An anonymous reader shares this report from Phoronix: For over a half-decade ASUS has been selling the Tinker Board devices as their line of Raspberry Pi alternatives. To date the ASUS Tinker Board single board computers have all been Arm-based while now they have launched their first RISC-V board, the Tinker V. The ASUS Tinker V is their first RISC-V single board computer and intended for the industrial IoT (Internet of Things) developer community. The ASUS Tinker V is set to officially run Debian Linux and Yocto while surely with time more Linux distributions will be supported.... Being IoT focused, there isn't any display support. Those interested in learning more about the ASUS Tinker V can do so via tinker-board.asus.com. The Register notes that Asus "is offering at least five years of support for Tinker V... Dedicated on-site technical support is also available to shorten customer development cycles and accelerate application deployment." The move shows that the RISC-V open-source instruction set architecture continues to garner support. The last RISC-V Summit in San Jose saw the launch of a family of datacenter-class processors based on the architecture from Ventana Micro Systems, while XMOS unveiled new high-performance microcontrollers using RISC-V. According to Asus, Tinker V samples will be available in Q2 of this year, but it did not disclose a date for full availability or pricing.

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"According to one count, more than 280,000 people were laid off from tech jobs in 2022 and the first two months of 2023," notes a new blog post at Stack Overflow. But then it asks the question: "What's different about these layoffs?" [T]he current economy has less in common than you might think with the wreckage of the dot-com bubble or the Great Recession. Overall, it's still a good time to work in tech, and the hiring market remains robust: One survey found that almost 80% of people laid off in tech found new roles within three months of launching their job search. There are more open tech positions than people to fill them (about 375,000, according to one estimate), and job listings between January and October 2022 were up 25% over the same period in 2021. If the job market isn't as dire as we think, why does this round of layoffs feel so widespread, affecting companies often perceived as more recession-proof than their peers? Part of the answer may be what organizational behavior experts have termed "copycat layoffs." "Laying off employees turns out to be infectious," writes Annie Lowrey in The Atlantic. "When executives see their corporate competitors letting go of workers, they seize what they see as an opportunity to reduce their workforce, rather than having no choice but to do so...." In many cases, workers laid off by household-name tech companies have found new jobs outside the traditional parameters of the tech industry, where their skill sets are in high demand. As Matt McLarty, global field chief technology officer for MuleSoft, told CNBC, businesses that have long needed tech professionals to upgrade their stack or guide a long-delayed cloud migration can now scoop up freshly laid-off tech workers (and those for whom Silicon Valley has lost its luster). Companies in energy and climate technology, healthcare, retail, finance, agriculture, and more are hiring tech pros at a steady clip, even if FAANG companies are less bullish. It's been said before that every company is a tech company, but in 2023, that's truer than ever. In fact, the biggest difference for tech workers this year, reports The New Stack, is that "the greatest opportunities may not lie exclusively in the FAANG companies anymore, but in more traditional industries that are upgrading their legacy stacks and embracing cloud native." Some of those opportunities also lie with startups, including ones helmed by Big Tech veterans ready to turn their layoffs into lemonade.... So whether you've been affected by the recent spate of layoffs or not, it's worth expanding your list of potential employers to include companies — even industries — you've never considered. You might find that they're thrilled to have you.

