An anonymous reader quotes a report from The New York Times: Scientists have come tantalizingly close to reproducing the power of the sun -- albeit only in a speck of hydrogen for a fraction of a second. Researchers at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory reported on Tuesday that by using 192 gigantic lasers to annihilate a pellet of hydrogen, they were able to ignite a burst of more than 10 quadrillion watts of fusion power -- energy released when hydrogen atoms are fused into helium, the same process that occurs within stars. Indeed, Mark Herrmann, Livermore's deputy program director for fundamental weapons physics, compared the fusion reaction to the 170 quadrillion watts of sunshine that bathe Earth's surface. "This about 10 percent of that," Dr. Herrmann said. And all of the fusion energy emanated from a hot spot about as wide as a human hair, he said.

But the burst -- essentially a miniature hydrogen bomb -- lasted only 100-trillionths of a second. Still, that spurred a burst of optimism for fusion scientists who have long hoped that fusion could someday provide a boundless, clean energy source for humanity. The success also signified a moment of redemption for Livermore's football-stadium-size laser apparatus, which is named the National Ignition Facility, or N.I.F. Despite an investment of billions of dollars -- construction started in 1997 and operations began in 2009 -- the apparatus initially generated hardly any fusion at all. In 2014, Livermore scientists finally reported success, but the energy produced then was minuscule -- the equivalent of what a 60-watt light bulb consumes in five minutes. On Aug. 8, the burst of energy was much greater -- 70 percent as much as the energy of laser light hitting the hydrogen target. That is still a losing proposition as an energy source, consuming more power than it produces. But scientists are confident that further jumps in energy output were possible with fine-tuning of the experiment.

A new paper suggests Saturn's core is more like a fluid than a solid, and makes up more of the planet's interior than we thought. From a report: With its massive rings stretching out 175,000 miles in diameter, Saturn is a one-of-a-kind planet in the solar system. Turns out its insides are pretty unique as well. A new study published in Nature Astronomy on Monday suggests the sixth planet from the sun has a "fuzzy" core that jiggles around. It's quite a surprising find. "The conventional picture for Saturn or Jupiter's interior structure is that of a compact core of rocky or icy material, surrounded by a lower-density envelope of hydrogen and helium," says Christopher Mankovich, a planetary scientist at Caltech and coauthor of the new study, along with his colleague Jim Fuller.

What Mankovich and Fuller glimpsed "is essentially a blurred-out version of that conventional structure." Instead of seeing a tidy boundary dividing the heavier rocks and ice from the lighter elements, they found that the core is oscillating so that there is no single, clear separation. This diffuse core extends out to about 60% of Saturn's radius -- a huge leap from the 10 to 20% of a planet's radius that a traditional core would occupy. One of the wildest aspects of the study is that the findings did not come from measuring the core directly -- something we've never been able to do. Instead, Mankovich and Fuller turned to seismographic data on Saturn's rings first collected by NASA's Cassini mission, which explored the Saturnian system from 2004 to 2017.

"Saturn essentially rings like a bell at all times," says Mankovich. As the core wobbles, it creates gravitational perturbations that affect the surrounding rings, creating subtle "waves" that can be measured. When the planet's core was oscillating, Cassini was able to study Saturn's C ring (the second block of rings from the planet) and measure the small yet consistent gravitational "ringing" caused by the core. Mankovich and Fuller looked at the data and created a model for Saturn's structure that would explain these seismographic waves -- and the result is a fuzzy interior. "This study is the only direct evidence for a diffuse core structure in a fluid planet to date," says Mankovich.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Interesting Engineering: The Manatee Energy Storage Center -- the world's largest solar-powered battery storage facility -- is now 75% finished with 100 of 132 total containers already installed, reveals a press release from Florida Power and Light Company (FPL). The battery is housed in Manatee County as the name indicates and is expected to be fully operational by the end of the year. When completed, the system will have a 409-MW capacity with the ability to deliver 900 MWh of energy. This is enough electricity to power 329,000 homes for more than two hours.

