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Elon Musk, the largest shareholder of Twitter, will no longer be joining the social media firm's board, CEO Parag Agrawal said late Sunday, in a surprising reversal following last week's announcement that the Tesla and SpaceX chief executive had been appointed to the panel. From a report: The Sunday disclosure from Agrawal, who said last week that he had been engaging with Musk for "a few weeks" before announcing his appointment to the board, follows a series of unusual tweets from the SpaceX executive over the weekend in which he wondered aloud to his over 80 million followers if Twitter was dying, citing low frequency of tweets from some of the most popular personalities on the social network. Musk also asked his followers if Twitter should convert its San Francisco headquarters into a homeless shelter, prompting a discussion that saw participation from a wide-range of industry figures, including Amazon and Blue Origin founder Jeff Bezos.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"Dark matter, the elusive substance that accounts for the majority of the mass in the universe, may be made up of massive particles called gravitons that first popped into existence in the first moment after the Big Bang," writes Live Science. "And these hypothetical particles might be cosmic refugees from extra dimensions, a new theory suggests."The researchers' calculations hint that these particles could have been created in just the right quantities to explain dark matter, which can only be "seen" through its gravitational pull on ordinary matter. "Massive gravitons are produced by collisions of ordinary particles in the early universe. This process was believed to be too rare for the massive gravitons to be dark matter candidates," study co-author Giacomo Cacciapaglia, a physicist at the University of Lyon in France, told Live Science. But in a new study published in February in the journal Physical Review Letters, Cacciapaglia, along with Korea University physicists Haiying Cai and Seung J. Lee, found that enough of these gravitons would have been made in the early universe to account for all of the dark matter we currently detect in the universe. The gravitons, if they exist, would have a mass of less than 1 megaelectronvolt (MeV), so no more than twice the mass of an electron, the study found. This mass level is well below the scale at which the Higgs boson generates mass for ordinary matter — which is key for the model to produce enough of them to account for all the dark matter in the universe.... The team found these hypothetical gravitons while hunting for evidence of extra dimensions, which some physicists suspect exist alongside the observed three dimensions of space and the fourth dimension, time. In the team's theory, when gravity propagates through extra dimensions, it materializes in our universe as massive gravitons. But these particles would interact only weakly with ordinary matter, and only via the force of gravity. This description is eerily similar to what we know about dark matter, which does not interact with light yet has a gravitational influence felt everywhere in the universe. This gravitational influence, for instance, is what prevents galaxies from flying apart. "The main advantage of massive gravitons as dark matter particles is that they only interact gravitationally, hence they can escape attempts to detect their presence," Cacciapaglia said.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"Digital purchases are mysteriously expiring on classic PlayStation consoles," Kotaku reports, "rendering a random assortment of games unplayable." The glitch is "affecting users' ability to play games they ostensibly own."Upon re-downloading the PSOne Classic version of Chrono Cross, for instance, Twitter user Christopher Foose was told the purchase expired on December 31, 1969, preventing him from playing the game on both PlayStation 3 and PlayStation Vita. GamesHub editor Edmond Tran described a similar issue. Trying to boot up Chrono Cross on PlayStation 3, Tran said, gave him the same expiration date and time, only adjusted for his location in Australia. Tran did mention, however, that he was able to download the PSOne Classic from his library and play just fine on Vita despite the game's apparent delisting from the handheld's store. While at first this felt like an attempt at encouraging Chrono Cross fans to purchase the new Radical Dreamers remaster, Kotaku quickly found evidence of this same problem occurring with different games. Chrono Cross worked just fine for content creator Words, but not its spiritual predecessor Chrono Trigger, the license for which somehow lapsed 40 years before the game was added to the PSOne Classic library. Steve J over on Twitter asked PlayStation directly why the expiration date for his copy of Final Fantasy VI was changed to 1969, but never received a response.... The only potential explanation I've seen for this issue thus far involves what's known as the "Unix epoch," or the arbitrary date early engineers designated as the beginning of the operating system's lifespan. Some bug or glitch on Sony's backend may be defaulting PlayStation game license expiration dates to the Unix epoch, essentially telling them they can't be played after midnight UTC on January 1, 1970.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Fast Company reviews the Bitcoin 2022 conference held in Miami this week — arguing that it was actually Ethereum that sparked 2021's boom in cryptocurrenies. (And that with NFTs and DAOs, Ethereum still remains the flashier, main driver of popular crypto culture.) Their conclusion? There's "a real sense of desperation for some kind of star power that can elevate Bitcoin from digital gold for the techno-libertarian set to the true mainstream cultural movement it needs to be in order to actually catch on." In fact, the issue of what influencers or celebrities can do for the Bitcoin community came up directly on Thursday morning, during a panel featuring Odell Beckham Jr., Serena Williams, Aaron Rodgers, and Cash App's crypto product lead, Miles Suter. Beckham and Rodgers have both made headlines recently for taking their salaries in Bitcoin; Williams is heavily involved in the Bitcoin startup world.... It was pretty far away from the high energy radiating from the world of NFTs, and it was clear that the event's bigger names aren't sure what else to do other than just tell the audience to buy Bitcoin over and over again. A lot of people make fun of NFTs, but they're an easier cultural product to point to and talk about than trying to have a fun conversation about lightning networks.... Bitcoin's attempts at going mainstream feel like a real two-steps-forward-one-step-back situation. Its most vocal supporters see it as a war-ending miracle technology. Alex Gladstein, the Human Rights Foundation's chief strategy officer led a panel on Thursday that argued it could lead to peace on Earth. It's not uncommon to hear presenters at Bitcoin 2022 argue that Bitcoin could end all wars forever. But that flies in the face of the conference's wilder, bawdier attractions — the big robot bull statue, the wild after-parties, the endless panels about cancel culture and Twitter drama. And these competing attitudes within the world of Bitcoin came to a head on Thursday afternoon, when chaos briefly erupted in the conference's main stage when it was announced that Barstool Sports founder Dave Portnoy had dropped out of his much talked-about panel, titled "Bitcoin Is Fuck You Money". Portnoy has not issued any explanation for why he dropped out, but he did spend the rest of the afternoon live tweeting the PGA Masters Tournament. For someone who claims to be all in on the technology, the so-called "baron of Bitcoin" didn't even stay for his panel. "Fuck you, Dave," the emcee gleefully told the crowd as they cheered and booed in response. The article reports that other speakers at the conference included:Former presidential candidate Andrew Yang Shark Tank's Kevin O'LearyPaypal and Palantir co-founder Peter ThielBut the article ultimately argues that the conference "feels like a low-level comic convention that's being held in the same event space as an economic forum."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

UPDATE: Jeff Bezos and Marc Andreessen have now responded to Elon Musk's suggestion to create a homeless shelter out of Twitter's San Francisco headquarters, "since no one shows up anyway." And at some point over the weekend, Musk also suggested a new way that Twitter could use Dogecoin... It all started when the newest member of Twitter's board of directors — Elon Musk — began tweeting new ideas for improving Twitter last night. "Everyone who signs up for Twitter Blue (i.e. pays $3/month) should get an authentication checkmark," Musk suggested, adding later that "It would massively expand the verified pool & make bot armies too expensive to maintain." Musk clarified that this checkmark "should be different from 'public figure' or 'official account' checkmark." And he also noted that Twitter Blue subscribers already get special features like a modifiable 20 second time window in which they can edit their tweets. "And no ads," Musk suggested in another tweet. "The power of corporations to dictate policy is greatly enhanced if Twitter depends on advertising money to survive." Musk later offered suggestions about how to implement that subscription fee, according to the Associated Press. Musk suggested it "should be proportionate to affordability and in local currency." And he added, "Maybe even an option to pay in Doge?" referring to Dogecoin cryptocurrency. But moments later Musk tweeted a poll, asking his followers to vote Yes or No to this idea: Convert Twitter's San Francisco headquarters to a homeless shelter since no one shows up anyway. Within 16 hours 1,425,937 people had voted "Yes!" — a whopping 91.3% of all votes cast. (Versus just 135,877 votes for "No.") Sunday night Bloomberg reported that Jeff Bezos, "a fellow billionaire, responded Sunday with a link to a report about an [8-story] homeless shelter attached to an Amazon office building, noting that a portion of Twitter's space could be converted, making it easier for employees who want to volunteer.Musk called the suggestion a "great idea...." Homelessness is a particularly visible problem at Twitter's headquarters, located in a part of San Francisco where residents have grappled with urban decay and drug addiction. Silicon valley entrepreneur/investor Marc Andreessen then posted his own three-word reply. Apparently in response to Bezos's suggestion that employees could volunteer more easily if if a portion of their building were a homeless shelter, Andreessen joked, "Every other desk?" And five hours after Musk's homeless shelter poll, he'd moved on to yet another question, polling his followers for "Yes" or "No" votes on this idea: Delete the w in Twitter?Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Sonic the Hedgehog 2 "shattered early box office projections," reports the Los Angeles Times, bringing in $71 million in its opening weekend. That makes it the biggest first-weekend for a Paramount movie in at least four years — more than Terminator: Dark Fate ($29 million) and Mission: Impossible — Fallout ($61.2 million). You can watch its trailer here — but here's how the Times summarizes its plot. "The titular furry blue protagonist (voiced by Ben Schwartz) faces an equally fluffy new threat, Knuckles the Echidna (Idris Elba), who has joined Dr. Robotnik's (Jim Carrey) ongoing quest conquer Earth." Engadget calls this the best opening weekend ever for a videogame movie. The previous record-holder was Sonic the Hedgehog 1, a movie which Paramount+ now "plans to expand into a cinematic universe" — or at least, expand into a spin-off TV series.Before the pandemic shut down theaters throughout the U.S, and other parts of the world, the first Sonic film went on to gross $319 million globally. Sonic the Hedgehog 2 is currently on track to beat those earnings having grossed approximately $141 million globally. As with the first movie, timing appears to have been a significant factor in Sonic 2's early success. Its main competitor at the box office was Sony's much-maligned Morbius, which saw a drastic 74 percent drop in ticket sales from its opening weekend last Friday. It only earned $10.2 million in additional domestic revenue after a $39 million debut.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

