“Elon Musk said on Sunday that SpaceX has shifted its focus to building a ‘self-growing city’ on the moon,” reports Reuters, “which could be achieved in less than 10 years.”
SpaceX still intends to start on Musk’s long-held ambition of a city on Mars within five to seven years, he wrote on his X social media platform, “but the overriding priority is securing the future of civilization and the Moon is faster.”
Musk’s comments echo a Wall Street Journal report on Friday, stating that SpaceX has told investors it would prioritize going to the moon and attempt a trip to Mars at a later time, targeting March 2027 for an uncrewed lunar landing. As recently as last year, Musk said that he aimed to send an uncrewed mission to Mars by the end of 2026.
Josh Grenier got a powerful lesson in the benefits of revitalization when he was a high school art teacher in Edina, Minnesota. He was teaching ceramics and photography in a dull classroom in the basement. No windows. Poor ventilation.
“It was an old, underutilized, leftover space down in the bowels of the building,” Grenier says.
Worse, the dreary room seemed to reflect an unspoken, but obvious, negativity directed at the people who used it: “I think the program and the students who were involved with it were not perceived particularly well.”
Within a few short years, though, the school went through a major renovation, which included a new, stylish fine-arts wing at the front of the existing structure. Grenier and his art students moved from “the worst space to the best space” in the building, a shift that transformed how others perceived the arts program, and how the students perceived themselves and their place in the school.
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Josh Grenier. Photo courtesy of Wold.
“Facilities investments are really expressions of what a community values,” Grenier says. “I think the people who are in them feel that; I witnessed that firsthand.”
The experience so moved Grenier that he left his nine-year teaching job to become an architect. Today, he’s an educational practice leader and educational planner in the Denver office of Wold Architects & Engineers, where he works with communities across Colorado that are trying to shape their school needs for the future. Sometimes they choose to build new schools. More often, they revamp old schools that have been around for decades, but lack the space or mechanical systems to meet the demands of modern learners.
Grenier and his design peers are part of a pivotal moment in education. Shifting populations have left cities and towns with unused school buildings in zero-growth areas and too few classrooms in high-growth areas. Many schools still in use were constructed in the boom years after World War II and don’t meet today’s building codes, some dangerously so. A 2020 report by the Government Accountability Office found that more than half of the nation’s 100,000 K-12 schools need to replace heating, ventilation and air conditioning systems or plumbing to mitigate health hazards.
At the same time, the amount districts have to spend on school renovations has dropped by about $85 billion a year nationwide since 2016, according to a recent report from the American Institute of Architects. This despite research of the past 20 years showing a strong link between unhealthy school buildings and poor learning outcomes. The Harvard School of Public Health concluded in 2017 that by failing to modernize old schools “policymakers and parents may be missing one of the largest health and safety issues affecting students daily.” On the other hand, the study’s authors wrote, “properly designed, maintained and operated school buildings…have been shown to prevent cognitive deficits, optimize student and teacher performance, and create a thriving learning environment within the school.”
In Colorado, about 85 percent of the population lives in urban areas; its small plains and mountain towns struggle to keep their identities. Grenier has worked with districts of all sizes in the state, including Manzanola School District, with fewer than 200 students; the eight-school district in touristy Cañon City, southeast of Aspen; and St. Vrain Valley Schools, the state’s seventh largest district.
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Grenier spoke with EdSurge about the challenges of rebuilding old schools — and how his experience as a teacher informs every aspect of his job.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
EdSurge: When you talk about how depressing it was to work in a basement, I think many people would identify with that. There are thousands of offices and schools where only a select few have access to light.
Josh Grenier: You’re pointing to something that I was very conscious of. Spaces communicate something to us about where we sit in a hierarchy of the world and how we’re valued and perceived by others. Schools are very much that way, too.
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In that [Edina] school, we had a front that was nice and well invested in, and it had a back with dumpsters and a loading dock. The buses dropped the kids off in the back by the dumpsters. The people who owned their own cars and could drive themselves to school would park in the front, and they’d walk in the nice front door. And I remember thinking, ‘what is that saying?’ If you don’t have a car and you’re of lesser means, well, you come in the back door by the dumpster. That’s the kind of thing that if you’re not thinking about it, the buildings themselves can communicate that.
