An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Register: The latest figures suggest that around 1,500 medical procedures have been canceled across some of London's biggest hospitals in the four weeks since Qilin's ransomware attack hit pathology services provider Synnovis. But perhaps no single person was affected as severely as Johanna Groothuizen. Hanna -- the name she goes by -- is now missing her right breast after her skin-sparing mastectomy and immediate breast reconstruction surgery was swapped out for a simple mastectomy at the last minute. The 36-year-old research culture manager at King's College London and former researcher in health sciences was diagnosed with HER2-positive breast cancer in late 2023. It's an aggressive form known for spreading faster and is more commonly recurring, which necessitates urgent treatment. Hanna soon began a course of chemotherapy following her diagnosis until she was able to have what will hopefully be the first and only major procedure to remove the disease. Between then and the operation, which was scheduled for June 7 -- four days after the ransomware attack was carried out -- she had been told repeatedly that the planned procedure was a skin-sparing mastectomy which would have allowed surgeons to cosmetically reconstruct her right breast immediately after the operation.

How the ordeal actually unraveled, however, was an entirely different story. Hanna was given less than 24 hours by doctors to make the daunting decision to either accept a simple mastectomy or delay a life-changing procedure until Synnovis's systems were back online. The decision was thrust upon her on the Thursday afternoon before her Friday surgery. This was after she was forced to chase the medical staff for updates about whether the procedure was going ahead at all. Hanna was told on the Tuesday of that week, the day after Qilin's attack, that despite everything going on, the staff at St Thomas' hospital in London were still planning to go ahead with the skin-sparing mastectomy as previously agreed. Per the updates Hanna requested on Thursday, it was strongly suggested that the operation was going to be canceled. The hospital deemed the reconstruction part of the procedure too risky because Synnovis was unable to support blood transfusions until its systems were back online.

The ransomware attack wasn't easy on hospitals. The situation was so dire that blood reserves were running low just a week after the attack, prompting an urgent appeal for O-type blood donations. For Hanna, though, this meant she had to make the unimaginably difficult choice between the surgery she wanted, or the surgery that would give her the best chance at survival. The mother of two young children, aged four and two, felt like she had no other choice but to accept the simple mastectomy, leaving her with only one breast. [...] At the time of writing, it's now nearly five weeks since Qilin's attack on Synnovis -- a pathology services partnership between Synlab, Guy's and St Thomas' NHS Foundation Trust, and King's College Hospital NHS Foundation Trust. The most recent update provided by the NHS said disruption to services was still evident across the region, although some services such as outpatient appointments are returning to near-normal levels. Between June 24-30, there were 1,517 cute outpatient appointments and 136 electric procedures that needed to be postponed across the two NHS trusts partnered with Synlab. "The total number of postponements for the entire month since the attack took hold (June 3-30) stand at 4,913 for acute outpatient appointments and 1,391 for elective procedures," notes the report.

Longtime Slashdot reader fahrbot-bot shares a report from CNN, written by Olesya Dmitracova: Nyobolt, based in Cambridge, has developed a new 35kWh lithium-ion battery that was charged from 10% to 80% in just over four and a half minutes in its first live demonstration last week. [...] Nyobolt's technology builds on a decade of research led by University of Cambridge battery scientist Clare Grey and Cambridge-educated Shivareddy, the company said. Key to its batteries' ability to be charged super-fast without a big impact on their longevity is a design that means they generate less heat. It also makes them safer as overheating can cause a lithium-ion battery to catch fire and explode. In addition, the materials used to make the batteries' anodes allow for a faster transfer of electrons. Nyobolt is currently in talks to sell its batteries to eight electric car manufacturers. At 35 kWh, the battery is much smaller than the 85 kWh in a more typical American electric vehicle (EV). Yet the technology may be used in larger battery packs in the future.

