An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Wood heating is reintroducing lead into the air of local communities and homes, a systematic investigation by academics has found. Overwhelming evidence of lead’s neurotoxicity meant the metal was banned as an additive in petrol more than 25 years ago. The research by academics from the University of Massachusetts Amherst began by analysing...

The acquisition, Weights.gg, was a sort of social network for creating and sharing artificial intelligence algorithms.

BrianFagioli writes: Kioxia and Dell Technologies say they have built a 2U server configuration capable of scaling to 9.8PB of flash storage, which is the sort of density that would have sounded impossible just a few years ago. The setup combines a Dell PowerEdge R7725xd Server with 40 Kioxia LC9 Series 245.76TB NVMe SSDs and AMD EPYC processors. According to Kioxia, matching the same capacity...

AMD says FSR 4.1 will finally bring its newer hardware-accelerated upscaling technology to older Radeon GPUs. “The rollout will begin in July with RDNA3- and 3.5-based GPUs, which include the Radeon RX 7000 series, as well as integrated GPUs like the Radeon 890M and Radeon 8060S,” reports Ars Technica. “In ‘early 2027,’ support will also be extended to the RDNA2 architecture, which includes the...

Bitwarden appears to be undergoing a quiet shift in leadership and messaging. Its longtime CEO and CFO have stepped down, while the company has removed “Always free” from a prominent password-manager page and replaced “Inclusion” and “Transparency” in its GRIT values with “Innovation” and “Trust.” Fast Company reports: In February, longtime CEO Michael Crandell moved to an advisory role,...

Google has confirmed it is testing a 5GB storage limit for some new Gmail accounts, with users able to unlock the standard 15GB by adding a phone number. Android Authority reports: While the company didn’t mention which regions are impacted, user reports from yesterday were mostly from African countries. That said, if Google’s tests prove successful, this could possibly become the norm for new...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: A bill focused on maintaining long-term playable access to online games has passed out of the California Assembly’s appropriations committee, setting up a floor vote by the full legislative body. The advancement is a major win for Stop Killing Games’ grassroots game preservation movement and comes over the objections of industry lobbyists...

OpenAI is previewing a feature that lets ChatGPT Pro users connect bank and investment accounts through Plaid, allowing the chatbot to analyze spending, subscriptions, balances, portfolios, debt, and major financial decisions. “More than 200 million people are already going to ChatGPT every month with finance questions — from budgeting to tips on how to cut back on spending,” OpenAI said in its...

ArXiv says it will ban authors for one year if they submit papers containing AI-generated slop, such as hallucinated citations, placeholder text, or chatbot meta-comments left in the manuscript. “If generative AI tools generate inappropriate language, plagiarized content, biased content, errors, mistakes, incorrect references, or misleading content, and that output is included in scientific...

Longtime Slashdot reader sinij shares a report from Car and Driver: A group of Michigan lawmakers has introduced a bill in Congress that would effectively place a permanent ban on Chinese connected vehicles from being sold in the United States. While an executive order signed by Joe Biden in early 2025 already imposed heavy restrictions, the new bill would codify and expand on the ban, as first...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Electrek: Honda is waving the white flag. The Japanese automaker previewed two new hybrids set to launch by 2028 after taking an over $9 billion hit over its failed EV bet, leading to its biggest loss in company history. Honda admitted it was “unable to deliver products that offer value for money better than that of new EV manufacturers, resulting in a...