GitHub will begin charging $0.002 per minute for self-hosted Actions runners used on private repositories starting in March. "At the same time, GitHub noted in a Tuesday blog post that it's lowering the prices of GitHub-hosted runners beginning January 1, under a scheme it calls 'simpler pricing and a better experience for GitHub Actions,'" reports The Register. "Self-hosted runner usage on public repositories will remain free." From the report: Regardless of the public repo distinction, enterprise-scale developers who rely on self-hosted runners were predictably not pleased about the announcement. "Github have just sent out an email announcing a $0.002/minute fee for self-hosted runners," Reddit user markmcw posted on the DevOps subreddit. "Just ran the numbers, and for us, that's close to $3.5k a month extra on our GitHub bill." [...]

"Historically, self-hosted runner customers were able to leverage much of GitHub Actions' infrastructure and services at no cost," the repo host said in its blog FAQ. "This meant that the cost of maintaining and evolving these essential services was largely being subsidized by the prices set for GitHub-hosted runners." The move, GitHub said, will align costs more closely with usage. Like many similar changes to pricing models pushed by tech firms, GitHub says "the vast majority of users ... will see no price increase."

GitHub claims that 96 percent of its customers will see no change to their bill, and that 85 percent of the 4 percent affected by the pricing update will actually see their Actions costs decrease. The company says the remaining 15 percent of impacted users will face a median increase of about $13 a month. For those using self-hosted runners and worried about increased costs, GitHub has updated its pricing calculator to include the cost of self-hosted runners.

The conventional wisdom that English prose has gotten easier to read because sentences have gotten shorter is wrong, according to a new analysis published in Works in Progress by writer and Mercatus Center research fellow Henry Oliver. The real transformation happened centuries ago in the 1500s and 1600s when Bible translators like William Tyndale and Thomas Cranmer developed a "plain style" built on logical syntax rather than the older rhythmic, periodic structures inherited from medieval prose.

Oliver argues that much of what modern datasets measure as declining sentence length is actually just changing punctuation habits. Writers now use periods where earlier generations used colons and semicolons. One dataset shows semicolon usage dropped from one every 90 words in 1781 to one every 390 words today. The cognitive complexity of a paragraph often remains the same regardless of how it's punctuated. Even wildly popular modern books don't follow the "short sentences equal readable" formula. Oliver points to Onyx Storm, the 2025 fantasy novel that has sold tens of millions of copies, which opens with sentences of 24 and 30 words. The 30-word sentence has a subordinate clause twice as long as its main clause. The book reads easily not because sentences are short but because the language is plain and the syntax is logical.

FCC Chairman Brendan Carr said in his Wednesday Senate testimony that the agency he governs "is not an independent agency, formally speaking." Axios: During his testimony, the word "independent" was removed from the FCC's mission statement on its website. The extraordinary statement speaks to a broader trend of regulatory agencies losing power to the executive branch during the Trump era. Last week, the Supreme Court appeared poised to allow President Trump to fire members of the Federal Trade Commission during oral arguments over the issue.

Sen. Ben Ray LujÃn (D-N.M.) began the line of questioning, citing the FCC's website, which said the agency was independent as of Wednesday morning. By Wednesday afternoon, the FCC's mission statement no longer said it was independent. Chairman Carr would not respond directly to questions about whether he believed the president was his boss. He would not answer whether it's appropriate if the president were to pressure him to go after media companies. He suggested the president has the power to fire him and other FCC commissioners.

Coursera announced on Wednesday that it will acquire rival online learning platform Udemy in an all-stock deal that values the combined company at $2.5 billion, a move that brings together two of the largest U.S.-based players in an industry that has struggled since pandemic-era enrollment highs faded. Under the terms of the agreement, Udemy shareholders will receive 0.8 shares of Coursera for each share they hold, valuing Udemy at roughly $930 million. Based on Coursera's last closing price, the offer works out to $6.35 per Udemy share, an 18.3% premium. The deal is expected to close in the second half of next year, pending regulatory and shareholder approvals.

