Slashdot is powered by your submissions, so send in your scoop

 


Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror

Submission + - SPAM: Genomic techniques can streamline breeding for grain quality

Submitted by alternative_right
alternative_right writes: Small grains researcher Juan David Arbelaez-Velez knows the secret to making perfect rice—and it's not about how you cook it. Arbelaez and his team are investigating the genetic blueprint that determines different grain attributes such as appearance, cooking time, and texture. Their paper, published in The Plant Genome, offers a strategy that will help breeders improve grain quality holistically, while cutting costs and saving time.
Link to Original Source

Submission + - China's 'biggest threat' to US is a 'tech kill-switch' (the-express.com)

Submitted by fjo3
fjo3 writes: A cybersecurity expert has delivered a chilling alert that China represents the greatest technological threat to Western countries, possessing the ability to trigger a 'killswitch' on America's power grid at will.

In response to this disclosure, the United States has initiated numerous probes into Chinese-made technology, with various investigations revealing 'malicious, mysterious computer codes' that can be remotely triggered to disable critical infrastructure such as natural gas pipelines and electrical networks.

Submission + - History is best told as a story of organised crime (theguardian.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: “We can’t put a date on Doomsday, but by looking at the 5,000 years of [civilisation], we can understand the trajectories we face today – and self-termination is most likely,” says Dr Luke Kemp at the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk at the University of Cambridge.
History shows that increasing wealth inequality consistently precedes collapse, says Kemp, from the Classical Lowland Maya to the Han dynasty in China and the Western Roman empire. He also points out that for the citizens of early rapacious regimes, collapse often improved their lives because they were freed from domination and taxation and returned to farming. “After the fall of Rome, people actually got taller and healthier,” he says.
Today’s global civilisation, however, is deeply interconnected and unequal and could lead to the worst societal collapse yet, he says. The threat is from leaders who are “walking versions of the dark triad” – narcissism, psychopathy and Machiavellianism – in a world menaced by the climate crisis, nuclear weapons, artificial intelligence and killer robots.

Comment This is Ricardoâs theory of rent (Score 4, Interesting) 48

by hey! (#65561360) Attached to: Amazon CEO Wants To Put Ads In Your Alexa+ Conversations

In case you never took that course, the classical economist David Ricardo figured out that if you were a tenant farmer choosing between two lots of land, the difference in the productivity of the lands makes no difference to you. Thatâ(TM)s because if a piece of land yielded, say, ten thousand dollars more revenue per year, the landlord would simply be able to charge ten thousand more in rent. In essence landlords can demand all these economic advantages their land offers to the tenant.

All these tech companies are fighting to create platforms which you, in essence, rent from them. Why do you want to use these platforms? Because they promise convenience, to save you time. Why do the tech companies want to be in the business of renting platforms deeply embedded in peopleâ(TM)s lives? Because they see the time theyâ(TM)re supposedly saving you as theirs, not yours.

Sure, the technology *could* save you time, thatâ(TM)s what youâ(TM)d want it for, but the technology companies will inevitably enshittify their service to point itâ(TM)s barely worth using, or even beyond that if they can make it hard enough for customers to extract themselves.

Submission + - Windows 11 = Windows 7 ? 1

Submitted by J. L. Tympanum
J. L. Tympanum writes: It looks to me like Windows 7, 10 and 11 are all the same OS, just with a different-looking window manager slapped on top. Can someone with more knowledge of Windows internals verify this claim, or refute it?

Submission + - SPAM: Engineers Weigh Up Returning to Ancient Roman Concrete Recipes

Submitted by alternative_right
alternative_right writes: The ancient Romans might have taught us a thing or two about manufacturing sustainable concrete that lasts for thousands of years.

A new study has rigorously analyzed the raw materials and energy demands of their ancient recipe, revealing some useful ways to improve modern cement.
Link to Original Source

Comment Re: This is why we need public health insurance (Score 4, Informative) 110

You should be careful of taking the claims of the Chinese Communist Party at face value. China has universal health insurance, but it is administered in a way that many people canâ(TM)t access critical care *services*.

For example if you are a rural guest worker in a city, you have health insurance which covers cancer treatment, but it requires you to go back to your home village to get that treatment, which probably isnâ(TM)t available there. If you are unemployed you have a different health insurance program, but its reimbursement rate is so low that most unemployed people canâ(TM)t afford treatment.

Authoritarian governments work hard to manage appearances, not substance. This is a clear example. It sounds egalitarian to say everyone has the same health insurance, but the way they got there was to engineer a system that didnâ(TM)t require them to do the hard work of making medical care available to everyone.

If you want an example of universal healthcare, go across the strait to Taiwan, which instituted universal healthcare in the 90s and now has what many regard as the best system in the world.

Submission + - SPAM: Can AI think—and should it? What it means to think, from Plato to ChatGPT

Submitted by alternative_right
alternative_right writes: Plato, who taught in the fourth century BCE, argued that each person has an intuitive capacity to recognize the truth. He called this the highest form of understanding: "noesis." Noesis enables apprehension beyond reason, belief or sensory perception. It's one form of "knowing" something—but in Plato's view, it's also a property of the soul.

Lower down, but still above his "dividing line," is "dianoia," or reason, which relies on argumentation. Below the line, his lower forms of understanding are "pistis," or belief, and "eikasia," imagination.
Link to Original Source

Submission + - SPAM: Birth of a Solar System Witnessed in Spectacular Scientific First

Submitted by alternative_right
alternative_right writes: Around a Sun-like star just 1,300 light-years away, a family of planets has been seen in its earliest moments of conception.

Astronomers analyzed the infrared flow of dust and detritus left over from the formation of a baby star called HOPS-315, finding tiny concentrations of hot minerals that will eventually form planetesimals – the 'seeds' around which new planets will grow.
Link to Original Source

Comment Re: effective? (Score 4, Insightful) 131

The COVID mRNA vaccines were the culmination of decades of research into genetic vaccines that could be in essence engineered to target a selected antigen without the years of trial and error that are required by the methods we have been using since the 1950s. Within days of the virus genome being published, they had a vaccine design, the months it took to get to the public were taken up with studies of the safety and effectiveness of the heretofore untested technology, ramping up production, and preparing for the distribution of a medicine that required cryogenic storage.

It would be unreasonable not to give the Trump administration credit for not mucking up this process. But the unprecedented speed of development wasnâ(TM)t due to Trump employing some kind of magical Fuhrermojo. It was a stroke good fortune that when the global pandemic epidemiologists have been worried about arrived, mRNA technology was just at the point where you could use it. Had it arrived a decade earlier the consequences would have been far worse, no matter who was president.

The lesson isnâ(TM)t that Trump is some kind of divine figure who willed a vaccine into existence, itâ(TM)s that basic research that is decades from practical application is important.

Comment Re: Talking about the weather (Score 1) 149

by hey! (#65492236) Attached to: Global Warming Is Speeding Up and the World Is Feeling the Effects

Sure, itâ(TM)s quite possible for two people to exchange offhand remarks about the local weather apropos of nothing, with no broader point in mind. It happens all the time, even, I suppose, right in the middle of a discussion of the impact of climate change on the very parameters they were discussing.

Slashdot Top Deals

The world will end in 5 minutes. Please log out.

Close