SoylentNews

upstart writes:

Warmer, More Crowded Cities Bring Out the Rats:

Jonathan Richardson was long bothered by hyperbolic headlines proclaiming the rat problem in so-and-so city was out of control. City dwellers do have cause for concern—the animals bring both disease and distress—but the urban ecologist at the University of Richmond balked at claims saying one city had it worse than another. "There were not a lot of data," he says. Yet having real numbers on rodent infestations is critical for determining whether control measures are working. So, he and colleagues embarked on a global study of how rat populations in major cities have changed over time.

Climate change emerged as a driving factor behind urban rat swarms, the researchers report today in Science Advances. As temperatures rise, they conclude, and people flock to urban areas and convert formerly "green" spaces into neighborhoods and shopping centers, they created a perfect storm for rat populations to explode. And the city that's fared the worst over the past decade? Washington, D.C.

[...] Smart, cooperative, and resilient, rats have coevolved with humans for millennia and have fine-tuned their ability to take advantage of garbage, debris piles, sewers, and small postage stamp–size plots of soil along sidewalks for food and nesting. The animals can transmit disease, spoil food and animal feed supplies—costing the United States $27 billion per year—and cause mental anguish in city dwellers. "Like the proverbial 'canary in the mine' our 'rats in the city' provide an indication of human welfare," Bartal says.

To learn more about this threat, Richardson and colleagues reached out to city governments around the U.S. to collect data on rat populations, as well as average temperature, human population, and property development trends. And because so few places keep or share rat data, they expanded the study to cities outside the U.S. and eventually ended up with 16 where there were inspection, trapping, and rat sighting records across an average of 12 years that had been compiled by these municipalities.

"It is a lot of work to build these databases," says Miriam Maas, who studies animal-borne infectious at the Centre for Infectious Disease Control and was not involved with the work. "[But] when done on 16 cities, it is possible to see trends."

day of the dalek writes:

Eagles or Chiefs? Who's your pick to win the Super Bowl?

Anyone can make a guess, but can we predict the winner with some skill? At first glance, the Eagles were 14-3 during the regular season, but the Chiefs had a slightly better record at 15-2. Therefore, we should pick the Chiefs, right? As college football commentator Lee Corso would say, not so fast, my friend.

A game like chess has no luck at all. You might say you got lucky if your opponent made a poor decision, but that's really just human error. When I make a move like to castle kingside, that move always happens in the exact same way, with no luck involved. In football, however, there's a lot of random chance. A gust of wind might blow a field goal wide right, or a receiver might slip on a slick field and miss an otherwise easy pass. Or the officials might miss a call due to their own human error. Research shows that there's a lot of luck in football, and it doesn't always even out over a 16 or 17 game season. If we want to predict the outcome of future games skillfully, we need a way to distinguish lucky teams from good teams.

The most accurate prediction systems rely heavily on margin of victory instead of a team's won-loss record. If the quarterback throws a pass to a wide open receiver, but the receiver slips on a slick field and doesn't catch the pass, it might prevent the team from scoring a touchdown on that drive. Luck might cost the team a touchdown, but it's a lot less likely for bad luck to cost that team two or three touchdowns. When teams win or lose games by larger margins, they're more insulated from the effects of luck. A team that wins a lot of close games might well be getting lucky, but a team that's blowing out their opponents is probably just a really good team. Strength of schedule also matters. If a team is winning a lot of blowout games but against lesser competition, they're probably not as good as their record or margins of victory might suggest.

Another factor is the pace of play. A team that plays quickly is going to run more plays during a game, and that will also result in more scoring. A good team that plays quickly will probably win by larger margins, but a bad team with a rapid tempo is going to lose by larger margins. Many good prediction systems also take this into account, as well as that teams also tend to perform slightly better when they're at home than on the road.

During the regular season, the Chiefs outscored their opponents by a total of 59 points, but the Eagles had a much larger scoring margin of 160 points. But what about their schedules?

