An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Guardian: South Korea is to offer reclusive youths a monthly living allowance of 650,000 won ($490) in order to encourage them out of their homes, as part of a new measure passed by the Ministry of Gender Equality and Family. The measure also offers education, job and health support. The condition is known as "hikikomori," a Japanese term that roughly translated means, "to pull back." The government wants to try to make it easier for those experiencing it to leave the house to go to school, university or work.

Included in the program announced this week, which expands on measures announced in November, is a monthly allowance for living expenses for people aged between nine and 24 who are experiencing extreme social withdrawal. It also includes an allowance for cultural experiences for teenagers. About 350,000 people between the ages of 19 and 39 in South Korea are considered lonely or isolated -- about 3% of that age group -- according to the Korea Institute for Health and Social Affairs. Secluded youth are often from disadvantaged backgrounds and 40% began living reclusively while adolescents, according to a government document outlining the measures.

The new measures aim to strengthen government support "to enable reclusive youth to recover their daily lives and reintegrate into society," the government said in a statement. Among the other types of support are paying for the correction of affected people's physical appearance, including scars "that adolescents may feel ashamed of," as well as helping with school and gym supplies. South Korea also has a relatively high rate of youth unemployment, at 7.2%, and is trying to tackle a rapidly declining birthrate that further threatens productivity.

A team of researchers in Florida have created a way to mimic nature's ability to reflect light and create beautifully vivid color without absorbing any heat like traditional pigments do. Debashis Chanda, a nanoscience researcher with the University of Central Florida, and his team published their findings in the journal Science Advances. NPR reports: Beyond just the beautiful arrays of color that structure can create, Chanda also found that unlike pigments, structural paint does not absorb any infrared light. Infrared light is the reason black cars get hot on sunny days and asphalt is hot to the touch in summer. Infrared light is absorbed as heat energy into these surfaces -- the darker the color, the more the surface colored with it can absorb. That's why people are advised to wear lighter colors in hotter climates and why many buildings are painted bright whites and beiges. Chanda found that structural color paint does not absorb any heat. It reflects all infrared light back out. This means that in a rapidly warming climate, this paint could help communities keep cool.

Chanda and his team tested the impact this paint had on the temperature of buildings covered in structural paint versus commercial paints and they found that structural paint kept surfaces 20 to 30 degrees cooler. This, Chanda said, is a massive new tool that could be used to fight rising temperatures caused by global warming while still allowing us to have a bright and colorful world. Unlike white and black cars, structural paint's ability to reflect heat isn't determined by how dark the color is. Blue, black or purple structural paints reflect just as much heat as bright whites or beige. This opens the door for more colorful, cooler architecture and design without having to worry about the heat.

It's not just cleaner, Chanda said. Structural paint weighs much less than pigmented paint and doesn't fade over time like traditional pigments. "A raisin's worth of structural paint is enough to cover the front and back of a door," he said. Unlike pigments which rely on layers of pigment to achieve depth of color, structural paint only requires one thin layer of particles to fully cover a surface in color. This means that structural paint could be a boon for aerospace engineers who rely on the lowest weight possible to achieve higher fuel efficiency. The possibilities for structural paint are endless and Chanda hopes that cans of structural paint will soon be available in hardware stores.

The world's largest music company, Universal Music Group, is asking major streaming services like Spotify and Apple Music to block artificial intelligence companies from using its music to "train" their technology, according to a recent report in Financial Times. Variety reports: Confirming the report, a UMG spokesperson told the FT: "We have a moral and commercial responsibility to our artists to work to prevent the unauthorized use of their music and to stop platforms from ingesting content that violates the rights of artists and other creators. We expect our platform partners will want to prevent their services from being used in ways that harm artists." The process involves the AI companies uploading copyrighted music from the platforms into their technology and thus enabling the bots to digest the lyrics and music and then essentially create songs or melodies in those styles. [...]

