Ninja has added everything from ice cream makers to double-decker toaster ovens to its extensive lineup of counter-clogging appliances, but it's only now introducing its first microwave. What makes the new Ninja Crispi Microwave stand out among its many competitors is that it doubles as an air fryer. After heating your food using microwaves, you have the option to switch over to using superheated air so the results are crispy instead of soggy, while also potentially replacing two kitchen appliances with just one multitasker. It's available starting today through SharkNinja's online store for $449.
Samsung's next flip phone might be tough to tell apart from last year's Galaxy Z Flip 7. As 9to5Google points out, leaked images and specs for the upcoming Galaxy Z Flip 8 shared by WinFuture are nearly identical to Samsung's current flip phone.
According to the leak, Samsung is not planning to upgrade the Z Flip 8 to one of Qualcomm's Snapdragon processors. Instead, it will have a Samsung Exynos 2600 chip, the successor to the previous-generation Exynos 2500 in the Z Flip 7. The only other notable upgrade is support for 45W wired charging.
Samsung is expected to officially announce the Z Flip 8, and the rest of its new lineup of foldable …
Ofcom concerned TikTok’s age verification is ineffective, leaving some exposed to posts on suicide, self-harm and pornography
TikTok is under formal investigation over concerns it has failed to protect children from harmful content, the UK’s online regulator, Ofcom, has announced.
The social media platform’s approach to checking the ages of users has sparked “particular concerns” at the watchdog, almost a year after measures to protect children from the worst of online content came into effect under the Online Safety Act.
1Password has launched a new browser integration for Claude that allows the Anthropic chatbot to access stored security credentials like usernames and passwords. The 1Password for Claude feature means that users can authorize Claude to complete multi-step tasks like booking travel and managing online accounts on their behalf without having to manually input their login credentials, but without actually exposing your security information to Anthropic's AI models, according to 1Password.
That's made possible by a new "zero-exposure security framework" developed by 1Password, which works by injecting the required credentials for each task thro …
For decades, paleoanthropologists have largely agreed that somewhere along the evolutionary course from apelike ancestors to modern humans, our bodies got dramatically larger. However, one lingering mystery has been when this intense growth began.
Did our ancestorsgradually grow bigger over millions of years? Did the shift coincide with the emergence of the genus Homo? Or did it occur later, after some of the earliest human species had already appeared?
Rather than supporting a single long-standing hypothesis, researchers used a sophisticated statistical method to show that human body size likely followed two evolutionary courses simultaneously: a slow, steady increase spanning millions of years, punctuated by a much larger leap in later members of the genus Homo.
The findings help reconcile decades of conflicting research while offering one of the clearest pictures yet of how, and perhaps why, our ancestors evolved into larger-bodied humans.
“Despite its central role in hominin evolution, there is little consensus on how body size increased through time,” researchers write. “We provide strong evidence for a marked size increase in later-occurring Homo, alongside a moderate general increase over time among all hominins.”
Body size is one of the defining characteristics of an organism. In humans and our extinct relatives, it has been linked to everything from brain expansion and walking efficiency to metabolism, hunting behavior, and the ability to travel across increasingly large landscapes. Understanding when body size changed, therefore, helps researchers reconstruct not only what our ancestors looked like, but how they lived.
Yet despite decades of fossil findings, scientists have struggled to agree on the evolutionary pattern behind those changes.
Some previous studies suggested that homininssimply became larger over time. Some contended that body size remained relatively stable until the emergence of Homo. Still others have proposed that the real transformation arose only after early species such as Homo habilis, often regarded as one of the first members of our genus.
According to researchers, one reason for the disagreement is that earlier analyses typically examined these competing ideas independently. They also often failed to account for uncertainties inherent in the fossil record, including disagreements over species classification, differences in body mass estimation methods, and uncertainties in evolutionary relationships among fossil species.
To address those limitations, researchers compiled one of the largest hominin body-size datasets assembled to date, incorporating body mass assessments from 386 fossil specimens representing 21 different taxa.
They then analyzed the data using Bayesian phylogenetic generalized linear mixed models—a statistical approach that accounts for evolutionary relationships while encompassing multiple layers of uncertainty.
The team repeated its analyses across 1,000 different phylogenetic trees and 1,000 separate datasets, allowing them to test whether the overall pattern remained consistent despite uncertainties.
The results pointed to two simultaneous trends.
