Watch the "Blue Ghost" lunar lander attempt its moon landing.

The actual landing is scheduled to happen at 3:34 a.m. Eastern time, according to CNN, while "The first images from the mission should be delivered about a half hour after..."
Success is not guaranteed... [B]roadly speaking, about half of all lunar landing attempts have ended in failure. Jason Kim, Firefly's CEO, told CNN in December that his company's experience building rockets has given him a high degree of confidence in Blue Ghost's propulsion systems. "We're using (reaction control system) thrusters that we've built, developed in-house, that are designed by the same people that design our rocket engines. That reduces risk," Kim said. "All that gives us high confidence when we have people that do rocket engines really, really well — some of the best in the world."

But the New York Times notes that Blue Ghost, built by Austin, Texas-based Firefly Aerospace, is just one of three robotic spacecraft "in space right now that are aiming to set down on the moon's surface."

Blue Ghost has performed nearly perfectly. For the first 25 days, it circled Earth as the company turned on and checked the spacecraft's systems. It then fired its engine on a four-day journey toward the moon, entering orbit on February 13. The spacecraft's cameras have recorded close-up views of the moon's cratered surface...

On the same SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket that launched Blue Ghost to orbit was Resilience, a lunar lander built by Ispace of Japan. The two missions are separate, but Ispace, seeking a cheaper ride to space, had asked SpaceX for a rideshare, that is, hitching a ride as a secondary payload... Although Resilience launched at the same time as Blue Ghost, it is taking a longer, more fuel-efficient route to the moon and is expected to enter orbit around the moon in early May.

The third lunar lander heading to the moon is Athena (from Intuitive Machines), which launched Thursday on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, "marking the first time humanity has had three lunar landers en route to the Moon at the same time," according to a statement from the company. Space.com notes that "To date, just one private spacecraft has ever landed successfully on the moon — Intuitive Machines' Odysseus, which did so in February 2024."

Athena launched with several other spacecraft last night, including Odin, a scouting probe built by the asteroid-mining company Astroforge, and NASA's water-hunting Lunar Trailblazer. Lunar Trailblazer is also moon-bound, though it's headed for orbit rather than the surface...

[ Read more of this story ]( https://science.slashdot.org/story/25/03/02/0425256/watch-blue-ghost-attempt-its-landing-on-the-moon?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

A malicious PyPi package effectively turned its users' systems "into an illicit network for facilitating bulk music downloads," writes The Hacker News.

Though the package has been removed from PyPI, researchers at security platform Socket.dev say it enabled "coordinated, unauthorized music downloads from Deezer — a popular streaming service founded in France in 2007."

Although automslc, which has been downloaded over 100,000 times, purports to offer music automation and metadata retrieval, it covertly bypasses Deezer's access restrictions... The package is designed to log into Deezer, harvest track metadata, request full-length streaming URLs, and download complete audio files in clear violation of Deezer's API terms... [I]t orchestrates a distributed piracy operation by leveraging both user-supplied and hardcoded Deezer credentials to create sessions with Deezer's API. This approach enables full access to track metadata and the decryption tokens required to generate full-length track URLs.

Additionally, the package routinely communicates with a remote server... to update download statuses and submit metadata, thereby centralizing control and allowing the threat actor to monitor and coordinate the distributed downloading operation. In doing so, automslc exposes critical track details — including Deezer IDs, International Standard Recording Codes, track titles, and internal tokens like MD5_ORIGIN (a hash used in generating decryption URLs) — which, when collected en masse, can be used to reassemble full track URLs and facilitate unauthorized downloads...

Even if a user pays for access to the service, the content is licensed, not owned. The automslc package circumvents licensing restrictions by enabling downloads and potential redistribution, which is outside the bounds of fair use...
"The malicious package was initially published in 2019, and its popularity (over 100,000 downloads) indicates wide distribution..."

[ Read more of this story ]( https://yro.slashdot.org/story/25/03/02/064255/malicious-pypi-package-exploited-deezers-api-orchestrates-a-distributed-piracy-operation?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

Petawatt lasers have already allowed scientists to "manipulate materials in new ways, emulate the conditions inside planets, and even split atoms," reports Science magazine. "Now, accelerator physicists have matched that feat, producing petawatt pulses of electrons that could also have spectacular applications..."

Described in a paper published Thursday in Physical Review Letters, the electron pulses last one-quadrillionth of a second but carry 100 kiloamps of current. "It's a supercool experiment," says Sergei Nagaitsev, an accelerator physicist at Brookhaven National Laboratory who was not involved in the work. Richard D'Arcy, a plasma accelerator physicist at the University of Oxford, adds, "It's not just an experimental demonstration of something interesting, it's a steppingstone on the way to megaamp beams." If achievable, those even more powerful beams might begin to perform extraordinary feats such as ripping particles out of empty space, he says...

[A]mped-up lasers would open the way to, for example, probing chemical processes as they happen, says Sergei Nagaitsev [an accelerator physicist at Brookhaven National Laboratory who was not involved in the experiment]. "These are the easy pickings." An ultraintense electron pulse could also be used to generate plasmas like those seen in astrophysics, such as the jets of matter and radiation that shoot out of certain stellar explosions at near-light-speed. Researchers need only fire the electron beam into the right target. "This is a fantastic relativistic drill," Ferrario says. "The interaction of this with matter could be very interesting."

Superintense electron bunches might someday even probe the nature of empty space. They produce a hugely intense electric field, so if one of them were to collide with an ultraintense laser pulse, which also contains a huge electric field, it would expose space to an incredibly strong electrical polarization, D'Arcy notes. If that field is strong enough, it should begin to rip particle-antiparticle pairs out of the vacuum, a phenomenon predicted by quantum physics but never observed. "You can access areas of particle physics that are inaccessible elsewhere," Darcy says.
Thanks to Slashdot reader sciencehabit for sharing the article.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://science.slashdot.org/story/25/03/01/1943243/first-petawatt-electron-beam-arrives-ready-to-rip-apart-matter-and-space?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

Can a new 3D-printing technique shorten 3D printing times to just seconds? A team of researchers in Europe has modified Tomographic Volumetric Additive Manufacturing, which can "create entire objects in one shot by shining light patterns into liquid resin," according to the 3D Printing Industry blog. (The liquid resin then solidifies when the light intensity is high enough...)

While this approach can fabricate support-free, micro-scale parts within tens of seconds, it is "highly inefficient." This is because under 1% of the encoded light reaches the resin vial. Conventional TVAM can also lead to unwanted distortions and poor resolution due to light blurring and projection artifacts. To address these limitations, the researchers developed HoloVAM, a new technique that uses a 3D hologram instead of conventional volumetric light projections. This approach reportedly boosts light efficiency by 20 times, resulting in faster and more accurate 3D printing.