Did that orientation change when the school was renovated?
No. That project was not perfect. That was another reason why I thought that I could contribute by joining the architecture side. We were winners — the arts program. But there were others who were not. There were other parts of the building that could have been thought about more deliberately.
What’s involved in designing for modern learners?
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There’s so much variety from student to student of what they’re doing throughout the day, when things are happening, how things are unfolding. There are far more moments of independence, informal opportunities.
That’s another part I like about having been a teacher. I’m pretty good at imagining what’s going to happen, and I like doing that. You’re working on a floor plan, you’re working on a space, and you’re trying to just imagine, well, there’s that kid and there’s all those backpacks, and here he goes doing this, and there she is doing that. They’re gathering over here, and the teachers are walking from here to here, and they’re stopping here.
That’s always been something that I find a lot of pleasure in, just imagining what’s going to happen.
I had a teacher in architecture school who encouraged [us] to try to make it so that people feel they’re being embraced by this space. If you can’t find in yourself some fondness for whoever is going to be there, well, what are you doing?
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Many kids today have conditions that hadn’t been identified when these old schools were built. How do you accommodate them?
It’s not a revolutionary idea, but allowing spaces to be used in a variety of different ways helps. You don’t have to make everything dedicated to one function.
A classroom in the renovated Manzanola School features furniture that is easily moved around and separate areas for reading or other quiet tasks. Photo courtesy of Wold.
Furniture is a huge part. It is the furniture that can help make those flexible spaces work. Things that are on wheels to support different uses or subtly separate one space from another.
You see a lot of modern furniture that has a ‘fidget component’ built into it so a kid can kind of vibrate. You know, a lot of times, kids just have extra energy; they’ll stay more engaged and more present if you just let them fidget.
It’s complicated and costly to renovate a school. How does it begin? In Cañon City, for instance, you took on four schools at once.
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Mostly we just listen. People are pretty quick to talk about what’s wrong. We also try to lean into ‘what are you proud of? What are you really good at?’ We try to find a few things that they can rally around and then build a list of possible projects at each of the four schools.
One of the complexities of planning with large entities is that you’re trying to navigate lots of different individual stakeholders and everybody has their own unique point of view. You’re trying to help [them] see bigger picture things. But that’s another benefit of having been a teacher. I feel like [teachers are] pretty good at facilitating those kinds of conversations.
The featured project was the high school. Like so many of our public schools, it was built in the post-World War II era. Most schools start there. And then it’s been added onto, like, 10 times.
They become Franken-buildings…?
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[Nods] They become mazes. The circulation becomes overly complex. They’re disorganized and confused. But that school, Cañon City High School, was really proud of its CTE programs. They’re a model in the state for allowing student choices to define the educational path that each of those students is going down. And they have a lot of specialized spaces already in place. But what they were lacking was a central part to the building that reinforced and supported all these piecemeal things that had been cobbled together.
A draft concept for Cañon City High School that imagines a new commons and gathering hub. Photo courtesy of Wold.
We really focused on creating a new core to the building that felt like it reflected the pride they had in their programs.
How do emotions and nostalgia play into design? How did it work in Manzanola?
The town is around 400 people. In communities like that, the school really is the heart of the town. With those small communities, one of the first things we hear is that they’re afraid if the school goes away, the whole town will go away.
Athletics are huge, and it’s not just Friday night football. Members of the town and the outlying areas will attend athletic events even if they don’t have kids in the school system. In addition to athletics, performances are huge. [The school gym] is usually the biggest space in town. When a prominent member of the community passes away, they have the funeral in the gym. People get married in the school.
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That alone makes it fun because it’s just such a key element to that community.
[We knew] it was going to be a public-facing building off-hours because of so much of the community use. It really needed a public side and a learning side with a pretty clear boundary.
Renovation and repurposing of existing schools is happening at all levels of education. California State University, Fullerton, reimagined its campus to accommodate a changing demographic of commuter students. Oklahoma City Public Schools repurposed unused elementary schools into early learning centers. What’s next?
Our facilities are aging and our communities are aging. In a lot of the communities, the bulk of the build-out was post-World War II. We see a lot of consolidation happening.
