An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Fine-particulate air pollution can drive devastating forms of dementia by triggering the formation of toxic clumps of protein that destroy nerve cells as they spread through the brain, research suggests. Exposure to the airborne particles causes proteins in the brain to misfold into the clumps, which are hallmarks of Lewy body dementia, the second most common form of dementia after Alzheimer's disease. The finding has "profound implications" for preventing the neurodegenerative disorder, which affects millions worldwide, with scientists calling for a concerted effort to improve air quality by cutting emissions from industrial activity and vehicle exhausts, improving wildfire management and reducing wood burning in homes.

The researchers began by analyzing hospital records of the 56.5 million US Medicare patients. They looked at those who were admitted for the first time between 2000 and 2014 with the protein damage. Armed with the patients' zip codes, the scientists estimated their long-term exposure to PM2.5 pollution, airborne particles that are smaller than 2.5 thousandths of a millimeter. These can be inhaled deep into the lungs and are found in the bloodstream, brain and other organs. They found that long-term exposure to PM2.5 raised the risk of Lewy body dementia, but had less of an impact on rates of another neurodegenerative brain disease that is not driven by the toxic proteins. Lewy bodies are made from a protein called alpha-synuclein. The protein is crucial for healthy brain functioning, but can misfold in various ways to produce different kinds of harmful Lewy bodies. These can kill nerve cells and cause devastating disease by spreading through the brain.

To see if air pollution could trigger Lewy bodies, the team exposed mice to PM2.5 pollution every other day for 10 months. Some were normal mice, but others were genetically modified to prevent them making alpha-synuclein. The results were striking: in normal mice, nerve cells died off, leading to brain shrinkage and cognitive decline. The genetically modified mice were largely unaffected. Further work in mice showed that PM2.5 pollution drove the formation of aggressive, resilient and toxic clumps of alpha-synuclein clumps that looked very similar to Lewy bodies in humans. Although the work is in mice, the findings are considered compelling evidence. The work has been published in the journal Science.

Intel shelled out $16.5 billion on R&D in 2024, outspending Nvidia by 28% and AMD by 156%, with much of the cash going into chip design, fabrication tech, and the upcoming Nova Lake architecture. "When you compare the R&D expenditures to the amount of revenue, though, the story takes on a very different look," notes PC Gamer. "Intel spent 31% of its net revenue, and 26% for AMD, but Nvidia and Samsung got by on just 10% and 4%, respectively." From the report: An analysis of research and development expenditure by TechInsights was reported by Korea JoongAng Daily, but you can get the numbers yourself by pulling up each company's 2024 financial results. For example, AMD declared that it spent $6.456 billion last year (pdf, page 1) on R&D, whereas Nvidia forked out $12.914 billion. It's worth noting that Nvidia's financial statements are numbered one year ahead of the actual period (FY 2026 is 2025 and so on).

Anyway, those figures pale in comparison to how much cash Intel burned through in 2024 to research and develop chip, fabrication technologies, software, and all kinds of tech stuffâ"a staggering $16.546 billion (pdf, page 25). That's 28% more than Nvidia and a frankly unbelievable 156% more than AMD. The nearest non-US semiconductor firm is Samsung Electronics, which spent a reported $9.5 billion on R&D. That would place third, comfortably ahead of AMD, and it strongly suggests that if you have your own foundries for making chips, you need to spend a lot of cash on finding ways to make better processors.

Germany has already met its 2028 goal for reducing coal-fired power generation, so won't need to order the shutdown of any plants for a second year running, the country's regulator said. From a report: Germany has an interim 2028 target of reducing coal-fired power by 8.7 gigawatts, and as of Sept. 1 it had exceeded this level by about 10%, the Federal Network Agency said on its website on Monday.

Almost two thirds of Germany's electricity comes from renewables and excess solar power production has frequently pushed prices below zero, making burning coal less profitable. Yet Europe's largest economy remains heavily dependent on the fossil fuel and is still the European Union's biggest polluter.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Adobe is bringing its video editor Premiere to iPhone, promising "pro-level" editing on the go for free. The app will launch later this month, with an Android version also under development.

The Premiere app features a familiar multi-track timeline, with support for an unlimited number of video, audio, and text layers. There's automatic captioning, 4K HDR support, and one-tap exporting to TikTok, YouTube Shorts, and Instagram -- including automatic resizing that frames content for each platform.

The iOS version of Premiere will be free to download and use, though Adobe says there will be charges for additional cloud storage and generative AI credits. Speaking of, it includes support for Adobe's generative sound effects and AI-powered speech enhancement, plus a wider range of AI assets generated through Adobe Firefly. If you'd rather not use AI content, there's a selection of Adobe fonts, along with images, sounds, music, and video assets that are free to use.

alternative_right writes: For decades, fragments and unofficial copies of Microsoft's 6502 BASIC have circulated online, mirrored on retrocomputing sites, and preserved in museum archives. Coders have studied the code, rebuilt it, and even run it in modern systems. Today, for the first time, we're opening the hatch and officially releasing the code under an open-source license. Microsoft BASIC began in 1975 as the company's very first product: a BASIC interpreter for the Intel 8080, written by Bill Gates and Paul Allen for the Altair 8800. That codebase was soon adapted to run on other 8-bit CPUs, including the MOS 6502, Motorola 6800, and 6809.

The 6502 port was completed in 1976 by Bill Gates and Ric Weiland. In 1977, Commodore licensed it for a flat fee of $25,000, a deal that placed Microsoft BASIC at the heart of Commodore's PET computers and, later, the VIC-20 and Commodore 64. The version we are releasing here -- labeled "1.1" -- contains fixes to the garbage collector identified by Commodore and jointly implemented in 1978 by Commodore engineer John Feagans and Bill Gates, when Feagans traveled to Microsoft's Bellevue offices. This is the version that shipped as the PET's "BASIC V2." It even contains a playful Bill Gates Easter egg, hidden in the labels STORDO and STORD0, which Gates himself confirmed in 2010.

Rising adoption of AI technology by firms in the Federal Reserve's New York district has not been much of a job-killer so far, the regional Fed bank said in a blog on Thursday. Reuters: "Businesses reported a notable increase in AI use over the past year, yet very few firms reported AI-induced layoffs," New York Fed economists wrote in the blog. "Indeed, for those already employed, our results indicate AI is more likely to result in retraining than job loss, similar to our findings from last year," and so far the technology does not point to "significant reductions in employment."

There has been broad concern that AI could create major headwinds for hiring in the coming years, with the technology hitting highly-paid professional and managerial jobs the hardest. Investors are plowing cash into AI investments at a time when employment has already begun to show some softness, although job market changes related to AI will almost certainly play out over a long time horizon. The New York Fed blog noted that the modest impact on jobs so far may not hold in the future. "Looking ahead, firms anticipate more significant layoffs and scaled-back hiring as they continue to integrate AI into their operations," New York Fed researchers wrote.

AI will disrupt the labor market within five to ten years and force Americans to rely on investment returns rather than wages for income, according to Vlad Tenev, chief executive of stock trading firm Robinhood. Tenev told Fortune that "if you can't rely on labor to generate money to make a living, capital becomes more important."

The brokerage chief said private companies and government must make investing easier from an early age. He cited the proposed Invest America Act, included in congressional reconciliation legislation, which would provide every newborn with $1,000 in an investment account. Tenev said the policy represents preparation for an economy where "humans comprise less than 1% of the total intelligence" as AI systems advance beyond current capabilities.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: On Tuesday, Tencent released HunyuanWorld-Voyager, a new open-weights AI model that generates 3D-consistent video sequences from a single image, allowing users to pilot a camera path to "explore" virtual scenes. The model simultaneously generates RGB video and depth information to enable direct 3D reconstruction without the need for traditional modeling techniques. However, it won't be replacing video games anytime soon.

