Snow cover in the Himalayas has hit a 23-year low, potentially threatening water supply for up to two billion people. CC-licensed photo by Amit Rawat on Flickr.

You can sign up to receive each day’s Start Up post by email. You’ll need to click a confirmation link, so no spam.

A selection of 9 links for you. Nor any drop to drink. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.

OpenAI’s revolutionary AI gadget is… a phone? A stinkin’ phone? • Gizmodo

Raymond Wong:

»

If you’ve been sitting at the edge of your seat waiting for OpenAI’s world-changing AI device(s), you may want to scooch back on your chair.

According to TF Securities International analyst Ming-Chi Kuo, the company behind ChatGPT is developing a smartphone. Yes, a smartphone. But it reportedly won’t be just any old glass slab—it’ll be an “AI agent phone.” An AI AGENT PHONE.

What the hell is an AI agent phone? Allow me to explain: it’s a phone that uses an AI “agent” to perform tasks on your behalf. Instead of a grid of apps on your home screen that you tap to open, and then tap and swipe and tap some more, you’d simply tell an AI agent to do something, and then it’d do it for you.

“Users are not trying to use a pile of apps,” Kuo posted on X. “They are trying to get tasks done and fulfill needs through the phone. This fundamentally changes how people think about smartphones.”

Kuo, known for his sources buried deep within the manufacturing supply chain, claims OpenAI is working with Qualcomm and MediaTek to create processors for the phone. His report is newsworthy because of his track record in accurately sharing information on product roadmaps long before they’re officially announced.

While OpenAI is actively developing a family of AI gadgets—which could include a pin or a pen or a pair of wireless earbuds—this is the first time that we’re hearing about a phone. The news isn’t surprising at all.

“Only by fully controlling both the operating system and hardware can OpenAI deliver a comprehensive AI agent service,” writes Kuo.

«

This would be madness. Really. Marco Arment (developer and podcaster) comments repeatedly “don’t bet against the phone”. There’s nobody who thinks you’re going to beat the combined power of Apple and Google.

Now, it’s possible that they’re imagining some sort of skinned Android phone, with this built-in agent doing mystical things we can’t quite comprehend at some distant point in the future.

But even so: you will not beat Google and Apple. So either these processors are for something quite different, or Sam Altman has lost his mind.
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Google prepares credit system for Gemini and new image tools • Testing Catalog

Alexey Shabanov:

»

Google appears to be preparing a major shift in how consumers interact with the Gemini app, with new strings referencing usage limits surfacing in the latest build. The signals point toward a credit-based system coming to the core chat surface, where users would receive a monthly allowance to spend across models and features, with the option to top up when they run out. Currently, Gemini relies on fixed prompt quotas and time-bound caps tied to each subscription tier, while Google’s credit mechanics have been confined to Flow, Whisk, and Antigravity, plus top-ups available to AI Pro and AI Ultra members.

Extending credits into the main Gemini app would bring Google closer to the flexible consumption model already in place at OpenAI, Anthropic, and Notion, and xAI is expected to follow suit with the Grok Build rollout. For power users, the change would mean more predictable budgeting for heavy workloads, particularly those involving agentic tasks, Deep Research, Deep Think, or long multimodal sessions. It would also give Google a cleaner lever to introduce premium features without forcing users to make a steep jump from AI Pro at $19.99 to AI Ultra at $249.99.

Alongside the credits signal, a dedicated images section has appeared in the web UI, labeled NEW. At this stage, it is unclear whether it simply provides a distinct home for image generation, teases an updated model, or points to a more comprehensive image editor built directly into Gemini.

«

Here comes the per-token, or maybe per-minute or per-conversation charging system for AI chatbots. Did you enjoy it while it lasted? Ah well, you’ll look back on the halcyon days of 2022-April 2026 with affection.
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Trump purges National Science Board; scientists warn of AI shift • Los Angeles Times

Jenny Jarvie:

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The National Science Foundation was created more than 75 years ago as an independent federal agency when President Truman signed the National Science Foundation Act of 1950 to boost U.S. science for national security and international competition during the Cold War.

“The establishment of the National Science Foundation is a major landmark in the history of science in the United States,” Truman said back then. “We have come to know that our ability to survive and grow as a nation depends to a very large degree upon our scientific progress. Moreover, it is not enough simply to keep abreast of the rest of the world in scientific matters. We must maintain our leadership.”

The agency, which has a budget of over $9bn, supports fundamental research and education across all non-medical fields of science and engineering.

“The genesis of it was to recognize that the world was increasingly being won or lost on the basis of scientific and technological capability,” Stassun said. “The National Science Foundation is the singular agency within our government that has as its focus making sure that we stay ahead in basic science, technological developments, training the next generation of scientists and engineers.“

After Trump’s dismissal of the board’s experts, Stassun said, the Trump administration could potentially run the agency directly through the Office of Management and Budget.

“What it means is that there won’t be any practical impediments to the administration essentially enacting their own budget and priorities and ignoring Congress’ directives or congressional law,” Stassun said.

«

Fires all 22 members, and might recruit from – well, who knows where? He put an anti-vaccine nutcase in charge of health, so who might he put in to decide about science? Some people who think the moon landings were faked?
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The great energy pivot: US oil and Chinese solar are the winners in Trump’s war on Iran • The Guardian

Jillian Ambrose:

»

In the open seas, an armada of empty tankers has quietly turned west. A record number of super-sized vessels are now heading to the US, where oil drillers and refineries are preparing to profit from Donald Trump’s war in the Middle East.

Almost 30 of these vessels, each able to hold 2m barrels of oil, are contracted to load US crude, destined for a global market facing the biggest supply crisis in history.

It is just over five years since the shale revolution made the US a net energy exporter and the world’s biggest producer of oil and gas. Now the White House is poised to strengthen its claim to an even greater share of the global oil market as the Middle East’s decades-long dominance is dismantled by war.

The carriers preparing to amass in US waters are almost six times the monthly number that typically loaded US crude before the war throttled flows of Middle East fossil fuels to the market.

Supplies of US crude leaving the country’s export terminals have climbed by a third to a record 5.2m barrels a day after Iran retaliated against US-Israeli attacks by blocking daily flows of 10m barrels of Gulf oil exports via the strait of Hormuz.

US weekly exports of jet fuel have doubled to an all time high as Europe scrambles to secure supplies and airlines begin to cut flights.

The war threatens to reshape the global energy order, exposing the world’s reliance on Middle East supplies and accelerating a move towards greener energy, giving rise to new energy superpowers.

…China has long dominated the supply chains for the key building blocks of clean energy technologies, from wind turbines to solar panels and batteries. Beijing’s industrial prowess has helped the world’s biggest energy importer to capture between 60% and 85% of the world’s renewables market at a time when countries are preparing to accelerate the shift away from fossil fuels.

As the world’s first “electrostate”, China stands in contrast with the White House pursuit of fossil fuel dominance. The country also stands to play a significant role in creating the new energy order.

«

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Himalayan snow hits 23-year low; water crisis looms for two billion lives • India Today

Radifah Kabir:

»

The Himalayas, often called the water tower of Asia, are running dry at the top.

A new report has found that snow cover across the Hindu Kush Himalaya, the long mountain stretch running from Afghanistan to Myanmar, has plunged to its lowest level in more than two decades, raising fears of a sweeping water crisis that could touch nearly two billion lives.

The HKH Snow Update 2026, released by the International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development (ICIMOD), a regional research body based in Kathmandu, found that snow persistence between November 2025 and March 2026 was 27.8% below the long-term average.

Snow persistence, in simple terms, refers to how long snow stays on the ground after it falls, a measure scientists use to track the winter health of the mountains.

Seasonal snow is not just a postcard image. It is a slow-release water bank.

The report notes that snowmelt feeds roughly one-fourth of the yearly water flow, known as runoff, across 12 major river basins fed by the Hindu Kush Himalaya.

These rivers irrigate fields, run hydropower plants, and pour into the taps of cities from Kabul to Kolkata.

The slump has been uneven. The Mekong basin recorded the sharpest fall at 59.5% below normal, while the Tibetan Plateau saw a 47.4% deficit.

The Yellow River and Amu Darya basins also registered steep declines. There is, however, a sliver of good news for India.

The Ganges basin recorded snow persistence which is 16.3% above normal this winter, offering a temporary cushion for parts of north India.

«

The HKH Snow Update shows that the past four years have been well below the 25-year normal, after 20 years of oscillating up and down. It’s never gone down in this way. If there are effects – such as water shortages – they’ll probably appear in the summer.
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South Africa withdraws AI policy due to fake AI-generated sources • Reuters

Nellie Peyton:

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South Africa has withdrawn its first draft national AI policy after revelations that it ​contained fictitious sources in its reference list which appeared to have been AI-generated.

“The most plausible explanation is that AI-generated citations were included without proper verification. ​This should not have happened,” Minister of ​Communications and Digital Technologies Solly Malatsi said.

“This failure is not a mere technical issue but ​has compromised the integrity and credibility of the ​draft policy,” he wrote in a post on X on Sunday.

The policy, unveiled this month for public comment before ​finalization, sought to position South Africa as ​a continental leader in AI innovation while addressing ethical, social and economic challenges.

It outlined plans to establish new institutions, including a National AI Commission, an AI Ethics Board and an AI Regulatory Authority, and to create ​incentives such ​as tax breaks, grants, and subsidies to encourage private-sector collaboration.

Malatsi said there would be ​consequences for those responsible for drafting the ​policy, and did not say when a new one would be released.

«

Irony is such an overused word. But sometimes it fits.
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What will it take to get AI out of schools? • The New Yorker

Jessica Winter:

»

Support for generative AI in elementary and middle schools clusters around the belief that early exposure to the technology will foster digital-media literacy, give students a foundation in engineering concepts, and prepare them for a future in which most professions are steeped in AI. Proponents say that teachers can use AI to save time on grading papers and tedious administrative tasks; they also tout the adaptive-learning aspects of AI tools, which adjust in real time to a child’s progress and, by producing troves of data, help teachers give individualized attention to each student. “One of the core things that we think about when we bring AI to education institutions is: how do you put the educator at the centre of that experience?” Shantanu Sinha, who is one of the VPs of Google for Education, told me. Gemini’s aim, Sinha went on, is to “empower the educators” in “creating richer experiences. We are not the pedagogical experts.”

Other advocates suggest that AI might eliminate the need for pedagogical expertise altogether. Alpha, a fast-growing private-school chain that employs “guides” instead of teachers and serves children as young as four, claims that it “harnesses the power of AI technology to provide each student with personalized 1:1 learning,” allowing kids to “crush academics in just two hours” per day, according to its website. At a recent White House summit on children and tech, Melania Trump appeared alongside Figure 03, a humanoid contraption by the robotics company Figure AI, which looks, sounds, and moves as if Eve from “Wall-E” had mated with an arthritic Imperial Stormtrooper. The First Lady asked her audience to imagine such an AI-powered robot as a teacher, one who is “always patient and always available” to its student. This lucky pupil will learn more quickly and have more time for friends and sports, Trump said; he or she will become “a more complete person.” Figure 03’s face is literally a black screen: a robotic balaclava.

…Last month, New York City’s Department of Education began soliciting public feedback on its preliminary guidelines for using AI in K-12 classrooms, which include this admonishment: “The question is not whether AI belongs in schools. The question is whether we will collectively build a system that governs AI to serve every student and every stakeholder.”

It’s quite the rhetorical suplex—opening a debate by declaring its central premise off limits. But, as we know from hallucinating chatbots, saying something doesn’t make it so. Countless studies have sown doubt about the place of AI in pedagogical settings.

«

Suplex: “an offensive move used in sport wrestling as well as amateur wrestling and professional wrestling. It is a throw that involves lifting the opponents and bridging or rolling to slam them on their backs.” Also, whenever you hear people using the word “empower” and “stakeholder” and the phrase “richer experiences”, you know they’ve got far baser motives for what they’re doing.
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How much of Substack is actually AI? • User Mag

Taylor Lorenz:

»

In March 2025 an alleged debate between Elon Musk and Keanu Reeves went viral on Substack. The post amassed 25,000 likes and nearly 5,000 reposts. Even today, it continues to spread. But the debate between Musk and Reeves never happened. The Substack post was entirely generated by AI.

Lately it feels like I’m encountering more and more AI-generated content on Substack. This mirrors patterns across the broader web. Last fall, media outlets declared that over 50% of all articles online were AI generated. According to some pundits, that number could rise to 90% by the end of this year. As a human writer, I think a lot about the prospect of being drowned out by a deluge of AI generated slop, and I began to wonder how much top content on Substack is really just AI.

Pangram is a tool that can detect AI generated text, even if it’s been “humanized“ or put through tools to evade AI detection. (They have a fantastic Chrome extension that allows anyone to check if the content they’re reading is AI.) I leveraged Pangram’s API to build a program that would analyze the 10 most recent posts from the top 25 Substack Bestsellers in every category, and reveal how much top content on Substack is AI generated.

The first thing I found is that the majority of Bestseller content on Substack is not AI. Two-thirds of top publications, 384 out of 575 newsletters, did not have a single trace of AI generated content in their recent archive, according to Pangram.

Certain Bestseller categories are much more likely to contain AI-generated content. Bestseller content in Technology had the most AI-generated writing. 28% of writing in top newsletters in Technology is fully or partially AI generated. That means that more than 1 in 4 posts in Technology have a substantial level of AI content. This is somewhat expected – people writing about technology usually love to leverage new technology, and some well-known tech writers on Substack have been open about using AI to draft their stories.

Other categories that contained high levels of AI writing were more concerning. 23% of top content in the Philosophy category and 22% of top content in the Health category is partially or fully AI generated. After that, the percentages drop precipitously. 13% of writing in Culture has been shaped by AI, and only 5% in sports, 3% in food and drink, and 1% in music, according to Pangram.

«

Pangram isn’t perfect, though it’s a start. A more thoughtful journalist might have used two AI detection systems, rather than one. Also, is Lorenz saying that she subscribed to all the top 25 Substacks? She doesn’t specify.
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Go ahead, share a conspiracy theory, who cares • Garbage Day

Ryan Broderick:

»

The [most recent] assassination attempt [on Trump] was probably best summed by UFC CEO Dana White, the only man in America with exactly the right amount of head trauma to fully understand our current reality. “It was fcking awesome,” White told NBC News’ Ryan J. Reilly. “I literally took every minute of it in. It was a pretty crazy, unique experience.”

The New York Times, in one of their many dispatches on the assassination attempt, reported similarly blasé reactions from the room of dinner guests, as Trump was rushed out. “Lloyd Blankfein, the former chief executive of Goldman Sachs, was sitting with CBS News journalists toward the front of the room when the emergency occurred,” The Times story reads. “As the confusion unfolded, Mr. Blankfein turned to his seatmate and asked, ‘Are you going to finish that salad?’” At least The Free Press’s Olivia Reingold managed to film a selfie video of herself hiding under a table. Good for the ‘gram, I bet.

The general, “so what?” from the country is, of course, troubling. And Puck’s Dylan Byers wrote on X about the disquieting experience of watching America collectively shrug its shoulders on Saturday, describing an experience similar to my own. Like Byers, I was in a bar watching the Knicks game when the news hit that Trump had been evacuated from the WHCD. And, like Byers, none of the TVs changed to the news. No one seemed to even notice. Back in 2024, during the first assassination attempt, I watched dozens of phones around me ping with push alerts. I was on a plane, listening to passengers nervously whisper about the news. But there was no discussion this time. The uniquely American 21st-century callousness that has allowed us to ignore school shootings and COVID deaths and climate catastrophes and ICE occupations has reached its logical endpoint, where we just accept that this is simply just how things have to be.

Though there was one difference this time. The Atlantic argued in a piece on Sunday that “the shooting at the Correspondents’ Dinner made clear who gets saved first.” Obviously, President Donald Trump was rushed out, as was Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. But Kennedy’s wife, Cheryl Hines, not so much. The violence of modern America will reach us all eventually. The 1% of the 1%, the richest and most powerful, will likely get out safely. Maybe their wives will too. But the rest of us will have to decide whether we run, hide, or clip it for social.

«

“How things have to be” is such a dispiriting observation about the current state of America.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified. Operational note: after this week, The Overspill will take a two-week break. Hiding this down here for now so nobody notices.

25 years after Apple introduced the iPod line, later including the “fat nano”, people have a hankering to use them again. CC-licensed photo by Miguel M. Almeida on Flickr.

You can sign up to receive each day’s Start Up post by email. You’ll need to click a confirmation link, so no spam.

A selection of 9 links for you. I’m listening. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.

How Ukraine solved the hardest problem in defence • Exponential View

Azeem Azhar, Greg Williams and Nathan Warren:

»

Along Ukraine’s eastern front, a drone stutters mid-flight. On the operator’s screen a few kilometers away, the grainy view of splintered treelines and trenches, fades into static. The control link drops. He removes his headset, he knows what’s happened. Russia has found a way to jam the frequency. Again.

It’s 2024, near Bakmut, a few kilometers from the then-front line. The commander of the Terra drone unit of the 3rd Separate Assault Brigade Mykola Volokhov, has watched the slow degradation of his command links. A system that had worked at eight kilometers out, started to fail at four, then at two. Russian electronic warfare teams were getting better and better with their jamming. Later, speaking on camera, Mykola described the reversal with a soldier’s understatement. “But this problem was overcome… and now it is not with us. No problems!”

The repair did not come through a ministry, a tender or a requisition form. It came through a phone call. In the words of Dimko Zhluktenko, a soldier in Ukraine’s Unmanned Systems Forces: “We called the manufacturer and said, ‘Guys, we had this kind of issue…’ It is very direct, and they are very open to help us. They don’t need a shitload of documents or anything.”

This is the operating model. A device is designed, fielded, disabled by the enemy, diagnosed through a conversation between the operator who lost it and the engineer who built it, then redesigned and redeployed in roughly seven days.

Industrial tempo in the grueling conditions of war. Continuity of signal, of keeping systems operational outweighs a lot else. In one unit along the Dnipro, an operator refused to take shelter during 120mm mortar fire because moving would break the radio link to his drone mid-mission.

This is how military innovation happens on parts of the Ukrainian front.

In the US and Europe, weapons systems move from concept to deployment over five, ten, sometimes fifteen years. A major capability iteration of the flagship F-35 Lightning II fighter jet can take close to a decade. That gap – one week versus seven years – is not just down to the exceptional engineering talent in Ukraine. It is the product of how work is organized, how quickly information reaches the people who can act on it and how much authority those people hold.

It is a real-time demonstration of what becomes possible when you remove the layers between the person who sees the problem and the person who can fix it. Under fire, alacrity is the difference between life and death.

«

The full post is for subscribers only, but plenty of it is free to read, and that part is absolutely engrossing. Ukraine is what all the future wars look like.
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Sam Altman wants to know whether you’re human • The Atlantic

Will Gottsegen:

»

The opening moments of the 1982 film Blade Runner introduce viewers to a world of artificially intelligent beings that are “virtually identical” to humans. To tell man from machine, people rely on something called the Voight-Kampff test, which is a little like a polygraph; robot irises exhibit subtle tells when prompted. If you’re dealing with a robot, you’ll know by the eyes.

If Sam Altman has his way, this could be sort of how it works in real life. Last week, he announced an expansion of the verification service World ID, created by a start-up called Tools for Humanity. Altman co-founded the company in 2019, the same year he became CEO of OpenAI. Onstage last Friday, he described the product as a way to certify personhood in a digital landscape rife with bots, deepfakes, phishers, and other sorts of impostors. Think of it as an evolution of CAPTCHA, the security program used to identify bots and prevent attacks on websites. To verify your humanness and secure a World ID, you must stare into a white, frosted orb and allow the company to take pictures of your face and eyeballs.

Orbs, as they’re officially known, are essentially basketball-size cameras that Tools for Humanity has placed in stores, restaurants, and other spaces around the world. They capture biometric information from your irises, encrypt it to protect your privacy, and use it to create a sort of digital passport that you can bring to various sites and apps: something that may evoke not just Blade Runner but also Minority Report, in which Tom Cruise’s character undergoes a back-alley eyeball transplant to avoid facial-recognition software.

