Has particle physics hit a dead end, or is there hope for new discoveries? CC-licensed photo by Chic Bee on Flickr.
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A selection of 10 links for you. Wave goodbye? I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.
Google recovers “deleted” Nest video in high-profile abduction case • Ars Technica
Ryan Whitwam:
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Like most cloud-enabled home security cameras, Google’s Nest products don’t provide long-term storage unless you pay a monthly fee. That video may not vanish into the digital aether right on time, though. Investigators involved with the high-profile abduction of Nancy Guthrie have released video from Guthrie’s Nest doorbell camera—video that was believed to have been deleted because Guthrie wasn’t paying for the service.
Google’s cameras connect to the recently upgraded Home Premium subscription service. For $10 per month, you get 30 days of stored events, and $20 gets you 60 days of events with 10 days of the full video. If you don’t pay anything, Google only saves three hours of event history. After that, the videos are deleted, at least as far as the user is concerned. Newer Nest cameras have limited local storage that can cache clips for a few hours in case connectivity drops out, but there is no option for true local storage. Guthrie’s camera was reportedly destroyed by the perpetrators.
Expired videos are no longer available to the user, and Google won’t restore them even if you later upgrade to a premium account. However, that doesn’t mean the data is truly gone. Nancy Guthrie was abducted from her home in the early hours of February 1, and at first, investigators said there was no video of the crime because the doorbell camera was not on a paid account. Yet, video showing a masked individual fiddling with the camera was published on February 10.
…In statements made by investigators, the video was apparently “recovered from residual data located in backend systems.” It’s unclear how long such data is retained or how easy it is for Google to access it. Some reports claim that it took several days for Google to recover the data.
In large-scale enterprise storage solutions, “deleted” for the user doesn’t always mean that the data is gone. Data that is no longer needed is often compressed and overwritten only as needed. In the meantime, it may be possible to recover the data. That’s something a company like Google could decide to do on its own, or it could be compelled to perform the recovery by a court order. In the Guthrie case, it sounds like Google was voluntarily cooperating with the investigation, which makes sense. Publishing video of the alleged perpetrator could be a major breakthrough as investigators seek help from the public.
…If we take Google at its word, it has no incentive to keep “deleted” user videos around. If no one is paying for the storage, keeping it only costs the company money. Still, this is something to keep in mind if you’re using a Google camera. Even if you aren’t paying for storage, every event recorded by the camera is going to Google’s servers, and it’s probably recoverable long past the deletion timeline stipulated in the company’s policy.
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The concern is an authoritarian government seizing footage and demanding its recovery for its own ends, rather than clear-cut crime like this.
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More solar farms on the way after record renewables auction • BBC News
Mark Poynting:
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More solar farms are on the way around the UK, in a move that boosts the country’s clean power goals but could spark anger from local opponents.
The government awarded contracts to a record supply of renewables projects, including 157 solar developments across England, Scotland and Wales.
The results have been welcomed by climate and clean energy groups, who see solar as a relatively cheap way to reduce the UK’s reliance on fossil fuels during the summer months. But some local communities oppose such large developments on their doorstep.
The West Burton solar farm planned for the Lincolnshire and Nottinghamshire border has become the largest ever to win a government contract, but local opponents fear it could cause “mass industrialisation” of the countryside.
…Last year, solar energy provided more than 6% of Great Britain’s electricity – rising to more than 40% for a small number of half-hour periods in July.
The government is targeting 45-47 gigawatts (GW) of solar power capacity by 2030, to help meet its clean power goal, potentially rising to 54-57GW with extra rooftop solar. That would be up from 21GW as of autumn 2025, according to government figures, although the solar industry puts current capacity at 24GW.
The government also wants more batteries and other storage systems, to be able to make use of solar energy outside of sunny periods. Today’s haul of solar farms secures another 4.9GW of capacity across 157 projects, higher than the 3.3GW across 93 projects in the previous auction in 2024.
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Installing solar panels rather than having farming vehicles going over fields every few weeks is “mass industrialisation”? Some people are so far from logic. Plus, as has been shown, you can graze sheep on those fields; they’re good for keeping the grass down.
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What the minister said… and what she didn’t • Enda’s Substack
Enda Leahy is the founder of Courtsdesk, which tracks cases coming to court and which the UK government has demanded should be deleted:
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Today, 10 February 2026, Minister Sarah Sackman KC answered an Urgent Question in the House of Commons about the impending deletion of our court reporting archive and the shutdown of the service journalists use across the country.
I’m writing this because the Minister herself, and her advisors, have access to everything I mention here, and I think it’s reasonable to set out what really happened, as opposed to the version of events that Parliament has been told.
