A strong solar storm headed to Earth could produce colorful aurora displays across more U.S. states than usual Tuesday night. The sun earlier this week burped out huge bursts of energy called coronal mass ejections, leading space weather forecasters to issue a geomagnetic storm watch. Northern lights were forecast in Alaska, Washington, Oregon, Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota, Minnesota, Michigan, Wisconsin, Vermont, New Hampshire and Maine. Parts of northern Idaho, Wyoming, Nebraska, Iowa, Illinois, New York and Pennsylvania may also get a view. The strength of the light show will depend on how Earth’s magnetic field interacts with the solar bursts, said Shawn Dahl at NOAA’s Space Weather Prediction Center. Here’s what to know about auroras and how to spot them. What are northern lights? The sun is at the maximum phase of its 11-year activity cycle, making the light displays more common and widespread. Colorful northern lights have decorated night skies in unexpected places and space weather experts say there are more auroras still to come. “This is going to kind of continue off and on throughout the year,” Dahl said. Last spring, the strongest geomagnetic storm in two decades slammed Earth, producing light displays across the Northern Hemisphere. And last fall, a powerful solar storm dazzled skygazers far from the Arctic Circle when dancing lights appeared in unexpected places including Germany, the United Kingdom, New England and New York City. Aurora displays known as the northern and southern lights are commonly visible near the poles, where charged particles from the sun interact with Earth’s atmosphere. Skygazers are spotting the lights deeper into the United States and Europe because the sun is going through a major facelift. Every 11 years, its poles swap places, causing magnetic twists and tangles along the way. Severe storms are capable of scrambling radio and GPS communications. The sun’s active spurt is expected to last at least through the end of this year, though when solar activity will peak won’t be known until months after the fact, according to NASA and the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. What do solar storms do? Solar storms can bring more than colorful lights to Earth. When fast-moving particles and plasma slam into Earth’s magnetic field, they can temporarily disrupt the power grid. Space weather can also interfere with air traffic control radio and satellites in orbit. In 1859, a severe solar storm triggered auroras as far south as Hawaii and caught telegraph lines on fire in a rare event. And a 1972 solar storm may have detonated magnetic U.S. sea mines off the coast of Vietnam. Space weather experts aren’t able to predict a solar storm months in advance. Instead, they alert relevant parties to prepare in the days before a solar outburst hits Earth. How to see auroras Northern lights forecasts can be found on NOAA’s Space Weather Prediction Center website or an aurora forecasting app. Consider aurora-watching in a quiet, dark area away from city lights. NASA’s Kelly Korreck recommended skygazing from a local or national park. And check the weather forecast because clouds can cover up the spectacle entirely. Taking a picture with a smartphone camera may also reveal hints of the aurora that aren’t visible to the naked eye. “Enjoy it,” said Korreck. “It’s this great show … from the sun to you.” —Adithi Ramakrishnan, AP science writer The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Science and Educational Media Group and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

EcoTech Lab, under the leadership of architect Logman Arja, has unveiled ClayPonic V1—a forward-thinking, sustainable urban farming system that challenges conventional approaches to food production. Developed in response to pressing global issues such as climate change, soil degradation, and water scarcity, ClayPonic V1 harnesses the potential of a 3D-printed hydroponics system made from clay. Its vertical, modular design maximizes space efficiency, making it well-suited for dense urban environments where land is limited. Designer: EcoTech Lab ClayPonic V1 merges traditional ceramics with advanced 3D printing technology, offering a unique solution that promotes food self-sufficiency and also enriches the sensory experience of urban agriculture. The system is designed to be immersive, engaging users through touch, sight, and even scent, as plants grow in a visually striking vertical arrangement. In addition to its environmental benefits, ClayPonic V1 aims to transform urban farming into a therapeutic and educational activity, encouraging communities to reconnect with nature and understand the value of sustainable food production. Through this innovative approach, EcoTech Lab envisions a future where cities are greener, healthier, and more resilient. EcoTech Lab’s innovative system is developed as part of its commitment to environmental design advocacy and is purposefully crafted to foster a deeper connection between people and nature by engaging all five senses. Visitors are invited to visually appreciate the flowing, organic shapes of the ceramic structures, which are both functional and artistic elements within the urban landscape. The tactile experience is also important—users can run their hands over the textured surfaces as they plant seeds or harvest crops, gaining a direct, physical connection to their food’s growth process. As they move through the space, the air is filled with the natural aromas of fresh herbs and blooming flowers, creating an immersive olfactory experience. The gentle sound of water trickling through the hydroponic system adds another sensory layer, providing a soothing auditory backdrop that enhances relaxation and mindfulness. Finally, the result and reward is getting to taste the freshly harvested produce, offering a literal and figurative fruition of the multisensory journey. In this way, EcoTech Lab’s design transforms urban farming into a holistic, engaging, and restorative practice that reconnects individuals with the rhythms of the natural world. Logman Arja’s ClayPonic V1 goes beyond food production, functioning as both a learning environment and a catalyst for conversations about the future of agriculture. The system demonstrates how advanced farming techniques, such as 3D-printed clay hydroponics, can positively influence urban spaces and foster community resilience. By incorporating a vertical, space-efficient design, ClayPonic V1 showcases the potential to integrate fresh food cultivation into dense city environments, making nutritious produce more accessible to urban populations. Through hands-on engagement and educational opportunities, it encourages communities to rethink food systems and actively participate in shaping a more sustainable and self-sufficient future. The post ClayPonic V1 Is A 3D-Printed Clay Hydroponics System Revolutionizing Urban Farming first appeared on Yanko Design.

