The Athena lunar lander from Intuitive Machines has prematurely ended its mission after tipping onto its side shortly after touching down near the moon's south pole, failing to fully accomplish its planned water-searching objectives. From a report: Athena was expected to operate for about 10 days before powering down as lunar night fell over the spacecraft's landing site at Mons Mouton, a plateau that lies about 100 miles (160 kilometers) from the south pole. But photographs delivered by the lander before it powered down confirmed the vehicle is lying on its side. "With the direction of the sun, the orientation of the solar panels, and extreme cold temperatures in the crater, Intuitive Machines does not expect Athena to recharge," the company said in a statement. "The mission has concluded and teams are continuing to assess the data collected throughout the mission." Intuitive Machines, however, highlighted that, although Athena did not operate as intended, the lander was able to briefly operate and transmit data after touchdown. That made the mission the "southernmost lunar landing and surface operations ever achieved." Intuitive Machines also said that Athena was "able to accelerate several program and payload milestones, including NASA's PRIME-1 suite, before the lander's batteries depleted." PRIME-1, which includes a drill that was expected to dig into the lunar surface to hunt for water, was able to move, according to a statement from NASA that states the device "demonstrated the hardware's full range of motion in the harsh environment of space."

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Many of us have been guilty of binning a mushy, overripe banana -- but now scientists say they have a solution with the launch of a genetically engineered non-browning banana. The product is the latest in a series of gene-edited fruits and vegetables designed to have a longer shelf life. Scientists say the technology is emerging as a powerful new weapon against food waste, which occurs globally on an epic scale. The banana, developed by Tropic, a biotech company based in Norwich, is said to remain fresh and yellow for 12 hours after being peeled and is less susceptible to turning brown when bumped during harvesting and transportation. The company has also developed a slow-ripening banana that has been approved in several countries, which it plans to launch later in the year. Other research teams are working on lettuce that wilts more slowly, bruise-resistant apples and potatoes and identifying the genes that determine how quickly grapes and blueberries shrivel. [...] The company worked out how to disable a gene responsible for the production of an enzyme called polyphenol oxidase, which causes browning. The same gene is silenced in Arctic apples, a genetically modified variety, which has been sold in the US since 2017, and blocking the production of polyphenol oxidase has been shown to work in tomatoes, melon, kiwifruits and mushrooms. In the bananas, Tropic made precise changes to existing genes without introducing foreign genetic material. The report notes that an estimated 33% of the produce that is harvested worldwide is never consumed due to the short shelf-life of many fruit and vegetable products. Bananas are among the most thrown-away foods, with some 5 billion bananas tossed in the U.S. each year.

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Microsoft is reportedly developing its own large language model series capable of rivaling OpenAI and Anthropic's models. SiliconANGLE reports: Sources told Bloomberg that the LLM series is known as MAI. That's presumably an acronym for "Microsoft artificial intelligence." It might also be a reference to Maia 100, an internally-developed AI chip the company debuted last year. It's possible Microsoft is using the processor to power the new MAI models. The company recently tested the LLM series to gauge its performance. As part of the evaluation, Microsoft engineers checked whether MAI could power the company's Copilot family of AI assistants. Data from the tests reportedly indicates that the LLM series is competitive with models from OpenAI and Anthropic. That Microsoft evaluated whether MAI could be integrated into Copilot hints the LLM series is geared towards general-purpose processing rather than reasoning. Many of the tasks supported by Copilot can be performed with a general-purpose model. According to Bloomberg, Microsoft is currently developing a second LLM series optimized for reasoning tasks. The report didn't specify details such as the number of models Microsoft is training or their parameter counts. It's also unclear whether they might provide multimodal features.

