tag:www.freshnews.org,2005:/feedburner-feed 2026-04-15T04:24:20+00:00 tag:www.freshnews.org,2005:Post/2819210 2026-04-14T23:00:05Z 2026-04-14T23:00:05Z

"The new Linux kernel was released and it's kind of a big deal," writes longtime Slashdot reader rexx mainframe. "Here is what you can expect." Linuxiac reports: A key update in Linux 7.0 is the removal of the experimental label from Rust support. That (of course) does not make Rust a dominant language in kernel development, but it is still an important step in its gradual integration into the project. Another notable security-related change is the addition of ML-DSA post-quantum signatures for kernel module authentication, while support for SHA-1-based module-signing schemes has been removed. The kernel now includes BPF-based filtering for io_uring operations, providing administrators with improved control in restricted environments. Additionally, BTF type lookups are now faster due to binary search. At the same time, this release continues ongoing cleanup in the kernel's lower layers. The removal of linuxrc initrd code advances the transition to initramfs as the sole early-userspace boot mechanism. Linux 7.0 also introduces NULLFS, an immutable and empty root filesystem designed for systems that mount the real root later. Plus, preemption handling is now simpler on most architectures, with further improvements to restartable sequences, workqueues, RCU internals, slab allocation, and type-based hardening. Filesystems and storage receive several updates as well. Non-blocking timestamp updates now function correctly, and filesystems must explicitly opt in to leases rather than receiving them by default. Phoronix has compiled a list of the many exciting changes. Linus Torvalds himself announced the release, which can be downloaded directly from his git tree or from the kernel.org website. Linux 7.0 has a major new version number but it's "largely a numbering reset [...], not a sign of some unusually disruptive release," notes Linuxiac. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

BeauHD tag:www.freshnews.org,2005:Post/2821577 2026-04-14T21:00:04Z 2026-04-14T21:00:04Z

A Chicago concert superfan Aadam Jacobs who has recorded more than 10,000 shows since the 1980s is working with Internet Archive volunteers to digitize the collection before the cassettes deteriorate. "So far, about 2,500 of these tapes have been posted on the Internet Archive, including some rare gems like a Nirvana performance from 1989," reports TechCrunch. From the report: For many of these recordings, Jacobs was using pretty mediocre equipment, but the volunteer audio engineers working with the Internet Archive have made these tapes sound great. One volunteer, Brian Emerick, drives to Jacobs' house once a month to pick up more boxes of tapes -- he has to use anachronistic cassette decks to play the tapes, which get converted into digital files. From there, other volunteers clean up, organize, and label the recordings, even tracking down song names from forgotten punk bands. The archive is available here. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

BeauHD tag:www.freshnews.org,2005:Post/2821201 2026-04-14T21:00:04Z 2026-04-14T21:00:04Z

Researchers at the University of Southern California say they've developed a memristor memory device that continued operating at 700 degrees Celsius. "And crucially, 700 degrees was not the limit, it was simply as hot as their testing equipment could go," adds ScienceAlert. "The device showed no signs of failing." From the report: The device is called a memristor and it's a nanoscale component that can both store information and perform computing operations. Think of it as a tiny sandwich with two electrode layers on the outside and a thin ceramic filling in the middle. The team built theirs from tungsten, the metal with the highest melting point of any element, combined with a ceramic called hafnium oxide, and with a layer of graphene at the bottom. Each material can withstand enormous heat. Together, they turned out to be extraordinary. What makes graphene the key ingredient is the way it interacts with tungsten at the atomic level. In a conventional device, heat causes metal atoms to drift slowly through the ceramic layer until they bridge the two electrodes, short circuiting everything and leaving the device permanently broken. Graphene stops that process dead. Its surface chemistry with tungsten is ... almost like oil and water. Tungsten atoms that drift toward the graphene find they simply cannot take hold, no anchor, no short circuit, no failure. The team used advanced electron microscopy and quantum level computer simulations to understand exactly why, turning a single lucky result into a repeatable principle. The findings have been published in the journal Science. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

BeauHD tag:www.freshnews.org,2005:Post/2818249 2026-04-14T20:00:04Z 2026-04-14T20:00:04Z

