In 2018 police arrested “the Golden State Killer” — now a 72-year-old man who had committed 13 murders between 1974 and 1986, the New York Times remembers:
What made the investigation possible was GEDmatch, a low-frills, online gathering place for people to upload DNA test results from popular direct-to-consumer services such as Ancestry or 23andMe, in hopes of connecting with unknown relatives. The authorities’ decision to mine the genealogical enthusiasts’ data for investigative leads was shocking at the time, and led the site to warn users. But the practice has continued, and has since been used in hundreds of cases.
But now using similar techniques, a wellness coach born in Mississippi (through a Facebook group called DNA Detectives) has helped over 200 strangers identify their unknown parents, the Times reports.

And she’s recently donated more than $100,000 to a genetics lab called Othram — to fund the sequencing of DNA to solve cold cases back in her home state. “These families have waited so long for answers,” she told the New York Times, which calls her “part of a growing cohort of amateur DNA detectives…”
[Othram] created a site called DNASolves to tell the stories of horrific crimes and tragic John and Jane Does — with catchy names like “Christmas tree lady” and “angel baby” — to encourage people to fund budget-crunched police departments, so that they can hire Othram. A competitor, Parabon NanoLabs, had created a similar site called JusticeDrive, which has raised around $30,000.

In addition to money, Othram encouraged supporters to donate their DNA, a request that some critics called unseemly, saying donors should contribute to databases easily available to all investigators. “Some people are too nervous to put their DNA in a general database,” said Mr. Mittelman, who declined to say how large his database is. “Ours is purpose-built for law enforcement.”
Another group raising money for genetic investigations are the producers of true-crime podcasts — and their listeners. According to the article, the podcast-producing company Audiochuck has donated roughly $800,000 to organizations doing investigative genealogical research (including Othram), though the majority went to a nonprofit started by the host of the “Crime Junkie” podcast. (And that nonprofit raised another $250,000, some through crowdfunding.)

“Why just listen to a murder podcast when you can help police comb through genealogical databases for the second cousins of suspected killers and their unidentified victims?” the Times asks?

So far donors around the country have given at least a million dollars to the cause. They could usher in a world where few crimes go unsolved — but only if society is willing to accept, and fund, DNA dragnets…. A group of well-off friends calling themselves the Vegas Justice League has given Othram $45,000, resulting in the solving of three murder-rape cases in Las Vegas, including those of two teenage girls killed in 1979 and in 1989…. [T]he perpetrators were dead….

Natalie Ram, a law professor at the University of Maryland, expressed concern about “the public picking and choosing between cases,” saying investigative priorities could be determined by who can donate the most. Ms. Ram said the “largest share” of cases solved so far with the method “tend to involve white female victims….”
Ms. Ram is also concerned about the constitutional privacy issues raised by the searches, particularly for those people who haven’t taken DNA tests or uploaded their results to the public internet. Even if you resolve never to put your DNA on a site accessible to law enforcement authorities, you share DNA with many other people so could still be discoverable. All it takes is your sibling, aunt or even a distant cousin deciding differently.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot – Amateur Detectives are Now Crowdfunding DNA Sequencing to Solve Murders

In 1983 the annual revenue at the electronics chain Crazy Eddie was roughly $134 million (or about $372 million today), remembers The Hustle. The next year they’d sold $44 million just in computers and games — and eventually grew to 43 stores. The company’s stock ticker symbol was CRZY.

“There was just one major problem,” the article notes. “Crazy Eddie had been lying about its numbers since its inception — and the higher the stock soared the further founder Eddie Antar went to maintain the illusion.”

It’s a colorful story from the early days of home PC sales. Antar’s uncle hid up to $3.5 million in cash in a false ceiling at Antar’s father’s house, according to The Hustle. “Eddie Antar kept close tabs, usually calling his uncle twice a day to see how much money they were skimming…. The skimming strategy allowed Antar to not only hoard cash but also evade sales taxes. His employees were also paid off the books so Crazy Eddie could avoid payroll taxes.”

“Money was always in the house,” said Debbie Rosen Antar, Antar’s first wife, to investigators in the late 1980s. “And if I needed it and I asked him, he would say, ‘Go underneath the bed and take what you need….'”

Why would a company built on a family fraud go public? Somebody told Antar he could keep making millions skimming cash, but he could make tens of millions if the company traded on the stock market. Strangely, Crazy Eddie’s fraudulent history gave it an advantage. To provide the illusion of quickly increasing profits ahead of the IPO, the Antars simply reduced the amount of cash they were skimming. With millions more on the ledger instead of in the family’s pockets, the company’s profits looked more impressive.
As a public company, Crazy Eddie then made up for its inability to skim cash by initiating new fraud streams.

