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The ocean is capable of being a “hero” in regulating climate change, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution president Peter de Menocal said. Already, the ocean is a natural source of carbon dioxide storage, and it has the potential to do a whole lot more.

Google's Bard chatbot is adding AI image generation, catching up on a feature that rival ChatGPT Plus has had for months. From a report: Users can prompt Bard to generate photos using Google's Imagen 2 text-to-image model. Bard, now powered by Google's Gemini Pro large language model, was always going to have image generation. It was assumed the more powerful Gemini Ultra model would power it; however, that model remains in development. Google has been positioning Bard as a worthy competitor to OpenAI's ChatGPT Plus, which runs GPT-4 and lets users generate images thanks to DALL-E 3 integration. Both chatbots perform well, but Bard's lack of text-to-image features gave ChatGPT Plus a bit of an edge. People can use the updated Bard with Imagen 2 at no cost, unlike ChatGPT Plus, which relies on a paid subscription.

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Identity management company Okta said on Thursday in a message to employees that it would lay off 400 employees, about 7% of the company's headcount. From a report: CEO Todd McKinnon said in his message that the "reality is that costs are still too high." Okta is only the latest tech company to trim headcount in the opening weeks of 2024. Nearly 24,000 tech workers lost their jobs in January alone, even as many tech companies saw their stock prices continue to grow.

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Apple has discontinued support for the mid-2012 13-inch MacBook Pro, the last model to include an optical drive. Products are considered obsolete when Apple ceased distribution over 7 years ago, making service and parts unavailable. The laptop was removed from Apple's lineup in 2016 but remained compatible with macOS until Big Sur in 2020. While optical drives had already fallen out of favor, the phase out marks the end of an era for pro users requiring discs for media production.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Biotechnology company Biogen is abandoning Aduhelm, its questionable Alzheimer's drug that has floundered on the market since its scandal-plagued regulatory approval in 2021 and brow-raising pricing. On Wednesday, the company announced it had terminated its license for Aduhelm (aducanumab) and will stop all development and commercialization activities. The rights to Aduhelm will revert back to the Neurimmune, the Swiss biopharmaceutical company that discovered it. Biogen will also end the Phase 4 clinical trial, ENVISION, that was required by the Food and Drug Administration to prove Biogen's claims that Aduhelm is effective at slowing progression of Alzheimer's in its early stages -- something two Phase 3 trials failed to do with certainty. In the announcement, Biogen noted it took a financial hit of $60 million in the fourth quarter of 2023 to close out its work on Aduhelm, which the company at one point reportedly estimated would bring in as much as $18 billion in revenue per year.

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This week, we learn what it feels like to use Apple’s new mixed-reality headset, and we examine the various ways Apple envisions people interacting with each other while wearing the devices.

Hulu updated its Terms of Service to explicitly ban password sharing outside of "your primary personal residence." Subscribers will need to comply by March 14th, 2024. Here's the new ToS section in full: m. Account Sharing. Unless otherwise permitted by your Service Tier, you may not share your subscription outside of your household. "Household" means the collection of devices associated with your primary personal residence that are used by the individuals who reside therein. Additional usage rules may apply for certain Service Tiers. For more details on our account sharing policy, please visit our Help Center. We may, in our sole discretion, analyze the use of your account to determine compliance with this Agreement. If we determine, in our sole discretion, that you have violated this Agreement, we may limit or terminate access to the Service and/or take any other steps as permitted by this Agreement (including those set forth in Section 6 of this Agreement). You will be responsible for any use of your account by your household, including compliance with this section. The Verge reports: The new ToS is dated January 25th, 2024; previous versions of the ToS didn't mention account sharing at all. "We're adding limitations on sharing your account outside of your household, and explaining how we may assess your compliance with these limitations," the most important paragraph reads. Neither the email nor the ToS say how Hulu will measure compliance or how quickly it'll take action, but Hulu will apparently "analyze the use of your account" and it reserves the right to "limit or terminate access" if it decides you've broken the policy. The ToS also suggests there's more info about its account sharing policy at the Hulu Help Center, but we're not seeing any help articles about account sharing right now. Netflix started cracking down on password sharing in the U.S. last May, resulting in the "four single largest days of U.S. user sign-ups since January 2019." The streaming giant later went on to add 2.6 million U.S. subscribers. Disney Plus enacted a similar plan a few months later.

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PROMOTIONS Darci Hamm has been promoted to executive vice president and chief operating officer at Norway Savings Bank. Hamm began her career with the Bank in 1999, and most recently served as executive vice president, senior retail banking officer. She has served on the Bank’s Culture Steering Committee and Culture Implementation Crew. Hamm has also […]

PROMOTIONS Darci Hamm has been promoted to executive vice president and chief operating officer at Norway Savings Bank. Hamm began her career with the Bank in 1999, and most recently served as executive vice president, senior retail banking officer. She has served on the Bank’s Culture Steering Committee and Culture Implementation Crew. Hamm has also […]

The goal is to begin the service by June and attract some of the hundreds of workers who are traveling that route daily.

The multi-billionaire says the electric car maker will move immediately to hold a shareholder vote on the matter.

SpaceX's Starship rocket has been selected by Starlab to launch its private space station into orbit. "SpaceX's history of success and reliability led our team to select Starship to orbit Starlab," Dylan Taylor, chairman and CEO of Voyager Space, said in a statement. "SpaceX is the unmatched leader for high-cadence launches, and we are proud Starlab will be launched to orbit in a single flight by Starship." Space.com reports: Today's announcement didn't give a target launch date. But NASA and Starlab's developers want the four-person commercial station to be up and running before 2030, when the International Space Station (ISS) is expected to cease operations (though that retirement date is apparently not set in stone). [...] The 400-foot-tall (122 meters) Starship is the biggest and most powerful rocket ever built, capable of hauling up to 150 tons to low Earth orbit. It will send the fully outfitted Starlab up in just one launch, as Taylor noted above. "Starlab's single-launch solution continues to demonstrate not only what is possible, but how the future of commercial space is happening now," Tom Ochinero, senior vice president of commercial business at SpaceX, said in the same statement. "The SpaceX team is excited for Starship to launch Starlab to support humanity's continued presence in low Earth orbit on our way to making life multiplanetary," Ochinero added.

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Bosses from five of the largest social media firms were grilled about how they are protecting children.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: Stretching thousands upon thousands of miles under your feet, a web of fibrous ears is listening. Whether you walk over buried fiber optics or drive a car across them, above-ground activity creates a characteristic vibration that ever-so-slightly disturbs the way light travels through the cables. With the right equipment, scientists can parse that disturbance to identify what the source was and when exactly it was roaming there. This quickly proliferating technique is known as distributed acoustic sensing, or DAS, and it's so sensitive that researchers recently used it to monitor the cacophony of a mass cicada emergence. Others are using the cables as an ultra-sensitive instrument for detecting volcanic eruptions and earthquakes: Unlike a traditional seismometer stuck in one place, a web of fiber optic cables can cover a whole landscape, providing unprecedented detail of Earth's rumblings at different locations. Now scientists are experimenting with bringing DAS to a railroad near you. When a train runs along a section of track, it creates vibrations that analysts can monitor over time -- if that signal suddenly changes, it might indicate a problem with the rail, like a crack, or a snapped tie. Or if on a mountain pass a rockslide blasts across the track, DAS might "hear" that too, warning railroad operators of a problem that human eyes hadn't yet glimpsed. More gradual changes in the signal might betray the development of faults in track alignment. It just so happens that fiber optic cables already run along many railways to connect all the signaling equipment or for telecommunications. "You're utilizing the already available facilities and infrastructure for that, which can reduce the cost," says engineer Hossein Taheri, who is studying DAS for railroads at Georgia Southern University. "There could be some railroads where they don't have the fiber, and you need to lay down. But yes, most of them, usually they do already have it." To tap into that fiber, you need a device called an interrogator, which fires laser pulses down the cables and analyzes the tiny bits of light that bounce back. So, say a rock hits the track 20 miles away from the interrogator. That creates a characteristic ground vibration that disturbs the fiber optics near the track, which shows up in the light signal. Because scientists know the speed of light, they can precisely measure the time it took for that signal to travel back to their interrogator, pinpointing the distance to the disturbance to within 10 meters, or about 30 feet. For a given stretch of track, you'd have already analyzed the DAS signals for a length of time, building a vibration profile for a normal, healthy railway. When the DAS data suddenly starts showing something different, you might have an issue, which shows up like an EKG picking up a problem with a human heartbeat. "What we're doing is profiling the track, looking for changes in the acoustic signature," says Daniel Pyke, a rail expert and spokesperson for Sensonic, which develops DAS technology for railroads. "We know what track should sound like, we know what a train should sound like. And we know that if it's changing -- so let's say this joint is coming loose -- that needs someone to go and fix it before it becomes a problem."

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Dan Robinson reports via The Register: Quantum companies received 50 percent less venture cap funding last year as investors switched to generative AI or shied away from risky bets on Silicon Valley startups. Progress in quantum computing is being made, but practical applications of the technology are still likely years away. Investment in quantum technology reached a high of $2.2 billion in 2022, as confidence (or hype) grew in this emerging market, but that funding fell to about $1.2 billion last year, according to the latest State of Quantum report, produced by The Quantum Insider, with quantum computing company IQM, plus VCs OpenOcean and Lakestar. The picture is even starker in the US, where there was an 80 percent decline in venture capital for quantum, while the APAC region dropped by 17 percent, and EMEA grew slightly by three percent. But the report denies that we have reached a "quantum winter," comparable with the "AI winter" periods of scarce funding and little progress. Instead, the quantum industry continues to progress towards useful quantum systems, just at a slower pace, and the decline in funding must be seen as part of broader venture capital trends, it insists. "Calendar year 2023 was an interesting year with regards to quantum," Heather West, research manager for Quantum Computing, Infrastructure Systems, Platforms, and Technology at IDC told The Register. "With the increased interest in generative AI, we started to observe that some of the funding that was being invested into quantum was transferred to AI initiatives and companies. Generative AI was seen as the new disruptive technology which end users could use immediately to gain an advantage or value, whereas quantum, while expected to be a disruptive technology, is still very early in development," West told The Register. Gartner Research vice president Matthew Brisse agreed. "It's due to the slight shift of CIO priorities toward GenAI. If organizations were spending 10 innovation dollars on quantum, now they are spending five. Not abandoning it, but looking at GenAI to provide value sooner to the organization than quantum," he told us. Meanwhile, venture capitalists in America are fighting shy of risky bets on Silicon Valley startups and instead keeping their powder dry as they look to more established technology companies or else shore up their existing portfolio of investments, according to the Financial Times.

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"China's hackers are positioning on American infrastructure in preparation to wreak havoc and cause real-world harm to American citizens and communities, if or when China decides the time has come to strike," said FBI Director Christopher Wray in a prepared testimony before the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party. NBC News reports: Wray also argued that "there has been far too little public focus" that Chinese hackers are targeting critical infrastructure in the U.S. such as water treatment plants, electrical grids, oil and natural gas pipelines, and transportation systems, according to the prepared remarks. "And the risk that poses to every American requires our attention -- now," his prepared testimony said. As Wray testified, the Justice Department and FBI announced they had disabled a Chinese hacking operation that had infected hundreds of small office and home routers with botnet malware that targeted critical infrastructure. The DOJ said the hackers, known to the private sector as "Volt Typhoon," used privately owned small routers that were infected with "KV botnet" malware to conceal further Chinese hacking activities against U.S. and foreign victims. Wray addressed the malware in his testimony, emphasizing that it targets critical infrastructure in the U.S. [...] At Wednesday's hearing, the director of the federal Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, Jen Easterly, testified that Americans should expect efforts by China to wage influence campaigns online relating to the 2024 election. However, Easterly added that she was confident that voting systems and other election infrastructure are well-defended. "To be very clear, Americans should have confidence in the integrity of our election infrastructure because of the enormous amount of work that's been done by state and local election officials, by the federal government, by vendors, by the private sector since 2016," Easterly said in her testimony. Wray emphasized in the remarks that the "cyber onslaught" of Chinese hackers "goes way beyond prepositioning for future conflict," saying in the prepared remarks that every day the hackers are "actively attacking" U.S. economic security, engaging in "wholesale theft of our innovation, and our personal and corporate data." "And they don't just hit our security and economy. They target our freedoms, reaching inside our borders, across America, to silence, coerce, and threaten our citizens and residents," the excerpts said.

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Jess Weatherbed reports via The Verge: Bullitt Group, the UK-based smartphone manufacturer behind the rugged handsets of Cat, Land Rover, and Motorola, has seemingly shut down. On Monday, Mobile World Live spotted several Bullitt Group employees on LinkedIn saying that the company folded on January 26th after a "critical planned restructuring" failed. The Telegraph reported earlier this month that the company was on the brink of insolvency. Bullitt Group has yet to issue an official statement confirming the closure. The manufacturer previously told The Telegraph that it planned to transfer its satellite connectivity business and all 100 of its employees to a new company owned by its creditors, though one former employee now claims the entire workforce has been laid off. Founded in 2009, Bullitt found its niche producing mobile devices and accessories for other companies. The most notable are the hardy, rugged handsets like the Land Rover Explore and Motorola Defy series, though it also made more traditional smartphones like the Kodak Ektra. In recent years, the company placed greater focus on satellite connectivity projects like the Motorola Defy Satellite Link as it struggled to compete against larger phone providers like Apple and Samsung.

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The fiery hearing was about the protection of children from exploitation and abuse on social media platforms.

Artificial intelligence is increasing being used to guide investments but risks remain.

Fans are shown swear words and racial slurs in dozens of songs even when explicit content is blocked.