The battery will serve to replace FPL's coal plants. The battery will store energy in order to bring electricity to homes even when the sun's not shining (at night and on cloudy days) meaning other more polluting power sources will not be required. Although customers are bound to see some financial benefits the main gains will be environmental. According to FPL, each battery module is capable of storing an amount of solar energy equivalent to roughly 2,000 iPhone batteries. The complete battery system will be equivalent to 100 million iPhone batteries and the energy storage containers will be organized across a 40-acre plot of land (the equivalent of 30 football fields). The battery will have a lifespan of 40 years.

"A start-up founded by scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology says it is nearing a technological milestone that could take the world a step closer to fusion energy, which has eluded scientists for decades," reports the New York Times: Researchers at M.I.T.'s Plasma Science and Fusion Center and engineers at the company, Commonwealth Fusion Systems, have begun testing an extremely powerful magnet that is needed to generate immense heat that can then be converted to electricity. It would open the gates toward what they believe could eventually be a fusion reactor... Though a fusion energy breakthrough remains elusive, it is still held out as one of the possible high-technology paths to ending reliance on fossil fuels. And some researchers believe that fusion research could finally take a leap forward this decade. More than two dozen private ventures in the United States, Europe, China and Australia and government-funded consortia are now investing heavily in efforts to build commercial fusion reactors. Total investment by people such as Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos is edging toward $2 billion. The federal government is also spending about $600 million each year on fusion research, and there is a proposed amendment to add $1 billion to the Biden administration's infrastructure bill, said Andrew Holland, chief executive of the Fusion Industry Association...

Commonwealth's new magnet, which will be one of the world's most powerful, will be a crucial component in a compact nuclear fusion reactor known as a Tokamak, a design that uses magnetic forces to compress plasma until it is hotter than the sun... Commonwealth Fusion executives claim that the magnet is a significant technology breakthrough that will make Tokamak designs commercially viable for the first time. They say they are not yet ready to test their reactor prototype, but the researchers are finishing the magnet and hope it will be workable by 2025...

Commonwealth, which has raised more than $250 million so far and employs 150 people, received a significant boost last year when physicists at M.I.T.'s Plasma Science and Fusion Center and the company published seven peer-reviewed papers in the Journal of Plasma Physics explaining that the reactor will work as planned. What remains to be proved is that the Commonwealth prototype reactor can produce more energy than it consumes, an ability that physicists define as Q greater than 1. The company is hoping that its prototype, when complete, will produce 10 times the energy it consumes.
Commonwealth's chief executive (also a plasma physicist) explains to the Times how fusion energy is different than other sources: because it really doesn't require any resources. "You add up all the costs, the cost of normal stuff like concrete and steel, and it will make as much power as a gas plant, but without having to pay for the gas."

A pretty little white flower that grows near urban centers of the Pacific Northwest turns out to be a killer. NPR reports: The bog-dwelling western false asphodel, Triantha occidentalis, was first described in the scientific literature in 1879. But until now, no one realized that this sweet looking plant used its sticky stem to catch and digest insects, according to researchers who note in their study published Monday that it's the first new carnivorous plant to be discovered in about 20 years. "We had no idea it was carnivorous," says Sean Graham, a botanist with the University of British Columbia. "This was not found in some exotic tropical location, but really right on our doorstep in Vancouver. You could literally walk out from Vancouver to this field site." Fewer than a thousand plant species are carnivorous, and these plants tend to live in places with abundant sun and water, but nutrient-poor soil.

Graham's team was doing an unrelated project on plant genetics and noticed that the western false asphodel had a genetic deletion that's sometimes seen in carnivorous plants. The researchers started to think about the fact that this flower grew in the kind of environment that's home to various other insect-eating plants. "And then they have these sticky stems," says Graham. "So, you know, it was kind of like, hmm, I wonder if this could be a sign that this might be carnivorous."

To see if the plants could actually take in nutrients from insects, researcher Qianshi Lin, now at the University of Toronto, Mississauga, fed fruit flies nitrogen-15 isotopes, so that this nitrogen could be used as a tracker. He then stuck these flies to stems of this plant. Later, an analysis showed that nitrogen from the dead insects was indeed getting into the plants. In fact, Triantha was getting more than half of its nitrogen from prey. In the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences published online Monday, Lin and his colleagues say that this is comparable to what's seen in other carnivorous plants. What's more, the researchers showed that the sticky hairs on the flower stalk produce a digestive enzyme that's known to be used by many carnivorous plants. And when the research team looked at specimens of this plant preserved in herbariums, they found small dead insects stuck to the stems.

