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The Sun is Producing Strong Solar Flares, Creating Blackouts. What to Know

upstart writes:

The sun is producing strong solar flares, creating blackouts. What to know:

A recent period of strong solar flares is expected to gradually decline over the coming weeks and months, scientists say, along with the potential for brief communication blackouts as the sun's solar cycle begins to fade.

The most powerful eruption of 2025 so far was observed last week by NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory and the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).

The flare, classified as an X2.7, caused a 10-minute period of "degraded communications" for high-frequency radio systems in the Middle East, according to NOAA's Space Weather Prediction Center.

"We are at solar maximum, so there can be periods of more activity," a spokesperson for the Space Weather Prediction Center told Global News in an email.

The spokesperson added that the active region last week's flare emanated from, however, "has weakened magnetically, and even though it remains capable of producing a notable event, it seems less likely at this time."

[...] The 10-minute blackout in the Middle East occurred because that part of the Earth was facing the sun at the time.

However, because the active region was still somewhat off to the side, a related coronal mass ejection — which produces plasma and magnetic energy from the sun's corona — did not impact Earth.

Taylor Cameron, a space weather forecaster at the Canadian Hazards Information Service, told Global News it's difficult to predict specifically when a solar flare can erupt and which part of Earth it can affect.

The sun is currently at the peak of its 11-year solar cycle, known as solar maximum.

Although activity is generally declining, the Space Weather Prediction Center spokesperson told Global News that "sunspot activity and solar event expectations remain elevated this year and perhaps even into 2026."

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

The call came into the help desk at a large US retailer. An employee had been locked out of their corporate accounts.

But the caller wasn't actually a company employee. He was a Scattered Spider criminal trying to break into the retailer's systems - and he was really good, according to Jon DiMaggio, a former NSA analyst who now works as a chief security strategist at Analyst1.

Scattered Spider is a cyber gang linked to SIM swapping, fake IT calls, and ransomware crews like ALPHV. They've breached big names like MGM and Caesars, and despite arrests, keep evolving. They're tracked by Mandiant as UNC3944, also known as Octo Tempest.

DiMaggio listened in on this call, which was one of the group's recent attempts to infiltrate American retail organizations after hitting multiple UK-based shops. He won't name the company, other than to say it's a "big US retail organization." This attempt did not end with a successful ransomware infection or stolen data.

"But I got to listen to the phone calls, and those guys are good," DiMaggio told The Register. "It sounded legit, and they had information to make them sound like real employees."

Scattered Spider gave the help desk the employee's ID and email address. DiMaggio said he suspected the caller first social-engineered the employee to obtain this data, "but that is an assumption."

"The caller had all of their information: employee ID numbers, when they started working there, where they worked and resided," DiMaggio said. "They were calling from a number that was in the right demographic, they were well-spoken in English, they looked and felt real. They knew a lot about the company, so it's very difficult to flag these things. When these guys do it, they're good at what they do."

hubie writes:

Agent mode arrives, for better or worse:

Microsoft's GitHub Copilot can now act as a coding agent, capable of implementing tasks or addressing posted issues within the code hosting site.

What distinguishes a coding agent from an AI assistant is that it can iterate over its own output, possibly correcting errors, and can infer tasks that have not been specified to complete a prompted task.

But wait, further clarification is required. Having evidently inherited Microsoft's penchant for confusing names, the GitHub Copilot coding agent is not the same thing as the GitHub Copilot agent mode, which debuted in February.

Agent mode refers to synchronous (real-time) collaboration. You set a goal and the AI helps you get there. The coding agent is for asynchronous work – you delegate tasks, the coding agent then sets off on its own to do them while you do other things.

"Embedded directly into GitHub, the agent starts its work when you assign a GitHub issue to Copilot," said Thomas Dohmke, GitHub CEO, in a blog post provided to The Register ahead of the feature launch, to coincide with this year's Microsoft Build conference.

"The agent spins up a secure and fully customizable development environment powered by GitHub Actions. As the agent works, it pushes commits to a draft pull request, and you can track it every step of the way through the agent session logs."