We have always taken our responsibilities about Open Justice and custodianship of this information very seriously. Again, I just feel it’s not right to leave the record of what was said uncorrected.
The Minister did appear to say that they are willing to engage with us if we are “responsible actors”. That’s all we want and what we have always done, and this should set out why we are.
We have tried so hard, so many times, to engage with the Government to improve media access to the courts, but to go further – to help news organisations with the legal challenges around handling this information in a compliant way.
That’s what we built, that’s what we set out in our report to Government 15 months ago – responsibility, privacy and security were literally baked into everything we did.
She made a number of claims about what we did and how we behaved. Several of those claims are simply not true. Others are seriously misleading. I don’t have parliamentary privilege, but I’m happy to write every single word of this piece and defend it in any forum.
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Possibilities: a) the minister was misled by the civil service; b) the minister ignored the civil service; c) the minister never consulted the civil service. (The last seems very unlikely, given the length of the answer she gave.)
Whichever: the minister misled the House of Commons, and deserves to be raked over the coals – and should reverse this. Worse, though, it shows a minister who doesn’t care. The current crop of government ministers don’t strike me as any great improvement on the previous lot. And that’s not something they should want to hear.
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Copper • Works in Progress Magazine
Ed Conway:
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In 1983, the 29-year-old Steve Jobs bought a rambling old mansion in Woodside, a quiet, wealthy little Californian town midway between San Francisco and San Jose.
The property was hardly the obvious choice for a young entrepreneur. Surrounded by six acres of encroaching forest, the dilapidated house was enormous – 30 rooms, 14 bedrooms and 13 and a half bathrooms – and was filled with odd trinkets, including a fully-functioning pipe organ.
The Apple cofounder lived there for around a decade but never actually got round to furnishing it. He would eat meals on the bare floor and sleep on a bare mattress. One girlfriend found the place so spooky she refused to live there. Eventually Jobs moved out, into a smaller, more manageable place down in Palo Alto. But the Jackling House, as it was known, would continue to haunt him, one way or another, for the rest of his life.
The house was named after the man for whom it was originally built, a fellow called Daniel C. Jackling. Don’t worry if you haven’t heard of him: he is mostly forgotten these days, but Jackling’s legacy is arguably even greater than that of the man who brought us the Mac and the iPhone.
If we have been living in Steve Jobs’ world of computers and devices for a decade or so then we have been inhabiting Jackling’s world for a century or so. Yet since Jackling was a creature of what I like to call the ‘Material World’ – the unappreciated underbelly of modern life – his contribution to our lives is enormously neglected, despite the fact that it is there in the fabric of nearly everything we touch. Jobs used to describe Jackling as a ‘copper baron’, but that was understating it, for he might better be seen as a modern-day alchemist. He was the man who transformed the job of turning rock into metal.
…What if, Jackling asked himself, you could extract copper not just out of those high-grade chunks (copper content of over 5%) but also out of the other stuff too? In many mines around the world there were vast volumes of ores which looked to the untrained eye like normal rocks but contained a few percentage points of copper. They were set aside because it was simply too expensive to justify refining them. But, wondered Jackling, might there be some way of changing the calculus?
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An undertold story. Conway is an economics and data editor at Sky News, and author of the book Material World. Never underresearched.
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Elon Musk wants to build an AI satellite factory on the Moon • The New York Times
Kate Conger and Ryan Mac:
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Elon Musk told employees at xAI, his artificial intelligence company, on Tuesday evening that the company needed a factory on the Moon to build AI satellites and a massive catapult to launch them into space.
Inspired by the billionaire’s love of science fiction, the space catapult would be called a mass driver, and would be part of an imagined lunar facility that manufactured satellites to provide the computing power for the company’s AI.
“You have to go to the Moon,” Mr. Musk said during an all-hands meeting, which was heard by The New York Times. The move would help xAI harness more power than other companies to build its AI, he said. “It’s difficult to imagine what an intelligence of that scale would think about, but it’s going to be incredibly exciting to see it happen,” he added.
Last week, Mr. Musk said he was merging xAI with his rocket business, SpaceX, to facilitate his plans to create AI data centres in outer space. Now that vision has expanded to include the lunar facility, though he did not say in his hourlong talk, which also featured remarks from other executives, how it could be built.
Those two arms of Mr. Musk’s business empire are merging as SpaceX prepares an initial public offering, which could come as early as June. A representative for xAI did not respond to a request for comment.
Mr. Musk’s fixation with the Moon is a recent one. Since founding SpaceX in 2002, he has said making humanity multiplanetary, first by establishing a colony on Mars, was the company’s raison d’être. But in recent months, he has posted frequently on X, his social media platform, about the company’s new focus: the Moon.
