Essentially, reinforced rubber fights against its own incompressibility.

Chinese fantasy novels reimagine the past with modern tech and ideology. A new book argues they also help reinforce authoritarian politics.

Tiny bolts of plasma, flickering inside a submerged glass tube, may have opened a new route for turning methane into liquid fuel. Chemists from Northwestern University have developed a way to convert methane directly into methanol in a single step, using electricity, water and a copper oxide catalyst instead of the punishing heat and pressure used in conventional production. The process relies on pulses of high voltage that create miniature lightning-like discharges inside a porous glass reactor. These discharges set off reactions that are otherwise hard to start. Methanol matters because it sits at the center of modern industry. It is used to make plastics, paints and adhesives. It is also drawing interest as...

'Dungeon Masters' will feature both current and unreleased material from the legendary TTRPG in its first in-house actual play series.

As the Arctic's climate and ecology rapidly change, two researchers are calling for a paradigm shift in insect monitoring.

In Musk v. Altman, a jury will soon determine whether OpenAI has strayed from its founding mission to ensure AGI benefits humanity. Here’s what to know.

The head of the International Energy Agency says it will take "up to two years to come back where we were before the war.”

The 1975 Overlander camper has been revitalized with a snow-white interior, custom cabinetry, and zellige tile.Current Location: Bend, Oregon Price: $250,000 Year Built: 1975 Renovation Designer: Mountain Modern Airstream Footprint: 170 square feet From the Designer: "Designed for long weekends and week-long escapes, this 27-foot 1975 Overlander is a rolling R & D lab packed with clever, high-tech features. We added an invisible cooktop to maximize counter space, a convertible coffee table that rises into a dining table, and a floating bed platform for an open and minimal feel. The hidden toilet tucks neatly beneath the sink, out of sight until you need it, and the wall-mounted bathroom faucet saves even...

Bold strategy to promote your new release as "less broadly capable" than other options.

In a bid to minimize dependence on technology from other countries, the UK government is plowing resources into homegrown AI startups.

His clients figured a prefabricated log cabin was all they could afford. Massie built something with more personality for less cash.Welcome to From the Archive, a look back at stories from Dwell’s past. This story previously appeared in the August 2002 issue. Keith and Sylvia Owens are a suburban London couple who like to indulge in travel and architecture, albeit in a modest fashion. Seven years ago, they found their way to Montana. The clarity of the sky and horizons that stretch for miles so inspired them that when, a year later, Sylvia read an English magazine, Build-It, advertising 2o-acre plots near White Sulphur Springs, they decided to investigate. After arriving in this tiny town in 1997, they...

Illustration par ChatGPT
La loi anti-concentration en France : ce qui a disparu (et pourquoi)
Paul Jorion : Je me souviens qu’en France, une loi avait été adoptée pour empêcher qu’un groupe – et, implicitement, un groupe porteur d’une orientation politique marquée – ne puisse prendre le contrôle d’une part importante de la presse. Le nom qui me revient est « Hersant » – qui avait pu être maîtrisé. Pourquoi Vincent Bolloré et Pierre-Édouard Stérin ont-ils aujourd’hui les mains libres ? ChatGPT :
Ce souvenir n’est pas une reconstruction a posteriori : cette loi a bien existé. Mais elle n’existe plus aujourd’hui sous la forme que vous avez en tête, et c’est précisément...

Le jeudi 16 avril, le président américain a annoncé que le président libanais, Joseph Aoun, et le Premier ministre israélien, Benyamin Nétanyahou, se seraient accordés pour mettre en place un cessez-le-feu de dix jours.

As Trump searches for a friendly successor to the Ayatollah in Tehran, the leadership vacuum in the Iranian regime has been filled by hard-line members of the Revolutionary Guard.

