A dead fin whale wound up on the bow of the Norwegian Joy cruise ship and has blocked its port near Sitka Bay in Alaska.

Melting sea ice from climate change has opened up the region for giant whales to undertake "feeding frenzies".

## Regular Papers * **Adaptive Snapshots Require Visible Reads** Niv Sulimany, Tomer Cory, Erez Petrank * **FinWhale: an Optimally Resilient 2 Rounds Terminating DAG Protocol** Razya Ladelsky, Roy Friedman * **Self-Stabilizing Algorithms in the Uniform Port Model** Yuval Emek, Liam Brinker, Oren Louidor * **How to Walk a Dog in Parallel: on Parallel Computation of the Discrete Frechet Distance** Leonid Barenboim, Arnold Filtser, Omrit Filtser, Orr Fischer * **Deterministic Edge Coloring with few Colors in CONGEST** Tijn de Vos, Yannic Maus, Joakim Blikstad * **Optimality and Trade-offs in Fast Leaderless BFT SMR** Neil Giridharan, Ittai Abraham, Natacha Crooks, Allen Clement, Pierre Sutra, Minh Tung Nguyen * **Solvability of Approximate Agreement on Graphs and Simplicial Complexes** Joel Rybicki, Yaroslav Verbitsky * **Predictions Can Only Help! Communication Efficient Byzantine Agreement with Predictions** Marc Dufay, Muhammad Ayaz Dzulfikar, Seth Gilbert * **Quadratic Asynchronous DKG from Plain Setup** Ittai Abraham, Renas Bacho, Gilad Stern * **It Does Not Matter How You Define Locally Checkable Labelings** Antonio Cruciani, Avinandan Das, Alesya Raevskaya, Jukka Suomela * **Lifeline: Optimal Validated Byzantine Agreement under Minimal Synchrony** Yuval Efron, Ling Ren * **Efficient Randomized LL/SC that Preserves History Independence** Dante Bencivenga, Homa Habashi, Philipp Woelfel * **Tight Energy Lower Bounds for Distributed Graph Algorithms** Fabien Dufoulon, Gopal Pandurangan, Peter Robinson * **Is a LOCAL algorithm computable?** Antonio Cruciani, Avinandan Das, Massimo Equi, Henrik Lievonen, Diep Luong-Le, Augusto Modanese, Jukka Suomela * **Near-Optimal Distributed 2-Ruling Sets on Graphs with Low Arboricity** Malte Baumecker, Rustam Latypov, Yannic Maus, Jara Uitto * **eAID: Elastic Asynchronous Information Dispersal with Post-Dissemination Pruning** Rithwik Kerur, Divyakant Agrawal, Dahlia Malkhi, Michael K. Reiter, Amit Wieder * **Efficient Stable Population Protocols for Parity and Beyond** Leszek Gasieniec, Tytus Grodzicki, Tomasz Jurdzinski, Jakub Kowalski, Grzegorz Stachowiak * **Consensus with Stochastic Broadcast** Pierre Fraigniaud, Boaz Patt-Shamir, Sergio Rajsbaum * **Õptimal Distributed Maximum Flow Approximation in Undirected Planar Graphs** Yaseen Abd-Elhaleem, Michal Dory, Oren Weimann * **A Lock-Free Move-to-Front List with a Working Set Bound** Shalom Asbell, Eric Ruppert * **Randomized Tree-Intersection Leader Election** Yuval Emek, Shay Kutten, Ido Rafael, Gadi Taubenfeld * **The local complexity of certifying parity** Nicolas Bousquet, Laurent Feuilloley, Jorge Valenzuela, Sébastien Zeitoun * **Fairness in the Wild: Secure Atomic Swap with External Incentives** Hao Chung, Elisaweta Masserova, Elaine Shi, Sri AravindaKrishnan Thyagarajan * **Designing Local Distributed Mechanisms** Juho Hirvonen, Sara Ranjbaran * **Fast Deterministic Distributed Degree Splitting** Yannic Maus, Alexandre Nolin, Florian Schager * **Space-Efficient Lock-Free Linear-Probing Hash Table** Hagit Attiya, Rotem Oshman, Noa Schiller * **Adaptive Self-Organization in Anonymous Dynamic Networks** Garrett Parzych, Joshua Daymude * **Generalizing LCL Complexity Gaps to Unbounded Degree via Monadic Second-Order Properties** Chiara Piombi * **Triangle-Free Coloring in LOCAL via Resilient Lovász Local Lemma** Peter Davies-Peck, Xusheng Zhang * **Near-optimal population protocols on bounded-degree trees** Joel Rybicki, Jakob Solnerzik, Robin Vacus * **Non-Leaking Concurrent Objects** Hagit Attiya, Rotem Oshman, Noa Schiller, Corentin Travers * **Wait-free Replicated Data Types and Fair Reconciliation** Petr Kuznetsov, Maxence Perion, Sara Tucci-Piergiovanni * **Distributed Triangle and Simplex Enumeration in Hypergraphs** Duncan Adamson, Will Rosenbaum, Paul Spirakis * **Counting in Population Protocols on Graphs** Petra Berenbrink, Robert Elsässer, Tom Friedetzky, Thorsten Götte, Lukas Hintze, Dominik Kaaser * **General Convex Agreement with Near-Optimal Communication** Marc Dufay, Diana Ghinea, Anton Paramonov * **Consensus Time in 3-Majority and 2-Choices Is Determined by the Maximum Initial Opinion Density** Niccolò D’Archivio * **LCLs Beyond Bounded Degrees** Gustav Schmid * **Fast and Robust Information Spreading in the Noisy PULL Model** Niccolò D’Archivio, Amos Korman, Robin Vacus, Emanuele Natale * **Subcubic Coin Tossing in Asynchrony without PKI** Mose Mizrahi, Roger Wattenhofer * **What can be computed in average anonymous networks?