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janrinok writes:

New technologies help wood-burning stoves burn more efficiently, produce less smoke

Oregon State University researchers are gaining a more detailed understanding of emissions from wood-burning stoves and developing technologies that allow stoves to operate much more cleanly and safely, potentially limiting particulate matter pollution by 95%.

The work has key implications for human health as wood-burning stoves are a leading source of PM2.5 emissions in the United States. PM2.5 refers to fine particulate matter with a diameter of 2.5 micrometers or smaller that can be inhaled deeply into the lungs and even enter the bloodstream. Exposure to PM2.5 is a known cause of cardiovascular disease and is linked to the onset and worsening of respiratory illness.

Even though a relatively small number of households use wood stoves, they are the U.S.'s third-largest source of particulate matter pollution, after wildfire smoke and agricultural dust, said Nordica MacCarty of the OSU College of Engineering.

Residential wood combustion, especially the use of inefficient stoves, is also a significant source of other harmful emissions including polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, carbon monoxide, nitrogen oxides, methane, benzene and formaldehyde.

"Wood is an affordable, local, renewable, low-carbon fuel that should be an important part of the U.S. energy mix, but it must be burned cleanly to effectively protect health," MacCarty said.

"Folks typically think of pollution as coming from vehicles and industry, but household wood stoves are a larger source—just a few smoky stoves can create a harmful effect on air quality in an entire community."

MacCarty published a paper in the Journal of the Air & Waste Management Association showing that 70% of the pollution emitted from wood stove flues happens at two points in time: when a stove is first lit, and when it's reloaded. MacCarty's team gained that knowledge by developing a new monitoring technique and deploying equipment at a collection of wood stove users' homes in rural Oregon.

According to the Environmental Protection Agency, there are an estimated 6.5 million inefficient stoves in the U.S., most of them models that predate EPA clean-burning standards. In all, there are roughly 10 million wood-burning stoves in the country, or one for every 35 people.

"A lot of the older stoves are essentially just metal boxes with chimneys and they don't incorporate modern engineering principles to optimize heat transfer and combustion," said MacCarty, the Richard & Gretchen Evans Professor of Humanitarian Engineering and an associate professor of mechanical engineering.

"They have no catalysts or secondary combustion to reduce emissions and lower the risk of creosote buildup that can cause chimney fires."

canopic jug writes:

Several sites are reporting that the legendary programmer Bill Atkinson has died. He contributed QuickDraw to the early Macintosh and was even responsible for MacPaint and Hypercard. The former, MacPaint, inspired Photoshop. The latter, Hypercard, can be considered an important milestone in computing even though it lacked the networking which the WWW is built upon.

He designed a program where information—text, video, audio—would be stored on virtual cards. These would link to each other. It was a vision that harkened back to a 1940s idea by scientist Vannevar Bush which had been sharpened by a technologist named Ted Nelson, who called the linking technique "hypertext." But it was Atkinson who made the software work for a popular computer. When he showed the program, called HyperCard, to Apple CEO John Sculley, the executive was blown away, and asked Atkinson what he wanted for it. "I want it to ship," Atkinson said. Sculley agreed to put it on every computer. HyperCard would become a forerunner of the World Wide Web, proof of the viability of the hyperlinking concept.

— Bill Atkinson, Macintosh Pioneer and Inventor of Hypercard, Dies at 74, Wired.

The Internet Archive has a digitized edition of a two part interview with him, recorded in 1985 and originally aired on KFOX.

• The Famous Computer Cafe 1985-01-08 Bill Atkinson : The Famous Computer Cafe
• The Famous Computer Cafe 1985-01-09 Bill Atkinson : The Famous Computer Cafe

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Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

In a significant advance for brain-computer interface (BCI) technology, a University of Michigan research team has achieved the first in-human recording using Paradromics' Connexus device – a wireless, fully implantable BCI designed to restore communication and movement for people living with severe neurological conditions.

The procedure took place on May 14, 2025, during epilepsy surgery, where the device was temporarily placed on the patient's temporal lobe, an area essential for processing sound and memory. This opportunity allowed the team to safely test the device's ability to capture neural signals without adding risk to the patient, as the surgery already required access to the brain.

The Connexus stands out for its compact size – smaller than a dime – and its high-density array of 421 microelectrodes, each thinner than a human hair. Unlike many earlier BCIs, which often relied on fewer electrodes and required external wires, Connexus is engineered to be fully implantable.

The device collects electrical signals from individual neurons, transmitting them via a thin lead to a transceiver implanted in the chest. From there, the data is sent wirelessly to an external computer, where artificial intelligence algorithms interpret the patterns and translate them into actions, such as moving a cursor or generating synthesized speech.

[...] The potential applications of Connexus extend beyond restoring speech and movement. By decoding neural signals at the level of individual neurons, the technology could one day help address mental health conditions or chronic pain by interpreting mood or discomfort directly from brain activity.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

What happened to all the megafauna? From moas to mammoths, many large animals went extinct between 50 and 10,000 years ago. Learning why could provide crucial evidence about prehistoric ecosystems and help us understand future potential extinctions. But surviving fossils are often too fragmented to determine the original species, and DNA is not always recoverable, especially in hot or damp environments.

Now scientists have isolated collagen peptide markers which allow them to identify three key megafauna that were once present across Australia: a hippo-sized wombat, a giant kangaroo, and a marsupial with enormous claws.

"The geographic range and extinction date of megafauna in Australia, and potential interaction with early modern humans, is a hotly debated topic," said Professor Katerina Douka of the University of Vienna, senior author of the article in Frontiers in Mammal Science.

"The low number of fossils that have been found at paleontological sites across the country means that it is difficult to test hypotheses about why these animals became extinct," explained first author Dr. Carli Peters of the University of Algarve.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Are Dead Sea Scrolls older than we thought?:

Over the years, scholars of the Dead Sea Scrolls have analyzed the ancient parchments with various methods: for example, X-rays, multispectral imaging, "virtual unfolding," and paleography, i.e., studying elements in their writing styles. The scrolls are believed to date back to between the third century BCE and the first century CE, but those dates rely largely on paleography, since only a handful of the scrolls have calendar dates written on them.

However, the traditional paleographic method is inherently subjective and based on a given scholar's experience. A team of scientists has combined radiocarbon dating from 24 scroll samples and machine-learning-based handwriting analysis to create their own AI program—dubbed Enoch. The objective was to achieve more accurate date estimates, according to a new paper published in the journal PLoS ONE. Among the findings: Many of the scrolls are older than previously thought.

[...] The development of Enoch grew out of the team's earlier deep neural network for ferreting out handwritten ink-trace patterns in digitized manuscripts, involving micro-level geometric shape analysis. "Enoch emphasizes shared characteristics and similarity matching between trained and test manuscripts, where traditional paleography focuses on subtle differences that are assumed to be indicative for style development," the authors wrote. "Combining dissimilarity matching and adaptive reinforcement learning can uncover hidden patterns."

They tested Enoch by having paleographic experts evaluate the AI program's age estimate for several scrolls. The results: About 79 percent of Enoch's estimates were deemed "realistic," while its age estimates for the remaining 21 percent were either too young, too old, or just indecisive.

This new model revealed that many of the Dead Sea Scrolls are older than previous estimates based solely on paleography. That should be relevant for the question of when two ancient Jewish script styles—"Hasmonean" and "Herodian"—developed, for example. The former script was thought to have emerged between 150–50 BCE, but the authors believe Hasmonean could have emerged much earlier; ditto for the Herodian script. So both scripts may have coexisted since the late second century, challenging the prevailing view that they preexisted by the mid-first century BCE.

Journal Reference:
Mladen Popović, Maruf A. Dhali, Lambert Schomaker, et al. Dating ancient manuscripts using radiocarbon and AI-based writing style analysis, PLOS ONE (DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0323185)

Original Submission

_-iNT13- writes:

https://edition.cnn.com/2025/06/04/europe/france-crypto-kidnappings-detained-intl

Badiss Mohamed Amide Bajjou, a 24-year-old French-Moroccan, suspected of being behind a string of violent kidnappings in France of people linked to cryptocurrency was detained Tuesday in Morocco. He was wanted by France for armed extortion and kidnapping as part of a criminal gang, according to the "red notice" for him published by Interpol.

French Justice Minister Gerald Darmanin thanked Morocco on X for detaining the man, citing the "excellent judicial cooperation" between the two countries.

Bajjou had "multiple bladed weapons of different sizes" in his possession when he was taken into custody, as well as "dozens of mobile phones and communication devices" and a sum of money allegedly related to criminal activities, Moroccan state media reported.

The man was apprehended, weeks after the latest kidnapping attempt in Paris, near Tangier in northern Morocco, according to CNN affiliate BFMTV. He is allegedly linked to a string of violent crimes related to crypto funds dating back to at least January 21 of this year.

According to the media he had "multiple bladed weapons of different sizes", "dozens of mobile phones and communication devices", and money alleged to be from criminal activities.

Reported widely, including:

• https://www.france24.com/en/live-news/20250604-suspected-mastermind-of-french-crypto-kidnappings-held-in-morocco
• https://www.coindesk.com/policy/2025/06/04/suspect-in-french-crypto-kidnappings-arrested-in-morocco

See also: https://soylentnews.org/article.pl?sid=25/05/07/2330241

Original Submission

upstart writes:

The system can take a passenger's profile into account to better protect them during crashes:

Volvo has introduced a new seatbelt technology that can customize the protection it provides in real time. The "multi-adaptive safety belt" system, as the automaker is calling it, uses data input from both interior and exterior sensors to change protection settings based on various factors. It can take a person's height, weight, body shape and seating position into account, as well as the direction and speed of the vehicle. The system can communicate all those information to the seatbelt "in the blink of an eye" so that it can optimize protection for the passenger.

If the passenger is on the larger side, for instance, they will receive a higher belt load setting to reduce the risk of a head injury in the event of a serious crash. For milder crashes, someone with a smaller frame will receive a lower belt load setting to prevent rib injuries. Volvo didn't specifically say if the system also takes the position of a seatbelt on women into account, since it doesn't always fit right over a woman's chest. However, the automaker explained that the system expands the number of load-limiting profiles to 11. Load limiters control how much force a seatbelt applies on the body during a crash. Typically, seatbelts only have three load-limiting profiles, but Volvo expanding them to 11 means the system can better optimize the protection a passenger gets.

Volvo used information from five decades of safety research and from a database of over 80,000 people involved in real-life accidents to design the new safety belt. The system was also created to incorporate improvements rolled out via over the-air software updates, which the company expects to release as it gets more data and insights.

"The world first multi-adaptive safety belt is another milestone for automotive safety and a great example of how we leverage real-time data with the ambition to help save millions of more lives," said Åsa Haglund, head of Volvo Cars Safety Centre. "This marks a major upgrade to the modern three-point safety belt, a Volvo invention introduced in 1959, estimated to have saved over a million lives."

Volvo engineer Nils Bohlin designed the modern three-point seatbelt and made its patent available for use by other automakers. The company didn't say whether it'll be as generous with the multi-adaptive safety belt, but the new system will debut in the all-electric Volvo EX60 midsize SUV sometime next year.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Mac fan paid $900 to color-match iconic Apple beige-gray "Platinum" plastic for everyone:

On Tuesday [03 JUN 2025], classic computer collector Joe Strosnider announced the availability of a new 3D-printer filament that replicates the iconic "Platinum" color scheme used in classic Macintosh computers from the late 1980s through the 1990s. The PLA filament (PLA is short for polylactic acid) allows hobbyists to 3D-print nostalgic novelties, replacement parts, and accessories that match the original color of vintage Apple computers.

[...] The Platinum color, which Apple used in its desktop and portable computer lines starting with the Apple IIgs in 1986, has become synonymous with a distinctive era of classic Macintosh aesthetic. Over time, original Macintosh plastics have become brittle and discolored with age, so matching the "original" color can be a somewhat challenging and subjective experience.

Strosnider, who runs a website about his extensive vintage computer collection in Ohio, worked for years to color-match the distinctive beige-gray hue of the Macintosh Platinum scheme, resulting in a spool of hobby-ready plastic by Polar Filament and priced at $21.99 per kilogram.

According to a forum post, Strosnider paid approximately $900 to develop the color and purchase an initial 25-kilogram supply of the filament. Rather than keeping the formulation proprietary, he arranged for Polar Filament to make the color publicly available.

"I paid them a fee to color match the speaker box from inside my Mac Color Classic," Strosnider wrote in a Tinkerdifferent forum post on Tuesday. "In exchange, I asked them to release the color to the public so anyone can use it."

[...] The timing of the filament's release coincides with growing interest in 3D-printed cases and accessories for vintage computer hardware. One example is the SE Mini desktop case, a project by "GutBomb" that transforms Macintosh SE and SE/30 logic boards into compact desktop computers that can connect to modern displays. The case, designed to be 3D-printed in multiple pieces and assembled, represents the type of project that benefits from color-accurate filament.

The SE Mini case requires approximately half a spool of filament and takes a couple of days to print on consumer 3D printers. Users can outfit the case with modern components, such as Pico PSUs and BlueSCSI storage devices, while maintaining the classic Macintosh appearance.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

The United Kingdom's Government Digital Service (GDS) has found that giving civil service employees access to Microsoft 365 Copilot saved them an average 26 minutes per day on office tasks.

Microsoft 365 Copilot provides generative AI assistance with various Microsoft Office applications like Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, and Teams. It allows workers to accomplish some tasks through a natural language chat interface instead of mouse movements and menu clicks.

UK Technology Secretary Peter Kyle discussed the results of the study in a presentation at SWSX London.

"Whether it’s helping draft documents, preparing lesson plans, or cutting down on routine admin, AI tools are saving civil servants time every day. That means we can focus more on delivering faster, more personalised support where it really counts," said Kyle in a statement

The GDS ran a trial of Microsoft M365 Copilot with 20,000 government employees from September 30, 2024, through December 31, 2024.

Based on self-reported data, the resulting study [PDF] showed fairly consistent time savings across professions and organizational ranks, though precise tool use and benefits varied.

"Over 70 percent of users agreed that M365 Copilot reduced time spent searching for information, performing mundane tasks, and increased time spent on more strategic activities," the report says.

"Perceived concerns with security and the handling of sensitive data led to reduced benefits in a minority of cases. Limitations were observed when dealing with complex, nuanced, or data-heavy aspects of work."

The report claims if the reported time savings were replicated across a full working year, "users could save 13 days."

[...] The study didn't investigate whether the workers used this extra time to do more work, take extra time for lunch, or head off to the pub early. "Due to experimental constraints it was not possible to identify how time saved was spent," the report says.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

Researchers have developed a self-healing artificial muscle for use in soft robotics and wearable systems. It mimics the ability of animals and plants to detect and self-heal injuries. This transformative development by the University of Nebraska–Lincoln engineering team is claimed to address a longstanding problem with synthetic systems.

Injury sensing and self-repair are obviously important features of organic life forms, but present a complex challenge for robotics makers. Thus, the researchers have gone down the tried and trusted path of biomimicry here.

It is explained that the key development presented is a system that can identify damage from a puncture or extreme pressure, pinpoint its location, and autonomously initiate self-repair. For this purpose, a multi-layer architecture was presented at the recent IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation in Atlanta, Georgia.

The muscle, or actuator, has three layers. At the bottom is a damage detection layer, which is a soft electronic skin composed of liquid metal microdroplets embedded in a silicone elastomer in this case. Next, a stiff thermoplastic elastomer is used as the middle layer, and this material acts as the self-healing component. On top, there us the actuation layer, the layer which contracts and expands with the variation in water pressure.

To create a self-repair mechanism that functions without external intervention also requires a variety of monitoring currents which flow in a network across the ‘skin’ of this design. Damage can thus be sensed as disruptions to the electrical network. Ingeniously, this triggers the same network to deliver heat to areas of damage, melting the thermoplastic layer to seal ruptures. This is “effectively self-healing the wound,” says the researchers.

canopic jug writes:

The KDE community has an outreach campaign encouraging the use of the Plasma desktop by people with older, but usable, laptops. Vista10 support will come to an end and Vista11 has been designed not to run on many still viable models of computer due to several factors including Digital Restrictions Management (DRM) requirements centered around TPM-2.0. GNU/Linux can not only keep the old system working, it can improve its performance, ease of use, and general security. KDE Plasma can be part of that.

Even if you agree to this tech extortion now, in a few years time, they will do it again as they have done many times in the past.

But things don't have to be this way...

Upgrade the smart way! Keep the machine you've got and switch to Linux and Plasma.

Linux can give new life to your laptop. Combined with KDE's Plasma desktop, you get all the advantages of the safety, stability and hi tech of Linux, with all the features of a beautiful, modern and powerful graphic environment.

Their campaign page covers where and how beginners can get help, what the differences are, the benefits gained, and more.

[Editor's Comment: This is obviously a KDE/Plasma centric promotion - which doesn't mean that it is bad but there are lots of other options too. Which Linux OS and desktop would you recommend for someone wanting to make the move from Windows to Linux? Which are the best for a beginner, and which desktops provide the most intuitive interface for someone who has never sat down in front of a Linux computer before?--JR]

Previously:
(2025) Microsoft is Digging its Own Grave With Windows 11, and It Has to Stop
(2023) The Wintel Duopoly Plans to Send 240 Million PCs to the Landfill
(2023) Two Security Flaws in the TPM 2.0 Specs Put Cryptographic Keys at Risk
(2022) Report Claims Almost Half of Systems are Ineligible for Windows 11 Upgrades
(2021) Windows 11 Will Leave Millions of PCs Behind, and Microsoft is Struggling to Explain Why
(2019) Microsoft's Ongoing Tactics Against Competitors Explained, Based on its Own Documents
(2016) Windows 10 Anniversary Update to Require TPM 2.0 Module

Original Submission

slon writes:

The gender gap in education doesn't always disadvantage women. In countries like Estonia, Iceland, or Sweden, women outperform men in key indicators such as tertiary education and lifelong learning. But that, too, is a gender gap.

That's the starting point for researchers at the [Spain's] Miguel Hernández University of Elche (UMH), who have developed a mathematical model to support European education authorities in improving performance and reducing gender disparities, regardless of which group is underperforming.

"In many European countries, women outperform men at every educational level. If we're serious about equality, we must also address these differences," explains Inmaculada Sirvent, professor of Statistics and Operations Research at UMH and co-author of the study.

Published in Socio-Economic Planning Sciences, the study analyzes four key indicators used by the European Commission to track access to knowledge: tertiary attainment, adult participation in learning, early leavers from education and training, and the share of young people not in employment, education, or training (NEETs).

One of the study's most striking findings is that, on average, women outperform men in three of the four indicators. The most significant gap concerns tertiary attainment: 38.5% of women in Europe have completed tertiary education, compared to 32% of men. "This imbalance, even if favorable to women, is still a gender gap—and one the education system can and should help close," says Sirvent.

upstart writes:

Reality check: Microsoft Azure CTO pushes back on AI vibe coding hype, sees 'upper limit':

REDMOND, Wash. — Microsoft Azure CTO Mark Russinovich cautioned that "vibe coding" and AI-driven software development tools aren't capable of replacing human programmers for complex software projects, contrary to the industry's most optimistic aspirations for artificial intelligence.

Russinovich, giving the keynote Tuesday at a Technology Alliance startup and investor event, acknowledged the effectiveness of AI coding tools for simple web applications, basic database projects, and rapid prototyping, even when used by people with little or no programming experience.

However, he said these tools often break down when handling the most complex software projects that span multiple files and folders, and where different parts of the code rely on each other in complicated ways — the kinds of real-world development work that many professional developers tackle daily.

"These things are right now still beyond the capabilities of our AI systems," he said. "You're going to see progress made. They're going to get better. But I think that there's an upper limit with the way that autoregressive transformers work that we just won't get past."

Even five years from now, he predicted, AI systems won't be independently building complex software on the highest level, or working with the most sophisticated code bases.

Instead, he said, the future lies in AI-assisted coding, where AI helps developers write code but humans maintain oversight of architecture and complex decision-making. This is more in line with Microsoft's original vision of AI as a "Copilot," a term that originated with the company's GitHub Copilot AI-powered coding assistant.

[...] He discussed his own AI safety research, including a technique that he and other Microsoft researchers developed called "crescendo" that can trick AI models into providing information they'd otherwise refuse to give.

upstart writes:

Klarna CEO says company will use humans to offer VIP customer service:

"My wife taught me something," Klarna CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski told the crowd at London SXSW. He was addressing the headlines about the company looking to hire human workers after previously saying Klarna used artificial intelligence to do work that would equate to 700 workers. "Two things can be true at the same time," he said.

Siemiatkowski said it's true that the company looked to stop hiring human workers a few years ago and rolled out AI agents that have helped reduce the cost of customer support and increase the company's revenue per employee. The company had 5,500 workers two years ago, and that number now stands at around 3,000, he said, adding that as the company's salary costs have gone down, Klarna now seeks to reinvest a majority of that money into employee cash and equity compensation.

But, he insisted, this doesn't mean there isn't an opportunity for humans to work at his company. "We think offering human customer service is always going to be a VIP thing," he said, comparing it to how people pay more for clothing stitched by hand rather than machines. "So we think that two things can be done at the same time. We can use AI to automatically take away boring jobs, things that are manual work, but we are also going to promise our customers to have a human connection."

He spoke about how the company plans to balance employees and AI workers. Siemiatkowski said that right now, engineering positions at the company haven't shrunk as much as those in other departments, but he notes that this could shift.

"What I'm seeing internally is a new rise of businesspeople who are coding themselves," he said, adding that the challenge many engineers have these days is that they are not business savvy. "I think that category of people will become even more valuable going forward," Siemiatkowski continued, especially as they can use AI and put their business understanding to good use.

He himself is using ChatGPT to help him learn to code and help him understand more of the data side of Klarna. He said doing this has helped Klarna become a better company. Before, he thought he would never catch up in learning what was needed to take a more present role in database conversations at the company.

"I'll take a Slack thread, I'll throw it in ChatGPT and say, 'This makes sense, right?'" he said, adding that he uses ChatGPT like a private tutor.

[Editor's Comment: Klarna Group plc, commonly referred to as Klarna, is a Swedish fintech company. The company provides payment processing services for the e-commerce industry, managing store claims and customer payments. --JR]

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

In 1983, researchers discovered that the planet’s surface was speckled with strange, circular landforms. These rounded mountain belts, known as coronae, have no known Earthly counterparts, and they’ve remained enigmatic for decades. But hot plumes of rock upwelling from Venus’ mantle are shaping the mysterious landforms, a new analysis suggests. If true, that mean that Venus’ surface is tectonically active, and not merely a stagnant layer, researchers report May 14 in Science Advances.

Some “people have said, well, it’s geologically dead,” says earth and planetary scientist Anna Gülcher of the University of Bern in Switzerland. But over the past few years, there’s been a growing mound of evidence supporting tectonic activity on the Morning Star. The new work shows that “hot material resides beneath [coronae] and is likely driving tectonic processes that are not so different than what occurs on the Earth,” she says.

Gülcher and colleagues simulated how Venus’ crust deformed in response to material rising from the underlying mantle, a thick layer between the planet’s crust and core. This allowed the team to make predictions about what the underground plumes — buoyant blobs of hot material — and resulting coronae would look like to spacecraft instruments.

Then the team analyzed data on the planet’s topography and gravity collected in the early 1990s by NASA’s Magellan spacecraft, on the agency’s last mission to Venus. The gravity data were crucial. They revealed underground density differences linked to plumes rising from below.

By comparing the simulation predictions to the Magellan observations, the team was able to identify plumes beneath 52 of the observed coronae. What’s more, the simulation results suggested that the plumes had been sculpting the coronae in various ways.

[...] The research supports the argument that Venus’ tectonics are active today, he says. What’s more, the demonstrated ability of computer simulations to predict what spacecraft may observe will be a boon to future Venus missions like the VERITAS mission, which will gather much higher resolution data than Magellan, Byrne says.

If Venus is tectonically active today, perhaps it could have been Earthlike in the past, Gülcher says. “Was there a period in Venus’ history that was … potentially less hot, and more habitable?”

Journal Reference: G. Cascioli et al. A spectrum of tectonic processes at coronae on Venus revealed by gravity and topography. Science Advances. Vol. 11, May 14, 2025. doi: 10.1126/sciadv.adt5932.

Original Submission