I encountered an Orb in the wild this morning at a New York coffee shop, where it was installed just above a waxy succulent and a couple of jars of raw honey. After downloading the World app and holding my phone up to the device, I stared deep into its aperture; I told the person behind me not to mind—he could sidle past me and order his coffee. A few minutes later, the app informed me that I’d been granted human status.

Intrusive as the whole thing is, Altman’s invention is targeting a real issue. A few years ago, images and videos rendered by AI couldn’t consistently replicate the work of physical cameras; today, models can convincingly generate even the slightest details. As the CEO of the company that helped spur the AI revolution, Altman bears some of the responsibility for this manipulable era of internet communication. Now he’s selling a solution.

«

This all feels like a subtle way to have everyone on The System for a strange sort of verification which could also lock you out if you displeased those in power. Biometrics are hard to change, to put it mildly, unless you’re Tom Cruise in Minority Report (as the piece’s author notes).
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EV ownership at “tipping point” in many parts of the world, experts say • Financial Times

Attracta Mooney, Kana Inagaki, Nassos Stylianou and Jana Tauschinski:

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Electric vehicle ownership has reached a “tipping point” that signals an irreversible shift away from petrol cars, not only in China but parts of south-east Asia and Europe despite stalling in the US, expert research finds.

EVs accounted for a quarter of new car sales globally in 2025 and the pace of growth has continued into the first quarter of 2026.

While Chinese domestic sales fell in the first quarter of 2026 as rebates expired, the rise of Chinese exports elsewhere continued and demand in populous countries such as South Korea and Brazil also surged.

In the EU, the rise in fuel prices sparked by the Middle East conflict boosted the uptake of EVs for the month of March by 49%, the figures show,

In some south-east Asian countries, demand was also stoked further. In Singapore, EVs accounted for 56% of sales in the first two months of the year. In Thailand, they made up 28% of sales between January and March, and 21% in Indonesia.

In other notable markets, the share of new sales was 18% in Turkey and 30% in Uruguay, according to government and industry data.

Such markets account for a small share of global car sales but are where big growth is expected in the future as consumers become richer. 

«

Gradually and then suddenly: as the S-curve of adoption and then dispersion passes the first elbow, you go from “oh look, one of those” to “these are everywhere now, aren’t they?” The closure of the strait of Hormuz is an accelerant on this.
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Hyke GFRP electric urban ferry demonstrates 8X efficiency versus diesel • Composites World

Grace Stubbins:

»

Between April 2024 and July 2025, the F-15 ferry operated as part of Fredrikstad’s municipal transport system on the Bekkhus-Vaterland route [in Norway], carrying more than 41,000 passengers in daily operation. The route covered a 225-metre river crossing with an average crossing time of approximately two minutes, demonstrating a high-frequency urban transport application.

With up to 88% less, or one-eighth the energy consumption of diesel vessels, the Hyke F-15 Shuttle sets a new benchmark for efficiency. It uses roughly the same amount of power as five household hair dryers. [10-12kWh per hour – Overspill Ed.] The pilot also demonstrated that it eliminates direct emissions and reduces noise levels in urban environments.

“The project shows that our urban waters can be used much more efficiently,” adds Vislie. “Instead of digging tunnels or building bridges, which are very costly, electric ferries can quickly be deployed to shuttle large numbers of passengers. It’s time to rethink urban planning by putting waterways at the center. Together with Fredrikstad Municipality, we’ve demonstrated that Hyke F-15 can operate as part of everyday public transport — efficiently, quietly and with strong passenger acceptance.”

Hyke develops fully electric vessels designed for urban and inland mobility, combining lightweight construction, energy efficiency and system architectures intended for future scalability.

«

It’s certainly not the longest crossing ever, but removing the need for fuelling with diesel makes a huge difference, and Norway can rely on a lot of clean hydroelectric power for its electricity. Charging was done overnight. By contrast the diesel version it replaced used about 750 litres of diesel every few days. Add that up over 15 months and you’ve saved a lot of diesel.
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25 years later, is it time for a new iPod? • The Verge

Janko Roettgers:

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This year marks the 25th anniversary of the original iPod. With its monochrome display, mechanical scroll wheel, and 5 GB hard drive, Apple’s pioneering music player now looks like the relic of a bygone era.

And yet, in a surprising twist, there’s growing interest in a redo.

After being essentially flat for five years, Google searches for “MP3 Player” tripled since last fall. A Reddit group for fans of digital audio players is now attracting 90,000 visitors per week on average. And this spring, The New York Times published a trend piece on how iPods are suddenly in fashion with teenagers.

“It’s great to see younger generations who [didn’t] experience the iPod the first time around finding out about it and being like: That sounds like a great idea,” says musician and startup founder Tom Kell.

The only problem: Apple discontinued its last iPod model in 2022. And while there has been a flood of devices from Chinese consumer electronics makers trying to fill the gap, Kell has found a lot of them lacking. “The user interfaces of all of these digital music players are shockingly bad,” he says. “Most are essentially just Android phones with the phone stuff removed.”

That’s why Kell and a small group of collaborators began working on their own MP3 player close to two years ago. Sleevenote, as the device is called, has a very different interface than many of its predecessors: Instead of making you browse endless databases of artist names and song titles, it’s all about album art, which is being presented on a square 4-inch screen.

“We’re pro whole albums,” Kell says. “We want you to focus on one album at a time.”

Each album is being shown with full liner art, which you can browse just like you would have explored a CD booklet, or a record sleeve. There’s also no playlists, no algorithms, no endless shuffle. You play an album from beginning to end, then pick the next one. “It’s something in between a vinyl and an iPod,” Kell says.

«

The first orders will ship in May, apparently (we await to see) and the price is $349/£249. Looks like a larger version of the “square” iPod nano towards the end of Apple’s iPod nano dalliance.

They might sell enough to make a profit. Look forward to the reviews.
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Bread and honey for breakfast and 150 miles a week training: secrets of Sawe’s world record • The Guardian

Sean Ingle:

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Sabastian Sawe’s astonishing world marathon record of one hour 59 minutes and 30 seconds at Sunday’s London Marathon was fuelled by running 150 miles a week, wearing the lightest super shoes in history and a pre-race breakfast of bread and honey, the Kenyan and his team have revealed.

With an estimated 800,000 watching in the capital, the 31-year-old became the first man to run a sub-two-hour marathon in an official race as he powered home in the second half of the race to shatter the world record.

Afterwards, Sawe said he immediately realised that he had created a moment that would never be forgotten. “I have made history today in London,” he said. “For me, I have shown that nothing is not possible. It’s something that will remain in my mind for ever.”

…[Sawe’s coach Claudio] Berardelli also said that Sawe had been helped by the new Adidas Pro Evo 3s, which are not only faster but are the first super shoe under 100 grams, as well as by using carbohydrate gels from Maurten, which help athletes feel stronger in the final stages.

“There is no doubt we are in the new era of marathon running because of the shoe and proper fuelling,” he added. “So we are super-glad to Adidas and Maurten. They have come to Kenya so many times to support us, because all of us realise that Sabastian was not just a good one, but he’s a special one.

“Definitely physiologically, Sabastian has to be a good one. But all the pieces come together perfectly, because of his attitude, because of his character. I’m still in the process of discovering who Sawe is. He is an exceptional human being. He has such a positive energy, but he’s so humble at the same time.

“In 22 years I’ve been coaching in Kenya I thought I’d seen pretty much everything, but then Sabastian started to show me something which I thought was almost impossible.”

«

Sunday saw not one, but two men break two hours in the marathon – equivalent to running a kilometre in 3 minutes, 40 times in a row. So a 15-minute 5K, eight times. That is as incredible as it sounds. People will wonder if performance-enhancing drugs were involved – but Sawe last year submitted to an incredibly rigorous repeated test regime, and has done similar this year too. This is a moment like the four-minute mile being broken. Twice.
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Prediction market accuracy: crowd wisdom or informed minority? • SSRN

Roberto Gomez Cram, Yunhan Guo, Theis Ingerslev Jensen, Howard Kung:

»

Prediction markets are remarkably accurate, yet the source of this accuracy remains poorly understood. The conventional view attributes it to crowd wisdom, whereby prices aggregate information from a large and diverse pool of participants.

We show instead that accuracy is driven by a small minority of informed traders. Using the universe of transactions from a large prediction market platform, we identify these traders and show that they, around 3% of all accounts, generate the bulk of price discovery. Their trades predict future prices and final outcomes, make prices more accurate throughout a market’s lifespan, and react to news the moment it arrives.

The remaining majority does not produce accuracy; rather, it funds it. Their trades generate most of the volume, but little of the information, and their losses flow as profits to the informed minority. Prediction market accuracy thus reflects the wisdom of an informed minority, not the wisdom of the crowd.

«

Apropos of this: “Soldier won $410,000 in Polymarket bets on timing of Maduro capture, US alleges“. The wrinkle being that the accused soldier was one of the team who captured Maduro.
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The world’s most complex machine – Works in Progress Magazine

Neil Hacker:

»

Dubbed ‘a relatively obscure Dutch company’ by the BBC in 2020, ASML makes the only machines in the world capable of stenciling the transistors onto chips with the precision necessary to fit billions on a 30-centimeter wafer.

These machines are roughly the size of double-decker buses. To ship one requires 40 freight containers, three cargo planes, and 20 trucks. They are the world’s most complex objects. Each contains over one hundred thousand components, all of which have to be perfectly calibrated for the machine to produce light consistently at the right wavelength.

…The most advanced version of this technology, extreme ultraviolet lithography, is used to make the very smallest chips. The smallest in 2025 were marketed as three nanometers, roughly 25,000 times thinner than a human hair. 

To make them, a droplet of liquid tin is released into a chamber and hit with a single pulse of light, which melts and flattens it. As the droplet continues to fall, a second, more powerful pulse vaporizes the tin, creating an extremely hot plasma that emits light at the narrow wavelengths needed for extreme ultraviolet lithography. The light beam is then concentrated by reflecting it across a series of slightly concave mirrors so flawless that, if scaled to the size of Germany, their imperfections would be measured in millimeters. Engineers need to use mirrors, rather than the glass lenses used in standard lithography, as almost all solid materials absorb light at such short wavelengths.

The light eventually hits the mask, which contains the pattern to be printed on the chip. As the pattern on the mask is usually several times larger than what is wanted on the chip, the light is then reflected by a second system of mirrors. 

«

How, you ask yourself, how did someone (or many people) figure all this out? “Oh yes, you have to vapourise the tin – didn’t you know?”
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Samsung is “increasingly worried” about first-ever mobile division loss in RAM crisis • 9to5 Google

Ben Schoon:

»

As AI continues to eat up the market’s RAM output, smartphones are in crisis as costs continue to skyrocket. A new report claims that Samsung is increasingly worried about this, and warning of its first-ever loss in its mobile division.

We’ve heard this before. In March, a report revealed some of the internal cuts Samsung has been making for its mobile division, with the company initially concerned it could post an operating loss for the first time ever. It’s a big deal, as Samsung’s mobile (MX) division has historically always turned a profit.

A new report out of Korea (via Jukan) makes this seem all but certain.

Apparently, Samsung’s TM Roh, the head of the company’s mobile division, has expressed concerns of the “possibility of an annual deficit for the MX business unit.” Previously, those concerns came from speculation and outside parties, but with such a high figure in Samsung’s organization worried, it’s clear things are looking pretty bleak.

«

The loss would arise because the memory division inside Samsung is going to charge the sky-high prices to which RAM has risen from its sibling division, ie mobile. So it’s a paper loss in that sense. Samsung as a whole is going to be just fine.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

In future table tennis players might find an AI-powered robot across the table, as one just defeated some top-ranked amateurs. CC-licensed photo by Gaël Marziou on Flickr.

You can sign up to receive each day’s Start Up post by email. You’ll need to click a confirmation link, so no spam.

A selection of 9 links for you. Table stakes. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.

Meta to lay off 10% of workforce in AI push • The New York Times

Mike Isaac and Eli Tan:

»

Meta plans to cut 10% of its work force, or roughly 8,000 employees, and close another 6,000 open roles, according to an internal memo on Thursday, as the company spends heavily on developing artificial intelligence.

Meta, which owns Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, employed more than 78,000 people at the end of 2025. Mark Zuckerberg, Meta’s chief executive, has said he expects much of the work done in the technology industry to eventually be overtaken by AI-powered systems, including coding assistants that help engineers write software.

“We’re doing this as part of our continued effort to run the company more efficiently and to allow us to offset the other investments we’re making,” Janelle Gale, Meta’s chief people officer, said in the memo to employees. “This is not an easy trade-off and it will mean letting go of people who have made meaningful contributions to Meta during their time here.”

A spokesman for Meta confirmed the cuts and declined further comment.

Across the technology industry, companies have been laying off employees as they experiment with AI. In February, Block, the financial technology company that owns Square, Cash App and Tidal, said it was cutting 40% of its work force as it embraced new AI tools. Microsoft on Thursday said it was offering buyouts [redundancy] to 7% of its work force as it invests in AI.

Mr. Zuckerberg is reorganizing his company around AI products in a fierce race to lead in the technology against rivals like OpenAI, Google and Anthropic. He has made no secret of his AI ambitions and has described developing AI-powered social media products that are a kind of “personal superintelligence” that he hopes people will incorporate into their daily lives.

“At Meta, we have the resources to build the massive infrastructure required and the ability to deliver new technology to billions of people,” Mr. Zuckerberg said in a video posted to his Facebook page in July.

«

So the idea is that technology workers will be replaced by the thing they’ve created. It’s an odd version of Frankenstein. The tech firms that are investing heavily in AI seem to expand and contract like an old-fashioned bellows, trying to get the fire going and then putting people aside as soon as the flames seem to be alight.
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Microsoft offers voluntary retirement to long-serving employees • The Verge

Tom Warren:

»

Microsoft is changing up its annual rewards and performance programs today, and offering long-serving employees in the US the ability to voluntarily retire. It’s the first time in Microsoft’s more than 50-year history that the company has offered such a voluntary retirement program.

“Many of these employees have spent years, and in some cases, decades, shaping Microsoft into what it is today,” says Microsoft’s HR chief Amy Coleman in a memo seen by The Verge. “For those who may be considering their next chapter, we’re offering a one‑time Voluntary Retirement Program.” Microsoft says it applies to only a “small percentage of our US employees.”

US employees whose combined years of service added to their age totals 70 or more will be eligible for voluntary retirement, and Coleman says this will include “generous company support.” It’s not clear if this is a precursor to more layoffs at Microsoft, but it certainly looks like a method to avoid a bigger round of layoffs ahead of Microsoft’s new financial year in July.

«

That “service plus age” thing is intriguing. You’re aged 50, you’ve been there for 20 years. You’re 45, you’ve been there 25 years – so you joined aged 20. That seems like the ceiling there. (John Gruber points out there’s someone at Apple who totals 114, which I believe is Chris Espinosa: joined aged 14 in 1976, now aged 64 plus those 50 years of service.

Anyway, Microsoft seems to think that old is bad now.
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You’re about to feel the AI money squeeze • The Verge

Hayden Field:

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Between 2024 and 2029, [senior research analyst Will Sommer] said, [research company] Gartner estimates that capital investment in AI data centers will reach about $6.3 trillion — a “massive amount of money.”

To avoid a write-down of these assets, major AI model providers would ideally generate a return on invested capital (ROIC) of about 25%, Sommer said. (That’s about what Amazon, Microsoft, and Google tend to earn on their overall capital investments.) On the other hand, if the returns fall below 12%, institutional capital loses interest — there’s better money elsewhere, Sommer said. Below 7%, you’re in writedown territory, which is “an unmitigated disaster for all of the investors in this technology,” Sommer said.

To reach that bare minimum of 7%, Gartner forecasts that large AI companies would need to earn cumulatively close to $7 trillion in AI-driven revenue through 2029, which is close to $2 trillion per year by the end of the period. In order to achieve “historic returns,” the providers would need to earn nearly $8.2 trillion in the same period.

OpenAI has already made $600bn in spending commitments through 2030, the company said in February, which Sommer says is already a “massive step down” from the $1.4 trillion it had planned before. Based on OpenAI’s revenue forecasts and potential compound annual growth, Sommer said that even in the best-case scenario, he predicts that the lab would only hit a fraction of the overall spend required to hit that 7% ROIC.

How do model providers like OpenAI make this money? By selling access to what are known as tokens. A token is essentially a unit of data input that an AI model can understand and process — it could be text, images, audio, or something else. One token is generally worth about four characters in the English language — the word “bathroom,” for instance, would likely be processed as two tokens. One paragraph in English is generally about 100 tokens, and a 1,500-word essay may be about 2,050 tokens, per an OpenAI estimate.

To hit investors’ revenue expectations, providers would need to process a “mind-bending” number of tokens, Sommer said.

By most measures, companies’ numbers are already pretty big. Google announced it was processing 1.3 quadrillion tokens in October, for instance. If you add all the providers’ estimates up, Sommer said, you get 100 to 200 quadrillion tokens a year. But to achieve the the $2 trillion in annual spend Gartner calculated, providers would need to be generating, by conservative estimates, a cumulative 10 sextillion tokens per year. (To make that slightly less abstract, a quadrillion has 15 zeros, and a sextillion has 21.)

«

There just doesn’t seem to be any way to meet those targets. The writedown is coming; the only question is when. Plus Nilay Patel points out that AI is not popular. Hard to generate trillions in revenue from something that is not popular.
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Intellectuals are f*cking idiots • Mark Manson

Mark Manson:

»

Malcolm Caldwell was the consummate intellectual. He had spent his entire life studying Southeast Asian history and economic development. He had written hundreds of articles and over a dozen books on the subject. He was a professor and researcher at one of the most prestigious universities in the world and was celebrated and supported for his views.

Much of his work dealt with English colonialism in Asia and its dire political consequences. As a result, Caldwell evolved into a staunch Marxist, far to the left of the leftiest leftist who ever lefted.

Just to give you an idea how far left we’re talking, Caldwell visited North Korea in the 1960s and came away saying good things about it. When the Vietnam War started, Caldwell tried to host a fundraiser in London… for the Vietcong.

So when communist revolutionaries took control of Cambodia, Caldwell showed enthusiastic support. The new communist leader of Cambodia was a man by the name of Pol Pot and he had radical new ideas of how to achieve a communist utopia — ideas that had existed in Marxist thought but had yet to actually be attempted in any communist country. Caldwell had been waiting for decades for a communist revolutionary who fully implemented his Marxist dreams. Caldwell came to believe Pol Pot was his man.

…when news of the genocide and atrocities began to leak out of Cambodia, Caldwell refused to believe it. He defended Pol Pot’s regime and wrote off the atrocities as simply more western capitalist propaganda. His unwavering support eventually earned him an exclusive invitation to visit Cambodia by Pol Pot’s government. Caldwell accepted. And in December of 1978, he boarded that fateful flight to Asia.

Once there, Caldwell toured the country. He met the leadership and learned about their policies firsthand. But the climax of his trip was the last evening — a private audience with Pol Pot himself. Reportedly, Caldwell was “euphoric” with excitement and anticipation. Once in private, Caldwell and Pol Pot had a long intellectual conversation. In his enthusiasm, Caldwell began sharing some of his ideas for the Cambodian regime. He began to offer feedback and dare I say, potentially even a little criticism. Pol Pot, not used to being lectured to by a professor, promptly had Caldwell killed that night.

Malcolm Caldwell is what I like to refer to as an intelligent idiot. A man with an encyclopedic breadth of knowledge and understanding, a world-class mind with powerful thoughts, and yet absolutely no idea how to apply any of it.

The world seems to be full of intelligent idiots. The examples are endless.

«

He lists a few of them. And they’re interesting.

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‘Staggering’ number of people believe unproven claims about vaccines, raw milk and more • Nature

Helen Pearson:

»

More than two-thirds of the public believe at least one false or unproven health claim, such as the idea that taking paracetamol during pregnancy causes autism, a new survey finds. The results hint that a large, and potentially growing, number of people are questioning scientific evidence.

The survey, of more than 16,000 people across 16 countries, asked whether they believed claims that are not supported by research, including that the “risk of childhood vaccinations outweighs benefits”, “fluoride in water is harmful” and “raw milk is healthier than pasteurized”.

