An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Just over a year ago, the Trump Administration issued an executive order meant to accelerate the development of nuclear power in the US. While an entire startup ecosystem has developed around the use of different -- and typically smaller -- reactor designs, only one of them has been fully licensed so far, and there are no plans to actually build any instances of that design.

The executive order directed the Department of Energy to have three different reactor designs reach criticality in a bit over a year. On Thursday, a startup called Antares announced that a test reactor it had placed at the Idaho National Laboratory had reached criticality, making it the first new design to cross this threshold. Criticality means that the nuclear reactions inside the hardware had become self sustaining; it does not mean the reactor had started to generate power. [...]

At the moment, Antares is just testing what it calls a Mark 0 reactor, which is not connected to the power-generation portion. Instead, it's being used to validate the company's modeling of the physical conditions in its reactors and generate safety data that can be used during licensing applications. Attempts to run the entire system, including electrical generation, are expected to happen next year. While the work was done at a Department of Energy Lab, the company is working with the Department of Defense's Project Pele program for developing a mobile nuclear reactor. The company has also received support from NASA.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A security researcher says evidence suggests the U.S. military has been using an obscure GPS message field for nearly 20 years to broadcast encrypted key-distribution data, effectively turning GPS satellites into a global "numbers station." The hidden-looking 176-bit messages appear tied to the Pentagon's Over-the-Air Distribution system for remotely updating cryptographic keys, meaning ordinary GPS receivers may have been receiving the traffic all along without anyone outside the military noticing. The findings have been detailed by Steven Murdoch, an information security expert, in a new article in Inside GNSS. 404 Media reports: [...] From the beginning, he suspected that the subframe field contained encrypted transmissions because the data was so random. "Random data is actually very unusual to get in nature," Murdoch said. "If you see it, either it's been carefully designed to be random -- but then, why is someone sending out random data? -- or it's encrypted data. I thought encrypted data is by far the most likely explanation." He returned to the subframe on and off over the years, and solicited guesses about its content on Stack Exchange in 2023. Ahmed Kamruddin, a master's student at UCL, developed the project further in 2025. Then, this year, Murdoch put the last pieces of the puzzle together over several weeks by analyzing open archive Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) recordings collected since 2007 and kept by GFZ Helmholtz Centre for Geosciences.

This dataset included more than 12 million observations of Subframe 4, Page 17, yielding 3,994 unique 176-bit messages. Within this corpus, Murdoch pinpointed key-repeating "sentinels" including a pattern that appeared in February 2010 and was broadcast on and off across dozens of satellites for more than a decade. Murdoch discovered that this particular sentinel was transmitted by all 31 operational satellites within a window of a few hours on May 26, 2011, potentially heralding the activation of a new operational system. He confirmed that this timeline coincided with the rollout of the military's Over-the-Air Distribution (OTAD) and the Over-the-Air Rekeying (OTAR) by cross-referencing declassified documents, including a 2015 presentation about the dates of the operation.

"There was a perfect match between the timeline and that presentation and the change points that were automatically identified from the data," Murdoch said. "That was the smoking gun that made me think: This is what it's for." These automated systems replaced the cumbersome manual distribution of cryptographic keying material, allowing military GPS receivers around the world to be rekeyed remotely through satellite broadcasts rather than through onsite procedures. For the next 11 years, this expansive rekeying operation was overlooked in public GPS data. In 2022, the system entered a new phase, according to Murdoch's analysis. The shift was characterized by a slowing in the message rotation rate. Later, in December 2023, broadcasts carrying a distinctive "TEXT" prefix emerged then gradually spread across the constellation.

Murdoch isn't sure what explains the recent transition, though it could be a possible modernization of the infrastructure or the introduction of a new protocol. But to him, the bigger takeaway is that the signals were always available for anyone willing to take a closer look, a discovery that suggests that there could be more revelations hidden for the cryptographically curious among us. "Every receiver in the world decodes Subframe 4, Page 17," Murdoch said in his new article. "Almost none of them have ever looked at it. The lesson generalizes: There is more to learn from the bytes already arriving at our antennas than from the bytes we wish were specified differently. The data are publicly available. The signal is overhead, twice a day, every day."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Another four platypuses re-homed into Royal National Park. There are at least 20 platypuses now living in the New South Wales Royal National Park's waterways, three years after their historic reintroduction.

Andy Atzert has added a photo to the pool:

Tamba, Hyogo Prefecture, Japan

TRUE 2 DEATH has added a photo to the pool:

Rainy backstreet moments in Iwasaki, Aomori.
A quiet cat watches the world pass by from an old window along the Sea of Japan coast — one of those small everyday scenes that makes rural Japan unforgettable. This cottage always has a bunch of cats in the window and outside. They are usually quite shy.

📍Iwasaki, Aomori, Japan
photo: November 2018

Raffles Terrace has added a photo to the pool:

uchi uchi has added a photo to the pool:

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

uchi uchi has added a photo to the pool:

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De Iraanse Revolutionaire Garde (IRG) meldt zaterdag dat zij Amerikaanse bases in Koeweit en Bahrein met ballistische raketten heeft aangevallen.

Het zou gaan om een vergelding voor eerdere Amerikaanse aanvallen. Ook meldt de IRG dat het vier tankers heeft beschoten die zonder toestemming de Straat van Hormuz probeerden over te steken.

Het Amerikaanse Central Command (CENTCOM) laat in een reactie op X weten dat Iran zeven ballistische raketten in de richting van beide landen heeft afgevuurd. "Uit eerste beoordelingen blijkt dat zes van de door Iran gelanceerde raketten zijn onderschept en dat een zevende het beoogde doel niet heeft bereikt", aldus het bericht.

Volgens de VS zijn er geen meldingen van letsel bij Amerikaanse militairen en zijn de Iraanse beweringen dat het hoofdkwartier van de Amerikaanse 5e vloot in Bahrein is beschadigd, onjuist.

De Amerikanen meldden eerder dat zij vier Iraanse drones hadden neergehaald die in de richting van de Straat van Hormuz waren gelanceerd. Vervolgens vielen de VS Iraanse radarinstallaties aan.

KOEWEIT-STAD (ANP) - De Koeweitse luchtverdediging heeft drone- en raketaanvallen onderschept, zo meldt het staatspersbureau KUNA in de nacht van vrijdag op zaterdag op basis van verklaringen van de generale staf van het leger.

Het is niet bekend wat de herkomst is van de drones en raketten, noch wat de doelwitten zijn.

Eerder deze week viel één dode bij aanvallen met ballistische raketten en drones op de internationale luchthaven en meerdere diplomatieke missies in Koeweit. Volgens het land ging het om Iraanse aanvallen, maar de Iraanse Revolutionaire Garde (IRG) ontkende het vliegveld van Koeweit te hebben beschoten.

Sinds het begin van de Amerikaans-Israëlische aanvallen op Iran hebben de Iraanse strijdkrachten geregeld projectielen afgevuurd op Koeweit en andere Golfstaten.

Thomas Hawk posted a photo:

Thomas Hawk posted a photo:

Thomas Hawk posted a photo:

Thomas Hawk posted a photo:

Thomas Hawk posted a photo: