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Submission + - Eighty per cent of Australian children escape social media ban (telegraph.co.uk)

Submitted by fjo3
fjo3 writes: Eight in 10 Australian children are still using social media despite their government’s ban on access to under-16s, research has revealed.

The study, by the University of Newcastle in Australia, suggested there was “insufficient evidence” to show “any substantive effects” on children’s use of social media, more than six months after the ban was introduced in December.

Australian ministers have blamed social media platforms for “systemic breaches” of the ban after the tech companies failed to remove or block children from their sites.

Submission + - France's heat this week was worse than a dire scenario imagined for 2050 (washingtonpost.com)

Submitted by fjo3
fjo3 writes: The heat on Wednesday alone, when the temperature soared as high as 112.3 degrees Fahrenheit (44.3 degrees Celsius), exceeded the 2050 projections in 19 out of 34 locations across mainland France — far sooner than some may have expected.

Some places surpassed those hypothetical future temperatures by more than 20 degrees Fahrenheit.

It’s part of a dramatic shift in heat wave frequency across the country. Half of the heat waves observed since 1947 have occurred since 2010.

Submission + - Mushroom Behind 'Tiny Human' Visions Lacks Genes For Known Psychedelics (sciencealert.com)

Submitted by alternative_right
alternative_right writes: When eaten undercooked, the mushroom can produce vivid visions of miniature people â" not unlike Gulliver on his travels to Lilliput.

"Biosynthetic gene mining of the L. asiatica genome found no close hits with any genes known in the production of mushroom psychoactive compounds," write the researchers in their published paper.

"This supports our hypothesis of the presence of a novel unidentified metabolite responsible for the unique hallucinogenic properties of L. asiatica."

Submission + - Europe: The World's Fastest-warming Continent (barrons.com)

Submitted by fjo3
fjo3 writes: The latest heatwave sweeping across Europe is a stark reminder that it is the world's fastest-warming continent, stretching into an Arctic that is heating at an even greater pace.

Britain, France, Italy and Spain have issued red alerts and health warnings for much of their territory this week as the region endures its second heat episode since May.

Submission + - SPCX Stock Slides Overnight (yahoo.com)

Submitted by fjo3
fjo3 writes: Shares of SpaceX slid 4% in overnight trading late Sunday after global financial services firm MSCI Inc. assigned the company its lowest ESG rating, placing it among the weakest-rated firms in its coverage universe and prompting a familiar rebuttal from CEO Elon Musk.

SPCX stock fell for a second consecutive session on Thursday after surging to more than 65% above its IPO price during its first week of trading. Investors are also weighing reports that SpaceX is considering a $20 billion bond sale to help fund its rapidly expanding AI and space businesses.

Submission + - Valve Will Finally Let You Build Your Own Steam Machine With SteamOS For Desktop (theverge.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Valve says that “starting with the SteamOS 3.8 release, you can put together your own Steam Machine using whatever PC parts you want.” SteamOS 3.8.10 launched last week with a slew of updates, including “improved compatibility with recent Intel and AMD platforms.” Alongside that improved compatibility, Valve is giving gamers the green light to install SteamOS on their own desktops. In an interview with The Verge, Valve’s Pierre-Loup Griffais said Valve has been “rolling out improvements to [SteamOS] so it’s more compatible with desktop hardware,” including eventual support for Nvidia graphics. Griffais says Valve has “a growing team” working on Nvidia driver support for SteamOS, adding, “We’re collaborating with Nvidia very closely.” While he mentioned that Nvidia support might not come this year, Griffais emphasized that “it’s certainly something that we’re working on in the background.”

It’s technically been possible to run SteamOS on your own hardware for a while now, but compatibility has been mostly limited to AMD systems. So far installing it has also required using a Steam Deck recovery image, a process that, speaking from experience, is much less straightforward than the installation process for most other Linux distributions. Trying to run SteamOS on Intel or Nvidia hardware has not been easy so far. According to Griffais, Valve is working to change that, which could mean that down the line, you’ll be able to run SteamOS on just about any gaming PC hardware you want, including Nvidia.

For the more immediate future, Griffais says SteamOS in its current state should offer a “good experience” on console-like PC setups: “If you have something that is similar to the use case of a Steam Machine, where you have a PC that’s gonna be plugged into a TV, and has a single hard drive that you’re not going to try and dual boot [] you can put SteamOS on there, and you’ll have an experience that is very similar to a Steam Deck docked or a Steam Machine, with some caveats, of course,” like a lack of HDMI-CEC support. But “the core bits of the experience are there. The SteamOS graphics driver, the shader precompilation [...] you can get at all of that with the SteamOS.”

Submission + - People Who Enjoy Dark Humor Might Be Smarter Than Everyone Else (dnyuz.com) 1

Submitted by fjo3
fjo3 writes: In 2017, psychologist Ulrike Willinger conducted a study at the Medical University of Vienna on “gallows humor.” Through the experiment, Willinger’s researchers found that people who enjoyed jokes about morbid or dark topics had higher levels of verbal and nonverbal intelligence. Additionally, participants who appreciated such jokes tended not to be as aggressive as those with more conventional senses of humor. These findings lined up with one of Sigmund Freud’s theories on the subject, as proposed in his 1905 book Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious.

Submission + - Autistic kids are being experimented on (theguardian.com)

Submitted by fjo3
fjo3 writes: Across the US, children with autism as young as 18 months old are being given unapproved stem cell treatments at clinics in Florida, Texas and elsewhere, part of a growing market operating beyond the bounds of FDA approval.

The procedure often involves the child being sedated before receiving intravenous doses of millions of stem cells commonly derived from human umbilical cords harvested at birth.

