An anonymous reader shared this story from SFGate: A boy who was kidnapped from an Oakland playground in 1951 has been found alive on the East Coast, a remarkable resolution to a mystery that has haunted his family for over half a century. On February 21, 1951, 6-year-old Luis Armando Albino was playing with his older brother Roger at Jefferson Square Park. The boys had recently immigrated with their mother and four other siblings from Puerto Rico... That afternoon, Luis and 10-year-old Roger walked down the block from their home at 730 Brush Street to play in the park. They were approached by a woman in her 30s, wearing a green bandana over her hair, who began chatting with Luis in Spanish. She promised she would buy him candy if he came along with her, and little Luis agreed to join her. Wary, Roger trailed the pair for a while before returning home to alert an adult to the strange encounter. Oakland police were called by frantic family members and a search was immediately launched... Antonia [the boy's mother] was convinced her son was alive. "She came once a week, then once a month, then at least once a year, to see the shake of the head, to have the answer 'no' translated for her although she could read it in the officers' faces," the Oakland Tribune wrote in 1966... Decades passed. In 2020, Luis' niece, Alida Alequin, took a DNA test on a whim, the Mercury News reported. The service returned several possible family members to the Oakland woman. One of them was a man who Alequin had never met. After some internet sleuthing, she began to suspect this man might be the missing uncle she'd heard so much about. She reached out to the man but didn't hear back. Earlier this year, Alequin tried again. Armed with photos, she took her evidence to the Oakland Police Department's missing persons unit. In short order, the FBI and California Department of Justice were also investigating Alequin's lead. They discovered the man was living on the East Coast, had worked as a firefighter and served two tours in Vietnam with the Marine Corps. This week, the Mercury News first reported that a DNA test confirmed what Alequin suspected: This was Luis Albino. In June, Luis flew to California to reunite with his family, among them his devoted brother Roger... For over 70 years, he lived on the East Coast believing he was the son of another couple.... When Luis met Alequin for the first time this summer, he held her in an embrace. "Thank you," he said, "for finding me."

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The JavaScript runtime Bun is a Node.js/Deno alternative (that's also a bundler/test runner/package manager). And Bun 1.1.28 now includes experimental support for ">compiling and running native C from JavaScript, according to this report from The New Stack: "From compression to cryptography to networking to the web browser you're reading this on, the world runs on C," wrote Jarred Sumner, creator of Bun. "If it's not written in C, it speaks the C ABI (C++, Rust, Zig, etc.) and is available as a C library. C and the C ABI are the past, present, and future of systems programming." This is a low-boilerplate way to use C libraries and system libraries from JavaScript, he said, adding that this feature allows the same project that runs JavaScript to also run C without a separate build step... "It's good for glue code that binds C or C-like libraries to JavaScript. Sometimes, you want to use a C library or system API from JavaScript, and that library was never meant to be used from JavaScript," Sumner added. It's currently possible to achieve this by compiling to WebAssembly or writing a N-API (napi) addon or V8 C++ API library addon, the team explained. But both are suboptimal... WebAssembly can do this but its isolated memory model comes with serious tradeoffs, the team wrote, including an inability to make system calls and a requirement to clone everything. "Modern processors support about 280 TB of addressable memory (48 bits). WebAssembly is 32-bit and can only access its own memory," Sumner wrote. "That means by default, passing strings and binary data JavaScript WebAssembly must clone every time. For many projects, this negates any performance gain from leveraging WebAssembly." The latest version of Bun, released Friday, builds on this by adding N-API (nap) support to cc [Bun's C compiler, which uses TinyCC to compile the C code]. "This makes it easier to return JavaScript strings, objects, arrays and other non-primitive values from C code," wrote Sumner. "You can continue to use types like int, float, double to send & receive primitive values from C code, but now you can also use N-API types! Also, this works when using dlopen to load shared libraries with bun:ffi (such as Rust or C++ libraries with C ABI exports).... "TinyCC compiles to decently performant C, but it won't do advanced optimizations that Clang or GCC does like autovectorization or very specialized CPU instructions," Sumner wrote. "You probably won't get much of a performance gain from micro-optimizing small parts of your codebase through C, but happy to be proven wrong!"