The first was a modest but persistent increase in body size across the hominin family as a whole. On average, body mass increased by roughly 2 pounds (0.9 kilograms) every million years, suggesting that larger bodies gradually became more common throughout human evolution.
However, the second trend proved far more dramatic.
Instead of all members of Homo becoming substantially larger, the researchers found the strongest evidence for a distinct jump in body size among later members of the genus, particularly species that appeared after Homo habilis. That pattern regularly emerged regardless of how the fossil data were analyzed.
In other words, early members of Homomay not have represented the major biological turning point scientists once assumed.
This finding disputes a common assumption that simply belonging to the genus Homo meant possessing a significantly larger body. Instead, the study suggests that some hallmark features traditionally associated with humans, including larger body size, may have evolved after the genus’s origin.
That interpretation also corresponds to broader changes that occurred later in human evolution.
Researchers note that this period coincides with evidence for more efficient upright walking, greater reliance on meat consumption, and expanding home ranges. Larger bodies may have been both a consequence of and a contributor to those behavioral and ecological shifts.
The study likewise reinforces another growing theme that evolution rarely follows a straight line.
Species such as Homo floresiensis, often nicknamed the “Hobbit” because of its diminutive stature, andHomo Naledi frequently appeared as outliers with unusually small bodysizes despite belonging to relatively recent branches of the human family tree. Their existence demonstrates that body size did not simply increase in a uniform march toward modern humans.
Instead, evolution repeatedly experimented with different solutions depending on local environments and ecological constraints.
The researchers also argue that part of the longstanding disagreement over body-size evolution stems from the fossil record itself. Different studies have estimated fossil body masses using different skeletal elements, comparison populations, and statistical techniques, sometimes producing substantially different results for the same individual.
By expressly incorporating those uncertainties into their analysis, rather than treating them as fixed values, the new framework seeks to capture the range of plausible evolutionary scenarios rather than relying on a single interpretation.
Even so, researchers caution that important questions remain unresolved.
Improved fossil discoveries, more accurate body-mass estimation methods, and a better understanding of species relationships could all further refine the picture. The study also does not explicitly account for sexual size differences between males and females, which may have been greater in some early hominin species than in modern humans.
Nevertheless, the wider conclusion is intriguing.
Rather than choosing between competing theories, the evidence suggests both contain elements of the truth.
Body size did increase gradually across the hominin lineage. But the most considerable leap appears to have occurred later, after the earliest representatives of Homo had already evolved.
That conclusion may help settle one of paleoanthropology’s longest-running debates while showing how advances in statistical methods are transforming scientists’ ability to extract new insights from fossils that have often been studied for decades.
“Overall, these findings bring clarity to a fundamental question in human evolution and show how the application of rigorous phylogenetic comparative tools can unlock patterns previously hidden in the fossil record while accounting for multiple sources of uncertainty,” researchers write. “By reconciling conflicting findings within a single framework, our results clarify key evolutionary transitions and highlight the complex nature of body size change in human evolution.”
Tim McMillan is a retired law enforcement executive, investigative reporter and co-founder of The Debrief. His writing typically focuses on defense, national security, the Intelligence Community and topics related to psychology. You can follow Tim on Twitter:@LtTimMcMillan. Tim can be reached by email: tim@thedebrief.org or through encrypted email:LtTimMcMillan@protonmail.com
On December 14, 1972, in the last hour before Gene Cernan climbed the ladder of the lunar module Challenger for the final time, he crouched in the powdery grey soil of the Taurus-Littrow valley and drew three letters with his gloved finger: T, D, C. They were the initials of his daughter, Teresa Dawn Cernan. He knew, standing there in a place with no rain, no wind of the kind that moves dust on Earth, and no plate tectonics to churn the surface, that the marks he was making would very likely still be there long after the little girl who inspired them, and everyone she had ever known, was gone.
No human being has been back to touch them.
The last hour on the surface
Cernan and geologist Harrison “Jack” Schmitt had been on the Moon for more than three days. They had driven the lunar rover through a valley carved by an ancient impact, gathered more than 240 pounds of rock and soil, and, at one point, patched a broken rover fender using laminated geology maps and duct tape after Cernan snagged it with a rock hammer. It was the brightest moment of his life.
Then it was time to leave.
