“Teleporting quantum information is now a practical reality,” asserts Deutsche Telekom. The firm’s T‑Labs used commercially available Qunnect hardware to demo quantum teleportation over 30km of live, commercial Berlin fiber, running alongside classical internet traffic. In an email to Tom’s Hardware, Deutsche Telekom’s PR folks said that Cisco also ran the same hardware and demo process to connect data centers in NYC.

Feed algorithms are widely suspected to influence political attitudes. However, previous evidence from switching off the algorithm on Meta platforms found no political effects. Here we present results from a 2023 field experiment on Elon Musk’s platform X shedding light on this puzzle. We assigned active US-based users randomly to either an algorithmic or a chronological feed for 7 weeks, measuring political attitudes and online behaviour. Switching from a chronological to an algorithmic feed increased engagement and shifted political opinion towards more conservative positions, particularly regarding policy priorities, perceptions of criminal investigations into Donald Trump and views on the war in Ukraine. In contrast, switching from the algorithmic to the chronological feed had no comparable effects. Neither switching the algorithm on nor switching it off significantly affected affective polarization or self-reported partisanship. To investigate the mechanism, we analysed users’ feed content and behaviour. We found that the algorithm promotes conservative content and demotes posts by traditional media. Exposure to algorithmic content leads users to follow conservative political activist accounts, which they continue to follow even after switching off the algorithm, helping explain the asymmetry in effects. These results suggest that initial exposure to X’s algorithm has persistent effects on users’ current political attitudes and account-following behaviour, even in the absence of a detectable effect on partisanship.

Ramadan Mubarak to all the Believers in the chat.

Sayed Abdul-Malik Badr al Din al Houthi gave some great advice this year (as he always does.)

Fully translated speech from the Leader of the Yemeni Revolution on 29 Shaban 1447.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/43392244

Feb. 18, 2026

Barak Ravid reported for Axios on Wednesday that, with a deal between the US and Iran appearing increasingly out of sight, “the Trump administration is closer to a major war in the Middle East than most Americans realize” and “It could begin very soon.”

Sources told the outlet that “A US military operation in Iran would likely be a massive, weeks-long campaign that would look more like full-fledged war than last month’s pinpoint operation in Venezuela.”

For the back half of the 20th century (what Fortune founder Henry Luce called “The American Century”), MBA and law degree programs were a ticket to a great office job and a path to the American Dream. The 21st century is asking the question: What happens when all those office jobs get automated?....

Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) and Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) are set to compel a vote on their War Powers Resolution, requiring congressional approval for military action against Iran.

This move comes in response to reports of a potential U.S.-Israeli strike on Iran, with a 90% likelihood, according to Trump officials cited by Khanna in his X post.

Former Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) also weighed in, saying the majority of Americans do not support going to war. She added that Americans want affordable healthcare, good jobs, and world peace, according to her tweet.

THIS AUGUST WILL mark five years since the Taliban returned to power in Afghanistan. If they hold onto their totalitarian rule for that long, they could go on to surpass their initial reign, which lasted from 1996 until the United States–led invasion in 2001. This time around, in the absence of armed intervention, it’s become increasingly clear that the international community’s measures to push them out are failing.

Over the past half-decade, the Taliban have brought one form of shock and pain after another to the Afghan people: girls being denied most types of higher education, the teaching of extremist ideology in schools, heavy restrictions on social media activity, the silencing of women’s voices, arrests and torture of dissidents, and strict rules targeting freedom of speech and the press. In January, the Taliban announced a new criminal code that, among other provisions, allows domestic violence and the corporal punishment of children and appears to legitimize slavery through the use of the word “slave.”

Pakistan and Iran began mass deportations of Afghans in 2023 and 2025 respectively, further compounding the humanitarian pressures. For a country beset by natural disasters, such as earthquakes, one that’s among the most vulnerable to climate change, the future looks grim.

