California saw its worst drought in 10,000 years between 2012 and 2015, remembers the Washington Post. And yet genetic analyses of California’s scarlet monkeyflower “found that many rapidly evolved… allowing them to cope with water scarcity and rebound from decline.”

“The fact that certain organisms are able to adapt just because of genetics that are already present is a great source of hope,” said Daniel Anstett, a plant biologist at Cornell University and lead author on a new study on the issue. “It’s one more arrow in the quiver of different ways that populations might be able to survive the massive climate change we’re inflicting on the planet.” The recovery of [Sequoia National Park’s] scarlet monkeyflowers offers rare, real-world evidence of what scientists call “evolutionary rescue,” according to the study published Thursday in the journal Science. It suggests that some species may be able to evolve quickly enough to keep up with the accelerating consequences of human-caused warming — essentially saving themselves from extinction.

This discovery could help people decide how to distribute limited conservation funds by pinpointing which species have enough genetic diversity to be resilient, ecologists Mark Urban and Laurinne Balstad, who were not involved in the study, wrote in a separate analysis published by Science. “The challenge going forward is to identify when evolutionary rescue is possible, when it is not, and how to rescue those species that cannot rescue themselves,” Urban and Balstad wrote.

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Meta could be preparing for one of the largest layoffs in its history, according to a Reuters report. The tech giant is planning to cut about 20 percent of its workforce, according to the outlet’s sources. According to the report, neither a date nor the exact number of layoffs has been finalized yet.

However, Reuters reported that Meta’s top executives have told “other senior leaders” to start “planning how to pare back.” In its latest financial report, the company’s employee headcount was 78,865 as of December 31, 2025, while revenue reached nearly $60 billion for the fourth quarter and more than $200 billion for the entire year. A Meta spokesperson told Reuters that this was “speculative reporting about theoretical approaches.”

Meta is no stranger to major layoffs. Earlier this year, Meta targeted about 1,000 employees in its layoffs with the Reality Labs division that’s responsible for the company’s virtual reality and metaverse efforts. Early last year, Meta laid off about five percent of its workforce, following a smaller round of firings that same month. Meanwhile, the company has been spending heavily to acquire AI startups, like Moltbook, a social network designed for AI agents, and Manus, a startup focused on AI agents for task automation.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/big-tech/meta-is-reportedly-planning-to-cut-up-to-20-percent-of-its-staff-in-upcoming-layoffs-160812304.html?src=rss

Digg has shut down, for now, just a few months after its open beta launched. Justin Mezzell, the company’s CEO, has explained on the home page that it noticed hours after the beta launched that it was already being targeted by SEO spammers. “The internet is now populated, in meaningful part, by sophisticated AI agents and automated accounts,” he wrote. Apparently, the Digg team wasn’t ready for the scale and the speed at which bots found and started flooding the website.

Mezzell said Digg banned thousands of accounts and deployed both internal tools and external solutions, but they weren’t enough. He admitted that the votes and the comments on the website couldn’t be trusted due to the amount of bot activity it got. While Digg has decided to significantly downsize its team, a small number of staff members has stayed to rebuild it completely. He said it wasn’t enough to present Digg as an alternative to current social networks and community-based websites. “What comes next needs to be genuinely different,” he added.

The CEO didn’t explain how Digg will reinvent itself, but he did announce that its founder, Kevin Rose, is joining the company full time. Rose bought back Digg last year in partnership with Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian. Back then, they said they had “a fresh vision to restore the spirit of discovery and genuine community that made the early web a fun and exciting place to be.” Based on what happened to Digg, that’s now harder to achieve with the state of the internet today.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/social-media/digg-shuts-down-for-a-hard-reset-because-it-was-flooded-with-bots-153848094.html?src=rss

“A new study suggests the productivity boost from AI may be far smaller than executives claim,” writes Slashdot reader BrianFagioli:

According to research cited in Foxit’s State of Document Intelligence report, while 89% of executives and 79% of end users say AI tools make them feel more productive, the actual time savings shrink dramatically once people account for reviewing and validating AI-generated output.

The survey of 1,000 desk-based workers and 400 executives in the United States and United Kingdom found executives believe AI saves them about 4.6 hours per week, but they spend roughly 4 hours and 20 minutes verifying those results. End users reported a similar pattern, estimating 3.6 hours saved but 3 hours and 50 minutes spent reviewing AI work. Once that “verification burden” is factored in, executives gain just 16 minutes per week, while end users actually lose about 14 minutes.