Basically, once given a command, the agent uses GitHub Actions to boot a virtual machine. It then clones the relevant repository, sets up the development environment, scours the codebase, and pushes changes to a draft pull request. And this process can be traced in session log records.

Available to Copilot Enterprise and Copilot Pro+ users, Dohmke insists that agents do not weaken organizational security posture because existing policies still apply and agent-authored pull requests still require human approval before they're run.

By default, the agent can only push code to branches it has created. As a further backstop, the developer who asked the agent to open a pull request is not allowed to approve it. The agent's internet access is limited to predefined trusted destinations and GitHub Actions workflows require approval before they will run.

With GitHub as its jurisdiction, Copilot's agent interactions can be used to automate various development-related site interactions via github.com, in GitHub Mobile, or through the GitHub CLI.

But the agent can also be configured to work with MCP (model context protocol) servers in order to connect to external resources. And it can respond to input beyond text, thanks to vision capabilities in the underlying AI models. So it can interpret screenshots of desired design patterns, for example.

"With its autonomous coding agent, GitHub is looking to shift Copilot from an in-editor assistant to a genuine collaborator in the development process," said Kate Holterhoff, senior analyst at RedMonk, in a statement provided by GitHub. "This evolution aims to enable teams to delegate implementation tasks and thereby achieve a more efficient allocation of developer resources across the software lifecycle."

GitHub claims it has used the Copilot code agent in its own operations to handle maintenance tasks, freeing its billing team to pursue features that add value. The biz also says the Copilot agent reduced the amount of time required to get engineers up to speed with its AI models.

GitHub found various people to say nice things about the Copilot agent. We'll leave it at that.

Original Submission

slon writes:

Positive proof-of-concept experiments may lead to the world's first treatment for celiac disease:

An investigational treatment for celiac disease effectively controls the condition—at least in an animal model—in a first-of-its-kind therapeutic for a condition that affects approximately 70 million people worldwide.

Currently, there is no treatment for celiac disease, which is caused by dietary exposure to gluten, a protein in wheat, barley and rye. The grains can produce severe intestinal symptoms, leading to inflammation and bloating.

Indeed, celiac disease is the bane of bread and pasta lovers around the world, and despite fastidiously maintaining a gluten-free eating plan, the disease can still lead to social isolation and poor nutrition, gastroenterologists say. It is a serious autoimmune disorder that, when left unaddressed, can cause malnutrition, bone loss, anemia, and elevated cancer risk, primarily intestinal lymphoma.

Now, an international team of scientists led by researchers in Switzerland hope to change the fate of celiac patients for the better. A series of innovative experiments has produced "a cell soothing" technique that targets regulatory T cells, the immune system components commonly known as Tregs.

The cell-based technique borrows from a form of cancer therapy and underlies a unique discovery that may eventually lead to a new treatment strategy, data in the study suggests.

"Celiac disease is a chronic inflammatory disorder of the small intestine with a global prevalence of about 1%," writes Dr. Raphaël Porret, lead author of the research published in Science Translational Medicine.

"The condition is caused by a maladapted immune response to cereal gluten proteins, which causes tissue damage in the gut and the formation of autoantibodies to the enzyme transglutaminase," continued Porret, a researcher in the department of Immunology and Allergy at the University of Lausanne.

Working with colleagues from the University of California, San Francisco, as well as at the Norwegian Celiac Disease Research Center at the University of Oslo, Porret and colleagues have advanced a novel concept. They theorize that a form of cell therapy, based on a breakthrough form of cancer treatment, might also work against celiac disease.

coolgopher writes:

https://www.technologyreview.com/2025/05/20/1116327/ai-energy-usage-climate-footprint-big-tech/

AI's integration into our lives is the most significant shift in online life in more than a decade. Hundreds of millions of people now regularly turn to chatbots for help with homework, research, coding, or to create images and videos. But what's powering all of that?

[...] Given the direction AI is headed—more personalized, able to reason and solve complex problems on our behalf, and everywhere we look—it's likely that our AI footprint today is the smallest it will ever be. According to new projections published by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in December, by 2028 more than half of the electricity going to data centers will be used for AI. At that point, AI alone could consume as much electricity annually as 22% of all US households.

