Long-time Slashdot reader jrronimo says JILA physicist Jun Ye's group "has made a breakthrough towards the next stage of precision timekeeping." From their paper recently published to arXiv: Optical atomic clocks use electronic energy levels to precisely keep track of time. A clock based on nuclear energy levels promises a next-generation platform for precision metrology and fundamental physics studies.... These results mark the start of nuclear-based solid-state optical clocks and demonstrate the first comparison of nuclear and atomic clocks for fundamental physics studies. This work represents a confluence of precision metrology, ultrafast strong field physics, nuclear physics, and fundamental physics.

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Founded in 1846, the not-for-profit Associated Press distributes its news stories to other news outlets. But are free online sites putting those outlets at risk? This week the Associated Press wrote that a "crisis" in local and state news reporting "shows little signs of abating" — and that it's now setting up "a sister organization that will seek to raise money" for those outlets. The organization, which will have a board of directors independent of the AP, will solicit philanthropic spending to boost this news coverage, both within the AP and through outside organizations, the news outlet said Tuesday. "We feel we have to lean in at this point, not pull back," said Daisy Veerasingham, the AP's president and CEO. "But the supporting mechanism — the local newspaper market that used to support this — can't afford to do that anymore." Veerasingham said she's been encouraged by preliminary talks with some funders who have expressed concern about the state of local journalism... The local news industry has collapsed over the past two decades, with the number of journalists working in newspapers dropping from 75,000 to 31,000 in 2022, according to Northwestern University. More than half of the nation's counties have no local news outlets or only one. The AP's CEO offered this succinct summary of their goal. "We want to add new products and services to help the industry."

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"The outdoor-apparel brand Patagonia has given 90 U.S. employees a choice," reports Business Insider: "tell the company by Friday that you're willing to relocate or leave your job." [Alternate URL here.] The employees all work in customer services, known at Patagonia as the customer-experience, or CX, team, and have been allowed to work remotely to field calls and inquiries. These workers received a text and email Tuesday morning about an "important" meeting... Two company executives, Amy Velligan and Bruce Old, told staff in a 15-minute video meeting that the team would be moving to a new "hub" model. CX employees are now expected to live within 60 miles of one of seven "hubs" — Atlanta; Salt Lake City; Reno, Nevada; Dallas; Austin; Chicago; or Pittsburgh. Workers were offered $4,000 toward relocation costs and extra paid time off. Those willing to relocate were told to do so by September 30. If CX staff are not willing to live near a hub city, they must leave the company. They were given 72 hours, until Friday, to confirm their decision... Access to company laptops and phones was shut off later that day until employees either agreed to relocate or said they wanted the severance, one affected CX worker said... Both employees who spoke to Business Insider believed this was because Patagonia didn't want to handle the increased demands of employees in states with higher costs of living. "We've been asking for raises for a long time, and they keep telling us that your wage is based on a Reno cost of living and where you choose to live is on you." According to the article, "The company hopes to bring staff together at the hubs at least once every six weeks for in-person training, company gatherings, or 'Activism Hours'." A company spokesperson described the changes as "crucial for us to build a vibrant team culture," and said there were workers who had been complaining about feeling disconnected. Though there may be another motive: "The reality is that our CX team has been running at 200% to 300% overstaffed for much of this year," she added. "While we hoped to reach the needed staffing levels through attrition, those numbers were very low, and retention remained high." One affected worker told Business Insider that the company's proposal "was very factual. If you don't live in these seven metro areas, you either need to move there or give us your stuff and hit the brick. If we don't respond by Friday, they will assume that we have chosen the severance package and we'll start that process." One worker added that the severance package they received was generous... Thanks to Slashdot reader NoWayNoShapeNoForm for sharing the article.

