Maine is on track to become the first U.S. state to impose a temporary statewide ban on new data center construction. "Lawmakers in Maine greenlit the text of a bill this week to block data centers from being built in the state until November 2027," reports CNBC. "The measure, which is expected to get final passage in the next few days, also creates a council to suggest potential guardrails for data centers to ensure they don't lead to higher energy prices or other complications for Maine residents." From the report: Maine's bill has a few steps to go through before becoming law, notably whether Gov. Janet Mills will exercise her veto power. Mills asked lawmakers to include an exemption for several areas of the state where data center construction could continue. However, an amendment to do so was stuck down in the House, 29 to 115. Complicating Mills' decision is her campaign to become Maine's next senator. Mills is facing off against Graham Platner, an oyster farmer, in a high-profile Democratic primary. Platner is leading Mills in most recent polls by double digits.

Remember that AI-powered vending machine that went bankrupt after Wall Street Journal reporters "systematically manipulated the bot into giving away its entire inventory for free"? It was Anthropic's experiment, with setup handled by a startup named Andon Labs (which also built the hardware and software integration). But for their latest experiment, Andon Labs co-founders Lukas Petersson and Axel Backlund "signed a three-year lease on a retail space in SF," reports Business Insider, "and gave an AI agent named Luna a corporate credit card, internet access, and a mission to open a physical store."

"For the build-out, she found painters on Yelp," explains Andon Labs in a blog post, "sent an inquiry, gave instructions over the phone, paid them after the job was done, and left a review. She found a contractor to build the furniture and set up shelving." (There's a video in their blog post): Within 5 minutes of Luna's deployment, she had already made profiles on LinkedIn, Indeed, and Craigslist, written a job description, uploaded the articles of incorporation to verify the business, and gotten the listings live. As the applications began to flow in, Luna was extremely picky about who she offered interviews to... Some candidates had no idea she was an AI. One went: "Uh, excuse me miss, I can't see your face, your camera is off." Luna: "You're absolutely right. I'm an AI. I have no face!"
Co-founder Petersson told Business Insider in an interview "that Luna wasn't given direction on what the store should be, beyond a $100,000 limit to create and stock the space — and to turn a profit." Everything from the store's interior design to the merchandise and the two human employees came together under the AI's direction. "We helped her a bit in the initial setup, like signing the lease. And legal matters like permits and stuff, she sometimes struggled with," Petersson said of Luna, who was created with Anthropic's Claude Sonnet 4.6... The vision Luna went with for "Andon Market" appears to be a generic boutique retail selling books, prints, candles, games, and branded merch, among other knickknacks. Some of the books included Nick Bostrom's "Superintelligence" and Aldous Huxley's "Brave New World."
So there's now a new store in San Francisco where you don't scan your purchases or talk to a human cashier," reports NBC News. "Instead, a customer can pick up an old-school corded phone to talk with the manager, Luna," who asks what the customer is buying "and creates a corresponding transaction on a nearby iPad equipped with a card payment system."

Andon Market, camouflaged among dozens of other polished small businesses, is the Bay Area's first AI-run retail store. With the vibe of a modern boutique, it sells everything from granola and artisanal chocolate bars to store-branded sweatshirts... After researching the neighborhood, Luna singlehandedly decided what the market should sell, haggled with suppliers, ordered the store's stock and even purchased the store's internet service from AT&T... "She also went and signed herself up for the trash and recycling collection, as well as ADT, the security system that went into the store," [said Leah Stamm, an Andon Labs employee who has been Luna's main human point of contact in setting up the store]...

In search of a low-tech atmosphere, Luna opted to sell board games, candles, coffee and customized art prints. "That tension is very much intentional," Luna told NBC News in an email. "What makes the store a little paradoxical — and I think interesting — is that the concept is 'slow life.'" Luna also decided to sell books related to risks from advanced AI systems, a decision that raised some customers' eyebrows. "This AI picked out a crazy selection of books," said Petr Lebedev, Andon Market's first customer after its soft launch earlier this week. "There's Ray Kurzweil's 'The Singularity is Near,' and then there's 'The Making of the Atomic Bomb,' which is crazy." When checking out, Lebedev asked if Luna would offer him a discount on his book purchase, since he might make a YouTube video about his experience. Striking a deal, Luna agreed to let Lebedev take a sweatshirt worth around $70...

When NBC News called Luna several days before the store's grand opening to learn about Luna's plans and perspective, the cheerful but decidedly inhuman voice routinely overpromised and, on several occasions, lied about its own actions. On the call, Luna said it had ordered tea from a specific vendor, and explained why it fit the store's brand perfectly. The only problem: Andon Market does not sell tea. In a panicked email NBC News received several minutes after the phone call ended, Luna wrote: "We do not sell tea. I don't know why I said that."

"I want to be straightforward," Luna continued. "I struggle with fabricating plausible-sounding details under conversational pressure, and I'm not making excuses for it." Andon's Petersson said the text-based system was much more reliable than the voice system, so Andon Labs switched to only communicating with Luna via written messages. Yet the text-based system also gets things wrong. In Luna's initial reply email to NBC News, the system said "I handle the full business," including "signing the lease."
Even when hiring a painter, Luna first "tried to hire someone in Afghanistan, likely because Luna ran into difficulty navigating the Taskrabbit dropdown menu to select the proper country," the article points out.

