Longtime Slashdot reader AmiMoJo shares a report from the BBC: China will let scientists from six countries, including the U.S., examine the rocks it collected from the Moon -- a scientific collaboration that comes as the two countries remain locked in a bitter trade war. Two NASA-funded U.S. institutions have been granted access to the lunar samples collected by the Chang'e-5 mission in 2020, the China National Space Administration (CNSA) said on Thursday. CNSA chief Shan Zhongde said that the samples were "a shared treasure for all humanity," local media reported.

Chinese researchers have not been able to access NASA's Moon samples because of restrictions imposed by U.S. lawmakers on the space agency's collaboration with China. Under the 2011 law, Nasa is banned from collaboration with China or any Chinese-owned companies unless it is specifically authorized by Congress. But John Logsdon, the former director of the Space Policy Institute at George Washington University, told BBC Newshour that the latest exchange of Moon rocks have "very little to do with politics." While there are controls on space technology, the examination of lunar samples had "nothing of military significance," he said. "It's international cooperation in science which is the norm."

DoorDash has sent a proposal to buy the British meal delivery company Deliveroo for $3.6 billion. "The current offer marks the first formal approach since the last report in the summer," notes Reuters. From the report: The deal is expected to face no regulatory hurdles, as it provides DoorDash access to 10 new markets where it currently has no presence, creating a highly complementary footprint - other competitors might encounter more antitrust issues, the source said. Last year, Reuters reported DoorDash had shown interest in a takeover of Deliveroo, but a source said talks ended after disagreements on valuation.

A deal between the two firms would help DoorDash solidify its footprint in Europe, after the U.S. meal delivery group's 2021 purchase of Finland-based rival Wolt Enterprises in an all-stock deal valued at about $8 billion.

Families earning $300,000 annually -- placing them among America's highest earners -- are increasingly finding themselves unable to afford elite college tuition without taking on substantial debt. Bloomberg's analysis of financial aid data from 50 selective colleges reveals households earning between $100,000 and $300,000 occupy a precarious middle ground: too affluent for meaningful aid but insufficiently wealthy to absorb annual costs approaching $100,000.

The squeeze begins around $150,000 income, where families typically contribute 20% ($30,000) annually toward tuition. At $270,000 income, expected contributions reach $61,000 per year. Most institutions eliminate financial aid entirely at approximately $400,000 income. Harvard, MIT, and the University of Pennsylvania recently expanded free tuition thresholds to $200,000, acknowledging this middle-class pressure. The changes take effect for 2025-26.

The Federal Reserve Board and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. have withdrawn several statements regarding banks' crypto-related activities in an effort to support innovation and clarify current policies. From a report: Two joint statements from 2023 on liquidity and other risks regarding banks' crypto-related activities were pulled on Thursday, the FDIC said. The move aims to clarify that banking organizations may engage in crypto activities so long as they are consistent with current laws and regulations. Banks may also provide products and services to people and firms engaged in crypto-related activities, the FDIC said. Providing more clarity on banks' crypto activities in the coming weeks and months is being considered, the agencies said.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from NPR: Air in the U.S. has gotten cleaner for decades, adding years to people's lives and preventing millions of asthma attacks, but nearly half of Americans still live with unhealthy air pollution, a new report finds. The report comes as the Trump administration is considering rolling back some key air quality regulations. Air quality across the country has improved dramatically since regulations like the Clean Air Act were put in place in the 1970s to govern sources of pollution like coal-fired power plants and emissions from diesel trucks. Despite that progress, the air is still unhealthy and polluted in many parts of the country. In 2023, nearly half of the country's inhabitants -- 156 million people -- lived in places heavy in smog or soot pollution that harms their lungs, hearts, and brains, according to the newest edition of the American Lung Association's State of the Air report.

"Both these types of pollution cause people to die. They shorten life expectancy and drive increases in asthma rates," says Mary Rice, a pulmonologist at Harvard University. Pollution levels vary widely across the country, the report finds, with the worst soot pollution, averaged over the whole year, centered on California cities like Fresno and Bakersfield. Ozone pollution is highest in the Los Angeles region. Phoenix, Arizona, and Dallas, Texas, also rank in the top 10 most smog-heavy cities. Nationwide, people of color are about twice as likely to live somewhere with high soot and ozone pollution as white Americans. "The Clean Air Act is one of the greatest success stories in our country," says Rice. NPR notes that the law requires the EPA to revisit the science every five years, reassessing what health researchers have learned about the risks of breathing in poor air and adjusting the regulations accordingly.

