Thursday was Rust's 10-year anniversary for its first stable release. "To say I'm surprised by its trajectory would be a vast understatement," writes Rust's original creator Graydon Hoare. "I can only thank, congratulate, and celebrate everyone involved... In my view, Rust is a story about a large community of stakeholders coming together to design, build, maintain, and expand shared technical infrastructure." It's a story with many actors: - The population of developers the language serves who express their needs and constraints through discussion, debate, testing, and bug reports arising from their experience writing libraries and applications. - The language designers and implementers who work to satisfy those needs and constraints while wrestling with the unexpected consequences of each decision. - The authors, educators, speakers, translators, illustrators, and others who work to expand the set of people able to use the infrastructure and work on the infrastructure. - The institutions investing in the project who provide the long-term funding and support necessary to sustain all this work over decades. All these actors have a common interest in infrastructure. Rather than just "systems programming", Hoare sees Rust as a tool for building infrastructure itself, "the robust and reliable necessities that enable us to get our work done" — a wide range that includes everything from embedded and IoT systems to multi-core systems. So the story of "Rust's initial implementation, its sustained investment, and its remarkable resonance and uptake all happened because the world needs robust and reliable infrastructure, and the infrastructure we had was not up to the task." Put simply: it failed too often, in spectacular and expensive ways. Crashes and downtime in the best cases, and security vulnerabilities in the worst. Efficient "infrastructure-building" languages existed but they were very hard to use, and nearly impossible to use safely, especially when writing concurrent code. This produced an infrastructure deficit many people felt, if not everyone could name, and it was growing worse by the year as we placed ever-greater demands on computers to work in ever more challenging environments... We were stuck with the tools we had because building better tools like Rust was going to require an extraordinary investment of time, effort, and money. The bootstrap Rust compiler I initially wrote was just a few tens of thousands of lines of code; that was nearing the limits of what an unfunded solo hobby project can typically accomplish. Mozilla's decision to invest in Rust in 2009 immediately quadrupled the size of the team — it created a team in the first place — and then doubled it again, and again in subsequent years. Mozilla sustained this very unusual, very improbable investment in Rust from 2009-2020, as well as funding an entire browser engine written in Rust — Servo — from 2012 onwards, which served as a crucial testbed for Rust language features. Rust and Servo had multiple contributors at Samsung, Hoare acknowledges, and Amazon, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Huawei, and others "hired key developers and contributed hardware and management resources to its ongoing development." Rust itself "sits atop LLVM" (developed by researchers at UIUC and later funded by Apple, Qualcomm, Google, ARM, Huawei, and many other organizations), while Rust's safe memory model "derives directly from decades of research in academia, as well as academic-industrial projects like Cyclone, built by AT&T Bell Labs and Cornell." And there were contributions from "interns, researchers, and professors at top academic research programming-language departments, including CMU, NEU, IU, MPI-SWS, and many others." JetBrains and the Rust-Analyzer OpenCollective essentially paid for two additional interactive-incremental reimplementations of the Rust frontend to provide language services to IDEs — critical tools for productive, day-to-day programming. Hundreds of companies and other institutions contributed time and money to evaluate Rust for production, write Rust programs, test them, file bugs related to them, and pay their staff to fix or improve any shortcomings they found. Last but very much not least: Rust has had thousands and thousands of volunteers donating years of their labor to the project. While it might seem tempting to think this is all "free", it's being paid for! Just less visibly than if it were part of a corporate budget. All this investment, despite the long time horizon, paid off. We're all better for it. He looks ahead with hope for a future with new contributors, "steady and diversified streams of support," and continued reliability and compatability (including "investment in ever-greater reliability technology, including the many emerging formal methods projects built on Rust.") And he closes by saying Rust's "sustained, controlled, and frankly astonishing throughput of work" has "set a new standard for what good tools, good processes, and reliable infrastructure software should be like. "Everyone involved should be proud of what they've built." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission. Here’s how it works. Tails Linux introduces reforms in security audit postmortem to make you safer Paul Hill Neowin @ziks_99 · May 17, 2025 10:16 EDT Alongside the release of Tails 6.11 earlier this year, the Tails Project revealed that Radically Open Security was auditing the Tails operating system to better protect users. The audit has now concluded and no remote code vulnerabilities were found. The only issues that were found required a compromised low-privileged amnesia user, which is the default account in Tails. Luckily for users, the Tails developers are quick on their toes and asked for information about the vulnerabilities before the report was published and released fixes for the discovered issues, which users now already enjoy. Here’s an overview of what was fixed: ID Impact Description Issue Status Release OTF-001 High Local privilege escalation in Tails Upgrader #20701 Fixed 6.11 OTF-002 High Arbitrary code execution in Python scripts #20702 Fixed 6.11 #20744 Fixed 6.12 OTF-003 Moderate Argument injection in privileged GNOME scripts #20709 Fixed 6.11 #20710 Fixed 6.11 OTF-004 Low Untrusted search path in Tor Browser launcher #20733 Fixed 6.12 Following the fixing of the bugs, the Tails team also did a postmortem of the audit to find out what cultural things need to change and which technical things need to be changed that had a role in allowing the entry of bugs into the operating system in the first place. The major cultural change that Tails has adopted is how it shares vulnerabilities with the public. So far, it said it has been too secretive about vulnerabilities, but going forward, has adopted the security issue response policy based on the policy of the Tor Project’s Network Team. It also found that refactoring large amounts of code can also be a way in for security bugs so from now on it will be more intentional and only do large refactoring when it’s worth the effort and risk. For anyone running Tails, these are extremely positive developments. Tails is used by all sorts of people for sensitive work, so knowing that it’s being proactive on security is reassuring. Source: Tails Tags Report a problem with article Follow @NeowinFeed