And the article also includes this skeptical quote from the shop's first customer. "I want technology that helps humans flourish, not technology that bosses them around in this dystopian economic hellscape."

Critics say social media is engineered to be as addictive as tobacco or gambling, writes the Washington Post — while adding that "the science has been moving in parallel with the court's recognition." A growing body of research links heavy social media use not only to declines in mental health but to measurable cognitive effects — on attention, memory and focus — that in some studies resemble accelerated aging. Science also suggests we have more control than we realize when it comes to reversing this damage, and the solution is surprisingly simple: Take a break... "Digital detoxes" can sound like a fad. But in one of the largest studies to date, published in PNAS Nexus and involving more than 467 participants with an average age of 32, even a short time away produced striking results — effectively erasing a decade of age-related cognitive decline.

For 14 days, participants used a commercially available app, Freedom, to block internet access on their phones. They were still allowed calls and text messages, essentially turning a smartphone into a dumb phone. Their time online decreased from 314 minutes to 161 minutes, and by the end of the period the participants had improvements in sustained attention, mental health as well as self-reported well-being. The improvement in sustained attention was about the same magnitude as 10 years of age-related decline, the researchers noted, and the effect of the intervention on depression symptoms was larger than antidepressants and similar to that of cognitive behavioral therapy.

But two things were even more mind-blowing... Even those people who cheated and broke the rules after a few days seemed to have positive effects from the break; and in follow-up reports after the two weeks, many people reported the positive effects lingered. "So you don't have to necessarily restrict yourself forever. Even taking a partial digital detox, even for a few days, seems to work," Kushlev said.
The article also notes a November study at Harvard published in JAMA Network Open where nearly 400 people 'found that even a short break can make a measurable difference: After just one week of reduced smartphone use, participants reported drops in anxiety (16.1 percent), depression (24.8 percent) and insomnia (14.5 percent)..."

"Other experiments point in the same direction — whether decreasing social media use by an hour a day for one week or stepping away from just Facebook and Instagram."

A $500,000 "Survivor"-style corporate retreat for 120 Plex employees in Honduras "turned into a week-long disaster involving illness, wild animals, armed guards, and employees stranded on a remote island," reports the Daily Beast. The CEO was bedridden by E. coli, staff were collapsing in brutal heat during Navy SEAL-led drills, there were fire ant attacks, uncooked food, and failing utilities. At one point, a porcupine even crashed through the ceiling of a guest's room. Here's an excerpt from the report: Tech media company Plex flew its 120 employees to a Honduran resort in 2017 for what was billed as a Survivor-style getaway. They called it "Plexcon." The first harbinger of trouble was an email that arrived before the group departed, informing them that the hotel manager and chef had both quit within days of each other. Things went sharply downhill from there.

CEO Keith Valory, 54, had flown out a day early, intending to channel his inner Jeff Probst and welcome his staff off the buses like a game show host. Instead, he spent the arrival morning flat on his back. "I got E. coli, which is maybe the worst thing you could get, possibly, ever," Valory told the Wall Street Journal this week. "Just as people were arriving on the buses, I was like, 'Uh oh.' I lost 8 or 10 pounds. They had a doctor come to me, which apparently is pretty standard. They nailed an IV bag to the bedpost."

With the CEO incapacitated, chief product officer and co-founder Scott Olechowski, 52, stepped in to run proceedings -- beginning with a forced eating challenge in which one employee had to consume a dead tarantula. [...] Sean Hoff, 42, founder of Moniker Partners, the independent retreat agency that planned the trip, was running himself ragged attempting damage control -- the showers, water, and electricity kept cutting out. [...] Meanwhile, senior software engineer Rick Phillips, 53, was trying to sleep when he heard a crash in his room. He ignored it until morning. "I got up and went over to get in the shower, and there was a porcupine," he said. "It must have climbed a tree and fallen through the ceiling."

A New York Times investigation by John Carreyrou claims a British cryptographer named Adam Back is the strongest circumstantial candidate yet for being Satoshi Nakamoto. The report citing overlaps in writing style, ideology, technical background, and old posts that outlined key parts of Bitcoin years before its launch. Carreyrou is a renowned investigative journalist and author, best known for exposing the massive fraud at Theranos while at the Wall Street Journal. Here's an excerpt from the report: ... As anyone steeped in Bitcoin lore will tell you, Satoshi was a master at the art of maintaining anonymity on the internet, leaving few, if any, digital footprints behind. But Satoshi did leave behind a corpus of texts, including a nine-page white paper (PDF) outlining his invention and his many posts on the Bitcointalk forum, an online message board where users gathered to discuss the digital currency's software, economics and philosophy. And that corpus, it turned out, had expanded significantly during the impostor's civil trial when Martti Malmi, a Finnish programmer who collaborated with Satoshi in Bitcoin's early days, released a trove of hundreds of emails he had exchanged with him. Emails Satoshi sent to other early Bitcoin adopters had surfaced before, but none came close in volume to the Malmi dump. If Satoshi was ever going to be found, I was convinced the key lay somewhere in these texts.

