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When Block cut 4,000 jobs - nearly half its workforce - co-founder Jack Dorsey "pointed to AI as the culprit," writes Entrepreneur magazine. "Dorsey claimed that AI tools now allow fewer employees to accomplish the same work." "But analysts see a different explanation: poor management."Block more than tripled its employee base between 2019 and 2022, growing from 3,835 to 12,430 workers. The company's stock had fallen 40% since early 2025, creating pressure to cut costs. "This is more about the business being bloated for so long than it is about AI," Zachary Gunn, a Financial Technology Partners analyst, told Bloomberg. The phenomenon has earned a nickname: "AI-washing," where companies use artificial intelligence as cover for traditional cost-cutting. Goldman Sachs economists estimate that AI is eliminating only 5,000 to 10,000 jobs per month across all U.S. sectors, hardly enough to justify Block's massive cuts. "European Central Bank President Christine Lagarde told lawmakers in Brussels last week that ECB economists are monitoring for signs that AI is causing job losses," reports Bloomberg, "and are 'not yet seeing' the 'waves of redundancies that are feared'..." And "a recent survey of global executives published in the Harvard Business Review found that while AI has been cited as the reason for some layoffs, those cuts are almost entirely anticipatory: executives expect big efficiency gains that have not yet been realized." Even a former senior Block executive "is questioning whether AI is truly the reason behind the cuts," writes Inc.:In a recent opinion piece for The New York Times, Aaron Zamost, Block's former head of communications, policy, and people, asked whether the layoffs reflect a genuine "new reality in which the work they do might no longer be viable," or whether artificial intelligence is "just a convenient and flashy new cover for typical corporate downsizing." Zamost acknowledged that the answer is unclear and perhaps unknowable, even within Block itself... Looking more closely at the layoffs, Zamost argued that the specific roles affected suggest more traditional corporate cost-cutting than a sweeping AI transformation... Many of the responsibilities being eliminated, he argued, rely on distinctly human skills that AI systems still cannot replicate. "A chatbot can't meet with the mayor, cast commercial actors, or negotiate with the Securities and Exchange Commission," Zamost wrote. "Not all the roles I've heard that Block is eliminating can be handled by AI, yet executives are treating it as equally useful today to all disciplines." Ultimately, Zamost suggested that the sincerity of companies' AI explanations may not really matter. "It matters less whether a company knows how to deploy AI and more whether investors believe it is on track to do so," he wrote. Indeed, whatever the rationale for Dorsey's statement, " Wall Street didn't seem to mind..." Entrepreneur magazine - since Block's stock shot up 15% after the announcement.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Cornell University makes an announcement. "Employees who are impressed by vague corporate-speak like 'synergistic leadership,' or 'growth-hacking paradigms' may struggle with practical decision-making, a new Cornell study reveals."Published in the journal Personality and Individual Differences, research by cognitive psychologist Shane Littrell introduces the Corporate Bullshit Receptivity Scale (CBSR), a tool designed to measure susceptibility to impressive-but-empty organizational rhetoric... Corporate BS seems to be ubiquitous - but Littrell wondered if it is actually harmful. To test this, he created a "corporate bullshit generator" that churns out meaningless but impressive-sounding sentences like, "We will actualize a renewed level of cradle-to-grave credentialing" and "By getting our friends in the tent with our best practices, we will pressure-test a renewed level of adaptive coherence." He then asked more than 1,000 office workers to rate the "business savvy" of these computer-generated BS statements alongside real quotes from Fortune 500 leaders... The results revealed a troubling paradox. Workers who were more susceptible to corporate BS rated their supervisors as more charismatic and "visionary," but also displayed lower scores on a portion of the study that tested analytic thinking, cognitive reflection and fluid intelligence. Those more receptive to corporate BS also scored significantly worse on a test of effective workplace decision-making. The study found that being more receptive to corporate bullshit was also positively linked to job satisfaction and feeling inspired by company mission statements. Moreover, those who were more likely to fall for corporate BS were also more likely to spread it. Essentially, the employees most excited and inspired by "visionary" corporate jargon may be the least equipped to make effective, practical business decisions for their companies.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Palantir's CEO was blunt. "If Silicon Valley believes we are going to take away everyone's white-collar job... and you're going to screw the military - if you don't think that's going to lead to the nationalization of our technology, you're retarded..." And OpenAI's Sam Altman is thinking about the same thing, writes long-time Slashdot reader destinyland: "It has seemed to me for a long time it might be better if building AGI were a government project," Sam Altman publicly mused last week... Altman speculated on the possibility of the government "nationalizing" private AI companies into a public project, admitting more than once he's wondered what would happen next. "I obviously don't know," Altman said - but he added that "I have thought about it, of course" Altman's speculation hedged that "It doesn't seem super likely on the current trajectory. That said, I do think a close partnership between governments and the companies building this technology is super important." Could powerful AI tools one day slip from the hands of private companies to be controlled by the U.S. government? Fortune magazine's AI editor points out that "many other breakthroughs with big strategic implications - from the Manhattan Project to the space race to early efforts to develop AI - were government-funded and largely government-directed." And Fortune added that last week the Defense Department threatened Anthropic with the Defense Production Act, which allows the president to designate "critical and strategic" goods for which businesses must accept the government's contracts. Fortune speculates this would've been "a sort of soft nationalization of Anthropic's production pipeline". Altman acknowledged Saturday that he'd felt the threat of attempted nationalization "behind a lot of the questions" he'd received when answering questions on X.com. How exactly will this AI build-out be handled - and how should AI companies be working with the government? In a sprawling ask-me-anything session on X that included other members of OpenAI leadership, one Missouri-based developer even broached an AGI-government scenario directly with OpenAI's Head of National Security Partnerships, Katherine Mulligan. If OpenAI built an AGI - something that even passed its own Turing test for AGI - would that be a case where its government contracts compelled them to grant access to the Defense Department? "No," Mulligan answered. At our current moment in time, "We control which models we deploy" The article notes 100 OpenAI employees joined with 856 Google employees in an online letter titled "We Will Not Be Divided" urging their bosses to refuse their models' use in domestic mass surveillance and autonomously killing without human oversight. But Adafruit's managing director Phillip Torrone (also long-time Slashdot reader ptorrone ) sees analogies to America's atomic bomb-building Manhattan Project, and "what happened when the scientists who built the thing tried to set conditions on how the thing would be used." (The government pressured them to back down, which he compares to the Pentagon's designating Anthropic a "supply chain risk" before offering OpenAI a contract "with the same red lines, just worded differently".) Ironically, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei frequently recommends the Pulitzer Prize-winning 1986 book The Making of the Atomic Bomb...Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Would you move sunrise to 9 a.m. in Detroit? Or to 4:11 a.m. in Seattle... Though both options have problems, "There's no law we can pass to move the sun to our will," argues the president of the nonprofit "Save Standard Time". The Associated Press explains why America remains stuck in that annual ritual making clocks "spring forward, fall backward..."The U.S. has tinkered with the clock intermittently since railroads standardized the time zones in 1883. So has a lot of the world. About 140 countries have had daylight saving time at some point; about half that many do now. About 1 in 10 U.S. adults favor the current system of changing the clocks, according to an AP-NORC poll conducted last year. About half oppose that system, and some 4 in 10 didn't have an opinion. If they had to choose, most Americans say they would prefer to make daylight saving time permanent, rather than standard time. ince 2018, 19 states - including much of the South and a block of states in the northwestern U.S. - have adopted laws calling for a move to permanent daylight saving time. There's a catch: Congress would need to pass a law to allow states to go to full-time daylight saving time, something that was in place nationwide during World War II and for an unpopular, brief stint in 1974. The U.S. Senate passed a bill in 2022 to move to permanent daylight saving time. A similar House bill hasn't been brought to a vote. U.S. Rep. Mike Rogers, a Republican from Alabama who introduces such a bill every term, said the airline industry, which doesn't want the scheduling complexity a change would bring, has been a factor in persuading lawmakers not to take it up. U.S. Rep. Greg Steube, a Florida Republican, is proposing another approach. "Why not just split the baby?" he asked. "Move it 30 minutes so it would be halfway between the two." Steube thinks his bill could get bipartisan support. The change would make the U.S. out of sync with most of the world - though India has taken a similar approach and in Nepal, the time is 15 minutes ahead of India.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

