An anonymous reader shared this report from the Wall Street Journal: The rich get richer — and older. People with high salaries and net worth tend to live longer lives, research shows. Once Americans make it to their late 50s, the wealthiest 10% live to a median age of around 86 years, roughly 14 years longer than the least wealthy 10%, according to a study published earlier this year in JAMA Internal Medicine. People with more money can afford healthier food, more healthcare and homes in safer, less-polluted neighborhoods, says Kathryn Himmelstein, a co-author of the study and a medical director at the Boston Public Health Commission. Though you can't add more months or years to your online shopping cart yet, health and aging researchers say there are ways to spend money to improve your chances of living longer. They suggest favoring purchases that help you track your health, stay active and reduce stress. "We know the things that help us age better, and everyone's always disappointed when you tell them," says Andrew Scott, director of economics at the Ellison Institute of Technology in Oxford, England. "Eat less and eat better, sleep more, exercise more and spend time with friends...." But certain gadgets and luxuries can be worth the cost, some researchers say. Devices such as the Apple Watch and Oura Ring can instill healthy habits and catch worrying patterns that might emerge between annual checkups, says Joe Coughlin, the director of the MIT AgeLab... Coughlin says he once went to the emergency room because his Apple Watch detected a spike in his heart rate that he hadn't noticed himself. "For the superwealthy, suddenly living longer and living better has become the new prestige," Coughlin says. Higher incomes correlate with longer lives, but there are diminishing returns. Each successive jump in pay is linked to smaller boosts in longevity, a 2016 study from the research group Opportunity Insights found... A key to the relationship between income and longevity is that money doesn't just buy stuff that helps you live longer. It also buys time and reduces stress. "If you've got a nice place to live and you don't have to worry about food on the table, you have the mental head space and resources to prioritize your health," says Steven Woolf, a professor at Virginia Commonwealth University School of Medicine... Moreover, many lower-income jobs are more physically taxing and more prone to workplace accidents and exposure to harmful substances. The article also includes examples of spending that promotes health, including things like home gym equipment and even swing-dancing lessons. But it also adds that "plenty of things that are good for you don't come with a bill, such as going on a walk or minimizing screen time before bedtime."

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When it comes to the possibility of a bird flu outbreak, America's Centers for Disease Control recently issued a statement that the risk to the public "remains low." But even in the event of a worst-case scenario, New York magazine believes "We may be more equipped for another pandemic than you think..." In 2023, more than half of people surveyed said that their lives had not returned to normal since the COVID outbreak, and a surprising number — 47 percent — said they now believe their lives will never return to normal. But do we really know how a new pandemic would go and how we would handle it? Things are different this time — and in ways that aren't all bad. Unlike with COVID in the spring of 2020, millions of doses of bird-flu vaccines at various stages of testing sit in government stockpiles, and more are on the way. There are also already tests that work, though these are not broadly available to the public... Recent research suggests that we might actually manage a second pandemic better than we would believe. Despite all the noise to the contrary, a June poll by Harvard's School of Public Health says that Americans overall think the government responses to COVID — asking people to wear masks, pausing indoor dining, requiring health-care workers to get vaccinated — were all good ideas. Although the media tends to paint school closures as radically unpopular, only 44 percent of respondents said they currently think the shutdowns were a mistake. A growing body of research also suggests that many Americans feel stronger for what we endured during the most extreme days of COVID. Counter to what we like to say about our friends and neighbors and children, the challenge of the pandemic may have benefited some people's mental health. One study found that "children entering the pandemic with clinically meaningful mental-health problems experienced notable improvements in their mental health." (Turns out there's one thing worse than shutting down an American school and that's having to attend it.) The article also points out that "There is no real information" on the likelihood of a bird-flu virus even crossing over into humans. And of course, "COVID still kills, with a body count just shy of 50,000 Americans in 2024, and it feels like a stretch to say that Americans are particularly concerned."

