Steven Spielberg grants that his 1977 UFO film Close Encounters was "speculative," writes the Associated Press, but "Disclosure Day, he insists, is the real deal." "It's my first film that will be considered science fiction that I do not consider to be science fiction," Spielberg said in a recent interview. "It's much more reflective of the world as it is evolving and discoveries that are being made as we speak." Spielberg, at 79, is trying to revive and reconsider the alien wonder that's long lingered in his mind, from "E.T." to "War of the Worlds." "Disclosure Day," Spielberg's first summer movie in a decade, is already being hailed as one of his best in years. But this time, Spielberg is testing whether he can conjure some of his trademark movie magic less with imagination than with conviction. "I've been a believer since I made 'Close Encounters' 50 years ago," Spielberg says. "But I would always say: Until I've seen a UAP or a UFO with my own eyes, I'm not going to categorically state that life from out there has come here. But I've changed that," he adds. "I'm now willing to change my mind because of the circumstantial evidence which is overwhelming..." Spielberg, having long followed reports of alleged alien encounters, was inspired by the 2023 House Subcommittee on National Security hearing on UAPs: Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena. Among the witnesses was whistleblower and former Air Force intelligence officer David Grusch, who testified that the government concealed a program investigating UAPs. The Pentagon then denied it... Those 2023 testimonies and others so fueled Spielberg that he produced a 50-page treatment on what would become "Disclosure Day." During the writing process with Koepp, he texted him more notes, he says, "than I've ever sent to anyone in my life." "There was a period in there where I believe he re-read the script every single day for a year," Koepp says. "We'd be in different time zones and I would wake up to 30 or 35 texts from his most current reading of the script. When the leader of the project has that level of commitment, it tends to bring along everyone. You up your game." The article calls it "a grand bookend for one of the most cosmically-minded moviemakers of our time." But the man who filmed some of the world's first summer blockbusters also shared his thoughts on the future of movies. "Even though the numbers are still not pre-COVID level numbers for any films being released now, it's more robust than it has been for many years. The audience gives me belief that people still want to congregate in a dark space in the company of strangers to share an experience of a film made by storytellers. And that gives me faith to continue making films." Rolling Stone wrote that "There's a lot to love in Disclosure Day." Though they also offer this pithy summary of its plot. "Remember when Steven Spielberg digitally replaced the guns in the hands of government agents for the 20th anniversary of E.T., then expressed regret about the decision? Imagine that he not only restored the weapons but crafted an entire two-and-a-half-hour feature around that one sequence as a mea culpa. That's Disclosure Day." The filmmaker may be staging a pulpy campaign with this sci-fi throwback, but he sincerely seems to believe the truth is out there — and will set us free... [W]hile the quality of his output can vary wildly when you look at the big picture of his career, there's still a baseline of love — for filmmaking, for storytelling through images, for giving people an experience that pushes emotional buttons and taps adrenal glands — that gives his work a sense of vitality and displays the sensibility of an artist at work... There's also a weird full-circle feel to it, and not just because he's returning to the fertile ground of Close Encounters and his other science fiction spectacles. You can see traces of everything from Duel to Minority Report show up, to the point where this almost doubles as a career retrospective in miniature... Yes, Spielberg does believe that we are not the only game running in the cosmos. But he also believes that our better angels have not left the building, and that movies still have the power to communally blow minds and open hearts. The Associated Press calls it "a grand bookend for one of the most cosmically-minded moviemakers of our time" and "a distant answer to the final notes of Close Encounters."

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There appears to be a gender attractiveness gap, but it fades away with age.

A 7,000-year-old village may have practiced a haunting skull ritual that left bodies behind

AI could accelerate the hunt for new physics, but sometimes it knows too much to see what’s right in front of it. Artificial intelligence could make it much cheaper and faster to search for new laws of physics, according to a new study published in the Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics (JCAP). But the [...]