Uri Maoz loved doing his human research, back when he was getting his PhD. He was studying a very specific topic in computational neuroscience: how the brain instructs our arms to move and how our gray matter in turn perceives that motion.  Then his professor asked him to deliver an undergrad lecture. Maoz assumed his boss was going to tell him exactly what to do, or at least throw some PowerPoint slides his way. But no. Maoz had free rein to teach anything, as long as it was relevant to the students. “I could have gone to human brain augmentation,” he says. “Cyborgs or whatever.” Yet that admittedly fun and borderline sci-fi topic wasn’t what popped, unbidden, into his mind. His idea, he recalls with excitement: “What neuroscience has to say about the question of free will!”  How—or whether—humans make decisions (like, say, about what to discuss in an undergrad lecture) had been on his mind since he’d read an article in his early twenties suggesting that … maybe they didn’t. This question might naturally beget others: Had he even had a choice about whether to read that article in the first place? How would he ever know if he was responsible for making decisions in his life or if he just had the illusion of control? “After that, there was no turning back,” says Maoz, now a professor at Chapman University, in California. He finished his PhD work in human movement, but afterward he scooted further up the neural chain to find out how desires and beliefs turn into actions—from raising an arm to choosing someone to ask out to dinner on a Friday night. Today, Maoz is a central figure in the attempt to (sort of, maybe) answer how that neural chain functions. His research has since overturned and reinter­preted canonical neuroscience studies and united the straight-scientific and philosophical sides of the free-will question. More than anything, though, he’s succeeded in uncovering new wrinkles in the debate. Machines and magic tricks The concept of free will seems straightforward, but it doesn’t have a universally accepted definition. One intuitive notion is that it’s the ability to make our own decisions and take our own actions on purpose—that we control our lives. But physicists might ask if the universe is deterministic, following a preordained path, and if human choices can still happen in such a universe.  That’s a question for them, Maoz says. What neuroscientists can do is figure out what’s going on in the brain when people make decisions. “And that’s what we’re trying to do: to understand how our wishes, desires, beliefs, turn into actions,” he says. By the time Maoz had finished his PhD, in 2008, neuroscientific research into the question had been going on for decades. One foundational study from the 1960s showed that a hand movement—something a person seemingly decides to do—was preceded by the appearance in the brain of an electrical signal called the “readiness potential.”  Building on that result, in the 1980s a neuroscientist named Benjamin Libet did the experiment that had first piqued Maoz’s interest in the topic—one that many, until recently, interpreted as a death knell for the concept of free will. An electrical impulse in our brains can shed only so much light on whether we truly are the architects of our own fates. “He just had people sit there, and whenever they feel like it, they would go like this,” says Maoz, wiggling his wrist. Libet would then ask where a rotating dot was on a screen when they first had the urge to flick. He found that the readiness potential appeared not only before they moved their hand but before they reported having the urge to move—or, in Libet’s interpretation, before they knew they were going to move.  Studies since have confirmed the observation and shown that the readiness potential appears a second or two—and maybe, fMRI implies, up to 10 seconds—before participants report making a conscious decision. “It suggests we are essentially passengers in a self-driving car,” says Maoz. “The unconscious biological machine does all the steering, but our conscious mind sits in the driver’s seat and takes the credit.”  Maoz initially approached his own research with variations on Libet’s experiments. He worked with epilepsy patients who already had electrodes in their brains, for clinical purposes, and was able to predict which hand they would raise before they raised it.  Still, some of the Libet-inspired studies people were doing nagged at him. “All these results were about completely arbitrary decisions. Raise your hand whenever you feel like it,” he says. “Why? No reason.” A decision like that is quite different from, say, choosing to break up with your partner. Try telling someone they weren’t in the driver’s seat for that.  The field wasn’t looking at meaningful decisions, he says—the ones that actually set the course of lives.  