Taiwan's spy catchers have launched probes into around 100 Chinese companies suspected of illegally poaching semiconductor engineers and other tech talent, a senior official at the island's Investigation Bureau told Reuters. From the report: That comes on top of seven prosecuted since the start of last year and includes 27 which have either been raided or whose owners have been summoned for questioning by the bureau, the official said. Home to industry giant TSMC and accounting for 92% of the world's most advanced semiconductor manufacturing capacity, Taiwan possesses what China needs - chip expertise in spades. A global chip shortage and Beijing's avowed goal of achieving self-reliance in advanced chips - more forcefully promoted by Chinese President Xi Jinping after a trade war with the former Trump administration - has only intensified the scramble for engineering talent. Taiwan responded with the creation in December 2020 of a task force within the justice ministry's Investigation Bureau -- its main spy catching organisation -- to tackle poaching. Cases where it has taken action with raids or questioning represented "the tip of the iceberg", the official said, asking to remain anonymous so that investigations are not impeded.

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Across three different animal models researchers have demonstrated how short bursts of ultrasound targeted at specific clusters of nerves in the liver can effectively lower insulin and glucose levels. New Atlas reports: Reporting in the journal Nature Biomedical Engineering, a team led by GE Research, including investigators from the Yale School of Medicine, UCLA, and the Feinstein Institutes for Medical Research, demonstrated a unique non-invasive ultrasound method designed to stimulate specific sensory nerves in the liver. The technology is called peripheral focused ultrasound stimulation (pFUS) and it allows highly targeted ultrasound pulses to be directed at specific tissue containing nerve endings. "We used this technique to explore stimulation of an area of the liver called the porta hepatis," the researchers explained in a Nature briefing. "This region contains the hepatoportal nerve plexus, which communicates information on glucose and nutrient status to the brain but has been difficult to study as its nerve structures are too small to separately stimulate with implanted electrodes." The newly published study indicates short targeted bursts of pFUS at this area of the liver successfully reversed the onset of hyperglycaemia. The treatment was found to be effective in three separate animal models of diabetes: mice, rats and pigs. [...] The study found just three minutes of focused ultrasound each day was enough to maintain normal blood glucose levels in the diabetic animals. Studies in humans are currently underway to work out whether this method translates from animal studies. But there are other hurdles facing broad clinical deployment of the technique beyond simply proving it works. Current ultrasound tools used to perform this kind of pFUS technique require trained technicians. The researchers suggest the technology exists to simplify and automate these systems in a way that could be used by patients at home, but it will need to be developed before this treatment can be widely deployed.

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Loren Grush writes via The Verge: Tomorrow morning, SpaceX is set to launch yet another crew of four to the International Space Station from Florida -- but unlike most of the company's passenger flights, this new crop of flyers won't include any current NASA astronauts. All four members of the crew are civilians, flying with a commercial aerospace company called Axiom Space. Their flight will mark the first time a completely private crew has visited the ISS. It's a new type of human spaceflight mission and one that comes with a hefty price tag for its participants. Three of the four flyers have each paid a reported $55 million for their seats on SpaceX's crew capsule, called the Crew Dragon. The trio of novice spacefarers includes Canadian investor Mark Pathy, American real estate investor Larry Connor, and former Israeli Air Force pilot Eytan Stibbe. The commander of the trip is a spaceflight veteran: Michael Lopez-Alegria, a former NASA astronaut who has flown four missions to space and now serves as a vice president of Axiom. Their mission, called Ax-1, is the latest in an emerging trend of completely private astronaut flights to orbit. [...] Axiom -- which strives to create a fleet of commercial space stations -- has arranged for three additional private crew missions to the ISS, just like Ax-1, to gear up for the creation of its first station. The company's goal is to "make space more accessible to everyone." "This really does represent the first step where a bunch of individuals who want to do something meaningful in low Earth orbit -- that aren't members of a government -- are able to take this opportunity," Mike Suffredini, Axiom's CEO and the former program manager of the ISS at NASA, said during a press conference. Though, until costs come down, such individuals will need a fat wallet.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: An object from another star system crashed into Earth in 2014, the United States Space Command (USSC) confirmed in a newly-released memo. The meteor ignited in a fireball in the skies near Papua New Guinea, the memo states, and scientists believe it possibly sprinkled interstellar debris into the South Pacific Ocean. The confirmation backs up the breakthrough discovery of the first interstellar meteor -- and, retroactively, the first known interstellar object of any kind to reach our solar system -- which was initially flagged by a pair of Harvard University researchers in a study posted on the preprint server arXiv in 2019. Amir Siraj, a student pursuing astrophysics at Harvard who led the research, said the study has been awaiting peer review and publication for years, but has been hamstrung by the odd circumstances that arose from the sheer novelty of the find and roadblocks put up by the involvement of information classified by the U.S. government. The discovery of the meteor, which measured just a few feet wide, follows recent detections of two other interstellar objects in our solar system, known as 'Oumuamua and Comet Borisov, that were much larger and did not come into close contact with Earth. "I get a kick out of just thinking about the fact that we have interstellar material that was delivered to Earth, and we know where it is," said Siraj, who is Director of Interstellar Object Studies at Harvard's Galileo Project, in a call. "One thing that I'm going to be checking -- and I'm already talking to people about -- is whether it is possible to search the ocean floor off the coast of Papua New Guinea and see if we can get any fragments." Siraj acknowledged that the odds of such a find are low, because any remnants of the exploded fireball probably landed in tiny amounts across a disparate region of the ocean, making it tricky to track them down. "It would be a big undertaking, but we're going to look at it in extreme depth because the possibility of getting the first piece of interstellar material is exciting enough to check this very thoroughly and talk to all the world experts on ocean expeditions to recover meteorites," he noted. "Siraj called the multi-year process a 'whole saga' as they navigated a bureaucratic labyrinth that wound its way though Los Alamos National Laboratory, NASA, and other governmental arms, before ultimately landing at the desk of Joel Mozer, Chief Scientist of Space Operations Command at the U.S. Space Force service component of USSC," adds Motherboard. Mozer confirmed that the object indicated "an interstellar trajectory," which was first brought to Siraj's attention last week via a tweet from a NASA scientist. He's now "renewing the effort to get the original discovery published so that the scientific community can follow-up with more targeted research into the implications of the find," the report says.

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Despite the availability of life-saving COVID-19 vaccines, so many people died in the second year of the pandemic in the U.S. that the nation's life expectancy dropped for a second year in a row last year, according to a new analysis. NPR reports: The analysis of provisional government statistics found U.S. life expectancy fell by just under a half a year in 2021, adding to a dramatic plummet in life expectancy that occurred in 2020. Public health experts had hoped the vaccines would prevent another drop the following year. "The finding that instead we had a horrible loss of life in 2021 that actually drove the life expectancy even lower than it was in 2020 is very disturbing," says Dr. Steven Woolf, a professor of population health and health equity at Virginia Commonwealth University, who help conduct the analysis. "It speaks to an extensive loss of life during 2021." Many of the deaths occurred in people in the prime of their lives, Woolf says, and drove the overall U.S. life expectancy to fall to 76.6 years -- the lowest in at least 25 years. "The motivation for this study was to determine whether the horrible drop in life expectancy that we documented in 2020 resolved or rebounded in 2021 or whether there was a continued decline. Unfortunately, we did not find good news," Woolf told NPR in an interview.

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After 10 years of careful analysis and scrutiny, scientists of the CDF collaboration at the U.S. Department of Energy's Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory announced today that they have achieved the most precise measurement to date of the mass of the W boson, one of nature's force-carrying particles. Phys.Org reports: Using data collected by the Collider Detector at Fermilab, or CDF, scientists have now determined the particle's mass with a precision of 0.01% -- twice as precise as the previous best measurement. It corresponds to measuring the weight of an 800-pound gorilla to 1.5 ounces. The new precision measurement, published in the journal Science, allows scientists to test the standard model of particle physics, the theoretical framework that describes nature at its most fundamental level. The result: The new mass value shows tension with the value scientists obtain using experimental and theoretical inputs in the context of the standard model. If confirmed, this measurement suggests the potential need for improvements to the standard model calculation or extensions to the model.

