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Scientists are developing biomarkers to objectively measure pain, addressing a fundamental medical challenge that has contributed to the opioid crisis and led to consistent underestimation of pain in women and minorities. Four research teams funded by the Department of Health and Human Services are developing technologies to quantify pain like other vital signs. Their approaches include a blood test for endometriosis pain, a device measuring nerve response through pupil dilation, microneedle patches sampling interstitial fluid, and a wearable sensor detecting pain markers in sweat. "When patients are told that the pain is all in their head, the implication is that it's imagined, but the irony is that's sort of right," said Adam Kepecs, a neuroscience professor at Washington University. "The pain only exists in your brain. It's neural activity, which is why it's invisible and uniquely personal. But it's still real." These innovations could transform treatment for the nearly 25% of Americans suffering from chronic pain, while potentially saving billions in healthcare costs.

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Official PoE+ HAT+ for the Pi 5 still MIA

The Raspberry Pi team has launched a Power-over-Ethernet Injector aimed at users who are seeking to add some juice to their network but who lack a network switch capable of doing so.…

The Pentagon has canceled its troubled Defense Civilian Human Resources Management System after years of delays and budget overruns, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said. The project, launched in 2018 with a one-year timeline and $36 million budget, ultimately ran eight years and exceeded costs by $280 million, reaching 780% over budget. "We're not doing that anymore," Hegseth said in a video announcing the cancellation. Officials have 60 days to develop a new plan to modernize DoD's civilian HR systems. The cuts are part of a broader $580 million spending reduction that includes $360 million in diversity, climate change and COVID-19 grant programs, plus $30 million in consulting contracts with Gartner and McKinsey.

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Google has confirmed that a technical issue has permanently deleted location history data for numerous users of its Maps application, with no recovery possible for most affected customers. The problem emerged after Google transitioned its Timeline feature from cloud to on-device storage in 2024 to enhance privacy protections. Users began reporting missing historical location data on support forums and social media platforms in recent weeks. "This is the result of a technical issue and not user error or an intentional change," said a Google spokesperson. Only users who manually enabled encrypted cloud backups before the incident can recover their data, according to Google. The company began shifting location storage policies in 2023, initially stopping collection of sensitive location data including visits to abortion clinics and domestic violence shelters.

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$280 million of excess spending makes for a ripe - and reasonable - DOGE target

After blowing deadlines and budgets for years, the Pentagon has finally pulled the plug on a troubled project to overhaul its outdated civilian HR IT systems.…

schwit1 writes: A compact, deep-sea, cable-cutting device, capable of severing the world's most fortified underwater communication or power lines, has been unveiled by China -- and it could shake up global maritime power dynamics. The revelation marks the first time any country has officially disclosed that it has such an asset, capable of disrupting critical undersea networks. The tool, which is able to cut lines at depths of up to 4,000 metres (13,123 feet) -- twice the maximum operational range of existing subsea communication infrastructure -- has been designed specifically for integration with China's advanced crewed and uncrewed submersibles like the Fendouzhe, or Striver, and the Haidou series.

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China's Cyberspace Administration and Ministry of Public Security have outlawed the use of facial recognition without consent. From a report: The two orgs last Friday published new rules on facial recognition and an explainer that spell out how orgs that want to use facial recognition must first conduct a "personal information protection impact assessment" that considers whether using the tech is necessary, impacts on individuals' privacy, and risks of data leakage. Organizations that decide to use facial recognition must data encrypt biometric data, and audit the information security techniques and practices they use to protect facial scans. Chinese that go through that process and decide they want to use facial recognition can only do so after securing individuals' consent. The rules also ban the use of facial recognition equipment in public places such as hotel rooms, public bathrooms, public dressing rooms, and public toilets. The measures don't apply to researchers or to what machine translation of the rules describes as "algorithm training activities" -- suggesting images of citizens' faces are fair game when used to train AI models.

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Looking to sort through large volumes of security info? Redmond has your backend

Microsoft's Security Copilot is getting some degree of agency, allowing the underlying AI model to interact more broadly with the company's security software to automate various tasks.…

Countries must develop their own artificial intelligence infrastructure or risk significant economic losses as the technology transforms global economies, Mistral CEO Arthur Mensch said last week. "It will have an impact on GDP of every country in the double digits in the coming years," Mensch told the A16z podcast, warning that nations without domestic AI systems would see capital flow elsewhere. The French startup executive compared AI to electricity adoption a century ago. "If you weren't building electricity factories, you were preparing yourself to buy it from your neighbors, which creates dependencies," he said.

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prisoninmate shares a report: Highlights of Linux 6.14 include Btrfs RAID1 read balancing support, a new ntsync subsystem for Win NT synchronization primitives to boost game emulation with Wine, uncached buffered I/O support, and a new accelerator driver for the AMD XDNA Ryzen AI NPUs (Neural Processing Units). Also new is DRM panic support for the AMDGPU driver, reflink and reverse-mapping support for the XFS real-time device, Intel Clearwater Forest server support, support for SELinux extended permissions, FUSE support for io_uring, a new fsnotify file pre-access event type, and a new cgroup controller for device memory.

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The answer to the ultimate question of Linux, the Universe, and Everything?

Fedora 42 is now in beta testing, with more desktops and editions than ever.…

CEO steps down after multiple failed attempts to take the DNA testing company private

Beleaguered DNA testing biz 23andMe - hit by a massive cyber attack in 2023 - is filing for bankruptcy protection in the US following years of financial uncertainty.…

DNA-testing company 23andMe has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection [non-paywalled source] in Missouri and announced CEO Anne Wojcicki's immediate resignation, weeks after rejecting her proposal to buy back the business she co-founded. The bankruptcy filing represents "the best path forward to maximize the value of the business," said Mark Jensen, board member and special committee chair.

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First woman and first person of color pledges dropped

The purge of DEI language from US federal websites has claimed another victim. This time, it is NASA's pledge to land the first woman and the first person of color on the Moon as part of the Artemis program.…

Return to office, hours and intensity of work cited as reasons to walk

Two in five techies quit in the past year because their employer didn't offer requisite flexibility with respect to hours, location and the "intensity of work."…

It's been a very busy week for Digicash Donald's administration

Analysis Is the US retreating from its hardline stance on crypto? On Friday, the US Treasury Department lifted sanctions imposed on notorious crypto mixer Tornado Cash, once accused of washing billions in illicit crypto for criminals and nation-states alike.…

It's "live-recording the World Wide Web," according to NPR, with a digital library that includes "hundreds of billions of copies of government websites, news articles and data." They described the 29-year-old nonprofit Internet Archive as "more relevant than ever." Every day, about 100 terabytes of material are uploaded to the Internet Archive, or about a billion URLs, with the assistance of automated crawlers. Most of that ends up in the Wayback Machine, while the rest is digitized analog media — books, television, radio, academic papers — scanned and stored on servers. As one of the few large-scale archivists to back up the web, the Internet Archive finds itself in a particularly unique position right now... Thousands of [U.S. government] datasets were wiped — mostly at agencies focused on science and the environment — in the days following Trump's return to the White House... The Internet Archive is among the few efforts that exist to catch the stuff that falls through the digital cracks, while also making that information accessible to the public. Six weeks into the new administration, Wayback Machine director [Mark] Graham said, the Internet Archive had cataloged some 73,000 web pages that had existed on U.S. government websites that were expunged after Trump's inauguration... According to Graham, based on the big jump in page views he's observed over the past two months, the Internet Archive is drawing many more visitors than usual to its services — journalists, researchers and other inquiring minds. Some want to consult the archive for information lost or changed in the purge, while others aim to contribute to the archival process.... "People are coming and rallying behind us," said Brewster Kahle, [the founder and current director of the Internet Archive], "by using it, by pointing at things, helping organize things, by submitting content to be archived — data sets that are under threat or have been taken down...." A behemoth of link rot repair, the Internet Archive rescues a daily average of 10,000 dead links that appear on Wikipedia pages. In total, it's fixed more than 23 million rotten links on Wikipedia alone, according to the organization. Though it receives some money for its preservation work for libraries, museums, and other organizations, it's also funded by donations. "From the beginning, it was important for the Internet Archive to be a nonprofit, because it was working for the people," explains founder Brewster Kahle on its donations page: Its motives had to be transparent; it had to last a long time. That's why we don't charge for access, sell user data, or run ads, even while we offer free resources to citizens everywhere. We rely on the generosity of individuals like you to pay for servers, staff, and preservation projects. If you can't imagine a future without the Internet Archive, please consider supporting our work. We promise to put your donation to good use as we continue to store over 99 petabytes of data, including 625 billion webpages, 38 million texts, and 14 million audio recordings. Two interesting statistics from NPR's article: "A Pew Research Center study published last year found that roughly 38% of web pages on the internet that existed in 2013 were no longer accessible as of 2023." "According to a Harvard Law Review study published in 2014, about half of all links cited in U.S. Supreme Court opinions no longer led to the original source material." Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader jtotheh for sharing the news.

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Tweaks mean smoother operation even on low-end kit

GNOME 48 is here, with some under-the-hood tweaks to improve performance even on low-end kit.…

Education authority still searching for an alternative after 13 years

A public body in Northern Ireland has granted Capita £208 million in additional contracts and extensions without competition after ditching a £485 million Fujitsu deal last November.…

Throw a spanner in the works, best get good at fixing things. Now, where did you put that spanner?

Opinion Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity. This works well in sane times, less so when "but it's both" is the default. Apply it to Microsoft's decision to make bug reports include not only a working example but a video of the same, and the meter oscillates wildly. What were they thinking? What did they expect?…