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Monday October 5
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Decades before the modern web, the BBC Domesday Project dared to archive an entire nation using.... what else – massive LV-ROM (LaserVision Read Only Memory) LaserDiscs.
To mark the impending 40th anniversary of the BBC Domesday Project's release, the UK's Centre for Computing History (CCH) hosted a celebration at its museum on September 19, bringing together several of the original team members responsible for the system.
One was Mike Tibbetts, an assistant to Peter Armstrong, the BBC producer behind the project. Tibbetts revealed that the UK's domestic intelligence service, MI5, took an interest in the system, but "they didn't understand a word of what we were doing!"
"And on one occasion, Peter and I had to give a presentation, or Peter gave the presentation to [former prime minister] Margaret Thatcher, and well, I'm not sure she understood what we were doing either..."
What they were doing was compiling a trove of data that will prove invaluable to historians in the years to come, even if the politicians of the era looked nervously on at the amount of data being handed over to the public.
The Domesday Project was intended to be a modern version of the Domesday Book, compiled after the 1066 Norman invasion of England. The original book surveyed most of England and parts of Wales and was used by the King to assess dues owed to him. 900 years later, the name was given to a project in which more than a million people participated to provide a snapshot of life in the UK.
Participants (many of whom were school children) contributed content, which was linked with maps, photographs, and other data. It was all compiled onto a pair of LaserDiscs – the Community Disc and the National Disc – and accessed via a BBC Master computer and a Philips VP415 LaserVision player.
Armstrong came up with the idea, and the team compiled the project between 1984 and 1986. The system was eventually released at the end of 1986, and was aimed at schools, libraries, and universities. It was, alas, not a roaring sales success – the exact price per unit is difficult to pin down, but approximately £5,000 is a fair estimate. Government subsidies lowered the cost to around £3,000, but it was still out of reach for much of its audience.
As a resource, however, it has huge value, which will only increase as the years pass. Tibbetts drew parallels to the original Domesday Book, which took centuries for historians to recognize as a vital resource. "Perhaps," he mused, "40 years is simply too short a time for historians to perceive the Domesday Project as a sufficiently distant benchmark of useful research."
Perhaps. However, while hundreds of years have passed since the Domesday Book was compiled, the years have not been kind to the Domesday Project, thanks to technology's inexorable march.
"The original Domesday Book had one huge advantage over the Domesday Project when it comes to future-proofing and longevity," explained Tibbetts. "The vellum pages of the original Domesday have been preserved for 940 years so far, and it's likely to continue to exist well into the future.
"It took very few years for the bespoke technology of the BBC Domesday Project to be overtaken by universal media technologies."
However, they chose the technology at the time for good technical reasons. The BBC Micro could output a 625-line television picture. The Philips LaserVision system could be re-engineered to store alphanumeric data. There wasn't much in the way of authoring and playback systems, so, as Tibbetts explained, the team had to invent everything. "In technological terms," he said, "the world of 1984 really couldn't be more different from the instant-access, media-rich world of today."
And so, inevitably, within a few short years, that technology began to show its age.
"As was entirely predictable, our discs aged and became difficult to read. The expensive LV-ROM player was quickly superseded by cheaper and more widely available CD-ROM and DVD systems."
And, worse, "Largely because of the lack of any great academic interest in preserving our massive resource for the future, the BBC Domesday Project was in grave danger of disappearing without a trace."
Several initiatives have kicked off over the years to preserve the project, and the CCH's event was as much about celebrating those as it was about looking at the project's genesis.
Tibbetts dropped some nuggets of information about the project, estimating that 60 people reported directly to him and Armstrong, with another 60 in subcontracted teams. He also discussed the frustration the team felt as doubt was cast about whether the project was even possible.
"We came back from Christmas in January 1986," Tibbetts recalled, "we sat down for our first team meeting, and I was forced to point out that our little VAX minicomputer didn't have one byte of data that was ready to go onto the Domesday discs, so we did the whole thing in a few months!"
As far as hardware was concerned, Andy Finney, who handled mastering the discs, remembered that the original plan for the Domesday Project was for it to be mouse-based, rather than the trackball the system used for navigation. The mouse was still a relatively novel concept, alien to many users. "I remember vividly one chap who was navigating with this mouse on the table, and he moved the mouse towards him, and by the time he got to the edge of the table, he hadn't actually reached the bottom of the screen. So he went on the edge and underneath..."
Tibbetts added, "I always feel guilty about the mouse, because we got that wrong ... the decision came down in favor of the trackball because that is much more easy for somebody with movement disabilities to use rather than a mouse."
"But boy, did we get that wrong..."
As Tibbetts noted, even with little interest from some parts of the academic community, enthusiasts have continued to put in a huge amount of effort over the years to keep the resource accessible. Simon Inns of the Domesday86 project described it as "a race against time" – not just for hardware, but to get data off discs before bit rot rendered them unreadable.
The good news is that the Domesday discs have been preserved, and reside in the Internet Archive. "Anyone," said Inns, "can go to the Internet Archive and download a Domesday Disc. This is, like, groundbreaking stuff. 10 years ago, this was a laugh, right? Now you can actually do this."
While there might not be many functioning examples of the hardware around anymore, the preservation efforts mean that the Domesday Project will endure. "Our hope," said Inns, "is that within the next couple of years, everyone in this room [at The Centre for Computing History] will be able to have a Domesday system and be able to experience what it was like."
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If there was a year the world began waking up to climate change, it might have been 1988. That June, the NASA climatologist James Hansen testified to Congress that the climate was warming and would continue to do so as long as humans pumped fossil fuel pollution into the atmosphere. Months later, the United Nations established the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
And, just weeks before the U.N. vote, Frank Sprow of Exxon's corporate research department warned his colleagues in an internal memo, "If a worldwide consensus emerges that action is needed to mitigate against Greenhouse gas effects, substantial negative impacts on Exxon could occur."
Sprow's memo is part of a batch of previously undisclosed documents released earlier this year without fanfare as part of an ongoing lawsuit Massachusetts filed against ExxonMobil in 2019. While the memo was quoted in a 2023 article by The Wall Street Journal, it has not been published in full. Several other documents included in the filings are being reported on here for the first time, including more recent statements from Exxon scientists challenging the company's climate-solution claims about its work on biofuels and carbon capture and storage.
