Last year, NBA superstar LeBron James opened an experimental school that focuses on teaching a STEM curriculum to students who have a higher probability of failing academically or dropping out of school. The New York Times is now reporting that "the inaugural classes of third and fourth graders at [the I PROMISE School] posted extraordinary results in their first set of district assessments. Ninety percent met or exceeded individual growth goals in reading and math (Warning: source may be paywalled; alternative source), outpacing their peers across the district." From the report: The students' scores reflect their performance on the Measures of Academic Progress assessment, a nationally recognized test administered by NWEA, an evaluation association. In reading, where both classes had scored in the lowest, or first, percentile, third graders moved to the ninth percentile, and fourth graders to the 16th. In math, third graders jumped from the lowest percentile to the 18th, while fourth graders moved from the second percentile to the 30th.

The 90 percent of I Promise students who met their goals exceeded the 70 percent of students districtwide, and scored in the 99th growth percentile of the evaluation association's school norms, which the district said showed that students' test scores increased at a higher rate than 99 out of 100 schools nationally. The students have a long way to go to even join the middle of the pack. And time will tell whether the gains are sustainable and how they stack up against rigorous state standardized tests at the end of the year. To some extent, the excitement surrounding the students' progress illustrates a somber reality in urban education, where big hopes hinge on small victories.

On April 6, something known as the GPS rollover, a cousin to the dreaded Y2K bug, mostly came and went, as businesses and government agencies around the world heeded warnings and made software or hardware updates in advance. But in New York, something went wrong -- and city officials seem to not want anyone to know. [Editor's note: the link may be paywalled; alternative source] New submitter RAYinNYC shares a report: At 7:59 p.m. E.D.T. on Saturday, the New York City Wireless Network, or NYCWiN, went dark, waylaying numerous city tasks and functions, including the collection and transmission of information from some Police Department license plate readers. The shutdown also interrupted the ability of the Department of Transportation to program traffic lights, and prevented agencies such as the sanitation and parks departments from staying connected with far-flung offices and work sites. The culprit was a long-anticipated calendar reset of the centralized Global Positioning System, which connects to devices and computer networks around the world. There has been no public disclosure that NYCWiN, a $500 million network built for the city by Northrop Grumman, was offline and remains so, even as workers are trying to restore it.

City officials tried to play down the shutdown when first asked about it on Monday, speaking of it as if it were a routine maintenance issue. "The city is in the process of upgrading some components of our private wireless network," Stephanie Raphael, a spokeswoman for the Department of Information Technology and Telecommunications, said in an email on Monday. She referred to the glitch as a "brief software installation period." By Tuesday, the agency acknowledged the network shutdown, but said in an emailed statement that "no critical public safety systems are affected." Ms. Raphael admitted that technicians have been unable to get the network back up and running, adding, "We're working overtime to update the network and bring all of it back online." The problem has raised questions about whether the city had taken appropriate measures to prepare the network for the GPS rollover.

Tesla is changing up its retail strategy yet again, this time deciding to end online sales of the long-awaited $35,000 version of its Model 3 sedan (Warning: source may be paywalled; alternative source). The move comes just over a month after the company announced that the $35,000 version was finally coming to market. The New York Times reports: In a blog post late Thursday, Tesla said customers wanting the $35,000 version of the Model 3 would have to make the purchase by phone or in person at one of its stores. The cheapest Model 3s ordered online will now include Tesla's Autopilot driver-assistance system and a longer battery range, features that increase the price to $39,500. The blog post said Tesla was making the changes to "simplify vehicle choices and to make Autopilot more affordable." Such a configuration would previously have cost $40,500, it said.

