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Scientists have proposed a framework that they say could unify quantum mechanics and Albert Einstein's theory of general relatively. "Quantum theory and Einstein's theory of general relativity are mathematically incompatible with each other, so it's important to understand how this contradiction is resolved," said Prof Jonathan Oppenheim, a physicist at University College London, who is behind the theory. The Guardian reports: Until now, the prevailing assumption has been that Einstein's theory of gravity must be modified, or "quantized," in order to fit within quantum theory. This is the approach of string theory, which advances the view that spacetime comprises 10, 11 or possibly 26 dimensions. Another leading candidate, advanced by Rovelli and others, is loop quantum gravity, in which spacetime is composed of finite loops woven into an extremely fine fabric. Oppenheim's theory, published in the journal Physical Review X, challenges the consensus by suggesting that spacetime may be classical and not governed by quantum theory at all. This means spacetime, however closely you zoomed in on it, would be smooth and continuous rather than "quantized" into discrete units. However, Oppenheim introduces the idea that spacetime is also inherently wobbly, subject to random fluctuations that create an intrinsic breakdown in predictability. "The rate at which time flows is changing randomly and fluctuating in time," said Oppenheim, although he clarifies that time would never actually go into reverse. "It's quite mathematical," he added. "Picturing it in your head is quite difficult." This proposed "wobbliness" would result in a breakdown of predictability, which, Oppenheim says, "many physicists don't like." [...] Ultimately, whether the theory is correct is not an aesthetic preference, but a question of whether it is a faithful representation of reality. A second paper, published simultaneously in Nature Communications and led by Dr Zach Weller-Davies, formerly of UCL and now at Canada's Perimeter Institute, proposes an experiment designed to uncover "wobbles" in spacetime through tiny fluctuations in the weight of an object. For example, the International Bureau of Weights and Measures in France routinely weigh a 1kg mass, which used to be the 1kg standard. If the fluctuations in measurements of this 1kg mass are smaller than a certain threshold, the theory can be ruled out. "We have shown that if spacetime doesn't have a quantum nature, then there must be random fluctuations in the curvature of spacetime which have a particular signature that can be verified experimentally," said Weller-Davies.

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An anonymous reader writes: Bill Ackman has called for the resignation of Harvard, MIT, and the University of Pennsylvania's presidents following their congressional hearing on antisemitism on Tuesday. The billionaire singled out the three college presidents in a post written on X, formerly Twitter, after their testimonies on Capitol Hill. "The presidents' answers reflect the profound educational, moral and ethical failures that pervade certain of our elite educational institutions due in large part to their failed leadership," Ackman wrote on X. "They must all resign in disgrace," he added. The three presidents were repeatedly asked by Rep. Elise Stefanik during the Tuesday congressional hearing if calling for the genocide of Jews violated their universities' rules on bullying and harassment. "If the speech turns into conduct, it can be harassment," said University of Pennsylvania president Liz Magill. Harvard and MIT presidents Claudine Gay and Sally Kornbluth replied similarly to Stefanik's question. "It can be, depending on the context," Gay replied when asked the same question. "I have heard chants which can be antisemitic depending on the context when calling for the elimination of the Jewish people," Kornbluth said earlier when Stefanik asked if she'd heard chants of "Intifada" on campus. The term is a reference to previous Palestinian uprisings in Gaza. Ackman wrote in response to the clip: "If a CEO of one of our companies gave a similar answer, he or she would be toast within the hour. Why has antisemitism exploded on campus and around the world? Because of leaders like Presidents Gay, Magill and Kornbluth who believe genocide depends on the context," Ackman continued. The hedge fund manager added in a later post that the three institutions would be far better off if they ditched their presidents -- quickly. "The world will be able to judge the relative quality of the governance at Harvard, Penn, and MIT by the comparative speed by which their boards fire their respective presidents," he wrote on X.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Axios: Increasingly intensive and frequent wildfires in the western U.S. are deteriorating air quality and causing more premature deaths, a new study found. Fires have damaged federal efforts from the Environmental Protection Agency to improve air quality mainly through reductions in automobile emissions, per the study published Monday in The Lancet Planetary Health. From 2000 to 2020, air quality has worsened in the western U.S. due to wildfires. Black carbon concentrations have risen 55% on an annual basis, mostly due to the wildfires, researchers found. The fires have also caused an increase of 670 premature deaths per year in the region in the two-decade span. Meanwhile, the eastern U.S. had no major declines in air quality during the same time period. Our air is supposed to be cleaner and cleaner due mostly to EPA regulations on emissions, but the fires have limited or erased these air-quality gains," said Jun Wang, the study's lead corresponding author and chair of the University of Iowa's Department of Chemical and Biochemical Engineering, in a statement. "[A]ll the efforts for the past 20 years by the EPA to make our air cleaner basically have been lost in fire-prone areas and downwind regions," Wang added. "We are losing ground." [Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at UCLA] said the findings were consistent with other studies that contribute to the same overall picture that after the air quality regulations' great success, "the extremes of those air pollution episodes are actually now increasing again" due to wildfires. "On average, the air quality is still better, but the problem is, it's during these episodes of just-near apocalyptic conditions where we're really losing a lot of ground and that really is because the size and the intensity of wildfires has increased greatly," he said. Given climate change is a wildfire driver, keeping global heating to the lowest level possible will help. "But we're still going to see more warming no matter what moving forward, and so there will be further increases in the wildfire hazard," Swain said.

