Slashdot reader fjo3 shared this article from Wired: [Flock] has told the public for years that its technology "cannot recognize, identify, or track individuals." It has now built a system that does both, an artificial intelligence tool for police that can identify drivers and track vehicles by their patterns of movement alone, WIRED has learned... Because the system also reaches police case files, 911 dispatch logs, and commercial identity records, those plates can be turned into names, home addresses, and relatives. It can search for people in an area drawn on a map based on nothing more than a physical description... The code describes 45 tools at the AI's disposal, giving it access to plate scans and camera metadata, arrest records, case files, dispatch logs, ballistics results, and commercial databases that contain Social Security numbers, dates of birth, phone numbers, email addresses, relatives and associates. Flock says it is testing the product with a small group of law enforcement partners and describes it as still in development, with capabilities that may not reflect what it eventually sells. It arrives as the company faces bipartisan political pressure, a growing record of officers caught misusing its platform, and a wave of vandalism that has left cameras sawed off and lenses painted over in cities across the country... An officer no longer needs a plate, a name, or a crime to begin: They supply a place, a stretch of time, and a pattern of behavior, and the system is designed to hand back the people who fit... One prompt Flock preloaded into the system reads: "Find me witnesses based on vehicles most seen in [neighborhood] during [last 14 days] during [daily timeframe] *(will not include whitelisted vehicles)." An officer would fill in the blanks and submit it. The output is a list of plates, which other tools in the product then convert into names and home addresses. Another prompt instructs the system to list everyone arrested more than twice in two years for "any offense," exempting only narcotics arrests, and then says to map where those people live, retrieve the calls for service at their homes, and "do a workup on the top three individuals." The prompt begins with everyone in the area who has an arrest record and ends with dossiers on three of them, chosen by the software. A "workup," in Flock's terminology, is a one-command background check. It starts with a name and a date of birth and returns what the department's records and commercial data hold: vehicles, prior listings as a suspect, and, on a second screen, relatives, phone numbers, and online accounts. Wired shares this reaction from a law professor at George Washington University. "It is clear Flock has aspirations far beyond ALPRs to become a digital platform for policing,"

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Long-time Slashdot reader AmiMoJo shared this report from the Guardian: Children's lungs grew bigger and stronger after the most polluting vehicles were restricted from entering London, a study has found. Examinations of London schoolchildren before and after the introduction of the city's ultra-low emission zone found a restoration of lung capacity that had been stunted by exposure to pollution... "Traffic pollution in cities damages children's health and development," said Chris Griffiths, a professor of primary care at the University of Oxford and Queen Mary University of London, and the study's joint senior author. "We provide the strongest evidence yet on how these harms can be prevented. Ambitious clean-air zones should be considered a priority for cities globally with traffic-related air pollution." Air pollution from traffic has stunted the development of children's lungs in London for decades. Previous research found that by the age of eight or nine, children from the most polluted areas had 5-10% less lung capacity than their peers elsewhere. That impairment, which scientists said was the result of exposure to nitrogen dioxide, put them at increased risk as adults of developing respiratory diseases, such as asthma and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, cardiovascular and metabolic disease, and premature death.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Economist: Students and school children are increasingly using artificial intelligence. A survey last year by Chegg, an ed-tech firm, found that 80% of rich-world undergraduates used it in their studies. More recent polls put the figure at 94% in Britain and 93% in Germany. Such widespread adoption has fueled concerns about the impact the technology might be having on learning. Teachers report marking identikit essays that they suspect are churned out by ChatGPT. Yet firm evidence on AI's educational effects has been lacking. David Stromberg of Stockholm University and Victor Lei and Wu Yanhui of the University of Hong Kong set out to fill the gap. They tracked 27,000 pupils aged 12-18 in China, where AI adoption has been fast. Around 80% reported using models such as Doubao and DeepSeek; the other 20% formed the control group. The results are eye-opening. After six months, pupils using AI saw their average homework score rise by 18% across all subjects. The time they took to complete each assignment fell from an average of 64 minutes to 45. But come exam time, the same students scored 20% below their classmates who had not called on AI's help. Homework scores once predicted exam performance; now those who score highest are, perversely, more likely to do worse in exams. The takeaway: "AI can boost learning productivity, but only for those who use the technology intelligently," reports The Economist. "Students must resist the temptation to reach for an AI-generated answer before thinking things through for themselves."

