There's 9,000 satellites circling the earth, the Guardian points out, with projections over over 60,000 by 2040. But "A new study shows that the emissions from expired satellites, as they fall to Earth and burn up, will be significant in future years, with implications for ozone hole recovery and climate." Most old satellites are disposed of by reducing their altitude and letting them burn up as they fall, releasing pollution into Earth's atmosphere such as aerosolised aluminium. To understand the impact of these growing emissions from expired satellites, researchers simulated the effects associated with an annual release of 10,000 tonnes of aluminium oxide by 2040 (the amount estimated to be released from disposal of 3,000 satellites a year, assuming a fleet of 60,000 satellites). The results, which are published in Journal of Geophysical Research Atmospheres, show that the re-entry material will accumulate at high latitudes and could result in temperature anomalies of up to 1.5C in the middle to upper atmosphere, reduction of wind speeds and ozone depletion, which could jeopardise ozone hole recovery. "At present, impacts on the middle and the upper atmosphere are small," the researchers write, "but have the potential to increase." They argue that "to shed light upon the potential climate impacts of increased satellite reentry," an "expanded effort, including observations and modeling is needed." Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader AmiMoJo for sharing the article.

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Mr. Buffett said at the annual shareholders’ meeting that he wanted to turn over the reins to Greg Abel at the end of the year. Earlier, he criticized Trump’s trade policies.

From traditional hats to fascinators and headdresses, the best looks at the 151st running of America’s most fashionable sporting event.

As the Democratic Party tries to win back support, some members say forcing older politicians to retire is one solution.

Long-time Slashdot reader AmiMoJo shares an article from Renewables Now: Chinese tech company Leapting has successfully completed its first commercial deployment of photovoltaic (PV) modules with an AI-driven solar module mounting robot in Australia. The Chinese company was tasked with supporting the installation of French Neoen's (EPA:NEOEN) 350-MW/440-MWp Culcairn Solar Farm in New South Wales' Riverina region. Shanghai-based Leapting said this week that its intelligent robot has installed almost 10,000 modules at an "efficient, safe, and stable" pace that has "significantly" reduced the original construction timeline. Litian Intelligent was deployed at the Australian project site in early February. The machine has a 2.5-metre-high robotic arm sitting on a self-guided, self-propelled crawler. Equipped with a navigation system, and visual recognition technology, it can lift and mount PV panels weighing up to 30 kilograms. By replacing labour-intensive manual operations, the robot shortens the module installation cycle by 25%, while the installation efficiency increases three to five times as compared to manual labour and is easily adapted to complex environments, Leapting says. Or, as Clean Technica puts it, "Meet the robot replacing four workers at a time on solar projects." This is part of a broader industrial trend. In the United States, Rosendin Electric demonstrated its own semi-autonomous system in Texas that allowed a two-person team to install 350 to 400 modules per day, a clear step-change from traditional methods. AES Corporation has been developing a robot called Maximo that combines placement and fastening with computer vision. Trina Solar's Trinabot in China operates in a similar space, with prototype systems demonstrating 50-plus modules per hour... In an industry where time-to-energy is critical, shaving weeks off the construction schedule directly reduces costs and increases net revenue... [T]he direction is clear. The future of solar construction will be faster, safer, and more precise — not because of human brawn, but because of robotic repetition. There will still be humans on-site, but their role shifts from lifting panels to managing throughput. Just as cranes and excavators changed civil construction, so too will robots like Leapting's define the next era of solar deployment.

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The man had viewed footage of the fatal shooting of his 18-year-old son in Cincinnati hours before deliberately crashing into a sheriff’s deputy in Hamilton County, Ohio, the authorities said.

A progressive member of Congress for two decades, he resigned as mayor after 18 women accused him of sexual harassment.

The mobilization could indicate that Israel is preparing to shift its tactics in its fight against Hamas.

