Slashdot

News for nerds, stuff that matters

Astronomers Find Biggest Super-Puff Planets Yet That Are Lighter Than Cotton Candy

Astronomers have discovered two Jupiter-sized exoplanets with densities lower than cotton candy, making them the lightest known worlds of their size. The rare "super-puffs," located about 1,110 light-years away, are likely composed mostly of hydrogen and helium, with follow-up observations by the James Webb Space Telescope expected to probe their atmospheres. The Associated Press reports: [University of Oxford's George Dransfield] suspects these fluffy, wispy worlds are probably white or blue, depending on whether the skies there are cloudy -- no shades of cotton-candy pink. The planets are probably mostly hydrogen and helium, although it will take follow-up observations by NASA's Webb Space Telescope to confirm their chemical makeup.

Detected by NASA's Tess satellite over the past decade, these two especially puffy-puffs orbit a star in the southern constellation Volans, known as the flying fish. The researchers studied the planets' orbits using telescopes on Earth to determine their density, from 1,110 light-years away. A light-year is nearly 6 trillion miles (9.7 trillion kilometers). Jupiter, by comparison, is as much as 35 times denser than these two lightweights.

Considered rare in the cosmos, super-puffs are thought to form around the disk of gas and dust around a newborn star where there is more gas than dust. They shed much of the material over time, stripping down even more. NASA's tally of worlds outside our solar system currently stands at nearly 6,300 confirmed. Fewer than 40 are super-puffs, according to Dransfield. The findings have been published in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Register

Biting the hand that feeds IT — Enterprise Technology News and Analysis

It's looking like a hot, messy summer for security teams as AI finds countless previously hidden vulns