The two companies are betting that a combined platform will be better positioned to pursue corporate customers seeking to retrain workers in artificial intelligence, data science and software development. Coursera has built its business on partnerships with universities and institutions to offer degree programs and professional certificates, while Udemy operates a marketplace where independent instructors sell courses directly to consumers and businesses. Both stocks have significantly underperformed this year. Udemy shares have fallen about 35% and Coursera is down roughly 7%, leaving both trading well below their post-IPO highs as investors remain cautious about competition and pricing pressure in the sector.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the New York Times: Two of the largest food-delivery app companies have made a last-ditch effort to overturn tipping laws in New York City that go into effect in January just as its next mayor, who has been highly critical of the companies and the app industry, takes office. Tips to delivery workers have plummeted since some food-delivery apps switched to showing the tipping option only after a purchase had been completed; that change came after New York City established the country's first minimum pay-rate for the workers in 2023. The new laws will require the apps to suggest a minimum tip of 10 percent at checkout, though customers can contribute more or less, or nothing at all.

Two of the app companies, DoorDash and Uber, filed a joint federal lawsuit in the Southern District of New York late last week targeting the City Council legislation, arguing that the new rules violated the First Amendment by requiring them to "speak a government-mandated message" and exceeded the Council's authority. Although tipping will be optional under the law, the companies wrote in the suit that a "mandated pre-delivery 10 percent tip suggestion" would cause customers to use the app less because they were suffering from "tipping fatigue." "Lessened engagement would result in fewer orders," the suit said.

A new Arctic Report Card recap shows how the Arctic has transformed in just 20 years, warming about twice as fast as the global average and losing most of its oldest sea ice. It's also triggering cascading impacts from "Atlantification" to permafrost-driven "rusting rivers" and more destructive storms. Scientific American reports: The first Arctic Report Card was released by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in 2006. Since then the region has warmed twice as fast as the global average. About 95 percent of the oldest, thickest sea ice is gone -- "the sliver that remains is collected in an area north of Greenland. Even the central Arctic Ocean is becoming warmer and saltier, causing more ice melt and changing how much heat is released into the atmosphere in a way that affects weather patterns around the world. Those are just some of the stark changes 20 years have wrought. The findings were highlighted in the 2025 Arctic Report Card, released on Tuesday.

The Arctic Ocean is undergoing what scientists are calling "Atlantification" -- a process where warm, salty water from the Atlantic flows north, changing how waters of different temperatures and densities are layered in the Arctic, disrupting ecosystems and altering how heat moves from the water to the air. [...] The Arctic is simply becoming wetter, with more precipitation falling as rain instead of snow. June snow cover over the entire Arctic is half of what it was 60 years ago, the report found. Permafrost also continues to thaw, releasing once trapped carbon into the atmosphere and disgorging iron and other elements that have turned rivers and streams orange. These "rusting rivers," found in more than 200 watersheds, are more acidic than normal and have elevated levels of toxic metals that endanger local ecosystems. And as the permafrost thaws, the tundra of the Arctic biome is shrinking, and the boreal forest biome is creeping northward, disrupting ecosystems.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Guardian: Mark Carney says that amid a fundamental shift to the nature of globalization, his government will catalyze the growth in both the public and private sector. But Canadian linguists say that's a problem. Language experts have called out the Canadian prime minister's growing "utilization" of British spellings in key documents -- including the recent federal budget and a press release issued following a meeting with Donald Trump.

Carney, who served as the governor of the bank of England for seven years, appears to have run afoul of Canadian linguistic norms, returning to his home country with a penchant for using 's' instead of 'z'- a hallmark of British spellings. In an open letter (PDF) chastising the prime minister, six linguists have asked his office, the Canadian government and parliament to stick to Canadian English spelling, "which is the spelling they consistently used from the 1970s to 2025." They warned that if governments start to use other systems for spelling, "this could lead to confusion about which spelling is Canadian."

