ICT news

• Regeneron Pharmaceuticals To Buy 23andMe and Its Data For $256 Million

  19-05-2025 23:30 via yro.slashdot.org
  
  Regeneron Pharmaceuticals is acquiring most of 23andMe's assets for $256 million. The sale includes 23andMe's Personal Genome Service, Total Health and Research Services business lines. What's not included is 23andMe's telehealth unit, Lemonaid Health, which the company acquired for around $400 million in 2021. It'll be shut down, but all staffers will remain employed. CNBC reports: The deal is still subject to approval by the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the Eastern District of Missouri. Pending a
  
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• xAI's Grok 3 Comes To Microsoft Azure

  19-05-2025 22:50 via slashdot.org
  
  An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Microsoft on Monday became one of the first hyperscalers to provide managed access to Grok, the AI model developed by billionaire Elon Musk's AI startup, xAI. Available through Microsoft's Azure AI Foundry platform, Grok -- specifically Grok 3 and Grok 3 mini -- will "have all the service-level agreements Azure customers expect from any Microsoft product," says Microsoft. They'll also be billed directly by Microsoft, as is the case with the ot
  
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• AI is More Persuasive Than People in Online Debates

  19-05-2025 22:10 via slashdot.org
  
  Chatbots are more persuasive in online debates than people -- especially when they are able to personalize their arguments using information about their opponent. From a report: The finding, published in Nature Human Behaviour on 19 May, highlights how large language models (LLMs) could be used to influence people's opinions, for example in political campaigns or targeted advertising.
  "Obviously as soon as people see that you can persuade people more with LLMs, they're going to start using them,
  
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• European 'Green' Investments Hold Billions in Fossil Fuel Majors

  19-05-2025 21:30 via news.slashdot.org
  
  An anonymous reader shares a report: European "green" funds holding more than $33 billion of investments in major oil and gas companies have been revealed by an investigation, despite fossil fuels being the root cause of the climate crisis. Some of these investment funds used branding such as Sustainable Global Stars and Europe Climate Pathway.
  Over $18 billion was invested in the five biggest polluters: TotalEnergies, Shell, ExxonMobil, Chevron and BP. These topped a 2023 Carbon Majors ranking
  
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• Microsoft's Edit on Windows is a New Command-Line Text Editor

  19-05-2025 20:53 via developers.slashdot.org
  
  Microsoft unveiled "Edit on Windows," a new command-line text editor, at its Build conference today. The open-source tool allows developers to edit files directly in the command line without switching to another app, similar to vim but designed to be more user-friendly.
  Accessible by typing "edit" in a command prompt, the lightweight editor (less than 250KB) includes features like multiple file support via ctrl + P shortcuts, find and replace functionality, and regular expression support. "What
  
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• LinkedIn Executive Warns AI Threatens Entry-Level Jobs as Graduate Unemployment Rises

  19-05-2025 20:10 via slashdot.org
  
  AI is eroding entry-level positions across multiple industries, threatening the traditional career ladder for young professionals, LinkedIn's chief economic opportunity officer warned Monday. College graduate unemployment has risen 30% since September 2022, compared to 18% for workers overall, according to LinkedIn data. The company's research shows Generation Z workers expressing greater pessimism about their futures than any other age group.
  "Breaking first is the bottom rung of the career lad
  
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• Microsoft's Plan To Fix the Web: Letting Every Website Run AI Search for Cheap

  19-05-2025 19:30 via tech.slashdot.org
  
  Microsoft has announced NLWeb, an open protocol designed to democratize AI-powered search capabilities for websites and apps. Developed by Microsoft technical fellow Ramanathan V. Guha, who previously created RSS and Schema.org, NLWeb allows site owners to implement ChatGPT-style natural language search with minimal code. The protocol enables websites to process complex queries like "spicy and crunchy appetizers for Diwali" or "jackets warm enough for Quebec," requiring only an AI model, some co
  
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• Microsoft Open Sources Windows Subsystem for Linux

  19-05-2025 18:54 via news.slashdot.org
  
  Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) is now open source, Microsoft said Monday. The tool, which allows developers to run Linux distributions directly in Windows, is available for download, modification, and contribution. "We want Windows to be a great dev box," said Pavan Davuluri, corporate VP at Microsoft. "Having great WSL performance and capabilities" allows developers "to live in the Windows-native experience and take advantage of all they need in Linux."
  First launched in 2016 with an emulate
  
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• Germany Drops Opposition To Nuclear Power

  19-05-2025 18:01 via hardware.slashdot.org
  
  An anonymous reader shares a report: Germany has dropped its long-held opposition to nuclear power, in the first concrete sign of rapprochement with France by Berlin's new government led by conservative Chancellor Friedrich Merz.
  Berlin has signalled to Paris it will no longer block French efforts to ensure nuclear power is treated on par with renewable energy in EU legislation, according to French and German officials.
  The move resolves a major dispute between the two countries that has delayed
  
