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173470870 story


VCS INVEST $90M IN VARDA SPACE INDUSTRIES' MICROGRAVITY DRUG MANUFACTURING
(TECHCRUNCH.COM) 2

Posted by EditorDavid on Sunday April 07, 2024 @11:34PM from the
sky-high-valuations dept.
"Varda Space Industries has closed a massive tranche of funding," reports
TechCrunch, "just weeks after its first drug manufacturing capsule returned from
orbit."

Varda has now raised $145 million to date, the article points out, and the $90
million in new Series B funding "marks an inflection point for the company,
which is now gearing up to scale from the initial demonstration mission to a
regular set of missions carrying customer payloads, Varda founder Delian
Asparouhov told TechCrunch." El Segundo-based Varda was founded in 2021 by
Asparouhov, who is also a partner at Founders Fund, and Will Bruey, a spacecraft
engineer who cut his teeth at SpaceX. The pair had an audacious goal to
commercialize what until very recently was promising but ultimately small-scale
research into the effects of microgravity on pharmaceutical crystals...
Astronauts have been conducting protein crystallization experiments in space for
decades on the International Space Station and before that, the Space Shuttle.
But the business case for expanding this research has never materialized — until
now...

Part of the reason Varda is possible today is due to the availability of
regular, low-cost rideshare launches from SpaceX and Rocket Lab's innovations in
satellite bus manufacturing. Even beyond these external partnerships, the
startup has made significant headway in its own right, as the success of the
first mission showed: Their reentry capsule appears to have performed flawlessly
and the experiment to reformulate the HIV medicine ritonavir was executed
without a hitch, it says. Varda has also started publishing the results of its
internal R&D efforts, including a scientific paper on its hyper-gravity (as
opposed to microgravity) crystallization platform, which the startup developed
as a sort of screening method prior to sending drugs to space. [The paper is
titled "Gravity as a Knob for Tuning Particle Size Distributions of Small
Molecules."] It's an entirely new field of research that takes advantage of the
ability to truly unlock gravity as a variable in scientific experiments. "Over
time, we will be able to generate data sets between both hyper-gravity and
microgravity and start to show correlations," he said....

In a recent podcast appearance, he specified that the all-in initial mission
cost around $12 million, which will drop to $5-6 million by mission 4 and $2.5
million or less by mission 10.) Larger capsules are also in the longer-term
pipeline, though also not until the 2027 time frame. Asparouhov also confirmed
that pharmaceuticals will be Varda's sole focus for the next 10-20 (or more)
years, based on the company's conviction that pharmaceutical products will
generate more economic value compared to other materials. A lot of that comes
down to the fact that there are a significant set of drugs that require only a
"seed" of the material that can only be made in microgravity, and the rest of
the drug formulation can be completed here on Earth...

The company is also aiming to improve the processing capabilities of the
on-board pharmaceutical reactor. The first mission carried just one drug
protein, but in the future the company hopes to process multiple drug products
that could be run through different processing regimes. In the future, other
missions could carry larger reactors for drugs that do need more than the "seed"
crystal, and those mission profiles would be closer to something like mass
manufacturing.
Varda already has "a handful" of signed contracts with biotech companies,
according to the article — and Varda's next manufacturing mission "will launch
later this year."



173470322 story


CNN INVESTIGATES 'SPACE SHUTTLE COLUMBIA: THE FINAL FLIGHT' (CNN.COM) 23

Posted by EditorDavid on Sunday April 07, 2024 @08:54PM from the
day-of-remembrance dept.
CNN revisits 2003's disastrous landing of the Space Shuttle Columbia tonight
with two "immersive" specials co-produced by BBC and Mindhouse Productions
"featuring exclusive interviews and revealing never-before-broadcast footage,"
according to an announcement — with two more specials airing next week.