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Last June Texas Agriculture Commissioner Sid Miller said in a statement that Texans “have a God-given right to know what’s on their plate, and for millions of Texans, it better come from a pasture, not a lab. It’s plain cowboy logic that we must safeguard our real, authentic meat industry from synthetic alternatives.”

But California company Wildtype sells lab-grown salmon — and is suing Texas over its ban on cell-cultivated meat, the Austin Chronicle reported this week. The company’s founder says lab-grown salmon eliminates the mercury, microplastic, and antibiotic contamination commonly found in seafood. And one chef in Austin, Texas says lab-grown salmon is “awesome” and “something new”– at the only Texas restaurant that was serving it last summer:

Just two months after the salmon hit the menu, Texas banned the sale of cell-cultivated meat…
A lawsuit from Wildtype and one other FDA-approved cultivated meat company [argues] it’s anti-capitalism and unconstitutional… This law “was not enacted to protect the health and safety of Texas consumers — indeed, it allows the continued distribution of cultivated meat to consumers so long as it is not sold. Instead, SB 261 was enacted to stifle the growth of the cultivated meat industry to protect Texas’ conventional agricultural industry from innovative competition that is exclusively based outside of Texas….” [according to the lawsuit]. It was filed in September, immediately after the ban took effect, and cell-cultivated companies are awaiting judgment.

That Texas ban would last two years, notes U.S. News and World Reports, adding that
Alabama, Florida, Indiana, Mississippi, Montana, and Nebraska have also passed bans, some temporary “on the manufacturing, sale or distribution of cell-cultured meat.” Meanwhile, a new five-year moratorium on lab-grown meat was signed this week by the governor of South Dakota “after rejecting a permanent ban last month,” reports South Dakota Searchlight:

The new law bars the sale, manufacture or distribution of “cell-cultured protein” products from July 1 this year through June 30, 2031. Violations are punishable by up to 30 days in jail, a fine of up to $500, or both.

“But supporters of lab-grown meat are not going down without a fight,” adds U.S. News and World Reports, with another lawsuit also filed challenging a ban in Florida:

When Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis signed the ban in Florida, he described it as “fighting back against the global elite’s plan to force the world to eat meat grown in a petri dish or bugs to achieve their authoritarian goals.” He added that his administration “will save our beef.”

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Welcome to our latest roundup of what’s going on in the indie game space. A bunch of intriguing games arrived this week, including a mobile port of one of the most absorbing things I’ve played in years and two completely different titles with the same name. Let’s get things started with a look at a few projects that were featured in the latest edition of the Future Games Show.

Hyperwired (from SidralGames and publisher SelectaPlay) is a 2D roguelike shooter with an interesting resource-management twist. To recharge your weapons and systems, you have to plug a cable that trails behind your spaceship into a socket. While you’re plugged in, your movement is restricted by the length of the tether, but you gain more firepower. 

There are a whole bunch of upgrades and bullet modifiers to play around with here, including a slow-motion system you can activate at almost any time. Hyperwired is slated to hit Steam, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S and Nintendo Switch this summer.

In Clean Up Earth, you and other players can work together to restore polluted environments. You can play solo if you like, but on the larger maps you’ll need to team up with others to handle large bits of junk. One particularly neat aspect of Clean Up Earth is that in-game actions will automatically trigger micro-donations from developer Magic Pockets and its partners to environmental organizations.

Clean Up Earth is coming to Steam, Epic Games Store, PS5, and Xbox Series X/S on April 2. A Nintendo Switch 2 version is on the way in the future. There’s a demo available on Steam as well. 

Mr. Magpie’s Harmless Card Game is a minesweeper-style riff on the likes of Inscryption and Buckshot Roulette. As with some other roguelike deckbuilders, you’re trapped in a creepy situation and the only way to escape alive is to gamble and earn enough money in time to meet quotas. To do that, you’ll need to twist the odds in your favor by building multipliers and synergies. You can boost your deck with powerful cards you can buy from a shop.

However, there are dangerous JERRY cards on the board that could spell doom if you flip them over. You can use hints and strategies to try to figure out where those cards are and avoid them. 

There’s no release date as yet for Mr. Magpie’s Harmless Card Game, which is from Giant Light Studios. However, you can request access to a playtest on Steam.

A press release described Herdles as “Spyro meets Breath of the Wild, with a dog.” I’m immediately sold.

Playing as a magical version of creative director Christian Hübel’s own dog, Snoopy, you’ll “restore balance to a fracturing world” in this open-world platformer. On your journey, you’ll rescue Herdles, or corrupted creatures. Doing so will unlock new powers, such as being able to glide, bust through walls and swim up waterfalls.

There’s no combat or death in this game, which seems to be largely about solving puzzles, experimenting with physics-based abilities and exploring. It’s said to have “deep accessibility and customization options” too. Fire Sword Studios and One More Journey are behind Herdles, which does not have a release window, though the Steam page is live.

New releases

I took an earlier-than-usual lunch break on Thursday to check out the mobile version of Ball x Pit (from Kenny Sun and friends and publisher Devolver Digital) as soon as it was released. I adore this game. I’m happy it runs smoothly on my iPhone 16, because that should give me more reason to avoid doomscrolling. 

It’s the same Ball x Pit. It’s still fantastic. The touchscreen dual-stick controls work well enough, especially when the auto-fire option is enabled. Still, a mobile controller like OhSnap’s MCON or the Backbone Pro works better for me. 

A bunch more people will be able to enjoy Ball x Pit now that it’s on iOS and Android. You can play the first level for free and it costs $10 to unlock the full game.

It’s a pretty good week for folks who are into brick-breaking roguelites, because here’s another one. ITER-8 (from fluckyMachine and publisher Fireshine Games) blends mining and tower defense. It’s a bit like Dome Keeper. 

You’re tasked with acquiring resources from an enormous monolith that’s above your base. You’ll need to drag these items back to your base so you can upgrade your character, ship, shield and weapon. There are relics to find and you can swap these for installations like lasers, barriers and cannons. There are also puzzle-based sections that sees your character leave their ship for some in-person mining and upgrade collecting, temporarily switching from 2D to 3D action.

After a while, the monolith starts to thrum with an ominous sound. That means it’s time to race back to base (with the help of a fast-travel system) to fend off waves of alien enemies.

The two sides of ITER-8 work fairly well together and I’ve enjoyed my time with it so far. I actually find it pretty relaxing overall, though the tower-defense aspect could have been designed a bit more elegantly. Switching aim from one side of the base to the other doesn’t feel snappy enough. ITER-8 is available on Steam for $13. There’s a 25 percent launch discount available until March 23.

Piece by Piece is billed as a cozy repair shop game from Gamkat and publisher No More Robots. It looks cute!

You can decorate your shop and make it homely by cleaning, keeping the log fire burning and making sure the cookie jar is full. Of course, you’ll be fixing up heirlooms and antiques for customers too. It’s out now on Steam for $12, with a 20 percent discount until March 25.

Piece by Piece is a puzzle platformer in the most literal sense. You manipulate levels by moving puzzle pieces around. It’s a great idea from Neon Polygons and I’m keen to check this one out on Steam. It typically costs $13, but there’s a 15 percent discount until March 27.

Wait a second here… Two games called Piece by Piece that were released in the same week? That’s a heck of a coincidence. Thankfully, the teams behind both games saw the funny side. They’ve even created a bundle of both games so you can buy them both for an extra 10 percent off.

Here’s another puzzle-forward game, albeit one that’s more of an adventure. In Rhell: Warped Worlds & Troubled Times, you’ll discover and combine spells in creative ways to solve riddles in similar fashion to games like Baba Is You. There are said to be more than a million ways to combine the magical keywords. Since every spell works on any object in the game, there are more than 102 million possible configurations. Neat!

Solo developer Alice Jarratt from SlugGlove spent three years making Rhell: Warped Worlds & Troubled Times and drew more than 10,000 frames of animation for it. The game is available on Steam for $15, with a 20 percent launch discount until March 26. A demo is available too. 

Upcoming 

I’ve had Hoa on my wishlist for forever, so it’s probably time for me to check out that puzzle platformer before the sequel arrives later this year. Hoa 2 (from Skrollcat Studio and publisher PM Studios) sticks with the hand-painted art of the original game but it’s a 3D game this time. 

It begins a long, long time after the end of Hoa, with the eponymous fairy returning to a world that’s been transformed by time. But many of her old friends have passed away, so Hoa seeks a new purpose. 

Along with platforming and spatial puzzles, Hoa 2 features secrets and mini-games. It’s coming to Steam, PS5, Xbox Series X/S and Nintendo Switch 2. 

I dig what I’ve seen of MotorSlice, which seems to have Mirror’s Edge-style parkour action but in a much grittier-looking world. The developers also took inspiration from the Prince of Persia series and Shadow of the Colossus here — perhaps not too surprising in the latter case given that you’ll be scaling huge bosses. This action adventure sees you on a mission to destroy every piece of machinery inside a ruined megastructure.

MotorSlice is coming to Steam this spring. A demo for this game from Regular Studio and publisher Top Hat Studios is available now. 

Being a lifelong soccer fan is a curse that’s punctuated with infrequent moments of the most intense joy you’ll ever feel. Plus, every few years, I lose about a month of my life to the most recent version of Football Manager (I gave up on the last one after winning every possible trophy with Borussia Mönchengladbach for three seasons in a row). So, it’s safe to say that a game focused on perhaps the least glamourous job in soccer is up my alley.

Kitman — a job you might know of as “equipment manager” — is a sports management game with co-op for up to four people in which you take care of things behind the scenes of a soccer team. You’ll clean locker rooms, polish boots, make sure players have the right uniforms and so on, while taking care of details on the fly on match days. 

There’s a fun twist here in that you can secretly take on some of the manager’s duties, such as scouting players and adjusting formations. Maybe that explains what’s been happening with Tottenham Hotspur lately.

Kitman, from Outlier, is coming to Steam later this year. In the meantime, you can sign up to take part in a playtest.

If, like me, you adore Astro Bot, here’s something to keep an eye on. Astrolander is a 2.5D platformer with lovely-looking 3D environments. As a robot named Feedback, you set out on a journey with a rocket-powered sidekick named Haptic (heh) to save bots known as the Most Valuable Programs, or MVPs. A second player can join in and help take control of Feedback.

Astrolander is from 16-year-old Max Trest of Lost Cartridge Creations. The PlayStation team (including its then-head of indie games Shuhei Yoshida) tried Astrolander at an event a few years back and offered Trest the chance to bring his game to PS5. Astrolander is also coming to Steam. It’s set to arrive later this year.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/gaming/ball-x-pit-on-mobile-piece-by-piece-x2-and-other-new-indie-games-worth-checking-out-110000319.html?src=rss

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: Meta is planning sweeping layoffs that could affect 20% or more of the company, three sources familiar with the matter told Reuters, as Meta seeks to offset costly artificial intelligence infrastructure bets and prepare for greater efficiency brought about by AI-assisted workers. No date has been set for the cuts and the magnitude has not been finalized, the people said. Top executives have recently signaled the plans to other senior leaders at Meta and told them to begin planning how to pare back, two of the people said. If Meta settles on the 20% figure, the layoffs will be the company’s most significant since a restructuring in late 2022 and early 2023 that it dubbed the “year of efficiency.” It employed nearly 79,000 people as of December 31, according to its latest filing. The speculation follows a recent report from The New York Times claiming that Meta has delayed the release of its next major AI model after falling behind competing systems from Google, OpenAI, and Anthropic.

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Elon Musk has ordered another round of job cuts at xAI after growing frustrated with the poor performance of its coding product, forcing out several more cofounders and parachuting in “fixers” from SpaceX and Tesla to audit the startup.

The latest overhaul of the 2-year-old startup follows the success of Anthropic and OpenAI, whose AI coding tools have shaken up the software industry, multiple people familiar with the decisions said.

Musk has dialled up the pressure after merging SpaceX with xAI in a $1.25 billion deal, as he attempts to meet a June deadline for what could be the biggest stock market listing in history. The world’s richest man has said his goals are to launch AI data centers into space, build factories on the Moon, and colonize Mars.

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Longtime Slashdot reader tsuliga writes: Two new episodes of Doctor Who that were previously lost have been found. The original Doctor Who episodes were wiped or deleted by the BBC because they were not aware of the future use of re-runs of these shows. Ninety-five of the 253 episodes from the program’s first six years are currently missing. How many more episodes are out there waiting to be rediscovered? “The main broadcasters in the UK in the 1960s, 70s, up to the 80s really, junked quite a lot of content,” said Justin Smith, a cinema professor at England’s De Montfort University and film archivist. “In some ways finding missing ‘Doctor Whos’ is the holy grail” of classic TV discoveries, Smith said.

The two episodes were “The Nightmare Begins” and “Devil’s Planet,” both of which aired during the show’s third series in 1965. It features William Hartnell as the Doctor in a story involving archvillains the Daleks — pepperpot-shaped metal aggressors whose favorite word is “Exterminate!” Smith said that for fans of the show, “it’s got it all, it really has. It is intergalactic, it’s got some great performances. It stands up really, really well.”

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from the New York Times: A top Senate administrator on Monday gave aides the green light to use three artificial intelligence chatbots for official work, a reflection of how widespread the use of the products has become in workplaces around the globe. The chief information officer for the Senate sergeant-at-arms, who oversees the chamber’s computers as well as security, said in a one-page memo reviewed by The New York Times that aides could use Google’s Gemini chat, OpenAI’s ChatGPT or Microsoft Copilot, which is already integrated into Senate platforms.

Copilot “can help with routine Senate work, including drafting and editing documents, summarizing information, preparing talking points and briefing material, and conducting research and analysis,” the memo said. The document later added that “data shared with Copilot Chat stays within the secure Microsoft 365 Government environment and is protected by the same controls that safeguard other Senate data.” It’s unclear how widely AI is used in the Senate or how widespread it might become, as individual offices and committees set their own rules. The chamber has also not publicly released comprehensive guidance on chatbots, the report notes.

In contrast, the House has clearer policies allowing the general use of AI for limited internal tasks but restricting it from sensitive data or for being used for deepfakes and certain decision-making activities.

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When talking about risk during a press conference on Thursday, the NASA officials in charge of the upcoming Artemis II Moon mission hedged their answers.

Reporters’ questions on the risks were certainly valid and appropriate. In an open society, it is vital to set expectations for any hazardous venture such as spaceflight—most importantly for the astronauts actually making the journey, but also for NASA’s workforce, the White House, lawmakers, and members of the public paying for the endeavor.

What’s more, Artemis II will be the first mission since 1972 to fly humans to the vicinity of the Moon. This is not following the well-trodden yet perilous path that astronauts take to reach the International Space Station, just a few hundred miles above Earth.

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A 58-year-old woman in Greece appears to hold the record for growing a parasitic sheep bot fly in her nose the longest, almost creating a snot rocket that could literally fly.

Usually, when the sheep bot fly accidentally nosedives into a human’s schnoz, the first-stage larvae they deliver don’t actually develop. In contrast, in its normal target—a sheep’s nose—the larvae would move up into the sinuses, feed, grow, and molt into second- and third-stage larvae. From there, the flies (Oestrus ovis) drip from the nose onto the ground, burrow into the soil, pupate, and emerge as adult flies.

For a long time, experts thought that the flies couldn’t complete their development in humans beyond the first larval stage. But a few human cases have been reported in recent decades involving the second- and third-stage larvae. The woman’s case, reported in the Journal of Emerging Infectious Diseases by a medical entomologist and colleagues, goes the furthest yet, finding pupa and a puparium—the hard casing of a pupa—in the woman’s nose.

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Do you remember the joyful satisfaction you felt when you really started to understand Slay the Spire?

This isn’t a totally rhetorical question. If you’re reading this piece about Slay the Spire 2—published roughly a week into what promises to be a lengthy Early Access period—I have to assume you’ve put in dozens, if not hundreds (or thousands?) of hours with the original Slay the Spire. At this point, the game probably feels less like a game and more like a comfortable old pair of sneakers. You probably have a favorite character, a preferred set of card synergies to focus on building for that character, and a set of alternative strategies to aim for when the vagaries of chance make that preferred strategy impossible. The game’s plentiful randomization makes each run feel a bit different, but the contours of those runs start to feel a little common to anyone who has tinkered with the game for years.

But think back, if you can, to when Slay the Spire was an exciting new challenge. Remember those first few runs, when you were still deep in the trial-and-error phase of your Slay the Spire journey. You still had to read each new card carefully as it appeared, developing potential strategies on the fly and weighing key deckbuilding and power-building decisions for minutes at a time to maximize your chance of survival. Sure, you failed a lot. But you got a little more confident each time and a little farther every few sessions and just a little more knowledgeable about and immersed in the game’s intricate, well-balanced systems.

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