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Reuters reports: Finnish police said on Sunday they had found tracks that drag on for dozens of kilometres along the bottom of the Baltic Sea where a tanker carrying Russian oil is suspected of breaking a power line and four telecoms cables with its anchor... A break in the 658 megawatt (MW) Estlink 2 power cable between Finland and Estonia occurred at midday on Wednesday, leaving only the 358 MW Estlink 1 linking the two countries, grid operators said. They said Estlink 2 might not be back in service before August. In an interesting twist, the New York Times reports that the ship "bears all the hallmarks of vessels belonging to Russia's shadow fleet, officials said, and had embarked from a Russian port shortly before the cables were cut." If confirmed, it would be the first known instance of a shadow fleet vessel being used to intentionally sabotage critical infrastructure in Europe — and, officials and experts said, a clear escalation by Russia in its conflict with the West... NATO's general secretary, Mark Rutte, responding to requests from the leaders of Finland and Estonia, both member nations, said the Atlantic alliance would "enhance" its military presence in the Baltic Sea... Since Russia began assembling its fleet, the number of shadow vessels traversing the oceans has grown by hundreds and now makes up 17 percent of the total global oil tanker fleet... Nearly 70 percent of Russia's oil is being transported by shadow tankers, according to an analysis published in October by the Kyiv School of Economics Institute, a research organization based in Ukraine... The authorities in Finland are still investigating whether the "Eagle S" engaged in a criminal act. But the sheer size of the shadow fleet might have made using some of these vessels for sabotage irresistible to Russia, [said Elisabeth Braw, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council who has researched and written about shadow fleets]... While it's still not certain that this week's cable cutting was done intentionally, the Baltic Sea, for a number of reasons, is an ideal arena to carry out sabotage operations. It is relatively shallow and is crisscrossed with essential undersea cables and pipelines that provide energy, as well as internet and phone services, to a number of European countries that are NATO members. Russia has relatively unfettered access to the sea from several ports, and its commercial vessels, protected by international maritime law, can move around international waters largely unmolested... The suspicions that Russia was using shadow vessels for more than just escaping sanctions existed before this week's cable cutting. Last April, the head of Sweden's Navy told a local news outlet that there was evidence such ships were being used to conduct signals intelligence on behalf of Russia and that some fishing vessels had been spotted with antennas and masts not normally seen on commercial vessels. Since the war began, there has also been an uptick in suspicious episodes resulting in damage to critical undersea infrastructure... Hours after Finland's energy grid operator alerted the police that an undersea power cable was damaged on Wednesday, Finnish officers descended by helicopter to the ship's deck and took over the bridge, preventing the vessel from sailing farther. By Friday, it remained at anchor in the Gulf of Finland, guarded by a Finnish Defense Forces missile boat and a Border Guard patrol vessel. The cable incident happened just weeks after the EU issued new sanctions targetting Russia's shadow fleet, Euronews reports. "A handful of Chinese companies suspected of enabling Russia's production of drones are also blacklisted as part of the agreement, a diplomat told Euronews." The "shadow fleet" has been accused of deceptive practices, including transmitting falsified data and turning off their transporters to become invisible to satellite systems, and conducting multiple ship-to-ship transfers to conceal the origin of the oil barrels...

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NPR remembers when the world "prepared for the impending global meltdown" that might've been, on December 31, 1999 — and the possible bug known as Y2K: The Clinton administration said that preparing the U.S. for Y2K was probably "the single largest technology management challenge in history." The bug threatened a cascade of potential disruptions — blackouts, medical equipment failures, banks shutting down, travel screeching to a halt — if the systems and software that helped keep society functioning no longer knew what year it was... Computer specialist and grassroots organizer Paloma O'Riley compared the scale and urgency of Y2K prep to telling somebody to change out a rivet on the Golden Gate Bridge. Changing out just one rivet is simple, but "if you suddenly tell this person he now has to change out all the rivets on the bridge and he has only 24 hours to do it in — that's a problem," O'Riley told reporter Jason Beaubien in 1998.... The date switchover rattled a swath of vital tech, including Wall Street trading systems, power plants and tools used in air traffic control. The Federal Aviation Administration put its systems through stress tests and mock scenarios as 2000 drew closer. "Twenty-three million lines of code in the air traffic control system did seem a little more daunting, I will say, than I had probably anticipated," FAA Administrator Jane Garvey told NPR in 1998. Ultimately there were no systemwide aviation breakdowns, but airlines were put on a Y2K alert.... Some financial analysts remained skeptical Y2K would come and go with minimal disruption. But by November 1999 the Federal Reserve said it was confident the U.S. economy would weather the big switch. "Federal banking agencies have been visited and inspected. Every bank in the United States, which includes probably 9,000 to 10,000 institutions, over 99% received a satisfactory rating," Fed Board Governor Edward Kelley said at the time. The article also remembers a California programmer who bought a mobile home, a propane generator, and a year's supply of dehydrated food. (They were also considering buying a handgun — and converting his bank savings into gold, silver, and cash.) And "Dozens of communities across the U.S. formed Y2K preparedness groups to stave off unnecessary panic..." But the article concludes that "the aggressive planning and recalibration paid off. Humanity passed into the year 2000 without pandemonium..." And "People like Jack Pentes of Charlotte, N.C., were left to figure out what to do with their emergency stockpiles."