Independent testing of Nyobolt's batteries by what it called a leading global manufacturer found that they can achieve over 4,000 fast-charge cycles, equivalent to 600,000 miles (965,600 kilometers), while retaining more than 80% of capacity, Nyobolt said in its Friday statement. William Kephart, an e-mobility specialist at consultancy P3 Group and a former engineer, said EV batteries of the kind Nyobolt has developed could "theoretically" be charged as fast as the firm is promising, but the challenge was manufacturing such batteries on an industrial scale. A crucial chemical element in Nyobolt's batteries is niobium but, as Kephart pointed out, last year only an estimated 83,000 tons (94,500 tons) was mined worldwide. Compare that with graphite, commonly used as anode material in lithium-ion batteries: an estimated 1.6 million tons (1.8 million tons) was produced in 2023. In addition, there are currently "a lot of unknowns" with the niobium battery technology, he told CNN. "The industry will work it out (but) it's not seen by the industry as a scalable technology just yet," he added.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Dr Joseph Cotter takes some unusual pieces of luggage on his trips on the London underground. They include a stainless steel vacuum chamber, a few billion atoms of rubidium and an array of lasers that are used to cool his equipment to a temperature just above absolute zero. While not the average kit you would expect to find being dragged into carriages on the District Line, this is the gear that Cotter -- who works at Imperial College London's Centre for Cold Matter -- uses on his underground travels. Though the baggage may be bizarre, it has an ambitious purpose. It is being used to develop a quantum compass -- an instrument that will exploit the behavior of subatomic matter in order to develop devices that can accurately pinpoint their locations no matter where they are placed, paving the way for the creation of a new generation of underground and underwater sensors. The ideal place to test it is the London underground, Cotter and his team have discovered. "We are developing very precise new sensors using quantum mechanics, and these are showing great promise in the laboratory," he told the Observer last week. "However, they are less accurate in real-life settings. That is why we are taking our equipment to the London underground. It's the perfect place for smoothing out the rough edges and getting our equipment to work in real life." [...]

At the heart of the quantum compass -- which could be ready for widespread use in a few years -- is a device known as an accelerometer that can measure how an object's velocity changes over time. This information, combined with the starting point of that object, allows its future positions to be calculated. Mobile phones and laptops possess accelerometers but these versions cannot maintain their accuracy over lengthy periods. However, quantum mechanics offers scientists a way to provide new precision and accuracy by measuring properties of supercool atoms. At extremely low temperatures, atoms behave in a "quantum" way. They act like matter and like waves. "When atoms are ultra-cold, we can use quantum mechanics to describe how they move, and this allows us to make accurate measurements that tell us how our device is changing its position," said Cotter. In the devices -- which have been carried on board London underground track-testing trains and not on commuter services -- rubidium is inserted into the vacuum chamber that lies at the machine's heart. Powerful lasers are then used to cool these atoms to a fraction of a degree above absolute zero (-273.15C). In these conditions, the wave properties of the rubidium atoms are affected by the acceleration of the vehicle that is carrying the equipment, and these minute changes can be measured accurately. The system has been found to work well in a stable laboratory but needs to be tested in more extreme conditions if it is to be turned into a transportable, standalone device that can be used in remote or complex locations, added Cotter.

The 34-year-old Hubble Space Telescope is now operating with its final two working gyroscopes, necessitating a switch to a less productive "one-gyro" mode to extend its operational life. This contingency plan will reduce Hubble's productivity by over 12%, limit its ability to track fast-moving objects, and decrease the portion of the sky it can observe. That said, NASA expects it to keep functioning through 2035. Science.org reports: Normally, Hubble measures its location in space with a system that includes three gyroscopes -- rapidly spinning wheels that can sense forces in three directions. But in a 4 June press conference, NASA officials said one of the telescope's three remaining gyroscopes is on the fritz. The agency is now invoking a contingency plan: a "one-gyro" mode that keeps the other functioning gyroscope in reserve. The mode will reduce the telescope's productivity by more than 12% but preserve its ability to observe for years to come, Mark Clampin, NASA's astrophysics division director, said at the press conference. "We believe this is our best approach to support Hubble science through this decade and into the next."

Hubble's gyroscopes, which spin at 19,200 revolutions per minute, are extremely precise but finicky. The agency has flown a total of 22 gyroscopes across various servicing missions and is now down to the last two of the six currently onboard. In one-gyro mode, Hubble must rely on its less precise star trackers and other sensors to verify its position, a slower process that leads to reduced productivity. "It will take us more time to slew from one target attitude to the next, and to be able to lock on to that science target," said Patrick Crouse, Hubble's project manager at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center.

