Meta removed a deepfake video from Facebook that falsely depicted Catherine Connolly withdrawing from Ireland's presidential election. The video was posted to an account called RTE News AI and viewed almost 30,000 times over 12 hours before the Irish Independent contacted the platform. The fabricated bulletin featured AI-generated versions of RTE newsreader Sharon Ni Bheolain and political correspondent Paul Cunningham announcing that Connolly had ended her campaign and the election scheduled for Friday would be cancelled.

Connolly responded in a statement that she remained a candidate and called the video a disgraceful attempt to mislead voters. Meta confirmed the account violated its community standards against impersonating people and organizations. Ireland's media regulator Coimisiun na Mean contacted Meta about the incident and reminded the platform of its obligations under the EU Digital Services Act. An Irish Times poll published last Thursday found Connolly leading the race with 38% support.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Financial Times: A lot of critical financial and government infrastructure runs on Cobol. The more-than-60-year-old mainframe coding language is embedded into payments and transaction rails, even though there are very few Cobol-literate coders available to maintain them. The big argument in favor of sticking with Cobol systems is that they work. The catch is that, whenever they stop working, it is difficult to figure out why. That's not good in a crisis, which is exactly when they're most likely to break. Covid-19 put a lot of strain the US state benefit systems.

The ones that used Cobol for processing unemployment claims failed spectacularly, according to a new working paper from The Atlanta Fed: "States that used an antiquated [unemployment insurance]-benefit system experienced a 2.8 percentage point decline in total credit and debit card consumption relative to card consumption in states with more modern UI benefit systems. [...] Using this estimate in a back-of-the-envelope calculation, I find that the lack of investment in updating UI-benefit systems in COBOL states was associated with a reduction in real GDP of at least $40 billion (in 2019 dollars) lower during this [March 13 2020 to year-end] period

The paper uses Cobol as a proxy for old and inefficient IT, not the direct cause of failure. Claimants faced much longer delays in the 28 states that still used Cobol in 2020, both because of the unprecedented volume of claims and the difficulty updating systems with new eligibility rules, author Michael Navarrete finds. [...] As an aside, one oddity of the data is that Republican-controlled states were more likely to have replaced old IT systems, even though their standard unemployment insurance payments are lower on average. Why? Absolutely no idea, but here are the maps. And, once adjusted for state politics, here's the key finding.

British Columbia is permanently banning new cryptocurrency mining operations from connecting to its power grid to conserve electricity for industries that generate more jobs and tax revenue. The province is also capping power allocations for AI and data centers, while launching a competitive allocation process in January 2026. CoinDesk reports: The move from the government of Canada's third-most populous province is part of a broader legislative and regulatory overhaul unveiled Monday [...]. "Government will also implement several regulatory and policy changes in fall 2025 that will ... permanently ban new BC Hydro connections to the electricity grid for cryptocurrency mining to preserve the province's electricity supply and avoid the overburdening of the electricity grid," the government said in a post on its website

The province said the restrictions will help prevent grid strain and ensure industrial development is powered by clean electricity. "We're seeing unprecedented demand from traditional and emerging industries," Charlotte Mitha, the president and CEO of power utility BC Hydro, said in the web post. "The province's strategy empowers BC Hydro to manage this growth responsibly, keeping our grid reliable and our energy future clean and affordable." Crypto mining operations often consume large amounts of electricity without creating many local jobs or tax revenue, according to the statement. By contrast, projects like mines or liquefied natural gas (LNG) facilities are seen as more beneficial to the economy.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: AI content has proliferated across the Internet over the past few years, but those early confabulations with mutated hands have evolved into synthetic images and videos that can be hard to differentiate from reality. Having helped to create this problem, Google has some responsibility to keep AI video in check on YouTube. To that end, the company has started rolling out its promised likeness detection system for creators. [...] The likeness detection tool, which is similar to the site's copyright detection system, has now expanded beyond the initial small group of testers. YouTube says the first batch of eligible creators have been notified that they can use likeness detection, but interested parties will need to hand Google even more personal information to get protection from AI fakes.

