Described in a paper published Thursday in Physical Review Letters, the electron pulses last one-quadrillionth of a second but carry 100 kiloamps of current. “It’s a supercool experiment,” says Sergei Nagaitsev, an accelerator physicist at Brookhaven National Laboratory who was not involved in the work. Richard D’Arcy, a plasma accelerator physicist at the University of Oxford, adds, “It’s not just an experimental demonstration of something interesting, it’s a steppingstone on the way to megaamp beams.” If achievable, those even more powerful beams might begin to perform extraordinary feats such as ripping particles out of empty space, he says…

[A]mped-up lasers would open the way to, for example, probing chemical processes as they happen, says Sergei Nagaitsev [an accelerator physicist at Brookhaven National Laboratory who was not involved in the experiment]. “These are the easy pickings.” An ultraintense electron pulse could also be used to generate plasmas like those seen in astrophysics, such as the jets of matter and radiation that shoot out of certain stellar explosions at near-light-speed. Researchers need only fire the electron beam into the right target. “This is a fantastic relativistic drill,” Ferrario says. “The interaction of this with matter could be very interesting.”

Superintense electron bunches might someday even probe the nature of empty space. They produce a hugely intense electric field, so if one of them were to collide with an ultraintense laser pulse, which also contains a huge electric field, it would expose space to an incredibly strong electrical polarization, D’Arcy notes. If that field is strong enough, it should begin to rip particle-antiparticle pairs out of the vacuum, a phenomenon predicted by quantum physics but never observed. “You can access areas of particle physics that are inaccessible elsewhere,” Darcy says.
Thanks to Slashdot reader sciencehabit for sharing the article.

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Though the package has been removed from PyPI, researchers at security platform Socket.dev say it enabled “coordinated, unauthorized music downloads from Deezer — a popular streaming service founded in France in 2007.”

Although automslc, which has been downloaded over 100,000 times, purports to offer music automation and metadata retrieval, it covertly bypasses Deezer’s access restrictions… The package is designed to log into Deezer, harvest track metadata, request full-length streaming URLs, and download complete audio files in clear violation of Deezer’s API terms… [I]t orchestrates a distributed piracy operation by leveraging both user-supplied and hardcoded Deezer credentials to create sessions with Deezer’s API. This approach enables full access to track metadata and the decryption tokens required to generate full-length track URLs.

Additionally, the package routinely communicates with a remote server… to update download statuses and submit metadata, thereby centralizing control and allowing the threat actor to monitor and coordinate the distributed downloading operation. In doing so, automslc exposes critical track details — including Deezer IDs, International Standard Recording Codes, track titles, and internal tokens like MD5_ORIGIN (a hash used in generating decryption URLs) — which, when collected en masse, can be used to reassemble full track URLs and facilitate unauthorized downloads…

Even if a user pays for access to the service, the content is licensed, not owned. The automslc package circumvents licensing restrictions by enabling downloads and potential redistribution, which is outside the bounds of fair use…
“The malicious package was initially published in 2019, and its popularity (over 100,000 downloads) indicates wide distribution…”

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The actual landing is scheduled to happen at 3:34 a.m. Eastern time, according to CNN, while “The first images from the mission should be delivered about a half hour after…”
Success is not guaranteed… [B]roadly speaking, about half of all lunar landing attempts have ended in failure. Jason Kim, Firefly’s CEO, told CNN in December that his company’s experience building rockets has given him a high degree of confidence in Blue Ghost’s propulsion systems. “We’re using (reaction control system) thrusters that we’ve built, developed in-house, that are designed by the same people that design our rocket engines. That reduces risk,” Kim said. “All that gives us high confidence when we have people that do rocket engines really, really well — some of the best in the world.”

But the New York Times notes that Blue Ghost, built by Austin, Texas-based Firefly Aerospace, is just one of three robotic spacecraft “in space right now that are aiming to set down on the moon’s surface.”

Blue Ghost has performed nearly perfectly. For the first 25 days, it circled Earth as the company turned on and checked the spacecraft’s systems. It then fired its engine on a four-day journey toward the moon, entering orbit on February 13. The spacecraft’s cameras have recorded close-up views of the moon’s cratered surface…

On the same SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket that launched Blue Ghost to orbit was Resilience, a lunar lander built by Ispace of Japan. The two missions are separate, but Ispace, seeking a cheaper ride to space, had asked SpaceX for a rideshare, that is, hitching a ride as a secondary payload… Although Resilience launched at the same time as Blue Ghost, it is taking a longer, more fuel-efficient route to the moon and is expected to enter orbit around the moon in early May.

The third lunar lander heading to the moon is Athena (from Intuitive Machines), which launched Thursday on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, “marking the first time humanity has had three lunar landers en route to the Moon at the same time,” according to a statement from the company. Space.com notes that “To date, just one private spacecraft has ever landed successfully on the moon — Intuitive Machines’ Odysseus, which did so in February 2024.”

Athena launched with several other spacecraft last night, including Odin, a scouting probe built by the asteroid-mining company Astroforge, and NASA’s water-hunting Lunar Trailblazer. Lunar Trailblazer is also moon-bound, though it’s headed for orbit rather than the surface…

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It was an old Visual Basic 4 program they had written in 1997. Running a VB4 exe in 2024 can be a real yak-shaving compatibility nightmare, chasing down outdated DLLs and messy workarounds. So! OP decided to upload the exe to Claude 3.7 with this request:
“Can you tell me how to get this file running? It’d be nice to convert it to Python.”>
Claude 3.7 analyzed the binary, extracted the VB ‘tokens’ (VB is not a fully-machine-code-compiled language which makes this task a lot easier than something from C/C++), identified UI elements, and even extracted sound files. Then, it generated a complete Python equivalent using Pygame. According to the author, the code worked on the first try and the entire process took less than five minutes…
Torrone speculates on what this might mean. “Old business applications and games could be modernized without needing the original source code… Tools like Claude might make decompilation and software archaeology a lot easier: proprietary binaries from dead platforms could get a new life in open-source too.”

And maybe Archive.org could even add an LLM “to do this on the fly!”

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If signed into law [by the governor], HB0081 would prevent any individual or political subdivision from adding fluoride “to water in or intended for public water systems…” A report published recently in JAMA Pediatrics found a statistically significant association between higher fluoride exposure and lower children’s IQ scores — but the researchers did not suggest that fluoride should be removed from drinking water. According to the report’s authors, most of the 74 studies they reviewed were low-quality and done in countries other than the United States, such as China, where fluoride levels tend to be much higher, the researchers noted.

An Australian study published last year found no link between early childhood exposure to fluoride and negative cognitive neurodevelopment. Researchers actually found a slightly higher IQ in kids who consistently drank fluoridated water. The levels in Australia are consistent with U.S. recommendations.

Major public health groups, including the American Academy of Pediatrics, the American Dental Association and the CDC — which says drinking fluoridated water keeps teeth strong and reduces cavities — support adding fluoride to water.

The article notes that since 2010 over 150 U.S. towns or counties have voted to keep fluoride out of public water systems or to stop adding it to their water (according to the anti-fluoride group “Fluoride Action Network”). But this week the American Dental Association (representing 159,000 members) urged Utah’s governor not to become ” the only state to end this preventive health practice that has been in place for over three quarters of a century.”

Thanks to Slashdot reader fjo3 for sharing the news.

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“We’re investigating an issue in which users may be unable to access Outlook features and services,” Microsoft 365 Status, the official Microsoft account for 365 service incidents, said in a post on X…

The number of reports that services such as Microsoft Outlook, Microsoft Exchange, Microsoft Teams, Microsoft 365 and Microsoft Azure were down spiked after 3:30 p.m. ET. More than 37,000 individuals reported an Outlook outage and roughly 24,000 reported an outage in the tech company’s 365 service, according to Downdetector, while roughly 150 users reported their Teams accounts were down.
One hour ago Microsoft posted on X.com that “We’ve identified a potential cause of impact and have reverted the suspected code to alleviate impact. We’re monitoring telemetry to confirm recovery…”

Minutes later they added that “Our telemetry indicates that a majority of impacted services are recovering following our change. We’ll keep monitoring until impact has been resolved for all services.” And the official status page for Microsoft Office says “We’ve confirmed that reverting the impacting service update has returned the service to a healthy state. We’ve entered a period of extended monitoring to ensure that the service remains stable, and to address any outstanding impact to other Microsoft 365 services.”

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