"So the air quality standards have kept pace with the science over time, and levels of fine particulate matter have declined over the last 50-plus years," Rice says. "As a result, life expectancy is longer, and asthma rates have gone down." [...] "We are best equipped to protect our health when we have all the information, like weather and air quality," she says.

AMD has open-sourced its "GPU-IOV Module" for enabling SR-IOV-based virtualization on Instinct accelerators using the Linux kernel and KVM hypervisor, with features like GPU scheduling and VF/PF management. Notably, AMD plans to extend this virtualization support to client Radeon GPUs. Phoronix reports: The AMD GPU-IOV Module is for the Linux kernel and for providing SR-IOV based hardware virtualization in conjunction with the KVM hypervisor. GIM provides the GPU IOV virtualization, virtual function (VF) configuration and enablement, GPU scheduling for world switch, hang detection and FLR reset, and PF/VF handshake capabilities. Initially the AMD GIM driver is for the Instinct MI300X hardware and tested atop Ubuntu 22.04 LTS with ROCm 6.4. Those interested can find the AMD GIM code currently via GitHub. It's not laid out in the repository or any other public communications I've seen what any upstreaming plans are for this GIM driver to get it into the mainline Linux kernel.

India's capital New Delhi plans to limit gasoline and diesel-powered cars a family can buy as well as ban sales of fuel-guzzling motorbikes and scooters, according to a draft policy aimed at cleaning up one of the world's most polluted cities. From a report: The measures represent one of the most drastic steps the city has lined up to tackle pollution, which often forces local authorities to ban some construction, shut schools and disrupt flights in the city of more than 30 million people during the winter season.

Under Delhi's new electric vehicle policy, the city government will also waive some local taxes on the purchase of hybrids, putting them on par with concessions given to EVs, while imposing a new levy of 0.5 rupees ($0.0059) on every litre of petrol sales, according to the 74-page draft seen by Reuters. The primary objective "is to unlock the next phase of EV adoption, reduce air pollution and contribute to India's energy independence and net-zero targets," the draft stated.

Male college enrollment in Lake County, Ohio plummeted by more than 15% over the last decade -- the steepest decline among any large U.S. county. Nationwide, men now constitute virtually the entirety of the 1.2 million student drop in college attendance between 2011 and 2022.

Financial concerns dominate decision-making, with even public in-state education costing approximately $25,000 annually. One high school senior secured a $15/hour collision repair job, Bloomberg reports, calculating he'll earn "upwards of a grand every other week" while avoiding student debt.

Social media significantly influences these choices. "You see a lot of influencers saying you don't need to go to college, and when people see that, they listen," explained one student from Perry High School.

A Government Accountability Office report released this week reveals generative AI systems consume staggering amounts of water, with 250 million daily queries requiring over 1.1 million gallons -- all while companies provide minimal transparency about resource usage. The 47-page analysis [PDF] found cooling data centers -- which demand between 100-1000 megawatts of power -- constitutes 40% of their energy consumption, a figure expected to rise as global temperatures increase.

Water usage varies dramatically by location, with geography significantly affecting both water requirements and carbon emissions. Meta's Llama 3.1 405B model has generated 8,930 metric tons of carbon, compared to Google's Gemma2 at 1,247.61 metric tons and OpenAI's GPT3 at 552 metric tons. The report confirms generative AI searches cost approximately ten times more than standard keyword searches. The GAO asserted about persistent transparency problems across the industry, noting these systems remain "black boxes" even to their designers.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Washington Post: Oil and gas companies are facing hundreds of lawsuits around the world testing whether they can be held responsible for their role in causing climate change. Now, two scientists say they've built a tool that can calculate how much damage each company's planet-warming pollution has caused -- and how much money they could be forced to pay if they're successfully sued. Collectively, greenhouse emissions from 111 fossil fuel companies caused the world $28 trillion in damage from extreme heat from 1991 to 2020, according to a paper published Wednesday in Nature. The new analysis could fuel an emerging legal fight.The authors, Dartmouth associate professor Justin Mankin and Chris Callahan, a postdoctoral researcher at Stanford University, say their model can determine a specific company's share of responsibility over any time period. [...]

Callahan and Mankin's work combines all of these steps -- estimating a company's historical emissions, figuring out how much those emissions contributed to climate change and calculating how much economic damage climate change has caused -- into one "end-to-end" model that links one polluter's emissions to a dollar amount of economic damage from extreme heat. By their calculation, Saudi Aramco is on the hook for $2.05 trillion in economic losses from extreme heat from 1991 to 2020. Russia's Gazprom is responsible for $2 trillion, Chevron for $1.98 trillion, ExxonMobil for $1.91 trillion and BP for $1.45 trillion. Industry groups and companies tend to object to the methodologies of attribution science. They could seek to contest the assumptions that went into each step of Mankin and Callahan's model.

Indeed, every step in that process introduces some room for error, and stringing together all of those steps compounds the uncertainty in the model, according to Delta Merner, lead scientist at theScience Hub for Climate Litigation, which connects scientists and lawyers bringing climate lawsuits. She also mentioned that the researchers relied on a commonly used but simplified climate model known as the Finite Amplitude Impulse Response (FAIR) model. "It is robust for the purpose of what the study is doing," Merner said, "but these models do make assumptions about climate sensitivity, about carbon cycle behavior, energy balance, and all of the simplifications in there do introduce some uncertainty." The exact dollar figures in the paper aren't intended as gospel. But outside scientists said Mankin and Callahan use well-established, peer-reviewed datasets and climate models for every step in their process, and they are transparent about the uncertainty in the numbers.

A draft executive order from the Trump administration proposes integrating AI into K-12 education by directing federal agencies to promote AI literacy, train teachers, and establish public-private partnerships. "The draft is marked 'predecisional' and could be subject to change before it is signed, or it could be abandoned," notes the Washington Post. From the report: Titled "Advancing artificial intelligence education for American youth," the draft order would establish a White House task force on AI education that would be chaired by Michael Kratsios, director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy, and would include the secretaries of education, agriculture, labor and energy, as well as Trump's special adviser for AI and cryptocurrency, David Sacks. The draft order would instruct federal agencies to seek public-private partnerships with industry, academia and nonprofit groups in efforts to teach students "foundational AI literacy and critical thinking skills."

The task force should look for existing federal funding such as grants that could be used for AI programs, and agencies should prioritize spending on AI education, according to the draft order. It would also instruct Education Secretary Linda McMahon to prioritize federal grant funding for training teachers on how to use AI, including for administrative tasks and teacher training and evaluation. All educators should undergo professional development to integrate AI into all subject areas, the draft order says. It would also establish a "Presidential AI Challenge" -- a competition for students and educators to demonstrate their AI skills -- and instruct Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer to develop registered apprenticeships in AI-related occupations. The focus is on K-12 education, but the draft order says, "Our Nation must also make resources available for lifelong learners to develop new skills for a changing workforce."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: On Monday, the State Bar of California revealed that it used AI to develop a portion of multiple-choice questions on its February 2025 bar exam, causing outrage among law school faculty and test takers. The admission comes after weeks of complaints about technical problems and irregularities during the exam administration, reports the Los Angeles Times. The State Bar disclosed that its psychometrician (a person skilled in administrating psychological tests), ACS Ventures, created 23 of the 171 scored multiple-choice questions with AI assistance. Another 48 questions came from a first-year law student exam, while Kaplan Exam Services developed the remaining 100 questions.

The State Bar defended its practices, telling the LA Times that all questions underwent review by content validation panels and subject matter experts before the exam. "The ACS questions were developed with the assistance of AI and subsequently reviewed by content validation panels and a subject matter expert in advance of the exam," wrote State Bar Executive Director Leah Wilson in a press release. According to the LA Times, the revelation has drawn strong criticism from several legal education experts. "The debacle that was the February 2025 bar exam is worse than we imagined," said Mary Basick, assistant dean of academic skills at the University of California, Irvine School of Law. "I'm almost speechless. Having the questions drafted by non-lawyers using artificial intelligence is just unbelievable." Katie Moran, an associate professor at the University of San Francisco School of Law who specializes in bar exam preparation, called it "a staggering admission." She pointed out that the same company that drafted AI-generated questions also evaluated and approved them for use on the exam. The report notes that the AI disclosure follows technical glitches with the February exam (like login issues, screen lag, and confusing questions), which led to a federal lawsuit against Meazure Learning and calls for a State Bar audit.

