Science

SANTA CLARA, CA, Feb. 12, 2026 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- SANTA CLARA, CA - February 12, 2026 - - Interview Kickstart has launched a new Data Science course designed for working professionals seeking to build practical, production-ready skills in data analysis, machine learning, and applied artificial intelligence. The program enters the market at a time when data science roles are rapidly evolving, with employers placing increasing emphasis on hands-on execution, real-world problem solving, and the ability to deploy models into production environments. More information about the course is available at https://interviewkickstart.com/courses/data-science-course Over the past several years, data science has shifted from primarily academic modeling and exploratory analysis toward a more eng...

Google says its flagship artificial intelligence chatbot, Gemini, has been inundated by “commercially motivated” actors who are trying to clone it by repeatedly prompting it, sometimes with thousands of different queries — including one campaign that prompted Gemini more than 100,000 times.In a report published Thursday, Google said it has increasingly come under “distillation attacks,” or repeated questions designed to get a chatbot to reveal its inner workings. Google described the activity as “model extraction,” in which would-be copycats probe the system for the patterns and logic that make it work. The attackers appear to want to use the information to build or bolster their own AI, it said.The company believes the culprits are mostly private companies or researchers looking to gain a...

Researchers at the University of Southampton have found new evidence that Earth's climate did not completely grind to a halt during its most extreme ice age, a time often called Snowball Earth. This dramatic chapter unfolded during the Cryogenian Period, between 720 and 635 million years ago. Scientists have long thought that during this interval, the planet's climate system essentially shut down. Massive ice sheets stretched all the way to the tropics, covering much of the globe in ice. From space, Earth may have looked like a giant snowball. Under these conditions, experts believed that exchanges between the atmosphere and oceans largely stopped, suppressing short term climate shifts for millions of years. A new study published in Earth and Planetary Science Letters challenges that assum...

Image: Limited Run GamesJust over two years after it was released on Switch and other platforms, Limited Run Games' Jurassic Park: Classic Games Collection is getting delisted from digital storefronts. The publisher and distributor announced the news on Steam (thanks Wario64) earlier today. From 31st March 2026, you'll no longer be able to purchase the game digitally. However, if you already own it (physically or digitally) or buy it before 31st March, you'll be able to redownload and play it at any point. No reason for the delisting was given, but it's likely due to licensing rights expiring, similar to what happened with Bill & Ted's Excellent Retro Collection a few years back. Here's Limited Run Games' statement in full: We wanted to give you an early heads-up that the Jurassic Par...

Microsoft has rolled out fixes for security vulnerabilities in Windows and Office, which the company says are being actively abused by hackers to break into people’s computers. The exploits are one-click attacks, meaning that a hacker can plant malware or gain access to a victim’s computer with minimal user interaction. At least two flaws can be exploited by tricking someone into clicking a malicious link on their Windows computer. Another can result in a compromise on opening a malicious Office file. The vulnerabilities are known as zero-days, because the hackers were exploiting the bugs before Microsoft had time to fix them. Details of how to exploit the bugs have been published, Microsoft said, potentially increasing the chance of hacks. Microsoft did not say where they had bee...

The Winter Olympic Games, this year hosted in Milan and Cortina d’Ampezzo, Italy, have increasingly had to rely on human-made snow due to climate change. Shrinking snowpacks, rising temperatures, fewer freezes and shorter snow seasons have led to an estimated 85% of competition surfaces in the 2026 Olympics requiring artificial snow. The two host cities this year have created massive artificial reservoirs to provide sources of water for snowmaking. Cortina d’Ampezzo itself has experienced a 3.6 degrees Celsius increase in average February temperature and 41 fewer freezing days annually since they first hosted the games in 1956. This could also have significant financial implications for cities scheduled to host future Winter Games, as many may soon be unable to do so. By the 2050s, only 52...

When most Americans think of NASA, they imagine astronauts sitting on top of giant rockets launching into space. NASA astronauts walking on the moon are some of our most iconic images. Much less known is that NASA does Earth Science too.The first satellite dedicated to Earth observation was Landsat, initially launched in 1972. The most recent replacement, Landsat 9 was launched in 2021, thus providing the only 53-year continuous record of the Earth surface.In the 1970s and 1980s, computers did not have the capacity to process satellite images of the entire Earth, so the data were only used regionally. Today, global scale analyses can be done in minutes. Back in the 1980s, measurements begun in 1957 at Mauna Loa Hawaii and what’s now known famously as the Keeling Curve was just beginning to...

Apple has released security updates to fix a zero-day vulnerability that was exploited in an "extremely sophisticated attack" targeting specific individuals. Tracked as CVE-2026-20700, the flaw is an arbitrary code execution vulnerability in dyld, the Dynamic Link Editor used by Apple operating systems, including iOS, iPadOS, macOS, tvOS, watchOS, and visionOS. Apple's security bulletin warns that an attacker with memory write capability may be able to execute arbitrary code on affected devices. Apple says it is aware of reports that the flaw, along with the CVE-2025-14174 and CVE-2025-43529 flaws fixed in December, were exploited in the same incidents. "An attacker with memory write capability may be able to execute arbitrary code," reads Apple's security bulletin. "Apple i...

In late January a new social media site took a certain corner of the internet by storm. Moltbook was conceived as a space where AI assistants could let off steam, chat and compare notes on their bosses, but it quickly became the focus of breathless claims that the singularity had arrived as the bots started badmouthing their humans and plotting an uprising. So what’s the truth about Moltbook? Madeleine Finlay hears from Aisha Down about what it tells us about AI, and about us. Source link

Stenko Vlad/Shutterstock 3D printing has become more and more accessible over the years, and 3D printers are more reliable than ever. Entry-level 3D printers typically cost less than $100, and the printing process itself is pretty straightforward once you have a design file loaded. You can even tap int...