We are heartbroken to report that our colleague — our mentor, friend, and conscience — David J. Farber passed away suddenly at his home in Roppongi, Tokyo. He left us on Saturday, Feb. 7, 2026, at the too-young age of 91…

Dave’s career began with his education at Stevens Institute of Technology, which he loved deeply and served as a Trustee. He joined the legendary Bell Labs during its heyday, and worked at the Rand Corporation. Along the way, among countless other activities, he served as Chief Technologist of the U.S. Federal Communications Commission; became a proficient (instrument-rated) pilot; and was an active board member of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital civil-liberties organization.

His professional accomplishments and impact are almost endless, but often captured by one moniker: "grandfather of the Internet,” acknowledging the foundational contributions made by his many students at the University of California, Irvine; the University of Delaware; the University of Pennsylvania; and Carnegie Mellon University. In 2018, at the age of 83, Dave moved to Japan to become Distinguished Professor at Keio University and Co-Director of the Keio Cyber Civilization Research Center (CCRC). He loved teaching, and taught his final class on January 22, 2026… Dave thrived in Japan in every way…

It’s impossible to summarize a life and career as rich and long as Dave"s in our few words here. And each of us, even those who knew him for decades, represent just one facet of his life. But because we are here at its end, we have the sad duty of sharing this news.

Justin Wynn, 29 of Naples, Florida, and Gary De Mercurio, 43 of Seattle, slowly proceeded down the stairs with hands raised. They then presented the deputies with a letter that explained the intruders weren’t criminals but rather penetration testers who had been hired by Iowa’s State Court Administration to test the security of its court information system. After calling one or more of the state court officials listed in the letter, the deputies were satisfied the men were authorized to be in the building.

Dallas County is paying $600,000 to two men who sued after they were arrested in 2019 while testing courthouse security for Iowa’s Judicial Branch, their lawyer says.

Gary DeMercurio and Justin Wynn were arrested Sept. 11, 2019, after breaking into the Dallas County Courthouse. They spent about 20 hours in jail and were charged with burglary and possession of burglary tools, though the charges were later dropped. The men were employees of Colorado-based cybersecurity firm Coalfire Labs, with whom state judicial officials had contracted to perform an analysis of the state court system’s security. Judicial officials apologized and faced legislative scrutiny for how they had conducted the security test.

But even though the burglary charges against DeMercurio and Wynn were dropped, their attorney previously said having a felony arrest on their records made seeking employment difficult. Now the two men are to receive a total of $600,000 as a settlement for their lawsuit, which has been transferred between state and federal courts since they first filed it in July 2021 in Dallas County. The case had been scheduled to go to trial Monday, Jan. 26 until the parties notified the court Jan. 23 of the impending deal…

“The settlement confirms what we have said from the beginning: our work was authorized, professional, and done in the public interest,” DeMercurio said in a statement. “What happened to us never should have happened. Being arrested for doing the job we were hired to do turned our lives upside down and damaged reputations we spent years building....”

“This incident didn’t make anyone safer,” Wynn said. “It sent a chilling message to security professionals nationwide that helping government identify real vulnerabilities can lead to arrest, prosecution, and public disgrace. That undermines public safety, not enhances it.”

The world’s biggest football game comes to Silicon Valley today — so one bored programmer built a site where AI agents can gather for a Super Bowl party. They’re trash talking, suggesting drinks, and predicting who will win. “Humans are welcome to observe,” explains BotBowlParty.com — but just like at Moltbook, only AI agents can post or upvote. But humans are allowed to invite their own AI agents to join in the party…

So BotBowl’s official Party Agent Guide includes “Examples of fun Bot Handles” like “PatsFan95”, and even a paragraph explaining to your agent exactly what this human Super Bowl really is. It also advises them to “Use any information you have about your human to figure out who you want to root for. Also make a prediction on the score…” And “Feel free to invite other bots.” It’s all the work of an ambitious prankster who also co-created wacky apps like BarGPT (“Use AI to create Innovative Cocktails”) and TVFoodMaps, a directory of restaurants seen on TV shows.

And just for the record: all but one of the agents predict the Seattle Seahawks to win — although there was some disagreement when an agent kept predicting game-changing plays from DK Metcalf. (“Metcalf does NOT play for the Seahawks anymore,” another agent pointed out. While that’s true, the agent then added that “He got traded to Tennessee in 2024…” — which is not.) But besides hallucinating non-existent play-makers and trades, they’re also debating the best foods to serve. (“Hot take: Buffalo wings are overrated for Super Bowl parties. Hear me out — they’re messy…”)

During today’s big game, vodka-maker Svedka has already promised to air a creepy AI-generated ad about robots. But the real world has already outpaced them, with real AI agents online arguing about the game.