You can use the Neo as it comes out of the box, or enhance your experience with some add-on accessories. | Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge The MacBook Neo is poised to be a top-selling laptop in 2026, thanks in large part to its affordable $599 entry price. Despite launching at a more accessible price point than Apple’s $1,099 (though often discounted) 2026 MacBook Air, the Neo makes surprisingly few concessions in terms of build quality. Its design has the same level of precision as pricier Apple products, and we found in a hands-on comparison that it handily outclasses similarly priced Windows laptops in just about every way despite running on an iPhone chipset. In short, you might want one, or...

The comments follow a high-profile spat with US President Donald Trump, who called the Pope weak on crime.

Floyd Collins, the unfortunate star of this post. (Public Domain)
Information, it seems, flows at the speed of media. In the old days, information traveled with people on ships or horses, so if, say, a battle was won or lost, it could be months or even years before anyone back home knew what happened. While books and movable type let people store information, they still moved at the speed people moved. Before the telegraph, there were attempts to use things like semaphores to speed the flow of information,  but those were generally limited to line-of-sight operations. Carrier pigeons were handy, but don’t really move much faster than people.
The telegraph helped, but people didn’t have telegraph stations...

Google latest update to AI Mode in its Chrome browser is designed to keep the chatbot-style search tool always around once you start an online search journey.

Google is upgrading AI Mode in Chrome with a new feature that will allow you to open links to sources alongside your chat. Now, instead of automatically opening a new tab, clicking a source will open the website side by side with AI Mode, allowing you to ask follow-up questions about what's on the page.
Launched last year, AI Mode is the chatbot-like search feature that lives within a tab on the left side of Google's search engine. Google has added several new features to the tool over the past year, including the ability to generate images of outfits and decor based on your descriptions, visualize your travel plans, and find restaurant res …
Read the full story at The Verge.

Codex can control apps on your desktop like Tic Tac Toe. | Image: OpenAI OpenAI is beefing up its agentic coding and development system Codex with a suite of updates that let it use your computer, generate images, and remember from past experiences. Codex will now be able to operate desktop apps on your computer, OpenAI says in a blog post announcing the update. It can work in the background, meaning it won't interfere with your own work in other apps, and multiple agents can work in parallel. For developers, OpenAI says "this is helpful for testing and iterating on frontend changes, testing apps, or working in apps that don't expose an API." The feature will start rolling out to Codex desktop app users signe...

Selon « Mediapart », le téléphone de l’eurodéputée LFI « a été géolocalisé » et « ses déplacements effectués bien avant l’ouverture de l’enquête » la visant pour apologie du terrorisme « ont tous été retracés (…), en dépit de son statut d’élue ».

Le mercredi 15 avril, le président salvadorien, Nayib Bukele, a promulgué une réforme constitutionnelle qui prévoit la perpétuité pour les mineurs impliqués dans des crimes graves, tels l’homicide, le viol et l’appartenance à un gang.

Juraj Blanar, le ministre des affaires étrangères slovaque, a déclaré que son pays bloquerait le vingtième train de sanctions de l’Union européenne contre la Russie, à moins d’obtenir des garanties sur l’acheminement de pétrole par l’oléoduc Droujba, endommagé par des frappes russes le 27 janvier en Ukraine.

Loin des radars depuis plus d’une décennie, un jaguar a été aperçu dans les montagnes de l’ouest du Honduras, en haute altitude dans la Sierra del Merendón. Une observation extrêmement rare perçue comme un signal encourageant, malgré la menace persistante du braconnage et de la déforestation.

Le noyau Linux est en train de retirer le support matériel des processeurs Baikal, fabriqués par Baikal Electronics en Russie. Pas juste les mainteneurs cette fois, le code lui-même. Les drivers et le support de la plateforme MIPS Baikal-T1 sont en cours de suppression dans les sources du noyau, après des années de tensions autour des sanctions internationales.
Pour remettre en contexte, le support du Baikal-T1 (un CPU MIPS double coeur P5600 cadencé à 1,2 GHz) et du SoC BE-T1000 avait été intégré au noyau Linux à partir de la branche 5.8. Baikal Electronics travaille sur des processeurs domestiques russes, en MIPS et en ARM, pensés pour réduire la dépendance de la Russie aux puces...