Slashdot reader fahrbot-bot quotes the New York Times: Two red things are hiding in a part of the solar system where they shouldn't be. The space rocks may have come from beyond Neptune, and potentially offer hints at the chaos of the early solar system.

Scientists led by Sunao Hasegawa from JAXA, the Japanese space agency, reported in The Astrophysical Journal Letters on July 26, 2021 that two objects, called 203 Pompeja and 269 Justitia, spotted in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter appear to have originated beyond Neptune. The discoveries could one day provide direct evidence of the chaos that existed in the early solar system.

"If true it would be a huge deal," says Hal Levison, a planetary scientist at the Southwest Research Institute in Colorado, who was not involved in the research...

"People have been talking about some fraction of asteroids coming from the Kuiper belt for quite a while now," said Josh Emery, a planetary scientist from Northern Arizona University who was not involved in the paper. He said the research "definitely takes a step" toward finding evidence to support that hypothesis. Not everyone is convinced just yet. Dr. Levison, who was also not involved in the paper, says objects should become less red as they approach the sun. "It seems to be inconsistent with our models," said Dr. Levison, who is the head of NASA's Lucy mission, which is scheduled to launch in October to study Jupiter's Trojans [asteroids captured in its orbit].

Michaël Marsset from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a co-author on the paper, agrees that it's not clear why they would be so red, but it is possibly related to how long it took them to become implanted into the asteroid belt. Some Trojans may also be as red, but haven't been found yet.

To truly confirm the origin of 203 Pompeja and 269 Justitia, a spacecraft would likely need to visit them.

"A quake-measuring device on Mars is providing the first detailed look at the red planet's interior, revealing a surprisingly thin crust and a hot molten core beneath the frigid surface," reports the Associated Press: In a series of articles published this week, scientists reported that the Martian crust is within the thickness range of Earth's. The Martian mantle between the crust and core is roughly half as thick as Earth's. And the Martian core is on the high side of what scientists anticipated, although smaller than the core of our own nearly twice-as-big planet.

These new studies confirm that the Martian core is molten. But more research is needed to know whether Mars has a solid inner core like Earth's, surrounded by a molten outer core, according to the international research teams. Stronger marsquakes could help identify any multiple core layers, scientists said Friday. The findings are based on about 35 marsquakes registered by a French seismometer on NASA's InSight stationary lander, which arrived at Mars in 2018...

InSight has been hit with a power crunch in recent months. Dust covered its solar panels, just as Mars was approaching the farthest point in its orbit around the sun. Flight controllers have boosted power by using the lander's robot arm to release sand into the blowing wind to knock off some of the dust on the panels. The seismometer has continued working, but all other science instruments remain on hiatus because of the power situation — except for a German heat probe was declared dead in January after it failed to burrow more than a couple feet (half a meter) into the planet.

The three studies and a companion article appeared in Thursday's edition of the journal Science.

A four-year-old startup says it has built an inexpensive battery that can discharge power for days using one of the most common elements on Earth: iron. From a report: Form Energy's batteries are far too heavy for electric cars. But it says they will be capable of solving one of the most elusive problems facing renewable energy: cheaply storing large amounts of electricity to power grids when the sun isn't shining and wind isn't blowing. The work of the Somerville, Mass., company has long been shrouded in secrecy and nondisclosure agreements. It recently shared its progress with The Wall Street Journal, saying it wants to make regulators and utilities aware that if all continues to go according to plan, its iron-air batteries will be capable of affordable, long-duration power storage by 2025.

Its backers include Breakthrough Energy Ventures, a climate investment fund whose investors include Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos. Form recently initiated a $200 million funding round, led by a strategic investment from steelmaking giant ArcelorMittal one of the world's leading iron-ore producers. Form is preparing to soon be in production of the "kind of battery you need to fully retire thermal assets like coal and natural gas" power plants, said the company's chief executive, Mateo Jaramillo, who developed Tesla's Powerwall battery and worked on some of its earliest automotive powertrains. On a recent tour of Form's windowless laboratory, Mr. Jaramillo gestured to barrels filled with low-cost iron pellets as its key advantage in the rapidly evolving battery space. Its prototype battery, nicknamed Big Jim, is filled with 18,000 pebble-size gray pieces of iron, an abundant, nontoxic and nonflammable mineral.

For a lithium-ion battery cell, the workhorse of electric vehicles and today's grid-scale batteries, the nickel, cobalt, lithium and manganese minerals used currently cost between $50 and $80 per kilowatt-hour of storage, according to analysts. Using iron, Form believes it will spend less than $6 per kilowatt-hour of storage on materials for each cell. Packaging the cells together into a full battery system will raise the price to less than $20 per kilowatt-hour, a level at which academics have said renewables plus storage could fully replace traditional fossil-fuel-burning power plants. A battery capable of cheaply discharging power for days has been a holy grail in the energy industry, due to the problem that it solves and the potential market it creates.

Wildfire smoke from Canada and the Western United States stretched across North America this week, covering skies in a thick haze, tinting the sun a malevolent red and triggering health alerts from Toronto to Philadelphia. Air quality remained in the unhealthy range across much of the East Coast on Wednesday morning. From a report: The map below, based on modeling from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, shows how the smoke spread across the country. It reflects fine particulate pollution released by wildfires and does not include pollution from other human sources, like power plants and cars. It's not unprecedented to see smoke travel such long distances, said Roisin Commane, an atmospheric scientist at Columbia University, but it doesn't always descend to the surface. The air quality index, a measure developed by the Environmental Protection Agency, spiked across the Midwest and East Coast this week, with numbers hovering around 130 to 160 in New York City, a range where members of sensitive groups and the general public may experience adverse health effects. (The index runs from 0 to 500; the higher the number, the greater the level of air pollution, with readings over 100 considered particularly unhealthy.)

NPR: Wearing a cowboy hat under the West Texas morning sun, Jeff Bezos crossed the bridge to enter the capsule made by his company Blue Origin. He was accompanied by three others -- his brother Mark Bezos, female aviation pioneer Wally Funk and 18-year-old Oliver Daemen. Then the shuttle hatch closed and just before 9:15 a.m. ET, the four blasted into space on the first human flight on Blue Origin's New Shepard launch vehicle. Bezos is the second billionaire this month to reach the edge of space: Richard Branson rocketed there last week aboard a vessel made by his company Virgin Galactic. The date of the New Shepard's maiden launch is no accident: July 20 was the day in 1969 that Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin landed on the moon. Further reading: 'Mercury 13' pilot Wally Funk carried 60 years of history to space on Blue Origin flight.

Slashdot reader sciencehabit shares news from Science magazine: When a giant space rock struck the waters near Mexico's Yucatán Peninsula 66 million years ago, it sent up a blanket of dust that blotted out the Sun for years, sending temperatures plummeting and killing off the dinosaurs. The impact also generated a tsunami in the Gulf of Mexico that some modelers believe sent an initial tidal wave up to 1500 meters (or nearly 1 mile) high crashing into North America, one that was followed by smaller pulses.

Now, for the first time, scientists have discovered fossilized megaripples from this tsunami buried in sediments in what is now central Louisiana.

"It's great to actually have evidence of something that has been theorized for a really long time," says Sean Gulick, a geophysicist at the University of Texas, Austin. Gulick was not involved in the work, but he co-led a campaign in 2016 to drill down to the remains of the impact crater, called Chicxulub... Cores from the 2016 drilling expedition helped explain how the impact crater was formed and charted the disappearance and recovery of Earth's life. In 2019, researchers reported the discovery of a fossil site in North Dakota, 3000 kilometers north of Chicxulub, that they say records the hours after the impact and includes debris swept inland from the tsunami.

"We have small pieces of the puzzle that keep getting added in," says Alfio Alessandro Chiarenza, a paleontologist at the University of Vigo who was not involved with the new study. "Now this research is another one, giving more evidence of a cataclysmic tsunami that probably inundated [everything] for thousands of miles."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from NPR: Barry Diller made his name in the film industry as the chairman and CEO of two Hollywood studios, Paramount Pictures and what was then 20th Century Fox. Now, he is declaring the industry dead. "The movie business is over," Diller said in an exclusive interview with NPR on the sidelines of the Allen & Company Sun Valley Conference, a media and technology conference in Idaho. "The movie business as before is finished and will never come back." Yes, that has to do with a substantial decline in ticket sales and the closure of movie theaters during the coronavirus pandemic. But Diller, the chairman and senior executive of IAC, a company that owns Internet properties, said, "It is much more than that."

According to Diller, who ran Paramount and Fox several decades ago, streaming has altered the film industry in substantial ways, including the quality of movies now being made. Last year, several media conglomerates, including Disney and WarnerMedia, decided to debut new releases in movie theaters and on streaming services simultaneously. That was a radical change, and theater chains protested it. "There used to be a whole run-up," Diller said, remembering how much time, energy and money studios invested in distribution and publicity campaigns. The goal, he said, was to generate sustained excitement and enthusiasm for new movies. "That's finished," he said.

The way companies measure success is also different, according to Diller. "I used to be in the movie business where you made something really because you cared about it," he said, noting that popular reception mattered more than anything else. When asked about Quibi, the now-defunct streaming platform founded by Jeffrey Katzenberg, the former chairman of Walt Disney Studios, Diller said: "Quibi was just a bad idea. I mean, it's that simple."

"It was a bad idea that had no testing ground other than a big-scale investment," Diller said. "Otherwise, it would have slithered around for a while. But it was such a big-scale thing that it lived and died in a millisecond." Diller added: "It has no relevance on anything. The idea of professional, A-quality 10-minutes-or-less stuff just made no sense."

For billions of years, Earth has been playing a cosmic game of hide-and-seek. New research published today in Nature posits that roughly 1,700 stars are in the right position to have spotted life on Earth as early as 5,000 years ago. From a report: These stars, within 100 parsecs (or about 326 light-years) of the sun, were found using data from NASA's Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite and the European Space Agency's Gaia mission. And with thousands of exoplanets already found orbiting other stars in our universe, could we have already seen life on other planets come and go? Might they have seen us? "The universe is dynamic," says Lisa Kaltenegger, director of the Carl Sagan Institute at Cornell, and lead author of the study. "Stars move, we move. First the Earth moves around the sun, but the sun moves around the center of our galaxy."

About 70% of exoplanets are found using the transit method: when a planet passes between a star and an observer, the star dims enough to confirm the presence of a previously unseen celestial body. Kaltenegger and coauthor Jackie Faherty of the American Museum of Natural History compiled a list of stars that either will see or already have seen Earth transit in their lifetimes. Of these, they found seven stars with orbiting exoplanets that could potentially be habitable. Statistically, one out of four stars has a planet that exists in the "Goldilocks zone" -- not too hot, not too cold, and just far away from a star to support life. But how do we determine whether faraway exoplanets meet these criteria? When transiting exoplanets block stellar light, part of that light filters through the atmosphere. Energy and light interact with the molecules and atoms of that planet, and by the time that light reaches an astronomer's telescope, scientists can determine whether it has interacted with chemicals like oxygen or methane. A combination of those two, Kaltenegger says, is the fingerprint for life.

"Frank McCourt, the billionaire real estate mogul and former owner of the Los Angeles Dodgers, is pouring $100 million into an attempt to rebuild the foundations of social media," reports Bloomberg: The effort, which he has loftily named Project Liberty, centers on the construction of a publicly accessible database of people's social connections, allowing users to move records of their relationships between social media services instead of being locked into a few dominant apps.

The undercurrent to Project Liberty is a fear of the power that a few huge companies — and specifically Facebook Inc. — have amassed over the last decade... Project Liberty would use blockchain to construct a new internet infrastructure called the Decentralized Social Networking Protocol. With cryptocurrencies, blockchain stores information about the tokens in everyone's digital wallets; the DSNP would do the same for social connections. Facebook owns the data about the social connections between its users, giving it an enormous advantage over competitors. If all social media companies drew from a common social graph, the theory goes, they'd have to compete by offering better services, and the chance of any single company becoming so dominant would plummet.

Building DSNP falls to Braxton Woodham, the co-founder of the meal delivery service Sun Basket and former chief technology officer of Fandango, the movie ticket website... McCourt hired Woodham to build the protocol, and pledged to put $75 million into an institute at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., and Sciences Po in Paris to research technology that serves the common good. The rest of his $100 million will go toward pushing entrepreneurs to build services that utilize the DSNP...

A decentralized approach to social media could actually undermine the power of content moderation, by making it easier for users who are kicked off one platform to simply migrate their audiences to more permissive ones. McCourt and Woodham say blockchain could discourage bad behavior because people would be tied to their posts forever...

Eventually, the group plans to create its own consumer product on top of the DSNP infrastructure, and wrote in a press release that the eventual result will be an "open, inclusive data economy where individuals own, control and derive greater social and economic value from their personal information."

The Earth is trapping nearly twice as much heat as it did in 2005, according to new research, described as an "unprecedented" increase amid the climate crisis. From a report: Scientists from NASA, the US space agency, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (Noaa), reported in a new study that Earth's "energy imbalance approximately doubled" from 2005 to 2019. The increase was described as "alarming." "Energy imbalance" refers to the difference between how much of the Sun's "radiative energy" is absorbed by Earth's atmosphere and surface, compared to how much "thermal infrared radiationâ bounces back into space.

"A positive energy imbalance means the Earth system is gaining energy, causing the planet to heat up," NASA said in a statement about this study. Scientists determined there was an energy imbalance by comparing data from satellite sensors -- which track how much energy enters and exits Earth's system -- and data from ocean floats. This system of data-gathering floats, which stretches across the globe, allows for "an accurate estimate of the rate at which the world's oceans are heating up." Because about 90% of excess energy from an imbalance winds up in the ocean, the satellite sensors' data should correspond with temperature changes in oceans.

Bloomberg Businessweek reports on "renewed interest in cables that can power consumers in one country with electricity generated hundreds, even thousands, of miles away in another" and possibly even transcontinental, submarine electricity superhighways: Coal, gas and even nuclear plants can be built close to the markets they serve, but the utility-scale solar and wind farms many believe essential to meet climate targets often can't. They need to be put wherever the wind and sun are strongest, which can be hundreds or thousands of miles from urban centers. Long cables can also connect peak afternoon solar power in one time zone to peak evening demand in another, reducing the price volatility caused by mismatches in supply and demand as well as the need for fossil-fueled back up capacity when the sun or wind fade. As countries phase out carbon to meet climate goals, they'll have to spend at least $14 trillion to strengthen grids by 2050, according to Bloomberg New Energy Finance. That's only a little shy of projected spending on new renewable generation capacity and it's increasingly clear that high- and ultra-high-voltage direct current lines will play a part in the transition.

The question is how international will they be...?
The article points out that in theory, Mongolia's Gobi desert "has potential to deliver 2.6 terawatts of wind and solar power — more than double the U.S.'s entire installed power generation capacity — to a group of Asian powerhouse economies that together produce well over a third of global carbon emissions..." The same goes for the U.S., where with the right infrastructure, New York could tap into sun- and wind-rich resources from the South and Midwest. An even more ambitious vision would access power from as far afield as Canada or Chile's Atacama Desert, which has the world's highest known levels of solar power potential per square meter. Jeremy Rifkin, a U.S. economist who has become the go-to figure for countries looking to remake their infrastructure for the digital and renewable future, sees potential for a single, 1.1 billion-person electricity market in the Americas that would be almost as big as China's. Rifkin has advised Germany and the EU, as well as China...

Persuading countries to rely on each other to keep the lights on is tough, but the universal, yet intermittent nature of solar and wind energy also makes it inevitable, according to Rifkin. "This isn't the geopolitics of fossil fuels," owned by some and bought by others, he says. "It is biosphere politics, based on geography. Wind and sun force sharing...."

If these supergrids don't get built, it will be because their time has both come and gone. Not only are they expensive, politically difficult, and unpopular — they have to cross a lot of backyards — their focus on mega-power installations seems outdated to some. Distributed microgeneration as close to home as your rooftop, battery storage, and transportable hydrogen all offer competing solutions to the delivery problems supergrids aim to solve.

Florida's fired Department of Health data manager Rebekah Jones has been "permanently suspended" from Twitter, "for violations of the Twitter Rules on spam and platform manipulation," a Twitter spokesperson tells Slashdot.

Florida's Sun-Sentinel reports: Jones, a former Department of Health data manager fired for alleged insubordination, emerged as a political lightning rod as COVID-19 cases spiked in Florida last year. Supporters see her as a whistleblower speaking truth to power and exposing an effort by the state to paint a rosier picture of the pandemic. Her detractors say she has peddled disinformation for her own financial benefit, unfairly casting doubt on the reliability of Florida's COVID-19 statistics... Jones helped to build the state's online coronavirus dashboard in the early days of the pandemic. In May 2020, she was fired from her post at the Florida Department of Health, where she was manager of Geographic Information Systems. Jones said her bosses pressured her to manipulate statistics to justify reopening the state amid lockdown.
In an article Monday Forbes investigated "the curious case of Rebekah Jones' suspension," citing a researcher who specializes in Twitter fraud: There was clearly a concentrated surge in new follower activity... What is not known is whether Rebekah Jones purchased the followers herself, or whether it was a false-flag campaign meant to discredit her (someone else purchased the followers and directed them at her account to make it appear she broke Twitter's rules).

Nearly 21,000 followers were added in a short amount of time...
Following up with Twitter's spokesperson, Slashdot asked them about Forbes' theory, and whether they had evidence that Jones herself (and not one of her detractors) had perpetrated the surge in follower activity.

Twitter's response? "We have nothing further to add beyond what I shared."

Jones had already attained more than 400,000 followers, reports the Washington Post. But they also note that her suspension is now being celebrated on Twitter by Florida governor DeSantis's press secretary, "who was hired after she wrote an article calling Jones's claims 'a big lie.'" DeSantis's office also pointed to an April Twitter thread from a prominent disinformation researcher alleging that an app has surreptitiously directed thousands of users to follow a number of accounts, including Jones's. Jones responded to the researcher, according to a screenshot, with a tweet saying: "This is insane."

"I've never heard of this app," she wrote.
Jones has since opened a new account on Instagram named "insubordinatescientist".

18-inch tall robots on four wheels zipping across city sidewalks "stopped people in their tracks as they whipped out their camera phones," reports the Florida Sun-Sentinel.

"The bots' mission: To deliver restaurant meals cheaply and efficiently, another leap in the way food comes to our doors and our tables." The semiautonomous vehicles were engineered by Kiwibot, a company started in 2017 to game-change the food delivery landscape...

In May, Kiwibot sent a 10-robot fleet to Miami as part of a nationwide pilot program funded by the Knight Foundation. The program is driven to understand how residents and consumers will interact with this type of technology, especially as the trend of robot servers grows around the country. And though Broward County is of interest to Kiwibot, Miami-Dade County officials jumped on board, agreeing to launch robots around neighborhoods such as Brickell, downtown Miami and several others, in the next couple of weeks... "Our program is completely focused on the residents of Miami-Dade County and the way they interact with this new technology. Whether it's interacting directly or just sharing the space with the delivery bots," said Carlos Cruz-Casas, with the county's Department of Transportation...

Remote supervisors use real-time GPS tracking to monitor the robots. Four cameras are placed on the front, back and sides of the vehicle, which the supervisors can view on a computer screen. [A spokesperson says later in the article "there is always a remote and in-field team looking for the robot."] If crossing the street is necessary, the robot will need a person nearby to ensure there is no harm to cars or pedestrians. The plan is to allow deliveries up to a mile and a half away so robots can make it to their destinations in 30 minutes or less.
Earlier Kiwi tested its sidewalk-travelling robots around the University of California at Berkeley, where at least one of its robots burst into flames. But the Sun-Sentinel reports that "In about six months, at least 16 restaurants came on board making nearly 70,000 deliveries...

"Kiwibot now offers their robotic delivery services in other markets such as Los Angeles and Santa Monica by working with the Shopify app to connect businesses that want to employ their robots." But while delivery fees are normally $3, this new Knight Foundation grant "is making it possible for Miami-Dade County restaurants to sign on for free."

A video shows the reactions the sidewalk robots are getting from pedestrians on a sidewalk, a dog on a leash, and at least one potential restaurant customer looking forward to no longer having to tip human food-delivery workers.

After teasing Windows 10's next UI refresh last week, Microsoft confirmed Wednesday that "the next generation of Windows" will be announced on June 24. CNBC reports: Windows, the dominant operating system for personal computers, is the source of 14% of total revenue for Microsoft, one of the most valuable companies in the world. The company has pushed two updates each year to its Windows 10 operating system since it first became available in 2015. Nadella made the Windows remarks last week shortly after the company announced that it won't ship Windows 10X. That operating system was initially designed for dual-screen devices such as the Surface Neo, which has been delayed.

The company is working on an update to Windows with the code name Sun Valley, that includes a more modern look, with rounded corners coming to components such as the Start menu. Microsoft could ship a revamp of its Windows app store, which would allow developers to use third-party commerce systems, alongside the Sun Valley update. The event will be held online at 11 a.m. ET, according to an invitation the company sent to reporters. Nadella will be there, along with Panos Panay, Microsoft's chief product officer, who has been the face of the company's Surface devices, the invitation said.

In March of 2020, Florida's governor was assuring the state that there was no evidence of Covid-19 in Florida, remembers the Washington Post. But there was — as far back as January.

The Miami Herald reports that when questioned Florida's Department of Health told its data manager to hide that data from public view, "emails from within the agency reviewed by the Miami Herald and others show." Eventually that data manager was fired, and within months her home had been raided by gun-toting police officers.

But that's not the end of the story. The latest development? That data manager is now instead "officially a whistleblower under Florida law, the Office of the Inspector General told her attorneys Friday," the Miami Herald reports. The Inspector General now says the data manager has indeed shown "reasonable cause to suspect that an employee or agent of an agency or independent contractor has violated [a] federal, state or local law, rule or regulation." Slashdot reader whoever57 notes the move "will grant her certain protections."

The Miami Herald reports: Rebekah Jones, who was responsible for building the COVID-19 data dashboard for the Florida Department of Health, was fired last year after raising concerns about "misleading data" being presented to the public, according to the complaint, which was reviewed by the Miami Herald. In the complaint, filed July 17, 2020, Jones alleged she was fired for "opposition and resistance to instructions to falsify data in a government website." She described being asked to bend data analysis to fit pre-determined policy and delete data from public view after questions from the press — actions she claimed "represent an immediate injury to the public health, safety, and welfare, including the possibility of death to members of the public."

On Friday, the Office of the Inspector General informed Jones that "the information disclosed does meet the criteria for whistleblower status as described by ... Florida statutes," according to the email obtained by the Herald... "It's pretty huge," Jones told the Herald in response to the news. "This isn't vindication but this is a start. It's a big push forward...."

A department spokesperson said at the time that Jones was fired for "insubordination."
There's now an ongoing investigation into Jones' allegations. And in December Florida's Sun-Sentinel newspaper cited other issues with the state government's transparency:

• The Florida Department of Health's county-level spokespeople were ordered in September to stop issuing public statements about COVID-19 until after the Nov. 3 election.

• State officials withheld information about infections in schools, prisons, hospitals and nursing homes, relenting only under pressure or legal action from family members, advocacy groups and journalists.

• The governor highlighted statistics that would paint the rosiest picture possible and attempted to cast doubt on the validity of Florida's rising death toll.

"Unfortunately, the possibility of the Department of Health manipulating information is not a stretch," writes the editorial board of the Miami Herald.

For that reason, they write that Jones' whistleblower victory "stands to be a win over state secrecy for the rest of us."