"Only the United States, China and Germany have larger economies than California," reports CNN.

In fact, they add that California "outpaced all three countries with growth of 6% last year," according to the California governor's office (which cites new data from the International Monetary Fund and the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis): In 2024, California's growth rate of 6% outpaced the top three economies: U.S. (5.3%), China (2.6%) and Germany (2.9%)...

With an increasing state population and recent record-high tourism spending, California is the nation's top state for new business starts, access to venture capital funding, and manufacturing, high-tech, and agriculture. The state drives national economic growth and also sends over $83 billion more to the federal government than it receives in federal funding. California is the leading agricultural producer in the country and is also the center for manufacturing output in the United States, with over 36,000 manufacturing firms employing over 1.1 million Californians.
The data shows that last year California accounted for 14% of America's GDP, CNN points out, "driven by Silicon Valley and its real estate and finance sectors."

Longtime Slashdot reader AmiMoJo shares a report from the BBC: China will let scientists from six countries, including the U.S., examine the rocks it collected from the Moon -- a scientific collaboration that comes as the two countries remain locked in a bitter trade war. Two NASA-funded U.S. institutions have been granted access to the lunar samples collected by the Chang'e-5 mission in 2020, the China National Space Administration (CNSA) said on Thursday. CNSA chief Shan Zhongde said that the samples were "a shared treasure for all humanity," local media reported.

Chinese researchers have not been able to access NASA's Moon samples because of restrictions imposed by U.S. lawmakers on the space agency's collaboration with China. Under the 2011 law, Nasa is banned from collaboration with China or any Chinese-owned companies unless it is specifically authorized by Congress. But John Logsdon, the former director of the Space Policy Institute at George Washington University, told BBC Newshour that the latest exchange of Moon rocks have "very little to do with politics." While there are controls on space technology, the examination of lunar samples had "nothing of military significance," he said. "It's international cooperation in science which is the norm."

Apple plans to shift the assembly of all US-sold iPhones to India[alternative source] as soon as next year, according to Financial Times, which cites people familiar with the matter, as President Donald Trump's trade war forces the tech giant to pivot away from China. From the report: The push builds on Apple's strategy to diversify its supply chain but goes further and faster than investors appreciate, with a goal to source from India the entirety of the more than 60 million iPhones sold annually in the US by the end of 2026.

The Trump administration introduced a new framework to expedite self-driving vehicle deployment by reducing regulatory hurdles, while maintaining mandatory safety incident reporting. NHTSA is also expanding its exemption program, allowing domestically produced autonomous vehicles lacking traditional safety controls to operate on U.S. roads. Reuters reports: The Trump administration said Thursday it aims to speed up the deployment of self-driving vehicles but will maintain rules requiring reporting of safety incidents involving advanced vehicles. U.S. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy on Thursday released a new framework to boost autonomous vehicles. "This administration understands that we're in a race with China to out-innovate, and the stakes couldn't be higher," Duffy said. "Our new framework will slash red tape."

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration said it will expand a program to exempt some self-driving vehicles from all safety requirements and will streamline but continue its requirement that vehicles equipped with certain advanced driver assistance systems or self-driving systems report safety incidents. NHTSA is expanding its Automated Vehicle Exemption Program to now include domestically produced vehicles that will allow companies to operate non-compliant imported vehicles on U.S. roads. It is currently only open to foreign assembled models.

South Korea's data protection authority said on Thursday that Chinese artificial intelligence startup DeepSeek transferred user information and prompts without permission when the service was still available for download in the country's app market. From a report: The Personal Information Protection Commission said in a statement that Hangzhou DeepSeek Artificial Intelligence Co Ltd did not obtain user consent while transferring personal information to a number of companies in China and the United States at the time of its South Korean launch in January.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from MIT Technology Review: A lawsuit to hold Yahoo responsible for "willfully turning a blind eye" to the mismanagement of a human rights fund for Chinese dissidents was settled for $5.425 million last week, after an eight-year court battle. At least $3 million will go toward a new fund; settlement documents say it will "provide humanitarian assistance to persons in or from the [People's Republic of China] who have been imprisoned in the PRC for exercising their freedom of speech." This ends a long fight for accountability stemming from decisions by Yahoo, starting in the early 2000s, to turn over information on Chinese internet users to state security, leading to their imprisonment and torture. After the actions were exposed and the company was publicly chastised, Yahoo created the Yahoo Human Rights Fund (YHRF), endowed with $17.3 million, to support individuals imprisoned for exercising free speech rights online.

