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.
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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
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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.
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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)
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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.
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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:
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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.”
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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:
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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.
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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.
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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:
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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.
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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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| • Why do social networks drive us a little mad? • Why does angry content seem to dominate what we see? • How much of a role do algorithms play in affecting what we see and do online? • What can we do about it? • Did Facebook have any inkling of what was coming in Myanmar in 2016?Read Social Warming, my latest book, and find answers – and more. |
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