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Amazon announced on Thursday it's releasing a ChatGPT and DALL-E rival it calls Amazon Bedrock. Insider reports: Bedrock is a suite of generative AI tools that can help Amazon Web Service customers -- businesses who run their operations on Amazon's data servers -- build chatbots, generate and summarize text, and make and classify images based on prompts. While OpenAI's ChatGPT is run solely on its GPT-4 language model, Bedrock users can perform specific tasks by selecting from a range of machine learning models it calls "foundation models," such as AI21's Jurassic-2, Anthropic's Claude, Stability AI's Stable Diffusion, and Amazon Titan. A content marketing manager, for example, can use Bedrock to create a targeted ad campaign for a new line of handbags by feeding it data so it can generate product social media posts, display ads, and web copy for each product, according to an AWS blog post. A preview of Amazon's generative AI toolkit is currently limited to select AWS customers. So far, Coda, an AI-document generation firm used by companies like Uber and the New York Times, is using Bedrock to scale its business operations, according to Amazon.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

International Business Machines is exploring a sale of its weather operation, WSJ reported, citing people familiar with the matter, as the technology company seeks to streamline its operations. From a report: An auction of the business is at an early stage, the people said, and there may not be a deal. Should there be one, private-equity is most likely the buyer in a deal that could be valued at more than $1 billion, the people said. IBM agreed to buy the business in 2015, purchasing The Weather Company's business-to-business, mobile and cloud-based businesses including Weather.com, which provides weather forecasts around the globe. The deal price at the time was pegged at more than $2 billion. The Weather Channel wasn't part of the deal, but agreed to license weather-forecast data and analytics from IBM. The deal was part of a push by IBM to use its cloud infrastructure to provide accurate weather forecasts and help companies control costs. The business issues more than 25 billion forecasts a day, according to the company's website. A sale of the weather unit would be a part of a broader push by IBM to streamline its operations as the once-dominant company's shares languish near levels they traded at more than 20 years ago.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Amazon is introducing a cloud service called Bedrock that developers can use to enhance their software with artificial intelligence systems that can generate text, similar to the engine behind the popular ChatGPT chatbot powered by Microsoft-backed startup OpenAI. From a report: The announcement indicates that the largest provider of cloud infrastructure won't be leaving a trendy growth area to challengers such as Google and Microsoft, both of which have started offering developers large language models they can tap into. Generally speaking, large language models are AI programs trained with extensive amounts of data that can compose human-like text in response to prompts that people type in. Through its Bedrock generative AI service, Amazon Web Services will offer access to its own first-party language models called Titan, as well as language models from startups AI21 and Google-backed Anthropic, and a model for turning text into images from startup Stability AI. One Titan model can generate text for blog posts, emails or other documents. The other can help with search and personalization. "Most companies want to use these large language models but the really good ones take billions of dollars to train and many years and most companies don't want to go through that," Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said on CNBC's "Squawk Box" Thursday. "So what they want to do is they want to work off of a foundational model that's big and great already and then have the ability to customize it for their own purposes. And that's what Bedrock is."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Instant messaging platform Discord says it was cooperating with U.S. law enforcement's investigation into a leak of secret U.S. documents that has grabbed attention around the world. From a report: The statement comes as questions continue to swirl over who leaked the documents, whether they are genuine and whether the intelligence assessments in them are reliable. The documents, which carry markings suggesting that they are highly classified, have led to a string of stories about the war in Ukraine, protests in Israel and how the U.S. surveils friend and foe alike. The source of the documents is not publicly known, but reporting by the open-source investigative site Bellingcat has traced their earliest appearance to Discord, a communications platform popular with gamers. Discord's statement suggested it was already in touch with investigators. The White House also urged social media companies on Thursday to prevent the circulation of information that could hurt national security.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"Early Wednesday, San Francisco police made an arrest in the April 4th killing of tech exec Bob Lee," writes Slashdot reader xevioso. "Lee was stabbed in the early hours of April 4th, and later died. His killing prompted a host of claims that this was yet another example of San Francisco's slide into chaos, but the person arrested is reportedly another tech exec." Mission Local reports: The alleged killer also works in tech and is a man Lee purportedly knew. We are told that police today were dispatched to Emeryville with a warrant to arrest a man named Nima Momeni. The name and Emeryville address SFPD officers traveled to correspond with this man, the owner of a company called Expand IT. Multiple police sources have described the predawn knifing that last week left the 43-year-old Lee dead in a deserted section of downtown San Francisco as neither a robbery attempt nor a random attack. Rather, Lee and Momeni were portrayed by police as being familiar with one another. In the wee hours of April 4, they were purportedly driving together through downtown San Francisco in a car registered to the suspect. Some manner of confrontation allegedly commenced while both men were in the vehicle, and potentially continued after Lee exited the car. Police allege that Momeni stabbed Lee multiple times with a knife that was recovered not far from the spot on the 300 block of Main Street to which officers initially responded.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the New York Times: The leader of a small online gaming chat group where a trove of classified U.S. intelligence documents leaked over the last few months is a 21-year-old member of the intelligence wing of the Massachusetts Air National Guard, according to interviews and documents reviewed by The New York Times. The National Guardsman, whose name is Jack Teixeira, oversaw a private online group called Thug Shaker Central, where about 20 to 30 people, mostly young men and teenagers, came together over a shared love of guns, racist online memes and video games. On Thursday afternoon, about a half-dozen F.B.I. agents pushed into a residence in North Dighton, Mass. Attorney General Merrick B. Garland later said in a short statement that Airman Teixeira had been arrested "without incident." Federal investigators had been searching for days for the person who leaked the top secret documents online. Starting months ago, one of the users uploaded hundreds of pages of intelligence briefings into the small chat group, lecturing its members, who had bonded during the isolation of the pandemic, on the importance of staying abreast of world events. [...] The Times spoke with four members of Thug Shaker Central, one of whom said he had known the person who leaked for at least three years, had met him in person and referred to him as the O.G. The friends described him as older than most of the group members, who were in their teens, and the undisputed leader. One of the friends said the O.G. had access to intelligence documents through his job. While the gaming friends would not identify the group's leader by name, a trail of digital evidence compiled by The Times leads to Airman Teixeira. The Times has been able to link Airman Teixeira to other members of Thug Shaker Central through his online gaming profile and other records. Details of the interior of Airman Teixeira's childhood home -- posted on social media in family photographs -- also match details on the margins of some of the photographs of the leaked secret documents. Members of Thug Shaker Central who spoke to The Times said that the documents they discussed online were meant to be purely informative. While many pertained to the war in Ukraine, the members said they took no side in the conflict. The documents, they said, started to get wider attention only when one of the teenage members of the group took a few dozen of them and posted them to a public online forum. From there they were picked up by Russian-language Telegram channels and then The Times, which first reported on them. The person who leaked, they said, was no whistle-blower, and the secret documents were never meant to leave their small corner of the internet. "This guy was a Christian, antiwar, just wanted to inform some of his friends about what's going on," said one of the person's friends from the community, a 17-year-old recent high school graduate. "We have some people in our group who are in Ukraine. We like fighting games; we like war games."