New image processing pulls a faint exoplanet out of its star's glare

Direct imaging of planets around other stars runs into a simple problem. The star is roughly a hundred thousand times brighter than the planet beside it. Telescopes such as the James Webb Space Telescope block most of that light with a coronagraph, and software subtracts what remains. The usual software builds a model of the star’s glare from reference images taken separately. Small changes in the telescope between those frames and the science exposure leave a residue. That residue can swallow a faint planet.

A team led by Rodrigo Ferrer-Chavez and Jason Wang replaced that empirical model with a physical one. Their method, described in Nature on 4 November, models the instrument’s optics directly and tunes millions of parameters with automatic differentiation. The model can therefore compensate for those instabilities rather than treating them as noise. The authors report sensitivity two to fifteen times better than standard techniques on real JWST observations, including the first detection of the planet 51 Eridani b at 4.3 micrometres. They say the framework can be carried over to future observatories such as the Roman Space Telescope and the Habitable Worlds Observatory. Doing so would ease the strict stability those missions depend on.

Featured source: Nature , paper .

Other Stories

Europe’s regulators say TikTok’s For You feed breaks the Digital Services Act

The European Commission issued preliminary findings on Friday that TikTok’s recommender system breaches the Digital Services Act through its “rabbit hole effect.” Regulators said the feed exposes users to endless and repeated content about sadness, isolation or body image. They added that the controls TikTok introduced do not work well enough. TikTok must change the feed’s design or risk fines of up to 6 percent of global annual turnover. Politico reported that this is the first time the Commission has cited a recommendation algorithm itself as the reason for a breach.

Filed from: The Verge , European Commission .

AMD calls itself a data center company first and plans for a smaller PC market in 2027

AMD chief executive Lisa Su told Yahoo Finance that the company is now “a data center first company.” On the third-quarter earnings call she forecast that PC shipments will fall by a double-digit percentage next year. She said PC sell-through slowed late in the quarter as memory and component costs weighed on demand. Data center revenue reached a record $8.5 billion, up 97 percent year over year, while client and gaming revenue fell 8 percent to $3.7 billion. The 2027 figure is a planning assumption rather than a measured result.

Filed from: TechRadar , AMD results .

GitHub rebuilt Git storage for repositories written by thousands of agents

GitHub published the design of a new storage layer, developed under the name Project Rubicon. It splits the parts of Git hosting that were once tightly coupled. Git objects are immutable and named by content, so only reference updates need to agree. Storage, request serving and repository maintenance can now scale on their own. In internal testing the system handled 5,000 concurrent agents on one repository and 7,200 pushes per second. Today’s busiest repositories see at most dozens of writes per second, usually in short bursts. GitHub said it designed for at least two orders of magnitude more scale than it sees now.

Filed from: GitHub Blog .

Meta, Google and TikTok sue California over a law restricting feeds for minors

The three companies filed separate lawsuits against California Attorney General Rob Bonta over AB 1709. The law bars platforms from showing autoplay video and personalized feeds to users under 16. Governor Gavin Newsom signed the bill in September, and it is due to take effect at the start of next year. Platforms that do not comply face fines of up to $50,000 per affected user. Meta argued the law violates the First Amendment and is preempted by Section 230. TikTok and Google made similar claims.

Filed from: TechCrunch .

Protesters break into a Microsoft data center site in Amsterdam

Around 100 people entered the construction site of a new Microsoft data center on the outskirts of Amsterdam on Friday, Reuters reported. Some scaled a crane to hang a banner. The action group Geef Tegengas organized the protest against three planned 85-meter towers. Amsterdam has banned new data centers until 2030, after a temporary stop announced at the end of 2023. This project was planned as far back as 2016, and Microsoft will be its sole tenant. The site is being built by the British developer Pure Data Centres. The protest came in the same week that activists staged a mock Israeli military checkpoint outside a Microsoft data center in Dublin.

Filed from: The Verge , Reuters .

Deloitte survey finds more firms reporting AI revenue, but few can trace where the money goes

In Deloitte’s latest State of AI in the Enterprise survey, 28 percent of organizations reported current revenue growth from AI, up from 20 percent earlier in 2026. Seventy-four percent cited gains in efficiency and productivity, and 86 percent planned to raise AI investment in the next financial year. Deloitte said revenue remains among the slowest returns to appear. It also found that 71 percent of respondents track total token spending, but most can see only the overall bill rather than which activities drive it. The figures come from self-reported survey answers rather than audited accounts.

Filed from: TechRadar , Deloitte .

From the Community

Thinking Machines releases a 594-billion-parameter model and promises open weights next week

Thinking Machines Lab introduced Inkling 2 Small, a mixture-of-experts model with 594 billion total parameters and 17 billion active. It accepts image input and supports adjustable reasoning effort. The company said it scores 31 on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index and was trained with reinforcement learning on hundreds of thousands of long-horizon coding tasks. The model is available only through the company’s Tinker platform for now, with closed weights. Thinking Machines said it will publish the full weights under Apache 2.0 next week, once external safety testing and red-teaming finish.

Filed from: Thinking Machines Lab .

A payment-app tracker documents how Play Integrity checks lock out alternative Android systems

A community tracker for banking apps on alternative Android systems collected reports that ASN Bank’s app fails iDEAL and Wero payments on GrapheneOS. Users said the app requires Google Play Integrity checks that those systems cannot pass. The thread quotes a reply attributed to EPI, the company behind Wero. It argues that Play Integrity is needed because hardware key attestation alone does not verify the calling app or the operating system. GrapheneOS maintainers dispute that reasoning, and some users reported Wero payments working through other banks’ apps. The claims rest on user reports, and no official ASN or EPI statement was available.

Filed from: PrivSec-dev compatibility tracker .