Public research university in Amherst, Massachusetts, and the flagship campus of the University of Massachusetts system.
UMass Amherst researchers showed at USENIX Security 2026 that an expired contactless card still pays in stores once a relay rewrites its expiry date. Issuers that trust the terminal's reported expiry approve the sale, a dev.to write-up says, so a reissued card leaves the old chip usable.
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Colin Gleason's team used NASA's SWOT satellite to check machine-learning river models and found serious errors in under 10% of reaches. Those errors cluster on dammed, arid and Arctic rivers, among the reaches that matter most for water resources.
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Joao Menezes and Jeff Podos of UMass Amherst report in Evolution that body size and especially beak width track call volume across 123 bird species. Their tests of mating behaviour, habitat density and flight ability found no general reason why extreme loudness evolved.
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FAO's Status of the World's Soil Resources 2026 ranks erosion among the most serious threats to soils, saying soil can be lost far faster than it regenerates. The best-measured case behind that warning is the US Corn Belt, where eroded farmland is already costing yield and money.
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Amazon pledged more than $1 billion over five years to the US communities that host its data centers. Allianz says local opposition delayed or blocked $130 billion of projects in the first quarter, and next to that the price Amazon is paying for consent is small.
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UMass Amherst biologists measured calls from 123 bird species in the field and found the loudest, above 120 decibels, come from big birds with wide beaks. Their tests of flight ability, forest habitat and mating system as reasons for loudness found no clear pattern.
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Pangram Labs and UMass Amherst researchers put AI-generated text at about 31% of August 2026 web tokens and fit a scaling law for when it starts to hurt. For teams that pretrain on web crawls, AI text becomes a measured line item in the data budget, with a curve for its marginal value.
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Researchers in Chile and the US found engagement across 1.62 million Twitter, Reddit and 8chan observations peaked at a moral-density score near 0.30. The data are observational, so they locate the peak without telling a writer whether trimming moral words from a post would earn more.
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UMass Amherst researchers bought groceries with an expired contactless card. The date that is supposed to kill it is unsigned, zeroed out before the issuer sees it, and checked by nobody in particular.
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A peer-reviewed audit scored the free ChatGPT model's election answers on one day in late October 2024, and it counted hedging and omission as failure categories alongside outright error.
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A five-year, $3.3 million project led at Worcester Polytechnic Institute will test whether the biology that builds sea sponge skeletons can break silicon-rich industrial waste apart gently enough to free the minerals inside.
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UMass Amherst measured 61,500 dead Android IoT companion apps and found 38.4% of their data flows point at servers that are unreachable, blocklisted or under new ownership, against under 1% in maintained apps.
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The long-duration jobless count has climbed without the downturn that historically accompanied it, which leaves hiring filters tuned to a population that has moved and senior candidates stuck on the wrong side of them.
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UMass Amherst researchers rewrote the expiration date on dead contactless cards in flight. Terminals for three networks caught the edit. Five banks' backends caught nothing.
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Eleven academic teams spent two months tuning on OfficeQA, then met a fresh benchmark on the day. The winner cleared 63.3 percent, and 18.8 percent of questions defeated every entrant.
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