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"When we learned that a BlackBerry movie was in the works last year," writes Engadget, "we had no idea it would be something close to a comedy. But judging from the trailer, it's aiming to be a far lighter story than other recent films about tech." Variety notes that the movie has already screened at both Berlin Film Festival and SXSW Film Festival. "The film has received favorable reviews so far, with Variety's Peter Debruge calling it "frantic, irreverent and endearingly scrappy." That review also calls the film "surprisingly charitable to the parties involved, acknowledging that these visionaries, while making it up as they go along, still managed to change the way the world communicates.... The film, at least, feels fresh, making geek history more entertaining than it has any right to be." But there's also a message in there somewhere. Mashable calls it "a cautionary tale jolted with humor and heart," while Vulture describes it as "a very funny geek tragedy." The stories of tech founders continue to entertain and frustrate us in equal measure, and continue to give us more content to watch on the platforms and devices they created. Clearly, something about power-tripping nerds really speaks to something in our collective psyche. Actor Jay Baruchel plays BlackBerry co-founder Mike Lazaridis — and even tells Vulture he'd kept using his own BlackBerry "until about three or four years ago..." "I think there's something inherently tragic about these guys that are really significantly responsible, in a really significant way, for the way we all relate to each other. There's a direct line from how we all communicate now, back to what these nerds did in Waterloo in 1996." The movie will be released on May 12.

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Liliputing.com has an update about the System76 Meerkat, which they describe as "a compact desktop computer with support for up to 64GB of RAM, up to two storage devices (for as much as 16TB of total storage), and up to an Intel Core i7 mobile processor. It's basically a rebranded Intel NUC." (Escept that System76 offers a choice of Pop!_OS or Ubuntu Linux pre-installed.) "Previously available with a choice of 10th or 11th-gen Intel Core processor options, the Meerkat now also supports 12th-gen Intel chips." That means there are a total of 9 different processor options available. Prices start at $499 for an entry-level model with a Core i3-10110U processor, 8GB of RAM and a 128GB SSD. The prices rises by $50 if you want to go with a Core i3-1135G4 model, while prices start at $599 for a Meerkat mini PC with a 12th-gen Intel Core processor.... But the biggest difference is that Intel's 12th-gen processors introduce a hybrid architecture that pairs Performance and Efficiency cores, leading to much higher core counts for better multi-core performance.

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And starting in 2021 — long before the run on Silicon Valley Bank — the Federal Reserve had "repeatedly warned the bank that it had problems," reports the New York Times: In 2021, a Fed review of the growing bank found serious weaknesses in how it was handling key risks. Supervisors at the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, which oversaw Silicon Valley Bank, issued six citations. Those warnings, known as "matters requiring attention" and "matters requiring immediate attention," flagged that the firm was doing a bad job of ensuring that it would have enough easy-to-tap cash on hand in the event of trouble. But the bank did not fix its vulnerabilities. By July 2022, Silicon Valley Bank was in a full supervisory review — getting a more careful look — and was ultimately rated deficient for governance and controls. It was placed under a set of restrictions that prevented it from growing through acquisitions. Last autumn, staff members from the San Francisco Fed met with senior leaders at the firm to talk about their ability to gain access to enough cash in a crisis and possible exposure to losses as interest rates rose. It became clear to the Fed that the firm was using bad models to determine how its business would fare as the central bank raised rates: Its leaders were assuming that higher interest revenue would substantially help their financial situation as rates went up, but that was out of step with reality. y early 2023, Silicon Valley Bank was in what the Fed calls a "horizontal review," an assessment meant to gauge the strength of risk management. That checkup identified additional deficiencies — but at that point, the bank's days were numbered. In early March, it faced a run and failed within a matter of days.... The picture that is emerging is one of a bank whose leaders failed to plan for a realistic future and neglected looming financial and operational problems, even as they were raised by Fed supervisors. For instance, according to a person familiar with the matter, executives at the firm were told of cybersecurity problems both by internal employees and by the Fed — but ignored the concerns. The Federal Reserve Bank system has 12 distircts, and the one overseeing California had a board of directors which included SVB's CEO Greg Becker, the article points out. "While board members do not play a role in bank supervision, the optics of the situation are bad."