You can watch a trailer here. Across four episodes, the story of the
ticking-clock of Columbia's final mission is told in dramatic detail, beginning
months before the troubled launch, unfolding across the sixteen days in orbit,
and concluding with the investigation into the tragic loss of the seven
astronauts' lives. Weaving together intimate footage shot by the astronauts
themselves inside the orbiter, exclusive first-hand testimony from family
members of the Shuttle's crew, key players at NASA — some of whom have never
spoken before — and journalists who covered the story on the ground, the series
paints an intimate portrait of the women and men onboard and uncovers in
forensic detail the trail of events and missed opportunities that ultimately led
to disaster.
CNN says the first two episodes will livestream tonight at 9 p.m. EST
(time-delayed on the west coast until 9 p.m.PST) — and then be available
on-demand starting Monday — "for pay TV subscribers via CNN.com, CNN connected
TV and mobile apps." CNN's web site offers a "preview" of its live TV offerings
here.

They're promising "the inside story of one America's most iconic institutions,
uncovering how financial pressures and a culture of complacency may have
contributed to the events of February 1, 2003. The series also reflects on the
legacy of the Space Shuttle era, serving as a timely exploration of the
challenges and inherent dangers that remain relevant to space travel today."

On its web site CNN has also published two companion articles — one by Rice
history professor Douglas Brinkley arguing that NASA "was America's crown jewel.
After the Columbia disaster it was never quite the same." Because other shuttle
missions had returned safely with "shredded" surface tiles — and because the
stalwart Columbia had brought astronauts home from 27 previous flights — many
NASA officials were lulled into complacency. They went so far as to assure the
pilot and commander via email that "there is no concern ... We have seen the
same phenomenon on several other flights and there is absolutely no concern for
entry."

NASA officials also decided against enlisting spy satellite photography to
examine the shuttle damage more thoroughly. If they had, it's possible that the
astronauts could have repaired the spaceplane or at least abandoned it for
refuge on the International Space Station...

As the Columbia Accident Investigation Board (CAIB) noted in its final report,
"the NASA organizational culture had as much to do with this accident as the
foam." All of NASA's launches were suspended for two years. While the shuttles
eventually flew again, post-Columbia, the program was stunted and curtailed.
The article notes that since then SpaceX, Blue Origin, and the United Launch
Alliance (Lockheed Martin and Boeing) "are thriving today in the space
industry," along with Virgin Galactic and Axiom Space. "NASA, far from feeling
threatened, has encouraged many of the private companies with massive contracts.
The agency already had a long history of dealing with sub-contractors, using its
pocketbook to steer aerospace development; that tradition has adjusted
seamlessly to the current space economy."

In the other article CNN Space & Science writer Jackie Wattles notes that when
America later retired its Space Shuttle program in 2011, "no U.S. astronaut
would travel to space on an American-made rocket for nearly a decade."



173470636 story


US ENERGY DEPARTMENT ANNOUNCES 'BLUEPRINT' FOR SLASHING EMISSIONS FROM BUILDINGS
AND REDUCING ENERGY USE (ENERGY.GOV) 19

Posted by EditorDavid on Sunday April 07, 2024 @08:21PM from the getting-greener
dept.
This week America's Department of Energy announced "a comprehensive plan to
reduce greenhouse-gas emissions from buildings by 65% by 2035 and 90% by 2050."
The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) led the Blueprint's development in
collaboration with the Department of Housing and Urban Development, the
Environmental Protection Agency, and other federal agencies. The Blueprint is
the first sector-wide strategy for building decarbonization developed by the
federal government... "America's building sector accounts for more than a third
of the harmful emissions jeopardizing our air and health..." said U.S. Secretary
of Energy Jennifer M. Granholm. "As part of a whole-of-government approach, the
Department of Energy is outlining for the first time ever a comprehensive
federal plan to reduce energy in our homes, schools, and workplaces — lowering
utility bills and creating healthier communities while combating the climate
crisis."

Buildings account for more than one third of domestic climate pollution and $370
billion in annual energy costs... The Blueprint projects reductions of 90% of
total greenhouse gas emissions from the buildings sector, which will save
consumers more than $100 billion in annual energy costs and avoid $17 billion in
annual health costs.
Just for example, the Department of Energy's Affordable Home Energy Shot program
"aims to reduce the upfront cost of upgrading a home by at least 50% and reduce
energy bills by 20% within a decade." (Meanwhile, the federal government's role
in making more change happen faster includes financing, funding R&D on
lower-cost technologies, expanding markets, and "supporting the development and
implementation of emissions-reducing building codes and appliance standards.")

