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Ten years of data from a nationwide survey of physicians confirm another trend that's worsened through the pandemic: Burnout rates among doctors in the United States, which were already high a decade ago, have risen to alarming levels. From a report: Results released this month and published in Mayo Clinic Proceedings, a peer-reviewed journal, show that 63 percent of physicians surveyed reported at least one symptom of burnout at the end of 2021 and the beginning of 2022, an increase from 44 percent in 2017 and 46 percent in 2011. Only 30 percent felt satisfied with their work-life balance, compared with 43 percent five years earlier. "This is the biggest increase of emotional exhaustion that I've ever seen, anywhere in the literature," said Bryan Sexton, the director of Duke University's Center for Healthcare Safety and Quality, who was not involved in the survey efforts. The most recent numbers also compare starkly with data from 2020, when the survey was run during the early stages of the pandemic. Then, 38 percent of doctors surveyed reported one or more symptoms of burnout while 46 percent were satisfied with their work-life balance.

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You even have until the end of the 2030s to get it done

The US Department of Energy has announced plans to award up to $50 million in funds to private businesses to develop a working fusion pilot plant (FPP) by the 2030s. …

As a rapidly advancing climate emergency turns the planet ever hotter, the Dallas-based biotechnology company Colossal Biosciences has a vision: "To see the Woolly Mammoth thunder upon the tundra once again." Founders George Church and Ben Lamm have already racked up an impressive list of high-profile funders and investors, including Peter Thiel, Tony Robbins, Paris Hilton, Winklevoss Capital -- and, according to the public portfolio its venture capital arm released this month, the CIA. From a report: Colossal says it hopes to use advanced genetic sequencing to resurrect two extinct mammals -- not just the giant, ice age mammoth, but also a mid-sized marsupial known as the thylacine, or Tasmanian tiger, that died out less than a century ago. On its website, the company vows: "Combining the science of genetics with the business of discovery, we endeavor to jumpstart nature's ancestral heartbeat." In-Q-Tel, its new investor, is registered as a nonprofit venture capital firm funded by the CIA. On its surface, the group funds technology startups with the potential to safeguard national security. In addition to its long-standing pursuit of intelligence and weapons technologies, the CIA outfit has lately displayed an increased interest in biotechnology and particularly DNA sequencing.

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And bundles its best bits at bargain price in case someone wants you to work their way for a while

Atlassian is plugging away at its version of the future of work with an eye on the needs of the admins who tend its software.…

When you combine it with DHCP, that spells TRACK ME

Computer scientists at the University of Twente in the Netherlands have found the interplay between the internet and local networks can be analyzed to reveal private data and facilitate tracking.…

For decades, security researchers warned about techniques for hijacking virtualization software. Now one group has put them into practice. From a report: For decades, virtualization software has offered a way to vastly multiply computers' efficiency, hosting entire collections of computers as "virtual machines" on just one physical machine. And for almost as long, security researchers have warned about the potential dark side of that technology: theoretical "hyperjacking" and "Blue Pill" attacks, where hackers hijack virtualization to spy on and manipulate virtual machines, with potentially no way for a targeted computer to detect the intrusion. That insidious spying has finally jumped from research papers to reality with warnings that one mysterious team of hackers has carried out a spree of "hyperjacking" attacks in the wild. Today, Google-owned security firm Mandiant and virtualization firm VMware jointly published warnings that a sophisticated hacker group has been installing backdoors in VMware's virtualization software on multiple targets' networks as part of an apparent espionage campaign. By planting their own code in victims' so-called hypervisors --VMware software that runs on a physical computer to manage all the virtual machines it hosts -- the hackers were able to invisibly watch and run commands on the computers those hypervisors oversee. And because the malicious code targets the hypervisor on the physical machine rather than the victim's virtual machines, the hackers' trick multiplies their access and evades nearly all traditional security measures designed to monitor those target machines for signs of foul play. "The idea that you can compromise one machine and from there have the ability to control virtual machines en masse is huge," says Mandiant consultant Alex Marvi. And even closely watching the processes of a target virtual machine, he says, an observer would in many cases see only "side effects" of the intrusion, given that the malware carrying out that spying had infected a part of the system entirely outside its operating system. Mandiant discovered the hackers earlier this year and brought their techniques to VMware's attention. Researchers say they've seen the group carry out their virtualization hacking -- a technique historically dubbed hyperjacking in a reference to "hypervisor hijacking" -- in fewer than 10 victims' networks across North America and Asia. Mandiant notes that the hackers, which haven't been identified as any known group, appear to be tied to China.

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We gave the cloud gaming service two years to live. It managed three

Google on Thursday said it will shut down Stadia, its cloud-based game streaming service, because few people use it.…

Meta Platforms, the owner of Facebook and Instagram, said it will freeze hiring and restructure some teams in an effort to cut costs and shift priorities. From a report: Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg announced the social networking company's freeze during a weekly Q&A session with employees, according to a person in attendance. He added that the company would reduce budgets across most teams, even teams that are growing, and that individual teams will sort out how to handle headcount changes -- whether that means not filling roles that employees depart, shifting people to other teams, or working to "manage out people who aren't succeeding," according to remarks reviewed by Bloomberg. "I had hoped the economy would have more clearly stabilized by now, but from what we're seeing it doesn't yet seem like it has, so we want to plan somewhat conservatively," Zuckerberg said.

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Where we're going, we don't need efficiency cores. But we may need 1.21 jiggawatts

Analysis At this week's launch of Intel's 13th-gen Core series, it appears staff accidentally left out on display a wafer of previously undisclosed 34-core Raptor Lake processor dies.…

All new vehicles purchased in New York will need to be zero-emission models beginning in 2035, Gov. Kathy Hochul (D) announced on Thursday. From a report: "We're really putting our foot down on the accelerator and revving up our efforts to make sure we have this transition -- not someday in the future, but on a specific date, a specific year -- by the year 2035," Hochul said at a press conference in White Plains, N.Y. After careening into the Chester-Maple Parking Lot in a white Chevy Bolt, Hochul announced a series of new electric vehicle (EV) initiatives for the state, beginning with the zero-emission requirement for 2035. To reach this target, she said that 35 percent of new cars will need to be zero-emission by 2026 and 68 percent by 2030. All new school buses purchased will have to be zero-emission by 2027, with the entire fleet meeting these standards by 2035, according to the governor. "We actually have benchmarks to achieve, to show we're on the path to get there," Hochul said, stressing that the changes would not occur suddenly. New York is following in the footsteps of California in mandating zero-emissions vehicles by the year 2035. "We had to wait for California to take a step because there's some federal requirements that California had to go first -- that's the only time we're letting them go first," the governor said.

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Curb your enthusiasm – coal-fired power went up too

In a global first, wind and solar energy combined to generate more than 10 percent of the world's electricity in 2021 yet coal-fired power plant emissions jumped to new highs in the same period too.…

NASA's Juno spacecraft has made the closest approach to Jupiter's tantalizing, icy moon Europa in more than 20 years. From a report: Juno on Thursday zipped within 222 miles (357 kilometers) of Europa, thought to have an ocean flowing beneath its thick frozen crust, raising the possibility of underwater life. Scientists hope to get lucky and observe possible water plumes shooting from the surface of Europa, close in size to Earth's moon. "We have to be at the right place at just the right time, but if we are so fortunate, it's a home run for sure," Juno's chief scientist, Scott Bolton of Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio, said in a statement. John Bordi, deputy mission manager at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, expected the spacecraft to go "screaming by pretty fast," with a relative velocity of almost 15 miles per second (23.6 kilometers per second). Pictures should be available by Friday, NASA said. The latest observations will help NASA plan for its Europa Clipper mission, due to launch in 2024. The European Space Agency also plans close encounters with its Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer, or Juice, lifting off next year.

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An internet advertiser as your service provider – what could go wrong?

Google is planning to offer much faster broadband speeds in the US areas where it operates its fiber networks, all the way to 100Gbps.…

Google is shutting down Stadia, its cloud gaming service. From a report: The service will remain live for players until January 18th, 2023. Google will be refunding all Stadia hardware purchased through the Google Store as well as all the games and add-on content purchased from the Stadia store. Google expects those refunds will be completed in mid-January. "A few years ago, we also launched a consumer gaming service, Stadia," Stadia vice president and GM Phil Harrison said in a blog post. "And while Stadia's approach to streaming games for consumers was built on a strong technology foundation, it hasn't gained the traction with users that we expected so we've made the difficult decision to begin winding down our Stadia streaming service." Employees on the Stadia team will be distributed to other parts of the company. Harrison says Google sees opportunities to apply Stadia's technology to other parts of Google, like YouTube, Google Play, and its AR efforts, and the company also plans to "make it available to our industry partners, which aligns with where we see the future of gaming headed," he wrote.

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Plus RHEL has fresh release goodies out too

Red Hat has released betas of RHEL 8.7 and 9.1 while its parent company IBM is offering Linux mainframe instances in the cloud, although only in some regions.…

Office Insider? You might want to check refreshed email client

Microsoft has a preview out for its "Unified" Outlook for Windows app for all users on its Office Insider program, and said it will be available for those on the Windows Insider program in the near future.…

Project with Mitsubishi Heavy Industries marks shift in policy since Fukushima disaster over a decade ago

Japan is about to change course on energy policy following the Fukushima disaster in 2011 with a focus on developing safer nuclear reactors.…

VMware, Mandiant track back operators, finding ties to China

Emerging covert malware families that target VMware environments could allow criminals to gain persistent administrative access to the hypervisor, transfer files, and execute arbitrary commands between virtual machines, according to VMware and Mandiant, which discovered the software nasty earlier this year.…

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: The UK has "no chance in hell" of becoming technologically sovereign, Hermann Hauser, the co-founder of Amadeus Capital Partners and Acorn Computers, said at Bloomberg's Technology Summit in London. Hauser emphasized the need for Europe and the UK to have access to critical technologies so it is not dependent on countries like the US. He mentioned former US President Donald Trump, who he said used semiconductor design software as "a weapon to force other countries including Britain to do what he wants." "These dependencies are as severe now as military occupation was in the past," Hauser said. "And we just have to find our own independent access to critical technologies." One question countries have to ask themselves if whether they have all the critical technologies needed to run a country and its economy. "The answer for Britain" is "absolutely no, there is no chance in hell that Britain could ever become technologically sovereign," he said. Hauser added that Europe is clearly in a recession that could last a year or two. "It's difficult to know for how long with so many imponderables." "The UK in particular is in this very stormy period of having a financially undereducated chancellor, who goes by neoliberal ideology rather than rational decision making so that doesn't help," he added. "The UK has struggled to keep its tech firms owned by local investors," notes Bloomberg. "Arm, one of the most significant global tech companies, is currently being prepped to be floated in the US by its Japanese owner SoftBank." "French firm Schneider Electric SE has recently agreed to buy out minority shareholders in Aveva Group Plc, currently the UK's largest listed tech firm, in a deal that values the industrial software company at $10.8 billion."

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IP director claims he was skipped over for merit-based retention bonus because of the retention part

A 67-year-old director in Apple's Intellectual Property Enforcement unit is suing the company for age discrimination, alleging Apple unfairly took away a special bonus it uses to "retain key employees" in lead positions because of his age.…