What just happened? Not long after Meta agreed to pay Donald Trump $25 million to settle a lawsuit over his suspension from the platform following the storming of the Capitol building in 2021, the president has quietly ended a similar lawsuit against Twitter, now called X. Trump sued Twitter, as it was still called back then, after he was banned from the platform in 2021 over claims that his First Amendment rights had been violated. Twitter said it had banned Trump "due to the risk of further incitement of violence."The case was dismissed by a judge in 2022, but Trump's lawyers continued to appeal the decision, though the judges were said to be skeptical of his pleas.In November 2022, Twitter's then-new owner, Elon Musk, posted a poll asking if Trump's account should be reinstated something the Tesla boss had promised to do if he acquired the platform. 51.8% of respondents voted yes, leading to Musk's response: "Vox Populi, Vox Dei," Latin for "the voice of the people is the voice of God."Trump argued in his appeal hearing that being allowed back on Twitter wasn't enough. In November, his lawyers asked the 9th US Circuit Court of Appeals to put the case on hold because settlement talks were ongoing. // Related StoriesA new court filing spotted by TechCrunch states that all parties are now asking the court to dismiss the case. There are no details about the agreement between X and Trump, though it states that both sides will pay their own costs.Trump also sued Meta and YouTube for banning him in the wake of the Capitol invasion. Last month, Meta agreed to pay $25 million to settle its lawsuit against the president. It's been reported that $22 million of this money will go toward a fund to pay for Trump's presidential library, with the rest paying for legal fees and going to other plaintiffs.The case against YouTube, which also allowed Trump to return, was stayed in 2022 pending the Twitter appeal and administratively closed at the end of 2023.Trump and Musk forged a close relationship prior to the president's election. The world's richest man is now the head of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). The agency aims to cut wasteful spending and unnecessary regulations, such as reducing the number of federal employees, abolishing some federal agencies, and improving governmental productivity by modernizing federal technology.

The clue about what makes the Samsung Galaxy S25 Edgespecial is in the name, but exactly how slim are we talking? The most up-to-date speculation puts the phone at a mere 5.84mm thick, even slimmer than has been suggested already. It brings the devices dimensions far closer to some of the thinnest phones ever made.Until now, the Galaxy S25 Edge previously known as the Galaxy S25 Slim was expected to be 6.4mm thick, which although definitely thin, wasnt groundbreaking. The latest comes from well-known phone leaker Ice Universe, apparently quoting another well-known phone leaker, OnLeaks. In a message on the Chinese social network Weibo, its stated the Edges dimensions will be 158.2 x 75.5 x 5.84mm.Recommended VideosThis makes it otherwise very close to the size of the Samsung Galaxy S25 Plus, which is 158.4 x 75.8 x 7.3mmm in size. In 2014, Oppo released the Oppo R5, which at the time (and likely remains) the thinnest smartphone in the world at a mere 4.85mm thick. If Samsung does get the Galaxy S25 Edge down to 5.84mm thick, it will come fairly close to matching Oppos feat of engineering. Before the R5 came along, a brand named Gionee held the title to worlds thinnest phone for a while with the 5.5mm thick Elife S5.5.Please enable Javascript to view this contentUnfortunately, the very thin body makes putting a very big battery inside rather difficult, and the S25 Edge is expected to have a 3,900mAh cell inside, which is 1,000mAh smaller in capacity than the cell inside the Galaxy S25 Plus, and even 100mAh smaller than the Galaxy S25s already diminutive 4,000mAh cell. If Samsung expects a 3,900mAh cell to power an S25 Plus-sized phone, potential buyers should prepare themselves for relatively disappointing battery life.Samsung showed a prototype of the Galaxy S25 Edge during its Unpacked event in January, where the rest of the Galaxy S25 series was officially revealed. Samsung has not given an exact final announcement date for the Galaxy S25 Slim, but its likely to be between April and June 2025. However, a U.S. release doesnt appear to be certain.Editors Recommendations

The privacy and safety troubles continue to pile up for buzzy Chinese AI upstart DeepSeek. After having access blocked for lawmakers and federal employees in multiple countries, while also raising alarms about its censorship and safeguards, it has now attracted an official notice from South Koreas spy agency.The countrys National Intelligence Service (NIS) has targeted the AI company over excessive collection and questionable responses for topics that are sensitive to the Korean heritage, as per Reuters.Recommended VideosUnlike other generative AI services, it has been confirmed that chat records are transferable as it includes a function to collect keyboard input patterns that can identify individuals and communicate with Chinese companies servers such as volceapplog.com, the agency was quoted as saying. This comes after a government notice asking different agencies and ministries to block employee access to DeepSeek over security alarms. Australia and Taiwan have already put such restrictions in place, and more countries are expected to follow suit.Nadeem Sarwar / Digital TrendsThe core issue is that DeepSeek is reportedly offering its ad partners open access to user data, which the Chinese government can also get its hands on, as per local laws. According to The Korea Herald, the chatbot was also returning controversial answers to queries about culturally sensitive and contentious geopolitical topics.Notably, the chatbot delivers different answers when asked the same question in Korean and Chinese languages. According to The Korea Times, the agency will conduct further tests to assess the safety and security aspects in the near future.While security concerns have made headlines as the biggest concern with DeepSeek, experts are also worried about the responses it can generate. In an analysis by The Wall Street Journal, the AI coughed up worrying information such as the recipe to cook up bioweapons, a Nazi defense manifesto, and self-harm encouragement.DeepSeeks censorial behavior mirrors that of the Great Firewall on Chinas internet. Nadeem Sarwar / Digital TrendsIn an analysis by fellow AI giant Anthropic, the companys CEO Dario Amodei mentioned that DeepSeek proved to be the worst AI model in their tests when it comes to generating extremely disturbing information such as the creation of bioweapons.Just over a week ago, researchers at Cisco also tested it against jailbreaking tools across six different categories, and it failed to block every single attack. In another round of tests by Qualys, the AI could only muster a 47% jailbreak pass rate.Then there are the concerns about leaking sensitive data and sharing it without any restraint. Cybersecurity researchers at Wiz recently discovered over a million lines of chat history containing sensitive information that was publicly accessible.DeepSeek plugged the flaw, but its commercial uptake remains a topic of hot debate. In the US, NASA has already banned employees from using DeepSeek, and so has the US Navy. Moreover, a bill seeking a DeepSeek ban on federal devices is also on the table.Editors Recommendations

Allstate is discovering soul-less generative AI models, made up of entirely data and code, are more empathetic than a lot of its human representatives.

How the rapper pulled off one of the riskiest performances in recent history, delivering a diss track to Drake for an audience of millions.

More CenturyLink horror stories CenturyLink nightmares: Users keep asking Ars for help with multi-month outages Three more tales of CenturyLink failing to fix outages until hearing from Ars. Jon Brodkin Feb 10, 2025 6:30 am | 1 Credit: Aurich Lawson | White Zombie (Public Domain) Credit: Aurich Lawson | White Zombie (Public Domain) Story textSizeSmallStandardLargeWidth *StandardWideLinksStandardOrange* Subscribers only Learn moreCenturyLink hasn't broken its annoying habit of leaving customers without service for weeks or months and repeatedly failing to show up for repair appointments.We've written about CenturyLink's failure to fix long outages several times in the past year and a half. In each case, desperate customers contacted Ars because the telecom provider didn't reconnect their service. And each time, CenturyLink finally sprang into action and fixed the problems shortly after hearing from an Ars reporter.Unfortunately, it keeps happening, and CenturyLink (also known as Lumen) can't seem to explain why. In only the last two months, we heard from CenturyLink customers in three states who were without service for periods of between three weeks and over four months.In early December, we heard from John in Boulder, Colorado, who preferred that we not publish his last name. John said he and his wife had been without CenturyLink phone and DSL Internet service for over three weeks."There's no cell service where we live, so we have to drive to find service... We've scheduled repairs [with CenturyLink] three different times, but each time nobody showed up, emailed, or called," he told us. They pay $113 a month for phone and DSL service, he said.John also told us his elderly neighbors were without service. He read our February 2024 article about a 39-day outage in Oregon and wondered if we could help. We also published an August 2023 article about CenturyLink leaving an 86-year-old woman in Minnesota with no Internet service for a month and a May 2024 article about CenturyLink leaving a couple in Oregon with no service for two months, then billing them for $239.We contacted CenturyLink about the outages affecting John and his neighbor, providing both addresses to the company. Service for both was fixed several hours later. Suddenly, a CenturyLink "repair person showed up today, replaced both the modem and the phone card in the nearest pedestal, and we are reconnected to the rest of the world," John told us.John said he also messaged a CenturyLink technician whose contact information he saved from a previous visit for a different matter. It turned out this technician had been promoted to area supervisor, so John's outreach to him may also have contributed to the belated fix. However it happened, CenturyLink confirmed to Ars that service was restored for both John and his neighbor on the same day,"Good news, we were able to restore service to both customers today," a company spokesperson told us. "One had a modem issue, which needed to be replaced, and the other had a problem with their line."What were you waiting for?After getting confirmation that the outages were fixed, we asked the CenturyLink spokesperson whether the company has "a plan to make sure that customer outages are always fixed when a customer contacts the company instead of waiting for a reporter to contact the company on the customer's behalf weeks later."Here is the answer we got from CenturyLink: "Restoring customer service is a priority, and we apologized for the delay. We're looking at why there was a repair delay."It appears that nothing has changed. Even as John's problem was fixed, CenturyLink users in other states suffered even longer outages, and no one showed up for scheduled repair appointments. These outages weren't fixed until late Januaryand only after the customers contacted us to ask for help.Karen Kurt, a resident of Sheridan, Oregon, emailed us on January 23 to report that she had no CenturyLink DSL Internet service since November 4, 2024. One of her neighbors was also suffering through the months-long outage."We have set up repair tickets only to have them voided and/or canceled," Kurt told us. "We have sat at home on the designated repair day from 85 pm, and no one shows up." Kurt's CenturyLink phone and Internet service costs $172.04 a month, according to a recent bill she provided us. Kurt said she also has frequent CenturyLink phone outages, including some stretches that occurred during the three-month Internet outage.Separately, a CenturyLink customer named David Stromberg in Bellevue, Washington, told us that his phone service had been out since September 16. He repeatedly scheduled repair appointments, but the scheduled days went by with no repairs. "Every couple weeks, they do this and the tech doesn't show up," he said.Quick fixesAs far as we can tell, there weren't any complex technical problems preventing CenturyLink from ending these outages. Once the public relations department heard from Ars, CenturyLink sent technicians to each area, and the customers had their services restored.On the afternoon of January 24, we contacted CenturyLink about the outage affecting Kurt and her neighbor. CenturyLink restored service for both houses less than three hours later, finally ending outages that lasted over 11 weeks.On Sunday, January 26, we informed CenturyLink's public relations team about the outage affecting Stromberg in Washington. Service was restored about 48 hours later, ending the phone outage that lasted well over four months.As we've done in previous cases, we asked CenturyLink why the outages lasted so long and why the company repeatedly failed to show up for repair appointments. We did not receive any substantive answer. "Services have been restored, and appropriate credits will be provided," the CenturyLink spokesperson replied.Stromberg said getting the credit wasn't so simple. "We contacted them after service was restored. They credited the full amount, but it took a few phone calls. They also gave us a verbal apology," he told us. He said they pay $80.67 a month for CenturyLink phone service and that they get Internet access from Comcast.Kurt said she had to call CenturyLink each month the outage dragged on to obtain a bill credit. Though the outage is over, she said her Internet access has been unreliable since the fix, with webpages often taking painfully long times to load.Kurt has only a 1.5Mbps DSL connection, so it's not a modern Internet connection even on a good day. CenturyLink told us it found no further problems on its end, so it appears that Kurt is stuck with what she has for now.Desperation"We are just desperate," Kurt told us when she first reached out. Kurt, a retired teacher, said she and her husband were driving to a library to access the Internet and help grandchildren with schoolwork. She said there's no reliable cell service in the area and that they are on a waiting list for Starlink satellite service.Kurt said her husband once suggested they switch to a different Internet provider, and she pointed out that there aren't any better options. On the Starlink website, entering their address shows they are in an area labeled as sold out.Although repair appointments came and went without a fix, Kurt said she received emails from CenturyLink falsely claiming that service had been restored. Kurt said she spoke with technicians doing work nearby and asked if CenturyLink is trying to force people to drop the service because it doesn't want to serve the area anymore.Kurt said a technician replied that there are some areas CenturyLink doesn't want to serve anymore but that her address isn't on that list. A technician explained that they have too much work, she said.CenturyLink has touted its investments in modern fiber networks but hasn't upgraded the old copper lines in Kurt's area and many others."This is DSL. No fiber here!" Kurt told us. "Sometimes when things are congested, you can make a sandwich while things download. I have been told that is because this area is like a glass of water. At first, there were only a few of us drinking out of the glass. Now, CenturyLink has many more customers drinking out of that same glass, and so things are slower/congested at various times of the