CNN reports on a "sudden surge of claimed sightings" of "unidentified figures averaging 8 feet tall in wooded areas" along Ohio's Mahoning River. "And it stopped just as quickly as it started," says Jeremiah Byron, host of the Bigfoot Society Podcast, which collected and mapped the reports .... Byron doesn't take every report at face value, making sure he talks to people directly before publicizing their claims. Once word got out about the reports in Ohio, so did the obvious fakes. "I started to get a lot of AI-generated reports in my email. It got up to the point where I was probably getting about 1,000 emails a day," he says. But when Byron spoke by phone with people who made the initial reports, they convinced him they weren't making anything up. "It was obvious they weren't just wanting to get their name out there," says Byron. "They were just freaked out by what they experienced, and they didn't want anything else to do with it."

[...] Local law enforcement in Ohio also seem to be enjoying the publicity. Portage County Sheriff Bruce D. Zuchowski made a series of gag posts purporting to show the arrest of Bigfoot and his detention by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, only for the creature to escape from custody at the Canadian border...

Despite the levity, the sheriff's office really did get some calls from concerned residents, Zuchowski says. "Ten individual people were like, 'Yeah I was walking my dog at 4 a.m. and I saw this hairy figure and I smelled this musty odor and there was this big thing and all of a sudden it ran,'" the sheriff told CNN affiliate WOIO in March.

A chain of 30 U.S. newspapers including the Sacramento Bee, the Miami Herald and the Idaho Statesman "has started to use a new AI tool that can summarize traditional articles and spit out different versions for different audiences," reports the New York Times.

And the chain's reporters "are not happy about it." Journalists in many of the company's newsrooms are now withholding their bylines from articles created by the new tool, meaning that those articles will run with a generic credit rather than a reporter's name, as is customary. They are also labeled AI-assisted. "We don't want to put our bylines on stories we did not actually write even if they're based on our work," said Ariane Lange, an investigative reporter at the Sacramento Bee and the vice chair of the Sacramento Bee News Guild. "That in itself feels like a lie."

The reporters' byline strike is one of the sharpest conflicts yet between journalists and their companies over the use of AI. Related debates are playing out in newsrooms across the country, as publishers experiment with new AI tools to streamline work that used to take hours, and some even use it to write full articles... [E]xecutives have promoted the tool internally as a way to increase the number of articles published and ultimately gain new subscribers... [Eric Nelson, the vice president of local news] said using reporters' bylines on the AI-generated articles was a way to show "authority" on Google so the search engine would rank the articles higher in the results. He also said the company was experimenting with feeding in reporters' notes to create articles. "Journalists who embrace and experiment with this tool are going to win," Nelson said in the meeting. "Journalists who are defiant will fall behind"....

McClatchy's public AI policy states that the company uses AI tools to summarize articles to "help readers quickly understand the main points of a single story or catch up on multiple stories about a larger topic," and that editors review the output before publication.

America's school districts "spent billions on technology during the pandemic," reports the Washington Post. "But now some states are limiting in-school screen time because of concerns about its impact on children." Nationwide [U.S.] schools invested at least $15 billion and possibly as much as $35 billion from federal pandemic relief funds on laptops, learning software and other technology between 2020 and 2024, according to an estimate by the Edunomics Lab, an education think tank. By last school year, 88% of public schools reported in a federal survey they had given every child a laptop, tablet or similar device.

Now, some states and school districts are walking back their technology use following pressure from parents who claim too much in-school screen time has zapped children's attention spans and left them worse off academically. At least a dozen states introduced or adopted policies this year that attempt to regulate screen time in schools — from prescribing limits to allowing families to opt out of virtual instruction... In Missouri, a bill would require every school district in that state to come up with a screen time policy is making its way through the state legislature. "Ed tech is just big tech in a sweater vest," said Missouri state Rep. Tricia Byrnes (R), who introduced the legislation and blames what she described as the overuse of technology for middling test scores...