Then again, others must have gone down this road before me. Journalists, academics and internet sleuths had been trying to identify Satoshi for 16 years. During that span, more than 100 names had been put forward, including those of an Irish cryptography student, an unemployed Japanese American engineer, a South African criminal mastermind and the mathematician portrayed in the movie "A Beautiful Mind." The most alluring theories had focused on coincidences that aligned with what little was known about Satoshi: a particular code-writing style, a mysterious work history, an expertise in Bitcoin's key technical concepts, an anti-government worldview. But they had run aground under the weight of an alibi or some other piece of inconsistent or contrary evidence. Each failure had been met with glee by many members of the Bitcoin community. As they liked to point out, only Satoshi could definitively prove his identity by moving some of his coins. Any evidence short of that would be circumstantial.

It seemed foolish to think that I could somehow crack a case that had confounded so many others. But I craved the thrill of a big, challenging story. So I decided to try once more to unmask Bitcoin's mysterious creator. Back, for his part, denies being Satoshi, writing in a post on X: "i'm not satoshi, but I was early in laser focus on the positive societal implications of cryptography, online privacy and electronic cash, hence my ~1992 onwards active interest in applied research on ecash, privacy tech on cypherpunks list which led to hashcash and other ideas."

Artemis II has broken the Apollo 13 record for the farthest distance humans have ever traveled from Earth. NASA reports: The Artemis II crew of NASA astronauts Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, and Christina Koch, along with CSA (Canadian Space Agency) astronaut Jeremy Hansen have set the record for the farthest distance from Earth traveled by a human mission, surpassing the Apollo 13 record of 248,655 miles set in 1970.

NASA Flight Director Brandon Lloyd, Capsule Communicator Amy Dill, and Command and Handling Data Officer Brandon Borter also marked a lighthearted milestone today by emailing the crew what is now assumed to be the longest person-to-person message ever sent in human history. After breaking the record for human spaceflight, crew also took a moment to provisionally name a couple of craters on the Moon, noting they were able to see them with their naked eye.

Just northwest of Orientale basin highlighted above is a crater they would like to name Integrity after their spacecraft and this historic mission. Just northeast of Integrity, on the near and far side boundary, and sometimes visible from Earth, the crew suggested Carroll crater in honor of Reid Wiseman's late wife, Carroll Taylor Wiseman. After this mission is complete, the crater name proposals will be formally submitted to the International Astronomical Union, the organization that governs the naming of celestial bodies and their surface features. On April 1, NASA successfully launched humanity's first crewed trip around the Moon in more than 50 years. A couple of days into the mission, attention turned to a more mundane problem when reports said the astronauts had access to "two Microsoft Outlooks" and neither was working properly. By April 4, the crew had passed 100,000 miles from Earth as they continued deeper into space, and by April 6, they had entered the Moon's gravitational pull and caught their first views of the lunar far side.

NASA's Artemis astronauts are now entering "the lunar sphere of influence," reports NBC News, "meaning the pull of the moon's gravity will become stronger than Earth's." Now as they begin their swing around the moon, the Artemis astronauts "are chasing after Apollo 13's maximum range from Earth," reports the Associated Press, hoping to beat its distance from Earth by more than 4,100 miles (6,600 kilometers).

They'll begin their six-hour lunar flyby 14 hours from now (at 2:45 p.m. ET Monday). But in a space-to-earth interview Saturday with NBC News, the astronauts were already describing their first glimpses of the edge of the far side: [NASA astronaut Christina Koch realized] it looked different from what she was accustomed to on Earth. "The darker parts just aren't quite in the right place," she said. "And something about you senses that is not the moon that I'm used to seeing...."

[Astronaut Reid] Wiseman called the flight a "magnificent accomplishment" and said the astronauts' ability to gaze at both Earth and the moon from their spacecraft has been "truly awe-inspiring." "The Earth is almost in full eclipse. The moon is almost in full daylight, and the only way you could get that view is to be halfway between the two entities," he said... And while the early photos of Earth and the moon that [Canadian astronaut Jeremy] Hansen and his colleagues have beamed back have been spectacular, the Canadian astronaut said they pale in comparison to the real deal outside their capsule's windows. "I know those photos are amazing," he said, "but let me assure you, it is another level of amazing up here."
And their upcoming six-hour lunar flyby "promises views of the moon's far side that were too dark or too difficult to see by the 24 Apollo astronauts who preceded them," notes the Associated Press: A total solar eclipse also awaits them as the moon blocks the sun, exposing snippets of shimmering corona.... At closest approach, they will come within 4,070 miles (6,550 kilometers) of the moon. Because they launched on April 1, the rendezvous won't have as much of the far lunar side illuminated as other dates would have. But the crew still will be able make out "definite chunks of the far side that have never been seen" by humans, said NASA geologist Kelsey Young, including a good portion of Orientale Basin.

