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An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Miniature human organs and other tissues are to be grown from NHS patients' cells in a drive to improve medicine testing and reduce the number of animals used in drug development. Scientists will use the clumps of tissue to learn how diseases vary between patients, helping them identify which treatments are best for different people based on the particular pathology underlying their condition. The move marks a shift away from the traditional use of animals as models for human disease, towards what researchers believe will be more accurate and reliable tests based directly on human tissues. Researchers have been growing tiny clumps of human organs, known as organoids, for more than a decade. Tests show that pieces smaller than a millimeter can mirror key features of full-scale organs and tissues, including how they falter with disease and respond to drugs. Armed with organoids grown from diseased human tissues, scientists can investigate whether new drug candidates reverse pathological changes in all or a subset of patients, and quickly identify ineffective drugs early in the process. Historically, more than 90% of drugs that clear animal testing go on to fail in human trials, raising questions about the value of the tests. US and European medicines regulators now encourage other approaches if available. "It's going to have a major impact on the numbers of animals used and the way we develop new drugs in the future," said Matthias Zilbauer, a clinical professor of paediatric gastroenterology at the Cambridge Stem Cell Institute. "We're not saying there won't be any animal use in the near or foreseeable future, because there are still certain issues that cannot be tested in these new models, but the reduction is very real." "A lot of human diseases either do not occur in animals or occur in a different way because they're not human," added Zilbauer. "We want tests and models that can tell us which treatments work, and in what patients, and a mouse cannot tell us that."

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Microsoft has been steadily scaling back its China presence, closing at least 15 branch offices and joint ventures over the past five years as Beijing favors domestic software. U.S. export controls also make it harder to grow its cloud and AI businesses, leaving the market with relatively little economic upside. Reuters reports: Microsoft took a major hit from the erosion of trust between Washington and Beijing, the five people said. China has since 2017 pushed the use of domestic software, which Beijing sees as more secure and whose quality is increasingly competitive with Windows and Office. U.S. restrictions, including export controls on advanced technology, have meanwhile hindered efforts to scale Microsoft's lucrative AI and cloud businesses in China. [...] Microsoft ultimately decided to remain because it had carved out a profitable business servicing Chinese companies like TikTok owner ByteDance, which need Western technology to manage overseas operations, according to three people familiar with the matter. The company also believed that it needed a presence to maintain access to China's world-class engineering talent, two of them said. Microsoft had also cultivated a relationship with the government that is among the deepest of any tech company, its former China head Alain Crozier told Reuters. "Because of the geopolitics ... some days it's a little bit harder, but we never had a crisis," he said. A Microsoft spokesperson did not address questions about the firm's deliberations on its China business but said it operates in a regulatory "environment that applies to every international supplier" and that it remains committed to the Chinese market. The state of Microsoft's China business reflects market competition, regulatory demands and technological trends, the company said.

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Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) is still trust-based. In the past, a router would announce it originated a block of address space, and its neighbors would take that claim at face value. That trust model is the reason a single misconfiguration or a deliberate false announcement can pull traffic for someone else’s network across the planet, and why routing security has become a core concern for anyone responsible for keeping services reachable. 

It’s been about a month since I started my Sovereign Tech Fellowship in mid-July, and I want to give you some updates about what’s been going on before I go on summer holiday for the next two weeks. The idea behind these update posts is to highlight certain aspects of my activities and get people interested in getting involved with design.

GUADEC 2026 This year I attended GUADEC in person for the first time and I really enjoyed it. There were three days of interesting talks followed by two days of productive workshops and hacking. My favorite talks were about:

• • the state of GNOME OS, an operating system that includes daily builds of all GNOME components, enabling us to identify system-level bugs before they reach distributions,
  • the new SVG renderer in GTK which enables scalable and animated icons,
  • the new symbolic icons themselves,
  • GNOME Shell design dreams, some of which are already materializing,
  • a new session save/restore framework that allows the user session and apps to save and restore their state across reboots which will enable system updates in the background without the user noticing the necessary reboot,
  • the path towards a Local-First Desktop, which highlights the potential of peer-to-peer synchronization for collaborative features in our app ecosystem,
  • the report on the journey of the Graphs app into GNOME Circle, our certification and education program for third party developers.

