Ukrainian drone strikes forced Russia to stop shipping in vital sea corridor

Ukrainian drone strikes forced Russia to stop shipping in vital sea corridor

fivenewscrypto    juillet 15, 2026   

Ukrainian drone strikes have forced Russia to completely halt shipping in the Sea of Azov in less than a week, showing once again how a country without traditional naval power can still effectively blockade maritime corridors.

Ukraine’s Unmanned Systems Forces have flown one-way attack drones to target and strike more than 100 Russian tankers and other ships in total, along with posting video evidence showing such drone strikes occurring every night between July 6 and July 14. The campaign has forced Russia to completely shut down the shipping route that flows from Russia’s Don River into the Sea of Azov, and to halt all Kerch Strait shipping transits from the Sea of Azov into the Black Sea, according to Reuters reporting.

The shutdown of such maritime lanes has further isolated the Russian-occupied Crimean Peninsula by cutting off seaborne delivery of fuel in particular. Crimea had already been experiencing severe fuel rationing and power outages as Ukraine stepped up its mid- and long-range drone strike campaign on Russian energy infrastructure and supply lines, leaving behind damaged oil refineries with billowing black smoke and burned-out trucks littering highways.

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California creates $3,500 rebate for new electric vehicle buyers

California creates $3,500 rebate for new electric vehicle buyers

fivenewscrypto    juillet 15, 2026   

At the end of last September, electric vehicle adoption in the US began to crater. That followed the abolition of the IRS clean vehicle tax credit as part of a series of moves by President Trump and congressional Republicans to undermine energy efficiency and pollution control measures. Until then, buyers of some EVs could claim up to $7,500 from the purchase as part of the IRS Section 30D credit, assuming the EV was below the price cap and the buyer earned less than the income cap. Since then, EV sales have dried up, and automakers have canceled entire product lines as they face the reality of a US government that has soundly rejected moving past oil dependence.

But EV buyers in California aren't quite as unlucky as their peers in the other 49 states and the District of Columbia. Yesterday, California Governor Gavin Newsom signed a new EV rebate into law for residents of the Golden State.

As Newsom said in a statement:

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Apple sues OpenAI after ex-engineer allegedly used bug to steal trade secrets

Apple sues OpenAI after ex-engineer allegedly used bug to steal trade secrets

fivenewscrypto    juillet 15, 2026   

Apple is gunning for OpenAI, demanding steep penalties after stumbling on a “rare” bug that temporarily allowed a poached employee that joined OpenAI to maintain access to confidential information on Apple servers for weeks after his termination.

In a lawsuit filed Friday, Apple sought several injunctions blocking OpenAI from using confidential information allegedly stolen by former employees. According to Apple’s complaint, OpenAI conspired with former Apple employees as part of a grand scheme to “take an unlawful shortcut” and launch a line of AI-powered devices as marketable as Apple’s iPhone.

Apple explained that it found a bug while investigating internal messages between a then-current employee, Yu-Ting “Alyssa” Peng, and an engineer who spent eight years “working on some of Apple’s most sensitive product development programs,” Chang Liu.

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Solution to Feynman's reverse sprinkler puzzle also applies to "silly sprinklers"

Solution to Feynman's reverse sprinkler puzzle also applies to "silly sprinklers"

fivenewscrypto    juillet 15, 2026   

Watering your lawn in the summer can be both pragmatic and fun with so-called "silly sprinklers," designed to create amusing loops and spirals of water jets. And there's some fascinating physics at work to boot. Researchers at New York University's Courant Institute conducted a series of experiments with different silly sprinkler designs to find the answer to a longstanding problem in fluid dynamics, according to a new paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

As previously reported, the reverse sprinkler problem is associated with physicist Richard Feynman because he popularized the concept, but it actually dates back to a chapter in Ernst Mach’s 1883 textbook The Science of Mechanics (Die Mechanik in Ihrer Entwicklung Historisch-Kritisch Dargerstellt). Mach’s thought experiment languished in relative obscurity until a group of Princeton University physicists began debating the issue in the 1940s.