Complicating the issue is research that shows students do not see any academic gains when provided with laptops. A meta-analysis of studies on reading comprehension suggests paper-based texts are better than digital-based reading... A body of research has established that excessive or unstructured screen time can have detrimental effects on children, including harming language development, weakening social skills and triggering anxiety and depression. But the effects of school-issued devices and in-school usage on children's development are less understood, said Tiffany Munzer, a developmental behavioral pediatrician and digital media researcher at the University of Michigan. Some studies report that high-quality digital tools can support students' learning goals, Munzer said. But "a lot of the apps that are marketed as educational ... are not actually educational and contain a lot of commercialized content."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Guardian: Walking into Mexico City's sprawling central Zocalo is a dizzying experience. At one end of the plaza, the capital's cathedral, with its soaring spires, slumps in one direction. An attached church, known as the Metropolitan Sanctuary, tilts in the other. The nearby National Palace also seems off-kilter. The teetering of many of the capital's historic buildings is the most visible sign of a phenomenon that has been ongoing for more than a century: Mexico City is sinking at an alarming rate. Now, the metropolis's descent is being tracked in real time thanks to one of the most powerful radar systems ever launched into space. Known as Nisar, the satellite can detect minute changes in Earth's surface, even through thick vegetation or cloud cover. "Nisar takes radar imaging observations of Earth to the next level," said Marin Govorcin, a scientist at Nasa's jet propulsion laboratory. "Nisar will see any change big or small that happens on Earth from week to week. No other imaging mission can claim this."

Though not the first time that Mexico City's sinking has been observed from space, the Nisar mission has provided a greater sense of how far the sinking spreads and how it changes across different types of land than any other space-based sensor. It has also been able to penetrate areas on the outskirts of the city that were previously challenging to study because of the complex terrain. The implications of the imagery extend far beyond the Mexican capital. "This study of Mexico City speaks to the realm of possibilities that will open up thanks to the Nisar system," said Dario Solano-Rojas, an engineer at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (Unam). "And not just for sinking cities but also for studying volcanoes, for studying the deformation associated with earthquakes, for studying landslides." According to Nasa, the technology is also capable of monitoring the climate crisis, glacier sliding, agricultural productivity, soil moisture, forestry, coastal flooding and more. The Nisar system found that some parts of the city are dropping by more than 2cm a month. "First documented in 1925, the city's sinking is a result of centuries of exploitation of the groundwater," the report says. "Because Mexico City and its surrounds were built on an ancient lake bed, the soil beneath the city is extremely soft. When water is pumped out of the aquifer below, this clay-like earth compacts, resulting in a city that is quietly sinking."

The crisis is also self-reinforcing: as the city sinks, aging pipes crack and leak, causing Mexico City to lose an estimated 40% of its water, even as drought and climate change make supplies more fragile.

Longtime Slashdot reader cellocgw writes: Hiding inside another layoff report, Fidelity is reorganizing: "The changes are aimed at moving the teams away from an 'agile' makeup -- comprising smaller, siloed squads -- and toward larger teams built to move faster on projects." OMG, as they say: "Sudden outbreak of common sense." According to the Boston Globe, Fidelity is cutting about 1,000 jobs even as it plans to hire roughly 5,300 new workers, many of them early-career engineers. Half of the 3,300 new workers hired this year "will be in tech or product-related roles," the report says, noting that "about 2,000 of those jobs are currently open, and 400 of them are in tech/product-delivery."

"The company also plans to add almost 2,000 new early-career workers, with the goal of making the tech and product-delivery teams more hands-on. In all, that means roughly 5,300 new jobs in the pipeline for Fidelity." The company says AI isn't driving the shift; as cellocgw noted, it's about moving toward larger teams that Fidelity says can move faster on priority projects.

The financial services firm also reported a strong 2025 under CEO Abigail Johnson, with managed assets rising 19% from 2024 to $7.1 trillion and revenue climbing 15% to $37.7 billion. "Throughout the company's history, our investments in technology have fueled our growth and customer service capabilities," Johnson wrote in a letter (PDF) included in the company's annual report. "We will continue to prioritize technology initiatives that help us advance digital capabilities, simplify our technology ecosystem, and protect the firm and our customers."

Longtime Slashdot reader Qbertino writes: The Fehrmarnbelt tunnel is a European construction megaproject building a tunnel between Denmark and Germany, crossing the Fehmarnbelt in the Baltic sea. The first segment of the tunnel has now successfully been placed in its designated spot. This is a yet-unseen, next-level engineering feat achieved by the Danish Sund & Baelt construction company. It took 14 hours and used a massive pontoon ship built specifically for this project.

The tunnel segments are 217 meters long, weigh more than 73,000 metric tons, and have to be placed within a tolerance of 3 mm. The tunnel will eventually consist of 89 of these segments, be 18 km long, and connect the Danish city of Rodby with the German island Fehmarn through five individual tunnel tubes: two for cars, two for trains, and one rescue and maintenance tunnel. Crossing time will be reduced from a 45-minute ferry crossing to seven minutes by train or 10 minutes by car, and cut the travel time between the German city of Hamburg and the Danish capital, Copenhagen, down to 2.5 hours. The project's planned completion is set for the year 2029. German news Tagesschau has some details and a neat animation, while further details are available from the German tech news site Heise.

Wired describes the recent Canvas breach as an unusually disruptive ransomware-style extortion incident because one attack on Instructure's learning platform temporarily paralyzed thousands of schools during finals and end-of-year assignments. The hackers using the "ShinyHunters" name claim more than 8,800 schools were affected, while Instructure says exposed data included names, email addresses, student ID numbers, and platform messages. From the report: Higher education has long been a target of ransomware gangs and data extortion attacks. But never before, perhaps, has a cyberattack against a single software platform so thoroughly disrupted the daily operations of thousands of schools across the United States. The widely used digital learning platform Canvas was put into "maintenance mode" on Thursday after its maker, the education tech giant Instructure, suffered a data breach and faced an extortion attempt by attackers using the recognizable moniker "ShinyHunters." Though the hackers have been advertising the breach and attempting to extract a ransom payment from Instructure since May 1, the situation took on additional immediacy for regular people across the US and beyond on Thursday because the Canvas downtime caused chaos at schools, including those in the midst of finals and end-of-year assignments.

Universities like Harvard, Columbia, Rutgers, and Georgetown sent alerts to students about the situation in recent days; other institutions, including school districts in at least a dozen states, also appear to have been affected. In a list published by the hackers behind the attack on their ransom-focused dark web site, they claim the breach affected more than 8,800 schools. The exact scale and reach of the breach is currently unclear, though. And the fact that Canvas was down throughout Thursday afternoon and evening further complicated the picture. In a running incident update log that began on May 1, Steve Proud, Instructure's chief information security officer, said that the company had "recently experienced a cybersecurity incident perpetrated by a criminal threat actor." He added on May 2 that "the information involved" for "users at affected institutions" included names, email addresses, student ID numbers, and messages exchanged by users on the platform.

The situation was ultimately marked as "Resolved" on Wednesday, with Proud writing that "Canvas is fully operational, and we are not seeing any ongoing unauthorized activity." At midday on Thursday, though, the Instructure status page registered an "issue" where "some users are having difficulties logging into Student ePortfolios." Within a few hours, the company had added another status update: "Instructure has placed Canvas, Canvas Beta and Canvas Test in maintenance mode." Late Thursday evening, the company said that Canvas was available again "for most users."

TechCrunch reported on Thursday that the hackers launched a secondary wave of attacks, defacing some schools' Canvas portals by injecting an HTML file to display their own message on the schools' Canvas login pages. According to The Harvard Crimson, attackers modified the Harvard Canvas login page to show a message that included a list of schools that the hackers claim were impacted by the breach. The message from attackers "urged schools included on the affected list to consult with a cyber advisory firm and contact the group privately to negotiate a settlement before the end of the day on May 12 -- or else risk their data being leaked," The Crimson reported. "It is unclear what information tied to Harvard affiliates was included in the alleged breach."

The IMF is warning that advanced AI-powered cyberattacks pose a serious threat to global financial stability. "IMF analysis suggests that extreme cyber-incident losses could trigger funding strains, raise solvency concerns, and disrupt broader markets," the lender warned in a new report. The report urged greater international cooperation and emphasized resilience, since breaches are "inevitable" -- particularly for emerging economies with weaker defenses. Agence France-Presse reports: The study's authors highlighted the risks posed by the highly interconnected nature of the global financial system, with advanced AI models able to "dramatically reduce" the time and cost of exploiting vulnerabilities. [...] The IMF warned that emerging and developing countries, "which often have more severe resource constraints, may be disproportionately exposed to attackers targeting regions with weaker defenses."

The risks, the authors said, were systemic, cut across sectors and came with the threat of contagion, with the reliance on a small number of platforms and cloud providers likely to increase "the impact of any single exploited weakness." "Defenses will inevitably be breached, so resilience must also be a priority, specifically to limit how far incidents spread and ensure rapid recovery," the report said.

IMF chief Kristalina Georgieva warned last month that the global financial system was not ready for the cybersecurity threats posed by AI. "We are very keen to see more attention to the guardrails that are necessary to protect financial stability in a world of AI," she told CBS News, seeking global collaboration on the issue.

