05 Sci-Tech
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The space between stars just got a little sweeter.
Astronomers have detected a type of sugar in space that’s also found in raspberries and self-tanners. The sugar, called erythrulose, lurks in what’s called the interstellar medium: thin clouds of gas and dust littered between stars.
Sugar does more than sweeten tea and powder doughnuts. Different varieties fuel our cells and even make up DNA. Scientists are itching to know how sugars form because they’re a key ingredient for life as we know it.
Using two dish-shaped radio telescopes in Spain, researchers collected data from a large gas cloud near the center of the Milky Way. They identified the sugar in gas form by comparing telescope signals to samples in the lab. It’s the latest kind of sugar detected in space — in a region crossed by NASA’s twin Voyager, the farthest spacecraft to ever travel from Earth.
The results were published Monday in the journal Nature Astronomy.
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BRUSSELS: The European Union and Britain targeted Russia on Monday (Jul 13) with coordinated sanctions over cyber attacks in Europe, accusing Moscow’s FSB intelligence agency over involvement in digital strikes.
The move comes as Western officials warn Russia has stepped up its “hybrid” campaign to destabilise Europe over four years into the war on Ukraine.
Brussels said it was imposing sanctions on nine people and four entities, while London said it was adding 24 names to its blacklist.
The British government said the sanctions – the first joint cyber package with the EU – “target the Russian state’s persistent and increasingly reckless attempts to sow chaos and division across Europe”.
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Elementary school students might memorize their times tables for single-digit numbers, but memorization won’t cut it when the teacher asks for three-digit multiplication. This requires an algorithm: students are taught to stack one number atop another and multiply each digit of the bottom number by each digit of the top one. For millennia, mathematicians believed this to be the fastest multiplication method, until a 23-year-old made a shocking discovery in 1960, which led to a mystery that remains unsolved to this day.
This mystery is critical to anyone who partakes in the digital world because multiplication is a foundational operation for computers. Encryption, robotics, artificial intelligence, audio processing and pretty much everything else we task silicon chips with involves multiplication, sometimes of huge numbers many times over. At this scale, even a simple operation becomes a bottleneck, and any extra efficiency has global economic consequences.
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Meta announced Monday that its Louisiana data center investment has grown from $10 billion to $50 billion and that it expects to generate substantial local tax revenues as it pursues artificial superintelligence.
The Richland Parish Data Center, nicknamed “Hyperion,” will be a nearly 10 million-square-foot, five-gigawatt facility, equivalent to a power plant capable of supplying enough electricity to power roughly 4 million average U.S. homes simultaneously. Altogether, that is about as much energy as New York City uses on a winter day.
“We’re delivering real economic impact alongside the AI infrastructure that will power the future,” Meta Vice President of Data Centers Rachel Peterson said in a statement.
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Writing in May for Above the Law, Ken Crutchfield observed that “over the past year, we’ve seen a steady stream of headlines about AI hallucinations where fake cases, fabricated quotes, and misstated facts made it through a review process and into court filings.” The predicament isn’t just that GenAI tools invent non-existent cases that some short-cut-taking attorneys cite without verifying; it’s that the tools also produce difficult-to-discover false claims and quotations that masquerade as truth in pleadings and motions. Indeed, the US Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit explained in February that the “problem now often manifests as false quotes or statements of law attributed to real cases, rather than the more easily recognizable fake cases.”
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For decades, video games have been a go-to hobby for Alyx Green. But in recent years, Green has felt priced out.
Instead of buying the biggest releases, the Illinois graduate student has opted for cheaper alternatives from smaller studios or turned to board and card games. In some cases, the 31-year-old watches videos of others playing hot games on YouTube in lieu of actually playing.
“The price has been going up,” Green said. “It’s just hard to keep up.”
U.S. consumers have for years grappled with “funflation,” used to describe the sharply higher prices for live experiences like concerts or sporting events that were halted during pandemic lockdowns.