Besides the national blueprint, the Department also announced an expansion of
its Better Buildings Commercial Building Heat Pump Accelerator initiative. In
this program, "manufacturers will produce higher efficiency and life cycle
cost-effective heat pump rooftop units and commercial organizations will
evaluate and adopt next-generation heat pump technology."

U.S. Secretary of Energy Jennifer M. Granholm said the program "builds on more
than a decade of public-private partnerships to get cutting edge clean
technologies from lab to market, helping to slash harmful carbon emissions
throughout our economy." On average, between 20% and 30% of the nation's energy
is wasted, presenting a significant opportunity to increase energy efficiency.
Through the Better Buildings Initiative, DOE partners with public and private
sector stakeholders to pursue ambitious portfolio-wide energy, waste, water,
and/or emissions reduction goals and publicly share solutions. By improving
building design, materials, equipment, and operations, energy efficiency gains
can be achieved across broad segments of the nation's economy.

The Accelerator initiative was developed with commercial end users like Amazon,
IKEA, and Target, and already includes manufacturers AAON, Carrier Global Corp.,
Lennox International, Rheem Manufacturing Co., Trane Technologies, and York
International Corp. The Accelerator aims to bring more efficient, affordable
next-generation heat pump rooftop units to market as soon as 2027 — which will
slash both emissions and energy costs in half compared to natural gas-fueled
heat pumps. If deployed at scale, they could save American businesses and
commercial entities $5 billion on utility bills every year.



173470424 story


WARNER BROS. ISSUES DMCA'S AFTER 'SUICIDE SQUAD' GAME CRACKED TO ALLOW PLAYING
AS UNRELEASED CHARACTERS (KOTAKU.COM) 6

Posted by EditorDavid on Sunday April 07, 2024 @07:04PM from the
killing-the-Justice-League dept.
"It appears the live-service shooter Suicide Squad: Kill The Justice League is,
once again, suffering from a hacker problem," reports Kotaku: Instead of doing
absolutely absurd amounts of damage, this time hackers have figured out how to
gain access to unreleased characters and skins. And publisher WB Games is
reportedly issuing DMCA takedown notices against any assets that have found
their way online.

As reported by IGN, one hacker discovered how to play as Deathstroke, one of the
four characters developer Rocksteady Studios teased for an upcoming Suicide
Squad season... There were also unreleased skins for The Joker and King Shark
that folks have somehow accessed, all of which began circulating on Reddit and
X/Twitter on April 4.

Not long after, the assets were removed, with folks believing WB Games was
behind the strikes. YouTuber TrixRidiculous, who primarily covers DC- and
Marvel-related RPGs, had their posts on X/Twitter swiftly taken down by a DMCA
strike."I posted three pics to Twitter," TrixRidiculous told Kotaku over email.
"Within probably 30 minutes, I received a DMCA strike from WB Games [Kotaku saw
a screenshot of this notice]. Please just bring attention to the fact that the
leaderboard is riddled with hackers/cheaters that have gone unbanned since
launch, as that's all I was trying to do anyway."

This sentiment is shared across the game's official subreddit, with folks
posting about "losing interest" in Suicide Squad due to hackers flooding the
leaderboards.



173469992 story


RUST, PYTHON, APACHE FOUNDATIONS AND OTHERS ANNOUNCE BIG COLLABORATION ON
CYBERSECURITY PROCESS SPECIFICATIONS (ECLIPSE-FOUNDATION.BLOG) 26

Posted by EditorDavid on Sunday April 07, 2024 @05:26PM from the
serious-on-security dept.
The foundations behind Rust, Python, Apache, Eclipse, PHP, OpenSSL, and Blender
announced plans to create "common specifications for secure software
development," based on "existing open source best practices."

From the Eclipse Foundation: This collaborative effort will be hosted at the
Brussels-based Eclipse Foundation [an international non-profit association]
under the auspices of the Eclipse Foundation Specification Process and a new
working group... Other code-hosting open source foundations, SMEs, industry
players, and researchers are invited to join in as well.

The starting point for this highly technical standardisation effort will be
today's existing security policies and procedures of the respective open source
foundations, and similar documents describing best practices.

The governance of the working group will follow the Eclipse Foundation's usual
member-led model but will be augmented by explicit representation from the open
source community to ensure diversity and balance in decision-making. The
deliverables will consist of one or more process specifications made available
under a liberal specification copyright licence and a royalty-free patent
licence... While open source communities and foundations generally adhere to and
have historically established industry best practices around security, their
approaches often lack alignment and comprehensive documentation.

The open source community and the broader software industry now share a common
challenge: legislation has introduced an urgent need for cybersecurity process
standards.
The Apache Foundation notes the working group is forming partly "to demonstrate
our commitment to cooperation with and implementation of" the EU's Cyber
Resilience Act. But the Eclipse Foundation adds that even before it goes into
effect in 2027, they're recognizing open source software's "increasingly vital
role in modern society" and an increasing need for reliability, safety, and
security, so new regulations like the CRA "underscore the urgency for secure by
design and robust supply chain security standards."

Their announcement adds that "It is also important to note that it is similarly
necessary that these standards be developed in a manner that also includes the
requirements of proprietary software development, large enterprises, vertical
industries, and small and medium enterprises." But at the same time, "Today's
global software infrastructure is over 80% open source... [W]hen we discuss the
'software supply chain,' we are primarily, but not exclusively, referring to
open source."

"We invite you to join our collaborative effort to create specifications for
secure open source development," their announcement concludes," promising
initiative updates on a new mailing list. "Contribute your ideas and participate
in the magic that unfolds when open source foundations, SMEs, industry leaders,
and researchers combine forces to tackle big challenges."

The Python Foundation's announcement calls it a "community-driven initiative"
that will have "a lasting impact on the future of cybersecurity and our shared
open source communities."



173469522 story


BOEING ENGINE COVER RIPS APART DURING TAKEOFF THIS MORNING (QZ.COM) 100

Posted by EditorDavid on Sunday April 07, 2024 @03:35PM from the scary-news
dept.
"Scary moments for passengers on a Southwest flight from Denver to Houston,"
tweets an ABC News transportation reporter, "when the engine cover ripped off
during flight, forcing the plane to return to Denver Sunday morning."

"Think that big circular metal panel surrounding the engine," writes QZ — adding
that after it ripped off, the engine cowling "struck the 737-800's wing flap."

It happened during takeoff, so the plane was towed back to the gate after
returning to the airport. All passengers and crew were safe, and passengers
boarded a replacement plane for their flight to Houston: Southwest was already
having a rough few weeks before this event occurred. Last Thursday, an engine on
one of its Boeing 737-800 planes caught fire before taking off from an airport
in Texas, and before that, two FAA-scrutinized Southwest flights were disrupted
by turbulence [One last month in New York City and the other in Florida on
Wednesday. "Two hours later, an All Nippon Airways Boeing 787 reported an oil
leak on arrival at Naha Airport, Japan," adds Newsweek.].
"We apologize for the inconvenience of their delay," Boeing said in a statement,
adding that they "place our highest priority on ultimate Safety for our
Customers and Employees.

"Our Maintenance teams are reviewing the aircraft."



173467144 story


PROFESSORS ARE NOW USING AI TO GRADE ESSAYS. ARE THERE ETHICAL CONCERNS?
(CNN.COM) 57

Posted by EditorDavid on Sunday April 07, 2024 @02:35PM from the robo-grades
dept.
A professor at Ithaca College runs part of each student's essay through ChatGPT,
"asking the AI tool to critique and suggest how to improve the work," reports
CNN. (The professor said "The best way to look at AI for grading is as a
teaching assistant or research assistant who might do a first pass ... and it
does a pretty good job at that.")

And the same professor then requires their class of 15 students to run their
draft through ChatGPT to see where they can make improvements, according to the
article: Both teachers and students are using the new technology. A report by
strategy consultant firm Tyton Partners, sponsored by plagiarismâdetection
platform Turnitin, found half of college students used AI tools in Fall 2023.
Meanwhile, while fewer faculty members used AI, the percentage grew to 22% of
faculty members in the fall of 2023, up from 9% in spring 2023.

Teachers are turning to AI tools and platforms — such as ChatGPT, Writable,
Grammarly and EssayGrader — to assist with grading papers, writing feedback,
developing lesson plans and creating assignments. They're also using the
burgeoning tools to create quizzes, polls, videos and interactives to up the
ante" for what's expected in the classroom. Students, on the other hand, are
leaning on tools such as ChatGPT and Microsoft CoPilot — which is built into
Word, PowerPoint and other products.

But while some schools have formed policies on how students can or can't use AI
for schoolwork, many do not have guidelines for teachers. The practice of using
AI for writing feedback or grading assignments also raises ethical
considerations. And parents and students who are already spending hundreds of
thousands of dollars on tuition may wonder if an endless feedback loop of
AI-generated and AI-graded content in college is worth the time and money.
A professor of business ethics at the University ofâVirginia "suggested teachers
use AI to look at certain metrics — such as structure, language use and grammar
— and give a numerical score on those figures," according to the article. ("But
teachers should then grade students' work themselves when looking for novelty,
creativity and depth of insight.")

But a writer's workshop teacher at the University of Lynchburg in Virginia "also
sees uploading a student's work to ChatGPT as a 'huge ethical consideration' and
potentially a breach of their intellectual property. AI tools like ChatGPT use
such entries to train their algorithms..."

Even the Ithaca professor acknowledged to CNN that "If teachers use it solely to
grade, and the students are using it solely to produce a final product, it's not
going to work."



173466676 story


MOZILLA ASKS: WILL GOOGLE'S PRIVACY SANDBOX PROTECT ADVERTISERS (AND GOOGLE)
MORE THAN YOU? (MOZILLA.ORG) 38

Posted by EditorDavid on Sunday April 07, 2024 @12:34PM from the cookie-monsters
dept.
On Mozilla's blog, engineer Martin Thomson explores Google's "Privacy Sandbox"
initiative (which proposes sharing a subset of private user information — but
without third-party cookies).

The blog post concludes that Google's Protected Audience "protects advertisers
(and Google) more than it protects you." But it's not all bad — in theory: The
idea behind Protected Audience is that it creates something like an alternative
information dimension inside of your (Chrome) browser... Any website can push
information into that dimension. While we normally avoid mixing data from
multiple sites, those rules are changed to allow that. Sites can then process
that data in order to select advertisements. However, no one can see into this
dimension, except you. Sites can only open a window for you to peek into that
dimension, but only to see the ads they chose...

Protected Audience might be flawed, but it demonstrates real potential. If this
is possible, that might give people more of a say in how their data is used.
Rather than just have someone spy on your every action then use that information
as they like, you might be able to specify what they can and cannot do. The
technology could guarantee that your choice is respected. Maybe advertising is
not the first thing you would do with this newfound power, but maybe if the
advertising industry is willing to fund investments in new technology that
others could eventually use, that could be a good thing.
But here's some of the blog post's key criticisms:
 * "[E]ntities like Google who operate large sites, might rely less on
   information from other sites. Losing the information that comes from tracking
   people might affect them far less when they can use information they gather
   from their many services... [W]e have a company that dominates both the
   advertising and browser markets, proposing a change that comes with clear
   privacy benefits, but it will also further entrench its own dominance in the
   massively profitable online advertising market..."

 * "[T]he proposal fails to meet its own privacy goals. The technical privacy
   measures in Protected Audience fail to prevent sites from abusing the API to
   learn about what you did on other sites.... Google loosened privacy
   protections in a number of places to make it easier to use. Of course, by
   weakening protections, the current proposal provides no privacy. In other
   words, to help make Protected Audience easier to use, they made the design
   even leakier..."

 * "A lot of these leaks are temporary. Google has a plan and even a timeline
   for closing most of the holes that were added to make Protected Audience
   easier to use for advertisers. The problem is that there is no credible fix
   for some of the information leaks embedded in Protected Audience's
   architecture... In failing to achieve its own privacy goals, Protected
   Audience is not now — and maybe not ever — a good addition to the Web."




173463266 story


IN AMERICA, A COMPLEX PATCHWORK OF STATE AI REGULATIONS HAS ALREADY ARRIVED
(CIO.COM) 11

Posted by EditorDavid on Sunday April 07, 2024 @11:34AM from the e-pluribus-unum
dept.
While the European Parliament passed a wide-ranging "AI Act" in March, "Leaders
from Microsoft, Google, and OpenAI have all called for AI regulations in the
U.S.," writes CIO magazine. Even the Chamber of Commerce, "often opposed to
business regulation, has called on Congress to protect human rights and national
security as AI use expands," according to the article, while the White House has
released a blueprint for an AI bill of rights.

But even though the U.S. Congress hasn't passed AI legislation — 16 different
U.S. states have, "and state legislatures have already introduced more than 400
AI bills across the U.S. this year, six times the number introduced in 2023."
Many of the bills are targeted both at the developers of AI technologies and the
organizations putting AI tools to use, says Goli Mahdavi, a lawyer with global
law firm BCLP, which has established an AI working group. And with populous
states such as California, New York, Texas, and Florida either passing or
considering AI legislation, companies doing business across the US won't be able
to avoid the regulations. Enterprises developing and using AI should be ready to
answer questions about how their AI tools work, even when deploying automated
tools as simple as spam filtering, Mahdavi says. "Those questions will come from
consumers, and they will come from regulators," she adds. "There's obviously
going to be heightened scrutiny here across the board."
There's sector-specific bills, and bills that demand transparency (of both
development and output), according to the article. "The third category of AI
bills covers broad AI bills, often focused on transparency, preventing bias,
requiring impact assessment, providing for consumer opt-outs, and other issues."

One example the article notes is Senate Bill 1047, introduced in the California
State Legislature in February, "would require safety testing of AI products
before they're released, and would require AI developers to prevent others from
creating derivative models of their products that are used to cause critical
harms."

Adrienne Fischer, a lawyer with Basecamp Legal, a Denver law firm monitoring
state AI bills, tells CIO that many of the bills promote best practices in
privacy and data security, but said the fragmented regulatory environment
"underscores the call for national standards or laws to provide a coherent
framework for AI usage."

Thanks to Slashdot reader snydeq for sharing the article.



173464020 story


HAVE SCIENTISTS FINALLY MADE SENSE OF STEPHEN HAWKING'S FAMOUS BLACK HOLE
FORMULA? (SCIENCE.ORG) 19

Posted by EditorDavid on Sunday April 07, 2024 @10:34AM from the
equations-for-entropy dept.
Slashdot reader sciencehabit shares this report from Science magazine: Fifty
years ago, famed physicist Stephen Hawking wrote down an equation that predicts
that a black hole has entropy, an attribute typically associated with the
disordered jumbling of atoms and molecules in materials.

The arguments for black hole entropy were indirect, however, and no one had
derived the famous equation from the fundamental definition of entropy — at
least not for realistic black holes. Now, one team of theorists claims to have
done so, although some experts are skeptical.

Reported in a paper in press at Physical Review Letters, the work would solve a
homework problem that some theorists have labored over for decades. "It's good
to have it done," says Don Marolf, a gravitational theorist at the University of
California, Santa Barbara who was not involved in the research. It "shows us how
to move forward, that's great."



173464422 story


RETRO COMPUTING ENTHUSIAST TRIES RUNNING TURBO PASCAL ON A 40-YEAR-OLD APPLE II
CLONE (YOUTUBE.COM) 22

Posted by EditorDavid on Sunday April 07, 2024 @07:34AM from the Franklin-Ace
dept.
Four months ago long-time Slashdot reader Shayde tried restoring a 1986 DEC
PDP-11 minicomputer.

But now he's gone even further back in time. Shayde writes: In 1984, Apple II's
were at the top of their game in the 8 bit market. A company in New Jersey
decided to get in on the action and built an exact clone of the Apple. The
Franklin Ace was chip and ROM compatible with the Apple II, and that led to it's
downfall.

In this video we resurrect and old Franklin Ace and not only boot ProDOS, but
also get the Z80 coprocessor up and running, and relive what coding in Turbo
Pascal in the 80s was like.
Why Turbo Pascal? "Some of my earliest professional programming was done in this
environment," Shayde says in the video, "and I was itching to play with it
again."



173466448 story


WAIT, DOES AMERICA SUDDENLY HAVE A RECORD NUMBER OF BEES? (SPOKESMAN.COM) 64

Posted by EditorDavid on Sunday April 07, 2024 @03:44AM from the creating-a-buzz
dept.
"America's honeybee population has rocketed to an all-time high," reports the
Washington Post: We've added almost 1 million bee colonies in the past five
years. We now have 3.8 million, the census shows. Since 2007, the first census
after alarming bee die-offs began in 2006, the honeybee has been the
fastest-growing livestock segment in the country! And that doesn't count feral
honeybees, which may outnumber their captive cousins several times over...

Much of the explosion of small producers came in just one state: Texas. The Lone
Star State has gone from having the sixth-most bee operations in the country to
being so far ahead of anyone else that it out-bees the bottom 21 states
combined... [A]ll 254 Texas counties adopted bee rules requiring, for example,
six hives on five acres plus another hive for every 2.5 acres beyond that to
qualify for the tax break...

When the census was taken in December 2022, California had more than four times
as many bees as any other state. We emailed pollination expert Brittney Goodrich
at the University of California at Davis, who explained that pollinating the
California almond crop "demands most of the honeybee colonies in the U.S. each
year...

Sadly, however, this does not mean we've defeated colony collapse. One major
citizen-science project found that beekeepers lost almost half of their colonies
in the year ending in April , the second-highest loss rate on record. For now,
we're making up for it with aggressive management. The Texans told us that they
were splitting their hives more often, replacing queens as often as every year
and churning out bee colonies faster than the mites, fungi and diseases can take
them down. But this may not be good news for bees in general. "It is absolutely
not a good thing for native pollinators," said Eliza Grames, an entomologist at
Binghamton University, who noted that domesticated honeybees are a threat to
North America's 4,000 native bees, about 40% of which are vulnerable to
extinction...

Many of the same forces collapsing managed beehives also decimate their native
cousins, only the natives don't usually have entire industries and governments
pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into supporting them.
So while Texas bee exemptions "have become big business," the article ends with
this quote from Mace Vaughan, who leads pollinator and agricultural biodiversity
at Xerces, an expanding insect-conservation outfit. "The way you support both
honeybees and beekeepers — and the way you save native pollinators — is to go
out there and create beautiful flower-rich habitat on your farm or your garden."



173465956 story


IS MICROSOFT WORKING ON 'PERFORMANT SOUND RECOGNITION' AI TECHNOLOGIES?
(WINDOWSREPORT.COM) 27

Posted by EditorDavid on Sunday April 07, 2024 @12:44AM from the sounding-on
dept.
Windows Report speculates on what Microsoft may be working on next based on a
recently-published patent for "performant sound recognition AI technologies"
(dated April 2, 2024): Microsoft's new technology can recognize different types
of sounds, from doorbells to babies crying, or dogs barking, but not limited to
them. It can also recognize sounds of coughing or breathing difficulties, or
unusual noises, such as glass breaking. Most intriguing, it can recognize and
monitor environmental sounds, and they can be further processed to let users
know if a natural disaster is about to happen...

The neural network generates scores and probabilities for each type of sound
event in each segment. This is like guessing what type of sound each segment is
and how sure it is about the guess. After that, the system does some
post-processing to smooth out the scores and probabilities and generate
confidence values for each type of sound for different window sizes.

