upstart writes:

Uncle Sam confirms it's saying nothing:

The US International Trade Administration (ITA) has admitted it promotes the sale of American-approved commercial spyware to foreign governments, and won't answer questions about it, according to US Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR).

Wyden, in a letter to US Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo, has demanded answers about the surveillance and policing tech that ITA a US government agency pushes to other countries. And he wants the agency to name names when it comes to which companies' spyware is being promoted with US tax dollars.

ITA is housed within the US Commerce Department and tasked with promoting American exports. Wyden chairs the Senate Finance Committee, which has responsibility for international trade policy, and he's not happy.

The senator first requested info from ITA about promoting spyware abroad in May 2022. At that time, the agency confirmed it had promoted this type of technology, but it didn't answer questions about which products it endorsed and in which markets.

Both of these things are problematic. Commercial spyware has historically been used to target activists, journalists, and political dissidents, and when it ends up in the hands of authoritarian regimes, these people can end up dead.

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upstart writes:

'We haven't been taught about sex': Teens talk about how to fix school sex education:

Last week, the Albanese government announced an expert panel to support relationships and sexuality education in Australian schools.

The group is lead by the head of anti-violence organization Our Watch, Patty Kinnersly, and includes consent advocate Chanel Contos. It will do a "rapid review" into consent and respectful relationships programs to identify "opportunities for improvement."

This follows a new focus on consent and healthy relationships in Australian schools. The former Coalition government made consent a mandatory part of the curriculum.

We are talking to teenagers about the sex education they receive at schools. This research highlights several areas young people think can be improved. They are particularly concerned sex education most often does not discuss actual sex.

As part of broader, ongoing research into online sexual content, we interviewed 30 West Australian teens (aged 11-17), between 2021 and 2023, to explore their experiences of sex education and where they source information to answer their questions about sex and relationships.

Eighteen interviewees were followed up with 12 months after we had first spoken, to see if their perspectives had changed.

Interviews began as some schools started teaching consent in 2021, with sexual assault being widely debated in the wake of the women's March4Justice rallies around the country and a school sexual assault petition spearheaded by Contos. We have continued to gather young people's perspectives as consent education became mandatory at the start of this school year.

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upstart writes:

If discovery is feasible in humans it could be used to send astronauts into suspended animation:

[...] In science fiction, space crews are often spared the boredom and inconvenience of long-distance space travel by being placed into a state of suspended animation. Now this goal may have come a step closer after scientists showed that hibernation can be artificially triggered in rodents using ultrasonic pulses.

The advance is seen as significant because the technique was effective in rats animals that do not naturally hibernate. This raises the prospect that humans may also retain a vestigial hibernation circuit in the brain that could be artificially reactivated.

"If this proves feasible in humans, we could envision astronauts wearing a helmet-like device designed to target the hypothalamus region for inducing a hypothermia and hypometabolism state," said Hong Chen, an associate professor at Washington University in St Louis, who led the work.

The team first identified a specific group of neurons in a deep brain region called the hypothalamus preoptic area, which were found to be involved in regulating body temperature and metabolism during hibernation. They showed that, in mice, these neurons could be artificially activated using ultrasound, delivered non-invasively through a helmet.

When stimulated, the mice showed a drop in body temperature of about 3C for about one hour. The mice's metabolism also shifted from using both carbohydrates and fat for energy to only fat, a key feature of torpor, and their heart rates fell by about 47%, all while at room temperature.

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driverless writes:

New Zealand's Hell Pizza has just launched their buy now, pay much, much later scheme. Later in this case meaning when you're dead:

AfterLife Pay will only be available to a select number of people: those who are selected will be invited to sign a real amendment to their wills, allowing the cost of their pizza to be collected upon death. No interest or fees will apply, and the agreement is legally binding, Hell said.

Hell CEO Benn Cumming said AfterLife Pay was born after they were approached by BNPL providers who wanted to offer the service to its customers.

"We're seeing a growing number of people using the schemes to buy essential items like food, and we think it's taking it a step too far when you've got quick service restaurants like ours being asked to offer BNPL for what is considered a treat - especially when you consider people are falling behind in their payments and 10.5 percent of loans in NZ are in arrears," Cumming said in a statement on Thursday.

AfterLife Pay will initially run as a trial, with anyone 18 years or older eligible to apply. Of the applicants, 666 people will then be selected. The offer has also been extended to 666 people in Australia.