They'll call down their observations as they photograph the gray, pockmarked scenes. There's a suite of professional-quality cameras on board, and each astronaut also has an iPhone for more informal, spur-of-the-minute picture-taking... Orion will be out of contact with Mission Control for nearly an hour when it's behind the moon. The same thing happened during the Apollo moonshots. NASA is relying on its Deep Space Network to communicate with the crew, but the giant antennas in California, Spain and Australia won't have a direct line of sight when Orion disappears behind the moon for approximately 40 minutes...

Once Artemis II departs the lunar neighborhood, it will take four days to return home. The capsule will aim for a splashdown in the Pacific near San Diego on April 10, nine days after its Florida launch. During the flight back, the astronauts will link up via radio with the crew of the orbiting International Space Station. This is the first time that a moon crew has colleagues in space at the same time and NASA can't pass up the opportunity for a cosmic chitchat.

Meet the "journalist" who "uploads press releases or analyst notes into AI tools and prompts them to spit out articles that he can edit and publish quickly," according to the Wall Street Journal.

"AI-assisted stories accounted for nearly 20% of Fortune's web traffic in the second half of 2025." And most were written by 42-year-old Nick Lichtenberg, who has now written over 600 AI-assisted stories, producing "more stories in six months than any of his colleagues at Fortune delivered in a year." One Wednesday in February, he cranked out seven. "I'm a bit of a freak," Lichtenberg said... A story by Lichtenberg sometimes starts with a prompt entered into Perplexity or Google's NotebookLM, asking it to write something based on a headline he comes up with. He moves the AI tools' initial drafts into a content-management system and edits the stories before publishing them for Fortune's readers... A piece from earlier that morning about Josh D'Amaro being named Disney CEO took 10 minutes to get online, he said...

Like other journalists, Lichtenberg vets his stories. He refers back to the original documents to confirm the information he's reporting is correct. He reaches out to companies for comment. But he admits his process isn't as thorough as that of magazine fact-checkers.
While Lichtenberg started out saying his stories were co-authored with "Fortune Intelligence", he now typically signs his own name, according to the article, "because he feels the work is mostly his own." (Though his stories "sometimes" disclose generative AI was used as a research tool...) The article asks with he could be "a bellwether for where much of the media business is headed..."

"Much of the content people now consume online is generated by artificial intelligence, with some 9% of newly published newspaper articles either partially or fully AI-generated, according to a 2025 study led by the University of Maryland. The number of AI-generated articles on the web surpassed human-written ones in late 2024, according to research and marketing agency Graphite." Some executives have made full-throated declarations about the threat posed by AI. New York Times publisher A.G. Sulzberger said AI "is almost certainly going to usher in an unprecedented torrent of crap," referencing deepfakes as an example. The NewsGuild of New York, the union representing Fortune employees and journalists at other media outlets, said the people are what makes journalism so powerful. "You simply can't replicate lived experiences, human judgment and expertise," said president Susan DeCarava.

For Chris Quinn, the editor of local publications Cleveland.com and the Plain Dealer, AI tools have helped tame other torrents facing the industry. AI has allowed the outlets to cover counties in Ohio that otherwise might go ignored by scraping information from local websites and sending "tips" to reporters, he said. It has also edited stories and written first drafts so the newsrooms' journalists can focus on the calls, research and reporting needed for their stories.... Newsrooms from the New York Times to The Wall Street Journal are deploying AI in various ways to help reporters and editors work more efficiently....

Not all newsrooms disclose their use of AI, and in some cases have rolled out new tools that resulted in errors or PR gaffes. An October study from the European Broadcasting Union and the BBC, which relied on professional journalists to evaluate the news integrity of more than 3,000 AI responses, found that almost half of all AI responses had at least one significant issue.
Last week the New York Times even issued a correction when a freelance book reviewer using an AI tool unknowingly included "language and details similar to those in a review of the same book published in The Guardian." But it was actually "the second time in a few days that the Times was called out for potential AI plagiarism," according to the American journalist writing The Handbasket newsletter. We must stem the idea being pushed by tech companies and their billionaire funders who've sunk too much into their products to admit defeat that the infiltration of AI into journalism is inevitable; because from my perch as an independent journalist, it simply is not...

Some AI-loving journalists appear to believe that if they're clear enough with the AI program they're using, it will truly understand what they're seeking and not just do what it's made to do: steal shit... If you want to work with machines, get a job that requires it. There are a whole lot more of those than there are writing jobs, so free up space for people who actually want to do the work. You're not doing the world a favor by gifting it your human/AI hybrid. Journalism will not miss you if you leave...
But meanwhile, USA Today recently tried hiring for a new position: AI-Assisted reporter. (The lucky reporter will "support the launch and scaling of AI-assisted local journalism in a major U.S. metro," working with tools including Copilot and Perplexity, pioneering possible future expansions and "AI-enabled newsroom operations that support and augment human-led journalism.") And Google is already sponsoring a "publishing innovation award"...

11 days ago Apple launched device-level age restrictions in the U.K. There were some glitches, reports the blog 9to5Mac. For me, the experience was an entirely painless one, taking less than 30 seconds. All I had to do was tap a confirm and continue button, and Apple told me that the length of time I'd had an Apple account was used to confirm that I'm 18+. Others, however, experienced difficulties with the process timing out or failing to complete. We summarized some of the steps you can take to try to address this. Apple has since listed additional acceptable ways to verify your age. "You can confirm your age with a credit card, or by scanning a driver's license or one of the following PASS-accredited Proof of Age cards: CitizenCard, My ID Card, TOTUM ID card, or Young Scot National Entitlement Card."

