"Boeing is pushing ahead on a plan to cut about 900 inspectors, replacing their jobs with technology improvements at its Seattle area factories, despite being under fire for software flaws in the 737 Max and quality issues in its other aircraft," reports USA Today.

"The union has raised an outcry, calling it a 'bad decision' that will 'eliminate the second set of eyes on thousands of work packages' in its newsletter to members." Some 451 inspectors will be transferred to other jobs this year, and about the same number next year, out of a total of about 3,000 at its commercial aircraft operations in the Seattle area, the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers, Local 751, has told its members.... When it comes to paring its inspection staff on the West Coast, Boeing says the "QA Transformation Plan" won't undermine safety. Substituting technology gains, it says, will increase quality and effect only "stable" procedures, those in which there is a low probability of mistakes.

For instance, Boeing says when it is bringing out a new aircraft with wings made out of composites, there is equipment now that can do the inspections more thoroughly than humans. Once the inspection equipment has verified that it can do the job -- with humans overseeing the process -- traditional inspectors can be redeployed to other tasks. "As we identify and reduce second-layer inspections for stable processes, quality assurance professionals will be redeployed and take on new roles such as leading and supporting efforts to prevent defects and rework," Boeing said in a statement. It adds that it is working to try to convince regulators and others that the changes "will not jeopardize our quality, but will, in fact, lead to higher levels."

So far, the Federal Aviation Administration hasn't given the plan a ringing endorsement... And skeptics are emerging. Ralph Nader, the consumer advocate who lost a niece when the Ethiopian Airlines jet crashed and who believes the 737 Max design is fatally flawed, is leery of substituting machines for people when it comes to quality. "They still haven't learned the lesson that risky automation does not replicate experienced human intelligence," he said. "There is no comparison. There is all kinds of human intuition that can't be translated into computer code."

Augmented reality is coming to Google Search, allowing you to "check out a pair of shoes in the 'real world' while you're shopping online or put an animated shark in your living room," reports The Verge. From the report: At I/O, Google offered a few different examples of how its AR search options might work. If you search for musculature, for instance, you can get a model of human muscles -- which you can either examine as an ordinary 3D object on your screen or overlay on a camera feed, letting you "see" the object in the real world. If you're looking at shopping results, you can preview a piece of clothing with your existing wardrobe.

3D AR objects will start showing up in search results later this year, and developers can add support for their own objects by adding "just a few lines of code." It's apparently already working with NASA, New Balance, Samsung, Target, Volvo, and other groups to add support for their 3D models.

Mossab Hussein, a security researcher at SpiderSilk, has discovered that a development lab used by Samsung engineers was leaking highly sensitive source code, credentials and secret keys for several internal projects -- including its SmartThings platform. TechCrunch reports: The electronics giant left dozens of internal coding projects on a GitLab instance hosted on a Samsung-owned domain, Vandev Lab. The instance, used by staff to share and contribute code to various Samsung apps, services and projects, was spilling data because the projects were set to "public" and not properly protected with a password, allowing anyone to look inside at each project, access and download the source code. Hussein said one project contained credentials that allowed access to the entire AWS account that was being used, including more than 100 S3 storage buckets that contained logs and analytics data.

Many of the folders, he said, contained logs and analytics data for Samsung's SmartThings and Bixby services, but also several employees' exposed private GitLab tokens stored in plaintext, which allowed him to gain additional access from 42 public projects to 135 projects, including many private projects. Samsung told him some of the files were for testing but Hussein challenged the claim, saying source code found in the GitLab repository contained the same code as the Android app, published in Google Play on April 10. The app, which has since been updated, has more than 100 million installs to date.

Fedora 30, the newest release of the venerable Linux distribution that serves (in part) as the staging environment for Red Hat Enterprise Linux, was released Tuesday, bringing with it a number of improvements and performance optimizations. From a report: he most exciting aspect, for workstation/desktop users at least, is the update to GNOME 3.32. Of course, that is hardly the only notable update -- the DNF package manager is getting a performance boost, for instance. In other words, this is a significant operating system upgrade that should delight both existing Fedora users and beginners alike. "Fedora 30 brings enhancements to all editions with updates to the common underlying packages, from bug fixes and performance tweaks to new versions. In Fedora 30, base updates include Bash shell 5.0, Fish 3.0, the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) 9 and Ruby 2.6. Fedora 30 also now uses the zchunk format for data compression within the DNF repository. When metadata is compressed using zchunk DNF will only download the differences between earlier copies of metadata and the current versions, saving on resources and increasing efficiency," says The Fedora Project.

