europeanspaceagency posted a photo:

This image from the European Space Agency’s Mars Express shows the Arsia Mons Elongated Cloud: the most visually striking cloud on the Red Planet. The image is based on data from Mars Express’s High Resolution Stereo Camera, and shows the cloud stretching out for around 1500 km.

Researchers using Mars Express now think that exotic physics might be behind this cloud’s formation – physics related to how water vapour turns into icy cloud particles.

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This image was processed by Flickr user J Cowart. It uses data from Mars Express orbit 18627 on 21 September 2018. Original image

[Image description: Tan-coloured horizontal rectangle showing part of the surface of Mars imaged by an orbiting satellite. Above the curved horizon is space. To the lower right of the image is a volcano. Stretching to the left of the volcano is a long wisp of white cloud, which seems to emanate from the volcano. We also see the shadow of the cloud just below the cloud itself.]

Credits: ESA/DLR/FU Berlin; CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO
Acknowledgements: J. Cowart

europeanspaceagency posted a photo:

Exactly two years after launch, ESA’s Hera planetary defence mission has caught its first glimpse of its destination: the Didymos binary asteroid system, seen from an approximate distance of 236 500 km away.

By combining multiple images and performing photometric analysis, the Hera mission team was able to identify Didymos against the background star field, seen in visible light, smaller than an individual pixel but sufficiently bright to be detected by the camera.

For now, Hera’s destination appears as little more than a single bright point. In reality, it is a binary asteroid system: the 780-m-diameter Didymos is orbited by the 150-m-diameter Dimorphos. In September 2022, NASA’s DART spacecraft deliberately impacted Dimorphos, changing its orbit around Didymos and demonstrating asteroid deflection for the first time.

Hera will have to travel much closer before its cameras can resolve the two asteroids separately. But from now on, its destination is no longer just a calculated point in space: Hera can see it.

When Hera reaches Didymos, it will perform a close-up investigation of the impact site and measure in detail how Dimorphos responded to DART’s collision.

These measurements will help turn the DART impact experiment into a well-understood and potentially repeatable planetary defence technique.

Have questions about Hera, its journey or what awaits it at Didymos? Ask the Hera Space Companion — an AI companion connected to the mission and designed to let everyone follow and explore ESA’s first planetary defence mission as it unfolds.

Credits: ESA

"At a busy thoroughfare inside the European Parliament, passing politicians are now confronted with a grotesque and gilded vision of American power: an 8.5-foot-tall statue of President Donald Trump, naked but for a thin layer of 23-karat gold leaf. 'Trump likes gold,' said Danish artist Jens Galschiøt, the statue's creator, over the phone after it was unveiled Tuesday. 'In a way, I think he would like this sculpture.'"

"Titled 'The Orange Plague,' the artwork has been installed in Strasbourg, France, the official seat of the European Parliament. The copper sculpture, also dubbed the 'King of Injustice,' imagines the US president on the shoulders of a frail smaller figure. His thighs and sagging belly wrap tightly around the man's head; his hands clutch at a long golf club and the scales of justice." "'I am sitting on the back of a man,' reads the text [a quote from Leo Tolstoy] on the statue's plinth. 'He is sinking under my burden. I will do anything to help him. Except step down from his back.'" "Galschiøt has exhibited 'The Orange Plague', [or in German, 'Die Orange Pest'] in public several times before, including at [the Danish Parliamentary building,] the Munich Security Conference, and last November's COP30 UN climate conference in Brazil. He also plans to display it at COP31 in Antalya, Turkey next month." "He said his decision to depict Trump naked alludes to Hans Christian Andersen's story "The Emperor's New Clothes," in which a vain emperor parades the city in the nude. 'Dictators don't like you laughing at them,' he explained." "The most recent temporary display is expected to remain on show until Thursday. It is accompanied by over 1,000 3D-printed miniatures of the sculpture, which are being made available to passersby as 'protest tokens.'"

The Job Trail, a web game about making it through 52 weeks as a laid-off creative worker. Based on The Oregon Trail. My first try: “You have died of burnout. Week 13. 51 applications, 1 ghosting.”

The agreement will bring the total number of people and entities under EU sanctions over the war to nearly 4,650.

DEN HAAG (ANP) - Kamerlid Doğukan Ergin (DENK) doet aangifte tegen Johan Derksen om diens uitspraken dinsdagavond in het programma Vandaag Inside. In een item over onverdoofd ritueel slachten zei Derksen "we zullen die meneer van DENK eens als proefkonijn zijn strot doorsnijden", om te zien "of dat geen pijn oplevert".

De presentator deed de uitspraak nadat er een fragment werd getoond waarin Ergin in de Tweede Kamer stelde tegen een verbod op onverdoofd slachten te zijn.

"Deze bedreiging en publiekelijke oproep om mij te vermoorden gaat alle grenzen te buiten", schrijft het Kamerlid op X. "Het is gevaarzettend en heeft veel impact op mijn veiligheid en werk. Daarom doe ik aangifte." DENK-fractievoorzitter Stephan van Baarle vindt de uitspraken "veel en veel te ver" gaan. "Dit is onacceptabel, dus het is terecht dat mijn collega aangifte doet."

Dit weekend gaf staatssecretaris Silvio Erkens (Dierenwelzijn, VVD) aan voor een verbod op onverdoofd slachten te zijn. De PvdD komt deze maand met een initiatiefwet hierover.

Actors and musicians sign open letter urging government to ‘protect’ residents amid impasse over the Drumcree parade

Dozens of artists, actors and musicians, including Susan Sarandon and Noel Gallagher, have expressed support for Garvaghy Road residents in the impasse over the Drumcree parade in Northern Ireland.

In an open letter to the secretary of state, Chris Bryant, they urged the government to “protect” residents and to appoint an international mediator to resolve the dispute between the Catholic residents and the Orange Order in County Armagh.

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Tennessee prisoner awake and speaking after surviving state’s attempt to execute her last Wednesday

• Christa Pike is conscious and speaking after botched execution attempt, lawyers say

On September 30, Christa Pike, who was set to be the first woman executed in Tennessee in more than 200 years, survived two doses of pentobarbital, a sedatative.

Witnesses to the attempt to execute Pike described how they heard she was choking and struggling for an hour after receiving the first injection. She was then hospitalized after a second dose failed to kill her. In the hospital, she was put on a ventilator and had been in critical condition.

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• Eckert was charged by FA with misconduct

• Southampton found to have spied on three opponents

Southampton’s manager, Tonda Eckert, has been given a six-week suspended ban by the Football Association for his part in the Spygate scandal that landed the club with a four-point penalty and expulsion from last season’s Championship playoffs.

The outcome means Eckert can continue in the dugout, starting with Sunday’s derby at home to Portsmouth. The German has been fined £28,000 by the FA after admitting its charges, with his ban suspended until the end of next season.

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Sean Peers admits offence against woman who was drugged and attacked for more than two decades

A man has pleaded guilty to sexually assaulting an unconscious woman, whose husband had drugged her and invited other men to abuse her.

Sean Peers, 38, had been due to stand trial alongside 11 other men, but admitted one count of assault by penetration on 15 September 2024 when he appeared at Manchester Minshull Street crown court.

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We appear to be entering a new era, in which political desperation at home leads to increasingly unhinged threats abroad

Donald Trump was in Nebraska on Monday, and though his long rally speech had elements of a performance, this was no Bruce Springsteen album. He offered another dark meditation on a world spiraling out of control, one in which the destruction of American cities is increasingly a possibility, unless Americans trust him to use the vast powers of the presidency to annihilate his foes.

The president drew fury when he suggested that Iran could launch a nuclear attack and “take out” Los Angeles or San Diego. California leaders reacted with scorn at Trump’s alarmism.

Ted Widmer, a former White House speechwriter, is the editor of American Speeches, and the recently published The Living Declaration: A Biography of America’s Founding Text, both published by the Library of America

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Chinstrap penguins on Zavodovski Island in Antarctica declined by two-thirds since 2011, likely due to climate crisis

The world’s largest penguin colony has declined by two-thirds since 2011, most likely due to the climate crisis, a new study has revealed.

Scientists warned the rapid demise of chinstrap penguins on Zavodovski, the northernmost of the South Sandwich Islands in Antarctica, increased the risk of a wider ecosystem collapse.

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Sir James Goldsmith’s links to Hilton Head, South Carolina, adds to mystery of Jane Doe 4, who claimed she was abused by Epstein in the 1980s

For Jeffrey Epstein, the billionaire Goldsmith family was a gateway to elite society and he wanted to be in their circle.

The disgraced financier, who died in prison in 2019 facing sex-trafficking charges, longed for a billionaire’s lifestyle and cultivated the family’s friends, bankers, business associates and advisers.

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Donderdag zijn in Londen tussentijdse verkiezingen voor de zetel in het Lagerhuis die is vrijgekomen door het vertrek van oud-premier Keir Starmer. De leider van de Groenen maakt kans op een doorbraak – maar een omstreden motie van partijgenoten over Israël kan hem opbreken.

China blijft zijn industrie volop steunen, ondanks de kritiek uit het buitenland en hoewel er ook op de eigen markt bedrijven onder lijden. Want voor veel technologie vindt China zich nog te afhankelijk van het Westen. „We hebben een paar dingen voor elkaar gekregen, maar voor andere industrieën is de weg nog lang.”

Franse jeugd die de straat op gaat om beter onderwijs te eisen: dat geeft de burger moed. Het bijkomende geweld is echter zorgelijk en vooral contraproductief. Hopelijk is het geen voorbode voor de presidentsverkiezingen van volgend jaar.

Het Sub-Antarctische eiland Zavodovski telt niet langer de grootste pinguïnpopulatie op aarde. Een half miljoen keelbandpinguïns zijn er in 15 jaar tijd verdwenen. Door klimaatveranderingen zijn ze de hongerdood gestorven.

Jon Siegel has added a photo to the pool:

Somewhere in the Nagano countryside, we stopped by for a walk and to look at this beautiful red bridge over a small river on the temple grounds.

Het COA kan het weer eens niet meer aan en dat gaat nu zelfs ten koste van vrouwen, kinderen en mensen die medische zorg behoeven. En daarom slaat het COA alarm: "Het COA kampt met een acuut tekort van honderden opvangplekken. De situatie in de asielopvang is ‘zeer kritiek’." In Trouw zegt bestuursvoorzitter Remco Bakker zelfs: "De rek is er aan alle kanten uit." Dat is niet zo gek als de instroom vorige week nog rond de 900 lag en deze week weer, de situatie in Ter Apel druk en vol en oorlogachtig is, de omstandigheden in de opvang voor kinderen verschrikkelijk zijn, de dwangwet een helleding is, andere COA-locaties van ellende maar open blijven, dwangwetweigeraars steeds talrijker worden en de dwangsomcentjes richting nieuwe records gaan. Het asielsysteem piept en kraakt en knelt en is kapotstuk omdat het probleem maar blijft en blijft en niet weggaat. Maar hee, gelukkig krijgen we er op een gegeven moment misschien wel één hele asielmaatregel bij!

Training the largest AI models is no longer simply a question of adding more GPUs. As clusters grow, power availability is becoming a hard physical constraint, forcing infrastructure teams to consider how a single training workload can operate across multiple data centres. That creates a very different networking problem. Traditional datacenter interconnect was designed to move traffic between sites. AI training demands something more exacting: huge, synchronous flows, minimal packet loss and tightly coordinated communication between GPUs. If one part of the cluster stalls, the impact can ripple across the entire job. In this interview, The Register’s Tim Phillips speaks with Rakesh Chopra, SVP, Silicon and Systems Architecture, Cisco Fellow, about what Cisco calls the “Scale-Across” imperative and why it believes distributed AI infrastructure requires a new approach to routing. Rakesh explains how the demands of AI are changing the role of the network, from simple transport to an integral part of the compute system. He discusses the challenge of making geographically separate facilities behave more like a single deterministic machine, and why buffering, high-speed coherent optics and tightly integrated silicon matter when workloads span long-distance fiber links. The conversation also looks inside the cluster itself. Rakesh outlines how Cisco’s Silicon One architecture and Intelligent Collective Networking are designed to manage synchronized bursts of GPU traffic, reduce bottlenecks and improve job completion time. Power efficiency is another central theme, including the trade-off between network consumption and the energy available to GPUs. Security and longevity also come into focus. The interview covers hardware-accelerated MACsec and IPsec, as well as the role of programmability in helping infrastructure adapt as AI workloads continue to evolve. For infrastructure and datacenter leaders planning for larger, more distributed AI environments, the discussion offers a practical view of the networking challenges that emerge once one site is no longer enough. Watch the full interview below.