Google has launched the AI Futures Fund, a new initiative to invest in AI startups that are building with the latest tools from Google DeepMind. TechCrunch reports: The fund will back startups from seed to late stage and will offer varying degrees of support, including allowing founders to have early access to Google AI models from DeepMind, the ability to work with Google experts from DeepMind and Google Labs, and Google Cloud credits. Some startups will also have the opportunity to receive direct investment from Google. "The AI Futures Fund doesn't follow a batch or cohort model," a Google spokesperson told TechCrunch. "Instead, we consider opportunities on a rolling basis -- there's no fixed application window or deadline. When we come across companies that align with the fund's thesis, we may choose to invest. We're not announcing a specific fund size at this time, and check sizes vary based on the company's stage and needs -- typically early to mid-stage, with flexibility for later-stage opportunities as well." Startups can apply here.

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Philips has launched a new initiative called "Philips Fixables," offering free, officially drafted 3D-printable replacement parts to encourage self-repair and sustainability. The program is initially available in the Czech Republic but aims to expand over time. Tom's Hardware reports: This is a new idea, so only one component is available right now for download. The piece happens to be a 3mm comb for one of their shavers, but Philips assures there will be more components made available for more of their devices over time. This isn't the release of a grand library of parts by any means, but it does showcase a shift in supporting communities in search of businesses that support repairable hardware. [...] The official Philips Fixables web page has a link for anyone in the general public to submit a request to add a specific component. Philips will notify customers with a download link if the component they suggested is able to be shared to Philips Fixables. It's not clear what sort of turnaround time to expect for these requests and whether there are limitations on what components will be made available. According to Philips, consumers must adhere to the recommended print settings for their components to get the best results. This is the only way to ensure the replacement part is sturdy enough to stand in for a repair. Compromising on fill space for time could make or break your user experience, for example, but if done correctly, a replacement 3D print can be a useful long term solution. You can check out the files over at Printables.com.

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The new owners of VPN provider VPNSecure have drawn ire after canceling lifetime subscriptions. From a report: The owners told customers that they didn't know about the lifetime subscriptions when they bought VPNSecure, and they cannot honor the purchases.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: Countries are meeting at the United Nations on Monday to revive efforts to regulate the kinds of AI-controlled autonomous weapons increasingly used in modern warfare, as experts warn time is running out to put guardrails on new lethal technology. Autonomous and artificial intelligence-assisted weapons systems are already playing a greater role in conflicts from Ukraine to Gaza. And rising defence spending worldwide promises to provide a further boost for burgeoning AI-assisted military technology. Progress towards establishing global rules governing their development and use, however, has not kept pace. And internationally binding standards remain virtually non-existent. Since 2014, countries that are part of the Convention on Conventional Weapons (CCW) have been meeting in Geneva to discuss a potential ban fully autonomous systems that operate without meaningful human control and regulate others. U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres has set a 2026 deadline for states to establish clear rules on AI weapon use. But human rights groups warn that consensus among governments is lacking. Alexander Kmentt, head of arms control at Austria's foreign ministry, said that must quickly change. "Time is really running out to put in some guardrails so that the nightmare scenarios that some of the most noted experts are warning of don't come to pass," he told Reuters. Monday's gathering of the U.N. General Assembly in New York will be the body's first meeting dedicated to autonomous weapons. Though not legally binding, diplomatic officials want the consultations to ramp up pressure on military powers that are resisting regulation due to concerns the rules could dull the technology's battlefield advantages. Campaign groups hope the meeting, which will also address critical issues not covered by the CCW, including ethical and human rights concerns and the use of autonomous weapons by non-state actors, will push states to agree on a legal instrument. They view it as a crucial litmus test on whether countries are able to bridge divisions ahead of the next round of CCW talks in September. "This issue needs clarification through a legally binding treaty. The technology is moving so fast," said Patrick Wilcken, Amnesty International's Researcher on Military, Security and Policing. "The idea that you wouldn't want to rule out the delegation of life or death decisions ... to a machine seems extraordinary." In 2023, 164 states signed a 2023 U.N. General Assembly resolution calling for the international community to urgently address the risks posed by autonomous weapons.

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Google is updating its iconic 'G' logo for the first time in 10 years, replacing the four solid color sections with a smooth gradient transition from red to yellow to green to blue. "This modernization feels inline with the Gemini gradient, while AI Mode in Search uses something similar for a shortcut," notes 9to5Google. The update has already rolled out to the Google Search app on iOS and is in beta for Android. From the report: It's a subtle change that you might not immediately notice, especially if the main place you see it is on your homescreen. It will be even less noticeable as a tiny browser favicon. It does not appear that Google is refreshing its main six-letter logo today, while it's unclear whether any other product logos are changing. In theory, some of the company's four-color logos, like Chrome or Maps, could pretty easily start bleeding in their sections.

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Ticketmaster will now show full ticket prices upfront -- fees included. "The company announced the 'All In Prices' initiative on Monday as part of its efforts to comply with the Federal Trade Commission's ban on junk fees, which goes into effect on May 12th," notes The Verge. From the report: Now, when you're shopping for tickets, Ticketmaster will display a ticket's full price, alongside a dropdown menu that you can select to see how much you're paying for the "Face Value" of a ticket and the service fee. You still won't see local taxes or delivery fees until checkout. Ticketmaster says it has made some improvements to its queue as well, by offering real-time updates about ticket availability and when wait times are expected to last more than 30 minutes. It also allows customers to see exactly how many people are ahead of them in the queue.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Last Thursday, white smoke emerged from a chimney at the Sistine Chapel, signaling that cardinals had elected a new pope. That's a rare event in itself, but one of the many unprecedented aspects of the election of Chicago-born Robert Prevost as Pope Leo XIV is one of the main reasons he chose his papal name: artificial intelligence. On Saturday, the new pope gave his first address to the College of Cardinals, explaining his name choice as a continuation of Pope Francis' concerns about technological transformation. "Sensing myself called to continue in this same path, I chose to take the name Leo XIV," he said during the address. "There are different reasons for this, but mainly because Pope Leo XIII in his historic Encyclical Rerum Novarum addressed the social question in the context of the first great industrial revolution." In his address, Leo XIV explicitly described "artificial intelligence" developments as "another industrial revolution," positioning himself to address this technological shift as his namesake had done over a century ago. As the head of an ancient religious organization that spans millennia, the pope's talk about AI creates a somewhat head-spinning juxtaposition, but Leo XIV isn't the first pope to focus on defending human dignity in the age of AI. Pope Francis, who died in April, first established AI as a Vatican priority, as we reported in August 2023 when he warned during his 2023 World Day of Peace message that AI should not allow "violence and discrimination to take root." In January of this year, Francis further elaborated on his warnings about AI with reference to a "shadow of evil" that potentially looms over the field in a document called "Antiqua et Nova" (meaning "the old and the new"). "Like any product of human creativity, AI can be directed toward positive or negative ends," Francis said in January. "When used in ways that respect human dignity and promote the well-being of individuals and communities, it can contribute positively to the human vocation. Yet, as in all areas where humans are called to make decisions, the shadow of evil also looms here. Where human freedom allows for the possibility of choosing what is wrong, the moral evaluation of this technology will need to take into account how it is directed and used." [...] Just as mechanization disrupted traditional labor in the 1890s, artificial intelligence now potentially threatens employment patterns and human dignity in ways that Pope Leo XIV believes demand similar moral leadership from the church. "In our own day," Leo XIV concluded in his formal address on Saturday, "the Church offers to everyone the treasury of her social teaching in response to another industrial revolution and to developments in the field of artificial intelligence that pose new challenges for the defense of human dignity, justice, and labor."

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Apple is planning to use AI technology to address a frequent source of customer frustration: the iPhone's battery life. From a report: The company is planning an AI-powered battery management mode for iOS 19, an iPhone software update due in September, according to people with knowledge of the matter. The enhancement will analyze how a person uses their device and make adjustments to conserve energy, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the service hasn't been announced. To create the technology -- part of the Apple Intelligence platform -- the company is using battery data it has collected from users' devices to understand trends and make predictions for when it should lower the power draw of certain applications or features. There also will be a lock-screen indicator showing how long it will take to charge up the device, said the people.

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An anonymous reader shares a report: A new report claims that Nvidia has recently raised the official prices of nearly all of its products to combat the impact of tariffs and surging manufacturing costs on its business, with gaming graphics cards receiving a 5 to 10% hike while AI GPUs see up to a 15% increase. As reported by Digitimes Taiwan, Nvidia is facing "multiple crises," including a $5.5 billion hit to its quarterly earnings over export restrictions on AI chips, including a ban on sales of its H20 chips to China. Digitimes reports that CEO Jensen Huang has been "shuttling back and forth" between the US and China to minimize the impact of tariffs, and that "in order to maintain stable profitability," Nvidia has reportedly recently raised official prices for almost all its products, allowing its partners to increase prices accordingly.

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Chegg said on Monday it would lay off about 22% of its workforce, or 248 employees, to cut costs and streamline its operations as students increasingly turn to AI-powered tools such as ChatGPT over traditional edtech platforms. From a report: The company, an online education firm that offers textbook rentals, homework help and tutoring, has been grappling with a decline in web traffic for months and warned that the trend would likely worsen before improving. Google's expansion of AI Overviews is keeping web traffic confined within its search ecosystem while gradually shifting searches to its Gemini AI platform, Chegg said, adding that other AI companies including OpenAI and Anthropic were courting academics with free access to subscriptions. As part of the restructuring announced on Monday, Chegg will also shut its U.S. and Canada offices by the end of the year and aim to reduce its marketing, product development efforts and general and administrative expenses.

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The climate crisis is threatening the future of the world's most popular fruit, as almost two-thirds of banana-growing areas in Latin America and the Caribbean may no longer be suitable for growing the fruit by 2080, new research has found. From a report: Rising temperatures, extreme weather and climate-related pests are pummeling banana-growing countries such as Guatemala, Costa Rica and Colombia, reducing yields and devastating rural communities across the region, according to Christian Aid's new report, Going Bananas: How Climate Change Threatens the World's Favourite Fruit. Bananas are the world's most consumed fruit -- and the fourth most important food crop globally, after wheat, rice and maize. About 80% of bananas grown globally are for local consumption, and more than 400 million people rely on the fruit for 15% to 27% of their daily calories.

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Western Digital has made a strategic investment in German startup Cerabyte, a company developing nearly indestructible ceramic-based data storage technology. The partnership aims to accelerate commercialization of Cerabyte's ceramic-on-glass material, which the company claims can preserve data for 5,000 years. Cerabyte recently demonstrated its technology's resilience by boiling storage devices in salt water and subjecting them to oven-level heat. The company states its ceramic storage withstands fire, moisture, UV light, radiation, corrosion, and EMP bursts. Beyond durability, Cerabyte aims to enable massive capacity increases as the industry moves toward what it calls the "Yottabyte era," while targeting storage costs below $1 per TB by 2030.

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Evidence is mounting for "a vast reservoir of liquid water" on Mars, according to a new article by Australian National University professor Hrvoje TkalÄiÄ and geophysics associate professor Weijia Sun from the Chinese Academy of Geological Sciences, announcing their recently published paper. "Using seismic data from NASA's InSight mission, we uncovered evidence that the seismic waves slow down in a layer between 5.4 and 8 kilometres below the surface, which could be because of the presence of liquid water at these depths." Mars is covered in traces of ancient bodies of water. But the puzzle of exactly where it all went when the planet turned cold and dry has long intrigued scientists... Billions of years ago, during the Noachian and Hesperian periods (4.1 billion to 3 billion years ago), rivers carved valleys and lakes shimmered. As Mars' magnetic field faded and its atmosphere thinned, most surface water vanished. Some escaped to space, some froze in polar caps, and some was trapped in minerals, where it remains today. But evaporation, freezing and rocks can't quite account for all the water that must have covered Mars in the distant past. Calculations suggest the "missing" water is enough to cover the planet in an ocean at least 700 metres deep, and perhaps up to 900 metres deep. One hypothesis has been that the missing water seeped into the crust. Mars was heavily bombarded by meteorites during the Noachian period, which may have formed fractures that channelled water underground. Deep beneath the surface, warmer temperatures would keep the water in a liquid state — unlike the frozen layers nearer the surface. In 2018, NASA's InSight lander touched down on Mars to listen to the planet's interior with a super-sensitive seismometer. By studying a particular kind of vibration called "shear waves", we found a significant underground anomaly: a layer between 5.4 and 8 kilometres down where these vibrations move more slowly. This "low-velocity layer" is most likely highly porous rock filled with liquid water, like a saturated sponge. Something like Earth's aquifers, where groundwater seeps into rock pores. We calculated the "aquifer layer" on Mars could hold enough water to cover the planet in a global ocean 520-780m deep. InSight's seismometer captured vibrations between the crust of Mars and its lower layers from two meteorite impacts in 2021 and a Marsquake in 2022. "These signatures let us pinpoint boundaries where rock changes, revealing the water-soaked layer 5.4 to 8 kilometres deep." It's an exciting possibility. "Purified, it could provide drinking water, oxygen, or fuel for rockets." And since microbes thrives on earth in deep rocks filled with water, "Could similar life, perhaps relics of ancient Martian ecosystems, persist in these reservoirs?"

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The United States and China said Monday they reached an agreement to temporarily reduce the tariffs [non-paywalled source] they have imposed on each other in an attempt to defuse the trade war threatening the world's two largest economies. From a report: In a joint statement, the countries said they would suspend their respective tariffs for 90 days while they negotiate. Under the agreement, the United States would reduce the tariff on Chinese imports to 30 percent from its current 145 percent, while China would lower its import duty on American goods to 10 percent from 125 percent. "We concluded that we have a shared interest," said Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent at a news conference in Geneva where U.S. and Chinese officials met over the weekend. "The consensus from both delegations is that neither side wanted a decoupling," he said. The agreement breaks an impasse that had brought trade between China and the United States to a halt. Many American businesses had suspended orders, holding out hope that the two countries could strike a deal to bring down the tariff rates while raising the spectre of price increases.

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Business Insider tells the story in three bullet points: - Big Tech companies depend on content made by others to train their AI models. - Some of those creators say using their work to train AI is copyright infringement. - The U.S. Copyright Office just published a report that indicates it may agree. The office released on Friday its latest in a series of reports exploring copyright laws and artificial intelligence. The report addresses whether the copyrighted content AI companies use to train their AI models qualifies under the fair use doctrine. AI companies are probably not going to like what they read... AI execs argue they haven't violated copyright laws because the training falls under fair use. According to the U.S. Copyright Office's new report, however, it's not that simple. "Although it is not possible to prejudge the result in any particular case, precedent supports the following general observations," the office said. "Various uses of copyrighted works in AI training are likely to be transformative. The extent to which they are fair, however, will depend on what works were used, from what source, for what purpose, and with what controls on the outputs — all of which can affect the market." The office made a distinction between AI models for research and commercial AI models. "When a model is deployed for purposes such as analysis or research — the types of uses that are critical to international competitiveness — the outputs are unlikely to substitute for expressive works used in training," the office said. "But making commercial use of vast troves of copyrighted works to produce expressive content that competes with them in existing markets, especially where this is accomplished through illegal access, goes beyond established fair use boundaries." The report says outputs "substantially similar to copyrighted works in the dataset" are less likely to be considered transformative than when the purpose "is to deploy it for research, or in a closed system that constrains it to a non-substitutive task." Business Insider adds that "A day after the office released the report, President Donald Trump fired its director, Shira Perlmutter, a spokesperson told Business Insider."