Currently, likeness detection is a beta feature in limited testing, so not all creators will see it as an option in YouTube Studio. When it does appear, it will be tucked into the existing "Content detection" menu. In YouTube's demo video, the setup flow appears to assume the channel has only a single host whose likeness needs protection. That person must verify their identity, which requires a photo of a government ID and a video of their face. It's unclear why YouTube needs this data in addition to the videos people have already posted with their oh-so stealable faces, but rules are rules.

After signing up, YouTube will flag videos from other channels that appear to have the user's face. YouTube's algorithm can't know for sure what is and is not an AI video. So some of the face match results may be false positives from channels that have used a short clip under fair use guidelines. If creators do spot an AI fake, they can add some details and submit a report in a few minutes. If the video includes content copied from the creator's channel that does not adhere to fair use guidelines, YouTube suggests also submitting a copyright removal request. However, just because a person's likeness appears in an AI video does not necessarily mean YouTube will remove it.

"Plasma is a popular desktop (and mobile) environment for GNU/Linux and other UNIX-like operating systems," writes longtime Slashdot reader jrepin. "Among other things, it also powers the desktop mode of the Steam Deck gaming handheld. The KDE community today announced the latest release: Plasma 6.5." From the announcement: This fresh new release is all about fine-tuning, fresh features, and a making everything smooth and sleek for everyone. The new version brings automatic light-to-dark theme switching based on the time of day. You can configure which global themes it switches between. You can also configure whether you want the wallpaper to switch between its light and dark versions based on the color scheme, the time of day, or be always light or dark.

Next up is a "Pinned clipboard items" feature, which lets you save text you use regularly into the clipboard. Breeze-themed windows will now have the same level of roundness in all four corners, even the bottom one. Flatpak Permissions page has been transformed into a general Application Permissions page, where you can configure applications' ability to do things like take screenshots and accept remote control requests. The utility that reads the level of ink or toner from your printer now informs you when it's running low or empty.

For the gamers out there, you can now see more relevant info about game controllers on System Settings' Game Controller page. Artists among you can now configure any rotary dials and touch rings on your drawing tablet. Users sensitive to color can now make use of a grayscale color filter, which desaturates or removes color systemwide.

Plasma 6.5 implements support for an experimental version of the Wayland picture-in-picture protocol that promises to allow apps like Firefox to eventually display proper PiP windows that stay above others automatically. Support for "overlay planes" was added, which can reduce CPU usage and power draw when displaying full-screen content using a compatible GPU. You can read more about these and many other new features in the Plasma 6.5 release announcement and complete changelog.

France and Spain are calling on the European Union to stick with plans to ban combustion engine cars in the bloc after 2035, at odds with German Chancellor Friedrich Merz ahead of a meeting of leaders in Brussels this week. From a report: The European Commission, the bloc's executive branch, is currently reviewing rules designed to accelerate the automotive sector's green transition. Merz has called on the bloc to give up its 2035 deadline to help Germany's troubled car industry.

France and Spain "hope that the upcoming review will preserve the 2035 cap and the environmental ambition of the CO2 emissions trajectory that underpins it," a paper presented to climate ministers in Luxembourg on Tuesday, and seen by Bloomberg says. "This revision should in no way call into question the zero emissions exhaust target in 2035."

London police finally understand why 80,000 phones disappeared from the city's streets last year. The answer involves budget cuts [non-paywalled source] that hollowed out British policing in the 2010s, the arrival of electric bikes that made theft easy, and a lucrative black market in China where stolen British phones retain full functionality. The Metropolitan Police discovered an industrial-scale operation in December when officers traced a woman's iPhone to a Heathrow warehouse on Christmas Eve. Boxes labeled as batteries and bound for Hong Kong contained almost 1,000 stolen iPhones. The police arrested two men in their thirties in September as suspected ringleaders of a group that sent up to 40,000 stolen phones to China.