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The Washington Post shares some good news from 2024: Researchers were able to detect a significant dip in atmospheric levels of hydrochlorofluorocarbons — harmful gases that deplete the ozone layer — for the first time, almost 30 years after countries first agreed to phase out the chemicals. A new satellite launched in March to track and publicly reveal the biggest methane polluters in the oil and gas industry — an important step in tackling the greenhouse gas that accounts for almost a third of global warming. The NASA/Carbon Mapper satellite, which measures CO2 and methane emissions, also launched, providing detailed images from individual oil and gas facilities across the world. Back on Earth, the world's largest plant for pulling carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere opened in Iceland. Norway became the first country to have more electric than gas-powered vehicles, while one Japanese island began using a new generation of batteries to help stockpile massive amounts of clean electricity. There were also small but important victories for animal conservation. The Iberian lynx, a European wildcat once on the brink of extinction, is no longer classed as an "endangered" species — in what experts have hailed as the "greatest recovery of a cat species ever achieved through conservation...." Despite a large number of powerful tornadoes to hit the United States in early 2024, the death tolls were fortunately not as high as meteorologists feared, in part due to improved forecasting technology. The article also notes America's Food and Drug Administration approved a new therapy which uses a patients' own cells to attack skin cancer for adults for whom surgery isn't an option. "Experts said the decision could open the door to similar treatments for far more common cancers." And one more inspiring story from 2024: 105-year-old Virginia Hislop, of Yakima, Washington received her master's degree from Stanford University...

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After a four-year hiatus, 2025 will see the return of the International Obfuscated C Code Contest. Started in 1984 (and inspired partly by a bug in the classic Bourne shell), it's "the Internet's oldest contest," acording to their official social media account on Mastodon. The contest enters its "pending" state today at 2024-12-29 23:58 UTC — meaning an opening date for submissions has been officially scheduled (for January 31st) as well as a closing date roughly eight weeks later on April 1st, 2025. That's according to the newly-released (proposed and tentative) rules and guidelines, listing contest goals like "show the importance of programming style, in an ironic way" and "stress C compilers with unusual code." And the contest's home page adds an additional goal: "to have fun with C!" Excerpts from the official rules: Rule 0 Just as C starts at 0, so the IOCCC starts at rule 0. :-) Rule 1 Your submission must be a complete program.... Rule 5 Your submission MUST not modify the content or filename of any part of your original submission including, but not limited to prog.c, the Makefile (that we create from your how to build instructions), as well as any data files you submit.... Rule 6 I am not a rule, I am a free(void *human); while (!(ioccc(rule(you(are(number(6)))))) { ha_ha_ha(); } Rule 6 is clearly a reference to The Prisoner... (Some other rules are even sillier...) And the guidelines include their own jokes: You are in a maze of twisty guidelines, all different. There are at least zero judges who think that Fideism has little or nothing to do with the IOCCC judging process.... We suggest that you avoid trying for the 'smallest self-replicating' source. The smallest, a zero byte entry, won in 1994. And this weekend there was also a second announcement: After a 4 year effort by a number of people, with over 6168+ commits, the Great Fork Merge has been completed and the Official IOCCC web site has been updated! A significant number of improvements has been made to the IOCCC winning entries. A number of fixes and improvements involve the ability of reasonable modern Unix/Linux systems to be able to compile and even run them. Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader — and C programmer — achowe for sharing the news.

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An anonymous reader shared this report from the Washington Post: Archer is aiming to launch its first commercially operated [and electrically-powered] flights with a pilot and passengers within a year in Abu Dhabi. A competitor, Joby Aviation, says it is aiming to launch passenger service in Dubai as soon as late 2025. Advancements in batteries and other technologies required for the futuristic tilt-rotor craft are moving so fast that they could soon move beyond the novelty stage and into broader commercial use in a matter of years. Both companies are laying plans to operate at the 2028 Olympics in Los Angeles... Scaling the industry from a novelty ride for the wealthy to a broadly available commuter option will take billions more in start-up money, executives said, including building out a network of takeoff and landing areas (called vertiports) and charging stations. Some high-profile ventures have already faltered. A plan for air taxis to transport spectators around the Paris Olympics fizzled... Still, investors, including big names like Stellantis and Toyota, have poured money into Silicon Valley companies like Archer and Joby. Boeing and Airbus are developing their own versions. All are betting that quieter, greener and battery-powered aircraft can revolutionize the way people travel. Major U.S. airlines including American, Delta, Southwest and United also are building relationships and planting seeds for deals with air taxi companies. Two interesting quotes from the article: "It feels like the modern-day American Dream, where you can invent a technology and actually bring it to market even [if it's] as crazy as what some people call flying cars." — Adam Goldstein, CEO of Archer Aviation. "They have created these amazing new aircraft that really 10 or 15 years ago would've been unimaginable. I think there's something innately attractive about being able to leapfrog all of your terrestrial obstacles. Who hasn't wished that if you live in the suburbs that, you know, something could drop into your cul-de-sac and 15 minutes later you're at the office." — Roger Connor, curator of the vertical flight collection at the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum.