The results aren't true 3D models, but they achieve a similar effect: The AI tool generates 2D video frames that maintain spatial consistency as if a camera were moving through a real 3D space. Each generation produces just 49 frames -- roughly two seconds of video -- though multiple clips can be chained together for sequences lasting "several minutes," according to Tencent. Objects stay in the same relative positions when the camera moves around them, and the perspective changes correctly as you would expect in a real 3D environment. While the output is video with depth maps rather than true 3D models, this information can be converted into 3D point clouds for reconstruction purposes. There are some caveats with the tool. It doesn't generate true 3D models (only 2D frames with depth maps) and each run produces just two seconds of footage, with errors compounding during longer or complex camera motions like full 360-degree rotations. Furthermore, because it relies heavily on training data patterns, its ability to generalize is limited and it demands enormous GPU power (60-80GB of memory) to run effectively. On top of that, licensing restricts use in the EU, UK, and South Korea, with large-scale deployments requiring special agreements.

Tencent published the model weights on Hugging Face.

Switzerland has launched Apertus, a fully open-source, multilingual LLM trained on 15 trillion tokens and over 1,000 languages. "What distinguishes Apertus from many other generative AI systems is its commitment to complete openness," reports CyberInsider. From the report: Unlike popular proprietary models, where users can only interact via APIs or hosted interfaces, Apertus provides open access to its model weights, training datasets, documentation, and even intermediate checkpoints. The source code and all training materials are released under a permissive open-source license that allows commercial use. Since the full training process is documented and reproducible, researchers and watchdogs can audit the data sources, verify compliance with data protection laws, and inspect how the model was trained. Apertus' development explicitly adhered to Swiss data protection and copyright laws, and incorporated retroactive opt-out mechanisms to respect data source preferences.

From a privacy perspective, Apertus represents a compelling shift in the AI landscape. The model only uses publicly available data, filtered to exclude personal information and to honor opt-out signals from content sources. This not only aligns with emerging regulatory frameworks like the EU AI Act, but also provides a tangible example of how AI can be both powerful and privacy-respecting. According to ETH Zurich's Imanol Schlag, technical lead of the project at ETH Zurich, Apertus is "built for the public good" and is a demonstration of how AI can be deployed as a public digital infrastructure, much like utilities or transportation. The model is available via Swisscom's Sovereign Swiss AI Platform. It's also available through Hugging Face and the Public AI Inference Utility.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from 404 Media, written by Jason Koebler: As I do most nights, I was listening to YouTube videos to fall asleep the other night. Sometime around 3 a.m., I woke up because the video YouTube was autoplaying started going "FEEEEEEEE." The video was called "Boring History for Sleep | How Medieval PEASANTS Survived the Coldest Nights and more." It is two hours long, has 2.3 million views, and, an hour and 15 minutes into the video, the AI-generated voice glitched. "In the end, Anne Boleyn won a kind of immortality. Not through her survival, but through her indelible impact on history. FEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE," the narrator says in a fake British accent. "By the early 1770s, the American colonies simmered like a pot left too long over a roaring fire," it continued. The video was from a channel I hadn't seen before, called "Sleepless Historian." I took my headphones out, didn't think much of it at the time, rolled over, and fell back asleep.

The next night, when I went to pick a new video to fall asleep to, my YouTube homepage was full of videos from Sleepless Historian and several similar-sounding channels like Boring History Bites, History Before Sleep, The Snoozetorian, Historian Sleepy, and Dreamoria. Lots of these videos nominally check the boxes for what I want from something to fall asleep to. Almost all of them are more than three hours long, and they are about things I don't know much about. Some video titles include "Unusual Medieval Cures for Common Illnesses," "The Entire History of the American Frontier," "What It Was Like to Visit a BR0THEL in Pompeii," and "What GETTING WASTED Was Like in Medieval Times." One of the channels has even been livestreaming this "history" 24/7 for weeks.

In the daytime, when I was not groggy and half asleep, it quickly became obvious to me that all of these videos are AI generated, and that they are part of a sophisticated and growing AI slop content ecosystem that is flooding YouTube, is drowning out human-made content created by real anthropologists and historians who spend weeks or months researching, fact-checking, scripting, recording, and editing their videos, and are quite literally rewriting history with surface-level, automated drek that the YouTube algorithm delivers to people. YouTube has said it will demonetize or otherwise crack down on "mass produced" videos, but it is not clear whether that has had any sort of impact on the proliferation of AI-generated videos on the platform, and none of the people I spoke to for this article have noticed any change. "It's completely shocking to me," Pete Kelly, who runs the popular History Time YouTube channel, told Koebler in a phone interview. "It used to be enough to spend your entire life researching, writing, narrating, editing, doing all these things to make a video, but now someone can come along and they can do the same thing in a day instead of it taking six months, and the videos are not accurate. The visuals they use are completely inaccurate often. And I'm fearful because this is everywhere."

"I absolutely hate it, primarily the fact that they're historically inaccurate," Kelly added. "So it worries me because it's just the same things being regurgitated over and over again. [...] It's worrying to me just for humanity. Not to get too high brow, but it's not good for the state of knowledge in the world. It makes me worry for the future."

U.S. workers are becoming more stressed about their rising personal debts and financial health, a Bank of America survey showed. From a report: Of the respondents polled by BofA, 47% of employed people said they had a sense of financial well-being, dropping from 52% at the start of the year. Nearly 85% of consumers carried some type of personal debt, while 26% of the workforce was seeking help in areas such as emergency savings, paying down debt, and overall financial wellness, compared with 13% in 2023, according to the May survey of more than 1,000 people working full-time.

The SAT is billed as "a great way to find out how prepared students are for college." If that's true, recent changes to its format offer an unflattering assessment of the country's aspiring scholars, Bloomberg's editorial board wrote Wednesday. From the piece: [...] Then the pandemic hit. As in-person exams became impractical, hundreds of schools dropped their testing requirements. The SAT and its main competitor, the ACT, lost millions of dollars in revenue. Although both recently started offering digital options, schools have been slow to reinstate their requirements. Today, more than 80% of schools remain test-optional.

"If students are deciding to take a test," as one College Board executive put it, "how do we make the SAT the one they want to take?" To anyone familiar with American teenagers, the company's answer should come as no surprise: Make the test easier. The newly digitized format allows a calculator for the entire math section and drastically cuts reading comprehension. Gone are the 500- to 750-word passages about which students would answer a series of questions. Instead, test takers read 25- to 150-word excerpts -- about the length of a social media post -- and answer a single question about each.

[...] An effort by the College Board to reemphasize the benefits of deep reading -- for critical thinking, for self-reflection, for learning of all kinds -- might go a long way toward restoring some balance. It should build on efforts to incorporate college prep into school curricula, work with districts to develop coursework that builds reading stamina for all test takers, and consider reducing the cost of its subject-specific Advanced Placement exams that continue to test these skills (now $99), in line with the SAT ($68). Schools, for their part, should recommit to teaching books in their entirety.

For the first time in more than four years, there are fewer open jobs in the U.S. than there are job seekers. CNN: "This is a turning point for the labor market," Heather Long, chief economist at Navy Federal Credit Union, wrote Wednesday. "It's yet another crack."

The number of job openings fell to an estimated 7.18 million at the end of July, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics data released Wednesday. Job openings not only are at their lowest level in 10 months, but they're also below the number of unemployed workers (at 7.2 million) for the first time since April 2021.

