Het waterschap Brabantse Delta ziet zich door droogte gedwongen om het watergebruik in de regio aan banden te leggen.

De economisch kleine, maar politiek omstreden handel tussen Europa en de illegale Israëlische nederzettingen op de bezette Westelijke Jordaanoever gaat door. Een grote groep EU-landen wil een verbod, maar Ursula von der Leyen en Berlijn liggen dwars.

Niet voor het eerst kreeg het Franse elftal een racistische opmerking te verwerken: de Spaanse oud-premier Mariano Rajoy noemde het een team „zonder Fransen”. Zo weerspiegelt voetbal de tendens bij radicaal-rechtse politici om het burgerschap van mensen met een migratieachtergrond in twijfel te trekken.

Seemingly unaware of the concept of irony, Satya Nadella is warning AI-using enterprises to take care not to give away their business secrets alongside the massive piles of cash they’re forking over to frontier labs every month. Writing in a long-form post on X over the weekend, the Microsoft CEO and chairman warned of what he called the “reverse information paradox,” a situation in which purchasers of AI essentially pay for the intelligence product they’re getting twice: once with cash, and again “with something even more valuable,” namely the proprietary business knowledge one has to feed an AI model in order to make it worth using in the rare instance an AI investment actually pays off. “Over time, the information asymmetry becomes increasingly skewed,” Nadella noted. “The seller learns more and more about you as you use what you purchased, while you learn very little about what the seller is learning in return.” The irony is thick, given that Microsoft itself pushes AI that slurps up business data, and Redmond helped get this entire messy AI ball rolling by investing billions into early generative AI leader OpenAI. Azure was the former exclusive cloud home for ChatGPT, and Microsoft leadership arguably helped Altman get his job back when OpenAI ousted him in 2023. The pair’s relationship grew strained in the intervening years, and they loosened several exclusivity provisions in early 2026. It also comes after a number of large organizations paused or restricted Microsoft Copilot deployments in 2024 over a related concern: weak data governance and sprawling internal access rights. Enterprise data security outfit Securiti told The Register in 2024 that about half of the more than 20 chief data officers it polled had grounded Copilot deployments, either switching the assistant off or severely restricting what it could access. The problem was particularly acute in organizations with years of accumulated SharePoint and Microsoft 365 permissions, where overly broad access rights risked exposing sensitive information through Copilot. Fast forward a couple of years, and now Nadella is warning that data protection measures aren’t even enough for a business to stay safe in the AI age. “Models learn from ‘exhaust,’ the prompts people write, the tools agents use, and especially the corrections people make,” Nadella warned. “It's the kind of knowledge a competitor could never buy, and the kind that leaks almost imperceptibly: trace by trace, correction by correction, eval by eval.” Consuming intelligence through AI, Nadella added, creates more organizational intelligence. The Microsoft chief argued that the knowledge generated through those interactions ought to belong to the companies that create it. “Enterprises need a real trust boundary for their human capital and token capital to compound,” Nadella wrote, describing his ideal solution as having “a hard boundary across which nothing crosses, not even the intelligence exhaust, without consent.” In other words, welcome to the post-cloud era when all your AI infrastructure will come home to roost inside your own network. If you think we’re exaggerating, Nadella even mentions that one of the things enterprises need to do to solve the reverse information paradox is to build their own proprietary AI learning environments “within the tenant boundary.” We asked Nadella and Microsoft whether solving the problem goes beyond good data governance, as Nadella suggested in his article, and a spokesperson told us yes, describing the matter as a structural problem with the current generally accepted model of AI business in which companies rely on hosted services. Anyone and everyone using AI for business is at risk, they explained. In addition to isolating learning environments, Nadella’s X note also suggested AI-using businesses should create their own private evaluation systems and retain ownership of organizational AI memory and decouple their orchestration layer from any particular AI model, essentially creating “your own continuous learning loop.” “A company should be able to use a model without giving up the knowledge that makes it unique,” Nadella wrote. The Microsoft spokesperson argued that agent harnesses and memory should be independent of models, and called for enterprises to have the rights to their own usage data and model outputs, echoing Nadella’s comments about the irony of leading AI firms crying foul about model distillation while reserving “the right to learn from customer usage and interaction data.” As for whether this is a generic warning that something in the AI industry’s got to give or a sales pitch with Microsoft positioned as the hero, the spokesperson made that clear, telling us that Copilot and Azure AI Foundry (a hosted solution, it’s worth pointing out) are Redmond’s solution to the problems Nadella outlined in his weekend post. Both separate context, memory, and agent harnesses from AI models themselves, giving businesses an additional layer of assurance that their data is safe, the company told us. It's debatable whether or not Microsoft is actually the AI data protection hero enterprises are looking for. But the bigger point is true: Frontier labs are rolling in valuable proprietary data, and that could come back to bite the businesses that forked it over for free. ®