UMG has been sending takedown requests to the streamers "left and right," FT quoted an unnamed source as saying. "We have become aware that certain AI systems might have been trained on copyrighted content without obtaining the required consents from, or paying compensation to, the rightsholders who own or produce the content," the company said in an email from last month, according to the report. "We will not hesitate to take steps to protect our rights and those of our artists." The website drayk.it delivered users a custom Drake song, although it has since been shut down.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: The hackers who breached data storage giant Western Digital claim to have stolen around 10 terabytes of data from the company, including reams of customer information. The extortionists are pushing the company to negotiate a ransom -- of "minimum 8 figures" -- in exchange for not publishing the stolen data. On April 3, Western Digital disclosed "a network security incident" saying hackers had exfiltrated data after hacking into "a number of the Company's systems." At the time, Western Digital provided few details about exactly what data the hackers stole, saying in a statement that the hackers "obtained certain data from its systems and [Western Digital] is working to understand the nature and scope of that data."

One of the hackers spoke with TechCrunch and provided more details, with the goal of verifying their claims. The hacker shared a file that was digitally signed with Western Digital's code-signing certificate, showing they could now digitally sign files to impersonate Western Digital. Two security researchers also looked at the file and agreed it is signed with the company's certificate. The hackers also shared phone numbers allegedly belonging to several company executives. TechCrunch called the numbers. Most of the calls rang but went to automated voicemail messages. Two of the phone numbers had voicemail greetings that mentioned the names of the executives that the hackers claimed were associated with the numbers. The two phone numbers are not public.

Screenshots shared by the hacker show a folder from a Box account apparently belonging to Western Digital, an internal email, files stored in a PrivateArk instance (a cybersecurity product), and a screenshot of a group call where one of the participants is identified as Western Digital's chief information security officer. They also said they were able to steal data from the company's SAP Backoffice, a backend interface that helps companies manage e-commerce data. The hacker said that their goal when they hacked Western Digital was to make money, though they decided against using ransomware to encrypt the company's files. [...] If Western Digital doesn't get back to them, the hacker said, they are ready to start publishing the stolen data on the website of the ransomware gang Alphv. The hacker said they are not directly affiliated with Alphv but "I know them to be professional." Western Digital said they're declining to comment or answer questions about the hacker's claims.

Amazon announced on Thursday it's releasing a ChatGPT and DALL-E rival it calls Amazon Bedrock. Insider reports: Bedrock is a suite of generative AI tools that can help Amazon Web Service customers -- businesses who run their operations on Amazon's data servers -- build chatbots, generate and summarize text, and make and classify images based on prompts. While OpenAI's ChatGPT is run solely on its GPT-4 language model, Bedrock users can perform specific tasks by selecting from a range of machine learning models it calls "foundation models," such as AI21's Jurassic-2, Anthropic's Claude, Stability AI's Stable Diffusion, and Amazon Titan.

A content marketing manager, for example, can use Bedrock to create a targeted ad campaign for a new line of handbags by feeding it data so it can generate product social media posts, display ads, and web copy for each product, according to an AWS blog post. A preview of Amazon's generative AI toolkit is currently limited to select AWS customers. So far, Coda, an AI-document generation firm used by companies like Uber and the New York Times, is using Bedrock to scale its business operations, according to Amazon.

International Business Machines is exploring a sale of its weather operation, WSJ reported, citing people familiar with the matter, as the technology company seeks to streamline its operations. From a report: An auction of the business is at an early stage, the people said, and there may not be a deal. Should there be one, private-equity is most likely the buyer in a deal that could be valued at more than $1 billion, the people said. IBM agreed to buy the business in 2015, purchasing The Weather Company's business-to-business, mobile and cloud-based businesses including Weather.com, which provides weather forecasts around the globe. The deal price at the time was pegged at more than $2 billion.

The Weather Channel wasn't part of the deal, but agreed to license weather-forecast data and analytics from IBM. The deal was part of a push by IBM to use its cloud infrastructure to provide accurate weather forecasts and help companies control costs. The business issues more than 25 billion forecasts a day, according to the company's website. A sale of the weather unit would be a part of a broader push by IBM to streamline its operations as the once-dominant company's shares languish near levels they traded at more than 20 years ago.

Instant messaging platform Discord says it was cooperating with U.S. law enforcement's investigation into a leak of secret U.S. documents that has grabbed attention around the world. From a report: The statement comes as questions continue to swirl over who leaked the documents, whether they are genuine and whether the intelligence assessments in them are reliable. The documents, which carry markings suggesting that they are highly classified, have led to a string of stories about the war in Ukraine, protests in Israel and how the U.S. surveils friend and foe alike. The source of the documents is not publicly known, but reporting by the open-source investigative site Bellingcat has traced their earliest appearance to Discord, a communications platform popular with gamers. Discord's statement suggested it was already in touch with investigators. The White House also urged social media companies on Thursday to prevent the circulation of information that could hurt national security.

"Early Wednesday, San Francisco police made an arrest in the April 4th killing of tech exec Bob Lee," writes Slashdot reader xevioso. "Lee was stabbed in the early hours of April 4th, and later died. His killing prompted a host of claims that this was yet another example of San Francisco's slide into chaos, but the person arrested is reportedly another tech exec." Mission Local reports: The alleged killer also works in tech and is a man Lee purportedly knew. We are told that police today were dispatched to Emeryville with a warrant to arrest a man named Nima Momeni. The name and Emeryville address SFPD officers traveled to correspond with this man, the owner of a company called Expand IT.

Multiple police sources have described the predawn knifing that last week left the 43-year-old Lee dead in a deserted section of downtown San Francisco as neither a robbery attempt nor a random attack. Rather, Lee and Momeni were portrayed by police as being familiar with one another. In the wee hours of April 4, they were purportedly driving together through downtown San Francisco in a car registered to the suspect. Some manner of confrontation allegedly commenced while both men were in the vehicle, and potentially continued after Lee exited the car. Police allege that Momeni stabbed Lee multiple times with a knife that was recovered not far from the spot on the 300 block of Main Street to which officers initially responded.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the New York Times: The leader of a small online gaming chat group where a trove of classified U.S. intelligence documents leaked over the last few months is a 21-year-old member of the intelligence wing of the Massachusetts Air National Guard, according to interviews and documents reviewed by The New York Times. The National Guardsman, whose name is Jack Teixeira, oversaw a private online group called Thug Shaker Central, where about 20 to 30 people, mostly young men and teenagers, came together over a shared love of guns, racist online memes and video games. On Thursday afternoon, about a half-dozen F.B.I. agents pushed into a residence in North Dighton, Mass. Attorney General Merrick B. Garland later said in a short statement that Airman Teixeira had been arrested "without incident." Federal investigators had been searching for days for the person who leaked the top secret documents online.

Starting months ago, one of the users uploaded hundreds of pages of intelligence briefings into the small chat group, lecturing its members, who had bonded during the isolation of the pandemic, on the importance of staying abreast of world events. [...] The Times spoke with four members of Thug Shaker Central, one of whom said he had known the person who leaked for at least three years, had met him in person and referred to him as the O.G. The friends described him as older than most of the group members, who were in their teens, and the undisputed leader. One of the friends said the O.G. had access to intelligence documents through his job. While the gaming friends would not identify the group's leader by name, a trail of digital evidence compiled by The Times leads to Airman Teixeira. The Times has been able to link Airman Teixeira to other members of Thug Shaker Central through his online gaming profile and other records. Details of the interior of Airman Teixeira's childhood home -- posted on social media in family photographs -- also match details on the margins of some of the photographs of the leaked secret documents.

Members of Thug Shaker Central who spoke to The Times said that the documents they discussed online were meant to be purely informative. While many pertained to the war in Ukraine, the members said they took no side in the conflict. The documents, they said, started to get wider attention only when one of the teenage members of the group took a few dozen of them and posted them to a public online forum. From there they were picked up by Russian-language Telegram channels and then The Times, which first reported on them. The person who leaked, they said, was no whistle-blower, and the secret documents were never meant to leave their small corner of the internet. "This guy was a Christian, antiwar, just wanted to inform some of his friends about what's going on," said one of the person's friends from the community, a 17-year-old recent high school graduate. "We have some people in our group who are in Ukraine. We like fighting games; we like war games."

The 2019 release of the first image of a black hole was hailed as a significant scientific achievement. But truth be told, it was a bit blurry -- or, as one astrophysicist involved in the effort called it, a "fuzzy orange donut." Scientists on Thursday unveiled a new and improved image of this black hole -- a behemoth at the center of a nearby galaxy -- mining the same data used for the earlier one but improving its resolution by employing image reconstruction algorithms to fill in gaps in the original telescope observations. From a report: Hard to observe by their very nature, black holes are celestial entities exerting gravitational pull so strong no matter or light can escape. The ring of light -- that is, the material being sucked into the voracious object -- seen in the new image is about half the width of how it looked in the previous picture. There is also a larger "brightness depression" at the center - basically the donut hole - caused by light and other matter disappearing into the black hole.

The image remains somewhat blurry due to the limitations of the data underpinning it -- not quite ready for a Hollywood sci-fi blockbuster, but an advance from the 2019 version. This supermassive black hole resides in a galaxy called Messier 87, or M87, about 54 million light-years from Earth. A light year is the distance light travels in a year, 5.9 trillion miles (9.5 trillion km). This galaxy, with a mass 6.5 billion times that of our sun, is larger and more luminous than our Milky Way. Further reading: The Black Hole Image Data Was Spread Across 5 Petabytes Stored On About Half a Ton of Hard Drives (2019).

Federal authorities are making arrests and seizing funds with the help of new tools to identify criminals through cryptocurrency transactions. From a report: James Zhong appeared to have pulled off the perfect crime. In December 2012, he stumbled upon a software bug while withdrawing money from his account on Silk Road, an online marketplace used to hide criminal dealings behind the seemingly bulletproof anonymity of blockchain transactions and the dark web. Mr. Zhong, a 22-year-old University of Georgia computer-science student at the time, used the site to buy cocaine. "I accidentally double-clicked the withdraw button and was shocked to discover that it resulted in allowing me to withdraw double the amount of bitcoin I had deposited," he later said in federal court. After the first fraudulent withdrawal, Mr. Zhong created new accounts and with a few hours of work stole 50,000 bitcoins worth around $600,000, court papers from federal prosecutors show.

Federal officials closed Silk Road a year later on criminal grounds and seized computers that held its transaction records. The records didn't reveal Mr. Zhong's caper at first. Authorities hadn't yet mastered how to track people and groups hidden behind blockchain wallet addresses, the series of letters and numbers used to anonymously send and receive cryptocurrency. One elemental feature of the system was the privacy it gave users. Mr. Zhong moved the stolen bitcoins from one account to another for eight years to cover his tracks. By late 2021, the red-hot crypto market had raised the value of his trove to $3.4 billion. In November 2021, federal agents surprised Mr. Zhong with a search warrant and found the digital keys to his crypto fortune hidden in a basement floor safe and a popcorn tin in the bathroom. Mr. Zhong, who pleaded guilty to wire fraud, is scheduled to be sentenced Friday in New York federal court, where prosecutors are seeking a prison sentence of less than two years.

Mr. Zhong's case is one of the highest-profile examples of how federal authorities have pierced the veil of blockchain transactions. Private and government investigators can now identify wallet addresses associated with terrorists, drug traffickers, money launderers and cybercriminals, all of which were supposed to be anonymous. Law-enforcement agencies, working with cryptocurrency exchanges and blockchain-analytics companies, have compiled data gleaned from earlier investigations, including the Silk Road case, to map the flow of cryptocurrency transactions across criminal networks worldwide. In the past two years, the U.S. has seized more than $10 billion worth of digital currency through successful prosecutions, according to the Internal Revenue Service -- in essence, by following the money. Instead of subpoenas to banks or other financial institutions, investigators can look to the blockchain for an instant snapshot of the money trail.

Google has announced that it'll shut down Currents, which was introduced in 2019 as a replacement for Google Plus for G Suite. From a report: In a blog post, the company says it's "planning to wind down" Currents, and that it'll push the people who were using it to Spaces, which is sort of like Google Chat's version of a Slack channel or Discord room. Google says that it's making the change so users won't have to work in a "separate, siloed destination" -- instead, they'll be using Chat and Spaces, which will soon be prominently integrated into Gmail. Google says it will begin winding down Currents on July 5th, with data available for export until August 8th, 2023, when it will no longer be available.

Sea levels on China's coastline have hit their highest on record for the second year in a row, rising more quickly than the global average and posing a serious threat to coastal cities such as the financial hub of Shanghai. From a report: In 2022, China's coastal sea levels were 94 millimeters (3.7 inch) higher than "normal," defined as the average over the 1993-2011 period, making it the highest since records began in 1980, an official at the Ministry of Natural Resources said Wednesday at a news conference. The swell was 10 mm higher than in 2021, when the previous record was reached. The temperature of China's coastal waters has increased significantly due to global warming, and the rise in sea levels has accelerated, said Wang Hua, head of the marine forecasting and monitoring department at the ministry.

China's sea levels have increased by an average of 3.5 mm per year since 1980, and an average of 4.0 mm per year since 1993 -- higher than the global rate over the same periods, Wang said. The global mean sea level has risen 3.4 mm a year over the past three decades, according to NASA. "In the last 11 years, from 2012 to 2022, China's coastal sea levels were the highest since observations were first recorded," Wang said at the news conference, which released the latest annual report on China's sea levels.

A new report looks at the firms that quietly move billions around the banking industry each day. Reciprocal deposits enable banks to place deposits with another bank and receive the same value back through technology firms, reshuffling approximately $1 trillion through their platforms. This deposit-swapping allows banks to offer customers more insurance, a priority after Silicon Valley Bank's failure, where 93% of deposits were uninsured. At the end of last year, around 45% of deposits in the American banking system were uninsured.

Invented by Eugene Ludwig in 2002, reciprocal deposits help banks offer greater deposit insurance without forgoing deposit funding. Ludwig's firm, IntraFi, allows banks to place insured deposits around the system while receiving the same value from other locations. IntraFi, the largest firm with 3,000 banks on its platform, has been joined by r&t Deposit Solutions, ModernFi, and StoneCastle Cash Management. These firms are experiencing rapid growth, with reciprocal deposits' value increasing significantly since March.

The story asks: All this deposit-swapping raises the question of whether it makes sense to maintain the federal cap. The private sector has come up with a clever workaround to offer more deposit insurance than mandated. It is conceivable that, with several thousand banks in the network, an account could offer deposit insurance for hundreds of millions of dollars. Indeed, StoneCastle offers an account with $125m in deposit insurance. But there is a difference between a private-sector workaround and a public-sector mandate. It is currently difficult to match banks so that all are able to offer such high limits (most offer just a few million dollars' insurance), and reciprocal-deposit firms levy fees, too. They apply on top of the charges, of between 0.05% and 0.32% of the value of total liabilities, that institutions pay for federal-deposit insurance.

Abolishing the cap would make insurance pricier across the system; these higher costs would almost certainly be passed on to customers in the form of lower interest rates. Still, if enough depositors seek insurance by spreading deposits around, higher costs might be the result anyway.

Chinese ride-hailing giant Didi Global said on Thursday that it is working with Chinese carmakers to develop its own robotaxis, which it aims to put into service by 2025, revealing a concept one with robotic arms it called "Didi Neuron." From a report: The company said that it is collaborating with multiple new energy carmakers in China on developing robotaxis. "We hope they can enter Didi's network and provide services by 2025," Didi Autonomous Driving COO Meng Xing said at a company event that was livestreamed online. "We hope they will be domestically produced. We hope the supply chain is controllable, and even 90% of the key components inside can be domestically produced," he said. He also showed off a robotaxi concept car called "Didi Neuron", with robotic arms that can help passengers pick up luggage.

Steve Jobs Archive: The official ebook edition of Make Something Wonderful: Steve Jobs in his own words is free to read on Apple Books and from participating libraries through our partners at Libby. You can also download the book to view it on any compatible e-reader: our EPUB file works on almost all tablets, smartphones, desktop computers, and digital reading devices. From a speech in 2007: There's lots of ways to be, as a person. And some people express their deep appreciation in different ways. But one of the ways that I believe people express their appreciation to the rest of humanity is to make something wonderful and put it out there.

And you never meet the people. You never shake their hands. You never hear their story or tell yours. But somehow, in the act of making something with a great deal of care and love, something's transmitted there. And it's a way of expressing to the rest of our species our deep appreciation. So we need to be true to who we are and remember what's really important to us."

A historic mission to Jupiter is about to blast off. The European Space Agency's spacecraft nicknamed Juice -- for Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer -- is set to begin an eight-year journey toward the planet and three of its largest moons. From a report: Juice is scheduled to launch Friday morning Eastern Time from a spaceport in Kourou, French Guiana, after an earlier attempt was scrubbed because of lightning risk. Once it arrives at Jupiter, Juice will study some of the moons in great detail, mapping their icy surfaces and searching for subsurface oceans that could harbor life.