First, Hyundai "is discontinuing its most affordable electric sedan after just three years on the market," reports USA Today. After being introduced in 2022, the Hyundai Ioniq 6 "quickly gained the admiration of automotive critics because of its affordable pricing and capable performance specs." But now, Hyundai "is axing the most affordable versions of the EV, leaving consumers with only one Ioniq 6 option."Hyundai will continue to produce the Ioniq 6 N performance trim, which is the quickest and most powerful iteration of the Ioniq 6. It's also the most expensive. The South Korean automaker is getting rid of lower Ioniq 6 trims due to "disappointing sales and tariff considerations," according to Cars.com. Hyundai sold 10,478 Ioniq 6 models in 2025, dropping 15% from 12,264 units in 2024, a company sales report stated. Hyundai's Ioniq 6 is mainly produced in South Korea, so it faces high import tariffs. Sales increased for their earlier IONIQ 5 model, reports the EV blog Electrek, "up 14% through the first two months of 2026, with 5,365 units sold... Meanwhile, IONIQ 6 sales slid 77% with only 229 units sold in February." Elsewhere they report that Kia's EV6 and EV9 "didn't fare much better with sales down 53% (600 units sold) and 40% (819 units sold), respectively." Now a Kia spokesperson tells Car and Driver that the 2025 EV6 GT and 2026 EV9 GT "will be delayed until further notice." They attributed the move to "changing market conditions," but added that this delay "does not impact the availability of other trims in the EV6 and EV9 lineups." More from Electrek:The news comes after Kia already said it was delaying the EV4, its entry-level electric sedan, "until further notice." It was expected to arrive in the US this year alongside the EV3, Kia's compact electric SUV that's already a top-seller in the UK, Europe, and other overseas markets. While Hyundai didn't directly say it, since the EV3, EV4, EV6 GT, and Hyundai IONIQ 6 are built in Korea, the Trump administration's import tariffs and other policy changes are likely the biggest reason to blame here. Kia and Hyundai, like many others, are hesitant to bring new EVs to the US due to the changes. The IONIQ 6, EV6 GT, and EV9 GT join a string of other models that have either been postponed or canceled altogether.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Steven Spielberg directed his last Jurassic Park movie nearly 30 years ago, notes ScreenRant. But the 79-year-old filmmaker now brings us The Dinosaurs, a four-part documentary on Netflix where he's executive producer:The first few reviews are in, and the results lead to a perfect 100% score on Rotten Tomatoes. It's worth noting that the rating will likely fluctuate since there are only six reviews. So far, critics all agree that the new Netflix docuseries is a breathtaking visual of history's most majestic creatures, and Morgan Freeman's soothing narration elevates the experience. Most importantly, the reviews note that the story is intimate, making the dinosaurs feel real with their personalities. "Audience" reviewers gave it a lower score of 67%. "There is a sense of drama and emotional weight which permeates through the entire series as it tells the story of the dinosaurs from start to the present day. The ending brought tears to my eyes..." "Wow, what a sleeper! Flat graphics, looks like video game animations. Unrelatable story lines. Don't waste your time. Honestly would you even look twice if Spielberg's name wasn't on it?" "This show was honestly incredible... It was a 10/10 series that I absolutely adored highly recommended to anyone who loves and has an interest of the ancient world." "I'm sorry, but the dinos of Prehistoric Planet are far superior, and were achieved on a much smaller budget. Their dinos look absolutely real, and you are convinced you're watching a documentary with real animals"ScreenRant notes Netflix's debut of The Dinosaurs' "aligns perfectly" with the arrival of all four Jurassic World movies on Netflix, where they're already dominating Netflix's "Top 10" charts for the U.S. "Witness the rise and the fall of nature's greatest empire," narrator Morgan Freeman says in the trailer...Read more of this story at Slashdot.

NASA heralded a new study published Friday documenting a first for humanity - "the first time a human-made object has measurably altered the path of a celestial body around the Sun." It was 2022's DART mission where NASA crashed a spacecraft into an asteroid - and the experiment "could have implications for protecting Earth from future asteroid strikes," writes ScienceNews:A spacecraft slowed the orbit of a pair of asteroids around the sun by more than 10 micrometers per second... Within a month, researchers showed that the impact shortened Dimorphos' 12-hour orbit by 32 minutes. Some of the rocks knocked off of Dimorphos fled the vicinity completely, escaping the gravitational influence of the Dimorphos-Didymos pair, says planetary defense researcher Rahil Makadia of the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Those rocky runaways took some momentum away from the duo and changed their joint motion around the sun. To figure out how much that motion was affected, astronomers watched the asteroids pass in front of distant stars, dimming some of the stars' light like a tiny eclipse. These blinks, called stellar occultations, can be visible from anywhere on Earth and are predictable in advance... Calculating how far off occultation timings were from predictions revealed that the asteroids' orbit around the sun was about 150 milliseconds slower than before the DART impact... Didymos and Dimorphos are not a threat to Earth, Makadia says, and weren't before DART. But knowing how a deliberate impact changes one asteroid's orbit can help make defense plans against another, "in case we need to do a kinetic impact for real." The researchers spent nearly two and a half years to collect 22 measurements of the asteroid's post-crash position, relying on amateur astronomers "to go out into the middle of nowhere and observe the necessary stellar occultations," acvcording to their paper. Planetary defense researcher even tells ScienceNews "There was an observer who drove two days each way into the Australian outback to get these measurements."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Long-time Slashdot reader fjo3 shared this report from Agence France-Presse:Japan has approved ground-breaking stem-cell treatments for Parkinson's and severe heart failure, one of the manufacturers and media reports said Friday, with the therapies expected to reach patients within months. Pharmaceutical company Sumitomo Pharma said it received the green light for the manufacture and sale of Amchepry, its Parkinson's disease treatment that transplants stem cells into a patient's brain. Japan's health ministry also gave the go-ahead to ReHeart, heart muscle sheets developed by medical startup Cuorips that can help form new blood vessels and restore heart function, media reports said. The treatments could be on the market and rolled out to patients as early as this summer, reports said, citing the health ministry, becoming the world's first commercially available medical products using induced pluripotent stem cells... In a statement, Sumitomo Pharma said it had obtained "conditional and time-limited approval" for the manufacture and marketing of Amchepry under a system which is reportedly designed to get these products to patients as quickly as possible. The approval is a kind of "provisional license", the Asahi newspaper said, after the safety and efficacy of the treatment was judged based on data from fewer patients than in ordinary clinical trials for drugs. A trial led by Kyoto University researchers indicated that the company's treatment was safe and successful in improving symptoms. The study involved seven Parkinson's patients aged between 50 and 69, with each receiving a total of either five million or 10 million cells implanted on both sides of the brain... The patients were monitored for two years and no major adverse effects were found, the study said. Four patients showed improvements in symptoms. The article notes that "Worldwide, about 10 million people have the illness, according to the Parkinson's Foundation," while also notes that today's current therapies "improve symptoms without slowing or halting the disease progression..."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

In a tweet that's been viewed 1.3 million times in the last six hours, OpenAI's head of robotics announced their resignation. They said they "care deeply about the Robotics team and the work we built together," so this "wasn't an easy call," but offered this reason for resigning:AI has an important role in national security. But surveillance of Americans without judicial oversight and lethal autonomy without human authorization are lines that deserved more deliberation than they got. This was about principle, not people. I have deep respect for Sam and the team, and I'm proud of what we built together. "To be clear, my issue is that the announcement was rushed without the guardrails defined," explains a later tweet. "It's a governance concern first and foremost. These are too important for deals or announcements to be rushed." And when asked how many OpenAI employees had left after OpenAI signed their new Pentagon deal, the roboticist said... "I can't share any internal details." The roboticist previously worked at Meta before leaving to join OpenAI in late 2024, reports Engadget:OpenAI confirmed Kalinowski's resignation and said in a statement to Engadget that the company understands people have "strong views" about these issues and will continue to engage in discussions with relevant parties. The company also explained in the statement that it doesn't support the issues that Kalinowski brought up. "We believe our agreement with the Pentagon creates a workable path for responsible national security uses of AI while making clear our red lines: no domestic surveillance and no autonomous weapons," the OpenAI statement read.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Astronomers have spotted a galaxy they believe is made of 99.9% dark matter, reports CNN - and it's so faint, it's almost invisible:CDG-2, which is about 300 million light-years from Earth, appears to be so rich in dark matter that it could belong to a hypothesized subset of low surface brightness galaxies called "dark galaxies," which are believed to contain few or no stars.... [Post-doctoral astrophysics/statistics fellow Dayi Li at the University of Toronto was lead author on a study about the discovery, and tells CNN] There is no strict definition of dark galaxies... but their existence is predicted by dark matter theories and cosmological simulations. "Where exactly do we draw the line in terms of how many stars they should have is still ambiguous, because not everything in astronomy is as clear-cut as we like," he said. "To be technically correct, CDG-2 is an almost-dark galaxy. But the importance of CDG-2 is that it nudges us much closer to getting to that truly dark regime, while previously we did not think a galaxy this faint could exist." To observe CDG-2, the researchers used data from three telescopes - Hubble, the European Space Agency's Euclid space observatory and the Subaru Telescope in Hawaii - along with a novel approach that involved looking for objects called globular clusters. "These are very tight, spherical groupings of very olds stars, basically the relics of the first generation of star formation," Li said. Globular clusters are bright even if the surrounding galaxy is not, and previous observations have shown a relationship between them and the presence of dark matter in a galaxy, Li added. Because CDG-2 appears to have very few stars, there must be something else providing the mass that the clusters need to hold themselves together. Li and his colleagues assume that the source of the mass is dark matter. The researchers found a set of four globular clusters in the Perseus Cluster, a group of thousands of galaxies immersed in a cloud of gas and one of the most massive objects in the universe. Further observations revealed a glow or halo around the globular clusters, suggesting the presence of a galaxy... Astronomers believe, Li explained, that after the formation of the clusters early in the galaxy's existence, larger surrounding galaxies stripped it of the hydrogen gas required to make more individual stars like our sun. "The material that this galaxy needed to continue to form stars was no longer there, so it was left with basically just a dark matter halo and the four globular clusters." The process, he added, would leave behind a skeleton or ghost of "a galaxy that pretty much just failed." As a result of this formation mechanism, the galaxy only has 0.005% of the brightness of our own galaxy, Li said... Studying potential dark galaxies is important because they provide nearly pristine views of the behavior of dark matter, according to Neal Dalal, a researcher at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada, who was not involved with the study. Robert Minchin, an astronomer at New Mexico's National Radio Astronomy Observatory, told CNN that "it seems likely that other very dark galaxies will be found by this method in the future."