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The 2019 release of the first image of a black hole was hailed as a significant scientific achievement. But truth be told, it was a bit blurry -- or, as one astrophysicist involved in the effort called it, a "fuzzy orange donut." Scientists on Thursday unveiled a new and improved image of this black hole -- a behemoth at the center of a nearby galaxy -- mining the same data used for the earlier one but improving its resolution by employing image reconstruction algorithms to fill in gaps in the original telescope observations. From a report: Hard to observe by their very nature, black holes are celestial entities exerting gravitational pull so strong no matter or light can escape. The ring of light -- that is, the material being sucked into the voracious object -- seen in the new image is about half the width of how it looked in the previous picture. There is also a larger "brightness depression" at the center - basically the donut hole - caused by light and other matter disappearing into the black hole. The image remains somewhat blurry due to the limitations of the data underpinning it -- not quite ready for a Hollywood sci-fi blockbuster, but an advance from the 2019 version. This supermassive black hole resides in a galaxy called Messier 87, or M87, about 54 million light-years from Earth. A light year is the distance light travels in a year, 5.9 trillion miles (9.5 trillion km). This galaxy, with a mass 6.5 billion times that of our sun, is larger and more luminous than our Milky Way. Further reading: The Black Hole Image Data Was Spread Across 5 Petabytes Stored On About Half a Ton of Hard Drives (2019).Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Federal authorities are making arrests and seizing funds with the help of new tools to identify criminals through cryptocurrency transactions. From a report: James Zhong appeared to have pulled off the perfect crime. In December 2012, he stumbled upon a software bug while withdrawing money from his account on Silk Road, an online marketplace used to hide criminal dealings behind the seemingly bulletproof anonymity of blockchain transactions and the dark web. Mr. Zhong, a 22-year-old University of Georgia computer-science student at the time, used the site to buy cocaine. "I accidentally double-clicked the withdraw button and was shocked to discover that it resulted in allowing me to withdraw double the amount of bitcoin I had deposited," he later said in federal court. After the first fraudulent withdrawal, Mr. Zhong created new accounts and with a few hours of work stole 50,000 bitcoins worth around $600,000, court papers from federal prosecutors show. Federal officials closed Silk Road a year later on criminal grounds and seized computers that held its transaction records. The records didn't reveal Mr. Zhong's caper at first. Authorities hadn't yet mastered how to track people and groups hidden behind blockchain wallet addresses, the series of letters and numbers used to anonymously send and receive cryptocurrency. One elemental feature of the system was the privacy it gave users. Mr. Zhong moved the stolen bitcoins from one account to another for eight years to cover his tracks. By late 2021, the red-hot crypto market had raised the value of his trove to $3.4 billion. In November 2021, federal agents surprised Mr. Zhong with a search warrant and found the digital keys to his crypto fortune hidden in a basement floor safe and a popcorn tin in the bathroom. Mr. Zhong, who pleaded guilty to wire fraud, is scheduled to be sentenced Friday in New York federal court, where prosecutors are seeking a prison sentence of less than two years. Mr. Zhong's case is one of the highest-profile examples of how federal authorities have pierced the veil of blockchain transactions. Private and government investigators can now identify wallet addresses associated with terrorists, drug traffickers, money launderers and cybercriminals, all of which were supposed to be anonymous. Law-enforcement agencies, working with cryptocurrency exchanges and blockchain-analytics companies, have compiled data gleaned from earlier investigations, including the Silk Road case, to map the flow of cryptocurrency transactions across criminal networks worldwide. In the past two years, the U.S. has seized more than $10 billion worth of digital currency through successful prosecutions, according to the Internal Revenue Service -- in essence, by following the money. Instead of subpoenas to banks or other financial institutions, investigators can look to the blockchain for an instant snapshot of the money trail.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Google has announced that it'll shut down Currents, which was introduced in 2019 as a replacement for Google Plus for G Suite. From a report: In a blog post, the company says it's "planning to wind down" Currents, and that it'll push the people who were using it to Spaces, which is sort of like Google Chat's version of a Slack channel or Discord room. Google says that it's making the change so users won't have to work in a "separate, siloed destination" -- instead, they'll be using Chat and Spaces, which will soon be prominently integrated into Gmail. Google says it will begin winding down Currents on July 5th, with data available for export until August 8th, 2023, when it will no longer be available.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Sea levels on China's coastline have hit their highest on record for the second year in a row, rising more quickly than the global average and posing a serious threat to coastal cities such as the financial hub of Shanghai. From a report: In 2022, China's coastal sea levels were 94 millimeters (3.7 inch) higher than "normal," defined as the average over the 1993-2011 period, making it the highest since records began in 1980, an official at the Ministry of Natural Resources said Wednesday at a news conference. The swell was 10 mm higher than in 2021, when the previous record was reached. The temperature of China's coastal waters has increased significantly due to global warming, and the rise in sea levels has accelerated, said Wang Hua, head of the marine forecasting and monitoring department at the ministry. China's sea levels have increased by an average of 3.5 mm per year since 1980, and an average of 4.0 mm per year since 1993 -- higher than the global rate over the same periods, Wang said. The global mean sea level has risen 3.4 mm a year over the past three decades, according to NASA. "In the last 11 years, from 2012 to 2022, China's coastal sea levels were the highest since observations were first recorded," Wang said at the news conference, which released the latest annual report on China's sea levels.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A new report looks at the firms that quietly move billions around the banking industry each day. Reciprocal deposits enable banks to place deposits with another bank and receive the same value back through technology firms, reshuffling approximately $1 trillion through their platforms. This deposit-swapping allows banks to offer customers more insurance, a priority after Silicon Valley Bank's failure, where 93% of deposits were uninsured. At the end of last year, around 45% of deposits in the American banking system were uninsured. Invented by Eugene Ludwig in 2002, reciprocal deposits help banks offer greater deposit insurance without forgoing deposit funding. Ludwig's firm, IntraFi, allows banks to place insured deposits around the system while receiving the same value from other locations. IntraFi, the largest firm with 3,000 banks on its platform, has been joined by r&t Deposit Solutions, ModernFi, and StoneCastle Cash Management. These firms are experiencing rapid growth, with reciprocal deposits' value increasing significantly since March. The story asks: All this deposit-swapping raises the question of whether it makes sense to maintain the federal cap. The private sector has come up with a clever workaround to offer more deposit insurance than mandated. It is conceivable that, with several thousand banks in the network, an account could offer deposit insurance for hundreds of millions of dollars. Indeed, StoneCastle offers an account with $125m in deposit insurance. But there is a difference between a private-sector workaround and a public-sector mandate. It is currently difficult to match banks so that all are able to offer such high limits (most offer just a few million dollars' insurance), and reciprocal-deposit firms levy fees, too. They apply on top of the charges, of between 0.05% and 0.32% of the value of total liabilities, that institutions pay for federal-deposit insurance. Abolishing the cap would make insurance pricier across the system; these higher costs would almost certainly be passed on to customers in the form of lower interest rates. Still, if enough depositors seek insurance by spreading deposits around, higher costs might be the result anyway.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Chinese ride-hailing giant Didi Global said on Thursday that it is working with Chinese carmakers to develop its own robotaxis, which it aims to put into service by 2025, revealing a concept one with robotic arms it called "Didi Neuron." From a report: The company said that it is collaborating with multiple new energy carmakers in China on developing robotaxis. "We hope they can enter Didi's network and provide services by 2025," Didi Autonomous Driving COO Meng Xing said at a company event that was livestreamed online. "We hope they will be domestically produced. We hope the supply chain is controllable, and even 90% of the key components inside can be domestically produced," he said. He also showed off a robotaxi concept car called "Didi Neuron", with robotic arms that can help passengers pick up luggage.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Steve Jobs Archive: The official ebook edition of Make Something Wonderful: Steve Jobs in his own words is free to read on Apple Books and from participating libraries through our partners at Libby. You can also download the book to view it on any compatible e-reader: our EPUB file works on almost all tablets, smartphones, desktop computers, and digital reading devices. From a speech in 2007: There's lots of ways to be, as a person. And some people express their deep appreciation in different ways. But one of the ways that I believe people express their appreciation to the rest of humanity is to make something wonderful and put it out there. And you never meet the people. You never shake their hands. You never hear their story or tell yours. But somehow, in the act of making something with a great deal of care and love, something's transmitted there. And it's a way of expressing to the rest of our species our deep appreciation. So we need to be true to who we are and remember what's really important to us."