"A year after spending over $14 billion to bring in Alexandr Wang and a group of his top Scale AI engineers to revamp its artificial intelligence efforts, Meta is at least back on the map in AI," reports CNBC, "though it's still far behind OpenAI, Anthropic and Google in the market." Wang's big accomplishment was the delivery of the Muse Spark AI model in April, marking Meta's first jump into proprietary foundation models and away from a strict adherence to open source, or open weight as it's more commonly called in AI... "Meta needs to provide more proof points of both adoption and commercialization," said Ralph Schackart, an analyst at William Blair who recommends buying the stock. "Investors are looking for Meta to monetize a new AI-first product, beyond the substantial positive impact AI is having on enhancing the advertising models." Wall Street, at least so far, is unimpressed. Meta's stock is down 18% over the past 12 months, the worst performer in the megacap group, along with Microsoft, which has its own challenges in AI. That's even after Meta reported 33% revenue growth in the first quarter, the fastest rate of expansion for any period since 2021. For Meta, the problem started with what some industry experts called, in hindsight at least, a strategic blunder. The company jumped into AI with its Llama family of models, offering an open-source approach that allowed developers to freely tinker, while the other big model makers charged for access. In April of last year, Meta's release of Llama 4 fell flat, failing to captivate developers and leading Zuckerberg to reconsider his company's approach to AI development... Since the release of Muse Spark, Meta has unveiled new AI and business-related subscription plans as part of an effort to expand its business beyond online ads. Historically, it hasn't worked. Meta still counts on ads for 98% of revenue. Schackart said he wants to see "tangible evidence of a growing list of new, AI-first products created by Muse Spark, even if monetization lags." He said that's "what investors are looking for." No matter how good Wang's model may be, Zuckerberg has a high hill to climb with developers coming off the Llama debacle. "I think the AI community largely ignores Meta at this point," said Rob May, CEO of the startup Neurometric, which works in the realm of token engineering.... Krish Subramanian, the CEO of consulting firm KOI AI and former product head at IBM Consulting, said developers are more excited about Google's AI models than what Meta is offering. The appeal of Llama was that it specifically targeted developers wanting open-weight alternative models, while with Muse Spark, Meta has made little effort in that direction, he said. "The lack of developer trust will come back to hit them if they don't focus on third-party developers," Subramanian said, noting that it took years for Microsoft to regain trust from open-source coders during the early days of Azure. "To just focus on a walled-garden kind of an ecosystem and ad revenue as the main source of income, they probably will never become the big player," he said. A Meta spokesperson pointed to Wang's recent comments about the company's continued support for the open-source ecosystem, and said Meta still plans to offer outside developers access to Muse Spark's underlying technology via an API, as it previously announced. "We're already testing with some early partners, and look forward to releasing it this month," the spokesperson said. "That Zuckerberg's metaverse and virtual reality ambitions have generated over $80 billion in total losses since late 2020 makes the AI pitch a tougher sell," the article points out, citing this observation from Howard Yu, business professor at Switzerland's International Institute for Management Development. "He's running out of the space for his credibility to last," Yu said. "I think the virtual reality foray may have burned up a lot of his goodwill in front of investors."

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Jeff Bezos vient de boucler une levée de fonds spectaculaire pour Prometheus, sa start-up d'IA physique. Son objectif : mettre au point une IA ingénieure générale qui pourrait mener des projets d’ingénierie poussée dans tous les domaines. Et Jeff Bezos imagine déjà un étrange futur florissant...

A potentially big step forward.

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One of fusion energy’s biggest selling points is that it is supposed to be different from traditional nuclear power. 

Unlike today’s fission reactors, which rely on uranium fuel and produce materials that can be linked to nuclear weapons programs, fusion machines are often portrayed as a cleaner and safer alternative. 

However, as governments and companies pour billions of dollars into making fusion commercially viable, some researchers are asking a burning question: How will anyone ensure that future fusion plants are being used exactly as advertised?

This is important because “fusion power systems can in principle be used to make significant amounts of fissile material,” researchers note.