The world's largest iceberg is now breaking apart rapidly in warmer waters after nearly 40 years adrift. "Earlier this year, the 'megaberg' known as A23a weighed a little under a trillion tons and was more than twice the size of Greater London," reports The Guardian. "It is now less than half its original size, but still a hefty 1,770 sq km (683 sq miles) and 60km (37 miles) at its widest point..." Scientists expect it to completely disintegrate within weeks. From the report: A23a calved from the Antarctic shelf in 1986 but quickly grounded in the Weddell Sea, remaining stuck on the ocean floor for over 30 years. It finally escaped in 2020 and, like other giants before it, was carried along "iceberg alley" into the South Atlantic Ocean by the powerful Antarctic Circumpolar Current. Around March, it ran aground in shallow waters off distant South Georgia island, raising fears it could disrupt large colonies of adult penguins and seals there from feeding their young. But it dislodged in late May, and moved on. [...] Iceberg calving is a natural process. But scientists say the rate at which they were being lost from Antarctica is increasing, probably because of human induced climate change.

A group of more than 85 scientists have issued a joint rebuttal to a recent U.S. Department of Energy report about climate change, finding it full of errors and misrepresenting climate science. NPR: The group of climate scientists found several examples where the DOE authors cherry-picked or misrepresented climate science in the agency's report. For instance, in the DOE report the authors claim that rising carbon dioxide can be a "net benefit" to U.S. agriculture, neglecting to mention the negative impacts of more heat and climate-change fueled extreme weather events on crops.

The DOE report also states that there is no evidence of more intense "meteorological" drought in the U.S. or globally, referring to droughts that involve low rainfall. But the dozens of climate scientists point out that this is misleading, because higher temperatures and more evaporation -- not just low rainfall -- can lead to and exacerbate droughts. They say that there are, in fact, many studies showing how climate change has exacerbated droughts.

SAP will invest over 20 billion euros ($23 billion) in European sovereign cloud infrastructure over the next decade. "Innovation and sovereignty cannot be two separate things -- it needs to come together," said Thomas Saueressig, SAP's board member tasked with leading customer services and delivery. CNBC reports: The company said it was expanding its sovereign cloud offerings to include an infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) platform enabling companies to access various computing services via its data center network. IaaS is a market dominated by players like Microsoft and Amazon. It will also roll out a new on-site option that allows customers to use SAP-operated infrastructure within their own data centers. The aim of the initiative is to ensure that customer data is stored within the European Union to maintain compliance with regional data protection regulations such as the General Data Protection Regulation, or GDPR.

[...] Saueressig said that SAP is "closely" involved in the creation of the new AI gigafactories but would not be the lead partner for the initiative. He added that the company's more than 20-billion-euro investment in Europe's sovereign cloud capabilities will not alter the company's capital expenditure for the next year and has already been baked into its financial plans.

UK weather agency Met Office, in a blog post: Provisional Met Office statistics confirm that summer 2025 is officially the warmest summer on record for the UK. Analysis by Met Office climate scientists has also shown that a summer as hot or hotter than 2025 is now 70 times more likely than it would be in a 'natural' climate with no human caused greenhouse gas emissions.

The UK's mean temperature from 1 June to 31 August stands at 16.10C, which is 1.51C above the long-term meteorological average. This surpasses the previous record of 15.76C, set in 2018, and pushes the summer of 1976 out of the top five warmest summers in a series dating back to 1884.

For decades, the dry season in the Amazon rainforest has been getting drier. A new study, published on Tuesday, found that about 75% of the decrease in rainfall is directly linked to deforestation. From a report: The study, in Nature Communications, also found that tree loss was partly responsible for increased heat across the Amazon. Since 1985, the hottest days in the Amazon have warmed by about 2 degrees Celsius. About 16% of that increase, the researchers found, was because of deforestation.

Marco Franco, an assistant professor at the University of Sao Paulo who led the study, said he was surprised by the findings. "We were expecting to see deforestation as a driver, but not this much," he said. "It tells us a lot about what's going on in the biome." The Amazon rainforest is often called the lungs of the planet because its trees help to regulate the global climate by absorbing planet-warming carbon dioxide. But decades of large-scale logging and burning in the forest have recently flipped that script, and parts of the region have become net producers of greenhouse gases.

An anonymous reader shares a report: If you're sharing an ad-free YouTube Premium or YouTube Music account with friends or family who live outside of your home, you could lose your premium privileges. Customers who lose these can still watch YouTube or listen to music with ads -- but let's be real, it's not the same.

Multiple reports have shown people who have the service have been receiving notices that their premium service will be paused for 15 days due to violating a policy that's been in place since 2023. On its support page, YouTube says that an account manager can add up to five family members in a household to their Premium membership. But, the post says, "Family members sharing a YouTube family plan must live in the same household as the family manager."

America is becoming a nation of economic pessimists. WSJ reports: A new Wall Street Journal-NORC poll [PDF] finds that the share of people who say they have a good chance of improving their standard of living fell to 25%, a record low in surveys dating to 1987. More than three-quarters said they lack confidence that life for the next generation will be better than their own, the poll found.

Nearly 70% of people said they believe the American dream -- that if you work hard, you will get ahead -- no longer holds true or never did, the highest level in nearly 15 years of surveys. Republicans in the survey were less pessimistic than Democrats, reflecting the longstanding trend that the party holding the White House has a rosier view of the economy. An index that combined six poll questions found that 55% of Republicans, as well as 90% of Democrats, held a negative view of prospects for themselves and their children.

The discontent reaches across demographic lines. By large majorities, both women and men held a pessimistic view in the combined questions. So did both younger and older adults, those with and without a college degree and respondents with more than $100,000 in household income, as well as those with less.

An anonymous reader shares a report: The United States is on the precipice of a historic, if dubious, achievement. If current trends hold, 2025 could be the first year on record in which the US population actually shrinks.

The math is straightforward. Population growth has two sources: natural increase (births minus deaths) and net immigration (arrivals minus departures). Last year, births outnumbered deaths by 519,000 people. That means any decline in net immigration in excess of half a million could push the U.S. into population decline. A recent analysis of Census data by the Pew Research Center found that between January and June, the US foreign-born population fell for the first time in decades by more than one million. While some economists have questioned the report, a separate analysis by the American Enterprise Institute predicted that net migration in 2025 could be as low as negative 525,000. In either case, annual population growth this year could easily turn negative.

College students have integrated generative AI into their academic routines at an unprecedented scale as 85% report usage for coursework in the past year, according to new Inside Higher Ed survey data. The majority employ AI tools for brainstorming ideas, seeking tutoring assistance, and exam preparation rather than wholesale academic outsourcing. Only 25% admitted using AI to complete assignments entirely, while 19% generated full essays.

Students overwhelmingly reject institutional policing approaches, with 53% favoring education on ethical AI use over detection software deployment. Despite widespread adoption, 35% of respondents report no change in their perception of college value, while 23% view their degrees as more valuable in the AI era.

International tourism to the United States faces an unprecedented 8.2% decline in 2025, with the World Travel and Tourism Council projecting a $12.5 billion loss in visitor spending -- the only decline among 184 economies analyzed. Canadian visitors, traditionally comprising 28% of international arrivals, have dropped by approximately 25% through July.

Seattle tour operators report 30-50% fewer Canadian customers with many explicitly citing recent tariff policies and political rhetoric as deterrents. The newly implemented $250 "visa integrity fee" for certain countries compounds existing concerns about immigration policies and National Guard deployments in major cities. Tourism Economics now projects full recovery to pre-pandemic levels won't occur until 2029, three years later than initially forecast.

Americans are having a record low amount of sex -- even less than they did during the Covid-19 pandemic -- according to a new study led by researchers at the Institute for Family Studies. WSJ: This continues the downward shift in sexual activity that has been worrying sociologists and psychologists for decades. For the report, called "The Sex Recession," researchers at the IFS analyzed the data on sex and intimacy in the latest General Social Survey produced by NORC at the University of Chicago, which was collected in 2024 and released in May. They found that just 37% of people age 18-64 reported having sex at least once a week, down from 55% in 1990. The decline is even more striking for young adults: Almost a quarter of people age 18-29, or 24%, said they had not had sex in the past year; this is twice as many as in 2010.

Much has been written in recent years about the trend of young people having less sex, attributed to everything from stunted social skills to a rise in internet pornography. Yet the IFS study shows that the same trend holds true for people up to the age of 64, of all sexual orientations, both married and single. (After age 64, there was no significant change in the amount of sex people have, largely because this group reports having sex less frequently to begin with, the researchers said.)

"Nearly 400 students, many of them entrepreneurs, have so far made the journey to Forest City to study everything from coding to unconventional theories on statehood," reports Bloomberg.

"They're building crypto projects, fine-tuning their physiques and testing whether a shared ideology — rather than just shared territory — can bind a community." They have descended on Forest City to attend Network School, the brainchild of former Coinbase Inc. executive and "The Network State" author Balaji Srinivasan. In this troubled megaproject once envisaged to house some 50 times its current population, they're conducting a real-life experiment of sorts with Srinivasan's vision of "startup societies" defined less by historical territory than shared beliefs in technology, cryptocurrency and light regulation... Mornings are spent in product sprints and coding sessions; afternoons in seminars exploring topics from the Meiji Restoration to Singapore's statecraft and the mechanics of decentralized governance. Guest lectures double as both technological deep dives and ideological sermons, according to half a dozen students interviewed by Bloomberg. The campus also mirrors Silicon Valley's infatuation with longevity and health, right down to a commercial-grade gym and specially designed workout routines. Students follow a protein-heavy diet...

After co-founding DNA testing startup Counsyl in 2008 and serving as its chief technology officer, Srinivasan spent five years at venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, first as general partner and then as board partner. He joined Coinbase as CTO in 2018 when the crypto exchange bought a portfolio company he oversaw and left after a little over a year, according to his LinkedIn profile. In a 2013 speech at Y Combinator's Startup School, Srinivasan brought his ideas about what he saw as a fundamental conflict between some modern nation-states and innovation to a wider audience. In the address, he advocated for Silicon Valley's "ultimate exit" from the U.S., which he argued was obsolete and hostile to innovators. In essence: If the society you live in is broken, why not just "opt out" and create a new one?

"The Network State: How To Start a New Country," published in 2022, expanded on Srinivasan's "exit" concept to outline how online, ideologically aligned communities can use crypto and digital tools to form new, decentralized states. A network state can be geographically dispersed and bound together by the internet and blockchains, he says, and the aim is to gain diplomatic recognition... On the Moment of Zen podcast in September 2023, he outlined how the "Gray Tribe" — entrepreneurs, innovators and thinkers — can retake control of San Francisco from the Blues using a variety of tactics, like allying with local police. The effort would involve gaining control of territory, according to Srinivasan, who didn't advocate for violence. "Elections are just the cherry on the cake," he said. "Elections are just a reflection of your total control of the streets."
The cost of attending Network School "starts at $1,500 per month, including lodging and food, for those who opt for a shared room."

The U.S. government site climate.gov offered years' worth of climate-science information — until its production team was fired earlier this summer. The site "is technically still online, but has been intentionally buried by the team of political appointees who now run the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration," reports the Guardian.

But now "a team of climate communication experts — including many members of the former climate.gov team — is working to resurrect its content into a new organization with an expanded mission." Their effort's new website, climate.us, would not only offer public-facing interpretations of climate science, but could also begin to directly offer climate-related services, such as assisting local governments with mapping increased flooding risk due to climate change. The effort is being led by climate.gov's former managing editor, Rebecca Lindsey, who, although now unemployed, has recruited several of her former colleagues to volunteer their time in an attempt to build climate.us into a thriving non-profit organization... "None of us were ready to let go of climate.gov and the mission...." Lindsey's new team has received a steady flow of outside support, including legal support, and a short-term grant that has helped them develop a vision for what they'd like to do next...

As multiyear veterans of the federal bureaucracy, at times they've been surprised by the possibilities that the new effort might offer. "We're allowed to use TikTok now," said Lindsey. "We're allowed to have a little bit of fun...

The climate.us team is also in the process of soft-launching a crowdsourced fundraising drive that Lindsey hopes they can leverage into more permanent support from a major foundation.... "[W]e do not yet have the sort of large operational funding that we will need if we're going to actually transition climate.gov operations to the non-profit space." In the meantime, Lindsey and her team have found themselves spending the summer knee-deep in the logistics of building a major non-profit from scratch.

There's something rare about a snail named Ned, reports CNN: Ned's shell spirals left, while almost all other snails have right spiraling shells. It's a one in 40,000 genetic condition among the common corno espersum... "I was quite breathless for a moment," says Giselle Clarkson, an author, illustrator and self-described 'observologist' who found Ned while digging in her garden in Wairarapa, just north of capital Wellington. "I was just pulling out this plant, and a snail tumbled into the dirt and I was just about to scoop it up and just chuck it off to the side, when I realized what I had," Clarkson told CNN. It was a serendipitous moment for Ned, now named for Homer Simpson's left-handed neighbor. Clarkson was aware of this rare asymmetry in snails from her work with the magazine New Zealand Geographic.
But "should Ned hope to mate one day, it will have to be with another very rare left-coiled snail," notes the Washington Post (since, as CNN points out, this snail's reproductive organs "don't line up" with those of snails with right-spiraling shells). This has sparked a national campaign to locate a compatible snail — something that was last successfully attempted in 2016.

"If 40,000 people read this," the campaign explains, "chances are, Ned's dreams will come true."

In 2017 Rick Beato streamed "Rick's Rant Episode 2" — and just received a copyright claim this month. And days after jazz pianist Chick Corea died in 2021, Beato livestreamed a half-hour video which was mostly commentary, but with several excerpts from Corea's albums (at least one more than three minutes long). He also received a copyright claim for that one this August — just minutes after the claim on his 2017 video.

These videos "are all fair use," Beato argues in a new video, noting it's also affected other popular YouTube channels like The Professor of Rock: Rick Beato: Universal Music Group [UMG] has continued to send emails about copyright content ID claims — and now copyright strikes — on my channel. As a matter of fact, I have three shorts — these are under a minute long — that if they go through in the next four days, I'll have three strikes on my channel! Now if you don't fight these things, those three strikes would actually remove my channel from YouTube.
Five months ago Rick Beato had posted a clip from his interview with singer-songwriter Adam Duritz (founder of The Counting Crows) on YouTube. After 250,000 views, he'd earned a whopping $36.52 — and then Universal Music Group also claimed that video violated their copyright. (In the background the video played Duritz's song as he described how he wrote it.) "So they're gonna take my channel down over less than a hundred bucks — for using a small segment from an interview with him, on a song he sang on," Beato complained on YouTube. "That video is 55 seconds long!"

"You need to play people's music to talk about it," Beato argues. "That is the definition of fair use. These are interviews with the people about their careers." (And the interviews actually help promote the artists for the record labels...) Rick Beato: The next one has me in it — it's an Olivia Rodrigo song — that I played maybe 10 seconds of the song on, and the short is 42 seconds long. Who did it? UMG. The third copyright strike is from a Hans Zimmer short. It's also UMG — it's from the Crimson Tide soundtrack.