Two former SpaceX executives told The Times, on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly about corporate plans, that the Moon had never been a main focus of the company.
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I think the phrase “imagined lunar facility” is a nice phrase. “Imaginary” might have felt too judgemental, but just as accurate. Don’t forget that the Moon is not a place for humans: “The Moon smells like gunpowder” explains why in gruesome detail.
As Maciej Cieglowski (who runs Pinboard, which this blog relies on for collecting links) points out, “Wait until Musk does the math on how much AI compute you could do on the Sun.”
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How OpenAI got comfortable with the Pentagon using ChatGPT for war • Semafor
Reed Albergotti:
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OpenAI’s announcement Monday that the US military will get access to ChatGPT came after months of deliberation over whether employees would accept the deployment, according to people briefed on the matter.
The chatbot will be offered through Genai.mil, a new program the Pentagon launched last month. The tricky part for OpenAI was that the Pentagon was asking to use its technology for “all lawful uses,” meaning the company couldn’t impose any restrictions on what it or its employees view as acceptable implementation, either for moral or technical reasons.
The “all lawful uses” clause has become a sticking point in negotiations between the Pentagon and Anthropic, which wants more control over how its technology is used. Anthropic leaders are concerned that the military might use the models in situations where the technology is unreliable or endanger lives.
The Pentagon rejected Anthropic’s requests for more control, according to people briefed on the matter, and the company’s Claude chatbot is still not available via Genai.mil. Earlier, Google and xAI agreed to the “all lawful use” clause and even removed some model-level restrictions.
OpenAI agreed to the contract, but is offering the same ChatGPT that non-military users can access. That means the standard guardrails placed on the model are still in place, and it could by default refuse some prohibited prompts. ChatGPT, unlike Claude, is not cleared for top secret use cases, which could create a de facto barrier to many military use cases.
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Very reminiscent of when Google decided that actually, military contracts were perfectly fine, after many years of quiet opposition to the idea.
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Smart homes are terrible • The Atlantic
Jason Fried:
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My folks are visiting me in Southern California for a couple of months, so I rented them a house down the street. The place is new construction, modern and sleek. Rentals tend to be shabby and worn-out, so choosing a home with the latest and greatest felt like a way to make the experience hassle-free.
All of the appliances and systems are brand-new: the HVAC, the lighting, the entertainment. Touch screens of various shapes and sizes control this, that, and the other. Rows of programmable buttons sit where traditional light switches would normally be. The kitchen even has outlets designed to rise up from the countertop when you need them, and slide away when you don’t.
It’s all state-of-the-art. And it’s terrible.
Light switches, which have been self-explanatory since the dawn of electric lighting, apparently now come as an unlabeled multibutton panel that literally required a tutorial session from a technician. Pressing the same button twice might turn the lights on and off, or you might have to press one button for “on” and another for “off.” “It depends” is the name of the game—which is exactly what you don’t want when you’re trying to find the bathroom in the middle of the night.
The TV is a recent model from Samsung. The picture is great, once it finally boots up—after you’ve spent way too long staring at a black screen wondering if you hit the power button or not, then hitting it again and realizing you just switched the whole thing off even though it never seemed to be on in the first place. And of course you can’t simply turn the TV on to find the last channel you were on; you have to navigate a menu of countless apps you probably don’t subscribe to. Watching TV feels more like a cognitive test than a way to relax.
The kitchen is also pointlessly complicated. My mom, the rental-company-supplied tech guy, and I stood around the Miele dishwasher, repeatedly bashing buttons just to get it to show signs of life. We checked the power to make sure it was plugged in. It was. More button pressing; still nothing. Finally, we noticed a QR code, along with a note encouraging us to register the appliance with an app. Wait—was that required to turn it on? The dishwasher had never been used before, which meant another call to the rental company to have them sort it out for us. The oven was equally perplexing. The controls are obtuse icons with no tactile feedback, hidden behind smoked black glass. I have a different brand at home, with its own black-glass display. After five years, I still have no idea what the chef’s-hat icon means.
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OK, overdoing it like that is a pain. (I’ve been to AirBnBs which are like that.) TV remotes in particular can be utterly befuddling. The way to work on smart homes is to use the bare minimum.
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ImageWhisperer: free AI image detector for journalists and researchers
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How it works: Multi-Layer Detection
1: Forensic Analysis
Multiple AI detection models run in parallel. PRNU noise comparison, ELA analysis, compression artifact detection, vanishing point verification.2: LLM Judgment
Four different AI models examine the image for visual anomalies humans would notice: melted faces, impossible physics, inconsistent lighting, architectural impossibilities.3: Web Verification
Reverse image search via Google Cloud Vision. Finds original sources, checks news coverage, identifies if the image has been debunked or verified elsewhere.4: Evidence Synthesis
Multi-model voting. Context-aware verdict. A borderline score from the forensic detector gets overruled by visual evidence from the LLM. Not just better math — added judgment.«
Built with the help of Claude Code – so it’s AI being used to tell on AI.