The epidemic took root after Conservative-led austerity measures reduced police numbers and budgets. In 2017 the Metropolitan Police announced it would stop investigating low-level crimes to focus resources on serious violence and sexual offenses. Thieves on rented electric bikes began mounting sidewalks to snatch phones at high speed while wearing balaclavas and hoods. Police data shows only 495 people were charged out of 106,000 phones reported stolen between March 2024 and February 2025. Thieves earn up to $401 per device. The phones sell for up to $5,000 in China because Chinese network providers do not subscribe to the international blacklist for stolen devices.

President Trump's $100,000 H-1B visa fee will apply only to new visa applicants outside the country, the government confirmed in new guidance on Monday. From a report: That means that under the new policy, employers won't need to pay the fee for anyone already living in the U.S., such as international students. The new guidance: Under the new guidance published on Monday, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services said the $100,000 fee will apply only to new applicants living outside the country. Employers will need to pay the fee after their prospective employee's visa is approved, allowing them to move to the U.S.

Previously, the White House had said the fee would apply to all new visa applicants, except those who work for companies or industries that have secured a special waiver. In 2024, roughly 54% of the 141,000 new H-1B visas issued went to immigrants who were already in the U.S. on a different visa type, according to government statistics. If that trend holds, the new fee wouldn't apply to over half of the applicants.

An anonymous reader shares a report: A hacking group that recently doxed hundreds of government officials, including from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), has now built dossiers on tens of thousands of U.S. government officials, including NSA employees, a member of the group told 404 Media. The member said the group did this by digging through its caches of stolen Salesforce customer data. The person provided 404 Media with samples of this information, which 404 Media was able to corroborate.

As well as NSA officials, the person sent 404 Media personal data on officials from the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF), members of the Air Force, and several other agencies.

India will need as much as $21 trillion to achieve its climate goals and lift its population out of poverty, according to a draft government plan seen by Bloomberg. From the report: The estimate offers a first glimpse of how the country intends to live up to its target of net zero emissions by 2070. The updated scenario implies hitting peak emissions in 2045, which is a decade earlier than the current trajectory.

India is already being severely battered by the fallout of climate change, as deadly floods and heat waves become more destructive each year. But the need to mitigate the emissions that feed climate change has historically been at odds with India's priorities of economic growth and energy security, with the latter still mostly provided through coal. The new plan shows India will seek to achieve climate and economic development goals simultaneously, with low-carbon options envisaged for much of its yet-to-be-built residential and industrial infrastructure.

A recent article in Noema magazines explores the issues in "editing nature to fix our failures."

"It turns out playing God is neither difficult nor expensive," the article points out. "For about $2,000, I can go online and order a decent microscope, a precision injection rig, and a vial of enough CRISPR-Cas9 — an enzyme-based genome-editing tool — to genetically edit a few thousand fish embryos..." So when going beyond the kept-in-captivity Dire Wolf to the possibility of bringing back forests of the American chestnut tree, "The process is deceptively simple; the implications are anything but..." If scientists could use CRISPR to engineer a more heat-tolerant coral, it would give coral a better chance of surviving a marine environment made warmer by climate change. It would also keep the human industries that rely on reefs afloat. But should we edit nature to fix our failures? And if we do, is it still natural...? Evolution is not keeping pace with climate change, so it is up to us to give it an assist [according to Christopher Preston, an environmental philosopher from the University of Montana, who wrote a book on CRISPR called "Ma href="https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262537094/the-synthetic-age/">The Synthetic Age."] In some cases, the urgency is so great that we may not have time to waste. "There's no doubt there are times when you have to act," Preston continued. "Corals are a case where the benefits of reefs are just so enormous that keeping some alive, even if they're genetically altered, makes the risks worth it."
Kate Quigley, a molecular ecologist and a principal research scientist at Australia's Minderoo Foundation, says "Engineering the ocean, or the atmosphere, or coral is not something to be taken lightly. Science is incredible. But that doesn't mean we know everything and what the unintended consequences might be." Phillip Cleves, a principal investigator at the Carnegie Institute for Science's embryology department, is already researching whether coral could be bioengineered to be more tolerant to heat.

But both of them have concerns: For all the research Quigley and Cleves have dedicated to climate-proofing coral, neither wants to see the results of their work move from experimentation in the lab to actual use in the open ocean. Needing to do so would represent an even greater failure by humankind to protect the environment that we already have. And while genetic editing and selective breeding offer concrete solutions for helping some organisms adapt, they will never be powerful enough to replace everything lost to rising water temperatures. "I will try to prepare for it, but the most important thing we can do to save coral is take strong action on climate change," Quigley told me. "We could pour billions and billions of dollars — in fact, we already have — into restoration, and even if, by some miracle, we manage to recreate the reef, there'd be other ecosystems that would need the same thing. So why can't we just get at the root issue?"
And then there's the blue-green algae dilemma: George Church, the Harvard Medical School professor of genetics behind Colossal's dire wolf project, was part of a team that successfully used CRISPR to change the genome of blue-green algae so that it could absorb up to 20% more carbon dioxide via photosynthesis. Silicon Valley tech incubator Y Combinator seized on the advance to call for scaled-up proposals, estimating that seeding less than 1% of the ocean's surface with genetically engineered phytoplankton would sequester approximately 47 gigatons of CO2 a year, more than enough to reverse all of last year's worldwide emissions.

But moving from deploying CRISPR for species protection to providing a planetary service flips the ethical calculus. Restoring a chestnut forest or a coral reef preserves nature, or at least something close to it. Genetically manipulating phytoplankton and plants to clean up after our mistakes raises the risk of a moral hazard. Do we have the right to rewrite nature so we can perpetuate our nature-killing ways?

Readers in 2025 "may struggle to remember the optimism of the aughts, when the internet seemed to offer endless possibilities for virtual art and writing that was free..." argues a new review at Bookforum. "The content we do create online, if we still create, often feels unreflectively automatic: predictable quote-tweet dunks, prefabricated poses on Instagram, TikTok dances that hit their beats like clockwork, to say nothing of what's literally thoughtlessly churned out by LLM-powered bots."

They write that author Joanna Walsh "wants us to remember how truly creative, and human, the internet once was," in the golden age of user-generated content — and funny cat picture sites like I Can Has Cheezburger: I Can Has Cheezburger... was an amateur project, an outlet for tech professionals who wanted an easier way to exchange cute cat pics after a hard day at work. In Amateurs!: How We Built Internet Culture and Why It Matters, Walsh documents how unpaid creative labor is the basis for almost everything that's good (and much that's bad) online, including the open-source code Linux, developed by Linus Torvalds when he was still in school ("just as a hobby, won't be big and professional"), and even, in Walsh's account, the World Wide Web itself. The platforms that emerged in the 2000s as "Web 2.0," including Facebook, YouTube, Reddit, and Twitter, allowed anyone to experiment in a space that had been reserved for coders and hackers, making the internet interactive even for the inexpert and virtually unlimited in potential audience. The explosion in amateur creativity that followed took many forms, from memes to tweeted one-liners to diaristic blogs to durational digital performances to sloppy Photoshops to the formal and informal taxonomic structures — wikis, neologisms, digitally native dialects...

[U]ser-generated content was also, at bottom, about the bottom line, a business model sold to us under the guise of artistic empowerment. Even referring to an anonymous amateur as a "user," Walsh argues, cedes ground: these platforms are populated by producers, but their owners see us as, and turn us into, "helpless addicts." For some, online amateurism translated to professional success, a viral post earning an author a book deal, or a reputation as a top commenter leading to a staff writing job on a web publication... But for most, these days, participation in the online attention economy feels like a tax, or maybe a trickle of revenue, rather than free fun or a ticket to fame. The few remaining professionals in the arts and letters have felt pressured to supplement their full-time jobs with social media self-promotion, subscription newsletters, podcasts, and short-form video. On what was once called Twitter, users can pay, and sometimes get paid, to post with greater reach...

