Google is introducing an AI-powered update to Gmail search that prioritizes "most relevant" results based on recency, frequent contacts, and most-clicked emails. The feature aims to help users more efficiently locate specific messages in crowded inboxes. The update is rolling out globally to personal Google accounts, with business accounts to follow at an unspecified date. Users will have the option to togg ... ⌘ Read more
Google is introducing an AI-powered update to Gmail search that prioritizes "most relevant" results based on recency, frequent contacts, and most-clicked emails. The feature aims to help users more efficiently locate specific messages in crowded inboxes. The update is rolling out globally to personal Google accounts, with business accounts to follow at an unspecified date. Users will have the option to togg ... ⌘ Read more
Over the past two decades, school districts have spent billions equipping classrooms with laptops, yet students have fallen further behind on essential skills, Michael Bloomberg argues. With about 90% of schools now providing these devices, test scores hover near historic lows -- only 28% of eighth graders proficient in math and 30% in reading.
Bloomberg notes technology's c ... ⌘ Read more
A new AI system called Aardvark could deliver weather forecasts as accurate as those from advanced public weather services but run on desktop computers, according to a project unveiled Thursday and published in Nature. Developed by the UK's Alan Turing Institute with partners including Cambridge University, the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts and Microsof ... ⌘ Read more
IBM is laying off thousands of employees across the United States, with approximately 25% of staff at its Cloud Classic operation affected, The Register reports, citing a source. "Concrete numbers are being kept private," a source told the publication. "It is in the thousands."
Staff reductions have occurred in Raleigh, North Carolina; New York; Dallas, T ... ⌘ Read more
Nvidia is selling its scarce RTX 5080 and 5090 graphics cards from a pop-up "food truck" at its GPU Technology Conference, where attendees paying over $1,000 for tickets can purchase the coveted hardware alongside merchandise. The company has only 2,000 cards available (1,000 each of RTX 5080 and 5090), released in small batches at random times during the three-day conference which concludes tomo ... ⌘ Read more
Apple is undergoing a rare shake-up of its executive ranks, aiming to get its artificial intelligence efforts back on track after months of delays and stumbles, Bloomberg News reported Thursday, citing people familiar with the matter. From the report: Chief Executive Officer Tim Cook has lost confidence in the ability of AI head John Giannandrea to exe ... ⌘ Read more
Cosmologists have uncovered stronger evidence that dark energy -- the mysterious force accelerating cosmic expansion -- may be weakening over time. The Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) collaboration presented their latest findings at the Global Physics Summit in Anaheim, California, reinforcing their preliminary results from last ye ... ⌘ Read more
Pebble founder Eric Migicovsky has warned that the company's revived smartwatch line will face significant functionality limitations when paired with iPhones, blaming Apple's restrictive policies that favor its own Apple Watch. "It's impossible for a 3rd party smartwatch to send text messages, or perform actions on notificat ... ⌘ Read more
The credit-card market has quietly split in two, Atlantic argues in a new story: one offering generous benefits to wealthy Americans, the other offering expensive debt to the poor. Credit-card balances have reached an all-time high of $1.2 trillion, with serious delinquency rates climbing to their highest point since the Great Recession.
"Transactors" pay off balances monthly and earn valuable rewards ... ⌘ Read more
Microsoft is developing a new Windows 11 feature that will explain how hardware limitations affect PC performance. The latest preview builds include a hidden FAQ section in system settings that addresses GPU memory, system RAM, and OS version impacts.
The feature, discovered by Windows observer "phantomofearth" in this ... ⌘ Read more
The National Archives has released thousands of pages of declassified records related to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 1963. From a report: The records were posted to the National Archives' website, joining recently released records posted in 2023, 2022, 2021 and 2017-2018.
"This release consist ... ⌘ Read more
Nvidia has not been approached about acquiring a stake in Intel, CEO Jensen Huang said on Wednesday, addressing speculation about potential semiconductor industry consolidation.
"Nobody's invited us to a consortium," Huang told reporters at Nvidia's annual developer conference. "Nobody invited me. Maybe other people are involved, but I don't know. There might be a party. I wasn't invi ... ⌘ Read more
prisoninmate writes: GNOME 48 desktop environment has been released after six months of development with major new features that have been expected for more than four years, such as dynamic triple buffering, HDR support, and much more. 9to5Linux reports: "Highlights of GNOME 48 include dynamic triple buffering to boost the performance on low-end GPUs, such as Intel integrated graphics or Raspberry Pi computers, Wayland color management pr ... ⌘ Read more
OpenAI has launched a more powerful version of its o1 "reasoning" AI model, o1-pro, in its developer API. From a report: According to OpenAI, o1-pro uses more computing than o1 to provide "consistently better responses." Currently, it's only available to select developers -- those who've spent at least $5 on OpenAI API services -- and it's pricey. Very pricey. ... ⌘ Read more
An anonymous reader shares a report: LG has ceased its XR product commercialization efforts, it confirmed, though will still continue long-term R&D.
The news of LG ending its XR product plans was first reported by South Korean news outlet The Bell, citing an industry source. In a statement given to the outlet, LG confirmed the claim but clarified that it will still continue long-term XR research and development.
Acc ... ⌘ Read more
An anonymous reader shares a report: PCI Express 7 is nearing completion, the PCI Special Interest Group said, and the final specification should be released later this year. PCI Express 7, the backbone of the modern motherboard, is at the stage 0.9, which the PCI-SIG characterizes as the "final draft" of the specification. The ... ⌘ Read more
Streaming service provider Plex announced Wednesday its first price increase in a decade for its premium Plex Pass subscription, raising monthly rates to $6.99 from $4.99, yearly subscriptions to $69.99 from $39.99, and lifetime access to $249.99 from $119.99, effective April 29. The company is also making remote playback of personal med ... ⌘ Read more
EU antitrust regulators ordered Apple on Wednesday to open its closed ecosystem to competitors, detailing how the company must comply with the bloc's Digital Markets Act or face potential fines. The European Commission's decision comes six months after initiating proceedings against the tech giant.
The first order requires Apple to grant rival smartphone, headphone and VR headset manuf ... ⌘ Read more
SourceHut, an open-source-friendly git-hosting service, says web crawlers for AI companies are slowing down services through their excessive demands for data. From a report: "SourceHut continues to face disruptions due to aggressive LLM crawlers," the biz reported Monday on its status page. "We are continuously working to deploy mitigations. We have deployed a number of m ... ⌘ Read more
The devastating impacts of the climate crisis reached new heights in 2024, with scores of unprecedented heatwaves, floods and storms across the globe, according to the UN's World Meteorological Organization. From a report: The WMO's report on 2024, the hottest year on record, sets out a trail of destruction from extreme wea ... ⌘ Read more
Federal authorities have broken up an international crime ring that stole thousands of iPhones from porches nationwide \[non-paywalled link\], arresting 13 people last month after a sophisticated operation that combined high-tech tools with old-fashioned bribery.
The thieves created software to scra ... ⌘ Read more
Nature: A Microsoft researcher \[this week\] presented results behind the company's controversial claim last month to have created the first 'topological' qubits -- a long-sought goal of quantum computing. In front of a packed room at a meeting of the American Physical Society (APS), Chetan Nayak, a theoretical physicist leading Microsoft's quantum computing effort in Red ... ⌘ Read more
Sony has developed a new TV display technology combining individual red, green, and blue LEDs for backlighting, potentially offering a middle ground between existing Mini LED and OLED panels. Dubbed "General RGB LED Backlight Technology," the system enables precise color control without sacrificing brightness, reaching ... ⌘ Read more
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: The Belgian prosecutor's office said on Tuesday that it has charged five people in connection with a bribery investigation in the European Parliament allegedly linked to China's Huawei. The five were detained last week. Four have now been arrested and charged with active corruption and involvement in a criminal organi ... ⌘ Read more
The abstract of a paper published on National Bureau of Economic Research: Ensuring broad access to the patent system is crucial for fostering innovation and promoting economic growth. To support this goal, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office offers reduced fees for small and micro entities. This paper investigates whether fee rates affect the filing of applications ... ⌘ Read more
During the company's GTC 2025 keynote today, Nvidia founder and CEO Jensen Huang announced Isaac GR00T N1 -- the company's first open-source, pre-trained yet customizable foundation model designed to accelerate the development and capabilities of humanoid robots. "The age of generalist robotics is here," said Huang. "With Nvidia Isaac GR00T N1 and new data-generation ... ⌘ Read more
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: \[A\] team of Korean researchers \[describe\] how they've engineered a bacterial strain that can make a useful polymer starting with nothing but glucose as fuel. The system they developed is based on an enzyme that the bacteria use when they're facing unusual nutritional conditions, and it can be tweaked to make a wide ... ⌘ Read more
Italian newspaper Il Foglio claims to have published the world's first entirely AI-generated edition as part of a month-long experiment to explore AI's impact on journalism. The special four-page supplement, available in print and online, features AI-written articles, headlines, and reader letters. The only thing the human jour ... ⌘ Read more
Trend Micro uncovered an eight-year-long spying campaign exploiting a Windows vulnerability involving malicious .LNK shortcut files, which attackers padded with whitespace to conceal commands. Despite being reported to Microsoft in 2023, the company considers it a UI issue rather than a security risk and has not prioritized a fix. The Regist ... ⌘ Read more
According to Politico, Gov. Gavin Newsom has distributed prepaid burner phones to around 100 California business leaders, giving them direct access to him and reinforcing his pro-business stance. "If you ever need anything, I'm a phone call away," read one of the notes. From the report: It was Newsom's idea, a representative said, and has already yie ... ⌘ Read more
U.S. music streaming services surpassed 100 million subscribers in 2024 \[PDF\] while industry revenue hit a record $14.9 billion, up 4% from the previous year, according to the Record Industry Association of America (RIAA).
Physical media sales outpaced digital growth, with vinyl records increasing 7% ... ⌘ Read more
NASA's SpaceX Crew-9 has returned to Earth safely after a stay of more than nine months aboard the International Space Station. The crew remained in space longer than expected due to issues with Boeing's Starliner capsule, which was originally scheduled to bring them home sooner.
While the mission has been politically fraught, the ... ⌘ Read more
The Federal Trade Commission has removed over 300 business guidance blogs published during former President Biden's term, including consumer protection information on AI and privacy lawsuits against Amazon and Microsoft, WIRED reported Tuesday, citing current and former FTC employees.
Deleted posts included guidance about Amazon's alleged use of ... ⌘ Read more
An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Volkswagen's ultra-cheap EV called the ID EVERY1 -- a small four-door hatchback revealed Wednesday -- will be the first to roll out with software and architecture from Rivian, according to a source familiar with the new model. The EV is expected to go into production in 2027 with a starting price of 20,000 euros ($21,500). A s ... ⌘ Read more
The Dutch parliament approved motions urging the government to reduce reliance on U.S. software companies by developing a sovereign cloud platform and reconsidering contracts with American firms. Reuters reports: While such initiatives have foundered in the past due to a lack of viable European alternatives, lawmakers said changing relati ... ⌘ Read more
General Motors is partnering with Nvidia to enhance its self-driving and manufacturing capabilities by leveraging Nvidia's AI chips, software, and simulation tools. "GM says it will apply several of Nvidia's products to its business, such as the Omniverse 3D graphics platform which will run simulations on virtual assembly lines with an eye on reducing downtime and improving ef ... ⌘ Read more
Nvidia unveiled its next wave of AI processors at GTC on Tuesday, announcing Blackwell Ultra chips that will ship in the second half of 2025, followed by the Vera Rubin architecture in 2026. CEO Jensen Huang also revealed that its 2028 chips will be named after physicist Richard Feynman.
