Friday Bill Gates visited Kemmerer, Wyoming (population: 2,656) — where a coal plant was shutting down after 50 years. But Gates was there "to celebrate the latest step in a project that's been more than 15 years in the making: designing and building a next-generation nuclear power plant..."

The new plant will employ "between 200 and 250 people," Gates writes in a blog post, "and those with experience in the coal plant will be able to do many of the jobs — such as operating a turbine and maintaining connections to the power grid — without much retraining." It's called the Natrium plant, and it was designed by TerraPower, a company I started in 2008. When it opens (potentially in 2030), it will be the most advanced nuclear facility in the world, and it will be much safer and produce far less waste than conventional reactors.

All of this matters because the world needs to make a big bet on nuclear. As I wrote in my book How to Avoid a Climate Disaster , we need nuclear power if we're going to meet the world's growing need for energy while also eliminating carbon emissions. None of the other clean sources are as reliable, and none of the other reliable sources are as clean...

Another thing that sets TerraPower apart is its digital design process. Using supercomputers, they've digitally tested the Natrium design countless times, simulating every imaginable disaster, and it keeps holding up. TerraPower's sophisticated work has drawn interest from around the globe, including an agreement to collaborate on nuclear power technology in Japan and investments from the South Korean conglomerate SK and the multinational steel company ArcelorMittal...

I'm excited about this project because of what it means for the future. It's the kind of effort that will help America maintain its energy independence. And it will help our country remain a leader in energy innovation worldwide. The people of Kemmerer are at the forefront of the equitable transition to a clean, safe energy future, and it's great to be partnering with them.
Gates writes that for safety the plant uses liquid sodium (instead of water) to absorb excess heat, and it even has an energy storage system "to control how much electricity it produces at any given time..."

"I'm convinced that the facility will be a win for the local economy, America's energy independence, and the fight against climate change.

An anonymous reader shared this report from Fortune: For eight years now, as millennials have entered their thirties and forties, also known as "homebuying age," Bank of America has surveyed over 1,000 members of the generation once a year for its Home Work series. And for 2023's edition... older millennials (age 31-41) are almost three times as likely to move into a house than an apartment, the survey found...

Migration patterns during the pandemic have clearly established that most homebuyers have wanted to flee big cities, with some "zoomtowns" such as Boise benefiting in particular. But the survey reveals something even more drastic. In a section called "suburban nation," BofA reveals that 43% to 45% of millennials — of every age — expect to buy a house in the suburbs. "We expect the ability to work from home to remain an incentive for young families to seek out more remote suburban and rural markets where housing may be more affordable," wrote the BofA team led by research analyst Elizabeth Suzuki. And remote work is still robust, they added.

Millennials are also looking toward the suburbs for wealth-building. A majority (two-thirds) of them believe that they'll buy a home in the next two years, citing a return on investment as the number one reason for purchasing. The interest is pervasive across the generation, and maybe means that the suburb is in for a new and better revival. And a 2021 study from Pew Research Center found that one in five adults preferred city life, compared to one quarter of adults in 2018...

Millennials reported to BoA that the pandemic increased their likelihood of buying a home...

Slashdot reader indominabledemon shared this article from TechSpot: Games today use highly-detailed textures that can quickly fill the frame buffer on many graphics cards, leading to stuttering and game crashes in recent AAA titles for many gamers... [T]he most promising development in this direction so far comes from Nvidia — neural texture compression could reduce system requirements for future AAA titles, at least when it comes to VRAM and storage.... In a research paper published this week, the company details a new algorithm for texture compression that is supposedly better than both traditional block compression (BC) methods as well as other advanced compression techniques such as AVIF and JPEG-XL.

The new algorithm is simply called neural texture compression (NTC), and as the name suggests it uses a neural network designed specifically for material textures. To make this fast enough for practical use, Nvidia researchers built several small neural networks optimized for each material... [T]extures compressed with NTC preserve a lot more detail while also being significantly smaller than even these same textures compressed with BC techniques to a quarter of the original resolution... Researchers explain the idea behind their approach is to compress all these maps along with their mipmap chain into a single file, and then have them be decompressed in real time with the same random access as traditional block texture compression...

However, NTC does have some limitations that may limit its appeal. First, as with any lossy compression, it can introduce visual degradation at low bitrates. Researchers observed mild blurring, the removal of fine details, color banding, color shifts, and features leaking between texture channels. Furthermore, game artists won't be able to optimize textures in all the same ways they do today, for instance, by lowering the resolution of certain texture maps for less important objects or NPCs. Nvidia says all maps need to be the same size before compression, which is bound to complicate workflows. This sounds even worse when you consider that the benefits of NTC don't apply at larger camera distances.

Perhaps the biggest disadvantages of NTC have to do with texture filtering. As we've seen with technologies like DLSS, there is potential for image flickering and other visual artifacts when using textures compressed through NTC. And while games can utilize anisotropic filtering to improve the appearance of textures in the distance at a minimal performance cost, the same isn't possible with Nvidia's NTC at this point.

An anonymous reader shared this report from BGR: Last year, Microsoft Edge surpassed Safari as the second most popular desktop browser. Now, new data from Statcounter shows that Apple's browser has finally regained second place.

The full ranking shows that Google Chrome remains the most used browser... It's also interesting to note that after Firefox almost surpassed Safari in February of 2022, the browser is still losing its base to Microsoft Edge and Safari... Even the all-mighty Google Chrome has lost a bit of userbase, as it had 66.64% of users last April and now has 66.13%.
The final rankings (with data from April 2023):

• Google Chrome: 66.13%
• Safari: 11.87%
• Microsoft Edge: 11%
• Firefox: 5.65%
• Opera 3.09%
• Internet Explorer: 0.55%

An anonymous reader shared this report from CNN: Ocean surface heat is at record-breaking levels. Temperatures began climbing in mid-March and skyrocketed over the course of several weeks, leaving scientists scrambling to figure out exactly why.

Temperatures have fallen since their peak in April — as they naturally do in the spring — but they are still higher than they have ever been on record for this time of year.... The record may not seem huge — it's nearly two-tenths of a degree higher than the previous record in 2016 — but given how much heat is needed to warm up this huge body of water, "it's a massive amount of energy," Matthew England, professor of ocean and climate dynamics at the University of New South Wales, Australia, told CNN... Some scientists are concerned the scale of these new records could mark the start of an alarming trend. Others say record-breaking temperatures like these are always concerning but to be expected given the human-caused climate crisis.

All agree the consequences are likely to be significant. Warmer oceans bleach coral, kill marine life, increase sea level rise and make the ocean less efficient at absorbing planet-warming pollution — the warmer oceans get, the more the planet will heat.
The science leader at the British Antarctic Survey told CNN that "it's probably too early" to blame El Niño." In fact, the world just emerged from a 3-year La Niña cooling event in March. So instead, CNN gets a different explanation fro Gregory C. Johnson, an oceanographer at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration: "It's a little bit like we've had the freezer door open for a while and it's helped to cool the planet," Johnson said. But even while that freezer has been open, background temperatures have continued to rise. Now the freezer is closed, everything is hotter than before.
Later CNN adds that some scientists are concerned "climate change might be progressing in ways climate models have not predicted." One surprising reason could be the reduction of aerosols in the atmosphere. In 2020, regulations were introduced to limit the amount of sulfur in the fuel ships used — a policy aimed at addressing air pollution. Though air pollution has a significant impact on human health, it also acts as an artificial sunscreen and reflects sunlight away from the Earth. One theory is the absence of aerosols may have turned up the heat, said Karina von Schuckmann [an oceanographer at Mercator Ocean International in France].

The Washington Post reports: TurboTax will begin sending checks next week to nearly 4.4 million low-income Americans whom the company deceived into paying for tax services that should have been free, New York Attorney General Letitia James said.