German textile company ZEGO Textilveredelungszentrum has filed for insolvency and is blaming the financial fallout from a March cyberattack that knocked its production offline for nearly six weeks. ZEGO's filing adds another name to the short but growing list of companies that say a digital break-in was commercially fatal to their business. The Bavaria-based company provides textile finishing, processing, and treatment services for customers across industries, including automotive, workwear, and technical textiles. In a notice to customers and suppliers, the organization said it had exhausted every available option before seeking insolvency protection. Managing director Johannes Zenglein described the filing as "one of the most difficult steps in our company's 37-year history." "The cyberattack of March 29, 2026, however, impacted our company to an extent that we could not fully compensate for despite our best efforts," Zenglein wrote. "The consequences resulted in a production outage of nearly six weeks and significant financial strain. These effects ultimately impacted our financial situation so severely that filing for insolvency became necessary." ZEGO did not disclose what kind of attack it suffered, whether ransomware was involved, who was behind it, or whether customer or employee data was compromised. What it has made clear is that the operational disruption alone was enough to push the business beyond the point of recovery. ZEGO said insolvency proceedings have now been initiated, but insisted the filing does not necessarily spell the end of the business. It said it plans to keep production running while administrators attempt to restructure the business, preserve jobs, and keep customers and suppliers on board. Cyberattacks have long been capable of bringing factories and production lines to a standstill, but relatively few businesses publicly acknowledge that the resulting financial damage ultimately tipped them into collapse. Perhaps the best-known example is Knights of Old, the 158-year-old British haulage company that collapsed after a ransomware attack. Criminals broke in using an employee's password, encrypted the company's systems, and left more than 700 people out of work. Paying the ransom made little difference. Last year, another German business, a phone repair company, also blamed a cyberattack for its demise after concluding the cost of recovering its systems and rebuilding customer confidence was simply too much to bear. For everyone else still debating whether cybersecurity spending pays for itself, ZEGO's message is difficult to miss: sometimes the highest cost isn't the ransom, it’s surviving the downtime. ®

Thomas Hawk posted a photo:

date stamped on slide December 1975

Thomas Hawk posted a photo:

europeanspaceagency posted a photo:

His Majesty King Charles III visited the Harwell Campus in Oxfordshire on 10 July to launch a new initiative designed to shape the future of the space and defence economy. Located adjacent to the European Space Agency’s European Centre for Space Applications and Telecommunications (ECSAT), the Space and Defence Gateway was officially opened by His Majesty at an event attended by ESA Director General Josef Aschbacher and other senior representatives from ESA, the UK Government and the Harwell Campus.

This photo features His Majesty being greeted by Josef Aschbacher; UK members of ESA’s astronaut reserve Meganne Christian and John McFall; UK ESA astronaut Rosemary Coogan; and Barbara Ghinelli, Director of Innovation Clusters, Harwell Campus, UKRI-STFC, and founder of the UK Space and Defence Gateway.

The visit provided an opportunity for Josef Aschbacher to present His Majesty with a Union Flag that spent nearly a year aboard the International Space Station.

Credits: Ian Jones

europeanspaceagency posted a photo:

The massive globular star cluster Omega Centauri has puzzled astronomers for decades. It should be filled with black holes left behind by exploding stars, yet evidence for them is scarce. Now, astronomers using archival data from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope and supportive observations from the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope have finally located their first stellar-mass black hole in this cluster. Discovering the first of this missing black hole population will help refine current theories on black hole formation within environments such as Omega Centauri.

Omega Centauri is composed of 10 million gravitationally bound stars. Though the astronomy community has previously found evidence with Hubble that an intermediate-mass black hole lurks at its centre, models suggest that this star cluster should contain about 10,000 smaller, stellar-mass black holes. This notable population of black holes has evaded detection in previous studies, which used the radial velocity method or looked for radio and X-ray emission from material falling onto the black holes.

A new discovery features a different approach, known as astrometry, to measure the very small movements of stars over time. By sifting through more than 20 years of Hubble archival data and pulling in recent Webb data to further refine the astrometric measurements, the team located a star orbiting an invisible object so hefty that it has to be a black hole. Dubbed oMEGACat BH-2, it is the first stellar-mass black hole detected within Omega Centauri, and it has some surprising qualities. oMEGACat BH-2 has a lower-than-expected mass and, with its visible star companion, the black hole-star duo has the longest orbital period of any black hole binary system known to date.

The team’s findings were published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

“With the Hubble and Webb data, we were able to see the motion of the visible main sequence star that is part of this binary, which is about 18,000 light-years away in the dense environment of Omega Centauri,” said the paper’s lead author Matthew Whitaker of the University of Utah, Salt Lake City, in the United States. “The precision of these measurements is incredible, down to a fraction of a pixel on Hubble and Webb’s detectors. It would not have been possible to find this black hole without these two space telescopes.”

The team’s findings refine a past study by a different group of scientists suggesting that this binary system included a neutron star. By expanding the Hubble data analyzed so that it included astrometric measurements from 2002 to 2023, and pulling in Webb near-infrared data to improve precision, the University of Utah-led team was able to better constrain the mass of the visible star’s dark companion, ruling out the neutron star possibility.

