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Submission + - Crypto loses against SEC in US courts (politico.com)

Submitted by SonicSpike
SonicSpike writes: The cryptocurrency industry is counting on the federal courts to survive a sweeping enforcement crusade by Wall Street’s top regulator.

But that bet is beginning to backfire.

A string of legal victories by the Securities and Exchange Commission has jolted some of crypto’s biggest players and shaken the industry as it strives for greater credibility in Washington.

Judges have recently rebuked claims that the SEC lacks authority to police the market. Coinbase, the largest U.S. exchange, lost a bid to throw out charges that it is violating investor-protection rules. And a New York jury found one-time billionaire entrepreneur Do Kwon and his firm liable for fraud.

Now, the crackdown is about to expand, with the SEC preparing for a new round of lawsuits.

“The SEC just keeps winning,” said John Reed Stark, a former agency attorney and prominent crypto critic. “The law is catching up.”

The legal onslaught, which gained new momentum after the collapse of Sam Bankman-Fried’s FTX empire in late 2022, is posing a threat to the industry and raising the stakes for the army of industry lobbyists seeking to convince lawmakers of the need for new, favorable rules for the market.

The clash underscores fundamentally different views of the emerging industry: Many federal officials like SEC Chair Gary Gensler are highly suspicious, seeing the market as riddled with corruption and a danger to investors. Crypto backers, including GOP lawmakers, see the business as the wave of the future in finance and want to nurture it.

“More and more we’re going to see the industry be willing to fight,” said Ladan Stewart, who was a crypto enforcement attorney at the SEC until earlier this year. “These are existential issues for them.”

The Department of Justice has also stepped up its attacks. Bankman-Fried was sentenced in March to 25 years in prison for fraud and conspiracy. The next month, a 28-year-old crypto trader was found guilty of manipulating markets in the first criminal case of its kind in the U.S.

Submission + - Defense Think Tank MITRE To Build AI Supercomputer With Nvidia (washingtonpost.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: A key supplier to the Pentagon and U.S. intelligence agencies is building a $20 million supercomputer with buzzy chipmaker Nvidia to speed deployment of artificial intelligence capabilities across the U.S. federal government, the MITRE think tank said Tuesday. MITRE, a federally funded, not-for-profit research organization that has supplied U.S. soldiers and spies with exotic technical products since the 1950s, says the project could improve everything from Medicare to taxes. “There’s huge opportunities for AI to make government more efficient,” said Charles Clancy, senior vice president of MITRE. “Government is inefficient, it’s bureaucratic, it takes forever to get stuff done. ... That’s the grand vision, is how do we do everything from making Medicare sustainable to filing your taxes easier?” [...] The MITRE supercomputer will be based in Ashburn, Va., and should be up and running late this year. [...]

Clancy said the planned supercomputer will run 256 Nvidia graphics processing units, or GPUs, at a cost of $20 million. This counts as a small supercomputer: The world’s fastest supercomputer, Frontier in Tennessee, boasts 37,888 GPUs, and Meta is seeking to build one with 350,000 GPUs. But MITRE’s computer will still eclipse Stanford’s Natural Language Processing Group’s 68 GPUs, and will be large enough to train large language models to perform AI tasks tailored for government agencies. Clancy said all federal agencies funding MITRE will be able to use this AI “sandbox.” “AI is the tool that is solving a wide range of problems,” Clancy said. “The U.S. military needs to figure out how to do command and control. We need to understand how cryptocurrency markets impact the traditional banking sector. ... Those are the sorts of problems we want to solve.”

Submission + - Amazon's Delivery Drones Won't Fly in Arizona's Summer Heat (wired.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Amazon plans to start flying deliverydronesin Arizona this year—but don't count on them to bring you a refreshing drink on a hot day. The hexacopter can’t operate when temperatures top 104 degrees Fahrenheit, or 40 degrees Celsius, the company says, and average daily highsexceed thatfor three months of the year in Tolleson, the city outside Phoenix where Amazon is preparing to offer aerial deliveries from inside a 7.5-mile radius. The drones can’t help with midnight snacks either, because they’ll be grounded after sunset. Potentially being inoperable for a quarter of the year might make launching drone deliveries in Tolleson and neighboring desert communities seem like an odd choice. It’s far from the first challenge faced by Amazon’s much-delayed drone project. The unit is years behindits goalsof flying items to customers in under an hour on a regular basis, and a one-time target of 500 million deliveries by 2030 seems distant. Amazon Prime Air has completed just thousands of deliveries, falling behind rivals; Alphabet subsidiary Wing has notched hundreds of thousands of delivery flights and Walmart more than 20,000.

In the California wine country town of Lockeford, where Amazon initially launched drone deliveries,some residents told WIRED last yearthat they ordered only because Amazon lured them with gift cards. In Arizona, it could be discouraging not being able to rely on drones during those hours when one might not want to venture too far from the comfort of air conditioning. [...] That temperature and other environmental conditions could ground or hamper the drone industry has been known for years. A team from University of Calgary’s geography department estimated that on average across the world, drones with limitations similar to Amazon’s, including from weather and daylight, would be limited to flying about 2 hours a day. In the world’s 100 most populous cities, the average daily flight time would be 6 hours. “Weather is an important and poorly resolved factor that may affect ambitions to expand drone operations,” they wrote ina study publishedin 2021. Heat, in particular, forces motors to work harder to keep drones aloft, and their batteries are only so powerful.

Submission + - Chinese Doctors Cure Type 2 Diabete Using Patient's Own Stem Cells (nature.com)

Submitted by hackingbear
hackingbear writes: Researchers at the Second Naval Medical University's Changzheng Hospital in Shanghai, China performed the world's first Type 2 diabetes (T2D) curing pancreatic cell transplantation with E-islet cells derived from the patient's own stem cells. These E-islets, generated from the patient's own non-tumorigenic human endoderm stem cells (EnSCs), were tested for quality and safety, showing no contamination or unwanted growths, and were found to function similarly to natural pancreatic cells from human donors. The patient received a transplant of these E-islets through an injection into the liver's portal vein. Following the transplant, the patient's blood sugar levels were closely monitored using various tests and devices. Notably, the insulin requirements were reduced gradually until complete withdrawal at the end of week 11, and the oral antidiabetic medications were tapered since week 44 and discontinued at weeks 48 (acarbose) and 56 (metformin). The first 27-month data revealed significant improvements in glycemic control, and provided the first evidence that stem cell-derived islet tissues can rescue islet function in late-stage T2D patients. The grafts were well tolerated with no tumor formation or severe graft-related adverse events. This approach also avoids complications related to immune rejection and provides a potentially safer alternative to using cells from donors. The success of this study suggests that stem cell-derived islet transplantation could be a promising treatment for diabetes, potentially eliminating the need for lifelong insulin injections and other diabetes medications. Future research will focus on refining this treatment for broader use and exploring its application in other types of diabetes. [Summarization by the submitter.]

Submission + - Small reactors don't add up (cosmosmagazine.com)

Submitted by ZipNada
ZipNada writes: The nuclear industry has been offering so-called Small Modular Reactors (SMRs) as an alternative to large reactors as a possible solution to climate change.

SMRs are defined as nuclear reactors with a power output of less than 300 megawatts of electricity, compared to the typically 1000 to 1,500 megawatts power capacity of larger reactors.

Proponents assert that SMRs would cost less to build and thus be more affordable.

However, when evaluated on the basis of cost per unit of power capacity, SMRs will actually be more expensive than large reactors.

This ‘diseconomy of scale’ was demonstrated by the now-terminated proposal to build six NuScale Power SMRs (77 megawatts each) in Idaho in the United States.

The final cost estimate of the project per megawatt was around 250 percent more than the initial per megawatt cost for the 2,200 megawatts Vogtle nuclear power plant being built in Georgia, US.

Previous small reactors built in various parts of America also shut down because they were uneconomical.

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