All posts tagged: begun

The coldest ever hunt for dark matter has begun deep underground

The coldest ever hunt for dark matter has begun deep underground

Published by Jenni Sidey

Two kilometres underground near Sudbury, Ont., a machine has reached a temperature so low it barely seems real. Inside SNOLAB, scientists have cooled the Super Cryogenic Dark Matter Search, or SuperCDMS, to just tens of milliKelvin above absolute zero, roughly a hundred times colder than outer space. That number matters because the experiment’s detectors cannot truly come alive until they reach it. “Reaching this base temperature now allows us to turn on the detectors, make sure they are all working and start collecting data that potentially is coming from dark matter particles hitting our detectors,” says Miriam Diamond, a co-principal investigator in the international collaboration and an assistant professor in the University of Toronto’s department of physics in the Faculty of Arts & Science. For the team behind SuperCDMS, hitting base temperature marks a turning point. The project is no longer mainly about construction and installation. It is moving into commissioning and, soon after that, science operations. Scientists have reached a critical milestone in their efforts to detect dark matter – the mysterious substance that …

Middle East war live: Iranian media say peace talks with the US have begun in Islamabad

Middle East war live: Iranian media say peace talks with the US have begun in Islamabad

Published by Sam Flores

11/04/2026 – 19:07 Lebanon’s health ministry says war death toll from Israeli strikes passes 2,000 11/04/2026 – 19:03 Pope Leo urges end to ‘madness of war’ Pope Leo ​urged world leaders to end what he called the “madness of war”. At a special prayer vigil in St. Peter’s Basilica, ​the ‌first US pope decried the use of religious language ⁠to justify war and said a “delusion of omnipotence that surrounds us … is becoming increasingly unpredictable”. Making a direct appeal ‌to world leaders, he said: “Stop! It is time for peace! Sit ⁠at the table of dialogue and mediation, not at the table where rearmament is planned.” 11/04/2026 – 18:57 Iraq elects Kurdish politician Nizar Amidi as president amid war fallout Iraq’s parliament voted to elect Nizar Amidi, a political official with one of the country’s two main Kurdish parties, as president, five months after a parliamentary election that didn’t produce a bloc with a decisive majority. His election comes as Iraq is reeling from the fallout of the US-Israeli war on Iran. Iraq became …

Awards Season Is Over. Strike Season Has Just Begun.

Awards Season Is Over. Strike Season Has Just Begun.

Published by Sam Flores

For many WGA members, one fact loomed large over these negotiations: The 2023 writers strike coincided with a sharp contraction in employment, with Writers Guild data showing television writing jobs falling 42% year over year in the 2023–24 season—equating to there being roughly 1,300 fewer positions. The SAG-AFTRA negotiations are proceeding under a media blackout, so people aren’t saying much. The actors union declined a request for an interview, and the AMPTP did not respond. However, underneath the silence is a shared reluctance to test a strike again because of fears that it might worsen the industry’s ongoing contraction, according to multiple industry sources who spoke to VF. Kuntz describes the dynamic between the studios and the unions as “two uncertain and weak entities negotiating” in an environment completely different from the one they were in last time. “In 2026 the old world is gone,” Kuntz says. The previous SAG-AFTRA and WGA strikes revolved around familiar matters—streaming residuals, minimum pay, mini writers rooms, and early concerns about artificial intelligence. The current talks are unfolding in …

Israel pounds Beirut in expansion of war; Iran says ‘some countries’ have begun mediation efforts

Israel pounds Beirut in expansion of war; Iran says ‘some countries’ have begun mediation efforts

Published by Sam Flores

“WE’RE GOING TO HAVE TO CHOOSE THAT PERSON”, TRUMP SAYS In insisting on the right to help choose Iran‘s next leader – meant to be a senior Shi’ite Muslim cleric selected by a panel of religious experts – Trump made his most explicit demand for control over a country of more than 90 million people. The remarks could make it more difficult to end the war quickly in a deal that would leave Iran‘s system of clerical rule in place. “We’re going to have to choose that person along with Iran. We’re going to have to choose that person,” Trump said on Thursday in a telephone interview with Reuters. Israel has said openly that it aims to overthrow Iran‘s ruling system. Washington has been more circumspect, saying its goal is to eliminate Iran‘s ability to project force beyond its borders, while also inviting Iranians to rise up and topple their government. There was no immediate Iranian response to Trump’s remarks. Iran has cast the war as an unprovoked attack and describes the killing of its …

A War Begun on Instinct

A War Begun on Instinct

Published by José Betancourt

Subscribe here: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube | Overcast | Pocket Casts In Othello, the villain Iago gives varied and constantly shifting reasons for why he wants to destroy Othello. Shakespeare scholars have generally interpreted that to mean that although none of the individual explanations are all that convincing, the sentiment behind them is crushingly powerful. Iago’s will to destroy has simply gathered so much momentum that it can no longer be stopped. President Trump’s reasons for striking Iran are similarly shifty and unpersuasive. Is it nuclear weapons? Ballistic missiles? The killing of protesters? A response to a move by Israel? No explanation alone quite adds up, except one: “a new element of Trump’s foreign-policy doctrine that we’re seeing here, because he and the people around him are willing to take risks and they’re willing to kind of go with their gut in a new way,” says Missy Ryan, an Atlantic staff writer who covers national security and has worked in the Middle East. “Based on the way the negotiation was going, I think …