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Samuel Axon reports via Ars Technica: The trailer for Amazon's Fallout TV series dropped this weekend, and it's either craven fan service or wonderfully authentic, depending on your point of view. The trailer depicts a lead character leaving a vault after an apparent catastrophe, discovering the broken world outside, and encountering ridiculous monsters as well as factions like the Brotherhood of Steel. It also features some extreme gore, which you'd expect from Fallout. We've written a few times about the slowly unfolding saga of this show, which has Westworld's Lisa Joy and Jonathan Nolan as producers. To be clear, though, they won't actually be the showrunners; that honor goes to Geneva Robertson-Dworet (Captain Marvel, Tomb Raider) and Graham Wagner (Portlandia, The Office, Silicon Valley). The two showrunners each cover one-half of what Fallout has traditionally been: Robertson-Dworet brings the sci-fi action credentials, and Wagner brings the satirical comedy. As announced in October, the show will premiere on April 12th, 2024, exclusively via Prime Video.

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Press2ToContinue shares a report from Politico: Congress at the urging of the Biden administration agreed in 2021 to spend $7.5 billion to build tens of thousands of electric vehicle chargers across the country, aiming to appease anxious drivers while tackling climate change. Two years later, the program has yet to install a single charger. States and the charger industry blame the delays mostly on the labyrinth of new contracting and performance requirements they have to navigate to receive federal funds. While federal officials have authorized more than $2 billion of the funds to be sent to states, fewer than half of states have even started to take bids from contractors to build the chargers -- let alone begin construction. [...] The goal is a reliable and standardized network in every corner of the nation, said Gabe Klein, executive director of the Joint Office of Energy and Transportation, which leads the federal government's efforts on EV charging. "You have to go slow to go fast," Klein said in an interview. "These are things that take a little bit of time, but boy, when you're done, it's going to completely change the game." [...] Aatish Patel, president of charger manufacturer XCharge North America, is worried the delays in installing chargers are imperiling efforts to drive up EV adoption. "As an EV driver, a charger being installed in two years isn't really going to help me out now," Patel said. "We're in dire need of chargers here." The Biden administration is expecting a deluge of chargers funded by the law to break ground in early 2024. A senior administration official granted anonymity to speak on the specifics of the rollout said the pace is to be expected, given that the goal is to create a "convenient, affordable, reliable, made-in-America equitable network." "Anybody can throw a charger in the ground -- that's not that hard, it doesn't take that long," the official said. "Building a network is different." The administration insists it is doing all it can to speed up the process, including by streamlining federal permitting for EV chargers and providing technical assistance to states and companies through the Joint Office. It expects the U.S. to hit Biden's 500,000 charger target four years early, in 2026, the official said.

