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Microsoft has struck a deal with French AI startup Mistral as it seeks to broaden its involvement in the fast-growing industry beyond OpenAI. From a report: The US tech giant will provide the 10-month-old Paris-based company with help in bringing its AI models to market. Microsoft will also take a minor stake in Mistral, although the financial details have not been disclosed. The partnership makes Mistral the second company to provide commercial language models available on Microsoft's Azure cloud computing platform. Microsoft has already invested about $13 billion in San Francisco-based OpenAI, an alliance that is being reviewed by competition watchdogs in the US, EU and UK. Other Big Tech rivals, such as Google and Amazon, are also investing heavily in building generative AI -- software that can produce text, images and code in seconds -- which analysts believe has the capacity to shake up industries across the world. WSJ adds: On Monday, Mistral plans to announce a new AI model, called Mistral Large, that Mensch said can perform some reasoning tasks comparably with GPT-4, OpenAI's most advanced language model to date, and Gemini Ultra, Google's new model. Mensch said his new model cost less than 20 million euros, the equivalent of roughly $22 million, to train. By contrast OpenAI Chief Executive Sam Altman said last year after the release of GPT-4 that training his company's biggest models cost "much more than" $50 million to $100 million.

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theodp writes: Asked at the recent World Government Summit in Dubai what people should focus on when it comes to education, what should they learn, and how they should educate their kids and their societies, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang made a counterintuitive break from tech CEOs advising youngsters to learn how to code. Huang argued that, even at this early stage of the AI revolution, programming is no longer a vital skill. With coding taken care of by AI, Huang suggested humans can instead focus on more valuable expertise like biology, education, manufacturing, or farming From the video: "You probably recall over the course of the last 10 years, 15 years, almost everybody who sits on a stage like this would tell you it is vital that your children learn computer science, everybody should learn how to program, and in fact it's almost exactly the opposite. It is our job to create computing technology such that nobody has to program and that the programming language, it's human, everybody in the world is now a programmer. This is the miracle, this is the miracle of artificial intelligence. For the very first time, we have closed the gap, the technology divide has been completely closed and it's the reason why so many people can engage artificial intelligence. It is the reason why every single government, every single industrial conference, every single company is talking about artificial intelligence today. Because for the very first time you can imagine everybody in your company being a technologist. "And so, this is a tremendous time for all of you to realize that the technology divide has been closed. Or another way to say it, the technology leadership of other countries has now been reset. The countries, the people that understand how to solve a domain problem in digital biology, or in education of young people, or in manufacturing or in farming, those people who understand domain expertise now can utilize technology that is readily available to you. You now have a computer that will do what you tell it to do to help automate your work, to amplify your productivity, to make you more efficient. And so, I think that this is just a tremendous time. The impact of course is great and your imperative to activate and take advantage of the technology is absolutely immediate. And also to realize that to engage AI is a lot easier now than at any time in the history of computing. It is vital that we upskill everyone and the upskilling process, I believe, will be delightful, surprising, to realize that this computer can perform all these things that you're instructing it to do and doing it so easily." Huang's words come as tech-backed nonprofit Code.org-- which is lobbying to make CS a high school graduation requirement in all 50 states -- hedges its bets by also including AI usage as part of its mission through its new TeachAI initiative (trademark pending). Interestingly, conspicuous by its absence from the Who's Who of tech giants on the advisory committee for the Code.org staffed-and-operated TeachAI is Nvidia (Nvidia is also missing from the list of Code.org donors). So, is it time to revisit the question of Is AI an Excuse for Not Learning To Code?