The Blackwell Ultra maintains the same 20 petaflops of AI performance as standar ... ⌘ Read more
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: A federal appeals court in Washington, D.C., on Tuesday affirmed that a work of art generated by artificial intelligence without human input cannot be copyrighted under U.S. law. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit agreed with the U.S. Copyright Office that an image created by Stephen Th ... ⌘ Read more
U.S. Vice President J.D. Vance text for hampering American innovation in a speech to entrepreneurs and venture capitalists on Tuesday, arguing that offshoring has eroded U.S. technological leadership. "Our workers have been failed by the government of the last 40 years," Vance told the American Dynamism Summit, criticizing two "conceits" of globalization: ... ⌘ Read more
Eric Migicovsky, founder of Pebble, will release two new smartwatches running the newly open-sourced Pebble operating system through his company Core Devices. The Core 2 Duo, priced at $149 and shipping in July, utilizes unused Pebble 2 frames with the same black-and-white E Ink display.
The device features a 30-day battery life -- quadruple its predece ... ⌘ Read more
Despite spending hundreds of millions on blockbuster films, Netflix continues to churn out critically panned big-budget fare with its latest $300 million flop, "The Electric State," starring Chris Pratt and Millie Bobby Brown. While the streaming giant has produced acclaimed films by giving talented directors creative freedom -- resulting in successes ... ⌘ Read more
Meta's open AI model family Llama has reached 1 billion downloads, CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced on Tuesday, marking a 53% increase from the 650 million reported in early December. Llama, which powers Meta's AI assistant across Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, operates under a proprietary license that some developers consider commercially restrictive ... ⌘ Read more
An anonymous reader shares a report: Apple lost an appeal on Tuesday against a regulatory assessment that opens the iPhone maker up to stricter controls in Germany, the Federal Court of Justice ruled on Tuesday, following years of debate over the company's market position. Federal judges backed the German cartel office's 2023 designat ... ⌘ Read more
Y Combinator CEO Garry Tan said startups are reaching $1-10 million annual revenue with fewer than 10 employees due to "vibe coding," a term coined by OpenAI cofounder Andrej Karpathy in February.
"You can just talk to the large language models and they will code entire apps," Tan told CNBC (video). " ... ⌘ Read more
The rumors were right: Google parent Alphabet has agreed to buy cyber security start-up Wiz for $32 billion, the biggest acquisition in the search group's history. From the report: Alphabet held talks over a $23 billion acquisition of Wiz last year, although the negotiations collapsed after some of the cyber security company's directors and investors became worried about a ... ⌘ Read more
Google parent Alphabet has agreed to buy cyber security start-up Wiz for $32 billion, the biggest acquisition in the search group's history, according to Financial Times, which cites sources. From the report: Alphabet held talks over a $23 billion acquisition of Wiz last year, although the negotiations collapsed after som ... ⌘ Read more
HR software startup Rippling has sued competitor Deel, alleging that Deel orchestrated corporate espionage by recruiting an employee within Rippling to steal trade secrets, including customer data, sales strategies, and internal records. The lawsuit (PDF) claims the spy shared confident ... ⌘ Read more
A newly FDA-approved form of adaptive deep-brain stimulation (DBS) for Parkinson's disease adjusts electrical stimulation in real time based on an individual's brain signals, improving symptom control and reducing medication dependence. Scientific American: For decades, Keith Krehbiel took high doses of medications with a debilita ... ⌘ Read more
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Variety: More than 400 Hollywood creative leaders signed an open letter to the Trump White House's Office of Science and Technology Policy, urging the administration to not roll back copyright protections at the behest of AI companies. The filmmakers, writers, actors, musicians and others -- ... ⌘ Read more
fahrbot-bot shares a report from Reuters: BYD on Monday unveiled a new platform for electric vehicles (EVs) that it said could charge EVs as quickly as it takes to pump gas and announced for the first time that it would build a charging network across China. The so-called "super e-platform" will be capable of peak charging speeds of 1,00 ... ⌘ Read more