While the documents align with hundreds of confidential files that have previously come to light through reporting by Inside Climate News and other news organizations, as well as lawsuits and other sources, experts say they provide new details on internal deliberations at Exxon from the 1980s to the 2010s.
The release of the documents comes at a pivotal time for the oil industry and for efforts to hold it accountable for its role fueling climate change. This week, the U.S. Supreme Court heard arguments from Exxon and oil producer Suncor Energy that a lawsuit filed by the city and county of Boulder, Colorado, should be halted. The outcome of that decision could decide whether more than two dozen other claims against oil companies proceed.
Aaron Regunberg, director of climate accountability at the advocacy group Public Citizen, said the documents from the Massachusetts case underscore why Exxon and other companies are fighting to block the lawsuits from even proceeding to the discovery phase.
"They are really scared of the public finding out about this reality," Regunberg said of oil companies. The Massachusetts filings, he said, suggest "that we have seen just a sliver of the evidence that they actually have that they've spent decades knowingly deceiving the public about this crisis. How many more reports are they sitting on?"
Most of the lawsuits assert that oil companies should help pay the escalating costs being imposed on the public by climate-fueled extreme weather because they knew the risks their products posed but worked to publicly question climate science and stymie efforts to curb emissions. Those costs have surged, topping $100 billion in the U.S. in four of the last five years. Exxon, meanwhile, reported nearly $19 billion in earnings over the first six months of this year alone.
Exxon did not respond to requests for comment, but it has denied misleading the public or investors about climate change. In its annual securities filing, the company said of the lawsuits, "We believe the legal and factual theories set forth in these proceedings are meritless and represent an inappropriate attempt to use the court system to usurp the proper role of policymakers in addressing the societal challenges of climate change."
The case brought by the Massachusetts attorney general's office in state court is slightly different from others, arguing that the company deceived the state's consumers and investors into thinking it was taking action to limit warming when those efforts were more about public relations than real action. The state is seeking fines and an injunction blocking Exxon's allegedly deceptive practices.
The new documents, filed as part of a dispute over whether Exxon should be forced to hand over more files and testimony, help lay out the state's case.
Take biofuels. For years, Exxon ran a sustained public relations campaign touting its research into using algae to make fuel, which it said could be a sustainable alternative to petroleum.
In March, The Wall Street Journal reported on internal documents that showed Exxon's scientists told executives the company's targets were not feasible. The new disclosures in the Massachusetts case add to the evidence with excerpts from a deposition by an Exxon scientist who worked on the program.
Asked whether a 2018 press release, which said Exxon anticipated "10,000 barrels of algae biofuel per day could be produced by 2025," was misleading, the scientist said "yes," adding, "All the clauses in there are patently false."
The scientist testified that the 10,000-barrel-per-day target was "completely impossible to achieve," and that he told this to others at the company before the press release was issued.
In another instance, the scientist said a research development on algae that Exxon publicly claimed as a breakthrough was, in fact, "a dead end."
Exxon later dropped its research into algae biofuels but has continued to promote carbon capture and storage as a climate solution. The documents include some statements which, according to the attorney general's office, show Exxon knew that technology was also unlikely to present a scalable solution to cutting emissions.
A 2014 presentation on Exxon's carbon capture portfolio included a slide listing challenges to reaching commercial scale. It noted widespread deployment would require a "massive investment" and an eventual storage rate "comparable to current oil and gas production." It said costs were high and there were no market-based incentives.
Three years later, a different Exxon scientist was asked by a colleague to record an advertisement for the technology. He noted that the company was calling itself a leader in carbon capture but said he was "not a big fan" of the claim. At the time, Exxon's carbon capture operations were largely restricted to gas processing plants that stripped the climate pollutant out of methane and injected it into oil or gas fields. That technology, he said, "has nothing to do" with the type of carbon capture that Exxon and others were promoting for power plants and industrial facilities.
That scientist later appeared in an ad promoting research he was conducting on carbon capture without any claim that Exxon was a leader in the technology.
Another presentation from 2017 appears to show the advertisements for algae and carbon capture were among the company's highest performing, calling them "All-Around Winners."
In 2021, Exxon was still promoting its work in carbon capture. An internal presentation about an advertising campaign targeting political and financial leaders said its objective was to get people to "believe ExxonMobil is committed to helping solve climate change" and to proving the company and carbon capture and storage "play an indispensable role in facilitating the transition to a lower carbon energy system."
Under a header of "what we're doing," the presentation listed a proposed hub for carbon capture in Houston that Exxon no longer promotes.
While the Massachusetts case focuses on these more recent campaigns, the filings include earlier records that serve as concise roadmaps for what would become Exxon's climate strategy in the following decades, said Geoffrey Supran, an associate professor of environmental science and policy at the University of Miami. He has published studies comparing Exxon's public statements with its internal documents and is a consulting expert on some climate-related legal actions.
It was November 1988, five months after Hansen's congressional testimony, when Sprow filed his draft memo.
With the threat of climate action looming, he wrote, the company's research and development on "Greenhouse" should have two primary goals: "Protect the value of our resources (oil, gas, coal)," and "Preserve Exxon's business options."
Sprow then laid out an agenda for how to achieve those ends.
With modeling critical to climate science, he wrote, "it could be considered important to be at the forefront of this modeling effort." Sprow proposed "supporting a person on staff at one of the leading modeling centers (e.g. Princeton) or by sending one of our people to work in such a center."
Sprow also recommended monitoring alternative energy technologies, including nuclear, solar and biofuels, to understand their viability as alternatives to fossil fuels or, eventually, for possible business development. Finally, he added, Exxon could look for "a research breakthrough" in one of these areas that would align with the company's business.
Sprow did not respond to requests for comment from Inside Climate News, but he told The Wall Street Journal that his memo was adopted as corporate policy.
By the late 1990s, Exxon and other oil companies were working assertively to convince the public and government officials that enacting policies to limit climate pollution would impose grave costs on society.
One newly published Exxon memo summarizing a 1997 meeting of a climate steering group at the American Petroleum Institute, a trade group, outlines many key elements of the strategy.
With governments poised to negotiate an international climate agreement in Kyoto, the steering group would recommend that API "continue to question the scientific basis and cite the high economic cost" of policies to address climate change and "avoid pressures to negotiate a compromise."
The memo cited polling about which arguments would "resonate with the public."
