Scientists at the University of Texas at Austin have developed a "smart soil" that can keep plants better hydrated and provide a controlled release of nutrients. As reported by New Atlas, tests found that it "drastically improved crop growth while using far less water." From the report: The soil gets its "smart" moniker thanks to the addition of a specially formulated hydrogel, which works to absorb more water vapor from the air overnight, then releasing it to the plants' roots during the day. Incorporating calcium chloride into the hydrogel also provides a slow release of this vital nutrient. The team tested the new smart soil in lab experiments, growing plants in 10 grams of soil, with some including 0.1 g of hydrogel. A day/night cycle was simulated, with 12 hours of darkness at 25 C (77 F) and either 60% or 90% relative humidity, followed by 12 hours of simulated sunlight at 35 C (95 F) and 30% humidity. Sure enough, plants growing in the hydrogel soil showed a 138% boost to their stem length, compared to the control group. Importantly, the hydrogel-grown plants achieved this even while requiring 40% less direct watering. In future work, the team plans to try incorporating other types of fertilizers, and conducting longer field experiments. The research was published in the journal ACS Materials Letters.

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A solar superstorm in May caused thousands of satellites to simultaneously maneuver to maintain altitude due to the thickening of the upper atmosphere, creating potential collision hazards as existing prediction systems struggled to cope. Space.com reports: According to a pre-print paper published on the online repository arXiv on June 12, satellites and space debris objects in low Earth orbit -- the region of space up to an altitude of 1,200 miles (2,000 kilometers) -- were sinking toward the planet at the speed of 590 feet (180 meters) per day during the four-day storm. To make up for the loss of altitude, thousands of spacecraft began firing their thrusters at the same time to climb back up. That mass movement, the authors of the paper point out, could have led to dangerous situations because collision avoidance systems didn't have time to calculate the satellites' changing paths. The solar storm that battered Earth from May 7 to 10 reached the intensity of G5, the highest level on the five-step scale used by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) to assess the strength of solar storms. It was the strongest solar storm to hit Earth since 2003. The authors of the paper, however, pointed out that the environment around the planet has changed profoundly since that time. While only a few hundred satellites were orbiting Earth twenty years ago, there are thousands today. The authors of the paper put the number of "active payloads at [low Earth orbit]" at 10,000. [...] The new paper points out that space weather forecasts ahead of the May storm failed to accurately predict the duration and intensity of the event, making satellite collision predictions nearly impossible. On the upside, the storm helped to clear out some junk as defunct satellites and debris fragments spiraled deeper into the atmosphere. The authors of the report estimate that thousands of space debris objects lost several kilometers in altitude during the storm. More powerful solar storms can be expected in the coming months as the peak of the current solar cycle -- the 11-year ebb and flow in the number of sunspots, solar flares and eruptions -- is expected in late 2024 and early 2025. The paper can be found here.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNBC: The U.S. will fall behind in the artificial intelligence race if it does not embrace natural gas to help meet surging electricity demand from data centers, the CEO of one of the nation's largest pipeline operators told CNBC. "The only way we're going to be able to keep up with the kind of power demand and the electrification that's already afoot is natural gas," Williams Companies CEO Alan Armstrong said in an interview Thursday. "If we deny ourselves that we're going to fall behind in the AI race." Williams Companies handles about one-third of the natural gas in the U.S. through a pipeline network that spans more than 30,000 miles. Williams' network includes the 10,000 mile Transcontinental Pipeline, or Transco, a crucial artery that serves virtually the entire eastern seaboard including Virginia, the world's largest data center hub, and fast growing Southeast markets such as Georgia. The tech sector's expansion of data centers to support AI and the adoption of electric vehicles is projected to add 290 terawatt hours of electricity demand by the end of the decade in the U.S., according to a recent report by the energy consulting firm Rystad. This load growth is equivalent to the entire electricity demand of Turkey, the world's 18th largest economy. Executives at some the nation's largest utilities have warned that failure to meet this surging electricity demand will jeopardize not just the artificial intelligence revolution, but economic growth across the board in the U.S. The role natural gas in helping to meet that demand is controversial as the country is simultaneously trying to transition to a clean energy economy through the rapid expansion of renewables. "We are going to run right up against a brick wall here and pretty quickly in terms of not having enough power available to do what we want to do on the AI side," Armstrong said. "I actually see this as a huge national security issue," the CEO said. "We're going to have to get out of our own way or we're going to accidentally keep ourselves from being the power we can be in the AI space." "Those groups that have very much had their brand be all green have come to us and said, 'We got to work with you guys. We've run out of alternatives -- we can't meet the needs of our customers without using natural gas,'" Armstrong said. "We're completely out of capacity ourselves," Armstrong added. "So we just have to kind of beg, borrow and steal from other people's capacity to do our best to make gas available."

