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upstart writes:

After a 10-year hiatus, the 31st century comedy arrives July 24th with 10 new episodes:

After debuting in 1999, multiple Emmy winner Futurama had an on-and-off existence across Fox, the direct-to-DVD realm, and Comedy Central, with its apparent finale in 2013—until news came last year that Hulu had ordered 20 new episodes. The first 10 arrive July 24, and fans will be glad to know they were worth the 10-year wait.

That said, you need not be an existing fan of Futurama (or be on a quote-along basis with the more than 120 episodes that came before) to appreciate the new season. Sure, there are Easter eggs for long-time devotees, and it's a more rewarding viewing experience if you are at least somewhat familiar with the show—but the plot callbacks are explained enough so that new viewers should be able to follow along.

[...] Though it can sometimes feel like the show is racing along trying to cram in fan-favorite characters (Robot Devil! Calculon! Robot Santa Claus! The Hypnotoad!), and that first episode leans awfully hard into the self-referential stuff, it all feels very rooted in the show Futurama has always been—with weird asides, clever gags, and characters you can't help but love, even though they tend to always do the wrong thing. The leap to 2023 feels as seamless as it could possibly feel, which is truly the greatest way to please old-school fans and, hopefully, the legions of new ones this revival will bring into the fold.

See also:
    Futurama Returns With New Episodes After a 10-Year Layoff
    "Futurama" Revival Ordered at Hulu with Multiple Original Cast Members Returning

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Sick of hearing about record heat? Scientists say those numbers paint the story of a warming world:

The summer of 2023 is behaving like a broken record about broken records.

Nearly every major climate-tracking organization proclaimed June the hottest June ever. Then July 4 became the globe's hottest day, albeit unofficially, according to the University of Maine's Climate Reanalyzer. It was quickly overtaken by July 5 and July 6. Next came the hottest week, a tad more official, stamped into the books by the World Meteorological Organization and the Japanese Meteorological Agency.

With a summer of extreme weather records dominating the news, meteorologists and scientists say records like these give a glimpse of the big picture: a warming planet caused by climate change. It's a picture that comes in the vibrant reds and purples representing heat on daily weather maps online, in newspapers and on television.

Beyond the maps and the numbers are real harms that kill. More than 100 people have died in heat waves in the United States and India so far this summer.

[...] In the past 30 days, nearly 5,000 heat and rainfall records have been broken or tied in the U.S. and more than 10,000 records set globally, according to NOAA [the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration]. Texas cities and towns alone have set 369 daily high temperature records since June 1.

Since 2000, the U.S. has set about twice as many records for heat as those for cold.

"Records go back to the late 19th century and we can see that there has been a decade-on-decade increase in temperatures," said Gavin Schmidt, director of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, keeper of the agency's climate records. "What's happening now is certainly increasing the chances that 2023 will be the warmest year on record. My calculations suggest that there's, right now, a 50-50 chance."

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upstart writes:

Apple Tries to Explain to U.K. Legislators That You Can't Add Back Doors to Secure Protocols:

Zoe Kleinman, reporting for BBC News:

Apple says it will remove services such as FaceTime and iMessage from the UK rather than weaken security if new proposals are made law and acted upon. The government is seeking to update the Investigatory Powers Act (IPA) 2016. It wants messaging services to clear security features with the Home Office before releasing them to customers. The act lets the Home Office demand security features are disabled, without telling the public. Under the update, this would have to be immediate. [...]

The U.K. legislators pushing this believe, wrongly, that it must be possible for these messaging platforms to add "good guys only" back doors. That if they pass this law, the result will be that the nerds who work at these companies will be forced to figure out a way to comply. What will actually happen is that these companies will be forced to pull the services from U.K., because they can't comply, unless they scrap their current end-to-end encryption and replace it — worldwide — with something insecure, which they aren't going to do.

