An anonymous reader shared this report from the Wall Street Journal:

Five years ago, Airbus made a bold bet: The plane maker would launch a zero-emissions, hydrogen-powered aircraft within 15 years that, if successful, would mark the biggest revolution in aviation technology since the jet engine. Now, Airbus is pulling the brakes. The company has cut the project’s budget by a quarter, reallocated staff and sent remaining engineers back to the drawing board, delaying its plans by as much as a decade…

Airbus has spent more than $1.7 billion on the project, according to people familiar with the matter, but over the past year concluded that technical challenges and a slow uptake of hydrogen in the wider economy meant the jet wouldn’t be ready by 2035… Airbus says the past five years of work and money haven’t been wasted. The company has established that hydrogen is technically feasible and delaying the project will give it more time to fine-tune the technology, executives said…

Airbus shifted focus to hydrogen-fuel cells, which use a chemical reaction to generate energy for an electric motor. It would produce only water vapor, but would require a more radical redesign of the airframe and propulsion system. The plane would carry only 100 passengers about 1,000 nautical miles. Over time, even that proved challenging because of the extra weight of the fuel cells and their limited electricity generation. Instead of a short-haul narrow-body — the workhorse of the aviation industry — at best the aircraft would be more akin to a less appealing regional turboprop.
Airbus received a multi-billion Covid-era support package from the French government that “required Airbus to spend a portion of the money on bringing green aircraft to market by the 2030s,” according to the article.
“The hydrogen project helped Airbus access additional government funding, as well as private green financing… Airbus ultimately assigned the project an annual budget of about €400 million, primarily funded through its own coffers, according to people familiar with its financing arrangements.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

“Honeybee colonies are under siege across much of North America…” reported the New York Times last week. [Alternate URL here.] Last winter beekeepers across America “began reporting massive beehive collapses. More than half of the roughly 2.8 million colonies collapsed, costing the industry about $600 million in economic losses…”

America’s Department of Agriculture says “sublethal exposure” to pesticides remains one of the biggest factors threatening honeybees, according to the article — but it’s one of several threats. “Parasites, loss of habitat, climate change and pesticides threaten to wipe out as much as 70% or more of the nation’s honeybee colonies this year, potentially the most devastating loss that the nation has ever seen.”

Some years are worse than others, but there has been a steady decline over time. Scientists have named the phenomenon colony collapse disorder: Bees simply disappear after they fly out to forage for pollen and nectar. Illness disables their radar, preventing them from finding their way home. The queen and her brood, if they survive, remain defenseless.

The precise causes remain unknown.
Bee colonies have become even more vulnerable because of the increase in extreme weather conditions, including droughts, heat waves, monster hurricanes, explosive wildfires and floods that have damaged or destroyed the bees and the vegetation they pollinate. If that isn’t bad enough, parasites — and other creatures researchers refer to as “biotic” threats that prey on bees — proliferate when there is damage to ecosystems.

All that means that the U.S. beekeeping industry has contracted by about 2.9% over the past five years, according to data collected by IBISWorld, a research firm. Annual loss rates have been increasing among all beekeepers over the past decade with the most significant colony collapses in commercial operations happening during the past five years.

The article notes that “compounding the troubles for the bee industry are recent federal cuts” proposed by DOGE to America’s Department of Agriculture, “where researchers were studying ways to protect the nation’s honeybees.” And while federal policies like tariffs could make farming more expensive, “Beekeepers also often depend on immigrants to manage their hives and to help produce commercial honey…”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Nintendo surprised us with a little blast from the past this weekend, uploading a 34-year-old Super Nintendo commercial featuring Paul Rudd to its YouTube channel — and it’s released a sequel for the Nintendo Switch 2. Rudd appears in the Switch 2 promo wearing the same outfit he wore back in 1991, but this time he’s playing Mario Kart World with some celebrity friends over the new GameChat social feature. It’s a charming callback to the original SNES ad, which itself is deliciously ‘90s and a real treat to revisit in 2025. Commercials today just don’t hit the same.