Maoz began pulling in philosophers to help guide his approach. They would challenge him to confront the semantic differences between things like intention, desire, and urge. Neuroscientists have tended to lump those concepts together, but philosophers tease them apart: Desire is a want that doesn’t necessarily progress toward an action; urge carries implications of immediacy and compulsion; and intention involves committing to a plan. (Maoz has come to focus specifically on intention—including, recently, the potential intentions of AI.) In 2017, he organized his first in a series of free-will conferences, drawing many autonomy-interested philosophers. “Thank you so much for coming,” he recalls saying at the opening of the meeting. “As if you had a choice.” One day, the crew took an excursion out on a lake. As the group munched on shrimp, someone joked that they hoped the boat didn’t sink, because everybody in the field would die.  The comment didn’t make Maoz feel existential dread. Instead, he figured that if the whole field was already there, why not lasso them all into writing a research grant? “He just thinks what should be the next step and just has a very good ability to just make it happen,” says Liad Mudrik, a neuroscientist at Tel Aviv University and a frequent collaborator. That ability is special among scientists, says Chapman colleague Aaron Schurger, with whom Maoz co-directs the Laboratory for Understanding Consciousness, Intentions, and Decision-Making (LUCID, appropriately). “I really think that Uri is kind of at the nexus of this field right now because he’s really, really good at bringing people together around these big ideas,” he says. Donations and interruptions Maoz has recently been making progress on one of the big ideas that have consistently occupied his working hours: how trivial and significant decisions play out differently in the brain. In collaborations with Mudrik, he’s parsed the neural difference between picking and choosing—their terms for arbitrary decisions and those that change your life and tug on your emotions.  Readiness potential? Their measurements didn’t clock it ahead of choices. In 2019, Maoz and a crew published a paper measuring the electrical activity in people’s brains as they pressed a key to choose one of two nonprofits to donate $1,000 to—for real, with actual dollars. Then the researchers compared that activity with what they saw when the same group pressed a key at random to donate $500 each to two nonprofits. The team saw the readiness potential in the arbitrary decision, but not for the $1,000 question.  Libet’s result, they concluded, doesn’t apply to the important stuff, which means readiness potential might not actually be a sign that your brain is making a choice before you’re aware of it. “If Libet would have chosen to focus on deliberate decisions, then maybe the entire debate about neuroscience proving free will to be an illusion would have been spared from us,” Mudrik says.  Maoz’s research has spurred others to reinterpret Libet’s work. It’s “enriched my thought process a great deal,” says Bianca Ivanof, a psychologist whose dissertation scrutinized Libet’s methods. They turn out to identify readiness potential at different times depending on how the rotating-dot setup is designed, complicating the ability to compare and interpret results. Maoz has also continued to gather data on the subject. Last year, for example, he used an EEG to measure electrical signals in people’s brains as they got ready to press a keyboard space bar. At random moments, he interrupted their preparations with an audible tone and asked them about their intentions. He saw no connection between the readiness potential and whether or not they were planning to tap the key—evidence that the potential doesn’t represent the buildup of either conscious or unconscious plans. The team did see a signal, though, in a different part of the brain when people said they were preparing to move. So … that’s free will? Sadly, Maoz would be compelled to say Well, not exactly. An electrical impulse in our brains can shed only so much light on whether we truly are the architects of our own fates. And maybe the confusing data from neurons is actually the point. “I don’t think it is a yes-or-no question,” Maoz says. Maybe our less meaningful choices aren’t mindfully made but big ones are; maybe we have the conscious power to change an intended action, but only if our brains are in a particular state.  Neuroscientists likely can’t figure out, on their own, if free will exists. But they can, Maoz says, parse how semantically distinct decision-making forces—desires, urges, intentions, wishes, beliefs—manifest in our brains and become actions. “That is something that we are making progress on,” he says, “and I think that that’s going to help us understand what we do control.” And perhaps also help us make peace with what we do not.  Sarah Scoles is a freelance science journalist and author based in southern Colorado.