A new study suggests antineutrinos, tiny particles produced in nuclear reactions, could act as independent witnesses to what is happening inside a fusion reactor. If this idea works as expected, future inspectors may be able to spot attempts to produce weapons-related materials without opening up the reactor or interrupting its operation.

When clean energy creates an unexpected security question

Most fusion designs under development rely on a reaction between two forms of hydrogen called deuterium and tritium. When these atomic nuclei merge, they release enormous amounts of energy. 

They also release fast-moving neutrons, which are essential for extracting that energy and converting it into electricity. Those neutrons, however, do not care how they are used.

If uranium-238 were placed near the fusion reaction, some of the neutrons could be absorbed by the uranium. Through a sequence of nuclear transformations, the uranium could eventually become plutonium-239, one of the materials that can be used in nuclear weapons.

This possibility does not mean that fusion reactors are secret weapons factories. Producing plutonium in this way would require deliberate action. Yet regulators generally prefer to design safeguards before a technology becomes widespread rather than after. 

“Demonstrating methods to assure the timely detection of such a misuse scenario would be extremely valuable as part of the efforts to guarantee the peaceful use of fusion energy systems,” the study authors said.

The challenge has been finding a monitoring method that can reliably reveal what is happening inside a reactor without becoming intrusive or technically impractical.

Listening for particles that cannot be silenced

The study authors investigated whether antineutrinos could provide that monitoring capability.

Antineutrinos are among the most elusive particles known to science. 

Trillions pass through the human body every second without leaving a trace. Since they interact so weakly with matter, they cannot realistically be blocked by walls, shielding, or other barriers.

That property turns them into a unique source of information. If plutonium production were taking place inside a fusion reactor, the nuclear reactions involved would generate a characteristic antineutrino signal. In principle, that signal could reveal activity that operators might otherwise try to conceal.

The researchers used computer simulations to test whether such a signal would be detectable in practice. They modeled the antineutrinos expected from plutonium-producing reactions and compared them with other sources of background noise, including signals generated during normal reactor operation and particles arriving from space.

Their results indicate that the difference should be measurable. According to the study, a relatively compact detector could detect the production of only a few kilograms of plutonium over about 30 days. 

In one benchmark scenario examined by the researchers, the production of 8 kilograms of plutonium in a month generated a strong and easily detectable antineutrino signal. This is a small enough amount to provide an early warning that something unusual is happening.

“Our results confirm that even a modestly-sized antineutrino detector should be able to detect the presence of fertile material during operation in a reliable and timely manner,” the study authors added.

Equally important, the detector would not need to sit inside the reactor complex. This is because antineutrinos travel through matter almost unhindered; the monitoring system could operate from outside the facility, making it less disruptive for reactor operators.

Building the rulebook before the reactors arrive

No commercial deuterium-tritium fusion power plants exist today, which means there is currently no facility where the approach can be tested under full operating conditions. The researchers therefore relied on simulations rather than real-world measurements.

That limitation also highlights why the study matters now. Fusion developers are still working to prove that their reactors can generate electricity economically. 

If they succeed, governments and international agencies will eventually need a framework for monitoring the technology. Creating such safeguards after hundreds of reactors are already operating would be far more difficult.

The new work does not solve every question surrounding fusion security, but it does offer a practical way to verify that future reactors are doing only what they are supposed to do. 

The study is published in the journal Physical Review Applied.

Scientists have created the first complete brain-to-body wiring map of a fruit fly, revealing that complex behavior may arise from distributed neural teamwork rather than a central controller. A large international research team led by labs at Harvard Medical School and Princeton University has reached a major neuroscience milestone: a complete wiring diagram of every [...]

Phoronix reports: The AMD R600 Gallium3D driver saw 59 commits [last] Sunday to Mesa 26.2. Making this code restructuring and code cleaning all the more notable is that the improvements to this old AMD Radeon graphics driver was done in part by GitHub Copilot. Gert Wollny has been among the few open-source developers left working on the AMD R600g driver that covers from the Radeon HD 2000 series through Radeon HD 6000 series graphics cards... [T]he old open-source GPU driver support is being assisted by AI long after the upstream vendor has stopped working on this driver — the Radeon HD 2000 "R600" series launched in 2007.