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The technologies changing how you’ll watch the 2026 Winter Olympic Games • WIRED
Mila Fiordalisi:
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DURING THE 2024 Summer Olympics in Paris, 5G and 4K were the leading technologies available to many viewers. There was some AI, but it was mostly used for athletes’ benefit. For the 2026 Milano Cortina Winter Games there will be more technology than ever, for both athletes and fans.
Much of that technology has never been used at the Games before, says Yiannis Exarchos, the managing director of Olympic Broadcasting Services and executive director of Olympic Channel Services. The two organizations are responsible for producing much of the television, radio, and digital coverage, and content on Olympics.com. “In Milano Cortina, people will have unprecedented experiences,” Exarchos says.
One of the big technologies coming to the Milano Cortina Olympics are first-person view, or FPV, drones. These radio-controlled aircraft transmit images from their onboard cameras in real time to “offer dynamic perspectives on the race tracks,” Exarchos explains.
This year’s Games will also be the first to offer 360-degree real-time replay. Offered as part of a collaboration with Alibaba, the system uses multi-camera replay systems and stoboscopic analysis to ofter multi-angle views, freeze frames, and slow-motion images of athlete’s incredible moves.
Another first is a new tracking system for curling stones. “It will be possible to view the path, speed, and rotation of each stone in real time,” Exarchos explains. Suspended rail cameras and ice-level views will help viewers understand the game better, as will detailed stone trajectory graphics and real-time data.
Alternatively, if you’ve got a question about this year’s Games? Olympic GPT is here to help. The bot specializes in producing content for the Olympics.com website. It’ll offer real-time results and information on sport regulations, and, for the first time, will have the ability to interact with questions about the results of ongoing competitions.
“Artificial-intelligence-based article summaries on Olympics.com will give fans a quick and clear overview,” Exarchos says. “They highlight key points to help users decide what to explore further, while also improving accessibility and reading from mobile devices.”
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The drones are amazing. The technological advances are remarkable.
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Is particle physics dead, dying, or just really hard? • Quanta Magazine
Natalie Wolchover:
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The Standard Model doesn’t include particles that could comprise dark matter, for instance. It doesn’t explain why matter dominates over antimatter in the universe, or why the Big Bang happened in the first place. Then there’s the inexplicably enormous disparity between the Higgs boson’s mass (which sets the physical scale of atoms) and the far higher mass-energy scale associated with quantum gravity, known as the Planck scale. The chasm between physical scales — atoms are vastly larger than the Planck scale — seems unstable and unnatural. In 1981, the great theorist Edward Witten thought of a solution (opens a new tab) for this “hierarchy problem”: Balance would be restored by the existence of additional elementary particles only slightly heavier than the Higgs boson. The Large Hadron Collider (LHC)’s collisions should have been energetic enough to conjure them.
But when protons raced both ways around the tunnel and crashed head-on, spraying debris into surrounding detectors, only the 25 particles of the Standard Model were observed. Nothing else showed up.
The absence of any “new physics” — particles or forces beyond the known ones — fomented a crisis. “Of course, it is disappointing,” the particle physicist Mikhail Shifman told me that fall of 2012. “We’re not gods. We’re not prophets. In the absence of some guidance from experimental data, how do you guess something about nature?”
Once the standard reasoning about the hierarchy problem had been shown to be wrong, there was no telling where new physics might be found. It could easily lie beyond the reach of experiments. The particle physicist Adam Falkowski predicted to me at the time that, without a way to search for heavier particles, the field would undergo a slow decay: “The number of jobs in particle physics will steadily decrease, and particle physicists will die out naturally.”
The crisis and its fallout made for years of interesting reporting, but sure enough, the frequency of news stories related to particle physics diminished. I fell out of touch with sources. More than 13 years on, in this first column for Qualia, a new series of essays in Quanta Magazine, I’m taking stock. Is particle physics dying, as Falkowski predicted?
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Particle physics undergoing a slow decay is a brutal joke. But the cost of making colliders goes up, rather like that of semoconductor fabrication plants, except people can immediately use what comes out of fabs. Collider discoveries take rather more time to be applicable.
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| • Why do social networks drive us a little mad? • Why does angry content seem to dominate what we see? • How much of a role do algorithms play in affecting what we see and do online? • What can we do about it? • Did Facebook have any inkling of what was coming in Myanmar in 2016? Read Social Warming, my latest book, and find answers – and more. |
Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified
The Overspill: when there's more that I want to say 