According to a new analysis of the subscription app economy from mobile subscription toolkit provider RevenueCat, the top 5% of apps generate 200 times the revenue of the bottom quartile after their first year, while the median monthly revenue an app generates after 12 months is under $50 USD. From a report: The "State of Subscription Apps" report offers a bird's-eye view into the subscription app universe, as RevenueCat has nearly 30,000 apps using its platform's tools to manage their monetization. Outside of Apple and Google, that makes RevenueCat the largest collection of subscription app developers on one platform.

This report specifically looks at data from over 29,000 apps and over 18,000 developers who collectively generate over $6.7 billion in tracked revenue and have over 290 million subscribers. After crunching its data, the company found that only 17.2% of apps will reach even $1,000 in monthly revenue, but after they hit that point, the odds of them growing further increase.

The University of Texas at Austin said Monday that it would again require standardized tests for admissions (non-paywalled source), becoming the latest selective university to reinstate requirements for SAT or ACT scores that were abandoned during the pandemic. From a report: A few years ago, about 2,000 colleges across the country began to move away from requiring test scores, at least temporarily, amid concerns they helped fuel inequality. But a growing number of those schools have reversed those policies, including Brown, Yale, Dartmouth, M.I.T., Georgetown and Purdue, with several announcing the changes in recent months.

U.T. Austin, which admits a cross-section of high-achieving Texas students under a plan designed to increase opportunity in the state, cited a slightly different reason than the other schools in returning to test requirements. Without requiring test scores, officials said, they were hampered in placing the admitted students in programs they would be most suited for and in determining which ones needed extra help. After making test scores optional the past few years, the university will now require applicants to submit either SAT or ACT scores beginning Aug. 1, with applications for fall 2025 admissions.

In an interview, Jay Hartzell, the U.T. president, said that the decision followed an analysis of students who did not submit scores. "We looked at our students and found that, in many ways, they weren't faring as well," Dr. Hartzell said. Those against testing requirements have long said that standardized tests are unfair because many students from affluent families use tutors and coaches to bolster their scores. But recent data has raised questions about the contention. In reinstating test requirements, some universities have said that making scores optional had the unintended effect of harming prospective students from low-income families.

The U.S. government must move "quickly and decisively" to avert substantial national security risks stemming from artificial intelligence (AI) which could, in the worst case, cause an "extinction-level threat to the human species," says a report commissioned by the U.S. government published on Monday. Time: "Current frontier AI development poses urgent and growing risks to national security," the report, which TIME obtained ahead of its publication, says. "The rise of advanced AI and AGI [artificial general intelligence] has the potential to destabilize global security in ways reminiscent of the introduction of nuclear weapons." AGI is a hypothetical technology that could perform most tasks at or above the level of a human. Such systems do not currently exist, but the leading AI labs are working toward them and many expect AGI to arrive within the next five years or less.

The three authors of the report worked on it for more than a year, speaking with more than 200 government employees, experts, and workers at frontier AI companies -- like OpenAI, Google DeepMind, Anthropic and Meta -- as part of their research. Accounts from some of those conversations paint a disturbing picture, suggesting that many AI safety workers inside cutting-edge labs are concerned about perverse incentives driving decisionmaking by the executives who control their companies. The finished document, titled "An Action Plan to Increase the Safety and Security of Advanced AI," recommends a set of sweeping and unprecedented policy actions that, if enacted, would radically disrupt the AI industry. Congress should make it illegal, the report recommends, to train AI models using more than a certain level of computing power.

The threshold, the report recommends, should be set by a new federal AI agency, although the report suggests, as an example, that the agency could set it just above the levels of computing power used to train current cutting-edge models like OpenAI's GPT-4 and Google's Gemini. The new AI agency should require AI companies on the "frontier" of the industry to obtain government permission to train and deploy new models above a certain lower threshold, the report adds. Authorities should also "urgently" consider outlawing the publication of the "weights," or inner workings, of powerful AI models, for example under open-source licenses, with violations possibly punishable by jail time, the report says. And the government should further tighten controls on the manufacture and export of AI chips, and channel federal funding toward "alignment" research that seeks to make advanced AI safer, it recommends.

It was an idea first proposed by Archimedes, reports CNN. But now, "Brenden Sener, 13, of London, Ontario, has won two gold medals and a London Public Library award for his minuscule version of the contraption — a supposed war weapon made up of a large array of mirrors designed to focus and aim sunlight on a target, such as a ship, and cause combustion — according to a paper published in the January issue of the Canadian Science Fair Journal." For his 2022 science project, Sener recreated the Archimedes screw, a device for raising and moving water. But he didn't stop there. Sener found the death ray to be one of the more intriguing devices — sometimes referred to as the heat ray. Historical writings suggested that Archimedes used "burning mirrors" to start anchored ships on fire during the siege of Syracuse from 214 to 212 BC...

There is no archaeological evidence that the contraption existed, as Sener noted in his paper, but many have tried to recreate the mechanism to see if the ancient invention could be feasible. In Sener's attempt at the ray, he set up a heating lamp facing four small concave mirrors, each tilted to direct light at a piece of cardboard with an X marked at the focal point. In this project he designed for the 2023 Matthews Hall Annual Science Fair, Sener hypothesized that as the mirrors focused light energy onto the cardboard, the temperature of the target would increase with each mirror added.

In his experiment, Sener conducted three trials with two different light bulb wattages, 50 watts and 100 watts. Each additional mirror increased the temperature notably, he found... The temperature of the cardboard with just the heating lamp and the 100-watt light bulb and no mirrors was about 81 degrees Fahrenheit (27.2 degrees Celsius). After waiting for the cardboard to cool, Sener added one mirror and retested. The focal point's temperature increased to almost 95 F (34.9 C), he found. The greatest increase occurred with the addition of the fourth mirror. The temperature with three mirrors aimed at the target was almost 110 F (43.4 C), but the addition of a fourth mirror increased the temperature by about 18 F (10 C) to 128 F (53.5 C)...

Sener was not attempting to light anything on fire, as "a heating lamp does not generate anywhere near enough heat as the sun would," he said. But he believes that with the use of the sun's rays and a larger mirror, "the temperature would increase even more drastically and at a faster rate" and "would easily cause combustion."
The powerful weapon wouldn't work on cloudy days, Sener's paper points out, and even a moving ship might diminish its impact.

But in an interview with CNN, Sener calls Archimedes' death ray "a neat idea".

An anonymous reader quotes a report from BleepingComputer: FBI's Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3) has released its 2023 Internet Crime Report (PDF), which recorded a 22% increase in reported losses compared to 2022, amounting to a record of $12.5 billion. The number of relevant complaints submitted to the FBI in 2023 reached 880,000, 10% higher than the previous year, with the age group topping the report being people over 60, which shows how vulnerable older adults are to cybercrime. Both figures continue a worrying trend seen by the agency since 2019, where complaints and losses rise yearly. For 2023, the types of crimes that increased were tech support scams and extortion, whereas phishing, personal data breach, and non-payment/non-delivery scams slightly waned.

dcblogs writes: A recent study in the National Bureau of Economic Research has found that companies are quietly adapting to rising temperatures by shifting operations from hotter to cooler locations. The researchers analyzed data from 50,000 companies between 2009 and 2020. "To illustrate the economic impact, the researchers found that when a company with equal employment across two counties experiences a heat shock in one county, there is a subsequent 0.7% increase in employment growth in the unaffected county over a three-year horizon," reports TechTarget. "The finding is significant, given that the mean employment growth for the sample of businesses in the study is 2.4%."

