ICON, a construction technology company, is nearing completion of 100 3D-printed homes in Wolf Ranch, Texas, using a massive robotic printer. The 45-foot-wide, 4.75-ton Vulcan printer began constructing the walls of what ICON claims is the world's largest 3D-printed community in November 2022. The printer extrudes a concrete mixture layer by layer, creating corduroy-textured walls. ICON senior project manager Conner Jenkins told Reuters the process is faster and more efficient than traditional construction, requiring fewer workers and reducing material waste.

The single-story homes, priced between $450,000 and $600,000, feature concrete walls resistant to water, mold, termites, and extreme weather. However, homeowners reported weak wireless signals due to the thick walls, necessitating mesh internet routers. ICON, which printed its first home in Austin in 2018, is also developing lunar construction systems for NASA's Artemis program.

Nasdaq is taking steps to purge itself of dubious companies whose shares trade below $1 each, following criticism that the exchange has become home to hundreds of risky penny stocks. From a report: [...] When a stock closes below $1 for 30 consecutive trading days, Nasdaq deems the company to be noncompliant and gives it 180 days to remedy the situation. After 180 days, if the stock hasn't climbed above $1, the company can request another 180-day grace period. At the end of that second period, the company can still get a last-minute reprieve by appealing to a Nasdaq hearings panel. The delisting is stayed while the company awaits its hearing.

Some say those rules are lax, leading to a pileup of penny stocks on Nasdaq. On Wednesday, there were 523 stocks listed on U.S. exchanges that closed below $1 per share, of which 433 were listed on Nasdaq, according to Dow Jones Market Data. By comparison, there were fewer than a dozen sub-$1 stocks in early 2021. The two proposed rule changes unveiled by Nasdaq on Thursday would tighten up some of the rules regarding sub-$1 stocks, though they don't go as far as Virtu has demanded.

Under one of the proposed changes, companies that reach the end of their second 180-day grace period wouldn't be able to postpone delisting by seeking an appeal. Instead, their shares would move to the over-the-counter market -- a sort of purgatory where companies land after being delisted -- while they await the appeal. Effectively, the rule change caps the amount of time that sub-$1 stocks can be listed on Nasdaq to roughly a year. The second proposed rule change would speed up the delisting process for companies that recently did a reverse stock split. Under the change, if a company carried out a reverse split to prop up its share price, but then its stock fell below $1 within a year, Nasdaq would immediately send the company a delisting notice. The company could still appeal and remain listed for another 180 days.

"The Royal Mint, which has produced coins since the 9th Century, has begun to recover gold from electronic waste as the use of cash has declined and fewer new coins are needed," writes Slashdot reader newcastlejon. "In 2022, construction began on a new site in Llantrisant, Wales. This facility will now be used to initially produce gold for jewelry and later for commemorative coins." The BBC reports: At the Royal Mint plant, piles of circuit boards are being fed into the new facility. First, they are heated to remove their various components. Then the array of detached coils, capacitors, pins and transistors are sieved, sorted, sliced and diced as they move along a conveyor belt. Anything with gold in it is set aside. The gold-laden pieces go to an on-site chemical plant. They're tipped into a chemical solution which leaches the gold out into the liquid. This is then filtered, leaving a powder behind. It looks pretty nondescript but this is actually pure gold -- it just needs to be heated in a furnace to be transformed into a gleaming nugget. "Traditional gold recovery processes are very energy intensive and use very toxic chemicals that can only be used once, or they go to high energy smelters and they're basically burnt," says Leighton John, the Royal Mint's operations director. "The groundbreaking thing for us is the fact that this chemistry is used at room temperature, at very low energy, it's recyclable and pulls gold really quickly."

"Our aim is to process over 4,000 tonnes of e-waste annually," says Leighton John. "Traditionally this waste is shipped overseas but we're keeping it in the UK and we're keeping those elements in the UK for us to use. It's really important."

The report notes that the UK is the second biggest producer of tech trash per capita, beaten only by Norway. According to the UN, e-waste is a rapidly growing problem, with 62 million tons discarded in 2022. That's expected to increase by a third by 2030.

Ryan Christoffel writes via 9to5Mac: Since the Mac doesn't have the same locked-down app distribution system of iOS and iPadOS, Apple has created other tools meant to protect users. Some of those tools include app signing and notarization. Essentially, these provide a way for Apple to perform a level of vetting for macOS apps, even ones that don't hit the Mac App Store. The intent is to ultimately prevent harmful software from being inadvertently opened by Mac users. Trying to open an app that isn't correctly signed or notarized results in some scary warnings. But until now, power users could bypass those warnings -- and Apple's overall security process -- using a Control-click shortcut. But that shortcut is going away in macOS Sequoia.

According to a new post on the Apple Developer site: "In macOS Sequoia, users will no longer be able to Control-click to override Gatekeeper when opening software that isn't signed correctly or notarized. They'll need to visit System Settings > Privacy & Security to review security information for software before allowing it to run." The post then urges developers to make sure their software is properly signed so users won't need to jump through these hoops.

Security researchers from SafeBreach have found what they say is a Windows downgrade attack that's invisible, persistent, irreversible and maybe even more dangerous than last year's BlackLotus UEFI bootkit. From a report: After seeing the damage that UEFI bootkit could do by bypassing secure boot processes in Windows, SafeBreach's Alon Leviev became curious whether there were any other fundamental Windows components that could be abused in a similar manner. He hit the jackpot in one of the most unlikely places: The Windows update process.

"I found a way to take over Windows updates to update the system, but with control over all of the actual update contents," Leviev told us in an interview ahead of his Black Hat USA conference presentation today detailing his findings. Using his technique, having compromised a machine so that he could get in as a normal user, Leviev was able to control which files get updated, which registry keys are changed, which installers get used, and the like. And he was able to do all of it while side-stepping every single integrity verification implemented in the Windows update process. After that, "I was able to downgrade the OS kernel, DLLs, drivers ... basically everything that I wanted." To make matters worse, Leviev said that poking and prodding around the vulnerabilities he found enabled him to attack the entire Windows virtualization stack, including virtualization-based security (VBS) features that are supposed to isolate the kernel and make attacker access less valuable.

AI is upending India's technology outsourcing business. The industry is pivoting to adapt, but the changes could cost a large number of coveted jobs. From a report: The country's big outsourcing companies are already using AI and have plans to integrate it throughout their businesses. That might not save the low-end operations that run call centers or do other basic tasks within the so-called business process outsourcing sector.Â

AI is threatening to disrupt most businesses around the world, not just India's $250 billion outsourcing industry. The outsourcing boom in India over the past few decades created the "getting Bangalore-d" phenomenon in the U.S., often used for Americans who lost their jobs to more affordable Indian talent. AI's impact could have big repercussions as the industry employs 5.4 million people, according to tech-industry body Nasscom, and contributes about 8% of the country's economy. More than 80% of companies in the S&P 500 outsource some operations to India, according to HSBC.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Unlike Tesla, which hopes to develop its own bipedal 'bot to work on its production line sometime next year, BMW has brought in a robot from Figure AI. The Figure 02 robot has hands with sixteen degrees of freedom and human-equivalent strength. "We are excited to unveil Figure 02, our second-generation humanoid robot, which recently completed successful testing at the BMW Group Plant Spartanburg. Figure 02 has significant technical advancements, which enable the robot to perform a wide range of complex tasks fully autonomously," said Brett Adcock, founder and CEO of Figure AI.

BMW wanted to test how to integrate a humanoid robot into its production process -- how to have the robot communicate with the production line software and human workers and determine what requirements would be necessary to add robots to the mix. The Figure robot was given the job of inserting sheet metal parts into fixtures as part of the process of making a chassis. BMW says this required particular dexterity and that it's an ergonomically awkward and tiring task for humans.

Now that the trial is over, Figure's robot is no longer working at Spartanburg, and BMW says it has "no definite timetable established" to add humanoid robots to its production lines. "The developments in the field of robotics are very promising. With an early-test operation, we are now determining possible applications for humanoid robots in production. We want to accompany this technology from development to industrialization," said Milan Nedeljkovi, BMW's board member responsible for production. BMW Group published a video of the Figure 02 robot on YouTube.

Intel has announced significant progress on its 18A process technology, with lead products successfully powering on and booting operating systems. The company's Panther Lake client processor and Clearwater Forest server chip, both built on 18A, achieved these milestones less than two quarters after tape-out. The 18A node, featuring RibbonFET gate-all-around transistors and PowerVia backside power delivery, is on track for production in 2025.

