The Dallas Business Journal reported Monday that the U.S. multinational paper goods company Kimberly-Clark announced "that its researchers identified and advanced patented technology transforming fibers from hesperaloe, a low-water-use plant with pointy leaves that thrives in the southwest region of the country, into material for paper towels." Discovering an alternative to conventional wood fiber "could reshape how the company, and the industry at large, manufactures products," according to article.

And the move comes "amid growing pressure on manufacturers regarding their reliance on wood fibre from freshly felled trees," reports The Telegraph. "Campaigners claim that more than one million trees are cut down every day..." Unlike trees, hesperaloe can be grown on dry, low-quality farmland unsuitable for most food crops and harvested much more quickly. Kimberly-Clark said it had tested more than 70 potential materials before settling on hesperaloe. Earlier candidates included wheat straw, corn waste, seaweed, algae and chicken feathers. The US consumer goods giant will now develop the fibre at a pilot factory in Yuma, Arizona, working with local growers to determine whether the crop can be cultivated for commercial use in its tissue products. "This represents an exciting moonshot for Kimberly-Clark and the culmination of more than two decades of materials and plant science expertise," said Craig Slavtcheff, who is helping develop the new toilet paper.

However, the company said products made from hesperaloe remained years away from supermarket shelves, with further research needed before the fibre could be produced at the scale required for global manufacturing. The US-based company has invested about $250m (£190m) in the project and filed more than 30 patents linked to the technology.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the BBC: German energy company RWE has said it will abandon its offshore wind projects in the U.S. after reaching a $1.2 billion payout deal with President Donald Trump's Department of the Interior (DoI). RWE said that it will now reinvest the sum into conventional gas projects, including $900 million in a liquefied natural gas (LNG) export terminal project in Louisiana. "After careful consideration, it was determined there is no path forward to permit these projects in the US for the foreseeable future," the company said in a statement.

RWE said it has agreed to relinquish its leases off the California and Louisiana coasts as well as in the New York Bight. Overall, the German firm plans to invest approximately $19.6 billion in the U.S. over the next six years "to grow its generation capacity." Interior Secretary Doug Burgum said in a statement posted on X that Americans deserve an energy system built on common sense and not one dependent on "costly subsidies." "We welcome RWE's agreement and voluntary investment in projects that strengthen our nation's energy security," he added. Earlier this year, the DOL reached a deal with TotalEnergies putting an end to the French company's offshore wind projects in the U.S. "Instead, the firm agreed to reroute investment to build a LNG plant in Texas and to develop 'upstream conventional oil' in the Gulf of Mexico," reports the BBC.

Another similar deal was signed with Charlotte-based Duke Energy last month to terminate the company's offshore wind lease in the Carolina Long Bay area.

Longtime Slashdot reader schwit1 shares an opinion piece from the Washington Post, written by Virginia Governor Abigail Spanberger: NextEra Energy, a Florida-based utility company, has filed paperwork to buy Dominion Energy for about $67 billion, creating the largest regulated electric utility in the world. Virginia's State Corporation Commission is the regulatory body tasked with reviewing the application, and the SCC's commissioners will ultimately decide whether to approve, deny or impose new conditions on any potential merger.

As a Virginian, I am deeply skeptical about whether selling our primary state-regulated utility to an out-of-state company is good for the commonwealth. I have serious questions about what this deal would mean for us. And as governor, I intend to get answers and be a voice for Virginians in the process. That is why I will be taking the legal step of "intervening" in this proposed merger, which means that as governor, I will formally request to be a party to the case.

I know this action is unprecedented by a Virginia governor -- but so, too, is the size of this proposed merger and its potential impact on the commonwealth. Virginians deserve to know that their leaders are laser-focused on ensuring that their needs are part of the SCC review. "If two large corporations stand to benefit financially from this merger, so, too, should the Virginians who pay the bills," said Spanberger. "That is why any potential deal must deliver a more affordable energy bill with sustained, long-term energy cost savings."

By formally intervening in the merger review, Spanberger's administration would gain legal standing to participate directly in the case, request detailed information, raise concerns, and advocate for conditions that benefit people in the state. She says the goal is to push for lower long-term energy costs, protect utility jobs, and ensure any new owner continues investing in reliable, affordable and cleaner power.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from NPR: Billions of dollars are traded every week on the lightly regulated prediction market sites, where users bet on everything from movie reviews to elections to conflicts in the Middle East. Clinical trials are just the latest area where the industry's rapid growth is raising ethical questions. Kalshi claims such bets will provide a new source of information about which drugs will get approved, and what clinical trials will show promising results, which the company says can help investors decide what new drugs to fund.

"If you want to ban profiting from the failure of clinical trials, you would start with the stock market, where the financial incentive for this type of profit is orders of magnitude larger," said Kalshi spokesman Jack Such, pointing to stock market short sellers who have profited from clinical trial failures. "While Kalshi and the stock market are the same in this regard, they do differ in one important way: the stock market doesn't give any valuable information to researchers," Such said.

Drug trial researchers, though, are far from convinced. David Tsai, who runs clinical trials at a biotech company in the San Francisco Bay Area, started an online petition pushing for such betting to be banned, making the case that betting on drug trials "threatens the very foundation of trust and integrity in biotechnology." Tsai is concerned that the prospect of betting provides those involved with a clinical trial a reason to tamper with the results for a prediction market payout. "If we were running a trial for an oncology drug that requires an infusion, a pharmacist who had placed a bet saying that it's gonna work well, or doesn't work well, could obviously adjust the infusion rate, could adjust the source temperature of the drug," he said. "They could change any number of variables that could obviously have a direct impact [on] how the trial and the data and the patient safety would come out."

Another skeptic is Nicholas Zaorsky, a professor of radiation oncology at the Mayo Clinic in Jacksonville, Fla., who has helped run clinical trials and agrees that prediction markets can interfere with the advancement of life-saving drugs. "Prediction markets can be valuable in some settings because they aggregate information, but clinical trials are fundamentally different: investigators, coordinators, and sometimes even participants can directly influence aspects of the outcomes being wagered on," Zaorsky said. "That creates financial incentives that risk undermining trial integrity." Bettors should not be rooting for an experimental medicine to fail just to earn a buck, says Joshua Pederson, the father of a 12-year-old cancer patient enrolled in a clinical trial. "It's a dark idea," he said. "It's quite ghastly."

Kalshi, for its part, argues that its prediction markets could help patients track promising medical breakthroughs and clinical trials, enlisting experts including 23andMe founder Anne Wojcicki to make the case.

"Most patients don't know about the choices available in clinical trials or which programs are most promising. The opportunity to have an open, transparent dataset about trial probabilities is extremely promising and empowering for people," a white paper sponsored by Kalshi stated.

A new study argues that life may have emerged twice on Earth. "Two of the main lineages of life -- bacteria and archaea -- may have independently figured out the secrets of metabolism that upgraded them from non-living to living," reports ScienceAlert, citing a new study that "focused on the most rudimentary set of chemical reactions thought to enable this transformation." From the report: "The surprise is that the enzymes that catalyze those reactions are not conserved across the evolutionary divide that separates bacteria and archaea," says William Martin, a biologist at Heinrich Heine University Dusseldorf in Germany.

"The new data leave only one conclusion. The bacterial and archaeal lineages made the transition to the free-living state independently. Only free-living cells are alive. "Let's call it by name: we are looking at one origin of the genetic code, but two origins of life." That's a huge claim to make, especially when defining what life even is can be surprisingly tricky. The findings have been published in the journal Science Advances.

A New Mexico court ordered (PDF) Meta to create a $567 million fund to address harms linked to youth mental health and child sexual exploitation after finding its platforms constituted a public nuisance. "In sum, the Court finds that New Mexico is in the midst of a teen mental health crisis affecting public health and public safety in and throughout the state, and that Meta's platforms are a significant contributing cause to the crisis," wrote Chief Judge Bryan Biedscheid in the decision. The fund comes on top of $375 million in civil penalties, though the judge declined to mandate changes to features such as infinite scroll and autoplay, citing potential First Amendment and Section 230 concerns. Tech Policy Press reports: The decision follows the second phase of in the State of New Mexico v. Meta Platforms Inc., which consisted of a bench trial. Its central question was whether Meta's platforms amounted to a public nuisance in New Mexico, and, if the court found that they did, what remedy would be needed to address it. In March, a Santa Fe jury found Meta liable for violations of New Mexico's Unfair Practices Act, awarding $375 million in civil penalties. The jury deliberated less than a day following that nearly seven-week trial. The $567 million abatement fund would be in addition to the civil penalties, according to today's decision.

New Mexico Attorney General Raul Torrez sued Meta in December 2023, alleging the company made false public statements about the safety of its platforms while knowing internally that its products facilitated child sexual exploitation. The court denied Meta's Section 230 defense in May 2024. In today's decision, the court again asserted that "Section 230 does not preclude the State's public nuisance claim," but the decision attempted to thread the needle on issues that the court determined might have run "afoul" of the statute, or of the First Amendment, such as issuing remedies around any particular product feature.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: The Federal Communications Commission voted 2-1 today to eliminate the National Television Ownership Rule, claiming authority to repeal a limit that was set by Congress over 20 years ago. The rule prohibits any single broadcast station owner from reaching more than 39 percent of all TV households in the US. Under Chairman Brendan Carr, the FCC is replacing the rule with a "case-by-case review" of each proposed merger.

"This will empower the FCC to approve deals that promote the public interest while allowing the agency to reject any deals that do not meet that standard," Carr's office said in a press release today. Without the 39 percent rule, broadcasters will be better able to compete against streaming companies that don't face similar limits, Carr's office said.

The change, if not stopped by courts, will make it easier for Carr to allow broadcast mergers that result in more favorable news coverage for President Trump. Carr has consistently threatened to revoke licenses from broadcasters who have drawn Trump's ire, including by ordering an early license review of all ABC-owned stations. Carr said local broadcast TV stations are becoming "undifferentiated passthroughs of national programming produced in Hollywood and New York," and he justified repealing the ownership rule by arguing it will help the stations invest in local news. "It's worth noting that Republicans with deep firsthand knowledge of this issue also agree the commission cannot do what it is attempting today," said Democratic FCC Commissioner Anna Gomez, who voted against the decision today. "Former FCC Commissioner Mike O'Rielly has been unequivocal that the FCC lacks authority to change the cap. Former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, who negotiated the 39 percent compromise, has stressed that Congress intentionally wrote the cap into law to prevent FCC revision. And Senate Commerce Chair Ted Cruz has said he is 'skeptical a change can be made absent an act of Congress.' Their consensus reinforces a simple point: Congress set the cap, and only Congress can change it."

Gomez, in addition to arguing that "Congress deliberately enshrined the cap in statute and removed it from the Commission's review process," said removing the cap will hurt local broadcasters. "Digital giants compete for their most valuable programming and advertising, while consolidation pressures at the national level threaten the local reporting and public-safety functions on which communities rely," Gomez said. "But eliminating the cap does not free local broadcasters from that strain. It just changes who is doing the squeezing. A handful of station-group giants does not represent the wishes of local broadcasters. They are large national companies that own local stations and increasingly dictate what airs on them without much local input. Trading a squeeze from Big Tech for a squeeze from Big Media does nothing to protect the communities this cap was designed to serve."

The FDA has approved the first mRNA flu vaccine in the United States after a clinical trial found it was about 27% more effective than a standard flu shot. Manufactured by Moderna and marketed as mFlusiva, the vaccine is expected to be available this fall for adults ages 50 to 64 and those 65 and older, though approval for the older group is conditional on Moderna conducting an additional clinical trial, NBC News reports. From the report: Many scientists and public health experts have touted the idea of an mRNA-based flu vaccine, which uses the same messenger RNA platform as the Covid vaccines from Moderna and Pfizer. That's because mRNA vaccines can be manufactured much faster than traditional vaccines, allowing scientists to better match circulating influenza strains. Moderna said it takes two to three months from picking the strain to rolling out its flu shot, compared with about six months for traditional flu shots.

Cloudflare has open-sourced Cloudflare OS, an Apache 2.0-licensed platform that lets organizations build AI agents, apps, and workflows using curated company data and tools within isolated, governed environments. Despite the name, it is not a traditional operating system but a framework for securely managing organizational AI workloads. Phoronix reports: Cloudflare OS is already used internally at Cloudflare and is described in today's announcement as: "Cloudflare OS starts with a conversation in your browser, like many other AI tools. What makes it different is that each conversation is grounded in the context and skills your organization has curated. Give your workspace a goal, and it can draw on that knowledge and work with the tools and data your organization already uses to achieve it.

