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• Obesity Jab Drug Fails To Slow Alzheimer's

  24-11-2025 21:01 via science.slashdot.org
  Drug maker Novo Nordisk says semaglutide, the active ingredient for the weight loss jab Wegovy, does not slow Alzheimer's -- despite initial hopes that it might help against dementia. From a report: Researchers began two large trials involving more than 3,800 people after reports the medicine was having an impact in the real world. But the studies showed the GLP-1 drug, which is already used to manage type 2 diabetes and obesity, made no difference compared to a dummy drug. The disappointing res
  
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• RoboCrop: Teaching Robots How To Pick Tomatoes

  10-12-2025 11:00 via hardware.slashdot.org
  alternative_right quotes a report from Phys.org: To teach robots how to become tomato pickers, Osaka Metropolitan University Assistant Professor Takuya Fujinaga, Graduate School of Engineering, programmed them to evaluate the ease of harvesting for each tomato before attempting to pick it. Fujinaga's new model uses image recognition paired with statistical analysis to evaluate the optimal approach direction for each fruit. The system involves image processing/vision of the fruit, its stems, and
  
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• In a Major New Report, Scientists Build Rationale For Sending Astronauts To Mars

  10-12-2025 08:00 via science.slashdot.org
  A major scientific report published Tuesday argues that sending astronauts to Mars is justified by the quest to find life and conduct research that robots alone can't achieve. "We're searching for life on Mars," said Dava Newman, a professor in the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and co-chair of the committee that wrote the report. "The answer to the question 'are we alone' is always going to be 'maybe,' unless it becomes yes." Ars Technica rep
  
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• 'Food and Fossil Fuel Production Causing $5 Billion of Environmental Damage an Hour'

  10-12-2025 04:30 via news.slashdot.org
  An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Guardian: The unsustainable production of food and fossil fuels causes $5 billion of environmental damage per hour, according to a major UN report. Ending this harm was a key part of the global transformation of governance, economics and finance required "before collapse becomes inevitable," the experts said. The Global Environment Outlook (GEO) report, which is produced by 200 researchers for the UN Environment Program, said the climate crisis, destr
  
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• OpenAI Joins the Linux Foundation's New Agentic AI Foundation

  10-12-2025 03:02 via news.slashdot.org
  OpenAI, alongside Anthropic and Block, have launched the Agentic AI Foundation under the Linux Foundation, describing it as a neutral home for standards as agentic systems move into real production. It may sound well-meaning, but Slashdot reader and NERDS.xyz founder BrianFagioli isn't buying the narrative. In a report for NERDS.xyz, Fagioli writes: Instead of opening models, training data, or anything that would meaningfully shift power toward the community, the companies involved are donating
  
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• Netflix Faces Consumer Class Action Over $72 Billion Warner Bros Deal

  10-12-2025 02:25 via yro.slashdot.org
  Netflix's $72 billion bid to buy Warner Bros Discovery has triggered a consumer class action claiming the merger would crush competition, erase HBO Max as a rival, and hand Netflix control over major franchises. Reuters reports: The proposed class action (PDF) was filed on Monday by a subscriber to Warner Bros-owned HBO Max who said the proposed deal threatened to reduce competition in the U.S. subscription video-on-demand market. "Netflix has demonstrated repeated willingness to raise subscript
  
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• Ask Slashdot: What Are the Best Locally-Hosted Wireless Security Cameras?

  10-12-2025 01:45 via yro.slashdot.org
  Longtime Slashdot reader Randseed writes: With the likes of Google Nest, Ring, and others cooperating with law enforcement, I started to look for affordable wireless IP security cameras that I can put around my house. Unfortunately, it looks like almost every thing now incorporates some kind of cloud-based slop. All I really want is to put up some cameras, hook them up to my LAN, and install something like ZoneMinder. What are the most economical, wireless IP security cameras that I can set up w
  
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• More People Crowdfunded Basic Needs In 2025, GoFundMe Report Shows

  10-12-2025 01:02 via news.slashdot.org
  An anonymous reader quotes a report from Fast Company: More and more people are turning to GoFundMe for help covering the cost of housing, food, and other basic needs. The for-profit crowdfunding platform's annual "Year in Help" report, released Tuesday, underscored ongoing concerns around affordability. The number of fundraisers started to help cover essential expenses such as rent, utilities, and groceries jumped 20%, according to the company's 2025 review, after already quadrupling last year.
  