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Signal President Meredith Whittaker warned at SXSW that agentic AI poses significant privacy and security risks, as these AI agents require extensive access to users' personal data, likely processing it unencrypted in the cloud. TechCrunch reports: "So we can just put our brain in a jar because the thing is doing that and we don't have to touch it, right?," Whittaker mused. Then she explained the type of access the AI agent would need to perform these tasks, including access to our web browser and a way to drive it as well as access to our credit card information to pay for tickets, our calendar, and messaging app to send the text to your friends. "It would need to be able to drive that [process] across our entire system with something that looks like root permission, accessing every single one of those databases -- probably in the clear, because there's no model to do that encrypted," Whittaker warned. "And if we're talking about a sufficiently powerful ... AI model that's powering that, there's no way that's happening on device," she continued. "That's almost certainly being sent to a cloud server where it's being processed and sent back. So there's a profound issue with security and privacy that is haunting this hype around agents, and that is ultimately threatening to break the blood-brain barrier between the application layer and the OS layer by conjoining all of these separate services [and] muddying their data," Whittaker concluded. If a messaging app like Signal were to integrate with AI agents, it would undermine the privacy of your messages, she said. The agent has to access the app to text your friends and also pull data back to summarize those texts. Her comments followed remarks she made earlier during the panel on how the AI industry had been built on a surveillance model with mass data collection. She said that the "bigger is better AI paradigm" -- meaning the more data, the better -- had potential consequences that she didn't think were good. With agentic AI, Whittaker warned we'd further undermine privacy and security in the name of a "magic genie bot that's going to take care of the exigencies of life," she concluded. You can watch the full speech on YouTube.

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New submitter grandrollerz writes: Despite streaming online since the RealAudio days of the late 1990s, the BBC has announced that most of its radio stations will become unavailable to international users later this year. Starting in Spring 2025, only talk news stations BBC World Service and BBC Radio 4 will remain accessible outside the UK. This change is due to rights issues and the launch of a new BBC audio website and app that will replace BBC Sounds for international users. The BBC Sounds app will be available exclusively to UK audiences, although UK users traveling abroad for short periods will still be able to use it. This move has disappointed many long-time international listeners who will lose access to their favorite BBC radio stations. It follows a similar move to further commercialize its services where in 2024 the BBC and Amazon Music struck a global deal to make BBC podcasts available on Amazon Music outside the UK, but only for subscribers to Amazon's Prime and Amazon Music Unlimited services.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: A 37-year-old Tennessee man was arrested Thursday, accused of stealing Blu-rays and DVDs from a manufacturing and distribution company used by major movie studios and sharing them online before the movies' scheduled release dates. According to a US Department of Justice press release, Steven Hale worked at the DVD company and allegedly stole "numerous 'pre-release' DVDs and Blu-rays" between February 2021 and March 2022. He then allegedly "ripped" the movies, "bypassing encryption that prevents unauthorized copying" and shared copies widely online. He also supposedly sold the actual stolen discs on e-commerce sites, the DOJ alleged. Hale has been charged with "two counts of criminal copyright infringement and one count of interstate transportation of stolen goods," the DOJ said. He faces a maximum sentence of five years for the former, and 10 years for the latter. Among blockbuster movies that Hale is accused of stealing are Dune, F9: The Fast Saga, Venom: Let There Be Carnage, Godzilla v. Kong, and, perhaps most notably, Spider-Man: No Way Home. The DOJ claimed that "copies of Spider-Man: No Way Home were downloaded tens of millions of times, with an estimated loss to the copyright owner of tens of millions of dollars."

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President Trump has signed an executive order to establish a strategic reserve of cryptocurrencies by using tokens already owned by the government. Reuters reports: A "Strategic Bitcoin Reserve" will be capitalized with bitcoin owned by the federal government that was seized as part of criminal or civil asset forfeiture proceedings, the White House crypto czar, billionaire David Sacks, said in a post on social media platform X. The order kept open the possibility of the government buying bitcoin in future. The U.S. commerce and treasury secretaries "are authorized to develop budget-neutral strategies for acquiring additional bitcoin, provided that those strategies impose no incremental costs on American taxpayers," a factsheet on the White House website said. "This is the most underwhelming and disappointing outcome we could have expected for this week," Charles Edwards, founder of bitcoin-focused hedge fund Capriole Investments, wrote in a post on X. "No active buying means this is just a fancy title for Bitcoin holdings that already existed with the Govt. This is a pig in lipstick."