Intel released the 18A Process Design Kit 1.0 in July, enabling foundry customers to leverage these advanced technologies in their designs. "Intel is out ahead of everyone else in the industry with these innovations," Kevin O'Buckley, Intel's new head of Foundry Services stated, highlighting the node's potential to drive next-generation AI solutions. Clearwater Forest will be the industry's first mass-produced, high-performance chip combining RibbonFET, PowerVia, and Foveros Direct 3D packaging technology. It also utilizes Intel's 3-T base-die technology, showcasing the company's systems foundry approach. Intel expects its first external customer to tape out on 18A in the first half of 2025. EDA and IP partners are updating their tools to support customer designs on the new node. The success of 18A is crucial for Intel's ambitions to regain process leadership and grow its foundry business.

Mainframe computers, stalwarts of high-speed data processing, are finding new relevance in the age of AI. Banks, insurers, and airlines continue to rely on these industrial-strength machines for mission-critical operations, with some now exploring AI applications directly on the hardware, WSJ reported in a feature story. IBM, commanding over 96% of the mainframe market, reported 6% growth in its mainframe business last quarter. The company's latest zSystem can process up to 30,000 transactions per second and hold 40 terabytes of data. WSJ adds: Globally, the mainframe market was valued at $3.05 billion in 2023, but new mainframe sales are expected to decline through 2028, IDC said. Of existing mainframes, however, 54% of enterprise leaders in a 2023 Forrester survey said they would increase their usage over the next two years.

Mainframes do have limitations. They are constrained by the computing power within their boxes, unlike the cloud, which can scale up by drawing on computing power distributed across many locations and servers. They are also unwieldy -- with years of old code tacked on -- and don't integrate well with new applications. That makes them costly to manage and difficult to use as a platform for developing new applications.

Scientists studying lunar samples brought back by the Apollo missions have determined that the moon's thin atmosphere is produced largely by meteorite impacts. "Our findings provide a clearer picture of how the moon's surface and atmosphere interact over long timescales, [and] enhance our understanding of space weathering processes," said Dr Nicole Nie, the co-author of the new study based at MIT's department of Earth, atmospheric, and planetary sciences. The Guardian reports: Writing in the journal Science Advances, Nie and her colleagues describe how the lunar atmosphere must be constantly replenished because its atoms are continuously being lost to space, primarily because of the moon's weak gravity, or trapped on the lunar surface. Ultraviolet photons from the sun can rerelease the latter, but the researchers say replenishment of the atmosphere is thought to rely on atoms being released from within lunar minerals -- either via vaporisation by meteorite impacts, or by solar wind sputtering, a process in which charged particles from the sun hit the moon and eject atoms. But which of the two factors dominates had been unclear, with data from Nasa's lunar atmosphere and dust environment explorer, launched in 2013, suggesting both were at play.

Nie and colleagues unpicked the conundrum by studying the different forms, or isotopes, of potassium and rubidium in 10 samples of lunar soil from the Apollo missions. The team say meteorite impacts and solar wind sputtering both favor the release of lighter forms of the elements, but that the actual proportion of heavy to light isotopes that end up in the lunar atmosphere and soil would differ depending on the process. "After measuring the isotopic compositions of lunar soils, we built a mathematical model taking into account various space weathering processes, and solve for the contribution of each of them by matching the measured isotopic compositions," said Nie. The results suggest about 70% of the moon's atmosphere is down to impact vaporization and 30% to solar wind sputtering.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: On July 19, Yelp informed select indie developers that they would have to switch to paid accounts, due to high API usage. Developers were given four days to make the change, in a move that echoes recent communication bungles by Reddit and Twitter. When the developers replied to the July 19 email, Yelp sent a deck of pricing tiers with base pricing starting from $229 per month for a limit of 1,000 API calls per day. Developers were concerned that other, more affordable options weren't mentioned in the deck. Yelp said the pricing is equivalent and simply presented in different ways. The method of communication and lack of transparency has angered developers, some of whom shuttered their services, even after Yelp gave them a 90-day leeway and apologized. While the company has issued an apology email to developers and extended their free usage by 90 days, it may not be enough to keep these frustrated developers from moving to new platforms.

"We apologize for last week's abbreviated transition that impacted a small percentage of developers and have extended access to these users," a company spokesperson told TechCrunch. "Yelp sunsetted free, commercial, unlimited use of the Yelp Fusion API in 2019 and has been in the process of migrating developers to a paid program over the last several years. The developer community is important to Yelp, and we've heard their feedback about the transition period from the free Yelp Fusion API to our paid program."