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There was a model that was really common across the country: a school that was designed to have about 300 kids in it. When you looked at the map, they weren’t particularly far apart and everybody could just walk to their neighborhood elementary school.
Now a lot of those schools are half full. I think, yes, we’re seeing people trying to be creative about how buildings can be used. Some outright just need to be sold.
When done poorly, a district can make a big mistake and have a vacant building that’s a blight. [One city we worked with, southeast of Colorado Springs], they originally had two elementaries, a middle and a high school. And before we got there, they closed one of those elementaries. They put it up for auction and somebody from out of town bought it, I think as a tax write-off. But it just sits there to this day, abandoned, with transients moving through and building little campfires inside. The worst thing you can imagine.
So if you’re going to leave a [school] building, we are very strong advocates that you either tear it down or you have a vetted proposal for reuse. Build some criteria for what you’re willing to sell to, so that you know that it’s actually going to be used.
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As a former teacher, what specifically do you think about when designing a school? What is top of mind based on your experience in the classroom?
There are a lot of different little examples, but the one that comes to mind for me a lot is acoustics. The design of spaces, in the end, is a lot of very tangible things that are just sort of specific. And one of those is how well [a space] does or doesn’t perform acoustically. As a teacher, I remember very clearly being in some spaces that were loud, chaotic. They made engaging with the students challenging and problematic. I remember wanting to have confidential conversations and not feeling like [we] had the spaces for that.
You want to be specific and intentional about designing things that function well for people, even if they don’t know or perceive that you even did it.
You know, it’s nice to walk around the school and have it feel… quiet.
The EU could take “interim measures” against WhatsApp as it investigates AI providers’ access to the app. On Monday, the EU’s regulatory arm announced its “preliminary view” that Meta, WhatsApp’s parent company, violated antitrust laws by blocking third-party AI assistants from operating on WhatsApp.
The European Commission’s is concerned that Meta’s actions will limit competitors from entering the AI assistant market. “We must protect effective competition in this vibrant field, which means we cannot allow dominant tech companies to illegally leverage their dominance to give themselves an unfair advantage,” Teresa Ribera, executive vice-president for Clean, Just and Competitive Transition said in a statement.
Ribera continued: “AI markets are developing at rapid pace, so we also need to be swift in our action. That is why we are considering quickly imposing interim measures on Meta, to preserve access for competitors to WhatsApp while the investigation is ongoing, and avoid Meta’s new policy irreparably harming competition in Europe.”
The issue arose in October when Meta announced updates to its WhatsApp Business Solution Terms. According to the European Commission, the January 15 update would “effectively” make Meta AI the only AI assistant available on WhatsApp. The regulatory agency opened an investigation into the matter on December 4.
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Today’s update stands as a warning to Meta that the European Commission initially believes the company has violated antitrust regulation. A final decision is still to come. It also gave Meta a chance to respond to the allegations — which it swiftly did.
“The facts are that there is no reason for the EU to intervene in the WhatsApp Business API,” a Meta spokesperson told Reuters. “There are many AI options and people can use them from app stores, operating systems, devices, websites, and industry partnerships.”
After launching the 14-inch MacBook Pro with the M5 chip last year, Apple is now preparing more powerful variants featuring the M5 Pro and M5 Max chips. Recent leaks suggest the company could unveil the updated laptops soon, and a new report now points to an early March announcement.
According to Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman, who has a strong track record with Apple-related leaks, the new MacBooks could arrive in the first week of March. The lineup is expected to include updated 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pro models, along with a new MacBook Air featuring the M5 chip.
It’s not immediately clear whether Apple will introduce the long-rumored OLED MacBook Pro as part of this refresh. Reports suggest the OLED model, which is also expected to add touch support, is likely to debut in 2026, with display production already underway.
Beyond the MacBook Pro upgrades, Gurman says Apple is also planning to launch a new low-cost MacBook in the first half of the year. The entry-level model is expected to feature a sub-13-inch display and an “iPhone-class chip.” New Mac Studio desktops are also in development and are said to arrive not long after Apple’s spring Mac refresh.
