nerd

03 May 2026

Slashdot

Former NASA Engineers Create Ingenious Way To Save Homes From Wildfires Using Noise

"Scientists have created a miraculous new way to stop fires from spreading through neighborhoods using nothing but sound," reports the New York Post: Former NASA engineers with California-based Sonic Fire Tech found that using sound waves can snuff out blazes and potentially be used to stop another Pacific Palisades inferno... The technology works by targeting oxygen molecules using low-frequency sound waves that vibrate them, stopping the fire from growing. "Sound waves vibrate the oxygen faster than the fuel can use it, and break the chemical reaction of the flame," Remington Hotchkis, Chief Commercialization Officer at Sonic Fire Tech told The Post. The San Bernardino County Fire Department recently tested out the equipment using a backpack version and the results were incredible. Video shows firefighters fighting small blazes on a shrub and a stove top fire with the technology putting it out... In the home application, the system would be alerted/activated if there was a fire, sending the sound waves through a home duct system, essentially snuffing out the blaze. The sound waves can reach as far as 30ft from a home, the report noted. The sound is also harmless to pets and humans. The article includes this quote that an executive at the company gave local news station KMPH. "Our former NASA engineers are rocket scientists, and they say it seems like magic, but it's just physics."

Hacker News

Maryland Is First to Ban A.I.-Driven Price Increases in Grocery Stores

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03 May 2026 1:24am GMT

Clandestine network smuggling Starlink tech into Iran to beat internet blackout

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03 May 2026 1:22am GMT

Am I the only one who hates delivery robots?

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03 May 2026 12:31am GMT

02 May 2026

Slashdot

Ask Slashdot: Are YouTube's Subtitles 'Appallingly Bad'?

Long-time Slashdot reader Anne Thwacks frequently uses YouTube's subtitles "not to disturb others in the room, or because my hearing is not very good." But they say there's a new problem. "The subtitling is terrible!" Almost every sentence has a huge error. Proper names are more often wrong than right. Non-English place names are almost always mangled to barely recognizable. And no effort whatsoever is made to use context to figure out whether a place name is Russian or Arabic, and often complete garbage is used in place of a common French, Spanish or Italian name! If AI actually works (I have my doubts about this), surely it would be possible to figure out language contexts. If it is about an event in Italy, then expect a lot of Italian names! If it is about the Russia-Ukraine war, then expect places in Russia or Ukraine to be more plausible than mindless gobbledygook! Does YouTube not know that there are places in the world that are not in America? (However, plenty of names of people and places famous in America are also regularly screwed up.) They argue the subtitles are "appallingly bad" - and that "the situation seems to be getting worse," wondering why the problem isn't addressed with some basic spell-checking. ("I'm sure that the vast majority of foul-ups could be fixed by the use of a dictionary.") Have any Slashdot readers seen similar problems? A friend of mine noticed that YouTube's subtitles even bungled this innocuous song from the 1966. ANNETTE FUNICELLO: "If your love is true love, you can tell by his touch." YOUTUBE SUBTITLE: "If your love is too lava, you can tell by his touch..." Share your own experiences and thoughts in the comments. And do you think YouTube's subtitles are "appallingly bad"?

The $19B "Nuclear AI" Energy Startup That Couldn't Sign a Single Client

"Nuclear AI startup" Fermi had hoped to build power plants generating 17 gigawatts of electricity, remembers Bloomberg, "three times the amount typically consumed by New York City." Hyperscalers could install their data centers on the site itself and tap directly into that power, which would come first from natural gas turbines and later from nuclear reactors. The pitch ticked so many boxes - artificial intelligence, nuclear energy, political connections - that some investors found it irresistible. Fermi went public in October worth more than $19 billion in market value, despite reporting no revenue or signed customers. Now, the startup's board has fired its top executive, Toby Neugebauer, after months of negotiations failed to secure a single client. Chief Financial Officer Miles Everson left as well... Fermi's stock, meanwhile, has tumbled 84% from its peak. The company's more than 5,000-acre site in the Texas panhandle - dubbed Project Matador, or the President Donald J. Trump Advanced Energy and Intelligence Campus - remains mostly unfinished. And some analysts see a cautionary tale of the market's AI enthusiasm running ahead of reality, with investors betting on companies whose grand projects may never get built... The idea of giving data centers their own, dedicated power supply not dependent on the grid may sound tempting, but former US Department of Energy official Jigar Shah said banks don't want to finance it. The grid, drawing power from many sources, is more reliable than a handful of expensive, on-site plants, he said. He considers Fermi a failure "of monumental proportions" and says similar, off-grid data center projects elsewhere deserve more skepticism than they've received... "We're allowing these types of projects to continue to be viewed as viable when they most certainly are not," said Shah, who ran the department's Loan Programs Office during the Biden administration.... "It was a piece of dirt with a dream," an investor who visited the site in February told the short sellers, Fuzzy Panda Research.