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Broadcom's VMware acquisition has significantly boosted revenue, largely driven by high-priced VMware Cloud Foundation bundles adopted by the majority of its top customers. The Register reports: Broadcom's acquisition of VMware appears to be a big success, on the balance sheet at least, after the company announced a big majority of its top 10,000 customers have decided to acquire its Cloud Foundation stack and posted strong growth. The chips-and-code company today announced its results for the quarter ended February 2nd, its first for FY 2025. Revenue of $14.92 billion represented 25 percent year-on-year growth. Net income of $5.5 billion was a 315 percent increase on the result from Q1 2024. Broadcom no longer breaks out VMware revenue: sales of Virtzilla's wares are all now lumped into its infrastructure software business unit, which posted $6.7 billion revenue for Q1, up from $4.55 billion for the same quarter last year. Direct comparisons of those numbers are not wise as Broadcom owned VMware for four fifths of Q1 2024. Consider, instead, the $1.97 billion Q4 2023 and $7.6 billion FY 2023 software revenue that Broadcom recorded before it acquired VMware. Know, also, that Broadcom's software sales grew by just three percent in FY 2023 and four percent in FY 2022. That slow growth means the jump from $1.97 billion software revenue in Q4 2023 to $6.7 billion in Q1 2025 is likely due to VMware, which in its last quarter as an independent company reported $3.4 billion revenue. It therefore looks a lot like Broadcom has added around $1 billion to quarterly VMware revenue in a little over a year.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: On Thursday, music labels sought to add nearly 500 more sound recordings to a lawsuit accusing the Internet Archive (IA) of mass copyright infringement through its Great 78 Project, which seeks to digitize all 3 million three-minute recordings published on 78 revolutions-per-minute (RPM) records from about 1898 to the 1950s. If the labels' proposed second amended complaint is accepted by the court, damages sought in the case -- which some already feared could financially ruin IA and shut it down for good -- could increase to almost $700 million. (Initially, the labels sought about $400 million in damages.) IA did not respond to Ars' request for comment, but the filing noted that IA has not consented to music labels' motion to amend their complaint. [...] Some sound recording archivists and historians also continue to defend the Great 78 Project as a critical digitization effort at a time when quality of physical 78 RPM records is degrading and the records themselves are becoming obsolete, with very few libraries even maintaining equipment to play back the limited collections that are available in physical archives. They push back on labels' claims that commercially available Spotify streams are comparable to the Great 78 Project's digitized recordings, insisting that sound history can be lost when obscure recordings are controlled by rights holders who don't make them commercially available. [...] David Seubert, who manages sound collections at the University of California, Santa Barbara library, told Ars that he frequently used the project as an archive and not just to listen to the recordings. For Seubert, the videos that IA records of the 78 RPM albums capture more than audio of a certain era. Researchers like him want to look at the label, check out the copyright information, and note the catalogue numbers, he said. "It has all this information there," Seubert said. "I don't even necessarily need to hear it," he continued, adding, "just seeing the physicality of it, it's like, 'Okay, now I know more about this record.'" [...] Nathan Georgitis, the executive director of the Association for Recorded Sound Collections (ARSC), told Ars that you just don't see 78 RPM records out in the world anymore. Even in record stores selling used vinyl, these recordings will be hidden "in a few boxes under the table behind the tablecloth," Georgitis suggested. And in "many" cases, "the problem for libraries and archives is that those recordings aren't necessarily commercially available for re-release." That "means that those recordings, those artists, the repertoire, the recorded sound history in itself -- meaning the labels, the producers, the printings -- all of that history kind of gets obscured from view," Georgitis said. Currently, libraries trying to preserve this history must control access to audio collections, Georgitis said. He sees IA's work with the Great 78 Project as a legitimate archive in that, unlike a streaming service, where content may be inconsistently available, IA's "mission is to preserve and provide access to content over time." "That 'over time' part is really the key function, I think, that distinguishes an archive from maybe a streaming service in a way," Georgitis said. "The Internet Archive is not hurting the revenue of the recording industry at all," Seubert suggested. "It has no impact on their revenue." Instead, he suspects that labels' lawsuit is "somehow vindictive," because the labels perhaps "don't like the Internet Archive's way of pushing the envelope on copyright and fair use." "There are people who, like the founder of the Internet Archive, want to push that envelope, and the media conglomerates want to push back in the other direction," Seubert said.

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The spectacular collapse of fintech middleman Synapse has left $200 million in customer money frozen and up to $95 million missing, with no clear answers about where the funds went. After Synapse, a financial technology company connecting other fintechs to banks, filed for bankruptcy in April 2024, customers of apps like Yotta, Juno, and Copper found themselves locked out of their savings. Founded in 2014 by Sankaet Pathak, Synapse connected consumer-facing fintech platforms with banks holding customer deposits. The disaster unfolded after relationships with regional bank Evolve and unicorn client Mercury deteriorated, triggering a chain reaction through the financial infrastructure. Nearly a year later, Fortune reports that a Department of Justice criminal investigation is underway, while the bankruptcy's court-appointed trustee called the situation an "awful, awful" mess. The debacle, the outlet writes, exposes the risks lurking beneath popular financial apps operating in a regulatory frontier where customer funds travel across an invisible bridge of intermediaries.