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The Washington Post reports that electric vehicles made by General Motors now can use Tesla's Superchargers. (GM's charger adapters "will first be made available to customers in the United States, followed by availability for Canadian customers later this year.") The Post writes that the move "expands the number of vehicles compatible with the North American Charging Standard developed by Tesla" — and also marks "another step forward for efforts to settle on a universal public charger network for battery-powered cars and trucks in the U.S. "It could also allay some GM customers' concerns about a lack of charging options." The new changes take effect immediately, along with sales of the GM-approved power adapters... The deal makes roughly 17,800 Tesla Superchargers available to drivers of GM-manufactured vehicles such as the Chevy Bolt, Cadillac Lyriq and Silverado EV, with the help of an adapter that costs $225... GM estimates that the partnership with Tesla contributes to an overall network of 231,800 fast chargers across the United States available to drivers of its vehicles. GM is also part of IONNA, a joint venture of eight automakers that plans to build at least 30,000 high-powered chargers nationwide. GM's statement calls it "a move that will help accelerate fast and convenient charging options for current and future EV drivers." And the move comes 15 months after GM announced it was adopting the standard — a move followed within weeks by similar announcements from Rivian, Ford, Volvo, Nissan, Hyundai and Kia. "Ford and Rivian have started distributing adapters for their EVs," the Washington Post points out, "while others, such as BMW, Honda, Hyundai and Mercedes-Benz have promised to start making their vehicles compatible this year or next." "Knowing we will now have access to Tesla Supercharger locations means that range anxiety has now virtually evaporated..." argues a Chevy owner at CleanTechnica: This is mostly good news for drivers of electric cars from GM. Tesla and The General have been bitter enemies in the past, with GM opposing Tesla's direct sales model in many states. The once fierce battle has cooled in recent years, but GM essentially won by keeping Tesla from selling direct to the public in several US states, including its new home of Texas. Nevertheless, the two companies are now cooperating, which is a bonus for drivers... Despite some niggling concerns, this is a big deal for EV drivers in North America. Tesla Superchargers are the gold standard in the industry today. There are fast, reliable, and always located in clean, well-lit places where restrooms and fresh foods are available. This could very well change the conversation about electric cars to the point where by the time GM, Ford, and Stellantis get their plug-in hybrids into showrooms, the demand for them will have shrunk considerably. One GM executive says in this week's statement that "GM's ongoing efforts to help accelerate the expansion of public charging infrastructure is an integral part of our commitment to an all-electric future."

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Polypropylene and polyethylene plastics "can be recycled," reports Ars Technica. But as "polyolefin" polymers, "the process can be difficult and often produces large quantities of the greenhouse gas methane. "Now, researchers at the University of California, Berkeley have come up with a method of recycling these polymers that uses catalysts that easily break their bonds, converting them into propylene and isobutylene, which are gasses at room temperature. Those gasses can then be recycled into new plastics..." [T]he previous catalysts were expensive metals that did not remain pure long enough to convert all of the plastic into gas. Using sodium on alumina followed by tungsten oxide on silica proved much more economical and effective, even though the high temperatures required for the reaction added a bit to the cost. In both plastics, exposure to sodium on alumina broke each polymer chain into shorter polymer chains and created breakable carbon-carbon double bonds at the ends. The chains continued to break over and over. Both then underwent a second process known as olefin metathesis. They were exposed to a stream of ethylene gas flowing into a reaction chamber while being introduced to tungsten oxide on silica, which resulted in the breakage of the carbon-carbon bonds. The reaction breaks all the carbon-carbon bonds in polyethylene and polypropylene, with the carbon atoms released during the breaking of these bonds ending up attached to molecules of ethylene... The entire chain is catalyzed until polyethylene is fully converted to propylene, and polypropylene is converted to a mixture of propylene and isobutylene. This method has high selectivity — meaning it produces a large amount of the desired product. That means propylene derived from polyethylene, and both propylene and isobutylene derived from polypropylene. Both of these chemicals are in high demand, since propylene is an important raw material for the chemical industry, while isobutylene is a frequently used monomer in many different polymers, including synthetic rubber and a gasoline additive. "Because plastics are often mixed at recycling centers, the researchers wanted to see what would happen if polypropylene and polyethylene underwent isomerizing ethenolysis together," the article adds. "The reaction was successful, converting the mixture into propylene and isobutylene, with slightly more propylene than isobutylene." The reaction worked, even if there were contaminants from other plastics. And "When the research team increased the scale of the experiment, it produced the same yield, which looks promising for the future...." The researchers hope this some day could reduce the demand for chemicals derived from fossil fuels. Thanks to Slashdot reader echo123 for sharing the article.

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"In all likelihood, in the next 25 years, we'll find evidence of life on another planet..." begins a new essay by author Dave Eggers in the Washington Post. "In more than a dozen conversations with some of the best minds in astrophysics, I did not meet anyone who was doubtful about finding evidence of life elsewhere — most likely on an exoplanet beyond our solar system. It was not a matter of if. It was a matter of when." [A]ll evidence points to us getting closer, every year, to identifying moons in our solar system, or exoplanets beyond it, that can sustain life. And if we don't find conditions for life on the moons near us, we'll find it on exoplanets — that is, planets outside our solar system. Within the next few decades, we'll likely find an exoplanet that has an atmosphere, that has water, that has carbon and methane and oxygen. Or some combination of those things. And thus, the conditions for life. In a few years, NASA will launch the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, which will have a panoramic field of vision a hundred times greater than the Hubble Space Telescope. And on the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope — we'll call it Roman from here on out — there will be a coronagraph, a device designed to perform something called, beautifully, starlight suppression. Starlight suppression is the blocking of the rays of a faraway star so that we can see behind it and around it. Once we can master starlight suppression, with Roman and NASA's next astrophysics flagship, the Habitable Worlds Observatory, we'll find the planets where life might exist. To recap: For thousands of years, humans have wondered whether life is possible elsewhere in the universe, and now we're within striking distance of being able to say not only yes, but here. And yet this is not front-page news. I didn't really know how close we were to this milestone until I visited the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., on a hot and dry day in June... Eggers' article is part of an ongoing series called "Who is government?" (For the series Michael Lewis also profiled the uncelebrated number-crunchers at the U.S. Department of Labor, while Casey Cep wrote about the use of DNA to identify the remains of World War II soldiers for America's Veteran Affairs' department's.) But this week Eggers wrote that the work being done at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory "is the most inspiring research and exploration being done by any humans on our planet..." "No billionaires will fund work like this because there's no money in it. This is government-funded research to determine how the universe was created and whether we are alone in it. If NASA and JPL were not doing it, it would not be done." Eggers emphasizes later that "doesn't mean it's intelligent life, or even semi-intelligent life. It could be bacteria, or some kind of interstellar sea cucumber. But whatever form it takes, we are close to finding it..."

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The administrators of Great Britain's power grid admit that it's often unable to use energy-storage batteries due to old computer systems and an old network with "not enough cables", according to the Financial Times — though the system operator says they're making progress after upgrading their system last December: The company has plans to lower the rate at which batteries are sidelined to single figures by early next year [said Craig Dyke, from National Grid's electricity system operator], calling current levels "higher than where we want them to be". Dyke's comments came in response to a letter from four leading battery storage groups which said National Grid's "electricity system operator" or ESO division was making the country's power costlier and dirtier by failing to use their technology properly. "Consumers are paying more, clean renewable energy is being wasted, and fossil fuel generation is being used instead," they said... depriving them of revenue and undermining investor confidence. While the U.K. has the world's second-largest offshore wind market, the article notes that when the system operator can't send its power where it's needed, "the ESO pays wind farms in one place to switch off... and can also need to pay gas-fired power plants in another area to turn on. These payments add up to hundreds of millions of pounds each year, and the costs are passed on to household and business energy bills." "Use of battery storage abroad has soared in places such as California, where batteries soak up solar power during the day and regularly supply a fifth of the state's power in the evening..." Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader AmiMoJo for sharing the article.

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"The cab was cut from a 1997 Jeep Grand Cherokee," writes the New York Times. "The engine once revved up a 1985 Toyota Celica; and 107 hand-sewn rubber segments, courtesy of Mr. Tymofichuk's wife, help to direct low-pressure air beneath the craft so that it rises eight inches above the ground..." On a cold spring day in a small garage in Alberta, Canada, an engine revved up and an improbable machine — fabricated from auto parts, a hand-sewn rubber skirt and an abandoned fiberglass hull — came to life. A homemade hovercraft began to rise off the ground with a small crew standing by. The successful liftoff was the culmination of a lifelong fascination of Robert Tymofichuk, 55, who spent about 1,800 hours over a year working on it [according to this nifty video on YouTube ]. And, to the gratitude of passengers, it comes with heated seats. "If you're going through all that hassle, you might as well make yourself comfortable," Mr. Tymofichuk said. He repurposed the seats from a Volkswagen, so the heating coils were already installed. Achieve speeds around 40 miles per hour (or 64 kmph), "Mr. Tymofichuk's hovercraft now sails above land and water, a bright red gem coasting over the Saskatchewan River," according to the article. And it also quotes Mr. Tymofichuk as saying it's the fulfillment of a childhood dream. "To actually have something constructed with your own hands be zipping around, and it's fully functional — it's like magic."

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"Exceed the speed limit in one of the 27 European Union countries, and you may get some pushback from your vehicle," reports Car and Driver. "As of July, new cars sold in the EU must include a speed-warning device that alerts drivers if they exceed the posted limit." The warnings can be ither acoustic or haptic, "though the European Commission gives automakers the latitude to supplant those passive measures with either an active accelerator pedal that applies counterpressure against the driver's foot or a governor that restricts the vehicle's speed to the legal limit." Drivers can override or deactivate these admonishments, but the devices must default to their active state at startup. Now California is looking to emulate the EU with legislation that would mandate in-car speed-warning devices [for driving more than 10 miles per hour over the speed limit — in "just about every 2030 model-year vehicle equipped with either GPS or a front-facing camera"]. The article cites statistics that 18% of those drivers involved in fatal crashes were speeding. Although the projects director at the European Transport Safety Council also acknowledges the systems may struggle to identify speed limits from passing signs — and that their testing shows the systems generally irritate drivers, who often deactivate the systems... Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader sinij for sharing the article.

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Friday America's Federal Trade Commission brought action against three companies for "anticompetitive and unfair" practices "that have artificially inflated the list price of insulin." For years, many of the millions of Americans who need insulin to survive "have been forced to pay exorbitant prices for a product that's inexpensive to make," writes NPR. "Now, the federal government is targeting one part of the system behind high insulin prices." While out-of-pocket costs have gone down for many people to $35 a month, questions remain on how the drug became so expensive in the first place. In a new lawsuit filed Friday, the Federal Trade Commission said it's going after one link in the chain: pharmacy benefit managers. The FTC brought action against the top pharmacy benefit managers (PBMs) — CVS Health's Caremark Rx, Cigna's Express Scripts, and United Health Group's OptumRx — saying the companies created a "perverse drug rebate system" that artificially inflates the cost of insulin. If the suit is successful, it could further drive down costs for patients at the pharmacy counter. PBMs are essentially the middlemen between drug manufacturers and insurance providers. Their job is to reduce drug prices. But the process is complex and opaque, and critics say they're actually driving prices up for patients. The FTC said a big issue is that PBMs' revenue is tied to rebates and fees — which are based on a percentage of a drug's list price. Essentially, in the case of insulin, when the drug costed more, it generated higher rebates and fees for PBMs. "Even when lower list price insulins became available that could have been more affordable for vulnerable patients, the PBMs systemically excluded them in favor of high list price, highly rebated insulin products," the FTC said in a press release on Friday. The three PBMs named in the FTC lawsuit make up about 80% of the market. According to the suit, the PBMs collected billions of dollars in rebates and fees while insulin became increasingly unaffordable. Over the last two decades, the cost of the lifesaving drug shot up 600% — forcing many Americans with diabetes to ration their medication and jeopardize their health. In 2019, one 1 of 4 insulin patients was unable to afford their medication, according to the FTC. Some people have died. The FTC's statement says the companies "have abused their economic power by rigging pharmaceutical supply chain competition in their favor, forcing patients to pay more for life-saving medication... While PBM respondents collected billions in rebates and associated fees according to the complaint, by 2019 one out of every four insulin patients was unable to afford their medication..." "[A]ll drug manufacturers should be on notice that their participation in the type of conduct challenged here raises serious concerns, and that the Bureau of Competition may recommend suing drug manufacturers in any future enforcement actions."

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It's hypothetically capable of "delivering an exquisite portrait of the detailed surface features of any exoplanet within 100 light-years..." writes Space.com. "It would be better than any telescope we could possibly build in any possible future for the next few hundred years..." While the sun may not look like a traditional lens or mirror, it has a lot of mass. And in Einstein's theory of general relativity, massive objects bend space-time around them. Any light that grazes the surface of the sun gets deflected and, instead of continuing in a straight line, heads toward a focal point, together with all the other light that grazes the sun at the same time... The "solar gravitational lens" leads to an almost unbelievably high resolution. It's as if we had a telescope mirror the width of the entire sun. An instrument positioned at the correct focal point would be able to harness the gravitational warping of the sun's gravity to allow us to observe the distant universe with a jaw-dropping resolution of 10^-10 arcseconds. That's roughly a million times more powerful than the Event Horizon Telescope. Of course, there are challenges with using the solar gravitational lens as a natural telescope. The focal point of all this light bending sits 542 times greater than the distance between Earth and the sun. It's 11 times the distance to Pluto, and three times the distance achieved by humanity's most far-flung spacecraft, Voyager 1, which launched in 1977. So not only would we have to send a spacecraft farther than we ever have before, but it would have to have enough fuel to stay there and move around. The images created by the solar gravitational lens would be spread out over tens of kilometers of space, so the spacecraft would have to scan the entire field to build up a complete mosaic image. Plans to take advantage of the solar lens go back to the 1970s. Most recently, astronomers have proposed developing a fleet of small, lightweight cubesats that would deploy solar sails to accelerate them to 542 AU. Once there, they would slow down and coordinate their maneuvers, building up an image and sending the data back to Earth for processing... The telescope already exists — we just have to get a camera in the right position. Thanks to Tablizer (Slashdot reader #95,088) for sharing the article.

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X's struggles in Brazil got this update from the Guardian Wednesday: In a statement tweeted from X's global government affairs account, the company said the restoration of service was an "inadvertent and temporary" side-effect of switching network providers. But Friday "After defying court orders in Brazil for three weeks, Mr. Musk's social network, X, has capitulated," writes the New York Times. "In a court filing on Friday night, the company's lawyers said that X had complied with orders from Brazil's Supreme Court in the hopes that the court would lift a block on its site." "The company's lawyers said X had complied with the court's orders — blocking designated accounts, paying fines, and naming a new formal representative in the country," writes TechCrunch (citing reporting by the New York Times): In a filing of its own, the Supreme Court reportedly responded by telling X it had not provided the proper paperwork and giving it five days to do so.... X came back online in Brazil earlier this week, although Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince told TechCrunch that the timing of the company's recent switch to Cloudflare infrastructure is just a "coincidence." During the ban, Brazilian users sought out social media alternatives, leading to dramatic growth at Bluesky and Tumblr. The New York Times believes "The moment showed how, in the yearslong power struggle between tech giants and nation-states, governments have been able to keep the upper hand." Although I'm curious about that missing paperwork...

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The Washington Post reports: An international team of scientists published a peer-reviewed paper Thursday saying genetic evidence indicates the coronavirus pandemic most likely originated with a natural spillover from an animal or animals sold in a market in Wuhan, China, where many of the first human cases of covid-19 were identified. The paper, which appears in the journal Cell, does not claim to prove conclusively that the pandemic began in the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market, and it is unlikely to end the acrimonious and politicized debate over the coronavirus's origin... "The results we see are consistent with infected animals, but we cannot prove that they were," said Florence Débarre, an evolutionary biologist at the French National Center for Scientific Research and a co-author of the new paper... Many of the 23 authors of the paper are known to have long supported a market origin for the virus. In an informal report in March 2023, they presented a central feature of the genetic data — the confirmation that animals potentially capable of triggering a pandemic were in the market... The new paper in Cell is longer, more comprehensive, probes a broader range of questions, and includes more data from the market and early-patient cases than the international team's informal 2023 report, Débarre said. Both the earlier and the new reports document that traces of the virus were found clustered in a section of the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market where genetic traces of animals were also found. Several of those species — raccoon dogs, rabbits and dogs — are known to be susceptible to infection with SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes covid. Raccoon dogs have also been shown experimentally to be capable of transmitting the virus. A significant element of the new paper is an analysis of when the pandemic began. Scientists can study mutations of the coronavirus, which evolves at a relatively steady rate, to estimate when the millions of genomes deposited in databases had the most recent common ancestor. That genetic evidence points to mid-November 2019 as the most likely time the virus spilled into humans and began spreading, and there could have been two or more spillover events, the researchers said. "The timing of the origin of the market outbreak is genetically indistinguishable from the timing of the origin of the pandemic as a whole," the report states. There are many independent lines of evidence pointing to the market as the epicenter of the pandemic, said Kristian Andersen, an infectious-disease researcher at Scripps Research in La Jolla, Calif., and a co-author of the report in Cell. No previous virus spillover has been so well-documented, he said. "Of any previous outbreak, pandemic, you name it, we don't have this level of granularity," he said. "We can narrow it down to a single market, and narrow it down to a section in that market, and maybe even narrow it down to a single stall in that market. That is mind-boggling...." The genetic evidence, the new report contends, supports the hypothesis that SARS-CoV-2 emerged in the same way that SARS-CoV-1 — which sickened people in 2002-2003 but was extinguished before it could cause a full-blown pandemic — is widely believed to have started, from animals sold in a market. The authors contend the world needs to take more aggressive action to shut down the illegal trade in wildlife to lower the risk of another catastrophic pandemic... There is no evidence that the virus, or its progenitor, was inside a laboratory before the outbreak.... "To the question — Did it come from a lab or come from a market? — I think we already knew the answer to that," Andersen said. "Yep, it's the market. It's natural, as we've previously seen happen." One co-author posted a summary on X.com "If you don't want to read the papers." "Early cases centered around the market (not a lab)" "Environmental swabs that tested positive for SARS-CoV-2 clustered in the corner of the market where animals were sold." "There were 2 lineages of SARS2 that spilled over separately at Huanan."

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Slashdot first covered Saul Justin Newman's work in 2019. Now a senior research fellow at the Centre for Longitudinal Studies at University College London, Newman was recognized last week for research finding that most claims of people living over 105 are wrong. Newman's research was honored with an Ig Nobel Prize (awarded for research that makes people "laugh then think") — which led to a thought-provoking interview in the Conversation: Newman: In general, the claims about how long people are living mostly don't stack up. I've tracked down 80% of the people aged over 110 in the world (the other 20% are from countries you can't meaningfully analyse). Of those, almost none have a birth certificate. In the U.S. there are over 500 of these people; seven have a birth certificate. Even worse, only about 10% have a death certificate. The epitome of this is blue zones, which are regions where people supposedly reach age 100 at a remarkable rate. For almost 20 years, they have been marketed to the public. They're the subject of tons of scientific work, a popular Netflix documentary, tons of cookbooks about things like the Mediterranean diet, and so on. Okinawa in Japan is one of these zones. There was a Japanese government review in 2010, which found that 82% of the people aged over 100 in Japan turned out to be dead. The secret to living to 110 was, don't register your death. [Newman says later that "In Okinawa, the best predictor of where the centenarians are is where the halls of records were bombed by the Americans during the war..."] The Japanese government has run one of the largest nutritional surveys in the world, dating back to 1975. From then until now, Okinawa has had the worst health in Japan. They've eaten the least vegetables; they've been extremely heavy drinkers.... With the Greeks, by my estimates at least 72% of centenarians were dead, missing or essentially pension-fraud cases... According to the Greek minister that hands out the pensions, over 9,000 people over the age of 100 are dead and collecting a pension at the same time. In Italy, some 30,000 "living" pension recipients were found to be dead in 1997. Regions where people most often reach 100-110 years old are the ones where there's the most pressure to commit pension fraud, and they also have the worst records. So what's the truth on human longevity? "The question is so obscured by fraud and error and wishful thinking that we just do not know," Newman answers (suggesting physicists "develop a measure of human age that doesn't depend on documents.") In the end the truth may be much more ordinary. "Longevity is very likely tied to wealth. Rich people do lots of exercise, have low stress and eat well." Newman also says that if the scientific community won't acknowledge their errors during his lifetime, "I guess I'll just get someone to pretend I'm still alive until that changes." Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader schwit1 for sharing the news.

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Meta (the parent company of Facebook, Instagram, and Threads) announced Monday that Russian state media outlets like RT are now "banned from our apps globally for foreign interference activity," reports CNN. CNN adds that Meta is alleging that the "Kremlin-controlled networks" have "engaged in deceptive influence operations and attempted to evade detection... Prior to Monday's ban, RT had 7.2 million followers on Facebook and 1 million followers on Instagram." The move comes days after the US Justice Department announced charges against two RT employees for funneling nearly $10 million into a US company, identified by CNN as Tenet Media, to create and amplify content that aligned with Russian interests. The covert influence campaign was aimed at the American public ahead of the 2024 US presidential election, US officials said. Last week the U.S. State department "revealed declassified U.S. intelligence findings that suggest RT is fully integrated into Russia's intelligence operations around the world," CNN reported earlier" In addition to its covert influence operations, the leaders of RT also administered an online crowdfunding effort to supply military equipment to Russian soldiers in Ukraine, Blinken alleged. The crowdfunding effort supplied "sniper rifles, suppressors, body armor, night vision equipment, drones, radio equipment, personal weapon sights, diesel generators" to Russian soldiers fighting in Ukraine, according to Blinken. The goal of the U.S. announcement — and private discussions with allied diplomats — is to make sure that countries know that RT and Russian intelligence agencies are working together to sow division and harm democratic processes, while simultaneously making it much more difficult for RT to operate globally, a senior administration official said... Asked for comment by CNN, RT responded with a mocking email that read in part: "We've been broadcasting straight out of the KGB headquarters all this time." More from Reuters: U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said on Friday that countries should treat RT's activities as they do covert intelligence operations... In briefing materials shared with Reuters, Meta said it had seen Russian state-controlled media try to evade detection in their online activities in the past and expected them to continue trying to engage in deceptive practices going forward. A YouTube spokesperson told Reuters they've also terminated over 230 channels affiliated with Kremlin-controlled outlets — channels which were previously only blocked from viewers. YouTube "began blocking Russian state-sponsored news channels globally in 2022," reports NBC News, "including those tied to RT and Sputnik. Over the years, according to YouTube, the platform has blocked thousands of channels and millions of videos." James Rubin, coordinator for the State Department's Global Engagement Center, said RT is "where propaganda, disinformation and lies are spread to millions, if not billions, of people around the world."

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"In the era of the open source rug pull, the role of open source foundations is more important than ever," argues the co-founder of the developer-focused industry analyst firm RedMonk: The "rug pull" here refers to companies that have used open source as a distribution mechanism, building a community and user base, before changing the license to be restricted, rather than truly open source. "This is capitalism, yo. We've got shareholders to satisfy. It's time to relicense that software, move to a Business Source license." [...] Where open source used to be a sustainable commitment, today too often it feels like a short term tactic. Commercial open source isn't what it used to be. Which means that open source foundations, which provide ongoing governance and intellectual property management for open source projects, are in an interesting position, in some cases becoming more adversarial than they historically have been with vendors.... [T]he Apache Software Foundation (ASF) has done a great job of fostering sustainable, commercial, open source for decades now, most notably in the data infrastructure space — think Hadoop, Spark, Kafka, Flink etc. ["[C]ommercial open source would almost certainly never have achieved critical mass and continued success without foundations in the mix," the article notes later. "The ASF was founded in 1999, and underpinned the adoption of open source middleware in the enterprise..."] One premise behind the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) is that user organisations can within reason trust it to stand behind the projects it incubates and manages. While not an explicit commitment, adopters generally, and enterprises specifically, have seen the CNCF imprimatur as one that they can rely on. In the era of the open source rug pull this kind of promise becomes even more important.... Sid Sijbrandij, CEO of GitLab has argued that open source companies should commit to an Open Charter as a mechanism to protect users from open source rug pulls. "Open source software isn't useful if people can't rely on the project remaining open source. Adopting Open Charter offers open source users predictability amidst the growing licensing switch trend." With a CNCF project, though, the need for this kind of charter becomes less important, because the code is by design not single source, but has a diverse set of contributors. Which is to say that open source foundations can make rug pulls a lot less likely than adoption of open source technology built by a single company. Relying on benevolent dictators is generally pretty risky. And recently the benevolent dictators have seemed... less benevolent. In conclusion, "Open Source Foundations Considered Helpful," according to the post's title. It does argue that "Any company is within its rights to relicense its software, but it can certainly be problematic from a community and project health perspective. "Which is exactly why open source foundations are more important than ever."

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Friday the Wall Street Journal reported Qualcomm recently "made a takeover approach" to Intel, which has a market value of roughly $90 billion ("according to people familiar with the matter...") A deal is far from certain, the people cautioned. Even if Intel is receptive, a deal of that size is all but certain to attract antitrust scrutiny, though it is also possible it could be seen as an opportunity to strengthen the U.S.'s competitive edge in chips... Both Intel and Qualcomm have become U.S. national champions of sorts as chip-making gets increasingly politicized. Intel is in line to get up to $8.5 billion of potential grants for factories in the U.S. as Chief Executive Pat Gelsinger tries to build up a business making chips on contract for outsiders... Both Intel and Qualcomm have been "overshadowed" by Nvidia's success in powering the AI boom, the article points out. But "To get the deal done, Qualcomm could intend to sell assets or parts of Intel to other buyers... A deal would significantly broaden Qualcomm's horizons, complementing its mobile-phone chip business with chips from Intel that are ubiquitous in personal computers and servers..." Qualcomm's approach follows a more than three-year turnaround effort at Intel under Gelsinger that has yet to bear significant fruit. For years, Intel was the biggest semiconductor company in the world by market value, but it now lags behind rivals including Qualcomm, Broadcom, Texas Instruments and AMD. In August, following a dismal quarterly report, Intel said it planned to lay off thousands of employees and pause dividend payments as part of a broad cost-saving drive. Gelsinger last month laid out a roadmap to slash costs by more than $10 billion in 2025, as the company reported a loss of $1.6 billion for the second quarter, compared with a $1.5 billion profit a year earlier... Intel earlier this year began to report separate financial results of its manufacturing operations, which many on Wall Street saw as a prelude to a possible split of the company. Some analysts have argued Intel should be split into two, mirroring a shift in the industry toward specializing in either chip design or chip manufacturing. Splitting up immediately might not be possible, however, Bernstein Research analyst Stacy Rasgon said in a recent note. Intel's manufacturing arm is money-losing and hasn't gained strong traction with customers other than Intel itself since Gelsinger opened the factories to outside chip designers three years ago. Gelsinger has been doubling down on the company's factory ambitions, outlining spending of hundreds of billions of dollars building new plants in the U.S., Europe and Israel in recent years. Given Intel's market value, a successful takeover of the entire company would rank as the all-time largest technology M&A deal, topping Microsoft's $69 billion acquisition of Activision Blizzard. Intel's stock "had its biggest one-day drop in over 50 years in August after the company reported disappointing earnings," reports CNBC. Partly because of that one-day, 26% drop, Intel's shares "are down 53% this year as investors express doubts about the company's costly plans to manufacture and design chips." But the Register remains skeptical about Qualcomm taking over Intel: Chipzilla may not be worth much to Qualcomm unless it can renegotiate the x86/x86-64 cross-licensing patent agreement between Intel and AMD, which dates back to 2009. That agreement is terminated if a change in control happens at either Intel or AMD. While a number of the patents expired in 2021, it's our understanding that agreement is still in force and Qualcomm would be subject to change of control rules. In other words, Qualcomm wouldn't be able to produce Intel-designed x86-64 chips unless AMD gave the green light. It's also likely one of the reasons why no one bought AMD when it was dire straits; whoever took over it would have to deal with Intel.

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Instead of eliminating jobs, self-service kiosks at McDonald's and other fast-food chains "have added extra work for kitchen staff," reports CNN — and as a bonus, "pushed customers to order more food than they do at the cash register..." Kiosks "guarantee that the upsell opportunities" like a milkshake or fries are suggested to customers when they order, Shake Shack CEO Robert Lynch said on an earnings call last month. "Sometimes that is not always a priority for employees when you've got 40 people in line. You're trying to get through it as quick as possible." Kiosks also shift employees from behind the cash register to maintaining the dining area, delivering food to customers or working in the kitchen, he said. [Although a study from Temple University researchers found long lines at a kiosk stress customers — making them order less.] Some McDonald's franchisees — which own and operate 95% of McDonald's in the United States — are now rolling out kiosks that can take cash and accept change. But even in these locations, McDonald's is reassigning cashiers to other roles, including new "guest experience lead" jobs that help customers use the kiosks and assist with any issues. "In theory, kiosks should help save on labor, but in reality, restaurants have added complexity due to mobile ordering and delivery, and the labor saved from kiosks is often reallocated for these efforts," said RJ Hottovy, an analyst who covers the restaurant and retail industries at data analytics firm Placer.ai.... Christopher Andrews, a sociologist at Drew University who studies the effects of technology on work, said the impacts of kiosks were similar to other self-service technology such as ATMs and self-checkout machines in supermarkets. Both technologies were predicted to cause job losses. "The introduction of ATMs did not result in massive technological unemployment for bank tellers," he said. "Instead, it freed them up from low-value tasks such as depositing and cashing checks to perform other tasks that created value." Self-checkout also has not caused retail job losses. In some cases, self-checkout backfired for chains because self-checkout leads to higher merchandise losses from customer errors and more intentional shoplifting than when human cashiers are ringing up customers. Fast-food chains and retailers need to do a better job communicating what the potential benefits of kiosks and self-checkout are to consumers and employees, Andrews said. "What I think will be central for customers is that they see how this technology is providing them with more or better service rather than more unpaid busywork," he said. "Otherwise, the public is just likely to view it as yet another attempt to reduce labor costs via automation and self-service." This article ends up taking both sides of the issue. For example, some befuddled kiosk users can take longer to order, the article points out — and of course, kiosks can also break down. Restaurant analyst Hottovy told CNN "If kiosks really improved speed of service, order accuracy, and upsell, they'd be rolled out more extensively across the industry than they are today."

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The world's biggest technology companies have embarked on a final push to persuade the European Union to take a light-touch approach to regulating AI as they seek to fend off the risk of billions of dollars in fines. From a report: EU lawmakers in May agreed the AI Act, the world's first comprehensive set of rules governing the technology, following months of intense negotiations between different political groups. But until the law's accompanying codes of practice have been finalised, it remains unclear how strictly rules around "general purpose" AI (GPAI) systems, such as OpenAI's ChatGPT will be enforced and how many copyright lawsuits and multi-billion dollar fines companies may face. The EU has invited companies, academics, and others to help draft the code of practice, receiving nearly 1,000 applications, an unusually high number according to a source familiar with the matter who requested anonymity because they were not authorised to speak publicly. The AI code of practice will not be legally binding when it takes effect late next year, but it will provide firms with a checklist they can use to demonstrate their compliance. A company claiming to follow the law while ignoring the code could face a legal challenge.

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American Battery Technology and lithium-producer Albemarle are among 25 companies getting more than $3 billion in funding from the Biden administration to boost domestic production of advanced batteries and components. From a report: The funding -- part of a broader White House goal of creating an American battery supply chain -- is going to projects that are building, expanding or retrofitting facilities to process critical minerals, build components and batteries and recycle materials, the Energy Department said Friday. American Battery Technology received $150 million to build a commercial-scale lithium-ion battery recycling facility in South Carolina. Albemarle is getting $67 million to retrofit a facility to manufacture commercial anode material for next-generation lithium-ion batteries around Charlotte, North Carolina. Other projects included $50 million for Cabot and $225 million for SWA Lithium, a joint venture of Standard Lithium and Equinor. Batteries -- which are used for electric vehicles as well as storing renewable energy for use on the electric grid -- are considered critical to reaching the administration's goal of net-zero emissions by 2050 and for boosting electric vehicles to half of all new light-duty vehicle sales by 2030.

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A massive Antarctic glacier, dubbed the "Doomsday Glacier," is melting at an accelerating rate and could be approaching irreversible collapse, international researchers are reporting. The Thwaites Glacier, holding enough ice to raise global sea levels by over two feet, has seen rapid retreat in the past 30 years. Scientists from the International Thwaites Glacier Collaboration used ice-breaking ships and underwater robots to study the glacier up close since 2018. Their findings reveal warm ocean water funneling through deep cracks in the ice, causing unexpected melting patterns. While computer modeling suggests catastrophic cliff collapse is less likely than feared, researchers project Thwaites and the Antarctic Ice Sheet could disintegrate within 200 years. This collapse could ultimately lead to 10 feet of sea level rise, devastating coastal communities worldwide.

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