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More Apple hardware launches are on the horizon
A refreshed Studio Display, referenced in multiple leaks over the past few months, is on the way, while new Mac mini models are also on Apple’s roadmap for the year. Alongside new Macs, Apple is reportedly gearing up to launch the iPhone 17e in the coming weeks, as well as a new entry-level iPad powered by the A18 chip and a refreshed iPad Air featuring the M4 processor.
Apple has yet to make anything official. If the reported timeline holds, Apple could announce the iPhone 17e later this month, followed by refreshed iPads and the new MacBook Pro lineup in early March.
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DeWalt was second only to Makita in our rankings of major power tool brands, and the familiar black and yellow tools are common on professional job sites. The brand’s quality and reputation come at a premium price, though. The DeWalt 20V XR drill/driver is sold by Home Depot in a kit with two 4 amp-hour batteries, a charger, and a soft case for $269, although it’s on sale as of this writing for $40 off.
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If you already have a collection of DeWalt 20V Max and Max XR batteries, buying power tools from another brand might not be the best move. But if you’re building a workshop from scratch or looking to save money on a replacement for a drill that no longer works, Harbor Freight’s Hercules brand is worth a look. For example, the 20V Hercules HCB91K1 1/2-inch drill comes with a charger and 2 Ah battery for $97.99, which leaves you plenty of cash left over vs. the DeWalt to purchase additional batteries and a carrying bag.
Consumer Reports named it the cordless drill with the best battery life, and a spare Hercules 8 Ah 20V battery costs $99.99 at Harbor Freight. With the larger battery the Hercules cordless drill can drill up to 350 holes in a pine board using a 1-inch spade bit. For comparison’s sake, DeWalt says its DCD801 20V drill is capable of making as many as 175 holes in a 1.5-inch softwood board using a ⅞-inch auger bit on a fully-charged 4 Ah battery. The two tasks aren’t a direct one-to-one comparison but should give you an idea of the power of the Hercules system.
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head-to head comparison of DeWalt and Hercules 20V drills
The manufacturer’s specs and features of the two drills match up pretty well, but it’s the huge price difference that makes the Hercules a far better buy. Both drills have a metal chuck, LED lights, and two speed settings and max out at 2,000 rpm. The Hercules drill can generate up to 100 foot-pounds of torque, but DeWalt doesn’t provide raw torque numbers for its tools.
With the almost-too-good-to-be-true pricing, it’s understandable if you’re wondering if Harbor Freight’s Hercules power tools are any good. You don’t have to trust the specs alone; plenty of outlets have thoroughly tested Hercules tools like this drill. Project Farm tested 11 different drills across multiple build and performance categories including 20V models from Hercules and DeWalt. The DeWalt drill performed slightly better when all test results are considered (averaging between 4th and 5th place to the Hercules’ sixth and a fraction), but the difference isn’t nearly enough to justify the huge price difference.
Matthew Peech did a head-to-head test betwen DeWalt and Hercules drills on his Woodworking and DIY blog and found that the Hercules didn’t heat up as much as the DeWalt during prolonged use. He concluded that “While the DeWalt might still edge ahead in premium features and build, the Hercules is nothing to scoff at.” Real Tool Reviews put this Hercules drill up against similar products from Makita and DeWalt in various real-world tests and found that the Hercules HCB91K1 held its own against the two much more expensive drills.
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Methodology
There is no shortage of comparisons between DeWalt and Harbor Freight power tools. We found our own previous reporting and the detailed data from Project Farm to be useful as a starting point, then consulted side-by-side testing by other outlets and anecdotal opinions from user reviews and online forums.
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In addition, the author has used an older DeWalt DCD780 cordless drill to perform campground maintenance and tested this Hercules HCB91K1 as part of an in-store demonstration at a local Harbor Freight store. While we didn’t try these two drills side-by-side, the Hercules drill felt solid, powerful, and capable of standing toe-to-toe with any of DeWalt’s offerings. This Hercules drill also comes with a five-year limited warranty, while buyers of DeWalt’s power tools enjoy three years of similar protection.
Following last year’s trend of showcasing AI in multimillion-dollar ad spots, the 2026 Super Bowl advertisements took it a step further by leveraging AI both to create the commercials and to promote the latest AI products. Love it or hate it, the technology has become a star in its own right, alongside the latest movie trailers and snack brands.
