ellithligraw writes: Last month a Stanford research paper coauthored by dozens of Stanford researchers which terms some artificial intelligence models "foundations" is causing a debate over the future of AI. A new research facility is proposed at Stanford to study these so-called "models." Critics call these "foundations" will "mess up the discourse." The debate centers on what Wired calls "colossal neural networks and oceans of data." Some object to the limited capabilities and sometimes freakish behavior of these models; others warn of focusing too heavily on one way of making machines smarter. "I think the term 'foundation' is horribly wrong," Jitendra Malik, a professor at UC Berkeley who studies AI, told workshop attendees in a video discussion. Malik acknowledged that one type of model identified by the Stanford researchers — large language models that can answer questions or generate text from a prompt — has great practical use. But he said evolutionary biology suggests that language builds on other aspects of intelligence like interaction with the physical world. "These models are really castles in the air; they have no foundation whatsoever," Malik said. "The language we have in these models is not grounded, there is this fakeness, there is no real understanding...." Subbarao Kambhampati, a professor at Arizona State University [says] there is no clear path from these models to more general forms of AI... Emily M. Bender, a professor in the linguistics department at the University of Washington, says she worries that the idea of foundation models reflects a bias toward investing in the data-centric approach to AI favored by industry... "There are all of these other adjacent, really important fields that are just starved for funding," she says. "Before we throw money into the cloud, I would like to see money going into other disciplines."

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An anonymous reader quotes the Record: An Irish man who ran a cheap dark web hosting service has been sentenced today to 27 years in prison for turning a blind eye to customers hosting child sex abuse material. Eric Eoin Marques, 36, from Dublin, operated the Freedom Hosting service between July 2008 and July 2013, when he was arrested following an FBI investigation. "The investigation revealed that the hosting service contained over 200 child exploitation websites that housed millions of images of child exploitation material," the US Department of Justice said today, announcing Marques' sentencing. "Over 1.97 million of these images and/or videos were not previously known by law enforcement," officials said. Flashback to 2013: [T]he FBI yesterday acknowledged that it secretly took control of Freedom Hosting last July, days before the servers of the largest provider of ultra-anonymous hosting were found to be serving custom malware designed to identify visitors. Freedom Hosting's operator, Eric Eoin Marques, had rented the servers from an unnamed commercial hosting provider in France, and paid for them from a bank account in Las Vegas. It's not clear how the FBI took over the servers in late July, but the bureau was temporarily thwarted when Marques somehow regained access and changed the passwords, briefly locking out the FBI until it gained back control. The new details emerged in local press reports from a Thursday bail hearing in Dublin, Ireland, where Marques, 28, is fighting extradition to America on charges that Freedom Hosting facilitated child pornography on a massive scale... Security researchers dissected the code and found it exploited a security hole in Firefox to identify users of the Tor Browser Bundle, reporting back to a mysterious server in Northern Virginia. The FBI was the obvious suspect, but declined to comment on the incident. The FBI also didn't respond to inquiries from WIRED today. But FBI Supervisory Special Agent Brooke Donahue was more forthcoming when he appeared in the Irish court yesterday to bolster the case for keeping Marque behind bars."