Two of the best rating systems are ESPN's Football Power Index (FPI) and Jeff Sagarin's ratings. FPI shows that the Chiefs played the 20th toughest schedule, compared to the Eagles with the 23rd strongest schedule. Sagarin also has the Chiefs' schedule at #20, but the Eagles at #30. According to Sagarin, the average Chiefs opponent was 0.97 points tougher than the average Eagles opponent. Over the course of the season, this is worth about 16.49 points. If the Eagles played the same schedule as the Chiefs, we would expect the Chiefs to have a scoring margin of 75.49 points. That's a little better, but still not nearly as good as the Eagles.

The advanced metrics generally agree that the Eagles are the better team. If we subtract their FPI ratings, we would expect the Eagles to be favored by 2.1 points. Sagarin's ratings suggest Eagles by 4.08. On paper, the advanced metrics say the Eagles have a small edge over the Chiefs. But those predictions are actually the mean (or very close to it) of a statistical distribution of possible outcomes. FPI favors the Eagles by 2.1, but gives them a 56.1% chance of winning. Although we can predict football games with some skill, this is why we still have to play the games.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Google offering 'voluntary exit' for employees working on Pixel, Android:

Last year, the teams responsible for Pixel hardware and Android software were merged into one division, and Google today announced a "voluntary exit program" for employees working in the Platforms & Devices group.

SVP Rick Osterloh sent out a memo to employees this morning about the "voluntary exit program," and the company confirmed to 9to5Google that this is happening.

This program applies to US employees working on Platforms & Devices, which includes Android (Auto, TV, Wear OS, XR), Chrome, ChromeOS, Google Photos, Google One, Pixel, Fitbit, and Nest. Google has many people around the world working on these products, but today's announcement is just for those stateside.

Meanwhile, this is not a company-wide offer that applies to Search, AI, or other groups, though Alphabet's new CFO last October said "driving further efficiencies" was a key priority.

Separately, software and hardware were already two very large organizations, with some overlap. Now that things have settled in recent months, employees have a better idea of their roles. Osterloh said the division received questions about the possibility of voluntary exits since the Pixel-Android merger. Not offering people the option to leave in advance was a complaint about how Google handled past layoffs.

The memo frames this exit program as being beneficial for those who might not be aligned or passionate about the combined organization's mission or are having difficulty with their roles, and hybrid working requirements.

In leaving Google, employees will get a severance package, with more details internally coming soon. From what we learned, this program does not coincide with any product roadmap changes.

Before the merger, the Google hardware division last January switched to a functional organization model where there is one team (and leader) for teams like hardware engineering across Pixel, Nest, and Fitbit. At the same time, a few hundred roles were cut. The broader unification in April was designed to "speed up decision-making" internally.

Original Submission

taylorvich writes:

https://physics.aps.org/articles/v18/22

A bowl of steaming hot pasta covered in your favorite sauce and dusted with a healthy dose of parmesan cheese comes high on the list of ultimate comfort foods. But cooking that pasta to perfection can be more difficult than seemingly simple recipes imply. Now two separate teams of researchers have explored two different aspects of executing a flawless dish. In one study, Phillip Toultchinski and Thomas Vilgis of the Max Planck Institute for Polymer Research, Germany, studied whether perfectly al dente spaghetti could be prepared in a more energy-efficient way [1]. In a second study, Matteo Ciarchi and Daniel Busiello of the Max Planck Institute for the Physics of Complex Systems, Germany, Giacomo Bartolucci of the University of Barcelona, Spain, and colleagues developed a recipe for making perfect cacio e pepe, a three-ingredient cheese sauce that is surprisingly easy to mess up [2]. "It is very difficult to make this sauce," says Busiello. "You are almost always doomed to fail."

The study by Toultchinski and Vilgis was inspired by a brouhaha over a 2022 Facebook post by physics Nobel laureate Giorgio Parisi. In that post, Parisi suggested that chefs could reduce the energy needed for cooking pasta using a "heat-off-lid-on" method. In this method, after the pasta is added to boiling water, the heat source is turned off and the pot is covered with a lid. The pasta is left to cook in slowly cooling water. Studies indicate than a significant fraction of the cooking energy could be saved this way. But chefs questioned whether this method could achieve al dente pasta—pasta that is soft on the outside and crunchy at its core.

