But the U.S. Congress “remains deadlocked about how to make that happen.”

The clocks are falling back despite a bipartisan House vote in July to make daylight saving time permanent and Trump’s subsequent push for Senate action… While most Americans want to end the twice-yearly clock changes, they don’t necessarily favor Trump’s solution. Gallup found 48% of Americans support permanent standard time the entire year, compared with 24% who prefer permanent daylight saving time, as Trump wants… In 1974, the U.S. experimented with year-round daylight saving time but reversed course amid concerns about children going to school in the dark>.

Experts still debate whether permanent DST is good for people. Supporters argue that permanent daylight saving time would provide more afternoon and evening sunlight, encouraging outdoor activities. But sleep experts warn that darker mornings and lighter evenings can disrupt sleep cycles, while permanent daylight saving time could force millions of children to travel to school in the dark. The bottom line: The American Academy of Sleep Medicine says it prefers permanent standard time because it better aligns with natural sleep cycles.

“Hawaii and most of Arizona don’t observe daylight saving time, so their clocks won’t change,” the article points out, adding that eliminating it for the rest of America “still faces opposition in the Senate and isn’t expected to be considered by the end of the year.

But “the upcoming midterms could change the balance of power in Congress, potentially shifting the debate.”

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Stirrup deactivated his social media account shortly after (though his posts have been archived elsewhere), igniting conversations about what role generative AI actually has or should have in game development. In some ways, it would be unsurprising to learn that Xbox is using AI to the extent that Stirrup implies. Xbox recently announced the formation of Xbox Labs at least in part as a response to a rising trend of AI-coded game ports; the announcement heavily implied that the new team would use AI as well but didn’t say it outright. Xbox owner Microsoft is also a major player in AI development… Developers including Capcom, Square Enix, Sega, Nexon and Activision have all either used AI in their games or pledged to do so. Fortnite developer Epic Games has been particularly up-front about its AI use, and CEO Tim Sweeney has aggressively promoted it on social media…

On the other hand, there are large pockets of the game industry vocally opposed to generative AI. Notably, these tend to be smaller, independent studios without shareholders to impress by touting the cost-savings of AI. These studios include Tunic publisher Finji, Stardew Valley developer ConcernedApe and Clickolding developer Strange Scaffold, among many more. Due to the sheer number and variety of game studios, it’s impossible to say just how much of the industry actually uses AI at this point, but claims that “everyone” is using it are clearly false.

There’s a similar divide among players about whether generative AI should be embraced or avoided at all costs. While some simply accept AI as part of games going forward, others have pledged to avoid games that use the technology outright due to its environmental costs, labor issues or pure aesthetic preference. That’s led to the popularity of tools like a browser extension that makes Steam’s AI disclosures more visible and grassroots efforts by developers to implement labels certifying their games as AI-free… Many players and developers alike justify the use of AI in generating code, even if they’re opposed to it in other areas.

“Gaming is the only industry slow-walking the transition,” Xbox’s Stirrup allegedly said, “because users have negative sentiment. Everyone else accepts reality.”

“Gaming is the only industry pretending to not use AI.”

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“Binance said it was able to replace the funds taken in the record hack by using company money to buy new tokens,” reports NBC News:

The remaining 10% consists of tokens that are less liquid, meaning they may take longer to buy, it said in a statement posted on X… Binance said it has set aside around $6.34 billion of company funds internally to cover the losses. The money spent re-buying tokens came from using part of its $1 billion Secure Asset Fund for Users, a bitcoin reserve it holds to protect customers in the event of security breaches, as well as some of its Futures Insurance Fund, and the company’s own corporate treasury, it said on X.

NBC News reports that the FBI blames the breach on a North Korea-sponsored group known as TraderTraitor:

Members of [TraderTraitor] were observed by law enforcement converting stolen assets into the cryptocurrency ethereum, the FBI said in a statement, adding that it expects “further laundering” of the assets through the use of related technology… After the hack, the exchange stopped allowing customers to withdraw their funds, but it said Saturday it was still on track to reopen withdrawals Sunday.

CNBC reports:

The world’s largest crypto exchange initially said the hack may involve “a compromised DevOps engineer’s laptop, which allowed an attacker to gain access to a service container and submit unauthorized withdrawal transactions.” However, Co-CEO Richard Teng later said the attack involved a more complex process rather than the misuse of a single engineer’s permissions.

