05 Sci-Tech

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Excerpt from amp.majorcadailybulletin.com

Roger Ver, the global cryptocurrency guru nicknamed ‘Bitcoin Jesus’, has taken up residence in Mallorca after being arrested for an alleged 48 million tax fraud in the United States. The investor has hired the services of the prestigious Mallorcan lawyer Jaime Campaner, who has managed to get the National Court to release him, while it is decided whether he is finally extradited to the US or not.

The US Department of Justice had been following the movements of the multimillionaire in his mega yacht for some time and last month he was arrested in the port of Barcelona. He was provisionally imprisoned while his team of lawyers in California began the legal fight to free him. Finally, after hiring Campaner, Judge Santiago Pedraz agreed to release him from jail upon payment of a bail of 150,000 euros.

He withdrew his passport so that he could not leave Spain and ordered him to appear every two days at a court or police station to sign in. Now, according to Bulletin stablemate newspaper Ultima Hora, Roger Ver has been seen in Mallorca, interested in the real estate market as he wants to establish his residence on the island and will soon buy a house in a discreet area whose exact location has not been revealed.

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Excerpt from timesofindia.indiatimes.com

Meta, the company that owns Facebook and Instagram, recently announced plans to train its generative artificial intelligence (AI) models, specifically the Llama language models, using the publicly shared social media content by users in Europe. After receiving some backlash on the same, the company has now detailed how it will use the publically available content on its social media platforms, and pointed out that it is not the first company to do it by saying that Google and Microsoft-backed OpenAI has done the same.

“Meta is not the first company to do this – we are following the example set by others, including Google and OpenAI, both of which have already used data from European users to train AI,” the company said in a blog post.

“Our approach is more transparent and offers easier controls than many of our industry counterparts already training their models on similar publicly available information,” it added.

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Excerpt from

Electric vehicle owners can soon sell surplus battery power back to grids  Business Standard

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Excerpt from www.musicbusinessworldwide.com

In an order issued on Tuesday (May 28), the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia said it will hear oral arguments in the case in September.

Under the law signed by President Joe Biden in late April, ByteDance has until January 19, 2025 to sell TikTok, or at least convince the president that the process of selling TikTok is credibly underway, or effectively face a ban on the app. App stores like the Apple Store and Google Play would be forbidden from offering TikTok, and web hosting services would be forbidden from working with the app.

TikTok said the expedited pace of hearings means it may not have to file for an injunction to prevent the law from being enforced, according to a report from Reuters.

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Excerpt from finbold.com

Argentina’s National Securities Commission (CNV) recently met with El Salvador’s National Commission of Digital Assets (CNAD) to gain insights into Bitcoin (BTC) adoption and crypto regulation, according to an official report

This collaboration comes as Argentina’s political and regulatory landscape grows increasingly Bitcoin-friendly under the leadership of President Javier Milei.

On May 23, CNV president Roberto Silva, CNV vice president Patricia Boedo, and CNAD president Juan Carlos Reyes discussed El Salvador’s pioneering role as the first country to adopt Bitcoin as a legal tender in September 2021. Silva emphasized El Salvador’s leadership in crypto assets, stating:

 “El Salvador has emerged as one of the leading countries, not only in the use of Bitcoin, but has also stood out in the world of crypto assets.”

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Excerpt from www.forbes.com

Reducing prescription drug prices has long been a goal of Democrats in Congress and the White House. But in a strange twist, a group of Senate Democrats—along with one Republican—has backed a bill that would increase drug prices by preventing people from challenging weak or invalid patents.

 

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Excerpt from cbsaustin.com

A Senate committee tasked with looking into election security policies gave the green light to ask for records from certain big tech companies, including the potential for subpoenas, in a hearing on Wednesday.

The Senate State Affairs committee, chaired by Sen. Bryan Hughes, R- Mineola, unanimously passed a resolution authorizing subpoenas for Alphabet, the parent company of Google; Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram; TikTok; X, formerly known as Twitter; and “any other relevant company or entity.”

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Excerpt from timesofindia.indiatimes.com

 

NEW DELHI: Chinese astronauts on the Tiangong space station have successfully completed a record-breaking spacewalk, lasting nearly eight hours, to enhance the station’s defenses against space debris, state media reported on Wednesday.
Astronauts Jing Haipeng and Zhu Yangzhu carried out the extravehicular activity (EVA) on Tuesday, surpassing the previous duration record for Chinese spacewalks.The mission involved installing additional equipment and conducting maintenance to improve the station’s ability to withstand impacts from orbital debris, a South China Morning Post report said.

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Excerpt from www.rt.com

Brussels is reportedly considering whether to subject the Russian-made platform to its ‘disinformation’ laws

EU officials are considering listing Telegram as a “very large online platform,” a move that would open the privacy-focused messaging app up to stringent censorship rules, Bloomberg reported on Tuesday.

Bloomberg’s report cited anonymous sources who claimed that Brussels has reached out to Telegram in a bid to establish how many people regularly use the platform. Telegram claims that it has around 41 million monthly active users, a figure that places it below the EU’s 45-million-user threshold for strict regulation under its Digital Services Act (DSA).

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Excerpt from www.mynbc5.com

Vermont Gov. Phil Scott has allowed a bill into law without his signature that would make so-called “ghost guns” illegal in an effort to close loopholes around firearm background checks.The law, which goes into effect in March 2025, will make it illegal to own a firearm without a serial number. “It prevents people from printing guns off of a 3D printer or buying kits over the internet that are unserialized, so it makes sure they get a background check and get a serial number,” said Sen. Phil Baruth, the Senate President Pro Tem.

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Excerpt from www.cbsnews.com

An archaeological dig in France uncovered over two dozen dead horses and left researchers with a puzzling mystery.

The excavation, located in Villedieu-sur-Indre in Central France, uncovered several buildings, pits, ditches and even a pathway from the early Middle Ages, according to a news release from the country’s National Institute for Preventive Archaeological Research. The finds included nine pits containing the remains of horses.

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Excerpt from www.tpusa.com

Denver Police Department Plans to Deploy Drones for 911 Call Responses – TPUSA LIVE  Turning Point USA

Go to Article Excerpt from www.sciencenews.org

Atoms are normally made of a nucleus and electrons. But scientists are proposing a hunt for a new variety of atom without either. Tauonium (sometimes called “ditauonium” or “true tauonium”) would consist of a negatively charged tau lepton, and its positively charged antimatter counterpart, an antitau.

Tau leptons are relatives of electrons. Each tau has about 3,500 times an electron’s mass, making it heavier than a proton. In the 1950s, scientists discovered an atom called positronium, consisting of an electron and its positively charged antiparticle, a positron. Tauonium, if discovered, would be a burlier atom. 

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Excerpt from news.bloomberglaw.com

Twenty-seven states and three tech trade groups urged the Federal Circuit not to scrap Idaho’s “anti-patent troll” law in response to an unprecedented challenge to its constitutionality.

Idaho’s law barring the bad-faith assertion of patents in court—and particularly a bond requirement it imposes on non-practicing entities—is before the court in appeals filed by Longhorn IP LLC and an affiliate, Katana Silicon Technologies LLC.

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Excerpt from www.washingtontimes.com

China’s army has a new weapon in its arsenal: four-legged robot dogs with rifles mounted on their back, exhibited during its Golden Dragon training with Cambodia.

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Excerpt from www.irishtimes.com

OpenAI has created a board committee to evaluate the safety and security of its artificial intelligence models, a governance change made weeks after its top executive on the subject resigned and the company effectively disbanded his internal team.

The new committee will spend 90 days evaluating the safeguards in OpenAI’s technology before giving a report. “Following the full board’s review, OpenAI will publicly share an update on adopted recommendations in a manner that is consistent with safety and security,” the company said in a blog post on Tuesday.

OpenAI also said that it has recently started to train its latest AI model.

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Excerpt from www.nytimes.com

OpenAI said on Tuesday that it has begun training a new flagship artificial intelligence model that would succeed the GPT-4 technology that drives its popular online chatbot, ChatGPT.

The San Francisco start-up, which is one of the world’s leading A.I. companies, said in a blog post that it expects the new model to bring “the next level of capabilities” as it strives to build “artificial general intelligence,” or A.G.I., a machine that can do anything the human brain can do. The new model would be an engine for A.I. products including chatbots, digital assistants akin to Apple’s Siri, search engines and image generators.

OpenAI also said it was creating a new Safety and Security Committee to explore how it should handle the risks posed by the new model and future technologies.

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Excerpt from www.sciencealert.com

One of the most peculiar things about Uranus and Neptune is their magnetic fields. Each of these planets has a hot mess of a magnetosphere, off-kilter and tilted wildly from the rotational axis in a way that’s not seen in any other planet.

It’s not entirely clear why, but thanks to a team of researchers from China and Russia we might have a new piece of the puzzle: a really weird, ionized form of water dubbed aquodiium that could exist deep in the extreme high-pressure interiors of these weird, icy worlds.

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Excerpt from www.discovermagazine.com

 

While robots with a human touch are still not a common sight, they are slowly appearing in public. For years, recreating the softness sensation of a person’s touch remained the ultimate technological challenge for humanoid robot scientists. Recent innovations effectively address these constraints, showing a glimpse of a future where robots can interact with humans in more advanced ways.

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Excerpt from cosmosmagazine.com

Archaeologists have unearthed evidence of ancient practices which might change our understanding of ancient Egyptian life.

Two skulls, both thousands of years old, bear cut marks which could be indications of attempted operations to treat cancer,  or perhaps even to conduct postmortems to learn more about excessive tissue growth.

It is known that as an early civilisation, the ancient Egyptians were skilled in medical practices. Historical records note that they could identify, describe and treat diseases and traumatic injuries. They even build prostheses and inserted dental fillings.

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Excerpt from news.ucsc.edu

A new paper summarizing decades of research demonstrates how social media has supported an explosion of diversity in gender and sexuality in America during the 21st Century, and also how these technologies have equally enabled a cultural backlash. 

The paper’s authors, UC Santa Cruz Psychology Professors Phil Hammack and Adriana Manago, identified five main narratives about gender and sexuality that they believe emerged through social media as people have strived to be “authentic” on these platforms. The findings, along with resulting recommendations for psychology researchers and practitioners, were published in American Psychologist, the flagship research journal of the American Psychological Association.

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Excerpt from lawandcrime.com

Special counsel Jack Smith (left) speaks on Aug. 1, 2023 AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin), former President Donald Trump (right) pictured on May 25, 2024. (AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana)

Irritated by a late Friday request to bar Donald Trump from falsely saying the feds who raided Mar-a-Lago were authorized to assassinate him, the former president’s lawyers want the Special Counsel’s Office sanctioned for running afoul of local rules and ignoring the judge’s “prior warnings.”

Attorneys Todd Blanche and Christopher Kise, pointing out that U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon already told special counsel Jack Smith months ago that “meaningful conferral” with the defense is needed and that “non-compliant notices or unauthorized filings will be stricken,” asked the jurist to “make civil contempt findings” and issue sanctions for “unsupported histrionics.”