ByteDance trains massive AI model in bid to rival Anthropic

ByteDance trains massive AI model in bid to rival Anthropic

fivenewscrypto    août 08, 2026   

ByteDance is training an AI model that could approach the size of Anthropic’s most cutting-edge Mythos system, as Chinese companies continue to narrow the gap with the top US labs.

The Chinese tech giant is at an early stage of training a model with as many as 10 trillion parameters—three times larger than Moonshot’s Kimi K3, the biggest Chinese model released to date, according to three people with knowledge of the matter.

The ByteDance model is being pre-trained—a stage that typically takes three to six months—before it is fine-tuned and released if all goes well, one of the people said. The exact model size would only be determined at a later stage.

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The world's biggest solar telescope caught vortexes on the Sun's surface

The world's biggest solar telescope caught vortexes on the Sun's surface

fivenewscrypto    août 08, 2026   

Wherever two fluids slide past each other at different speeds, the boundary between them buckles, then curls, then rolls up into vortexes. It’s called the Kelvin-Helmholtz instability, and the physics behind it was worked out in the late 1860s. We know this instability explains why wind causes ripples on the surface of water and clouds shear into a row of curves.

For decades scientists argued the same thing must be happening with plasma on the surface of the Sun, and yet nobody had been able to confirm it. Now, a team led by David Kuridze and Friedrich Wöger of the National Solar Observatory reports that Kelvin-Helmholtz instabilities are not just visible on the Sun, but they’re ubiquitous. Their new study proposes that this may change the way we think about how heat, mass, and magnetic energy move through the Sun's atmosphere.

Telescope’s test drive

The reason plasma whirlpools on the Sun stayed hidden for so long is rather trivial: They are very small. Their scale sits below what telescopes with mirrors smaller than 2 meters can resolve. For most of the history of solar physics, that has ruled out every telescope on Earth. This changed when the US National Science Foundation opened the Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope, a 4-meter instrument in Hawaii and the largest solar telescope in the world. The telescope entered its operational phase back in November 2021.

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Trump is losing his war on wind power

Trump is losing his war on wind power

fivenewscrypto    août 08, 2026   

On Thursday, a US District Court in Oregon ordered the US government to restart the process of approving wind projects. All new wind development in the US has been on hold since August 2025, when the Department of Defense (DoD) stopped participating in a process that allows it to compel developers to alter projects in order to limit their interference with radar equipment. The court ruled, however, that the DoD's national security claims did not allow it to opt out of a process that is legally mandated.

The Trump administration has made many attempts to block wind development, both offshore and land based. Its attempts to stop offshore wind included the same approach at issue in this case: Claim that drone developments mean that radar interference by wind turbines creates a national security risk. The courts were not sympathetic to this claim, including in cases where judges examined a classified report that the DoD was using to justify blocking offshore wind construction. As a result, the administration has turned to paying companies not to pursue wind development.

In parallel, the government was pursuing a similar approach for onshore wind. Here, a law lays out a process for the DoD to evaluate any problems posed by wind turbines and negotiate changes to planned wind farms with the developers. As laid out in the new decision, the government simply stopped participating in this process in August 2025, first by refusing to sign off on previously negotiated agreements, and later by refusing to draft agreements entirely. Eventually, it simply refused to participate in negotiations at all. This has brought a halt to all wind development in the US.

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Remembering the pre-Google web, when search was an experiment

Remembering the pre-Google web, when search was an experiment

fivenewscrypto    août 08, 2026   

In the mid-'90s, the web was exploding, but finding anything of actual value on it felt like an elaborate negotiation with whatever proto-search engine happened to be standing closest to the door. Unlike now, when Google is widely seen as both portal and gatekeeper, sites like AltaVista, Lycos, Excite, HotBot, and Ask Jeeves promised to tame the chaos, each with its own suite of quirks, charms, and flaws.

The real story of pre-Google search is not that early engines were inferior. It's that they reflected a different Internet entirely, one where directories mattered, crawling was still an art, ranking was fragile, and the idea of “search” had not yet hardened into a single dominant interface.

A different kind of web

The first thing to remember about the pre-Google Internet is that there was no built-in assumption that you could search for everything. Many users found pages through Yahoo-style directories, bookmarks, newsgroups, email signatures, and links from site to site because the web was still small enough that human organization could compete with machine indexing. It was an era of Wild West-style discoverability. Search engines existed, but they were only one part of a larger ecosystem that blended curation and accident.

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Organ donation group accused of trying to take living man's organs faces shutdown

Organ donation group accused of trying to take living man's organs faces shutdown

fivenewscrypto    août 08, 2026   

The US health department is working to shut down a Kentucky-based organ procurement organization that made headlines over a 2021 incident in which it was accused of trying to harvest a man's organs while he was still alive.

In an announcement Wednesday, the Department of Health and Human Services said it had begun the process to decertify the organization, Network for Hope (NFH). Losing its certification would effectively shutter the organization, which serves Kentucky as well as parts of Indiana, Ohio, and West Virginia. If decertified, another organization will be appointed to coordinate donations in the region.

In a statement, NFH said it "strongly disagrees" with the HHS's finding and will appeal the decertification decision.

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Explosive drone found hovering near Ukrainian cargo aircraft at German airport

Explosive drone found hovering near Ukrainian cargo aircraft at German airport

fivenewscrypto    août 07, 2026   

German police disarmed a drone carrying explosives after it was discovered near Ukrainian cargo aircraft parked at Leipzig airport—and authorities are looking into the possibility of a second drone after an approaching aircraft collided with something midair.

The drone, first spotted by an airport employee, was hovering close to the ground between two parked An-124 cargo aircraft owned by Ukraine’s Antonov Airlines shortly before midnight on August 4, according to The Guardian. It had apparently been modified to help avoid detection by the airport’s drone defense sensors, said Alexander Dobrindt, federal minister of the interior for Germany, during a press conference.

Dobrindt described the drone as carrying a fist-sized package of a substance believed to be the plastic explosive Semtex. Only a failed detonator prevented the drone from exploding near the Ukrainian cargo aircraft, he said.

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X wants to keep suing advertisers, asks 5th Circuit to overrule district judge

X wants to keep suing advertisers, asks 5th Circuit to overrule district judge

fivenewscrypto    août 07, 2026   

Elon Musk's X is trying to revive a lawsuit against advertisers it's accusing of illegally boycotting the social media platform, despite previously reaching a settlement to end litigation against an ad-industry trade group.

"This case involves an unusually brazen group boycott," X said in a filing yesterday. "That misconduct has drawn the attention of regulators and Congress. There is no valid reason that this effort by the direct victim to recover its massive economic losses from that boycott should not move forward."

X's lawsuit was thrown out in March when US District Judge Jane Boyle in the Northern District of Texas ruled that advertisers did not commit any antitrust violation. Last week, Musk reached a settlement with the World Federation of Advertisers, the first defendant named in the lawsuit.

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