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While microplastics seem to be everywhere, CNN reports that scientists in China "have come up with a possible solution: a biodegradable sponge made of squid bones and cotton" (which contain two organic compounds "known for eliminating pollution from wastewater...") They then tested the sponge in four different water samples, taken from irrigation water, pond water, lake water and sea water, and found it removed up to 99.9% of microplastics, according to a study published last month in Science Advances... The sponge created by the Wuhan researchers was able to absorb microplastics both by physically intercepting them and through electromagnetic attraction, the study said. Previously studied methods for absorbing plastics tend to be expensive and difficult to make, limiting their scalability. Last year, researchers in Qingdao, China developed a synthetic sponge made of starch and gelatin designed to remove microplastics from water, though its efficacy varied depending on water conditions. The low cost and wide availability of both cotton and squid bones mean [the Chinese researchers' sponge] "has great potential to be used in the extraction of microplastic from complex water bodies," according to the study. Shima Ziajahromi, a lecturer at Australia's Griffith University who studies microplastics, called the squid-cotton-sponge method "promising" and said it could be an effective way to "clean up the high risk and vulnerable aquatic ecosystem." However, the study's authors did not address whether the sponge can remove microplastics that sink to the sediment, which is the majority of microplastics in our waters, said Ziajahromi, who was not involved in the study. Another "critical issue" is the proper disposal of the sponges, Ziajahromi said. "Although the material is biodegradable, the microplastics it absorbs need to be disposed of properly," she said. "Without careful management, this process risks transferring microplastics from one ecosystem to another." Ultimately, Ziajahromi added, minimizing plastic pollution is in the first place should remain a "top priority."

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A 9-year-old girl born without a left hand had "started asking for a robotic arm to help her feel more confident," her mother told the Washington Post. So her parents met with a consultant from Open Bionics, which fits people with lightweight, 3D-printed prostheses that function more like a natural arm and hand — known as Hero Arms. The bionic arms are manufactured in Britain and cost about $24,000, but the Batemans were hopeful that their health insurance company, Select Health, would pay for one for [their 9-year-old daughter] Remi. Remi said she tried using one of the robotic arms for a few days in Colorado and was thrilled to cut her food with a knife and fork for the first time and carry plates with two hands. "I loved it so much — I could function like a full human," she said. "I was able to steal my dad's hat. When they fit me for my arm, I told them I wanted it to be pink." On Oct. 1, the Batemans sent a prescription for the robotic arm and office notes from Remi's pediatrician to Select Health for approval. One week later, their request was denied, Jami Bateman said. "They sent us a letter saying it was not medically necessary for Remi to have a Hero Arm and that it was for cosmetic use only," she said. "We appealed twice and were again denied." "It was very upsetting, and Remi cried when I told her, because we'd all been so hopeful," Bateman added. "It broke our hearts." In mid-December, a frustrated Jami Bateman tried an approach she'd seen other people use when their health insurance failed them: She started a GoFundMe for her daughter, hoping to purchase a robotic arm through the kindness of strangers.... Bateman was stunned when friends and strangers chipped in more than $30,000 in just a few days, surpassing the family's $24,000 goal. People who donated understood the Batemans' predicament, and many were furious on their behalf. As donations poured in, the Batemans received a call from somebody else who wanted to help. Andy Schoonover is the CEO of CrowdHealth, a subscriber-based resource that helps people negotiate lower costs for medical bills. He told the family on Dec. 16 that his company wanted to pay the entire cost of Remi's bionic arm. "We were looking for some ways to help people during the holiday season, and I stumbled upon Remi's story on social media," Schoonover said. "We were honored to help her out...." Remi quickly came up with an idea. "She came to me and said, 'Mom, I know how it feels to have one hand. Is there someone else we can help?" Bateman recalled. She said she contacted Open Bionics and learned there was a long list of children who had been turned down for Hero Arms by their health insurance companies for the same reason Remi was denied... Somewhere in Maryland, the mother of a 9-year-old boy born without a left hand suddenly got a surprise phone call explaining Remi's decision. "I was so proud of Remi that I immediately started crying," she said. "She wanted to give my son an opportunity that I was unable to give him. It just touched my heart." They had been trying to raise money by running a lemonade stand. But yesterday Remi's GoFundMe page posted an update. The 9-year-old boy's arm had now been paid for. "And maybe, if more donations roll in we can help a third child!"

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"Over the course of 2024, Python has proven again and again why it's one of the most popular, useful, and promising programming languages out there," writes InfoWorld: The latest version of the language pushes the envelope further for speed and power, sheds many of Python's most decrepit elements, and broadens its appeal with developers worldwide. Here's a look back at the year in Python. In the biggest news of the year, the core Python development team took a major step toward overcoming one of Python's longstanding drawbacks: the Global Interpreter Lock or "GIL," a mechanism for managing interpreter state. The GIL prevents data corruption across threads in Python programs, but it comes at the cost of making threads nearly useless for CPU-bound work. Over the years, various attempts to remove the GIL ended in tears, as they made single-threaded Python programs drastically slower. But the most recent no-GIL project goes a long way toward fixing that issue — enough that it's been made available for regular users to try out. The no-GIL or "free-threaded" builds are still considered experimental, so they shouldn't be deployed in production yet. The Python team wants to alleviate as much of the single-threaded performance impact as possible, along with any other concerns, before giving the no-GIL builds the full green light. It's also entirely possible these builds may never make it to full-blown production-ready status, but the early signs are encouraging. Another forward-looking feature introduced in Python 3.13 is the experimental just-in-time compiler or JIT. It expands on previous efforts to speed up the interpreter by generating machine code for certain operations at runtime. Right now, the speedup doesn't amount to much (maybe 5% for most programs), but future versions of Python will expand the JIT's functionality where it yields real-world payoffs. Python is now more widely used than JavaScript on GitHub (thanks partly to its role in AI and data science code).

