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

 


Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror

Submission + - Jurassic Park Was Right: Mosquitoes Really Can Carry Libraries of Animal DNA (sciencealert.com)

Submitted by alternative_right
alternative_right writes: Mosquito meals really can provide a thorough ecological snapshot of the area they buzz about, new research from the University of Florida finds.

"They say Jurassic Park inspired a new generation of paleontologists, but it inspired me to study mosquitoes," says entomologist Lawrence Reeves.

Reeves, fellow entomologist Hannah Atsma, and their colleagues caught more than 50,000 individual mosquitoes, representing 21 different species, across a 10,900-hectare protected reserve in central Florida over eight months.

Based on the blood contained in a few thousand females, the researchers found that mosquitoes' blood meals can reveal the presence of "the smallest frogs to the largest cows."

Submission + - 'Fish Mouth' Filter Removes 99% of Microplastics From Laundry Waste (sciencealert.com) 1

Submitted by alternative_right
alternative_right writes: The ancient evolution of fish mouths could help solve a modern source of plastic pollution.

Inspired by these natural filtration systems, scientists in Germany have invented a way to remove 99 percent of plastic particles from water. It's based on how some fish filter-feed to eat microscopic prey.

Submission + - Ready, Fire, Aim: As Schools Embrace AI, Skeptics Raise Concerns

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes: "Fueled partly by American tech companies, governments around the globe are racing to deploy generative A.I. systems and training in schools and universities," reports the NY Times. "In early November, Microsoft said it would supply artificial intelligence tools and training to more than 200,000 students and educators in the United Arab Emirates. Days later, a financial services company in Kazakhstan announced an agreement with OpenAI to provide ChatGPT Edu, a service for schools and universities, for 165,000 educators in Kazakhstan. Last month, xAI, Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence company, announced an even bigger project with El Salvador: developing an A.I. tutoring system, using the company’s Grok chatbot, for more than a million students in thousands of schools there."

"In the United States, where states and school districts typically decide what to teach, some prominent school systems recently introduced popular chatbots for teaching and learning. In Florida alone, Miami-Dade County Public Schools, the nation’s third-largest school system, rolled out Google’s Gemini chatbot for more than 100,000 high school students. And Broward County Public Schools, the nation’s sixth-biggest school district, introduced Microsoft’s Copilot chatbot for thousands of teachers and staff members."

"Teachers currently have few rigorous studies to guide generative A.I. use in schools. Researchers are just beginning to follow the long-term effects of A.I. chatbots on teenagers and schoolchildren. 'Lots of institutions are trying A.I.,' said Drew Bent, the education lead at Anthropic. 'We’re at a point now where we need to make sure that these things are backed by outcomes and figure out what’s working and what’s not working.'"

Submission + - UK company sends factory with 1,000C (1273F) furnace into space

Submitted by yuvcifjt
yuvcifjt writes: Cardiff-based company Space Forge has launched a microwave-sized "factory", ForgeStar-1, into orbit and successfully powered its onboard furnace to about 1,000C (1,273F). Their goal is to manufacture higher-purity semiconductors in microgravity and vacuum conditions, which allow atoms to align more perfectly and reduce contamination compared with Earth-based production. The plasma demonstration confirms that the extreme conditions needed for gas-phase crystal growth can now be created and controlled on an autonomous platform in low Earth orbit, enabling production of ultra-pure seed material. CEO Josh Western says space-made semiconductors could be up to 4,000 times purer and used in a range of electronics. The company plans to build a larger factory (ForgeStar-2) capable of producing material for about 10,000 chips and to test re-entry recovery using a heat shield to return materials to Earth.

Submission + - NYC Inauguration Bans Raspberry Pi, Flipper Zero Devices (adafruit.com)

Submitted by ptorrone
ptorrone writes: The January 1, 2026 NYC mayoral inauguration prohibits attendees from bringing specific brand-name devices, explicitly banning Raspberry Pi single-board computers and the Flipper Zero, listed alongside weapons, explosives, and drones. Rather than restricting behaviors or capabilities like signal interference or unauthorized transmitters, the policy names two widely used educational and testing tools while allowing smartphones and laptops that are far more capable. Critics argue this device-specific ban creates confusion, encourages selective enforcement, and reflects security theater rather than a clear, capability-based public safety framework. New York has handled large-scale events more pragmatically before.

Submission + - Cheap Solar Is Transforming Lives and Economies Across Africa (nytimes.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: South Africans ... have found a remedy for power cuts that have plagued people in the developing world for years. Thanks to swiftly falling prices of Chinese made solar panels and batteries, they now draw their power from the sun. These aren’t the tiny, old-school solar lanterns that once powered a lightbulb or TV in rural communities. Today, solar and battery systems are deployed across a variety of businesses — auto factories and wineries, gold mines and shopping malls. And they are changing everyday life, trade and industry in Africa’s biggest economy. This has happened at startling speed. Solar has risen from almost nothing in 2019 to roughly 10 percent of South Africa’s electricity-generating capacity.

