ICT news

• Insect Collapse: 'We Are Destroying Our Life Support Systems'

  16-01-2019 06:30 via rss.slashdot.org
  An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Scientist Brad Lister returned to Puerto Rican rainforest after 35 years to find 98% of ground insects had vanished. His return to the Luquillo rainforest in Puerto Rico after 35 years was to reveal an appalling discovery. The insect population that once provided plentiful food for birds throughout the mountainous national park had collapsed. On the ground, 98% had gone. Up in the leafy canopy, 80% had vanished. The most likely culprit by fa
  
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• OpenAI's Sam Altman on iPhones, Music, Training Data, and Apple's Controversial iPad Ad

  12-05-2024 22:34 via apple.slashdot.org
  
  OpenAI CEO Sam Altman gave an hour-long interview to the "All-In" podcast (hosted by Chamath Palihapitiya, Jason Calacanis, David Sacks and David Friedberg). And speaking on technology's advance, Altman said "Phones are unbelievably good.... I personally think the iPhone is like the greatest piece of technology humanity has ever made. It's really a wonderful product."
  Q: What comes after it?Altman: I don't know. I mean, that was what I was saying. It's so good, that to get beyond it, I think the
  
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• Webb Telescope Finds a (Hot) Earth-Sized Planet With an Atmosphere

  12-05-2024 21:34 via science.slashdot.org
  
  An anonymous reader shared this report from the Associated Press:
  A thick atmosphere has been detected around a planet that's twice as big as Earth in a nearby solar system, researchers reported Wednesday.
  The so-called super Earth — known as 55 Cancri e — is among the few rocky planets outside our solar system with a significant atmosphere, wrapped in a blanket of carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide. The exact amounts are unclear. Earth's atmosphere is a blend of nitrogen, oxygen, ar
  
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• Could Atomically Thin Layers Bring A 19x Energy Jump In Battery Capacitors?

  12-05-2024 20:34 via hardware.slashdot.org
  
  Researchers believe they've discovered a new material structure that can improve the energy storage of capacitors.
  The structure allows for storage while improving the efficiency of ultrafast charging and discharging.
  The new find needs optimization but has the potential to help power electric vehicles.*
  An anonymous reader shared this report from Popular Mechanics:In a study published in Science, lead author Sang-Hoon Bae, an assistant professor of mechanical engineering and materials science,
  
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• Photographer Sets World Record for Fastest Drone Flight at 298 MPH

  12-05-2024 19:34 via tech.slashdot.org
  
  An anonymous reader shared this report from PetaPixel:
  A photographer and content creator has set the world record for the fastest drone flight after his custom-made aircraft achieved a staggering 298.47 miles per hour (480.2 kilometers per hour). Guinness confirmed the record noting that Luke Maximo Bell and his father Mike achieved the "fastest ground speed by a battery-powered remote-controlled (RC) quadcopter."Luke, who has previously turned his GoPro into a tennis ball, describes it as the
  
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• Is Dark Matter's Main Rival Theory Dead?

  12-05-2024 18:34 via science.slashdot.org
  
  "One of the biggest mysteries in astrophysics today is that the forces in galaxies do not seem to add up," write two U.K. researchers in the Conversation:Galaxies rotate much faster than predicted by applying Newton's law of gravity to their visible matter, despite those laws working well everywhere in the Solar System. To prevent galaxies from flying apart, some additional gravity is needed. This is why the idea of an invisible substance called dark matter was first proposed. But nobody has eve
  
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• Father of SQL Says Yes to NoSQL

  12-05-2024 17:34 via hardware.slashdot.org
  
  An anonymous reader shared this report from the Register:
  The co-author of SQL, the standardized query language for relational databases, has come out in support of the NoSQL database movement that seeks to escape the tabular confines of the RDBMS. Speaking to The Register as SQL marks its 50th birthday, Donald Chamberlin, who first proposed the language with IBM colleague Raymond Boyce in a 1974 paper [PDF], explains that NoSQL databases and their query languages could help perform the tasks re
  
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• AMD Core Performance Boost For Linux Getting Per-CPU Core Controls

  12-05-2024 16:34 via linux.slashdot.org
  
  An anonymous reader shared this report from Phoronix:
  For the past several months AMD Linux engineers have been working on AMD Core Performance Boost support for their P-State CPU frequency scaling driver. The ninth iteration of these patches were posted on Monday and besides the global enabling/disabling support for Core Performance Boost, it's now possible to selectively toggle the feature on a per-CPU core basis...
  The new interface is under /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpuX/cpufreq/amd_pstate_boo
  
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• Are Small Modular Nuclear Reactors Costly and Unviable?

  12-05-2024 13:34 via hardware.slashdot.org
  
  The Royal Institution of Australia is a national non-profit hub for science communication, publishing the science magazine Cosmos four times a year.
  This month they argued that small modular nuclear reactors "don't add up as a viable energy source."Proponents assert that SMRs would cost less to build and thus be more affordable. However, when evaluated on the basis of cost per unit of power capacity, SMRs will actually be more expensive than large reactors. This 'diseconomy of scale' was demonst
  
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• Former Boeing Quality Inspector Turns Whistleblower, Says Plane Parts Had Serious Defects

  12-05-2024 09:34 via tech.slashdot.org
  
  Thursday the BBC reported:Plane bodies made by Boeing's largest supplier regularly left the factory with serious defects, according to a former quality inspector at the firm. Santiago Paredes who worked for Spirit AeroSystems in Kansas, told the BBC he often found up to 200 defects on parts being readied for shipping to Boeing. He was nicknamed "showstopper" for slowing down production when he tried to tackle his concerns, he claimed.
  Spirit said it "strongly disagree[d]" with the allegations. "
  
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• The World's Largest Vaccuum to Suck Climate Pollution From the Air Just Began Operating

  12-05-2024 05:34 via news.slashdot.org
  
  An anonymous reader shared this report from CNN:
  The "world's largest" plant designed to suck planet-heating pollution out of the atmosphere like a giant vacuum began operating in Iceland on Wednesday. "Mammoth" is the second commercial direct air capture plant opened by Swiss company Climeworks in the country, and is 10 times bigger than its predecessor, Orca, which started running in 2021... Climeworks plans to transport the carbon underground where it will be naturally transformed into stone,
  
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• Google Employees Question Execs Over 'Decline in Morale' After Blowout Earnings

  12-05-2024 03:34 via tech.slashdot.org
  
  "Google's business is growing at its fastest rate in two years," reports CNBC, "and a blowout earnings report in April sparked the biggest rally in Alphabet shares since 2015, pushing the company's market cap past $2 trillion.
  "But at an all-hands meeting last week with CEO Sundar Pichai and CFO Ruth Porat, employees were more focused on why that performance isn't translating into higher pay, and how long the company's cost-cutting measures are going to be in place.""We've noticed a significant
  
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• Red Hat (and CIQ) Offer Extend Support for RHEL 7 (and CentOS 7)

  12-05-2024 02:04 via linux.slashdot.org
  
  This week, The Register reported:
  If you are still running RHEL 7, which is now approaching a decade old, there's good news. Red Hat is offering four more years of support for RHEL 7.9, which it terms Extended Life Cycle Support or ELS.If you are running the free version, CentOS Linux 7, that hits its end-of-life on the same date: June 30, 2024. CIQ, which offers CentOS Linux rebuild Rocky Linux, has a life cycle extension for that too, which it calls CIQ Bridge. The company told The Reg:"CIQ Br
  
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• RHEL (and Rocky and Alma Linux) 9.4 Released - Plus AI Offerings

  12-05-2024 00:34 via linux.slashdot.org
  
  Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9.4 has been released. But also released is Rocky Linux 9.4, reports 9to5Linux:
  Rocky Linux 9.4 also adds openSUSE's KIWI next-generation appliance builder as a new image build workflow and process for building images that are feature complete with the old images... Under the hood, Rocky Linux 9.4 includes the same updated components from the upstream Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9.4
  This week also saw the release of Alma Linux 9.4 stable (the "forever-free enterprise Linux
  
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• The People Who Won't Give Up Floppy Disks

  11-05-2024 23:34 via hardware.slashdot.org
  
  Slashdot reader quonset writes: The last floppy disk was manufactured in 2011. Despite no new supplies being available for over a decade, there are still people, and organizations, who rely on floppy disks. Each has their own story as to why they rely on what is essentially 1970s technology.From the BBC:
  Tom Persky, a US businessman, has been selling "new", as in, unopened, floppy disks for years and still finds the trade lucrative. He runs Floppydisk.com, which offers disks for about US$1 (&pou
  
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• Could Stem Cells One Day Cure Diabetes?

  11-05-2024 22:34 via science.slashdot.org
  
  Brian Shelton's type 1 diabetes was treated with an infusion of insulin-producing pancreas cells (grown from stem cells). In 2021, the New York Times reported:Now his body automatically controls its insulin and blood sugar levels. Shelton, now 64, may be the first person cured of the disease with a new treatment that has experts daring to hope that help may be coming for many of the 1.5 million Americans suffering from Type 1 diabetes. "It's a whole new life," Shelton said. Diabetes experts were
  
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• Lightweight Dillo Browser Resurrected: TLS But No JavaScript

  11-05-2024 21:34 via tech.slashdot.org
  
  The Dillo browser dates back to 1999, writes the Register, with its own rendering engine. And now Dillo "has returned with a new release, version 3.1.
  "It's nearly nine years after version 3.05 appeared on the last day of June 2015."
  Version 3.1 incorporates dozens of fixes and improvements, as the official announcement describes.
  Project lead Rodrigo Arias Mallo announced his resurrection attempt on Hacker News early this year. He has taken the last available code from the project's Mercurial r
  
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• NASA's Plan To Build a Levitating Robot Train on the Moon

  11-05-2024 20:34 via science.slashdot.org
  
  "Does a levitating robot train on the moon sound far-fetched?" asks LiveScience.
  "NASA doesn't seem to think so, as the agency has just greenlit further funding for a study looking into the concept."The project, called "Flexible Levitation on a Track" (FLOAT), has been moved to phase two of NASA's Innovative Advanced Concepts program (NIAC) , which aims to develop "science fiction-like" projects for future space exploration. The FLOAT project could result in materials being transported across th
  
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• 'Hunt For Gollum' Short on YouTube Survives New Peter Jackson Movie Announcement

  11-05-2024 19:34 via entertainment.slashdot.org
  
  Thursday CNN reported:The Oscar-winning team behind the nearly $6 billion blockbuster "Lord of the Rings" and "The Hobbit" trilogies is reuniting to produce two new films. The first of the new projects from Sir Peter Jackson, Fran Walsh and Philippa Boyens is tentatively titled "Lord of the Rings: The Hunt for Gollum," Warner Bros. Discovery announced Thursday. It will be directed by "LOTR" alum Andy Serkis.
  But "amid the news," TMZ reports, "a famous short film about it got yanked ... only to b
  
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• Did OpenAI, Google and Meta 'Cut Corners' to Harvest AI Training Data?

  11-05-2024 18:34 via tech.slashdot.org
  
  What happened when OpenAI ran out of English-language training data in 2021?
  They just created a speech recognition tool that could transcribe the audio from YouTube videos, reports The New York Times, as part of an investigation arguing that tech companies "including OpenAI, Google and Meta have cut corners, ignored corporate policies and debated bending the law" in their search for AI training data. [Alternate URL here.]Some OpenAI employees discussed how such a move might go against YouTube's
  
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• How Microsoft and Red Hat Are Collaborating on Cloud Migrations

  11-05-2024 17:34 via linux.slashdot.org
  
  SiliconANGLE looks at how starting in 2021, Microsoft and Red Hat have formed "an unlikely partnership set to reshape the landscape of cloud computing..."First, their collective open-source capabilities will lead to co-developed solutions to simplify the modernization and migration of Red Hat technologies to the cloud, seamlessly integrating them with Microsoft's Azure platform, according to João Couto, EMEA VP and COO of cloud commercial solutions at Microsoft. "We have acquired GitHub,
  
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• The Earth's CO2 Levels Are Increasing Faster Than Ever

  11-05-2024 16:34 via news.slashdot.org
  
  "Atmospheric levels of planet-warming carbon dioxide aren't just on their way to yet another record high this year," reports the Washington Post.
  "They're rising faster than ever, according to the latest in a 66-year-long series of observations."Carbon dioxide levels were 4.7 parts per million higher in March than they were a year earlier, the largest annual leap ever measured at the National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration laboratory atop a volcano on Hawaii's Big Island. And from January th
  
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• Bike Brands Start To Adopt C-V2X To Warn Cyclists About Cars

  11-05-2024 15:00 via tech.slashdot.org
  
  An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: There's a fundamental flaw in current car safety tech: It's limited to line of sight. Or, perhaps, line of "sensing" is more accurate, because the way cameras and lidar work is to inspect the perimeter of a vehicle and use predictive algorithms to understand the motion of an object in relation to the motion of the vehicle itself. Which is good, because as carmakers have added elements such as pedestrian and cyclist detection, they're trying
  
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• Black Basta Ransomware Attack Brought Down Ascension IT Systems, Report Finds

  11-05-2024 12:00 via it.slashdot.org
  
  The Russia-linked ransomware group Black Basta is responsible for Wednesday's cyberattack on St. Louis-based Ascension health system, according to sources reported by CNN. The attack disrupted access to electronic health records, some phone systems and "various systems utilized to order certain tests, procedures and medications," the company said in a statement. From a report: On Friday, the nonprofit group Health-ISAC (Information Sharing and Analysis Center) issued an alert about the group, sa
  
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• 'Tungsten Wall' Leads To Nuclear Fusion Breakthrough

  11-05-2024 09:00 via hardware.slashdot.org
  
  A tokamak in France achieved a new record in fusion plasma by using tungsten to encase its reaction, which enabled the sustainment of hotter and denser plasma for longer periods than previous carbon-based designs. Quartz reports: A tokamak is a torus- (doughnut-) shaped fusion device that confines plasma using magnetic fields, allowing scientists to fiddle with the superheated material and induce fusion reactions. The recent achievement was made in WEST (tungsten (W) Environment in Steady-state
  
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• UK Toddler Has Hearing Restored In World First Gene Therapy Trial

  11-05-2024 05:30 via science.slashdot.org
  
  An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: A British toddler has had her hearing restored after becoming the first person in the world to take part in a pioneering gene therapy trial, in a development that doctors say marks a new era in treating deafness. Opal Sandy was born unable to hear anything due to auditory neuropathy, a condition that disrupts nerve impulses traveling from the inner ear to the brain and can be caused by a faulty gene. But after receiving an infusion containin
  
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• Big Three Carriers Pay $10 Million To Settle Claims of False 'Unlimited' Advertising

  11-05-2024 03:25 via yro.slashdot.org
  
  Jon Brodkin reports via Ars Technica: T-Mobile, Verizon, and AT&T will pay a combined $10.2 million in a settlement with US states that alleged the carriers falsely advertised wireless plans as "unlimited" and phones as "free." The deal was announced yesterday by New York Attorney General Letitia James. "A multistate investigation found that the companies made false claims in advertisements in New York and across the nation, including misrepresentations about 'unlimited' data plans that were
  
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• G5 Severe Geomagnetic Storm Watch Issued For First Time Since 2003

  11-05-2024 02:49 via news.slashdot.org
  
  Longtime Slashdot reader davidwr shares a report from Space Weather Prediction Center (SWPC): On Thursday, May 9, 2024, the NOAA Space Weather Prediction Center issued a Severe (G4) Geomagnetic Storm Watch. At least five earth-directed coronal mass ejections (CMEs) were observed and expected to arrive as early as midday Friday, May 10, 2024, and persist through Sunday, May 12, 2024. Several strong flares have been observed over the past few days and were associated with a large and magnetically
  
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• Apple Will Revamp Siri To Catch Up To Its Chatbot Competitors

  11-05-2024 02:02 via apple.slashdot.org
  
  An anonymous reader quotes a report from the New York Times: Apple's top software executives decided early last year that Siri, the company's virtual assistant, needed a brain transplant. The decision came after the executives Craig Federighi and John Giannandrea spent weeks testing OpenAI's new chatbot, ChatGPT. The product's use of generative artificial intelligence, which can write poetry, create computer code and answer complex questions, made Siri look antiquated, said two people familiar w
  
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• Google Cloud Accidentally Deletes UniSuper's Online Account Due To 'Unprecedented Misconfiguration'

  11-05-2024 01:20 via hardware.slashdot.org
  
  A "one-of-a-kind" Google Cloud "misconfiguration" resulted in the deletion of UniSuper's account last week, disrupting the financial services provider's than half a million members. "Services began being restored for UniSuper customers on Thursday, more than a week after the system went offline," reports The Guardian. "Investment account balances would reflect last week's figures and UniSuper said those would be updated as quickly as possible." From the report: The UniSuper CEO, Peter Chun, wrot
  
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