It also said Exxon was planning to fund a climate change project by Jonathan Adler of the free-market oriented Competitive Enterprise Institute, who had come to the meeting seeking support. Exxon asked Adler to "focus their project more narrowly" on the impacts of climate policy proposals on individuals and trade competitiveness. The memo outlined a grassroots campaign and efforts with labor unions, and said API continued to work with the American Enterprise Institute, another conservative think tank, to arrange a seminar about a letter written by economists. The goal was to "prevent its misuse by advocates or near-term action."
"These are sophisticated strategies to use and weaponize experts in order to perpetuate their denial," said Supran, who co-authored an amicus brief supporting Boulder in the case against Exxon and Suncor. "This is the playbook all in one place."
In an interview, Adler rejected the argument that he was promoting climate denial. "I can't speak to what API or Exxon's motivations were," said Adler, now a professor at William & Mary Law School. "What I can say is the work we did at CEI at the time was very much focused on what was accurate and correct and consistent with the principles the organization was founded on."
He said it was natural for his organization to seek funding from companies and entities that also supported limited government regulation.
This year, Adler wrote a brief supporting Boulder in the case before the Supreme Court, arguing that its claims were not preempted by federal law and should be allowed to proceed in state court. He did not take a position on the merits of Boulder's claims.
By 2005, when Exxon was facing public criticism for its support for groups that questioned climate science, a company spokesperson told Mother Jones magazine that Exxon believed "the scientific evidence on greenhouse gas emissions remains inconclusive and that studies must continue." She also said Exxon had devoted large sums to university research programs, including a planned $100 million to Stanford University's Global Climate and Energy Project.
The following year, documents from the Massachusetts case now show, a colleague arranged a meeting for the spokesperson with two self-identified global warming skeptics.
By the 2010s, Exxon's public position on climate change had evolved. It was no longer questioning science, a position that became harder to maintain as scientists' conclusions grew stronger and the United States joined the Paris Agreement in 2015. In fact, following Sprow's advice, the company had one of its research scientists contributing to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
Exxon was fending off concerns from shareholders that it was failing to prepare its business for the risks posed by climate change, so it began work on a "climate risk matrix," the documents show. In 2016, the Exxon scientist who contributed to the U.N. climate panel warned colleagues of the risk of climate tipping points, the probability of which were "poorly understood but probability is expected to rise with temperature change." He noted that failure to limit emissions would have a growing influence on temperatures beyond 2040 and cited concerns that the impacts of hitting tipping points "would be significantly larger" than the direct effects of heat.
And yet, the Massachusetts case shows, Exxon continued to promote solutions that its own scientists said were unlikely to reach commercial scale. The vast majority of its money instead went to oil and gas, the production of which Exxon plans to expand more than 15 percent by 2030.
This story originally appeared on Inside Climate News.
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Samsung Electronics expects third-quarter revenue to more than double and operating profit to reach nearly nine times last year's level as the AI infrastructure boom fuels demand for memory.
The South Korean company is among the major memory manufacturers benefiting from demand for chips used in datacenter servers and GPUs.
Although Samsung will not report its full earnings until the end of this month, its guidance puts sales at between ₩194 trillion and ₩196 trillion (about $145 billion) for the quarter ended September 30, 2026. This is more than double the ₩86.1 trillion ($63 billion) for the same period last year.
The company expects operating profit of between ₩107.3 trillion and ₩107.5 trillion (about $80 billion), compared with just ₩12.2 trillion ($9 billion) for Q3 2025, roughly 8.8 times last year's figure.
Samsung's brief guidance note does not break down performance by business division. Demand for memory, including high-bandwidth memory (HBM) used alongside AI processors, is likely to be a major contributor.
The demand for DRAM and NAND for AI applications is driving profits across the semiconductor industry. Analyst Gartner forecast that the sector as a whole will bring in $1.6 trillion during 2026, almost double the revenue seen in 2025.
Rival chipmaker Micron posted similar gains last week, and the other Korean memory giant, SK hynix, will likely have the same story to tell when it discloses its own quarterly figures later this month.
The boom is proving costly for buyers of everyday electronics. Memory manufacturers' shift towards more lucrative AI products is squeezing supplies for PCs, smartphones, and other devices, driving up component prices.
As The Register previously reported, rising component costs are pricing budget PCs out of the market. US sales in that bracket fell 18.7 percent year-on-year in the first quarter, while average PC selling prices were forecast to rise by up to 12 percent by December. Smartphone makers face similar pressures, with budget devices becoming increasingly difficult to produce profitably.
Samsung warned earlier this year that it expected the memory supply crunch to deepen in 2027 and potentially persist through 2028, leaving buyers with little to smile about.
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On Friday, Amazon committed to donating more than $1 billion over the next five years to communities neighboring data centers.
In a press release, Amazon Web Services' CEO Matt Garman said that communities would decide how to prioritize funds across "education, job training, energy affordability, water, and energy preservation, and local priorities."
Laying out other community commitments, Amazon also promised to ensure data centers wouldn't increase power bills or wipe out local water supplies. Regarding the latter, Amazon promised to be "water positive" by 2030, while claiming that 75 percent of projects have already met this goal.
Rolling out these commitments, Amazon seemed bent on convincing Americans that the swelling data center backlash is based on lies. Echoing Donald Trump's claims that foreign disinformation campaigns are fueling widespread protests, Garman urged that calls for data moratoriums must end or else American frontier AI might fall behind China's.
According to Garman, US rivals are trying to "trick us into slowing down," and Amazon's commitments are meant to reassure Americans that everything's okay and that we should instead plow ahead, as Trump endlessly advocates.
However, advocates at Stand.Earth—a global nonprofit that's been fighting for environmental protections in communities hosting data centers—told Ars that Amazon is the one being "misleading" by spreading "corporate propaganda." Seemingly in crisis mode as billions of dollars in data center projects have been blocked nationwide, Amazon's promised donations represent "a flailing attempt at damage control for the harm its data center build-out has already caused," Stand.Earth said.
Most problematic, Stand.Earth suggested, is Amazon's plan to back a power plant that experts expect will become the largest source of US climate pollution. Glaringly, Amazon's data center commitments don't mention the power plant and scarcely address pollution, apart from promising to exclusively rely on back-up generators that use the lowest possible emissions.