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"Mysterious streaks of light were seen in the sky in the Sacramento area Friday night," reports the Associated Press. The lights lasted about 40 seconds, remembered one witness who filmed the lights while enjoying a local brewery. The brewery then asked on Instagram if anyone could solve the mystery, the report continues: Jonathan McDowell says he can. McDowell is an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. McDowell said Saturday in an interview with The Associated Press that he's 99.9% confident the streaks of light were from burning space debris. McDowell said that a Japanese communications package that relayed information from the International Space Station to a communications satellite and then back to Earth became obsolete in 2017 when the satellite was retired. The equipment, weighing 310 kilograms (683 pounds), was jettisoned from the space station in 2020 because it was taking up valuable space and would burn up completely upon reentry, McDowell added.... He estimated the debris was about 40 miles high, going thousands of miles per hour. The U.S. Space Force confirmed the re-entry path over California for the Inter-Orbit Communication System, and the timing is consistent with what people saw in the sky, he added.

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An anonymous reader shared this report from Phoronix: A pull request of early AMDGPU kernel graphics driver changes was submitted for DRM-Next on Friday as some of the early feature work accumulating for the Linux 6.4 kernel cycle. Among the AMDGPU kernel driver changes this round are a number of fixes affecting items such as the UMC RAS, DCN 3.2, FreeSync, SR-IOV, various IP blocks, USB4, and more. On the feature side, mentioned subtly in the change-log are a few power-related additions... These additions are largely focused on Van Gogh APUs, which is notably for the Valve Steam Deck and benefiting its graphics moving forward. First up, this kernel pull request introduces a new sysfs interface for adjusting/setting thermal throttling. This is wired up for Van Gogh and allows reading/updating the thermal limit temperature in millidegrees Celsius. This "APU thermal cap" interface is just wired up for Van Gogh and seems to be Steam Deck driven feature work so that SteamOS will be better able to manage the thermal handling of the APU graphics.... These power features will be exposed via sysfs while Steam OS will wrap around them intelligently and possibly some new UI settings knobs for those wanting more control over their Steam Deck's thermal/performance.

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With all the space junk cluttering our orbits, Popular Science writes, "Lowering costs while also shortening satellite lifespans is important if space exploration and utilization is to remain safe and viable. "As luck would have it, a group of students and researchers at Brown University just made promising headway for both issues." Last year, the team successfully launched their breadloaf-sized cube satellite (or cubesat) aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket for the comparatively low production cost of $10,000, with a dramatically shortened lifespan estimated at just five years. What's more, much of the microsat was constructed using accessible, off-the-shelf components, such as a popular $20 microprocessor powered by 48 AA batteries. In total, SBUDNIC — a play on Sputnik as well as an acronym of the students' names — is likely the first of its kind to be made almost entirely from materials not specifically designed for space travel. Additionally, the group attached a 3D-printed drag sail made from Kapton film that unfurled once the cubesat reached orbit roughly 520 kilometers above Earth. Since tracking began in late May 2022, the students' satellite has already lowered down to 470 kilometers — well below its fellow rocketmates aboard the Falcon 9, which remain around 500 kilometers high.

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Slashdot reader Prahjister knows what a system on a chip is. But that's part of the problem: I recently started hearing the term SoC at work when referring to digital signage hardware. This has really triggered me.... It is like when I heard people refer to a PC as a CPU. I tried to speak to my colleagues and dissuade them from using this term in this manner with no luck. Am I wrong trying to dissuade them for this? Maybe another question would be: Are there technical malapropisms that drive you crazy? Share your own thoughts and experiences in the comments. And when should you call hardware a 'SoC'?

