, and Test Websites All in One Place

Polypane is a powerful web development tool that lets you build, debug, and test every aspect of your website without context switching. It supports responsive design, accessibility checks, meta tag verification, and performance testing. View all viewports at once, from mobile screens to 5K monitors; get instant feedback on structure, metadata, and accessibility; and easily test different views like dark and light mode. All actions are mirrored across all devices for streamlined workflow.

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Development Debugging Tool

Pentagon Axes $280M AI Project, Prioritizes 'Lethal' AI Over 'Equitable' AI

2025-03-24
Pentagon Axes $280M AI Project, Prioritizes 'Lethal' AI Over 'Equitable' AI

The Pentagon has canceled its troubled Defense Civilian Human Resources Management System (DCHRMS) project, which ran eight years over budget at $280 million. Along with DCHRMS, over $360 million in grants focused on DEI, climate change, and social programs were also cut. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth explained that the department needs "lethal" AI, not "equitable" AI, and will replan the HR system modernization. This is part of the Pentagon's Department of Government Efficiency initiative to eliminate wasteful spending.

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Chrome Ditches FreeType for Rust-Based Skrifa: A Security and Performance Win

2025-03-19
Chrome Ditches FreeType for Rust-Based Skrifa: A Security and Performance Win

Chrome has replaced its aging FreeType font rendering engine with Skrifa, a new Rust-based library. FreeType's C-based codebase was plagued by security vulnerabilities, demanding significant maintenance resources. Skrifa leverages Rust's memory safety to dramatically reduce vulnerabilities and improve developer productivity. Rigorous testing and comparisons ensure Skrifa matches FreeType's performance and rendering quality. Chrome plans to extend Skrifa's use to more operating systems in the future.

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Development

IngressNightmare: Critical Vulnerabilities Impacting Thousands of Kubernetes Clusters

2025-03-25
IngressNightmare: Critical Vulnerabilities Impacting Thousands of Kubernetes Clusters

Wiz Research discovered a series of unauthenticated Remote Code Execution vulnerabilities (dubbed #IngressNightmare) in Ingress NGINX Controller for Kubernetes. Exploitation grants unauthorized access to all secrets across all namespaces, potentially leading to cluster takeover. Approximately 43% of cloud environments are vulnerable, with over 6,500 affected clusters, including Fortune 500 companies, publicly exposing vulnerable components. Immediate patching is crucial. Mitigations include updating to the latest Ingress NGINX Controller version or disabling the admission controller component.

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Development

Samsung Co-CEO Jong-hee Han Dies Suddenly

2025-03-25
Samsung Co-CEO Jong-hee Han Dies Suddenly

Samsung Electronics Vice Chairman and Co-CEO Jong-hee Han died suddenly of a heart attack at age 63, according to Reuters and CNBC. Han joined Samsung in 1988, leading the visual display R&D in 2011 before heading the TV business. In 2021, he took the helm of Samsung DX, encompassing mobile and consumer electronics, and became Co-CEO in 2022. Despite lacking mobile experience, he oversaw 15 years of global TV sales leadership. Just a week before his death, he apologized at the shareholder meeting for poor stock performance and the company's inadequate response to the AI semiconductor market, acknowledging regulatory hurdles in semiconductor M&A but promising tangible results this year. Following his passing, his co-CEO, Young-Hyun Jun, is now Samsung's sole CEO.

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Tech

arXivLabs: Experimenting with Community Collaboration

2025-03-25
arXivLabs: Experimenting with Community Collaboration

arXivLabs is a framework for collaborators to develop and share new arXiv features directly on the website. Participants embrace arXiv's values of openness, community, excellence, and user data privacy. Got an idea to improve the arXiv community? Learn more about arXivLabs.

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Development

From Beach to Museum: The Epic Journey of Art the Whale

2025-03-21

The story of Art the Whale begins with the discovery of a 40-foot California Gray Whale carcass. What follows is an incredible journey: dismemberment, clandestine burial, and eventual reconstruction by scientists. Art, now the centerpiece exhibit at the Sierra Natural History Museum, went by eight different names throughout his post-mortem journey, reflecting the various stages of his transformation. This article recounts the museum team's resourcefulness and dedication in acquiring this complete whale skeleton at minimal cost, overcoming numerous challenges along the way.