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"It took Anthropic's most advanced artificial-intelligence model about 20 minutes to find its first Firefox browser bug during an internal test of its hacking prowess," reports the Wall Street Journal.The Anthropic team submitted it, and Firefox's developers quickly wrote back: This bug was serious. Could they get on a call? "What else do you have? Send us more," said Brian Grinstead, an engineer with Mozilla, Firefox's parent organization. Anthropic did. Over a two-week period in January, Claude Opus 4.6 found more high-severity bugs in Firefox than the rest of the world typically reports in two months, Mozilla said... In the two weeks it was scanning, Claude discovered more than 100 bugs in total, 14 of which were considered "high severity..." Last year, Firefox patched 73 bugs that it rated as either high severity or critical. A Mozilla blog post calls Firefox "one of the most scrutinized and security-hardened codebases on the web. Open source means our code is visible, reviewable, and continuously stress-tested by a global community." So they're impressed - and also thankful Anthropic provided test cases "that allowed our security team to quickly verify and reproduce each issue."Within hours, our platform engineers began landing fixes, and we kicked off a tight collaboration with Anthropic to apply the same technique across the rest of the browser codebase... . A number of the lower-severity findings were assertion failures, which overlapped with issues traditionally found through fuzzing, an automated testing technique that feeds software huge numbers of unexpected inputs to trigger crashes and bugs. However, the model also identified distinct classes of logic errors that fuzzers had not previously uncovered... We view this as clear evidence that large-scale, AI-assisted analysis is a powerful new addition in security engineers' toolbox. Firefox has undergone some of the most extensive fuzzing, static analysis, and regular security review over decades. Despite this, the model was able to reveal many previously unknown bugs. This is analogous to the early days of fuzzing; there is likely a substantial backlog of now-discoverable bugs across widely deployed software. "In the time it took us to validate and submit this first vulnerability to Firefox, Claude had already discovered fifty more unique crashing inputs" in 6,000 C++ files, Anthropic says in a blog post (which points out they've also used Claude Opus 4.6 to discover vulnerabilities in the Linux kernel). "Anthropic "also rolled out Claude Code Security, an automated code security testing tool, last month," reports Axios, noting the move briefly rattled cybersecurity stocks...Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"It took Anthropic's most advanced artificial-intelligence model about 20 minutes to find its first Firefox browser bug during an internal test of its hacking prowess," reports the Wall Street Journal.The Anthropic team submitted it, and Firefox's developers quickly wrote back: This bug was serious. Could they get on a call? "What else do you have? Send us more," said Brian Grinstead, an engineer with Mozilla, Firefox's parent organization. Anthropic did. Over a two-week period in January, Claude Opus 4.6 found more high-severity bugs in Firefox than the rest of the world typically reports in two months, Mozilla said... In the two weeks it was scanning, Claude discovered more than 100 bugs in total, 14 of which were considered "high severity..." Last year, Firefox patched 73 bugs that it rated as either high severity or critical. A Mozilla blog post calls Firefox "one of the most scrutinized and security-hardened codebases on the web. Open source means our code is visible, reviewable, and continuously stress-tested by a global community." So they're impressed - and also thankful Anthropic provided test cases "that allowed our security team to quickly verify and reproduce each issue."Within hours, our platform engineers began landing fixes, and we kicked off a tight collaboration with Anthropic to apply the same technique across the rest of the browser codebase... . A number of the lower-severity findings were assertion failures, which overlapped with issues traditionally found through fuzzing, an automated testing technique that feeds software huge numbers of unexpected inputs to trigger crashes and bugs. However, the model also identified distinct classes of logic errors that fuzzers had not previously uncovered... We view this as clear evidence that large-scale, AI-assisted analysis is a powerful new addition in security engineers' toolbox. Firefox has undergone some of the most extensive fuzzing, static analysis, and regular security review over decades. Despite this, the model was able to reveal many previously unknown bugs. This is analogous to the early days of fuzzing; there is likely a substantial backlog of now-discoverable bugs across widely deployed software. "In the time it took us to validate and submit this first vulnerability to Firefox, Claude had already discovered fifty more unique crashing inputs" in 6,000 C++ files, Anthropic says in a blog post (which points out they've also used Claude Opus 4.6 to discover vulnerabilities in the Linux kernel). "Anthropic "also rolled out Claude Code Security, an automated code security testing tool, last month," reports Axios, noting the move briefly rattled cybersecurity stocks...Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"Within 24 hours of the first US-Israeli strikes on Iran, ships in the region's waters found their navigation systems had gone haywire," reports CNN, "erroneously indicating that the vessels were at airports, a nuclear power plant and on Iranian land. "The location confusion was a result of widespread jamming and spoofing of signals from global positioning satellite systems."Used by all sides in conflict zones to disrupt the paths of drones and missiles, the process involves militaries and affiliated groups intentionally broadcasting high-intensity radio signals in the same frequency bands used by navigation tools. Jamming results in the disruption of a vehicle's satellite-based positioning while spoofing leads to navigation systems reporting a false location. Though commercial vessels are not the target, the electronic interference disrupted the navigation systems of more than 1,100 commercial ships in UAE, Qatari, Omani and Iranian waters on February 28, according to a report from Windward, a shipping intelligence firm. Jamming and spoofing also slowed marine traffic moving through the Strait of Hormuz, a congested shipping lane that handles roughly 20% of the world's oil and gas exports and where precise navigation is essential, Windward's data showed.... Daily incidents have more than doubled, rising from 350 when the conflict began to 672 by March 2, the firm reported. As use of this warfare tactic grows, experts worry the impacts could reach far beyond battlespaces.... In June 2025, electronic interference with navigation systems was thought to be a factor in the collision between two oil tankers, Adalynn and Front Eagle, off the coast of the UAE... The number of global positioning system signal loss events affecting aircraft increased by 220% between 2021 and 2024, according to data from the International Air Transport Association. Last year, IATA said that the aviation industry must act to stay ahead of the threat. Cockpits are seeing their navigation displays "literally drift away from reality," said a commercial pilot, who didn't want to be identified because he was not permitted to speak publicly. He said that he and his colleagues have experienced map shifts, where the aircraft location appears to move up to 1 mile away from the actual flight path, false altitude information that leads to phantom "pull up" commands, and systems suggesting an aircraft was on a taxiway, a path that connects runways with various airport facilities, when taking off. These incidents force pilots to rely on manual actions that increase workload, often during the most exhausting points of long-haul flights, he said. "Alternative navigational tools that don't rely on GPS, but instead harness quantum technology, are also in development," the article points out, "but remain a long way off operational use."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"Seagate says it is now shipping its Mozaic 4+ HAMR-based hard drives at up to 44TB per drive," writes Slashdot reader BrianFagioli, "with production deployments already underway at two hyperscale cloud providers. "The company claims the platform is the only heat-assisted magnetic recording [HAMR] implementation currently operating at scale, and it is targeting a path from today's 4+TB per disk toward 10TB per disk, eventually enabling 100TB-class drives."In a one-exabyte deployment, Seagate estimates Mozaic could improve infrastructure efficiency by roughly 47% compared to standard 30TB drives, cutting both footprint and energy consumption... HAMR uses a tiny laser to heat the disk surface during writes, allowing higher recording density without sacrificing stability. With most major cloud storage providers reportedly qualified on the Mozaic platform, Seagate is positioning spinning disks, not flash, as the long-term answer for cost-effective AI-scale data growth.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"Reservation holders, it's finally time to get ready," writes long-time Slashdot reader AirHog. The EV news site Electrek reports:Aptera Motors, "the little startup that could," announced another important milestone... completing the first example of its flagship solar EV on its validation assembly line in Southern California... While the validation line at its headquarters remains a low-volume assembly process, its successful operation represents the startup's transition from hand-built validation SEVs to a more structured assembly line process that will be fine-tuned for mass production... With low-volume assembly now being validated, Aptera is starting to publicly utter encouraging terms like "EPA certification" and, better yet, that holy grail of "initial customer deliveries." Before then, however, the Aptera Solar EVs built on this low-volume validation line will be used for testing programs such as thermal validation, brake performance, and "some destructive testing." Aptera shared that its assembly and integration team has grown to become the largest at the startup, "reflecting the beginning of its transition from engineering development to testing and production execution"... As of March 2026, Aptera says it has over 50,000 reservations totaling over $2 billion in sales if all were to solidify following the launch of a deliverable vehicle. Clean Technica notes the vehicles' "generous cargo space that comes out to 60% more storage than a Honda Accord and 20% more storage than a Prius, according to the company.""Built with recyclable materials, this eco-friendly vehicle features a lightweight carbon fiber structure and no-welding assembly for maximum cost and production efficiency," Aptera adds. The emphasis on lightweighting supports the goal of engineering a car that can travel on the electricity provided by its onboard solar panels. The company currently advertises that the vehicle can travel 40 miles on solar power alone, with the battery providing extra juice as needed. Ideally, the car can keep recharging itself with sunlight, further elongating the time between charging sessions... [Its range is up to 1,000 miles with plug-in charging.] The new autocycle could also appeal to drivers who enjoy the challenge of hypermiling, which involves deploying a suite of driving techniques to minimize fuel consumption. Hypermiling can apply to gas-powered cars, but the magic really kicks in with the regenerative braking capability of EVs. Aptera's onboard solar panels add another dimension to the fun.