An anonymous reader shared this report from the blog It's FOSS: Canonical has committed funding to a three-year PhD project focused on building a system that can automatically translate large C codebases into Rust. And they are not alone; UK Research and Innovation is matching their funding for the project, which is set to run through the University of Bristol's Programming Languages Research Group. The PhD is aiming to build an all-encompassing platform that can take a C repository running into hundreds of thousands of lines and translate it into Rust that's "safe, behaviourally correct and maintainable Rust." The work will be carried out by a student, Alex Wood, who will be supported by Professor Meng Wang leading the work, with Dr. Cristina David and Canonical's Jon Seager serving as co-supervisors.

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Falling prices have made grid-scale storage batteries more attractive, reports Bloomberg. But after decades of stagnant investment, America's grids "are racing to make the upgrades needed to plug them in," with supplies straining for the necessary equipment. Demand for batteries has skyrocketed as electricity use across the U.S. swells, driven by data centers' booming energy needs and increasing electrification. It's also getting harder to get them connected to power grids... As those upgrades get delayed, storage projects are piling up in interconnection queues from coast to coast. For example, Consolidated Edison Inc., a major utility in New York state, says over the last two years the volume of battery storage projects waiting to be connected has grown by 300%... "The whole process of interconnecting these new power plants got really log-jammed and bottlenecked," said Joseph Rand, an energy policy researcher at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory... Nationwide, some 750 gigawatts of energy storage projects — roughly equivalent to the generating capacity of more than 700 nuclear reactors — are in line to get grid connections, according to the lab's research. Not all of these projects will get built. Many developers already abandoned the queue because of delays. Still, the waiting time is increasing; the median was five years in 2025, up from a year and a half in 2015. The flood of battery projects is expected to continue. Wood Mackenzie, an energy consultancy, projects the U.S. energy storage market will quadruple in the next six years... [Shortages in key equipment] have driven up construction costs and time lines for grid upgrades, leaving utilities struggling to build fast enough. A drought of skilled workers is further slowing them down... In California, PG&E Corp., the state's largest utility, told regulators in January that a key driver of delays was long lead times for specialized equipment. Procuring certain breakers could take nearly four years, according to the utility, which reported a 300% increase in its interconnection workload compared to prior years. In Northern California, for example, holdups to circuit breaker upgrades to a substation in Solano County led to projected delays for two battery projects worth a combined 450 megawatts. Transmission line work in the Bay Area has put another 800 megawatts of energy storage at risk of delay, according to PG&E. Last year New York's Con Ed started requiring developers to help pay for upgrades if their projects will push power demand and strain infrastructure. But that also drew criticism: According to a survey conducted by the trade group New York Battery and Energy Storage Technology Consortium (NY-BEST), the new methodology raised costs by an average of $21 million per project, a 14-fold increase. At least 25 projects have been canceled as a result, according to the group. Battery advocates have appealed to state regulators to get Con Ed to abandon the new policy. Thanks to Slashdot reader Bruce66423 for sharing the news.

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Debian developers are voting on whether to ban AI-assisted contributions, reports the blog Linuxiac, with a ballot listing eight proposals and a "None of the above" option. The first one is still the original proposal to ban LLM-assisted contributions by changing the Debian Social Contract. This would stop generative AI from being used for direct Debian work like packaging, software, documentation, translations, websites, and project communication. However, upstream projects made with AI help would not be affected. The proposal gives several reasons for the ban, such as unclear copyright and licensing, doubts about the reliability of AI-generated work, extra review work for maintainers, aggressive scraping of Free Software resources, and the high resource use of large AI systems... The second option would clearly allow contributions that are partly or fully made by an LLM, as long as contributors check their technical quality, security, licensing, and usefulness, fully understand the changes, and disclose major AI help. It would also ban sending private or sensitive Debian information to untrusted external AI services. A similar fourth option recognizes worries about generative AI but says banning it would be hard to enforce and not helpful. This proposal would accept AI-assisted Debian work if it follows the Debian Free Software Guidelines, is properly reviewed and understood by the contributor, and is marked as AI-assisted when needed. The fifth proposal is even more open. It says Debian should not support or ban generative AI tools, but should apply the same standards for quality, correctness, maintainability, and legality to all contributions, no matter how they were made... One unique proposal is called "Debian is created by humans." Instead of banning AI tools for contributors, it focuses on what actually gets included in Debian. With this approach, contributors could use generative AI for research, analysis, exploration, or critique, but could not submit AI-generated output directly as Debian packaging, patches, documentation, bug reports, project communications, or other Debian work. As the proposal says: humans create Debian. Another, much stricter proposal asks Debian contributors to avoid LLM use as much as possible. It would require all Debian communication, like bug reports, mailing-list messages, Salsa discussions, and Planet Debian posts, to be written only by humans. Any AI use in Debian work would have to be disclosed, and violations could be handled under the project's Code of Conduct. The CEO/founder of AI-native compliance management platform company Strike Graph believes a Debian AI ban is "the wrong fix for the actual problem" at hand, reports The New Stack: "Debian's ban isn't really about banning AI," [CEO Justin] Beals says. "It's an admission that nobody has built a reliable way to verify what an AI agent actually produced before it lands in a codebase this many systems depend on, including infrastructure running in orbit. That's a legitimate thing to be worried about...." He thinks that any policy statement that says AI isn't allowed simply won't hold up, as the tooling keeps getting harder to detect... Looking across the complete set of tabled propositions, proposal A (no LLM contributions to Debian via social contract) needs a 3:1 majority to pass; the other seven proposals (B to H) need a simple majority.

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Retraction Watch reports: A trial date has been set in a $1 billion defamation case against Elsevier that alleges the company published what plaintiffs say was a manipulated study about an air purifying technology over objections from peer reviewers. The case has already cost Elsevier a $10,000 sanction from a judge. Global Plasma Solutions (GPS), which makes air quality products, sued Elsevier in 2022 after the publisher declined to retract a 2021 paper in Building and Environment about GPS' needlepoint bipolar ionization technology, which it heavily marketed during the COVID-19 pandemic as an air purifier. The complaint claims Elsevier is responsible for the authors' alleged omission of data and misleading conclusions in the paper that fueled "massive" financial losses for the company, its lawyers claim. Elsevier knew the paper "failed peer review" under its "own standards," but moved forward with the article despite this knowledge, according to GPS, which now goes by GPS Air. The complaint has survived a bid by Elsevier to dismiss the case, and a trial has been set for Dec. 7. In allowing the case to proceed, U.S. Magistrate Judge David Keesler said in a May 2024 opinion that GPS has "plausibly alleged actual malice" by Elsevier defined as "knowledge of falsity or reckless disregard for the truth." Chief Judge Martin Reidinger of the U.S. District Court for the Western District of North Carolina upheld Keesler's recommendation in July 2025... Citing internal and discovery documents, GPS alleges an assessment of 19 journals revealed Elsevier has published more than 1,200 articles either without any peer review, or against the recommendations of the reviewers. Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader sandbagger for sharing the article.

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BleepingComputer reports: Microsoft says ongoing issues causing games to crash or fail to launch after installing the August 2026 Windows updates may be caused by peripherals with RGB lighting. As Microsoft explained when it confirmed it's investigating on Wednesday, this known issue affects games like ARC Raiders, MARVEL Tokon: Fighting Souls, and The Finals on systems running Windows 11 24H2 and 25H2... "[Peripherals or internal device components with RGB lighting features] may install drivers or code components with file names similar to inpoutx64. In systems where these drivers are found, the issue is then triggered by launching certain games," it noted. Thanks to Slashdot reader joshuark for sharing the article.

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Wrongly discarded lithium batteries, such as those in vapes, are causing more than 10 fires a week at U.K. recycling centers, according to figures shared with the Guardian: The Environment Services Association (ESA), the trade body for waste management companies, said its members had reported 1,518 fires in the year to March 2026. At least 541 of these fires were directly attributed to lithium ion batteries, the survey found. There were a further 216 battery fires in bin lorries [garbage trucks]. The ESA said the reported number of battery-related fires underestimated the scale of the problem, because in most incidents it was impossible to determine the cause of the blaze. A spokesperson said: "We know 40% of fires at recycling centres are caused by batteries, but we think the actual number is more like 70%." It estimates that annual cost of these fires has increased from £150m in 2021 to £1bn today... The ESA is calling for a £5 deposit scheme on the sale of all vapes to ensure that vape users have an incentive to return used devices to retailers for safe disposal... [Patrick Brighty, the head of recycling policy at the ESA, said] "Vapes are among the biggest culprits because they're cheap, abundant and typically have a short use-life." Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader AmiMoJo for sharing the news.

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"AI went from being very terrible to seemingly genuinely quite good at a professional level in a very short space of time..." says the Verge's AI reporter. But AI systems "are still truly, truly terrible at some areas of math... even the days of the week." If you look at academic math papers, a lot of the time you won't see numbers... So they're still terrible, but they're now also very good at this other part. As to why, at some point you reach a critical mass of what these systems can do. We saw it with writing, we've seen it with programming. They're very good at forging connections between different areas, applying old methods in new ways, those kinds of things. It appears that the newer models they're training have apparently reached that level where it clicks, and now it can do math... There are areas now where it seems to be producing work that is on par with good mathematicians, alongside other parts where yeah, it can't count. All caught up in that is whether it's going to rewrite employment structures or funding structures... One would hope [math researchers] would branch out into all of these new exciting areas or pose new questions. But AI won't do that, and that's the concern. And then that would leave the field quite sterile, and it will have all of these things that have been done, and maybe nothing left to pursue... [A] lot are scared that it's closing off the field. So by definition, those breakthroughs that lead to something surprising and new that you can say, "Oh, this works here," may not be happening anymore... There were some bleak responses from graduate students I saw in essays posted online. Where's their place in this as future researchers? Do they have a place in this? Is it as glorified AI proof checkers? That will be quite an unsatisfying career, I imagine. Or maybe not, I don't know. We will see. I think anything used properly will be a net boon. They also had an interesting response when asked if AI democratizes access to high-level mathematical proofs: A lot of the mathematicians I spoke to were almost quite weary of this, actually. They love the idea, in theory, of democratizing access. They're also quite fed up with AI-generated or -assisted papers that are flooding every publication imaginable, as well as the pre-print servers that they use in these fields. Some of those I spoke to said things like, "Oh, I got three emails this week alone with people being like, 'Hey, is this legit?'" Because they thought they'd solved something with ChatGPT or with Claude, and they also don't have the mathematical skills to check whether they've actually solved something. On the flip side, there are parts where they said, "Well, we've got a talented undergrad who's done something that a talented undergrad would probably have never managed, and here they are doing grad-level work and they've produced a paper that is legit." And in the bigger scheme of things, a few I spoke to said, "Well yeah, a lot of these are in the ivory tower. Having access to this kind of thing globally could really boost access to the kind of things here." On the flip side, the cost. These things cost a lot to run.

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Remember that rush rescue mission for NASA's $500M space telescope? It failed, reports CNN, and the LINK satellite won't be able to boost the telescope's orbit. NASA says its decades-old Swift telescope will now continue losing altitude, until it reaches Earth's atmosphere later this year and burns up. CNN reports: Just weeks after LINK lifted off on July 3, it started to spin out of control. [Satellite designer] Katalyst was able to regain control of the satellite, but the company acknowledged that the issue cost it time, which would delay LINK's rendezvous with Swift by about a month. However, that postponement — at least initially — did not seem to be a deterrent to the mission. Now, NASA and Katalyst have announced that LINK's mission will not capture and boost Swift to a higher orbit "due to ongoing attitude control issues," according to statements Wednesday. "NASA should be willing to move quickly and take smart risks when the potential return is worth it, and that is exactly what we did with this mission," NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman said in a statement. "This is not the outcome we were working toward, but it does not change why this mission was worth attempting. The team moved with extraordinary speed to give Swift a chance to carry out more science while advancing capabilities America will need for satellite servicing in the future...." The mission team is forging ahead with its plan for LINK to rendezvous with Swift — but as a demonstration rather than a rescue. "We are going to learn everything we can from LINK's rendezvous attempt and put those lessons to work on the missions that follow," Isaacman said... Swift wasn't designed to be serviced in space, which means that insights from the demonstration could be used for future missions... "We have already learned a tremendous amount," [said Ghonhee Lee, CEO of Katalyst Space Technologies], "and now our job is to turn those lessons into something durable — building a repeatable playbook to inform future rendezvous and proximity operations and satellite servicing."

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Slashdot reader fjo3 shared this article from Wired: [Flock] has told the public for years that its technology "cannot recognize, identify, or track individuals." It has now built a system that does both, an artificial intelligence tool for police that can identify drivers and track vehicles by their patterns of movement alone, WIRED has learned... Because the system also reaches police case files, 911 dispatch logs, and commercial identity records, those plates can be turned into names, home addresses, and relatives. It can search for people in an area drawn on a map based on nothing more than a physical description... The code describes 45 tools at the AI's disposal, giving it access to plate scans and camera metadata, arrest records, case files, dispatch logs, ballistics results, and commercial databases that contain Social Security numbers, dates of birth, phone numbers, email addresses, relatives and associates. Flock says it is testing the product with a small group of law enforcement partners and describes it as still in development, with capabilities that may not reflect what it eventually sells. It arrives as the company faces bipartisan political pressure, a growing record of officers caught misusing its platform, and a wave of vandalism that has left cameras sawed off and lenses painted over in cities across the country... An officer no longer needs a plate, a name, or a crime to begin: They supply a place, a stretch of time, and a pattern of behavior, and the system is designed to hand back the people who fit... One prompt Flock preloaded into the system reads: "Find me witnesses based on vehicles most seen in [neighborhood] during [last 14 days] during [daily timeframe] *(will not include whitelisted vehicles)." An officer would fill in the blanks and submit it. The output is a list of plates, which other tools in the product then convert into names and home addresses. Another prompt instructs the system to list everyone arrested more than twice in two years for "any offense," exempting only narcotics arrests, and then says to map where those people live, retrieve the calls for service at their homes, and "do a workup on the top three individuals." The prompt begins with everyone in the area who has an arrest record and ends with dossiers on three of them, chosen by the software. A "workup," in Flock's terminology, is a one-command background check. It starts with a name and a date of birth and returns what the department's records and commercial data hold: vehicles, prior listings as a suspect, and, on a second screen, relatives, phone numbers, and online accounts. Wired shares this reaction from a law professor at George Washington University. "It is clear Flock has aspirations far beyond ALPRs to become a digital platform for policing,"

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Long-time Slashdot reader AmiMoJo shared this report from the Guardian: Children's lungs grew bigger and stronger after the most polluting vehicles were restricted from entering London, a study has found. Examinations of London schoolchildren before and after the introduction of the city's ultra-low emission zone found a restoration of lung capacity that had been stunted by exposure to pollution... "Traffic pollution in cities damages children's health and development," said Chris Griffiths, a professor of primary care at the University of Oxford and Queen Mary University of London, and the study's joint senior author. "We provide the strongest evidence yet on how these harms can be prevented. Ambitious clean-air zones should be considered a priority for cities globally with traffic-related air pollution." Air pollution from traffic has stunted the development of children's lungs in London for decades. Previous research found that by the age of eight or nine, children from the most polluted areas had 5-10% less lung capacity than their peers elsewhere. That impairment, which scientists said was the result of exposure to nitrogen dioxide, put them at increased risk as adults of developing respiratory diseases, such as asthma and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, cardiovascular and metabolic disease, and premature death.

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Reuters reports "a major success in a new field of cancer treatment this week, as Moderna and Merck announced a personalized mRNA cancer vaccine "reduced the risk of recurrence and spread of melanoma in a late-stage trial". The vaccine was tested with Merck's widely used immunotherapy drug Keytruda: Thousands of patients who have undergone surgery to remove high-risk melanoma tumors could benefit as soon as next year if regulators approve the vaccine, Moderna President Stephen Hoge said in an interview. This is the first positive late-stage trial result for an mRNA cancer vaccine, which trains a patient's immune system to fight tumors by targeting specific mutations in those cells, and the first such study to show that adding a treatment to Keytruda worked better than that therapy alone... Interim results of the ongoing study, released on Wednesday, found the treatment, Intismeran, met both its primary target of reducing cancer recurrence and its secondary goal of preventing tumors from spreading to other parts of the body, compared with Keytruda alone. When the vaccine is injected into a patient, the patient's cells produce copies of mutations for the immune system to recognize and destroy... Merck said the companies are already in talks with regulators about the treatment. "Merck, Moderna and other companies are testing similar approaches against lung, breast and pancreatic cancers," the article points out. It adds that Karen Knudsen, CEO of the Parker Institute for Cancer Immunotherapy, "said the Moderna results could signal a new era for treating solid-tumor cancers." More from CNN: The trial result is "a monumental leap forward," validating mRNA technology as a cancer treatment, said Dr. Julie Gralow, chief medical officer of the American Society of Clinical Oncology... Roche and BioNTech, whose mRNA technology was used in the Pfizer COVID vaccines, are testing a similar treatment called autogene cevumeran in mid-stage studies in colon and pancreatic cancer patients who have undergone surgery. Results of the colon cancer trial are expected in 2027, with pancreatic trial results to follow in 2031. "We should be hearing results from multiple studies over the next few years and there's every reason to hope now, with this news, that many of them will be positive," said Dr. Robert Vonderheide, director of Penn Medicine's Abramson Cancer Center and president-elect of the American Association for Cancer Research.

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47% of recent graduates say AI has already impacted hiring in their field, according to an April survey from ZipRecruiter. "But is AI really the problem, or is it more complicated?" asks NPR. "Here's what economists have to say." According to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, the unemployment rate for recent graduates — which it defines as 22-to-27-year-olds with a new bachelor's degree or higher — was 5.7% as of June, more than the rate for all workers, which stands at 4.1%... Stanford University economist Erik Brynjolfsson says AI is impacting the labor market for entry-level roles. "AI is not the whole story, but it's part of the story and the evidence is building," he says. Using payroll data, Brynjolfsson and his co-authors found that since late 2022 — when large language models like ChatGPT started popping up — early-career workers ages 22 to 25 in AI-exposed roles, like software developers and marketing managers, have experienced a 16% relative employment decline. In comparison, employment rates for older workers in AI-exposed fields and for all workers in jobs that aren't easily automated — like home health aides, physical therapists and construction workers — remained stable or have grown over that same time period... [Though he also says often when companies pull back on hiring, they cut junior roles first.] Harvard University economist David Deming isn't convinced that AI is to blame for the challenging early-career job market. "If you look very carefully at the timing, it looks like the decline in junior hiring actually started a bit like six months before ChatGPT was released. And so what that tells me is it's something else," Deming says. "I think it's more like remote work." A recent analysis from the New York Fed found that companies are less likely to hire recent college grads into roles that can be done remotely. As remote jobs increased following the COVID-19 pandemic, so did unemployment among younger college grads, the New York Fed found. The analysis also found that AI didn't explain the rise in unemployment among younger workers and that remote work was more of a driving force... Employers hiring for remote jobs may be less likely to choose an entry-level candidate because it's harder to train them from afar... [And with remote positions, there's many more senior candidates to choose from.] And here's another thing to consider: University of Chicago economist Anders Humlum says if AI were replacing entry-level jobs, you'd expect to see companies that rely heavily on AI to hire fewer workers. But that's not what the data shows. Humlum points to a study done by the financial accounting firm Ramp and the workforce research company Revelio Labs. The study examined AI spending and employee head count across more than 21,000 U.S. firms, from early 2021 to early 2026. It found that at companies making the largest AI investments, entry-level head count grew by 12% over the two years following AI adoption.

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Firefox 154 "brings a number of usability improvements," writes PC World: The free built-in VPN, introduced with Firefox 149, continues to offer a selection of virtual locations — temporarily extended to 28 countries until the end of August... The free VPN is currently available to Firefox users in the US, Canada, the UK, France, and Germany. In addition, the free VPN can now also be used in Firefox for Android (rolling out gradually) with iOS to follow soon. Firefox 154 also begins adding the privacy-focused search engine Startpage to its address-bar search options for desktop users in Germany, France, Austria, Switzerland, and the Netherlands (the home markets for the Netherlands-based search engine). And Startpage is also coming soon to Android and iOS. "When so much of the web experience is decided by a handful of very large companies, a search option that's private by design and European by origin isn't a small thing," explains a Mozilla blog post, with Ajit Varma, Head of Firefox, saying this now gives millions of people in Europe one-click access to "real results, zero profiling, AI-free." Queries aren't stored or linked to you, and there are no AI answers pushed above your search results. In fact, there's no AI at all. Based in the Netherlands, Startpage built its product around a simple idea: great search and personal privacy can go hand in hand... Firefox users were choosing Startpage long before today — to the tune of more than a billion searches a year, every one of them required some assembly: an extension, a manual setting, a workaround... Startpage ranks among the most-requested search engines in the Firefox community. When demand is this clear, our job is to remove the friction... Most browsers have already decided how you're going to search. Firefox hasn't. Pick your search engine, control what happens to your queries, decide who sees data about you, even turn AI on or off. It should always be your call. Not everyone wants the same thing from search, and a browser shouldn't pretend they do. "Firefox has always been the browser for people who want to make their own decisions about the web," said Startpage President Stewart Marlborough, "which makes it a natural home for private search." Nvidia's GeForce NOW cloud-gaming platform is also now officially supported on Firefox, expanding access across even more devices," according to a Nvidia blog post: Members can outfox big downloads and jump into high-performance PC gaming directly from the browser — no waiting on lengthy game installs or updates. The experience delivers GeForce RTX-powered performance at up to 1440p and 120 frames per second for GeForce NOW Ultimate members. Simply download the latest version of Firefox, head to play.geforcenow.com and start playing. The cloud handles the heavy lifting, so games are ready to play without taking up valuable storage space on the device. Firefox joins Chrome, Edge and Opera in supporting GeForce NOW on Windows browsers. Mozilla's own blog post even includes an animation of the Firefox mascot playing games: Gamers put real effort into making their rigs their own, and Firefox gets that. Users can choose themes, custom colors, and tab settings to customize their setup, instead of sitting there like just another window. We also know online gaming doesn't happen in just one window. It's social and sometimes spontaneous. With Firefox, you can have a Discord call running in Split View, a guide open in another tab, or Reddit pulled up between matches. Then go full screen when you're ready to play, no need to switch browsers to stream games. "In the security report for Firefox 154, Mozilla lists 58 resolved security vulnerabilities, 54 of which were discovered and reported by external security researchers," notes PC World. ("Mozilla classifies 17 of these vulnerabilities as high risk.") With Firefox 155 (scheduled for September 1), Mozilla is switching to a fortnightly release cycle for major versions, like Google Chrome and Microsoft Edge.

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