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Scientists have grown tooth-like structures using a combination of pig and human cells, marking a step toward potential alternatives to dental implants, researchers at Tufts University School of Dental Medicine reported. The team, led by Pamela Yelick and Weibo Zhang, cultivated the structures by seeding cells into pig tooth scaffolds and implanting them in mini pigs' jaws. After two months, the bioengineered teeth developed hard tissue layers similar to natural teeth, including dentin and cementum. While not yet fully formed teeth, the structures could eventually lead to living replacements for lost teeth, addressing limitations of current titanium implants.

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DeepSeek's AI app will highly likely face a US consumer ban after topping download charts on Apple's App Store and Google Play, according to analysts at US investment bank Jefferies. The US federal government, Navy and Texas have already banned the app, and analysts expect broader restrictions using legislation similar to that targeting TikTok. While consumer access may be blocked, US developers could still be allowed to self-host DeepSeek's model to eliminate security risks, the analysts added. Even if completely banned, DeepSeek's impact on pushing down AI costs will persist as US companies work to replicate its technology, Jefferies said in a report this week reviewed by Slashdot. The app's pricing advantage remains significant, with OpenAI's latest o3-mini model still costing 100% more than DeepSeek's R1 despite being 63% cheaper than o1-mini. The potential ban comes amid broader US-China tech tensions. While restrictions on H20 chips appear unlikely given their limited training capabilities, analysts expect the Biden administration's AI diffusion policies to remain largely intact under Trump, with some quota increases possible for overseas markets based on their AI activity levels.

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For those for whom a runny white or a hard yolk is just not good un œuf

Researchers have put computational fluid dynamics software to good use in devising a solution to the age-old problem of the perfect soft-boiled egg.…

AMD will launch its new Radeon RX 9070-series graphics cards in March 2025, promising "high-quality gaming to mainstream players" amid struggling sales. The company's gaming division reported $563 million in Q4 2024 revenue, down 59% year-over-year. The new cards will target the same market segment as Nvidia's RTX 4070 Ti ($799) and 4070 Super ($599), featuring a 4nm TSMC manufacturing process, ML-enhanced FSR 4 upscaling, and next-generation ray-tracing accelerators. Steam Hardware Survey shows AMD's current RX 7000-series cards have minimal market presence, with only the 7900 XTX and 7700 XT registering on the list. Industry research indicates AMD sells approximately one GPU for every seven or eight sold by Nvidia. The launch timing could be opportune, as Nvidia's upcoming RTX 5070 features fewer CUDA cores than the RTX 4070 Super it replaces.

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20 years? More like five for real-world workloads says company's Quantum AI lead

Despite ongoing breakthroughs, quantum computing has struggled to shake the perception that it's always another ten years away from being practical. However, researchers at Google now argue the tech is actually much closer to commercial viability than some would have you believe.…

AI researchers at Stanford and the University of Washington were able to train an AI "reasoning" model for under $50 in cloud compute credits, according to a research paper. From a report: The model, known as s1, performs similarly to cutting-edge reasoning models, such as OpenAI's o1 and DeepSeek's R1, on tests measuring math and coding abilities. The s1 model is available on GitHub, along with the data and code used to train it. The team behind s1 said they started with an off-the-shelf base model, then fine-tuned it through distillation, a process to extract the "reasoning" capabilities from another AI model by training on its answers. The researchers said s1 is distilled from one of Google's reasoning models, Gemini 2.0 Flash Thinking Experimental. Distillation is the same approach Berkeley researchers used to create an AI reasoning model for around $450 last month.

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Concerns around unfixed problems remain after system resulted in harm to some 150 patients

The US Department of Veterans Affairs has restarted a project to implement Oracle electronic health records in its hospitals after the project was suspended in 2023.…

Joseph Firmage, a former Silicon Valley prodigy who built a $2.5 billion web services company in the 1990s, is now being sued by investors who claim he defrauded them through an alleged antigravity machine scheme. In 1998, at the height of his success as CEO of USWeb, Firmage claimed an alien appeared in his bedroom, derailing his corporate career. He then spent decades pursuing UFO research and attempting to develop antigravity propulsion technology, raising millions from investors. Court documents allege Firmage and associates are responsible for roughly $25 million in losses through various companies and schemes. Some investors say he used elaborate ruses, including people impersonating government officials, to solicit funds. Firmage, currently in jail on elder abuse charges, maintains he was actually the victim of international scammers who exploited his access to investors.

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Preview arrives in Canary Channel, release planned for Windows 10 and 11

Microsoft has released its first in-box public preview of Windows MIDI Services with full support for the MIDI 2.0 standard.…

In 2022, writer and activist Cory Doctorow coined the term "enshittification" to describe the gradual deterioration of a service or product. The term's prevalence has increased to the point that it was the National Dictionary of Australia's word of the year last year. The editors at Ars Technica, having "covered a lot of things that have been enshittified," decided to highlight some of the worst examples the've come across. Here's a summary of each thing mentioned in their report: Smart TVs: Evolved into data-collecting billboards, prioritizing advertising and user tracking over user experience and privacy. Features like convenient input buttons are sacrificed for pushing ads and webOS apps. "This is all likely to get worse as TV companies target software, tracking, and ad sales as ways to monetize customers after their TV purchases -- even at the cost of customer convenience and privacy," writes Scharon Harding. "When budget brands like Roku are selling TV sets at a loss, you know something's up." Google's Voice Assistant (e.g., Nest Hubs): Functionality has degraded over time, with previously working features becoming unreliable. Users report frequent misunderstandings and unresponsiveness. "I'm fine just saying it now: Google Assistant is worse now than it was soon after it started," writes Kevin Purdy. "Even if Google is turning its entire supertanker toward AI now, it's not clear why 'Start my morning routine,' 'Turn on the garage lights,' and 'Set an alarm for 8 pm' had to suffer." Portable Document Format (PDF): While initially useful for cross-platform document sharing and preserving formatting, PDFs have become bloated and problematic. Copying text, especially from academic journals, is often garbled or impossible. "Apple, which had given the PDF a reprieve, has now killed its main selling point," writes John Timmer. "Because Apple has added OCR to the MacOS image display system, I can get more reliable results by screenshotting the PDF and then copying the text out of that. This is the true mark of its enshittification: I now wish the journals would just give me a giant PNG." Televised Sports (specifically cycling and Formula 1): Streaming services have consolidated, leading to significantly increased costs for viewers. Previously affordable and comprehensive options have been replaced by expensive bundles across multiple platforms. "Formula 1 racing has largely gone behind paywalls, and viewership is down significantly over the last 15 years," writes Eric Berger. "Major US sports such as professional and college football had largely been exempt, but even that is now changing, with NFL games being shown on Peacock, Amazon Prime, and Netflix. None of this helps viewers. It enshittifies the experience for us in the name of corporate greed." Google Search: AI overviews often bury relevant search results under lengthy, sometimes inaccurate AI-generated content. This makes finding specific information, especially primary source documents, more difficult. "Google, like many big tech companies, expects AI to revolutionize search and is seemingly intent on ignoring any criticism of that idea," writes Ashley Belanger. Email AI Tools (e.g., Gemini in Gmail): Intrusive and difficult to disable, these tools offer questionable value due to their potential for factual inaccuracies. Users report being unable to fully opt-out. "Gmail won't take no for an answer," writes Dan Goodin. "It keeps asking me if I want to use Google's Gemini AI tool to summarize emails or draft responses. As the disclaimer at the bottom of the Gemini tool indicates, I can't count on the output being factual, so no, I definitely don't want it." Windows: While many complaints about Windows 11 originated with Windows 10, the newer version continues the trend of unwanted features, forced updates, and telemetry data collection. Bugs and performance issues also plague the operating system. "... it sure is easy to resent Windows 11 these days, between the well-documented annoyances, the constant drumbeat of AI stuff (some of it gated to pricey new PCs), and a batch of weird bugs that mostly seem to be related to the under-the-hood overhauls in October's Windows 11 24H2 update," writes Andrew Cunningham. "That list includes broken updates for some users, inoperable scanners, and a few unplayable games. With every release, the list of things you need to do to get rid of and turn off the most annoying stuff gets a little longer." Web Discourse: The rapid spread of memes, trends, and corporate jargon on social media has led to a homogenization of online communication, making it difficult to distinguish original content and creating a sense of constant noise. "[T]he enshittifcation of social media, particularly due to its speed and virality, has led to millions vying for their moment in the sun, and all I see is a constant glare that makes everything look indistinguishable," writes Jacob May. "No wonder some companies think AI is the future."

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Fleets built to handle peak demand will lose money, leaving humans driving to the rescue

Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi is warning that it's not yet possible to commercialize autonomous vehicles due to high costs, seasonal demand fluctuations, and the need to prove "superhuman" safety.…

57% higher price point and app compatibility issues aren't helping

There remains little love for notebooks containing AI-capable processors and even less for Microsoft's Copilot+ models, with premium pricing, software compatibility, and opaque benefits cited as the reasons.…

Lennart Poettering gave packed-out keynote talk. Jack Dorsey … didn't

FOSDEM 2025 FOSDEM returned to Brussels for the first weekend in February – not without some controversial people.…

'Fetch' just got a lot more interesting

You can teach a robotic dog new tricks, it seems, with mechanic canines now being deployed in tests to detect and defuse bomb threats.…

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Down an easy-to-miss turnoff on the A48 just outside Chepstow on the Welsh border, the gentle rumble of trucks, cranes and people at work mixes with birdsong in what is an otherwise peaceful rural setting. It is a crisp and sunny winter morning when I visit and, at first glance, the site appears to be little more than prefab containers and a car park. Yet, behind the scenes a group of men and women with expertise in diving, marine biology, technology, finance, construction and manufacturing are building something extraordinary. They have come together with a single mission statement: to make humans aquatic. Their project is called Deep (not The Deep) and the site was chosen after a global search for the perfect location to build and test underwater accommodation, which the project founders say will enable them to establish a "permanent human presence" under the sea from 2027. So far, so crazy sounding. Yet Deep is funded by a single anonymous private investor with deep pockets who wants to put hundreds of millions of pounds (if not more) into a project that will "increase understanding of the ocean and its critical role for humanity," according to a Deep spokesperson. Its leadership team remains tight-lipped not only about the amount (they will only say it is substantially more than the 100 million pounds being invested into the Deep campus near Chepstow), but also about the investor's identity. Whoever is behind it, the size of the investment means that an ambitious-sounding idea appears to be swiftly becoming a reality. [...] Mike Shackleford, Deep's chief operating officer, explains the thought process behind the project. "Back in the 1950s and 60s, there was a space race and an ocean race going on, and space won out. Space is tough to get to, but once you're up there, it's a relatively benign environment." The ocean is the opposite: it's fairly easy to get to the bottom, but once you're down there, "basically, everything wants to kill you," he jokes. "Yet, just about every oceanographer I've met says, 'You'd be shocked at how little we know about the ocean,'" Shackleford tells me. "So somebody has got to take those first steps to try to build some of the technology that will allow us to go down and study the ocean in situ." The idea of Deep's sentinels is that, initially, people will be able to stay inside for up to 28 days at a time -- though the hope is that this could one day be extended to months ... and beyond. "The goal is to live in the ocean, for ever. To have permanent human settlements in all oceans across the world," says Shackleford.

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Download speeds of 41.9 Gbps and upload speeds of 20.6 Gbps achieved, claims BT division

Network builder and maintainer Openreach says it has tested a 50 Gbps fiber broadband connection in the UK, as a first step towards making it commercially available at some point in the distant future.…

Individual publishers could be held liable for visitors' off-topic posts, legal eagle argues

Analysis Individuals who run their own website could be held liable for, weirdly enough, off-topic visitor-posted comments that break the UK's Online Safety Act.…

Somewhat stale range of Muskmobiles, competition from China, Elon being Elon, or all of the above?

Registration of new Tesla cars slumped across Europe in January, as Chinese electric-vehicle makers racked up enormous growth.…

A new study reveals that two Grand Canyon-sized valleys were formed in less than 10 minutes by "floods of rocks traveling as fast as bullets," reports Space.com. From the report: Scientists analyzed the lunar canyons, named Vallis Schrodinger and Vallis Planck, to find that these huge valleys measure 167 miles long (270 kilometers) and nearly 1.7 miles (2.7 km) deep, and 174 miles long (280 km) and nearly 2.2 miles deep (3.5 km), respectively. In comparison, the Grand Canyon is 277 miles long (446 km) and is, at most, about 1.2 miles deep (1.9 km), the researchers noted. [...] This pair of lunar canyons represents two of many valleys radiating out from Schrodinger basin, a crater about 200 miles wide (320 km) that was blasted out of the lunar crust by a cosmic impact about 3.81 billion years ago. This structure is located in the outer margin of the moon's largest and oldest remaining impact crater, the South Pole-Aitken basin, which measures about 1,490 miles wide (2,400 km) and dates about 4.2 billion to 4.3 billion years old. [...] The scientists estimate that rocky debris flew out from the impact at speeds between 2,125 to 2,860 miles per hour (3,420 to 4,600 km/h). In comparison, a bullet from a 9mm Luger handgun might fly at speeds of about 1,360 mph (2,200 km/h). The researchers suggest the energy needed to create both of these canyons would have been more than 130 times the energy in the current global inventory of nuclear weapons. "The lunar canyons we describe are produced by streams of rock, whereas the Grand Canyon was produced by a river of water," [said David Kring, a geologist at the Lunar and Planetary Institute of the Universities Space Research Association]. "The streams of rock were far more energetic than the river of water, which is why the lunar canyons were produced in minutes and the Grand Canyon produced over millions of years." The findings have been published in the journal Nature.

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The British are coming, the British are coming ... to terms with their loss

Arm has given up on terminating one of its key licenses with Qualcomm, leaving the latter free to continue producing homegrown Arm-compatible chips for PCs, phones, and servers.…