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It had a 4.8-inch display. Introduced in 1991, Hewlett-Packard's (DOS-based) HP 95LX Palmtop PC — a collaboration with Lotus — was finally discontinued back in 2003. But one found its way to long-time Slashdot reader Shayde (who in November repaired a 48-year-old handheld videogame console from Mattel). "I really wanted to get this HP95LX talking to the internet at large," they told Slashdot, " but network stacks for DOS in 1991 were pretty limited, and this machine didn't even have the hardware for a network connection. "It did have a serial port though — a flat 4-pin custom interface. I did a bunch of research and learned how to custom-build an RS-232 hookup for this port, and using an external Wifi module, got it online — and talking to the retrocomputing BBS!" There's a video documenting the whole experience. (Along the way he uses 20-gauge hook-up wire from Amazon, a zip tie, solder cups, and an internet modem (the WiFi232 Hayes modem emulator). The whole thing is powered by two AA batteries — it has 512K of memory, and about half a meg of storage. My favorite technical detail? "Conveniently, the HP 95 [Palmtop PC] uses the exact same pinout as the HP 48GX handheld graphing calculator. So looking up on the Internet, we can determine what pins we need to map from the HP unit over to what would be a DB25 serial port..."

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"Dating apps are on the cusp of a major transformation," argues CNN, suggesting AI-powered possibilities like "personalized chatbots dating other chatbots on your behalf," as well as "AI concierges fielding questions about potential matches," and "advanced algorithms predicting compatibility better than ever before." At its investor day last week, executives from Match Group — the parent company of Match.com, Tinder, Hinge, OkCupid, Our Time and more — teased plans to use AI to improve user experiences and help make better connections. Justin McLeod, CEO of Hinge, outlined how the company intends to fully embrace AI next year: more personalized matching, smarter algorithms that adapt to users and better understand them over time and AI coaching for struggling daters. "While AI is not going to be a panacea when it comes to the very deeply and personal problem of love, I can tell you that it is going to transform the dating app experience, taking it from a do-it-yourself platform to an expertly guided journey that leads to far better outcomes and much better value to our daters," he told investors.... It's already starting to play a bigger role. Tinder, for example, uses AI to help users select their best profile photos. Meanwhile, Bumble's recently enhanced "For You" roundup uses advanced AI when delivering its daily set of four curated profiles based on a user's preferences and past matches. Bumble also uses AI in safety features like its Private Detector — an AI-powered tool that blurs explicit images — and Deception Detector, which identifies spam, scams and fake profiles. Similarly, Match Group offers tools like buttons that say "Are You Sure?" to detect harmful language and "Does This Bother You?" to prompt users to report inappropriate behavior.... According to Liesel Sharabi, an associate professor at Arizona State University's Hugh Downs School of Human Communication, the dating industry is still "very much in the early stages" of embracing AI. "The platforms are still figuring out its role in the online dating experience, but it really does have the potential to transform this space...." Bumble founder Whitney Wolfe Herd previously said she envisions AI functioning as a dating concierge, helping users navigate matches, set up dates and respond to messages. Startups such as Volar and Rizz have already experimented with chatbots that help respond to messages. On Rizz, users upload screenshots of conversations they're having on other dating apps, and the platform helps create flirty replies. (Volar, a standalone dating app that trains on users' preferences and automatically responds to other chatbots, shut down in September due to lack of funding.) While the concept of chatbots dating on your behalf may seem strange, it could reduce the tedious early-stage communication by focusing more on highly compatible matches, Sharabi said... During Match Group's investor day, Hinge's McLeod announced plans to build the "world's most knowledgeable dating coach" using years of insights from the dating process... McLeod said Hinge has already seen a higher number of matches and subscription renewals with its improved AI algorithm among early test groups. It plans to roll this out globally in March. And of course, some users are already using ChatGPT to write online dating profiles or respond to messages, the article points out...

