"A raft of articles have been retracted from publications including Business Insider and Wired in recent month," reports the Washington Post, "with links between them suggesting a possible broader scheme to pass off fake stories that these outlets now suspect were written using artificial intelligence." A Washington Post probe into the retractions found a connection between Onyeka Nwelue, the purported author of one of 38 essays removed this week by Business Insider, and someone using the name Margaux Blanchard, two of whose stories were previously removed by the same outlet. In recent months SFGate, Index on Censorship and Wired also retracted articles under the Blanchard byline, after it was identified as bogus by the British publication Press Gazette...

Business Insider Editor in Chief Jamie Heller explained to staff Tuesday in an email, obtained by The Post, that the report of a phony writer spurred a fuller investigation that turned up dozens of suspicious articles under various bylines. "We recently learned that a freelance contributor misrepresented their identity in two first-person essays written for Business Insider. As soon as this came to light, we took down the essays and began an investigation," Heller said. "As part of this process, we've removed additional first-person essays from the site due to concerns about the authors' identity or veracity. No news articles or videos were found to have this issue." On Tuesday Business Insider removed 38 pieces that had been published under bylines other than Blanchard. Business Insider deleted the author pages of 19 individuals, including Blanchard and Nwelue, and replaced their essays with editor's notes.

The website's investigation involved reviewing "tens of thousands of records," Business Insider spokesperson Ari Isaacman D'Angelo said in a statement to The Post. But it hadn't determined whether artificial intelligence was used to produce the yanked essays, she said, noting that AI-detection tools are often unreliable... Essays under [Nate] Giovanni's byline feature contradictory information. One piece, published in December 2024, refers to the author having two teenage daughters and a two-and-a-half-year-old son. Another, published three months later mentions two sons, aged eight and nine. Pieces that ran in May and July — about house-sitting around the world and applying to PhD programs — make no mention of a family at all...

On Aug. 21, Wired wrote a longer mea culpa about the article it published under Blanchard's name, with the headline "How WIRED Got Rolled by an AI Freelancer." "If anyone should be able to catch an AI scammer, it's WIRED," the publication wrote. ["In fact we do, all the time. Our editors receive transparently AI-generated pitches on a regular basis, and we reject them accordingly..."] "Unfortunately, one got through," referring to a story that ran under Blanchard's byline in May about two people who were married in the video game Minecraft.
The site Index on Censorship also published an article under the Blanchard byline about threats to journalists in Guatemala. "In the age of very intelligent AI it's clear we will have to look at things differently," the site's editor told the Washington Post.

The Post's article notes that one sign the pitches were AI-generated "is that while they sounded interesting, they featured details that were erroneous — including fictitious locales." Reached for a comment, one of the authors told the Post "Don't mention my name in your stupid article," claiming their acocunt was recently "compromised" (though their X.com account had also recently tweeted one of their articles.) But another author emailed the Post from their actual academic email address, saying they had no connection to the Gmail account The Post had been corresponding with. And here's how the person at that Gmail account responded to a follow-up query from the Post.

"What is one to do? With a few savvy prompts, AI could probably generate a 'long-lost' novel by Proust."

In 2016 comedian Dave Chappelle made headlines by requiring concert attendees to lock their cellphones in a pouch to prevent recording.

Nine years later those pouches (made by tech startup Yondr) are required for at least 2.5 million students in America, reports CBS News, "and the company said the number could triple after the 2025 numbers are tallied in about three months... Students in 35 states, including New York, Florida, Texas, California, Massachusetts and Georgia, now contend with laws or rules limiting phones and other electronic devices in school."

For example, The Yonkers School District purchased about 11,000 pouches, according to the article, "to comply with the statewide mandate that bans phones in classrooms." The pouch, which students carry with them, is locked and unlocked using magnets affixed to the entrance of the school and outside the main office... ["Some students have reported long lines and disruption at their schools," the article notes later, "as they wait to open their pouches." But on the first day of school at Yonkers, one student said the lines actually went pretty smoothly, and they ended up having a live conversation with a friend during lunch and "felt human"...] Other students were not so enthralled by the pouch; some reported seeing classmates bypass the Yondr pouch by using their Apple watches, buying "burner" phones and putting them in the pouch, breaking the pouch and other tricks to get to their phones.

