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Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

Florida bans local governments from pursuing net-zero emissions goals

A new state law limits Florida communities' aims to offset greenhouse gas emissions that are warming the global climate and intensifying disasters such as hurricanes.

Specifically, HB 1217 prohibits local governments from pursuing net-zero emissions goals. At least 10 cities and counties have implemented such policies, including Fort Lauderdale, Miami, Orlando, and Leon County, where Tallahassee, the state capital, is located. But the new law will not necessarily upend these policies, said Bradley Marshall, senior attorney at Earthjustice, an advocacy group.

"It's certainly meant to scare municipalities and local governments from trying to do things to further net-zero policies," he said. "Now, its exact impact and what it exactly prohibits is probably up for some debate. Things that are adjacent to it—emissions reductions and even climate change reduction policies—on their face will not run afoul at all of a ban on adopting a net zero policy."

The measure requires local governments to submit an affidavit annually to the state Department of Revenue verifying compliance. Gov. Ron DeSantis, a Republican, signed the measure on April 22, Earth Day, and the law will take effect July 1. It states that "net zero policies, carbon taxes and assessments, and emission trading programs are detrimental to this state's energy security and economic interests and inconsistent with the energy policy and the environmental policy of this state."

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

NetNut cracked as Google and FBI target 2 million-device botnet

Tech companies working with US law enforcement "significantly degraded" the NetNut residential proxy network as part of an ongoing effort to disrupt the tools cybercriminals use to conceal their activity, say researchers.

The work was carried out by Google, Lumen, Shadowserver, the FBI, and others, and marks a continuation of the IPIDEA proxy network disruption from January.

According to Google Cloud, those working on the operation believe NetNut was among the most popular residential proxy network providers and had at least 2 million devices enrolled in its botnet, comprising mainly small TV-streaming hardware. Crims often use residential proxy networks to make it look like their traffic is actually coming from legit homes and businesses.

In the same way that other residential proxy networks expand their pool of enrolled devices, NetNut distributed its own SDK via these devices.

Proxy providers often approach users under the guise of monetizing their spare bandwidth, paying them a fee in exchange for letting their SDK run on their devices.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

https://www.engadget.com/2206582/amazon-leo-is-ready-to-go/

A United Launch Alliance (ULA) Atlas V rocket left for space in the early hours of July 2, bringing 29 Amazon Leo satellites with it. Amazon says the rocket has successfully deployed the satellites and that it has already established contact with them in orbit, as well as ensured that they were in working condition. All that remains is raising the satellites to their assigned operational altitude of 392 miles, after which, Leo will be ready to begin providing customers access to its satellite broadband service.

This ULA launch, which took off from Florida's Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, brings the total number of operational Leo satellites to over 390. That's "enough to support continuous service across initial latitudes," said Amazon Leo VP Chris Weber. After putting 224 Leo satellites in space, this is the Atlas V's rocket last mission for the project, as well. The next Leo mission will be using ULA's heavy-lift Vulcan vehicle, which can carry more than 40 satellites for every launch and can fly more frequently, allowing Amazon to expand the service's coverage and capacity more quickly.

Still lots of work ahead – including raising all these new satellites to their assigned altitude – but we've completed enough... pic.twitter.com/UZb404fXRq

— Chris Weber (@Weber44Chris) July 2, 2026

"With hundreds of flight-ready satellites standing by at the Cape and a new, dedicated vertical integration facility ready to support Leo Vulcan 1 and subsequent missions, we have a clear path to increase launch and deployment cadence, helping us quickly expand network coverage following an initial service rollout later this year," said Melissa Wuerl, Amazon Leo Director of Launch Systems.

Of course, with only 390 or so satellites in space, Leo still has a monumental to climb to be able to catch up to Starlink. SpaceX's Starlink, after all, has more than 10,000 satellites currently providing its customers' satellite broadband needs. In addition to launching satellites on ULA's Vulcan rockets, Amazon also plans to use Blue Origin's New Glenn vehicle, which can carry more than 48 satellites at once. New Glenn's launchpad exploded during a hotfire test in May, delaying all missions that were planning to use the rocket. But Blue Origin, which was also founded by Jeff Bezos, has been building a new launchpad in earnest, so that it can launch New Glenn flights by the end of the year.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

https://www.quantamagazine.org/for-the-first-time-a-cell-built-from-scratch-grows-and-divides-20260701/

For the very first time, biologists packed nonliving components into a cell-like membrane, piece by piece, and witnessed the bag of molecules start to behave like life. The lab-made synthetic cell grew, replicated its DNA, and divided, demonstrating the basic functions of a cell cycle.

It's "an impressive step," said Jack Szostak, who studies the origins of life at the University of Chicago and was not involved in the research. "I don't know of any other effort to put together an artificial cell from biological components that has progressed so far."

The cell is not alive by any definition. It can't survive without constant deliveries of food and ribosomes, the machinery needed to make proteins. It has no defenses or a good waste removal system. But it's the strongest demonstration yet that it is possible to generate life from nonlife, a goal that synthetic biologists have been chasing for decades.

"It's a big step forward to this holy grail of making a living thing out of dead components," said Sijbren Otto, a systems chemist at the Stratingh Institute for Chemistry in the Netherlands who was not involved in the work. "It's not completely there yet, but it's definitely getting quite close."

Since these cells were pieced together from scratch, and all the molecular parts were crafted in the lab, scientists can tinker with the system and switch components in and out. "I have a blueprint, I have a full chemical ingredient list of every component," said Kate Adamala, a synthetic biologist at the University of Minnesota who led the new study, which is not yet peer-reviewed. With such flexibility, this kind of synthetic cell could eventually be coaxed to create new materials, such as biofuels and drugs, and help researchers study disease.

It could also give scientists insight into some of their deepest existential questions: What is the minimum needed to sustain life? How could life start? What happens if we alter the biology that composes life on Earth today?

Or, as Adamala put it: "What else can biology do?"

Some 4 billion years ago, a bunch of nonliving molecules got together to form the first protocells. They fed, grew, and divided. Then, over time, evolutionary processes emerged that let these cells change and diversify into many different types, decorating a barren world with all manner of strange beings. A purely chemical world blossomed into a biological one. Scientists cannot agree on how this shift from nonlife to life, or abiogenesis, happened, but some have turned their sights on trying it out for themselves in the lab.

For decades, researchers have taken different approaches to this challenge. Some, like the synthetic biologist John Glass at the J. Craig Venter Institute, are stripping down bacterial cells to their smallest, barest genomes to reveal a cell's minimum requirements to stay alive. Others, like Otto, try to build cells with molecules that differ from those found in Earth biology.

Adamala also works from the ground up, but with biological molecules found in nature today. When she started her lab in 2016, she envisioned assembling a synthetic cell, a proof of concept, that could undergo a complete cycle of cell division using its own genome.

She found an instruction manual in what all known cells have in common: They grow, they duplicate their DNA, they divide, and they evolve. They transcribe their DNA into RNA and then make proteins to carry out these tasks and others that keep a cell running, such as metabolizing molecules for energy. All of this is done inside a lipid membrane, which holds all the necessary materials in one place. Adamala's team needed to build their synthetic cell a genome and supply it with all the materials to carry out those tasks.

They developed and optimized different ingredients, most inspired by other labs, before combining them together inside liposomes — hollow sacs enclosed by a simple lipid membrane. This would serve as the cellular body.

canopic jug writes:

Archivist David Rosenthal observes now that more material is posted online by LLMs than actual people, the bots are starting to ingest their own digital excrement, creating a negative feedback loop.

In the belief that "more is better", Large Language Models (LLMs) have insatiable appetites for training data. They started by scraping everything on the Web (robots.txt be dammed). When that ran out they downloaded the various pirate libraries (copyright be dammed). That exhausted the texts easily available in digital form, but their hunger wasn't assuaged. As for images, they partly used CAPTCHAs but mostly paid vast numbers of poor people to label the images with what they showed.

