David Gross: The expected lifetime, in the case of 2% [per year], is about 35 years. [The expected lifetime is the average time it would take to have had a nuclear war by then. It is calculated using similar equations as those used to determine the “half-life” of a radioactive material.]

Live Science: So what do you suggest as remedies to lower that risk?

Gross: We had something called the Nobel Laureate Assembly for reducing the risk of nuclear war in Chicago last year. There are steps, which are easy to take — for nations, I mean. For example, talk to each other. In the last 10 years, there are no treaties anymore. We’re entering an incredible arms race.

We have three super nuclear powers. People are talking about using nuclear weapons; there’s a major war going on in the middle of Europe; we’re bombing Iran; India and Pakistan almost went to war. OK, so that’s increased the chance [of nuclear war]. I would really like to have a solid estimate — it might be more, and I think I’m being conservative — but a 2% estimate [of nuclear war] in today’s crazy world.

Live Science: Do you think we’ll ever get to a place where we get rid of nuclear weapons?

Gross: We’re not recommending that. That’s idealistic, but yes, I hope so. Because if you don’t, there’s always some risk an AI 100 years from now [could launch nuclear weapons], but chances of [humanity] living, with this estimate, 100 years, is very small, and living 200 years is infinitesimal. So [the answer to] Fermi’s question of “Where are the civilizations, all the intelligent organisms around the galaxy, and why don’t they talk to us?” is that they’ve killed themselves…

There are now nine nuclear powers. Even three is infinitely more complicated than two. The agreements, the norms between countries, are all falling apart. Weapons are getting crazier. Automation, and perhaps even AI, will be in control of those instruments pretty soon… It’s going to be very hard to resist making AI make decisions because it acts so fast.

In the U.K., electric car sales reached a record high, with 86,120 vehicles sold in March… The French online used-car retailer Aramisauto reported its share of EV sales nearly doubled from February 16 to March 9, rising to 12.7% from 6.5%, while sales of fueled models dropped to 28% of sales from 34%, and sales of diesel models dropped to 10% from 14%. Germany’s largest online car market, mobile.de, told Reuters that the share of EV searches on its website has tripled since the start of March — from 12% to 36%, with car dealers receiving 66% more enquiries for used EVs than in February.

South Korea reported that registrations for electric vehicles more than doubled in March compared to the prior year, due in part to rising fuel prices and government subsidies… In New Zealand, more than 1,000 EVs were registered in the week that ended on March 22, close to double the week before, making it the country’s biggest week for electric vehicle registrations since the end of 2023, according to the country’s Transport Minister, Chris Bishop.

Patients still have surgery to remove tumors. After that, the mRNA vaccines are personalized for each individual using genetic material taken from their unique tumor cells. In the clinical trial, after getting the vaccine, the patients also received chemotherapy, which is standard post-op treatment for operable pancreatic cancer… [The article notes that less than 13% of people diagnosed with pancreatic cancer live for more than five years, making it “one of the deadliest cancers.”]

[E]xperts have long believed that people with pancreatic cancer could not generate an immune response against tumors. But after nine doses of the personalized vaccine, [clinical trial participant Donna] Gustafson is one of eight people in the 16-person Phase 1 trial who did just that, producing an army of immune cells called T cells that seek out and destroy tumor cells… [Dr. Vinod Balachandran, a vaccine center director who is leading the trial, said] it was unclear whether the immune response would last and lead to the patients living longer… 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. Six years after treatment, Gustafson and six others who responded to the treatment are still alive…

More research is still needed. Genentech and BioNTech, the two drugmakers behind the vaccine, have already launched a larger Phase 2 clinical trial… Another team is working on an off-the-shelf vaccine that targets a protein called KRAS that is present in as many as 90% of pancreatic cancers. In a small, early trial, about 85% of the participants mounted an immune response to the protein.

The lawsuit, filed in a Bengaluru court and obtained by TechCrunch, names platforms such as X, YouTube, and Instagram along with dozens of content creators, and seeks takedown of the content as well as broader restraint on what it describes as false or defamatory material related to the company’s devices. In its over 60-page filing, Motorola has sought a permanent injunction restraining the defendants from publishing or sharing what it describes as false or defamatory content about its products, including reviews, videos, comments, and boycott campaigns.

The complaint cites hundreds of posts across platforms, including videos alleging device issues and phones catching fire. But it is also targeting unfavorable product reviews and user commentary that the company alleges are false or defamatory. In a statement after publication, a Motorola spokesperson said it had initiated legal action “in the interest of public safety” against what it described as demonstrably false claims that its devices had exploded or caught fire.

The software from Fog Data Science, adopted this January in Nevada through a Department of Public Safety contract, pulls information from smartphone apps in order to let state investigators identify the location of mobile devices. The state is allowed more than 250 queries a month using the tool, which allows officers to track a device’s location over long stretches of time and enables them to see what Fog calls “patterns of life,” according to company documents from 2022. It can help them deduce where and when people work and live, with whom they associate and what places they visit, according to privacy experts… Traditionally, police must obtain a warrant from a judge to access cellphone location information — a process that can take days or weeks. And while cellphone users may be aware that they are sharing their location through apps such as Google Maps, critics say few are aware that such information can make its way to police…

Other agencies in Nevada have been known to use technology similar to Fog. In 2013, Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department acquired something known as a cell-site simulator that mimics cellphone towers and can sweep up signals from entire areas to track individuals, with some models capable of intercepting texts and calls. Police have not released detailed information about the technology since then.

HP Anyware, the new name of the Teradici PCoIP remote desktop solution that was acquired by HP in 2021, is being discontinued.

Light on specifics, Disney says they will be certifying premium large format theaters for the Infinity Vision experience, highlighting laser projection and immersive audio quality. The new program will begin in the summer for a theater run of 2019’s Avengers: Endgame ahead of Doomsday‘s holiday release.

Now you might be thinking: Giant screen? Booming audio? That sounds an awful lot like IMAX. The most consumer-recognized premium movie-going screen is the coveted throne for big blockbuster events, from Avatar to One Battle After Another. Unfortunately for Doomsday, IMAX screens are already booked for the holiday season by Dune: Part Three, the anticipated return to Arrakis, where Timothée Chalamet’s Muad’Dib will begin to go worm-mode. Locked out of the popular choice for doubling your ticket price, Disney appears to have made up a new one…

Disney says they aim to certify 75 theaters in the United States and 300 internationally for the Infinity Vision program.

D. Graham Burnett is a historian of science at Princeton University and one of the authors of " Attensity! A Manifesto of the Attention Liberation Movement,” making him a pillar of the growing backlash against the corporate harvesting of human attention. Along with MS NOW host Chris Hayes’ bestselling " The Sirens’ Call: How Attention Became the World’s Most Endangered Resource,” his work is part of a growing body of literature calling for people to move away from screens and pay attention to life. Burnett says the “attention liberation movement” is about throwing off the yoke of time-sucking apps. People “need to rewild their attention. Their attention is the fullness of their relationship to the world”....

There are several dozen “attention activism” groups across the United States and Canada, and the movement has also cropped up in Spain, Italy, Croatia, France and England. Burnett said he expects it to spread further.

• “More than a dozen millennials gathered in a brownstone apartment in Brooklyn and placed their phones in a metal colander before two hours of reading, drawing and conversation.”

• A few miles away “Nearly 20 people in their 30s stared at their cellphones for a few minutes. Then they set them down and looked at their bared palms for a while. Then those of their neighbors.”

Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader destinyland for sharing the article.

Floppy disks also felt quite fragile, and while we got “superfloppy” formats that were physically larger and had more capacity, those were pretty unwieldy as portable storage. Enter 1994, when a company called Iomega introduced its variant of a “superfloppy”, the Zip drive… [T]he initial capacity introduced in 1994 reached a whopping 100MB, which was huge number when put up against the traditional floppy disk. Zip drives also had major performance benefits, with read speeds that could average 1.4MB/s, as opposed to the comparatively sluggish 16kB/s speeds of a traditional floppy disk, as well as a seek time of around 28ms seconds, whereas a floppy disk averaged 200ms. Zip drives weren’t quite as fast as desktop HDDs, but for portable storage, this was a huge step forward…

[I]n 1998, Iomega introduced the Zip 250 disks, which increased the capacity to 250MB, and, already in the new millennium, we got the Zip 750, which took that further to 750MB… It was an appealing enough proposition that big computer manufacturers like Dell started including a Zip drive in some of their PCs. Even Apple included Zip drives in some of its Power Macintosh models from the mid-to-late 90s. However, things started to shift towards the end of the decade as other portable formats rose to prominence, most notably CDs and USB flash drives.

Despite their initial success, it didn’t take long for users to start noticing a major drawback of Zip drives: many times, they would just fail. It wasn’t necessarily related to age or any particular misuse of the disks, it just happened. It was a big enough phenomenon that it became known as the “click of death”, and once it happened, your drive was gone. The problem was estimated by Iomega to affect around 0.5% of Zip drives, but while that sounds like a small number, when you sell products by the thousands, it becomes fairly widespread. It was a big enough issue that, in September 1998, a class action lawsuit was filed against Iomega for the common problems. Some of the complaints in that lawsuit were eventually dismissed by the court of Delaware, but others were not, and once the public became aware of the problems with Zip drives, it was hard for the brand to make a comeback.

It didn’t help that this happened around the same time as formats such as CDs were becoming more popular… And eventually, USB flash drives became the most popular way to carry data around since they were smaller and offered much faster speeds… Eventually, after seeing its profits plummet by the mid-2000s, Iomega was sold to a company called EMC in 2008, and in 2013, EMC and Lenovo formed a joint venture that took over Iomega’s business and removed all of the Iomega branding from its products.

In April 2025, Duolingo CEO Luis von Ahn made headlines after writing a memo calling the company "AI-first.” In the memo, von Ahn announced that the language-learning platform would track employees’ AI use in performance reviews. Now, a year later, von Ahn is backtracking and rethinking how he measures employee performance. He told the Silicon Valley Girl podcast earlier this month that Duolingo no longer considers AI use in performance reviews.

The change arose after employees started to ask, “Do you just want us to use AI for AI’s sake?” von Ahn explained. “We said no, look — the most important thing in your performance is that you are doing whatever your job is as well as possible. A lot of times, AI can help you with that, but if it can’t, I’m not going to force you to do that,” von Ahn said on the podcast. He felt as though the company was “trying to push something that in some cases did not fit” instead of “being held accountable for the actual outcome.” The CEO is, however, still sticking to other “constructive constraints” he introduced in the April 2025 memo, including stopping contractor hiring in cases where AI can assume their workload…

Von Ahn also mentioned that a few months ago, Duolingo had a day dedicated to vibe coding, or prompting AI to create an app without manually writing a single line of code. Every single person at the company, from engineers to human resources professionals, had to vibe code an app. Vibe coding has made an impact at the company. One of Duolingo’s latest offerings, a course teaching users how to play chess, arose when two people vibe-coded the first prototype of it, the CEO said. Neither of them knew how to play chess or program, but they managed to use AI to create the whole chess curriculum and a prototype of the app in about six months last year. Now chess is Duolingo’s fastest-growing course, according to von Ahn. “At this point, we have seven million daily active users that are learning chess,” the CEO said on the podcast.

In a mission recently added to the docket for next year, Artemis III’s yet-to-be -named astronauts will practice docking their Orion capsule with a lunar lander or two in orbit around Earth. Elon Musk’s SpaceX and Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin are racing to have their company’s lander ready first. Musk’s Starship and Bezos’ Blue Moon are vying for the all-important Artemis IV moon landing in 2028. Two astronauts will aim for the south polar region, the preferred location for [NASA Administrator Jared] Isaacman’s envisioned $20 billion to $30 billion moon base. Vast amounts of ice are almost certainly hidden in permanently shadowed craters there — ice that could provide water and rocket fuel.

The docking mechanism for Artemis III’s close-to-home trial run is already at Florida’s Kennedy Space Center. The latest model Starship is close to launching on a test flight from South Texas, and a scaled-down version of Blue Moon will attempt a lunar landing later this year.

Val Kilmer was cast in western As Deep As the Grave before his death in April 2025. Production delays meant he never shot any scenes, but the creative team worked with UK-based company Sonantic to create an AI speaking voice based on his old recordings. His estate and daughter Mercedes collaborated with the film-makers on the visual deepfake of the actor. Kilmer, who was diagnosed with throat cancer, was also assisted by technology for his cameo in 2022’s Top Gun: Maverick…

Writer-director Coerte Voorhees confirmed that Kilmer is seen for around an hour of the film’s running time… Voorhees has said that the production followed Sag-Aftra [union] guidelines, and that Kilmer’s estate — which provided archival material for them to use — was compensated financially.

He is accompanied (per Variety) by a whole host of disclaimers, caveats, and explanations offered by writer-director Coerte Voorhees and his associates: Kilmer deeply wanted to be in the movie, but was too sick to do so. His family endorses and supports his inclusion. He was a big fan of technology, including, presumably, its use in turning his own image into a digital avatar to then shove into movies…

The fact is, of course, that nobody would be paying a fraction of this attention to As Deep As The Grave — about early female archeologist Ann Axtell Morris — if it weren’t now being used as the stage on which Voorhees was very publicly accepting the dare to go full-on ghoulish with AI tech.

“Very fitting that this trailer includes a scene where a corpse is unceremoniously yanked out of the ground,” read one of the top comments on As Deep as the Grave’s trailer at time of writing… [O]nline commenters have labelled it disgusting and disrespectful, not only for digitally reanimating Kilmer but also for the damaging precedent As Deep as the Grave‘s use of AI could set for the film industry as a whole.

Research and development engineer Romain Marchand of Paris headquartered Quarkslab obtained a telematic control unit (TCU) from a salvage yard in Poland… Marchand tore down the TCU, which is based on a Qualcomm system on a chip, and extracted the Linux-based file system from the Micron multi-chip package (MCP) which contained NAND-based non-volatile storage memory. The non-volatile storage contained sensitive information, including system configuration data and more importantly, logs that revealed the vehicle’s GPS positions over time.

None of that information was encrypted, Marchand told iTnews, which made it possible to collect and retrieve sensitive data of interest. What’s more, the global navigation satellite system (GNSS) logs with GPS positions covered the BYD’s full journey from the factory in China to its operational life in the United Kingdom, and to its final wrecking in Poland, Marchand explained in an analysis… The issue is not restricted to BYD, and Marchand added that the hardware architecture of the Chinese car maker’s TCU is broadly similar to what can be found in other brands.

Sarah Karamarkovich, a research associate with the National Student Clearinghouse, pointed to an explanation from the data that we had overlooked. Enrollments in two interdisciplinary majors, data analytics and data science, topped a combined 35,000 in the fall of 2025. That was up from a few hundred when those disciplines were broken out into their own majors in 2020. Those relatively new categories reflect colleges’ zeal to create specialized majors, including in AI, data science, robotics and cybersecurity. Some of those disciplines may be counted in the national enrollment data as computer science. Others are not.

The numbers suggest that some of the disappearing computer science majors didn’t flee so much as they splintered into related disciplines.... The 8 percent decline in computer science majors last fall was nearly mirrored by a 7.3 percent increase in engineering majors, according to the National Student Clearinghouse data. Within engineering, mechanical and electrical engineering major enrollments increased by the largest absolute amounts — a jump of 11 percent and 14 percent, respectively.

The warrantless surveillance law, known as Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, was set to expire on Monday night. Members are hoping the additional time will allow them to come to agreement without ending authorization for the intelligence gathering program, which permits US officials to monitor phone calls and text messages from foreign targets… There was an hour of suspense in the Senate Friday morning when it appeared possible that Democratic Sen. Ron Wyden, a longtime critic of FISA 702, might block the House-passed extension. But ultimately, he said his House colleagues had assured him “this short-term extension makes reform more likely, and expiration makes reform less likely,” and so he chose not to object....

House Republican leaders believed Thursday night they had struck a deal with conservative holdouts who harbor deep and longstanding concerns that a key piece of the law infringes on Americans’ privacy rights. But in a pair of after-midnight votes, more than a dozen rank-and-file Republicans rejected the long-term reauthorization plan on the floor, which was the result of days of tense negotiations among leadership, lawmakers and the White House.

The law allows authorized US officials to gather phone calls and text messages of foreign targets, but they can also incidentally collect the data of Americans in the process. Senior national security officials have for years said the law is critical for thwarting terror attacks, stemming the flow of fentanyl into the US and stopping ransomware attacks on critical infrastructure. Civil liberties groups on the left and the right, meanwhile, argue the surveillance authority risks infringing on Americans’ privacy.