Feynman was a graduate student there at the time and threw himself into the debate with gusto, even devising an experiment in the cyclotron laboratory to test his hypothesis. One might intuit that a reverse sprinkler would work just like a regular sprinkler, merely played backward, so to speak. But the physics turns out to be more complicated. “The answer is perfectly clear at first sight,” Feynman wrote in Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman (1985). “The trouble was, some guy would think it was perfectly clear [that the rotation would be] one way, and another guy would think it was perfectly clear the other way.”

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States sue to block Paramount/WBD merger that was approved by Trump admin

States sue to block Paramount/WBD merger that was approved by Trump admin

fivenewscrypto    juillet 14, 2026   

A group of 12 states led by California sued Paramount Skydance and Warner Bros. Discovery today in an attempt to block a $111 billion merger that was greenlit by the Trump administration last month.

"The unlawful merger of these two entertainment behemoths would lead to higher prices, lower quality, and less content for film and television, harming movie theaters, basic cable distributors, and ultimately, audiences on every sofa and movie theater seat in the US," California Attorney General Rob Bonta said.

The merger would combine two of the largest movie studios and merge streaming service Paramount+ with HBO Max. Netflix previously had a deal to buy WBD's streaming and movie studios businesses, but Paramount succeeded in a hostile takeover bid helped along by support from the Trump administration.

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Tom Cruise is utterly transformed in Digger trailer

Tom Cruise is utterly transformed in Digger trailer

fivenewscrypto    juillet 14, 2026   

When Warner Bros. showed new footage of its forthcoming satirical black comedy, Digger, at Cinemacon in April, industry insiders considered it a highlight of the event. The general public hasn't seen anything other than a title announcement and a teaser in May that largely provided a retrospective of star Tom Cruise's career, with just 30 seconds of footage from Digger tacked on at the end. But now we have the official trailer, and it certainly lives up to that earlier enthusiastic word of mouth. We're getting powerful Dr. Strangelove vibes, updated for our 21st-century times.

Digger is four-time Oscar-winning director Alejandro G. Iñárritu's (Birdman) first English-language film since 2015's The Revenant. The official logline is short and sweet: "The most powerful man in the world races to prove he's humanity's savior before the disaster he unleashed destroys everything." That disaster appears to be ecological in nature and involves a rapidly melting iceberg, as well as some nuclear waste.

Cruise is often at his best when he takes big creative swings and plays against type—the rage-fueled motivational speaker in Magnolia, for instance, or the over-the-top movie mogul in Tropic Thunder. He's almost unrecognizable in this new trailer as eccentric billionaire oil baron Digger Rockwell—wispy hair, potbelly, and all.

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Apple and Samsung benefit as memory shortage pushes smartphone shipments to historic lows

Apple and Samsung benefit as memory shortage pushes smartphone shipments to historic lows

fivenewscrypto    juillet 14, 2026   

Smartphone shipments started to plateau a few years back, ending the days of guaranteed double-digit growth for any company that wanted to make phones. Fewer smartphone manufacturers exist today, and they're facing new pressure in the age of AI. A new report claims that smartphone shipments cratered 11 percent in the last quarter. Some are weathering the storm better than others, though.

According to Counterpoint, this substantial drop brings smartphone shipments to their lowest second-quarter level since 2013. Analysts place the blame for this drop squarely on the increasing price of DRAM and NAND chips. Manufacturers have largely shifted to supporting the AI computing boom, which leaves fewer components for consumer devices like smartphones and PCs. As prices climb higher, fewer people are interested in buying new phones.

This problem has been particularly vexing for people who are happy to purchase budget devices. A recent report from market research firm Omdia noted that higher memory costs are particularly bad for phones priced at $500 or less. In these segments, memory can now easily account for half of the total manufacturing cost. These devices have seen quicker and larger price increases compared to flagship devices, for which memory is now more than a quarter of the cost. That's a significant increase in the past year, but there's still more profit to be had at the high end.

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