17 million people trade stocks and cryptocurrency on the Robinhood app. Now Gizmodo has obtained copies of hundreds of complaints filed about the app between mid-2020 until and-2021 with America's consumer protection agency, the FTC:The inability to withdraw money from Robinhood accounts for extended periods of time was a common complaint from consumers. There were also people who said they were hacked and then became frustrated that Robinhood was unresponsive when they tried to resolve the issue. Some users who say they were hacked even claimed they lost thousands of dollars when they couldn't reach Robinhood about the issue... The FTC found 3,081 complaints, but only released 200 of those to Gizmodo under its obligations to comply with the Freedom of Information Act law... But we're publishing a small sample of the complaints in an effort to highlight patterns that point to larger problems, just as we have with other companies like Binance, Tinder, Venmo, Rent-A-Center, AirBNB, and Honest Company, to name a few. One of the most common complaints about Robinhood was an inability to reach someone with the company's customer service team. Robinhood only introduced phone support in October of 2021, so it was common for people with complaints to be unable to reach anyone, according to the FTC documents we obtained. Robinhood is aware of the issue, the company told Gizmodo, and has worked to ameliorate it with a 24/7 hotline.... "Since 2020, when some of these complaints were filed, we've invested heavily in phone support, systems stability, and security processes. We're committed to supporting our customers and offering a safe experience, and we're confident that the steps we've taken over the past two years put us in a strong position to serve our growing customer base." Another recurring complaint involves people being unable to sell a given stock while its value tanked on the market. This issue, as you can imagine, is troubling because it prevents people from minimizing their losses.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

NBC News looks at the "thriving ecosystem" of space businesses "dramatically expanding access to the cosmos and fueling what is projected to grow into a trillion-dollar commercial space industry." "Yet alongside the numerous benefits to society, increasing access to space and supporting an economy in orbit comes with its share of challenges, including how to balance a growing industry with the safe and sustainable use of outer space...."Speckled among the operational satellites in low-Earth orbit are thousands of tons of space debris, ranging from tiny flecks of paint to spent rocket parts to huge defunct spacecraft that have languished in orbital graveyards for decades. Adding more satellites to the mix not only increases the chances of a catastrophic on-orbit collision, but also pushes humanity closer to a perilous tipping point, beyond which certain parts of low-Earth orbit may become too cluttered and risky to operate in safely. "We're really on borrowed time before we have another big collision," said Charity Weeden, vice president of global space policy and government relations at Astroscale U.S., a private company that specializes in satellite servicing and orbital debris removal. "There are thousands of close calls every day in orbit...." But placing all the blame on these megaconstellations is oversimplifying the problem, said Darren McKnight, a senior technical fellow at LeoLabs, a California-based aerospace company that operates networks of ground-based radars and tracking systems to monitor objects in low-Earth orbit and map their movements. For one, operational satellites make up only a small fraction of the total number of objects in low-Earth orbit that pose collision risks, he said. And unlike defunct spacecraft that have languished in orbit for decades, most newer satellites can be maneuvered out of harm's way, if necessary. It has also become standard practice for satellite operators to have an end-of-life plan to cut down on the accumulation of space junk. These strategies include purposefully commanding a spacecraft to "deorbit," or burn up harmlessly in Earth's atmosphere, or strand it in a higher, "graveyard" orbit away from the most congested sections around the planet. Still, the risks are serious. And the amount of debris in space is expected to grow as launches continue. McKnight said "bad neighborhoods" have already emerged — areas in low-Earth orbit where big clouds of debris pose very real threats." There are certain places in Earth orbit where we are destined to have a major event within the next five to 10 years," he said. "We're looking at a 10 to 15 percent probability of a collision, which sounds unlikely, but by leaving these objects in orbit since the mid-'80s, we're rolling the dice a lot" These risks were amplified by a series of recent anti-satellite missile tests — one conducted by China in 2007, one by India in 2019 and one carried out by Russia last year — and a separate accidental collision between two satellites in 2009. Each event is estimated to have produced thousands of pieces of debris larger than the size of a golf ball, and even smaller, harder-to-track objects, according to the Secure World Foundation, a nongovernmental organization that focuses on space policy... Part of the problem is that while launches are subject to domestic regulations in individual countries, there is no international body to oversee what happens in orbit. Policies have yet to catch up with the industry's growth, and it's unclear if any binding global agreements can be achieved anytime soon. "It's like we're building the plane as we're flying it," said Josef Koller, a systems director for the Center for Space Policy and Strategy at The Aerospace Corp. The article also points out that companies like Astroscale are currently "developing technologies to actively remove objects from orbit."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Chainalysis is a software for tracing cryptocurrency, "to turn the digital underworld's preferred means of exchange into its Achilles' heel," writes Wired. This week they describe what happened when that company's co-founder discovered that for two yeras, hundreds of users of a child pornography-trading site — and its administrators — "had done almost nothing to obscure their cryptocurrency trails..." and "seemed to be wholly unprepared for the modern state of financial forensics on the blockchain."Over the previous few years, [Internal Revenue Service criminal investigator Chris] Janczewski, his partner Tigran Gambaryan, and a small group of investigators at a growing roster of three-letter American agencies had used this newfound technique, tracing a cryptocurrency that once seemed untraceable, to crack one criminal case after another on an unprecedented, epic scale. But those methods had never led them to a case quite like this one, in which the fate of so many people, victims and perpetrators alike, seemed to hang on the findings of this novel form of forensics.... Janczewski thought again of the investigative method that had brought them there like a digital divining rod, revealing a hidden layer of illicit connections underlying the visible world.... When Bitcoin first appeared in 2008, one fundamental promise of the cryptocurrency was that it revealed only which coins reside at which Bitcoin addresses — long, unique strings of letters and numbers — without any identifying information about those coins' owners. This layer of obfuscation created the impression among many early adherents that Bitcoin might be the fully anonymous internet cash long awaited by libertarian cypherpunks and crypto-anarchists: a new financial netherworld where digital briefcases full of unmarked bills could change hands across the globe in an instant. Satoshi Nakamoto, the mysterious inventor of Bitcoin, had gone so far as to write that "participants can be anonymous" in an early email describing the cryptocurrency. And thousands of users of dark-web black markets like Silk Road had embraced Bitcoin as their central payment mechanism. But the counterintuitive truth about Bitcoin, the one upon which Chainalysis had built its business, was this: Every Bitcoin payment is captured in its blockchain, a permanent, unchangeable, and entirely public record of every transaction in the Bitcoin network. The blockchain ensures that coins can't be forged or spent more than once. But it does so by making everyone in the Bitcoin economy a witness to every transaction. Every criminal payment is, in some sense, a smoking gun in broad daylight. Within a few years of Bitcoin's arrival, academic security researchers — and then companies like Chainalysis — began to tear gaping holes in the masks separating Bitcoin users' addresses and their real-world identities. The article describes some investigative techniques — like pressuring exchanges for identities, tying a transaction to a known identity, or even performing an undercover transaction themselves. "Thanks to tricks like these, Bitcoin had turned out to be practically the opposite of untraceable: a kind of honeypot for crypto criminals that had, for years, dutifully and unerasably recorded evidence of their dirty deals. "By 2017, agencies like the FBI, the Drug Enforcement Agency, and the IRS's Criminal Investigation division had traced Bitcoin transactions to carry out one investigative coup after another, very often with the help of Chainalysis. "The cases had started small and then gained a furious momentum...." Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader Z00L00K for sharing the article.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