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from RathBiotaClan: Millions of people finish short video after short video every day; a new brain-scan study shows that the very act of finishing a clip they like temporarily quiets the brain regions that normally help them stay focused and weigh longer-term goals. When people watch a short video they enjoy enough to finish, two brain regions involved in cognitive control show significant deactivation. That is the central finding of a new study from Zhejiang University, published in NeuroImagein January 2026. Using functional MRI alongside proton magnetic resonance spectroscopy (H-MRS), the research team examined 56 young adults while they freely watched short video clips inside an MRI scanner. Both the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex (dACC) and the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (dlPFC) showed reduced activity specifically when participants watched clips they liked enough to view to completion. Cognitive control helps people balance immediate pleasures against longer-term goals, and impairments in this system are linked to conditions such as depression, anxiety, ADHD, and addiction. Short-video platforms present rapid, algorithmically curated streams that are built for continuous, low-effort consumption. Prior behavioral research has tied both internet addiction and smartphone addiction to weaker self-control, and separate neuroimaging work has documented disruptions to reward and cognitive-control circuits in people with behavioral addictions. Despite this, few studies had directly tested whether the act of watching entertaining short videos itself suppresses the brain's cognitive control regions. The Zhejiang University team set out to answer that question, along with a second one: what neurochemical factors might explain why this suppression varies from person to person?

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Elon Musk’s talk about maintaining a million-strong AI data center satellite megaconstellation may not exactly be practical or economical, but it might be unique. It’s about the closest we’ve come to confronting a scheme that would export a considerable amount of valuable materials into space. Humans aren’t doing a great job of material sustainability, but normally we’re talking about stuff escaping a recycling pipeline rather than escaping Earth’s gravitational pull.

The commercial space sector likes talking about the allure of mining asteroids for precious metals to bring back to Earth. Under what circumstances are we going to be willing to do that in reverse? Starlink alone has doubled the mass of objects in low-Earth orbit, and this orbital data center constellation would dwarf that—and dispose of at least some satellites by pushing them away from Earth.

Given the roughly five-year expected lifetime for data center GPUs, about 200,000 of the 1 million proposed SpaceX AI1 satellites would be decommissioned each year. Based on their May 29 FCC filing, about 40,000 would definitely deorbit and burn up in the atmosphere. (Those materials would largely be dispersed throughout the atmosphere, turning a resource into a diffuse contaminant that slowly settles over the globe. One related issue: the aluminum would cause an unknown amount of ozone depletion over a period of decades.) Some or all of the remaining 160,000 satellites would be moved outward into a distant “disposal” orbit, instead. Either way, they're lost from a "material life cycle" point of view.

Without full, detailed specifications for these satellites, there’s no way to properly tally the amount of material we’re talking about. Focusing on just the GPUs themselves—ignoring solar panels, cooling systems, and the rest of the server and networking devices—can at least provide a starting point.

Musk has described these satellites as using a modified Nvidia Vera Rubin NVL72 rack, which contains 72 GPUs. Though it references a slightly older card, a May study on the material footprint of LLMs provided a full chemical analysis of an A100, covering 32 elements. The massive air-cooled heatsink on that card accounted for 88 percent of its mass, which we’ll simply have to exclude, since the satellite will obviously require another type of cooling that has not been defined.

But using the extremely conservative assumption that each AI1 satellite was simply composed of 72 naked A100 GPUs taped together, we can estimate the material exported to space (or vaporized so thoroughly that it might as well have been) each year.

That includes 1,000 tons of copper, 170 kilograms of gold, almost 2 tons of silver, over 20 tons each of bismuth and titanium, over 2 tons of palladium, and 76 kilograms of thallium.

Some of these elements are, unsurprisingly, rounding errors compared to the amount we mine each year. But that’s around 1 percent of global annual palladium and thallium—a remarkable amount to eject into space.

