When Aristotle claimed that humans differ from other animals because they have the ability to be rational, he understood rational to mean that we could form our views and beliefs based on evidence, and that we could reconsider that evidence. “You know—ask ourselves if we should really believe that based on the evidence we’ve got,” says Jan M. Engelmann, an evolutionary anthropologist at the University of California, Berkeley.

Engelmann says that from the beginning of the Western intellectual tradition, people thought that only humans are rational. So, he designed a study to see if rationality shows up in chimpanzees. It turned out that they’re almost as rational as we are.

Food puzzles

“There was quite a bit of research showing that chimpanzees can form their beliefs in response to evidence,” Engelmann says. The experiments usually involved chimpanzees deciding which of the two boxes contained a snack. When the researchers shook both boxes and there was a rattling sound coming from one of them, the chimps almost always chose the box where the rattling came from.

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An anonymous reader shared this report from PC World:

It won’t whip the llama’s ass, but Opera has added a Spotify visualizer to its latest iteration of its free Opera One browser. Known as Sonic, the visualizer will be part of Opera’s Dynamic Themes, which use the WebGPU standard to employ a dynamic theme that runs in the background of the browser. It’s essentially a shader, which uses your PC’s graphics engine to generate the moving background.

The browser also comes with a music player, which is set to Spotify by default. Users will have an opportunity to upgrade to Spotify Premium as part of the browser upgrade, Opera said. Opera’s Sonic theme… takes the Spotify input and transforms it into a dynamic background.

“As any old tech head knows, the original visualizer was found in Winamp, which would sync visualizations to the beat and flow of music being played,” the article points out.

And 27 years later, WinAmp arrived as an app in Apple’s App Store and Google Play and in April of 2024. (The latest version was apparently released this May — and you can also download it to your desktop…)

Somewhere along the way, Winamp also announced “Winamp for Creators,” which they’re describing as a dedicated platform for music artists with monetization and promotion tools, music management services, and other essential resources “to help creators take control of their careers” (including “a powerful social media publishing tool that lets users write a single post and push it to all their social media channels simultaneously.”)

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It’s been trying to measure the popularity of programming languages since 2000 using metrics like the number of engineers, courses, and third-party vendors. And “The November 2025 TIOBE Index brings another twist below Python’s familiar lead,” writes TechRepublic. “C solidifies its position as runner-up, C++ and Java lose some ground, and C# moves sharply upward, narrowing the gap with Java to less than a percentage point…”

TIO CEO Paul Jansen said this month that “Instead of Python, programming language C# is now the fastest rising language,”

How did C# achieve this? Java and C# are battling for a long time in the same areas. Right now it seems like C# has removed every reason why not to use C# instead of Java: it is cross platform nowadays, it is open source and it contains all new language features a developer wants. While the financial world is still dominated by Java, all other terrains show equal shares between Java and C#. Besides this, Microsoft is going strong and C# is still their most backed programming language.

Interesting note: C# has never been higher than Java in the TIOBE index. Currently the difference between the two rivals is less than 1%. There are exciting times ahead of us. Is C# going to surpass Java for the first time in the TIOBE index history?

“The fact that C# has been in the news for the successive betas and pre-release candidates prior to the release of C# 14 may have bumped up its percentage share in the last few months,” notes a post on the site i-Programmer. But they also point out that by TIOBE’s reckoning, Java — having been overtaken by Python in 2021 — “has been in decline ever since.”

TechRepublic summarizes the rest of the Top Ten:

JavaScript stays in sixth place at 3.42%, and Visual Basic edges up to seventh with 3.31%. Delphi/Object Pascal nudges upward to eighth at 2.06%, while Perl returns to the top 10 in ninth at 1.84% after a sharp year-over-year climb. SQL rounds out the list at tenth with 1.80%, maintaining a foothold that shows the enduring centrality of relational databases. Go, which held eighth place in October, slips out of the top 10 entirely.

Here’s how TIOBE’s methodology ranks programming language popularity in November:

Python
C
C++
Java
C#
JavaScript
Visual Basic
Delphi/Object Pascal
Perl
SQL

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Slashdot reader spatwei writes: It is now more common for data to leave companies through copying and pasting than through file transfers and uploads, LayerX revealed in its Browser Security Report 2025. This shift is largely due to generative AI (genAI), with 77% of employees pasting data into AI prompts, and 32% of all copy-pastes from corporate accounts to non-corporate accounts occurring within genAI tools. ‘Traditional governance built for email, file-sharing, and sanctioned SaaS didn’t anticipate that copy/paste into a browser prompt would become the dominant leak vector,’ LayerX CEO Or Eshed wrote in a blog post summarizing the report.