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When Better.com CEO Vishal Garg laid off 900 employees, or about 9% of the company's staff, in early December, the startup world was shocked with his callous delivery. Now a video of Garg and CFO Kevin Ryan addressing the remaining employees right after the chief executive performed those layoffs has emerged, confirming many reports of his brash style and harsh words about those affected. TechCrunch reports: In a video obtained by TechCrunch, Garg is seen addressing the layoffs and in the process, admitting to making a number of mistakes. We chose not to publish the video in an effort to protect the identity of the source, but we've picked out the most relevant bits based on a transcription of the 12-minute meeting. About two minutes into the meeting, Garg says: "Make no mistake we did also eliminate redundant roles -- who might be strong performers but were in the wrong place at the wrong time, with the wrong task, and weren't mission critical." After about four minutes, Garg also acknowledged that the company was continuing to hire, including some interns, in the midst of the layoffs, while at the time making a thinly veiled threat: "...It's because we expect those people to be super productive and add value, and if they don't we will exit them too." He added: "We are going to be leaner, meaner and hungrier going forward. We will not be spending time trying to raise capital. We will not be spending time focused on what investors think. We will be spending time grinding this business forward in what will likely be a bloodbath in the mortgage industry in the next year or two." In the video at around the 8-minute mark, Garg admits to not being disciplined in managing the company's cash and in its hiring strategy, which helps explain the company's second mass layoff of over 3,000 people just three months later. It also helps support multiple sources' claims that the company is currently "losing $50 million per month." "Today we acknowledge that we overhired, and hired the wrong people. And in doing that we failed. I failed. I was not disciplined over the past 18 months. We made $250 million last year, and you know what, we probably pissed away $200 million. We probably could have made more money last year and been leaner, meaner and hungrier." He also explicitly says that the company lost $100 million in the previous quarter, saying it was his "mistake" for not laying off staff earlier.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Facebook today reported an increase in attacks on accounts run by Ukraine military personnel. In some cases, attackers took over accounts and posted "videos calling on the Army to surrender," but Facebook said it blocked sharing of the videos. Specifically, Facebook owner Meta's Q1 2022 Adversarial Threat Report said it has "seen a further spike in compromise attempts aimed at members of the Ukrainian military by Ghostwriter," a hacking campaign that "typically targets people through email compromise and then uses that to gain access to their social media accounts across the Internet." Ghostwriter has been linked to the Belarusian government. "Since our last public update [on February 27], this group has attempted to hack into the Facebook accounts of dozens of Ukrainian military personnel," Meta wrote today. Ghostwriter successfully hacked into the accounts in "a handful of cases" in which "they posted videos calling on the Army to surrender as if these posts were coming from the legitimate account owners. We blocked these videos from being shared." In its February 27 update, Meta said it detected Ghostwriter's "attempts to target people on Facebook to post YouTube videos portraying Ukrainian troops as weak and surrendering to Russia, including one video claiming to show Ukrainian soldiers coming out of a forest while flying a white flag of surrender." Meta said it had "taken steps to secure accounts that we believe were targeted by this threat actor" and "blocked phishing domains these hackers used to try to trick people in Ukraine into compromising their online accounts." But Ghostwriter continued its operations and hacked into accounts of Ukrainian military personnel, as previously mentioned. Separately, Facebook recently removed a network of Russian accounts that were trying to silence Ukrainians by reporting "fictitious policy violations." "Under our Inauthentic Behavior policy against mass reporting, we removed a network in Russia for abusing our reporting tools to repeatedly report people in Ukraine and in Russia for fictitious policy violations of Facebook policies in an attempt to silence them," Meta said today. Providing more detail in its quarterly report, Meta said the removed network included 200 accounts operated from Russia. "The individuals behind it coordinated to falsely report people for various violations, including hate speech, bullying, and inauthenticity, in an attempt to have them and their posts removed from Facebook. The majority of these fictitious reports focused on people in Ukraine and Russia, but the network also reported users in Israel, the United States, and Poland," the report said.

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Robinhood Markets (HOOD) said Thursday it has activated its crypto wallet for 2 million "eligible" customers, making digital asset transfers broadly possible in the long-firewalled investments app. CoinDesk reports: Chief Product Officer Aparna Chennapragada made the announcement on stage at the Bitcoin 2022 conference in Miami. Only a handful of wallet beta testers could move bitcoin (BTC), ether (ETH), dogecoin (DOGE) and a handful of other traded coins in and out of Robinhood's walled garden before. Now, all waitlisted customers outside of regulatory no-go zones Nevada, New York and Hawaii can do so. Additionally, she said Robinhood will add support for bitcoin transactions on the Lightning Network, the speedy, low-cost settlement layer for Bitcoin. "For the larger community this is a fantastic way" to access bitcoin cheaply and in a green way, she said, adding that BTC is the top recurring buy on the app. Still, Robinhood's multi-asset wallet falls short of true functionality. It cannot plug into Ethereum-based services as MetaMask does. It cannot accept ERC-20 tokens, non-fungible tokens (NFT) or any asset outside of Robinhood's trading list. Tokens generated by airdrops and forks won't work either. "Any NFTs sent to a Robinhood Ethereum address may be lost and unrecoverable," the FAQ page said. Staking also appears to be off-limits for now. Tenev has previously acknowledged customers' desire for the yield-earning feature and said during last quarter's earnings call that Robinhood was investing in the necessary tech. A staking service would have to be "compliant," he said. Users won't be charged for moving their Robinhood-based crypto into wallets that have such abilities. The company said it will apply estimated gas fees but not withdrawal fees to requested outbound transfers. There's a $5,000 daily cap on outbound transfers and newly acquired crypto stays put until the transaction settles, the web page said. Further, users must undergo an identity check and enable two-factor authentication to access the wallet.

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The Fedora 37 development team is considering dropping support for non-UEFI BIOS. Linuxiac reports: The Unified Extensible Firmware Interface, or UEFI, is a modern method of handling the boot process. UEFI is similar to Legacy; however, the boot data is stored in a .efi file rather than the firmware. In the case of Fedora, while the change may take some time, the new Fedora x86_64 installations will no longer work on non-UEFI platforms. On x86_64 architectures, Fedora 37 will mark legacy BIOS installation as deprecated in favor of UEFI. While systems already using Legacy BIOS to boot will continue to be supported, new Legacy BIOS installations on these architectures will be impossible.

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Zimbabwe's mobile data is so expensive, people have to rely on a signal from the next country over, Mozambique. Rest of World: Econet and NetOne had a combined 94.5% market share at the end of 2020, according to the national telecomms regulator. Analysts say that the lack of competition, combined with the high cost of running a telecomms business in Zimbabwe -- due to import tariffs on communications equipment, foreign currency risk, and weak infrastructure -- has kept prices high for consumers. "Poor collateral infrastructure, like electricity, dissuades telecomms investment and [means] fewer players, which leads to higher costs," Arthur Gwagwa, a leading Zimbabwe telecomms expert and lawyer, told Rest of World. The cripplingly high cost of internet access has slowed adoption of digital services by individuals and businesses and prevented Zimbabweans from accessing educational materials and health services online, Gwagwa said. But for people living near the border with Mozambique, there is a workaround. Enterprising traders cross over on foot or on motorbikes, bulk-buy Movitel SIM cards, and return to Chimanimani, where they distribute the SIMs to supermarkets and corner shops, where they are sold with a markup of more than 50%. The availability of affordable internet has made the unfashionable rural district into an attractive destination for people who need to be online for work. The area was hit by a tropical cyclone in 2019, which displaced more than 11,000 people in Chimanimani alone, bringing hundreds of NGO and health workers to the area to work on the relief. Many have stayed, taking advantage of the cheap internet access to work remotely. [...] Nollen Singo, founder of NGO Orphans Dreams, which gives free math lessons to children orphaned by the cyclone, said that he's been able to stay in the region because the cheap internet allows him to connect to free education apps that can be used in the classroom. "It's so helpful being able to access Khan Academy maths app or Buzzmath app online and tutor local orphaned kids," Singo said.

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A British startup pioneering a new approach to fusion energy has successfully combined atomic nuclei, in what the UK regulator described as an important step in the decades-long effort to generate electricity from the reaction that powers the sun. From a report: Oxford-based First Light Fusion, which has been developing an approach called projectile fusion since 2011, said it had produced energy in the form of neutrons by forcing deuterium isotopes to fuse, validating years of research. While other fusion experiments have generated more power for longer, either by using "tokamak" machines or high-powered lasers, First Light says its approach, which involves firing a projectile at a target containing the fuel, could offer a faster route to commercial fusion power. "The value of this [result] is that it offers potentially a much cheaper, a much easier path to power production," said chief executive Nicholas Hawker. To achieve fusion, First Light used a hyper-velocity gas gun to launch a projectile at a speed of 6.5km per second -- about 10 times faster than a rifle bullet -- at a tiny target designed to amplify the energy of the impact and force the deuterium fuel to fuse. The design of the target -- a clear cube, a little over a centimetre wide, enclosing two spherical fuel capsules -- is the key technology and is closely guarded by the company. "It is the ultimate espresso capsule," Hawker told the Financial Times last year. First Light, which is backed by China's Tencent, hopes to manufacture and sell the targets to future power plants -- built to its design -- which would need to vaporise one every 30 seconds to generate continual power. Further reading: So How Close Are We Now to Nuclear Fusion Energy? (August 2021).

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from ABC News: Britain plans to build eight new nuclear reactors and expand production of wind energy as it seeks to reduce dependence on oil and natural gas from Russia and other foreign suppliers following the invasion of Ukraine. Prime Minister Boris Johnson announced the plans Thursday as part of a new energy security strategy that will also accelerate development of solar power and hydrogen projects. The government said it wants to almost triple nuclear power generation capacity to 24 gigawatts by 2050. "We're setting out bold plans to scale up and accelerate affordable, clean and secure energy made in Britain, for Britain, from new nuclear to offshore wind, in the decade ahead,'' Johnson said. "This will reduce our dependence on power sources exposed to volatile international prices we cannot control." The strategy comes after oil and natural gas prices soared following the invasion of Ukraine amid concerns that energy supplies from Russia could be curtailed. High energy prices are fueling a cost-of-living crisis in Britain, where household gas and electricity prices jumped 54% this month.

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Microsoft Chief Executive Officer Satya Nadella warned that employee well-being could suffer from an ever-expanding workday that often now creeps well into the night. From a report: Nadella, whose company has studied how remote work impacts collaboration in an effort to improve its Teams software, cited Microsoft research showing that about a third of white-collar workers have a "third peak" of productivity late in the evening, based on keyboard activity. Productivity typically spikes before and after lunch, but this third peak illustrates how remote work has broken down already-blurred boundaries between our job and our home lives. Nadella, speaking Thursday at the Wharton Future of Work Conference, said managers need to set clear norms and expectations for workers so that they're not pressured to answer emails late at night. "We think about productivity through collaboration and output metrics, but well-being is one of the most important pieces of productivity," he said. "We know what stress does to workers. We need to learn the soft skills, good old-fashioned management practices, so people have their wellbeing taken care of. I can set that expectation, that our people can get an email from the CEO on the weekend and not feel that they have to respond." Two out of 3 employees who consider leaving their job say their employer has not followed through on early pandemic promises to focus on employee mental health, according to a Harris Poll commissioned by online therapy provider Talkspace.

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Activision Blizzard will convert all its U.S.-based temporary and contingent quality assurance (QA) positions to full-time jobs, the company announced Thursday. Nearly 1,100 workers will become full-time Activision Blizzard employees, upping pay to at least $20 an hour and allowing QA workers access to bonuses and full benefits. From a report: Activision Publishing chief operating officer and Blizzard Entertainment head Mike Ybarra shared the news with staff Thursday. "Across Activision Blizzard, we are bringing more content to players across our franchises than ever before," an Activision Blizzard spokesperson said in an statement emailed to Polygon. "As a result, we are refining how our teams work together to develop our games and deliver the best possible experiences for our players. We have ambitious plans for the future and our Quality Assurance (QA) team members are a critical part of our development efforts." The conversion of all U.S.-based QA staff to full-time employment increases Activision Publishing's total full-time workforce by 25%.

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U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said on Thursday crypto asset regulations should support responsible innovation while managing risks, sticking to the contours of a recent White House executive order that was well-received by the crypto market. From a report: In a speech on digital assets policy released by the Treasury, Yellen said that in many cases regulators already have authorities that can manage crypto risks and provide appropriate oversight of new types of intermediaries such as digital asset exchanges. "Our regulatory frameworks should be designed to support responsible innovation while managing risks -- especially those that could disrupt the financial system and economy," Yellen said in the excerpts of her speech to be delivered at American University in Washington. "As banks and other traditional financial firms become more involved in digital asset markets, regulatory frameworks will need to appropriately reflect the risks of these new activities," she said.

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Apple, looking to address criticism of its competitive practices by the European Union, developers and U.S. lawmakers, pointed to a report showing that third-party apps are thriving on the iPhone and other devices. From a report: In a study published by Analysis Group and touted by the iPhone maker, analysts said that Apple's own apps are infrequently the dominant option and only account for a small share of app usage. "We found that Apple's own apps, while used by many, are rarely the most popular of a given type and are eclipsed in popularity by third-party apps for nearly every country and app type we considered," the report said. In the U.S., the report found that Spotify is 1.6 times more popular than Apple Music, that Google Maps is used 1.5 times more than Apple Maps, and that Netflix is 17 times more popular than Apple's service. The Amazon Kindle service, meanwhile, was 4.5 times more popular than Apple's Books app.

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An anonymous reader shares a report: Bad news for everyone who loved watching Bill Nye the Science Guy during middle school science class: your fave is problematic. This week, Coca-Cola, one of the world's biggest plastic polluters, teamed up with TV's favorite scientist for a campaign to create a "world without waste," a joke of a corporate greenwashing campaign. In a video innocuously titled "The Coca-Cola Company and Bill Nye Demystify Recycling," an animated version of Nye -- with a head made out of a plastic bottle and his signature bow tie fashioned from a Coke label -- walks viewers through the ways "the good people at the Coca-Cola company are dedicating themselves to addressing our global plastic waste problem." Coke, Nye explains, wants to use predominantly recycled materials to create bottles for its beverages; he then describes the process of recycling a plastic bottle, from a user throwing it into a recycling bin to being sorted and shredded into new material. "If we can recover and recycle plastic, we can not only keep it from becoming trash, but we can use that plastic again and again -- it's an amazing material," quips Shill Nye the Plastic Guy. "What's more, when we use recycled material, we also reduce our carbon footprint. What's not to love?" What's not, indeed! The video is, on the surface, an accurate depiction of the process of recycling a beverage bottle. The problem lies in what recycling can actually do. Nye paints a rosy picture in the video of plastic Coke bottles being recycled "again and again" -- but if everything worked like he's said, we wouldn't be facing plastic pollution that has grown fourfold over the past few decades. Thanks to concerted lobbying efforts, the public has been led to believe that recycling is the cure for our disastrous plastic addiction. What it does in actuality is place the burden of responsibility on the consumer and allow companies like Coca-Cola to get away with no repercussions for their waste.

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An anonymous reader shares a report: Cloud gaming isn't for everyone, but it's getting easier to tell if it's for you because Nvidia and Google are now letting you try their virtual gaming PCs for free. Following Google's recent announcement that any Stadia developer will be able to offer an instantly accessible free trial of their game without needing to log into a Google account, Nvidia's GeForce Now is now pushing reduced-friction demos as well -- starting with Chorus, Ghostrunner, Inscryption, Diplomacy Is Not an Option and The Riftbreaker: Prologue. Typically, you'd need to log into an Nvidia account, then log in again to a Steam, Epic Games, or Ubisoft account to play one of these demos on GeForce Now, and you'd have to search for them as well. Now, the Nvidia account is all you'll need. Demos will automatically appear in a new "Instant Play Free Demos" row and won't require the second login.

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