Let’s explore the biggest moments from this year’s Big Game ads, which featured everything from robots and AI glasses to a touch of drama involving tech founders.
Svedka
Vodka brand Svedka went with what it touts as the first “primarily” AI-generated national Super Bowl spot. The 30-second ad, titled “Shake Your Bots Off,” features the company’s robot character, Fembot, and her new companion, Brobot, dancing their circuits off at a human party.
According to Svedka’s parent company, Sazerac, it took roughly four months to reconstruct the Fembot and train the AI to mimic facial expressions and body movements, The Wall Street Journal reported. However, the vodka brand noted that certain aspects were still handled by humans, such as developing the storyline.
It’s a bold move to debut AI-generated content during the Super Bowl, an event known for star-studded, high-production ads. The heavy reliance on AI is polarizing, fueling debates over whether AI will replace creative jobs.
Techcrunch event
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Boston, MA | June 23, 2026
Either way, Svedka definitely got people talking.
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Anthropic
Anthropic’s ad wasn’t just about selling its Claude chatbot; it was about throwing shade. The commercial took a jab at OpenAI’s plan to introduce ads to ChatGPT, with a tagline: “Ads are coming to AI. But not to Claude.” Rather than focus solely on Claude’s features, it poked fun at the idea of your helpful AI assistant suddenly turning into a hype man for “Step Boost Maxx” insoles, for example.
It wasn’t a standard product pitch, and it escalated into an online feud. OpenAI’s Sam Altman fired back on social media, calling the ad “clearly dishonest.” So while we didn’t get any more Kendrick vs. Drake rap beef this time around, maybe we did get our own AI, nerdy version of it.
Meta spotlighted its Oakley-branded AI glasses, designed for sports, workouts, and adventures, including extreme scenarios such as chasing down a departing plane.
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The ad showcased thrill-seekers, from skydivers to mountain bikers, using the glasses to capture epic moments. Famous faces like IShowSpeed and filmmaker Spike Lee made appearances, demonstrating capabilities like filming a basketball dunk in slow motion, posting hands-free to Instagram, and other advanced features.
The tech giant also featured its wearable AI tech in last year’s Super Bowl ad to spark consumer interest, with stars like Chris Pratt, Chris Hemsworth, and Kris Jenner showing off Ray-Ban Meta glasses.
Amazon
Amazon’s ad took a cheeky (and slightly unsettling) approach, starring Chris Hemsworth in a satirical “AI is out to get me” storyline. The commercial exaggerates common fears about AI, with Hemsworth humorously accusing Alexa+ of plotting against him. Scenes included Alexa+ closing the garage door on his head and shutting the pool cover while he swam, each mishap escalating in absurdity.
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Beyond the dark comedy, the ad introduced the new Alexa+, showcasing its enhanced intelligence and capabilities, ranging from managing smart home devices to planning vacations. Alexa+ had been available in early access for over a year and officially launched to all U.S. users on Wednesday.
Ring
Ring’s commercial spotlighted its “Search Party” feature, which leverages AI and a community network to reunite lost pets with their owners. The ad followed a young girl searching for her dog Milo, illustrating how users can upload a pet’s photo to the app, where AI works to identify matches and taps into nearby cameras and the broader Ring user community to help track down missing furry family members.
Ring recently announced that anyone can now use Search Party, even without owning a Ring security camera. According to the company, the feature has already helped reunite more than one lost dog with its owner every day.
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Google
Google’s ad showcased the Nano Banana Pro, its newest image-generation model. The commercial followed a mother and son as they used AI to envision and design their new home, uploading photos of bare rooms and turning them into personalized spaces with just a few prompts.
Ramp
Ramp scored big by getting Brian Baumgartner — the actor who played Kevin in “The Office” — for its Super Bowl commercial.
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In the spot, Baumgartner uses Ramp’s AI-powered spend management platform to “multiply” himself, effortlessly tackling a mountain of work. The ad highlights how Ramp’s all-in-one solution helps teams focus on the most important tasks through smart automation.
And, as a playful nod to his TV persona, Baumgartner is seen carrying a pot of chili in the ad, referencing Kevin’s legendary scene where he brings his cherished recipe for his co-workers to try, only to disastrously spill the entire pot on the floor.