The checks, part of a $141 million settlement reached in May 2022 between TurboTax owner Intuit and all 50 states and the District of Columbia, are for people who were eligible to file taxes for free through an IRS partner program but were "tricked" into paying TurboTax between 2016 and 2018, James (D) said in a statement Thursday.

The company was also accused of knowingly misleading customers and blocking its landing page for its IRS Free File Program, a public-private partnership with the IRS, from showing up on search engines such as Google. Because Intuit and other companies agreed to participate in that program, the IRS agreed not to offer its own free electronic tax services.

Intuit admitted no wrongdoing in the settlement.

Customers who qualify will receive between $29 and $85, depending on the number of years they paid for the services... Consumers who are eligible for the payments do not need to file a claim and will be notified by email, James's office said Thursday. Checks will be sent automatically and will be mailed throughout May.
"TurboTax's predatory and deceptive marketing cheated millions of low-income Americans who were trying to fulfill their legal duties to file their taxes," said Attorney General James. "Today we are righting that wrong and putting money back into the pockets of hardworking taxpayers who should have never paid to file their taxes." James described it as an effort "to stand up for ordinary Americans and hold companies who cheat consumers accountable," specifically calling out Intuit "for deceiving millions of low-income Americans into paying for tax services that should have been free."

Long-time Slashdot reader schwit1 shared this report from Futurism: We'd need an astronomical amount of resources to construct a Dyson sphere, a giant theoretical shell that would harvest all of a given star's energy, around the Sun. In fact, as science journalist Jaime Green explores in her new book "The Possibility of Life," we'd have to go as far as to demolish a Jupiter-sized planet to build such a megastructure, a concept first devised by physicist Freeman Dyson in 1960...

Not everybody agrees that constructing a Dyson sphere would end up being such a huge undertaking. In an interview with Green, astrophysicist Jason Wright compared such an effort to [the city of] Manhattan, a human and interconnected "megastructure," which was constructed over a long period of time, bit by bit... "It's just every generation made it a little bigger...."

"If the energy is out there to take and it's just gonna fly away to space anyway, then why wouldn't someone take it?" Wright told Green.

Phoronix shares some overlooked news from AMD's openSIL presentation at the OCP Regional Summit in April. Specifically, that AMD openSIL — their open-source x86 silicon initialization library — "is planned to eventually replace AMD's well known AGESA [BIOS utility]" around 2026, and "it will be supported across AMD's entire processor stack — just not limited to EPYC server processors as some were initially concerned..." Raj Kapoor, AMD Fellow and AMD's Chief Firmware Architect, in fact began the AMD openSIL presentation by talking about the challenges they've had with AGESA in adapting it to Coreboot for Chromebook purposes with Ryzen SoCs... With AMD openSIL not expected to be production ready until around 2026, this puts it roughly inline for an AMD Zen 6 or Zen 7 introduction. The proof of concept code for AMD Genoa is expected to come soon...

The presentation also noted that beyond AMD openSIL code being open-source, the openSIL specification will also be open. AMD "invites every silicon vendor" to participate in this open-source system firmware endeavor.

All across North America today, over 2,000 comic book stores are celebrating Free Comic Book Day. As it enters its third decade — the event started in 2001, according to Wikipedia — there'll be over two dozen free comic books to choose from this, and enthusiastic stores trying to dial up the fun even more.

16 stores are also giving away Ant-Man and The Wasp: Quantumania in special "ant-sized" boxes — the size of penny — with tiny versions of the cover art from the full-sized Blu-Ray disc boxes (along with a code for a digital version of the movie). The Bleeding Cool site has a running list of stores doing additional special "cool stuff," including cookie giveaways, discounts on paperbacks and comic books, and personal appearances by comic book writers and artists.

Geek-friendly free comic books this year:

• Dark Horse Comics' Star Wars/ Avatar: The Last Airbender
• D.C. Comics is offering Dawn of DC — Knight Terrors
• Marvel is offering several multi-character books, including Spider-Man/Venom, the Avengers/X-Men, and a sampler of the upcoming graphic novel biography of Stan Lee
• IDW's free comics include the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles
• There's also the official prequel to the new Street Fighter 6 video game
• Also available: Runescape: Untold Tales/God Wars
• Fantagraphics even has a preview of its upcoming Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers book.
• Archie Horror Presents: The Cursed Library

Bleeding Cool also has previews the artwork from Star Trek: Prelude to Day of Blood, a teaser for a coming "comic book crossover event between IDW's main Star Trek comic and the Star Trek: Defiant series" (that's also accompanied by a Lower Decks comic book story).

Just remember, in 2017 NPR had this advice for visiting comics fans. "While you're there, buy something... The comics shops still have to pay for the 'free' FCBD books they stock, and they're counting on the increased foot traffic to lift sales."

Supported by conversations with nearly a dozen former employees, 9to5Mac details the downfall of Brydge -- "a once thriving startup making popular keyboard accessories for iPad, Mac, and Microsoft Surface products." An anonymous reader shares an excerpt from the report: According to nearly a dozen former Brydge employees who spoke to 9to5Mac, Brydge has gone through multiple rounds of layoffs within the past year after at least two failed acquisitions. As it stands today, Brydge employees have not been paid salaries since January. Customers who pre-ordered the company's most recent product have been left in the dark since then as well. Its website went completely offline earlier this year, and its social media accounts have been silent since then as well. Those former Brydge employees largely attribute the company's failure to mismanagement during growth, misleading statements from its two co-CEOs, and an overall hostile working environment that led to a high turnover rate.

For the first time, astronomers have observed a star swallowing a planet. The findings have been published in the journal Nature. MIT News reports: The planetary demise appears to have taken place in our own galaxy, some 12,000 light-years away, near the eagle-like constellation Aquila. There, astronomers spotted an outburst from a star that became more than 100 times brighter over just 10 days, before quickly fading away. Curiously, this white-hot flash was followed by a colder, longer-lasting signal. This combination, the scientists deduced, could only have been produced by one event: a star engulfing a nearby planet.

What of the planet that perished? The scientists estimate that it was likely a hot, Jupiter-sized world that spiraled close, then was pulled into the dying star's atmosphere, and, finally, into its core. A similar fate will befall the Earth, though not for another 5 billion years, when the sun is expected to burn out, and burn up the solar system's inner planets. "For decades, we've been able to see the before and after," says lead author Kishalay De, a postdoc in MIT's Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research. "Before, when the planets are still orbiting very close to their star, and after, when a planet has already been engulfed, and the star is giant. What we were missing was catching the star in the act, where you have a planet undergoing this fate in real-time. That's what makes this discovery really exciting."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Science Magazine: The creamy fruit and nectar-rich flowers of the milk fruit tree are irresistible to Xenohyla truncata, a tree frog native to Brazil. On warm nights, the dusky-colored frogs take to the trees en masse, jostling one another for a chance to nibble the fruit and slurp the nectar. In the process, the frogs become covered in sticky pollen grains -- and might inadvertently pollinate the plants, too. It's the first time a frog -- or any amphibian -- has been observed pollinating a plant, researchers reported last month in Food Webs.

Scientists long thought only insects and birds served as pollinators, but research has revealed that some reptiles and mammals are more than up to the task. Now, scientists must consider whether amphibians are also capable of getting the job done. It's likely that the nectar-loving frogs, also known as Izecksohn's Brazilian tree frogs, are transferring pollen as they move from flower to flower, the authors say. But more research is needed, they add, to confirm that frogs have joined the planet's pantheon of pollinators.

