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Microsoft employees will be free to seek jobs at the likes of Google and Amazon after the internet giant announced it would no longer enforce non-compete clauses (NCCs) against the majority of its staff. From a report: The change is one of four updates announced in a blog post on Wednesday, including plans to ditch non-disclosure agreements, conduct a civil rights audit of its existing work policies, and commit to providing salary ranges on all internal and external job descriptions. NCCs are used by firms to stop employees moving to companies considered to be direct competitors. While there's more understanding when they're included in the contracts of c-suite and senior managers, their use against lower-level workers has been criticized as being too restrictive and holding people to unfair conditions. Microsoft has enforced them in some employee contracts, but effective today, the company is removing clauses from employee agreements, and will not enforce existing clauses in the US, the company said. "We have heard concerns that the non-competition clauses in some U.S. employee agreements, even when rarely and reasonably enforced, feel at odds with our talent principles," said the blog post, attributed to Amy Pannoni, Microsoft's deputy general counsel and Amy Coleman, Microsoft's corporate vice president for HR.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from New Scientist: Robots can now be covered in living skin grown from real human cells to make them look more like us. As robots increasingly take on roles as nurses, care workers, teachers and other jobs that involve close personal contact, it is important to make them look more human so we feel comfortable interacting with them, says Shoji Takeuchi at the University of Tokyo in Japan. At the moment, robots are sometimes coated in silicone rubber to give them a fleshy appearance, but the rubber lacks the texture of human skin, he says. To make more realistic-looking skin, Takeuchi and his colleagues bathed a plastic robot finger in a soup of collagen and human skin cells called fibroblasts for three days. The collagen and fibroblasts adhered to the finger and formed a layer similar to the dermis, which is the second-from-top layer of human skin. Next, they gently poured other human skin cells called keratinocytes onto the finger to recreate the upper layer of human skin, called the epidermis. The resulting 1.5-millimeter-thick skin was able to stretch and contract as the finger bent backwards and forwards. As it did this, it wrinkled like normal skin, says Takeuchi. "It is much more realistic than silicone." The robot skin could also be healed when it was cut by grafting a collagen sheet onto the wound. However, the skin began to dry out after a while since it didn't have blood vessels to replenish it with moisture. In the future, it may be possible to incorporate artificial blood vessels into the skin to keep it hydrated, as well as sweat glands and hair follicles to make it more realistic, says Takeuchi. It should also be possible to make different skin colors by adding melanocytes, he says. The researchers now plan to try coating a whole robot in the living skin. The research has been published in the journal Matter.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A 29% rate hike for hydroelectric power in Chelan County, created specifically for cryptocurrency miners, went into effect on June 1. Decrypt reports: The miners used to pay a lower, high-density load rate for their electricity. Now they'll pay a newly-created cryptocurrency rate, known as Rate 36. Washington state accounted for about two-thirds of all hydroelectric power generated in the U.S. in 2020, according to the Energy Information Administration. The state's Grand Coulee Dam, located on the Columbia River in Grant and Okanogan counties, powers a 6,809-megawatt. The cheap and renewable hydropower has made Washington state a popular destination for Bitcoin miners too. Washington state accounted for 4% of the total U.S. hashrate in December, according to the Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance. [...] KPQ also reported that nearby Douglas County has stopped allowing new Bitcoin miners to set up operations there because they already consume 25% of the county's available energy. Still, the Chelan County rate hike won't ban crypto miners. For companies that have made substantial investments in their mining facilities, officials have approved transition plans to gradually increase energy rates over the next two years. "We need to have some sort of transition. That's important for business," PUD Commissioner Ann Congdon told the Wenatchee World on Tuesday. "I understand how businesses need that in order to plan." Malachi Salcido, CEO of Salcido Enterprises, told the local news outlet that the new rate will force him to reconfigure his three Chelan County crypto mining facilities into data farms. He has four other crypto mining facilities, two in Douglas County and two in Grant County. Under the new pricing plan, Salcido can keep his Chelan facility on the lower, high-density energy rate if he processes data instead of mining crypto. The data processing uses the same amount of power as crypto mining, he told the Wenatchee World. "Do you really want to be in the business of regulating what kind of processing happens on servers in your territory," Salcido said.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

schwit1 shares a report from The Verge: NASA's new powerful space observatory, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), got pelted by a larger than expected micrometeoroid at the end of May, causing some detectable damage to one of the spacecraft's 18 primary mirror segments. The impact means that the mission team will have to correct for the distortion created by the strike, but NASA says that the telescope is "still performing at a level that exceeds all mission requirements." Engineers do have the capability to also maneuver JWST's mirror and instruments away from showers of space debris, if NASA can see them coming. The problem, though, was that this micrometeoroid was not part of a shower, so NASA considers it an "unavoidable chance event." Still, the agency is forming an engineering team to come up with ways to potentially avoid or lessen the effects of micrometeoroid strikes of this size. And since JWST is so sensitive, the telescope will also help NASA get a better understanding of just how many micrometeoroids there are in the deep space environment. Despite the strike, NASA remained optimistic in its post about JWST's future. "Webb's beginning-of-life performance is still well above expectations, and the observatory is fully capable of performing the science it was designed to achieve," according to the blog. Engineers can also adjust the impacted mirror to help cancel out the data distortion. The mission team has done this already and will continue to tinker with the mirror over time to get the best results. It's a process that will be ongoing throughout JWST's planned five to 10 years of life as new observations are made and events unfold. At the same time, NASA warns that the engineers will not be able to completely cancel out the impact of the strike.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: Scientists in Australia have discovered that superworms can live and even grow on a diet of only polystyrene, also known colloquially as Styrofoam. Superworm is a common name for the larval stages of the darkling beetle (Zophobas morio). The researchers described their finding as a "first step" in discovering natural enzymes that could be used to recycle this type of plastic. "We envision that polystyrene waste will be collected, mechanically shredded, and then degraded in bioreactors with an enzyme cocktail," said Chris Rinke, a scientist at the University of Queensland and an author of a paper published on Thursday in the journal Microbial Genomics. In recent years, scientists globally have been looking for microorganisms that can digest plastic, which is how natural materials like wood biodegrade. The idea is that some kind of enzyme engineered from the gut of an insect or bacteria could be used to digest difficult-to-recycle plastic so it could be made into new plastic products, which would reduce the need for virgin plastic. Used for things such as coffee cups and packing peanuts, polystyrene is one of the most common plastics in production. It accounts for "up to 7-10% of the total non-fibre plastic production," according to the paper. Experimenters divided worms into three groups and fed each a different diet: bran, polystyrene or a starvation diet. The worms that lived on polystyrene were not as healthy as those eating bran, but they were able to eat the Styrofoam and gain weight and complete their life cycle. However, the report also found that the diet had "negative impacts on host gut microbiome diversity and health" of the worms. In other words, they could eat plastics, but it had a cost to them. It would theoretically be possible to keep thousands of worms in an industrial setting to digest plastics. But the researchers say their next goal is to identify and enhance the enzyme the worms use for future applications.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Music streaming giant Spotify has revealed that it's intending to make a big splash in the audiobooks business. Trusted Reviews reports: At the company's Investor Day 2022, CEO Daniel Ek revealed that the company would be branching out into audiobooks following its successful music and podcast offerings. Several months ago, Spotify announced its agreement to acquire audiobook distribution platform Findaway, which was a surefire indicator that it was thinking big in this area. Whie that deal has yet to close, Ek has confirmed that he sees audiobooks as "a massive opportunity." The overall book market today is worth $140 billion, yet audiobooks only represent 6 to 7% of that. In the most developed audiobook markets that figure is closer to 50%, so Spotify as seeing this as a potential $70 billion market that it's going to compete with Amazon and its Audible platform for. Spotify revealed that it's planning to relaunch the audiobook arm of its streaming service later this year. As this suggests, you can already access audiobooks through Spotify, but it's not a particularly well fleshed out offering, and it's not easily accessible. No specifics were mentioned on the pricing of this audiobook offering.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Developer James Brown created a custom LEGO computer terminal brick, complete with "an actual processor and a working screen to help bring the fictional computer to reality," reports Tom's Hardware. From the report: The iconic computer terminal brick it's based off of is made using the 2 x 2 slope brick. James has created this one entirely from scratch with the help of a 3D printer and an ARM-based microcontroller. It powers up and features screen animations that look like lines of terminal code scrolling by as well as a loading animation. The screen used inside this custom LEGO is super tiny -- less than half an inch across -- and Brown appears to have ordered tons of these things. Just last month, he used a handful of them to create a custom mechanical keyboard on which each key has its own OLED display. The keyboard can be programmed with a demo video showing the letters changing from lowercase to capital on the fly. Rather than using a Raspberry Pi to power the tiny terminal, Brown had a custom PCB printed just for the project using a different ARM-based chip. On this board is an STM32F030F4P6TR -- an ARM Cortex M0 series microcontroller with a 32-bit single core and 16KB of flash. An RP2040 SoC could be used in its place, should you wish to spin your own PCB. It's connected to a .42-inch OLED display which has a resolution of 72 x 40px. Brown explains that it gets power from an old LEGO 9V system that uses conductive strips inside the studs. Instead of taking apart an existing brick, Brown opted to design one from scratch. This process involved 3D-printing a mold in which he could cast the brick with the electronic components fit inside. The final product is a semi-translucent blue brick that illuminates with the light from the OLED display.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Meta plans to stop making consumer versions of its Portal video calling hardware and instead pivot the product line to focus on use cases for businesses, like conference calling. The Verge reports: The change in strategy, first reported by The Information and confirmed to The Verge by a source familiar with the matter, comes as Meta is reassessing its ambitious hardware plans against investor concerns about the billions of dollars it's spending on projects that have yet to pay off financially. The Portal line debuted in 2018 with two displays meant as dedicated video calling stations. [...] New versions have been released in the time since, including the portable Portal Go, but the device never became a huge hit. The research firm IDC estimates that Meta shipped 800,000 Portals in 2021, accounting for less than 1 percent of the global smart speaker and display market, according to The Information. Meta currently sells four Portal products, from a $99 TV-connected camera to a $349 smart display.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares an excerpt from an opinion piece via The Register, written by longtime technology reporter and Linux enthusiast Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols: Recently, The Register's Liam Proven wrote tongue in cheek about the most annoying desktop Linux distros. He inspired me to do another take. Proven pointed out that Distrowatch currently lists 270 -- count 'em -- Linux distros. Of course, no one can look at all of those. But, having covered the Linux desktop since the big interface debate was between Bash and zsh rather than GNOME vs KDE, and being the editor-in-chief of a now-departed publication called Linux Desktop, I think I've used more of them than anyone else who also has a life beyond the PC. In short, I love the Linux desktop. Many Linux desktop distros are great. I've been a big Linux Mint fan for years now. I'm also fond, in no particular order, of Fedora, openSUSE, Ubuntu, and MX Linux. But you know what? That's a problem right there. We have many excellent Linux desktop distros, which means none of them can gain enough market share to make any real dent in the overall market.[...]Besides over 200 distros, there are 21 different desktop interfaces and over half-a-dozen different major ways to install software such as the Debian Package Management System (DPKG), Red Hat Package Manager (RPM), Pacman, Zypper, and all too many others. Then there are all the newer containerized ways to install programs including Flatpak, Snap, and AppImage. I can barely keep them all straight and that's part of my job! How can you expect ordinary users to make sense of it all? You can't. None of the major Linux distributors -- Canonical, Red Hat, and SUSE -- really care about the Linux desktop. Sure, they have them. They're also major desktop influencers. But their cash comes from servers, containers, the cloud, and the Internet of Things (IoT). The desktop? Please. We should just be glad they spend as many resources as they do on them. Now, all this said, I don't want you to get the impression that I don't think the conventional Linux desktop is important. I do. In fact, I think it's critical. Microsoft, you see, is abandoning the traditional PC-based desktop. In its crystal ball, Microsoft sees Azure-based Desktop-as-a-Service (DaaS) as its future. [...] That means that the future of a true desktop operating system will lie in the hands of Apple with macOS and us with Linux. As someone who remembers the transition from centrally controlled mainframes and minicomputers to individually empowered PCs, I do not want to return to a world where all power belongs to Microsoft or any other company. "The Linux desktop will never be as big as Windows once was," writes Vaughan-Nichols in closing. "Between DaaS's rise and the fall of the desktop to smartphones, it can't be. But it may yet, by default, become the most popular true conventional desktop."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Biden administration on Thursday pledged to have 500,000 public charging stations for electric vehicles in place by 2030. "The proposed standards, which will be published next week in the Federal Register, dictate that a charging station be located every 50 miles along the interstate and no more than a mile off the highway," reports USA Today. "Stations would be required to maintain a minimum number and type of chargers capable of serving multiple customers." From the report: Stations would be prohibited from requiring drivers to have a membership or be part of a club to use their chargers. Real-time information on pricing and location would have to be available to help motorists using a GPS app better plan their trip. The Federal Highway Administration's proposed standards will apply to federally funded charging stations in all 50 states, the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico. The goal is to ensure a seamless system of charging stations that can be used by motorists no matter what car they drive, where they live or how they pay. [...] The administration is providing more than $5 billion to states over the next five years to build a network of charging stations along the nation's interstates.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Intel, one of the world's leading chipmakers, has responded to global headwinds by joining a string of other tech companies in placing a freeze on new hires as it seeks ways to cut costs. Fortune reports: "Increased focus and prioritization in our spending will help us weather macroeconomic uncertainty, execute on our strategy, and meet our commitments to customers, shareholders, and employees," Intel said in a statement provided to Fortune on Thursday, a day after Reuters reported a leaked internal memo announcing the hiring freeze at Intel. According to the memo, Intel is placing a two-week hiring freeze on its client computing group, which creates PC chips for desktop and laptop computers. Client computing is Intel's largest division by sales, generating just over 50% of the manufacturer's revenue last quarter. In April, Intel issued weaker-than-expected profit guidance for the second quarter, citing reduced PC chip sales. But Citi's semiconductor analyst, Christopher Danely, predicts Intel will miss its weak second-quarter guidance, following negative comments Intel CFO David Zinsner made at a Bank of America conference on Tuesday. "Weaker" macroeconomic conditions are "clearly going to impact" Intel's earnings, Zinsner said, adding that "the circumstances at this point are much worse than what we had anticipated coming into the quarter."