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shared this report from the Independent:A popular predictions market app will not pay out the $54 million some of its users believed they were owed after correctly forecasting the death of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, according to a report. Kalshi, which allows players to gamble on real-world events, offered customers favorable odds on Khamenei, 86, being "out as Supreme Leader" in response to the announcement of joint U.S.-Israeli airstrikes on Tehran in the early hours of Saturday morning. The company promoted the trade on its homepage and app and tweeted [last] Saturday: "BREAKING: The odds Ali Khamenei is out as Supreme Leader have surged to 68 percent." It continued: "Reminder: Kalshi does not offer markets that settle on death. If Ali Khamenei dies, the market will resolve based on the last traded price prior to confirmed reporting of death." Khamenei was later confirmed dead in the airstrikes and the company clarified in a follow-up post: "Please note: A prior version of this clarification was grammatically ambiguous. As a customer service measure, Kalshi will reimburse lost value due to trades made between these clarifications...." While the company has offered to reimburse any bets, fees or losses from the trade placed prior to its clarification message, it has nevertheless attracted a firestorm of complaints on social media. A Kalshi spokesperson told Reuters they'd reimbursed "net losses" out of pocket "to the tune of millions of dollars". But a class action lawsuit was filed Thursday saying Kalshi had failed to pay $54 million:Kalshi did not invoke a "death carveout" provision until after the Iranian leader was killed to avoid paying customers in Kalshi's "Khamenei Market" what they were owed, the lawsuit said... The language specifying that Khamenei's departure could be due to any cause, including death, was "clear, unambiguous and binary," the lawsuit said, describing Kalshi's actions as "deceptive" and "predatory." "In a notice filed Monday, the company proposed standardizing the terms of all its markets that implicitly depend on a person surviving..." reports Business Insider. "The update comes after Kalshi paid $2.2 million to resolve complaints from users who were confused by the way it divided the $55 million wagered on Iran's Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei's ouster after his targeted killing by Israel and the US." Their article cites a DePaul University law professor who says "There's now sort of this nascent, but bipartisan movement against prediction markets. I think Kalshi's feeling the heat." For example, U.S. Senator Chris Murphy told the Washington Post, "People shouldn't be rooting for people to die because they placed a bet."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Indonesia will ban children under 16 from having accounts on major social media platforms as part of a government push to protect minors from harmful content, addiction, and online threats. The rule will roll out starting March 28 and makes Indonesia the first country in Southeast Asia to impose such a restriction. The Guardian reports: Meutya Hafid said in a statement to media said that she signed a government regulation that will mean children under the age of 16 can no longer have accounts on high-risk digital platforms, including YouTube, TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, Threads, X, Roblox and Bigo Live, a popular livestreaming site. With a population of about 285 million, the fourth-highest in the world, the south-east Asian nation represents a significant market for social networks. The implementation will start gradually from 28 March, until all platforms fulfill their compliance obligations. "The basis is clear. Our children face increasingly real threats. From exposure to pornography, cyberbullying, online fraud, and most importantly addiction. The government is here so that parents no longer have to fight alone against the giant of algorithms," Hafid said. She added that the government is taking this step as the best effort in the midst of a digital emergency to reclaim sovereignty over children's futures. "We realize that the implementation of this regulation may cause some discomfort at first. Children may complain and parents may be confused about how to respond to their children's complaints," Hafid said.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Global Times reports: China's first domestically developed quantum computer operating system, Origin Pilot, has been made available for online download, the Global Times learned from the Anhui Quantum Computing Engineering Research Center on Wednesday. A Chinese scientist said while several quantum computing operating system efforts are underway worldwide, this is the first developed in China where it is seen as part of China's broad effort to achieve technology independence and to achieve technology advance in quantum computing. The center said the release marks the world's first open-source quantum computer operating system available for public download, which is expected to lower development barriers and support the growth of China's quantum computing ecosystem. Developed by Hefei-based Origin Quantum Computing Technology Co, the company behind China's third-generation superconducting quantum computer, Origin Wukong, Origin Pilot was first launched in 2021 and has gone through multiple rounds of iteration and upgrade. The developer describes it as an integrated quantum-classical-intelligent computing operating system compatible with major hardware approaches, including superconducting qubits, trapped ions and neutral atoms. It is now deployed on the company's Origin Wukong series and is available to external users, the company said. Guo Guoping, chief scientist of Origin Quantum and director at the Anhui Quantum Computing Engineering Research Center, told the Global Times that a quantum operating system is the "soft heart" of the quantum computing ecosystem. He said the decision to make Origin Pilot available globally marks a shift in China's quantum computing industry from closed-door tech innovation to broader open-source ecosystem development. Dou Menghan, head of the research team, said: "Users can quickly integrate with quantum chips of multiple physical types and, using autonomous programming frameworks such as QPanda, execute quantum computing jobs across different physical quantum chips to support both research and commercialization needs."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Ancient Slashdot reader alanw shares a report from the European Space Agency (ESA): Last year, an approximately 60 meter near-Earth object captured global attention. For a brief period, asteroid 2024 YR4 became the most dangerous asteroid discovered in the last 20 years. While an Earth impact was soon ruled out, the asteroid faded from view with a lingering 4% chance of striking the Moon on 22 December 2032. Now, that risk has been eliminated. Astronomers have confirmed that 2024 YR4 will not impact the Moon using new observations made by the Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam) on the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope. Instead, it will safely pass the Moon at a distance of more than 20 000 km.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader The Guardian: Humanity is heating the planet faster than ever before, a study has found. Climate breakdown is occurring more rapidly with the heating rate almost doubling, according to research that excludes the effect of natural factors behind the latest scorching temperatures. It found global heating accelerated from a steady rate of less than 0.2C per decade between 1970 and 2015 to about 0.35C per decade over the past 10 years. The rate is higher than scientists have seen since they started systematically taking the Earth's temperature in 1880. "If the warming rate of the past 10 years continues, it would lead to a long-term exceedance of the 1.5C (2.7F) limit of the Paris agreement before 2030," said Stefan Rahmstorf, a scientist at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research and co-author of the study. [...] The researchers applied a noise-reduction method to filter out the estimated effect of nonhuman factors in five major datasets that scientists have compiled to gauge the Earth's temperature. In each of them, they found an acceleration in global heating emerged in 2013 or 2014. The findings have been published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) said in a filing on Friday that it currently cannot process billions in tariff refunds because its import-processing system is "not well suited to a task of this scale." The Verge reports: The CBP's admission comes after the Supreme Court struck down the tariffs imposed by Trump under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) last month. This week, the International Trade Court ruled that importers impacted by the tariffs are entitled to refunds with interest. The CBP estimates that it collected around $166 billion in IEEPA duties as of March 4th, 2026. [...] The CBP says it currently processes imports through its Automated Commercial Environment (ACE) system. In the filing, Lord says that using the department's existing technology, it would take more than 4.4 million hours to process refunds for the over 53.2 million entries with IEEPA duties. Despite these current limitations, the CBP says it's "confident" it can develop and launch new capabilities to "streamline and consolidate refunds and interest payments on an importer basis" -- but this could take 45 days. "The process will be simpler and more efficient than the existing functionalities, and CBP will provide guidance on how to file refund declarations in the new system," Lord says.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Smart ring maker Oura has acquired Doublepoint, a Finnish startup specializing in gesture recognition technology for wearables. Engadget reports: The Finnish startup uses smartwatches and wristbands as examples of products that benefit from its technology, but Oura will clearly be looking to incorporate it into its rings, in theory allowing you to control your connected devices with hand movements. Oura said in a press release that the deal sees it inherit an "exceptional team of AI architects and builders from Doublepoint," including Doublepoint's four founders. The newly-acquired company will remain in its native Helsinki, where it will work with Oura's international teams. It added that Doublepoint's expertise in helping devices register subtle hand movements will be key, as nobody wearing a smart ring is going to engage with gesture control if they have to thrash their hand around like a conductor.