Now, what do these things say...? "Your video is scheduled to be removed in four days and your channel will get a copyright strike due to a removal request from a claimant. If you delete your video before then, your channel won't get a copyright strike." [And there's also emails like "After reviewing your dispute, UMG has decided that their copyright claim is still valid..."] I've had probably 4,000 claims, over the last 9 years — from things that are fair use. [When he interviewed producer Rick Rubin, that video got 13 separate copyright claims.]

That's when I hired a lawyer to fight these. [Full-time, Beato says later.] And what he's done is he fought every single claim... We have successfully fought thousands of these now. But it literally costs me so much money to do this. Since we've been fighting these things — and never lost one — they still keep coming in... They're all Universal Music Group. So they obviously have hired some third party company, that are dredging up things, they're looking for things that haven't been claimed in the past — they're taking videos from seven or eight years ago!
Slashdot reader MrBrklyn (Slashdot reader #4,775) writes on the "New York's Linux Scene" site that video bloggers like Beato "have been hounded by copyright pirates like UMG," arguing that new videos of support are a "rebellion gaining traction". (Beato's video drew 1,369,859 views — and attracted 24,605 Comments — along with videos of support from professional musicians like drummer Anthony Edwards, guitarist Justin Hawkins, and bassist Scot Lade, as well as two different professional music attorneys.)

"Since there's rarely humans making any of these decisions and it's automated by bots, they don't understand these claims are against Universal Music's best interests," argues the long-running blog Saving Country Music (first appearing on MySpace in 2008). On YouTube videos, creators can freely filch copyrighted photos and other people's videos virtually free of ramifications. You can take an entire 2 1/2 hour film, impose it over a background, and upload it to YouTube, and usually avoid any problems. But feature a barely audible 8 1/2-second clip of music underneath audio dialogue, and you could have your entire podcast career evaporate overnight... People continue to ask, "Why doesn't Saving Country Music has a podcast?" Because what's the point of having a music podcast when you can't feature music? In fact, after over a decade of refusing to start one, I finally did, music free. What happened? About a dozen episodes in, someone took out a claim, and not only were all the episodes deleted, so was the entire account, even though no music even appeared on any of the episodes. I was given absolutely no recourse to fight whatever false claim had been made...

The music industry continues to so colossal fail the artists and catalogs they represent, and the fans they're supposed to serve with this current system of how podcasts are handled. If everything changes today thanks to the Rick Beato rant, it would still be 15 years too late. But at least it would happen.
Instead, they write, "Music labels have been leaving major opportunities to promote their catalogs and performers on the table with their punitive copyright claims that make it impossible to feature music on music podcasts and other platforms...

"You aren't screwing podcasters. You're screwing artists who could be using podcasts to help promote their music. "

Intel amended its deal with the U.S. Department of Commerce "to remove earlier project milestones," reports Reuters, "and received about $5.7 billion in cash sooner than planned."

"The move will give Intel more flexibility over the funds." The amended agreement, which revises a November 2024 funding deal, retains some guardrails that prevent the chipmaker from using the funds for dividends and buybacks, doing certain control-changing deals and from expanding in certain countries.
The move makes the Wall Street Journal wonder what, beyond equity, the U.S. now gets in return, calling government's position "a stake without a strategy." The U.S. has historically shied away from putting money into private business. It can't really outguess the market on where the most promising returns lie. Yet there are exceptions. Sometimes a company or industry risks failing without public support, and that failure would hurt the whole country, not just its shareholders and employees. Intel meets both conditions. It isn't failing, but it is losing money, its core business is in decline, and it lacks the capital and customers needed to make the most advanced semiconductors. If Intel were to fail, it would take a sizable chunk of the semiconductor industrial base with it. At a time of existential competition with China, that is a national emergency...

[U.S. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick] said as a shareholder, the U.S. would help Intel "to create the most advanced chips in the world." And yet the deal doesn't provide Intel with new resources to accomplish that. Rather, to get the remaining $9 billion, Intel had to give the U.S. equity. This is more like a tax than an investment: Shareholders gave up a 10th of their ownership in return for money the company was supposed to get anyway... Some of the administration's forays into private business do reflect strategic thinking, such as the Pentagon's 15% stake in MP Materials in exchange for investment and contracts that help make the company a viable alternative to China as a supplier of rare-earth magnets for products such as automobiles, wind turbines, jet fighters and missile systems. But more often, companies recoil from government ownership...

Though the U.S. stake dilutes Intel's existing shareholders, its stock has held up. There could be several reasons. It eliminates uncertainty over whether the remaining $9 billion in federal funds will be forthcoming... [B]ecause Washington has a vested interest in Intel's share price, investors believe it may prod companies such as Nvidia and Apple to buy more of its chips.
But that only goes so far, the article seems to conclude, offering this quote from an analyst Bernstein investment research. "If Intel can prove they can make these leading-edge products in high volume that meets specifications at a good cost structure, they'll have customers lined up around the block. If they can't prove they can do it, what customer will put meaningful volume to them regardless of what pressure the U.S. government brings to bear?"

CBS News also notes the U.S. government stake "is being criticized by conservatives and some economic policy experts alike, who worry such extensive government intervention undermines free enterprise."

Thanks to Slashdot reader joshuark for sharing the news.

After Will Smith uploaded a video of an adoring crowd, blogger Andy Baio "conducted a detailed analysis that suggests Will Smith's team might have used AI to turn photos from his recent concerts into videos," writes BGR. But there's more to the story: Google recently ran an experiment for YouTube Shorts in which it used AI (machine learning) to improve the quality of Shorts without asking the creator for permission. People complained the videos looked like they were AI generated. It seems that Will Smith's YouTube Shorts clip that attracted criticism from fans this week might have been a victim of this experiment... The signs are real. The man who claimed Will Smith's song helped him cure cancer was there. The woman in front of him was holding the sign with him. The "Lov U" sign appeared in photos the singer posted on his social media channels before the clip was shared.
"Will Smith has not denied the use of AI in these promotional clips," the article adds.

But the Hollywood Reporter also calls it "just the beginning of AI chaos," noting that "influencers and spinmeisters have been using AI upscaling for years, if quietly, the way you might round up your current salary in a job interview." It's only going to grow more popular as the tools get better. (And they will — you just need some tweaks to the model and increases in compute to erase these hallucinations.) In fact, when the chapter on the early AI Age is written, the line about this moment is less likely to be, "Remember when Will Smith did something cringily AI?" and more, "Remember when AI was still seen as so cringe that we made fun of Will Smith for it?" Experts differ on the timeline, but everyone agrees it's just years if not months before we'll stop being able to spot an AI video. [Will Smith's video] had the particular misfortune of coming out at this interregnum moment: good enough for someone to use but not so good we can't spot it.

That moment will be over soon enough, and, I suspect, so will our pearl-clutching. The main effect of this new age of the synthetic is that video will stop being a meaningful measure of truth. We have long stopped believing everything we read, and AI image-generators have killed what photoshop wounded. But video until now has been the last bastion of objectivity — incontrovertible evidence that an event took place the way it seemed to....

But there is an upside. (Really.) Without a format that can telegraph objectivity, we'll need to (if we care to) turn to other ways to assure ourselves of the facts: the source of the video. That could mean the human-led content creator will matter more. After years of seeing news brands take a beating in the trust department, they'll soon become the only hope we have of knowing whether something happened. We no longer will be able to trust the medium. But we may newly believe the media.