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Scientists studying the remarkable regenerative abilities of planarian flatworms have uncovered a previously unknown type of immune cell with an unusually destructive defense strategy. What if an immune cell could wipe out nearby threats by detonating itself? That is exactly what Stanford researchers have discovered in one of nature’s most unlikely creatures: the planarian flatworm. [...]

Des chercheurs viennent de franchir une étape que la biologie considérait encore récemment comme inaccessible : rajeunir de vraies cellules humaines. Non pas les remplacer mais pour les rajeunir. Cette avancée, qui a eu lieu il y a quelques mois, mérite qu'on s'y attarde sérieusement, tant ses...

America’s Government Accountability Office (GAO) watchdog has warned that the US may struggle to sustain a long-term conflict with China should hostilities break out. The issue is not about technical capability (the US military is arguably the world’s most powerful), but rather a matter of logistics.

For combat operations thousands of miles from home, as would be the case in the Indo-Pacific, the GAO argues that the US may struggle to refuel and resupply assets, notably its considerable aircraft fleet.

The issue mainly centers around aging refueling aircraft and issues with spare parts. If tensions over Taiwan were to go hot, these could both conspire to make American efforts in the region trickier than expected.

“The percentage of aerial refuelling tankers that are available and mission capable has remained persistently below the standards that the [US] Air Force established for the fleet,” the report said.

To give you some idea of the problem, imagine an F-35 running a sortie from Hawaii to Taiwan, say. These aircraft have a combat radius of around 700 miles (1,127 km), and the distance between these two islands is about 5,000 miles.

An army marches on its stomach

The fighter wouldn’t be able to make it on its own and would need several midair refueling operations to safely get there and back. After the mission, it may also need repairs, which require a sufficient stock of spare parts lying around.

If enough tankers aren’t available, the fighters couldn’t arrive in meaningful numbers. A bit of a quandary.

Of course, travel distances for fighters can be dramatically reduced by deploying carrier groups closer to Taiwan, but that puts them at risk of being attacked by long-range missiles (including hypersonics), submarines, or Chinese aircraft.

The main weakness, the report argues, is the US reliance on aging aircraft like Boeing KC-135 Stratotankers. Many of the current airframes entered service in the 1950s and 1960s, and are still going strong.

The airframes have been upgraded repeatedly, but old aircraft require more maintenance and suffer more breakdowns. And that leads to the second main issue: a lack of spare parts.

The US military increasingly struggles to obtain parts for older systems. Some suppliers no longer exist, and some components must be specially manufactured. Any break in supply means that assets, like aircraft, can sit grounded while waiting for parts.

Not how much you make, it’s how much you keep

So, even if you have 400 tankers on paper, perhaps only 250 are actually flyable on a given day. Other issues cited include a shortage of skilled personnel and delays in replacement hardware for older tech, like the planned Boeing KC-46 Pegasus.

But the KC-46 program has experienced years of technical problems and delays. The Air Force expected newer tankers to reduce pressure on older aircraft.

When factoring in the fact that China reportedly possesses long-range missiles specifically designed to target US bases and support aircraft, any direct conflict could prove very expensive for the US.

China’s military planners, the South China Morning Post (SCMP) reports, understand that destroying tankers may be more effective than trying to shoot down stealth fighters.

So, would such a conflict mean China could win? Not necessarily, since China has its own issues (like a lack of combat experience), but a “home advantage” would certainly tip the odds in its favor unless the US can cure its growing logistical bottlenecks.