The Yahoo Human Rights Fund was intended to support imprisoned Chinese dissidents. Instead, a lawsuit alleges that only a small fraction of the money went to help former prisoners. But in the years that followed, its chosen nonprofit partner, the Laogai Research Foundation, badly mismanaged the fund, spending less than $650,000 -- or 4% -- on direct support for the dissidents. Most of the money was, instead, spent by the late Harry Wu, the politically connected former Chinese dissident who led Laogai, on his own projects and interests. A group of dissidents sued in 2017, naming not just Laogai and its leadership but also Yahoo and senior members from its leadership team during the time in question; at least one person from Yahoo always sat on YHRF's board and had oversight of its budget and activities.

The defendants -- which, in addition to Yahoo and Laogai, included the Impresa Legal Group, the law firm that worked with Laogai -- agreed to pay the six formerly imprisoned Chinese dissidents who filed the suit, with five of them slated to receive $50,000 each and the lead plaintiff receiving $55,000. The remainder, after legal fees and other expense reimbursements, will go toward a new fund to continue YHRF's original mission of supporting individuals in China imprisoned for their speech. The fund will be managed by a small nonprofit organization, Humanitarian China, founded in 2004 by three participants in the 1989 Chinese democracy movement. Humanitarian China has given away $2 million in cash assistance to Chinese dissidents and their families, funded primarily by individual donors.

Google has argued in court that the U.S. Department of Justice's proposal to break up its Chrome and Android businesses would weaken national security and harm the country's position in the global AI race, particularly against China. CNBC reports: The remedies trial in Washington, D.C., follows a judge's ruling in August that Google has held a monopoly in its core market of internet search, the most-significant antitrust ruling in the tech industry since the case against Microsoft more than 20 years ago. The Justice Department has called for Google to divest its Chrome browser unit and open its search data to rivals.

Google said in a blog post on Monday that such a move is not in the best interest of the country as the global battle for supremacy in artificial intelligence rapidly intensifies. In the first paragraph of the post, Google named China's DeepSeek as an emerging AI competitor. The DOJ's proposal would "hamstring how we develop AI, and have a government-appointed committee regulate the design and development of our products," Lee-Anne Mulholland, Google's vice president of regulatory affairs, wrote in the post. "That would hold back American innovation at a critical juncture. We're in a fiercely competitive global race with China for the next generation of technology leadership, and Google is at the forefront of American companies making scientific and technological breakthroughs."

CATL has unveiled a second-generation Shenxing battery capable of delivering a 520km range in just five minutes of charging, surpassing BYD's recent breakthrough and positioning both Chinese firms ahead of Western rivals in EV battery tech. The battery manufacturer also introduced a sodium-ion battery called Naxtra, offering up to 500km range for EVs and potential to diversify global energy resources. The Financial Times reports: The claims by the Chinese battery groups would put them ahead of major western rivals. At present, Tesla vehicles can be charged up to 200 miles (321km) in added range in 15 minutes, while Germany's Mercedes-Benz recently launched its all-electric CLA compact sedan, which can be charged for up to 325km within 10 minutes using a fast-charging station. [...] The second generation of the Shenxing battery, which boasts a range of 800km on one charge, can achieve a peak charging speed of 2.5km per second, the company said at a media event ahead of this week's Shanghai auto show.

"We look forward to collaborating with more industry leaders to push the limits of supercharging through true innovation," said CATL's chief technology officer Gao Huan, adding that he wanted the new batteries to become "the standard for electric vehicles." Analysts at Bernstein said the latest progress meant that charging speeds had more than doubled in the past year and "increased tenfold over the past 3-4 years." Huan said the new Shenxing battery would be installed in more than 67 EV models this year. He later told reporters that energy density would not be sacrificed as a trade-off for fast charging.

During its tech day, CATL also unveiled its new sodium-ion battery, which it said would go into mass production in December. The battery brand called Naxtra is able to give a range of about 200km for a hybrid vehicle and 500km for an electric vehicle, according to Huan. [...] At the event, Huan claimed the new sodium-ion battery would enable the industry's shift from "single resource dependence" to "energy freedom" and reshape the global energy landscape. He added that he was in discussions with several companies about using sodium-ion batteries in their vehicles.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Tom's Hardware: While most people enjoy PCs that are powered by SSDs, mechanical hard drives are still king in the datacenter. When these drives reach the end of their useful lives, they are usually shredded, and the key materials they're made of -- including several rare earth elements (REE) -- end up as e-waste. At the same time, countries are mining these same materials and emitting a lot of greenhouse gases in the process. And China, a major source of REE, recently announced export restrictions on seven of them, potentially limiting the U.S. tech industry's access to materials such as dysprosium, which is necessary for magnetic storage, motors, and generators.

[On Thursday], Western Digital announced that it has created a large-scale hard disk drive recycling program in concert with Microsoft and recycling-industry partners CMR (Critical Materials Recycling) and PedalPoint Recycling. The new process reclaims Rare Earth Oxides (REO) containing dysprosium, neodymium, and praseodymium from hard drives, along with aluminum, steel, gold, palladium, and copper. The REO reclamation takes place completely within the U.S. and those materials go back into the U.S. market.

Dubbed the Advanced Recycling and Rare Earth Material Capture Program, WD's initiative has already saved 47,000 pounds worth of hard drives, SSDs, and caddies from landfills or less-effective recycling programs. WD was able to achieve a more than 90% reclaim rate for REE and an 80% rate for all of the shredded material. The drives came from Microsoft's U.S. data centers where they were first shredded and then sent to PedalPoint for sorting and processing. Magnets and steel were then sent to CMR, which uses its acid-free dissolution recycling (ADR) technology to extract the rare earth elements.

Verizon Consumer CEO Sowmyanarayan Sampath has declared that net neutrality regulations "went literally nowhere." Sampath claimed he couldn't identify what problem net neutrality was attempting to solve, despite Verizon's history of aggressive lobbying against such rules. "I don't know what net neutrality does," Sampath told The Verge. "I still don't know what problem we are trying to solve with net neutrality."

When pressed about potential anti-competitive behaviors like zero-rating services, Sampath deflected by focusing exclusively on traffic management concerns, arguing that networks require prioritization capabilities during congestion. "For traffic management purposes, we need to have some controls in the network," he stated. The interview comes as Verizon faces a different regulatory challenge from FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr, who is holding up Verizon's Frontier acquisition over the company's diversity initiatives.

Chad Anderson is the founder/managing partner of the early-stage VC Space Capital (and an investor in SpaceX, along with dozens of other space companies). Space Capital produces quarterly reports on the space economy, and he says today, unlike 2021, "the froth is gone. But so is the hype. What's left is a more grounded — and investable — space economy."

On Yahoo Finance he shares several of the report's insights — including the emergence of "investable opportunities across defense-oriented startups in space domain awareness, AI-driven command systems, and hardened infrastructure." The same geopolitical instability that's undermining public markets is driving national urgency around space resilience. China's simulated space "dogfights" prompted the US Department of Defense to double down on orbital supremacy, with the proposed "Golden Dome" missile shield potentially unleashing a new wave of federal spending...

Defense tech is on fire, but commercial location-based services and logistics are freezing over. Companies like Shield AI and Saronic raised monster rounds, while others are relying on bridge financings to stay afloat...

Q1 also saw a breakout quarter for geospatial artificial intelligence (GeoAI). Software developer Niantic launched a spatial computing platform. SkyWatch partnered with GIS software supplier Esri. Planet Labs collaborated with Anthropic. And Xona Space Systems inked a deal with Trimble to boost precision GPS. This is the next leg of the space economy, where massive volumes of satellite data is finally made useful through machine learning, semantic indexing, and real-time analytics.

Distribution-layer companies are doing more with less. They remain underfunded relative to infrastructure and applications but are quietly powering the most critical systems, such as resilient communications, battlefield networks, and edge-based geospatial analysis. Don't let the low round count fool you; innovation here is quietly outpacing capital.
The article includes several predictions, insights, and possible trends (going beyond the fact that defense spending "will carry the sector...")

• "AI's integration into space (across geospatial intelligence, satellite communications, and sensor fusion) is not a novelty. It's a competitive necessity."

• "Focusing solely on rockets and orbital assets misses where much of the innovation and disruption is occurring: the software-defined layers that sit atop the physical backbone..."

• "For years, SpaceX faced little serious competition, but that's starting to change." [He cites Blue Origin's progress toward approval for launching U.S. military satellites, and how Rocket Lab and Stoke Space "have also joined the competition for lucrative government launch contracts." Even Relativity Space may make a comeback, with former GOogle CEO Eric Schmidt acquiring a controlling stake.]