They offer "a self-sustaining power solution for marine regions," according to a newly published 41-page review after "pioneering use in wave energy harvesting in 2014". Ten years later, researchers have developed several structures for these "triboelectric nanogenerators" (TENGs) to "facilitate their commercial deployment." But there's a lack of "comprehensive summaries and performance evaluations".

So the review "distills a decade of blue-energy research into six design pillars" for next-generation technology, writes EurekaAlert, which points the way "to self-powered ocean grids, distributed marine IoT, and even hydrogen harvested from the sea itself..." By "translating chaotic ocean motion into deterministic electron flow," the team "turns every swell, gust and glint of sunlight into dispatchable power — ushering in an era where the sea itself becomes a silent, self-replenishing power plant."

Some insights: - Multilayer stacks, origami folds and magnetic-levitation frames push volumetric power density...three orders of magnitude above first-generation prototypes.

- Frequency-complementary couplings of TENG, EMG and PENG create full-spectrum harvesters that deliver 117 % power-conversion efficiency in real waves.

- Pendulum, gear and magnetic-multiplier mechanisms translate chaotic 0.1-2 Hz swells into stable high-frequency oscillations, multiplying average power 14-fold.

- Resonance-tuned structures now span 0.01-5 Hz, locking onto shifting wave spectra across seasons and sea states.

- Spherical, dodecahedral and tensegrity architectures harvest six-degree-of-freedom motion, eliminating orientational blind spots.

- Single devices co-harvest wave, wind and solar inputs, powering self-charging buoys that cut battery replacement to zero...
Another new wave energy project is moving forward, according to the blog Renewable Energy World: Eco Wave Power, an onshore wave energy technology company, announced that its U.S. pilot project at the Port of Los Angeles has successfully completed operational testing and achieved a new milestone: the lowering of its floaters into the water for the first time. The moment, broadcast live by Good Morning America, follows the finalization of all installation works at the project site, including full installation of all wave energy floaters; connection of hydraulic pipes and supporting infrastructure; and placement of the onshore energy conversion unit.

With installation completed, Eco Wave Power has now officially entered the operational phase of its U.S. excursion... [Inna Braverman, founder and CEO of Eco Wave Power] said "This pilot station is a vital step in demonstrating how wave energy can be harnessed using existing marine infrastructure, while laying the groundwork for full-scale commercialization in the United States...." Eco Wave Power's patented onshore wave energy system attaches floaters to existing marine structures. The up-and-down motion of the waves drives hydraulic cylinders, which send pressurized fluid to a land-based energy conversion unit that generates electricity... The U.S. Department of Energy's National Renewable Energy Laboratory estimates that wave energy has the potential to generate over 1,400 terawatt-hours per year — enough to power approximately 130 million homes.

Eco Wave Power's 404.7 MW global project pipeline also includes upcoming operational sites in Taiwan, India, and Portugal, alongside its grid-connected station in Israel.
Long-time Slashdot reader PongoX11 also brings word of a company building a "simple" floating rig to turn wave motion into electricity, calling it "a steel can that moves water around" and wondering if "This one might work!"

The news site TechEBlog points out that "Unlike old-school wave energy systems with clunky mechanical parts, Ocean-2 rocks a modular, flexible setup that rolls with the ocean's flow." At about 10 meters wide [30 feet wide. and 260 feet long!], it is made from materials designed to (hopefully) withstand the ocean's abuse, over some maintenance cycle. It's designed for deep ocean, so solving this technically is the first big challenge. Figuring out how to use/monetize all that cheap energy out in the middle of nowhere will be the next.
"Ocean-2 works with the ocean, not against it, so we can generate power without messing up marine life," said Panthalassa's CEO, Dr. Elena Martinez, according to TechEBlog: Tests in Puget Sound, done with Everett Ship Repair, showed it pumping out up to 50 kilowatts in decent conditions — enough juice for a small coastal town. "We're thinking big," Martinez said in a press release. "Ocean-2 is just the start, but we're already planning bigger arrays that could crank out gigawatts..." Looking forward, Panthalassa sees Ocean-2 as part of a massive wave energy network. By 2030, they're aiming to roll out arrays that could power whole coastal cities, cutting down on fossil fuel use.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: The collapse of a critical Atlantic current can no longer be considered a low-likelihood event, a study has concluded, making deep cuts to fossil fuel emissions even more urgent to avoid the catastrophic impact. The Atlantic meridional overturning circulation (Amoc) is a major part of the global climate system. It brings sun-warmed tropical water to Europe and the Arctic, where it cools and sinks to form a deep return current. The Amoc was already known to be at its weakest in 1,600 years as a result of the climate crisis.

Climate models recently indicated that a collapse before 2100 was unlikely but the new analysis examined models that were run for longer, to 2300 and 2500. These show the tipping point that makes an Amoc shutdown inevitable is likely to be passed within a few decades, but that the collapse itself may not happen until 50 to 100 years later. The research found that if carbon emissions continued to rise, 70% of the model runs led to collapse, while an intermediate level of emissions resulted in collapse in 37% of the models. Even in the case of low future emissions, an Amoc shutdown happened in 25% of the models.

Scientists have warned previously that Amoc collapse must be avoided "at all costs." It would shift the tropical rainfall belt on which many millions of people rely to grow their food, plunge western Europe into extreme cold winters and summer droughts, and add 50cm to already rising sea levels. The new results are "quite shocking, because I used to say that the chance of Amoc collapsing as a result of global warming was less than 10%," said Prof Stefan Rahmstorf, at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany, who was part of the study team. "Now even in a low-emission scenario, sticking to the Paris agreement, it looks like it may be more like 25%. "These numbers are not very certain, but we are talking about a matter of risk assessment where even a 10% chance of an Amoc collapse would be far too high," added Rahmstorf. "We found that the tipping point where the shutdown becomes inevitable is probably in the next 10 to 20 years or so. That is quite a shocking finding as well and why we have to act really fast in cutting down emissions."

"Observations in the deep [far North Atlantic] already show a downward trend over the past five to 10 years, consistent with the models' projections," said Prof Sybren Drijfhout, at the Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute, who was also part of the team. "Even in some intermediate and low-emission scenarios, the Amoc slows drastically by 2100 and completely shuts off thereafter. That shows the shutdown risk is more serious than many people realize."

The findings have been published in the journal Environmental Research Letters.

Federal Trade Commission Chairman Andrew Ferguson accused Google of using "partisan" spam filtering in Gmail that sends Republican fundraising emails to the spam folder while delivering Democratic emails to inboxes. From a report: Ferguson sent a letter yesterday to Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai, accusing the company of "potential FTC Act violations related to partisan administration of Gmail." Ferguson's letter revives longstanding Republican complaints that were previously rejected by a federal judge and the Federal Election Commission.

"My understanding from recent reporting is that Gmail's spam filters routinely block messages from reaching consumers when those messages come from Republican senders but fail to block similar messages sent by Democrats," Ferguson wrote. The FTC chair cited a recent New York Post report on the alleged practice.

The letter told Pichai that if "Gmail's filters keep Americans from receiving speech they expect, or donating as they see fit, the filters may harm American consumers and may violate the FTC Act's prohibition of unfair or deceptive trade practices." Ferguson added that any "act or practice inconsistent with" Google's obligations under the FTC Act "could lead to an FTC investigation and potential enforcement action."

A newly published Investigatory Powers Tribunal filing indicates the UK government's Technical Capability Notice to Apple went beyond the company's Advanced Data Protection encryption to include standard iCloud services used by millions [non-paywalled source]. The document states the UK Home Office order "is not limited to" ADP data and applies "globally in respect of the relevant data categories of all iCloud users."