According to their paper, published in Nature Communications, HoloVAM successfully fabricated several millimeter-scale objects in under 60 seconds with fine details as small as 31 micrometers...
They believe this new approach offers value for medical bioprinting applications, thanks to HoloVAM's use of "self-healing beams." These can generate and retain their shape when passing through materials, which is particularly valuable when 3D printing with cell-laden bio-resins and hydrogels.
Thanks to Slashdot reader BizarreVR for sharing the news.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/25/03/02/0216225/fast-new-3d-printing-technique-shines-holograms-into-resin?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

How confident are we about the safety of commercial space tourism? Long-time Slashdot reader theodp writes:
It's one thing for Microsoft to boast that they dare to use Outlook instead of Gmail. But it took a whole other level of commitment for Jeff Bezos to join his brother Mark aboard Blue Origin's first passenger-carrying mission in July 2021.

So, while Bezos is unhesitant about sending himself and other celebrities and loved ones into space aboard Blue Origin, how confident are you about the current state of space travel safety?

If offered a free ride into space from Bezos's Blue Origin, or one of the other options like Virgin Galactic, Axiom Space, or Boeing's Starliner, would you accept or decline it?

Share your own thoughts and answers in the comments.

Would you accept a free ride into space?

[ Read more of this story ]( https://science.slashdot.org/story/25/03/02/0123200/ask-slashdot-would-you-accept-a-free-ride-into-space?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

A "decision science partner" at a seed-stage venture fund (who is also a cognitive-behavioral decision science author and professional poker player) explored what happens when GPT-4 Turbo converses with conspiracy theorists:

Researchers have struggled for decades to develop techniques to weaken the grip of conspiracy theories and cult ideology on adherents. This is why a new paper in the journal Science by Thomas Costello of MIT's Sloan School of Management, Gordon Pennycook of Cornell University and David Rand, also of Sloan, is so exciting... In a pair of studies involving more than 2,000 participants, the researchers found a 20 percent reduction in belief in conspiracy theories after participants interacted with a powerful, flexible, personalized GPT-4 Turbo conversation partner. The researchers trained the AI to try to persuade the participants to reduce their belief in conspiracies by refuting the specific evidence the participants provided to support their favored conspiracy theory.

The reduction in belief held across a range of topics... Even more encouraging, participants demonstrated increased intentions to ignore or unfollow social media accounts promoting the conspiracies, and significantly increased willingness to ignore or argue against other believers in the conspiracy. And the results appear to be durable, holding up in evaluations 10 days and two months later... Why was AI able to persuade people to change their minds? The authors posit that it "simply takes the right evidence," tailored to the individual, to effect belief change, noting: "From a theoretical perspective, this paints a surprisingly optimistic picture of human reasoning: Conspiratorial rabbit holes may indeed have an exit. Psychological needs and motivations do not inherently blind conspiracists to evidence...."

It is hard to walk away from who you are, whether you are a QAnon believer, a flat-Earther, a truther of any kind or just a stock analyst who has taken a position that makes you stand out from the crowd. And that's why the AI approach might work so well. The participants were not interacting with a human, which, I suspect, didn't trigger identity in the same way, allowing the participants to be more open-minded. Identity is such a huge part of these conspiracy theories in terms of distinctiveness, putting distance between you and other people. When you're interacting with AI, you're not arguing with a human being whom you might be standing in opposition to, which could cause you to be less open-minded.

Answering questions from Slashdot readers in 2005, Wil Wheaton described playing poker against the cognitive-behavioral decision science author who wrote this article...

[ Read more of this story ]( https://slashdot.org/story/25/03/02/183210/what-happened-when-conspiracy-theorists-talked-to-openais-gpt-4-turbo?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

"Thousands of buildings across the United States are staying cool with the help of cutting-edge batteries made from one of the world's simplest materials," reports the Washington Post — ice.

When electricity is cheap, the batteries freeze water. When energy costs go up, building managers turn off their pricey chillers and use the ice to keep things cool. A typical building uses about a fifth of its electricity for cooling, according to the International Energy Agency. By shifting their energy use to cheaper times of day, the biggest buildings can save hundreds of thousands of dollars a year on their power bills. They can also avoid using electricity from the dirtiest fossil fuel plants. In places where the weather is hot and energy prices swing widely throughout the day — for instance, Texas, Southern California and most of the American Southwest — buildings could cut their power bills and carbon emissions by as much as a third, experts say...

When every building is blasting its air conditioner at the same moment on a hot day, power companies often fire up backup generators, known as peaker plants, which are generally extra pricey and polluting. If utilities avoid using peaker plants, they'll pollute less and save money. Last year, the Energy Department struck a tentative $306 million loan deal with the ice-battery-maker Nostromo Energy to install its systems in 193 California buildings to make energy cheaper and cleaner while lowering the state's blackout risk.
"The batteries themselves are huge..." the article acknowledges, citing one in New York City that uses 100 parking spot-sized tanks "which collectively make 3 million margaritas' worth of ice each night... But that's starting to change." (And they believe new smaller designs "could bring the batteries into smaller buildings and even houses.")

Wherever they can squeeze into the market, ice batteries could be a cheaper and longer-lasting option than the lithium-ion batteries that power phones, cars and some buildings because their main ingredient is water, experts say. The pricey chemicals in a lithium-ion cell might degrade after 10 years, but water never wears out.

And according to the article, one company has already installed ice batteries in over 4,000 buildings...

[ Read more of this story ]( https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/25/03/02/2015220/how-buildings-are-staying-cool-and-saving-money---with-batteries-made-of-ice?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

Earth's core "burns with an estimated forty-four trillion watts of power," the New Yorker reminds us — enough to "satisfy the entire world's energy needs" with a power source that's carbon-free, ubiquitous — and unlimited. (Besides running 24 hours a day, one of geothermal energy's key advantages is "it can be used for both electricity and heating, which collectively account for around 38% of global climate emissions...")
And one drilling expert tells them there's been an "exponential spin-up of activity in geothermal" energy projects over the last two years. (Ironically it was the fracking boom also brought an "explosion of new drilling practices — such as horizontal drilling and magnetic sensing — that inspired a geothermal resurgence.") In 2005 one research team calculated that just 2% of the heat just four miles underground in America "could meet the entire country's energy needs — two thousand times over," according to the article.

So their new article checks in on the progress of geothermal energy projects around the world, including a Utah company using a diamond-bit drill to dig nearly a mile into the earth to install a 150-ton steel tube surrounded by special heat-resistant cement — all to create "a massive straw" for transporting hot water (and steam).

