Posted by msmash from Slashdot
From the closer-look department: US scientists are fleeing abroad in record numbers as the Trump administration slashes research funding, according to exclusive data analysis by Nature. Applications from American researchers for international positions surged 32% between January and March 2025 compared to the same period last year, while US-based users browsing overseas jobs jumped 35%.
The exodus accelerated in March as the administration intensified science cuts, with job views spiking 68% year-over-year. Applications to Canadian institutions increased 41%, while interest from Canadians in US positions plummeted 13%.
Recent months have seen more than 200 federal HIV/AIDS research grants abruptly terminated, cuts to NIH COVID-19 funding revealed, and a $400 million reduction in research grants at Columbia University.
"To see this big drop in views and applications to the US -- and the similar rise in those looking to leave -- is unprecedented," said James Richards, who leads Global Talent Solutions at Springer Nature.
European institutions are capitalizing on the talent migration. Aix-Marseille University launched its "Safe Place for Science" initiative with $17.2 million to sponsor researchers, while Germany's Max Planck Society created a Transatlantic Program offering positions to scientists "no longer able to work in the United States." The trend extends beyond Europe, with US-based views of Chinese science positions increasing 30% in the first quarter of 2025.
Posted by msmash from Slashdot
From the old-habits-die-hard department: Google pays Samsung an "enormous sum of money" every month to preinstall Google generative AI app, Gemini, on its phones and devices, according to court testimony, even though the company's practice of paying for installations has twice been found to violate the law. From a report: The company began paying Samsung for Gemini in January, according to Peter Fitzgerald, Google's vice president of platforms and device partnerships, who testified Monday in Washington federal court as part of the Justice Department's antitrust case. The contract, set to run at least two years, provides fixed monthly payments for each device that preinstalls Gemini and pays Samsung a percentage of the revenue Google earns from advertisements within the app, Fitzgerald told Judge Amit Mehta, who is overseeing the case.
Posted by from MMO Champion
Patch 11.1.5 Live This Week
Patch 11.1.5 launches this week in North America and Europe.
What is Releasing This Week?
Several new content additions are coming in Patch 11.1.5.
Official Patch Notes
Winds of Mysterious Fortune Leveling Buff
Nightfall Scenario
Cooldown Manager
New Mounts
What is Releasing May 20?
Horrific Visions Revisited
What is Releasing June 3?
Dastardly Duos
Official Patch 11.1.5 Notes
Here are the official patch notes for the War Within Patch 11.1.5.
Winds of Mysterious Fortune Leveling Buff
Players can take advantage of a 20% experience buff for a brief period, including more rewards on the journey to 80.
Originally Posted by Blizzard Entertainment
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Posted by BeauHD from Slashdot
From the pulling-the-China-card department: Google has argued in court that the U.S. Department of Justice's proposal to break up its Chrome and Android businesses would weaken national security and harm the country's position in the global AI race, particularly against China. CNBC reports: The remedies trial in Washington, D.C., follows a judge's ruling in August that Google has held a monopoly in its core market of internet search, the most-significant antitrust ruling in the tech industry since the case against Microsoft more than 20 years ago. The Justice Department has called for Google to divest its Chrome browser unit and open its search data to rivals.
Google said in a blog post on Monday that such a move is not in the best interest of the country as the global battle for supremacy in artificial intelligence rapidly intensifies. In the first paragraph of the post, Google named China's DeepSeek as an emerging AI competitor. The DOJ's proposal would "hamstring how we develop AI, and have a government-appointed committee regulate the design and development of our products," Lee-Anne Mulholland, Google's vice president of regulatory affairs, wrote in the post. "That would hold back American innovation at a critical juncture. We're in a fiercely competitive global race with China for the next generation of technology leadership, and Google is at the forefront of American companies making scientific and technological breakthroughs."
Posted by from MMO Champion
Season of Discovery - Scarlet Enclave Raid Hotfix Notes
Originally Posted by Blizzard
(
Blue Tracker /
Official Forums)
Hi All,
We’ve seen a bit of confusion about the Scarlet Enclave adjustments posted in today’s hotfix notes
here and wanted to post an additional note ahead of tomorrow’s North American resets to clarify that these are not the only adjustments we have planned this week. The adjustments detailed in the post earlier this evening are already live as of today, but the remainder of the adjustments we have planned needed a bit more time for testing but are ready and waiting for deploy with regional downtimes starting tomorrow.
Here’s an overview of the adjustments coming with regional maintenance tomorrow:
Solistrasza, Beastmaster, and Mason and their adds have had their HP reduced by ~15%
Reborn Council, Lillian Voss, and Caldoran and their adds have had their HP reduced by ~10%
Reborn Council enrage increased from 5 minutes 30 seconds to 7 minutes
Lillian Voss enrage timer increased from 3 minutes to 4 minutes
Beatrix Trash HP lowered by 20%
We apologize for the confusion on this. We had intended to combine our communications around these two rounds of hotfixes tomorrow for clarity, but there was a miscommunication that prevented that on our end. We will continue to monitor performance in this next week’s reset and make additional adjustments as needed.
Thank you!
Posted by BeauHD from Slashdot
From the happy-birthday department: NASA's oldest active astronaut, Don Pettit, celebrated his 70th birthday by returning to Earth after a seven-month mission aboard the ISS. The Guardian reports: A Soyuz capsule carrying the American and two Russian cosmonauts landed in Kazakhstan on Sunday, Pettit's birthday. "Today at 0420 Moscow time (0120 GMT), the Soyuz MS-26 landing craft with Alexei Ovchinin, Ivan Vagner and Donald (Don) Pettit aboard landed near the Kazakh town of Zhezkazgan," Russia's space agency Roscosmos said.
Spending 220 days in space, Pettit, Ovchinin and Vagner orbited the Earth 3,520 times and completed a journey of 93.3m miles over the course of their mission. It was the fourth spaceflight for Pettit, who has logged more than 18 months in orbit during his 29-year career. Nasa said in a statement that Pettit was "doing well and in the range of what is expected for him following return to Earth." A recording of the touchdown can be viewed here.
Earlier this year, Pettit managed to take one of the best photos ever captured from space. "When I first saw it, I was dazzled by its beauty," wrote Ars Technica's Eric Berger. "But when I looked further into the image, there were just so many amazing details to be found."
"In this image, one can see the core of the Milky Way galaxy, zodiacal light (sunlight diffused by interplanetary dust), streaks of SpaceX Starlink satellites, individual stars, an edge-on view of the atmosphere that appears in burnt umber due to hydroxide emissions, a near-sunrise just over the horizon, and nighttime cities appearing as streaks."
Posted by BeauHD from Slashdot
From the reef-to-relief department: An anonymous reader quotes a report from MIT Technology Review: Arete Glacier Initiative has raised $5 million to improve forecasts of sea-level rise and explore the possibility of refreezing glaciers in place.
Off one atoll, just south of the Maldives' capital, Male, researchers are testing one way to capture sand in strategic locations -- to grow islands, rebuild beaches, and protect coastal communities from sea-level rise. Swim 10 minutes out into the En'boodhoofinolhu Lagoon and you'll find the Ramp Ring, an unusual structure made up of six tough-skinned geotextile bladders. These submerged bags, part of a recent effort called the Growing Islands project, form a pair of parentheses separated by 90meters (around 300 feet). The bags, each about two meters tall, were deployed in December 2024, and by February, underwater images showed that sand had climbed about a meter and a half up the surface of each one, demonstrating how passive structures can quickly replenish beaches and, in time, build a solid foundation for new land. "There's just a ton of sand in there. It's really looking good," says Skylar Tibbits, an architect and founder of the MIT Self-Assembly Lab, which is developing the project in partnership with the Male-based climate tech company Invena.
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Posted by BeauHD from Slashdot
From the stop-the-slop department: Researchers have uncovered a new supply chain attack called Slopsquatting, where threat actors exploit hallucinated, non-existent package names generated by AI coding tools like GPT-4 and CodeLlama. These believable yet fake packages, representing almost 20% of the samples tested, can be registered by attackers to distribute malicious code. CSO Online reports: Slopsquatting, as researchers are calling it, is a term first coined by Seth Larson, a security developer-in-residence at Python Software Foundation (PSF), for its resemblance to the typosquatting technique. Instead of relying on a user's mistake, as in typosquats, threat actors rely on an AI model's mistake. A significant number of packages, amounting to 19.7% (205,000 packages), recommended in test samples were found to be fakes. Open-source models -- like DeepSeek and WizardCoder -- hallucinated more frequently, at 21.7% on average, compared to the commercial ones (5.2%) like GPT 4. Researchers found CodeLlama ( hallucinating over a third of the outputs) to be the worst offender, and GPT-4 Turbo ( just 3.59% hallucinations) to be the best performer.
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Journey Together might be a reasonably interesting set for the tabletop card game, re-introducing Trainer Pokémon to the game for the first time in 25 years, but it’s a massive anticlimax for collectors. Which turns out to be just the thing the hobby desperately needed; there are no $1000+ cards this time out, not…
Civilization VII’s next big update has arrived and the 4X strategy game is steadily checking off the boxes on players’ most requested fixes and additions. It hasn’t yet purged the negative vibes around launch (or the game’s underwater user review rating on Steam), but the fourth major update in two months has…
After many reports, leaks, and rumors, Bethesda officially unveiled The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Remastered. And the $50 remaster is launching today on Xbox Series X/S, Game Pass, PS5, and PC.
It’s been a difficult week for The Last of Us fans. Two episodes into the second season of HBO’s live-action series, fans are experiencing the traumatic events of The Last of Us Part II, the game on which this season is based. Those of us who played it dealt with this five years ago and are being retraumatized. Now,…
A comic about a Terminator and a washing machine.
Days Gone is arriving on PlayStation 5 later this month with a host of new accessibility features. One of those is a new game speed toggle that will let players turn the entire open-world zombie experience into a bullet time fever dream.
The Jurassic Park movies (including the Jurassic World movies) are ridiculous examples of human hubris. Dinosaurs are cloned, genetically engineered to be better entertainment attractions, and hunted for sport. But absurdity aside, a few of those films have some surprisingly gruesome deaths, especially for a franchise…
