ICT news

• SpaceX Launches New NASA Telescope to Help JWST Study Exoplanets

  18-01-2026 23:29 via science.slashdot.org
  Last week a University of Arizona astronomy professor "watched anxiously...as an awe-inspiring SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket carried NASA's new exoplanet telescope, Pandora, into orbit."
  In 2018 NASA had approached Daniel Apai to help build the telescope, which he says will "shatter a barrier — to understand and remove a source of noise in the data — that limits our ability to study small exoplanets in detail and search for life on them."Astronomers have a trick to study exoplanet atmospher
  
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• Hundreds Answer Europe's 'Public Call for Evidence' on an Open Digital Ecosystem Strategy

  18-01-2026 21:57 via news.slashdot.org
  The European Commission "has opened a public call for evidence on European open digital ecosystems," writes Help Net Security, part of preparations for an upcoming Communication "that will examine the role of open source in EU's digital infrastructure."The consultation runs from January 6 to February 3, 2026. Submissions will be used to shape a Commission Communication addressed to the European Parliament, the Council, and other EU bodies, which is scheduled for publication in the first quarter
  
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• Microsoft Forced to Issue Emergency Out-of-Band Windows Update

  18-01-2026 20:34 via tech.slashdot.org
  The senior editor at the blog Windows Central decries two serious Windows issues "that were not spotted by Microsoft during testing, and are so severe that the company has now issued an emergency fix to address the problems."
  Microsoft's first update for Windows 11 in 2026 has already caused two major issues that saw users unable to fully shutdown their PCs or sign-in into a device when using Remote Desktop... Being unable to shut down your PC due to a recent OS update is a huge oversight on Mic
  
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• Astronomers Finally Explain How Molecules From Earth's Atmosphere Keep Winding Up On the Moon

  18-01-2026 18:34 via science.slashdot.org
  An anonymous reader shared this report from CNN:
  Particles from Earth's atmosphere have been carried into space by solar wind and have been landing on the moon for billions of years, mixing into the lunar soil, according to a new study [published in the journal Nature Communications Earth & Environment last month]. The research sheds new light on a puzzle that has endured for over half a century since the Apollo missions brought back lunar samples with traces of substances such as water, car
  
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• Acer Sues Verizon, AT&T, and T-Mobile, Alleging Infringment on Acer's Cellular Networking Patents

  18-01-2026 17:34 via yro.slashdot.org
  Slashdot reader BrianFagioli writes: Acer has filed three separate patent infringement lawsuits against AT&T, Verizon, and T-Mobile, taking the unusual step of hauling the nation's largest wireless carriers into federal court. The suits, filed in the Eastern District of Texas, claim the companies are using Acer-developed cellular networking technology without paying for the privilege. Acer says it tried to negotiate licenses for years but reached a dead end, arguing it was left with no optio
  
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• China Builds 'Hypergravity' Machine 2,000X Stronger Than Earth

  18-01-2026 16:34 via science.slashdot.org
  Long-time Slashdot reader schwit1 shared this report from Futurism:China has unveiled an extremely powerful "hypergravity machine" that can generate forces almost two thousand times stronger than Earth's regular gravity.The futuristic-looking machine, called CHIEF1900, was constructed at China's Centrifugal Hypergravity and Interdisciplinary Experiment Facility (CHIEF) at Zheijang University in Eastern China, and allows researchers to study how extreme forces affect various materials, plants, ce
  
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• Could We Provide Better Cellphone Service With Fewer, Bigger Satellites?

  18-01-2026 13:34 via science.slashdot.org
  European satellite operator Eutelsat "plans to launch 440 Airbus-built LEO satellites in the coming years to replenish and expand its constellation," Reuters reported Friday. And last week America's Federal Communications Commission approved SpaceX's request to deploy another 7,500 Starlink satellites, while Starlink "projects it will eventually have a constellation of 34,000 satellites," writes Fast Company, and Amazon's Project Leo "plans to launch more than 3,200 satellites."
  Meanwhile "Beiji
  
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• Retailers Rush to Implement AI-Assisted Shopping and Orders

  18-01-2026 09:54 via slashdot.org
  This week Google "unveiled a set of tools for retailers that helps them roll out AI agents," reports the Wall Street Journal,
  The new retail AI agents, which help shoppers find their desired items, provide customer support and let people order food at restaurants, are part of what Alphabet-owned Google calls Gemini Enterprise for Customer Experience. Major retailers, including home improvement giant Lowe's, the grocer Kroger and pizza chain Papa Johns say they are already using Google's tools to
  
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• 53% of Crypto Tokens Launched Since 2021 Have Failed, Most in 2025

  18-01-2026 06:59 via news.slashdot.org
  =["More than half of all cryptocurrencies ever launched are now defunct," reports CoinDesk, citing a new analysis by cryptocurrency data aggregator CoinGecko.
  And most of those failures occurred in 2025:The study looked at token listings on GeckoTerminal between mid-2021 and the end of 2025. Of the nearly 20.2 million tokens that entered the market during that period, 53.2% are no longer actively traded. A staggering 11.6 million of those failures happened in 2025 alone — accounting for 86
  
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• How Much Do AI Models Resemble a Brain?

  18-01-2026 03:34 via slashdot.org
  At the AI safety site Foom, science journalist Mordechai Rorvig explores a paper presented at November's Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing conference:[R]esearchers at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (EPFL), the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and Georgia Tech revisited earlier findings that showed that language models, the engines of commercial AI chatbots, show strong signal correlations with the human language network, the region of the brain responsible f
  
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• 2026's Breakthrough Technologies? MIT Technology Review Chooses Sodium-ion Batteries, Commercial Space Stations

  18-01-2026 00:41 via science.slashdot.org
  As 2026 begins, MIT Technology Review publishes "educated guesses" on emerging technologies that will define the future, advances "we think will drive progress or incite the most change — for better or worse — in the years ahead."
  This year's list includes next-gen nuclear, gene-editing drugs (as well as the "resurrection" of ancient genes from extinct creatures), and three AI-related developments: AI companions, AI coding tools, and "mechanistic interpretability" for revealing LLM d
  
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