CNET points out the far side of the moon — the one that never faces earth — is "rugged, spotted with tons of craters" and "filled with totally different elements." "In essence, our moon has two faces, and scientists are still trying to solve the mystery of why they're so different."But a paper published Friday in the journal Science Advances might finally have an explanation for one major aspect of this enigmatic lunar duality. It has to do dark shadows, a massive impact many billions of years ago, and... lava.... They used computer simulations to see what might've gone on long, long (long) ago, way before there was any volcanic activity on the moon's surface. More specifically, they re-created a massive impact that, billions of years ago, changed the base of the moon, forming a gigantic crater that we now refer to as the South Pole-Aitken (SPA) basin.... What they found is that this huge smash would've created a plume of heat that carried a bunch of specific chemical elements to the near side of the moon, and not the far side. "We expect that this contributed to the mantle melting that produced the lava flows we see on the surface," Jones said. In other words, those elements presumably contributed to an era of volcanism on the lunar face we can see from Earth but it left the far side untouched.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"According to a new International Money Fund (IMF) report, cryptocurrency is much more popular in countries with insecure currencies and corrupt governments..." reports The Street, adding that the report concludes "the best way forward is not fight, but to learn how to better regulate cryptocurrency."The IMF surveyed more than 110,000 respondents in over 55 countries, polling between 2,000 and 12,000 people in each country, about their cryptocurrency use...."Crypto usage is empirically associated with higher perceived corruption and more intensive capital controls," the study's authors write. "[...] This evidence adds to the case for regulating crypto usage — for example, by requiring intermediaries to implement know-your-customer procedures." Bloomberg adds:The report shows why countries might want to require intermediaries, such as digital currency exchanges, to implement know-your-customer procedures — ID verification standards that are designed to prevent fraud, money laundering and terrorism financing, the organization said. Some countries, like the U.S., have already instituted those kinds of controls. Nations around the world are struggling over the best way to regulate the $2 trillion crypto market, with the level of oversight varying greatly from one country to another. The findings suggest that crypto assets "may be used to transfer corruption proceeds or circumvent capital controls," the organization said, without singling out individual countries.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The newest member of Twitter's board of directors just tweeted "Is Twitter dying?" That would be Elon Musk — who'd preceded the question with a list of Twitter's ten most-followed accounts, noting that most of them "tweet rarely and post very little content." And in follow-up tweets, Musk pointed out that Taylor Swift hasn't posted anything in three months, while Justin Bieber "only posted once this entire year." When someone posted a bar graph showing that Twitter's user count continued to grow, Musk posted a reply which he's since pinned to the top of his own Twitter feed. "Now subtract crypto scam accounts that twitter constantly shows as 'real' people in everyone's feed" This isn't the first time Elon Musk has posted something interesting on Twitter, reports AFP:On Thursday, Musk tweeted a photo of himself smoking marijuana on a Joe Rogan podcast in 2018, with the caption, "Twitter's next board meeting is gonna be lit." About an hour ago Musk also shared a graph from YouGov (a British market research and data analytics firm) showing that Democrats and Republicans have starkly different levels of trust in major news sources. On the chart Republicans show an average "trustworthiness" rating above 50% for just two of the 22 news outlets: Fox News and the Weather Channel. Above the chart Musk added the words, "Truth is the first casualty." Two minutes later he followed that tweet with an equally cryptic remark. "69.420% of statistics are false."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A new article on the Verge argues that the era of fixing your own phone "has nearly arrived."When I called up iFixit CEO Kyle Wiens, I figured he'd be celebrating — after years of fighting for right-to-repair, big name companies like Google and Samsung have suddenly agreed to provide spare parts for their phones. Not only that, they signed deals with him to sell those parts through iFixit, alongside the company's repair guides and tools. So did Valve. But Wiens says he's not done making deals yet. "There are more coming," he says, one as soon as a couple of months from now. (No, it's not Apple.) Motorola was actually the first to sign on nearly four years ago. And if Apple meaningfully joins them in offering spare parts to consumers — like it promised to do by early 2022 — the era of fixing your own phone may be underway. Last October, the United States effectively made it legal to open up many devices for the purpose of repair with an exemption to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Now, the necessary parts are arriving. What changed? Weren't these companies fighting tooth and nail to keep right-for-repair off the table, sometimes sneakily stopping bills at the last minute? Sure. But some legislation is getting through anyhow... and one French law in particular might have been the tipping point. "The thing that's changing the game more than anything else is the French repairability scorecard," says Wiens, referring to a 2021 law that requires tech companies to reveal how repairable their phones are — on a scale of 0.0 to 10.0 — right next to their pricetag. Even Apple was forced to add repairability scores — but Wiens points me to this press release by Samsung instead. When Samsung commissioned a study to check whether the French repairability scores were meaningful, it didn't just find the scorecards were handy — it found a staggering 80 percent of respondents would be willing to give up their favorite brand for a product that scored higher. "There have been extensive studies done on the scorecard and it's working," says Wiens. "It's driving behavior, it's shifting consumer buying patterns." Stick, meet carrot. Seeing an opportunity, Wiens suggests, pushed these companies to take up iFixit on the deal. Nathan Proctor, director of the Campaign for the Right to Repair at the US Public Interest Research Group (US PIRG), still thinks the stick is primarily to thank. "It feels cheeky to say 100 percent... but none of this happens unless there's a threat of legislation... These companies have known these were issues for a long time, and until we organized enough clout for it to start seeming inevitable, none of the big ones had particularly good repair programs and now they're all announcing them," Proctor notes.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Harvard University's school of engineering has an announcement. "For all the recent advances in integrated lithium niobate photonic circuits — from frequency combs to frequency converters and modulators — one big component has remained frustratingly difficult to integrate: lasers..."Long haul telecommunication networks, data center optical interconnects, and microwave photonic systems all rely on lasers to generate an optical carrier used in data transmission. In most cases, lasers are stand-alone devices, external to the modulators, making the whole system more expensive and less stable and scalable. Now, researchers from the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) in collaboration with industry partners at Freedom Photonics and HyperLight Corporation, have developed the first fully integrated high-power laser on a lithium niobate chip, paving the way for high-powered telecommunication systems, fully integrated spectrometers, optical remote sensing, and efficient frequency conversion for quantum networks, among other applications.... "Integrating high-performance plug-and-play lasers would significantly reduce the cost, complexity, and power consumption of future communication systems," said Amirhassan Shams-Ansari, a graduate student at SEAS and first author of the study. "It's a building block that can be integrated into larger optical systems for a range of applications, in sensing, lidar, and data telecommunications." By combining thin-film lithium niobate devices with high-power lasers using an industry-friendly process, this research represents a key step towards large-scale, low-cost, and high-performance transmitter arrays and optical networks. Thanks to Slashdot reader Hari Pota for sharing the story (via Semicounductor Digest)Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"English rock band Pink Floyd has released new music for the first time in 28 years," reports UPI, "with proceeds from the track going to humanitarian relief in Ukraine amid its ongoing conflict with Russia." "The single will be available on all streaming and download platforms..." the band said on their official web site. [Including downloads on Amazon Music and Apple Music]. "This is the first new original music that they have recorded together as a band since 1994's The Division Bell."The track sees David Gilmour and Nick Mason joined by long-time Pink Floyd bass player Guy Pratt and Nitin Sawhney on keyboards and features an extraordinary vocal performance by Andriy Khlyvnyuk of Ukrainian band Boombox.... David, who has a Ukrainian daughter-in-law and grandchildren says: "We, like so many, have been feeling the fury and the frustration of this vile act of an independent, peaceful democratic country being invaded and having its people murdered by one of the world's major powers...." "Recently I read that Andriy had left his American tour with Boombox, had gone back to Ukraine, and joined up with the Territorial Defense. Then I saw this incredible video on Instagram, where he stands in a square in Kyiv with this beautiful gold-domed church and sings in the silence of a city with no traffic or background noise because of the war. It was a powerful moment that made me want to put it to music." While writing the music for the track, David managed to speak with Andriy from his hospital bed in Kyiv where he was recovering from a mortar shrapnel injury. "I played him a little bit of the song down the phone line and he gave me his blessing...." Speaking about the track David says, "I hope it will receive wide support and publicity. We want to raise funds for humanitarian charities and raise morale. We want to express our support for Ukraine and, in that way, show that most of the world thinks that it is totally wrong for a superpower to invade the independent democratic country that Ukraine has become". All proceeds will go towards Ukrainian humanitarian relief. On March 11 the band had posted another update on their official site:To stand with the world in strongly condemning Russia's invasion of Ukraine, the works of Pink Floyd, from 1987 onwards, and all of David Gilmour's solo recordings are being removed from all digital music providers in Russia and Belarus....Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The New York Times reports: Pristine slivers of the impactor that killed the dinosaurs have been discovered, said scientists studying a North Dakota site that is a time capsule of that calamitous day 66 million years ago... "If you're able to actually identify it, and we're on the road to doing that, then you can actually say, 'Amazing, we know what it was,'" Robert DePalma, a paleontologist spearheading the excavation of the site, said Wednesday during a talk at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt.... A New Yorker article in 2019 described the site in southwestern North Dakota, named Tanis, as a wonderland of fossils buried in the aftermath of the impact some 2,000 miles away. Many paleontologists were intrigued but uncertain about the scope of DePalma's claims; a research paper published that year by DePalma and his collaborators mostly described the geological setting of the site, which once lay along the banks of a river. When the object hit Earth, carving a crater about 100 miles wide and nearly 20 miles deep, molten rock splashed into the air and cooled into spherules of glass, one of the distinct calling cards of meteor impacts. In the 2019 paper, DePalma and his colleagues described how spherules raining down from the sky clogged the gills of paddlefish and sturgeon, suffocating them. Usually the outsides of impact spherules have been mineralogically transformed by millions of years of chemical reactions with water. But at Tanis, some of them landed in tree resin, which provided a protective enclosure of amber, keeping them almost as pristine as the day they formed.... Finding amber-encased spherules, he said, was the equivalent of sending someone back in time to the day of the impact, "collecting a sample, bottling it up and preserving it for scientists right now...." DePalma said there also appear to be some bubbles within some of the spherules. Because the spherules do not look to be cracked, it's possible that they could hold bits of air from 66 million years ago. In 1998, UCLA geochemist Frank Kyte claimed he'd found a fragment of that meteor in a core sample drilled off Hawaii, the article points out, "but other scientists were skeptical that any bits of the meteor could have survived." But now DePalma tells the Times that this North Dakota discovery "actually falls in line with what Frank Kyte was telling us years ago."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Leaders of the successful unionization drive at Amazon's warehouse in Staten Island have heard from workers at 100 other Amazon facilities in all 50 states, the union's president told AFP. "We are witnessing a revolution," he added Friday. But meanwhile, "Amazon tipped its hand" this week on how it plans to try to defeat that vote, reports the Washington Post. Specifically, yesterday Amazon filed a list of 25 objections to the election with America's National Labor Relations Board — objecting mostly to the actions of the National Labor Relations Board:The company alleged that the regional office of the agency, based in Brooklyn, "created the impression" it was supporting the union by filing a lawsuit against Amazon before the vote. Amazon also alleged the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) delayed investigating "unmeritorious" unfair labor practice charges and understaffed the election. Amazon also alleges the independent Amazon Labor Union harassed employees who did not support the union, trespassed on Amazon's property and "misled employees by telling them that they would lose their benefits if they did not support the ALU," among other issues.... Labor lawyers say the company, which strongly opposed unionization, could try to delay the process of workers forming a union for years. "Amazon probably figures it has nothing to lose by exhausting every possible appeals process because time is on its side," said John Logan, chair of the labor and employment studies department at San Francisco State University.... A representative for the Amazon Labor Union said none of Amazon's objections had merit and called them a tactic to delay the union. "It's a blatant attempt by Amazon to interfere with and go around the democratic choice of their workforce," Amazon worker and labor organizer Connor Spence said.... The NLRB will need to certify the vote before the union can try to bargain a contract with Amazon. The objections could delay or even cancel that process, depending on what the NLRB decides. Amazon has many avenues to fight the vote results, including by refusing to bargain and forcing regulators to get involved. The president of the Amazon warehouse's reminded AFP what happened after two Starbucks cafes in upstate New York voted to union in December. More than 180 more Starbucks cafes launched unionization campaigns, and "On Friday, three more Starbucks cafes in upstate New York voted to unionize, taking the national total to 16."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Slashdot reader sciencehabit quotes Science magazine:Tiny molecular machines make life possible. Spinning rotary motors generate the chemical fuel our cells need, miniature walkers carry nutrients, and minute construction crews build proteins. Now, chemists are getting in on the act by making even smaller and simpler versions of these biological machines. In three studies, scientists report designing their own molecular pumps and rotary motors. The puny devices are not quite ready to make their real-world debut, but future versions could suck carbon dioxide from the air and harvest valuable metals from seawater. The new studies show it's possible to get teams of motors all working in the same direction and concentrate target chemicals in a confined space, a feat biology uses to sustain work. "These are very important steps toward useful real-life molecular machines," says Ivan Aprahamian, a chemist at Dartmouth College who wasn't involved with the studies.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"The sudden ear-piercing beep of a radiation meter fills the room," reports CNN, "as a Ukrainian soldier walks in. "This is where Russian soldiers were living at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant, and radiation levels are now higher than normal."There's no visible presence of the source of the radioactive material in the room, but Ukrainian officials say it's coming from small particles and dust that the soldiers brought into the building. "They went to the Red Forest and brought radioactive material back with them on their shoes," soldier Ihor Ugolkov explains. "Other places are fine, but radiation increased here, because they were living here." CNN was given exclusive access to the power plant for the first time since it came back into Ukrainian control. Officials at the plant explain the levels inside the room used by Russian soldiers are only slightly above what the World Nuclear Association describes as naturally occurring radiation. One-time contact would not be dangerous but continuous exposure would pose a health hazard. "They went everywhere, and they also took some radioactive dust on them [when they left]," Ugolkov adds. It's an example of what Ukrainian officials say was the lax and careless behavior of Russian soldiers while they were in control of the site of the 1986 nuclear disaster. The area around Chernobyl, namely the Red Forest, is still the most nuclear contaminated area on the planet, with most of the radioactive particles present on the soil.... Russian soldiers held Chernobyl for a month and are thought to have been operating in contaminated areas most of the time. Russian soldiers entered the Red Forest and dug trenches, Ukranian officials believe — and on the edge of the area CNN spotted a Russian military ration box "that exhibited radiation levels 50 times above naturally occurring values." The 169 Ukraine National Guard soldiers, who guarded the facility, were locked in the plant's Cold War era underground nuclear bunker, crammed up in tight quarters without access to natural light, fresh air or communication with the outside world, according to the Ukrainian Interior Minister. "They were kept here for 30 days without sufficient lighting and food. They were not allowed outside. On the last day they were taken away from here to an unknown direction," Denys Monastyrskyy says while standing inside the bunker. The minister says he believes the men have been taken to Russia, via Belarus, as prisoners of war, but doesn't know for certain.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Register: A newly proposed amendment to California's hiring discrimination laws would make AI-powered employment decision-making software a source of legal liability. The proposal would make it illegal for businesses and employment agencies to use automated-decision systems to screen out applicants who are considered a protected class by the California Department of Fair Employment and Housing. Broad language, however, means the law could be easily applied to "applications or systems that may only be tangentially related to employment decisions," lawyers Brent Hamilton and Jeffrey Bosley of Davis Wright Tremaine wrote. Automated-decision systems and algorithms, both fundamental to the law, are broadly defined in the draft, Hamilton and Bosley said. The lack of specificity means that technologies designed to aid human decision-making in small, subtle ways could end up being lumped together with hiring software, as could third-party vendors who provide the code. Strict record keeping requirements are included in the proposed law that double record retention time from two to four years, and require anyone using automated-decision systems to retain all machine-learning data generated as part of its operation and training. Training datasets leave vendors responsible, too: "Any person who engages the advertisement, sale, provision, or use of a selection tool, including but not limited to an automated-decision system, to an employer or other covered entity must maintain records of the assessment criteria used by the automated-decision system," the proposed text says. It specifically mentions it must maintain records for each customer it trains models for, too. Unintentional filtering isn't covered by the newly proposed California law, which focuses on the ways in which software can discriminate against certain types of people, unintentionally or otherwise. [...] Hamilton and Bosley suggest that California employers review their ATS and RMS software to ensure it conforms to the proposal, enhance their understanding of how the algorithms they use function, be prepared to demonstrate that the results of their process is fair and speak with vendors to ensure they are doing what they need to do to comply. The 45-day public commentary period for the proposed changes is not yet open, meaning there's no timetable for the changes to be reviewed, amended and submitted for passage.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The French aerospace company Gama has raised 2 million euros to deploy a solar sail in space. The Guardian reports: Solar sails require no engines to move. Instead, they are pushed around by the pressure of sunlight. The angle of the sail determines the direction of motion. Gama plans to deploy a 73.3-sq-meter solar sail in a 550km-altitude orbit in October. It will be launched as an additional payload on a SpaceX rocket. Gama hopes to demonstrate that solar sails can revolutionize access to deep space because they are cost-effective and scalable in size. After this year's deployment test, the company plans to launch a follow-up mission in 2024 to a higher orbit to demonstrate control and onboard navigation. In 2025, it hopes to emulate the Japanese and fly to Venus.