Joseph Cox, and Jason Koebler, reporting for Motherboard: At a Twitter all-hands meeting on March 22, an employee asked a blunt question: Twitter has largely eradicated Islamic State propaganda off its platform. Why can't it do the same for white supremacist content? An executive responded by explaining that Twitter follows the law, and a technical employee who works on machine learning and artificial intelligence issues went up to the mic to add some context.

With every sort of content filter, there is a tradeoff, he explained. When a platform aggressively enforces against ISIS content, for instance, it can also flag innocent accounts as well, such as Arabic language broadcasters. Society, in general, accepts the benefit of banning ISIS for inconveniencing some others, he said. In separate discussions verified by Motherboard, that employee said Twitter hasn't taken the same aggressive approach to white supremacist content because the collateral accounts that are impacted can, in some instances, be Republican politicians. The employee argued that, on a technical level, content from Republican politicians could get swept up by algorithms aggressively removing white supremacist material. Banning politicians wouldn't be accepted by society as a trade-off for flagging all of the white supremacist propaganda, he argued.

Samsung Electronics is delaying the expected Friday rollout of its Galaxy Fold smartphone [Editor's note: the link may be paywalled; alternative source] until at least next month, WSJ reported Monday citing people familiar with the matter, the latest fallout from a product headache that began with tech reviewers reporting their test devices had malfunctioned. From the report: The Galaxy Fold phone -- priced at nearly $2,000 and the industry's first mainstream foldable-screen device -- was slated to hit shelves this week in the U.S. But problems with phones being used by reviewers have changed those plans, the people said. The new rollout is expected in the coming weeks, though a firm date has yet to be determined, they said. Though the company's internal investigation remains ongoing, the Galaxy Fold phone's reported issues stem from problems affecting the handset's hinge and extra pressure applied to the internal screen, the people said. A Samsung spokeswoman didn't have immediate comment. The company had previously said it would adhere to its plans for the Galaxy Fold phones to hit shelves on April 26 in the U.S. The delayed launch came hours after Samsung abruptly scrapped prerelease media events planned for Hong Kong on Tuesday and Shanghai on Wednesday.

A new online tool "analyzes publicly disclosed data breaches and gives concrete advice to victims," reported CNET last week. Now the site's creator, data breach expert jimvandyke, is asking Slashdot's readers for feedback: At BreachClarity.com, just enter the name of any data breach you were in (such as 'Anthem', 'Equifax', 'Yahoo', etc.), and click the bright green 'search' button. Every publicly-reported breach since January 2017 (and noteworthy older ones) are in the database, and eventually every publicly-reported breach will be in the database, thanks to my non-profit partner the IDTheftCenter.org (ITRC). Breach Clarity is now available for free in basic form to consumers, as a very simple UI sitting in front of a comprehensive algorithm of my own design.

The goal of Breach Clarity is to help people by demystifying how any new data breach creates identity-holder risk of identity theft, identity fraud, and other harms. My goal in creating Breach Clarity is to move past the myths and victim-blaming (for instance, my research finds that very few people are actually 'apathetic' or 'lazy' when it comes to security, and it's simply not true that 'everyone's data is all already out there' for any cyber-criminal who wants to commit fraud in another person's name).

Breach Clarity uses dynamic research, technology, and design-thinking to protect people in the face of an onslaught of ongoing data breaches (The ITRC recorded 1,244 publicly reported US ones last year, leading to over $10B in annual identity crimes as reported by my former company Javelin Strategy & Research!)... If you like what you see, please use it and spread the word.
The original submission says the site's creator is currently "a one-person pre-funded operation, aiming to create an advanced and more full-featured version of Breach Clarity that will be licensed for financial institutions and employers." But if this is beta testing, there's some great technical support. "If you're confused by what you see, you can actually call the phone number in the upper right of BreachClarity and talk to a real person for free. You'll reach my partner, the ITRC, who gets grant funding from law enforcement and foundations."

CNET notes that "You can already find out if you've lost login credentials and other sensitive information by visiting Have I Been Pwned or Firefox Monitor. Breach Clarity takes things a step further by helping you decide what to do afterward."

