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More than 200,000 barrels of low-level radioactive waste were stored on the floor of the Atlantic Ocean between 1949 and 1982, reports ScienceAlert.

Whatever happened to those barrels?


Scientists have descended to the wreckage in a crewed submersible to investigate — and found many of the barrels corroded and degraded, their contents spilling across the seafloor. Surprisingly, this isn't necessarily a subversion of the original plan... The International Atomic Energy Agency recommends that low-level waste be disposed of in robust containment in isolation for at least a few hundred years — but back in the mid-20th century, the recommendations were a little different. The contemporaneous guidelines recommended that containers needed to reach the seafloor intact and remain sealed only long enough for the short-lived radionuclides to decay. After that, the remaining waste was expected to slowly escape and disperse through the surrounding ocean. Not everything in the barrels would conveniently decay away, however. They contained a radioactive hodgepodge, including cesium-137, plutonium isotopes, and tritium, some of which can persist for thousands of years...

[A] few years ago, nuclear engineer Patrick Chardon and marine geologist Javier Escartín of the French National Center for Scientific Research started to wonder what had become of the dumped waste. That question eventually became NODSSUM — Nuclear Ocean Dump Site Survey Monitoring — an interdisciplinary project bringing together nuclear physics, geology, oceanography, biology, and marine chemistry to find the barrels and investigate what, if anything, they were doing to the surrounding environment.... [T]he barrels also appeared to function as tiny oases on the otherwise sparsely populated sandy seafloor. Anemones had attached themselves to the barrels. Sponges, sea cucumbers, fish, and crustaceans lived around them, with crabs apparently particularly fond of the artificial shelters...

Instruments aboard the ship detected significant signals of cobalt-60 and niobium-94, which the researchers could specifically link to the dumped waste... [Samples are now being analyzed] There is precedent, however, to suggest that even striking levels of radioactivity around a source don't necessarily spread very far. A recent study of the sunken Soviet submarine Komsomolets found radionuclide levels hundreds of thousands of times above background immediately around the leaking reactor — but those levels dropped sharply within just a few meters as the material dispersed through the seawater. The NODSSUM team similarly found that, despite the significant radioactive signals around the barrels, activity levels weren't high enough to pose major radiation-protection problems for the scientists handling the samples. [Their three-person submersible] Nautile and the instruments it carried showed no signs of contamination.
The real achievement was mapping the exact location of the barrels. "None of this means the waste is harmless," the article concludes — but it also doesn't mean we're about to be overrun by radioactive crabs."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

CANBERRA (ANP) - Kunstmatige intelligentie (AI) van het bedrijf OpenAI heeft een Australische overheidswebsite binnengedrongen, meldt de Australische premier Anthony Albanese aan de Sydney Morning Herald. Het AI-programma had daardoor ook toegang tot medische gegevens die niet openbaar zijn.

"Dit is natuurlijk onacceptabel", zei Albanese in New York, waar hij de bijeenkomst van de Verenigde Naties bijwoont. "En vandaag heb ik gesproken met Sam Altman, de CEO van OpenAI, om de grote bezorgdheid van Australië over dit incident te uiten."

De infiltratie vond plaats in juni. Albanese zegt teleurgesteld te zijn dat OpenAI er "veel te lang" over heeft gedaan om dit te melden aan de Australische regering.

Volgens de premier is er op dit moment geen reden om aan te nemen dat het AI-programma bij meer overheidswebsites is binnengedrongen.

NEW YORK (ANP/AFP) - Topmannen van prominente AI-bedrijven hebben woensdag de VN-Veiligheidsraad woensdag toegesproken over de risico's en veiligheid rond AI, nu AI-systemen steeds krachtiger worden. Zo beloofde topman Dario Amodei van Anthropic, bekend van chatbot Claude, dat het bedrijf "zoveel zal vertragen als nodig is om ervoor te zorgen dat elke volgende AI-technologie die we uitbrengen ook echt veilig is".

De afgelopen tijd hebben berichten over hacks door AI-systemen wereldwijd een debat ontketend over de toenemende risico's van kunstmatige intelligentie en de maatregelen die nodig zijn om deze te beperken. Amodei riep AI-bedrijven onlangs al op om het tempo waarin ze de capaciteiten van AI-modellen uitbreiden bewust te matigen. Die oproep werd gesteund door onder meer OpenAI-topman Sam Altman en Elon Musk.

Altman sprak de vijftien leden van de Veiligheidsraad ook toe. De baas van het bedrijf achter chatbot ChatGPT zei dat de huidige fase in de ontwikkeling van AI "vraagt om uiterste voorzichtigheid".

ASSEN (ANP) - Drie Drentse mannen hebben gevangenisstraffen tot vier jaar tegen zich horen eisen voor oplichting van Amazon. Het OM heeft de drie onder meer oplichting en verduistering ten laste gelegd. Ook wordt hen onder andere witwassen en deelname aan een criminele organisatie verweten. Volgens het Openbaar Ministerie hebben ze Amazon voor miljoenen euro's opgelicht.