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It's been a mobile-only game for decades. Then a little more than a week ago Infinity Nikkireleased its 1.5 update (which introduced multiplayer and customization options) and launched the game on Steam. But it "didn't go over as planned," writes the worker-owned gaming site Aftermath, citing some very negative reactions on Reddit. (Some players say that in response the game's publisher is now even censoring the word "boycott" on its official forums and community spaces...) Infinity Nikki players were immediately incensed by a bevy of bugs and general game instability, and made even more angry by several baffling changes to both the story and its monetization structure... Players globally are vowing to stay off the game until Infold Games addresses their concerns, including at least one Infinity Nikki creator who is part of the game's partner program... [T]he Chinese Infinity Nikki community — as well as others — has been flooding Steam with negative reviews of the game... [T]he complaints are also impacting Infinity Nikki's review score on the Google Play Store... The company said it's working to fix the patch's performance issues, which have caused game-breaking bugs for some players.... [T]he Infinity Nikki team also gave players some free currency, but there's been problems there, too: Players say Infold had a bug in this distribution, which awarded players too much free currency. Instead of letting players keep that — it was Infold's mistake, after all — they deducted the currency, some of which players had already spent, putting them in the negative. But the community is looking for more from the studio; it wants an acknowledgement of the "dumpster fire" of a situation, as one Infinity Nikki player told Aftermath, but also wants some of the biggest problems reversed... Beyond the problematic monetization strategy, players Aftermath spoke with said they're also pissed off at a major change to the start of the game... Infold Games removed the game's original start with the update; the new intro drops players into Infinity Nikki with little context and a new, unexplained character who is supposed to be a guide as Nikki is dropped into intergalactic limbo. While the spend-to-upgrade-your-character model has always been inherently predatory, as one player put it, the new update pushed the system "much too far for a lot of players," according to the article — "something made more egregious by the numerous bugs and strange gameplay changes." The article now describes some players as "upset that the trust they've given Infold Games thus far has been broken." "Infold Games has not responded to a request for comment."

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An anonymous reader shared this report from the Verge: This morning, while summarizing an Apple "product blitz" he expects for 2027, Bloomberg's Mark Gurman writes in his Power On newsletter that Apple is planning a "mostly glass, curved iPhone" with no display cutouts for that year, which happens to be the iPhone's 20th anniversary... [T]he closest hints are probably in Apple patents revealed over the years, like one from 2019 that describes a phone encased in glass that "forms a continuous loop" around the device. Apart from a changing iPhone, Gurman describes what sounds like a big year for Apple. He reiterates past reports that the first foldable iPhone should be out by 2027, and that the company's first smart glasses competitor to Meta Ray-Bans will be along that year. So will those rumored camera-equipped AirPods and Apple Watches, he says. Gurman also suggests that Apple's home robot — a tabletop robot that features "an AI assistant with its own personality" — will come in 2027... Finally, Gurman writes that by 2027 Apple could finally ship an LLM-powered Siri and may have created new chips for its server-side AI processing. Earlier this week Bloomberg reported that Apple is also "actively looking at" revamping the Safari web browser on its devices "to focus on AI-powered search engines." (Apple's senior VP of services "noted that searches on Safari dipped for the first time last month, which he attributed to people using AI.")

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Fusion energy "took one step closer to reality," announced the University of Texas at Austin, as their researchers joined with a team from Los Alamos National Laboratory and Type One Energy Group and "solved a longstanding problem in the field" — how to contain high-energy particles inside fusion reactors. When high-energy alpha particles leak from a reactor, that prevents the plasma from getting hot and dense enough to sustain the fusion reaction. To prevent them from leaking, engineers design elaborate magnetic confinement systems, but there are often holes in the magnetic field, and a tremendous amount of computational time is required to predict their locations and eliminate them. In their paper published in Physical Review Letters, the research team describes having discovered a shortcut that can help engineers design leak-proof magnetic confinement systems 10 times as fast as the gold standard method, without sacrificing accuracy... "What's most exciting is that we're solving something that's been an open problem for almost 70 years," said Josh Burby, assistant professor of physics at UT and first author of the paper. "It's a paradigm shift in how we design these reactors...." This new method also can help with a similar but different problem in another popular magnetic fusion reactor design called a tokamak. In that design, there's a problem with runaway electrons — high-energy electrons that can punch a hole in the surrounding walls. This new method can help identify holes in the magnetic field where these electrons might leak.

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Cybersecurity researchers have flagged three malicious npm packages that target the macOS version of AI-powered code-editing tool Cursor, reports The Hacker News: "Disguised as developer tools offering 'the cheapest Cursor API,' these packages steal user credentials, fetch an encrypted payload from threat actor-controlled infrastructure, overwrite Cursor's main.js file, and disable auto-updates to maintain persistence," Socket researcher Kirill Boychenko said. All three packages continue to be available for download from the npm registry. "Aiide-cur" was first published on February 14, 2025... In total, the three packages have been downloaded over 3,200 times to date.... The findings point to an emerging trend where threat actors are using rogue npm packages as a way to introduce malicious modifications to other legitimate libraries or software already installed on developer systems... "By operating inside a legitimate parent process — an IDE or shared library — the malicious logic inherits the application's trust, maintains persistence even after the offending package is removed, and automatically gains whatever privileges that software holds, from API tokens and signing keys to outbound network access," Socket told The Hacker News. "This campaign highlights a growing supply chain threat, with threat actors increasingly using malicious patches to compromise trusted local software," Boychenko said. The npm packages "restart the application so that the patched code takes effect," letting the threat actor "execute arbitrary code within the context of the platform."

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18 years ago Slashdot covered the creation of Spaceport America. Today Space.com hails it as "the first purpose-built commercial spaceport in the world." But engineer/executive director Scott McLaughlin has plans to grow even more. Already home to an array of commercial space industry tenants, such as Virgin Galactic, SpinLaunch, Up Aerospace, and Prismatic, Spaceport America is a "rocket-friendly environment of 6,000 square miles of restricted airspace, low population density, a 12,000-foot by 200-foot runway, vertical launch complexes, and about 340 days of sunshine and low humidity," the organization boasts on its website... Space.com: What changes do you see that make Spaceport America even more viable today? McLaughlin: I think opening ourselves up to doing different kinds of work. We're more like a civilian test range now. We've got high-altitude UAVs [Unmanned Aerial Vehicles]. We're willing to do engine production. We believe we're about to sign a data center, one that's able to provide services to our customers who want low-latency, artificial intelligence, or high-powered computing. You'll be able to rent some virtual machines and do your own thing and have it be instantaneous at the spaceport. So I think being more broadminded about what we can do at the spaceport is helping generate customers and revenue... Our goal is to see Virgin Galactic fly in a year or so, hopefully flying twice a week, and that will have a big impact on the spaceport... [W]e're trying to be open-minded as we're partnered with White Sands Missile Range to use that airspace. We're even looking at things like an electromagnetic pulse facility. It's a customer that I can't identify yet... We are working on a "reentry" license too. We recently discussed this with specialists and we think we have a site relatively close to the spaceport that's flat and free of mesquite bushes and such, so we can do capsule return and other types of return. And of course we have the runway. So I'd think we'd be the only spaceport that does vertical and horizontal launch and reentry.... We're never going to have the throughput that the Cape in Florida has. But we'll be a good alternative especially if you're going to do a small to medium-sized launch, and you need to do it quickly, and perhaps do it more securely than you would if you were to fly over water. That's why the Department of Defense is showing interest in the inland spaceport.

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