Posts

Posted on

The Bright Headlight Problem Crash Reports Can’t See

https://www.autoblog.com/news/the-bright-headlight-problem-crash-reports-cant-see

Anyone who has driven at night recently knows the feeling. An oncoming SUV crests the hill, its LED headlights blazing, and for a moment, the road ahead disappears entirely. You squint, you look away, and then you carry on, rattled and blinking. And yet, according to IIHS crash data, this experience barely exists. Lawmakers in both Canada and the United States have started paying attention to that experience, pushing for tighter regulation on headlight brightness in recent years. The public frustration is widespread and only growing louder.

The response from safety researchers, however, has been dim in contrast. The IIHS examined crash data from 2015 to 2023 across multiple states and found that glare was cited in only one or two out of every 1,000 nighttime crashes. The IIHS interpretation is clear enough: better illumination saves lives, and dialing it back to please annoyed commuters would create bigger problems than it solves. On its own terms, that argument is hard to dismiss. But it sidesteps a quieter issue that is accumulating its own body of evidence.

When the Harm Doesn’t Show Up in Crash Reports

The problem with measuring glare purely through collision data is that many of its most damaging effects never register as direct causes. Discomfort glare, by definition, does not directly impair visual performance in the same way that disability glare does. Instead, it produces subjective discomfort, fatigue, and annoyance, which can lead to behavioural adaptations such as looking away or excessive blinking. A driver who looks away from an oncoming vehicle to protect their eyes is not going to show up in a crash report as a glare statistic, even if the behaviour contributed to a near miss.

Getty

The Fatigue Link Researchers Are Quietly Building

Research has found that exposure to headlamp illumination appears to have measurable impacts on driving behaviours associated with stress, distraction, and fatigue, including reductions in speed and lateral drift in lane position. In a large UK survey by the RAC and the College of Optometrists, nearly a fifth of motorists who still drive at night say bright headlights leave them feeling tired and fatigued while driving, while 16 percent reported headaches, migraines, or eye pain. Fatigue, of course, is among the most dangerous conditions a driver can be in, and it almost never gets attributed to oncoming headlights when a crash eventually occurs.

Mercedes-Benz

A Problem That Is Shrinking People’s Lives

Beyond fatigue, the scale of behavioural change being driven by headlight glare deserves more attention than a footnote in a crash report. RAC research shows that a quarter of drivers affected by glare are either driving less at night or have stopped altogether, rising to 43 percent among those aged 75 and above. Cognitive overload from dealing with glare forces drivers to divert attention away from where it needs to be.

In other words, the argument that glare is not meaningfully causing crashes may be technically accurate while completely missing what glare is actually doing to millions of people on the road every night. From elderly people losing independence to drivers feeling more fatigued at night than usual, the impact is real.

The IIHS is not wrong that better headlights save lives. But if the defence of brighter lights requires ignoring the fact that so many drivers are rearranging their lives around them, you might want to check whether the data is actually measuring the full cost, or just the parts that end up in a police report.

via Autoblog https://ift.tt/ws4PzUT

February 19, 2026 at 09:33AM

Posted on

These 3 popular password managers are insecure, researchers find

https://www.pcworld.com/article/3063480/these-3-popular-password-managers-are-insecure-researchers-find.html

Bitwarden, LastPass, and Dashlane are less secure than you might expect, at least if you go by the findings of security researchers at ETH Zurich and the Università della Svizzera italiana (USI) in Lugano.

They’ve allegedly discovered serious security vulnerabilities in these popular password managers. “In tests, they were able to view and even change stored passwords,” writes the editor (machine translated).

Why are they vulnerable?

Many password managers store passwords in encrypted form in the cloud. The advantage of this is that you can access your passwords across all your devices, no matter where you are. The important bit is that your passwords are encrypted, which guarantees that those passwords are secure against unauthorized access. Even if hackers gain access to the password manager’s servers, the encryption will thwart them.

