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For the first time, astronomers have confirmed the existence of a lone black hole," reports Science News — "one with no star orbiting it." It's "the only one so far," says Kailash Sahu, an astronomer at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore. In 2022, Sahu and his colleagues discovered the dark object coursing through the constellation Sagittarius. A second team disputed the claim, saying the body might instead be a neutron star. New observations from the Hubble Space Telescope now confirm that the object's mass is so large that it must be a black hole, Sahu's team reports in the April 20 Astrophysical Journal.... [And that second team has revised its assessment and now agrees: the object is a black hole.] While solitary black holes should be common, they are hard to find. The one in Sagittarius revealed itself when it passed in front of a dim background star, magnifying the star's light and slowly shifting its position due to the black hole's gravity. This passage occurred in July 2011, but the star's position is still changing. "It takes a long time to do the observations," Sahu says. "Everything is improved if you have a longer baseline and more observations." The original discovery relied on precise Hubble measurements of star positions from 2011 to 2017. The new work incorporates Hubble observations from 2021 and 2022 as well as data from the Gaia spacecraft. The upshot: The black hole is about seven times as massive as the sun, give or take 0.8 solar masses.... Located 5,000 light-years from Earth, this black hole is much closer than the supermassive one at the Milky Way's center, which also lies in Sagittarius but about 27,000 light-years from us. The star-rich region around the galactic center provides an ideal hunting ground for solitary black holes passing in front of stars. Sahu hopes to find additional lone black holes by using the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, slated for launch in 2027.

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There was excitement when biotech company Collosal announced genetically modified grey wolves (first hailed as a "de-extinction" of the Dire wolf species after several millennia). "But bioethicists and conservationists are expressing unease with the kind of scientific research," writes the Chicago Tribune. [Alternate URL here.] "Unfortunately, as clever as this science is ... it's can-do science and not should-do science," said Lindsay Marshall, director of science in animal research at Humane World for Animals, formerly the Humane Society of the U.S.... Ed Heist, a professor at Southern Illinois University and a conservation geneticist, said the news bothered him. "This is not conservation, but people conflate it," he said. "The point is entertainment...." Naomi Louchouarn [program director of wildlife partnerships at Humane World for Animals], has dedicated her studies and research to the relationship between humans and animals, specifically carnivores like gray wolves. "The reason our current endangered species are becoming extinct is because we don't know how to coexist with them," she said. "And this doesn't solve that problem at all." Humans can treat the symptoms of wildlife conflict with "big, flashy silver bullets" and "in this case, advanced, inefficient science," she said, but the real solution is behavioral change. "Assuming that we could actually bring back a full population of animals," Louchouarn said, "which is so difficult and so crazy — that's a big if — I don't understand the point of trying to bring back a woolly mammoth when we already can't coexist with elephants." The article notes that even Colossal's chief science officer says their technology is at best one of several tools for fighting biodiversity loss, calling it a battle which humans are 'not close to winning'... We as a global community need to continue to invest in traditional approaches to conservation and habitat preservation, as well as in the protection of living endangered species." But the article adds that the Trump administration "is citing the case of the dire wolf as it moves to reduce federal protections under the Endangered Species Act of 1973." (Wednesday U.S. interior secretary Doug Burgum has even posted on X "The concept of 'de-extinction' can serve as a bedrock for modern species conservation.") And the article adds that "During a livestreamed town hall with Interior Department employees on April 9, Burgum said: "If we're going to be in anguish about losing a species, now we have an opportunity to bring them back. Pick your favorite species and call up Colossal. Ken Angielczyk, curator of mammal fossils at the Field Museum who researches extinct species that lived 200 to 300 million years ago, said it's a misguided approach. "If that's the basis ... for changing regulations related to the endangered species list, that is very, very premature," he said. "Because we can't resurrect things.... If the purpose is to restore the damage to the shared ecosystem, we have that opportunity right now," she said. "And that's the necessity immediately...." "This whole idea that extinction is reversible is so dangerous," Marshall said, "because then it stops us caring." Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader walterbyrd for sharing the news.

