Neuroscientists know that there is a link between loneliness and cognitive decline in older adults, although it is still difficult to understand the exact magnitude of the link. A new longitudinal study provides evidence that a proportion of people who feel lonely end up having more memory impairment, though this doesn't necessarily mean that their brains age faster.

The report, published in Aging & Mental Health, shows that older adults with higher levels of loneliness scored lower on tests of immediate and delayed recall. Even so, the rate at which their memory declined over six years was virtually identical to those who were not lonely.

“It suggests that loneliness may play a more prominent role in the initial state of memory than in its progressive decline,” said Luis Carlos Venegas-Sanabria of the School of Medicine and Health Sciences at Universidad del Rosario, who led the research. “The study underscores the importance of addressing loneliness as a significant factor in the context of cognitive performance in older adults.”

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With growing focus on the existential threat quantum computing poses to some of the most crucial and widely used forms of encryption, cryptography engineer Filippo Valsorda wants to make one thing absolutely clear: Contrary to popular mythology that refuses to die, AES 128 is perfectly fine in a post-quantum world.

AES 128 is the most widely used variety of the Advanced Encryption Standard , a block cipher suite formally adopted by NIST in 2001. While the specification allows 192- and 256-bit key sizes, AES 128 was widely considered to be the preferred one because it meets the sweet spot between computational resources required to use it and the security it offers. With no known vulnerabilities in its 30-year history, a brute-force attack is the only known way to break it. With 2 ¹²⁸ or 3.4 x 10 ³⁸ possible key combinations, such an attack would take about 9 billion years using the entire Bitcoin mining resources as of 2026.

It boils down to parallelization

Over the past decade, something interesting happened to all that public confidence. Amateur cryptographers and mathematicians twisted a series of equations known as Grover’s algorithm to declare the death of AES 128 once a cryptographically relevant quantum computer (CRQC) came into being. They said a CRQC would halve the effective strength to just 2 ⁶⁴ , a small enough supply that—if true—would allow the same Bitcoin mining resources to brute force it in less than a second (the comparison is purely for illustration purposes; a CRQC almost certainly couldn’t run clusters of Bitcoin ASICs and more importantly couldn’t parallelize the workload as the amateurs assume).

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On Monday, the Energy Information Agency released its analysis of the energy trends of 2025, covering the entire globe. It confirms and extends the primary conclusion of a more limited analysis by the International Renewable Energy Agency: 2025 was the first year of solar's dominance. Increased solar production was a key reason the growth of carbon-free energy sources outpaced rising demand.

Coupled with a massive growth in battery storage and relatively stagnant fossil fuel use, the year has led the EIA to declare that "the world has entered the Age of Electricity."

Electrons for everyone

The EIA report covers energy use, including the electrical grid, transportation, home heating, and other forms of consumption. As such, it can track how some of those uses are shifting, as electric vehicles displace some gasoline use and heat pumps replace gas and oil heating. It also saw a more global trend: the demand for electricity grew at twice the rate of overall energy demand. All of these went into the conclusion that we're starting the Age of Electricity.

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The Pentagon has canceled a ground control system for the US military's GPS satellite navigation network after the program's enduring problems "proved insurmountable," the US Space Force announced in a press release Monday.

The Global Positioning System Next-Generation Operational Control System, known by the acronym OCX, was officially canceled by Michael Duffey, the Pentagon's defense acquisition executive, on Friday, April 17, the Space Force said.

The decision to terminate the OCX program ends a 16-year, multibillion-dollar effort to design, test, and deliver a command and control system for the military's constellation of GPS navigation satellites. The program consisted of software to handle new signals from the latest generation of GPS satellites, GPS III, which started launching in 2018, along with two master control stations and modifications to ground monitoring stations around the world.

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Apple CEO Tim Cook will step down from the job effective September 1, 2026. As has long been rumored, Senior Vice President of Hardware Engineering John Ternus will become Apple's new CEO.

While Cook will no longer serve as CEO, he will remain with the company in a different capacity as executive chairman.

