The U.S. government site climate.gov offered years’ worth of climate-science information — until its production team was fired earlier this summer. The site “is technically still online, but has been intentionally buried by the team of political appointees who now run the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration,” reports the Guardian.

But now “a team of climate communication experts — including many members of the former climate.gov team — is working to resurrect its content into a new organization with an expanded mission.”

Their effort’s new website, climate.us, would not only offer public-facing interpretations of climate science, but could also begin to directly offer climate-related services, such as assisting local governments with mapping increased flooding risk due to climate change. The effort is being led by climate.gov’s former managing editor, Rebecca Lindsey, who, although now unemployed, has recruited several of her former colleagues to volunteer their time in an attempt to build climate.us into a thriving non-profit organization… “None of us were ready to let go of climate.gov and the mission….” Lindsey’s new team has received a steady flow of outside support, including legal support, and a short-term grant that has helped them develop a vision for what they’d like to do next…
As multiyear veterans of the federal bureaucracy, at times they’ve been surprised by the possibilities that the new effort might offer. “We’re allowed to use TikTok now,” said Lindsey. “We’re allowed to have a little bit of fun…
The climate.us team is also in the process of soft-launching a crowdsourced fundraising drive that Lindsey hopes they can leverage into more permanent support from a major foundation…. “[W]e do not yet have the sort of large operational funding that we will need if we’re going to actually transition climate.gov operations to the non-profit space.” In the meantime, Lindsey and her team have found themselves spending the summer knee-deep in the logistics of building a major non-profit from scratch.

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Labor Day sales are rolling in, and Lifehacker is sharing the best sales based on product reviews, comparisons, and price-tracking tools before they’re over. You can also subscribe to our shopping newsletter, Add to Cart, for the best sales sent to your inbox.

It’s Labor Day weekend, and tech sales are going strong, with deals on TVs, iPads, tablets, and headphones. If you’re looking for a deal on a new MacBook, this is your best chance so far this year: Apple’s powerful M4 MacBook Air already dropped to $799, its lowest price ever, and now, the base 14-inch M4 MacBook Pro is following suit: It’s down to $1299 on Amazon, a $300 discount from the usual $1599. It’s the cheapest price yet for this model MacBook Pro. (The pricier M4 Pro model with the M4 Pro chip and 25GB RAM has already received a $300 cut, from $1999 to $1699.)

The 14-inch M4 MacBook Pro is a step above the M4 MacBook Air. They share the same chip, but the MacBook Pro gets a 10-core GPU instead of an eight-core. You also get 16GB Unified Memory, and 512GB Storage as standard (instead of 256GB for the Air).

Apple M4 MacBook Pro

$1,548.00
at Amazon

$1,878.00
Save $330.00

$1,548.00
at Amazon

$1,878.00
Save $330.00

Apple M4 Pro MacBook Pro

$1,799.00
at Amazon

$1,999.00
Save $200.00

$1,799.00
at Amazon

$1,999.00
Save $200.00

The MacBook Pro body and design are also completely different. Unlike the Air, the Pro’s body is fan-cooled, so it can sustain processor intensive workloads for video editing and coding for much longer. The Pro also offers a much better screen, with a 3024×1964 native resolution at 254 pixels per inch, 16,00 nits HDR brightness, up to 1,000 nits of regular outdoor brightness, and a 120Hz refresh rate. The M4 MacBook Pro’s battery backup is also substantial, with up to 24 hours of video streaming and 16 hours of wireless web browsing.

As a Pro model, it comes with three Thunderbolt USB-C ports, an HDMI cable, and a SD card slot. All this tech does make the Pro heavier: It’s 1.55 kg, or 3.4 pounds, versus the Air’s 1.24 kg, or 2.7 pounds. But if you’re the kind of person that wants a really fast MacBook with 120Hz display, long battery, great build, and don’t mind the weight, the M4 MacBook Pro can be a great choice.

If you just want a thin and light laptop for work and school, you can’t go wrong with the M4 MacBook Air, which, again, is discounted to $799 for Labor Day. If you’re looking for a budget option, the still reliable M1 MacBook Ai can be yours for $599.

