An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Birds had to rediscover flight after the meteor strike that killed off the dinosaurs, scientists say. The cataclysm 66 million years ago not only wiped out Tyrannosaurus rex and ground-dwelling dinosaur species, but also flying birds, a detailed survey of the fossil record suggests. As forests burned around the world, the only birds to survive were flightless emu-like species that lived on the ground. The six to nine-mile-wide meteor struck the Earth off the coast of Mexico, releasing a million times more energy than the largest atomic bomb. Hot debris raining from the sky is thought to have triggered global wildfires immediately after the impact. It took hundreds or even thousands of years for the world's forests of palms and pines to recover. Fossil records from New Zealand, Japan, Europe and North America, all show evidence of mass deforestation. They also reveal that birds surviving the end of the Cretaceous period had long sturdy legs made for living on the ground. They resembled emus and kiwis, said the researchers whose findings are reported in the journal Current Biology.

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Search and rescue missions under way as authorities look for survivors after boat capsizes in Mombovo River.

The latest installment of Microsoft's browser battery challenge shows once again that Edge consumes less energy than Chrome and Firefox. From a report: With the Windows 10 April 2018 Update rolling out across the globe, Microsoft thinks it's once again time to square Edge up against Chrome and Firefox in a new battery-life test. Microsoft's browser experiment shows a time-lapse of "three identical devices, three different browsers, streaming one video." Firefox, Edge, and Chrome play what appears to be a Netflix video on three Surface Books. As usual, the Edge device lasts the longest, depleting the battery after 14 hours and 20 minutes. The Chrome device lasted 12 hours and 32 minutes, while the Firefox laptop ran out of steam after just seven hours and 15 minutes.

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Shaun Nichols, reporting for The Register: A group of German researchers have devised a method to thwart the VM security in AMD's server chips. Dubbed SEVered (PDF), the attack would potentially allow an attacker, or malicious admin who had access to the hypervisor, the ability to bypass AMD's Secure Encrypted Virtualization (SEV) protections. The problem, say Fraunhofer AISEC researchers Mathias Morbitzer, Manuel Huber, Julian Horsch and Sascha Wessel, is that SEV, which is designed to isolate VMs from the prying eyes of the hypervisor, doesn't fully isolate and encrypt the VM data within the physical memory itself.

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US President Donald Trump cancels much-awaited talks with North Korea's Kim Jong-un.

Amid period of talks over formation of new government, Al Jazeera speaks to Raed Fahmi, secretary of Communist Party.

The Trump administration told lawmakers the U.S. government has reached a deal to put Chinese telecommunications company ZTE Corp back in business, a senior congressional aide said on Friday. From a report: The deal, communicated to officials on Capitol Hill by the Commerce Department, requires ZTE to pay a substantial fine, place U.S. compliance officers at the company and change its management team, the aide said. The Commerce Department would then lift an order preventing ZTE from buying U.S. products. ZTE was banned in April from buying U.S. technology components for seven years for breaking an agreement reached after it violated U.S. sanctions against Iran and North Korea. The Commerce Department decision would allow it to resume business with U.S. companies, including chipmaker Qualcomm Inc.

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Specification of the MARC21 format

Interface with the Subsonic API

BSON serialization and deserialization

Several readers have shared an EuroGamer report: Just a week after the Santa Fe High School shooting in Texas that saw 10 people fatally shot and 13 others were wounded, Valve has come under fire for a Steam school-shooting game that encourages you to "hunt and destroy" children. Active Shooter, which at the time of publication is live on Steam and due for release on 6th June, is described by its developer as "a dynamic S.W.A.T. simulator." The idea is you're sent in to deal with a shooter at a school, but you can also play as the actual shooter, gunning down school children. Now, an anti-gun violence charity has called on Valve to pull the game from Steam. The developer of Active Shooter is called Revived Games, the publisher Acid. Revived Games' credits include White Power: Pure Voltage and Dab, Dance & Twerk. "Acid", who plans to add a survival mode in which you play as a civilian and have to "escape or perform a heroic action such as fight against the shooter itself," took to Active Shooter's Steam page to defend the game. "First of all, this game does not promote any sort of violence, especially any soft [sic] of a mass shooting," Acid said.

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Iran wants economic assurances to stay in nuclear deal and calls for specifics on how that would happen by end of May.

It has been nearly two weeks since researchers unveiled "EFAIL," a set of critical software vulnerabilities that allow encrypted email messages to be stolen from within the inbox. The Intercept reports that developers of email clients and encryption plugins are still scrambling to come up with a permanent fix. From the report: Apple Mail is the email client that comes free with every Mac computer, and an open source project called GPGTools allows Apple Mail to smoothly encrypt and decrypt messages using the 23-year-old PGP standard. The day the EFAIL paper was published, GPGTools instructed users to workaround EFAIL by changing a setting in Apple Mail to disable loading remote content. Similarly, the creator of PGP, Phil Zimmermann, co-signed a blog post Thursday stating that EFAIL was "easy to mitigate" by disabling the loading of remote content in GPGTools. But even if you follow this advice and disable remote content, Apple Mail and GPGTools are still vulnerable to EFAIL. I developed a proof-of-concept exploit that works against Apple Mail and GPGTools even when remote content loading is disabled (German security researcher Hanno Bock also deserves much of the credit for this exploit, more on that below). I have reported the vulnerability to the GPGTools developers, and they are actively working on an update that they plan on releasing soon.

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A day after abrupt cancellation, US president says highly-anticipated summit with N Korea's leader might still go ahead.

Doctors are now one step closer to deploying sensors that can travel to parts of a patient's body to diagnose hard-to-detect conditions. From a report: Researchers have devised a new way to get a sneak peek into what's going on deep in your digestive system, creating a swallowable sensor that, with the help of engineered bacteria and a tiny electrical circuit, can detect the presence of molecules that might be signs of disease and then beam the results to a smartphone app. The device, which scientists validated in pigs, remains a prototype and needs to be refined before it could be used in people. But the researchers, who reported their work Thursday in the journal Science, combined innovations in synthetic biology and microelectronics to create a modular platform that could be adapted to identify a wide range of molecules. "We want to try to illuminate and provide understanding into areas that are not easily accessible," said Dr. Timothy Lu, a bioengineer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and senior author of the paper.

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