fidzu : geek

The U.S. Supreme Court will hear Monsanto's argument that federal pesticide law should shield it and parent company Bayer from tens of thousands of state lawsuits over Roundup since the Environmental Protection Agency has not required a cancer warning label. The case could determine whether federal rules preempt state failure-to-warn claims without deciding whether glyphosate causes cancer. The Los Angeles Times reports: Some studies have found it is a likely carcinogen, and others concluded it does not pose a true cancer risk for humans. However, the court may free Monsanto and Bayer, its parent company, from legal claims from more than 100,000 plaintiffs who sued over their cancer diagnosis. The legal dispute involves whether the federal regulatory laws shield the company from being sued under state law for failing to warn consumers. [...] "EPA has repeatedly determined that glyphosate, the world's most widely used herbicide, does not cause cancer. EPA has consistently reached that conclusion after studying the extensive body of science on glyphosate for over five decades," the company told the court in its appeal. They said the EPA not only refused to add a cancer warning label to products with Roundup, but said it would be "misbranded" with such a warning. Nonetheless, the "premise of this lawsuit, and the thousands like it, is that Missouri law requires Monsanto to include the precise warning that EPA rejects," they said. On Friday, the court said in a brief order that it would decide "whether the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide, and Rodenticide Act preempts a label-based failure-to-warn claim where EPA has not required the warning." The court is likely to hear arguments in the case of Monsanto vs. Durnell in April and issue a ruling by late June.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

17 Jan 2026 10:00am GMT

A federal judge has temporarily lifted the Trump administration's suspension of the Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind, allowing construction on the largest offshore wind project in the U.S. to resume. CNBC reports: Judge Jamar Walker of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia granted Dominion's request for a preliminary injunction Friday. Dominion called the Trump suspension "arbitrary and illegal" in its lawsuit. "Our team will now focus on safely restarting work to ensure CVOW begins delivery of critical energy in just weeks," a Dominion spokesperson told CNBC in a statement Friday. "While our legal challenge proceeds, we will continue seeking a durable resolution of this matter through cooperation with the federal government," the spokesperson said. Dominion said in December that "stopping CVOW for any length of time will threaten grid reliability for some of the nation's most important war fighting, AI and civilian assets." Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind is a 176-turbine project that would provide enough power for more than 600,000 homes, according to Dominion. It is scheduled to start dispatching power by the end of the first quarter of 2026. In December, the Trump administration paused the leases on all five offshore wind sites currently under construction in the U.S., blaming the decisions on a classified report from the Department of Defense.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

17 Jan 2026 7:00am GMT

"I've got one job, and it's the safe return of Reid, Victor, Christina, and Jeremy."

17 Jan 2026 4:45am GMT

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Guardian: Even low levels of common agricultural pesticides can stunt the long-term lifespan of fish, according to research led by Jason Rohr, a biologist at the University of Notre Dame in Indiana. Signs of aging accelerated when fish were exposed to the chemicals, according to the study, published in Science, which could have implications for other organisms. [...] The research found that fish from pesticide-affected lakes showed shortened telomeres, the caps at the end of chromosomes that are known as the biological clock for aging. When they shorten, it is a sign of cellular aging and a decline in the body's regenerative capacity. The lake populations consisted of younger fish, indicating that the pesticides contributed to shortened lives. Laboratory experiments confirmed the findings and showed chronic low-dose exposure reduced fish survival and degraded telomeres. These effects were not seen with acute high-dose exposure. Chemical analysis showed chlorpyrifos, which is banned in the UK and the EU but used in the US and China, was the only compound found in the fish tissues that was consistently associated with signs of aging. These included shortened telomeres and lipofuscin deposition -- a buildup of insoluble proteins often described as cellular "junk". The worrying aging effects occurred at concentrations below current US freshwater safety standards, Rohr said, suggesting the effects of chemicals and pesticides could be occurring at low levels over the long term. While short-term exposure to high doses did not appear to cause these aging issues -- though it did cause high toxicity and death in fish -- the researchers concluded that it was long-term exposure to low doses that drove the changes. The scientists added that reduced lifespan was particularly problematic because older fish often contribute disproportionately to reproduction, genetic diversity and population stability.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

17 Jan 2026 3:30am GMT

Reseller says Rackspace plans to charge it 706 percent more.

16 Jan 2026 11:15pm GMT

Since Wayland is still quite new to a lot of people, it's often difficult to figure out which features the Wayland compositor you're using actually supports. While the Wayland Explorer is a great way to browse through the various protocols and their status in various compositors, there's now an easier way. The Wayland protocols table makes it very easy to see what your favourite compositor supports, which compositors support the protocol you really want supported before leaving X11 behind, and much more. Roughly speaking, there's a set of stable core Wayland protocols, as well as a slew of unstable core Wayland protocols that are still in development, but may already be supported by various compositors. On top of that, compositors themselves also have a ton of protocols they themselves introduced and support, but which aren't supported by anything else - yet, as they may be picked up by other compositors and eventually become part of Wayland's core protocols. Keeping tabs on specific protocols and their support status is mostly only interesting for developers and people with very specific needs, since mature compositors provide a complete set of features most users never have to worry about. Still, that doesn't mean there aren't really cool features cooking, nor does it mean that one specific accessibility-related protocol isn't incredibly important to keep track of. These websites provide an easy way to do so.

16 Jan 2026 10:08pm GMT

The sunken ship reveals that the medieval European economy was growing fast.

16 Jan 2026 10:07pm GMT

Excellent news for OpenBSD users who are tied to macOS: you can now run OpenBSD using Apple's Hypervisor. Following a recent series of commits by Helg Bredow and Stefan Fritsch, OpenBSD/arm64 now works as a guest operating system under the Apple Hypervisor. ↫ Peter N. M. Hansteen at the OpenBSD Journal If you have an M1 or M2 Mac and want to get rid of macOS entirely, OpenBSD can be run on those machines natively, too.

16 Jan 2026 8:20pm GMT

Speaking of NixOS' use of 9P, what if you want to, for whatever inexplicable reason, use macOS, but make it immutable? Immutable Linux distributions are getting a lot of attention lately, and similar concepts are used by Android and iOS, so it makes sense for people stuck on macOS to want similar functionality. Apple doesn't offer anything to make this happen, but of course, there's always Nix. And I literally do mean always. Only try out Nix if you're willing to first be sucked into a pit of despair and madness before coming out enlightened on the other end - I managed to only narrowly avoid this very thing happening to me last year, so be advised. Nix is no laughing matter. Anyway, yes, you can use Nix to make macOS immutable. But managing a good working environment on macOS has long been a game of "hope for the best." We've all been there: a curl | sh here, a manual brew install there, and six months later, you're staring at a broken PATH and a Python environment that seems to have developed its own consciousness. I've spent a lot of time recently moving my entire workflow into a declarative system using nix. From my zsh setup to my odin toolchain, here is why the transition from the imperative world of Homebrew to the immutable world of nix-darwin has been both a revelation and a fight. ↫ Carette Antonin Of course it's been a fight - it's Nix, after all - but it's quite impressive and awesome that Nix can be used in this way. I would rather discover what electricity from light sockets tastes like than descend into this particular flavour of Nix madness, but if you're really sick of macOS being a pile of trash for - among a lot of other things - homebrew and similar bolted-on systems held together by duct tape and spit, this might be a solution for you.

16 Jan 2026 12:09am GMT

In the recent blog post on the work funded by Sovereign Tech Fund (STF), we provided an overview of the "File Hierarchy for the Verification of OS Artifacts" (VOA) and the voa project as its reference implementation. VOA is a generic framework for verifying any kind of distribution artifacts (i.e. files) using arbitrary signature verification technologies. The voa CLI ⌨️ The voa project offers the voa(1) command line interface (CLI) which makes use of the voa(5) configuration file format for technology backends. It is recommended to read the respective man pages to get …

11 Jan 2026 12:00am GMT

In 2024 the Sovereign Tech Fund (STF) started funding work on the ALPM project, which provides a Rust-based framework for Arch Linux Package Management. Refer to the project's FAQ and mission statement to learn more about the relation to the tooling currently in use on Arch Linux. The funding has now concluded, but over the time of 15 months allowed us to create various tools and integrations that we will highlight in the following sections. We have worked on six milestones with focus on various aspects of the package management ecosystem, ranging from formalizing, parsing and writing of …

10 Jan 2026 12:00am GMT

Did you know you can have newlines in pathnames? The design is very human and this absolutely doesn't have any unforeseen consequences! Also a friendly reminder that you can store anything on a nameserver if you try hard enough.

Originally posted by me on donotsta.re (2025-12-23)

09 Jan 2026 12:00am GMT