An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: South Korea's government and top tech companies are committing $1 trillion to several flagship megaprojects that could bolster global memory chip supply, build new AI data centers and spur commercial deployment of humanoid robots by 2028. [...] "We must secure the core elements of AI faster than any other country," said South Korean President Lee Jae Myung in a televised speech on June 29, as reported by BBC News and other media outlets. "Semiconductors, physical AI, and AI data centers are the triple axis for a great leap forward." [...]

The most costly of the megaprojects involves Samsung and SK Hynix committing $585 billion to building new chip fabrication plants in the southwest provinces of South Korea, along with boosting semiconductor fab construction in the Seoul capital region, according to Reuters. The government's goal is to double South Korea's production of dynamic random-access memory (DRAM) within five years. [...] The second flagship megaproject involves a $357 billion investment by the South Korean tech companies SK Group, GS Group, and Naver into building large-scale AI data centers in more outlying provinces, including South Chungcheong Province in the west, Gangwon Province in the east, and the North and South Jeolla Provinces in the southwest corner of South Korea.

The third flagship megaproject revolves around the South Korean government assigning a "national strategic industry" designation to physical AI -- the AI systems that enable robots and self-driving vehicles to interact more autonomously with the real world. The government aims to develop a Korean "general-purpose foundation model" based on a world model to support robots within three years, according to The Chosun Daily. Hyundai Motor Company has also committed $5.8 billion to build a robot manufacturing facility and AI data center in the Saemangeum region of North Jeolla Province in the southwest, The Chosun Daily reported.

The South Korean automaker has already been helping Boston Dynamics -- the US robotics company it acquired in 2021 -- use the South Korean supply chain in scaling up manufacturing to produce 30,000 Atlas humanoid robots each year by 2028. Similarly, the South Korean government announced it would aim to commercialize humanoid robots in 10 major industries by 2028, along with training 10,000 human workers as "AI robotics specialists" over the next five years, Reuters reported.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The U.S. Supreme Court ruled 6-3 (PDF) in Chatrie v United States (No. 25-112) that geofence warrants sweeping up smartphone location data constitute searches under the Fourth Amendment. The Court found that individuals have a "reasonable expectation of privacy" in such data, even when the tracking covers only a brief period or records movements in public. "An individual has a reasonable expectation of privacy in records about his cell phone's location, and police intrude on that constitutionally protected interest when they demand the information -- even though for only a limited time, and from a third-party tech company," wrote Justice Elena Kagan. Longtime Slashdot reader schwit1 submitted the story. The Guardian reports: The use of geofence warrants is widespread, and gives law enforcement agencies the power to compel tech companies to hand over sensitive cell phone data from people at or near crime scenes. The warrants allow police and the FBI to collect this information from individuals within the radius of a virtual "fence" during a particular timeframe. But they are not restricted to requesting data for precise targets.

The Chatrie case focuses on local police's pursuit of an armed bank robber in Richmond, Virginia. He fled with $195,000. Law enforcement tracked Okello Chatrie down through their use of geofence warrants. Chatrie had opted in to an optional Google "location history" feature that documented his location every few minutes. He was eventually sentenced to 12 years in prison, after pleading guilty. Chatrie's lawyers argued that this search was overly broad and violated his fourth amendment rights, which protects individuals from "unreasonable search and seizure." Lawyers said that police's use of geofence warrants amounted to an official "search" under the fourth amendment, and didn't meet the constitution's requirements for one.

The government had argued that accessing only a short amount of cellphone location information means this tactic does not count as a fourth amendment search and accordingly, should not be afforded the same privacy protections. But the judges in the majority disagreed. The judges in the majority opinion also wrote that the government's characterization of generating location history as a voluntary choice is "meritless." They suggested that people aren't choosing to share private information with third parties and the government "just by doing the ordinary thing cellphone users do." "The point of carrying smartphones is to use what is on them," including the apps and services they provide -- many of which use location data to customize a user's experience, they said.

[...] While the majority opinion noted that police conducted a fourth amendment search by accessing Chatrie's location history data, they noted that the court of appeals will weigh in on whether the "search was reasonable, meaning that each of its steps was properly described with particularity and found to be supported by probable cause." Law enforcement has said they need geofence warrants to find suspects and witnesses -- after reaching dead ends. The US government, for its part, has argued that people can't have a "reasonable expectation of privacy" when they are in public and have allowed a third party company, such as Google, to collect and analyze phone location data.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Here are all the timings – along with all the additional information you need – for the ninth Grand Prix weekend of the 2026 season from Silverstone.

McLaren have taken inspiration from their 1966 F1 car for their livery at this weekend's British Grand Prix.

Charles Leclerc had another difficult race in Austria on Sunday, so what's behind his lack of form, and how can he get back in the groove?

Allan McNish has reflected on the Austrian Grand Prix after Audi narrowly missed out on scoring points.

PARIJS (ANP/AFP) - De Franse Groene partij is van plan een motie van wantrouwen in te dienen tegen de regering vanwege de vermeend gebrekkige aanpak van de hitte deze maand, meldt Politico. Volgens partijleider Cyrielle Chatelain is de regering medeverantwoordelijk voor alle doden die er zijn gevallen tijdens de elf dagen durende hittegolf, waarin de warmste dag ooit werd gemeten.

Volgens de autoriteiten heeft de hittegolf zeker duizend mensen het leven gekost. "Deze doden heeft u op uw geweten", zei Chatelain in het parlement tegen premier Sébastien Lecornu. Die reageerde woedend en beschuldigde haar van het verspreiden van nepnieuws. Zijn kantoor verklaarde later dat de Groenen de doden misbruiken om politiek te scoren.

De motie van wantrouwen lijkt weinig kans van slagen te hebben, maar andere oppositiepartijen hebben ook kritiek op de hitte-aanpak van de regering. Het radicaal-rechtse Rassemblement National kondigde dinsdag een plan aan om airconditioners te installeren in miljoenen gebouwen.

MUSCAT (ANP) - Oman heeft een plan gemaakt voor het heffen van servicekosten in de Straat van Hormuz, meldt The New York Times op basis van ingewijden. Oman zou daarover zelfs al een officieel voorstel hebben ingediend bij de Verenigde Staten, die sterk tegen betalingen in de zeestraat zijn.

De bronnen van de Amerikaanse krant spreken elkaar wel tegen over de aard van de heffingen. Volgens een Iraanse functionaris zijn de servicekosten ook in het Omaanse plan verplicht voor alle schepen die door de Straat van Hormuz willen varen, maar een andere diplomaat uit de regio zegt dat de betalingen vrijwillig zijn. Een Amerikaanse bron bevestigt het voorstel te hebben ontvangen.

Het is niet duidelijk of dit voorstel alleen geldt voor schepen die langs de kust van Oman varen of voor de hele Straat van Hormuz. Iran en Oman liggen tegenover elkaar en recent gebruikten schepen vooral de route langs Oman, tot onvrede van Teheran. Iran zei maandag de zeestraat gezamenlijk met Oman te willen beheren.

Servicekosten

Functionarissen uit beide landen spraken maandag voor het eerst in een nieuwe Gezamenlijke Hormuzcommissie over de toekomst van de belangrijke vaarroute, die maandenlang was geblokkeerd na het begin van de oorlog tussen Iran, Israël en de Verenigde Staten.

In het zogenoemde memorandum van overeenstemming dat eerder deze maand werd gesloten tussen Iran en de VS, stond dat de Straat van Hormuz per direct weer geopend zou worden. Ook zouden er zeker zestig dagen geen betalingen worden gevraagd voor de vaarroute. Iran heeft gezegd dat de servicekosten daarna van kracht worden, de VS protesteren daartegen.

Veel Golfstaten die afhankelijk zijn van de olie-export hebben zich ook uitgesproken tegen de betalingen, omdat de vaarroute voor de oorlog gratis was.

AMSTERDAM (ANP) - De Amsterdamse effectenbeurs sloot dinsdag aanzienlijk hoger en rondde daarmee het tweede kwartaal positief af. Vooral de chipbedrijven met een groot gewicht in de index zorgden voor de winst. Wereldwijd maakten chipaandelen op de financiële markten deze week weer een opmars, wat ook zijn weerslag had op chipfondsen ASML, Besi en ASMI in de AEX. Ook ebben zorgen over oplopende inflatie weg nu vijandelijkheden tussen de Verenigde Staten en Iran niet voor grote problemen voor de scheepvaart lijken te hebben gezorgd.

De AEX won 1,4 procent op 1080,17 punten. Daarmee is de index van de dertig meest verhandelde fondsen op de Amsterdamse beurs in het tweede kwartaal van dit jaar 12,5 procent gestegen. De MidKap ging dinsdag 0,2 procent omhoog tot 1068,28 punten. De beurzen in Frankfurt, Parijs en Londen stegen tot 1,4 procent. Ook op Wall Street zat de sfeer er goed in bij beleggers.

De levensverwachting bij kanker is de afgelopen tien jaar flink gestegen. Nieuwe behandelingen lijken voor een groot aantal kankersoorten te werken, zeggen experts. „Het wordt reëler om oud te worden met kanker.”

Er rijden deze dinsdag nog steeds geen treinen tussen Rotterdam en Breda door een stroomstoring en dat zorgt voor grote frustraties bij reizigers. Waar de één op een dubbele reistijd moet rekenen, komt de ander in tijdnood om zijn vlucht te halen. Zoals het er nu naar uitziet, duren de problemen op het spoor nog de hele week.

De vijf verdachten van een massale vechtpartij in 's-Gravendeel mogen hun zitting in vrijheid afwachten. De tieners blijven verdachten in de zaak. Drie van hen hebben een gedragsaanwijzing gekregen in de vorm van een contactverbod.

⚽️ Kick-off time: 1pm local/3pm EDT/6pm BST/3am AEST
⚽️ Player guide | Bracketology | Golden Boot | Mail Scott

Norway named almost a complete team of reserves for the 4-1 loss to France, and so only Patrick Berg keeps his place from that very particular starting line-up. Ståle Solbakken welcomes back all of his first-choice men, so it’s the same team that started the 3-2 win over Senegal, with the exceptions of Marcus Holmgren Pedersen, who replaces the injured Julian Ryerson, and the aforementioned Berg, who is in for the benched Fredrik Aursnes. Erling Haaland resumes his quest for the Golden Boot.

Côte d’Ivoire make three changes to the side that started the 2-0 win over Curaçao. Emmanuel Agbadou, Ghislain Konan and Christ Inao Oulaï come in for Ousmane Diomande, Christopher Opéri and Amad Diallo.

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Reckless exercise can lead to exertional rhabdomyolysis, a condition that has risen due to the popularity of high-intensity workouts

In January 2025, I attended my first bootcamp class.

I had spent the day hunched over my laptop, anxious and craving an intense workout that would dispel my worries. I booked the class at a nearby gym, and the five-star reviews promised the all-consuming exercise I wanted: “Militant style instructor, but very motivating,” read one. Another: “Hardest workout of my life; extremely rewarding.”

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Court rules against Trump administration on policy that people born in the United States are citizens

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The US supreme court has upheld birthright citizenship, which provides nearly all people born in the country with citizenship, ruling against a central piece of Donald Trump’s anti-immigrant agenda.

“Children born in the United States to parents unlawfully or temporarily present are ‘subject to the jurisdiction’ of the United States and are citizens at birth under the Fourteenth Amendment’s Citizenship Clause,” the ruling says.

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Past and present leaders of wealthy nations such as UK and Germany have argued their actions are insignificant

On first hearing, it is a position that sounds reasonable. “When our share of global emissions is less than 1%,” Rishi Sunak argued when he was the UK prime minister in 2023, “how can it be right that British citizens are now being told to sacrifice even more than others?”

Sunak is not the only world leader to have cited such figures while delaying cuts to pollution. In 2019, Scott Morrison, Australia’s then prime minister, used his country’s 1.3% of global emissions to reject any suggestion Australia was not “doing our bit” on climate breakdown. In July, the German chancellor, Friedrich Merz, pointed to his country’s 2% share of global emissions while supporting loopholes in European climate targets. A few months later the Italian prime minister, Giorgia Meloni, followed suit, flagging the EU’s 6% share.

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Database management work will soon be mostly automated by AI agents, just like coding, according to the CEO of Cockroach Labs, the company behind the distributed database of the same name. Spencer Kimball told The Register that the proliferation of databases demanded by the explosion of AI agents in coding and business functions will mean that managing them in a largely manual way is out of the question. “Nobody's going to do manual work on a database, just like almost nobody's doing manual coding anymore,” he said. “A lot of people don't even know what’s within their code base anymore, like they only know the designs, specifications and guarantees. They're still verifying the software, but in the end they're just not down at the level of code, because it doesn't make sense. It's like nobody programs in Assembly,” he said. Kimball is among the tech CEOs with the commensurate background in software engineering to make such statements. He helped build Google’s Colossus distributed file storage system and, as a computer science student at UC Berkely, developed FOSS image editor GIMP, which continues to this day. In the time since, he has seen shifts in the level of abstraction before. “These cycles happen all the time. It's pretty easy to see what's coming next, because ultimately agents beyond coding are going to be increasingly complementing and supplementing human-driven workloads. They're going to use tools, tools are using APIs, and APIs are talking to operational databases, every single one. If you think about the implications of this massive scale-up of traffic, it means that operational databases are going to get busier, and a lot busier. We're talking about exponential scale-up,” he said. Cockroach Labs is not the only database company to see the level of AI agent demand on the enterprise as an opportunity. It’s where many vendors are positioning themselves. For example, vector database vendor Pinecone's idea is that by compiling a knowledge base of an organization's data structure and content, its technology can avoid burning through tokens back and forth between the data and AI agents. Tiger Data, the company behind TimescaleDB, has built Ghost, a technology designed specifically for developers working with AI agents, charging by compute, rather than by database. Cockroach Labs, whose customers include OpenAI, CoreWeave, Booking.com, and Cisco, is pitching the idea of an Agentic Database Cloud to address this demand. Among the elements will be elastic compute and storage separation, unified estate management, database virtualization and agentic operations. It expects to announce a product around this idea later this year. Nonetheless, in database estates, Kimball expects AI agents to act in an advisory role to avoid disruptions to operations. “You can imagine, the enterprise isn't eager to turn over the keys to production to an agent. These agents are a second pair of eyes,” he said. To this end, Cockroach has been building its own agents to improve its operations and how it manages databases. Kimball said it had built AI agents in a layered approach, giving agents sub tasks to perform and then allowing agents to manage those agents, and other agents that verify the approach taken. “There's all kinds of hand-offs, there's agents that help with migrations, agents that help with slow queries, agents that can diagnose problems with clusters, because they've been given the institutional knowledge. For example, our entire Zendesk history for the last two years — every customer ticket, every issue, the resolutions — has been digested and cross-indexed. The agents we're building are the engineering of the prompts, the handoffs and the quality control,” he said. The “thinking” is done by foundation models, he said. “We have some open-source ones we use that are very, very fast and inexpensive. Those do more… prosaic and mundane tasks that you do a lot of, quickly.” Kimball said Cockroach also uses proprietary models including OpenAI gpt-oss and Claude Opus. “We're trying to provide a replacement for a lot of human labor. We provide corporate ‘Artificial General Intelligence’ for database roles, that once you used to have to hire humans for, but you simply cannot do that at 10x the scale, much less 100x the scale. You have to find that way to get these agents to do extremely useful work, very consistently, at a level that is as good or increasingly better than humans. Frankly, there are things the agents can do that are so grungy you couldn't hire a human to do it, such as constantly looking through log files, and investigating threads. It's just too boring,” Kimball said. As such, Cockroach expects to be able to increase the scope of its products and the number of customers it serves, but only modestly increase its workforce. “You can do different things right now with your resources. You can try to scale the human teams, or you can figure out how to make the human teams more efficient, and that's what we're doing internally. Fundamentally, this is what we're going to do for our customers, because if you anchor yourself to what’s possible today, then you might say, 'Oh, the AI is not completely ready,' but like the speed at which these things are changing makes it all but inevitable at some point in the near future,” he said. Whether Cockroach’s vision will become reality or not, the database market will have to respond to AI in the enterprise, spending on which shows no sign of letting up. Nonetheless, if agents need databases, and databases need agents to manage them, maybe it's going to be turtles all the way down. ®