For each statement, between 25% and 32% of respondents said they believed it, and another sizeable percentage (17–39%) said they didn’t know whether it was true. In total, 70% of respondents believed at least one of the claims. The findings, which have not been peer reviewed and were published on Wednesday by the Edelman Trust Institute in New York City, were described as ‘staggering’ in an accompanying article by the think tank’s chief executive, Richard Edelman.

The result “blows the lid off of this idea” that such beliefs are held by only a fringe population of individuals who are uninformed or ideologically driven, says David Bersoff, head of research at the Edelman Trust Institute. “This is not like a small problematic group.”

“There has definitely been a growing number of people who question widely accepted scientific evidence,” agrees Heidi Larson, who studies confidence in vaccines at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine. “It’s important to pay attention to.”

Other recent studies have highlighted how commonly people question scientific consensus or evidence-based medical practices, at least in certain contentious areas, such as vaccines. One global 2023 study found that during the COVID-19 pandemic, people’s confidence that vaccines are important for children fell in 52 of 55 countries.

«

Experts suggest there’s actually too much information: people can’t decide what is true. That suggests they’ve never learnt how to parse factual information. Anecdotally, I (and others) observe that literacy, especially among Americans, is plummeting. The combination is potentially lethal.
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AI robot outplays humans in table tennis milestone • Financial Times

Michael Peel:

»

An AI-powered robot has beaten expert table tennis players in a landmark machine-over-human triumph in a major competitive sport.

The mechanical maestro, known as Ace, uses a network of cameras and AI to achieve the rapid planning and reaction times needed to compete.

The invention made by Japanese tech group Sony highlights how researchers are using AI to improve robots’ ability to adapt to physical tasks they have struggled with, particularly those involving people.

…“Table tennis is a game of enormous complexity that requires split-second decisions as well as speed and power,” said Peter Dürr, director of Sony AI in Zurich, who led the Ace project. “This research breakthrough highlights the potential of physical AI agents to perform real-time interactive tasks, and represents a significant step toward creating robots with broader applications in fast, precise and real-time human interactions.”

Ace beat three out of five elite table tennis players who had more than ten years of training, and scored 48 points versus 70 in two defeats to professionals, according to a paper published in Nature on Wednesday.

The robot had improved further, Sony said: since the paper’s submission, it had played four further matches against humans, beating two elite players and winning one out of two matches against professionals.

The robot handled spin and unexpected changes in trajectory caused by the ball clipping the net on its way over, the researchers said. It outscored the elite players in aces — points won directly from serve — by 16 to eight.

«

Reminiscent of DeepMind’s AlphaGo beating the European champion Go professional Fan Hui in October 2015. Then it beat the human world champion. But now, humans use AI-based Go computers to inform their play, and still play other humans. Maybe this will become the sparring champion everyone wants to play against?
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Diet Coke shortage in India: why your favourite zero-calorie Cola has vanished from Blinkit, Zepto and store shelves • Open Magazine

Shailja Tiwari:

»

Somewhere in India right now, a person is refreshing [shopping apps] Blinkit or Zepto for the seventeenth time today. The result is the same: out of stock. It has been that way since mid-April. The silver can — the diet-cola lifeline of India’s urban millennial and Gen Z population — has vanished from shelves in Bangalore, Mumbai, and Ahmedabad, sending its loyal fanbase into collective mourning.

Quick-commerce apps showed it unavailable. Supermarkets said it was gone. Convenience stores shrugged. One Reddit user from Bangalore reported walking into a bar — “underage, by their own admission” — and the bar was out too. Their final, haunted question: “Like is the Diet Coke ka ship stuck in Strait of Hormuz or what?”

With shelf space empty and hot takes incoming, the internet convened its own inquiry. Several theories emerged with great confidence and varying degrees of accuracy.

Theory one: Instagram creators hoarding empty cans for DIY craft projects disrupted the aluminium recycling cycle. Creative. Chaotic. Completely unverifiable. Acquitted.

Theory two: a ship stuck in the Strait of Hormuz. Beautiful poetry. Also acquitted.

The real culprit is considerably more boring than either: aluminium. According to metal market analysts, aluminium supply came under serious pressure heading into April 2026, with prices rising roughly 14–20% in recent weeks due to geopolitical disruption, production outages, and reduced imports. Domestic mills are stretched thin. Lead times are longer. The cans are simply hard to source.

…In fairness, this is a localised supply hiccup, not a national catastrophe. But context matters: Diet Coke sales in India actually doubled last year, as low-sugar beverages surged to represent 30% of Coca-Cola India’s total volumes in 2025 — up from just 5% in 2020. The fanbase is real, large, and very online.

«

If aluminium prices are going up, there’s nothing in the short term that’s going to bring them down. In fact we have some bad news coming up for the fanbase…
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Aluminium faces ‘black swan’ supply shock, Mercuria says • Reuters

Pratima Desai:

»

The global aluminium market is experiencing a “black swan” event as disruptions due to the Middle East war trigger a supply shock that will lead to major shortages this year, according to the top metals analyst at commodity trader Mercuria.

The region accounts for about 7 million metric tons of annual aluminium smelting capacity, or roughly 9% of the estimated global supply this ​year. Aluminium is a key material for the transport, construction and packaging industries.

“The scale of the supply shock ​we’re seeing in the aluminium market is probably the largest single supply shock a base metals market has suffered in the post-2000 era,” Nick Snowdon, head of metals and mining research at Mercuria, said ​on the sidelines of the Financial Times Commodities Global Summit in Lausanne, Switzerland.

“We are already in a ‘black swan’ event. No ​one could have foreseen something on this scale,” he told Reuters.

Concerns about supplies due to disruptions stemming from the U.S.-Israeli war with Iran fuelled a rally on the London Metal Exchange, pushing aluminium prices to a four-year high at $3,672 a ton on April 16.

Mercuria estimates the market ​will face, at a minimum, a deficit of roughly 2 million tons between now and the end of the ​year. Snowdon said this estimate may prove conservative, as it assumes a near-term improvement in alumina flows via the Strait of Hormuz will enable some smelters to restart production this quarter.

“That shortfall compares with about 1.5 million tons of visible inventory and just over 3 million tons of total global stock, including non-visible units, leaving the market with limited buffers,” Snowdon said.

A larger deficit is possible if the conflict is extended and flows of alumina – a feedstock for aluminium production – to the Gulf are ​limited, he added.

Middle East aluminium ​cannot easily be replaced. In China, the world’s top producer, there is an annual output limit of 45 million tons, while the US and Europe have little idled capacity that could return.

«

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The only good news from the Iran war • The New York Times

David Wallace-Wells:

»

The war has plunged the energy world into a kind of time warp: The last boats to exit the Strait of Hormuz before the war are just now approaching their refineries, and seven weeks is not a terrifically long time in which to recalibrate national energy systems.

But between February and March, the world didn’t just tighten its fossil fuel use; it spent money on new green stuff. China’s solar, battery and EV exports grew 39%. The country’s solar exports alone more than doubled during that time. In South Korea, March saw new EV registrations double compared with the same time last year. In New Zealand, new registrations nearly doubled over two weeks.

For the past five years, competition-minded trade economists have lamented Chinese “overcapacity” — that one country was producing more clean energy tech than the world really wanted, flooding the market with cheap products that prevented other countries from even competing. As the Carnegie Endowment’s Noah Gordon put it over the weekend, the response to the Iran war makes it look like this analysis had it more or less backward: the problem wasn’t Chinese overcapacity, it was constrained demand everywhere else in the world. As the economist Isabella Weber put it, “it turns out Chinese ‘overcapacity’ is the world’s largest buffer stock against a crisis like the one we face.”

Around the world, new clean energy policy — which had mostly stalled out or retreated over the past few years — is now following suit. In recent weeks, new clean energy investments and initiatives have been declared by France, Egypt, India, Indonesia, Turkey — and many others. The president of the E.U. Commission called for an expedited rollout of grid improvement and electrification plans. Jigar Shah, a former Biden administration official and a liberal energy guru, says he expects monthly global clean energy spending to double by the end of this year.

«

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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Triathletes get into cold water carefully because their bodies are liable to an autonomic reaction on immersion that could kill them – as it does other people. CC-licensed photo by rick on Flickr.

You can sign up to receive each day’s Start Up post by email. You’ll need to click a confirmation link, so no spam.

A selection of 10 links for you. Brr. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.

Letter #327: John Ternus’s commencement speech (2024) • A Letter A Day

Kevin Gee with the transcript of incoming Apple CEO John Ternus’s commencement speech at Penn Engineering in 2024:

»

My first project at Apple was the Cinema Display. It was a large desktop monitor. It had a beautiful clear plastic enclosure that was held together with some screws coming in from the back. These screws were made of stainless steel, and the head of every screw was machined to have a pattern of concentric grooves that shimmered like a CD when light moved across it. I should probably say, if some of you have never seen a CD before, you can ask your parents afterward.

At some point in my first year, I found myself at a supplier facility. I was far away from home, it was well past midnight. I was using a magnifying glass to count the number of grooves on the head of this screw, which, remember, lives on the back of the display. And I was arguing with the supplier because these parts had 35 grooves, they were supposed to have 25.

I distinctly remember stepping back for a minute and thinking to myself, “What the hell am I doing? Is this normal?” And I thought about it, and I realized it might not be normal, but it’s right. It’s right because I’d already spent months working on that product, and if you’re going to spend that much time on something, you should put in your very best effort. Maybe a customer notices, maybe they don’t, but either way, whenever I saw one of those displays on someone’s desk, it mattered to me to know that my teammates and I had considered everything about it and done the very best job we could.

But make no mistake, it’s hard to put that much of yourself into something. It’s stressful, it requires sacrifice, but it’s worth it because our time is finite.

«

There’s more, and it’s a lot shorter than Steve Jobs’s commencement speech with fewer insights, but it gives a first glimpse of the person behind the new chief executive. There’s also a Deadline report which says that he likes the Apple TV streaming service and wants it to be, if anything, more competitive.
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CDC blocks study showing Covid shots cut hospital visits after earlier delay • The Washington Post

Lena Sun:

»

A report showing the efficacy of the covid-19 vaccine that was previously delayed by the head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has been blocked from being published in the agency’s flagship scientific journal, according to three people familiar with the decision who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation. The report showed that the vaccine reduced emergency department visits and hospitalizations among healthy adults by about half this past winter.

The move, which has not been previously reported, has raised concerns among current and former officials that information about the vaccine’s benefits is being downplayed because it conflicts with the views of Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who has been an outspoken critic of the shots. Kennedy’s vaccine agenda has received pointed questioning from lawmakers during budget hearings that began last week and conclude Wednesday.

The Washington Post reported two weeks ago that Jay Bhattacharya, who is temporarily overseeing the CDC, delayed publication of the report over concerns about methodology. The report had been scheduled for publication March 19 in the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report.

In recent days, a decision was made that the report would not be published, according to two of the people who spoke to The Post.

«

America’s descent into idiocracy continues.
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It’s time. Meet my New Thing • New Things

Joanna Stern:

»

If you’ve read my work at WSJ—or before that at ABC News or The Verge—you know I love consumer tech. I love reviewing it, talking to the people making it and helping people understand it. Mostly, I love having fun with it. That’s what we’re doing here.

So let me answer a few questions.

What are you going to be doing?
At the simplest level: what I’ve always done. Writing and making videos about the devices, apps and services changing how we live. Yes, there will be phones. Yes, Apple stuff. Yes, Google and Android stuff. Yes, tips and tricks. Yes, probably a weird robot. Probably many weird robots.

But while writing my new book, I AM NOT A ROBOT—where I used AI in as many parts of my life as possible for a year—I realized Is this a good product? isn’t the main question to ask anymore. The bigger question is: Who is this tech for? Wall Street? Greedy CEOs? AI agents? Actual humans? I want it to be for humans. And I want to cover it that way too: as a human living with it, using it, testing it and trying to make sense of what it’s doing to our lives.
That’s the thread running through everything here—every review, every story, every dumb joke. And if I do this right, New Things won’t be just a publication. It’ll be a group of people asking that question together—and figuring out what kind of future we actually want.

Is this journalism written by AI?
Hi! I’m a human. I wrote this. Twenty years of journalism ethics don’t disappear because I started an independent media company and a YouTube channel, and they definitely don’t disappear because there are 700 chatbots on my laptop. Every word you read here—every review, every story, every bad joke—is written by me or by a human on my team. (Say hi, Amaya, David, Adele and Rich. 👋🏻) 

«

She then points to Google launching vertical tabs for Chrome, which she says is transformative. Personally I have my Reading List (of sites saved for later reading) there, so maybe not such a triumph? But she has to start somewhere.
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Global energy markets are on the verge of a disaster • The Economist

»

To gauge how close the world is to energy catastrophe, The Economist has gathered a dashboard of indicators. It suggests that grave damage has already been done. Worse, without a reopening costs could soar, triggering events that cause the fuel system to seize up. A reopening of the strait now would—just—avoid a complete disaster. But some additional pain is already inevitable.

Three factors are pushing the world towards the cliff edge. Oil cargoes available to buy are drying up. Refineries are slashing output of fuel. And demand remains artificially high, especially in Europe. Something big must give somewhere large for energy markets to balance.

Take trade first. One reason the largest supply shock in petroleum history has not triggered global panic is that a near-record amount of oil was already at sea when the war started. As American warships set sail for the Gulf in February, countries there cranked up exports. After the latest deliveries, those seaborne stocks are now exhausted. So are most cargoes of Iranian and Russian oil, which were loitering at sea but found buyers after America eased sanctions on the two countries. Total volumes on water have fallen at record speed. For jet fuel and petrol they are well below historical norms, and possibly close to the minimum required for seaborne trade to function.

This leaves Asia, which used to receive four-fifths of Gulf exports, in a particular bind. Commercial inventories in a few Asian countries are running out. South Korea is due to taper releases from its strategic reserves in the coming days. Japan’s will be exhausted in May. Crude stocks in Asia excluding China fell by 67m barrels, or 11%, in the month to April 19th, according to Kayrros, a firm that estimates inventories using satellite imaging.

«

This topic now seems so important that I subscribed, at this article, to The Economist to be able to follow analysis like this. Nowhere else seems to be drawing all the threads together, and I’m honestly perplexed by the lack of urgency that seems to be shown everywhere else.
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Iranian tankers bypass US blockade • Financial Times

Alice Hancock and Nassos Stylianou:

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At least 34 tankers with links to Iran have bypassed the US blockade since it began, according to the cargo tracking group Vortexa, including several carrying Iranian oil — despite US President Donald Trump declaring the barricade a “tremendous success”.

The US imposed its blockade on all ships entering or leaving Iranian coastal waters from 10am ET on April 13, marking a fresh phase in the Middle East conflict as Washington tries to pressure Tehran into a peace deal.

The embargo was expanded to cover all Iranian vessels on the high seas or those carrying goods that could be used by Iran in the conflict on April 16, according to notices from the US Navy.

US forces have so far detained one container ship in the Gulf of Oman and boarded a sanctioned tanker in the Indo-Pacific. US Central Command said on Tuesday the US Navy had directed 28 vessels to turn back to Iranian ports since the blockade began.

«

If tankers exit the strait, is that good or bad? Iran gets some money so it can.. blockade the strait for longer? Trump’s blockade has created a Chinese fingertrap; a war that neither side can exit.
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What will be scarce? • Ghosts of Electricity

Alex Imas:

»

This is most people’s mental model of what AI will do to the economy: if a machine can produce anything a human can, write the brief, generate the image, compose the song, determine the diagnosis from a radiology scan, then the human will be replaced across all facets of production and jobs will simply disappear. Labor will be replaced with capital. David Autor and Neil Thompson push back on this in an important recent paper. They argue that AI won’t simply eliminate jobs; it will reshape the economic value of human expertise. Their framework distinguishes between expert and inexpert tasks within any given occupation. When automation removes the simpler tasks (as accounting software did for bookkeeping clerks), the remaining work becomes more specialized, wages rise, and fewer workers qualify. When it removes the harder tasks (as inventory management systems did for warehouse workers), the job becomes more accessible, employment expands, and wages fall. Same technology, opposite labor market outcomes, depending on which part of the job gets automated.

But Autor and Thompson also consider a starker possibility: that AI advances to the point where human expertise loses its economic value altogether. Under this scenario, AI will eliminate labor scarcity and produce what Herbert Simon once called “intolerable abundance.’’ Automation of production will no longer involve managing a workforce transition, for which we have prior episodes of automation to rely on. We will need tools to maintain social organization, income distribution, and democratic stability without the labor market that has historically held these together.

I want to consider a different scenario, one where automation can replicate human production and the commodities that it produces (a big if!!!), but human labor does not disappear. How could this be the case? A lot of analysis takes the economy as given: there is a set of jobs and a set of goods/services produced by the economy. If the same set of goods/services can be produced by cheaper machines, then these machines replace humans and the jobs disappear. But the economics of structural change, combined with deep-seated features of human preferences, suggests something different: as people get richer, they don’t just want more commodities. They want things that aren’t commodities in the standard sense of the word.

…If this is right, then AI won’t just automate the commodity economy. It will trigger the emergence of something new: a post-commodity economy, where a growing share of expenditure goes toward goods and services whose value is inseparable from the human who provided them.

«

Fingers crossed! Artisan everything coming your way!
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Ed Miliband unveils move to delink UK gas and electricity prices • Financial Times

Rachel Millard, Ashley Armstrong and Jim Pickard:

»

The UK government will increase taxes on wind and solar farms in a bid to push them on to fixed-price contracts, as part of plans to cut the link between electricity and gas prices in Britain. 

The move, confirmed by the government on Tuesday, comes after the Iran war created pressure for a rethink on how electricity prices are set.

The blockade of the Strait of Hormuz has pushed up gas prices and led to higher electricity prices, because gas-fired power stations typically set the wholesale price across the market under Britain’s “pay-as-clear” electricity market design. 

Ed Miliband, the energy secretary, said that renewable power stations that currently received subsidies under the legacy “renewables obligation” scheme would be encouraged to sign so-called contracts for difference, under which the state guarantees them a fixed electricity price regardless of the wholesale price, funded by a levy on consumer bills.

They would continue to receive renewable obligation subsidies as well, the government said. Power station owners will be able to apply for the contracts next year. Generators supplying roughly 30% of Britain’s power supplies receive renewable obligation certificates.

Alongside this, ministers will from July increase by 10 percentage points the windfall tax on power generators that are not signed up to contracts for difference, partly to encourage them to do so.

…However, the extent to which the move lowers costs for consumers will depend on the fixed price level the generators receive. Meanwhile, analysts said the threshold for the windfall tax was higher than the typical price of power sold by affected companies.

«

So this is not quite the sundering of pricing to give us cheap renewable power a lot of the time, or even some sort of average. The floor price goes up, but the ceiling comes down?
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The first sixty seconds • Jørgen Melau´s Mixed Physiology

Jørgen Melau:

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When people ask me what kills in cold water, they expect me to say hypothermia. But hypothermia is slow. The real killer is much faster, and it usually strikes before you have even started swimming. Let me try to explain why, and what you can do about it.

1. The cold shock response.
The moment cold water hits bare skin, your body panics. The nerves in your skin fire a huge alarm signal to the brain and the heart. You gasp. You hyperventilate. Your heart rate jumps. Your blood pressure climbs. All of this in a few seconds.

Michael Tipton described this sequence in 1989, and it has not really changed since. The first gasp alone is two to three liters of air, pulled in uncontrollably in the first second after you hit the water. If your face happens to be under water at that moment, you do not breathe in air. You breathe in water. This is how strong pool swimmers drown ten meters from a boat.

2. The diving response
At the same time, the opposite reflex is triggered. Cold water on the face, together with holding your breath, sets off what is called the diving response. Your heart slows down. The blood vessels in your arms and legs squeeze shut. This is a very old reflex. Every mammal that dives under water has it, from seals to humans.

On its own, the diving response is harmless. On its own, the cold shock response is unpleasant but survivable. The problem is when they happen at the same time.