Those who are selected will then sign a legally binding agreement online for the total of their chosen order.

Cumming said pizza is one of the simple joys of life, and AfterLife Pay means customers can get their fix without having to dip into the bank account immediately.

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upstart writes:

Are those scattered spacecraft parts?

NASA couldn't help but do a little rubbernecking of the recent crash site where a private Japanese company recently attempted to land on the moon.

The Hakuto-R mission ended abruptly on April 25, 2023, shortly after ispace lost contact with its spacecraft as it descended toward the lunar surface. A preliminary investigation indicated the lander had run out of fuel, according to the company, which is necessary for firing thrusters to slow down before reaching the ground.

Flying overhead, NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter captured 10 images of the proposed landing site near the Atlas Crater that show four prominent pieces of debris and several small changes to the surface. Those features could be a small crater or parts of the lander that have scattered. The U.S. space agency intends to snap more pictures over the coming months to get a better look with different lighting conditions and angles.

[...] NASA has used the orbiter to take pictures of other moon crashes in the past, and it's not to bask in others' failures. The purpose is to study the impacts for insight into the moon dust. When spacecraft land on the moon, the spray of dust and soil damages anything that can be sandblasted. Anticipating a future filled with moon landings, scientists want to better understand the erosion and impacts they cause and learn how to mitigate them.

Ispace invited the world to watch alongside its Tokyo-based mission control through a livestream of the nail-biting space event. Company officials said they're proud of what the mission achieved and will use the flight data during the landing phase to help them prepare for their next two lunar missions.

LATE UPDATE FOLLOWS:

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fliptop writes:

At national tournaments, judges are making their stances clear: students who argue 'capitalism can reduce poverty' or 'Israel has a right to defend itself' will loseno questions asked:

First, some background. Imagine a high school sophomore on the debate team. She's been given her topic about a month in advance, but she won't know who her judge is until hours before her debate round. During that time squeezeperhaps she'll pace the halls as I did at the 2012 national tournament in Indianapolisshe'll scroll on her phone to look up her judge's name on Tabroom, a public database maintained by the NSDA [National Speech and Debate Association]. That's where judges post "paradigms," which explain what they look for during a debate. If a judge prefers competitors not "spread"speak a mile a minutedebaters will moderate their pace. If a judge emphasizes "impacts"the reasons why an argument mattersdebaters adjust accordingly.

But let's say when the high school sophomore clicks Tabroom she sees that her judge is Lila Lavender, the 2019 national debate champion, whose paradigm reads, "Before anything else, including being a debate judge, I am a Marxist-Leninist-Maoist. . . . I cannot check the revolutionary proletarian science at the door when I'm judging. . . . I will no longer evaluate and thus never vote for rightest capitalist-imperialist positions/arguments. . . . Examples of arguments of this nature are as follows: fascism good, capitalism good, imperialist war good, neoliberalism good, defenses of US or otherwise bourgeois nationalism, Zionism or normalizing Israel, colonialism good, US white fascist policing good, etc."

[...] Traditionally, high school students would have encountered a judge like former West Point debater Henry Smith, whose paradigm asks students to "focus on clarity over speed" and reminds them that "every argument should explain exactly how [they] win the debate."

In the past few years, however, judges with paradigms tainted by politics and ideology are becoming common. Debate judge Shubham Gupta's paradigm reads, "If you are discussing immigrants in a round and describe the person as 'illegal,' I will immediately stop the round, give you the loss with low speaks"low speaker points"give you a stern lecture, and then talk to your coach. . . . I will not have you making the debate space unsafe."

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upstart writes:

Microsoft launches an AI tool to take the pain out of building websites:

Microsoft wants to take the pain out of designing web pages. AI is its solution.

Today marks the launch of Copilot in Power Pages in preview for U.S. customers, an AI-powered assistant for Microsoft's low-code business website creation tool, Power Pages. Given prompts, Copilot can generate text, forms, chatbots and web page layouts as well as create and edit image and site design themes.

To create a form, for example, users can simply describe the kind of form that they need and Copilot will build it and auto-generate the necessary backend database tables. Those tables can then be edited, removed or added to using natural language within Copilot.

"As the maker, you describe what you need in natural language and use Copilot suggestions to design web pages, create content and build complex business data forms for your website," Sangya Singh, VP of Power Pages at Microsoft, told TechCrunch in an email interview. "You no longer need to start from a blank slate."

Generating a website with AI isn't exactly a novel idea not in this day and age, at least. Tools like Jasper can handle copy, images, layouts and more, while generators like Mixo can create basic splash pages given a short description.

But Singh paints Copilot in Power Pages as more versatile than the competing solutions out there, while stressing that it's not a tool that could or should be used to generate whole spam sites.

[...] Singh claims that Copilot in Power Pages, though, which is powered by OpenAI's GPT-3.5 model, has "guardrails" to protect against issues that might crop up.

[...] "The key thing to note is that Power Pages Copilot is not an 'automatic' AI-pilot generating websites, but an 'AI assistant' to a human website maker hence the name Copilot where the maker can ask for suggestions on how to build different components of a business data-centric site," she added. "Giving the makers 'total control' is a principle we have where the maker is always in control if they want to apply the Copilot suggestion or tweak it further or discard it."

Original Submission

...

I'm going to simply write this quickly now. I have had very long discussions with a member of the community known as kolie who has been negotiating to try and keep SN operational, and help provide a realistic plan for both rebuilding the site, and migration. I was approached after the shutdown post was put up via public contact information. He has offered help in the form of hosting, capital, and helping coding a replacement for rehash. He has convinced me that there are enough people in the community that it might be possible to pay down the technical debt.

I was asked to formally take the gun off SN's head, since it doesn't help recruit volunteers if there's a death sentence.

I am more than a little reluctance to do this, simply on the basis that there has been a long history on this site of saying "we'll do X", and then X never happens. The situation was also discussed prior with Matt, and quite a few other people before I finally made the decision after it became clear to me that the situation had become completely untenable. I spent weeks looking for an alternative before I finally resided myself that there were no other viable options. But sometimes you can be wrong, and sometimes you can get outside help.

One of my cited reasons for shutting down SN was that calls for help were left unanswered. However, said call finally got answered and came at the 11th hour, and as an unsolicited DM by someone who wanted to see the site go on. We have been discussing this at length since Monday, in a conversation that at this point has been longer than everything said in a private, staff channel for the last six months. So, I accept the possibility I can be wrong. More specifically, I hope I am wrong.

So, ultimately, I will put my faith in someone I have never met before. It might be absurd sounding, but that is ultimately how SN started. A bunch of people who never met coming together to make a replacement for Slashdot. I will take steps to keep SN going past the 30th. This may involve the legal entity changing, as the PBC already voted to dissolve itself. I will write more on this next week, since frankly, I need time to sit back and reflect. I also need to write some emails.

The staff have told me that they will not work with me going forward. For my part, the feeling is mutual.

There are also the facts that I listed in the shutdown letter. SN's codebase is effectively unmaintained since the departure of TMB. I've already discussed the state of infrastructure to death, but there's an objective truth here: SN's VMs were exposed to the open Internet on end-of-life operating systems for years and the database cluster had been in an extended failure with corrupted log tables. As I see it, the staff allowed SN to degrade to the point that it was about to entirely fail. As I understand it, they see me as acting rashly and irresponsibly in attempting to address the situation. I freely admitted I could have done b...

janrinok writes:

The earliest trilobites may have evolved before Saturn donned its icy hoops

Saturn's rings might have formed while trilobites scuttled about on Earth. Space dust has been accumulating on the icy halos for no more than 400 million years, researchers report in the May 12 Science Advances.

The 4.5-billion-year-old planet appears to have acquired its iconic ornamentation relatively recently, says physicist Sascha Kempf of the University of Colorado Boulder. "We're quite lucky to see a ring in the first place."

The rings of Saturn are made of countless icy particles, which become covered with dust as tiny meteoroids strike them. These dustings darken the rings' complexion, like mud sullies snow on roads in winter.

[...] The age of the rings has been debated for decades [...]. Even after the new study, there's still disagreement.

If the rings are somehow losing dust over time, they could be ancient, says planetary scientist Aurlien Crida of Universit Cte d'Azur in Nice, France, who was not involved in the study. "Possibly as old as Saturn."

It seems clear that the rings have been exposed to micrometeoroid impacts for at least a hundred million years, Crida says. But simulations of the rings' formation from the gravitational shredding of an early moon suggest their size is consistent with an age of billions of years, he says. And researchers have reported silicate grains falling from the rings into Saturn's atmosphere (SN: 10/4/18). Some unidentified process might be cleaning the rings of the micrometeoroid dust, making them appear younger than they are, Crida says.

[...] Experiments that smash micrometeoroids into ice particles could help resolve the discrepancy, Crida says. For now, the debate over the age of the rings lives on.

Journal Reference:
S. Kempf et al. Micrometeoroid infall onto Saturn's rings constrains their age to no more than a few hundred million years. Science Advances. Vol. 9, May 12, 2023. doi: 10.1126/sciadv.adf8537

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upstart writes:

AI is changing how Americans find jobs, get promoted and succeed at work:

Whether we realize it or not, advancements in artificial intelligence are increasingly influencing the paths of our careers.

Advancements in human capital management systems [HCM], more strategic and data-driven human resource and talent management practices, and increased attention to bias are all factors that are changing how people are hired, developed, promoted and fired.

I teach and work in talent management and leadership development. I've used these programs and practices in the real world and continue to learn and research how these practices are changing. Artificial intelligence and systems are already big business, grossing over US$38 billion in 2021. Without a doubt, AI-driven software has the potential to advance quickly and change how companies make strategic decisions about their employees.

Imagine you apply for a job in the very near future. You upload your carefully written rsum through the company website, noting that the platform looks eerily similar to other platforms you've used to apply for other jobs. After your rsum is saved, you provide demographic information and complete countless fields with the same data from your rsum. You then hit "submit" and hope for a follow-up email from a person.

Your data now lives within this company's human capital management system. Even if they collect them, very few companies are looking at rsums anymore; they're looking at the info you type into those tiny boxes to help make comparisons between you, dozens or hundreds of other applicants, and the job requirements. Even if your rsum demonstrates that you are the most qualified applicant, it alone is unlikely to catch the eye of the recruiter, because the recruiter's attention is elsewhere.

Let's say you get the call, you ace the interview and the job is yours. Your information hits another stage within the company's database, or HCM: active employee. Your performance rat...

upstart writes:

New York City Is Sinking. It's Far From Alone:

Add up the million or so buildings in New York City, and you get something on the order of 1.7 trillion pounds of weight pressing on the earthand that's not even counting all the other infrastructure, like roads and sidewalks. All that weight is deforming the ground, like bowling balls on a memory foam mattress, and causing a type of sinking known as subsidence, when land slowly compresses.

New research finds that, on average, subsidence rates in NYC are between 1 and 2 millimeters per year, but in some places that's up to 4 millimeters. This may not sound like a worrying figure, but compounded year after year, it's significant sinking that's effectively doubling the relative sea-level rise in the metropolis. "You have about 1 to 2 millimeters of sea level going up, while you have 1 to 2 millimeters on average going down," says United States Geological Survey geophysicist Tom Parsons, coauthor of a new paper describing the research. "It's a common issue with cities around the world. It appears there's a definite link between urbanization and subsidence."

Parts of Jakarta, Indonesia, for instance, are sinking by nearly a foot a year. The San Francisco Bay Area could lose up to 165 square miles of coastline due to a combination of rising seas and subsidence. And just last month, another team of researchers reported finding subsidence up and down the East Coast, as high as 10 millimeters a year in parts of Delaware.

The primary way to cause dramatic sinking is the over-extraction of groundwater, which is the case in Jakarta; drained aquifers collapse like empty water bottles. But in NYC, subsidence depends on the composition of the underlying soil. Long ago, glaciers scraped across the area, depositing sediments. Lakes formed too, depositing still more sediments. So the metropolis is built on a complex mix of materials like clay, silt, and artificial fill, which are more prone to subsidence, as well as sand and gravel, which tend to resist it.

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upstart writes:

Windows to Finally Support 30 Year Old Archive Format:

It's been 30 years since Russian software engineer Eugene Roshal created the RAR archive format. RAR allows users to compress files so they take up less room on your hard drive. However, you needed a special program like WinRAR to open RAR files on Windows for the better part of three decades.

That's all changing soon. This week Microsoft quietly announced that Windows 11 will finally support RAR files natively. In a long-winded blog post about the future of AI, the company slipped in RAR support in the "In addition..." section. If you were just casually scrolling through, you may have missed it.