De officier van justitie eiste tegen de hoofdverdachte, een 30-jarige man uit Hoogeveen, vier jaar gevangenisstraf. De twee medeverdachten moeten respectievelijk 30 en 28 maanden de cel in als het aan justitie ligt.

Volgens de officier van justitie deden de verdachten alsof ze goederen retour zouden sturen, maar gebeurde dat niet. De retouren werden gevuld met goedkope spullen, om het gewicht van de oorspronkelijke doos te benaderen. "Zo betaalden de verdachten niet voor onder meer telefoons, geheugenkaarten en LEGO. De schade voor Amazon liep daarbij uiteindelijk in de miljoenen."

Amazon vraagt in deze strafzaak om een schadevergoeding van omgerekend ruim 2 miljoen euro.

NEW YORK (ANP) - Wall Street is woensdag lager de handelsdag uitgegaan. Beleggers volgen de onderhandelingen over het beëindigen van het conflict in het Midden-Oosten. Ook kijken zij vooruit naar de belangrijke top tussen de Verenigde Staten en China, die donderdag plaatsvindt. De olieprijzen stegen, wat de vrees voor een hogere inflatie aanwakkerde.

De Dow-Jonesindex eindigde 0,7 procent lager op 51.511,59 punten. De brede S&P 500 verloor 0,8 procent tot 7706,03 punten. Techgraadmeter Nasdaq werd in zijn opmars gestuit en noteerde bij het slot 1,1 procent lager tot 26.936,04 punten. De Nasdaq steeg dinsdag nog tot een nieuw recordniveau, dankzij sterke koerswinsten van chipbedrijven en techbedrijven.

De olieprijzen stegen, nadat de prijs per vat de afgelopen dagen juist een daling liet zien. Brentolie kostte 4,5 procent meer op 103,67 dollar per vat en Amerikaanse olie werd 2,5 procent duurder tot 92,78 dollar per vat.

BRUSSEL (ANP) - De Europese Unie zegt "diep bezorgd" te zijn over het oplaaiende geweld tussen de Tigray-rebellen en het Ethiopische leger in het noorden van het land. De diplomatieke dienst van de EU roept op tot de-escalatie en stelt dat het "nog niet te laat" is om terug te keren naar de afspraken van het vredesakkoord uit 2022.

"Meningsverschillen kunnen alleen worden opgelost door middel van dialoog, en niet door militair optreden", staat in de verklaring. De EU hamert op respect voor mensenrechten en veroordeelt aanvallen op hulporganisaties.

De spanningen in Tigray liepen de afgelopen tijd sterk op door confrontaties en droneaanvallen. Woensdag escaleerde de situatie. De rebellen vielen steden aan en namen een aantal vliegvelden in.

De Ethiopische president Taye Atske-Selassie ⁠Amde sprak woensdag tijdens een bijeenkomst van wereldleiders bij de Verenigde Naties in New York. Hij stelde dat zijn land zich zeer terughoudend opstelt, "ondanks roekeloze externe actoren" die hij niet bij naam noemde.

Greg Adams Photography posted a photo:

Pannenhuis Station, Brussels.

September, 2026

Mr Mikage (ミスター御影） posted a photo:

Thomas Hawk posted a photo:

Thomas Hawk posted a photo:

Wieke Kaptein’s early goal gave Chelsea a winning start to their Champions League campaign against Austria Vienna but it was a far from comfortable evening for the Blues.

A David v Goliath scale endeavour welcomed the visiting team at the Cherry Red Records stadium. The mammoth financial gulf between the two teams was excellently highlighted by the Austrian broadcaster ORF in the buildup, which reported that “Chelsea Women’s personnel costs alone for the 2024/25 season, at a cool €17m, were higher than those of the entire Austria club (€14.9m) – including the men’s department, by far the largest item.” Meanwhile, Uefa noted that the manager Stefan Kenesei has a full-time job in state pensions insurance.

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Scientists are questioning whether the nestings on Seal and Huntington Beach were freak occurrences or start of a trend

A sea turtle crawled out of the surf in southern California last weekend around sunset and started laying eggs in the sand.

People on Huntington Beach who saw the female olive ridley sea turtle were shocked and excited. And they weren’t the only ones freaking out, said Justin Viezbicke, the California stranding coordinator for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association (Noaa).

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Prime minister says measure is discriminatory when fans of other sports are not similarly restricted

Andy Burnham has signalled he may lift the ban on drinking alcohol in the stands at football matches, suggesting it is “unfair” for fans to be singled out when it is permitted for other sports.

The prime minister, a committed Everton fan who still attends matches, said there was a case for trialling an end to the ban to bring football in line with rugby and cricket.

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The Mercury prize-winner said ‘quite severe’ bleed was why he’d missed support slots with Mumford & Sons this year

The British singer-songwriter Michael Kiwanuka has said he has suffered a stroke and faces a “long tough journey” on the road to recovery.