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Global telecom operators are struggling to shut down aging 2G networks despite pressure to free up spectrum for 4G and 5G services, as the transition threatens to exclude millions of vulnerable users. While Vietnam successfully decommissioned 2G in November 2024 by providing free 4G phones to low-income users, countries like South Africa and India have delayed shutdowns over concerns about cutting off phone access for millions. According to GSMA Intelligence, 61 countries have planned or initiated 2G network shutdowns to enhance bandwidth and reduce maintenance costs. For 2.5 billion people worldwide, smartphones cost about 30% of monthly income, keeping basic phones essential despite declining global feature phone sales.

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Warner Bros. Home Entertainment has confirmed widespread issues affecting DVDs manufactured between 2006-2008 that are experiencing premature disc rot. The company is offering replacements for affected titles but no refunds, even when replacements aren't possible. The problem manifests in various ways: complete disc failure, freezing midway through playback, or menu issues. Movie critic Chris Bumbray recently discovered several of his classic film DVDs had deteriorated, including titles not available digitally. DVD collectors have documented this issue for years via YouTube and forums, with speculation that a Pennsylvania manufacturing plant used subpar materials.

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Apple is postponing the rollout of its more personalized Siri features, originally promised as part of its Apple Intelligence initiative. "It's going to take us longer than we thought to deliver on these features and we anticipate rolling them out in the coming year," Apple told DaringFireball. The future update seeks to give Siri greater awareness of personal context and the ability to perform actions across apps.

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Europe's new tech rule aims to keep digital markets open and is not targeted at U.S. tech giants, EU antitrust and tech chiefs told U.S. congressmen, reminding them that U.S. enforcers have in recent years also cracked down on these companies. From a report: The comments by EU antitrust chief Teresa Ribera and EU tech chief Henna Virkkunnen came after U.S. House Judiciary Chair Jim Jordan and Scott Fitzgerald, chairman of the subcommittee on the administrative state, regulatory reform and antitrust demanded clarifications on the Digital Markets Act (DMA). "The DMA does not target U.S. companies," Ribera and Virkkunnen wrote in a joint letter dated March 6 to Jordan and Fitzgerald seen by Reuters. "It applies to all companies which fulfil the clearly defined criteria for being designated as a gatekeeper in the European Union irrespective of where they are headquartered," they said.

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PhD students trained in small research groups are more likely to remain in academia than those from larger labs, according to a comprehensive analysis published in Nature Human Behaviour. The study, which examined 1.5 million scientists and 1.8 million mentorships across chemistry, physics and neuroscience, found that trainees from large research groups had 38-48% lower "survival rates" in academia between the 1980s and 1995 compared to their small-group counterparts. However, researchers from larger labs who do stay in academia tend to achieve greater career success, publishing papers with higher citation rates and more frequently ranking among the most-cited scientists. The research team, led by social-data scientist Roberta Sinatra from the University of Copenhagen, discovered that successful large-group scientists typically published more first-author papers with their mentors as last authors, suggesting they received substantial attention despite the group size.

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The White House is weighing measures to restrict Chinese artificial-intelligence upstart DeepSeek, including banning its chatbot from government devices because of national-security concerns, WSJ reported Friday, citing people familiar with the matter. From the report: U.S. officials are worried about DeepSeek's handling of user data, which the Chinese company says it stores in servers located in China, the people said. Officials also believe DeepSeek hasn't sufficiently explained how it uses the data it collects and who has access to the data, they said. The Trump administration is likely to adopt a rule that would bar people from downloading DeepSeek's chatbot app onto U.S. government devices, the people said. Officials are also considering two other possible moves: banning the DeepSeek app from U.S. app stores and putting limits on how U.S.-based cloud service providers could offer DeepSeek's AI models to their customers, people close to the matter said. They cautioned that discussions about these two moves were still at an early stage.