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Lego teamed up with the European Space Agency to make Lego pieces from actual meteorite dust, writes Engadget. "It's a proof of concept to show how astronauts could use moondust to build lunar structures." Consider the sheer amount of energy and money required to haul up building materials from Earth to the Moon. It would be a game changer to, instead, build everything from pre-existing lunar materials. There's a layer of rock and mineral deposits at the surface of the Moon, which is called lunar regolith... However, there isn't too much lunar regolith here on Earth for folks to experiment with. ESA scientists made their own regolith by grinding up a really old meteorite. [4.5 billion years, according to Lego's site, discovered in Africa in 2000.] The dust from this meteorite was turned into a mixture that was used to 3D print the Lego pieces. Voila. Moon bricks. They click together just like regular Lego bricks, though they only come in one color (space gray obviously.) "The result is amazing," says ESA Science Officer Aidan Cowley on the Lego site (though "the bricks may look a little rougher than usual. Importantly the clutch power still works, enabling us to play and test our designs.") "Nobody has built a structure on the Moon," Cowley said in an ESA statement. "So it was great to have the flexibility to try out all kinds of designs and building techniques with our space bricks." And the bricks will also be "helping to inspire the next generation of space engineers," according to the ESA's announcement — since they'll be on display in select Lego stores in the U.S., Canada, the U.K., Spain, France, Germany, the Netherlands, and Australia through September 20th.

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This week the Linux Foundation announced a new organization for decentralized systems and technologies, with an aim of "fostering innovation and collaboration" in both their development and deployment. It will build on existing Linux Foundation blockchain and digital identity projects, according to the announcement, while supporting "a rapidly growing decentralized technology landscape." To foster this broader ecosystem, LF Decentralized Trust will encompass the growing portfolio of Hyperledger projects and host new open source software, communities, standards, and specifications that are critical to the macro shift toward decentralized systems of distributed trust.... LF Decentralized Trust's expanded project and member ecosystem will be both essential to emerging tokenized assets classes and networks, as well as to modernizing the core infrastructure for finance, trade, government, healthcare, and more. LF Decentralized Trust will serve as a neutral home for the open development of a broad range of ledger, identity, security, interoperability, scale, implementation, and related technologies... LF Decentralized Trust will also include new directed funding models that will drive strategic investments by members into individual projects and project resources. "With LF Decentralized Trust, we're expanding our commitment to open source innovation by embracing a wider array of decentralized technologies," said Jim Zemlin, Executive Director of the Linux Foundation. "This new, elevated foundation will enable the community to build a more robust ecosystem that drives forward transparency, security, and efficiency in global infrastructure." "After eight years of advancing the development of blockchain, decentralized identity and related technologies via the Hyperledger community, the time has come to broaden our effort and impact," said Daniela Barbosa, General Manager, Blockchain and Identity, the Linux Foundation. "Ledgers and ledger technologies are but one component of the decentralized systems that will underpin a digital-first global economy. LF Decentralized Trust is where we will gather and grow an expanded community and portfolio of technologies to deliver the transparency, reliability, security and efficiency needed to successfully upgrade critical systems around the world." The announcement includes quotes of support from numerous companies including Oracle, Siemens, Visa, Accenture, Citi, and Hitachi. Some highlights: "The formation of the LF Decentralized Trust reflects the growing demand for open source resources that are critical to the management and functionality of decentralized systems." — CEO of Digital Asset "The adoption of decentralized infrastructure is at an inflection point, reflecting the increasing demand from both enterprises and consumers for more secure and transparent digital transactions. As the industry leader for onchain data, blockchain abstraction, and interoperability, we're excited to see the formation of the LF Decentralized Trust and to expand our collaboration with leading financial institutions on advancing tokenized assets and the onchain economy at large." — CMO at Chainlink Labs. "As a founding member of the Hyperledger Foundation, and given our unique position in the financial markets, we recognize the vast potential for open-source innovation and decentralized technologies when it comes to reducing risk, increasing resiliency and improving security. The expansion of Hyperledger Foundation into LF Decentralized Trust represents an exciting opportunity to continue expanding these groundbreaking technologies." — a managing director at DTCC