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In 2024, the Pixar films that debuted on Disney+ during the COVID-19 pandemic years when theaters were shut down will be returning to the big screen. Those include Soul, Luca and Turning Red. Engadget reports: Soul will get a theatrical release on January 12, Turning Red will hit cinemas on February 9 and Luca will emerge on a silver screen near you on March 22. Given that these movies have been around for as long as three years, it's unlikely that they'll set the box office charts alight. But the theatrical releases mean you'll have a chance to enjoy these films as originally intended.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Windows 10's end-of-support date is October 14, 2025. That's the day that most Windows 10 PCs will receive their last security update and the date when most people should find a way to move to Windows 11 to ensure that they stay secure. As it has done for other stubbornly popular versions of Windows, though, Microsoft is offering a reprieve for those who want or need to stay on Windows 10: three additional years of security updates, provided to those who can pay for the Extended Security Updates (ESU) program. The initial announcement, written by Windows Servicing and Delivery Principal Product Manager Jason Leznek, spends most of its time encouraging users and businesses to upgrade to Windows 11 rather than staying on 10, either by updating their current computers, upgrading to new PCs or transitioning to a Windows 365 cloud-based PC instead. But when Leznek does get to the announcement of the ESU program, the details are broadly similar to the program Microsoft offered for Windows 7 a few years ago: three additional years of monthly security updates and technical support, paid for one year at a time. The company told us that "pricing will be provided at a later date," but for the Windows 7 version of the ESU program, Microsoft upped the cost of the program each year to encourage people to upgrade to a newer Windows version before they absolutely had to; the cost was also per-seat, so what you paid was proportional to the number of PCs you needed updates for. One difference this time is that Microsoft told us it would be offering Windows 10 ESU updates to individuals, though the company didn't offer particulars. More details should be available on Windows 10's lifecycle support page soon. Leznek reiterated that Windows 10 22H2 would be the final version of Windows 10 and that the operating system would not receive any additional features during the ESU period.

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According to the Wikimedia Foundation, the page on "ChatGPT" was the most-viewed English article on Wikipedia in 2023, attracting nearly 50 million page views. The Hill reports: Wikimedia Foundation said English Wikipedia pages attracted more than 84 billion total page views in 2023, and ChatGPT topped its annual top 25 chart with a total of 49.5 million page views. The chatbot, created by Sam Altman's OpenAI, soared in popularity this year, as much of the public got its first chance to use artificial intelligence hands-on. The AI system debuted just more than a year ago, Nov. 30, 2022, and surpassed 100 million users, the nonprofit said. Following ChatGPT, "Deaths in 2023" was the second most-popular page with 42.7 million views; "2023 Cricket World Cup" came in third place with 38.2 million views; "Indian Premier League" placed fourth with 32 million views; and "Oppenheimer (film)" rounded out the top five with 28.3 million views. The rest of the list includes articles on sports, film/television, celebrities and some current events. The full list of the top 25 most popular English Wikipedia articles in 2023 is available here.

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Ivana Saric reports via Axios: U.S. students lag behind their peers in many industrialized countries when it comes to math, according to the results of a global exam released Tuesday. U.S. students saw a 13-point drop in their 2022 Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) math results when compared to the 2018 exam. The 2022 math score was not only lower than it was in 2012 but it was "among the lowest ever measured by PISA in mathematics" for the U.S., per the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) country note. The 2018 PISA assessment found that U.S. students straggled behind their peers in East Asia and Europe, per the Washington Post. PISA examines the proficiency of 15-year-olds in reading, mathematics, and science worldwide. The 2022 PISA edition is the first to take place since the pandemic and compares the test results of nearly 700,000 students across 81 OECD member states and partner economies. The exam, coordinated by the OECD, was first administered in 2000 and is conducted every three years. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the 2021 test was delayed until 2022. What about the rest of the world? According to Axios, a total of 31 countries and economies "maintained or improved upon their 2018 math scores, including Switzerland and Japan." "10 countries and economies -- Canada, Denmark, Finland, Hong Kong, Ireland, Japan, Korea, Latvia, Macao and the U.K. -- saw their students score proficiently in all three domains and had 'high levels of socio-economic fairness,'" the report adds.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: In 2015, as part of the wave of encrypting all the things on the internet, encouraged by the Edward Snowden revelations, Facebook announced that it would allow users to receive encrypted emails from the company. Even at the time, this was a feature for the paranoid users. By turning on the feature, all emails sent from Facebook -- mostly notifications of "likes" and private messages -- to the users who opted-in would be encrypted with the decades-old technology called Pretty Good Privacy, or PGP. Eight years later, Facebook is killing the feature due to low usage, according to the company. The feature was deprecated Tuesday. Facebook declined to specify exactly how many users were still using the encrypted email feature.

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An anonymous reader shares a report: A little more than three months ago the Indian space agency, ISRO, achieved a major success by putting its Vikram lander safely down on the surface of the Moon. In doing so India became the fourth country to achieve a soft landing on the Moon, and this further ignited the country's interest in space exploration. But it turns out that is not the end of the story for the Chandrayaan 3 mission. In a surprise announcement made Monday, ISRO announced that it has successfully returned the propulsion module used by the spacecraft into a high orbit around Earth. This experimental phase of the mission, the agency said in a statement, tested key capabilities needed for future lunar missions, including the potential for returning lunar rocks to Earth.

