fidzu : geek

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Guardian: High-profile studies reporting the presence of microplastics throughout the human body have been thrown into doubt by scientists who say the discoveries are probably the result of contamination and false positives. One chemist called the concerns "a bombshell." Studies claiming to have revealed micro and nanoplastics in the brain, testes, placentas, arteries and elsewhere were reported by media across the world, including the Guardian. There is no doubt that plastic pollution of the natural world is ubiquitous, and present in the food and drink we consume and the air we breathe. But the health damage potentially caused by microplastics and the chemicals they contain is unclear, and an explosion of research has taken off in this area in recent years. However, micro- and nanoplastic particles are tiny and at the limit of today's analytical techniques, especially in human tissue. There is no suggestion of malpractice, but researchers told the Guardian of their concern that the race to publish results, in some cases by groups with limited analytical expertise, has led to rushed results and routine scientific checks sometimes being overlooked. The Guardian has identified seven studies that have been challenged by researchers publishing criticism in the respective journals, while a recent analysis listed 18 studies that it said had not considered that some human tissue can produce measurements easily confused with the signal given by common plastics. There is an increasing international focus on the need to control plastic pollution but faulty evidence on the level of microplastics in humans could lead to misguided regulations and policies, which is dangerous, researchers say. It could also help lobbyists for the plastics industry to dismiss real concerns by claiming they are unfounded. While researchers say analytical techniques are improving rapidly, the doubts over recent high-profile studies also raise the questions of what is really known today and how concerned people should be about microplastics in their bodies.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

14 Jan 2026 3:30am GMT

"Since the United States reopened its embassy in Cuba in 2015, a number of personnel have reported a series of debilitating medical ailments which include dizziness, fatigue, problems with memory, and impaired vision," writes longtime Slashdot reader smooth wombat. "For ten years, these sudden and unexplained onsets have been studied with no conclusive evidence one way or the other. Now comes word that a device, purchased by the Pentagon, has been tested which may be linked to what is known as Havana Syndrome." From a report: A division of the Department of Homeland Security, Homeland Security Investigations, purchased the device for millions of dollars in the waning days of the Biden administration, using funding provided by the Defense Department, according to two of the sources. Officials paid âoeeight figuresâ for the device, these people said, declining to offer a more specific number. [...] The device acquired by HSI produces pulsed radio waves, one of the sources said, which some officials and academics have speculated for years could be the cause of the incidents. Although the device is not entirely Russian in origin, it contains Russian components, this person added. Officials have long struggled to understand how a device powerful enough to cause the kind of damage some victims have reported could be made portable; that remains a core question, according to one of the sources briefed on the device. The device could fit in a backpack, this person said. [...] One key concern now for some officials is that if the technology proves viable it may have proliferated, several of the sources said, meaning that more than one country could now have access to a device that may be capable of causing career-ending injuries to US officials. Further reading: 'Havana Syndrome' Debate Rises Again in US Government

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

14 Jan 2026 2:02am GMT

Meta is shutting down three acquired VR studios as part of Reality Labs layoffs and a strategic pivot away from VR content toward AI-powered smart glasses. UploadVR reports: Meta shut down Twisted Pixel Games (Deadpool VR), Sanzaru Games (Asgard's Wrath), and Armature Studio (Resident Evil 4 VR). [...] Twisted Pixel Games was founded in 2006 and mostly made Xbox games published by Microsoft for the first decade of its existence. In fact, Microsoft owned the studio from 2011 until 2015, when it became an independent company again. On contract from Facebook, between 2017 and 2019 Twisted Pixel released four VR games: Wilson's Hearth (Rift); B-Team (Go/Quest); Defector (Rift); and Path of the Warrior (Rift/Quest). In 2022, Twisted Pixel Games was acquired by Meta. And just two months ago, it released what it had been working on since then: Deadpool VR, the latest Quest-exclusive VR game. [...] Sanzaru Games was also founded in 2006, and made a combination of its own games and contract titles for companies such as Sony, porting the original God of War series to PS Vita. Sanzaru Games was also contracted by Facebook to build VR games for the Oculus Rift and its Touch controllers, between 2016 and 2019: Ripcoil (2016); VR Sports Challenge (2016); Marvel Powers United VR (2018); and Asgard's Wrath (2019). In 2020, Sanzaru Games was acquired by Facebook, and in 2023 released Asgard's Wrath 2, taking the core essence of Asgard's Wrath to Quest 2 and Quest 3 standalone, with a semi-open world and a campaign more than 60 hours long. Exactly one year ago, Sanzaru released the last major content update for Asgard's Wrath 2, stating that it was now working on the "next big thing" with no detail released on what that would be before the studio closed. Founded in 2008, Armature Studio was mainly a porting studio, bringing PC titles to consoles and console titles to PS Vita. Like Twisted Pixel and Sanzaru, Armature too was contracted by Facebook to build early consumer VR games: Fail Factory (2017); Sports Scramble (2019); and Resident Evil 4 VR (2021). Armature was acquired by Meta in 2022, and many VR gamers had been eagerly anticipating what it had been working on since. Whatever it was, Armature too is now shut down.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

14 Jan 2026 1:25am GMT

Are you a normal person and thus sick of all the nonsensical, non-browser stuff browser makers keep adding to your browser, but for whatever reason you don't want to or cannot switch to one of the forks of your browser of choice? Just the Browser helps you remove AI features, telemetry data reporting, sponsored content, product integrations, and other annoyances from desktop web browsers. The goal is to give you "just the browser" and nothing else, using hidden settings in web browsers intended for companies and other organizations. This project includes configuration files for popular web browsers, documentation for installing and modifying them, and easy installation scripts. Everything is open-source on GitHub. ↫ Just The Browser's website It comes in the form of scripts for Windows, Linux, or macOS, and can be used for Google Chrome, Microsoft Edge, and Mozilla Firefox. It's all open source so you can check the scripts for yourself, but there are also manual guides for each browser if you're not too keen on running an unknown script. The changes won't be erased by updates, unless the specific settings and configuration flags used are actually removed or altered by the browser makers. That's all there's to it - a very straightforward tool.

14 Jan 2026 12:42am GMT

Despite December being the holiday month, Haiku's developers got a lot of things done. A welcome addition for those of us who regularly install Haiku on EFI systems is a tool in the installer that will copy the EFI loader to the EFI system partition, so fewer manual steps are needed on EFI systems. Support for touchpads from Elantech has also been improved, and the FreeBSD driver compatibility layer and all of its Ethernet and WiFi drivers have been updated to match the recent FreeBSD 15 release. Of course, there's also the usual long list of smaller fixes, improvements, and changes. As for a new release milestone, beta 6 seems to be on the way. Not quite. There has been some discussion on the mailing list as the ticket list gets smaller, but there's still at least some more regressions that need to be fixed. But it looks like we'll be starting the release process in the next month or two, most likely… ↫ Haiku's December 2025 activity report To be fair, though, Haiku's nightly releases are more than able to serve their duties, and waiting for a specific release if you're interested in trying out Haiku is really not needed. Just grab the latest nightly, follow the installation instructions, and you're good to go. The operating system supports updating itself, so you'll most likely won't need to reinstall nightlies all the time.

14 Jan 2026 12:30am GMT

Here's what we know about the first BMW EV to wear a proper M badge.

13 Jan 2026 11:01pm GMT

"General interest in AI PCs has been wavering for a while ..."

13 Jan 2026 10:34pm GMT

VoidLink includes an unusually broad and advanced array of capabilities.

13 Jan 2026 10:07pm GMT

It's no secret that the Windows 95 installer uses a heavily stripped-down Windows 3.10 runtime, but what can you actually do with it? How far can you take this runtime? Can it run Photoshop? It is a long-standing tradition for Microsoft to use a runtime copy of Windows as a part of Windows Setup. But the copy is so stripped-down, it cannot run anything but the setup program (winsetup.bin). OR IS IT? A mini-challenge for myself: create a semi-working desktop only based on runtime Windows 3.10 shipped with Windows 95 installer but not using any other Microsoft products. ↫ Nina Kalinina A crucial limitation here is that Kalinina is not allowing herself to use any additional Microsoft products, so the easy route of just copying missing DLLs and other files from a Windows 95 disk or whatever is not available to her; she has to source any needed files from other sources. This may seem impossible, but during those days, tons of Windows (and even DOS) applications would ship with various Microsoft DLLs included, so there are definitely places to get Windows DLLs that aren't coming directly from Microsoft. As an example, since there's no shell of any kind included in the stripped-down Windows 3.10 runtime, Kalinina tried Calmira and WinBar, which won't work without a few DLLs. Where to get them if you can't get them straight from Microsoft? Well, it turns out programs compiled with later version of MSVC would include several of these needed DLLs, and AutoCad R12 was one of them. WinBar would now start and work, and while Calmira would install, it didn't work because it needs the Windows Multimedia Subsystem, which don't seem to be included in anything non-Microsoft. It turns out you can take this approach remarkably far. Things like Calculator and Notepad will work, but Pain or Paintbrush will not. Larger, more complex applications work too - Photoshop 2.5.1 works, as does Netscape, but without any networking stack, it's a little bit moot. Even Calmira XP eventually runs, as some needed DLLs are found inside "Mom For Windows 2.0", at which point the installation starts to look and feel a lot like a regular Windows 3.x installation, minus things like settings panels and a bunch of default applications. Is this useful? Probably not, but who cares - it's an awesome trick, and that alone makes it a worthwhile effort.

13 Jan 2026 9:00pm 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