May 15 marks one year since Governor Kathy Hochul enacted a “bell-to-bell” ban on personal phones in public schools, impacting almost a million children in K-12 public and charter schools across the state.

Teachers who spoke to The Post all say the ban has had an overwhelmingly postive impact on their schools.

“I think that the cell phone ban has been remarkable,” Dr. Jessica Chock-Goldman, director of clinical services at Bard High School Early College of Manhattan on the Lower East Side, told The Post. “I’ve been astounded by how much of a shift it has been.” //

But it’s not just in the classroom. When he walks by the cafeteria during lunch, it’s now full of energy.

“They’re talking with each other instead of just looking down at their phones,” he marveled. “Now they have to communicate, they have to socialize. They have to talk, find out how their day is going, what’s going on, what class do you have next, did you do last night’s homework?”

In a recent paper in Nature, a team of scientists led by Kimihiko Nakajima, an astronomer at the Kanazawa University, Japan, used the James Webb Space Telescope to observe an ultra-faint galaxy called LAP1-B as it existed roughly 800 million years after the Big Bang. It’s the most chemically primitive galaxy we’ve ever seen.

The magnifying glass
The LAP1-B is 13 billion light-years away from Earth. To observe an object that faint and distant, even the huge, gold-coated beryllium mirrors of JWST were not enough on their own. We spotted it due to a massive cluster of galaxies called the MACS J046, which warps the spacetime between us and the LAP1-B.

“The galaxy was strongly magnified through the gravitational lensing effect,” Nakajima said. Specifically, the spacetime warped by the MACS J046 clusters magnifies light traveling from LAP1-B toward Earth by roughly 100-fold. //

This analysis revealed a profound shortage of elements heavier than hydrogen and helium. The gas-phase oxygen-to-hydrogen ratio stood at just 0.4 percent of what we find in our Sun.

Another detail in the spectrum indicated the type of radiation that made the gas glow. The team detected emission lines from triply ionized carbon—a state where a carbon atom has lost half of its six electrons. Stripping multiple electrons away from carbon atoms requires extreme-ultraviolet photons, with energies exceeding 47.9 electronvolts. Standard stars, even the massive ones we see in our galactic vicinity, are not hot enough to produce radiation this intense.

The stars that could get this hot, Nakajima’s team suggests, were the very first that ignited in the Universe. These were made exclusively of hydrogen and helium forged in the Big Bang and lacked heavy elements to help them cool as they formed. “Such stars should be formed from primordial gas,” Nakajima said. //

The stars we see today, including our Sun, are Population I stars. The older generation, found in the halo of our galaxy, are Population II stars, which have far lower levels of elements heavier than helium. Population III stars were the first to appear in the cosmos, and they’re theorized to be violent monsters with masses hundreds of times higher than the Sun squeezed into surprisingly small volumes. They burned extremely hot and died young in supernova explosions. Nakajima’s team has likely found traces of these explosions in LAP1-B.

Cable firm Cox’s Supreme Court win may help all tech providers, not just ISPs.

Second, Jackson’s relationship with children too often ventured into the inappropriate and indefensible, but at the same time, the overwhelming evidence is that he was not guilty of sexually abusing children and was in fact the victim of multiple extortion schemes.

But even today, when the world has rendered its own judgement, that Michael Jackson remains beloved, the media cannot bring themselves to talk about him without suggesting he was likely a pedophile. They refuse to do it. They refuse to tell the truth and they refuse to acknowledge that their preferred version of his story has been rejected by the public. //

I could understand some of the obsession if there were any proof that Jackson did something criminal. He’s been accused and after the one and only time it went to trial, he was acquitted because the jury was introduced to the alleged victim’s wretch of a mother who had a proven history of theft and fraud— schemes that she used her kids to execute.

There was the 2019 Leaving Neverland documentary in which another two accusers, now grown men, laid out graphic details of their own alleged abuse. Both of them are demonstrable liars in ways both big and small, and both made their charges only after Jackson was dead and in pursuit of money (they’re both actively suing his estate).

The details of all of these cases are genuinely riveting, just not in the way the media would prefer.