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A lawsuit over the Trump administration’s infamous Houthi Signal group chat has revealed what steps departments took to preserve the messages—and how little they actually saved.

Every year, distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks break records for frequency, size, and sophistication, making it imperative that enterprises adopt powerful mitigation measures. To be effective, those measures require network and processing capacity that can handle the flood of requests DDoS attacks generate in their quest to overwhelm corporate servers.  Defense mechanisms need to incorporate detection technology that can quickly distinguish attacks from legitimate, normal spikes in incoming business traffic. And they need to generate reports on DDoS incidents to help businesses plan future security enhancements and to provide data that supports audit and compliance requirements. Given the cost of tools and staffing to meet all these needs, enterprises cannot act alone. Their best strategy is to enlist dedicated DDoS services that unburden corporate security teams from assembling in-house specialized talent and technology to design, install, monitor and maintain the necessary mitigation infrastructure on site. Such services can be both effective and painless to adopt.  Addressing the DDoS problem While DDoS attacks certainly worry CIOs, CTOs and CSOs, they should also be of concern to CFOs and CEOs because of the well-known havoc they can wreak on revenues, productivity, and reputation. Mitigating DDoS attacks requires the ability to process incoming attack volume and sort harmful traffic from legitimate. Because the cost of doing so is just too large for enterprises to bear, they must find trusted service partners with the scale and expertise to handle it for them. These partners monitor inbound traffic and redirect any suspicious activity to scrubbing centers that find the suspect traffic and drop it. Clean traffic gets routed to customer networks. And all that must happen fast, to avoid intrusive delays that disrupt end users. The mitigation partner needs to have the network capacity and processing power to automatically respond to the attacks it detects — before any damage is done, and no matter the scale of the attack.  Ideally, the service can accomplish all this with little or no additional hardware at corporate sites, while complementing in-house security measures already in place.  Optimum offers a DDoS solution One such solution is Managed DDoS Protection offered by Optimum, which is rolled into Optimum Business Internet service. Within a minute of customer-bound traffic showing anomalies that indicate a DDoS attack, all traffic headed to that IP address is off-ramped to Optimum’s scrubbing centers. When it’s been sandboxed and sorted, malicious traffic is dumped and good traffic is routed to the customer, with that extra hop adding just 2ms of latency. Customers go about business as usual, with no knowledge the attack even occurred until they receive an incident report from Optimum detailing the type, size, and duration of the attack — information that can support audit and compliance requirements. The whole process requires no additional hardware, circuits or tunneling configurations.  This type of DDoS protection, especially when integrated with other internet services, can mitigate the threat of downtime without additional investment in staff or hardware. It’s a form of protection that’s too good to ignore.  Learn more about how Optimum can protect you from DDoS attacks. Visit our Business Secure Internet page. 

Apple will soon encourage customers to bring their old gear in to an Apple Store that wouldn't qualify for store credit to get a discount on AirPods, AirTags, and more.Image Credit: AppleIt's spring, which means it's time to declutter our homes and discard unwanted items. Apple thinks so, too, and is planning a promotion to help you turn your old and unwanted Apple tech into credit for new Apple accessories.Subscribe to AppleInsider on YouTube Continue Reading on AppleInsider | Discuss on our Forums

Carlo Ratti has unveiled his design for the torches for next year’s Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games in Milano.& The instruments to be used in ceremonies seen across the world are made from either bronze or aluminum, weigh close to 1.06kg (or 2.3 pounds), and can be reused up to ten times by the respective torchbearers in each relay.  Image courtesy Fondazione Milano Cortina 2026Ratti, who is busy preparing the 2025 Venice Biennale, has chosen to name these torches Essential and says their inspiration has concentrated more on enhancing the ancient symbol of the games than being presented as a singular design object.  Image courtesy Fondazione Milano Cortina 2026"We were clear from the very beginning: it’s not the torch that matters, but the flame. So, we started thinking about how to design a torch that, in a way, isn’t a torch – and instead emphasizes the power and beauty of the flame," he reiterates in the design announcement. Image courtesy Fondazione Milano Cortina 2026As a ...