"Five years ago, Brian Frye set an elaborate trap," writes Decrypt.co. "Now the law professor is teaming up with a singer-songwriter to finally spring it" on America's Security and Exchange Commission "in a novel lawsuit — and in the process, prevent the regulator from ever coming after NFT art projects again." Over and again, the SEC has sued cherry-picked NFT projects it says qualify as unregistered securities — but never once has the regulator defined what types of NFT projects are legal and which are not, casting a chill over the nascent industry... [In 2019] Frye, an expert in securities law and a fan of novel technologies, minted an NFT of a letter he sent to the SEC in which he declared his art project to constitute an illegal, unregistered security. If the conceptual art project wasn't a security, Frye challenged the agency, then it needed to say so. The SEC never responded to Frye — not then, and not after several more self-incriminating correspondences from the professor. But in due time, the agency began vigorously pursuing, and suing, NFT projects.
So 10 months ago, Jonathan Mann — who writes a new song every day and shares it online — crafted a song titled "This Song is A Security." As a seller of NFTs himself, Mann wrote the song "to fight back against the SEC, and defend his right — plus the rights of other artists like him — to earn revenue," according to the article: Frye, who'd practically been salivating for such an opportunity for half a decade, was a natural fit.... In the lawsuit filed against the SEC in Louisiana earlier this week, they challenged the SEC's standing to regulate their NFT-backed artworks as securities, and demanded the agency declare that their respective art projects do not constitute illegal, unregistered securities offerings.
More from the International Business Times: The complaint asked the court to clarify whether the SEC should regulate art and whether artists were supposed to "register" their artworks before selling the pieces to the general public. The complaint also asked whether artists should be "forced to make public disclosures about the 'risks' of buying their art," and whether artists should be "required to comply" with federal securities laws...

The Blockchain Association, a collective crypto group that includes some of the biggest digital asset firms, asserted that the SEC has no authority over NFT art. "We support the plaintiffs in their quest for legal clarity," the group said.
In an interview with Slashdot, Mann says he started his "Song a Day" project almost 17 years ago (when he was 26 years old) — and his interest in NFTs is sincere: "Over the years, I've always sought a way to make Song A Day sustainable financially, through video contests, conference gigs, ad revenue, royalties, Patreon and more.

"When I came across NFTs in 2017, they didn't have a name. We just called them 'digital collectibles'. For the last 2+ years, NFTs have become that self-sustaining model for my work.

"I know most people believe NFTs are a joke at best and actively harmful at worst. Even most people in the crypto community have given up on them. Despite all that, I still believe they're worth pursuing.

"Collecting an NFT from an artist you love is the most direct way to support them. There's no multinational corporation, no payment processor, and no venture capitalists between you and the artist you want to support."
Slashdot also tracked down the SEC's Office of Public Affairs, and got an official response from SEC public affairs specialist Ryan White.

Slashdot: The suit argues that the SEC's approach "threatens the livelihoods of artists and creators that are simply experimenting with a novel, fast-growing technology," and seeks guidance in the face of a "credible threat of enforcement". Is the SEC going to respond to this lawsuit? And if you don't have an answer at this time, can you give me a general comment on the issues and concerns being raised?

SEC Public Affairs Specialist Ryan White: We would decline comment.

Decrypt.co points out that the lawsuit "has no guarantee of offering some conclusive end to the NFT regulation question... That may only come with concrete legislation or a judgment by the Supreme Court."

But Mann's song still makes a very public show out of their concerns — with Mann even releasing a follow-up song titled "I'm Suing the SEC." (Its music video mixes together wacky clips of Mila Kunis's Stoner Cats and Fonzie jumping a shark with footage of NFT critics like Elizabeth Warren and SEC chairman Gary Gensler.)

And an earlier song also used auto-tune to transform Gensler's remarks about cryptocurrencies into the chorus of a song titled "Hucksters, Fraudsters, Scam Artists, Ponzi Schemes".

Mann later auctioned an NFT of the song — for over $3,000 in Ethereum.

An anonymous Slashdot reader shared this report from the blog 9to5Mac: In 2022, Apple agreed to pay a $50 million dollar settlement for certain eligible 2015-2019 MacBook owners who experienced problems with their butterfly keyboards. The claims process opened in late 2022, and the settlement got final approval last May. Starting today, eligible MacBook owners are finally receiving their payouts...