Schmitt was already inside the lunar module. Cernan lingered at the base of the ladder. He had spent part of the mission privately grasping for a line worthy of Neil Armstrong’s “giant leap.” What came out, into his suit radio, was quieter: “We leave as we came and, God willing, as we shall return, with peace and hope for all mankind.”
Before he turned to the ladder, he bent down. He traced TDC into the lunar dust with a fingertip protected only by the layered fabric of an EVA glove. He imagined, according to interviews he gave later, someone in a distant future finding the rover, the boot prints, and the three letters, and asking, “I wonder who was here? Some ancient civilization was here back in the 20th century, and look at the funny marks they made.”
Why the letters are still there
Earth erases almost everything. Wind sands down mountains. Rain dissolves limestone into caves. Roots crack pavement in a season. Ice widens fissures into canyons. A footprint on a beach is gone before the tide turns.
The Moon does none of that.
There is no atmosphere thick enough to move dust the way weather moves it on Earth. There is no liquid water at the surface. There are no plants, no burrowing animals, no plate tectonics reshuffling the crust. What does happen is slow. Micrometeorites — specks of interplanetary debris the size of sand grains and smaller — strike the surface constantly, gradually stirring the uppermost layer of regolith in a process planetary scientists call “gardening.” Solar wind sputters atoms off exposed grains. Temperature swings of more than 250°C between lunar day and lunar night flex and fatigue the rock.
None of that is fast. The top centimeter of lunar soil is turned over on a timescale measured in millions of years, not decades. The boot prints left by Cernan and Schmitt, and by the ten Americans who walked there before them, are, on any human clock, effectively permanent. NASA imagery from the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter has confirmed the Apollo tracks are still visible from orbit more than half a century later — a point Cernan himself made in congressional testimony, when he noted his footprints were still visible on the Moon more than 40 years after he had made them.
The same forces that preserve the Apollo hardware preserve TDC.
The claim that the initials will last millions of years is worth pinning down. The rate at which the lunar surface is churned by micrometeoroid impacts has been measured by studying the ages of exposed rocks and modeled from impact-flux data. Fine surface features roughly the depth of a fingertip trace — a few millimeters — are estimated to be erased on timescales of order 10 million years. Larger structures, like rover tracks and deeper boot impressions, last longer still. Meanwhile, cosmic dust rains onto every airless body in the solar system, including Earth, where it turns up preserved in unexpected places — in 2017, Imperial College London researchers recovered fossilised micrometeorites from roughly 90-million-year-old chalk of the same Late Cretaceous formation that makes up the White Cliffs of Dover.
On the Moon, that same slow dusting is one of the processes that will eventually bury the TDC letters. But “eventually” is not on a human scale. The letters will almost certainly outlast every printed book, every steel bridge, every marble monument on Earth. They will outlast the pyramids by a factor of a thousand. They will still be legible after languages that have not yet been invented have come and gone.
A father, an astronaut, and a nine-year-old
Cernan was in his late thirties on that last EVA. Teresa, whom the family called Tracy, was nine years old, in elementary school. His marriage to her mother, Barbara, would later end in divorce. He was, by every account, an aviator’s aviator — thousands of hours of Navy flight time, an electrical engineering degree from Purdue, graduate training in aeronautics, and a spacewalk on Gemini 9 that nearly killed him when his suit overheated and his visor fogged.
The image of a fighter pilot writing a child’s initials in the dust of another world is not the image Apollo usually offered the public. Apollo offered flags, salutes, and the pale-blue Earth hanging in a black sky. The astronaut office, as we’ve explored in a piece on Buzz Aldrin’s 1973 memoir, was a culture where emotional interiority was something you flew through, not something you talked about.
Cernan talked about it anyway. In interviews across four decades, he returned again and again to the moment on the ladder. “Those steps up that ladder, they were tough to make,” he told a NASA oral historian in 2007. “I didn’t want to go up. I wanted to stay a while.”
The TDC gesture sat inside that reluctance. It was a way of leaving something of his life behind in a place he suspected, correctly, he would never come back to.
Tracy grew up. The Moon kept the initials.
Teresa Dawn Cernan was a child when her father wrote her name on another world. She was in her fifties when he died in a Houston hospital in January 2017, aged 82. She is named in her father’s obituaries among his survivors, alongside her stepmother, Jan Nanna Cernan, two stepsisters, and nine grandchildren.
