Category: Science & Tech
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The leap second is on its way out, changing the definition of civil time for the first time since the 1970s. What it was for, why computers hated it, and the long-run problem that abolishing it defers rather than solves.
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Almost all international internet traffic runs through seabed cables about the thickness of a garden hose. They break more than a hundred times a year. What decides whether anyone notices is redundancy — and the real bottleneck is the small, ageing fleet of repair ships.
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NOAA gives a 69 per cent chance that the developing El Niño reaches an intensity beyond anything recorded since 1950. The forecast’s value is its lead time — months of warning for droughts that funding systems are built to respond to only after they arrive.
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A destroyer moves fifteen kilometres while a ballistic missile is in flight, so hitting one requires a seeker that finds the target in the final seconds. An electro-optical seeker looks rather than emits — which is why radar jamming does not stop it.
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Australia will require platforms to notify users and offer them a choice over their default feed. It sounds procedural. Defaults are among the most powerful levers in policy design, and this one regulates the ranking mechanism rather than the speech.
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ASML is working on larger photomasks for its most advanced machines. Higher-resolution optics print finer features across a smaller area, which limits how big an AI chip can be — and the standard being changed has held for decades.
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Star formation across the universe has been falling for billions of years, and it is not because the hydrogen ran out. There is plenty left. The question is why galaxies have stopped turning it into stars — and the answer is about process, not supply.
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A research team chartered a jet and flew toward a reentering satellite to sample the air. Satellites are designed to burn up so they don’t become debris — but the metal they vaporise stays in the stratosphere, and no regulator is clearly responsible for it.
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An aircraft touches down at up to 160 miles per hour with a fixed distance in which to stop. Water, wind, weight and a slightly long touchdown each eat into the margin. Why runway overruns almost never have a single cause, and what is meant to be waiting at the end of the pavement.
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DRAM is up 171 per cent in a year and DDR5 spot prices have quadrupled since last September. No factory burned down. AI accelerators use three times the wafer capacity, and the wafers went to them.