Abstract of a paper on National Bureau of Economic Research: We estimate the effect of social media deactivation on users' emotional state in two large randomized experiments before the 2020 U.S. election. People who deactivated Facebook for the six weeks before the election reported a 0.060 standard deviation improvement in an index of happiness, depression, and anxiety, relative to controls who deactivated for just the first of those six weeks. People who deactivated Instagram for those six weeks reported a 0.041 standard deviation improvement relative to controls. Exploratory analysis suggests the Facebook effect is driven by people over 35, while the Instagram effect is driven by women under 25.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Europe’s weapons makers are prospering as the continent reconsiders its post-Cold War stance of favoring domestic investment over military spending.

In rural England, increasingly sophisticated farming equipment has become a target for thieves, adding to pressure on farming communities.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from MIT Technology Review: Arete Glacier Initiative has raised $5 million to improve forecasts of sea-level rise and explore the possibility of refreezing glaciers in place. Off one atoll, just south of the Maldives' capital, Male, researchers are testing one way to capture sand in strategic locations -- to grow islands, rebuild beaches, and protect coastal communities from sea-level rise. Swim 10 minutes out into the En'boodhoofinolhu Lagoon and you'll find the Ramp Ring, an unusual structure made up of six tough-skinned geotextile bladders. These submerged bags, part of a recent effort called the Growing Islands project, form a pair of parentheses separated by 90meters (around 300 feet). The bags, each about two meters tall, were deployed in December 2024, and by February, underwater images showed that sand had climbed about a meter and a half up the surface of each one, demonstrating how passive structures can quickly replenish beaches and, in time, build a solid foundation for new land. "There's just a ton of sand in there. It's really looking good," says Skylar Tibbits, an architect and founder of the MIT Self-Assembly Lab, which is developing the project in partnership with the Male-based climate tech company Invena. The Self-Assembly Lab designs material technologies that can be programmed to transform or "self-assemble" in the air or underwater, exploiting natural forces like gravity, wind, waves, and sunlight. Its creations include sheets of wood fiber that form into three-dimensional structures when splashed with water, which the researchers hope could be used for tool-free flat-pack furniture.Growing Islands is their largest-scale undertaking yet. Since 2017, the project has deployed 10 experiments in the Maldives, testing different materials, locations, and strategies, including inflatable structures and mesh nets. The Ramp Ring is many times larger than previous deployments and aims to overcome their biggest limitation. In the Maldives, the direction of the currents changes with the seasons. Past experiments have been able to capture only one seasonal flow, meaning they lie dormant for months of the year. By contrast, the Ramp Ring is "omnidirectional," capturing sand year-round. "It's basically a big ring, a big loop, and no matter which monsoon season and which wave direction, it accumulates sand in the same area," Tibbits says. The approach points to a more sustainable way to protect the archipelago, whose growing population is supported by an economy that caters to 2 million annual tourists drawn by its white beaches and teeming coral reefs. Most of the country's 187 inhabited islands have already had some form of human intervention to reclaim land or defend against erosion, such as concrete blocks, jetties, and breakwaters.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Trump will never be the ‘fertilization president.’

The justices heard arguments in a constitutional challenge to a task force that decides what treatments are covered at no cost.

Experts in federal employment law said the Trump administration’s justifications to end the investigations were baffling at best.

Researchers have uncovered a new supply chain attack called Slopsquatting, where threat actors exploit hallucinated, non-existent package names generated by AI coding tools like GPT-4 and CodeLlama. These believable yet fake packages, representing almost 20% of the samples tested, can be registered by attackers to distribute malicious code. CSO Online reports: Slopsquatting, as researchers are calling it, is a term first coined by Seth Larson, a security developer-in-residence at Python Software Foundation (PSF), for its resemblance to the typosquatting technique. Instead of relying on a user's mistake, as in typosquats, threat actors rely on an AI model's mistake. A significant number of packages, amounting to 19.7% (205,000 packages), recommended in test samples were found to be fakes. Open-source models -- like DeepSeek and WizardCoder -- hallucinated more frequently, at 21.7% on average, compared to the commercial ones (5.2%) like GPT 4. Researchers found CodeLlama ( hallucinating over a third of the outputs) to be the worst offender, and GPT-4 Turbo ( just 3.59% hallucinations) to be the best performer. These package hallucinations are particularly dangerous as they were found to be persistent, repetitive, and believable. When researchers reran 500 prompts that had previously produced hallucinated packages, 43% of hallucinations reappeared every time in 10 successive re-runs, with 58% of them appearing in more than one run. The study concluded that this persistence indicates "that the majority of hallucinations are not just random noise, but repeatable artifacts of how the models respond to certain prompts." This increases their value to attackers, it added. Additionally, these hallucinated package names were observed to be "semantically convincing." Thirty-eight percent of them had moderate string similarity to real packages, suggesting a similar naming structure. "Only 13% of hallucinations were simple off-by-one typos," Socket added. The research can found be in a paper on arXiv.org (PDF).

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Demonstrators sought the release of Mohsen Mahdawi and Mahmoud Khalil, who organized pro-Palestinian protests and have been taken into ICE custody.

Airbnb is rolling out a global update that displays the total cost of a stay upfront in search results. The only fee that won't be included are taxes. The Verge reports: The company first started showing the full price of its listings in some locations in 2019 after facing scrutiny from the European Union over how it displays its fees. It later launched a toggle in the US and hundreds of other countries that shows the total cost of a stay across Airbnb's search results, individual listings pages, and other areas of the platform. Airbnb says nearly 17 million people have used the toggle since its launch in 2022, and now, you won't have to worry about turning the option on when making a search. Instead, you'll now see a banner at the very top of your search results that says, "Prices include all fees."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Microsoft is intensifying performance scrutiny through new policies that target underperforming employees, according to an internal email from Chief People Officer Amy Coleman. The company has introduced a formalized Performance Improvement Plan (PIP) system that gives struggling employees two options: accept improvement targets or exit the company with a Global Voluntary Separation Agreement. The policy establishes a two-year rehire blackout period for employees who leave with low performance ratings (zero to 60% in Microsoft's 0-200 scale) or during a PIP process. These employees are also barred from internal transfers while still at the company. Coming months after Microsoft terminated 2,000 underperformers without severance, the company is also developing AI-supported tools to help managers "prepare for constructive or challenging conversations" through interactive practice environments. "Our focus remains on enabling high performance to achieve our priorities spanning security, quality, and leading AI," Coleman wrote, emphasizing that these changes aim to create "a globally consistent and transparent experience" while fostering "accountability and growth."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The mistakes, miscommunications and flip-flops are piling up after an early run defined by a flood of major policy changes that were rolled out at breakneck speed.

Harvard’s lawsuit comes after the administration sought to force the university to comply with a list of demands by cutting billions in federal funding the school receives.

Those tariff clouds? Indians wish them away as they welcome Vice President JD Vance for a four-day visit.

Simple, affordable initiatives like rain gardens are helping to soak up water in New Orleans.

CATL has unveiled a second-generation Shenxing battery capable of delivering a 520km range in just five minutes of charging, surpassing BYD's recent breakthrough and positioning both Chinese firms ahead of Western rivals in EV battery tech. The battery manufacturer also introduced a sodium-ion battery called Naxtra, offering up to 500km range for EVs and potential to diversify global energy resources. The Financial Times reports: The claims by the Chinese battery groups would put them ahead of major western rivals. At present, Tesla vehicles can be charged up to 200 miles (321km) in added range in 15 minutes, while Germany's Mercedes-Benz recently launched its all-electric CLA compact sedan, which can be charged for up to 325km within 10 minutes using a fast-charging station. [...] The second generation of the Shenxing battery, which boasts a range of 800km on one charge, can achieve a peak charging speed of 2.5km per second, the company said at a media event ahead of this week's Shanghai auto show. "We look forward to collaborating with more industry leaders to push the limits of supercharging through true innovation," said CATL's chief technology officer Gao Huan, adding that he wanted the new batteries to become "the standard for electric vehicles." Analysts at Bernstein said the latest progress meant that charging speeds had more than doubled in the past year and "increased tenfold over the past 3-4 years." Huan said the new Shenxing battery would be installed in more than 67 EV models this year. He later told reporters that energy density would not be sacrificed as a trade-off for fast charging. During its tech day, CATL also unveiled its new sodium-ion battery, which it said would go into mass production in December. The battery brand called Naxtra is able to give a range of about 200km for a hybrid vehicle and 500km for an electric vehicle, according to Huan. [...] At the event, Huan claimed the new sodium-ion battery would enable the industry's shift from "single resource dependence" to "energy freedom" and reshape the global energy landscape. He added that he was in discussions with several companies about using sodium-ion batteries in their vehicles.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An unlikely choice to be pope championed causes and challenged orthodoxy, keeping allies and critics alike on their toes.

Mr. Khalil, a permanent resident detained in Louisiana, had requested a monitored furlough for the birth. His request was denied in less than an hour.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Tom's Hardware: While most people enjoy PCs that are powered by SSDs, mechanical hard drives are still king in the datacenter. When these drives reach the end of their useful lives, they are usually shredded, and the key materials they're made of -- including several rare earth elements (REE) -- end up as e-waste. At the same time, countries are mining these same materials and emitting a lot of greenhouse gases in the process. And China, a major source of REE, recently announced export restrictions on seven of them, potentially limiting the U.S. tech industry's access to materials such as dysprosium, which is necessary for magnetic storage, motors, and generators. [On Thursday], Western Digital announced that it has created a large-scale hard disk drive recycling program in concert with Microsoft and recycling-industry partners CMR (Critical Materials Recycling) and PedalPoint Recycling. The new process reclaims Rare Earth Oxides (REO) containing dysprosium, neodymium, and praseodymium from hard drives, along with aluminum, steel, gold, palladium, and copper. The REO reclamation takes place completely within the U.S. and those materials go back into the U.S. market. Dubbed the Advanced Recycling and Rare Earth Material Capture Program, WD's initiative has already saved 47,000 pounds worth of hard drives, SSDs, and caddies from landfills or less-effective recycling programs. WD was able to achieve a more than 90% reclaim rate for REE and an 80% rate for all of the shredded material. The drives came from Microsoft's U.S. data centers where they were first shredded and then sent to PedalPoint for sorting and processing. Magnets and steel were then sent to CMR, which uses its acid-free dissolution recycling (ADR) technology to extract the rare earth elements.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A leading sociologist, he explored American society up close — living in a Levittown at one point — to gain insight into issues of race, class, the media and even the Yankees.