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Long-time Slashdot reader schwit1 writes: The Dubai-based startup LEAP71, focused on using AI software to quickly develop rocket engine designs it can then 3D print, has successfully test fired a prototype aerospike engine on December 18, 2024 during a static fire test campaign conducted in the United Kingdom. Along the way they tackled a problem with bell-shaped rocket nozzles, writes New Atlas. "A rocket that works very well on liftoff will work less well as it rises in the atmosphere and the air pressure decreases. This is why second- and third-stage rocket engines are different from those of the first stage." Ideally, engineers want an engine that can adjust itself automatically to changes in air pressure. An aerospike does this by shaping the engine into a spike or plug with a curve like that of the inside of a rocket bell. As the combustion gases flow from the engine over the spike, the curve acts as one side of the bell and the surrounding air as the outside curve. As the air pressure changes, so does the shape of the virtual bell. There have been a number of aerospike engines developed since the 1950s and one has actually gone airborne, but there's still a long way to go when it comes to turning a promising idea into a practical space engine. LEAP 71's contribution to the effort is to apply its Noyron Large Computational Engineering Model to the problem. It's an AI programmed and trained by aerospace experts to take a given set of input parameters and use them to create a design that meets those parameters by inferring physical interactions of various factors, including thermal behaviors and projected performance. The results of this are then fed back into the AI model to fine tune it as it presents computed performance parameters, the geometry of the engine, the parameters of the manufacturing process, and other details. "Despite their clear advantages, Aerospikes are not used in space access today," LEAP 71's co-founder said in a statement. "We want to change that. Noyron allows us to radically cut the time we need to re-engineer and iterate after a test and enables us to converge rapidly on an optimal design." Aerospikes "are more compact and significantly more efficient across various atmospheric pressures, including the vacuum of space," the company said this week — announcing the successful hot-firing of their Aerospike engine, and calling it "one of the most advanced and elusive rocket engines ever created..." By leveraging the power of Noyron's computational AI, the thruster was developed in a matter of weeks, manufactured as a monolithic piece of copper through industrial 3D printing, and put on the test stand, where it worked successfully on the first attempt... The Aerospike was fired on December 18th, 2024, as part of a four-engines-in-four-days campaign conducted by LEAPâ71 at Airborne Engineering in Westcott, UK. The company will process the collected data to fine-tune Noyron for the next iteration of engines and continue testing in 2025, with the goal of making Aerospikes a viable option for modern spacecraft.

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Long-time Slashdot reader theodp writes: Back in January, Rice University professor and former CACM Editor-in-Chief Moshe Y. Vardi wrote of the unintended consequences of social media and mobile computing in "Computing, You Have Blood on Your Hands!" To close out the year, Vardi addresses the role tech workers play in enabling dubious Big Tech business models — including now-powered-by-AI Big Tech Surveillance Capitalism — in an opinion piece titled "I Was Wrong about the Ethics Crisis." Vardi writes: "The belief in the magical power of the free market always to serve the public good has no theoretical basis. In fact, our current climate crisis is a demonstrated market failure. To take an extreme example, Big Tobacco surely does not support the public good, and most of us would agree that it is unethical to work for Big Tobacco. The question, thus, is whether Big Tech is supporting the public good, and if not, what should Big Tech workers do about it. Of course, there is no simple answer to such a question, and the only reasonable answer to the question of whether it is ethical to work for Big Tech is, 'It depends.' [...] It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it, said the writer and political activist Upton Sinclair. By and large, Big Tech workers do not seem to be asking themselves hard questions, I believe, hence my conclusion that we do indeed suffer from an ethics crisis."

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Business Insider reports: The lead researcher for Sam Altman's basic-income study says guaranteed no-strings payments are not a silver bullet for issues facing lower-income Americans. Elizabeth Rhodes, the research director for the Basic Income Project at Open Research, told Business Insider that while basic-income payments are "beneficial in many ways," the programs also have "clear limitations...." Rhodes headed up one of the largest studies in the space, which focused specifically on those on low incomes rather than making universal payments to adults across all economic demographics. The three-year experiment, backed by OpenAI boss Altman, provided 1,000 low-income participants with $1,000 a month without any stipulations for how they could spend it.... The initial findings, released in July, found that recipients put the bulk of their extra spending toward basic needs such as rent, transportation, and food. They also worked less on average but remained engaged in the workforce and were more deliberate in their job searches compared with a control group. But Rhodes says the research reinforced how difficult it is to solve complex issues such as poverty or economic insecurity, and that there is "a lot more work to do." The Altman-backed study is still reporting results. New findings released in December showed recipients valued work more after receiving the recurring monthly payments — a result that may challenge one of the main arguments against basic income payments. Participants also reported significant reductions in stress, mental distress, and food insecurity during the first year, though those effects faded by the second and third years of the program. "Poverty and economic insecurity are incredibly difficult problems to solve," Rhodes said. "The findings that we've had thus far are quite nuanced." She added: "There's not a clear through line in terms of, this helps everyone, or this does that. It reinforced to me the idea that these are really difficult problems that, maybe, there isn't a singular solution." In an earlier article coauthor David Broockman told Business Insider that the study's results might offer insights into how future programs could be successful — but said that the study's results didn't necessarily confirm the fears or hopes expressed by skeptics or supporters of a basic income. Thanks to Slashdot reader jjslash for sharing the news.