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A historic mission to Jupiter is about to blast off. The European Space Agency's spacecraft nicknamed Juice -- for Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer -- is set to begin an eight-year journey toward the planet and three of its largest moons. From a report: Juice is scheduled to launch Friday morning Eastern Time from a spaceport in Kourou, French Guiana, after an earlier attempt was scrubbed because of lightning risk. Once it arrives at Jupiter, Juice will study some of the moons in great detail, mapping their icy surfaces and searching for subsurface oceans that could harbor life. While the spacecraft can't detect life, the mission should help confirm whether the moons -- Europa, Callisto and Ganymede -- have the conditions necessary to sustain life. The trio, along with the volcanically active moon Io, were discovered by Galileo more than four centuries ago and are among the nearly 100 moons orbiting Jupiter, according to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. About half an hour after its launch, which will be livestreamed Friday, Juice will separate from its rocket and make contact with mission controllers on Earth. The solar-powered spacecraft will then deploy solar wings that measure roughly 900 square-feet and expand into a cross-like configuration on both sides of the craft. In the following 17 days, Juice is expected to deploy its antennas and instrument-containing booms and begin its cosmic sojourn, which people can follow on the agency's website. The journey will be a roundabout one. Juice will complete flybys of Earth, the moon, and Venus over the next six years to adjust its trajectory and gain enough speed to get to Jupiter. Jupiter is, on average, about 444 million miles from Earth, yet Juice will travel nearly 4 billion miles before getting there, according to Mr. Sarri. It will also have to withstand temperatures from close to 500 degrees Fahrenheit around Venus to nearly minus 400 degrees Fahrenheit at Jupiter. If all goes well, Juice is scheduled to arrive at Jupiter by July 2031. Once there, the craft will complete flybys of the three moons before entering Ganymede's orbit to collect further data, which are sent back to Earth using an 8-foot antenna.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Ethereum blockchain, the most important commercial highway in the digital-asset sector, successfully implemented a widely anticipated software upgrade. From a report: The so-called Shanghai update enables investors to queue up to withdraw Ether coins that they had pledged to help operate the network in return for rewards, a process called staking. Tim Beiko, who helps to co-ordinate the development of Ethereum, posted on Twitter on Wednesday that the upgrade is now "official." The network revamp -- also known as Shapella -- is designed to let people exit an Ether staking investment and has stirred debate on whether the appeal of the largest token after Bitcoin will increase over time. "Ethereum is updating and navigating with great skill -- so far anyway -- and cementing its position as the No. 2 crypto," said Aaron Brown, a crypto investor who writes for Bloomberg Opinion. He added that the network is "moving to the future much faster than Bitcoin." About 1.2 million of Ether tokens -- worth approximately $2.3 billion at current prices -- are expected to be withdrawn over the next five days, according to researcher Coin Metrics. Some $36.7 billion of Ether is locked up for staking, data from Staking Rewards shows.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Twitter will let its users access stocks, cryptocurrencies and other financial assets through a partnership with eToro, a social trading company. From a report: Starting Thursday, a new feature will be rolled out on the Twitter app. It will allow users to view market charts on an expanded range of financial instruments and buy and sell stocks and other assets from eToro, the company told CNBC exclusively. Currently, it's already possible to view real-time trading data from TradingView on index funds like the S&P 500 and shares of some companies such as Tesla. That can be done using Twitter's "cashtags" feature -- you search for a ticker symbol and insert dollar sign in front of it, after which the app will show you price information from TradingView using an API (application programming interface). With the eToro partnership, Twitter cashtags will be expanded to cover far more instruments and asset classes, an eToro spokesperson told CNBC. You'll also be able to click a button that says "view on eToro," which takes you through to eToro's site, and then buy and sell assets on its platform. EToro uses TradingView as its market data partner. "As we've grown over the past three years immensely, we've seen more and more of our users interact on Twitter [and] educate themselves about the markets," Yoni Assia, eToro's CEO, told CNBC in an interview.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The White House said Thursday that data does not indicate a US recession is on the horizon, rebuffing Federal Reserve staff economists who forecast a minor contraction starting later this year. From a report: White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said job numbers and consumer spending are strong and chalked it up to President Joe Biden's economic plans, waving off a recession risk. "We're seeing the success of his plans, and recent economic indicators are not consistent with a recession or even a pre-recession," Jean-Pierre said Thursday when asked about the Fed forecast. Federal Reserve minutes published Wednesday indicated that "the staff's projection at the time of the March meeting included a mild recession starting later this year, with a recovery over the subsequent two years." Still, Fed officials appear on track to extend their run of interest-rate hikes, shrugging off the warning. Jean-Pierre pointed to job gains, the unemployment rate and consumer spending as indicators. She also said that inflation has been falling, though it remains well above target and may spur more Fed hikes, raising the chance of a recession. Still, the spokeswoman contradicted the warning of the Fed staff. "Those are the indicators that show us that we are not headed to a recession or a pre-recession," she said.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

According to a recent study involving a sample of 28,646 Chinese people, high-speed rail projects were found to increase individual happiness, albeit not by much. An anonymous reader shares an excerpt from a Motherboard article: It can increase happiness, especially for people who live in regional capitals, rural areas, men and the elderly, but only by an increase of .076 on the happiness scale of one to five. To put it another way, as the study does, "The coefficient accounts for 1.997 percent of the mean of happiness." This is statistically significant, in the strict definition of whether results are due to chance, and therefore a publishable scientific finding. But it is hardly meaningful in terms of how much high speed rail influences the happiness of Chinese people. I mean, come on. Two measly percent? In the "policy implications" section, the study authors pose a tantalizing question: "What is the significance of economic growth if it cannot effectively improve residents' happiness?" While the two percent happiness finding may be marginal, they're at least asking the right questions.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An unprecedented analysis of how cancers grow has revealed an "almost infinite" ability of tumors to evolve and survive, say scientists. The BBC reports: The results of tracking lung cancers for nine years left the research team "surprised" and "in awe" at the formidable force they were up against. They have concluded we need more focus on prevention, with a "universal" cure unlikely any time soon. The study -- entitled TracerX -- provides the most in-depth analysis of how cancers evolve and what causes them to spread. More than 400 people -- treated at 13 hospitals in the UK -- had biopsies taken from different parts of their lung cancer as the disease progressed. The evolutionary analysis has been published across seven separate studies in the journals Nature and Nature Medicine. The research showed: - Highly aggressive cells in the initial tumor are the ones that ultimately end up spreading around the body- Tumors showing higher levels of genetic "chaos" were more likely to relapse after surgery to other parts of the body- Analyzing blood for fragments of tumor DNA meant signs of it returning could be spotted up to 200 days before appearing on a CT scan- The cellular machinery that reads the instructions in our DNA can become corrupted in cancerous cells making them more aggressive. "I don't think we're going to be able to come up with universal cures," said Prof Charles Swanton, from the Francis Crick Institute and University College London. "If we want to make the biggest impact we need to focus on prevention, early detection and early detection of relapse." Last week, Dr Paul Burton, the chief medical officer of pharmaceutical company Moderna, said he believes the firm will be able to offer vaccines for cancer, cardiovascular and autoimmune diseases, and other conditions by 2030. The new analysis reported on by the BBC casts doubt on that timeline. "I don't want to sound too depressing about this, but I think -- given the almost infinite possibilities in which a tumor can evolve, and the very large number of cells in a late-stage tumor, which could be several hundred billion cells -- then achieving cures in all patients with late-stage disease is a formidable task," said Swanton.