Following the release of Visual Studio 2019 for Windows and Mac platforms, Microsoft today is releasing a snap version of Visual Studio Code. A report adds: No, the source-code editor is not the Windows-maker's first snap -- it also released one for Skype, for instance. "As of today, Visual Studio Code is available for Linux as a snap, providing seamless auto-updates for its users. Visual Studio Code, a free, lightweight code editor, has redefined editors for building modern web and cloud applications, with built-in support for debugging, task running, and version control for a variety of languages and frameworks," says Canonical. Joao Moreno, Software Development Engineer, Microsoft Visual Studio Code offers the following statement: "The automatic update functionality of snaps is a major benefit. It is clear there is a thriving community around snaps and that it is moving forward at great pace. The backing of Canonical ensures our confidence in its ongoing development and long-term future."

Researchers at UpGuard, a cybersecurity firm, found troves of Facebook user information hiding in plain sight, inadvertently posted publicly on Amazon.com's cloud computing servers. From a report: The discovery shows that a year after the Cambridge Analytica scandal exposed how unsecure and widely disseminated Facebook users' information is online, companies that control that information at every step still haven't done enough to seal up private data, Bloomberg News reports. In one instance, Mexico City-based media company Cultura Colectiva openly stored 540 million records on Facebook users, including identification numbers, comments, reactions and account names. That database was closed on Wednesday after Bloomberg alerted Facebook to the problem and Facebook contacted Amazon. Facebook shares pared their gains after the Bloomberg News report. UpGuard adds: The data sets vary in when they were last updated, the data points present, and the number of unique individuals in each. What ties them together is that they both contain data about Facebook users, describing their interests, relationships, and interactions, that were available to third party developers. As Facebook faces scrutiny over its data stewardship practices, they have made efforts to reduce third party access. But as these exposures show, the data genie cannot be put back in the bottle. Data about Facebook users has been spread far beyond the bounds of what Facebook can control today. Combine that plenitude of personal data with storage technologies that are often misconfigured for public access, and the result is a long tail of data about Facebook users that continues to leak.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Researchers have devised a simple attack that might cause a Tesla to automatically steer into oncoming traffic under certain conditions. The proof-of-concept exploit works not by hacking into the car's onboard computing system. Instead, it works by using small, inconspicuous stickers that trick the Enhanced Autopilot of a Model S 75 into detecting and then following a change in the current lane. Researchers from Tencent's Keen Security Lab recently reverse-engineered several of Tesla's automated processes to see how they reacted when environmental variables changed. One of the most striking discoveries was a way to cause Autopilot to steer into oncoming traffic. The attack worked by carefully affixing three stickers to the road. The stickers were nearly invisible to drivers, but machine-learning algorithms used by by the Autopilot detected them as a line that indicated the lane was shifting to the left. As a result, Autopilot steered in that direction.

The researchers noted that Autopilot uses a variety of measures to prevent incorrect detections. The measures include the position of road shoulders, lane histories, and the size and distance of various object. [A section of the researchers' 37-page report] showed how researchers could tamper with a Tesla's autowiper system to activate wipers on when rain wasn't falling. Unlike traditional autowiper systems -- which use optical sensors to detect moisture -- Tesla's system uses a suite of cameras that feeds data into an artificial intelligence network to determine when wipers should be turned on. The researchers found that -- in much the way it's easy for small changes in an image to throw off artificial intelligence-based image recognition (for instance, changes that cause an AI system to mistake a panda for a gibbon) -- it wasn't hard to trick Tesla's autowiper feature into thinking rain was falling even when it was not. So far, the researchers have only been able to fool autowiper when they feed images directly into the system. Eventually, they said, it may be possible for attackers to display an "adversarial image" that's displayed on road signs or other cars that do the same thing. In a statement, Tesla officials said that the vulnerabilities addressed in the report have been fixed via security update in 2017, "followed by another comprehensive security update in 2018, both of which we released before this group reported this research to us." They added: "The rest of the findings are all based on scenarios in which the physical environment around the vehicle is artificially altered to make the automatic windshield wipers or Autopilot system behave differently, which is not a realistic concern given that a driver can easily override Autopilot at any time by using the steering wheel or brakes and should always be prepared to do so and can manually operate the windshield wiper settings at all times."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Wall Street Journal: Amazon is planning to cut prices on hundreds of items at Whole Foods stores this week (Warning: source paywalled; alternative source), as the e-commerce giant seeks to change the chain's high-cost image amid intense competition among grocers. The price cuts affect more than 500 products and include a focus on produce and meat, according to documents viewed by The Wall Street Journal. The move comes after Whole Foods raised prices on select items in February, mostly consumer products, as suppliers increased their prices because of higher transport and ingredient costs.

