Researchers in South Africa have injected radioactive material into the horns of 20 rhinos to deter poaching, aiming to leverage existing radiation detectors at borders for early detection and interception of trafficked horns. The Associated Press reports: The research, which has included the participation of veterinarians and nuclear experts, begins with the animal being tranquilized before a hole is drilled into its horn and the nuclear material carefully inserted. This week, researchers at the University of the Witwatersrand's Radiation and Health Physics Unit in South Africa injected 20 live rhinos with these isotopes. They hope the process can be replicated to save other wild species vulnerable to poaching -- like elephants and pangolins. "We are doing this because it makes it significantly easier to intercept these horns as they are being trafficked over international borders, because there is a global network of radiation monitors that have been designed to prevent nuclear terrorism," said Professor James Larkin, who heads the project. "And we're piggybacking on the back of that."

According to figures by the International Union for Conservation of Nature, an international conservation body, the global rhino population stood at around 500,000 at the beginning of the 20th century. It now stands at around 27,000 due to continued demand for rhino horns on the black market. South Africa has the largest population of rhinos with an estimated 16,000, making it a hotspot with over 500 rhinos killed yearly. [...] While the idea has received support from some in the industry, the researchers have had to jump many ethical hurdles posed by critics of their methodology.

Pelham Jones, chairperson of the Private Rhino Owners Association, is among the critics of the proposed method and doubts that it would effectively deter poachers and traffickers. "(Poachers) have worked out other ways of moving rhino horn out of the country, out of the continent or off the continent, not through traditional border crossings," he said. "They bypass the border crossings because they know that is the area of the highest risk of confiscation or interception." Professor Nithaya Chetty, dean of the science faculty at Witwatersrand, said the dosage of the radioactivity is very low and its potential negative impact on the animal was tested extensively.

Amazon unveiled a new generative AI-powered version of its Alexa voice assistant at a packed event in September 2023, demonstrating how the digital assistant could engage in more natural conversation. However, nearly a year later, the updated Alexa has yet to be widely released, with former employees citing technical challenges and organizational dysfunction as key hurdles, Fortune reported Thursday. The magazine reports that the Alexa large language model lacks the necessary data and computing power to compete with rivals like OpenAI. Additionally, Amazon has prioritized AI development for its cloud computing unit, AWS, over Alexa, the report said. Despite a $4 billion investment in AI startup Anthropic, privacy concerns and internal politics have prevented Alexa's teams from fully leveraging Anthropic's technology.

America "is now adding less wind capacity each year" than it was before the passage of a climate-protecting bill in 2022, according to the New York Times.

Since then "solar panel installations are indeed soaring to record highs in the U.S., as are batteries that can store energy for later. But wind power has struggled, both on land and in the ocean." Some factors behind the wind industry's recent slowdown may be temporary, such as snarled supply chains. But wind power is also more vulnerable than solar power to many of the biggest logistical hurdles that hinder energy projects today: a lack of transmission lines, a lengthy permitting process and a growing backlash against new projects in many communities... [M]any areas are now crowded with turbines and existing electric grids are clogged, making it difficult to add more projects. Energy companies want to expand the grid's capacity to transport even more wind power to population centers, but getting permits for transmission lines and building them has become a brutal slog that can take more than a decade... Because they can reach the height of skyscrapers, wind turbines are more noticeable than solar farms and often attract more intense opposition from local communities.

The wind industry has also been hampered by soaring equipment costs after the pandemic wrecked supply chains and inflation spiked. While those factors initially hurt solar, too, the solar industry has adjusted much faster, with China nearly doubling its manufacturing capacity for panels over the past two years. Wind supply chains, which are dominated by a few manufacturers in China, Europe and the United States, have yet to fully recover. The cost increases have been devastating for offshore wind projects in the Northeast, where developers have canceled more than half the projects they planned to build this decade. Wind isn't languishing only in the United States. While a record 117 gigawatts of new wind capacity came online last year globally, virtually all of that growth was in China. In the rest of the world, developers weren't installing wind turbines any faster than they were in 2020...