[Yondr CEO Graham] Dugoni acknowledged that there will always be some students who can figure out how to get around the restrictions. The purpose of the pouches, he said, was to create a culture change in a school and create an environment conducive to their learning and development. More than 70% of high school teachers in the U.S. say cellphones are a major classroom distraction, according to the Pew Research Center Center.
Yondr CEO Graham Dugoni uses a flip phone, the article points out, and says "Our whole perspective is that it's not taking something away from students, it's giving them something back."

He says his larger mission is to create chances for people "to experience life outside of a fully digital realm" — and that Yondr now has school partners in all 50 U.S. states, and in 45 different countries: The cost of buying the pouches — roughly $25-30 per student — has set off debates around how schools should be spending their limited budgets. It's a particular issue for districts struggling with crumbling infrastructure, limited textbooks and access to other technology needed to learn...Districts in various states have reported spending from $26,000 to over $370,000, with Cincinnati Schools saying they spent $500,000 to provide pouches for students in grades 7-12.

Announced this week at RustConf 2025 in Seattle, the new Rust Innovation Lab will offer open source projects "the opportunity to receive fiscal sponsorship from the Rust Foundation, including governance, legal, networking, marketing, and administrative support."

And their first project will be the TLS library Rustls (for cryptographic security), which they say "demonstrates Rust's ability to deliver both security and performance in one of the most sensitive areas of modern software infrastructure." Choosing Rustls "underscores the lab's focus on infrastructure-critical tools, where reliability is paramount," argues explains WebProNews. But "Looking ahead, the foundation plans to expand the lab's portfolio, inviting applications from promising Rust initiatives. This could catalyze innovations in areas like embedded systems and blockchain, where Rust's efficiency shines."

Their article notes that the Rust Foundation "sees the lab as a way to accelerate innovation while mitigating the operational burdens that often hinder open-source development." [T]he Foundation aims to provide a stable, neutral environment for select Rust endeavors, complete with governance oversight, legal and administrative backing, and fiscal sponsorship... At its core, the Rust Innovation Lab addresses a growing need within the developer community for structured support amid Rust's rising adoption in sectors like systems programming and web infrastructure. By offering a "home" for projects that might otherwise struggle with sustainability, the lab ensures continuity and scalability. This comes at a time when Rust's memory safety features are drawing attention from major tech firms, including those in cloud computing and cybersecurity, as a counter to vulnerabilities plaguing languages like C++...

Industry observers note that such fiscal sponsorship could prove transformative, enabling projects to secure funding from diverse sources while maintaining independence. The Rust Foundation's involvement ensures compliance with best practices, potentially attracting more corporate backers wary of fragmented open-source efforts... By providing a neutral venue, the foundation aims to prevent the pitfalls seen in other ecosystems, such as project abandonment due to maintainer burnout or legal entanglements... For industry insiders, the Rust Innovation Lab represents a strategic evolution, potentially accelerating Rust's integration into mission-critical systems.

Longtime Slashdot reader sinij shares a report from CBC News: Prime Minister Mark Carney is delaying a plan to force automakers to hit minimum sales levels for electric vehicles. The move is part of a series of measures the government announced Friday to help the sectors most affected by U.S. President Donald Trump's tariffs. The EV mandate will be paused as the government conducts a 60-day review of the policy, and will be waived for 2026 models. Sources told CBC News that the review will look at the entire mandate and next steps.

"We have an auto sector which, because of the massive change in U.S. policy, is under extreme pressure. We recognize that," Carney said at a news conference in Mississauga, Ont. "They've got enough on their plate right now. So we're taking that off." The government is using the review as part of broader look at all the government's climate measures, he added. [...]