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OpenAI, Microsoft, Nvidia, and Jeff Bezos are all part of a pack of investors in a business "developing human-like robots," reports Bloomberg, "according to people with knowledge of the situation..." At the startup — which is named "Figure" — engineers "are working on a robot that looks and moves like a human. The company has said it hopes its machine, called Figure 01, will be able to perform dangerous jobs that are unsuitable for people and that its technology will help alleviate labor shortages." Figure is raising about $675 million in a funding round that carries a pre-money valuation of roughly $2 billion, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the matter is private. Through his firm Explore Investments LLC, Bezos has committed $100 million. Microsoft is investing $95 million, while Nvidia and an Amazon.com Inc.-affiliated fund are each providing $50 million... Other technology companies are involved as well. Intel Corp.'s venture capital arm is pouring in $25 million, and LG Innotek is providing $8.5 million. Samsung's investment group, meanwhile, committed $5 million. Backers also include venture firms Parkway Venture Capital, which is investing $100 million, and Align Ventures, which is providing $90 million... The AI robotics industry has been busy lately. Earlier this year, OpenAI-backed Norwegian robotics startup 1X Technologies AS raised $100 million. Vancouver-based Sanctuary AI is developing a humanoid robot called Phoenix. And Tesla Inc. is working on a robot called Optimus, with Elon Musk calling it one of his most important projects. Agility Robotics, which Amazon backed in 2022, has bots in testing at one of the retailer's warehouses. Bloomberg calls the investments in Figure "part of a scramble to find new applications for artificial intelligence."

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At CNN's product review site, one electronics reporter wrote they were "dumbfounded", "surprised," and "shocked" by the transparent screen on Lenovo's ThinkBook Transparent Display prototype. "This Micro LED screen is no slouch, either; a Full HD panel with up to 1,000 nits of brightness..." Let's get the big issue out of the way early: Lenovo is merely boasting what it can do, not what it will do. That's what a "concept" product means, of course. That said, it's still the most exciting thing I've seen in laptops in quite some time... Thinking of major use cases for such a laptop, I basically considered any time you're out in public and want a more complete world view. While websites with white backgrounds look more opaque than transparent, the black backgrounds of a Notepad document and animations of space and fish fit the experience much better, as I could see the plants that Lenovo had placed behind the screen. The more websites use dark modes, the better this will go, too. Admittedly, I can also imagine some will blanch at the fact that such a laptop completely removes your privacy as a user. From those shopping for loved ones in the same room to those working on important business documents, the ThinkBook Transparent Display laptop could use a non-transparent mode, just like the LG OLED T offers. That said, I'm sure teachers would love to see what their kids are working on in the classroom. The Verge calls it "an exceptionally cool-looking device that's capable of some fun novelties." The key draw is its bezel-less 17.3-inch MicroLED display, which offers up to 55 percent transparency when its pixels are set to black and turned off. But as its pixels light up, the display becomes less and less see-through, until eventually, you're looking at a completely opaque white surface with a peak brightness of 1,000 nits... How often, of course, do you actually want to see the empty desk behind your laptop? Would it be beneficial to be able to see your colleague sitting across from you, or would it be distracting? One of Lenovo's big ideas is that the form factor could be useful for digital artists, helping them to see the world behind the laptop's screen while sketching it on the lower half of the laptop where the keyboard is (more on this later).... 720p still feels like a very work-in-progress spec on a 17.3-inch laptop like this, but at least text shown on the screen during my demo was perfectly readable... Lenovo's transparent laptop concept feels like a collection of cool technologies in search of a killer app. And yet Lenovo's executive director of ThinkPad portfolio and product Tom Butler tells the Verge he has "very high confidence" this will be in a real laptop within the next five years. (The Verge add that he "hopes that revealing this proof of concept will start a public conversation about what it could be useful for, setting a target for Lenovo to work toward.") But would you use a laptop with a transparent screen?

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The Washington Post reports: Google's self-driving car company, Waymo, is hitting resistance in its quest to expand 24/7 robotaxi service to other parts of California, including a series of incidents that have fed public officials' safety concerns about the vehicles coming to their cities. Over eight days in February, for example, a Waymo vehicle smashed into a closing gate while exiting the University of Southern California's campus; the next day, another collided with a cyclist in San Francisco. Later that week, a mob of people vandalized and lit one of its cars on fire. Days later, the company announced a voluntary recall of its software for an incident involving a pickup truck in Phoenix. [Though it occurred three months ago, the Post reports that after the initial contact between the vehicles, "A second Waymo vehicle made contact with the pickup truck a few minutes later."] This string of events — none of which resulted in serious injuries — comes after Waymo's main competitor, General Motors-owned Cruise, recalled its fleet of driverless cars last year... [Waymo] is now the lone company trying to expand 24/7 robotaxi service around California, despite sharp resistance from local officials. "Waymo has become the standard-bearer for the entire robotaxi industry for better or for worse," said David Zipper, a senior fellow at the MIT Mobility Initiative. While Waymo's incidents are "nowhere near what Cruise is accused of doing, there is a crisis of confidence in autonomous vehicle companies related to safety right now." The California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) delayed deciding whether Waymo could expand its service to include a portion of a major California highway and also Los Angeles and San Mateo counties, pending "further staff review," according to the regulator's website. While Waymo said the delay is a part of the commission's "standard and robust review process," the postponement comes as officials from other localities fear becoming like San Francisco — where self-driving cars have disrupted emergency scenes, held up traffic and frustrated residents who are learning to share public roads with robot cars... Zipper said it is a notable disparity that "the companies are saying the technology is supposed to be a godsend for urban life, and it's pretty striking that the leaders of these urban areas really don't want them," he said. Waymo offers ride-hailing services in San Francisco and Phoenix — as well as some free rides in Los Angeles, according to the article. It also cites a December report from Waymo estimated that overich 7.1 million miles of testing, there were 17 fewer injuries and 20 fewer police-reported crashes "compared to if human drivers with the benchmark crash rate would have driven the same distance in the areas we operate."

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From a report: A team of drone enthusiasts have built a sub-$500 drone that uses a camera and Google Maps to provide itself with GPS co-ordinates, removing the need for a GPS satellite signal. And all of this was done in 24 hours during the El Segundo Defense Tech Hackathon. The drone the trio opted for is a custom designed and 3D printed fixed wing featuring a large single motor towards the rear and a downward facing camera used for geo-referencing... Doesn't Google Maps still require internet, you may ask? Google Maps allows users to download segments of maps ahead of time, usually for use when you are travelling or camping out in remote areas. In this instance, the team used this feature to their advantage, allowing the drone to continue operating... Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader schwit1 for sharing the news.

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Linus has released 6.8-rc6 for testing.

Last week I said that I was hoping things would calm down a bit. Technically things did calm down a bit, and rc6 is smaller than rc5 was. But not by a huge amount, and honestly, while there's nothing really alarming here, there's more here than I would really like at this point in the release.

So this may end up being one of those releases that get an rc8. We'll see.

Long-time Slashdot reader BishopBerkeley writes: Though it does not come as much of a surprise, a new study highlighted in IEEE Spectrum delves into how corporate profit motives are preventing the upgrading and the expansion of the U.S. electrical grid. The full report can be downloaded here from the source [the nonprofit economic research group NBER]. Besides opening up the market to competition, utilities don't want to lose control over regional infrastructure, writes IEEE Spectrum. "[I]nterregional lines threaten utility companies' dominance over the nation's power supply. In the power industry, asset ownership provides control over rules that govern energy markets and transmission service and expansion. When upstart entities build power plants and transmission lines, they may be able to dilute utility companies' control over power-industry rules and prevent utilities from dictating decisions about transmission expansion." The article begins by noting that "The United States is not building enough transmission lines to connect regional power networks. The deficit is driving up electricity prices, reducing grid reliability, and hobbling renewable-energy deployment. " Utilities can stall transmission expansion because out-of-date laws sanction these companies' sweeping control over transmission development... One of the main values of connecting regional networks is that it enablesâ"and is in fact critical forâ"incorporating renewable energy... Plus, adding interregional transmission for renewables can significantly reduce costs for consumers. Such connections allow excess wind and solar power to flow to neighboring regions when weather conditions are favorable and allow the import of energy from elsewhere when renewables are less productive. Even without renewables, better integrated networks generally lower costs for consumers because they reduce the amount of generation capacity needed overall and decrease energy market prices. Interregional transmission also enhances reliability,particularly during extreme weather... Addressing the transmission shortage is on the agenda in Washington, but utility companies are lobbying against reforms. The article points out that now investors and entrepreneurs "are developing long-distance direct-current lines, which are more efficient at moving large amounts of energy over long distances, compared with AC," and also "sidestep the utility-dominated transmission-expansion planning processes." They're already in use in China, and are also becoming Europe's preferred choice...

