Over a decade ago, when I was first starting to pretend I could write about quantum mechanics, I covered a truly bizarre experiment . One half of a pair of entangled photons was sent through a device it could navigate as either a particle or a wave. After it was clear of the device, the other half of the pair was measured in a way that forced the first to act as one or the other. Once that was done, the first invariably behaved as if it were whatever the measurement made it into the whole time.

It was as if the measurement had reached backward in time to alter the photon's behavior, raising questions about whether causality itself actually applied to quantum mechanics.

Unbeknownst to me, physicists have been asking the same question and have designed experiments to probe it in detail. A few weeks back, they provided an experiment that seems to indicate it's possible to create quantum superpositions of two different series of events, essentially making the question of whether A or B happened first a matter of probability*. While the current experiment leaves a few loopholes, the researchers behind the work think they could ultimately be eliminated.

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Our oceans are full of sophisticated, perfect traps: Nets, hooks, fishing lines. Designed to capture animals destined for our dinner tables, they often catch other wildlife too.

This accidental harvest is known as bycatch, and every year it causes the death of millions of marine animals , including whales, dolphins, sharks, turtles, and seabirds. Nets and gear can asphyxiate animals or cause fatal injuries; even when the animals are tossed back to sea, they frequently die. Bycatch is also a dilemma for fishermen—entangled creatures can destroy equipment, costing time, money, and fisheries’ reputations.

Over the decades, conservationists, researchers, and fishermen have developed ways to minimize various kinds of bycatch in different fishing stocks around the world. But putting these solutions to work is often a challenge, and many mitigation strategies are never widely implemented.

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Like practically everyone who owned a PC in the early '90s, I tore through the shareware episode of Wolfenstein 3D shortly after it came out. At the time, the game’s mere existence seemed like a magic trick, offering a smooth-scrolling first-person perspective that was unlike pretty much anything I had ever seen. Strictly speaking, the game might have been ironically two-dimensional (lacking even the simulated gameplay “height” of follow-up Doom ), but the sense of depth conveyed by the viewpoint was simply mind-blowing.

Coming back to Wolfenstein 3D in 2026 feels quite a bit different. The initial magic trick of the game’s perspective has worn off after nearly 35 years of playing the countless first-person shooters it inspired. And the advancements in shooter design since 1992 make some of the decisions id Software made for its first experiment in the genre feel a bit archaic from a modern perspective.

Still, it’s fascinating to look back at Wolfenstein 3D today and see the seeds that would sprout into one of gaming’s most popular genres. Playing it today feels like going to a car museum and taking a Model T for a spin, with all the confusion and danger that entails.

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OpenAI has added plugin support to its agentic coding app Codex in an apparent attempt to match similar features offered by competitors Anthropic (in Claude Code) and Google (in Gemini's command line interface).

What OpenAI calls "plugins" are actually bundles that may include skills ("prompts that describe workflows to Codex"—a standard feature in tools like this these days), app integrations, and MCP (Model Context Protocol) servers.

The idea is that they make it possible to configure Codex in certain ways for specific tasks to be easier for the user and replicable across multiple users in an organization.

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Two more illnesses have been identified in an E. coli outbreak linked to unpasteurized cheese and milk, the Food and Drug Administration reported Thursday . The maker of the products, California-based Raw Farm, continues to deny the link and has refused to issue a recall.

According to the FDA, at least nine people have been sickened in three states, an increase of two cases since the outbreak was announced earlier this month . Three of the nine cases required hospitalization, and one person developed a life-threatening complication called Hemolytic uremic syndrome, or HUS, which causes a type of kidney failure.

Outbreak investigators have interviewed eight of the nine people sickened. All eight reported consuming unpasteurized dairy. One person couldn't recall a brand, but the remaining seven all singled out products from Raw Farm. Five people ate Raw Farm's raw cheddar, and two drank Raw Farm's raw milk. Whole genome sequencing of the E. coli isolates from the patients shows high similarity, suggesting they came from a common source.

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A local judge in Woodhaven, Michigan, lost it this week when a defendant showed up to her court hearing late, on Zoom, and... while driving a car.

Kimberly Carroll was facing a hearing over a few thousand dollars that she allegedly owed and had defaulted on. She was allowed to attend remotely, but when the hearing began, she wasn't yet available on Zoom.

When she finally joined, Judge Michael McNally told her she needed to turn her camera on.

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AOMedia Video 1 (AV1) was invented by a group of technology companies to be an open, royalty-free alternative to other video codecs, like HEVC/H.265. But a lawsuit that Dolby Laboratories Inc. filed this week against Snap Inc. calls all that into question with claims of patent infringement.

Numerous lawsuits are currently open in the US regarding the use of HEVC. Relevant patent holders, such as Nokia and InterDigital, have sued numerous hardware vendors and streaming service providers in pursuit of licensing fees for the use of patented technologies deemed essential to HEVC.

It’s a touch rarer to see a lawsuit filed over the implementation of AV1. The Alliance for Open Media (AOMedia), whose members include Amazon, Apple, Google, Microsoft, Mozilla, and Netflix, says it developed AV1 “under a royalty-free patent policy ( Alliance for Open Media Patent License 1.0 )” and that the standard is “supported by high-quality reference implementations under a simple, permissive license ( BSD 3-Clause Clear License ).”

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"Classic First Amendment retaliation." That's how US District Judge Rita Lin described the Department of War's effort to blacklist Anthropic and designate it a supply-chain risk .

By all appearances, "these measures appear designed to punish Anthropic," Lin wrote in an order granting Anthropic's request for a preliminary injunction.

Officials seemingly had no authority to take such extreme actions without considering less restrictive alternatives or offering any evidence that Anthropic posed an urgent risk to national security, Lin said. Instead, "the Department of War’s records show that it designated Anthropic as a supply chain risk because of its 'hostile manner through the press.'"

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Iran-linked hackers successfully broke into FBI Director Kash Patel's personal email, the Department of Justice confirmed to Reuters on Friday.

Reuters could not authenticate the leaked emails themselves but noted that the Gmail address matched an email account "linked to Patel in previous data breaches ⁠preserved by the dark web intelligence firm District 4 Labs." The DOJ suggested the emails appeared to be authentic.

On their website, the Handala Hack Team boasted that Patel "will now find his name among the list of successfully hacked victims." The hacker group taunted Patel by sharing photos of him sniffing cigars and holding up a jug of rum, along with other documents that Reuters reported were from 2010 to 2019.

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