When the supply of text ran low, people observed that the LLMs were capable of generating human-like text in large quantities. The obvious idea was to pour the output of the LLMs into their training sets. This wasn't just a conscious decision, it was inevitable. The advent of LLMs rapidly polluted the Web with LLM output. Greg Druck's AI Now Writes as Many Online Articles as Humans notes that:

We observe significant growth in primarily AI-generated articles, coinciding with the launch of ChatGPT in November 2022. After only 12 months, primarily AI-generated articles accounted for 35.9% of articles published.

In Q1 2025, the quantity of primarily AI-generated articles being published on the web nearly equaled the quantity of human-written articles, 49.6% vs. 50.4%. In Q4 2025, primarily AI-generated articles surpassed human-written at 50.9%, before returning to 49.9% in Q1 2026.

Even if slop were not of undesirable quality, it is not produced by humans and thus is completely unsuitable as training data.

Previously:
(2026) A Wikipedia Clone Built on AI Hallucinations is Here to Hasten Along the Death of the Internet
(2025) When It All Comes Crashing Down: The Aftermath of the AI Boom
(2025) AI Favors Texts Written by Other AIs, Even When They're Worse Than Human Ones
(2025) What the Hell is Going on Right Now?

Original Submission

looorg writes:

Travel like it's 0 AD. Plan and travel your next road trip along the old Roman road network. As if they had Google Maps.

https://www.euronews.com/culture/2026/07/02/ancient-romes-version-of-google-maps-how-long-to-reach-the-beach
https://omnesviae.org/

A digital tool lets users explore the Roman Empire's road network and, using historical data, estimate how long journeys between cities took 2,000 years ago.

A Dutch engineer has reconstructed, with the help of academic sources and ancient cartography, the road map that linked up the Roman Empire. The result, accessible from any browser, including on mobile phones, allows users to plot routes between cities of Antiquity and find out how many days the journey would have taken on foot or on horseback.

The tool is called OmnesViae and is based mainly on the Tabula Peutingeriana, a medieval copy of a Roman map that depicted the cursus publicus, the Empire's official road network.

As the western part of that document has been lost, the data for that area come from the Antonine Itinerary, another record from the Roman era. Behind the project is René Voorburg (source in Spanish), who drew on the work of historian Richard Talbert on the Tabula and on the location data from the Pleiades Project. The code and database are open access and can be consulted on Codeberg.

Original Submission

jelizondo writes:

A very interesting article was published in Phys.org about how modern life might be outpacing our mind, which evolved to deal with a simpler world:

The human brain evolved for a world of familiar faces, immediate threats and small social groups. But the world around us is changing far faster than human biology can keep pace. That mismatch may help explain some of the stress, loneliness and constant comparison people experience today.

The review, co-authored by Dr. Jose Yong, senior lecturer at James Cook University, Singapore, and Dr. Sarah Chan, research fellow at the Lee Kuan Yew Centre for Innovative Cities at SUTD, is published in Behavioral Sciences.

Evolutionary mismatch describes what happens when human instincts shaped in one kind of environment are forced to operate in a very different one. Humans evolved in smaller, close-knit groups, where danger, belonging, status and trust were read through familiar people and everyday face-to-face signals. [...]

Social media makes this mismatch especially visible. The urge to understand our place within a group may once have helped people maintain trust and cooperation among familiar faces. Today, that same instinct can be triggered by an endless stream of curated lives, achievements and status signals.

At the center of the paper is competition. Modern environments can intensify the feeling that others are judging, outperforming or leaving us behind. [...]

"Competition is not new, but modern life can make it feel constant," said Yong. "An evolutionary perspective may help explain why people respond so strongly to comparison and the fear of falling behind, even when those signals come from strangers or screens rather than a small social group."

The paper draws on existing research and theory rather than new data. It presents evolutionary mismatch as one way of understanding modern social and psychological problems, alongside psychological, social and economic explanations. These ideas will need to be tested through real-world research.

That matters because the response to modern stress cannot rest only on telling individuals to be more resilient. If environments are activating old instincts in new and unhelpful ways, then cities, workplaces, digital platforms and communities also need to be part of the solution. [...]