It's going to be a "messy" summer for security folks, especially when it comes to fixing the open source code that underpins their organizations. That's according to Dan Lorenc, CEO and co-founder of Chainguard, a software supply-chain security company leading Athena, a newly formed coalition of about two dozen companies that wants to make the process of finding and fixing open source bugs "as easy to consume as possible." The members have committed to using AI to prevent attacks on open source software. In addition to Chainguard, other founding member companies include BNY, Cisco, Cloudflare, Corridor, DepthFirst, Docker, JPMorganChase, Kyndryl, LTM, and PwC. Many of these member companies are also partners with Anthropic's Project Glasswing and OpenAI Daybreak, which allow them to try out the pair's most advanced bug-hunting models. The coalition accepts vulnerability findings generated by all frontier models, according to Lorenc. Athena has already processed more than 20,000 findings and developed over 2,000 patches across 500 open source projects. In about three weeks, the coalition's first wave of bug disclosures will begin. "This is going to be a messy summer for everyone," Lorenc told The Register in a phone interview. "I know there's still a percentage of people who think it's all fake and marketing," he said, talking about the newest, most advanced frontier models like Anthropic's Mythos and OpenAI's GPT‑5.5‑Cyber. "The stats and data we're seeing are so scary – if you just keep running scans on the same libraries and same code, it just keeps finding more [vulnerabilities]," Lorenc said. "We haven't seen that curve start to bottom out yet." Chainguard isn't part of Glasswing or Daybreak, but many of its customers and partners are. "Put yourself in the shoes of someone with Glasswing access," he said. "You get this crazy, new model that can find vulnerabilities everywhere, that no one had seen and you had missed for years with all of your other tooling. You run it on your code, and it finds tons of stuff in your first-party code, the stuff that you've written, and you fix all of that." After running Mythos Preview on all of your organization's proprietary code, imagine pointing the model at an application. Most modern apps contain a mixture of code from different sources, mostly third-party. According to Lorenc, 95 percent of the code in any of these codebases is open source. "When you run [advanced models] at the application level, you find a ton of vulnerabilities in open source code that you can't fix for yourself the same way you can that first-party code," Lorenc said. "So then you're left with: what to do?" By now, most people are familiar with vulnerability disclosure processes and know they need to report these flaws to open source project maintainers. "But when the numbers start getting this large, and you're finding thousands of these [bugs] at a time, and they're across tons of projects you didn't even know you were using before you ran this tool, and you don't even know how to contact the people, you kind of get stuck," he said. The only guarantee in the entire disclosure process is that attackers are moving quickly and the time to exploit – that's the time between a CVE's public disclosure and first confirmed in-the-wild exploitation – has essentially collapsed. A clearinghouse for bug reports This may mean that your application is vulnerable to attack even before someone develops a patch. "Then you're putting yourself at risk – and you were already at risk before you ran these scans, but no one else knew about it," Lorenc said. "In an unintended way, [AI] has created this pickle for everyone." In May, Anthropic said it used Mythos Preview to scan more than 1,000 open-source projects, which also underpin much of its own infrastructure, and found an estimated 6,202 high or critical-severity vulnerabilities in these projects. "It's a super awkward, strange world and timeline we are all living in," Lorenc said. "There's a ton of pressure because all of the frontier models are getting better, and the open models are getting better, and they're going to be able to start discovering these at the same time, too. So, that's what we're trying to help with: to be that clearinghouse for critical industry." Athena coalition members submit vulnerabilities they find in open source code using any frontier model. Sometimes they find these bugs while scanning their own apps. In other cases they discover them after pointing Mythos or GPT‑5.5‑Cyber at a commonly used library, Lorenc said. The companies submit a full report to Chainguard, which acts as a clearinghouse, deduplicating, correlating, and addressing findings from members in batches across entire libraries, hardening them against classes of vulnerabilities instead of just one bug. Affected projects are rebuilt as private, hardened versions available to Athena members through Chainguard Libraries before vulnerabilities are publicly disclosed – and hopefully addressed upstream – a month later. For maintainers that can't make a permanent fix, Athena acts as a "maintainer of last resort," according to Lorenc. On Thursday, the Linux Foundation joined the effort and announced Akrites, an industry coalition to defend open source software against AI-enabled threats, by finding and fixing vulnerabilities. Akrites establishes a shared Security Incident Response Team (SIRT) and a standardized Coordinated Vulnerability Disclosure (CVD) process. Founding companies include Amazon Web Services, Anthropic, Chainguard, Cisco, Citi, Endor Labs, Ericsson, Google, IBM, JPMorganChase, Microsoft and GitHub, Nvidia, OpenAI, RapidFort, Red Hat, Rust Foundation, Sonatype, Vodafone, and Zscaler. "As AI finds more vulnerabilities, the industry will rush to patch them. Without coordination, those fixes will fragment across different patches and forks, and maintainers who are already overwhelmed, unreachable, or haven't touched a project in years," Lorenc said, adding that Akrites provides a coordinated way to fix flaws upstream before criminals exploit them. Plus having a dedicated SIRT gives maintainers a single partner - and disclosure -to work with on remediation instead of a hundred uncoordinated reports. "Now the work is making sure there's always someone on the other end to catch them," Lorenc said. ®

VK: Voorpagina

Volkskrant.nl biedt het laatste nieuws, opinie en achtergronden

Ruim 1,6 miljoen keken donderdagnacht naar Nederlands elftal

Premier Netanyahu: leger trekt zich terug op twee plekken in Zuid-Libanon na nieuw ‘raamwerk voor vrede’

Vliegtuigje vliegt tegen hoogste wolkenkrabber van Beijing en China wil niet dat iemand dit weet

Wel.nl

Minder lezen, Meer weten.

Weeronline: nieuw junirecord voor warmste nacht vastgesteld

HOUTEN (ANP) - Voor de derde dag op rij is het landelijke junirecord voor de hoogste minimumtemperatuur verbroken, meldt Weeronline zaterdag. In Maastricht daalde de temperatuur gedurende het etmaal van vrijdag niet onder de 22,9 graden.

Het vorige record van 22,8 graden werd een dag eerder gemeten in Horst. Daarvoor stond het junirecord op 22,0 graden, gemeten in Vlissingen.

In De Bilt bleef het officiële junirecord staan. De minimumtemperatuur kwam daar uit op 21,2 graden, net onder de 21,3 graden van een dag eerder. Die meting vormde de eerste officiële tropennacht in juni ooit in De Bilt.


Ruim 1,6 miljoen mensen bleven wakker voor Oranje

AMSTERDAM (ANP) - De laatste groepswedstrijd van het Nederlands elftal op het WK voetbal is in de nacht van donderdag op vrijdag door zo'n 1,6 miljoen mensen bekeken. Dat blijkt uit voorlopige cijfers van het Nationaal Media Onderzoek (NMO).

De kijkcijfers worden elke dag tot 02.00 uur berekend. Daardoor was vrijdag al duidelijk dat naar de eerste helft bijna 1,65 miljoen mensen hadden gekeken. De tweede helft toonde nauwelijks verval, blijkt zaterdag. Daar bleven 1,62 miljoen mensen voor op.

Ondanks het nachtelijke duel is de wedstrijd wel het best bekeken programma van de vrijdag. Noorwegen-Frankrijk volgt met 1,3 miljoen kijkers.

Naar de eerste WK-wedstrijden van Oranje keken respectievelijk 4,2 en 4,6 miljoen mensen.


Vanillasludge posted a photo:

Vanillasludge posted a photo:

Azumi, Nagano Japan

Vanillasludge posted a photo:

Azumi, Nagano Japan

Vanillasludge has added a photo to the pool:

Azumi, Nagano Japan

Rijnmond - Nieuws

Het laatste nieuws van vandaag over Rotterdam, Feyenoord, het verkeer en het weer in de regio Rijnmond

Tien wethouders, slechts één persoon van kleur in nieuw Rotterdams college: 'Geen goede afspiegeling'

Het nieuwe Rotterdamse college bestaat uit tien wethouders, waarvan slechts één persoon met een migratieachtergrond. Dat leidt tot kritiek, want volgens velen vormt dit geen goede afspiegeling van de bevolking van zo’n multiculturele stad. “Het kan niet in deze tijd”, vinden ook de nieuwe wethouders zelf.

Mist

jspeter9191 has added a photo to the pool:

Mist

Today(27/06/26) morning at Tallawong rooftop, Sydney, Australia.
God will be with you.

Sunrise at Manly boat harbour Brisbane

Vinaykumargg has added a photo to the pool:

Sunrise at Manly boat harbour Brisbane

The Guardian

Latest news, sport, business, comment, analysis and reviews from the Guardian, the world's leading liberal voice

Life, Larry and the Pursuit of Unhappiness: only Larry David would have the titanium balls to pull this off

It’s Curb Your Enthusiasm in britches and bonnets, poking hole after hole in American lore – and it’s so audacious it will make your jaw drop. Brace yourself!

‘I hear America singing,” wrote Walt Whitman in Leaves of Grass. He didn’t say that the song was “USA! USA!” backed by a klaxon and accompanied by a foam finger. For a country evangelical about its superiority, there is a dark and sizable underbelly they would prefer to ignore. A pretty big overbelly, too. Yet every society has its truth tellers – and they’re generally obnoxious types who can’t let things go.

Who better to educate America on its history, then, than Larry David? Loads of people. But none of them have a series on HBO, executive produced by Barack and Michelle Obama. Life, Larry and the Pursuit of Unhappiness: An Almost History of America reimagines key scenes from 250 years of US history, as if they were a series of rapidly escalating, socially awkward celebrations of epic pettiness. In other word, it’s Curb Your Enthusiasm in britches and bonnets. I’m excited.

Continue reading...

What was the first concert tour to gross $2bn in ticket sales? The Saturday quiz

From the Cosmati Pavement and Pyx Chamber to Ode to the Yimeng Mountains, test your knowledge with the Saturday quiz

1 Who requested in his will that an art gallery be established in Linz?
2 Which mustelid was named “most fearless animal” by Guinness World Records?
3 What was the first concert tour to gross $2bn in ticket sales?
4 The Kirkwood gaps are regions within what?
5 The Ishihara test is used to diagnose which condition?
6 Which element is named from the Greek for lead?
7 Helvetia appears on which country’s stamps?
8 Which sports teams were rebranded from “minor” to “national” in 2020?
What links:
9
Agatha Christie; Sophia Engastromenou; Earl Spencer?
10 The Red Detachment of Women; The White-Haired Girl; Ode to the Yimeng Mountains?
11 Cosmati Pavement; Henry VII Chapel; Pyx Chamber; Shrine of Edward the Confessor?
12 Alexandria and Avignon; Balkans and Levant; Cairo; New York?
13 Lost (Confederate myth); Good Old (English republicanism); Great (13th-century Scottish succession)?
14 Coldplay; Devo; James; Talking Heads; U2?
15 Alces alces, Canada; Haliaeetus leucocephalus, US; Panthera onca, Mexico?

