Tsinghua University collected 4,986 AI and machine learning patents between 2005 and the end of 2024. The Beijing institution has received more than 900 patents last year alone. The total exceeds the combined patent count from MIT, Stanford, Princeton and Harvard during the same period. China now accounts for more than half of all active patent families globally in AI and machine learning fields, according to data analytics service LexisNexis.

The university also has more AI research papers among the 100 most cited than any other school at last count. The US still holds the most influential AI patents and the top performing models. Harvard and MIT consistently rank ahead of Tsinghua in patent influence. American institutions produced 40 notable AI models in 2024 compared to 15 from Chinese organizations, according to Stanford's AI Index Report. China's share of the world's elite AI researchers -- the top 2% -- rose from 10% in 2019 to 26% in 2022. The US share fell from 35% to 28% during the same period, according to the Information Technology & Innovation Foundation.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Cloudflare suffered its worst network outage in six years on Tuesday, beginning at 11:20 UTC. The disruption prevented the content delivery network from routing traffic for roughly three hours. The failure, writes Cloudflare in a blog post, originated from a database permissions change deployed at 11:05 UTC. The modification altered how a database query returned information about bot detection features. The query began returning duplicate entries. A configuration file used to identify automated traffic doubled in size and spread across the network's machines. Cloudflare's traffic routing software reads this file to distinguish bots from legitimate users. The software had a built-in limit of 200 bot detection features. The enlarged file contained more than 200 entries. The software crashed when it encountered the unexpected file size.

Users attempting to access websites behind Cloudflare's network received error messages. The outage affected multiple services. Turnstile security checks failed to load. The Workers KV storage service returned elevated error rates. Users could not log into Cloudflare's dashboard. Access authentication failed for most customers.

Engineers initially suspected a coordinated attack. The configuration file was automatically regenerated every five minutes. Database servers produced either correct or corrupted files during a gradual system update. Services repeatedly recovered and failed as different versions of the file circulated. Teams stopped generating new files at 14:24 UTC and manually restored a working version. Most traffic resumed by 14:30 UTC. All systems returned to normal at 17:06 UTC.

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Tundra

Robstours has added a photo to the pool:

Beautiful young lady

europeanspaceagency posted a photo:

This NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope’s mid-infrared image shows four coiled shells of dust around a pair of Wolf-Rayet stars known as Apep for the first time. Previous observations by other telescopes showed only one.

Webb’s data, combined with observations from the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) in Chile, confirmed that the two Wolf-Rayet stars sail past one another approximately every 190 years. Over each orbit, they make a close pass for 25 years, producing and spewing amorphous carbon dust.

Webb’s new data also confirmed that there are three stars gravitationally bound to one another in this system. Holes are “sliced” into these shells by the third star, a massive supergiant.

Learn more about this result here.

[Image description: Four dust shells in Wolf-Rayet Apep expand away from three central stars that appear as a single pinpoint of light. The shells are curved, and the interior shell looks like a backward lowercase e shape.]

Credits: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, Y. Han (Caltech), R. White (Macquarie University), A. Pagan (STScI); CC BY 4.0

James Webb Space Telescope posted a photo:

Some serious chaotic energy…

Webb refined our view of a star system called Apep, named after the Egyptian god of chaos. Apep was thought to consist solely of two Wolf-Rayet stars, which are a rare class of massive, evolved, luminous stars. Only 1000 are estimated to exist in our galaxy, out of hundreds of billions. To have found a system with two of them is exceedingly rare, and it’s the only known one in our galaxy.

Adding to the chaos, Webb confirmed that there is actually a third star in this system, a massive supergiant, which is slicing holes into the dusty shells the Wolf-Rayet stars are creating. Prior to Webb, we could only see one dust shell - the others were just theoretical. We can now see four of them in the mid-infrared, resembling serpentine spirals, the fourth of which is almost transparent and only seen at the edges of this image. The Wolf-Rayet stars have been creating these shells over the last 700 years.

As the Wolf-Rayet stars pass by each other, their strong stellar winds collide and mix, forming and casting out heaps of carbon-rich dust. Additionally, though they are orbiting quickly, astronomically speaking, these stars have an extremely long orbital period of 190 years, and it takes 25 years for them to pass each other. The next longest orbit for a dusty Wolf-Rayet binary is approximately 30 years, and most have orbits between two and 10 years. While similar systems cast out dust for months-long periods, this system forms and casts out dust for a quarter century at a time.

Their 3rd companion, originally spotted by the ESO’s Very Large Telescope and confirmed by Webb, carves holes into each expanding dust cloud from its wider orbit. (Note that all three stars appear as a single bright point of light in this image.)

Read more: go.nasa.gov/44eHTgH

Image credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, Yinuo Han (Caltech), Ryan White (Macquarie University)

Image description: Four dust shells expand away from three central stars that appear as a single pinpoint of light. The innermost shell is smallest, like the size of a thumbprint, and brightest. It is yellow and forms a backward lowercase e. A line at 3 o’clock swoops to the bottom-left in an arc that ends at 8 o’clock. A second line at 9 o’clock dips down to start, but then goes straight up, angling around the top. The second shell, about the size of a fist, is orange and has looser arcs. One appears from 4 to 7 o’clock. A brighter orange triangle appears from 10 to 12 o’clock. Its outer edges overlap, forming a rough circle. The third shell extends almost to the edges and is semi-translucent red, with similar arcs and a darker red line that also forms a faint triangle at top left. The widest shell is faintest and at the edges. A semi-transparent blue appears across the scene. A larger foreground star with spikes is at bottom left, and more distant stars and galaxies are strewn across the black expanse of space.

Thomas Hawk posted a photo:

Thomas Hawk posted a photo:

De zestienjarige Carlo Acutis, een diep gelovige jongen uit een niet-religieus gezin, overleed aan leukemie en werd onlangs heilig verklaard.

Meta hoeft Instagram en WhatsApp niet af te stoten, nu een rechter bepaald heeft dat het bedrijf geen monopolist op de markt van sociale media is. Met TikTok heeft het immers een sterke concurrent.