I gave a short update on the GNOME Design Team’s recent achievements and challenges, announced my fellowship and invited interested individuals to join us. Tobias and I lead the Design BoF where we discussed some recent design pattern standardization efforts and received helpful feedback from the audience. Furthermore, the discussions in between talks and workshops were an amazing opportunity to connect with other contributors.

I was not able to attend GUADEC in the past because of the locations, but also because of high travel costs. The GNOME Foundation provides travel sponsorships, and this year’s budget was not used completely. Please reach out to the Travel Committee if you are a contributor and need financial support to attend conferences and hackfests.

Kicking Things Off

Traveling to GUADEC marked the start of my fellowship, and the weeks after that I was pretty much busy with kicking off things of various kinds.

Internal

As an employee of the Sovereign Tech Agency, I went through the onboarding process, set up hardware and software tools, and got to know the team. The 2026 cohort of the Sovereign Tech Fellowship comprises 14 people from a variety of different projects, which provides an amazing opportunity to share knowledge and establish cross-project collaborations. I am responsible for organizing a monthly ‘Lightning Talks’ series, in which fellows give short presentations on topics of broader interest, with the intention of leading to longer peer mentoring sessions. For my own presentation, I chose to talk about This Week in GNOME, the GNOME project’s weekly blog that covers news from the community. I believe it is a major success because it enables our community members to share project news without having to set up their own blog. The numbers speak for themselves: a total of 2,643 news posts have been submitted by 335 individuals over a period of 261 weeks. I would like to take this opportunity to thank Felix Häcker for developing ‘This Week in GNOME’ and for curating a weekly post for more than four years.

Design

There are a few design patterns we have wanted to standardize for a while. These include Action Rows with a scale, time and date pickers, drag and drop target styling, and floating controls. I discussed with Alice which ones to prioritize and started with Action Rows with a scale. If your app uses a scale in an Action Row in a way that hasn’t been mentioned in the issue yet, please leave a comment with a screenshot. You are also welcome to contribute state-of-the-art examples from other platforms.

Another topic I plan to work on is the credentials portal and I’ve had a first video meeting with the maintainers of credentialsd to coordinate our timelines and clarify the requirements.

I also reviewed a few merge requests and provided some design feedback in issues and on Matrix. One topic I find particularly interesting and worth sharing is adjusting arbitrary colors to ensure contrast of the event widgets in Calendar. Other apps that have to handle arbitrary colors (e.g. user-selected colors) in the user interface might benefit from looking into using the oklab color space too. Alice has published a blog post about the CSS capabilities which helped me to figure out the proposal for Calendar.

Community

I’ll soon begin reviewing apps for GNOME Circle, and I’ve already had an onboarding meeting with Tobias from the Circle Committee and another interested contributor. My plan is to support new reviewers through peer reviews and feedback so they can gain experience in GNOME design.

I attended a video meeting about Test Center, a new app for installing experimental versions of apps and system components. It makes testing much easier, and I see some potential for newcomers to get involved through coordinated user testing.

Until now, I’ve never had the time to blog about my design work for GNOME, but I’ve finally set up this blog and have been really enjoying it so far. Since this is my first time blogging, I’d appreciate any feedback via Matrix.

Thanks for reading. I’ll be back in September after my holiday.

A Linux security tool can catch a system call and still record the wrong thing.

Linux Audit can tell defenders that a system call ran while leaving out the setting that explains what the call did.

This week’s Linux security updates cover several areas administrators cannot afford to overlook. Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora, SUSE, openSUSE, and other distributions released fixes for privilege escalation, remote code execution, denial of service, and flaws affecting network-facing services.

