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Submission + - How robotic hives and AI are lowering the risk of bee colony collapse (phys.org)

Submitted by alternative_right
alternative_right writes: The unit—dubbed a BeeHome—is an industrial upgrade from the standard wooden beehives, all clad in white metal and solar panels. Inside sits a high-tech scanner and robotic arm powered by artificial intelligence. Roughly 300,000 of these units are in use across the U.S., scattered across fields of almond, canola, pistachios and other crops that require pollination to grow.

AI and robotics are able to replace "90% of what a beekeeper would do in the field," said Beewise Chief Executive Officer and co-founder Saar Safra. The question is whether beekeepers are willing to switch out what's been tried and true equipment.

Submission + - Study finds online searches reduce diversity of group brainstorming ideas (phys.org)

Submitted by alternative_right
alternative_right writes: While the study found no statistically relevant difference between the creativity of individuals with access to internet search and those without, as those individuals were clumped into groups, internet search appeared to stymie their production of ideas.

"This appears to be due to the fact that Google users came up with the same common answers, often in the same order, as they relied on Google, while non-Google users came up with more distinct answers," wrote lead author Danny Oppenheimer, a professor in CMU's Department of Social and Decision Sciences.

Submission + - NASA teams with Netflix to stream rocket launches and spacewalks this summer (nerds.xyz)

Submitted by BrianFagioli
BrianFagioli writes: NASA is coming to Netflix. No, not a drama or sci-fi reboot. The space agency is actually bringing real rocket launches, astronaut spacewalks, and even views of Earth from space directly to your favorite streaming service.

Starting this summer, NASA+ will be available on Netflix, giving the space-curious a front-row seat to live mission coverage and other programming. The space agency is hoping this move helps it connect with a much bigger audience, and considering Netflix reaches over 700 million people, that’s not a stretch.

This partnership is about accessibility. NASA already offers NASA+ for free, without ads, through its app and website. But now it’s going where the eyeballs are. If people won’t come to the space agency, the space agency will come to them.

Comment Re:Raise your hand if you're surprised (Score 1) 179

by swillden (#65486918) Attached to: Earth is Trapping Much More Heat Than Climate Models Forecast

Between all the permafrost melting across Russia to methane to massive fossil fuel use, how can anybody be surprised? I have long viewed the worst possibilities as the most likely. The most likely predictions always seemed pretty damn optimistic. We fucked.

I'm surprised, and you should be too, if your view is evidence-based, because this is a new effect that was not predicted by any of the previous models, which already consider the melting permafrost, methane emissions and fossil fuel use.

Submission + - Space is hard (spacenews.com)

Submitted by RUs1729
RUs1729 writes: For-profit companies are pushing the narrative that they can do space inexpensively. Their track record reveals otherwise: cutting corners won't do it for the foreseeable future.

Submission + - DoJ deal gives HPE the go-ahead for its $14 billion Juniper purchase (telecoms.com)

Submitted by AmiMoJo
AmiMoJo writes: HPE has settled its antitrust case with the US Department of Justice (DoJ), paving the way for its acquisition of rival kit maker Juniper Networks. Under the agreement, HPE has agreed to divest its Instant On unit, which sells a range of enterprise-grade Wi-Fi networking equipment for campus and branch deployments. It has also agreed to license Juniper's Mist AIOps source code – a software suite that enables AI-based network automation and management. HPE can live with that, since its primary motivation for buying Juniper is to improve its prospects in an IT networking market dominated by Cisco, where others like Arista and increasingly Nokia and Nvidia are also trying to make inroads.

Comment: Pour one out for Juniper.

Submission + - Defense Department to stop sharing satellite weather data. (npr.org)

Submitted by Dustin Destree
Dustin Destree writes: Maybe it's conspiracy theory, maybe it's connected, but I remember something about AccuWeather wanting this to happen so only they could get the data, and then sell it to others. No more hurricane data, and it'll be so much easier to deny climate change when you can no longer see the sea ice retreating, or can't afford (if they sell it) access to the data proving so!

Comment OMG thank you (Score 5, Insightful) 126

by pz (#65482788) Attached to: X11 Fork XLibre Released For Testing On Systemd-Free Artix Linux

I hate Wayland. Still so frelling buggy. So many unfulfilled promises. So many things that just worked, and worked well, under X have been broken for so very, very long. I hope the teenagers who repllied "pffft" to the graybeards when they said "windowing is hard, secure remote windowing is really hard," have learned their lesson, who replied "X is just too complicated" have now recognized that they have something worse, who opined "the API is too obscure" have been brought to awareness.

Just because something is new does not mean it is better. Keep repeating that. If an old, working system appears to be complex, there just might be good reasons for it.

I used to be able to run remote windows on kinda slow cable with reasonable responsiveness, back in the day, under X. I could even run a browser. I haven't been able to do any of that under Wayland; opening a remote browser window now takes *minutes*, if it works at all, and I've got fat pipes now, compared to back in the day. Wayland, from the user's perspective, has been and remains an unmitigated disaster.

I'm all for bringing back X. Maybe those guys at MIT knew what they were doing.

Submission + - Sinaloa cartel used phone data and surveillance cameras to find FBI informants, (reuters.com)

Submitted by alternative_right
alternative_right writes: The report said the hacker identified an FBI assistant legal attaché at the U.S. Embassy in Mexico City and was able to use the attaché's phone number "to obtain calls made and received, as well as geolocation data." The report said the hacker also "used Mexico City's camera system to follow the (FBI official) through the city and identify people the (official) met with."

Archive: https://archive.ph/AX47j

Comment Re:Duh (Score 1) 181

by swillden (#65481160) Attached to: New IQ Research Shows Why Smarter People Make Better Decisions

in a world where overpopulation strains every system and food scarcity becomes unavoidable

I suppose, but that's nothing like the world we live in. In our world, food is abundant at never-before-seen levels. Agricultural productivity has not only matched but significantly exceeded population growth. Unless climate change or some catastrophic event has large negative impacts on food production, directly or indirectly, it seems unlikely that the human race will ever again experience significant food scarcity.

Submission + - UV-C light kills nearly everything—except this unusual organism (science.org)

Submitted by sciencehabit
sciencehabit writes: If you’ve ever gotten burned at the beach or swimming pool, you’re no stranger to the Sun bombarding Earth with ultraviolet rays. But the UV light that keeps beachgoers reaching for the sunblock isn’t even the worst the Sun sends our way. Lucky for us, Earth’s ozone layer blocks the Sun’s shortest wave radiation, called UV-C, which is so damaging to cells in high doses that it’s a go-to sterilizer in hospitals.

UV-C is such a killer, in fact, that scientists have questioned whether life can survive on worlds that lack an ozone layer, such as Mars or distant exoplanets. But research published this month in Astrobiology suggests one hardy lichen, a hybrid organism made of algae and fungi, may have cracked the UV-C code with a built-in sunscreen, despite never experiencing these rays in its long evolutionary history.

When scientists brought a sample of the species, the common desert dweller Clavascidium lacinulatum, back to the lab, graduate student Tejinder Singh put the lichen through the wringer. First, Singh dehydrated the lichen, to make sure it couldn’t grow back in real time and mask any UV damage. Then he placed the lichen a few centimeters under a UV lamp and blasted it with radiation. The lichen seemed just fine.

So Singh purchased the most powerful UV-C lamp he could find online, capable of sending out 20 times more radiation than the amount expected on Mars. When he tested the lamp on the most radiation-resistant life form on Earth, the bacterium Deinococcus radiodurans, it died in less than a minute.

After 3 months—likely the highest amount of UV-C radiation ever tested on an organism—Singh pulled the sample so he could finish his master’s thesis in time. About half of the lichen’s algal cells had survived. Then, when the team ground up and cultured part of the surviving lichen, about half of its algal cells sprouted new, green colonies after 2 weeks, showing it maintained the ability to reproduce.

The species may provide a blueprint for surviving on Mars or exoplanets, which don’t have an ozone layer to protect them.

Comment Re:in other words (Score 1) 181

by swillden (#65481068) Attached to: New IQ Research Shows Why Smarter People Make Better Decisions

Because... and bear with me here.... humans developed the LLMs.

I think it's more likely that approximation is necessary to complex, higher-level thinking, and that produces a certain form of error which is therefore inherent in all intelligences capable of it. This can be improved by adding subsystems that compute more precisely, just as humans do, using processes and equipment to augment their intellectual abilities, ranging from complex computation engines to pencil and paper (Einstein said "My pencil and me are smarter than me").

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