A Tesla spokesman said the change would allow the company to produce one version of the Model 3 and use software to limit the battery range and turn off features such as heated seats for customers who wanted the $35,000 model. A longer range and additional features will be switched on in the $39,500 car, known as the Standard Plus model. Previously, Tesla planned to put a smaller battery pack in the basic model and a larger one in the Standard Plus, the spokesman said. Tesla's announcement also said it would begin leasing the Model 3, but would not offer customers the option to buy the cars after their leases expired, a departure from the typical industry practice and its own policy on other models. Tesla said it aimed to upgrade Model 3s returned after a lease to allow them to drive themselves, with no human at the wheel, and be deployed in a driverless taxi fleet. The company acknowledged that the technology for driverless taxis was still in development and would need to be approved by safety regulators before such a business could begin.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The New York Times: A small spacecraft that has captured the imagination and excitement of people in Israel and around the world appears to have crashed on the moon (Warning: source may be paywalled; alternative source). "We had a failure in the spacecraft," said Opher Doron, the general manager of Israel Aerospace Industries' space division, which collaborated on building the spacecraft. "We unfortunately have not managed to land successfully."

If it had succeeded, the robotic lander, named Beresheet, which means "Genesis" or "in the beginning" in Hebrew, would have been the first on the moon built by a private organization, and it would have added Israel to just three nations -- the United States, the former Soviet Union, and China -- to have accomplished that feat. Beresheet reached the launchpad and was headed to space aboard a SpaceX rocket in February. It orbited the moon, by itself a major accomplishment. That has only been done by five nations -- the United States, the former Soviet Union, China, Japan and India -- and the European Space Agency. But the landing was the riskiest part of the mission. The start of the automated landing sequence went as planned. The spacecraft even took a picture of itself at an altitude of 13 miles with the moon in the background. Then, still high above the surface, the engine cut out. The appointed landing time -- 10:25 p.m. in Israel, or 3:25 p.m. Eastern time -- came and passed, and the SpaceIL team realized the mission was over. "Well we didn't make it, but we definitely tried," said Morris Kahn, an Israeli telecommunications entrepreneur and president of SpaceIL, the nonprofit that undertook the mission. "And I think the achievement of getting to where we got is really tremendous. I think we can be proud."

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel said, "If at first you don't succeed, you try again."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The New York Times: Australia passed sweeping legislation Thursday that threatens huge fines for social media companies and jail for their executives (Warning: source may be paywalled; alternative source) if they fail to rapidly remove "abhorrent violent material" from their platforms. The law -- strongly opposed by the tech industry -- puts Australia at the forefront of a global movement to hold companies like Facebook and YouTube accountable for the content they host. It comes less than a month after a gunman, believed to be an Australian white nationalist, distributed a hate-filled manifesto online before using Facebook to live-stream the massacre of 50 people at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand. Written quickly and without much input from technology companies or experts, the measure goes as far as any other democracy's attempt to punish multinational tech platforms for the behavior of their users. "The legislation criminalizes 'abhorrent violent material,' which it defines as videos that show terrorist attacks, murders, rape or kidnapping. Social media companies that fail to remove such content 'expeditiously' could face fines of up to 10 percent of their annual profit, and employees could be sentenced to up to three years in prison," the report adds. "Companies must also inform the police when illegal material is found."

"This law, which was conceived and passed in five days without any meaningful consultation, does nothing to address hate speech, which was the fundamental motivation for the tragic Christchurch terrorist attacks," said Sunita Bose, the managing director of the Digital Industry Group, an advocacy group representing Facebook, Google and other companies. "With the vast volumes of content uploaded to the internet every second, this is a highly complex problem that requires discussion with the technology industry, legal experts, the media and civil society to get the solution right -- that didn't happen this week."

"On Thursday, 41 scientists published the first worldwide analysis of a fungal outbreak that's been wiping out frogs for decades," The New York Times reports. The outbreak has caused more than 500 species of amphibians to decline significantly (Warning: source may be paywalled; alternative source), making it "the most deadly pathogen known to science." From the report: Scientists first noticed in the 1970s that some frog populations were declining quickly; by the 1980s, some species appeared to be extinct. The losses were puzzling, because the frogs were living in pristine habitats, unharmed by pollution or deforestation. In the late 1990s, researchers discovered that frogs in both Australia and Panama were infected with a deadly fungus, which they named Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis -- Bd, for short. The fungus turned up in other countries, but studies of its DNA suggest that Bd originated on the Korean Peninsula. In Asia, amphibians seem impervious to Bd, but when it got to other parts of the world â" probably via the international trade in pet amphibians -- the pathogen reached hundreds of vulnerable species.

Amphibians are infected with Bd by contact with other animals or by spores floating in the water. The fungus invades skin cells and multiplies. An infected frog's skin will start to peel away as the animal grows sluggish. Before it dies, a frog may manage to hop its way to a new stream or pond, spreading the fungus further. The fungus thrives in cool, moist conditions. As a result, frogs that live in cloud forests on mountainsides have been hit particularly hard. Big frogs are at a greater risk, too, possibly because they don't multiply as quickly as small ones. [The lead author of the new study and his colleagues] identified 501 species in decline, far greater than the previous estimate of 200. Certain factors once thought to account for the decimation of frog populations -- like climate change and deforestation -- are not the greatest threats, the scientists found. The study has been published in the journal Science.

Microsoft is urging lawmakers in Washington to increase the tax burden on itself and Amazon (Warning: source may be paywalled; alternative source) to help pay for a new higher education fund. "The bill, which was introduced Monday by Rep. Drew Hansen and Rep. Gerry Pollet among others, "would pour about a billion dollars over the next four years into a 'workforce education account,' to be spent on more financial aid as well as more degree slots in high-demand subjects such as computer science, engineering and nursing," The Seattle Times reports. Microsoft and Amazon would be the only two companies included in the highest tax bracket. From the report: The premise now is to put a surcharge on businesses that benefit the most from a highly skilled workforce. That means high-tech of course, as well as professional services firms. The bill proposes increasing the state business and occupation tax by 20 percent on about 40 categories of technical services, such as telecom, engineering, medical and finance. And by 33 percent on tech firms with more than $25 billion in annual revenue. But here's where this goes off the charts, into politically unheard-of territory. It mandates a top rate, a whopping 67 percent business tax increase, for those "advanced computing businesses" with "worldwide gross revenue of more than one hundred billion dollars" per year. There are only two businesses headquartered here that fit that rarefied description. And one of them, Microsoft, is the tax's biggest booster.

But that other company that would also be most on the hook? Apparently it isn't so thrilled to have been volunteered for civic duty by one of its chief rivals. "Amazon was surprised to be included in such a public 'hey, let's do this' by Microsoft," said Rep. Gael Tarleton, D-Seattle, who said she heard that lament directly from an Amazon lobbyist. Added Pollet: "Amazon has groused in meetings down here that Microsoft is doing this mostly as a way of making Amazon look bad."

Facebook will begin banning posts, photos and other content that reference white nationalism and white separatism, revising its rules in response to criticism that a loophole had allowed racism to thrive on its platform. From a report: Previously, Facebook only had prohibited users from sharing messages that glorified white supremacy -- a rhetorical discrepancy, in the eyes of civil rights advocates, who argued that white nationalism, supremacy and separatism are indistinguishable and that the policy undermined the tech giant's stepped-up efforts to combat hate speech online. Facebook now agrees with that analysis, [Editor's note: the link may be paywalled; alternative source] according to people who've been briefed on the decision. The new policy also applies to Instagram. The rise and spread of white nationalism on Facebook were thrown into sharp relief in the wake of the deadly neo-Nazi rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017, when self-avowed white nationalists used the social networking site as an organizing tool.

