An anonymous reader quotes a report from CBS News: New York Gov. Kathy Hochul says a $254 billion state budget deal has been reached, including a "bell-to-bell" school cellphone ban. [...] The distraction-free policy would take effect next school year, making New York the largest state in the country with a "bell-to-bell" cellphone ban. Hochul says the plan will help protect children from addictive technology and improve their mental health. The New York State United Teachers union also came out in support of the ban, saying "we are at a crisis point."

The governor previously outlined the proposal back in January, saying it would ban the use of smartphones and other internet-enabled devices on school grounds during the school day. That includes classroom time, lunch and study hall periods. "A bell-to-bell ban, morning until the day is over, is not going to hurt your kids. It's going to help them emerge with stronger mental health and resiliency," she told CBS News New York at the time.

Hochul said the ban would include smartphones and other personal "smart" devices, like smartwatches. Exemptions could be made if a student requires a device to manage a medical condition or for translation purposes. Cellphones that don't have internet capability and devices that are provided by the school for lesson plans would still be allowed. The proposal would let individual schools come up with their own ways to implement the ban and store the devices, and schools would be able to decide whether to have students leave them in things like pouches, lockers or cubbies. It would also require schools to make sure parents have a way to contact their children during the day, if needed. "Protecting our communities requires more than streets where people feel safe. We need classrooms where young minds can flourish, and that means eliminating once and for all the digital distractions that steal our kids' attention," the governor said, adding, "We protected our kids before from cigarettes, alcohol and drunk driving, and now, we're protecting them from addictive technology designed to hijack their attention."

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Ars Technica's Andrew Cunningham reports: Intel's oddball Core Ultra 200V laptop chips -- codenamed Lunar Lake -- will apparently be a one-off experiment, not to be replicated in future Intel laptop chips. They're Intel's only processors with memory integrated onto the CPU package; the only ones with a neural processing unit that meets Microsoft's Copilot+ performance requirements; and the only ones with Intel's best-performing integrated GPUs, the Intel Arc 130V and 140V.

Today, Intel announced some updates to its graphics driver that specifically benefit those integrated GPUs, welcome news for anyone who bought one and is trying to get by with it as an entry-level gaming system. Intel says that version 32.0.101.6734 of its graphics driver can speed up average frame rates in some games by around 10 percent, and can speed up "1 percent low FPS" (that is, for any given frames per second measurement, whatever your frame rate is the slowest 1 percent of the time) by as much as 25 percent. This should, in theory, make games run better in general and ease some of the stuttering you notice when your game's performance dips down to that 1 percent level.

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Google Play's app marketplace has seen a dramatic 47% drop in available apps
-- from 3.4 million to 1.8 million -- since the start of 2024. An analysis by app intelligence provider Appfigures attributes the decline to stricter quality standards, expanded human reviews, and increased enforcement against low-quality and deceptive apps. TechCrunch reports: In July 2024, Google announced it would raise the minimum quality requirements for apps, which may have impacted the number of available Play Store app listings.

Instead of only banning broken apps that crashed, wouldn't install, or run properly, the company said it would begin banning apps that demonstrated "limited functionality and content." That included static apps without app-specific features, such as text-only apps or PDF file apps. It also included apps that provided little content, like those that only offered a single wallpaper. Additionally, Google banned apps that were designed to do nothing or have no function, which may have been tests or other abandoned developer efforts.

Reached for comment, Google confirmed that its new policies were factors here, which also included an expanded set of verification requirements, required app testing for new personal developer accounts, and expanded human reviews to check for apps that try to deceive or defraud users. In addition, the company pointed to other 2024 investments in AI for threat detection, stronger privacy policies, improved developer tools, and more. As a result, Google prevented 2.36 million policy-violating apps from being published on its Play Store and banned more than 158,000 developer accounts that had attempted to publish harmful apps, it said. TechCrunch also notes that a new trader status rule, which went into effect in the EU this February, could be another contributing factor. It requires developers to display their names and addresses in their app listings, and failure to comply would see their apps removed from EU app stores.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Hill: Daily exposure to certain chemicals used to manufacture household plastics may be connected to more than 356,000 cardiovascular-related deaths in 2018 alone, a new analysis has found. These chemicals, called phthalates, are present in products around the world but have particular popularity in the Middle East, South Asia, East Asia and the Pacific -- regions that collectively bore about 75 percent of the global death total, according to the research, published on Tuesday in the Lancet eBioMedicine.

Phthalates, often used in personal care products, children's toys and food packaging and processing materials, are known to disrupt hormone function and have been linked to birth defects, infertility, learning disabilities and neurological disorders. The NYU Langone Health team focused in the analysis on a kind of phthalate called di-2-ethylhexyl phthalate (DEHP), which is used to make items like food containers and medical equipment softer and more flexible. Scientists have already shown that exposure to DEHP can trigger an overactive immune response in the heart's arteries, which over time can be linked to increased risk of heart attack or stroke.

In the new analysis, the researchers estimated that DEHP exposure played a role in 356,238 global deaths in 2018, or nearly 13.5 percent of heart disease mortality among men and women ages 55 through 64. [...] These findings are in line with the team's previous research, which in 2021 determined that phthalates were connected to more than 50,000 premature deaths each year among older Americans -- most of whom succumbed to heart conditions. But this latest analysis is likely the first global estimate of cardiovascular mortality resulting from exposure to these environmental contaminants [...]. In a separate report from the New York Times, author Nina Agrawal highlights some of the caveats with the data.

First of all, the study relies heavily on statistical modeling and assumptions, drawing from prior research that may include biases and confounding factors like diet or socioeconomic status. It also uses U.S.-based risk estimates that may not generalize globally and focuses only on one type of phthalate (DEHP). Additionally, as Agrawal points out, this is an observational study, showing correlation rather than causation. As such, more direct, long-term research is needed to clarify the true health impact of phthalate exposure.

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