The New York Times describes what happened when Binance first spotted “a multibillion-dollar deluge of digital coins” pouring out of its accounts:

As the news spread, Binance’s top executives put together an informal war room on Wea, the company’s internal messaging system, with about 100 participants, including specialized cryptocurrency tracers and security personnel. They eventually transitioned to a mass conference call, with 100 boxes on the screen, where employees took turns muting and then unmuting, communicating in a mixture of English and Chinese. Among them was He Yi, Binance’s co-chief executive, who is seven months pregnant, and worked through the night from her base in Abu Dhabi, taking a call at 3 a.m. local time….

Much of the drama played out in public. Almost all crypto transactions are recorded on the blockchain, a ledger of money movements that anyone can look up. That meant crypto analysts could see funds leaving Binance in real time… North Koreans have targeted crypto companies for years, using the proceeds of those thefts to fund its nuclear program, according to Western officials. The hackers have developed increasingly complex strategies to steal crypto and launder the proceeds, a painstaking endeavor that can take months to complete. In a blog post on Friday, Chainalysis said the attackers had deployed “laundering patterns we have not seen before,” conducting thousands of transactions over a short period, probably with the help of automation.

At the same time, Binance’s colleagues in the industry mobilized to intercept some of the laundered crypto. Certain digital coin issuers can freeze funds, allowing them to halt a money-laundering operation in its tracks. Soon after the hack, Tether and Circle, two major issuers, announced that they had frozen stashes of their own coins that the hackers had seized from Binance, a combined total of more than $2 billion in crypto. Binance is now working to gain access to those funds, the company said. But $2.4 billion in crypto is already “beyond any issuer’s reach,” according to [blockchain intelligence firmm] TRM.

The article also includes President Trump’s reaction when asked Friday about the breach. “I’ve always felt it was a little bit dangerous. But they say they have it pretty much under control. We’ll see.”

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The popular theory that comets were crucial in kick-starting life on Earth billions of years ago may not hold up, according to new computer simulations that counter decades of scientific thinking. The finding suggests the fragile organic molecules supposedly carried by the icy objects would have been destroyed on impact, upending an established origin of life theory that dates back to at least 1961 [with earlier versions postulated in 1908]…

Early in its history — over 4 billion years ago — Earth may have experienced a period of heavy bombardment from more than 100,000 comets larger than 100 meters (328 feet), according to the new study, published Wednesday in the journal Scientific Reports. Those impacts, however, were mostly too heavy for life-starting molecules to withstand. The team used the latest models of comet formation and evolution to simulate this early planetary period 100,000 times. “Given what we know about surface environments on the early Earth, on average, our simulations found that there were no successful impacts,” said lead study author Richard Anslow, who conducted the research while completing his doctorate at the Institute of Astronomy of the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom… “The typical velocities of these comets when they impact the Earth meant that actually very few, if any, would have been able to deliver intact organic molecules, so comets actually don’t seem to be as useful for prebiotic chemistry as was previously thought,” Anslow said.

More precisely, 54% of the simulations showed no impact at all, while the remaining 46% had at least one and a “tiny minority” returned up to three collisions, Anslow said. “We can’t rule out confidently that there was never a successful impact — there could have been one of these fluke impacts.” However, such flukes had to occur in a “perfect location” that already met several important conditions, including the presence of liquid water and other chemicals needed to support life. That combination makes the overall process unlikely, he added.
The article notes his argument that even if a successful impact occurred, it’s unlikely an important chemical like hydrogen cyanide (HCN) could survive the impact, and would’ve dissolved in an ocean impact. Plus, “many other precursor molecules are also needed, such as compounds that contain phosphorus and sulfur, but these are not routinely found in comets, Anslow said.”

An alternative cosmic source of organic material could have been asteroids, which typically struck Earth more slowly and in greater numbers. Anslow pointed to recent findings on samples from asteroids Bennu and Ryugu, which contain the majority of protein-building amino acids. The recent study also raises another intriguing possibility: While Earth may not have had the ideal conditions to foster HCN from comet impacts, ancient Mars might have been better suited. “Because Mars is much smaller than Earth and further away from the sun, the typical impact velocity of comets is much lower, so while these impacts on Earth were destroying most of the HCN, this wasn’t the case so much for Mars,” Anslow said. This idea could add another dimension to the long-standing question of whether the red planet once supported life.

While the authors closely analyzed how HCN could have survived comet impact, the chemical may have undergone reactions before the icy bodies entered Earth’s atmosphere, said Queenie Chan, an associate professor of Earth sciences at Royal Holloway University of London, who was not involved with the study. This process could have created biologically important compounds, such as those protein building blocks, that are less volatile and more likely to survive.

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