ICT news

• Astronomers Confirm First 'Lone' Black Hole Discovery - and It's in the Milky Way

  20-04-2025 23:55 via science.slashdot.org
  
  For the first time, astronomers have confirmed the existence of a lone black hole," reports Science News — "one with no star orbiting it."It's "the only one so far," says Kailash Sahu, an astronomer at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore. In 2022, Sahu and his colleagues discovered the dark object coursing through the constellation Sagittarius. A second team disputed the claim, saying the body might instead be a neutron star. New observations from the Hubble Space Telescope
  
  Read more

• Conservations Say 'De-Extinction' Not the Answer to Saving Extinct Species

  20-04-2025 22:55 via news.slashdot.org
  
  There was excitement when biotech company Collosal announced genetically modified grey wolves (first hailed as a "de-extinction" of the Dire wolf species after several millennia). "But bioethicists and conservationists are expressing unease with the kind of scientific research," writes the Chicago Tribune. [Alternate URL here.]"Unfortunately, as clever as this science is ... it's can-do science and not should-do science," said Lindsay Marshall, director of science in animal research at Humane Wo
  
  Read more

• Conservationists Say 'De-Extinction' Not the Answer to Saving Extinct Species

  20-04-2025 22:55 via news.slashdot.org
  
  There was excitement when biotech company Collosal announced genetically modified grey wolves (first hailed as a "de-extinction" of the Dire wolf species after several millennia). "But bioethicists and conservationists are expressing unease with the kind of scientific research," writes the Chicago Tribune. [Alternate URL here.]"Unfortunately, as clever as this science is ... it's can-do science and not should-do science," said Lindsay Marshall, director of science in animal research at Humane Wo
  
  Read more

• Famed AI Researcher Launches Controversial Startup to Replace All Human Workers Everywhere

  20-04-2025 21:23 via hardware.slashdot.org
  
  TechCrunch looks at Mechanize, an ambitious new startup "whose founder — and the non-profit AI research organization he founded called Epoch — is being skewered on X..."Mechanize was launched on Thursday via a post on X by its founder, famed AI researcher Tamay Besiroglu. The startup's goal, Besiroglu wrote, is "the full automation of all work" and "the full automation of the economy."
  Does that mean Mechanize is working to replace every human worker with an AI agent bot? Essentially
  
  Read more

• Advertisement

• The Bees Are Disappearing Again

  20-04-2025 19:34 via news.slashdot.org
  
  "Honeybee colonies are under siege across much of North America..." reported the New York Times last week. [Alternate URL here.] Last winter beekeepers across America "began reporting massive beehive collapses. More than half of the roughly 2.8 million colonies collapsed, costing the industry about $600 million in economic losses..."
  America's Department of Agriculture says "sublethal exposure" to pesticides remains one of the biggest factors threatening honeybees, according to the article &mdas
  
  Read more

• Is There a Greener Way to Produce Iron?

  20-04-2025 18:34 via news.slashdot.org
  
  "Using electrochemistry, University of Oregon researchers have developed a way to make iron metal for steel production without burning fossil fuels..." the University of Oregon wrote last year. "Decarbonizing this step would do roughly as much to reduce greenhouse gas emissions as converting every gas-guzzling vehicle on the roads to electric... If scaled up, the process could help decarbonize one of the largest and most emissions-intensive industries worldwide," replacing carbon-spewing industr
  
  Read more

• ArcoLinux Lead Steps Down After Eight Years

  20-04-2025 17:34 via linux.slashdot.org
  
  "The time has come for me to step away," ArcoLinux lead Erik Dubois posted last week. ("After eight years of dedication to the ArcoLinux project and the broader Linux community...")
  'Learn, have fun, and enjoy' was our motto for the past eight years — and I really had fun doing all this," Dubois says in a video version of his farewell post. "And if we reflect back on this teaching and the building and promoting of Linux, it was fun. But the time has come for me to step away..."
  Over its ei
  
  Read more

• Water on Earth May Not Have Originated from an Asteroid Impact, Study Finds

  20-04-2025 16:34 via news.slashdot.org
  
  Discover magazine reports that a team of researchers have produced evidence that the ancient building blocks for water have been here on earth "since early in the planet's history, according to a study published in the journal Icarus."
  Pinpointing when and where Earth's hydrogen is an essential key to understanding how life arose on the planet. Without hydrogen, there's no water, and without water, life can't exist here. Ironically, researchers turned to a meteorite containing hydrogen to prove
  
  Read more

• Advertisement

• Open Source Advocate Argues DeepSeek is 'a Movement... It's Linux All Over Again'

  20-04-2025 13:34 via news.slashdot.org
  
  Matt Asay answered questions from Slashdot readers in 2010 (as the then-COO of Canonical). He currently runs developer relations at MongoDB (after holding similar positions at AWS and Adobe).
  This week he contributed an opinion to piece to InfoWorld arguing that DeepSeek "may have originated in China, but it stopped being Chinese the minute it was released on Hugging Face with an accompanying paper detailing its development."Soon after, a range of developers, including the Beijing Academy of Art
  
  Read more

• New 'Star Wars' Movie Announced Set 5 Years After 'Rise of Skywalker'

  20-04-2025 09:34 via entertainment.slashdot.org
  
  A new Star Wars movie — starring Ryan Gosling and directed by Shawn Levy — will be released in 2027, the two announced Friday at the "Star Wars Celebration" (a fan event in Japan). CNN reports:Set to begin production this fall, the movie will be set approximately five years after "Star Wars: Episode IX — The Rise of Skywalker," released in 2019, but will sit outside the Skywalker story as a standalone film. "The film... is an entirely new adventure featuring all-new characters
  
  Read more

• US Chipmakers Fear Ceding China's AI Market to Huawei After New Trump Restrictions

  20-04-2025 06:34 via yro.slashdot.org
  
  The Trump administration is "taking measures to restrict the sale of AI chips by Nvidia, Advanced Micro Devices and Intel," especially in China, reports the New York Times. But that's triggered a series of dominoes. "In the two days after the limits became public, shares of Nvidia, the world's leading AI chipmaker, fell 8.4%. AMD's shares dropped 7.4%, and Intel's were down 6.8%." (AMD expects up to $800 million in charges after the move, according to CNBC, while NVIDIA said it would take a quar
  
  Read more

• Scientists Find Rare Evidence Earth is 'Peeling' Under the Sierra Nevada Mountains

  20-04-2025 03:39 via news.slashdot.org
  
  "Seismologist Deborah Kilb was wading through California earthquake records from the past four decades when she noticed something odd," reports CNN, "a series of deep earthquakes that had occurred under the Sierra Nevada at a depth where Earth's crust would typically be too hot and high pressure for seismic activity..."Kilb flagged the data to Vera Schulte-Pelkum, a research scientist at the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences and an associate research professor of geolo
  
  Read more

• Could AI and Automation Find Better Treatments for Cancer - and Maybe Aging?

  20-04-2025 00:34 via science.slashdot.org
  
  CNN looks at "one field that's really benefitting" from the use of AI: "the discovery of new medicines".The founder/CEO of London-based LabGenius says their automated robotic system can assemble "thousands of different DNA constructs, each of which encodes a completely unique therapeutic molecule that we'll then test in the lab. This is something that historically would've had to have been done by hand." In short, CNN says, their system lets them "design and conduct experiments, and learn from t
  
  Read more

Follow @newslocke_ict on Twitter!