Tootfinder

This week, public power is stepping up.
Great British Energy is targeting 15 GW of wind, solar and storage by 2030. New York's NYPA is building 5.5 GW of renewables. Bolivia launched its first Indigenous protected area with forest monitoring. Tennessee turned a former farm into Middle Fork Bottoms State Park, reconnecting floodplains to reduce flooding.
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Weekly Climate Solutions Digest
Welcome This week feels like work and wonder at once. Night comes early in the north and the Geminids begin to stitch bright threads across the cold sky. Far south, heat lifts and cicadas test their summer chorus. In that split screen of seasons, our stories settle on two steady

Endangered Species Protection Sought for New Mexico Flower Threatened by Fossil Fuel Industry https://biologicaldiversity.org/w/news/press-releases/endangered-species-protection-sought-f…

Endangered Species Protection Sought for New Mexico Flower Threatened by Fossil Fuel Industry
TUCSON, Ariz.— The Center for Biological Diversity petitioned the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service today to protect Allred’s flax under the Endangered Species Act.

Microsoft has begun automatically replacing the original Secure Boot security certificates on Windows devices through regular monthly updates, a necessary move given that the 15-year-old certificates first issued in 2011 are set to expire between late June and October 2026.

Refreshing the root of trust: industry collaboration on Secure Boot certificate updates
Secure Boot is a foundational security feature of the Windows and Windows Server experience, providing protection from the moment a device powers on. Introduced in 2011, Secure Boot runs at startup – before Windows loads – and h

Talking #water in Hsinchu: the biggest reservoir and cleanest stream here in the mid-north of #Taiwan is connected with the Science Park. It serves the #semiconductor industry. A bit is for agricu…

As Bitcoin prices continue to plummet and electricity costs climb,
it’s become tough out there for a crypto miner.
The hash price index, which is used to determine how much revenue miners can make by mining crypto,
reached its lowest point on record this week, according to mining services company Luxor Technology.
According to Coindesk, the average cost to mine one Bitcoin is currently around $87,000
— far higher than its current going rate,
making it an e…

Miners are being squeezed as bitcoin’s $70,000 price fails to cover $87,000 production costs
Bitcoin is now approximately 20% below its estimated average production cost, historically a feature of a bear market.

Sources: Masayoshi Son plans with the White House to build "Trump Industrial Parks" in the US to produce AI infrastructure parts, funded by Japan's trade deal (Wall Street Journal)
https://www.wsj.com/tech/trump-softbank-ma

Pro-Ukrainian partisans sabotage substation in Russia's Udmurt Republic, disrupt power supply to military‑industrial plant, group claims: https://benborges.xyz/2026/01/28/proukrainian-partisans-sabotage-substation-in.html

Approximate Cartesian Tree Matching with Substitutions
Panagiotis Charalampopoulos, Jonas Ellert, Manal Mohamed
https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.08570 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2602.08570 https://arxiv.org/html/2602.08570
arXiv:2602.08570v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: The Cartesian tree of a sequence captures the relative order of the sequence's elements. In recent years, Cartesian tree matching has attracted considerable attention, particularly due to its applications in time series analysis. Consider a text $T$ of length $n$ and a pattern $P$ of length $m$. In the exact Cartesian tree matching problem, the task is to find all length-$m$ fragments of $T$ whose Cartesian tree coincides with the Cartesian tree $CT(P)$ of the pattern. Although the exact version of the problem can be solved in linear time [Park et al., TCS 2020], it remains rather restrictive; for example, it is not robust to outliers in the pattern.
To overcome this limitation, we consider the approximate setting, where the goal is to identify all fragments of $T$ that are close to some string whose Cartesian tree matches $CT(P)$. In this work, we quantify closeness via the widely used Hamming distance metric. For a given integer parameter $k>0$, we present an algorithm that computes all fragments of $T$ that are at Hamming distance at most $k$ from a string whose Cartesian tree matches $CT(P)$. Our algorithm runs in time $\mathcal O(n \sqrt{m} \cdot k^{2.5})$ for $k \leq m^{1/5}$ and in time $\mathcal O(nk^5)$ for $k \geq m^{1/5}$, thereby improving upon the state-of-the-art $\mathcal O(nmk)$-time algorithm of Kim and Han [TCS 2025] in the regime $k = o(m^{1/4})$.
On the way to our solution, we develop a toolbox of independent interest. First, we introduce a new notion of periodicity in Cartesian trees. Then, we lift multiple well-known combinatorial and algorithmic results for string matching and periodicity in strings to Cartesian tree matching and periodicity in Cartesian trees.
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📽️ Pirated film quality and ticket costs shape U.S. moviegoers' viewing choices
#movies

Pirated film quality and ticket costs shape U.S. moviegoers' viewing choices
Movie studios face unique challenges in managing their operations. The success of a film relies not only on its artistic merits, but also on studios' operational decisions, particularly those related to a movie's initial box office release. A critical concern for the industry is how to manage movie piracy, a form of digital counterfeiting that undermines legal box-office sales.

Samsung says it expects memory chip supply shortages to raise prices across the electronics industry, including potentially among its own consumer products (Bloomberg)
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-01-07/samsung…