Apple finally moved away from the butterfly keyboard on the 16-inch MacBook Pro in late 2019. By mid 2020, the 13-inch MacBook Pro and MacBook Air also moved to the new Magic Keyboard. However, that wouldn't be the end of the story for Apple... In mid 2022, Apple was required to pay a $50 million settlement. The claims process started later that year, although there were some caveats. For one, you could only claim this settlement if you lived in California, Florida, Illinois, Michigan, New Jersey, New York, or Washington. This excludes 43 US states, so a good number of people with butterfly keyboards weren't even covered. Additionally, the estimated payout amount varied depending on the severity of your keyboard problems:

- Up to $395 for 2 or more top case replacements
- Up to $125 for 1 top case replacement
- Up to $50 for keycap replacements

Obviously, this wasn't the most ideal outcome for customers, but if you were eligible and filed a claim (or multiple), you're in luck!
The original goal "was to make the keyboards thinner and the laptops slimmer," remembers ZDNet. This backfired spectacularly as MacBook owners started complaining that the keys would easily stick or get jammed by dust, crumbs, or other tiny objects. Noted tech blogger John Gruber even called the new keyboards "the worst products in Apple's history."
Gruber's headline? "Appl Still Hasn't Fixd Its MacBook Kyboad Problm"

Stack Overflow says over 65,000 developers took their annual survey — and "For the first time this year, we asked if developers felt AI was a threat to their job..."

Some analysis from The New Stack: Unsurprisingly, only 12% of surveyed developers believe AI is a threat to their current job. In fact, 70% are favorably inclined to use AI tools as part of their development workflow... Among those who use AI tools in their development workflow, 81% said productivity is one of its top benefits, followed by an ability to learn new skills quickly (62%). Much fewer (30%) said improved accuracy is a benefit. Professional developers' adoption of AI tools in the development process has risen rapidly, going from 44% in 2023 to 62% in 2024...

Seventy-one percent of developers with less than five years of experience reported using AI tools in their development process, as compared to just 49% of developers with 20 years of experience coding... At 82%, [ChatGPT] is twice as likely to have been used than GitHub Copilot. Among ChatGPT users, 74% want to continue using it.
But "only 43% said they trust the accuracy of AI tools," according to Stack Overflow's blog post, "and 45% believe AI tools struggle to handle complex tasks."

More analysis from The New Stack: The latest edition of the global annual survey found full-time employment is holding steady, with over 80% reporting that they have full-time jobs. The percentage of unemployed developers has more than doubled since 2019 but is still at a modest 4.4% worldwide... The median annual salary of survey respondents declined significantly. For example, the average full-stack developer's median 2024 salary fell 11% compared to the previous year, to $63,333... Wage pressure may be the result of more competition from an increase in freelancing.

Eighteen percent of professional developers in the 2024 survey said they are independent contractors or self-employed, which is up from 9.5% in 2020. Part-time employment has also risen, presenting even more pressure on full-time salaries... Job losses at tech companies have contributed to a large influx of talent into the freelance market, noted Stack Overflow CEO Prashanth Chandrasekar in an interview with The New Stack. Since COVID-19, he added, the emphasis on remote work means more people value job flexibility. In the 2024 survey, only 20% have returned to full-time in-person work, 38% are full-time remote, while the remainder are in a hybrid situation. Anticipation of future productivity growth due to AI may also be creating uncertainty about how much to pay developers.
Two stats jumped out for Visual Studio magazine: In this year's big Stack Overflow developer survey things are much the same for Microsoft-centric data points: VS Code and Visual Studio still rule the IDE roost, while .NET maintains its No. 1 position among non-web frameworks. It's been this way for years, though in 2021 it was .NET Framework at No. 1 among IDEs, while the new .NET Core/.NET 5 entry was No. 3. Among IDEs, there has been less change. "Visual Studio Code is used by more than twice as many developers than its nearest (and related) alternative, Visual Studio," said the 2024 Stack Overflow Developer survey, the 14th in the series of massive reports.
Stack Overflow shared some other interesting statistics:

• "Javascript (62%), HTML/CSS (53%), and Python (51%) top the list of most used languages for the second year in a row... [JavaScript] has been the most popular language every year since the inception of the Developer Survey in 2011."

• "Python is the most desired language this year (users that did not indicate using this year but did indicate wanting to use next year), overtaking JavaScript."

• "The language that most developers used and want to use again is Rust for the second year in a row with an 83% admiration rate. "

• "Python is most popular for those learning to code..."

• "Technical debt is a problem for 62% of developers, twice as much as the second- and third-most frustrating problems for developers: complex tech stacks for building and deployment."