In some cases, the doctors selling the treatments have no scientific expertise in autism or child development. Instead, physicians from unrelated specialties, including plastic surgery and orthopaedics, have entered the booming stem cell sector, billing the procedures as “regenerative medicine” for children, some of whom have severe disabilities

Submission + - Pacific Islanders Appear To Have Most Ancient Human DNA On Earth (studyfinds.com)

Submitted by fjo3
fjo3 writes: People living in Near Oceania, a region spanning New Guinea, surrounding island chains, and the main Solomon Islands, carry more ancient, pre-modern human DNA than any other population on Earth. New research has found that their ancestors inherited genetic material from three distinct Denisovan-like groups, extinct relatives of modern humans, across tens of thousands of years of prehistory. Some of that ancient inheritance appears to influence gene activity today, particularly in immune-related pathways.

Comment Re:Doesn't ring true (Score 1) 61

by fjo3 (#66189528) Attached to: China Lures Foreign Patients With Cutting-Edge, Cheap Medical Care

Apparently a *lot* of people on Slashdot are completely fooled by the CCP propaganda.

And some of them are CCP propaganda, using multiple "sockpuppets" to both post and moderate.

Decades earlier — during Vietnam war — USSR was financing all of "peace" movements in the West in particular, while attacking the "Capitalist way of life" in general. It'd be quite foolish for China to not be doing the same now. Even more foolish would be for us to not realize, that they do.

The fact that you got modded down proves your point!

Comment Re:Doesn't ring true (Score 1) 61

by fjo3 (#66188428) Attached to: China Lures Foreign Patients With Cutting-Edge, Cheap Medical Care

I have lived and worked in China for a number of years. The hospitals and medical care are not remotely close to US standards in terms of quality of care or even basic cleanliness of the facilities. And that's in Beijing, not some 2nd or 3rd tier city off in the hinterlands. It is undoubtedly cheaper, but I wouldn't go to a Chinese hospital for any sort of critical care unless I absolutely had to....regardless of the price. It's THAT bad. People in China go out of their way and will pay MORE to visit a "clinic" run and staffed by doctors trained outside of China and with significantly improved facilities and outcomes.

Apparently a *lot* of people on Slashdot are completely fooled by the CCP propaganda.

Submission + - Usenet is back! (sort of] (newsgrouper.org) 1

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Newsgrouper is a free web-based interface for reading and posting to Usenet discussion groups (text only, no binaries). Hosted at newsgrouper.org, it allows users to access Usenet newsgroups through a simple browser interface — no dedicated newsreader software or Usenet provider subscription needed

Key features:

Read and post to Usenet newsgroups via the web
Text-only — no binary (file) groups supported
Guest access available for browsing; account required for posting

It was built as a personal project and shared on Reddit and Hacker News in late 2024/early 2025, with the goal of making Usenet's remaining worthwhile discussion corners (like comp.lang.* groups) more accessible

Submission + - Facial Recognition Falsely Identifies Florida Man as a Child Abductor (reason.com)

Submitted by fjo3
fjo3 writes: Police arrested a man in Florida for attempted child abduction in a town he had never visited, and the only evidence linking him to the crime was an AI facial recognition hit. Represented by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), he is now suing the officers and agencies who put him through it.

Submission + - College Students Are Rapidly Losing the Ability to Read (futurism.com)

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: In a new essay for The Chronicle Higher Education , university-level literature and writing instructor Tyler Jagt recalls how not a single one of his students could get through an assigned 20-page article, something that he had read "without complaint" as an undergraduate a decade ago.

One student confessed that the reason they didn't finish was that they kept losing track of what the paper was about. And there's no doubt that they're not alone.

Jagt cites the 2024 National Assessment of Educational Progress reading assessment results released last year. It showed that 12th grade reading scores were at the lowest level since the assessment began in 1992. Nearly a third of those 12th graders scored below the assessment's "basic" level in reading, meaning they likely "cannot draw general conclusions based on concepts presented explicitly in a text." Younger children aren't better off: a recent report from the Annie E. Casey Foundation found that 70 percent of fourth graders, or around two million kids, can't read at a proficient level.

"What I am seeing in my classroom is no longer a hunch," Jagt writes. "There is a measurable, generational collapse in sustained reading and writing, and the academy is responding to it with improvisation and exhaustion rather than the structural overhaul it requires."

Pupils arriving unable to read is an increasingly common complaint from college-level educators amid the explosion of generative AI. Many students treat AI as a genuine learning tool — perhaps to summarize a lengthy article they can't understand, for example — becoming reliant on its speedy responses to race through coursework.

More flagrantly detrimental to learning, plenty more use the tech to generate entire essays and solve math problems — or, in a word, cheat. That many universities have partnered with tech companies to provide students with access to their shiny AI models has only served to rubber stamp and accelerate the tech's adoption in the classroom, marooning individual instructors to figure out how to work around AI on their own.

Submission + - The FDA Approved a New Sunscreen Ingredient (reason.com)

Submitted by fjo3
fjo3 writes: This week, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) added bemotrizinol (BEMT) to its list of permitted active sunscreen ingredients, updating the list for the first time since 1999, according to National Geographic. BEMT, per the FDA, "provides protection against both ultraviolet A and B rays and has low levels of absorption through the skin into the body," and it is safe and effective "for use in sunscreens by adults and children 6 months of age and older." Beginning August 9, BEMT will be sold in the U.S. exclusively by the manufacturer DSM, under the name Parsol Shield, The Hill reports. After 18 months, other manufacturers will be allowed to sell BEMT.

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