[...] And while it's Apple and iMessage/FaceTime that are getting the headlines today, it's WhatsApp that's the big player in the UK, with 75 percent of adult Britons using it monthly. It's hard to overstate how much outrage these legislators are poised to bring upon themselves if they effectively ban WhatsApp. (The legislators themselves surely all depend upon it.)

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upstart writes:

NASA's unprecedented asteroid experiment is still churning out results:

Last year in a mission called DART, the space agency intentionally slammed a sacrificial spacecraft into an asteroid called Dimorphos, which was 7 million miles from Earth. Scientists hoped to prove civilization could alter the path of a menacing asteroid — should one be on a collision course with our planet — and they successfully nudged the (non-threatening) 525-foot-wide space rock.

Now, planetary researchers are watching the aftermath of the event to gather all the information possible about how to best change the trajectory of, or deflect, a future incoming asteroid. NASA released an image captured by the legendary Hubble Space Telescope — orbiting some 332 miles above Earth — showing a "swarm of boulders" from the experimental impact, which you can see below.

"This is a spectacular observation – much better than I expected," David Jewitt, a planetary scientist at The University of California, Los Angeles, said in a statement. "We see a cloud of boulders carrying mass and energy away from the impact target. The numbers, sizes, and shapes of the boulders are consistent with them having been knocked off the surface of Dimorphos by the impact."

"The boulders are some of the faintest things ever imaged inside our solar system," Jewitt added.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

It's still early days for AI in health care, but already racial bias has been found in some of the tools:

Doctors, data scientists and hospital executives believe artificial intelligence may help solve what until now have been intractable problems. AI is already showing promise to help clinicians diagnose breast cancer, read X-rays and predict which patients need more care. But as excitement grows, there's also a risk: These powerful new tools can perpetuate long-standing racial inequities in how care is delivered.

"If you mess this up, you can really, really harm people by entrenching systemic racism further into the health system," said Dr. Mark Sendak, a lead data scientist at the Duke Institute for Health Innovation.

These new health care tools are often built using machine learning, a subset of AI where algorithms are trained to find patterns in large data sets like billing information and test results. Those patterns can predict future outcomes, like the chance a patient develops sepsis. These algorithms can constantly monitor every patient in a hospital at once, alerting clinicians to potential risks that overworked staff might otherwise miss.

The data these algorithms are built on, however, often reflect inequities and bias that have long plagued U.S. health care. Research shows clinicians often provide different care to white patients and patients of color. Those differences in how patients are treated get immortalized in data, which are then used to train algorithms. People of color are also often underrepresented in those training data sets.

"When you learn from the past, you replicate the past. You further entrench the past," Sendak said. "Because you take existing inequities and you treat them as the aspiration for how health care should be delivered."

owl writes:

https://arcadeblogger.com/2023/07/22/environmental-discs-of-tron-roadside-pickup/

Environmental Discs of Tron (or EDOT for short) is arguably the most complex arcade cabinet of the Golden Age of videogaming. Working examples are hard to come by, and when they do, you can expect to pay handsomely for one!

What sets this game apart, is the thought that went into the cabinet design. Brian Colin (who we interviewed on the podcast a while back here), worked extensively on the game. Have a listen to his recollections of what made the game and cabinet so special.

So, finding one of these glorious pieces is a challenge these days. But can you imagine stumbling across one dumped in the street? Well, that's exactly what happened to my friend Tim Lapetino recently.

I was visiting my family in the Chicago suburbs recently, when my niece mentioned she saw "some TRON thing" sitting on a curb while she was riding her bike through the neighbourhood.

Of course we jumped in the car to go take a look, as it was just blocks away from where my parents and other family live. As we drove up to the spot, I uttered "What the &*@$?!" forgetting that my niece was in the car with us. And would you believe it – there it was. An EDOT was sitting by the curb

Tim Lapetino

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Freeman writes:

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/07/tsmc-delays-us-chip-fab-opening-says-us-talent-is-insufficient/

The Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) was supposed to have its first Arizona chip factory operational by late 2024 but now has confirmed significant delays. Primarily due to a shortage of technical workers with critical expertise in the US, TSMC projects to finish construction instead by 2025.