** Joel Rybicki, Oleg Verbitsky, Maksim Zhukovskii * **Strong Efficiency Lower Bounds for Byzantine Agreement** Matthieu Rambaud, Clément Ducros, Julian Loss * **Token Distribution Revisited** Petra Berenbrink, Robert Elsässer, Tom Friedetzky, Hamed Hosseinpour, Dominik Kaaser * **Multivalued Consensus: General Adversaries Require More Communication** Mose Mizrahi, Roger Wattenhofer * **Fully Fluctuating Sleepy Consensus from Minimal Assumptions** Javier Nieto, Yuval Efron, Joachim Neu, Ling Ren * **Symmetry all the way down** Ignacio Amores-Sesar, Christian Cachin, Simon Holmgaard Kamp, Juan Villacis * **Fixed-Threshold Peeling in Sublinear MPC: Round-Approximation Tradeoffs and Applications** Slobodan Mitrović, Theodore Pan, Wen-Horng Sheu * **AegisBFT: Fast, Responsive, Fork-Resistant Consensus with Speculation Accountability** Mohammad Mussadiq Jalalzai, Kushal Babel, Jovan Jovan, Tobias Klenze, Sourav Das, Fatima Elsheimy, Mike Setrin, John Bergschneider, Babak Poorebrahim Gilkalaye * **Dynamic Graph Exploration: Semi-synchrony and Dynamic Port Labeling** Ashish Saxena, Anisur Rahaman Molla, Kaushik Mondal, Gokarna Sharma * **Upper and Lower Bounds on the Space Complexity of Multi-word Single-Writer Registers** Yuanhao Wei, Yousof Yavari * **A Fast Deterministic Algorithm for (Δ + 1)-Edge Coloring in CONGEST** Sebastian Brandt, Ananth Narayanan, Alexandre Nolin * **Validity in Responsive Byzantine Agreement** Diana Ghinea, Simon Holmgaard Kamp, Chen-Da Liu-Zhang * **Near-Tight Bounds on the Rate of Collective Communication** Rotem Oshman, Tal Roth, Ofer Shayevitz, Anirudh Sivaraman * **Approximating Minimum Dominating Set with Few Awake Rounds** Hongyan Ji, Shreyas Pai, Sriram Pemmaraju * **Weighted Beeping Networks** Dariusz Kowalski, Miguel A. Mosteiro * **Brief Announcement: Fast Tendermint: Speeding Up a Foundational Consensus Protocol** Preston Vander Vos, Daniel Cason * **Brief Announcement: Fast TetraBFT – Optimizing Latency Where It Matters** Antonio J. Fernández-Pinto, Manuel Bravo, Gregory Chockler, Alexey Gotsman * **Brief Announcement: Semantic Lock: Synchronization Based on the Analysis of the Operation Conflict Graph** Denis Korotchenko, Vitaly Aksenov * **Brief Announcement: Fair Binding for Hidden-State Authorization in Byzantine SMR** Arnab Mallick * **Brief Announcement: Superlogarithmic Gap Result for LCLs on Trees in Quantum-LOCAL** Francesco d’Amore, Henrik Lievonen * **Brief Announcement: The Minimal Commit Rule for DAG-based Atomic Broadcast** Petr Kuznetsov, Maxence Perion, Sara Tucci-Piergiovanni * **Brief Announcement: How Complex Can Sequential Consistency Be?** Dimitar Dimitrov * **Brief Announcement: Stone Duality Proofs for Colorless Distributed Computability Theorems** Cameron Calk, Emmanuel Godard * **Brief Announcement: Simple and Fast Self-Stabilizing Dynamics for k-Winner-Take-All Computation** Vincenzo Bonifaci, Fabio Galvan * **Brief Announcement: Local Certification for Irrelevant Vertices** Kai-Yuan Lai * **Brief Announcement: Optimal Adaptive Multi-Valued Byzantine Agreement** Marc Dufay, Anton Paramonov, Roger Wattenhofer * **Brief Announcement: Liquid democracy under vote correlation: on the fallacies of averaging and the excluded middle** Seth Gilbert, Stefan Schmid, Santiago Schnell, Jakub Svoboda, Michelle X. Yeo * **Brief Announcement: Initialization with Exponentially Fewer Bits** Dominick Banasik, Varsha Dani, Thomas P. Hayes * **Brief Announcement: Simulations between Massively Parallel Computing and Distributed Computing** Philipp Schneider, Julian Werthmann

