The FBI says it is unable to find records related to its purchase of a series of hacking tools, despite spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on them and those purchases initially being included in a public U.S. government procurement database before being quietly scrubbed from the internet. From a report: The news highlights the secrecy the FBI maintains around its use of hacking tools. The agency has previously used classified technology in ordinary criminal investigations, pushed back against demands to provide details of hacking operations to defendants, and purchased technology from surveillance vendors.

"Potentially responsive records were identified during the search," a response to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request I sent about a specific hacking tool contract says. "However, we were advised that they were not in their expected locations. An additional search for the missing records also met with unsuccessful results. Since we were unable to review the records, we were unable to determine if they were responsive to your request." In other words, the FBI says it identified related records, then couldn't actually find them when it went looking.

In February tech journalist Nicholas Carr published Superbloom: How Technologies of Connection Tear Us Apart.

A University of Virginia academic journal says the book "appraises the past and present" of information technology while issuing "a warning about its future." And specifically Carr argues that the government ignored historic precedents by not regulating the early internet sometime in the 1990s. But as he goes on to remind us, the early 1990s were also when the triumphalism of America's Cold War victory, combined with the utopianism of Silicon Valley, convinced a generation of decision-makers that "an unfettered market seemed the best guarantor of growth and prosperity" and "defending the public interest now meant little more than expanding consumer choice." So rather than try to anticipate the dangers and excesses of commercialized digital media, Congress gave it free rein in the Telecommunications Act of 1996, which, as Carr explains,

"...erased the legal and ethical distinction between interpersonal communication and broadcast communications that had governed media in the twentieth century. When Google introduced its Gmail service in 2004, it announced, with an almost imperial air of entitlement, that it would scan the contents of all messages and use the resulting data for any purpose it wanted. Our new mailman would read all our mail."

As for the social-media platforms, Section 230 of the Act shields them from liability for all but the most egregiously illegal content posted by users, while explicitly encouraging them to censor any user-generated content they deem offensive, "whether or not such material is constitutionally protected" (emphasis added). Needless to say, this bizarre abdication of responsibility has led to countless problems, including what one observer calls a "sociopathic rendition of human sociability." For Carr, this is old news, but he warns us once again that the compulsion "to inscribe ourselves moment by moment on the screen, to reimagine ourselves as streams of text and image...[fosters] a strange, needy sort of solipsism. We socialize more than ever, but we're also at a further remove from those we interact with."
Carr's book suggests "frictional design" to slow posting (and reposting) on social media might "encourage civil behavior" — but then decides it's too little, too late, because our current frictionless efficiency "has burrowed its way too deeply into society and the social mind."

Based on all of this, the article's author looks ahead to the next revolution — AI — and concludes "I do not think it wise to wait until these kindly bots are in place before deciding how effective they are. Better to roll them off the nearest cliff today..."

Pope Francis has died at the age of 88, the Vatican said Monday. The pontiff, who was Bishop of Rome and head of the Catholic Church, became pope in 2013 after his predecessor Benedict XVI resigned. On February 14, the Pope was admitted to hospital for bronchitis treatment. From a report: Born in 1936, Francis was the first pope from South America. His papacy was marked by his championing of those escaping war and hunger, as well as those in poverty, earning him the moniker the "People's Pope." In 2016, he washed the feet of refugees from different religions at an asylum centre outside Rome in a "gesture of humility and service."

He also made his views known on a wide range of issues, from climate change to wealth inequality and the role of women in the Catholic Church.

While college applicants are often required to write a personal essay for their applications, political scientist/author/academic Yascha Mounk argues that's "a deeply unfair way to select students for top colleges, one that is much more biased against the poor than standardized tests." The college essay wrongly encourages students to cast themselves as victims, to exaggerate the adversity they've faced, and to turn genuinely upsetting experiences into the focal point of their self-understanding. The college essay, dear reader, should be banned and banished and burned to the ground.

There are many tangible, "objective" reasons to oppose making personal statements a key part of the admissions process. Perhaps the most obvious is that they have always been the easiest part of the system to game. While rich parents can hire SAT tutors they can't sit the standardized test in the stead of their offspring; they can, however, easily write the admissions essay for their kid or hire a "college consultant" who "works with" the applicant to "improve" that essay. Even if rich parents don't cheat in those ways, their class position gives rich kids a huge advantage in the exercise... [W]riting a good admissions essay is to a large extent an exercise in demonstrating one's good taste — and the ability to do so has always depended on being fluent in the unspoken norms of an elite community...

Many on the left oppose standardized tests on the grounds that they have a class bias, and that hiring a tutor can make you perform better at them. But studies on the subject consistently suggest that the class bias of personal essays is far stronger than the class bias of standardized tests.... But the thing I truly hate about the college essay is not that it is part of a system that keeps deserving kids out of top colleges while rewarding privileged kids who (to add insult to injury) get to flatter themselves that they have been selected for showcasing such superior personality in their 750-word statements composed by their college consultant or ghostwritten by ChatGPT... [W]hat I truly hate about the college essay is the way in which it shapes the lives of high school students and encourages the whole elite stratum of society — including some of its most affluent, privileged and sheltered members — to conceive of themselves in terms of the hardships they have supposedly suffered...

[I]t is the bizarre spectacle of those kids from comparatively privileged backgrounds being effectively coerced by the admissions system to self-exoticize as products of great hardship which I find to be truly unseemly... And this is why I suspect that the seemingly innocuous institution of the college essay is more deeply damaging — to the high school experience, to the self-conception of millions of Americans, and even to the country's ability to sustain a trusted elite — than it appears... [I]t drains the souls of teenagers and encourages a deeply pernicious brand of fakery and breeds widespread mistrust in social elites.

The college essay is absurd and unfair and — ironically — unforgivably cringe. It's time to put an end to its strange hold over American society, and liberate us all from its tyranny.

An anonymous reader shared this report from the Wall Street Journal: Five years ago, Airbus made a bold bet: The plane maker would launch a zero-emissions, hydrogen-powered aircraft within 15 years that, if successful, would mark the biggest revolution in aviation technology since the jet engine. Now, Airbus is pulling the brakes. The company has cut the project's budget by a quarter, reallocated staff and sent remaining engineers back to the drawing board, delaying its plans by as much as a decade...

Airbus has spent more than $1.7 billion on the project, according to people familiar with the matter, but over the past year concluded that technical challenges and a slow uptake of hydrogen in the wider economy meant the jet wouldn't be ready by 2035... Airbus says the past five years of work and money haven't been wasted. The company has established that hydrogen is technically feasible and delaying the project will give it more time to fine-tune the technology, executives said...

Airbus shifted focus to hydrogen-fuel cells, which use a chemical reaction to generate energy for an electric motor. It would produce only water vapor, but would require a more radical redesign of the airframe and propulsion system. The plane would carry only 100 passengers about 1,000 nautical miles. Over time, even that proved challenging because of the extra weight of the fuel cells and their limited electricity generation. Instead of a short-haul narrow-body — the workhorse of the aviation industry — at best the aircraft would be more akin to a less appealing regional turboprop.
Airbus received a multi-billion Covid-era support package from the French government that "required Airbus to spend a portion of the money on bringing green aircraft to market by the 2030s," according to the article.

"The hydrogen project helped Airbus access additional government funding, as well as private green financing... Airbus ultimately assigned the project an annual budget of about €400 million, primarily funded through its own coffers, according to people familiar with its financing arrangements."

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.

"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..."

"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!"

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 [originated] 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."

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 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.)

"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.

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.

"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."

About one sixth of global cropland is contaminated by toxic heavy metals, researchers have estimated, with as many as 1.4 billion people living in high-risk areas worldwide. From a report: Approximately 14 to 17% of cropland globally -- roughly 242m hectares -- is contaminated by at least one toxic metal such as arsenic, cadmium, cobalt, chromium, copper, nickel or lead, at levels that exceed agricultural and human health safety thresholds.

The analysis, which was conducted by the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) and published in the journal Science, collected data from more than 1,000 regional studies across the globe, as well as using machine learning technology. Dr Liz Rylott, a senior lecturer in the department of biology at the University of York, who was not involved in the research, said: "These findings reveal the deeply worrying extent to which these natural poisons are polluting our soils, entering our food and water, and affecting our health and our environment. Often collectively called heavy metals, these elements cause a range of devastating health problems, including skin lesions, reduced nerve and organ functions, and cancers."

Toxic metal pollution in soil originates from both natural and human activity. Contaminated soil causes significant risks to ecosystems and human health as well as reducing crop yields, jeopardising water quality and food safety owing to bioaccumulation in farm animals. Toxic metal contamination can persist for decades once pollution has been introduced into soil.

Netflix's Q1 revenue rose to $10.5 billion, a 13% increase from last year, while net income grew to $2.9 billion. The company says it expects more growth in the coming months when it sees "the full quarter benefit from recent price changes and continued growth in membership and advertising revenue." The Verge reports: Netflix raised the prices across most of its plans in January, with its premium plan hitting $24.99 per month. It also increased the price of its Extra Member option -- its solution to password sharing -- to $8.99 per month. Though Netflix already rolled out the increase in the US, UK, and Argentina, the streamer now plans to do the same in France. This is the first quarter that Netflix didn't reveal how many subscribers it gained or lost. It decided to only report "major subscriber milestones" last year, as other streams of revenue continue to grow, like advertising, continue to grow. Netflix last reported having 300 million global subscribers in January.

During an earnings call on Thursday, Netflix co-CEO Greg Peters said the company expects to "roughly double" advertising revenue in 2025. The company launched its own advertising technology platform earlier this month. There are some changes coming to Netflix, too, as Peters confirmed that its homepage redesign for its TV app will roll out "later this year." He also hinted at adding an "interactive" search feature using "generative technologies," which sounds a lot like the AI feature Bloomberg reported on last week. Further reading: Netflix CEO Counters Cameron's AI Cost-Cutting Vision: 'Make Movies 10% Better'

Rice, the world's most consumed grain, will become increasingly toxic as the atmosphere heats and as carbon dioxide emissions rise, potentially putting billions of people at risk of cancers and other diseases, according to new research published this week in The Lancet. From a report: Eaten every day by billions of people and grown across the globe, rice is arguably the planet's most important staple crop, with half the world's population relying on it for the majority of its food needs, especially in developing countries.

But the way rice is grown -- mostly submerged in paddies -- and its highly porous texture mean it can absorb unusually high levels of arsenic, a potent carcinogenic toxin that is especially dangerous for babies. After growing rice in controlled fields for six years, researchers from Columbia University and international partners found that when both temperature and CO2 increased in line with climate projections, arsenic levels in rice grains rose significantly. "When we put both of them together, then wow, that was really something we were not expecting," said Lewis Ziska, a plant physiologist at Columbia University who led the study. "You're looking at a crop staple that's consumed by a billion people every day, and any effect on toxicity is going to have a pretty damn large effect."

Inorganic arsenic exposure has been linked to cancers, heart disease, and neurological problems in infants. Disease risk rose across all seven top rice-consuming Asian countries analyzed. "This is one more reason to intervene -- to control people's exposure," said co-author Keeve Nachman of Johns Hopkins University. "The No. 1 thing we can do is everything in our power to slow climate change."

A ground-breaking project to suck carbon out of the sea has started operating on England's south coast. From a report: The small pilot scheme, known as SeaCURE, is funded by the UK government as part of its search for technologies that fight climate change. [...] These projects, known as carbon capture, usually focus either on capturing emissions at source or pulling them from the air. What makes SeaCure interesting is that it is testing whether it might be more efficient to pull planet-warming carbon from the sea, since it is present in greater concentrations in water than in the air.

databasecowgirl writes: [Liz Truss will launch an "uncensorable" social media platform this summer.] The shortest-serving prime minister, who was quickly shown the door after crashing the UK economy, claims the platform is needed to take on the Deep State. Truss has worked diligently to earn comparisons to Trump with appearances at American political rallies sporting a red MAGA cap. The effort has paid off with Trump's recent tariff announcement and resulting market meltdown, resulting in the two brands combined in the neologism Liz Trump to mark the unprecedented economic policy disasters of the two politicians.

Truss' continuing in Trump's footsteps is creating her own uncensored social media platform for the UK to talk about important matters, which apparently is unable to be achieved without censorship on Musk's X or Trump's Truth Social. While a name has yet to be announced, Lettuce Talk has been suggested as appropriate for a platform run by a prime minister whose term was famously outlasted by a head of lettuce.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Electrek: In its most aggressive attack against offshore wind yet, the Trump administration halted the $5 billion Empire Wind 1, already under construction off New York's coast. Norwegian developer Equinor announced yesterday that it received notice from the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) ordering Empire Wind 1 to halt all activities on the outer continental shelf until BOEM has completed its review. Interior Secretary Doug Burgum posted this tweet yesterday: ".@Interior, in consultation with @HowardLutnick, is directing @BOEM to immediately halt all construction activities on the Empire Wind Project until further review of information that suggests the Biden administration rushed through its approval without sufficient analysis."

Burgum gave no indication of what insufficiencies there were in the approval process for the fully permitted offshore wind project, despite Trump's recent declaration of a national energy emergency that speeds up permitting processes. The commercial lease for the 810-megawatt (MW) Empire Wind 1's federal offshore wind area was signed in March 2017 during the first Trump administration. It was approved by the Biden administration in November 2023 and began construction in 2024. The project is being developed under contract with the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority (NYSERDA). Empire Wind 1, which was due to come online in 2027, has the potential to power 500,000 New York homes. Equinor says it's considering appealing the order.

New York Governor Kathy Hochul issued a statement: "Every single day, I'm working to make energy more affordable, reliable and abundant in New York and the federal government should be supporting those efforts rather than undermining them. Empire Wind 1 is already employing hundreds of New Yorkers, including 1,000 good-paying union jobs as part of a growing sector that has already spurred significant economic development and private investment throughout the state and beyond. As Governor, I will not allow this federal overreach to stand. I will fight this every step of the way to protect union jobs, affordable energy and New York's economic future."

Google is offering all U.S. college students a free year of its Gemini Advanced AI tools through its Google One AI Premium plan, as part of a push to expand Gemini's user base and compete with ChatGPT. It includes access to the company's Pro models, Veo 2 video generation, NotebookLM, Gemini Live and 2TB of Drive storage. Ars Technica reports: Google has a new landing page for the deal, allowing eligible students to sign up for their free Google One AI Premium plan. The offer is valid from now until June 30. Anyone who takes Google up on it will enjoy the free plan through spring 2026. The company hasn't specified an end date, but we would wager it will be June of next year. Google's intention is to give students an entire school year of Gemini Advanced from now through finals next year. At the end of the term, you can bet Google will try to convert students to paying subscribers.

As for who qualifies as a "student" in this promotion, Google isn't bothering with a particularly narrow definition. As long as you have a valid .edu email address, you can sign up for the offer. That's something that plenty of people who are not actively taking classes still have. You probably won't even be taking undue advantage of Google if you pretend to be a student -- the company really, really wants people to use Gemini, and it's willing to lose money in the short term to make that happen.