"For all the claims Amazon makes about investing in carbon-free energy, it conveniently leaves out that it is constructing the single-largest source of climate emissions in the United States in Pecos, Texas," Stand.Earth said. "Communities will face 33 million tons of harmful air pollution every year—with the power plant using the same amount of energy needed to run more than 1.9 million homes."
Additionally, Stand.Earth called out Amazon for claiming that most data center generators sparking pollution fears in communities typically sit "idle." Although Amazon emphasized that most generators only run for "roughly 10 hours per year," Stand.Earth cited cases where "Amazon data centers ran on diesel back-up power for days at a time."
At least one part of Amazon's deal is promising, Stand.Earth suggested. The company ending its practice of using nondisclosure agreements when building new data centers will likely help make projects more transparent.
However, "many of the key concerns communities have are not addressed," Stand.Earth found. For example, Amazon's promises to replace all water used for data centers seemingly won't address "the massive water footprint left by energy infrastructure powering its data centers" or "the potential for forever-chemical contamination from nascent cooling technologies," Stand.Earth told Ars.
The total amount Amazon is investing also doesn't seem like much compared to what the company has spent. In the press release, Garman said that Amazon contributed the same amount, more than $1 billion, to data center communities over the past three years.
"Compared to the $220 billion the company is investing in data centers in 2026 alone, Amazon's commitment of $1 billion over five years for community support is a drop in the bucket," Stand.Earth said. "It is difficult to read this statement as anything other than a plea from Amazon to continue exploiting communities at minimal cost."
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https://www.righto.com/2026/10/ML10-switched-capacitor-filter.html
Sometimes it's easier to identify an IC with a microscope. While sorting a box of old ICs, CuriousMarc came across some Harris ICs labeled "F1-10-5", a mysterious part number that didn't show up in any databooks. Since unidentifiable ICs are useless, he gave me one to analyze. Conveniently, it was in a ceramic package, so I could open it up with a quick tap from a chisel. Under the microscope, the chip's most striking feature was a grid of square capacitors. With all those capacitors, I guessed that it was a switched-capacitor filter. The die provided another clue: the part number HF-10. With this information, we quickly found that the chip was Harris's version of the standard MF10 switched-capacitor filter chip.
Switched-capacitor filters were a popular way to implement analog filters in the 1980s. Rapidly switching capacitors in and out of a circuit enabled the construction of single-chip filters that were easy to use and performed well. The MF10, introduced by National Semiconductor in 1981, provides two flexible filters on a chip; each filter acts as a low-pass filter, band-pass filter, or a high-pass filter. The filter's characteristics are simple to control with a few external resistors.
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For a while, those hoping to avoid the difficulty and expense of dealing with Adobe's Creative Suite have been able to use several free and/or open-source alternatives that replicate some or all of those capabilities. Now, one developer is using AI-powered reverse engineering to mimic the look, feel, and functionality of Adobe's well-known software with what he hopes will soon be perfect fidelity.
Artcraft got its start last year as a "controllable AI for artists" that allows for precise post-generation editing of AI-crafted images and videos. Over the weekend, though, the brand debuted its pivot to a suite of seven open source apps recreating the user interface and tools found in Adobe's Photoshop, Illustrator, Premiere, Lightroom, After Effects, InDesign, and Acrobat Pro.
In announcing those new apps on Reddit earlier this week, software developer Brandon Thomas said he used Anthropic's Claude Opus 5.5 to create "clean-room replacements" for Adobe's closed source software in Rust (with WebAssembly versions available for use in a browser). And while commenters on Hacker News and elsewhere have taken pains to point out the new software's many current shortcomings, Thomas make the grandiose promise that the current "super early alpha" state will soon lead to something just as functional as anything Adobe has ever put out.
"We're going to reach 100% [feature] parity within a month," Thomas stated on Reddit of his plans to quickly squash bugs and add features with the help of community reports. Days later, on Hacker News, he amended that position slightly to say that "99% parity will take a while, but I'm sure it'll be measured in months and not years."
Thomas, who says he has about a decade of experience working on large-scale Rust projects, wrote on Hacker News that he was inspired to create his own open source Adobe software alternatives after being "bit by the dark pattern 'cancellation fee' one too many times." Development of the totally free options offered here under MIT/Apache licenses will be funded, Thomas wrote, by selling token-based access to the pre-existing Artcraft visual AI model and IDE, which is offered as an imagery-generation option inside the apps alongside third-party models. This revenue stream will help ensure these apps aren't "going to be some orphaned small-team project," Thomas wrote. "We have a team building popular software for filmmakers, so supporting this is fully funded."
Thomas is the latest in a long line of coders using AI tools to speed up the long-standing but labor-intensive practice of reverse engineering (i.e., replicating the functionality of a piece of software without directly copying the code itself). While that practice has generally been found legally acceptable, the ArtCraft apps could still face legal trouble if their "trade dress" too closely mimics Adobe's familiar appearance and interface.
After coding exclusively with AI tools since February, Thomas said he foresees a near future when everyday developers can re-create open source versions of popular paid software to "take back the internet and own tech forever."
"Now you can just create 1:1 functional equivalents, clean room, that are highly performant and cross-platform. Nothing is stopping you," Thomas wrote. "We'll replace Google Search, we'll build our own smartphones, we'll build better infra. We'll remove all the ads and de-enshittify the entire tech world."
"Software is over," he gloated in an earlier comment, claiming to have "one-shotted Photoshop. The whole thing."
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As many doctors are moving ahead with the latest advances of modern medicine—from powerful obesity drugs to breakthrough cancer treatments—pediatricians are being forced to turn back, fighting to maintain advances in children's health that were hard-won decades ago.
With anti-vaccine advocate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as health secretary, the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) has spent a considerable amount of time and resources in the past year fiercely defending lifesaving vaccinations—safe, routine shots that have saved the lives of millions of children over decades and thwarted untold suffering and disability.
But just this week, The New York Times reported that Ken Paxton, the attorney general of Texas, has opened aggressive investigations against pediatricians simply because they vaccinated their patients. Paxton falsely claims vaccines are part of a "multi-level, multi-industry scheme." But critics say his anti-vaccine campaign appears more aimed at currying favor with Kennedy, President Trump, and their supporters as Paxton runs for the US Senate.