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Long-time Slashdot reader turp182 shares two stories about the new state-of-the-art in very-high-speed imaging. "The techniques don't image captured photons, but instead 'touch' the target to perform imaging/read structures using either lasers or neutrons." First, Science Daily reports that physicists from the University of Gothenburg (with colleagues from the U.S. and Germany) have developed an ultrafast laser camera that can create videos at 12.5 billion images per second, "which is at least a thousand times faster than today's best laser equipment." [R]esearchers use a laser camera that photographs the material in [an ultrathin, one-atom-thick] two-dimensional layer.... By observing the sample from the side, it is possible to see what reactions and emissions occur over time and space. Researchers have used single-shot laser sheet compressed ultrafast photography to study the combustion of various hydrocarbons.... This has enabled researchers to illustrate combustion with a time resolution that has never been achieved before. "The more pictures taken, the more precisely we can follow the course of events...." says Yogeshwar Nath Mishra, who was one of the researchers at the University of Gothenburg and who is now presenting the results in a scientific article in the journal Light: Science & Applications.... The new laser camera takes a unique picture with a single laser pulse. Meanwhile, ScienceAlert reports on a camera with a trillionth-of-a-second shutter speed — that is, 250 million times faster than digital cameras — that's actually able to photograph atomic activity, including "dynamic disorder." Simply put, dynamic disorder is when clusters of atoms move and dance around in a material in specific ways over a certain period — triggered by a vibration or a temperature change, for example. It's not a phenomenon that we fully understand yet, but it's crucial to the properties and reactions of materials. The new super-speedy shutter speed system gives us much more insight into what's happening.... The researchers are referring to their invention as variable shutter atomic pair distribution function, or vsPDF for short.... To achieve its astonishingly quick snap, vsPDF uses neutrons to measure the position of atoms, rather than conventional photography techniques. The way that neutrons hit and pass through a material can be tracked to measure the surrounding atoms, with changes in energy levels the equivalent of shutter speed adjustments.

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Long-time Slashdot reader SpzToid quotes an intriguing new article from the Economist: Imagine a habitable colony on Mars or the Moon and the kinds of structures that come to mind are probably gleaming domes or shiny metallic tubes snaking over the surface. But with no Earth-like atmosphere or magnetic field to repel solar radiation and micrometeorites, space colonists would probably need to pile metres-thick rocks and geological rubble onto the roofs of such off-world settlements. More like a hobbit hole than Moonbase Alpha. There could be another solution, however, that would offer future colonists safer and far more expansive living space than any cramped base built on the surface. Writing in Acta Astronautica, Raymond Martin, an engineer at Blue Origin, a rocket company, and Haym Benaroya, an aerospace engineer at Rutgers University, explore the benefits of setting up a Moon base inside giant geological tunnels that lie just below the lunar surface. First discovered during the Apollo programme, these lunar lava tubes are a legacy of when Earth's nearest celestial neighbour was geologically hyperactive, with streams of boiling basaltic magma bursting from the interior to flow across the Moon's surface as lava. Found on Earth (see picture), and identified on Mars, lava tubes form when the sluggish top layer of a lava stream slows and cools, forming a thick and rocky lid that is left behind when the rest of the lava underneath eventually drains away. Lava tubes on Earth are usually up to 15 metres wide and can run for several kilometres. But the reduced gravity on the Moon makes them hundreds of times bigger, creating colossal cave systems that are up to a kilometre across and hundreds of kilometres long.

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Long-time Slashdot reader theodp writes: Like many, parents Sai Gaddam and his wife Priyanka Rai were concerned about how well schooling and education might serve their own children. Unlike many, PhD-educated computational neuroscientist Gaddam and MBA-trained marketer Rai took matters into their own hands and are now running a micro-school in Mumbai that's inspired by the Finnish model of early education. In One AI Tutor Per Child, Gaddam explains with examples why he's so excited about the possibilities for the use of AI and Large Language Models to practically facilitate the Holy Grail of personalized learning. "With generative AI," Gaddam explains, "we have the ability — today — to massively boost this human-human loop by inserting into it an AI tutor/assistant who also doubles as a pedagogy translator. What Seymour Papert — inventor of LOGO, pioneering educator, and the original inspiration for the One Laptop Per Child initiative — said about computers back in the early nineties ('The computer is the Proteus of machines. Its essence is its universality, its power to simulate. Because it can take on a thousand forms and can serve a thousand functions, it can appeal to a thousand tastes.') is even more true of AI now. We are now within touching distance of giving every child their own personal Aristotle."