Wired reports that consumer neurotechnology is rapidly moving from the lab into workplaces and homes, with companies including Apple, Meta, and Snap developing products that can monitor or interpret brain activity. Researchers warn that as these systems improve, neural data could become the next major privacy battleground. Some neuroscientists are already calling for a series of core rights, coined "neurorights," that protect "mental privacy," "identity," and personal "agency." Here's an excerpt from the article: Over the past two decades, researchers using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), which tracks the iron in the hemoglobin supplying oxygen to neurons, have been building up increasingly detailed maps and inventories of the mammalian cortex. Thanks to huge advances in machine-learning artificial intelligence -- computer algorithms that are able to sort through enormous amounts of information and use statistical methods to make classifications and predictions -- fMRI scans can now be used to identify everything from depressive thoughts to the nuanced feelings of envy and schadenfreude. Other algorithms have been able to accurately piece together reconstructions of movie clips watched by subjects, just by analyzing their brain scans; or have detected, in probing the brain activity of swing voters in the US presidential election, responding to photographs and videos of presidential candidates, which candidates provoked anxiety or even disgust, and which elicited positive responses or feelings of empathy. In just the last few years, neuroscience researchers have progressed from decoding images and emotions as they play across the cortex to sounds, words, phrases, and even language. In 2023, in a remarkable demonstration of this emerging technology, a woman called Ann Johnson, who had been paralyzed for 18 years by a brain-stem stroke, was able to speak again through the insertion of a grid of 253 electrodes onto the surface of her brain, which translated her neuronal signals into sentences, in real time, at a rate of 78 words per minute (just about half the speed of standard conversation). The research team at the University of California, led by neurosurgeon Edward Chang, had combined this brain-computer interface with an animated avatar of Johnson's head, which spoke in her own voice, as reconstructed from a recording of a 15-minute toast she had given at her wedding. Just as the avatar's mouth spoke Johnson's words as she thought them, so its expressions were similarly influenced by the nuances of her brain activity, which turned her thoughts about facial gestures into displays of emotion -- from smiles to pursed lips and frowns. [...] The more invasive the recording equipment, the richer and more detailed the data. Surgical interventions are at the vanguard of neuroscience and remain very rare -- fewer than 100 people on the planet have brain-computer interfaces like Johnson's embedded beneath their skulls. Yet almost inevitably, a concerted trickle-down effect is occurring. In the summer of 2023, a team at the University of Texas demonstrated that they could use fMRI to translate brain scans into words and sentences, after subjects listened to 16 hours of the storytelling podcasts The Moth Radio Hour and The New York Times' Modern Love to train an AI model. When the subjects then listened to new podcasts, the algorithm was able to convert the gist of what they heard, as it manifested in their brains, into words, phrases, and sentences that roughly captured the stories. As the team's lead computational neuroscientist, Alexander Huth, put it in an interview with Science, "Our thought when we actually had this working was, 'Oh my God, this is kind of terrifying.'" Now noninvasive, wearable brain scanners are beginning to proliferate beyond the lab, making their way into our workplaces and, through the vast global consumer market, into our homes too.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Fei-Fei Li, aka The Godmother of AI, says the biggest AI risk in education may be students losing the motivation and agency to learn, rather than simply using the technology to cheat. She argues against banning AI outright, saying it can be valuable when used to support engaged students instead of replacing the thinking and struggle that learning requires. Techspot reports: Speaking on an episode of the science podcast Huberman Lab this week, Li talked about the fears around how students are using AI. "The absolute bad outcome is that our young generation, their agency and human-level motivation of learning and living is taken away by tools," the ImageNet inventor warned. "It should not be taken away by humans nor should it be taken away by machines." If we see a generation of graduates who have completely relied on AI without actively trying to learn anything for themselves, they risk leaving education without having "properly developed the brain," Li said. [...] Li certainly isn't advocating for a complete ban on students using AI. She believes it can genuinely help struggling students who are already engaged in their learning. Li herself noted how she struggled with organic chemistry as a premed student, when teaching assistants and professors didn't have enough time to answer every question. While there's no obvious solution, Li says we need to find a way to keep children and students' motivation and agency. "Let's find a way to give them the access and the right way of using these tools," she said. Li added that if AI is used properly in education, it could make the students of the future "way smarter than us because they are superpowered."