Pros Easy to installMulti-gig WAN/LANSupports Matter, Thread, and ZigbeeDecent performance Cons Lacks 6GHz bandDoes not support 320MHz channelsNo USB portsParental control and network security software cost extra eero 7 Specs Anti-Malware Tools Coverage Area for Hardware as Tested 6000 IPv6 Compatible MU-MIMO Number of Antennas 3 Number of Bands 2 Number of Nodes 3 Number of Wired LAN Ports (Excluding WAN Port) 1 on router, 2 on node Parental Controls Quality of Service (QoS) Security WPA2 Security WPA3 Wi-Fi Speed (Total Rated Throughput) BE5000 Wired Backhaul Wireless Specification 802.11be All Specs The latest addition to Amazon’s eero family of whole-home mesh systems, the eero 7, is the company’s most affordable Wi-Fi 7 offering to date. For $349.99, you get a three-piece system that offers 6,000 square feet of coverage, two 2.5GbE networking ports per node, and support for the latest smart home technologies, including Matter, Thread, and Zigbee. It delivered good (but not great) throughput in testing and is very easy to install, but it lacks 6GHz transmissions, and parental control and network security tools are locked behind a paywall. You’ll get much better performance, 6GHz transmissions, free basic parental control and network security software, and USB connectivity with our Editors’ Choice winner for Wi-Fi 7 mesh systems, the significantly more expensive Asus ZenWiFi BQ16 Pro.Design and Specs: Three Nodes Are Enough for Large HomesThe eero 7 nodes are identical and have the same curvy shape and white finish as the eero 6+ nodes, but at 5.1 by 5.1 by 2.5 inches (HWD), they are slightly larger. (The eero 6+ nodes measure 2.6 by 3.9 by 3.8 inches.) The three-pack reviewed here provides 6,000 square feet of coverage, but if you have a smaller dwelling, you can order a two-pack for $279.99, which gives you 4,000 square feet of coverage, or a single node for $169.99, which gives you 2,000 square feet of coverage.A small LED indicator on the front of each node glows white when everything is connected and working properly, flashes white during setup, flashes blue when connecting to the app via Bluetooth, flashes green during a firmware update, and is solid red when the node has gone offline.Around back are two 2.5GbE networking ports (one serves as a WAN port for the router node) and a USB-C power port. Wired backhaul is supported. Missing are the USB data ports that you’ll find on the TP-Link Deco BE63.(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)The eero 7 has a 1.1 GHz A53 ARM processor, 1GB of RAM, and 4GB of flash memory. It’s a dual-band BE5000 system capable of speeds of up to 688Mbps on the 2.4GHz band and up to 4,324Mbps on the 5GHz band. As with the TP-Link Deco BE25 and the MSI Roamii BE Lite systems, the eero 7 does not offer a 6GHz radio band and therefore does not support 320MHz channels. It does, however, support 240MHz channels as well as other Wi-Fi 7 technologies, including direct-to-client beamforming, Multi-Link Operation (MLO), Orthogonal Frequency-Division Multiple Access (OFDMA) transmissions, and WPA3 encryption. Additionally, this system contains a Zigbee radio and serves as a Thread border router and a Matter controller, making it ideal for controlling home automation devices. It also supports Alexa voice commands.You manage the eero 7 with the same user-friendly mobile app as the eero Max 7 and eero Outdoor 7. The Home screen displays the name of the network and contains an Internet tab and tabs for each node. Tap the Internet tab to run an internet speed test and tap any node to see the node’s IP address, which clients are connected to it, which band each client is using, and if it is a wired or wireless connection. Below the node tabs are tabs for each client device. When you tap a client tab, you come to a screen where you can pause internet access, completely block it, configure IPv4 reservation and Port Forwarding rules, enable Client Steering, and enable MLO connections. Here you can also create user profiles, but if you want to assign parental controls to any profile, you’ll have to subscribe to an eero Plus plan, which unlocks age-based content filters, malware protection, VPN services, password management, and more. New users currently get a free two-month trial, but once it expires, it’ll cost you $9.99 per month or $99.99 per year.Recommended by Our Editors(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)At the very bottom of the screen are Activity, Devices, Home, and Settings buttons. The Home button brings you back to the Home screen, and the Devices button opens a screen where you can view information about connected and recently connected clients. The Activity button opens a screen with upload and download speeds and uploaded and downloaded data statistics. Finally, tap the Settings button to open a screen where you can manage your account, view and share login information, enable guest networking, and configure network settings and network notifications.Setup and Performance: Decent Speed, User-Friendly AppInstalling the eero 7 is a breeze. You’ll have to download the mobile app and create an account to get started. I started by tapping Setup on the Welcome screen and followed the instructions to power down my modem. I connected an eero node to the modem, powered up both devices, and allowed Bluetooth communications. Once the eero node was found, I gave it a location, a name, and a password. The network was up and running within seconds. I tapped Next and followed the instructions to add another node. I placed the satellite nodes in their respective locations, plugged them in, gave them names, and tapped Finish Setup. After a firmware update, the installation was complete.The eero 7 delivered fairly good throughput performance in testing, but it’s certainly not the fastest mesh system out there. The router node’s score of 1,101Mbps on the close proximity test was faster than the MSI Roamii BE Lite router (937Mbps) but significantly slower than the TP-Link Deco BE5000 router (1,959Mbps). The TP-Link Deco BE63, which employs the 6GHz band with 320MHz channels, led the pack with a score of 2,288Mbps. At a distance of 30 feet, the eero 7 router delivered 586Mbps, once again besting the Roamii BE Lite router (524Mbps) but not the Deco BE5000 (628Mbps) or Deco 63 (780Mbps) routers.The eero 7 satellite node managed 745Mbps on the close proximity test and 513Mbps on the 30-foot test. In comparison, the Roamii BE Lite node scored 561Mbps and 441Mbps, respectively; the Deco BE5000 node scored 982Mbps and 630Mbps, respectively; and the Deco 63 node scored 1,688Mbps and 950Mbps, respectively.We test wireless signal strength using an Ekahau Sidekick 2 diagnostic device paired with the company's Survey software. (Disclosure: Ekahau is owned by PCMag.com's parent company, Ziff Davis. For more, read about our ethics policy in the Editorial Mission Statement.) This combination generates a heat map that displays Wi-Fi signal strength throughout our test home. The circles on the heat map represent the router and node locations, and the colors represent signal strength, with dark green representing the strongest signal, lighter yellow a weaker one, and gray representing a very weak or no measurable signal. (Credit: Ekahau)As illustrated on the map, the eero 7 had no trouble broadcasting a strong Wi-Fi signal to all corners of our test home.

If a user publishes a post with a link to a website or article on Elon Musk's X, very often they'll find that the post receives minimal views, retweets, and likes. Musk has previously confirmed that his social media platform, formerly known as Twitter, deprioritizes links via its algorithm.X users have complained about this, but Musk wants people to spend the maximum amount of time on his platform. However, it appears one of X's competitors now views this as an opportunity.Meta's Threads will now prioritize links on the platform in a few major ways. You May Also Like Share more links in your Threads bioIn an update this week, Meta announced that Threads will now allow users to place up to 5 links in their bio. For comparison, X only allows users to post a single link in the "website" section of a user's profile page.  Credit: Meta By allowing multiple links, Threads allows users to share more of their personal websites and projects with people on the platform. This might also help users circumvent the need to use link-in-bio services like Linktree to share multiple links on their Threads profile page. Mashable Light Speed Want more out-of-this world tech, space and science stories? Sign up for Mashable's weekly Light Speed newsletter. By clicking Sign Me Up, you confirm you are 16+ and agree to our Terms of Use and Privacy Policy. Thanks for signing up! Threads link analyticsFurthermore, Meta wants its users to know just how much traffic Threads sends from links posted on the platform. Credit: Meta The company announced that Threads will now profile users with link analytics that present data regarding the number of clicks that links receive via Threads. The platform will provide users with this information for links posted to both a user's bio and in their posts.Link recommendations in ThreadsWhile Instagram head Adam Mosseri previously claimed Threads didn't specifically downrank posts with links, Mosseri also said the platform didn't place much value on them either.  Related Stories That's about to change, too, according to Engadget. Threads will now start promoting posts that include links at a higher rate than before via its recommendation algorithm.Meta has started prioritizing content creators on all of its platforms in recent months. Prioritizing links seems like a big step in that direction as creators look to use social media platforms to promote their work, regardless of where it's posted.We'll soon find out if these changes help Threads win over creators over its competitors like Musk's X and Bluesky. Topics X/Twitter Meta

In 2022.2 and 2021.3.14f1, we’ve improved the scheduling cost and performance scaling of the Unity job system. In this two-part article, I’ll offer a brief recap of parallel programming and job systems, discuss job system overhead, and share Unity’s approach to mitigating it.In part one, we cover background information on parallel programming and the job system API. If you’re already familiar with parallelism, feel free to skim and skip to part two.In the 2017.3 release, a public C# API was added for the internal C++ Unity job system, allowing users to write small functions called “jobs” which are executed asynchronously. The intention behind using jobs instead of plain old functions is to provide an API that makes it easy, safe, and efficient to allow code that would otherwise run on the main thread to instead run on job “worker” threads, ideally in parallel. This helps to reduce the overall amount of wall time the main thread needs to complete a game’s simulation. Using the job system for your CPU work can provide significant performance improvements and allow your game’s performance to scale naturally as the hardware your game runs on improves.If you think of computation as a finite resource, a single CPU core can only do so much computational “work” in a given period of time. For example, if a single threaded game needs its simulation Update() to take no more than 16ms, but it currently takes 24ms, then the CPU has too much work to do – more time is needed. In order to hit a target of 16ms, there are only two options: make the CPU go faster (e.g., raise the minimum specs for your game – normally not a great option), or do less work.Ultimately, you need to eliminate 8ms of computational work.That typically means improving algorithms, spreading subsystem work across multiple frames, removing redundant work that can accumulate during development, etc. If this still doesn’t get you to your performance target, you may need to reduce game simulation complexity by cutting content and gameplay, for example, by reducing the number of enemies allowed to be spawned at once – which is certainly not ideal.What if, instead of eliminating work, we give the work to another CPU core to run on? Nowadays, most CPUs are multi-core, which means the available single-threaded computational power can be multiplied by the number of cores the CPU has. If we could magically and safely divide all the work currently in the Update() function between two CPU cores, the 24ms Update() work could be run in two simultaneous 12ms chunks. This would get us well below the target of 16ms. Further, if we could divide the work into four parallel chunks and run them on four cores, then the Update() would take only 6ms!This type of work division and running on all available cores is known as performance scaling. If you add more cores, you can ideally run more work in parallel, reducing the wall time of the Update() without code changes.Alas, this is fantasy. Nothing is going to divide the Update() function into pieces and run them on separate cores without some help. Even if we switched to a CPU with 128 cores, the 24ms Update() above will still take 24ms, provided both CPUs have the same clock rate. What a waste of potential! How, then, can we write applications to take advantage of all available CPU cores and increase parallelism?One approach is multithreading. That is, your program creates threads to run a function which the operating system will schedule to run for you. If your CPU has multiple cores, then multiple threads can run at the same time, each on their own core. If there are more threads than available cores, the operating system is responsible for determining which thread gets to run on a core – and for how long – before it switches to another thread, a process called context switching.Multithreaded programming comes with a bunch of complications, however. In the magical scenario above, the Update() function was evenly divided into four partial updates. But in reality, you likely wouldn’t be able to do something so simple. Since the threads will run simultaneously, you need to be careful when they read and write to the same data at the same time, in order to keep them from corrupting each other’s calculations.This usually involves using locking synchronization primitives, like a mutex or semaphore, to control access to shared state between threads. These primitives usually limit how much parallelism specific sections of code can have (usually opting for none at all) by “locking” other threads, preventing them from running the section until the lock holder is done and “unlocks” the section for any waiting threads. This reduces how much performance you get by using multiple threads since you aren’t running in parallel all the time, but it does ensure programs remain correct.It also likely doesn’t make sense to run some parts of your update in parallel due to data dependencies. For example, almost all games need to read input from a controller, store that input in an input buffer, and then read the input buffer and react based on the values.It wouldn’t make sense to have code reading the input buffer to decide if a character should jump executing at the same time as the code writing to the input buffer for that frame’s update. Even if you used a mutex to make sure reading and writing to m_InputBuffer was safe, you always want m_InputBuffer to be written to first and then the m_InputBuffer reading code to run second, so you know whether the jump button was pressed for the current frame (and not one in the past). Such data dependencies are common and normal, but will decrease the amount of parallelism possible.There are many approaches to writing a multithreaded program. You can use platform-specific APIs for creating and managing threads directly, or use various APIs that provide an abstraction to help manage some of the complications of multithreaded programming.A job system is one such abstraction. It provides the means to break up parts of your single-threaded code into logical blocks, isolate what data is needed by that code, control who accesses that data simultaneously, and run as many blocks of code in parallel as possible to try and utilize all computational power available on the CPU as needed.Today, we cannot divide arbitrary functions into pieces automatically, so Unity provides a job API that enables users to convert functions into small logical blocks. From there, the job system takes care of making those pieces run in parallel.The job system is made up of a few core components:JobsJob handlesJob schedulerAs mentioned before, a job is just a function and some data, but this encapsulation is useful, as it reduces the scope of which specific data the job will read from or write to.Once a job instance is created, it needs to be scheduled with the job system. This is done with the .Schedule() method added to all job types via C#’s extension mechanism. To identify and keep track of the scheduled job, a JobHandle is provided.Since job handles identify scheduled jobs, they can be used to set up job dependencies. Job dependencies guarantee that a scheduled job won’t start executing until its dependencies have completed. As a direct result, they also tell us when different jobs are allowed to run in parallel by creating a directed acyclic job graph.Finally, as jobs are scheduled, the job scheduler is responsible for keeping track of scheduled jobs (mapping JobHandles to the job instances scheduled) and ensuring jobs start running as quickly as possible. How this is done is important, as the design and usage patterns of the job system can potentially conflict in non-obvious ways, leading to overhead costs that eat into the performance gains of multithreaded programming. As users started adopting the C# job system, we began to see scenarios where job system overhead was higher than we’d like, which led to the improvements to Unity’s internal job system implementation in the 2022.2 Tech Stream.Stay tuned for part two, which will explore where overhead in the C# job system comes from and how it has been reduced in Unity 2022.2.If you have questions or want to learn more, visit us in the C# Job System forum. You can also connect with me directly through the Unity Discord at username @Antifreeze#2763. Be sure to watch for new technical blogs from other Unity developers as part of the ongoing Tech from the Trenches series.

The upper-stage Starship spacecraft during a static fire test ahead of Starship Flight 9. Image: SpaceX SpaceX's Starship Flight 9 launch might have slipped once again, suggests a fresh navigational warning notice from the US National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency. The warning covers hazardous operations in the Indian Ocean and warns mariners about space debris from May 27th to June 4th. A May 26th launch date falls within the range of aviator notices sent by the FAA for flights over the Turks and Caicos Islands, which start from May 22nd and end on May 31st. Additionally, in a release sent to the media yesterday, the FAA confirmed that SpaceX cannot launch Starship Flight 9 until the space agency either deems it safe for the rocket to fly again or closes the Starship Flight 8 mishap investigation. Elon Musk Confident SpaceX Can Launch Starship Flight 9 Next Week Over the past couple of days, a flurry of new information for SpaceX's Starship Flight 9 has come to light. For starters, the FAA has approved SpaceX's launch license modifications for Starship Flight 9. These medications include allowing SpaceX to launch up to 25 missions from its Texas facilities instead of the earlier five launches. More crucially, the launch license also appears to suggest that SpaceX might not catch the Super Heavy booster with the launch tower on Starship Flight 9. The regulator notes in the license that SpaceX is "authorized to conduct" from its Boca Chica launch site to the "Gulf of America and Indian Ocean locations specified in its application." Notably, the section removes "SpaceX Boca Chica Launch Complex" from the destination locations in its Flight 9 license, strengthening the argument that SpaceX might skip the tower catch this time. Starship Flight 9 will be the first flight in the test program that reuses a first-stage Super Heavy booster. This booster first flew on Starship Flight 7, and SpaceX could have skipped the tower catch to fully evaluate a reusable rocket's performance before risking potential damage to its launch infrastructure. The upper-stage Starship spacecraft during a static fire test ahead of Starship Flight 9. Image: SpaceX Along with the launch license, the FAA's mailed statement was careful to note that "SpaceX may not launch until the FAA either closes the Starship Flight 8 mishap investigation or makes a return to flight determination." The agency adds that SpaceX submitted its mishap report on May 14th. Along with Flight 9 being dependent on Flight 8's investigation, a navigational warning notice from the US National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency suggests that Flight 9 could occur close to the end of this month. It lists warnings for space debris in the Indian Ocean starting from May 27th to June 4th, indicating that Starship Flight 9 could fly on May 27th at the earliest. However, May 27th clashes with Elon Musk's latest statements, where he suggests that Starship Flight 9 could occur next week. In an X post, Musk shared that "Just before the Starship flight next week, I will give a company talk explaining the Mars game plan in Starbase, Texas, that will also be live-streamed on X." Yet, even though Musk is confident about a launch next week, SpaceX might ship the mission's Super Heavy booster to its production facilities from the launch site. Footage from local media reveals that SpaceX's booster transport vehicle returned to the site earlier today and transferred the booster from the launch pad to SpaceX's production facilities. Deal of the Day

First determine if the baby bird is a nestling or fledgling.   Image: jennifer m. ramos / Getty Images Get the Popular Science daily newsletter💡 Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. The arrival of spring brings many changes to our natural surroundings. Flowers bloom, barren trees fill with leaves, and occasionally, baby birds come tumbling out of those trees. If you’ve ever encountered one of these not-quite-flighted chicks and wondered how best to look after them, you’ve come to the right place.  Your first aim upon finding a chick out of its nest is to work out whether it has accidentally fallen or is simply taking its first steps out of the nest. Siân Denney, who has had six years of wildlife experience for the Royal Society of the Protection of Birds, says you should determine if the bird is a nestling or fledgling. “Nestlings are the tiny, tiny babies with no feathers, and they’re at very early stages and very vulnerable,” says Denney. In contrast, fledglings have feathers but may lack the flight feathers needed to take to the skies.  Helping a nestling If the bird you’ve found is a featherless nestling, it will be at risk if left out of the nest. “The amount of care that birds require is intense. It is unlikely that a very young bird that age that’s got no feathers will survive if it is out of the nest,” says George Bradley, who works for wildlife charity SongBird Survival. If you know which nest the bird has fallen from you should place it back in. Denney and Bradley advise that gloves should be worn for handling birds as a hygiene measure. Some people believe that if a well-meaning human handles a bird, its parents will cease to recognize its scent and reject it. This is a myth, says Denney. “Birds actually have a terrible sense of smell,” she says.  Garden bird species will usually make their nests in hedges or trees. However, other species, like gulls or sparrows, make their homes on rooftops or the underside of eaves. By watching to see if its parents appear to try to help it, you may be able to work out where its nest is hidden and whether it is accessible. If you can’t identify which nest a nestling has fallen from, it will still need to be moved off the ground, where it will be helpless against predators. The best option is to elevate the nestling. Placing them in a bucket or empty flower pot can protect them while still making it easy for their parents to find them.  Fledging is a part of bird life. Image: Getty Images Joni Eskridge Helping a fledgling Denney has different advice if the bird you come across is a feathered fledgling. “They should just be left alone,” she says. “They’ve attempted to leave the nest because they’re ready to take to life outside and beyond,” she adds. Their parents will likely be surreptitiously monitoring them to check they have learned how to fly independently. Denney adds that fledglings can spend days or weeks on their ground as they learn to fly. If the bird is in obvious and immediate danger—your local cat is eyeing it up, for example—it can also be shooed somewhere more secure, like a bush or tree.  How to help an injured bird If a fallen bird is injured, it might be time to contact a local wildlife rehabilitator. These are experts who volunteer to care for sick or injured birds. These resources will vary by state. Humane World for Animals has a detailed list of rescuers and rehabilitators.  The overarching message is that baby birds eventually need to fly from their nest, and unless they are too young or in danger, leaving them alone to learn how to navigate the big, new world they find themselves in is the best course of action.  Humans can also proactively help by avoiding activities that put baby birds at risk of falling in the first place. Denney says that cutting trees or hedges aggressively or without checking for any nesting birds during the summer months can lead to disturbed or destroyed nests. Before you cut, says Denney, “check the area first for a couple of days. If you see signs of activity, it’s best just to postpone that cutting to let those birds nest in peace.”

Bats are the only mammals that can fly (though some can glide). They have excellent hearing, navigate by echolocation, and they can eat their body weight in insects in a single night. But bats’ most impressive superpower is a remarkable tolerance to viral infections. Bats host many viruses, viruses that would sicken and even kill other mammals, without suffering serious consequences themselves (rabies is an exception). And that superpower may be related to the ability to fly, explains Cara Brook, a professor at the University of Chicago who studies the ecological and evolutionary dynamics of infections that jump from animals to humans, in particular infections that come from wild bats. Long Lifespans Make For Better Viral Protection Flying is metabolically expensive. A bat in flight increases its basal metabolic rate 15-fold compared with its resting rate, Brook says. Organisms that have high metabolic rates tend to be small-bodied and very short-lived. That’s probably because organisms with high metabolic rates accumulate oxidative stress in their cells, and so tissues and organs degrade more quickly, shortening their lifespans. Bats, however, are unusually long-lived for their body size. Brook and other scientists who study bats think that bats evolved molecular pathways that mitigate the oxidative damage caused by the increased metabolism, thus increasing their lifespans. So what does this have to do with viruses?Bat Immune Systems Brook’s theory is that many of these molecular pathways, in addition to extending bats’ lifespans, made bats more tolerant of viruses. But how? The answer, according to Brook, is that the damage to a cell infected with a virus is similar to that caused by metabolic activity, and bats have evolved to dampen that response. The immune response to a virus is highly inflammatory. “What we experience as disease is actually immunopathology,” Brook explains. When you have a fever from the flu, for example, that’s your immune system’s response to the flu virus. But bats don’t develop these intense immune responses to the viruses they harbor. “We think that's really a byproduct of their adaptations for flight,” says Brook. That’s super cool, but it also could be very useful. If researchers can understand how bats handle these infections without becoming sick, they might learn how to make humans more resilient to infections. A team of U.S. and Canadian researchers led by Michael Letko has developed a new set of tools to help researchers do just that.Growing Bat CellsLetko is a molecular virologist at Washington State University. He and his team have recently cultured two new lines of bat cells that can be grown and divided indefinitely in the lab. The work was described in a paper published in PLOS Biology. These cell lines will be useful for learning how bats co-exist with viruses that can kill humans in droves. This could be crucial when the next pandemic arises, of course, but the utility of these cells goes beyond that. “Viruses oftentimes trigger all sorts of pathologies,” says Letko. “If we can understand how to control those pathologies, we can apply them to lots of other scenarios, not just infectious disease.”Some private labs are already culturing these cell lines, but they’re not available for outside researchers. Work funded by the U.S. government, however, must be shared freely. Letko’s research was funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and was a collaborative effort of scientists from the U.S. and Canada. Letko and colleagues have arranged for these cell lines to be available to any researchers who need them for their work. “We have lots of experts who probably would be able to say something about what's going on in these animals if they had the ability to study it, but they don’t,” he says. “So we're hoping that putting this resource out there will let people with a wide range of backgrounds really get into this.” Humans didn’t develop the ability to fly. But we did develop the ability to study animals that do fly. And that’s turning out to be an even more useful skill.Article SourcesOur writers at Discovermagazine.com use peer-reviewed studies and high-quality sources for our articles, and our editors review for scientific accuracy and editorial standards. Review the sources used below for this article:Avery Hurt is a freelance science journalist. In addition to writing for Discover, she writes regularly for a variety of outlets, both print and online, including National Geographic, Science News Explores, Medscape, and WebMD. She’s the author of Bullet With Your Name on It: What You Will Probably Die From and What You Can Do About It, Clerisy Press 2007, as well as several books for young readers. Avery got her start in journalism while attending university, writing for the school newspaper and editing the student non-fiction magazine. Though she writes about all areas of science, she is particularly interested in neuroscience, the science of consciousness, and AI–interests she developed while earning a degree in philosophy.

By Vanessa Taylor Published May 17, 2025 | Comments (0) | Elon Musk waves as he arrives for a state dinner at the Lusail Palace on May 14, 2025, in Doha, Qatar. © Photo by Win McNamee/Getty Images Starlink, Elon Musk’s satellite internet constellation that is run through SpaceX, has caught legislators’ attention. Democratic Senators this week called for an investigation into whether the Trump administration is using trade negotiations to benefit Musk. In a letter addressed to federal officials, including Attorney General Pam Bondi and acting director of the U.S. Office of Government Ethics Jamieson Greer, a group of Democratic Senators wrote, “Musk may be using his official role and his proximity to the President as leverage for his own personal and financial benefit — even if it comes at the expensive of American consumers and the nation’s foreign policy interests.” The letter comes shortly after Musk accompanied Trump to Saudi Arabia on the president’s first overseas trip of his second term and announced Starlink’s approval in Saudi Arabia while the White House shared its newest defense and trade agreements. The senators, including Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), Mark Warner (D-Va.), and Jeanne Shaheen (D-N.H.), noted that Starlink has an “aggressive goal” of gaining a million new customers each year. However, Starlink has “struggled to secure agreements to operate in certain emerging markets” and its growth seemed slow last year. But then things shifted. “Since President Trump took office, and Musk became a top Trump advisor, Starlink has seen a rush of new countries permitting the company to enter their markets,” the senators wrote. For example, Lesotho awarded Musk its first-ever satellite internet service license shortly after Trump hit the country with high tariffs. Senators also highlighted recent deals with other countries “seeking a reprieve from the threat of the Trump administration’s unpredictable tariffs,” including India, Vietnam, and Bangladesh. The letter specifically mentions two articles from the Washington Post. First, an op-ed detailing that a Bangladeshi official met with Musk at the White House in February immediately after a trade meeting. There, Musk implied that the country “would not be able to get favorable trade terms” without granting Starlink access into Bangladesh. And then, a report in which the Post detailed how internal documents it obtained show that officials “have pushed nations to clear hurdles for U.S. satellite companies, often mentioning Starlink by name.” Although nothing shows the Trump administration “explicitly demand[ing] favors for Starlink in exchange for lower tariffs,” the Post reported that the State Department told officials to push for regulatory approvals. “Suggesting that a foreign government adopt Starlink in exchange for relief on tariffs appears to be a textbook case of corruption,” the senators said, while requesting an investigation into whether officials “pursued a quid-pro-quo exchange of Starlink access for tariff favors in violation of federal ethic laws.” In addition, the senators wrote that the State Department’s involvement raises additional concerns, including whether “these officials may be subverting the public’s interest in favor of Mr. Musk’s personal financial interests as they negotiate new tariff agreements — and whether they have been directed by [Musk] or [Trump] to do so.” The Senators requested that the State Department Inspector General investigate that matter. Daily Newsletter You May Also Like By AJ Dellinger Published May 17, 2025 By Matt Novak Published May 16, 2025 By Lucas Ropek Published May 15, 2025 By Vanessa Taylor Published May 15, 2025 By Matt Novak Published May 15, 2025 By Vanessa Taylor Published May 14, 2025

Sludge Vohaul! Sierra made the games of my childhood. Are they still fun to play? Get ready for some nostalgia. Nate Anderson – May 17, 2025 7:00 am | 14 Story text Size Small Standard Large Width * Standard Wide Links Standard Orange * Subscribers only   Learn more My Ars colleagues were kicking back at the Orbital HQ water cooler the other day, and—as gracefully aging gamers are wont to do—they began to reminisce about classic Sierra On-Line adventure games. I was a huge fan of these games in my youth, so I settled in for some hot buttered nostalgia. Would we remember the limited-palette joys of early King's Quest, Space Quest, or Quest for Glory titles? Would we branch out beyond games with "Quest" in their titles, seeking rarer fare like Freddy Pharkas: Frontier Pharmacist? What about the gothic stylings of The Colonel's Bequest or the voodoo-curious Gabriel Knight? Nope. The talk was of acorns. [Bleeping] acorns, in fact! The scene in question came from King's Quest III, where our hero Gwydion must acquire some exceptionally desiccated acorns to advance the plot. It sounds simple enough. As one walkthrough puts it, "Go east one screen and north one screen to the acorn tree. Try picking up acorns until you get some dry ones. Try various spots underneath the tree." Easy! And clear! Except it wasn't either one because the game rather notoriously won't always give you the acorns, even when you enter the right command. This led many gamers to believe they were in the wrong spot, when in reality, they just had to keep entering the "get acorns" command while moving pixel by pixel around the tree until the game finally supplied them. One of our staffers admitted to having purchased the King's Quest III hint book solely because of this "puzzle." (The hint book, which is now online, says that players should "move around" the particular oak tree in question because "you can only find the right kind of acorns in one spot.") This wasn't quite the "fun" I had remembered from these games, but as I cast my mind back, I dimly began to recall similar situations. Space Quest II: Vohaul's Revenge had been my first Sierra title, and after my brother and I spent weeks on the game only to get stuck and die repeatedly in some pitch-dark tunnels, we implored my dad to call Sierra's 1-900 pay hint line. He thought about it. I could see it pained him because he had never before (and never since!) called a 1-900 number in his life. In this case, the call cost a piratical 75 cents for the first minute and 50 cents for each additional minute. But after listening to us whine for several days straight, my dad decided that his sanity was worth the fee, and he called. Much like with the acorn example above, we had known what to do—we had just not done it to the game's rather exacting and sometimes obscure standards. The key was to use a glowing gem as a light source, which my brother and I had long understood. The problem was the text parser, which demanded that we "put gem in mouth" to use its light in the tunnels. There was no other place to put the gem, no other way to hold or attach it. (We tried them all.) No other attempts to use the light of this shining crystal, no matter how clear, well-intentioned, or succinctly expressed, would work. You put the gem in your mouth, or you died in the darkness. Returning from my reveries to the conversation at hand, I caught Ars Senior Editor Lee Hutchinson's cynical remark that these kinds of puzzles were "the only way to make 2–3 hours of 'game' last for months." This seemed rather shocking, almost offensive. How could one say such a thing about the games that colored my memories of childhood? So I decided to replay Space Quest II for the first time in 35 years in an attempt to defend my own past. Big mistake. We're not on Endor anymore, Dorothy. Play it again, Sam In my memory, the Space Quest series was filled with sharply written humor, clever puzzles, and enchanting art. But when I fired up the original version of the game, I found that only one of these was true. The art, despite its blockiness and limited colors, remained charming. As for the gameplay, the puzzles were not so much "clever" as "infuriating," "obvious," or (more often) "rather obscure." Finding the glowing gem discussed above requires you to swim into one small spot of a multi-screen river, with no indication in advance that anything of importance is in that exact location. Trying to "call" a hunter who has captured you does nothing… until you do it a second time. And the less said about trying to throw a puzzle at a Labian Terror Beast, typing out various word permutations while death bears down upon you, the better. The whole game was also filled with far more no-warning insta-deaths than I had remembered. On the opening screen, for instance, after your janitorial space-broom floats off into the cosmic ether, you can walk your character right off the edge of the orbital space station he is cleaning. The game doesn't stop you; indeed, it kills you and then mocks you for "an obvious lack of common sense." It then calls you a "wing nut" with an "inability to sustain life." Game over. The game's third screen, which features nothing more to do than simply walking around, will also kill you in at least two different ways. Walk into the room still wearing your spacesuit and your boss will come over and chew you out. Game over. If you manage to avoid that fate by changing into your indoor uniform first, it's comically easy to tap the wrong arrow key and fall off the room's completely guardrail-free elevator platform. Game over. Do NOT touch any part of this root monster. Get used to it because the game will kill you in so, so many ways: touching any single pixel of a root monster whose branches form a difficult maze; walking into a giant mushroom; stepping over an invisible pit in the ground; getting shot by a guard who zips in on a hovercraft; drowning in an underwater tunnel; getting swiped at by some kind of giant ape; not putting the glowing gem in your mouth; falling into acid; and many more. I used the word "insta-death" above, but the game is not even content with this. At one key point late in the game, a giant Aliens-style alien stalks the hallways, and if she finds you, she "kisses" you. But then she leaves! You are safe after all! Of course, if you have seen the films, you will recognize that you are not safe, but the game lets you go on for a bit before the alien's baby inevitably bursts from your chest, killing you. Game over. This is why the official hint book suggests that you "save your game a lot, especially when it seems that you're entering a dangerous area. That way, if you die, you don't have to retrace your steps much." Presumably, this was once considered entertaining. When it comes to the humor, most of it is broad. (When you are told to "say the word," you have to say "the word.") Sometimes it is condescending. ("You quickly glance around the room to see if anyone saw you blow it.") Or it might just be potty jokes. (Plungers, jock straps, toilet paper, alien bathrooms, and fouling one's trousers all make appearances.) My total gameplay time: a few hours. "By Grabthar's hammer!" I thought. "Lee was right!" When I admitted this to him, Lee told me that he had actually spent time learning to speedrun the Space Quest games during the pandemic. "According to my notes, a clean run of SQ2 in 'fast' mode—assuming good typing skills—takes about 20 minutes straight-up," he said. Yikes. What a fiendish plot! And yet The past was a different time. Computer memory was small, graphics capabilities were low, and computer games had emerged from the "let them live just long enough to encourage spending another quarter" arcade model. Mouse adoption took a while; text parsers made sense even though they created plenty of frustration. So yes—some of these games were a few hours of gameplay stretched out with insta-death, obscure puzzles, and the sheer amount of time it took just to walk across the game's various screens. (Seriously, "walking around" took a ridiculous amount of the game's playtime, especially when a puzzle made you backtrack three screens, type some command, and then return.) Let's get off this rock. Judged by current standards, the Sierra games are no longer what I would play for fun. All the same, I loved them. They introduced me to the joy of exploring virtual worlds and to the power of evocative artwork. I went into space, into fairy tales, and into the past, and I did so while finding the games' humor humorous and their plotlines compelling. ("An army of life insurance salesmen?" I thought at the time. "Hilarious and brilliant!") If the games can feel a bit arbitrary or vexing today, my child-self's love of repetition was able to treat them as engaging challenges rather than "unfair" design. Replaying Space Quest II, encountering the half-remembered jokes and visual designs, brought back these memories. The novelist Thomas Wolfe knew that you can't go home again, and it was probably inevitable that the game would feel dated to me now. But playing it again did take me back to that time before the Internet, when not even hint lines, insta-death, and EGA graphics could dampen the wonder of the new worlds computers were capable of showing us. Literal bathroom humor. Space Quest II, along with several other Sierra titles, is freely and legally available online at sarien.net—though I found many, many glitches in the implementation. Windows users can buy the entire Space Quest collection through Steam or Good Old Games. There's even a fan remake that runs on macOS, Windows, and Linux. Nate Anderson Deputy Editor Nate Anderson Deputy Editor Nate is the deputy editor at Ars Technica. His most recent book is In Emergency, Break Glass: What Nietzsche Can Teach Us About Joyful Living in a Tech-Saturated World, which is much funnier than it sounds. 14 Comments