The filing emerged days after Trump administration officials claimed the UK had agreed to drop efforts targeting American citizens' data. Apple launched its legal challenge in March after receiving the TCN, which the company cannot discuss publicly under the Investigatory Powers Act. The tribunal scheduled a hearing for early next year. Apple withdrew ADP from UK customers in February.

Universities facing federal research budget cuts are increasingly turning to corporate partnerships for funding as Georgia Tech secures $70 million from industry this fiscal year -- 28% more than last year and representing 15% of campus research funding versus the 6% national average. The Atlanta school's corporate engagement office has fielded multiple weekly calls from other institutions seeking guidance after securing deals including Hyundai's $55 million stadium naming rights agreement alongside undisclosed research investments in electric vehicle and hydrogen fuel technologies.

The arrangements come with restrictions: nondisclosure agreements limit publication options for graduate students, and companies typically avoid funding basic research without immediate commercial applications. Federal grants still constitute over half of university research spending nationally, supporting early-stage discovery work that laid groundwork for current quantum computing developments.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Valve has started to comply with the UK's Online Safety Act, by rolling out a requirement for all Brits to verify their age with a credit card to access "mature content" pages and games on Steam. UK users won't even be able to access the community hubs of mature content games unless a valid credit card is stored on a Steam account.

While platforms like Reddit, Bluesky, and Discord have opted for age verification checks using selfies, Valve is restricting its age checks to just credit cards, according to a support article. "Among all age assurance mechanisms reviewed by Valve, this process preserves the maximum degree of user privacy," says Valve. "Having the credit card stored as a payment method acts as an additional deterrent against circumventing age verification by sharing a single Steam user account among multiple persons."

FFmpeg 8.0 brings GPU-accelerated video encoding via Vulkan -- and can now subtitle your videos automatically using integrated speech recognition. From a report: At the start of the week, the FFmpeg project released its eighth major version. It's codenamed "Huffman" after the Huffman code algorithm, which was invented in 1952, making it one of the oldest lossless compression algorithms.

[...] The changelog lists 30 significant changes, of which the top new feature is integrating Whisper. This means whisper.cpp, which is Georgi Gerganov's entirely local and offline version of OpenAI's Whisper automatic speech recognition model. The bottom line is that FFmpeg can now automatically subtitle videos for you.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Over half of the British public are worried about the impact of AI on their jobs, according to employment unions, which want the UK government to adopt a "worker first" strategy rather than simply allowing corporations to ditch employees for algorithms. The Trades Union Congress (TUC), a federation of trade unions in England and Wales, says it found that people are concerned about the way AI is being adopted by businesses and want a say in how the technology is used at their workplace and the wider economy.

It warns that without such a "worker-first plan," use of "intelligent" algorithms could lead to even greater social inequality in the country, plus the kind of civil unrest that goes along with that. The TUC says it wants conditions attached to the tens of billions in public money being spent on AI research and development to ensure that workers are supported and retrained rather than deskilled or replaced. It also wants guardrails in place so that workers are protected from "AI harms" at work, rules to ensure workers are involved in deciding how machine learning is used, and for the government to provide support for those who euphemistically "experience job transitions" as a result of AI disruption.

Apple has warned that "EU-style rules" proposed by the UK competition watchdog "are bad for users and bad for developers." From a report: It says EU laws -- which have sought to make it easier for smaller firms to compete with big tech -- have resulted in some Apple features and enhancements being delayed for European users. It argues the UK risks similar hold-ups if the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) pushes ahead with plans designed to open up markets the regulator says is too dominated by Apple and Google.

[...] The CMA wants UK app makers to be able to use and exchange data with Apple's mobile technology -- something called "interoperability." Without it, app makers cannot create the full range of innovative products and services, it argues. Apple claims under EU interoperability rules it has received over 100 requests -- some from big tech rivals -- demanding access to sensitive user data, including sensitive information Apple itself cannot access. It argues the rules are effectively allowing other firms to demand its data and intellectual property for free.

The Sixteen Thirty Fund, a liberal dark money organization, is paying Democratic influencers up to $8,000 monthly through its Chorus Creator Incubator Program, Wired reports. Contracts prohibit participants from disclosing their payments or identifying funders, the publication added. The program launched last month includes over 90 creators with a collective audience exceeding 40 million followers. Influencers must attend advocacy trainings and messaging check-ins while Chorus retains approval rights over political content made with program resources. The Sixteen Thirty Fund distributed over $400 million to left-leaning causes in 2020.

alternative_right shares a report from ScienceAlert: When's the last time you settled down with a good book, just because you enjoyed it? A new survey shows reading as a pastime is becoming dramatically less popular in the U.S., which correlates with an increased consumption of other digital media, like social media and streaming services. The survey was carried out by researchers from the University of Florida and the University of London, and charts a 40 percent decrease in daily reading for pleasure across the years 2003-2023, based on responses from 236,270 US adults.

"This is not just a small dip -- it's a sustained, steady decline of about 3 percent per year," says Jill Sonke, director for the Center for the Arts in Medicine at the University of Florida. "It's significant, and it's deeply concerning." The number of US people reading for pleasure every day peaked in 2004 at 28 percent, the researchers found, but by 2023 this was down to 16 percent. There was a silver lining though: those people who are still reading are reading for slightly longer on average.

Reading habits aren't changing across the board. The drops in reading for pleasure were higher in Black Americans, especially those with lower income, education levels, and who lived outside of cities. That speaks to problems beyond the rise of smartphones, tablets, and other screens, according to the researchers. Different life situations are leading to disparities in accessibility that don't help promote reading as a pastime. "Our digital culture is certainly part of the story," says Sonke. "But there are also structural issues -- limited access to reading materials, economic insecurity and a national decline in leisure time. If you're working multiple jobs or dealing with transportation barriers in a rural area, a trip to the library may just not be feasible." The findings have been published in the journal iScience.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from 404 Media: 4chan and Kiwi Farms sued the United Kingdom's Office of Communications (Ofcom) over its age verification law in U.S. federal court Wednesday, fulfilling a promise it announced on August 23. In the lawsuit, 4chan and Kiwi Farms claim that threats and fines they have received from Ofcom "constitute foreign judgments that would restrict speech under U.S. law." Both entities say in the lawsuit that they are wholly based in the U.S. and that they do not have any operations in the United Kingdom and are therefore not subject to local laws. Ofcom's attempts to fine and block 4chan and Kiwi Farms, and the lawsuit against Ofcom, highlight the messiness involved with trying to restrict access to specific websites or to force companies to comply with age verification laws.

The lawsuit calls Ofcom an "industry-funded global censorship bureau." "Ofcom's ambitions are to regulate Internet communications for the entire world, regardless of where these websites are based or whether they have any connection to the UK," the lawsuit states. "On its website, Ofcom states that 'over 100,000 online services are likely to be in scope of the Online Safety Act -- from the largest social media platforms to the smallest community forum.'" [...] Ofcom began investigating 4chan over alleged violations of the Online Safety Act in June. On August 13, it announced a provisional decision and stated that 4chan had "contravened its duties" and then began to charge the site a penalty of [roughly $26,000] a day. Kiwi Farms has also been threatened with fines, the lawsuit states. "American citizens do not surrender our constitutional rights just because Ofcom sends us an e-mail. In the face of these foreign demands, our clients have bravely chosen to assert their constitutional rights," said Preston Byrne, one of the lawyers representing 4chan and Kiwi Farms.