Continue reading...

BBC was aware of concerns over Ashley Cain’s ‘toxic masculinity’ online

Disclosure casts doubt on broadcaster’s claim that failure to properly vet presenter lay with independent production partners

The BBC failed to investigate concerns about the presenter Ashley Cain that were raised with the broadcaster directly by an interviewee who was a victim of sexual violence.

Last week, the Guardian reported that Cain, a former footballer and reality TV star, had a history of extreme misogyny on social media.

Continue reading...

Watching Brokeback Mountain kept me in the closet

The first time I saw the film, I convinced myself I didn’t like it. Now it’s one of my favourites

I was 14 years old the first time I saw two men kiss on screen. It was 2006, and my mum had rented Brokeback Mountain from our local Blockbuster. She said it was a “special” movie night for “just the two of us”.

For the next 134 minutes, I watched two sheep herders, Ennis Del Mar (Heath Ledger) and Jack Twist (Jake Gyllenhaal), fall in love in the beautiful Wyoming countryside, only for that love to be suffocated by rigid expectations of masculinity and self-contempt. The film culminates in Jack’s untimely death, and alludes to the possibility that he was the victim of a vicious homophobic hate crime.

Continue reading...

The Guide #249: As Glastonbury has a fallow year, here’s why more much-loved culture should down tools

In this week’s newsletter: The festival always comes back fresher after allowing Worthy Farm to recover from its yearly musical extravaganza. Star Wars and Charli xcx could learn a thing or two

In any other year this week’s Guide would be arriving into your inbox from Worthy Farm, home of Glastonbury festival. Not in 2026 though: for the first time since the Covid pandemic, which poleaxed two consecutive years of the festival, Glasto is a no-show. The reason? It has booked in one of its occasional fallow years, which allows the dairy farmland on which the festival sits a chance to recover from a half decade of camping, trampling and moshing. It also gives its organisers a rare window to recharge their batteries and plan for the festival’s future, and its detractors a year off from declaring its headliners “the worst ever”, again.

For long-term Glasto-goers, it’s always bittersweet when the fallow year rolls around – the last was in 2018 – but this year it does feel like a bullet dodged, given that the event would have landed bang in the middle of a truly dangerous heatwave (my face, and many others, would have turned a previously undiscovered shade of beetroot). And moreover, the fallow year often works a treat: when the festival returns the year after, it tends to be re-energised, with new stages, stronger lineups and well rested people running the show.

Continue reading...

Where Copenhagen leads, the food world still follows

Two decades after chefs rewrote the rules at Noma, Copenhagen’s food scene still flies the flag for seasonality and innovation – progressive, sustainable and uniquely Danish

I didn’t realise I was a fussy eater until I left Denmark. During 12 years of living Danishly, with regular trips to the capital, I just … liked most things. Danes specialise in high-quality, organic produce, eaten as close to its natural state as possible. Denmark has very specific, diverse climatic conditions, making seasonal eating a science. Forget root vegetables in autumn and strawberries in summer – we’re talking micro seasons, week to week, with cabbage, kale, apples, potatoes, berries and rye a speciality. None are around for long, but when they are, they’re fabulous – and the seasonal Nordic diet has been proven to be as healthy as the renowned Mediterranean diet and better for the planet. No wonder Copenhageners look so smug.

But the city’s food scene hasn’t always been so good. Many who grew up in the 1970s and 1980s report being reared on canned food and frozen vegetables, with pork and potatoes, smørrebrød (open sandwiches) or junk food making up much of the offerings. (You’re never far from a pølservogn, or “hot dog wagon”, in Copenhagen – doling out bright red wieners baked in their own bready prophylactic.)

Continue reading...