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Misc museum

AirPods Max USB-C Gets Lossless Audio, But Is Apple Overhyping It?

2025-03-26
AirPods Max USB-C Gets Lossless Audio, But Is Apple Overhyping It?

Apple announced that AirPods Max (USB-C) will gain support for lossless audio and ultra-low latency audio via a firmware update next month, alongside iOS 18.4, iPadOS 18.4, and macOS 15.4. However, Apple's own support documents claim that AAC audio is already virtually indistinguishable from original studio recordings, contradicting marketing chief Greg Joswiak's claim of an "ultimate" audio upgrade. While the improvement from lossless audio alone is minimal, the combination with ultra-low latency will make AirPods Max the only headphones allowing musicians to create and mix in Personalized Spatial Audio with head tracking.

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Chrono Trigger at 30: A Timeless RPG Masterpiece

2025-03-25
Chrono Trigger at 30: A Timeless RPG Masterpiece

Celebrating its 30th anniversary, Chrono Trigger remains a landmark RPG. This article reflects on the game's legendary development, bringing together top talent from Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest. The SNES classic's innovative time travel mechanics, stunning pixel art, unforgettable soundtrack, and captivating story continue to resonate with players. The piece delves into the gameplay, narrative, and characters, exploring its unique charm and the reasons behind its enduring legacy, likening it to Citizen Kane and Rosebud in the gaming world.

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Reinforcement Learning: From AlphaGo to AlphaGo Zero

2025-03-26

This article provides a comprehensive overview of reinforcement learning (RL), starting with the captivating story of AlphaGo defeating human Go champions. It explains core RL concepts like MDPs, Bellman equations, dynamic programming, Monte Carlo methods, TD learning (SARSA, Q-learning, DQN), policy gradient methods (REINFORCE, Actor-Critic, A3C), and evolutionary strategies. The article delves into the details of each algorithm, using AlphaGo Zero as a compelling case study to illustrate RL's practical applications and its power in solving complex problems.

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AI

MySQL Transactions Per Second vs. fsyncs Per Second: Unraveling the Mystery

2025-03-21

This article investigates the discrepancy between the theoretical and actual transaction throughput of MySQL. A benchmark reveals MySQL's write speed is significantly faster than theoretically predicted (based on fsync() latency). Further investigation uncovered that MySQL uses group commit to batch writes to the WAL and binlog, and the file system/disk likely employs similar batching, boosting efficiency. The author also analyzes inverted index performance and explains the gap between theoretical models and real-world performance.

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Development

True Parallelism with Global Mutable State in Ruby

2025-03-25

This article explores achieving true parallelism with concurrent data structures in Ruby, overcoming the limitation of built-in Ruby primitives that don't support global mutable state for concurrency. The author demonstrates a method to achieve this, requiring familiarity with Ruby, Rust, and C, along with some additional tooling. Code examples are available on GitHub and require a recent Ruby version (master branch recommended for local compilation), Rust, and C compilers.

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Development

Outperforming std::deque: Introducing the Shift-To-Middle Array

2025-03-23
Outperforming std::deque: Introducing the Shift-To-Middle Array

The Shift-To-Middle Array is a dynamic array designed to outperform std::deque, std::vector, and linked lists in insertion and deletion at both ends. It achieves this by using contiguous memory, improving cache locality, and supporting SIMD and parallel optimizations. Benchmarks show significant performance gains, especially on multi-core CPUs and hardware with SIMD instruction sets. The project is open-source, with full API documentation and benchmark reports available. Contributions are welcome!

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Development dynamic array

ttyd: Share Your Terminal Over the Web

2025-03-23
ttyd: Share Your Terminal Over the Web

ttyd is a simple command-line tool for sharing your terminal over the web. It offers a wealth of options, including port specification, network interface binding, authentication, user permission settings, custom working directories, and more, allowing for flexible configuration. Advanced features such as SSL encryption, IPv6 support, and client argument passing ensure secure and reliable remote terminal access.