Canadian English is a source of immense pride for the nation's pedants. But the country's distinct and somewhat arbitrary spelling reflects the legacy of how Canada was colonized. "Canadian English evolved through Loyalist settlement after the American Revolutionary War, subsequent waves of English, Scottish, Welsh and Irish immigration, and from European and global contexts," the letter says, with the current accepted spellings of words reflecting "global influences and cultures from around the world represented in our population, as well as containing words and phrases from Indigenous languages." The linguists pointed out that Canada's distinct style of spelling was widespread in media and government documents, with this deliberate decision reflecting a desire to preserve a vital element of the country's "national history, identity and pride."

Intel has quietly stopped maintaining its open-source user-space driver stack for Gaudi accelerators. Phoronix reports: It turns out earlier this year Intel archived the SynapseAI Core open-source code and is no longer maintained by Intel. The open-source Synapse AI Core GitHub repository was archived in February and README updated with: "This project will no longer be maintained by Intel. Intel has ceased development and contributions including, but not limited to, maintenance, bug fixes, new releases, or updates, to this project. Intel no longer accepts patches to this project. If you have an ongoing need to use this project, are interested in independently developing it, or would like to maintain patches for the open source software community, please create your own fork of this project."

U.S. officials excoriated the European Union for discriminating against American technology companies and threatened to penalize European tech companies in return, in a social media post on Tuesday. From a report: The pronouncement appeared to signal a rockier period for U.S.-E.U. trade relations, as the two governments work to finalize a trade framework they announced this year. The United States has been pushing Europe to open up its tech sector to American firms. But U.S. officials have complained that the European Union has not walked back broader regulation of company business practices while also proceeding with investigations of major American tech firms like Google, X, Amazon and Meta.

In a social media post, the Office of the United States Trade Representative, which has carried out the negotiations, said that the European Union and some member states had "persisted in a continuing course of discriminatory and harassing lawsuits, taxes, fines and directives" against American companies.

The United States had raised concerns with the European Union about these issues for years "without meaningful engagement," all while allowing European companies to operate freely in the United States, it said. If the European Union continues these policies, the United States would "have no choice but to begin using every tool at its disposal to counter these unreasonable measures," the U.S.T.R. said. It named fees and restrictions on service companies among the possibilities, and said it would use the same approach against other countries that echoed Europe's strategy.

The post singled out potential European service providers that could be targeted by name, listing Accenture, DHL, Mistral, SAP, Siemens and Spotify, among others.

The traditional signals that employers used to evaluate entry-level job candidates -- college GPAs, cover letters, and interview performance -- have lost much of their value as grade inflation and widespread AI use render these metrics nearly meaningless, writes The Atlantic.

The recent-graduate unemployment rate now sits slightly higher than the overall workforce's, a reversal from historical norms where new college graduates were more likely to be employed than the average worker. Job postings on Handshake, a career-services platform for students and recent graduates, have fallen by more than 16 percent in the past year. At Harvard, 60% of undergraduate grades are now A's, up from fewer than a quarter two decades ago. Seven years ago, 70% of new graduates' resumes were screened by GPA; that figure has dropped to 40%.

Two working papers examining Freelancer.com found that cover-letter quality once strongly predicted who would get hired and how well they would perform -- until ChatGPT became available. "We basically find the collapse of this entire signaling mechanism," researcher Jesse Silbert said. The average number of applications per open job has increased by 26% in the past year. Students at UC Berkeley are now applying to 150 internships just to land one or two interviews.

Mozilla has named Anthony Enzor-DeMeo as its new chief executive, promoting the executive who has spent the past year leading the Firefox browser team and who now plans to make AI central to the company's future.