The latest cuts -- which are set to drop at Whole Foods stores on Wednesday -- are some of the broadest since Amazon bought the grocer for nearly $14 billion in 2017. Prices will be reduced by an average of 20 percent on the selected items. The e-commerce giant has tried to extend its own reputation for low prices and convenience to Whole Foods, to counter a sense among some consumers that shopping there required a "Whole Paycheck." The discounts include more produce and meat products than the earlier cuts. The price of organic-rainbow carrots, for instance, will drop by $1, to $1.99, and the price of Black Forest ham will drop $3 a pound to $9.99. The companies also said Monday that Amazon Prime members would be able to save more than before at Whole Foods, with double the number of weekly Prime Member deals and deeper discounts. The report adds that the price cuts are expected to last at least through the end of the year.

Last year, a Belgian court ruled that Facebook would have to stop tracking Belgian internet users and delete the data it's already gathered on them, or face fines of about $280,000 a day. "Belgium's data-protection regulators have targeted the company since at least 2015 when a court ordered it to stop storing non-users' personal data," Mercury News reported at the time. Facebook is now fighting the Belgian court's decision, and will go "face to face with the Belgian data protection authority in a Brussels appeals court for a two-day hearing starting on Wednesday," reports Bloomberg. From the report: Armed with new powers since the introduction of stronger European Union data protection rules, Belgium's privacy watchdog argues Facebook "still violates the fundamental rights of millions of residents of Belgium." The Brussels Court of First Instance in February 2018 ruled that Facebook doesn't provide people with enough information about how and why it collects data on their web use, or what it does with the information. "Facebook then uses that information to profile your surfing behavior and uses that profile to show you targeted advertising, such as advertising about products and services from commercial companies, messages from political parties, etc," the Belgian regulator said in an emailed statement on Wednesday.

Belgium's data protection authority last year won the court's backing for its attack against Facebook's use of cookies, social plug-ins -- the "like" or "share" buttons -- and tracking technologies that are invisible to the naked eye to collect data on people's behavior during their visits to other sites. Facebook understands "that people want more information and control over the data Facebook receives from other websites and apps that use our services," the company said in a statement. "That's why we are developing Clear History, that will let you to see the websites and apps that send us information when you use them, disconnect this information from your account, and turn off our ability to store it associated with your account going forward," it said. "We have also made a number of changes to help people understand how our tools work and explain the choices they have, including through our privacy updates."

According to ZDNet, researchers at Microsoft have discovered a buggy Huawei utility that could have given attackers a cheap way to undermine the security of the Windows kernel. From the report: Microsoft has now detailed how it found a severe local privilege escalation flaw in the Huawei PCManager driver software for its MateBook line of Windows 10 laptops. Thanks to Microsoft's work, the Chinese tech giant patched the flaw in January. As Microsoft researchers explain, third-party kernel drivers are becoming more attractive to attackers as a side-door to attacking the kernel without having to overcome its protections using an expensive zero-day kernel exploit in Windows. The flaw in Huawei's software was detected by new kernel sensors that were implemented in the Windows 10 October 2018 Update, aka version 1809.