This is an "ominous delay," Bloomberg reported, and it comes right when investment in AI is booming.

[...] At the end of last month, TSMC confirmed it would be sending more Taiwanese workers to the US to ensure a "fast ramp up" of its $40 billion fab in Arizona, Reuters reported. A second Arizona fab is planned to be operational by 2026— the most advanced chip factory currently in production, Reuters reported—and, at least so far, it has not been confirmed whether the first fab's delay will result in any further delays on completing the second fab.

[...] Both officials and workers wonder how TSMC will spend US funding to finish its fabs. TSMC seeks up to $15 billion in funding from the CHIPS and Science Act, The Wall Street Journal reported, but has objected to some of the US conditions requiring that TSMC share profits and provide detailed information about its operations. The Biden administration has said that these conditions are only intended to ensure that TSMC makes appropriate use of taxpayer money.

It's clear, though, that TSMC is expected to hire and fairly pay US workers. Last year, President Joe Biden announced that building the first Arizona fab would employ "more than 3,000 union workers," and he previously promised that the CHIPS and Science Act was designed to "create good-paying American jobs."

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hubie writes:

If you aren't familiar with the experiment where you try to count the number of times a basketball is passed between people, you should watch the video and try the experiment first before reading on.

Research Reveals We Can Spot the Unexpected Better than Commonly Believed:

We are quite good at spotting unexpected objects while focused on another activity if they are moving fast, reveals a new study by a team of New York University researchers. Their findings cast doubt on a long-standing view that our ability to see the unexpected is necessarily impaired when our attention is already directed elsewhere.

"For decades, it's been thought that when we're intently focused on something relevant, like driving or playing a game, we fail to spot something that unexpectedly enters our field of vision, even if it is clearly visible and moving," says Pascal Wallisch, a clinical associate professor at New York University's Center for Data Science and Department of Psychology and lead author of the paper, which appears in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. "Our study questions the generality of this view because it shows that people, while focusing on a task, are quite capable of noticing unexpected objects that are moving quickly. However, our research confirms that we are indeed less adept at noticing these same objects when they are moving slowly."

The research team, who also included Wayne Mackey, Michael Karlovich, and David Heeger, centered its study on "inattentional blindness"—the inability to notice unexpected objects if attention is focused on a task. [...]

This and similar studies characterized one of the most striking phenomena in cognitive psychology—inattentional blindness—as an inevitable flip side of task focusing, and essentially a deficit.

upstart writes:

Seven AI companies agree to safeguards in the US:

Seven leading companies in artificial intelligence have committed to managing risks posed by the tech, the White House has said.

This will include testing the security of AI, and making the results of those tests public.

Representatives from Amazon, Anthropic, Google, Inflection, Meta, Microsoft, and OpenAI joined US President Joe Biden to make the announcement.

It follows a number of warnings about the capabilities of the technology.

The pace at which the companies have been developing their tools have prompted fears over the spread of disinformation, especially in the run up to the 2024 US presidential election.

"We must be clear-eyed and vigilant about the threats emerging from emerging technologies that can pose - don't have to but can pose - to our democracy and our values," President Joe Biden said during remarks on Friday.

[...] As part of the agreement signed on Friday, the companies agreed to:

• Security testing of their AI systems by internal and external experts before their release.
• Ensuring that people are able to spot AI by implementing watermarks.
• Publicly reporting AI capabilities and limitations on a regular basis.
• Researching the risks such as bias, discrimination and the invasion of privacy.

The goal is for it to be easy for people to tell when online content is created by AI, the White House added.

upstart writes:

Disenchanted mods Ars spoke with want change, not more communication:

Reddit is publicly extending an olive branch to the moderator community that it largely enraged over recent weeks. In a post on Wednesday, a Reddit employee detailed outreach efforts from the company, including new weekly feedback sessions, that it hopes can help repair ties with the social media platform and over 50,000 volunteer mods that it relies on. But as you might expect, mods remain skeptical.