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: While TikTok operates in the United States under new ownership, Apple has deployed technical restrictions to block iOS users in the United States from downloading other apps made by the video platform's Chinese parent organization ByteDance. ByteDance owns a vast array of different apps spanning social media, entertainment, artificial intelligence, and other sectors. The leading one is Douyin, the Chinese version of TikTok, which has over 1 billion monthly active users. While most of those users reside in China, iPhone owners around the world have traditionally been able to download these apps from anywhere without using a VPN, as long as they have a valid App Store account registered in China. That's not true anymore. Starting in late January, iPhone users in the U.S. with Chinese App Store accounts began reporting that they were encountering new obstacles when they tried to download apps developed by ByteDance. WIRED has confirmed that even with a valid Chinese App Store account, downloading or updating a ByteDance-owned Chinese app is blocked on Apple devices located in the United States. Instead, a pop-up window appears that says, "This app is unavailable in the country or region you're in." The restriction appears to apply only to ByteDance-owned apps and not those developed by other Chinese companies. The timing and technical specifics suggest the restriction is related to the deal TikTok agreed to in January to divest Chinese ownership of its U.S. operations. The agreement was the result of the so-called TikTok ban law passed by Congress in 2024, which also barred companies like Apple and Google from distributing other apps majority-owned by ByteDance. The Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act states that no company can "distribute, maintain, or update" any app majority-controlled by ByteDance "within the land or maritime borders of the United States." The law was primarily aimed at TikTok, which has more than 100 million users in the U.S. and had been the subject of years of debate in Washington over whether its Chinese ownership posed a national security risk. But ByteDance also has dozens of other apps that at some point were also removed from Apple's and Google's app stores in the U.S.. Now it seems like the scope of impact has reached even more apps that are not technically designed for U.S. audiences, such as Douyin, the AI chatbot Doubao, and the fiction reading platform Fanqie Novel.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

In a blog post on Thursday, System76 CEO Carl Richell criticized new state laws in California, Colorado, and New York that would require operating systems to verify users' ages and expose that information to apps, arguing the rules are easy for kids to bypass and ultimately undermine privacy and freedom more than they protect minors. "System76's position is interesting given that they sell Linux-loaded desktops, workstations and laptops plus being an operating system vendor with their in-house Pop!_OS distribution and COSMIC desktop environment," adds Phoronix's Michael Larabel, noting that they're also based out of Colorado. Here's an excerpt from the post: "A parent that creates a non-admin account on a computer, sets the age for a child account they create, and hands the computer over is in no different state. The child can install a virtual machine, create an account on the virtual machine and set the age to 18 or over. It's a similar technique to installing a VPN to get around the Great Firewall of China (just consider that for a moment). Or the child can simply re-install the OS and not tell their parents. ... In the case of Colorado's and California's bills, effectiveness is lost. In the case of New York's bill, liberty is lost. In the case of centralized platforms, potential is lost. ... The challenges we face are neither technical nor legal. The only solution is to educate our children about life with digital abundance. Throwing them into the deep end when they're 16 or 18 is too late. It's a wonderful and weird world. Yes, there are dark corners. There always will be. We have to teach our children what to do when they encounter them and we have to trust them." "We are accustomed to adding operating system features to comply with laws," writes Richell, in closing. "Accessibility features for ADA, and power efficiency settings for Energy Star regulations are two examples. We are a part of this world and we believe in the rule of law. We still hope these laws will be recognized for the folly they are and removed from the books or found unconstitutional."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

darwinmac writes: Mozilla is working on a huge redesign for its Firefox browser, codenamed "Nova," which will bring pastel gradients, a refreshed new tab page, floating "island" UI elements, and more. "From the mockups, it appears Mozilla took some inspiration from Googles Material You (or at least, the dynamic color extraction part of it) because the browser color accent appears influenced by the wallpaper setting," reports Neowin. "Choosing a mint-green desktop background automatically shifts the top navigation bars to match that exact shade." Mozilla has a habit of redesigning Firefox every few years. Before "Nova," there was the "Proton" redesign in 2021, the "Photon" redesign in 2017, and the "Australis" redesign in 2014. Nova is still in early development, so it might take a year or two before it appears in an official stable Firefox release. Neowin adds: "Not every redesign project ends well for Mozilla, though. You might remember 2012's Firefox Metro, an ambitious attempt to build a custom browser for Windows 8s touch-first interface. The team built it to operate both as a traditional desktop application and as a touch-optimized Metro app. The whole thing was scrapped in 2014 after two years in development due to a dismally low user adoption rate (a preview version of the software had been released a year earlier on the Aurora channel)."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg, written by Katrina Manson: The U.S. strikes on Iran ordered by President Donald Trump mark the arrival on a large scale of a new era of warfare assisted by artificial intelligence. Captain Timothy Hawkins, a Central Command spokesperson, told me last night that the AI tools the U.S. military is using in Iran operations don't make targeting decisions and don't replace humans. But they do help "make smarter decisions faster." That's been the driving ambition of the U.S. military, which has spent years looking at how to develop and deploy AI to the battlefield [...]. Critics, such as Stop Killer Robots, a coalition of 270 human-rights groups, argue that AI-enabled decision-support systems reduce the separation between recommending and executing a strike to a "dangerously thin" line. Hawkins said the military's use of AI assistance follows a rigorous process aligned with U.S. policy, military doctrine and the law. Artificial intelligence helps analysts whittle down what they need to focus on, generating so-called points of interest and helping personnel make "smart" decisions in the Iran operations, he told me. AI is also helping to pull data within systems and organize information to provide clarity. Among the AI tech used in the Iran campaign is Maven Smart System, a digital mission control platform produced by Palantir [...]. That emerged from Project Maven, a project started in 2017 by the Pentagon to develop AI for the battlefield. Among the large language models installed on the system is Anthropic's Claude AI tool, according to the people, who said it has become central to U.S. operations against Iran and to accelerating Maven's development. Claude is also at the center of a row that pits Anthropic against the Department of Defense over limits on the software. Further reading: Hacked Tehran Traffic Cameras Fed Israeli Intelligence Before Strike On KhameneiRead more of this story at Slashdot.

Ancient Slashdot reader ewhac writes: The maintainers of the Python package `chardet`, which attempts to automatically detect the character encoding of a string, announced the release of version 7 this week, claiming a speedup factor of 43x over version 6. In the release notes, the maintainers claim that version 7 is, "a ground-up, MIT-licensed rewrite of chardet." Problem: The putative "ground-up rewrite" is actually the result of running the existing copyrighted codebase and test suite through the Claude LLM. In so doing, the maintainers claim that v7 now represents a unique work of authorship, and therefore may be offered under a new license. Version 6 and earlier was licensed under the GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL). Version 7 claims to be available under the MIT license. The maintainers appear to be claiming that, under the Oracle v. Google decision, which found that cloning public APIs is fair use, their v7 is a fair use re-implementation of the `chardet` public API. However, there is no evidence to suggest their re-write was under "clean room" conditions, which traditionally has shielded cloners from infringement suits. Further, the copyrightability of LLM output has yet to be settled. Recent court decisions seem to favor the view that LLM output is not copyrightable, as the output is not primarily the result of human creative expression -- the endeavor copyright is intended to protect. Spirited discussion has ensued in issue #327 on `chardet`s GitHub repo, raising the question: Can copyrighted source code be laundered through an LLM and come out the other end as a fresh work of authorship, eligible for a new copyright, copyright holder, and license terms? If this is found to be so, it would allow malicious interests to completely strip-mine the Open Source commons, and then sell it back to the users without the community seeing a single dime.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Longtime Slashdot reader AmiMoJo shares a report from 404 Media: Privacy-focused email provider Proton Mail provided Swiss authorities with payment data that the FBI then used to determine who was allegedly behind an anonymous account affiliated with the Stop Cop City movement in Atlanta, according to a court record reviewed by 404 Media. The records provide insight into the sort of data that Proton Mail, which prides itself both on its end-to-end encryption and that it is only governed by Swiss privacy law, can and does provide to third parties. In this case, the Proton Mail account was affiliated with the Defend the Atlanta Forest (DTAF) group and Stop Cop City movement in Atlanta, which authorities were investigating for their connection to arson, vandalism and doxing. Broadly, members were protesting the building of a large police training center next to the Intrenchment Creek Park in Atlanta, and actions also included camping in the forest and lawsuits. Charges against more than 60 people have since been dropped.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Hayden AI, a San Francisco startup that makes spatial analytics tools for cities worldwide, has sued its co-founder and former CEO, alleging that he stole a large quantity of proprietary information in the days leading up to his ouster from the company in September 2024. In a lawsuit filed late last month in San Francisco Superior Court but only made public this week, Hayden AI claims that former CEO Chris Carson undertook what it called "numerous fraudulent actions," which include "forged board signatures, unauthorized stock sales, and improper allocation of personal expenses." [...] Hayden AI, which is worth $464 million according to an estimated valuation on PitchBook, has asked the court to impose preliminary injunctive relief, requiring Carson to either return or destroy the data he allegedly stole. Specifically, the lawsuit alleges that Carson secretly sold over $1.2 million in company stock, forged board signatures, and copied 41GB of proprietary company emails before being fired in September 2024. The complaint also claims Carson fabricated key parts of his resume, including a PhD and military service. It's a "carefully constructed fraud," says Hayden AI. "That is a lie," the complaint states. "Carson does not hold a PhD from Waseda or any other university. In 2007, he was not obtaining a PhD but was operating 'Splat Action Sports,' a paintball equipment business in a Florida strip mall."