NEW YORK (ANP) - De aandelenbeurzen in New York zijn vrijdag met stevige winsten het weekend ingegaan door het nieuws dat Iran de Straat van Hormuz volledig heropent voor de commerciële scheepvaart. De olieprijzen gingen juist hard omlaag door de hoop bij beleggers op vrede in het Midden-Oosten. Verder was Netflix een opvallende daler op Wall Street na een slecht ontvangen kwartaalbericht van de videostreamingdienst.

De Dow-Jonesindex steeg 1,8 procent tot 49.447,43 punten. De brede S&P 500 won 1,2 procent tot 7126,06 punten en de technologiegraadmeter Nasdaq won 1,5 procent tot 24.468,48 punten. Daarmee werd de recordopmars van de S&P 500 en Nasdaq verder doorgezet. De prijs van een vat Amerikaanse olie daalde meer dan 10 procent tot 84,64 dollar en Brentolie werd bijna 9 procent goedkoper op 90,66 dollar per vat.

Bedrijven die erg gevoelig zijn voor hoge brandstofkosten waren in trek. Zo stegen de cruisemaatschappijen Carnival, Norwegian Cruise Line en Royal Caribbean Cruises tot meer dan 7 procent in waarde.

Oliebedrijven in de min

Luchtvaartmaatschappijen als Delta Air Lines, United Airlines, American Airlines en Southwest Airlines gingen tot 7 procent vooruit. Reisgerelateerde aandelen als Airbnb en Expedia wonnen tot 4,5 procent.

Oliebedrijven hadden het daarentegen moeilijk met minnen voor ExxonMobil, Chevron, Occidental Petroleum en ConocoPhillips tot meer dan 5 procent. Door de Iraanse blokkade van de Straat van Hormuz zijn de olieprijzen de afgelopen tijd hard gestegen omdat veel olie uit het Midden-Oosten via die zeestraat wordt geëxporteerd.

Netflix

Netflix sloot bijna 10 procent in de min. De winst ging in het eerste kwartaal flink omhoog, mede dankzij prijsverhogingen en meer abonnees, maar de vooruitzichten voor het huidige kwartaal vielen tegen. Netflix, dat zich in februari terugtrok uit de overnamestrijd rond Warner Bros. Discovery, maakte ook bekend dat voorzitter en medeoprichter Reed Hastings het bedrijf na bijna dertig jaar gaat verlaten.

Aluminiumproducent Alcoa meldde eveneens tegenvallende cijfers en eindigde bijna 7 procent in het rood.

The last season of this once hugely funny comedy absolutely tears out of the blocks in its best outing in years. But it’s still not the show it once was – despite the brilliant performances

For a while there, Hacks represented the height of comedy. Actual funny comedy, as opposed to trauma-ridden half-hour dramas like The Bear. When it won an Emmy for best comedy in 2024, it felt like Hacks and Hacks alone was at the vanguard of proper comedy.

That seems like a while ago now. Since then, The Studio came along: another entertainment business satire, only one with bigger stars, better production values and sharper barbs. At last year’s Emmys, The Studio won everything in sight, while all Hacks could muster were a pair of trophies for Jean Smart and Hannah Einbinder, playing a rich but disconnected comedian and her put-upon writer respectively. So the question is this: can Hacks rally in its final season?

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Actor accused of acting negligently after firing loaded gun at cinematographer Halyna Hutchins, who was killed

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A judge in Los Angeles has ruled that a civil lawsuit accusing Alec Baldwin of acting negligently in the deadly 2021 shooting on the set of his western film Rust can proceed to trial.

According to Variety, the superior court judge Maurice Leiter issued a summary judgment on Friday allowing the case to move forward. Leiter’s ruling – obtained by the outlet – said that “a reasonable jury could find that Mr Baldwin recklessly disregarded the probability that pointing a gun in the direction of someone, with the finger on the trigger, would cause emotional distress”.

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As revelations mount and accusations fly, prime minister prepares for MPs’ anger and Olly Robbins’ testimony early next week

Keir Starmer’s claim he was “staggered” not to have been told of Peter Mandelson’s vetting failure has provoked incredulity across Westminster and accusations that he sacked a senior civil servant to save his premiership.

Senior government figures said the prime minister faced “judgment day” next week when Olly Robbins, who is understood to be furious at being forced to quit the Foreign Office, is expected to appear before a powerful committee of MPs.