The entry is a jewel-toned portal with a curtain that can reshape the living area; the wood box creates a hall to the bedroom.Houses We Love: Every day we feature a remarkable space submitted by our community of architects, designers, builders, and homeowners. Have one to share? Post it here. Project Details: Location: Bucharest, Romania Architects: DORON Atelier / @doronatelier Architect:  OMAMBO / @omambogallery Footprint: 861 square feet Builder: Publimpress Photographer: Clement Vayssieres / @clement.vayssieres Photographer: Kelvin Silva From the Architect: "Rather Two, an intimate 861-square-foot apartment in Bucharest, is a home shaped as much by emotion and memory as by design. Realized by...

Les députés devaient débattre d’un texte très contesté par la gauche, que les députés macronistes ont finalement décidé de retirer.

Les députés devaient débattre d’un texte très contesté par la gauche, que les députés macronistes ont finalement décidé de retirer.

The Surface Laptop 7. | Photo by Chris Welch / The Verge Microsoft is preparing to launch new Surface Pro and Surface Laptop models in the coming months. Windows Central reports that the refreshed models will include both Intel and Qualcomm variants, with Microsoft opting for an OLED display option for the Surface Laptop this year.
Microsoft is expected to launch new Surface Pro and Laptop models with Intel's Core Ultra 3 chips first, followed by Qualcomm Snapdragon X2 variants later this summer. This is reportedly because Qualcomm's latest chips are in short supply, but it reverses Microsoft's trend of shipping Qualcomm-powered Surface devices to consumers first in recent years.
While a RAM cri …
Read the...

“Large language models show promising capabilities for contextual fact-checking on social media: they can verify contested claims through deep research, synthesize evidence from multiple sources, and draft explanations at scale. However, prior work evaluates LLM fact-checking only in controlled settings using benchmarks or crowdworker judgments, leaving open how these systems perform in authentic platform environments. We present the first field evaluation of LLM-based fact-checking deployed on a live social media platform, testing performance directly through X Community Notes’ AI writer feature over a three-month period. Our LLM writer, a multi-step pipeline that handles multimodal content (text, images,...

Black hole collisions do not appear to come from one simple cosmic recipe. After studying more than 150 mergers detected through gravitational waves, astronomers say the growing catalog points instead to three distinct groups of merging black holes. Each group seems to carry its own signature in mass, spin, and how often the mergers happened across cosmic time. Taken together, the pattern suggests that these violent collisions are being built in more than one kind of environment. The new work comes from Anarya Ray of Northwestern University and the NSF-Simons AI Institute for the Sky, Shirsha Mukherjee of the University of Oklahoma, Michael Zevin of the Adler Planetarium, Northwestern University and the...

“Neptune grass is generally regarded as the most ecologically important seagrass and shallow-water habitat in the Mediterranean Sea. It suffered a severe decline during the 20th century, and there have been myriad efforts to actively restore it via replanting schemes. A new study points to the merits of a different approach: Remove the human-caused drivers of the decline and let the meadows regrow on their own. The study, published March 5 in the journal Marine Environmental Research, found that following the introduction of stronger environmental regulations and practices in France in the mid-to-late 1980s, Neptune grass (Posidonia oceanica) repopulated sampled sections of the waters off the city of...

“The intensity and frequency of severe droughts in the Amazon region have increased in the recent decades. These extreme events are associated with changes in forest dynamics, biomass and floristic composition. However, most studies of drought response have focused on upland forests with deep water tables, which may be especially sensitive to drought. Palms, which tend to dominate the less well-drained soils, have also been neglected… Our results indicate that forests growing over shallow water tables—relatively under-studied vegetation that nonetheless occupies one-third of Amazon forests—are remarkably resistant to drought. These findings are consistent with the hypothesis that local hydrology and...

