Author: Vidya Saras

Today is synonymous with fireworks, flags, parades and barbecues, but 33 percent of Americans do not plan to celebrate the nation’s 249th birthday. National pride has fallen to record lows, and a 2023 poll found that 41 percent of Americans do not know the meaning of Independence Day on the Fourth of July.

Scientists are striving to discover new semiconductor materials that could boost the efficiency of solar cells and other electronics. But the pace of innovation is bottlenecked by the speed at which researchers can manually measure important material properties.A fully autonomous robotic system developed by MIT researchers could speed things up.Their system utilizes a robotic probe to measure an important electrical property known as photoconductance, which is how electrically responsive a material is to the presence of light.The researchers inject materials-science-domain knowledge from human experts into the machine-learning model that guides the robot’s decision making. This enables the robot to identify…

Verified symbols can be faked Once thought to be a reliable indicator of trust, the blue ‘check’ icon next to an extension’s name can now be spoofed. Attackers can replicate verification tokens, essentially bypassing identity checks, and inject rogue code while preserving the verified badge. “We analyzed the traffic performed by VSCode and discovered a request to marketplace.visualstudio.com that allows the server to determine whether an extension is verified,” researchers said, adding that they found where the verification data is stored and figured out how to modify it. Using this, they built a malicious extension that copied the verification values…

David Beckham took the high road in his anniversary message to his wife, Victoria Beckham, giving a rare nod to their son, Brooklyn, despite ongoing tension within the family.While marking 26 years of marriage, David thanked his wife for their children, subtly including their estranged eldest. Brooklyn Beckham recently made headlines for secretly flying to London to shoot a fashion campaign with his wife, Nicola Peltz, without seeing his parents.David Beckham, who met his wife in 1997 and tied the knot in 1999, shares four kids: Brooklyn, Romeo, Cruz, and Harper, but the rift with their oldest continues to draw…

The United Kingdom has been named the worst country in Europe for commuting, tied with Greece, according to a new report by cross-border e-commerce platform Ubuy. The ranking – based on commuting costs, travel times, paid leave, working hours and national happiness – places the UK bottom of a 34-country index. The UK scored 107 out of a possible 136 points, where a lower score indicates a better commuting experience. The report highlights soaring costs, long travel times, limited paid time off and declining wellbeing as the key factors behind the UK’s poor performance. UK commuters face the third-highest average…

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s outfit at a June 24 NATO meeting in the Netherlands has become the focal point of a fierce dispute between Polymarket bettors. A user on Polymarket, a crypto-based prediction platform, created a betting market that asked whether Zelenskyy would wear a suit before July. To settle the bet, a photo or video must show Zelenskyy wearing a suit between May 22 and June 30.The market racked up nearly $79 million in volume. The result initially landed on “yes,” but has been disputed twice since and now awaits a final decision. On July 1, Polymarket said it was aware…

Today, Senator Lummis unveiled a bill that would enable U.S. citizens to spend up to $300 worth of bitcoin on goods and services, with a yearly cap of $5,000, without having to pay capital gains taxes on the transactions. The proposed legislation also stipulates that the threshold for spending will be adjusted for inflation starting in 2026. Such provisions were initially conceptualized as an amendment that Senator Lummis pushed to have included in the One Big Beautiful Bill (OBBB), but wasn’t. In the wake of Senate Finance Committee Chairman Mike Crapo not putting Senator Lummis’ amendment up for a vote…

Last week, seven of the eight Eth2 clients under active development succeeded in marking the major milestone of moving from single-client to multi-client testnets at the “Interop Lock-in”. With this exciting success in Eth2 development, we wanted to reflect on how this point was reached and on what it means to the Ethereum network and ecosystem. Anyone following Ethereum over the past couple of years has likely become familiar with terms such as “Ethereum 2.0”, “Eth2”, or “Serenity”. Each of these refer to substantial upgrades slated for the Ethereum protocol that have been envisioned in some form since before the…

Nexpace, the web3 division of Nexon, is planning to launch more than a dozen applications linked to the MapleStory Universe ecosystem by early 2026. These upcoming tools are designed to give players access to parts of the game—such as character growth, item management, and questing—without needing to open the full PC client.The new apps will be available via web browsers and mobile devices, allowing users to carry out tasks from outside the main game. The goal is to make the platform more accessible to players who have limited time or cannot always use a desktop setup.Due later this year, the…

AI slop is flooding every single digital platform, and music streaming services are no exception—so much so, even someone who generally avoids AI might find themselves unknowingly listening to a robot hornily singing about butts.Take the sordid saga of “Make Love to My Shitter,” an AI-generated track from an artist called BannedVinylCollection. Brace Belden, a host of the popular politics podcast TrueAnon, says that Spotify recently queued up the bawdy song after he’d finished listening to alt-country legend Lucinda Williams’ 1992 album Sweet Old World. “I didn’t realize the song was AI at first,” he says. “I thought it might’ve…