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from ZDNet: Lead researcher Alyssa Blackburn of Baylor and Rice, along with team-mates Christoph Huber, Yossi Eliaz, Muhammad S. Shamim, David Weisz, Goutham Seshadri, Kevin Kim, Shengqi Hang, and Erez Lieberman Aiden, used a technique called "address linking" to study the Bitcoin transactions in the first two years of its existence: January of 2009 to February of 2011. Their key discovery is that, in those first two years, "most Bitcoin was mined by only sixty-four agents [] collectively accounting for B2,676,800 (PV: $84 billion)." They are referring to the process of minting new coins by solving computer challenges. That number -- 64 people in total -- "is 1000-fold smaller than prior estimates of the size of the early Bitcoin community (75,000)," they observe. Those 64 people include some notable figures that have already become legends, such as Ross Ulbricht, known by the handle Dread Pirate Roberts. Ulbricht is the founder of Silk Road, a black-market operation that used Bitcoin for illicit means -- until it was shut down by the FBI. For Blackburn and team, the point was to study the effects of people participating in game-theoretic situations as anonymous parties. Surprisingly, they found early insiders like Ulbricht could have exploited the relative paucity of participants by undermining Bitcoin to double-spend coins, but they did not. They acted "altruistically" to maintain the integrity of the system. That's intriguing, but a more pressing discovery is that addresses can be traced and identities can be revealed. To find out who was doing those early transactions, Blackburn and team had to reverse-engineer the entire premise of Bitcoin and of all crypto: anonymity. As outlined in the original Bitcoin white paper by Satoshi Nakamoto, privacy was to be preserved by two means: anonymous public key use and creating new key pairs for every transaction [...]. Blackburn and team had to trace those key pairs to reveal early Bitcoin's transacting parties. To do so, they developed what they called a novel address-linking scheme. The scheme finds two patterns that point to users: one is the presence of recurring bits of code, and one is duplicate addresses for certain transactions. [...] The consequence of that, they write, is that it is possible to "follow the money" to expose any identity by following a chain of relatedness in a graph of addresses, starting from a known identity [...]. Further, they hypothesize that "many cryptocurrencies may be susceptible to follow-the-money attacks." Blackburn told The New York Times's Siobhan Roberts, "When you are encrypting private data and making it public, you cannot assume that it'll be private forever." As the team concludes in the report, "Drip-by-drip, information leakage erodes the once-impenetrable blocks, carving out a new landscape of socioeconomic data." The new paper, titled "Cooperation among an anonymous group, protected Bitcoin during failures of decentralization," has been posted on the researchers' server (PDF).Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Apple plans to expand the lineup of laptops using its new, speedier in-house chips next year, aiming to grab a bigger share of the market, Bloomberg News reported Thursday, citing people with knowledge of the matter said. From the report: The company is working on a larger MacBook Air with a 15-inch screen for release as early as next spring, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the plans aren't public. This would mark the first model of that size in the MacBook Air's 14-year history. Apple is also developing what would be its smallest new laptop in years. The new models underscore Apple's strategy to use homegrown processors to make gains in a market led by Lenovo and HP. The company began splitting from longtime partner Intel in 2020 and announced its latest chip, the M2, at a developers conference earlier this week. Better performance and new designs have helped spur a resurgence for the Mac lineup, which accounts for about 10% of Apple's sales.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

NASA is putting a team together to study unidentified aerial phenomena, popularly known as UFOs, the US space agency said Thursday. From a report: The team will gather data on "events in the sky that cannot be identified as aircraft or known natural phenomena -- from a scientific perspective," the agency said. NASA said it was interested in UAPs from a security and safety perspective. There was no evidence UAPs are extraterrestrial in origin, NASA added. The study is expected to take nine months. "NASA believes that the tools of scientific discovery are powerful and apply here also," said Thomas Zurbuchen, the associate administrator for science at NASA Headquarters in Washington, DC. "We have access to a broad range of observations of Earth from space -- and that is the lifeblood of scientific inquiry. We have the tools and team who can help us improve our understanding of the unknown. That's the very definition of what science is. That's what we do."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Google today announced a set of new and updated security features for Chrome, almost all of which rely on machine learning (ML) models, as well as a couple of nifty new ML-based features that aim to make browsing the web a bit easier, including a new feature that will suppress notification permission prompts when its algorithm thinks you're unlikely to accept them. From a report: Starting with the next version of Chrome, Google will introduce a new ML model that will silence many of these notification permission prompts. And the sooner the better. At this point, they have mostly become a nuisance. Even if there are some sites -- and those are mostly news sites -- that may offer some value in their notifications, I can't remember the last time I accepted one on purpose. Also, while legitimate sites love to push web notifications to remind readers of their existence, attackers can also use them to send phishing attacks or prompt users to download malware if they get users to give them permission. "On the one hand, page notifications help deliver updates from sites you care about; on the other hand, notification permission prompts can become a nuisance," Google admits in its blog post today. The company's new ML model will now look for prompts that users are likely to ignore and block them automatically. And as a bonus, all of that is happening on your local machine, so none of your browsing data makes it onto Google's servers.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A new dataset from Google shows the features on the surface of the Earth in near real time, the company announced Thursday. The tool, called Dynamic World, uses deep learning and satellite imagery to develop a high-resolution land cover map that shows which bits of land have features like trees, crops, or water. From a report: Land cover maps usually take a long time to produce, and there are big gaps between the time images are taken and when the data is published. They also often don't have a detailed breakdown of what's on the ground in a particular area -- a city would be classified as "built-up" (a designation for human-altered landscapes) even if there are big sections with parks, for example. Dynamic World classifies the land cover type for every 1,100 square feet, Google said. It shows how likely it is that the sections are covered by one of nine cover types: water, flooded vegetation, built-up areas, trees, crops, bare ground, grass, shrub / scrub, and snow / ice. Google detailed its system, developed with the World Resources Institute, in a paper published in Nature's Scientific Data.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

GitHub has announced that it will sunset Atom, the text editor for software development that the company introduced in 2011. In a blog post, GitHub said that it will archive the Atom repository and all other repositories remaining in the Atom organization on December 15, 2022. From a report: Atom served as the foundation for the Electron framework, which paved the way for thousands of apps including Microsoft Visual Studio Code, Slack, GitHub's own GitHub Desktop. But GitHub asserts that Atom community involvement has declined as new tools have emerged over the years. Atom itself hasn't seen significant feature development for the past several months beyond maintenance and security updates.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Browser maker Vivaldi's email client has finally hit version 1.0, seven years after it was first announced. From a report: Vivaldi Mail, which includes a calendar and feed reader as well as an email client, first arrived in technical preview in 2020. A slightly wobbly beta arrived last year alongside version 4 of the Chromium-based browser. After another year of polish and tidying of loose ends, the company has declared the client ready. As before, the client is built into the browser, meaning it is unlikely to appeal to many beyond Vivaldi's existing user base. Enabling it is a simple matter of dropping into Settings pages and wading through until the option to enable Mail, Calendar, and Feeds can be selected. Vivaldi has a lot of settings -- delightfully customizable for some and downright baffling for others. That said, for users still pining for a good old-fashioned email client that doesn't require wading through a web page festooned with adverts, there's a lot to like. It supports multiple accounts, will sort messages and create folders automatically (locally, rather than on a mystery server in the cloud), and permits searching (with indexing performed offline). IMAP and POP3 are supported, making adding a provider relatively straightforward, and the company also claims that users can log into their Google accounts from Mail and Calendar.