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The National Videogame Museum has acquired an extremely rare MSF-1 development kit, believed to be the oldest surviving prototype of the canceled Nintendo PlayStation. Engadget reports: Nicknamed the Nintendo PlayStation, the idea was that a new CD-ROM format backed by Sony would be added to the cartridge-based Super NES, resulting in a hybrid console that could play both. The partnership didn't last long, though, with Nintendo backing out before it ever really got off the ground, announcing that it would instead be working with Philips. Sony decided to make the PlayStation on its own instead, in an act of revenge that you have to say paid off in the long run, and we never did get to see Crash Bandicoot running around the Mushroom Kingdom. Still, the short-lived Nintendo PlayStation remains a fascinating what-if scenario in video game history, and the USA's National Video Museum has acquired the original development kit.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A Florida woman was sentenced to 22 months in federal prison and fined $50,000 for illegally trafficking thousands of Microsoft certificate-of-authenticity labels used to activate Windows and Office. Prosecutors said she bought genuine labels cheaply from suppliers and resold them without the accompanying licensed software, wiring over $5 million during the scheme. TechRadar reports: The indictment details how [52-year-old Heidi Richards] purchased tens of thousands of genuine COA labels from a Texas-based supplier between 2018 and 2023 for well below the retail value, before reselling them in bulk to customers globally without the licensed software. "COA labels are not to be sold separately from the license and hardware that they are intended to accompany, and they hold no independent commercial value," the US Attorney's Office wrote. Richards was found to have wired $5,148,181.50 to the unnamed Texas company during the scheme's operation. Some examples include the purchase of 800 Windows 10 COA labels in July 2018 for $22,100 (under $28 each) and a further 10,000 Windows 10 Pro COA labels in December 2022 for $200,000 ($20 each). Ultimately fined $50,000 and given a near-two-year sentence, prosecutors had sought to get Richards to pay $242,000, "which represents the proceeds obtained from the offenses."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from 404 Media: Wikipedia editors have implemented new policies and restricted a number of contributors who were paid to use AI to translate existing Wikipedia articles into other languages after they discovered these AI translations added AI "hallucinations," or errors, to the resulting article. The new restrictions show how Wikipedia editors continue to fight the flood of generative AI across the internet from diminishing the reliability of the world's largest repository of knowledge. The incident also reveals how even well-intentioned efforts to expand Wikipedia are prone to errors when they rely on generative AI, and how they're remedied by Wikipedia's open governance model. The issue centers around a program run by the Open Knowledge Association (OKA), a nonprofit that was found to be "mostly relying on cheap labor from contractors in the Global South" to translate English Wikipedia articles into other languages. Some translators began using tools like Google Gemini and ChatGPT to speed up the process, but editors reviewing the work found numerous hallucinations, including factual errors, missing citations, and references to unrelated sources. "Ultimately the editors decided to implement restrictions against OKA translators who make multiple errors, but not block OKA translation as a rule," reports 404 Media.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

BrianFagioli shares a report from NERDS.xyz: An international team of scientists has done something chemistry has never seen before. IBM, working alongside researchers from the University of Manchester, Oxford University, ETH Zurich, EPFL, and the University of Regensburg, has created and characterized a molecule whose electrons travel through its structure in a corkscrew-like pattern, fundamentally altering its chemical behavior. The findings were published today in Science. The molecule, known as C13Cl2, is the first experimental observation of what scientists call a half-Mobius electronic topology in a single molecule. To the researchers' knowledge, nothing like it has ever been synthesized, observed, or even formally predicted. And proving why it behaves the way it does required something equally extraordinary -- a quantum computer. The whole thing started at IBM, where the molecule was assembled atom by atom from a custom precursor synthesized at Oxford. Working under ultra-high vacuum at near-absolute-zero temperatures, researchers used precisely calibrated voltage pulses to remove individual atoms one at a time. The result is an electronic structure that undergoes a 90-degree twist with each circuit through the molecule, requiring four complete loops to return to its starting phase. That is a topological property that has no counterpart anywhere in chemistry's existing record. What makes it even more interesting to folks who follow materials science is that this topology can be switched. The molecule can move reversibly between clockwise-twisted, counterclockwise-twisted, and untwisted states. That means electronic topology is not just a curiosity to be stumbled upon in nature -- it can be deliberately engineered. That is a big deal. The quantum computing angle here is not just a supporting role. Electrons within C13Cl2 interact in deeply entangled ways, each influencing the others simultaneously. Modeling that requires tracking every possible configuration of those interactions at once -- something that causes computational demands to grow exponentially and can quickly overwhelm classical machines. A decade ago, researchers could exactly model 16 electrons classically. Today that number has crept to 18. Using IBM's quantum computer, the team was able to explore 32 electrons. Quantum computers can represent these systems directly rather than approximate them, because they operate according to the same quantum mechanical laws that govern electrons in molecules. In this case, that capability helped reveal helical molecular orbitals for electron attachment -- a fingerprint of the half-Mobius topology -- and exposed the mechanism behind the unusual structure: a helical pseudo-Jahn-Teller effect.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A recently-revised Senate authorization bill (PDF), co-sponsored by Senate Commerce Committee Chair Ted Cruz, would extend the International Space Station's lifespan from 2030 to 2032 while pushing NASA to accelerate plans for commercial space stations to replace it. Ars Technica's Eric Berger reports: Regarding NASA's support for the development of commercial space stations, the bill mandates the following, within specified periods, of passage of the law: - Within 60 days, publicly release the requirements for commercial space stations in low-Earth orbit- Within 90 days, release the final "request for proposals" to solicit industry responses- Within 180 days, enter into contracts with "two or more" commercial providers for such stations Cruz is trying to inject urgency into NASA as several private companies -- including Axiom Space, Blue Origin, Vast, and Voyager -- are finalizing designs for space stations. All have expressed a desire for clarity from NASA on how long the space agency would like its astronauts to stay on board, the types of scientific equipment needed, and much more. These are known as "requirements" in NASA parlance. [...] Cruz and other senators on the committee appear to share those concerns, as their legislation extends the International Space Station's lifespan from 2030 to 2032 (an extension must still be approved by international partners, including Russia). Moreover, the authorization bill states, "The Administrator shall not initiate the de-orbit of the ISS until the date on which a commercial low-Earth orbit destination has reached an initial operational capability." With this legislation, the U.S. Senate is making clear that it views a permanent human presence in low-Earth orbit as a high priority. This version of the authorization legislation must still be passed by the full Senate and work its way through the House of Representatives.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from 80 Level: Microsoft has officially confirmed development of its next-generation Xbox console, currently known internally as Project Helix. While concrete details remain limited, early information suggests the company is positioning the device as a hybrid between a traditional console and a gaming PC, capable of running both Xbox titles and PC games. The codename was revealed recently by new Xbox CEO Asha Sharma, who reaffirmed Microsoft's continued commitment to dedicated gaming hardware despite speculation that the company might shift entirely toward cloud or platform-based ecosystems. According to Sharma, Project Helix represents the next step in Xbox's console strategy. Although official specifications have not yet been announced, early reports indicate the system will likely rely on a new AMD system-on-chip combining Xbox hardware with PC-style architecture. The device is expected to emphasize high performance while maintaining compatibility with existing Xbox game libraries. [...] If the concept holds, Project Helix could mark a significant shift in how console ecosystems are structured, moving away from tightly closed hardware platforms toward something closer to a unified PC-console environment. Sharma wrote in a post on X: "Great start to the morning with Team Xbox, where we talked about our commitment to the return of Xbox, including Project Helix, the code name for our next generation console. Project Helix will lead in performance and play your Xbox and PC games. Looking forward to chatting about this more with partners and studios at my first GDC next week!"Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Pentagon has formally designated Anthropic as a "supply chain risk," ordering federal agencies and defense contractors to stop using its AI tools after the company sought limits on the military's use of its models. In a written statement, the department said it has "officially informed Anthropic leadership the company and its products are deemed a supply chain risk, effective immediately." Politico reports: The designation, historically reserved for foreign firms with ties to U.S. adversaries, will likely require companies that do business with the U.S. military -- or even the federal government in general -- to cut ties with Anthropic. "From the very beginning, this has been about one fundamental principle: the military being able to use technology for all lawful purposes," the Pentagon said in the statement. "The military will not allow a vendor to insert itself into the chain of command by restricting the lawful use of a critical capability and put our warfighters at risk." A spokesperson for Anthropic did not immediately respond to a request for comment. But the company said last week it would fight a supply-chain risk label in court.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Apple has removed the 512GB RAM configuration for the Mac Studio, leaving 256GB as the new maximum. The remaining 256GB upgrade has also increased in price and now faces longer shipping delays as demand grows "due to consumers seeking machines suitable for running local AI agents," reports MacRumors. From the report: The Mac Studio starts with 36GB RAM, but there were upgrades ranging from 48GB to 512GB, with the higher tier upgrades limited to the M3 Ultra chip. Now there are options ranging from 48GB to 256GB, with wait times into May for the 256GB upgrade. Apple has also raised the price for the 256GB RAM upgrade option. It used to cost $1,600 to go from 96GB to 256GB on the high-end M3 Ultra machine, but now it costs $2,000. 512GB was $4,000 when it was available.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