– The company embellished its inventories by millions of dollars to appear better-stocked and better positioned for profits.

– The Antar family laundered profits it had previously skimmed — and deposited in foreign bank accounts — back into the company to inflate revenues….

In November 1987, a hostile investment group led by Houston entrepreneur Elias Zinn pounced, purchasing Crazy Eddie. As Antar’s cousin later recounted, Antar thought the sale would at least give them an opportunity to pin the fraud on the new owners. But Zinn immediately discovered $45 million of listed inventory was missing. Stores soon closed, and the company went bankrupt in 1989.
Two disgruntled ex-employees then brought fraud allegations to America’s stock-regulating agency, the article reports, while the FBI “started sniffing around, too.” Crazy Eddie fled the country, using forged passports to escape to Tel Aviv, Zurich, São Paulo, and the Cayman Islands. But he was eventually arrested in Israel, sentenced to 12.5 years in prison, and ordered to repay investors $121 million (though he apparently served only seven).

But Crazy Eddie also became a cultural phenomenon — sort of. In the 1984 movie Splash, Darryl Hannah’s character even watches a Crazy Eddie TV ad. The Hustle’s article also includes photos of a Crazy Eddie stock certificate — and an actual “Wanted” poster issued the next year by the U.S. Marshalls office.

Yet just four years before his death in 2016, Antar — a high school dropout — was telling an interviewer from The Record that “I changed the business….”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot – How ‘Crazy Eddie’ Electronics Chain Scammed America

In 2021, the European Union imported about 40% of its gas and 25% of its oil from Russia, reports the Associated Press. But now EU officials “are fixated on rapidly reducing the continent’s reliance on Russian oil and natural gas — and that means friction between security and climate goals, at least in the short term.

“To wean itself from Russian energy supplies as quickly as possible, Europe will need to burn more coal and build more pipelines and terminals to import fossil fuels from elsewhere….”
[T]he EU plans to reduce Russian gas imports by two-thirds by the end of this year, and to eliminate them altogether before 2030… In the near-term, ending energy ties with Russia puts the focus on securing alternative sources of fossil fuels. But longer term, the geopolitical and price pressures stoked by Russia’s war in Ukraine may actually accelerate Europe’s transition away from oil, gas and coal. Experts say the war has served as a reminder that renewable energy isn’t just good for the climate, but also for national security. That could help speed up the development of wind and solar power, as well as provide a boost to conservation and energy-efficiency initiatives….

The rapid pursuit of energy independence from Russia will likely require “a slight increase” in carbon emissions, said George Zachmann, an energy expert at the Bruegel think tank in Brussels. But “in the long term, the effect will be that we will see more investment in renewables and energy efficiency in Europe,” Zachmann said.

Plans that wouldn’t have been contemplated just a few months ago are now being actively discussed, such as running coal plants in Germany beyond 2030, which had previously been seen as an end date. Germany’s vice chancellor and energy minister, Robert Habeck, said there should be “no taboos.” The Czech government has made the same calculation about extending the life of coal power plants. “We will need it until we find alternative sources,” Czech energy security commissioner Václav Bartuska, told the news site Seznam Zprávy. “Until that time, even the greenest government will not phase out coal….”

In Britain, which is no longer part of the EU, Prime Minister Boris Johnson says it’s “time to take back control of our energy supplies.” Britain will phase out the small amount of oil it imports from Russia this year. More significantly, Johnson has signaled plans to approve new oil and gas exploration in the North Sea, to the dismay of environmentalists, who say that is incompatible with Britain’s climate targets. Some within the governing Conservative Party and the wider political right want the British government to retreat on its commitment to reach net zero by 2050, a pledge made less than six months ago at a global climate summit in Glasgow, Scotland….

Yet the shock waves from the war cut both ways. Sharply higher gas and electricity prices, and the desire to be less dependent on Russia, are increasing pressure to expand the development of home-grown renewables and to propel conservation. The International Energy Agency recently released a 10-point plan for Europe to reduce its dependence on Russian gas by a third within a year. Simply lowering building thermostats by an average of one degree Celsius during the home-heating season would save 10 billion cubic meters of natural gas a year, or roughly 6% of what Europe imports from Russia.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot – Will Europe’s Push to Reduce Russian Fossil Fuel Use Hurt Its Climate Goals?

In January the virally-popular game Wordle was sold to the New York Times for between between $1 million (£758,345) and $5 million. Now the Independent reveals why the game’s creator took that step.

“Because so many people were cloning it and making money from it without his permission.”