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A possible galaxy that exists some 13.5 billion light-years from Earth has broken the record for farthest astronomical object ever seen. Live Science reports: That age places this collection of stars, now dubbed HD1, between a time of total darkness -- about 14 billion years ago the universe was a blank slate devoid of any stars or galaxies -- and one of just-burgeoning lights as clumps of dust and gas were growing into their cosmic destinies. [...] The researchers discovered HD1 in data collected over 1,200 hours of observation time using the Subaru Telescope, the VISTA Telescope, the U.K. Infrared Telescope and the Spitzer Space Telescope. They were particularly looking at redshift, a phenomenon in which light waves stretch out or become redder as an object moves away from the observer. In this case, the redshift suggested HD1 was extremely distant. The researchers found that the red wavelengths were the equivalent to a galaxy located 13.5 billion light-years away. HD1 also seems to be growing at a feverish rate -- about 100 stars each year, or at least 10 times the rate predicted for starburst galaxies that are known to produce stars at an extraordinarily high pace. These stars were also more massive, brighter (in ultraviolet wavelengths) and hotter than younger stars, the researchers found. As such, HD1 could be home to the universe's very first stars, called Population III stars; if that identity is verified, this would be the first observation of this type of star, the researchers said. There's also the possibility that HD1 is a supermassive black hole with a mass of about 100 million times that of the sun. To figure out HD1's true identity, the researchers can look for X-rays, which are emitted as material gets devoured by the gravity of a black hole. "If HD1 is a black hole, we should see X-ray emission from it. If we do not find X-rays, the emission must originate from massive stars," [one of the researchers told Live Science].Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Guardian: It's a sunny day on a city street as a green bus pulls up by the kerb. Onboard, a handful of passengers sit stony-faced as you step up to present your pass. But you cannot see your body -- only a floating pair of blue hands. It might sound like a bizarre dream, but the scenario is part of a virtual reality (VR) system designed to help people with agoraphobia -- those for whom certain environments, situations and interactions can cause intense fear and distress. Scientists say the approach enables participants to build confidence and ease their fears, helping them to undertake tasks in real life that they had previously avoided. The study also found those with more severe psychological problems benefited the most. "It leads to a real step-change in people's lives," said Prof Daniel Freeman, the lead researcher in the work, from the psychiatry department at the University of Oxford. The VR experience begins in a virtual therapist's office before moving to scenarios such as opening the front door or being in a doctor's surgery, each with varying levels of difficulty. Participants are asked to complete certain tasks, such as asking for a cup of coffee, and are encouraged to make eye contact or move closer to other characters. Freeman said while the scenarios feel real, the computer-generated scenes allow participants to feel able to try something new or approach the situation differently. "There's a little bit of the conscious bit [of the brain] going: 'OK, it's OK, I know it's not real and therefore I can persist, try something new and do something differently,'" he said. "That enables people to apply it in the real world. Basically, if you get over something in VR, you will get over in the real world." Writing in the Lancet Psychiatry journal, Freeman and colleagues report how they randomly allocated 174 patients with difficulties going outside and psychosis to use the "gameChange" VR technology alongside their usual care. Another 172 patients were allocated to receive their usual care alone. [...] The results show that six weeks after the trial began, those allocated to the VR therapy had a small but significant reduction in avoiding real-life situations because of agoraphobia, as well as less distress, compared with those who had only received their usual care. However, by six months there was no difference between the two groups. But further analysis revealed that those who had severe agoraphobia benefited most, and for these people the effect was sustained at six months. Such patients were able to complete, on average, two more activities than before -- such as going shopping or getting on a bus.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Nissan is working with NASA on a new type of battery for electric vehicles that promises to charge more quickly and be lighter yet safe, the Japanese automaker said Friday. CBS News reports: The all-solid-state battery will replace the lithium-ion battery now in use for a 2028 product launch and a pilot plant launch in 2024, according to Nissan. The battery would be stable enough to be used in pacemakers, Nissan said. When finished, it will be about half the size of the current battery and fully charge in 15 minutes instead of a few hours. The collaboration with the U.S. space program, as well as the University of California San Diego, involves the testing of various materials, Corporate Vice President Kazuhiro Doi told reporters. "Both NASA and Nissan need the same kind of battery," he said. Nissan and NASA are using what's called the "original material informatics platform," a computerized database, to test various combinations to see what works best among hundreds of thousands of materials, Doi said. The goal is to avoid the use of expensive materials like rare metals needed for lithium-ion batteries.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Twitter is experimenting with an "unmentioning" feature that will allow users to remove themselves from conversations. The Verge reports: It's limited to some users and only on the web version for now but looks like a very useful way to clean up your mentions. "We're experimenting with Unmentioning -- a way to help you protect your peace and remove yourself from conversations," the tweet reads. The company posted a short GIF of what the feature will look like to its Twitter Safety account. The "leave this conversation" option will appear on the menu that pops out of the corner of a tweet on the web version of Twitter. (It includes the "mute" and "embed" options as well.) Clicking the "leave this conversation" option brings up another menu that details what happens when you leave a conversation: your username gets untagged, it stops any future mentions in that conversation, and, perhaps most importantly, it will stop notifications.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

E Ink has unveiled a new version of its "Kaleido" color e-paper color display capable of playing animations and videos. It can also support displays up to 13.3-inches. Gizmodo reports: Kaleido was followed by Kaleido Plus which offered some key improvements, but it is now being replaced by the freshly announced Kaleido 3. We haven't had a chance to go eyes-on with Kaleido 3 just yet, but according to E Ink, "by optimizing the design of the ePaper module structure, E Ink Kaleido 3 has increased its color saturation by 30 percent compared to the previous generation." That's not a stark contrast on paper (pun intended) and Kaleido 3 still only supports 4,096 colors, but in person, the improvements between versions are usually far more obvious. E Ink also claims that Kaleido 3, which will be available in three sizes (7.8-inch, 10.3-inch, and 13.3-inch) for everything from e-readers to larger tablets, employs a new front light technology that reduces the amount of blue light bouncing off the screen to make reading easier at night without resorting to warmer color temperature options for the LEDs which would throw off the accuracy of the colors being displayed. The most interesting upgrade with Kaleido 3 is that E Ink claims the responsiveness of the display has been improved which "enables the module to play animations and videos, providing new options for digital reading and writing in educational and professional applications."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Since its launch, the Raspberry Pi OS (and most operating systems based on it) has shipped with a default "pi" user account, making it simpler to boot up a Pi and start working without needing to hook up the device to a monitor or go through a multi-step setup process. But as of today, that's changing -- new installs of the Raspberry Pi OS are shedding that default user account for both security and regulatory reasons. Raspberry Pi Foundation software engineer Simon Long explains the thinking in this blog post. "[The "pi" user account] could potentially make a brute-force attack slightly easier, and in response to this, some countries are now introducing legislation to forbid any Internet-connected device from having default login credentials," he writes. This move will improve the Pi operating system's security. Before, even if you assigned a good password to the "pi" account, attackers could still assume with a reasonable degree of certainty that most Raspberry Pi boards were using the "pi" username. Many Pi OS-based operating systems also ship with the default "pi" user account enabled and are completely passwordless, requiring extra steps to assign the account a password in the first place. The flip side is that the change could break some software and scripts, particularly those that are hard-coded to use the "pi" user account and home folder. "[T]he Raspberry Pi OS now boots into a dedicated setup mode the first time you start it up instead of running the setup wizard as an app in the normal desktop environment," adds Ars. "And that setup wizard now prompts you to create a username and password rather than simply assigning a password to the default 'pi' user account. To aid with setup, the wizard can now pair Bluetooth keyboards and mice without requiring you to plug in a USB accessory first." The new version of the Pi OS also includes experimental support for the Wayland display server protocol, but Long says most people should ignore it for now since it's explicitly labeled as "experimental."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Decentralized finance (DeFi) firm Truflation is building a new gauge to track inflation independent from the government and in real-time. CoinDesk reports: Think of it as a competitor to the Consumer Price Index (CPI), and one where officials can't move the goalposts. "The framework that [the government] is using is a hundred years old ... and they have continuously tried to evolve that versus taking a fresh approach in an age where we've got everything computerized," Truflation founder Stefan Rust told CoinDesk in an interview. The team started building Truflation after former Coinbase (COIN) Chief Technology Officer Balaji Srinivasan challenged Web 3 developers to build a censorship-resistant inflation feed, claiming that "the centralized state isn't going to provide reliable inflation stats," and promising an investment of $100,000. On Friday it was announced that Truflation won the challenge. The key difference between the CPI and the Truflation index is that while the government uses survey data to measure inflation, Truflation looks at price data. The CPI is measured in the form of a survey that collects about 94,000 prices per month for commodities and services and 8,000 rental housing units for the housing component. While the Truflation index is based on the same calculation model as the widely used CPI, it is different because it measures and reports inflation changes daily by using current real-market price data from sources like Zillow, Penn State and Nielsen, among others. About 40% of the data that is being looked at is the same goods basket that the Bureau of Labor Statistics uses. The remaining 60% is being substituted with data from other sources. Truflation, which runs on Chainlink and is therefore accessible and visible for everyone, currently measures a 13.2% inflation rate, as opposed to 7.9% measured by the CPI in March.