Joanna Stern, writing for the Wall Street Journal [the link may be paywalled]: Why is the breaking of my MacBook Air keyboard so insanely maddening? Let's take a trip down Memory Lane.
April 2015: Apple releases the all-new MacBook with a "butterfly" keyboard. In order to achieve extreme thinness, the keys are much flatter than older generations but the butterfly mechanism underneath, for which the keyboard is named, aims to replicate the bounce of a more traditional keyboard.
October 2016: The MacBook Pro arrives with a second-generation butterfly keyboard. A few months later, some begin to report that letters or characters don't appear, that keys get stuck or that letters unexpectedly repeat.
June 2018: Apple launches a keyboard repair program for what the company says is a "small percentage" of MacBook and MacBook Pro keyboards impacted.
July 2018: Apple releases a new high-end MacBook Pro with the third-generation of the keyboard that's said to fix the issues.
October 2018: Apple's new MacBook Air also has the third-generation keyboard. I recommend it, and even get one for myself.

Which brings us to the grand year 2019 and my MacBook Air's faulty E and R keys. Others have had problems with Apple's latest laptops, too. A proposed nationwide class-action suit alleges that Apple has been aware of the defective nature of these keyboards since 2015 yet sold affected laptops without disclosing the problem. "We are aware that a small number of users are having issues with their third-generation butterfly keyboard and for that we are sorry," an Apple spokesman said in a statement. "The vast majority of Mac notebook customers are having a positive experience with the new keyboard." If you have a problem, contact Apple customer service, he added. John Gruber, a long time Apple columnist: I consider these keyboards the worst products in Apple history. MacBooks should have the best keyboards in the industry; instead they're the worst. They're doing lasting harm to the reputation of the MacBook brand.

The first all-female spacewalk scheduled for Friday has been cancelled by NASA (Warning: source may be paywalled; alternative source) because they don't have two spacesuits that fit the female astronauts. According to The New York Times, Anne C. McClain and Christina H. Koch both need to wear a medium-size torso component, but only one is readily available at the International Space Station. From the report: The mission itself is unchanged. On Friday, two astronauts will venture outside of the space station on a six-hour mission to install massive lithium-ion batteries that will help to power the research laboratory. Ms. Koch is still scheduled to participate, along with her fellow astronaut Nick Hague; Ms. McClain did her first spacewalk last week. But the first women-only venture outside of the confines of the space station will have to happen on another day. "After consulting with McClain and Hague following the first spacewalk, mission managers decided to adjust the assignments, due in part to spacesuit availability on the station," NASA said in a statement.

Stephanie Schierholz, a spokeswoman for NASA, said in an interview on Monday that there were already two medium-size hard upper torsos -- "essentially the shirt of the spacesuit," according to NASA -- at the space station. But there were a couple of issues. One was that Ms. McClain had thought she would be able to work in a large-size torso, but after her spacewalk last Friday, she wore a medium-size torso and learned that it fit her better. Ms. Koch also uses the same size. And of the two medium-size torsos available, one has yet to be properly configured for a spacewalk. It would take hours of crew labor -- not to mention some additional risk -- to fix that in time for Friday. Instead of doing that, NASA decided to simply switch out the astronauts. In the end, both women will have done a spacewalk -- just not together.

Employment has fallen in jobs that can be easily automated and risen in those which are trickier for robots, damping hopes that higher minimum wages could unleash a wave of investment in automation. From a report: Statistics from the Office for National Statistics published on Monday showed that in 2011 about 8.1 per cent of workers were in jobs with a "high" risk of automation, but by 2017 that had fallen to 7.4 per cent. [Editor's note: the link may be paywalled; alternative source and original study.] The ONS report highlighted that fewer workers remain in areas that can be easily automated, such as dry cleaning and laundry jobs, which fell by 28 per cent between 2011 and 2017, and retail cashier work, which fell by 25.3 per cent over the same period.

Since the financial crisis the UK has enjoyed rapid growth in employment combined with one of the lowest rates of investment spending of any large rich country. Many economists have suggested that hiring cheap labour instead of investment in new techniques is behind the country's weak rate of productivity growth. Policymakers had hoped that increasing the minimum wage would spur companies to replace low-paid jobs with machines, in turn boosting growth in productivity. [...] But the ONS analysis suggests the increase in employment over the past decade has not come from jobs that could easily be done by machines. Instead, since 2011 the UK lost jobs with a high or medium risk of automation, like shelf fillers, but gained them in areas with a low risk, such as physiotherapy.