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Amazon has told Britain's antitrust authority its rival Microsoft uses business practices that restrict customer choice in the cloud computing market, the second major company to criticise the U.S. tech giant's operations. From a report: Britain's Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) launched an investigation into the country's cloud computing industry in October, following a referral from media regulator Ofcom that highlighted Amazon and Microsoft's dominance of the market. In a letter published on the CMA's website on Tuesday, Amazon said changes to Microsoft's terms of services had made it difficult for customers to switch to alternative cloud providers, or run competitors' services alongside. "To use many of Microsoft's software products with these other cloud services providers, a customer must purchase a separate license even if they already own the software," Amazon said. "This often makes it financially unviable for a customer to choose a provider other than Microsoft."

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An anonymous reader shares a report: Beeper has been offering a unified messaging platform for a few years, allowing users to open a single app to communicate with contacts via SMS, Google Chat, Facebook Messenger, Slack, Discord, WhatsApp, and perhaps most significantly, iMessage. Up until this week though, Android users that wanted to use Beeper to send "blue bubble" messages to iMessage users had their messages routed through a Mac or iOS device. Now Beeper has launched a new app called Beeper Mini that handles everything on-device, no iPhone or Mac bridge required. Beeper Mini is available now from the Google Play Store, and offers a 7-day free trial. After that, it costs $2 per month to keep using. [...] previously the company had to rely on a Mac-in-the-cloud? The company explains the method it's using in a blog post, but in a nutshell, Beeper says a security researcher has reverse engineered "the iMessage protocol and encryption," so that "all messages are sent and received by Beeper Mini Android app directly to Apple's servers" and "the encryption keys needed to encrypt these messages never leave your phone." That security researcher, by the way, is a high school student that goes by jjtech, who was hired by Beeper after showing the company his code. A proof-of-concept Python script is also available on Github if you'd like to run it to send messages to iMessage from a PC.

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Many PlayStation Network users reported Monday that their accounts were unexpectedly permanently suspended. As of Tuesday morning, many of the people who had received the messages now say their accounts have been restored. From a report: Some of them contacted customer service while others did not, but nearly a day after the issues began, Sony hasn't commented publicly or responded to us about the wave of bans or the restorations that followed. A message to one user read: "This account is permanently suspended from PlayStation Network due to violations of the PlayStation Network Terms of Service and User Agreement."

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Microsoft is detailing a number of new features coming to its Copilot service soon, including OpenAI's latest models. Copilot will get support for GPT-4 Turbo soon, alongside an updated DALL-E 3 model, a new code interpreter feature, and deep search functionality inside Bing. From a report: Copilot will soon be able to respond using OpenAI's latest GPT-4 Turbo model, which essentially means it will "see" more data thanks to a 128K context window. This larger context window will allow Copilot to better understand queries and offer better responses. While you're waiting on the GPT-4 Turbo model to appear in Copilot, Microsoft is now using an improved DALL-E 3 model in Bing Image Creator and Copilot. Microsoft Edge, which includes a Copilot sidebar, is also getting the ability to compose text within websites' text input to rewrite sentences inline. You can also now use Copilot in Microsoft Edge to summarize videos you're watching on YouTube. Coders and developers might be interested in a new code interpreter feature coming to Copilot soon. This new feature will allow Copilot users to get more accurate calculations, data analysis, or even code from the AI chatbot.

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404 Media: OctoML, a Seattle-based startup that helps companies optimize and deploy their machine learning models, debated internally whether it was ethical and legally risky for it to generate images for Civitai, an AI model sharing and image generating platform backed by venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, after it discovered Civitai generated content that OctoML co-founder Thierry Moreau said "could be categorized as child pornography," according to internal OctoML Slack messages and documents viewed by 404 Media. OctoML has raised $132 million in funding, and is an AWS partner, meaning it generated these images on Amazon servers. "What's absolutely staggering is that this is the #3 all time downloaded model on CivitAI, and is presented as a pretty SFW model," Moreau, who is also OctoML's VP, technology partnerships, said in a company Slack room called #ai_ethics on June 8, 2023. Moreau was referring to an AI model called "Deliberate" that can produce pornographic images. "A fairly innocent and short prompt '[girl: boy: 15], hyperdetailed' automatically generated unethical/shocking content -- read something could be categorized as child pornography," his Slack message added.

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Banks using generative artificial intelligence tools could boost their earnings by as much as $340 billion annually through increased productivity, according to consultants hoping to help the industry adapt in this fast-moving area. From a report: This would amount to a 9% to 15% increase in operating profits, according to a McKinsey Global Institute report published Tuesday. Corporate and retail banks have the most to gain, the authors claimed. Generative AI was popularized last year when OpenAI's ChatGPT tool launched, offering users sentences, summaries or even poetry based on simple prompts. The technology is trained on vast quantities of existing material that is used to generate its responses. Tools like this could eventually take over repetitive tasks from most human workers, according to McKinsey's research on 63 use cases across industries. While the initial efficiencies are set to be within companies -- and the timeframe for adoption is unclear -- the finance sector can expect the AI shift in the future "to be a lot more on the customer facing side," McKinsey senior partner Gokhan Sari said in an interview. Sales and marketing, software engineering, and call center roles are among those most likely to be affected, said senior McKinsey partner Jared Moon. As many as 70% of business activities will have automated parts, which will leave only "a very small proportion" of jobs untouched, Moon added.

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An anonymous reader shares a report: After a spy camera designed to look like a towel hook was purchased on Amazon and illegally used for months to capture photos of a minor in her private bathroom, Amazon was sued. The plaintiff -- a former Brazilian foreign exchange student then living in West Virginia -- argued that Amazon had inspected the camera three times and its safety team had failed to prevent allegedly severe, foreseeable harms still affecting her today. Amazon hoped the court would dismiss the suit, arguing that the platform wasn't responsible for the alleged criminal conduct harming the minor. But after nearly eight months deliberating, a judge recently largely denied the tech giant's motion to dismiss. Amazon's biggest problem persuading the judge was seemingly the product descriptions that the platform approved. An amended complaint included a photo from Amazon's product listing that showed bathroom towels hanging on hooks that disguised the hidden camera. Text on that product image promoted the spycams, boasting that they "won't attract attention" because each hook appears to be "a very ordinary hook." Because "Amazon approved product descriptions suggesting consumers use" the spycam "to record private moments in a bathroom," US district judge Robert Chambers wrote, "Amazon cannot claim shock when a consumer does just that." "These allegations raise a reasonable inference Amazon sold a camera knowing it would be used to record a third party in a bathroom without their consent," Chambers wrote.

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An anonymous reader shares a report: A somewhat obscure guideline for developers of U.S. government websites may be about to accelerate the long, sad decline of Mozilla's Firefox browser. There already are plenty of large entities, both public and private, whose websites lack proper support for Firefox; and that will get only worse in the near future, because the 'fox's auburn paws are perilously close to the lip of the proverbial slippery slope. The U.S. Web Design System (USWDS) provides a comprehensive set of standards which guide those who build the U.S. government's many websites. Its documentation for developers borrows a "2% rule" from its British counterpart: "... we officially support any browser above 2% usage as observed by analytics.usa.gov." (Firefox's market share was 2.2%, per the traffic for the previous ninety days.) [...] "So what?" you may wonder. "That's just for web developers in the U.S. government. It doesn't affect any other web devs." Actually, it very well could. Here's how I envision the dominoes falling: 1. Once Firefox slips below the 2% threshold in the government's visitor analytics, USWDS tells government web devs they don't have to support Firefox anymore. 2. When that word gets out, it spreads quickly to not only the front-end dev community but also the corporate IT departments for whom some web devs work. Many corporations do a lot of business with the government and, thus, whatever the government does from an IT standpoint is going to influence what corporations do. 3. Corporations see this change as an opportunity to lower dev costs and delivery times, in that it provides an excuse to remove some testing (and, in rare cases, specific coding) from their development workflow.

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Meta and IBM are joining more than 40 companies and organizations to create an industry group dedicated to open source artificial intelligence work, aiming to share technology and reduce risks. From a report: The coalition, called the AI Alliance, will focus on the responsible development of AI technology, including safety and security tools, according to a statement Tuesday. The group also will look to increase the number of open source AI models -- rather than the proprietary systems favored by some companies -- develop new hardware and team up with academic researchers. Proponents of open source AI technology, which is made public by developers for others to use, see the approach as a more efficient way to cultivate the highly complex systems. Over the past few months, Meta has been releasing open source versions of its large language models, which are the foundation of AI chatbots.

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