It's still possible that wind power could rebound. In fact, some experts argue that the recent slowdown is only a temporary artifact of tax policy... [John Hensley, vice president for markets and policy analysis at the American Clean Power Association, a renewable industry trade group] said that U.S. wind manufacturing was beginning to ramp up thanks to new tax incentives, while costs were starting to come down. Last year, orders for new turbines increased by 130%, although many of them won't be delivered until 2025 or later. Some states are now trying to make it easier to build renewable energy: Illinois, Michigan and Minnesota have all passed laws making it harder for local governments to restrict wind and solar. The federal government has issued new rules to accelerate the planning of transmission lines.

Demand for wind could also rise as a growing number of states, tech companies and hydrogen producers are trying to secure clean electricity around the clock, rather than just a burst of solar power in the daytime.
Many plans for moving America off fossil fuels "envision a large expansion of both solar and wind," the article points out, "because the two sources generate electricity at different hours and can complement each other. A boom in solar power alone, which runs only in daytime, isn't enough."

Cruise's autonomous vehicles have resumed operation in Phoenix, Arizona, following an incident in San Francisco last October where a driverless vehicle dragged a pedestrian. The Verge reports: Cruise spokesperson Tiffany Testo said the company is deploying only two autonomous vehicles with safety drivers behind the wheel. In addition, the company has eight manually driven vehicles in the city. Eventually, the service area will "gradually expand" to include Scottsdale, Paradise Valley, Tempe, Mesa, Gilbert, and Chandler -- "measured against predetermined safety benchmarks."

Cruise's slow return to the road is noteworthy, given the huge hurdles facing the company in the wake of the October incident. Regulators accused the company of misleading them about the nature and severity of the incident, in which a pedestrian was dragged over 20 feet by a driverless Cruise after first being struck by a hit-and-run driver.

Several top executives have since left the company, including founder and CEO Kyle Vogt, and around a quarter of employees were laid off. GM has said it will reduce its spending on Cruise. And an outside report found evidence that a culture of antagonism toward regulators contributed to many of the failings.

A Shanghai flying taxi company says that China's "low altitude" industry is edging ahead of western rivals, thanks to more supportive regulators, technological breakthroughs and cut-throat competition in the Chinese logistics sector. From a report: The total market created by electric vertical take-off and landing, or eVTOL, aircraft is forecast to be worth $1.5tn a year by 2040 in a base-case assessment by Morgan Stanley analysts, with potential customers across airlines, logistics, emergency services, agriculture, tourism and security operations. China's AutoFlight Group won airworthiness certification from the Civil Aviation Administration of China in late March for the design and parts for its unmanned CarryAll aircraft -- a global first for an eVTOL weighing more than 1 tonne being cleared by regulators.

Kellen Xie, AutoFlight vice-president, said that while the company is also seeking similar approvals in Europe, the CAAC has been "quite supportive" of the new industry. "They work longer hours... they are determined to actually speed up the process of bringing this new technology into reality," he said. EVTOL aircraft take off vertically, like helicopters, but then transition into fixed-wing mode for travelling at higher speeds, offering faster and more efficient transport than ground-based options. Analysts point to a labyrinth of regulatory and safety hurdles, but supporters say the technology could fundamentally reshape how humans travel and freight is moved, in a level of disruption akin to the introduction of mass-market cars and commercial airlines. Most eVTOL aircraft are still in the testing stages and vary widely in terms of how fast and high they can fly and how much weight they can carry.

404 Media claims to have identified "the fundamental flaw with the age verification bills and laws" that have already passed in eight state legislatures (with two more taking effect in July): "the delusional, unfounded belief that putting hurdles between people and pornography is going to actually prevent them from viewing porn."

They argue that age verification laws "drag us back to the dark ages of the internet." Slashdot reader samleecole shared this excerpt: What will happen, and is already happening, is that people — including minors — will go to unmoderated, actively harmful alternatives that don't require handing over a government-issued ID to see people have sex. Meanwhile, performers and companies that are trying to do the right thing will suffer....

The legislators passing these bills are doing so under the guise of protecting children, but what's actually happening is a widespread rewiring of the scaffolding of the internet. They ignore long-established legal precedent that has said for years that age verification is unconstitutional, eventually and inevitably reducing everything we see online without impossible privacy hurdles and compromises to that which is not "harmful to minors." The people who live in these states, including the minors the law is allegedly trying to protect, are worse off because of it. So is the rest of the internet.
Yet new legislation is advancing in Kentucky and Nebraska, while the state of Kansas just passed a law which even requires age-verification for viewing "acts of homosexuality," according to a report: Websites can be fined up to $10,000 for each instance a minor accesses their content, and parents are allowed to sue for damages of at least $50,000. This means that the state can "require age verification to access LGBTQ content," according to attorney Alejandra Caraballo, who said on Threads that "Kansas residents may soon need their state IDs" to access material that simply "depicts LGBTQ people."
One newspaper opinion piece argues there's an easier solution: don't buy your children a smartphone: Or we could purchase any of the various software packages that block social media and obscene content from their devices. Or we could allow them to use social media, but limit their screen time. Or we could educate them about the issues that social media causes and simply trust them to make good choices. All of these options would have been denied to us if we lived in a state that passed a strict age verification law. Not only do age verification laws reduce parental freedom, but they also create myriad privacy risks. Requiring platforms to collect government IDs and face scans opens the door to potential exploitation by hackers and enemy governments. The very information intended to protect children could end up in the wrong hands, compromising the privacy and security of millions of users...

Ultimately, age verification laws are a misguided attempt to address the complex issue of underage social media use. Instead of placing undue burdens on users and limiting parental liberty, lawmakers should look for alternative strategies that respect privacy rights while promoting online safety.
This week a trade association for the adult entertainment industry announced plans to petition America's Supreme Court to intervene.

John Timmer reports via Ars Technica: A company called Colossal plans to pioneer the de-extinction business, taking species that have died within the past few thousand years and restoring them through the use of DNA editing and stem cells. It's grabbed headlines recently by announcing some compelling targets: the thylacine, an extinct marsupial predator, and an icon of human carelessness, the dodo. But the company was formed to tackle an even more audacious target: the mammoth, which hasn't roamed the Northern Hemisphere for thousands of years. Obviously, there are a host of ethical and conservation issues that would need to be worked out before Colossal's plans go forward. But there are some major practical hurdles as well, most of them the product of the distinct and extremely slow reproductive biology of the mammoth's closest living relatives, the elephants. At least one of those has now been cleared, as the company is announcing the production of the first elephant stem cells. The process turned out to be extremely difficult, suggesting that the company still has a long road ahead of it. [...] Overall, it's a project that has a high probability of failure and may ultimately require generations of scientists. If we do successfully de-extinct a species, the first example will probably be a different species, even though the projects launched later.

But Colossal is forging ahead and cleared one of the many hurdles it faces: It created the first induced stem cells from elephants and will be placing a draft manuscript describing the process on a public repository on Wednesday. (Colossal provided Ars with an advanced version of the draft that, outside of a few editing errors, appears largely complete.) Beyond providing the technical details of how the process works, the manuscript describes a long, failure-ridden route to eventual success. Several methods have been developed to allow us to induce stem cells from the cells of an adult organism. The original Nobel-winning process developed by Shinya Yamanaka involved inserting the genes that encode four key embryonic regulatory genes into adult cells and allowing them to reprogram the adult cell into an embryonic state. That has proven effective in a variety of species but has a couple of drawbacks due to the fact that the four genes can potentially stick around, interfering with later development steps. Although there are ways around that, others have developed a cocktail of chemicals that perform a similar function by activating signaling pathways that, collectively, can also reprogram adult cells. When it works, this simplifies matters, as you only have to remove the chemicals to allow the stem cells to adopt other fates. Colossal tried both of these. Neither worked with elephant cells: "Multiple attempts with current standard reprogramming methods were tried, and failed, and resulted in no, or incomplete, reprogramming." Apparently, lots of additional trial and error ensued. The eventual solution ended up being based in part on combining the two primary options: Cells were first exposed to a chemical reprogramming cocktail and then given the four genes used in the alternative reprogramming method. On its own, however, that wasn't enough. The researchers also had to address a quirk of elephant biology.