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Chinese government made another attempt in promoting its vision of the internet, in a repackaging intended to lure lagging regions. From a report: Throughout the years, China has made several attempts at changing the current internet architecture, mostly in the context of the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), the United Nation's agency for ICT technologies. Contrarily to other standardisation organisations that are dominated by private companies, in ITU governments play a leading role. Thus, Beijing has been using this forum to attract countries that might have similar interests in asserting stronger governmental control over the internet. In September 2019, the delegate of Chinese telecom juggernaut Huawei presented a proposal for a new IP (Internet Protocol). In February, EURACTIV anticipated that more proposals were expected in the context of the World Telecommunication Standardisation Assembly. Beijing's new proposal took the form of a modification of a resolution set to be adopted at the World Telecommunication Development Conference, the ITU's conference dedicated to telecom development that takes place in Rwanda from 6 to 16 June. Two weeks ago, the Chinese government circulated a modification of a resolution that in a footnote introduced the concept of IPv6+, presented as an enhanced version of the latest version of the internet protocol, known as IPv6. At around the same time, IPv6+ was promoted by Huawei. "IPv6+ can realize more open and active technology and service innovation, more efficient and flexible networking and service provision, more excellent performance and user experience," the footnote reads. According to the document, seen by EURACTIV, IPv6+ would have three crucial advantages. A more efficient allocation of information across the network; integration of other technologies that allow for an organisation of network resources; integration of innovative solutions.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Microsoft is working on Project Moorcroft, a program designed to bring early game demos to Xbox Game Pass subscribers. The demos will be similar to the limited levels and early samples of games that fans would typically spend hours waiting in line to play at E3 or PAX. From a report: These early game demos have largely been lost in the transition to virtual game conferences during the pandemic, and they're key for indie developers trying to generate awareness for their titles. Sarah Bond, Microsoft's head of gaming ecosystem, describes Project Moorcroft as a way to bring back that E3-like experience. "Why don't we take Game Pass, and make it like the show floor?" says Bond. "Why don't we make it possible for a developer to take a piece, a level of their game, release it into Game Pass, generate excitement for what's coming, and also get that really valuable feedback as they're tuning and preparing their game for launch."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Google Cloud developer advocate Emma Haruka Iwao and her colleagues say they've calculated Pi to 100 trillion digital decimal places. Engadget reports: Iwao and her team previously set the record in 2019 when they carried out a calculation to an accuracy of 31.4 trillion digits. The benchmark has been broken a few times since then [...]. In a blog post, Iwao wrote that finding as many digits of Pi as possible is a way to measure the progress of compute power. Her job involves showing off what Google Cloud is capable of, so it's not too surprising that Iwao tapped into the power of the platform to perform the calculation. In 2019, the calculation (which figured out a third as many digits as the most recent attempt) took 121 days. This time around, the calculation ran for 157 days, 23 hours, 31 minutes and 7.651 seconds, meaning the computers were running more than twice as quickly despite Iwao using "the same tools and techniques." Around 82,000 terabytes of data were processed overall. Iwao also notes that reading all 100 trillion digits out loud at a rate of one per second would take more than 3.1 million years. And in case you're wondering, the 100-trillionth decimal place of Pi is 0.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Researchers have discovered a new particle that is a magnetic relative of the Higgs boson. Whereas the discovery of the Higgs boson required the tremendous particle-accelerating power of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), this never-before-seen particle -- dubbed the axial Higgs boson -- was found using an experiment that would fit on a small kitchen countertop. Live Science reports: As well as being a first in its own right, this magnetic cousin of the Higgs boson -- the particle responsible for granting other particles their mass -- could be a candidate for dark matter, which accounts for 85%t of the total mass of the universe but only reveals itself through gravity. The axial Higgs boson differs from the Higgs boson, which was first detected by the ATLAS and CMS detectors at the LHC a decade ago in 2012, because it has a magnetic moment, a magnetic strength or orientation that creates a magnetic field. As such, it requires a more complex theory to describe it than its non-magnetic mass-granting cousin. [...] "When my student showed me the data I thought she must be wrong," Kenneth Burch, a professor of physics at Boston College and lead researcher of the team that made the discovery, told Live Science. "It's not every day you find a new particle sitting on your tabletop." [...] "We found the axial Higgs boson using a tabletop optics experiment which sits on a table measuring about 1 x 1 meters by focusing on a material with a unique combination of properties," Burch continued. "Specifically we used rare-earth Tritelluride (RTe3) [a quantum material with a highly 2D crystal structure]. The electrons in RTe3 self-organize into a wave where the density of the charge is periodically enhanced or reduced." The size of these charge density waves, which emerge above room temperature, can be modulated over time, producing the axial Higgs mode. In the new study, the team created the axial Higgs mode by sending laser light of one color into the RTe3 crystal. The light scattered and changed to a color of lower frequency in a process known as Raman scattering, and the energy lost during the color change created the axial Higgs mode. The team then rotated the crystal and found that the axial Higgs mode also controls the angular momentum of the electrons, or the rate at which they move in a circle, in the material meaning this mode must also be magnetic. "Originally we were simply investigating the light scattering properties of this material. When carefully examining the symmetry of the response -- how it differed as we rotated the sample -- we discovered anomalous changes that were the initial hints of something new," Burch explained. "As such, it is the first such magnetic Higgs to be discovered and indicates the collective behavior of the electrons in RTe3 is unlike any state previously seen in nature." The report notes that this is also the first time scientists have observed a state with multiple broken symmetries. "Symmetry breaking occurs when a symmetric system that appears the same in all directions becomes asymmetric," reports Live Science. "Oregon University suggests thinking of this as being like a spinning coin that has two possible states. The coin eventually falls onto its head or tail face thus releasing energy and becoming asymmetrical." The findings have been published in the journal Nature.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Facebook parent company Meta Platforms has halted development of a smartwatch with dual cameras and is instead working on other devices for the wrist, Bloomberg reported Wednesday, citing a person with knowledge of the matter. From the report: The device, which has been in development for at least two years, was designed to include several features common in other smartwatches, including activity tracking, music playback and messaging. A prototype of the now halted device includes dual-cameras, a key differentiator from market leaders like the Apple Watch. One camera was located below the display and another sat on the backside against the wearer's wrist, according to images and video of a prototype seen by Bloomberg. The second camera was designed so users could remove the watch face from its strap to quickly take pictures. But the presence of the camera caused issues with another feature for translating nerve signals from the wrist into digital commands, the person said. Having that technical ability, known as electromyography, is a top priority for Meta.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Microplastics have been found in freshly fallen snow in Antarctica for the first time, which could accelerate snow and ice melting and pose a threat to the health of the continent's unique ecosystems. The tiny plastics -- smaller than a grain of rice -- have previously been found in Antarctic sea ice and surface water but this is the first time it has been reported in fresh snowfall, the researchers say. The research, conducted by University of Canterbury PhD student, Alex Aves, and supervised by Dr Laura Revell has been published in the scientific journal The Cryosphere. Aves collected snow samples from the Ross Ice Shelf in late 2019 to determine whether microplastics had been transferred from the atmosphere into the snow. Up until then, there had been few studies on this in Antarctica. "We were optimistic that she wouldn't find any microplastics in such a pristine and remote location," Revell said. She instructed Aves to also collect samples from Scott Base and the McMurdo Station roadways -- where microplastics had previously been detected -- so "she'd have at least some microplastics to study," Revell said. But that was an unnecessary precaution -- plastic particles were found in every one of the 19 samples from the Ross Ice Shelf. "It's incredibly sad but finding microplastics in fresh Antarctic snow highlights the extent of plastic pollution into even the most remote regions of the world," Aves said. Aves found an average of 29 microplastic particles per liter of melted snow, which is higher than marine concentrations reported previously from the surrounding Ross Sea and in Antarctic sea ice. Samples taken from immediately next to the scientific bases on Ross Island, Scott Base and McMurdo Station threw up larger concentrations -- nearly three times that of remote areas. There were 13 different types of plastic found, with the most common being PET -- the plastic commonly used to make soft drink bottles and clothing. Atmospheric modelling suggested they may have travelled thousands of kilometers through the air, however it is equally likely the presence of humans in Antarctica has established a microplastic 'footprint', Revell said.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