“While we already knew that the star was 0.78 solar masses, we can now calculate the black hole’s mass, which is 4.46 solar masses and therefore too heavy to be a neutron star. However, its mass is actually much lower than would be expected in a metal-poor environment like Omega Centauri. This is surprising and exciting,” said Anil Seth of the University of Utah, a coauthor of the study. “We now know that a metal-poor star should be able to form a black hole like this, and we need to figure out how that happens. This detection is providing some data to those who do that kind of modeling.”

Long time coming

Based on the precise data from Hubble and Webb, the team could chart the star’s path over 20-plus years, which fortunately was during its closest approach to its black hole companion when it moved the fastest across the sky. From the extensive data, the team determined that the visible star orbits oMEGACat BH-2 once every 94 years, making it the longest period black hole binary ever known.

Its long orbital period also gives a clue to the origin of this binary system. It was probably dynamically formed, meaning the star and its black hole companion did not start out together but rather found each other in this cluster. The researchers calculated that a system like oMEGACat BH-2 will survive for less than a billion years before it is torn apart by encounters with nearby stars, much shorter than the age of the cluster (approximately 12 billion years old).

“It’s important to understand black hole populations in globular clusters because there’s uncertainty about their physics and formation,” said Seth. “More specifically, understanding the process of forming black holes and then dynamically forming binaries is vital, because it affects our ability to interpret and understand gravitational wave events. Environments like Omega Centauri are the primary places where we think binaries are merging and creating these waves.”

The team’s discovery of stellar-mass black hole oMEGACat BH-2 with the Hubble-Webb dataset is just the start of finding these evasive black hole populations in globular star clusters.

“This new discovery highlights the immense legacy value of the Hubble Space Telescope archive” said Maximilian Häberle, postdoctoral fellow at the European Southern Observatory, who led the data reduction for the Hubble and Webb data. “It marks the second breakthrough from our oMEGACat astrometric re-analysis, following the confirmation of the intermediate-mass black hole in Omega Centauri."

[Image description: Hubble image of globular star cluster Omega Centauri, which looks like a highly dense field of stars. Some appear a bit larger and brighter than others, with the majority of stars appearing blue, orange, and yellow. They are scattered mostly uniformly, like grains of sand. Toward the centre they gradually become closer, creating a more luminous area at the globular star cluster’s core. A small red square frame is near the centre. It connects to a square pullout in the top right corner, which shows the outlined area in greater detail. Among the blue- and orange-colored stars is a small blue-white dot that is highlighted by a small red circle.]

Credits: ESA/Hubble & NASA, M. Häberle (MPIA), J. DePasquale (STScI); CC BY 4.0

“Civilizations are remembered through their monuments, but understood through the things they throw away,” says artist Helena Minginowicz, whose sensitive paintings interrogate our understanding of value. Using airbrushed acrylic, which can be built up in lightweight, translucent layers, the artist takes one of the most quotidian household items as a starting point: paper towel.

With its machine-embossed, moisture-wicking patterns, the absorbent paper comprises an instantly recognizable substrate. The precise, textured flourishes are aesthetically pleasing, and yet it’s hard to completely separate them from our associations with mass-produced paper products that are designed for one-time use and disposability. This dichotomy sits at he heart of Minginowicz’s practice, in which she explores “how changing the hierarchy of materials can reshape the way we perceive value, dignity, and the human experience,” she tells Colossal.

Minginowicz’s embossed pieces from everyday domestic material are one facet of a broader multimedia approach to materiality in which she creates paintings on canvas and also painstakingly embosses delicate tissues. The paper towel works, in addition to some that are made on supermarket-style plastic bags, are then presented between thick slabs of acrylic, transforming them into objects with substantial heft and dimensionality.

“Every civilization constructs its own hierarchy of values,” the artist says. “It decides what deserves to be preserved, admired, and passed on to future generations. Monuments, works of art, symbols, and myths preserve an image of humanity as we wish to remember it—strong, beautiful, enduring, and heroic. Yet every monument has its reverse.”

Minginowicz’ imagery draws on the style of Renaissance paintings, especially focusing on expressiveness, intimacy, and the idealized female figure. One might think of Sandro Botticelli’s “The Birth of Venus” or aristocratic portraiture of the era. “For centuries, painting monumentalized what civilizations wished to remember: saints, heroes, gods, victories, myths, and ideals. I use that same language to ask a different question: Who deserves to be remembered with dignity? Not only heroes. Not only the victorious. But every human being.”

Minginowicz is currently working toward a solo exhibition at Galerie Prima in Paris, which is slated to open on October 8. Follow updates and see more on Instagram.

Do stories and artists like this matter to you? Become a Colossal Member today and support independent arts publishing for as little as $7 per month. The article Helena Minginowicz Transforms Humble Paper Towel into Ethereal Paintings appeared first on Colossal.