[...] Racks of servers hum along for months, ingesting training data, crunching numbers, and performing computations. This is a time-consuming and expensive process—it's estimated that training OpenAI's GPT-4 took over $100 million and consumed 50 gigawatt-hours of energy, enough to power San Francisco for three days. It's only after this training, when consumers or customers "inference" the AI models to get answers or generate outputs, that model makers hope to recoup their massive costs and eventually turn a profit.

"For any company to make money out of a model—that only happens on inference," says Esha Choukse, a researcher at Microsoft Azure who has studied how to make AI inference more efficient.

As conversations with experts and AI companies made clear, inference, not training, represents an increasing majority of AI's energy demands and will continue to do so in the near future. It's now estimated that 80–90% of computing power for AI is used for inference.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Evidence for 'Planet Nine' lurking on the fringes of the Solar System is building. So why can't astronomers spot it? - ABC News:

A huge unknown lurks in the far reaches of our Solar System — something massive enough to pull distant space rocks into extraordinarily long, thin loops around the Sun.

At least, this is what US astronomer Michael Brown believes.

In 2016, he and a colleague at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) proposed something almost unfathomable: a huge planet, up to 10 times heftier than Earth, way out on the edge of our Solar System.

[...] Those that are convinced Planet Nine is out there are waiting for the new Vera Rubin Observatory to come online in Chile early next year.

The telescope has an 8.4-metre mirror, which makes it the largest camera ever built for astronomy.

"It's going to be doing something called the Legacy Survey of Space and Time, which is a massive survey — taking images of the sky every single night," Swinburne University of Technology astrophysicist Sara Webb says.

[...] "If Vera Rubin doesn't find it by reflected sunlight, the next best thing is to find it not as reflected sunlight, but by using radio telescopes," he says.

"They're not designed to look at little planets; they're designed to look at the whole sky at once. It'll take a while for the telescopes to be able to see that this planet has moved from one place to the other, so it'll be a couple of years of those surveys before we know it's there.

Original Submission

hubie writes:

The Roman massacre that never happened according to a new study of an iconic archaeological site:

A new study by archaeologists at Bournemouth University (BU) has revealed that bodies recovered from a 'war-cemetery' previously attributed to the Roman Conquest of Britain at Maiden Castle Iron Age hillfort in Dorset, did not die in a single dramatic event.

A re-analysis of the burials, including a new programme of radiocarbon dating, has revealed that, rather than dying in a single, catastrophic event, individuals fell in periods of lethal violence spanning multiple generations, spread across the late first century BC to the early first century AD. This is suggestive of episodic periods of bloodshed, possibly the result of localised turmoil, executions or dynastic infighting during the decades leading up to the Roman Conquest of Britain.

BU's Dr Martin Smith, Associate Professor in Forensic and Biological Anthropology, who analysed the bodies said: "The find of dozens of human skeletons displaying lethal weapon injuries was never in doubt, however, by undertaking a systematic programme of radiocarbon dating we have been able to establish that these individuals died over a period of decades, rather than a single terrible event".

The 'war-cemetery' of Maiden Castle Iron Age hillfort in Dorset is one of Britain's most famous archaeological discoveries. Discovered in 1936, many of the skeletons unearthed had clear evidence of trauma to the head and upper body. Dig director at the time, Sir Mortimer Wheeler suggested, were "the marks of battle", caused during a furious but ultimately futile defence of the hillfort against an all-conquering Roman legion. Wheeler's colourful account of an attack on the native hillfort and the massacre of its defenders by invading Romans, was accepted as fact, becoming an iconic event in popular narratives of Britain's 'Island Story'.

Principal Academic in Prehistoric and Roman Archaeology at BU, and the study's Dig Director, Dr Miles Russell said: "Since the 1930s, the story of Britons fighting Romans at one of the largest hillforts in the country has become a fixture in historical literature. With the Second World War fast approaching, no one was really prepared to question the results. The tale of innocent men and women of the local Durotriges tribe being slaughtered by Rome is powerful and poignant. It features in countless articles, books and TV documentaries. It has become a defining moment in British history, marking the sudden and violent end of the Iron Age."