But Swiss security researchers found vulnerabilities in popular password managers Bitwarden, LastPass, and Dashlane: “[The researchers’] attacks ranged from breaches of the integrity of targeted user vaults to the complete compromise of all vaults of an organization using the service. In most cases, the researchers were able to gain access to the passwords—and even manipulate them.”

The researchers demonstrated 12 attacks on Bitwarden, 7 on LastPass, and 6 on Dashlane. To do this, they set up their own servers that behaved like a hacked password manager server. The researchers then initiated “simple interactions that users or their browsers routinely perform when using the password manager, such as logging into the account, opening the vault, viewing passwords, or synchronizing data.”

The researchers found “very bizarre code architectures,” which were probably created because the companies were trying to “offer their customers the most user-friendly service possible, for example the ability to recover passwords or share their account with family members.”

This not only makes the code architectures more complex and confusing, but ends up increasing the number of potential attack points for hackers. The security researchers warn: “Such attacks don’t require particularly powerful computers and servers, just small programs that can spoof the server’s identity.”

Before publishing their findings, the researchers informed each password manager so they’d have enough time to fix the flaws. They all responded positively, but not all fixed the flaws at the same speed.

Blame it on outdated encryption methods

According to the researchers, the reason for the vulnerabilities is obvious: “Discussions with password manager developers have revealed their reluctance to release system updates, fearing their customers could lose access to their passwords and other personal data. These customers include millions of individuals and thousands of companies that entrust their entire password management to these providers. One can imagine the consequences of suddenly losing access to their data. Therefore, many providers cling to cryptographic technologies from the 1990s, even though these are long outdated.”

The only solution to this dilemma is for all password managers to be cryptographically updated, at least for new customers. Existing customers could then decide for themselves “whether they want to migrate to the new, more secure system and transfer their passwords there, or whether they want to remain with the old system—aware of the existing security vulnerabilities.”

What should you do?

The researchers reassure us that there’s no immediate danger, say they have “no reason to believe that password manager providers are currently malicious or compromised, and as long as this remains the case, your passwords are safe. However, password managers are high-profile targets, and security breaches do occur.”

Anyone considering a password manager should choose a password manager “that openly discloses potential security vulnerabilities, is externally audited, and has end-to-end encryption enabled by default.”

We recommend: NordPass

NordPass




Best Prices Today:

$1.29 at NordPass

Further reading: The best password managers, reviewed

via PCWorld https://www.pcworld.com

February 17, 2026 at 11:10AM

Posted on

Scientists Discover Time Crystals You Can Hold—and They Levitate

https://gizmodo.com/scientists-discover-time-crystals-you-can-hold-and-they-levitate-2000721148

Last year, physicists created a time crystal—atomic arrangements repeating motion patterns—visible to the naked eye. But the latest research on this quantum eccentricity might represent more than a few steps forward.

This time crystal, described in a recent Physical Review Letters paper, is big enough to be held in your hand, and it levitates. Discovered by a team of physicists at New York University (NYU), the new type of time crystal consists of styrofoam-like beads that levitate on a cushion of sound while exchanging sound waves.

If that wasn’t strange enough, the time crystal does this by violating Newtonian physics—and the team believes that gives the new crystal both academic and practical significance.

“This was a discovery in the truest sense,” David G. Grier, the study’s senior author and a physicist at NYU, told Gizmodo. “Perhaps the most remarkable thing is that such rich and interesting behavior emerges from such a simple system.”

What are time crystals?

In 2012, Nobel laureate Frank Wilczek pitched an idea for an impossible crystal breaking the rules of symmetry in physics. Typically, solid crystals maintain a continuous lattice of their respective components. Time crystals, however, do the exact opposite, with the individual atoms inside them changing positions over time in a relatively defined pattern.

In the past decade or so, physicists have managed to find varying versions of Wilczek’s vision. But these instances mostly featured short-term, microscopic time crystals with little practical implications. It was only last year that one team at the University of Colorado Boulder proposed a time crystal design that we can actually see.