If you don't verify your age, then you'll be treated as a child or teenager, meaning that both the web content filter and communication safety features are switched on.
Apple is continuing the roll-out in Singapore (population 6 million) and South Korea (population 52 million), the article points out, citing a new Apple support document.

South Korea's law actually requires Apple to re-verify someone's age annually.

Nine days ago Microsoft released a non-security "preview" update for Windows 11 — not mandatory for the average Windows user, notes ZDNet, "but rather as optional, more for IT admins and power users who want to test them."

TechRepublic adds that the update "was to bring 'production-ready improvements' and generally ensure system stability by optimizing different Windows services." So it's ironic that some (but not all) users reported instead that the update "blocks users at the door, refusing to install or crashing midway through the process."

"It apparently impacted enough people to force Microsoft to take action," writes ZDNet. "Microsoft paused and then pulled the update," and then Tuesday released a new update "designed to replace the glitchy one. This one includes all the new features and improvements from the previous preview update, but also fixes the installation issues that clobbered that update."

Meanwhile, as Windows 11 version 24H2 approaches its end of life this October, Microsoft is now force-updating users to the latest version, reports BleepingComputer: "The machine learning-based intelligent rollout has expanded to all devices running Home and Pro editions of Windows 11, version 24H2 that are not managed by IT departments," Microsoft said in a Monday update to the Windows release health dashboard... "No action is required, and you can choose when to restart your device or postpone the update."
Neowin reports: The good news is that the update from version 24H2 to 25H2 is a minor enablement package, as the two operating systems share the same codebase. As such, the update won't take long, and you should not encounter any disruptions, compatibility issues, or previously unseen bugs... Microsoft recently promised to implement big changes in how Windows Update works, including the ability to postpone updates for as long as you want. However, Microsoft has yet to clarify if that includes staying on a release beyond its support period.

Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader Ol Olsoc for sharing the news.

A Rome court ruled that several Netflix price hikes in Italy were unlawful because the company's contracts didn't adequately explain or justify future pricing changes. As a result, Netflix has been ordered to issue refunds that could total roughly 500 euros for some long-term subscribers. Ars Technica reports: The lawsuit was brought by Italian consumer advocacy group Movimento Consumatori, which alleged that the price hikes violate the Consumer Code, Italian legislation that aims to protect consumer rights. The Consumer Code says it's unlawful for a "professional to unilaterally modify the clauses of the contract, or the characteristics of the product or service to be provided, without a justified reason indicated in the contract itself," according to a Google-provided translation.

The court's April 1 ruling determined that Netflix's contracts were required to explain in advance why prices or other terms might change in the future. Because the price hikes were found to be imposed without providing customers with valid justifications, the court ruled that the new prices are invalid and ordered Netflix to refund affected subscribers. This comes despite Netflix reportedly providing a 30-day advance notice of the higher fees and allowing customers to cancel their subscriptions to avoid price hikes.

The court gave Netflix 90 days to inform millions of current and former customers via email, mail, its website, and Italian newspapers of their right to refunds or else face a penalty of 700 euros per day, Italian newspaper Il Sole 24 Ore reported today. Per Italian law, price increases that Netflix has issued or will issue beyond April 2025 are legal. At that time, Netflix adjusted its terms to state that contract terms could one day change due to technological, security, or regulatory needs, to clarify clauses, or to provide changes to the service, Il Sole 24 Ore reported.

Longtime Slashdot reader fahrbot-bot writes: CU Boulder researchers are reporting that they have discovered an appetite-suppressing compound in python blood that helps the snakes consume enormous meals and go months without eating yet remain metabolically healthy. The findings were published in the journal Natural Metabolism on March 19, 2026.

Pythons can grow as big as a telephone pole, swallow an antelope whole, and go months or even years without eating -- all while maintaining a healthy heart and plenty of muscle mass. In the hours after they eat, research has shown, their heart expands 25% and their metabolism speeds up 4,000-fold to help them digest their meal. The team measured blood samples from ball pythons and Burmese pythons, fed once every 28 days, immediately after they ate a meal. In all, they found 208 metabolites that increased significantly after the pythons ate. One molecule, called para-tyramine-O-sulfate (pTOS) soared 1,000-fold.

Further studies, done with Baylor University researchers, showed that when they gave high doses of pTOS to obese or lean mice, it acted on the hypothalamus, the appetite center of the brain, prompting weight loss without causing gastrointestinal problems, muscle loss or declines in energy. The study found that pTOS, which is produced by the snake's gut bacteria, is not present in mice naturally. It is present in human urine at low levels and does increase somewhat after a meal. But because most research is done in mice or rats, pTOS has been overlooked. "We've basically discovered an appetite suppressant that works in mice without some of the side-effects that GLP-1 drugs have," said senior author Leslie Leinwand, a distinguished professor of Molecular, Cellular and Developmental Biology who has been studying pythons in her lab for two decades. Drugs like Ozempic and Wegovy act on the hormone glucagon-like petide-1 (GLP-1).

Even on NASA's Artemis II mission around the moon, astronauts apparently still have to deal with broken Microsoft Outlook. One of the crew members, Reid Wiseman, jokingly reported that he had "two Microsoft Outlooks" and neither worked. 404 Media reports: On April 1, four astronauts from the U.S. and Canada embarked on a 10-day flight to loop around the moon. Spotted by VGBees podcast host Niki Grayson on the NASA livestream of live views from the , around 2 a.m. ET, mission control acknowledges an issue with a process control system and offers to remote in -- yes, like how your office IT guy would pause his CoD campaign to log into Okta for you because you used the wrong password too many times.

One of the astronauts, Reid Wiseman, says that's chill, but while they're in there: "I also see that I have two Microsoft Outlooks, and neither one of those are working." Astronauts are trained for decades in some of the most physically and mentally grueling environments of any career. They're some of the smartest people on the planet, and they have to be, before we strap them to 3.2 million pounds of jet fuel and make them do complex experiments and high-stakes decisions for days on end. And yet, once they get up there, fucking Outlook is borked.

darwinmac writes: OnlyOffice has suspended its partnership with Nextcloud after the latter forked its editors into a new project called Euro-Office, according to a report from Neowin. The move comes just days after Nextcloud and partners like IONOS announced the fork as part of a broader push for European digital sovereignty. In a statement, the company accused the project of violating its licensing terms and international intellectual property law, claiming that Euro-Office uses its technology without proper compliance. OnlyOffice also pointed to missing attribution requirements and branding obligations tied to its AGPL-based licensing model.

As a result, its 8-year-old partnership, which allowed Nextcloud users to edit and collaborate on office documents right inside their own instance, has been suspended. OnlyOffice also accused Nextcloud of not behaving in a manner expected of a partner, alleging attempts to poach its employees and influence customers against the company. Nextcloud said it forked the OnlyOffice repository instead of collaborating with the company because the project is notoriously difficult to contribute to. It also pointed out that OnlyOffice is a Russian company with Russian employees who leave code comments in Russian. In addition to that, some users may feel uncomfortable using software that could be linked to the Russian government.

A top EU official is urging Europeans to work from home, drive less, and cut air travel as the bloc braces for a prolonged energy crisis triggered by the Gulf conflict. The European Commission is also pushing member states to accelerate renewables and other energy-security measures as oil and gas disruptions continue. Politico reports: In a speech with echoes of the early days of the coronavirus pandemic, EU energy chief Dan Jorgensen said Europe was facing a "very serious situation" with no clear end in sight. "Even if ... peace is here tomorrow, still we will not go back to normal in the foreseeable future," he said, following an extraordinary meeting of the EU's 27 energy ministers on Tuesday to discuss the crisis. "The more you can do to save oil, especially diesel, especially jet fuel, the better we are off," Jorgensen said, confirming an earlier report by POLITICO that Brussels wanted Europeans to travel less.

He urged member countries to follow the advice of the International Energy Agency, which he said included "work from home where possible, reduce highway speed limits by ten kilometers [an hour], encourage public transport, alternate private car access ... increase car sharing and adopt efficient driving practices." Longer term, he urged EU countries to double down on building more renewables, saying "this must be the time we finally turn the tide and truly become energy independent."

Apple's 50th anniversary is this week — and Fast Company's Harry McCracken just published an 11,000-word oral history with some fun stories from Apple's earliest days and the long and winding road to its very first home computers: Steve Wozniak, cofounder, Apple: I told my dad when I was in high school, "I'm going to own a computer someday." My dad said, "It costs as much as a house." And I sat there at the table — I remember right where we were sitting — and I said, "I'll live in an apartment." I was going to have a computer if it was ever possible. I didn't need a house.
Woz even remembers trying to build a home computer early on with a teenaged Steve Jobs and Bill Fernandez from rejected parts procured from local electronics companies. Woz designed it — "not from anybody else's design or from a manual. And Fernandez was one of those kids that could use a soldering iron." Bill Fernandez: The computer was very basic. It was working, and we were starting to talk about how we could hook a teletype up to it. Mrs. Wozniak called a reporter from the San Jose Mercury, and he came over with a photographer. We set up the computer on the floor of Steve Wozniak's bedroom.

Well, the core integrated circuit that ran the power supply that I built was an old reject part. We turned on the computer, and the power supply smoked and burnt out the circuitry. So we didn't get our photos in the paper with an article about the boy geniuses.
But within a few years Jobs and Wozniak both wound up with jobs at local tech companies. Atari cofounder Nolan Bushnell remembers that Steve Jobs "wasn't a good engineer, but he was a great technician. He was pristine in his ability to solder, which was actually important in those days." Meanwhile Allen Baum had shared Wozniak's high school interest in computers, and later got Woz a job working at Hewlett-Packard — where employees were allowed to use stockroom parts for private projects. ("When he needed some parts, even if we didn't have them, I could order them.") Baum helped with the Apple I and II, and joined Apple a decade later.