Dr Russell added: "The trouble is it doesn't appear to have actually happened. Unfortunately, the archaeological evidence now points to it being untrue. This was a case of Britons killing Britons, the dead being buried in a long-abandoned fortification. The Roman army committed many atrocities, but this does not appear to be one of them."

[...] The study has also raised further questions as to what may still lie undiscovered at Maiden Castle. Paul Cheetham commented that "Whilst Wheeler's excavation was excellent in itself, he was only able to investigate a fraction of the site. It is likely that a larger number of burials still remains undiscovered around the immense ramparts."

Journal Reference: https://doi.org/10.1111/ojoa.12324 [open access]

Original Submission

owl writes:

https://archive.is/lhQuY

In November of 2021, Vladimir Dinets was driving his daughter to school when he first noticed a hawk using a pedestrian crosswalk.

The bird—a young Cooper's hawk, to be exact—wasn't using the crosswalk, in the sense of treading on the painted white stripes to reach the other side of the road in West Orange, New Jersey. But it was using the crosswalk—more specifically, the pedestrian-crossing signal that people activate to keep traffic out of said crosswalk—to ambush prey.

The crossing signal—a loud, rhythmic click audible from at least half a block away—was more of a pre-attack cue, or so the hawk had realized, Dinets, a zoologist now at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville, told me. On weekday mornings, when pedestrians would activate the signal during rush hour, roughly 10 cars would usually be backed up down a side street. This jam turned out to be the perfect cover for a stealth attack: Once the cars had assembled, the bird would swoop down from its perch in a nearby tree, fly low to the ground along the line of vehicles, then veer abruptly into a residential yard, where a small flock of sparrows, doves, and starlings would often gather to eat crumbs—blissfully unaware of their impending doom.

The hawk had masterminded a strategy, Dinets told me: To pull off the attacks, the bird had to create a mental map of the neighborhood—and, maybe even more important, understand that the rhythmic ticktock of the crossing signal would prompt a pileup of cars long enough to facilitate its assaults. The hawk, in other words, appears to have learned to interpret a traffic signal and take advantage of it, in its quest to hunt. Which is, with all due respect, more impressive than how most humans use a pedestrian crosswalk.

Cooper's hawks are known for their speedy sneak attacks in the wild, Janet Ng, a senior wildlife biologist with Environment and Climate Change Canada, told me. Zipping alongside bushes and branches for cover, they'll conceal themselves from prey until the very last moment of a planned ambush. "They're really fantastic hunters that way," Ng said. Those skills apparently translate fairly easily into urban environments, where Cooper's hawks flit amid trees and concrete landscapes, stalking city pigeons and doves.

[...] But maybe the most endearing part of this hawk's tale is the idea that it took advantage of a crosswalk signal at all—an environmental cue that, under most circumstances, is totally useless to birds and perhaps a nuisance. To see any animal blur the line between what we consider the human and non-human spheres is eerie, but also humbling: Most other creatures, Plotnik said, are simply more flexible than we'd ever think.

Original Submission

NotSanguine writes:

A Caltech press release details research on the evolution of Jupiter.

From the release:

Understanding Jupiter's early evolution helps illuminate the broader story of how our solar system developed its distinct structure. Jupiter's gravity, often called the "architect" of our solar system, played a critical role in shaping the orbital paths of other planets and sculpting the disk of gas and dust from which they formed.

In a new study published in the journal Nature Astronomy, Konstantin Batygin (PhD '12), professor of planetary science at Caltech; and Fred C. Adams, professor of physics and astronomy at the University of Michigan; provide a detailed look into Jupiter's primordial state. Their calculations reveal that roughly 3.8 million years after the solar system's first solids formed—a key moment when the disk of material around the Sun, known as the protoplanetary nebula, was dissipating—Jupiter was significantly larger and had an even more powerful magnetic field.

"Our ultimate goal is to understand where we come from, and pinning down the early phases of planet formation is essential to solving the puzzle," Batygin says. "This brings us closer to understanding how not only Jupiter but the entire solar system took shape."

Batygin and Adams approached this question by studying Jupiter's tiny moons Amalthea and Thebe, which orbit even closer to Jupiter than Io, the smallest and nearest of the planet's four large Galilean moons. Because Amalthea and Thebe have slightly tilted orbits, Batygin and Adams analyzed these small orbital discrepancies to calculate Jupiter's original size: approximately twice its current radius, with a predicted volume that is the equivalent of over 2,000 Earths. The researchers also determined that Jupiter's magnetic field at that time was approximately 50 times stronger than it is today.

[...] Importantly, these insights were achieved through independent constraints that bypass traditional uncertainties in planetary formation models—which often rely on assumptions about gas opacity, accretion rate, or the mass of the heavy element core. Instead, the team focused on the orbital dynamics of Jupiter's moons and the conservation of the planet's angular momentum—quantities that are directly measurable. Their analysis establishes a clear snapshot of Jupiter at the moment the surrounding solar nebula evaporated, a pivotal transition point when the building materials for planet formation disappeared and the primordial architecture of the solar system was locked in.

Cool research with a novel methodology.

Referenced paper (Abstract)
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41550-025-02512-y

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

In an email posted on Reddit from "The VPN Secure Team" sent to lifetime subscription holders, it's explained that VPNSecure was acquired in 2023. The deal included the technology, domain, and customer database, but not the liabilities.

"Unfortunately, the previous owner did not disclose that thousands of Lifetime Deals (LTDs) had been sold through platforms like StackSocial," reads the mail.

"We discovered this only months later – when a large portion of our resources were strained by these LTD accounts and high support volume from users, who through part of the database, provided no sustaining income to help us improve and maintain the service."

As a result of this, the new owners began deactivating lifetime accounts that had been dormant for six months. While it's claimed that this was "technically fair," – for some reason – the new owners seem shocked that it led to a wave of negative reviews.

[...] Ars Technica reports that a follow-up email from VPNSecure shed more light on the situation. It states that InfiniteQuant Ltd, which is a different company than InfiniteQuant Capital Ltd, acquired VPN Secure in an "asset only deal."

It goes on to say that while the buyers received the tech, brand, infrastructure, and tech, they received none of the company, contracts, payments, or obligations from the previous owners.

It's also claimed the Lifetime Deals sold by the old team between 2015 and 2017 were not disclosed to InfiniteQuant Ltd, but it kept the accounts running for 2 extra years despite never receiving a "single cent from those subscriptions." So stop being ungrateful, basically.

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

While CTO officially stands for Chief Technology Officer, the standard jokes are that it’s either Chief Talking Officer or Chief Travel Officer. I embraced all of those roles, especially the travel part when my territory covered India, New Zealand, China and everything in between. And while I definitely relished having a job that required me to keep developing my expertise in a wide range of technical fields, I also really enjoyed the chance to keep working on my communications skills, whether that was through talking or writing.

In my last year at VMware (when travel was curtailed due to COVID) I put a lot of energy into developing (online) presentations, including one on the art of giving presentations. You can find that talk on Peertube – it is in PechaKucha format, which means 20 slides, 20 seconds per slide, which I find a great source of creative inspiration. You can probably watch it in less time than it takes to read this article.

The longer I worked in technology, the more I came to believe that communications, both oral and written, can be a key differentiator in a technical career. Probably the first time I realized this was when writing my PhD thesis. Engineers as a group are notoriously averse to writing, but I came to see the satisfaction to be had in clearly communicating your ideas on paper. For one thing, by the time I was in the last year of my program, I was pretty happy to be producing something as tangible as a thesis. I had written a lot less software in my course than I’d expected, a result of Edinburgh Computer Science being more of a theory place than one encouraging system building from its students. So watching my ideas grow on the page into something the size of a book was oddly satisfying.