When One Dead Whale Becomes a Decades-Long Buffet: An ocean floor feast that’s bottomless

World Whale Day celebrates whale species from oceans across the world. Find out more about these awe-inspiring animals and how you can help protect them.

San Francisco Bay Area-based SunnyWhale brought an early version of its inaugural product to CES 2026, a new pool water quality measurement and chemical dispensing system called FinWhale. The device is named after the fin whale, the largest filter-feeding animal in the ocean, which inspired the system. FinWhale is a self-contained, floating device about size of a gallon milk jug. Bobbing in the pool, the device measures water temperature, free chlorine (FC), and pH, tracking data over time and logging it in its mobile app. A solar charging system ensures its batteries are kept topped up as it floats on the surface, communicating conditions regularly with the company’s cloud system via Wi-Fi. A cartridge inside the FinWhale holds up to six standard-sized chlorine tablets. The device monitors a pool’s free chlorine (FC), water temperature, and pH, and dispenses fresh chlorine as conditions warrant. Christopher Null/Foundry FinWhale distinguishes itself from other pool chemical monitoring systems thanks to the inclusion of an integrated chlorine dispensing system. The top of the FinWhale device unscrews to reveal a chamber that can hold up to six standard chlorine tablets. By configuring desired levels the FinWhale app, the tablets can be exposed to the water in the pool only when ambient FC is low enough to warrant it. In most cases, SunnyWhale says a full set of tablets should last for up to three weeks before they need to be topped off. The FinWhale outside of a pool. Christopher Null/Foundry While Auto Mode is designed for regular use, a secondary mode called Vacation Mode is also included. This switches the device into a very low-power operational cycle that keeps water chemistry stabilized over longer periods and is designed for use when you’re away from home for extended periods. FinWhale is ideally designed for pools of 20,000 gallons or less in volume, and it does not need to be removed from the pool in the winter unless the water freezes, thanks to an IP68 weatherproof rating. SunnyWhale expects the device will last for two to three years in typical conditions, with sensors requiring roughly annual replacement. SunnyWhale has not set pricing for the FinWhale, but expects to finalize it in time for an estimated Q3 2026 release. Additional details can be found at https://sunnywhale.net/, or if you’re attending CES in person, SunnyWhale is exhibiting FinWhale at its Venetian Expo booth #56345.

YouTube video by National Geographic

A pregnant endangered fin whale was found dead on the bow of Royal Caribbean's Ovation of the Seas. Conservationists are urging ships to reduce speeds in whale habitats to prevent future collisions.

• 🐳 70-foot fin whale discovered on Cefn Sidan Beach in Wales • 🔬 Fourth fin whale stranding in Wales this century • 🌊 Provides critical research opportunity for marine scientists • 📊 Highlights ongoing challenges in marine ecosystem conservation

Whaling ship Hvalur 9 requested assistance because they believed their safety was under threat from the protest vessel Bandero

At CES 2026, a San Francisco Bay Area startup looks to remove the hassle from pool chemical maintenance.