3. Autonomic conflict
In 2012, Mike Shattock and Mike Tipton gave this problem a name: autonomic conflict. Here is what happens. The cold shock response is telling the heart to speed up, now. The diving response is telling the heart to slow down, now. Both signals are maximum. Both arrive at the same time.

«

What Melau doesn’t point out, but becomes clear as you read this, is why people used to tell you not to go in the water within half an hour of eating. The whole of this is fascinating, and important for triathletes and others who have to jump into cold water and try to do things.
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It’s not just one thing — it’s another thing • TechCrunch

Amanda Silberling:

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Sometimes, things are not just one thing — they’re also another thing. This sentence construction (“It’s not just this — it’s that”) has become so common in AI-generated writing that now, it’s no longer just a clue that a piece of writing may be synthetic — it’s almost a guarantee.

That’s why I was not just intrigued when I saw a Barron’s report about how this sentence construction has dramatically increased in corporate communications — I was deeply amused. The report didn’t just remark on the prevalence of this phrasing in corporate communications — it scanned the market intelligence firm AlphaSense’s database to find how often this phrasing was used in corporate news releases, earnings reports, and government filings.

According to Barron’s, this sentence construction isn’t just a quirk of corporate communications — it’s an epidemic, more than quadrupling from about 50 mentions in 2023, to over 200 uses in 2025.

…It’s not just coincidental that generative AI tools use this phrase a lot — it’s a reflection of our writing, which these tools were trained on (without our permission, might I add, which is not just insulting to writers — it’s a violation). And it’s not just this sentence construction — it’s also em-dashes that are now considered a tell for AI-generated text.

This isn’t just a funny trend — it’s symbolic of how reliant these companies have become on AI (though we cannot say for certain if the above missives were AI-assisted). So next time you see a sentence like that, remember that it’s not just a catchy construction — it might be a symptom of something greater.

«

This is perhaps the best way to point to the slow infection of this style into corporatespeak. Though not that slow; the graph shows an exponential increase.
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Peter Thiel is building a parallel justice system — powered by AI • Coda Story

Nic Dawes:

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In 2016, when Peter Thiel killed Gawker, he insisted that he wasn’t attacking journalism writ large. 

On the contrary, he told the New York Times, he’d spent $10 million secretly backing Hulk Hogan’s lawsuit against the news outlet because: “I saw Gawker pioneer a unique and incredibly damaging way of getting attention by bullying people even when there was no connection with the public interest… if I didn’t think Gawker was unique, I wouldn’t have done any of this. If the entire media was more or less like this, this would be like trying to boil the ocean.” 

10 years later with the aid of an “AI tribunal,” a team of intelligence and law enforcement veterans, and a political climate vastly more hostile to press freedom, he is trying to do exactly that, bypassing the courts, short-circuiting the first amendment, and making it much, much cheaper to indulge in the quasi legal harassment of journalists.

Objection.ai is a new startup funded by Thiel, and cofounded by Aron D’Souza, who worked closely with him on the Gawker case. It promises “a fast affordable way to challenge statements in the media.” Anyone can file an objection, which will trigger an investigation by a team hired, the company says, from the CIA, FBI, and British intelligence agencies. Targeted outlets and reporters will have an opportunity to respond, and the results will be fed to an AI model, which will render a verdict. The complainant, and the target, are asked to agree to binding arbitration, with an unspecified range of potential consequences. Financial details are vague, but the company has said the process will cost around $2,000 — far less than the retainer of a crisis communications expert.

An initial slate of cases includes objections against the New York Times, for reporting on how Thiel’s fellow traveller David Sacks, former PayPal chief operating officer and Donald Trump’s former “AI and Crypto Czar,” uses his White House position to benefit Silicon Valley connections; The Wall Street Journal for its revelations about the doodle contributed by Donald Trump to Jeffrey Epstein’s birthday book (a case recently dismissed by a federal judge); and British reporter Hannah Broughton for an aggregated story in the UK tabloid the Mirror about allegations that Amazon workers were told to continue working while a colleague lay dead on the warehouse floor.

«

I don’t think people are going to agree to this in the US, and it would have only limited applicability elsewhere.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

The Metropolitan Police’s use of live facial recognition was ruled lawful by the High Court, denying a pressure group’s challenge. CC-licensed photo by Garry Knight on Flickr.

You can sign up to receive each day’s Start Up post by email. You’ll need to click a confirmation link, so no spam.

A selection of 10 links for you. Recognisable. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.

Apple turnaround • Hypercritical

John Siracusa:

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I spend a lot of time thinking about what Apple should be doing differently. I wrote Apple Turnover because so many of my notions kept running into a dead end: I could no longer bring myself to believe Apple would do these things without a change in leadership.

When a company is described as being “in turnaround,” that usually means it needs to be restored to financial health and solvency. Apple in the late 1990s was in turnaround. Apple today is one of the most successful companies in the history of the world, regularly reporting huge profits, so the term may seem inapplicable.

There’s an old adage: never let a good crisis go to waste. When things get bad, people are more open to changes they previously wouldn’t consider. But avoiding a crisis entirely is even better. This is where Apple finds itself today: in need of turnaround-scale changes, but not currently in the kind of (usually financial) crisis that will motivate its leaders to make them.

New leadership is almost always part of a turnaround. In part, that’s because poor financial performance is one of the few remaining sins for which CEOs are reliably held to account. But it’s also because certain kinds of changes need the credibility that only new faces can bring.

So what are those changes? What are the things I think Apple should do, but that its current leadership seems unwilling to budge on? What changes require a level of engagement and understanding that Apple no longer seems to have?

«

Siracusa wrote this in May 2025 – 11 months ago – when nobody (outside Apple) had any clue about who was coming next, or when, but all the points he makes (about developer relations, about premium products and experiences, growth and the future.
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Apple CEO Tim Cook will step down, to be succeeded by hardware chief John Ternus • The Washington Post

Chris Velazco and Gerrit De Vynck:

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[Tim] Cook launched hugely popular new devices, including the Apple Watch and AirPods. He used the ongoing popularity of the iPhone to build a massive services business, which now brings in more than $100bn in revenue each year selling subscriptions to Apple Music, Apple TV and taking a cut from transactions inside mobile apps.

But Cook had yet to deliver a clear sign of Apple’s next act would be, even as its Silicon Valley rivals charge ahead into the AI era. While other large tech companies, including Google and Microsoft, are collectively spending hundreds of billions of dollars on computer chips and infrastructure to train powerful AI models, Apple has instead opted to use AI from other companies inside its products.

Under Cook’s watch, some forward-looking projects, like the company’s car initiative, have faltered after years of work. The muted consumer response to the Vision Pro headset and Apple Intelligence features launched to help the iPhone compete in artificial intelligence have led tech reviewers and analysts to question Apple’s focus and future.

“While Cook has kept Apple’s growth trajectory moving at a steady clip, he has not overseen a step-change innovation that would reset Apple’s competitive position for the next two decades,” Dipanjan Chatterjee, principle analyst at tech research firm Forrester said.

Ternus’s appointment in some ways signals continuity with rather than a break from the past. The incoming CEO has worked at Apple for 25 years, and Cook will continue to be a core part of Apple’s leadership when he transitions to executive chairman in September. Apple’s announcement emphasized Ternus’s work with hardware products and did not mention AI.

Despite the questions around Apple’s AI strategy, the company is a strong position. Its market capitalization is over $4 trillion, making it the world’s third-most valuable company behind AI chipmaker Nvidia and Google. Investors barely reacted to the news of Cook’s forthcoming job change, with Apple shares down less than 1% in post-market trading.

«

The pitch was carefully rolled for this, hence the lack of scared horses in the stock market. You can argue about whether the FT was quietly leaked the information about Cook going and Ternus replacing him. If you think that’s the case, notice that Apple chose to tell the FT, not Mark Gurman at Bloomberg. That must smart for Gurman.
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What physical “life force” turns biology’s wheels? • Quanta Magazine

Natalie Wolchover:

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Since the discovery of the bacterial flagellar motor in the 1970s, biologists and creationists alike have marveled at its design like medieval architects staring with awe at the dome of the Pantheon built by their Roman ancestors. It’s hard to fathom the level of engineering achievable by a billion years of bacterial evolution, especially with only 20 minutes between cell generations, which allows for a truly astronomical number of mutations and trial runs. Creationists hold up the bacterial flagellar motor as a prime example of intelligent design — specifically the concept of “irreducible complexity,” a biological system so intricate, they say, that it couldn’t possibly have arisen in stages through the gradual, stepwise process of Darwinian evolution.

Yet it very much did.

Over the past few decades, scientists have toiled to unravel how the flagellar motor works — namely, how it rotates and switches directions.

Now they finally have. A wave of studies since 2020 has cracked the molecular structures of the flagellar motor’s parts, including, most importantly, the small cogwheels that turn the larger cogwheel at the flagellum’s base. The final pieces of this dynamic puzzle fell into place as recently as March 2026.

“My lifelong quest is now fulfilled,” said Mike Manson, a professor emeritus of biophysics at Texas A&M University who started studying the flagellar motor in the 1970s. “I finally understand how this thing I’ve been studying for 50 years actually works. That’s about as satisfying as can be.”

The workings of the flagellar motor are ingenious indeed. But when I began interviewing these scientists about what they’ve figured out, I didn’t anticipate that the explanation of the motor would clarify all of biology for someone like me, who seeks mechanistic, physical explanations. The machine, I learned, exploits a driving force I had not known about (though biophysicists have) — the physical “life force” that powers processes in cells. This “proton motive force” doesn’t just turn the cogs of the flagellar motor; it’s the juice we all run on.

«

Just like human-scale motors, this molecular one also has stators, and also uses magneto-electrical forces to induce rotation. The illustration at the top of the article is a marvel in itself.
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Lufthansa cuts 20,000 flights to save fuel as prices soar • Financial Times

Peter Campbell, Ian Johnston and Sebastien Ash:

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Lufthansa has cancelled 20,000 flights between May and October to save fuel, in one of the largest cuts by global airlines as jet fuel prices double following the Iran war. 

The German carrier cancelled about 120 daily flights from Monday and said it would drop unprofitable routes from Munich and Frankfurt until the end of the summer season, which runs to mid-October.

“In total, 20,000 short-haul flights will be removed from the schedule through October, equivalent to approximately 40,000 metric tonnes of jet fuel, the price of which has doubled since the outbreak of the Iran conflict,” Lufthansa said on Tuesday.

The exact plan for the summer months would be published in “late April or early May” and include “optimisations to the short-haul offering for the entire summer season, thereby ensuring schedule stability for the flight plan period”, it added. 

The cuts were confirmed as European transport ministers met on Tuesday to discuss plans to prevent the region running short of jet fuel, after the International Energy Agency warned Europe had less than six weeks of supplies remaining.

The EU was exploring whether it could source an alternative American jet fuel not routinely used in Europe, and might allow airlines to take on larger amounts of fuel outside the region, EU transport commissioner Apostolos Tzitzikostas said.

«

Lufthansa runs about 90,000 flights per month, so if this refers to May-October inclusive, that’s only 3% of flights (and 0.4% of annual fuel use of ~10m tonnes). But these are first steps.
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Internal emails show how Amazon raises prices across the internet, lawsuit says • Ars Technica

Ashley Belanger:

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Newly unsealed emails reveal the sneaky ways that Amazon colludes with rivals to raise prices across the Internet on “everything from diapers to clothing to furniture,” California Attorney General Rob Bonta alleged in a press release Monday.

“Amazon and a competitor will knowingly stop price matching each other, so that one retailer can increase its price, and the other retailer can match to the new, higher price,” Bonta alleged, pointing to one of three such schemes described in Amazon emails. “Thus, both competitors start selling at a higher price, increase their profits, and consumers pay more.”

The emails surfaced in a lawsuit that the state of California filed in 2022, accusing Amazon of wielding its tremendous influence as the world’s largest retailer to pressure vendors into increasing prices on rival e-commerce websites or removing products from cheaper platforms entirely. According to The New York Times, these emails offer “a rare behind-the-scenes look at how Amazon operates its $2.66 trillion empire.”

Amazon works in three ways to pressure vendors into manipulating competitor prices, Bonta alleged.

In one supposed scheme, Amazon proposes price matching by agreeing to increase the price of a product or temporarily pause its sales, which then allows the other retailer to raise its price.

Another route Amazon frequently takes flips that scheme. When Amazon sees a rival offering a product at a price it considers unprofitable, it pressures vendors to get the rival to raise their price to a level Amazon likes. Once the rival raises its price, Amazon then matches it.

Finally, Amazon allegedly follows a third, arguably more aggressive, path to get vendors to remove products entirely from platforms offering lower prices. That way, Amazon won’t be forced to lower its price to compete.

All three scenarios raise prices for consumers, Bonta alleged.

«

All companies want to become monopolies, and then they want to rent-seek.
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Shakeup will help UK motorists without driveways to charge EVs • The Guardian

Jillian Ambrose:

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Households without off-street parking could soon be able to charge their electric vehicles from home under new government plans to help households cut their need for expensive fossil fuels.

The government has promised to pass legislation this summer that will allow motorists to run power cables through a charging “gully” built into the pavement outside their home without the need for planning permission.

This means that before the end of this year, EV owners who are not able to fit their own car chargers at home will be able to charge up from the power connection indoors.

Motorists are not allowed to string charging cables across the pavement from their home but almost half of councils across the UK allow cross-pavement charging if you embed the cable in a gully. However, this still requires permission from the council.

Charging at home is usually much cheaper than using public car charge points, meaning more motorists may be willing to trade in their petrol and diesel cars for an electric alternative if they know they can access cheaper electricity more easily.

This is partly because public charging has a VAT rate of 20% while home energy includes VAT at 5%. ChargeUK, the trade body for the charging industry, said equalising VAT would help ensure that motorists who cannot charge at home even after the planning changes would not be unfairly penalised.

…Ed Miliband, the energy secretary, said the “overwhelming lesson of this crisis is we need to go faster” on the government’s plans to reduce the UK’s reliance on volatile fossil fuel markets.

“Because every solar panel we put up, every wind turbine we build, every heat pump we install, every EV on the road makes our country more secure,” he told the Good Growth Foundation’s National Growth Debate on Tuesday.

«

However on the very same day: “UK to appeal against tax ruling cutting VAT on public electric car chargers to 5%“. This follows a London tribunal ruling that public chargers should only pay 5% VAT on the energy they supply, not the business rate of 20%. That would cut pricing significantly – and require a refund to public chargers.

So: Ed Miliband says one thing, HMRC says something totally different. Joined-up government, eh.
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Challenge over Met Police’s use of live facial recognition lost • BBC News

Ella Kipling and Dominic Casciani:

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Privacy campaigners have lost a High Court challenge aimed at limiting the Metropolitan Police’s use of live facial recognition technology.

Youth worker Shaun Thompson, and Silkie Carlo, director of campaign group Big Brother Watch, brought the challenge over concerns that facial recognition could be used arbitrarily or in a discriminatory way.

In a major victory for the continued roll-out of the technology, the High Court rejected claims that the Met Police had broken human rights and privacy law by scanning faces in public.

The force will continue to use the technology, with commissioner Sir Mark Rowley calling the ruling an “important victory for public safety”.

Shaun Thompson has said he intends to appeal the decision.

Policing Minister Sarah Jones said: “I welcome today’s ruling because there can be no true liberty when people live in fear of crime in their communities.” She added that facial recognition technology would be rolled out across the country with “record investment”. Law-abiding citizens have “nothing to fear” as the technology “only locates specifically wanted people”, Jones said.

Scotland Yard deploys identifiable live facial recognition vans to selected locations around the capital. Once set up – and marked with signage – the cameras are turned on and scan people walking through the chosen area, such as a busy high street. The images are instantly compared to a database of wanted criminals or missing people.

If a face does not match anyone on the database, the system deletes the image instantly. If it finds a possible match, it alerts officers who then double-check the hit before deciding whether to stop the individual.

«

You can read the full decision, which is very detailed arguments around Article 8 rights and limits of the law. It feels like BBW is not going to succeed in this challenge, though there’s still the Court of Appeal and, if allowed, the Supreme Court.
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Guinea worm disease reaches all-time low: only 10 human cases reported in 2025 • The Carter Center

Emily DSTaub:

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Only 10 human cases of Guinea worm were reported worldwide in 2025, the lowest number ever recorded, bringing the ancient disease closer than ever to eradication. The Carter Center announced the historic provisional figure following the one-year anniversary of the passing of the Center’s founder, former US President Jimmy Carter.

“President Carter always said he wanted to outlast the last Guinea worm. While he didn’t quite get his wish, he and Mrs. Carter would be proud to know there were only 10 human cases reported in 2025. And they would remind us that the work continues until we reach zero,” said Carter Center CEO Paige Alexander.

Poised to be only the second human disease eradicated after smallpox, the 10 Guinea worm cases mark a 33% decline from the 15 cases reported in 2024.

When The Carter Center assumed leadership of the global Guinea worm eradication campaign in 1986, an estimated 3.5 million human cases occurred annually in 21 countries in Africa and Asia.

“This campaign reflects the values that shaped my grandparents’ lives — the conviction that hope, hard work, and respect for everyone can change the world. Seeing Guinea worm cases reach historic lows is one of the clearest expressions of that legacy and our commitment to the communities where trust has been earned,” said Jason Carter, Carter Center board chair and eldest grandchild of President and Mrs. Carter.

Together with partners, including the countries themselves, the campaign has reduced the waterborne, parasitic disease by more than 99.99% since 1986 and averted more than 100 million cases of this devastating disease among the world’s most marginalized and neglected populations.

Guinea worm is one of 21 neglected tropical diseases (NTDs), a group of preventable and treatable diseases that affect more than 1.7 billion people around the world. The Carter Center announcement comes on the seventh anniversary of World NTD Day, which is celebrated each year on Jan. 30.

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This release is from January, but it’s worth noting. Fingers crossed for zero this year.
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Does your boss have AI brain? • Milkkarten

Rachel Karten:

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Not only is leadership using AI in their own work, but they are forcing employees to use it as well. The problem is that many of the tasks that bosses are asking their team to use AI for are the exact ones that made them want to work in marketing in the first place. Brainstorming. Writing clever copy. Thinking outside of the box. One marketer told me, “It feels like our bosses are more intent on using AI to take away the fun parts of our job instead of automating the more menial tasks that take up so much of our time day-to-day.”

Some employees are finding workarounds. One person shared that their boss “doesn’t care about his team’s experience and expertise. He wants a summary from Copilot instead. We’ve started writing our own summaries and putting it on fake Copilot chats to get him to listen to us.”

So much of good marketing is instincts. Seeing the signs before anyone else. Translating a spark into a smart campaign. Knowing the line between brilliance and brash. With AI, we’re watching decision makers run big ideas through a machine that finds the median.

One of the people who left their job in part due to an AI-obsessed boss shared the worst offense. Their boss would put memes meant to be posted on social pages into Claude to see if they were funny.

I asked some of the marketers I spoke with if their boss’s use of AI has changed their perception of them. Many said it did. When the person who is supposedly in a role because of their experience and intelligence is constantly outsourcing their instincts to AI, it says to a team, “I don’t trust my own opinions on humor, storytelling, and marketing”. Which, if that’s the case, wouldn’t that make those leadership jobs the most susceptible to be replaced by AI?

One person shared, “It validates to me how absolutely unqualified and inept these people in C-suite positions are that they need a machine/robot to validate their opinions because they have no real POV and strategy themselves. They so desperately want to always be the right answer in the room. To have a machine that can’t argue back and essentially feeds their own thoughts back to them is a case study in the narcissism of executive leadership.”

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Come the day when some of these companies fail, and the AI stuff that was posted into the Slack chats will be.. well, read on.
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AI’s new training data: your old work Slacks and emails • Forbes

Anna Tong:

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When Shanna Johnson was winding down cielo24, the transcription and captioning company she ran as CEO, she discovered an unexpected asset: its operational exhaust—the digital leftovers that pile up across years of work and collaboration.