According to The Verge, legacy G Suite accounts will soon lose their individual storage allotment perks and be transitioned to pooled storage, which will be "shared across all users within your organization." The changes will come into effect starting May 1st. From the report: G Suite was rebranded as Workspace in 2020. G Suite legacy ... ⌘ Read more
Roku is testing autoplaying video ads that play before users can access the home screen. While Roku claims this is just an experiment, users are threatening to abandon the platform if the change becomes permanent. Ars Technica reports: Reports of Roku customers seeing video ads automatically play before they could view the OS' home screen started appearing online t ... ⌘ Read more
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Politico: A top Commerce Department official sent a blistering email to his former colleagues on his way out the door Sunday warning that the Trump administration is poised to unduly enrich Elon Musk's satellite internet company with money for rural broadband. The technology offered ... ⌘ Read more
Google's parent company Alphabet is reportedly in talks to acquire cybersecurity startup Wiz for approximately $30 billion. Last July, negotiations had advanced on a $23 billion deal, but the talks were put on hold to prioritize Wiz's IPO. Around the same time, Alphabet also walked away from a potential acquisition of online marketing software company HubSpot. Reuters reports: ... ⌘ Read more
Apple will introduce a slimmer iPhone 17 "Air" this fall, marking a strategic shift toward potentially port-free devices in future product lines, according to a Bloomberg report.
The new model will feature a 6.6-inch display with ProMotion scrolling, Dynamic Island interface, and a Camera Control button while measuring approximately ... ⌘ Read more
GIMP 3.0 has been released after over a decade of development. Highlights include a refined GTK3 interface with scroll wheel tab navigation, a new splash screen, improved HiDPI icon support, enhanced color management, a stable public API, and support for more file formats. 9to5Linux reports: GIMP 3.0 also brings improvements to non-destructive editing by introducing an optional "Merge Filters" checkbox at the bottom of NDE filters that mer ... ⌘ Read more
Most mobile apps fail to reach $1,000 in monthly revenue within their first two years, according to a new report from RevenueCat examining data from over 75,000 mobile apps. Across all categories, only about 20% of apps achieve the $1,000 threshold, while just 5% reach $10,000 monthly.
In 2025, the top 5% of apps ... ⌘ Read more
An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Last week, Google expanded access to its Gemini 2.0 Flash model's image generation feature, which lets the model natively generate and edit image content. It's a powerful capability, by all accounts. But it also appears to have few guardrails. Gemini 2.0 Flash will uncomplainingly ... ⌘ Read more
Huawei will no longer be able to produce or sell Windows-based PCs as Microsoft's supply license to the Chinese tech company expires this month, according to Chinese tech site MyDrivers. The restriction comes as Huawei remains on the U.S. Department of Commerce's Entity List, requiring American companies to obtain special export lic ... ⌘ Read more
An anonymous reader shares a report: Xbox 360 modders have discovered a new way to get homebrew apps and games running on the console. A new software-only exploit known as BadUpdate allows you to use a USB key to hack past Microsoft's Hypervisor protections and run unsigned code and games.
Modern Vintage Gamer has tested BadUpdate and found that you don't even h ... ⌘ Read more
Harvard University on Monday announced that tuition will be free for students from families with annual incomes of $200,000 or less starting in the 2025-26 academic year. From a report: "Putting Harvard within financial reach for more individuals widens the array of backgrounds, experiences, and perspectives that all of our students encounte ... ⌘ Read more
Alphabet is spinning out Taara, a laser-based internet company from its X "moonshot" incubator, securing backing from Series X Capital while retaining a minority stake.
Taara's technology transmits data at 20 gigabits per second over 20km by firing pencil-width light beams between traffic light-sized terminals, extending tradit ... ⌘ Read more
More than 80 signatories representing about 100 European tech organizations have urged EU leaders to take "radical action" to reduce reliance on foreign digital infrastructure, according to a letter sent to European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen.
The coalition, including Airbus, Proton, and OVHCloud, warns Europe "will lose out on digital innovation" ... ⌘ Read more
Across high-income countries, humans' ability to reason and solve problems appears to have peaked in the early 2010s and declined since. Despite no changes in fundamental brain biology, test scores for both teenagers and adults show deteriorating performance in reading, mathematics and science. In an eye-opening statistic, 25% of adults in high-income countries now struggle to "use mathematical reas ... ⌘ Read more
Abstract of a paper published on National Bureau of Economic Research: This paper investigates self-reported wedges between how much people work and how much they want to work, at their current wage. More than two-thirds of full-time workers in German survey data are overworked -- actual hours exceed desired hours. We combine this evidence with a simple model of labor supply to assess the welfare consequen ... ⌘ Read more
Prolonged exposure to extreme heat accelerates biological aging in older adults, increasing the risk of age-related illnesses, according to research published in Science Advances.
In a nationally representative study of 3,686 U.S. adults over age 56, scientists found that long-term exposure to high heat days was associated with accelerated epigenetic aging - molecul ... ⌘ Read more
HR software provider Rippling has sued competitor Deel for allegedly planting a spy in its Dublin office to steal trade secrets, court documents \[PDF\] showed on Monday. Rippling claims the employee, identified as D.S., systematically searched internal Slack channels for competitor information, including sales leads and pitch decks.
The company discove ... ⌘ Read more
This week the Free Software Foundation published memorabilia items for an online silent auction — part of their big 40th anniversary celebration. "Starting March 17, the FSF will unlock items each day for bidding on the LibrePlanet wiki at 12:00 EDT.. Bidding on all items will conclude at 15:00 EDT on March 21, 2025...
"During the auction, the FSF welcomes everyone who supports user ... ⌘ Read more
An anonymous reader shared this article from TechCrunch:
Social network Bluesky recently published a proposal on GitHub outlining new options it could give users to indicate whether they want their posts and data to be scraped for things like generative AI training and public archiving.
CEO Jay Graber discussed the proposal earlier th ... ⌘ Read more
Google collaborated with Imperial College London and its "Fleming Initiative" partnership with Imperial NHS, giving their scientists "access to a powerful new AI designed" built with Gemini 2.0 "to make research faster and more efficient," according to an announcement from the school. And the results were surprising...
"José Penad ... ⌘ Read more
Long-time Slashdot reader chicksdaddy writes:
A group of U.S. consumer advocacy groups on Wednesday proposed legislation to address the growing epidemic of "zombie" Internet of Things (IoT) devices that have had software support cut off by their manufacturer, Fight To Repair News reports.
The Connected Consumer Product End of Life Disclosure Act is a collabora ... ⌘ Read more
Zillow CEO Jeremy Wacksman "recently told Entrepreneur magazine that almost five years of remote work has 'been fantastic for us,'" writes the Seattle Times.
Zillow shifted to allowing people to work fully remote during the pandemic. It's been a recruiting and retention tool for Zillow as they "now see four times th ... ⌘ Read more
Intel's stock jumped nearly 19% this week. "However, in the past year through Wednesday's close, Intel stock had fallen 53%," notes Investor's Business Daily:
The appointment of Lip-Bu Tan as CEO is a "good start" but Intel has significant challenges, Morgan Stanley analyst Joseph Moore said in a client note. Those challenges include delays in its server chip product ... ⌘ Read more
Long-time Slashdot reader theodp writes: Wall Street Journal K-12 education reporter Matt Barnum has a heads-up for parents: There's a Good Chance Your Kid Uses AI to Cheat. Barnum writes: "A high-school senior from New Jersey doesn't want the world to know that she cheated her way through English, math and history classes last year. Yet her experience, which the 17-year-old tol ... ⌘ Read more
America's Vice President "expressed confidence Friday that a deal to sell TikTok and keep the social media app running in the U.S. would largely be in place by an April deadline," reports NBC News. (Specifically the Vice President said "There will almost certainly be a high-level agreement that I think satisfies our national security concerns, allows there to be a distinct American TikTok enterprise.")
