Researchers from the University of Birmingham have developed an innovative method for existing furnaces that could reduce steelmaking’s CO2 emission by nearly 90%. The Next Web reports: The iron and steel industry is a major cause of greenhouse gasses, accounting for 9% of global emissions. That’s because of the inherent carbon-intensive nature of steel production in blast furnaces, which currently represent the most-widely used practice. In blast furnace steel manufacturing, coke (a type of coal) is used to produce metallic iron from ore obtained from mining — which releases large quantities of carbon dioxide in the process. According to Dr Harriet Kildahl, who co-devised the method with Professor Yulong Ding, their technology aims to convert this carbon dioxide into carbon monoxide that can be reused in the iron ore reaction.

This is realized using a thermochemical cycle which performs chemical reactions through changes in temperature. That way, the typically damaging CO2 is turned into a useful part of the reaction, forming “an almost perfect closed carbon loop.” This drastically reduces emission by the amount of coke needed and, subsequently, lowers steelmaking’s emissions by up to 88%. As per the researchers, if this method was implemented in the remaining two blast furnaces in the UK, it could save 1.28 billion pounds in 5 years, all while reducing the country’s overall emissions by 2.9%.

“Current proposals for decarbonizing the steel sector rely on phasing out existing plants and introducing electric arc furnaces powered by renewable electricity. However, an electric arc furnace plant can cost over 1 billion pounds to build, which makes this switch economically unfeasible in the time remaining to meet the Paris Climate Agreement,” Professor Ding said. “The system we are proposing can be retrofitted to existing plants, which reduces the risk of stranded assets, and both the reduction in CO2, and the cost savings, are seen immediately.” The study has been published in the Journal of Cleaner Production.

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Source: Slashdot – UK Scientists Discover Method To Reduce Steelmaking’s CO2 Emissions By 90%

A tiny radioactive capsule with the potential to cause skin burns has gone missing as it was transported from a mine in Western Australia. The Guardian reports: Hazardous material experts are searching for the 8mm by 6mm capsule, which is believed to have fallen from a truck as it was traveling the 1,400km between a mine site north of Newman in the Pilbara and a depot in Perth. At an emergency press conference on Friday, the WA chief health officer, Andy Robertson, said the capsule, which is only 6mm by 8mm, emits a “reasonable” amount of radiation. […] The radioactive gauges are often used in the mining industry. Health authorities said the amount of radiation exposure was comparable to receiving 10 X-rays in the space of an hour.

Robertson said the capsule was understood to have fallen from a truck during the 1,400km journey, after vibrations worked loose a bolt, and the capsule fell through the bolt hole. The Department of Emergency and Fire Services issued a health alert on Friday saying there was “radioactive substance risk in parts of the Pilbara, Midwest Gascoyne, Goldfields-Midlands and Perth Metropolitan regions.” DFES country north chief superintendent David Gill said areas around the mine site, north of Newman, and the transport depot had unsuccessfully been searched. Drivers who had travelled along the Great Northern Highway between Newman and Perth were being asked to check their tyres in case the capsule had become stuck in them.

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Source: Slashdot – Missing Radioactive Capsule Sparks Urgent Health Alert In Western Australia

An anonymous reader quotes a report from MIT Technology Review: Eight years ago, a patient lost her power of speech because of ALS, or Lou Gehrig’s disease, which causes progressive paralysis. She can still make sounds, but her words have become unintelligible, leaving her reliant on a writing board or iPad to communicate. Now, after volunteering to receive a brain implant, the woman has been able to rapidly communicate phrases like “I don’t own my home” and “It’s just tough” at a rate approaching normal speech. That is the claim in a paper published over the weekend on the website bioRxiv by a team at Stanford University. The study has not been formally reviewed by other researchers. The scientists say their volunteer, identified only as “subject T12,” smashed previous records by using the brain-reading implant to communicate at a rate of 62 words a minute, three times the previous best. […] People without speech deficits typically talk at a rate of about 160 words a minute. Even in an era of keyboards, thumb-typing, emojis, and internet abbreviations, speech remains the fastest form of human-to-human communication.

The brain-computer interfaces that [co-lead author Krishna Sehnoy’s] team works with involve a small pad of sharp electrodes embedded in a person’s motor cortex, the brain region most involved in movement. This allows researchers to record activity from a few dozen neurons at once and find patterns that reflect what motions someone is thinking of, even if the person is paralyzed. In previous work, paralyzed volunteers have been asked to imagine making hand movements. By “decoding” their neural signals in real time, implants have let them steer a cursor around a screen, pick out letters on a virtual keyboard, play video games, or even control a robotic arm. In the new research, the Stanford team wanted to know if neurons in the motor cortex contained useful information about speech movements, too. That is, could they detect how “subject T12” was trying to move her mouth, tongue, and vocal cords as she attempted to talk?

These are small, subtle movements, and according to Sabes, one big discovery is that just a few neurons contained enough information to let a computer program predict, with good accuracy, what words the patient was trying to say. That information was conveyed by Shenoy’s team to a computer screen, where the patient’s words appeared as they were spoken by the computer. […] The current system already uses a couple of types of machine learning programs. To improve its accuracy, the Stanford team employed software that predicts what word typically comes next in a sentence. “I” is more often followed by “am” than “ham,” even though these words sound similar and could produce similar patterns in someone’s brain. Adding the word prediction system increased how quickly the subject could speak without mistakes.

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Source: Slashdot – An ALS Patient Set a Record For Communicating Via a Brain Implant: 62 Words Per Minute

The United States and European Union on Friday announced an agreement to speed up and enhance the use of artificial intelligence to improve agriculture, healthcare, emergency response, climate forecasting and the electric grid. Reuters reports: A senior U.S. administration official, discussing the initiative shortly before the official announcement, called it the first sweeping AI agreement between the United States and Europe. Previously, agreements on the issue had been limited to specific areas such as enhancing privacy, the official said. AI modeling, which refers to machine-learning algorithms that use data to make logical decisions, could be used to improve the speed and efficiency of government operations and services.

“The magic here is in building joint models (while) leaving data where it is,” the senior administration official said. “The U.S. data stays in the U.S. and European data stays there, but we can build a model that talks to the European and the U.S. data because the more data and the more diverse data, the better the model.” The initiative will give governments greater access to more detailed and data-rich AI models, leading to more efficient emergency responses and electric grid management, and other benefits, the administration official said. The partnership is currently between just the White House and the European Commission, the executive arm of the 27-member European Union. The senior administration official said other countries will be invited to join in the coming months.

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Source: Slashdot – US and EU To Launch First-Of-Its-Kind AI Agreement

Jody Serrano writes via Gizmodo: In a 1,669-word email to employees, [PagerDuty CEO Jennifer Tejada] echoed the script many tech CEOs have recited in recent months, stating that today’s “volatile economy requires additional transformation” by the company. As a result, PagerDuty would be “refining” its operating model by cutting about 7% of its staff globally. That wasn’t the only “refinement” the company would undertake, though. According to Tejada, PagerDuty will reduce its discretionary spend, negotiate “more favorable commercial agreements with key vendors,” and “rationalize [its] real estate footprint.” Up to this point, Tejada’s email, while overly complex, weird, and tone deaf, still was not that bad. She goes on to acknowledge employees and their contributions to PagerDuty and announces a decent severance pay of 11 weeks, with extended healthcare coverage and job support.
Nonetheless, it all starts to go downhill when she decides to use the same email where she announces layoffs to celebrate recent employee promotions, reveal good financial results for the fourth quarter of last year, and state that the company expects to end the year strong. As if she couldn’t do so in another email where people weren’t told they were possibly losing their jobs. “We expect to finish the year strong — in fact, we have reaffirmed our guidance for FY23 today — and those results, combined with the refinements outlined above, put PagerDuty in a position of strength to successfully execute on our platform strategy regardless of what the market and the macroenvironment bring,” Tejada said.