A Reddit admin going by Go_JasonWaterfalls on the site and claiming the title of Reddit VP of community (Ars attempted to confirm the identity of /u/Go_JasonWaterfalls, but Reddit spokesperson Tim Rathschmidt declined to confirm the employee's identity by name) acknowledged the shattered relationship between mods—who spend thousands of hours providing free labor and have recently engaged in variously disruptive forms of protest over API pricing on the site—and Reddit—which has responded to said protests by ousting some protesting moderators from their posts. [...]

"So, we've all had a... time on Reddit lately," Go_JasonWaterfalls wrote. "And I'm here to recognize it, acknowledge that our relationship has been tested, and begin the 'now what?' conversation."

Noting that Reddit's "role is facilitation" and to give mods a platform they "can rely on," including necessary tools and resources, Go_JasonWaterfalls emphasized the need for "consistent, inclusive, and direct connection" with mods before detailing outreach efforts, like Weekly Mod Feedback Sessions.

[...] Mods, meanwhile, traumatized by a tumultuous past couple of months, have very low expectations of Reddit's efforts. Ars spoke with some who have already participated in similar efforts, like feedback sessions or the Mod Council, and claimed mixed results in regard to Reddit making actual moves in response to mod critiques and suggestions.

The Aptera streamlined car project has been on and off for something like 10(?) years now, including a bankruptcy and reorg. They just released this statement on some wind tunnel testing, so it does seem like there is at least a little bit of life in the company.

From the link:

Alessandro Aquili, head of wind tunnel at Pininfarina, said, "Aptera's exterior design draws inspiration from the research of Prof. Morelli, the same engineer behind the Pininfarina wind tunnel. By building on Prof. Morelli's ideas, Aptera carries on this philosophy, continuing to push bounds of aerodynamic efficiency."

Steve Fambro, CEO and co-founder of Aptera, remarked, "Working with Pininfarina to validate Aptera's shape marks an exciting chapter in our journey toward creating a passenger vehicle with the lowest drag coefficient ever."

Aptera's aerodynamic shape is key to its energy efficiency. According to the company, it will enable its solar EVs to achieve a range of up to 1,000 miles per charge and the ability to drive up to 40 miles per day directly from the sun's rays.

An average of 10 miles a day would probably be enough for my limited/local car use (work from home), but I'm not in Southern CA, we don't get sun year around like they do.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

You Can Help Stop These Bad Internet Bills:

For the last six months, EFF, our supporters, and dozens of other groups have been sounding the alarm about several #BadInternetBills that have been put forward in Congress. We've made it clear that these bills are terrible ideas, but Congress is now considering packaging them together—possibly into must-pass legislation. I'm asking you to join us, ACLU, Fight for the Future, and other digital rights defenders in a week of action to protect the internet. Will you take a few minutes to join us in telling Congress that these bills must not become law?

The Kids Online Safety Act would increase surveillance and restrict access to information under the guise of protecting children online. KOSA would put the tools of censorship in the hands of state attorneys general. It would greatly endanger the rights and safety of young people online. KOSA's burdens will affect adults, too, who will likely face hurdles, like age verification, to access legal content online as a result of the bill.

The STOP CSAM Act would put security and free speech at risk by potentially making it a crime to offer encryption. The law would undermine digital security for all internet users, impacting private messaging and email app providers, social media platforms, cloud storage providers, and many other internet intermediaries and online services.

Freeman writes:

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2023/07/google-demos-unsettling-tool-to-help-journalists-write-the-news/

Google has been developing tools aimed at helping journalists write news articles, reports The New York Times and Reuters. It has demonstrated one tool, dubbed "Genesis," to the Times, The Washington Post, and The Wall Street Journal. Reportedly, Google is positioning the tool as a personal assistant for news reporters.

