Antiprotonen bestuderen geeft fysici inzicht in het ontstaan van het heelal. Maar hoe breng je ze naar de plek waar je dat het best kunt doen? Dat is „echt een technisch hoogstandje”.

Door een verandering in de bekostiging van het basisonderwijs betaalde het ministerie van OCW schoolbesturen in 2022 te weinig geld uit voor personeelskosten. De Raad van State oordeelt dat ze alsnog recht hebben op dat geld.

In aanloop naar het debat in de Tweede Kamer over compensatiemaatregelen voor de hoge energieprijzen heeft vakbond FNV vanochtend invoering geopperd van maximumprijzen voor…

Wetenschappers van TNO zijn erin geslaagd vanuit een vliegtuig een stabiele laserverbinding met een satelliet in de ruimte te maken. „Het is als glasvezel, maar dan zonder vezel.”

Voormalig Frontex-directeur Fabrice Leggeri wordt beschuldigd van medeplichtigheid aan misdaden tegen de menselijkheid wegens het illegaal terugsturen van migranten. Justitie in Frankrijk onderzoekt de zaak tegen Leggeri, die inmiddels Europarlementariër voor het radicaal-rechtse RN is.

Effort includes permitting and planning

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Barely three months ago, the Walt Disney Company announced that it would be bringing user-generated AI slop to Disney+ as part of a landmark $1 billion investment into OpenAI that would allow people to use Sora to create short videos from more than 200 beloved Disney characters. The announcement was so important that Disney’s then-CEO Bob Iger and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman both championed it in a press release that is full of the kind of cope that Silicon Valley AI boosters and some Hollywood executives suggest would unleash a new era of moviemaking and storytelling powered by AI that is cheaper than making movies with human workers.

“The rapid advancement of artificial intelligence marks an important moment for our industry, and through this collaboration with OpenAI we will thoughtfully and responsibly extend the reach of our storytelling through generative AI, while respecting and protecting creators and their works,” Iger said. 

“Disney will become a major customer of OpenAI, using its APIs to build new products, tools, and experiences, including for Disney+, and deploying ChatGPT for its employees,” the press release stated. “Under the license, fans will be able to watch curated selections of Sora-generated videos on Disney+, and OpenAI and Disney will collaborate to utilize OpenAI’s models to power new experiences for Disney+ subscribers, furthering innovative and creative ways to connect with Disney’s stories and characters. Sora and ChatGPT Images are expected to start generating fan-inspired videos with Disney’s multi-brand licensed characters in early 2026.”

Tuesday was a disastrous day for that future, and the complete and utter failure of both Sora and Disney’s dalliance with AI garbage suggests AI slop is indeed not the future of Hollywood. Disney did not even get to the point here it allowed people to build anything with Disney characters before pulling the plug on the whole endeavor and its investment.

Sora is dead. May the memory of its four-month existence as a copyright infringement machine that was also used to make videos of men strangling women and ICE arresting undocumented immigrants be a blessing. 

Disney is pulling out of its billion-dollar investment in OpenAI entirely. Other efforts to slopify Hollywood look underwhelming, appear to have been quietly shelved, or have utterly failed to gather any audience whatsoever. This news does not bode well for OpenAI and it likely does not bode well for Paramount’s megamerger with Warner Brothers, a deal whose financial terms and the debt involved only make sense if you can believe in a future in which the cost of creating blockbuster movies is drastically reduced by AI via huge numbers of people losing their jobs. 

At the time of Disney’s announcement with OpenAI, it was hard to imagine why Disney would infect its flagship paid streaming service with content from a service whose viral videos consisted of users turning Pikachu into a felon and SpongeBob into Hitler. It was not clear why Disney would want AI slop made by randos to live next to, say the $200 million Toy Story 4 or any number of Disney’s masterpieces. It was also hard to imagine why a company that has so aggressively enforced its copyright would suddenly say all bets are off for Sam Altman’s plagiarism machine. The only thing that made any sense is that Hollywood executives, like Silicon Valley executives, hate paying for human labor so much that they have convinced themselves that their customers would happily consume AI slop if it was shoved down their throats. 