In 2019, Ars Technica reported on a new advanced ignition system from Transient Plasma Systems that replaces the conventional spark plugs in a vehicle's engine with an ignition module that uses very short duration pulses of plasma to ignite the fuel/air mixture within the cylinder. Now, about three years later, the system is "almost ready for production after validation testing has confirmed its potential to increase fuel efficiency by up to 20 percent when fitted to an existing engine." From the report: TPS's plasma ignition system is designed to drop into existing cars with very little modification. An ignition module replaces the regular spark plugs, and there's a power module to control it, but otherwise the only other modifications are in software, as the engine requires remapping to take advantage of the new technology. "A lot of the OEMs we've been working with are freezing their engine designs, they're saying, 'No more new engine block, we might change some parts out, but we're freezing the design.' So it has to basically just drop into the holes that already exist, which this technology does," [said Dan Singleton, founder and CEO of TPS]. [...] The final stage of testing for TPS's system is to prove its durability, but Singleton expects this won't be a problem. "The technology uses all solid-state, high-voltage switches -- these are switches that are used in applications where they're run for millions and millions of shots. If you just did an analysis of the parts, you would say no problem, right? The testing that still needs to be done is, once you've put it into a package where it's going to go to altitude and extreme heat, extreme cold, you just have to do some design validation and tweaking," he said. [...] As for when we might see the first cars fitted with plasma ignition on the road, Singleton was optimistic. "We are currently in discussions with a couple of Tier 1s and OEMs that are interested in acquiring the technology or working with us to take this to market. The most aggressive timeline that one of those companies has told us is that they could get it to market in 18 months from the start of a deal. That's aggressive. And typically it takes longer in automotive to do testing, but if they say they can do it, this is their world, not mine. So 18 months, I would say, from the start of a partnership," Singleton said. Why develop a new internal combustion engine technology when we're going all in on electric vehicles? Here's what Singleton told Ars: "[W]e do think that the future is going to be EVs. But the question is, what do we do while we're ramping up? And I think if you look at the data, it's pretty compelling that the best thing you can do is to start getting CO2 emissions down now. So that's really where we see this fitting in is if you put this technology to market immediately. That's what our data shows is that there's immediate, meaningful CO2 reductions." Ars also notes that "it's going to be many years before countries like the US stop selling new internal combustion-powered vehicles and longer still until they're no longer allowed on our roads."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A recent executive brief from data storage industry analyst firm Trendfocus reports that OEMs have disclosed that Microsoft is pushing them to drop HDDs as the primary storage device in pre-built Windows 11 PCs and use SSDs instead, with the current deadlines for the switchover set for 2023. Tom's Hardware reports: Interestingly, these actions from Microsoft come without any firm SSD requirement listed for Windows 11 PCs, and OEMs have pushed back on the deadlines. [...] Microsoft's most current(opens in new tab) list of hardware requirements calls for a '64 GB or larger storage device' for Windows 11, so an SSD isn't a minimum requirement for a standard install. However, Microsoft stipulates that two features, DirectStorage and the Windows Subsystem for Android(opens in new tab), require an SSD, but you don't have to use those features. It is unclear whether or not Microsoft plans to change the minimum specifications for Windows 11 PCs after the 2023 switchover to SSDs for pre-built systems. As always, the issue with switching all systems to SSDs boils down to cost: Trendfocus Vice President John Chen tells us that replacing a 1TB HDD requires stepping down to a low-cost 256 GB SSD, which OEMs don't consider to be enough capacity for most users. Conversely, stepping up to a 512 GB SSD would 'break the budget' for lower-end machines with a strict price limit. "The original cut-in date based on our discussions with OEMs was to be this year, but it has been pushed out to sometime next year (the second half, I believe, but not clear on the firm date)," Chen told Tom's Hardware. "OEMs are trying to negotiate some level of push out (emerging market transition in 2024, or desktop transition in 2024), but things are still in flux." The majority of PCs in developed markets have already transitioned to SSDs for boot drives, but there are exceptions. Chen notes that it is possible that Microsoft could make some exceptions, but the firm predicts that dual-drive desktop PCs and gaming laptops with both an SSD for the boot drive and an HDD for bulk storage will be the only mass-market PCs with an HDD. [...] It's unclear what measures, if any, Microsoft would take with OEMs if they don't comply with its wishes, and the company has decided not to comment on the matter. Trendfocus says the switchover will have implications for HDD demand next year.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Several US federal agencies today revealed that Chinese-backed threat actors have targeted and compromised major telecommunications companies and network service providers to steal credentials and harvest data. BleepingComputer reports: As the NSA, CISA, and the FBI said in a joint cybersecurity advisory published on Tuesday, Chinese hacking groups have exploited publicly known vulnerabilities to breach anything from unpatched small office/home office (SOHO) routers to medium and even large enterprise networks. Once compromised, the threat actors used the devices as part of their own attack infrastructure as command-and-control servers and proxy systems they could use to breach more networks. "Upon gaining an initial foothold into a telecommunications organization or network service provider, PRC state-sponsored cyber actors have identified critical users and infrastructure including systems critical to maintaining the security of authentication, authorization, and accounting," the advisory explains. The attackers then stole credentials to access underlying SQL databases and used SQL commands to dump user and admin credentials from critical Remote Authentication Dial-In User Service (RADIUS) servers. "Armed with valid accounts and credentials from the compromised RADIUS server and the router configurations, the cyber actors returned to the network and used their access and knowledge to successfully authenticate and execute router commands to surreptitiously route, capture, and exfiltrate traffic out of the network to actor-controlled infrastructure," the federal agencies added. The three federal agencies said the following common vulnerabilities and exposures (CVEs) are the network device CVEs most frequently exploited by Chinese-backed state hackers since 2020. "The PRC has been exploiting specific techniques and common vulnerabilities since 2020 to use to their advantage in cyber campaigns," the NSA added. Organizations can protect their networks by applying security patches as soon as possible, disabling unnecessary ports and protocols to shrink their attack surface, and replacing end-of-life network infrastructure that no longer receives security patches. The agencies "also recommend networks to block lateral movement attempts and enabling robust logging and internet-exposed services to detect attack attempts as soon as possible," adds BleepingComputer.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Solid Power, a Colorado-based battery developer, moved one step closer to producing solid-state batteries for electric vehicles on Monday. The company has completed an automated "EV cell pilot line" with the capacity to make around 15,000 cells per year, which will be used first by Solid Power and then by its OEM partners for testing. "The installation of this EV cell pilot line will allow us to produce EV-scale cells suitable for initiating the formal automotive qualification process. Over the coming quarters, we will work to bring the EV cell pilot line up to its full operational capability and look forward to delivering EV-scale all-solid-state cells to our partners later this year," said Solid Power CEO Doug Campbell. Solid-state batteries differ from the lithium-ion batteries currently used in EVs in that they replace the liquid electrolyte with a solid layer between the anode and cathode. It's an attractive technology for multiple reasons: Solid-state cells should have a higher energy density, they should be able to charge more quickly, and they should be safer, as they're nonflammable (which should further reduce the pack density and weight, as it will need less-robust protection). It's one of those technologies that to a very casual observer is perennially five years away, but in Europe there are already operational Mercedes-Benz eCitaro buses with solid-state packs. The tech is taking a little longer to get ready for passenger EVs, but it does appear to be maturing. Solid Power is one of the leading solid-state battery developers, having been established in 2012. Its approach is to use a sulfur-based solid electrolyte and an anode that's very high in silicon -- more than 50 percent, according to Solid Power. [...] This new line is designed to produce the same sized large-format pouch cells currently used by automotive OEMs in their EVs, with cell capacities ranging from 60-100 Ah. BMW and Ford will be the first carmakers to receive cells for testing by the end of this year.