Cloudflare OS combines three parts:
- An agent workspace grounded in context and skills your company curates, with an isolated runtime where agents can write and run code.
- A new security and governance framework for safe access to internal data and services.
- A platform for personal, modifiable apps that people can build, share, and continue changing.

What begins as a conversation can become a doc, an app, or a workflow that continues doing the work." You can learn more at os.cloudflare.app.

Trump Media has officially launched its $100,000-per-month data feed giving trading firms machine-readable access to Truth Social posts milliseconds before the public. According to Fortune, five Wall Street firms have already signed up for the service, which "would generate about $500,000 in monthly revenue, or $6 million annually."

Critics argue the service could let President Trump, who owns about 41% of the company, profit from early access to market-moving presidential communications. "I'll be blunt," Gian Luca Clementi, an economics professor at NYU Stern School of Business, told Fortune. "This is insider trading by definition."

"He's going to monetize the role of the office of the president of the United States," he said. "The undisputable fact is that somebody is going to earn some more money than before, and that's the president of the United States." From the report: Trump's media venture has struggled to build a profitable social media business despite its lofty valuation. Truth Social has reported significant operating losses since going public. According to the company's earnings report for Q1 2026, Trump Media & Technology Group netted a roughly $405 million loss and raised less than $900,000 in sales.

Not everyone agrees the arrangement meets the legal bar for insider trading. Shannon Devine, a spokeswoman for Trump Media & Technology Group, has pushed back on the characterization, telling Quartz that Truth API "offers customers the fastest way to ingest publicly available Truth Social data" and that critics "must have invented a new theory of 'insider trading' based on publicly available information."

Classic insider trading law hinges on trading on secret, material information in breach of a fiduciary duty, and Truth Social posts are, by design, meant to become public within moments -- raising real doctrinal uncertainty about whether faster access alone qualifies. But other legal experts argue the greater risk lies ahead. Richard Painter, former White House chief ethics counsel, has argued that the arrangement could violate federal law once Trump posts genuinely market-moving news -- on tariffs, military action, or other policy decisions -- before it's public, with Truth Social effectively acting as a paid "tipper" on the president's behalf. Sen. Alex Padilla (D-Calif.) said he plans to introduced legislation Tuesday to ban the president from selling expedited access to his statements.

Longtime Slashdot reader schwit1 shares a report from Reuters: The Federal Communications Commission, which oversees the U.S. telecom industry, is working on the measure to bar imports of new Chinese optical transceivers, which allow data to travel over fiber-optic cables at the speed of light within data centers. Officials hope to publish it this year, when it would take effect. The move, not previously reported, aims to prevent Chinese firms from stealing data, installing malware or disrupting service at U.S. data centers, which house the chips to train and run AI models.

The FCC could still modify or shelve the restriction, the sources stressed, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive matters. [...] A U.S. ban on new models of Chinese data center devices would likely hit China's Zhongji Innolight, one of the biggest global sellers of transceivers, which was added to the Pentagon's list of alleged Chinese military-backed companies in June. The list can be a harbinger of tougher action. A ban could also raise costs for American cloud firms such as Amazon Web Services, as it may force them to transition to other producers such as U.S.-based Coherent and Lumentum.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Apple has launched a new legal challenge against a UK government demand to access its customers' highly encrypted data, a year after the Home Office agreed to abandon its previous request. The US tech company launched the legal complaint last month at the Investigatory Powers Tribunal (IPT), an independent court that has the power to investigate claims that the UK intelligence services have acted unlawfully. The UK government had made a second request to Apple to grant it a "back door" to encrypted iCloud data belonging to British users, according to an order issued by the court.

Britain backed down on its original demand for access to data from UK and US customers last year, after a heated transatlantic tussle over encryption between London and Washington. UK authorities subsequently issued a new "technical capability notice" (TCN) to Apple that did not apply to American users. Apple is seeking to challenge the British government's powers to issue TCNs under the UK Investigatory Powers Act, according to the details of the new legal case first reported by the Financial Times. [...] The original TCN issued last year asked Apple for the right to see users' encrypted data protected by its advanced data protection (ADP) program in the event of a national security risk.

Apple said the removal of the tool -- which not even it can access -- would make users more vulnerable to data breaches from bad actors and other threats to customer privacy. Creating a "back door" would also mean all data was accessible by Apple, which it could be forced to share with law enforcement possessing a warrant. As a result, Apple withdrew UK customers' access to its ADP program in January 2025. The Home Office has maintained that the Investigatory Powers Act, under which such orders are issued, contains robust safeguards and is used only when absolutely necessary.

Longtime Slashdot reader schwit1 shares a report from Behind the Black: In a new bid to get the Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT) to move from Hawaii, which has blocked its construction for more than a decade, the Spanish government has put together a $1.14 billion package that would not only pay for construction on the Canary Islands, but would finance an additional half century of operations. Tech Times provides some additional details: The package is conditional on the TMT International Observatory formally choosing La Palma as its construction site. The financing architecture has three pillars and two additional contingent instruments. The first pillar is 400 million euros (approximately $456 million USD) from Spain's Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities, routed through the Centre for Technological Development and Innovation (CDTI). This figure was first pledged a year ago in July 2025 as Spain's initial bid.

The second pillar is a 300 million-euro (approximately $342 million USD) loan from the EIB [European Investment Bank] itself -- subject to satisfactory completion of the bank's technical, financial, and legal due diligence and approval by its governing bodies.

The third is a potential 300 million-euro (approximately $342 million USD) participation from the Instituto de Credito Oficial (ICO), Spain's state development finance institution, evaluated under equivalent conditions to the EIB loan but subject to its own separate analysis. Spain's export credit agency, Cesce, may also provide coverage instruments, and the EIB has left open the possibility of expanding its support through intermediated financing mechanisms or guarantees.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Earlier this summer, nearly 160,000 applicants took the entrance exam for UNAM, Mexico's largest university. For the first time, they did it completely remotely, using a "lockdown" browser and AI-powered webcam proctoring software, over several weeks from late May through early June. It was a disaster. When exam results came in, they bore little resemblance to past results, especially at the top. Between 2021 and 2025, 3.5 percent of test takers scored 100 or more on the 120-question UNAM test. This year, 16.3 percent did so. The story was even worse at the highest of the high end. Between 2021 and 2025, 0.9 percent of test takers scored 110 or more; this year, 5.5 percent did so.

The surge in top scores led to accusations of widespread cheating, and UNAM appointed a commission of experts to investigate the situation. The group was given the unwieldy name "la Comision Tecnica de Personas Expertas para la Revision del Proceso de Seleccion de Ingreso a Licenciatura para el Circlo Escolar 2026-2027/1," and it has just submitted its recommendations. The commission believes that the best path forward, given all the concerns, is to administer a "control exam" -- that is, applicants will have to sit for another test, and they will do so in person.

This control exam will apply not only to those who secured a spot at UNAM based on this year's test but also to everyone who would have been admitted based on minimum successful scores in their program of study since 2021. About 58,000 people could be affected, and places at UNAM will now depend on the results of the new test. (Details on the control exam should appear soon; classes are currently scheduled to begin on August 10, so everything will have to move quickly unless the school decides to delay classes.) According to Gaceta UNAM, the school's official news publication, the university rector has apologized to honest applicants, since they will now have to prepare for and take the test again despite doing nothing wrong. Still, the control exam is "necessary to give certainty and guarantee equity in access," the rector added.

South Korea recorded its highest temperature since modern observations began in 1904, with the city of Yangsan reaching 42.5C as temperatures exceeded 40C for a fifth consecutive day. Authorities warned residents to "immediately stop all outdoor activities." The Guardian reports: More than 20 localities in South Korea were under emergency heatwave alerts on Sunday -- a new warning category introduced this year to better address rising temperatures. An emergency alert is issued when areas experiencing a heatwave are forecast to hit perceived temperatures of 38C or an actual temperature of 39C for the day. Issuing a heat warning, the weather agency urged people to "immediately stop all outdoor activities," adding that "indoor spaces without air conditioning are dangerous."

"Move immediately to a cool place, such as a designated cooling centre or a shaded area, and stay hydrated while resting," it advised. Fearing for those people most vulnerable to heat, the prime minister, Han Seong-sook, ordered local officials to strengthen safety checks on residents and to ensure a stable power and water supply was maintained. [...] Korea Meteorological Administration (KMA) data show the average annual number of heatwave days in the country has more than doubled to 19 in the past five years.