Enzor-DeMeo announced on Tuesday that an "AI Mode" is coming to Firefox next year. The feature will let users choose from multiple AI models rather than being locked into a single provider. Some options will be open-source models, others will be private "Mozilla-hosted cloud options," and the company also plans to integrate models from major AI companies. Mozilla itself will not train its own large language model.

"We're not incentivized to push one model or the other," Enzor-DeMeo told The Verge. Firefox currently has about 200 million monthly users, a fraction of Chrome's roughly 4 billion, though Enzor-DeMeo insists mobile usage is growing at a decent clip.

He takes over from interim CEO Laura Chambers, who led the company through a major antitrust case and what Mozilla describes as "double-digit mobile growth" in Firefox. Chambers is returning to the Mozilla board of directors. The new CEO has outlined three priorities: ensuring all products give users control over AI features including the ability to turn them off, building a business model around transparent monetization, and expanding Firefox into a broader ecosystem of trusted software. Mozilla VPN integration is planned for the browser next year.

PayPal has applied to become a US bank by forming a Utah-chartered industrial loan company, signaling a push to deepen its financial services "as companies rush to capitalize on a friendly regulatory environment under the Trump administration," reports Reuters. From the report: If approved, the move will help PayPal to strengthen its lending offerings to small businesses in the U.S. as well as reduce its reliance on third parties. "Securing capital remains a significant hurdle for small businesses striving to grow and scale," said PayPal CEO Alex Chriss. "Establishing PayPal Bank will strengthen our business and improve our efficiency, enabling us to better support small business growth and economic opportunities across the U.S."

PayPal also plans to offer interest-bearing savings accounts to customers. The company has provided over $30 billion in loans and capital since 2013, it said. [...] PayPal has selected Mara McNeill to serve as PayPal Bank's president. She comes with over two decades of experience in banking and commercial lending, and has previously served as the CEO of Toyota Financial Savings Bank.

A new study warns that glaciers in the European Alps will hit their peak extinction rate within eight years, with global glacier loss accelerating toward thousands per year unless emissions are rapidly cut. "Glaciers in the western US and Canada are forecast to reach their peak year of loss less than a decade later, with more than 800 disappearing each year by then," adds the Guardian. From the report: About 200,000 glaciers remain worldwide, with about 750 disappearing each year. However, the research indicates this pace will accelerate rapidly as emissions from burning fossil fuels continue to be released into the atmosphere. Current climate action plans from governments are forecast to push global temperatures to about 2.7C above preindustrial levels, supercharging extreme weather. Under this scenario, glacier losses would peak at about 3,000 a year in 2040 and plateau at that rate until 2060. By the end of the century, 80% of today's glaciers will have gone. By contrast, rapid cuts to carbon emissions to keep global temperature rise to 1.5C would cap annual losses at about 2,000 a year in 2040, after which the rate would decline. [...]

The new study, published in Nature Climate Change, analyzed more than 200,000 glaciers from a database of outlines derived from satellite images. The researchers used three global glacier models to assess their fate under different heating scenarios. Regions with the smallest and fastest-melting glaciers were found to be the most vulnerable. The study estimates the 3,200 glaciers in central Europe would shrink by 87% by 2100 -- even if global temperature rise is limited to 1.5C, rising to 97% under 2.7C of heating.

In the western US and Canada, including Alaska, about 70% of today's 45,000 glaciers are projected to vanish under 1.5C of heating, and more than 90% under 2.7C. The Caucasus and southern Andes are also expected to face devastating losses. Larger glaciers take longer to melt, with those in Greenland reaching their peak extinction rate in about 2063 -- losing 40% by 2100 under 1.5C of heating and 59% under 2.7C. However, the melting is forecast to continue beyond 2100. The researchers said the peak loss dates represent more than a numerical milestone. "They mark turning points with profound implications for ecosystems, water resources and cultural heritage," they wrote. "[It is] a human story of vanishing landscapes, fading traditions and disrupted daily routines."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Wall Street Journal: JPMorgan Chase is joining the list of traditional financial firms seeking to bring blockchain technology to an investing staple: the money-market fund. The banking giant's $4 trillion asset-management arm is rolling out its first tokenized money-market fund on the Ethereum blockchain. JPMorgan will seed the fund with $100 million of its own capital, and then open it to outside investors on Tuesday. Called My OnChain Net Yield Fund, or "MONY," the private fund is supported by JPMorgan's tokenization platform, Kinexys Digital Assets, and will be open to qualified investors, or individuals with at least $5 million in investments and institutions with a minimum of $25 million. The fund has a $1 million investment minimum.