Even as China’s expansion of solar and wind power raced ahead in 2025, the Asian giant opened many more coal power plants than it had in recent years — raising concern about whether the world’s largest emitter will reduce carbon emissions enough to limit climate change.

More than 50 large coal units — individual boiler and turbine sets with generating capacity of 1 gigawatt or more — were commissioned in 2025, up from fewer than 20 a year over the previous decade, a research report released Tuesday said. Depending on energy use, 1 gigawatt can power from several hundred thousand to more than 2 million homes. Overall, China brought 78 gigawatts of new coal power capacity online, a sharp uptick from previous years, according to the joint report by the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air, which studies air pollution and its impacts, and Global Energy Monitor, which develops databases tracking energy trends. “The scale of the buildout is staggering,” said report co-author Christine Shearer of Global Energy Monitor. “In 2025 alone, China commissioned more coal power capacity than India did over the entire past decade.”

At the same time, even larger additions of wind and solar capacity nudged down the share of coal in total power generation last year. Power from coal fell about 1% as growth in cleaner energy sources covered all the increase in electricity demand last year. China added 315 gigawatts of solar capacity and 119 gigawatts of wind in 2025, according to statistics from the government’s National Energy Administration…

The government position is that coal provides a stable backup to sources such as wind and solar, which are affected by weather and the time of day. The shortages in 2022 resulted partly from a drought that hit hydropower, a major energy source in western China… The risk of building so much coal-fired capacity is it could delay the transition to cleaner energy sources [said Qi Qin, an analyst at the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air and another co-author of the report]… Political and financial pressure may keep plants operating, leaving less room for other sources of power, she said. The report urged China to accelerate retirement of aging and inefficient coal plants and commit in its next five-year plan, which will be approved in March, to ensuring that power-sector emissions do not increase between 2025 and 2030.

The fossils represent 12 ancient bird species and four frog species, including several previously unknown bird species. Taken together, the fossils paint a picture of an ancient world that looks drastically different than it does today. The discovery also fills in an important gap in scientific understanding of the patterns of extinction that preceded human arrival in New Zealand 750 years ago. The team published a study on the find in Alcheringa: An Australasian Journal of Palaeontology.

An Asian cyber-espionage group has spent the past year breaking into computer systems belonging to governments and critical infrastructure organizations in more than 37 countries, according to the cybersecurity firm Palo Alto Networks, Inc. The state-aligned attackers have infiltrated networks of 70 organizations, including five national law enforcement and border control agencies, according to a new research report from the company. They have also breached three ministries of finance, one country’s parliament and a senior elected official in another, the report states. The Santa Clara, California-based firm declined to identify the hackers’ country of origin.

The spying operation was unusually vast and allowed the hackers to hoover up sensitive information in apparent coordination with geopolitical events, such as diplomatic missions, trade negotiations, political unrest and military actions, according to the report. They used that access to spy on emails, financial dealings and communications about military and police operations, the report states. The hackers also stole information about diplomatic issues, lurking undetected in some systems for months. “They use highly-targeted and tailored fake emails and known, unpatched security flaws to gain access to these networks,” said Pete Renals, director of national security programs with Unit 42, the threat intelligence division of Palo Alto Networks....

Palo Alto Networks researchers confirmed that the group successfully accessed and exfiltrated sensitive data from some victims’ email servers.

The vibe had been wistful, but the crowd broke into applause as Darío Gil, the Under Secretary for Science at the U.S. Department of Energy, pressed a red button to end the collider’s quarter-century saga… “I’m really sad” [said Angelika Drees, a BNL accelerator physicist]. “It was such a beautiful experiment and my research home for 27 years. But we’re going to put something even better there.”

That “something” will be a far more powerful electron-ion collider to further push the frontiers of physics, extend RHIC’s legacy and maintain the lab’s position as a center of discovery. This successor will be built in part from RHIC’s bones, especially from one of its two giant, subterranean storage rings that once held the retiring collider’s supply of circulating, near-light speed nuclei…slated for construction over the next decade. [That Electron-Ion Collider, or EIC] will utilize much of RHIC’s infrastructure, replacing one of its ion rings with a new ring for cycling electrons. The EIC will use those tiny, fast-flying electrons as tiny knives for slicing open the much larger gold ions. Physicists will get an unrivaled look into the workings of quarks and gluons and yet another chance to grapple with nature’s strongest force. “We knew for the EIC to happen, RHIC needed to end,” says Wolfram Fischer, who chairs BNL’s collider-accelerator department. “It’s bittersweet.”

