The Academy has clarified that only human-performed acting and human-authored writing are eligible for Oscar nominations. The Oscars will not ban AI tools broadly, but says it will judge films based on the degree to which humans remain central to the creative work. The BBC reports: The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences [...], which controls the US film industry's most prestigious award, on Friday issued updated rules for what kind of work in movies and documentaries would be considered eligible for an Oscar as the use of artificial intelligence (AI) technology grows. In updated eligibility requirements, the Academy specified that only acting "demonstrably performed by humans" and that writing "must be human-authored" in order to be nominated for an award. The Academy called the requirements a "substantive" change to the rules for the Oscars.

The need to specify awards can only go to acting and writing done by "humans" is new for the academy. [...] However, the academy did not issue a ban on AI use in films more broadly. Outside of acting and writing, if a filmmaker used AI tools in their work, such "tools neither help nor harm the chances of achieving a nomination," the academy wrote. "The Academy and each branch will judge the achievement, taking into account the degree to which a human was at the heart of the creative authorship when choosing which movie to award," the group added. "If questions arise regarding the aforementioned use of generative artificial intelligence, the Academy reserves the right to request more information about the nature of the use and human authorship."

Dave Knott shares a report from the New York Times: On Wednesday, the Association for Computing Machinery, the world's largest society of computing professionals, said Drs. Charles Bennett and Gilles Brassard had won this year's Turing Award for their work on quantum cryptography and related technologies. The Turing Award, which was introduced in 1966, is often called the Nobel Prize of computing, and it includes a $1 million prize, which the two scientists will share.

[...] The two met in 1979 while swimming in the Atlantic just off the north shore of Puerto Rico. They were taking a break while attending an academic conference in San Juan. Dr. Bennett swam up to Dr. Brassard and suggested they use quantum mechanics to create a bank note that could never be forged. Collaborating between Montreal and New York, they applied Dr. Bennett's idea to subway tokens rather than bank notes. In a research paper published in 1983, they showed that their quantum subway tokens could never be forged, even if someone managed to steal the subway turnstile housing the elaborate hardware needed to read them.

This led to quantum cryptography. After describing their new form of encryption in a research paper published in 1984, they demonstrated the technology with a physical experiment five years later. Called BB84, their system used photons -- particles of light -- to create encryption keys used to lock and unlock digital data. Thanks to the laws of quantum mechanics, the behavior of a photon changes if someone looks at it. This means that if anyone tries to steal the keys, he or she will leave a telltale sign of the attempted theft -- a bit like breaking the seal on an aspirin bottle.

Longtime Slashdot reader chicksdaddy writes: CES, the Consumer Electronics Show, isn't just about shiny new gadgets. As AP reports, this year brought back the fifth annual Worst in Show anti-awards, calling out the most harmful, wasteful, invasive, and unfixable tech at the Las Vegas show. The coalition behind the awards -- including Repair.org, iFixit, EFF, PIRG, Secure Repairs, and others -- put the spotlight on products that miss the point of innovation and make life worse for users.

2026 Worst in Show winners include:

Overall (and Repairability): Samsung's AI-packed Family Hub Fridge -- over-engineered, hard to fix, and trying to do everything but keep food cold.
Privacy: Amazon Ring AI -- expanding surveillance with features like facial recognition and mobile towers.
Security: Merach UltraTread treadmill -- an AI fitness coach that also hoovers up sensitive data with weak security guarantees, including a privacy policy that declares the company "cannot guarantee the security of your personal information" (!!).
Environmental Impact: Lollipop Star -- a single-use, music-playing electronic lollipop that epitomizes needless e-waste.
Enshittification: Bosch eBike Flow App -- pushing lock-in and digital restrictions that make gear worse over time.
"Who Asked For This?": Bosch Personal AI Barista -- a voice-assistant coffee maker that nobody really wanted.
People's Choice: Lepro Ami AI Companion -- an overhyped "soulmate" cam that creeps more than it comforts.

The message? Not all tech is progress. Some products add needless complexity, threaten privacy, or throw sustainability out the window -- and the industry's watchdogs are calling them out.

Irish competitor Diarmuid Early, dubbed the "Lebron James of Excel spreadsheets," has won the 2025 Microsoft Excel World Championship in Las Vegas, dethroning three-time champion Andrew Ngai. The BBC reports: The esport showpiece in December attracted competitors worldwide as 256 spreadsheet heads battled it out across knockout rounds to join the final 24 in Vegas. [...] A three-time champion in the financial Excel tournaments, this win was Diarmuid's first in the overall competition. He held the triple-world champion Andrew Ngai to second place, and won the $5,000 prize and title belt. [...]

Excel esports transforms a common office tool into a dynamic sport. More than 20 years old, the competitive scene has evolved from being finance based to now involving more general problem solving. Although it might help, Diarmuid said "it doesn't require accounting or finance knowledge." He described an example where Excel is used in solving a maze, scoring poker hands, or even sorting Kings and Queens into the battles in which they fought.

Generally there is a 30 minute challenge, with each challenge broken up into levels. The questions increase gradually in difficulty, with each correct answer gaining a player points. Whoever gets the most points wins, and in a tie, it is whoever got there first. "It's just, can you think on your feet and do things quickly in Excel?" he said. "If you solve the earlier levels in a neat way, that'll let you hit the ground running faster on the later ones."

The Academy has struck a multi-year deal to move the Oscars to YouTube starting in 2029, ending decades on ABC and making the ceremony free to stream worldwide with YouTube holding exclusive global rights. Variety reports: The Oscars, including red carpet coverage, behind-the-scenes content and Governors Ball, will be available live and for free on YouTube to viewers around the world, as well as to YouTube TV subscribers in the United States. Architects of the agreement said they hope the move to YouTube will help make the Oscars more accessible to "the Academy's growing global audience through features such as closed captioning and audio tracks available in multiple languages." [...]

The Academy had been seeking a new broadcast licensing agreement for the better part of 2025. Over the summer, several expected and unconventional buyers, including NBCUniversal and Netflix, had come into the mix as potential suitors. Insiders believe that YouTube shelled out over nine figures for the Oscars, besting the high eight-figure offers from Disney/ABC and NBCUniversal. Under the most recent contract, Disney was paying around $100 million annually for the Oscars -- but given the ratings declines for the kudocast, Disney/ABC were reportedly looking to spend less on license fees.

[...] It's not a secret that the Academy and Disney/ABC would occasionally have disagreements over the best path for the Oscars, including the show's length, which awards to present and who should host. Now, on a streamer with no time limits, the Oscars can be any length, and the Academy likely has carte blanche to do whatever it wants with the telecast. "They can do whatever they want," says one insider. "You can have a six-hour Oscars hosted by MrBeast."

"Another year, yet another Hugo Awards-adjacent controversy?" writes Gizmodo's Cheryl Eddy, reporting that three key organizers of the 2025 Seattle Worldcon resigned after backlash over the use of ChatGPT to vet program participants. From the report: In a post on Bluesky co-signed by Hugo administrator Nicholas Whyte, deputy Hugo administrator Esther MacCallum-Stewart, and World Science Fiction Society division head Cassidy, the trio announced they were resigning from their roles ahead of the Seattle event, which takes place in August. "We want to reaffirm that no LLMs or generative AI have been used in the Hugo Awards process at any stage," the statement read in part, which might turn the heads of anyone who is a) interested in the Hugos, but b) not up on the latest controversy.

However, plenty of people in the community are well aware of what's been going on. A quick journey to the blog File 770 will bring you up to speed, as will a visit to Seattle Worldcon 2025's own site, which on April 30 shared a post clarifying exactly what role AI played in the upcoming event. [...] However, as File 770 pointed out, the damage has apparently already been done: the use of ChatGPT in any capacity in connection to Worldcon created a furor on social media. It also inspired at least one Hugo nominee to remove their book from contention: Yoon Ha Lee, whose Moonstorm was named a Lodestar Award finalist, which honors YA releases. In a May 1 post on Bluesky, the author linked to the April 30 Worldcon blog post noted above, and noted he was withdrawing the title from consideration.

Then, in a post shared today responding to File 770's latest post announcing the resignations, the author wrote âoeAll respect and I'm grateful to them for their work, sorry [things] came to this pass." Seattle Worldcon 2025 takes place August 13-17; the Hugo Awards will be handed out August 16.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from IEEE Spectrum: The XPrize Foundation today announced the winners of its four-year, $100 million XPrize competition in carbon removal. The contest is one of dozens hosted by the foundation in its 20-year effort to encourage technological development. Contestants in the carbon removal XPrize had to demonstrate ways to pull carbon dioxide from the atmosphere or oceans and sequester it sustainably.

