In no place Barnes & Noble's diminished fortune felt as intensely as it was in the Bronx, where gratitude for what it provided far outweighed snobbishness. From a report: Five years ago when Barnes & Noble announced that it was closing the only branch it had opened there, residents and local civic leaders were angry and heartbroken and fought to save it. At the time, there were 90 bookstores in Manhattan. But the Bronx essentially had just the one, and now it would disappear.

Noelle Santos, who worked in human resources, was especially torn up. In 2014 she was on Facebook when she stumbled upon a petition to save Barnes & Noble. It pointed out how alarming it was that the Bronx was getting more and more cellphone stores and chain restaurants but would be left without a place to buy novels or training manuals or SAT preparation guides. Ms. Santos grew up in the Bronx, in Soundview, a rough neighborhood, and she stayed in the Bronx for college and graduate school. But she suddenly felt a radical need to do change things.

"Up to that point I had measured my success by how far I could get away from the Bronx," she told me recently. "I was disappointed in myself for thinking about leaving a community in no better condition that I had found it," she said. "I had never been inside an independent book store before I decided to open one." On Saturday, she will open such a store, The Lit. Bar.

In the not-so-distant future, pending regulatory approvals, self-driving cars will be everywhere. A handful of top companies are working to improve the reliability of their autonomous vehicles as we speak. But what about their design?

What are some changes that you think could be made to the exterior and interior of a self-driving car? If someone is not required to steer the wheel, do they even need to look ahead? One can argue that seats in the car should be rearchitected to face each other. Tesla founder and CEO Elon Musk suggested this week that in two years, his automaker firm could explore cars "with no steering wheels or pedals." What would you like to see in a self-driving car?

New submitter scullyitsaliens writes: The Reddit clone Voat has reportedly been contacted by a "US agency" about threats being made on the censorship-free website, according to its founder Justin Chastain. In a post on Wednesday, Chastain (who goes by PuttItOut on Voat) told users they need to "chill on the 'threats,'" as the platform had been officially approached by an unnamed agency over some of its content. Chastain said he didn't want to litigate free speech, but that Voat would cooperate with law enforcement and remove "gray area" posts if asked. Voat users took offense to the perceived curtailing of their ability to post racial slurs and endorse violence.

If free nations demand companies store data locally, it legitimizes that practice for authoritarian nations, which can then steal that data for their own nefarious purposes, according to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg. From a report: He laid out the threat in a new 93-minute video of a discussion with Sapiens author Yuval Noah Harari released today as part of Zuckerberg's 2019 personal challenge of holding public talks on the future of tech. Zuckerberg has stated that Facebook will refuse to comply with laws and set up local data centers in authoritarian countries where that data could be snatched. Russia and China already have data localization laws, but privacy concerns and regulations proposals could see more nations adopt the restrictions.

Germany now requires telecommunications metadata to be stored locally, and India does something similar for payments data. While in democratic or justly ruled nations, the laws can help protect user privacy and give governments more leverage over tech companies, they pave the way for similar laws in nations where governments might use military might to see the data. That could help them enhance their surveillance capabilities, disrupt activism or hunt down dissidents.

During its Q1 earnings call, Intel provided an update regarding its 10 nm process technology as well as the ramp up of its Ice Lake-U processor for notebooks, which is the company's first 10 nm design that will be mass produced and broadly available. From a report: Qualification for the new processors has already started, so systems based on Ice Lake-U will be available by the holidays, as promised. Furthermore, Intel believes that it will be able to ship more 10 nm parts than it originally anticipated. Intel started production of its Ice Lake-U processors in Q1, but Intel has been building up a stockpile of them first before they are sent to PC makers for qualification. Once the CPUs are qualified -- something that Intel expects to happen in Q2 -- the manufacturer can start sales/shipments of these CPUs, which will likely happen in Q3. Considering the lead-time required to get built systems on to store shelves, Ice Lake-U-based PCs are on track to hit the market in Q4 (something Intel reaffirmed today).

Sinemia, a would-be rival to MoviePass, is closing down its U.S. operations -- telling customers it could not find "a path to sustainability" amid legal headaches, competitive pressures and the challenging economics of the business model. From a report: The company announced the shutdown in a notice on its website Thursday. "While we are proud to have created a best in market service, our efforts to cover the cost of unexpected legal proceedings and raise the funds required to continue operations have not been sufficient," Sinemia said in the statement. "The competition in the U.S. market and the core economics of what it costs to deliver Sinemia's end-to-end experience ultimately [led] us to the decision of discontinuing our U.S. operations." From the notice, it's not clear whether Sinemia will be extending refunds that may be due to subscribers.

Amazon is in discussion with various large music rights-holders regarding the launch of a high fidelity music streaming platform -- and that at least one major record company has already agreed to license it, news outlet Music Business Worldwide reported this week. sqorbit shares a report: MBW has heard this whisper from several high-placed music industry sources, who say the price of Amazon's new tier will likely be in the region of $15 per month. It's expected to launch before the end of 2019. "It's a better bit rate, better than CD quality," said one source. "Amazon is working on it as we speak: they're currently scoping out how much catalog they can get from everyone and how they'll ingest it." The best known existing hi-def music streaming offering comes from TIDAL, whose TIDAL Hi-FI subscription tier costs $19.99 per month and offers CD-quality lossless streams at 44.1 kHz / 16 bit. In addition, TIDAL also offers a 'Masters' quality offering for pickier audiophiles, which presents thousands of albums at 96 kHz / 24 bit.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Firefox browser made by the non-profit Mozilla Foundation, was born as "Phoenix." It rose from the ashes of Netscape Navigator, slain by Microsoft's Internet Explorer. In 2012 Mozilla created Firefox OS, to rival Apple's iOS and Google's Android mobile operating systems. Unable to compete with the duopoly, Mozilla killed the project. Another phoenix has arisen from it [Editor's note: the link may be paywalled]. KaiOS, an operating system conjured from the defunct software, powered 30m devices in 2017 and another 50m in 2018. Most were simple flip-phones sold in the West for about $80 apiece, or even simpler ones which Indians and Indonesians can have for as little as $20 or $7, respectively.

Smartphones start at about $100. The company behind the software, also called KaiOS and based in Hong Kong, designed it for smart-ish phones -- with an old-fashioned number pad and long battery life, plus 4G connectivity, popular apps such as Facebook and modern features like contactless payments, but not snazzy touchscreens. Most such devices are found in India. Reliance Jio, a network that has upended the local mobile industry with heavily discounted 4G data plans, sells subsidised, Jio-branded phones that use KaiOS software. Google, which invested $22m in Kaios last year, prioritises getting people in emerging markets online, where it can sell their attention to advertisers, over getting them onto Android smartphones. Smart-ish phones help with this.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Michael Leggett is even more annoyed with Gmail than you are. "It's like Lucky Charms got spewed all over the screen," he says to me, as he scrolls through his inbox. It's true. Folders, contacts, Google apps like Docs and Drive -- and at least half a dozen notifications -- all clutter Gmail at any given moment. And of course, there's that massive Gmail logo that sits in the upper left-hand corner of the screen. Just in case you forgot that you just typed "gmail.com" into your browser bar three seconds ago. "Go look at any desktop app and tell me how many have a huge fucking logo in the top left," rants Leggett. "C'mon. It's pure ego, pure bullshit. Drop the logo. Give me a break."

Rather than sit there and stew, Leggett decided to do something about it: He created a free Chrome extension called Simplify, where all the extraneous folders and functions overloading Gmail seem to melt away, leaving you with a calm screen and nothing but your messages. It's understatedly beautiful, and every button just seems like it's in the right place. In fact, it feels a little too good for some random free Chrome extension made by some random developer. Let's just say that Leggett was highly qualified for the job. You see, Leggett was actually the lead designer for Gmail from 2008 to 2012. He also cofounded the since-discontinued Inbox, which attempted to reimagine Gmail for the modern era.

Hundreds of students and faculty at two universities in Los Angeles have been asked to stay home unless they can prove that they've been vaccinated against measles. From a report: The LA campuses of the University of California and California State University imposed the quarantine after they became aware of people infected with measles who had potentially exposed hundreds. At UCLA, a student exposed at least 500 people earlier this month; at Cal State, someone with measles went to a library and encountered hundreds. UCLA was notified by the LA County Department of Public Health that one of its students had contracted measles. After identifying people the infected student might have come in contact with while contagious, the school asked them to provide proof of immunization. On Wednesday, 119 people who couldn't provide proof were quarantined. Of those, dozens were able to prove immunity and were released from quarantine by Thursday afternoon. But 82 were still quarantined, and "a few may need to remain in quarantine for up to seven days," the school said in a statement.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Go to an activist, technologist, or journalist gathering, and you may find a free pile of Google's security keys, dubbed Titan. These are small devices a Gmail user can plug into their computer via USB to make their account much harder to hack. The keys don't just work with Google accounts; Twitter and other large sites now support hardware security tokens too. But if you're an activist inside Iran, Sudan, Syria, Cuba, the region of Crimea, or North Korea, Google probably won't give you a Titan key. Google bars nonprofits and other groups from providing these tools, or promoting the availability of any Google product to activists in those countries, according to two independent sources familiar with Google's approach and a legal document viewed by Motherboard.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: What in the world is going on over at Samsung in the wake of the Galaxy Fold delay? The whole situation keeps refusing to normalize, and instead gets weirder nearly every day. The latest is that iFixit has decided to honor a Samsung request to pull its Galaxy Fold teardown off the internet, even though Samsung apparently didn't ask iFixit to do so directly. This oddity follows AT&T's seemingly arbitrary decision to email a potential ship date for the Galaxy Fold despite the fact that Samsung hasn't officially set a new release date. By requesting that iFixit pull the teardown, Samsung is apparently willing to risk the Streisand effect when it comes to people clamoring to see the innards of its device. Here's what iFixit has to say on the matter: "We were provided our Galaxy Fold unit by a trusted partner. Samsung has requested, through that partner, that iFixit remove its teardown. We are under no obligation to remove our analysis, legal or otherwise. But out of respect for this partner, whom we consider an ally in making devices more repairable, we are choosing to withdraw our story until we can purchase a Galaxy Fold at retail."