United Airlines has updated its contract of carriage to require passengers to use headphones when playing audio or video on personal devices during flights. Travelers who refuse could be removed from the plane or even permanently banned from flying with the airline, reports CBS News. United notes that it will offer customers who forget theirs a free pair of wired earbuds. "Don't worry if you forget your headphones for your flight," the airline states on its website. "If they're available, you can request free earbuds." You'd better hope your device still has a headphone jack... Further reading: Flying Was Already the Worst. Then America Stopped Using Headphones.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anti-corruption group has filed a lawsuit (PDF) against Donald Trump and Attorney General Pam Bondi over the deal that transferred TikTok's U.S. operations to a group of investors tied to the administration. The suit claims the arrangement violates a 2024 law requiring ByteDance to divest and alleges the deal financially benefited Trump allies while leaving the platform's algorithm under Chinese ownership. NBC News reports: The suit, filed by the Public Integrity Project, a law firm that seeks to raise the "reputational cost of corruption in America," argues the deal violates a law intended to prevent the spread of Chinese government propaganda and has enriched Trump's allies. That law, signed by then-President Joe Biden in 2024, said that TikTok couldn't be distributed in the United States unless the Chinese company ByteDance found an American-based corporate home by the day before Donald Trump returned to office. The law was upheld by the Supreme Court. "The law was clear, but it was never enforced," says the lawsuit, filed Thursday in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. "Shortly after the deadline to divest passed, President Trump issued an executive order purportedly granting an extension for TikTok to find a domestic owner and directed his Attorney General not to enforce the law." The plaintiffs in the suit are two software engineers from California: One is a shareholder in Alphabet Inc., YouTube's parent company; the other is a shareholder in Meta Platforms, Inc., which is Instagram's parent company. Both say they suffered financially due to the non-enforcement of the law. "The original motivation for this law was to prevent the Chinese government from pushing propaganda onto American audiences," said Brendan Ballou, CEO of the Public Integrity Project and a former Justice Department prosecutor. "The deal that the president approved is the absolute worst of all possible worlds, because right now ByteDance continues to own the algorithm, which means that it can censor the content that it doesn't like, but at the same time Oracle controls the data and it can censor the information that it doesn't like. Really it's a situation that's going to be terrible for users, and terrible for free speech on the platform."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: AMD has been selling "Ryzen AI"-branded laptop processors for around a year and a half at this point. In addition to including modern CPU and GPU architectures, these are attempting to capitalize on the generative AI craze by offering chips with neural processing units (NPUs) suitable for running language and image-generation models locally, rather than on some company's server. But so far, AMD's desktop chips have lacked both these higher-performance NPUs and the Ryzen AI label. That changes today, at least a little: AMD is announcing its first three Ryzen AI chips for desktops using its AM5 CPU socket. These Ryzen AI 400-series CPUs are direct replacements for the Ryzen 8000G processors, rather than the Ryzen 9000-series, and they combine Zen 5-based CPU cores, RDNA 3.5 GPU cores, and an NPU capable of 50 trillion operations per second (TOPS). This makes them AMD's first desktop chips to qualify for Microsoft's Copilot+ PC label, which enables a handful of unique Windows 11 features like Recall and Click to Do. The six chips AMD is announcing today -- the 65 W Ryzen AI 7 Pro 450G, Ryzen AI 5 Pro 440G, and Ryzen AI 5 Pro 435G, along with low-power 35 W "GE" variants -- all bear AMD's "Ryzen Pro" branding as well, which means they support a handful of device management capabilities that are important for business PCs managed by IT departments. At this point, it doesn't seem as though AMD will be offering boxed versions to regular consumers; the Ryzen AI desktop chips will appear mainly in business PCs that don't need a dedicated graphics card but still benefit from more robust graphics than AMD offers in regular Ryzen desktop CPUs. Like past G-series Ryzen chips, these are essentially laptop silicon repackaged for desktop systems. They share most of their specs in common with Ryzen AI 300 laptop processors, despite their Ryzen AI 400-series branding. The two chip generations are extremely similar overall, but the Ryzen AI 400-series laptop CPUs include slightly faster 55 TOPS NPUs.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

OpenAI today released GPT-5.4, an upgraded ChatGPT model designed to be faster, cheaper, and more accurate for workplace tasks. The update also introduces tools that let ChatGPT work directly inside Excel and Google Sheets. Axios reports: GPT-5.4 is designed to be less error-prone, more efficient and better at workplace tasks like drafting documents, OpenAI said. The new model can create files in fewer tries with less back-and-forth than prior models, the company said. GPT-5.4 outperformed office workers 83% of the time on GDPval, an OpenAI benchmark measuring performance on real-world tasks across 44 occupations. The model can also solve problems using fewer tokens, OpenAI says -- which can translate to faster responses and lower costs. The company is also debuting OpenAI for Financial Services, a set of new tools that includes the version of ChatGPT that runs inside spreadsheets and new apps and skills within ChatGPT. Partners include FactSet, MSCI, Third Bridge and Moody's.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

As part of Epic's settlement with Google over the Play Store, Epic CEO Tim Sweeney agreed to stop criticizing Google's app store practices until 2032 and even publicly support the revised policies. The deal also prohibits Epic from pushing for further changes to Google's platform rules. The Verge reports: On March 3rd, he not only signed away Epic's rights to sue and disparage the company, he signed away his right to advocate for any further changes to Google's app store polices. He can't criticize Google's app store practices. In fact, he has to praise them. The contract states that "Epic believes that the Google and Android platform, with the changes in this term sheet, are procompetitive and a model for app store / platform operations, and will make good faith efforts to advocate for the same." He may even have to appear in other courts around the world to defend this deal with Google, and Google gets to make sure his public statements are supportive of the deal from here on out. And while Epic can still be part of the "Coalition for App Fairness," the organization that Epic quietly and solely funded to be its attack dog against Google and Apple, he can only point that organization at Apple now. "Google is opening up Android all the way with robust support for competing stores, competing payments, and a better deal for all developers. So, we've settled all of our disputes worldwide. THANKS GOOGLE!," Sweeney wrote in a post on X on Wednesday.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Anthropic co-founder and CEO Dario Amodei is not happy -- perhaps predictably so -- with OpenAI chief Sam Altman. In a memo to staff, reported by The Information, Amodei referred to OpenAI's dealings with the Department of Defense as "safety theater." "The main reason [OpenAI] accepted [the DoD's deal] and we did not is that they cared about placating employees, and we actually cared about preventing abuses," Amodei wrote. Last week, Anthropic and the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) failed to come to an agreement over the military's request for unrestricted access to the AI company's technology. Anthropic, which already had a $200 million contract with the military, insisted the DoD affirm that it would not use the company's AI to enable domestic mass surveillance or autonomous weaponry. Instead, the DoD -- known under the Trump administration as the Department of War -- struck a deal with OpenAI. Altman stated that his company's new defense contract would include protections against the same red lines that Anthropic had asserted. In a letter to staff, Amodei refers to OpenAI's messaging as "straight up lies," stating that Altman is falsely "presenting himself as a peacemaker and dealmaker." Amodei might not be speaking solely from a position of bitterness, here. Anthropic specifically took issue with the DoD's insistence on the company's AI being available for "any lawful use." [...] "I think this attempted spin/gaslighting is not working very well on the general public or the media, where people mostly see OpenAI's deal with the DoW as sketchy or suspicious, and see us as the heroes (we're #2 in the App Store now!)," Amodei wrote to his staff. "It is working on some Twitter morons, which doesn't matter, but my main worry is how to make sure it doesn't work on OpenAI employees."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Iranian state media said on Wednesday that it targeted Amazon's data center in Bahrain due to the company's support of the U.S. military. The drone strike that occurred on Sunday disrupted core cloud services and caused "prolonged" outages. Two data centers in the UAE were also damaged by drone strikes. CNBC reports: All of the facilities remain offline, according to the Amazon Web Services health dashboard. The attack in Bahrain was launched "to identify the role of these centers in supporting the enemy's military and intelligence activities," Iran's Fars News Agency said on Telegram. In addition to structural damage, the data centers also experienced power disruptions and some water damage after firefighters worked to put out sparks and fire. Some popular AWS applications experienced "elevated error rates and degraded availability" due to the incident. AWS advised cloud customers to back up their data, consider migrating their workloads to other regions and direct traffic away from Bahrain and the UAE.