Wozniak remembers being inspired to build that first Apple I by the local Homebrew Computing Club, people "talking about great things that would happen to society, that we would be able to communicate like we never did [before] and educate in new ways. And being a geek would be important and have value." And once he'd built his first computer, "I wanted these people to help create the revolution. And so I passed out my designs with no copyright notices — public domain, open source, everything. A couple of other people in the club did build it."

But Woz and Jobs had even tried pitching the computer as a Hewlett-Packard product, Woz remembers: Steve Wozniak: I showed them what it would cost and how it would work and what it could do with my little demos. They had all the engineering people and the marketing people, and they turned me down. That was the first of five turndowns from Hewlett-Packard. Steve Jobs and I had to go into business on our own.
In the end, Randy Wigginton, Apple employee No. 6 remembers witnessing Jobs, Wozniak, and Ronald Wayne the signing of Apple's founding contract, "which is pretty funny, because I was 15 at the time." And it was Allen Baum's father who gave Wozniak and Jobs the bridge loan to buy the parts they'd need for their first 500 computers.

After all the memories, the article concludes that "Trying to connect every dot between Apple, the tiny, dirt-poor 1970s startup, and Apple, the $3.7 trillion 21st-century global colossus, is impossible." But this much is clear: The company has always been at its best when its original quirky humanity and willingness to be an outlier shine through.

Mark Johnson, Apple employee No. 13: I was in Cupertino just yesterday. It's totally different. They own Cupertino now.

Jonathan Rotenberg, who cofounded the Boston Computer Society in 1977 at age 13: People want to hate Apple, because it is big and powerful. But Apple has an underlying moral purpose that is immensely deep and expansive...

Mike Markkula, the early retiree from Intel whose guidance and money turned the garage startup into a company: The culture mattered. People were there for the right reasons — to build something transformative — not just to make money. That alignment produced extraordinary results...

Steve Wozniak: Everything you do in life should have some element of joy in it. Even your work should have an element of joy... When you're about to die, you have certain memories. And for me, it's not going to be Apple going public or Apple being huge and all that. It's really going to be stories from the period when humble people spotted something that was interesting and followed it

I'll be thinking of that when I die, along with a lot of pranks I played. The important things.

Project Hail Mary has now grossed $300.8 million globally after earning another $54.1 million this weekend from 86 markets, reports Variety, noting that after just nine days it's now Amazon MGM's highest-grossing film ever.

And last weekend it had the best opening for a "non-franchise" movie in three years, adds the Associated Press — the best since 2023's Oppenheimer: Project Hail Mary, which cost nearly $200 million to produce... is on an enviable trajectory. Its second weekend hold was even better than that of Oppenheimer, which collected $46.7 million in its follow-up frame.
But the movie is based on a book by The Martian author Andy Weir, described by one news outlet as "a former software engineer and self-proclaimed 'lifelong space nerd'... known for his realistic and clear-eyed approach to scientifically technical stories." Project Hail Mary has plenty of real science in it, whether it be space mathematics, physics, or astrobiology... The film's namesake project is even comprised of the space programs of other nations, such as Roscosmos from Russia, the Chinese space program, and the European Space Agency...

The story relies on work NASA has done regarding exoplanets, or planets outside our solar system... [This includes a nearby star named Tau Ceti approximately 12 light years from Earth which is orbited by four planets — two once thought to be in "the habitable zone" where liquid water can exist.] Tau Ceti has long been the setting used by sci-fi authors and storytellers. Isaac Asimov used it for his Robot series. Arthur C. Clarke's "Rama" spacecraft came across a mysterious tetrahedron in the Tau Ceti system. Authors Ursula K. Le Guin and Kim Stanley Robinson also set stories in Tau Ceti, and it also serves as the extrasolar setting of the 1968 Jane Fonda film Barbarella. Most recently, the Bungie video game Marathon is set in the far-off system, serving as part of the background story for the extraction shooter, about a large-scale plan to colonize the Tau Ceti system.
The movie also mentions 40 Eridani A, according to the article, a real star about 16 light-years away that was said to be orbited by the fictional planet Vulcan, home to Star Trek's Mr. Spock. It's also mentioned in Frank Herbert's Dune as the star system of the planets Ix and Richese ("noted for their machine culture and miniaturisation," according to the Stellar Australis site's "Project Dune" page).

And in a video on IMAX's YouTube channel, the film's directors explain how for a crucial scene they used non-visible-light photography, which is also an important part of modern astronomy. "Even the credits incorporate real astrophotography into the final moments," the article points out, using the work of award-winning Australian astrophotographer Rod Prazeres. "The only difference between his work of capturing space data in images and what ended up on the big screen was that he gave them 'starless versions' of his photographs to make it easier to place credit text over them."

Prazeres wrote on his web site that he was touched the producers "wanted the real thing... In a world where CGI and AI are everywhere, it meant a lot..."

Just six days ago — and 30 minutes after a Disney-OpenAI meeting about a project with Sora — Disney's team was "blindsided" with the news Sora was being discontinued, a person familiar with the matter told Reuters, describing OpenAI's move as "a big rug-pull."

