An anonymous reader shares a report from the University of Bonn in North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany: A few years ago, a novel measurement technique showed that protons are probably smaller than had been assumed since the 1990s. The discrepancy surprised the scientific community; some researchers even believed that the Standard Model of particle physics would have to be changed. Physicists at the University of Bonn and the Technical University of Darmstadt have now developed a method that allows them to analyze the results of older and more recent experiments much more comprehensively than before. This also results in a smaller proton radius from the older data. So there is probably no difference between the values -- no matter which measurement method they are based on. The study appeared in Physical Review Letters. [...] Using this method, the physicists reanalyzed readings from older, as well as very recent, experiments -- including those that previously suggested a value of 0.88 femtometers. With their method, however, the researchers arrived at 0.84 femtometers; this is the radius that was also found in new measurements based on a completely different methodology. So the proton actually appears to be about 5 percent smaller than was assumed in the 1990s and 2000s. At the same time, the researchers' method also allows new insights into the fine structure of protons and their uncharged siblings, neutrons. So it's helping us to understand a little better the structure of the world around us -- the chair, the air, but also the stars in the night sky.

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"Developers reacted with astonishment and anger at Apple's 27% commission policy as a minimal form of compliance with a new antitrust law regarding the App Store," reports 9to5Mac. After being ordered by Dutch regulators to allow developers to opt-out of the App Store payment platform, Apple announced today that it "would reduce its commission by only three percent" from the 30 percent commission it typically charges developers, reports 9to5Mac. Additionally, Apple said it would "impose onerous administrative overheads -- such as applying for permission to use a specific API, maintaining a separate version of the app, and filing reports with Apple." 9to5Mac highlights a number of reactions from disgruntled developers: Macworld did a great roundup of reactions to this by a number of well-known developers: "Apple was blasted by developers on Twitter who took issue with the exorbitant fee. Steve Troughton-Smith called the move 'absolutely vile' [...] Marco Arment wrote that you 'can just FEEL how much they despise having to do any of this.' Others noted that it 'defeats the purpose of the law' and that developers will still need to pay at least 3 percent to the payment provider, thus negating even the small savings." Steve Troughton-Smith retweeted our story, and commented: "Absolutely vile. This says everything about @tim_cook's Apple and what it thinks of developers. I hope the company gets exactly what it deserves. Everybody on their executive team should be ashamed, and some of them should not be here when it's all over. We all see you." Marco Arment highlighted the conditions imposed by Apple: - Separate app, only available in Netherlands - Cannot also support IAP - Must display scary sheets before payment - Website links are all to a single URL specified in Info.plist with no parameters - Must submit monthly report to Apple listing EVERY external transaction Adding: "And after you pay your ~3% to your payment processor, Apple's 27% commission takes you right back up to 30%. Glorious. Come on, THIS is comedy. Amazing, ridiculous comedy. I'd be surprised if a single app ever took them up on this. (And that's exactly by design.)"