A one-gyro Hubble will also struggle to track fast-moving targets, such as asteroids within the orbit of Mars, and to swivel to spot transient distant phenomena such as supernovae, according to a 2016 report (PDF) from the Space Telescope Science Institute, which operates Hubble. In addition, the inefficiencies of one-gyro mode will reduce the portion of the sky that Hubble can safely point to at any given moment, from 82% to roughly 40%, including a larger avoidance zone near the Sun. It won't be able to observe Venus or the Moon, nor will it be able to reliably spot comets when they're near the Sun. Its ability to scrutinize distant exoplanets will also be hampered, especially in gathering the spectral measurements used to discern alien atmospheres. Furthermore, a one-gyro Hubble won't be able to perform as many simultaneous observations with the new JWST space observatory. Moving forward, the two telescopes' fields of view at any given moment may overlap by less than 20%, according to a 2019 estimate anticipating this event from a Hubble advisory committee.

"The seemingly star-cross Boeing Starliner — within minutes of its long-delayed blastoff on the spacecraft's first piloted test flight — was grounded again Saturday," writes CBS News, "when one of three redundant computers managing the countdown from the base of the launch pad ran into a problem, triggering a last-minute scrub."

More details from NPR: With 3:50 left in the countdown, the rocket's computer initiated a hold. The next launch attempt won't happen until at least Wednesday, NASA said.

An issue with one of the three redundant computer systems at the base of the launch pad that are responsible for initiating the launch sequence prompted the automatic halt, said Tory Bruno, the head of United Launch Alliance, the government contractor trying to launch the Starliner. "We do require all three systems to be running — triple redundancy," ULA President and CEO Bruno said at a Saturday afternoon press briefing. "Those three big computers do a health check. ... Two came up normally. The third one came up, but it was slow to come up, and that tripped a red line that created an automatic hold." ULA engineers don't know why the computer halted, and will troubleshoot ground support equipment overnight, NASA said in an update on Saturday evening.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: Alphabet's Google has preemptively paid damages to the U.S. government, an unusual move aimed at avoiding a jury trial in the Justice Department's antitrust lawsuit over its digital advertising business. Google disclosed (PDF) the payment, but not the amount, in a court filing last week that said the case should be heard and decided by a judge directly. Without a monetary damages claim, Google argued, the government has no right to a jury trial. The Justice Department, which has not said if it will accept the payment, declined to comment on the filing. Google asserted that its check, which it said covered its alleged overcharges for online ads, allows it to sidestep a jury trial whether or not the government takes it.

The Justice Department filed the case last year with Virginia and other states, alleging Google was stifling competition for advertising technology. The government has said Google should be forced to sell its ad manager suite. Google, which has denied the allegations, said in a statement that the Justice Department "manufactured a damages claim at the last minute in an attempt to secure a jury trial." Without disclosing the size of its payment, Google said that after months of discovery, the Justice Department could only point to estimated damages of less than $1 million. The company said the government has said the case is "highly technical" and "outside the everyday knowledge of most prospective jurors."

With Amazon on its heels, the nation's biggest company by revenue is hunting for ways to continue growing. From a report: For a decade, Walmart has reigned as the nation's biggest company by revenue. Its sales last year added up to $648 billion -- more than $1.2 million a minute. That status comes with benefits. It gives Walmart power in negotiations with product manufacturers and in dealing with government officials over policy issues. It's also a point of pride: Job postings often tout working at the "Fortune 1" company as a perk. Its reign is looking shaky lately [non-paywalled link]. If current sales trends persist, Amazon is likely to overtake Walmart soon. Amazon reported $575 billion in total revenue last year, up 12% from the previous year, compared with Walmart's revenue growth of 6%.

Walmart's behemoth size means that to meet its own sales target of around 4% growth each year, the company has to find an additional $26 billion in sales this year. That's no easy task. About 90% of Americans already shop at the retailer. The pandemic and rising inflation boosted Walmart's revenue by $100 billion since 2019. It faces continued uncertainty in consumer confidence and while it's spending in some areas, it's pulling back in others. Earlier this week, Walmart told workers it would cut hundreds of corporate jobs and ask most remote workers to move to offices. While Amazon's and Walmart's businesses compete head on, there are big differences. Amazon earns much of its profit from non-retail operations such as cloud computing and advertising, while grabbing retail market share with fast shipping. Walmart gets the bulk of its sales and profits from U.S. stores, while growing side businesses like advertising and digital sales.

Walmart executives are most wary of Amazon's ability to keep increasing profits through its non-retail business, while eating more of the retail landscape with ever-faster shipping and a bigger product selection, people familiar with the company said. Internally some executives are highlighting Walmart's role as a good corporate citizen and emphasizing that it's important to be the best at serving customers and workers, not just the biggest, say some of those people. Its scale can also have downsides, say some, like outsize attention on every misstep.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Google's Gemini AI often just feels like a chatbot built into a text-input field, but you can really start to do special things when you give it access to a ton of data. Gemini in Gmail will soon be able to search through your entire backlog of emails and show a summary in a sidebar. That's simple to describe but solves a huge problem with email: even searching brings up a list of email subjects, and you have to click-through to each one just to read it.

Having an AI sift through a bunch of emails and provide a summary sounds like a huge time saver and something you can't do with any other interface. Google's one-minute demo of this feature showed a big blue Gemini button at the top right of the Gmail web app. Tapping it opens the normal chatbot sidebar you can type in. Asking for a summary of emails from a certain contact will get you a bullet-point list of what has been happening, with a list of "sources" at the bottom that will jump you right to a certain email. In the last second of the demo, the user types, "Reply saying I want to volunteer for the parent's group event," hits "enter," and then the chatbot instantly, without confirmation, sends an email.

An anonymous reader shares a report: I paid a lot of money for the privilege of getting an Apple Vision Pro brand-new in February. All-in, with optical inserts and taxes, I financed a little over $3,900 for the 256GB version of the headset. A day or so ago, I made a mistake that I'm sure many early adopters are familiar with: I looked up how much it's been selling for on eBay. On Wednesday, a 1TB Vision Pro, complete with all the included gear, Apple's fluffy $200 travel case, $500 AppleCare Plus, and claimed to have been "worn maybe about an hour" sold for $3,200 after 21 bids. The listed shipping estimate was $20.30. Brand new, that combination is $5,007.03 on Apple's site for me.

Another eBay listing, this one with my headset's configuration (but sans optical inserts) went for just $2,600 -- again with most, if not all, of the included accessories. Several other 256GB and 512GB models sold for around that amount this week. The story is no different over on Swappa, a popular reselling site among Apple users. Bloomberg News, over the weekend: In related news, employees at some Apple retail stores are now being asked to fill out surveys after giving Vision Pro demonstrations to potential buyers. Apple wants to know if they were able to close a sale and get any feedback from the would-be buyer. Apple also wants to ensure employees are following the 20-minute demo script.

As I wrote last week, Vision Pro demand has dropped considerably at many Apple stores. One retail employee says they haven't seen one Vision Pro purchase in weeks and that the number of returns equaled the device's sales in the first month that it was available.

Rachel Treisman reports via NPR: Authorities in the Russian republic of Chechnya are banning music they consider either too fast or too slow, effectively criminalizing many genres. The Chechen Ministry of Culture announced the ban on its website last week, by the order of Culture Minister Musa Dadayev and with the agreement of Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov. "Musical, vocal and choreographic" works will be limited to a tempo of 80 to 116 beats per minute (BPM) to "conform to the Chechen mentality and sense of rhythm," said Dadayev, according to the Russian state-run news agency TASS.

"Borrowing musical culture from other peoples is inadmissible," Dadayev said, per a translation by The Guardian. "We must bring to the people and to the future of our children the cultural heritage of the Chechen people. This includes the entire spectrum of moral and ethical standards of life for Chechens." Russian media report that artists have until June 1 to rewrite any music that doesn't conform to the new rule, though it's not clear how it will be enforced. [...]

The government's crackdown on certain musical tempos would silence most modern music genres. Electronic styles of music like house, techno and dubstep all tend to have BPMs of over 116, says the audio tech company Izotope, while the average tempo of 2020's best-selling pop songs was 122 BPM, according to the BBC. The independent Russian news outlet Meduza said the tempo of the Russian national anthem would be considered too slow under the new limit, reports RadioFreeEurope/RadioLiberty. But it would seem to permit hip-hop music, which generally has a BPM of 85 to 95. "Chechnya is a roughly 6,700-square-mile autonomous republic situated in the North Caucasus of southern Russia and home to some 1.5 million people, the vast majority of whom are Muslim," notes NPR. "The U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom has said Kadyrov's regime 'maintains hegemony through the imposition of a purported 'traditional' version of Islam, which falsely claims to defend local belief and culture, and combat violent extremism.'"

"'In reality, Kadyrov has [co-opted] Chechen religion and culture to support his brutal regime, which violates the secular constitution of the Russian Federation and international standards of freedom of religion or belief,' it added."