While it’s clearly a CEO’s job to cheer on their company, Tejada makes things sound so good that it’s perplexing to think the company has to lay off any people to begin with. Alas, the PagerDuty CEO was not done sticking her foot in her mouth and ended her note with a reference a quote from King’s sermons published in The Measure of a Man in 1959. She used brackets to change the quote slightly to accommodate her message. “I am reminded in moments like this, of something Martin Luther King said, that ‘the ultimate measure of a [leader] is not where [they] stand in the moments of comfort and convenience, but where [they] stand in times of challenge and controversy,'” Tejada said. “It doesn’t seem to have been written with ill intent, but rather with the goal to save time (by announcing layoffs, promotions, and predictions for a solid year) and save face (by refusing to say the word layoffs),” adds Serrano. “In these difficult situations, though, it’s just better to be upfront.”

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Source: Slashdot – PagerDuty CEO Quotes MLK Jr. In Worst Layoff Email Ever

An anonymous reader quotes a report from NPR: Aerospace giant Boeing entered a plea of not guilty to a criminal charge at an arraignment in federal court in Texas Thursday. The company is charged with felony fraud related to the crashes of two of its 737 Max airplanes that killed a total of 346 people. About a dozen relatives of some of those who were killed in the crashes gave emotional testimony during the three-hour arraignment hearing about how they’ve been affected by what they call “the deadliest corporate crime in U.S. history.” They testified after Boeing’s chief aerospace safety officer Mike Delaney entered a plea of not guilty on behalf of the airplane manufacturer to the charge of conspiracy to commit fraud. The company is accused of deceiving and misleading federal regulators about the safety of a critical automated flight control system that investigators found played a major role in causing the crashes in Indonesia in 2018 and in Ethiopia in 2019.

Boeing and the Justice Department had entered into a deferred prosecution agreement to settle the charge two years ago but many of the families of the crash victims objected to the agreement, saying that they were not consulted about what they called a “secret, sweetheart deal.” Under the terms of the agreement, Boeing admitted to defrauding the FAA by concealing safety problems with the 737 Max, but pinned much of the blame on two technical pilots who they say misled regulators while working on the certification of the aircraft. Only one of those pilots was prosecuted and a jury acquitted him at trial last year. Boeing also agreed to pay $2.5 billion, including $1.7 billion in compensation to airlines that had purchased 737 Max planes but could not use them while the plane was grounded for 20 months after the second plane crashed. The company also agreed to pay $500 million in compensation to the families of those killed in the two Max plane crashes, and to pay a $243 million fine. The agreement also required Boeing to make significant changes to its safety policies and procedures, as well as to the corporate culture, which many insiders have said had shifted in recent years from a safety first focus to one that critics say put profits first.

After three years, if the aerospace giant and defense contractor lived up to the terms of the deferred prosecution agreement, the criminal charge against Boeing would be dismissed and the company would be immune from further prosecution. But last fall, U.S. District Court Judge Reed O’Connor agreed that under the Crime Victims’ Rights Act, the relatives’ rights had been violated and they should have been consulted before the DOJ and Boeing reached the agreement. Last week, he ordered Boeing to appear Thursday to be arraigned. On Thursday, the families asked Judge O’Connor to impose certain conditions on Boeing as a condition of release, including appointing an independent monitor to oversee Boeing’s compliance with the terms of the previous deferred prosecution agreement, and that the company’s compliance efforts “be made public to the fullest extent possible.” O’Connor did not rule on whether to impose those conditions yet, as Boeing and the Justice Department opposed the request. But he did impose a standard condition that Boeing commit no new crimes.

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Source: Slashdot – Boeing Pleads Not Guilty To Fraud In Criminal Case Over Deadly 737 Max Crashes