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• Congress Quietly Strips Right-To-Repair Provisions From US Military Spending Bill

  10-12-2025 00:20 via yro.slashdot.org
  Congress quietly removed provisions that would have let the U.S. military fix its own equipment without relying on contractors, despite bipartisan and Pentagon support. The Register reports: The House and Senate versions of the NDAA passed earlier both included provisions that would have extended common right-to-repair rules to US military branches, requiring defense contractors to provide access to technical data, information, and components that enabled military customers to quickly repair ess
  
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• Millions of Australian Teens Lose Access To Social Media As Ban Takes Effect

  09-12-2025 23:40 via tech.slashdot.org
  Australia's world-first ban blocking under-16s from major social platforms has come into effect. The BBC is live reporting the reactions "both from within Australia and outside it." From the report: I've been speaking to 12-year-old Paloma, who lives in Sydney and says she is "sad" about the ban. She spends between 30 minutes and two hours a day on social media. "I'm upset... because I am part of several communities on Snapchat and TikTok," she tells me. "I've developed good friendships on the a
  
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• Apple's Slow AI Pace Becomes a Strength As Market Grows Weary of Spending

  09-12-2025 23:02 via apple.slashdot.org
  An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: Shares of Apple were battered earlier this year as the iPhone maker faced repeated complaints about its lack of an artificial intelligence strategy. But as the AI trade faces increasing scrutiny, that hesitance has gone from a weakness to a strength -- and it's showing up in the stock market. Through the first six months of 2025, Apple was the second-worst performer among the Magnificent Seven tech giants, as its shares tumbled 18% through the
  
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• 2025 Will Be World's Second or Third-Hottest Year on Record, EU Scientists Say

  09-12-2025 22:22 via news.slashdot.org
  This year is set to be the world's second or third-warmest on record, potentially surpassed only by 2024'S record-breaking heat, the European Union's Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S) said on Tuesday. From a report: The data is the latest from C3S following last month's COP30 climate summit, where governments failed to agree to substantial new measures to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, reflecting strained geopolitics as the U.S. rolls back its efforts, and some countries seek to weaken C
  
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• Microsoft 365 Prices Rising For Businesses and Governments in July 2026

  09-12-2025 21:41 via it.slashdot.org
  Microsoft has announced that it will raise prices on its Microsoft 365 productivity suites for businesses and government clients starting in July 2026, marking the first commercial price increase since 2022. Small business and frontline worker plans face the steepest hikes: Business Basic jumps 16.7% to $7 per user per month, while frontline worker subscriptions surge up to 33%. Enterprise plans see more modest bumps, ranging from 5.3% for E5 to 8.3% for E3. Microsoft attributed the increases to
  
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• The Inevitable Shape of Cheap Online Retail

  09-12-2025 21:01 via slashdot.org
  Pinduoduo in China, Shopee in Southeast Asia, and Meesho in India operate in markets that could hardly be more different -- an upper-middle-income industrial state, a stitched-together archipelago of under-banked economies, and a country where three-quarters of retail is unorganized and e-commerce penetration sits at about 7% -- yet all three have landed on the same business model.
  These platforms run asset-light marketplaces specializing in cheap goods and slow delivery, monetizing through logi
  
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• How Pokemon Cards Became a Stock Market For Millennials

  09-12-2025 20:28 via games.slashdot.org
  The Pokemon Trading Card Game has quietly transformed into something its creators never intended: a speculative asset class dominated by adults hunting for profit while children struggle to find a single pack on store shelves. The resale market has climbed so high that the latest set, Phantasmal Flames, had a rare Charizard illustration valued at more than $800 before anyone had even pulled one from a pack -- a pack that retails for about $5.3.
  Ben Thyer, owner of BathTCG in Bath, has watched hi
  