No longer do South Africans depend entirely on giant coal-burning plants that have defined how people worldwide got their electricity for more than a century. That’s forcing the nation’s already beleaguered electric utility to rethink its business as revenues evaporate. Joel Nana, a project manager with Sustainable Energy Africa, a Cape Town-based organization, called it “a bottom-up movement” to sidestep a generations-old problem. “The broken system is unreliable electricity, expensive electricity or no electricity at all,” he said. “We’ve been living in this situation forever.” What’s happening in South Africa is repeating across the continent. Key to this shift: China’s ambition to lead the world in clean energy.

Submission + - ClippyAI says AI is overhyped

Submitted by Mirnotoriety
Mirnotoriety writes: Why it's overhyped

Most demos are still cherry-picked, brittle, and require heavy human babysitting. (The moment you ask the agent to deal with a slightly weird PDF, a CAPTCHA, an internal tool without an API, or a manager who changes requirements mid-task — it falls apart.)

* Actual enterprise adoption is still tiny. Companies are piloting, not replacing teams at scale.

* The economics don’t work yet for most roles: paying $20–200/month per agent sounds cheap until you need 10–20 specialized agents + human oversight + error correction + compliance checks.

* Many “I replaced my team” stories later get walkbacks when people admit they’re still doing 60–80% of the work themselves.

More honest current state (Dec 2025)

* AI agents are genuinely useful for narrow, repetitive, well-defined tasks (scraping data, writing first drafts, basic QA, simple customer support replies, generating boilerplate code).

* They’re not autonomous workers yet. Think of them as extremely talented but unreliable interns who need constant supervision.

* The real productivity gains right now are coming from centaurs (human + AI) rather than fully autonomous agents.

Submission + - Sodium batteries with 3.6m mile lifespan in 2026 (simcottrenewables.co.uk) 1

Submitted by shilly
shilly writes: CATL has announced it will be launching its new sodium batteries in 2026. They have some major advantages over LFP chemistries, including:
- 65% cheaper at launch ($19 at cell level, expected to drop to $10 in future)
- 85% range at 3.6m miles
- Dramatically less range reduction in very cold conditions
- Inherently lower fire risk
- Can be transported on 0% charge
- Slightly better gravimetric density (175Wh/kg cf 165)
Sodium isn’t a panacea: volumetric density remains lower, for example. But these batteries could well dominate in years to come, not least because they are made of commonly available materials (table salt!). For example, millions of homes across Africa are putting in solar plus storage to have heat, light and power at night, throwing out their kerosene. Sodium could substantially accelerate the trend.

Submission + - America is building a society that cannot function without AI (nerds.xyz)

Submitted by BrianFagioli
BrianFagioli writes: The United States is rapidly building a society that assumes artificial intelligence will always be available. AI now sits at the center of banking, healthcare, logistics, education, media, and government workflows, increasingly handling not just automation but decision-making and cognition itself. The risk is not AI being “too smart,” but Americans slowly losing the ability — and habit — of thinking and functioning without it. As more writing, research, planning, and judgment are outsourced to centralized systems, human fallback skills quietly atrophy, making society efficient but brittle.

That brittleness becomes a national risk when AI’s real dependencies are considered. Large-scale AI depends on data centers, power grids, and stable infrastructure that can fail due to outages, cyber incidents, or geopolitical pressure. Foreign adversaries do not need to defeat the US militarily to cause disruption; they only need to interrupt systems Americans assume will always work. A society optimized for AI uptime rather than resilience may discover, very suddenly, that when the intelligence layer goes dark, confusion spreads faster than solutions.

Submission + - Beijing Ruled AI-caused Job Replacement Illegal (globaltimes.cn)

Submitted by hackingbear
hackingbear writes: China's state-affiliated Global Times reported that Beijing Municipal Bureau of Human Resources and Social Security ruled in a labor dispute arbitration that "AI replacing a position does not equal to legal dismissal," providing a case reference for resolving similar cases in the future. A worker with surname Liu had worked in a technology company for many years, responsible for traditional manual map data collection. In early 2024, the company decided to full transition to AI-managed autonomous data collection, abolishing Liu's department, and terminated Liu's labor contract on the grounds that "major changes have occurred in the objective circumstance on which the hiring contract was based, making it impossible to continue implementing the labor contract." Liu objected to the firm's termination, claiming it was unlawful and applied for arbitration. The labor board ruled that the company's introduction of AI technology was a proactive technological innovation implemented by the enterprise to adapt to market competition, and that termination of Liu's labor contract on the grounds that the position was replaced by AI shifts the risk of normal technological iteration onto the employee. The arbitration committee noted that, against the backdrop of the rapid development of AI technology, employers should properly accommodate affected employees through measures such as negotiating changes to the labor contract, providing skills training, and internal job reassignment. If it is indeed necessary to terminate the labor contract, employers must strictly comply with relevant laws and avoid simply applying "major changes in the objective environment" as grounds for termination. "This ruling safeguards Liu's legitimate rights and interests, providing reassurance to the vast number of workers, helping alleviate employees' anxiety about AI," Wang Peng, an associate researcher at the Beijing Academy of Social Sciences, told the Global Times.

Submission + - TIME FEELS BROKEN? TIKTOK MAY BE TO BLAME⦠(nerds.xyz)

Submitted by BrianFagioli
BrianFagioli writes: TikTok users are increasingly claiming that time feels âoeoff,â with many saying December vanished and Christmas arrived without warning. Some online are framing the sensation as a timeline shift or a break in reality itself. A new opinion piece argues the cause is far more mundane: short-form video and streaming culture may be flattening memory, erasing shared experiences, and compressing how time is perceived.

The article points to TikTokâ(TM)s endless scroll, lack of natural stopping points, and constant novelty as factors that prevent the brain from forming clear memory anchors. Combined with the decline of synchronized TV viewing and shared cultural moments, the result is a growing sense that time is accelerating — even though the clock has not changed. The author suggests that restoring structure, rituals, and uninterrupted experiences can make time feel âoenormalâ again.

Submission + - Digital Sovereignty in Europe (theregister.com)

Submitted by mspohr
mspohr writes: Europe’s quest for digital sovereignty is hampered by a 90 per cent dependency on US cloud infrastructure, claims Cristina Caffarra, a competition expert and a driving force behind the Eurostack initiative.

While Brussels champions policy initiatives and American tech giants market their own ‘sovereign’ solutions, a handful of public authorities in Austria, Germany, and France, alongside the International Criminal Court in The Hague, are taking concrete steps to regain control over their IT.
These cases provide a potential blueprint for a continent grappling with its technological autonomy, while simultaneously revealing the deep-seated legal and commercial challenges that make true independence so difficult to achieve.

The core of the problem lies in a direct and irreconcilable legal conflict. The US CLOUD Act of 2018 allows American authorities to compel US-based technology companies to provide requested data, regardless of where that data is stored globally. This places European organizations in a precarious position, as it directly clashes with Europe's own stringent privacy regulation, the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).

Austria's Federal Ministry for Economy, Energy and Tourism is a case in point. The ministry recently completed a migration of 1,200 employees to the European open-source collaboration platform Nextcloud, but the project was not a migration away from an existing US cloud provider. It was a deliberate choice not to adopt one.

The primary driver was not cost, but sovereignty. "It was never about saving money," Zinnagl adds. "It was about maintaining control over our own data and our own systems."

The decision has triggered a ripple effect, as several other Austrian ministries have since begun implementing Nextcloud. For Zinnagl and Ollrom, this proves that one organization willing to take the first step can inspire others to follow.

Their advice to other European governments is clear: be brave, involve management, and start. "You don't achieve digital sovereignty overnight," Ollrom tells The Register. "You have to do this in many steps, but you have to start with the first step. Don't just talk about it, but execute it."

Submission + - Coup in Paris: How an AI-generated video caused Macron a major headache (euronews.com) 2

Submitted by alternative_right
alternative_right writes: Alongside the message, a compelling video showcasing a swirling helicopter, military personnel, crowds and — what appears to be — a news anchor delivering a piece to camera.

"Unofficial reports suggest that there has been a coup in France, led by a colonel whose identity has not been revealed, along with the possible fall of Emmanuel Macron. However, the authorities have not issued a clear statement," she says.

Except, nothing about this video is authentic: it was created with AI.

After discovering the video, Macron asked Pharos — France's official portal for signalling online illicit content — to call Facebook's parent company Meta, to get the fake video removed.

But that request was turned down, as the platform claimed it did not violate its “rules of use."

Submission + - University of Oklahoma removes instructor after grading dispute on gender essay (nbcnews.com)

Submitted by SchroedingersCat
SchroedingersCat writes: Oklahoma instructor who gave student a zero on gender essay barred from teaching duties.

The assignment asked students to write a 650-word "reaction paper" to a scholarly article about gender expectations in society. The student wrote in her essay that the scholarly article bothered her, and she described how God created men and women differently. The instructor, who is transgender, gave the student a failing grade because her “paper ... does not answer the questions for this assignment, contradicts itself, heavily uses personal ideology over empirical evidence in a scientific class, and is at times offensive”. The student appealed the grade and filed a claim of religious discrimination.

The school released a statement on Monday: "Based on an examination of the graduate teaching assistant’s prior grading standards and patterns, as well as the graduate teaching assistant’s own statements related to this matter, it was determined that the graduate teaching assistant was arbitrary in the grading of this specific paper. The graduate teaching assistant will no longer have instructional duties at the University."

Slashdot Top Deals

"Virtual" means never knowing where your next byte is coming from.

Close