While the spacecraft can't detect life, the mission should help confirm whether the moons -- Europa, Callisto and Ganymede -- have the conditions necessary to sustain life. The trio, along with the volcanically active moon Io, were discovered by Galileo more than four centuries ago and are among the nearly 100 moons orbiting Jupiter, according to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. About half an hour after its launch, which will be livestreamed Friday, Juice will separate from its rocket and make contact with mission controllers on Earth. The solar-powered spacecraft will then deploy solar wings that measure roughly 900 square-feet and expand into a cross-like configuration on both sides of the craft. In the following 17 days, Juice is expected to deploy its antennas and instrument-containing booms and begin its cosmic sojourn, which people can follow on the agency's website.

The journey will be a roundabout one. Juice will complete flybys of Earth, the moon, and Venus over the next six years to adjust its trajectory and gain enough speed to get to Jupiter. Jupiter is, on average, about 444 million miles from Earth, yet Juice will travel nearly 4 billion miles before getting there, according to Mr. Sarri. It will also have to withstand temperatures from close to 500 degrees Fahrenheit around Venus to nearly minus 400 degrees Fahrenheit at Jupiter. If all goes well, Juice is scheduled to arrive at Jupiter by July 2031. Once there, the craft will complete flybys of the three moons before entering Ganymede's orbit to collect further data, which are sent back to Earth using an 8-foot antenna.

The Ethereum blockchain, the most important commercial highway in the digital-asset sector, successfully implemented a widely anticipated software upgrade. From a report: The so-called Shanghai update enables investors to queue up to withdraw Ether coins that they had pledged to help operate the network in return for rewards, a process called staking. Tim Beiko, who helps to co-ordinate the development of Ethereum, posted on Twitter on Wednesday that the upgrade is now "official." The network revamp -- also known as Shapella -- is designed to let people exit an Ether staking investment and has stirred debate on whether the appeal of the largest token after Bitcoin will increase over time.

"Ethereum is updating and navigating with great skill -- so far anyway -- and cementing its position as the No. 2 crypto," said Aaron Brown, a crypto investor who writes for Bloomberg Opinion. He added that the network is "moving to the future much faster than Bitcoin." About 1.2 million of Ether tokens -- worth approximately $2.3 billion at current prices -- are expected to be withdrawn over the next five days, according to researcher Coin Metrics. Some $36.7 billion of Ether is locked up for staking, data from Staking Rewards shows.

Twitter will let its users access stocks, cryptocurrencies and other financial assets through a partnership with eToro, a social trading company. From a report: Starting Thursday, a new feature will be rolled out on the Twitter app. It will allow users to view market charts on an expanded range of financial instruments and buy and sell stocks and other assets from eToro, the company told CNBC exclusively. Currently, it's already possible to view real-time trading data from TradingView on index funds like the S&P 500 and shares of some companies such as Tesla. That can be done using Twitter's "cashtags" feature -- you search for a ticker symbol and insert dollar sign in front of it, after which the app will show you price information from TradingView using an API (application programming interface).

With the eToro partnership, Twitter cashtags will be expanded to cover far more instruments and asset classes, an eToro spokesperson told CNBC. You'll also be able to click a button that says "view on eToro," which takes you through to eToro's site, and then buy and sell assets on its platform. EToro uses TradingView as its market data partner. "As we've grown over the past three years immensely, we've seen more and more of our users interact on Twitter [and] educate themselves about the markets," Yoni Assia, eToro's CEO, told CNBC in an interview.

The White House said Thursday that data does not indicate a US recession is on the horizon, rebuffing Federal Reserve staff economists who forecast a minor contraction starting later this year. From a report: White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said job numbers and consumer spending are strong and chalked it up to President Joe Biden's economic plans, waving off a recession risk. "We're seeing the success of his plans, and recent economic indicators are not consistent with a recession or even a pre-recession," Jean-Pierre said Thursday when asked about the Fed forecast. Federal Reserve minutes published Wednesday indicated that "the staff's projection at the time of the March meeting included a mild recession starting later this year, with a recovery over the subsequent two years."

Still, Fed officials appear on track to extend their run of interest-rate hikes, shrugging off the warning. Jean-Pierre pointed to job gains, the unemployment rate and consumer spending as indicators. She also said that inflation has been falling, though it remains well above target and may spur more Fed hikes, raising the chance of a recession. Still, the spokeswoman contradicted the warning of the Fed staff. "Those are the indicators that show us that we are not headed to a recession or a pre-recession," she said.