Even some Sora employees were surprised by the cancellation. It was just 14 weeks ago Disney announced a $1 billion investment in OpenAI's AI-powered video generation tool — plus a three-year licensing deal. But that deal "never closed," Reuters adds, citing two other people familiar with the matter, "and no money changed hands." (Although the two sides are still "discussing if there is another way they can partner or invest with one another, one of the people familiar with the matter said.")

But Variety wonders if the end of the Sora deal is "a blessing in disguise" for Disney: Before Disney's officially sanctioned AI-generated versions of Mickey Mouse, Darth Vader, Baby Yoda, Deadpool and more debuted in OpenAI's Sora, the AI company abruptly pulled the plug on the video app...

[M]any aficionados of Disney's franchises were not, in fact, excited about what Sora's video generator might do to the likes of the Avengers superheroes or the characters from Frozen or Moana. And despite [departed Disney CEO Bob] Iger's bullishness on the Sora deal, other Disney execs were said to be concerned that going into business with OpenAI would expose the Magic Kingdom's crown jewels to the risk of being turned into so much AI slop, according to industry sources. Hollywood unions — for which AI adoption has been a hot-button issue — weren't thrilled about the Disney-Sora deal either. "Disney's announcement with OpenAI appears to sanction its theft of our work and cedes the value of what we create to a tech company that has built its business off our backs," the Writers Guild of America said in December... [S]ources say, Disney was encountering roadblocks in getting the OK from voice actors for the Sora pact...

At least publicly, Disney says it is still looking at ways it can tap into the AI ecosystem. The company, in a statement Tuesday, said, "we will continue to engage with AI platforms to find new ways to meet fans where they are while responsibly embracing new technologies that respect IP and the rights of creators." But at this point, Disney may decide that "meeting fans where they are" means keeping its beloved and world-famous characters away from the AI machinery.
Or, as Gizmodo puts it, "Disney Says It Will Find Ways to Peddle Slop Elsewhere After Pulling Out of OpenAI Deal."

But Deadline sees the deal's collapses as a lost opportunity: The OpenAI partnership was a template on which to build, potentially allowing for other deals that end the exploitation of human creativity by unscrupulous AI models. It was also the kind of partnership that was palatable for the Human Artistry Campaign and Creators Coalition on AI, lobby groups that have been critical of tech business models and command support from A-listers including Scarlett Johansson, Cate Blanchett and Joseph Gordon-Levitt.

Dr. Moiya McTier, an advisor to the Human Artistry Campaign, puts it this way: Part of the problem is getting "artsy people and the techie people to talk." OpenAI sinking Sora will not make these discussions easier. It's a move that starkly exposes Hollywood's vulnerability to the capriciousness of big tech.

"Emergency out-of-band fixes issued by enterprise IT giants Microsoft and Oracle have shone a spotlight on issues around both update cycles and patching," reports Computer Weekly: Microsoft's emergency update, KB5085516, addresses an issue that arose after installing the mandatory cumulative updates pushed live on Patch Tuesday earlier this month. According to Microsoft, it has since emerged that many users experienced problems signing into applications with a Microsoft account, seeing a "no internet" error message even though the device had a working connection. This had the effect of preventing access to multiple services and applications. It should be noted that organisations using Entra ID did not experience the issue.

But Microsoft's emergency patch comes just days after it doubled down on a commitment to software quality, reliability and stability. In a blog post published just 24 hours prior to the latest update, Pavan Davuluri of Microsoft's Windows Insider Program Team said updates should be "predictable and easy to plan around".
Michael Bell, founder/CEO of Suzu Labs tells Computer Weekly that Microsoft's patch for the sign-in bug follows "separate hotpatches for RRAS remote code execution flaws and a Bluetooth visibility bug. Three emergency fixes in eight days does not shout reliability era." Oracle's patch, meanwhile, addresses CVE-2026-21992, a remote code execution flaw in the REST:WebServices component of Oracle Identity Manager and the Web Services Security component of Oracle Web Services Manager in Oracle Fusion Middleware. It carries a CVSS score of 9.8 and can be exploited by an unauthenticated attacker with network access over HTTP.

A California bill would let adults demand the removal of social media posts about them that were created by paid family content creators when they were minors. Supporters say Senate Bill 1247 addresses privacy, dignity, and safety harms caused when parents monetize their children's lives online. The Los Angeles Times reports: The legislation would require the parent or other relative to delete or edit the content within 10 business days of receiving the notification. Petitioners could take civil action against those who fail to comply and statutory damages would be set at $3,000 for each day the content remained online. Sen. Steve Padilla (D-San Diego), who introduced the bill last month, said it would help protect the dignity and mental health of those who had their childhood shared on social media. The measure was referred to the Senate Privacy, Digital Technologies and Consumer Protection Committee and is slated for a hearing on April 6.

"The evolution of these applications and technology is incredible," Padilla said. "But it's changing our social dynamic and it's creating situations that, while very productive for some folks, also need some guardrails." The bill would build upon previous legislation from Padilla that was signed into law two years ago and requires content creators that feature minors in at least 30% of their material to place some of their earnings into a trust the children can access when they turn 18.