Obviously, for Colossal, this is a means to an end: the mammoth. But that's remarkably underplayed in the manuscript. Instead, its emphasis is on the technology's use in the conservation of existing species. [T]he researchers note that studying things like elephant development and metabolism in actual elephants is not especially realistic. But we can potentially induce the stem cells developed here into any cell we'd want to study -- nerve, liver, heart, and so on. So, the stem cells described here could be a useful tool for research. So, these cells are being presented as a valuable tool for the research community. Still, you can expect the people behind the de-extinction project to be getting to work on some of the easier things: showing that the genome in the cells can be edited and that they can be induced to start the process of embryogenesis. Separately, some unfortunate individuals will need to be working on the hard problems we mentioned earlier.

JetBlue Airways and Spirit Airlines announced on Monday that they would walk away from their planned $3.8 billion merger after federal antitrust regulators successfully challenged the deal in court. JetBlue said it would pay Spirit $69 million to exit the deal. From a report: A federal judge in Boston blocked the proposed merger on Jan. 16, siding with the Justice Department in determining that the merger would reduce competition in the industry and give airlines more leeway to raise ticket prices. The judge, William G. Young of the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts, noted that Spirit played a vital role in the market as a low-cost carrier and that travelers would have fewer options if JetBlue absorbed it.

"We are proud of the work we did with Spirit to lay out a vision to challenge the status quo, but given the hurdles to closing that remain, we decided together that both airlines' interests are better served by moving forward independently," JetBlue's chief executive, Joanna Geraghty, said in a statement on Monday. "We wish the very best going forward to the entire Spirit team." JetBlue and Spirit appealed Judge Young's decision. JetBlue filed an appellate brief last week arguing that the deal should be allowed to go through. But in a regulatory filing on Jan. 26, JetBlue said it might terminate the deal. Spirit said in its own filing the same day that it believed "there is no basis for terminating" the agreement.

The Food and Drug Administration has allowed Florida to import millions of dollars worth of medications from Canada at far lower prices than in the United States, overriding fierce decades-long objections from the pharmaceutical industry. From a report: The approval, issued in a letter to Florida Friday, is a major policy shift for the United States, and supporters hope it will be a significant step forward in the long and largely unsuccessful effort to rein in drug prices. Individuals in the United States are allowed to buy directly from Canadian pharmacies, but states have long wanted to be able to purchase medicines in bulk for their Medicaid programs, government clinics and prisons from Canadian wholesalers.

Florida has estimated that it could save up to $150 million in its first year of the program, importing medicines that treat H.I.V., AIDS, diabetes, hepatitis C and psychiatric conditions. Other states have applied to the F.D.A. to set up similar programs. But significant hurdles remain. The pharmaceutical industry's major lobbying organization, the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, or PhRMA, which has sued over previous importation efforts, is expected to file suit to prevent the Florida plan from going into effect. Some drug manufacturers have agreements with Canadian wholesalers not to export their medicines, and the Canadian government has already taken steps to block the export of prescription drugs that are in short supply.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced that Threads is now available to users in the European Union. "Today we're opening Threads to more countries in Europe," wrote Zuckerberg in a post on the platform. "Welcome everyone." MacRumors reports: The move comes five months after the social media network launched in most markets around the world, but remained unavailable to EU-based users due to regulatory hurdles. [...] In addition to creating a Threads profile for posting, users in the EU can also simply browse Threads without having an Instagram account, an option likely introduced to comply with legislation surrounding online services.

The expansion into a market of 448 million people should see Threads' user numbers get a decent boost. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said on a company earnings call in October that Threads now has "just under" 100 million monthly users. Since its launch earlier this year it has gained a web app, an ability to search for posts, and a post editing feature.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Scientific American: This week doctors announced they had completed the first successful transplant of a partial face and an entire eye. In May at NYU Langone Health in New York City, the surgery was performed on a 46-year-old man who had suffered severe electrical burns to his face, left eye and left arm. He does not yet have vision in the transplanted eye and may never regain it there, but early evidence suggests the eye itself is healthy and may be capable of transmitting neurological signals to the brain. The feat opens up the possibility of restoring the appearance -- and maybe even sight -- of people who have been disfigured or blinded by injuries. Researchers caution there are many technical hurdles before such a procedure can effectively treat vision loss, however.