According to a recent study involving a sample of 28,646 Chinese people, high-speed rail projects were found to increase individual happiness, albeit not by much. An anonymous reader shares an excerpt from a Motherboard article: It can increase happiness, especially for people who live in regional capitals, rural areas, men and the elderly, but only by an increase of .076 on the happiness scale of one to five. To put it another way, as the study does, "The coefficient accounts for 1.997 percent of the mean of happiness." This is statistically significant, in the strict definition of whether results are due to chance, and therefore a publishable scientific finding. But it is hardly meaningful in terms of how much high speed rail influences the happiness of Chinese people. I mean, come on. Two measly percent?

In the "policy implications" section, the study authors pose a tantalizing question: "What is the significance of economic growth if it cannot effectively improve residents' happiness?" While the two percent happiness finding may be marginal, they're at least asking the right questions.

An unprecedented analysis of how cancers grow has revealed an "almost infinite" ability of tumors to evolve and survive, say scientists. The BBC reports: The results of tracking lung cancers for nine years left the research team "surprised" and "in awe" at the formidable force they were up against. They have concluded we need more focus on prevention, with a "universal" cure unlikely any time soon. The study -- entitled TracerX -- provides the most in-depth analysis of how cancers evolve and what causes them to spread. More than 400 people -- treated at 13 hospitals in the UK -- had biopsies taken from different parts of their lung cancer as the disease progressed.

The evolutionary analysis has been published across seven separate studies in the journals Nature and Nature Medicine. The research showed:

- Highly aggressive cells in the initial tumor are the ones that ultimately end up spreading around the body
- Tumors showing higher levels of genetic "chaos" were more likely to relapse after surgery to other parts of the body
- Analyzing blood for fragments of tumor DNA meant signs of it returning could be spotted up to 200 days before appearing on a CT scan
- The cellular machinery that reads the instructions in our DNA can become corrupted in cancerous cells making them more aggressive. "I don't think we're going to be able to come up with universal cures," said Prof Charles Swanton, from the Francis Crick Institute and University College London. "If we want to make the biggest impact we need to focus on prevention, early detection and early detection of relapse."

Last week, Dr Paul Burton, the chief medical officer of pharmaceutical company Moderna, said he believes the firm will be able to offer vaccines for cancer, cardiovascular and autoimmune diseases, and other conditions by 2030. The new analysis reported on by the BBC casts doubt on that timeline.

"I don't want to sound too depressing about this, but I think -- given the almost infinite possibilities in which a tumor can evolve, and the very large number of cells in a late-stage tumor, which could be several hundred billion cells -- then achieving cures in all patients with late-stage disease is a formidable task," said Swanton.

Researchers have discovered that in the exotic conditions of the early universe, waves of gravity may have shaken space-time so hard that they spontaneously created radiation. Universe Today reports: a team of researchers have discovered that an exotic form of parametric resonance may have even occurred in the extremely early universe. Perhaps the most dramatic event to occur in the entire history of the universe was inflation. This is a hypothetical event that took place when our universe was less than a second old. During inflation our cosmos swelled to dramatic proportions, becoming many orders of magnitude larger than it was before. The end of inflation was a very messy business, as gravitational waves sloshed back and forth throughout the cosmos.

Normally gravitational waves are exceedingly weak. We have to build detectors that are capable of measuring distances less than the width of an atomic nucleus to find gravitational waves passing through the Earth. But researchers have pointed out that in the extremely early universe these gravitational waves may have become very strong. And they may have even created standing wave patterns where the gravitational waves weren't traveling but the waves stood still, almost frozen in place throughout the cosmos. Since gravitational waves are literally waves of gravity, the places where the waves are the strongest represent an exceptional amount of gravitational energy.

The researchers found that this could have major consequences for the electromagnetic field existing in the early universe at that time. The regions of intense gravity may have excited the electromagnetic field enough to release some of its energy in the form of radiation, creating light. This result gives rise to an entirely new phenomenon: the production of light from gravity alone. There's no situation in the present-day universe that could allow this process to happen, but the researchers have shown that the early universe was a far stranger place than we could possibly imagine.