Nintendo has steadily been drumming up the hype for the Switch 2’s arrival since the release details were announced at the beginning of April. The company recently held a livestream to share a more in-depth look at Mario Kart World, which launches on the same day as the new console, revealing some of the new courses, items and assistive features like Smart Steering. We’ve still got some time to wait before it’s all here, though. Pre-orders for the Switch 2 open on April 24, and the console will be available starting June 5.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/gaming/nintendo/nintendo-shares-a-vintage-snes-commercial-starring-paul-rudd-as-he-reprises-the-role-for-switch-2-171316112.html?src=rss

For the first time, astronomers have confirmed the existence of a lone black hole,” reports Science News — “one with no star orbiting it.”

It’s “the only one so far,” says Kailash Sahu, an astronomer at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore. In 2022, Sahu and his colleagues discovered the dark object coursing through the constellation Sagittarius. A second team disputed the claim, saying the body might instead be a neutron star. New observations from the Hubble Space Telescope now confirm that the object’s mass is so large that it must be a black hole, Sahu’s team reports in the April 20 Astrophysical Journal…. [And that second team has revised its assessment and now agrees: the object is a black hole.]

While solitary black holes should be common, they are hard to find. The one in Sagittarius revealed itself when it passed in front of a dim background star, magnifying the star’s light and slowly shifting its position due to the black hole’s gravity. This passage occurred in July 2011, but the star’s position is still changing. “It takes a long time to do the observations,” Sahu says. “Everything is improved if you have a longer baseline and more observations.” The original discovery relied on precise Hubble measurements of star positions from 2011 to 2017. The new work incorporates Hubble observations from 2021 and 2022 as well as data from the Gaia spacecraft.

The upshot: The black hole is about seven times as massive as the sun, give or take 0.8 solar masses…. Located 5,000 light-years from Earth, this black hole is much closer than the supermassive one at the Milky Way’s center, which also lies in Sagittarius but about 27,000 light-years from us. The star-rich region around the galactic center provides an ideal hunting ground for solitary black holes passing in front of stars. Sahu hopes to find additional lone black holes by using the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, slated for launch in 2027.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

There was excitement when biotech company Collosal announced genetically modified grey wolves (first hailed as a “de-extinction” of the Dire wolf species after several millennia). “But bioethicists and conservationists are expressing unease with the kind of scientific research,” writes the Chicago Tribune. [Alternate URL here.]

“Unfortunately, as clever as this science is … it’s can-do science and not should-do science,” said Lindsay Marshall, director of science in animal research at Humane World for Animals, formerly the Humane Society of the U.S…. Ed Heist, a professor at Southern Illinois University and a conservation geneticist, said the news bothered him. “This is not conservation, but people conflate it,” he said. “The point is entertainment….”

Naomi Louchouarn [program director of wildlife partnerships at Humane World for Animals], has dedicated her studies and research to the relationship between humans and animals, specifically carnivores like gray wolves. “The reason our current endangered species are becoming extinct is because we don’t know how to coexist with them,” she said. “And this doesn’t solve that problem at all.” Humans can treat the symptoms of wildlife conflict with “big, flashy silver bullets” and “in this case, advanced, inefficient science,” she said, but the real solution is behavioral change. “Assuming that we could actually bring back a full population of animals,” Louchouarn said, “which is so difficult and so crazy — that’s a big if — I don’t understand the point of trying to bring back a woolly mammoth when we already can’t coexist with elephants.”

The article notes that even Colossal’s chief science officer says their technology is at best one of several tools for fighting biodiversity loss, calling it a battle which humans are ‘not close to winning’… We as a global community need to continue to invest in traditional approaches to conservation and habitat preservation, as well as in the protection of living endangered species.”
But the article adds that the Trump administration “is citing the case of the dire wolf as it moves to reduce federal protections under the Endangered Species Act of 1973.” (Wednesday U.S. interior secretary Doug Burgum has even posted on X “The concept of ‘de-extinction’ can serve as a bedrock for modern species conservation.”)