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For 14 years Israel had wanted to kill Iran's chief military nuclear scientist and the father of its weapons program, who they suspected of leading Iran's quest to build nuclear weapons. Then last November "they came up with a way to do it with no operatives present" using a "souped-up, remote-controlled machine gun," according to the New York Times: (Thanks to Slashdot readers schwit1 and PolygamousRanchKid for sharing this story.) Since 2004, when the Israeli government ordered its foreign intelligence agency, the Mossad, to prevent Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons, the agency had been carrying out a campaign of sabotage and cyberattacks on Iran's nuclear fuel enrichment facilities. It was also methodically picking off the experts thought to be leading Iran's nuclear weapons program. Since 2007, its agents had assassinated five Iranian nuclear scientists and wounded another. Most of the scientists worked directly for Fakhrizadeh on what Israeli intelligence officials said was a covert program to build a nuclear warhead, including overcoming the substantial technical challenges of making one small enough to fit atop one of Iran's long-range missiles. Israeli agents had also killed the Iranian general in charge of missile development and 16 members of his team. But the man Israel said led the bomb program was elusive... This time they were going to try something new. Iranian agents working for the Mossad had parked a blue Nissan Zamyad pickup truck on the side of the road connecting Absard to the main highway. The spot was on a slight elevation with a view of approaching vehicles. Hidden beneath tarpaulins and decoy construction material in the truck bed was a 7.62 mm sniper machine gun... The assassin, a skilled sniper, took up his position, calibrated the gun sights, cocked the weapon and lightly touched the trigger. He was nowhere near Absard, however. He was peering into a computer screen at an undisclosed location more than 1,000 miles away... Cameras pointing in multiple directions were mounted on the truck to give the command room a full picture not just of the target and his security detail, but of the surrounding environment... The time it took for the camera images to reach the sniper and for the sniper's response to reach the machine gun, not including his reaction time, was estimated to be 1.6 seconds, enough of a lag for the best-aimed shot to go astray.The AI was programmed to compensate for the delay, the shake and the car's speed. Ultimately 15 bullets were fired in less than 60 seconds. None of them hit Fakhrizadeh's wife, who was seated just inches away. The whole remote-controlled apparatus "was smuggled into the country in small pieces over several months," reports the Jerusalem Post, "because, taken together, all of its components would have weighed around a full ton." One new detail in the report was that the explosives used to destroy evidence of the remote-gun partially failed, leaving enough of the gun intact for the Iranians to figure out what had happened... While all Israeli intelligence and defense officials still praise the assassination for setting back Iran's nuclear weapons program dramatically, 10 months later and with the Islamic Republic an estimated one month away from producing sufficient enriched uranium for a nuclear bomb, the legacy of the operation is less clear... On the other hand, others say that even if Iran decides to move its uranium enrichment up to 90%, that is weaponized level, they still have to put together the other components of a nuclear weapon capability. These include tasks concerned with detonation and missile delivery. Fakhizadeh would have shone in these tasks and his loss will still be felt and slow down the ayatollahs.

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jyosim summarizes an article at EdSurge: edX, founded by Harvard University and MIT a decade ago as a nonprofit alternative to for-profit online education providers, has agreed [in June] to sell its operations to a for-profit company, 2U. Exactly what that means is only now becoming clear, but many observers have noted that in the end, 2U bought a giant source of leads for students that it can upsell graduate degrees to from its partner colleges. But turning edX into a marketing vehicle is a far cry from the high-minded language used when the nonprofit was founded to bring education to underserved students around the world. In the article edX CEO and co-founder Anant Agarwal acknowledges there were tough questions after the initial announcement: But he says that the vast majority of college presidents, provosts and professors he's spoken with have been reassured by the details of the arrangement. He listed those details: that 2U has committed to continue the key mission of edX, including continuing to offer free versions of courses; that the sale price of $800 million will all go to a new nonprofit entity that will advance equity in education; that "not a single penny of the $800 million will [go] to either me or MIT or Harvard or the employees"; and that the open-source platform that edX courses run on, Open Edx, will be maintained by the new nonprofit rather than by 2U. But there are many critics of the deal. And the positive message of Agarwal and 2U CEO and co-founder Chip Paucek doesn't square with some vocal protests of the arrangement. A dean of digital learning at MIT, Krishna Rajagopal, resigned in protest, telling colleagues in an email that he had "serious continuing reservations" about the proposed direction. IBL News reported this week that 2U CEO Paucek "asked edX partners to give his company a shot." "All we need is an opportunity to prove that the future of edX will grow; the brand will grow," he said during an interview with EdSurge.com... "You will see us begin to advertise edX outright and grow the learner base. And I think that'll be good for everybody." Paucek also mentioned plans to incorporate into edX's courses a 2U job placement tool (developed by a coding bootcamp 2U acquired) which charges businesses to reach prospective employees.

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Slashdot reader storagedude writes: With the release of LTO-9, just about every tape vendor has pushed its wares as a solution to the ransomware problem. After all, is there any backup technology that's more air-gapped? Tape IS great for backup — just not so much for recovery. Writing for eSecurity Planet, [CTO of Seagate Government Solutions] Henry Newman notes that not only is disk about 80% cheaper than LTO tape, but even an entry-level RAID card can restore data 6 times faster than tape. "Backup is not about backing up the data, but the time it takes to restore that data to meet your business requirements," writes Newman. "Tape drives are not striped, but disks generally are put into stripe groups," he writes. "With RAID controllers and/or software RAID methods, you can easily get many 10s of GB/sec of bandwidth to restore data from a single set of SAS connections. Doing that with tape is very expensive and requires architectural planning. So the bottom line is you can surely backup to tape and it is cost effective – for backup, that is. If you actually need to restore that data quickly, you have my best wishes." Tape may have a better bit error rate than disk, but disk can be architected in a way that removes that reliability advantage, he notes. "Tape vendors often state that the BER (bit error rate) of tape is far better than disk, which is 100% true, but you can make up for tape's advantage with RAID methods that check the reliability of your data and ensure that what you wrote is what you read. This has been the case with RAID since the early 1990s, with parity check on read to validate the data. With other ANSI standard techniques – which sadly are not used often enough – such as T10 PI/DIX you can achieve data integrity on a single device equal to or greater than tape. The net-net here is disk is far faster than tape, as there is native striping that has been in use at least since the 1980s with RAID methods, and disk can achieve equal data integrity to tape." "The most often overlooked part of data backup is the recovery part – the longer it takes to restore your data, the more damage it can do to your business," Newman writes. He concludes: "Yes, tape can be air gapped but so can disk. Does tape provide better protection against ransomware? Likely, but is it so much slower than disk that you can turn off your system and turn on when you need to. Does having slower restoration make tape a better defense against a ransomware attack? As far as I can see, the marketing claims made by tape vendors do not hold up to a rigorous engineering analysis. If you want to use tape, that is your choice and there might be good reasons, but disk-based backups can be air gapped just like tape, for lower cost and with a much faster recovery time. Why tape vendors are making claims such as this, I will leave it to readers to speculate." But Slashdot reader BAReFO0t takes the "tape" side of the argument. "Being slower does not equal it not working as a solution at all," they argue in a comment on the original submission — adding "Also, it's not even slower, since tape can just as easily be made into a RAID. You can flood ANY bus if you just use enough mirrors, no matter the medium." And a follow-up comment also defended tapes. "If tape meets the service level agreement and provides a reasonable risk mitigation from ransomware, then it's still a perfectly viable solution regardless of certain performance limitations. LTO development would have likely died long ago otherwise." But what do other Slashdot readers think? Share your own experiences and opinions in the comments. What offers a better ransomware backup solution: disk or tape?

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"China fired a fresh regulatory shot at its tech giants on Monday," writes Reuters, "telling them to end a long-standing practice of blocking each other's links on their sites or face consequences." The comments, made by the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) at a news briefing, mark the latest step in Beijing's broad regulatory crackdown that has ensnared sectors from technology to education and property and wiped billions of dollars off the market value of some of the country's largest companies. China's internet is dominated by a handful of technology giants which have historically blocked links and services by rivals on their platforms. Restricting normal access to internet links without proper reason "affects the user experience, damages the rights of users and disrupts market order," said MIIT spokesperson Zhao Zhiguo, adding that the ministry had received reports and complaints from users since it launched a review of industry practices in July. "At present we are guiding relevant companies to carry out self-examination and rectification," he said, citing instant messaging platforms as one of the first areas they were targeting. He did not specify what the consequences would be for companies that failed to abide by the new guidelines.

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"Y'all a plane just crashed into all those houses," one eyewitness says in an online video. "People jumped out of the plane with parachutes." The two people — jumping from the 38-foot-long training plane — were both hospitalized, reports CNN: Police were notified of the crash...around 10:53 a.m. (11:53 am ET) and on arrival found one pilot who had ejected from the military training jet caught in power lines, Lake Worth Police Chief JT Manoushagian said during a Sunday afternoon news conference. Another pilot also ejected from the training jet and was found in a neighborhood nearby... None of the homes involved in the crash took a direct hit, said Fire Chief Ryan Arthur. A little bit of damage occurred to the areas around the homes, he said. "This incident could've been much worse knowing that this plane went down in a residential area here in Lake Worth," Arthur said. ABC News has more information: One of the occupants was burned by power lines and another landed in a tree as they parachuted to the ground, authorities said. One of the crew members was in critical condition, the other one was in serious condition, authorities said... WFAA-TV reported that the plane crashed in the backyard of a home, and no one on the ground was injured. Power was also knocked out to around 1,300 customers in the area. ABC News identifies the aircraft as a T45 Goshawk fighter jet trainer, a plane first developed in 1974 by McDonnell Douglas and British Aerospace (before McDonnell Douglas's 1997 merger with Boeing). But Boeing.com notes they "delivered the 221st and final T-45 training jet to the Navy in November 2009." The company continued to support the T-45 fleet by providing engineering, logistics and support equipment in partnership with BAE Systems, the successor company to British Aerospace, which had supplied the aircraft's rear and center fuselage sections, wing assembly and vertical tail. On Aug. 26, 2010, Boeing joined the U.S. Navy at Cecil Field in Jacksonville, Florida, to celebrate the Naval Air Training Command's one millionth flight-hour with the T-45 Goshawk.

