"Breathable oxygen has been created from Moon dust," reports the Telegraph, "in a world first that paves the way for a lunar base."

Jeff Bezos's Blue Origin ""announced this week that it had developed a reactor that could successfully release oxygen from lunar soil by using an electric current."

Almost half of Moon dust — the thin layer of rock that blankets the lunar surface — is oxygen, but it is bound to metals such as iron and titanium... Previous work to isolate oxygen has been lab-based, and the unwieldy equipment needed has been too difficult to send to the Moon. In contrast, Blue Origin said its small-scale reactor, named Air Pioneer, could be made flight-ready to "provide the first breath of life for a sustainable Moon base"... As well as breathable air, Blue Origin said the reactor produces other critical elements for planetary infrastructure, such as iron, aluminium and silicon for construction and electronics, as well as glass for windows and solar panel covers. The company has previously said it wants to turn the Moon, and eventually Mars, into "self-sustaining worlds where robots and humans can go beyond visiting and truly explore, grow, live, and thrive"....

Blue Origin said it would need to generate around one megawatt of power to drive the reactors — about the energy it would require to power around 400 to 1,000 homes simultaneously. It envisages that each lunar settlement would have an array of nearby solar panels, generating the power needed for one reactor.
Besides breathable air for astronauts, the oxygen could also be used in propellant for refuelling landers and fuel cells, Blue Origin points out — and "produced right where they're needed, and at much lower cost than being brought from Earth."

Thanks to Slashdot reader fjo3 for sharing the article.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Amazon's Luna cloud gaming service is making some changes, reports Engadget:

It's no longer possible to buy Ubisoft+ and Jackbox Games subscriptions or standalone games through Luna. Amazon will automatically cancel any active subscriptions bought through Luna at the end of customers' next billing cycle. If you have a Ubisoft+ subscription that you bought directly from Ubisoft instead, you'll still be able to access games on that service through Luna until June 10. The Bring Your Own Library option — which allows users to play games they own on the likes of EA, GOG and Ubisoft on Luna — is going away too. You won't be able to access games from those storefronts via Amazon's streaming service after June 3.

If you bought any games outright on Luna, you'll still be able to play them there until June 10. Unlike Google did when it shut down Stadia, Amazon isn't offering refunds for those purchases. However, you'll still have access to them through the respective third-party platform that's linked to your account, be it the EA App, GOG Galaxy or Ubisoft Connect. That doesn't exactly help folks who don't have powerful-enough systems to play more demanding games and were relying on Luna.
For those users, Kotaku complains, "you'll essentially lose access to your purchased games in June unless you buy some hardware to play games like Star Wars Outlaws or set up a different streaming option..."

They describe Luna as Amazon's "barely talked about, struggling game streaming service"...

On April 10, Amazon announced that it is "always looking for ways to better serve our players" and that "feedback" has made it "clear" that gamers who use Luna want "easy access to great games." And because more of that content is now offered via Amazon Prime, the company has decided that the best way to "serve" you and other users is to rip out most of Luna's gaming options and remove access to paid games you bought in the past. Do you feel better served...?

Launched in 2020, Amazon Luna has never been much of a big hit for the company, which has struggled to even figure out what to do with it. Initially, it was offered up as a Stadia competitor, providing access to big and small third-party games. This apparently didn't work out for Amazon. So in 2025, Amazon officially announced plans to pivot Luna to a service focused on Jackbox-like casual games. This latest shake-up for Luna further focuses the service on these kinds of games and will put everything available on the service behind different sub tiers, similar to Game Pass.

Their conclusion? "This is all just a great reminder to never, ever, ever, ever buy a video game through a streaming service. At least you can download digital games offline and make backups for later."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"Only about 2% of visually impaired people in the United States use guide dogs," notes StudyFinds.com, "partly because breeding and training takes years and fewer than half the dogs in training actually graduate."

But someday there could be another option:

What if you could ask your guide dog where the nearest water fountain is and hear it answer back, complete with directions and an estimated walk time? Researchers at the State University of New York at Binghamton have built a robotic guide dog that can do something close to that, holding simple back-and-forth conversations about navigation with its handler, describing the surrounding environment, and talking through route options as it leads the way... Their work, presented at the 40th Annual AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, pairs a large language model, a system that understands and generates language, with a navigation planner. Together, the two let the robot understand open-ended requests, suggest destinations, and adjust plans on the fly.


Thanks to Slashdot reader fjo3 for sharing the article.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A 17,000-word expose in the New Yorker reveals "several executives connected to OpenAI have expressed ongoing reservations about Altman's leadership." Reporters Ronan Farrow and Andrew Marantz spoke to "a hundred people with firsthand knowledge of how Altman conducts business," including current and former OpenAI employees and board members.

Among other revelations, internal messages from a few years ago show that OpenAI executives and board members "had come to believe that Altman's omissions and deceptions might have ramifications for the safety of OpenAI's products..."

At the behest of his fellow board members, [OpenAI cofounder] Sutskever worked with like-minded colleagues to compile some seventy pages of Slack messages and H.R. documents, accompanied by explanatory text... The memos, which we reviewed, have not previously been disclosed in full. They allege that Altman misrepresented facts to executives and board members, and deceived them about internal safety protocols. One of the memos, about Altman, begins with a list headed "Sam exhibits a consistent pattern of . . ." The first item is "Lying"....

In a tense call after Altman's firing, the board pressed him to acknowledge a pattern of deception. "This is just so fucked up," he said repeatedly, according to people on the call. "I can't change my personality." Altman says that he doesn't recall the exchange.... He attributed the criticism to a tendency, especially early in his career, "to be too much of a conflict avoider." But a board member offered a different interpretation of his statement: "What it meant was 'I have this trait where I lie to people, and I'm not going to stop.' " Were the colleagues who fired Altman motivated by alarmism and personal animus, or were they right that he couldn't be trusted?

Friday Altman responded in part to the article. ("I am not proud of being conflict-averse, which has caused great pain for me and OpenAI," he wrote in a blog post. "I am not proud of handling myself badly in a conflict with our previous board that led to a huge mess for the company.")

But the article also assembled similar stories from throughout Altman's career:

- At Altman's earlier startup Loopt, "groups of senior employees, concerned with Altman's leadership and lack of transparency, asked Loopt's board on two occasions to fire him as C.E.O.," according to Keach Hagey, author of the Altman biography The Optimist.
- During Altman's time as president of Y Combinator, "several Silicon Valley investors came to believe that his loyalties were divided. An investor told us that Altman was known to 'make personal investments, selectively, into the best companies, blocking outside investors.'" The article adds that in private, Y Combinator co-founder Paul Graham "has been unambiguous that Altman was removed because of Y.C. partners' mistrust... On one occasion, Graham told Y.C. colleagues that, prior to his removal, 'Sam had been lying to us all the time.'"

- "In a meeting with U.S. intelligence officials in the summer of 2017, he claimed that China had launched an 'A.G.I. Manhattan Project,'" the article points out, "and that OpenAI needed billions of dollars of government funding to keep pace...." But one intelligence official "after looking into the China project, concluded that there was no evidence that it existed: 'It was just being used as a sales pitch.'"

- As California lawmakers considered safety testing for AI model, one legislative aide complained of "increasingly cunning, deceptive behavior from OpenAI". OpenAI later subpoenaed some of the bill's top supporters (and OpenAI critics), in some cases asking for their private communications to investigate whether Elon Musk was funding them. [The article notes an ongoing animosity between Altman and Musk. "When Altman complained on X about a Tesla he'd ordered, Musk replied, 'You stole a non-profit.'"]

And "Multiple prominent investors who have worked with Altman told us that he has a reputation for freezing out investors if they back OpenAI's competitors."

[M]ost of the people we spoke to shared the judgment of Sutskever and Amodei: Altman has a relentless will to power that, even among industrialists who put their names on spaceships, sets him apart. "He's unconstrained by truth," the board member told us. "He has two traits that are almost never seen in the same person. The first is a strong desire to please people, to be liked in any given interaction. The second is almost a sociopathic lack of concern for the consequences that may come from deceiving someone."

The board member was not the only person who, unprompted, used the word "sociopathic." One of Altman's batch mates in the first Y Combinator cohort was Aaron Swartz, a brilliant but troubled coder who died by suicide in 2013 and is now remembered in many tech circles as something of a sage. Not long before his death, Swartz expressed concerns about Altman to several friends. "You need to understand that Sam can never be trusted," he told one. "He is a sociopath. He would do anything."

Multiple senior executives at Microsoft said that, despite [CEO Satya] Nadella's long-standing loyalty, the company's relationship with Altman has become fraught. "He has misrepresented, distorted, renegotiated, reneged on agreements," one said... The senior executive at Microsoft said, of Altman, "I think there's a small but real chance he's eventually remembered as a Bernie Madoff- or Sam Bankman-Fried-level scammer."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Critics say social media is engineered to be as addictive as tobacco or gambling, writes the Washington Post — while adding that "the science has been moving in parallel with the court's recognition."

A growing body of research links heavy social media use not only to declines in mental health but to measurable cognitive effects — on attention, memory and focus — that in some studies resemble accelerated aging. Science also suggests we have more control than we realize when it comes to reversing this damage, and the solution is surprisingly simple: Take a break... "Digital detoxes" can sound like a fad. But in one of the largest studies to date, published in PNAS Nexus and involving more than 467 participants with an average age of 32, even a short time away produced striking results — effectively erasing a decade of age-related cognitive decline.


For 14 days, participants used a commercially available app, Freedom, to block internet access on their phones. They were still allowed calls and text messages, essentially turning a smartphone into a dumb phone. Their time online decreased from 314 minutes to 161 minutes, and by the end of the period the participants had improvements in sustained attention, mental health as well as self-reported well-being. The improvement in sustained attention was about the same magnitude as 10 years of age-related decline, the researchers noted, and the effect of the intervention on depression symptoms was larger than antidepressants and similar to that of cognitive behavioral therapy.
But two things were even more mind-blowing... Even those people who cheated and broke the rules after a few days seemed to have positive effects from the break; and in follow-up reports after the two weeks, many people reported the positive effects lingered. "So you don't have to necessarily restrict yourself forever. Even taking a partial digital detox, even for a few days, seems to work," Kushlev said.

The article also notes a November study at Harvard published in JAMA Network Open where nearly 400 people 'found that even a short break can make a measurable difference: After just one week of reduced smartphone use, participants reported drops in anxiety (16.1 percent), depression (24.8 percent) and insomnia (14.5 percent)..."

"Other experiments point in the same direction — whether decreasing social media use by an hour a day for one week or stepping away from just Facebook and Instagram."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

It's the first time a major U.S. newsroom has gone on strike partly to demand protections from AI-related layoffs, according to a report from Nieman Lab.

They noted that one of the picketer's signs read "Thoughts not bots," :

On Wednesday, roughly 150 members of the Propublica Guild, one of the largest nonprofit newsroom unions in the country, went on a 24-hour strike. About two dozen Guild members picketed ProPublica's headquarters in New York City's Hudson Square neighborhood during working hours, as simultaneous picket lines formed in front of the publication's offices in Chicago and Washington D.C...

The Guild has been negotiating its first collective bargaining agreement for two and a half years, and the one-day action was intended to put new pressure on ProPublica's management to agree to several contract proposals. The union is seeking "just cause" protections for terminations, wage increases to keep up with the rising cost of living, and contract language that would prohibit layoffs resulting from AI adoption... Beyond the strike, the ProPublica Guild has also taken its dispute over newsroom AI adoption to the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB). On Monday, the Guild filed an unfair-labor-practice charge, citing a "unilateral implementation of AI policy." The filing claims that ProPublica published AI editorial guidelines on its website last month, without first bargaining with union members over its tenets and language... A petition launched Wednesday calling for ProPublica to agree to the Guild's contract terms had received roughly 4,200 signatures by Thursday morning...

Susan DeCarava, the president of The NewsGuild of New York, joined strikers in front of the ProPublica offices yesterday. During a spare moment on the picket line, she told me that while this strike may be setting precedent for her union, it likely won't be the last over AI adoption in newsrooms. "We're going to see more and more concentrated conflicts between media bosses and journalists and media workers over who has a say and how AI is used in their workplaces," she said. For one, The New York Times Guild is currently in contract negotiations after its last agreement expired in February. Already, AI language has taken center stage in the Guild's initial bargaining sessions, including over a proposal that would see Guild members receive a share of the revenue earned when their work is licensed for AI training.
"Management has offered expanded severance for AI-related layoffs as a counter proposal..." according to the article.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Weer voor Rotterdam 🌕 - 12-04-2026 01:16 CEST

In één oogopslag:
• 8.8°C · Licht bewolkt 🌕 | Min 8.9°C / Max 16.3°C | Kans op neerslag 26%

Verwachting voor vandaag:
• Min 8.9°C, Max 16.3°C (Matige motregen) 🌦️, Neerslag 1.7 mm, Kans op neerslag 26%, 🧭 1013.7 hPa ↗️ +1.1 hPa/24h, Windsnelheid: 22.7 km/u (6.3 m/s), richting: ↑ 174°

Uurlijkse voorspelling voor de komende 12 uur:

• 02:00: 7.9°C (Helder) 🌕, 🧭 1012.6 hPa ➡️ 0.0 hPa/1h, Windsnelheid: 14.0 km/u (3.9 m/s), richting: ↗ 203°
• 03:00: 7.4°C (Bewolkt) ☁️, 🧭 1012.9 hPa ➡️ 0.0 hPa/1h, Windsnelheid: 16.6 km/u (4.6 m/s), richting: ↑ 196°
• 04:00: 7.4°C (Bewolkt) ☁️, 🧭 1013.0 hPa ➡️ 0.0 hPa/1h, Windsnelheid: 17.3 km/u (4.8 m/s), richting: ↑ 198°
• 05:00: 7.2°C (Bewolkt) ☁️, 🧭 1013.3 hPa ➡️ 0.0 hPa/1h, Windsnelheid: 17.6 km/u (4.9 m/s), richting: ↑ 185°
• 06:00: 7.0°C (Bewolkt) ☁️, 🧭 1013.7 hPa ➡️ 0.0 hPa/1h, Windsnelheid: 18.7 km/u (5.2 m/s), richting: ↑ 186°
• 07:00: 7.1°C (Gedeeltelijk bewolkt) ⛅, 🧭 1013.5 hPa ➡️ 0.0 hPa/1h, Windsnelheid: 19.8 km/u (5.5 m/s), richting: ↑ 195°
• 08:00: 7.3°C (Bewolkt) ☁️, 🧭 1013.9 hPa ➡️ 0.0 hPa/1h, Windsnelheid: 18.4 km/u (5.1 m/s), richting: ↑ 197°
• 09:00: 8.1°C (Bewolkt) ☁️, 🧭 1014.4 hPa ↗️ +0.5 hPa/1h, Windsnelheid: 17.3 km/u (4.8 m/s), richting: ↑ 195°
• 10:00: 9.1°C (Bewolkt) ☁️, 🧭 1014.5 hPa ➡️ 0.0 hPa/1h, Windsnelheid: 16.2 km/u (4.5 m/s), richting: ↑ 196°
• 11:00: 10.5°C (Gedeeltelijk bewolkt) ⛅, 🧭 1014.4 hPa ➡️ 0.0 hPa/1h, Windsnelheid: 16.9 km/u (4.7 m/s), richting: ↑ 199°
• 12:00: 11.9°C (Bewolkt) ☁️, Kans op neerslag 5%, 🧭 1014.3 hPa ➡️ 0.0 hPa/1h, Windsnelheid: 18.0 km/u (5.0 m/s), richting: ↑ 199°
• 13:00: 12.9°C (Bewolkt) ☁️, Kans op neerslag 12%, 🧭 1014.2 hPa ➡️ 0.0 hPa/1h, Windsnelheid: 18.0 km/u (5.0 m/s), richting: ↑ 202°

Voorspelling voor de komende dagen:

• maandag 13 april: Min 7.0°C, Max 15.2°C (Bewolkt) ☁️, Kans op neerslag 3%, 🧭 1013.4 hPa ➡️ 0.0 hPa/24h, Windsnelheid: 19.8 km/u (5.5 m/s), richting: ↗ 207°
• dinsdag 14 april: Min 9.6°C, Max 14.8°C (Lichte motregen) 🌦️, Neerslag 0.3 mm, Kans op neerslag 9%, 🧭 1019.6 hPa ↗️ +6.2 hPa/24h, Windsnelheid: 14.0 km/u (3.9 m/s), richting: ↓ 19°
• woensdag 15 april: Min 7.7°C, Max 14.6°C (Bewolkt) ☁️, Kans op neerslag 6%, 🧭 1021.3 hPa ↗️ +1.7 hPa/24h, Windsnelheid: 11.9 km/u (3.3 m/s), richting: → 286°
• donderdag 16 april: Min 7.0°C, Max 16.9°C (Lichte motregen) 🌦️, Neerslag 0.4 mm, Kans op neerslag 3%, 🧭 1020.4 hPa ↘️ -0.9 hPa/24h, Windsnelheid: 11.7 km/u (3.2 m/s), richting: ↑ 170°
• vrijdag 17 april: Min 9.5°C, Max 15.6°C (Lichte motregen) 🌦️, Neerslag 1.4 mm, Kans op neerslag 8%, 🧭 1021.2 hPa ↗️ +0.8 hPa/24h, Windsnelheid: 12.6 km/u (3.5 m/s), richting: ↗ 239°
• zaterdag 18 april: Min 8.2°C, Max 17.9°C (Bewolkt) ☁️, Kans op neerslag 3%, 🧭 1020.2 hPa ↘️ -1.0 hPa/24h, Windsnelheid: 9.6 km/u (2.7 m/s), richting: ↑ 197°

Details:
• 🌡️ Huidige temperatuur (om 01:15): 8.8°C (Licht bewolkt)
• 🤚 Gevoelstemperatuur: 4.5°C (-4.3°C)
• 💨 Windsnelheid: 14.0 km/u (3.9 m/s), richting: ↗ 228°
• 🌬️ Windstoten: 26.3 km/h (7.3 m/s)
• 💧 Luchtvochtigheid: 76%
• 🧭 Luchtdruk: 1012.6 hPa ➡️ 0.0 hPa/3h
• 👁️ Zichtbaarheid: 50.0 km
• ☀️ UV-index: 0.0
• 🌅 Zonsopgang: 06:54 · 🌇 Zonsondergang: 20:32

Luchtkwaliteit:
• AQI: 52 🟡 (Matig)
• PM2.5: 7.1 μg/m³
• PM10: 15.9 μg/m³

Gegevens geleverd door Open-Meteo

#Rotterdam #Meteo #MeteoBot #MeteoNetherlands #OpenMeteo #FediMeteo

Thomas Hawk posted a photo:

Thomas Hawk posted a photo:

Thomas Hawk posted a photo:

Thomas Hawk posted a photo:

The American shoots sublime 65 in a show of strength to give himself a chance of a third title at Augusta

On Friday evening Scottie Scheffler was in the new player facility going back and forth over his putting game. Despite himself, he got sucked into watching what Rory McIlroy was doing on the big TVs the club have up in the training room. “It was pretty special stuff,” Scheffler admitted. And by the time McIlroy had finished Scheffler, the world’s No 1 golfer, had a different perspective on the tournament. He had scored 70 and 74 himself, and was even-par for the tournament, 12 shots off McIlroy’s lead, with 36 holes to play and nothing left to lose.

All of a sudden a tournament which has a way of making the game feel very complicated indeed had become very simple for him. Scheffler needed birdies. And he got them. He made five altogether, along with an eagle. He scored 65, seven under. It was the best round he’s ever played in the Masters. “I think that’s what great players do,” Scheffler said. “They rise to the occasion when you are at the biggest tournaments, and you’d be hard pressed to find another tournament that’s bigger than this one, especially for me.”

Continue reading...

Study identified eight areas that can sustain a population and government has given £1m for recovery programme

“The world is grown so bad that wrens make prey where eagles dare not perch.” So wrote Shakespeare in Richard III, in a line of social commentary that feels ever more relevant with age.

A note of good news then, in a world of so much bad, that the eagles the Bard was probably referring to could finally be reintroduced to England after more than 150 years.

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• Fury easily defeats Russian by unanimous decision

• Joshua was ringside and initially evades Fury’s challenge

Tyson Fury completed the first stage of his latest comeback when he outclassed Arslanbek Makhmudov in an uninspiring near shutout over 12 rounds late on Saturday night. The former world heavyweight champion has retired on five previous occasions and, each time, he has been unable to resist the lure of a return to the ring. Now, even at the age of 37, he was still too fast, fluid and accurate for the lumbering Makhmudov.

The Russian from Dagestan hits hard and 17 of his previous 21 victories had featured successful stoppages within the first three rounds. But Makhmudov has never faced a heavyweight of Fury’s pedigree. The chasm between them was obvious from the second round and reflected in the scorecards as two judges had Fury winning each round, in a 120-108 victory, while the third official recorded a 119-109 margin.

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Empire Polo Club, Indio, California
The English indie rock band’s first festival set in eight years hypnotized with their atmospheric dance sound

When Jamie Smith, Oliver Sim and Romy Madley Croft took the Coachella main stage on Friday evening, you could be forgiven for forgetting the momentousness of the occasion. The trio known as the xx has not performed together in eight years, save for a couple of warm-up shows in Mexico City ahead of the California festival, though they’ve hardly been absent from the music scene. Smith, the renowned electronic producer known as Jamie xx, is now a festival mainstay, while Madley Croft and Sim have each built on the indie rock band’s signature haunted sound with their solo material, 2023’s clubby Mid Air and 2022’s horror-tinged Hideous Bastard, respectively.

The three childhood friends still collaborate – Jamie produced Sim’s Hideous Bastard – and their long-awaited Coachella reunion, the first outing of a planned festival run and “new chapter”, felt more like peeking into an ongoing mind-meld than one of the buzziest sets of the festival. The group appeared in their signature all-black and launched into their 2009 debut single Crystalised as if no time had passed.

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Historic Temple on Miyajima Island in Japan.

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