Rippling
Rippling, the cloud-based workforce management platform, went all in on its first-ever Super Bowl ad. The company tapped comedian Tim Robinson in a spot about onboarding an alien monster, poking fun at HR headaches and the promise of AI automation.
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Hims & Hers
Health company Hims & Hers used its Super Bowl spot to address disparities in healthcare access. The ad cleverly references the lengths the wealthy go to for health and longevity, even appearing to poke fun at Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin spaceflight in 2021 and Bryan Johnson’s expensive anti-aging routines.
In recent years, the company launched an AI-powered “MedMatch” tool to deliver more personalized treatment recommendations, especially for mental health and wellness.
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Wix
Website builder Wix spotlighted its new AI-powered Wix Harmony platform, promising website creation as easy as chatting with a friend. Unveiled in January, the flagship platform combines AI-driven creation and “vibe coding” with full visual editing and customization.
Wix’s biggest competitor, Squarespace, also has a Super Bowl ad this year. Squarespace’s ad has a more cinematic approach starring Emma Stone and directed by Yorgos Lanthimos.
This post was initially published on February 6, 2026.
Danny Spencer took his trusty old Game Boy Color and turned it into a canvas for real-time 3D shading, transforming the simple handheld into a shockingly convincing three dimensional environment. As the teapot spins, its curves capture the light from a source you control with the D-pad, causing shadows to alter seamlessly in response to each nudge.
Pixels light up one by one with a Lambertian shader, which tells you exactly how directly light hits a surface, and Spencer solved the problem of multiplying non-integer numbers by baking surface information into normal maps and storing them in tiny three-byte chunks in the ROM. Each pixel selects a normal vector from these maps, doses it with light direction, and outputs a shade ranging from dead black to full-on white. The teapot’s spout glints in the light or falls into shade, with each frame a whole new creation from raw calculations.
The hardware will not be pleased because the Game Boy Color only runs at 8 MHz, which equates to approximately 140,000 cycles each 60 FPS frame. There is no multiply command, so Spencer had to get inventive. He had no trouble swapping multiplications for logarithms and lookup tables. Log tables convert products into sums, whereas power tables do the reverse. All values are compressed into 8-bit fractions from 1 to 1, with signs hidden away in the highest bits. Negative numbers in logarithmic space? No need to worry, he flags them independently and makes modifications on the fly.
To reduce the workload, Spencer shifted to spherical coordinates, in which vectors become angles: tilt (theta) and spin (phi), where light theta remains constant and you only adjust phi to move the light. The dot product is a simple formula: sin(Nθ)sin(Lθ)cos(Nφ – Lφ) + cos(Nθ)cos(Lθ). One subtraction later, he’s incorporating a custom cos_log table, a combination of cosine and logarithm, to speed things up. Five lookups every pixel, subtract, add, lookup, add, for a total of 960 pixels and 89% of the frame budget.
Spencer can patch the shader method in real time, swapping memory loads for hard-coded immediates. That’s an additional 8 cycles saved every subtraction, for a total of 11,520 over the frame. He skips over rows that contain no pixels at a rate of three cycles per pop. As a result, all of the frames remain consistent, even with some slight LCD ghosting to contend with.
You can examine the code for yourself in the GitHub repository, which was compiled with the RGBDS toolkit and includes Python scripts to transform Blender normal maps into ROM data. Two ROMs appear: teapot and gbspin. The releases page contains pre-compiled versions that will get you up and running. You can launch the BGB emulator or flash it onto a cart. Or, better yet, simply press some keys on Spencer’s internet emulator. [Source]
Microsoft is investigating an ongoing Exchange Online issue that mistakenly flags legitimate emails as phishing and quarantines them.
The incident began on February 5 and continues to affect Exchange Online customers, preventing them from sending or receiving emails.
“Some users’ legitimate email messages are being marked as phish and quarantined in Exchange Online,” Microsoft said in a service alert when it acknowledged the bug on Thursday.
“We’ve determined that the URLs associated with these email messages are incorrectly marked as phish and quarantined in Exchange Online due to ever-evolving criteria aimed at identifying suspicious email messages, as spam and phishing techniques have become more sophisticated in avoiding detection.”