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Development terminal sharing

VMware Sues Siemens Over Unlicensed Software

2025-03-26
VMware Sues Siemens Over Unlicensed Software

VMware is suing Siemens' US operations for allegedly using more VMware software than licensed. The dispute began when Siemens requested extended support, submitting a list of its VMware software that significantly exceeded its purchased licenses. Siemens later attempted to retract the list, leading VMware to believe they intentionally concealed unlicensed software use. This lawsuit follows VMware's recent announcement of changes to its software download process, a move aimed at better tracking license compliance.

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A Quilt's Story: Deconstructing the Myths of Clothing Quality

2025-03-26
A Quilt's Story: Deconstructing the Myths of Clothing Quality

This article recounts the creation of a patchwork quilt using worn textiles from friends and family, sparking a reflection on the quality of mass-produced clothing. The author argues that garment quality isn't solely determined by origin or maker, but by brands' control over costs and production processes. Low-quality fast fashion reflects brand choices to cut costs, not the skill of the workers. The piece challenges stereotypes about East Asian women's sewing abilities, advocating for a focus on brand and supply chain responsibility instead.

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AMD's Radeon RX 9000 Series GPUs Sell 10x More Units in First Week

2025-03-25
AMD's Radeon RX 9000 Series GPUs Sell 10x More Units in First Week

AMD CEO Lisa Su announced that the Radeon RX 9000 series graphics cards have been a phenomenal success, selling ten times more units than their predecessors in their first week on the market. This success is attributed to AMD's focus on delivering top-tier gaming performance at competitive prices. While current supply is limited and prices are exceeding MSRP, AMD is aggressively increasing production. More RDNA 4 cards are on the way, with the rumored RX 9060 potentially included in the lineup.

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Hardware

Heathrow Airport Shutdown: Massive Power Outage Causes Chaos

2025-03-21
Heathrow Airport Shutdown: Massive Power Outage Causes Chaos

A major fire at an electrical substation near London's Heathrow Airport caused a complete power outage, shutting down the airport for the entire day. Thousands of flights were diverted or turned back, impacting tens of thousands of passengers. The fire also left over 16,000 homes without power. The incident highlights the vulnerability of critical infrastructure and raises questions about backup power systems. Affected passengers shared stories of disrupted travel plans, including missed weddings and delayed visits to sick family members.

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AI Teammate: Field Experiment Shows Generative AI Reshaping Teamwork and Expertise

2025-03-22
AI Teammate: Field Experiment Shows Generative AI Reshaping Teamwork and Expertise

A randomized controlled trial at Procter & Gamble reveals generative AI significantly boosts team productivity and solution quality. Individuals with AI performed as well as teams without, while AI-enabled teams excelled, significantly increasing the likelihood of top-tier solutions. AI not only improved efficiency but also enhanced positive emotions, bridged departmental silos, and enabled less experienced employees to reach the performance levels of experienced team members. This research suggests AI is not merely a productivity tool, but a 'teammate' capable of reshaping teamwork and organizational structures.

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AI

AmigaDOS String Interpolation: Beyond {} Braces

2025-03-22

This blog post explores the flexibility and quirks of string interpolation in AmigaDOS shell scripts. While AmigaDOS defaults to using `<` and `>` for interpolation, it allows customization via `.BRA` and `.KET` directives. Experiments demonstrate the successful use of various character pairs, including printable and non-printable ASCII characters (like BEL and NAK). This highlights the robustness of the AmigaDOS script parser and its resilience in handling unusual input.

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Development string interpolation

WWI Dazzle Camouflage: It Wasn't the Paint, It Was the Horizon Effect

2025-03-25
WWI Dazzle Camouflage: It Wasn't the Paint, It Was the Horizon Effect

During WWI, navies used "dazzle" camouflage to confuse German U-boats. Researchers at Aston University re-analyzed a 106-year-old study and found that the "dazzle" effect was far less significant than the "horizon effect." The horizon effect causes viewers to underestimate a ship's angle relative to the horizon; even at a 25-degree angle, it appears to be traveling along the horizon. This study reveals that even experienced naval officers were fooled by the horizon effect, highlighting a misinterpretation of the camouflage's effectiveness.

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