Wall Street has waded deeper into tokenization since the passage of the Genius Act earlier this year. The landmark measure, which establishes a regulatory framework for tokenized dollars known as stablecoins, has unleashed a wave of efforts to tokenize everything from stocks and bonds to funds and real assets. "There is a massive amount of interest from clients around tokenization," said John Donohue, head of global liquidity at J.P. Morgan Asset Management. "And we expect to be a leader in this space and work with clients to make sure that we have a product lineup that allows them to have the choices that we have in traditional money-market funds on blockchain."

One of the most water-scarce regions on Earth is now experiencing a dramatic atmospheric shift that's pushing moisture onto Oman's northern coast at rates more than 1.5 times the global average, according to a Washington Post investigation of global atmospheric data [non-paywalled source]. The change has turned extreme rainfall into a recurrent source of catastrophe across the Arabian Peninsula. In the 126 years between 1881 and 2007, just six hurricane-strength storms hit Oman or came within 60 miles of the country. At least four more have made landfall in the past 15 years alone.

Research from Sultan Qaboos University analyzing 8,000 storms across 69 rainfall stations found that half of all rain in Oman falls within the first 90 minutes of a 24-hour storm. These intense bursts quickly overwhelm the desert's ability to absorb water and send flash floods racing through wadis -- normally dry riverbeds where many communities are built. In response, Dubai is constructing an $8 billion underground stormwater network spanning more than 120 miles. Oman has agreements to build 58 new dams and is studying 14 major wadis that funnel to its al-Batinah coastline.

The Trump administration announced Monday the United States Tech Force, a new program to recruit around 1,000 technologists for two-year government stints starting as soon as March -- less than a year after dismantling several federal technology teams and driving thousands of tech workers out of their jobs.

The program will primarily recruit early-career software engineers and data scientists, paying between $150,000 and $200,000 annually. About 20 companies have signed on to participate, including Palantir, Meta, Oracle and Elon Musk's xAI. Some engineering managers will be allowed to take leaves of absence from their private-sector employers to join the program without divesting their stock holdings.

The initiative follows the March closure of 18F, General Services Administration's internal tech consultancy, and the shuttering of the Social Security Administration's Office of Transformation in February. The IRS had lost over 2,000 tech workers by June.

Sixty years after a team of American and Indian climbers abandoned a plutonium-powered generator on the slopes of Nanda Devi, one of the world's most forbidding Himalayan peaks, the U.S. government still refuses to acknowledge that the mission ever happened. The device, a SNAP-19C portable generator containing plutonium isotopes including Pu-239 -- the same material used in the Nagasaki bomb -- was left behind in October 1965 when a sudden blizzard forced climbers to retreat from Camp Four, just below the summit.

The mission originated from a cocktail party conversation between General Curtis LeMay and National Geographic photographer Barry Bishop, who had summited Everest in 1963. China had just detonated its first atomic bomb in October 1964, and the CIA wanted to intercept radio signals from Chinese missile tests by placing an unmanned listening station atop the Himalayas. Barry Bishop recruited elite American climbers and coordinated with Indian intelligence to haul surveillance equipment up the mountain.