She has, on the rare occasions she has spoken publicly, acknowledged the initials as an extraordinary gift. It is also, quietly, one of the strangest inheritances anyone has ever received: not a house, not a watch, not a piece of jewelry, but three finger-drawn letters in extraterrestrial soil, protected from erasure by the physics of a world without weather.
The last footprint, and the reason it stayed the last
Cernan spent much of the rest of his life pushing, publicly and often, for humans to go back. He testified before Congress. He filmed a documentary. He worried aloud, more than once, that he would die still holding the title of the last man on the Moon.
He did.
The Apollo program ended not because the rockets stopped working but because the political reason for building them evaporated the moment the Soviet Union was decisively beaten to the surface. Apollo 18, 19, and 20 were cancelled. The Saturn V production line was shut down. Engineers who had built the largest rocket in history were laid off or reassigned. By the time Cernan retired from NASA in the mid-1970s, the infrastructure to send someone else back had already been dismantled.
More than half a century passed before anyone came close again. The Artemis program, now underway, plans its first crewed landing at the Moon’s south pole rather than Taurus-Littrow. Cernan’s valley is on the near side, at the eastern edge of Mare Serenitatis, more than 3,000 kilometers from the planned Artemis landing zone.
The initials will keep their solitude for a while yet.
A signature outlasting its author
There is a category of human gesture that only makes sense against the scale of geological time. Carving a lover’s name into a beech tree. Scratching initials into wet cement. Leaving graffiti in a Roman catacomb. What all of these share is a bet against forgetting — a bet the graffito will outlast the person who made it.
Most of those bets lose. Trees fall. Cement is repoured. Catacombs collapse.
The Moon is different. It is possibly the most stable writing surface in the accessible solar system. Cernan, an electrical engineer by training, would have understood this instinctively. He was drawing on a substrate that had been undisturbed for something like three billion years before he arrived. The mare basalts that underlie the regolith are older than most of the surface of Earth. When he wrote his daughter’s initials, he was signing a very old page.
In his final decades, Cernan gave a version of the same speech to schoolchildren over and over: humans belong out there. He was, by then, an old man in a blazer, talking to auditoriums of eight-year-olds. Somewhere in each of those talks, he mentioned Tracy’s initials. It was the human hook, the moment the room went quiet.
Gene Cernan died on January 16, 2017. His body is buried on Earth. The suit he wore in the Taurus-Littrow valley — the same one whose glove drew the letters — is a museum object now, gradually being studied and preserved by conservators who worry about the way lunar dust, once so alien it was quarantined on return, is slowly working its way out of the fabric.
Two hundred and fifty thousand miles away, on the eastern edge of a valley named for the Latin word for bull, three finger-drawn letters continue to exist in a place with no weather and no witnesses.
There is no fence around them. There is no plaque. There is no camera pointed at them. There is only lunar day, two weeks long, and lunar night, two weeks long, and the occasional silent flash of a micrometeorite hitting somewhere in the surrounding kilometers of grey.
If humans return to Taurus-Littrow in a century, or a thousand years, or ten thousand, and think to look, the letters will almost certainly still be there. If humans never return, the letters will still be there. If the species that made them goes extinct, the letters will still be there. If, on some very distant morning, another kind of visitor arrives from somewhere else entirely and finds a rover and a set of boot prints and, in the powdery grey soil beside them, three shallow marks in the shape of a T, a D, and a C, they will not know that they have found the way one father, on his last hour in another world, said goodbye to his daughter.
Every now and then, a company launches something that doesn’t fit neatly into any existing category. Not because it’s obscenely powerful or flaunts conventional safety, but just because it doesn’t fit the mold that we’ve grown accustomed to. That’s exactly what the Infinite Machine Olto is.
Call it an e-bike, call it an electric moped, call it a scooter with pedals – everyone is going to have a different opinion. But after spending several weeks riding the Olto around town, I can confidently say one thing: it’s unlike anything else currently on the market.
In a major new confirmation of Einstein’s Theory of Relativity, the LARES-2 (Laser Relativity Satellite 2) has measured frame dragging around Earth with unprecedented precision.
Ignazio Ciufolini of China’s Wuhan Institute of Physics and Mathematics led the team behind a new paper published in Nature reporting the most precise measurement of the effect to date. The researchers reduced the uncertainty to just 0.2 percent, compared with several percent—and in some cases as much as 10 percent—in previous measurements.
