Iran is offering to sell advanced weapons systems including ballistic missiles, drones and warships to foreign governments for cryptocurrency, in a bid to use digital assets to bypass western financial controls. From a report: Iran's Ministry of Defence Export Center, known as Mindex, says it is prepared to negotiate military contracts that allow payment in digital currencies, as well as through barter arrangements and Iranian rials, according to promotional documents and payment terms analysed by the Financial Times.

The offer, introduced during the past year, appears to mark one of the first known instances in which a nation state has publicly indicated its willingness to accept cryptocurrency as payment for the export of strategic military hardware. Mindex, a state-run body responsible for Iran's overseas defence sales, says it has client relationships with 35 countries and advertises a catalogue of weapons that includes Emad ballistic missiles, Shahed drones, Shahid Soleimani-class warships and short-range air defence systems.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Only the government could spend 20 years creating a national ID that no one wanted and that apparently doesn't even work as a national ID. But that's what the federal government has accomplished with the REAL ID, which the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) now considers unreliable, even though getting one requires providing proof of citizenship or lawful status in the country.

In a December 11 court filing [PDF], Philip Lavoie, the acting assistant special agent in charge of DHS' Mobile, Alabama, office, stated that, "REAL ID can be unreliable to confirm U.S. citizenship." Lavoie's declaration was in response to a federal civil rights lawsuit filed in October by the Institute for Justice, a public-interest law firm, on behalf of Leo Garcia Venegas, an Alabama construction worker. Venegas was detained twice in May and June during immigration raids on private construction sites, despite being a U.S. citizen. In both instances, Venegas' lawsuit says, masked federal immigration officers entered the private sites without a warrant and began detaining workers based solely on their apparent ethnicity.

And in both instances officers allegedly retrieved Venegas' Alabama-issued REAL ID from his pocket but claimed it could be fake. Venegas was kept handcuffed and detained for an hour the first time and "between 20 and 30 minutes" the second time before officers ran his information and released him.

As the calendar flips to January 1, 2026, thousands of copyrighted works from 1930 are entering the US public domain alongside sound recordings from 1925, making them free to copy, share, remix and build upon without permission or licensing fees. The literary haul includes William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying, Dashiell Hammett's full novel The Maltese Falcon, Agatha Christie's first Miss Marple mystery The Murder at the Vicarage, and the first four Nancy Drew books. The popular illustrated version of The Little Engine That Could also joins the commons. Betty Boop makes her public domain debut through her first appearance in the Fleischer Studios cartoon Dizzy Dishes.

The original iteration of Disney's Pluto -- then named Rover -- enters as well. Nine additional Mickey Mouse cartoons and ten Silly Symphonies from 1930 are now available for reuse. Films entering the public domain include the Academy Award-winning All Quiet on the Western Front, the Marx Brothers' Animal Crackers, and John Wayne's first leading role in The Big Trail. Musical compositions going public include George and Ira Gershwin's "I Got Rhythm," Hoagy Carmichael's "Georgia on My Mind," and "Dream a Little Dream of Me."

Sound recordings from 1925 now available include Bessie Smith and Louis Armstrong's "The St. Louis Blues" and Marian Anderson's "Nobody Knows the Trouble I've Seen." Piet Mondrian's Composition with Red, Blue, and Yellow rounds out the artistic entries.

A UK-based company has successfully powered up a microwave-sized space factory in orbit, proving it can run a 1,000C furnace to manufacture ultra-pure semiconductor materials in microgravity. "The work that we're doing now is allowing us to create semiconductors up to 4,000 times purer in space than we can currently make here today," says Josh Western, CEO of Space Forge. "This sort of semiconductor would go on to be in the 5G tower in which you get your mobile phone signal, it's going to be in the car charger you plug an EV into, it's going to be in the latest planes." The BBC reports: Conditions in space are ideal for making semiconductors, which have the atoms they're made of arranged in a highly ordered 3D structure. When they are being manufactured in a weightless environment, those atoms line up absolutely perfectly. The vacuum of space also means that contaminants can't sneak in. The purer and more ordered a semiconductor is, the better it works.

[...] The company's mini-factory launched on a SpaceX rocket in the summer. Since then the team has been testing its systems from their mission control in Cardiff. Veronica Viera, the company's payload operations lead, shows us an image that the satellite beamed back from space. It's taken from the inside of the furnace, and shows plasma - gas heated to about 1,000C -- glowing brightly. [...]

The team is now planning to build a bigger space factory -- one that could make semiconductor material for 10,000 chips. They also need to test the technology to bring the material back to Earth. On a future mission, a heat shield named Pridwen after the legendary shield of King Arthur will be deployed to protect the spacecraft from the intense temperatures it will experience as it re-enters the Earth's atmosphere.

NASA is closing its largest research library at the Goddard Space Flight Center amid budget cuts and campus consolidation, putting tens of thousands of largely non-digitized historical and scientific documents at risk of being warehoused or discarded. The New York Times reports: Jacob Richmond, a NASA spokesman, said the agency would review the library holdings over the next 60 days and some material would be stored in a government warehouse while the rest would be tossed away. "This process is an established method that is used by federal agencies to properly dispose of federally owned property," Mr. Richmond said.

The shutdown of the library at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., is part of a larger reorganization under the Trump administration that includes the closure of 13 buildings and more than 100 science and engineering laboratories on the 1,270-acre campus by March 2026. "This is a consolidation not a closure," said NASA spokeswoman Bethany Stevens. The changes were part of a long-planned reorganization that began before the Trump administration took office, she said. She said that shutting down the facilities would save $10 million a year and avoid another $63.8 million in deferred maintenance.

Goddard is the nation's premiere spaceflight complex. Its website calls it "the largest organization of scientists, engineers, and technologists who build spacecraft, instruments, and new technology to study Earth, the Sun, our solar system, and the universe." [...] The library closure on Friday follows the shutdown of seven other NASA libraries around the country since 2022, and included three libraries this year. As of next week, only three -- at the Glenn Research Center in Cleveland, the Ames Research Center in Mountain View, Calif., and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. -- will remain open.