A new analysis of data from NASA's Voyager 2 mission reveals that the planet Uranus and its five largest moons might harbor subsurface oceans and potential conditions for life. The BBC reports: Much of what we know about them was gathered by Nasa's Voyager 2 spacecraft which visited nearly 40 years ago. But a new analysis shows that Voyager's visit coincided with a powerful solar storm, which led to a misleading idea of what the Uranian system is really like. [...] So, for 40 years we have had an incorrect view of what Uranus and its five largest moons are normally like, according to Dr William Dunn of University College London. "These results suggest that the Uranian system could be much more exciting than previously thought. There could be moons there that could have the conditions that are necessary for life, they might have oceans below the surface that could be teeming with fish!". It has been nearly 40 years since Voyager 2 last flew past the icy world and its moons. Nasa has plans to launch a new mission, the Uranus Orbiter and Probe, to go back for a closer look in 10 years' time. According to Nasa's Dr Jamie Jasinski, whose idea it was to re-examine the Voyager 2 data, the mission will need to take his results into account when designing its instruments and planning the scientific survey. "Some of the instruments for the future spacecraft are very much being designed with ideas from what we learned from Voyager 2 when it flew past the system when it was experiencing an abnormal event. So we need to rethink how exactly we are going to design the instruments on the new mission so that we can best capture the science we need to make discoveries." Nasa's Uranus probe is expected to arrive by 2045, which is when scientists hope to find out whether these far-flung icy moons, once thought of as being dead worlds, might have the possibility of being home to life. The findings have been published in the journal Nature Astronomy.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Register: Royal assent was granted to two right to repair bills last week that amend Canada's Copyright Act to allow the circumvention of technological protection measures (TPMs) if this is done for the purposes of "maintaining or repairing a product, including any related diagnosing," and "to make the program or a device in which it is embedded interoperable with any other computer program, device or component." The pair of bills allow device owners to not only repair their own stuff regardless of how a program is written to prevent such non-OEM measures, but said owners can also make their devices work with third-party components without needing to go through the manufacturer to do so. Bills C-244 (repairability) and C-294 (interoperability) go a long way toward advancing the right to repair in Canada and, as iFixit pointed out, are the first federal laws anywhere that address how TPMs restrict the right to repair -- but they're hardly final. TPMs can take a number of forms, from simple administrative passwords to encryption, registration keys, or even the need for a physical object like a USB dongle to unlock access to copyrighted components of a device's software. Most commercially manufactured devices with proprietary embedded software include some form of TPM, and neither C-244 nor C-294 place any restrictions on the use of such measures by manufacturers. As iFixit points out, neither Copyright Act amendments do anything to expand access to the tools needed to circumvent TPMs. That puts Canadians in a similar position to US repair advocates, who in 2021 saw the US Copyright Office loosen DMCA restrictions to allow limited repairs of some devices despite TPMs, but without allowing access to the tools needed to do so. [...] Canadian Repair Coalition co-founder Anthony Rosborough said last week that the new repairability and interoperability rules represent considerable progress, but like similar changes in the US, don't actually amount to much without the right to distribute tools. "New regulations are needed that require manufacturers and vendors to ensure that products and devices are designed with accessibility of repairs in mind," Rosborough wrote in an op-ed last week. "Businesses need to be able to carry out their work without the fear of infringing various intellectual property rights."

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OpenAI's latest large language model, known internally as Orion, has fallen short of performance targets, marking a broader slowdown in AI advancement across the industry's leading companies, according to Bloomberg, corroborating similar media stories in recent days. The model, which completed initial training in September, showed particular weakness in novel coding tasks and failed to demonstrate the same magnitude of improvement over its predecessor as GPT-4 achieved over GPT-3.5, the publication reported Wednesday. Google's upcoming Gemini software and Anthropic's Claude 3.5 Opus are facing similar challenges. Google's project is not meeting internal benchmarks, while Anthropic has delayed its model's release, Bloomberg said. Industry insiders cited by the publication pointed to growing scarcity of high-quality training data and mounting operational costs as key obstacles. OpenAI's Orion specifically struggled due to insufficient coding data for training, the report said. OpenAI has moved Orion into post-training refinement but is unlikely to release the system before early 2024. The report adds: [...] AI companies continue to pursue a more-is-better playbook. In their quest to build products that approach the level of human intelligence, tech firms are increasing the amount of computing power, data and time they use to train new models -- and driving up costs in the process. Amodei has said companies will spend $100 million to train a bleeding-edge model this year and that amount will hit $100 billion in the coming years. As costs rise, so do the stakes and expectations for each new model under development. Noah Giansiracusa, an associate professor of mathematics at Bentley University in Waltham, Massachusetts, said AI models will keep improving, but the rate at which that will happen is questionable. "We got very excited for a brief period of very fast progress," he said. "That just wasn't sustainable." Further reading: OpenAI and Others Seek New Path To Smarter AI as Current Methods Hit Limitations.

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Apple executives have defended the relocation of the power button to the bottom of its new M4 Mac mini, citing the computer's significantly reduced size as the driving factor behind the design change. In a Bilibili video interview, Apple's Greg Joswiak and John Ternus explained that the Mac mini's form factor, now half the size of its predecessor, necessitated finding a new position for the power button. The executives said that the bottom placement allows for convenient access despite initial user criticism.

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Paul Kinlan, who leads the Chrome and the Open Web Developer Relations team at Google, asks and answers the question (with a no.): Frameworks are abstractions over a platform designed for people and teams to accelerate their teams new work and maintenance while improving the consistency and quality of the projects. They also frequently force a certain type of structure and architecture to your code base. This isn't a bad thing, team productivity is an important aspect of any software. I'm of the belief that software development is entering a radical shift that is currently driven by agents like Replit's and there is a world where a person never actually has to manipulate code directly anymore. As I was making broad and sweeping changes to the functionality of the applications by throwing the Agent a couple of prompts here and there, the software didn't seem to care that there was repetition in the code across multiple views, it didn't care about shared logic, extensibility or inheritability of components... it just implemented what it needed to do and it did it as vanilla as it could. I was just left wondering if there will be a need for frameworks in the future? Do the architecture patterns we've learnt over the years matter? Will new patterns for software architecture appear that favour LLM management?

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An anonymous reader shares a report: Officials inside the Secret Service clashed over whether they needed a warrant to use location data harvested from ordinary apps installed on smartphones, with some arguing that citizens have agreed to be tracked with such data by accepting app terms of service, despite those apps often not saying their data may end up with the authorities, according to hundreds of pages of internal Secret Service emails obtained by 404 Media. The emails provide deeper insight into the agency's use of Locate X, a powerful surveillance capability that allows law enforcement officials to follow a phone, and person's, precise movements over time at the click of a mouse. In 2023, a government oversight body found that the Secret Service, Customs and Border Protection, and Immigration and Customs Enforcement all used their access to such location data illegally. The Secret Service told 404 Media in an email last week it is no longer using the tool. "If USSS [U.S. Secret Service] is using Locate X, that is most concerning to us," one of the internal emails said. 404 Media obtained them and other documents through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request with the Secret Service.

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Mark Rainey: Engineers are currently debugging why the Voyager 1 spacecraft, which is 15 billions miles away, turned off its main radio and switched to a backup radio that hasn't been used in over forty years! I've had some tricky debugging issues in the past, including finding compiler bugs and debugging code with no debugger that had been burnt into prom packs for terminals, however I have huge admiration for the engineers maintaining the operation of Voyager 1. Recently they sent a command to the craft that caused it to shut off its main radio transmitter, seemingly in an effort to preserve power and protect from faults. This prompted it to switch over to the backup radio transmitter, that is lower power. Now they have regained communication they are trying to determine the cause on hardware that is nearly 50 years old. Any communication takes days. When you think you have a difficult issue to debug, spare a thought for this team.

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AmiMoJo writes: The climate-damaging vapors left behind by jet planes could be easily tackled, aviation experts say, with a new study suggesting they could be eliminated for a few pounds per flight. Jet condensation trails, or contrails, have spawned wild conspiracy theories alleging mind control and the spreading of disease, but scientists say the real problem is their warming effect. "They create an artificial layer of clouds, which traps the heat from the Earth that's trying to escape to outer space," said Carlos Lopez de la Osa, from the Transport & Environment campaign group, which has carried out a new study on the solutions to contrails. "The scale of the warming that's associated with them is roughly having a similar impact to that of aviation carbon emissions." Tweaking the flight paths of a handful of aircraft could reduce contrail warming by more than half by 2040, at a cost of less than $5.1 per flight. Geography and a flight's latitude have a strong influence on whether a contrail is warming. Time of day also influences the climate effects of contrails. Those formed by evening and night flights have the largest warming contribution. Seasonality is also important -- the most warming contrails tend to occur in winter. "Planes are already flying around thunderstorms and turbulence areas," Mr Lopez de la Osa said. "We will need to add one more constraint to flight planning, which is avoiding areas of contrail formation."

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The James Bond star's donation helped avoid organisations being evicted from Brimscombe Mill.

Paul Clarke, 40, died in hospital after he was fatally crushed by the reversing lorry.

Climate campaigners are bringing a legal case they hope will halt drilling at two huge fossil fuel projects.

Footballers Matt Crossen and Aaron Lucas speak to BBC Sport about representing England at the Cerebral Palsy World Cup in Spain.

The IOC needs to improve rules on transgender athletes to protect "female sport", says World Athletics president Lord Coe.

Captain Harry Kane is unhappy with the number of players who have withdrawn from the latest England squad, insisting "England comes before club".

The judge describes Holly Le Gresley and Adriana Orme's actions as "abhorrent and sadistic".

Irish mixed martial artist Conor McGregor claimed to have had consensual sex with a woman who is accusing him of rape, a court has heard.

Justin Welby behaved like a politician and in some ways has faced the downfall of one, writes religion editor Aleem Maqbool.

Mysterious metal group Sleep Token are one of three headliners announced for Download festival.

For many Welsh speakers, Eryri and Yr Wyddfa are the names they have used all along.

The news comes a day after confirmation that he will leave the BBC's Match of the Day.

Pistiwan Jameel described migrants as "pigeons" or "sticks" as he facilitated illegal crossings.

The former soldier has pleaded guilty to escaping from prison but still faces other charges.

Regulators want to give more time to car dealers potentially facing a deluge of mis-selling claims.

The health secretary has ordered officials to review the costs for the NHS of implementing changes in the law.

Homebase enters administration, but The Range buys up to 70 stores and the brand.

1. Year-long action plan to combat diabetes to be launched on World Diabetes Day  The Hindu
2. World Diabetes Day 2024  PIB
3. World Diabetes Day: Why diabetes is more than abnormal blood sugar level  The Times of India
4. World Diabetes Day 2024: 10 Foods That Are Secretly Increasing Your Risk Of Diabetes  NDTV
5. World Diabetes Day 2024: 5 ways to detect diabetes quickly  Health shots

1. After Sunita Williams, NASA now worried about her stranded mission partner's losing body mass  Hindustan Times
2. "My Body Has Changed, But....": Sunita Williams On Health Aboard Space Station  NDTV
3. Stranded Sunita Williams dismisses severe weight loss rumours, says she feels ‘healthier than ever’  The Times of India
4. Sunita Williams explains reason behind her changed appearance in space | 'They have routine checks, dedicated surgeons' | Inshorts  Inshorts
5. Inside Sunita Williams' extended mission: What she’s doing in space  India Today

1. 'I have found ways...': Ravichandran Ashwin gives an insight on his mind games with Steve Smith  The Times of India
2. 'I have figured out Steve Smith': R Ashwin tries to get inside Australia star's head ahead of India's series opener  Hindustan Times
3. 'His Time At Delhi Capitals...': R Ashwin Reveals How He Broke Steve Smith's Sound Game Plans  News18
4. BGT 2024-25: Ashwin says over the years he found ways to break Smith's 'sound game plans'  Daijiworld.com
5. I've found ways and means to break it down: Ashwin on Smith's batting  The Hindu

1. Tata Steel Chess India Day 1: Abdussatorov Leads Carlsen, So, Narayanan  Chess.com
2. Magnus Carlsen interview: I probably will have the most fun playing Gukesh  Hindustan Times
3. Tata Steel Chess India - Live!  Chess News | ChessBase
4. Abdusattorov Nodirbek leads, Magnus Carlsen close behind in India Open chess  The Times of India
5. Indian chess has come a long way, courtesy Anand: Carlsen  The Hindu

1. Rohit Shetty gives an update on Deepika’s Lady Singham  123telugu
2. Rohit Shetty Confirms A Standalone Film On Deepika's Lady Singham: 'There's A Reason...' | Exclusive  News18
3. Rohit Shetty CONFIRMS a standalone film on Deepika Padukone's cop character from Singham Again: 'Otherwis  TOI Etimes
4. Rohit Shetty confirms Lady Singham with Deepika Padukone, promises action-packed spin-off  Moneycontrol
5. Deepika's cop character in 'Singham...' to get a solo film: Rohit | Ajay Devgn & Ranveer are part of 'Singham...' | Inshorts  Inshorts

1. John Krasinski reveals wife Emily Blunt's reaction to his Sexiest Man Alive title  Hindustan Times
2. Actor John Krasinski Named 'Sexiest Man Alive' Of 2024 By People Magazine  NDTV
3. Is Jim from The Office really the sexiest man in the world?  The Guardian
4. Not Shah Rukh Khan, Hrithik Roshan, Leonardo Dicaprio, Chris Evans, or Tom Cruise, THIS actor is the sexiest  India.com
5. John Krasinski Is PEOPLE's 2024 Sexiest Man Alive!  PEOPLE

1. Global carbon market gets green signal at COP29 under Paris Agreement's Article 6  The Hindu
2. Why India and China have pushed against climate change-related trade measures at COP29  The Indian Express
3. COP29: G77, China agree to use new NCQG draft text as basis for finance negotiations  The New Indian Express
4. Video | UN Scientists Warn Of 'Rising Emissions' Worldwide  NDTV
5. COP29 gets momentum with consensus on creation of carbon credits standards, India wants to conclude work  The Times of India

1. Watch: Nitish Kumar bows to touch PM’s feet at Bihar event. Here’s how Modi reacted  Moneycontrol
2. Watch: PM Modi's unexpected gesture as Nitish Kumar bows down to touch his feet  The Times of India
3. Nitish Kumar tries to touch PM's feet at Bihar event. Modi does this next  India Today
4. PM Modi lays foundation stone for AIIMS Darbhanga in Bihar, says NDA Govt committed to welfare of people  The Hindu
5. PM Modi states ‘1 lakh medical seats in India’, vows to add ‘75,000 more’, lays foundation stone of AIIMS in Bihar  Mint

Proposing a constitutional amendment allowing the legislature to establish a special district to be the seat of state government.

Proposing a constitutional amendment guaranteeing the rights to an abortion and to assisted reproductive technology treatments and procedures, including in vitro fertilization.

Proposing a constitutional amendment authorizing the legislature to provide that the appraised value of a residence homestead for ad valorem tax purposes for the first tax year that the owner of the property qualifies the property for a residence homestead exemption is the market value of the property and that, if the owner purchased the property, the purchase price of the property is considered to be the market value of the property for that tax year and to limit increases in the appraised value of the homestead for subsequent tax years based on the inflation rate.

Proposing a constitutional amendment authorizing the legislature to exempt from ad valorem taxation the total assessed value of the residence homestead of an unpaid caregiver of an individual who is eligible to receive long-term services and supports under the Medicaid program while the individual is on a waiting list for the services and supports.

Proposing a constitutional amendment authorizing the legislature to exempt from ad valorem taxation income-producing tangible personal property for a certain period of time.

Proposing a constitutional amendment to abolish ad valorem taxes.

Proposing a constitutional amendment to authorize the legislature to exempt from ad valorem taxation the portion of the assessed value of a person's property that is attributable to the installation or construction in or on the property of border security infrastructure.

Related to expanding the exemptions of abortions and Texas women's access to reproductive healthcare including in vitro fertilization.

Relating to an exemption from sales and use taxes for purchases up to a certain amount.

Relating to an exemption from sales and use taxes for certain educational materials.

Related to making the Texas Education Commissioner an elected office

Relating to the ability of a voter registrar and volunteer deputy registrar to distribute and receive applications for a ballot to be voted by mail.

Relating to requiring fine arts as part of the foundation curriculum for public schools.

Relating to required instruction in the Success Sequence for students in public schools.

Relating to postage for early voting ballots voted by mail.

Relating to the voter registration powers of volunteer deputy registrars.

Relating to consideration of education-related income in determining eligibility of applicants for residential tenancies.