The chapters are bookended by an introduction on the early promise of 2004 and a coda on the defeat of 2025 and supplemented by an appendix with a straightforward timeline of the major events and publications that serve as the book's touchstones... The online spaces where amateur content creators once "created and steered online culture" have been hollowed out and replaced by slop, but what really hurts is that the slop is being produced by bots trained on precisely that amateur content.

Slashdot reader BrianFagioli writes: GIMP has officially launched its own Snap package for Linux, finally taking over from the community-maintained Snapcrafters project. The move means all future GIMP releases will now be built directly from the team's CI pipeline, ensuring faster, more consistent updates across distributions. The developers also introduced a new "gimp-plugins" interface to support external plugins while maintaining Snap's security confinement, with GMIC and OpenVINO already supported.

This marks another major step in GIMP's cross-platform packaging efforts, joining Flatpak and MSIX distribution options. The first officially maintained version, Version 3.0.6GIMP 3.0.6, is available now on the "latest/stable" Snap channel, with preview builds rolling out for testers.

"This is an attempt to stop Waymo cars from driving into the dead end," complains a home-made sign in San Francisco, "where they are forced to reverse and adversely affect the lives of the residents."

On an orange traffic post, the home-made sign declares "NO WAYMO — 8:00 p.m. to 8:00 a.m," with an explanation for the rest of the neighborhood. "Waymo comes at all hours of the night and up to 7 times per hour with flashing lights and screaming reverse sounds, waking people up and destroying the quality of life."

SFGate reports that 1,400 people on Reddit upvoted a photo of the sign's text: It delves into the bureaucratic mess — multiple requests to Waymo, conversations with engineers, and 311 [municipal services] tickets, which had all apparently gone ignored — before finally providing instructions for human drivers. "Please move [the cones] back after you have entered so we can continue to try to block the Waymo cars from entering and disrupting the lives of residents."

This isn't the first time Waymo's autonomous vehicles have disrupted San Francisco residents' peace. Last year, a fleet of the robotaxis created another sleepless fiasco in the city's SoMa neighborhood, honking at each other for hours throughout the night for two and a half weeks.
Other on Reddit shared the concern. "I live at an dead end street in Noe Valley, and these Waymos always stuck there," another commenter posted. "It's been bad for more than a year," agreed another comment. "People on the Internet think you're just a hater but it's a real issue with Waymos."

On Thursday "the sign remained at the corner of Lake Street and Second Avenue," notes SFGate. And yet "something appeared to have shifted. "Waymo vehicles weren't allowing drop-offs or pickups on the street, though whether this was due to the home-printed plea, the cone blockage, or simply updating routes remains unclear."

An anonymous reader shared this report from Cryptonews: Sony has taken Wall Street by surprise after its banking division, Sony Bank, filed an application with the U.S. Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) to establish a national crypto bank under its subsidiary "Connectia Trust." The move positions the Japanese tech giant to become one of the first major global corporations to issue a U.S. dollar-backed stablecoin through a federally regulated institution. The application outlines plans to issue a U.S. dollar-pegged stablecoin, maintain the reserve assets backing it, and provide digital asset custody and management services.

The filing places Sony alongside an elite list of firms, including Coinbase, Circle, Paxos, Stripe, and Ripple, currently awaiting OCC approval to operate as national digital banks. If approved, Sony would become the first major global technology company to receive a U.S. bank charter specifically tied to stablecoin issuance....
The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency "has received over 15 applications from fintech and crypto entities seeking trust charters," according to the article, calling it "a sign of renewed regulatory openness" under the office's new chief, a former blockchain executive.

Meanwhile, the United States has also "conditionally given the nod to a new cryptocurrency-focused national bank launched by California tech billionaire Palmer Luckey," reports SFGate: To bring the bank to life, Luckey joined forces with JoeLonsdale, co-founder of Palantir and venture firm 8VC, and financial backer and fellow Palantir co-founder Peter Thiel, according to the Financial Times. Luckey conceived the idea for Erebor following the collapse of the Silicon Valley Bank in 2023, the Financial Times reported. The bank's name draws inspiration from J.R.R. Tolkien's "The Hobbit," referring to another name for the Lonely Mountain in the novel...

