The U.S. company Meteomatics has created an automated weather-monitoring system that uses drones to collect atmospheric data at multiple altitudes before returning to recharge and upload their findings. The so-called Meteobase, which consists of a base station on the ground with a drone that can be launched and recovered automatically, "is highly weather resistant and keeps the drone at a comfortable temperature," reports The Guardian. "It can send out one data-gathering mission a day, or multiple flights to monitor fog, icing, an advancing weather front, or other fast-changing conditions." The report says the reusable drones could offer a cheaper, more controllable alternative to helium weather balloons, especially for tracking rapidly changing conditions.
Rafael Camara has admitted that Ollie Bearman’s path to F1 as a Ferrari-backed driver is giving him added motivation to “keep working” and “keep improving” – as the Brazilian youngster looks to earn his own chance in the top echelon.
AMSTERDAM (ANP) - Een pand van ING Private Banking op de Herengracht in het centrum van Amsterdam is beklad met rode verf. Dat is vermoedelijk in de nacht van vrijdag op zaterdag gebeurd. De politie bevestigt de bekladding en zegt al buurtonderzoek te hebben gedaan. Ook wordt onderzocht of er camerabeelden zijn.
Op beelden op sociale media is te zien dat de gevel, de ramen en de trap zijn besmeurd. Ook staat er de tekst: 'Be gay, boycot ING'. Het zou een protest zijn van "queer activisten" tegen 'pinkwashing' waaraan ING zich schuldig zou maken: de bank zou zich als sponsor van de Pride voordoen als pro-lhbti, maar intussen wel investeren in wapens en "profiteren van de gedwongen verdrijving en genocide van de Palestijnen", zo meldt het Instagram-account pal_action_nl.
Vanaf vandaag is het afsteken van gewoon consumentenvuurwerk verboden. Niet alleen met oud en nieuw, maar het hele jaar door. Wie nog een doos cakes op zolder heeft staan, is per direct in overtreding.
De Wet veilige jaarwisseling treedt op 1 augustus 2026 in werking, een jaar nadat de Eerste Kamer instemde. Daarmee wordt de jaarwisseling 2026-2027 de eerste waarin particulieren niets meer de lucht in mogen sturen. Een deel van de Tweede Kamer wilde uitstel, maar vond daarvoor geen meerderheid.
Wat mag nog wél
Het verbod treft alles vanaf categorie F2: cakes, compoundboxen, grote fonteinen en grondbloemen. Wat overblijft is F1-vuurwerk — sterretjes, knalerwten, trektouwtjes en kleine fonteintjes, toegestaan vanaf 12 jaar en het hele jaar door. Dat is geen Haagse mildheid maar Europees recht: de Pyrorichtlijn staat een verbod op deze categorie niet toe. Professionele shows blijven mogelijk.
Zwaar knalvuurwerk was al sinds 2020 verboden. Wat nu verdwijnt, is precies het vuurwerk dat de gemiddelde Nederlander als ‘normaal’ beschouwde.
Eén smalle uitzondering
Burgemeesters mógen ontheffing verlenen aan verenigingen en stichtingen met een aantoonbare lokale binding. Dan geldt: maximaal 200 kilo verpakt F2-vuurwerk, afsteken alleen tussen 31 december 18.00 uur en 1 januari 02.00 uur, en publiek op 15, 40 of 60 meter afstand — dezelfde eisen als voor professionals. In een dichtbebouwde wijk is zo’n terrein in de praktijk knap lastig te vinden.
Wie nog voorraad heeft, kan die in september en oktober inleveren. Er komen tijdelijke inleverpunten in ongeveer dertig gemeenten, zo verspreid dat niemand verder dan 45 minuten hoeft te rijden.
Zóveel kost het
Politie en boa’s handhaven. Het Openbaar Ministerie werkt met standaardbedragen uit een richtlijn van 2024, die nog is geschreven voor de oude situatie en dus nog kan worden herzien.