Instead, their fitness seems to stem from their father’s exercise habits before they were even conceived. It’s a finding suggesting that running might benefit not just the exerciser, but also his unborn children.

“I was very surprised when I first saw the data,” says Yin, a biochemist at Nanjing University.

Yin’s team analyzed the molecules inside the exercising rodents’ sperm and found tiny bits of RNA—dubbed microRNAs—that were present in higher amounts than in the sperm of their idle littermates. When the scientists injected those molecules into unrelated embryos, they got animals just as fit as those that were born to exercising fathers.

That 2025 study adds to mounting evidence that sperm are more than wriggling vessels carrying DNA to an egg. Over the past two decades, studies in mice have detected microRNAs and other types of RNA fragments that surge and wane inside sperm cells in response to not just exercise or sloth but also fatty or sugary diets, daily stress, childhood trauma, heavy drinking and exposure to pesticides and other hazards. In step with these changes, researchers have documented developmental and metabolic changes and differing rates of depression in the males’ offspring.

And while it’s difficult to study the effect in people, researchers also have documented fluctuations in RNA fragments in the sperm of men who do or don’t exercise, smoke or eat excess sugar, as well as men with obesity or traumatic childhoods. Studies also report that children of parents who are overweight or who dealt with mental health stress are more likely to have those conditions, too. //

But though puzzles remain, recent studies show that not only are paternal RNA fragments transferred to a fertilized egg, but also that they are capable of inducing changes in the offspring at the doses found in sperm. //

Today, those studying the phenomenon are sure the effects exist but aren’t certain how they are transmitted. The end result, they believe, is adjustments to the activity of genes—a phenomenon known as epigenetics.

Such adjustments occur during normal development as tissues and organs adopt their different identities, which require certain genes to be active or to be turned off. //

Today, the idea that small RNAs carry environmental signals has the most direct evidence behind it. Although small RNAs are short-lived, they aren’t actively removed like other epigenetic marks. Somehow, the tiny bits of nucleic acid fluctuate in response to the environment, then find their way into sperm cells.b//

Whatever the mechanism, there’s enough evidence to rebalance parental responsibility, Teperino says. “Now it’s almost all on women,” he says. “When a couple is planning a family, the doctor gives the woman a list of rules to follow. This is not valid anymore—we need to at least give recommendations to both.”

First impressions disproportionately shape how passengers rate an entire flight. With self-service kiosks, online check-in, and biometric boarding gates reducing human touchpoints, the gate agent and the flight attendant at the door are now among the very few staff members a customer interacts with directly.

Net Promoter Score, a metric that airlines track closely, is heavily influenced by these early micro interactions. A warm welcome at the door costs the airline nothing yet sets a positive tone for the entire journey. A cold or absent greeting does the opposite and primes the passenger to view every subsequent service touchpoint negatively.

The hospitality industry follows the same principle. Most hotel guests form a subconscious judgement about their stay within five minutes of arrival, based largely on how the front desk staff receives them. Aviation operates under identical psychological dynamics. //

A greeting at the door is not a complicated training problem. It is the clearest available signal of whether an airline’s service culture is functioning, and right now at American, that signal is flashing red.

The Fast Identity Online (FIDO) Alliance developed passkeys several years ago, and the technology offers numerous benefits. For example, passkeys cannot be guessed or shared. Also, passkeys resist some phishing attempts because they're unique to the sites they're created for, so they won't work on fraudulent lookalikes. Most importantly, in the age of near-constant data breaches, your passkeys cannot be stolen by hacking into a company's server or database, making the stolen data far less valuable to criminals. //

Apps or websites store your unique public key. A private key is stored on your device, in your password manager, or, if you're an Apple user, in your iCloud keychain. After your device (or iCloud) authenticates your identity, the two keys combine to grant you access to your account. //

To learn how to set up passkeys for your online accounts, check out our guide to setting up and using passkeys.
https://www.pcmag.com/how-to/no-more-passwords-how-to-set-up-apples-passkeys-for-easy-sign-ins

You know the data privacy pop-up screens? Don't immediately tap "Accept." Instead, navigate to the "Cookies" or "User Data" sections and choose the shortest available session duration. That way, your cookies will expire automatically or whenever you close your browser window. //

Because the technologies became popular around the same time, many people seem to believe that 2FA options like biometric authentication, authenticator apps, and hardware security keys are the same as passkeys.