Styrofoam finds a new quirk

Nyu Time Crystal Levitation Setup
The setup of the new time crystal system. A bead (purple) is suspended in mid-air by sound waves emanating from (black) circular speakers arranged in a six-inch-tall 3D-printed frame. Credit: NYU Center for Soft Matter Research

The newly discovered time crystal may represent huge advances in the practical relevance of time crystals. For one, the bead in the experiment is expanded polystyrene—the same material used for packing styrofoam.

The team turned this common material into a time crystal by suspending styrofoam beads in sound waves. By itself, the bead floats motionlessly, but things begin to change once multiple beads levitate together.

In this system, each bead scatters its own share of sound waves. That contributes to an overall system of “unbalanced interactions” that essentially allows the particles to harvest and supply energy from the sound waves, Grier explained. “The key point is that time crystals select their own frequency without being told what to do by any external force.”

The simplest of them all?

What’s more, these interactions aren’t bound to Newton’s third law of motion, which dictates that two bodies exerting force on each other must exert the same amount of force in opposite directions.

“Think of two ferries of different sizes approaching a dock,” Mia Morrell, the study’s lead author and a graduate student at NYU, said in a university statement. “Each one makes water waves that push the other one around—but to different degrees, depending on their size.”

Time Crystals Nyu Stop Motion
A stop-motion image that shows pairs of millimeter-scale beads forming a time crystal over approximately one-third of a second in time. The colors represent the beads interacting at different stages during this period. Credit: NYU Center for Soft Matter Research

According to Grier, the sheer simplicity of this time crystal setup potentially makes it the “hydrogen atom” for this phenomenon—highlighting its potential across other contexts, such as “the neural pacemakers in our hearts to cyclic trends in financial markets.”

“We’re hoping that studying a minimal model will provide access to the deepest insights into the spontaneous emergence of clocks in more general and more complex manifestations,” he added.

via Gizmodo https://gizmodo.com/

February 13, 2026 at 05:08AM

Posted on

The EVs That Handle Extreme Cold Best Aren’t Sold in the US

https://www.autoblog.com/news/the-evs-that-handle-extreme-cold-best-arent-sold-in-the-us

Extreme Winter Cold Greatly Affects EV Range

Cold weather is still one of the biggest real-world hurdles for EVs. When temperatures drop, battery chemistry slows down, internal resistance goes up, and the car has to work harder just to keep the battery and cabin warm. Even with the latest thermal management tech, range loss is something you can’t fully escape.

To see just how much cold weather hits EV range, Norwegian publication Motor ran its annual winter test. They took a wide mix of EVs through snowy highways and mountain roads, with temperatures dropping to -31°C (-24°F). According to the publication, each car was driven in normal conditions until it couldn’t safely go any farther.

At the end of the test, every EV in the test fell short of its certified range, and plenty lost more than a third of what’s promised. Of note, WLTP ratings, used in Europe, are more generous than US EPA numbers.

But here’s what really stood out: it wasn’t about which EV went the farthest, but which ones came closest to their rated range. And most of those top performers aren’t sold in the US.

Lucid

Highlights from the Test

Motor’s results highlight how much winter can cut into range, even for high-end, long-range EVs. The Lucid Air managed the longest real-world run at 323 miles, but that’s still a 46 percent drop from its 597-mile WLTP rating. The Mercedes-Benz CLA went from 441 miles to 262, a 41 percent hit. The Audi A6 e-tron dropped from 406 miles to 250, losing 38 percent.

Other big-name EVs saw the same kind of drop. The BMW iX managed 241 miles, down from a 398-mile WLTP figure – a 39 percent loss. The Tesla Model Y hit 223 miles versus its 391-mile rating, down 43 percent. Even the new Hyundai Ioniq 9 only managed 230 miles on an official 373-mile range, a 38 percent decline.


Least Affected EVs – All Not Sold in America

When ranked by percentage deviation rather than total distance, a different set of EVs emerges as the top performers. Compared to EVs that lost over 40 percent of their range, these models clearly have the edge in winter consistency. Most of them focus on smaller size, efficiency, and moderate power rather than headlining figures.