The recent Boeing 737 MAX crashes involving an Ethiopian Airlines flight and a Lion Air flight may have been a result of two missing safety features that Boeing charged airlines extra for (Warning: source may be paywalled; alternative source). The New York Times reports that many low-cost carriers like Indonesia's Lion Air opted not to buy them so they could save money, even though some of these systems are fundamental to the plane's operations. "Now, in the wake of the two deadly crashes involving the same jet model, Boeing will make one of those safety features standard as part of a fix to get the planes in the air again," the report says. From the report: It is not yet known what caused the crashes of Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 on March 10 and Lion Air Flight 610 five months earlier, both after erratic takeoffs. But investigators are looking at whether a new software system added to avoid stalls in Boeing's 737 Max series may have been partly to blame. Faulty data from sensors on the Lion Air plane may have caused the system, known as MCAS, to malfunction, authorities investigating that crash suspect.

The jet's software system takes readings from one of two vanelike devices called angle of attack sensors that determine how much the plane's nose is pointing up or down relative to oncoming air. When MCAS detects that the plane is pointing up at a dangerous angle, it can automatically push down the nose of the plane in an effort to prevent the plane from stalling. Boeing's optional safety features, in part, could have helped the pilots detect any erroneous readings. One of the optional upgrades, the angle of attack indicator, displays the readings of the two sensors. The other, called a disagree light, is activated if those sensors are at odds with one another. The angle of attack indicator will remain an option that airlines can buy. Neither feature was mandated by the Federal Aviation Administration. All 737 Max jets have been grounded. "Boeing will soon update the MCAS software, and will also make the disagree light standard on all new 737 Max planes," the report adds, citing a person familiar with the changes. "Boeing started moving on the software fix and the equipment change before the crash in Ethiopia."

Slashdot reader Futurepower(R) adds to the story: The FBI has joined the criminal investigation into the certification of the Boeing 737 MAX, lending its considerable resources to an inquiry already being conducted by U.S. Department of Transportation agents, according to people familiar with the matter. "The federal grand jury investigation, based in Washington, D.C., is looking into the certification process that approved the safety of the new Boeing plane, two of which have crashed since October.

Recycling, for decades an almost reflexive effort by American households and businesses to reduce waste and help the environment, is collapsing in many parts of the country [Editor's note: the link may be paywalled; syndicated source]. From a report: Philadelphia is now burning about half of its 1.5 million residents' recycling material in an incinerator that converts waste to energy. In Memphis, the international airport still has recycling bins around the terminals, but every collected can, bottle and newspaper is sent to a landfill. And last month, officials in the central Florida city of Deltona faced the reality that, despite their best efforts to recycle, their curbside program was not working and suspended it. Those are just three of the hundreds of towns and cities across the country that have canceled recycling programs, limited the types of material they accepted or agreed to huge price increases.

"We are in a crisis moment in the recycling movement right now," said Fiona Ma, the treasurer of California, where recycling costs have increased in some cities. Prompting this nationwide reckoning is China, which until January 2018 had been a big buyer of recyclable material collected in the United States. That stopped when Chinese officials determined that too much trash was mixed in with recyclable materials like cardboard and certain plastics. After that, Thailand and India started to accept more imported scrap, but even they are imposing new restrictions. The turmoil in the global scrap markets began affecting American communities last year, and the problems have only deepened.