The biggest problem is drilling miles through hot rock, safely. If scientists can do that, however, next-generation geothermal power could supply clean energy for eons... At 6:15 P.M. on May 3rd, cement had started flowing into the hole. Four hours later, part of the cement folded in on itself. The next morning, the cement supply ran out; the men had miscalculated how much they needed. This brought the three-hundred-million-dollar operation to a maddening halt... The cement truck from Bakersfield arrived around 8:30 P.M. By ten-thirty, the men were pouring cement again, gluing the enormous metal straw in place. Next, the team scanned the borehole with gamma rays...

[ Read more of this story ]( https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/25/03/02/229216/exponential-spin-up-in-geothermal-energy-projects-brings-hope-for-green-power?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

Despite a January announcement that America would explore the idea of a national digital asset stockpile, the exact cryptocurrecies weren't specified. Today on social media the president posted that it would include bitcoin, ether, XRP, Solana's SOL token and Cardano's ADA, reports CNBC — prompting a Sunday rally in cryptocurrencies trading.

XRP surged 33% after the announcement while the token tied to Solana jumped 22%. Cardano's coin soared more than 60%. Bitcoin rose 10% to $94,425.29, after dipping to a three-month low under $80,000 on Friday. Ether, which has suffered some of the biggest losses in crypto year-to-date, gained 12%... This is the first time Trump has specified his support for a crypto "reserve" versus a "stockpile." While the former assumes actively buying crypto in regular installments, a stockpile would simply not sell any of the crypto currently held by the U.S. government.

"The total cryptocurrency market has risen about 10%," reports Reuters, "or more than $300 billion, in the hours since Trump's announcement, according to CoinGecko, a cryptocurrency data and analysis company."

"A U.S. Crypto Reserve will elevate this critical industry..." the president posted, promising to "make sure the U.S. is the Crypto Capital of the World," reports The Hill:
His announcement comes just after the White House announced it would be welcoming cryptocurrency industry professionals on March 7 in a first-of-its-kind summit... It's unclear what exactly Trump's crypto reserve would look like, and while he previously dismissed crypto as a scam, he's embraced the industry throughout his most recent campaign.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://news.slashdot.org/story/25/03/02/2327231/trump-names-cryptocurrencies-for-digital-asset-stockpile-in-social-media-post?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

Lenovo demonstrated "a laptop with a foldable screen and one that can get extra battery life from solar power," reports CNBC, emphasizing that "These laptops are just concepts, meaning they are not commercially available."
But "Lenovo, the world's biggest PC maker, has a history of showing off imaginative concepts with some becoming reality, so it's worth keeping an eye on what the Chinese technology giant is up to..."
The latest concepts were unveiled at the Mobile World Congress trade show in Barcelona... When fully unfolded, the screen is an 18-inch display [on the Lenovo ThinkBook 'flip' concept]... The screen can then be folded in half horizontally to create two screens — one on the front and one on the back. The entire display can be folded down flat so the laptop turns into a tablet-like device.

Lenovo also showed off a Yoga Solar PC concept, reports Gizmodo, calling it "relatively thin and light" despite a solar panel in its lid with "a supposed 24% solar conversion rate":

Lenovo claims they achieved this by maneuvering the gridlines you usually find on a solar panel behind the solar cells, offering more real estate for energy absorption... Lenovo's software showed the power accumulation at around 7 V when facing away from the sunlight and 12 V when facing toward it. It could get more when getting direct sunlight. Despite the presence of the solar panel, the laptop still weighs a little more than 2.6 pounds, which isn't out of the realm of what to expect from most modern laptops.

We should note that the panel isn't generating the required power to run the PC continuously. Lenovo claimed that 20 minutes of direct sunlight will transform into about one hour of video playback battery life. Depending on the CPU and battery, that could be 1/20 of the laptop's battery life.

CNBC had slightly different statistics for the laptop's battery life. "Lenovo said that the solar panels can absorb even ambient light in a person's surroundings to give a user an extra hour of laptop use at the end of an eight-hour work day..."

[ Read more of this story ]( https://mobile.slashdot.org/story/25/03/03/0028222/lenovo-teases-solar-powered-and-foldable-screen-laptops-in-latest-concepts?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

What's Linux's marketshare on Steam? The Steam Survey numbers tell this story:

11/24: 2.03%
12/24: 2.29%
01/25: 2.06%
02:25: 1.45%

"The February numbers show a staggering 0.61% drop to Linux use..." reports Phoronix. But they attribute this to an sampling error:
According to the survey, it shows 50% of Steam users using the Simplified Chinese language pack [a 20% increase from the month before]. In prior months where there has been drops to Linux use, it's been correlated to wild swings in the Chinese use on Steam. This looks to be another such month.
Of the Linux specific data, SteamOS continues to prove most popular for that Valve distribution powering the Steam Deck [at 34.67%, with Arch Linux coming in second at 9.7%].
AMD CPUs power around 70% of the Linux gaming systems thanks to the Steam Deck APU and AMD Ryzen being quite popular with Linux enthusiasts.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://linux.slashdot.org/story/25/03/03/0158226/linuxs-marketshare-drops-in-monthly-steam-survey?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

It's a feature-length film "rendered on a free and open-source software platform called Blender," reports Reuters. And it just won the Oscar for best animated feature film, beating movies from major studios like Disney/Pixar and Dreamworks.

In January Blender.org called Flow "the manifestation of Blender's mission, where a small, independent team with a limited budget is able to create a story that moves audiences worldwide, and achieve recognition with over 60 awards, including a Golden Globe for Best Animation and two Oscar nominations." The entire project cost just $3.7 million, reports NPR — though writer/director Gints Zilbalodis tells Blender.org that it took about five and a half years.

"I think a certain level of naivety is necessary when starting a project," Zilbalodis tells Blender. "If I had known how difficult it would be, I might never have started. But because I didn't fully grasp the challenges ahead, I just dove in and figured things out along the way..."

Zilbalodis: [A]fter making a few shorts, I realized that I'm not good at drawing, and I switched to 3D because I could model things, and move the camera... After finishing my first feature Away, I decided to switch to Blender [from Maya] in 2019, mainly because of EEVEE... It took a while to learn some of the stuff, but it was actually pretty straightforward. Many of the animators in Flow took less than a week to switch to Blender...

I've never worked in a big studio, so I don't really know exactly how they operate. But I think that if you're working on a smaller indie-scale project, you shouldn't try to copy what big studios do. Instead, you should develop a workflow that best suits you and your smaller team.
You can get a glimpse of their animation style in Flow's official trailer.

NPR says that ultimately Flow's images "possess a kinetic elegance. They have the alluring immersiveness of a video game..."

[ Read more of this story ]( https://news.slashdot.org/story/25/03/03/051210/blender-rendered-movie-flow-wins-oscar-for-best-animated-feature-beating-pixar?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

"TrapC, a fork of the C language, is being developed as a potential solution for memory safety issues that have hindered the C and C++ languages," reports InfoWorld.
But also being developed is a compiler named trapc "intended to be implemented as a cybersecurity compiler for C and C++ code, said developer Robin Rowe..."

Due by the end of this year, trapc will be a free, open source compiler similar to Clang... Rowe said. TrapC has pointers that are memory-safe, addressing the memory safety issue with the two languages. With TrapC, developers write in C or C++ and compile in TrapC, for memory safety...
Rowe presented TrapC at an ISO C meeting this week. Developers can download a TrapC whitepaper and offer Rowe feedback. According to the whitepaper, TrapC's memory management is automatic and cannot leak memory. Pointers are lifetime-managed, not garbage-collected. Also, TrapC reuses a few code safety features from C++, notably member functions, constructors, destructors, and the new keyword.

"TrapC Memory Safe Pointers will not buffer overrun and will not segfault," Rowe told the ISO C Committee standards body meeting, according to the Register. "When C code is compiled using a TrapC compiler, all pointers become Memory Safe Pointers and are checked."

In short, TrapC "is a programming language forked from C, with changes to make it LangSec and Memory Safe," according to that white paper. "To accomplish that, TrapC seeks to eliminate all Undefined Behavior in the C programming language..."

"The startup TRASEC and the non-profit Fountain Abode have a TrapC compiler in development, called trapc," the whitepaper adds, and their mission is "to enable recompiling legacy C code into executables that are safe by design and secure by default, without needing much code refactoring... The TRASEC trapc cybersecurity compiler with AI code reasoning is expected to release as free open source software sometime in 2025."

In November the Register offered some background on the origins of TrapC...

[ Read more of this story ]( https://developers.slashdot.org/story/25/03/03/0654205/can-trapc-fix-c-and-c-memory-safety-issues?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

Apple users noticed a change in 2023, "when streaming platforms like Netflix, HBO Max, Amazon Prime, and the Criterion Channel imposed a quiet embargo on the screenshot," noted the film blog Screen Slate:

At first, there were workarounds: users could continue to screenshot by using the browser Brave or by downloading extensions or third-party tools like Fireshot. But gradually, the digital-rights-management tech adapted and became more sophisticated. Today, it is nearly impossible to take a screenshot from the most popular streaming services, at least not on a Macintosh computer. The shift occurred without remark or notice to subscribers, and there's no clear explanation as to why or what spurred the change...

For PC users, this story takes a different, and happier, turn. With the use of Snipping Tool — a utility exclusive to Microsoft Windows, users are free to screen grab content from all streaming platforms. This seems like a pointed oversight, a choice on the part of streamers to exclude Mac users (though they make up a tiny fraction of the market) because of their assumed cultural class.
"I'm not entirely sure what the technical answer to this is," tech blogger John Gruber wrote this weekend, "but on MacOS, it seemingly involves the GPU and video decoding hardware..."

These DRM blackouts on Apple devices (you can't capture screenshots from DRM video on iPhones or iPads either) are enabled through the deep integration between the OS and the hardware, thus enabling the blackouts to be imposed at the hardware level. And I don't think the streaming services opt into this screenshot prohibition other than by "protecting" their video with DRM in the first place. If a video is DRM-protected, you can't screenshot it; if it's not, you can.

On the Mac, it used to be the case that DRM video was blacked-out from screen capture in Safari, but not in Chrome (or the dozens of various Chromium-derived browsers). But at some point a few years back, you stopped being able to capture screenshots from DRM videos in Chrome, tooâ — âby default. But in Chrome's Settings page, under System, if you disable "Use graphics acceleration when available" and relaunch Chrome, boom, you can screenshot everything in a Chrome window, including DRM video...

What I don't understand is why Apple bothered supporting this in the first place for hardware-accelerated video (which is all video on iOS platformsâ — âthere is no workaround like using Chrome with hardware acceleration disabled on iPhone or iPad). No one is going to create bootleg copies of DRM-protected video one screenshotted still frame at a timeâ — âand even if they tried, they'd be capturing only the images, not the sound. And it's not like this "feature" in MacOS and iOS has put an end to bootlegging DRM-protected video content.
Gruber's conclusion? "This 'feature' accomplishes nothing of value for anyone, including the streaming services, but imposes a massive (and for most people, confusing and frustrating) hindrance on honest people simply trying to easily capture high-quality (as opposed to, say, using their damn phone to take a photograph of their reflective laptop display) screenshots of the shows and movies they're watching."

[ Read more of this story ]( https://apple.slashdot.org/story/25/03/03/0245252/why-cant-we-screenshot-frames-from-drm-protected-video-on-apple-devices?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

China aims to commercialize nuclear fusion technology for use in emissions-free power generation by 2050, according to the countryâ(TM)s state-owned atomic company. From a report: China National Nuclear Corp., which runs an experimental device dubbed the 'artificial sun,' could start commercial operation of its first power generation project about five years after a demonstration phase starting around 2045, it said in a media briefing on Friday.

The Asian nation has recently stepped up its ambitions in achieving nuclear fusion, a process by which the sun and other stars generate energy and that is considered a near-infinite form of clean energy. It is notoriously difficult to carry out in a sustained and usable manner and only a handful of countries like the US, Russia and South Korea have managed to crack the basics.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://slashdot.org/story/25/03/03/1335250/china-may-be-ready-to-use-nuclear-fusion-for-power-by-2050?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

Daniel Parris: Some TV shows take a while to "get good." Modern classics like Breaking Bad, The Wire, Community, and Bojack Horseman are notorious for "starting slow" and are often recommended with a disclaimer like "Give it a few episodes; I promise it gets good!"

At the same time, some shows never get good. Recently, I started a spy series called The Agency, which could best be characterized as premium mediocre (at least so far). There are big-name actors (Michael Fassbender, Jeffrey Wright, Richard Gere), expensive sets, and glossy camerawork -- but after a few installments, I'm trapped in a liminal space between engaged and listless. At the end of each episode, I'm left with the same thought: "Maybe the next one will get good."

Committing to a mediocre program or continuing with a floundering series elicits a state of (mildly) torturous ambiguity. Should you cut your losses, or is this show some late-blooming classic like Breaking Bad? What is the optimal number of episodes one should watch before cleansing a subpar series from their life? Surely, a universal number must exist! Like 42, but for television. So today, we'll explore how long it takes a new show to reach its full potential and how many lackluster episodes you should grant an established series before cutting ties. His analysis reveals that viewers should watch six episodes before quitting TV shows. The study, based on IMDb user ratings, found most series require six to seven episodes before early ratings match or exceed the show's long-term average. After six consecutive subpar episodes, the likelihood of permanent decline exceeds 50%, making it the optimal point to abandon disappointing series.

Several acclaimed shows including Breaking Bad, Friends, and Seinfeld required multiple episodes before reaching their quality potential, with Seinfeld needing 16 episodes to match its series average. The research also identified a pattern where long-running shows typically experience quality decline around seasons five and six, with ratings dropping below first-season averages and continuing to fall.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://entertainment.slashdot.org/story/25/03/03/1424248/how-many-episodes-should-you-watch-before-quitting-a-tv-show-a-statistical-analysis?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

Speaking of some concept devices that Lenovo has unveiled, the company today teased its ThinkBook "codename Flip" AI PC Concept at Mobile World Congress, featuring a flexible 18.1-inch OLED display that can transform between three configurations: a traditional 13.1-inch clamshell, a folded 12.9-inch tablet, or a laptop with an extra-tall vertical screen.

Unlike the motorized ThinkBook Plus Gen 6 expected in June, the Flip uses the display's flexibility to fold behind itself, eliminating motors while gaining 0.4 inches of additional screen space. Users can mirror content on the rear-facing portion when folded or enjoy the full 2000x2664 resolution display in vertical orientation. The concept also features a SmartForcePad trackpad with LED-illuminated shortcut layers. While still in prototype phase, Lenovo has specs in mind: Intel Ultra 7 processor, 32GB RAM, PCIe SSD storage, and Thunderbolt 4 connectivity.

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Nvidia and Broadcom are conducting manufacturing tests using Intel's advanced 18A chip production process, according to Reuters, signaling potential confidence in the struggling chipmaker's contract manufacturing ambitions. The previously unreported tests could lead to significant manufacturing contracts for Intel, whose foundry business has suffered delays and lacks major chip designer customers.

AMD is also evaluating Intel's 18A technology, which competes with Taiwan's dominant TSMC, according to the report. The current tests focus on determining capabilities of Intel's process rather than running complete chip designs. Intel faces additional setbacks, with qualification of critical intellectual property for 18A taking longer than expected, potentially delaying some customer chip production until mid-2026.

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Job placement rates have declined at all top U.S. business schools [non-paywalled source] since 2021, leaving MBA graduates anxious about their expensive degrees' return on investment. Harvard Business School, which produced Wall Street titans like Bill Ackman and Ray Dalio, saw the percentage of graduates without job offers three months post-graduation rise from 4% in 2021 to 15% currently.

Similar trends are evident at Stanford, Chicago Booth, MIT Sloan, and Wharton, where 7% of 2024 graduates lacked offers within three months of completing their programs. Industry experts cited in a Bloomberg report attribute the downturn to tepid white-collar job growth, declining private-sector wages, and high-profile layoffs at companies including Meta and JPMorgan.

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U.S. publishers are increasingly abandoning paperback editions of nonfiction books, eliminating a traditional second chance for authors to reach readers with lower-priced versions of their work. New adult nonfiction paperback titles plummeted 42% between 2019 and 2024 [non-paywalled source] to under 40,000, while hardcover titles fell just 9% during the same period, according to Bowker Books in Print.

"It's profoundly demoralizing that a book that might have taken four years to write and was published with such promise is done after five months," Dan Conaway, a senior literary agent with Writers House, told WSJ. The shift reflects changing consumer habits, the rise of digital formats, and market realities where Amazon sometimes prices hardcovers below paperbacks. Barnes & Noble now promotes just one nonfiction paperback monthly.

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Britain, the birthplace of the Industrial Revolution, now suffers from its opposite: profound energy shortages and deep affordability crises [non-paywalled link]. A new report titled "Foundations" identifies the root cause -- "it is difficult to build almost anything, anywhere" in the UK.

Housing exemplifies this malaise. Since the 1990s, homeownership among young British workers has halved while housing prices doubled. The 1947 Town and Country Planning Act effectively nationalized development rights, requiring special permission for new construction and establishing restrictive "green belts." Despite Margaret Thatcher's market reforms, British house-building never recovered.

This constrictive policy has stymied potential growth beyond housing, Atlantic reports. Cambridge remains a small city despite biotech breakthroughs that might have transformed it into a major hub. Transit infrastructure languishes -- Leeds is Europe's largest city without a metro system. Energy production has collapsed, with per capita electricity generation now roughly one-third of America's.

Britain faces a self-imposed scarcity crisis. Environmental regulations, while beneficial, created a one-way system where lawsuits easily block development. As co-author Sam Bowman summarized: "Europe has an energy problem; the Anglosphere has a housing problem; Britain has both." The solution requires comprehensive reform-- overhauling the planning system, reducing anti-growth litigation, and encouraging energy production to unlock what the private sector "already wants to do."

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Silicon Valley, the place that did more than any other to pioneer artificial intelligence, is the most exposed to its ability to automate work. That's according to an analysis by researchers at the Brookings Institution, a think tank, which matched the tasks that OpenAI's ChatGPT-4 could do with the jobs that are most common in different US cities. From a report: The result is a sharp departure from previous rounds of automation. Whereas technologies like robotics came for middle-class jobs -- and manufacturing cities such as Detroit -- generative AI is best at the white-collar work that's highly paid and most common in "superstar" cities like San Francisco and Washington, DC.

The Brookings analysis is of the US, but the same logic would apply anywhere: The more a city's economy is oriented around white-collar knowledge work, the more exposed it is to AI. "Exposure" doesn't necessarily mean automation, stressed Mark Muro, a senior fellow at Brookings and one of the study's authors. It could also mean productivity gains. From the Brookings report: Now, the higher-end workers and regions only mildly exposed to earlier forms of automation look to be most involved (for better or worse) with generative AI and its facility for cognitive, office-type tasks. In that vein, workers in high-skill metro areas such as San Jose, Calif.; San Francisco; Durham, N.C.; New York; and Washington D.C. appear likely to experience heavy involvement with generative AI, while those in less office-oriented metro areas such as Las Vegas; Toledo, Ohio; and Fort Wayne, Ind. appear far less susceptible. For instance, while 43% of workers in San Jose could see generative AI shift half or more of their work tasks, that share is only 31% of workers in Las Vegas.

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The world's biggest call center company is using artificial intelligence to "neutralise" Indian accents for Western customers. From a report: Teleperformance said it was applying real-time AI software on phone calls in order to increase "human empathy" between two people on the phone. The French company's customers in the UK include parts of the Government, the NHS, Vodafone and eBay.