Companies including Philips and Pandora say they plan to seek tariff reimbursements after the Supreme Court ruled Trump's sweeping duties illegal, with the U.S. potentially facing up to $175 billion in refunds. Many firms say tariffs hurt earnings, but CFO survey results suggest companies applying for refunds are unlikely to pass savings back to consumers through lower prices. CNBC reports: Companies across Europe are flagging disruption from tariffs as a factor contributing to a skewed earnings picture. "We will ask for a rebate of tariffs in line with the government policies," Roy Jakobs, CEO of healthtech firm Philips, told CNBC's "Squawk Box Europe" on Wednesday morning. "We have been saying that of course we prefer a world without tariffs, without trade barriers, because we want to serve patients." Philips included the cost of tariffs within its full-year guidance and did not assume the impact from any potential refunds. Danish jeweler Pandora also announced its intention to apply for a rebate on Wednesday, with CEO Berta de Pablos-Barbier telling CNBC that tariffs were a "headwind" to earnings in the first quarter. "We have no news yet, so we cannot count on any of that refund," she told CNBC's "Squawk Box Europe." "Let's wait and see."

De Pablos-Barbier noted that the biggest factor impacting Pandora's profit this quarter is the cost of silver, which more than quadrupled in the last 18 months. She reiterated the firm's pivot from pure silver to platinum as a way of reducing costs. BMW, Daimler, Renishaw, Smith & Nephew and Continental all flagged tariffs as negatively impacting results in a slew of earnings updates on Wednesday, but the companies did not say whether they are applying for rebates. Businesses often bear some of the cost of tariffs, with some costs passing on to consumers through price hikes. Tariffs have had an overall inflationary impact on the economy, economists have told CNBC.

Despite the refund process potentially covering more than 330,000 importers on roughly 53 million entries, per court documents, consumers are unlikely to benefit, according to the results of the latest CNBC CFO Council quarterly survey. Twelve of the 25 chief financial officers interviewed said their company plans to apply for tariff refunds, however, none intend to lower prices in response.

Morgan Stanley is adding crypto trading to E*Trade, with a pilot now underway and a broader rollout planned for the platform's 8.6 million customers later this year. The bank is reportedly undercutting rivals with a 50-basis-point trading fee as it bets traditional finance and DeFi will converge.

"By contrast, Robinhood Markets' (HOOD) fees start at 95 bps, Coinbase Global's (COIN) begins at 60 bps, and Charles Schwab (SCHW) will charge 75 bps," notes Seeking Alpha. Morgan Stanley's head of wealth management, Jed Finn, told Bloomberg: "This is much bigger than trading crypto at a cheaper rate. In a way, the strategy is disintermediating the disintermediators."

jeditobe writes: Developers of ReactOS told Phoronix that the project has introduced a unified BootCD, replacing its previously separate installation media and LiveCD images. The new image combines the traditional text-mode installer with a LiveCD mode in a single medium. Within this unified BootCD, the updated LiveCD mode now includes an option to launch a first-stage GUI installer. The graphical interface is intended to make installation more approachable for new users compared to the long-standing text-based setup process.

In a separate development, the project has also merged a new ATA storage driver that has been in progress since early 2024. The plug-and-play aware storage stack supports SATA, PATA, ATAPI, AHCI, and even SCSI devices, potentially expanding the range of hardware on which ReactOS can successfully boot.

Following recent improvements to graphics driver support, the project continues to make incremental progress across core subsystems, though its long development timeline remains a point of discussion. Will these usability and hardware compatibility improvements be enough to broaden ReactOS adoption beyond its current niche?

Please note that all new features are not present in version 0.4.15 and are available for testing in the latest nightly test builds.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Silicon Valley investors such as Palantir co-founder Peter Thiel have bet hundreds of millions of dollars on deploying AI data centers powered by waves in the middle of the world's oceans -- a move that coincides with tech companies facing mounting challenges in building AI data center projects on land. The latest investment round of $140 million is intended to help the company Panthalassa complete a pilot manufacturing facility near Portland, Oregon, and speed up deployments of wave-riding "nodes" designed to generate electrical power, according to a May 4 press release. Instead of sending renewable energy to a land-based data center, the floating nodes would directly power onboard AI chips and transmit inference tokens representing the AI models' outputs to customers worldwide via satellite link.

Each node resembles a huge steel sphere bobbing on the water with a tube-like structure extending vertically down beneath the surface. The wave motions drive water upward through the tube into a pressurized reservoir, where it can be released to spin a turbine generator that produces renewable energy for the AI chips on board. Panthalassa claims the node's AI chips would also get cooled using the surrounding water, which could offer another advantage over traditional data centers. "Ocean-based compute might offer a massive cooling advantage because the ambient temperature is so low," Lee said. "Land-based data centers use a lot of electricity and fresh water for cooling."