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Crayta, a platform that lets players create, share, and play games with friends, is coming to Facebook Gaming's cloud-streaming service. The Verge reports: The collaborative game-building platform is built on Unreal Engine 4 and features a library of thousands of player-made games users can browse or add to with their own creations. While Crayta shares the element of game creation with Roblox, it also takes some cues from Fortnite, with the most obvious being its bright and cartoonish art. It also has rotating seasons, offers a battle pass, and lets users customize their own avatars. But probably one of the coolest -- and most unique -- things about Crayta is that it lets you share a game with just a single link, allowing your friend to hop right in from their browser. "A lot of times today, people think about the metaverse as 3D experiences you can have in virtual and augmented reality, but I think what Crayta shows is that you can both build and enjoy these kind of experiences really easily on all kinds of 2D environments including just within the Facebook App on phones and on computers," Mark Zuckerberg said in a video showing off Crayta's addition to its cloud gaming platform.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The European Parliament on Wednesday threw its weight behind a proposed ban on selling new cars with combustion engines in 2035, seeking to step up the fight against climate change through the faster development of electric vehicles. The Associated Press reports: The European Union assembly voted in Strasbourg, France, to require automakers to cut carbon-dioxide emissions by 100% by the middle of the next decade. The mandate would amount to a prohibition on the sale in the 27-nation bloc of new cars powered by gasoline or diesel. EU lawmakers also endorsed a 55% reduction in CO2 from automobiles in 2030 compared with 2021. The move deepens an existing obligation on the car industry to lower CO2 discharges by 37.5% on average at the end of the decade compared to last year. Environmentalists hailed the parliament's decisions. Transport & Environment, a Brussels-based alliance, said the vote offered "a fighting chance of averting runaway climate change." But Germany's auto industry lobby group VDA criticized the vote, saying it ignored the lack of charging infrastructure in Europe. The group also said the vote was "a decision against innovation and technology" a reference to demands from the industry that synthetic fuels be exempt from the ban, which European lawmakers rejected. If approved by EU nations, the 2035 deadline will be particularly tough on German automakers, who have focused on powerful and expensive vehicles with combustion engines while falling behind foreign rivals when it comes to electric cars.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Eater NY: Two weeks after Grubhub rolled out a disastrous, citywide free lunch promo that overloaded NYC restaurants with delivery orders, some businesses are still waiting for the company to refund them for undelivered food orders. The New York Post reports that salad chain Fresh & Co. lost about $4,000 on the promotion stemming from orders that were never picked up, according to the company's CEO. Upper West Side restaurateur Jeremy Wladis tells the Post that he's down $1,500 from the promotion. Grubhub has promised to reach out to restaurants that are requesting refunds over the snafu starting this week, according to the Post. A sales representative told the paper that "all orders from the Free Lunch Promo will be refunded." At the height of the hours-long promotional frenzy, the app was recording 6,000 orders per minute, according to Grubhub.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A small NYC-led cancer trial has achieved a result reportedly never before seen - the total remission of cancer in all of its patients. From a report: To be sure, the trial -- led by doctors at Memorial Sloan Kettering and backed by drug maker GlaxoSmithKline -- has only completed treatment of 12 patients, with a specific cancer in its early stages and with a rare mutation as well. But the results, reported Sunday in the New England Journal of Medicine and the New York Times, were still striking enough to prompt multiple physicians to tell the paper they were believed to be unprecedented. One cancer specialist told the Times it was an "unheard-of" result. According to the NEJM paper and the Times report, all 12 patients had rectal cancer that had not spread beyond the local area, and their tumors all exhibited a mutation affecting the ability of cells to repair damage to DNA.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The UK government says it is not "currently considering" copying European Union plans for a common charging cable. From a report: The EU has provisionally agreed all new portable electronic devices must, by autumn 2024, use a USB Type-C charger, a move it says will benefit consumers. Critics say it will stifle innovation. Under the current post-Brexit arrangements, the regulation would apply to Northern Ireland, according to EU and UK officials. According to the a December 2021 parliamentary report, the "new requirements may also apply to devices sold in Northern Ireland under the terms of the Northern Ireland protocol in the Brexit agreement, potentially triggering divergence of product standards with the rest of the UK." The treaty works by keeping Northern Ireland inside the EU's single market for goods, while the rest of the UK is outside it. A row between the UK and EU about how to reform the Northern Ireland protocol remains unresolved. A UK government spokesperson said "we are not currently considering replicating this requirement."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares a report: At Roku, a video-streaming platform operator that's suffered a punishing stock plunge, employees are buzzing about the possibility of an acquisition -- and their talk and hopes are pinned on Netflix. Employees at Roku have been discussing the possibility of a Netflix acquisition in recent weeks, according to people familiar with the matter. The chatter comes as Roku's stock has dropped about 80% since late July on weaker demand for video streaming and lower set-top-box sales. Roku competes with Apple, Amazon, Google, and Samsung in the market for streaming devices, and some of those industry titans are battling with the smaller company for lucrative video-ad dollars. The collapse in Roku's stock made it hard to compete with its larger tech rivals on pay in a tight labor market. The result has been a staggering increase in equity grants to employees, leaving Roku well underwater on stock-based compensation. Roku has been seen as an acquisition target before -- including last year, when, according to The Wall Street Journal, Comcast CEO Brian Roberts considered purchasing the company. In January, the departure of a top Roku executive stoked questions about the company's future.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The European Union is working on a possible ban on the provision of cloud services to Russia as part of new sanctions against the Kremlin for the invasion of Ukraine, an EU official told Reuters on Wednesday, noting the measure was technically complex. From a report: If introduced, it is unclear how the EU ban would affect Russia, because top cloud providers in Europe are U.S. companies, including Amazon, Google and Microsoft. The European Union last week adopted a new package of sanctions against Russia and Belarus which included an oil embargo, restrictive measures on Russian banks and a ban on the provision of consultancy services to Moscow.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