... ⌘ Read more
After Meta convinced an arbitrator to temporarily prevent a whistleblower from promoting their book about the company, the book climbed to the top of Amazon's best-seller list. And the book's publisher Macmillan released a defiant statement that "The arbitration order has no impact on Macmillan... We will absolutel ... ⌘ Read more
"The number of discrete GPU developers from the U.S. and Western Europe shrank to three companies in 2025," notes Tom's Hardware, "from around 10 in 2000." (Nvidia, AMD, and Intel...)
No company in the recent years — at least outside of China — was bold enough to engage into competition against these t ... ⌘ Read more
Slashdot reader rikfarrow summarizes an article they wrote for Usenix.org about the Open Source Python compiler Codon:
In 2023 I tried out Codon. At the time I had difficulty compiling the scripts I most commonly used, but was excited by the prospect. Python is essentially single threaded and checks the shape (type) of each variable ... ⌘ Read more
A ransomware-as-a-service variant called "Medusa" has claimed over 300 victims in "critical infrastructure sectors" (including medical), according to an joint alert from CISA, the FBI, and the Multi-State Information Sharing Analysis Center.
And that alert reminds us that Medusa is a globe-spanning operation that recruits third-party affiliates t ... ⌘ Read more
The Washington Post reports:
Oceans last year reached their highest levels in three decades — with the rate of global sea level rise increasing around 35% higher than expected, according to a NASA-led analysis published Thursday... Last year's rate of average global sea level rise was 0.23 inches per year, higher than the expected 0.17 inches per yea ... ⌘ Read more
"A new four-lane highway cutting through tens of thousands of acres of protected Amazon rainforest is being built for the COP30 climate summit," reports the BBC, "in the Brazilian city of Belém."
The highway will ease traffic into the city, which will host over 50,000 people at the conference this November:
The state government touts the highway's "sustainable" creden ... ⌘ Read more
"Why can't we each have our own AI software that runs locally," asks long-time Slashdot reader BrendaEM — and that doesn't steal the work of others.
Imagine a powerful-but-locally-hosted LLM that "doesn't spy... and no one else owns it."
We download it, from souce-code if you like, install it, if we want. And it assists: us... No one gate-keeps it. ... ⌘ Read more
"For the first time in history, a privately operated lunar lander has captured images of a total eclipse from the Moon's surface," reports Daily Galaxy.
While the Athena lunar lander tipped over and ended its mission, elsewhere on the moon Firefly Aerospace's Blue Ghost lunar lander "continues to beam home incredible imagery," writes Space.co ... ⌘ Read more
Long-time Slashdot reader BenFenner writes: For the third time in recent memory, CloudFlare has blocked large swaths of niche browsers and their users from accessing web sites that CloudFlare gate-keeps. In the past these issues have been resolved quickly (within a week) and apologies issued with promises to do better. (See 2024-03-11, 2024-07-08, and 2025-01-30.)
This time around it ... ⌘ Read more
Cities in Europe "are dramatically scaling back their relationship with the car," reports the Washington Post:
They are removing parking spaces and creating dedicated bike lanes. They are installing cameras at the perimeter of urban centers and either charging the most-polluting vehicles or preventing them from entering. Some are going so far as to put entire neighborhoods off-limits to v ... ⌘ Read more
"SpaceX founder Elon Musk has said his Starship rocket will head to Mars by the end of next year," writes the BBC, "as the company investigates several recent explosions in flight tests."
Human landings could begin as early as 2029 if initial missions go well, though "2031 was more likely", he added in a post on his social media platform ... ⌘ Read more
"Is everything we see around us is sealed within a black hole?" asks Space.com.
Because here's the thing. The $10 billion James Webb Space telescope (in operation since 2022) "has found that the vast majority of deep space and, thus the early galaxies it has so far observed, are rotating in the same direction. While around two-thirds of galaxies spin clockwise, the other third rotat ... ⌘ Read more
"Alphabet's Waymo autonomous vehicles are programmed to follow the rules of the road..." notes the Washington Post. But while the cars obey speed limits and properly use their turn signals — they also "routinely violate parking rules."
Waymo vehicles driving themselves received 589 tickets for parking violations in 202 ... ⌘ Read more
Slashdot has run nearly a dozen stories about Michael Mann, one of America's most prominent climate scientists and a co-creator of the famous "hockey stick" graph of spiking temperatures. In 2012 Mann sued two bloggers for defamation — and last year Mann finally won more than $1 million, repor ... ⌘ Read more
"Cuba's power grid collapsed Friday night," reports CNN, "triggering a nationwide power outage and plunging its more than 10 million people into darkness."
Video filmed by CNN in the capital Havana showed streets and buildings shrouded in total darkness, as people used electric torches to navigate the streets. By Saturday morning, the Cuban government officials said that " ... ⌘ Read more
Tuesday Microsoft "surprised everyone," writes Neowin, "by announcing a new change that will radically improve TypeScript performance" — porting TypeScript to Go.
InfoWorld writes that "The initiative promises dramatic improvements in editor startup speed, build times, and memory usage, making it easier to scale TypeScript to large code bases, Microsoft said ... ⌘ Read more
"Wind and solar energy generated more electricity in the U.S. than coal for the first time last year," reports the Wall Street Journal, "according to analysis from clean-energy think tank Ember.
"The two renewable energy sources accounted for 17% of the country's power mix while coal fell to a low of 15%, it said."
Solar was the fastest-g ... ⌘ Read more
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Broadband TV News: The National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) has filed a petition with the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) urging the agency to establish a clear, industry-wide transition plan for the full deployment of Next Gen TV (ATSC 3.0). The proposal outlines a two-phased transition while modernizing regulatory requirements to support consumer acce ... ⌘ Read more
Astronomers using the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope have discovered 128 new moons around Saturn, bringing its total to 274 -- more than all the other planets combined. CBC News reports: Jupiter and Saturn have been locked in a battle for the most moons for years -- with Saturn stealing the crown from Jupiter only two years ago ... ⌘ Read more
From a Space.com article: Athena, the second lunar lander from Houston company Intuitive Machines, tipped over during its touchdown on March 6, ending up on its side within a small crater near the moon's south pole. This orientation prevented the lander's solar panels from capturing enough sunlight, and Intuitive Machines declared At ... ⌘ Read more
An anonymous reader quotes a report from 404 Media: Something very strange is happening inside Super Nintendo (SNES) consoles as they age: a component you've probably never heard of is running ever so slightly faster as we get further and further away from the time the consoles first hit the market in the early '90s. The discovery started a mild panic in the speedru ... ⌘ Read more
With Microsoft ending free security updates for Windows 10 in October, millions of PCs that don't meet Windows 11's hardware requirements face an uncertain fate... Charities that refurbish and distribute computers to low-income individuals must choose between providing soon-to-be-insecure Windows 10 machines, transitioning to Linux -- despite usability challenges f ... ⌘ Read more
A leaked Apple meeting reveals significant internal struggles with Siri's development, as AI-powered features announced last June have been delayed and may not make it into iOS 19. The Verge reports: Bloomberg (paywalled) has the full scoop on what happened at a Siri team meeting led by senior director Robby Walker, who oversees the division. He ... ⌘ Read more
A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket launched a four-member crew to the International Space Station on Friday night, paving the way for NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams to return to Earth after being there for nine months due to issues with Boeing's Starliner capsule. Arrival is set for late Saturday night. The Associated Press reports: NASA wants overlap between the two crews s ... ⌘ Read more
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Fortune: Younger Americans don't have enough saved to cover a single month of spending, showcasing their vulnerability should the economy head into a downturn. Members of the Gen Z generation -- people born after 1995 -- were spending twice the amount they had in savings on average in ... ⌘ Read more