Chinese Team Claims Stem Cell Breakthrough in Mice Study “Researchers at Tsinghua University in China have developed a new drug cocktail that can convert cells into totipotent stem cells, the very seeds of life…” writes New Atlas:

Not all stem cells are created equal — they sit in a branching hierarchy of differentiation potential. Multipotent stem cells are found in many tissues in adults, where they can turn i … ⌘ Read more

What Happened After Amazon’s $71M Tax Break in Central New York? This week Amazon announced that “Approximately 1,500 local Amazon employees will operate and work with innovative robotics technology” at a new fulfillment center that’s a first of its kind for Central New York.

Amazon’s press release says they’ve created 39,000 jobs in New York since 2010 — and “invested over $14 billion in the state of New York” — … ⌘ Read more

Tesla Pays Powerwall Owners to Form ‘Virtual Power Plant’ in California “Tesla has launched a new virtual power plant in partnership with PG&E in California that will pay Powerwalls owners to help stabilize the electric grid and end brownouts in California,” reports Electrek.

A virtual power plant (VPP) consists of distributed energy storage systems, like Tesla Powerwalls, used in concert to provide … ⌘ Read more

Here Come the Solar-Powered Cars The Guardian reports on the “world’s first production-ready solar car”, a streamlined and energy-efficient sedan-style vehicle covered with curved solar panels called “the Lightyear 0.”

The Dutch company Lightyear hopes to be shipping the vehicle by November, priced at about $264,000 (€250,000 or £215,000) — though the company plans another solar-assisted car priced at $32,000 (€30,000) as early as 2025. … ⌘ Read more

Facebook Agrees To Massive Settlement For Data Privacy Class Action Lawsuit Here’s an announcement from lawfirm DiCello Levitt Gutzler. This week a U.S. District court “granted preliminary approval of a $90 million settlement” with Facebook’s parent company, Meta Platforms, “to resolve a long-running class action accusing Facebook of tracking its subscribers’ activities on non-Facebook websites — eve … ⌘ Read more

Are Air Taxis Getting Closer? Last week a headline in the Los Angeles Times proclaimed “Look! Up in the sky! It’s an air taxi. They’re coming to Los Angeles.”

Even the British newspaper the Times took notice: Air taxis will be flying through the skies above Los Angeles in time for the summer Olympics of 2028 if city officials and entrepreneurs have their way.

A Silicon Valley company is the latest to claim that it is close to creating viable e … ⌘ Read more

How 1982’s ‘Blade Runner’ Defined the Sci-Fi Film Genre Esquire celebrates the 40th anniversary of the movie Blade Runner: Based on Philip K. Dick’s 1968 novel Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep, Scott’s film created a world so rich, so dirty and wet and worn out, so visually stunning, that imitation was an inevitability. Less gym-bro than The Terminator, less wacky than Terry Gilliam’s Brazil, and less all-out … ⌘ Read more

Satellites are Sinking Faster Toward Earth. Scientists Blame Solar Wind “In late 2021, operators of the European Space Agency’s Swarm constellation noticed something worrying,” reports Space.com. “The satellites, which measure the magnetic field around Earth, started sinking toward the atmosphere at an unusually fast rate — up to 10 times faster than before.

“The change coincided with the onset of th … ⌘ Read more

Tim Berners-Lee Skeptical of Web3, Touts Decentralized Internet Without Blockchain Sir Tim Berners-Lee “is skeptical about a blockchain-based internet,” reports the Next Web. Instead, they describe his new vision as “a decentralized architecture that gives users control of their data” — on a Platform called Solid: Berners-Lee shares Web3’s purported mission of transferring data from Big Tech t … ⌘ Read more

How China Hopes to Fly Mars Samples to Earth Two Years Before NASA and ESA “China’s Mars sample return mission aims to collect samples from the Red Planet and deliver them to Earth in 2031, or two years ahead of a NASA and ESA joint mission,” reports SpaceNews:

Lifting off in late 2028… the complex, multi-launch mission will have simpler architecture in comparison with the joint NASA-ESA project … ⌘ Read more

Are Today’s Programmers Leaving Too Much Code Bloat? Long-time Slashdot reader Artem S. Tashkinov shares a blog post from indie game programmer who complains “The special upload tool I had to use today was a total of 230MB of client files, and involved 2,700 different files to manage this process.”

Oh and BTW it gives error messages and right now, it doesn’t work. sigh.

I’ve seen coders do this. I know how this happ … ⌘ Read more

Why MapQuest, Jeeves, and Other ‘Internet Zombies’ are Still Around “The dream of the 1990s internet is still alive, if you look in the right corners,” argues the New York Times’ newsletter On Tech: More than 17 million Americans regularly use MapQuest, one of the first digital mapping websites that was long ago overtaken by Google and Apple, according to data from the research firm Comscore. The dot-com-era int … ⌘ Read more

Stack Overflow Survey Finds Developers Like Rust, Python, JavaScript and Remote Work For Stack Overflow’s annual survey, “Over 73,000 developers from 180 countries each spent roughly 15 minutes answering our questions,” a blog post announces: The top five languages for professional developers haven’t changed: JavaScript is still the most used, and Rust is the most loved for a seventh yea … ⌘ Read more

New Linux Foundation Podcast: ‘Untold Stories of Open Source’ The nonprofit Linux Foundation pays Linus Torvalds’ salary and supports many other open source projects. But they also launched a new podcast series this week covering “The Untold Stories of Open Source.”

“Each week we explore the people who are supporting Open Source projects, how they became involved with it, and the problems they faced along the way,” … ⌘ Read more

Meme-Stock Probe Finds Robinhood Woes Were Worse Than It Let On Bloomberg writes that the makers of the Robinhood app “faced a more dire situation during the height of last year’s meme-stock frenzy than executives at the online brokerage let on publicly, according to a report from top Democrats on a key congressional committee.”

A more-than-yearlong investigation by staff on the House Financial Services Commit … ⌘ Read more

US Proposes New Rules to Curb ‘Meme Stock’ Rallies America’s Securities and Exchange Commission “is considering broad changes to curb the frenetic trading of stocks based on social media activity,” reports Reuters:

The proposed overhaul would be the biggest change to Wall Street’s rules since 2005 and would affect nearly every corner of the market, from commission-free brokerages to market makers and exchanges. The U.S. House … ⌘ Read more

Is Dyslexia an Evolutionary Advantage Rather Than a ‘Disorder’? LinkedIn recently added ‘dyslexic thinking’ as an official skill.

And now the U.K. national newspaper the Telegraph reports on scientists arguing that dyslexia is not a “disorder” — but an evolutionarily beneficial willingness to explore:

The experts suggested that dyslexia, which causes difficulty reading, writing and spelling, is a useful speci … ⌘ Read more

Russia’s Cyberattacks Thwarted by Ukraine, Microsoft, Google, and Western Intelligence Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is “the first full-scale battle in which traditional and cyberweapons have been used side by side,” reports the New York Times. But the biggest surprise is that “many of the attacks were thwarted, or there was enough redundancy built into the Ukrainian networks that the efforts d … ⌘ Read more

On NetHack’s 35th Anniversary, It’s Displayed at Museum of Modern Art Switzerland-based software developer Jean-Christophe Collet writes: A long time ago I got involved with the development of NetHack, a very early computer role playing game, and soon joined the DevTeam, as we’ve been known since the early days. I was very active for the first 10 years then progressively faded out even though I am still off … ⌘ Read more

A Single AI-Enhanced Brain Scan Can Diagnose Alzheimer’s Disease Long-time Slashdot reader schwit1 shares an announcement from London’s Imperial College of Science, Technology and Medicine:

A single MRI scan of the brain could be enough to diagnose Alzheimer’s disease, according to new research by Imperial College London.

The research uses machine learning technology to look at structural features within th … ⌘ Read more

Are ‘Google Programmers’ the New ‘Next-Next-Finish Programmers’? Long-time Slashdot reader theodp writes:

Back in 1998, Ellen Ullman wrote in Salon about The dumbing-down of programming: “My programming tools were full of wizards. Little dialog boxes waiting for me to click “Next” and “Next” and “Finish.” Click and drag and shazzam! — thousands of lines of working code. No need to get into the “hassle” of rememberin … ⌘ Read more

AI-Powered GitHub Copilot Leaves Preview, Now Costs $100 a Year It was June 29th of 2021 that Microsoft-owned GitHub first announced its AI-powered autocompletion tool for programmers — trained on GitHub repositories and other publicly-available source code.

But after a year in “technical preview,” GitHub Copilot has reached a new milestone, reports Info-Q: you’ll now have to pay to use it after a 60-day t … ⌘ Read more

How China’s Expanding Surveillance Allows the State to Tighten Its Grip “China’s ambition to collect a staggering amount of personal data from everyday citizens is more expansive than previously known,” reports the New York Times, after their Visual Investigations team with reporters in Asia “spent more than a year analyzing more than 100,000 government bidding documents.” The Chinese government’s goal is … ⌘ Read more

Linux Kernel Signature Verification Code Adds FIPS Compliance Phoronix reports a new change was merged into the soon-to-be-released Linux 5.19 on Tuesday, making the kernel’s signature verification code compliant with the Federal Information Processing Standards known as FIPS:

FIPS are public standards via the National Institute of Standards and Technology used by U.S. government agencies and contractors in the … ⌘ Read more

Pig Heart Transplant Failure: Doctors Detail Everything That Went Wrong An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Earlier this year, news broke of the first experimental xenotransplantation: A human patient with heart disease received a heart from a pig that had been genetically engineered to avoid rejection. While initially successful, the experiment ended two months later when the transp … ⌘ Read more