The kernel sensors are meant to address the difficulty of detecting malicious code running in the kernel and are designed to detect user-space asynchronous procedure call (APC) code injection from the kernel. Microsoft Defender ATP anti-malware uses these sensors to detect actions caused by kernel code that may inject code into user-mode. Huawei's PCManager triggered Defender ATP alerts on multiple Windows 10 devices, prompting Microsoft to launch an investigation. [...] The investigation led the researcher to the executable MateBookService.exe. Due to a flaw in Huawei's 'watchdog' mechanism for HwOs2Ec10x64.sys, an attacker is able to create a malicious instance of MateBookService.exe to gain elevated privileges. The flaw can be used to make code running with low privileges read and write to other processes or to kernel space, leading to a "full machine compromise." Long-time Slashdot reader shanen writes: Though the story features Huawei, there doesn't seem to be anything specific to that company there. Just innuendo that you can't trust Chinese companies, eh? "Don't throw your computer into that Chinese briar patch!" Anyway, the sordid reality is that Microsoft is the root of all evils in the Windows platform. If increasing security had been half as important as maximizing profits, then we'd be in a much better world today. All complicated software is buggy, but adding complexity for no good reason is just begging for more problems. Here's a crazy solution approach: Any OS feature that isn't used by a LARGE majority of the users should be REMOVED from the OS. Maybe that isn't strong enough. Maybe the OS should be strictly limited to what absolutely needs to be there. Guard those eggs carefully!

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: The Federal Trade Commission, in what could be considered a prelude to new regulatory action, has issued an order to several major internet service providers requiring them to share every detail of their data collection practices. The information could expose patterns of abuse or otherwise troubling data use against which the FTC -- or states -- may want to take action. The letters requesting info went to Comcast, Google, T-Mobile, and both the fixed and wireless sub-companies of Verizon and AT&T. These "represent a range of large and small ISPs, as well as fixed and mobile Internet providers," an FTC spokesperson said. I'm not sure which is mean to be the small one, but welcome any information the agency can extract from any of them.

To be clear, the FTC already has consumer protection rules in place and could already go after an internet provider if it were found to be abusing the privacy of its users -- you know, selling their location to anyone who asks or the like. (Still no action there, by the way.) But the evolving media and telecom landscape, in which we see enormous companies devouring one another to best provide as many complementary services as possible, requires constant reevaluation. As the agency writes in a press release: "The FTC is initiating this study to better understand Internet service providers' privacy practices in light of the evolution of telecommunications companies into vertically integrated platforms that also provide advertising-supported content." The report provides this example as to the kind of situation the FTC is concerned about: "If Verizon wants to offer not just the connection you get on your phone, but the media you request, the ads you are served, and the tracking you never heard of, it needs to show that these businesses are not somehow shirking rules behind the scenes."

"For instance, if Verizon Wireless says it doesn't collect or share information about what sites you visit, but the mysterious VZ Snooping Co (fictitious, I should add) scoops all that up and then sells it for peanuts to its sister company, that could amount to a deceptive practice," TechCrunch adds. "Of course it's rarely that simple (though don't rule it out), but the only way to be sure is to comprehensively question everyone involved and carefully compare the answers with real-world practices."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Recode: After years of circling the TV business, Apple is finally ready to make its big splash: On Monday it will unveil its new video strategy, along with some of the new big-budget TV shows it is funding itself. One thing Apple won't do is unveil a serious competitor to Netflix, Hulu, Disney, or any other entertainment giant trying to sell streaming video subscriptions to consumers. Instead, Apple's main focus -- at least for now -- will be helping other people sell streaming video subscriptions and taking a cut of the transaction. Apple may also sell its own shows, at least as part of a bundle of other services. But for now, Apple's original shows and movies should be considered very expensive giveaways, not the core product.

All of this might very well work. Apple has an installed base of 1.4 billion users, and some of them will buy the things Apple promotes: Look at the success of Apple Music, which launched seven years after Spotify but quickly amassed 50 million subscribers due to a free trial period and prominent real estate on Apple's devices. Another reason this could work: Amazon has already been very successful with its own version of the same idea. Facebook is also bullish on selling TV subscriptions and is pushing would-be partners to sign up so it can launch later this spring or summer, according to industry sources. Similarly, Comcast (which is a minority investor in Vox Media, which owns this site) is rolling out Flex, a $5-a-month service that gives you a bunch of free content (some of which you can also get other places) and the ability to easily buy HBO, Showtime, etc. Instead of offering exclusive content, Comcast is offering subscribers a Roku-like streaming box. According to people who've talked to Apple about its plans, Apple's new TV service will consist of selling TV subscription apps surrounded by millions of other apps in its main app store. "Apple plans on making a new storefront that's much more prominent for those who use Apple TV boxes and other Apple hardware," reports Recode. "It will also be able to offer its own bundles -- for instance, it could offer a package of HBO, Showtime, and Starz at a price that's lower than you'd pay for each pay TV service on its own."

NVIDIA's older GeForce GTX 10-series cards will be getting the company's new ray-tracing tech in April. The technology, which is currently only available on its new RTX cards, "will work on GPUs from the 1060 and up, albeit with some serious caveats," reports Engadget. "Some games like Battlefield V will run just fine and deliver better visuals, but other games, like the freshly released Metro Exodus, will run at just 18 fps at 1440p -- obviously an unplayable frame-rate." From the report: What games you'll be able to play with ray-tracing tech (also known as DXR) on NVIDIA GTX cards depends entirely on how it's implemented. In Battlefield V, for instance, the tech is only used for things like reflections. On top of that, you can dial down the strength of the effect so that it consumes less computing horsepower. Metro Exodus, on the other hand, uses ray tracing to create highly realistic "global illumination" effects, simulating lighting from the real world. It's the first game that really showed the potential of RTX cards and actually generated some excitement about the tech. However, because it's so computationally intensive, GTX cards (which don't have the RTX tensor cores) will be effectively be too slow to run it.

NVIDIA explained that when it was first developing the next gen RTX tech, it found chips using Pascal tech would be "monster" sized and consume up to 650 watts. That's because the older cards lack both the integer cores and tensor cores found on the RTX cards. They get particularly stuck on ray-tracing, running about four times slower than the RTX cards on Metro Exodus. Since Metro Exodus is so heavily ray-traced, the RTX cards run it three times quicker than older GTX 10-series cards. However, that falls to two times for Shadow of the Tomb Raider, and 1.6 times for Battlefield V, because both of those games use ray tracing less. The latest GTX 1660 and 1660 Ti GPUs, which don't have RT but do have integer cores, will run ray-traced games moderately better than last-gen 10-series GPUs. NVIDIA also announced that Unity and Unreal Engine now support ray-tracing, allowing developers to implement the tech into their games. Developers can use NVIDIA's new set of tools called GameWorks RTX to achieve this.

"It includes the RTX Denoiser SDK that enables real-time ray-tracing through techniques that reduce the required ray count and number of samples per pixel," adds Engadget. "It will support ray-traced effects like area light shadows, glossy reflections, ambient occlusion and diffuse global illumination (the latter is used in Metro Exodus). Suffice to say, all of those things will make game look a lot prettier."

Ben Jervey from DeSmogBlog writes about how Toyota is "using questionable logic" to claim hybrid vehicles are superior than electric vehicles, when in reality it's only saying that because it decided years ago to invest in gasoline-electric hybrids and fuel cells in the long term instead of battery production. This decision is now coming back to haunt them. From the report: There are at least 12 car companies currently selling an all-electric vehicle in the United States, and Toyota isn't one of them. Despite admitting recently that the Tesla Model 3 alone is responsible for half of Toyota's customer defections in North America -- as Prius drivers transition to all-electric -- the company has been an outspoken laggard in the race to electrification. Now, the company is using questionable logic to attempt to justify its inaction on electrification, claiming that its limited battery capacity better serves the planet by producing gasoline-electric hybrids. For years, Toyota leadership has shunned investment in all-electric cars, laying out a more conservative strategy to "electrify" its fleet -- essentially doubling down on hybrids and plug-in hybrids -- as a bridge to a future generation of hydrogen fuel cell vehicles. As Tesla, Nissan, and GM have led the technological shift to fully battery electric vehicles, Toyota has publicly bashed the prospects of all-electric fleets. (See, for instance, the swipe the company took at plug-in vehicles in this recent Toyota Corolla Hybrid commercial.)

Last week, at the Geneva Auto Show, a Toyota executive provided a curious explanation for the company's refusal to launch a single battery electric vehicle. As Car and Driver reported, Toyota claims that it is limited by battery production capacity and that "Toyota is able to produce enough batteries for 28,000 electric vehicles each year -- or for 1.5 million hybrid cars." In other words, because Toyota has neglected to invest in battery production, it can only produce enough batteries for a trivial number of all-electric vehicles. Due to this self-inflicted capacity shortage, the company is forced to choose between manufacturing 1.5 million hybrids or 28,000 electric cars. Using what Car and Driver called "fuzzy math," the company tried to justify the strategy to forgo electric vehicles (EVs) on environmental grounds. As Toyota explained it, "selling 1.5 million hybrid cars reduces carbon emissions by a third more than selling 28,000 EVs." As for the "fuzzy math," Toyota's calculation "seems to assume that for every hybrid sold, a fully gasoline-powered car would be taken off the road," writes Jervey. "In reality, many Toyota hybrid buyers are replacing a Toyota hybrid. And, based on Toyota's own revelation that they are losing Prius drivers to Tesla, it stands to reason that many Toyota hybrid drivers would jump at the opportunity to transition to an all-electric Toyota."

Cells from a woolly mammoth that died more than 28,000 years ago have been partially reactivated inside of mouse egg cells, according to a study published Monday in Scientific Reports. "The achievement shows that biological activity can be induced in the cells of long-dead creatures, but that does not mean that scientists will be resurrecting extinct animals like mammoths any time soon," reports Motherboard. From the report: A team led by Kazuo Yamagata, a biologist at Kindai University in Japan, extracted cells from the remains of "Yuka," a young female mammoth discovered in 2010 on the coast of the Dmitry Laptev Strait in the Russian Far East. Yuka was entombed in permafrost, a frozen ground layer that can often keep the skin, fur, brains, and other softer tissues of dead animals intact. Because Yuka is in particularly great condition, Yamagata's team was able to extract 88 nucleus-like structures from her preserved muscle tissues. The mammoth cells were implanted into mouse oocytes, which are ovarian cells involved in embryonic development. The researchers also implanted elephant cells into mouse eggs to provide a control sample.

Once the cell nuclei were incubated, they seemed to reawaken -- but only slightly. The cells did not divide, but completed some steps that precede cell division. For instance, the mammoth nuclei performed a process called "spindle assembly," which ensures that chromosomes are correctly attached to microscopic spindle structures before a parent cell breaks into two daughter cells. The fact that Yuka's cells were able to spring back into partial action is both an exciting and challenging development for scientists interested in cloning extinct animals. On one hand, some degree of cellular reactivation is clearly possible. But Yuka is also an exceptionally pristine specimen, and even her cells were not able to complete cell division -- a major hurdle that scientists must clear to accomplish de-extinction.

Scientists have developed an "acoustic meta-material" that can catch certain frequencies passing through the air and reflect them back toward their source. When a loudspeaker was placed into one end of a PVC pipe with a 3D-printed ring of the metamaterial, the ring "cut 94% of the sound blasting from the speaker, enough to make it inaudible to the human ear," reports Fast Company. From the report: Typical acoustic paneling works differently, absorbing sound and turning the vibrations into heat. But what's particularly trippy is that this muffler is completely open. Air and light can travel through it -- just sound cannot. The implications for architecture and interior design are remarkable, because these metamaterials could be applied to the built environment in many different ways. For instance, they could be stacked to build soundproof yet transparent walls. Cubicles will never be the same.

The researchers also believe that HVAC systems could be fitted with these silencers, and drones could have their turbines muted with such rings. Even in MRI machines, which can be harrowingly loud for patients trapped in a small space, could be quieted. There's really no limit to the possibilities, but it does sound like these silencers will need to be tailored to circumstance. "The idea is that we can now mathematically design an object that can blocks the sounds of anything," says Boston University professor Xin Zhang, in a press release. You can see a demo of the noise cancellation device here.

An anonymous reader quotes TechCrunch: As she sat in the airport with a one-way ticket in her hand, Tiffany Filler wondered how she would pick up the pieces of her life, with tens of thousands of dollars in student debt and nothing to show for it. A day earlier, she was expelled from Tufts University veterinary school. As a Canadian, her visa was no longer valid and she was told by the school to leave the U.S. 'as soon as possible.' That night, her plane departed the U.S. for her native Toronto, leaving any prospect of her becoming a veterinarian behind. Filler, 24, was accused of an elaborate months-long scheme involving stealing and using university logins to break into the student records system, view answers, and alter her own and other students' grades.

The case Tufts presented seems compelling, if not entirely believable.

There's just one problem: In almost every instance that the school accused Filler of hacking, she was elsewhere with proof of her whereabouts or an eyewitness account and without the laptop she's accused of using. She has alibis: fellow students who testified to her whereabouts; photos with metadata putting her miles away at the time of the alleged hacks; and a sleep tracker that showed she was asleep during others. Tufts is either right or it expelled an innocent student on shoddy evidence four months before she was set to graduate.