Marathon is out later this year for Bungie, but that’s not all it has in the works. On May 6th, 9 AM PT, it will reveal Destiny 2’s The Edge of Fate and further details for the upcoming year of content. The Edge of Fate could be the name of the upcoming expansion codenamed Apollo. Launching in mid-June, it includes new stories and locations (some brand new to the franchise), a new raid, the start of the next saga for Destiny 2, and the ability to choose your own story path. The season consists of two major updates, Arsenal and Surge, one every three months adding new and reprised activities, gear and Artifact Mods, events, new raid weapons and more. Each will have a Rewards Pass containing a new Exotic weapon and ornament, cosmetics, Legendary gear ornaments, and resources. Of course, we’re yet to know what all this could be, so stay tuned for more details in May. Destiny 2 is available for Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S, PS4, PS5, and PC. It’s currently in the middle of Act 3 of its third Episode, Heresy. Join us on May 6, 2025 as we reveal The Edge of Fate and the upcoming year of Destiny 2.— Destiny 2 (@destinythegame.bungie.net) 2025-04-15T15:00:00.000Z

High School Student Discovers 1.5 Million Potential New Astronomical Objects by Developing an A.I. Algorithm The 18-year-old won $250,000 for training a machine learning model to analyze understudied data from NASA’s retired NEOWISE telescope Matteo Paz with Caltech President Thomas F. Rosenbaum after winning the Regeneron Science Talent Search award. California Institute of Technology In a leap forward for astronomy, a researcher has developed an artificial intelligence algorithm and discovered more than one million objects in space by parsing through understudied data from a NASA telescope. The breakthrough is detailed in a study published in November in The Astronomical Journal. What the study doesn’t detail, however, is that the paper’s sole author is 18 years old. Matteo Paz from Pasadena, California, recently won the first place prize of $250,000 in the 2025 Regeneron Science Talent Search for combining machine learning with astronomy. Self-described as the nation’s “oldest and most prestigious science and math competition for high school seniors,” the contest recognized Paz for developing his A.I. algorithm. The young scientist’s tool processed 200 billion data entries from NASA’s now-retired Near-Earth Object Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (NEOWISE) telescope. His model revealed 1.5 million previously unknown potential celestial bodies. “I was just happy to have had the privilege. Not only placing in the top ten, but winning first place, came as a visceral surprise,” the teenager tells Forbes’ Kevin Anderton. “It still hasn’t fully sunk in.” Pasadena high schooler earns top science award Watch on Paz’s interest in astronomy turned into real research when he participated in the Planet Finder Academy at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in summer 2022. There, he studied astronomy and computer science under the guidance of his mentor, Davy Kirkpatrick, an astronomer and senior scientist at the university’s Infrared Processing and Analysis Center (IPAC). Kirkpatrick had been working with data from the NEOWISE infrared telescope, which NASA launched in 2009 with the aim of searching for near-Earth asteroids and comets. The telescope’s survey, however, also collected data on the shifting heat of variable objects: rare phenomena that emit flashing, changing or otherwise dynamic light, such as exploding stars. It was Kirkpatrick’s idea to look for these elusive objects in NEOWISE’s understudied data. “At that point, we were creeping up towards 200 billion rows in the table of every single [NEOWISE] detection that we had made over the course of over a decade,” Kirkpatrick explains in a Caltech statement. “So, my idea for the summer was to take a little piece of the sky and see if we could find some variable stars. Then we could highlight those to the astronomic community, saying, ‘Here’s some new stuff we discovered by hand; just imagine what the potential is in the dataset.’” Paz, however, had no intention of doing it by hand. Instead, he worked on an A.I. model that sorted through the raw data in search of tiny changes in infrared radiation, which could indicate the presence of variable objects. Paz and Kirkpatrick continued working together after the summer to perfect the model, which ultimately flagged 1.5 million potential new objects, including supernovas and black holes. “Prior to Matteo’s work, no one had tried to use the entire (200-billion-row) table to identify and classify all of the significant variability that was there,” Kirkpatrick tells Business Insider’s Morgan McFall-Johnsen in an email. He adds that Caltech researchers are already making use of Paz’s catalog of potential variable objects, called VarWISE, to study binary star systems. “The variable candidates that he’s uncovered will be widely studied,” says Amy Mainzer, NEOWISE’s principal investigator for NASA, to Business Insider. As for the A.I. model, Paz explains that it might be applicable to “anything else that comes in a temporal format,” such as stock market chart analysis and atmospheric effects like pollution, according to the statement. It’s no surprise the teenager is interested in the climate—as fires burned in L.A. earlier this year, the Eaton Fire forced him and his family to evacuate their home, Forbes Other teenage scientists recognized by the contest studied mosquito control, drug-resistant fungus, the human genome and mathematics. “The remarkable creativity and dedication of these students bring renewed hope for our future,” Maya Ajmera, president of the Society for Science, which oversees the award, says in a statement. “Driven by their ingenuity, these young scientists are developing groundbreaking solutions that have the potential to transform our world and propel society forward.” Get the latest stories in your inbox every weekday.

At TED 2025, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman faced tough questions on AI ethics, artist compensation, and the risks of autonomous agents in a tense interview with TED’s Chris Anderson, revealing new details about OpenAI’s explosive growth and future plans.Read More