EU governments are allowing more than 100 advertising companies, including Google and Facebook, to surreptitiously track citizens across sensitive public sector websites, in apparent violation of their own EU data protection rules, a study has found. From a report: Danish browser-analysis company Cookiebot found ad trackers -- which log users' locations, devices and browsing behaviours for advertisers -- on the official government websites of 25 EU member states [Editor's note: the link may be paywalled; alternative source]. The French government had the highest number of ad trackers on its site, with 52 different companies tracking users' behaviour. Google, YouTube and DoubleClick, Google's advertising platform, accounted for three of the top five tracking domains on 22 of the main government websites. Researchers also studied the websites for EU public health services, finding that people seeking health advice on sensitive topics such as abortion, HIV and mental illness were met with commercial ad trackers on more than half of the sites analysed.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The New York Times: The Department of Energy disclosed details on Monday of one of the most expensive computers being built: a $500 million machine based on Intel and Cray technology that may become crucial in a high-stakes technology race between the United States and China (Warning: source may be paywalled; alternative source). The supercomputer, called Aurora, is a retooling of a development effort first announced in 2015 and is scheduled to be delivered to the Argonne National Laboratory near Chicago in 2021. Lab officials predict it will be the first American machine to reach a milestone called "exascale" performance, surpassing a quintillion calculations per second. That's roughly seven times the speed rating of the most powerful system built to date, or 1,000 times faster than the first "petascale" systems that began arriving in 2008. Backers hope the new machines will let researchers create significantly more accurate simulations of phenomena such as drug responses, climate changes, the inner workings of combustion engines and solar panels.

Aurora, which far exceeds the $200 million price for Summit, represents a record government contract for Intel and a test of its continued leadership in supercomputers. The Silicon Valley giant's popular processors -- the calculating engine for nearly all personal computers and server systems -- power most such machines. But additional accelerator chips are considered essential to reach the very highest speeds, and its rival Nvidia has built a sizable business adapting chips first used with video games for use in supercomputers. The version of Aurora announced in 2015 was based on an Intel accelerator chip that the company later discontinued. A revised plan to seek more ambitious performance targets was announced two years later. Features discussed on Monday include unreleased Intel accelerator chips, a version of its standard Xeon processor, new memory and communications technology and a design that packages chips on top of each other to save space and power.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Mercury News: Amid a worldwide race for supremacy in artificial intelligence, Stanford University on Monday will unveil a new institute dedicated to using AI to build the best-possible future (Warning: source may be paywalled; alternative source). The Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence is co-directed by Fei-Fei Li, a former chief scientist for AI at Google, now a Stanford computer science professor. The institute will take advantage of Stanford's strength in a variety of disciplines, including AI, computer science, engineering, robotics, business, economics, genomics, law, literature, medicine, neuroscience and philosophy, according to promotional materials. Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates is scheduled to deliver the keynote speech at Monday's official launch.

Stanford's AI institute will work in partnership with a number of other university facilities and initiatives, including the Center on AI Safety, the Center for Ethics in Society, the Center for International Security and Cooperation, and the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research, plus AI4ALL, which aims to boost diversity in AI fields. The 78 faculty members assigned to the institute reflect the diversity of fields the university intends to cover in its research and teaching, coming from disciplines including computer science, medicine, law, business, economics, environmental science, linguistics, political science and philosophy. Although the institute highlights the importance of AI being "broadly representative of humanity" across gender, ethnicity, nationality, culture and age, its faculty also reflect the gender gap in technology -- only 18 percent are women. About three quarters of the faculty are white. Courses will include "The Politics of Algorithms," "Theoretical Neuroscience," "AI-assisted Health Care" and "Regulating Artificial Intelligence."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The New York Times: Federal prosecutors are conducting a criminal investigation into data deals Facebook struck with some of the world's largest technology companies (Warning: source may be paywalled; alternative source), intensifying scrutiny of the social media giant's business practices as it seeks to rebound from a year of scandal and setbacks. A grand jury in New York has subpoenaed records from at least two prominent makers of smartphones and other devices, according to two people who were familiar with the requests and who insisted on anonymity to discuss confidential legal matters. Both companies had entered into partnerships with Facebook, gaining broad access to the personal information of hundreds of millions of its users. The companies were among more than 150, including Amazon, Apple, Microsoft and Sony, that had cut sharing deals with the world's dominant social media platform. The agreements, previously reported in The New York Times, let the companies see users' friends, contact information and other data, sometimes without consent. Facebook has phased out most of the partnerships over the past two years. "We are cooperating with investigators and take those probes seriously," a Facebook spokesman said in a statement. "We've provided public testimony, answered questions and pledged that we will continue to do so."