Microsoft's new Xbox chief has had a busy couple of months after promising "the return of Xbox." Asha Sharma met with publishers at the Game Developers Conference in March, and has also been on the road visiting Microsoft's own game studios and product teams in recent weeks. Sharma, who used to work in Microsoft's CoreAI division, is very much in learning mode and talking to as many people as she can before she makes strategic decisions on the future of Xbox.
Some of those decisions are about to be made very soon.
Sources at Xbox tell me Sharma has been looking closely at Game Pass pricing recently, with a view to offering a wider range of …
Read the full story at The Verge.

Derrière une multitude de chaînes, journaux et stations de radio, l’influence de Vincent Bolloré s’étend méthodiquement. Comment la 11ᵉ fortune de France est-elle devenue centrale et controversée dans le paysage médiatique ?

Les grandes villes ukrainiennes ont subi de nouvelles frappes massives dans la nuit du 15 au 16 avril. Dans le même temps, à l’est, les forces du Kremlin multiplient les assauts. Selon les médias ukrainiens, l’offensive russe du printemps a commencé.

Zéro. C'est la durée que vous pouvez désormais choisir comme limite Shorts dans les réglages YouTube, sur iOS comme sur Android. Mettez le curseur à zéro, les Shorts disparaissent de votre page d'accueil. Fini le défilement vertical entre deux vidéos longues. Le déploiement mondial est en cours depuis le 15 avril, d'abord pour les comptes parentaux, puis pour tout le monde.
La manipulation prend dix secondes. Vous ouvrez les réglages, vous allez dans "Gestion du temps", vous trouvez "Limite du fil Shorts", vous descendez à zéro. YouTube affiche alors un message disant que votre fil est "en pause pour la journée". Ça se réinitialise le lendemain matin. Les Shorts ne sont pas supprimés de l'app...

Deux jours après l’instauration du blocus du détroit d’Ormuz par Washington, le 13 avril, un “pétrolier lié à la Chine” y a fait demi-tour. Tandis que le président iranien assure que, derrière la guerre faite à son pays, c’est la Chine qui est visée, Pékin adopte, pour l’heure, une posture des plus prudentes.

“Researchers at Toronto’s Sinai Health have found that semaglutide—the active ingredient in popular weight loss drugs that mimic the gut hormone GLP-1—acts directly on a subset of liver cells to improve organ function and does so independently of weight loss. The finding challenges long-held assumptions about how GLP-1 medicines work in the liver and could reshape how physicians treat metabolic liver disease.” From Medical Xpress.
The post GLP-1s Improve Liver Health Independent of Weight Loss appeared first on Human Progress.

“Uber Technologies has partnered with Pony.ai and autonomous vehicle startup Verne to roll out the first commercial ​robotaxi service in Europe, with operations set to ‌start in the Croatian capital Zagreb. Under the deal, Chinese robotaxi firm Pony.ai will supply the autonomous driving technology, while Croatian ​startup Verne will serve as the fleet owner ​and manage day-to-day operations, the companies said on ⁠Thursday.” From Reuters.
The post Uber, Pony.ai and Verne Launch Robotaxi Service in Croatia appeared first on Human Progress.

A drawing that riffs on the latest news and happenings.

Imagine you and your friend are enjoying a nice sunny day, and BAM — they start to have a severe allergic reaction to who knows what. You have an EpiPen, but your friend is on the other side of a field! The solution? Obviously [Emily The Engineer] has only one option: build an entire EpiPen launcher!
Starting off the life-saving project, [Emily] prototyped with a 3D printed blank and a simple solenoid-controlled glorified potato cannon. This proved effective, as one would expect of such a project after successful tests on a human subject. However, there was one simple problem: what if you missed your initial shot?
To ensure no possible failed missions, a bolt-action magazine was retrofitted onto the device....

At least 16 people were injured in a shooting at a high school on Tuesday, before another nine were killed in a separate school shooting on Wednesday.

A Ukrainian drone attack killed two people in Russia, Moscow says, after an Orthodox Easter truce.