The world's coral reefs have been pushed into "uncharted territory" by the worst global bleaching event on record that has now hit more than 80% of the planet's reefs, scientists have warned. From a report: Reefs in at least 82 countries and territories have been exposed to enough heat to turn corals white since the global event started in January 2023, the latest data from the US government's Coral Reef Watch shows.

Coral reefs are known as the rainforests of the sea because of their high concentration of biodiversity that supports about a third of all marine species and a billion people. But record high ocean temperatures have spread like an underwater wildfire over corals across the Pacific, Atlantic and Indian oceans, damaging and killing countless corals.

On its 20th anniversary, YouTube now says that since YouTube co-founder Jawed Karim's video -- "Me at the zoo" -- was posted, more than 20 trillion videos have been uploaded. From a report: The video behemoth dropped a number of jaw-dropping stats Wednesday, along with significant updates to its TV experience, which has become a strategic priority for the platform, all connected to its anniversary. YouTube says that as of March 2025, more than 20 million videos are uploaded every single day, and that in 2024 users posted more than 100 million comments on videos, on average, every day.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: In 2019, Garrett Mitchell was already an Internet success. His YouTube channel, Cleetus McFarland, had over a million followers. If you perused the channel at that time, you would've found a range of grassroots motorsports videos with the type of vehicular shenanigans that earn truckloads of views. Some of those older videos include "BLEW BY A COP AT 120+mph! OOPS!," "THERE'S A T-REX ON THE TRACK!," and "Manual Transmission With Paddle Shifters!?!." Those videos made Mitchell, aka Cleetus McFarland, a known personality among automotive enthusiasts. But the YouTuber wanted more financial independence beyond the Google platform and firms willing to sponsor his channel. " after my YouTube was growing and some of my antics [were] getting videos de-monetized, I realized I needed a playground," Mitchell told Ars Technica in an email.

Mitchell found a road toward new monetization opportunities through the DeSoto Super Speedway. The Bradenton, Florida, track had changed ownership multiple times since opening in the 1970s. The oval-shaped racetrack is three-eighths of a mile long with 12-degree banking angles. By 2018, the track had closed its doors and was going unused. DeSoto happened to be next to Mitchell's favorite drag strip, giving the YouTuber the idea of turning it into a stadium where people could watch burnouts and other "massive, rowdy" ticketed events. Mitchell added: "So I sold everything I could, borrowed some money from my business manager, and went all in for [$]2.2 million." But like the rest of the world, Mitchell hit the brakes on his 2020 plans during COVID-19 lockdowns. Soon after his purchase, Mitchell couldn't use the track, renamed Freedom Factory, for large gatherings, forcing him to reconsider his plans. "We had no other option but to entertain the people somehow. And with no other racing goin' on anywhere, we bet big on making something happen. And it worked," Mitchell said. That "something" was a pay-per-view (PPV) event hosted from the Freedom Factory in April 2020.

The event led to others and, eventually, Mitchell running his own subscription video on demand (SVOD) service, FRDM+, which originally launched as Cleetervision in 2022. Today, a FRDM+ subscription costs $20 per month or $120 per year. A subscription provides access to an impressive library of automotive videos. Some are archived from Mitchell's YouTube channel. Other, exclusive videos feature content such as interviews with motorsports influencers and members of Mitchell's staff and crew, and outrageous motorsports stunts. You can watch videos from other influencers on FRDM+, and the business can also white-label its platform into other influencers' websites, too. "Today, bandwidth isn't a problem for FRDM+, and navigating the streaming service doesn't feel much different from something like Netflix," writes Ars Technica's Scharon Harding. "There are different 'channels' (grouped together by related content or ongoing series) on top and new releases and upcoming content highlighted below. There are horizontal scrolling rows, and many titles have content summaries and/or trailers. The platform also has a support section with instructions for canceling subscriptions."

"Due to wildly differing audiences, markets, costs, and scales, comparing FRDM+'s financials to the likes of Netflix and other mainstream streaming services is like comparing apples to oranges. But it's interesting to consider that FRDM+ has achieved profitability faster than some of those services, like Peacock, which also launched in 2020, and Apple TV+, which debuted in 2019."