U.S. law enforcement have announced the takedown of SSNDOB, a notorious marketplace used for trading the personal information -- including Social Security numbers, or SSNs -- of millions of Americans. From a report: The operation was conducted by the FBI, the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), and the Department of Justice (DOJ), with help from the Cyprus Police, to seize four domains hosting the SSNDOB marketplace -- ssndob[dot]ws, ssndob[dot]vip, ssndob[dot]club, and blackjob[dot]biz. SSNDOB listed the personal information for approximately 24 million individuals in the United States, including names, dates of birth, SSNs, and credit card numbers, and generated more than $19 million in revenue, according to the DOJ. Chainalysis, a blockchain analysis company, reports separately that the marketplace has received nearly $22 million worth of Bitcoin across over 100,000 transactions since April 2015, though the marketplace is believed to have been active since at least 2013. These figures suggest that some users were buying personally identifiable information from the service in bulk, according to Chainalysis, which also uncovered a connection between SSNDOB and Joker's Stash, a large dark net market focused on stolen credit card information that shut down in January 2021.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Microsoft is substantially reducing its business in Russia, joining the list of prominent technology firms cutting back or exiting the country altogether after the Russian invasion of Ukraine. From a report: "As a result of the changes to the economic outlook and the impact on our business in Russia, we have made the decision to significantly scale down our operations in Russia," the company said in an emailed statement. "We will continue to fulfill our existing contractual obligations with Russian customers while the suspension of new sales remains in effect." More than 400 employees will be affected, a company spokesperson said. "We are working closely with impacted employees to ensure they are treated with respect and have our full support during this difficult time," Microsoft said in the statement.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Who knows whether it's FOMO or actual customer demand for such a thing, but Salesforce announced today that it's launching a pilot of NFT Cloud, a new platform for buying and selling these crypto assets. It's a turn to the future, according to the company, one it insists comes from customer curiosity. "Salesforce is seeing interest from CMOs and CDOs who are asking for help entering web3, and we are enthusiastic about bringing new innovations, products and offerings to our customers in a way that allows them to build and maintain meaningful relationships with their customers," Adam Caplan, SVP of Emerging Technology at Salesforce told TechCrunch. The company's goal with this product is to make NFT selling more accessible. "NFT Cloud is all about helping our customers mint, manage and sell NFTs, and of course it's all no code. So it's super easy on our platform, abstracting all the complicated technology in this [new] web3 world," he said. He says he's seeing interest across a variety of verticals including retail, media, fashion and consumer goods, among others. "It's really about driving engagement and communities, and we're seeing super passionate communities in the NFT space..." Caplan explained. He sees it as a way to market to customers with something of potential value to them. "It's really about utility. And what we mean by utility is as an NFT holder, I receive certain benefits. It could be something in a digital world, or it could be something in the physical world," he said.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

There's a growing effort to name and categorize heat waves the way we do hurricanes -- to call attention to their significance, alert people to dangerous temperatures and prod public officials into action. From a report: Excessive heat -- which hits low-income communities the hardest -- doesn't lend itself to dramatic TV coverage, so people sometimes underestimate the risk. Proponents of a more formal public warning system say it could save lives and trigger measures like opening community cooling stations and asking people to stay indoors. This month Seville, Spain is poised to become the first city to start naming severe heat waves. Five other cities -- Los Angeles; Miami; Milwaukee; Kansas City, Missouri; and Athens -- have also started piloting a similar initiative, using weather data and public health criteria to categorize heat waves. They'll use a three-category system that organizers want to standardize. Each city's system will be tailored to its particular climate. A "category three" heat wave in L.A., for example, will look and feel quite different from the same designation in Milwaukee.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: Apple is adding native support for the Nintendo Switch Pro and Joy-Con controllers in iOS 16. Riley Testut, one of the iOS developers behind AltStore, discovered the new controller support in a developer beta of iOS 16 that was released yesterday. The Nintendo Switch Pro Controller works "perfectly" according to Testut, and both Joy-Con controllers show up as a single device for apps and games to take advantage of. Nat Brown, an engineering manager at Apple, has confirmed the new controller support and even revealed there's a neat method to switch how the Joy-Cons work in iOS 16. You can dynamically switch between using both Joy-Cons as a single controller or two separate ones by holding the screenshot and home buttons for a few seconds.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

British researchers have developed a biodegradable gel to repair damage caused by a heart attack in a breakthrough that could improve the health of millions of survivors worldwide. The Guardian reports: Now after years of efforts searching for solutions to help the heart repair itself, researchers at the University of Manchester have created a gel that can be injected directly into the beating heart -- effectively working as a scaffold to help injected cells grow new tissue. Until now, when cells have been injected into the heart to reduce the risk of heart failure, only 1% have stayed in place and survived. But the gel can hold them in place as they graft on to the heart. To prove the technology could work, researchers showed the gel can support growth of normal heart muscle tissue. When they added human cells reprogrammed to become heart muscle cells into the gel, they were able to grow in a dish for three weeks and the cells started to spontaneously beat. Echocardiograms (ultrasounds of the heart) and electrocardiograms (ECGs, which measure the electrical activity of the heart) on mice confirmed the safety of the gel. To gain more knowledge, researchers will test the gel after mice have a heart attack to show they develop new muscle tissue. The study is being presented at the British Cardiovascular Society conference in Manchester.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

HBO Max has canceled the sci-fi TV show Raised by Wolves after two seasons. From a report: Originally ordered to series for the cable channel TNT, its first season premiered in 2020, and four months after HBO Max launched, it ranked as the service's top streaming series. The first two episodes were directed by Ridley Scott, and the plot, which focused on two androids raising human children on a desolate alien planet, aligned well with the hallmarks of his style. [...] Before the cancellation, cast members were calling on watchers to advocate for the show's future. Abubakar Salim, who played "Father" in Raised by Wolves, hinted in a Twitter thread last week that the show's fate was in jeopardy with the hashtag #RenewRaisedByWolves, while referring to the merger of HBO Max parent company WarnerMedia and Discovery, which was completed in April. HBO Max said in a statement to Variety, which first broke the news: "While we are not proceeding with a third season of Raised by Wolves, we are beyond grateful to the stellar cast and crew, our creators Aaron Guzikowski, Ridley Scott, David W. Zucker, and the entire team at Scott Free Productions, for their beautiful artistry and unique ability to immerse fans into the world of Kepler-22b."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Phys.Org: Researchers in Australia have been able to use trace amounts of liquid platinum to create cheap and highly efficient chemical reactions at low temperatures, opening a pathway to dramatic emissions reductions in crucial industries. When combined with liquid gallium, the amounts of platinum required are small enough to significantly extend the earth's reserves of this valuable metal, while potentially offering more sustainable solutions for CO2 reduction, ammonia synthesis in fertilizer production, and green fuel cell creation, together with many other possible applications in chemical industries. These findings, which focus on platinum, are just a drop in the liquid metal ocean when it comes to the potential of these catalysis systems. By expanding on this method, there could be more than 1,000 possible combinations of elements for over 1,000 different reactions. Platinum is very effective as a catalyst (the trigger for chemical reactions) but is not widely used at industrial scale because it's expensive. Most catalysis systems involving platinum also have high ongoing energy costs to operate. Normally, the melting point for platinum is 1,700C. And when it's used in a solid state for industrial purposes, there needs to be around 10% platinum in a carbon-based catalytic system. It's not an affordable ratio when trying to manufacture components and products for commercial sale. That could be set to change in the future, though, after scientists at UNSW Sydney and RMIT University found a way to use tiny amounts of platinum to create powerful reactions, and without expensive energy costs. The team, including members of the ARC Center of Excellence in Exciton Science and the ARC Center of Excellence in Future Low Energy Technologies, combined the platinum with liquid gallium, which has a melting point of just 29.8C -- that's room temperature on a hot day. When combined with gallium, the platinum becomes soluble. In other words, it melts, and without firing up a hugely powerful industrial furnace. For this mechanism, processing at an elevated temperature is only required at the initial stage, when platinum is dissolved in gallium to create the catalysis system. And even then, it's only around 300C for an hour or two, nowhere near the continuous high temperatures often required in industrial-scale chemical engineering. The results have been published in the journal Nature Chemistry.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Sony said Tuesday that Nobuyuki Idei, its former chairman and CEO who led the Japanese giant's push into the digital network business, has died of liver failure. He was 84. Kyodo News reports: In addition to enhancing Sony's presence in the digital and communications fields, he also focused on the entertainment business, such as movies, music and game consoles, laying the foundation for its current operations. Idei joined Sony in 1960, becoming president in 1995 and CEO in 1998. He served as both chairman and chief executive from 2000 to 2005. He stepped down as chairman and CEO amid lackluster sales in its appliance business, making headlines for naming Howard Stringer as his successor at a time when it was still rare for a Japanese company to be led by a non-Japanese CEO. Idei also contributed to the advancement of the internet environment in Japan, having been appointed to head the government's IT strategy council in 2000. [...] Under Idei's tenure as CEO, the conglomerate launched its Vaio-brand personal computers and domestic internet service provider So-net. It also ventured into online-based banking services and the nonlife insurance business. But after its earlier success with sales of bulky CRT televisions, Sony was slow to transition to flat screens and was outpaced amid intense competition with South Korean and other overseas rival manufacturers. Company stocks plunged in 2003 in what was referred to as the "Sony shock," and sluggish growth for much of the following decade led Sony to focus on corporate restructuring initiatives.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Waymo and Uber, former legal foes and bitter rivals in the autonomous vehicle space, are teaming up to speed up the adoption of driverless trucks. The Verge reports: Waymo is integrating Uber Freight, the ride-hail company's truck brokerage, into the technology that powers its autonomous big rigs. This "long-term strategic partnership" will enable fleet owners to more quickly deploy trucks equipped with Waymo's autonomous "driver" for on-demand delivery routes offered by Uber Freight, the companies said. Waymo describes the team-up as a "deep integration" of each company's products, including a jointly developed "product roadmap" to outline how autonomous trucks will get deployed on Uber's network once they are commercial ready. Until then, Waymo says it will use Uber Freight with its own test fleet to better understand how driverless trucks will receive and accept delivery orders. But the partnership goes beyond just beta testing each other's technology. Waymo said it will reserve "billions of miles of its goods-only capacity for the Uber Freight network" in a capacity commitment meant to underscore the seriousness of this partnership. The report notes that Alphabet's Waymo sued Uber in early 2017 over allegations of trade secret theft and patent infringement. The two sides reached a settlement agreement about a year later. "Uber later admitted that it misappropriated some of Waymo's tech and vowed to license it for future use," adds The Verge.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"Besides new language features and other improvements, Python 3.11 performance is looking fantastic with very nice performance uplift over prior Python 3.x releases," writes Phoronix's Michael Larabel. From the report: Python 3.11 has been baking support for task groups in asyncio, fine-grained error locations in tracebacks, the self-type to return an instance of their class, TypeVarTuple for variadic generics, and various other features. Besides changes affecting the Python language itself, Python 3.11 has been landing performance work from the "Faster Cython Project" to speed-up the reference implementation. Python 3.11 is 10~60% faster than Python 3.10 according to the official figures and a 1.22x speed-up with their standard benchmark suite. The Python Docs cover some of the significant performance improvements made for this upcoming release. The formal Python 3.11.0 release isn't expected until October while multiple betas will come through July and then at least two release candidates in the following months before early October.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: A new security feature in Apple's upcoming macOS 13 Ventura will automatically block new USB-C devices from communicating with the operating system until the accessory can be approved by the user. Apple dropped details of the new security feature in its release notes, which appears to be aimed at protecting newer Apple laptops that run its bespoke M1 or M2 chips from potentially malicious accessories. According to Apple's description, the feature will be enabled by default and will require the user to approve a USB-C accessory before it can talk to the operating system -- essentially an on-screen pop-up asking the user for permission. Apple says this doesn't apply to power adapters, standalone displays, and connections to an approved hub -- and devices can still charge even if you don't approve the accessory. Apple says that accessories that are already connected will automatically work when updating to the new macOS software.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

PayPal announced on Tuesday that the service now "supports the native transfer of cryptocurrencies between PayPal and other wallets and exchanges." Decrypt reports: The ability to conduct external transfers on PayPal's crypto platform, an image of which can be seen below, will start rolling out to users today and be available to everyone in the U.S. in the next week or two. PayPal first launched its crypto offering in late 2020, allowing users to buy, sell, and hold four cryptocurrencies -- Bitcoin, Ethereum, Bitcoin Cash, and Litecoin -- but not to move the funds to external destinations like MetaMask, Coinbase, or hardware wallets. The fact users now can do this is significant because PayPal, which also owns the popular app Venmo, is used by hundreds of millions of people across the world to move money, and is increasingly used by merchants as a payment platform. It's also notable that PayPal is not backing off its ambitious crypto plans despite a financial downturn that's seen the company's share price get battered in recent months.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

China should seize Taiwan to gain control of TSMC if the US and its allies impose sanctions against the Middle Kingdom like those now in place against Russia, according to a prominent Chinese economist. The Register reports: This latest development comes in a speech by Chen Wenling, chief economist for the China Center for International Economic Exchanges, delivered at the China-US Forum hosted by the Chongyang Institute for Financial Studies at Renmin University of China at the end of May. The text of the speech was posted to the Guancha (Observer) online news site. In the speech, Chen opened by saying that China and the US needs to ease the hostile relations between them, and that a confrontation between the two powers would be "a disaster for mankind." However, she then claimed the US was seeking to isolate China, citing the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) and Trans-Atlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) agreements as attempts by the US to create two large "anti-China" trade bodies, although the US pulled out of the former and the latter was cancelled because of disagreements. Echoing many concerns in the West, Chen said that China needs to take steps to secure its industrial chain and supply chain, and make strategic preparations to "deal with the United States' insistence on breaking the chain and containing it," according to a translation of the text. This means that if the US and allies imposed sanctions on China like those deployed against Russia, China "must recover Taiwan" and "seize TSMC, a company that originally belonged to China." Chen claimed that "they are speeding up the transfer to the United States, and to build six factories in the United States. We must not let all the goals of the transfer be achieved," a possible reference to the US CHIPS Act, which seeks to encourage the building of semiconductor fabrication plants on US soil, which may include funding going to TSMC for chipmaking facilities it is building in Arizona. While alarming, Chen's speech appears to suggest that China should only take this action as retaliation to threats against its economic security, and there is no reason to believe that sanctions comparable to those on Russia are likely unless China becomes involved in a similar act of hostility against another country.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: One of the few things that Intel Macs can do that Apple Silicon Macs can't is run operating systems written for Intel or AMD processors inside of virtual machines. Most notably, this has meant that there is currently no legal way to run Windows on an Apple Silicon Mac. Apple Silicon Macs can, however, run operating systems written for Arm processors inside of virtual machines, including other versions of macOS and Arm-compatible versions of Linux. And those Linux VMs are getting a new feature in macOS Ventura: the ability to run apps written for x86 processors using Rosetta, the same binary translation technology that allows Apple Silicon Macs to run apps written for Intel Macs. Apple's documentation will walk you through the requirements for using Rosetta within a Linux guest operating system -- it requires creating a shared directory that both macOS and Linux can access and running some terminal commands in Linux to get it set up. But once you do those steps, you'll be able to enjoy the wider app compatibility that comes with being able to run x86 code as well as Arm code. Some developers, including Hector Martin of the Asahi Linux project and Twitter user @never_released, have already found that these steps can also enable Rosetta on non-Apple ARM CPUs as long as they're modern enough to support at least version 8.2 of the Arm instruction set. As Martin points out, this isn't strictly legal because of macOS's licensing restrictions, and there are some relatively minor Apple-specific hardware features needed to unlock Rosetta's full capabilities.Read more of this story at Slashdot.