news aggregator

An anonymous reader shares a report: In a landmark move, Illinois state lawmakers have passed a bill banning AI from acting as a standalone therapist and placing firm guardrails on how mental health professionals can use AI to support care. Governor JB Pritzker signed the bill into law on Aug. 1. The legislation, dubbed the Wellness and Oversight for Psychological Resources Act, was introduced by Rep. Bob Morgan and makes one thing clear: only licensed professionals can deliver therapeutic or psychotherapeutic services to another human being. [...] Under the new state law, mental health providers are barred from using AI to independently make therapeutic decisions, interact directly with clients, or create treatment plans -- unless a licensed professional has reviewed and approved it. The law also closes a loophole that allows unlicensed persons to advertise themselves as "therapists."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Stricken spacecraft gives scientists the silent treatment

NASA has called it quits on attempts to contact its Lunar Trailblazer probe, notching up a failure in its low-cost, high-risk science program.…

For years, whistle-blowers have warned that fake results are sneaking into the scientific literature at an increasing pace. A new statistical analysis backs up the concern. From a report: A team of researchers found evidence of shady organizations churning out fake or low-quality studies on an industrial scale. And their output is rising fast, threatening the integrity of many fields. "If these trends are not stopped, science is going to be destroyed," said LuÃs A. Nunes Amaral, a data scientist at Northwestern University and an author of the study, which was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on Monday. Science has made huge advances over the past few centuries only because new generations of scientists could read about the accomplishments of previous ones. Each time a new paper is published, other scientists can explore the findings and think about how to make their own discoveries. Fake scientific papers produced by commercial "paper mills" are doubling every year and a half, according to the report. Northwestern University researchers examined over one million papers and identified networks of fraudulent studies sold to scientists seeking to pad their publication records. The team estimates the actual scope of fraud may be 100 times greater than currently detected cases. Paper mills charge hundreds to thousands of dollars for fake authorship and often target specific research fields like microRNA cancer studies.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Plan would embed location verification in advanced semiconductors to combat black market exports

The Trump administration wants better ways to track the location of chips, as part of attempts to prevent advanced AI accelerator hardware from getting into Chinese hands.…

OneWeb constellation may be smaller, but it's suddenly looking like a safer bet for some

Paris-based Eutelsat is reporting rocketing revenues in Low Earth Orbit (LEO) satellite services, driven partly by an uptick in interest from governments seeking to reduce reliance on US providers.…

You can build your own robot CHILD for under $1,000

Before humanoid robots walk among us, they'll be operated remotely, in part to gather the training data to develop Vision-Language-Action Models for autonomous, nonlethal bipedal ambulation.…

These are the conference events to keep an eye on. You can even stream a few

The security industry is hitting Vegas hard this week with three conferences in Sin City that bring the world's largest collection of security pros together for the annual summer camp.…

Chipmaker said it caught the ‘unauthorized activity’ early

Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC) has launched legal proceedings against an unknown number of employees as it investigates a potential breach of trade secrets.…

BrianFagioli shares a report from NERDS.xyz: Synchron has just released a public demo showing something that used to feel impossible. A man with ALS is now using his iPad with nothing but his brain. No hands. No voice. No eye-tracking. Just thought. The man in the video is named Mark. He's part of Synchron's COMMAND clinical study and has an implant called the Stentrode. It sits inside his brain's blood vessels and picks up his motor intention. Those signals get sent wirelessly to an external decoder, which then tells the iPad what to do. It's all made possible by Apple's new Brain-Computer Interface Human Interface Device protocol, which lets iPadOS treat brain activity like an actual input method. Apple's built-in Switch Control feature makes the whole thing work on the software side. The iPad even sends back screen context to the BCI decoder to make everything run more smoothly and accurately. [...] Synchron was the first company to start clinical trials with a permanently implanted BCI. The big difference here is that it doesn't require open brain surgery. The device is implanted through the blood vessels, which makes it way more practical for real-world use.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Developer community skeptical following 'long silent stagnation' of the framework and accompanying SDK

Microsoft lead software engineer Beth Pan has stated that WinUI, the modern user interface framework for Windows, will be made "truly open source," though no date is yet set because of deep entanglements with proprietary code in the operating system.…