"I think it's an important proof of principle," says Jeffrey Goldberg, a professor and chair of ophthalmology at the Byers Eye Institute at Stanford University, who was not involved in the surgery but has been part of a team working toward whole-eye transplants in humans. "I think it points to the opportunity and importance that we really stand on the verge of being able to [achieve] eye transplants and vision restoration for blind patients more broadly."But he cautions that the main obstacle is achieving regeneration of the optic nerve, which carries visual signals from the retina to the brain; this step has not yet been successfully demonstrated in humans.

Scientists have been working toward whole-eye transplantation for many years. "This has been, I would say, science fiction for a long time," says Jose-Alain Sahel, a professor and chair of the department of ophthalmology at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine, who has been working toward such transplants with Goldberg and others. Progress in surgical techniques and nerve regeneration have made this goal seem more attainable. [...] "The fact that this surgery was successful is wonderful news," Sahel says. He cautions that surgery is only a small part of the issues that need to be addressed in order to restore eye function, however. These include making sure the immune system doesn't reject the donor eye, which is a challenge with any type of transplant. Then the corneal nerve -- which carries sensory signals from the transparent part of the eye -- must be reconnected. Yet the most complex part is regenerating the optic nerve. In order to do so, surgeons have to coax the nerve fibers to grow to the right place, which Sahel says could take months or even years. And complete optic nerve regeneration has not yet been successfully achieved in humans or other mammals.

schwit1 shares a report from CNBC: Apple will pay $25 million in back pay and civil penalties to settle a matter over the company's hiring practices under the Immigration and Nationality Act, the Department of Justice announced Thursday. Apple has agreed to pay $6.75 million in civil penalties and establish an $18.25 million fund for back pay to eligible discrimination victims, the DOJ said in a release.

Apple was accused of not advertising positions that it wanted to fill through a federal program called Permanent Labor Certification Program or PERM, which allows U.S. companies to recruit workers who can become permanent U.S. residents after completing a number of requirements. The DOJ said that it believed that Apple followed procedures that were designed to favor current Apple employees holding temporary visas who wanted to become permanent employees. In particular, Apple was accused of not advertising positions on its external website and erecting hurdles such as requiring mailed paper applications, which the DOJ alleges means that some applicants to Apple jobs were not properly considered under federal law.

"These less effective recruitment procedures deterred U.S. applicants from applying and nearly always resulted in zero or very few mailed applications that Apple considered for PERM-related job positions, which allowed Apple to fill the positions with temporary visa holders," according to the settlement agreement between Apple and DOJ. Apple contests the accusation, according to the agreement, and says that it believes it was following the appropriate Department of Labor regulations. Apple also contests that any failures were the result of inadvertent errors and not discrimination, according to the agreement.

An anonymous reader shares this report from Futurism: Training large language models is an incredibly power-intensive process that has an immense carbon footprint. Keeping data centers running requires a ludicrous amount of electricity that could generate substantial amounts of greenhouse emissions — depending, of course, on the energy's source. Now, the Verge reports, Microsoft is betting so big on AI that its pushing forward with a plan to power them using nuclear reactors. Yes, you read that right; a recent job listing suggests the company is planning to grow its energy infrastructure with the use of small modular reactors (SMR)...

But before Microsoft can start relying on nuclear power to train its AIs, it'll have plenty of other hurdles to overcome. For one, it'll have to source a working SMR design. Then, it'll have to figure out how to get its hands on a highly enriched uranium fuel that these small reactors typically require, as The Verge points out. Finally, it'll need to figure out a way to store all of that nuclear waste long term...

Other than nuclear fission, Microsoft is also investing in nuclear fusion, a far more ambitious endeavor, given the many decades of research that have yet to lead to a practical power system. Nevertheless, the company signed a power purchase agreement with Helion, a fusion startup founded by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman earlier this year, with the hopes of buying electricity from it as soon as 2028.