After Sora’s initial novelty wore off, it became clear that people do not actually want this, and that the people using Sora were using it at great financial cost to OpenAI in order to largely take videos off-platform to spam other social media sites. The Sora subreddit has been basically dead for months outside of people attempting to figure out how to get it to create nudes or people complaining about content violations. When I scrolled Sora Tuesday evening I almost exclusively saw videos that had few or no likes or comments. I saw very little Disney content, though I did see a lot of South Park, Peppa Pig, and SpongeBob videos, none of which were very good. 

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The death of Sora is a good time to check in on how other attempts to slopify Hollywood are going. In December 2024, I wrote about Chinese television giant TCL’s attempt to make an AI-generated movie studio called TCL Film Machine, which was pitched as a “key pillar of TCLArt, an important brand initiative of TCL to make art more accessible and inspiring worldwide.” I went to the premiere of a series of short films that were pitched as a new way of making movies faster and cheaper. At the time, I asked Chris Regina, TCL’s then Chief Content Officer and a leader of the TCL Film Machine project what the plan was. 

“If you can imagine where we might be a year or 18 months from now, I think that in some ways is probably what scares a lot of the industry because they can see where it sits today, and as much as they want to poke holes or be critical of it, they do realize that it will continue to be better,” he said, 14 months ago. 

Regina and another TCL executive on that project now have other jobs. TCL itself has released the five shorts I saw, as well as an 11-minute, widely mocked romcom film called Next Stop Paris, and a four-minute film called Memory Maker. Memory Maker was released 13 months ago and has 1,771 views on YouTube. Next Stop Paris has 10,000 views on YouTube. Comments have been turned off for both movies. The “applications” page for prospective TCL Film Machine projects is now just a static page, and TCL hasn’t mentioned AI films in any of its press releases in roughly a year; many of its recent announcements have to do with releasing reruns of shows from the 80s and 90s. 

Meanwhile, much-hyped “AI movies” or “AI special effects,” including the Brad Pitt-Tom Cruise AI fight scene that the New York Times boldly declared “spooked Hollywood” have been wildly overhyped, still have various continuity errors and an uncanny feel, or are simply not movies in any meaningful sense. 

This is not to say that AI will have no role in Hollywood or that people are not making money from AI slop. Hollywood studios are using AI behind the scenes for editing, storyboarding, scratch voiceover, and a handful of other things. But the wild hype of AI slop as a direct threat to human storytelling and AI tools as a replacement for talented humans in Hollywood has not come to pass and it’s not clear if it ever will. The AI movies at AI film festivals continue to suck and the people who show up to them are largely people involved in making them or invested in having them work out. AI slop is effective on social media, meanwhile, not because it is good or because people like it but because these platforms are flooded with it, because social media companies are invested in making generative AI tools, and because their algorithms are wildly broken. It turns out when you try to serve slop on a product people pay for, no one wants it.

And the end of Sora does not mean there is no demand for AI video generators, but it does mean that the overwhelming use case for AI video generators continues to be what it has always been: people making porn, nonconsensual sexual imagery, disinformation, and low-effort slop at scale. The people making this type of content do not want to deal with guardrails or limitations and so have largely flocked to open source and Chinese models. When you take away those use cases, it turns out there’s basically nothing left.

The Rolling Stones

De hoogste militair van Nederland en die van een dertigtal vooral Europese landen gaan overleggen over het breken van de Iraanse blokkade van de Straat van Hormuz. Ze komen later deze week bijeen in het Verenigd Koninkrijk, dat het voortouw wil nemen in de nieuwe 'Hormuz-coalitie'.

Nederland en andere bondgenoten van de VS bewaarden aanvankelijk afstand van de Amerikaans-Israëlische oorlog met Iran, maar komen nu meer in beweging. Ze voelen de gevolgen van de blokkade, met hogere brandstof- en kunstmestprijzen en mogelijk zelfs tekorten. Bovendien eist de boze Amerikaanse president Donald Trump hun assistentie bij het weer op gang brengen van de scheepvaart door de zeestraat.

