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The U.S. Space Force has certified United Launch Alliance's Vulcan Centaur rocket for national security missions after successful test flights and resolution of a booster nozzle issue. This certification allows ULA to join SpaceX in conducting launches under the National Security Space Launch program, with Vulcan missions expected to begin this summer. SpaceNews reports: "Thank you to all our customer partners who have worked hand-in-hand with us throughout this comprehensive certification process. We are grateful for the collaboration and excited to reach this critical milestone in Vulcan development," said Tory Bruno, president and chief executive of United Launch Alliance in a ULA statement about the vehicle's certification. Bruno said at the roundtable that the next launch by ULA will be of its Atlas 5, carrying a set of Project Kuiper broadband satellites for Amazon. That launch is expected as soon as next month. He said then that would be followed by the first two Vulcan national security launches, missions designated USSF-106 and USSF-87. ULA did not give a schedule for those upcoming Vulcan launches but Space Systems Command, in a summary accompanying its press release, said the first NSSL mission on Vulcan is planned for the summer. Bruno said at the roundtable that the payloads for those missions have "complex processing" requirements beyond a typical mission, and did not state how long it would take them to be ready for a launch. Bruno said ULA is projecting a dozen launches this year, split roughly evenly between Atlas and Vulcan and between national security and commercial missions. ULA has been stockpiling components, such as BE-4 engines and solid rocket boosters, needed for those missions. "We're all staged up and ready, and as spacecraft show up, we'll be able to fly them," he said. He noted the company wants to get to a "baseline tempo" of two launches a month by the end of this year and perform 20 launches next year.

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Scientists in China successfully transplanted a genetically modified pig liver into a brain-dead patient, where it functioned for 10 days. The liver, modified to reduce immune rejection, produced key proteins and bile, showing compatibility and offering hope for future short-term xenotransplants. The Guardian reports: The surgery, at a Chinese hospital last year, is thought to mark the first time a pig liver has been transplanted into a human. It raises the prospect of pig livers serving as a "bridging organ" for patients on the waiting list for a transplant or to support liver function while their own organ regenerates. [...] The latest procedure was carried out in a 50-year-old man diagnosed with brain death after a severe head injury. The patient's own liver was intact and, in a surgery that took more than 10 hours, the organ taken from a genetically modified Bama miniature pig was plumbed into his blood supply as an additional liver. The pig had six genetic modifications aimed at preventing immune rejection. These included deactivating genes that contribute to the production of sugars on the surface of pig cells, which the human immune system attacks, and introducing genes that express human proteins to "humanize" the liver. After the transplant, the pig liver showed signs of functioning, including producing bile, which helps break down fats in the digestive system, and porcine albumin, a blood protein. The team behind the advance, described in the journal Nature, said it was not clear whether the liver would have been able to fully support the patient, given that he had an existing liver and because the liver was removed after 10 days at the request of his family.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: It's only been a day since ChatGPT's new AI image generator went live, and social media feeds are already flooded with AI-generated memes in the style of Studio Ghibli, the cult-favorite Japanese animation studio behind blockbuster films such as "My Neighbor Totoro" and "Spirited Away." In the last 24 hours, we've seen AI-generated images representing Studio Ghibli versions of Elon Musk, "The Lord of the Rings", and President Donald Trump. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman even seems to have made his new profile picture a Studio Ghibli-style image, presumably made with GPT-4o's native image generator. Users seem to be uploading existing images and pictures into ChatGPT and asking the chatbot to re-create it in new styles. OpenAI's latest update comes on the heels of Google's release of a similar AI image feature in its Gemini Flash model, which also sparked a viral moment earlier in March when people used it to remove watermarks from images. OpenAI's and Google's latest tools make it easier than ever to re-create the styles of copyrighted works -- simply by typing a text prompt. Together, these new AI image features seem to reignite concerns at the core of several lawsuits against generative AI model developers. If these companies are training on copyrighted works, are they violating copyright law? According to Evan Brown, an intellectual property lawyer at the law firm Neal & McDevitt, products like GPT-4o's native image generator operate in a legal gray area today. Style is not explicitly protected by copyright, according to Brown, meaning OpenAI does not appear to be breaking the law simply by generating images that look like Studio Ghibli movies. However, Brown says it's plausible that OpenAI achieved this likeness by training its model on millions of frames from Ghibli's films. Even if that was the case, several courts are still deciding whether training AI models on copyrighted works falls under fair use protections. "I think this raises the same question that we've been asking ourselves for a couple years now," said Brown in an interview. "What are the copyright infringement implications of going out, crawling the web, and copying into these databases?"

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sciencehabit quotes a report from Science.org: Whales sing, orcas squeal, and sea turtles croak. But sharks are more the strong, silent type. Now, researchers report the first evidence that sharks make sounds, too, described today in Royal Society Open Science. The animals may be making the sounds -- a series of clicking noises -- by snapping their flat rows of teeth, which are blunt for crushing prey. The sharks can hear mostly low-frequency noise, and the clicks they emit are higher pitched, which suggests they are not for communicating with other rigs. It's possible they are a defensive tactic. Marine mammals that eat rigs, such as leopard seals, can hear in the frequency range of the rig clicks, but the researchers question whether a few clicks would deter an attack. The sounds might be part of their response to being startled, the team says.

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JPMorgan Chase used a quantum computer from Honeywell's Quantinuum to generate and mathematically certify truly random numbers -- an advancement that could significantly enhance encryption, security, and financial applications. The breakthrough was validated with help from U.S. national laboratories and has been published in the journal Nature. From a report: Between May 2023 and May 2024, cryptographers at JPMorgan wrote an algorithm for a quantum computer to generate random numbers, which they ran on Quantinuum's machine. The US Department of Energy's supercomputers were then used to test whether the output was truly random. "It's a breakthrough result," project lead and Head of Global Technology Applied Research at JPMorgan, Marco Pistoia told Bloomberg in an interview. "The next step will be to understand where we can apply it." Applications could ultimately include more energy-efficient cryptocurrency, online gambling, and any other activity hinging on complete randomness, such as deciding which precincts to audit in elections.

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According to the Financial Times, Fidelity Investments is in advanced stages of developing its own stablecoin. Binance reports: The Boston-based financial services giant plans for the token to serve as a form of digital cash, according to the report, which cites two people close to the matter. The token would form part of company's strategy to enter the tokenized government bonds market. Stablecoins are a cryptocurrency whose value is pegged to a real-world asset such as the U.S. dollar or gold. They provide a convenient way for crypto traders to preserve their fiat value without having to cash out of the market. The news emerges just days after Fidelity filed paperwork to register a blockchain-based version of its U.S. dollar money market fund. The company seeks to register an "OnChain" share class of its Treasury Digital Fund (FYHXX), which holds cash and U.S. Treasury securities and is available only to Fidelity's hedge fund and institutional clients. A Fidelity stablecoin could fill the role of cash in this fund. The report comes a day after World Liberty Financial, a crypto venture backed by Donald Trump and his family, launched a U.S. dollar-pegged stablecoin called USD1.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from ZDNet, written by Steven Vaughan-Nichols: Despite the minor delay, Linux 6.14 arrives packed with cutting-edge features and improvements to power upcoming Linux distributions, such as the forthcoming Ubuntu 25.04 and Fedora 42. The big news for desktop users is the improved NTSYNC driver, especially those who like to play Windows games or run Windows programs on Linux. This driver is designed to emulate Windows NT synchronization primitives. What that feature means for you and me is that it will significantly improve the performance of Windows programs running on Wine and Steam Play. [...] Gamers always want the best possible graphics performance, so they'll also be happy to see that Linux now supports recently launched AMD RDNA 4 graphics cards. This approach includes support for the AMD Radeon RX 9070 XT and RX 9070 graphics cards. Combine this support with the recently improved open-source RADV driver and AMD gamers should see the best speed yet on their gaming rigs. Of course, the release is not just for gamers. Linux 6.14 also includes several AMD and Intel processor enhancements. These boosts focus on power management, thermal control, and compute performance optimizations. These updates are expected to improve overall system efficiency and performance. This release also comes with the AMDXDNA driver, which provides official support for AMD's neural processing units based on the XDNA architecture. This integration enables efficient execution of AI workloads, such as convolutional neural networks and large language models, directly on supported AMD hardware. While Rust has faced some difficulties in recent months in Linux, more Rust programming language abstractions have been integrated into the kernel, laying the groundwork for future drivers written in Rust. [...] Besides drivers, Miguel Ojeda, Rust for Linux's lead developer, said recently that the introduction of the macro for smart pointers with Rust 1.84: derive(CoercePointee) is an "important milestone on the way to building a kernel that only uses stable Rust functions." This approach will also make integrating C and Rust code easier. We're getting much closer to Rust being grafted into Linux's tree. In addition, Linux 6.14 supports Qualcomm's latest Snapdragon 8 Elite mobile processor, enhancing performance and stability for devices powered by this chipset. That support means you can expect to see much faster Android-based smartphones later this year. This release includes a patch for the so-called GhostWrite vulnerability, which can be used to root some RISC-V processors. This fix will block such attacks. Additionally, Linux 6.14 includes improvements for the copy-on-write Btrfs file system/logical volume manager. These primarily read-balancing methods offer flexibility for different RAID hardware configurations and workloads. Additionally, support for uncached buffered I/O optimizes memory usage on systems with fast storage devices. Linux 6.14 is available for download here.

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Fortune reports that over 4 million Gen Zers are currently not in education, employment, or training (NEET), with experts blaming a broken educational system and "worthless degrees" for failing to deliver on promises of career readiness. From the report: While some Gen Zers may fall into this category because they are taking care of a family member, many have become frozen out of the increasingly tough job market where white-collar jobs are becoming seemingly out of reach. In the U.S., this translates to an estimated over 4.3 million young people not in school or work. Across the pond in the U.K., the situation is also only getting worse, with the number of NEET young people rising by over 100,000 in the last year alone. A British podcaster went so far as to call the situation a "catastrophe" -- and cast a broad-stroke blame on the education system. "In many cases, young people have been sent off to universities for worthless degrees which have produced nothing for them at all," the political commentator, journalist and author, Peter Hitchens slammed colleges last week. "And they would be much better off if they apprenticed to plumbers or electricians, they would be able to look forward to a much more abundant and satisfying life." With millions of Gen Zers waking up each day feeling left behind, there needs to be a "wake-up call" that includes educational and workplace partners stepping up, Jeff Bulanda, vice president at Jobs for the Future, tells Fortune.

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The U.S. has added 80 entities to its export blacklist to prevent China from acquiring advanced American chips for military development, including AI, quantum tech, and hypersonic weapons. The Verge reports: More than 50 of the new entities added to the list are based in China, with others located in Iran, Taiwan, Pakistan, South Africa, and the United Arab Emirates. BIS says the restrictions have been applied to entities that acted "contrary to US national security and foreign policy," and are intended to hinder China's ability to develop high-performance computing capabilities, quantum technologies, advanced artificial intelligence, and hypersonic weapons. Six of the newly blacklisted entities are subsidiaries of Inspur Group -- China's leading cloud computing service provider and a major customer for US chip makers such as Nvidia, AMD, and Intel -- which BIS alleges had contributed to projects developing supercomputers for the Chinese military. The Beijing Academy of Artificial Intelligence is another addition to the list, which has criticized its inclusion. "American technology should never be used against the American people," said Jeffrey Kessler, Under Secretary of Commerce for Industry and Security. "BIS is sending a clear, resounding message that the Trump administration will work tirelessly to safeguard our national security by preventing U.S. technologies and goods from being misused for high performance computing, hypersonic missiles, military aircraft training, and UAVs that threaten our national security."

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An anonymous reader shares a report: After years of decline, the number of applications to the country's two-year MBA programs rebounded in 2024 -- rising 19%, according to a survey by the Graduate Management Admission Council. The pandemic saw a blossoming of new ways to deliver an MBA, but tradition has reasserted itself: The biggest growth last year was in conventional two-year and part-time programs. As in recent years, the great majority of student demand came from overseas, but applications from the US rose as well. While the two-year class graduating this spring included record levels of international students at many institutions, most of the top 20 schools as ranked by Bloomberg Businessweek welcomed classes last fall with a reduced international presence. Given the Trump administration's hostility to immigration, the graduating class of 2025 could prove to be the high-water mark for international MBA students in the US for at least the near future.

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VMware has sued industrial giant AG Siemens's US operations for alleged use of unlicensed software and accused it of changing its story negotiations. From a report: The case was filed last Friday in the US District Court for the District Delaware. VMware's complaint [PDF] alleges that Siemens AG's US operations used more VMware software that it had licensed. Siemens's use of VMware became contentious when it tried to arrange extended support for some products. On September 9, 2024, Siemens apparently produced a list of the VMware software it used and "demanded that VMware accept a purchase order to provide maintenance and support services for the listed products." The complaint states that list mentioned VMware deployments that "far exceeded the number of licenses it [Siemens] had actually purchased."

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Android Authority: No matter the manufacturer, every Android phone has one thing in common: its software base. Manufacturers can heavily customize the look and feel of the Android OS they ship on their Android devices, but under the hood, the core system functionality is derived from the same open-source foundation: the Android Open Source Project. After over 16 years, Google is making big changes to how it develops the open source version of Android in an effort to streamline its development. [...] Beginning next week, all Android development will occur within Google's internal branches, and the source code for changes will only be released when Google publishes a new branch containing those changes. As this is already the practice for most Android component changes, Google is simply consolidating its development efforts into a single branch. This change will have minimal impact on regular users. While it streamlines Android OS development for Google, potentially affecting the speed of new version development and bug reduction, the overall effect will likely be imperceptible. Therefore, don't expect this change to accelerate OS updates for your phone. This change will also have minimal impact on most developers. App developers are unaffected, as it pertains only to platform development. Platform developers, including those who build custom ROMs, will largely also see little change, since they typically base their work on specific tags or release branches, not the main AOSP branch. Similarly, companies that release forked AOSP products rarely use the main AOSP branch due to its inherent instability. External developers who enjoy reading or contributing to AOSP will likely be dismayed by this news, as it reduces their insight into Google's development efforts. Without a GMS license, contributing to Android OS development becomes more challenging, as the available code will consistently lag behind by weeks or months. This news will also make it more challenging for some developers to keep up with new Android platform changes, as they'll no longer be able to track changes in AOSP. For reporters, this change means less access to potentially revealing information, as AOSP patches often provide insights into Google's development plans. [...] Google will share more details about this change when it announces it later this week. If you're interested in learning more, be sure to keep an eye out for the announcement and new documentation on source.android.com. Android Authority's Mishaal Rahman says Google is "committed to publishing Android's source code, so this change doesn't mean that Android is becoming closed-source." "What will change is the frequency of public source code releases for specific Android components," says Rahman. "Some components like the build system, update engine, Bluetooth stack, Virtualization framework, and SELinux configuration are currently AOSP-first, meaning they're developed fully in public. Most Android components like the core OS framework are primarily developed internally, although some features, such as the unlocked-only storage area API, are still developed within AOSP."

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Computer maker Dell's staff numbers have fallen by 25,000 in the last two years. In its latest 10-K filing, published on Tuesday, the company said that it had about 108,000 global employees as of January 31, 2025. In February 2024, that number was 120,000, marking a 10% annual reduction in the workforce. From a report: Looking back two years, Dell's head count stood at 133,000, meaning that since February 2023, the Texas-based tech company has reduced its workforce by 19%. The decline in Dell's head count comes after a year of both layoffs and RTO mandates. In August, the company significantly restructured its sales division, which it told workers was necessary to prepare for "the world of AI." As part of the restructuring, Dell laid off workers, though it did not specify how many.

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Microsoft has walked away from new data center projects in the US and Europe that would have amounted to a capacity of about 2 gigawatts of electricity, according to TD Cowen analysts, who attributed the pullback to an oversupply of the clusters of computers that power artificial intelligence. From a report: The analysts, who rattled investors with a February note highlighting leases Microsoft had abandoned in the US, said the latest move also reflected the company's choice to forgo some new business from ChatGPT maker OpenAI, which it has backed with some $13 billion. Microsoft and the startup earlier this year said they had altered their multiyear agreement, letting OpenAI use cloud-computing services from other companies, provided Microsoft didn't want the business itself. Microsoft's retrenchment in the last six months included lease cancellations and deferrals, the TD Cowen analysts said in their latest research note, dated Wednesday. Alphabet's Google had stepped in to grab some leases Microsoft abandoned in Europe, the analysts wrote, while Meta Platforms had scooped up some of the freed capacity in Europe.

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The United States has won far more Nobel Prizes in physics, chemistry, and medicine than any other nation, with the UK and Germany following in second and third place, according to an analysis of nearly 900 prize-winning publications. Universities account for roughly three-fourths of Nobel Prize-winning research, with a small number of elite institutions producing a disproportionate share of winners. Cambridge University leads with 32 prizes, followed by Harvard (22) and Columbia (13). While prizes are concentrated among researchers from the US, UK, and Germany, 43 countries have produced at least one scientific Nobel laureate. Outside Europe and the Anglosphere, Japan leads with 11 prizes, while Argentina, China, and India have only one or two each. The average age of Nobel Prize winners has steadily increased from about 45 in the 1920s to 65 in the 2010s, though the age at which scientists perform their groundbreaking work has remained relatively constant at around 40.

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Here's one more reason to cling to a steady job: It doesn't pay to quit. From a report: Typically workers who snag a new position see higher pay bumps than those holding down the same job. But in February, median wage growth of 4.4% for job stayers surpassed a 4.2% gain for job switchers, according to data from the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta. The change, as measured by a three-month moving average, is yet another sign of a softening labor market. White collar workers have been clinging to their jobs in the face of widespread layoffs and workplace reductions. Last month, employers announced the fastest pace of job cuts since 2020, when factoring in government job losses. And now an oversupply of job seekers means workers are having to settle for smaller pay bumps, said Peter Cappelli, a professor of management at The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. "That certainly sounds like a big slackening of the job market," Cappelli said. It's a major reversal from the "Great Resignation" a few years ago, when workers left their jobs at unprecedented rates, demanding more benefits and higher pay from employers. At a peak in July 2022, workers who got new jobs saw their wages grow by a whopping 8.5% compared to 5.9% for those who stayed loyal to their company, Atlanta Fed data show.

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Signal president Meredith Whittaker challenged recent assertions by WhatsApp head Will Cathcart that minimal differences exist between the two messaging platforms' privacy protections. "We're amused to see WhatsApp stretching the limits of reality to claim that they are just like Signal," Whittaker said in a statement published Monday, responding to Cathcart's comments to Dutch journalists last week. While WhatsApp licenses Signal's end-to-end encryption technology, Whittaker said that WhatsApp still collects substantial user metadata, including "location data, contact lists, when they send someone a message, when they stop, what users are in their group chats, their profile picture, and much more." Cathcart had previously stated that WhatsApp doesn't track users' communications or share contact information with other companies, claiming "we strongly believe in private communication."

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Streaming platforms are increasingly indistinguishable to consumers despite high brand awareness, according to Hub Entertainment Research. The annual Evolution of Video Branding report shows major services like Netflix, Disney+, Hulu, and Max experiencing year-over-year declines in viewers' ability to articulate what makes each platform unique. Fewer consumers (37% in 2025, down from 41% in 2023) report signing up for services to watch specific shows, while many can't correctly identify where signature programs like Game of Thrones or The Bear can be viewed. While 58% know Stranger Things streams on Netflix, less than half can properly place other major titles.

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Transport for London will ban most e-bikes across its network from March 31 amid growing safety concerns over battery fires, the transport authority announced on Wednesday. The ban, covering London Underground, Overground, Elizabeth Line and DLR trains, exempts only folding e-bikes, which are considered less likely to have been modified and pose a reduced safety risk. TfL implemented the measure following union strike threats after several incidents, including an e-bike that exploded into flames at Rayners Lane Underground platform last month. The train drivers' union Aslef said the incident could have caused mass casualties.

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A U.S. appeals court has ruled that Apple cannot participate in Google's upcoming antitrust trial, potentially jeopardizing a $20 billion annual deal between the tech giants. The DC Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed that Apple waited too long to join the proceedings, filing its request 33 days after the government proposed remedies in the case Google lost last August. "The delay seems difficult to justify," the judges ruled. While Apple can still submit written testimony and file friend-of-court briefs, it cannot present evidence or cross-examine witnesses as it had sought. At stake is Google's practice of paying Apple approximately $20 billion annually to remain the default search engine in Safari browsers across Apple devices. The government's proposed remedies would make such arrangements impermissible.

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