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Engineers from the University of Delaware developed a method for effectively capturing 99 percent of carbon dioxide from the air using an electrochemical system powered by hydrogen, a press statement reveals. Interesting Engineering reports: The new system, outlined in a new paper in the journal Nature Energy, was actually born out of a setback in another research project. The team behind the new technology was originally working on hydroxide exchange membrane (HEM) fuel cells, a more affordable and environmentally friendly alternative to traditional acid-based fuel cells. While working on that technology, the team was faced with a serious obstacle. HEM fuel cells, they found, are very sensitive to carbon dioxide in the air, making it hard for the batteries to function properly. Fast forward a few years later, and the researchers that once tried to combat the effects of carbon dioxide on HEM fuel cells are now using it to our advantage. "Once we dug into the mechanism, we realized the fuel cells were capturing just about every bit of carbon dioxide that came into them, and they were really good at separating it to the other side," said Brian Setzler, a co-author on the paper. The team leveraged the built-in "self-purging" process seen in HEM fuel cells to create a carbon dioxide separator that could be placed upstream from their fuel cell stacks. "It turns out our approach is very effective. We can capture 99 percent of the carbon dioxide out of the air in one pass if we have the right design and right configuration," said study lead and UD Professor Yushan Yan. Today, the team has a more compact system that is capable of filtering greater quantities of air. According to the researchers, their soda can-sized early prototype device is capable of filtering roughly 10 liters of air per minute and of removing about 98 percent of CO2. What's more, they found that a smaller electrochemical cell measuring 2 inches by 2 inches could be used to continuously remove roughly 99 percent of CO2 found in the air flowing at a rate of approximately two liters per minute. The team's prototype is designed to scrub CO2 out of a vehicle's exhaust, though it could also be used for a number of other applications, including aircraft, spacecraft, and submarines.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from New Scientist: About a tenth of the global oil and gas industry's methane emissions have been found to come from a group of "ultra-emitter" sites located mostly in Turkmenistan, Russia and the US. Methane is a powerful greenhouse gas that governments recently agreed to slash by 2030. While huge plumes of methane leaking from gas pipelines have been detected by satellites at individual sites, such as a gas well in Ohio and several pipelines in central Turkmenistan, little has been know about their extent globally. Now, images captured by an instrument aboard a satellite have been run through an algorithm to automatically detect the biggest plumes of methane streaming from oil and gas facilities worldwide. These ultra-emitters were spotted pumping out more than 25 tons of methane an hour. That's "a heck of a lot," says Steve Hamburg at Environmental Defense Fund (EDF), a US non-profit organization. Collectively, these contribute about 8 million tons of methane a year, about a tenth of the oil and gas industry's total annual emissions for 2019-20. Turkmenistan was the biggest ultra-emitter, releasing more than a million tons of methane between 2019 and 2020. Russia was second at just under a million tons, followed by the US, Iran, Algeria and Kazakhstan. The US count is probably low because it excluded a major oil and gas region, the Permian basin, due to monitoring difficulties. By contrast to these countries, other major oil producing countries, including Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, had very few ultra-emitters. "The study also found that ultra-emitting sites are releasing so much methane, which could be sold, that it should be cost effective to solve," reports New Scientist. "For the six worst countries, tackling those plumes should cost up to $300 less per ton than it would typically cost to reduce methane from oil and gas facilities in those nations." The report also notes that these findings "are based on a snapshot and some ultraemitters may have gone undetected." The findings have been published in the journal Science.

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The NFT marketplace is rife with people buying their own NFTs in order to drive up prices, according to a report released this week by blockchain data firm Chainalysis. Engadget reports: Known as "wash trading," the act of buying and selling a security in order to fool the market was once commonplace on Wall Street, and has been illegal for nearly a century. But the vast, unregulated NFT marketplace has shown to be a golden opportunity for scammers. The report tracked instances of the same traders selling the same NFTs back and forth at least 25 times, a likely incident of wash trading. It identified a group of 110 alleged NFT wash traders who have made roughly $8.9 million in profit from this practice. Researchers also discovered significant evidence of money laundering in the NFT marketplace in the last half of 2021. The value sent to NFT marketplaces by addresses associated with scams spiked significantly in the third quarter of 2021, worth more than $1 million worth of cryptocurrency, according to the report. Roughly $1.4 million dollars of sales in the fourth quarter of 2021 came from such illicit addresses. "NFT wash trading exists in a murky legal area. While wash trading is prohibited in conventional securities and futures, wash trading involving NFTs has yet to be the subject of an enforcement action," wrote the authors of the report.

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slack_justyb writes: "Quietly making its v1.0 debut yesterday was system76-scheduler as a Rust-written daemon aiming to improve Linux desktop responsiveness and catering to their Pop!_OS distribution," reports Phoronix. The daemon will work with the kernel's CFS scheduler to give priority to components that System76 deems important for its distro. Out of the box, the scheduler will assign priority to the X.Org Server and desktop window managers/compositors, while pushing compilers and other background tasks lower. However, the scheduler will be configurable via Rusty Object Notation (RON) files found in /etc/system76-scheduler/assignments/ and /usr/share/system76-scheduler/assignments/. Over on the GitHub page for the project, the team indicates that they are indeed making a trade-off from the default CFS to benefit Desktop configurations over the typical load a server might see.

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Google is trying to salvage its failing Stadia game service with a new focus on striking deals with Peloton, Bungie, and others under the brand "Google Stream." Business Insider reports: When Google announced last year that it was shutting down its internal gaming studios, it was seen as a blow to the company's big bet on video games. Google, whose Stadia cloud service was barely more than a year old, said it would instead focus on publishing games from existing developers on the platform and explore other ways to bring Stadia's technology to partners. Since then, the company has shifted the focus of its Stadia division largely to securing white-label deals with partners that include Peloton, Capcom, and Bungie, according to people familiar with the plans. Google is trying to salvage the underlying technology, which is capable of broadcasting high-definition games over the cloud with low latency, shopping the technology to partners under a new name: Google Stream. (Stadia was known in development as "Project Stream.") The Stadia consumer platform, meanwhile, has been deprioritized within Google, insiders said, with a reduced interest in negotiating blockbuster third-party titles. The focus of leadership is now on securing business deals for Stream, people involved in those conversations said. The changes demonstrate a strategic shift in how Google, which has invested heavily in cloud services, sees its gaming ambitions. Google has continued to prop up the Stadia consumer platform with a steady stream of titles. After Google closed Stadia's internal game studios, known as Stadia Games & Entertainment, insiders said the directive was to build out what was internally dubbed a "content flywheel" -- a steady flow of independent titles and content from existing publishing deals that would be much more affordable than securing AAA blockbusters, two former employees familiar with the conversations said. "The key thing was that they would not be spending the millions on the big titles," one said. "And exclusives would be out of the question." Executives and employees for the Stadia product have also shifted roles. Phil Harrison, the former PlayStation executive Google tapped to run its gaming operations, now reports to the company's head of subscriptions. Patrick Seybold, a Google spokesperson, told Insider in a statement: "We announced our intentions of helping publishers and partners deliver games directly to gamers last year, and have been working toward that. The first manifestation has been our partnership with AT&T who is offering Batman: Arkham Knight available to their customers for free. While we won't be commenting on any rumors or speculation regarding other industry partners, we are still focused on bringing great games to Stadia in 2022. With 200+ titles currently available, we expect to have another 100+ games added to the platform this year, and currently have 50 games available to claim in Stadia Pro."

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Gizmodo: Clearview AI, the shady face recognition firm which claims to have landed contracts with federal, state, and local cops across the country, has landed a roughly $50,000 deal with the U.S. military for augmented reality glasses. First flagged by Tech Inquiry's Jack Poulson, Air Force procurement documents show that it awarded a $49,847 contract to Clearview AI for the purposes of "protecting airfields with augmented reality facial recognition; glasses." The contract is designated as part of the Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) program, meaning that Clearview's contract is to determine for the Air Force whether such applications are feasible. Bryan Ripple, a media lead at the Air Force Research Laboratory Public Affairs, told Gizmodo via email that Clearview will conduct a three-month study under which "no glasses or units are being delivered under contract," nor are any prototypes. Clearview, he wrote, stipulated "that security personnel are vulnerable while their hands are occupied with scanners and ID cards" and AR goggles would allow them to "remain hands-free and ready during this timeframe." "Clearview AI's Augmented Reality (AR) Glasses perform facial recognition scanning to vet backgrounds and restrict unauthorized individuals from entering bases and flightlines," Ripple wrote. "This 100% hands-free identity verification wearable device allows Defenders to keep their weapons at the ready, increase standoff and social distance, and confirm authorized base access using rapid and accurate facial biometrics while keeping threats distant. The results are improved safety at entry control points and for bases, faster identity verification without manual ID card checks, and cost savings by replacing the need for large permanent camera installations." In a promotional document shared by the Air Force, Clearview argued that in the time it takes to scan an ID card at the entry point to a military facility, "A criminal or terrorist can pull a gun, knife, or weapon during this brief but critical moment, kill the Defender, and access the base." They argued the AR glasses would increase "standoff distance," save guards time while vetting high volumes of traffic and allow them to maintain distance from anyone contagious with diseases.

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Contrary to what you may have read earlier this week, Microsoft's HoloLens is not dead. In fact, "HoloLens is doing great," says Microsoft's mixed reality head, Alex Kipman. The Verge reports: Business Insider reported on Wednesday that Microsoft has scrapped plans for HoloLens 3 in recent months and that it could be "the end of the road" for the headset. Microsoft has reportedly agreed to partner with Samsung on a new mixed reality device, a move that has apparently "inflamed divisions" that exist in Microsoft's mixed reality teams. [...] Anonymous Microsoft employees speaking to Business Insider claim there is confusion and uncertainty over the future of HoloLens inside the division that is run by Alex Kipman, technical fellow at Microsoft. "Don't believe what you read on the internet," claims Kipman in a reply to a tweet referencing the report. "HoloLens is doing great and if you search said internet they also said we had cancelled HoloLens 2... which last I checked we shipped with success." [...] Meta, formerly Facebook, is aggressively pursuing the dream of a metaverse, and it's something Microsoft wants to build, too. "We feel very well positioned to be able to catch what I think is essentially the next wave of the internet," said Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella about the metaverse last month. "I think the next wave of the internet will be a more open world where people can build their own metaverse worlds, whether they're organizations, game developers, or anyone else."

