The Athena lunar lander from Intuitive Machines has prematurely ended its mission after tipping onto its side shortly after touching down near the moon’s south pole, failing to fully accomplish its planned water-searching objectives. From a report: Athena was expected to operate for about 10 days before powering down as lunar night fell over the spacecraft’s landing site at Mons Mouton, a plateau that lies about 100 miles (160 kilometers) from the south pole. But photographs delivered by the lander before it powered down confirmed the vehicle is lying on its side. “With the direction of the sun, the orientation of the solar panels, and extreme cold temperatures in the crater, Intuitive Machines does not expect Athena to recharge,” the company said in a statement. “The mission has concluded and teams are continuing to assess the data collected throughout the mission.”

Intuitive Machines, however, highlighted that, although Athena did not operate as intended, the lander was able to briefly operate and transmit data after touchdown. That made the mission the “southernmost lunar landing and surface operations ever achieved.” Intuitive Machines also said that Athena was “able to accelerate several program and payload milestones, including NASA’s PRIME-1 suite, before the lander’s batteries depleted.” PRIME-1, which includes a drill that was expected to dig into the lunar surface to hunt for water, was able to move, according to a statement from NASA that states the device “demonstrated the hardware’s full range of motion in the harsh environment of space.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Many of us have been guilty of binning a mushy, overripe banana — but now scientists say they have a solution with the launch of a genetically engineered non-browning banana. The product is the latest in a series of gene-edited fruits and vegetables designed to have a longer shelf life. Scientists say the technology is emerging as a powerful new weapon against food waste, which occurs globally on an epic scale. The banana, developed by Tropic, a biotech company based in Norwich, is said to remain fresh and yellow for 12 hours after being peeled and is less susceptible to turning brown when bumped during harvesting and transportation.

The company has also developed a slow-ripening banana that has been approved in several countries, which it plans to launch later in the year. Other research teams are working on lettuce that wilts more slowly, bruise-resistant apples and potatoes and identifying the genes that determine how quickly grapes and blueberries shrivel. […] The company worked out how to disable a gene responsible for the production of an enzyme called polyphenol oxidase, which causes browning. The same gene is silenced in Arctic apples, a genetically modified variety, which has been sold in the US since 2017, and blocking the production of polyphenol oxidase has been shown to work in tomatoes, melon, kiwifruits and mushrooms. In the bananas, Tropic made precise changes to existing genes without introducing foreign genetic material. The report notes that an estimated 33% of the produce that is harvested worldwide is never consumed due to the short shelf-life of many fruit and vegetable products. Bananas are among the most thrown-away foods, with some 5 billion bananas tossed in the U.S. each year.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Microsoft is reportedly developing its own large language model series capable of rivaling OpenAI and Anthropic’s models. SiliconANGLE reports: Sources told Bloomberg that the LLM series is known as MAI. That’s presumably an acronym for “Microsoft artificial intelligence.” It might also be a reference to Maia 100, an internally-developed AI chip the company debuted last year. It’s possible Microsoft is using the processor to power the new MAI models. The company recently tested the LLM series to gauge its performance. As part of the evaluation, Microsoft engineers checked whether MAI could power the company’s Copilot family of AI assistants. Data from the tests reportedly indicates that the LLM series is competitive with models from OpenAI and Anthropic.

That Microsoft evaluated whether MAI could be integrated into Copilot hints the LLM series is geared towards general-purpose processing rather than reasoning. Many of the tasks supported by Copilot can be performed with a general-purpose model. According to Bloomberg, Microsoft is currently developing a second LLM series optimized for reasoning tasks. The report didn’t specify details such as the number of models Microsoft is training or their parameter counts. It’s also unclear whether they might provide multimodal features.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Signal President Meredith Whittaker warned at SXSW that agentic AI poses significant privacy and security risks, as these AI agents require extensive access to users’ personal data, likely processing it unencrypted in the cloud. TechCrunch reports: “So we can just put our brain in a jar because the thing is doing that and we don’t have to touch it, right?,” Whittaker mused. Then she explained the type of access the AI agent would need to perform these tasks, including access to our web browser and a way to drive it as well as access to our credit card information to pay for tickets, our calendar, and messaging app to send the text to your friends. “It would need to be able to drive that [process] across our entire system with something that looks like root permission, accessing every single one of those databases — probably in the clear, because there’s no model to do that encrypted,” Whittaker warned.

“And if we’re talking about a sufficiently powerful … AI model that’s powering that, there’s no way that’s happening on device,” she continued. “That’s almost certainly being sent to a cloud server where it’s being processed and sent back. So there’s a profound issue with security and privacy that is haunting this hype around agents, and that is ultimately threatening to break the blood-brain barrier between the application layer and the OS layer by conjoining all of these separate services [and] muddying their data,” Whittaker concluded.

If a messaging app like Signal were to integrate with AI agents, it would undermine the privacy of your messages, she said. The agent has to access the app to text your friends and also pull data back to summarize those texts. Her comments followed remarks she made earlier during the panel on how the AI industry had been built on a surveillance model with mass data collection. She said that the “bigger is better AI paradigm” — meaning the more data, the better — had potential consequences that she didn’t think were good. With agentic AI, Whittaker warned we’d further undermine privacy and security in the name of a “magic genie bot that’s going to take care of the exigencies of life,” she concluded. You can watch the full speech on YouTube.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

New submitter grandrollerz writes: Despite streaming online since the RealAudio days of the late 1990s, the BBC has announced that most of its radio stations will become unavailable to international users later this year. Starting in Spring 2025, only talk news stations BBC World Service and BBC Radio 4 will remain accessible outside the UK. This change is due to rights issues and the launch of a new BBC audio website and app that will replace BBC Sounds for international users. The BBC Sounds app will be available exclusively to UK audiences, although UK users traveling abroad for short periods will still be able to use it. This move has disappointed many long-time international listeners who will lose access to their favorite BBC radio stations. It follows a similar move to further commercialize its services where in 2024 the BBC and Amazon Music struck a global deal to make BBC podcasts available on Amazon Music outside the UK, but only for subscribers to Amazon’s Prime and Amazon Music Unlimited services.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

President Trump has signed an executive order to establish a strategic reserve of cryptocurrencies by using tokens already owned by the government. Reuters reports: A “Strategic Bitcoin Reserve” will be capitalized with bitcoin owned by the federal government that was seized as part of criminal or civil asset forfeiture proceedings, the White House crypto czar, billionaire David Sacks, said in a post on social media platform X. The order kept open the possibility of the government buying bitcoin in future. The U.S. commerce and treasury secretaries “are authorized to develop budget-neutral strategies for acquiring additional bitcoin, provided that those strategies impose no incremental costs on American taxpayers,” a factsheet on the White House website said. “This is the most underwhelming and disappointing outcome we could have expected for this week,” Charles Edwards, founder of bitcoin-focused hedge fund Capriole Investments, wrote in a post on X. “No active buying means this is just a fancy title for Bitcoin holdings that already existed with the Govt. This is a pig in lipstick.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Broadcom’s VMware acquisition has significantly boosted revenue, largely driven by high-priced VMware Cloud Foundation bundles adopted by the majority of its top customers. The Register reports: Broadcom’s acquisition of VMware appears to be a big success, on the balance sheet at least, after the company announced a big majority of its top 10,000 customers have decided to acquire its Cloud Foundation stack and posted strong growth. The chips-and-code company today announced its results for the quarter ended February 2nd, its first for FY 2025. Revenue of $14.92 billion represented 25 percent year-on-year growth. Net income of $5.5 billion was a 315 percent increase on the result from Q1 2024.

Broadcom no longer breaks out VMware revenue: sales of Virtzilla’s wares are all now lumped into its infrastructure software business unit, which posted $6.7 billion revenue for Q1, up from $4.55 billion for the same quarter last year. Direct comparisons of those numbers are not wise as Broadcom owned VMware for four fifths of Q1 2024. Consider, instead, the $1.97 billion Q4 2023 and $7.6 billion FY 2023 software revenue that Broadcom recorded before it acquired VMware.

Know, also, that Broadcom’s software sales grew by just three percent in FY 2023 and four percent in FY 2022. That slow growth means the jump from $1.97 billion software revenue in Q4 2023 to $6.7 billion in Q1 2025 is likely due to VMware, which in its last quarter as an independent company reported $3.4 billion revenue. It therefore looks a lot like Broadcom has added around $1 billion to quarterly VMware revenue in a little over a year.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.