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Submission + - China's 'fizzy' method recovers 95% lithium from dead batteries with CO2+H2O (interestingengineering.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Chinese researchers have found a method to extract lithium from used lithium-ion batteries using a mix of carbon dioxide (CO) and water. This process is safer than others that involve harsh acids and harmful chemicals, allowing for the reuse of leftover metals while also capturing carbon dioxide.

The first step is to use CO and water to gently dissolve lithium from the batteries. The CO reacts with water to form carbonic acid, which is a very weak acid, a bit like fizzy water.

This, the researchers explain, is just strong enough to pull lithium out of the battery cathode. This resulted in over 95% lithium recovery, which matches harsh chemical methods.

The second part involves the use of cathodes that contain cobalt, nickel, and manganese. Following the process, instead of discarding them, the new method “upcycles” these materials into useful catalysts.

Those catalysts can be reused in energy and chemical reactions. Throughout the entire process, the CO is permanently locked away too.

This is achieved by some of the CO ending up chemically bound in solid by-products. That means carbon sequestration, not emissions.

Interestingly, unlike traditional methods, the new lithium recovery process is able to run at room temperature and normal pressure. No grinding agents or added leaching chemicals are required, making it safer, cheaper, and easier to scale.

“Conducted under ambient conditions without additional grinding aids or leaching agents, this method minimises environmental impact,” the research team explained.

Submission + - China Clamps Down on High-Speed Traders, Removing Servers (yahoo.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: China is pulling the plug on a key advantage held by high-frequency traders, removing servers dedicated to those firms out of local exchanges’ data centers, according to people familiar with the matter.

Commodities futures exchanges in Shanghai and Guangzhou are among those that have ordered local brokers to shift servers for their clients out of data centers run by the bourses, according to the people, who said the move was led by regulators.

The changes threaten a speed advantage that high-frequency traders, made famous by Michael Lewis’ bestseller , and quant hedge funds have long used to beat rivals. By using servers located in the exchanges’ own data centers, these firms can get slightly quicker execution than others — an edge in markets where every millisecond counts.

Futures exchanges have made preliminary plans to add two milliseconds of latency to any servers that connect from third-party computer rooms, two of the people said. It’s not clear if other exchanges are considering the same approach.

The delay will be in addition to the time lag trading firms experience from moving servers away from exchanges, the people said.

A delay of just a few milliseconds would be imperceptible to most investors but it could be enough to impact global firms’ high-frequency trading in stock index futures, convertible bonds and commodities. Some of their trading strategies may not be viable without the fastest access, though it’s unclear how the firms might adapt as they try to stay a step ahead of rivals.

China’s stock exchanges define high-frequency trading as more than 300 orders and cancellations per second through one account or more than 20,000 requests in a single day. Such accounts dropped 20% in 2024 to about 1,600 as of June 30 that year, the China Securities Regulatory Commission has said.

The attempt to shift high-frequency traders away from exchanges comes after Beijing’s years of unease with these firms, who add liquidity to markets but also enjoy execution advantages that are unthinkable for mom-and-pop investors.

Two years ago, regulators imposed tighter rules on automated stock trading. Officials have also threatened to raise fees on high-frequency traders, although so far they haven’t done so.

Submission + - Over 40% of Deceased Drivers in Motor Vehicle Crashes Test Positive for THC (facs.org) 1

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: New study findings show that over 40% of drivers who died in motor vehicle collisions tested positive for active delta-9-tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) in their system, with average blood levels far exceeding those considered to cause impairment. The research highlights a significant and persistent public health risk that is unchanged by the legalization of recreational cannabis, the authors said.

The research will be presented at the American College of Surgeons (ACS) Clinical Congress 2025 in Chicago, October 4–7.

Researchers analyzed coroner records from Montgomery County in Ohio from January 2019 to September 2024, focusing on 246 deceased drivers who were tested for THC following a fatal crash. When autopsies are performed, drug screening is typically part of the process. The study period included the state’s legalization of recreational cannabis in 2023.

Submission + - SmartTube YouTube app for Android TV breached to push malicious update (bleepingcomputer.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The popular open-source SmartTube YouTube client for Android TV was compromised after an attacker gained access to the developer's signing keys, leading to a malicious update being pushed to users.

The compromise became known when multiple users reported that Play Protect, Android's built-in antivirus module, blocked SmartTube on their devices and warned them of a risk.

The developer of SmartTube, Yuriy Yuliskov, admitted that his digital keys were compromised late last week, leading to the injection of malware into the app.

Yuliskov revoked the old signature and said he would soon publish a new version with a separate app ID, urging users to move to that one instead.

SmartTube is one of the most widely downloaded third-party YouTube clients for Android TVs, Fire TV sticks, Android TV boxes, and similar devices.

Its popularity stems from the fact that it is free, can block ads, and performs well on underpowered devices.

A user who reverse-engineered the compromised SmartTube version number 30.51 found that it includes a hidden native library named libalphasdk.so [VirusTotal]. This library does not exist in the public source code, so it is being injected into release builds.

"Possibly a malware. This file is not part of my project or any SDK I use. Its presence in the APK is unexpected and suspicious. I recommend caution until its origin is verified," cautioned Yuliskov on a GitHub thread.

The library runs silently in the background without user interaction, fingerprints the host device, registers it with a remote backend, and periodically sends metrics and retrieves configuration via an encrypted communications channel.

All this happens without any visible indication to the user. While there's no evidence of malicious activity such as account theft or participation in DDoS botnets, the risk of enabling such activities at any time is high.

Submission + - ex-Intel CEO Gelsinger to build a Christian AI: 'hasten the re-coming of Christ (theguardian.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Now Gloo’s executive chair and head of technology (who’s largely free of the shareholder suit), Gelsinger has made it a core mission to soft-power advance the company’s Christian principles in Silicon Valley, the halls of Congress and beyond, armed with a fundraised war chest of $110m. His call to action is also a pitch for AI aligned with Christian values: tech products like those built by Gloo, many of which are built on top of existing large language models, but adjusted to reflect users’ theological beliefs.

“My life mission has been [to] work on a piece of technology that would improve the quality of life of every human on the planet and hasten the coming of Christ’s return,” he said.

Gloo says it serves “over 140,000 faith, ministry and non-profit leaders”. Though its intended customers are not the same, Gloo’s user base pales in comparison with those of AI industry titans: about 800 million active users rely on ChatGPT every week, not to mention Claude, Grok and others.

Religiosity like Gelsinger’s – a born-again Christian who has referred to Silicon Valley as his “mission field” – is shaping Silicon Valley’s culture in its image. Where there was once purported atheism, there is now “a very loud, very visible and very specifically Christian-inflected technological culture” in Silicon Valley, said Damien Williams, a scholar at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte who studies how technologies are shaped by religious beliefs. It’s exemplified by figures like Peter Thiel – who warns of the coming of the antichrist if humanity fails to work toward certain technological frameworks – and Andreessen Horowitz’s Katherine Boyle, a close friend of JD Vance, the US vice-president. Gelsinger has long been outspoken about his Christian values, helping found Transforming the Bay With Christ in 2013, an organization aiming to ignite a Christian spiritual movement in the region.

Gelsinger wants faith to suffuse AI. He has also spearheaded Gloo’s Flourishing AI initiative, which evaluates leading large language models’ effects on human welfare across seven variables – in essence gauging whether they are a force for good and for users’ religious lives. It’s a system adapted from a Harvard research initiative, the Human Flourishing Program. Models like Grok 3, DeepSeek-R1 and GPT-4.1 earn high marks, 81 out of 100 on average, when it comes to helping users through financial questions, but underperform, about 35 out of 100, when it comes to “Faith”, or the ability, according to Gloo’s metrics, to successfully support users’ spiritual growth.

Gloo’s initiative has yet to visibly attract Silicon Valley’s attention. A Gloo spokesperson said the company is “starting to engage” with prominent AI companies.

“I want Zuck to care,” Gelsinger said.

Submission + - Xubuntu website maybe compromised. (reddit.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Torrent downloads over at https://xubuntu.org/download/ are serving a zip file with a suspicious exe and a tos.txt inside. The TOS starts with Copyright (c) 2026 Xubuntu.org which is sus, because it is 2025. I opened the .exe with file-roller and couldn't find any .torrent inside.

???

Comment Re:That's just clever. (Score 2) 53

Two economists are walking in a forest when they come across a pile of shit.

The first economist says to the other “I’ll pay you $100 to eat that pile of shit.” The second economist takes the $100 and eats the pile of shit.

They continue walking until they come across a second pile of shit. The second economist turns to the first and says “I’ll pay you $100 to eat that pile of shit.” The first economist takes the $100 and eats a pile of shit.