The Federal Communications Commission is taking steps to restrict Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) providers from easily accessing US telephone numbers. Over the past several years, robocallers have exploited VoIP providers to inundate US citizens with unwanted calls, many of which come from falsified numbers. Previously, the regulations allowed VoIP services relatively uncomplicated access to US phone numbers. ArsTechnica: But under rules adopted by the FCC yesterday, VoIP providers will face some extra hurdles. They will have to "make robocall-related certifications to help ensure compliance with the Commission's rules targeting illegal robocalls," and "disclose and keep current information about their ownership, including foreign ownership, to mitigate the risk of providing bad actors abroad with access to US numbering resources," the FCC said. The FCC order will take effect 30 days after it's published in the Federal Register. A public draft of the order was released ahead of the FCC meeting.

Elad Gil, writing in a blog post: In most industries, regulation prevents competition. This famous chart of prices over time reflects how highly regulated industries (healthcare, education, energy) have their costs driven up over time, while less regulated industries (clothing, software, toys) drop costs dramatically over time. (Please note I do not believe these are inflation adjusted - so 60-70% may be "break even" pricing inflation adjusted.)

Regulation favors incumbents in two ways. First, it increase the cost of entering a market, in some cases dramatically. The high cost of clinical trials and the extra hurdles put in place to launch a drug are good examples of this. A must-watch video is this one with Paul Janssen, one of the giants of pharma, in which he states that the vast majority of drug development budgets are wasted on tests imposed by regulators which "has little to do with actual research or actual development." This is a partial explanation for why (outside of Moderna, an accident of COVID), no $40B+ market cap new biopharma company has been launched in almost 40 years (despite healthcare being 20% of US GDP).

Secondly, regulation favors incumbents via something known as "regulatory capture." In regulatory capture, the regulators become beholden to a specific industry lobby or group -- for example by receiving jobs in the industry after working as a regulator, or via specific forms of lobbying. There becomes a strong incentive to "play nice" with the incumbents by regulators and to bias regulations their way, in order to get favors later in life. Additional resource: All-In Summit: Bill Gurley Presents 2,851 Miles.

An anonymous reader shared this report from IGN: A demo for the unofficial fan game Twin Peaks: Into the Night has been released, allowing players to explore the weird and wonderful world of David Lynch and Mark Frost's '90s TV show in a PS1-style adaptation... developed by Jean Manzoni and Lucas Guibert of the Blue Rose Team. The game is now available to download on PC via itch.io, with its creators welcoming feedback on the gameplay experience... "We hope you'll enjoy playing it. As a quick reminder, this is a free fan game made by a very small team of two on our free time. Please take this into consideration... The demo is intended to show you the direction we're taking, and we've put our hearts at it. We're already working on the next release."

Although the game shares no affiliation with the show or its creators, it promises an "experience that will immerse you directly into the unique atmosphere of the show" by offering players the opportunity to step into the shoes of Cooper to solve the mystery while enjoying a slice of cherry pie and a damn fine cup of coffee.
More details from Engadget: The graphics are retro and decidedly PS1-flavored, which makes sense given how the show premiered in 1990. The gameplay looks to be full of exploration, complete with conversations with the town's many oddball residents, though there's a survival horror element reminiscent of the original Resident Evil titles. This is also an appropriate design choice, as the show pits Agent Cooper against foes both physical and supernatural...

The creators have announced that the game will be free when it launches, so that should clear up any potential legal hurdles moving forward.

Amtrak and a company called Texas Central announced a partnership on Wednesday to connect Houston and Dallas by train, spanning roughly 240 miles at speeds upwards of 205 mph. Popular Science reports: According to Quartz, the applications have already been submitted to "several federal grant programs" to help finance research and design costs. Amtrak representatives estimate the project could reduce greenhouse gas emissions by over 100,000 tons annually and remove an estimated 12,500 cars per day from the region's I-45 corridor. The reduction in individual vehicles on the roads could also save as much as 65 million gallons of fuel each year.

