SlashdotNews for nerds, stuff that matters
26 Jul 2026, 15:39 by EditorDavid
"Welcome home!" NASA posted on X.com, sharing footage of a successful "parachute-assisted" landing on a Kazakhstan steppe for the Soyuz MS-28, carrying three astronauts who'd spent 241 days on the International Space Station. (And YouTube has a full two-hour video with NASA's coverage of the landing.) A NASA web page notes they orbited Earth 3,856 times and traveling more than 102 million miles after docking with the Space Station on November 27. It was the first mission for NASA astronaut Chris Williams and Roscosmos cosmonaut Sergei Mikaev (and the second mission for Roscosmos cosmonaut Sergey Kud-Sverchkov). "After routine post-landing medical checks, recovery teams will fly the crew by helicopter to Karaganda, Kazakhstan. Williams then will board a NASA aircraft bound for the agency's Johnson Space Center in Houston."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
26 Jul 2026, 14:34 by EditorDavid
It started with some underground utility work for the South Carolina town of Surfside Beach (population: 4,155). "Public records confirm that a payment of $545,598.30 was issued," according to a local news station — but the CEO of Wildcat Contractors "stated that the account that received the money is a scammer account and that his company has an overdue invoice for underground utility work completed in Surfside Beach." Yahoo picks up the story: After the payment issue surfaced, Wildcat said Surfside Beach sent over the email thread containing the payment confirmation. The company told WMBF it noticed multiple red flags in the chain. One involved an email address where "Wildcat" appeared with an extra "i." Another involved documents that the company said included a forged signature taken from a prior notarized document. Wildcat said the money was sent to a spoofing account claiming to be the contractor. More local reports are unraveling what happened: According to the Wall Street Journal, the town's finance director said a town employee called Wildcat's project manager on March 13, the day the payment was sent. The project manager referred the caller to [Wildcat CEO] Bowker. The town then called Bowker's mobile phone and left a voicemail about the ACH transfer. Bowker told the Wall Street Journal she does not recall the voicemail but acknowledged she may have missed it. Now a new report released by a law firm hired by the town to investigate "shows it did make an attempt to verify before sending $545,000 to a fraudulent bank account," according to local news reports: According to the report, the town sent an email to Wildcat's legitimate email domain on March 13 requesting a callback for verbal verification before sending the payment. Surfside received a response to that email with a phone number, though it remains unclear whether that response came from a real Wildcat employee or from the scammers. The report found that the fake town domain was used in communications between both parties throughout the process, which the law firm overseeing the investigation said was likely created to facilitate the fraud and delay its discovery. That seems to be the case in a nutshell: Investigators determined the fraudsters used spoofed and typo-squatted email domains, including surfsidesbeach.org, to impersonate town officials and redirect the payment. The fraudulent domain was created March 9 and was used to help conceal the scheme, according to investigators. Town officials said they are continuing to work with the FBI, South Carolina Law Enforcement Division, and their insurance partners to recover the funds. "The town has also implemented additional security measures to strengthen payment verification procedures and reduce the risk of similar incidents."
 
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
26 Jul 2026, 11:34 by EditorDavid
A Canadian lab has run a chemical process on real spent nuclear fuel "and pulled out 90% of the long-lived danger in 24 hours, the part that forces a burial site to last 100,000 years," notes the blog Autonocio, "with the leftovers meant to fuel a reactor." The standard plan for spent nuclear fuel is to wait it out. You pull the used bundles from a reactor, sit them in a pool of water for seven to ten years while the heat and radiation come down, seal them in concrete casks, and look for somewhere deep and geologically dull to leave them for the next hundred thousand years. Canada has been hunting for that burial site since the 1980s and still doesn't have one in the ground. A company in Saint John, New Brunswick thinks most of what makes that waste dangerous never needed to go in the ground at all. Moltex Energy Canada says a chemical process it calls WATSS can strip 90% of the long-lived material out of used Canada Deuterium Uranium [CANDU] fuel in 24 hours, and that the concentrated leftovers become fuel for a reactor it wants to build on the same site. The recovery step isn't a slide in a pitch deck anymore. In 2025, World Nuclear News reported that Canadian Nuclear Laboratories ran the process on real used fuel from a commercial Canadian reactor and confirmed the 90% figure. None of it is generating power yet. What exists is a validated chemical step and a reactor design waiting in line at a regulator. The rest is a 2030s problem. "The chemistry has a lab result behind it. The reactor does not exist..." the article points out. "Moltex is aiming to have its first WATSS and SSR-W units running at Point Lepreau by the early-to-mid 2030s... Not everyone buys the pitch. Critics have argued the reprocessing creates its own stream of byproducts, that the economics are unproven, and that a single site's stockpile is finite." But Moltex "isn't alone in trying to burn nuclear waste instead of bury it," the article notes, with Switzerland and Denmark "chasing the same goal a different way." Switzerland's Transmutex drives a subcritical reactor with a particle accelerator, feeding it spent fuel alongside thorium... Denmark's Copenhagen Atomics is building a thorium molten-salt reactor that fits inside a shipping container and runs on the leftovers from conventional plants. Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader kwelch007 for sharing the article.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