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Shares of cybersecurity company CrowdStrike Holdings dropped 15% on Friday after the company's software update resulted in what may turn out to be the largest IT outage ever. CrowdStrike stock "is on pace for its steepest daily loss since November 2022 and its $290 low share price is the lowest intraday mark since April 25," reports Forbes. "CrowdStrike is on track for the third-worst day in its five-year history as a publicly traded company." From the report: Microsoft, which was swept up in the outage as the downed systems are those running CrowdStrike's cybersecurity applications and Microsoft's Windows software, also slumped, with its shares down about 1% to the $3.2 trillion behemoth's lowest share price since June 11. CrowdStrike competitor Palo Alto Networks enjoyed a 4% rally Friday, while the tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite stock index gained about 0.2%, held up by the likes of Microsoft rival Apple's 1% stock gain and a 1% rise for shares of Alphabet, which is reportedly in talks to buy cybersecurity firm Wiz for $23 billion. The CrowdStrike selloff is "an overreaction to a temporary setback," Rosenblatt analyst Catharine Trebnick wrote in a note to clients Friday. It's a "compelling buying opportunity" as it "creates a window for investors to buy into a high-quality, growth-oriented cybersecurity company at a discounted valuation," Trebnick continued. To her point, CrowdStrike stock's relative valuation, according to its price-to-earnings ratio (P/E), which compares its market value to its projected profits over the next four quarters, fell Friday to its lowest number since April. Still, CrowdStrike's P/E of about 70 is very high for a company of its size, meaning investors will need to express significant confidence in the business' ability to grow earnings, a challenge if Friday's incident were to impact CrowdStrike's client base.

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More than a dozen new Immersive Videos are coming to Vision Pro, with the first, titled Boundless, launching last night. "The announcement follows a long, slow period for new Vision Pro-specific video content from Apple," writes Ars Technica's Samuel Axon. "The headset launched in early February with a handful of Immersive Video episodes ranging from five to 15 minutes each. Since then, only three new videos have been added." From the report: Tonight's Boundless episode will allow viewers to see what it's like to ride in a hot air balloon over sweeping vistas. Another episode titled "Arctic Surfing" will arrive this fall, Apple says. Sometime next month, Apple will publish the second episode of its real wildlife documentary, simply titled Wild Life. The episode will focus on elephants in Kenya's Sheldrick Wildlife Trust. Another episode is in the works, too. "Later this year," Apple writes in its newsroom post, "viewers will brave the deep with a bold group of divers in the Bahamas, who come face-to-face with apex predators and discover creatures much more complex than often portrayed." In September, we'll see the debut of a new Immersive Video series titled Elevated. Apple describes it as an "aerial travel series" in which viewers will fly over places of interest. The first episode will take viewers to Hawaii, while another planned for later this year will go to New England. Apple is additionally partnering with Red Bull for a look at surfing called Red Bull: Big-Wave Surfing. In addition to those documentary episodes, there will be three short films by year's end. One will be a musical experience featuring The Weeknd, and another will take basketball fans inside the 2024 NBA All-Star Weekend. There will also be Submerged, the first narrative fictional Immersive Video on the platform. It's an action short film depicting struggles on a submarine during World War II.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from the New York Times: For years, the people building powerful artificial intelligence systems have used enormous troves of text, images and videos pulled from the internet to train their models. Now, that data is drying up. Over the past year, many of the most important web sources used for training A.I. models have restricted the use of their data, according to a study published this week by the Data Provenance Initiative, an M.I.T.-led research group. The study, which looked at 14,000 web domains that are included in three commonly used A.I. training data sets, discovered an "emerging crisis in consent," as publishers and online platforms have taken steps to prevent their data from being harvested. The researchers estimate that in the three data sets -- called C4, RefinedWeb and Dolma -- 5 percent of all data, and 25 percent of data from the highest-quality sources, has been restricted. Those restrictions are set up through the Robots Exclusion Protocol, a decades-old method for website owners to prevent automated bots from crawling their pages using a file called robots.txt. The study also found that as much as 45 percent of the data in one set, C4, had been restricted by websites' terms of service. "We're seeing a rapid decline in consent to use data across the web that will have ramifications not just for A.I. companies, but for researchers, academics and noncommercial entities," said Shayne Longpre, the study's lead author, in an interview.

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Nigeria fined Meta for $220 million on Friday, alleging the tech giant violated the country's local consumer, data protection and privacy laws. Reuters reports: Nigeria's Federal Competition and Consumer Protection Commission (FCCPC) said Meta appropriated the data of Nigerian users on its platforms without their consent, abused its market dominance by forcing exploitative privacy policies on users, and meted out discriminatory and disparate treatment on Nigerians, compared with other jurisdictions with similar regulations. FCCPC chief Adamu Abdullahi said the investigations were jointly held with Nigeria's Data Protection Commission and spanned over 38 months. The investigations found Meta policies don't allow users the option or opportunity to self-determine or withhold consent to the gathering, use, and sharing of personal data, Abdullahi said. "The totality of the investigation has concluded that Meta over the protracted period of time has engaged in conduct that constituted multiple and repeated, as well as continuing infringements... particularly, but not limited to abusive, and invasive practices against data subjects in Nigeria," Abdullahi said. "Being satisfied with the significant evidence on the record, and that Meta has been provided every opportunity to articulate any position, representations, refutations, explanations or defences of their conduct, the Commission have now entered a final order and issued a penalty against Meta," Abdullahi said. The final order mandates steps and actions Meta must take to comply with local laws, Abdullahi said.

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Kylie Robison reports via The Verge: Have you seen the memes online where someone tells a bot to "ignore all previous instructions" and proceeds to break it in the funniest ways possible? The way it works goes something like this: Imagine we at The Verge created an AI bot with explicit instructions to direct you to our excellent reporting on any subject. If you were to ask it about what's going on at Sticker Mule, our dutiful chatbot would respond with a link to our reporting. Now, if you wanted to be a rascal, you could tell our chatbot to "forget all previous instructions," which would mean the original instructions we created for it to serve you The Verge's reporting would no longer work. Then, if you ask it to print a poem about printers, it would do that for you instead (rather than linking this work of art). To tackle this issue, a group of OpenAI researchers developed a technique called "instruction hierarchy," which boosts a model's defenses against misuse and unauthorized instructions. Models that implement the technique place more importance on the developer's original prompt, rather than listening to whatever multitude of prompts the user is injecting to break it. The first model to get this new safety method is OpenAI's cheaper, lightweight model launched Thursday called GPT-4o Mini. In a conversation with Olivier Godement, who leads the API platform product at OpenAI, he explained that instruction hierarchy will prevent the meme'd prompt injections (aka tricking the AI with sneaky commands) we see all over the internet. "It basically teaches the model to really follow and comply with the developer system message," Godement said. When asked if that means this should stop the 'ignore all previous instructions' attack, Godement responded, "That's exactly it." "If there is a conflict, you have to follow the system message first. And so we've been running [evaluations], and we expect that that new technique to make the model even safer than before," he added.

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Bangladesh is experiencing a "near-total" nationwide internet shutdown amid government efforts to control widespread student protests against the country's quota system for government jobs. The country's quota system requires a third of government jobs be reserved for relatives of veterans who had fought for independence from Pakistan. According to Reuters, the protests "have opened old and sensitive political fault lines between those who fought for Bangladesh's independence from Pakistan in 1971 and those accused of collaborating with Islamabad." Analysts say the protests have also been "fueled by high unemployment among young people" and "wider economic woes, such as high inflation and shrinking reserves of foreign exchange." Engadget reports on the internet disruptions: To control the situation, Bangladeshi authorities shut down internet and phone access throughout the country, a common practice in South Asia to prevent the spread of rumors and misinformation and exercise state control. NetBlocks, a global internet monitor that works on digital rights analyzed live network data that showed that Bangladesh was in the middle of a "near-total national internet shutdown." [...] Bangladesh has frequently blacked out the internet to crack down on political opposition and activists. At the end of 2023, research tool CIVICUS Monitor, which provides data on the state of civil society and freedoms in nearly 200 countries, downgraded Bangladesh's civic space to "closed," its lowest possible rating, after the country imposed six internet shutdowns the previous year. That made Bangladesh the fifth-largest perpetrator of internet shutdowns in 2022, Access Now said. The country's telecom regulator had pledged to keep internet access on through Bangladesh's general elections at the beginning of 2024, but that electoral period is now over. Despite the pledge, Bangladesh blocked access to news websites during its elections.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Citing frustration with mobile carriers enforcing different phone-unlocking policies that are bad for consumers, the Federal Communications Commission is proposing a 60-day unlocking requirement that would apply to all wireless providers. The industry's "confusing and disparate cell phone unlocking policies" mean that "some consumers can unlock their phones with relative ease, while others face significant barriers," Commissioner Geoffrey Starks said at yesterday's FCC meeting. "It also means certain carriers are subject to mandatory unlocking requirements while others are free to dictate their own. This asymmetry is bad for both consumers and competition." The FCC is "proposing a uniform 60-day unlocking policy" so that "consumers can choose the carrier that offers them the best value," Starks said. Unlocking a phone allows it to be used on a different carrier's network as long as the phone is compatible. The FCC approved the Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (NPRM) in a 5-0 vote. That begins a public comment period that could lead to a final rulemaking. A draft of the NPRM said the FCC "propose[s] to require all mobile wireless service providers to unlock handsets 60 days after a consumer's handset is activated with the provider, unless within the 60-day period the service provider determines the handset was purchased through fraud." "You bought your phone, you should be able to take it to any provider you want," Rosenworcel said. "Some providers already operate this way. Others do not. In fact, some have recently increased the time their customers must wait until they can unlock their device by as much as 100 percent." Rosenworcel apparently was referring to a prepaid brand offered by T-Mobile. The NPRM draft said that "T-Mobile recently increased its locking period for one of its brands, Metro by T-Mobile, from 180 days to 365 days." The 365-day rule brought Metro into line with other T-Mobile prepaid phones that already came with the year-long lock. We reached out to T-Mobile and will update this article if it provides a comment. A merger condition imposed on T-Mobile's purchase of Sprint merely requires that it unlock prepaid phones within one year. T-Mobile imposes different unlocking policies on prepaid and postpaid phones. For postpaid devices, T-Mobile says it will unlock phones that have been active for at least 40 days, but only if any associated financing or leasing agreement has been paid in full.

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Master Chief has fought his last battle at Paramount+. The streamer has canceled its video game adaptation Halo after two seasons. The show originally debuted in 2022. From a report: The series, based on the Xbox franchise and starring Pablo Schreiber as Master Chief John-117, finished its second season in March. "We are extremely proud of this ambitious series and would like to thank our partners at Xbox, 343 Industries and Amblin Television, along with showrunner and executive producer David Wiener, his fellow executive producers, the entire cast led by Pablo Schreiber as Master Chief and the amazing crew for all their outstanding work," Paramount+ said in a statement. "We wish everyone the best going forward." Sources say the show's producers -- Amblin, Xbox and 343 Industries -- will look to land the series at another outlet for a third season. Paramount+ is said to be supportive of a possible move. "We deeply appreciate the millions of fans who propelled the Halo series to be a global success, and we remain committed to broadening the Halo universe in different ways in the future," reads a statement from 343 Industries. "We are grateful to Amblin and Paramount for their partnership in bringing our expansive sci-fi universe to viewers around the world."

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AMD has introduced its latest Ryzen AI chips, built on the new Zen 5 architecture, in an ambitious attempt to compete with Apple's dominant MacBook processors. During a recent two-day event in Los Angeles, the company made bold claims about outperforming Apple's M3 and M3 Pro chips in various tasks including multitasking, image processing, and gaming, though these assertions remain unverified due to limited demonstrations and benchmarks provided at the event, The Verge reports. The report adds: At that event, I heard AMD brag about beating the MacBook more than I've ever heard a company directly target a competitor before. AMD claimed its new Ryzen chip "exceeds the performance of what MacBook Air has to offer in multitasking, image processing, 3D rendering, and gaming"; "is 15 percent faster than the M3 Pro" in Cinebench; and is capable of powering up to four displays, "unlike the MacBook Air, which limits you to two displays only." While AMD touted significant improvements in CPU architecture, graphics performance, and AI capabilities, journalists present at the event were unable to fully test or validate these features, leaving many questions unanswered about the chips' real-world performance. The company's reluctance or inability to showcase certain capabilities, particularly in gaming and AI applications, has raised eyebrows among industry observers, the report adds. The new Ryzen AI chips are scheduled to debut in Asus laptops on July 28th, marking a critical juncture for AMD in the fiercely competitive laptop processor market. As Apple's M-series chips and Qualcomm's Snapdragon processors continue to gain traction in the mobile computing space, the success or failure of AMD's latest offering could have far-reaching implications for the future of x86 architecture in laptops.

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OpenAI escaped a copyright lawsuit from a group of open-source programmers after they voluntarily dismissed their case against the company in federal court. From a report: The programmers, who allege the generative AI programming tool Copilot was trained on their code without proper attribution, filed their notice of voluntary dismissal Thursday, but will still have their case against GitHub and parent company Microsoft, which collaborated with OpenAI in developing the tool. The proposed class action filed in 2022 in the US District Court for the Northern District of California was the first major copyright case against OpenAI, which has since been hit with numerous lawsuits from authors and news organizations including the New York Times.

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Calling plastic pollution one of the world's most pressing environmental problems, the Biden administration on Friday said that the federal government, the biggest buyer of consumer goods in the world, would phase out purchases of single-use plastics. From a report: The administration also said it planned tougher regulations on plastic manufacturing, which releases planet-warming greenhouse gases and other dangerous pollutants. The efforts, which the White House called the first comprehensive strategy to tackle plastic use nationwide, aim to reduce demand for disposable plastic items while also helping to create a market for substitutes that are reusable, compostable or more easily recyclable. Brenda Mallory, who heads the White House Council on Environmental Quality, said in a statement that the changes would "require unprecedented action at every stage of the plastic life cycle." Because of its purchasing power, the White House added, "the federal government has the potential to significantly impact the supply of these products." The emphasis on curbing plastic use mirrors a growing recognition that the world can't recycle or manage its way out of a deluge of plastic waste. Global plastic production rose nearly 230-fold between 1950 and 2019, to more than 400 million tons a year, and is expected to quadruple from current levels by 2050. An estimated 40 percent of that is single-use plastic, which makes up the bulk of the world's plastic waste.

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The FTC says the across-the-board price increases that Microsoft recently announced for its Xbox Game Pass subscription service tiers represent "exactly the sort of consumer harm from the merger the FTC has alleged" when it sought to block Microsoft's merger with Activision. From a report: In a letter to the court posted as part of an ongoing appeal by the FTC in the case, the federal regulator alleges Microsoft's moves are a clear example of "product degradation" brought about by "a firm exercising market power post-merger." The letter's primary focus is on the soon-to-be-discontinued $10.99/month Console Game Pass tier. That's being replaced with a $14.99/month Game Pass Standard tier (a 36 percent price increase) that no longer includes "day one" access to all of Microsoft's first-party titles. To maintain that key benefit, "Console" subscribers will have to spend 81 percent more for the $19.99 Game Pass Ultimate tier, which also includes a number of additional benefits over the current $10.99/month option. The FTC notes that these changes "coincide with adding Call of Duty to Game Pass's most expensive tier." Previously, Microsoft publicly promised that this Game Pass access to Activision's ultra-popular shooter would come "with no price increase for the service based on the acquisition." It's that "based on the acquisition" clause that's likely to give Microsoft some wiggle room in arguing for its planned pricing changes. Inflation is also a sufficient explanation for a large portion of the price increase in nominal terms -- the $14.99 Microsoft charged for a month of Game Pass Ultimate when it launched in 2019 is the equivalent of $18.39 today, according to the BLS CPI calculator.

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Oracle agreed to pay $115 million to settle a lawsuit accusing the database software and cloud computing company of invading people's privacy by collecting their personal information and selling it to third parties. Reuters: The plaintiffs, who otherwise have no connection to Oracle, said the company violated federal and state privacy laws and California's constitution by creating unauthorized "digital dossiers" for hundreds of millions of people. They said the dossiers contained data including where people browsed online, and where they did their banking, bought gas, dined out, shopped and used their credit cards. Oracle then allegedly sold the information directly to marketers or through products such as ID Graph, which according to the company helps marketers "orchestrate a relevant, personalized experience for each individual."

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Russian officials boasted on Friday that Moscow was spared the impact of the global IT systems outage because of its increased self-sufficiency after years of Western sanctions, though some experts said Russian systems could still be vulnerable. From a report: Microsoft and other IT firms have suspended sales of new products in Russia and have been scaling down their operations in line with sanctions imposed over Russia's war in Ukraine, which Moscow describes as a special military operation. The Kremlin, along with companies from state nuclear giant Rosatom, which operates all of Russia's nuclear plants, to major lenders and airlines, reported no glitches amid the outage that affected international companies across the globe. "The situation once again highlights the significance of foreign software substitution," Russia's digital development ministry said. Russian financial and currency markets also ran smoothly.

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An anonymous reader shares a report, which expands on the ongoing global outage: The incident will exacerbate concerns about concentration risk in the cyber security industry. Just 15 companies worldwide account for 62 per cent of the market in cyber security products and services, according to SecurityScorecard. In modern endpoint security, the business of securing PCs, laptops and other devices, the problem is worse: three companies, with Microsoft and CrowdStrike by far the largest, controlled half the market last year, according to IDC. While the US Cyber Safety Review Board dissects large cyber attacks for lessons learned, there is no obvious body charged with analysing these technical failures to improve the resilience of global tech infrastructure, said Ciaran Martin, former head of the UK's National Cyber Security Centre. The current global outage should spur clients -- and perhaps even governments and regulators -- to think more about how to build diversification and redundancy into their systems.

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The demand for software developers has declined sharply from the peak seen in 2021 and 2022, according to independent analysis by job portal Indeed and research firm ADP, reflecting a broader slowdown in high-paying white-collar job opportunities across tech, marketing, and finance sectors. Nick Bunker, an economist at Indeed, identified these positions as the labor market's current weak point. The shift follows a period of intense recruitment during the pandemic, when tech workers could command premium salaries. ADP Research adds: Employment of software developers in fact has been slowing since 2020, the year pandemic lockdowns first hit the United States. In January 2024, the U.S. employed fewer software developers than it did six years ago. [...] The ADP Research Institute tracked employees at 6,500 companies, including more than 75,000 software developers and engineers in 10 industries, between January 2018 and January 2024. Using this data, we built an index to track the employment of software developers beginning in January 2018. Developer employment grew from January 2018 to November 2019, then began to fall. The index dropped sharply in January 2022 (down 4.6 percentage points), May 2022 (down 3.5 percentage points), and January 2023 (down 3.4 percentage points). Despite intermediate increases in August 2021 and October 2022, the developer employment index has been falling since 2020.

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Microsoft has a suggested solution for individual customers affected by what may turn out to be the largest IT outage that has ever happened: Just reboot it a lot. From a report: Customers can delete a specific file called C00000291*.sys, which is seemingly tied to the bug, Microsoft said in a status update published Friday. But in some cases, people can't even get to a spot where they can delete that file. In an update posted Friday morning, Microsoft told users that they should simply reboot Virtual Machines (VMs) experiencing a BSoD over and over again until they can fix the issue. [...] "We have received reports of successful recovery from some customers attempting multiple Virtual Machine restart operations on affected Virtual Machines," Microsoft told users. "We have received feedback from customers that several reboots (as many as 15 have been reported) may be required, but overall feedback is that reboots are an effective troubleshooting step at this stage."

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