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An anonymous reader shares a report: A physicist has cast doubt on a test that underlies a high-profile claim by Microsoft to have created the first 'topological qubits', a long-sought goal of the company's quantum computing effort. The critique comes amid mounting speculation about the validity of Microsoft's claim. Microsoft announced the breakthrough, which could lead to a quantum computer more resistant to information loss than with other approaches, on 19 February. Without a peer-reviewed paper backing up the claim, some researchers were sceptical. An accompanying paper in Nature described a method to measure the read-out from future topological qubits, but did not offer proof of their existence. In the latest critique, posted as a preprint, Henry Legg, a theoretical physicist at the University of St Andrews, UK, raises concerns about a test that Microsoft uses to look for Majoranas, so-far undiscovered quasiparticles arising from the collective behaviour of electrons that are needed for the topological qubits to work. Known as the topological gap protocol (TGP), the test is not mentioned in the 19 February Microsoft announcement. But the company has subsequently indicated to Nature's news team, and in a comment online, that it created the topological qubits using the TGP. "Since the TGP is flawed, the very foundations of the qubit are not there," says Legg. Business Insider, separately reports: On February 19, Microsoft unveiled a new quantum processor called Majorana 1. [...] On the same day, Simone Severini, Amazon's head of quantum technologies, emailed CEO Andy Jassy casting doubt on Microsoft's claims, according to a copy of the email obtained by Business Insider. Severini wrote that Microsoft's underlying scientific paper, released in Nature, "doesn't actually demonstrate" the claimed achievement and only showed that the new chip "could potentially enable future experiments." [...] Oskar Painter, Amazon's head of quantum hardware, stressed the need to "push back on BS statements like S. Nadella's," likely in reference to the Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella's social media post proclaiming major advancements with the Majorana chip. Further reading: Scientists Question Microsoft's Quantum Computing Claims.

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FiveThirtyEight founder Nate Silver, on the site's demise: Last night, as President Trump delivered his State of the Union address, the Wall Street Journal reported that ABC News would lay off the remaining staff at 538 as part of broader cuts within corporate parent Disney. Having been through several rounds of this before, including two years ago when the staff was cut by more than half and my tenure expired too, I know it's a brutal process for everyone involved. It's also tough being in a business while having a constant anvil over your head, as we had in pretty much every odd-numbered (non-election) year from 2017 onward at 538/FiveThirtyEight. I don't know all of the staffers from the most recent iteration of the site, but the ones I have met or who I overlapped with are all extremely conscientious and hard-working people and were often forced to work double-duty as jobs were cut but frequently not replaced. My heart goes out to them, and I'm happy to provide recommendations for people I worked with there. [...] The basic issue is that Disney was never particularly interested in running FiveThirtyEight as a business, even though I think it could have been a good business. Although they were generous in maintaining the site for so long and almost never interfered in our editorial process, the sort of muscle memory a media property builds early in its tenure tends to stick. We had an incredibly talented editorial staff, but we never had enough "product" people or strategy people to help the business grow and sustain itself. It's always an uphill battle under those conditions, particularly when it comes to recruiting and retaining staff, who were constantly being poached by outlets like the New York Times and the Washington Post.

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A Brazilian judge has ordered Apple to open its iOS platform to alternative app stores within 90 days, according to Valor International. The ruling cited Apple's compliance with similar requirements in the European Union under the Digital Markets Act without showing "significant impact or irreparable harm to its economic model." The case originated from a 2022 complaint by Mercado Livre. Brazil previously issued a 20-day deadline in November for Apple to permit alternative payment options and sideloading, but that injunction was overturned in December. Apple plans to appeal.

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Intuitive Machines' Athena lander touched down near the lunar south pole Thursday but may have toppled during landing, jeopardizing its scientific mission. "We're trying to evaluate exactly what happened in that last bit," said Tim Crain, Intuitive Machines' chief technology officer. Data from an inertial measurement unit suggests the 15-foot robotic spacecraft is lying on its side. The landing issues mirror problems faced by the company's Odysseus spacecraft last year, which also toppled after touchdown. Noisy data from laser altitude instruments likely contributed to the landing complications, officials said. CEO Steve Altemus reported the spacecraft isn't generating expected power, probably because its solar panels are improperly oriented. The company believes Athena landed somewhere on Mons Mouton, though outside the planned landing zone. The $62.5 million NASA-contracted mission carries several payloads, including a drill to search for frozen water, three small rovers, and a rocket-powered hopping drone. NASA officials indicated some experiments might still function despite the lander's orientation. Intuitive Machines' stock fell 20% Thursday following reports of the spacecraft's problems.

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