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In our previous post we looked at fixing a super 8 film projector. While watching filme with a real projector has its own charm, it is inconvenient to say the least. First of all you make the entire room properly dark or you can't see anything. This is regardless of the fact that the projector bulb is consuming 100 watts of power to show the image. Even if you manage not to burn the film merely running it through the projector causes wear, scratches and tearing. While film typically ages very well, eventually it will turn into magenta goop or gets eaten by vinegar syndrome. Thus you'd really want to convert all these films into high quality digital files.

There are several companies that offer this service. If you only have a few rolls, using those is the smart thing to do. I, on the other hand, have so much material that using a commercial service would cost thousands (possibly tens of thousands) of euros. Fortunately, this is a fairly common problem and there are dozens of existing projects on the Internet to be inspired by. 

The main technical problem with super 8 film is that it is very small. A sequence of 10 super 8 images is approximately as long as a matchstick. The fact that projectors can display 18 frames per second with sub millimeter registration is an astounding achievement of mechanical engineering. How do they do that? Very difficultly.

Many of the DIY solutions start by taking an existing projector and modifying it to run slower. Then you remove the projection lens and aim a digital camera with a macro lens at the gate. This yields incredible results quality-wise but requires a fairly expensive macro lens and typically the modification on the projector is destructive. So that's out. Some more searching eventually lead me to this Github project.

The basic idea is simple. Instead of using a projector or trying to replicate a film transport (which proper tension and all that) instead rely on the basic stiffness on film and drive it directly with stepper motor. Film is not aligned mechanically but instead by detecting the sprocket hole with some straightforward machine vision code. Time to fire up the ol' 3D printer and order components. This is what the end result looks like after assembly

The thing at the top left that looks like a space cannon prop from a scifi movie is actually a microscope lens. Not only can it do > 1x optical magnification, it can do so at a cost of about 25 euros. The downside is noticeable chromatic aberration. The small flat thing on the other end is the Raspberry Pi HQ camera module that can do 4k at 12 bits per channel. The whole thing is run via a single Raspberry Pi 3 with a stepper motor hat. The board at the bottom is used to distribute 12V DC power to the lamp and motors.

Before going further, let's just spend some time appreciating just how awesome colors look in this film. Props to the chemical engineers at Kodak. And remember, the original image is about one third of the size of your smallest fingernail.

The Github repo says that you probably need to adapt the code to your setup. I basically ended up rewriting all of it from scratch. In the process I learned that OpenCV has its own GUI toolkit which is both simple (one could even say simplistic) and perfect for this use case. The first attempt took nine hours to process one 3.5 minute reel of film. Then I realized that trying to do 4k on material that physically maxes out at approximately 2k with the processing power of a potato is not a recipe for success. Halving the capture resolution and a few other optimizations brought the runtime down to about one hour per reel.

With this, some more custom software for image processing and stabilization coupled with FFmpeg scripts one can start to go through the archive of films. Doing so raises a fair bit of questions. For example:

Is that a 3 year old child driving a jury-rigged go-kart on a frozen lake on his own without even wearing a helmet?

Yes it is. A bit later a grown up drives the car but he is too heavy so the ice cracks under him. No one seems particularly concerned. This may seem strange to us but you have to understand that this was the very early 70s. The concept of safety had not been invented yet.