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Researchers have discovered that in the exotic conditions of the early universe, waves of gravity may have shaken space-time so hard that they spontaneously created radiation. Universe Today reports: a team of researchers have discovered that an exotic form of parametric resonance may have even occurred in the extremely early universe. Perhaps the most dramatic event to occur in the entire history of the universe was inflation. This is a hypothetical event that took place when our universe was less than a second old. During inflation our cosmos swelled to dramatic proportions, becoming many orders of magnitude larger than it was before. The end of inflation was a very messy business, as gravitational waves sloshed back and forth throughout the cosmos. Normally gravitational waves are exceedingly weak. We have to build detectors that are capable of measuring distances less than the width of an atomic nucleus to find gravitational waves passing through the Earth. But researchers have pointed out that in the extremely early universe these gravitational waves may have become very strong. And they may have even created standing wave patterns where the gravitational waves weren't traveling but the waves stood still, almost frozen in place throughout the cosmos. Since gravitational waves are literally waves of gravity, the places where the waves are the strongest represent an exceptional amount of gravitational energy. The researchers found that this could have major consequences for the electromagnetic field existing in the early universe at that time. The regions of intense gravity may have excited the electromagnetic field enough to release some of its energy in the form of radiation, creating light. This result gives rise to an entirely new phenomenon: the production of light from gravity alone. There's no situation in the present-day universe that could allow this process to happen, but the researchers have shown that the early universe was a far stranger place than we could possibly imagine.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Red sand shifts under the boots of the crew members. In the distance, it appears that a rocky mountain range is rising out of the Martian horizon. A thin layer of red dust coats the solar panels and equipment necessary for the year-long mission. This landscape isn't actually 145m miles away. We are in a corner of the Nasa Johnson Space Center in Houston, in a large white warehouse right next to the disc golf course and on the tram route for tourists and school groups. But starting this June, four volunteer test subjects will spend a year locked inside, pretending to live on Mars. Nasa researchers say they're doing everything they can to make it as realistic as possible so they can learn the impact that a year in isolation with limited resources has on human health. "As we move from low Earth orbit, from moon to Mars, we're going to have a lot more resource restrictions than we have on the International Space Station and we're going to be a lot further from Earth or any help from Earth," said Dr Grace Douglas, the principal investigator for the Crew Health Performance Exploration Analog, or Chapea for short. The four crew members will live in a small housing unit that was constructed using a huge 3D printer to simulate how Nasa may create structures on the Martian surface with Martian soil. They'll conduct experiments, grow food and exercise -- and be tested regularly so scientists can learn what a year on Mars could do to the body and mind. "This is really an extreme circumstance," said Dr Suzanne Bell, who leads the Behavioral Health and Performance Laboratory at the Nasa Johnson Space Center. "You're asking for individuals to live and work together for over a one-year period. Not only will they have to get along well, but they'll also have to perform well together." Watching four people spend a year in a 3D-printed box is Nasa's next small step toward landing humans on the surface of Mars. Nasa says it hopes to send humans to the red planet as early as the 2030s. The first mission could be a nine-month trip one-way, and could leave the astronauts on the surface for two and a half years before starting the long trip back home. Preparations for that trek are already well under way with the agency's Artemis program. Artemis is sending astronauts back to the Moon for the first time since 1972, including the first person of color and woman to walk on another celestial body. As part of the Artemis missions, Nasa is also launching Gateway, a space station that will orbit the Moon and serve as a pit stop for Mars-bound missions. Getting to the Moon means getting to Mars, and getting to Mars means testing the physical and behavioral health of a crew in isolation. That's where Chapea comes in.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Earth's water could have originated from interactions between the hydrogen-rich atmospheres and magma oceans of the planetary embryos that comprised Earth's formative years, according to new work from Carnegie Science's Anat Shahar and UCLA's Edward Young and Hilke Schlichting. Their findings, which could explain the origins of Earth's signature features, are published in Nature. Phys.Org reports: "Exoplanet discoveries have given us a much greater appreciation of how common it is for just-formed planets to be surrounded by atmospheres that are rich in molecular hydrogen, H2, during their first several million years of growth," Shahar explained. "Eventually these hydrogen envelopes dissipate, but they leave their fingerprints on the young planet's composition." Using this information, the researchers developed new models for Earth's formation and evolution to see if our home planet's distinct chemical traits could be replicated. Using a newly developed model, the Carnegie and UCLA researchers were able to demonstrate that early in Earth's existence, interactions between the magma ocean and a molecular hydrogen proto-atmosphere could have given rise to some of Earth's signature features, such as its abundance of water and its overall oxidized state. The researchers used mathematical modeling to explore the exchange of materials between molecular hydrogen atmospheres and magma oceans by looking at 25 different compounds and 18 different types of reactions -- complex enough to yield valuable data about Earth's possible formative history, but simple enough to interpret fully. Interactions between the magma ocean and the atmosphere in their simulated baby Earth resulted in the movement of large masses of hydrogen into the metallic core, the oxidation of the mantle, and the production of large quantities of water. Even if all of the rocky material that collided to form the growing planet was completely dry, these interactions between the molecular hydrogen atmosphere and the magma ocean would generate copious amounts of water, the researchers revealed. Other water sources are possible, they say, but not necessary to explain Earth's current state. "This is just one possible explanation for our planet's evolution, but one that would establish an important link between Earth's formation history and the most common exoplanets that have been discovered orbiting distant stars, which are called Super-Earths and sub-Neptunes," Shahar concluded.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Hyper-volumetric DDoS (distributed denial of service) attacks in the first quarter of 2023 have shifted from relying on compromised IoT devices to leveraging breached Virtual Private Servers (VPS). BleepingComputer reports: According to internet security company Cloudflare, the newer generation of botnets gradually abandoned the tactic of building large swarms of individually weak IoT devices and are now shifting towards enslaving vulnerable and misconfigured VPS servers using leaked API credentials or known exploits. This approach helps the threat actors build high-performance botnets easier and often quicker, which can be up to 5,000 times stronger than IoT-based botnets. "The new generation of botnets uses a fraction of the amount of devices, but each device is substantially stronger," explains Cloudflare in the report. "Cloud computing providers offer virtual private servers to allow start ups and businesses to create performant applications. The downside is that it also allows attackers to create high-performance botnets that can be as much as 5,000x stronger." Cloudflare has been working with key cloud computing providers and partners to crack down on these emerging VPS-based threats and says it has succeeded in taking down substantial portions of these novel botnets.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Amazon has started charging a fee for some returns made at UPS stores. Insider reports: While customers used to be able to drop off their returns at a UPS Store free of charge, Amazon will now charge a $1 fee if customers have another free-return option the same distance away or closer. Customers can still visit those other drop-off locations -- including Whole Foods, Kohl's, and Amazon stores -- and leave their packages for free. The company already charged customers to have UPS pick up returns from their homes or to drop off packages at UPS Access Points, which are located inside third-party businesses, The Information reported. "We always offer a free option for customers to return their item," Amazon spokesperson Steve Kelly told Insider by email. "If a customer would prefer to return their item at a UPS Store when there is a free option closer to their delivery address, a very small amount of customers may incur a $1 fee."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from PC Gamer: Back in 2017, we learned about the biggest heist in EVE Online history: A year-long inside job that ultimately made off with an estimated 1.5 triillion ISK, worth around $10,000 in real money. But now another EVE player claims to have pulled off a heist worth significantly more than that -- and with significantly less work involved. The 2017 heist, like so many of EVE's most interesting stories, relied primarily on social engineering: Investing months or years of time into grooming a target before pulling the rug out from beneath them. But redditor Flam_Hill said this job was less bloody: Instead of betrayal, this theft was dependent upon learning and exploiting the "shares mechanic" in EVE Online in order to leverage a takeover of Event Horizon Expeditionaries, a 299-member corporation that was part of the Pandemic Horde alliance. Using a "clean account with a character with a little history," Flan_Hill and an unnamed partner applied for membership in the EHEXP corporation. After the account was accepted, Flan_Hill transferred enough of his shares in the corporation to the infiltrator to enable a call for a vote for a new CEO. The conspirators both voted yes, while nobody else in the corporation voted at all. This was vital, because after 72 hours the two "yes" votes carried the day. The infiltrating agent was very suddenly made CEO, which was in turn used to make Flan_Hill an Event Horizon Expeditionaries director, at which point they removed all the other corporate directors and set to emptying the coffers. They stripped 130 billion ISK from the corporate wallet, but that was only a small part of the haul: Counting all stolen assets, including multiple large ships, Flam_Hill estimated the total value of the heist at 2.23 trillion ISK, which works out to more than $22,300 in real money. ISK can't be legally cashed out of EVE Online, but it can be used to buy Plex, an in-game currency used to upgrade accounts, purchase virtual goods, and activate other services.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Now Australian online businesses that put up hurdles to make it harder for customers to unsubscribe from their services may face a crackdown from the federal government, with plans to be unveiled later this year. The Guardian reports: The practice of "forced continuity" or "subscription trapping" involves building design features of a website or app in a way that impedes a customer's ability to cancel a particular service. The chair of the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC), Gina Cass-Gottlieb, said in a speech to the National Press Club on Wednesday a prohibition on unfair trade practices would help protect consumers and small businesses "exposed to manipulative practices designed to get them to agree to unfair or unfavorable contract terms". The consumer watchdog has called for new powers in Australian consumer law to crack down on such practices since 2017. A spokesperson for the regulator said subscription traps can cause "significant harm to consumers and some small businesses." "These practices make it difficult for consumers to cancel subscriptions after fixed-term periods, with the consequence that many subscriptions roll over to paid subscriptions despite consumers no longer utilizing or wanting them," the spokesperson said. The report cites a discrepancy in the steps required to canceled an Amazon Prime subscription. In Europe, "there is a simple two-step process," reports the Guardian. "But customers in Australia must navigate four convoluted steps, with the wording and location of the cancellation button changing between each screen." This is due to Australia's lack of unfair trading practices laws that exist in Europe and other countries.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Bankrupt crypto exchange FTX has recovered over $7.3 billion in cash and liquid crypto assets, an increase of more than $800 million since January, the company's attorney said on Wednesday at a U.S. bankruptcy court hearing in Delaware. Reuters reports: FTX attorney Andy Dietderich said the company is starting to think about its future after months of effort devoted to collecting resources and figuring out what went wrong under the leadership of indicted ex-founder Sam Bankman-Fried. Bankman-Fried has pleaded not guilty. "The situation has stabilized, and the dumpster fire is out," Dietderich said. FTX has benefited from a recent rise in crypto prices, Dietderich said. Its total recovery would be valued at $6.2 billion based on crypto prices from November 2022, when it filed for bankruptcy after traders pulled $6 billion from the platform in three days and rival exchange Binance abandoned a rescue deal. As it looks to the future, FTX is negotiating with stakeholders about options for restarting its crypto exchange, and it may make a decision on that in the current quarter, Dietderich said.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: An Amsterdam court today ordered one of the largest adult entertainment websites, xHamster, to remove all amateur footage showing recognizable people in the Netherlands who did not consent to be featured on the site. The ruling followed complaints raised by the Expertise Bureau for Online Child Abuse, known as EOKM, which identified 10 videos where xHamster could not verify it had secured permission from amateur performers to post. The court found that this violated European privacy laws and conflicted with a prior judgment from the Amsterdam court requiring porn sites to receive permission from all performers recognizably featured before posting amateur videos. According to EOKM director Arda Gerkens, this ruling will require xHamster to clean up its site and is part of EOKM's larger plan to stop all porn sites from distributing amateur footage without consent. The Amsterdam court has given xHamster three weeks to comply with the order and remove all footage posted without consent, or face maximum fines per video up to $32,000 daily. Lawyers assisting EOKM on the case said the verdict had "major consequences for the entire porn industry," including bigger sites like Pornhub, which already was required to remove 10 million videos, as Vice reported in 2020. "Now it's xHamster's turn," Otto Volgenant of Boekx Advocaten said in EOKM's press release, noting that 30 million people visit xHamster daily. On xHamster, only professional producers and verified members can upload content. The website requires everyone who creates an account to upload an ID and share a selfie to become verified. Before any verified member's upload is made public, xHamster moderators -- a team of 28 who use software approved by EOKM to identify illegal content -- conduct a review to block any illegal content. The website's terms of service require that each uploader provides a consent form from each person recognizably featured in all amateur content. Hammy Media told the court that it had already removed all violating content that EOKM had flagged in the case and provided assurances that moderators check to ensure the uploader is the same person as the performer. However, in his order, judge RA Dudok van Heel wrote that "it is sufficiently plausible for the time being that a large amount of footage is being made public on xhamster.com, of which it cannot be demonstrated that permission has been obtained from the persons who appear recognizable in the picture."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A report released on Wednesday found that wind and solar energy made up a record high 12% of global electricity generation in 2022. Meanwhile EU countries are lagging behind with wind power expansion. From a report: All renewable energy sources, including nuclear power, made up 39% of global electricity last year according to the report by independent energy think tank Ember. The authors predict a phasedown of gas power along with a reduction of coal-fired power, forecasting that fossil fuel generation will decline by 0.3% this year. Electricity is as clean as ever, with the share of solar power rising by 24% and wind by 17% from 2021. Solar and wind energy now makes up over 10% of electricity in more than 60 countries. Ember's annual global electricity review takes data from 78 countries which account for 93% of global electricity demand. The European Union gets 22% of its electricity from wind and solar power. However, EU countries seem to lag behind global wind energy expansion, logging 9% growth from wind power -- below the global average. "The EU started the race to renewables early but, as the world accelerates, it cannot afford complacency," said Sarah Brown, Ember's Europe program lead. Russia's invasion of Ukraine in February last year caused concern among EU member states about declining fossil fuel imports. The European Commission put forward a plan to increase renewable energy to 45%, an increase of 5% compared to the previous year.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The European Commission on Wednesday said U.S. chipmaker Broadcom's proposed $61 billion takeover of cloud computing company VMware could restrict competition in the market for certain hardware components. From a report: The Commission said it had informed Broadcom of its objection that the deal could restrict competition in the global markets for the supply of so-called fibre channel host bus adapters (FC HBAs) and storage adapters, by limiting access for competitors' hardware to VMware's software.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The first beta of Google's Android 14 OS is available to download today, introducing new features focused on system navigation, privacy, performance, and user customization. From a report We already had a good idea of what to expect thanks to the first two developer-only previews, but the beta release is the first opportunity for the general public to test the changes. Gesture navigation has been updated to include a more conspicuous Material You-themed back arrow that adjusts to complement the device's theme or wallpaper. Aside from arguably being more aesthetically pleasing, the updated back arrow is designed to help users better understand Android 14's predictive back gesture experience, which now previews the screen users are navigating to within applications. Android 14 also introduces a new system share sheet -- the page that opens when you tap to share content. This allows developers to add custom app-specific actions to the top of the share menu. Google describes this as a "superior" experience compared to the existing Android share sheets in which share targets (the app you're sharing content to) are always sorted alphabetically. The new share sheet also uses more app signals to determine where the direct share targets that appear toward the top of the page should rank (though it's not clear what exactly those signals are).Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Nvidia announced the GeForce RTX 4070 desktop GPU, a move that anyone who's been putting off a new midrange DIY PC build has likely been eagerly awaiting. It puts the company's impressive Ada Lovelace graphics architecture within grasp for people who don't want to spend $1,000 or more on a huge graphics card. From a report: It'll launch Thursday, April 13, starting at $599 for Nvidia's Founders Edition single-fan model. As is always the case, other manufacturers like Asus, Zotac, Gigabyte, MSI, and others are putting out factory overclocked variants, too. The Verge already has a full review up for the RTX 4070. The RTX 4070 Founders Edition card requires a 650 W power supply, and it connects via two PCIe 8-pin cables (an adapter comes in the box). Alternatively, it can connect via a PCIe Gen 5 cable that supports 300 W or higher. The RTX 4070 won't require a humongous case, as it's a two-slot card that's quite a bit smaller than the RTX 4080. It's 9.6 inches long and 4.4 inches wide, which is just about the same size as my RTX 3070 Ti Founders Edition card. Despite being a lower-end GPU compared to Nvidia's RTX 4080 or RTX 4090, it retains the DLSS 3 marquee selling point. It's the next iteration of Nvidia's upscaling technique that drops the render resolution to make games run better, then uses the GPU's AI cores to intelligently upscale what you see.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

It's not HBO Max -- soon it's just going to be Max. From a report: Warner Bros. Discovery officially announced Max as the new name of its flagship streamer, lopping off the HBO part of the name as it mixes in a big bucket of new content from Discovery+ and other new original series. The company announced the name change at a press event Wednesday, where it also revealed a slate of upcoming projects. The rebuilt Max (on the web at max.com) is set to launch first in the U.S. on May 23, featuring what the company promises will be an average of more than 40 new titles and TV show seasons every month. "Max is the one to watch," WBD CEO David Zaslav said on stage at the event, featuring thousands of shows and movies on the service for every member of the household. According to the service's website, Max will be available in three different versions. The first two plans align with the existing HBO Max pricing, and WBD said current HBO Max customers will not see their pricing change (for now) when the new service debuts. The third tier, "Max Ultimate," expands to up to four streams and includes 4K content. The trio of options are:Max Ad-Lite ($9.99/month or $99.99/year): Two concurrent streams, 1080p HD resolution, no offline downloads, 5.1 surround sound qualityMax Ad Free ($15.99/month or $149.99/year): Two concurrent streams, 1080p HD, up to 30 offline downloads, 5.1 surround sound qualityMax Ultimate Ad Free ($19.99/month or $199.99/year): Four concurrent streams, up to 4K Ultra HD resolution, 100 offline downloads, Dolby Atmos sound qualityRead more of this story at Slashdot.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) on Wednesday proposed sweeping emissions cuts for new cars and trucks through 2032, a move it says could mean two out of every three new vehicles automakers sell will be electric within a decade. From a report: The proposal, if finalized, represents the most aggressive U.S. vehicle emissions reduction plan to date, requiring 13% annual average pollution cuts and a 56% reduction in projected fleet average emissions over 2026 requirements. The EPA is also proposing new stricter emissions standards for medium-duty and heavy-duty trucks through 2032. The EPA projects the 2027-2032 model year rules would cut more than 9 billion tons of CO2 emissions through 2055 - equivalent to more than twice total U.S. CO2 emissions last year. Automakers and environmentalists say the administration is moving quickly in order to finalize new rules by early 2024 to make it much harder for a future Congress or president to reverse them. Then President Donald Trump rolled back tough emissions limits through 2025 set under Barack Obama but the Biden administration reversed the rollback. The agency estimates net benefits through 2055 from the proposal range from $850 billion to $1.6 trillion. By 2032 the proposal would cost about $1,200 per vehicle per manufacturer, but save an owner more than $9,000 on average on fuel, maintenance, and repair costs over an eight-year period.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares a report: About a year ago, Google announced its Assured Open Source Software (Assured OSS) service, a service that helps developers defend against supply chain security attacks by regularly scanning and analyzing some of the world's most popular software libraries for vulnerabilities. Today, Google is launching Assured OSS into general availability with support for well over a thousand Java and Python packages -- and while Google didn't initially disclose pricing when it first announced the service, the company has now revealed that it will be available for free. Software development has long depended on third-party libraries (which are often maintained by only a single developer), but it wasn't until the industry got hit with a number of high-profile exploits that everyone (including the White House) perked up and started taking software supply chain security seriously. Now, you can't attend an open source conference without hearing about Software Bills of Materials (SBOMs), artifact registries and similar topics. It's no surprise then that Google, which has long been at the forefront of releasing open-source products, launched a service like Assured OSS. Google promises that it will constantly keep these libraries up to date (without creating forks) and continuously scan for known vulnerabilities, do fuzz tests to discover new ones and then fix these issues and contribute these fixes back upstream. The company notes that when it first launched the service with around 250 Java libraries, it was responsible for discovering 48% of the new CVEs for these libraries and subsequently addressing them.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

In the never-ending battle against online impersonation scams, the professional social media platform LinkedIn announced today a set of new verification features that enable users to authenticate aspects of their identities and job histories. From a report: Crucially, users will now have a few different options to verify their identity and current jobs on LinkedIn. That way, if someone tries to make a copycat LinkedIn account, there can be clear differences between the imposter account and the verified profile. LinkedIn facilitates verification in three ways that are all free to individual users. The most low-key option launching today is to verify your current employer by receiving a security code on your work email and entering it into LinkedIn. The social media platform has recently been piloting this work email verification feature with a small group of companies. The second option is to verify your identity on LinkedIn through the airport security service Clear. The authentication company will take your United States phone number and government-issued ID and use the information to verify your name. You have to weigh whether you want to trust a third party like Clear with your personal data, but the option might be particularly appealing if you already use the company for travel verification and they have your data on file anyway. The third verification feature allows users to confirm their name and current employer through the Microsoft Entra Verified ID credential, a workplace identification platform Microsoft launched last year. This option will have a slower rollout, and it will be available at the end of the month to employees at a few dozen pilot companies that are already enrolled in Entra.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Intel on Wednesday said its chip contract manufacturing division will work with U.K.-based chip designer Arm to ensure that mobile phone chips and other products that use Arm's technology can be made in Intel's factories. From a report: Once the biggest name in chips known as central processing units (CPUs), Intel has seen long seen its technological manufacturing edge blunted by rivals such as Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co, the world leader in making chips for customers such as Apple. Intel's turnaround strategy hinges in part on opening up its factories to other chip companies, particularly those in mobile phones. It has said firms such as Qualcomm are planning to use its factories for future chip designs. "There is growing demand for computing power driven by the digitization of everything, but until now ... customers have had limited options for designing around the most advanced mobile technology," Pat Gelsinger, Intel's chief executive, said in a statement.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The company behind the Raspberry Pi line of computers has raised fresh investment from Sony's semiconductor unit, in a deal aimed at advancing its efforts in artificial intelligence. From a report: Sony Semiconductor Solutions, a subsidiary of Sony Corporation, invested an undisclosed amount in Raspberry Pi Ltd, the trading company of Raspberry Pi, the company said in a statement on Wednesday. The extent of the funding was not revealed, but Eben Upton, Raspberry Pi's co-founder and CEO, said that the firm raised the cash at the same $500 million valuation it was worth in a 2021 funding round, when it brought in $45 million. Upton established Raspberry Pi in 2012 with the aim of making computing more accessible to young people. Raspberry Pi's tiny single-board computers are the size of a credit card and have been used to build everything from high-altitude balloons to small radio-controlled submarines. Raspberry Pi's customers were mainly hobbyists and teachers in the early days. The company has since become a more active player in the enterprise -- in a typical year, roughly 70% of its sales now come from commercial customers embedding its products into factories or consumer devices, Upton told CNBC.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Universal Music Group has told streaming platforms, including Spotify and Apple, to block artificial intelligence services from scraping melodies and lyrics from their copyrighted songs, according to emails viewed by the Financial Times. From the report: UMG, which controls about a third of the global music market, has become increasingly concerned about AI bots using their songs to train themselves to churn out music that sounds like popular artists. AI-generated songs have been popping up on streaming services and UMG has been sending takedown requests "left and right," said a person familiar with the matter. The company is asking streaming companies to cut off access to their music catalogue for developers using it to train AI technology. "We will not hesitate to take steps to protect our rights and those of our artists," UMG wrote to online platforms in March, in emails viewed by the FT. "This next generation of technology poses significant issues," said a person close to the situation. "Much of [generative AI] is trained on popular music. You could say: compose a song that has the lyrics to be like Taylor Swift, but the vocals to be in the style of Bruno Mars, but I want the theme to be more Harry Styles. The output you get is due to the fact the AI has been trained on those artists' intellectual property."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: The New York Police Department is reenlisting Digidog, the four-legged robot that the city faced backlash for deploying a few years back, as reported earlier by The New York Times. NYC Mayor Eric Adams announced the news during a press event on Tuesday, stating that the use of Digidog in the city can "save lives." Digidog -- also known as Spot -- is a remote-controlled robot made by the Hyundai-owned Boston Dynamics. It's designed to work in situations that may pose a threat to humans, helping to do things like perform inspections in dangerous areas and monitor construction sites. However, Boston Dynamics also touts its use as a public safety tool, which the NYPD has tried in the past. City officials say that the NYPD will acquire two robot dogs for a total of $750,000, according to the NYT, and that they will only be used during life-threatening situations, such as bomb threats. "I believe that technology is here; we cannot be afraid of it," Mayor Adams said during Tuesday's press conference. "A few loud people were opposed to it, and we took a step back — that is not how I operate. I operate on looking at what's best for the city." The Surveillance Technology Oversight Project (STOP), a group that advocates against the use of local and state-level surveillance, has denounced Mayor Adams' move. "The NYPD is turning bad science fiction into terrible policing," Albert Fox Cahn, STOP's executive director, says in a statement. "New York deserves real safety, not a knockoff robocop. Wasting public dollars to invade New Yorkers' privacy is a dangerous police stunt."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

According to the BBC, the Atacama Cosmology Telescope (ACT) in Chile has traced the distribution of dark matter "on a quarter of the sky and across almost 14 billion years of time." From the report: In the image [here], the colored areas are the portions of the sky studied by the telescope. Orange regions show where there is more mass, or matter, along the line of sight; purple where there is less. Typical features are hundreds of millions of light-years across. The grey/white areas show where contaminating light from dust in our Milky Way galaxy has obscured a deeper view. The distribution of matter agrees very well with scientific predictions. ACT observations indicate that the "lumpiness" of the Universe and the rate at which it has been expanding after 14 billion years of evolution are just what you'd expect from the standard model of cosmology, which has Einstein's theory of gravity (general relativity) at its foundation. Recent measurements that used an alternative background light, one emitted from stars in galaxies rather than the CMB, had suggested the Universe lacked sufficient lumpiness. Another tension concerns the rate at which the Universe is expanding - a number called the Hubble constant. When [the European Space Agency's Planck observatory] looked at temperature fluctuations across the CMB, it determined the rate to be about 67 kilometres per second per megaparsec (A megaparsec is 3.26 million light-years). Or put another way - the expansion increases by 67km per second for every 3.26 million light-years we look further out into space. A tension arises because measurements of the expansion in the nearby Universe, made using the recession from us of variable stars, clocks in at about 73km/s per megaparsec. It's a difference that can't easily be explained. ACT, employing its lensing technique to nail down the expansion rate, outputs a number similar to Planck's. "It's very close - about 68km/s per megaparsec," said Dr Mathew Madhavacheril from the the University of Pennsylvania. ACT team-member Prof Blake Sherwin from Cambridge University, UK, added: "We and Planck and several other probes are coming in on the lower side. Obviously, you could have a scenario where both the measurements are right and there's some new physics that explains the discrepancy. But we're using independent techniques, and I think we're now starting to close the loophole where we could all be riding this new physics and one of the measurements has to be wrong." Papers describing the new results have been submitted to The Astrophysical Journal and posted on the ACT website.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Apple said it will invest up to an additional $200 million in its Restore Fund, which was created in 2021 to remove carbon from the atmosphere. Reuters reports: The additional investment is expected to help the fund start new projects and carry forward its previously stated goal to remove about 1 million metric tons of carbon dioxide per year, the company said. Apple is making efforts to become carbon neutral through its entire supply chain and the life cycle of every product by 2030. The fund, launched with Goldman Sachs Group Inc (GS.N) and nonprofit Conservation International, has invested in forest properties in Brazil and Paraguay in the last two years. The expanded fund will be managed by Climate Asset Management, a joint venture of HSBC Asset Management and Pollination, Apple added.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Debugging a faulty program can be frustrating, so why not let AI do it for you? That's what a developer that goes by "BioBootloader" did by creating Wolverine, a program that can give Python programs "regenerative healing abilities," reports Hackaday. (Yep, just like the Marvel superhero.) "Run your scripts with it and when they crash, GPT-4 edits them and explains what went wrong," wrote BioBootloader in a tweet that accompanied a demonstration video. "Even if you have many bugs it'll repeatedly rerun until everything is fixed." In the demo video for Wolverine, BioBootloader shows a side-by-side window display, with Python code on the left and Wolverine results on the right in a terminal. He loads a custom calculator script in which he adds a few bugs on purpose, then executes it. "It runs it, it sees the crash, but then it goes and talks to GPT-4 to try to figure out how to fix it," he says. GPT-4 returns an explanation for the program's errors, shows the changes that it tries to make, then re-runs the program. Upon seeing new errors, GPT-4 fixes the code again, and then it runs correctly. In the end, the original Python file contains the changes added by GPT-4.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

If reactors are retired, polluting energy sources that fill the gap could cause more than 5,000 premature deaths, researchers estimate. The findings appear in the journal Nature Energy. MIT News reports: They lay out a scenario in which every nuclear power plant in the country has shut down, and consider how other sources such as coal, natural gas, and renewable energy would fill the resulting energy needs throughout an entire year. Their analysis reveals that indeed, air pollution would increase, as coal, gas, and oil sources ramp up to compensate for nuclear power's absence. This in itself may not be surprising, but the team has put numbers to the prediction, estimating that the increase in air pollution would have serious health effects, resulting in an additional 5,200 pollution-related deaths over a single year. If, however, more renewable energy sources become available to supply the energy grid, as they are expected to by the year 2030, air pollution would be curtailed, though not entirely. The team found that even under this heartier renewable scenario, there is still a slight increase in air pollution in some parts of the country, resulting in a total of 260 pollution-related deaths over one year. When they looked at the populations directly affected by the increased pollution, they found that Black or African American communities -- a disproportionate number of whom live near fossil-fuel plants -- experienced the greatest exposure. "They also calculated that more people are also likely to die prematurely due to climate impacts from the increase in carbon dioxide emissions, as the grid compensates for nuclear power's absence," adds the report. "The climate-related effects from this additional influx of carbon dioxide could lead to 160,000 additional deaths over the next century." Lead author Lyssa Freese, a graduate student in MIT's Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences (EAPS), said: "We need to be thoughtful about how we're retiring nuclear power plants if we are trying to think about them as part of an energy system. Shutting down something that doesn't have direct emissions itself can still lead to increases in emissions, because the grid system will respond."