The trains traveling Amtrak's Dallas-Houston route would be based on Japan's updated N700S Series Shinkansen "bullet train," a design that first debuted in 2020. "This high-speed train, using advanced, proven Shinkansen technology, has the opportunity to revolutionize rail travel in the southern US," Texas Central CEO Michael Bui said via the August 9 announcement.

American city planners have been drawn to the idea of high-speed railways for decades, but have repeatedly fallen short of getting them truly on track due to a host of issues, including funding, political pushback, and cultural hurdles. That said, 85 percent of recently surveyed travelers between Dallas and the greater North Texas area indicated they would ride such a form of transportation "in the right circumstances." If so, as many as 6 million travelers could be expected to ride the train by the end of the decade, with the number rising to 13 million by 2050.

The Supreme Court ruled Tuesday that in order to find someone guilty of making a "true threat" courts must first determine that the person recklessly disregarded the fact that their words might be perceived as threats. From a report: Experts fear the decision will create new hurdles for victims of cyberstalking by requiring them to first prove that their stalkers understand the consequences of their actions. "The Supreme Court has just decreed that stalking is free speech protected by the First Amendment if the stalker genuinely believes his actions are non-threatening," tweeted Mary Anne Franks, a professor at George Washington Law School and president of the nonprofit Cyber Civil Rights Initiative. "That is, the more deluded the stalker, the more protected the stalking."

The case, Counterman v. Colorado, concerns a man named Billy Raymond Counterman, who was convicted under a Colorado anti-stalking law, after he sent a barrage of threatening Facebook messages to a woman he'd never met. The Colorado law didn't require the court to consider Counterman's mental state when he sent the messages. It only had to consider his behavior and how it was objectively received, that is, whether he repeatedly contacted, followed, or surveilled his target in a way that would cause a "reasonable person" distress. Counterman was found guilty under that statute, but he appealed his conviction, arguing that his statements were protected by the First Amendment and did not constitute "true threats," a category of speech that falls outside the bounds of the First Amendment, because it wasn't his intention to threaten his target. In its decision, the Supreme Court overwhelmingly sided with Counterman.

Wind turbines have generated more electricity than gas for the first time in the UK. From a report: In the first three months of this year a third of the country's electricity came from wind farms, research from Imperial College London have shown. National Grid has also confirmed that April saw a record period of solar energy generation. By 2035 the UK aims for all of its electricity to have net zero emissions. "There are still many hurdles to reaching a completely fossil fuel-free grid, but wind out-supplying gas for the first time is a genuine milestone event," said Iain Staffell, energy researcher at Imperial College and lead author of the report. The majority of the UK's wind power has come from offshore wind farms. Installing new onshore wind turbines has effectively been banned since 2015 in England.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: U.S. company Westinghouse unveiled plans on Thursday for a small modular reactor to generate virtually emissions-free electricity that could replace coal plants or power water desalinization and other industries. Rita Baranwal, the Westinghouse Electricity Co's top technology officer, said the reactor, dubbed AP300 for its planned 300 Megawatt capacity, will not use special fuels or liquid metal coolants unlike some other next-generation reactors. It will be a smaller version of its AP1000 reactor, several of which are operating in China, and which are ramping up in Georgia at the Vogtle plant, after years of delay and billions of dollars over budget.

Despite hurdles for new nuclear, Baranwal was confident. "We've kept it simple, designed it on demonstrated and licensed technology, and I think that's one of the advantages that we have with this concept," she told Reuters in an interview. Westinghouse, owned by Brookfield Business Partners, plans to start constructing the reactor by 2030 and have it running by 2033. So far the design for only one SMR, planned by NuScale Power, has been approved by U.S. regulators and it still needs permits.

Westinghouse did not reveal how much the first reactor would cost, but said later units would cost about $1 billion. The company, based in western Pennsylvania, has had informal talks with parties in neighboring states Ohio and West Virginia about the potential building of AP300s at former coal plants. Westinghouse also hopes to sell reactors to countries in eastern Europe, even though nuclear power critics have expressed concerns that developers and governments should think carefully before building new nuclear plants anywhere near the region. They noted that Russia took the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant in Ukraine, the site of repeated shelling.