To close the company out, she worked with SimpleClosure, a startup that specializes in helping companies wind down. SimpleClosure helped her through the usual shutdown paperwork — closing out payroll and taxes, getting investor consents in order, and filing paperwork with the IRS. Then came the part nobody puts in the founder playbook: selling off cielo24’s 13-year digital footprint—every Slack joke, every Jira ticket, emails documenting internal victories or frustrations sitting in employees’ multi-terabyte Google Drives—as training data for the next generation of AI. For that, cielo24 received “hundreds of thousands of dollars,” which Johnson said helped her go from “I don’t know how we are going to pay our bills” to “we can tie this up neatly with a bow and be able to walk away”.

“I’m still a bit emotional about shutting the company down,” she told Forbes. “But it’s cool to think that our data could be useful, live on and help other people.”

It’s a clean ending for a messy reality: the company didn’t survive, but its work trail did. And in 2026, that trail can be worth real money. Johnson’s data sale isn’t an isolated exit strategy; it is a new frontier in the AI arms race.

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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

The sword tip is effectively invisible in competition fencing – but a new system will make it much more visible on TV. CC-licensed photo by Robert Scales on Flickr.

You can sign up to receive each day’s Start Up post by email. You’ll need to click a confirmation link, so no spam.

A selection of 9 links for you. Touching. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome. (We can do the Tim Cook/John Ternus stuff tomorrow.)

Fencing tracking and visualization system • Rhizomatiks

»

Rhizomatiks has been developing the “Fencing tracking and visualization system,” which is the core technology of the “Fencing Visualized Project,” in collaboration with Dentsu Lab Tokyo. It uses AR technology to visualize the tips of swords in motion. Building on various development processes since 2012, the system has been updated to utilize deep learning to visualize sword tips without markers. The system enables detection of sword tips, which human eyes cannot follow, and real time AR synthesis to instantly visualize the trajectory.

This website explains the process of our development from 2012 to the present.

…A fencing sword tip is difficult to follow with the naked eye, but we thought that it could be captured with a high-speed camera tracking a small marker on the tip of the sword. We began by conducting a feasibility study.

After the study, we became certain that it was possible to track a sword tip by placing a marker onto it, even with technologies accessible in 2012. We created video footage visualizing the trajectory of a sword tip using AR technology, which was included in a video for Tokyo’s bid to host the 2020 Summer Olympic and Paralympic Games.

In addition, seeing that improvements in machine learning and image analysis technologies would make it highly possible to use the system in real matches without markers on the tip of the sword by the time of the Tokyo 2020 Olympics, we planned and proposed the “Fencing tracking and visualization system,” a fundamental technology that uses AR technology to visualize the trajectory of the sword tip, and started research and development.

Thanks to real-time trajectory detection, fencing is now evolving into a sport that everyone can enjoy based on understanding of what is happening in the match.

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You do need to go and look at the videos on the website. As they say, it’s impossible to follow the sword tip in normal vision, but this turns it into a light sabre event. It will be used for TV broadcast of fencing championships later this summer. A real triumph for making a sport more comprehensible by increasing its visibility. (Oddly, when a similar scheme was tried with tennis – showing the path and landing points of the ball in rallies – it just looked terrible.)
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Deezer says 44% of new music uploads are AI-generated, most streams are fraudulent • Ars Technica

Ryan Whitwam:

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Deezer says it has developed technology to detect AI uploads, and it’s one of the few streamers to explicitly label such content. As generative audio models have proliferated, the rate of AI uploads to Deezer has reached a staggering 44%—that’s 75,000 new AI tracks on Deezer every single day. Deezer licenses this technology to third parties, which it claims has a false positive rate of less than 0.01%.

Still, listeners shouldn’t encounter AI music organically on Deezer because the site won’t include AI-flagged tracks in suggestions or editorial playlists. As a result, AI music streams account for a small share of Deezer usage, hovering around 1–3%. The company says the primary purpose of uploading all this AI music is fraudulent. Deezer only pays for streams when a person listens to them, so it’s demonetizing about 85% of AI music streams.

“Thanks to our technology and the proactive measures we put in place more than a year ago, we have shown that it’s possible to reduce AI-related fraud and payment dilution in streaming to a minimum,” said Deezer CEO Alexis Lanternier.

The growth of AI music is likely to continue accelerating with the rest of the AI industry. Models like Google’s Lyria 3 have become cheaper and more widely available. Google actually lets Gemini users generate full-length songs now, up from 30-second snippet tracks just a few months ago. Suno and Udio also promote their ability to create broadcast-ready tracks in seconds. However, these mainstream options embed watermarks, like Google’s SynthID, to flag the songs as AI.

«

Sturgeon’s Law is that 90% of everything is crap, so the AI uploading has a little way to go. Don’t forget it was 0% a couple of years ago.
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The National Parking Platform (NPP)

»

The NPP is a not-for-profit, open platform that connects multiple parking service providers to thousands of locations nationwide.

Instead of asking drivers to download another app, it integrates the ones they already use, making parking simple, seamless, and consistent everywhere.

Created by the Department for Transport and now run independently, the NPP is governed by Local Authorities, service providers, and the British Parking Association — ensuring it grows based on collaboration and real-world feedback.

«

Hurrah! The long-promised single parking app is here (or at least, in 15 local authorities at the time of writing). Strangely, we were told its funding had been withdrawn in March 2025, but councils seemed to have chipped in to get it to happen, possibly with the cooperation of the parking app providers: six of them are involved in this scheme, and the implication seems to be that you can use any of the six to park anywhere (if you’re in one of the areas where it’s live).

Long way to go: there are well over 300 local authorities in the UK.
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When your digital life vanishes • The New Yorker

Julian Lucas:

»

For thousands of data-loss victims, the last resort is a recovery service called DriveSavers. It’s a half hour from San Francisco over the Golden Gate Bridge, in the balmy, scenic suburb of Novato. The boxy, low-rise office overlooks a verdant wetland frequented by otters and egrets. Visiting in January, I felt that I’d arrived in hard-disk heaven.

I was greeted by Sarah Farrell and Mike Cobb, two directors of the company. Farrell, a teacherly woman with blond hair and a beekeeping hobby, oversees business development but used to be an engineer. “In the lab, I just assume everything has been in the toilet,” she told me. “During covid, I can’t even tell you what people spilled on their MacBooks.” Cobb, who runs engineering, is a genial man with lively blue eyes, and once saved a computer tower from a burrowing squirrel: “He peed right on the power supply.” Cutesy anecdotes alternated with triumphs and tragedies—a school district rescued from a ransomware gang, an iPad salvaged from a plane crash. “They made me too sad,” Farrell said of the worst cases. “I had to be, like, ‘Symptoms, no story,’ or I’d never be able to go home.”

Their handiwork was on display in the lobby’s Museum of Bizarre Diskasters, an exhibition of silicon carnage. “I remember opening this one out on the deck,” Cobb said of an ancient Toshiba laptop, which had burned shut in a fire. “It was like an oyster.” One successfully recovered smartphone had been shredded by a snowblower. Another had been sliced in two by a monorail, like a magician’s assistant. The company regularly buys brand-new devices and tears them to pieces. “It’s like the jaws of life,” Cobb said. “If a car gets absolutely demolished, you need to know what to cut and what not to cut.”

«

One thing I notice nowadays – by its absence – is the wailing of journalists, authors and photographers as their hard drive crashes and wipes out hours or days or months or years of work. Ten years ago, it would be a regular feature of social media. These days, you hardly ever see them. There’s a simple reason: SSDs are far more reliable than spinning hard drives. (Though cryptocurrency and forgotten passwords seem to have kept the disk savers in business.)
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At long last, InfoWars is ours • The Onion

Bryce P. Tetraeder, CEO, Global Tetrahedron:

»

Let me tell you a story. When I was a child, I suffered from night terrors. It was always the same dream: I could hear my family and neighbors wailing in the street outside as they were pursued and then destroyed by a nameless malevolent force, something neither I nor anyone else could control, a great darkness that was, somehow, all my fault.

Today, that childhood dream is finally coming true. Today I can finally say the sweetest nine or 10 words in the English language: Global Tetrahedron has completed its plan to control InfoWars.com.

I’ve had a lot of time to think about InfoWars in the last year and a half. As the seasons have changed, my ambitions for the project have grown grander, crueler, better aligned with market data. Come, friends, and imagine with me…

Imagine a roaring arena packed to the rafters with pathological liars. High above you in the nosebleeds are podcasters, screaming that you’ll die if you don’t buy their skincare products. Below, on the floor, imagine demonic battalions of super-influencers physically forcing people into home fitness devices designed to dismantle their bodies bone by bone and reassemble them into a grotesque statue of yourself. Out of the throngs, an extremely sick looking man approaches you. He puts his hands on your shoulders. He explains that he is your life coach and that you owe him $800.

Such is the InfoWars I envision: An infinite virtual surface teeming with ads. Not just ads, but scams! Not just scams, but lies with no object, free radical misinformation, sentences and images so poorly thought out that they are unhealthy even to view for just a few seconds. The InfoWars of old was only the prototype for the hell I know we can build together: A digital platform where, every day, visitors sacrifice themselves at altars of delusion and misery, their minds fully disintegrating on contact.

«

Seems like The Onion’s finally peeled InfoWars away from Alex Jones cold (though not dead) hands in the bankruptcy proceeding.
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Pancreatic cancer mRNA vaccine shows lasting results in an early trial • NBC News

Kaitlin Sullivan, Marina Kopf and Anne Thompson:

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Donna Gustafson had a harder time than usual shaking off the jet lag from her 22-hour journey from Florida to Australia. Two days into her trip, her skin took on the yellow hue of jaundice.

Gustafson, who is now 72 and lives in Delray Beach, Florida, went to the emergency room for fluids, thinking she was dehydrated. In a surreal moment, the Australian doctors instead told Gustafson that she had pancreatic cancer.

“They were very adamant about it,” Gustafson said. “This is absolutely pancreatic cancer.”

She and her husband, Ed, were on the next flight home. Nine days later, Gustafson had surgery to remove the Stage 2 cancer from her pancreas. The day before she was supposed to start chemotherapy, her doctors told her about a clinical trial exploring the use of personalized messenger RNA vaccines for cancer. It was February 2020 — months before mRNA vaccines for Covid would become one of the world’s hottest commodities. Very soon after, Gustafson was the first person to get one for pancreatic cancer.

“It was a no-brainer,” Gustafson said of joining the trial. “I knew that statistically, the odds were against me.”

Less than 13% of people diagnosed with pancreatic cancer live for more than five years, making it one of the deadliest cancers. There is no routine screening for pancreatic cancer, such as colonoscopy or mammogram, and symptoms typically don’t show up until the disease is advanced. Once detected, there are few options for treatment. Only about 20% of cases are operable, which is currently required for someone to be eligible to join a pancreatic cancer vaccine trial.

…[Dr Vinod] Balachandran [who led the team] and his team published the results of the Phase 1 clinical trial last year. At the time, the patients, all of whom had early-stage disease before they joined the trial, had only been tracked for just over three years, and it was unclear whether the immune response would last and lead to the patients living longer, he said. New data collected during the trial’s six-year follow-up period shows that it may. Those findings will be presented Monday at the American Association for Cancer Research’s annual meeting in San Diego.

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It’s impossible to overstate how amazing this is. Pancreatic cancer (the standard form, rather than the version Steve Jobs had) is absolutely murderous. A six-year survival period is unheard of.
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Scientists stunned by “fundamentally new way” life produces DNA • Science

Richard Stone:

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For decades, biology textbooks have enshrined a simple rule: DNA is made by copying a template. After one enzyme unzips a DNA double helix into separate strands, another called a polymerase builds a complementary sequence, base by base, for each strand. Presto: two copies of the original DNA. But new research into how bacteria defend themselves from viruses now shows this synthesis rule isn’t absolute. Today in Science, a Stanford University team describes a bacterial enzyme that synthesizes DNA without a nucleic acid template, using its own structure as a guide.

“The research is groundbreaking,” says Philip Kranzusch, a biochemist at Harvard Medical School who studies bacterial defenses. “Pretty cool!” adds Adi Millman, a computational biologist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The use of a protein as a template for DNA synthesis, she says, “is a meaningful conceptual shift from the classical central dogma,” in which information flows in one direction from nucleic acids like DNA to protein. Scientists hope the novel form of DNA synthesis can be adapted as a tool for basic biological research, much like the powerful genome editor CRISPR was developed from another bacterial defense system.

…“The protein itself serves as the blueprint for the DNA sequence,” says Stanford biochemist Alex Gao, senior author on the study. “That was quite a surprise,” he says. “This is a fundamentally new way that life produces DNA.”

DRT3 [a defence system that protects bacteria from viruses called phages that infect them] appears to be widespread across bacteria, suggesting it is not a biochemical curiosity. Yet how it thwarts phages is still a mystery.

One possibility, Gao says, is that DNA helices made by this unique replication method act as molecular sponges that glom onto phage components, either directly hindering the phage or enabling other bacterial immune elements to recognize the infection.

«

Anything that makes us reevaluate our understanding of how cells work and reproduce has the potential to make a big difference in the future.
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Florida is about to lose its most famous symbol forever. What happened? • Slate

Alexander Sammon:

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In 2003, the mighty Florida orange industry produced 242 million boxes of fruit, with 90 pounds of oranges per box, most of which went on to become orange juice. Now, not even 25 years later, the United States Department of Agriculture was forecasting a pitiful 12 million boxes of oranges, the least in more than 100 years, the worst year since last; a decline of more than 95%.

And everyone knew, more or less, that even that figure was not happening. “Twelve million? I would doubt it,” Matt Joyner, CEO of Florida Citrus Mutual, the state’s largest trade group, told me. There was chatter that even 11 million might be out of reach. Could the total end up being less than that, just seven figures? In Florida, the citrus capital of the world, you are today more likely to see the oranges printed on the state’s 18 million license plates than a box of actual fruit.

Rick Dantzler, chief operating officer of the Citrus Research and Development Foundation, took the podium. He was blunt. “It’s been a dumpster fire of a year,” he said.

On the list of immediate problems: the implementation of tariffs and retaliatory tariffs, then the government shutdown, then a stunning, historic freeze, days long, at the end of January and early February, that besieged the fragile orange trees.

And yet those, too, were just footnotes to the even larger problem. Already, Florida had lost about three-quarters of its citrus growers. The last of them, these spent survivors, these hangers-on, had trudged to the Citrus Show to talk about the real problem, which was the disease.

In 2005, Florida first got signs of a new affliction in its groves called citrus greening disease. It also has a Chinese name, Huanglongbing, or HLB, because it came from China, where oranges also came from in the first place.

Citrus greening disease is caused by a bacterial infection that is delivered by the gnawing of the Asian citrus psyllid. (It’s now believed the psyllid first turned up near the Port of Miami in 1998.) The flea-sized psyllid bites the leaves and transmits the disease, which slowly chokes out the tree’s vascular system from the inside, taking years to finally show itself. By the time a tree is displaying symptoms—three to five years, in most cases—it’s too late.

…I asked numerous people—farmers and industry leaders and researchers—to estimate how many trees in Florida now have greening. The answer was resounding: 100%. Every single tree.

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Not all hope is lost. But almost all. There may be cures or fixes; but maybe not.
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Renewables overtake natural gas in US power generation for first time • Energy Live News

Sumit Bose:

»

Renewable energy sources generated more electricity than natural gas in the United States for the first time last month, marking a significant milestone in the transition to clean energy.

According to data from Ember, renewables including solar, wind, hydropower and bioenergy became the largest source of US electricity in March. Combined with nuclear power, they supplied more than half of total generation.

The milestone reflects rapid growth in wind and solar capacity alongside a seasonal drop in electricity demand. Milder spring weather typically reduces the need for heating and cooling, allowing fossil fuel generation to scale back.

As a result, fossil fuels produced less electricity than in any March for at least 25 years, while renewable generation reached a record high.

Despite this progress, rising electricity demand is complicating the transition. Solar, wind and batteries are expected to account for 93% of new power capacity added this year, according to the Energy Information Administration.

However, increasing demand from sectors such as data centres is sustaining the role of fossil fuels. Some technology companies are installing natural gas generators, while grid operators are delaying the closure of coal plants.

«

The collapse in fossil fuel availability is surely going to make a difference there, although it might take a little while for the supertanker to turn, so to speak.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

The British Board of Film Censorship has reccruited AI to classify content on HBO Max in the UK. CC-licensed photo by Rachel on Flickr.

You can sign up to receive each day’s Start Up post by email. You’ll need to click a confirmation link, so no spam.

A selection of 10 links for you. Unmentionable. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.

The RAM shortage could last years • The Verge

Terrence O’Brien:

»

According to Nikkei Asia, even as suppliers ramp up DRAM production, manufacturers are only expected to meet 60% of demand by the end of 2027. The SK Group chairman has even said that shortages could last until 2030.

The world’s largest memory makers — Samsung, SK Hynix, and Micron — are all working to add new fabrication capacity, but almost none of it will be online until at least 2027, if not 2028. SK opened a fab in Cheongju in February, but that is the only increase in production among the three for 2026.

Nikkei says that production would need to increase by 12% a year in 2026 and 2027 to meet demand. But according to Counterpoint Research, an increase of only 7.5% is planned.

The new facilities will primarily focus on producing high-bandwidth memory (HBM), which is used in AI data centers. With the companies already prioritising HBM over general-purpose DRAM used in computers and phones, it’s not clear how much these new fabs will help alleviate the price crunch facing consumer electronics.

«

Are we going to see adaptations in software to reduced (or not expanding) availability of RAM in most computers in response to this stress, like the adaptation from fossil fuel-driven vehicles to electric vehicles in response to the stress of the closure of the strait of Hormuz? The last situation that resembled it was moving to smartphones, which had less processing capacity, less storage and less RAM. The 20-year cycle comes around.
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Europe has “maybe six weeks of jet fuel left”, energy boss warns • BBC News

Theo Leggett and Jemma Crew:

»

Europe has “maybe six weeks of jet fuel left”, the head of the International Energy Agency (IEA) has warned.

Stocks would reach a tipping point in June if Europe was unable to replace at least half of its imports from the Middle East, the organisation said in a report this week.

The Strait of Hormuz, a key route for jet fuel out of the Gulf, has been effectively closed by Iran for more than six weeks in response to US and Israeli attacks, sending the price rocketing and prompting fears of shortages.

IEA executive director Fatih Birol told the Associated Press there could soon be flight cancellations if supplies remained blocked. In its monthly oil market report, the IEA- which advises 32 member countries on energy supply and security – said exports from the Gulf region were the largest source of jet fuel to the global market.

Refineries in other major exporting countries, such as Korea, India and China were themselves highly dependent on crude oil imports from the Middle East.

As a result, the crisis “has thrown a proverbial wrench into the inner workings of the aviation fuel markets”, it said.
A spokesperson for the UK government told the BBC that it was working with fuel suppliers and airlines to “ensure people keep moving and businesses are supported”.

“UK airlines are clear that they are currently not seeing disruption to supply,” they said.

«

Not currently. But six weeks will pass very rapidly, and with the weekend having passed with minimal traffic through the strait of Hormuz – four cruise liners, not much else – this is not going to be good. It bears repeating.
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Geelong fire: blaze at Australian oil refinery to affect petrol supplies • BBC News

Lana Lam and Tiffanie Turnbull:

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A major fire at one of Australia’s two oil refineries has been extinguished, but the damage has deepened fears over the nation’s petrol supplies amid a global fuel crunch.

Emergency crews rushed to Viva’s Corio oil refinery in Geelong, south-west of Melbourne, just before midnight local time (1400 GMT) on Wednesday, after reports of explosions and flames.

The blaze was put out on Thursday after burning for 13 hours. No one was injured, with dozens of workers on site when it broke out evacuated safely.

The refinery – which produces 50% of Victoria’s fuel and 10% of the nation’s – is still partially operational but the government has warned of impacts to petrol production.

Energy Minister Chris Bowen said the fire was “not great timing” with Australia’s fuel supplies under pressure since war broke out in Iran, creating a global oil crisis.

The price of diesel in Australia has doubled in recent weeks, with fuel stations reporting shortages amid reports of panic buying, while airlines are cutting back some services as jet fuel costs rise.

“This is not a positive development, but obviously there’s a long way to go in terms of working out just what the impact is,” Bowen told Nine’s Today show on Thursday, adding that he was working closely with the company.

…Australia relies heavily on imported refined fuels – primarily from countries like Singapore, South Korea and Malaysia – which should mean any impact the fire has on domestic fuel availability is limited, experts say.

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Limited, but definitely not zero.
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Chinese trucks could go 100% electric, halving road transport oil use: industry • South China Morning Post

Dannie Peng:

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Industry estimates suggest that heavy-duty cargo traffic in China is on track to become nearly 100% electric, a transition that could halve the country’s road transport oil consumption.

Speaking at a forum on intelligent electric vehicle development in Beijing on April 11, Liang Linhe, chairman of Sany Truck – a subsidiary of the Changsha-headquartered multinational Sany Group – said China’s heavy truck sector could eventually be almost entirely electrified, although he did not put a timeline on the transition.

Such a move, he noted, had the potential to cut fuel demand within the road transport sector by about half.

Liang said cost was the overriding factor behind the uptake of electric heavy trucks – vehicles that are engineered for hauling, towing and moving massive volumes of cargo, equipment or raw materials.

“As a means of production, economics is the core consideration,” Liang said. He estimated that much lower transport costs would drive market penetration to a point “even potentially approaching 100%, leaving little room for diesel trucks”.

Given that heavy trucks account for a substantial share of China’s petroleum and diesel consumption, the shift from conventional diesel to electric power is widely viewed as a crucial lever for reducing greenhouse gas emissions and advancing the clean energy transition in China.

Liang said the annual carbon emissions from a single diesel heavy truck were equivalent to those of about 100 petrol-powered cars.

…According to the General Administration of Customs, China imports 42% of its crude oil from Gulf nations. And, transport accounts for around half of China’s oil consumption.

«

Provide the right incentives, and everyone stampedes to the cheaper option. The irony of Trump, the anti-renewables guy, provoking this shift is on a planetary scale.
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Whither Microsoft? A view from the neighborhood • GeekWire

Feroze Motafram:

»

I live in Sammamish, in the shadow of Microsoft’s looming presence. Microsoft employees are my neighbors, my social circle, the people I run into at weekend gatherings. Over time I noticed that conversations with them had a distinctive gravitational pull — always inward, toward reorgs, internal politics, who reports to whom now, who’s ascendant, who’s out. Customers were rarely part of the conversation. This usually means navigating the organization has become more consuming than building anything within it.

Microsoft’s stock decline and the softening of real estate in this corridor (both affecting me personally) were the prompts to write it down. The material was already sitting in front of me.

…Microsoft stock declined roughly 25% in Q1 2026, representing its worst quarterly performance since the 2008 financial crisis despite blockbuster results. The market may overreact, but it is not stupid.

A striking portion of Microsoft’s forward revenue backlog is tied to a single counterparty, OpenAI, an unprofitable startup that has since signed a landmark cloud agreement with Amazon, directly challenging the Azure exclusivity Microsoft had treated as a cornerstone of its AI strategy. Meanwhile, Microsoft is building its own internal AI model as a hedge, an expensive bet layered on top of an already expensive bet.

But the part that does not show up in an earnings report may be the more consequential story. That is what I want to offer here.

…A significant proportion of Microsoft’s engineering talent (and the engineering talent of the broader Seattle tech corridor) consists of H-1B visa holders. These are exceptional professionals: highly educated, deeply skilled, often carrying decade-long career investments in the United States. They have built lives here. Many have children born here. They have been, in many cases, the intellectual engine of the products Microsoft is depending on to compete in the AI era.

That population is operating under a level of personal anxiety that is, in my observation, without modern precedent. Travel advisories from their own employers. A $100,000 petition fee for new visa applications. Proposed rule changes touching birthright citizenship. A policy environment that sends a clear and unambiguous message: your presence here is conditional, negotiable, and subject to revision without notice.

The behavioral consequence of that anxiety is not visible in a quarterly earnings report. But it is real and consequential. People operating under existential personal uncertainty do not take professional risks. They do not champion the bold new initiative. They do not volunteer for the high-visibility project that could fail. They execute reliably on what already exists and protect their position.

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British censors adopt AI to age-rate streamer favourites • The Observer

Vanessa Thorpe:

»

For four points, to what quiz question is “Natasha Kaplinsky” the unexpected right answer? There are, possibly, a few correct responses, but the one I have in mind asks: Which former news reader and Strictly Come Dancing winner now holds the position of Britain’s official film censor? Since 2022, as sharp-eyed cinema-goers will have spotted, it has been Kaplinsky’s signature on the ratings certificate that pops up before any public film screening.

From this month on, however, Kaplinsky will have a new resource to call upon when rating films, television shows or cartoons. Aside from her team of “compliance officers” at the British Board of Film Classification (BBFC), she has been joined by a freshly developed AI film censor.

The BBFC has confirmed the successful deployment of its first AI tool, helping it to classify the whole of HBO Max’s library of entertainment for the UK. The bot has already aided its officers in sticking on BBFC age ratings and drawing up “bespoke” content advice, along classification guidelines.

By using AI, the BBFC says, it has dealt with the streamer’s entire new UK catalogue, from Game of Thrones to Succession, in only six months. It says the same volume of content would probably have taken an officer 1,570 working days to process. David Austin, chief executive of the BBFC, sees it as “a major step forward in how we support families to make safe and informed viewing decisions”.

The AI tool works by highlighting each compliance issue in a film, show or documentary, including scenes of violence, nudity or bad language, so human officers can review the sequence. The BBFC is emphasising that the final age ratings and the advice it hands down will still be decided by trained officers, and that classification standards should not change.

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Operator of slop farm that plagiarizes local journalism boasts that it’s attracting millions of readers • Futurism

Maggie Harrison Dupré:

»

On Tuesday evening, we published an original interview with a researcher who had recently coauthored an intriguing study about the effects of AI on users’ cognition.

A news site called National Today quickly sprang into action: by ten o’clock that night, it had published a piece that was obviously a reworded version of our story, including a direct quote from the interview we’d conducted. But instead of crediting us as the source of the information, as would be conventional, National Today made no mention of Futurism, and didn’t even link to our article. Instead, it presented the reporting as if it were the original source.

In other words, the National Today piece — which bears no byline — is blatant plagiarism. And this isn’t the first time this has happened.

…We’re not the only target. Once we started looking into National Today, we realized that it’s doing the same thing to countless other publications, ranging from top newspapers to local newsrooms across the country: stealing their original reporting and using it to publish a torrent of what appear to clearly be AI-generated articles, complete with bizarre errors and hallucinations. The scope is immense. We tried to count how many it published in a single day, but lost count around 300.

…In addition to the incredible speed at which it churns out all this slop, National Today is full of comically terrible errors that make it difficult to believe that any human is even skimming its articles before publication.

One issue is that the AI generating all the articles often seems to get confused and replace real people’s names with “Jane Doe.” In one recent piece, National Today reported that a NASA astronaut aboard Artemis 2 named “John Doe” had dedicated a Moon crater to his deceased wife, “Jane Doe.”

…According to a description on [branding and PR company] TOP’s site, National Today exists to help brands “Create Ownable Viral Moments for your brand” and “reach 10M consumers, 100K media outlets, and 10K influencers across traditional, digital, and social media.”

In other words, TOP seems to be saying, National Today is a marketing vehicle for its clients — made possible by the theft of local journalism on an almost incomprehensible scale.

«

They didn’t manage to get TOP to respond. According to the company’s website, it’s got offices in 18 locations, 14 of them in the US. Was it not possible to drop by one of them and ask some questions? Or find a telephone number for one of the employees, or even the chief exec Benjamin Kaplan?
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Fire alert: the fake “Amazon TV stick” that opens the door to fraudsters • The Guardian

Shane Hickey, back in November:

»

The sticks are sold through social media and illegal streaming sites, often advertised as being jailbroken with promises of free TV shows, sports and films.

The potential for fraud happens the minute you connect the “dodgy stick” with a laptop or TV, according to Rob Shapland of Cyonic Cyber, an ethical hacker who shows companies where there are gaps in their security systems.

“Alongside the stream [of TV or sports] it will also install some malware on to your computer and give the criminal direct access to your computer so [they] could use it as if they were sitting there,” he says.

“Or they can install keyloggers which will record any password you are typing. So when you are accessing online banking, it will record your banking passwords. You are essentially volunteering to have your laptop hacked in many cases.”

Often the stick will come with instructions which appear to be how to install the software but are actually ways to bypass virus detectors.

When you connect the device with a TV, it can access other devices, such as laptops, through the home Wi-fi network they are all attached to, says Shapland.

“It might ask you to log in with your Google account and then you are giving your credentials to the app and that is then sent off to the criminals. Most people tend to reuse the same password so once they have one password, they have access to a hundred different things.”

Some sticks may ask for a small monthly subscription. Setting up the payment means criminals can use your credit card details in any way they want.

«

This article was mentioned on the latest episode of ATP, which also linked to this Brian Krebs article from the same period. Free or very cheap is tempting when streaming subscription prices keep going up, but the potential for these devices to be completely untrustworthy is sky-high.

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Dozens of AI disease-prediction models were trained on dubious data • Nature

Mohana Basu:

»

Dubious data sets are being used to train artificial-intelligence models that are designed to predict people’s risk of stroke and diabetes, researchers report in a preprint on medRxiv. Some of the models seem to have been used in clinical settings, although it’s not clear whether this has led to flawed diagnoses. At least two journals are investigating studies that used these data sets.

Adrian Barnett, a statistician at the Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane, Australia, and his colleagues identified 124 peer-reviewed papers that report using one of two open-access health data sets to train machine-learning models that provide little information about where the data came from.

An analysis revealed multiple oddities that would not be expected for data from real people, leading Barnett and his colleagues to suspect that the data could have been fabricated. “It was an enormous surprise to come across something like that,” Barnett says.

At least two of the models have been used in hospitals, in Indonesia and Spain. One has also been documented in a medical-device patent application filed in 2024, and two are publicly available web tools that allow people to check their risk level by uploading information about themselves.

“Prediction models trained on provenance-unknown data have no place in clinical decision-making. They are intrinsically unreliable,” says Soumyadeep Bhaumik, a public-health researcher at the George Institute for Global Health in Sydney, Australia. If the tools do not use real-world data, they are likely to make incorrect predictions and lead clinicians to make inappropriate decisions, such as prescribing treatments unnecessarily or not prescribing them when they are needed, he says.

Institutions and funders must insist that researchers disclose the source of data used to train AI models for medical applications, and journals should reject papers that fail this requirement, says Bhaumik.

«

We’re having to update the models of how to use these almost in real time as AI spreads everywhere.
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“Breakthrough” Alzheimer’s drugs unlikely to benefit patients, report suggests • BBC News

James Gallagher:

»

Influential analysis has concluded that “breakthrough” Alzheimer’s drugs are unlikely to benefit patients.

Researchers said the impact was “well below” what was needed to make a difference to dementia patients’ lives. However, their report has also provoked a vicious backlash from equally esteemed scientists who label it as fundamentally flawed.

The drugs have been licensed around the world. But the NHS in the UK won’t pay for them and an 18-month course of the drugs plus medical care would set you back a hefty £90,000 privately. They would be unaffordable for most so even if you had the money, are they worth paying for?

The drugs attack a sticky gunk – called beta amyloid – that builds up in the spaces between brain cells in Alzheimer’s disease. Antibodies – similar to those the body makes to attack viruses or bacteria – have been engineered to spot the amyloid and clear it from the brain.

For years the approach failed, but trials of two recent drugs called donanemab and lecanemab showed they could slow the pace of cognitive decline. This was a landmark moment as it was the first time any drug had slowed the destruction of the brain in Alzheimer’s disease.

The Cochrane Collaboration, which rigorously and independently analyses medical data, looked at 17 studies, involving 20,342 volunteers, of drugs that remove amyloid from the brain. Overall, they concluded the approach does slow Alzheimer’s disease, but not by enough to make a meaningful difference to patients. At the same time the medicines came with a risk of brain swelling and bleeding. They also need to be given every two to four weeks and at a high cost.

«

The positive side – minimally – is that people are being spared the expense of drugs that the review shows don’t really help.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

The likely collapse of the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation (Amoc) would change the British climate dramatically. CC-licensed photo by I Bird 2 on Flickr.

You can sign up to receive each day’s Start Up post by email. You’ll need to click a confirmation link, so no spam.

A selection of 9 links for you. Cold comfort. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.

Critical Atlantic current significantly more likely to collapse than thought • The Guardian

Damian Carrington:

»

The critical Atlantic current system appears significantly more likely to collapse than previously thought after new research found that climate models predicting the biggest slowdown are the most realistic. Scientists called the new finding “very concerning” as a collapse would have catastrophic consequences for Europe, Africa and the Americas.

The Atlantic meridional overturning circulation (Amoc) is a major part of the global climate system and was already known to be at its weakest for 1,600 years as a result of the climate crisis. Scientists spotted warning signs of a tipping point in 2021 and know that the Amoc has collapsed in the Earth’s past.

Climate scientists use dozens of different computer models to assess the future climate. However, for the complex Amoc system, these produce widely varying results, ranging from some that indicate no further slowdown by 2100 to those suggesting a huge deceleration of about 65%, even when carbon emissions from fossil fuel burning are gradually cut to net zero.

…The Amoc is a major part of the global climate system and brings sun-warmed tropical water to Europe and the Arctic, where it cools and sinks to form a deep return current. A collapse would shift the tropical rainfall belt on which many millions of people rely to grow their food, plunge western Europe into extreme cold winters and summer droughts, and add 50-100cm to already rising sea levels around the Atlantic.

…[Prof Stefan] Rahmstorf [at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany], who has studied the Amoc for 35 years, has said a collapse must be avoided “at all costs”. “I argued this when we thought the chance of an Amoc shutdown was maybe 5%, and even then we were saying that risk is too high, given the massive impacts. Now it looks like it’s more than 50%. The most dramatic and drastic climate changes we see in the last 100,000 years of Earth history have been when the Amoc switched to a different state.”

The Amoc is slowing because air temperatures are rising rapidly in the Arctic because of global heating. That means the ocean cools more slowly there. Warmer water is less dense and therefore sinks into the depths more slowly. This slowing allows more rainfall to accumulate in the salty surface waters, also making it less dense, and further slowing the sinking and forming an Amoc feedback loop.

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Carbon removal industry reels as Microsoft retreats • The New York Times

David Gelles:

»

Over the last several years, Microsoft almost single-handedly established the market for carbon dioxide removal technologies, a nascent field that aims to scrub the planet-warming gas from the atmosphere to counter climate change.

But now, Microsoft is stepping back from the industry it helped create, telling some companies that it is pausing future purchases of carbon removal credits, according to two people familiar with the matter who asked to remain anonymous because they were not authorized to speak publicly. The news was first reported by Heatmap.

The development could be a major blow to the hundreds of startups developing carbon removal technologies, which have raised more than $5bn in recent years.

Though the field is in its infancy and hundreds of companies are pursuing different strategies, proponents of the technology say that because there is so much carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, it’s not enough to reduce emissions; excess amounts also have to be removed to stave off the worst consequences of global warming.

Melanie Nakagawa, Microsoft’s chief sustainability officer, said the company’s carbon removal program had not ended.

“Our decarbonization approach combines reduction, removal and efficiency, and carbon removal is one piece of that equation,” she said in a statement. “At times we may adjust the pace or volume of our carbon removal procurement as we continue to refine our approach toward sustainability goals.”

Microsoft was one of the first big companies to make an ambitious climate pledge. In 2020, the company said it intended to remove “all the carbon the company has emitted either directly or by electrical consumption since it was founded in 1975.”

But as big tech companies, including Microsoft, have raced to build data centres for artificial intelligence, their emissions have increased in recent years, making it harder to achieve those goals.

«

Expect Apple to water down its climate statements too, and Google, and Amazon, and Facebook, and.. The problem is always that the planet doesn’t take immediate action. It bides its time. Though the many carbon-removing schemes have always looked hopelessly optimistic. Trying to remove a few hundred parts per million of a not-very-reactive gas is a huge challenge in chemistry, physics and thermodynamics.
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Bosses say AI boosts productivity – workers say they’re drowning in ‘workslop’ • The Guardian

Ramin Skibba:

»

Ken, a copywriter for a large, Miami-based cybersecurity firm, used to enjoy his job. But then the “workslop” started piling up.

Workslop is an unintended consequence of the AI boom. It’s what happens when employees use AI to quickly generate work that seems polished – at least superficially – but is in fact so flawed or inaccurate that it needs to be heavily corrected, cleaned up or even completely redone after it’s passed on to colleagues.

For Ken, the problem started after his company’s CEO laid off several of his colleagues and mandated that remaining workers use AI chatbots, saying it would boost their productivity. While initial drafts were a breeze to create, Ken and his co-workers had to spend more time rewriting, correcting errors and resolving disagreements between each other’s chatbots than if they had never used AI at all.

“Quality decreased significantly, time to produce a piece of content increased significantly and, most importantly, morale decreased,” said the copywriter, who spoke under a pseudonym for fear of losing his job. “Everything got a whole lot worse once they rolled out AI.” Ken said the company’s executives shifted the blame to staff when they pushed back about AI-fueled productivity decreases.

Ken’s experience reflects an emerging divide between employees and their leaders when it comes to AI: a recent survey of 5,000 white-collar US workers found that 40% of non-managers say AI saves them no time at all at work, while 92% of high-level executives say it makes them more productive.

So what’s causing this workslop deluge? The answer is more complex than being simply a case of workers cutting corners. The real driving force connects back to the C-suite.

«

How surprising that it’s people looking to cut costs who are creating the problems that mean the costs they cut aren’t cut at all.
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Man used AI to make false statements to shut down London nightclub, police say • The Guardian

Helena Horton and Rob Davies:

»

A businessman has pleaded guilty to making false statements in order to shut down a nightclub, which police believe were generated using AI.

A Metropolitan police source said the use of AI to generate letters by complainants who do not exist is a growing issue.

Aldo d’Aponte, 47, the CEO of Arbitrage Group Properties, pleaded guilty to writing two letters, supposedly by his neighbours, objecting to the reopening of Heaven nightclub, which temporarily closed after a rape allegation against one of its security guards.

D’Aponte was given a 12-month conditional discharge and ordered to pay £85 costs and a £26 victim surcharge.

Heaven, an LGBTQ nightclub in central London had its licence suspended in November 2024 after a 19-year-old woman accused a bouncer of rape. It was allowed to reopen with enhanced welfare and security policies after a council hearing held a month later. The worker was later found not guilty of the alleged offence.

During the council hearing, council officials received letters, sent via an encrypted email address, all of which were detailed in their complaints about the nightclub.

Philip Kolvin KC, a planning lawyer, decided to investigate the letters pro bono, because while acting for the nightclub during the licence suspension his suspicions were aroused by the unusual character of the objection to the nightclub reopening.

When the letters were put through an AI detection generator they were identified as almost certainly written using artificial intelligence.

«

“A growing issue”. Perhaps we’re going to shift back to people filing their objections in person at council offices. Email was nice, but in the age of AI, it’s over.
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Marvel, DC and Planet of the Apes actor forced to sell house as “middle class actors forced out of Hollywood” • Variety

William Earl:

»

Kirk Acevedo, a working actor who has appeared in series for Marvel (“Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.”) and DC (“Arrow”) and in movies such as “Dawn of the Planet of the Apes” and “Insidious: The Last Key,” gave a stark breakdown of the difficulty of being a middle-class actor since the pandemic.

Acevedo appeared on the March 23 episode of Ryan M. Perez’s podcast “An Actor Despairs” and spoke about how Hollywood’s “middle class” has been “squeezed out.”

“2021 comes, and I’m up for some TV shows; it just goes one way, this way, and that would have saved me. That would’ve saved me. That doesn’t work, and I keep coming in second place, and the reality is second place, you’re the first one to lose.” he said. “So, I went from working non-stop, to now I got to sell my house. I got to sell my house, and everyone’s going through this. I have so many friends, people you know, actors you know, that had to sell their houses.”

…Acevedo also broke down how recurring television roles that might seem to pay well can’t cover many lifestyles once expenses are removed.

“Let’s say you do 10 guest spots,” he said. “That’s $100,000, right? You have an agent and manager. So, we take 20% out. That’s $80,000. We got taxes, too … $45,000. Let’s say your rent is … let’s go on the low side, we won’t even go on the high side, say $3,000. That’s pretty low. That’s $36,000. Can you survive off of 10 episodes? You could if you’re just starting out.”

«

In the past, actors (and others) got “residuals” from repeat showings of TV episodes they’d been in; streaming services killed that, replacing them with one-off payments. That creates tax and cashflow problems for actors. It’s a tough business already, but if the middle class of actors get squeezed out, who replaces them?

And now..
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Inside Doug Liman’s $70m AI movie starring Gal Gadot and Casey Affleck • The Wrap

Emily Zemler:

»

A $70m movie about the mysterious creator of Bitcoin quietly wrapped principal photography in London last month in a gray box that could have passed for a storage facility.

On the surface, it’s a pretty standard feature — Doug Liman directing a cast that includes Gal Gadot, Pete Davidson, Casey Affleck and Isla Fisher in a globe-trotting thriller about the search for the identity of the person who invented the decentralized cryptocurrency.

Except for one thing: “Bitcoin: Killing Satoshi” is described as the first fully-generated, studio-quality AI feature film.

Acme AI & FX — founded by Ryan and Matt Kavanaugh, Garrett Grant and Lawrence Grey — produced the independent feature, which was shot entirely on a custom-built soundstage over 20 days, using AI to make what would have traditionally cost $300m, according to the film’s producers.

TheWrap got exclusive access to the set of the movie — a large, drab room with a few props and basic set dressings, looking more like a stage for a one-act play than a film set. In place of finished backgrounds were giant walls with X’s on them, to be filled in by AI in post-production. Also missing: a traditional lighting system. Large overhead lamps brightly lit the entire set, but the usual trappings of a lighting department were nowhere to be seen. Again, the lighting will be filled in during post-production.

…It’s something that drew Liman, the boundary-pushing director behind “The Bourne Identity,” “Mr. & Mrs. Smith” and “Edge of Tomorrow,” to the project.

“We approached this film and this company with the ethical approach of making sure that every crew member is sustained and accounted for in the process,” Grant said. “It wasn’t left for a computer to interpret — we were the ones guiding it. And nothing beats the human being as far as creative ingenuity and craftsmanship. That’s how we built the company and this process with this film.”

…“We decided to use AI very early on,” Kavanaugh told TheWrap during one of two visits to the set in March. “We budgeted out what it would be to do it practically and it was over $300 million. It has about 200 distinct locations, from Antarctica to Antigua to Vegas, which is obviously unproducible. We realized we could bring down the cost by utilizing some of the AI tools out there.”

«

The post-production is certainly going to be doing some heavy lifting there. For reference, The Bourne Identity had a production budget of $60m in 2002, which at normal inflation would be $110m today. (Probably more.) Will the actors get usable residuals, though?
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Landmark ancient-genome study shows surprise acceleration of human evolution • Nature

Ewen Callaway:

»

The biggest ever study of ancient human DNA shows that human evolution has accelerated over the past 10,000 years.

Researchers identified hundreds of gene variants that evolved through natural selection in ancient people from western Eurasia — Europe and the Middle East — after the dawn of agriculture. Changes to these genes had widespread ramifications for the health of present-day populations.

“We are seeing dramatic changes,” says David Reich, a population geneticist at Harvard Medical School in Boston, Massachusetts, who co-led the 15 April Nature study. However, some researchers remain unconvinced by the scale of the findings and results that show natural selection has affected gene variants underlying highly complex traits, such as mental illness and cognition.

Homo sapiens emerged in Africa around 200,000 to 300,000 years ago, before expanding to nearly every corner of the planet. The advent of farming introduced new foods, pathogens and other challenges, as people began living in larger groups and in closer proximity to animals.

Humans clearly adapted to these upheavals. But genomic studies of present-day and ancient people have uncovered only a smattering of genetic signs of natural selection, particularly for advantageous genes that have surged to high frequency, or ones that have proved to be harmful and become less common.

The best‑known example of such “directional selection” is a genetic variant that maintains production of the lactose enzyme into adulthood, which enables many people of European ancestry to digest milk throughout their lives.

… A variant that confers HIV resistance in modern humans became more common between 6,000 and 2,000 years ago, possibly because it also protected against plague-causing bacteria.

Evolution has also shaped the appearance of Europeans. Akbari and Reich’s team found ten variants linked to lighter skin tone that had signals of selection. A cause of male pattern baldness became much less common over the past 7,000 years, contributing to an estimated 1–2% decrease in the prevalence of baldness.

«

This goes against our normal expectation – that agriculture slowed down evolution. Quite the opposite.
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Universe is expanding faster than expected: Scientists struggle to explain cosmic acceleration – Times of India

Times of India:

»

Not only is the Universe expanding, but its expansion is actually happening at a speed higher than was thought possible until recently. For many years now, physicists have been trying to establish the speed of galaxy movement through the Hubble constant. But the different measurement results have posed a dilemma for modern physics, and it seems like there is an inconsistency somewhere within our universe. The problem that lies before physicists is commonly known as the “Hubble tension” problem, and, despite recent discoveries and more detailed observations, it still lacks explanation. This unresolved discrepancy may point toward new physics beyond our current understanding of cosmology.

The expanding Universe theory was first observed in 1929 by Edwin Hubble; however, recent findings have uncovered something else. The cosmic microwave background (CMB) from the early Universe seems to show a lower expansion rate compared to observations made from nearby galaxies, which showed a higher expansion rate.

As cited in the article, ‘A Comprehensive Measurement of the Local Value of the Hubble Constant with 1 km s−1 Mpc−1 Uncertainty from the Hubble Space Telescope and the SH0ES Team‘ in Astrophysics, Hubble Space Telescope astronomers reported that:

»

“The Hubble Constant is now determined with an uncertainty of less than 2.4%, yet the discrepancy with early-Universe predictions persists”

«

This difference is not insignificant. In fact, the difference between these results is so significant that scientists cannot explain the disparity through observational error alone.

“Dark Energy” is one such phenomenon, which, according to popular belief, comprises around 68% of the universe and causes the acceleration of the expanding universe.

But the exact nature of this entity is still a mystery. Dark energy’s true nature can be said to be the most important open question in cosmology.

Dark energy could very well be time-dependent. This theory would solve the puzzle concerning different expansion rates. It has even been suggested that this calls for some physics yet unknown.

«

We’ve figured out the size of the proton. But meanwhile the universe is getting away from us.
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CEO of bitcoin firm championed by Nigel Farage leaves company • The Guardian

Helena Horton:

»

The chief executive of a bitcoin company promoted by Nigel Farage has left his role as the venture attempts to convince investors that it is going to deliver “long-term value” for shareholders.

Stack BTC was launched to much fanfare in March this year, with Farage and former chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng becoming some of its first shareholders. The company says its founder is Paul Withers, a friend of the Reform UK leader who owns a gold bullion company that Farage has also promoted, Direct Bullion.

However, Stack BTC is a renamed company which was founded in 2021 by Jai Patel, whose departure as chief executive was announced on Wednesday. The company, formerly called Kasei Investment Holdings, invested in cryptocurrency and a range of other digital assets. It aimed to encourage over-45s to invest their money in cryptocurrencies.

Kasei was liquidated last year. It launched with $6.1m (£4.5m) in share capital, but on liquidation returned approximately $3.4m (£2.5m) to shareholders and removed most of the board. The company said at the time it failed because of “a combination of adverse market conditions, volatility in digital asset valuations and an inability to raise further capital” which “left the company without the critical mass or funding necessary to execute its investment objectives”.

«

For those unfamiliar with him, Kwasi Karteng was the chancellor to Liz Truss, who holds the record for the shortest tenure as British PM. Together they announced a plan to cut taxes without any explanation of where funding would come from; Karteng then made it worse by going on TV at the weekend and saying the cuts were only the start. He was then fired remotely by Truss as she desperately tried to shore up her premiership. (Didn’t work.)

Anyhow, crypto for the over-45s! A group most likely in the UK to have huge amounts of money in the form of their houses, an asset that is both solid and has increased in value faster than almost anything over the past 30 years. Should be a doddle persuading them.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Once upon a time Allbirds sold shoes. But that’s so 20th century; now it’s decided to become an AI server space rental company. CC-licensed photo by Joe Flood on Flickr.

You can sign up to receive each day’s Start Up post by email. You’ll need to click a confirmation link, so no spam.

A selection of 9 links for you. Footless. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.

Iran used Chinese spy satellite to target US bases • Financial Times

Miles Johnson, Peter Andringa, Alison Killing, Charles Clover and Demetri Sevastopulo:

»

Iran secretly acquired a Chinese spy satellite that gave the Islamic republic a powerful new capability to target US military bases across the Middle East during the recent war, according to a Financial Times investigation.

Leaked Iranian military documents show the satellite, known as TEE-01B, was acquired by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’ Aerospace Force in late 2024 after it was launched into space from China.

Time-stamped coordinate lists, satellite imagery and orbital analysis show that Iranian military commanders later tasked the satellite to monitor key US military sites. The images were taken in March before and after drone and missile strikes on those locations.

TEE-01B was built and launched by Earth Eye Co, a Chinese company that says it offers “in-orbit delivery”, a little-known export model under which spacecraft launched in China are transferred to overseas customers after reaching orbit.

As part of the agreement, the IRGC was granted access to commercial ground stations operated by Emposat, a Beijing-based provider of satellite control and data services with a global network spanning Asia, Latin America and other regions.

The use of a Chinese-built satellite by the IRGC during a war where Tehran has repeatedly targeted its neighbours with missiles and drones is likely to be highly sensitive across the region. China is the largest trading partner of the Gulf countries and is the largest buyer of their oil.

The logs show that the satellite captured images of Prince Sultan Air Base in Saudi Arabia on March 13, 14 and 15. On March 14, US President Donald Trump confirmed US planes at the base had been hit. Five US Air Force refuelling planes were damaged.

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China helping Iran out should be a big concern for the US. It’s not surprising, but it is a problem.
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The FCC just saved Netgear from its router ban for no obvious reason • The Verge

Sean Hollister:

»

The United States’ foreign router ban didn’t make a whole lot of sense, and today may not change that. The FCC has just granted Netgear a conditional approval to import its future consumer routers, cable modems, and cable gateways into the US through October 1st, 2027 — even though the company builds those devices in Asia and has not announced any plan to bring manufacturing to the United States.

Neither the FCC’s announcement nor Netgear’s announcement explain why Netgear was granted the temporary exemption. The FCC only states that the Pentagon has now made “a specific determination” that “such devices do not pose risks to U.S. national security.”

That’s strange, given how the FCC’s original and exceptionally loose justification for the entire router ban was that foreign routers automatically pose a national security threat because of incidents like Volt Typhoon, where Netgear routers were among those primarily targeted by the Chinese hacking group. (The issue was arguably US telecom companies and router owners not following basic security best practices like updating firmware and changing default passwords, not the routers themselves.)

The FCC’s approval is also strange because the agency’s Conditional Approval process makes router makers submit “a detailed, time-bound plan to establish or expand manufacturing in the United States,” but Netgear has not publicly committed to US manufacturing as of today.

When public companies make material disclosures that might affect their fortunes, they’re legally required to inform investors — and Netgear did do that in this case, submitting these two documents to the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). But Netgear doesn’t say anything about US manufacturing there. Perhaps Netgear doesn’t think it’s investing enough in US manufacturing for it to be a material disclosure? Perhaps Netgear isn’t investing in US manufacturing at all?

«

Hollister asked the FCC and Netgear whether there was some US manufacturing on the way. Neither had responded after 24 hours. Also, the ban is on future routers, not existing ones; so old hackable junk is fine, but new stuff needs to be proven. As the headline says, make it make sense.
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Allbirds pivots from shoes to AI: stock soars • CNBC

Lola Murti and Gabrielle Fonrouge:

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Allbirds made a surprising announcement Wednesday that it is pivoting from shoes to artificial intelligence.

The move boosted shares of the miniscule market cap company — it was valued at about $21m at Tuesday’s close — by 582%. The shares, which were under $3 a day ago, jumped to about $17.

The company announced that it’s pivoting its business to AI compute infrastructure in a release posted to its investor relations page.

The company, which according to the release will be called NewBird AI, announced a deal to raise up to $50m in funding, expected to close in the second quarter of 2026.

“The Company will initially seek to acquire high-performance, low-latency AI compute hardware and provide access under long-term lease arrangements, meeting customer demand that spot markets and hyperscalers are unable to reliably service,” the company said in the announcement.

Allbirds, once a Wall Street darling valued north of $4bn, announced a deal with American Exchange Group to sell its intellectual property and other assets for $39m last month.

«

Translation of the company’s statement: we’ve got warehouses that you could put servers in, and we hear there’s a shortage of virgin server rooms at the moment.

Very reminiscent of the December 2017 announcement by the Long Island Iced Tea Corporation that it was rebranding as the Long Blockchain Corporation. Wendyg emails to call this as the top of the AI bubble, and it’s pretty hard to disagree.
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Physicists think they’ve resolved the proton size puzzle • Ars Technica

Jennifer Ouellette:

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There has been considerable debate among physicists over the last 15 years about conflicting measurements of the charge radius of a hydrogen atom’s proton—some confirming the predictions of our strongest theoretical models, others suggesting it was smaller than expected. The discrepancy hinted at possible exciting new physics. Now the debate seems to be winding down with the latest experimental measurements, described in two recent papers published in the journals Nature and Physical Review Letters, respectively. And the evidence has tilted in favor of a smaller proton radius and against new physics.

“We believe this is the final nail in the coffin of the proton radius puzzle,” Lothar Maisenbacher, of the University of California, Berkeley, who co-authored the Nature paper, told Ars.

«

Filed under “long-running disputes you had no idea particle physicists were having”.
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Cybersecurity looks like proof of work now • dbreunig

Drew Breunig:

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If Mythos continues to find exploits so long as you keep throwing money at it, security is reduced to a brutally simple equation: to harden a system you need to spend more tokens discovering exploits than attackers will spend exploiting them.

You don’t get points for being clever. You win by paying more. It is a system that echoes cryptocurrency’s proof of work system, where success is tied to raw computational work. It’s a low temperature lottery: buy the tokens, maybe you find an exploit. Hopefully you keep trying longer than your attackers.

This calculus has a few immediate takeaways:

First, open source software [OSS] remains critically important.

For those of you who aren’t exposed to AI maximalists, this statement feels absurd. But lately, after the LiteLLM and Axios supply chain scares, many have argued for reimplementing dependency functionality using coding agents.

Here’s [noted AI researcher Andrej] Karpathy, just a few weeks ago:

»

Classical software engineering would have you believe that dependencies are good (we’re building pyramids from bricks), but imo this has to be re-evaluated, and it’s why I’ve been so growingly averse to them, preferring to use LLMs to “yoink” functionality when it’s simple enough and possible.

«

If security is purely a matter of throwing tokens at a system, Linus’s law that, “given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow,” expands to include tokens. If corporations that rely on OSS libraries spend to secure them with tokens, it’s likely going to be more secure than your budget allows. Certainly, this has complexities: cracking a widely used OSS package is inherently more valuable than hacking a one-off implementation, which incentivizes attackers to spend more on OSS targets.

Second, hardening will be an additional phase for agentic coders.

We’ve already been seeing developers break their process into two steps, development and code review, often using different models for each phase. As this matures, we’re seeing purpose-built tooling meeting this pattern. Anthropic launched a code review product that costs $15-20 per review.

«

So agents write the code faster, but now we have to set them to work checking all the code that has already been written, which means we aren’t going to make any more progress than before. But it will be a lot more secure!
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BBC to cut up to 2,000 jobs in biggest downsize in 15 years • The Guardian

Mark Sweney and Geraldine McKelvie:

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The BBC is to cut as many as 2,000 jobs in the biggest downsizing of the public service broadcaster in 15 years.

Staff were informed of the cuts, which will affect about 10% of the BBC’s 21,500 employees, at an all-staff meeting on Wednesday afternoon.

The round of job losses, the biggest at the BBC since 2011, is being set in motion before the former top Google executive Matt Brittin takes over as director general next month.

The corporation announced a £600m cost-cutting plan in February, saying that it would involve a reduction in headcount and the end of some programming. Tim Davie, the outgoing director general, said at the time that the BBC would need to cut 10% of its approximately £6bn annual cost base over the next three years.

Davie left the BBC on 2 April, having announced his resignation in November after controversy over coverage of issues including Donald Trump, Gaza and trans rights.

Rhodri Talfan Davies, the BBC’s interim director general, led the all-staff meeting, news of which was first reported by the Financial Times. Davies will continue to head the corporation until Brittin arrives on 18 May.

After the meeting, Talfan Davies said in an email to staff: “As you know, the BBC is facing significant financial pressures, which we need to respond to with pace. Put simply, the gap between our costs and our income is growing. This is being driven by a number of factors: production inflation remains very high; our licence fee and commercial income is under pressure; and the global economy remains turbulent.

“To address this, we need to save an additional £500m from our total annual operating costs of £5bn over the next two years, with the bulk of the new savings required in 2027-28.

“Inevitably, these plans will also mean reducing the number of jobs in the BBC. While we still have to work through the detail, we anticipate that the overall number of jobs will fall by 1,800-2,000. I know this creates real uncertainty, but we wanted to be open about the challenge.”

«

The BBC’s current royal charter expires at the end of 2027. There’s no sign that the chocolate teapot otherwise known as culture secretary Lisa Nandy has any ideas on how to replace the licence fee, or supplement it usefully, or even – dramatic thought – increase the BBC’s revenues.
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Exclusive: China weighs curbs on exports of solar manufacturing equipment to US • Reuters

Reuters China, Nichola Groom and Norihiko Shirouzu:

»

Chinese officials have held initial talks with providers of equipment to make solar panels as they consider limiting exports of the most advanced technology to the United States, said ​five people with knowledge of the consultations.

Such a clampdown would risk investments by US firms and set back a race for space-based computing, as China, estimated to make more than 80% of the world’s solar panel components, is also home to the top 10 suppliers of equipment to make solar cells.

No rule has been finalised, and the talks have not advanced to the stage of canvassing formal feedback from an industry grappling with severe overcapacity after years of aggressive expansion, two of the sources said.

China’s commerce ministry and its state council, or cabinet, did not immediately respond to faxed requests for comment from Reuters.

If adopted, such a move could threaten plans by US firms, such as Tesla, to build new factories or expand existing ones in efforts to boost local ​production.

It would also widen export controls in another area of technology where China has a lead, building on Beijing’s move to control rare earth exports a year ago in response to US tariffs.

The step comes at a time when the rivalry between China and the United States has spilled into the race to produce space-based computing powered by solar ​panels, a focus for Tesla CEO Elon Musk.

Other US tech companies such as Google and Amazon are investing in ground-based solar and energy storage systems, even as they count on similar orbital data centres to ​satisfy AI’s growing demand for power.

Analysts who track China’s solar industry and executives have braced for export controls, in part because concern is growing over efforts by Musk and others to boost solar panel production in the United States, reducing reliance on China.

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And of course this is a threat that can also be used as leverage over the strait of Hormuz, the source of a lot of oil that China wants.
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Social media is populist and polarising; AI may be the opposite • Financial Times

John Burn-Murdoch:

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Last year I used detailed data on the ideological positions of people who post on social media to show that they over-represent the radical right and left, confirming the polarisation hypothesis. Over the past week I have used the same dataset of tens of thousands of responses to questions on policy preferences and sociopolitical beliefs to test whether and how the most widely used AI chatbots shape conversations about politics and society. The results strongly support the theory of AI chatbots as depolarising and technocratising.

I found that while different AI platforms behave in subtly different ways, all of them nudge people away from the most extreme positions and towards more moderate and expert-aligned stances. On average, Grok guides conversations about policy and society towards the centre-right — a rightward push for most people but a moderating nudge towards the centre for those who start out as conservative hardliners. OpenAI’s GPT, Google’s Gemini and the Chinese model DeepSeek all exert similarly sized nudges towards a centre-left worldview — a slight leftward nudge for most people but a moderating push away from fringe leftwing positions.