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Denver legislators have just passed the first-ever agricultural Right to Repair bill. Today's landslide 44-16 vote in the House follows a successful vote in the Senate last month. iFixit reports: Once the Agricultural Right to Repair bill passes, manufacturers will be required to share all the parts, embedded software, firmware, tools, and documentation necessary for repair. One critical step remains: a signature by Governor Polis, who has signaled that he supports the legislation. To support Right to Repair legislation near you, find your state on Repair.org -- or, if you're outside the US, look for your country's advocacy network here. The summary of HB23-1011 reads: "Starting January 1, 2024, the bill requires a manufacturer to provide parts, embedded software, firmware, tools, or documentation, such as diagnostic, maintenance, or repair manuals, diagrams, or similar information (resources), to independent repair providers and owners of the manufacturer's agricultural equipment to allow an independent repair provider or owner to conduct diagnostic, maintenance, or repair services on the owner's agricultural equipment. The bill folds agricultural equipment into the existing consumer right-to-repair statutes, which statutes provide the following: - A manufacturer's failure to comply with the requirement to provide resources is a deceptive trade practice;- In complying with the requirement to provide resources, a manufacturer need not divulge any trade secrets to independent repair providers and owners; and - Any new contractual provision or other arrangement that a manufacturer enters into that would remove or limit the manufacturer's obligation to provide resources to independent repair providers and owners is void and unenforceable; and - An independent repair provider or owner is not authorized to make modifications to agricultural equipment that permanently deactivate any safety notification system or bring the equipment out of compliance with safety or emissions laws or to engage in any conduct that would evade emissions, copyright, trademark, or patent laws."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The New York Times added a new daily puzzle game to its library in the form of Digits. GameSpot reports: This collection of math conundrums tasks you with reaching a designated number by using six numbers that you're free to multiply, divide, subtract, or add up to reach the final result, so long as your process doesn't create any fractions or negative numbers. Currently in beta and only available for this week, there'll be five of these math puzzles to solve every day. These aren't one-and-done puzzles like Wordle, and depending on the path you choose to solve one of these math mysteries, you'll be awarded 1-3 star ratings. If Digits proves to be popular with its readers, the New York Times will then start work on the further development of the game.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: Ukrainian hackers claim to have broken into the emails of a senior Russian military spy wanted by the Federal Bureau of Investigation for hacking the Hillary Clinton campaign and other senior U.S. Democrats ahead of Donald Trump's election to the presidency in 2016. In a message posted to Telegram on Monday, a group calling itself Cyber Resistance said it had stolen correspondence from Lt. Col. Sergey Morgachev, who was charged in 2018 with helping organize the hack and leak of emails from the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and the Clinton campaign. InformNapalm said in an article about the breach that it had confirmed Morgachev's identity by poring through personnel files and a curriculum vitae stolen by the hackers, including one document that identified him as a department head in Unit 26165 -- the same position which the FBI accused him of holding in 2018. [...] It wasn't immediately clear what information the hackers had managed to steal or how significant it was. Morgachev's inbox could potentially hold insight into Russia's hacking operations, including the operation against Clinton and the Democrats. In its indictment, the FBI described him as an officer in the Russia's military spy agency, still known by its old acronym, GRU. It said his department was "dedicated to developing and managing malware," including the "X-Agent" spy software used to hack the DNC. In its message announcing the theft, the group said of Morgachev: "A very cool and clever hacker, but ... We hacked him."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Substack's Twitter-like feature for shorter posts, called Notes, is launching for everyone on Tuesday. The Verge reports: Substack's Notes will appear in their own separate tab, meaning they'll be separate from the full newsletters you can read in the Inbox tab or the threads you can read in the Chat tab, where you can read newsletters. In a blog post, Substack suggests using Notes to share things like "posts, quotes, comments, images, and links," and there is no character limit, Substack spokesperson Helen Tobin tells The Verge. Each post can include up to six photos or GIFs, but video isn't supported. Notes you share won't go to subscriber inboxes; they'll just live on the Substack website and app. And you can interact with other Notes with like, reply, and "restack" (retweet) buttons. Within the Notes tab, you can look through two different feeds: "Home" and "Subscribed." "Home" shows notes from writers you subscribe to and "writers they recommend," meaning you'll see notes from people you may not already be familiar with. "Subscribed" only shows notes from people you subscribe to.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Ford said Tuesday it will spend $1.34 billion (C$1.8B) to turn its 70-year-old Oakville facility in Canada into an assembly plant for its next-generation of electric vehicles. TechCrunch reports: The campus, which first opened in 1953, will be renamed Oakville Electric Vehicle Complex. The company said Tuesday it will begin modernizing the 487-acre site in the second quarter of 2024. The upgrade includes completely retooling the facility that currently produces the internal combustion engine-powered Ford Edge and Lincoln Nautilus to own that only produces EVs. This is the first time that Ford has completely retooled an existing plant for EVs in North America. Ford also plans to add a 407,000-square-foot battery plant that will use cells and arrays from its BlueOval SK Battery Park in Kentucky. Workers will assemble the components into battery packs and then install them into EVs produced at the plant. "I'm most excited for the world to see the incredible next-generation electric and fully digitally connected vehicles produced in Oakville," CEO Jim Farley said in a statement.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: Over the past month, classified Pentagon documents have circulated on 4chan, Telegram, and various Discord servers. The documents contain daily intelligence briefings, sensitive information about Ukrainian military positions, and a handwritten character sheet for a table-top roleplaying game. No one knows who leaked the Pentagon documents or how. They appeared online as photographs of printed pages, implying someone printed them out and removed them from a secure location, similar to how NSA translator Reality Winner leaked documents. The earliest documents Motherboard has seen are dated February 23, though the New York Times and Bellingcat reported that some are dated as early as January. According to Bellingcat, the earliest known instances of the leaks appearing online can be traced back to a Discord server. At some point, a Discord user uploaded a zip file of 32 images from the leak onto a Minecraft Discord server. Included in this pack alongside highly sensitive, Top Secret and other classified documents about the Pentagon's strategy and assessment of the war in Ukraine, was a handwritten piece of paper that appeared to be a character sheet for a roleplaying game. It's written on a standard piece of notebook paper, three holes punched out on the side, blue lines crisscrossing the page. The character's name is Doctor "Izmer Trotzky," his character class is "Professor Scientist." They've got a strength of 5, a charisma of 4, and 19 rubles to their name. Doctor Trotzky has 10 points in first aid and occult skills, and 24 in spot hidden. He's carrying a magnifying glass, a fountain pen, a sword cane, and a deringer. [...] But what game is it from? Motherboard reached out to game designer Jacqueline Bryk to find out. Bryk is an award-winning designer of roleplaying games who has worked on Kult: Divinity Lost, Changeling: the Lost, Fading Suns: Pax Alexius, and Vampire: the Masquerade. "I strongly suspect this is Call Of Cthulhu," Bryk said when first looking at the sheet. Call of Cthulhu (COC) is an RPG based on the work of H.P. Lovecraft where players attempt to stave off madness while investigating eldritch horrors. "This is a pretty classic Professor build. The sword cane really clinches it for me. I notice he's currently carrying a derringer and a dagger but took no points in firearms or fighting. I'm not sure which edition this is but it seems like the most he could do with his weapons is throw them." "After some research, Bryk concluded that the game is a homebrewed combination of COC and the Fallout tabletop game based on the popular video game franchise," adds Motherboard. "My best guest here is Fallout: Cthulhu the Homebrew," Bryk said, giving the home designed game a name.Read more of this story at Slashdot.