The difference? Passkeys perform multi-factor authentication. You will log into a website using only the passkey; there is no need to enter a password and username. Depending on your privacy and security settings, the iCloud account, device, or password manager where you've stored a passkey may require you to unlock it by using your face, fingerprint, or passcode.

Google Chrome will steal 4 GB of disk space from your computer for its local large language model unless you opted out.

It's called weights.bin and it's stored in a folder called OptGuideOnDeviceModel. What's more, if you track down the file and delete it, Chrome will download a fresh copy and reinstate it. //

If you didn't opt out, Google has some info on how to disable it. In brief: in Chrome's address box, enter the special URL chrome://flags. In the resulting page, look for an entry named optimization-guide-on-device-model and set it to Disabled, then restart Chrome. The browser should then delete the weights.bin file. //

The late great Grace Hopper used to hand out 30 cm (roughly 1 foot) lengths of wire as physical examples of a nanosecond: that's how far light can travel in one billionth of a second. If Google considers a 4 GB model to be "nano" sized, then it puts Hanff's hyperbolic comment about the climate footprint into real perspective. It gives a hint of the size of the real gigantic models in the datacenters metastasizing across the world.

A recent study led by Grace Liu at Carnegie-Mellon found that regular AI use caused measurable cognitive impairment. It's worth thinking carefully about what we trade away when we outsource our thinking and, separately, what the planet pays to power the systems we're outsourcing it to.

This vulture suggests you turn it off now, everywhere you can. ®

A celebration of the tweaks and customizations that make life easier at the CLI.

For hantaviruses, human infections are accidental and almost always dead ends. Transmission to people generally happens when virus-laden rodent excreta gets stirred up in dust and inhaled—for example, a person sweeping out a shed or garage with a rodent infestation without a mask.

Such a scenario made headlines in the US last year when pianist Betsy Arakawa, who was married to actor Gene Hackman, was revealed to have died of hantavirus. A subsequent investigation found an extensive rodent infestation at the couple’s residence.

The one exception to this transmission route is from the Andes virus; ANDV is the only hantavirus that has been documented in rare instances to spread from person to person.

Based on that documented incidence, it is clear that person-to-person transmission requires close, prolonged contact. To date, though, it remains unclear whether breathing significant amounts of aerosolized virus from an infected person or exposure to an infected person’s respiratory droplets is behind the rare transmission. //

Whether from rodent exposure or the ultra-rare person-to-person transmission, the incubation period for hantaviruses—the amount of time between exposure and when symptoms develop—ranges from about 7 to 42 days.

The currently recommended quarantine and/or active monitoring period for potentially exposed cases is 42 days.

Microsoft continues to make some of the earliest chapters of its operating system history open-source and freely available. Earlier this week, it announced that Tim Paterson's DOS listings, containing source code of the 86-DOS 1.00 kernel, various PC-DOS 1.00 pre-release kernels and utilities, and the Microsoft BASIC-86 Compiler runtime library, were available on GitHub. Microsoft VP Scott Hanselman tied the release to 86-DOS 1.00’s 45th anniversary. The exec confirmed that the code, transcribed from reams of old dot matrix printouts found in a garage, was perfect, "and recompiles byte for byte to the original binaries.”

View and download this historic assembly code for your own space program //

The historic computer software code that took Apollo 11 to the moon has been open-sourced and is available for anyone to read, download, and tinker with. NASA’s Chris Garry made the code available on GitHub as public domain. The published resource is basically in two large codebases, one set of code for the Command Module (Comanche055) and another for the Lunar Module (Luminary099). These modules both had their own Apollo 11 guidance computers (AGC) upon which to run the code, and were instrumental to the success of the remarkable mission – the first human Moon landing in history. //

It is fascinating to see this Apollo 11 code from nearly 60 years ago shared in the context of the ongoing Artemis II lunar mission. Today, we aren’t marveling at the lean and mean machine code that NASA is using to get humans to and from the Moon. Rather, Microsoft Outlook email bugs and a malfunctioning toilet on the Orion spacecraft may have taken the shine off the momentous achievement this latest mission represents.