And the article adds that “During a livestreamed town hall with Interior Department employees on April 9, Burgum said: “If we’re going to be in anguish about losing a species, now we have an opportunity to bring them back. Pick your favorite species and call up Colossal.

Ken Angielczyk, curator of mammal fossils at the Field Museum who researches extinct species that lived 200 to 300 million years ago, said it’s a misguided approach. “If that’s the basis … for changing regulations related to the endangered species list, that is very, very premature,” he said. “Because we can’t resurrect things…. If the purpose is to restore the damage to the shared ecosystem, we have that opportunity right now,” she said. “And that’s the necessity immediately….”

“This whole idea that extinction is reversible is so dangerous,” Marshall said, “because then it stops us caring.”

Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader walterbyrd for sharing the news.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

There was excitement when biotech company Collosal announced genetically modified grey wolves (first hailed as a “de-extinction” of the Dire wolf species after several millennia). “But bioethicists and conservationists are expressing unease with the kind of scientific research,” writes the Chicago Tribune. [Alternate URL here.]

“Unfortunately, as clever as this science is … it’s can-do science and not should-do science,” said Lindsay Marshall, director of science in animal research at Humane World for Animals, formerly the Humane Society of the U.S…. Ed Heist, a professor at Southern Illinois University and a conservation geneticist, said the news bothered him. “This is not conservation, but people conflate it,” he said. “The point is entertainment….”

Naomi Louchouarn [program director of wildlife partnerships at Humane World for Animals], has dedicated her studies and research to the relationship between humans and animals, specifically carnivores like gray wolves. “The reason our current endangered species are becoming extinct is because we don’t know how to coexist with them,” she said. “And this doesn’t solve that problem at all.” Humans can treat the symptoms of wildlife conflict with “big, flashy silver bullets” and “in this case, advanced, inefficient science,” she said, but the real solution is behavioral change. “Assuming that we could actually bring back a full population of animals,” Louchouarn said, “which is so difficult and so crazy — that’s a big if — I don’t understand the point of trying to bring back a woolly mammoth when we already can’t coexist with elephants.”

The article notes that even Colossal’s chief science officer says their technology is at best one of several tools for fighting biodiversity loss, calling it a battle which humans are ‘not close to winning’… We as a global community need to continue to invest in traditional approaches to conservation and habitat preservation, as well as in the protection of living endangered species.”
But the article adds that the Trump administration “is citing the case of the dire wolf as it moves to reduce federal protections under the Endangered Species Act of 1973.” (Wednesday U.S. interior secretary Doug Burgum has even posted on X “The concept of ‘de-extinction’ can serve as a bedrock for modern species conservation.”)

And the article adds that “During a livestreamed town hall with Interior Department employees on April 9, Burgum said: “If we’re going to be in anguish about losing a species, now we have an opportunity to bring them back. Pick your favorite species and call up Colossal.

Ken Angielczyk, curator of mammal fossils at the Field Museum who researches extinct species that lived 200 to 300 million years ago, said it’s a misguided approach. “If that’s the basis … for changing regulations related to the endangered species list, that is very, very premature,” he said. “Because we can’t resurrect things…. If the purpose is to restore the damage to the shared ecosystem, we have that opportunity right now,” she said. “And that’s the necessity immediately….”

“This whole idea that extinction is reversible is so dangerous,” Marshall said, “because then it stops us caring.”

Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader walterbyrd for sharing the news.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Star Wars Celebration is heading back to Los Angeles for the first time since 2006 to mark the franchise’s 50th anniversary in 2027. Star Wars: Episode IV – A New Hope, then simply called Star Wars, first hit theaters in 1977 and the rest is history. The location was announced during the closing ceremony of this year’s event, which took place in Japan. Star Wars Celebration 2027 will be held at the Los Angeles Convention Center from April 1 to April 4, 2027.

This year’s Star Wars Celebration brought a ton of announcements and previews into upcoming developments for the franchise. We finally got a real look at Star Wars Zero Company, a single-player turn-based tactics game expected to be released in 2026. ILM also revealed a bit more about its Meta Quest mixed-reality experience (which it’s calling a “playset”), Star Wars: Beyond Victory, and it was confirmed that Ryan Gosling will star in a film called Star Wars: Starfighter, per The Hollywood Reporter. And of course, there will be a Fortnite collaboration. With the Galactic Battle season beginning May 2, Darth Jar Jar is coming to Fortnite.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/entertainment/the-next-star-wars-celebration-will-be-held-in-la-in-2027-for-the-50th-anniversary-of-the-first-film-194628408.html?src=rss

TechCrunch looks at Mechanize, an ambitious new startup “whose founder — and the non-profit AI research organization he founded called Epoch — is being skewered on X…”

Mechanize was launched on Thursday via a post on X by its founder, famed AI researcher Tamay Besiroglu. The startup’s goal, Besiroglu wrote, is “the full automation of all work” and “the full automation of the economy.”

Does that mean Mechanize is working to replace every human worker with an AI agent bot? Essentially, yes. The startup wants to provide the data, evaluations, and digital environments to make worker automation of any job possible. Besiroglu even calculated Mechanize’s total addressable market by aggregating all the wages humans are currently paid. “The market potential here is absurdly large: workers in the US are paid around $18 trillion per year in aggregate. For the entire world, the number is over three times greater, around $60 trillion per year,” he wrote.
Besiroglu did, however, clarify to TechCrunch that “our immediate focus is indeed on white-collar work” rather than manual labor jobs that would require robotics…

Besiroglu argues to the naysayers that having agents do all the work will actually enrich humans, not impoverish them, through “explosive economic growth.” He points to a paper he published on the topic. “Completely automating labor could generate vast abundance, much higher standards of living, and new goods and services that we can’t even imagine today,” he told TechCrunch.

TechCrunch wonders how jobless humans will produce goods — and whether wealth will simply concentrate around whoever owns the agents.
But they do concede that Besiroglu may be right that “If each human worker has a personal crew of agents which helps them produce more work, economic abundance could follow…”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

“Using electrochemistry, University of Oregon researchers have developed a way to make iron metal for steel production without burning fossil fuels…” the University of Oregon wrote last year. “Decarbonizing this step would do roughly as much to reduce greenhouse gas emissions as converting every gas-guzzling vehicle on the roads to electric… If scaled up, the process could help decarbonize one of the largest and most emissions-intensive industries worldwide,” replacing carbon-spewing industrial blast furnaces.

Paul Kempler, their research assistant chemistry professor, added “The reason we got excited about this chemistry, is that our reactants are two things that are very cheap: saltwater and iron oxide.” And this week he announced that “We actually have a chemical principle, a sort of guiding design rule, that will teach us how to identify low-cost iron oxides that we could use in these reactors.”

“Those reactions conveniently also produce chlorine, a commercially valuable byproduct,” writes SciTechDaily, in a new follow-up report this week:

In their latest study, the researchers focused on improving the process by identifying which types of iron oxides make the reaction more cost-effective, an essential step toward scaling the method for industrial use…. In lab tests, the difference was striking: “With the really porous particles, we can make iron really quickly on a small area,” Goldman said. “The dense particles just can’t achieve the same rate, so we’re limited in how much iron we can make per square meter of electrodes….”

To take their process beyond the lab, Kempler’s lab is working with researchers in other fields. A collaboration with civil engineers at Oregon State University is helping them better understand what’s needed for the product to work in real-world applications. And collaboration with an electrode manufacturing company is helping them address the logistical and scientific challenges of scaling up an electrochemical process. “I think what this work shows is that technology can meet the needs of an industrial society without being environmentally devastating,” Goldman said.

“We haven’t solved all the problems yet, of course, but I think it’s an example that serves as a nucleation point for a different way of thinking about what solutions look like. We can continue to have industry and technology and medicine, and we can do it in a way that’s clean — and that’s awesome!”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

“The time has come for me to step away,” ArcoLinux lead Erik Dubois posted last week. (“After eight years of dedication to the ArcoLinux project and the broader Linux community…”)

‘Learn, have fun, and enjoy’ was our motto for the past eight years — and I really had fun doing all this,” Dubois says in a video version of his farewell post. “And if we reflect back on this teaching and the building and promoting of Linux, it was fun. But the time has come for me to step away…”

Over its eight years ArcoLinux “accomplished several important milestones,” reports Linux magazine, “such as creating over 5,000 educational videos; the creation of ArcoInstall; the Carli education project; the Arch Linux Calamares Installer (ALCI); the ArcoPlasma, ArcoNet, ArcroPro, and Ariser variants; and much more.”
According to Dubois, they weren’t just creating a distribution but a mindset.

Dubois says that the code will remain online so others can learn from, fork, or remix the distro. He also indicated that ArcoLinux will supply users with a transition package to help them convert their existing ArcoLinux systems to Arch Linux. That package will remove ArcoLinux branding, replace pacman.conf with an Arch and Chaotic-AUR focused config file, and change the arcolinux-mirrorlist to a single source.

It’s FOSS News describes ArcoLinux as one of those “user-friendly Arch-based distros that give you a bleeding-edge experience.”
The reasoning behind this move, as shared by Erik, is his advancing age and him realizing that he doesn’t have the same level of mental focus or stamina he used to have before. He has found himself making small mistakes, the kind that can negatively affect a major undertaking like this… Come July 1, 2025, the transition period will end, marking a stop to all development, including the deactivation of the ArcoLinux social media handles. The Telegram and Discord communities will stay a bit longer but will close up eventually.
“I want to leave ArcoLinux while it’s still strong, and while I can look back with pride at everything we’ve accomplished together,” Dubois says in their post…

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Discover magazine reports that a team of researchers have produced evidence that the ancient building blocks for water have been here on earth “since early in the planet’s history, according to a study published in the journal Icarus.”
Pinpointing when and where Earth’s hydrogen is an essential key to understanding how life arose on the planet. Without hydrogen, there’s no water, and without water, life can’t exist here. Ironically, researchers turned to a meteorite containing hydrogen to prove that such former bodies did not provide the H2 ingredient of water’s H2O recipe. They examined a rare type of meteorite — known as an enstatite chondrite — that was built similarly to early Earth 4.5 billion years ago and the team discovered hydrogen present in the chemical. The logic is that if this material resembling early Earth’s composition can contain hydrogen, so too could the young planet….

Since the proto-Earth was made of material similar to enstatite chondrites, by the time the immature planet had grown large enough to be struck by asteroids, it would have already stashed enough hydrogen to explain Earth’s present-day water supply.Although this study likely won’t resolve the debate over Earth’s original water source, it tilts the ta ble toward an internal, not external one. “We now think that the material that built our planet — which we can study using these rare meteorites — was far richer in hydrogen than we thought previously,” James Bryson, an Oxford professor and an author of the paper, said in a press release. “This finding supports the idea that the formation of water on Earth was a natural process, rather than a fluke of hydrated asteroids bombarding our planet after it formed.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A new Star Wars movie — starring Ryan Gosling and directed by Shawn Levy — will be released in 2027, the two announced Friday at the “Star Wars Celebration” (a fan event in Japan). CNN reports:

Set to begin production this fall, the movie will be set approximately five years after “Star Wars: Episode IX — The Rise of Skywalker,” released in 2019, but will sit outside the Skywalker story as a standalone film. “The film… is an entirely new adventure featuring all-new characters set in a period of time that has not been explored on screen,” said a statement from Lucasfilm, the owner of the “Star Wars” franchise…

“The script is just so good, the story, it has so much adventure, so much heart and original character. It’s an opportunity to shine the light into a side of the universe that we may not have seen,” Gosling said. Levy, the director of “Deadpool & Wolverine,” told the crowd the film would have all the “fun of ‘Star Wars'” but it would be done “in ways that are new and original….”

The next movie in the franchise, “The Mandalorian & Grogu,” a spin-off of “The Mandalorian” series, directed by Jon Favreau, will hit cinemas in May 2026.

USA Today notes that more new Star Wars movies have also been announced:

Daisy Ridley is set to star in a film that will see her character, Rey, building a new Jedi Order after the events of “The Rise of Skywalker.” [This is sometimes referred to as “Star Wars Episode X: New Jedi Order.”]

“Logan” filmmaker James Mangold has also been tapped to direct a movie about the dawn of the Jedi, and [Dave] Filoni is directing one said to “close out the interconnected stories” told in the live-action Disney+ shows like “The Mandalorian.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Trump administration is “taking measures to restrict the sale of AI chips by Nvidia, Advanced Micro Devices and Intel,” especially in China, reports the New York Times. But that’s triggered a series of dominoes. “In the two days after the limits became public, shares of Nvidia, the world’s leading AI chipmaker, fell 8.4%. AMD’s shares dropped 7.4%, and Intel’s were down 6.8%.” (AMD expects up to $800 million in charges after the move, according to CNBC, while NVIDIA said it would take a quarterly charge of about $5.5 billion.)

The Times notes hopeful remarks Thursday from Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia, during a meeting with the China Council for the Promotion of International Trade. “We’re going to continue to make significant effort to optimize our products that are compliant within the regulations and continue to serve China’s market.” But America’s chipmakers also have a greater fear, according to the article: “that their retreat could turn the Chinese tech giant Huawei into a global chip-making powerhouse.”
“For the U.S. semiconductor industry, China is gone,” said Handel Jones, a semiconductor consultant at International Business Strategies, which advises electronics companies. He projects that Chinese companies will have a majority share of chips in every major category in China by 2030… Huang’s message spoke to one of his biggest fears. For years, he has worried that Huawei, China’s telecommunications giant, will become a major competitor in AI. He has warned U.S. officials that blocking U.S. companies from competing in China would accelerate Huawei’s rise, said three people familiar with those meetings who spoke on the condition of anonymity.
If Huawei gains ground, Huang and others at Nvidia have painted a dark picture of a future in which China will use the company’s chips to build AI data centers across the world for the Belt and Road Initiative, a strategic effort to increase Beijing’s influence by paying for infrastructure projects around the world, a person familiar with the company’s thinking said…

Nvidia’s previous generation of chips perform about 40% better than Huawei’s best product, said Gregory C. Allen, who has written about Huawei in his role as director of the Wadhwani AI Center at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. But that gap could dwindle if Huawei scoops up the business of its American rivals, Allen said. Nvidia was expected to make more than $16 billion in sales this year from the H20 in China before the restriction. Huawei could use that money to hire more experienced engineers and make higher-quality chips. Allen said the U.S. government’s restrictions also could help Huawei bring on customers like DeepSeek, a leading Chinese AI startup. Working with those companies could help Huawei improve the software it develops to control its chips. Those kinds of tools have been one of Nvidia’s strengths over the years.
TechRepublic identifies this key quote from an earlier article:

“This kills NVIDIA’s access to a key market, and they will lose traction in the country,” Patrick Moorhead, a tech analyst with Moor Insights & Strategy, told The New York Times. He added that Chinese companies will buy from local rival Huawei instead.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.