"Stress, loneliness and anxiety are often treated as personal or lifestyle problems," said Chan. "But they may also reflect a mismatch between the environments people live in and the conditions our minds and bodies evolved to navigate. That means we should think not only about individual resilience, but also about how cities and communities are designed."

None of this is an argument for returning to a simpler past or a suggestion that modern life is inherently broken. It is a case for designing the present more thoughtfully. Understanding where modern life conflicts with the conditions human beings evolved to navigate could help researchers, designers and policymakers create cities and communities that feel less alienating and more supportive of everyday well-being.

More information

Jose C. Yong et al, Evolutionary Mismatch, Stress, and Competition: Making Sense of Psychosocial Problems in the Polycrisis Era, Behavioral Sciences (2026). DOI: 10.3390/bs16050650

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

https://www.slashgear.com/2204680/dot-law-change-no-brake-pedals-self-driving-cars/

Autonomous vehicles have been a big talking point in the United States as Waymo spreads to more cities and Tesla's Cybercab service launch looms overhead. In June 2026, the Department of Transportation (DOT) proposed changes to federal regulations that would allow the growing number of autonomous vehicles in the United States to forgo brake pedals.

As it stands, automakers building autonomous vehicles without brake pedals or other components must request an exemption from the federal government — and if granted, these vehicles must be limited to 2,500 per year. This proposed change will get autonomous vehicles on the road faster, with fewer obstacles. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) is on board, with Administrator Jonathan Morrison stating that autonomous vehicles are the greatest innovation "since the Model T."

"NHTSA is tearing down pointless barriers to innovative designs while strengthening the fundamental safety requirements that matter and holding AV developers accountable for safe performance," Morrison said (via TechCrunch). The public has until July 27th to comment on the proposal before the DOT officially approves these changes.

Right now, most autonomous vehicles have a steering wheel, accelerator, and brake pedals, but even popular brands like Waymo have been considering ditching these components — federal regulations are the only thing in the way. One company that would benefit greatly from the DOT's changes is Tesla, given the upcoming Cybercab.

Currently, Tesla's robotaxi service has remained a small operation in Austin, Texas, with human monitors in the front seat. CEO Elon Musk has repeatedly blamed regulatory red tape for the delayed rollout of the Cybercab, which was first revealed at the "We, Robot" event in 2024. The NHTSA has been consistently investigating Tesla's Full Self-Driving mode for false claims and possible shortcomings, which could be prolonging the process. California has also claimed that FSD is engaging in false advertising and demanded that it change the name.

Early Cybercab prototypes featured no steering wheel or pedals, as well as a cabin with just two rear seats. The first production Cybercab came out of the Giga Texas facility in April 2026, despite a delay in the unsupervised driving feature. Now, a new Tesla document states that the controversial vehicle typically won't have a steering wheel, accelerator, or brake pedals. This means Tesla will need DOT's changes to go through to avoid more delays in its Cybercab services.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

A philosopher has put forward an argument for rethinking how particles are defined within the standard model of particle physics:

The standard model of particle physics may be due for a philosophical remodel, including rethinking what qualifies each of its particles to count as a particle to begin with.

Whether a particle is involved in making up matter or carrying a force, it or its constituent parts has a place in the standard model of particle physics. In this way, the standard model is similar to the periodic table of elements – it tabulates the building blocks of our world. But George Hobart at the University of Bristol in the UK now argues that this tabulation may need to be revisited, and even changed, to make for a more sound model of physical reality.

At the heart of his reasoning are particles called neutrinos, which are notoriously elusive because they only interact with other particles very weakly through gravity or across very short distances through the weak nuclear force. Additionally, their mass isn’t precisely known, nor can the standard model predict it through the so-called Higgs mechanism that explains the masses of all other particles.

There is another oddity, too. The standard model tabulates three different neutrinos – the electron neutrino, muon neutrino and tau neutrino – each of which has a more massive "big brother" particle that it shares a name with: electron, muon and tau. While an electron can’t spontaneously become a muon, an electron neutrino can, for example, randomly turn into a muon neutrino.