Van alle dingen die ook al niet meer mogen zorgt het aankomend verbod op het levend koken van kreeften en krabben er wel voor dat we het snelst koken van woede. Het koken van krab en kreeft tot een krokant knaaghapje is kennelijk een soort mishandeling terwijl het er op foto's (zie hierboven) doorgaans juist uitziet als een warm bad. Bovendien mogen dan ook rivierkreeftjes niet meer levend gekookt worden terwijl rivierkreeftjes het verdienen voor eeuwig te branden in de hel. Tja, het mag allemaal niet meer omdat de jeu er niet alleen vanaf moet, de jeu moet volledig drooggekookt. En dan straks raar opkijken als gestoorde dierenbeulen die aan kreeften koken een dagtaak hadden zich uit frustratie weer ouderwets toeleggen op katjes, konijnen en ezels wurgen (of erger).

Moet het dan zo kreeftonterend? (RIP Kareltje 2009-2026)

In March 2025, the Euclid mission led by the The European Space Agency (ESA) enabled scientists to capture the highest resolution image ever taken of the dense, glowing center of the Milky Way galaxy. An enormous swarm of stars forms a bulge at the heart of the spiral, and researchers continue to search amid its billions of stars for exoplanets, or any planet that’s located outside of our solar system.

“The galactic bulge—the central region of our galaxy—is a vast, tightly packed structure filled mainly with old, cooler stars, giving it its characteristic yellow colour,” ESA says. The photograph, which is taken with visible light, allows scientists to pinpoint exoplanets and measure their mass by monitoring tiny changes in starlight over time in a process called microlensing.

ESA’s Euclid image captures more than 60 million stars, plus other phenomena such as nebulae, bright star clusters, and molecular clouds that appear like amorphous, dark splotches in front of the brighter areas. Incidentally, to the human eye, they serve as a visual guide or cue to the incredible depth of field the image has actually captured.

“For comparison, Euclid’s sharpness and sensitivity in visible light is similar to the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope’s wide field camera,” ESA says. “But each pointing that Euclid captures in a few hours spans an area 270 times larger than Hubble’s field of view. To observe the same Euclid mosaic, the Keck Observatory would need around 2,000 hours.”

Zoom in on the Galactic Bulge Survey image on ESASky.

Do stories and artists like this matter to you? Become a Colossal Member today and support independent arts publishing for as little as $7 per month. The article Scan More than 60 Million Stars in the Most Detailed Photo of the Milky Way Ever Taken appeared first on Colossal.

​De uitschakeling van Nederland op het WK is een hard gelag voor de ploeg van Ronald Koeman. In Nederland is men eensgezind over wie de schuld moet krijgen voor de deceptie: Marokkanen.

"Je mag het zeker weer niet zeggen, maar van die jongens die Nederland zoekspeelden zat er geen enkele bij die Jan of Piet heet, zal ik maar zeggen", vat een Twitteraar het heersende sentiment treffend samen. "We moeten het beestje bij de naam noemen, dit waren allemaal waanzinnig voetballende mannen met een Noord-Afrikaans uiterlijk", vindt een ander. VVD-leider Yesilgöz Twitterde dat de ouders van de verantwoordelijken voor deze vernedering aangesproken moeten worden op de voetbalkwaliteiten van hun kinderen.

Voor sommige Nederlanders gaat het te ver om alleen maar de schuld bij Marokkanen te leggen. Zij wijzen erop dat als deze jongemannen meer kansen op werk zouden hebben, ze niet uit verveling de hele dag aan het voetballen zouden zijn.

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