Posted by EditorDavid

https://science.slashdot.org/story/25/08/17/0011242/can-we-harness-light-like-nature-for-a-new-era-of-green-chemistry?utm_source=rss1.0mainlinkanon&utm_medium=feed

Sunlight becomes energy when plants convert four photons of light. But unfortunately, most attempts at synthetic light-absorbing chemicals can only absorb one photon at a time, write two researchers from the University of Melbourne. "In the Polyzos research group at the School of Chemistry, we have developed a new class of photocatalysts that, like plants, can absorb energy from multiple photons." This breakthrough allows us to harness light energy more effectively, driving challenging and energy-demanding chemical reactions. We have applied this technology to generate carbanions — negatively charged carbon atoms that serve as crucial building blocks in the creation, or synthesis, of carbon- and hydrogen-rich chemicals known as organic chemicals. Carbanions are vital in making drugs, polymers and many other important materials. However, traditional methods to produce carbanions often require lots of energy and dangerous reagents, and generate significant chemical waste, posing environmental and safety challenges... Our new method offers a greener, safer alternative [using visible light and renewable starting materials]... We've used it to synthesize important drug molecules, including antihistamines, in a single step using simple, cheap and commonly available "commodity chemicals" — amines and alkenes. And importantly, the reaction scales well in commercial-scale continuous flow reactors, highlighting its potential for industrial applications. "By learning from the subtle mastery of photosynthesis," the researchers write, their group "is forging a new paradigm for chemical manufacturing — one where sunlight powers sustainable and elegant solutions for the molecules that shape our world."

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https://science.slashdot.org/story/25/08/17/0011242/can-we-harness-light-like-nature-for-a-new-era-of-green-chemistry?utm_source=rss1.0mainlinkanon&utm_medium=feed

Posted by EditorDavid

https://news.slashdot.org/story/25/08/16/0434221/illinois-bans-ai-therapy-joins-two-other-states-in-regulating-chatbots?utm_source=rss1.0mainlinkanon&utm_medium=feed

"Illinois last week banned the use of artificial intelligence in mental health therapy," reports the Washington Post, "joining a small group of states regulating the emerging use of AI-powered chatbots for emotional support and advice." Licensed therapists in Illinois are now forbidden from using AI to make treatment decisions or communicate with clients, though they can still use AI for administrative tasks. Companies are also not allowed to offer AI-powered therapy services — or advertise chatbots as therapy tools — without the involvement of a licensed professional. Nevada passed a similar set of restrictions on AI companies offering therapy services in June, while Utah also tightened regulations for AI use in mental health in May but stopped short of banning the use of AI. The bans come as experts have raised alarms about the potential dangers of therapy with AI chatbots that haven't been reviewed by regulators for safety and effectiveness. Already, cases have emerged of chatbots engaging in harmful conversations with vulnerable people — and of users revealing personal information to chatbots without realizing their conversations were not private. Some AI and psychiatry experts said they welcomed legislation to limit the use of an unpredictable technology in a delicate, human-centric field.

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https://news.slashdot.org/story/25/08/16/0434221/illinois-bans-ai-therapy-joins-two-other-states-in-regulating-chatbots?utm_source=rss1.0mainlinkanon&utm_medium=feed

Posted by EditorDavid

https://science.slashdot.org/story/25/08/16/2045223/researchers-solve-long-standing-mystery-after-voyagers-1986-flyby-of-uranus?utm_source=rss1.0mainlinkanon&utm_medium=feed

"The planet Uranus emits more heat than it gets from the Sun," reports Science Daily , citing a new study led by University of Houston researchers, in collaboration with planetary scientists worldwide. "This means it's still slowly losing leftover heat from its early history," says the first author on the paper, "a key piece of the puzzle that helps us understand its origins and how it has changed over time." The study found the planet emitting about 12.5% more heat than it absorbs via sunlight, which "suggests Uranus does have its own internal heat — an advance that not only informs NASA's future missions but also deepens scientists' understanding of planetary systems, including processes that influence Earth's climate and atmospheric evolution." The discovery resolves a long-standing scientific mystery about the giant planet, because observational analyses from Voyager 2 in 1986 didn't suggest the presence of significant internal heat — contradicting scientists' understanding of how giant planets form and evolve... Additionally, the team's methodology provides testable theories and models that could also be applied to explore radiant energy of other planets within and beyond our solar system... It could even impact technology innovation and climate understanding on Earth [giving insights intoi "the fundamental processes that shape planetary atmospheres, weather systems and climate systems," said one of the paper's authors.] The article adds that the researchers now think the planet "may have a different interior structure or evolutionary history compared to the other giant planets."

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https://science.slashdot.org/story/25/08/16/2045223/researchers-solve-long-standing-mystery-after-voyagers-1986-flyby-of-uranus?utm_source=rss1.0mainlinkanon&utm_medium=feed

Posted by EditorDavid

https://news.slashdot.org/story/25/08/16/1749228/remember-the-companies-making-vital-open-source-contributions?utm_source=rss1.0mainlinkanon&utm_medium=feed

Matt Asay answered questions from Slashdot readers in 2010 as the then-COO of Canonical. Today he runs developer marketing at Oracle (after holding similar positions at AWS, Adobe, and MongoDB). And this week Asay contributed an opinion piece to InfoWorld reminding us of open source contributions from companies where "enlightened self-interest underwrites the boring but vital work — CI hardware, security audits, long-term maintenance — that grassroots volunteers struggle to fund." [I]f you look at the Linux 6.15 kernel contributor list (as just one example), the top contributor, as measured by change sets, is Intel... Another example: Take the last year of contributions to Kubernetes. Google (of course), Red Hat, Microsoft, VMware, and AWS all headline the list. Not because it's sexy, but because they make billions of dollars selling Kubernetes services... Some companies (including mine) sell proprietary software, and so it's easy to mentally bucket these vendors with license fees or closed cloud services. That bias makes it easy to ignore empirical contribution data, which indicates open source contributions on a grand scale. Asay notes Oracle's many contributions to Linux: In the [Linux kernel] 6.1 release cycle, Oracle emerged as the top contributor by lines of code changed across the entire kernel... [I]t's Oracle that patches memory-management structures and shepherds block-device drivers for the Linux we all use. Oracle's kernel work isn't a one-off either. A few releases earlier, the company topped the "core of the kernel" leaderboard in 5.18, and it hasn't slowed down since, helping land the Maple Tree data structure and other performance boosters. Those patches power Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI), of course, but they also speed up Ubuntu on your old ThinkPad. Self-interested contributions? Absolutely. Public benefit? Equally absolute. This isn't just an Oracle thing. When we widen the lens beyond Oracle, the pattern holds. In 2023, I wrote about Amazon's "quiet open source revolution," showing how AWS was suddenly everywhere in GitHub commit logs despite the company's earlier reticence. (Disclosure: I used to run AWS' open source strategy and marketing team.) Back in 2017, I argued that cloud vendors were open sourcing code as on-ramps to proprietary services rather than end-products. Both observations remain true, but they miss a larger point: Motives aside, the code flows and the community benefits. If you care about outcomes, the motives don't really matter. Or maybe they do: It's far more sustainable to have companies contributing because it helps them deliver revenue than to contribute out of charity. The former is durable; the latter is not. There's another practical consideration: scale. "Large vendors wield resources that community projects can't match." Asay closes by urging readers to "Follow the commits" and "embrace mixed motives... the point isn't sainthood; it's sustainable, shared innovation. Every company (and really every developer) contributes out of some form of self-interest. That's the rule, not the exception. Embrace it." Going forward, we should expect to see even more counterintuitive contributor lists. Generative AI is turbocharging code generation, but someone still has to integrate those patches, write tests, and shepherd them upstream. The companies with the most to lose from brittle infrastructure — cloud providers, database vendors, silicon makers — will foot the bill. If history is a guide, they'll do so quietly.

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Posted by EditorDavid

https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/25/08/16/0335211/virtual-power-plants-where-home-batteries-are-saving-americans-from-blackouts?utm_source=rss1.0mainlinkanon&utm_medium=feed

Puerto Rico expects 93 different power outages this summer, reports the Washington Post. But they also note that "roughly 1 in 10 Puerto Rican homes now have a battery and solar array for backup power" which have also "become a crucial source of backup power for the entire island grid." A network of 69,000 home batteries can generate as much electricity as a small natural gas turbine during an emergency, temporarily covering about 2 percent of the island's energy needs when things go wrong... "It has very, very certainly prevented more widespread outages," said Daniel Haughton, [transmission and distribution planning director for Puerto Rico's grid operator]. "In the instances that we had to [cut power], it was for a much shorter duration: A four-hour outage became a one- or two-hour outage." Puerto Rico's experience offers a glimpse into the future for the rest of the United States, where batteries are starting to play a big role in keeping the lights on. Authorities in Texas, California and New England have credited home batteries with preventing blackouts during summer energy crunches. As power grids across the country groan under the increasing strain of new data centers, factories and EVs, batteries offer a way for homeowners to protect themselves — and all of their neighbors — from the threat of outages. Batteries have been booming in the U.S. since 2022, when Congress created generous installation tax credits for homeowners and power companies. Home batteries generally come as an option alongside rooftop solar panels, according to Christopher Rauscher, head of grid services and electrification for Sunrun, a company that installs both. More than 70 percent of the people who hire Sunrun to put up solar panels also get a battery. With the tax credits — and the money saved on rising electricity costs — solar panels and batteries make financial sense for most American homes, according to a study Stanford University scientists published Aug. 1. About 60 percent of homes would save money in the long run with solar panels and batteries... Those batteries can have broader benefits, too. Utilities pay customers hundreds of dollars a year to sign their batteries up to form "virtual power plants," which send electricity to the grid whenever power plants can't keep up with demand. California's network of home batteries can now add 535 megawatts of electricity in an emergency — about half as much energy as a nuclear power plant... [H]omeowners can make thousands of dollars a year lowering their energy bills, selling solar power back to the grid or enrolling their batteries in a virtual power plant, depending on their power company's policies and state regulations. "Over time, you would get the full payback for your system and basically get your backup for free," said Ram Rajagopal, an associate professor of civil and environmental engineering who co-authored the Stanford study.

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https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/25/08/16/0335211/virtual-power-plants-where-home-batteries-are-saving-americans-from-blackouts?utm_source=rss1.0mainlinkanon&utm_medium=feed

Posted by EditorDavid

https://developers.slashdot.org/story/25/08/16/0658254/python-surges-in-popularity-and-so-does-perl?utm_source=rss1.0mainlinkanon&utm_medium=feed

Last month, Python "reached the highest ranking a programming language ever had in the TIOBE index," according to TIOBE CEO Paul Jansen. "We thought Python couldn't grow any further, but AI code assistants let Python take yet another step forward." According to recent studies of Stanford University (Yegor Denisov-Blanch), AI code assistants such as Microsoft Copilot, Cursor or Google Gemini Code Assist are 20% more effective if used for popular programming languages. The reason for this is obvious: there is more code for these languages available to train the underlying models. This trend is visible in the TIOBE index as well, where we see a consolidation of languages at the top. Why would you start to learn a new obscure language for which no AI assistance is available? This is the modern way of saying that you don't want to learn a new language that is hardly documented and/or has too few libraries that can help you. TIOBE's "Programming Community Index" attempts to calculate the popularity of languages using the number of skilled engineers, courses, and third-party vendors. It nows gives Python a 26.14% rating, which TechRepublic notes "is well ahead of the next two programming languages on this month's leaderboard: C++ is at 9.18% and C is 9.03%." But the first top six languages haven't changed since last year... PythonC++C JavaC#JavaScript Since August of 2024 SQL has dropped from its #7 rank down to #12 (meaning Visual Basic and Go each rise up one rank from their position a year ago, into the #7 and #8 positions). In the last year Perl has risen from the #25 position to #9, beating out Delphi/Oracle Pascal at #10, and Fortran at #11 (last year's #10). TIOBE CEO Jansen "told TechRepublic in an email that many people were asking why Perl was becoming more popular, but he didn't have a definitive answer. He said he double-checked the underlying data and found the increase to be accurate, though the reason for the shift remains unclear."

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https://developers.slashdot.org/story/25/08/16/0658254/python-surges-in-popularity-and-so-does-perl?utm_source=rss1.0mainlinkanon&utm_medium=feed