Teleperformance has 90,000 employees in India and tens of thousands more in other countries. It is using software from Sanas, an American company that says the system helps "build a more understanding world" and reduces miscommunication. The company's website says it makes call center workers more productive and means customer service calls are resolved more quickly. The company also says it means call center workers are less likely to be abused and customers are less likely to demand to speak to a supervisor. It is already used by companies including Walmart and UPS.

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Former Intel CEO Craig Barrett urged the rehiring of Pat Gelsinger, who was abruptly fired two months ago, arguing he should "finish the job he has aptly handled over the past few years."

"Pat Gelsinger did a great job resuscitating the technology development team," Barrett wrote, criticizing the company's current leadership under "a CFO and a product manager." He suggested firing the Intel board rather than splitting the company.

Barrett's comments come in response to proposals from four former board members advocating for Intel's separation into design and manufacturing businesses. Barrett dismissed these board members as "two academics and two former government bureaucrats" lacking semiconductor industry expertise.

The former CEO praised Intel's technological resurgence under Gelsinger, noting its capabilities now match industry leader TSMC's 2nm technology, with additional advances in imaging technology and backside power delivery to complex chips. "Intel is backâ"from a technology point of view," Barrett wrote, arguing the best path forward is building on current momentum rather than organizational restructuring that would disrupt the company's 100,000-plus employees across multiple continents.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Chipmaker TSMC said that it aims to invest "at least" $100 billion in chip manufacturing plants in the U.S. over the next four years as part of an effort to expand the company's network of semiconductor factories. President Donald Trump announced the news during a press conference Monday. TSMC's cash infusion will fund the construction of several new facilities in Arizona, C. C. Wei, chairman and CEO of TSMC, said during the briefing. "We are going to produce many AI chips to support AI progress," Wei said.

TSMC previously pledged to pour $65 billion into U.S.-based fabrication plants and has received up to $6.6 billion in grants from the CHIPS Act, a major Biden administration-era law that sought to boost domestic semiconductor production. The new investment brings TSMC's total investments in the U.S. chip industry to around $165 billion, Trump said in prepared remarks. [...] TSMC, the world's largest contract chip maker, already has several facilities in the U.S., including a factory in Arizona that began mass production late last year. But the company currently reserves its most sophisticated facilities for its home country of Taiwan.

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Microsoft has introduced Dragon Copilot, a voice-activated AI assistant for doctors that integrates dictation and ambient listening tools to automate clinical documentation, including notes, referrals, and post-visit summaries. The tool is set to launch in May in the U.S. and Canada. CNBC reports: Microsoft acquired Nuance Communications, the company behind Dragon Medical One and DAX Copilot, for about $16 billion in 2021. As a result, Microsoft has become a major player in the fiercely competitive AI scribing market, which has exploded in popularity as health systems have been looking for tools to help address burnout. AI scribes like DAX Copilot allow doctors to draft clinical notes in real time as they consensually record their visits with patients. DAX Copilot has been used in more than 3 million patient visits across 600 health-care organizations in the last month, Microsoft said.

Dragon Copilot is accessible through a mobile app, browser or desktop, and it integrates directly with several different electronic health records, the company said. Clinicians will still be able to draft clinical notes with the assistant like they could with DAX Copilot, but they'll be able to use natural language to edit their documentation and prompt it further, Kenn Harper, general manager of Dragon products at Microsoft, told reporters on the call. For instance, a doctor could ask questions like, "Was the patient experiencing ear pain?" or "Can you add the ICD-10 codes to the assessment and plan?" Physicians can also ask broader treatment-related queries such as, "Should this patient be screened for lung cancer?" and get an answer with links to resources like the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. [...]

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A fully driverless Maserati MC20 Coupe set a new autonomous land speed record, reaching 197.7 mph at the Kennedy Space Center. The Verge reports: The Maserati was running self-driving software developed by Politecnico di Milano, Italy's largest scientific and technological university. The team also worked with the Indy Autonomous Challenge, which most recently ran at the Las Vegas Motor Speedway during CES 2025. In the shadow of NASA's iconic Space Shuttles, the race car flew down the 2.8-mile runway at record-breaking speeds, surpassing the 192.2mph record that was also held by Indy Autonomous Challenge and PoliMOVE, set by an IAC AV-21 race car in April 2022.

The Maserati MC20 is a stylish -- and expensive -- choice for the autonomous run. Retailing for at least $239,000, the race car sports a mid-mounted, twin-turbocharged 3.0-liter V-6 that Maserati calls the Nettuno. The engine makes serious power: 621 horsepower and 538 pound-feet of torque, which is sent through an eight-speed dual-clutch automatic transmission to the rear wheels.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: The United States has suspended its offensive cyber operations against Russia, according to reports, amid efforts by the Trump administration to grant Moscow concessions to end the war in Ukraine. The reported order to halt U.S.-launched hacking operations against Russia was authorized by U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, according to The Record. The new guidance affects operations carried out by U.S. Cyber Command, a division of the Department of Defense focused on hacking and operations in cyberspace, but does not apply to espionage operations conducted by the National Security Agency. The reported order has since been confirmed by The New York Times and The Washington Post.

The order was handed down before Friday's Oval Office meeting between U.S. President Donald Trump, Vice President JD Vance, and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, according to the reports. The New York Times said that the instruction came as part of a broader effort to draw Russian President Vladimir Putin into talks about the country's ongoing war in Ukraine. The Guardian also reports that the Trump administration has signaled it no longer views Russian hackers as a cybersecurity threat, and reportedly ordered U.S. cybersecurity agency CISA to no longer report on Russian threats. The newspaper cites a recent memo that set out new priorities for CISA, including threats faced by China and protecting local systems, but the memo did not mention Russia. CISA employees were reportedly informed verbally that they were to pause any work on Russian cyber threats.

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Google Play on Android devices is being updated to include a new search filter for widgets, widget badges on app detail pages, and a curated editorial page dedicated to widgets. The Verge reports: With the search filter, users will be able to more easily search for apps with widgets. The badge "eliminates guesswork for users and highlights your widget offerings, encouraging them to explore and utilize this capability," Taiwo-Peters says. And the curated editorial page will show off "collections of excellent widgets." The updated widget discoverability tools will be "coming soon," Taiwo-Peters says. "Historically, one of the challenges with investing in widget development has been discoverability and user understanding," product manager Yinka Taiwo-Peters says in the post. "You've asked for better ways for users to find and utilize your widgets, and we're delivering." Yinka Taiwo-Peters also acknowledges that "we understand that the effort required to build and maintain widgets needs to be justified by user adoption."

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NASA used specialized Schlieren photography to capture an image of Boom Supersonic's XB-1 demonstrator aircraft breaking the sound barrier on February 10, 2025 and producing shock waves as it exceeded Mach 1. The flight produced no audible sonic boom, marking progress toward the goal of quiet supersonic travel. CNN reports: "This image makes the invisible visible," said Blake Scholl, founder and CEO of Boom Supersonic, in a press release. In order to capture the Schlieren images, Boom chief test pilot Tristan "Geppetto" Brandenburg positioned XB-1 at an exact time in a precise location over the Mojave Desert.

As the aircraft flew in front of the sun, NASA's team documented the changing air speeds as speeds over Mach 1, the speed of sound (761.23 miles per hour or 1,225.1 kilometers per hour). The images were captured during ground telescopes with special filters that detect air distortions. You can view the photo here.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Since the launch of ChatGPT in late 2022, experts have debated how widely AI language models would impact the world. A few years later, the picture is getting clear. According to new Stanford University-led research examining over 300 million text samples across multiple sectors, AI language models now assist in writing up to a quarter of professional communications across sectors. It's having a large impact, especially in less-educated parts of the United States. "Our study shows the emergence of a new reality in which firms, consumers and even international organizations substantially rely on generative AI for communications," wrote the researchers.

The researchers tracked large language model (LLM) adoption across industries from January 2022 to September 2024 using a dataset that included 687,241 consumer complaints submitted to the US Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), 537,413 corporate press releases, 304.3 million job postings, and 15,919 United Nations press releases. By using a statistical detection system that tracked word usage patterns, the researchers found that roughly 18 percent of financial consumer complaints (including 30 percent of all complaints from Arkansas), 24 percent of corporate press releases, up to 15 percent of job postings, and 14 percent of UN press releases showed signs of AI assistance during that period of time.

The study also found that while urban areas showed higher adoption overall (18.2 percent versus 10.9 percent in rural areas), regions with lower educational attainment used AI writing tools more frequently (19.9 percent compared to 17.4 percent in higher-education areas). The researchers note that this contradicts typical technology adoption patterns where more educated populations adopt new tools fastest. "In the consumer complaint domain, the geographic and demographic patterns in LLM adoption present an intriguing departure from historical technology diffusion trends where technology adoption has generally been concentrated in urban areas, among higher-income groups, and populations with higher levels of educational attainment." "Arkansas showed the highest adoption rate at 29.2 percent (based on 7,376 complaints), followed by Missouri at 26.9 percent (16,807 complaints) and North Dakota at 24.8 percent (1,025 complaints)," notes Ars. "In contrast, states like West Virginia (2.6 percent), Idaho (3.8 percent), and Vermont (4.8 percent) showed minimal AI writing adoption. Major population centers demonstrated moderate adoption, with California at 17.4 percent (157,056 complaints) and New York at 16.6 percent (104,862 complaints)."

The study was listed on the arXiv preprint server in mid-February.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://news.slashdot.org/story/25/03/03/2327219/researchers-find-less-educated-areas-adopting-ai-writing-tools-faster?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

Firefly Aerospace's Blue Ghost lander successfully touched down on the moon, making it the first private company to achieve a stable lunar landing without crashing. The craft is carrying various NASA-funded experiments, including a "vacuum to suck up moon dirt for analysis and a drill to measure temperature as deep as 10 feet (3 meters) below the surface," reports the Associated Press. There's also "a device for eliminating abrasive lunar dust -- a scourge for NASA's long-ago Apollo moonwalkers, who got it caked all over their spacesuits and equipment." From the report: A half hour after landing, Blue Ghost started to send back pictures from the surface, the first one a selfie somewhat obscured by the sun's glare. The second shot included the home planet, a blue dot glimmering in the blackness of space. Blue Ghost -- named after a rare U.S. species of fireflies -- had its size and shape going for it. The squat four-legged lander stands 6-foot-6 (2 meters) tall and 11 feet (3.5 meters) wide, providing extra stability, according to the company.

Launched in mid-January from Florida, the lander carried 10 experiments to the moon for NASA. The space agency paid $101 million for the delivery, plus $44 million for the science and tech on board. It's the third mission under NASA's commercial lunar delivery program, intended to ignite a lunar economy of competing private businesses while scouting around before astronauts show up later this decade.

Firefly's Ray Allensworth said the lander skipped over hazards including boulders to land safely. Allensworth said the team continued to analyze the data to figure out the lander's exact position, but all indications suggest it landed within the 328-foot (100-meter) target zone in Mare Crisium. The demos should get two weeks of run time, before lunar daytime ends and the lander shuts down.

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CISA has warned U.S. federal agencies about active exploitation of vulnerabilities in Cisco VPN routers and Windows systems. "While the cybersecurity agency has tagged these flaws as actively exploited in the wild, it has yet to provide specific details regarding this malicious activity and who is behind it," adds Bleeping Computer. From the report: The first flaw (tracked as CVE-2023-20118) enables attackers to execute arbitrary commands on RV016, RV042, RV042G, RV082, RV320, and RV325 VPN routers. While it requires valid administrative credentials, this can still be achieved by chaining the CVE-2023-20025 authentication bypass, which provides root privileges. Cisco says in an advisory published in January 2023 and updated one year later that its Product Security Incident Response Team (PSIRT) is aware of CVE-2023-20025 publicly available proof-of-concept exploit code.

The second security bug (CVE-2018-8639) is a Win32k elevation of privilege flaw that local attackers logged into the target system can exploit to run arbitrary code in kernel mode. Successful exploitation also allows them to alter data or create rogue accounts with full user rights to take over vulnerable Windows devices. According to a security advisory issued by Microsoft in December 2018, this vulnerability impacts client (Windows 7 or later) and server (Windows Server 2008 and up) platforms.

Today, CISA added the two vulnerabilities to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog, which lists security bugs the agency has tagged as exploited in attacks. As mandated by the Binding Operational Directive (BOD) 22-01 issued in November 2021, Federal Civilian Executive Branch (FCEB) agencies now have three weeks, until March 23, to secure their networks against ongoing exploitation.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Google has open sourced an AI model, SpeciesNet, designed to identify animal species by analyzing photos from camera traps. Researchers around the world use camera traps -- digital cameras connected to infrared sensors -- to study wildlife populations. But while these traps can provide valuable insights, they generate massive volumes of data that take days to weeks to sift through. In a bid to help, Google launched Wildlife Insights, an initiative of the company's Google Earth Outreach philanthropy program, around six years ago. Wildlife Insights provides a platform where researchers can share, identify, and analyze wildlife images online, collaborating to speed up camera trap data analysis.

Many of Wildlife Insights' analysis tools are powered by SpeciesNet, which Google claims was trained on over 65 million publicly available images and images from organizations like the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute, the Wildlife Conservation Society, the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences, and the Zoological Society of London. Google says that SpeciesNet can classify images into one of more than 2,000 labels, covering animal species, taxa like "mammalian" or "Felidae," and non-animal objects (e.g. "vehicle"). SpeciesNet is available on GitHub under an Apache 2.0 license, meaning it can be used commercially largely sans restrictions.

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China's highest court has called for a crack down on the activities of paper mills, businesses that churn out fraudulent or poor-quality manuscripts and sell authorships. Nature: Some researchers are cautiously optimistic that the court's guidance will help curb the use of these services, while others think the impact will be minimal. "This is the first time the supreme court has issued guidance on paper mills and on scientific fraud," says Wang Fei, who studies research-integrity policy at Dalian University of Technology in China.

Paper mills sell suspect research and authorships to researchers who want journal articles to burnish their CVs. They are a significant contributor to overall research misconduct, particularly in China. Last month, the Supreme People's Court published a set of guiding opinions on technology innovation. Among the list of 25 articles, one called for lower courts to crack down on 'paper industry chains,' and for research fraud to be severely punished. Further reading:
Research Reveals Data on Which Institutions Are Retraction Hotspots;
Paper Mills Have Flooded Science With 400,000 Fake Studies, Experts Warn.

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AmiMoJo shares a report: Europe's biggest battery storage project has entered commercial operation in Scotland [alternative source], promising to soak up surplus wind power and prevent turbines being paid to switch off.

Zenobe said the first phase of its project at Blackhillock, between Inverness and Aberdeen, was now live with capacity to store enough power to supply 200 megawatts of electricity for two hours. It is due to be expanded to 300 megawatts by next year, enough to supply 3.1 million homes, more than every household in Scotland.

The government's Clean Power 2030 action plan sets a target capacity of up to 27 gigawatts of batteries by 2030, a sixfold increase from the 4.5 gigawatts installed today. This huge expansion is seen as critical as Britain builds more renewable wind and solar power, since batteries can store surplus generation for use when the wind does not blow and the sun does not shine.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://science.slashdot.org/story/25/03/04/1348203/europes-biggest-battery-powered-up-in-scotland?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

Apple today announced a significant update to its iPad Air lineup, integrating the M3 chip previously reserved for higher-end devices. The new tablets, available in both 11-inch ($599) and 13-inch ($799) configurations, deliver substantial performance gains: nearly 2x faster than M1-equipped models and 3.5x faster than A14 Bionic versions.

The M3 brings Apple's advanced graphics architecture to the Air for the first time, featuring dynamic caching, hardware-accelerated mesh shading, and ray tracing. The chip includes an 8-core CPU delivering 35% faster multithreaded performance over M1, paired with a 9-core GPU offering 40% faster graphics. The Neural Engine processes AI workloads 60% faster than M1, the company said. Apple also introduced a redesigned Magic Keyboard ($269/$319) with function row and larger trackpad.

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EmagGeek shares a report: Scientists have genetically engineered mice with some key characteristics of an extinct animal that was far larger -- the woolly mammoth. This "woolly mouse" marks an important step toward achieving the researchers' ultimate goal -- bringing a woolly mammoth-like creature back from extinction, they say.

"For us, it's an incredibly big deal," says Beth Shapiro, chief science officer at Colossal Biosciences, a Dallas company trying to resurrect the woolly mammoth and other extinct species. The company announced the creation of the woolly mice Tuesday in a news release and posted a scientific paper online detailing the achievement. Scientists implanted genetically modified embryos in female lab mice that gave birth to the first of the woolly pups in October.

My editorial: One has to wonder why it is necessary or even a great idea to bring back species that nature long ago determined were a failure.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://science.slashdot.org/story/25/03/04/1624239/scientists-create-woolly-mice?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

After California's bar exams were plagued last week with technical problems, the State Bar of California is recommending that the agency return to in-person tests as it scrutinizes whether the vendor behind the new testing system met the obligations of its contract. From a report: "Based on the administration of the February Bar Exam, staff cannot recommend going forward with Meazure Learning," Donna Hershkowitz, chief of admissions for the State Bar, wrote to the agency's Board of Trustees in a staff memo, referring to the vendor. Instead, she wrote, staff recommend reverting to in-person testing for the next round of exams in July.

The State Bar's 13-member board, which is scheduled to meet March 5, will ultimately decide on plans for the July bar exam and remedies for test takers who faced problems. In a statement Monday, the State Bar said it is "closely scrutinizing whether Meazure Learning met its contractual obligations" in administering the February State Bar exam and will be "actively working with its psychometrician and other stakeholders to determine the full scope of necessary remediation measures for February 2025 bar exam test takers."

[ Read more of this story ]( https://it.slashdot.org/story/25/03/04/1728200/after-exam-fiasco-california-state-bar-staff-recommend-reverting-to-in-person-exams?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

Apple is stepping up its fight with the British government over a demand to create a "back door" in its most secure cloud storage systems, by filing a legal complaint that it hopes will overturn the order. Financial Times: The iPhone maker has made its appeal to the Investigatory Powers Tribunal, an independent judicial body that examines complaints against the UK security services, according to people familiar with the matter. The Silicon Valley company's legal challenge is believed to be the first time that provisions in the 2016 Investigatory Powers Act allowing UK authorities to break encryption have been tested before the court.

The Investigatory Powers Tribunal will consider whether the UK's notice to Apple was lawful and, if not, could order it to be quashed. The case could be heard as soon as this month, although it is unclear whether there will be any public disclosure of the hearing. The government is likely to argue the case should be restricted on national security grounds. Apple received a "technical capability notice" under the act in January.

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Chinese electric vehicle maker BYD is rapidly gaining market share in Australia, with sales rising 65% last year as nearly one in four EVs sold in the country was a BYD, according to EVDirect CEO David Smitherman. Chinese EVs now comprise roughly one-third of electric vehicles sold in Australia, which has no domestic auto industry to protect with tariffs, unlike the United States where both Trump and Biden administrations have effectively blocked Chinese EV imports.

The Biden administration imposed a 100% tariff on Chinese EVs to shield U.S. automakers from what it termed unfair competition. U.S. officials also blocked Chinese vehicle software over security concerns that Beijing could use internet-connected cars for surveillance. Australian authorities are monitoring U.S. developments but remain noncommittal despite security experts urging restrictions on Chinese connected car technology.

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