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For more than 5,300 years, it lay undisturbed beneath a Stone Age tomb in northern Spain, hidden among the remains of nearly 100 people. When archaeologists finally uncovered the ancient skull, they expected another glimpse into prehistoric life. Instead, they found evidence of something far more extraordinary. Careful examination revealed that the woman had undergone not one but two complex ear surgeries thousands of years before modern medicine existed. Even more astonishing, signs of new bone growth showed she survived both procedures, making the discovery the world’s earliest known physical evidence of ear surgery and rewriting what scientists know about prehistoric healthcare.The skull was unearthed in 2018 from the Dolmen of El Pendón, a large Neolithic burial monument near Reinoso in Spain’s Burgos province. The tomb, which dates back to between 3800 BCE and 3000 BCE, served as a collective burial site for around 100 individuals. Among them was the skull of an elderly woman, believed to have been around 65 years old, whose remains would become the focus of an extraordinary scientific investigation.
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With the exploding popularity of generative artificial intelligence, many open-source models are now available online for anyone to adapt for their task, such as generating product renderings in a certain artistic style.
But these models also find their way into the hands of nefarious actors who may optimize them to produce illegal content, like hate speech or child sexual abuse material (CSAM). This is a growing problem — the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children received more than 1.5 million reports of AI-generated CSAM in 2025, an increase from 67,000 in 2024.
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Physicists have successfully recreated some of the extreme physics of black holes inside a laboratory by building a stationary device that can copy the effects of impossible rotational speeds.The achievement confirms a theoretical idea suggested more than half a century ago by Sir Roger Penrose, who proposed that energy could be taken from a rapidly spinning black hole. Instead of using moving parts, researchers at the Advanced Science Research Center at the CUNY Graduate Center (CUNY ASRC) used artificial rotation to recreate this cosmic energy process in a controlled laboratory setting.The discovery, published in the journal Nature, takes a long-standing idea from science fiction into practical physics. The laboratory model avoids the physical limits of mechanical machines and could help create new technologies in wireless communication, advanced optics and quantum computing.
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AI is turning scientists into publishing machines—and quietly funneling them into the same crowded corners of research.
That’s the conclusion of an analysis of more than 40 million academic papers, which found that scientists who use AI tools in their research publish more papers, accumulate more citations, and reach leadership roles sooner than peers who don’t.
But there’s a catch. As individual scholars soar through the academic ranks, science as a whole shrinks its curiosity. AI-heavy research covers less topical ground, clusters around the same data-rich problems, and sparks less follow-on engagement between studies.
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Praying mantises have fascinated people for centuries. Across different cultures, they have been viewed as everything from mystical guides that help lost travelers find their way home to ominous creatures associated with bad luck. Beyond the legends, native mantises also play an important ecological role by serving as indicators of healthy, biodiverse ecosystems.
Now, however, scientists say two Asian mantis species are becoming a growing threat to Europe’s native wildlife.
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The researchers behind the breakthrough say these humanoid robots could offer several advantages over the complex surgical systems currently in use.
Humanoid-style robot performs surgery for the first time, marking a potential turning point in the relationship between robotics and healthcare. Working alongside surgeons from the University of California San Diego, a robot named Surgie successfully removed a gallbladder. In another operation, “Surgie” was joined by another robot also dubbed “Surgie” to work alongside one another to perform a laparoscopic gallbladder removal. Both procedures were performed on non-primate mammals, The Independent reports.
“This study shows that humanoid robots have a viable future in the field of surgery,” said Michael Yip, a faculty member in the UC San Diego Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering.,” said to The Independent. “Remotely operated and autonomous humanoid robots have real potential for amplifying access to critical surgeries to which patients would otherwise not have access. This can help address the healthcare crisis not only in the United States, but also worldwide.”
President Trump has lifted his export ban on Anthropic’s AI product. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick announced “… The controls … are withdrawn. A license is no longer required for the export, reexport, or in-country transfer, including deemed export or deemed reexport, of the Mythos or Fable models.”
The software giant Microsoft announced it was laying off 4,000 people, primarily its X-box division. The move is designed to optimize X-box and other divisions using AI. The layoffs amount to 2.1% of its workforce. 1,600 of those layoffs are already happening, and they’re all in the X-box division.
AI ‘actor’ Tilly Norwood to appear in feature film set in the ‘Tillyverse’ – National– globalnews.ca
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The AI “actor” known as Tilly Norwood will be used in a new feature film entitled Misaligned, its first lead role as a digitally generated persona.
Particle6, the AI production studio that built Norwood, is developing and producing the film, the company told Global News in an email statement. The company is led by comedian and writer Eline Van der Velden.