Heat shocks are characterized by their severe impact on health, energy grids, and increased fire risks, influencing companies with multiple locations to reconsider their geographical distribution of operations. Despite this trend, states like Arizona and Nevada, which have some of the highest heat-related death tolls, continue to experience rapid business expansion. Experts believe that factors such as labor pool, taxes, and regulations still outweigh environmental climate risks when it comes to business site selection. But heat associated deaths are on the rise. In the Phoenix area alone, it experienced 425 heat related deaths in 2022 and a similar number in 2023 -- record highs for this region.

The study suggests that the implications of climate change on business operations are becoming more apparent. Companies are beginning to evaluate climate risks as part of their regular risk assessment process.

Huawei is back from the dead after recording a sales jump of 64% in the first six weeks of 2024 compared to a year earlier. Meanwhile, Apple's iPhone sales in China fell by 24% during the same period. The BBC reports: Aside from a resurgence of Huawei sales at the more expensive end of the Chinese phone market, Apple was also "squeezed in the middle on aggressive pricing from the likes of Oppo, Vivo and Xiaomi," Counterpoint Research's Mengmeng Zhang wrote. China, which is one of Apple's biggest markets, also saw overall smartphone sales shrink by 7% in the same period, the report said. Huawei struggled for years due to US sanctions but its sales surged after releasing its Mate 60 series of 5G smartphones in August. It came as a major surprise as the Chinese firm was cut off from key chips and technology required for 5G mobile internet.

Honor, which is the smartphone brand spun off from Huawei in 2020, was the only other top-five brand to see sales increase in China during the period, according to the report. Sales of Vivo, Xiaomi and Oppo also fell in the first six weeks of the year, Counterpoint said. Its report also said Apple's share of the Chinese smartphone market dropped to 15.7% from 19% last year, putting it in fourth place as it fell from the number two spot. Meanwhile, Huawei rose to second place as its market share grew to 16.5% from 9.4% a year earlier. Despite its sales falling by 15% over the last year, Vivo remained China's top-selling smartphone maker, Counterpoint said.

Rust's official survey team released results from their 8th annual survey "focused on gathering insights and feedback from Rust users". In terms of operating systems used by Rustaceans, the situation is very similar to the results from 2022, with Linux being the most popular choice of Rust users [69.7%], followed by macOS [33.5%] and Windows [31.9%], which have a very similar share of usage. Rust programmers target a diverse set of platforms with their Rust programs, even though the most popular target by far is still a Linux machine [85.4%]. We can see a slight uptick in users targeting WebAssembly [27.1%], embedded and mobile platforms, which speaks to the versatility of Rust.

We cannot of course forget the favourite topic of many programmers: which IDE (developer environment) do they use. Visual Studio Code still seems to be the most popular option [61.7%], with RustRover (which was released last year) also gaining some traction [16.4%].
The site ITPro spoke to James Governor, co-founder of the developer-focused analyst firm RedMonk, who said Rust's usage is "steadily increasing", pointing to its adoption among hyperscalers and cloud companies and in new infrastructure projects. "Rust is not crossing over yet as a general-purpose programming language, as Python did when it overtook Java, but it's seeing steady growth in adoption, which we expect to continue. It seems like a sustainable success story at this point."

But InfoWorld writes that "while the use of Rust language by professional programmers continues to grow, Rust users expressed concerns about the language becoming too complex and the low level of Rust usage in the tech industry." Among the 9,374 respondents who shared their main worries for the future of Rust, 43% were most concerned about Rust becoming too complex, a five percentage point increase from 2022; 42% were most concerned about low usage of Rust in the tech industry; and 32% were most concerned about Rust developers and maintainers not being properly supported, a six percentage point increase from 2022. Further, the percentage of respondents who were not at all concerned about the future of Rust fell, from 30% in 2022 to 18% in 2023.

Space.com writes that NASA's plan to return samples from Mars to the earth "is facing major challenges, according to a new report.

"Design, cost and scheduling are all significant obstacles, an audit report of NASA's Mars Sample Return (MSR) Program by the agency's Office of Inspector General (OIG) finds..." It involves landing on Mars to collect samples taken by the Perseverance rover and launching those samples to rendezvous with an orbiter, which will haul them to Earth. Perseverance is already on Mars, snagging and storing samples. But the program still needs to build a Sample Retrieval Lander and an Earth Return Orbiter, the latter being developed and funded by the European Space Agency. The Mars Sample Return program is one of the most technically complex, operationally demanding and ambitious robotic science missions ever undertaken by NASA, according to the OIG report.

The report notes design, architecture and schedule issues with the Capture Containment and Return System. These design issues resulted in adding about $200 million to the budget and one year of lost schedule... There is concern that, due to the number and significance of cost increase indicators so far, the $7.4 billion estimate is "premature and may be insufficient," the report finds. Now, the complexity... could drive costs to between $8 billion to $11 billion, the OIG report notes, citing a September 2023 Independent Review Board report. Notably, a July 2020 estimate listed costs of $2.5 to $3 billion.

These new figures indicate significant financial challenges and uncertainties... Issues include inflation, supply chain problems and increases in funding requests for specific program components.

Energy-related emissions of carbon dioxide hit a record high in 2023, the International Energy Agency (IEA) said in a report on Friday. The IEA analysis showed that it rose by 410 million tonnes, or 1.1%, in 2023 to 37.4 billion tonnes. From a report: "Far from falling rapidly -- as is required to meet the global climate goals set out in the Paris Agreement -- CO2 emissions reached a new record high," the IEA said. However, the Paris-based watchdog also found clean energy including wind and solar energy, as well as electric vehicles, had helped to offset the impact of the continued burning of coal and oil growth, which was 1.3% in 2022.

The reopening of China's economy after the COVID-19 pandemic and a recovery in the aviation sector contributed to an overall rise, the IEA said in its report. Severe droughts last year in China, the United States, India, and other countries hampered hydropower production. It accounted for around 40% of the rise in emissions or 170 million tonnes of CO2. "Without this effect, emissions from the global electricity sector would have fallen in 2023," the IEA said. Carbon dioxide emissions from coal accounted for the remaining increase. The IEA analysis showed that 2023 was the first year in which at least half of electricity generation in industrialized countries came from low-emission sources such as renewable energy and nuclear power. Energy-related emissions in the United States fell by 4.1%, and 9% in the European Union, driven by a surge in renewable power generation.

Eating ultraprocessed foods raises the risk of developing or dying from dozens of adverse health conditions, according to a new review of 45 meta-analyses on almost 10 million people. From a report: "We found consistent evidence linking higher intakes of ultra-processed foods with over 70% of the 45 different health outcomes we assessed," said senior author Wolfgang Marx, a senior research fellow at the Food & Mood Centre at Deakin University in Geelong, Australia, in an email. A higher intake was considered about one serving or about 10% more ultraprocessed foods per day, said Heinz Freisling, a scientist in the nutrition and metabolism branch of the World Health Organization's International Agency for Research on Cancer, in an email.

"This proportion can be regarded as 'baseline' and for people consuming more than this baseline, the risk might increase," said Freisling, who was not involved in the study. Researchers graded each study as having credible or strong, highly suggestive, suggestive, weak or no evidence. All the studies in the review were published in the past three years, and none was funded by companies involved in the production of ultraprocessed foods, the authors said. "Strong evidence shows that a higher intake of ultra-processed foods was associated with approximately 50% higher risk of cardiovascular disease-related death and common mental disorders," said lead author Dr. Melissa Lane, a postdoctoral research fellow at Deakin, in an email. Cardiovascular disease encompasses heart attacks, stroke, clogged arteries and peripheral artery disease. The study: Ultra-processed food exposure and adverse health outcomes: umbrella review of epidemiological meta-analyses (BMJ)

Fast food chain Wendy's announced it's adopting a similar approach to Uber's Surge Pricing policy by dynamically adjusting the prices of its menu items during peak demand periods at certain locations. The controversial strategy seeks to leverage real-time data to align pricing and demand, enhancing efficiency and potentially improving customer satisfaction. From a report: During a conference call earlier this month, Wendy's CEO Kirk Tanner said the fast-food chain would experiment with dynamic pricing as early as next year. "Beginning as early as 2025, we will begin testing more enhanced features like dynamic pricing and daypart offerings, along with AI-enabled menu changes and suggestive selling," he said. "As we continue to show the benefit of this technology in our company-operated restaurants, franchisee interest in digital menu boards should increase, further supporting sales and profit growth across the system."

Prices seesaw all the time on the sites of online retailers like Amazon that use algorithms and artificial intelligence to monitor competitors and glean insights into individual shoppers, adjusting prices depending on interest in the product or in the brand, said Timothy Webb, an assistant professor at the University of Delaware's hospitality and sport business management program. Coupons and other offers are also routinely dangled in mobile apps to encourage people to make purchases. "A lot of this stuff is already happening even if you don't realize that it is happening. If you have the Starbucks app and I have the Starbucks app, we probably have different offers," Webb said. "We might not be in the drive-through and they just increased the prices, but we are already paying different prices for the same products."

But, he says, Wendy's fans will likely see moderate, not massive, price swings during periods of peak demand. "It's not like $200 or $300 on a flight. This is a hypercompetitive industry. If Wendy's goes up $2 to $3 on a burger at dinner time, I would be shocked. People have too many options. They will just walk down the street and eat at Burger King instead," Webb said. "There will just be little price changes here."

According to the Wall Street Journal (paywalled), Canada has proposed new rules that would compel digital platforms to remove online content that features the sexual exploitation of children or intimate images without consent of the individuals involved. From a report: The rules were years in the making, and represent the third and possibly final installment of measures aimed at regulating digital platforms. Measures introduced since 2022 aim to increase the amount of domestic, Canadian-made content on streaming services, such as Netflix, and require digital platforms to help Canadian news-media outlets finance their newsroom operations. The legislation needs to be approved by Canada's Parliament before it takes effect.

Canada said its rules are based on concepts introduced by the European Union, the U.K. and Australia. Canadian officials say the proposed measures would apply to social-media platforms, adult-entertainment sites where users can upload content, and live-streaming services. These services, officials said, are expected to expeditiously remove two categories of content: That which sexually exploits a child or an abuse survivor, and intimate content broadcast without an individual's consent. The latter incorporates so-called revenge porn, or the nonconsensual posting or dissemination of intimate images, often after the end of a romantic relationship. Officials said private and encrypted messaging services are excluded from the proposed regulations.

Canadian officials said platforms will have a duty to either ensure the material is not published, or take it down once notified. Canada also intends to set up a new agency, the Digital Safety Commission, to enforce the rules, order harmful content taken down, and hold digital services accountable. Platforms that violate the rules could face a maximum penalty of up to 25 million Canadian dollars, or the equivalent of $18.5 million, officials said.

"One London resident watched on CCTV as a thief walked up to his £40,000 car and drove away," reports the Observer. "Now manufacturers say they are being drawn in to a hi-tech 'arms race' with criminals." [H]i-tech devices disguised as handheld games consoles are being traded online for thousands of pounds and are used by organised crime gangs to mimic the electronic key on an Ioniq 5, opening the doors and starting the engine. The device, known as an "emulator", works by intercepting a signal from the car, which is scanning for the presence of a legitimate key, and sending back a signal to gain access to the vehicle...

Hyundai says it is looking at measures to prevent the use of emulators "as a priority". But it is not the only carmaker whose vehicles appear to be vulnerable. An Observer investigation found that models by Toyota, Lexus and Kia have also been targeted... British motorists now face an increase in the number of thefts and rising insurance premiums... Car thefts are at their highest level for a decade in England and Wales, rising from 85,803 vehicles in the year to March 2012 to 130,270 in the year to March 2023 — an increase of more than 50%. Part of the reason, say experts, is the rise of keyless entry...

Kia did not respond to a request for comment. A spokesperson for Toyota, which owns Lexus, said: "Toyota and Lexus are continuously working on developing technical solutions to make vehicles more secure. Since introducing enhanced security hardware on the latest versions of a number of models, we have seen a significant drop-off in thefts. For older models we are currently developing solutions."
Another common attack requires entry to the vehicle first, according to the article, but then uses the vehicle's onboard diagnostic port to program "a new key linked to the vehicle..."

"Many owners of Ioniq 5s, which sell from around £42,000, now use steering locks to deter thieves."

jbmartin6 shares a report from Phys.Org: Threatening messages aimed to prevent digital piracy have the opposite effect if you're a man, a new study from the University of Portsmouth has found. According to the research, women tend to respond positively to this kind of messaging, but men typically increase their piracy behaviors by 18%. [...] This paper studies how effective anti-piracy messages are as a deterrent, examining the change in TV and film piracy intentions among 962 adults compared with their past behavior. The three messages examined in the study were verbatim copies of three real-world anti-piracy campaigns. Two of the campaigns used threatening messages to try to combat piracy and the third was educational in tone.

One of the threatening messages was from crime reduction charity, Crimestoppers, which focused on the individual's risk of computer viruses, identity fraud, money and data theft and hacking. The other message was based on a campaign by the French government, which used a "three strike" process, whereby infringers were given two written warnings before their internet access was terminated. The educational message was taken from the campaign "Get It Right from a Genuine Site," which focuses on the cost to the economy and to the individual creative people, and signposts consumers away from piracy sites and towards legal platforms such as Spotify or Netflix.

The study found that one threatening message influences women to reduce their piracy intentions by over 50%, but men increase their piracy behaviors. The educational messages had no effect on either men or women. "The research shows that anti-piracy messages can inadvertently increase piracy, which is a phenomenon known as psychological reactance," explained [lead author, Kate Whitman, from the University of Portsmouth's Centre for Cybercrime and Economic Crime]. "From an evolutionary psychology point of view, men have a stronger reaction to their freedom being threatened and therefore they do the opposite." Moreover, the study found that participants with the most favorable attitudes towards piracy demonstrated the most polarized changes in piracy intentions -- the threatening messages increased their piracy even more. The study has been published in the Journal of Business Ethics.

"I'm not so sure about the author's attribution of this difference to evolutionary psychology, so looking forward to some educational comments on that," adds Slashdot reader jbmartin6.

Academics have found that the U.S. mortality declines during recessions, with "reductions in air pollution... a quantitatively important mechanism." Abstract of a paper on National Bureau of Economic Research: We leverage spatial variation in the severity of the Great Recession across the United States to examine its impact on mortality and to explore implications for the welfare consequences of recessions. We estimate that an increase in the unemployment rate of the magnitude of the Great Recession reduces the average, annual age-adjusted mortality rate by 2.3 percent, with effects persisting for at least 10 years. Mortality reductions appear across causes of death and are concentrated in the half of the population with a high school degree or less. We estimate similar percentage reductions in mortality at all ages, with declines in elderly mortality thus responsible for about three-quarters of the total mortality reduction. Recession-induced mortality declines are driven primarily by external effects of reduced aggregate economic activity on mortality, and recession-induced reductions in air pollution appear to be a quantitatively important mechanism. Incorporating our estimates of pro-cyclical mortality into a standard macroeconomics framework substantially reduces the welfare costs of recessions, particularly for people with less education, and at older ages where they may even be welfare-improving.

An anonymous reader shares a report: In a concession to automakers and labor unions, the Biden administration intends to relax elements of one of its most ambitious strategies to combat climate change, limits on tailpipe emissions that are designed to get Americans to switch from gas-powered cars to electric vehicles, according to three people familiar with the plan. Instead of essentially requiring automakers to rapidly ramp up sales of electric vehicles over the next few years, the administration would give car manufacturers more time [non-paywalled source], with a sharp increase in sales not required until after 2030, these people said. They asked to remain anonymous because the regulation has not been finalized. The administration plans to publish the final rule by early spring.

The change comes as President Biden faces intense crosswinds as he runs for re-election while trying to confront climate change. He is aiming to cut carbon dioxide emissions from gasoline-powered vehicles, which make up the largest single source of greenhouse gases emitted by the United States. At the same time, Mr. Biden needs cooperation from the auto industry and political support from the unionized auto workers who backed him in 2020 but now worry that an abrupt transition to electric vehicles would cost jobs. Meanwhile, consumer demand has not been what automakers hoped, with potential buyers put off by sticker prices and the relative scarcity of charging stations. The EPA last year proposed the toughest-ever limits on tailpipe emissions. The rules would be so strict, the only way car makers could comply would be to sell a tremendous number of zero-emissions vehicles in a relatively short time frame. The E.P.A. designed the proposed regulations so that 67% of sales of new cars and light-duty trucks would be all-electric by 2032, up from 7.6% in 2023, a radical remaking of the American automobile market.

Capital One is buying Discover Financial (non-payalled source) in a deal that would marry two of the largest credit-card companies in the U.S. WSJ: The all-stock deal could be announced Tuesday, according to people familiar with the matter. Discover has a market value of $28 billion, and the takeover would be expected to value it at a premium to that. Buying Discover will give Capital One, a credit-card lender with a market value of a little over $52 billion, a network that would vastly increase its power in the payments ecosystem.

Card networks are critical to enabling transactions and setting fees that merchants pay when consumers shop with credit cards. Though much smaller than Visa and Mastercard, Discover is one of the few competitors to those companies in the U.S. and it is one of a small number of card issuers that also has a payments network. Capital One, the ninth-largest bank in the country and a major credit-card issuer, uses Visa and Mastercard for most of its cards. The bank plans to switch at least some of its cards to the Discover network, while continuing to use Visa and Mastercard on others. Those larger networks have more merchant acceptance abroad than Discover does. Update: Capital One has proposed to pay $35.3 billion for Discover in an all-stock deal.

High-capacity DNA data storage "is closer than you think," Slashdot wrote in 2019.

Now IEEE Spectrum brings an update on where we're at — and where we're headed — by a participant in the DNA storage collaboration between Microsoft and the Molecular Information Systems Lab of the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Washington. "Organizations around the world are already taking the first steps toward building a DNA drive that can both write and read DNA data," while "funding agencies in the United States, Europe, and Asia are investing in the technology stack required to field commercially relevant devices." The challenging part is learning how to get the information into, and back out of, the molecule in an economically viable way... For a DNA drive to compete with today's archival tape drives, it must be able to write about 2 gigabits per second, which at demonstrated DNA data storage densities is about 2 billion bases per second. To put that in context, I estimate that the total global market for synthetic DNA today is no more than about 10 terabases per year, which is the equivalent of about 300,000 bases per second over a year. The entire DNA synthesis industry would need to grow by approximately 4 orders of magnitude just to compete with a single tape drive. Keeping up with the total global demand for storage would require another 8 orders of magnitude of improvement by 2030. But humans have done this kind of scaling up before. Exponential growth in silicon-based technology is how we wound up producing so much data. Similar exponential growth will be fundamental in the transition to DNA storage...

Companies like DNA Script and Molecular Assemblies are commercializing automated systems that use enzymes to synthesize DNA. These techniques are replacing traditional chemical DNA synthesis for some applications in the biotechnology industry... [I]t won't be long before we can combine the two technologies into one functional device: a semiconductor chip that converts digital signals into chemical states (for example, changes in pH), and an enzymatic system that responds to those chemical states by adding specific, individual bases to build a strand of synthetic DNA. The University of Washington and Microsoft team, collaborating with the enzymatic synthesis company Ansa Biotechnologies, recently took the first step toward this device... The path is relatively clear; building a commercially relevant DNA drive is simply a matter of time and money...

At the same time, advances in DNA synthesis for DNA storage will increase access to DNA for other uses, notably in the biotechnology industry, and will thereby expand capabilities to reprogram life. Somewhere down the road, when a DNA drive achieves a throughput of 2 gigabases per second (or 120 gigabases per minute), this box could synthesize the equivalent of about 20 complete human genomes per minute. And when humans combine our improving knowledge of how to construct a genome with access to effectively free synthetic DNA, we will enter a very different world... We'll be able to design microbes to produce chemicals and drugs, as well as plants that can fend off pests or sequester minerals from the environment, such as arsenic, carbon, or gold. At 2 gigabases per second, constructing biological countermeasures against novel pathogens will take a matter of minutes. But so too will constructing the genomes of novel pathogens. Indeed, this flow of information back and forth between the digital and the biological will mean that every security concern from the world of IT will also be introduced into the world of biology...

The future will be built not from DNA as we find it, but from DNA as we will write it.
The article makes an interesting point — that biology labs around the world already order chemically-synthesized ssDNA, "delivered in lengths of up to several hundred bases," and sequence DNA molecules up to thousands of bases in length.

"In other words, we already convert digital information to and from DNA, but generally using only sequences that make sense in terms of biology."

"For nearly a year now, a bizarre heating event has been unfolding across the world's oceans," reports Wired.

"In March 2023, global sea surface temperatures started shattering record daily highs and have stayed that way since..." Brian McNoldy, a hurricane researcher at the University of Miami. "It's really getting to be strange that we're just seeing the records break by this much, and for this long...." Unlike land, which rapidly heats and cools as day turns to night and back again, it takes a lot to warm up an ocean that may be thousands of feet deep. So even an anomaly of mere fractions of a degree is significant. "To get into the two or three or four degrees, like it is in a few places, it's pretty exceptional," says McNoldy.

So what's going on here? For one, the oceans have been steadily warming over the decades, absorbing something like 90 percent of the extra heat that humans have added to the atmosphere...

A major concern with such warm surface temperatures is the health of the ecosystems floating there: phytoplankton that bloom by soaking up the sun's energy and the tiny zooplankton that feed on them. If temperatures get too high, certain species might suffer, shaking the foundations of the ocean food web. But more subtly, when the surface warms, it creates a cap of hot water, blocking the nutrients in colder waters below from mixing upwards. Phytoplankton need those nutrients to properly grow and sequester carbon, thus mitigating climate change...

Making matters worse, the warmer water gets, the less oxygen it can hold. "We have seen the growth of these oxygen minimum zones," says Dennis Hansell, an oceanographer and biogeochemist at the University of Miami. "Organisms that need a lot of oxygen, they're not too happy when the concentrations go down in any way — think of a tuna that is expending a lot of energy to race through the water."
But why is this happening? The article suggests less dust blowing from the Sahara desert to shade the oceans, but also 2020 regulations that reduced sulfur aerosols in shipping fuels. (This reduced toxic air pollution — but also some cloud cover.)

There was also an El Nino in the Pacific ocean last summer — now waning — which complicates things, according to biological oceanographer Francisco Chavez of the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute in California. "One of our challenges is trying to tease out what these natural variations are doing in relation to the steady warming due to increasing CO2 in the atmosphere."

But the article points out that even the Atlantic ocean is heating up — and "sea surface temperatures started soaring last year well before El Niño formed." And last week the U.S. Climate Prediction Center predicted there's now a 55% chance of a La Nina in the Atlantic between June and August, according to the article — which could increase the likelihood of hurricanes.

Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader mrflash818 for sharing the article.