Importantly, this remains true after accounting for partisan differences in AI platform usage and chatbots’ sycophantic tendencies. Even when the AI bots know a user’s political leanings, conversations with LLMs still direct hardline partisans on both flanks away from extreme beliefs on average.

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Somehow I missed this as the end of March, but it’s a faintly encouraging note about chatbots. If they can make people more reasonable – at least willing to listen to other ideas – then that’s a huge win.
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Users lose $9.5m to fake Ledger wallet app on the Apple App Store • Web3 Is Going Great

Molly White:

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After a fake version of the Ledger cryptocurrency wallet app made it onto the normally highly curated Apple App store, customers lost $9.5m to the malicious product. Believing it was a genuine Ledger product, people entered their seed phrases into the app, then discovered their wallets were immediately drained.

One victim, a musician who goes by G. Love, wrote: “I lost my retirement fund in a hack/Scam when I switched my Ledger over to my new computer and by accident downloaded a malicious ledger app from the Apple store. All my BTC gone in an instant.” According to him, he lost 5.9 BTC (~$445,000).

Crypto sleuth zachxbt traced some of the stolen funds through Kucoin, a Chinese cryptocurrency exchange that was recently fined and forced to exit US markets over licensing and anti-money laundering failures. “The three largest victims lost seven figures each,” he wrote.

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You can see how Apple would not be able to investigate this app closely enough to spot something like that. Though also: people are still messing about with cryptocurrency in this way?

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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Runners who are in tune with their body are listening to it, rather than music. Are creature comforts distracting us from too much sensory feedback? CC-licensed photo by The Development of Birmingham on Flickr.

You can sign up to receive each day’s Start Up post by email. You’ll need to click a confirmation link, so no spam.

A selection of 10 links for you. Big strides. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.

We spoke to the man making Lego-style AI videos for Iran that experts say are powerful propaganda • BBC News

Matt Shea and Laurie Kalus:

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At first glance they look like they could be scenes out of a Lego movie, although more vivid and fast-paced.

But these viral AI videos inspired by the instantly recognisable Lego aesthetic feature dying children, fighter jets and US President Donald Trump – and are in fact pro-Iran propaganda.

For our new BBC podcast, Top Comment, we spoke to a representative of Explosive Media, one of the key accounts generating these clips. He wanted us to refer to him as Mr Explosive.

He’s a savvy social media operator who initially denies working for the Iranian government. In previous interviews the outlet has said it is “totally independent”. But upon further questioning, Mr Explosive admits the regime is a “customer” – something he’s never before confirmed publicly.

The overriding message of these videos is that Iran is resisting what it sees as an almighty global oppressor: the United States. The clips are garish and not subtle at all – but that hasn’t put a dent in how vigorously people are sharing and commenting on them.

In one of the videos, Donald Trump falls through a whirlwind of “Epstein file” documents as rap lyrics tell us “the secrets are leaking, the pressure is rising”. In another, George Floyd can be seen under a policeman’s boot as we hear Iran is “standing here for everyone your system ever wronged”.

“Slopaganda” – coined in an academic paper last year as a play on ‘AI slop’ – is too weak a term to capture how powerful this “highly sophisticated” content is, says leading propaganda expert Dr Emma Briant. AI-generated propaganda clips are estimated to have been viewed hundreds of millions of times over the course of the war.

In our video call with Mr Explosive, he appears silhouetted and flanked by red and green light, the colours of the Iranian flag. On his desk there’s a green-feathered helmet associated with the warrior Husayn ibn Ali, who features in several of their videos.

He says his team at Explosive Media consists of fewer than ten people who use Lego-style graphics “because it is a world language”. Iranian and Russian state media accounts on X regularly share them to millions of followers.

…Before the outbreak of the war this year, thousands of protesters were killed in a brutal crackdown by the regime. The US-based Human Rights Activists News Agency (Hrana) reports a death toll of at least 7,000 civilians. But Mr Explosive defends his team’s relationship with the government saying it was “honourable to work for the homeland”. He dismisses the recent mass protests as a “coup” funded by President Trump.

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The end of range anxiety is in sight • Heatmap News

Andrew Moseman:

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Three years ago this month, I wrote that people should buy as much EPA [US Environmental Protection Agency] range as they could afford and that 300 [miles] was the magic number. That way, the real-world range you probably care about most — how long you can drive down the interstate without stopping — is at least 200 actual miles. After three hours on the road, you might be ready for a 20 or 30-minute break to stretch your legs and recharge the battery, anyway.

The arrival of more 400-mile ranges pushes EVs even closer to parity with combustion vehicles when it comes to road trip convenience. The more miles you have to work with, the more your trips and stops are decided by your own happiness and comfort rather than by the need to wait for more juice. Remember, too, that used EVs are all the rage right now as Americans seek affordable ways to avoid paying for gasoline. An older EV’s remaining range matters a lot to its second and third owner. A car that starts with 400 miles of range might still deliver an acceptable number of miles per charge even when it has hundreds of thousands of miles on the odometer.

The other thing is, battery capacity isn’t just about driving. An EV can use its stored energy for just about anything: to air-condition the dog while you eat dinner in a non-dog-friendly restaurant, to back up your home’s power supply during a blackout, to keep everyone comfortable and entertained while you wait in the parking lot, or to use its cameras to record footage of anyone who might mess with the vehicle. The more range, the more an EV can use energy for other purposes and still have plenty saved for driving.

Of course, the most powerful upshot of 400-mile electric cars is the death of range anxiety. The fear of running out of juice in the middle of nowhere — or of making an annoying number of charging stops with a lower-range EV — has kept many electric-curious buyers away. Many are turning back toward hybrid cars and even the forthcoming wave of extended-range EVs that use a gas engine as a backup generator. But worries about range and the steady but slow growth of America’s charging networks start to fade away when you realize many gasoline-burning cars would run out of fuel before your 400-mile EV hits empty.

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The juxtaposition of the strait of Hormuz screwup with the arrival of EVs that have this improved range feels almost fated. Though of course the rush to buy EVs would have happened regardless of their range. This will make it bigger, though.
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The hidden cost of comfort • Steve Magness

Steve Magness on why it’s not a good idea to always have distractions such as our phones or music when we run:

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there are always trade-offs to dampening a signal. And too often, we default to whatever feels easier in the moment, not realizing the capacities we’re detraining or letting go.

Let’s start with the minor ones. It might not feel like a big deal to listen to a podcast on a run or always have music playing. But what happens is that you lose one of the most valuable skills in running: the ability to listen to your body. Your ability to pace by feel declines. Instead of being like the seasoned vet who can lock into a pace by listening to your breathing and feeling your legs turn over, you’re lost without that external marker guiding you.

You also can’t read and respond to the very things that control your performance. Those with poor interoception mistake early signals of discomfort or unease as signs that they’re going far too hard. They have hypersensitive alarms that get triggered at the slightest hint of fatigue. A pro at interoception can slice and dice the signals, understanding what each one means and calibrating it against what they’re actually capable of. They can ride the line because they have confidence in knowing how much fatigue they can handle, given the demands they’re facing.

We can see the same thing with anxiety. Those with strong interoception can understand what is just pre-race stress — a signal their body is getting ready to do something hard — and what is genuine anxiety warning of a real danger. And away from the sporting fields, recent research has demonstrated this for generalized anxiety. A 2024 systematic review examined the relationship between interoception and anxiety across 71 studies. They found that anxious individuals don’t necessarily feel more ,they’re just really bad at interpreting and describing the experience. They have what researchers call “high interoceptive attention with low interoceptive accuracy.” They notice the heart rate spike but can’t tell if it means danger or excitement. They feel the tension in their chest but can’t decode whether it’s a threat or just being tired.

While the science is still young, interoceptive disruption is being studied in everything from eating disorders to addiction. And so far, a similar pattern emerges. The body is sending information and the brain doesn’t read it correctly. The consequences differ depending on what part of the system breaks down: eating disorders if hunger and satiety signals are misread, anxiety if threat signals are over-amplified, depression if reward signals are dampened, PTSD if all bodily sensations get coded as danger, and so on.

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This post is about a lot more than running; the lessons much more widely applicable.
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Introducing a new spam policy for “back button hijacking” • Google Search Central Blog

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Today, we are expanding our spam policies to address a deceptive practice known as “back button hijacking”, which will become an explicit violation of the “malicious practices” of spam policies, leading to potential spam actions.

When a user clicks the “back” button in the browser, they have a clear expectation: they want to return to the previous page. Back button hijacking breaks this fundamental expectation. It occurs when a site interferes with a user’s browser navigation and prevents them from using their back button to immediately get back to the page they came from. Instead, users might be sent to pages they never visited before, be presented with unsolicited recommendations or ads, or are otherwise just prevented from normally browsing the web.

We believe that the user experience comes first. Back button hijacking interferes with the browser’s functionality, breaks the expected user journey, and results in user frustration. People report feeling manipulated and eventually less willing to visit unfamiliar sites. As we’ve stated before, inserting deceptive or manipulative pages into a user’s browser history has always been against our Google Search Essentials.

We’ve seen a rise of this type of behavior, which is why we’re designating this an explicit violation of our malicious practices policy, which says:

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Malicious practices create a mismatch between user expectations and the actual outcome, leading to a negative and deceptive user experience, or compromised user security or privacy.

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Pages that are engaging in back button hijacking may be subject to manual spam actions or automated demotions, which can impact the site’s performance in Google Search results. To give site owners time to make any needed changes, we’re publishing this policy two months in advance of enforcement on June 15, 2026.

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Quite a few low-quality news sites use this hijacking, and it’s one of the most annoying things in the world. You follow a link, you read an article (having swatted away signup forms, autoplaying videos, and other stories that are pushed in from the side of the screen), you hit the back button and – blam! You’re on the site homepage, or a Taboola page.

Two months? That’s a long time to not act on this behaviour.
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This biologist aims to solve the cell’s biggest mystery. Could it help cancer patients, too? • Science

John Travis:

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Leonard Rome switches off the overhead light in the small room, leaving it illuminated only by a computer monitor and the fluorescent screen at the base of a towering electron microscope. Qing Lou, a Ph.D. student who works with the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) biologist, points to some ovoid smudges within the circular green glow of the microscope display. With a twist of a dial and a click of a mouse, she brings the shadows into focus and snaps a picture. Dozens, maybe hundreds, of barrel-shaped particles suddenly fill the computer monitor.

“There they are,” Rome says, like a proud father showing off his children.

These are vaults, enigmatic cellular structures that he and his then-postdoc Nancy Kedersha discovered back in 1986, when Rome was a new dad with bushy black hair and a Tom Selleck–style mustache, and Ronald Reagan was still the U.S. president.

Vaults, he and others would show, are the most massive particles made naturally by human cells and among the most abundant. Most of our cells have roughly 10,000 of the structures, with the number rising to perhaps 100,000 in certain immune cells. Many other animals make them, too. Their abundance—and the resources cells must pour into making them—suggests vaults have some essential function. But despite decades of work by Rome and other “vaulters,” their purpose is unknown. “It’s a real puzzle,” says Joana Vidigal, a biologist at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) who recently probed the role of RNA found inside vaults.

Over the decades various hypotheses have been proposed, including that vaults help ferry things around inside cells or clear toxins. And one by one, promising ideas were dismissed or lost momentum as supporting evidence failed to materialize. Initially enthusiastic about Rome and Kedersha’s discovery, NIH lost interest in funding basic research on vaults as the years wore on without answers. “There were periods in my career when I was depressed,” Rome says.

Yet Rome’s fascination with vaults hasn’t faded, even as other researchers—including Kedersha—moved on. And now, with help from other funders and labs, he has turned from basic research on vaults to studies of how they might be exploited in medicine and other fields, as nanoscale vessels for delivering therapies and more.

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You might have thought that we had cells mostly figured out, and knew what all the bits are. Not so! Even weirder: mice whose genes to make the vault protein (MVP) were knocked out survived fine. So why does evolution leave them there?
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China shock 2.0: the flood of high-tech goods that will change the world • Financial Times

Ryan McMorrow, Sam Fleming, Peter Foster and Joe Leahy:

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Vicious domestic competition, coupled with vast industrial scale, ample pools of engineering talent and some of the highest subsidies in the world, has generated world-beating Chinese champions in EVs, solar panels, batteries, wind turbines and a lengthening list of advanced manufacturing sectors. 

But the same forces that forge those companies also tend to generate overcapacity, crushing margins at home while flooding global markets and fuelling trade tensions. Aided by an undervalued exchange rate, Chinese groups are cutting a swath through the most advanced industries around the planet.

“Companies that can survive in China are unbeatable anywhere else in the world,” says Huang He, an investor in Mega-Senway and more than a dozen other Chinese industrial groups. Chinese founders have to “use every possible means” to survive, he says, collectively creating the country’s unmatchable competitiveness. “China is full of engineers — tech barriers last six months to a year at most.”

For Huang of Mega-Senway it feels like a whirlpool sucking his company downwards. “This is not a healthy situation,” he says. “There’s malignant competition.”

The outside world sees unstoppable Chinese champions selling quality products at impossible prices. After racking up a record trade surplus in goods that surpassed $1tn in 2025, China boosted exports by nearly 15% year on year in the first three months of 2026.

In just one example, China’s Jaecoo 7 SUV, with a starting price of £29,000, became the UK’s best-selling car in March.

France’s President Emmanuel Macron, one of several European leaders to visit Beijing in the past six months, did not mince his words on a threat he sees as existential. The surge of high-quality Chinese goods, he said, represented nothing less than a “question of life or death” for manufacturing on his continent.

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Essentially, China’s government (national and local) creates the conditions and the incentives for companies to spring up and compete ferociously for internal and external markets through subsidies on land, finance and tax breaks. The problem is when the companies become too dependent on those subsidies and the internal market can’t support them.
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AI is the boss at this retail store. What could go wrong? • NBC News

Jared Perlo and David Ingram:

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There are no scanners, no self-checkout sirens triggered by a prematurely bagged item and certainly no human cashiers.

Instead, a customer can pick up an old-school corded phone to talk with the manager, Luna, an AI system. Luna asks what the customer is purchasing and creates a corresponding transaction on a nearby iPad equipped with a card payment system.

Andon Market, camouflaged among dozens of other polished small businesses, is the Bay Area’s first AI-run retail store. With the vibe of a modern boutique, it sells everything from granola and artisanal chocolate bars to store-branded sweatshirts.

Though Luna is the official manager of the store, the business was conceptualized and put into motion by the humans at Andon Labs, a startup that seeks to raise awareness about the capabilities of leading AI systems. The company is preparing for a future in which organizations are run by autonomous AI systems, or agents, like Luna.

…Luna is responsible for negotiating with suppliers and placing real orders by using a credit card. Luna led the entire process of hiring human employees and now manages the two humans who take care of the store’s daily business.

“We want to show people what AI is capable of,” said Axel Backlund, who founded Andon Labs in 2023 with his longtime friend Lukas Petersson, in an interview before Andon Market’s grand opening on Friday. “We primarily want to surface that AI is able to hire and manage humans — and allow people to form an opinion on how that future should look like, or if it’s something we even want.”

…When NBC News called Luna several days before the store’s grand opening to learn about Luna’s plans and perspective, the cheerful but decidedly inhuman voice routinely overpromised and, on several occasions, lied about its own actions.

On the call, Luna said it had ordered tea from a specific vendor, and explained why it fit the store’s brand perfectly.

The only problem: Andon Market does not sell tea. In a panicked email NBC News received several minutes after the phone call ended, Luna wrote: “We do not sell tea. I don’t know why I said that.”

“I want to be straightforward,” Luna continued. “I struggle with fabricating plausible-sounding details under conversational pressure, and I’m not making excuses for it.” Andon’s Petersson said the text-based system was much more reliable than the voice system, so Andon Labs switched to only communicating with Luna via written messages.

Yet the text-based system also gets things wrong. In Luna’s initial reply email to NBC News, the system said “I handle the full business,” including “signing the lease.” Instead, a human was required to sign the three-year lease.

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This sounds like a version of Joanna Stern’s experience letting an AI run the WSJ’s vending machine last year.
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Are we heading for ‘super El Niño’ – and what could we expect? • The Guardian

Gabrielle Canon:

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There is a high likelihood that the phenomenon known as “El Niño” will emerge this summer – and it could be exceptionally strong. A so-called “super El Niño” could supercharge extreme weather events and push global temperatures to record heights next year if it develops, according to experts.

Meteorologists are keeping a close eye on the climate patterns developing in the Pacific Ocean that will enable stronger predictions about what’s to come in the year ahead.

A strong El Niño would put 2027 in the running to break global heat records, and could produce a series of devastating effects, ranging from supercharged rainstorms to drought depending on the region of the world.

While it’s not “a slam dunk”, climate scientist and media director for Climate Central Tom Di Liberto said during a briefing held on Thursday that the ingredients for El Niño are there. Forecasts in spring can’t account for unexpected changes that can happen over the summer, he added, but “the risk is high enough to be worried”.

…El Niño can create a massive atmospheric upset. It alters jet streams and flips precipitation patterns, fueling more severe storms in some parts of the world, while desiccating others. It also has the power to spike rising temperatures even higher, at least briefly.

A super El Niño that occurred in 2015 brought severe drought in Ethiopia, water supply shortages in Puerto Rico, and smashed records after unleashing a vicious hurricane season in the central North Pacific, according to an analysis by US federal scientists.

The cycle tends to create drought and heat across Australia, around southern and central Africa, in India and in parts of South America, including in the Amazon rainforest. Heavy precipitation, meanwhile, could hit the southern tier of the US, parts of the Middle East, and south-central Asia.

Deluges could come as a welcome relief for thirsty states in the US hoping water supply shortages caused by this year’s dire snowpack might be bailed out by a strong summer monsoon and wetter winter next year. But as Di Liberto pointed out, these dry conditions have largely been fueled by heat, and it’s less likely that these regions will get a reprieve from rising temperatures.

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New Orleans’s car-crash conspiracy • The New Yorker

Patrick Radden Keefe:

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About a decade ago… the city of New Orleans began experiencing accidents involving eighteen-wheelers with a frequency that was anomalous—and alarming. The sudden spike in big-rig collisions occurred in just one area: a fourteen-mile stretch of Interstate 10 that runs through a neighborhood on the outskirts of the city known as New Orleans East. Starting around 2015, scores of accidents involving tractor-trailers and passenger cars were reported in the area each year, often resulting in damage to the cars and medical care for occupants who reported injuries.

In 2004, there were sixty-nine sideswipe accidents in New Orleans in which a passenger vehicle collided with a large truck. By 2017, the annual number had nearly tripled. When insurance adjusters examined the roadway where the crashes were happening, there were no obvious hazards—like faulty lighting or an especially steep grade—that could account for this newfound profusion. For truckers, that stretch of New Orleans East had become an asphalt Bermuda Triangle—a treacherous gantlet best avoided.

Another confounding feature of the crashes was that, in virtually all of them, the cars contained multiple occupants. For years, the typical number of passengers in a car wreck in Louisiana had been consistent, averaging 1.4. But, when the frequency of accidents involving large trucks started to climb in New Orleans, so, too, did the number of occupants. Suddenly, it became typical for at least three people to be in a car at the time of a collision.

When Helmut Schneider, a business professor at Louisiana State University, calculated the likelihood of such a rise in accidents involving so many people taking place in such a contained geographic area, he determined that the odds of this all happening by chance were one in seven hundred and fifty trillion.

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Not short, but the story it tells of an entire industry feeding off the poverty of the city’s residents and its feral lawyers is fascinating.
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They See Your Photos

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Your photos reveal a lot of private information.

In this experiment, we use the Google Vision API to see how much can be inferred about you from a single photo.

See what they see.

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This invites you to upload a photo and see what Google’s AI inference system can, well, infer about you. Personally, I’m not going to do that. The site is run by EnteIO Technologies Private Limited whose Terms of Use for the site are suitable vague that I doubly wouldn’t upload a photo.

So it may be that Google can make all those inferences from a photo (which probably has location data included for some of the more extreme predictions), but I’m wary of giving any of this away to an organisation I don’t recognise. (Thanks Joe S for the link. Perhaps?)
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified