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NASA has shared new snaps captured by its Curiosity rover that show a large “field of honeycomb textures” on Mars. Here’s the best of the images Curiosity captured. It shows the honeycomb field, each element of which is four to eight centimeters across. NASA doesn’t know how the honeycomb formed, but The Register is willing to rule out space bees because Curiosity has seen this sort of thing before and scientists are pretty sure the patterns are the result of mud drying and cracking during some unknowably distant Martian event. Curiosity spotted the polygonal features after starting its climb up a Martian valley that mission scientists have nicknamed “Valle Grande.” NASA’s post about the find says the rover has seen “small patches of these geometric shapes several times before, but nothing at the scale discovered in Valle Grande.” The Rover snapped the honeycomb field on June 19 and 20, the 4,930th and 4,931st Martian days of its very extended mission. Curiosity reached Martian soil on August 5, 2012, and was the first probe to land under a “sky crane” – a hovering craft that lowers rovers to the ground. Previous Mars landings relied on bouncing airbags that space agencies hoped would protect probes as they landed at speeds exceeding 70 km/h. Curiosity has travelled about 35 kilometers since arriving on Mars and has made myriad fascinating observations along the way, some of which suggest Mars was once home to intermittent oases or even a large lake. The journey was hard, with damaged tires a persistent problem. The rover’s drill got stuck in a Martian rock. NASA took a leaf from the Taylor Swift playbook and found a way to shake it off. The space agency has also remotely reprogrammed the rover to conduct different experiments and uploaded major software upgrades to keep it rolling. The rover is currently carrying out its fifth extended mission. NASA typically extends missions for as long as its robots gather enough data to justify the cost of operating them. Curiosity continues to meet those criteria very comfortably! ®

Qualcomm has predicted its entry to the datacenter market will yield $15 billion of annual revenue by FY 2029 – huge growth, but also a modest number compared to its more established rivals. The chip design firm dangled the $15 billion figure on Wednesday along with its Q3 results, which included a warning that revenue from its business selling modems to Apple is about to crater. Execs told investors that supply chain constraints mean Qualcomm expects “an acceleration in the step down of Apple product revenues” as its contribution to the next iPhone “is expected to be materially lower than our prior estimate of 20 percent.” Apple has spent years working on its own modems, a shift Qualcomm has long acknowledged. Now the House of the Snapdragon has advised investors to expect less than $2 billion in sales to Cupertino next year. “This obviously accelerates kind of the exit of Apple revenue out of our model,” said CFO Akash Palkhiwala. Qualcomm has a plan to replace Apple’s cash, by diversifying away from smartphones. Execs said the company thinks it will sell $40 billion a year of products not tied to handsets in FY 2029, with $10 billion of automotive sales and revenue from internet of things devices hitting $14 billion. The company sold $3.3 billion on non-smartphone kit in Q3 and previously forecast $22 billion of non-phone revenue in 2029. Growing its datacenter business from zero to $15 billion in a few years is impressive, but it’s worth comparing Qualcomm’s plans to current results from its rivals like AMD and Intel, both of which won over $16 billion in datacenter revenue in FY 25 and are growing fast. And then there’s Nvidia, which is on track to post over $250 billion annual datacenter revenue. Qualcomm’s datacenter products compete directly with AMD and Nvidia. $15 billion of annual revenue in 2029 will mean Qualcomm is a minor player, suggesting its focus on cheaper inferencing won’t have wide appeal. Execs could at least point to initial sales of datacenter kit arriving just in time to replace revenue it used to win from Apple. On the company’s earnings call, Qualcomm CEO and president Cristiano Amon foreshadowed price rises across the company’s range and said he doesn’t expect that decision will hurt the already-depressed smartphone market. “Even a double-digit price increase, which is just a pass-through of the input costs increase and wafer price increases, it actually is small when you compare it to the order of magnitude of the memory bill of materials,” he said, after blaming slow handset sales on the cost of RAM. Indeed, Qualcomm is banking on increased revenue from sales of its products for use in Android handsets, helped by a resurgent Chinese market. Amon thinks Middle Kingdom smartphone sales will rebound now that vendors have sold all the stock they warehoused and are set to launch new models featuring agentic AI. Q3 revenue came in at $9.95 billion, a four percent year-over-year dip. Net income fell 25 percent to $2 billion. Those figures weren’t far off the company’s predictions. Qualcomm’s share price dropped by about five percent in after hours trading. ®

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Trump vowed to hit Iran ‘very hard’ after it targeted a base in Jordan that hosts US troops, a day after joint US-Saudi strikes on militants in Iraq

• Middle East crisis – live updates

The US military has launched strikes on Iranian targets in response to Tehran’s attack on American forces in Jordan on Wednesday, raising the risk of a return to all-out-war in the region.

The new strikes were launched hours after president Donald Trump vowed to hit Iran “very hard” after it targeted a base in Jordan that hosts US troops, and comes after a days-long pause in violence between the two sides.

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Soldiers and emergency workers are combing through a badly damaged shopping mall and collapsed houses looking for trapped survivors

The death toll from the major earthquake that hit Japan on Tuesday rose to at least 23 as the search for trapped survivors inside a badly damaged shopping mall and collapsed houses in the country’s south-west continued.

The magnitude 6.8 earthquake that struck the Kumamoto prefecture on the island of Kyushu has injured at least 62, the prefectural government said. That number has steadily grown, fanning fears it will rise.

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De grootste Amerikaanse AI-bedrijven zijn samen bijna de helft van de totale omvang van de Amerikaanse economie waard.

Deze zomer is Amsterdam het middelpunt van de internationale queergemeenschap. Het is World Pride, twee weken vol feest én protest.

KUMAMOTO (ANP) - Er zijn in totaal 28 mensen omgekomen bij een zware aardbeving in Japan, meldt de Japanse regering in een bijgewerkte balans.

De zuidelijke regio Kumamoto werd dinsdag getroffen door een beving met een kracht van 7 op de Japanse Shindo-schaal - de zwaarste categorie.

Honderden reddingswerkers zoeken nog naar eventuele overlevenden in het puin van een ingestort winkelcentrum in de stad Kashima.

De aardbeving richtte veel schade aan op het zuidelijke eiland Kyushu. Huizen zijn verwoest en bruggen raakten beschadigd. Er braken branden uit en tienduizenden mensen zitten zonder stroom en water.

WASHINGTON (ANP) - Het Amerikaanse leger heeft "met succes een zware reeks aanvallen op Iran uitgevoerd, als reactie op de pogingen tot raketaanvallen op Amerikaanse troepen van de dag ervoor", meldt het Amerikaanse centrale commando CENTCOM op X. "De aanvallen waren bedoeld om de dreiging die uitgaat van Iran voor Amerikaanse troepen, de commerciële scheepvaart en buurlanden in de Golfregio te verminderen."

De Amerikanen bestookten tientallen doelen van de Iraanse Revolutionaire Garde (IRGC) in Iran, waaronder "militaire commandocentra, faciliteiten voor raketten en drones, locaties voor kustbewaking en -verdediging, en maritieme capaciteiten", aldus CENTCOM.

De aanvallen waren een vergelding voor de Iraanse verrassingsaanval dinsdag op Amerikaanse bases in de regio, onder meer in Jordanië.