“A class of drugs called beta-blockers — used for decades as a first-line treatment after a heart attack — doesn’t benefit the vast majority of patients,” reports CNN. And in fact beta-blockers “may contribute to a higher risk of hospitalization and death in some women but not in men, according to groundbreaking new research…”

Women with little heart damage after their heart attacks who were treated with beta-blockers were significantly more likely to have another heart attack or be hospitalized for heart failure — and nearly three times more likely to die — compared with women not given the drug, according to a study published in the European Heart Journal and also scheduled to be presented Saturday at the European Society of Cardiology Congress in Madrid… The findings, however, only applied to women with a left ventricular ejection fraction above 50%, which is considered normal function, the study said. Ejection fraction is a way of measuring how well the left side of the heart is pumping oxygenated blood throughout the body. For anyone with a score below 40% after a heart attack, beta-blockers continue to be the standard of care due to their ability to calm heart arrhythmias that may trigger a second event…

The analysis on women was part of a much larger clinical trial called REBOOT — Treatment with Beta-Blockers after Myocardial Infarction without Reduced Ejection Fraction — which followed 8,505 men and women treated for heart attacks at 109 hospitals in Spain and Italy for nearly four years. Results of the study were published in Mem>The New England Journal of Medicine and also presented at the European Society of Cardiology Congress. None of the patients in the trial had a left ventricular ejection fraction below 40%, a sign of potential heart failure. “We found no benefit in using beta-blockers for men or women with preserved heart function after heart attack despite this being the standard of care for some 40 years,” said Fuster, former editor-in-chief of the Journal of the American College of Cardiology and past president of the American Heart Association and the World Health Federation…

In fact, most men and women who survive heart attacks today have ejection fractions above 50%, Ibáñez said [Dr. Borja Ibáñez, scientific director for Madrid’s National Center for Cardiovascular Investigation]. “Yet at this time, some 80% of patients in the US, Europe and Asia are treated with beta-blockers because medical guidelines still recommend them….”

While the study did not find any need to use beta-blockers for people with a left ventricular ejection fraction above 50% after a heart attack, a separate meta-analysis of 1,885 patients published Saturday in The Lancet did find benefits for those with scores between 40% and 50%, in which the heart may be mildly damaged. “This subgroup did benefit from a routine use of beta-blockers,” said Ibáñez, who was also a coauthor on this paper. “We found about a 25% reduction in the primary endpoint, which was a composite of new heart attacks, heart failure and all-cause death.”

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We’ll have to wait until May to discover the fate of Earthrealm and Johnny Cage. Mortal Kombat II, the sequel to 2021’s reboot of the video game adaptation, will be pushed back from its original October 24 release date to May 15, 2026. According to a post on X from the movie’s official account, the “tournament demands a new time and place, worthy of its spectacle.”

The delay goes against the trailer and promotional images that Warner Bros. and New Line Cinema already put out, but the studios may be banking on it as a way to maximize the sequel’s potential success. According to Deadline, the movie could avoid a crowded box office in October and instead perform better in a spring debut. The report added that a record-breaking red-band trailer that saw 106 million views in the first 24 hours and a strong performance in research screenings could have influenced the decision to reschedule.

Impatient fans will have to wait until next year for the sequel that stars Karl Urban as Johnny Cage. The trailer revealed a plot that will revolve heavily around Cage as he joins the fight-to-the-death tournament in order to save Earthrealm. As confusing as the Mortal Kombat video game timeline is, the reboot movies could be a more approachable alternative. Starting with the Mortal Kombat movie from 2021 and leading into the upcoming Mortal Kombat II, the story could end with a third film to close out a potential trilogy, as hinted by the movies’ writer, Greg Russo.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/entertainment/tv-movies/the-mortal-kombat-ii-movie-is-postponed-to-a-spring-2026-release-192515532.html?src=rss

It’s a regrettable reality that there is never enough time to cover all the interesting scientific stories we come across each month. In the past, we’ve featured year-end roundups of cool science stories we (almost) missed. This year, we’re experimenting with a monthly collection. August’s list includes a 3D digital reconstruction of the Shroud of Turin; injecting succulent leaves with phosphors to create plants that glow in different colors; a nifty shape-changing antenna; and snails with a unique ability to grow back their eyeballs.

Digitally reconstructing the Shroud of Turin

Perhaps the most famous “holy relic” is the Shroud of Turin, an old linen cloth that retains a distinct impression of the body of a crucified mine (both front and back). The legend is that Jesus himself was wrapped in the shroud upon his death around 30 CE, although modern scientific dating methods revealed the shroud is actually a medieval artifact dating to between 1260 and 1390 CE. A 3D designer named Cícero Moraes has created a 3D digital reconstruction to lend further credence to the case for the shroud being a medieval forgery, according to a paper published in the journal Archaeometry.

Moraes developed computer models to simulate draping a sheet on both a 3D human form and a bas-relief carving to test which version most closely matched the figure preserved in the shroud. He concluded that the latter was more consistent with the shroud’s figure, meaning that it was likely created as an artistic representation or a medieval work of art. It was certainly never draped around an actual body. Most notable was the absence of the so-called “Agamemnon mask effect,” in which a human face shrouded in fabric appears wider once flattened.

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Labor Day sales are rolling in, and Lifehacker is sharing the best sales based on product reviews, comparisons, and price-tracking tools before they’re over. You can also subscribe to our shopping newsletter, Add to Cart, for the best sales sent to your inbox.

There’s nothing worse than getting partway through a DIY project and discovering you don’t have the right tool to finish it—and Labor Day sales provide a good way to keep that from happening, providing discounts that make it easier to upgrade your toolkit while keeping to a budget. Even if your budget is relatively miniscule. To that end, here are the best Labor Day tool deals I’ve found under $25.

Wrenches and ratchets

A good tool kit should include a set of wrenches and a ratchet, which will allow you to drive nuts for multiple sizes of bolts for assembling and disassembling furniture, changing filters on large appliances, or auto maintenance. Here are some great under-$25 deals on wrenches and ratchets.

• This Crescent 20-piece ratchet set is on sale on Amazon for $24.98, 41% off its usual price. This set comes with a ⅜-inch ratchet handle, an extension bit, and 8 each of metric and SAE sockets. This is a good beginner kit because it covers most sizes of nuts you’ll encounter, and it’s small and easily portable.

• This Ryobi 26-piece 1/4 -inch drive ratchet set is on sale for $19.97 at Home Depot, 33% off its normal price. This set comes with a ¼-inch drive ratchet handle, 24 sockets in both metric and SAE sizes, and a carrying case. This is a good set for smaller home maintenance tasks and because it’s so compact, it’s great for apartment living.

• This Craftsman 10-piece combination wrench set is on sale for $19.98 at Lowe’s, 31% off its typical price. The set includes 10 double-ended, SAE wrenches. This set is a good companion to a ratchet set, so you can use a wrench to hold a bolt head as you’re turning the nut, or use the wrenches on their own to drive nuts.

Screwdriver sets

A range of screwdrivers is essential for any basic home toolkit, whether you’re assembling flatpack furniture or swapping out a switch plate. Here are some deals on screwdriver sets on sale for under $25.

• The Craftsman 8-piece screwdriver set is on sale on Amazon for $14.98, 49% off its usual price. This set includes 8 screwdrivers with half slotted and half Phillip’s head, in a variety of sizes; it also has two short-handled drivers for turning screws in tight spaces. This is a good starter set.

• The DeWalt 2-piece screwdriver set is on sale for $9.97 for Labor day. The set includes two drivers, on Phillip’s head, and one flathead. The tips of these screwdrivers are magnetic, so they’ll hold onto your fasteners, which is convenient if you’re working in an awkward space.

• The Craftsman 15-piece ratcheting screwdriver set is on sale at Ace Hardware for $14.99, 41% off the regular price. It’s labeled as a 15-piece set because the bits are double ended, but it actually comes with 7 bits and a ratcheting handle. The bits store inside the handle, so it’s a compact option for your home tool kit if you have limited storage space. It includes Phillip’s head, flat head, square tip, and star drive bits.

Other tools and accessories

Here are a few more standout Labor Day tool deals on tools and accessories.

• The DeWalt 20-inch handsaw is on sale at Ace Hardware for $15, 50% off its normal price. This is a basic handsaw for cutting medium sized dimensional lumber, and can be handy for finishing corners when cutting sheet goods with a power saw. The 8-tooth-per-inch blade will provide a medium-to-smooth cut without splintering or tear out on most lumber.

• A set of four Vevor bar clamps is on sale at Lowe’s for $24.99. This set includes two 6-inch clamps and two 12-inch clamps with a 2 ½-inch jaw depth and a 600-pound pressure capacity. Clamps are a useful tool for DIY woodworking because you can use them to hold joints flush while you’re driving fasteners or waiting for glue to dry.

• A DeWalt 16-oz. Hammer is on sale for $14.99 at Ace Hardware, 44% off its regular price. This is a small, smooth-faced hammer with a curved-claw for pulling nails. This is a good hammer for projects like hanging pictures or driving small finish nails, but it doesn’t have the weight necessary for larger jobs like framing.

“AI web crawlers are strip-mining the web in their perpetual hunt for ever more content to feed into their Large Language Model mills,” argues Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols at the Register.

And “when AI searchbots, with Meta (52% of AI searchbot traffic), Google (23%), and OpenAI (20%) leading the way, clobber websites with as much as 30 Terabits in a single surge, they’re damaging even the largest companies’ site performance…”

How much traffic do they account for? According to Cloudflare, a major content delivery network (CDN) force, 30% of global web traffic now comes from bots. Leading the way and growing fast? AI bots… Anyone who runs a website, though, knows there’s a huge, honking difference between the old-style crawlers and today’s AI crawlers. The new ones are site killers. Fastly warns that they’re causing “performance degradation, service disruption, and increased operational costs.” Why? Because they’re hammering websites with traffic spikes that can reach up to ten or even twenty times normal levels within minutes.

Moreover, AI crawlers are much more aggressive than standard crawlers. As the InMotionhosting web hosting company notes, they also tend to disregard crawl delays or bandwidth-saving guidelines and extract full page text, and sometimes attempt to follow dynamic links or scripts. The result? If you’re using a shared server for your website, as many small businesses do, even if your site isn’t being shaken down for content, other sites on the same hardware with the same Internet pipe may be getting hit. This means your site’s performance drops through the floor even if an AI crawler isn’t raiding your website…

AI crawlers don’t direct users back to the original sources. They kick our sites around, return nothing, and we’re left trying to decide how we’re to make a living in the AI-driven web world. Yes, of course, we can try to fend them off with logins, paywalls, CAPTCHA challenges, and sophisticated anti-bot technologies. You know one thing AI is good at? It’s getting around those walls. As for robots.txt files, the old-school way of blocking crawlers? Many — most? — AI crawlers simply ignore them… There are efforts afoot to supplement robots.txt with llms.txt files. This is a proposed standard to provide LLM-friendly content that LLMs can access without compromising the site’s performance. Not everyone is thrilled with this approach, though, and it may yet come to nothing.

In the meantime, to combat excessive crawling, some infrastructure providers, such as Cloudflare, now offer default bot-blocking services to block AI crawlers and provide mechanisms to deter AI companies from accessing their data.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Following news that Escape from Tarkov is escaping its perpetual beta, the pioneering extraction shooter is also about to make its debut on Steam. Nikita Buyanov, head of the Battlestate Games studio that developed Escape from Tarkov, confirmed on X that the game’s Steam page “will be available soon,” only teasing that the full details will come later.

Buyanov’s confirmation comes less than a day after the developer posted a GIF on X of a man spraying steam from an iron. Earlier this month, Buyanov revealed on X that the looter shooter will get its 1.0 release on November 15, 2025, more than eight years after the beta opened up to players in July 2017, and that the studio has plans to port it to consoles. The Steam page for Escape from Tarkov isn’t live yet, and with only vague details to go off of, longtime fans already have burning questions. Most importantly, existing players are eager to know if they will have to buy the game again on Steam and how this change will affect the ongoing cheating problem.

While we don’t have any answers yet, Battlestate Games recently went into damage control mode when it revealed the Unheard Edition of the game that costs $250 and includes a new PvE mode. This move irked longstanding players who previously purchased another premium edition of the game, called the Edge of Darkness, which promised access to all future DLCs. The controversy boiled down to owners of the Edge of Darkness edition claiming they should have access to the new content, but the studio argued that it isn’t classified as DLC. In the end, Buyanov apologized for the debacle and promised the PvE mode would be available for anyone who purchased the Edge of Darkness package.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/gaming/escape-from-tarkov-is-finally-coming-to-steam-soon-developer-says-181356635.html?src=rss