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The Biden administration is poised to lend $1.5 billion for what what would be the first restart of a shuttered US nuclear reactor, the latest sign of strengthening federal government support for the atomic industry. Bloomberg: The funding, which is set to get conditional backing from the US Energy Department, will be offered as soon as next month to closely held Holtec International to restart its Palisades nuclear plant in Michigan, according to people familiar with the matter. Holtec has said a restart of the reactor is contingent on a federal loan. Without such support, the company has said it would decommission the site. The financing comes as the Biden administration prioritizes maintaining the nation's fleet of nuclear plants to help meet its ambitious climate goals -- including a plan to decarbonize the electricity grid by 2035. More than a dozen reactors have closed since 2013 amid competition from cheaper power from natural gas and renewables, and the Energy Department has warned that as many of half of the nation's nuclear reactors are at risk of closing due to economic factors.

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Endeavour raised into position for California Science Center's 'Go For Stack'

For the first time in more than ten years, a Space Shuttle has been raised into launch position. Although the completed stack won't be seeing a launchpad any time soon.…

An anonymous reader shares a report: Microsoft's adoption of Rust continues apace if a posting on the IT titan's careers website is anything to go by. Although headcount at Microsoft might currently be down -- by two percent compared to the previous year -- recruitment persists at the Windows giant. In this case, the company is forming a team of Rustaceans to tackle a platform move away from C#. The job, a principal software architect for Microsoft 365, has responsibilities that include "guiding technical direction, design and implementation of Rust component libraries, SDKs, and re-implementation of existing global scale C# based services to Rust." According to the post, the job lurks within the Substrate App Platform group, part of the Microsoft 365 Core Platform organization. The Substrate does the heavy lifting behind the scenes for Microsoft's cloud services, making a rewrite into Rust quite a statement of intent. Microsoft said: "We are forming a new team focused on enabling the adoption of the Rust programming language as the foundation to modernizing global scale platform services, and beyond."

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When Redmond says unsupported, it really means it. Windows 11 fans beware

Old Windows 10 hardware is struggling to open some recently updated Microsoft applications, giving anyone running Windows 11 on unsupported hardware a glimpse of their potential future.…

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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No restrictions, but it could be harder to deal with American businesses

The chip wars between Washington and Beijing keep grinding on with more than a dozen Chinese tech companies now being added to a list of entities claimed by the Department of Defense (DoD) to be working for the military.…

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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It even had the gall to set the ransom demand at $800K … for a nonprofit

Ransomware gang LockBit is claiming responsibility for an attack on a Chicago children's hospital in an apparent deviation from its previous policy of not targeting nonprofits.…

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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They're just an algorithm away, national lab engineer tells El Reg

Feature When the first commercial coal-fired electric power plants came online, starting with the Holborn Viaduct power station that supplied electricity to the City of London in January 1882, the world was changed forever. Fast forward 142 years, and the world has changed a lot.…

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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'Deepest apologies to the sub-postmasters and their families'

Fujitsu's CFO is the latest in the the Japanese vendor's exec ranks to apologize for the megacorp's role in the Post Office Horizon scandal, widely viewed as one of the greatest miscarriages of justice in UK history.…

Holding up the EV supply chain is not a great start to 2024

Huawei is experiencing production issues with a computing unit that powers advanced driver assistance systems in electric vehicles, known as the MDC 810, according to a recent report from Reuters.…

When 'what's the value to the economy?' wasn't front of mind

SPACE WEEK It will soon be half a century since NASA's Voyager probes were launched on a tour of the solar system. The reason for their unprecedented longevity is unprecedented, but modern realities mean that we might not see their like again.…

Staff at Northern Ireland facility voted in ballot that forces drivemaker's hand, union says

Seagate workers building external hard drives in Northern Ireland have voted for trade union recognition, meaning they now have collective bargaining rights and potentially a layer of employment protection.…

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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Building semiconductors into fabrics often hits a snag, which a new fiber pulling technique seeks to avoid

Smart clothing is a go-to item on the hype-cycle bandwagon, which never seems to arrive. Yet for anyone wanting to play Doom on their knitwear, a glimmer of hope was reported by scientists this week.…

At least it's no longer an afterthought

Systems Approach In 1996, Larry Peterson and I published the first edition of Computer Networks: A Systems Approach in the hope that it would become a widely adopted textbook in networking classes. Our draft manuscripts had been reviewed by a number of professors so we had a decent amount of feedback regarding the content and overall structure of the book.…

Good start, but we want further reassurance, says Competition and Markets Authority

Google so far has lived up to its commitments to make room in its Privacy Sandbox for rivals, though the UK's Competition and Markets Authority says a number of concerns still have to be addressed before the web giant's ambitious advertising technology gets its blessing.…

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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