An anonymous reader shares a report: Amazon on Tuesday said it is piloting a quick commerce service in India that will see the U.S. tech giant delivering grocery and other items in 15 minutes or less.

[...] The quick-commerce model -- delivering items to customers within 10 to 15 minutes -- hasn't worked in most parts of the world, but it's increasingly finding success in India, where a range of retailers and internet firms, from food delivery giant Swiggy to online cosmetics platform Nykaa, are gearing up their supply chain ecosystems to accommodate for faster deliveries.

As tech giants struggle to profit from AI, a growing industry of specialized AI training firms is emerging by hiring doctors, radiologists and other experts to develop commercially viable applications. The $20 billion data services sector, projected to grow 20% annually, is attracting major investment by focusing on high-value, specialized AI applications.

Companies like iMerit and Centaur Labs are recruiting specialists worldwide, from radiologists in Kazakhstan to agricultural experts in Bhutan, paying premium rates for domain expertise rather than basic data processing. While Microsoft and Alphabet post losses on AI development, this specialized sector is finding profitability by bridging the gap between raw AI capabilities and practical business applications.

chiguy writes: In October, a jury in a federal class-action lawsuit returned a verdict that found Cognizant intentionally discriminated against more than 2,000 non-Indian employees between 2013 and 2022. The verdict, which echoed a previously undisclosed finding from a 2020 US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission investigation, centered on discrimination claims based on race and national origin. Cognizant, based in Teaneck, New Jersey, was found to have preferred workers from India, most of whom joined the firm's US workforce of about 32,000 using skilled-worker visas called H-1Bs.

The case is part of a wave of recent discrimination claims against IT outsourcing companies that underscore growing concerns that these firms have exploited a broken employment-visa system to secure a cheaper, more malleable workforce. In the process, US workers say they've been disadvantaged. The industry, which provides computer services to other companies, makes extensive use of H-1Bs; over the past decade and a half, no employer has obtained more of them than Cognizant, federal records show.

"Are Primordial Black Holes real...?" asks Universe Today. "If they do exist, a "new paper suggests they may be hiding in places so unlikely that nobody ever thought to look there..." — in planets, in asteroids, and here on earth. Physicists hypothesize that Primordial Black Holes (PBHs) formed in the early Universe from extremely dense pockets of sub-atomic matter that collapsed directly into black holes. They could form part or all of what we call dark matter. However, they remain hypothetical because none have been observed... The authors claim that evidence for PBHs could be found in objects as large as hollowed out planetoids or asteroids and objects as small as rocks here on Earth. "Small primordial black holes could be captured by rocky planets or asteroids, consume their liquid cores from inside and leave hollow structures," the authors write. "Alternatively, a fast black hole can leave a narrow tunnel in a solid object while passing through it."

"We could look for such micro-tunnels here on Earth in very old rocks," the authors claim, explaining that the search wouldn't involve specialized, expensive equipment... "The chances of finding these signatures are small, but searching for them would not require much resources and the potential payoff, the first evidence of a primordial black hole, would be immense," said Dejan Stojkovic [the paper's co-author from the State University of New York]. "We have to think outside of the box because what has been done to find primordial black holes previously hasn't worked...." Cosmology is kind of at a standstill while we wrestle with the idea of dark matter. Could PBHs be dark matter? Could they behave like the authors suggest, and be detected in this manner?

"The smartest people on the planet have been working on these problems for 80 years and have not solved them yet," Stojkovic said. "We don't need a straightforward extension of the existing models. We probably need a completely new framework altogether."

Nature: Millions of research articles are absent from major digital archives. This worrying finding, which Nature reported on earlier this year, was laid bare in a study by Martin Eve, who studies technology and publishing at Birkbeck, University of London. Eve sampled more than seven million articles with unique digital object identifiers (DOIs), a string of characters used to identify and link to specific publications, such as scholarly articles and official reports. Of these, he found that more than two million were 'missing' from archives -- that is, they were not preserved in major archives that ensure literature can be found in the future.

Eve, who is also a research developer at Crossref, an organization that registers DOIs, carried out the study in an effort to better understand a problem librarians and archivists already knew about -- that although researchers are generating knowledge at an unprecedented rate, it is not necessarily being stored safely for the future. One contributing factor is that not all journals or scholarly societies survive in perpetuity. For example, a 2021 study found that a lack of comprehensive and open archiving meant that 174 open-access journals, covering all major research topics and geographical regions, vanished from the web in the first two decades of this millennium.

A lack of long-term archiving particularly affects institutions in low- and middle-income countries, less-affluent institutions in rich countries and smaller, under-resourced journals worldwide. Yet it's not clear whether researchers, institutions and governments have fully taken the problem on board. [...] At the heart of the problem is a lack of money, infrastructure and expertise to archive digital resources. [...] For institutions that can afford it, one solution is to pay a preservation archive to safeguard content. Examples include Portico, based in New York City, and CLOCKSS, based in Stanford, California, both of which count a raft of publishers and libraries as customers.

schwit1 writes: Recruiters approach students with tempting offers, often after observing them for weeks. Promising salaries of over $800 per month -- double the average pay for chemists in Mexican companies, along with potential bonuses like cars or housing -- recruiters capitalize on the financial struggles of young professionals.

These "cooks" are tasked with improving fentanyl's addictive quality and finding alternative synthesis methods to mitigate supply chain disruptions caused by stricter chemical export controls from China and pandemic-induced bottlenecks. The Times interviewed seven drug "cooks," three university chemistry students recruited by the Sinaloa cartel, two agents, a recruiter, and a university professor -- all anonymously to avoid cartel retaliation. According to the recruiter, candidates must be passionate, discreet, and indifferent to the ethical consequences of their work.

The university professor highlighted a disturbing trend: students openly expressed interest in synthesizing illicit drugs during lectures.

To help replace power plants, Japan's northernmost island, Hokkaido, "is turning to a new generation of batteries designed to stockpile massive amounts of energy," reports the Washington Post.

"The Hokkaido Electric Power Network (HEPCO Network) is deploying flow batteries, an emerging kind of battery that stores energy in hulking tanks of metallic liquid." [F]low batteries are making their debut in big real-world projects. Sumitomo Electric, the company that built the Hokkaido plant, has also built flow batteries in Taiwan, Belgium, Australia, Morocco and California. Hokkaido's flow battery farm was the biggest in the world when it opened in April 2022 — a record that lasted just a month before China built one that is eight times bigger and can deliver as much energy as an average U.S. natural gas plant. "It looks like flow batteries are finally about to take off with interest from China," said Michael Taylor, an energy analyst at the International Renewable Energy Agency, an international group that studies and promotes green energy. "When China starts to get comfortable with a technology and sees it working, then they will very quickly scale their manufacturing base if they think they can drive down the costs, which they usually can...."

Lithium-ion batteries are perfect for smartphones because they're lightweight and fit in small spaces, even if they don't last long and have to be replaced frequently. Utilities have a different set of priorities: They need to store millions of times more energy, and they have much more room to work with. "If you think about utility-scale stationary applications, maybe you don't need lithium-ion batteries. You can use another one that is cheaper and can provide the services that you want like, for example, vanadium flow batteries," said Francisco Boshell, a researcher at the International Renewable Energy Agency...

Flow batteries are designed to tap giant tanks that can store a lot of energy for a long time. To boost their storage capacity, all you have to do is build a bigger tank and add more vanadium. That's a big advantage: By contrast, there's no easy way to adjust the storage capacity of a lithium-ion battery — if you want more storage, you have to build a whole new battery... One major barrier to building more of these battery farms is finding enough vanadium. Three-quarters of the world's supply comes as a by-product from 10 steel mills in China and Russia, according to Kara Rodby [a battery analyst at the investment firm Volta Energy Technologies] who got her PhD at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology studying the design and market for flow batteries. Australia, South Africa and the United States also produce vanadium, but in much smaller quantities. Mines that have been proposed could boost supply. And some flow battery start-ups are trying to sidestep the vanadium problem entirely by using different materials that are easier to buy.