After 64 years of service, ULA on Tuesday launched its last-ever Delta rocket carrying a classified payload for the U.S. National Reconnaissance Office (NRO). "The powerful booster departed Space Launch Complex-37 (SLC-37) at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida at 12:53 p.m. EDT (1653 GMT), literally setting itself on fire for the 16th and final time," reports Space.com. From the report: That spectacle, which was unique to the Delta IV in its heaviest configuration, was the result of hydrogen building up in the flame trench and then rising up alongside the rocket after it was used to cool down the three RS-68A engines to cryogenic temperatures. When the engines fired, the hydrogen ignited and flames lapped at the orange insulation covering the core stage and its two side-mounted boosters. The two boosters were jettisoned about four minutes into the flight, followed by the core, or first stage, separating one minute and 45 seconds later. A single RL10C-2-1 engine on the Delta cryogenic second stage then took over, propelling the NROL-70 payload into space. Due to national security concerns, coverage of the launch ceased following fairing jettison at about 6 minutes and 40 seconds into the flight.

ULA is retiring the Delta IV, and eventually its other legacy rocket, the Atlas V, in favor of its newly introduced Vulcan, which flew a near-perfect first mission in January. The Vulcan was developed to replace both long-flying rockets in all of their configurations. "This is a great mission to think about that transition, because national security space missions is our core and the unique set of missions there require a high-energy launch vehicle. We designed Vulcan specifically for that," said [Tory Bruno, chief executive officer of United Launch Alliance]. In addition to being the 16th Delta IV Heavy, Tuesday's launch was also the 45th liftoff of a Delta IV, the 35th Delta IV to fly from Florida and the 389th Delta launch of any kind since 1960 (of which 294 were sent skyward from Cape Canaveral). Half of the Delta IV Heavy launches were devoted to sending NRO payloads into orbit. The rocket and its less powerful configurations were also used in support of NASA, NOAA (the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration), U.S. Air Force and commercial payloads.

SonicSpike shares a report from Scientific American: A day after the American Astronomical Society (AAS) announced that there were no signs of unsafe eclipse glasses or other solar viewers on the market in early March, astronomer and science communicator Rick Fienberg received an alarming call. Fienberg is project manager of the AAS Solar Eclipse Task Force, which is busy preparing for the total eclipse over North America on April 8. He's the creator of a list of vetted solar filters and viewers that will protect wearers' eyes as they watch the moon move in front of the sun. When a solar eclipse last crossed a major swath of the U.S. in 2017, Fienberg and his team spotted some counterfeit glasses entering the marketplace -- imitations that distributors claimed were manufactured by vetted companies. Testing at accredited labs indicated that many counterfeits were actually safe to use, however. This led the task force to describe such eclipse glasses as "misleading" but not "dangerous" in a March 11 statement meant to reassure the public.

But then Fienberg's phone rang. The caller was "a guy who had bought thousands of eclipse glasses from a distributor who had been on our list at one point," Fienberg says. "Those glasses were not safe. They were no darker than ordinary sunglasses." Legitimate eclipse glasses are at least 1,000 times darker than the darkest sunglasses you can buy. Fienberg contacted Cangnan County Qiwei Craft, a Chinese factory that he knew manufactured safe glasses and had -- in the past -- sold them to the distributor in question. But this time, Fienberg says, factory representatives told him they hadn't sold to that distributor in a long while. "That's when we switched from being concerned about only counterfeits to being concerned about actual fakes," Fienberg says. The AAS does not have a confident estimate of how many fake or counterfeit glasses are for sale out there. And though Fienberg doesn't think this is a widespread problem, the situation is an "iceberg kind of concern," he says, because there are likely more examples than the ones he knows about. While counterfeit glasses may still be safe to use, completely fake glasses could put wearers in serious danger. [...]

While lab tests are the best way to determine whether glasses meet the ISO standard, Fienberg says there is a three-part test people can do at home if they're concerned their eclipse viewers aren't up to the task. First, put your glasses on indoors and look around. The only things you should be able to see are very bright lights, such as a halogen bulb or a smartphone flashlight. Then, if the glasses pass the indoor test, bring them outside -- but don't look at the sun just yet. Look around: it should be too dark to see distant hills, trees or even the ground. If that second test is passed, keep the glasses on and quickly glance at the sun. You should comfortably see a bright, sharp-edged round disk. If your glasses pass all three tests, they are probably safe to wear. Still, Fienberg points out that it's best to use them for only a few seconds every minute or so during the eclipse; this cautious approach is how they're intended to be used. And if you don't trust your glasses for April's celestial event, you could try to find a reliable pair in the next two decades. "You only have to wait 20 years for another really good eclipse year in the [United] States," Fienberg says.