day."Kurt said the service tends to work better in mid-morning, early afternoon, after 9 pm on weeknights, and on weekends. "Sometimes pages take a bit of time to load. That is especially frustrating while doing school work with my grandson and granddaughter," she said.CenturyLink Internet even slower than expectedAfter the nearly three-monthoutage ended, Kurt told us on January 27 that "many times, we will get Internet back for two or three days, only to lose it again." This seemed to be what happened on Sunday, February 2, when Kurt told us her Internet stopped working again and that she couldn't reach a human at CenturyLink. She restarted the router but could not open webpages.We followed up with CenturyLink's public relations department again, but this time, the company said its network was performing as expected. "We ran a check and called Karen regarding her service," CenturyLink told us on February 3. "Everything looks good on our end, with no problems reported since the 24th. She mentioned that she could access some sites, but the speed seemed really slow. We reminded her that she has a 1.5Mbps service. Karen acknowledged this but felt it was slower than expected."Kurt told us that her Internet is currently slower than it was before the outage. "Before October, at least the webpages loaded," she said. Now, "the pages either do not load, continue to attempt to load, or finally time out."While Kurt is suffering from a lack of broadband competition, municipalities sometimes build public broadband networks when private companies fail to adequately serve their residents. ISPs such as CenturyLink have lobbied against these efforts to expand broadband access.In May 2024, we wrote about how public broadband advocates say they've seen a big increase in opposition from "dark money" groups that don't have to reveal their donors. At the time, CenturyLink did not answer questions about specific donations but defended its opposition to government-operated networks."We know it will take everyone working together to close the digital divide," CenturyLink told us then. "That's why we partner with municipalities on their digital inclusion efforts by providing middle-mile infrastructure that supports last-mile networks. We have and will continue to raise legitimate concerns when government-owned networks create an anti-competitive environment. There needs to be a level playing field when it comes to permitting, right-of-way fees, and cross subsidization of costs."Stuck with CenturyLinkKurt said that CenturyLink has set a "low bar" for its service, and it isn't even meeting that low standard. "I do not use the Internet a lot. I do not use the Internet for gaming or streaming things. The Internet here would never be able to do that. But I do expect the pages to load properly and fully," she said.Kurt said she and her husband live in a house they built in 2007 and originally were led to believe that Verizon service would be available. "Prior to purchasing the property, we did our due diligence and sought out all utility providers... Verizon insisted it was their territory on at least two occasions," she said.But when it was time to install phone and Internet lines, it turned out Verizon didn't serve the location, she said. This is another problem we've written about multiple timesISPs incorrectly claiming to offer service in an area, only to admit they don't after a resident moves in. (Verizon sold its Oregon wireline operations to Frontier in 2010.)"We were stuck with CenturyLink," and "CenturyLink did not offer Internet when we first built this home," Kurt said. They subscribed to satellite Internet offered by WildBlue, which was acquired by ViaSat in 2009. They used satellite for several years until they could get CenturyLink's DSL Internet.Now they're hoping to replace CenturyLink with Starlink, which uses low-Earth orbit satellites that offer faster service than older satellite services. They're on the waiting list for Starlink and are interested in Amazon's Kuiper satellite service, which isn't available yet."We are hoping one of these two vendors will open up a spot for us and we can move our Internet over to satellite," Kurt said. "We have also heard that Starlink and Amazon are going to be starting up phone service as well as Internet. That would truly be a gift to us. If we could move all of our services over to something reliable, our life would be made so much easier."Not enough technicians for copper networkJohn, the Colorado resident who had a three-week CenturyLink outage, said his default DSL speed is 10Mbps downstream and 2Mbps upstream. He doubled that by getting a second dedicated line to create a bonded connection, he said.When John set up repair appointments during the outage, the "dates came and went without the typical 'your tech's on their way' email, without anyone showing up," he said. John said he repeatedly called CenturyLink and was told there was a bad cable that was being fixed."Every time I called, I'd get somebody who said that it was a bad cable and it was being fixed. Every single time, they'd say it would be fixed by 11 pm the following day," he said. "It wasn't, so I'd call again. I asked to talk with a supervisor, but that was always denied. Every time, they said they'd expedite the request. The people I talked with were all very nice and very apologetic about