fidzu : geek

"Phys.org is reporting on a study published in Nature Physics involving ICN2 at the UAB campus, Xi'an Jiaotong University (Xi'an) and Stony Brook University (New York), showing for the first time that ordinary ice is a flexoelectric material -- meaning it can generate electricity when subjected to mechanical deformation," writes longtime Slashdot reader fahrbot-bot. From the report: "We discovered that ice generates electric charge in response to mechanical stress at all temperatures. In addition, we identified a thin 'ferroelectric' layer at the surface at temperatures below -113C (160K)," explains Dr. Xin Wen, a member of the ICN2 Oxide Nanophysics Group and one of the study's lead researchers. "This means that the ice surface can develop a natural electric polarization, which can be reversed when an external electric field is applied -- similar to how the poles of a magnet can be flipped. The surface ferroelectricity is a cool discovery in its own right, as it means that ice may have not just one way to generate electricity, but two: ferroelectricity at very low temperatures, and flexoelectricity at higher temperatures all the way to 0 C." This property places ice on a par with electroceramic materials such as titanium dioxide, which are currently used in advanced technologies like sensors and capacitors.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

17 Sep 2025 7:00am GMT

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: As Jonathan Roll neared completion of a master's degree in science and technology policy at Arizona State University three years ago, he did some research into recent developments by China's ascendant space program. He came away impressed by the country's growing ambitions. Now a full-time research analyst at the university, Roll was recently asked to take a deeper dive into Chinese space plans. "I thought I had a pretty good read on this when I was finishing grad school," Roll told Ars. "That almost everything needed to be updated, or had changed three years later, was pretty scary. On all these fronts, they've made pretty significant progress. They are taking all of the cues from our Western system about what's really galvanized innovation, and they are off to the races with it." Roll is the co-author of a new report, titled "Redshift," on the acceleration of China's commercial and civil space activities and the threat these pose to similar efforts in the United States. Published on Tuesday, the report was sponsored by the US-based Commercial Space Federation, which advocates for the country's commercial space industry. It is a sobering read and comes as China not only projects to land humans on the lunar surface before the US can return, but also is advancing across several spaceflight fronts to challenge America. "The trend line is unmistakable," the report states. "China is not only racing to catch up -- it is setting pace, deregulating, and, at times, redefining what leadership looks like on and above Earth. This new space race will not be won with a single breakthrough or headline achievement, but with sustained commitment, clear-eyed vigilance, and a willingness to adapt over decades." "The key takeaway here is that there is an acceleration," said Dave Cavossa, president of the Commercial Spaceflight Federation. "The United States is still ahead today in a lot of areas in space. But the Chinese are advancing very quickly and poised to overtake us in the next five to 10 years if we don't do something." "There's other things along the lines of budget battles," Cavossa said. "We don't want to see the US government scaling back its reliance on commercial satellite communications. We don't want to see them scaling back commercial remote sensing data buys, which is what they've been doing, or at least threatening to do. We want to make sure that there's a seamless transition from the ISS to commercial LEO destinations, and then a transition away from old programs of record to commercial transportation alternatives. That's what the US government can do and Congress can do here in the next couple of years to make sure that we stay ahead."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

17 Sep 2025 3:30am GMT

OpenAI is rolling out stricter safety measures for ChatGPT after lawsuits linked the chatbot to multiple suicides. "ChatGPT will now attempt to guess a user's age, and in some cases might require users to share an ID in order to verify that they are at least 18 years old," reports 404 Media. "We know this is a privacy compromise for adults but believe it is a worthy tradeoff," the company said in its announcement. "I don't expect that everyone will agree with these tradeoffs, but given the conflict it is important to explain our decisionmaking," OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said on X. From the report: OpenAI introduced parental controls to ChatGPT earlier in September, but has now introduced new, more strict and invasive security measures. In addition to attempting to guess or verify a user's age, ChatGPT will now also apply different rules to teens who are using the chatbot. "For example, ChatGPT will be trained not to do the above-mentioned flirtatious talk if asked, or engage in discussions about suicide of self-harm even in a creative writing setting," the announcement said. "And, if an under-18 user is having suicidal ideation, we will attempt to contact the users' parents and if unable, will contact the authorities in case of imminent harm." OpenAI's post explains that it is struggling to manage an inherent problem with large language models that 404 Media has tracked for several years. ChatGPT used to be a far more restricted chatbot that would refuse to engage users on a wide variety of issues the company deemed dangerous or inappropriate. Competition from other models, especially locally hosted and so-called "uncensored" models, and a political shift to the right which sees many forms of content moderation as censorship, has caused OpenAI to loosen those restrictions. "We want users to be able to use our tools in the way that they want, within very broad bounds of safety," Open AI said in its announcement. The position it seemed to have landed on given these recent stories about teen suicide, is that it wants to "'Treat our adult users like adults' is how we talk about this internally, extending freedom as far as possible without causing harm or undermining anyone else's freedom."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

17 Sep 2025 12:02am GMT

The problem arose early Tuesday when the spacecraft's main engine shut down earlier than expected.

16 Sep 2025 11:13pm GMT

Trump's TikTok deal requires US to make its own version of the app.

16 Sep 2025 9:24pm GMT

Boar's Head plans to reopen the plant linked to an outbreak that killed 10 people.

16 Sep 2025 9:11pm GMT

It's been a little over a month since OSNews went completely ad-free for everyone. I can say the support has been overwhelming, with the accompanying fundraiser currently sitting at 67% of the €5000 goal! Of course things slowed down a bit after the initial week of one donation after the next, so I'm throwing out this reminder that without your support, OSNews can't exist - doubly so now that I've removed any and all advertising. Help us reach that 100%! So, what can you do to support OSNews? By being entirely free from the corrupting influence of advertising, I have even less desire to chase views, entrap users with slop content, game search engines with shitty SEO spam, or turn on the taps of "AI"-generated trash to spew forth as much "articles" and thus views as possible. This also means that OSNews is one of the few technology news websites remaining that is not part of a massive corporate media conglomerate, so there's no pressure from "corporate" to go easy on advertisers or write favourable stuff about corporate's friends. You'd be surprised to learn how many technology sites out there are not independent. The response to OSNews no longer having any advertising has been overwhelmingly positive - unsurprisingly - and that has taken away any reservations I might have had about taking this step. In a world where so many websites are disappearing, turning into corporate mouthpieces, or becoming glorified content farms, OSNews can keep on doing what it does, independent of any outside influence, thanks to the countless contributions from all of you. Thank you.

15 Sep 2025 10:11pm GMT

It's release day for all of Apple's operating systems, so if you're fully or only partway into the ecosystem, you've got some upgrades ahead of you. Version 26 for macOS, iOS and iPadOS, watchOS, tvOS, visionOS, and HomePod Software have all been released today, so if you own any device running any of these operating system, it's time to head on over to the update section of the settings application and wait for that glass to slowly and sensually liquefy all over your screens. Do put a sock on the doorknob.

15 Sep 2025 9:36pm GMT

I recently implemented a minimal proof of concept time-sharing operating system kernel on RISC-V. In this post, I'll share the details of how this prototype works. The target audience is anyone looking to understand low-level system software, drivers, system calls, etc., and I hope this will be especially useful to students of system software and computer architecture. Finally, to do things differently here, I implemented this exercise in Zig, rather than traditional C. In addition to being an interesting experiment, I believe Zig makes this experiment much more easily reproducible on your machine, as it's very easy to set up and does not require any installation (which could otherwise be slightly messy when cross-compiling to RISC-V). ↫ Uros Popovic This is not the first, and certainly not the last, operating system implemented from scratch as a teaching exercise, both for the creator itself, as well as for others wanting to follow along. This time it's developed for RISC-V, and in an interesting twist, programmed in Zig (no Rust for once!).

15 Sep 2025 9:30pm GMT

https://archlinux.org/news/recent-services-outages/

21 Aug 2025 12:00am GMT

We want to provide an update on the recent service outages affecting our infrastructure. The Arch Linux Project is currently experiencing an ongoing denial of service attack that primarily impacts our main webpage, the Arch User Repository (AUR), and the Forums. We are aware of the problems that this creates for our end users and will continue to actively work with our hosting provider to mitigate the attack. We are also evaluating DDoS protection providers while carefully considering factors including cost, security, and ethical standards. To improve the communication around this issue we will provide regular updates on our service …

21 Aug 2025 12:00am GMT

Starting with 7.4.1-2, the following Zabbix system user accounts (previously shipped by their related packages) will no longer be used. Instead, all Zabbix components will now rely on a shared zabbix user account (as originally intended by upstream and done by other distributions):

• zabbix-server
• zabbix-proxy
• zabbix-agent (also used by the zabbix-agent2 package)
• zabbix-web-service

This shared zabbix user account is provided by the newly introduced zabbix-common split package, which is now a dependency for all relevant zabbix-* packages. The switch to the new user account is handled automatically for the corresponding main configuration files and systemd service units. However, manual intervention may be required if you created custom files or configurations referencing to and / or being owned by the above deprecated users accounts, for example:

• PSK files used for encrypted communication
• Custom scripts for metrics collections or report generations
• sudoers rules for metrics requiring elevated privileges to be collected
• ...

Those should therefore be updated to refer to and / or be owned by the new zabbix user account, otherwise some services or user parameters may fail to work properly, or not at all. Once migrated, you may remove the obsolete user accounts from your system.

04 Aug 2025 12:00am GMT