I think the reason I was not as averse to writing as many engineers had a lot to do with the way I was educated in Australia. High school English was a “must-pass” subject if you wanted to go on to university, and I found it much more challenging than my maths and science classes. Not wanting to take chances, I worked disproportionately hard on English in my last year of high school, surprising both myself and my teachers with the highest grade of my life in the final exam that mattered most.

Somewhat to my chagrin, the undergraduate engineering degree in those days did not allow any courses to be taken outside of the Engineering department, but there was a mandated “English for Engineers” course, taught by one of the engineering lecturers. (I think the course had a different official name, something like “Engineering Communications”.) I can only remember two things about that course: one is that we read “Voss” by Nobel-prize-winner Patrick White, which was challenging but enjoyable. So they weren’t treating us as complete dummies. And the second was that we had to make a formal presentation in front of the class, which I found both stressful and educational. (My high school debating experience helped a bit here.) While I might have enjoyed an actual English Literature class more, this one was much better than the course name implied.

I continued to make the occasional presentations through my PhD program and into my early career, but a pivotal experience was watching David Clark speak twice at SIGCOMM 1990, at which he won the SIGCOMM award and also presented the paper, "Architectural considerations for a new generation of protocols.” His presentation of the latter was so engaging that I remember thinking “that is how you get people to listen to your ideas.” (That paper’s ideas continue to influence my thinking today.) As a young researcher at Bellcore at the time, I was surrounded by people who had creative ideas, but I had never seen someone get the audience excited about their work the way Clark had done. I resolved to get better at making technical presentations.

At the same time, I was working on my “accidental smartNIC” project as part of the Aurora gigabit testbed. There came a point where I realized that the system was complex enough that I needed to write some sort of design document–hardly a revolutionary idea in industry, but somewhat uncommon in the research group that I worked in. My first audience for this document was me, because I realized I couldn’t keep all the details in my head any more. Later on it would enable me to involve others in the project both as subsystem designers and programmers of the system.

quietus writes:

"The European Union, which was formed for the primary purpose of taking advantage of the United States on TRADE, has been very difficult to deal with. Their powerful Trade Barriers, Vat Taxes, ridiculous Corporate Penalties, Non-Monetary Trade Barriers, Monetary Manipulations, unfair and unjustified lawsuits against Americans Companies, and more, have led to a Trade Deficit with the U.S. of more than $250,000,000 a year, a number which is totally unacceptable. Our discussions with them are going nowhere! Therefore, I am recommending a straight 50% Tariff on the European Union, starting on June 1, 2025. There is no Tariff if the product is built or manufactured in the United States. Thank you for your attention to this matter!"

@realdonaldtrump, Truth Social, May 23.

President Trump announced a 50% tariff on EU exports into the United States.

the Trump administration considers EU food and product standards protectionist and wants the bloc to unilaterally drop tariffs. The EU has proposed that both sides scrap tariffs on all industrial and some agricultural products.

Brussels has also offered to help tackle Chinese overcapacity in sectors such as steel and cars, and to discuss restrictions on exporting technology to Beijing.

But it has refused to discuss scrapping national digital taxes or VAT, key US demands, or weakening EU regulation of US tech companies.

Trump's post on Friday contrasted with his administration's moves to defuse trade tensions with Beijing this month. The US has also recently sealed a trade deal with the UK.

(Source: Financial Times, May 23, Trump warns of 50% tariff on EU imports from next month)

Stock up on bourbon while you still can, mateys.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

You are glowing – no, really:

You, along with all living things, produce subtle, ethereal, semi-visible light that glows until you die, according to a recent study.

You would be forgiven for jumping to the conclusion that this spooky luminescence is evidence that auras exist, or something similar.

But Dr Daniel Oblak, physicist at the University of Calgary and last author of the study, told BBC Science Focus that, while auras are a metaphysical, spiritual, unscientific idea, this light is not. Instead, it's called ultraweak photon emission (UPE) and is a natural product of your metabolism.

"I normally point out that UPE is a result of a biochemical process and in that sense is related to what happens in a glow-stick, which no one suspects of having an aura," he said.

"UPE is so weak that it is not visible to the human eye and completely overwhelmed by other sources of light, unless you are in a completely dark room."

That's not to say that shutting your curtains and turning off your lights will allow you to see your own glow. This light is between 1,000 and 1,000,000 times dimmer than the human eye can perceive.

UPE is produced when chemicals in your cells create unstable molecules known as reactive oxygen species (ROS), basically byproducts of your body's metabolism.

When ROS levels rise, they cause other molecules to become 'excited', meaning they carry excess energy. It's this energy that causes light to be emitted.

A key driver of this effect is oxidative stress – a form of cellular wear and tear caused by factors like ageing and illness. The more oxidative stress the body experiences, the more ROS it produces – and the more light it emits.

"Hence, when an organism ceases living, it stops metabolising and thus, the ultraweak photon emission ends," he said.

To test UPE, Calgary scientists measured UPE produced by immobilised and dead mice, as well as scratched leaves.

Using specialist cameras, they observed much more UPE being emitted by the living mice, compared to their dead bodies. Meanwhile, the leaves gave off much more light where they had been damaged, compared to unscratched areas.

That's because they were experiencing more oxidative stress in scratched regions. But the dead mice did not glow, because their bodies weren't metabolising anymore.

Journal Reference: DOI: https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.jpclett.4c03546

Original Submission

fliptop writes:

AI chatbot that pulled him into what she described as an emotionally and sexually abusive relationship that led to his suicide:

A federal judge on Wednesday rejected arguments made by an artificial intelligence company that its chatbots are protected by the First Amendment—at least for now. The developers behind Character.AI are seeking to dismiss a lawsuit alleging the company's chatbots pushed a teenage boy to kill himself.

The judge's order will allow the wrongful death lawsuit to proceed, in what legal experts say is among the latest constitutional tests of artificial intelligence.

The suit was filed by a mother from Florida, Megan Garcia, who alleges that her 14-year-old son Sewell Setzer III fell victim to a Character.AI chatbot that pulled him into what she described as an emotionally and sexually abusive relationship that led to his suicide.

[...] The suit against Character Technologies, the company behind Character.AI, also names individual developers and Google as defendants. It has drawn the attention of legal experts and AI watchers in the United States and beyond, as the technology rapidly reshapes workplaces, marketplaces, and relationships despite what experts warn are potentially existential risks.

[...] The lawsuit alleges that in the final months of his life, Setzer became increasingly isolated from reality as he engaged in sexualized conversations with the bot, which was patterned after a fictional character from the television show "Game of Thrones." In his final moments, the bot told Setzer it loved him and urged the teen to "come home to me as soon as possible," according to screenshots of the exchanges. Moments after receiving the message, Setzer shot himself, according to legal filings.

Related: Chatbot 'Encouraged Teen to Kill Parents Over Screen Time Limit'

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

A new examination of Apple partner TSMC's Arizona facility shines a spotlight on how the U.S. bet on domestic chipmaking is colliding with labor shortages, cost overruns, and global dependencies.

Just outside Phoenix, a sleek, high-security facility is taking shape. Known as Fab 21, the site is operated by Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) and will soon be one of the most advanced chipmaking facilities in the world.

The microscopic transistors produced here will power Apple devices, artificial intelligence systems and critical infrastructure, representing a significant shift of advanced technology manufacturing to American soil.

TSMC currently makes about 90% of the world's most advanced semiconductors, nearly all of them in Taiwan. That long-standing reliance is now being reexamined amid global supply disruptions and rising tensions in the Asia-Pacific.

[...] TSMC replicated much of its Taiwan production environment in Arizona, but the complexity of the process means the US still relies heavily on foreign equipment, materials and expertise.

[...] Officially, Taiwan's government supports TSMC's global expansion. Privately, there is concern. Taiwan's dominance in semiconductors, sometimes called the "Silicon Shield," is seen as critical leverage in deterring Chinese aggression.

Moving high-end production overseas may reduce that leverage and undermine the island's geopolitical relevance.

Some in Taipei have warned against letting the US or other allies "hollow out" Taiwan's tech advantage. Others view diversification as necessary insurance against supply chain shocks or military threats.