Hobart says it helps to visualise the standard model as an actual table with all the neutrinos in one row and their big brothers in another. "We have no evidence for the big brothers being able to swap horizontally; we have very good evidence that they can’t. But for some reason, the neutrinos... they are able to swap horizontally."

Hobart says that to a philosopher, this begs the question of whether categorising the particles in this way makes sense. From numerous experiments, we know that neutrinos exist and what properties all the other particles in the standard model have, but there are multiple ways to turn that knowledge into a system of understanding, or an ontology.

canopic jug writes:

Derek Thompson has republished excerpts from an almost 100-year-old report on what the US was like in the 1920s. He includes some of the charts and summaries.

One hundred years ago, on September 26, 1929, President Herbert Hoover gathered a group of social scientists at the White House. He asked them to begin research on the most detailed report ever produced on the state of the nation. Four years later, running more than 1,500 pages long, Recent Social Trends was published, offering an unusually granular look at life in the mid-1920s.

The document is almost entirely forgotten. But today, for America's 250th birthday, I'm blowing the cobwebs off this sucker and taking readers inside its yellowed pages for a look back at what life was like in the U.S. exactly 100 years ago, when the U.S. was celebrating its sesquicentennial anniversary.

Derek observes some interesting parallels between US society around both the sesquicentennial and the recent semiquincentennial.

A scanned version of Recent Social Trends in the United States: Report of the President's Research Committee on Social Trends is available online having been scanned at the University of California back when scanning old material was still allowed, though there are paper copies there and elsewhere. For now.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

Linux 6.18 arrives with a few desktop tweaks, while the neglected x86 edition remains stuck on Debian 11:

The distro formerly known as Raspbian has received some modest tweaks – and a whole new kernel version.

Raspberry Pi Ltd is a little capricious when it comes to version numbering for Raspberry Pi OS, and although this release contains a fairly significant change, it doesn't seem to have a different version number. While PiOS is based on Debian 13 "Trixie," the company significantly customizes upstream Debian, including newer kernels.

For 13 years now, Raspberry Pi has been adding new sections to the top of a single release notes file, which tells us that this build is dated 2026-06-18 and updates the kernel from version 6.12.75 to version 6.18.34. Even so, the version number on the splash screen is strangely unchanged. It remains at 6.2, which was the modest security update announced in April. Now there's a much bigger change – but no announcement and no new version number. So much for version numbers having meaning.

[...] So what is new in the latest version of PiOS? Well, the kernel is now version 6.18 from November, which became the LTS kernel within days. By default, PiOS 6 uses the labcw Wayland compositor with some components drawn from LXDE, such as the panel and file manager.

This is in place of its old customized version of LXDE, formerly called PIXEL. This release includes labwc version 0.9.7, replacing version 0.9.2. You can still switch back to Openbox for an X11 desktop if you want, but this disables the Wayland-based Raspberry Pi Connect that was added a couple of years ago (and might yet make it over to Windows).

[...] We upgraded a testbed Pi 5 from the January release, and it went smoothly with no apparent difference – and it still only takes about 560 MB of RAM under X11, which is very good for 2026. The new kernel means that some functions are slightly slower and some slightly faster, but you probably won't be able to tell. For the full lowdown, Linux news site Phoronix has extensive benchmarks.

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

Patients are also three times more likely to trust AI in their doctor's secure portal than a public chatbot:

Only 2% of U.S. adults turned to AI for healthcare information in 2024, and today the number is 61%, according to Salesforce's Connected Health Consumer report, a survey of 3,200 consumers worldwide aimed at better understanding how the rise of agentic AI is reshaping consumer expectations, attitudes, and demands within healthcare -- specifically patient experience. 

Here are the four key findings of the 2026 Connected Health Consumer Report:

The report found that 60% of patients put off care because of scheduling friction. Patients are desperately seeking a better engagement experience with healthcare providers. The current multichannel engagement models fail to deliver a good experience, with 49% of patients noting abandoned calls after 10 minutes of holding. 

The online experience is not better, with 46% of patients labeling websites as confusing and difficult to navigate. One in 6 now says ease of digital access is a deciding factor when choosing a provider. Record sharing is another major deficit for improved experiences. More than half of patients (60%) say poor record sharing between providers means repeating the same medical tests. 

And 66% of patients have run out of medication while waiting for their prescriptions to be refilled.

Nearly 7 out of 10 patients would rather have access to 24/7 help via AI agents versus waiting to speak with a person during standard hours. Bad scheduling experiences are driving patients away from care, and AI agents are helping. Patients want proactive care, with 83% of patients interested in self-enrolled programs that can provide healthcare recommendations. 

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

Time to start praying to the goddess of wisdom and war:

It's going to be a "messy" summer for security folks, especially when it comes to fixing the open source code that underpins their organizations.

That's according to Dan Lorenc, CEO and co-founder of Chainguard, a software supply-chain security company leading Athena, a newly formed coalition of about two dozen companies that wants to make the process of finding and fixing open source bugs "as easy to consume as possible." 

The members have committed to using AI to prevent attacks on open source software. In addition to Chainguard, other founding member companies include BNY, Cisco, Cloudflare, Corridor, DepthFirst, Docker, JPMorganChase, Kyndryl,  LTM, and PwC.  

Many of these member companies are also partners with Anthropic's Project Glasswing and OpenAI Daybreak, which allow them to try out the pair's most advanced bug-hunting models. The coalition accepts vulnerability findings generated by all frontier models, according to Lorenc.

Athena has already processed more than 20,000 findings and developed over 2,000 patches across 500 open source projects. 

In about three weeks, the coalition's first wave of bug disclosures will begin.

"This is going to be a messy summer for everyone," Lorenc told The Register in a phone interview.

[...] "Put yourself in the shoes of someone with Glasswing access," he said. "You get this crazy, new model that can find vulnerabilities everywhere, that no one had seen and you had missed for years with all of your other tooling. You run it on your code, and it finds tons of stuff in your first-party code, the stuff that you've written, and you fix all of that."

After running Mythos Preview on all of your organization's proprietary code, imagine pointing the model at an application. Most modern apps contain a mixture of code from different sources, mostly third-party. According to Lorenc, 95 percent of the code in any of these codebases is open source.

"When you run [advanced models] at the application level, you find a ton of vulnerabilities in open source code that you can't fix for yourself the same way you can that first-party code," Lorenc said. "So then you're left with: what to do?"

canopic jug writes:

The Medievalists has a short list of 10 inventions from the Middle Ages which have shaped the modern world.

The Middle Ages are often portrayed as an age of superstition and stagnation, but many of the technologies that transformed everyday life were first developed or greatly improved during this period. From eyeglasses and mechanical clocks to windmills and universities, these medieval inventions continue to shape the modern world.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

The High-Luminosity LHC will be mostly the same machine, but it'll deliver 10 times the luminosity and just as little chance of destroying the universe - sorry, conspiracy theorists:

The end has come for CERN's Large Hadron Collider (LHC), but it's not being turned off for fear of the world being sucked into some sort of cosmic anomaly - it's getting a major upgrade. 

Physicists at CERN are still bidding goodbye to the LHC, per a Monday announcement from the lab, but this is very much a "the king is dead, long live the king" sort of moment, as the four-year shutdown will result in the completion of the High-Luminosity LHC, or HiLumi LHC, not a full-fledged replacement.

In essence, a younger, fitter model with much better eyesight and most of the same genes will be taking the throne as the world's largest particle accelerator, or human-made machine, for that matter, when it comes online in 2030 after what the lab is calling Long Shutdown 3.

HiLumi LHC will feature a number of upgrades. As its name suggests, increased luminosity is the biggest difference between the new model and the old LHC, which was first switched on in 2008.

Luminosity, as CERN explains, is proportional to the number of collisions produced in a given time. Those collisions are detected in the ATLAS and CMS detectors at the LHC (the pair were responsible for the world's first detection of the Higgs boson in 2012), which will be getting some major upgrades that, per CERN, will effectively make them into entirely new detectors.