Model

WLTP Range (miles)

Achieved Range (miles)

Deviation

MG6S EV

301

214

-29%

Hyundai Inster

224

159

-29%

MG IM6

314

219

-30%

KGM Musso

235

163

-31%

Voyah Courage

273

186

-32%

Here’s the catch: none of these top winter performers are sold in America. Some are built in China, like the MGS6 EV; others are for Europe or select global markets, like the Hyundai Inster and KGM Musso. For now, American buyers can’t get their hands on the EVs that seem best suited for extreme cold.

Norway’s latest winter test drives home a simple point: if you live somewhere that’s cold for much of the year, range consistency matters more than big battery numbers.

Hyundai


View the 5 images of this gallery on the
original article

via Autoblog https://ift.tt/t729ZCD

February 17, 2026 at 11:05AM

Posted on

Earth orbit is getting crowded. Can this map of 1 million routes around our planet help prevent satellite collisions?

https://www.space.com/space-exploration/satellites/earth-orbit-is-getting-crowded-can-this-map-of-1-million-routes-around-our-planet-help-prevent-satellite-collisions

Space is getting crowded — nowadays, over 45,000 human-made objects orbit Earth. A portion of that figure is indeed represented by the thousands of satellites humans use for internet, GPS and other communications, but it also takes into account space junk from humanity’s previous space escapades.

Thus, figuring how to prevent collisions has become more important as space agencies continue to rocket new technology into low Earth orbit — and there’s already a brisk launch schedule planned for 2026. As such, researchers at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) in California have developed a new method for modeling orbits in cislunar space, which refers to the space between and around Earth and the moon.

"When you have a million orbits, you can get a really rich analysis using machine learning applications," LLNL scientist Denvir Higgins said in an announcement. "You can try to predict the lifetime of the orbit, try to predict stability or try to do anomaly detection to see if an orbit is moving in a strange way."

The researchers found that about half of the orbits they modeled remained stable for at least one year, and just under 10% remained stable for the full six years of the simulation.

"If you want to know where a satellite is in a week, there’s no equation that can actually tell you where it’s going to be," LLNL scientist Travis Yeager said in the release. "You have to step forward a little bit at a time."

The amount of computing power required to track a million obits over a six-year period in a simulated environment is significant. LLNL said they used 1.6 million CPU hours, which would take more than 182 years to process on a single computer. But using the lab’s Quartz and Ruby supercomputers, it only took three days to run the simulations.

Get the Space.com Newsletter

Breaking space news, the latest updates on rocket launches, skywatching events and more!

This work could be helpful in the future for determining busy intersections for satellites, LLNL says. The lab also noted that, as countries continue to launch satellites without worldwide coordination, this could be a useful tool.

via Latest from Space.com https://www.space.com

February 10, 2026 at 02:02PM

Posted on

How to clear space in your Google for free

https://www.popsci.com/diy/how-to-clear-space-in-google-for-free/

If Google keeps bothering you to pay for cloud storage, it’s not just you. You only get a relatively measly 15GB of storage free of charge with a Google account, and you have to split that across Gmail, Google Photos, and Google Drive.

That 15GB can fill up quickly, but it doesn’t have to. We’ve curated a few tricks to help trim down space in all three of these key Google apps. That can mean you won’t have to pay Google every month for file space in the cloud.

These tips focus on the various web apps, but you’ll find you can access the same features from the mobile apps too (though the buttons and menus may be laid out differently).

Gmail

In Gmail, scroll down to the bottom of your inbox and click the X% of X GB link to see how much space Gmail is using (the exact label will vary depending on your Gmail usage). Once you know the severity of the situation, you can start doing something about it.