The CFTC has ordered Kalshi to keep operating in New York, claiming the state's lawsuit against the prediction market created a "market emergency." They said it acted "to ensure market stability" and "ordered the exchange to continue to operate in accordance with the Commodity Exchange Act's Core Principles." Ars Technica reports: The market emergency alleged by the CFTC is that New York Attorney General Letitia James sued Kalshi on July 31. James' lawsuit seeks a court order to permanently enjoin Kalshi "from operating an unlawful gambling business" in the state. The lawsuit also demands that Kalshi "make full restitution to customers who have engaged in betting" and pay financial penalties. "New York intends to make event contract derivatives waste away under its iron curtain of state gaming laws before the courts get the chance to issue final rulings," CFTC Chairman Michael Selig said yesterday. "Congress did not intend for derivatives exchanges to be regulated under a patchwork of state gaming laws... New York has no business regulating these interstate financial markets. The commission is required by law to ensure order in these markets, and that is what we have done today." [...] The CFTC says it alone has the power to regulate platforms such as Kalshi and Polymarket under the Commodity Exchange Act, a US law that gives the CFTC exclusive jurisdiction over designated contract markets (DCMs). "These are financial exchanges that offer financial instruments and operate across state lines," Selig said yesterday. "They match the bid from a resident of one state with the offer of a resident from another state and submit the trade to a clearinghouse that backstops the transactions of customers throughout the country."

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Researchers at Israeli cybersecurity firm Dream say suspected China-linked hackers used an open-source AI-agent system to conduct what may be the first observed end-to-end autonomous cyberattack against a government. According to the Financial Times (paywalled), the attack compromised at least 85 accounts and resulted in the theft of more than 2,500 personnel records from Taiwanese systems. Tom's Hardware reports: The campaign reportedly ran for four days at the beginning of July and at times deployed as many as eight autonomous agents in parallel. Dream said the system mapped 21 government systems before compromising user accounts and extracting personnel information. The attackers subsequently expanded their activity to Taiwan's nuclear safety agency, at least seven energy companies, government suppliers, and other government systems. Dream says it found the evidence inside a 160-megabyte (160MB) online archive that surfaced during its broader tracking of cyberthreat actors. The archive reportedly held 1,395 files showing that the tool was built on two open-source AI agent systems -- Hermes and OpenClaw -- both of which can be downloaded freely and are designed to let large language models carry out multi-step tasks on their own. Researchers could not determine which underlying model powered the agents, but the data reportedly showed the model's safeguards had been sidestepped by presenting the intrusion as an authorized penetration test rather than a real attack. Of particular concern is that the toolkit for the hack comprised such easily available systems, neither of which was purpose-built for offense. The operators appear to have assembled a capable autonomous tool out of components any developer can pull down and run. What the researchers describe as the tool's most striking feature was its ability to continuously devise attacks on its own, rather than follow a preprogrammed route. The platform continuously assessed available evidence, ranked possible attack paths, and reprioritized them as circumstances changed. When one technique failed, the tool tasked another agent with searching the internet for information and developing an alternative approach.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: On Monday, passengers aboard Delta flight 591 going from Las Vegas to Atlanta allegedly spoofed the onboard Wi-Fi, raising the attention of federal law enforcement. The incident came one day after the DEF CON security conference concluded in Las Vegas, and was first described on social media accounts that follow publicly available air-to-ground messages, known as ACARS. According to the "ACARS Drama" account, a message was sent by pilots from the plane stated: "NO INFO AS OF NOW WE HAVE A BUNCH OF PAX THAT WERE AT A CYBER CONFERENCE IN LAS THEY WERE ABLE TO JAM OUR WIFI AND BROADCAST THEIR SIGNAL." A description of the incident posted to Reddit further stated that these passengers created a fake hotspot ("Delta WiFi Fast"), with a phishing landing page "designed to harvest passengers' personal credentials." This technique, sometimes known as an "evil twin" attack, has been long-known to the IT security community. It involves setting up a fake Wi-Fi network and then capturing login credentials and other data. "One initial finding is an unauthorized WiFi network, which was not provided, operated, or supplied by Delta, was present onboard the aircraft for a short time during the flight," said a Delta spokesperson. Delta further noted that the flight's safety was "never in question and no aircraft operating systems were affected," and that no emergency was declared. Ars notes that the "actual onboard Wi-Fi was disabled for 30 minutes."

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Google has unveiled the $29 Pixel Tag, its long-awaited AirTag rival that combines UWB with Bluetooth 6.0 Channel Sounding for two forms of precision tracking. It launches November 11. The Verge reports: The Pixel Tag is a slim oblong device available in one grayish color -- Fog -- that weighs about 12g, or 0.4oz. Like the AirTag, it has no built-in hooks or clips for attaching to objects you want to track. There's a single button that will trigger a sound on your phone, for the rare occasion when you've got the Tag but have lost your main device. It also has an IP67 rating, so it should be safe from dust and rain. As for the battery, the Pixel Tag takes CR2032 coin batteries, and says one battery should last for over a year. Naturally, it'll be compatible with Google's Find Hub network, which leverages the Bluetooth capabilities of Android devices worldwide to help locate lost objects. [...] Once you're close enough to the Pixel Tag, UWB lets the Find Hub app display the distance and direction to the tracker, so long as you're using a phone with a UWB chip. Channel Sounding is a newer development that can display the exact distance, but not direction, and it will work with any phone or tablet that includes Bluetooth 6.0. The Moto Tag 2 is the only other tracker to currently support it.

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A German digital-rights group has filed a criminal complaint against Meta, Ray-Ban parent EssilorLuxottica, and several retailers over Meta's AI smart glasses, arguing the devices can enable covert recording in violation of German privacy law. Prosecutors have begun a preliminary review, while Germany's network regulator says smart glasses are legal "as long as the recording function is clearly visible." Reuters reports: "There's no place to escape from smart glasses. You have to expect at any moment to be filmed and then exposed on the internet," said HateAid managing director Josephine Ballon. The organization reported the management of Meta, units of spectacles maker EssilorLuxottica including Ray-Ban, as well as retailers Fielmann, Apollo-Optik, Mister Spex and MediaMarkt to the Frankfurt-based digital crime prosecution unit ZIT. HateAid said its complaint was based on a federal digital data protection law that prohibits the sale of communication devices designed to film people without them noticing. ZIT confirmed it received a complaint from HateAid invoking that law, saying it would routinely investigate on a preliminary basis whether there are grounds for a deeper probe. MediaMarktSaturn Retail Group said it was taking the complaint very seriously, adding that its suppliers had contractual obligations for all goods to be compliant with the law. Mister Spex said it had not been officially notified of a complaint and that it was taking protection of privacy very seriously.

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At its Made by Google 2026 event today, Google unveiled a slew of new devices, headlined by the Pixel 11, Pixel 11 Pro, and Pixel 11 Pro Fold. Here's a breakdown of the company's latest smartphones, provided by TechCrunch: Pixel 11: The standard Pixel 11 gets a redesigned camera bar that is thinner than the one on the previous generation. Google says the new camera bar is more than 40% thinner and now uses an all-glass surface that stretches across the width of the phone. Google is also increasing the base storage to 256GB, doubling the previous starting capacity. The starting price for the new model is set at $899, reflecting a $100 increase compared to the Pixel 10. This price hike comes with the decision to drop the 128GB storage option. Plus, the ongoing RAM supply shortage plays a part in this increase. Pixel 11 Pro and Pro XL: Google is making durability a bigger part of the Pro lineup. The company says the Pixel 11 Pro and Pixel 11 Pro XL have improved drop resistance and a new anti-scratch display coating that provides more than twice the scratch resistance of the Pixel 10 Pro models. The Pixel 11 Pro starts at $1,099, compared to $999 for the Pixel 10 Pro. Pixel 11 Pro Fold: Google says the new foldable is nearly 10% lighter and almost 1mm thinner than the Pixel 10 Pro Fold. It also has slimmer bezels, a 48-megapixel main camera, and 30x Super Zoom. The company is also building on the IP68 water and dust resistance introduced with the Pixel 10 Pro Fold. The Pixel 11 Pro Fold uses a glass-fiber composite back cover designed to better withstand cracking, while a redesigned hinge offers additional protection for the inner display. Google says the changes make the model three times more durable than its predecessor. There were also several new Gemini-powered features unveiled at the event. Google is expanding "Live Transcribe" to support American Sign Language, using the Pixel Camera to translate signing into text in real time. A new voice-input feature called "Rambler" is designed to understand natural, unstructured speech, including filler words and run-on sentences. Google is also integrating "Circle to Search" more directly into the Pixel Camera for identifying objects, translating text, and asking questions about what users see.

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The FAA says its push to recruit video gamers as air traffic controllers has helped it hire more than 2,000 trainees, reaching 94% of its hiring goal. Another 2,000-plus candidates are in the pipeline. CBS News reports: U.S. Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy said in a recent social media post that the federal agency's recruitment campaign to recruit gamers as air traffic controllers has been a "game changer" for the Federal Aviation Administration. [...] When Duffy announced the initiative in April, he acknowledged that the Transportation Department needed to extend its reach to recruit prospective air traffic controllers. "A lot of what they do playing games ... is what they do ... controlling traffic in the air," Duffy told CBS News senior transportation correspondent Kris Van Cleave in an interview on Tuesday at New Jersey's Newark Liberty International Airport. Duffy added that many current trainees started out as gamers. Only about 25% of controllers hold a traditional college degree, while former controllers note that gaming requires many of the same skills that air traffic controllers use on the job, such as thinking quickly, staying focused and managing multiple sources of information as they guide more than 80,000 flights to their destinations daily.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A proposed Linux kernel patch addresses a private-futex race that a recent security fix left unresolved. Security researcher Hyunwoo Kim found that a rare sequence involving nested vfork() calls can allow two tasks sharing the same memory to run concurrently and reach private futex hash initialization at nearly the same time.

alternative_right shares a report from Phys.org: Scientists from the Czech Republic have created microscopic cleanup robots that successfully removed microplastics from both soil and aquatic environments in the lab. Details of their work are published in the journal npg Asia Materials. To build the robots, researchers started with microscopic MXene particles made of ultrathin, stacked layers. The material has a large surface area and surface chemistry that help it attract and hold plastic. They then coated the particles with magnetic nickel nanoparticles so rotating magnetic fields could drive the tiny robots. Then came the testing phase. The team placed swarms of these microbots into water and soil samples contaminated with plastic. The externally generated magnetic fields made the robots spin and tumble through the liquid and squeeze through tiny water-filled gaps in the soil. "In soil environments, the microrobots can navigate through water-permeated soil microenvironments, actively disrupt microplastic entrapment within soil matrices, and extract them," the study authors commented in their paper. As they moved, their sticky surfaces collided with microplastics, binding to them and dragging them along. The researchers then used a magnet to pull the microrobots, along with their trapped plastic cargo, out of the samples. They performed well. In water, they removed about 94% of test polystyrene particles and 89% of PET (polyethylene terephthalate) in around an hour. In the model soil, they removed about 81% of the polystyrene and 72% of PET. This outperformed the same MXene material used without magnetic motion, which relied on passive adsorption rather than actively moving through soil and water.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

sciencehabit shares a report from Science Magazine: For more than half a century, physicists have searched for one of the strangest particles predicted by modern theory. It would be made almost entirely of gluons, the elusive subatomic particles that carry the strong nuclear force. Now, using a particle collider in Beijing, researchers say they have effectively proved the existence of such a "glueball." In a preprint posted last month on arXiv and in a presentation last week at the International Conference on High Energy Physics (ICHEP), the researchers argue that a particle called X(2370), which they produced by smashing electrons into positrons at high energies, has the properties expected of a glueball. "It's an experimental triumph," says Colin Morningstar, a particle physicist at Carnegie Mellon University who was not involved in the finding. "It's the strongest evidence yet that particles dominated by a glueball component can exist in nature."

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