26 Jul 2026, 07:34 by EditorDavid
Big news from Comic-Con 2026: "Coyote vs. ACME" debuted its long-awaited final trailer. CNET calls it "an animation-meets-live-action story," with the Coyote catapulting into theaters this August 28. (The film began development back in 2018, but was shelved for a tax write-off in 2023 by Warner Bros. until a backlash led to its sale to Ketchup Entertainment.) "Fed up with Acme's unreliable products, Wile E. Coyote decides to hire a lawyer and sue the company..." writes CNET. "The movie also features Lana Condor along with a host of Looney Tunes characters like Porky Pig, Tweety, Foghorn Leghorn and Granny (who gets dinged by an anvil)." In other movie news, CNET says Johnny Depp also "made a surprise appearance at Comic-Con, donning a costume as Ebenezer Scrooge" to promote his November 13 movie about the miser from Charles Dickens' famous Christmas novella. (Ian McKellen and Daisy Ridley are also in the movie.) But several geek favorites are being filmed as TV series... There's big news for William Gibson fans, reports Entertainment Weekly. "Two years after Apple TV announced production on the first-ever series adaptation of William Gibson's seminal 1984 novel Neuromancer, the lucky few hundred who attended the studio's Hall H panel at Comic-Con 2026 got to watch the first teaser. For Amazon's Prime Video, the Tolkien-derived "Rings of Power" series released a season 3 trailer that CNET said "successfully hides the best parts with fire... The trailer suggests that Sauron is building an army, and all of Middle-earth is trying to find ways to stop him... Rings of Power season 3 will start dropping weekly episodes on Nov. 11, meaning this show will be airing at the same time the Peter Jackson films will be celebrating their 25th anniversary." Later in November Amazon's Prime Video will also debut Blade Runner 2099, an eight-episode series that's a sequel to 2017's film Blade Runner 2049, reports CNET. "Set in an alternate version of LA where replicants run things and the humans play second fiddle, the series sees Yeoh's replicant Olwen chasing down outlaw replicants who've gone missing. With her own shelf life on a ticking clock, the stakes are high for her and for her human fugitive partner, Cora..." Paramount Plus will debut Avatar: Seven Havens in October, a new animated series from the creators of Avatar: The Last Airbender which CNET says "follows a pair of twin avatars, one of whom is Korra's successor." Disney+ has season 3 of Percy Jackson and the Olympians. Kevin Feige said Marvel's television slate will include more seasons of "X-Men '97" and the upcoming "VisionQuest" TV series. HBO Max will launch a new Green Lantern series called Lanterns on August 16.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
26 Jul 2026, 01:34 by EditorDavid
In a sign of the times, Firefox's New Tab page could soon include a crossword puzzle from AI-powered news platform Particle. The blog OMG Ubuntu reports: The mini crossword game is updated daily, with puzzles based around recent content Particle's AI has ingested and summarised that day. [After solving the crossword, links appear to related news articles...] If you just want to try the crossword, you access it in any browser via a direct link. While it may look like Mozilla is trying to capitalise on the Wordle craze several years too late, it's part of its strategy to make the Firefox new tab page a discover destination in itself, not just a springboard for new searches. The 'Daily Grind' crossword widget (name subject to change) is just one of several widgets Firefox has (or will get). You'll also find a to-do list, timer, stock checker, world clock, picture of the day, privacy report and new-look weather widget (bigger than the existing one). During the World Cup 2026, Firefox offered real-time match scores and fixture information too... [T]hey aren't mandatory. You can disable the ones you don't want to use, or, if you don't want any at all, turn them all off to hide the widget area itself. A button to 'show fewer widgets' frees up room to allow other distractions (sponsored stories) on the new tab page to show... [Presumably you can also still open new tabs to a blank page...] They're rolling out to users in certain region and locales already. Plus, Mozilla routinely tests new features with a small set of users before they hit stable builds (i.e., the "Allow Firefox to run feature studies" setting). If you don't have widgets in your Firefox build, but you want them, you can manually enable them in Firefox 153 and later from the about:config page. Search for the following master switch and set it to true to enable the widget area: browser.newtabpage.activity-stream.widgets.system.enabled Then, enable the widgets you want to use by searching: activity-stream.widgets.*.enabled However, the usual caveats about "trying things not enabled by default" still apply. Mozilla hasn't set a firm rollout date, though the feature is already documented on its support site. With fortnightly Firefox releases about to start, and a big Nova redesign, chances are we'll all be puzzling over these widgets sooner rather than later.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
You are receiving this email because you subscribed to this feed at blogtrottr.com. By using Blogtrottr, you agree to our terms. If you no longer wish to receive these emails, you can unsubscribe from this feed, edit this subscription, or manage all your subscriptions. |
Comments
Post a Comment