The search box up at the top of the screen is your main tool here: Click the slider icon to the right of it to see your options. You can search for a particular sender, for example, or a particular email subject if there are groups of emails you know you no longer need. Use the Size field to look for large emails, and the Has attachment box to find emails with bulky files attached.

screenshot of gmail search options
You can search for emails based on size in Gmail. Screenshot: Google

Once a certain set of search results are shown—all the newsletters you’ve ever been sent from a particular site, for example—click the group selection box up in the top left corner, then click the Select all link at the top. With that done, you can click the trash can icon to delete all the messages at once.

You can also click All Mail (on the left) and then the older arrow (top right) to go back through time. It might take you a while to get all the way to the oldest emails in your inbox, but you can probably now do without a lot of them (note that there’s also a date option in the search panel).

Google Photos

Google Photos is actually pretty helpful when it comes to clearing out storage and saving you some room. You can see how much cloud storage space the app is taking up by clicking on the storage bar at the bottom of the left-hand navigation pane.

The same screen that tells you how much room Google Photos is taking up also gives you some suggestions for clearing out space. You might see links including Large photos and videos, Screenshots, Blurry photos, and Unsupported videos. Click on any of these links to see matching images and video clips, which can then be deleted if you want.

screenshot of google photo storage
Google Photos will give you some suggestions about what to delete. Screenshot: Google

There should also be a link labeled Convert existing photos and videos to Storage saver. Click on this to compress your existing photos and videos to free up space. Note that this is an operation that can’t be undone, so make sure you want to do it—you can follow the Learn more link to get information on exactly how it works.

Note that there won’t be any duplicates in Google Photos—the app makes sure these are filtered out automatically at the upload stage. You can of course use the standard search tool to find and delete photos and videos as well. Maybe search for a year or month and select the files you don’t really need any more via the check boxes. Use the trash can icon (top right) to delete them once selected.

Consider printing some of your favorite photos while you’re at it.

Google Drive

Over to Google Drive, and here you get the same storage bar on the left-hand navigation pane as you do in Google Photos. Click on the bar to see a breakdown of how your cloud storage space is being used up, including how much Google Drive accounts for.

Underneath the storage breakdown, you’ll see the biggest files currently saved in your Google Drive account, with the largest at the top. If you see anything you know you don’t need any more, you can click on the filename and then on the trash can icon at the top of the list, freeing up the space.

screenshot of google drive
Google Drive will show you the biggest files in your storage. Screenshot: Google

You can do your own investigating by clicking on the Home link on the left, then using the search bar up at the top: Click the sliders icon just to the right of the search bar to see all the options. You can look for particular types of files for example (like videos), or look for files older than a certain date.

On every search result page you can sort by Date modified (so you can quickly get to the oldest and most out of date files), and on every folder view you can sort by File size (so you can quickly get to the biggest files). If you need to delete entire folders at once, click on the folder name at the top of the screen, then Move to trash.

Use alternative apps

There is a strategy you can use across all of these apps to free up space, which is to use alternative apps. You could even use the Google apps to sync your files somewhere else (like your laptop), and then back them up in a different way using a method of your choice—maybe an external hard drive, perhaps.

You can easily download individual files and folders from Google Drive and Google Photos, but getting your emails out of Gmail is a little more difficult. One way of doing it is to use a desktop email client (instructions here), but bear in mind if you delete emails in Gmail the local copies will be deleted to, by default—if you want to keep them, export them first.

screenshot of google takeout
You can download all your files via Google Takeout. Screenshot: Google

There’s also the very useful Google Takeout service: From this web portal you can select Drive, Mail, and Google Photos to download everything from the three apps and save them to a local computer. When that’s done, you can delete files from the cloud (just make sure your computer copies have backups somewhere else).

For the most comprehensive clean out of your Google cloud storage, you’ll probably want to combine a few different methods for deleting your files—and these apps offer plenty of help along the way too. If you stay below the 15GB limit then it’s one less subscription to have to worry about or pay for.

The post How to clear space in your Google for free appeared first on Popular Science.

via Popular Science – New Technology, Science News, The Future Now https://www.popsci.com

February 7, 2026 at 07:41AM