Focused search for science

16+ min ago (1138+ words) Re:Invent Amazon wants to make AI meaningful to enterprises, and it's building yet another walled garden disguised as an easy button to do it. During his keynote at Amazon Web Services' annual re:Invent conference, CEO Matt Garman laid out the cloud titan's vision for lowering the barriers to enterprise AI adoption, spanning infrastructure to custom models and pre-baked agents. "When I speak to customers and many of you out there, you haven't yet seen the returns that match up to the promise of AI. The true value of AI has not yet been unlocked," Garman said. Garman's comments broadly align with the results of an MIT study from August which found enterprises had invested between $35 and $40 billion in generative AI initiatives and, so far, have almost nothing to show for it. As damning as that appears, it suggests…...

28+ min ago (280+ words) The science museum in Golden Gate Park is popular with Bay Area school children and international tourists, and many kids over the years have ended their visits clutching a mini Claude stuffed animal to take home. As an unofficial mascot of the museum and the city, Claude appeared in a children's book and in ads at bus and light-rail stations. The rare alligator icon had a "quiet charisma" that captivated hearts in his 17 years in San Francisco, the museum said in a statement. "Claude showed us the power of ambassador animals to connect people to nature and stoke curiosity to learn more about the world around us," it said. Claude hatched in 1995 at an alligator farm in Louisiana, and came to live at the Academy in 2008. He was born with albinism, a genetic mutation that made him appear white. His…...

28+ min ago (344+ words) A beloved albino alligator named Claude at the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco has died at age 30 SAN FRANCISCO -- A rare albino alligator named Claude who was beloved by fans around the world died Tuesday, according to the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco. He was 30. The science museum in Golden Gate Park is popular with Bay Area school children and international tourists, and many kids over the years have ended their visits clutching a mini Claude stuffed animal to take home. As an unofficial mascot of the museum and the city, Claude appeared in a children's book and in ads at bus and light-rail stations. The alligator icon had a "quiet charisma" that captivated hearts in his 17 years in San Francisco, the museum said in a statement. It has also said there are fewer than 200 albino…...

37+ min ago (659+ words) A rare confluence of factors makes the Atacama an ideal home for some of the world's biggest ground-based astronomical projects " dry climate, high altitude and, crucially, isolation from the light pollution of civilization. "It's a perfect cocktail for astronomy," said Daniela Gonz'lez, executive director of the Skies of Chile Foundation, a nonprofit that defends the quality of the country's night skies. But that may not be the case for much longer, a group of leading scientists warned in an open letter to Chile's government released Tuesday. A private company is pressing ahead with plans to construct a giant renewable energy complex in sight of one of Earth's most productive astronomical facilities " the Paranal Observatory, operated by an international consortium known as the European Southern Observatory, or ESO. In the letter, 30 renowned international astronomers, including Reinhard Genzel, a 2020 Nobel laureate in…...

41+ min ago (516+ words) By Leonardo Policarpo Software Engineer | Backend Architecture & IoT Enthusiast " Leia a vers'o em Portugu's aqui Recently, I tackled a common challenge in large corporate scenarios: the need to create new, high-performance, scalable features that consume data from a consolidated database, without compromising the stability of the central system. The goal was to architect a Read-Only Microservice to feed data visualization interfaces and export routines. The business requirement was speed of delivery; the technical requirement I imposed on myself was engineering excellence and long-term maintainability. In this article, I share the architectural decisions taken to ensure a robust and decoupled solution using Node.js, Clean Architecture, Prisma, and Docker. The scenario involved complexities typical of robust systems that have grown organically over the years: To ensure the project's longevity, I adopted Clean Architecture. The main goal was to isolate business rules…...

41+ min ago (619+ words) How to write fast, reliable tests for workflows that span hours Testing long-running workflows is tricky. Your function waits for callbacks, retries failed operations, and spans multiple invocations. How do you test that without actually waiting hours or deploying to AWS? The AWS Durable Execution SDK includes a testing library that solves this. You can run your durable functions locally, skip time-based waits, inspect every operation, and verify behavior without touching AWS. Let's see how. The SDK provides testing tools for different scenarios: LocalDurableTestRunner runs your function in-process with a simulated checkpoint server. Tests execute in milliseconds, even for workflows that would normally take hours. This is what you'll use for most testing. CloudDurableTestRunner tests against deployed Lambda functions in AWS. Use this for integration tests or when you need to verify behavior in the actual AWS environment. run-durable CLI…...

43+ min ago (619+ words) When the Kiroween Hackathon was announced, I wanted to try something different " something playful, something nostalgic, and something that would push the boundaries of what an AI-powered IDE like Kiro could help me build. Most hackathon projects either look forward into the future or try to solve an immediate problem. I wanted to look backward. That's how I came up with MCP Time-Traveler " an app that reconstructs historical tech stacks from 2015 to 2025 across Node, Python, and Ruby, using real version data from npm, PyPI, and RubyGems. What surprised me most wasn't the idea. It was how quickly Kiro turned it into a real, working project. This is the story of how it came to life. " Where the Idea Started Developers often discuss "what stack should I use?" But rarely do we ask, "what did this stack look like five or…...

51+ min ago (820+ words) The longevity entrepreneur's five-and-a-half hour livestreamed trip is antithetical to the introspective nature of the drug. But the stunt could reduce stigma around psychedelics. It marked the second act of his stunty new investigation into whether using psilocybin can improve almost 250 wellness biomarkers including various measures of brain connectivity, cortisol levels and testosterone. "There's a potential for psychedelics to play a more important role in all of our lives, and wouldn't it be amazing if it was also a longevity therapy," Johnson proclaimed on the stream. Prior to consuming the shrooms Sunday'which has been legal at licensed facilities in Oregon since 2023'Johnson measured his brain activity with a $50,000 helmet produced by Kernel, a neuroimaging company founded by the 48-year-old. He also took saliva samples and temperature readings. (After his November trip, he shared a lot of information about the state…...

56+ min ago (345+ words) Token-Oriented Object Notation offers 30-60% token reduction and 4.8x faster parsing. Here's why that matters and how to use it. JSON is everywhere. It's the backbone of modern web development, API communication, and data storage. But here's the thing: JSON is verbose. Every quote, comma, and brace adds up. In AI/LLM applications, this verbosity translates directly to higher costs and limited context windows. When you're paying per token, those extra characters matter. Enter TOON (Token-Oriented Object Notation) " a format that promises to solve these problems while maintaining (or improving) human readability. TOON achieves 30-60% fewer tokens compared to JSON. Let's see why: Notice the difference? No quotes around keys. No commas. No braces. Just clean, indentation-based structure. The TOON version uses approximately 40% fewer tokens. TOON isn't just more compact " it's also up to 4.8x faster to parse. This matters for real-time applications, high-throughput…...

1+ hour, 8+ min ago (369+ words) Most IoT projects today lean heavily on Python, C, or Node.js, and that's fine. But during my recent academic paper selection process, I came across "The Benefits of Tierless Elixir/Potato for Engineering IoT Systems, and it completely shifted how I think about building IoT architectures. The paper raised a question that stuck with me: why do we keep separating the logic, runtime and UI layers in IoT systems if functional, tierless architectures can unify everything? That curiosity, combined with the influence of a professor(Adolfo Neto) who strongly advocates for functional programming and the BEAM, pushed me to test this idea in practice. So I built a complete IoT prototype using Elixir, Circuits, Raspberry Pi, and Phoenix LiveView. And honestly? It felt like IoT the way it should be: supervised, fault-tolerant, reactive, and consistent from the edge to…...