Almost all new homes in England will be fitted with solar panels during construction within two years, the UK government will announce after Keir Starmer rejected Tony Blair's criticism of net zero policies. From a report: Housebuilders will be legally required to install solar panels on the roofs of new properties by 2027 under the plans. The policy is estimated to add between $4,000 and $5,320 to building a home but homeowners would save more than $1,331 on their annual energy bills, according to the Times.

Labour has set a target of building 1.5m homes by the end of the parliament. The party has promised to decarbonise the electricity grid by 2030 and cut household energy bills by $400 a year.

Apple has updated its App Store Guidelines to comply with a court order from the Epic Games lawsuit, now allowing U.S. apps to include external payment links and buttons without needing special approval. "The App Review Guidelines have been updated for compliance with a United States court decision regarding buttons, external links, and other calls to action in apps. These changes affect apps distributed on the United States storefront of the App Store," Apple said in an email to developers on Thursday night. 9to5Mac reports: Here are the full changes to the App Store Guidelines with today's revisions:

3.1.1: Apps on the United States storefront are not prohibited from including buttons, external links, or other calls to action when allowing users to browse NFT collections owned by others.
3.1.1(a): On the United States storefront, there is no prohibition on an app including buttons, external links, or other calls to action, and no entitlement is required to do so.
3.1.3: The prohibition on encouraging users to use a purchasing method other than in-app purchase does not apply on the United States storefront.
3.1.3(a): The External Link Account entitlement is not required for apps on the United States storefront to include buttons, external links, or other calls to action. "We strongly disagree with the decision. We will comply with the court's order and we will appeal," Apple said in a statement to 9to5Mac yesterday.

Spotify, Patreon, Epic Games and others are already working to circumvent Apple's App Store fees.

Following a major court ruling limiting Apple's control over App Store payments, Patreon plans to update its iOS app to allow payments outside Apple's system, letting creators keep more of their earnings. Spotify and Proton are also preparing similar updates. The Verge reports: "This is a huge moment for creators and their businesses," [spokesperson Adiya Taylor] says. "The iOS app is the number one platform for fan engagement on Patreon, and we believe this ruling allows creators to get paid without giving Apple 30 percent. As a first step, we will submit an app update for review by Apple to enable payments outside of IAP so creators keep more from iOS based fan payments."

Last year, Patreon said it was forced to switch to Apple's in-app purchase system, which applied a 30 percent fee to all new memberships purchased in the app, or else risk "being removed from the App Store." "When we first announced rolling out Apple's IAP requirements last year, we shared that we used three principles to guide our decision in how we wanted to move forward: transparency, control, and stability," Taylor says. "Keeping with those principles, we're exploring further action we can take, and we'll continue to keep creators and fans posted on any changes to our experience." Taylor wasn't able to share a timeline for when the update might be rolled out. Further reading: Epic Games Is Launching Webshops To Circumvent App Store Fees

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Epic Games is taking a victory lap. After notching a big win against Apple in a years-long legal dispute, Epic announced that its Epic Games Store will allow developers to open webshops, which can offer players out-of-app purchases to circumvent fees from Apple and Google. [...] With the Epic Games Store's new webshops feature, other developers will be more easily able to follow suit.

Usually, Epic takes a 12% share of a developer's earnings from the Epic Games Store, which is still a better deal than what developers get from Apple. But starting in June, Epic Games will not take a cut from the first $1 million each game earns annually. Only after a game eclipses $1 million in revenue will Epic begin taking a cut. "With new legal rulings in place, developers will be able to send players from games to make digital purchases from webshops on any platform that allows it, including iOS in the European Union and United States," Epic said.

Nature: A forthcoming policy from the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) will target - and at least temporarily stop -- funding to laboratories and hospitals outside the United States, threatening thousands of global-health projects and international collaborations on topics such as emerging infectious diseases and cancer.

The NIH, the world's largest funder of biomedical research, plans to release the policy in the next week. Some agency staff members have already been instructed to hold funds for foreign institutions that are part of both new research grants and grants coming up for renewal, according to multiple agency employees who spoke to Nature under the condition of anonymity because they are not authorized to speak to the press.

Chinese scientists have achieved a significant nuclear breakthrough by successfully refueling a thorium-based reactor while it remains operational, according to reports from Chinese state media.

The experimental 2-megawatt thermal reactor, which came online in June 2024, represents the revival of technology originally developed and abandoned by the United States in the mid-20th century. The milestone was revealed during a closed meeting at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, where project leaders shared results demonstrating the reactor's ability to be refueled without shutdown -- a capability conventional uranium reactors lack.

Though small compared to MIT's 6-megawatt research reactor, this achievement shows China's accelerating nuclear ambitions. The country has surpassed France in nuclear generation and recently approved 10 new reactors worth over $27 billion in investment. This thorium reactor joins other revived nuclear concepts, including molten-salt cooling systems and high-temperature gas reactors, as developers look to the past for solutions to advance nuclear energy's future.

An anonymous reader shares a report: The video game website Polygon has been sold to click-farm powerhouse Valnet and much of its masthead has been laid off, Kotaku has learned. The sale was subsequently announced in a press release. Multiple staff members have posted online about losing their jobs or about colleagues now being out of work.

Amazon CEO Andy Jassy has this week sounded the alarm on AI adoption speeds. Though self-described as an AI optimist, Jassy cautioned that this technological shift "may be quicker than other technology transitions in the past."

Jassy pointed directly to declining education quality as "one of the biggest problems" facing AI implementation, not the technology itself. He questioned whether schools are adequately preparing students for future tool use, including coding applications.

Investigative journalist and cybersecurity expert Brian Krebs reports: A 23-year-old Scottish man thought to be a member of the prolific Scattered Spider cybercrime group was extradited last week from Spain to the United States, where he is facing charges of wire fraud, conspiracy and identity theft. U.S. prosecutors allege Tyler Robert Buchanan and co-conspirators hacked into dozens of companies in the United States and abroad, and that he personally controlled more than $26 million stolen from victims. Scattered Spider is a loosely affiliated criminal hacking group whose members have broken into and stolen data from some of the world's largest technology companies. Buchanan was arrested in Spain last year on a warrant from the FBI, which wanted him in connection with a series of SMS-based phishing attacks in the summer of 2022 that led to intrusions at Twilio, LastPass, DoorDash, Mailchimp, and many other tech firms. The complain against Buchanan is available here (PDF).

New submitter LDA6502 writes: The Republican chairman of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee is proposing a new annual federal vehicle registration fee of $200 for full EVs, $100 for hybrid EVs, and $20 for combustion vehicles. The tax would be tied to inflation, would be collected by the states, and would expire in 2035. Critics of the proposal note that it could result in low mileage EVs paying a far higher tax rate than heavy ICE trucks and SUVs. Ars Technica notes that the bill "exempts commercial vehicles, which should see a rush from tax avoiders to register their vehicles under their businesses [...]." Farm vehicles will also be exempt from the tax.

"The Eno Center for Transportation calculates that this new tax will contribute an extra $110 billion to the highway Trust Fund by 2035 but that cuts to other taxes and more spending mean that the fund will still be $222 billion short of its commitments -- assuming that this added fee doesn't further dampen EV adoption in the U.S., that is."

Finland has passed legislation to restrict the use of phones and other mobile devices during the school day amid fears over their impact on student wellbeing and learning. From a report: Under the changes, which were approved by the Finnish parliament on Tuesday and will come into effect on 1 August, mobile devices will be heavily restricted during lesson times. Pupils will be allowed to use them only with the teacher's permission for healthcare or learning purposes.

Finland is the latest European country to impose legal restrictions on the use of phones and other mobile devices in schools amid growing evidence of their impact on children and young people, including attention and self-esteem. Earlier this year, Denmark said it would ban mobile phones from all schools. The chair of the country's wellbeing commission, Rasmus Meyer, told the Guardian the measure was necessary to stop schools from being "colonised by digital platforms" and urged the rest of Europe to follow suit.

Wikipedia will employ AI to enhance the work of its editors and volunteers, it said Wednesday, also asserting that it has no plans to replace those human roles. The Wikimedia Foundation plans to implement AI specifically for automating tedious tasks, improving information discovery, facilitating translations, and supporting new volunteer onboarding, it said.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Register: Instead of depressing wages or taking jobs, generative AI chatbots like ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini have had almost no wage or labor impact so far -- a finding that calls into question the huge capital expenditures required to create and run AI models. In a working paper released earlier this month, economists Anders Humlum and Emilie Vestergaard looked at the labor market impact of AI chatbots on 11 occupations, covering 25,000 workers and 7,000 workplaces in Denmark in 2023 and 2024.

Many of these occupations have been described as being vulnerable to AI: accountants, customer support specialists, financial advisors, HR professionals, IT support specialists, journalists, legal professionals, marketing professionals, office clerks, software developers, and teachers. Yet after Humlum, assistant professor of economics at the Booth School of Business, University of Chicago, and Vestergaard, a PhD student at the University of Copenhagen, analyzed the data, they found the labor and wage impact of chatbots to be minimal. "AI chatbots have had no significant impact on earnings or recorded hours in any occupation," the authors state in their paper.

The report should concern the tech industry, which has hyped AI's economic potential while plowing billions into infrastructure meant to support it. Early this year, OpenAI admitted that it loses money per query even on its most expensive enterprise SKU, while companies like Microsoft and Amazon are starting to pull back on their AI infrastructure spending in light of low business adoption past a few pilots. The problem isn't that workers are avoiding generative AI chatbots -- quite the contrary. But they simply aren't yet equating to actual economic benefits. "The adoption of these chatbots has been remarkably fast," Humlum told The Register. "Most workers in the exposed occupations have now adopted these chatbots. Employers are also shifting gears and actively encouraging it. But then when we look at the economic outcomes, it really has not moved the needle."

Humlum said while there are gains and time savings to be had, "there's definitely a question of who they really accrue to. And some of it could be the firms -- we cannot directly look at firm profitability. Some of it could also just be that you save some time on existing tasks, but you're not really able to expand your output and therefore earn more. So it's like it saves you time writing emails. But if you cannot really take on more work or do something else that is really valuable, then that will put a damper on how much we should actually expect those time savings to affect your earning ability, your total hours, your wages."

"In terms of economic outcomes, when we're looking at hard metrics -- in the administrative labor market data on earnings, wages -- these tools have really not made a difference so far," said Humlum. "So I think that that puts in some sense an upper bound on what return we should expect from these tools, at least in the short run. My general conclusion is that any story that you want to tell about these tools being very transformative, needs to contend with the fact that at least two years after [the introduction of AI chatbots], they've not made a difference for economic outcomes."

Kosmos 482, a failed Soviet Venus probe, is expected to make an uncontrolled reentry in mid-May after orbiting Earth for 53 years. Gizmodo reports: The lander module from an old Soviet spacecraft is expected to reenter Earth's atmosphere during the second week of May, according to Marco Langbroek, a satellite tracker based in Leiden, the Netherlands. "As this is a lander that was designed to survive passage through the Venus atmosphere, it is possible that it will survive reentry through the Earth atmosphere intact, and impact intact," Langbroek wrote in a blog update. "The risks involved are not particularly high, but not zero."

Kosmos 482 launched on March 31, 1972 from the Baikonur Cosmodrome spaceport in Kazakhstan. The mission was an attempt by the Soviet space program to reach Venus, but it failed to gain enough velocity to enter a transfer trajectory toward the scorching-hot planet. A malfunction resulted in an engine burn that wasn't sufficient to reach Venus' orbit and left the spacecraft in an elliptical Earth orbit, according to NASA. The spacecraft broke apart into four different pieces, with two of the smaller fragments reentering over Ashburton, New Zealand, two days after launch. Meanwhile, two remaining pieces, believed to be the payload and the detached upper-stage engine unit, entered a higher orbit measuring 130 by 6,089 miles (210 by 9,800 kilometers).

The failed mission consisted of a carrier bus and a lander probe, which together form a spherical pressure vessel weighing more than 1,000 pounds (495 kilograms). Considering its mass, "risks are similar to that of a meteorite impact," Langbroek wrote. As of now, it's hard to determine exactly when the spacecraft will reenter. Langbroek estimates that the reentry will take place on May 10, but a more precise date will get clearer as the reentry date nears.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CBS News: New York Gov. Kathy Hochul says a $254 billion state budget deal has been reached, including a "bell-to-bell" school cellphone ban. [...] The distraction-free policy would take effect next school year, making New York the largest state in the country with a "bell-to-bell" cellphone ban. Hochul says the plan will help protect children from addictive technology and improve their mental health. The New York State United Teachers union also came out in support of the ban, saying "we are at a crisis point."

The governor previously outlined the proposal back in January, saying it would ban the use of smartphones and other internet-enabled devices on school grounds during the school day. That includes classroom time, lunch and study hall periods. "A bell-to-bell ban, morning until the day is over, is not going to hurt your kids. It's going to help them emerge with stronger mental health and resiliency," she told CBS News New York at the time.

Hochul said the ban would include smartphones and other personal "smart" devices, like smartwatches. Exemptions could be made if a student requires a device to manage a medical condition or for translation purposes. Cellphones that don't have internet capability and devices that are provided by the school for lesson plans would still be allowed. The proposal would let individual schools come up with their own ways to implement the ban and store the devices, and schools would be able to decide whether to have students leave them in things like pouches, lockers or cubbies. It would also require schools to make sure parents have a way to contact their children during the day, if needed. "Protecting our communities requires more than streets where people feel safe. We need classrooms where young minds can flourish, and that means eliminating once and for all the digital distractions that steal our kids' attention," the governor said, adding, "We protected our kids before from cigarettes, alcohol and drunk driving, and now, we're protecting them from addictive technology designed to hijack their attention."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from ZDNet: Today, open-source software powers the world. It didn't have to be that way. The Open Invention Network's (OIN) origins are rooted in a turbulent era for open source. In the mid-2000s, Linux faced existential threats from copyright and patent litigation. Besides, the infamous SCO lawsuit and Microsoft's claims that Linux infringed on hundreds of its patents cast a shadow over the ecosystem. Business leaders became worried. While SCO's attacks petered out, patent trolls -- formally known as Patent Assertion Entities (PAEs) -- were increasing their attacks. So, open-source friendly industry giants, including IBM, Novell, Philips, Red Hat, and Sony, formed the Open Invention Network (OIN) to create a bulwark against patent threats targeting Linux and open-source technologies. Founded in 2005, the Open Invention Network (OIN) has evolved into a global community comprising over 4,000 participants, ranging from startups to multinational corporations, collectively holding more than three million patents and patent applications.

At the heart of OIN's legal strategy is a royalty-free cross-license agreement. Members agree not to assert their patents against the Linux System, creating a powerful network effect that shields open-source projects from litigation. As OIN CEO Keith Bergelt explained, this model enables "broad-based participation by ensuring patent risk mitigation in key open-source technologies, thereby facilitating open-source adoption." This approach worked then, and it continues to work today. [...] Over the years, OIN's mission has expanded beyond Linux to cover a range of open-source technologies. Its Linux System Definition, which determines the scope of patent cross-licensing, has grown from a few core packages to over 4,500 software components and platforms, including Android, Apache, Kubernetes, and ChromeOS. This expansion has been critical, as open source has become foundational across industries such as finance, automotive, telecommunications, and artificial intelligence.

Mastercard is working with Microsoft and other leading AI companies to give AI agents the ability to shop online and make payments on behalf of consumers. From a report: Under the new program, a shopper could prompt an AI agent -- Microsoft's Copilot, for example -- to search for a pair of yellow running shoes in a particular size.

The agent would then search and offer the customer options, and then be able to make the purchase while also recommending the best way to pay, Mastercard said in a statement Tuesday.

Firefox has launched its long-awaited tab groups feature, responding to the most upvoted request in Mozilla Connect's three-year history. The feature allows users to organize tabs by name or color through a drag-and-drop interface.

Mozilla is now developing an AI-powered "smart tab groups" feature that automatically suggests organization based on open tabs. Unlike competitors, the company said, Firefox processes this data locally, keeping tab information on the user's device rather than sending it to cloud servers.

Carbon removal technologies, potentially a $250 billion market, are failing to gain traction as buyers remain scarce. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change projects a need for 10 billion metric tons of carbon removals annually by 2050, yet only 175 million tons have been sold to date -- less than 2% of requirements.

Microsoft dominates the market, accounting for 35% of all purchases and 76% of engineered removal solutions specifically. The market suffers from significant barriers: unproven technologies, vast price disparities ($80 per ton for forest projects versus $1,000 for direct air capture), and lack of standardization. Industry experts at a recent London gathering concluded that without more buyers willing to accept early adoption risks, the market cannot meaningfully grow.

According to an email posted on Duolingo's LinkedIn, the language learning app will "gradually stop using contractors to do work that AI can handle." Co-founder and CEO Luis von Ahn also said the company will be "AI-first." The Verge reports: According to von Ahn, being "AI-first" means the company will "need to rethink much of how we work" and that "making minor tweaks to systems designed for humans won't get us there." As part of the shift, the company will roll out "a few constructive constraints," including the changes to how it works with contractors, looking for AI use in hiring and in performance reviews, and that "headcount will only be given if a team cannot automate more of their work."

von Ahn says that "Duolingo will remain a company that cares deeply about its employees" and that "this isn't about replacing Duos with AI." Instead, he says that the changes are "about removing bottlenecks" so that employees can "focus on creative work and real problems, not repetitive tasks."

"AI isn't just a productivity boost," von Ahn says. "It helps us get closer to our mission. To teach well, we need to create a massive amount of content, and doing that manually doesn't scale. One of the best decisions we made recently was replacing a slow, manual content creation process with one powered by AI. Without AI, it would take us decades to scale our content to more learners. We owe it to our learners to get them this content ASAP."