Overtreding
Eerste keer
Bij herhaling
Consumentenvuurwerk in bezit, t/m 25 kg
€ 100
€ 150
26 tot 50 kilo
€ 250
€ 375
100 kilo of meer
vanaf € 750
vanaf € 1.200
Afsteken buiten de toegestane tijd
€ 250
€ 375
Illegaal F3-vuurwerk afsteken, per stuk
€ 600
€ 600
Bij zwaar illegaal vuurwerk uit categorie F4 houdt de portemonnee op: al voor 1 tot 20 stuks eist het OM 90 uur taakstraf. En bij elke boete van € 100 of meer volgt een aantekening in het strafblad, wat een Verklaring Omtrent het Gedrag in de weg kan zitten.
Wie de inleverdagen laat schieten, houdt vanaf november alleen nog een strafbaar feit in de schuur.
Zesentwintig Limburgse burgemeesters waarschuwden vorige maand al dat ze problemen voorzien met de handhaving. Een verbod dat op papier waterdicht is, moet op 31 december om drie uur ’s nachts in elke straat tegelijk worden gehandhaafd. De komende vijf maanden wijzen uit of Nederland een stillere jaarwisseling krijgt, of vooral een illegalere.
Meer weten?
Rijksoverheid: landelijk vuurwerkverbod voor consumenten dit jaar van kracht
Staatsblad 2026, 168: inwerkingtredingsbesluit en ontheffingsregels
Openbaar Ministerie: Richtlijn voor strafvordering vuurwerkdelicten
@nixCraft Same here, choose Debian as my go-to distro 10 years ago and never looked back. (Mandriva, Ubuntu, Fedora, Gentoo, Centos and others, i've seen a couple)
Welcome to a special edition of the Abstract! I’m out on vacation for the next two weeks, which means it’s time to break out all of the weird and wild studies that have come out so far in 2026, but that slipped through the cracks for one reason or another. I’ve been saving these gems up for a special occasion and hope you enjoy the roundups this week and next!
So without further delay, here are the studies this year that put aliens on lockdown, bedazzled their axes, undulated spermily, and captured shooting stars.
First, scientists come up with a game plan to protect Earth from invasive extraterrestrial species. Then: a trove of rare decorative tools, GIGANTIC SPERM, and a long-sought solution to a Venusian mystery.
Well, folks: It’s finally time to build a quarantine on the Moon for aliens.
That’s the upshot of a study published in May that argues for the establishment of “a lunar biocontainment facility” to house extraterrestrial samples en route to Earth until they are deemed safe.
The U.S. and China's space programs both aim to bring back samples from the surface of Mars in the coming years, and many missions have already delivered rocks from asteroids. The new study anticipates a disastrous scenario in which samples from nearby celestial bodies might contain dangerous extraterrestrial life.
“If samples from Mars or other celestial bodies harbor dormant or active biological entities, then Earth’s biosphere could become exposed to a potentially invasive novel organism with unpredictable pathogenicity or ecological effects,” said Frederick I. Moxley of Strategic Threat and Analysis Research Laboratories, LLC, and Anthony Ricciardi of McGill University.
“For example, if extraterrestrial life exists, its molecular architecture could reflect atypical biochemistry (such as chirality reversal or alternative nucleic acid analogs) that is hazardous to Earth’s ecosystems and even to human biology,” the team added.
The team pointed to earthly analogs, such as viral strains that have broken containment or species that thrive in habitats that are completely different from the ones in which they originally evolved. If life on Earth can be this adaptable and unpredictable, why should we expect anything different from life elsewhere?
“The Moon must not merely serve as a stepping stone for exploration, but also as a preemptive shield between Earth and potential forms of extraterrestrial contamination…ensuring that exploration does not come at the expense of Earth’s biosphere” the team said. “The formalization of such precautionary lunar quarantine protocols will not only safeguard our planet, but also affirm humanity’s maturity as an interplanetary civilization.”
Moreover, “the economic cost for a lunar biocontainment facility is negligible compared to the potential ecological devastation of an invasive extraterrestrial organism.”