Toen grote Europese landen en Japan donderdag verklaarden te willen helpen met "passende" maatregelen, was Nederland daar meteen bij. Commandant der Strijdkrachten Onno Eichelsheim hield zondag al een videovergadering met deze collega's. Inmiddels telt de coalitie in wording een dertigtal landen.

When we can’t control what’s happening in the world, there is some solace in the predictability of a comforting routine and the safe landing of a warm bed

An early bedtime is my number one prescription when things go awry. It’s a reliable comfort through all life seasons, especially when uncertainty is rife and sleep is disturbed.

I’m not ashamed to admit that I spend a considerable amount of time each day thinking about how nice it would be to get into bed. We’ve just passed the autumn equinox which means we’ll light the first fire soon and “hottie season” will officially commence. Yes, my partner of 20 years is handsome but it’s the hot-water bottle that gets preference when the temperature drops, the world threatens to implode and extra cosiness is required.

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• UK participation levels more than doubled in 2025

• 860,000 Britons played padel at least once last year

It was once seen as a quirky upstart or continental fad. But padel now has nearly a million players across the UK after participation levels more than doubled in 2025.

According to LTA figures seen by the Guardian, 860,000 Britons played padel at least once last year – up from 400,000 in 2024 and 129,000 in 2023 – as the racket sport’s dizzying rise continued.

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Roy’s memoir Mother Mary Comes to Me and Doucet’s The Finest Hotel in Kabul are joined by books on exile by Ece Temelkuran and Judith Mackrell and an ode to the arts by Daisy Fancourt

Arundhati Roy, Lyse Doucet and Judith Mackrell are among the writers shortlisted for this year’s Women’s prize for nonfiction.

Jane Rogoyska, Ece Temelkuran and Daisy Fancourt are also in contention for the £30,000 prize, launched in 2024 to address the persistent gender imbalance in UK nonfiction prize winners.

To browse all books in the 2026 Women’s prize for nonfiction shortlist, visit guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.

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The true quality of a fabric is revealed by a neutral tone – one that beautifully offsets the brighter tones of 2026. Just don’t mention John Major

Sometimes a colour name is a whole mood. Rouge Noir: the stamp of cult 1990s glamour. Millennial pink: the colour of overthinking and oversharing. Elephant’s Breath by Farrow & Ball: the imperial age of the gastro pub.

I have a new favourite. Pairs is a lovely little Scottish brand which makes great quality socks at good prices. There are many cute names – Frosting Pink, Milky Tea Beige – but the one I just had to click on was Correct Grey, “a warm grey with nods to a classic British school sock”, according to the website.

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Human Rights Watch and others say they have documented use of weapon in civilian areas, which some argue is illegal

When the M825-series 155mm artillery projectile airbursts, expelling its felt wedges containing white phosphorus, it leaves a distinctive knuckle-shaped plume. That is how Human Rights Watch (HRW) researchers said they were able to verify that Israel was again using the notorious weapon over south Lebanon, reigniting accusations that it is breaking the laws of war.

The New York-based rights group said it had verified and geolocated eight images showing airburst white phosphorus munitions exploding over residential areas in the southern Lebanese town of Yohmor in the opening days of Israel’s assault during the war on Gaza.

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​Het kabinet gaat toch naar gas boren in Nederland, niet in Groningen maar in Friesland. Dat maakte minister Van Veldhoven van Klimaat en Groene Groei (D66) zojuist bekend. Dit doen ze door de pijplijn van Groningen naar Friesland te verleggen, zodat er niet meer in Groningen gepompt wordt.

“We gaan de pijplijn verlengen van Groningen naar Friesland, zodat we niet meer in Groningen gas omhoog pompen”, zegt Van Veldhoven. “We hopen dat inwoners uit Groningen nu niet meer boos worden en we ze ook niet hoeven te compenseren.”

Van Veldhoven denkt dat dit de ideale oplossing is. “Daarnaast denk ik dat de Friezen nog minder gewend zijn en ook wat meer nuchter erin staan.”

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Thomas Hawk posted a photo:

Thomas Hawk posted a photo: