Scientists have observed for the first time how microplastics move through and block blood vessels in mouse brains, according to research published in Science Advances this week. Using fluorescence imaging, researchers at Peking University tracked plastic particles as they were consumed by immune cells and accumulated in brain blood vessels, causing obstructions that persisted for up to four weeks and reduced blood flow. The study found that these blockages, which behaved similarly to blood clots, decreased the mice's mobility for several days.

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Nearly 190 million Americans were affected by February's cyberattack on UnitedHealth's Change Healthcare unit, almost double initial estimates, the company disclosed Friday. The breach, the largest in U.S. medical history, exposed sensitive data including Social Security numbers, medical records, and financial information. UnitedHealth said it has not detected misuse of the stolen data or found medical databases among compromised files. Change Healthcare, a major U.S. healthcare claims processor, paid multiple ransoms after Russian-speaking hackers known as ALPHV breached its systems using stolen credentials lacking multi-factor authentication, according to CEO Andrew Witty's testimony to Congress.

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Non-fungible tokens and memecoins are neither securities nor commodities, according to White House crypto czar David Sacks. Instead, he defines them as "collectibles." From a report: "It's like a baseball card or a stamp," Sacks said in an interview with Fox Business on Thursday, referencing Trump's explosively popular memecoin. "People buy it because they want to commemorate something." The famous venture capitalist's comments touched on a long-running debate about the crypto industry in general: how exactly to treat different digital assets. Some argue that digital assets are securities, which are tradable financial assets like stocks. But others say they're commodities, or raw materials that can be bought and sold, like gold and wheat. The classification differences have vast regulatory implications. "There's a few different categories here, so defining the market structure is important," said Sacks.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: Apple executive Kim Vorrath, a company veteran known for fixing troubled products and bringing major projects to market, has a new job: whipping artificial intelligence and Siri into shape. Vorrath, a vice president in charge of program management, was moved to Apple's artificial intelligence and machine learning division this week, according to people with knowledge of the matter. She'll be a top deputy to AI chief John Giannandrea, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the change hasn't been announced publicly. The move helps bolster a team that's racing to make Apple a leader in AI -- an area where it's fallen behind technology peers. [...] Vorrath, who has spent 36 years at Apple, is known for managing the development of tough software projects. She's also put procedures in place that can catch and fix bugs. Vorrath joins the new team from Apple's hardware engineering division, where she helped launch the Vision Pro headset. Over the years, Vorrath has had a hand in several of Apple's biggest endeavors. In the mid-2000s, she was chosen to lead project management for the original iPhone software group and get the iconic device ready for consumers. Until 2019, she oversaw project management for the iPhone, iPad and Mac operating systems, before taking on the Vision Pro software. Haley Allen will replace Vorrath overseeing program management for visionOS, the headset's operating system, according to the people. Prior to joining Giannandrea's organization, Vorrath had spent several weeks advising Kelsey Peterson, the group's previous head of program management. Peterson will now report to Vorrath -- as will two other AI executives, Cindy Lin and Marc Schonbrun. Giannandrea, who joined Apple from Google in 2018, disclosed the changes in a memo sent to staffers. The move signals that AI is now more important than the Vision Pro, which launched in February 2024, and is seen as the biggest challenge within the company, according to a longtime Apple executive who asked not to be identified. Vorrath has a knack for organizing engineering groups and creating an effective workflow with new processes, the executive said. It has been clear for some time now that Giannandrea needs additional help managing an AI group with growing prominence, according to the executive. Vorrath is poised to bring Apple's product development culture to the AI work, the person said.

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Longtime Slashdot reader shanen writes: What matters to you when buying a new smartphone? How can we make the recurring topic relevant without more SCREAMS about "dupe"? I do have a bit of recent research I could share -- quite a bit of fresh data since my latest search started a couple of months ago. Or perhaps I could start with a summary of the useful bits from an ancient Ask Slashdot discussion about batteries? Seems funny to ask about relevant books, even though two come to mind already. One is The Anxious Generation by Jonathan Haidt, where he argues that smartphone use by preadolescents is destroying their personalities. The other is Antifragile by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, who doesn't actually say much about them, but I still think they should have been included in the the big table of examples at the end of the prologue. The "system" of smartphones is antifragile, even though the earliest models were quite fragile. The essence of this question is about which current smartphone models are the most robust... Maybe I should include a list of my own criteria so far? However, would would just be responses to the problems with my current Samsung Galaxy and the Oppo I had before that. I've already determined that the two main problems with those models don't exist with any of the current options offered by my phone company... And the ancient battery problems are still lurking, too.

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Netflix plans to expand its cloud gaming offerings to include couch co-op and party games, according to co-CEO Greg Peters. The company will also continue developing narrative games based on its IP, despite recent leadership changes and the closure of its AAA game studio. The Verge reports: In the blog post, Netflix notes that it's a "limited" beta test, so it seems like this won't be available to too many people to start. (Netflix used that same "limited" language with the initial launch in Canada and the UK.) Like with the original test, the only two games available to stream are Oxenfree from Netflix's own Night School Studio and another game titled Molehew's Mining Adventure. If you have access to the service, you'll need to download Netflix's special controller app for your iPhone or Android device to play the game on your TV. (Netflix says the streamed games work on "select devices," including Amazon Fire TV devices, Chromecast with Google TV, Roku devices and TVs, and more.) On the web, you'll be able to play games with a mouse and keyboard.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: The game of chess has long been central to computer science and AI-related research, most notably in IBM's Deep Blue in the 1990s and, more recently, AlphaZero. But the game is about more than algorithms, according to Marc Barthelemy, a physicist at the Paris-Saclay University in France, with layers of depth arising from the psychological complexity conferred by player strategies. Now, Barthelmey has taken things one step further by publishing a new paper in the journal Physical Review E that treats chess as a complex system, producing a handy metric that can help predict the proverbial "tipping points" in chess matches. [...] For his analysis, Barthelemy chose to represent chess as a decision tree in which each "branch" leads to a win, loss, or draw. Players face the challenge of finding the best move amid all this complexity, particularly midgame, in order to steer gameplay into favorable branches. That's where those crucial tipping points come into play. Such positions are inherently unstable, which is why even a small mistake can have a dramatic influence on a match's trajectory. Barthelemy has re-imagined a chess match as a network of forces in which pieces act as the network's nodes, and the ways they interact represent the edges, using an interaction graph to capture how different pieces attack and defend one another. The most important chess pieces are those that interact with many other pieces in a given match, which he calculated by measuring how frequently a node lies on the shortest path between all the node pairs in the network (its "betweenness centrality"). He also calculated so-called "fragility scores," which indicate how easy it is to remove those critical chess pieces from the board. And he was able to apply this analysis to more than 20,000 actual chess matches played by the world's top players over the last 200 years. Barthelemy found that his metric could indeed identify tipping points in specific matches. Furthermore, when he averaged his analysis over a large number of games, an unexpected universal pattern emerged. "We observe a surprising universality: the average fragility score is the same for all players and for all openings," Barthelemy writes. And in famous chess matches, "the maximum fragility often coincides with pivotal moments, characterized by brilliant moves that decisively shift the balance of the game." Specifically, fragility scores start to increase about eight moves before the critical tipping point position occurs and stay high for some 15 moves after that. "These results suggest that positional fragility follows a common trajectory, with tension peaking in the middle game and dissipating toward the endgame," writes Barthelemy. "This analysis highlights the complex dynamics of chess, where the interaction between attack and defense shapes the game's overall structure."

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The FBI warned this week that North Korean IT workers are abusing their access to steal source code and extort U.S. companies that have been tricked into hiring them. From a report: The security service alerted public and private sector organizations in the United States and worldwide that North Korea's IT army will facilitate cyber-criminal activities and demand ransoms not to leak online exfiltrated sensitive data stolen from their employers' networks. "North Korean IT workers have copied company code repositories, such as GitHub, to their own user profiles and personal cloud accounts. While not uncommon among software developers, this activity represents a large-scale risk of theft of company code," the FBI said. "North Korean IT workers could attempt to harvest sensitive company credentials and session cookies to initiate work sessions from non-company devices and for further compromise opportunities." To mitigate these risks, the FBI advised companies to apply the principle of least privilege by disabling local administrator accounts and limiting permissions for remote desktop applications. Organizations should also monitor for unusual network traffic, especially remote connections since North Korean IT personnel often log into the same account from various IP addresses over a short period of time.

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Walgreens Boots Alliance has ended a $200 million digital display venture with startup Cooler Screens after widespread technical failures and poor revenue, removing thousands of smart screens from its store freezer doors [non-paywalled link]. The screens, which displayed product information and ads, frequently crashed, showed incorrect inventory, and occasionally caught fire, Bloomberg reports. Cooler Screens CEO Arsen Avakian cut data feeds to over 100 Chicago-area stores in December 2023 during a contract dispute, prompting Walgreens to obtain a restraining order. Walgreens completed removal of 10,300 screens from 700 stores in August 2024, replacing them with traditional glass doors. The screens generated just $215 per door annually, less than half the contractual minimum, according to Walgreens. Nearly $50 million worth of custom-made screens now sit unused in a Texas warehouse.

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Battery cars on Britain's roads are lasting as long as petrol and diesel cars, according to a study that has found a rapid improvement in electric vehicle reliability. From a report: An international team of researchers has estimated that an electric car will have a lifespan of 18.4 years, compared with 18.7 years for petrol cars and 16.8 years for diesels, according to a peer-reviewed study published on Friday in the journal Nature Energy. The findings were based on 300m records from compulsory annual MOT tests of roadworthiness. Automotive engineers have long suspected electric cars will be more reliable than petrol or diesel cars, because they contain many fewer moving parts. Data has been limited, however, because the earliest mass-market electric cars are only just reaching the end of their lives. The researchers, from the University of Birmingham, the London School of Economics, the University of California San Diego, and the University of Bern, Switzerland, used MOT data to estimate the failure rate of all cars -- ignoring scrappage in the first few years, which is most likely to be related to accidents. The analysis found that Tesla cars had the longest lifespan among battery cars.

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Sony will cease production of recordable Blu-ray discs at its last factory in February, ending an 18-year manufacturing run amid declining demand for physical media. The Japanese electronics giant will also halt production of MiniDiscs and MiniDV cassettes. The company had already stopped making consumer recordable Blu-ray and optical disks in mid-2024, maintaining production only for business clients.

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Meta plans to spend between $60 billion and $65 billion this year to build out AI infrastructure, CEO Mark Zuckerberg said on Friday, joining a wave of Big Tech firms unveiling hefty investments to capitalize on the technology. From a report: As part of the investment, Meta will build a more than 2-gigawatt data center that would be large enough to cover a significant part of Manhattan. The company -- one of the largest customers of Nvidia's coveted artificial intelligence chips -- plans to end the year with more than 1.3 million graphics processors. "This will be a defining year for AI," Zuckerberg said in a Facebook post. "This is a massive effort, and over the coming years it will drive our core products and business." Zuckerberg expects Meta's AI assistant -- available across its services, including Facebook and Instagram -- to serve more than 1 billion people in 2025, while its open-source Llama 4 would become the "leading state-of-the-art model."

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Leaders at CERN, Europe's particle-physics laboratory in Geneva, Switzerland, will introduce financial incentives for academic publishers to adopt open science policies as part of the organization's collective agreement with 11 particle-physics journals. From a report: The current scheme sees those journals publish work from the field openly and at no cost to authors, in exchange for bulk payments. Under the newly launched initiative, CERN will pay more to publishers that adopt polices such as use of public or open peer review and linking research to data sets, and less to those that do not. Some open-science specialists say the policy could be a game-changer in encouraging transparent science. Others caution that it could set a precedent for publishers to boost their fees in exchange for becoming more open. "Particle physics is large, international, highly complex, highly dynamic. Openness is the only really effective way of practising science in the discipline," says Kamran Naim, head of open science at CERN. The move comes as a result of CERN's success in encouraging journals that publish its work to do so more openly, through a programme called the Sponsoring Consortium for Open Access Publishing in Particle Physics (SCOAP3). SCOAP3 launched in 2014 and its members include 3,000 libraries, research funders and research organizations worldwide, all of which contribute to a common fund at CERN. This is used to pay annual or quarterly lump sums to journals, in amounts depending on how many papers they publish. The initiative has so far supported the publication of more than 70,000 open-access articles. It has an annual budget of around $10.4 million.

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Google will take firmer action against British businesses that use fake reviews to boost their star ratings on the search giant's reviews platform. From a report: The UK's Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) announced on Friday that Google has agreed to improve its processes for detecting and removing fake reviews, and will take action against the businesses and reviewers that post them. This includes deactivating the ability to add new reviews for businesses found to be using fake reviews, and deleting all existing reviews for at least six months if they repeatedly engage in suspicious review activity. Google will also place prominent "warning alerts" on the Google profiles of businesses using fake reviews to help consumers be more aware of potentially misleading feedback. Individuals who repeatedly post fake or misleading reviews on UK business pages will be banned and have their review history deleted, even if they're located in another country.

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Chinese venture capital and private equity firm HongShan, formerly part of Sequoia, said on Friday it has struck a deal to acquire a majority stake in Marshall in a deal valuing the audio equipment maker at $1.15 billion.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: When threat actors use backdoor malware to gain access to a network, they want to make sure all their hard work can't be leveraged by competing groups or detected by defenders. One countermeasure is to equip the backdoor with a passive agent that remains dormant until it receives what's known in the business as a "magic packet." On Thursday, researchers revealed that a never-before-seen backdoor that quietly took hold of dozens of enterprise VPNs running Juniper Network's Junos OS has been doing just that. J-Magic, the tracking name for the backdoor, goes one step further to prevent unauthorized access. After receiving a magic packet hidden in the normal flow of TCP traffic, it relays a challenge to the device that sent it. The challenge comes in the form of a string of text that's encrypted using the public portion of an RSA key. The initiating party must then respond with the corresponding plaintext, proving it has access to the secret key. The lightweight backdoor is also notable because it resided only in memory, a trait that makes detection harder for defenders. The combination prompted researchers at Lumin Technology's Black Lotus Lab to sit up and take notice. "While this is not the first discovery of magic packet malware, there have only been a handful of campaigns in recent years," the researchers wrote. "The combination of targeting Junos OS routers that serve as a VPN gateway and deploying a passive listening in-memory only agent, makes this an interesting confluence of tradecraft worthy of further observation." The researchers found J-Magic on VirusTotal and determined that it had run inside the networks of 36 organizations. They still don't know how the backdoor got installed.

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The U.S. may have led China in the AI race for the past decade, according to Alexandr Wang, CEO of Scale AI, but on Christmas Day, everything changed. From a report: Wang, whose company provides training data to key AI players including OpenAI, Google and Meta , said Thursday at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, that DeepSeek, the leading Chinese AI lab, released an "earth-shattering model" on Christmas Day, then followed it up with a powerful reasoning-focused AI model, DeepSeek-R1, which competes with OpenAI's recently released o1 model. "What we've found is that DeepSeek ... is the top performing, or roughly on par with the best American models," Wang said. In an interview with CNBC, Wang described the artificial intelligence race between the U.S. and China as an "AI war," adding that he believes China has significantly more Nvidia H100 GPUs -- AI chips that are widely used to build leading powerful AI models -- than people may think, especially considering U.S. export controls. [...] "The United States is going to need a huge amount of computational capacity, a huge amount of infrastructure," Wang said, later adding, "We need to unleash U.S. energy to enable this AI boom." DeepSeek's holding company is a quant firm, which happened to have a lot of GPUs for trading and mining. DeepSeek is their "side project."

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Longtime Slashdot readers smooth wombat and AmiMoJo shares a fusion energy breakthrough from China. Charming Science reports: China's "artificial sun," officially known as the Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak (EAST), has achieved a groundbreaking milestone in fusion energy research. According to the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), EAST recently sustained high-confinement plasma operation for an unprecedented 1,066 seconds, shattering the previous world record of 403 seconds, also set by EAST in 2023. [...] The 1,000-second mark is considered a critical threshold in fusion research. Sustaining plasma for such extended durations is essential for demonstrating the feasibility of operating fusion reactors. This breakthrough, accomplished by the Institute of Plasma Physics under the CAS, signifies a major leap towards realizing the potential of fusion energy. [...] The success of EAST's recent experiment can be attributed to several key advancements. Researchers have made significant strides in improving the stability of the heating system, enhancing the accuracy of the control system, and refining the precision of the diagnostic systems. Warning: the source originates from China Daily, an English-language daily newspaper owned by the Central Propaganda Department of the Chinese Communist Party. It's rated "questionable" by Media Bias/Fact Check because of its association with the CCP.

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President Donald Trump signed an executive order on AI Thursday that will revoke past government policies his order says "act as barriers to American AI innovation." From a report: To maintain global leadership in AI technology, "we must develop AI systems that are free from ideological bias or engineered social agendas," Trump's order says. The new order doesn't name which existing policies are hindering AI development but sets out to track down and review "all policies, directives, regulations, orders, and other actions taken" as a result of former President Joe Biden's sweeping AI executive order of 2023, which Trump rescinded Monday. Any of those Biden-era actions must be suspended if they don't fit Trump's new directive that AI should "promote human flourishing, economic competitiveness, and national security." Last year, the Biden administration issued a policy directive that said U.S. federal agencies must show their artificial intelligence tools aren't harming the public, or stop using them. Trump's order directs the White House to revise and reissue those directives, which affect how agencies acquire AI tools and use them.

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"Math is hard, especially timely math," explains The Beast in Black.

 

Cinephile Jono enjoys contemporary dramas far more than sci-fi. "Letterboxd tells me I've logged this movie 3 times, I'm not sure I'll be watching it in 2566." I hope you are, Jono.

 

Pieter may have to turn in his official pedants card. Pieter is concerned about the apparent contradiction between the two salaries on offer here, declaring:
"The title says She can earn up to 8.000 euro/month. But by the time you get to the actual article link, that amount deflated to 6.000 euro/month. I didn't know it was that bad in the euro zone! Or is it good, since we've got inflation under control? I don't know which way is up anymore..."
Pieter, 6,000 is "up to" 8,000. Technically.

 

Cross-country runner Andrei looks to be taking the long way around for this trip. Says he, "According to Google Maps, one of my transfers involves teleporting about 70 km away to catch my next train."

 

Finally David B. reports "My wife works as a quality auditor for Initech [ed: the William Lumberg company, presumably, not the Flavor and Fragrance company]. When setting up contact information for a company she will be auditing in the near future they needed some basic information. So much for gender equality." They're just getting ahead of the next batch of executive orders.

 

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