Over the weekend, Microsoft confirmed that the issue is caused by a new URL rule that incorrectly flags some URLs as malicious and the emails as phishing attempts.
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“An updated URL rule intending to identify more sophisticated spam and phishing email messages is incorrectly quarantining legitimate email messages in Exchange Online, resulting in impact,” it added.
While Microsoft has yet to disclose how many customers are affected or which regions are impacted by this ongoing issue, it has classified it as an incident, which typically involves noticeable user impact.
Until the issue is resolved, Microsoft is working to release quarantined emails and said that affected users may begin to see previously flagged messages in their inboxes.
“We’re reviewing the release of quarantined messages for affected users and working on confirming legitimate URLs are unblocked,” it noted on Saturday. “Some users may see their previously quarantined messages successfully delivered and we’re working to confirm full remediation. We’ll provide an estimated time to resolve when one becomes available.”
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Microsoft has addressed similar issues over the last several years, resulting in emails being quarantined or incorrectly tagged as spam or malicious. For instance, in March, an Exchange Online bug caused anti-spam systems to mistakenly quarantine some users’ emails, and another one in May caused a machine learning model to incorrectly flag emails from Gmail accounts as spam.
Modern IT infrastructure moves faster than manual workflows can handle.
In this new Tines guide, learn how your team can reduce hidden manual delays, improve reliability through automated response, and build and scale intelligent workflows on top of tools you already use.
Looking for the most recent Connections answers? Click here for today’s Connections hints, as well as our daily answers and hints for The New York Times Mini Crossword, Wordle, Connections: Sports Edition and Strands puzzles.
Today’s NYT Connections puzzle has a varied mix of categories, and some of them are pretty tough to solve. Read on for clues and today’s Connections answers.
The Times has a Connections Bot, like the one for Wordle. Go there after you play to receive a numeric score and to have the program analyze your answers. Players who are registered with the Times Games section can now nerd out by following their progress, including the number of puzzles completed, win rate, number of times they nabbed a perfect score and their win streak.
Here are four hints for the groupings in today’s Connections puzzle, ranked from the easiest yellow group to the tough (and sometimes bizarre) purple group.
Yellow group hint: A textile art.
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Green group hint: How you do something.
Blue group hint: `Related to books and money.
Purple group hint: You might do this with crayons.
It’s been almost five years since the PlayStation 5 launched. That means its successor, the PlayStation 6, isn’t far away, so the rumors are starting to arrive thick and fast. Read Entire Article Source link
As anyone who extrudes plastic noodles knows, the glass transition temperature of a material is a bit misleading; polymers gradually transition between a glass and a liquid across a range of temperatures, and calling any particular point in that range the glass transition temperature is a bit arbitrary. As a general rule, the shorter the glass transition range is, the weaker it is in the glassy state, and vice-versa. A surprising demonstration of this is provided by compleximers, a class of polymers recently discovered by researchers from Wageningen University, and the first organic polymers known to form strong ionic glasses (open-access article).
When a material transforms from a glass — a hard, non-ordered solid — to a liquid, it goes through various relaxation processes. Alpha relaxations are molecular rearrangements, and are the main relaxation process involved in melting. The progress of alpha relaxation can be described by the Kohlrausch-Williams-Watts equation, which can be exponential or non-exponential. The closer the formula for a given material is to being exponential, the more uniformly its molecules relax, which leads to a gradual glass transition and a strong glass. In this case, however, the ionic compleximers were highly non-exponential, but nevertheless had long transition ranges and formed strong glasses.
The compleximers themselves are based on acrylate and methacrylate backbones modified with ionic groups. To prevent water from infiltrating the structure and altering its properties, it was also modified with hydrophobic groups. The final glass was solvent-resistant and easy to process, with a glass transition range of more than 60 °C, but was still strong at room temperature. As the researchers demonstrated, it can be softened with a hot air gun and reshaped, after which it cools into a hard, non-malleable solid.
The authors note that these are the first known organic molecules to form strong glasses stabilized by ionic interactions, and it’s still not clear what uses there may be for such materials, though they hope that compleximers could be used to make more easily-repairable objects. The interesting glass-transition process of compleximers makes us wonder whether their material aging may be reversible.