According to Reuters, Genesis is not intended to automate news writing but can instead potentially support journalists by offering suggestions for headlines or alternative writing styles to enhance productivity.

[...] Like OpenAI with its ChatGPT AI assistant that can compose text, Google has also been developing large language models (LLMs) such as PaLM 2

[...] However, unnamed anonymous executives who previewed Google's presentation described Genesis as "unsettling," according to the Times. Two of the executives told the outlet that the Google product seemed to underestimate the effort it takes to produce accurate and interesting news stories.

Original Submission

hubie writes:

Avi and Oumuamua: Setting the Record Straight:

As an astrophysicist that searches for signs of alien technology beyond Earth, I'm often asked these days what I think about Avi Loeb.

Loeb, you might know, recently rose to public prominence with his claims that the first discovered interstellar comet, 'Oumuamua, is actually a piece of an alien spacecraft passing through the Solar System. Since then he has headlined UFO conventions, written a very popular book about his claim, and raised millions of dollars to study UFOs with his "Galileo Project" initiative. His latest venture with that money is to sweep a metal detector across the Pacific to find fragments of what he claims is another interstellar visitor that the US military detected crashing into the ocean, resulting in the headline "Why a Harvard professor thinks he may have found fragments of an alien spacecraft" in the Independent.

Loeb has the credentials to be taken seriously. He is a well-respected theoretical cosmologist that has made foundational contributions to our understanding of the early universe. He served as the chair of the Harvard astronomy department, and leads the distinguished Institute for Theory and Computation at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. He is well known as an outside-the-box thinker who is brave enough to be wrong often enough to occasionally be right in important and unexpected ways. He is a prolific paper writer, mentor to many students and postdoctoral researchers, and a leader in the community. I, in particular, was strongly influenced by a lecture he gave on "diversifying one's research portfolio" to include a lot of safe but passé research, some more risky cutting edge work, and a small amount of outré science. It's important advice for any scientific field.

But his shenanigans have lately strongly changed the astronomy community's perceptions of him. His recent claims about alien spacecraft and comets and asteroids largely come across to experts as, at best, terribly naive, and often as simply erroneous (Loeb has no formal training or previous track record to speak of in planetary science, which has little in common with the plasma physics he is known for). His promotion of his claims in the media is particularly galling to professionals who discover and study comets, who were very excited about the discovery of 'Oumuamua but have found their careful work dismissed and ridiculed by Loeb, who is the most visible scientist discussing it in the media.

upstart writes:

Stunned Researchers Discover that Metals Can Heal Themselves 'Without Human Intervention':

Scientists for the first time have witnessed pieces of metal crack, then fuse back together without any human intervention, overturning fundamental scientific theories in the process.

If the newly discovered phenomenon can be harnessed, it could usher in an engineering revolution—one in which self-healing engines, bridges, and airplanes could reverse damage caused by wear and tear, making them safer and longer-lasting.

The research team from Sandia National Laboratories and Texas A&M University described their findings today in the journal Nature.

"This was absolutely stunning to watch first-hand," said Sandia materials scientist Brad Boyce.

"What we have confirmed is that metals have their own intrinsic, natural ability to heal themselves, at least in the case of fatigue damage at the nanoscale," he told the Laboratory's press.

Repeated stress or motion causes microscopic cracks to form in machines' metal components. Over time, these cracks grow and spread until the whole device breaks, or in the scientific lingo, it fails.

The fissure Boyce and his team saw disappear was one of these tiny but consequential fractures—measured in nanometers.

"From solder joints in our electronic devices to our vehicle's engines to the bridges that we drive over, these structures often fail unpredictably due to cyclic loading that leads to crack initiation and eventual fracture," Boyce said. "When they do fail, we have to contend with replacement costs, lost time and, in some cases, even injuries or loss of life. The economic impact of these failures is measured in hundreds of billions of dollars every year for the U.S."