Microsoft CTO confesses that 30-year-old code from the mid-90s still forms the bedrock of Windows 11 — ancient Win32 API still the backbone, but CTO says it's 'more relevant than ever in 2026' //

As Russinovich eloquently puts it, those of us invested in the computer scene in the 90s “were thinking flying cars and moon stations by the year 2026, not Win32.” The admission that such old software tech is still the "bedrock" of Windows today may be the CTO strategically sharing a cold, hard truth, providing a 'let's be real' moment as part of Microsoft’s latest charm offensive. //

Russinovich highlights that Win32 was also the bedrock for tools like Sysmon and ZoomIt, which he actually wrote back in 1996. These tools are now “more relevant than ever in 2026,” as parts of Windows 11 and PowerToys, respectively, reckons the CTO.

From Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch and bestselling author Janie Nitze! Explore the courage and sacrifice of some of the heroes of the American Revolution and the stories behind the document that started it all—The Declaration of Independence.

In the spring of 1776, the streets of Philadelphia buzzed with the sounds of revolution. Talk of war and rumors of spies swirled in the air. Noisy debates spilled out of taverns. The State House bell tolled urgently, calling men to meetings and momentarily drowning out the normal hum of the port city.

Dive into the stories of ordinary people willing to do extraordinary things, from iconic figures like Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, Ben Franklin, and Paul Revere, to lesser-known revolutionaries such as Caesar Rodney, Thomas Paine, and Mary Katherine Goddard. These great men and women risked all they had—their property, freedom, and ultimately their lives—to secure a better life for their children and grandchildren. Packed with firsthand accounts and vivid depictions of the patriots’ struggle for freedom, Justice Gorsuch’s and Janie Nitze’s debut children’s book thoughtfully investigates the foundations of our country, centering the human experience at the heart of it all.

Celebrate America’s 250th birthday with the Heroes of 1776, a celebration of the ideals upon which this country stands, told with humanity in only the way Justice Gorsuch and Janie Nitze can. //

Carolyn
5 out of 5 stars

Be prepared to be moved by this book!
Reviewed in the United States on May 6, 2026
Format: Hardcover
Verified Purchase

I ordered this book because I heard Justice Gorsuch promoting the book in a TV interview. I liked what he said, and I thought it might be a good gift for my younger relatives. I’m cautious about gifting books that I haven’t read, especially for children. So upon its arrival, I sat down to read it and I was so moved that it caught me off guard. I studied American history and the creation of the Declaration of Independance in high school and in college. I’ve seen the movies. I’ve watched the documentaries. I’ve even gone to DC and viewed the document. I know the story, or at least I thought I did. But not like this. This story made it real, because, to use the authors’ words, “At the heart of it all were ordinary people willing to do extraordinary things and risk all they had to secure a better life for themselves, their children, and generations to come.“ They didn’t teach this part of the story in school. I never knew how extraordinary these ordinary people were. I have a new appreciation for the Declaration of Independence and for the men and women who sacrificed so much to create this experiment, we call America. This book is not just for children. It is for everyone of any age. Order a copy or a few. You, can thank me later.

It's that sharp decline in young people's knowledge of how and why America was founded, and our form of government, that prompted Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch to write "Heroes of 1776: The Story of the Declaration." The book is aimed at both school-aged kids and adults. During a recent interview promoting the book, Gorsuch gave some startling figures:

"Only about 13% of kids today in eighth grade are proficient in American history — [and just] 22% in civics. Six out of 10 adults would fail our citizenship test." //

Gorsuch added that much of his inspiration for the book came from former Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, who founded a civics non-profit after her time on the nation's highest court. Gorsuch said of O'Connor and her work,

"As she was leaving the court, she reflected that civic education in this country is a problem. And for a lot of reasons, it's simply not being taught anymore."

Gorsuch offered up some other disturbing facts. In 2019, only one-third of Americans could name all three branches of government. He stated that this was concerning, given the fact that all three branches "interact" and "check" one another against overreach. //

We know why American history and civics are no longer taught in public schools. The agenda of the teachers' unions is not for students to be knowledgeable in history and civics, but in climate change, transgender issues, and why America is inherently a racist nation. They know that if kids are taught about history or civics, it will be that much harder to indoctrinate them on left-wing ideology and hate the country. 

ALSO READ: How Much Confidence Do Americans Have in the Supreme Court? A New Poll Says Not Much

Gorsuch said that history and civics education isn't a left- or right-issue for him and his fellow justices. He added, "If you polled the nine of us in our conference room, one thing we could all agree on is the importance of learning American history."

That agreement among the justices on Americans' knowledge of history and civics is encouraging. Neil Gorsuch summed it up, saying, "Because how else are you going to carry this thing forward? Somebody has to run the zoo."  //

TheBlaze @theblaze
·
Justice Neil Gorsuch: “We’re a creedal nation. What unites us is not a religion, not a race, it’s a belief in those ideas in the Declaration of Independence.”

7:37 PM · May 6, 2026

TL;DR: The 2021 Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act requires all new cars sold after September 2027 to include technology that monitors whether you're impaired or distracted—and can prevent you from driving. Infrared cameras will track your eyes, breath sensors will measure alcohol, and your car can refuse to start or limit its speed. Privacy advocates warn this biometric data could be shared with insurance companies, law enforcement, or sold to data brokers.

What's coming to your car
Tucked into the 2,702-page Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act that President Biden signed in November 2021 was a provision that few Americans noticed. Section 24220 requires NHTSA to issue safety standards mandating "advanced drunk and impaired driving prevention technology" in all new passenger vehicles.

The law gave NHTSA until November 15, 2024 to finalize rules. Enforcement begins no later than September 2027. That deadline is now 18 months away.

Starting September 2026, a silent update, nonconsensually pushed by Google, will block every Android app whose developer hasn't registered with Google, signed their contract, paid up, and handed over government ID.

You bought an Android phone because Google told you it was open. You could install what you wanted, and that was the deal.

Google is now rewriting that deal, retroactively, on hardware you already own. After the update lands, you can only run software that Google has pre-approved. On your phone: your property, that you paid for.

After September 2026, none of these can be installed without Google's blessing.

F-Droid, home to thousands of free and open-source Android apps, has called this an "existential" threat. Cory Doctorow calls it "Darth Android".

Android's openness was never just a feature. It was the promise that distinguished it from iPhone. Millions chose Android for exactly that reason. Google is now revoking that promise unilaterally, on devices already in people's pockets, because they've decided they have enough market dominance and regulatory capture to get away with it.

Ars Technica: "Google's Apple envy threatens to dismantle Android's open legacy."

FreeOTP is a two-factor authentication application for systems utilizing one-time password protocols. Tokens can be added easily by scanning a QR code. If you need to generate a QR code, try our QR code generator.

FreeOTP implements open standards: HOTP and TOTP. This means that no proprietary server-side component is necessary: use any server-side component that implements these standards. We recommend FreeIPA.

it appears that ${name}_umask will do the job. i.e. in my case syncthing_umask="0002" set in /etc/rc.conf (or /usr/local/etc/rc.conf).

There are three types of file links supported in the NTFS file system: hard links, junctions, and symbolic links. Otherwise known as Reparse Points.

Hard Links can only be created for files. Any changes to that file are instantly visible to applications that access it through the hard links that reference it. Hard links do not support UNC paths (network paths that begin with \). Hard links to a file will not have a shortcut arrow icon on them.

Symbolic Links are soft links that are basically advanced shortcuts. You can create a symbolic link to a local or remote file, folder, or shares path, and that link will appear to be the same as the target source. Symbolic links do support UNC paths (network paths that begin with \). When you open a symbolic link, you will be redirected to the target source. Symbolic links will have a shortcut arrow icon on them.

Junctions (Directory Junction) are soft links that can only be created to a local folder (directory) path. Junction points make it appear as though folder (directory) actually exists at the location of the junction point, and your app won’t know any better. Junction points do not support UNC paths (network paths that begin with \). Junction points will have a shortcut arrow icon on them.

Deleting anything in the link/junction or target (source) folder will delete it in both folders.

Deleting the hard link, symbolic link, or junction point itself will not delete anything in the target (source) folder.