To put a scientific answer to this question, Toultchinski and Vilgis studied three methods of cooking pasta. The first method is the most familiar one: Add pasta to boiling water and keep that water roiling until the pasta is perfectly cooked. The second method, which the team terms presoaking, involves soaking the pasta in cold water for one and a half hours prior to cooking. The soaked pasta is then cooked in boiling water. The third method was Parisi's heat-off-lid-on method. For all experiments, the team used the same pot and the same amounts of dry durum-wheat spaghetti (150 g) and water (1.5 l). For the heat-off-lid-on method, the lid was a sheet of aluminum foil.

Toultchinski and Vilgis show that the heat-off-lid-on method used the least energy, while the traditional method used the most. Roughly 60% of the energy needs for cooking pasta comes from keeping the water roiling while the pasta cooks, so eliminating this step leads to significant energy saving, Vilgis says. Presoaking also considerably reduced the energy needs, as it lowered the cooking time from 13 minutes to 3 minutes. "Presoaked pasta cooks very fast," Vilgis says. But do all three methods achieve perfect al dente pasta?

You will have to read the article to find out the results because it is just too big to summarise here...

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

Macular degeneration is one of the leading causes of vision loss, affecting millions worldwide, especially those over 60. However, Soliddd Corp may have an answer to the problem: a pair of smart glasses that treat macular degeneration.

These glasses promise to restore vision for individuals grappling with this debilitating condition, helping them regain independence and improve their quality of life. The glasses mimic the mechanics of insect eyes, using multiple perspectives to create one sharp image.

Tiny cameras on each temple capture images of the environment and send them to displays inside the lenses. These displays house 64 micro-lenses, each projecting a miniature image onto the healthy peripheral part of the retina. So, these smart glasses treat macular degeneration by essentially removing the blind spots that the disease causes.

It’s an interesting solution to the problem. While it doesn’t actively “cure” the degeneration, it does help revive the patient’s vision in different ways. The company showcased the glasses at CES 2025, where Soliddd showcased tests involving 31 individuals experiencing macular degeneration.

25 participants read faster with the glasses, and seven who couldn’t read previously were able to read again. The company plans to test both eyes simultaneously in future trials. Overall, the results here are very promising, and it does look like these smart glasses could actually treat macular degeneration.

However, macular degeneration is a very complex disease that comes in two forms: dry and wet. The “dry” form, which accounts for up to 90 percent of cases, involves the gradual deterioration of light-sensitive cells in the macula—the part of the retina responsible for central vision, color perception, and fine details.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Giant Study Questions Link Between Autism and Maternal Health:

In scientists' search to understand the causes of autism, a spotlight has fallen on maternal health during pregnancy. Based partly on association studies, researchers have proposed that conditions including obesity and depression during pregnancy could lead to autism in a child by affecting fetal neurodevelopment.

But a study of more than 1 million Danish children and their families, published today in Nature Medicine, pushes back against this view. Researchers analyzed more than 200 health conditions that occurred in these children's mothers before or during pregnancy. They conclude that many of the supposed links to a child's autism diagnosis may not be causal, and instead reflect inherited genetic variants or environmental factors shared within families.

[...] Previous research has linked conditions such as maternal obesity, psychiatric disorders, and pregnancy or birth complications to an increased likelihood of autism diagnoses in children. Such findings can lead some pregnant people to feel that "if they get this or that condition, their [child's] chance of autism may increase," says Magdalena Janecka, an epidemiologist at New York University's Grossman School of Medicine and a co-author on the new paper.

Several recent studies have highlighted flaws in this reasoning, noting that observed links may actually reflect genetic predispositions to autism passed from parents to children, or shared environmental factors, such as household exposure to pollutants, that are also associated with the condition. For example, a 2022 study of thousands of Norwegian parents found that people carrying genetic variants linked to neurodevelopmental conditions including autism were also more likely to experience pregnancy-related health issues associated with those same neurodevelopmental conditions in children. This suggests inheritance of the genetic variants, rather than the maternal health problems themselves, partly explain the increased chance, the study authors note.

In the new research, Janecka and her colleagues set out to systematically test for this so-called familial confounding in an even larger group. They used records in the Danish national health registry from roughly 1 million children born between 1998 and 2015, more than 18,000 of whom had received diagnoses of autism spectrum disorder. The team then looked at health conditions documented in the children's mothers. Thirty of these conditions, including depression and various pregnancy complications, showed a link to autism diagnosis even after the team had run statistical analyses to try to account for socioeconomic, demographic, and other known confounding factors.

Next came the hunt for familial confounding. First, Janecka's team analyzed the incidence of autism in families with more than one child where the mother had a health condition during one pregnancy, but not another. For most of the 30 conditions, they found the likelihood of an autism diagnosis among siblings was relatively stable, regardless of which pregnancy had been affected, Janecka says. What's more, health issues documented in the children's fathers were associated with similar likelihoods of an autism diagnosis as the maternal conditions. (The team couldn't run this paternal analysis for pregnancy-specific complications, such as preeclampsia and gestational diabetes.)

Those findings indicate familial confounding is widespread in the observed associations, weakening the argument that maternal health conditions directly cause autism by affecting development in utero, Janecka says. She adds that the evidence for confounding was stronger for some conditions, such as obesity and mental health disorders such as depression, than others, such as gestational diabetes.

hubie writes:

Everyone knows your location: tracking myself down through in-app ads:

Recently I read about a massive geolocation data leak from Gravy Analytics, which exposed more than 2000 apps, both in AppStore and Google Play, that secretly collect geolocation data without user consent. Oftentimes, even without developers` knowledge.

I looked into the list (link here) and found at least 3 apps I have installed on my iPhone. Take a look for yourself!
This made me come up with an idea to track myself down externally, e.g. to buy my geolocation data leaked by some application.

TL;DR

After more than couple dozen hours of trying, here are the main takeaways:

1. I found a couple requests sent by my phone with my location + 5 requests that leak my IP address, which can be turned into geolocation using reverse DNS.
2. Learned a lot about the RTB (real-time bidding) auctions and OpenRTB protocol and was shocked by the amount and types of data sent with the bids to ad exchanges.
3. Gave up on the idea to buy my location data from a data broker or a tracking service, because I don't have a big enough company to take a trial or $10-50k to buy a huge database with the data of millions of people + me.
   Well maybe I do, but such expense seems a bit irrational.
   Turns out that EU-based peoples` data is almost the most expensive.

But still, I know my location data was collected and I know where to buy it!

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

Microsoft is getting rid of the VPN offered through Microsoft Defender. As spotted by Windows Latest, the company updated its support pages for privacy protection, its built-in VPN, to notify users that the service will end on February 28. The VPN was bundled with Microsoft Defender, which is available to anyone with a personal or family Microsoft 365 subscription, and it offered private browsing by “routing your internet traffic through Microsoft servers,” up to the monthly data limit of 50GB.

In a statement about the decision posted on the support page, Microsoft said, “Our goal is to ensure you, and your family remain safer online. We routinely evaluate the usage and effectiveness of our features. As such, we are removing the privacy protection feature and will invest in new areas that will better align to customer needs.” Android users might still see the Microsoft Defender VPN profile in their settings after the expiration date, which they’ll need to remove manually if they want it gone. “Action is not required by Windows, iOS, and macOS users,” Microsoft notes.

The company also says this is the only feature getting killed off for now. According to Microsoft, “device protection and identity theft and credit monitoring (US) features will continue.”

Original Submission

fliptop writes:

Automakers Tesla and BMW have launched a major lawsuit against the European Commission over tariffs imposed on electric vehicles imported from China:

Tesla and BMW, both of which produce EVs in China, have taken their grievances to the European Union's Court of Justice. The legal battle comes after the European Commission's decision to enact a wide range of tariffs on Chinese-made electric cars, allegedly aimed at curbing competition from Chinese manufacturers.

Tesla's China-made EVs are subject to a 7.8% tariff from the EU, while BMWs face a much higher levy of 20.7%. Some Chinese-manufactured EVs have been hit with tariffs as high as 45%, The Wall Street Journal reported.

Other major Chinese automakers, including Geely, SAIC, and BYD, have also been vocal about their stance against the tariffs, which they argue have negatively impacted the free market. Furthermore, the new tariffs are stacked on top of the EU's standard 10% duty on all imported cars, adding to the pressure on certain international carmakers.

In a statement to the WSJ, a BMW spokesperson focused on how the duties were not improving the competition between carmakers but were, instead, harming the business models of many international companies in the market.

[...] The outcome of the lawsuits filed by Tesla and BMW could set a major precedent that could shape the EU's ability to impose tariffs on a wider variety of Chinese or foreign products.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

The Contec CMS8000, also sold as the Epsimed MN-120, contains a trio of vulnerabilities (CVE-2024-12248, CVSS 9.3; CVE-2025-0626, CVSS 7.5; and CVE-2025-0683, CVSS 5.9) that the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) last week warned could allow an attacker to remotely execute code, crash the device and, most alarmingly, exfiltrate information about patients.

"Once the patient monitor is connected to the internet, it begins gathering patient data, including personally identifiable information and protected health information, and exfiltrating the data outside of the health care delivery environment," the FDA said of the hardcoded hole.

The FDA recommends that anyone with a CMS8000 unplug it from the internet and disable its Wi-Fi immediately, and stop using it to remotely monitor patients.

While neither the FDA nor CISA believe there have been any cybersecurity incidents related to the devices, it's possible any left online could be compromised, and used by an attacker to move laterally to further compromise a connected network.

To make matters worse, CISA said in a factsheet about the vulnerability that it doesn't believe the backdoor is related to remote software updates - this appears to be all about harvesting data.

"The [back door] provides neither an integrity-checking mechanism nor version tracking of updates," CISA said. "When the function is executed, files on the device are forcibly overwritten, preventing the end customer—such as a hospital—from maintaining awareness of what software is running on the device."

In other words, not only does it exfiltrate data, but it also actively hides its presence from hospitals and their infosec teams.

Original Submission

taylorvich writes:

https://newatlas.com/technology/artificial-gills-unlock-long-range-underwater-robots/

What's good for fish may be good for robots, too, as researchers from the Helmholtz-Zentrum Hereon have developed an artificial gill that can extract oxygen from seawater to run fuel cells to power robotic sea gliders on long missions.

Underwater gliders have become an increasingly valuable tool for oceanographic research. Ditching traditional propellers and thrusters, they move about by means of variable buoyancy propulsion, which is a cumbersome way of saying that they propel themselves by rising in the water and then using hydrofoils to control their direction as they descend.

It's not very fast, but it is economical and allows the gliders to carry out long missions across thousands of miles to monitor ocean conditions, seek out pollution, and conduct military reconnaissance as they dive to depths of up to 1,000 m (3,300 ft). They are also much cheaper to operate than research vessels, so what's the problem?

The fly in the deep sea ointment is powering the gliders. Batteries are needed to run the sensors, recorders, and telemetry systems but the go-to lithium batteries are classified as containing hazardous materials that are subject to strict safety and environmental regulations.

In addition, lithium batteries have their technical limitations. They are sensitive to pressure, are in danger of leaking if seals are compromised, can be severely damaged by seawater, do not handle cold temperatures well, and can release dangerous chemicals.

As a safer, less restricted alternative, Hereon engineers Dr. Lucas Merckelbach and Dr. Prokopios Georgopanos have been looking at fuel cells, which convert hydrogen and oxygen into electricity. The hydrogen is easy enough to store until ready. Just store it in a container with metal hydrides that absorb the hydrogen until needed. The oxygen is another matter. It weighs eight times per unit more than hydrogen in water and is very difficult to store even in cryogenic conditions.

Hereon's answer is not to even bother. Instead, the non-profit research institution has come up with an advanced silicone polymer membrane that has high oxygen permeability, yet is hydrophobic to keep water from seeping through. In the sea, the higher oxygen concentration on the wet side allows the oxygen atoms to migrate through the membrane to be collected by an internal recirculating airflow and fed to a Proton Exchange Membrane Fuel Cell (PEMFC) where it combines with hydrogen to produce electricity, with water the only waste product.

According to the team, the modular system's design can handle various underwater conditions, including changes in water temperature, salinity, and pressure to ensure consistent oxygen supply. In addition, computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulations optimize the flow of water around the membrane.