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America's Energy Department "wants to build a single national platform for doing science with AI," reports Communications of the ACM: It is called the Genesis Mission, and the idea is to connect the country's 17 national laboratories, their supercomputers, scientific datasets, and a growing layer of AI models and agents into one system researchers can access. The DOE has taken to calling it 'a national operating system for science.' That means treating compute, data, and AI models the way the country treats power lines and highways, as shared national plumbing everyone else builds on top of. If it works, Genesis will change how scientific work gets organized, checked, and scaled, with AI helping run the whole pipeline from hypothesis to simulation to experiment and back. The pitch is that this is better understood as infrastructure policy than as another research program. Genesis is now moving from announcement into execution. President Trump signed the executive order launching it in November 2025. This past February, the DOE published 26 science and technology challenges for the program, and in March it opened a $294-million call for research teams in fields like nuclear energy, quantum information science, semiconductors, and biotechnology. The program is also beginning to reach beyond U.S. borders. In June 2026, Japan moved to become Genesis's first international partner. The two governments plan to invest a combined $1 billion over five years, with Japan contributing $500 million toward joint work in quantum technology, nuclear fusion, and biotechnology. The stated goal is staying ahead of China in the fields where AI is advancing fastest. The open question is whether a federated platform this big can actually work, or whether it ends up as one more expensive coordination exercise.

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Em muitas espécies de peixes, a temperatura da água determina se o filhote nascerá macho ou fêmea -um mecanismo biológico que, diante do aquecimento global, ameaça extinguir populações inteiras pela escassez de fêmeas. No entanto, um estudo internacional realizado na Espanha, na França e no Brasil descobriu que esse conhecido efeito de masculinização pode ser compensado ao longo das gerações. Em um experimento de dez anos com mais de 3.000 indivíduos de robalo-europeu (Dicentrarchus labrax), os cientistas observaram que a maioria de machos nascidos nas primeiras gerações sob calor intenso foi surpreendentemente revertida pelo nascimento de mais fêmeas na terceira geração. Leia mais (06/14/2026 - 12h00)

Apollo astronauts trying to rest on the way to the Moon kept noticing the same thing in the dark. With the cabin lights down and their eyes adjusted, they saw brief flashes and streaks of light, dots and lines that no one else could see and that were not there in any ordinary sense. The cause, worked out over the missions that followed, was cosmic rays from deep space passing through the visual system. The broad cause is now well supported, even if the exact biophysics of how a passing particle turns into a flash of light is still not fully pinned down.

The flashes are an example of a phosphene, a sensation of light produced by something other than light entering the eye.

In this case, the something was radiation.

What the astronauts saw

The reports began on Apollo 11. After a period of dark adaptation, with eyes open or closed, crew members saw flashes they described as pinpoints, thin streaks, or small clouds of light. They were almost always colourless. They came at a rate of roughly one-half to two a minute, often enough to be a distraction when someone was trying to sleep.

This was not confined to one crew or one flight. Flashes were reported across the Apollo missions, and later by astronauts on Skylab, on Mir, and on the International Space Station. The phenomenon even had a kind of forecast. As early as 1952, the biophysicist Cornelius Tobias had suggested that people exposed to cosmic radiation in space might see exactly this sort of thing, and the team that investigated the Apollo reports traced them back to that idea.

How they tied it to cosmic rays

Suspecting a cause and demonstrating it are different tasks. To test whether the flashes really were caused by particles passing through the head, the Apollo 16 and 17 crews carried a device called the Apollo Light Flash Moving Emulsion Detector, worn on the head during the coast to and from the Moon. It used stacked photographic emulsion to record the tracks of charged particles, so that the path of a particle could be matched against the moment an astronaut reported a flash.

The numbers were small but telling. The detector was worn for about an hour on each of the last two Apollo missions. On Apollo 17, seventeen flashes were reported during the session, and two of them were matched to heavy cosmic-ray nuclei passing through an eye. Combined with the geometry of the eye and statistical modelling, that was enough for the investigators to attribute the flashes to cosmic rays. Ground experiments pointed the same way: when volunteers had their dark-adapted eyes exposed to beams of heavy ions, they saw comparable flashes.

What is still uncertain

The confirmed part is that cosmic rays cause the flashes. The unconfirmed part is the step in between, the biophysics of how a single fast particle produces a perceived point of light. Several mechanisms have been proposed, and more than one may contribute.