Last year, BMW announced plans to charge a $18 per month subscription for heated seats. Now, Mercedes is considering making better EV engine performance an added subscription surcharge. "Mercedes-Benz electric vehicle owners in North America who want a little more power and speed can now buy 60 horsepower for just $60 a month or, on other models, 80 horsepower for $90 a month," reports CNN. "They won't have to visit a Mercedes dealer to get the upgrade either, or even leave their own driveway. The added power, which will provide a nearly one second decrease in zero-to-60 acceleration, will be available through an over-the-air software patch." Techdirt reports: If you don't want to pay monthly, Mercedes will also let you pay a one time flat fee (usually several thousand dollars) to remove the artificial restrictions they've imposed on your engine. That's, of course, creating additional upward pricing funnel efforts on top of the industry's existing efforts to upsell you on a rotating crop of trims, tiers, and options you probably didn't want.

It's not really clear that regulators have any interest in cracking down on charging dumb people extra for something they already owned and paid for. After all, ripping off gullible consumers is effectively now considered little more than creative marketing by a notable segment of government "leaders" (see: regulatory apathy over misleading hidden fees in everything from hotels to cable TV).

Longtime Slashdot reader SonicSpike shares a report from Engadget: The Biden administration wants to impose a 30 percent tax on the electricity used by cryptocurrency mining operations, and it has included the proposal in its budget for the fiscal year of 2024. In a blog post on the White House website, the administration has formally introduced the Digital Asset Mining Energy or DAME excise tax. It explained that it wants to tax cryptomining firms, because they aren't paying for the "full cost they impose on others," which include environmental pollution and high energy prices.

Crypto mining has "negative spillovers on the environment," the White House continued, and the pollution it generates "falls disproportionately on low-income neighborhoods and communities of color." It added that the operations' "often volatile power consumption " can raise electricity prices for the people around them and cause service interruptions. Further, local power companies are taking a risk if they decide to upgrade their equipment to make their service more stable, since miners can easily move away to another location, even abroad. As Yahoo News noted, there are other industries, such as steel manufacturing, that also use large amounts of electricity but aren't taxed for their energy consumption. In its post, the administration said that cryptomining "does not generate the local and national economic benefits typically associated with businesses using similar amounts of electricity."

Critics believe that the government made this proposal to go after and harm an industry it doesn't support. A Forbes report also suggested that DAME may not be the best solution for the issue, and that taxing the industry's greenhouse gas emissions might be a better alternative. That could encourage mining firms not just to minimize energy use, but also to find cleaner sources of power. It might be difficult to convince the administration to go down that route, though: In its blog post, it said that the "environmental impacts of cryptomining exist even when miners use existing clean power." Apparently, mining operations in communities with hydropower have been observed to reduce the amount of clean power available for use by others. That leads to higher prices and to even higher consumption of electricity from non-clean sources. "If the proposal ever becomes a law, the government would impose the excise tax in phases," adds Engadget. "It would start by adding a 10 percent tax on miners' electricity use in the first year, 20 percent in the second and then 30 percent from the third year onwards."

Vice Media Group is planning to sell to investors for about $400 million -- a fraction of its once high-flying $5.7 billion valuation back in 2017. The investors include Fortress Investment Group and Soros Fund Management, according to the Wall Street Journal. Variety reports: Cash-strapped Vice Media has been searching for a buyer over the past year, to no avail. In February, Nancy Dubuc announced her exit as CEO after almost five years. The company subsequently appointed longtime execs Bruce Dixon and Hozefa Lokhandwala as co-CEOs. Under the proposed sale to "senior lenders," Fortress "plans to find a role for Vice co-founder Shane Smith," who is executive chairman and previously served as CEO prior to Dubuc's hire.

The bankruptcy and sale would "wipe out" most of Vice's other shareholders, including TPG Group and James Murdoch (who invested in the company via his Lupa Systems investment firm), per the Journal report. Vice has been unable to pay many of its vendors and recently secured a $30 million "lifeline" from Fortress, the Journal previously reported. Last week, the New York Times reported that Vice Media was preparing for bankruptcy after being unable to find a buyer. It announced a series of layoffs and said it was pulling the plug on "Vice News Tonight."