Filipino workers in Manila are remotely operating robots that restock convenience store shelves across Tokyo. The partnership represents a new economic model where physical labor can be offshored through telepresence. Around 60 workers at Astro Robotics monitor the machines and intervene when problems occur about 4% of the time. They earn between $250 and $315 per month. Japan faces severe labor shortages but has resisted expanding immigration. Offshoring the work through robots solves this while dramatically reducing costs.

Filipino workers are also training the AI systems designed to eliminate the need for human operators entirely. Tokyo-based Telexistence has collected extensive data from its workers and is providing it to a San Francisco startup building fully autonomous robots. The combination of automation and offshoring creates what one University of Michigan professor called a "double whammy" for workers in developed nations. It also exploits workers in developing countries who build the tools meant to replace them. The market for AI agents is expected to grow eightfold to $43 billion by 2030. Human-only work is forecast to drop 27% over the next five years.

Amazon executives believe the company can avoid hiring more than 160,000 workers in the United States by 2027 through robotic automation. Internal documents viewed by The New York Times show the automation would save approximately 30 cents on each item the company picks, packs and delivers. The documents reveal that executives told Amazon's board last year they hoped automation would allow the company to flatten its U.S. workforce growth over the next decade.

Amazon expects to sell twice as many products by 2033. That projection translates to more than 600,000 positions Amazon would not need to fill. Amazon opened its most advanced warehouse in Shreveport, Louisiana last year as a template for future facilities. The site uses a thousand robots and employed a quarter fewer workers than it would have without automation. The company plans to replicate this design in approximately 40 facilities by the end of 2027. A facility in Stone Mountain, Georgia currently employs roughly 4,000 workers. After a planned robotic retrofit, internal analyses project it will process 10% more items but need as many as 1,200 fewer employees. The documents show Amazon's robotics team has set a goal to automate 75% of its operations.

Alibaba Cloud claims its new Aegaeon GPU pooling system cuts Nvidia GPU use by 82%, letting 213 H20 accelerators handle workloads that previously required 1,192. The advancements have been detailed in a paper (PDF) at the 2025 ACM Symposium on Operating Systems (SOSP) in Seoul. Tom's Hardware reports: Unlike training-time breakthroughs that chase model quality or speed, Aegaeon is an inference-time scheduler designed to maximize GPU utilization across many models with bursty or unpredictable demand. Instead of pinning one accelerator to one model, Aegaeon virtualizes GPU access at the token level, allowing it to schedule tiny slices of work across a shared pool. This means one H20 could serve several different models simultaneously, with system-wide "goodput" -- a measure of effective output -- rising by as much as nine times compared to older serverless systems.

The system was tested in production over several months, according to the paper, which lists authors from both Peking University and Alibaba's infrastructure division, including CTO Jingren Zhou. During that window, the number of GPUs needed to support dozens of different LLMs -- ranging in size up to 72 billion parameters -- fell from 1,192 to just 213. While the paper does not break down which models contributed most to the savings, reporting by the South China Morning Post says the tests were conducted using Nvidia's H20, one of the few accelerators still legally available to Chinese buyers under current U.S. export controls.

Investigators recovered the OceanGate Titan sub's underwater camera nearly intact, discovering a SanDisk SD card that survived the 2023 implosion and still contained 12 images and 9 videos. TechSpot reports: Scott Manley, the science communication YouTuber, gamer, astrophysicist, and programmer, posted about the latest find: a hardened SubC-branded Rayfin Mk2 Benthic Camera containing the undamaged SD card. The titanium and synthetic sapphire crystal camera is rated to withstand depths of up to 6,000 meters (19,685 feet) -- the Titan imploded at around 3,300 meters (10,827 feet). The casing is intact, though the lens is shattered and the PCBs are slightly damaged.

Incredibly the SD card inside the camera was undamaged. Tom's Hardware reports that it's almost certainly a SanDisk Extreme Pro 512GB, which costs around $62 on Amazon. The camera's SD card was found to be fully encrypted, divided into a small partition for operating system updates and a larger one for user data. Due to impact damage from the accident, several components of the system-on-module (SOM) board -- including connectors and the microcontroller -- were broken, complicating the data extraction process. [...] After determining the data wasn't encrypted beyond the file system level, they successfully accessed the SD card contents using the manufacturer's proprietary equipment and procedures.

Repair Plan Underway to Restore Power at Ukrainian Nuclear Plant The Associated Press reports: Work has begun to repair the damaged power supply to Ukraine's Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant, the head of the U.N.'s nuclear watchdog said Saturday. The repairs are hoped to end a precarious four-week outage that saw it dependent on backup generators.

Russian and Ukrainian forces established special ceasefire zones for repairs to be safely carried out, said the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, Rafael Grossi... "Both sides engaged constructively with the IAEA to enable the complex repair plan to proceed," Grossi said in a statement...

The Zaporizhzhia plant, Europe's largest nuclear power station, has been operating on diesel back-up generators since Sept. 23 when its last remaining external power line was severed in attacks that Russia and Ukraine each blamed on the other. The plant is in an area under Russian control since early in Moscow's full-scale invasion of Ukraine and is not in service, but it needs reliable power to cool its six shutdown reactors and spent fuel, to avoid any catastrophic nuclear incidents.

Concrete accounts for about 8% of the world's greenhouse gas emissions, notes CNN. But a research team at the University of Pennsylvania just used a robotic 3D printer to construct a bridge with "complex, lattice-like patterns" that are just as strong and durable — but with materials that absorb more carbon dioxide.

Check out the photos of the "Diamanti" projects "post-tensioned concrete canopy". And CNN's report includes an animated photo showing the 3D printer in action: While most regular concrete absorbs carbon dioxide (up to 30% of its production emissions over its entire life cycle, according to some research), Diamanti's enhanced concrete mixture absorbs 142% more carbon dioxide than conventional concrete mixes. Its first design, a pedestrian bridge, uses 60% less material while retaining mechanical strength, says Masoud Akbarzadeh, an associate professor of architecture at the University of Pennsylvania and director of the lab that spearheaded the project.

"Through millions of years of evolution, nature has learned that you don't need material everywhere," says Akbarzadeh. "If you take a cross section of a bone, you realize that bone is quite porous, but there are certain patterns within which the load (or weight) is transferred." By mimicking the structures in certain porous bones — known as triply periodic minimal surface (TPMS) structures — âDiamanti also increased the surface area of the bridge, increasing the concrete mixture's carbon absorption potential by another 30%... According to Akbarzadeh, 3D printing reduces construction time, material, and energy use by 25%, and its structural system reduces the need for steel by 80%, minimizing use of another emissions-heavy material. He added that using the technique with Diamanti's concrete significantly cuts greenhouse gas emissions compared to regular construction techniques, and reduces construction costs by 25% to 30%.
"Even without the material innovation, the higher surface itself allows higher CO2 absorption," one engineering lecturer tells CNN. The project was a collaboration with chemical company Sika, funded with grants from the U.S. Energy Department, and is now preparing its first full-size prototype in France.

The team has published their findings in the journal Advanced Functional Materials earlier this year.

Amazon is investing hundreds of millions into the Cascade Advanced Energy Facility, a next-generation small modular reactor project in Richland, Washington, developed with X-energy and Energy Northwest. "The question now is will it be enough to kick off a new wave of U.S. nuclear energy innovation -- a field that America largely soured on by the 1980s?" writes GeekWire. From the report: The facility will be located near Richland, Wash., near Energy Northwest's Columbia Generating Station nuclear plant. The initial goal is to install a cluster of four small modular reactors (SMRs) that can produce up to 320 megawatts of power, but the overall vision is to construct 12 reactors total, with a capacity of nearly one gigawatt. If all the funding, permitting and public support come together, construction should start within the next five years, with the plant coming online in the 2030s. [...] For Amazon, its support of the Cascade Advanced Energy Facility is part of a much bigger initiative. The company has set a goal of deploying 5 gigawatts of nuclear power in the U.S. by 2039.

"One thing that Amazon does well is scale technology," said Brandon Oyer, Amazon Web Services' head of power and water for North and South America. "We've done this over and over again ... We'll go and make an investment and then learn how to scale that up, drive out cost, make it more readily available." Targeting SMRs for amplification was a "natural fit," Oyer added. The company believes nuclear aligns with its climate ambitions. Amazon matches all of its electricity use with clean power and is the largest corporate purchaser of wind, solar and other renewable sources. That said, it is struggling to cut its carbon footprint to reach a goal of net-zero emissions by 2040 as the AI-boom stokes energy use.

Amazon reported that its carbon footprint grew by 6% last year. Amazon has dibs on half of the 320 megawatts of electricity that will be generated by the first four reactors at the Washington site, but will take all of it if the power prices are too high for local utilities to afford. Cullen said that if everything goes well with the initial phase, it would be straightforward to build the other eight reactors as the permits will encompass the complete build out. The added reactors would produce enough electricity for about one million homes and should come at a lower cost. "Amazon recognizes the role they can -- and are willing -- to play," Cullen said. The company can take some of the early risk and bring that catalytic capital, he said, which is "every, very difficult for utilities to do."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Register: Hyperscale datacenters stateside will consume 22 percent more grid power by the end of 2025 than a year ago, and are forecast to need nearly three times as much electricity by the end of the decade. Warnings about datacenters' rising energy draw are coming thick and fast of late, and this latest one from 451 Research (now a part of S&P Global) comes with figures and cautions about how fast this change may occur and what grid resources will be required to meet it.

The bit barn building boom is largely fueled by estimated demand for new machine learning models, which require highly configured servers packed with power-hungry GPUs to develop and train. The power and cooling infrastructure required also mean it is easier to build a new facility rather than attempt to retrofit an existing one. As a consequence, utility power to datacenters in America is estimated to jump 11.3 GW to 61.8 GW by the end of this year. 451 calculates this will rise again to 75.8 GW in 2026, then 108 GW in 2028, before hitting 134.4 GW by 2030. These figures also exclude enterprise-owned facilities, only considering those of the hyperscale tech giants such as Amazon, Apple, Google, Meta, and Microsoft, alongside leased and crypto-mining sites.

The research identifies Virginia and Texas as the two states with by far the highest requirement for bit barn energy supplies in the US this year. 451 forecasts that Virginia's datacenter load, made up of leased and hyperscale facilities, will reach 12.1 GW in 2025, up from 9.3 GW last year. In Texas, demand is driven by cryptomining and leased capacity, and is slated to hit 9.7 GW this year, from less than 8 GW previously. However, the search for an optimum location is seeing datacenter operators explore emerging markets such as Idaho, Louisiana, Oklahoma and smaller cities in West Texas, looking for "stranded power" and alternative energy generation opportunities, the report says.

Backblaze has been tracking hard disk drive failures in its datacenter since 2013. The backup and cloud storage company's latest analysis of approximately 317,230 drives shows that peak failure rates have dropped dramatically and shifted much later in a drive's lifespan. Where the company once saw failure rates of 13.73% at around three years in 2013 and 14.24% at seven years and nine months in 2021, the current data shows a peak of just 4.25% at 10 years and three months.

This represents the first time the company has observed the highest failure rate occurring at the far end of the drive curve rather than earlier in its operational life, it said. The drives maintained relatively consistent failure rates through most of their use before spiking sharply near the end. The improvement amounts to roughly one-third of the previous peak failure rates.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Heise: The European Commission has revised the Ecodesign requirements for external power supplies (EPS). The new rules aim to increase consumer convenience, resource efficiency, and energy efficiency. Manufacturers have three years to prepare for the changes. The new regulations apply to external power supplies that charge or power devices such as laptops, smartphones, Wi-Fi routers, and computer monitors. Starting in 2028, these products must meet higher energy efficiency standards and become more interoperable. Specifically, USB chargers on the EU market must have at least one USB Type-C port and function with detachable cables.

With the regulation, the EU is also establishing minimum requirements for the efficiency of power supplies with an output power of up to 240 watts that charge via USB Power Delivery (USB-PD), among other things, under other things, minimum requirements. Power supplies with an output power exceeding 10 watts will also have to meet minimum energy efficiency values in partial load operation (10 percent of rated power) in the future, which is intended to reduce unnecessary energy losses. The EU Commission says the new requirements are expected to save around 3% of energy consumption over the lifecycle of external chargers by 2035. Additionally, greenhouse gas emissions are expected to decrease by 9% and pollutant emissions by about 13%.

"The EU also calculates that consumer spending could decrease by around 100 million euros per year by 2035," reports Heise.

Google DeepMind is partnering with Commonwealth Fusion Systems (CFS) to use its Torax AI software to simulate and optimize plasma behavior inside the company's Sparc fusion reactor. TechCrunch reports: There's a reason Google keeps coming back to the problem: AI might be uniquely suited to making fusion power possible. One of the biggest challenges facing fusion startups is keeping the plasma inside a reactor hot enough for long enough. Unlike nuclear fission reactions, which are self-sustaining, fusion reactions are difficult to maintain outside of stars like the Sun. Without that sort of mass and gravity, the plasma is constantly in danger of diffusing and snuffing itself out.

In CFS's reactors, powerful magnets substitute for gravity to help corral the plasma, but they're not perfect. Reactor operators have to develop control software that can enable the device to continuously react to changing plasma conditions. Problem is, there are almost too many knobs to turn, certainly more than a human is capable of. That's the sort of problem that AI excels at. Experts have cited AI as one of the key technologies that has enabled the industry's remarkable advances over the past several years.

CFS is currently building Sparc, its demonstration reactor, in a suburb outside Boston. The device is about two-thirds completed, and when finished later in 2026, the startup is predicting that it will be the first fusion device capable of producing more power than the plant needs to run itself. Google said Torax can be used with reinforcement learning or evolutionary search models to find the "most efficient and robust paths to generating net energy." The two companies are also exploring whether AI can be used to control the reactor's operation.

Oil, gas and coal will continue to dominate the world's energy mix well beyond 2050, as soaring electricity demand outpaces the shift to renewables, according to a new McKinsey report. From a report: McKinsey expects fossil fuels to account for about 41-55% of global energy consumption in 2050, down from today's 64% but higher than previous projections. U.S. data-center-related power demand is expected to grow nearly 25% a year until 2030, while demand from data centers globally would average 17% growth per year between 2022 and 2030, especially in OECD countries. Alternative fuels are not likely to achieve broad adoption before 2040 unless mandated, but renewables do have the potential to provide 61-67% of the 2050 global power mix, McKinsey said.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from 404 Media: On Monday, a publicly-sourced archive of more than 10,000 national park signs and monument placards went public as part of a massive volunteer project to save historical and educational placards from around the country that risk removal by the Trump administration. Visitors to national parks and other public monuments at more than 300 sites across the U.S. took photos of signs and submitted them to the archive to be saved in case they're ever removed in the wake of the Trump administration's rewriting of park history. The full archive is available here, with submissions from July to the end of September. The signs people have captured include historical photos from Alcatraz, stories from the African American Civil War Memorial, photos and accounts from the Brown v. Board of Education National History Park, and hundreds more sites. "I'm so excited to share this collaborative photo collection with the public. As librarians, our goal is to preserve the knowledge and stories told in these signs. We want to put the signs back in the people's hands," Jenny McBurney, Government Publications Librarian at the University of Minnesota and one of the co-founders of the Save Our Signs project, said in a press release. "We are so grateful for all the people who have contributed their time and energy to this project. The outpouring of support has been so heartening. We hope the launch of this archive is a way for people to see all their work come together."

An anonymous reader shared this excerpt from a Los Angeles Times newsletter: One of the most consequential moments in California's drive to beat back climate change will take place next month. The state will stop receiving electricity from the Intermountain Power Plant in Central Utah, meaning our reliance on coal as a source of power will essentially be over...

[T]he U.S. got nearly half its electricity from coal-fired plants as recently as 2007. By 2023, that figure had dropped to just 16.2%. California drove an even more dramatic shift, getting just 2.2% of its electricity from coal in 2024 — nearly all of it from the Intermountain plant. Operators plan to cut off that final burst of ions next month.
"And with improved technology to store power, the change has been made without the power shortages that dogged the state up until 2020..."

It's the largest nuclear power plant in Europe. But "Ukraine's foreign minister accused Russia on Sunday of deliberately severing the external power line to the Russian-held Zaporizhzhia nuclear power station," reports Reuters, "in order to link the plant to Moscow's power grid." Ukrainian Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha said Moscow was attempting to test a reconnection to Russia's grid. Ukraine has long feared that Moscow would try to redirect the plant's output to its grid. But Russian officials have denied any intention of trying to restart the plant, seized by Moscow's forces in the early weeks of the February 2022 invasion of Ukraine.

The plant produces no electricity at the moment, but has been without an external electricity source for nearly three weeks. Officials have relied on emergency diesel generators to secure the power needed to keep the fuel cool inside the facility and guard against a meltdown. "Russia intentionally broke the plant's connection with the Ukrainian grid in order to forcefully test reconnection with the Russian grid," Sybiha wrote on X in English. He denounced the "attempted theft of a peaceful Ukrainian nuclear facility".... Each side has accused the other of shelling that caused the line outage.
Russia's continued occupation of the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant deprived Ukraine of a quarter of its generating capacity, according to a report from the Brookings Institute — calling Ukraine's energy sector "a key battleground" in the war. The Russian invasion began on the very day that Ukraine launched its so-called island test. This involved completely isolating the Ukrainian and Moldovan power systems from their neighbors to check whether the system was stable. This is a mandatory procedure prior to synchronization with the European grid... Despite this, Ukraine managed not only to militarily defend itself but also to maintain grid stability in wartime conditions and implement all the solutions necessary for an unprecedented synchronization on March 16, 2022.
In 2022 a former commissioner of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (from 1998 to 2007) even argued in the Wall Street Journal that "An unappreciated motive for Russia's invasion of Ukraine is that Kyiv was positioning itself to break from its longtime Russian nuclear suppliers..." At the time of the invasion, Westinghouse supplied fuel to six of the 15 [Ukrainian] nuclear reactors and could displace the Russians in all of them. The U.S. government had been highly supportive of this effort, and these fuel contracts represented hundreds of millions of dollars in yearly lost sales to Atomstroyexport [a nuclear exporter that's a subsidiary of Russian state corporation Rosatom]. By seizing the nuclear plants, Russia is able to retake the market for Ukrainian nuclear fuel.

Most important, Westinghouse, with support from the U.S., was in a position to build nuclear reactors in Ukraine over the next two decades. On Aug. 31, 2021, Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm and her Ukrainian counterpart, Herman Halushchenko, signed a strategic cooperation agreement to build five nuclear units with a value, according to the World Nuclear Association, of more than $30 billion. The timing is telling. In November 2021, Ukraine's leaders signed a deal with Westinghouse to start construction on what they hoped would be at least five nuclear units — the first tranche of a program that could more than double the number of plants in the country, with a potential total value approaching $100 billion. Ukraine clearly intended that Russia receive none of that business.
Brookings looks at how Ukraine's energy sector has fared during the war: The Ukrainian energy sector was designed to be oversized with significant redundancy in order to meet huge Soviet-era industrial demand as well as to make it more resilient to a future world war... A radical change did not occur until 2014, when Ukrainians overthrew the pro-Russian president, Viktor Yanukovych. In the decade since then, Ukraine has pursued a policy of European Union (EU) integration with determination and without interruption... The real prospect of an improvement in the quality of life and development of Ukraine through integration with the EU and NATO was unacceptable to Russia, which first annexed Crimea and covertly attacked the Ukrainian Donbas, before launching a full-scale invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022. Russia's in-depth knowledge of the Ukrainian power system, dating back to the Soviet Union, was used to carry out a well-planned operation to cut off electricity to Ukrainians.

The aim was to break the morale of Ukrainians to continue defending themselves and to collapse the economy so that it could not support the Ukrainian military effort. Ironically, however, the size of the energy system, which had been scaled up in case of war, and the enormous Western support, unexpectedly ensured its resilience to Russian attacks.
Although they note that "During the first two years of the war, Russia fired nearly 2,000 missiles and drones at Ukrainian energy infrastructure... "

And this week in Ukraine, damage to substations, power plants and oil depot temporarily cut off electricity for hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian homes and businesses, reports the UN. "As colder weather sets in, strikes on critical infrastructure are deepening humanitarian needs," warned a UN spokesperson on Thursday...

"Amazon Echo Show owners are reporting an uptick in advertisements on their smart displays," reports Ars Technica. The company's Echo Show smart displays have previously shown ads through the company's Shopping Lists feature, as well as advertising for Alexa skills. Additionally, Echo Shows may play audio ads when users listen to Amazon Music on Alexa. However, reports on Reddit (examples here, here, and here) and from The Verge's Jennifer Pattison Tuohy, who owns more than one Echo Show, suggest that Amazon has increased the amount of ads it shows on its smart displays' home screens.

The Echo Show's apparent increase in ads is pushing people to stop using or even return their Echo Shows.
The article notes Amazon's smart displays have also started showing ads for Alexa+ — and The Verge's reporter saw ads on one (but not all) of her Echo Shows this week. (Even when the display is set to show personal photos, ads sometimes appear for herbal supplements, Quest sports chips, and tabletop picture frames.

Ars Technica notes that users "are unable to disable the home screen ads." When reached for comment, an Amazon spokesperson told Ars Technica: "Advertising is a small part of the experience, and it helps customers discover new content and products they may be interested in..." Amazon declined to comment on whether it has increased Echo Show ad loads... According to Amazon, Echo Show home screen ads change based on how close someone is to the gadget. "When the customer is more than four feet away from their device, ads will display full-screen in rotation with other content such as weather, recipes, sports, and news..."

Ferrari's first electric car arrives next summer, reports Carscoops, with a top speed of 193 mph (310 km/h) and accelerating from 0 to 62 mph (0 to 100 km/h) in just 2.5 seconds.

"The Elettrica" will also have a large high-density battery for over 329 miles (530 km) of range, ultra-fast DC charging up to 350 kW, and a 122 kWh capacity and an energy density of 195 Wh/kg that Ferrari "claims is the highest among production EVs."

But what's really interesting is its engine noises: Ferrari's approach to the Elettrica's sound moves away from artificial engine simulation. Instead, a sensor mounted on the inverter detects the powertrain's real mechanical vibrations, which are then amplified to create what the company describes as a natural, evolving tone that reflects how the car is being driven... a reactive soundtrack. Antonio Palermo [Ferrari's head of sound and vibration] calls it "language and connection," a way to keep drivers emotionally engaged with the car without resorting to synthetic gimmicks...

Needless to say, how convincing this synthesized feedback will feel in practice remains to be seen, as much of Ferrari's allure has traditionally rested on the emotional impact of its combustion engines.
"The Torque Shift Engagement system offers five selectable levels of power and torque using the right paddle, while the left paddle adjusts braking intensity," the article points out.

But if the engine noises are well-executed, argues the EV news site Electrek, "I even think it might convince some petrolheads to give EVs a try," . Whether you like them or not, engine sounds are essential, especially in performance vehicles. They are part of the identity of certain cars — a sort of signature. They can be emotional. They can give a sense of power. But beyond that, they are information. The pitch, volume, and texture of the engine sound provide critical, real-time feedback to the driver about RPM, load, and the car's health.

Some electric automakers are using curated soundscapes (like BMW with Hans Zimmer) or trying to mimic V8s (like Dodge with its "Fratzonic Chambered Exhaust")... Other automakers are simply letting the natural sounds of the electric motors exist. There's nothing wrong with that. However, considering that electric motors produce minimal sounds, which are then trapped inside a metal casing, you rarely hear anything significant, especially in modern vehicles with quiet cabins and even active noise cancellation. For most EVs, this is not a problem, but for a performance electric vehicle, it does feel like something is missing...

Ferrari insists the sound will only be used when "functionally useful" to provide feedback to the driver and will be directly tied to torque requests... The entire system was reportedly developed in-house, giving Ferrari complete control over the vehicle's final acoustic signature... [T]hey are embracing the new technology rather than hiding it. They are making a confident statement that an electric powertrain can be emotionally engaging on its own terms, without having to pretend to be something it's not...

If you prefer a completely silent drive, you can disable it.
Electrek's conclusion? "The purists who were worried that Ferrari would lose its soul in the EV transition should be encouraged by this."

I uploaded a photo on my phone to Microsoft's "OneDrive" file-hosting app — and there was a surprise waiting under Privacy and Permissions. "OneDrive uses AI to recognize faces in your photos..."

And...

"You can only turn off this setting 3 times a year."



If I moved the slidebar for that setting to the left (for "No"), it moved back to the right, and said "Something went wrong while updating this setting." (Apparently it's not one of those three times of the year.)

The feature is already rolling out to a limited number of users in a preview, a Microsoft publicist confirmed to Slashdot. (For the record, I don't remember signing up for this face-recognizing "preview".) But there's a link at the bottom of the screen for a "Microsoft Privacy Statement" that leads to a Microsoft support page, which says instead that "This feature is coming soon and is yet to be released." And in the next sentence it's been saying "Stay tuned for more updates" for almost two years...

A Microsoft publicist agreed to answer Slashdot's questions...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CBC News: The study by a team from Toronto's Hospital for Sick Children (also known as Sick Kids) and St. Michael's Hospital was published in the Journal of the American Medical Association. It found that children who spent more time on screens before age eight scored lower on standardized tests. Child psychiatry researchers say handing kids digital devices, like iPads, every time they have a tantrum could lead to future issues. One new study links too much screen time to emotional and anger management problems.

The study followed more than 3,000 kids in Ontario over a 15 year span from 2008 to 2023, tracking how much time they spent watching TV or DVDs, playing video games, using the computer or playing on handheld devices like iPads, as reported by their parents. That data was compared to their EQAO standardized test scores, which are used to assess the reading and math skills of kids across Ontario in grades 3 and 6. The findings point to a "significant association," between screen use and lower test scores, according to Dr. Catherine Birken, a pediatrician and senior scientist at Sick Kids and lead author of the study.

"For each additional hour of screen use, there was approximately a 10 percent lower odds of meeting standards in both reading and mathematics ... in Grade 3 and mathematics in Grade 6," said Dr. Catherine Birken, a pediatrician and senior scientist at Sick Kids and lead author of the study, in an interview with CBC News. The study didn't differentiate between different types of screen time -- for example, whether a child was playing a game on their iPad versus FaceTiming a relative in another city, or watching an educational video. It was also an observational study that relied on parents answering questionnaires about how much time their kids spent in front of screens. The study authors note that this means the research can't be taken as definitive proof that screen time causes lower grades, just that the two things tend to go hand in hand.

Toyota is fast-tracking its long-promised all-solid-state EV batteries through a new partnership with Sumitomo Metal Mining, aiming to debut its first production vehicle using the technology by 2027 or 2028. Electrek reports: Toyota said that its new batteries could significantly enhance driving range, charging times, and output, potentially transforming the future of automobiles. Compared to current liquid-based batteries, which use electrolyte solutions, Toyota's all-solid-state batteries utilize a cathode, an anode, and a solid electrolyte. According to Toyota, the next-gen battery tech "offers the potential for smaller size, higher output, and longer life."

The two companies have been developing cathode materials for all-solid-state EV batteries since 2021, focusing on some of the biggest challenges in producing them at a mass scale. Using Sumitomo Metal Mining's proprietary powder synthesis technology, Toyota claimed to have developed a "highly durable cathode material" for all-solid-state batteries. Sumitomo has been supplying cathode materials for electric vehicles for years, but it's now working to introduce the newly developed tech, moving it toward mass production.