"As executive chairman, Cook will assist with certain aspects of the company, including engaging with policymakers around the world," Apple says.

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Dubious nutrition research and downright terrible diet and health advice are nothing new, but the situation has devolved as of late. With the rise of anti-vaccine Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, federal food guidelines have centered on slabs of meat, excessive amounts of protein, and sticks of butter. The animal-based food craze has people slathering beef tallow on their faces . And, if your cardiovascular system isn't already hardening just reading this, health influencers are now peddling nicotine —an addictive drug considered to be a cardiovascular toxin .

With this bananas context came headlines in the past few days suggesting that eating fruits, vegetables, and whole grains can be bad for you. Specifically, it can increase the risk of lung cancer—a claim that flies in the face of decades of evidence-based nutrition guidance, like a full-fat cream pie.

The full study behind the headlines hasn't been published yet, but experts have seen enough to call it baloney. The study is being presented at the American Association for Cancer Research conference this week and hasn’t been peer reviewed. Based on the abstract available online, the study was small, had no appropriate control group, led to a finding not previously hypothesized, used groupings that were "arbitrary," is likely picking up on a known correlation, and jumps to speculation based on no data from the study.

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The US government today opened an online portal for submitting tariff refund requests, two months after the Supreme Court ruled that President Trump illegally imposed the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) tariffs. The refunds will be paid to importers and customs brokers, while consumers who paid higher prices because of the tariffs won't necessarily get anything back.

US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) opened the Consolidated Administration and Processing of Entries (CAPE) portal for IEEPA refunds. "Importers and authorized customs brokers can now file their CAPE Declarations," said a CBP bulletin issued today .

Over 330,000 importers paid a total of $166 billion in IEEPA duties as of March 4, a March 6 court filing by a CBP trade office official said. Despite moving ahead with the portal to comply with the Supreme Court ruling, it appears the Trump administration is looking into how it can avoid paying back the entire $166 billion.

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After spending the last couple of weeks discussing the problem , Formula 1's stakeholders have arrived at a number of solutions to the sport's hybrid energy problem. F1 started this year with all-new powertrains with much more powerful electric motors than ever before, but with batteries that can only send full power to those motors for a few seconds a lap. Once exhausted, the power halves until there's more charge in the battery. In qualifying this ruins the show , as the fastest lap is no longer a flat-out one; in the race it can create dangerous speed differentials with other cars that still have charge in their battery.

The new rules, which go into effect from the Miami Grand Prix (May 1–3), reduce the maximum energy you can recharge per lap. The battery holds 4 MJ, and in the past few races, each driver has been allowed to recharge and then use up to 8 MJ per lap to power the electric motor that supplements the turbocharged V6 engine.

Recharging is done through a mixture of regenerative braking and what the sport calls "super clipping," using the engine to power the electric motor as a generator to charge the battery. The problem is that every kW that gets super-clipped from the engine is a kW that isn't going to the rear wheels, creating speed differentials of up to 70 km/h (43 mph). And without an electric motor at the front axle, the cars can only harvest a few MJ via regenerative braking each lap.

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Humanoid robots outran the fastest human competitors while surpassing the human world record during a half-marathon event held in Beijing on April 19. The demonstration of fast-improving robotic speed and autonomy comes as China’s tech industry is rapidly scaling up mass production of humanoid robots to explore possible uses in the real world.

The fastest robot from Chinese smartphone-maker Honor notched a winning time of 50 minutes and 26 seconds while autonomously navigating the 13-mile (21-kilometer) route, according to the Global Times . That beat the human world record of 57 minutes and 20 seconds recently set by Ugandan long-distance runner Jacob Kiplimo during the Lisbon Half Marathon.

The winning robot design took inspiration from top human athletes by incorporating long legs measuring approximately 37 inches (95 centimeters) in length, said Du Xiaodi, a test development engineer for Honor, who spoke as a member of the winning team to The Associated Press and other publications. Xiaodi also described the robot as incorporating a custom liquid-cooling system—derived from similar cooling technology for consumer electronics—that could potentially be adapted for industrial applications.

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