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Submission + - Alexei Navalny has died in prison. Vladimir Putin is suspect. (archive.is)

Submitted by echo123
echo123 writes: Alexei Navalny has died in a Siberian prison. A great many in the international community have blamed Vladimir Putin for Alexei Navalny's death, including US President Joe Biden. Only a day earlier in a videotaped court proceeding, Navalny appeared in good health and spirits. Former president Trump has yet to comment on his Truth Social account or elsewhere.

Submission + - Big name cancer institute is correcting dozens of papers and retracting others (nbcnews.com) 1

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: The Dana-Farber Cancer Institute has requested the retraction of six studies and corrections in another 31 papers after a scathing critique drew attention to alleged errors a blogger and biologist said range from sloppiness to “really serious concerns.”

The allegations — against top scientists at the prestigious Boston-based institute, which is a teaching affiliate of Harvard Medical School — put the institute at the center of a roiling debate about research misconduct, how to police scientific integrity and whether the organizational structure of academic science incentivizes shortcuts or cheating.

The criticism also spotlights how artificial intelligence is playing a growing role in catching sloppy or dubious science.

Submission + - Precision Agriculture Has Its Cassandra. His Name Is Kevin. (substack.com) 1

Submitted by chicksdaddy
chicksdaddy writes: Farming in the United States is in the midst of a major transformation — the biggest since the arrival of mechanized agriculture more than a century ago.The transformative technology back then was the internal combustion engine, which allowed farmers to power a wide range of new machines and mechanize previously manual implements from tractors and reapers to combine harvesters.The transformative technology now? Precision agriculture, a catch-all term that describes a constellation of technologies that includes Internet- and GPS connected agricultural equipment, highly accurate remote sensors, “big data” analytics and cloud computing.

Once it is broadly adopted, precision agriculture technology promises to further reduce the need for human labor to run farms even more than the combustion engine did. (Autonomous equipment means you no longer even need drivers!) But the risks it poses to small farms and farming communities are much bigger than that. First, as the USDA notes on its website (https://www.nifa.usda.gov/grants/programs/precision-geospatial-sensor-technologies-programs/adoption-precision-agriculture): the scale and high capital costs of precision agriculture technology tend to favor large, corporate producers over smaller farms. Then there are the systemic risks to U.S. agriculture of an increasingly connected and consolidated agriculture sector, with a few major OEMs having the ability to remotely control and manage access to- and maintenance of vital equipment on millions of U.S. farms. That includes the risk of disruption due to cyber attacks on precision farming hardware, software and services — an issue that agricultural equipment makers are scrambling to address (https://www.forbes.com/sites/paulfroberts/2021/06/20/under-scrutiny-big-ag-scrambles-to-address-cyber-risk/), but reluctant to discuss.

The biggest risk, however, comes from the reams of valuable and proprietary operational data that precision agriculture equipment generates and collects about the operation of a farm — from soil quality to the application of fertilizers and other agents, to crop yields. For centuries, such information resided in farmers’ heads, or on written or (more recently) digital records that they owned and controlled exclusively, typically passing that knowledge and data down to succeeding generation of farm owners. Precision agriculture technology wrests it from the farmer’s control and shares it with equipment manufacturers and service providers — often without the explicit understanding of the farmers themselves, and almost always without monetary compensation to the farmer for the data. Over time, this massive transfer of knowledge from individual farmers or collectives to multinational corporations risks beggaring farmers by robbing them of one of their most vital assets: data, and turning them into little more than passive caretakers of automated equipment managed, controlled and accountable to distant corporate masters.

That’s a dark view of the future — and one that its hard to hear over the “rah rah rah!” of precision agriculture’s (corporate funded) boosters. But its not like nobody sees the writing on the wall, or is sounding the alarm bell. The blog Fight to Repair News (http://fighttorepair.news) recently interviewed Kevin Kenney an Alternative Fuel Systems Engineer at Grassroots Energy in Nebraska and one of the loudest voices warning about the dangers posed by precision agriculture technologies, including the wholesale theft and monetization of proprietary farmer data.

Comment Top-level Boeing managers quit. (Score 5, Interesting) 99

A Slashdot comment I posted, copied below: Top-level Boeing managers quit.

The Long-Forgotten Flight That Sent Boeing Off Course

"A company once driven by engineers became driven by finance."

Boeing must change leadership: Former employee

Quoting that story:

Boeing executives "need to get out of their corporate headquarters and they need to spend time with their troops on the factory floor and they need to understand what they're dealing with," Pierson, a former Boeing Senior Manager and a whistleblower on similar issues in 2019, adding: "If it was up to me, I would absolutely advocate the change of leadership."

Comment Management requires 3 kinds of capabilities (Score 5, Insightful) 99

Management of high-technology companies requires 3 kinds of capabilities:
1) Thorough interest in many areas of the technology.
2) Strong, careful, caring interest in people.
3) Concern for the complicated issues of finances.

News stories have indicated that Boeing management focuses on finances.

Submission + - Fusion research facility's final tritium experiments yield new energy record (phys.org)

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: The Joint European Torus (JET), one of the world’s largest and most powerful fusion machines, has demonstrated the ability to reliably generate fusion energy, while simultaneously setting a world record in energy output.

These notable accomplishments represent a significant milestone in the field of fusion science and engineering.

In JET’s final deuterium-tritium experiments (DTE3), high fusion power was consistently produced for five seconds, resulting in a ground-breaking record of 69 megajoules using a mere 0.2 milligrams of fuel.

Submission + - Ring video doorbell customers angry at 43% price hike (bbc.co.uk)

Submitted by Alain Williams
Alain Williams writes: Users of Ring video doorbells have reacted angrily to a huge price hike being introduced in March.