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Major tech companies including Google, Microsoft, Amazon, and Meta pledged at the White House to pay for new power generation and grid upgrades needed to support their rapidly expanding datacenters. The Guardian reports: The agreement is meant to help mitigate concerns that big tech's datacenters are driving up US electricity costs for homes and small businesses at a time the administration of Donald Trump is seeking to curb inflation. "This means that the tech companies and the datacenters will be able to get the electricity they need, all without driving up electricity costs for consumers," the president said at the pledge signing event. "This is a historic win for countless American families and we'll also make our electricity grid stronger and more resilient than ever before." The so-called "Ratepayer Protection Pledge" was first announced by Trump in his State of the Union address, and comes as communities and state legislators increase scrutiny of rapidly proliferating datacenters. Datacenters consume vast amounts of electricity to run server racks and cooling systems for the development of technologies such as artificial intelligence. "Some datacenters were rejected by communities for that, and now I think it's going to be just the opposite," Trump said, referencing cancelled or postponed projects in recent months across several states after local opposition. The pledge includes a commitment by technology companies to bring or buy electricity supplies for their datacenters, either from new power plants or existing plants with expanded output capacity. It also includes commitments from big tech to pay for upgrades to power delivery systems and to enter special electricity rate agreements with utilities. The effort is aimed at drawing support from towns and cities that otherwise oppose the projects, said the Trump official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: At the Morgan Stanley Technology, Media and Telecom conference in downtown San Francisco Wednesday, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said his company's recent investments in OpenAI and Anthropic are likely to be its last in both, saying that once they go public as anticipated later this year, the opportunity to invest closes. It could be that simple. While firms sometimes pile into companies until practically the eve of their public debut in search of more upside, Nvidia is minting money selling the chips that power both companies -- it's not like it needs to goose its returns by pouring even more money into either one. Nvidia, for its part, isn't offering much more on the matter. Asked for comment earlier today following Huang's remarks, a spokesman pointed TechCrunch to a transcript from the company's fourth-quarter earnings call, where Huang said all of Nvidia's investments are "focused very squarely, strategically on expanding and deepening our ecosystem reach," a goal its earlier stakes in both companies have arguably met. Still, a few other dynamics might also explain the pullback, including the circular nature of these arrangements themselves. [...] Meanwhile, Nvidia's relationship with Anthropic has looked fraught in its own right. Just two months after Nvidia announced a $10 billion investment in November, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei took the stage at Davos and, without naming Nvidia directly, compared the act of U.S. chip companies selling high-performance AI processors to approved Chinese customers to "selling nuclear weapons to North Korea." Ouch. [...] Where that leaves Nvidia is holding stakes in two companies that, at this particular moment, are pulling in very different directions, and potentially dragging customers and partners along for the ride. Whether Huang saw any of this coming, given Nvidia's web of partnerships, is impossible to know. But his stated reason on Wednesday for likely pulling the plug on future investments -- that the IPO window closes the door on this kind of deal -- is hard to square with how late-stage private investing actually works. What's looking more probable is that this is an exit from a situation that has gotten really complicated, really fast.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

schwit1 shares a report from Slow Boring: A new report (PDF) from the Center for Global Development documents that most of [the decentralized solar/battery systems used in poor countries in sub-Saharan Africa] use lead-acid batteries, like Americans use in cars. Lead-acid batteries work for a while and then need to be recycled. If they're recycled safely, that's fine. But in poor countries, most lead-acid batteries are not recycled safely and they become a huge source of toxic lead poisoning. C.G.D. believes that decentralized solar systems are currently generating somewhere between 250,000 and 1.5 million tons of unsafe lead-acid battery waste per year, a number that could grow much higher. Americans have mostly heard about lead issues in recent years due to the tragic situation in Flint, Michigan. But on the whole, lead exposure via faulty water pipes is a relatively minor issue. Across American history, the biggest culprits for lead exposure have been lead paint and leaded gasoline. Both were phased out decades ago, but old paint chips and lingering lead in soil have remained problems for years, albeit at diminishing rates. The global situation is quite different and much worse, to the point that in low- and middle-income countries, half of children have blood lead levels above the threshold that would trigger emergency action in the United States. It sounds fantastical to cite numbers this high. But there is credible (albeit somewhat uncertain) research indicating that five million people per year die as a result of lead-induced cardiovascular impairments. And roughly 20 percent of the gap in academic achievement between poor and rich countries is due to lead's impact on kids' cognitive development. The report goes on to note that lead-acid batteries dominate solar storage in poorer countries because they're far cheaper than lithium-ion alternatives. When these lead batteries reach end-of-life, they are often recycled unsafely, creating significant lead pollution. It's difficult to determine the scale of the problem due to limited data and minimal attention from policymakers, but researchers say it could become massive as solar adoption accelerates. Since safer battery technologies and proper recycling methods already exist, the issue largely stems from cost and lack of regulation. In other words, the problem is solvable if addressed early.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Former Humble Games executives have reacquired the publisher's catalog of more than 50 indie titles from Ziff Davis and relaunched their company as Balor Games. "For the developers we have worked with over the years, this moment is a reunion," Balor Games CEO Alan Patmore wrote in a statement. "[It has] the same leadership and the same commitment to thoughtful publishing remain in place. What changes is our scale and our focus. Balor Games is built for inventors and backed by believers. To that end, it exists to be a seal of quality for independent games." Engadget reports: The Humble Games lineup includes (among others) Slay the Spire, A Hat in Time, SIGNALIS, Forager, Coral Island, Monaco and Wizard of Legend. Separate from the Humble transaction, Balor also bought the complete catalog of Firestoke Games (which shut down last August) and publishing rights to Fights in Tight Spaces. In total, the young studio now owns the publishing rights to over 60 indie titles. Humble Games is separate from the Humble Bundle storefront. The latter is still owned by Ziff Davis. The pair view the newly anointed Balor as a developer-friendly publishing house. As for its name, Balor is a supernatural being in Irish mythology. It's sometimes depicted as having three eyes. Triple-eye, triple-I... Clever devils! The triple-I moniker is a more recent addition to the gaming lexicon. It typically means something defined by indie creativity and passion -- with a budget far less than AAA but more than a tiny two-person passion project. (Balor says it's about "high-quality, impactful games.") You wouldn't be blamed for wondering how that's different from AA. But the slant here is to define the genre less by budget and more by "indie" intangibles. You can learn more about the company's vision in an interview with GamesIndustry.biz.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

joshuark writes: The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) has added a VMware Aria Operations vulnerability tracked as CVE-2026-22719 to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog, flagging the flaw as exploited in attacks. VMware Aria Operations is an enterprise monitoring platform that helps organizations track the performance and health of servers, networks, and cloud infrastructure. The flaw has now been added to the CISA's Known Exploited Vulnerabilities (KEV) catalog, with the U.S. cyber agency requiring federal civilian agencies to address the issue by March 24, 2026. Broadcom said it is aware of reports indicating the vulnerability is exploited in attacks but cannot confirm the claims. "A malicious unauthenticated actor may exploit this issue to execute arbitrary commands which may lead to remote code execution in VMware Aria Operations while support-assisted product migration is in progress," the advisory explains. Broadcom released security patches on February 24 and also provided a temporary workaround for organizations unable to apply the patches immediately. The mitigation is a shell script named "aria-ops-rce-workaround.sh," which must be executed as root on each Aria Operations appliance node. There are currently no details on how the vulnerability is being exploited in the wild, who is behind it, and the scale of such efforts.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the New York Times: A novel type of nuclear power plant in Wyoming backed by Bill Gates received a key federal permit on Wednesday, making it the first new U.S. commercial reactor in nearly a decade to receive clearance to begin construction. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the federal body that oversees reactor safety, unanimously voted (PDF) to grant a construction permit to TerraPower, a start-up founded by Mr. Gates. TerraPower is one of several companies trying to build a new wave of smaller, advanced reactors meant to be easier to build than the large reactors of old. The permit, which comes after years of consultations and regulatory reviews, means that TerraPower can begin pouring concrete and building the nuclear components of its proposed nuclear plant in Kemmerer, Wyo. The plant, which still faces plenty of logistical hurdles, is currently expected to come online in 2031 near an old coal-burning power plant that is slated to retire a few years later. [...] With its construction permit in hand, the company says it plans to start work on the Wyoming reactor in the coming weeks. The company had already broken ground on the site in 2024 and had begun building the nonnuclear parts of the plant, which did not require a permit. TerraPower has already had to push back its start date several times, and it will still face hurdles in trying to avoid the snags and cost overruns that have plagued other reactor projects as well as securing the fuel it needs. Before coming online, the reactor will also need to secure a separate operating license from the N.R.C., which has told the company it will continue to monitor several safety issues. TerraPower plans to sell electricity from its first plant to PacificCorp, a utility in the Northwest. The company has also agreed to supply up to eight reactors to Meta to power its data centers in the coming years.Read more of this story at Slashdot.