Meanwhile, the AAP this week had to renew another decades-old stance for children's health—one against unpasteurized dairy, aka raw milk. Since the early 20th century, dairy producers in the US have briefly heated milk to kill the array of dangerous pathogens that naturally dwell in and around cattle and can easily migrate into milk. The simple intervention of pasteurization contributed to a sharp, "remarkable" drop in infant deaths and illnesses.
But, much like vaccines, a flood of misinformation has eroded trust and understanding of this public health triumph. And again, Kennedy has been among the advocates working to reverse this health victory.
In recent years, state laws have been loosening on raw milk, despite a federal ban on interstate commerce. At least 27 states now allow raw milk sales. In turn, outbreaks from raw milk have increased over the past two decades, the AAP highlights. Nearly half the illnesses in these outbreaks are in children—who are particularly vulnerable to foodborne pathogens.
Last week, ProPublica reported the heart-wrenching story of a 17-month-old girl in California, who nearly died after acquiring E. coli O157:H7 from drinking raw goat milk. She developed a life-threatening complication called hemolytic uremic syndrome that destroys red blood cells and damages blood vessels in the kidneys, which can lead to kidney failure and death. She required intensive care, and although she survived, she will have lasting effects from the ordeal. Her speech and motor development were halted, and she faces long-term kidney problems, requiring monitoring by a nephrologist every six months.
Prior to the girl's infection, her mother was unaware of the dangers of unpasteurized dairy and trusted information on social media, which falsely claimed that raw milk has health benefits over pasteurized milk. Such myths have persisted despite experts pointing out for years that they are unfounded or plainly false. The girl's mother now strongly regrets ever giving her daughter the raw milk and has tried to raise awareness of the risk—only to get barred from online groups for speaking out.
In the AAP's policy renewal this week, pediatricians review all the reasons health experts have, for decades, endorsed consuming only pasteurized dairy products.
"The AAP also endorses a ban on the sale or distribution of unpasteurized milk and milk products throughout the United States," the AAP wrote. "This recommendation is based on the multiplicity of data regarding the burden of illness associated with consumption of unpasteurized milk and milk products, especially among pregnant people, fetuses and neonates, and infants and young children, as well as the strong scientific evidence that pasteurization does not alter the nutritional value of milk."
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It's that time of the year. It's Nobel Prize week. A million SEK for your scientific (and other) career and achievements.
economic sciences (Monday) not yet announced as I made this submission.
Nobel Prize in Physics 2026
Francis Halzen"for decisive contributions to the IceCube Neutrino Observatory and the discovery of high-energy neutrinos of astrophysical origin"
Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2026
Henri B. Kagan and Kenso Soai"for the discovery of non-linear effects and autocatalysis in asymmetric organic synthesis"
Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 2026
Karl Deisseroth, Peter Hegemann and Georg Nagel"for their discoveries concerning light-gated ion channels and optogenetics"
Nobel Prize for Literature 2026
Anne Carson"for her bold and inventive oeuvre that, in playful dialogue with the classical tradition, has created new forms for contemporary literature"
Nobel Peace Prize 2026
Navanethem "Navi" Pillay"for her efforts to promote peace and international law"
https://www.nobelprize.org/
https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/lists/all-nobel-prizes/
https://time.com/article/2026/10/05/nobel-prize-2026-winners/
https://www.nobelpeaceprize.org/articles/announcement-of-the-nobel-peace-prize-2026
https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/peace/2026/pillay/facts/
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As revealed by unsealed court documents, Department of Homeland Security agents are allegedly creating dossiers on those that are accused of observing or protesting Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents. As first reported by Wired, these DHS files on protestors reportedly include sensitive info like photos and license plate numbers and are stored in a database built by Palantir called Investigative Case Management.
The new information comes from a partially unsealed court filing about a January ICE operation that took place in Maine, according to Wired. The filing is part of a class action lawsuit, which led to a redacted version becoming available to the public on Friday and revealing the purported database of ICE protestors.
According to the lawsuit, DHS agents would track and intimidate observers or protestors, sometimes by driving by their homes or labeling them as "Threat to Law Enforcement, Professional Protestor." In one example, an agent reportedly called one of the plaintiffs on her cell and suggested that she tell her spouse "not to do anything like that in the future because people who are doing things like that might get added to a domestic terrorism watchlist."
The lawyers representing the plaintiffs said that this sort of database creates a chilling effect on the First Amendment rights of protestors. On the other side, a DHS spokesperson told Wired that the case was "meritless" and denied the existence of such a database that labels and tracks "domestic terrorists."
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One of Donald Trump's biggest goals as president is to increase domestic manufacturing and reshore supply chains so that the most in-demand technologies in the world can be 100 percent made in the United States.
By executive order last December, he launched his "Genesis Mission," an ambitious plan seeking to leverage US dominance in AI to maintain or seize an edge in advanced robotics, biotechnology, semiconductors, and nuclear technologies. According to Trump, that plan works best with self-sustaining supply chains. Not even neighboring countries or longtime allies should be relied upon to manufacture a single component of any US product in his ideal world.
The Consumer Technology Association (CTA) has long warned that Trump's reshoring goals are not grounded in reality, but only recently has America's largest technology trade association attempted to estimate what it would cost businesses and consumers to follow through on Trump's plan.
"It is no longer enough to say that reshoring is difficult," the CTA acknowledged. "The practical questions are what it would cost, product by product, what it would physically require, and who would pay for it."
In new research shared with members this week, the CTA warned that reaching full US production of 10 categories of products most commonly found in US homes by 2031 "would require between $185 and $230 billion in capital expenditure, 555,000 to 668,000 additional full-time employees, and 19.1-19.5 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity per year."
While the costs are eye-popping, the labor demand might be the bigger problem, requiring more than double the "existing US computer and electronics manufacturing workforce," the CTA said. Additionally, the energy demand required to reshore all supply chains at once would clash with huge energy needs of AI data centers over the same time period.
Product categories included computer monitors, laptops, robotic vacuums, smart speakers, smartphones, smartwatches, televisions, video game consoles, wireless earbuds, and wireless headphones.
Smartphones are in a "league of their own," the CTA said, emerging as the most expensive product to make in the US and the product that Americans consider least dispensable. Taking into account tariffs in place today, the cost of fully manufacturing a smartphone in the US would go up by 152 percent, CTA estimated, and some of those costs would inevitably have to be covered by consumers to maintain profit margins and keep investors happy.
The largest cost increases would be in products with processors, memory, and advanced displays, the CTA said. Building laptops would cost 93 percent more, and smartwatches 97 percent more. On the lower end of the spectrum, TVs would cost 41 percent more to build entirely in the US.
In this scenario, most tech companies wouldn't immediately pass all extra costs on to their customers. But any big price jumps could hurt Americans already pinching pennies. CTA's research indicated that companies could pass on between 25 and 50 percent of the cost increase.
On average, CTA estimated that "the 10 products in our report would see a weighted average price increase of 27 to 55 percent." For the most cash-vulnerable and value-seeking US families, that could quickly add up as the devices they depend on wear down.
"A household replacing a phone, a laptop, and a television over a typical replacement cycle would face that increase on each purchase," the CTA reported.
Households already facing budget strains—including rising costs of rent, groceries, and fuel—are already delaying technology purchases until prices come down in the US, the CTA reported. And while most people are unwilling to go without smartphones for very long, the fewer products that tech companies can sell over time, the worse their margins will get as they continue to absorb higher costs. As returns diminish, that could spook investors, the CTA suggested, making it even harder to reshore supply chains, despite Trump insisting that reshoring will ultimately attract more investment in the US. With each product category taking years to fully reshore, the jury is out on how many businesses could afford that, the CTA suggested.
Instead of rushing companies to invest in domestic manufacturing on expedited timelines that hardly anybody can afford, the CTA recommended a "first step" that could help tech firms manage costs while pursuing some reshoring.
If the US focused only on reshoring the assembly part of manufacturing—rather than reshoring the manufacturing of every component—firms' costs would be substantially less, estimated between $16 billion and $19 billion.
In that scenario, the cost of manufacturing smartphones would still rise by 67 percent, CTA estimated, and laptops by 50 percent. But for businesses, that's a comparably lower cost impact that allows them to perhaps avoid price increases while continuing working with "trusted trading partners, suppliers, and allies to secure component access," until they can bring the full supply chain into the US.
To support that scenario, the CTA suggested that Trump pump the brakes on imposing tariffs on component parts—at the very least, considering eliminating tariffs on components from trusted trade partners and allies. That could further reduce costs for businesses without carrying the risk of the US overly relying on potentially less stable markets of foreign rivals like China.
"Component tariffs drive up US assembly costs relative to the current import mix," the CTA reported. "They make it more expensive for companies to manufacture in the US and raise costs the most for products that matter most to consumers."
Ideally, once assembly is brought into the US, businesses can then evaluate "on its merits" which products they can afford to fully manufacture in the US, components and all.
Trump seems unlikely to embrace an assembly-only plan for reshoring, as, for example, he has demanded that the US move quickly to reshore 50 percent of semiconductor manufacturing by the end of his term. On a press call, the CTA's executive chair, Gary Shapiro, confirmed that "it is not realistic to think that roughly two years from now, we're going to have over 50 percent of the semiconductor manufacturing in the US.
"I mean, that's just physically impossible, labor-wise impossible," Shapiro said. "And even if you threw full money at it today, you just can't do it."
The CTA didn't forecast any specific product price increases. But Apple counts among the tech giants that the group represents, and it has faced the most pressure so far from Trump to commit to manufacturing its iPhone in the US—despite reports that this could dramatically increase the price of the world's most popular smartphone.
Last spring, Trump threatened to impose a 25 percent tariff against a US company for the first time after Apple announced plans to manufacture smartphones in India. At that time, Wall Street analysts forecasted that an average US-made iPhone could cost anywhere from $1,500 to $3,500. More than doubling the cost of the latest iPhone might risk pricing out customers and hobbling Apple's ubiquity, analysts suggested. And hiring enough US workers to manufacture iPhones to meet global demand would be impossible, a former Apple manufacturing engineer, Matthew Moore, told Bloomberg.
Apple never officially commented on Trump's threats, instead gifting him a statue with a 24-karat gold base that said "Made in America."
But notably since then, the company has faced some backlash for announcing a $2,000 starting price tier for the foldable iPhone Duo. That pricing came after Apple rolled out a 2T storage tier for the iPhone 17 Pro Max, also set around $2,000. Apple has denied that these price increases are linked to Trump's tariffs, but critics doubt that's entirely true. They wonder if Apple is anticipating more challenging cost margins as it invests in reshoring supply chains for other products and is perhaps "testing how much customers will pay for the absolute best iPhone money can buy," Yahoo Finance reported.
PC Mag defended the iPhone Duo price as fair, noting that "in the middle of an industry-wide memory crisis, almost every new piece of tech is painfully marked up" and claiming that "Apple could have slapped an astronomical price tag on a brand-new foldable form factor and still sold units day one."
Although Apple's silence about tariffs and US-made iPhones has made it clear that the company, like other Big Tech firms, can navigate whatever Trump throws at them, small businesses that represent 80 percent of the CTA's membership are not in the same boat, the CTA said. Those businesses bring in billions to the US economy, and increasing their costs could "measurably affect overall US inflation at a time when inflation is already above target and rising," the CTA said.
"Policy that treats consumer technology as a single undifferentiated reshoring target risks imposing the largest consumer costs precisely where the economics are least favorable," the CTA said. "The categories consumers regard as most essential, led by smartphones and laptops, are exactly those where the modeled cost of full domestic production is highest."
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As reported on https://www.espn.com/racing/f1/story/_/id/50100614/formula-1-2026-bahrain-grand-prix-malaysia-engine-delays-happened-verstappen and elsewhere:
The Bahrain Grand Prix in Malaysia {relocated due to war in Iran} already had a farcical name. Formula 1's unnecessarily complicated hybrid engines ensured the race will be remembered as one of the biggest farces in the sport's recent history.
F1's current engines, which feature a near 50-50 split between internal combustion energy and electrical battery elements, are already considered the biggest mistake the sport has made in recent times. Whenever they are consigned to the scrapheap, the foremost memories will be of Sunday's two formation laps in the rain.
[...]
Several corners into the first formation lap is where things started going wrong, when the cars encountered a software bug baked into the algorithms that dictate F1's new complicated engines. During rain, for safety reasons, engine modes run at a maximum deployment of 250 kilowatts of deployment in certain sectors, down from 350kW in dry conditions. Once Verstappen, leading the pack but tiptoeing around on the cold intermediates{tires}, dropped below a speed of 50 km/h, the algorithms dictating the behaviour of his engine started having problems: essentially, the MGU-K [part of the hybrid power unit] no longer kicked in to feed power into his low-revving engine. The restriction on the car's hybrid-electric component is meant to prevent teams from effectively using it as a traction control device at the start of a race; this time, however, the combination of not running on wet tires with an extremely wet tarmac meant drivers were applying much less throttle than normal.The algorithm did not spot the difference, so kicked in. With the additional power boost locked out, the internal combustion engine was effectively dying without a surge of recovery power from the electrical side.
[...]
"There was a bit of a combination of circumstances which caused this bug to kick in. Basically, [on] the formation lap, some cars went very slowly, almost came to a standstill. There was a bit of a concertina effect between cars, and some cars almost stopped completely. That bug prevented the power from being redeployed, and for the cars to start again. I think if we had had a bit more testing, we probably would have managed to catch it in time, and not have such a situation."Once the problem happened, our guys realised very quickly what was happening, and had to work under a lot of time pressure for an update to the software, which was issued to the teams, and the teams had to install it on their cars.
The FIA {sanctioning body} later gave a simpler statement on what had happened, blaming a perfect storm of various factors. The governing body said "an unprecedented combination of low engine speed, low-grip conditions, wet-weather energy management settings and the Sepang circuit's sector configuration led to an unintended loss of power for a number of cars".
The remedy was a software update -- code Tombazis admitted was a "cobbled up, hurried solution." Rewriting and sending the new code to the teams to install in their systems led to another delay. It meant the worst of the rain also disappeared, we got only a handful of laps on the intermediates and the prospect of a genuine wet-weather classic disappeared.
A few bits of explanation for non-F1 fans added {inside braces} by the submitter. After they got past the delay at the start, it was an entertaining race, on a track that the drivers generally like. The story link has a few additional humorous quotes and more details.
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"Let me just ask the chatbot." For many of us, this has become an everyday phrase. Where we used to turn to Google to find information, AI chatbots have become a common way of getting answers to everything from what to make for dinner and how to word that difficult email to the boss, to what it actually means when interest rates rise.
But the large language models underpinning AI chatbots give us a significantly narrower range of information than a conventional web search. This is the finding of a new study led by researchers at the Department of Computer Science (DIKU) at the University of Copenhagen.
"Every language model we tested provides users with more uniform information than a simple Google search across all the topics we looked at. In other words, people are to a large extent exposed to the same information over and over again. So AI chatbots are not just changing how we find knowledge, but also which knowledge we have access to," says first author Dustin Wright, a former postdoctoral researcher at DIKU who is now an assistant professor at Aalborg University.
[...] according to the researchers, the low level of diversity in language models is partly a result of how the models basically work. They compress the vast amount of text they are trained on and learn the patterns that occur most frequently. In the process, information that deviates from the most common patterns is filtered out.
The effect could be amplified if language models are increasingly trained on text produced by other AI models – something the researchers expect to happen. In that case, models would learn from their own outputs, which are already less diverse than the human-written texts on which they were originally trained.
If this process is repeated over several generations of models, the range of information could gradually become narrower. This is what the researchers refer to as 'knowledge collapse'.
"It's a worrying thought. However, we can see that the more recent models produce slightly more diverse answers than older models, so knowledge collapse is not happening yet. But the mechanism that could trigger it in the longer term is already there. So it is something we should be aware of," says Isabelle Augenstein.
[...] "AI chatbot summaries can of course be useful – that is why so many people use them. But it is still important to seek out different sources in order to understand the nuances and get a broader picture – especially for the younger generation growing up with AI. We must not become so dependent on the technology that we stop understanding and thinking for ourselves," says Isabelle Augenstein.
arXiv link: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.04226
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https://www.club386.com/3dfx-voodoo-history-ross-smith-interview/
30 years ago, on 7 October 1996, PC gaming changed forever. On that day, the Orchid Righteous 3D was unleashed into the wild, the first card bearing 3dfx's Voodoo Graphics chipset, having been announced 11 months earlier at Comdex. What followed was a rewriting of the 3D gaming rulebook, as the PC became the games machine to beat. With graphics that made the PlayStation and N64 look positively stone age, you just couldn't believe what you were seeing when you fired up one of 3dfx's demos for the first time the future of gaming was here, and it was on PC.
I loved my Guillemot Maxi Gamer 3D that I bought with my student loan in 1997 to this day, I consider it the best PC upgrade I've ever bought in terms of the difference it made. How on earth did something as cool as the Voodoo Graphics chipset get made in the mid 90s? As the fabled 3D accelerator passes its 30th birthday, I caught up with 3dfx cofounder Ross Smith to talk about its development behind the scenes.
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Life is remarkably selective. Life relies on many molecules with what is termed "handedness"—they're chemically identical but are mirror images of each other. Most chemical reactions will make a 50-50 mix of the left- and right-handed forms of a chemical, but life uses only one of them. In fact, because of the differences between left- and right-handed chemicals, most of the key enzymes used by organisms will fail to work if they're presented with chemicals that have the wrong handedness.
That poses a bit of a challenge for origin-of-life research, as we're forced to explain how a world that may have started with an even mix of left- and right-handed chemicals produced organisms that only used one of them.
Today's Nobel Prize in Chemistry goes to two individuals, Henri Kagan and Kenso Soai, who discovered chemical reactions could be biased, producing large excesses of one of the two forms of a chemical.
The technical term for molecular handedness is "chirality," and scientists replace left and right with dextro (D) and levo (L). But the ideas are largely the same. Your hands have all the same components—fingers and thumbs—organized in the same way. Yet if you point your thumb upward, the fingers curl in opposite directions, making one the mirror image of the other. Depending on the arrangements of the chemical bonds, many molecules can form similar mirror-image forms, with all the same parts oriented slightly differently in space.
(For the geekier among the readership: carbon atoms have four potential sites that can form bonds, spread evenly across the surface of the atom's sphere. If each of those sites is linked to a different chemical, then swapping the chemicals located in any two of them can potentially change the way it's arranged in 3D space.)
This can really matter when it comes to enzymes, which typically latch onto chemicals using binding sites that are sculpted by evolution to fit only that chemical and its close relatives. Try to feed the enzyme the mirror-image version of that same chemical, and it will often fail to fit the binding site. Since life uses nothing but the D form of sugars, all of its enzymes are optimized to latch onto those, and many cannot interact at all with the L form.
There are two ways this could have happened. The first life may not have been as picky about the reactions it catalyzed and only evolved chirality preferences slowly. Or life could have evolved in an environment where one chiral form dominated. Or there was some combination of the two. But either of the latter two cases simply pushes the question back a bit: How could chemistry create an environment where one chiral form dominates?
Over the years, there have been a number of ideas about how this might occur. Several of those trace back to a physicist, Frederick Charles Frank, who addressed this issue in a data-free, theory-focused paper. (It's clear from the Nobel Prize Committee's writing that, were Frank still alive, he might have shared in this award.) One option is that a catalyst with only a slight preference for forming a D or L molecule could, over time, produce a large excess of that form. Another is that a chiral reaction product could itself serve as a catalyst for forming more of the same form. Or the chiral reaction product could inhibit the formation of its mirrored form.
Many chemical reactions reach an equilibrium, finding a point where forward and reverse reactions occur at similar rates. If the reverse reaction is indifferent to chirality, but the forward one is influenced by one of the factors above, then time would allow this to create a large excess of one chiral form.
All of these were hypotheticals, however, until the researchers being honored got to work. Henri Kagan of the University of Paris-Sud also approached his work very theoretically, describing the factors that would be needed to drive reactions that favored a single chirality. But in several cases, he was able to go out and find actual chemical reactions that demonstrated his ideas mattered in the real world.
Kagan worked with a catalyst that was itself chiral. He found that, in a mix of L and D versions of his catalyst, one of the forms was much more active than the other. While the forms might be present at the same level, most of the actual catalysis was performed by just one of them. And, if it was used to catalyze a reaction that produced a chiral product, this difference could lead to much higher levels of a single chirality.
By the mid-1960s, Kagan had found three different reactions that could produce an excess of a single chiral form. Other researchers who followed up on his ideas showed that chiral catalysts could also be selectively activated or inhibited by the addition of non-chiral chemicals, allowing a finer degree of control that found its way into the production of pharmaceuticals.
About a decade later, Tokyo University's Kenzo Soai was working on reactions where one of the products of the reaction acted as a catalyst to boost the same reaction. Eventually, he found one that selected for chirality; one form of the reaction product would catalyze the formation of more molecules of the same chirality. He started the reaction with a slight excess of one form of catalyst and found that, after a single round of reactions, the excess in the catalyst had risen to 55 percent. Using that as a catalyst for a new round of reactions would enhance the excess further; after several rounds, 90 percent of the products were a single chirality.
Eventually, Soai found conditions where one product would not only catalyze the formation of more of the same form, but inhibit the formation of the opposite chirality. This allowed him to start with a tiny excess of a single chiral form (0.00005 percent more) and, after a few rounds of reactions, bring the excess to over 99 percent.
Others later found conditions where a similar reaction that reached an equilibrium of forward and back reactions would gradually lead to a single chiral form dominating.
There are three different aspects of this work that are worth celebrating. One is that it's simply great science; people reasoned through the ways that an excess of one chiral form could emerge, and then others found ways to demonstrate that the behavior took place in the real world. A second is that it has immense practical applications. Many of our drugs work because they interact with proteins, where chirality often matters. And there are many examples of drugs where the wrong chiral form can be inactive or positively harmful. So finding new ways to catalyze the production of specific chiral forms has a lot of utility.
But the final thing comes back to the origin of life. None of these reactions were demonstrated with anything closely related to a biomolecule, so it's not obvious that this particular work is directly relevant to the origin of life. But it does show that small excesses of some chiral forms—smaller than the 90 percent seen in this work, but still significant—may be common in the natural world.
The current thinking is that those small differences weren't decisive, but did help push the emergence of life along a pathway that ultimately led to the exclusive chemistry we see now.
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To build the ultrafast computers of the future, scientists are looking beyond the electrical charge of electrons to another property: their spin. While conventional hardware relies entirely on the movement of charge to process data, the ability to tap into this intrinsic quantum property could enable researchers to completely reinvent how information travels through a circuit.
Now, a team led by UCF Professor of Physics Madhab Neupane has identified a promising candidate. Neupane and his collaborators found evidence of altermagnetism, an emerging form of magnetism that combines useful characteristics of the two more familiar types of magnetism: ferromagnetism and antiferromagnetism.
Ferromagnetism produces the behavior most people associate with everyday magnets. In these materials, magnetic moments align in the same direction, creating a magnetic field. That property can be useful in electronics, but the resulting stray magnetic fields can interfere with nearby components.
Antiferromagnets behave differently. Their magnetic moments point in opposing directions and cancel one another out, largely avoiding the stray fields. However, they lack some of the useful electronic properties found in ferromagnets.
Altermagnets offer another possibility by combining desirable characteristics of both.
Like antiferromagnets, they can avoid producing unwanted stray magnetic fields. But they can also generate and detect spin currents — the movement of electron spins through a material — that researchers hope to use for future electronics.
Neupane and his collaborators experimentally identified signatures of this unusual magnetic state in Co₁/₄TaSe₂, a layered material containing magnetic cobalt atoms. The discovery gives researchers a promising, versatile platform for studying altermagnetism and could help advance future electronic and spintronic technologies.
"These materials are distinguished from more conventional antiferromagnets by their ability to generate and detect spin currents without the negative effect of producing stray fields," Neupane says. "This new property makes them very well positioned for use in many different applications — including spintronics, ultrafast memory devices, terahertz networks and energy-efficient electronics."
[...] Finding evidence of altermagnetism was only part of what made Co₁/₄TaSe₂ interesting to researchers.
The material is built from extremely thin layers stacked on top of one another. Because those layers are weakly bound, scientists can separate and combine them into extremely thin structures, making layered materials promising for use in thin-film devices and other emerging technologies.
Scientists call this family of layered materials transition-metal dichalcogenides, or TMDs.
[...] Most conventional electronics rely on the electrical charge of electrons to transmit and process information. But electrons possess another property, their spin, that researchers are exploring as another way to carry information.
This emerging field is known as spintronics.
Altermagnets could be particularly useful for spintronics because they can generate and detect spin currents without producing the stray magnetic fields that can interfere with densely packed electronic components.
"As electronic devices continue to shrink, researchers need new materials that can operate faster while consuming less energy," Neupane says.
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