Brian Kingston, president of the Canadian Vehicle Manufacturers' Association, called it "an important first step." "The EV mandate imposes unsustainable costs on auto manufacturers, putting at risk Canadian jobs and investment in this critical sector of the economy," he said in a statement. "A full repeal of the regulation is the most effective way to provide immediate relief to the industry and keep it competitive."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: President Donald Trump said on Thursday his administration would impose tariffs on semiconductor imports from companies not shifting production to the U.S., speaking ahead of a dinner with major technology company CEOs. "Yeah, I have discussed it with the people here. Chips and semiconductors -- we will be putting tariffs on companies that aren't coming in. We will be putting a tariff very shortly," Trump said without giving an exact time or rate.

"We will be putting a very substantial tariff, not that high, but fairly substantial tariff with the understanding that if they come into the country, if they are coming in, building, planning to come in, there will not be a tariff," Trump told reporters. "If they are not coming in, there is a tariff," Trump said in his comments on semiconductors. "Like, I would say (Apple CEO) Tim Cook would be in pretty good shape," he added, as Cook sat across the table. Further reading: Trump Basks in Tech Leaders' Spending Vows at White House Dinner

Mozilla announced today that they will end 32-bit Linux support for Firefox in 2026, with version 144 being the last release and ESR 140 as the fallback option. Phoronix reports: Firefox has continued providing 32-bit Linux binaries even with most other web browsers and operating systems going all-in on x86_64 support. But given that 32-bit Linux support is waning by distributions and the vast majority of distributions aren't even shipping i686 install images anymore, they will be removing 32-bit Linux builds in 2026.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Deadline: Anthropic has agreed to pay at least $1.5 billion into a class action fund as part of a settlement of litigation brought by a group of book authors. The sum, disclosed in a court filing on Friday, "will be the largest publicly reported copyright recovery in history, larger than any other copyright class action settlement or any individual copyright case litigated to final judgment," the attorneys for the authors wrote.

The settlement also includes a provision that releases Anthropic only for its conduct up the August 25, meaning that new claims could be filed over future conduct, according to the filing. Anthropic also has agreed to destroy the datasets used in its models. The settlement figure amounts to about $3,000 per class work, according to the filing. You can read the terms of Anthropic's copyright settlement here (PDF). A hearing in the case is scheduled for Sept. 8.

A first-of-its-kind global research expedition has extracted freshwater samples from beneath the Atlantic Ocean floor off Cape Cod, documenting a massive aquifer stretching from New Jersey to Maine. The three-month Expedition 501, funded at $25 million by the National Science Foundation and European Consortium for Ocean Research Drilling, drilled up to 1,289 feet into the seabed at sites 20-30 miles offshore.

Samples registered salinity as low as 1 part per thousand -- meeting U.S. freshwater standards -- with some readings even lower. Scientists collected nearly 50,000 liters for laboratory analysis to determine whether the water originates from ancient glacial melt or current terrestrial groundwater systems. The UN projects global freshwater demand will exceed supply by 40% within five years.

Networks of pipes and heat exchangers can transfer excess heat from buildings into nearby bodies of water -- but as the world warms, the cooling potential of some water courses is now diminishing, Wired reports. Paris's district cooling network, which pipes Seine river water to cool 800 buildings including the Louvre Museum, faces diminishing returns as climate change warms water temperatures. The system achieves coefficients of performance between 4 and 15 -- significantly higher than conventional air conditioning -- by transferring building heat through heat exchangers to the river. The Seine briefly exceeded 27C this summer, approaching the 30C regulatory limit for returned water.

The network currently spans 100 kilometers of pipes and will expand to 245 kilometers by 2042 to serve 3,000 buildings. Similar installations operate in Toronto using lake water from 83-meter depths and at Cornell University drawing 4C water from Lake Cayuga at 76 meters. Rotterdam and other cities are developing comparable systems as cooling demand rises.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Can AI help "smooth over" discussion on abortion, racism, immigration, or Israel-Palestine? Columbia University sure hopes so. The Verge has learned that the university recently began testing Sway, an AI debate program currently in beta. Developed by two researchers at Carnegie Mellon University, Sway matches up students with opposing views to chat one-on-one about hot-button issues and "facilitates better discussions between them," according to the tool's website. Nicholas DiBella, a postdoctoral scholar at CMU who helped develop Sway, told The Verge that about 3,000 students from more than 30 colleges and universities have used the tool.

One of those may soon be Columbia. News of the potential partnership comes after more than two years of escalating tensions at Columbia between students, administrators, and the federal government. The university has spent years at the center of controversy after controversy: expulsions of pro-Palestinian student protesters, a string of police raids, and demands from the federal government.

People at Columbia's Teachers College are testing Sway in order to potentially integrate it into the conflict resolution curriculum and "bridge-building initiatives at Columbia," DiBella said. He said there's also been interest from other teams at Columbia in using Sway for the fall 2026 semester and onward. Simon Cullen, an assistant professor at CMU and the other developer behind Sway, told The Verge that the company is also in touch with Columbia University Life.

Much of the world favors protecting 30% of the world's land and water for nature by 2030, according to new research that has found overwhelming public support for the goal across eight countries on five continents. The Guardian: Nearly 200 nations agreed in 2022 to set aside 30% of the world's land and 30% of marine areas for nature. But just 17.6% of the world's land and 8.6% of the seas are now under global protection, and more than 100 nations are less than halfway to meeting the target, which was established under the 2022 Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework.

Governments will need to implement swift changes if they are to achieve the target within the next five years. But setting aside more space for nature can be a political pitfall. Often it can mean restricting people's access to land, halting resource extraction and relocating human settlements. These issues, along with possible effects on economic growth, are often cited by countries as barriers to expanding protecting areas. Research published last week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, however, suggests that more than 80% of the public across eight sampled countries support the policy.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Google's CEO Sundar Pichai stood smiling in a leafy-green California garden in September 2020 and declared that the tech behemoth was entering the "most ambitious decade yet" in its climate action. "Today, I'm proud to announce that we intend to be the first major company to operate carbon free -- 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year," he said, in a video announcement at the time.

Pichai added that he knew the "road ahead would not be easy," but Google "aimed to prove that a carbon-free future is both possible and achievable fast enough to prevent the most dangerous impacts of climate change." Five years on, just how hard Google's "energy journey" would become is clear. In June, Google's Sustainability website proudly boasted a headline pledge to achieve net-zero emissions by 2030. By July, that had all changed. An investigation by Canada's National Observer has found that Google's net-zero pledge has quietly been scrubbed, demoted from having its own section on the site to an entry in the appendices of the company's sustainability report.

A UK government trial of Microsoft's M365 Copilot found no clear productivity gains despite user satisfaction with tasks like summarizing meetings and writing emails. While the tool sped up some routine work, it actually slowed down more complex tasks like Excel analysis and PowerPoint creation, often producing lower-quality results. The Register reports: The Department for Business and Trade received 1,000 licenses for use between October and December 2024, with the majority of these allocated to volunteers and 30 percent to randomly selected participants. Some 300 of these people consented to their data being analyzed. An evaluation of time savings, quality assurance, and productivity was then calculated in the assessment (PDF). Overall, 72 percent of users were satisfied or very satisfied with their digital assistant and voiced disappointment when the test ended. However, the reality of productivity gains was more nuanced than Microsoft's marketing materials might suggest. Around two-thirds of the employees in the trial used M365 at least once a week, and 30 percent used it at least once a day -- which doesn't sound like great value for money. [...]

According to the M365 Copilot monitoring dashboard made available in the trial, an average of 72 M365 Copilot actions were taken per user. "Based on there being 63 working days during the pilot, this is an average of 1.14 M365 Copilot actions taken per user per day," the study says. Word, Teams, and Outlook were the most used, and Loop and OneNote usage rates were described as "very low," less than 1 percent and 3 percent per day, respectively. "PowerPoint and Excel were slightly more popular; both experienced peak activity of 7 percent of license holders using M365 Copilot in a single day within those applications," the study states. The three most popular tasks involved transcribing or summarizing a meeting, writing an email, and summarizing written comms. These also had the highest satisfaction levels, we're told.

Participants were asked to record the time taken for each task with M365 Copilot compared to colleagues not involved in the trial. The assessment report adds: "Observed task sessions showed that M365 Copilot users produced summaries of reports and wrote emails faster and to a higher quality and accuracy than non-users. Time savings observed for writing emails were extremely small. "However, M365 Copilot users completed Excel data analysis more slowly and to a worse quality and accuracy than non-users, conflicting time savings reported in the diary study for data analysis. PowerPoint slides [were] over 7 minutes faster on average, but to a worse quality and accuracy than non-users." This means corrective action was required.

A cross-section of participants was asked questions in an interview -- qualitative findings -- and they claimed routine admin tasks could be carried out with greater efficiency with M365 Copilot, letting them "redirect time towards tasks seen as more strategic or of higher value, while others reported using these time savings to attend training sessions or take a lunchtime walk." Nevertheless, M365 Copilot did not necessarily make them more productive, the assessment found. This is something Microsoft has worked on with customers to quantify the benefits and justify the greater expense of a license for M365 Copilot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Fine-particulate air pollution can drive devastating forms of dementia by triggering the formation of toxic clumps of protein that destroy nerve cells as they spread through the brain, research suggests. Exposure to the airborne particles causes proteins in the brain to misfold into the clumps, which are hallmarks of Lewy body dementia, the second most common form of dementia after Alzheimer's disease. The finding has "profound implications" for preventing the neurodegenerative disorder, which affects millions worldwide, with scientists calling for a concerted effort to improve air quality by cutting emissions from industrial activity and vehicle exhausts, improving wildfire management and reducing wood burning in homes.

The researchers began by analyzing hospital records of the 56.5 million US Medicare patients. They looked at those who were admitted for the first time between 2000 and 2014 with the protein damage. Armed with the patients' zip codes, the scientists estimated their long-term exposure to PM2.5 pollution, airborne particles that are smaller than 2.5 thousandths of a millimeter. These can be inhaled deep into the lungs and are found in the bloodstream, brain and other organs. They found that long-term exposure to PM2.5 raised the risk of Lewy body dementia, but had less of an impact on rates of another neurodegenerative brain disease that is not driven by the toxic proteins. Lewy bodies are made from a protein called alpha-synuclein. The protein is crucial for healthy brain functioning, but can misfold in various ways to produce different kinds of harmful Lewy bodies. These can kill nerve cells and cause devastating disease by spreading through the brain.

To see if air pollution could trigger Lewy bodies, the team exposed mice to PM2.5 pollution every other day for 10 months. Some were normal mice, but others were genetically modified to prevent them making alpha-synuclein. The results were striking: in normal mice, nerve cells died off, leading to brain shrinkage and cognitive decline. The genetically modified mice were largely unaffected. Further work in mice showed that PM2.5 pollution drove the formation of aggressive, resilient and toxic clumps of alpha-synuclein clumps that looked very similar to Lewy bodies in humans. Although the work is in mice, the findings are considered compelling evidence. The work has been published in the journal Science.

Intel shelled out $16.5 billion on R&D in 2024, outspending Nvidia by 28% and AMD by 156%, with much of the cash going into chip design, fabrication tech, and the upcoming Nova Lake architecture. "When you compare the R&D expenditures to the amount of revenue, though, the story takes on a very different look," notes PC Gamer. "Intel spent 31% of its net revenue, and 26% for AMD, but Nvidia and Samsung got by on just 10% and 4%, respectively." From the report: An analysis of research and development expenditure by TechInsights was reported by Korea JoongAng Daily, but you can get the numbers yourself by pulling up each company's 2024 financial results. For example, AMD declared that it spent $6.456 billion last year (pdf, page 1) on R&D, whereas Nvidia forked out $12.914 billion. It's worth noting that Nvidia's financial statements are numbered one year ahead of the actual period (FY 2026 is 2025 and so on).

Anyway, those figures pale in comparison to how much cash Intel burned through in 2024 to research and develop chip, fabrication technologies, software, and all kinds of tech stuffâ"a staggering $16.546 billion (pdf, page 25). That's 28% more than Nvidia and a frankly unbelievable 156% more than AMD. The nearest non-US semiconductor firm is Samsung Electronics, which spent a reported $9.5 billion on R&D. That would place third, comfortably ahead of AMD, and it strongly suggests that if you have your own foundries for making chips, you need to spend a lot of cash on finding ways to make better processors.