Blue Origin stands ready to help NASA achieve its goals with regard to landing humans on the Moon as soon as possible, the company’s chief executive said Saturday in an interview with Ars.

“We just want to help the US get to the Moon,” said Dave Limp, CEO of the space company founded by Jeff Bezos. “If NASA wants to go quicker, we would move heaven and Earth, pun intended, to try to get to the Moon sooner. And I think we have some good ideas.”

Limp spoke on Saturday, about 24 hours ahead of the company’s second launch of the large New Glenn rocket. Carrying the ESCAPADE spacecraft for NASA, the mission has a launch window that opens at 2:45 pm ET (19:45 UTC) at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida, and runs for a little more than two hours.

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The Associated Press reports that “For the past decade, Dr. Priscilla Chan and her husband Mark Zuckerberg have focused part of their philanthropy on a lofty goal — ‘to cure, prevent or manage all disease’ — if not in their lifetime, then in their children’s.”

During that decade they also funded other initiatives (including underprivileged schools and immigration reform), according to the article. But there’s a change coming:

Now, the billionaire couple is shifting the bulk of their philanthropic resources to Biohub, the pair’s science organization, and focusing on using artificial intelligence to accelerate scientific discovery. The idea is to develop virtual, AI-based cell models to understand how they work in the human body, study inflammation and use AI to “harness the immune system” for disease detection, prevention and treatment. “I feel like the science work that we’ve done, the Biohub model in particular, has been the most impactful thing that we have done. So we want to really double down on that. Biohub is going to be the main focus of our philanthropy going forward,” Zuckerberg said Wednesday evening at an event at the Biohub Imaging Institute in Redwood City, California…. Chan and Zuckerberg have pledged 99% of their lifetime wealth — from shares of Meta Platforms, where Zuckerberg is CEO — toward these efforts…

On Thursday, Chan and Zuckerberg also announced that Biohub has hired the team at EvolutionaryScale, an AI research lab that has created large-scale AI systems for the life sciences…
Biohub’s ambition for the next years and decades is to create virtual cell systems that would not have been possible without recent advances in AI. Similar to how large language models learn from vast databases of digital books, online writings and other media, its researchers and scientists are working toward building virtual systems that serve as digital representations of human physiology on all levels, such as molecular, cellular or genome. As it is open source — free and publicly available — scientists can then conduct virtual experiments on a scale not possible in physical laboratories.

“We will continue the model we’ve pioneered of bringing together scientists and engineers in our own state-of-the-art labs to build tools that advance the field,” according to Thursday’s blog post. “We’ll then use those tools to generate new data sets for training new biological AI models to create virtual cells and immune systems and engineer our cells to detect and treat disease….

“We have also established the first large-scale GPU cluster for biological research, as well as the largest datasets around human cell types. This collection of resources does not exist anywhere else.”

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Store pages on Steam are looking a lot less cramped thanks to a new update. Pages have been made wider, with support for higher resolution images and new viewing modes for trailers and screenshots. You’ll notice changes in the top carousel and in the “About the Game” section, where some new formatting options should make things look a bit more organized. The update just rolled out to the public after first being tested among beta users.

With this update, pages have been widened to 1200 pixels, which Valve says “felt like a good balance where we can show more content on screen without overwhelming the page and making it hard to navigate.” There’s now the option of a large pop-up view called theater mode in the carousel, as well as full-screen mode. In addition to games’ store pages, Valve has slightly tweaked the appearance of search results and recommendation pages to be wider, and made store hubs, Steam Charts and the News Hub look more uniform.

You may also notice some more colorful backgrounds on games’ store pages and in bundle detail pages. Where you won’t see changes yet, though, is the homepage. While Valve says it’s working on “similar adjustments” for the homepage, those aren’t rolling out with this update.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/gaming/pc/steam-store-pages-get-a-mini-makeover-to-better-suit-wide-screens-200142506.html?src=rss

Long-time Slashdot reader AmiMoJo shared this report from Marine Insight:

The world’s largest cargo sailboat, Neoliner Origin, completed its first transatlantic voyage on 30 October despite damage to one of its sails during the journey. The 136-metre-long vessel had to rely partly on its auxiliary motor and its remaining sail after the aft sail was damaged in a storm shortly after departure… Neoline, the company behind the project, said the damage reduced the vessel’s ability to perform fully on wind power…

The Neoliner Origin is designed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 80 to 90 percent compared to conventional diesel-powered cargo ships. According to the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), global shipping produces about 3 percent of worldwide greenhouse gas emissions…

The ship can carry up to 5,300 tonnes of cargo, including containers, vehicles, machinery, and specialised goods. It arrived in Baltimore carrying Renault vehicles, French liqueurs, machinery, and other products. The Neoliner Origin is scheduled to make monthly voyages between Europe and North America, maintaining a commercial cruising speed of around 11 knots.

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Long-time Slashdot reader AmiMoJo shared this report from Linuxiac:

The Japanese branch of Mozilla’s Support Mozilla (SUMO) community — responsible for localizing and maintaining Japanese-language support documentation for Firefox and other Mozilla products (consisting of Japanese native speakers) — has officially disbanded after more than two decades of voluntary work…

SUMO, short for Support Mozilla, is the umbrella project for Mozilla’s user support platform, support.mozilla.org, that brings together volunteers and contributors worldwide who translate, maintain, and update documentation, tutorials, and troubleshooting guides for Firefox, Thunderbird, and other Mozilla products… According to marsf, the long-time locale leader of the Japanese SUMO team, the decision to disband was triggered by the recent introduction of an automated translation system known as Sumobot. Deployed on October 22, the bot began editing and approving Japanese Knowledge Base articles without community oversight.

The article notes marsf’s complaints in a post to the SUMO discussion forum, including the fact that the new automated system automatically approved machine-translated content with only a 72-hour window for human review. As a result, more than 300 Knowledge Base articles were overwritten on the production server, which marsf called “mass destruction of our work.”

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American multinational freight company UPS “has grounded its fleet of MD-11 aircraft,” reports the Guardian, “days after a cargo plane crash that killed at least 13 people in Kentucky. The grounded MD-11s are the same type of plane involved in Tuesday’s crash in Louisville. They were originally built by McDonnell Douglas until it was taken over by Boeing.”

More details from NBC News:

UPS said the move to temporarily ground its MD-11 fleet was made “out of an abundance of caution and in the interest of safety.” MD-11s make up 9% of the company’s air fleet, it said. “We made this decision proactively at the recommendation of the aircraft manufacturer. Nothing is more important to us than the safety of our employees and the communities we serve,” UPS spokesman Jim Mayer said… FedEx said early Saturday that it was also grounding its MD-11s. The UPS rival has 28 such planes in operation, out of a fleet of around 700, FedEx said.

Video shows that the left engine of the plane caught fire during takeoff and immediately detached, National Transportation Safety Board member Todd Inman said Wednesday. The National Transportation Safety Board is the lead agency in the investigation.

Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader echo123 for suggesting the article.

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“Maybe you’ve heard that artificial intelligence is a bubble poised to burst,” writes a Washington Post technology columnist. “Maybe you have heard that it isn’t. (No one really knows either way, but that won’t stop the bros from jabbering about it constantly.)”

“But I can confidently tell you that the money being thrown around for AI is so huge that numbers have lost all meaning.”

The companies pouring money in are so rich and so power-hungry (in multiple meanings of that term) that our puny human brains cannot really comprehend. So let’s try to give some meaning and context to the stratospheric numbers in AI. Is it a bubble? Eh, who knows. But it is completely bonkers. In just the past year, the four richest companies developing AI — Microsoft, Google, Amazon and Meta — have spent roughly $360 billion combined for big-ticket projects, which included building AI data centers and stuffing them with computer chips and equipment, according to my analysis of financial disclosures…. How do companies pay for the enormous sums they are lavishing on AI? Mostly, these companies make so much money that they can afford to go bananas…

Eight of the world’s top 10 most valuable companies are AI-centric or AI-ish American corporate giants — Nvidia, Apple, Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Broadcom, Meta and Tesla. That’s according to tallies from S&P Global Market Intelligence based on the total price of the companies’ stock held by investors. My analysis of the S&P data shows that the collective worth of those eight giants, $23 trillion, is more than the value of the next 96 most valuable U.S. companies put together, which includes many still very rich names such as JPMorgan, Walmart, Visa and ExxonMobil. No. 1 on that list, the AI computer chip seller Nvidia, last week become the first company in history to reach a stock market value of $5 trillion. That alone was more than the value of entire stock markets in most countries, Bloomberg News reported, other than the five biggest (in the U.S., China, Japan, Hong Kong and India)…

All the announced or under-construction data centers for powering AI would consume roughly as much electricity as 44 million households in the United States if they run full tilt, according to a recent analysis by the Barclays investment bank as reported by the Financial Times.
For context, that’s nearly one-third of the total number of residential housing units in the entire country, according to U.S. Census Bureau housing estimates for 2024.

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