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A Linux Foundation project focused on understanding the health of the open source community just studied the outcomes for three projects that switched to "more restrictive" licenses and then faced community forks. The data science director for the project — known as Community Health Analytics in Open Source Software (or CHAOSS) — is also an OpenUK board member, and describes the outcomes for OpenSearch, Redis with fork Valkey, and Terraform: The relicensed project (Redis) had significant numbers of contributors who were not employed by the company, and the fork (Valkey) was created by those existing contributors as a foundation project... The Redis project differs from Elasticsearch and Terraform in the number of contributions to the Redis repository from people who were not employees of Redis. In the year leading up to the relicense, when Redis was still open source, there were substantial contributions from employees of other companies: Twice as many non-Redis employees made five or more commits, and about a dozen employees of other companies made almost twice as many commits as Redis employees made. In the six months after the relicense, all of the external contributors from companies (including Amazon, Alibaba, Tencent, Huawei and Ericsson) who contributed over five commits to the Redis project in the year prior to the relicense stopped contributing. In sum, Redis had strong organizational diversity before the relicense, but only Redis employees made significant contributions afterward. Valkey was forked from Redis 7.2.4 on March 28, 2024, as a Linux Foundation project under the BSD-3 license. The fork was driven by a group of people who previously contributed to Redis with public support from their employers. Within its first six months, the Valkey repository had 29 contributors employed at 10 companies, and 18 of those people previously contributed to Redis. Valkey has a diverse set of contributors from various companies, with Amazon having the most contributors. The results weren't always so clear-cut. Because Terraform always had very few contributors outside of the company, "there was no substantial impact on the contributor community from the relicensing event..." (Although the OpenTofu fork — a Linux Foundation project — had 31 people at 11 organizations who made five or more contributions.) And both before and after Elasticsearch's relicensing, most contributors were Elastic employees, so "the 2021 relicense had little to no impact on contributors." (But the OpenSearch fork — transferred in September to the Linux Foundation — shows a more varied contributor base, with just 63% of additions and 64% of deletions coming from Amazon employees who made 10 or more commits. Six people who didn't work for Amazon made 10 or more commits, making up 11% of additions and 13% of deletions.") So "Looking at all of these projects together, we see that the forks from relicensed projects tend to have more organizational diversity than the original projects," they conclude, adding that in general "projects with greater organizational diversity tend to be more sustainable..." "You can dive into the details about these six projects in the paper, presentation and data we shared at the recent OpenForum Academy Symposium.

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Magnus Carlsen quit the World Rapid Chess Championship on Friday, reports CNN, "after he refused to change out of the jeans he was wearing..." "Carlsen, the world champion from 2013 until 2023, allegedly replied, 'I'm out, f*** you,' after being informed that he would not be permitted to continue," reports the Hindustan Times. The International Chess Federation (or FIDE) "said in a statement that Carlsen breached the tournament's dress code by wearing jeans," reports CNN: As a result, Carlsen would not have been paired for round nine, though he could have returned for the rest of the tournament had he not decided to walk away, per Chess.com. Since he had performed poorly in the earlier rounds, there was little chance that Carlsen could have defended his title regardless.... The standoff became "a matter of principle" for Carlsen, he told chess channel Take Take Take. "I haven't appealed, honestly I'm too old at this point to care too much, if this is what they want to do ... nobody wants to back down, if this is where we are, that's fine by me," he said. "I'll probably head off to somewhere where the weather is a bit nicer than here and that's it." He explained that he had been at a lunch meeting before heading to the tournament's second day and "barely had time to go the room, change, put on a shirt, jacket and honestly I didn't even think about the jeans." Carlsen was also fined $200, according to the article. He has now also withdrawn from the World Blitz Championship which follows this tournament. In a statement, the FIDE said their dress code and other regulations "are designed to ensure professionalism and fairness for all participants," and that the federation "remains committed to promoting chess and its values, including respect for the rules that all participants agree to follow." The group's CEO added "Rules are applicable to all the participants, and it would be unfair towards all players who respected the dress-code, and those who were previously fined." (They added that "We gave Magnus more than enough time to change. But as he had stated himself in his interview — it became a matter of principle for him.") CNN notes that Carlsen has already won five world rapid and seven world blitz titles in the last 10 years...