"We are aware of the lawsuit," an Ofcom spokesperson told 404 Media. "Under the Online Safety Act, any service that has links with the UK now has duties to protect UK users, no matter where in the world it is based. The Act does not, however, require them to protect users based anywhere else in the world."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Hill: Republicans on the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee opened a probe into alleged organized efforts to inject bias into Wikipedia entries and the organization's responses. Chair James Comer (R-Ky.) and Rep. Nancy Mace (R-S.C.), chair of the panel's subcommittee on cybersecurity, information technology, and government innovation, on Wednesday sent an information request on the matter to Maryana Iskander, chief executive officer of the Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit that hosts Wikipedia. The request, the lawmakers said in the letter (PDF), is part of an investigation into "foreign operations and individuals at academic institutions subsidized by U.S. taxpayer dollars to influence U.S. public opinion."

The panel is seeking documents and communications about Wikipedia volunteer editors who violated the platform's policies, as well as the Wikimedia Foundation's efforts to "thwart intentional, organized efforts to inject bias into important and sensitive topics." "Multiple studies and reports have highlighted efforts to manipulate information on the Wikipedia platform for propaganda aimed at Western audiences," Comer and Mace wrote in the letter. They referenced a report from the Anti-Defamation League about anti-Israel bias on Wikipedia that detailed a coordinated campaign to manipulate content related to the Israel-Palestine conflict and similar issues, as well as an Atlantic Council report on pro-Russia actors using Wikipedia to push pro-Kremlin and anti-Ukrainian messaging, which can influence how artificial intelligence chatbots are trained.

"[The Wikimedia] foundation, which hosts the Wikipedia platform, has acknowledged taking actions responding to misconduct by volunteer editors who effectively create Wikipedia's encyclopedic articles. The Committee recognizes that virtually all web-based information platforms must contend with bad actors and their efforts to manipulate. Our inquiry seeks information to help our examination of how Wikipedia responds to such threats and how frequently it creates accountability when intentional, egregious, or highly suspicious patterns of conduct on topics of sensitive public interest are brought to attention," Comer and Mace wrote. The lawmakers requested information about "the tools and methods Wikipedia utilizes to identify and stop malicious conduct online that injects bias and undermines neutral points of view on its platform," including documents and records about possible coordination of state actors in editing, the kind of accounts that have been subject to review, and and of the panel's analysis of data manipulation or bias. "We welcome the opportunity to respond to the Committee's questions and to discuss the importance of safeguarding the integrity of information on our platform," a Wikimedia Foundation spokesperson said.

Deforestation has killed more than half a million people in the tropics over the past two decades as a result of heat-related illness, a study has found. The Guardian: Land clearance is raising the temperature in the rainforests of the Amazon, Congo and south-east Asia because it reduces shade, diminishes rainfall and increases the risk of fire, the authors of the paper found. Deforestation is responsible for more than a third of the warming experienced by people living in the affected regions, which is on top of the effect of global climate disruption.

About 345 million people across the tropics suffered from this localised, deforestation-caused warming between 2001 and 2020. For 2.6 million of them, the additional heating added 3C to their heat exposure. In many cases, this was deadly. The researchers estimated that warming due to deforestation accounted for 28,330 annual deaths over that 20-year period.

South Korea has passed a bill banning the use of mobile phones and smart devices during class hours in schools -- becoming the latest country to restrict phone use among children and teens. From a report: The law, which comes into effect from the next school year in March 2026, is the result of a bi-partisan effort to curb smartphone addiction, as more research points to its harmful effects. Lawmakers, parents and teachers argue that smartphone use is affecting students' academic performance and takes away time they could have spent studying.

Wikipedia's volunteer editors have rejected founder Jimmy Wales' proposal to use ChatGPT for article review guidance after the AI tool produced error-filled feedback when Wales tested it on a draft submission. The ChatGPT response misidentified Wikipedia policies, suggested citing non-existent sources and recommended using press releases despite explicit policy prohibitions.

Editors argued automated systems producing incorrect advice would undermine Wikipedia's human-centered model. The conflict follows earlier tensions over the Wikimedia Foundation's AI experiments, including a paused AI summary feature and new policies targeting AI-generated content.

Canada's tech job market has collapsed from its pandemic-era boom, with postings down 19% from 2020 levels. Analysts say the decline was sharper than the overall job market and worsened after ChatGPT's debut in 2022 fueled AI-driven shifts in workforce demand. The Canadian Press reports: "The Canadian tech world remains stuck in a hiring freeze," said Brendon Bernard, Indeed's senior economist. "While both the tech job market and the overall job market have definitely cooled off from their 2022 peaks, the cool off has been much sharper in tech." He thinks the fall was likely caused by the market adjusting after a pandemic boom in hiring along with recent artificial intelligence advances that have reduced tech firms' interest in expanding their workforces.

"We went from this really hot job market with job postings through the roof to one where job postings really crashed, falling well below their pre-pandemic levels," Bernard said. However, he sees AI's recent boom as a "watershed moment." While much of the decline in tech job postings has been in software engineer roles, Indeed found hiring for AI-related jobs was still up compared to early 2020. In fact, machine learning engineers and roles that support AI infrastructure, such as data engineers and data centre technicians, were among the job titles with postings still above early-2020 levels.

At the same time, Indeed saw postings for senior and manager-level tech jobs drop sharply from their 2022 peak, but as of early 2025, they were still up five per cent from their pre-pandemic levels. Meanwhile, basic and junior tech titles were down 25 per cent. When it compared Canada's overall decline in tech job postings, Indeed found the country's decrease from pre-pandemic levels was somewhat milder than the retrenchment it has observed in the U.S., U.K., France and Germany. The U.S. fall amounted to 34 per cent, while in the U.K. it was 41 per cent. France saw a 38 per cent drop and Germany experienced a 29 per cent decrease. "All this just highlights is that this tech hiring freeze is a global tech hiring freeze," Bernard said.

Air pollution from oil and gas causes more than 90,000 premature deaths and sickens hundreds of thousands of people across the US each year, a new study shows, with disproportionately high impacts on communities of color. From a report: More than 10,000 annual pre-term births are attributable to fine particulate matter from oil and gas, the authors found, also linking 216,000 annual childhood-onset asthma cases to the sector's nitrogen dioxide emissions and 1,610 annual lifetime cancer cases to its hazardous air pollutants. The highest number of impacts are seen in California, Texas, New York, Pennsylvania and New Jersey, while the per-capita incidences are highest in New Jersey, Washington DC, New York, California and Maryland.

Google has integrated AI-powered language learning capabilities into its Translate app through a beta feature that generates customized lessons using its Gemini AI models. The Practice button allows English speakers to learn Spanish and French while Spanish, French, and Portuguese speakers can practice English.

Users select their skill level and learning goals to receive tailored scenarios ranging from professional conversations to family interactions. The company also launched live translation for real-time conversations across 70 languages in the US, India, and Mexico. The feature creates AI-generated transcriptions and audio translations but does not replicate users' voices, the company told The Verge.

The Document Foundation, which operates the popular open source productivity suite LibreOffice, is positioning the suite's newest release, v25.8, as a strategic asset for digital sovereignty, targeting governments and enterprises seeking independence from foreign software vendors and cloud infrastructure.

The Document Foundation released the update last week with zero telemetry architecture, full offline capability, and OpenPGP encryption for documents, directly addressing national security concerns about extraterritorial surveillance and software backdoors. The suite requires no internet access for any features and maintains complete transparency through open source code that governments can audit. Government bodies in Germany, Denmark, and France, alongside national ministries in Italy and Brazil, have deployed LibreOffice to meet GDPR compliance, national procurement laws, and IT localization mandates while eliminating unpredictable licensing costs from proprietary vendors.

"It's time to own your documents, own your infrastructure, and own your future," the foundation wrote in a blog post.