fidzu : geek

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: While traditional hotspots in the region such as Thailand, South Korea and Malaysia focus on services such as cosmetic surgery, IVF or physicals, China is trying to differentiate itself by providing some of the world's most advanced procedures. "There are two reasons why a patient travels for medical treatments: availability of advanced treatments and price," said Victor Cao, operations director of Joyful Medical, an agency in Shanghai that connects international patients to advanced cancer therapies in China. "Chinese people used to travel overseas for treatments that were not available at home, but now tables have turned." As expanding visa-free policies eased travel in the past year or so, videos are proliferating on social media of foreigners recounting their positive experiences of treatment in China, usually for consumer procedures like acupuncture and tooth scaling. But one treatment that's more quietly gaining traction is CAR-T, among the most promising breakthroughs in oncology but unavailable in most countries, or extremely costly. The process sees doctors collect T cells from the patient's blood then modify them in a lab to produce a special receptor, CAR, that can bind to a specific protein on cancer cells. These engineered cells are then multiplied into large numbers and infused back into the patient. The CAR-T cells seek out cancer cells carrying the target antigen and kill them. In the US, one single infusion can cost between $300,000 to $475,000, according to the American Cancer Society. In China, the equivalent costs about $150,000 to $180,000, and it could get even cheaper -- its drug regulator recently accepted a marketing application for a therapy aimed to be priced below 300,000 yuan ($44,000). China's medical tourism market remains in its infancy. Lecheng International Medical Tourism Pilot Zone in Hainan, which was designated as the country's only special medical zone in 2013, treated just a few thousand foreign medical tourists last year, compared to hundreds of thousands of domestic patients who visited. There, patients can access advanced drugs, devices, and therapies approved in other countries but not elsewhere in mainland China. But China is pushing to upgrade its economy and reshape its global image from just a manufacturing hub into a provider of high-value services, and demand for medical tourism is surging. Globally, the market is estimated at around $34 billion and expected to reach $126 billion by 2035, according to San Francisco-based Grand View Research. Meanwhile, China's sector is projected to grow from $1.3 billion in 2025 to $3.4 billion by 2035, according to New York-based firm Market Research Future. "The patients chose China for something they can't get at home," said Shi Haoying, the group's founder and chief executive officer. "I think the growing attention to medical tourism to China is the inevitable result of long-term accumulation and development in many areas, such as growing medical technologies, quality of service and cost-effectiveness." Jeroen Groenewegen-Lau, an analyst at the Mercator Institute for China Studies, added: "Many new treatments, including in very advanced areas, are made in China but too advanced for the state of its healthcare system and the ability of its patients to pay for these things. It's in China's interest to integrate into the international system."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

12 Jun 2026 3:30am GMT

Two recent studies argue that smartphones may have contributed to falling birthrates by reducing in-person social interaction, sexual frequency, and other conditions tied to unintended pregnancies. "One of the studies published in May is called 'The Collapse of Teen Fertility in the Digital Era' and the other, published just Monday, is titled 'Is the iPhone Birth Control? Causal Evidence from AT&T's 2007-2011 Carrier Monopoly,'" reports KTLA. "Both were chronicled in a New York Times piece by political writer Sabrina Tavernise on Monday." Slashdot reader sabbede submitted the story. From the report: The one from May, authored by two University of Cincinnati professors, posits that teen fertility "collapsed globally" starting around 2007 -- the same year the first iPhone was released. "Smart phones changed how teens spend time with each other ... this change in turn drove the collapse in teen fertility," the study's abstract reads. "Once enough teens are on the phone, being on the phone is where the peer network is; in-person time falls sharply, and with it the unstructured contact in which most unintended teen conceptions occur." The study claimed that countries "across the income and policy spectrum" were affected by the teen fertility drop, and that researchers used data from multiple countries, including the U.S., England and Wales, to rule out "country-specific contraceptive access and welfare reform stories." "This model predicts that the shift towards the phone-mediated equilibrium affects multiple aspects of teen behavior," the abstract continues, concluding that "the same instrument that produces a collapse in teen fertility produces a surge in teen suicides." The study published on Monday looks more closely at the United States, explaining that nationwide general fertility rates have fallen 22% since 2007. "[This is] a sustained decline not readily explained by economic conditions, contraceptive use, housing or childcare costs, or other commonly cited factors," the National Bureau of Economic Researchers study states. "We assess the potential role of a different shock: the diffusion of the smartphone." As mentioned before, the first iPhone was rolled out in 2007, and this study makes use of that timeframe as "a natural experiment" by using data from 2007 through 2011, when iPhones were only sold on AT&T. "From June 2007 through February 2011, the device was sold only on AT&T, allowing us to identify its effect from variation in AT&T's mobile broadband coverage," the study says. "Entropy-balanced Poisson and synthetic difference-in-differences event studies imply that access to the iPhone reduced births by 4.5-8.0% at ages 15-19 and 3.2-6.6% at ages 20-24, with statistically significant but smaller declines among older cohorts. Placebo analyses applied to Verizon and Sprint's pre-2011 coverage footprint are null. Taken together, these cohort effects imply that the diffusion of the iPhone deepened the decline in births among women under 30 while suppressing the rise in births among older women." "Overall, the diffusion of the iPhone explains 33-52% of the decline in the general fertility rate among women aged 15-44," researchers continued. "National-survey evidence on time use and sexual behavior is consistent with the iPhone reducing in-person interactions, increasing pornography use and reducing sexual frequency."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

11 Jun 2026 11:00pm GMT

Polish lawmakers have voted to criminalize "trash streaming," with up to five years in prison for online broadcasts of serious crimes such as rape or murder, animal cruelty, humiliating violence, gambling promotion, or even simulated depictions of those acts. Reuters reports: The move is part of a broader push by Poland to tighten regulation of online content. Recent measures include banning the use of mobile phones by children under 16 in schools and introducing stricter age verification rules to access pornography. Under the new provisions, broadcasting crimes punishable by more than five years in prison, including murder or rape, will itself be classed as a separate offence punishable by up to five years behind bars. The law also covers content showing cruelty to animals, violence aimed at humiliating others, and the promotion of gambling. The same penalties will apply to individuals who simulate or falsely portray the commission of such crimes while streaming, lawmakers said.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

11 Jun 2026 10:00pm GMT

Cruz/Wyden bill would help Americans sue federal officials over censorship.

11 Jun 2026 7:31pm GMT

The old app "still needs to be retired," AcuRite tells us.

11 Jun 2026 7:08pm GMT

"Some missions are using more than what their paperwork would say."

11 Jun 2026 6:34pm GMT

Video game consoles have a long history with web browsers. From the advent of the World Wide Web, consoles have been trying to get online. Browsers on video game consoles were initially very much an attempt to provide a cheap gateway to the web for a casual audience lacking technical expertise, though as time progressed they've become a greater and more integrated part of systems. This article takes a look at browsers on video game consoles in detail, though only covers official web browsers. Many consoles have browsers installable via custom firmware and homebrew, but they're beyond the scope of this post, as are non-web systems such as Satellaview and online services that didn't provide a browser, such as XBAND, Sega Meganet, and Sega Channel. ↫ Declan Chidlow The article starts off with the Philips CD-I, which has always been a fascinating product for technology fans in The Netherlands because that's where Philips is from. Memory that far back is untrustworthy, but I can definitely remember being inundated with commercials, advertising, magazine articles, and newspaper reports about the CD-I, all throughout its rather troubled life. Yet, I don't remember anything about it being capable of browsing a rudimentary web. Of course, we're talking 1995 here, a time when I didn't even have internet at home yet, although I did use the web at a friend's place at that time. We didn't get internet at home until I think 1997 or 1998, followed by the move to broadband cable internet just a year later, since our small rural town happened to be one of the first places to get broadband. Good times. Did anyone ever actually use browsers on consoles, though? I mean, using them always felt incredibly clunky, and by the time they were capable enough to really do anything we all had laptops and later smartphones anyway. I certainly don't remember anyone using them for anything but a gimmick, but perhaps my sample size was far too small and not diverse enough.

11 Jun 2026 5:38pm GMT

With the announcement of an upcoming new macOS release also come the usual changes in which Macs will still be supported. MacOS 27 Golden Gate is an important release in this regard, as it will be the first release of Apple's desktop operating system that will be entirely ARM-only, dropping support for all Intel Macs. It's important to note that Apple will provide three more years of security updates for the final Intel release of macOS, so Intel users won't be dropped like a brick immediately. Still, the Intel Mac Pro was still being sold all the way up until mid-2023, and I'd be royally pissed off if my expensive 2023 Intel Mac went out of support a mere six years after purchase. They weren't cheap machines, and while you can argue everybody knew the writing was on the wall for the Intel Mac Pro in 2023, it still feels way too short of a supported lifespan for such an expensive, high-end piece of equipment. It didn't sell many units, I'm sure, but still. In addition, MacOS 27 will be the last release to include the Rosetta 2 translation layer that allows Intel binaries to run on ARM macOS. I have no idea how many important applications are still Intel-only, but I have a feeling that number is going to be relatively small, and will become even smaller as the first macOS release without Rosetta 2 support nears release. On top op of that, I'm sure enterprising users will find a way to transplant Rosetta 2 onto unsupported macOS releases, and if all else fails, there's always virtual machines.

11 Jun 2026 2:13pm GMT

Apple recently announced its next crack at integrating "AI" into its operating systems, this time opting to simply whitelabel Google's Gemini "AI" tools instead of developing its own LLM technology. Called "Siri AI", Apple also stated it's not coming to the EU, and the company stated that's because the EU's basic consumer protection legislation would give other "AI" tools "unprecedented access" to user data on users' devices. The company made a big stink about this in the press. As anyone with basic pattern recognition skills already knew, this was a blatant, baldfaced lie. What really happened is that Apple asked the EU for an 18-month long exemption from the EU's consumer protection and privacy legislation during which it would not have to comply with any legal privacy and interoperability requirements - just so it could roll out Siri "AI" before anyone else could offer a competing product for Apple users. Obviously, the EU wasn't going to grant such an exemption. "The decision not to roll out Siri AI in the EU is Apple's and Apple's only," spokesperson Thomas Regnier told reporters in Brussels, saying there was nothing in the Digital Markets Act to stop the company from introducing new products in the EU. "Apple was simply unable to develop interoperability solutions that meet essential EU ​privacy and security standards," Regnier said. "Instead ​of trying to find ⁠a suitable compliance solution, Apple simply made a request to the European Commission to be exempted from their interoperability obligations under the DMA - and this for at least 18 months. ​That's not an option," Regnier said. ↫ Inti Landauro and Foo Yun Chee at Reuters So what's really going on here is that Apple wants to offer a set of whitelabeled Google Gemini tools on iOS and macOS in the EU, but because Apple is classified as a gatekeeper, it is legally obligated to offer interoperability options for competing "AI" tools. These options in turn need to adhere to the EU's strict privacy regulations, so that competing "AI" tools can offer the same level of privacy that Apple's own whitelabeled Google Gemini tools claim to offer. Apple didn't want to offer these privacy-respecting interoperability options as required by law, so instead of following the law in the countries it wants to operate in, Apple asked to be placed above the law for at least 18 months, basically giving Siri "AI" a massive head-start over possible competitors so that it could entrench itself in the userbase. The EU saw right through Apple's nonsense, and now called them out on their bullshit. Perhaps Apple has gotten so used to openly bribing Trump that they forgot other parts of the world don't work that way. Whenever Apple and its PR attack dogs say anything about the EU, you can be assured they are lying. They have proven time and time again to basically never speak a single word of truth when it comes to its dealings in the EU. It's almost pathological at this point, and what makes it doubly interesting is that Apple will not launch Siri "AI" in China either, for the very same regulatory reasons - yet all China got was a single footnote in a press release. I wonder why.

10 Jun 2026 11:12pm GMT

Good morning from JetBrains Berlin office!

01 Jun 2026 12:00am GMT

Just trying to answer one simple question: What if the terminal was 3D?

11 May 2026 12:00am GMT

Break the pattern today or the loop will repeat tomorrow.

18 Apr 2026 12:00am GMT