• "An infrastructure reset is coming. The imminent ramp-up of SpaceX's Starship could collapse the cost structure for the infrastructure layer. When that happens, legacy providers with fixed-cost-heavy business models will be at risk. Conversely, capital-light innovators in station design, logistics, and in-orbit servicing could suddenly be massively undervalued."

Matt Asay answered questions from Slashdot readers in 2010 (as the then-COO of Canonical). He currently runs developer relations at MongoDB (after holding similar positions at AWS and Adobe).

This week he contributed an opinion piece to InfoWorld arguing that DeepSeek "may have originated in China, but it stopped being Chinese the minute it was released on Hugging Face with an accompanying paper detailing its development." Soon after, a range of developers, including the Beijing Academy of Artificial Intelligence (BAAI), scrambled to replicate DeepSeek's success but this time as open source software. BAAI, for its part, launched OpenSeek, an ambitious effort to take DeepSeek's open-weight models and create a project that surpasses DeepSeek while uniting "the global open source communities to drive collaborative innovation in algorithms, data, and systems."

If that sounds cool to you, it didn't to the U.S. government, which promptly put BAAI on its "baddie" list. Someone needs to remind U.S. (and global) policymakers that no single country, company, or government can contain community-driven open source... DeepSeek didn't just have a moment. It's now very much a movement, one that will frustrate all efforts to contain it. DeepSeek, and the open source AI ecosystem surrounding it, has rapidly evolved from a brief snapshot of technological brilliance into something much bigger — and much harder to stop. Tens of thousands of developers, from seasoned researchers to passionate hobbyists, are now working on enhancing, tuning, and extending these open source models in ways no centralized entity could manage alone.

For example, it's perhaps not surprising that Hugging Face is actively attempting to reverse engineer and publicly disseminate DeepSeek's R1 model. Hugging Face, while important, is just one company, just one platform. But Hugging Face has attracted hundreds of thousands of developers who actively contribute to, adapt, and build on open source models, driving AI innovation at a speed and scale unmatched even by the most agile corporate labs.

Hugging Face by itself could be stopped. But the communities it enables and accelerates cannot. Through the influence of Hugging Face and many others, variants of DeepSeek models are already finding their way into a wide range of applications. Companies like Perplexity are embedding these powerful open source models into consumer-facing services, proving their real-world utility. This democratization of technology ensures that cutting-edge AI capabilities are no longer locked behind the walls of large corporations or elite government labs but are instead openly accessible, adaptable, and improvable by a global community.
"It's Linux all over again..." Asay writes at one point. "What started as the passion project of a lone developer quickly blossomed into an essential, foundational technology embraced by enterprises worldwide," winning out "precisely because it captivated developers who embraced its promise and contributed toward its potential."

We are witnessing a similar phenomenon with DeepSeek and the broader open source AI ecosystem, but this time it's happening much, much faster...

Organizations that cling to proprietary approaches (looking at you, OpenAI!) or attempt to exert control through restrictive policies (you again, OpenAI!) are not just swimming upstream — they're attempting to dam an ocean. (Yes, OpenAI has now started to talk up open source, but it's a long way from releasing a DeepSeek/OpenSeek equivalent on GitHub.)

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.

"Russia is automating the spread of false information to fool AI chatbots," reports the Washington Post. (When researchers checked 10 chatbots, a third of the responses repeated false pro-Russia messaging.)

The Post argues that this tactic offers "a playbook to other bad actors on how to game AI to push content meant to inflame, influence and obfuscate instead of inform," and calls it "a fundamental weakness of the AI industry." Chatbot answers depend on the data fed into them. A guiding principle is that the more the chatbots read, the more informed their answers will be, which is why the industry is ravenous for content. But mass quantities of well-aimed chaff can skew the answers on specific topics. For Russia, that is the war in Ukraine. But for a politician, it could be an opponent; for a commercial firm, it could be a competitor. "Most chatbots struggle with disinformation," said Giada Pistilli, principal ethicist at open-source AI platform Hugging Face. "They have basic safeguards against harmful content but can't reliably spot sophisticated propaganda, [and] the problem gets worse with search-augmented systems that prioritize recent information."

Early commercial attempts to manipulate chat results also are gathering steam, with some of the same digital marketers who once offered search engine optimization — or SEO — for higher Google rankings now trying to pump up mentions by AI chatbots through "generative engine optimization" — or GEO.
Our current situation "plays into the hands of those with the most means and the most to gain: for now, experts say, that is national governments with expertise in spreading propaganda." Russia and, to a lesser extent, China have been exploiting that advantage by flooding the zone with fables. But anyone could do the same, burning up far fewer resources than previous troll farm operations... In a twist that befuddled researchers for a year, almost no human beings visit the sites, which are hard to browse or search. Instead, their content is aimed at crawlers, the software programs that scour the web and bring back content for search engines and large language models. While those AI ventures are trained on a variety of datasets, an increasing number are offering chatbots that search the current web. Those are more likely to pick up something false if it is recent, and even more so if hundreds of pages on the web are saying much the same thing...

The gambit is even more effective because the Russian operation managed to get links to the Pravda network stories edited into Wikipedia pages and public Facebook group postings, probably with the help of human contractors. Many AI companies give special weight to Facebook and especially Wikipedia as accurate sources. (Wikipedia said this month that its bandwidth costs have soared 50 percent in just over a year, mostly because of AI crawlers....) Last month, other researchers set out to see whether the gambit was working. Finnish company Check First scoured Wikipedia and turned up nearly 2,000 hyperlinks on pages in 44 languages that pointed to 162 Pravda websites. It also found that some false information promoted by Pravda showed up in chatbot answers.
"They do even better in such places as China," the article points out, "where traditional media is more tightly controlled and there are fewer sources for the bots." (The nonprofit American Sunlight Project calls the process "LLM grooming".)

The article quotes a top Kremlin propagandist as bragging in January that "we can actually change worldwide AI."

"There has never been a consensus or a 'smoking gun' to explain what started the pandemic," writes ABC News.

Yet the Associated Press reports that "A federal website that used to feature information on vaccines, testing and treatment for COVID-19 has been transformed into a page supporting the theory that the pandemic originated with a lab leak." (This despite the fact that "about 325 Americans have died from COVID per week on average over the past four weeks, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.") The covid.gov website shows a photo of President Donald Trump walking between the words "lab" and "leak" under a White House heading... The web page also accuses Dr. Anthony Fauci, the former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, of pushing a "preferred narrative" that COVID-19 originated in nature. The origins of COVID have never been proven. Scientists are unsure whether the virus jumped from an animal, as many other viruses have, or came from a laboratory accident. A U.S. intelligence analysis released in 2023 said there is insufficient evidence to prove either theory.
"Many scientists think it's more likely the virus originated naturally in a wild animal and then spilled over into people in a wildlife market located in Wuhan," reports NPR.

And even Jamie Metzl, a critic of the wildlife spillover theory, told NPR that while they appreciated "efforts to dig deeper... it would be a terrible shame if such efforts distracted from essential work to help prevent further infections and treat people suffering from COVID-19 and long COVID." (The federal website covidtests.gov now also redirects instead to the new page...) Some scientists were critical of the new site, which they say appears political in intent. "Every one of the five pieces of evidence supporting the lab leak hypothesis ... is factually incorrect, embellished, or presented in a misleading way," [wrote Angela Rasmussen, a virologist at the University of Saskatchewan in Canada]. "But making evidence-based arguments in good faith about the pandemic's origin is not the purpose of this document. This is pure propaganda, intended to justify the systematic devastation of the federal government, particularly programs devoted to public health and biomedical research," Rasmussen added.

Other scientists said the web site doesn't follow the existing body of scientific evidence on the issue. That evidence does not support "any of the many, often contradictory, lab leak scenarios that have been proposed," Michael Worobey, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Arizona, in an email to NPR. He argued that the evidence is consistent with "the less flashy hypothesis that bringing live animals infected with pathogens with pandemic potential into the heart of one of the biggest cities in the world was how this pandemic started.... the next pathogen with pandemic potential will find us easy pickings if we don't appreciate how risky this sort of 'biosafety level zero' activity is."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: Twenty-one humanoid robots joined thousands of runners at the Yizhuang half-marathon in Beijing on Saturday, the first time these machines have raced alongside humans over a 21-km (13-mile) course. The robots from Chinese manufacturers such as DroidVP and Noetix Robotics came in all shapes and sizes, some shorter than 120 cm (3.9 ft), others as tall as 1.8 m (5.9 ft). One company boasted that its robot looked almost human, with feminine features and the ability to wink and smile.

Some firms tested their robots for weeks before the race. Beijing officials have described the event as more akin to a race car competition, given the need for engineering and navigation teams. "The robots are running very well, very stable ... I feel I'm witnessing the evolution of robots and AI," said spectator He Sishu, who works in artificial intelligence. The robots were accompanied by human trainers, some of whom had to physically support the machines during the race.

A few of the robots wore running shoes, with one donning boxing gloves and another wearing a red headband with the words "Bound to Win" in Chinese. The winning robot was Tiangong Ultra, from the Beijing Innovation Center of Human Robotics, with a time of 2 hours and 40 minutes. The men's winner of the race had a time of 1 hour and 2 minutes. [...] Some robots, like Tiangong Ultra, completed the race, while others struggled from the beginning. One robot fell at the starting line and lay flat for a few minutes before getting up and taking off. One crashed into a railing after running a few metres, causing its human operator to fall over. You can watch a recording of the race in its entirety on YouTube.

Longtime Slashdot reader hackingbear shares a report from Interesting Engineering: A research team at Fudan University in Shanghai, China has built the fastest semiconductor storage device ever reported, a nonvolatile flash memory dubbed "PoX" that programs a single bit in 400 picoseconds (0.0000000004 s) -- roughly 25 billion operations per second. Conventional static and dynamic RAM (SRAM, DRAM) write data in 1-10 nanoseconds but lose everything when power is cut while current flash chips typically need micro to milliseconds per write -- far too slow for modern AI accelerators that shunt terabytes of parameters in real time.

The Fudan group, led by Prof. Zhou Peng at the State Key Laboratory of Integrated Chips and Systems, re-engineered flash physics by replacing silicon channels with two dimensional Dirac graphene and exploiting its ballistic charge transport. Combining ultralow energy with picosecond write speeds could eliminate separate highspeed SRAM caches and remove the longstanding memory bottleneck in AI inference and training hardware, where data shuttling, not arithmetic, now dominates power budgets. The team [which is now scaling the cell architecture and pursuing arraylevel demonstrations] did not disclose endurance figures or fabrication yield, but the graphene channel suggests compatibility with existing 2Dmaterial processes that global fabs are already exploring. The result is published in the journal Nature.

Sage has retracted 678 more papers from the Journal of Intelligent and Fuzzy Systems (JIFS), concluding an investigation that has now purged 1,561 articles -- the most ever removed from a single journal. The publisher, which acquired JIFS from IOS Press in November 2023, began investigating the journal in early 2024 after discovering "indicators that raised concerns about the authenticity of the research and the peer review process."

This final batch follows 467 articles retracted in August and another 416 in January. Problems in the retracted papers included citation manipulation, "tortured phrases," unauthorized third-party involvement in submissions, and evidence suggesting collusion between authors and reviewers. Most authors were from India and China, with some from Pakistan, Turkey, Iran, and Iraq. Cengiz Kahraman of Istanbul Technical University, who authored 20 of the retracted papers, disputed the decision, telling Retraction Watch that Sage acted "without any reason and evidence." The journal has now resumed publishing.

China is banning automakers from using the terms "smart driving" and "autonomous driving" when they advertise driving assistance features, and it will tighten scrutiny of such technology upgrades. From a report: The mandate on vehicle advertising was delivered by the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology in its meeting with nearly 60 representatives from automakers on Wednesday, according to a transcript seen by Reuters and confirmed by one of the attendees. The move follows a fatal accident involving Xiaomi's best-selling SU7 sedan in March that triggered widespread concerns over vehicle safety.

More than half of the top privately held AI companies based in the U.S. have at least one immigrant founder, according to an analysis from the Institute for Progress. From the report: The IFP analysis of the top AI-related startups in the Forbes AI 2025 list found that 25 -- or 60% -- of the 42 companies based in the U.S. were founded or co-founded by immigrants. The founders of those companies "hail from 25 countries, with India leading (nine founders), followed by China (eight founders) and then France (three founders). Australia, the U.K., Canada, Israel, Romania, and Chile all have two founders each."

Among them is OpenAI -- whose co-founders include Elon Musk, born in South Africa, and Ilya Sutskever, born in Russia -- and Databricks, whose co-founders were born in Iran, Romania and China. The analysis echoes previous findings about the key role foreign-born scientists and engineers have played in the U.S. tech industry and the broader economy.