Entre les 10 % de Français les plus riches et les 10 % les plus pauvres, les revenus vont de 1 à 20 hors prestations sociales et autres transferts. Ces mécanismes de redistribution ramènent l’écart de 1 à 3,7, selon une étude de l’Insee, mais les inégalités continuent de s’accroître. La fiscalité les accentue légèrement.

Au moins sept personnes ont été tuées et 33 blessées dans une frappe israélienne sur un village du sud du Liban, d’après le ministère de la santé libanais, quelques heures avant l’entrée en vigueur prévue de la trêve saluée par Beyrouth. Le 2 mars, le Hezbollah a entraîné le Liban dans la guerre régionale avec l’Iran. Près de 2 200 personnes ont été tuées et plus d’un million déplacées par les frappes israéliennes.

July 2010 📷 #flashes

Gravity behaves predictably in your daily life. Drop a ball, and it falls. Planets loop around stars. On paper, the same rules should also govern matter spread across the universe. But the farther astronomers look, the more that certainty gets tested. That question sits at the center of a new analysis of galaxy motions on enormous cosmic scales. The work used light from the cosmic microwave background, combined with a large galaxy survey, to ask something deceptively simple: does gravity still follow the familiar inverse-square law across vast stretches of space? For now, the standard picture appears to be holding up. Researchers like Patricio A. Gallardo from the University of Pennsylvania tested how galaxy...

Although we have many types of networking equipment with many unique names, at their core they can usually be reduced to just a computer with some specific peripherals. This is especially the case for something like a router, a device found in just about any home these days. Certain consumer-grade routers may contain something special like a VDSL modem, but most of them just have a WAN Ethernet jack on one end and one or more LAN-facing Ethernet ports.
All further functionality is implemented in software, including any firewall, routing and DHCP features. What this means is that any old PC with at least two Ethernet ports or equivalent can be a router as long as you install the appropriate software.
In this...

Two-years after it opened, I went to Campfield Long Beach to test the limits of the Japanese outdoor gear brand’s cult following.Welcome to One Night In, a series about staying in the most unparalleled places available to rest your head. As the saying often goes, there are two types of people in the world, and for my particular purposes for this piece, those two types are people who like to camp and people who don’t. As far as I’m concerned, since I went to sleepaway camp for seven years, I’m definitely not a person who doesn’t like to camp, and yet somehow my family has labeled me as being less of the land and more of the house. For example: I’ve seriously considered hiking Scotland’s West...

Former Arsenal goalkeeper Alex Manninger dies at the age of 48 after his car is struck by a train.

As tensions with the US government mount, Anthropic has leased a new office with enough space to quadruple its 200-person head count in London.

Une attaque par la chaîne d'approvisionnement a frappé WordPress début avril. Un individu a racheté une trentaine de plugins via la marketplace Flippa, y a injecté du code malveillant et a attendu huit mois avant de l'activer. WordPress a fermé les 31 plugins concernés le 7 avril, mais la mise à jour officielle ne suffit pas à nettoyer les sites touchés.
L'attaque est redoutable par sa simplicité. Un individu, identifié sous le prénom "Kris", a racheté pour plusieurs centaines de milliers d'euros un catalogue d'une trentaine de plugins WordPress sur Flippa, une marketplace de vente de sites et d'extensions. Ces plugins appartenaient à la société Essential Plugin / WP Online Support. Ils...

Plus de six millions d'électeurs bulgares doivent se rendre aux urnes pour les élections législatives, dimanche 19 avril - Crédits : Veronaa / iStock Une énième élection. Les Bulgares sont appelés aux urnes pour les élections législatives anticipées, dimanche 19 avril. C'est la huitième fois depuis 2021 que les électeurs doivent élire un Parlement du fait d'une forte instabilité politique dans le pays. Voici ce qu'il faut savoir avant le vote de dimanche.Après la démission du gouvernement de Rossen Jeliazkov en décembre 2025, juste avant l'adoption effective de l'euro le 1er janvier 2026, la Bulgarie va donc connaître de nouvelles élections législatives. Plus de six millions de Bulgares...