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In November of 2022, "More than 800 people were selected to participate in the Denver Basic Income Project," reports the Colorado Sun, "while they were living on the streets, in shelters, on friends' couches or in vehicles. One group received $1,000 a month, according to the article, while a second group received $6,500 in the first month, and then $500 for the next 11 months. (And a "control" group received $50 a month.) Amazingly, about 45% of participants in all three groups "were living in a house or apartment that they rented or owned by the study's 10-month check-in point, according to the research." The number of nights spent in shelters among participants in the first and second groups decreased by half. And participants in those two groups reported an increase in full-time work, while the control group reported decreased full-time employment. The project also saved tax dollars, according to the report. Researchers tallied an estimated $589,214 in savings on public services, including ambulance rides, visits to hospital emergency departments, jail stays and shelter nights... The study, which began in November 2022 with payments to the first group of participants, has been extended for an additional eight months, until September, and organizers are attempting to raise money to extend it further.

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Tom's Hardware reports that Japan's National Institute of Information and Communications Technology (working with the Aston Institute of Photonic Technologies and Nokia Bell) set a 402 terabits per second data transfer record — over commercially available optical fiber cables. The NICT and its partners were able to transmit signals through 1,505 channels over 50 km (about 31 miles) of optic fiber cable for this experiment. It used six types of amplifiers and an optical gain equalizer that taps into the unused 37 THz bandwidth to enable the 402 Tb/s transfer speed. One of the amplifiers this was demonstrated with is a thulium-based doped fiber amplifier, which uses C-band or C+L band systems. Additionally, semiconductor optical amplifiers and Raman amplifiers were used, which achieved 256 Tb/s data rate through almost 20 THz. Other amplifiers were also used for this exercise which provided a cumulative bandwidth of 25 THz for up to 119 Tb/s data rate. As a result, its maximum achievable result surpassed the previous data rate capacity by over 25 percent and increased transmission bandwidth by 35 percent. "This is achievable with currently available technology used by internet service providers..." the article points out. "With 'beyond 5G' potential speeds achievable through commercially available cables, it will likely further a new generation of internet services."

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"Stars very close to the center of our galaxy could be fueled by dark matter in perpetuity," writes Gizmodo, "according to a team of astronomers who recently studied the distant light sources." The group of stars, known as S-cluster stars, is just three light-years from the center of the Milky Way (for reference, we are about 26,000 light-years from the center of our galaxy, which hosts a supermassive black hole at its core). The stars are surprisingly young for their galactic neighborhood, yet they don't look like stars that simply migrated to this part of the Milky Way after forming in another location... As reported by Space.com, the research team posits that these weird stars may be accreting dark matter, which they then use as fuel to keep burning. Since models estimate there is plenty of dark matter near the galaxy's core, the stars are "forever young," as study lead author Isabelle John, an astrophysicist at the Kavli Institute for Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology told Space.com. Effectively, the stars have a long, long way to go before they start running low on fuel. The team's paper is currently hosted on the preprint server arXiv, meaning it has not yet gone through the process of peer review. Dark matter is only "seen" through its effects on other objects, the article points out — leading to lots of theories as to where it's actually located. "Earlier this year, a different team of researchers proposed that neutron stars — extremely dense stellar remnants — could actually be a source of dark matter. Last July, yet another team suggested that the Webb Telescope had detected stars that were powered by dark matter."

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Two prominent unions are teaming up to challenge Amazon, reports the New York Times — "after years of organizing Amazon workers and pressuring the company to bargain over wages and working conditions." Members of the Amazon Labor Union "overwhelmingly chose to affiliate with the 1.3-million-member International Brotherhood of Teamsters" in a vote last Monday. While the Amazon Labor Union (or ALU) is the only union formally representing Amazon warehouse workers anywhere in America after an election in 2022, "it has yet to begin bargaining with Amazon, which continues to contest the election outcome." Leaders of both unions said the affiliation agreement would put them in a better position to challenge Amazon and would provide the Amazon Labor Union with more money and staff support... The Teamsters are ramping up their efforts to organize Amazon workers nationwide. The union voted to create an Amazon division in 2021, and O'Brien was elected that year partly on a platform of making inroads at the company. The Teamsters told the ALU that they had allocated $8 million to support organizing at Amazon, according to ALU President Christian Smalls, and that the larger union was prepared to tap its more than $300 million strike and defense fund to aid in the effort... The Teamsters also recently reached an affiliation agreement with workers organizing at Amazon's largest airplane hub in the United States, a Kentucky facility known as KCVG. Experts have said unionizing KCVG could give workers substantial leverage because Amazon relies heavily on the hub to meet its one- and two-day shipping goals. Their agreement with the Teamsters says the Amazon Labor Union will also "lend its expertise to assist in organizing other Amazon facilities" across America, according to the article.

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"The Short Happy Reign of the CD-ROM" was just one article in a Fast Company series called 1994 Week. As the week rolled along they also re-visited Yahoo, Netscape, and how the U.S. Congress "forced the videogame industry to grow up." But another article argues that it's in web pages from 1994 that "you can start to see in those weird, formative years some surprising signs of what the web would be, and what it could be." It's hard to say precisely when the tipping point was. Many point to September '93, when AOL users first flooded Usenet. But the web entered a new phase the following year. According to an MIT study, at the start of 1994, there were just 623 web servers. By year's end, it was estimated there were at least 10,000, hosting new sites including Yahoo!, the White House, the Library of Congress, Snopes, the BBC, sex.com, and something called The Amazing FishCam. The number of servers globally was doubling every two months. No one had seen growth quite like that before. According to a press release announcing the start of the World Wide Web Foundation that October, this network of pages "was widely considered to be the fastest-growing network phenomenon of all time." As the year began, Web pages were by and large personal and intimate, made by research institutions, communities, or individuals, not companies or brands. Many pages embodied the spirit, or extended the presence, of newsgroups on Usenet, or "User's Net." (Snopes and the Internet Movie Database, which landed on the Web in 1993, began as crowd-sourced projects on Usenet.) But a number of big companies, including Microsoft, Sun, Apple, IBM, and Wells Fargo, established their first modest Web outposts in 1994, a hint of the shopping malls and content farms and slop factories and strip mines to come. 1994 also marked the start of banner ads and online transactions (a CD, pizzas), and the birth of spam and phishing... [B]ack in '94, the salesmen and oilmen and land-grabbers and developers had barely arrived. In the calm before the storm, the Web was still weird, unruly, unpredictable, and fascinating to look at and get lost in. People around the world weren't just writing and illustrating these pages, they were coding and designing them. For the most part, the design was non-design. With a few eye-popping exceptions, formatting and layout choices were simple, haphazard, personal, and — in contrast to most of today's web — irrepressibly charming. There were no table layouts yet; cascading style sheets, though first proposed in October 1994 by Norwegian programmer Håkon Wium Lie, wouldn't arrive until December 1996... The highways and megalopolises would come later, courtesy of some of the world's biggest corporations and increasingly peopled by bots, but in 1994 the internet was still intimate, made by and for individuals... Soon, many people would add "under construction" signs to their Web pages, like a friendly request to pardon our dust. It was a reminder that someone was working on it — another indication of the craft and care that was going into this never-ending quilt of knowledge. The article includes screenshots of Netscape in action from browser-emulating site OldWeb.Today (albeit without using a 14.4 kbps modems). "Look in and think about how and why this web grew the way it did, and what could have been. Or try to imagine what life was like when the web wasn't worldwide yet, and no one knew what it really was." Slashdot reader tedlistens calls it "a trip down memory lane," offering "some telling glimpses of the future, and some lessons for it too." The article revisits 1994 sites like Global Network Navigator, Time-Warner's Pathfinder, and Wired's online site HotWired as well as 30-year-old versions of the home pages for Wells Fargo and Microsoft. What did they miss? Share your own memories in the comments. What do you remember about the web in 1994?

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America's National Labor Relations Board "has filed a complaint against Amazon..." reports the Verge, "that alleges the company 'unlawfully disciplined and terminated an employee' after they assisted in organizing walkouts last May in protest of Amazon's new return-to-work [three days per week] directives, issued early last year." [T]housands of Amazon employees signed petitions against the new mandate and staged a walkout several months later. Despite the protests and pushback, according to a report by Insider, in a meeting in early August 2023, Jassy reaffirmed the company's commitment to employees returning to the office for the majority of the week. The NLRB complaint alleges Amazon "interrogated" employees about the walkout using its internal Chime system. The employee was first put on a performance improvement plan by Amazon following their organizing efforts for the walkout and later "offered a severance payment of nine weeks' salary if the employee signed a severance agreement and global release in exchange for their resignation." According to the NLRB's lawyers, all of that was because the employee engaged in organizing, and the retaliation was intended to discourage "...protected, concerted activities...." The NLRB's general counsel is seeking several different forms of remediation from Amazon, including reimbursement for the employee's "financial harms and search-for-work and work related expenses," a letter of apology, and a "Notice to Employees" that must be physically posted at the company's facilities across the country, distributed electronically, and read by an Amazon rep at a recorded videoconference. Amazon says their actions were entirely unrelated to the workers activism against their return-to-work policies. An Amazon spokesperson told the Verge that instead, the employee "consistently underperformed over a period of nearly a year and repeatedly failed to deliver on projects she was assigned. Despite extensive support and coaching, the former employee was unable to improve her performance and chose to leave the company."

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An anonymous reader shared this report from the OMG Ubuntu blog: Those of you who own a Framework Laptop 13 — consider me jealous, btw — or are considering buying one in the near future, you may be interested to know that a RISC-V motherboard option is in the works. DeepComputing, the company behind the recently-announced Ubuntu RISC-V laptop, is working with Framework Computer Inc, the company behind the popular, modular, and Linux-friendly Framework laptops, on a RISC-V mainboard. This is a new announcement; the component itself is in early development, and there's no tentative price tag or pre-order date pencilled in... [T]he Framework RISC-V mainboard will use soldered memory and non-upgradeable eMMC storage (though it can boot from microSD cards). It will 'drop into' any Framework Laptop 13 chassis (or Cooler Master Mainboard Case), per Framework's modular ethos... Framework mentions DeepComputing is "working closely with the teams at Canonical and Red Hat to ensure Linux support is solid through Ubuntu and Fedora", which is great news, and cements Canonical's seriousness to supporting Ubuntu on RISC-V. "We want to be clear that in this generation, it is focused primarily on enabling developers, tinkerers, and hobbyists to start testing and creating on RISC-V," says Framework's announcement. "The peripheral set and performance aren't yet competitive with our Intel and AMD-powered Framework Laptop Mainboards." They're calling the Mainboard "a huge milestone both for expanding the breadth of the Framework ecosystem and for making RISC-V more accessible than ever... DeepComputing is demoing an early prototype of this Mainboard in a Framework Laptop 13 at the RISC-V Summit Europe next week, and we'll be sharing more as this program progresses." And their announcement included two additional updates: "Just like we did for Framework Laptop 16 last week, today we're sharing open source CAD for the Framework Laptop 13 shell, enabling development of skins, cases, and accessories." "We now have Framework Laptop 13 Factory Seconds systems available with British English and German keyboards, making entering the ecosystem more affordable than ever." "We're eager to continue growing a new Consumer Electronics industry that is grounded in open access, repairability, and customization at every level."

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It's been a 1,000 years since there was a significant volcanic eruption from Mount Rainier, CNN reminds readers. It's a full 60 miles from Tacoma, Washington — and 90 miles from Seattle. Yet "more than Hawaii's bubbling lava fields or Yellowstone's sprawling supervolcano, it's Mount Rainier that has many U.S. volcanologists worried." "Mount Rainier keeps me up at night because it poses such a great threat to the surrounding communities, said Jess Phoenix, a volcanologist and ambassador for the Union of Concerned Scientists, on an episode of CNN's series "Violent Earth With Liv Schreiber." The sleeping giant's destructive potential lies not with fiery flows of lava, which, in the event of an eruption, would be unlikely to extend more than a few miles beyond the boundary of Mount Rainier National Park in the Pacific Northwest. And the majority of volcanic ash would likely dissipate downwind to the east away from population centers, according to the US Geological Survey. Instead, many scientists fear the prospect of a lahar — a swiftly moving slurry of water and volcanic rock originating from ice or snow rapidly melted by an eruption that picks up debris as it flows through valleys and drainage channels. "The thing that makes Mount Rainier tough is that it is so tall, and it's covered with ice and snow, and so if there is any kind of eruptive activity, hot stuff ... will melt the cold stuff and a lot of water will start coming down," said Seth Moran, a research seismologist at USGS Cascades Volcano Observatory in Vancouver, Washington. "And there are tens, if not hundreds of thousands of people who live in areas that potentially could be impacted by a large lahar, and it could happen quite quickly." The deadliest lahar in recent memory was in November 1985 when Colombia's Nevado del Ruiz volcano erupted. Just a couple hours after the eruption started, a river of mud, rocks, lava and icy water swept over the town of Armero, killing over 23,000 people in a matter of minutes... Bradley Pitcher, a volcanologist and lecturer in Earth and environmental sciences at Columbia University, said in an episode of CNN's "Violent Earth"... said that Mount Rainier has about eight times the amount of glaciers and snow as Nevado del Ruiz had when it erupted. "There's the potential to have a much more catastrophic mudflow...." Lahars typically occur during volcanic eruptions but also can be caused by landslides and earthquakes. Geologists have found evidence that at least 11 large lahars from Mount Rainier have reached into the surrounding area, known as the Puget Lowlands, in the past 6,000 years, Moran said. Two major U.S. cities — Tacoma and South Seattle — "are built on 100-foot-thick (30.5-meter) ancient mudflows from eruptions of Mount Rainier," the volcanologist said on CNN's "Violent Earth" series. CNN's article adds that the US Geological Survey already set up a lahar detection system at Mount Rainier in 1998, "which since 2017 has been upgraded and expanded. About 20 sites on the volcano's slopes and the two paths identified as most at risk of a lahar now feature broadband seismometers that transmit real-time data and other sensors including trip wires, infrasound sensors, web cameras and GPS receivers."

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Earlier this month Apple announced a partnership with OpenAI to bring ChatGPT to Siri. "Now, the Wall Street Journal reports that Apple and Facebook's parent company Meta are in talks around a similar deal," according to TechCrunch: A deal with Meta could make Apple less reliant on a single partner, while also providing validation for Meta's generative AI tech. The Journal reports that Apple isn't offering to pay for these partnerships; instead, Apple provides distribution to AI partners who can then sell premium subscriptions... Apple has said it will ask for users' permission before sharing any questions and data with ChatGPT. Presumably, any integration with Meta would work similarly.

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Michigan's House of Representatives passed a bill requiring all the state's public high schools to offer a computer science course by the start of the 2027-28 school year. (The bill now goes to the Senate, according to a report from Chalkbeat Detroit.) Long-time Slashdot reader theodp writes: Michigan is also removing the requirement for CS teacher endorsements in 2026, paving the way for CS courses to be taught in 2027 by teachers who have "demonstrated strong computer science skills" but do not hold a CS endorsement. Michigan's easing of CS teaching requirements comes in the same year that New York State will begin requiring credentials for all CS teachers. With lobbyist Julia Wynn from the tech giant-backed nonprofit Code.org sitting at her side, Michigan State Rep. Carol Glavnille introduced the CS bill (HB5649) to the House in May (hearing video, 16:20). "This is not a graduation requirement," Glavnille emphasized in her testimony. Code.org's Wynn called the Bill "an important first step" — after all, Code.org's goal is "to require all students to take CS to earn a HS diploma" — noting that Code.org has also been closely collaborating with Michigan's Education department "on the language and the Bill since inception." Wynn went on to inform lawmakers that "even just attending a high school that offers computer science delivers concrete employment and earnings benefits for students," citing a recent Brookings Institute article that also noted "30 states have adopted a key part of Code.org Advocacy Coalition's policy recommendations, which require all high schools to offer CS coursework, while eight states (and counting) have gone a step further in requiring all students to take CS as a high school graduation requirement." Minutes from the hearing report other parties submitting cards in support of HB 5649 included Amazon (a $3+ million Code.org Platinum Supporter) and AWS (a Code.org In-Kind Supporter), as well as College Board (which offers the AP CS A and CSP exams) and TechNet (which notes its "teams at the federal and state levels advocate with policymakers on behalf of our member companies").

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Slashdot reader unixbhaskar shared this report from Phoronix: Larry Finger who has contributed to the Linux kernel since 2005 and has seen more than 1,500 kernel patches upstreamed into the mainline Linux kernel has sadly passed away. His wife shared the news of Larry Finger's passing this weekend on the linux-wireless mailing list in a brief statement. Reactions are being shared around the internet. LWN writes: The LWN Kernel Source Database shows that Finger contributed to 94 releases in the (Git era) kernel history, starting with 2.6.16 — 1,464 commits in total. He will be missed... In part to his contributions, the Linux wireless hardware support has come a long way over the past two decades. Larry was a frequent contributor to the Linux Wireless and Linux Kernel mailing lists. (Here's a 2006 discussion he had about Git with Linus Torvalds.) Larry also answered 54 Linux questions on Quora, and in 2005 wrote three articles for Linux Journal. And Larry's GitHub profile shows 122 contributions to open source projects just in 2024. In Reddit's Linux forum, one commenter wrote, "He was 84 years old and was still writing code. What a legend. May he rest in peace."

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OpenAI's 'Media Manager' Mocked, Amid Accusations of Robbing Creative Professionals "Amid the hype surrounding Apple's new deal with OpenAI, one issue has been largely papered over," argues the Executive Director of America's writer's advocacy group, the Authors Guild. OpenAI's foundational models "are, and have always been, built atop the theft of creative professionals' work." [L]ast month the company quietly announced Media Manager, scheduled for release in 2025. A tool purportedly designed to allow creators and content owners to control how their work is used, Media Manager is really a shameless attempt to evade responsibility for the theft of artists' intellectual property that OpenAI is already profiting from. OpenAI says this tool would allow creators to identify their work and choose whether to exclude it from AI training processes. But this does nothing to address the fact that the company built its foundational models using authors' and other creators' works without consent, compensation or control over how OpenAI users will be able to imitate the artists' styles to create new works. As it's described, Media Manager puts the burden on creators to protect their work and fails to address the company's past legal and ethical transgressions. This overture is like having your valuables stolen from your home and then hearing the thief say, "Don't worry, I'll give you a chance to opt out of future burglaries ... next year...." AI companies often argue that it would be impossible for them to license all the content that they need and that doing so would bring progress to a grinding halt. This is simply untrue. OpenAI has signed a succession of licensing agreements with publishers large and small. While the exact terms of these agreements are rarely released to the public, the compensation estimates pale in comparison with the vast outlays for computing power and energy that the company readily spends. Payments to authors would have minimal effects on AI companies' war chests, but receiving royalties for AI training use would be a meaningful new revenue stream for a profession that's already suffering... We cannot trust tech companies that swear their innovations are so important that they do not need to pay for one of the main ingredients — other people's creative works. The "better future" we are being sold by OpenAI and others is, in fact, a dystopia. It's time for creative professionals to stand together, demand what we are owed and determine our own futures. The Authors Guild (and 17 other plaintiffs) are now in an ongoing lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft. And the Guild's executive director also notes that there's also "a class action filed by visual artists against Stability AI, Runway AI, Midjourney and Deviant Art, a lawsuit by music publishers against Anthropic for infringement of song lyrics, and suits in the U.S. and U.K. brought by Getty Images against Stability AI for copyright infringement of photographs." They conclude that "The best chance for the wider community of artists is to band together."

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Tuesday a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket will launch a special satellite — a state-of-the-art weather-watcher from America's National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. It will complete a series of four GOES-R satellite launches that began in 2016. Space.com drills down into how these satellites have changed weather forecasts: More than seven years later, with three of the four satellites in the series orbiting the Earth, scientists and researchers say they are pleased with the results and how the advanced technology has been a game changer. "I think it has really lived up to its hype in thunderstorm forecasting. Meteorologists can see the convection evolve in near real-time and this gives them enhanced insight on storm development and severity, making for better warnings," John Cintineo, a researcher from NOAA's National Severe Storms Laboratory , told Space.com in an email. "Not only does the GOES-R series provide observations where radar coverage is lacking, but it often provides a robust signal before radar, such as when a storm is strengthening or weakening. I'm sure there have been many other improvements in forecasts and environmental monitoring over the last decade, but this is where I have most clearly seen improvement," Cintineo said. In addition to helping predict severe thunderstorms, each satellite has collected images and data on heavy rain events that could trigger flooding, detected low clouds and fog as it forms, and has made significant improvements to forecasts and services used during hurricane season. "GOES provides our hurricane forecasters with faster, more accurate and detailed data that is critical for estimating a storm's intensity, including cloud top cooling, convective structures, specific features of a hurricane's eye, upper-level wind speeds, and lightning activity," Ken Graham, director of NOAA's National Weather Service told Space.com in an email. Instruments such as the Advanced Baseline Imager have three times more spectral channels, four times the image quality, and five times the imaging speed as the previous GOES satellites. The Geostationary Lightning Mapper is the first of its kind in orbit on the GOES-R series that allows scientists to view lightning 24/7 and strikes that make contact with the ground and from cloud to cloud. "GOES-U and the GOES-R series of satellites provides scientists and forecasters weather surveillance of the entire western hemisphere, at unprecedented spatial and temporal scales," Cintineo said. "Data from these satellites are helping researchers develop new tools and methods to address problems such as lightning prediction, sea-spray identification (sea-spray is dangerous for mariners), severe weather warnings, and accurate cloud motion estimation. The instruments from GOES-R also help improve forecasts from global and regional numerical weather models, through improved data assimilation." The final satellite, launching Tuesday, includes a new sensor — the Compact Coronagraph — "that will monitor weather outside of Earth's atmosphere, keeping an eye on what space weather events are happening that could impact our planet," according to the article. "It will be the first near real time operational coronagraph that we have access to," Rob Steenburgh, a space scientist at NOAA's Space Weather Prediction Center, told Space.com on the phone. "That's a huge leap for us because up until now, we've always depended on a research coronagraph instrument on a spacecraft that was launched quite a long time ago."

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The Roddenberry Foundation — named for Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry — "announced Tuesday that this year's biennial award would focus on artificial intelligence that benefits humanity," reports the Los Angeles Times: Lior Ipp, chief executive of the foundation, told The Times there's a growing recognition that AI is becoming more ubiquitous and will affect all aspects of our lives. "We are trying to ... catalyze folks to think about what AI looks like if it's used for good," Ipp said, "and what it means to use AI responsibly, ethically and toward solving some of the thorny global challenges that exist in the world...." Ipp said the foundation shares the broad concern about AI and sees the award as a means to potentially contribute to creating those guardrails... Inspiration for the theme was also borne out of the applications the foundation received last time around. Ipp said the prize, which is "issue-agnostic" but focused on early-stage tech, produced compelling uses of AI and machine learning in agriculture, healthcare, biotech and education. "So," he said, "we sort of decided to double down this year on specifically AI and machine learning...." Though the foundation isn't prioritizing a particular issue, the application states that it is looking for ideas that have the potential to push the needle on one or more of the United Nations' 17 sustainable development goals, which include eliminating poverty and hunger as well as boosting climate action and protecting life on land and underwater. The Foundation's most recent winner was Sweden-based Elypta, according to the article, "which Ipp said is using liquid biopsies, such as a blood test, to detect cancer early." "We believe that building a better future requires a spirit of curiosity, a willingness to push boundaries, and the courage to think big," said Rod Roddenberry, co-founder of the Roddenberry Foundation. "The Prize will provide a significant boost to AI pioneers leading these efforts." According to the Foundation's announcement, the Prize "embodies the Roddenberry philosophy's promise of a future in which technology and human ingenuity enable everyone — regardless of background — to thrive." "By empowering entrepreneurs to dream bigger and innovate valiantly, the Roddenberry Prize seeks to catalyze the development of AI solutions that promote abundance and well-being for all."

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