Trump says U.S. military has begun major combat operations in Iran

Trump says U.S. military has begun major combat operations in Iran

Published by Sam Flores

The U.S. military has begun “major combat operations” in Iran, U.S. President Donald Trump confirmed on Saturday, as explosions were heard in cities around the Middle East. “Our objective is to defend the American people by eliminating imminent threats from the Iranian regime, a vicious group of very hard, terrible people,” Trump said in a video message on his Truth Social account. A U.S. official confirmed earlier that American forces attacked Iran by air and sea, Reuters reported. It also cited an unidentified Iranian official as saying that several ministries in the southern part of the Iranian capital, Tehran, were targeted Explosions were heard in key cities around the Middle East, including Jerusalem as Iran launched counterattacks. CNBC producer Joan Muwahed in Dubai reported hearing two explosions over the city in the United Arab Emirates. Qatar and the UAE condemned Iranian missile counterattacks. “The State of Qatar expresses its strong condemnation of the targeting of Qatari territory with Iranian ballistic missiles, considering it a flagrant violation of its national sovereignty,” Qatar’s Ministry of Defense said …

War With Iran Has Begun. Where Does It End?

War With Iran Has Begun. Where Does It End?

Published by Daniella Wilson

More than an hour after missiles began targeting top Iranian officials across downtown Tehran, President Trump for the first time described his goal to the American public: for the most powerful armed factions in Iran to lay down their arms and for Iranians to rise up and risk death by seizing control of their government. In an eight-minute address on Truth Social that amounted to a declaration of war, Trump also acknowledged the possibility of American casualties. Within three hours of the initial strike, Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps said it launched ballistic missiles at four nearby U.S. bases, and the sound of air defenses shooting down missiles reverberated across the region. Iranian forces successfully struck inside Bahrain, home to the U.S. Fifth Fleet. Air defenses appeared to have shot down missiles aimed at Qatar (home to the largest U.S. military base in the region), the United Arab Emirates and Kuwait (which also host American forces), and Israel, which joined U.S. forces in the attack. Jordan, where American aircraft are parked, also said it shot down …

The furore over Grok’s sexualised images has begun an AI reckoning

The furore over Grok’s sexualised images has begun an AI reckoning

Published by skeptic

Controversy over the chatbot Grok escalated rapidly through the early weeks of 2026. The cause was revelations about its alleged ability to generate sexualised images of women and children in response to requests from users on the social media platform X. This prompted the UK media regulator Ofcom and, subsequently, the European Commission, to launch formal investigations. These developments come at a pivotal moment for digital regulation in the UK and the EU. Governments are moving from aspirational regulatory frameworks to a new phase of active enforcement, particularly with legislation such as the UK’s Online Safety Act. The central question here is not whether individual failures by social media companies occur, but whether voluntary safeguards – those devised by the social media companies rather than enforced by a regulator – remain sufficient where the risks are foreseeable. These safeguards can include such measures as blocking certain keywords in the user prompts to AI chatbots, for example. Grok is a test case because of the integration of the AI produced within the X social media platform. …

Metabolism, not cells or genetics, may have begun life on Earth

Metabolism, not cells or genetics, may have begun life on Earth

Published by Jenni Sidey

Planet Earth is overrun with life. Lakes, rivers, seas, and oceans are teeming with it, from the surfaces all the way down to the bottom, often at depths of miles and miles. The land, both above and below ground, is packed with living organisms of varying size, mass, and complexity, including plants, animals, and fungi. Even the atmosphere houses a wide variety of life forms, from birds and insects to microbes found far above the highest mountain peaks. All told, more than 8 million species of organisms are currently represented on Earth, totaling over half a trillion tonnes of carbon in overall biomass. We can trace our evolutionary history through time, with notable milestones including: We have fossil evidence of life existing 3.8 billion years ago, but the start of it all — the origin of life itself on Earth — remains an unsolved puzzle. Although many theories and scenarios abound, one of the least-talked-about may actually be the most likely: a metabolism-first scenario for life’s beginnings. Here’s why recent research, only conducted in the …

The Post-Chatbot Era Has Begun

The Post-Chatbot Era Has Begun

Published by José Betancourt

Americans are living in parallel AI universes. For much of the country, AI has come to mean ChatGPT, Google’s AI overviews, and the slop that now clogs social-media feeds. Meanwhile, tech hobbyists are becoming radicalized by bots that can work for hours on end, collapsing months of work into weeks, or weeks into an afternoon. Recently, more people have started to play around with tools such as Claude Code. The product, made by the start-up Anthropic, is “agentic,” meaning it can do all sorts of work a human might do on a computer. Some academics are testing Claude Code’s ability to autonomously generate papers; others are using agents for biology research. Journalists have been experimenting with Claude Code to write data-driven articles from scratch, and earlier this month, a pair used the bot to create a mock competitor to Monday.com, a public software company worth billions. In under an hour, they had a working prototype. Although the actual quality of all of these AI-generated papers and analyses remains unclear, the progress is both stunning and …