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TechCrunch looks at Mechanize, an ambitious new startup "whose founder — and the non-profit AI research organization he founded called Epoch — is being skewered on X..." Mechanize was launched on Thursday via a post on X by its founder, famed AI researcher Tamay Besiroglu. The startup's goal, Besiroglu wrote, is "the full automation of all work" and "the full automation of the economy." Does that mean Mechanize is working to replace every human worker with an AI agent bot? Essentially, yes. The startup wants to provide the data, evaluations, and digital environments to make worker automation of any job possible. Besiroglu even calculated Mechanize's total addressable market by aggregating all the wages humans are currently paid. "The market potential here is absurdly large: workers in the US are paid around $18 trillion per year in aggregate. For the entire world, the number is over three times greater, around $60 trillion per year," he wrote. Besiroglu did, however, clarify to TechCrunch that "our immediate focus is indeed on white-collar work" rather than manual labor jobs that would require robotics... Besiroglu argues to the naysayers that having agents do all the work will actually enrich humans, not impoverish them, through "explosive economic growth." He points to a paper he published on the topic. "Completely automating labor could generate vast abundance, much higher standards of living, and new goods and services that we can't even imagine today," he told TechCrunch. TechCrunch wonders how jobless humans will produce goods — and whether wealth will simply concentrate around whoever owns the agents. But they do concede that Besiroglu may be right that "If each human worker has a personal crew of agents which helps them produce more work, economic abundance could follow..."

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"Honeybee colonies are under siege across much of North America..." reported the New York Times last week. [Alternate URL here.] Last winter beekeepers across America "began reporting massive beehive collapses. More than half of the roughly 2.8 million colonies collapsed, costing the industry about $600 million in economic losses..." America's Department of Agriculture says "sublethal exposure" to pesticides remains one of the biggest factors threatening honeybees, according to the article — but it's one of several threats. "Parasites, loss of habitat, climate change and pesticides threaten to wipe out as much as 70% or more of the nation's honeybee colonies this year, potentially the most devastating loss that the nation has ever seen." Some years are worse than others, but there has been a steady decline over time. Scientists have named the phenomenon colony collapse disorder: Bees simply disappear after they fly out to forage for pollen and nectar. Illness disables their radar, preventing them from finding their way home. The queen and her brood, if they survive, remain defenseless. The precise causes remain unknown. Bee colonies have become even more vulnerable because of the increase in extreme weather conditions, including droughts, heat waves, monster hurricanes, explosive wildfires and floods that have damaged or destroyed the bees and the vegetation they pollinate. If that isn't bad enough, parasites — and other creatures researchers refer to as "biotic" threats that prey on bees — proliferate when there is damage to ecosystems. All that means that the U.S. beekeeping industry has contracted by about 2.9% over the past five years, according to data collected by IBISWorld, a research firm. Annual loss rates have been increasing among all beekeepers over the past decade with the most significant colony collapses in commercial operations happening during the past five years. The article notes that "compounding the troubles for the bee industry are recent federal cuts" proposed by DOGE to America's Department of Agriculture, "where researchers were studying ways to protect the nation's honeybees." And while federal policies like tariffs could make farming more expensive, "Beekeepers also often depend on immigrants to manage their hives and to help produce commercial honey..."

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"Using electrochemistry, University of Oregon researchers have developed a way to make iron metal for steel production without burning fossil fuels..." the University of Oregon wrote last year. "Decarbonizing this step would do roughly as much to reduce greenhouse gas emissions as converting every gas-guzzling vehicle on the roads to electric... If scaled up, the process could help decarbonize one of the largest and most emissions-intensive industries worldwide," replacing carbon-spewing industrial blast furnaces. Paul Kempler, their research assistant chemistry professor, added "The reason we got excited about this chemistry, is that our reactants are two things that are very cheap: saltwater and iron oxide." And this week he announced that "We actually have a chemical principle, a sort of guiding design rule, that will teach us how to identify low-cost iron oxides that we could use in these reactors." "Those reactions conveniently also produce chlorine, a commercially valuable byproduct," writes SciTechDaily, in a new follow-up report this week: In their latest study, the researchers focused on improving the process by identifying which types of iron oxides make the reaction more cost-effective, an essential step toward scaling the method for industrial use.... In lab tests, the difference was striking: "With the really porous particles, we can make iron really quickly on a small area," Goldman said. "The dense particles just can't achieve the same rate, so we're limited in how much iron we can make per square meter of electrodes...." To take their process beyond the lab, Kempler's lab is working with researchers in other fields. A collaboration with civil engineers at Oregon State University is helping them better understand what's needed for the product to work in real-world applications. And collaboration with an electrode manufacturing company is helping them address the logistical and scientific challenges of scaling up an electrochemical process. "I think what this work shows is that technology can meet the needs of an industrial society without being environmentally devastating," Goldman said. "We haven't solved all the problems yet, of course, but I think it's an example that serves as a nucleation point for a different way of thinking about what solutions look like. We can continue to have industry and technology and medicine, and we can do it in a way that's clean — and that's awesome!"

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"The time has come for me to step away," ArcoLinux lead Erik Dubois posted last week. ("After eight years of dedication to the ArcoLinux project and the broader Linux community...") 'Learn, have fun, and enjoy' was our motto for the past eight years — and I really had fun doing all this," Dubois says in a video version of his farewell post. "And if we reflect back on this teaching and the building and promoting of Linux, it was fun. But the time has come for me to step away..." Over its eight years ArcoLinux "accomplished several important milestones," reports Linux magazine, "such as creating over 5,000 educational videos; the creation of ArcoInstall; the Carli education project; the Arch Linux Calamares Installer (ALCI); the ArcoPlasma, ArcoNet, ArcroPro, and Ariser variants; and much more." According to Dubois, they weren't just creating a distribution but a mindset. Dubois says that the code will remain online so others can learn from, fork, or remix the distro. He also indicated that ArcoLinux will supply users with a transition package to help them convert their existing ArcoLinux systems to Arch Linux. That package will remove ArcoLinux branding, replace pacman.conf with an Arch and Chaotic-AUR focused config file, and change the arcolinux-mirrorlist to a single source. It's FOSS News describes ArcoLinux as one of those "user-friendly Arch-based distros that give you a bleeding-edge experience." The reasoning behind this move, as shared by Erik, is his advancing age and him realizing that he doesn't have the same level of mental focus or stamina he used to have before. He has found himself making small mistakes, the kind that can negatively affect a major undertaking like this... Come July 1, 2025, the transition period will end, marking a stop to all development, including the deactivation of the ArcoLinux social media handles. The Telegram and Discord communities will stay a bit longer but will close up eventually. "I want to leave ArcoLinux while it's still strong, and while I can look back with pride at everything we've accomplished together," Dubois says in their post...

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Discover magazine reports that a team of researchers have produced evidence that the ancient building blocks for water have been here on earth "since early in the planet's history, according to a study published in the journal Icarus." Pinpointing when and where Earth's hydrogen is an essential key to understanding how life arose on the planet. Without hydrogen, there's no water, and without water, life can't exist here. Ironically, researchers turned to a meteorite containing hydrogen to prove that such former bodies did not provide the H2 ingredient of water's H2O recipe. They examined a rare type of meteorite — known as an enstatite chondrite — that was built similarly to early Earth 4.5 billion years ago and the team discovered hydrogen present in the chemical. The logic is that if this material resembling early Earth's composition can contain hydrogen, so too could the young planet.... Since the proto-Earth was made of material similar to enstatite chondrites, by the time the immature planet had grown large enough to be struck by asteroids, it would have already stashed enough hydrogen to explain Earth's present-day water supply.Although this study likely won't resolve the debate over Earth's original water source, it tilts the ta ble toward an internal, not external one. "We now think that the material that built our planet — which we can study using these rare meteorites — was far richer in hydrogen than we thought previously," James Bryson, an Oxford professor and an author of the paper, said in a press release. "This finding supports the idea that the formation of water on Earth was a natural process, rather than a fluke of hydrated asteroids bombarding our planet after it formed."

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Matt Asay answered questions from Slashdot readers in 2010 (as the then-COO of Canonical). He currently runs developer relations at MongoDB (after holding similar positions at AWS and Adobe). This week he contributed an opinion to piece to InfoWorld arguing that DeepSeek "may have originated in China, but it stopped being Chinese the minute it was released on Hugging Face with an accompanying paper detailing its development." Soon after, a range of developers, including the Beijing Academy of Artificial Intelligence (BAAI), scrambled to replicate DeepSeek's success but this time as open source software. BAAI, for its part, launched OpenSeek, an ambitious effort to take DeepSeek's open-weight models and create a project that surpasses DeepSeek while uniting "the global open source communities to drive collaborative innovation in algorithms, data, and systems." If that sounds cool to you, it didn't to the U.S. government, which promptly put BAAI on its "baddie" list. Someone needs to remind U.S. (and global) policymakers that no single country, company, or government can contain community-driven open source... DeepSeek didn't just have a moment. It's now very much a movement, one that will frustrate all efforts to contain it. DeepSeek, and the open source AI ecosystem surrounding it, has rapidly evolved from a brief snapshot of technological brilliance into something much bigger — and much harder to stop. Tens of thousands of developers, from seasoned researchers to passionate hobbyists, are now working on enhancing, tuning, and extending these open source models in ways no centralized entity could manage alone. For example, it's perhaps not surprising that Hugging Face is actively attempting to reverse engineer and publicly disseminate DeepSeek's R1 model. Hugging Face, while important, is just one company, just one platform. But Hugging Face has attracted hundreds of thousands of developers who actively contribute to, adapt, and build on open source models, driving AI innovation at a speed and scale unmatched even by the most agile corporate labs. Hugging Face by itself could be stopped. But the communities it enables and accelerates cannot. Through the influence of Hugging Face and many others, variants of DeepSeek models are already finding their way into a wide range of applications. Companies like Perplexity are embedding these powerful open source models into consumer-facing services, proving their real-world utility. This democratization of technology ensures that cutting-edge AI capabilities are no longer locked behind the walls of large corporations or elite government labs but are instead openly accessible, adaptable, and improvable by a global community. "It's Linux all over again..." Asay writes at one point. "What started as the passion project of a lone developer quickly blossomed into an essential, foundational technology embraced by enterprises worldwide," winning out "precisely because it captivated developers who embraced its promise and contributed toward its potential." We are witnessing a similar phenomenon with DeepSeek and the broader open source AI ecosystem, but this time it's happening much, much faster... Organizations that cling to proprietary approaches (looking at you, OpenAI!) or attempt to exert control through restrictive policies (you again, OpenAI!) are not just swimming upstream — they're attempting to dam an ocean. (Yes, OpenAI has now started to talk up open source, but it's a long way from releasing a DeepSeek/OpenSeek equivalent on GitHub.)

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A new Star Wars movie — starring Ryan Gosling and directed by Shawn Levy — will be released in 2027, the two announced Friday at the "Star Wars Celebration" (a fan event in Japan). CNN reports: Set to begin production this fall, the movie will be set approximately five years after "Star Wars: Episode IX — The Rise of Skywalker," released in 2019, but will sit outside the Skywalker story as a standalone film. "The film... is an entirely new adventure featuring all-new characters set in a period of time that has not been explored on screen," said a statement from Lucasfilm, the owner of the "Star Wars" franchise... "The script is just so good, the story, it has so much adventure, so much heart and original character. It's an opportunity to shine the light into a side of the universe that we may not have seen," Gosling said. Levy, the director of "Deadpool & Wolverine," told the crowd the film would have all the "fun of 'Star Wars'" but it would be done "in ways that are new and original...." The next movie in the franchise, "The Mandalorian & Grogu," a spin-off of "The Mandalorian" series, directed by Jon Favreau, will hit cinemas in May 2026. USA Today notes that more new Star Wars movies have also been announced: Daisy Ridley is set to star in a film that will see her character, Rey, building a new Jedi Order after the events of "The Rise of Skywalker." [This is sometimes referred to as "Star Wars Episode X: New Jedi Order."] "Logan" filmmaker James Mangold has also been tapped to direct a movie about the dawn of the Jedi, and [Dave] Filoni is directing one said to "close out the interconnected stories" told in the live-action Disney+ shows like "The Mandalorian."

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The Trump administration is "taking measures to restrict the sale of AI chips by Nvidia, Advanced Micro Devices and Intel," especially in China, reports the New York Times. But that's triggered a series of dominoes. "In the two days after the limits became public, shares of Nvidia, the world's leading AI chipmaker, fell 8.4%. AMD's shares dropped 7.4%, and Intel's were down 6.8%." (AMD expects up to $800 million in charges after the move, according to CNBC, while NVIDIA said it would take a quarterly charge of about $5.5 billion.) The Times notes hopeful remarks Thursday from Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia, during a meeting with the China Council for the Promotion of International Trade. "We're going to continue to make significant effort to optimize our products that are compliant within the regulations and continue to serve China's market." But America's chipmakers also have a greater fear, according to the article: "that their retreat could turn the Chinese tech giant Huawei into a global chip-making powerhouse." "For the U.S. semiconductor industry, China is gone," said Handel Jones, a semiconductor consultant at International Business Strategies, which advises electronics companies. He projects that Chinese companies will have a majority share of chips in every major category in China by 2030... Huang's message spoke to one of his biggest fears. For years, he has worried that Huawei, China's telecommunications giant, will become a major competitor in AI. He has warned U.S. officials that blocking U.S. companies from competing in China would accelerate Huawei's rise, said three people familiar with those meetings who spoke on the condition of anonymity. If Huawei gains ground, Huang and others at Nvidia have painted a dark picture of a future in which China will use the company's chips to build AI data centers across the world for the Belt and Road Initiative, a strategic effort to increase Beijing's influence by paying for infrastructure projects around the world, a person familiar with the company's thinking said... Nvidia's previous generation of chips perform about 40% better than Huawei's best product, said Gregory C. Allen, who has written about Huawei in his role as director of the Wadhwani AI Center at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. But that gap could dwindle if Huawei scoops up the business of its American rivals, Allen said. Nvidia was expected to make more than $16 billion in sales this year from the H20 in China before the restriction. Huawei could use that money to hire more experienced engineers and make higher-quality chips. Allen said the U.S. government's restrictions also could help Huawei bring on customers like DeepSeek, a leading Chinese AI startup. Working with those companies could help Huawei improve the software it develops to control its chips. Those kinds of tools have been one of Nvidia's strengths over the years. TechRepublic identifies this key quote from an earlier article: "This kills NVIDIA's access to a key market, and they will lose traction in the country," Patrick Moorhead, a tech analyst with Moor Insights & Strategy, told The New York Times. He added that Chinese companies will buy from local rival Huawei instead.

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"Seismologist Deborah Kilb was wading through California earthquake records from the past four decades when she noticed something odd," reports CNN, "a series of deep earthquakes that had occurred under the Sierra Nevada at a depth where Earth's crust would typically be too hot and high pressure for seismic activity..." Kilb flagged the data to Vera Schulte-Pelkum, a research scientist at the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences and an associate research professor of geological sciences at the University of Colorado Boulder... Using the newfound data, the researchers imaged the Sierra Nevada through a technique known as receiver function analysis, which uses seismic waves to map Earth's internal structure. The scientists found that in the central region of the mountain range, Earth's crust is currently peeling away, a process scientifically known as lithospheric foundering. Kilb and Schulte-Pelkum reported the findings in December in the journal Geophysical Research Letters. The hypothesis lined up with previous speculation that the area had undergone lithospheric foundering, which happens when Earth's outermost layer sinks into the lower layer of the mantle. Now, the study authors believe that the process is ongoing and is currently progressing to the north of the mountain range, according to the study... What's happening under the Sierra Nevada could offer rare insight into how the continents formed, Schulte-Pelkum said. The finding could also help scientists identify more areas where this process is happening as well as provide a better understanding of earthquakes and how our planet operates, she added... Evidence for this process has been hard to come by. It is not visible from above ground, and it's an extremely slow process. Scientists theorize that the south Sierra finished the process of lithospheric foundering about 4 million to 3 million years ago, according to the study. It appears that these natural events happen occasionally around the world, Schulte-Pelkum said. "Geologically speaking, this is a pretty quick process with long periods of stability in between. ... This (lithosphere foundering) probably started happening a long time ago when we started building continents, and (the continents) have gotten bigger over time. So it's just sort of this punctuated, localized thing," she added... Further study within this area could also help scientists better understand how the Earth evolves on long timescales. If the lithospheric foundering continues underneath the mountain range, one can speculate that the land will continue to stretch vertically, changing the way the landscape looks now [said Mitchell McMillan, a research geologist and postdoctoral fellow at Georgia Tech, who was not involved with the study]. But that could take anywhere from several hundred thousand to a few million years, he added.

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CNN looks at "one field that's really benefitting" from the use of AI: "the discovery of new medicines". The founder/CEO of London-based LabGenius says their automated robotic system can assemble "thousands of different DNA constructs, each of which encodes a completely unique therapeutic molecule that we'll then test in the lab. This is something that historically would've had to have been done by hand." In short, CNN says, their system lets them "design and conduct experiments, and learn from them in a circular process that creates molecular antibodies at a rate far faster than a human researcher." While many cancer treatments have debilitating side effects, CNN notes that LabGenius "reengineers therapeutic molecules so they can selectively target just the diseased cells." But more importantly, their founder says they've now discovered "completely novel molecules with over 400x improvement in [cell] killing selectivity." A senior lecturer at Imperial College London tells CNN that LabGenius seems to have created an efficient process with seamless connections, identifying a series of antibodies that look like they can target cancer cells very selectively "that's as good as any results I've ever seen for this." (Although the final proof will be what happens when they test them on patients..) "And that's the next step for Labgenius," says CNN. "They aim to have their first therapeutics entering clinics in 2027." Finally, CNN asks, if it succeeds is their potential beyond cancer treatment? "If you take one step further," says the company's CEO/founder, "you could think about knocking out senescent cells or aging cells as a way to treat the underlying cause of aging."

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Billions of years ago Mars "had a warm, habitable climate with liquid water in lakes and flowing rivers," writes Ars Technica. But "In order for Mars to be warm enough to host liquid water, there must have been a lot of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere," says Benjamin Tutolo, a researcher at the University of Calgary. "The question we've been asking for at least 30 years was where the record of all this carbon is." Tutolo led a new study of rock samples collected by the Curiosity rover that might have answered this question... Curiosity rover was called Mars Science Laboratory for a reason. It went to the red planet fitted with a suite of instruments, some of which even the newer Perseverance was lacking. These enabled it to analyze the collected Martian rocks on the spot and beam the results back to Earth. "To get the most bang for the buck, NASA decided to send it to the place on Mars called the Gale Crater, because it was the tallest stack of sediments on the planet," Tutolo says. The central peak of Gale Crater was about 5 kilometers tall, created by the ancient meteorite impact... The idea then was to climb up Mount Sharp and collect samples from later and later geological periods at increasing elevations, tracing the history of habitability and the great drying up of Mars. On the way, the carbon missed by the satellites was finally found... It turned out the samples contained roughly between 5 and 10 percent of siderite... The siderite found in the samples was also pure, which Tutolo thinks indicates it has formed through an evaporation process akin to what we see in evaporated lakes on Earth. This, in turn, was the first evidence we've found of the ancient Martian carbon cycle. "Now we have evidence that confirms the models," Tutolo claims. The carbon from the atmosphere was being sequestered in the rocks on Mars just as it is on Earth. The problem was, unlike on Earth, it couldn't get out of these rocks... A large portion of carbon that got trapped in Martian rocks stayed in those rocks forever, thinning out the atmosphere. "While it's likely the red planet had its own carbon cycle, it was an imperfect one that eventually turned it into the lifeless desert it is today," the article points out. But the study still doesn't entirely explain what warmed the atmosphere of Mars — or why Martian habitability "was seemingly intermittent and fluctuating".

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For combining machine learning with astronomy, high school senior Matteo Paz won $250,000 in the Regeneron Science Talent Search, reports Smithsonian magazine: The young scientist's tool processed 200 billion data entries from NASA's now-retired Near-Earth Object Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (NEOWISE) telescope. His model revealed 1.5 million previously unknown potential celestial bodies.... [H]e worked on an A.I. model that sorted through the raw data in search of tiny changes in infrared radiation, which could indicate the presence of variable objects. Working with a mentor at the Planet Finder Academy at Caltech, Paz eventually flagged 1.5 million potential new objects, accoridng to the article, including supernovas and black holes. And that mentor says other Caltech researchers are using Paz's catalog of potential variable objects to study binary star systems. Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader schwit1 for sharing the article.

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"Members of the CA/Browser Forum have voted to slash cert lifespans from the current one year to 47 days," reports Computerworld, "placing an added burden on enterprise IT staff who must ensure they are updated." In a move that will likely force IT to much more aggressively use web certificate automation services, the Certification Authority Browser Forum (CA/Browser Forum), a gathering of certificate issuers and suppliers of applications that use certificates, voted [last week] to radically slash the lifespan of the certificates that verify the ownership of sites. The approved changes, which passed overwhelmingly, will be phased in gradually through March 2029, when the certs will only last 47 days. This controversial change has been debated extensively for more than a year. The group's argument is that this will improve web security in various ways, but some have argued that the group's members have a strong alternative incentive, as they will be the ones earning more money due to this acceleration... Although the group voted overwhelmingly to approve the change, with zero "No" votes, not every member agreed with the decision; five members abstained... In roughly one year, on March 15, 2026, the "maximum TLS certificate lifespan shrinks to 200 days. This accommodates a six-month renewal cadence. The DCV reuse period reduces to 200 days," according to the passed ballot. The next year, on March 15, 2027, the "maximum TLS certificate lifespan shrinks to 100 days. This accommodates a three-month renewal cadence. The DCV reuse period reduces to 100 days." And on March 15, 2029, "maximum TLS certificate lifespan shrinks to 47 days. This accommodates a one-month renewal cadence. The DCV reuse period reduces to 10 days." The changes "were primarily pushed by Apple," according to the article, partly to allow more effective reactions to possible changes in cryptography. And Apple also wrote that the shift "reduces the risk of improper validation, the scope of improper validation perpetuation, and the opportunities for misissued certificates to negatively impact the ecosystem and its relying parties." Thanks to Slashdot reader itwbennett for sharing the news.

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An anonymous reader shared this report from CNBC: Neurotech startup Precision Neuroscience on Thursday announced that a core component of its brain implant system has been approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, a major win for the four-year-old company... The company's brain-computer interface will initially be used to help patients with severe paralysis restore functions such as speech and movement, according to its website. Only part of Precision's system was approved by the FDA on Thursday, but it marks the first full regulatory clearance granted to a company developing a wireless BCI, Precision said in a release. Other prominent startups in the space include Elon Musk's Neuralink, and Synchron, which is backed by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates.... The piece of Precision's system that the FDA approved is called the Layer 7 Cortical Interface. The microelectrode array is thinner than a human hair and resembles a piece of yellow scotch tape. Each array is made up of 1,024 electrodes that can record, monitor and stimulate electrical activity on the brain's surface. When it is placed on the brain, Precision says it can conform to the surface without damaging any tissue. The FDA authorized Layer 7 to be implanted in patients for up to 30 days, and Precision will be able to market the technology for use in clinical settings. This means surgeons will be able to use the array during procedures to map brain signals, for instance. It is not Precision's end goal for the technology, but it will help the company generate revenue in the near term. Precision's co-founder and chief science officer also helped co-found Musk's Neuralink in 2017 before departing the following year, according to the article. He nows says this regulatory clearance "will exponentially increase our access to diverse, high-quality data, which will help us to build BCI systems that work more effectively."

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In NoSQL database news, Arch Linux "is the latest Linux distribution replacing its Redis packages with the Valkey fork," reports Phoronix. Valkey is backed by the Linux Foundation, Google, Amazon Web Services, and Oracle, which the article points out is due to Redis's decision last year to shift the upstream Redis license from a BSD 3-clause to RSALv2 and SSPLv1. Valkey is replacing Redis in the Arch Linux extra repository and after a two week period the Redis package will be moved out to AUR and receive no further updates. Users are encouraged to migrate to Valkey as soon as possible.

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"Russia is automating the spread of false information to fool AI chatbots," reports the Washington Post. (When researchers checked 10 chatbots, a third of the responses repeated false pro-Russia messaging.) The Post argues that this tactic offers "a playbook to other bad actors on how to game AI to push content meant to inflame, influence and obfuscate instead of inform," and calls it "a fundamental weakness of the AI industry." Chatbot answers depend on the data fed into them. A guiding principle is that the more the chatbots read, the more informed their answers will be, which is why the industry is ravenous for content. But mass quantities of well-aimed chaff can skew the answers on specific topics. For Russia, that is the war in Ukraine. But for a politician, it could be an opponent; for a commercial firm, it could be a competitor. "Most chatbots struggle with disinformation," said Giada Pistilli, principal ethicist at open-source AI platform Hugging Face. "They have basic safeguards against harmful content but can't reliably spot sophisticated propaganda, [and] the problem gets worse with search-augmented systems that prioritize recent information." Early commercial attempts to manipulate chat results also are gathering steam, with some of the same digital marketers who once offered search engine optimization — or SEO — for higher Google rankings now trying to pump up mentions by AI chatbots through "generative engine optimization" — or GEO. Our current situation "plays into the hands of those with the most means and the most to gain: for now, experts say, that is national governments with expertise in spreading propaganda." Russia and, to a lesser extent, China have been exploiting that advantage by flooding the zone with fables. But anyone could do the same, burning up far fewer resources than previous troll farm operations... In a twist that befuddled researchers for a year, almost no human beings visit the sites, which are hard to browse or search. Instead, their content is aimed at crawlers, the software programs that scour the web and bring back content for search engines and large language models. While those AI ventures are trained on a variety of datasets, an increasing number are offering chatbots that search the current web. Those are more likely to pick up something false if it is recent, and even more so if hundreds of pages on the web are saying much the same thing... The gambit is even more effective because the Russian operation managed to get links to the Pravda network stories edited into Wikipedia pages and public Facebook group postings, probably with the help of human contractors. Many AI companies give special weight to Facebook and especially Wikipedia as accurate sources. (Wikipedia said this month that its bandwidth costs have soared 50 percent in just over a year, mostly because of AI crawlers....) Last month, other researchers set out to see whether the gambit was working. Finnish company Check First scoured Wikipedia and turned up nearly 2,000 hyperlinks on pages in 44 languages that pointed to 162 Pravda websites. It also found that some false information promoted by Pravda showed up in chatbot answers. "They do even better in such places as China," the article points out, "where traditional media is more tightly controlled and there are fewer sources for the bots." (The nonprofit American Sunlight Project calls the process "LLM grooming".) The article quotes a top Kremlin propagandist as bragging in January that "we can actually change worldwide AI."

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Launched in 1958, the "awkward-looking" Vanguard-1 satellite ("the size of a grapefruit") is the oldest artificial object orbiting Earth. "A team of researchers and engineers want to retrieve the satellite for closer inspection and are currently working to find a way to bring Vanguard-1 home," writes Gizmodo: Other satellites of its time have reentered through Earth's atmosphere, burning up in a fiery death, but Vanguard-1 is still in orbit, silently zooming through the void of space... A team of researchers and engineers from Virginia-based consulting firm Booz Allen Hamilton have put together a proposal on how to retrieve the satellite from space, bringing it back to Earth to study how its equipment has fared over the years, according to a report by Space.com. The team's proposal is detailed in a study published in the Aerospace Research Center earlier this year... Considering how old Vanguard-1 is, the astronauts would need to handle it with care, according to the team behind the proposal. Before a retrieval attempt, the team suggests that a spacecraft be sent to rendezvous with the satellite to inspect its condition up-close. The engineers suggested partnering with a wealthy space enthusiast willing to fund the outer space venture, or using a SpaceX vehicle to bring the satellite home. Once it's brought back to Earth, experts would examine Vanguard-1 to assess its condition — whether it was struck by space debris, if it's still holding together, and how its time in orbit has affected the satellite. The satellite could then be placed at the Smithsonian for display as a sort of time capsule, a reminder of the history of spaceflight, the team suggests. "Future missions (space debris removal, materials capture for on-orbit manufacturing, and even deep space exploration) could build on techniques demonstrated in the retrieval of Vanguard 1," the paper read. "Retrieving Vanguard 1 would be a challenge, but an achievable and invaluable step forward for the entire U.S. space community." "The researchers suggest that the satellite can be placed in a lower orbit and snagged from space, or reeled into the International Space Station," according to the article. Space.com shares this assessment from Bill Raynor, the associate superintendent of the Naval Research Laboratory's spacecraft engineering division. "For material and radiation effects scientists and engineers, it would be an unprecedented opportunity for investigating the effects of long-term space environmental exposure." Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader AmiMoJo for sharing the news.

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"There has never been a consensus or a 'smoking gun' to explain what started the pandemic," writes ABC News. Yet the Associated Press reports that "A federal website that used to feature information on vaccines, testing and treatment for COVID-19 has been transformed into a page supporting the theory that the pandemic originated with a lab leak." (This despite the fact that "about 325 Americans have died from COVID per week on average over the past four weeks, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.") The covid.gov website shows a photo of President Donald Trump walking between the words "lab" and "leak" under a White House heading... The web page also accuses Dr. Anthony Fauci, the former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, of pushing a "preferred narrative" that COVID-19 originated in nature. The origins of COVID have never been proven. Scientists are unsure whether the virus jumped from an animal, as many other viruses have, or came from a laboratory accident. A U.S. intelligence analysis released in 2023 said there is insufficient evidence to prove either theory. "Many scientists think it's more likely the virus originated naturally in a wild animal and then spilled over into people in a wildlife market located in Wuhan," reports NPR. And even Jamie Metzl, a critic of the wildlife spillover theory, told NPR that while they appreciated "efforts to dig deeper... it would be a terrible shame if such efforts distracted from essential work to help prevent further infections and treat people suffering from COVID-19 and long COVID." (The federal website covidtests.gov now also redirects instead to the new page...) Some scientists were critical of the new site, which they say appears political in intent. "Every one of the five pieces of evidence supporting the lab leak hypothesis ... is factually incorrect, embellished, or presented in a misleading way," [wrote Angela Rasmussen, a virologist at the University of Saskatchewan in Canada]. "But making evidence-based arguments in good faith about the pandemic's origin is not the purpose of this document. This is pure propaganda, intended to justify the systematic devastation of the federal government, particularly programs devoted to public health and biomedical research," Rasmussen added. Other scientists said the web site doesn't follow the existing body of scientific evidence on the issue. That evidence does not support "any of the many, often contradictory, lab leak scenarios that have been proposed," Michael Worobey, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Arizona, in an email to NPR. He argued that the evidence is consistent with "the less flashy hypothesis that bringing live animals infected with pathogens with pandemic potential into the heart of one of the biggest cities in the world was how this pandemic started.... the next pathogen with pandemic potential will find us easy pickings if we don't appreciate how risky this sort of 'biosafety level zero' activity is."

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