"Researchers have created the first laboratory analog of the 'black hole bomb'," reports ScienceAlert, "a theoretical concept developed by physicists in the 1970s..." There's no black hole involved; their experiment just simulates the "electromagnetic analogue" of the theoretical concept — the "exponential runaway amplification of spontaneously generated electromagnetic modes." Or, as ScienceAlert puts it, "It doesn't, just to set your mind at ease, pose any danger. It consists of a rotating aluminum cylinder, placed inside layers of coils that generate magnetic fields that rotate around it, at controllable speeds." As Roger Penrose proposed in 1971, the powerful rotational energy of a spinning black hole could be used to amplify the energy of nearby particles. Then, physicist Yakov Zel'Dovich figured out that you didn't need a black hole to see this phenomenon in action. An axially symmetrical body rotating in a resonance chamber, he figured, could produce the same energy transfer and amplification, albeit on a much smaller scale. Later work by other physicists found that, if you enclose the entire apparatus in a mirror, a positive feedback loop is generated, amplifying the energy until it explodes from the system. This concept was named the black hole bomb, and a team of physicists led by Marion Cromb of the University of Southampton in the UK now claim to have brought it to life. A paper describing their experiment has been uploaded to preprint server arXiv... [W]hat the team's experiment does is simulate it, using magnetic fields as a proxy for the particles, with the coils around the system acting as the reflector to produce the feedback loop. When they ran the experiment, they found that, when the cylinder is rotating faster than, and in the same direction as, the magnetic field, the magnetic field is amplified, compared to when there is no cylinder. When the cylinder rotates more slowly than the magnetic field, however, the magnetic field is dampened. This is a really interesting result, because it demonstrates a very clear amplification effect, based on the theories described decades ago... Because we can't probe black holes directly, analogs such as this are an excellent way to understand their properties... [T]he experiment could represent a significant step towards better understanding the physics of the most gravitationally extreme objects in the Universe. "The exponential amplification from noise supports theoretical investigations into black hole instabilities," the researchers write, "and is promising for the development of future experiments to observe quantum friction in the form of the Zeldovich effect seeded by the quantum vacuum..."

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Dozens of people forced to leave the Deschutes National Forest in Oregon set up camp nearby in different wooded areas.

Long-time Slashdot reader piojo writes: Tim Friede, Wisconsin man, has been injecting himself with snake venom for 18 years to gain protection from his pet snakes. The antibodies he developed have formed two components of a three-part antivenom, which gives partial or total protection against 18 of 19 species of venomous snakes that were tested. Notably, the antivenom is ineffective against vipers. From Australia's public broadcaster ABC: The team's results have been published today in the journal Cell... The new antivenom described in the study is very different to traditional antivenoms, according to Peter Kwong, a biochemist at Columbia University and one of the study's authors. The scientists call their new antivenom "unparallel," according to the BBC, though the snake enthusiast (a former truck mechanic) had "initially wanted to build up his immunity to protect himself when handling snakes, documenting his exploits on YouTube." The team is trying to refine the antibodies further and see if adding a fourth component could lead to total protection against elapid snake venom... "Tim's antibodies are really quite extraordinary — he taught his immune system to get this very, very broad recognition," said Professor Peter Kwong [one of the researchers at Columbia University]. In a video interview, CNN shows footage of the man inducing snake bites (calling it "a classic do-not-try-this-at-home moment"). "I have a lot of notes in Excel files," he tells CNN, "where I hit these particular windows to where I know I can boost up before a bite." "I don't just take the bite, because that can kill you. I properly boost up, and methodically take notes, and weigh the venomes out very specifically..."

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The lawsuit, which names the governor and mayor as defendants, is the latest move by the White House to try to get local governments to cooperate more with its immigration agenda.

America's federal government "is a veritable cosmos of information, made up of constellations of databases," warns the Atlantic. The FBI "has a facial-recognition apparatus capable of matching people against more than 640 million photos — a database made up of driver's license and passport photos, as well as mug shots. The Homeland Security department holds data "about the movements of every person who travels by air commercially". America's Drug Enforcement Administration "tracks license plates scanned on American roads." And there's also every taxpayer's finance and employment history..." Government agencies including the IRS, the FBI, DHS, and the Department of Defense have all purchased cellphone-location data, and possibly collected them too, via secretive groups such as the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency. That means the government has at least some ability to map or re-create the past everyday movements of some American citizens. But now the information at individual agencies "is being pooled together. The question is Why? And what does the administration intend to do with it?" A White House spokesperson confirmed to the Atlantic that data collected by different agencies is now being combined. (They said that "Through data sharing between agencies, departments are collaborating to identify fraud and prevent criminals from exploiting hardworking American taxpayers.") But a March executive explicitly stated an aim "to eliminate the data silos that keep everything separate." The article accuses the administration officials of "not just undoing decades of privacy measures. They appear to be ignoring that they were ever written." The Atlantic spoke with former government officials "who have spent time in these systems," reporting that "to a person, these experts are alarmed about the possibilities for harm, graft, and abuse... Collecting and then assembling data in the industrial way — just to have them in case they might be useful — would represent a huge and disturbing shift for the government..." "A fragile combination of decades-old laws, norms, and jungly bureaucracy has so far prevented repositories such as these from assembling into a centralized American surveillance state. But that appears to be changing... DOGE has systematically gained access to sensitive data across the federal government "in ways that people in several agencies have described to us as both dangerous and disturbing."

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As official research positions are lost to budget cuts, the work of citizen scientists to preserve federal forests is becoming more valuable.

Threads has now grown to over 350 million monthly active users, reports TechCrunch, citing Mark Zuckerberg's comments on a company earnings call. That means Threads grew by 9.4% in roughly 90 days: That's an increase of 30 million users since the prior quarter, where Meta reported that Threads had 320 million users. The new figure represents increased growth, as Threads added 30 million in the first quarter of this year, compared with 20 million in Q4 2024. It's also worth noting that in a single quarter, Threads added nearly the same number of users to its network as one of its newer competitors, Bluesky. The latter, a decentralized social app, today has roughly 35 million users. Zuckerberg also said there's been a 35% increase in time spent on Threads, according to the article, as a result of improvements to its recommendations systems.

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Residents of Oakdale, Calif., have abandoned traditional media outlets for a mishmash of online sources. These days, they’re often not sure what information to trust.

The Open Source Initiative is joining "a global community of contributors" for GitHub's annual event "honoring the individuals who steward and sustain Open Source projects." And the theme of the 4th Annual "Maintainer Month" will be: securing Open Source: Throughout the month, OSI and our affiliates will be highlighting maintainers who prioritize security in their projects, sharing their stories, and providing a platform for collaboration and learning... Maintainer Month is a time to gather, share knowledge, and express appreciation for the people who keep Open Source projects running. These maintainers not only review issues and merge pull requests — they also navigate community dynamics, mentor new contributors, and increasingly, adopt security best practices to protect their code and users.... - OSI will publish a series of articles on Opensource.net highlighting maintainers whose work centers around security... - As part of our programming for May, OSI will host a virtual Town Hall [May 21st] with our affiliate organizations and invite the broader Open Source community to join.... - Maintainer Month is also a time to tell the stories of those who often work behind the scenes. OSI will be amplifying voices from across our affiliate network and encouraging communities to recognize the people whose efforts are often invisible, yet essential. "These efforts are not just celebrations — they are opportunities to recognize the essential role maintainers play in safeguarding the Open Source infrastructure that underpins so much of our digital world," according to the OSI's announcement. And this year they're focusing on three key areas of open source security: Adopting security best practices in projects and communities Recognizing contributors who improve project security Collaborating to strengthen the ecosystem as a whole

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For countries that depend heavily on oil revenue, dropping prices are worrisome.

President Volodymyr Zelensky called the proposal a “theatrical show” and said such a short truce would not bolster negotiations for a lasting peace.

An anonymous reader shared this report from the Washington Post: Facebook's loosening of its content moderation standards early this year got lots of attention and criticism. But a new study suggests that it might matter less what is taken down than when. The research finds that Facebook posts removed for violating standards or other reasons have already been seen by at least three-quarters of the people who would be predicted to ever see them. "Content takedowns on Facebook just don't matter all that much, because of how long they take to happen," said Laura Edelson, an assistant professor of computer science at Northeastern University and the lead author of the paper in the Journal of Online Trust and Safety. Social media platforms generally measure how many bad posts they have taken down as an indication of their efforts to suppress harmful or illegal material. The researchers advocate a new metric: How many people were prevented from seeing a bad post by Facebook taking it down...? "Removed content we saw was mostly garden-variety spam — ads for financial scams, [multilevel marketing] schemes, that kind of thing," Edelson said... The new research is a reminder that platforms inadvertently host lots of posts that everyone agrees are bad.

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