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"Anyone can be a banker these days," argues Reuters. All it takes it the right software: Global brands from Mercedes and Amazon to IKEA and Walmart are cutting out the traditional financial middleman and plugging in software from tech startups to offer customers everything from banking and credit to insurance. For established financial institutions, the warning signs are flashing. So-called embedded finance — a fancy term for companies integrating software to offer financial services — means Amazon can let customers "buy now pay later" when they check out and Mercedes drivers can get their cars to pay for their fuel. To be sure, banks are still behind most of the transactions but investors and analysts say the risk for traditional lenders is that they will get pushed further away from the front end of the finance chain. And that means they'll be further away from the mountains of data others are hoovering up about the preferences and behaviours of their customers — data that could be crucial in giving them an edge over banks in financial services... Accenture estimated in 2019 that new entrants to the payments market had amassed 8% of revenues globally — and that share has risen over the past year as the pandemic boosted digital payments and hit traditional payments, Alan McIntyre, senior banking industry director at Accenture, said. Now the focus is turning to lending, as well as complete off-the-shelf digital lenders with a variety of products businesses can pick and choose to embed in their processes... So far this year, investors have poured $4.25 billion into embedded finance startups, almost three times the amount in 2020, data provided to Reuters by PitchBook shows... "Big banks and insurers will lose out if they don't act quickly and work out where to play in this market," said Simon Torrance, founder of Embedded Finance & Super App Strategies. Several other retailers have announced plans this year to expand in financial services. Walmart launched a fintech startup with investment firm Ribbit Capital in January to develop financial products for its employees and customers while IKEA took a minority stake in BNPL firm Jifiti last month. Automakers such as Volkswagen's Audi and Tata's Jaguar Land Rover have experimented with embedding payment technology in their vehicles to take the hassle out of paying, besides Daimler's Mercedes. Some traditional banks are now working with the big tech companies, the article notes, with JPMorgan even buying 75% of Volkswagen's payments business. And it also points out the other thing that could protect their business from encroaching new startups: the possibility of new rules from financial regulators.

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Oregon Health & Science University reported Friday that in the 45 days before September 14, five Oregonians had to be hospitalized "because they consumed a potent antiparasitic drug despite there being no clinical data supporting its use for COVID-19... "Two people were so severely ill that they had to be admitted to an intensive care unit." The Oregon Poison Center has managed 25 cases involving Oregonians intentionally misusing ivermectin to treat or prevent COVID-19 between Aug. 1 and Sept. 14... The Oregon Poison Center's recent cases involved a variety of symptoms, including mental confusion, balance issues, low blood pressure and seizure. The patients were in their 20s through their 80s, although most were older than 60. The cases were fairly evenly split between both men and women, and between people attempting to either prevent or treat COVID-19. Some cases involved individuals obtaining a prescription for either human or veterinary forms of the drug. Both the Food and Drug Administration and Merck, which makes ivermectin for human use, have announced there is no scientific data that supports its use for COVID-19. Neither the FDA nor the National Institutes of Health have endorsed its use for COVID-19, and OHSU doesn't recommend any use of ivermectin for COVID-19. They add that "The Oregon Poison Center strongly recommends the public only use scientifically proven and FDA-approved methods to combat the novel coronavirus." But there's also been more hospitalizations from ivermectin overdoses in other states, reports the Arizona Republic. Banner Health, a 50,000-employee health non-profit managing 30 hospitals in six states (and staffing a local poison control hotline) reports that their "Poison and Drug Information Center" received at least 30 calls this year, including 10 in August, and "at least seven cases have resulted in hospitalization, health system officials said." "That is the bare minimum. We expect that there are probably more adverse effects," said Dr. Daniel Brooks, medical director for Banner Health's Poison and Drug Information Center. "We are very concerned that people are using this medication inappropriately because we don't know what dose they are using. We don't even know what product they are getting their hands on..." ivermectin has side effects in up to 10% of people who are treated with it, Brooks said. Side effects can include diarrhea, confusion, nausea, vomiting, balance problems and blurred vision... "If they have side effects, then they could end up in the emergency department, further overwhelming the health system in Arizona and the rest of the United States and potentially getting COVID from sitting in a busy emergency department waiting room, or being admitted to the hospital because of ongoing nausea and vomiting." And even in the same state, other organizations also reported more hospitalizations from ivermectin overdoses. "The University of Arizona's Arizona Poison and Drug Information Center, which has had 19 reports related to ivermectin so far this year, including eight who were hospitalized, center director Steve Dudley wrote in an email."

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A Pennsylvania newspaper tracked down Dr. Kenneth Brown — who wrote Merck's original research protocols in the 1980s for studying ivermectin as a "river blindness" treatment. They describe Brown as 85 years old, retired, and "proud of his association with Ivermectin." More than 4 billion doses of ivermectin (renamed Mectizan) have been administered globally in the effort to eliminate river blindness, the leading cause of preventable blindness worldwide. Historically, river blindness — transmitted by the bites of black flies that breed near rivers and streams — is prevalent in 36 countries in Africa, Latin America and Yemen. Brown saw firsthand in west Africa the miracle at work, often administered by local townspeople — who could neither read nor write — trained through Merck's donation program. "We want to celebrate Ivermectin for what it's done around the world," said Polly Ann Brown, Brown's wife. They asked how he feels about people "willing to bypass evidence...collected through traditional scientific studies" to try self-administering their own levels of the drug in home experiments seeking remedies for Covid-19. (The article notes that even the author of an often-cited Australian study that initially claimed a benefit from ivermectin has since said "[T]he potential repurposing plausibility if any is at present not very likely, because the antiviral concentrations would be attainable only after massive overdose.") Brown tracks questionable claims about medicines as a retirement job... The main thrust of many pushing the use of ivermectin [as an unproven Covid-19 treatment] goes something like this: Big pharma doesn't want the public to use ivermectin...because the pharmaceutical companies don't make vast sums of money on what is, essentially in the U.S., a horse dewormer. Billions of people — they will argue — have taken the drug safely. What they don't say, or don't know, is that ivermectin has been administered billions of times. But because ivermectin is not a one-and-done treatment (it has to be administered once annually) that's an exaggeration. And while it's been used for decades, there are no established safety protocols for its use as a COVID-19 treatment. The way Brown sees it, the affection for ivermectin rather than one of the COVID-19 vaccines authorized for use in the U.S. reveals an anti-science bias. Brown's advice? "Don't get your information or medical advice from Facebook or Instagram," Brown said. "No social media can be reliably accurate." Elsewhere in the article, Brown stresses that Ivermectin is "not magic..." "It is a danger to trust the dream we wish for rather than the science we have.'

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"Last week Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, the world's largest chipmaker, which supplies chips to Apple, pledged to reach net zero emissions by 2050," reports the Guardian. "But decarbonizing the industry will be a big challenge." TSMC alone uses almost 5% of all Taiwan's electricity, according to figures from Greenpeace, predicted to rise to 7.2% in 2022, and it used about 63m tons of water in 2019. The company's water use became a controversial topic during Taiwan's drought this year, the country's worst in a half century, which pitted chipmakers against farmers. In the US, a single fab, Intel's 700-acre campus in Ocotillo, Arizona, produced nearly 15,000 tons of waste in the first three months of this year, about 60% of it hazardous. It also consumed 927m gallons of fresh water, enough to fill about 1,400 Olympic swimming pools, and used 561m kilowatt-hours of energy. Chip manufacturing, rather than energy consumption or hardware use, "accounts for most of the carbon output" from electronics devices, the Harvard researcher Udit Gupta and co-authors wrote in a 2020 paper.... [A]mid pressure from investors and electronics makers keen to report greener supply chains to customers, the semiconductor business has been ramping up action on tackling its climate footprint... Greater availability of renewable energy is helping chipmakers reduce their carbon footprint. Intel made a commitment to source 100% of its energy from renewable sources by 2030, as did TSMC, but with a deadline of 2050. Energy consumption accounts for 62% of TSMC's emissions, said a company spokesperson, Nina Kao. The company signed a 20-year deal last year with the Danish energy firm Ørsted, buying all the energy from a 920-megawatt offshore windfarm Ørsted is building in the Taiwan Strait. The deal, which has been described as the world's largest corporate renewables purchase agreement, has benefits for TSMC, said Shashi Barla, renewables analyst at the energy consultancy Wood Mackenzie. As well as guaranteeing a clean electricity supply, it pays a wholesale cost and removes itself from price shocks, "killing two birds with one stone", he said. TSMC's actions have the potential to influence the rest of the industry, said Clifton Fonstad, professor of electrical engineering and computer science at MIT, "other manufacturers are likely to follow its lead"... There is also innovation aimed at tackling the worst-polluting materials used in making semiconductors. The chip industry uses different gases during the production process, many of which have a significant climate impact. TSMC said it had implemented scrubbers and other facilities to treat gas emissions. But another route is replacing "dirtier" cleaning gases that clean the delicate tools in semiconductor manufacturing, said Michael Pittroff, a chemical engineer working on semiconductor gases at Solvay Special Chemicals. In industrial tests over the last six years with about a half dozen chipmaker clients, Pittroff said, he and his team had replaced more polluting gases with "cleaner" fluorine, with a lower global warming impact. Other companies target the gases that are used to etch patterns onto and clean the silicon surface of a wafer — the thin piece of material used to make semiconductors. Paris-based industrial gases company Air Liquide, for example, has come up with a line of alternative etching gases with lower global warming impacts... Some experts believe chipmakers will start to modify their processes to incorporate greener gases, especially if the big players make a move. "If TSMC switches, I am sure the others will," said Fonstad. "If TSMC doesn't, then other manufacturers may switch to show they are better than TSMC."

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"The whitest paint in the world has been created in a lab at Purdue University," reports USA Today, "a paint so white that it could eventually reduce or even eliminate the need for air conditioning, scientists say. "The paint has now made it into the Guinness World Records book as the whitest ever made." Long-time Slashdot reader phalse phace shared their report: "When we started this project about seven years ago, we had saving energy and fighting climate change in mind," said Xiulin Ruan, a professor of mechanical engineering at Purdue, in a statement. The idea was to make a paint that would reflect sunlight away from a building, researchers said. Making this paint really reflective, however, also made it really white, according to Purdue University. The paint reflects 98.1% of solar radiation while also emitting infrared heat. Because the paint absorbs less heat from the sun than it emits, a surface coated with this paint is cooled below the surrounding temperature without consuming power. Using this new paint to cover a roof area of about 1,000 square feet could result in a cooling power of 10 kilowatts. "That's more powerful than the air conditioners used by most houses," Ruan said. Typical commercial white paint gets warmer rather than cooler. Paints on the market that are designed to reject heat reflect only 80% to 90% of sunlight and can't make surfaces cooler than their surroundings... Researchers at Purdue have partnered with a company to put this ultra-white paint on the market, according to a news release. "This white paint is the result of research building on attempts going back to the 1970s," adds a statement from Purdue University, "to develop radiative cooling paint as a feasible alternative to traditional air conditioners. "Ruan's lab had considered over 100 different materials, narrowed them down to 10 and tested about 50 different formulations for each material..." Two features make this paint ultra-white: a very high concentration of a chemical compound called barium sulfate — also used in photo paper and cosmetics — and different particle sizes of barium sulfate in the paint. What wavelength of sunlight each particle scatters depends on its size, so a wider range of particle sizes allows the paint to scatter more of the light spectrum from the sun.

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"The whitest paint in the world has been created in a lab at Purdue University," reports USA Today, "a paint so white that it could eventually reduce or even eliminate the need for air conditioning, scientists say. "The paint has now made it into the Guinness World Records book as the whitest ever made." Long-time Slashdot reader phalse phace shared their report: "When we started this project about seven years ago, we had saving energy and fighting climate change in mind," said Xiulin Ruan, a professor of mechanical engineering at Purdue, in a statement. The idea was to make a paint that would reflect sunlight away from a building, researchers said. Making this paint really reflective, however, also made it really white, according to Purdue University. The paint reflects 98.1% of solar radiation while also emitting infrared heat. Because the paint absorbs less heat from the sun than it emits, a surface coated with this paint is cooled below the surrounding temperature without consuming power. Using this new paint to cover a roof area of about 1,000 square feet could result in a cooling power of 10 kilowatts. "That's more powerful than the air conditioners used by most houses," Ruan said. Typical commercial white paint gets warmer rather than cooler. Paints on the market that are designed to reject heat reflect only 80% to 90% of sunlight and can't make surfaces cooler than their surroundings... Researchers at Purdue have partnered with a company to put this ultra-white paint on the market, according to a news release. "This white paint is the result of research building on attempts going back to the 1970s," adds a statement from Purdue University, "to develop radiative cooling paint as a feasible alternative to traditional air conditioners. "Ruan's lab had considered over 100 different materials, narrowed them down to 10 and tested about 50 different formulations for each material..." Two features make this paint ultra-white: a very high concentration of a chemical compound called barium sulfate — also used in photo paper and cosmetics — and different particle sizes of barium sulfate in the paint. What wavelength of sunlight each particle scatters depends on its size, so a wider range of particle sizes allows the paint to scatter more of the light spectrum from the sun.

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