Sarah Scoles tag:www.freshnews.org,2005:Post/2818453 2026-04-14T20:00:04Z 2026-04-14T20:00:04Z

This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology. You have no choice in reading this article—maybe How do humans make decisions? The question has been on Uri Maoz’s mind since he read an article in his early twenties suggesting that… maybe they didn’t.   Had he even had a choice about whether to read that article in the first place? How would he ever know if he was truly responsible for making any decisions? “After that, there was no turning back,” says Maoz, now a professor of computational neuroscience at Chapman University.  Today, Maoz is a central figure in efforts to understand how desires and beliefs turn into actions. He’s also uncovered new wrinkles in the debate. Read the full story on his discoveries. —Sarah Scoles This article is from the next issue of our print magazine, packed with stories all about nature. Subscribe now to read the full thing when it lands on Wednesday, April 22. What’s in a name? Moderna’s “vaccine” vs. “therapy” dilemma  Moderna, the covid-19 shot maker, is using its mRNA technology to destroy tumors through a very, very promising technique known as a cancer vacc— “It’s not a vaccine,” a spokesperson for Merck said before the V-word could be uttered. “It’s an individualized neoantigen therapy.” Oh, but it is a vaccine, and it looks like a possible breakthrough. But it’s been rebranded to avoid vaccine fearmongering—and not everyone is happy about the word game. Read the full story.  —Antonio Regalado This article is from The Checkup, our weekly newsletter covering the latest in biotech. Sign up to receive it in your inbox every Thursday.  The must reads I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology.1 Sam Altman’s home has been attacked twice in two days A driver reportedly fired a gun at his property on Sunday. (SF Standard) + A Molotov cocktail was thrown at his home on Friday. (NBC News) + The suspect wrote essays warning AI would end humanity. (SF Chronicle) + The attacks expose growing divides in opinion on AI. (Axios)  2 AI weapons are ushering in a new kind of arms race Countries are racing to deploy AI in military systems. (NYT $) + The Pentagon wants AI firms to train on classified data. (MIT Technology Review) + Where OpenAI’s technology could show up in Iran. (MIT Technology Review)  3 Artemis II was a success Astronauts did an array of experiments that will be crucial to the future of both the program itself and deep-space missions. (Guardian) + But next steps for the Artemis missions are uncertain. (Ars Technica)  4 OpenAI and Elon Musk are heading toward a massive courtroom clashThe company has accused Musk of a “legal ambush.” (Engadget) + He’s lost a streak of cases ahead of the showdown. (FT $)  5 AI job fears in China are fueling a viral “ability harvester” project It claims to turn human skills into AI tools. (SCMP) + Hustlers are cashing in on China’s OpenClaw AI craze. (MIT Technology Review)  6 Governments are hiding information about the Iran war online Through restrictions on internet access and satellite imagery. (NPR)   7 Apple is testing four smart glasses that could rival Meta Ray-Bans They’re part of a broader wearables strategy. (Bloomberg $)  8 Meta is building an AI version of Mark Zuckerberg to interact with staffIt’s being trained on his mannerisms, voice, and statements. (FT $)  9 Anthropic is asking Christian leaders for guidance It’s seeing advice on building moral machines. (WP $) + AI agents have spread their own religions. (MIT Technology Review)  10 A dancer with MND is performing again through an avatar Her brainwaves powered the digital dancer. (BBC)  Quote of the day “Earth was this lifeboat hanging in the universe.” —Artemis II astronaut Christina Koch describes her view of Earth from space, the Guardian reports. One more thing RAVEN JIANG How AI and Wikipedia have sent vulnerable languages into a doom spiral When Kenneth Wehr started managing the Greenlandic-language version of Wikipedia, he discovered that almost every article had been written by people who didn’t speak the language.  A growing number of them had been copy-pasted into Wikipedia from machine translators—and were riddled with elementary mistakes. This is beginning to cause a wicked problem. AI systems, from Google Translate to ChatGPT, learn new languages by scraping text from Wikipedia. This could push the most vulnerable languages on Earth toward the precipice. Read the full story on what happens when AI gets trained on junk pages.  —Jacob Judah  We can still have nice things A place for comfort, fun and distraction to brighten up your day. (Got any ideas? Drop me a line.) + Hungary’s next health minister can throw some serious shapes.  + Here’s a welcome route to an AI-free Google search. + Movievia eschews endless scrolling to find the right film for your needs+ A photography trick has turned a giant glacier into a tiny, living diorama.

Thomas Macaulay