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Julia 1.0 was released in 2018 — after a six-year wait. And there's now another update. LWN.net gets you up to speed, calling Julia "a general-purpose, open-source programming language with a focus on high-performance scientific computing." Some of Julia's unusual features: - Lisp-inspired metaprogramming - The ability to examine compiled representations of code in the REPL or in a "reactive notebook" - An advanced type and dispatch system - A sophisticated, built-in package manager. Version 1.10 brings big increases in speed and developer convenience, especially improvements in code precompilation and loading times. It also features a new parser written in Julia... [I]t is faster, it produces more useful syntax-error messages, and it provides better source-code mapping, which associates locations in compiled code to their corresponding lines in the source. That last improvement also leads to better error messages and makes it possible to write more sophisticated debuggers and linters... Between the improvements in precompilation and loading times, and the progress in making small binaries, two major and perennial complaints, of beginners and seasoned Julia users alike, have been addressed... StaticCompiler and related WebAssembly tools will make it easier to write web applications in Julia for direct execution in the browser; it is already possible, but may become more convenient over the next few years. Thanks for sharing the article to long-time Slashdot reader lee1 — who also wrote No Starch Press's Practical Julia: A Hands-On Introduction for Scientific Minds . lee1 also reminds us that Gnuplot 6.0 was released in December: lee1 writes: This article surveys the new features, including filled contours in 3D, adaptive plotting resolution, watchpoints, clipping of surfaces, pie charts, and new syntax for conditionals.

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Popular Science points out that for encoding data, "optical disks almost always offer just a single, 2D layer — that reflective, silver underside." "If you could boost a disk's number of available, encodable layers, however, you could hypothetically gain a massive amount of extra space..." Researchers at the University of Shanghai for Science and Technology recently set out to do just that, and published the results earlier this week in the journal, Nature. Using a 54-nanometer laser, the team managed to record a 100 layers of data onto an optical disk, with each tier separated by just 1 micrometer. The final result is an optical disk with a three-dimensional stack of data layers capable of holding a whopping 1 petabit (Pb) of information — that's equivalent to 125,000 gigabytes of data... As Gizmodo offers for reference, that same petabit of information would require roughly a six-and-a-half foot tall stack of HHD drives — if you tried to encode the same amount of data onto Blu-rays, you'd need around 10,000 blank ones to complete your (extremely inefficient) challenge. To pull off their accomplishment, engineers needed to create an entirely new material for their optical disk's film... AIE-DDPR film utilizes a combination of specialized, photosensitive molecules capable of absorbing photonic data at a nanoscale level, which is then encoded using a high-tech dual-laser array. Because AIE-DDPR is so incredibly transparent, designers could apply layer-upon-layer to an optical disk without worrying about degrading the overall data. This basically generated a 3D "box" for digitized information, thus exponentially raising the normal-sized disk's capacity. Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader hackingbear for sharing the news.

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Fast Company notes that "the deadly impacts of Pegasus and other cyberweapons — wielded by governments from Spain to Saudi Arabia against human rights defenders, journalists, lawyers and others — is by now well documented. A wave of scrutiny and sanctions have helped expose the secretive, quasi-legal industry behind these tools, and put financial strain on firms like Israel's NSO Group, which builds Pegasus. "And yet business is booming." New research published this month by Google and Meta suggest that despite new restrictions, the cyberattack market is growing, and growing more dangerous, aiding government violence and repression and eroding democracy around the globe. "The industry is thriving," says Maddie Stone, a researcher at Google's Threat Analysis Group (TAG) who hunts zero-day exploits, the software bugs that have yet to be fixed and are worth potentially hundreds of millions to spyware sellers. "More companies keep popping up, and their government customers are determined to buy from them, and want these capabilities, and are using them." For the first time, half of known zero-days against Google and Android products now come from private companies, according to a report published this month by Stone's team at Google. Beyond prominent firms like NSO and Candiru, Google's researchers say they are tracking about 40 companies involved in the creation of hacking tools that have been deployed against "high risk individuals." Of the 72 zero-day exploits Google discovered in the wild between 2014 and last year, 35 were attributed to these and other industry players, as opposed to state-backed actors. "If governments ever had a monopoly on the most sophisticated capabilities, that era is certainly over," reads the report. The Google findings and a spyware-focused threat report published by Meta a week later reflect an increasingly tough response by Big Tech to an industry that profits from breaking into its systems. The reports also put new pressure on the US and others to take action against the mostly unregulated industry. "In its report, Google describes a 'rise in turnkey espionage solutions' offered by dozens of shady companies..." Thanks to Slashdot reader tedlistens for sharing the article.

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CNN reports: AT&T is reimbursing customers for the nearly 12-hour network outage on Thursday, the company announced in a news release. The mobile network will issue a $5 credit to "potentially impacted" AT&T Wireless customers, which it says is the "average cost of a full day of service." The credit will be applied automatically "within 2 bill cycles," according to an announcement at the URL att.com/makeitright. "We recognize the frustration this outage has caused and know we let many of our customers down." In a much smaller font, they note that the credit "does not apply to AT&T Business, AT&T Prepaid or Cricket. More from CNN: AT&T had encountered sporadic service interruptions in the days leading up to the outage, including a temporary 911 outage in some parts of the southeast. While regional disruptions to wireless service happen occasionally, prolonged nationwide outages are rare. The Federal Communications Commission confirmed Thursday it was investigating the incident... Several hours after service was restored, AT&T released an update stating the outage seemed to be the result of an internal issue, not a cybersecurity threat. "Based on our initial review, we believe that today's outage was caused by the application and execution of an incorrect process used as we were expanding our network," the company said. On Saturday, AT&T reiterated it was taking steps "to prevent this from happening again in the future," but did not elaborate.

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jd (Slashdot reader #1,658) writes: The Register has been running a series of articles about the evolution of Unix, from humble beginnings to the transition to Plan9. There is a short discussion of why Plan9 and its successors never really took off (despite being vastly superior to microkernels), along with the ongoing development of 9Front. From the article: Plan 9 was in some way a second implementation of the core concepts of Unix and C, but reconsidered for a world of networked graphical workstations. It took many of the trendy ideas of late-1980s computing, both of academic theories and of the computer industry of the time, and it reinterpreted them through the jaded eyes of two great gurus, Kenneth Thompson and Dennis Ritchie (and their students) — arguably, design geniuses who saw their previous good ideas misunderstood and misinterpreted. In Plan 9, networking is front and center. There are good reasons why this wasn't the case with Unix — it was being designed and built at the same time as local area networking was being invented. UNIX Fourth Edition, the first version written in C, was released in 1973 — the same year as the first version of Ethernet. Plan 9 puts networking right into the heart of the design. While Unix was later used as the most common OS for standalone workstations, Plan 9 was designed for clusters of computers, some being graphical desktops and some shared servers... Because everything really is a file, displaying a window on another machine can be as simple as making a directory and populating it with some files. You can start programs on other computers, but display the results on yours — all without any need for X11 or any visible networking at all. This means all the Unixy stuff about telnet and rsh and ssh and X forwarding and so on just goes away. It makes X11 look very overcomplicated, and it makes Wayland look like it was invented by Microsoft.

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Netflix's new sci-fi drama Spaceman centers on Czech astronaut Jakub Procházk, described by Polygon as "painfully introverted, emotionally repressed, and above all, quiet... so muted and compressed, he seems like a trauma victim." The film, adapted from the 2017 novel Spaceman of Bohemia written by Czech author Jaroslav KalfaÅ(TM), is a solemn drama in the mold of Andrei Tarkovsky's Solaris, or to some degree, Christopher Nolan's Interstellar. The story revolves around Jakub's disintegrating frame of mind after eight months alone in space as he investigates a glowing cosmic phenomenon that's become visible from Earth. Meanwhile, his wife Lenka (Carey Mulligan), heavily pregnant and going through her own breakdown back home, decides to leave Jakub, and his handlers (Isabella Rossellini among them) work to keep him from finding out. And then the giant spider appears, and Jakub worries that he's losing his mind. CNN says Sandler's deal with Netflix "means pretty much doing whatever he wants, which, in the case of Spaceman, means traveling to the furthest reaches of space as the near-solitary star of a pretentious, message-heavy drama." You can watch a trailer here. The movie enjoys a "limited theatrical release" this weekend, and will stream on Netflix starting March 1.

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An anonymous reader shared this report from Electrek: Renewable developer Clearway Energy Group has completed a 452-megawatt (MW) solar farm in West Texas — and it's huge... It's built on around 5,000 acres of land and features over 1.1 million solar panels... Texas Solar Nova will generate enough electricity to power over 190,000 homes annually. It's got an offtake agreement with telecoms giant Verizon, and agreements with auto component maker Toyota Boshoku and Swedish bearing and seal maker SKF to purchase renewable energy certificates (RECs). Both Toyota Boshoku and SKF have 12-year agreements for RECs. The $660 million facility will "contribute significantly to the local tax base," the company said in a statement, "starting with an estimated $5.4 million in property taxes and wages to be paid in the first year."

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A U.S. government auction site was breached by an Oklahoma man, reports NBC News. So when it came time to pay up on his winning bids, he "falsified the true auction price to $1," according to the U.S. attorney's office. He defrauded the government out of more than $150,000 between Jan. 31 and March 21, 2019, the indictment alleges. Included in the $1-buys were a 2010 Ford Escape Hybrid, for which Coker submitted a bid of $8,327; a Ford F550 pickup, with a bid of $9,000; and a Chevrolet C4500 box truck, bid $22,700; the U.S. attorney's office said... Nineteen items in all were bought through the auctions, according to prosecutors. Coker used eight accounts and pre-paid debit cards with very little balances to make the purchases, the indictment says. "Coker was indicted on three counts of wire fraud in March 2023 and pleaded guilty to one count Wednesday, according to court records." Thanks to Slashdot reader Thelasko for sharing the news.

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In 2019 a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket launched an Israeli spacecraft carrying a 30-million page archive of human civilization to the moon. Unfortunately, that spacecraft crashed. But thanks to this week's moon landing by the Odysseus, there's now a 30-million page "Lunar Library" on the moon — according to a Medium post by the Arch Mission Foundation. "This historic moment secures humanity's cultural heritage and knowledge in an indestructible archive built to last for up to billions of years." Etched onto thin sheets of nickel, called NanoFiche, the Lunar Library is practically indestructible and can withstand the harsh conditions of space... Some of the notable content includes: The Wikipedia. The entire English Wikipedia containing over 6 million articles on every branch of knowledge. Project Gutenberg. Portions of Project Gutenberg's library of over 70,000 free eBooks containing some of our most treasured literature. The Long Now Foundation's Rosetta Project archive of over 7,000 human languages and The Panlex datasets. Selections from the Internet Archive's collections of books and important documents and data sets. The SETI Institute's Earthling Project, featuring a musical compilation of 10,000 vocal submissions representing humanity united The Arch Lunar Art Archive containing a collection of works from global contemporary and digital artists in 2022, recorded as NFTs. David Copperfield's Magic Secrets — the secrets to all his greatest illusions — including how he will make the Moon disappear in the near future. The Arch Mission Primer — which teaches a million concepts with images and words in 5 languages. The Arch Mission Private Library — containing millions of pages as well as books, documents and articles on every subject, including a broad range of fiction and non-fiction, textbooks, periodicals, audio recordings, videos, historical documents, software sourcecode, data sets, and more. The Arch Mission Vaults — private collections, including collections from our advisors and partners, and a collection of important texts and images from all the world's religions including the great religions and indigenous religions from around the world, collections of books, photos, and a collection of music by leading recording artists, and much more content that may be revealed in the future... We also want to recognize our esteemed advisors, and our many content partners and collections including the Wikimedia Foundation, the Long Now Foundation, The SETI Institute Earthling Project, the Arch Lunar Art Archive project, Project Gutenberg, the Internet Archive, and the many donors who helped make the Lunar Library possible through their generous contributions. This accomplishment would not have happened without the collaborative support of so many... We will continue to send backups of our important knowledge and cultural heritage — placing them on the surface of the Earth, in caves and deep underground bunkers and mines, and around the solar system as well. This is a mission that continues as long as humanity endures, and perhaps even long after we are gone, as a gift for whoever comes next. Space.com has a nice rundown of the other new payloads that just landed on the moon. Some highlights: "Cloud computing startup Lonestar's Independence payload is a lunar data center test mission for data storage and transmission from the lunar surface." LRA is a small hemisphere of light-reflectors built to servce as a precision landmark to "allow spacecraft to ping it with lasers to help them determine their precise distance..." ROLSES is a radio spectrometer for measuring the electron density near the lunar surface, "and how it may affect radio observatories, as well as observing solar and planetary radio waves and other phenomena." "Artist Jeff Koons is sending 125 miniature stainless steel Moon Phase sculptures, each honoring significant human achievements across cultures and history, to be displayed on the moon in a cube. "

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Since 2010, billionaire tech investor Peter Thiel has offered to pay about 20 students $100,000 to drop out of school each year "to start companies or nonprofits," reports the Wall Street Journal. His program has now backed 271 people, and this year the applicant pool "is bigger than ever." So how's it going? Some big successes include Vitalik Buterin, co-founder of Ethereum, the blockchain network; Laura Deming, a key figure in venture investing in aging and longevity; Austin Russell, who runs self-driving technologies company Luminar Technologies; and Paul Gu, co-founder of consumer lending company Upstart... Thiel and executives of the fellowship acknowledge they have learned painful lessons along the way. Some applicants pursued ambitious ideas that turned out to be unrealistic, for example. "Asteroid mining is great for press releases but maybe we should have pushed back early on," he says. Others were better at applying to be Thiel fellows than they were starting businesses, it turned out... They've also learned that lone geniuses with brilliant ideas aren't usually the kinds of people who can build organizations. "It's a team sport to get something going and build on it, you can't just be a mad genius, you have to have some social skills and emotional intelligence," says Michael Gibson, an early leader of the organization who is co-founder of a venture fund that invests primarily in those who don't have a college degree... Thiel hasn't attempted to build a better education system, which program officials acknowledge has made it harder to develop talent in the program... Thiel fellows say they don't receive much more than funding from the program and have limited contact with Thiel, though access to a network of former Thiel fellows can be useful. "Meeting some of the other members inspires you to think bigger," says Boyan Slat, a 2016 Thiel fellow who is chief executive of The Ocean Cleanup, a Netherlands-based nonprofit developing technologies to remove plastic from oceans. Slat says he has spoken to Thiel "three or four times." As a result, Thiel and other staffers have concluded they can't grow beyond the 20 or so young people chosen as fellows each year. "If you scale the program," Thiel says, "you will have a lot more people who aren't quite ready, you would then have to be super-confident you can develop them" — which Thiel and his colleagues say they aren't skilled at doing... About a quarter of the Thiel fellows eventually returned to college to finish their degrees, suggesting that even the dropouts see enduring value in higher education. Thiel says they "got way more out of it by going back" after launching their businesses. "The other 75% didn't need a college degree," he says.

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"One London resident watched on CCTV as a thief walked up to his £40,000 car and drove away," reports the Observer. "Now manufacturers say they are being drawn in to a hi-tech 'arms race' with criminals." [H]i-tech devices disguised as handheld games consoles are being traded online for thousands of pounds and are used by organised crime gangs to mimic the electronic key on an Ioniq 5, opening the doors and starting the engine. The device, known as an "emulator", works by intercepting a signal from the car, which is scanning for the presence of a legitimate key, and sending back a signal to gain access to the vehicle... Hyundai says it is looking at measures to prevent the use of emulators "as a priority". But it is not the only carmaker whose vehicles appear to be vulnerable. An Observer investigation found that models by Toyota, Lexus and Kia have also been targeted... British motorists now face an increase in the number of thefts and rising insurance premiums... Car thefts are at their highest level for a decade in England and Wales, rising from 85,803 vehicles in the year to March 2012 to 130,270 in the year to March 2023 — an increase of more than 50%. Part of the reason, say experts, is the rise of keyless entry... Kia did not respond to a request for comment. A spokesperson for Toyota, which owns Lexus, said: "Toyota and Lexus are continuously working on developing technical solutions to make vehicles more secure. Since introducing enhanced security hardware on the latest versions of a number of models, we have seen a significant drop-off in thefts. For older models we are currently developing solutions." Another common attack requires entry to the vehicle first, according to the article, but then uses the vehicle's onboard diagnostic port to program "a new key linked to the vehicle..." "Many owners of Ioniq 5s, which sell from around £42,000, now use steering locks to deter thieves."

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"The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, which selects Nobel laureates in chemistry and physics, last week awarded Dr. Wu its Sjöberg Prize in honor of 'decisive contributions' to cancer research," reports CNN. Their profile of the oncologist from Boston's Dana-Farber Cancer Institute notes Dr. Wu's research "has laid the scientific foundation for the development of cancer vaccines tailored to the genetic makeup of an individual's tumor." It's a strategy looking increasingly promising for some hard-to-treat cancers such as melanoma and pancreatic cancer, according to the results of early-stage trials, and may ultimately be widely applicable to many of the 200 or so forms of cancer... The most common treatments for cancer — radiation therapy and chemotherapy — are like sledgehammers, striking all cells and often damaging healthy tissue. Since the 1950s, cancer researchers have been seeking a way to dial up the body's immune system, which naturally tries to fight cancer but is outsmarted by it, to attack tumor cells. Progress on that front was middling until about 2011 with the arrival of a class of drugs called checkpoint inhibitors, which boost the anti-tumor activity of T cells, an important part of the immune system... These drugs have helped some people with cancer who would have been given months to live survive for decades, but they don't work for all cancer patients, and researchers continue to look for ways to turbocharge the body's immune system against cancer... Wu's research focused on small mutations in cancer tumor cells. These mutations, which occur as the tumor grows, create proteins that are slightly different to those in healthy cells. The altered protein generates what's called a tumor neoantigen that can be recognized by the immune system's T cells as foreign, and therefore susceptible to attack. With thousands of potential neoantigen candidates, Wu used "tour de force lab work" to identify the neoantigens that are on the cell surface, making them a potential target for a vaccine, said Urban Lendahl, professor of genetics at the Karolinska Institutet in Sweden and the secretary of the committee that awarded the prize. "If the immune system is to have a chance to attack the tumor, this difference must be manifested on the surface of the tumor cells. Otherwise, it's pretty pointless," Lendahl added... By sequencing DNA from healthy and cancer cells, Wu and her team identified a cancer patient's unique tumor neoantigens. Synthetic copies of these unique neoantigens could be used as a personalized vaccine to activate the immune system to target the cancer cells... Once it had FDA approval, the team vaccinated six patients with advanced melanoma with a seven-shot course of patient-specific neoantigens vaccines. The breakthrough results were published in an 2017 article in Nature. For some patients, this treatment resulted in the immune system's cells being activated and targeting the tumor cells. The results, along with another paper published the same year led by the founders of mRNA vaccine company BioNTech, provided "proof of principle" that a vaccine can be targeted to a person's specific tumor, Lendahl said. A follow-up by Wu's team four years after the patients received the vaccines published in 2021, showed that the immune responses were effective in keeping cancer cells under control... Since then, Wu's team, other groups of medical researchers and pharmaceutical companies, including Merck, Moderna and BioNTech, have further developed this field of research, with trials underway for vaccines that treat pancreatic and lung cancer as well as melanoma. "All the trials underway are small-scale, typically involving a handful of patients with later-stage disease and a high tolerance for safety risks," adds CNN. "To show that these type of cancer vaccines work, much larger randomized control trials are needed."

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