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• How Miami Schools Are Leading 100,000 Students Into the A.I. Future

  19-05-2025 17:22 via news.slashdot.org
  
  Miami-Dade County Public Schools, the nation's third-largest school district, is now deploying Google's Gemini chatbots to more than 105,000 high school students -- marking the largest U.S. school district AI deployment to date. This represents a dramatic reversal from just two years ago when the district blocked such tools over cheating and misinformation concerns.
  The initiative follows President Trump's recent executive order promoting AI integration "in all subject areas" from kindergarten t
  
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• New South Wales Education Department Caught Unaware After Microsoft Teams Began Collecting Students' Biometric Data

  19-05-2025 16:40 via yro.slashdot.org
  
  New submitter optical_phiber writes: In March 2025, the New South Wales (NSW) Department of Education discovered that Microsoft Teams had begun collecting students' voice and facial biometric data without their prior knowledge. This occurred after Microsoft enabled a Teams feature called 'voice and face enrollment' by default, which creates biometric profiles to enhance meeting experiences and transcriptions via its CoPilot AI tool.
  The NSW department learned of the data collection a month after
  
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• Thoughts About the Evolution of Mainstream Macroeconomics Over the Last 40 Years

  19-05-2025 16:00 via slashdot.org
  
  Abstract of a paper featured on NBER: This year marks the 40th anniversary of the NBER Macro Annual Conference, founded in 1986. This paper reviews the evolution of mainstream macroeconomics since then. It presents my views, informed by a survey of a number of researchers who have made important contributions to the field. I develop two main arguments.
  The first is that, starting from strikingly different positions, there has been substantial convergence, in terms of methodology, architecture, a
  
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• Danes Are Finally Going Nuclear. They Have To, Because of All Their Renewables

  19-05-2025 13:16 via hardware.slashdot.org
  
  "The Danish government plans to evaluate the prospect of beginning a nuclear power programme," reports the Telegraph, noting that this week Denmark lifted a nuclear power ban imposed 40 years ago.
  Unlike its neighbours in Sweden and Germany, Denmark has never had a civil nuclear power programme. It has only ever had three small research reactors, the last of which closed in 2001. Most of the renewed interest in nuclear seen around the world stems from the expected growth in electricity demand fr
  
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• EV Sales Keep Growing In the US, Represent 20% of Global Car Sales and Half in China

  19-05-2025 09:16 via tech.slashdot.org
  "Despite many obstacles — and what you may read elsewhere — electric-vehicle sales continue to grow at a healthy pace in the U.S. market," Cox Automotive reported this week. "Roughly 7.5% of total new-vehicle sales in the first quarter were electric vehicles, an increase from 7% a year earlier."
  An anonymous reader shared this analysis from Autoweek:
  "Despite a cloud of uncertainty around future EV interest and potential economic headwinds hanging over the automotive industry, consum
  
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• Since 2022 Nuclear Fusion Breakthrough, US Researchers Have More Than Doubled Its Power Output

  19-05-2025 05:06 via hardware.slashdot.org
  TechCrunch reports:The world's only net-positive fusion experiment has been steadily ramping up the amount of power it produces, TechCrunch has learned.In recent attempts, the team at the U.S. Department of Energy's National Ignition Facility (NIF) increased the yield of the experiment, first to 5.2 megajoules and then again to 8.6 megajoules, according to a source with knowledge of the experiment. The new results are significant improvements over the historic experiment in 2022, which was the f
  
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• Why We're Unlikely to Get Artificial General Intelligence Any Time Soon

  19-05-2025 02:06 via slashdot.org
  OpenAI CEO and Sam Altman believe Artificial General Intelligence could arrive within the next few years. But the speculations of some technologists "are getting ahead of reality," writes the New York Times, adding that many scientists "say no one will reach AGI without a new idea — something beyond the powerful neural networks that merely find patterns in data. That new idea could arrive tomorrow. But even then, the industry would need years to develop it."
  "The technology we're building
  
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• Bungie Blames Stolen 'Marathon' Art On Former Developer

  19-05-2025 00:19 via games.slashdot.org
  An anonymous reader shared this report from Kotaku:One of the most striking things about Bungie's Marathon is its presentation. The sci-fi extraction shooter combines bleak settings with bright colors in a way that makes it feel a bit like a sneaker promo meets Ghost in the Shell, or as designer Jeremy Skoog put it, "Y2K Cyberpunk mixed with Acid Graphic Design Posters." But it now looks like at least a few of the visual design elements that appeared in the recent alpha test were lifted from eig
  
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