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Gizmodo reports that Amazon "is thinking about releasing a web browser, a boring-sounding project that could have massive implications." The company has sent a survey to users asking detailed questions, including which features would "convince you to download and try" a "new desktop/laptop browser from Amazon...." The survey asked a variety of questions. Most telling was the last question: "Imagine that there is a new desktop/laptop browser from Amazon available to do. Select which of the following you would most like to know more about." The survey went on to list topics such as privacy, syncing passwords across devices, and shopping features.... Users were asked to rate the importance of features including text to speech, extensions, the availability to sync data across desktop and mobile devices, and — notably — blocking third party cookies. Amazon seems to be seriously considering a web browser of its own, and it comes at a time when it would have an unusual impact on the advertising business. The ad industry is bracing for cataclysmic change as Google moves closer to killing third-party cookies in Chrome, the world's most popular web browser, which would kneecap one of the primary ways businesses track consumers for ads.... Part of what makes Amazon so attractive to marketers is the fact that the company sits on a treasure trove of data about what consumers are buying and what their shopping habits are like. If Amazon could match that information with the data collection that comes from a web browser, it could tip the scales of internet advertising in favor of the retail giant. One thing Amazon asked users is whethered they'd be convinced to download and try a browser if it offered "AI-enabled tab, history, and bookmarks management to automatically sort these into categories for quick search and retrieval."

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Long-time Slashdot reader BonThomme shared this article from Axios: In a story in the Financial Times out Thursday, current and former Silicon Valley Bank employees cited the bank's commitment to remote work as one reason for its failure.... The banking industry has led the return to office charge for a while, and SVB was an outlier in its commitment to something different. The company's career site touted its flexible culture. "If our time working remotely has taught us anything, it's that we can trust our employees to be productive from wherever they work," the site says. The executive team at SVB was spread out around the country, with CEO Greg Becker at times working from Hawaii, according to the FT. Yet, SVB included remote work as a risk to its business in its 2022 annual report — in part because of the IT issues posed when employees are dispersed around the country, but also for productivity reasons. The FDIC, which now runs the bank, told staff they could continue working remotely — except essential workers and branch employees, per Reuters. Axios ultimately blames SVB's run 11 days ago on its panic-inciting public communications about needing to raise capital, combined with its oddly high concentration of tech clients and a portfolio of long-term U.S. treasuries as interest rates rose. "It's certainly possible that if more executives were working in closer proximity those missteps would've been avoided. But it's hard to really know." Yet they warn workplace policies could change simply because the Financial Times ran a piece blaming remote work. "Companies looking for a reason to bring workers back to the office may find it in this piece."

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The closing keynote at the SCaLE 20x conference was delivered by 80-year-old Ken Thompson (co-creator of Unix, Plan9, UTF8, and the Go programming language). Slashdot reader motang shared Thompson answer to a question at the end about what operating system he uses today: I have, for most of my life — because I was sort of born into it — run Apple. Now recently, meaning within the last five years, I've become more and more depressed, and what Apple is doing to something that should allow you to work is just atrocious. But they are taking a lot of space and time to do it, so it's okay. And I have come, within the last month or two, to say, even though I've invested, you know, a zillion years in Apple — I'm throwing it away. And I'm going to Linux. To Raspbian in particular.

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Codon is a new "high-performance Python compiler that compiles Python code to native machine code without any runtime overhead," according to its README file on GitHub. Typical speedups over Python are on the order of 10-100x or more, on a single thread. Codon's performance is typically on par with (and sometimes better than) that of C/C++. Unlike Python, Codon supports native multithreading, which can lead to speedups many times higher still. Its development team includes researchers from MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence lab, according to this announcement from MIT shared by long-time Slashdot reader Futurepower(R): The compiler lets developers create new domain-specific languages (DSLs) within Python — which is typically orders of magnitude slower than languages like C or C++ — while still getting the performance benefits of those other languages. "We realized that people don't necessarily want to learn a new language, or a new tool, especially those who are nontechnical. So we thought, let's take Python syntax, semantics, and libraries and incorporate them into a new system built from the ground up," says Ariya Shajii SM '18, PhD '21, lead author on a new paper about the team's new system, Codon. "The user simply writes Python like they're used to, without having to worry about data types or performance, which we handle automatically — and the result is that their code runs 10 to 100 times faster than regular Python. Codon is already being used commercially in fields like quantitative finance, bioinformatics, and deep learning." The team put Codon through some rigorous testing, and it punched above its weight. Specifically, they took roughly 10 commonly used genomics applications written in Python and compiled them using Codon, and achieved five to 10 times speedups over the original hand-optimized implementations.... The Codon platform also has a parallel backend that lets users write Python code that can be explicitly compiled for GPUs or multiple cores, tasks which have traditionally required low-level programming expertise.... Part of the innovation with Codon is that the tool does type checking before running the program. That lets the compiler convert the code to native machine code, which avoids all of the overhead that Python has in dealing with data types at runtime. "Python is the language of choice for domain experts that are not programming experts. If they write a program that gets popular, and many people start using it and run larger and larger datasets, then the lack of performance of Python becomes a critical barrier to success," says Saman Amarasinghe, MIT professor of electrical engineering and computer science and CSAIL principal investigator. "Instead of needing to rewrite the program using a C-implemented library like NumPy or totally rewrite in a language like C, Codon can use the same Python implementation and give the same performance you'll get by rewriting in C. Thus, I believe Codon is the easiest path forward for successful Python applications that have hit a limit due to lack of performance." The other piece of the puzzle is the optimizations in the compiler. Working with the genomics plugin, for example, will perform its own set of optimizations that are specific to that computing domain, which involves working with genomic sequences and other biological data, for example. The result is an executable file that runs at the speed of C or C++, or even faster once domain-specific optimizations are applied.

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InfoWorld interviews Grady Booch, chief scientist for software engineering at IBM Research (who is also a pioneer in design patterns, agile methods, and one of the creators of UML). Here's some of the highlights: Q: Let me begin by asking something "of the moment." There has been an almost cultural war between object-oriented programming and functional programming. What is your take on this? Booch: I had the opportunity to conduct an oral history with John Backus — one of the pioneers of functional programming — in 2006 on behalf of the Computer History Museum. I asked John why functional programming didn't enter the mainstream, and his answer was perfect: "Functional programming makes it easy to do hard things" he said, "but functional programming makes it very difficult to do easy things...." Q: Would you talk a bit about cryptography and Web3? Booch: Web3 is a flaming pile of feces orbiting a giant dripping hairball. Cryptocurrencies — ones not backed by the full faith and credit of stable nation states — have only a few meaningful use cases, particularly if you are a corrupt dictator of a nation with a broken economic system, or a fraud and scammer who wants to grow their wealth at the expense of greater fools. I was one of the original signatories of a letter to Congress in 2022 for a very good reason: these technologies are inherently dangerous, they are architecturally flawed, and they introduce an attack surface that threatens economies.... Q: What do you make of transhumanism? Booch: It's a nice word that has little utility for me other than as something people use to sell books and to write clickbait articles.... Q: Do you think we'll ever see conscious machines? Or, perhaps, something that compels us to accept them as such? Booch: My experience tells me that the mind is computable. Hence, yes, I have reason to believe that we will see synthetic minds. But not in my lifetime; or yours; or your children; or your children's children. Remember, also, that this will likely happen incrementally, not with a bang, and as such, we will co-evolve with these new species.

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Long-time Slashdot reader theodp writes: In Something Pretty Right: A History of Visual Basic, Retool's Ryan Lucas has a nice round-up of how Visual Basic became the world's most dominant programming environment, its sudden fall from grace, and why its influence is still shaping the future of software development. Visual Basic (or VB) burst onto the scene at a magical, transitional moment, presenting a radically simpler alternative for Windows 3.0 development. Bill Gates' genuine enthusiasm for VB is evident in an accompanying 1991 video in which BillG personally and playfully demonstrates Visual Basic 1.0 at its launch event, as well as in a 1994 video in which Gates thanks Alan Cooper, the "Father of Visual Basic," with the Windows Pioneer Award. For Gates, VB was love at first sight. "It blew his mind, he had never seen anything like it," recalls Cooper of Gates's reaction to his 1988 demo of a prototype. "At one point he turned to his retinue and asked 'Why can't we do stuff like this?'" Gates even came up with the idea of taking Cooper's visual programming frontend and replacing its small custom internal language with BASIC. After seeing what Microsoft had done to his baby, Cooper reportedly sat frustrated in the front row at the launch event. But it's hard to argue with success, and Cooper eventually came to appreciate VB's impact. "Had Ruby [Cooper's creation] gone to the market as a shell construction set," Cooper said, "it would have made millions of people happier, but then Visual Basic made hundreds of millions of people happier. I was not right, or rather, I was right enough, had a modicum of rightness. Same for Bill Gates, but the two of us together did something pretty right." At its peak, Visual Basic had nearly 3.5 million developers worldwide. Many of the innovations that Alan Cooper and Scott Ferguson's teams introduced 30 years ago with VB are nowhere to be found in modern development, fueling a nostalgic fondness for the ease and magic VB delivered that we have yet to rekindle.

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"Minnesota regulators said Thursday they're monitoring the cleanup of a leak of 400,000 gallons of radioactive water from Xcel Energy's Monticello nuclear power plant," reports the Associated Press, "and the company said there's no danger to the public." "Xcel Energy took swift action to contain the leak to the plant site, which poses no health and safety risk to the local community or the environment," the Minneapolis-based utility said in a statement. While Xcel reported the leak of water containing tritium to state and federal authorities in late November, the spill had not been made public before Thursday. State officials said they waited to get more information before going public with it.... "Now that we have all the information about where the leak occurred, how much was released into groundwater, and that contaminated groundwater had moved beyond the original location, we are sharing this information," said Minnesota Pollution Control Agency spokesman Michael Rafferty, adding the water remains contained on Xcel's property and poses no immediate public health risk. The company said it notified the federal Nuclear Regulatory Commission and the state on Nov. 22, the day after it confirmed the leak, which came from a pipe between two buildings. Since then, it has been pumping groundwater, storing and processing the contaminated water, which contains tritium levels below federal thresholds. "Ongoing monitoring from over two dozen on-site monitoring wells confirms that the leaked water is fully contained on-site and has not been detected beyond the facility or in any local drinking water," the Xcel Energy statement said. When asked why Xcel Energy didn't notify the public earlier, the company said: "We understand the importance of quickly informing the communities we serve if a situation poses an immediate threat to health and safety. In this case, there was no such threat."

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RockDoctor (Slashdot reader #15,477) writes: A recent paper on ArXiv reports new spectroscopic analyses of the surfaces of 42 asteroids. The main result for space enthusiasts is that there is not one "M" class asteroid (metal-rich) surface in the collection. The imagery that (many) people grow up with from Hollywood and TV "science" "documentaries" is that the Solar system is full of asteroids which are made of metal ready for mining to produce solid ingots of precious metals. That's Hollywood, not reality. This result is about what you'd expect from the proportion of metallic asteroids — otherwise estimated at about 0.5% of the population. The asteroid mining fraternity dream of taking apart an M-type asteroid like Psyche, which is fair enough as a dream. Even as a dream for "asteroid mining" metal market speculators. But they are relatively rare asteroids. A realistic "ISRU" (In-Situ Resource Utilisation) plan is going to have to expect to digest around 200 silicate mineral (and clay ("phyllosilicate"), and ice) asteroids for every metallic one they digest. Here's the home page for the project.

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