Slashdot reader Applehu Akbar shared this report from MacRumors: Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney commented on Apple's 'Find My' service, referring to it as "super creepy surveillance tech" that "shouldn't exist." Sweeney went on to explain that several years ago, "a kid" stole a Mac laptop out of his car. Years later, Sweeney was checking Find My, and as the Mac was still connected to his Apple ID account, it showed him the location where the thief lived.
When someone asked Sweeney if he'd at least gotten his laptop back, Sweeney answered "No. I was creeped the hell out by having unexpectedly received the kid's address, and turned off Find My iPhone on all of my devices."

Slashdot reader crmarvin42 quipped "Tell me you are stupidly rich, without telling me you are stupidly rich... Next someone will be saying that it is 'Creepy' to have security footage of someone taking your Amazon packages off of your porch." And they also questioned Sweeney's sincerity, suggesting that he's "just saying that to try and make Apple look bad because of all the lawsuits going on."

MacRumors followed the ensuing discussion: Sweeney said that the location of a device in someone's possession can't be tracked without tracking the person, and "people have a right to privacy." ["This right applies to second hand device buyers and even to thieves."] He claims that detection and recovery of a lost or stolen device should be "mediated by due process of law" and not exposed to the device owner "in vigilante fashion."
Some responded to Sweeney's comments by sharing the headline of a Vox news story about Epic's own privacy polices. ("Fortnite maker Epic Games has to pay $520 million for tricking kids and violating their privacy.")

MacRumors cited a 2014 report that thefts of iPhones dropped after the introduction of Apple's "Activation Lock" feature (which prevents the disabling of 'Find My' without a password).

But when the blog AppleInsider accused Sweeney of "an incredibly bad leap of logic" — Sweeney responded. "You're idealizing this issue as good guys tracking criminals to their lairs, but when Find My or Google's similar tech points a device owner to a device possessor's home, one must anticipate the presence of families and kids and innocent used device buyers, and ask whether it's really appropriate for a platform to use GPS and shadowy mesh network tech to set up physical confrontations among individuals."

Sweeney also posted a quote from Steve Jobs about how at Apple, "we worry that some 14-year-old is going to get stalked and something terrible is going to happen because of our phone."

A professor at Brigham Young University "has figured out a way to shave critical years off the complicated design and licensing processes for modern nuclear reactors," according to an announcement from the university.

"AI is teaming up with nuclear power." The typical time frame and cost to license a new nuclear reactor design in the United States is roughly 20 years and $1 billion. To then build that reactor requires an additional five years and between $5 and $30 billion. By using AI in the time-consuming computational design process, [chemical engineering professor Matt] Memmott estimates a decade or more could be cut off the overall timeline, saving millions and millions of dollars in the process — which should prove critical given the nation's looming energy needs.... "Being able to reduce the time and cost to produce and license nuclear reactors will make that power cheaper and a more viable option for environmentally friendly power to meet the future demand...."

Engineers deal with elements from neutrons on the quantum scale all the way up to coolant flow and heat transfer on the macro scale. [Memmott] also said there are multiple layers of physics that are "tightly coupled" in that process: the movement of neutrons is tightly coupled to the heat transfer which is tightly coupled to materials which is tightly coupled to the corrosion which is coupled to the coolant flow. "A lot of these reactor design problems are so massive and involve so much data that it takes months of teams of people working together to resolve the issues," he said... Memmott's is finding AI can reduce that heavy time burden and lead to more power production to not only meet rising demands, but to also keep power costs down for general consumers...

Technically speaking, Memmott's research proves the concept of replacing a portion of the required thermal hydraulic and neutronics simulations with a trained machine learning model to predict temperature profiles based on geometric reactor parameters that are variable, and then optimizing those parameters. The result would create an optimal nuclear reactor design at a fraction of the computational expense required by traditional design methods. For his research, he and BYU colleagues built a dozen machine learning algorithms to examine their ability to process the simulated data needed in designing a reactor. They identified the top three algorithms, then refined the parameters until they found one that worked really well and could handle a preliminary data set as a proof of concept. It worked (and they published a paper on it) so they took the model and (for a second paper) put it to the test on a very difficult nuclear design problem: optimal nuclear shield design.

The resulting papers, recently published in academic journal Nuclear Engineering and Design, showed that their refined model can geometrically optimize the design elements much faster than the traditional method.
In two days Memmott's AI algorithm determined an optimal nuclear-reactor shield design that took a real-world molten salt reactor company spent six months. "Of course, humans still ultimately make the final design decisions and carry out all the safety assessments," Memmott says in the announcement, "but it saves a significant amount of time at the front end....

