Major Blud writes: A newly discovered extinct species of human has been found in the Philippines. It's been named Homo Luzonensis after the island of Luzon where it was found. Homo Erectus has long thought to have been the first member of our direct line to leave the African homeland -- around 1.9 million years ago. The physical features of Homo Luzonensis are a mixture of those found in very ancient human ancestors and in more recent people. This could mean primitive human relatives left Africa and made it all the way to South-East Asia, something not previously thought possible, since Luzon was only ever accessible by sea. The paper detailing the discovery has been published in the journal Nature.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Register: An American company is to build a series of undersea cables linking Australia to China after the Aussie government put its foot down and kicked Huawei off the contract. Building on our reports from last year that Australia had blocked Huawei from building a 4,000km cable between Australia, Papua New Guinea and the Solomon Islands, U.S. company TE Subcom has reportedly won the deal to build the link.

"All options for meshing the Pacific Islands are good for the development of the economies of these countries," Keir Preedy, chief executive of the Solomon Island Submarine Cable Company, told Reuters. The company is developing the Solomons' new cable. In addition to the Aus-PNG-Solomons route previously announced, TE Subcom will build a cable spur to Hong Kong -- Chinese territory. "It is due for completion in 2022 and also includes a possible trans-Pacific branch to Los Angeles," the newswire stated.

Freshly Exhumed writes: RCMP officers spotted a man driving with earbuds plugged into his iPhone. The phone was not in his hands nor on his lap, was not playing music or video, and the driver was not using it to talk to someone or navigate. The battery was, in fact, completely dead. Nonetheless, a judge has ruled that "by plugging the earbud wire into the iPhone, the defendant had enlarged the device, such that it included not only the iPhone (proper) but also attached speaker or earbuds," he wrote. "Since the earbuds were part of the electronic device and since the earbuds were in the defendant's ears, it necessarily follows that the defendant was holding the device (or part of the device) in a position in which it could be used, i.e. his ears." On the question of the battery, the judge said he relied on a 2015 precedent set in a Canadian provincial court, which says that holding an electronic device in a position where it could be used constitutes an offense, even if it is temporarily not working.

Longtime Slashdot reader johnnyb (Jonathan Bartlett) shares the findings of a new study he, along with co-author Asatur Zh. Khurshudyan, published this week in the journal DCDIS-A: Recently a longstanding flaw in elementary calculus was found and corrected. The "second derivative" has a notation that has confused many students. It turns out that part of the confusion is because the notation is wrong. Note -- I am the subject of the article. Mind Matters provides the technical details: "[T]he second derivative of y with respect to x has traditionally had the notation 'd2 y/dx 2.' While this notation is expressed as a fraction, the problem is that it doesn't actually work as a fraction. The problem is well-known but it has been generally assumed that there is no way to express the second derivative in fraction form. It has been thought that differentials (the fundamental 'dy' and 'dx' that calculus works with) were not actual values and therefore they aren't actually in ratio with each other. Because of these underlying assumptions, the fact that you could not treat the second derivative as a fraction was not thought to be an anomaly. However, it turns out that, with minor modifications to the notation, the terms of the second derivative (and higher derivatives) can indeed be manipulated as an algebraic fraction. The revised notation for the second derivative is '(d 2 y/dx 2) - (dy/dx)(d 2 x/dx 2).'"

The report adds that while mathematicians haven't been getting wrong answers, "correcting the notation enables mathematicians to work with fewer special-case formulas and also to develop a more intuitive understanding of the nature of differentials."

Bowing to growing pressure from opponents who say that cashless stores leave out low-income Americans, Amazon plans to take cash at its 10 cashierless "Go" stores. From a report: Amazon Go stores, located in San Francisco, Chicago and Seattle, use AI and cameras to check out customers. Amazon reportedly is considering opening up to to 3,000 by 2021. "We are working to accept cash," a spokesperson for Amazon said Wednesday. "Paying cash at Amazon Go will work as you would expect: you'll check out, pay with cash, and then get your change." Amazon did not say when Go stores will begin accepting cash. Amazon also said its bookstores will start taking cash, but did not share any details.

Steve Kessel, Amazon's senior vice president of physical stores, told employees last month that Go stores would add "additional payment mechanisms," CNBC reported earlier on Wednesday. Kessel was responding to a question about how Amazon plans to address "discrimination and elitism" at cashierless stores, according to the report. Further reading: As More Retailers Ban Paper Money, It's Making Things Awkward For Customers Without Plastic.

YouTube TV isn't immune to the latest wave of rate hikes plaguing the streaming world. From a report: The Google-owned service has announced that it's raising the base monthly price to $50 ($55 if you subscribe directly through an Apple TV), effective immediately for new subscribers and from May 13th onward for existing customers. You'll at least get something for your trouble, though, as YouTube TV will finally offer a host of additional channels.

You now have access to eight Discovery channels that include the original as well as Animal Planet, Food Network, HGTV, Investigation Discovery, MotorTrend, TLC and Travel Channel. Oprah Winfrey's OWN channel is coming later in 2019, and Epix's movie-oriented channel is available today if you're willing to spend extra.

Udacity, the $1 billion online education startup, has laid off about 20 percent of its workforce and is restructuring its operations as the company's co-founder Sebastian Thrun seeks to bring costs in line with revenue without curbing growth, TechCrunch has learned. From the report: The objective is to do more than simply keep the company afloat, Thrun told TechCrunch in a phone interview. Instead, Thrun says these measures will allow Udacity from a money-losing operation to a "break-even or profitable company by next quarter and then moving forward." The 75 employees, including a handful of people in leadership positions, were laid off earlier today as part of a broader plan to restructure operations at Udacity. The startup now employs 300 full-time equivalent employees. It also employs about 60 contractors.

Udacity, which specializes in "nanodegrees" on a range of technical subjects that include AI, deep learning, digital marketing, VR and computer vision, has been struggling for months now, due in part to runaway costs and other inefficiencies. The company grew in 2017, with revenue increasing 100 percent year-over-year thanks to some popular programs like its self-driving car and deep learning nanodegrees, and the culmination of a previous turnaround plan architected by former CMO Shernaz Daver. New programming was added in 2018, but the volume slowed. Those degrees that were added lacked the popularity of some of its other degrees. Meanwhile, costs expanded and their employee ranks swelled.