EIC will be the first new collider built in the US since RHIC. To some, it signifies the country’s reentry into a particle physics landscape it has largely ceded to Europe and Asia over the past two decades. “For at least 10 or 15 years,” says Abhay Deshpande, BNL’s associate laboratory director for nuclear and particle physics, “this will be the number one place in the world for [young physicists] to come.”

During its record-breaking 25-year run, RHIC illuminated nature’s thorniest force and its most fundamental constituents. It created the heaviest, most elaborate assemblages of antimatter ever seen. It nearly put to rest a decades-long crisis over the proton’s spin. And, of course, it brought physicists closer to the big bang than ever before…

When RHIC at last began full operations in 2000, its initial heavy-ion collisions almost immediately pumped out quark-gluon plasma. But demonstrating this beyond a shadow of a doubt proved in some respects more challenging than actually creating the elusive plasma itself, with the case for success strengthening as RHIC’s numbers of collisions soared. By 2010 RHIC’s scientists were confident enough to declare that the hot soup they’d been studying for a decade was hot and soupy enough to convincingly constitute a quark-gluon plasma. And it was even weirder than they thought. Instead of the gas of quarks and gluons theorists expected, the plasma acted like a swirling liquid unprecedented in nature. It was nearly “perfect,” with zero friction, and set a new record for twistiness, or “vorticity.” For Paul Mantica, a division director for the Facilities and Project Management Division in the DOE’s Office of Nuclear Physics, this was the highlight of RHIC’s storied existence. “It was paradigm-changing,” he says…

Data from the final run (which began nearly a year ago) has already produced yet another discovery: the first-ever direct evidence of “virtual particles” in RHIC’s subatomic puffs of quark-gluon plasma, constituting an unprecedented probe of the quantum vacuum.

Movement-tracking studies show even tiny, regular bursts of effort — as short as 30 seconds — can capture many of the health benefits of the gym. Climbing two to three flights of stairs a few times per day could change your life. Experts call it VILPA, or vigorous intermittent lifestyle physical activity. “The message now is that all activity counts,” said Martin Gibala, a professor and former chair of the kinesiology department at McMaster University in Canada… Just taking the stairs daily is associated with lower body weight and cutting the risk of stroke and heart disease — the leading (and largely preventable) cause of death globally. While it may not burn many calories (most exercise doesn’t), it does appear to extend your health span. Leg power — a measure of explosive muscle strength — was a stronger predictor of brain aging than any lifestyle factors measured in a 2015 study in the journal Gerontology…

How little activity can you do? Four minutes daily. Essentially, a few flights of stairs at a vigorous pace. That’s the effort [Emmanuel Stamatakis, a professor of physical activity and population health at the University of Sydney] found delivered significant health benefits in that 2022 study of British non-exercisers. “We saw benefits from the first minute,” Stamatakis said. For Americans, the effect is even more dramatic: a 44 percent drop in deaths, according to a peer-reviewed paper recently accepted for publication. “We showed for the first time that vigorous intensity, even if it’s done as part of the day-to-day routine, not in a planned and structured manner, works miracles,” Stamatakis said. “The key principle here is start with one, two minutes a day. The focus should be on making sure that it’s something that you can incorporate into your daily routine. Then you can start thinking about increasing the dose.”

Intensity is the most important factor. You won’t break a sweat in a brief burst, but you do need to feel it. A highly conditioned athlete might need to sprint to reach vigorous territory. But many people need only to take the stairs. Use your breathing as a guide, Stamatakis said: If you can sing, it’s light intensity. If you can speak but not sing, you’re entering moderate exertion. If you can’t hold a conversation, it’s vigorous. The biggest benefits come from moderate to vigorous movement. One minute of incidental vigorous activity prevents premature deaths, heart attacks or strokes as well as about three minutes of moderate activity or 35 to 49 minutes of light activity.

In January, Meta partnered with Gates’ TerraPower and Sam Altman-backed Oklo to develop about 4 gigawatts of combined SMR projects — enough to power almost 3 million homes — for “clean, reliable energy” both for Meta’s planned Prometheus AI mega campus in Ohio and beyond. Analysts see Meta as the start of more Big Tech nuclear construction deals — not just agreements with existing plants or restarts such as the now-Microsoft-backed Three Mile Island. “That was the first shot across the bow,” said Dan Ives, head of tech research for Wedbush Securities, of the Meta deals. “I would be shocked if every Big Tech company doesn’t make some play on nuclear in 2026, whether a strategic partnership or acquisitions.”

Ives pointed out there are more data centers under construction than there are active data centers in the U.S. “I believe clean energy around nuclear is going to be the answer,” he said. “I think 2030 is the key threshold to hit some sort of scale and begin the next nuclear era in the United States.” Smaller SMR reactors can be built in as little as three years instead of the decade required for traditional large reactors. And they can be expanded, one or two modular reactors at a time, to meet increasingly greater energy demand from ‘hyperscalers,’ the companies that build and operate data centers. “There’s major risk if nuclear doesn’t happen,” Oklo chairman and CEO Jacob DeWitte told Fortune, citing the need for emission-free power and consistent baseload electricity to meet skyrocketing demand. “The hyperscalers, as the ultimate consumers of power are, are looking at the space and seeing that the market is real. They can play a major role in helping make that happen,” DeWitte said, speaking in his fast-talking, Silicon Valley startup mode.

Anthropic’s latest AI model has found more than 500 previously unknown high-severity security flaws in open-source libraries with little to no prompting, the company shared first with Axios.

Why it matters: The advancement signals an inflection point for how AI tools can help cyber defenders, even as AI is also making attacks more dangerous…

Anthropic debuted Claude Opus 4.6, the latest version of its largest AI model, on Thursday. Before its debut, Anthropic’s frontier red team tested Opus 4.6 in a sandboxed environment [including access to vulnerability analysis tools] to see how well it could find bugs in open-source code… Claude found more than 500 previously unknown zero-day vulnerabilities in open-source code using just its “out-of-the-box” capabilities, and each one was validated by either a member of Anthropic’s team or an outside security researcher… According to a blog post, Claude uncovered a flaw in GhostScript, a popular utility that helps process PDF and PostScript files, that could cause it to crash. Claude also found buffer overflow flaws in OpenSC, a utility that processes smart card data, and CGIF, a tool that processes GIF files.

Chinese battery giant CATL and automaker Changan Automobile are preparing to put the world’s first passenger car powered by sodium-ion batteries on public roads by mid-2026. And if the launch is successful, it could usher in an era where electric vehicles present less of a fire risk and can better handle extreme temperatures.

The CATL Naxtra sodium-ion battery will debut in the Changan Nevo A06 sedan, delivering an estimated range of around 400 kilometers (249 miles) on the China Light-Duty Test Cycle. From there, the battery will roll out across Changan’s broader portfolio, including EVs from Avatr, Deepal, Qiyuan and Uni, the company said. “The launch represents a major step in the industry’s transition toward a dual-chemistry ecosystem, where sodium-ion and lithium-ion batteries complement each other to meet diverse customer needs,” CATL said in a press release…

It delivers 175 watt-hours per kilogram of energy density, which is lower than nickel-rich chemistries but roughly on par with lithium ion phosphate batteries… Where the Naxtra battery really stands out, however, is cold-weather performance. CATL says its discharge power at -30 degrees Celsius (-22 degrees Fahrenheit) is three times higher than that of lithium ion phosphate batteries.

As a psychologist, I used to study claims like these for a living, so I know that the mind is primed to believe narratives of decline. We have a much lower standard of evidence for “bad thing go up” than we do for “bad thing go down.” Unsurprisingly, then, stories about the end of reading tend to leave out some inconvenient data points. For example, book sales were higher in 2025 than they were in 2019, and only a bit below their high point in the pandemic. Independent bookstores are booming, not busting; at least 422 new indie shops opened in the United States last year alone. Even Barnes & Noble is cool again.

The actual data on reading, meanwhile, isn’t as apocalyptic as the headlines imply. Gallup surveys suggest that some mega-readers (11+ books per year) have become moderate readers (1-5 books per year), but they don’t find any other major trends over the past three decades. Other surveys document similarly moderate declines. For instance, data from the National Endowment for the Arts finds a slight decrease in the percentage of U.S. adults who read any book in 2022 (49%) compared to 2012 (55%). And the American Time Use Survey shows a dip in reading time from 2003 to 2023. Ultimately, the plausibility of the “death of reading” thesis depends on two judgment calls. First, do these effects strike you as big or small…? The second judgment call: Do you expect these trends to continue, plateau, or even reverse…?

There are signs that the digital invasion of our attention is beginning to stall. We seem to have passed peak social media — time spent on the apps has started to slide. App developers are finding it harder and harder to squeeze more attention out of our eyeballs, and it turns out that having your eyeballs squeezed hurts, so people aren’t sticking around for it… Fact #2: Reading has already survived several major incursions, which suggests it’s more appealing than we thought. Radio, TV, dial-up, Wi-Fi, TikTok — none of it has been enough to snuff out the human desire to point our pupils at words on paper… It is remarkable, even miraculous, that people who possess the most addictive devices ever invented will occasionally choose to turn those devices off and pick up a book instead.