"Our demand for electricity is going to skyrocket in years to come and we need to figure out how to produce additional power quickly. The only baseload power we can make in the Gigawatt quantities needed that is completely emissions free is nuclear power."

Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader schwit1 for sharing the article.

A proposed European Union law seeks to ensure that video games sold or licensed in the EU remain playable even if servers are shut down or studios close. The law would require publishers of sold and free-to-play games with microtransactions to provide resources to keep games functional, such as allowing players to host their own servers. Through a process called the "European Citizens Initiative," the petition needs one million signatures just to have a chance at becoming law. PC Gamer reports: "An increasing number of publishers are selling videogames that are required to connect through the internet to the game publisher, or 'phone home' to function," the petition reads. "While this is not a problem in itself, when support ends for these types of games, very often publishers simply sever the connection necessary for the game to function, proceed to destroy all working copies of the game, and implement extensive measures to prevent the customer from repairing the game in any way."

Understanding that developers and publishers can't support games forever, the initiative would expect "the publisher to provide resources for the said videogame once they discontinue it while leaving it in a reasonably functional (playable) state." That means giving players the tools to host the game on their own servers, for example, and removing the requirement for games to connect to the publisher's (defunct) servers in order to be played. This is what the developer behind Knockout City did when it pulled the plug on the game's official servers.

Not only does this initiative apply to games that are sold, but includes free to play games that have microtransactions for assets (like skins) or other paid-for features. The thought is, if you purchase an item in a free game, you should have the right to continue to use it indefinitely -- which means keeping that free game playable in some form. It's important to note that even a million signatures doesn't mean an automatic win, just that it'll go forward to the European Union as a proposal to become a law.

New preliminary evidence for phosphine and ammonia in Venus's atmosphere deepens the mystery of their origins, suggesting the possibility of a biological source. The detections, made using the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope and the Green Bank Telescope, point to potential microbial life in Venus's clouds despite the planet's extreme surface conditions. Space.com reports: The new detections of phosphine and ammonia were obtained by a team led by Jane Greaves of the University of Cardiff using submillimeter radio wavelength data collected by the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope (JCMT) in Hawaii and the Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia. "We don't know how you make phosphine or ammonia in an oxygenating atmosphere like that of Venus," said team member and astrophysicist Dave Clements of Imperial College, London, in an interview with Space.com. Then again, it's not clear why biology on Earth produces phosphine, either." Whether it's in penguin poop or badger guts, we don't know why bacteria make phosphine, but they do."

The JCMT's initial detection of phosphine on Venus in 2020 by Greaves and her team was met by fierce disagreement from some quarters. This disagreement focused on how the data was processed and whether that was creating spurious signals since observations by other telescopes struggled to detect the phosphine. Clements said those technical disagreements have now been resolved and that the latest measurements, using a new detector on the JCMT called Namakanui (meaning 'Big Eyes' in Hawaiian), have come from three observing campaigns, each providing 140 times as much data as the initial detection. [...]

Clements is open to the possibility that both phosphine and ammonia are being produced by some rare photochemistry in Venus' upper atmosphere involving solar ultraviolet breaking up molecules and allowing phosphine and ammonia to form from the molecular debris. If that is the case, nobody has observed this process yet, not even in the laboratory. Another possibility that has been mooted is that the phosphine could be produced by Venusian volcanoes. Clements also pointed out that the European Space Agency's Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer (JUICE) is making a fly-by of Venus in August 2025 to help slingshot it towards the Jovian system. JUICE carries instruments capable of detecting phosphine and ammonia, but there's no guarantee that its instruments will be switched on and deployed at Venus.

AI music generators Suno and Udio responded to the lawsuits filed by the major recording labels, arguing that their platforms are tools for making new, original music that "didn't and often couldn't previously exist."

