The winning runner at a Beijing half-marathon for humanoid robots finished the race today in 50 minutes and 26 seconds — significantly faster than the human world record of 57 minutes recently set by Jacob Kiplimo. […] [T]he winning time is a massive improvement over last year’s race, when the fastest robot finished in two hours and 40 minutes.

The Associated Press reports that this year’s winner was built by Chinese smartphone maker Honor. It seems the winning robot wasn’t actually the fastest, as a different Honor robot finished in 48 minutes and 19 seconds. But that one was remote controlled — the 50:26 robot was autonomous and won due to weighted scoring. About 40% of participating robots competed autonomously, while the remaining 60% were remote controlled, according to Beijing’s E-Town tech hub. Not all of them did as well as Honor’s robots, with one robot falling at the starting line and another hitting a barrier.

The high-tech, however, apparently does not ensure gentle landings. Collisions, including a recent crash-and-burn into a Texas building, as well as several mid-flight malfunctions in rainy weather, have abounded since the drones’ inaugural launch....

Tasha, a separate Amazon user, spotted the drone plunging a package near the paved driveway of a neighbor’s yard. Unfortunately, its propellers caused other, previously delivered parcels to blow away, sending one into the street… In a statement to The Post, Amazon said it apologized for one of the “rare instances when products don’t arrive as expected.”

For those wondering how World’s Deep Face technology works, it includes a three-step process. It cross-references a signed image from a user’s original Orb registration, a live face scan from the device, and the frame of the video that’s visible to the other participants in the meeting. Only when the three samples match does a “Verified Human” badge appear next to the user’s name…

Hosts can also make Deep Face verification mandatory for joining meetings, preventing unverified participants from joining entirely. Mid-call, on-the-spot checks are also possible…

The stripped-down browser is available either as a separate browser download or as an upgrade to the existing Brave install, unlocked through a one-time purchase that can be activated across multiple devices. The idea is simple on paper: pay once, and you get a cleaner, more minimal browsing experience without the add-ons that fund Brave’s ecosystem. What makes the move unusual is the pricing model itself. While paying to support a browser is not controversial, charging users specifically to remove features raises questions about whether those additions are seen as value or clutter.

The situation gets even stranger on Linux, where Brave Origin is reportedly available at no cost, creating an uneven experience across platforms and leaving some users wondering why they are being asked to pay for something others get for free.

Blue Origin’s New Glenn suffered a malfunction of its second stage on the rocket’s third flight April 19, stranding its payload in an unrecoverable “off-nominal” orbit and dealing the company a setback as it seeks to increase its flight rate… AST SpaceMobile had planned to launch 45 to 60 satellites this year for its D2D constellation, but BlueBird 7 is the first to launch since BlueBird 6 launched on an Indian LVM3 rocket in December.

The booster, called “Never Tell Me The Odds” by Blue Origin, touched down on the company’s landing platform, Jacklyn, in the Atlantic Ocean nearly nine and a half minutes after liftoff. The booster launched NASA’s ESCAPADE Mars mission on the NG-2 flight in November. However, the booster reuse on NG-3 was only partial since the stage’s biggest component, its BE-4 engines, was new. “With our first refurbished booster we elected to replace all seven engines and test out a few upgrades including a thermal protection system on one of the engine nozzles,” Dave Limp, chief executive of Blue Origin, said in an April 13 social media post. “We plan to use the engines we flew for NG-2 on future flights.”

The spacecraft runs on a radioisotope thermoelectric generator — a device that converts heat from decaying plutonium into electricity. It carries no solar panels, no rechargeable batteries. Just the slow, steady release of nuclear warmth, which diminishes by about 4 watts each year. After nearly five decades, that decline has become critical.

During a routine maneuver in late February, Voyager 1’s power levels fell unexpectedly, bringing the probe dangerously close to triggering an automatic fault-protection shutdown — a self-preservation response that would have forced engineers into a lengthy and risky recovery process. The team needed to act first. On April 17, mission engineers sent a sequence of commands to deactivate the Low-energy Charged Particles experiment, known as the LECP, which is one of Voyager 1’s remaining science instruments. The LECP has measured ions, electrons, and cosmic rays originating from both our solar system and the galaxy beyond it, helping scientists map the structure of interstellar space in a way no other instrument could…

Voyager 1 now carries two operational science instruments: one that listens for plasma waves, and one that measures magnetic fields. Engineers believe the latest shutdown could buy the mission roughly another year of breathing room. The team is also developing a more sweeping power conservation plan they informally call “the Big Bang” — a coordinated swap of several powered components all at once, trading older systems for lower-power alternatives. If testing on Voyager 2, planned for May and June 2026, goes well, the same procedure will be attempted on Voyager 1 no sooner than July. If it works, there is even a slim chance the LECP could once more continue to work.

The engineers say they hope to keep at least one instrument operating on each spacecraft into the 2030s. It would leave both still reporting from places no machine has ever gone before.111

David Gross: The expected lifetime, in the case of 2% [per year], is about 35 years. [The expected lifetime is the average time it would take to have had a nuclear war by then. It is calculated using similar equations as those used to determine the “half-life” of a radioactive material.]

Live Science: So what do you suggest as remedies to lower that risk?

Gross: We had something called the Nobel Laureate Assembly for reducing the risk of nuclear war in Chicago last year. There are steps, which are easy to take — for nations, I mean. For example, talk to each other. In the last 10 years, there are no treaties anymore. We’re entering an incredible arms race.

We have three super nuclear powers. People are talking about using nuclear weapons; there’s a major war going on in the middle of Europe; we’re bombing Iran; India and Pakistan almost went to war. OK, so that’s increased the chance [of nuclear war]. I would really like to have a solid estimate — it might be more, and I think I’m being conservative — but a 2% estimate [of nuclear war] in today’s crazy world.

Live Science: Do you think we’ll ever get to a place where we get rid of nuclear weapons?

Gross: We’re not recommending that. That’s idealistic, but yes, I hope so. Because if you don’t, there’s always some risk an AI 100 years from now [could launch nuclear weapons], but chances of [humanity] living, with this estimate, 100 years, is very small, and living 200 years is infinitesimal. So [the answer to] Fermi’s question of “Where are the civilizations, all the intelligent organisms around the galaxy, and why don’t they talk to us?” is that they’ve killed themselves…

There are now nine nuclear powers. Even three is infinitely more complicated than two. The agreements, the norms between countries, are all falling apart. Weapons are getting crazier. Automation, and perhaps even AI, will be in control of those instruments pretty soon… It’s going to be very hard to resist making AI make decisions because it acts so fast.

In the U.K., electric car sales reached a record high, with 86,120 vehicles sold in March… The French online used-car retailer Aramisauto reported its share of EV sales nearly doubled from February 16 to March 9, rising to 12.7% from 6.5%, while sales of fueled models dropped to 28% of sales from 34%, and sales of diesel models dropped to 10% from 14%. Germany’s largest online car market, mobile.de, told Reuters that the share of EV searches on its website has tripled since the start of March — from 12% to 36%, with car dealers receiving 66% more enquiries for used EVs than in February.

South Korea reported that registrations for electric vehicles more than doubled in March compared to the prior year, due in part to rising fuel prices and government subsidies… In New Zealand, more than 1,000 EVs were registered in the week that ended on March 22, close to double the week before, making it the country’s biggest week for electric vehicle registrations since the end of 2023, according to the country’s Transport Minister, Chris Bishop.

Patients still have surgery to remove tumors. After that, the mRNA vaccines are personalized for each individual using genetic material taken from their unique tumor cells. In the clinical trial, after getting the vaccine, the patients also received chemotherapy, which is standard post-op treatment for operable pancreatic cancer… [The article notes that less than 13% of people diagnosed with pancreatic cancer live for more than five years, making it “one of the deadliest cancers.”]

[E]xperts have long believed that people with pancreatic cancer could not generate an immune response against tumors. But after nine doses of the personalized vaccine, [clinical trial participant Donna] Gustafson is one of eight people in the 16-person Phase 1 trial who did just that, producing an army of immune cells called T cells that seek out and destroy tumor cells… [Dr. Vinod Balachandran, a vaccine center director who is leading the trial, said] it was unclear whether the immune response would last and lead to the patients living longer… New data collected during the trial’s six-year follow-up period shows that it may. Those findings will be presented Monday at the American Association for Cancer Research’s annual meeting in San Diego. Six years after treatment, Gustafson and six others who responded to the treatment are still alive…

More research is still needed. Genentech and BioNTech, the two drugmakers behind the vaccine, have already launched a larger Phase 2 clinical trial… Another team is working on an off-the-shelf vaccine that targets a protein called KRAS that is present in as many as 90% of pancreatic cancers. In a small, early trial, about 85% of the participants mounted an immune response to the protein.

The lawsuit, filed in a Bengaluru court and obtained by TechCrunch, names platforms such as X, YouTube, and Instagram along with dozens of content creators, and seeks takedown of the content as well as broader restraint on what it describes as false or defamatory material related to the company’s devices. In its over 60-page filing, Motorola has sought a permanent injunction restraining the defendants from publishing or sharing what it describes as false or defamatory content about its products, including reviews, videos, comments, and boycott campaigns.

The complaint cites hundreds of posts across platforms, including videos alleging device issues and phones catching fire. But it is also targeting unfavorable product reviews and user commentary that the company alleges are false or defamatory. In a statement after publication, a Motorola spokesperson said it had initiated legal action “in the interest of public safety” against what it described as demonstrably false claims that its devices had exploded or caught fire.

The software from Fog Data Science, adopted this January in Nevada through a Department of Public Safety contract, pulls information from smartphone apps in order to let state investigators identify the location of mobile devices. The state is allowed more than 250 queries a month using the tool, which allows officers to track a device’s location over long stretches of time and enables them to see what Fog calls “patterns of life,” according to company documents from 2022. It can help them deduce where and when people work and live, with whom they associate and what places they visit, according to privacy experts… Traditionally, police must obtain a warrant from a judge to access cellphone location information — a process that can take days or weeks. And while cellphone users may be aware that they are sharing their location through apps such as Google Maps, critics say few are aware that such information can make its way to police…

Other agencies in Nevada have been known to use technology similar to Fog. In 2013, Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department acquired something known as a cell-site simulator that mimics cellphone towers and can sweep up signals from entire areas to track individuals, with some models capable of intercepting texts and calls. Police have not released detailed information about the technology since then.

HP Anyware, the new name of the Teradici PCoIP remote desktop solution that was acquired by HP in 2021, is being discontinued.

Light on specifics, Disney says they will be certifying premium large format theaters for the Infinity Vision experience, highlighting laser projection and immersive audio quality. The new program will begin in the summer for a theater run of 2019’s Avengers: Endgame ahead of Doomsday‘s holiday release.

Now you might be thinking: Giant screen? Booming audio? That sounds an awful lot like IMAX. The most consumer-recognized premium movie-going screen is the coveted throne for big blockbuster events, from Avatar to One Battle After Another. Unfortunately for Doomsday, IMAX screens are already booked for the holiday season by Dune: Part Three, the anticipated return to Arrakis, where Timothée Chalamet’s Muad’Dib will begin to go worm-mode. Locked out of the popular choice for doubling your ticket price, Disney appears to have made up a new one…

Disney says they aim to certify 75 theaters in the United States and 300 internationally for the Infinity Vision program.

D. Graham Burnett is a historian of science at Princeton University and one of the authors of " Attensity! A Manifesto of the Attention Liberation Movement,” making him a pillar of the growing backlash against the corporate harvesting of human attention. Along with MS NOW host Chris Hayes’ bestselling " The Sirens’ Call: How Attention Became the World’s Most Endangered Resource,” his work is part of a growing body of literature calling for people to move away from screens and pay attention to life. Burnett says the “attention liberation movement” is about throwing off the yoke of time-sucking apps. People “need to rewild their attention. Their attention is the fullness of their relationship to the world”....

There are several dozen “attention activism” groups across the United States and Canada, and the movement has also cropped up in Spain, Italy, Croatia, France and England. Burnett said he expects it to spread further.

• “More than a dozen millennials gathered in a brownstone apartment in Brooklyn and placed their phones in a metal colander before two hours of reading, drawing and conversation.”

• A few miles away “Nearly 20 people in their 30s stared at their cellphones for a few minutes. Then they set them down and looked at their bared palms for a while. Then those of their neighbors.”

Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader destinyland for sharing the article.

Floppy disks also felt quite fragile, and while we got “superfloppy” formats that were physically larger and had more capacity, those were pretty unwieldy as portable storage. Enter 1994, when a company called Iomega introduced its variant of a “superfloppy”, the Zip drive… [T]he initial capacity introduced in 1994 reached a whopping 100MB, which was huge number when put up against the traditional floppy disk. Zip drives also had major performance benefits, with read speeds that could average 1.4MB/s, as opposed to the comparatively sluggish 16kB/s speeds of a traditional floppy disk, as well as a seek time of around 28ms seconds, whereas a floppy disk averaged 200ms. Zip drives weren’t quite as fast as desktop HDDs, but for portable storage, this was a huge step forward…

[I]n 1998, Iomega introduced the Zip 250 disks, which increased the capacity to 250MB, and, already in the new millennium, we got the Zip 750, which took that further to 750MB… It was an appealing enough proposition that big computer manufacturers like Dell started including a Zip drive in some of their PCs. Even Apple included Zip drives in some of its Power Macintosh models from the mid-to-late 90s. However, things started to shift towards the end of the decade as other portable formats rose to prominence, most notably CDs and USB flash drives.

Despite their initial success, it didn’t take long for users to start noticing a major drawback of Zip drives: many times, they would just fail. It wasn’t necessarily related to age or any particular misuse of the disks, it just happened. It was a big enough phenomenon that it became known as the “click of death”, and once it happened, your drive was gone. The problem was estimated by Iomega to affect around 0.5% of Zip drives, but while that sounds like a small number, when you sell products by the thousands, it becomes fairly widespread. It was a big enough issue that, in September 1998, a class action lawsuit was filed against Iomega for the common problems. Some of the complaints in that lawsuit were eventually dismissed by the court of Delaware, but others were not, and once the public became aware of the problems with Zip drives, it was hard for the brand to make a comeback.

It didn’t help that this happened around the same time as formats such as CDs were becoming more popular… And eventually, USB flash drives became the most popular way to carry data around since they were smaller and offered much faster speeds… Eventually, after seeing its profits plummet by the mid-2000s, Iomega was sold to a company called EMC in 2008, and in 2013, EMC and Lenovo formed a joint venture that took over Iomega’s business and removed all of the Iomega branding from its products.