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Thursday New York's governor signed new legislation "to hold polluters responsible for the damage done to our environment" by establishing a Climate Superfund that's paid for by big fossil-fuel companies. The money will be used for "climate change adaptation," according to New York state senator Liz Krueger, who notes that the legislation follows "the polluter-pays model" used in America's already-existing federal and state superfund laws. Spread out over 25 years, the legislation collects an average of $3 billion each year — or $75 billion — "from the parties most responsible for causing the climate crisis — big oil and gas companies." "The Climate Change Superfund Act is now law, and New York has fired a shot that will be heard round the world: the companies most responsible for the climate crisis will be held accountable," said Senator Krueger. "Too often over the last decade, courts have dismissed lawsuits against the oil and gas industry by saying that the issue of climate culpability should be decided by legislatures. Well, the Legislature of the State of New York — the 10th largest economy in the world — has accepted the invitation, and I hope we have made ourselves very clear: the planet's largest climate polluters bear a unique responsibility for creating the climate crisis, and they must pay their fair share to help regular New Yorkers deal with the consequences. "And there's no question that those consequences are here, and they are serious," Krueger continued. "Repairing from and preparing for extreme weather caused by climate change will cost more than half a trillion dollars statewide by 2050. That's over $65,000 per household, and that's on top of the disruption, injury, and death that the climate crisis is causing in every corner of our state. The Climate Change Superfund Act is a critical piece of affordability legislation that will deliver billions of dollars every year to ease the burden on regular New Yorkers...." Starting in the 1970s, scientists working for Exxon made "remarkably accurate projections of just how much burning fossil fuels would warm the planet." Yet for years, "the oil giant publicly cast doubt on climate science, and cautioned against any drastic move away from burning fossil fuels, the main driver of climate change." "The oil giant Saudi Aramco of Saudi Arabia could be slapped with the largest annual assessment of any company — $640 million a year — for emitting 31,269 million tons of greenhouse gases from 2000 to 2020," notes the New York Post. And "The law will also standardize the number of emissions tied to the fuel produced by companies," reports the Times Union newspaper. "[F]or every 1 million pounds of coal, for example, the program assigns over 942 metric tons of carbon dioxide. For every 1 million barrels of crude oil, an entity is considered to have produced 432,180 metric tons of carbon dioxide." Among the infrastructure programs the superfund program aims to pay for: coastal wetlands restoration, energy efficient cooling systems in buildings, including schools and new housing developments, and stormwater drainage upgrades. New York is now the second U.S. state with a "climate Superfund" law, according to Bloomberg Law, with New York following the lead of Vermont. "Maryland, Massachusetts, and California are also considering climate Superfund laws to manage mounting infrastructure costs." The American Petroleum Institute, which represents about 600 members of the industry, condemned the law. "This type of legislation represents nothing more than a punitive new fee on American energy, and we are evaluating our options moving forward," an API spokesperson said in an emailed statement... The bills — modeled after the federal Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act, known as Superfund — would almost certainly spur swift litigation from fossil fuel companies upon enactment, legal educators say.

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Slashdot reader DevNull127 writes: This year the London Stock Exchange got a new listing for "Raspberry Pi Holdings plc." It's the computer-making commercial subsidiary of their larger educational charity, the Raspberry Pi Foundation. "Access to the public market will enable us to build more of the products you love, faster," explained CEO Eben Upton in June. And in May Foundation head Philip Colligan added that beyond the $50 million already donated to their educational charity by the commercial subsidiary, the IPO would allow the conversion of some stock sales to "an endowment that we will use to fund our educational programmes... The Foundation will use any funds that we raise through the sale of shares at the IPO — or subsequently — to advance our ambitious global strategy to enable every young person to realise their full potential through the power of computing and digital technologies." So how's that working out? A finance site called Proactive Investors UK reports that in September Raspbery Pi Holdings plc "reported underlying profits (EBITDA) of US$20.9 million, up by 55% from a year ago, on revenues up 61% to US$144 million... The Pi 5 single-board computer (SBC), launched at the end of last October [2023], sold 1.1 million units in the first half, with overall unit growth at 31%." And then in December its stock price suddenly shot up to more than double where it was at the end of November — giving Raspbery Pi Holdings plc a valuation "just under £1.3 billion."

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ewhac (Slashdot reader #5,844) writes: Retraction Watch is reporting that the entire editorial staff (save one) for the Journal of Human Evolution has resigned in protest over creeping harmful changes imposed by its publisher, Elsevier. In an open letter posted to social media, the editors recount Elsevier's changes to their journal's scientific and editorial processes (inserting itself into those processes) — along with staff and budget reductions negatively impacting their ability to review and publish submissions. The letter alleges that when the editorial board complained of Elsevier's eliminating support for a copy editor, Elsevier responded that the editors shouldn't be paying attention to language, grammar, readability, consistency, or accuracy of proper nomenclature or formatting. When the editors fiercely protested Elsevier's ending of JHE's dual-editor model, Elsevier allegedly responded that it would support a dual-editor model by cutting the compensation rate by half. But perhaps most damning is a footnote revealing Elsevier's use of so-called "AI" in the publication process. "In fall of 2023, for example, without consulting or informing the editors, Elsevier initiated the use of AI during production, creating article proofs devoid of capitalization of all proper nouns (e.g., formally recognized epochs, site names, countries, cities, genera, etc.) as well italics for genera and species. These AI changes reversed the accepted versions of papers that had already been properly formatted by the handling editors. This was highly embarrassing for the journal and resolution took six months and was achieved only through the persistent efforts of the editors. AI processing continues to be used and regularly reformats submitted manuscripts to change meaning and formatting and require extensive author and editor oversight during proof stage." Except for one unnamed associate editor, the editorial board for the Journal of Human Evolution determined that the situation with Elsevier was no longer tenable, and resigned.

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