The other hurdle is their up-front cost. Vanadium flow batteries are at least twice as expensive to build as lithium-ion batteries, Rodby said, and banks are hesitant to lend money to fund an unfamiliar technology. But experts say flow batteries can be cheaper in the long run because they're easier to maintain and last longer. A lithium-ion battery might have to be replaced after 10 years, but Rodby says flow batteries can last much longer. "There really is no finite lifetime for a flow battery in the way there is for lithium-ion," Rodby said.
Here's an interesting statistic from the article. "Over the next six years, utilities will have to build 35 times as many batteries as there are today to soak up all extra renewable energy that will come online, according to the International Energy Agency."

More than half of longer English posts on LinkedIn are likely generated by AI, according to research from AI detection firm Originality AI. The company analyzed nearly 9,000 public posts over 100 words published between 2018 and 2024, finding AI usage surged 189% after ChatGPT's launch in early 2023, Wired reported Wednesday.

LinkedIn, which also offers AI writing tools to premium subscribers, told Wired that it does not track AI-generated content levels but maintains "robust defenses" against low-quality and duplicate posts.

An anonymous reader shares a report: The human eye can't really tell the difference between 4K and 8K resolution. Video game console manufacturers, who have built their businesses selling increasingly powerful machines every few years, are grappling with a future where performance improvements are becoming less dramatic.

Sony Group launched its PlayStation 5 Pro console in mid-November. The $700 upgraded version of Sony's 2020 gaming machine uses AI to improve games' frame rate while maintaining exceptional image quality -- at least for 82 games that have been enhanced to take advantage of the new specs. That means gamers can see the realistic glint of their metal sword and experience smooth, sword-swinging battle action.

But despite all the fancy tech and a $200 price increase over the previous version, reviews so far haven't suggested it's a must-have machine. "It's an improvement, but there's nothing that makes it a complete generation above what the Series X offered," Daniel Ahmad, director of research and insights at Niko Partners, said. "It's a lot more difficult to distinguish the jump between each generation." The number of households with a gaming console hasn't really budged in more than a decade. Many gamers are replacing older machines more slowly, finding the one they already have is good enough.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: The Supreme Court signaled it may take up a case that could determine whether Internet service providers must terminate users who are accused of copyright infringement. In an order (PDF) issued today, the court invited the Department of Justice's solicitor general to file a brief "expressing the views of the United States."

In Sony Music Entertainment v. Cox Communications, the major record labels argue that cable provider Cox should be held liable for failing to terminate users who were repeatedly flagged for infringement based on their IP addresses being connected to torrent downloads. There was a mixed ruling at the US Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit as the appeals court affirmed a jury's finding that Cox was guilty of willful contributory infringement but reversed a verdict on vicarious infringement "because Cox did not profit from its subscribers' acts of infringement." That ruling vacated a $1 billion damages award and ordered a new damages trial. Cox and Sony are both seeking a Supreme Court review. Cox wants to overturn the finding of willful contributory infringement, while Sony wants to reinstate the $1 billion verdict.

The Supreme Court asking for US input on Sony v. Cox could be a precursor to the high court taking up the case. For example, the court last year asked the solicitor general to weigh in on Texas and Florida laws that restricted how social media companies can moderate their platforms. The court subsequently took up the case and vacated lower-court rulings, making it clear that content moderation is protected by the First Amendment.

"Get your head examined. And get the fuck out of here with this shit." That's how Bcachefs developer Kent Overstreet ended a post on the Linux kernel mailing list.

This was followed by "insufficient action to restore the community's faith in having otherwise productive technical discussions without the fear of personal attacks," according to an official ruling by committee enforcing the kernel community's code of conduct. After formalizing an updated enforcement process for unacceptable behaviors, it then recommended that during the Linux 6.13 kernel development cycle, Overstreet's participation should be restricted (with his pull requests declined). Phoronix covered their ruling, and ItsFOSS and The Register offer some of the backstory.

Overstreet had already acknowledged that "Things really went off the rails (and I lost my cool, and earned the ire of the CoC committee)" in a 6,200-word blog post on his Patreon page. But he also emphasized that "I'm going to keep writing code no matter what. Things may turn into more of a hassle to actually get the code, but people who want to keep running bcachefs will always be able to (that's the beauty of open source, we can always fork), and I will keep supporting my users..."

More excerpts from Overstreet's blog post: I got an emails from multiple people, including from Linus, to the effect of "trust me, you don't want to be known as an asshole — you should probably send him an apology"... Linus is a genuinely good guy: I know a lot of people reading this will have also seen our pull request arguments, so I specifically wanted to say that here: I think he and I do get under each other's skin, but those arguments are the kind of arguments you get between people who care deeply about their work and simply have different perspectives on the situation...

[M]y response was to say "no" to a public apology, for a variety of reasons: because this was the result of an ongoing situation that had now impacted two different teams and projects, and I think that issue needs attention — and I think there's broader issues at stake here, regarding the CoC board. But mostly, because that kind of thing feels like it ought to be kept personal... I'd like a better process that isn't so heavy handed for dealing with situations where tensions rise and communications break down. As for that process: just talk to people... [W]e're a community. We're not interchangeable cogs to be kicked out and replaced when someone is "causing a problem", we should be watching out for each other...

Another note that I was raising with the CoC is that a culture of dismissiveness, of finding ways to avoid the technical discussions we're supposed to be having, really is toxic, and moreso than mere flamewars... we really do need to be engaging properly with each other in order to do our work well.
After the official response from the committee, Overstreet responded on the kernel mailing list. "I do want to apologize for things getting this heated the other day, but I need to also tell you why I reacted the way I did... I do take correctness issues very seriously, and I will get frosty or genuinely angry if they're being ignored or brushed aside."

On November 24th, 1971 — 53 years ago today — a mysterious man jumped out of an airplane clutching $200,000 in ransom money. (He'd extorted it from the airline by claiming he had a bomb, and it's still "the only unsolved case of air piracy in the history of commercial aviation," according to Wikipedia.) Will modern technology finally let us solve the case — or just turn it into a miniseries on Netflix? And have online researchers finally discovered the definitive clue?

The FBI vetted more than 800 suspects, according to the Wyoming news site Cowboy State Daily, but in 2016 announced they were suspending their active investigation.

So it's newsworthy that the FBI now appears to be investigating new evidence, according to an amateur D.B. Cooper researcher on YouTube: the discovery of what's believed to be D.B. Cooper's uniquely-modified parachute: Retired pilot, skydiver and YouTuber, Dan Gryder told Cowboy State Daily that he may have found the missing link after uncovering the modified military surplus bailout rig he believes was used by D.B. Cooper in the heist. It belonged to Richard Floyd McCoy II, and was carefully stored in his deceased mother's storage stash until very recently... McCoy's children, Chanté and Richard III, or "Rick," agree with Gryder that they believe their father was D.B. Cooper, a secret that shrouded the family but wasn't overtly discussed. For years, they said, the family stayed mum out of fear of implicating their mother, Karen, whom they believe was complicit in both hijackings. Upon her death in 2020, they broke their silence to Gryder after being contacted by him off and on for years.

Gryder, who has been researching the case for more than 20 years, documented his investigation in a lengthy two-part series on his YouTube channel, "Probable Cause," in 2021 and 2022, where he connects the dots and shows actual footage of him finding the parachute in an outbuilding on the McCoy family property in North Carolina in July 2022. On Monday, Gryder released a third video, "D.B. Cooper: Deep FBI Update," where he announced the FBI's new and very recent efforts in his discoveries. After watching his first two videos, Gryder said FBI agents contacted Rick and Gryder to see the parachute. It was the first investigative move by the agency since issuing the 2016 public statement, declaring the case closed pending new evidence. Gryder and Rick McCoy traveled to Richmond, Virginia, in September 2023, where they met with FBI agents, who took the harness and parachute into evidence along with a skydiving logbook found by Chanté that aligned with the timeline for both hijackings, providing another vital piece in the puzzle, Gryder said....

During the meeting, Gryder said the agents called it a first step. If the evidence proved fruitless, they would have promptly returned the skydiving rig, he said, but that didn't happen. Instead, an FBI agent called Rick a month later to ask to search the family property in Cove City, North Carolina, which McCoy's mother owned and where Gryder had found the parachute and canopy... [Gryder says he watched] at least seven vehicles descend on the property with more than a dozen agents who scoured the property for about four hours... Rick said he has provided a DNA sample and was told by the FBI agents that the next step might be exhuming his father's body, but no formal terms and conditions for that process have been established thus far, he said.
A retired commercial airline pilot who was present in the Virginia FBI meeting said "It was clear they were taking it seriously" — noting it was the FBI who'd requested that meeting. The article cites two FBI agents who'd earlier already believed D.B. Cooper was McCoy. And the article points out that the FBI "has never ruled McCoy out, stating in a 2006 statement that he was 'still a favorite suspect among many.'"

A second article notes that Gryder supports the FBI's recent request to exhume McCoy's body. As he sees it, "The existing DNA marker comparisons studied so far only validate the need for this final extreme step and should close the mystery once and for all."

And the article adds that McCoy's children are "eager for closure and hope that the FBI finds the evidence agents need to close the D.B. Cooper case once and for all."

NBC News reports that a newly identified chemical byproduct "may be present in drinking water in about a third of U.S. homes, a study found."

"Scientists do not yet know whether the byproduct is dangerous. But some are worried that it could have toxic properties because of similarities to other chemicals of concern." The newly identified substance, named "chloronitramide anion," is produced when water is treated with chloramine, a chemical formed by mixing chlorine and ammonia. Chloramine is often used to kill viruses and bacteria in municipal water treatment systems. Researchers said the existence of the byproduct was discovered about 40 years ago, but it was only identified now because analysis techniques have improved, which finally enabled scientists to determine the chemical's structure.

It could take years to figure out whether chloronitramide anion is dangerous — it's never been studied. The researchers reported their findings Thursday in the journal Science, in part to spur research to address safety concerns. The scientists said they have no hard evidence to suggest that the compound represents a danger, but that it bears similarities to other chemicals of concern. They think it deserves scrutiny because it's been detected so widely...

David Reckhow, a research professor in civil and environmental engineering at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, who was not involved with the study, said the finding was an important step. The ultimate goal, he said, is understanding whether the substance is a hazard; he concurred that it was likely toxic. "It's a pretty small molecule and it can probably for that reason enter into biological systems and into cells. And it is still a reactive molecule," he said. "Those are the kinds of things you worry about."
"It's estimated more than 113 million people drink chloraminated processed water in the U.S.," according to a follow-up article by ABC News.

But they also include this quote from Dr. Stephanie Widmer, a board-certified medical toxicologist and emergency medicine physician. "The reality is that no one really knows too much about this chloronitramide and its impact on human health, and more research needs to be done. These disinfecting chemicals have been giving us clean drinking water for decades, so no reason to fear drinking water as a result of this study." Although ABC News tacks on this sentence.

"The study authors suggest, in general, adding a carbon filter to a sink or a standalone pitcher may be a good option for those concerned."

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

June, 2023: "Harvard Scholar Who Studies Honesty Is Accused of Fabricating Findings."

November, 2024: "The Business-School Scandal That Just Keeps Getting Bigger." A senior editor at the Atlantic raises the possibility of systemic dishonesty-rewarding incentives where "a study must be even flashier than all the other flashy findings if its authors want to stand out," writing that "More than a year since all of this began, the evidence of fraud has only multiplied."

And the suspect isn't just Francesca Gino, a Harvard Business School professor. One person deeply affected by all this is Gino's co-author, a business school professor from the University of California at Berkeley — Juliana Schroeder — who launched an audit of all 138 studies conducted by Francesca Gino (called "The Many Coauthors Project"): Gino was accused of faking numbers in four published papers. Just days into her digging, Schroeder uncovered another paper that appeared to be affected — and it was one that she herself had helped write... The other main contributor was Alison Wood Brooks, a young professor and colleague of Gino's at Harvard Business School.... If Brooks did conduct this work and oversee its data, then Schroeder's audit had produced a dire twist. The Many Co-Authors Project was meant to suss out Gino's suspect work, and quarantine it from the rest... But now, to all appearances, Schroeder had uncovered crooked data that apparently weren't linked to Gino.... Like so many other scientific scandals, the one Schroeder had identified quickly sank into a swamp of closed-door reviews and taciturn committees. Schroeder says that Harvard Business School declined to investigate her evidence of data-tampering, citing a policy of not responding to allegations made more than six years after the misconduct is said to have occurred...

In the course of scouting out the edges of the cheating scandal in her field, Schroeder had uncovered yet another case of seeming science fraud. And this time, she'd blown the whistle on herself. That stunning revelation, unaccompanied by any posts on social media, had arrived in a muffled update to the Many Co-Authors Project website. Schroeder announced that she'd found "an issue" with one more paper that she'd produced with Gino... [Schroeder] said that the source of the error wasn't her. Her research assistants on the project may have caused the problem; Schroeder wonders if they got confused...

What feels out of reach is not so much the truth of any set of allegations, but their consequences. Gino has been placed on administrative leave, but in many other instances of suspected fraud, nothing happens. Both Brooks and Schroeder appear to be untouched. "The problem is that journal editors and institutions can be more concerned with their own prestige and reputation than finding out the truth," Dennis Tourish, at the University of Sussex Business School, told me. "It can be easier to hope that this all just goes away and blows over and that somebody else will deal with it...." [Tourish also published a 2019 book decrying "Fraud, Deception and Meaningless Research," which the article notes "cites a study finding that more than a third of surveyed editors at management journals say they've encountered fabricated or falsified data."] Maybe the situation in her field would eventually improve, [Schroeder] said. "The optimistic point is, in the long arc of things, we'll self-correct, even if we have no incentive to retract or take responsibility."

"Do you believe that?" I asked.

"On my optimistic days, I believe it."

"Is today an optimistic day?"

"Not really."

Instead of focusing on chatbots, a new study reveals an automated way to breach LLM-driven robots "with 100 percent success," according to IEEE Spectrum. "By circumventing safety guardrails, researchers could manipulate self-driving systems into colliding with pedestrians and robot dogs into hunting for harmful places to detonate bombs..." [The researchers] have developed RoboPAIR, an algorithm designed to attack any LLM-controlled robot. In experiments with three different robotic systems — the Go2; the wheeled ChatGPT-powered Clearpath Robotics Jackal; and Nvidia's open-source Dolphins LLM self-driving vehicle simulator. They found that RoboPAIR needed just days to achieve a 100 percent jailbreak rate against all three systems... RoboPAIR uses an attacker LLM to feed prompts to a target LLM. The attacker examines the responses from its target and adjusts its prompts until these commands can bypass the target's safety filters. RoboPAIR was equipped with the target robot's application programming interface (API) so that the attacker could format its prompts in a way that its target could execute as code. The scientists also added a "judge" LLM to RoboPAIR to ensure the attacker was generating prompts the target could actually perform given physical limitations, such as specific obstacles in the environment...

One finding the scientists found concerning was how jailbroken LLMs often went beyond complying with malicious prompts by actively offering suggestions. For example, when asked to locate weapons, a jailbroken robot described how common objects like desks and chairs could be used to bludgeon people.

The researchers stressed that prior to the public release of their work, they shared their findings with the manufacturers of the robots they studied, as well as leading AI companies. They also noted they are not suggesting that researchers stop using LLMs for robotics... "Strong defenses for malicious use-cases can only be designed after first identifying the strongest possible attacks," Robey says. He hopes their work "will lead to robust defenses for robots against jailbreaking attacks."
The article includes a reaction from Hakki Sevil, associate professor of intelligent systems and robotics at the University of West Florida. He concludes that the "lack of understanding of context of consequences" among even advanced LLMs "leads to the importance of human oversight in sensitive environments, especially in environments where safety is crucial." But a long-term solution could be LLMs with "situational awareness" that understand broader intent.

"Although developing context-aware LLM is challenging, it can be done by extensive, interdisciplinary future research combining AI, ethics, and behavioral modeling..."

Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader DesertNomad for sharing the article.

Silicon Valley's venture-capital firms are having an easy time finding promising startups to back. The hard part is cashing out. From a report: Last year, U.S. venture firms returned $26 billion worth of shares back to their investors, the lowest amount since 2011, according to the data provider PitchBook. Startup investors say 2024 has continued the trend, with high levels of investment and few acquisition deals or initial public offerings. "We've raised a lot of money, and we've given very little back," Thomas Laffont, co-founder of investment firm Coatue Management, said at a recent conference. "We are bleeding cash as an industry."

Last year, U.S. venture firms invested $60 billion more than they collected, the highest such deficit in PitchBook's 26 years of data. As a result, the investors that back VC firms, such as university endowments and pension funds, aren't seeing the type of profits the industry has long delivered. The decline is particularly notable because the past three years have been the highest three on record for total VC firm investments since 1998 -- as far as back as the PitchBook data goes. Much of that money has recently gone to artificial-intelligence startups -- a white-hot space in which valuations are rising fast and companies quickly burn through cash to develop new technology.

China's Chang'e-6 mission made history by retrieving the first surface samples from the moon's far side, revealing evidence of volcanic activity spanning 1.4 billion years. Reuters reports: Researchers said on Friday the soil brought back from the Chang'e-6 landing site contained fragments of volcanic rock - basalt - dating to 4.2 billion years ago and to 2.8 billion years ago. This points to a long period of volcanic activity - at least 1.4 billion years - on the far side during the first half of the moon's history, when it was a more dynamic world than it is today. The moon, like Earth, formed about 4.5 billion years ago. Volcanism on the moon, Earth and other planetary bodies involves the eruption of molten rock from the mantle - the layer just under the outer crust - onto the surface. The landing site in the South Pole-Aitken Basin, an impact crater, is an area with the thinnest crust on the moon, helpful for finding evidence of volcanism.

The samples contained various volcanic rock fragments, and the researchers used a method called radioisotope dating to determine their age. Lunar basalt samples previously were obtained from the moon's near side, which perpetually faces Earth, during U.S. Apollo, Soviet Luna and Chinese Chang'e-5 missions. These showed that volcanism on the near side had occurred as long ago as 4.0 billion years ago and continued for at least two billion years, Li said. "The exact timing and duration of lunar volcanism is elusive and maybe varied across different regions. Some small-scale volcanism may have also occurred on the near side as late as about 120 million years ago as recorded by volcanic glass beads from Chang'e-5 samples" collected in 2020, Li said.

