TRUE 2 DEATH has added a photo to the pool:

Looking down over the tracks between Tokyu’s Nagatsuta Depot (長津田検車区) and Nagatsuta Station (長津田駅) on a cloudy night in Yokohama.
A long exposure turns the passing trains into ribbons of white, blue, and red light, while the rails, switches, signals, overhead structures, and power lines remain sharply defined beneath them. This stretch of track is especially interesting because of its proximity to the Nagatsuta depot, giving the area a dense, almost industrial railway landscape.
I’ve always liked scenes like this in Japan, where the infrastructure itself becomes the subject. At night, all of the points, wires, signals, and parallel tracks take on a completely different character.

Nagatsuta, Yokohama, Kanagawa, Japan
July 2026

Global struggle for control of Bab al-Mandab strait threatens to turn Yemen’s on-off conflict into a forever war

• Violence erupts in Yemen again: why it matters globally and how it is linked to the US-Iran war

Nearly 50,000 people have fled a sudden advance by Houthi forces in western Yemen, with entire villages emptied and families trapped near frontline fighting with depleting food supplies, according to aid workers.

Civilians in the Middle East’s poorest country have found themselves victims of a global struggle for control over one of the most important shipping routes in the world, which threatens to turn Yemen’s on-off conflict into a forever war.

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Many fear chancellor is wrong man for the job at a time when Germany’s defences against far right are crumbling

A cataclysm. A 9.0 earthquake. A five-alarm fire. A bitter rejection of Germany’s joyous reunification three decades ago, and a threat to the democratic postwar order.

Sizing up the repercussions of last weekend’s win for the far-right Alternative für Deutschland party in the former communist state of Saxony-Anhalt, German commentators expressed a sense of doom, panic and helplessness in the political establishment.

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NEW YORK (ANP) - Tennisser Ben Shelton heeft voor de eerste keer de finale van een grandslamtoernooi bereikt. De 23-jarige Amerikaan versloeg in de halve eindstrijd van de US Open in New York zijn landgenoot Frances Tiafoe in vier sets. Het werd: 4-6 6-3 6-3 7-5.

Shelton neemt het zondag in de finale op tegen de als eerste geplaatste Duitser Alexander Zverev, die eerder in de andere halve finale te sterk was voor de Rus Karen Chatsjanov.

De als achtste geplaatste Shelton schakelde in de eerste ronde de Nederlander Tallon Griekspoor in vier sets uit.

Na deze bloedhete zomer, waarin warmte- en droogterecords rijkelijk sneuvelden, volgde geen crisisberaad of ingelaste ministerraad. In politiek Den Haag bleef het opvallend stil.

Thomas Hawk posted a photo:

Thomas Hawk posted a photo:

Last week, Google announced that it managed to produce a detailed 3D reconstruction of an adult male fruit fly's brain and central nervous system. A few days later a software engineer at Coinbase said the fly brain was being trained to play the original Doom. "Each Doom frame stimulates sensory neurons," says Alex Wormuth. "Neural activity is mapped to game controls. Damage triggers a stimulus to two PPL101 dopamine cells as reinforcement." Since then, the digital brain model has been repurposed to control other games like Beat Saber and Super Mario 64. PC Gamer reports: You can even watch the fruit fly play in real time via Wormuth's website, and it not only shows the point of view in Doom, but can also show a third-person render of the fly going around Doom maps. As of the time of writing, the fly is on round 6385 and, well, it's not very good. Sorry, fly.

But modders aren't done here. They have also somehow managed to make the fruit fly play Beat Saber, and play it pretty well. Lyra Bubbles on X has used the brain and replays of a song in Beat Saber to teach the fruit fly where to hit and why, via Reinforcement Learning. That does mean it's not organically reacting to the notes popping up on screen, but it is receiving input and responding to stimuli. Lyra says, "Further training is to reduce reliance on external signals and allow it to play fully reactively with no input data."

And, after "pivoting to fly engineering in 2026", Jessica Paquette also shared on X their experience running the digital fly brain through Super Mario 64. If you think that is all the game's modders made the fruit fly play, think again, as YouTuber Ro0oney even put it in Minecraft. But this time, Ro0oney used Flywire.AI, a similar project made in collaboration with Princeton University. The number of neurons are different (160,000+ vs 139,255), and Google analyzed a male brain whilst Flywire analyzed a female brain, but the basic idea is the same.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

iain.davidson100 has added a photo to the pool: