ICT news

• Curiosity Rover Finds Hints of a Carbon Cycle on Ancient Mars

  19-04-2025 23:34 via science.slashdot.org
  
  Billions of years ago Mars "had a warm, habitable climate with liquid water in lakes and flowing rivers," writes Ars Technica.
  But "In order for Mars to be warm enough to host liquid water, there must have been a lot of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere," says Benjamin Tutolo, a researcher at the University of Calgary. "The question we've been asking for at least 30 years was where the record of all this carbon is."
  Tutolo led a new study of rock samples collected by the Curiosity rover that migh
  
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• High School Student Discovers 1.5M New Astronomical Objects by Developing an AI Algorithm

  19-04-2025 22:34 via science.slashdot.org
  
  For combining machine learning with astronomy, high school senior Matteo Paz won $250,000 in the Regeneron Science Talent Search, reports Smithsonian magazine:The young scientist's tool processed 200 billion data entries from NASA's now-retired Near-Earth Object Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (NEOWISE) telescope. His model revealed 1.5 million previously unknown potential celestial bodies.... [H]e worked on an A.I. model that sorted through the raw data in search of tiny changes in infrared
  
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• CA/Browser Forum Votes for 47-Day Cert Durations By 2029

  19-04-2025 21:34 via it.slashdot.org
  
  "Members of the CA/Browser Forum have voted to slash cert lifespans from the current one year to 47 days," reports Computerworld, "placing an added burden on enterprise IT staff who must ensure they are updated."
  In a move that will likely force IT to much more aggressively use web certificate automation services, the Certification Authority Browser Forum (CA/Browser Forum), a gathering of certificate issuers and suppliers of applications that use certificates, voted [last week] to radically sla
  
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• Brain Implant Cleared by America's FDA to Help Paralysis Patients

  19-04-2025 20:34 via hardware.slashdot.org
  
  An anonymous reader shared this report from CNBC:
  Neurotech startup Precision Neuroscience on Thursday announced that a core component of its brain implant system has been approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, a major win for the four-year-old company... The company's brain-computer interface will initially be used to help patients with severe paralysis restore functions such as speech and movement, according to its website.
  Only part of Precision's system was approved by the FDA on
  
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• Arch Linux Is the Latest Distro Replacing Redis with Valkey

  19-04-2025 19:34 via news.slashdot.org
  
  In NoSQL database news, Arch Linux "is the latest Linux distribution replacing its Redis packages with the Valkey fork," reports Phoronix.
  Valkey is backed by the Linux Foundation, Google, Amazon Web Services, and Oracle, which the article points out is due to Redis's decision last year to shift the upstream Redis license from a BSD 3-clause to RSALv2 and SSPLv1.
  Valkey is replacing Redis in the Arch Linux extra repository and after a two week period the Redis package will be moved out to AUR an
  
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• As Russia and China 'Seed Chatbots With Lies', Any Bad Actor Could Game AI the Same Way

  19-04-2025 18:34 via yro.slashdot.org
  
  "Russia is automating the spread of false information to fool AI chatbots," reports the Washington Post. (When researchers checked 10 chatbots, a third of the responses repeated false pro-Russia messaging.)
  The Post argues that this tactic offers "a playbook to other bad actors on how to game AI to push content meant to inflame, influence and obfuscate instead of inform," and calls it "a fundamental weakness of the AI industry."Chatbot answers depend on the data fed into them. A guiding principl
  
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• Engineers Want To Bring Home the World's Oldest Satellite

  19-04-2025 17:34 via science.slashdot.org
  
  Launched in 1958, the "awkward-looking" Vanguard-1 satellite ("the size of a grapefruit") is the oldest artificial object orbiting Earth."A team of researchers and engineers want to retrieve the satellite for closer inspection and are currently working to find a way to bring Vanguard-1 home," writes Gizmodo:Other satellites of its time have reentered through Earth's atmosphere, burning up in a fiery death, but Vanguard-1 is still in orbit, silently zooming through the void of space... A team of
  
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• Trump-Branded 'Lab Leak' Page Replaces US Covid Information Sites

  19-04-2025 16:34 via news.slashdot.org
  
  "There has never been a consensus or a 'smoking gun' to explain what started the pandemic," writes ABC News.
  Yet the Associated Press reports that "A federal website that used to feature information on vaccines, testing and treatment for COVID-19 has been transformed into a page supporting the theory that the pandemic originated with a lab leak." (This despite the fact that "about 325 Americans have died from COVID per week on average over the past four weeks, according to the U.S. Centers for D
  
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• China Pits Humanoid Robots Against Humans In Half-Marathon

  19-04-2025 15:00 via hardware.slashdot.org
  
  An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: Twenty-one humanoid robots joined thousands of runners at the Yizhuang half-marathon in Beijing on Saturday, the first time these machines have raced alongside humans over a 21-km (13-mile) course. The robots from Chinese manufacturers such as DroidVP and Noetix Robotics came in all shapes and sizes, some shorter than 120 cm (3.9 ft), others as tall as 1.8 m (5.9 ft). One company boasted that its robot looked almost human, with feminine features
  
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• About 15% of World's Cropland Polluted With Toxic Metals, Say Researchers

  19-04-2025 12:00 via news.slashdot.org
  
  About one sixth of global cropland is contaminated by toxic heavy metals, researchers have estimated, with as many as 1.4 billion people living in high-risk areas worldwide. From a report: Approximately 14 to 17% of cropland globally -- roughly 242m hectares -- is contaminated by at least one toxic metal such as arsenic, cadmium, cobalt, chromium, copper, nickel or lead, at levels that exceed agricultural and human health safety thresholds.
  The analysis, which was conducted by the American Assoc
  
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• Scientists Claim To Have Found Color No One Has Seen Before

  19-04-2025 10:30 via science.slashdot.org
  
  Researchers at UC Berkeley claim to have induced a previously unseen color by using lasers to stimulate only the M cones in the retina, creating a visual experience beyond the natural limits of human perception. Called olo, the color is described as a highly saturated blue-green but is only visible through direct retinal manipulation. The Guardian reports: "We predicted from the beginning that it would look like an unprecedented color signal but we didn't know what the brain would do with it," s
  
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• China Develops Flash Memory 10,000x Faster With 400-Picosecond Speed

  19-04-2025 09:00 via hardware.slashdot.org
  
  Longtime Slashdot reader hackingbear shares a report from Interesting Engineering: A research team at Fudan University in Shanghai, China has built the fastest semiconductor storage device ever reported, a nonvolatile flash memory dubbed "PoX" that programs a single bit in 400 picoseconds (0.0000000004 s) -- roughly 25 billion operations per second. Conventional static and dynamic RAM (SRAM, DRAM) write data in 1-10 nanoseconds but lose everything when power is cut while current flash chips typi
  
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• A Musician's Brain Matter Is Still Making Music Three Years After His Death

  19-04-2025 05:30 via entertainment.slashdot.org
  
  An anonymous reader quotes a report from Popular Mechanics: American composer Alvin Lucier was well-known for his experimental works that tested the boundaries of music and art. A longtime professor at Wesleyan University (before retiring in 2011), Alvin passed away in 2021 at the age of 90. However, that wasn't the end of his lifelong musical odyssey. Earlier this month, at the Art Gallery of Western Australia, a new art installation titled Revivification used Lucier's "brain matter" -- hooked
  
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• OpenAI Puzzled as New Models Show Rising Hallucination Rates

  19-04-2025 03:40 via slashdot.org
  
  OpenAI's latest reasoning models, o3 and o4-mini, hallucinate more frequently than the company's previous AI systems, according to both internal testing and third-party research. On OpenAI's PersonQA benchmark, o3 hallucinated 33% of the time -- double the rate of older models o1 (16%) and o3-mini (14.8%). The o4-mini performed even worse, hallucinating 48% of the time. Nonprofit AI lab Transluce discovered o3 fabricating processes it claimed to use, including running code on a 2021 MacBook Pro
  
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• Fresh Tools That Keep Vintage Macs Online and Weirdly Alive

  19-04-2025 02:45 via apple.slashdot.org
  
  With macOS now 24 years old and Apple officially designating all Intel-based Mac minis as "vintage" or "obsolete," The Register takes a look at new internet tools that help keep vintage Macs online and surprisingly relevant: Cameron Kaiser of Floodgap Systems is a valuable ally. His retro computing interests are broad, and we've mentioned him a few times on The Register, such as his deep dive into the revolutionary Canon Cat computer, and his evaluation of RISC-V hardware performance. Back in 20
  
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• Users React To Bluesky's Upcoming Blue Check Mark Verification System

  19-04-2025 02:02 via tech.slashdot.org
  
  Bluesky is testing a new verification system featuring blue checks issued by "Trusted Verifiers" like news organizations, rather than a centralized authority or pay-to-play model like X (formerly Twitter). "Looking at the comments on the pull request, it's clear this idea has sparked a lot of discussion and a lot of concern among the community who follow the platform's development closely," reports Neowin. "Many users voiced strong opposition to the change, arguing that the existing domain name
  
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• Netflix Revenue Rises To $10.5 Billion Following Price Hike

  19-04-2025 01:20 via entertainment.slashdot.org
  
  Netflix's Q1 revenue rose to $10.5 billion, a 13% increase from last year, while net income grew to $2.9 billion. The company says it expects more growth in the coming months when it sees "the full quarter benefit from recent price changes and continued growth in membership and advertising revenue." The Verge reports: Netflix raised the prices across most of its plans in January, with its premium plan hitting $24.99 per month. It also increased the price of its Extra Member option -- its solutio
  
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• Study Finds 50% of Workers Use Unapproved AI Tools

  19-04-2025 00:40 via it.slashdot.org
  
  An anonymous reader quotes a report from SecurityWeek: An October 2024 study by Software AG suggests that half of all employees are Shadow AI users, and most of them wouldn't stop even if it was banned. The problem is the ease of access to AI tools, and a work environment that increasingly advocates the use of AI to improve corporate efficiency. It is little wonder that employees seek their own AI tools to improve their personal efficiency and maximize the potential for promotion. It is friction
  
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• Actors Who Sold AI Avatars Stuck In Black Mirror-Esque Dystopia

  19-04-2025 00:00 via slashdot.org
  
  Some actors who sold their likenesses to AI video companies like Synthesia now regret the decision, after finding their digital avatars used in misleading, embarrassing, or politically charged content. Ars Technica reports: Among them is a 29-year-old New York-based actor, Adam Coy, who licensed rights to his face and voice to a company called MCM for one year for $1,000 without thinking, "am I crossing a line by doing this?" His partner's mother later found videos where he appeared as a doomsay
  
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