"We have added native support for additional archive formats, including tar, 7-zip, rar, gz and many others using the libarchive open-source project. You now can get improved performance of archive functionality during compression on Windows," the blog post states.

Granted, this move may not matter much to people who have never heard of a RAR file. But, those who work with archive formats know the sheer annoyance of not being able to open a somewhat common file format without special software like WinRARa file extraction program that people can pay for but generally don't.

See also: 28 years later, Windows finally supports RAR files submitted by owl.

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fliptop writes:

Scientists making the "Air-gen" device have discovered that any material can be used to generate electricity from the air:

Scientists have invented a device that can continuously generate electricity from thin air, offering a glimpse of a possible sustainable energy source that can be made of almost any material and runs on the ambient humidity that surrounds all of us, reports a new study.

The novel "air generator," or Air-gen, is made from materials with holes that are under 100 nanometers in length, which is a scale thousand times smaller than a human hair. This design can pull electricity from water droplets in the air for much longer periods than previous concepts, the researchers report, suggesting that it could eventually provide a continuous and sustainable source of power. Researchers hope the technique could eventually help to fight climate change by serving as an alternative to fossil fuels.

[...] Now, researchers at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, have developed an Air-gen device that yields electricity from contact with water droplets that pass through its porous material. In this way, the Air-gen technology creates "a spontaneous and sustained charging gradient for continuous electric output" that "opens a wide door for the broad exploration of sustainable electricity from ambient air," according to a study published on Wednesday in Advanced Materials.

[...] Indeed, the results revealed that practically any material could become an Air-gen device provided it was perforated with tiny holes measuring 100 nanometers or fewer. At this scale, the holes are big enough to allow water to pass through an upper chamber into a lower chamber, but are small enough that the droplets make contact with the material as they move down through the holes. As a consequence, a charge imbalance is created in the device because the water droplets increase the charge of the upper layer by soaking it as they move into the lower chamber.

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upstart writes:

ChatGPT-maker warns it might leave EU over planned AI law:

The boss of the company behind ChatGPT has said it might consider leaving the EU if it fails to comply with a planned law on artificial intelligence (AI).

The EU's planned legislation could be the first to specifically regulate AI.

And it could require generative AI companies to reveal which copyrighted material had been used to train their systems to create text and images.

"The current draft of the EU AI Act would be over-regulating," OpenAI's Sam Altman said, Reuters reported. "But we have heard it's going to get pulled back."

Many in the creative industries accuse AI companies of using the work of artists, musicians and actors to train systems to imitate their work.

But Mr Altman is worried it would be technically impossible for OpenAI to comply with some of the AI Act's safety and transparency requirements, according to Time magazine.

At an event at University College London, Mr Altman added he was optimistic AI could create more jobs and reduce inequality.

He also met Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and the heads of AI companies DeepMind and Anthropic to discuss the technology's risks - from disinformation to national security and even "existential threats" - and the voluntary actions and regulation required to manage them.

Original Submission

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upstart writes:

Yes, They Really Have a Favorite!:

A study conducted in 2004 aimed to determine the blood type that mosquitoes preferred when it came to feeding. The researchers released a group of Aedes albopictus mosquitoes and observed their behavior as they landed on different individuals with varying blood types. The results showed that the mosquitos were more attracted to people with Type O blood, landing on them almost twice as often compared to those who had Type A.

Although there was no significant difference between the preference for blood types B and AB, the findings strongly suggested that Type O was indeed the most favored by mosquitoes. This information is crucial in understanding how these pesky insects behave, especially since certain diseases like malaria are transmitted through mosquito bites.

If you are getting bitten more often than other people, there might be a good reason for that. Here are some of the reasons, other than Type O blood, that mosquitos may be attracted to you.

[...] Despite popular belief, mosquitoes do not actually bite us for our blood but rather for the proteins in our blood plasma. These proteins help female mosquitoes produce eggs and are essential for their survival. When a mosquito bites an individual with a particular blood type, it can detect these proteins and know if it is worth biting again in order to obtain more nutrients.

Mosquitoes aren't only attracted to a certain blood type. They are highly attracted to carbon dioxide, a gas that is naturally emitted by humans when they exhale. In fact, these pesky insects can detect carbon dioxide from almost half a football field away! This makes it easy for mosquitoes to locate potential hosts and feed on their blood.

Interestingly, some individuals naturally exhale more carbon dioxide than others. Generally speaking, larger people tend to produce more of this gas compared to smaller individuals. As a result, bigger individuals may be more attractive targets for mosquitoes.

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upstart writes:

Collisions of water and ice might build electric charge in thunderclouds on both planets:

On Jupiter, lightning jerks and jolts a lot like it does on Earth.

Jovian lightning emits radio wave pulses that are typically separated by about one millisecond, researchers report May 23 in Nature Communications. The energetic prestissimo, the scientists say, is a sign that the gas giant's lightning propagates in pulses, at a pace comparable to that of the bolts that cavort through our own planet's thunderclouds. The similarities between the two world's electrical phenomena could have implications for the search for alien life.

Arcs of lightning on both worlds appear to move somewhat like a winded hiker going up a mountain, pausing after each step to catch their breath, says Ivana Kolmaov, an atmospheric physicist at the Czech Academy of Sciences in Prague. "One step, another step, then another step ... and so on."

Here on Earth, lightning forms as turbulent winds within thunderclouds cause many ice crystals and water droplets to rub together, become charged and then move to opposite sides of the clouds, progressively generating static electrical charges. When the charges grow big enough to overcome the air's ability to insulate them, electrons are released the lightning takes its first step. From there, the surging electrons will repeatedly ionize the air and rush into it, lurching the bolt forward at an average of hundreds of thousands of meters per second.

Scientists have suggested that superbolts observed in Jovian clouds might also form by collisions between ice crystals and water droplets (SN: 8/5/20). But no one knew whether the alien lightning extended and branched in increments, as they do on Earth, or if they took some other form.

[...] If that universality is real, it could have implications for the search for life elsewhere. Experiments have shown that lightning strikes on Earth could have smelted some of the chemical ingredients needed to form the building blocks of life (SN: 3/16/21). If lightning is discharging in a similar way on alien worlds, Yair says, then it could be producing similar ingredients in those places too.

Journal Reference:
Kolmaov, I., Santolk, O., Imai, M. et al. Lightning at Jupiter pulsates with a similar rhythm as in-cloud lightning at Earth. Nat Commun 14, 2707 (2023). https://doi.or...

upstart writes:

Virgin Orbit to cease operations, sell assets of Richard Branson's satellite launcher:

Richard Branson's Virgin Orbit is shutting down less than two months after the satellite launch start-up filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, according to a Tuesday company announcement.

Virgin Orbit will cease operations and sell its assets to four winning bidders, the company announced Tuesday. Those bidders include three aerospace companiesRocket Lab, Stratolaunch and Vast Space subsidiary Launcherwith combined bids totaling almost $36 million, according to court documents.

A sale hearing for court approval is scheduled for Wednesday afternoon and transactions are expected to close soon after, the company said.

"Virgin Orbit's legacy in the space industry will forever be remembered," Virgin Orbit said in a Tuesday statement. "Its groundbreaking technologies, relentless pursuit of excellence, and unwavering commitment to advancing the frontiers of air launch have left an indelible mark on the industry."

[...] Virgin Orbit was founded in 2017 by Branson, a British billionaire, in hopes of targeting the market for launching small satellites into space. Its LauncherOne rockets were launched from the air from modified Virgin passenger planes, allowing the company to operate more flexibly than using fixed launch sites.

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janrinok writes:

https://phys.org/news/2023-05-early-disaster-deaths-plunging.html

Weather-related disasters have surged over the past 50 years, causing swelling economic damage even as early warning systems have meant dramatically fewer deaths, the United Nations said Monday.

Extreme weather, climate and water-related events caused 11,778 reported disasters between 1970 and 2021, new figures from the UN's World Meteorological Organization (WMO) show.

Those disasters killed just over two million people and caused $4.3 trillion in economic losses.

"The most vulnerable communities unfortunately bear the brunt of weather, climate and water-related hazards," WMO chief Petteri Taalas said in a statement.

The report found that over 90 percent of reported deaths worldwide due to disasters over the 51-year-period occurred in developing countries.

But the agency also said improved early warning systems and coordinated disaster management had significantly reduced the human casualty toll.

WMO pointed out in a report issued two years ago covering disaster-linked deaths and losses between 1970 and 2019, that at the beginning of the period the world was seeing more than 50,000 such deaths each year.

By the 2010s, the disaster death toll had dropped to below 20,000 annually.

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upstart writes:

Eric Schmidt wants to prevent potential abuse of AI:

Add Eric Schmidt to the list of tech luminaries concerned about the dangers of AI. The former Google chief tells guests at The Wall Street Journal's CEO Council Summit that AI represents an "existential risk" that could get many people "harmed or killed." He doesn't feel that threat is serious at the moment, but he sees a near future where AI could help find software security flaws or new biology types. It's important to ensure these systems aren't "misused by evil people," the veteran executive says.

Schmidt doesn't have a firm solution for regulating AI, but he believes there won't be an AI-specific regulator in the US. He participated in a National Security Commission on AI that reviewed the technology and published a 2021 report determining that the US wasn't ready for the tech's impact.

Schmidt doesn't have direct influence over AI. However, he joins a growing number of well-known moguls who have argued for a careful approach. Current Google CEO Sundar Pichai has cautioned that society needs to adapt to AI, while OpenAI leader Sam Altman has expressed concern that authoritarians might abuse these algorithms. In March, numerous industry leaders and researchers (including Elon Musk and Steve Wozniak) signed an open letter calling on companies to pause AI experiments for six months while they rethought the safety and ethical implications of their work.

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upstart writes:

With increasing demand on terrestrial launch pads, some companies are venturing out into the open sea:

With increasing demand on terrestrial launch pads, some companies are venturing out into the open sea, with this Virginia startup leading the way.

The Spaceport Company recently pulled off a series of rocket launches from a floating launch pad in the Gulf of Mexico, in its effort to create more options for rocket companies needing to reach space.

On Monday, the Virginia-based startup announced its successful demonstration, marking the first set of rocket launches from U.S. territorial waters using a prototype mobile floating spaceport.

"This demonstration provided numerous lessons which will be incorporated into our next project: building a sea-based spaceport capable of orbital operations," Tom Marotta, founder and CEO of The Spaceport Company, said in the company statement. "We are working towards offering the U.S.'s first truly commercial spaceport, which can best support the rapidly growing commercial launch industry and alleviate the burdens on government ranges."

In partnership with Evolution Space, which is providing the required propulsion systems, The Spaceport Company launched four small sounding rockets from a modified ship floating in the Gulf of Mexico. The demonstration paves the way for orbital launches hosted on offshore platformsan effort to decrease demand on terrestrial launch sites as the cadence of rocket launches continues to increase. The launch pace and resulting traffic at Cape Canaveral, Florida, is now so intense, for example, that U.S. Space Force is looking for alternatives, as SpaceNews reported earlier this month.

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owl writes:

NYT Link: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/23/opinion/cybersecurity-hacking.html

Archive Link: https://archive.is/wMAXA

In the movies, you can tell the best hackers by how they type. The faster they punch the keys, the more dangerous they are. Hacking is portrayed as a highly technical feat, a quintessentially technological phenomenon.

This impression of high-tech wizardry pervades not just our popular culture but also our real-world attempts to combat cybercrime. If cybercrime is a sophisticated high-tech feat, we assume, the solution must be too. Cybersecurity companies hype proprietary tools like "next generation" firewalls, anti-malware software and intrusion-detection systems. Policy experts like John Ratcliffe, a former director of national intelligence, urge us to invest public resources in a hugely expensive "cyber Manhattan Project" that will supercharge our digital capabilities.

But this whole concept is misguided. The principles of computer science dictate that there are hard, inherent limits to how much technology can help. Yes, it can make hacking harder, but it cannot possibly, even in theory, stop it. What's more, the history of hacking shows that the vulnerabilities hackers exploit are as often human as technical not only the cognitive quirks discovered by behavioral economists but also old-fashioned vices like greed and sloth.

To be sure, you should enable two-factor authentication and install those software updates that you've been putting off. But many of the threats we face are rooted in the nature of human and group behavior. The solutions will need to be social too job creation programs, software liability reform, cryptocurrency regulation and the like.

For the past four years, I have taught a cybersecurity class at Yale Law School in which I show my students how to break into computers. Having grown up with a user-friendly web, my students generally have no real idea how the internet or computers work. They are surprised to find how easily they learn to hack and how much they enjoy it. (I do, too, and I didn't hack a computer until I was 52.) By the end of the semester, they are cracking passwords, cloning websites and crashing servers.

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