"Those genres and styles -- the recognizable sounds of opera, or jazz, or rap music -- are not something that anyone owns," the companies said. "Our intellectual property laws have always been carefully calibrated to avoid allowing anyone to monopolize a form of artistic expression, whether a sonnet or a pop song. IP rights can attach to a particular recorded rendition of a song in one of those genres or styles. But not to the genre or style itself." TorrentFreak reports: "[The labels] frame their concern as one about 'copies' of their recordings made in the process of developing the technology -- that is, copies never heard or seen by anyone, made solely to analyze the sonic and stylistic patterns of the universe of pre-existing musical expression. But what the major record labels really don't want is competition." The labels' position is that any competition must be legal, and the AI companies state quite clearly that the law permits the use of copyrighted works in these circumstances. Suno and Udio also make it clear that snippets of copyrighted music aren't stored as a library of pre-existing content in the neural networks of their AI models, "outputting a collage of 'samples' stitched together from existing recordings" when prompted by users.

"[The neural networks were] constructed by showing the program tens of millions of instances of different kinds of recordings," Suno explains. "From analyzing their constitutive elements, the model derived a staggeringly complex collection of statistical insights about the auditory characteristics of those recordings -- what types of sounds tend to appear in which kinds of music; what the shape of a pop song tends to look like; how the drum beat typically varies from country to rock to hip-hop; what the guitar tone tends to sound like in those different genres; and so on." These models are vast stores, not of copyrighted music, the defendants say, but information about what musical styles consist of, and it's from that information new music is made.

Most copyright lawsuits in the music industry are about reproduction and public distribution of identified copyright works, but that's certainly not the case here. "The Complaint explicitly disavows any contention that any output ever generated by Udio has infringed their rights. While it includes a variety of examples of outputs that allegedly resemble certain pre-existing songs, the Complaint goes out of its way to say that it is not alleging that those outputs constitute actionable copyright infringement." With Udio declaring that, as a matter of law, "that key point makes all the difference," Suno's conclusion is served raw. "That concession will ultimately prove fatal to Plaintiffs' claims. It is fair use under copyright law to make a copy of a protected work as part of a back-end technological process, invisible to the public, in the service of creating an ultimately non-infringing new product." Noting that Congress enacted the first copyright law in 1791, Suno says that in the 233 years since, not a single case has ever reached a contrary conclusion.

In addition to addressing allegations unique to their individual cases, the AI companies accuse the labels of various types of anti-competitive behavior. Imposing conditions to prevent streaming services obtaining licensed music from smaller labels at lower rates, seeking to impose a "no AI" policy on licensees, to claims that they "may have responded to outreach from potential commercial counterparties by engaging in one or more concerted refusals to deal." The defendants say this type of behavior is fueled by the labels' dominant control of copyrighted works and by extension, the overall market. Here, however, ownership of copyrighted music is trumped by the existence and knowledge of musical styles, over which nobody can claim ownership or seek to control. "No one owns musical styles. Developing a tool to empower many more people to create music, by scrupulously analyzing what the building blocks of different styles consist of, is a quintessential fair use under longstanding and unbroken copyright doctrine. "Plaintiffs' contrary vision is fundamentally inconsistent with the law and its underlying values." You can read Suno and Udio's answers to the RIAA's lawsuits here (PDF) and here (PDF).

Intel's stock plunged as much as 30% on Friday after the company issued disappointing guidance and announced plans for a substantial workforce reduction. According to Bloomberg, it was the company's biggest single-day drop since at least 1982. Markets Insider reports: The decline comes after the software company announced quarterly revenue of $12.83 billion, down 1% from the previous year and missing analyst expectations of $12.94 billion, according to LSEG estimates. The company also lowered its revenue forecast for the current quarter to a range between $12.5 billion and $13.5 billion, down from analyst estimates of $14.35 billion. Intel executives pointed to unexpected trends in the most recent quarter to explain how it performed this way even with product milestones.

"Our Q2 financial performance was disappointing, even as we hit key product and process technology milestones," CEO Pat Gelsinger said in a press release. "Second-half trends are more challenging than we previously expected, and we are leveraging our new operating model to take decisive actions that will improve operating and capital efficiencies." Those operations and efficiency improvements include plans to lay off over 15% of staff by the end of this year, realign structure and operations, and cut operations expenses by over $10 billion next year. Technology shares fell across the globe following underwhelming earnings and fears of a U.S. economic recession grew. Stock markets in Europe, Asia and New York tumbled on Friday.

"Japanese equities suffered their worst day since the Covid-19 pandemic rocked markets in 2020; the Nikkei 225 share index tumbled by 5.8% to its lowest closing level since January," reports The Guardian. "The broader Japanese Topix fell 6.1%, Australia's ASX fell 2.5% and Hong Kong's Hang Seng was down 2.1%."

"Europe's main stock indices also declined on Friday, with European technology stocks falling to their lowest level in more than six months."