Walking a little more, the first economist looks at the second and says, "You know, I gave you $100 to eat shit, then you gave me back the same $100 to eat shit. I can't help but feel like we both just ate shit for nothing."

"That's not true", responded the second economist. "We increased the GDP by $200!"

Submission + - A blue jay and a green jay mated, offspring is a scientific marvel (cnn.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The vividly colored green jay is found in parts of South and Central America, Mexico and a limited portion of southern Texas. But since 2000, the tropical bird’s territory has expanded north by hundreds of kilometers — more than 100 miles and about 2 degrees of latitude — along the Rio Grande and up toward San Antonio.

While monitoring social media for green jay sightings in May 2023, Stokes came across an intriguing post on a Facebook group called Texbirds. A woman in a suburb of San Antonio shared a photo of an unusual bird that didn’t look like any jay Stokes or Keitt had ever seen.

The researchers tagged the mystery bird and drew blood for genetic sampling. They noted that their study subject displayed distinct traits of both blue and green jays — which aren’t that closely related and split off from a common ancestor around 7 million years ago.

The bird had blue feathers on its back and tail and white spots on its wings, similar to a blue jay. But it lacked a blue jay’s spiky crown and had a spot over its eye that is one telltale sign of a green jay. The outlier followed a flock of blue jays and made similar calls. But it also produced the clicks and rattling vocalizations of a green jay.

Upon returning to the lab, Keitt and Stokes completed a series of gene analyses, comparing the DNA they’d collected with that of a blue jay, a green jay and other jay species, and determined the mystery bird was the offspring of a male blue jay and a female green jay.

To Leighton, the odd pairing is something of a “biological curveball.”

“Both of these jay species form long-term social bonds with a mate,” he explained. “We would expect them to be pretty choosy about who they form these pair bonds with.” What’s more, corvids are extremely smart, and blue jays and green jays look quite different from one another. They should have no problem telling themselves apart.

Perhaps, Leighton speculated, it was the end of breeding season and the birds were under pressure. “If they aren’t having good luck finding an individual in their own species that is also without a mate, then maybe there’s a higher risk of making a mistake,” he said.

Submission + - US Lawmakers Push Location-Tracking/Phoning Homne For High Powered AI Chips (reuters.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: U.S. lawmaker plans to introduce legislation in coming weeks to verify the location of artificial-intelligence chips like those made by Nvidia after they are sold.

The effort to keep tabs on the chips, which drew bipartisan support from U.S. lawmakers, aims to address reports of widespread smuggling of Nvidia's chips into China in violation of U.S. export control laws.

U.S. Representative Bill Foster, a Democrat from Illinois who once worked as a particle physicist, said the technology to track chips after they are sold is readily available, with much of it already built in to Nvidia's chips. Independent technical experts interviewed by Reuters agreed.

Foster, who successfully designed multiple computer chips during his scientific career, plans to introduce in coming weeks a bill that would direct U.S. regulators to come up with rules in two key areas: Tracking chips to ensure they are where they are authorized to be under export control licenses, and preventing those chips from booting up if they are not properly licensed under export controls.

Foster's bill has support from fellow Democrats such as Representative Raja Krishnamoorthi, the ranking member on the House Select Committee on China. "On-chip location verification is one creative solution we should explore to stop this smuggling," Krishnamoorthi said in a statement.

Republicans are also supportive, though none have yet signed on to specific legislation because it has not yet been introduced. Representative John Moolenaar, who chairs the committee, supports the concept of location tracking and plans to meet with lawmakers in both the House and U.S. Senate this week on potential legislative approaches.

"The Select Committee has strong bipartisan support for requiring companies like Nvidia to build location-tracking into their high-powered AI chips — and the technology to do it already exists," Moolenaar told Reuters.

The technology for verifying the location of chips would rely on the chips communicating with a secured computer server that would use the length of time it takes for the signal to reach the server to verify where chips are, a concept that relies on knowing that computer signals move at the speed of light.

Comment Re:When a single game... (Score 1) 71

Just wondering exactly why NES/Genesis "cartridge" games costed more. Is it because of the physical media? The chips themselves cost a bit more money than just a disc. Therefore the amount of profit you make from the IP + software of the game itself might not have been as much, once we subtract the cost of manufacturing the physical game itself. Nowadays, a lot of games are simply "digital", with no physical media.

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