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"Steam Deck Verified list is ramping up!" writes Slashdot reader segaboy81, sharing a breakdown of some notable stats via a Neowin article: As of this writing, there are 136 Steam Deck Verified titles, which will alone give Steam Deck the largest launch library of any console, ever. In fact, at this time yesterday the Steam Deck Verified list was at 99 titles. This means there has been over a 30% jump in verified titles overnight. Let's look at the breakdown. Of the 136 verified titles, 64 of them were developed with Unity. That could be an indication of how popular the engine is, but in all of Steam there are 26,142 titles that use it, out of 110,014. That's less than a quarter of all titles. But what about publishers? Square Enix tops this list and the top developers list, but not by a lot. Of the verified games, nine are published by Square, while five are published and developed by them. Among those titles is the awesome Power Wash simulator, which has a whopping 95.26% user rating. Neowin also notes that 48 of the verified titles "have been released since 2021" and over a third "have been released within the last 14 months."

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Economist: Pop-up notifications are often annoying. For Meta, one in Apple's iOS operating system, which powers iPhones, is a particular headache. On February 2nd Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, told investors that privacy-focused changes to iOS, including the "ask app not to track" notification, would cost the company around $10 billion in 2022. That revelation, along with growing competition and sluggish growth in user numbers, helped to prompt a 23% plunge in Meta's share price and showed Apple's might. But what did Apple actually do, and why was it so costly? The promise of digital advertising has always been its ability to precisely target people. Before the digital age, companies placed ads in places where they expected potential customers would see them, such as a newspaper, and hoped for the best. Online, companies could instead target ads based on people's browsing history and interests. This fueled the profits of companies like Meta, which held vast amounts of data on their users. For years, Apple helped by offering an "identifier for advertisers" (IDFA), giving advertisers a way to track people's behavior on its devices. Users have long been able to disable IDFA in their phones' settings. But last year, citing privacy concerns, Apple turned off IDFA by default and forced apps to ask people if they want to be tracked. It seems most do not: a study in December by AppsFlyer, an ad-tech company, suggested that 54% of Apple users who saw the prompt opted out. This change has made digital advertising much trickier. Sheryl Sandberg, Meta's chief operating officer, told investors that the change decreased the accuracy of ad targeting and slowed the collection of data showing whether ads work. Both of these changes make "direct-response ads," which encourage consumers to take an action like clicking or purchasing, less appealing to advertisers. The financial impact on ad-sellers like Meta has been painful. The $10 billion hit estimated by Meta amounts to over 8% of its revenue in 2021. Snap, another social-media company, and Unity, a games engine which operates an ad network, also expect Apple's changes to hurt their businesses. Apple, meanwhile, is doing well: estimates suggest its own ad business has grown significantly since it introduced the app tracking pop-up. (A different pop-up, with a more persuasive sales pitch for opting-in to tracking, appears on Apple's own apps.)

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Mark Zuckerberg's virtual reality business is to introduce a mandatory distance between people's digital avatars after warnings that the social media tycoon's plans for a metaverse will lead to a new wave of online harassment. From a report: Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook, is making a multibillion-dollar bet on VR as the next source of growth for his empire but his strategy has already been dogged by warnings that virtual worlds are rife with abuse. In December a user testing Horizon Worlds, a VR app owned by Zuckerberg's Meta business, complained of being groped online and called for a protective bubble around their avatar, or digital representation of themselves. "Sexual harassment is no joke on the regular internet but being in VR adds another layer that makes the event more intense," said the user.

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Apple plans to charge developers of dating apps a 27 percent commission on any in-app purchases made via alternative payment systems in the Netherlands, the company has announced. From a report: The change comes in response to an order from Dutch competition regulator, the Authority for Consumers and Markets (ACM), which has demanded that Apple allow dating app developers -- and only dating app developers -- to use alternatives to Apple's in-app payment system in the country. Twenty-seven percent represents a reduction of only 3 percentage points compared to the 30 percent commission Apple typically charges for developers using its own payment system. The announcement follows Google's proposal to reduce its commission by 4 percentage points for developers using alternative payment systems in South Korea, Reuters reports.

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Toshiba will spend roughly 100 billion yen ($873 million) to build a power semiconductor fabrication facility in Japan, with production expected to begin by March 2025, Nikkei has learned. From the report: The new plant will be built on the grounds of Kaga Toshiba Electronics, a chipmaking subsidiary in Ishikawa Prefecture. Toshiba aims to meet the rise in demand for power chips -- used in automobiles, servers and industrial equipment -- that save energy and contribute to lower carbon emissions. All of the production equipment will be compatible with large 300 mm wafers. Compared with a 200 mm wafer conventionally used for power chips, one 300 mm wafer can produce more chips and boost production efficiency. Kaga Toshiba is also installing a 300 mm wafer production line at one of its existing buildings. The line is expected to begin operation between October 2022 and March 2023. Toshiba's investment for these endeavors totals around 130 billion yen. The 300 mm production lines to be installed in the old and new buildings will more than double the Japanese group's power-chip production capacity.

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Amazon is raising the price of its annual Prime membership to $139 from $119, the company announced on Thursday as part of its fourth-quarter earnings results. From a report: Amazon last hiked the price of Prime in 2018, when it increased to $119 from $99. Four years before that, it raised the subscription fee to $99 from $79. Amazon's annual increase amounts to about a 17% rise in price. Amazon also raised the monthly price of a Prime membership from $12.99 to $14.99, the company said. New members will see the increased prices on Feb. 18, and current members will be billed at the higher rate after March 25. Launched in 2005, Amazon Prime gives members access to free two-day shipping, as well as access to exclusive movies and TV shows, among other perks. As of last April, the service had more than 200 million subscribers worldwide.

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An anonymous reader shares a report: Mark Zuckerberg quipped that if he started to cry, it wasn't because of the day's news. His red, teary eyes were the result of a scratched cornea, the Facebook founder said Thursday, attempting to lighten the mood as Meta Platforms' stock price lost more than a quarter of its value. At a company-wide virtual meeting, Zuckerberg explained that the historic stock drop was a result of Meta's weak forecast for revenue in the current quarter, according to a person who attended and was not authorized to speak about it. It is important to focus on growing Facebook's short-video product, he said. Zuckerberg echoed his remarks of a day earlier to investors, telling employees that the social networking giant faced an "unprecedented level of competition," with the rise of TikTok, the rival viral-video platform. Meta's Instagram app has a copycat of TikTok called Reels, which the company is now prioritizing. Employees were glued to the stock price. Facebook lost a record $251 billion of value in a single day. Some were discussing buying shares during the dip, believing in Zuckerberg's long-term vision for the metaverse, an immersive version of the internet. Others fretted about what a continued decline might mean for their net worth, according to people familiar with the matter. Zuckerberg's own wealth dropped by $31 billion. Meta is already talking about ways to retain staff amid the stock rout. The social media giant is thinking of extending existing three-day holiday weekends, Zuckerberg said, responding to a question on burnout. He also encouraged exhausted employees to use their vacation days. He added that based on his life experience, transitioning to a four-day work week all the time would not be productive.

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Big tech companies whose online platforms carry advertisements for scams should be made to reimburse victims, British lawmakers said, as part of wider efforts to combat a growing epidemic of online fraud in Britain. From a report: While banks have signed up for a voluntary code to reimburse fraud victims who do enough to protect themselves, there is not sufficient regulation governing social media and other websites where victims are often first lured in, Mel Stride, chairman of the cross-party Treasury committee, told Reuters. "The government should look at some kind of arrangement that makes the polluter pay," he said. "Online platforms are hosting this stuff, not really putting enough effort into weeding it out, and indeed financially benefiting because they're getting the advertising revenues," Stride said. TechUK, a trade body that represents major tech companies in Britain, including Facebook, Twitter and Microsoft, declined to provide an immediate comment. Stride's comments came as the Treasury committee on Wednesday published the findings of a report on economic crime, which urged the government to seriously consider forcing online platforms to help to refund victims.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: The Falcon 9 reached a notable US milestone in January, equaling and then exceeding the tally of space shuttle launches. During its more than three decades in service, NASA's space shuttle launched 135 times, with 133 successes. To put the Falcon 9's flight rate into perspective, it surpassed the larger shuttle in flights in about one-third of the time. There is no way to know how many missions the Falcon 9 will ultimately fly. At its current rate, the rocket could reach 500 flights before the end of this decade. However, SpaceX is also actively working to put its own booster out of business. The success of the company's Starship project will probably ultimately determine how long the Falcon 9 will remain a workhorse. Nevertheless, it seems likely the Falcon 9 will fly for a long time yet. That is because it now provides the only means for US astronauts to get into space. And while NASA's deep-space Orion vehicle and Boeing's Starliner spacecraft should come online within the next couple of years, the Falcon 9 rocket and Crew Dragon spacecraft will very likely remain the lowest risk, and lowest cost, means of putting humans into orbit for at least the next decade. Speaking of safety, this is where the Falcon 9 rocket has really shone of late. Since the Amos-6 failure during its static fire test, SpaceX has completed a record-setting run of 111 successful Falcon 9 missions in a row. It probably will be 112 after Thursday. There are only two other rockets with a string of successful flights comparable to the Falcon 9. One is the Soyuz-U variant of the Russian rocket, which launched 786 times from 1973 to 2017. The other is the American Delta II rocket, which recently retired. (Eventually, the Atlas V rocket could also exceed 100 consecutive successes before its retirement later this decade.) According to Wikipedia, amid its long run, the Soyuz-U rocket had a streak of 112 consecutive successful launches between July 1990 and May 1996. However this period includes the Cosmos 2243 launch in April 1993. This mission should more properly be classified as a failure. According to noted space scientist Jonathan McDowell, the control system of the rocket failed during the final phase of the Blok-I burn, and the payload was auto-destructed. Taking this failure into account, the Soyuz-U had a run of 100 successful launches from 1983 to 1986. This happens to be the exact same number of consecutive successes by the Delta II rocket, originally designed and built by McDonnell Douglas and later flown by Boeing and United Launch Alliance. Overall the Delta II rocket launched 155 times, with two failures. Its final flight, in 2018, was the rocket's 100th consecutive successful mission. So the Falcon 9 has now exceeded both the Soyuz-U and Delta II rockets for consecutive mission successes, and apparently its low flight insurance costs reflect this. What seems remarkable about all of this is that the Falcon 9 amassed this safety record at the very same time SpaceX was experimenting with and demonstrating reuse. At the time of the Amos-6 failure in 2016, the company had yet to re-fly a single Falcon 9 first stage. Now it has pushed some of its boosters to fly 11 flights, and SpaceX has never lost a mission on a reused first stage, even though founder Elon Musk and other officials have explicitly said they are pushing the technology to find its limits.

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A new study out of Germany says having traffic lights use AI technology may keep traffic flowing faster and smoother. Jalopnik reports: One of the partners in the study with an aggressively German name -- the Fraunhofer Institute for Optronics, System Technologies and Image Exploitation -- recently installed high-resolution cameras and radar sensors at a busy intersection with a traffic light in the city of Lemgo, according to New Atlas. The setup recorded the number of vehicles waiting for the light to change, the amount of time each of them had to wait and the average speed a vehicle drove through the intersection. Science wizardry was then used to train a machine-learning based computer algorithm. It experimented with different light-changing patterns. They would continuously adapt to real time traffic conditions and see which ones worked best to keep wait times down. According to the simulations, the best artificial intelligence patterns could improve traffic flow by 10 to 15 percent. That may not sound like a ton, but add up all the time you spend white-knuckled at a long traffic light, and chop 15 percent off. Not too bad. The algorithm will be used to run the traffic lights at actual intersections in Germany for the next few months, and can only get better. The study is also looking to find ways to reduce waiting times at crosswalks for pedestrians. They're using LiDAR sensors among other things to assess the walking speed of pedestrians to make sure they have enough time to cross before the light turns on them.

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schwit1 shares a report from IFLScience: A historic bridge in Rotterdam, Netherlands, is to be dismantled so that Jeff Bezos' superyacht can pass through. The Koningshaven Bridge, nicknamed "De Hef" by locals, has been a landmark in Rotterdam since 1878. Originally a swing bridge, it was converted into a lifting bridge after several ships got stuck in the narrow passage, and a collision involving the German ship Kandelfels in 1918. Having been damaged in the bombing of Rotterdam, it was one of the first monuments to be restored in the city shortly afterward. Now, it is to be dismantled to let the Amazon founder's 127-meter (417-foot) long luxury sailing yacht -- the Y721 -- to reach the ocean. The yacht will be the largest vessel of its kind in the world, and will be unable to make it under De Hef when it is completed by the ship-making firm Oceanco. Despite promises that the bridge would not be dismantled again following renovations in 2014-2017, the middle section of the bridge will be temporarily removed to let the billionaire's boat out. A spokesperson for the mayor's office said "It's the only route to the sea." They noted that the yacht created jobs during its construction and that the bridge would be restored (once again) after Bezos' vessel passes.

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