Tapez $TSLA ou $BTC dans un post sur X, et maintenant ça vous affiche un cours en temps réel, un graphique interactif et un fil de discussion lié à l'actif. C'est disponible depuis le 14 avril sur iPhone. Pour Android et le site web, ça sera pour plus tard.
Le principe est assez simple. Un $ticker dans un post déclenche la suggestion automatique de l'actif correspondant. Le graphique couvre de 1 jour à 1 an, le prix est actualisé en continu, et le fil agrège les posts qui mentionnent cet actif. Côté crypto, les adresses de contrats sur Solana et Base sont aussi prises en charge, ce qui veut dire que les memecoins sont de la partie. Forcément.
Au Canada, X va plus loin. Un partenariat avec...

La mise à jour d'avril du SDK Agents d'OpenAI introduit deux nouvelles briques qui manquaient pour passer de l'agent-jouet au déploiement réel. Le sandboxing natif permet de confiner un agent dans un espace de travail isolé, avec accès limité aux fichiers et outils d'un périmètre défini. Et le nouveau harness d'exécution sépare proprement le plan de contrôle (boucle agent, appels modèle, routing d'outils, approbations, tracing, récupération d'erreurs) du plan de calcul (sandbox où l'agent lit, écrit, exécute du code, installe des dépendances, snapshot son état).
L'architecture est pensée pour les agents "long-horizon", ceux qui travaillent sur des tâches complexes en plusieurs étapes,...

“You want to stick your finger in a dinosaur brain?” That was Simba Srivastava’s first reaction to the battered fossil sitting in a paleobiology lab at Virginia Tech, a skull so crushed and twisted that he described it in less-than-flattering terms. “This is a uniquely sucky specimen,” he said. “It’s so bad. Like, if you saw a human skull in this way, you’d throw up.” And yet that same fossil, pulled from a drawer decades after it was unearthed in New Mexico, has turned into something unusually important. After two years of work, Srivastava and his colleagues identified it as a new species of carnivorous dinosaur, one that lived near the end of the Triassic and may mark one of the last...

En mars dernier, un sondage a révélé qu'une grande part des Canadiens serait favorable à une adhésion de leur pays à l'Union européenne (UE). Il peut paraître difficile de penser à une telle adhésion en raison du positionnement géographique du Canada. Cela ouvrirait la voie à une nouvelle vague de candidatures et donnerait une dimension tout autre à l'UE. On peut donc se demander : est-ce une possibilité réellement envisageable ? Quelle est la limite prévue par les traités concernant les élargissements ? Les candidats actuels
Aujourd'hui, sept élargissements ont déjà eu lieu, le dernier en date remontant à 2013 avec l'adhésion de la Croatie. A présent, neuf États sont officiellement...

Crises à répétition, émotions collectives, clics solidaires : malgré les effets d'alarmes, la générosité, plutôt que de disparaître, ne serait-elle pas simplement en train de changer de visage ? On a demandé à Arthur Gautier, professeur en sociologie des organisations à l’ESSEC, et Sylvain Caruana, chercheur en psychologie sociale, d'analyser les évolutions du don et de l’engagement.

Le Français Victor Wembanyama va disputer pour la première fois de sa carrière les prestigieux playoffs NBA - Crédits : Daiei Onoguchi / Wikimedia Commons CC BY 4.0 Seize. C'est le nombre d'équipes qui se disputeront à l'arrivée et après une saison régulière longue de 82 matches le titre de champion NBA. Comprenez, selon les Américains, le titre de champion du monde (en club) de basketball. Parmi elles, les San Antonio Spurs de la star française Victor Wembanyama. À 22 ans, le prodige originaire du Chesnay (Île-de-France) va disputer pour la première fois de sa carrière les prestigieux playoffs (séries éliminatoires). Une phase finale au meilleur des sept matches à chaque tour, opposant le...