The 39-year-old singer from London, whose hits include Cold Little Heart and Home Again, said the “quite severe” bleed in his brain was the reason he had missed some tour dates this year when he was due to support Mumford & Sons, and that the stroke had been brought on by high blood pressure.

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I can’t remember where I heard about this, but judging by the trailer, Hope by Korean director Na Hong-jin looks pretty good.

Het Tigrese Volksbevrijdingsfront en het regeringsleger vochten tussen november 2020 en november 2022 een oorlog uit, waarbij vermoedelijk honderdduizenden burgerslachtoffers vielen.

Decision-making AI model Jev has found another job: helping a Chrome extension identify and flag low-value writing on LinkedIn. AI enthusiast, author, and business consultant Tom Frazier released Slop Mop as a Chrome extension on Tuesday, as well as publishing its code on GitHub for those who want to tinker with it on their own. Frazier said it’s completely free, doesn’t require any signup, and doesn’t just filter out AI slop, either - it catches garbage written by humans too, actually. The extension relies on nine signs drawn from research by SEO firm Graphite Growth into patterns that appear disproportionately often in AI-generated writing – a particularly relevant issue on LinkedIn. AI-detection outfit Pangram classified 41 percent of the LinkedIn posts longer than 250 words in its sample as fully AI-generated, which doesn't include posts human authors use AI to improve. The problem has become so bad that LinkedIn recently added a button to the platform that allows users to report posts as "Seems Like AI Slop." Slop Mop distills Graphite's much broader research into nine tells: Posts stop users from scrolling by including one line of text and a gap that requires viewers to extend the post, use lots of hype words, contain no-catch promises, are written with flowery language, contain a suspiciously neat lesson, are engagement bait, rely on empty praise, define terms by contrast, and are worded stiffly. Those nine tells are what Slop Mop uses to identify potentially low-value writing, and two more questions are posed to prevent quality content from getting caught up in a Jevian purge: Whether what's written sounds like a particular person and whether it contains anything useful to readers. Both of those questions lower the score, Frazier explains on Slop Mop's website. A 12th question asks how likely it is that a model drafted the post, but that answer can only lower the slop score for writing that otherwise reads as human-written and cannot cause a post to be flagged on its own. None of those factors alone will distinguish AI from human writing, we note - as does Frazier. He describes Slop Mop less as an AI detector and more as a filter for eliminating internet garbage, no matter who or what writes it. “Slop Mop flags poor human content equally to poor AI content,” Frazier told The Register. “I feel that is the right decision because AI content can also be good and human content can also be bad.” The key question behind Slop Mop, Frazier writes in an FAQ on the extension’s website, is whether a post is worth your attention. Slop Mop will either flag or hide posts that meet its threshold for slop, whether AI- or human-written, meaning that they won’t actually be removed from a LinkedIn feed and can still be reported using the “Seems Like AI Slop” button. By Jev, he might be on to something! Rather than being frustrated by LinkedIn slop and looking for a way to stop seeing it, Frazier told us his primary motivation in building Slop Mop was to experiment with Jev, the new probabilistic decision AI model from TypeSafe that was released last week. Jev isn’t a chatbot and can’t be interacted with like one. Instead, it is designed to make probabilistic decisions for other software systems and is accessed via an API. It’s quickly become a hit on the internet, with developers finding lots of new applications for the cheap, fast model. Slop Mop, in other words, is another attempt by another developer to run Jev through its paces, and it's been open-sourced so others can do the same if they wish, and they might want to: The entire thing is running on Frazier’s Jev account, and thus is running requests through his API key, so if it proves to be a hit, he might be looking at some sizeable bills. Frazier has implemented daily post caps for users to prevent them from running up his bill. Up to 250 posts can be analyzed per installation per day, which he said well exceeds how most use LinkedIn. “From my early install base I am seeing a cost per user of ~$0.005 per day,” Frazier told us. “If this project goes viral, I might re-evaluate the free service portion of it but for now I am happy to eat those costs to understand tuning parameters and build the dataset.” If enough people find it useful and it doesn’t break the bank, Frazier also said he may extend its capabilities beyond LinkedIn to other platforms, but for now he’s treating it purely as a Jev experiment. Speaking of which, he’s pleased with the early results, saying that the project shows off Jev’s capabilities as “a new class of AI infrastructure that is here to stay.” “The context aware decision making with a confidence score will do more for enterprise workflows than LLMs have to date,” Frazier predicts. You can grab your own copy of Slop Mop on GitHub, or install it from the Chrome Web Store. ®

Endless Countdown is a 22-day illustrated countdown created for the start of the KHL 2026/27 season. Designed specifically for the Endless Paper app, each illustration is nested inside the next, forming one continuous infinite zoom through all 22 artworks. The format required a more simplified visual approach, with cleaner shapes, fewer effects, and no gradients or complex overlays. Each piece represents a different team and city, combining club identity, mascots, local landmarks, cultural references, inside jokes, and easter eggs. A custom numeral set was also created to unify the entire series.