To some human rights activists, there’s increasingly another cause for concern: that the Taliban may eventually become accepted on the world stage. Most states have, so far, condemned the Taliban’s human rights violations and do not formally recognize the group as Afghanistan’s legitimate rulers. But over the past year, some governments have quietly begun engaging with Taliban authorities—what US-based human rights activist Metra Mehran describes as a “soft normalization” of Taliban rule.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/43389705

Recently in the presence of Defence Minister, Rajnath Singh, successful full afterburner test of the Kaveri engine was done at the Gas Turbine Research Establishment (GTRE) in Bangalore.

The event showcased a new design with significant changes in Partnership with BrahMos Aerospace, this finally shows some development in this decade old project.

The afterburner, however, has historically posed the greatest hurdle. Earlier iterations managed only around 73 kN of wet thrust, which, while promising, did not match the performance of contemporary low-bypass turbofans. For general, the GE F-404 engine for Tejas Mk1 produces and afterburner thrust of 84Kn, a 70 per cent augmentation. Modern designs typically achieve 60-80 per cent thrust increases, depending on operational conditions and engineering refinements. The new Kaveri engine with new KDE core gives a thrust in afterburner of 81-83Kn or 79-81Kn on the safer side.

I think it is a good news and not DRDO should focus on reducing weight of the engine to increase thrust to weight ratio and finally, these can be tested on Tejas.

What do you think, let me know. To all the Indians and people who like our content, Join "BharatDefense". We really need your support.

Jai Hind

Atide of anger is rising in New Zealand’s capital, Wellington, as the city’s toilets continue to flush directly into the ocean more than two weeks after the catastrophic collapse of its wastewater treatment plant.

Millions of litres of raw and partially screened sewage have been pouring into pristine reefs and a marine reserve along the south coast daily since 4 February, prompting a national inquiry, as the authorities struggle to get the decimated plant operational.

Abandoned beaches, public health warning signs and seagulls eating human waste are now features of the popular coastline, with the environmental disaster zone adjacent to the airport where thousands of international visitors alight every day.

Fears for the safety of marine ecosystems – including vulnerable species such as the little blue penguin, or kororā, which nest along the shore – are mixed with concerns over the length and cost of disruption to those who depend on the coast for income, wellness, and recreation.

Like many of us who are mindful of our plastic consumption, Beth Gardiner would take her own bags to the supermarket and be annoyed whenever she forgot to do so. Out without her refillable bottle, she would avoid buying bottled water. “Here I am, in my own little life, worrying about that and trying to use less plastic,” she says. Then she read an article in this newspaper, just over eight years ago, and discovered that fossil fuel companies had ploughed more than $180bn (£130bn) into plastic plants in the US since 2010. “It was a kick in the teeth,” says Gardiner. “You’re telling me that while I am beating myself up because I forgot to bring my water bottle, all these huge oil companies are pouring billions …” She looks appalled. “It was just such a shock.”

Two months before that piece was published, a photograph of a seahorse clinging to a plastic cotton bud had gone viral; two years before that England followed Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland and introduced a charge for carrier bags. “I was one of so many people who were trying to use less plastic – and it just felt like such a moment of revelation: these companies are, on the contrary, increasing production and wanting to push [plastic use] up and up.” Then, says Gardiner, as she started researching her book Plastic Inc: Big Oil, Big Money and the Plan to Trash our Future, “it only becomes more shocking.”

Her research took her to Reserve, Louisiana, in the Lower Mississippi River, where she met Robert Taylor, an activist in his 80s who has spent much of his life living by an enormous plastics plant. “He is surrounded by illness, by all kinds of cancers. He only found out in 2016, as a result of federal action, that the levels of toxic gases had gone through the roof in his area, an overwhelmingly Black neighbourhood. He told me about all the illness in his family – affecting his wife and his daughter, his neighbours and his cousins. It was haunting. When we talk about plastic, we tend to think about the ways we experience it in our own lives, and we’re not as aware of the production and the impact it has on the people who live beside it.”