hackingbear shares a report: Xiamen University of China, in partnership with a private aerospace company in Beijing, claims to have launched and landed a hypersonic prototype winged rocket that could travel faster than five times the speed of sound. The success of the experiment means that Chinese engineers are one step closer to building a full-fledged rocket that is capable reaching anywhere in the world within two hours and be recycled.

The rocket, named Jia Geng 1, reached a maximum altitude of 26.2 kilometers (16.3 miles) -- about one-third of the way to space -- before returning to the ground during the landmark launch on Tuesday over Gobi Desert, said the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics of Xiamen University. The design enables the rocket to ride on two layers of extremely hot gas known as "shock waves" -- one under its belly and the other in the air-inlet duct for its ramjet engine, unlike other experimental hypersonic vehicles such as Boeing's X-51 Waverider which rides on one layer of "shock wave," according to South China Morning Post citing members of the team. The new design has some intriguing advantages: it can make the transition from supersonic to hypersonic speeds more smoothly, create more lift, and allow the aircraft to travel farther using less fuel.

Slashdot reader The Snazster shares a report from ScienceDaily, reporting on materials provided by Johns Hopkins University: New measurements from NASA's Hubble Space Telescope confirm that the Universe is expanding about 9% faster than expected based on its trajectory seen shortly after the big bang, astronomers say. The new measurements, published April 25 in the Astrophysical Journal Letters, reduce the chances that the disparity is an accident from 1 in 3,000 to only 1 in 100,000 and suggest that new physics may be needed to better understand the cosmos.

In this study, [Adam Riess, Bloomberg Distinguished Professor of Physics and Astronomy at The Johns Hopkins University, Nobel Laureate and the project's leader] and his SH0ES (Supernovae, H0, for the Equation of State) Team analyzed light from 70 stars in our neighboring galaxy, the Large Magellanic Cloud, with a new method that allowed for capturing quick images of these stars. The stars, called Cepheid variables, brighten and dim at predictable rates that are used to measure nearby intergalactic distances. The usual method for measuring the stars is incredibly time-consuming; the Hubble can only observe one star for every 90-minute orbit around Earth. Using their new method called DASH (Drift And Shift), the researchers using Hubble as a "point-and-shoot" camera to look at groups of Cepheids, thereby allowing the team to observe a dozen Cepheids in the same amount of time it would normally take to observe just one. [...] As the team's measurements have become more precise, their calculation of the Hubble constant has remained at odds with the expected value derived from observations of the early universe's expansion by the European Space Agency's Planck satellite based on conditions Planck observed 380,000 years after the Big Bang. "This is not just two experiments disagreeing," Riess explained. "We are measuring something fundamentally different. One is a measurement of how fast the universe is expanding today, as we see it. The other is a prediction based on the physics of the early universe and on measurements of how fast it ought to be expanding. If these values don't agree, there becomes a very strong likelihood that we're missing something in the cosmological model that connects the two eras."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Phys.Org: The celestial phenomenon known as STEVE is likely caused by a combination of heating of charged particles in the atmosphere and energetic electrons like those that power the aurora, according to new research. In a new study, scientists found STEVE's source region in space and identified two mechanisms that cause it. Last year, the obscure atmospheric lights became an internet sensation. Typical auroras, the northern and southern lights, are usually seen as swirling green ribbons spreading across the sky. But STEVE is a thin ribbon of pinkish-red or mauve-colored light stretching from east to west, farther south than where auroras usually appear. Even more strange, STEVE is sometimes joined by green vertical columns of light nicknamed the "picket fence."

Authors of a new study published in AGU's journal Geophysical Research Letters analyzed satellite data and ground images of STEVE events and conclude that the reddish arc and green picket fence are two distinct phenomena arising from different processes. The picket fence is caused by a mechanism similar to typical auroras, but STEVE's mauve streaks are caused by heating of charged particles higher up in the atmosphere, similar to what causes light bulbs to glow. "Aurora is defined by particle precipitation, electrons and protons actually falling into our atmosphere, whereas the STEVE atmospheric glow comes from heating without particle precipitation," said Bea Gallardo-Lacourt, a space physicist at the University of Calgary and co-author of the new study. "The precipitating electrons that cause the green picket fence are thus aurora, though this occurs outside the auroral zone, so it's indeed unique."