Tootfinder

As Amazon's 'flying rivers' weaken with tree loss, scientists warn of worsening droughts #Amazon

As Amazon's 'flying rivers' weaken with tree loss, scientists warn of worsening droughts
Droughts have withered crops in Peru, fires have scorched the Amazon and hydroelectric dams in Ecuador have struggled to keep the lights on as rivers dry up. Scientists say the cause may lie high above the rainforest, where invisible "flying rivers" carry rain from the Atlantic Ocean across South America.

Metacurity is back after our hiatus, and we're shaking things up. Check out today's issue for a special report and a recap of the top infosec developments of the past two weeks, including
--More on DOGE and that insecure database at SSA…,
--UK's age ID law pushes users to non-compliant sites,
--Noem fires FEMA workers for failing basic security protocols,
--UNC6395 stole mass of authentication tokens from Salesloft,
--A hacker used Anthropic's Cl…

More on DOGE and that insecure database at SSA…
UK's age ID law pushes users to non-compliant sites, Noem fires FEMA workers for failing basic security protocols, UNC6395 stole a mass of authentication tokens from Salesloft, A hacker used Anthropic's Claude in crime spree, Salt Typhoon struck at least 200 organizations and 80 countries, more

this is worth reading, even if you have no interest in hearing about Ezra Klein (I sure didn't): it's only using him as a paradigmatic case in how a lot of us are feeling lost.
https://degenerateart.beehiiv.com/p/you-don-t-have-to-swallow-frogs…

The US is set to raise the number of military vessels deployed near Venezuela to eight this week,
which Maduro described as
“the greatest threat that has been seen on our continent in the last 100 years.”
Following an authorization by Trump to use military force against Latin American drug cartels,
the Associated Press and CBS News report that “the US Navy now has two Aegis guided-missile destroyers — the USS Gravelyand the USS Jason Dunham — in the Caribbean,
a…

Maduro Says US Pointing '1,200 Missiles' at Venezuela After Trump Sends More Warships | Common Dreams
In a press conference on Monday, Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro said the US has "1,200 missiles" pointed at the country after Trump sent more warships. One US defense official said Trump is gearing up for "Noriega part two," suggesting regime change.

On three classes of logarithmic integrals
Necdet Bat{\i}r, Nandan Sai Dasireddy
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.00870 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.00870

On three classes of logarithmic integrals
In this paper, we evaluate the following families of definite integrals in closed form and we show that they are expressible only in terms of the dilogarithm function and the inverse tangent integral, and elementary functions. \begin{equation*} \int_{0}^{1}\frac{\log\big(x^m+1\big)}{x+1}\thinspace{\rm d}x \quad \mbox{and}\quad \int_{0}^{1}\frac{\log\big(x^m+1\big)}{x^2+1}\thinspace{\rm d}x, \end{equation*} where $m$ is a positive odd integer. When $m$ is a positive even integer, these integrals…

Anduril conducts the first flight of its jet-powered unmanned drone, flying it "semi-autonomously", as the US Air Force plans swarms of unmanned jet drones (David Jeans/Reuters)
https://www.reuters.com/business/aerospace

Three-fold Superstructured Superlattice HfN/HfAlN Thin Films for Enhanced Toughness
M. Lorentzon, R. Hahn, J. Palisaitis, H. Riedl, L. Hultman, J. Birch, N. Ghafoor
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.00716

Three-fold Superstructured Superlattice HfN/HfAlN Thin Films for Enhanced Toughness
To simultaneously achieve high hardness and high toughness in protective coatings remains a fundamental challenge. Here, we harness the superlattice architecture to combine Koehler hardening while the coherent interfaces reduce the crack driving force and improve toughness, enabling coatings that are both hard and damage tolerant. We design and fabricate epitaxial HfN$_{1.33}$/Hf$_{0.76}$Al$_{0.24}$N$_{1.15}$ superlattices, deposited on MgO(001) substrates using low-energy, high-flux ion-assist…

a bit physically relieved that we managed to avoid what would have been an extinction-level event for the web (the Mozilla search deal is also deemed fine now) https://www.cnn.com/2025/09/02/tech/google-antitrust-ruling-chrome-android

Google will not be forced to sell off Chrome or Android, judge rules in landmark antitrust ruling
A court will not force Google to sell off its Chrome browser or Android, a federal judge said in a court filing on Tuesday. The decision serves as a significant win for the tech company, which has avoided the most extreme possible outcome from a landmark antitrust case that determined the company was operating an illegal online search monopoly.

An iterative-bijective approach to asymmetric generalizations of Schur's theorem
Laure Velenik
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.00846 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2…

An iterative-bijective approach to asymmetric generalizations of Schur's theorem
In this paper, we present a new Rogers--Ramanujan type identity for overpartitions by extending the asymmetrical version of Schur's theorem due to Lovejoy to a broader class of infinite products. More precisely, we provide a combinatorial interpretation of the following product, for any positive integer $k$, as a generating function for a class of overpartitions in which parts appear in $2^k - 1$ colors: \[ \frac{(-y_1 q;q)_\infty \cdots (-y_k q;q)_\infty}{(y_1 d q;q)_\infty}. \] Our proof is b…

DHS Secretary Kristi Noem fires 24 FEMA IT staffers, including the CIO and CISO; DHS says they failed security protocols and let hackers access FEMA networks (David DiMolfetta/Nextgov/FCW)
https://www.nextgov.com/people/2025/08/noe

Noem terminates 24 FEMA workers for failing to address cyber vulnerabilities
An internal FEMA email obtained by Nextgov/FCW ordered all agency employees to change their passwords “due to recent cybersecurity incidents and threats.”