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The bar for creating visual assets has been lowered to the ability to converse with a model

Anthropic is known for its industry-leading Claude Code that writes programs, but why stop there? The company, on Friday, introduced a research preview service called Claude Design that creates visual assets, potentially putting some folks out of work.…

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: On Thursday, OpenAI announced it had developed a large language model specifically trained on common biology workflows. Called GPT-Rosalind after Rosalind Franklin, the model appears to differ from most science-focused models from major tech companies, which have generally taken a more generic approach that works for various fields. In a press briefing, Yunyun Wang, OpenAI's Life Sciences Product Lead, said the system was designed to tackle two major roadblocks faced by current biology researchers. One is the massive datasets created by decades of genome sequencing and protein biochemistry, which can be too much for any one researcher to take in. The second is that biology has many highly specialized subfields, each with its own techniques and jargon. So, for example, a geneticist who finds themselves working on a gene that's active in brain cells might struggle to understand the immense neurobiological literature.

Wang said the company had taken an LLM and trained it on 50 of the most common biological workflows, as well as on how to access the major public databases of biological information. Further training has resulted in a system that can suggest likely biological pathways and prioritize potential drug targets. "We're connecting genotype to phenotype through known pathways and regulatory mechanisms, infer likely structural or functional properties of proteins, and really leveraging this mechanistic understanding," Wang said. To address LLMs' tendencies toward sycophancy and overenthusiasm, OpenAI says it has tuned the model to be more skeptical, so it's more likely to tell you when something is a bad drug target. There was a lot of talk about GPT-Rosalind's "reasoning" and "expert-level" abilities. We were told that the former was defined as being able to work through complex, multi-step processes, while the latter was derived from the model's performance on a handful of benchmarks. Access to GPT-Rosalind is currently limited "due to concerns about the model's potential for harmful outputs if asked to do something like optimize a virus's infectivity," notes Ars. Only U.S.-based organizations can request access at the moment.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Too chonk to fail. Private Equity Vet lets you see if your local D.V.M. is just a PE with a lab coat. (previously)

The 16th season of the Dissect podcast is a deep dive into Daft Punk; here’s the 1st episode.

europeanspaceagency posted a photo:

This image from the Copernicus Sentinel-2 mission captures the coast of Gabon in striking colours.

Gabon, in Equatorial Africa, shares borders with Cameroon, the Republic of the Congo and Equatorial Guinea, with its coast facing the Gulf of Guinea. Immense forests thrive in the country’s humid tropical climate, covering approximately 88% of Gabon. It is home to some of Africa’s most diverse rainforest and a haven for wildlife, including western lowland gorillas and the critically endangered forest elephants.

The country's hot and humid climate also means that the region is often covered by clouds, making it difficult to acquire optical cloud-free views. This is where Sentinel-2’s instrument, with its 13 spectral channels, is able to help.

This false-colour image was generated using selected near-infrared and short-wave spectral bands to reduce haze and to enhance the variations in vegetation, moisture patterns and land cover with more contrasting colours compared to standard optical imagery.

This combination also shows clouds in varying colours from white to pink, depending on their altitude and on the amount of water droplet or ice particles within them. Water bodies, such as rivers and lakes, appear dark, while densely forested areas come up in orange.

The image clearly illustrates how the country's geography is dominated by forests and by the Ogooué (Ogowe) River, visible running across the centre of the image. It flows westwards through Gabon, collecting water from numerous lakes along its course, before emptying into the Gulf of Guinea, where it forms a large delta.

Other than the water bodies, the image is predominantly orange, representing dense, undisturbed rainforest, with darker orange or brownish tones indicating more humid, low‑lying vegetation typically along the streams and in swampy areas. Yellow and acid‑green patches throughout the image usually denote grasslands or exposed bare soil.

Urban, built-up areas appear in shades of aquamarine. Near the Ogooué River delta lies Port Gentil, Gabon’s second city, located close to Cape Lopez, the nation’s most westerly point, which juts into the Atlantic Ocean. Gabon’s capital Libreville can be seen on the northern shore of the Gabon Estuary, the large inlet visible in the upper part of the image.

Credits: contains modified Copernicus Sentinel data (2025), processed by ESA; CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO

europeanspaceagency posted a photo:

ESA’s Earth Explorer FLEX, shows off at a media event hosted by Thales Alenia Space in one of their cleanrooms in Cannes, France, in April 2026.

FLEX is designed to yield information about the health of the world’s plants by measuring a faint florescence glow they give off as they photosynthesise. Importantly, the signal, which is invisible to the naked eye, varies according to environmental conditions and the health of the plant – and, therefore, when measured, can be used to assess plant health and stress.

The information gathered by FLEX can be used to improve our understanding of how carbon moves between plants and the atmosphere and how photosynthesis affects the carbon and water cycles. The mission also offers better insight into plant health, which is especially important since Earth’s growing population is placing increasing demands on the production of food and animal feed.

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Credits: ESA - P. Sebirot