The charging network is spotty, but it’s a small country.

People in Costa Rica and other Latin American, Asian and African countries are increasingly buying electric vehicles to avoid spiking fuel prices.

In 2016 an online “swarm intelligence” platform generated a correct prediction for the Kentucky Derby — naming all four top finishers in order. (But its 2017 predictions weren’t even close.) Slashdot checked in again on how modern AI systems performed in 2023, 2024, and 2025 — but their predictions were still pretty bad. Would AI-generated Derby predictions be any better in 2026? This...

“The war in Iran has sent oil-starved countries scrambling for fuel,” CNN reported this week. And many of those countries now want renewable fuels, the article points out, “leaving them turning to the renewables king of the planet: China.”Chinese exports of solar technology, batteries and electric vehicles all reached record highs in March, according to energy think tank Ember, a sign that the...

“Scientists have created a miraculous new way to stop fires from spreading through neighborhoods using nothing but sound,” reports the New York Post:Former NASA engineers with California-based Sonic Fire Tech found that using sound waves can snuff out blazes and potentially be used to stop another Pacific Palisades inferno… The technology works by targeting oxygen molecules using low-frequency...

Long-time Slashdot reader Anne Thwacks frequently uses YouTube’s subtitles “not to disturb others in the room, or because my hearing is not very good.” But they say there’s a new problem. “The subtitling is terrible!”Almost every sentence has a huge error. Proper names are more often wrong than right. Non-English place names are almost always mangled to barely recognizable. And no effort...

“Nuclear AI startup” Fermi had hoped to build power plants generating 17 gigawatts of electricity, remembers Bloomberg, “three times the amount typically consumed by New York City.”Hyperscalers could install their data centers on the site itself and tap directly into that power, which would come first from natural gas turbines and later from nuclear reactors. The pitch ticked so many boxes —...

Monday a company called Rainmaker announced their rain-triggering technology had produced 143 million gallons of freshwater for Utah and Oregon residents — making them “the first private company in history to validate the results of cloud seeding operations.” The Deseret News reports:Founded in 2023, Rainmaker uses drones to disperse silver iodide into clouds, then they track precipitation...

“Running a Big Tech company during Silicon Valley’s AI mania may not necessarily require fewer workers or cost less,” writes the Washington Post:Amazon, Google and Meta together have roughly the same number of employees now as they did during an industry-wide hiring binge in 2022, company disclosures show. Growing costs for technical workers and related expenses have often outpaced sales...

Slashdot reader joshuark writes: Scientific American reports that a ChatGPT AI has proved a conjecture with a method no human had developed. A 23-year-old student Liam Price just cracked a 60-year-old problem that world-class mathematicians have tried and failed to solve. The new solution that Price got in response to a single prompt to GPT-5.4 Pro was posted on www.erdosproblems.com, a website...