Earth’s neighborhood inconvenience store

Another way to think about this is to calculate the size of asteroid you would have to mine to recover the amounts of these elements being lost. As a 2023 study notes, there are only a few elements that can be found at a higher concentration in asteroids compared to ores on Earth, like the platinum group metals.

Using average chemistry and densities for a couple different types of asteroids—common CM-group carbonaceous chondrites and rarer iron-rich M-type asteroids—some of the elements lost could be found in modestly sized bodies. The platinum, for example, equates to the contents of an asteroid 16 to 43 meters in diameter. The 180 kilograms of cobalt could be recovered from an asteroid about 3 to 6 meters across.

But it would take a 140–190-meter asteroid to collect that much copper, something in the 225–300-meter range for an equivalent amount of silver and barium, and something like a 530-meter asteroid for an equivalent amount of tin.

Again, this would have to be repeated annually to balance the losses from the satellite constellation.

Most of these elements are too low in value to be proposed targets for asteroid mining, but it has been suggested that spacecraft materials like aluminum and titanium might someday be mined in space for use in space. SpaceX suggested a variant of this in an SEC filing: “We intend to establish lunar‑based manufacturing capabilities, including factories to produce large‑scale AI compute satellites[…] We expect to use raw materials from the Moon to construct most of the mass of the satellites and ship chips and other lower mass elements from Earth.”

It’s technically possible to mine aluminum and titanium on the Moon. It doesn’t necessarily follow that it’s cheaper to manufacture satellites on the Moon just because it would reduce the weight launched from Earth’s surface. (Of course, you’d first have to launch an entire moonbase and mining operation and satellite factory up there…)

There are a number of questions about all this that one would not have to answer if one were building servers on Earth, deploying them in data centers inside humble buildings, and responsibly processing e-waste for recycling in a few years when they die of email-summary-related causes. (Or even better, pushing some equipment to the secondary market if it has useful life left.) In addition to the cost of putting something in orbit, there is a cost to not getting it back.

Will there someday be an environmental review for space projects that includes an evaluation of the mass of materials it proposes to remove from the Earth system? The legal framework for extracting minerals from space has been much discussed—but congested orbits full of junk (or junk reentering the atmosphere) may not be the only space disposal concern on the horizon if projects of this size are ever seriously pursued.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: The Federal Communications Commission last week eliminated the gigabit speed goal established during the Biden administration and declared that current levels of broadband deployment in the US are acceptable. Though fiber networks have routinely offered such speeds for years, the FCC said the gigabit speed goal is not "technologically neutral," suggesting that it isn't fair to other, slower technologies. In 2024, the FCC raised its broadband benchmark to 100Mbps downstream and 20Mbps upstream, setting the new standard by which to judge whether deployment is reasonable and timely. The FCC at the time also set a long-term speed goal of 1Gbps download speeds paired with 500Mbps upload speeds, saying it would use the goal "as a guidepost for evaluating our efforts to encourage deployment." Republican Brendan Carr, who is now the FCC chairman, never liked that long-term goal. He proposed abolishing it last year, and the change was finalized on August 14 in the FCC's latest broadband deployment report. The reports are mandated by Section 706 of the Telecommunications Act. "As part of our return to following the plain language of Section 706, we adopt our proposal from the Notice [of Inquiry] to abolish without replacement the long-term goal of 1,000/500 Mbps established in the 2024 Report," the order said. "A long-term goal is not mentioned in Section 706 and could appear to violate our obligation to conduct our analysis in a technologically neutral manner. At present, it is impossible to predict long-term technological developments and the evolution of consumer preferences." The FCC said that comments submitted by cable industry group NCTA and wireless industry group CTIA "support our reasoning for abolishing the long-term goal." Last year, the Brendan Carr-led FCC said (PDF) that the gigabit goal "may be unreasonably prejudicial to technologies such as satellite and fixed wireless that presently do not support such speeds." However, last week's report contradicts that stance. "We disagree with commenters arguing that our concern about technological neutrality merely serves to accommodate technologies that may currently offer slower speeds," the FCC said. "At present, we do not know the nature of future consumer preferences and, considering that the goal is not required by the statute and does not serve any positive purpose (as discussed herein), we believe it prudent to abolish it."

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