our outage, but they clearly stayed in their box."John still had the contact information for the CenturyLink technician who set up his bonded connection and messaged him around the same time he contacted Ars. When a CenturyLink employee finally showed up to fix the problem, he "found that our DSL was out because our modem was bad, and the phone was out because there was a bad dial-tone card in the closest pedestal. It took this guy less than an hour to get us back workingand it wasn't a broken cable," John said.John praised CenturyLink's local repair team but said his requests for repairs apparently weren't routed to the right people. A CenturyLink manager told John that the local crew never got the repair ticket from the phone-based customer service team, he said.The technician who fixed the service offered some insight into the local problems, John told us. "He said that in the mountains of western Boulder County, there are a total of five techs who know how to work with copper wire," John told us. "All the other employees only work with fiber. CenturyLink is losing the people familiar with copper and not replacing them, even though copper is what the west half of the county depends on."Lumen says it has 1.08 million fiber broadband subscribers and 1.47 million "other broadband subscribers," defined as "customers that primarily subscribe to lower speed copper-based broadband services marketed under the CenturyLink brand."John doesn't know whether his copper line will ever be upgraded to fiber. His house is 1.25 miles from the nearest fiber box. "I wonder if they'll eventually replace lines like the one to our house or if they'll drop us as customers when the copper line eventually degrades to the point it's not usable," he said.Jon BrodkinSenior IT ReporterJon BrodkinSenior IT Reporter Jon is a Senior IT Reporter for Ars Technica. He covers the telecom industry, Federal Communications Commission rulemakings, broadband consumer affairs, court cases, and government regulation of the tech industry. 1 Comments

Tyler Ditto, Principal Customer Success Manager, ImmutaFebruary 10, 20254 Min Read Panther Media GmbH via Alamy StockEstablishing a data governance framework is essential for any organization, but as technology evolves, so does the process of implementing an effective, future-proof data governance program.Whether youre just beginning to explore data governance or are looking to refine your existing framework for future scalability, heres what you can expect to face throughout your journey and how to keep all stakeholders engaged and productive.Proof of ConceptThe first step is proof of concept (POC). Before signing a contract with a data governance platform provider, you must outline the features and functionality that are must-haves to support your business value and initiatives. This may include the need for a solution that will connect with your cloud storage and compute platforms, or a tool that requires SQL expertise to work with your long-term growth goals.Clearly define the POCs scope and success criteria with decision-making stakeholders to help simplify the evaluation and transition to the next steps. The most successful organizations document their goals, understand who the stakeholders are, and define the long-term business problems they want to solve. This documentation approach helps hold everyone accountable for what needs to be achieved and what the goal line is in order to move forwardRelated:Technical Implementation/DeploymentTechnical implementation/deployment is the next phase, which focuses on designing the architecture to fit your new tool into your data ecosystem, including integrating it with the existing technologies in your tech stack.To implement your data governance solution, its key to have a strong vision of where you want to go. At this stage, its easy to want to pursue a fully integrated, end-to-end platform, but you should instead focus on integrating the technologies that are absolutely necessary to execute a minimum viable product (MVP).Sitting down with decision-makers and stakeholders, as well as the support team, helps to align the vision, roadmap and strategy for rolling out the platform. This ensures that the teams agree on how to successfully deploy a product in terms of instance sizing, integration selection and design, resource planning, and workstream prioritization.Minimum Viable ProductThe MVP phase is the pivotal point in the customer life cycle. This is where you begin to design and validate the people and processes involved in fully deploying and driving the adoption of your data governance platform. This phase determines whether an organization has a strong strategy, is prepared to scale across business units and divisions, and can navigate obstacles that may arise in the following phases.Related:The MVP will highlight any gaps in preparedness or commitment to being able to see your project through to its desired end state. Your teams, as well as the platform support team, must share a strong understanding of how data owners, stewards, governors, engineers and users will interact with data and with each other.At large enterprises, this is often the point at which the data marketplace, mesh or fabric concept is woven into the solution to ensure it is fully integrated into the organizations data strategy. Completing this phase means leveraging the newly established processes to go live with data users in production and then evaluating and optimizing deployment over the coming phases of adoption.Strategy and AdoptionNext, we move to the strategy and adoption phase. This is when you work with your governance platform support team to review your MVP in retrospect, refine processes, close any gaps in your adoption strategy, and then put it all to work.A best practice at this stage is to develop a Center of Excellence (CoE) that creates support lanes for various stakeholder groups and thus avoid bottlenecks as you scale. Your platform support team should help with this by identifying CoE leaders, training processes, and communication strategies for each business unit to build a strong foundation for successful adoption.Related:When your focus shifts to driving adoption, youll naturally start to think more long-term. This includes diligent demand planning to understand which users will adopt the product, when they will do so, and whether that aligns with your product licensing. By focusing your stakeholders and executives attention on demand planning, youll ensure that you have a clear plan for how your platform will be used in the near term and a predictive plan for how the rest of your organization will adopt and begin to realize ROI.Starting Your Data Governance ImplementationThe length of data governance implementation depends on your organization. The more cohesive your team is with your new platforms support team, the better youll be able to plan effectively and move through these phases efficiently. Work with your support team to schedule quarterly planning workshops, business reviews and program incremental planning exercises. This will set you up for long-term success by ensuring your team is aligned in understanding the roadmap and execution strategy. Then you can put your data to work and start seeing results faster and confidently.About the AuthorTyler DittoPrincipal Customer Success Manager, ImmutaTyler Ditto is a seasoned consultant with extensive experience in implementing data governance programs and technologies. Over the past 4 years with Immuta, Tyler has successfully led several projects with Immuta, helping organizations establish robust frameworks for managing, securing, and leveraging their data. With a passion for bridging the gap between business and technology, Tyler specializes in delivering practical, scalable solutions that drive organizational efficiency and compliance.See more from Tyler DittoNever Miss a Beat: Get a snapshot of the issues affecting the IT industry straight to your inbox.SIGN-UPYou May Also LikeWebinarsMore WebinarsReportsMore Reports

Clothes are often made of nylonanna.spoka/ShutterstockA genetically modified bacterium can break down chemicals in nylon and turn them into useful products, which could one day help us recycle clothes and fishing nets.Nylons, or aliphatic polyamides, are plastics that are widely used due to their high durability and tensile strength, but their recycling rate is below 5 per cent. AdvertisementProduction is around 10 million tonnes per year, but at the moment theres basically no recycling, says Nick Wierckx at the Jlich Research Centre in Germany. Even incineration is difficult because you get cyanides when you burn them. The vast majority ends up in landfill.Nylon can be dissolved in a strong acid solution, but the mix of chemicals generated isnt valuable enough to make this commercially useful.Now, Wierckx and his colleagues have used a combination of genetic engineering and laboratory evolution to create a strain of the bacterium Pseudomonas putida that can break down the various compounds that are produced once nylon has been dissolved and turn them into something useful. The latest science news delivered to your inbox, every day.Sign up to newsletterThe bacterium is already known for degrading oil-based materials and breaking down oil in spills. It is also showing promise at breaking down plastics.Wierckz and his colleagues took a strain known as P. putida KT2440 and gave it genes to help it metabolise various chemicals in dissolved nylon. They then cultured bacteria in the lab on these chemicals again and again until they found a strain that thrived. The researchers continued to modify and culture it until they had bacteria that could use the compounds in nylon to create useful products, such as polyhydroxybutyrate a biodegradable plastic that isnt harmful to living tissues.The Pseudomonas consumes almost all the pre-treated plastic, says Wierckx. What we can measure is that about 80 to 90 per cent is being consumed, but I think that is an analytical limitation, and its actually consuming almost everything because we dont see anything left there.But improvements are needed before this technique could be used commercially, says Wierckx. For example, the amount of useful product is still only about 7 per cent of the dry bacterial biomass at the end.Improving that will require further modification of bacteria and adjusting the chemicals used to tweak what is fed to the microorganisms, he says. Its probably going to be 10, 20, 30 years until we see this happening.We dont need to worry that the bacteria will one day dissolve our underwear, though, says Wierckx. Its not going to eat all the plastics in our clothing and cars. We need to pre-treat the plastic so it becomes digestible.This also means we cant yet use the bacteria to clean up old fishing nets in oceans. But Wierckx hopes that having this recycling process will encourage the future collection of old nets, clothing and car engines, which contain heat-resistant plastics, so they can be recycled.Journal reference:Nature Microbiology DOI: 10.1038/s41564-025-01929-5