The leading idea is that the particle ionises tissue directly in the retina, stimulating the light-sensing cells or the neurons behind them as it passes through. This fits the ground experiments, where heavy ions produced flashes at intensities too low for any light to have been generated. A second idea is Cherenkov radiation: a particle moving through the clear jelly of the eye faster than light moves through that medium emits a faint glow, real photons generated inside the eye itself. The trouble is that Cherenkov light should look bluish and diffuse, and most astronauts described sharp white dots and streaks, which do not match. A third possibility is that some flashes come from particles striking the optic nerve or the visual centres of the brain, bypassing the eye altogether.

Decades on, reviews of the phenomenon still describe the specific mechanism as undefined, and note that the effects on the different parts of the visual system have not been fully separated.

The cause is well established; the wiring is not.

Why it still matters

On Earth’s surface, we are mostly shielded from this by the atmosphere and the magnetic field. In low Earth orbit the shielding is reduced but not gone, which is why astronauts on stations such as Mir and the ISS have also reported the effect. The Apollo crews saw the flashes more strongly still because they left that protection behind, travelling beyond the magnetosphere. The flashes were, in effect, the radiation environment of deep space made briefly visible inside a human head.

That is why they are treated as more than a curiosity. They are a perceptible sign that high-energy particles are passing through the body, the brain included, and the same radiation is a serious concern for long missions beyond Earth. On the International Space Station, experiments have used the visual system as a way to study how cosmic radiation affects the central nervous system. For a crew bound for Mars, who would spend months outside the magnetosphere, the dose to the brain over that time is one of the open problems of the trip.

What to watch

The people who travel back to lunar distance under Artemis and later missions will almost certainly see the flashes again. They will also carry better instruments and a sharper reason to use them. Pinning down how the flashes are produced would be a small result. Understanding what months of that radiation does to the brain behind the eye is the one that matters.

The post Apollo astronauts trying to sleep on the way to the Moon kept seeing flashes and streaks in the dark, and the cause turned out to be cosmic rays from deep space passing straight through their eyes. appeared first on Space Daily.

"Blizzard Entertainment is continuing its crusade against private World of Warcraft servers," reports the gaming news site Aftermath: The company filed a new lawsuit on Friday in a California court against the makers of Project Ascension, alleging copyright infringement, Digital Millennium Copyright Act violations, and other claims. Blizzard Entertainment claims that Project Ascension is a "lucrative way to exploit and profit from the popularity of the WoW game experience," according to the complaint, obtained by Aftermath. Blizzard Entertainment's lawyers say in the complaint that Project Ascension purports to have "over a million players." Lawyers write that the developers have "distributed (and are continuing to distribute) millions of pirated copies of Blizzard's copyrighted WoW game software." They also allege that Project Ascension's servers are hosted on Russian "bulletproof" servers with Aeza Group, a company that was sanctioned in 2025 "for its role in supporting cybercriminal activity targeting victims in the United States and around the world," per a U.S. Department of Treasury press release... Project Ascension lets players combine pieces of World of Warcraft's different classes to build unique characters. It's free-to-play, but players can purchase in-game currency, Donation Points, to buy things in-game, such as cosmetics and experience boosts. Blizzard Entertainment's lawyers assert that Project Ascension has made "millions of dollars from the sale of Donation Points...." Blizzard Entertainment successfully sued a popular World of Warcraft server called Turtle Wow last year. The project had been running since 2018, taking donations from players for the free-to-play server. Both sides announced in April 2026 that they'd reached a settlement after Blizzard Entertainment was awarded a permanent injunction to shut down Turtle WoW. The details of the settlement were not made public. Turtle WoW was shut down for good shortly after May 15; players gathered online to mourn the end of the server.

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DevLille 2026 met en avant une évolution bien installée dans les pratiques de développement : les projets ne restent plus confinés aux environnements locaux. API, blogs techniques, prototypes ou mini-services cloud sont de plus en plus testés directement en ligne, dès les premières étapes. La...

One of the most violent events the Solar System has ever witnessed.

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