After the mysterious disappearance of Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370, barnacles offer "a potential breakthrough" in the search for its wreckage, reports WION: These barnacles were discovered clinging to the initial piece of debris conclusively linked to MH370 — a flaperon bearing the distinctive marking "657 BB," which washed ashore on Reunion Island, situated off the coast of Africa, a year following the event...

Scientists now posit that barnacles could provide invaluable insights into solving this mystery. These small creatures offer a unique biological record akin to the growth rings found in trees. Researchers speculate that by deciphering this information, it may be feasible to retrace the barnacles' trajectory along the flaperon, potentially leading investigators to the crash site.
This week the Independent also reported a new theory from a British pilot: Simon Hardy believes that the Malaysian Airlines flight plan and technical log reveal last-minute changes to the cargo including an additional 3,000kg of fuel and extra oxygen that indicate Captain Zaharie Ahmad Shah directed the plane "to oblivion... It's a strange coincidence that the last engineering task that was done before it headed off to oblivion was topping up crew oxygen which is only for the cockpit, not for the cabin crew...."

Hardy also said that the flaperon found on Reunion Island indicates there was an active pilot until the end of the flight: "If the flaps were down, there is a liquid fuel, then someone is moving a lever and it's someone who knows what they are doing. It all points to the same scenario."
In a kind of rebuttal, long-time Slashdot reader Maury Markowitz suggests there's more innocent explanations for the extra fuel and oxygen, arguing that Hardy's theory "sounds like yet more balonium from someone who likes being in the newspapers."

Thanks to Slashdot reader Press2ToContinue for sharing the news.

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission on Wednesday approved a rule that will require some public companies to report their greenhouse gas emissions and climate risks, after last-minute revisions that weakened the directive in the face of strong pushback from companies. From a report: The rule was one of the most anticipated in recent years from the nation's top financial regulator, drawing more than 24,000 comments from companies, auditors, legislators and trade groups over a two-year process. It brings the U.S. closer to the European Union and California, which moved ahead earlier with corporate climate disclosure rules.

The SEC rule passed 3-2, with three Democratic commissioners supporting it and two Republicans opposed. Since the SEC proposed a rule two years ago, experts had said it was likely to face litigation almost immediately. SEC Chairman Gary Gensler, one of the Democrats, acknowledged that was a factor the agency considered as it worked toward a final rule. "We've seriously considered what people have said about our legal authorities," Gensler said on Wednesday.

U.S. edutech platform Coursera added a new user every minute on average for its AI courses in 2023, CEO Jeff Maggioncalda said on Thursday, in a clear sign of people upskilling to tap a potential boom in generative AI. Reuters: The technology behind OpenAI's ChatGPT has taken the world by a storm and sparked a race among companies to roll out their own versions of the viral chatbot. "I'd say the real hotspot is generative AI because it affects so many people," he told Reuters in an interview at the World Economic Forum in Davos.

Coursera is looking to offer AI courses along with companies that are the frontrunners in the AI race, including OpenAI and Google's DeepMind, Maggioncalda said. Investors had earlier feared that apps based on generative AI might replace ed-tech firms, but on the contrary the technology has encouraged more people to upskill, benefiting companies such as Coursera. The company has more than 800 AI courses and saw more than 7.4 million enrollments last year. Every student on the platform gets access to a ChatGPT-like AI assistant called "Coach" that provides personalized tutoring.

The White House has convened a last-minute meeting to discuss a private lunar mission, Peregrine Mission One, after the Navajo Nation requested a delay due to cultural concerns over the transport of human ashes for burial on the moon. "The moon holds a sacred place in Navajo cosmology," said Navajo Nation President Buu Nygren in a statement. "The suggestion of transforming it into a resting place for human remains is deeply disturbing and unacceptable to our people and many other tribal nations."

If successful, the commercial mission scheduled to launch Monday "will be the first time an American-made spacecraft has landed on the lunar surface since the end of the Apollo program in 1972," notes CNN. Longtime Slashdot reader garyisabusyguy shares the report: The private companies providing these lunar burial services, Celestis and Elysium Space, are just two of several paying customers hitching a ride to the moon on Pittsburgh-based Astrobotic Technology's Peregrine lunar lander. The uncrewed spacecraft is expected to lift off on the inaugural flight of the United Launch Alliance's Vulcan Centaur rocket from Florida's Cape Canaveral Space Force Station. Celestis' payload, called Tranquility Flight, includes 66 "memorial capsules" containing "cremated remains and DNA," which will remain on the lunar surface "as a permanent tribute to the intrepid souls who never stopped reaching for the stars," according to the company's website.