Also known as the Lense-Thirring effect, named for the physicists who modeled it in 1918, frame dragging is the pull of a rotating mass on spacetime. The phenomenon was first predicted in Einstein’s Theory of Relativity.
Seeking Frame Dragging
Frame dragging becomes more pronounced around faster-spinning and more massive objects. For this reason, its effects are far stronger around black holes than around comparatively small bodies such as Earth. Some black holes possess millions or even billions of times the Sun’s mass, producing an immense distortion of the surrounding spacetime.
LARES-2, a satellite developed by the Italian Space Agency, made the new measurement possible. Its appearance has been compared to a golf ball or a disco ball, with its 303 corner-cube retroreflectors creating golf-ball-like divots on its surface, which is composed of a nickel-chromium alloy called Inconel 718.
The spacecraft is remarkably simple, with no thrusters, solar panels, or onboard electronics cluttering its compact, 16-inch-wide frame. Despite its small size, LARES-2 weighs roughly 650 pounds. This combination gives it the lowest area-to-mass ratio of any satellite in medium Earth orbit, minimizing the influence of nongravitational forces on its motion.
Measuring Frame Dragging
The effect of gravitation on the object was then measured by bombarding it with ground-based lasers, which the retroreflectors bounce back to the surface. Ciufolini’s team collected roughly 200,000 of these observations between July 2022 and June 2025, with one-millimeter precision, forming the dataset from which they calculated the frame-dragging effect.
The method presents a significant challenge, however. Earth is an oblate spheroid, with bulging sides created by centrifugal force, rather than a perfect sphere, which produces Newtonian forces that interfere with the frame-dragging signal. To mitigate this issue, the researchers used another satellite in a supplementary orbit, canceling out the effect of the opposing Newtonian forces.
That second satellite was NASA’s LAGEOS, launched in 1976. The orbital planes of LAGEOS and LARES-2 differ by 180.01 degrees—remarkably close to the ideal separation of 180 degrees.
A Final Challenge
One additional complication remained: the K1 lunisolar tide, a variation in Earth’s gravitational field produced by the combined influence of the Moon and Sun. Time provided the solution. Over the tide’s 1,050-day precession cycle, its effects average out and can be removed from the data.
After accounting for these sources of interference, the researchers measured a drift of 61.3 milliarcseconds per year in the satellites’ orbits caused by Earth’s frame dragging. The result closely matches the value predicted by general relativity, with only a narrow margin of uncertainty.
The researchers say the true value of their finding lies not just in confirming general relativity, but also in limiting the scope of the Chern-Simons theory, which seeks to reconcile general relativity with quantum mechanics for a Theory of Everything. Of more limited concern, the work also provided the most precise K1 tide measurement ever recorded, which could prove important to future Earth science research.
Ryan Whalen covers science and technology for The Debrief. He holds an MA in History and a Master of Library and Information Science with a certificate in Data Science. He can be contacted at ryan@thedebrief.org, and follow him on Twitter @mdntwvlf.
Google must give rival AI assistants and search engines greater access to key parts of Android and Google Search after the European Union ordered the company to comply with the bloc's digital antitrust rules.
The two decisions, handed down Thursday, could weaken Google's control over two of the tech industry's most important platforms and have far-reaching consequences for the company, shape the future of its AI tool Gemini, and open up new opportunities for rivals to gain ground. Google has until January 2027 to begin sharing search data and July 2027 to implement changes to Android.
The rulings stem from technical regulatory proceedings …
The Office of Space Commerce defended its proposal for a mission authorization scheme for novel space activities, arguing it would provide certainty for companies while limiting regulatory burdens.
Thalha Jubair, 20, and Owen Flowers, 19, sentenced to five and a half years each for cyber-attack that cost Transport for London £39m
The data of millions of commuters was stolen, Londoners were left out of pocket and 27,000 Transport for London staff were forced to reset their passwords.
Over four days in 2024 a pair of teenage hackers had London’s transport network at their mercy. Thalha Jubair and Owen Flowers had burrowed into the heart of Transport for London’s IT systems and held the “keys to the kingdom”.
Ukraine has ordered four next-generation SAMP/T NG air defense systems developed jointly by France and Italy as part of a new defense agreement with France. Before the delivery of the new systems begins, Paris will temporarily provide Ukraine with two existing SAMP/T batteries. According to a joint declaration published by the Office of the President […]
Login
