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Submission + - World's first nuclear microreactor test bed launches at Idaho National Lab (interestingengineering.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The race to dominate next-gen nuclear power just hit ignition at Idaho’s Demonstration of Microreactor Experiments.

The Department of Energy has conditionally selected Westinghouse and Radiant to conduct the first fueled experiments at the DOME, a new test bed at Idaho National Laboratory.

Slated to launch as early as spring 2026, the experiments mark a global first—offering U.S. developers a high-stakes proving ground to accelerate the commercialization of advanced microreactors.

Submission + - 1.5M sq km of sea ice is missing near Antarctica. All climate models were wrong (joannenova.com.au)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Something huge is happening around Antarctica and the experts didn’t see it coming

More than a million square kilometers of ice has gone:

Since 2015, the continent has shed sea ice equivalent to the area of Greenland. Researchers call it the largest environmental shift detected anywhere on Earth in recent decades. –– Earth dot com

Everything about Antarctica has defied the experts. For years Antarctic sea ice expanded when it wasn’t supposed to. Then, suddenly in 2016 the sea ice around Antarctica dramatically started to shrink, and that wasn’t supposed to happen either. Scientists wondered at the time if it was just a temporary blip, but then it got even smaller. Holes in the sea ice “as big as Switzerland” have started to appear for the first time since the mid 1970s.

To explain this mystery (that was rarely mentioned) a new paper suggests the salinity of surface waters has changed. We’re not just talking about a small piece of ocean, this is everything south of 50. For decades, the surface of the polar Southern Ocean was getting less salty — an “expected response to a warming climate” they said that started in about 1980, “however, this trend reversed abruptly after 2015”.

So as news seeps out this week that there is a “dangerous feedback loop” where shrinking ice is warming the ocean, bear in mind that the experts also admit this is “completely unexpected” which is their way of saying “the models were wrong”. Carbon dioxide was not supposed to do this.

Submission + - UK Scientists Achieve First Commercial Tritium Production (interestingengineering.com)

Submitted by fahrbot-bot
fahrbot-bot writes: Interesting Engineering is reporting that Astral Systems, a UK-based private commercial fusion company, in collaboration with the University of Bristol, has claimed to have become the first firm to successfully breed tritium, a vital fusion fuel, using its own operational fusion reactor.

The milestone came during a 55-hour Deuterium-Deuterium (DD) fusion irradiation campaign conducted in March. Scientists from Astral Systems and the University of Bristol produced and detected tritium in real-time from an experimental lithium breeder blanket within Astral’s multi-state fusion reactors.

“There’s a global race to find new ways to develop more tritium than what exists in today’s world [currently about 20kg] – a huge barrier is bringing fusion energy to reality,” said Talmon Firestone, CEO and co-founder of Astral Systems.

Astral Systems’ approach uses its Multi-State Fusion (MSF) technology. The company states this will commercialize fusion power with better performance, efficiency, and lower costs than traditional reactors.

A core innovation is lattice confinement fusion (LCF), a concept first discovered by NASA in 2020. This allows Astral’s reactor to achieve solid-state fuel densities 400 million times higher than those in plasma.

The company’s reactors are designed to induce two distinct fusion reactions simultaneously from a single power input, with fusion occurring in both plasma and a solid-state lattice.

The reactor core also features an electron-screened environment. This design reduces the energy needed to overcome the Coulomb barrier between particles, which lowers required fusion temperatures by several million degrees and allows for higher performance in a compact size.
User Journal

Journal Journal: Identity theft on Facebook, but why? 11

Journal by shanen

Why does Facebook support so much identity theft? I had an actual account on Facebook for many years, but it was nuked without explanation back in 2022. After that, someone created a fake Facebook account in its place. The fake account is using one of my old email addresses, and that is causing Facebook to send me increasingly frequent reminders about something--but I cannot see what the scam is because I have no access to Facebook.

Submission + - Germany keeps burning coal for another winter (euractiv.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Amidst a winter marked by scarce gas supplies, the German government has opted to retain its lignite coal power plants on standby for another season. Originally, Germany had planned a phased shutdown of coal plants in exchange for a portion of the government's €40 billion coal phase-out fund. However, last year, disruptions in Russian gas supplies post-Ukraine war prompted an emergency decision to keep coal plants operational. This measure is now extended for the upcoming winter, maintaining 1.9 GWs of lignite capacity alongside the existing 45 GW of coal power plants.

The primary purpose of these lignite plants is to alleviate gas demand during peak times and stabilize prices. Despite the economic benefits, the move raises environmental concerns, given lignite's status as a major climate polluter. The government acknowledges this and plans to assess the additional carbon emissions resulting from keeping coal plants on standby, estimated to be between 2.5 and 5.6 tonnes of CO2.

The German government emphasized the persistence of the goal to ideally complete the coal phase-out by 2030 and meet climate targets. However, skepticism surrounds the likelihood of achieving these objectives. This makes it even more challenging for Germany's message to be heard by Southern countries, particularly South Africa, urging them to shut down their coal power plants.

Submission + - GPT-4 Will Hunt For Trends In Medical Records Thanks To Microsoft and Epic (arstechnica.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: On Monday, Microsoft and Epic Systems announced that they are bringing OpenAI's GPT-4 AI language model into health care for use in drafting message responses from health care workers to patients and for use in analyzing medical records while looking for trends. Epic Systems is one of America's largest health care software companies. Its electronic health records (EHR) software (such as MyChart) is reportedly used in over 29 percent of acute hospitals in the United States, and over 305 million patients have an electronic record in Epic worldwide. Tangentially, Epic's history of using predictive algorithms in health care has attracted some criticism in the past.

In Monday's announcement, Microsoft mentions two specific ways Epic will use its Azure OpenAI Service, which provides API access to OpenAI's large language models (LLMs), such as GPT-3 and GPT-4. In layperson's terms, it means that companies can hire Microsoft to provide generative AI services for them using Microsoft's Azure cloud platform. The first use of GPT-4 comes in the form of allowing doctors and health care workers to automatically draft message responses to patients. The press release quotes Chero Goswami, chief information officer at UW Health in Wisconsin, as saying, "Integrating generative AI into some of our daily workflows will increase productivity for many of our providers, allowing them to focus on the clinical duties that truly require their attention." The second use will bring natural language queries and "data analysis" to SlicerDicer, which is Epic's data-exploration tool that allows searches across large numbers of patients to identify trends that could be useful for making new discoveries or for financial reasons. According to Microsoft, that will help "clinical leaders explore data in a conversational and intuitive way." Imagine talking to a chatbot similar to ChatGPT and asking it questions about trends in patient medical records, and you might get the picture.

Submission + - EU Takes On United States, Asia With Chip Subsidy Plan (reuters.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The European Union on Tuesday agreed a 43 billion euro ($47 billion) plan for its semiconductor industry in an attempt to catch up with the United States and Asia and start a green industrial revolution. The EU Chips Act, proposed by the European Commission last year and confirmed by Internal Market Commissioner Thierry Breton, aims to double the bloc's share of global chip output to 20% by 2030 and follows the U.S. CHIPS for America Act.

"We need chips to power digital and green transitions or healthcare systems," Commission Vice-President Margrethe Vestager said in a tweet. Since the announcement of its chips subsidies plan last year, the EU has already attracted more than 100 billion euros in public and private investments, an EU official said. "The critical piece of the equation which the EU will need to get right, as for the U.S., is how much of the supply chains supporting the industry can be moved to the EU and at what cost," said [Paul Triolo, a China and tech expert at the Washington-based Center for Strategic & International Studies]. While the Commission had originally proposed funding only cutting-edge chip plants, EU governments and lawmakers have widened the scope to cover the whole value chain, including older chips and research and design facilities.

Submission + - The 4-Year Debate: Do Degree Requirements Still Matter for IT? (cio.com)

Submitted by snydeq
snydeq writes: Some companies have moved away from seeking only applicants with a college education, while others still want to see that bachelor's degree on IT worker's resumes. CIO.com's Mary Pratt reports on the debate among tech executives as to the value of a 4-year degree in today's tight talent market. 'Figures from the 2022 study The Emerging Degree Reset from The Burning Glass Institute quantify the trend, reporting that 46% of middle-skill and 31% of high-skill occupations experienced material degree resets between 2017 and 2019. Moreover, researchers calculated that 63% of those changes appear to be “‘structural resets’ representing a measured and potentially permanent shift in hiring practices” that could make an additional 1.4 million jobs open to workers without college degrees over the next five years.'

Submission + - Valve restricts accounts of 2500 users who marked a negative game review useful

Submitted by jth1234567
jth1234567 writes: In late January, a Steam user posted a negative review for the game Warlander, warning potential buyers about the shady anti-cheat system the game was using, the apparent problems being intrusive data collection and difficult removal after the game itself had been uninstalled (the review text is no longer available). This review stayed on top as the most helpful review for nearly three months, which must have been a big thorn in the side for the developer and the publisher.

Until yesterday, when they managed to get a Steam moderator to remove the negative review. In a perfect, consumer-friendly world it should have been another way around, and the game's sales page removed until the claims were investigated by Valve, but this is not a perfect world. However, things didn't end there.

Apparently the Steam moderator categorized the negative review as "attempting to scam users or other violations of Steam's Rules & Guidelines", which meant that all those 2439 people (plus people who have it 437 awards) got their accounts restricted for 30 days, during this time none of them can up- or downvote any Steam reviews at all.

Support tickets from affected users to Steam Support have received a default response saying Support will not help nor adjust the length of vote bans.

The Steam review system was never perfect, but the impact of this kind of behavior from Valve will render the whole system completely pointless, as negative reviews can be culled by the developers/publishers at any time, and people will just stop marking any negative review as useful to avoid these kinds of repercussions.

Submission + - Montana close to becoming 1st state to completely ban TikTok (apnews.com)

Submitted by rmdingler
rmdingler writes:

Montana lawmakers moved one step closer Thursday to passing a bill to ban TikTok from operating in the state, a move that’s bound to face legal challenges but also serve as a testing ground for the TikTok-free America that many national lawmakers have envisioned.

So yeah, it's only a matter of time before a conservative State terminates intrastate use of the nefarious Chinese platform that young Americans cannot stop dancing on. Realistically, with VPN's and other browsing cleverness, how enforceable is such a ban? What will be the penalty to Montana's citizens for interacting with a forbidden site?

Submission + - Stanford University creates ChatGPT-backed NPCs for RPGs (arstechnica.com)

Submitted by Baron_Yam
Baron_Yam writes: A group of researchers at Stanford University and Google have created a miniature RPG-style virtual world similar to The Sims, where 25 characters, controlled by ChatGPT and custom code, live out their lives independently with a high degree of realistic behavior. They wrote about their experiment in a preprint academic paper released on Friday.

Submission + - Dashcam Footage Shows Driverless Cars Clogging San Francisco (wired.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: “Driverless cars have completed thousands of journeys in San Francisco—taking people to work, to school, and to and from dates. They have also proven to be a glitchy nuisance, snarling traffic and creeping into hazardous terrain such as construction zones and downed power lines. Autonomous cars in San Francisco made 92 unplanned stops between May and December 2022—88 percent of them on streets with transit service, according to city transportation authorities, who collected the data from social media reports, 911 calls, and other sources, because companies aren’t required to report all the breakdowns.”

Submission + - The story behind the creation of GIF at CompuServe in 1987 (fastcompany.com)

Submitted by harrymcc
harrymcc writes: Steve Wilhite, who died on March 14 of complications from COVID-19, is well remembered as the creator of the GIF image file format. But the details behind his invention—which dates to CompuServe in 1987 and still rules the web—are not so widely known. Over at Fast Company, I talked to Wilhite’s colleague Alexander Trevor, who initiated the GIF project, about what the company was trying to accomplish—and why Wilhite should be remembered for much more than one pervasive graphics format.

Submission + - German Investigators Shut Down Biggest Illegal Marketplace On the Darknet (apnews.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: German prosecutors said Tuesday that they have taken down what they believe was the biggest illegal marketplace on the darknet and arrested its suspected operator. The site, known as DarkMarket, was shut down on Monday, prosecutors in the southwestern city of Koblenz said. All sorts of drugs, forged money, stolen or forged credit cards, anonymous mobile phone SIM cards and malware were among the things offered for sale there, they added. German investigators were assisted in their months-long probe by U.S. authorities and by Australian, British, Danish, Swiss, Ukrainian and Moldovan police.

The marketplace had nearly 500,000 users and more than 2,400 vendors, prosecutors said. They added that it processed more than 320,000 transactions, and Bitcoin and Monero cryptocurrency to the value of more than 140 million euros ($170 million) were exchanged. The suspected operator, a 34-year-old Australian man, was arrested near the German-Danish border. Prosecutors said a judge has ordered him held in custody pending possible formal charges, and he hasn’t given any information to investigators. More than 20 servers in Moldova and Ukraine were seized, German prosecutors said. They hope to find information on those servers about other participants in the marketplace.

Submission + - Identical Twins Are Not So Identical, Study Suggests (theguardian.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Genetic differences between identical twins can begin very early in embryonic development, according to a study that researchers say has implications for examining the effects of nature versus nurture. Identical – or monozygotic – twins come from a single fertilised egg that splits in two. They are important research subjects because they are thought to have minimal genetic differences. This means that when physical or behavioural differences emerge, environmental factors are presumed to be the likely cause. But the new research, published on Thursday in the journal Nature Genetics, suggests the role of genetic factors in shaping these differences has been underestimated.

[Kari Stefansson, the co-author of the paper and head of Iceland's deCODE genetics] and his team sequenced the genomes of 387 pairs of identical twins and their parents, spouses and children in order to track genetic mutations. They measured mutations that occurred during embryonic growth and found that identical twins differed by an average of 5.2 early developmental mutations. In 15% of twins, the number of diverging mutations was higher. When a mutation happened in the first few weeks of embryonic development, it would be expected to be widespread both in an individual’s cells and in those of their offspring.

In one of the pairs of twins studied, for example, a mutation was present in all cells in one sibling’s body – meaning it is likely to have happened very early in development – but not at all in the other twin. Stefansson said that out of the initial mass that would go on to form the individuals, "one of the twins is made out of the descendants of the cell where the mutation took place and nothing else," while the other was not. “These mutations are interesting because they allow you to begin to explore the way in which twinning happens.”

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