Mati Carbon, a Houston-based startup developing a sequestration technique called enhanced rock weathering, won the grand prize of $50 million. The company spreads crushed basalt on small farms in India and Africa. The silica-rich volcanic rock improves the quality of the soil for the crops but also helps remove carbon dioxide from the air. It does this by reacting with dissolved CO2 in the soil's water, turning it into bicarbonate ions and preventing it from returning to the atmosphere.

More than a dozen organizations globally are developing enhanced rock weathering approaches at an industrial scale, but Mati's tech-heavy verification and software platform caught the XPrize judges' attention. "On the one hand, they're moving rocks around in trucks—that's not very techy. But when we looked under the hood... what we saw was a very impressive data-collection exercise," says Michael Leitch, XPrize's technical lead for the competition. Here's a list of the runners-up:

- Paris-based NetZero won $15 million for turning agricultural waste into biochar through pyrolysis, a method that locks carbon into a stable, solid form.
- Houston-based Vaulted Deep won $8 million for geologically sequestering carbon-rich organic waste by injecting it deep underground.
- London-based Undo Carbon won $5 million for its enhanced rock weathering approach, spreading silicate minerals to speed up natural carbon removal.

Additionally, Project Hajar and Planetary Technologies each received $1 million honorary XFactor prizes, recognizing their promising work in direct air capture and ocean carbon removal, despite not meeting the competition's 1,000-tonne removal threshold.

Despite recent test failures, NASA has added SpaceX's Starship to its Launch Services Program contract, allowing it to compete for future science missions once it achieves a successful orbital flight. Florida Today reports: NASA announced the addition Friday to its current launch provider contract with SpaceX, which covers the Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy. This opens the possibility of Starship flying future NASA science missions -- that is once Starship reaches a successful orbital flight.

"NASA has awarded SpaceX of Starbase, Texas, a modification under the NASA Launch Services (NLS) II contract to add Starship to their existing Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy launch service offerings," NASA's statement reads. Th announcement is simply an onboarding of Starship as an option, as the contract runs through 2032. However, SpaceX is under pressure to get Starship operational by next year as the company plans not only to send an uncrewed Starship to Mars by late 2026, but the NASA Artemis III moon landing is fast approaching. Should it remain the plan with the current administration, Starship will act as a human lander for NASA's Artemis III crew.

"The NLS II contracts are multiple award, indefinite-delivery/indefinite-quantity, with an ordering period through June 2030 and an overall period of performance through December 2032. The contracts include an on-ramp provision that provides an opportunity annually for new launch service providers to add their launch service on an NLS II contract and compete for future missions and allows existing contractors to introduce launch services not currently on their NLS II contracts," NASA's statement reads.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Gizmodo: Fourteen-year-old Aaryan Shukla cruised through six mental math calculation world records in a single day, according to a Guinness World Records statement published on February 12, earning the well-deserved nickname, "human calculator kid." Specifically, it took Shukla:

- 30.9 seconds to mentally add 100 four-digit numbers
- One minute and 9.68 seconds to mentally add 200 four-digit numbers
- 18.71 seconds to mentally add 50 five-digit numbers
- Five minutes and 42 seconds to mentally divide a 20-digit number by a ten-digit number ten times
- 51.69 seconds to mentally multiply two five-digit numbers ten times
- Two minutes and 35.41 seconds to mentally multiply two eight-digit numbers ten times

According to the statement, these are among the most difficult mental calculation world records ever attempted. Shukla's frankly mind-boggling achievement also comes in the wake of another world record he broke in April 2024 at the age of 13: fastest time to mentally add 50 five-digit numbers. It took him just 25.19 seconds. That's an addition every half a second. I wouldn't be surprised if students seeking "shortcuts" in their math homework started phoning up Shukla instead of reaching for their ChatGPT browser tab. Guinness World Records published a video about Shukla's accomplishments on YouTube.

Astro Bot has been crowned winner of Game of the Year at The Game Awards 2024 tonight. The category also included Balatro, Black Myth Wukong, Metaphor: ReFantazio, and Final Fantasy VII Rebirth. IGN reports: Astro Bot was one of the biggest winners of the night, taking home a total of four awards in categories including Best Family Game and Best Game Direction. Other notable winners included Metaphor: ReFantazio, which won Best Narrative, Best Art Direction, and Best RPG, and Balatro, which one Best Indie and Best Debut Indie. A full list of the nominees and winners can be viewed here.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Jason Allen-a synthetic media artist whose Midjourney-generated work "Theatre D'opera Spatial" went viral and incited backlash after winning a state fair art competition-is not giving up his fight with the US Copyright Office. Last fall, the Copyright Office refused to register Allen's work, claiming that almost the entire work was AI-generated and insisting that copyright registration requires more human authorship than simply plugging a prompt into Midjourney. Allen is now appealing (PDF) that decision, asking for judicial review and alleging that "the negative media attention surrounding the Work may have influenced the Copyright Office Examiner's perception and judgment." He claims that the Examiner was biased and considered "improper factors" such as the public backlash when concluding that he had "no control over how the artificial intelligence tool analyzed, interpreted, or responded to these prompts."

As Allen sees it, a rule establishing a review process requiring an Examiner to determine which parts of the work are human-authored seems "entirely arbitrary" since some Copyright Examiners "may not even be able to distinguish an artwork that used AI tools to assist in the creation from one which does not use any computerized tools." Further, Allen claims that the denial of copyright for his work has inspired confusion about who owns rights to not just Midjourney-generated art but all AI art, and as AI technology rapidly improves, it will only become harder for the Copyright Office to make those authorship judgment calls. That becomes an even bigger problem if the Copyright Office gets it wrong too often, Allen warned, running the risk of turning every artist registering works into a "suspect" and potentially bogging courts down with copyright disputes. Ultimately, Allen is hoping that a jury reviewing his appeal will reverse the denial, arguing that there is more human authorship in his AI-generated work than the Copyright Office considered when twice rejecting his registration.

Longtime Slashdot reader davidwr writes: Winners of the 34th First Annual Ig Nobel Prizes included studies on hair swirling (natural, not from grade-school bathroom torture), mammals that breath through their anal orifices, and a study on pigeon-guided missiles. There were also prizes for the study of the swimming abilities of a formerly-living trout. "Honors" were also bestowed for research in coin-flipping (no, it's not 50/50), why cows spew milk, and drunken worms, among other topics. Prizes included $10,000,000,000 (in now-worthless Zimbabwe dollars) and items related to Murphy's Law.

Media coverage includes AP, CNN, Gizmodo, Ars Technica, and by the time you read this, probably much more.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: The prestigious Hugo awards for science fiction and fantasy writing has revealed that almost 400 votes -- about 10% of all votes cast in this year's awards -- were fraudulently paid for to help one finalist win. The Hugo administration subcommittee, which tallies the votes for the annual awards, issued a statement on Monday saying that they had determined that 377 votes had been cast by individuals with "obvious fake names and/or other disqualifying characteristics." These included voters with almost identical surnames, with just one letter changed and placed in alphabetical order, and some whose names were "translations of consecutive numbers."

The voting pattern was "startlingly and obviously different" to anything the members of the current Hugo administration subcommittee had ever seen, and most of the votes favored one finalist, who the subcommittee called "Finalist A." "We have no evidence that Finalist A was at all aware of the fraudulent votes being cast for them, let alone in any way responsible for the operation. We are therefore not identifying them," the subcommittee said. Only members of the World Science Fiction Society (WSFS) can nominate works for the Hugos and vote on finalists, which costs a minimum of 45 pounds each year. Based on the Hugo administration subcommittee's tally, paying for 377 memberships would have cost at least $22,000. The Hugo administration subcommittee said they received "a confidential report that at least one person had sponsored the purchase of WSFS memberships by large numbers of individuals, who were refunded the cost of membership after confirming that they had voted as the sponsor wished." The subcommittee said the finalist has not been disqualified but didn't win their category without the invalid votes.

"We want to reassure 2024 Hugo voters that the ballots cast were counted fairly," their statement said. "Most of all, we want to assure the winners of this year's Hugos that they have won fair and square, without any arbitrary or unexplained exclusion of votes or nominees and without any possibility that their award had been gained through fraudulent means."

In February, the Hugo awards came under fire over censorship accusations that it was excluding several authors at its event in China.

In a featured article for The Verge, David Pierce explores the world of competitive Excel, highlighting its rise from a hobbyist activity to a potential esport, showcased during the Excel World Championship in Las Vegas. Top spreadsheet enthusiasts competed at the MGM Grand to solve complex Excel challenges, emphasizing the transformative power and ubiquity of spreadsheets in both business and entertainment. An anonymous reader quotes an excerpt from the report: Competitive Excel has been around for years, but only in a hobbyist way. Most of the people in this room full of actuaries, analysts, accountants, and investors play Excel the way I play Scrabble or do the crossword -- exercising your brain using tools you understand. But last year's competition became a viral hit on ESPN and YouTube, and this year, the organizers are trying to capitalize. After all, someone points out to me, poker is basically just math, and it's all over TV. Why not spreadsheets? Excel is a tool. It's a game. Now it hopes to become a sport. I've come to realize in my two days in this ballroom that understanding a spreadsheet is like a superpower. The folks in this room make their living on their ability to take some complex thing -- a company's sales, a person's lifestyle, a region's political leanings, a race car -- and pull it apart into its many component pieces. If you can reduce the world down to a bunch of rows and columns, you can control it. Manipulate it. Build it and rebuild it in a thousand new ways, with a couple of hotkeys and an undo button at the ready. A good spreadsheet shows you the universe and gives you the ability to create new ones. And the people in this room, in their dad jeans and short-sleeved button-downs, are the gods on Olympus, bending everything to their will.

There is one inescapably weird thing about competitive Excel: spreadsheets are not fun. Spreadsheets are very powerful, very interesting, very important, but they are for work. Most of what happens at the FMWC is, in almost every practical way, indistinguishable from the normal work that millions of people do in spreadsheets every day. You can gussy up the format, shorten the timelines, and raise the stakes all you want -- the reality is you're still asking a bunch of people who make spreadsheets for a living to just make more spreadsheets, even if they're doing it in Vegas. You really can't overstate how important and ubiquitous spreadsheets really are, though. "Electronic spreadsheets" actually date back earlier than computers and are maybe the single most important reason computers first became mainstream. In the late 1970s, a Harvard MBA student named Dan Bricklin started to dream up a software program that could automatically do the math he was constantly doing and re-doing in class. "I imagined a magic blackboard that if you erased one number and wrote a new thing in, all of the other numbers would automatically change, like word processing with numbers," he said in a 2016 TED Talk. This sounds quaint and obvious now, but it was revolutionary then. [...]

Competitive Excel has been around for years, but only in a hobbyist way. Most of the people in this room full of actuaries, analysts, accountants, and investors play Excel the way I play Scrabble or do the crossword -- exercising your brain using tools you understand. But last year's competition became a viral hit on ESPN and YouTube, and this year, the organizers are trying to capitalize. After all, someone points out to me, poker is basically just math, and it's all over TV. Why not spreadsheets? Excel is a tool. It's a game. Now it hopes to become a sport. I've come to realize in my two days in this ballroom that understanding a spreadsheet is like a superpower. The folks in this room make their living on their ability to take some complex thing -- a company's sales, a person's lifestyle, a region's political leanings, a race car -- and pull it apart into its many component pieces. If you can reduce the world down to a bunch of rows and columns, you can control it. Manipulate it. Build it and rebuild it in a thousand new ways, with a couple of hotkeys and an undo button at the ready. A good spreadsheet shows you the universe and gives you the ability to create new ones. And the people in this room, in their dad jeans and short-sleeved button-downs, are the gods on Olympus, bending everything to their will.

After shutting down its awards system last July, Reddit announced that it is bringing it back, with much of the same and some new features. There'll be "a new design for awards, a new award button under eligible posts and a leaderboard showing top awards earned for a comment or a post," reports TechCrunch. From the report: The company sunset its awards program last year along with the ability for users to purchase coins. At the same time, Reddit introduced "Golden Upvotes," which were purchased directly through cash. In a new post, the company said the system wasn't as expressive as awards. "While the golden upvote was certainly simpler in theory, in practice, it missed the mark. It wasn't as fun or expressive as legacy awards, and it was unclear how it benefited the recipient," the social network said.

Users who want to give awards to posts and comments will need to buy "gold," which kind of replaces coins. On a support page, the company mentioned that, on average, awards cost anywhere between 15 to 50 gold. Gold packages in Reddit's mobile apps currently start at $1.99 for 100 gold. Users can buy as much as 2,750 gold for $49.99. The company is also adding some safeguards to the awards system, such as disabling awards in NSFW subreddits, trauma and addiction support subreddits, and subreddits with mature content. Additionally, users will be able to report awards to avoid them being used for moderator removals.