The closest ever Einstein ring, picked up by the European Space Agencys Euclid space telescopeESAAstronomers have identified the closest ever Einstein ring, a rare phenomenon where light from a further-off galaxy is bent by the gravity of a galaxy closer to Earth. The ring was previously thought to be one galaxy and was identified more than 100 years ago.Galactic lenses like this one, which is the closest astronomers have ever found, were predicted by Albert Einstein in 1936 from his theory of general relativity. At the time, he thought such an effect would be impossible to observe. In fact, he would have been able to see one if he had just had a powerful enough telescope. It was there all along, but we had no idea, says Thomas Collett at the University of Portsmouth, UK. AdvertisementCollett and his team realised that the oval-shaped galaxy NGC 6505, which is about 600 million light years from Earth and was first spotted in 1884, was actually bending the light of a second galaxy behind it, about 6 billion light years from Earth.A close-up of the Einstein ringESA/Euclid/Euclid Consortium/NASA, image processing by J.-C. Cuillandre, T. LiTeam member Bruno Altieri at the European Space Agency observed the Einstein ring while he was validating early testing data from the Euclid telescope, which has recently started scanning billions of galaxies over an area that will eventually span a third of the night sky. There was this abundantly obvious Einstein ring. Theres not that many things in the universe that can produce a ring like this, says Collett. Untangle the weirdness of reality with our subscriber-only, monthly newsletter.Sign up to newsletterWe would have expected about a 1 in 3 chance of finding something as spectacular as this over the whole survey, he says. To find it in essentially the first, earliest data is spectacularly lucky. This is probably the prettiest lens we will find in the mission.The ring itself is exceptionally bright compared with most Einstein rings that we know of, says Collett, in part because it is very close to us, but also due to Euclids imaging capabilities. Its like someone with bad eyesight putting their glasses on, says Collett. This makes it easier to see the four images of the faraway galaxy. The faint orange light surrounding the bright ring is the lensing galaxy.Having an Einstein ring so close to Earth will let us test relativity in ways we cant with other faraway lenses, says Collett, because they can measure the galaxys mass in two ways: using the amount the light bends and the speed of the stars, which are often too distant to accurately measure. Einsteins general relativity says these masses should be the same, so any difference might suggest our theory of gravity needs to be modified.When Collett and his colleagues measured the mass of the lensed galaxy, they also found a slightly higher number than should be possible from just the estimated number of stars in the galaxy. This could be due to dark matter clumping together in the galaxys centre, says Frdric Dux at the European Southern Observatory, though we will need to find many more Einstein lenses to confirm, he says.Journal reference:Astronomy & Astrophysics DOI: 10.1051/0004-6361/202453014Topics:galaxies

An Iberia flight was preparing to take off on Friday when a passenger opened an exit.Airlive.net reported the passenger hit a flight attendant and jumped onto the tarmac.Iberia confirmed the incident to Business Insider, but did not comment further.A passenger hit a flight attendant and opened an emergency exit before jumping onto the tarmac while their flight was preparing to take off.The Airbus A320neo, operated by Spanish airline Iberia, was about to fly from Paris Orly Airport to Madrid on Friday.Airlive.net first reported the incident. Iberia spokesperson confirmed the information shared by Airlive to Business Insider, but did not comment further.Airlive.net reported that the plane was about to turn onto the runway when passengers heard a loud sound.In a video obtained by the outlet and seemingly filmed by another passenger, emergency vehicles are seen surrounding the A320neo.Passengers deplaned after two hours and were sent to nearby hotels, Airlive.net reported.Flight IB578 took off from Paris five hours later than scheduled, according to data from Flightradar24.Aroports de Paris, which administers Orly Airport, did not immediately respond to a request for comment from BI.In January, a similar incident occurred on a JetBlue flight that was about to take off from Boston. The Federal Aviation Administration said the plane was on a taxiway when a passenger opened an emergency exit, causing the slide to deploy.Last August, a passenger in Australia opened an emergency exit when their plane had just arrived at the gate before walking along the jet's wing.In 2023, a Southwest Airlines passenger caused panic after jumping out of an emergency exit and running across the tarmac before attempting to steal a truck.