Ultimately, this technology can be used in various applications. In a smart home
device, it can detect when someone breaks into the house, by recognizing the
sound of glass shattering, or if a newborn is hungry, or distressed, by
recognizing the sounds of baby crying. It can also be used in healthcare, to
accurately detect lung or heart diseases, by recognizing heartbeat sounds,
coughing, or breathing difficulties. But one of its most important applications
would be to prevent casual users of upcoming natural disasters by recognizing
and detecting sounds associated with them.
Thanks to Slashdot reader John Nautu for sharing the article.



173463882 story


FOUR BASEBALL TEAMS NOW LET TICKET-HOLDERS ENTER USING AI-POWERED 'FACIAL
AUTHENTICATION' (SFGATE.COM) 40

Posted by EditorDavid on Saturday April 06, 2024 @09:44PM from the
take-my-face-to-the-ball-game dept.
"The San Francisco Giants are one of four teams in Major League Baseball this
season offering fans a free shortcut through the gates into the ballpark,"
writes SFGate.

"The cost? Signing up for the league's 'facial authentication' software through
its ticketing app." The Giants are using MLB's new Go-Ahead Entry program, which
intends to cut down on wait times for fans entering games. The pitch is simple:
Take a selfie through the MLB Ballpark app (which already has your tickets on
it), upload the selfie and, once you're approved, breeze through the ticketing
lines and into the ballpark. Fans will barely have to slow down at the entrance
gate on their way to their seats...

The Philadelphia Phillies were MLB's test team for the technology in 2023.
They're joined by the Giants, Nationals and Astros in 2024...

[Major League Baseball] says it won't be saving or storing pictures of faces in
a database — and it clearly would really like you to not call this technology
facial recognition. "This is not the type of facial recognition that's scanning
a crowd and specifically looking for certain kinds of people," Karri Zaremba, a
senior vice president at MLB, told ESPN. "It's facial authentication. ... That's
the only way in which it's being utilized."
Privacy advocates "have pointed out that the creep of facial recognition
technology may be something to be wary of," the article acknowledges. But it
adds that using the technology is still completely optional.

And they also spoke to the San Francisco Giants' senior vice president of ticket
sales, who gushed about the possibility of app users "walking into the ballpark
without taking your phone out, or all four of us taking our phones out."



173463594 story


HOW THE EUROPEAN SPACE AGENCY CELEBRATED APRIL FOOL'S DAY (ESA.INT) 33

Posted by EditorDavid on Saturday April 06, 2024 @05:34PM from the
irreproducible-results dept.
The European Space Agency has a Planetary Defence Office, which includes its
Near-Earth Object Coordination Centre. "It has come to our attention," they
wrote in the April edition of their monthly newsletter, "that a recent trend
among journalists has been to come up with creative comparisons to convey the
size of an asteroid to the public."

So then, as explained by RockDoctor (Slashdot reader #15,477) "they propose a
number of standardised units of comparison for journalists describing 'death
from the skies'".

An excerpt from that April 1 newsletter: In the absence of a handy skyscraper,
animals commonly used have included giraffes, corgis and an entire colony of
penguins. But how do these comparisons stack up? Let's look at some of our
favourite unusual suspects:

- Corgi: At around 30 cm tall, a space rock the size of a corgi wouldn't pose
much of a threat.

- Half a giraffe: An adult giraffe can reach up to 5.5 metres in height, so half
a giraffe would be about 2.75 metres. While not as impressive as a full
skyscraper, an asteroid that size could certainly destroy a building or two...

- Elephants: An adult African elephant can reach 7 metres at the shoulder.
Ninety elephants stacked on top of each other would form a staggering pile over
630 metres high, creating a devastating but probably not planet-ending event.

As this menagerie of animals can cause a lot of confusion, we at the NEOCC
recommend the use of a Standardised Giraffe Unit (SGU, 1 SGU = 5 penguins) for
ease of comparison.
RockDoctor shares this additional thought in his original submission about the
newly proposed standardized unit.

"The world may be turtles all the way down, but it's giraffes all the way up."



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