The new study also found that the basalt dating to 4.2 billion years ago differed in composition from the basalt dating to 2.8 billion years ago, meaning they originated from different sources of molten rock - magma - in the mantle, Li said. The Chang'e-6 samples, Li said, also differ in composition compared with previously collected lunar samples from the near side.

Mark Rainey: Engineers are currently debugging why the Voyager 1 spacecraft, which is 15 billions miles away, turned off its main radio and switched to a backup radio that hasn't been used in over forty years!

I've had some tricky debugging issues in the past, including finding compiler bugs and debugging code with no debugger that had been burnt into prom packs for terminals, however I have huge admiration for the engineers maintaining the operation of Voyager 1.

Recently they sent a command to the craft that caused it to shut off its main radio transmitter, seemingly in an effort to preserve power and protect from faults. This prompted it to switch over to the backup radio transmitter, that is lower power. Now they have regained communication they are trying to determine the cause on hardware that is nearly 50 years old. Any communication takes days. When you think you have a difficult issue to debug, spare a thought for this team.

Apple executives have defended the relocation of the power button to the bottom of its new M4 Mac mini, citing the computer's significantly reduced size as the driving factor behind the design change.

In a Bilibili video interview, Apple's Greg Joswiak and John Ternus explained that the Mac mini's form factor, now half the size of its predecessor, necessitated finding a new position for the power button. The executives said that the bottom placement allows for convenient access despite initial user criticism.

A 2002 Slashdot post informed the world that "Recently Blake Ross, a developer of the Phoenix web browser, has made a post on the Mozillazine forums looking for a new name for the project. Apparently the people over at Phoenix Technologies decided that the name interferes with their trademark since they make an 'internet access device'..."

And then, on November 9 of 2004, the BBC reported that "Microsoft's Internet Explorer has a serious rival in the long-awaited Firefox 1.0 web browser, which has just been released." Their headline? "Firefox Browser Takes on Microsoft." Fans of the software have banded together to raise cash to pay for an advert in the New York Times announcing that version 1.0 of the browser is available. ["Are you fed up with your browser? You're not alone...."] The release of Firefox 1.0 on 9 November might even cause a few heads to turn at Microsoft because the program is steadily winning people away from the software giant's Internet Explorer browser.

Firefox has been created by the Mozilla Foundation which was started by former browser maker Netscape back in 1998... Earlier incarnations, but which had the same core technology, were called Phoenix and Firebird. Since then the software has been gaining praise and converts, not least because of the large number of security problems that have come to light in Microsoft's Internet Explorer. Rivals to IE got a boost in late June when two US computer security organisations warned people to avoid the Microsoft program to avoid falling victim to a serious vulnerability.

Internet monitoring firm WebSideStory has charted the growing population of people using the Firefox browser and says it is responsible for slowly eroding the stranglehold of IE. Before July this year, according to WebSideStory, Internet Explorer was used by about 95% of web surfers. That figure had remained static for years. In July the IE using population dropped to 94.7% and by the end of October stood at 92.9%. The Mozilla Foundation claims that Firefox has been downloaded almost eight million times and has publicly said it would be happy to garner 10% of the Windows- using, net-browsing population.

Firefox is proving popular because, at the moment, it has far fewer security holes than Internet Explorer and has some innovations lacking in Microsoft's program. For instance, Firefox allows the pages of different websites to be arranged as tabs so users can switch easily between them. It blocks pop-ups, has a neat way of finding text on a page and lets you search through the pages you have browsed...
Firefox celebrated its 20th anniversary with a special video touting new and upcoming features like tab previews, marking up PDFs, and tab grouping.

And upgrading to the latest version of Firefox now displays this message on a "What's New" page. "Whether you just downloaded Firefox or have been with us since the beginning, you are a vital part of helping us make the internet a better place.

"We can't wait to show you what's coming next." ("Check out our special edition wallpapers — open a new tab and click the gear icon at the top right corner...")