"We are aware of the concerns expressed by Mr. Nygren, but do not find them substantive," Celestis CEO Charles Chafer told CNN. "We reject the assertion that our memorial spaceflight mission desecrates the moon," Chafer said. "Just as permanent memorials for deceased are present all over planet Earth and not considered desecration, our memorial on the moon is handled with care and reverence, is a permanent monument that does not intentionally eject flight capsules on the moon. It is a touching and fitting celebration for our participants -- the exact opposite of desecration, it is a celebration." Elysium Space has not responded to CNN's request for a comment, but the company's website describes its "Lunar Memorial" as delivering "a symbolic portion of remains to the surface of the Moon, helping to create the quintessential commemoration." "I've been disappointed that this conversation came up so late in the game," John Thornton, Astrobotic Technology CEO, said. "I would have liked to have had this conversation a long time ago. We announced the first payload manifest of this nature to our mission back in 2015. A second in 2020. We really are trying to do the right thing and I hope we can find a good path forward with Navajo Nation." [...]

Friday's meeting convened by the White House is scheduled to feature representatives from NASA, the FAA, the US Department of Transportation, and the Department of Commerce. But Navajo Nation officials have little hope that they will be able to stop Monday's launch. "Based off of what we're seeing, and NASA are already having their pre-launch briefing, it doesn't look like they have any intention of stopping the launch or removing the remains," Ahasteen said.

A Canadian cybersecurity firm has warned that as soon as 2025, quantum computers could make current encryption methods useless.

But now Slashdot reader christoban shares a "reality check" — an IEEE Spectrum takedown with the tagline "Hype is everywhere, skeptics say, and practical applications are still far away." The quantum computer revolution may be further off and more limited than many have been led to believe. That's the message coming from a small but vocal set of prominent skeptics in and around the emerging quantum computing industry... [T]here's growing pushback against what many see as unrealistic expectations for the technology. Meta's head of AI research Yann LeCun recently made headlines after pouring cold water on the prospect of quantum computers making a meaningful contribution in the near future.

Speaking at a media event celebrating the 10-year anniversary of Meta's Fundamental AI Research team he said the technology is "a fascinating scientific topic," but that he was less convinced of "the possibility of actually fabricating quantum computers that are actually useful." While LeCun is not an expert in quantum computing, leading figures in the field are also sounding a note of caution. Oskar Painter, head of quantum hardware for Amazon Web Services, says there is a "tremendous amount of hype" in the industry at the minute and "it can be difficult to filter the optimistic from the completely unrealistic."

A fundamental challenge for today's quantum computers is that they are very prone to errors. Some have suggested that these so-called "noisy intermediate-scale quantum" (NISQ) processors could still be put to useful work. But Painter says there's growing recognition that this is unlikely and quantum error-correction schemes will be key to achieving practical quantum computers. The leading proposal involves spreading information over many physical qubits to create "logical qubits" that are more robust, but this could require as many as 1,000 physical qubits for each logical one. Some have suggested that quantum error correction could even be fundamentally impossible, though that is not a mainstream view. Either way, realizing these schemes at the scale and speeds required remains a distant goal, Painter says... "I would estimate at least a decade out," he says.
A Microsoft technical fellow believes there's fewer applications where quantum computers can really provide a meaningful advantage, since operating a qubit its magnitudes slower than simply flipping a transistor, which also makes the throughput rate for data thousands or even millions of times slowers.

"We found out over the last 10 years that many things that people have proposed don't work," he says. "And then we found some very simple reasons for that."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: With redesigned engine components, Blue Origin's New Shepard rocket took off from West Texas and flew to the edge of space on Tuesday with a package of scientific research and technology demonstration experiments. This was the first flight of Blue Origin's 60-foot-tall (18-meter) New Shepard rocket since September 12, 2022, when an engine failure destroyed the booster and triggered an in-flight abort for the vehicle's pressurized capsule. There were no passengers aboard for that mission, and the capsule safely separated from the failed booster and parachuted to a controlled landing.

The flight on Tuesday also didn't carry people. Instead, Blue Origin, Jeff Bezos's space company, lofted 33 payloads from NASA, research institutions, and commercial companies. Some of these payloads were flown again on Tuesday's launch after failing to reach space on the failed New Shepard mission last year. Among these payloads were an experiment to demonstrate hydrogen fuel cell technology in microgravity and an investigation studying the strength of planetary soils under different gravity conditions. Blue Origin's capsule, mounted on top of the rocket, also flew 38,000 postcards submitted by students through Club for the Future, the company's nonprofit.

For Tuesday's return-to-flight mission, the New Shepard rocket ignited its BE-3PM engine and climbed away from Blue Origin's remote launch site near Van Horn, Texas, at 10:42 am CST (16:42 UTC). The hydrogen-fueled engine fired for more than two minutes, then shut down as scheduled as the rocket continued coasting upward, reaching an altitude of more than 347,000 feet (106 kilometers). The booster returned for a precision propulsive landing a short distance from the launch pad, and Blue Origin's capsule deployed three parachutes to settle onto the desert floor, completing a 10-minute up-and-down flight. Blue Origin has launched 24 missions with its reusable New Shepard rocket, including six flights carrying people just over the Karman line, the internationally recognized boundary of space 100 kilometers above Earth.

During a Wells Fargo summit last month, Microsoft Gaming CFO Tim Stuart suggested Xbox is seeking to bring Xbox Game Pass to competing platforms, such as PlayStation and Nintendo Switch. One of the scenarios for Xbox Game Pass expansion may include offering access in exchange for viewing advertisements. Windows Central reports: "For models like Africa, or India, Southeast Asia, maybe places that aren't console-first, you can say, 'hey, do you want to watch 30 seconds of an ad and then get two hours of game streaming?'," Stuart continued. "Africa is, you know, 50% of the population is 23 years old or younger with a growing disposable income base, all with cell phones and mobile devices, not a lot of high-end disposable income, generally-speaking. So we can go in with our own business models and say -- there's millions of gamers we would never have been able to address, and now we can go in with our business models."

Microsoft has previously surveyed Xbox users on the Xbox Insider Program and via other avenues about the possibility of offering Xbox Game Pass time in exchange for viewing advertisements. And recently, security researcher Title_OS shared some code snippets from the Xbox OS that described systems that would provide access to Xbox Game Pass via on an "Earned Time" basis, complete in 15-minute blocks.

15,279 people live in the rural Minnesota town of Bemidji. But now mail carriers there, "overwhelmed by Amazon packages, say they've been warned not to use the word 'Amazon,' including when customers ask why the mail is delayed," reports the Washington Post: "We are not to mention the word 'Amazon' to anyone," said a mail carrier who spoke on the condition of anonymity to protect their job. "If asked, they're to be referred to as 'Delivery Partners' or 'Distributors,'" said a second carrier. "It's ridiculous." The directive, passed down Monday morning from U.S. Postal Service management, comes three weeks after mail carriers in the northern Minnesota town staged a symbolic strike outside the post office, protesting the heavy workloads and long hours caused by the sudden arrival of thousands of Amazon packages...

In addition to being banned from saying "Amazon," postal workers have also been told their jobs could be at risk if they speak publicly about post office issues. Staffers were told they could attend Tuesday's meeting only on their 30-minute lunch break if they changed out of uniform, mail carriers said. One mail carrier said he'd been warned there could be "consequences" for those who showed up.

Postal customers in Bemidji have been complaining about late and missing mail since the beginning of November, when the contract for delivering Amazon packages in town switched from UPS to the post office. Mail carriers told The Post last month that they were instructed to deliver packages before the mail, leaving residents waiting for tax rebates, credit card statements, medical documents and checks...

The post office has held a contract to deliver Amazon packages on Sundays since 2013. The agency, which has lost $6.5 billion in the past year, has said that it's crucial to increase package volume by cutting deals with Amazon and other retailers.
Tuesday the town's mayor held a listening session for the state's two senators with Bemidji residents, whose complaints included "missing medications and late bills resulting in fees." Senator Amy Klobuchar later told the Post that "We need a very clear commitment that we're not going to be prioritizing Amazon packages over regular mail," promising to explore improving postal staffing and pay for rural carriers. On Monday, the Minnesota senators introduced a bill called the Postal Delivery Accountability Act, which would require the post office to improve tracking and reporting of delayed and undelivered mail nationally.