Josh Wardle, a Welsh software engineer who now lives in Brooklyn, New York, said in a talk on Thursday that selling to the Times was “a way to walk away” from the pressure he felt to stop his creation being exploited…. The game’s success inspired numerous smartphone apps that simply copied Mr Wardle’s version while adding ads, in-app-purchases, or subscription fees, many of which were later removed from Apple’s app store.

Speaking at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco, Mr Wardle said: “That isn’t money that I would have made, because I said I don’t want to make money, but something about that felt really deeply unpleasant for me. And so selling to the New York Times was a way for me to walk away from that. I didn’t want to be paying a lawyer to issue cease and desists on the game that I’m not making money from. It felt like it was all going to get really, really complicated in a way that just [made me] pretty stressed out, truthfully.”

Answering a question from The Independent after the talk, Mr Wardle added that he felt “an enormous amount of pressure” and a sense of limited time to act because so many people were trying to copy the game.

Besides the outright clones, Wordle has also led to some interesting variations, including Nerdle (which challenges players to guess the digits and symbols in an eight-digit equation).
There’s Dordle (which challenges players to guess two words at the same time), as well as a four-word variation called Quordle, and even an eight-word version called Octordle.

In a recent article in Tom’s Guide (titled “I don’t like Wordle — but I love these alternatives”) they also recommended Heardle and Framed. “The former tasks you with guessing a song based on a short audio clip, and the latter asks you to name a movie based on a single frame.” (As well as Adverswordle, where you choose the word while an AI tries to guess it.)

And then there’s the excruciatingly difficult Semantle…

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot – ‘Wordle’ Creator Says Unauthorized Clones Drove Him to Selling His Game

“Microsoft has been struggling to reach a state of convergence between tablet and desktop ever since Windows 8 and the original Surface,” argues Neowin, adding “If we’re using Windows 11 as a barometer of their progress, they’ll likely never get there….”

But meanwhile, writes Slashdot reader segaboy81, “KDE’s new swipe gesture is awesome. It’s about 1000% smoother than the overview in Windows 11 and the swiping mechanism is easier, too. Is KDE getting better for tablets?”
From Neowin’s report:

Starting in KDE Plasma 5.25, users with touch screen devices will be able to enter their tasks and virtual desktops overview by simply swiping down from the top edge, but with a special twist. The scale of the windows directly follows the path of your finger. The result is every bit as fluid as you might imagine. While you can achieve the same result in Windows 11 with a simple three-finger swipe up, this implementation looks great and performs great too.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot – KDE’s New Swipe Gesture Makes Windows 11 Look Bad

On Saturday CNBC published a remarkable headline. “Stem cells may finally offer a cure for Type 1 diabetes.”

There are 537 million people around the world living with diabetes. And that number is growing…. But over the past 20 years, significant advancements in stem cell research and therapies have revealed promising methods of creating new insulin-making cells, which are needed to cure Type 1 diabetes. Biotech company Vertex Pharmaceuticals recently began a clinical trial where it plans to treat 17 participants who have Type 1 diabetes with new insulin-making cells derived from stem cells. The first patient in the trial, Brian Shelton, has had positive results. After 150 days, Shelton was able to reduce the amount of insulin he injects by 92%.

Other global companies are also working to cure diabetes, such as ViaCyte, CRISPR, and Novo Nordisk, one of the biggest insulin manufacturers in the world.
In CNBC’s 20-minute video, a VP/disease area executive from Vertex Pharmaceuticals explains that diabetes is “one of the few diseases where a single cell type is destroyed or missing” — the pancreas cell that produces insulin. So they’re exploring “the idea that if you could create those cells and replace them, you can really address the underlying causal biology of the disease directly.”

CNBC also spoke to Brian Shelton, the trial’s first patient, who’s been a Type 1 diabetic for 44 years, and whose pancreas suddenly started producing insulin again. “Now my body does it all on its own,” Shelton says. The news was especially surprising, CNBC reports, because “as the first person in the trial, Shelton received only half of the anticipated dose to ensure it was safe.”

One researcher they spoke to even predicts that biological solutions will compete with “ongoing efforts to use nanotechnology to miniaturize all the hardware necessary to do this,” and that within the next 3 to 5 years patients will finally have the option of “something that is really Cadillac.” And Aaron Kowalski, CEO of the nonprofit Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation, tells CNBC, “I am fully convinced that I will walk away from my insulin pump and continuous glucose monitor in my lifetime, and I would be disappointed if it wasn’t in this decade.”

CNBC’s report concludes, “For diabetics who want a cure that requires no additional treatment, it may no longer be a question of if, but a matter of when.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot – CNBC: ‘Stem Cells May Finally Offer a Cure for Type 1 Diabetes’