“GenAI now accounts for 11% of enterprise application usage,” notes this article from SC World, “with adoption rising faster than many data loss protection (DLP) controls can keep up. Overall, 45% of employees actively use AI tools, with 67% of these tools being accessed via personal accounts and ChatGPT making up 92% of all use…”

“With the rise of AI-driven browsers such as OpenAI’s Atlas and Perplexity’s Comet, governance of AI tools’ access to corporate data becomes even more urgent, the LayerX report notes.”

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“Google is going to court to help put an end to, or at least limit, the prevalence of phishing scams over text message,” reports BGR:

Google said it’s bringing suit against Lighthouse, an impressively large operation that allegedly provides tools customers can buy to set up their own specialized phishing scams. All told, Google estimates that Lighthouse-affiliated scams in the U.S. have stolen anywhere between 12.7 million and 115 million credit cards. “Bad actors built Lighthouse as a phishing-as-a-service kit to generate and deploy massive SMS phishing attacks,” Google notes. “These attacks exploit established brands like E-Z Pass to steal people’s financial information.”

Google’s legal action is comprehensive and is intent on completely dismantling Lighthouse’s operations. The search giant is bringing claims under RICO, the Lanham Act, and the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA). RICO, which often comes up in movies and television shows, allows authorities to treat Lighthouse’s phishing operation as a broad criminal enterprise as opposed to isolated scams. By using RICO, Google also expands the list of individuals who can be found liable, whether it be the people who started Lighthouse, the people who run it, or even unaffiliated customers who used the company’s services. The Lanham Act, for those unaware, targets malicious actors who misappropriate well-known company trademarks in order to confuse consumers. This Lanham Act comes into play because many phishing scams masquerade as legitimate messages from companies like Amazon and FedEx. The Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, meanwhile, is relevant because scammers typically use stolen credentials to gain unauthorized access to financial systems, something the CFAA is designed to target…

The fact that Google is invoking all three of the acts above underscores how serious the company is about putting a stop to SMS-based scams. By using all three, Google’s legal attack is more potent and also expands the range of available remedies to include civil damages and criminal penalties. In short, Google isn’t merely trying to win a legal case; it’s aiming to emphatically and permanently stop Lighthouse in its tracks.

Getting even more aggressive, Google says it’s also working with the U.S. Congress to pass new anti-scammer legislation, and endorsed these three new bipartisan bills:

The Scam Compound Accountability and Mobilization (SCAM) Act “would develop a national strategy to counter scam compounds, enhance sanctions and support survivors of human trafficking within these compounds.”

The Foreign Robocall Elimination Act “would establish a taskforce focused on how to best block foreign-originated illegal robocalls before they ever reach American consumers.”

The Guarding Unprotected Aging Retirees from Deception (GUARD) Act “would empower state and local law enforcement by enabling them to utilize federal grant funding to investigate financial fraud and scams specifically targeting retirees. ”

Thanks to Slashdot reader anderzole for sharing the article.

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The dream of quantum computers has been hampered by the challenge of error correction, writes the Harvard Gazette, since qubits “are inherently susceptible to slipping out of their quantum states and losing their encoded information.”

But in a newly-published paper, a research team “combined various methods to create complex circuits with dozens of error correction layers” that “suppresses errors below a critical threshold — the point where adding qubits further reduces errors rather than increasing them.”

“For the first time, we combined all essential elements for a scalable, error-corrected quantum computation in an integrated architecture,” said Mikhail Lukin, co-director of the Quantum Science and Engineering Initiative, Joshua and Beth Friedman University Professor, and senior author of the new paper. “These experiments — by several measures the most advanced that have been done on any quantum platform to date — create the scientific foundation for practical large-scale quantum computation…”

“There are still a lot of technical challenges remaining to get to very large-scale computer with millions of qubits, but this is the first time we have an architecture that is conceptually scalable,” said lead author Dolev Bluvstein, Ph.D. ’25, who did the research during his graduate studies at Harvard and is now an assistant professor at Caltech. “It’s going to take a lot of effort and technical development, but it’s becoming clear that we can build fault-tolerant quantum computers….”

Hartmut Neven, vice president of engineering at the Google Quantum AI team, said the new paper came amid an “incredibly exciting” race between qubit platforms. “This work represents a significant advance toward our shared goal of building a large-scale, useful quantum computer,” he said… With recent advances, Lukin believes the core elements for building quantum computers are falling into place. “This big dream that many of us had for several decades, for the first time, is really in direct sight,” he said.

“In theory, a system of 300 quantum bits can store more information than the number of particles in the known universe…” the article points out.

“The new paper represents an important advance in a three-decade pursuit of quantum error correction.”

Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader schwit1 for sharing the article.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A new “cold war” between America and China is “pushing leaders to sideline concerns about the dangers of powerful AI models,” reports the Wall Street Journal, “including the spread of disinformation and other harmful content, and the development of superintelligent AI systems misaligned with human values…”

“Both countries are driven as much by fear as by hope of progress. ”

In Washington and Silicon Valley, warnings abound that China’s
“authoritarian AI,” left unchecked, will erode American tech
supremacy. Beijing is gripped by the conviction that a failure to
keep
pace in AI will make it easier for the U.S. to cut short China’s
resurgence as a global power. Both countries believe market share
for their companies across the world is up for grabs — and with it,
the potential to influence large swaths of the global population.

The U.S. still has a clear lead, producing the most powerful AI
models. China can’t match it in advanced
chips and has no answer for the financial firepower of private
American investors, who funded AI startups to the tune of $104
billion in the first half of 2025, and are gearing
up for more. But it has a massive population of capable
engineers, lower costs and a state-led development model that often
moves faster than the U.S., all of which Beijing is working to
harness to tip the contest in its direction. A new “whole of
society” campaign looks to accelerate the construction of computing
clusters in areas like Inner Mongolia, where vast solar and wind
farms provide plentiful cheap energy, and connect hundreds of data
centers to create a shared compute pool — some describe it as a
“national cloud” — by 2028. China is also funneling hundreds of
billions of dollars into its power grid to support AI training and
adoption…

“Our lead is probably in the ‘months but not years’ realm,”
said Chris McGuire, who helped design U.S. export controls on AI
chips while serving on the National Security Council under the Biden
administration. Chinese AI models currently rank at or near the top
in every task from coding to video generation, with the exception of
search, according to Chatbot Arena, a popular crowdsourced ranking
platform. China’s manufacturing sector, meanwhile, is rocketing
past the U.S. in bringing
AI into the physical world through robotaxis, autonomous drones
and humanoid
robots. Given China’s progress, McGuire said, the U.S. is
“very lucky” to have its advantage in chips…

If AI surpasses human intelligence and acquires the ability to
improve itself, it could confer unshakable scientific, economic and
military superiority on the country that controls it. Short of that,
AI’s ability to automate tedious tasks and process vast amounts of
data quickly promises to supercharge everything from cancer diagnoses
to missile defense. With so much at stake, hacking and cyber
espionage are likely to get worse, as AI gives hackers more powerful
tools, while increasing incentives for state-backed groups to try to
steal AI-related intellectual property. As distrust grows, Washington
and Beijing will also find it hard, if not impossible, to cooperate
in areas like preventing extremist groups from using AI in
destructive ways, such as building bioweapons. “The costs of the
AI Cold War are already high and will go much higher,” said Paul
Triolo, a former U.S. government analyst and current technology
policy lead at business consulting firm DGA-Albright Stonebridge
Group. “A U.S.-China AI arms race becomes a self-fulfilling
prophecy, with neither side able to trust that the other would
observe any restrictions on advanced AI capability development….”

The article includes an interesting observation from Helen Toner, director of strategy for Georgetown’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology and a former OpenAI board member. Toner points out “We don’t actually know” if boosting computing power with better chips will continue producing more-powerful AI models.

So “If performance plateaus,” the Journal writes, “despite all the spending by OpenAI and others — a growing concern in Silicon Valley — China has a chance to compete.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Researchers at MIT have been working with the South Korean beauty company Amorepacific for the past few years to develop a wearable “electronic skin” platform that can provide real-time insights about skin aging and make personalized skincare recommendations, and it’s due to debut at CES 2026 as “Skinsight.” Skinsight, which was announced as one of the CES 2026 Innovation Award Honorees this week, is a Bluetooth-equipped sensor patch that sticks to the skin and works with a mobile app, tracking skin tightness, UV exposure, temperature and moisture.

Amorepacific

Based on the readings, the AI-powered app will approximate how the different factors might contribute to or speed up skin aging, and suggest the products best suited for the job so the user can incorporate them into their skincare routine. The patch is designed to be breathable and withstand sweat so it can stay on for long periods of time. The team hasn’t yet shared on Skinsight’s availability and cost. 

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/wearables/mit-researchers-and-beauty-brand-amorepacific-made-a-wearable-patch-that-analyzes-skin-aging-225125621.html?src=rss