The newest node prototype, called Ocean-3, is scheduled for testing in the northern Pacific Ocean later in 2026. The latest version reaches about 85 meters in length and would stand nearly as tall as London's Big Ben or New York City's Flatiron Building, according to the Financial Times. Panthalassa has already tested several earlier prototypes of the wave energy converter technology, including the Ocean-1 in 2021 and the Ocean-2 that underwent a three-week sea trial off the coast of Washington state in February 2024. The company's CEO and co-founder, Garth Sheldon-Coulson, said in a CBS interview that he hopes to eventually deploy thousands of the nodes.

Atmospheric carbon dioxide hit a new record in April, averaging about 431 parts per million at NOAA's Mauna Loa Observatory. That's up from under 320 ppm when the site began measurements in 1958. Scientific American reports: Greenhouse gases, such as carbon dioxide, are measured as a proportion of the total atmosphere. The numbers are presented as the number of molecules of a particular gas out of a million total molecules, or ppm. Climate scientist Zachary Labe of Climate Central, a nonprofit that researches climate change, says the new record is "depressing" but not unexpected. "It's just another sign that carbon dioxide continues to increase in our atmosphere as our planet continues to warm," he says. "For many climate scientists, this is just 'here it is again, another record in the wrong direction.'"

Labe explains that the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere tends to peak in April each year as decaying plants release greenhouse gases after winter. Some of that CO2 gets reabsorbed by plants as they grow during the warmer months. But NOAA's data show a worrying trend, with the average monthly amount of CO2 steadily increasing. [...] Although the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere has continued to rise, there was a reduction in U.S. emissions in 2023 and 2024. That trend, however, was reversed in 2025, at least partially because of the increased electricity demand from artificial intelligence data centers. Still, Labe says there are reasons for optimism as the use of renewable energy sources such as solar and wind expands.

A new Internet Matters survey suggests the UK's Online Safety Act age checks are easy for many children to bypass. Reported workarounds include fake birthdays, borrowed IDs, video game characters, and even drawing on a fake mustache. The Register reports: The group surveyed over 1,000 UK children and their parents, and while it did report some positive effects from changes made under the OSA, many children saw age verification as an easy-to-bypass hurdle rather than something that kept them genuinely safe. A full 46 percent of children even said that age checks were easy to bypass, while just 17 percent said that they were difficult to fool. The methods kids use to fool age gates vary, but most are pretty simple: There's the classic use of a video game character to fool video selfie systems, while in other instances, children reported just entering a fake birthday or using someone else's ID card when that was required.

The report even cites cases of children drawing a mustache on their faces to fool age detection filters. Seriously. While nearly half of UK kids say it's easy to bypass online age checks (and another 17 percent say it's neither hard nor easy), only 32 percent say they've actually bypassed them, according to Internet Matters. Like scoring some booze from "cool" parents, keeping age-gated content out of the hands of kids under the OSA is only as effective as parents let it be, and a quarter of them enable their kids' online delinquency. More specifically, Internet Matters found that a full 17 percent of parents admitted to actively helping their kids evade age checks, while an additional 9 percent simply turned a blind eye to it.

A new Nature Climate Change study suggests airborne microplastics -- especially darker and colored particles -- are likely contributing to atmospheric warming by absorbing more heat than they reflect. Researchers estimate the effect could be roughly one-sixth that of black carbon, though outside experts say the uncertainties remain large and more study is needed before drawing firm policy conclusions. "We can say with confidence that overall they are warming agents," said Drew Shindell, a Duke University earth science professor and co-author of the study. "To me, that's the big advance." The Washington Post reports: To undertake their study, a group led by researchers at Fudan University in China examined how different colors and sizes of microplastics interact with light across the spectrum, while combining that information with simulations of how particles get dispersed in the air across the planet. "Black, yellow, blue and red [particles] absorb sunlight much more strongly than the white particles," Yu Liu, a Fudan professor and study co-author, said in a call with reporters. In fact, the study details how black and colored particles showed "absorption levels nearly 75 times higher than pristine, non-pigmented plastics." The scientists also found that different sizes of particles absorb light at different intensities -- and that how they absorb light can change as they age.

The authors estimate that microplastics suspended in the atmosphere could be contributing to global warming at about one-sixth the amount of black carbon, also known as soot, a pollutant generated largely from burning fossil fuels. If the latest estimates are right, Shindell said, microplastics might not be an enormous source of atmospheric warming, compared with massive contributors such as cars and trucks, belching industrial plants or even burping cows. "But not a trivial one, either," he said.

By his calculation, the effect of one year's microplastic emissions globally is approximately equivalent to 200 coal-fired power plants running for that year. But that rough estimate does not factor the longer-term repercussions of microplastics decaying and persisting in the environment for decades to come. Whatever the exact impact, the topic deserves further study, the authors say, because current climate modeling does not account for any additional warming that these tiny particles might be causing.