A new front has opened in the battle between the U.S. and China over control of global networks that deliver the internet. This one is beneath the ocean. [Editor's note: the link may be paywalled; syndicated source.] From a report: While the U.S. wages a high-profile campaign to exclude China's Huawei from next-generation mobile networks over fears of espionage, the company is embedding itself into undersea cable networks that ferry nearly all of the world's internet data. About 380 active submarine cables -- bundles of fiber-optic lines that travel oceans on the seabed -- carry about 95% of intercontinental voice and data traffic, making them critical for the economies and national security of most countries. Current and former security officials in the U.S. and allied governments now worry that these cables are increasingly vulnerable to espionage or attack and say the involvement of Huawei potentially enhances China's capabilities.

Huawei denies any threat. The U.S. hasn't publicly provided evidence of its claims that Huawei technology poses a cybersecurity risk. Its efforts to persuade other countries to sideline the company's communication technology have been met with skepticism by some. Huawei Marine Networks, majority owned by the Chinese telecom giant, completed a 3,750-mile cable between Brazil and Cameroon in September. It recently started work on a 7,500-mile cable connecting Europe, Asia and Africa and is finishing up links across the Gulf of California in Mexico. Altogether, the company has worked on some 90 projects to build or upgrade seabed fiber-optic links, gaining fast on the three U.S., European and Japanese firms that dominate the industry. These officials say the company's knowledge of and access to undersea cables could allow China to attach devices that divert or monitor data traffic -- or, in a conflict, to sever links to entire nations.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Chicken companies spent decades breeding birds to grow rapidly and develop large breast muscles. Now the industry is spending hundreds of millions of dollars to deal with the consequences ranging from squishy fillets known as "spaghetti meat," because they pull apart easily, to leathery ones known as "woody breast." [Editor's note: the link may be paywalled; alternative source.] The abnormalities pose no food safety risk, researchers and industry officials say. They are suspected side effects of genetic selection that now allows meat companies to raise a 6.3-pound bird in 47 days, roughly twice as fast as 50 years ago, according to the National Chicken Council.

That efficiency drive has helped U.S. meat giants such as Tyson Foods, Pilgrim's Pride, Perdue Farms and Sanderson Farms produce a record 42 billion pounds of chicken nuggets, tenders and other products in 2018. Now, it's adding an estimated $200 million or more in annual industry expenses to identify and divert breast fillets that are too tough, too squishy or too striped with bands of white tissue to sell in restaurants or grocery stores, according to researchers at the University of Arkansas.

Boeing is making an extensive change to the flight-control system in the 737 MAX aircraft implicated in October's Lion Air crash in Indonesia, going beyond what many industry officials familiar with the discussions had anticipated. From a report: The change was in the works before a second plane of the same make crashed in Africa last weekend -- and comes as world-wide unease about the 737 MAX's safety grows. The change would mark a major shift from how Boeing originally designed a stall-prevention feature in the aircraft, which were first delivered to airlines in 2017. U.S. aviation regulators are expected to mandate the change by the end of April.

Boeing publicly released details about the planned 737 MAX software update late Monday [Editor's note: the link may be paywalled; alternative source]. A company spokesman confirmed the update would use multiple sensors, or data feeds, in MAX's stall-prevention system -- instead of the current reliance on a single sensor. The change was prompted by preliminary results from the Indonesian crash investigation indicating that erroneous data from a single sensor, which measures the angle of the plane's nose, caused the stall-prevention system to misfire. Then, a series of events put the aircraft into a dangerous dive.