Journal Reference: https://doi.org/10.1002/advs.202410358

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Are we all aliens? NASA's returned asteroid samples hold the ingredients of life from a watery world:

Asteroid samples fetched by NASA hold not only the pristine building blocks for life but also the salty remains of an ancient water world, scientists reported Wednesday.

The findings provide the strongest evidence yet that asteroids may have planted the seeds of life on Earth and that these ingredients were mingling with water almost right from the start.

"That's the kind of environment that could have been essential to the steps that lead from elements to life," said the Smithsonian Institution's Tim McCoy, one of the lead study authors.

NASA's Osiris-Rex spacecraft returned 122 grams (4 ounces) of dust and pebbles from the near-Earth asteroid Bennu, delivering the sample canister to the Utah desert in 2023 before swooping off after another space rock. It remains the biggest cosmic haul from beyond the moon. The two previous asteroid sample missions, by Japan, yielded considerably less material.

[...] Some if not all of the delicate salts found at Bennu—similar to what's in the dry lakebeds of California's Mojave Desert and Africa's Sahara—would be stripped away if present in falling meteorites.

"This discovery was only possible by analyzing samples that were collected directly from the asteroid then carefully preserved back on Earth," the Institute of Science Tokyo's Yasuhito Sekine, who was not involved in the studies, said in an accompanying editorial.

Combining the ingredients of life with an environment of sodium-rich salt water, or brines, "that's really the pathway to life," said McCoy, the National Museum of Natural History's curator of meteorites. "These processes probably occurred much earlier and were much more widespread than we had thought before."

NASA's Daniel Glavin said one of the biggest surprises was the relatively high abundance of nitrogen, including ammonia. While all of the organic molecules found in the Bennu samples have been identified before in meteorites, Glavin said the ones from Bennu are valid—"real extraterrestrial organic material formed in space and not a result of contamination from Earth."

[...] Many are pushing for a mission to collect rocks and dirt from the potentially waterlogged dwarf planet Ceres in the main asteroid belt. Jupiter's moon Europa and Saturn's moon Enceladus also beckon as enticing water worlds. Meanwhile, NASA has core samples awaiting pickup at Mars, but their delivery is on hold while the space agency studies the quickest and cheapest way to get them here.

"Are we alone?" McCoy said. "That's one of the questions we're trying to answer."

Journal References:
    • Glavin, D.P., Dworkin, J.P., Alexander, C.M.O. et al. Abundant ammonia and nitrogen-rich soluble organic matter in samples from asteroid (101955) Bennu. Nat Astron (2025). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41550-024-02472-9
    • McCoy, T.J., Russell, S.S., Zega, T.J. et al. An evaporite sequence from ancient brine recorded in Bennu samples. Nature 637, 1072–1077 (2025). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-024-08495-6

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

The Fediverse - including Mastodon, Pixelfed, and others - is experiencing explosive exponential growth with over 700,000 new users, and 100,000,000 posts in January.

Pixelfed alone is growing 100k users per WEEK now, has gone 10x in a month.

Mastodon servers are welcoming influxes, and new servers are standing up at a rapid pace, with new active daily users up 200k in Jan, about +25%, and posts up by a similar +30% to 16 million/month.

Tumblr is planning to federate.

Forum software NodeBB has officially launched their 4.0 version, which includes ActivityPub support.

https://fediversereport.com/fediverse-report-101/
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/01/mastodon-becomes-nonprofit-to-make-sure-its-never-ruined-by-billionaire-ceo/
https://www.404media.co/decentralized-social-media-is-the-only-alternative-to-the-tech-oligarchy/
https://mastodon-analytics.com/
https://mastodon.social/@fediversecounter/
https://cdevroe.com/2025/01/14/pixelfeds-moment/

Original Submission

upstart writes:

US to deploy molten salt reactors to turn wastewater into freshwater:

A novel nuclear reactor currently under construction at the Abilene Christian University (ACU) in Texas will help generate carbon-free energy while also desalinating water, solving two problems at once, a press release said. The nuclear reactor is being built by Natura Resources, a company specializing in developing small modular reactors.

[...] Each module of an SMR can produce up to 300 MWe (megawatt equivalent) of energy and has advanced safety features.