Captain M.S. Kohli, the Indian naval officer commanding the mission, ordered climbers to secure the equipment and descend when the blizzard struck. Jim McCarthy, the last surviving American climber, recalled warning Kohli he was making a mistake. "You can't leave plutonium by a glacier feeding into the Ganges!" he recalled. "Do you know how many people depend on the Ganges?" When teams returned in spring 1966, the entire ice ledge where the gear had been stashed was gone -- sheared off by an avalanche. Search missions in 1967 and 1968 found nothing.

The device remains buried somewhere in the glaciers that feed tributaries of the Ganges River.

An anonymous reader shared this report from the BBC: A billionaire investor keen on buying TikTok's US operations has told the BBC he has been left in limbo as the latest deadline for the app's sale looms.

The US has repeatedly delayed the date by which the platform's Chinese owner, Bytedance, must sell or be blocked for American users. US President Donald Trump appears poised to extend the deadline for a fifth time on Tuesday. "We're just standing by and waiting to see what happens," investor Frank McCourt told BBC News...

The president...said "sophisticated" US investors would acquire the app, including two of his allies: Oracle chairman Larry Ellison and Dell Technologies' Michael Dell. Members of the Trump administration had indicated the deal would be formalised in a meeting between Trump and Xi in October — however it concluded without an agreement being reached. Neither TikTok's Chinese owner ByteDance nor Beijing have since announced approval of a sale, despite Trump's claims. This time there are no such claims a deal is imminent, leading most analysts to conclude another extension is inevitable.
Other investors besides McCourt include Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian and Shark Tank entrepreneur Kevin O'Leary.

"Polar bears are still sadly expected to go extinct this century," with two-thirds of the population gone by 2050," says the lead researcher on a new study from the University of East Anglia in Britain.

But their research also suggests polar bears "are rapidly rewiring their own genetics in a bid to survive," reports NBC News, in "the first documented case of rising temperatures driving genetic change in a mammal." "I believe our work really does offer a glimmer of hope — a window of opportunity for us to reduce our carbon emissions to slow down the rate of climate change and to give these bears more time to adapt to these stark changes in their habitats," [the lead author of the study told NBC News].

Building on earlier University of Washington research, [lead researcher] Godden's team analyzed blood samples from polar bears in northeastern and southeastern Greenland. In the slightly warmer south, they found that genes linked to heat stress, aging and metabolism behaved differently from those in northern bears. "Essentially this means that different groups of bears are having different sections of their DNA changed at different rates, and this activity seems linked to their specific environment and climate," Godden said in a university press release. She said this shows, for the first time, that a unique group of one species has been forced to "rewrite their own DNA," adding that this process can be considered "a desperate survival mechanism against melting sea ice...."

Researchers say warming ocean temperatures have reduced vital sea ice platforms that the bears use to hunt seals, leading to isolation and food scarcity. This led to genetic changes as the animals' digestive system adapts to a diet of plants and low fats in the absence of prey, Godden told NBC News.

America's solar industry "just delivered another huge quarter," reports Electrek, "installing 11.7 gigawatts (GW) of new capacity in Q3 2025. That makes it the third-largest quarter on record and pushes total solar additions this year past 30 GW..." According to the new "US Solar Market Insight Q4 2025" report from Solar Energy Industries Association (SEIA) and Wood Mackenzie, 85% of all new power added to the grid during the first nine months of the Trump administration came from solar and storage. And here's the twist: Most of that growth — 73% — happened in red [Republican-leaning] states. Eight of the top 10 states for new installations fall into that category, including Texas, Indiana, Florida, Arizona, Ohio, Utah, Kentucky, and Arkansas...

Two new solar module factories opened this year in Louisiana and South Carolina, adding a combined 4.7 GW of capacity. That brings the total new U.S. module manufacturing capacity added in 2025 to 17.7 GW. With a new wafer facility coming online in Michigan in Q3, the U.S. can now produce every major component of the solar module supply chain...

SEIA also noted that, following an analysis of EIA data, it found that more than 73 GW of solar projects across the U.S. are stuck in permitting limbo and at risk of politically motivated delays or cancellations.