There you have it: We can’t afford not to build an alien Moon quarantine.
Some 500,000 years ago, early humans collected fossils and geodes and crafted them into handaxes, according to a study published in March that suggested these decorative tools had symbolic significance to their makers.
From 2024 to 2025, archaeologists discovered an unprecedented trove of ten fossil-bearing handaxes in what is today the Sakhnin Valley in Israel, which were made by the influential early human Homo erectus. While previous digs have unearthed the occasional handaxe containing fossils, this is the first site to yield a whole hoard of them.
“To our knowledge, no other archaeological context besides Sakhnin Valley has yielded more than a single extraordinary specimen,” said authors Ran Barkai of Tel Aviv University and Muataz Shalala, a local independent researcher who found the site.
“We propose that these handaxes served as tools and mediators between humans and the cosmos, conceived as objects of potency enhanced by the primeval fossil imprints and unique geological features within the stone,” the team said. “The richly embellished rocky landscape of Sakhnin Valley, particularly with its abundant geodes, may have encouraged early humans to express their profound and extraordinary relationships with the cosmos via stones.”
The human appreciation for cool rocks knows no bounds. Given that there’s no obvious functional advantage to the fossil-bearing stones beyond aesthetics, It’s tantalizing to imagine what these geological rarities meant to the bygone humans who selected them.
Here’s a fun fact to share at a party: Fruit flies have the longest sperm in nature. Measuring anywhere from several millimeters to more than two inches depending on the species, these bugs offer an extreme example of “sperm gigantism,” a phenomenon seen across many animal species.
Now, scientists have probed the mystery of how these “ultralong sperm” avoid getting all tangled up in their journey through the female reproductive tract, according to a study published in June.
Using in vivo imagery and mathematical models, researchers revealed how two-millimeter-long sperm from the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster autonomously organizes themselves en route to prospective fertilization.
Illustration of collective flows of fruit fly sperm. Image: Lucy Reading-Ikkanda/Simons Foundation
“Giant sperm have evolved in several animal taxa for >100 million years—a testament to the enduring success of sperm gigantism as a sexual strategy,” said researchers co-led by Jasmin Imran Alsous of the Flatiron Institute and Brato Chakrabarti of International Centre for Theoretical Sciences in India.
Fruit fly sperm seamlessly forms “collective flows” that are “primarily associated with the dense packing of sperm, rather than the specific geometry of the confining organs,” the team found.
Who knew fruit fly sperm could be so mesmerizing? Nature continues to astonish in the most unexpected places.
For more than a half-century, scientists have pondered the origin of the so-called “lower haze” on Venus, a particle-rich layer of clouds at about 20 to 30 miles of altitude that was first detected by spacecraft in the 1970s.
In April, a team finally solved the mystery; turns out it’s just a light sprinkling of cosmic dust from bygone shooting stars that broke up and dispersed in the Venusian skies. In addition to providing an ethereal explanation for the phenomenon on Venus, the new results may also inform our understanding of exoplanet atmospheres.
“On planets like Earth, where surface liquid water exists, rain constantly scavenges involatile particles from the air,” said researchers led by Hiroki Karyu of Tohoku University. “However, as observed in our Solar System, planets with surface liquid water are truly unique; most planets possess dry atmospheres where liquid droplets evaporate before reaching the surface.”
“In such worlds, the lower haze originating from cosmic dust can accumulate in the hot lower atmosphere, enhancing cloud formation” and “substantially [impacting] the planet’s climate,” the team added. “These effects establish cosmic dust as an essential component of planetary climates, a role that is also likely to be important for exoplanets.”
No big deal, Venus is just marinating in cosmic crumbs that can shed light on alien skies. Go on with your day.
