2026-04-20 23:00:22
Bruce the kea—a species of alpine parrot native to New Zealand—lost his upper beak in an accident as a young bird. But that hasn't stopped him from becoming the dominant male in his kea community (known as a "circus") at the Willowbank Wildlife Reserve. According to a new paper published in the journal Current Biology, Bruce achieved his alpha status via a unique fighting method, essentially "jousting" with what remains of his beak.
Researchers already knew Bruce was special. Back in 2021, scientists at the Kea Animal Minds Lab at the University of Auckland studied Bruce and other non-disabled kea and found that Bruce exhibited unusual preening behavior to compensate for his missing upper beak. He figured out how to use small pebbles for that purpose, wedging them between his lower jaw and tongue and then rubbing them along his feathers. Other non-disabled keas occasionally played with pebbles, too, but they chose larger ones and never used them for preening.
So Bruce didn't learn this behavior by watching other birds; he figured it out on his own. The authors concluded this was evidence of keas' high problem-solving abilities and possibly an example of deliberate tool use. It's also why Bruce's caretakers at the reserve have never fitted him with prosthetics, believing it would only cause him stress and force him to re-adapt his behavior all over again.
2026-04-20 22:21:40
Anthropic’s new Mythos AI model is raising concern among governments and companies that it could outpace current cyber security defenses, turbocharge hacking, and expose weaknesses faster than they can be fixed.
The San Francisco-based startup released a cyber-focused model this month, which has shown the ability to detect software flaws faster than humans but also demonstrated it can generate exploits needed to take advantage of them.
In one alarming case, the Mythos model showed it could break out of a secure digital environment to contact an Anthropic worker and publicly reveal software glitches, overriding the intention of its human makers.
2026-04-20 19:00:07
You don’t notice good video compression—until it's not there.
For years, people have streamed high-resolution video without thinking about the tech behind it. But when companies clash over which hardware, software, and services can use modern codecs like HEVC/H.265, the idea that it all "just works" quickly falls apart.
For some Dell and HP customers, that illusion has already been shattered. When the companies disabled HEVC support built into the CPUs of select PCs, it raised uncomfortable questions: Why remove a capability that's already a part of third-party hardware? What do OEMs and chipmakers pay to support HEVC—and are HEVC patent holders effectively double-dipping on licensing fees and royalties?
2026-04-20 02:19:19
The third flight of Blue Origin's heavy-lift New Glenn launcher began Sunday with the company's first successful reflight of an orbital-class booster, but ended with a setback for Jeff Bezos' flagship rocket, a key element in NASA's Artemis lunar program.
The 321-foot-tall (98-meter) New Glenn launch vehicle ignited its seven methane-fueled BE-4 engines at 7:25 am EDT (11:25 UTC) Sunday, beginning a slow climb from its launch pad at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida.
The main engines, each producing more than a half-million pounds of thrust, accelerated the rocket past the speed of sound in about a minute-and-a-half. Three minutes into the flight, the booster switched off its engines and fell away from New Glenn's upper stage, powered by two BE-3U engines burning liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen.
2026-04-19 19:17:28
If you walk across the open yard in front of the Physics, Math, and Astronomy building at the University of Texas at Austin, you’ll see a 17-story tower and a huge L-shaped building. What you won’t see is what’s underneath you. Two floors below ground, behind heavy double doors stamped with a logo that most students have never noticed, sits one of the most powerful lasers in the United States.
I was the lead laser scientist on the Texas Petawatt, or TPW as we called it, from 2020 to 2024. Texas Petawatt, which is currently closed due to funding cuts, was a government-funded research center where scientists from across the country applied for time to use specialized equipment. It was part of LaserNetUS, a Department of Energy network of high-power laser labs.
This type of laser takes a tiny pulse of light, stretches it out so it doesn’t blast optics to pieces, and amplifies it until, for a brief instant, it carries more power than the entire US electrical grid. Then it compresses the pulse back to a trillionth of a second to create a star in a vacuum chamber.
2026-04-18 19:07:59
The evolutionary edge that fueled great white shark dominance for millions of years could soon become its greatest downfall.
The ocean’s most iconic predators maintain warmer body temperatures than the surrounding seawater and are paying an increasingly steep price for it. As the oceans warm due to climate change, they now face the risk of potentially fatal overheating, according to a new report in Science.
Several large tuna species and sharks, known as “mesothermic” species for the way their bodies run hot, require more fuel to maintain their temperature and are thus confronting a “double jeopardy” of warming oceans and declining food, mainly from overfishing. As water temperatures climb, these species will be forced to relocate to cooler waters.