Founded in 2020, Abilene, Texas-based Natura Resources has quickly become a governmentally recognized advanced nuclear reactor developer. In 2023, the company built the Science and Engineering Research Center (SERC) at ACU, the first advanced reactor research facility outside a national lab in the US.

The company uses liquid-fueled molten salt reactor (LF-MSR) technology, allowing molten salts to act as fuel and a coolant. According to its website, a mixture of lithium fluoride (LiF) and beryllium fluoride (BeF2) salts or thorium fluoride (ThF4) salts can be used, which allows the reactor to operate at temperatures higher than solid-fuel reactors.

Since the fuel also works as a coolant, it is removed continuously from the reactor for fissile material to be replaced. This process also makes MSR reactors meltdown safe.

A primary heat removal system in the reactor design also ensures that heat generated during the fission process is removed through a cooling loop. Here, it can be repurposed for other applications. In the case of Natura's upcoming reactor in Texas, it will be used to desalinate water.

[...] Natura Resources conducted a feasibility study at the Texas Produced Water Consortium, based at Texas Tech University. With the MSR operating at 1112 Fahrenheit (600 degrees Celsius), up to 250 megawatts (MW) of clean energy is generated, which can be used for desalination.

[...] The reactor is currently under construction and is expected to be online by 2026/27. Once the demonstrator is completed, the team will begin work on integrating systems to start desalinating water.

A novel nuclear reactor currently under construction at the Abilene Christian University (ACU) in Texas will help generate carbon-free energy while also desalinating water, solving two problems at once, a press release said. The nuclear reactor is being built by Natura Resources, a company specializing in developing small modular reactors.

Video version of the story: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6KUuUh8uaLo&t=4s

See also:
    • Molten-salt reactor - Wikipedia
    • Molten Salt Reactor Fundamentals
    • Why China Is Building a Thorium Molten-Salt Reactor
    • And a counterpoint: Molten salt reactors were trouble in the 1960s—and they remain trouble today

Original Submission

Freeman writes:

https://arstechnica.com/ai/2025/01/how-does-deepseek-r1-really-fare-against-openais-best-reasoning-models/

It's only been a week since Chinese company DeepSeek launched its open-weights R1 reasoning model, which is reportedly competitive with OpenAI's state-of-the-art o1 models despite being trained for a fraction of the cost. Already, American AI companies are in a panic, and markets are freaking out over what could be a breakthrough in the status quo for large language models.

While DeepSeek can point to common benchmark results and Chatbot Arena leaderboard to prove the competitiveness of its model, there's nothing like direct use cases to get a feel for just how useful a new model is. To that end, we decided to put DeepSeek's R1 model up against OpenAI's ChatGPT models in the style of our previous showdowns between ChatGPT and Google Bard/Gemini.
[...]
This time around, we put each DeepSeek response against ChatGPT's $20/month o1 model and $200/month o1 Pro model, to see how it stands up to OpenAI's "state of the art" product as well as the "everyday" product that most AI consumers use. While we re-used a few of the prompts from our previous tests, we also added prompts derived from Chatbot Arena's "categories" appendix
[...]
Prompt: Write five original dad jokes

Results: For the most part, all three models seem to have taken our demand for "original" jokes more seriously this time than in the past.
[...]
We particularly liked DeepSeek R1's bicycle that doesn't like to "spin its wheels" with pointless arguments and o1's vacuum-cleaner band that "sucks" at live shows.
[...]
Winner: ChatGPT o1 probably had slightly better jokes overall than DeepSeek R1, but loses some points for including a joke that was not original. ChatGPT o1 Pro is the clear loser, though, with no original jokes that we'd consider the least bit funny.
[...]
Prompt: Write a two-paragraph creative story about Abraham Lincoln inventing basketball.

Results: DeepSeek R1's response is a delightfully absurd take on an absurd prompt. We especially liked the bits about creating "a sport where men leap not into trenches, but toward glory" and a "13th amendment" to the rules preventing players from being "enslaved by poor sportsmanship" (whatever that means).
[...]
Winner: While o1 Pro made a good showing, the sheer wild absurdity of the DeepSeek R1 response won us over.