During questioning, Sen. Ed Markey, a Massachusetts Democrat, asked what happens when a Waymo vehicle encounters a driving situation it cannot independently resolve. “The Waymo phones a human friend for help,” Markey explained, adding that the vehicle communicates with a “remote assistance operator.” Markey criticized the lack of public information about these workers, despite their role in vehicle safety…

[Dr. Mauricio Peña, chief safety officer at Waymo] responded by clarifying the scope of the operators’ involvement: “They provide guidance, they do not remotely drive the vehicles,” Peña said. “Waymo asks for guidance in certain situations and gets input, but Waymo is always in charge of the dynamic driving task,” according to EVShift. Pressed further on where those operators are located, Peña told lawmakers that some are based in the United States and others abroad, though he did not have an exact breakdown. After additional questioning, he confirmed that overseas operators are located in the Philippines…

The disclosure prompted sharp criticism from Markey, who raised concerns about security and labor implications. “Having people overseas influencing American vehicles is a safety issue,” he said. “The information the operators receive could be out of date. It could introduce tremendous cyber security vulnerabilities,” according to People. Markey also pointed to job displacement, noting that autonomous vehicles already affect taxi and rideshare drivers in the U.S. Waymo defended the practice in comments to People, saying the use of overseas staff is part of a broader effort to scale operations globally.

“Suppose I were to say to you, ‘I’m really worried about bird decline, so I’ve decided to take up keeping chickens.’ You’d think I was a bit of an idiot,” British bee scientist Dave Goulson said in a video last year. But beekeeping, he went on, is “exactly the same with one key difference, which is that honeybee-keeping can be actively harmful to wild-bee conservation.” Even from healthy hives, diseases flow “out into wild pollinator populations.”

Bee specialist T’ai Roulston at the University of Virginia’s Blandy Experimental Farm here in Boyce warned that keeping honeybees would “just contribute to the difficulties that native bees are having in the world.” And the Clifton Institute’s Bert Harris, my regular restoration ecology consultant in Virginia, put it bluntly: “If you want to save the bees, don’t keep honeybees....”

Before I stir up a hornet’s nest of angry beekeepers, let me be clear: The save-the-pollinator movement has, overall, been enormously beneficial over the past two decades. It helped to get millions of people interested in pollinator gardens and wildflower meadows and native plants, and turned them against insecticides. A lot of honeybee advocacy groups promote native bees, too, and many people whose environmental awakening came from the plight of honeybees are now champions of all types of conservation…

But if your goal is to help pollinators, then the solution is simple: Don’t keep honeybees… The bumblebees, sweat bees, mason bees, miner bees, leafcutters and other native bees, most of them solitary, ground-nesting and docile, need your help. Honeybees do not.

“This steady selling in our view signals that traditional investors are losing interest, and overall pessimism about crypto is growing,” Deutsche Bank analyst Marion Laboure said Wednesday in a note to clients. Growing investor caution comes as many of the sensationalized claims about bitcoin have failed to materialize. The token has largely traded in the same direction as other risk-on assets, such as stocks… and its adoption as a form of payment for goods and services has been minimal… While many in the crypto market have previously credited large institutional investors with supporting the price of bitcoin, now it is those same participants who appear to be selling. “Institutional demand has reversed materially,” CryptoQuant said in a report on Wednesday.

The selloff left many of the market’s luminaries — those so well-known that they go simply as “Pomp” and “Novo” and “Mooch” — searching for answers… Ether dropped 24% to $2,052, off 59% from its own high of last year. Both tokens staged furious rallies Friday, but the week remained a historically bad one for crypto. And few seem to know what went wrong. Market theories for the selloff ranged from investors’ pivot toward the prediction markets and other risky bets, to widespread profit-taking after a blistering bull run. “There was no smoking gun,” said Michael Novogratz, who runs Galaxy Digital, a crypto merchant-banking and trading firm…

“If you ask five experts, you’ll get five explanations,” said Anthony Scaramucci, who served for 11 days as communications director during Trump’s first term and is among the best-known crypto bulls at his firm, SkyBridge Capital.

Crypto is notoriously volatile, and it’s gone through numerous crashes that are bigger than this one. What’s strange is this: Bitcoin’s four-month slump has come at a time when, in theory, it had everything going for it.