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An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Register: A German court has told Apple to stop advertising its Watches as being carbon-neutral, ruling that this was misleading and could not fly under the country's competition law. Apple has been marketing its newest smartwatches as being carbon-neutral for nearly two years now, with an array of rationales. It claims that clean energy for manufacturing, along with greener materials and shipping, lop around three-quarters off the carbon emissions for each model of the Apple Watch. The remaining emissions are offset by the purchase of carbon credits, according to Apple. Deutsche Umwelthilfe (well, DUH – that's the acronym), a prominent environmental group, begged to differ on that last point. It applied for an injunction in May and Tuesday's ruling (in German), which will only be published in full later this week, led it to claim victory. The ruling means Apple can't advertise the Watch as a "CO2-neutral product" in Germany. [...] The ruling revolved around the Paraguayan forestry program that Apple claimed was offsetting some of the Watch's production emissions. The project involves commercial eucalyptus plantations on leased land, where the leases for three-quarters of the land will run out in 2029 with no guarantee of renewal. According to the court, consumers' expectations of carbon compensation schemes are shaped by the prominent 2015 Paris Agreement, which commits countries to achieving carbon neutrality by the second half of this century. It said consumers would therefore "assume" that the carbon-neutrality claims around the Apple Watch would mean neutrality was assured through 2050. That leaves a 21-year gap of uncertainty in this case. The Verified Carbon Standard program, in which Apple is participating, has a "pooled buffer account" scheme to hedge against this sort of uncertainty. However, the German court was not impressed, saying it would only allow Apple to monitor the situation after the leases run out, which is a far cry from definitely being able to keep offsetting those emissions if the plantation gets cleared.

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BrianFagioli shares a report from NERDS.xyz: Hosting.com has acquired Rocket.net, bringing the fast-growing managed WordPress hosting company under its corporate umbrella. The move gives hosting.com a proven SaaS platform and a strong brand in WordPress hosting, while Rocket.net gains the capital and global reach of a much larger player. Financial details of the deal were not disclosed. Rocket.net will continue to operate under its own name, but it is now part of hosting.com's family of brands. As part of the deal, Rocket.net founder and CEO Ben Gabler has been appointed Chief Product Officer at hosting.com, where he will lead product and software engineering across the entire company. [...] For hosting.com, the acquisition strengthens its ability to serve a wider range of customers. The company, founded in 2019, already operates more than 20 data centers, powers over 3 million websites, and serves 600,000 customers worldwide with a team of 900 employees. The Rocket.net platform will now be rolled out across hosting.com's global footprint, including the USA, UK, Germany, and Singapore, as well as new regions such as Mexico, the UAE, and Australia. Both companies stress that their commitment to WordPress and open source will remain intact. Hosting.com already sponsors global WordCamps and encourages employees to contribute to the WordPress project, while Rocket.net has long positioned itself as a champion of the open web.

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According to The Information, Apple executives have debated acquiring Mistral AI and Perplexity to strengthen its AI capabilities. MacRumors reports: Services chief Eddy Cue is apparently the most vocal advocate of a deal to buy AI firms to bolster the company's offerings. Cue previously supported propositions of Apple acquiring Netflix and Tesla, both of which Apple CEO Tim Cook turned down. Other executives such as software chief Craig Federighi have reportedly been reluctant to acquire AI startups, believing that Apple can build its own AI technology in-house. [...] Apple is said to be hesitant to do a deal, which would likely cost billions of dollars. Apple has rarely spent more than a hundred million dollars on an acquisition, with Beats at $3 billion and Intel's wireless modem business at $1 billion. If a federal ruling ends the $20 billion deal between Apple and Alphabet that makes Google the default search engine on its devices, the company could be compelled to acquire an AI-powered search startup to fill that gap. For now, Apple apparently told bankers that it plans to continue with its strategy of focusing on smaller deals in AI.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Before 16-year-old Adam Raine died by suicide, he had spent months consulting ChatGPT about his plans to end his life. Now, his parents are filing the first known wrongful death lawsuit against OpenAI, The New York Times reports. Many consumer-facing AI chatbots are programmed to activate safety features if a user expresses intent to harm themselves or others. But research has shown that these safeguards are far from foolproof. In Raine's case, while using a paid version of ChatGPT-4o, the AI often encouraged him to seek professional help or contact a help line. However, he was able to bypass these guardrails by telling ChatGPT that he was asking about methods of suicide for a fictional story he was writing. OpenAI has addressed these shortcomings on its blog. "As the world adapts to this new technology, we feel a deep responsibility to help those who need it most," the post reads. "We are continuously improving how our models respond in sensitive interactions." Still, the company acknowledged the limitations of the existing safety training for large models. "Our safeguards work more reliably in common, short exchanges," the post continues. "We have learned over time that these safeguards can sometimes be less reliable in long interactions: as the back-and-forth grows, parts of the model's safety training may degrade."

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Anthropic reached a settlement with authors in a high-stakes copyright class action that threatened the AI company with potentially billions of dollars in damages. From a report: In a Tuesday filing in the US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, both sides asked the court to pause all proceedings while they finalize the deal. The parties signed a binding term sheet on Aug. 25 outlining the core terms of a proposed class settlement to resolve litigation brought by authors. "This historic settlement will benefit all class members," said the authors' counsel, Justin Nelson of Susman Godfrey LLP. "We look forward to announcing details of the settlement in the coming weeks." The case is one of several copyright actions brought against AI developers in courts around the country. Judge William Alsup of the US District Court for the Northern District of California had allowed the class action to proceed for authors whose books were contained in two pirate databases Anthropic downloaded.

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The Michigan Supreme Court has drawn a firm line around digital privacy, ruling that police cannot use overly broad warrants to comb through every corner of a person's phone. From a report: In People v. Carson, the court found [PDF] that warrants for digital devices must include specific limitations, allowing access only to information directly tied to the suspected crime. Michael Carson became the focus of a theft investigation involving money allegedly taken from a neighbor's safe. Authorities secured a warrant to search his phone, but the document placed no boundaries on what could be examined. It permitted access to all data on the device, including messages, photos, contacts, and documents, without any restriction based on time period or relevance. Investigators collected over a thousand pages of information, much of it unrelated to the accusation. The court ruled that this kind of expansive warrant violates the Fourth Amendment, which requires particularity in describing what police may search and seize.

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Air pollution from oil and gas causes more than 90,000 premature deaths and sickens hundreds of thousands of people across the US each year, a new study shows, with disproportionately high impacts on communities of color. From a report: More than 10,000 annual pre-term births are attributable to fine particulate matter from oil and gas, the authors found, also linking 216,000 annual childhood-onset asthma cases to the sector's nitrogen dioxide emissions and 1,610 annual lifetime cancer cases to its hazardous air pollutants. The highest number of impacts are seen in California, Texas, New York, Pennsylvania and New Jersey, while the per-capita incidences are highest in New Jersey, Washington DC, New York, California and Maryland.

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Swiss researchers have determined that fermentation degree controls beer foam stability after seven years of study published in Physics of Fluids. Triple-fermented Belgian beers maintained the longest-lasting foam while single-fermented lagers produced the shortest duration. The team tested six commercial beers including Westmalle Tripel, Tripel Karmeliet, and Swiss lagers Feldschlosschen and Chopfab. Surface viscosity dominated foam stability in single-fermented beers. Marangoni stresses from surface tension differences stabilized double- and triple-fermented beer foams. Lipid transfer protein 1 underwent progressive denaturation through successive fermentations. Single fermentation produced small round protein particles. Double fermentation created net-like protein structures. Triple fermentation broke proteins into hydrophobic and hydrophilic fragments that function as surfactants. ETH Zurich's Jan Vermant said breweries can now improve foam using these specific mechanisms rather than adjusting multiple factors simultaneously.

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Google has integrated AI-powered language learning capabilities into its Translate app through a beta feature that generates customized lessons using its Gemini AI models. The Practice button allows English speakers to learn Spanish and French while Spanish, French, and Portuguese speakers can practice English. Users select their skill level and learning goals to receive tailored scenarios ranging from professional conversations to family interactions. The company also launched live translation for real-time conversations across 70 languages in the US, India, and Mexico. The feature creates AI-generated transcriptions and audio translations but does not replicate users' voices, the company told The Verge.

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The Document Foundation, which operates the popular open source productivity suite LibreOffice, is positioning the suite's newest release, v25.8, as a strategic asset for digital sovereignty, targeting governments and enterprises seeking independence from foreign software vendors and cloud infrastructure. The Document Foundation released the update last week with zero telemetry architecture, full offline capability, and OpenPGP encryption for documents, directly addressing national security concerns about extraterritorial surveillance and software backdoors. The suite requires no internet access for any features and maintains complete transparency through open source code that governments can audit. Government bodies in Germany, Denmark, and France, alongside national ministries in Italy and Brazil, have deployed LibreOffice to meet GDPR compliance, national procurement laws, and IT localization mandates while eliminating unpredictable licensing costs from proprietary vendors. "It's time to own your documents, own your infrastructure, and own your future," the foundation wrote in a blog post.

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Yahoo Finance interviews Peter Cappelli, a Wharton professor of management, on "the business case for employers pushing for workers to get back to the office." (Cappelli has co-written a new book with workplace strategist Ranya Nehmeh titled In Praise of the Office: The Limits to Hybrid and Remote Work ...) Yahoo Finance: What's wrong with a hybrid work arrangement? Cappelli: People just don't come in. That's maybe the single biggest factor. There is a growing awareness that people are really never there on their anchor days. If you want that for your company, you have to manage that attendance... Yahoo Finance: What's the compelling advantage of in-person work? Cappelli: There's value in human interaction, what we learn from each other, the cooperation that we can get in solving problems, and the motivation and commitment that comes from being around other people... When you first began your career, imagine what it would've been like if no one was in the office. You'd be completely lost. If you think about how we learn about office work, we learn by watching. You learn what the values of the organization are. You learn it from the conversations in the office. You can see how the boss reacts to different requests and different problems. As you advance, you've got your ear to the ground, and you've got the opportunity to raise your hand and pitch in and have some influence. You can catch the boss between meetings and pass along a little tidbit of information, and you develop relationships with people where you can solve problems... Those are the kind of things that we miss when we move to remote — in addition to the general fact that people are energized by working with people. With remote work, people also spend more time in meetings that are worthless. A lot of those things could be fixed, but the problem is they're not. He argues remote work isn't as widespread as it seems. ("In Europe, for example, where employees have always had more power, I figured remote work would stay. It hasn't. Most everybody's gone back to the office.") Even in the U.S., 70% of employers are in-office, all the time. ("[M]ost employers are small. Remote work and hybrid work, in particular, is largely a big city, big company phenomenon... It's only white-collar jobs.") And fewer jobs offered are being offered with remote-working options, he believes, now that the labor market has softened. "CEOs are now thinking we're losing something, and the employee resistance to return to the office has weakened.... The longer you wait, the harder it is to ever get people to come back without a big fight. " Cappelli: Right now, people might be saying, 'I will quit if I have to go back to the office,' but it turns out they don't mean it. The reason, of course, is it's one thing to say that you will quit; it's another to actually walk away from a paycheck... If you opt for remote or hybrid, good outcomes don't happen by themselves. You can make it work, but it requires more time and effort for management, more rules, more practices, more leadership.

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People in Mississippi no longer have access to Bluesky. "If you access Bluesky from a Mississippi IP address, you'll see a message explaining why the app isn't available," announced a Bluesky blog post Friday. The reason is a new Mississippi law that "requires all users to verify their ages before using common social media sites ranging from Facebook to Nextdoor," noted NPR. Bluesky wrote that their block "will remain in place while the courts decide whether the law will stand." [U]nder the law, we would need to verify every user's age and obtain parental consent for anyone under 18. The potential penalties for non-compliance are substantial — up to $10,000 per user. Building the required verification systems, parental consent workflows, and compliance infrastructure would require significant resources that our small team is currently unable to spare. Bluesky also notes that the law "requires collecting and storing sensitive personal information from all users...not just those accessing age-restricted content" — and that this information would include "detailed tracking of minors." TechCrunch notes that even blocking Mississippi has created some problems: Some Bluesky users outside Mississippi subsequently reported issues accessing the service due to their cell providers routing traffic through servers in the state, with CTO Paul Frazee responding Saturday that the company was "working deploy an update to our location detection that we hope will solve some inaccuracies." The company's blog post notes that its decision only applies to the Bluesky app built on the AT Protocol. Other apps may approach the decision differently. Interestingly, the law had been immediately challenged by NetChoice (a trade association of major tech companies). But while a District Court agreed, blocking the law from going into effect (until court challenges finished), an Appeals Court then lifted that block. A final appeal to America's Supreme Court was unsuccessful — although the ruling by Justice Kavanaugh suggests the law could be overturned later: "To be clear, NetChoice has, in my view, demonstrated that it is likely to succeed on the merits — namely, that enforcement of the Mississippi law would likely violate its members' First Amendment rights under this Court's precedents... [U]nder this Court's case law as it currently stands, the Mississippi law is likely unconstitutional. Nonetheless, because NetChoice has not sufficiently demonstrated that the balance of harms and equities favors it at this time, I concur in the Court's denial of the application for interim relief."

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More than 30,000 Python developers from around the world answered questions for the Python Software Foundation's annual survey — and PSF Fellow Michael Kennedy tells the Python community what they've learned in a new blog post. Some highlights: Most still use older Python versions despite benefits of newer releases... Many of us (15%) are running on the very latest released version of Python, but more likely than not, we're using a version a year old or older (83%). [Although less than 1% are using "Python 3.5 or lower".] The survey also indicates that many of us are using Docker and containers to execute our code, which makes this 83% or higher number even more surprising... You simply choose a newer runtime, and your code runs faster. CPython has been extremely good at backward compatibility. There's rarely significant effort involved in upgrading... [He calculates some cloud users are paying up to $420,000 and $5.6M more in compute costs.] If your company realizes you are burning an extra $0.4M-$5M a year because you haven't gotten around to spending the day it takes to upgrade, that'll be a tough conversation... Rust is how we speed up Python now... The Python Language Summit of 2025 revealed that "Somewhere between one-quarter and one-third of all native code being uploaded to PyPI for new projects uses Rust", indicating that "people are choosing to start new projects using Rust". Looking into the survey results, we see that Rust usage grew from 27% to 33% for binary extensions to Python packages... [The blog post later advises Python developers to learn to read basic Rust, "not to replace Python, but to complement it," since Rust "is becoming increasingly important in the most significant portions of the Python ecosystem."] PostgreSQL is the king of Python databases, and only it's growing, going from 43% to 49%. That's +14% year over year, which is remarkable for a 28-year-old open-source project... [E]very single database in the top six grew in usage year over year. This is likely another indicator that web development itself is growing again, as discussed above... [N]early half of the respondents (49%) plan to try AI coding agents in the coming year. Program managers at major tech companies have stated that they almost cannot hire developers who don't embrace agentic AI. The productive delta between those using it and those who avoid it is simply too great (estimated at about 30% greater productivity with AI). It's their eighth annual survey (conducted in collaboration with JetBrains last October and November). But even though Python is 34 years old, it's still evolving. "In just the past few months, we have seen two new high-performance typing tools released," notes the blog post. (The ty and Pyrefly typecheckers — both written in Rust.) And Python 3.14 will be the first version of Python to completely support free-threaded Python... Just last week, the steering council and core developers officially accepted this as a permanent part of the language and runtime... Developers and data scientists will have to think more carefully about threaded code with locks, race conditions, and the performance benefits that come with it. Package maintainers, especially those with native code extensions, may have to rewrite some of their code to support free-threaded Python so they themselves do not enter race conditions and deadlocks. There is a massive upside to this as well. I'm currently writing this on the cheapest Apple Mac Mini M4. This computer comes with 10 CPU cores. That means until this change manifests in Python, the maximum performance I can get out of a single Python process is 10% of what my machine is actually capable of. Once free-threaded Python is fully part of the ecosystem, I should get much closer to maximum capacity with a standard Python program using threading and the async and await keywords. Some other notable findings from the survey: Data science is now over half of all Python. This year, 51% of all surveyed Python developers are involved in data exploration and processing, with pandas and NumPy being the tools most commonly used for this. Exactly 50% of respondents have less than two years of professional coding experience! And 39% have less than two years of experience with Python (even in hobbyist or educational settings)... "The survey tells us that one-third of devs contributed to open source. This manifests primarily as code and documentation/tutorial additions."

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"For a few dozen people in the world, the downside of living with a rare immune condition comes with a surprising superpower — the ability to fight off all viruses..." notes an announcement from Columbia University. "At first, the condition only seemed to increase vulnerability to some bacterial infections. But as more patients were identified, its unexpected antiviral benefits became apparent." Columbia immunologist Dusan Bogunovic discovered the individuals' antiviral powers about 15 years ago, soon after he identified the genetic mutation that causes the condition... Bogunovic, a professor of pediatric immunology at Columbia University's Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons, soon learned that everyone with the mutation, which causes a deficiency in an immune regulator called ISG15, has mild, but persistent systemic inflammation... "In the back of my mind, I kept thinking that if we could produce this type of light immune activation in other people, we could protect them from just about any virus," Bogunovic says. Today, Bogunovic is closing in on a therapeutic strategy that could provide that broad-spectrum protection against viruses and become an important weapon in next pandemic. In his latest study, published August 13 in Science Translational Medicine, Bogunovic and his team report that an experimental therapy they've developed temporarily gives recipients (hamsters and mice, so far) the same antiviral superpower as people with ISG15 deficiency. When administered prophylactically into the animals' lungs via a nasal drip, the therapy prevented viral replication of influenza and SARS-CoV-2 viruses and lessened disease severity. In cell culture, "we have yet to find a virus that can break through the therapy's defenses," Bogunovic says... Bogunovic's therapeutic turns on production of 10 proteins that are primarily responsible for the broad antiviral protection. The current design resembles COVID mRNA vaccines but with a twist: Ten mRNAs encoding the 10 proteins are packaged inside a lipid nanoparticle. Once the nanoparticles are absorbed by the recipient's cells, the cells generate the ten host proteins to produce the antiviral protection. "We only generate a small amount of these ten proteins, for a very short time, and that leads to much less inflammation than what we see in ISG15-deficient individuals," Bogunovic says. "But that inflammation is enough to prevent antiviral diseases...." "We believe the technology will work even if we don't know the identity of the virus," Bogunovic says. Importantly, the antiviral protection provided by the technology will not prevent people from developing their own immunological memory to the virus for longer-term protection. "Our findings reinforce the power of research driven by curiosity without preconceived notions," Bogunovic says in the announcement. "We were not looking for an antiviral when we began studying our rare patients, but the studies have inspired the potential development of a universal antiviral for everyone." More coverage from ScienceAlert.

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"A fierce dust storm hit the Black Rock Desert on the eve of its annual Burning Man festival," reports the San Francisco Chronicle, "causing at least four minor injuries and damaging campsites that had been set up early." [Alternate URL] "Winds of up to 50 mph stirred up the lake bed's alkaline dust so ferociously that participants in the annual art and culture festival reported not being able to see beyond a foot... " The dust storm arrived Saturday evening after strong thunderstorms in the Sierra Nevada drifted off the mountains and whipped up strong winds in the Nevada desert... At 5:14 p.m. Saturday, the weather service issued a dust storm advisory for Black Rock City and warned of "a wall of blowing dust coming off the Smoke Creek and Black Rock Desert playa areas is tracking northward at around 30 mph." The agency warned of visibility less than 1 mile and wind gusts exceeding 45 mph. A weather station at Black Rock City Airport measured gusts up to 52 mph at 5:50 p.m... ["We saw structures being ripped and torn down by the wind speeds even though we buttoned everything down as best as we could..." one Burner told the Chronicle.] Camp residents posted a slew of videos to social media featuring dust tornadoes, destroyed campsites, and fellow campers struggling to hold onto bucking canvases as the wind threatened to rip them away. "Every popup canopy I've seen has been destroyed," one Burner wrote on Reddit... ["Make sure you carry your particle/dust mask and goggles with you when you venture out on playa!" warns Burning Man's official weather page.] Even after Saturday's storm, Burners won't be out of the woods from hazardous weather. The weather service warned of possible monsoon thunderstorms and heavy rain Sunday through Wednesday, raising concerns that this year's festival could echo disastrous 2023 conditions, when heavy storms stranded tens of thousands of attendees amid thick mud. "It's becoming increasingly likely that we could see an even greater flash flood threat," the weather service wrote in an online forecast. "If you're on the playa at the Black Rock Desert, you may very well be in for a muddy mess Monday through Wednesday." Slow-moving storms could drop an inch of rain or more in a short period. "Still, gates to the festival had opened by Sunday morning," the article adds, "with organizers cautioning new arrivals to 'drive safely!'" Burning Man's official weather page currently links to a National Weather Service page with a "Flood Watch" warning through 9 p.m. Sunday, and also predicting a chance of thunderstorms on Sunday and Monday.

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After the Tea dating-advice app leaked information on its users, the BBC found two online maps "purporting to represent the locations of women who had signed up for Tea... showing 33,000 pins spread across the United States." The maps were hosted on Google Maps. (Notified by the BBC, Google deleted the maps, saying they violated their harassment policies.) "Since the breach, more than 10 women have filed class actions against the company which owns Tea," the article points out, noting that leaked content is also spreading around social media: Since the breach, the BBC has found websites, apps and even a "game" featuring the leaked data... The "game" puts the selfies submitted by women head-to-head, instructing users to click on the one they prefer, with leaderboards of the "top 50" and "bottom 50"... [And one researcher calculates more than 12,000 posts on 4Chan referenced the Tea app over the three weeks after the leak.] It is unsurprising that the leak was exploited. The app had drawn criticism ever since it had grown in popularity. Defamation, with the spread of unproven allegations, and doxxing, when someone's identifying information is published without their consent, were real possibilities. Men's groups had wanted to take the app down — and when they found the data breach, they saw it as a chance for retribution. They weren't the only ones with a gripe against Tea. Back in 2023 the fiance of Tea's CEO founder approached the administrator of a collection of Facebook groups called "Are We Dating the Same Guy?" to see if she'd be the "face" of the Tea app, reports 404 Media. But they add that after Tea failed to recruit her, Tea "shifted tactics" to raid her Facebook groups instead: Tea paid influencers to undermine Are We Dating the Same Guy and created competing Facebook groups with nearly identical names. 404 Media also identified a number of seemingly hijacked Facebook accounts that spammed the real Are We Dating The Same Guy groups with links to Tea app. Reviews for the Tea app show several women later thought the app was affiliated with their trusted Facebook groups, the reporter said this week on a 404 Media podcast. And they add that founder Sean Cook took over the "Tara" personna that his fiance has used for technical support. "So he's on the app pretend to be a woman, talking to other women who are on the app in order to weed out men who are being deceptive..." Thanks to Slashdot reader samleecole for sharing the article.

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"The truly universal properties of languages are not independent of our physiology and cognition," argues the co-author of a new study. Instead he says their research "strengthens the idea that intonation units are a universal feature of language." Phys.org explains: Have you ever noticed that a natural conversation flows like a dance — pauses, emphases, and turns arriving just in time? A new study has discovered that this isn't just intuition; there is a biological rhythm embedded in our speech... According to the study, led by Dr. Maya Inbar, alongside Professors Eitan Grossman and Ayelet N. Landau, human speech across the world pulses to the beat of what are called intonation units, short prosodic phrases that occur at a consistent rate of one every 1.6 seconds. The research analyzed over 650 recordings in 48 languages spanning every continent and 27 language families. Using a novel algorithm, the team was able to automatically identify intonation units in spontaneous speech, revealing that regardless of the language spoken, from English and Russian to endangered languages in remote regions, people naturally break their speech into these rhythmic chunks. "These findings suggest that the way we pace our speech isn't just a cultural artifact, it's deeply rooted in human cognition and biology," says Dr. Inbar. "We also show that the rhythm of intonation units is unrelated to faster rhythms in speech, such as the rhythm of syllables, and thus likely serves a different cognitive role...." Most intriguingly, the low-frequency rhythm they follow mirrors patterns in brain activity linked to memory, attention, and volitional action, illuminating the profound connection between how we speak and how we think. The work is published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

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"The ultimate test of climate projections is to compare them with what has played out..." says earth sciences professor Torbjörn Törnqvist, lead author on a new study published in the open-access journal Earth's Future (published by the American Geophysical Union). But after "decades of observations," he says his researchers "were quite amazed how good those early projections were, especially when you think about how crude the models were back then, compared to what is available now." "For anyone who questions the role of humans in changing our climate, here is some of the best proof that we have understood for decades what is really happening, and that we can make credible projections...." A new era of monitoring global sea-level change took off when satellites were launched in the early 1990s to measure the height of the ocean surface. This showed that the rate of global sea-level rise since that time has averaged about one eighth of an inch per year. Only more recently, it became possible to detect that the rate of global sea-level rise is accelerating. When NASA researchers demonstrated in October 2024 that the rate has doubled during this 30-year period, the time was right to compare this finding with projections that were made during the mid-1990s, independent of the satellite measurements. In 1996, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change published an assessment report soon after the satellite-based sea-level measurements had started. It projected that the most likely amount of global sea-level rise over the next 30 years would be almost 8 centimeters (3 inches), remarkably close to the 9 centimeters that has occurred. But it also underestimated the role of melting ice sheets by more than 2 centimeters (about 1 inch). At the time, little was known about the role of warming ocean waters and how that could destabilize marine sectors of the Antarctic Ice Sheet from below. Ice flow from the Greenland Ice Sheet into the ocean has also been faster than foreseen. "The findings provide confidence in model-based climate projections," according to the paper. Again, its two key points: The largest disparities between projections and observations were due to underestimated dynamic mass loss of ice sheets Comparison of past projections with subsequent observations gives confidence in future climate projections Thanks to Slashdot reader Mr. Dollar Ton for sharing the news.

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"Delta Air Lines Flight 1334 was flying from Atlanta to Fort Lauderdale last month when smoke and flames started pouring out of a backpack," reports CNN. "The pilots declared an emergency and diverted to Fort Meyers where the 191 people onboard safely evacuated." The culprit was a passenger's personal lithium-ion battery pack, which had been tucked away in the carry-on bag. At the FAA's William J. Hughes Technical Center for Advanced Aerospace in Atlantic City, New Jersey, fire safety engineers research and demonstrate just how bad it can be. "Lithium batteries can go into what's called thermal runaway," Fire Safety Branch Manager Robert Ochs, explained. "All of a sudden, it'll start to short circuit ... It will get warmer and warmer and warmer until the structure of the battery itself fails. At that point, it can eject molten electrolyte and flames and smoke and toxic gas...." These thermal runaways are difficult to fight. The FAA recommends flight attendants first use a halon fire extinguisher, which is standard equipment on planes, but that alone may not be enough. In the test performed for CNN, the flames sprung back up in just moments... "Adding the water, as much water from the galley cart, non-alcoholic liquids, everything that they can get to just start pouring on that device." The problems are not new, but more batteries are being carried onto planes than ever before. Safety organization UL Standards and Engagement says today an average passenger flies with four devices powered by lithium-ion batteries. "The incidents of fire are rare, but they are increasing. We're seeing as many as two per week, either on planes or within airports," Jeff Marootian, the president and CEO of the organization, told CNN... [T]he latest federal data shows external battery packs are the top cause of incidents, and as a result the FAA has banned them from checked baggage where they are harder to extinguish. But despite all of the warnings, UL Standards and Engagement says two in five passengers still say they check them.

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The mysterious X-37B space-plane — the U.S. military's orbital test vehicle — "serves partly as a platform for cutting-edge experiments," writes Space.com And "one of these experiments is a potential alternative to GPS that makes use of quantum science as a tool for navigation: a quantum inertial sensor." This technology could revolutionize how spacecraft, airplanes, ships and submarines navigate in environments where GPS is unavailable or compromised. In space, especially beyond Earth's orbit, GPS signals become unreliable or simply vanish. The same applies underwater, where submarines cannot access GPS at all. And even on Earth, GPS signals can be jammed (blocked), spoofed (making a GPS receiver think it is in a different location) or disabled — for instance, during a conflict... Traditional inertial navigation systems, which use accelerometers and gyroscopes to measure a vehicle's acceleration and rotation, do provide independent navigation, as they can estimate position by tracking how the vehicle moves over time... Eventually though, without visual cues, small errors will accumulate and you will entirely lose your positioning... At very low temperatures, atoms obey the rules of quantum mechanics: they behave like waves and can exist in multiple states simultaneously — two properties that lie at the heart of quantum inertial sensors. The quantum inertial sensor aboard the X-37B uses a technique called atom interferometry, where atoms are cooled to the temperature of near absolute zero, so they behave like waves. Using fine-tuned lasers, each atom is split into what's called a superposition state, similar to Schrödinger's cat, so that it simultaneously travels along two paths, which are then recombined. Since the atom behaves like a wave in quantum mechanics, these two paths interfere with each other, creating a pattern similar to overlapping ripples on water. Encoded in this pattern is detailed information about how the atom's environment has affected its journey. In particular, the tiniest shifts in motion, like sensor rotations or accelerations, leave detectable marks on these atomic "waves". Compared to classical inertial navigation systems, quantum sensors offer orders of magnitude greater sensitivity. Because atoms are identical and do not change, unlike mechanical components or electronics, they are far less prone to drift or bias. The result is long duration and high accuracy navigation without the need for external references. The upcoming X-37B mission will be the first time this level of quantum inertial navigation is tested in space. The article points out that a quantum navigation system could be crucial "for future space exploration, such as to the Moon, Mars or even deep space," where autonomy is key and when signals from Earth are unavailable. "While quantum computing and quantum communication often steal headlines, systems like quantum clocks and quantum sensors are likely to be the first to see widespread use."

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