After buying the devices, customers can pay a subscription to store footage on the cloud, download clips and get discounted products.
That subscription is going up 43%, from £34.99 to £49.99 per device, per year, for basic plan customers.

The firm, which is owned by Amazon, insisted it still provided "some of the best value in the industry."
Its customers appear not to to agree.

Submission + - Comcast Reluctantly Agrees To Stop Its Misleading '10G Network' Claims (arstechnica.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Comcast has reluctantly agreed to discontinue its "Xfinity 10G Network" brand name after losing an appeal of a ruling that found the marketing term was misleading. It will keep using the term 10G in other ways, however. Verizon and T-Mobile both challenged Comcast's advertising of 10G, a term used by cable companies since it was unveiled in January 2019 by industry lobby group NCTA-The Internet & Television Association. We wrote in 2019 that the cable industry's 10G marketing was likely to confuse consumers and seemed to be a way of countering 5G hype generated by wireless companies.

10G doesn't refer to the 10th generation of a technology. It is a reference to potential 10Gbps broadband connections, which would be much faster than the actual speeds on standard cable networks today. The challenges lodged against Comcast marketing were filed with the advertising industry's self-regulatory system run by BBB National Programs. BBB's National Advertising Division (NAD) ruled against Comcast in October 2023, but Comcast appealed to the National Advertising Review Board (NARB). The NARB announced its ruling today, agreeing with the NAD that "Comcast should discontinue use of the term 10G, both when used in the name of the service itself ('Xfinity 10G Network') as well as when used to describe the Xfinity network. The use of 10G in a manner that is not false or misleading and is consistent with the panel decision is not precluded by the panel recommendations."

Comcast agreed to make the change in an advertiser's statement that it provided to the NARB. "Although Comcast strongly disagrees with NARB's analysis and approach, Comcast will discontinue use of the brand name 'Xfinity 10G Network' and will not use the term '10G' in a manner that misleadingly describes the Xfinity network itself," Comcast said. Comcast said it disagrees with "the recommendation to discontinue the brand name" because the company "makes available 10Gbps of Internet speed to 98 percent of its subscribers upon request." But those 10Gbps speeds aren't available in Comcast's typical service plans and require a fiber-to-the-home connection instead of a standard cable installation. Comcast said it may still use 10G in ways that are less likely to confuse consumers. "Consistent with the panel's recommendation... Comcast reserves the right to use the term '10G' or 'Xfinity 10G' in a manner that does not misleadingly describe the Xfinity network itself," the company said.

Submission + - Fossil fuel industry knew about climate change since 1954 (theguardian.com) 1

Submitted by smooth wombat
smooth wombat writes: Newly uncovered documents show that as early as 1954, the fossil fuel industry was aware of potential climate change from the burning of fossil fuels. This came about through their own funding to study the effects of burning fossil fuels.

A coalition of oil and car manufacturing interests provided $13,814 (about $158,000 in today’s money) in December 1954 to fund Keeling’s earliest work in measuring CO2 levels across the western US, the documents reveal.

Keeling would go on to establish the continuous measurement of global CO2 at the Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii. This “Keeling curve” has tracked the steady increase of the atmospheric carbon that drives the climate crisis and has been hailed as one of the most important scientific works of modern times.

In the research proposal for the money – uncovered by Rebecca John, a researcher at the Climate Investigations Center, and published by the climate website DeSmog – Keeling’s research director, Samuel Epstein, wrote about a new carbon isotope analysis that could identify “changes in the atmosphere” caused by the burning of coal and petroleum.

“The possible consequences of a changing concentration of the CO2 in the atmosphere with reference to climate, rates of photosynthesis, and rates of equilibration with carbonate of the oceans may ultimately prove of considerable significance to civilization,” Epstein, a researcher at the California Institute of Technology (or Caltech), wrote to the group in November 1954.

Submission + - Soon, Only Republicans Will Get Cancer (wired.com) 1

Submitted by Applehu Akbar
Applehu Akbar writes: Another new use for messenger RNA is emerging: use of lipid carriers to place cancer-fighting compounds precisely into cancerous tissue. Using mRNA to treat cancer works in the same way as in Covid-19 vaccines. Tumor cells notoriously evade the immune system, going undetected. But synthetic mRNA can direct cancerous cells to make certain proteins that alert the immune system to the tumor’s presence.

Submission + - Chinese Company Releases World's First Mass Produced Nuclear Battary (tomshardware.com)

Submitted by hackingbear
hackingbear writes: Chinese company Betavolt has announced an atomic energy battery for consumers with a touted 50-year lifespan without charging. Betavolt says that its nuclear battery will target aerospace, AI devices, medical, MEMS systems, intelligent sensors, small drones, and robots – and may eventually mean manufacturers can sell smartphones that never need charging. However, the BV100, which is in the pilot stage ahead of mass production, doesn’t offer a lot of power. This 15 x 15 x 5mm battery delivers 100 microwatts at 3 volts. The new BV100 is claimed to be a disruptive product on two counts. Firstly, a safe miniature atomic battery with 50 years of maintenance-free stamina is a breakthrough. Secondly, Betavolt claims it is the only company in the world with the technology to dope large-size diamond semiconductor materials, as used by the BV100. The Betavolt BV100, built using nickel-63 which decays to a stable isotope of copper, is claimed to be safe for consumers and won’t leak radiation even if subjected to gunshots or puncture, unlike power cells developed by the US and USSR in the 1960s. Its 1-watt successor is scheduled for next year, while the company is investigating isotopes such as strontium-90, promethium-147, and deuterium to develop atomic energy batteries with higher power levels and even longer service lives – up to 230 years.

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