In letter to Brussels, Spanish PM hits out at ‘polarising and illegal’ reaction after tens of thousands of people crossed from Morocco to Spanish enclave
As a reminder of the EU countries that have issued strong warnings or rebukes over the events in Ceuta, my colleagues Sam Jones in Madrid, Angela Giuffrida in Rome and Jakub Krupa reported the following:
Italy’s foreign minister, Antonio Tajani, blamed the situation in Ceuta on the Sánchez government’s decision to offer a now closed scheme to regularise the status of more than 1 million undocumented migrants and asylum seekers. He said the programme had incentivised human trafficking and was “profoundly wrong”.
The Swedish prime minister, Ulf Kristersson, urged Spain to “act swiftly to regain control of the situation and fulfil its commitments within Schengen cooperation”.
It is true that most European Union countries have expressed their support for Spain in a difficult and complex situation that we have reversed in a short period of time, but there are other countries that have shown an absolutely selfish and unsupportive attitude.”
Weary travelers making their way through airports have enough to contend with these days without some Microsoft borkage popping up over departure information. Spotted by an eagle-eyed Register reader identifying themselves as Ethel Grapefruit (Mrs), one of the information boards at Heathrow Terminal 5's check-in area has decided that whatever is running behind the scenes does not meet with Microsoft's approval, and requires activation. The message is familiar to many Windows users, and appears as a watermark when something has made the knickers of the computer behind the scenes get a bit twisty. Perhaps there's been a hardware replacement, and Windows needs to be reactivated. Or an update that sent the operating system into a tizzy. There are any number of reasons the watermark may appear, and any number of ways to remove it. The good news is that, while annoying, the presence of the watermark is unlikely to have much adverse effect at a technical level. There'll be nagging. There won't be much in the way of customization to make the computer your own. And, of course, Microsoft won't be offering much – if anything – in the way of support (other than security updates). Not that any of that matters much for a sign showing where to go to check in for a flight and hand bags over to be weighed by a member of staff. However, it might matter for a passenger already a little tense about being flung through the air in a metal tube at ludicrous speed after passing through multiple (and occasionally performative) security gates. If, after stepping through the airport doors, the first sight a person has is of an approach to IT that would have the head of their home tech team given a stern talking-to by The Boss, what hope is there for the rest of the journey? Heathrow and British Airways are names that rarely feature in sentences that include the words "competent IT." There was the 2024 British Airways luggage whoopsie or last year's Heathrow fire-related closure. Digital signage indicating that some IT contractor has not done their work to the required standard is therefore the least of their worries. And it's not as if either entity couldn't afford a Windows license. Let's face it, the cost of some baggage tipping the scales would probably go a long way toward acquiring a license key (if that is indeed the issue). However, for an already jumpy customer, a Windows activation message is unlikely to assuage nerves already jangling over EU passport queues and overly complicated airplanes doing some odd things on approach. Perhaps the moral of today's bork is that it is better to forget all this traveling malarky. Instead, how about a nice sit-down, a beverage, and a delicious biscuit? ®
Toch een bijzondere Pride, want de eerste keer met ook zo eentje als premier! Z'n verloofde is er overigens niet bij, want hockeytraining in Argentinië. Maar goed, we gaan geNIETEN. 80 boten, ongeveer precies zoveel betonblokken en Splinter Chabot. Jetten ter plaatse tegen AT5: ""Het is geweldig, sowieso is de Pride in Amsterdam altijd een feest, maar nu met de World Pride erbij extra groot (...). En heel belangrijk. Want dit gaat niet alleen maar over vrijheid, blijheid. Maar ook over die hele belangrijke strijd voor de lhbti-gemeenschap in Nederland en wereldwijd."Hij zegt dat deaanslag in Berlijnvorige week 'des te meer reden om te laten zien dat we ons hier niet klein laten krijgen'. "Ik merk vooral dat iedereen hier echt extra gemotiveerd is om hier vandaag echt een geweldig evenement van te maken. Om Amsterdam echt weer op de kaart te zetten als een van de belangrijke plekken voor de lhbti-emancipatie wereldwijd."" Vanaf 12:00 live te volgen op NPO1, en als het meezit straks onderstaand nog een AT5 livestream.