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• Microsoft To Invest $17.5 Billion in India

  09-12-2025 19:15 via slashdot.org
  Microsoft announced on Tuesday its largest-ever investment in Asia -- $17.5 billion over four years starting in 2026 -- to expand cloud and AI infrastructure across India, fund skilling programs, and support ongoing operations in the country. The commitment adds to a $3 billion investment the company announced in January 2025 that is on track to be spent by the end of 2026. A new hyperscale cloud region in Hyderabad is set to go live in mid-2026 and will be Microsoft's largest in India, comprisi
  
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• What Happens When an 'Infinite-Money Machine' Unravels

  09-12-2025 18:25 via news.slashdot.org
  Michael Saylor's software company Strategy, formerly known as MicroStrategy, built a financial model that some observers called an "infinite-money machine" by stockpiling hundreds of thousands of bitcoins and issuing stock and debt to buy more, but that machine appears to be breaking down. The company's stock peaked above $450 in mid-July and ended November at $177.18, a 60% decline. Bitcoin fell only 25% over the same period. The gap between Strategy's market cap and the value of its bitcoin ho
  
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• Xbox Is Bleeding Out

  09-12-2025 17:50 via games.slashdot.org
  Microsoft's Xbox consoles were conspicuously absent from Black Friday's winners, failing to crack the top three in U.S. sales during one of the retail calendar's most important weeks. According to Circana analyst Mat Piscatella, the PlayStation 5 captured 47% of Black Friday week console sales ending November 29, followed by the Nintendo Switch 2 at 24% and -- somewhat remarkably -- the NEX Playground, a Kinect-like Android device aimed at children, at 14%.
  Microsoft ran no promotions on its con
  
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• The Rarest of All Diseases Are Becoming Treatable

  09-12-2025 17:11 via science.slashdot.org
  In February, a six-month-old baby named KJ Muldoon became the first person ever to receive a CRISPR gene-editing treatment customized specifically for his unique genetic mutation, a milestone that researchers say marks a turning point in how medicine might approach the thousands of rare diseases that collectively affect 30 million Americans. Muldoon was born with a type of urea-cycle disorder that gives patients roughly a 50% chance of surviving infancy and typically requires a liver transplant;
  
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• 'Colleges Oversold Education. Now They Must Sell Connection'

  09-12-2025 16:21 via news.slashdot.org
  A tenured USC professor is arguing that universities need to fundamentally rethink their value proposition as AI rapidly closes the gap on human instruction and a loneliness epidemic grips the generation most likely to be sitting in their lecture halls. Eric Anicich, an associate professor at USC's Marshall School of Business, wrote in the Los Angeles Times that nearly three-quarters of 16- to 24-year-olds now report feeling lonely, young adults spend 70% less time with friends in person compare
  
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• Microsoft Excel Turns 40, Remains Stubbornly Unkillable

  09-12-2025 15:41 via it.slashdot.org
  Microsoft Excel, the 40-year-old spreadsheet application that helped establish personal computers as essential workplace tools and contributed to Microsoft's current valuation of nearly $4 trillion, has weathered both the rise of cloud computing and the current AI boom largely unscathed. In its most recent quarter, commercial revenue for Microsoft 365 -- the bundle including Excel, Word, and PowerPoint -- increased 17% year over year, and consumer revenue rose 28%.
  The software traces its origin
  
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• India's Aviation Crisis Is All About Too Big to Tame

  09-12-2025 15:01 via tech.slashdot.org
  India's dominant airline IndiGo has cancelled roughly 3,000 flights since last week after new pilot fatigue regulations collided with technical issues and the seasonal schedule shift, stranding more than half a million passengers and forcing aviation authorities to reverse course on the safety rules they had just implemented.
  InterGlobe Aviation, IndiGo's parent company, told regulators that stricter requirements for night flying and weekly rest periods created an acute crew shortage. The Airlin
  
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• Science Journal Retracts Study On Safety of Monsanto's Roundup

  09-12-2025 14:00 via science.slashdot.org
  An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Guardian: The journal Regulatory Toxicology and Pharmacology has formally retracted a sweeping scientific paper published in 2000 that became a key defense for Monsanto's claim that Roundup herbicide and its active ingredient glyphosate don't cause cancer. Martin van den Berg, the journal's editor in chief, said in a note accompanying the retraction that he had taken the step because of "serious ethical concerns regarding the independence and accounta
  
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• Opportunistic Pro-Russia Hacktivists Attack US and Global Critical Infrastructure

  09-12-2025 13:00 via cisa.gov
  CISA, in partnership with Federal Bureau of Investigation, the National Security Agency, Department of Energy, Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of Defense Cyber Crime Center, and other international partners published a joint cybersecurity advisory, Pro-Russia Hacktivists Create Opportunistic Attacks Against US and Global Critical Infrastructure.
  This advisory, published as an addition to the joint fact sheet on Primary Mitigations to Reduce Cyber Threats to Operational Techn
  
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• Evidence That Humans Now Speak In a Chatbot-Influenced Dialect Is Getting Stronger

  09-12-2025 11:00 via tech.slashdot.org
  Researchers and moderators are increasingly concerned that ChatGPT-style language is bleeding into everyday speech and writing. The topic has been explored in the past but "two new, more anecdotal reports, suggest that our chatbot dialect isn't just something that can be found through close analysis of data," reports Gizmodo. "It might be an obvious, every day fact of life now." Slashdot reader joshuark shares an excerpt from the report: Over on Reddit, according to a new Wired story by Kat Tenb
  
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• Claude Code Is Coming To Slack

  09-12-2025 08:00 via developers.slashdot.org
  Anthropic is bringing Claude Code directly into Slack, letting developers spin up coding sessions from chat threads and automate workflows without leaving the app. TechCrunch reports: Previously, developers could only get lightweight coding help via Claude in Slack -- like writing snippets, debugging, and explanations. Now they can tag @Claude to spin up a complete coding session using Slack context like bug reports or feature requests. Claude analyzes recent messages to determine the right repo
  
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• Cold Case Inquiries Stall After Ancestry.com Revisits Policy For Users

  09-12-2025 04:30 via science.slashdot.org
  An anonymous reader quotes a report from the New York Times: Since online genealogy services began operating, millions of people have sent them saliva samples in hopes of learning about their family roots and discovering far-flung relatives. These services also appeal to law enforcement authorities, who have used them to solve cold case murders and to investigate crimes like the 2022 killing of four University of Idaho students. Crime-scene DNA submitted to genealogy sites has helped investigato
  
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• 193 Cybercrims Arrested, Accused of Plotting 'Violence-As-a-Service'

  09-12-2025 03:00 via yro.slashdot.org
  Europol's GRIMM taskforce has arrested nearly 200 people accused of running or participating in "violence-as-a-service" schemes where cybercrime groups recruit youth online for real-world attacks. "These individuals are groomed or coerced into committing a range of violent crimes, from acts of intimidation and torture to murder," the European police said on Monday. The Register reports: GRIMM began in April, and includes investigators from Belgium, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Iceland, the
  
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• Nvidia Can Sell H200 Chips To China For 25% US Cut

  09-12-2025 02:30 via hardware.slashdot.org
  The Trump administration will allow Nvidia to resume selling H200 chips to China, but only if the U.S. government takes a 25% cut. Axios reports: Trump said on Truth Social that he'll allow Nvidia to sell H200 chips -- the generation of chips before its current, more-advanced Blackwell lineup -- to China, with the U.S. government pocketing a quarter of the revenue. He said he would apply "the same approach to AMD, Intel, and other GREAT American Companies."American defense hawks fear that China
  
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• More Than 200 Environmental Groups Demand Halt To New US Datacenters

  09-12-2025 02:10 via news.slashdot.org
  An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Guardian: A coalition of more than 230 environmental groups has demanded a national moratorium on new datacenters in the U.S., the latest salvo in a growing backlash to a booming artificial intelligence industry that has been blamed for escalating electricity bills and worsening the climate crisis. The green groups, including Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth, Food & Water Watch and dozens of local organizations, have urged members of Congress to h
  
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