Blender 5.3 has been released with support for 3D Gaussian Splats, Nvidia DLSS 4.5 Ray Reconstruction and Vulkan as the default graphics backend on Linux. Phoronix reports: Blender now allows importing Gaussian Splats from PLY, SPZ, and glTF files. Also new to Blender 5.3 is NVIDIA DLSS 4.5 Ray Reconstruction support as a new denoiser. Blender 5.3 also brings support for NVIDIA RTX Spark devices.

For the Cycles code in Blender 5.3 the Principled BSDF for shader nodes now supports dispersion. Another notable change with Blender 5.3 is the Vulkan back-end now being the default on Windows (except for Windows on ARM) and Linux systems. Vulkan 1.1 or newer is required and should deliver better performance than OpenGL.

Discord is replacing Electron with a desktop client built fully in Rust, which the company says should significantly reduce the app's notoriously high resource usage while improving performance and memory safety. "We've been early adopters of Rust since 2018 and a lot of our infra, voice tech, and even some of the current client is already Rust, the holy grail was getting the whole client there," explains Discord chief technology officer Stanislav Vishnevskiy in a post on X. "That means Electron goes away, and so does React Native, mobile keeps native UI but shares app code with desktop via Rust." The Verge reports: Vishnevskiy also shared an image of the Discord Windows client using just 290MB of RAM, which is a clear improvement as you only have to participate in a few servers and RAM usage can easily hit 1GB or more using the current Windows app. It's not clear when Discord will make the full switch over to Rust, but Vishnevskiy says the company "hope to get it into testing with users soon."

"EMACS, the mother of all editors, turns 50!" writes Slashdot reader dr_jerry, sharing a report from MIT Technology Review: Programming used to be a very different experience from the one we know today. In fact, the first programmers didn't write code at all; the six women who worked on the ENIAC, one of the world's first computers, at the University of Pennsylvania in 1946 did it by physically configuring switches, cables, and plugboards.

A few years later, MIT engineers programmed the Whirlwind by punching code onto paper tape that was then loaded into the computer's memory -- making it among the first "stored-program" machines. Later, they and others moved on to punch cards, one for each line of code.

By the early 1960s, programmers with interactive computers could use a "line editor" to type their code on teletypes -- large, noisy keyboard-and-printer machines. They'd type one line of code at a time, and their work would be saved on a spinning hard disk the size of a modern washing machine. But there was still no such thing as the now-familiar full-screen text editors that allow programmers to see and modify many lines at a time on a display.

One of the first such tools, EMACS, turns 50 this year, and it is still widely used. EMACS first ran on the early video terminals at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory in 1976, but its core concepts were so powerful that it was rewritten for many operating systems in the decades that followed. Apple even distributed it with Mac OS X. Beyond that, the software-sharing community that started around EMACS helped give rise to the modern-day free software movement and the GNU/Linux operating system.

Japan has successfully launched its Martian Moons eXploration (MMX) mission to study Mars' two moons, Phobos and Deimos. Scheduled to arrive in August 2027, "MMX will become the first spacecraft to land on and return samples from Phobos for study back on Earth, which scientists think could shed light on a decades-old mystery about the moons' origins" and resolve whether they were formed from a giant impact or were captured asteroids, reports Space.com. From the report: It was the 10th liftoff of Japan's expendable, two-stage H3 rocket, which was jointly developed by JAXA and Mitsubishi Heavy Industries. After clearing its launch pad today, the 207-foot-tall (63 meters) launch vehicle flew a nominal trajectory through its ascent corridor over the Pacific Ocean, jettisoning its four solid boosters in pairs just before the flight clock reached two minutes. The rocket shed its payload fairings about one minute and 20 seconds later, exposing MMX to the vacuum of space for the first time. [...] MMX is now under its own power, and on course for Mars.

The interplanetary transit will last about 10 months, with the spacecraft scheduled to arrive at the Red Planet in August 2027. When it does, MMX's propulsion module will execute an orbital insertion burn to place itself in a quasi-satellite orbit (QSO) around Phobos, which places MMX within the space around the moon as both circle Mars. MMX will spend about three years in the Martian system, devoting much of that time to studying the 14-mile-wide (22 km) Phobos with its science instruments. The spacecraft also carries the IDEFIX rover, a joint effort of the space agencies of France and Germany, which is scheduled to deploy to the surface of Phobos in late 2028 or early 2029.

After a mapping campaign to select suitable landing sites, MMX will perform two separate touchdowns on Phobos to collect and stow samples in the spacecraft's return capsule. Following its second landing and sample collection, MMX will briefly return to QSO with Phobos before transferring to a more elongated orbit around Mars that intersects with the planet's smaller moon, Deimos, which is just 8 miles (14 km) in diameter. During the last several months of its time around Mars, MMX will perform a series of Deimos flybys before departing for Earth in November 2030. If all goes according to plan, the MMX sample-return capsule will land in Australia in 2031. You can watch a recording of the launch on YouTube.

Paramount and Warner Bros. Discovery will operate under the Skydance name once their roughly $110 billion merger closes, which is expected on October 6. The combined company will bring together Paramount+, HBO Max, CBS, CNN, MTV and other networks, along with major franchises including The Lord of the Rings, Game of Thrones, DC and Yellowstone.

Ellison said the Paramount and Warner Bros. brands will remain prominent. "We never wanted a new corporate identity to diminish, alter or overshadow either one. Instead, we wanted a name that would give the combined company an identity of its own while allowing Paramount and Warner Bros. -- and all our extraordinary brands -- to remain in the spotlight."