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The full 90-minute keynote of the Windows 95 launch was uploaded this week by the Blue OS Museum YouTube account. As Gizmodo's Florence Ion notes, "clips from the presentation have floated around online for decades," but the full keynote "has been harder to track down." From the report: [T]he complete presentation is an absolute time capsule of technology culture as it existed on Aug. 24, 1995. It also features some incredibly cringe moments, most of which stem from Jay Leno's cheesy and problematic joke-telling. My face felt flush the entire time I watched this presentation from all the nostalgia pulsating throughout it. There are all the requisite hairstyles, khaki pants, and overly-used Bill Clinton jokes that make this a quintessential event of the '90s. In a slideshow, Gizmodo highlights the "best and worst parts" of the event, adding that if you do watch the entire presentation, "you will have The Rolling Stones' 'Start Me Up' stuck in your head for the rest of the day."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The United States set a major renewable energy milestone last Tuesday: wind power was the second-highest source of electricity for the first time since the Energy Information Administration began gathering the data. From a report: As E&E reporter Ben Storrow noted and the EIA confirmed, wind turbines last Tuesday generated over 2,000 gigawatt-hours of electricity, edging out electricity generated by nuclear and coal (but still trailing behind natural gas). Last year, wind was the fourth-largest electricity source behind natural gas, coal, and nuclear, generating close to 380 terawatt-hours for the entire year, according to the EIA. For context, a terawatt is a thousand times bigger than a gigawatt. Major milestone aside, wind energy in the US is still lagging behind one European country that recently broke a record of its own: Germany. Although the US has more wind capacity by sheer numbers -- it's a larger country with a larger population -- Germany is outpacing the US in terms of how much electricity it gets from wind. In February alone, windmills in Germany generated a record 20.6 terawatt-hours of wind energy, Rystad Energy reported Tuesday, which made up 45% of its total energy in February. In 2020 -- the most recent year the EIA has robust statistics for -- Germany got 24% of its electricity from wind, compared to 8% in the US.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Early in the pandemic, the World Health Organization stated that SARS-CoV-2 was not transmitted through the air. That mistake and the prolonged process of correcting it sowed confusion and raises questions about what will happen in the next pandemic. Nature: According to Trish Greenhalgh, a primary-care health researcher at the University of Oxford, UK, the IPC GDG members were guided by their medical training and the dominant thinking in the medical field about how infectious respiratory diseases spread; this turned out to be flawed in the case of SARS-CoV-2 and could be inaccurate for other viruses as well. These biases led the group to discount relevant information -- from laboratory-based aerosol studies and outbreak reports, for instance. So the IPC GDG concluded that airborne transmission was rare or unlikely outside a small set of aerosol-generating medical procedures, such as inserting a breathing tube into a patient. That viewpoint is clear in a commentary by members of the IPC GDG, including Schwaber, Sobsey and Fisher, published in August 20202. The authors dismissed research using air-flow modelling, case reports describing possible airborne transmission and summaries of evidence for airborne transmission, labelling such reports "opinion pieces." Instead, they concluded that "SARS-CoV-2 is not spread by the airborne route to any significant extent." In effect, the group failed to look at the whole picture that was emerging, says Greenhalgh. "You've got to explain all the data, not just the data that you've picked to support your view," and the airborne hypothesis is the best fit for all the data available, she says. One example she cites is the propensity for the virus to transmit in 'superspreader events,' in which numerous individuals are infected at a single gathering, often by a single person. "Nothing explains some of these superspreader events except aerosol spread," says Greenhalgh. Throughout 2020, there was also mounting evidence that indoor spaces posed a much greater risk of infection than outdoor environments did. An analysis of reported outbreaks recorded up to the middle of August 2020 revealed that people were more than 18 times as likely to be infected indoors as outdoors3. If heavy droplets or dirty hands had been the main vehicles for transmitting the virus, such a strong discrepancy would not have been observed. Although the WHO played down the risk of airborne transmission, it did invite Li [a building environment engineer at the University of Hong Kong who suspected early on that SARS-CoV-2 was also airborne] to become a member of the IPC GDG after he spoke to the group in mid-2020. Had the organization not at least been open to his view that infections were caused by aerosols, especially at short range, "they would not have invited me there as they knew my standing," he says.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: Tesla opened its Austin, Texas-based Gigafactory on Thursday, a crucial step in the company's delayed plans to begin production of its electric Cybertruck. To celebrate the opening, Tesla held an event, billed as a "Cyber Rodeo," to which it invited 15,000 people to listen to live music, eat food, and pay homage to Elon Musk and his company. "We are really entering a new phase of Tesla's future," Musk told the audience. Clad in a black cowboy hat and aviator sunglasses, Musk said he was excited to begin working on Cybertruck production at last. "I can't wait to see this baby in production, it's going to be epic." Along with a new version of the Cybertruck, Musk also showed off a new Roadster vehicle, which is slated to begin production next year. He also teased a robotaxi he said would look "quite futuristic" but didn't elaborate or provide any details. It is the company's fourth factory in the US, following the vehicle factory in Fremont, California, battery factory in Sparks, Nevada, and solar factory in Buffalo, New York. Tesla also has a vehicle factory outside Shanghai, China, and recently opened its first European factory near Berlin, Germany. Tesla spent an estimated $5 million purchasing the land outside Austin, plus another $1.1 billion to build the plant. "We need a place where we can be really big, and there's no place like Texas," Musk said. "We going to move to a truly massive scale." The Texas factory is expected to be the site where, starting in 2023, Tesla will make its long-delayed Cybertruck. Indications that the Cybertruck would be delayed first emerged last year, when the online reservation page was changed and then later withdrawn from the site. Musk had said that he expected a few trucks to be delivered to customers by the end of 2021, but no deliveries were ever made. The Cybertruck has already gone through some changes since its initial reveal in 2019 -- including the addition of a comically oversized single windshield wiper, traditional folding mirrors, and invisible door handles. In addition to the Cybertruck, Tesla also plans to build Model Ys and Model 3s destined for the East Coast, as well as the long-delayed Tesla Semi. The company has already started to build Model Y crossovers at the unfinished Texas Gigafactory in the fourth quarter of 2021, according to the company's latest earnings report.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

OneHundredAndTen writes: It would seem that a majority of managers have decided to launch a campaign of threats to force people back into the office. From the report: About 77% of managers said they'd be willing to implement "severe consequences" -- including firing workers or cutting pay and benefits -- on those who refuse to return to the office, according to a recent survey by employment background check company GoodHire of 3,500 American managers.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A lawsuit charges that Rutgers Business School sought to improve its rankings by creating bogus temporary jobs for graduating MBA students. From a report: Rutgers Business School is always keeping score. On its website, it proclaims its No. 1 ranking this year by Bloomberg Businessweek as the top Public Business School in the Northeast. Fortune bestowed a similar honor in 2021. And U.S. News & World Report rated its MBA program among the top ten for Best Overall Employment Outcomes in the U.S., as well as No. 12 for its Supply Chain Management MBA program. But in a whistleblower lawsuit filed Friday, a Rutgers administrator charged that the university fraudulently burnished those national rankings by creating totally bogus jobs to show the success its business school graduates had in finding employment. The lawsuit by Deidre White, the business school's human resources manager, alleged the program used a temp agency to hire unemployed MBA students, placing them into sham positions at the university itself -- for no other reason than to make it appear like a greater number of graduates were getting full-time jobs after getting their Rutgers diplomas. "The fraud worked," wrote White's attorney, Matthew A. Luber of McOmber McOmber & Luber in Marlton. In the very first year of the scheme, they said Rutgers was suddenly propelled to, among other things, the 'No. 1' business school in the Northeast.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Microsoft has rolled out a new security feature called Smart App Control with Windows 11. From a report: "Smart App Control is a major enhancement to the Windows 11 security model that prevents users from running malicious applications on Windows devices that default blocks untrusted or unsigned applications," Microsoft vice president David Weston explains. "It goes beyond previous built-in browser protections and is woven directly into the core of the OS at the process level. Using code signing along with AI, our new Smart App Control only allows processes to run that are predicted to be safe based on either code certificates or an AI model for application trust within the Microsoft cloud. Model inference occurs 24 hours a day on the latest threat intelligence that provides trillions of signals." Smart App Control is interesting because it will be enabled by default on new Windows PCs in the future. But if you upgrade to whatever version of Windows 11 that enables this feature on an existing install, you will have to use Reset this PC to reset Windows 11 and clean install it. That is, I believe, unprecedented.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Google is partnering with iFixit to sell official replacement parts for its Pixel phones later this year, making it easier for independent professionals and consumers to repair the devices. From a report: The news follows similar moves by Apple and Samsung and will cover models ranging from the Pixel 2 to the Pixel 6 Pro, along with future Pixel models. The parts will sold through ifixit.com and be available in the US, UK, Canada, Australia and European Union countries where Pixels are sold. The parts, which will include batteries, replacement displays and cameras, will be available either individually or in iFixit kits, which include tools needed to perform the repairs like specialty screwdriver bits, Google said.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Talent shortages, geopolitical disruption, currency fluctuations and inflation aren't expected to have an impact on IT investments in 2022. In fact, research firm Gartner forecasts a four percent increase in worldwide IT spending this year amid all the turmoil. From a report: "Contrary to what we saw at the start of 2020, CIOs are accelerating IT investments as they recognize the importance of flexibility and agility in responding to disruption," said John-David Lovelock, research vice president at Gartner. As such, Gartner anticipates heavy spending on IT services including analytics, cloud computing and security. [...] Collective spending across all IT categories totaled nearly $4.3 trillion in 2021. This year, organizations are expected to shell out more than $4.4 trillion. Growth in categories like IT services and software is forecasted to increase by 6.8 percent and 9.8 percent, respectively. In 2023, the software category could see double-digit growth thanks to experimental end-consumer experiences and supply chain optimizations.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Blockstream and Jack Dorsey's Block, formerly Square, are breaking ground on a solar- and battery-powered bitcoin mine in Texas that uses solar and storage technology from Tesla. Tesla's 3.8 megawatt solar PV array and 12 megawatt-hour Megapack will power the facility. From a report: Blockstream co-founder and CEO Adam Back, a British cryptographer and a member of the "cypherpunk" crew, told CNBC on the sidelines of the Bitcoin 2022 conference in Miami that the mining facility is designed to be a proof of concept for 100% renewable energy bitcoin mining at scale. [...] Miners provide demand to these semi-stranded assets and make renewables in Texas economically viable, according to Castle Island Venture's Nic Carter. The constraint is that West Texas has roughly 34 gigawatts of power, five gigawatts of demand, and only 12 gigawatts of transmission. You can think of bitcoin miners as temporary buyers who keep the energy assets operational until the grid is able to fully absorb them. Back said the off-grid mine, expected to be completed later this year, highlights another key tenet of the bitcoin network: Miners are location agnostic and can "do it from anywhere without local infrastructure."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

People could eventually be able to turn the clock back on the cell-ageing process by 30 years, according to researchers who have developed a technique for reprogramming skin cells to behave as if they are much younger. From a report: Research from the Babraham Institute, a life sciences research organisation in Cambridge, could lead to the development of techniques that will stave off the diseases of old age by restoring the function of older cells and reducing their biological age. In experiments simulating a skin wound, older cells were exposed to a concoction of chemicals that "reprogrammed" them to behave more like youthful cells and removed age-related changes. This has been previously achieved, but the new work was completed in a much a shorter time frame -- 13 days compared with 50 -- and made the cells even younger. Dr Diljeet Gill, a researcher at the Babraham Institute, said: "Our understanding of ageing on a molecular level has progressed over the last decade, giving rise to techniques that allow researchers to measure age-related biological changes in human cells. We were able to apply this to our experiment to determine the extent of reprogramming our new method achieved. Our results represent a big step forward in our understanding of cell reprogramming."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Canada will offer a substantial incentive to companies that invest in carbon-capture technologies and will set aside as much as $3 billion over eight years to accelerate critical mineral exploration, extraction and processing as it seeks to cut carbon emissions. From a report In this year's budget presented on Thursday, Canada is introducing a 60% tax credit for equipment used to capture carbon from the air, and 50% for all other capture equipment, plus a 37.5% credit for transportation and storage equipment. Carbon capture and storage (CSS) facilities are expected to be a key part of global efforts to contain emissions from fossil fuels. Canada is the world's fourth-largest oil producer and has a set a goal of generating net-zero emissions by 2050. "For the oil and gas sector this tax credit, combined with the fact they are generating massive revenues right now, is more than enough to reduce the risk associated with going ahead with CCS projects," said Chris Severson-Baker, Alberta regional director at the Pembina Institute, a clean energy think-tank.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Tech giants have a message for Congress: Stop pushing for antitrust laws, and pass privacy rules instead. Lobbying to stop a package of bills designed to curb internet giants' power reached a frenzy this week, as the window for major legislation before the midterms closes. A report notes: Two industry groups representing companies such as Meta Platforms and Alphabet held separate lobbying days to oppose the bills and promote a federal privacy law, among other industry goals. TechNet, one of the oldest tech interest groups, met virtually with 41 lawmakers, including Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. The group's president, Linda Moore, said TechNet argued that voters care more about addressing privacy issues than antitrust issues. "A lot of the interest around the competition bills is based on the collection and the use of data," Moore said. "Let's focus on that part." A federal privacy standard was proposed years ago, but has not been a focus for this Congress as lawmakers turned their attention to competition and content moderation issues. But as many states have passed their own privacy bills, companies and lawmakers have looked to codify a federal standard.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Taiwan's spy catchers have launched probes into around 100 Chinese companies suspected of illegally poaching semiconductor engineers and other tech talent, a senior official at the island's Investigation Bureau told Reuters. From the report: That comes on top of seven prosecuted since the start of last year and includes 27 which have either been raided or whose owners have been summoned for questioning by the bureau, the official said. Home to industry giant TSMC and accounting for 92% of the world's most advanced semiconductor manufacturing capacity, Taiwan possesses what China needs - chip expertise in spades. A global chip shortage and Beijing's avowed goal of achieving self-reliance in advanced chips - more forcefully promoted by Chinese President Xi Jinping after a trade war with the former Trump administration - has only intensified the scramble for engineering talent. Taiwan responded with the creation in December 2020 of a task force within the justice ministry's Investigation Bureau -- its main spy catching organisation -- to tackle poaching. Cases where it has taken action with raids or questioning represented "the tip of the iceberg", the official said, asking to remain anonymous so that investigations are not impeded.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Windows Central: Windows 11 may be the latest operating system from Microsoft, but [Wednesday was] about Windows 3.1. It's the birthday of the classic OS, marking 30 years since its launch on April 6, 1992. Windows 3.1 introduced several key components, many of which have digital descendants on Windows 11 and imitators on other operating systems. Windows 3.1 brought PCs the CTRL+C and CTRL+V shortcuts for copy and paste. It added TrueType fonts and came with screensavers and a media player as well. Gamers had two options for games that preinstalled games: Solitaire and Minesweeper. Selling over 3 million copies in the first three months it was on the market, Windows 3.1 was considered a success. It was more user-friendly than Windows 3.0 and introduced many people to the idea of a personal computer in their home. Sadly for those that miss the days of the MS-DOS and command line being king, Windows 3.1 reached its end of support in 2001. Further reading: Windows 3.1 Turns 30: Here's How It Made Windows Essential (How To Geek)Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Across three different animal models researchers have demonstrated how short bursts of ultrasound targeted at specific clusters of nerves in the liver can effectively lower insulin and glucose levels. New Atlas reports: Reporting in the journal Nature Biomedical Engineering, a team led by GE Research, including investigators from the Yale School of Medicine, UCLA, and the Feinstein Institutes for Medical Research, demonstrated a unique non-invasive ultrasound method designed to stimulate specific sensory nerves in the liver. The technology is called peripheral focused ultrasound stimulation (pFUS) and it allows highly targeted ultrasound pulses to be directed at specific tissue containing nerve endings. "We used this technique to explore stimulation of an area of the liver called the porta hepatis," the researchers explained in a Nature briefing. "This region contains the hepatoportal nerve plexus, which communicates information on glucose and nutrient status to the brain but has been difficult to study as its nerve structures are too small to separately stimulate with implanted electrodes." The newly published study indicates short targeted bursts of pFUS at this area of the liver successfully reversed the onset of hyperglycaemia. The treatment was found to be effective in three separate animal models of diabetes: mice, rats and pigs. [...] The study found just three minutes of focused ultrasound each day was enough to maintain normal blood glucose levels in the diabetic animals. Studies in humans are currently underway to work out whether this method translates from animal studies. But there are other hurdles facing broad clinical deployment of the technique beyond simply proving it works. Current ultrasound tools used to perform this kind of pFUS technique require trained technicians. The researchers suggest the technology exists to simplify and automate these systems in a way that could be used by patients at home, but it will need to be developed before this treatment can be widely deployed.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Loren Grush writes via The Verge: Tomorrow morning, SpaceX is set to launch yet another crew of four to the International Space Station from Florida -- but unlike most of the company's passenger flights, this new crop of flyers won't include any current NASA astronauts. All four members of the crew are civilians, flying with a commercial aerospace company called Axiom Space. Their flight will mark the first time a completely private crew has visited the ISS. It's a new type of human spaceflight mission and one that comes with a hefty price tag for its participants. Three of the four flyers have each paid a reported $55 million for their seats on SpaceX's crew capsule, called the Crew Dragon. The trio of novice spacefarers includes Canadian investor Mark Pathy, American real estate investor Larry Connor, and former Israeli Air Force pilot Eytan Stibbe. The commander of the trip is a spaceflight veteran: Michael Lopez-Alegria, a former NASA astronaut who has flown four missions to space and now serves as a vice president of Axiom. Their mission, called Ax-1, is the latest in an emerging trend of completely private astronaut flights to orbit. [...] Axiom -- which strives to create a fleet of commercial space stations -- has arranged for three additional private crew missions to the ISS, just like Ax-1, to gear up for the creation of its first station. The company's goal is to "make space more accessible to everyone." "This really does represent the first step where a bunch of individuals who want to do something meaningful in low Earth orbit -- that aren't members of a government -- are able to take this opportunity," Mike Suffredini, Axiom's CEO and the former program manager of the ISS at NASA, said during a press conference. Though, until costs come down, such individuals will need a fat wallet.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: An object from another star system crashed into Earth in 2014, the United States Space Command (USSC) confirmed in a newly-released memo. The meteor ignited in a fireball in the skies near Papua New Guinea, the memo states, and scientists believe it possibly sprinkled interstellar debris into the South Pacific Ocean. The confirmation backs up the breakthrough discovery of the first interstellar meteor -- and, retroactively, the first known interstellar object of any kind to reach our solar system -- which was initially flagged by a pair of Harvard University researchers in a study posted on the preprint server arXiv in 2019. Amir Siraj, a student pursuing astrophysics at Harvard who led the research, said the study has been awaiting peer review and publication for years, but has been hamstrung by the odd circumstances that arose from the sheer novelty of the find and roadblocks put up by the involvement of information classified by the U.S. government. The discovery of the meteor, which measured just a few feet wide, follows recent detections of two other interstellar objects in our solar system, known as 'Oumuamua and Comet Borisov, that were much larger and did not come into close contact with Earth. "I get a kick out of just thinking about the fact that we have interstellar material that was delivered to Earth, and we know where it is," said Siraj, who is Director of Interstellar Object Studies at Harvard's Galileo Project, in a call. "One thing that I'm going to be checking -- and I'm already talking to people about -- is whether it is possible to search the ocean floor off the coast of Papua New Guinea and see if we can get any fragments." Siraj acknowledged that the odds of such a find are low, because any remnants of the exploded fireball probably landed in tiny amounts across a disparate region of the ocean, making it tricky to track them down. "It would be a big undertaking, but we're going to look at it in extreme depth because the possibility of getting the first piece of interstellar material is exciting enough to check this very thoroughly and talk to all the world experts on ocean expeditions to recover meteorites," he noted. "Siraj called the multi-year process a 'whole saga' as they navigated a bureaucratic labyrinth that wound its way though Los Alamos National Laboratory, NASA, and other governmental arms, before ultimately landing at the desk of Joel Mozer, Chief Scientist of Space Operations Command at the U.S. Space Force service component of USSC," adds Motherboard. Mozer confirmed that the object indicated "an interstellar trajectory," which was first brought to Siraj's attention last week via a tweet from a NASA scientist. He's now "renewing the effort to get the original discovery published so that the scientific community can follow-up with more targeted research into the implications of the find," the report says.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Despite the availability of life-saving COVID-19 vaccines, so many people died in the second year of the pandemic in the U.S. that the nation's life expectancy dropped for a second year in a row last year, according to a new analysis. NPR reports: The analysis of provisional government statistics found U.S. life expectancy fell by just under a half a year in 2021, adding to a dramatic plummet in life expectancy that occurred in 2020. Public health experts had hoped the vaccines would prevent another drop the following year. "The finding that instead we had a horrible loss of life in 2021 that actually drove the life expectancy even lower than it was in 2020 is very disturbing," says Dr. Steven Woolf, a professor of population health and health equity at Virginia Commonwealth University, who help conduct the analysis. "It speaks to an extensive loss of life during 2021." Many of the deaths occurred in people in the prime of their lives, Woolf says, and drove the overall U.S. life expectancy to fall to 76.6 years -- the lowest in at least 25 years. "The motivation for this study was to determine whether the horrible drop in life expectancy that we documented in 2020 resolved or rebounded in 2021 or whether there was a continued decline. Unfortunately, we did not find good news," Woolf told NPR in an interview.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

After 10 years of careful analysis and scrutiny, scientists of the CDF collaboration at the U.S. Department of Energy's Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory announced today that they have achieved the most precise measurement to date of the mass of the W boson, one of nature's force-carrying particles. Phys.Org reports: Using data collected by the Collider Detector at Fermilab, or CDF, scientists have now determined the particle's mass with a precision of 0.01% -- twice as precise as the previous best measurement. It corresponds to measuring the weight of an 800-pound gorilla to 1.5 ounces. The new precision measurement, published in the journal Science, allows scientists to test the standard model of particle physics, the theoretical framework that describes nature at its most fundamental level. The result: The new mass value shows tension with the value scientists obtain using experimental and theoretical inputs in the context of the standard model. If confirmed, this measurement suggests the potential need for improvements to the standard model calculation or extensions to the model.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

When Better.com CEO Vishal Garg laid off 900 employees, or about 9% of the company's staff, in early December, the startup world was shocked with his callous delivery. Now a video of Garg and CFO Kevin Ryan addressing the remaining employees right after the chief executive performed those layoffs has emerged, confirming many reports of his brash style and harsh words about those affected. TechCrunch reports: In a video obtained by TechCrunch, Garg is seen addressing the layoffs and in the process, admitting to making a number of mistakes. We chose not to publish the video in an effort to protect the identity of the source, but we've picked out the most relevant bits based on a transcription of the 12-minute meeting. About two minutes into the meeting, Garg says: "Make no mistake we did also eliminate redundant roles -- who might be strong performers but were in the wrong place at the wrong time, with the wrong task, and weren't mission critical." After about four minutes, Garg also acknowledged that the company was continuing to hire, including some interns, in the midst of the layoffs, while at the time making a thinly veiled threat: "...It's because we expect those people to be super productive and add value, and if they don't we will exit them too." He added: "We are going to be leaner, meaner and hungrier going forward. We will not be spending time trying to raise capital. We will not be spending time focused on what investors think. We will be spending time grinding this business forward in what will likely be a bloodbath in the mortgage industry in the next year or two." In the video at around the 8-minute mark, Garg admits to not being disciplined in managing the company's cash and in its hiring strategy, which helps explain the company's second mass layoff of over 3,000 people just three months later. It also helps support multiple sources' claims that the company is currently "losing $50 million per month." "Today we acknowledge that we overhired, and hired the wrong people. And in doing that we failed. I failed. I was not disciplined over the past 18 months. We made $250 million last year, and you know what, we probably pissed away $200 million. We probably could have made more money last year and been leaner, meaner and hungrier." He also explicitly says that the company lost $100 million in the previous quarter, saying it was his "mistake" for not laying off staff earlier.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Facebook today reported an increase in attacks on accounts run by Ukraine military personnel. In some cases, attackers took over accounts and posted "videos calling on the Army to surrender," but Facebook said it blocked sharing of the videos. Specifically, Facebook owner Meta's Q1 2022 Adversarial Threat Report said it has "seen a further spike in compromise attempts aimed at members of the Ukrainian military by Ghostwriter," a hacking campaign that "typically targets people through email compromise and then uses that to gain access to their social media accounts across the Internet." Ghostwriter has been linked to the Belarusian government. "Since our last public update [on February 27], this group has attempted to hack into the Facebook accounts of dozens of Ukrainian military personnel," Meta wrote today. Ghostwriter successfully hacked into the accounts in "a handful of cases" in which "they posted videos calling on the Army to surrender as if these posts were coming from the legitimate account owners. We blocked these videos from being shared." In its February 27 update, Meta said it detected Ghostwriter's "attempts to target people on Facebook to post YouTube videos portraying Ukrainian troops as weak and surrendering to Russia, including one video claiming to show Ukrainian soldiers coming out of a forest while flying a white flag of surrender." Meta said it had "taken steps to secure accounts that we believe were targeted by this threat actor" and "blocked phishing domains these hackers used to try to trick people in Ukraine into compromising their online accounts." But Ghostwriter continued its operations and hacked into accounts of Ukrainian military personnel, as previously mentioned. Separately, Facebook recently removed a network of Russian accounts that were trying to silence Ukrainians by reporting "fictitious policy violations." "Under our Inauthentic Behavior policy against mass reporting, we removed a network in Russia for abusing our reporting tools to repeatedly report people in Ukraine and in Russia for fictitious policy violations of Facebook policies in an attempt to silence them," Meta said today. Providing more detail in its quarterly report, Meta said the removed network included 200 accounts operated from Russia. "The individuals behind it coordinated to falsely report people for various violations, including hate speech, bullying, and inauthenticity, in an attempt to have them and their posts removed from Facebook. The majority of these fictitious reports focused on people in Ukraine and Russia, but the network also reported users in Israel, the United States, and Poland," the report said.Read more of this story at Slashdot.