The OCC said it applied the "same rigorous review and standards" used in all charter applications. The ["preliminary"] approval was granted in just four months; however, compliance and security checks are expected to take several more months before the new bank can open.
"I am committed to a dynamic and diverse federal banking system," America's Comptroller of the Currency said Wednesday, "and our decision today is a first but important step in living up to that commitment."

"Permissible digital asset activities, like any other legally permissible banking activity, have a place in the federal banking system if conducted in a safe and sound manner. The OCC will continue to provide a path for innovative approaches to financial services to ensure a strong, diverse financial system that remains relevant over time."

Long-time Slashdot reader Bruce66423 shared this article from the Los Angeles Times: Scientists have increasingly observed how the rupturing of a fault during an earthquake can be even faster than the speed of another type of damaging seismic wave, theoretically generating energy on the level of a sonic boom. These shock waves — created during "supershear" earthquakes — can worsen how bad the ground shakes both side to side and up and down along an affected fault area, scientists at USC, Caltech and the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign wrote in a recent opinion article for the journal Seismological Research Letters. Although not everyone agrees that supershear earthquakes are inherently more destructive than other types, the potential implications are massive and need to be accounted for in seismic forecasts, the scientists contend... In just the last 15 years, 14 of 39 large strike-slip earthquakes have exhibited features of supershear ruptures, the opinion article said....

In California, supershear earthquakes would be expected on the straightest of "strike-slip" faults — in which one block of earth slides past another — like the San Andreas... There are a number of communities directly on top of the San Andreas fault. Among them are Coachella, Indio, Cathedral City, Palm Springs, Desert Hot Springs, Banning, Yucaipa, Highland, San Bernardino, Wrightwood, Palmdale, Gorman, Frazier Park, San Juan Bautista, Palo Alto, Portola Valley, Woodside, San Bruno, South San Francisco, Pacifica, Daly City and Bodega Bay.
One earthquake scientist suggests building codes need to be more strict, according to the article.

But it also cites a U.S. Geological Survey research geophysicist who isn't convinced by the new opinion article. "I don't think we know yet whether supershear ruptures really are more destructive."

"Microsoft does everything in its power to keep Windows users under its control," warns the Free Software Foundation in a new blog post this week.

They argue that the lack of freedom that comes with proprietary code "forces users to surrender to decisions made by Microsoft to maximize its profits and further lock users into its product ecosystem" — describing both the problem and one possible solution: [IT management company Lansweeper] found that of the 30 million enterprise systems they manage, over 40% are incompatible with Windows 11. This is due to the hardware requirements like Treacherous Platform Module version 2.0 — a proprietary chip that uses cryptography that users can't influence or audit to restrict their control over the system.

The end of Windows 10 support is the perfect opportunity to break free from this cycle and switch to GNU/Linux operating system (GNU/Linux OS), a system that respects your freedom...

The endless, freedom-restricting cycle of planned obsolescence is not inevitable. Instead of paying Microsoft for continued updates or buying new hardware, Windows users left behind by Microsoft should install GNU/Linux. Free Software Foundation certified GNU/Linux distributions respect the user's freedom to run their computer as they wish, to study and modify its source code, and to redistribute copies. They don't require update contracts, often run faster on older hardware, and, most importantly, put you in control.
"If you're already a GNU/Linux user, you have an important role to play. Help your friends and family make the switch by sharing your knowledge, help them install a free-as-in-freedom OS. Show them what it means to have real control over their computing!"

The Guardian reports that atmospheric carbon dioxide "soared by a record amount in 2024 to hit another high, UN data shows."

But what's more troubling is why: Several factors contributed to the leap in CO2, including another year of unrelenting fossil fuel burning despite a pledge by the world's countries in 2023 to "transition away" from coal, oil and gas. Another factor was an upsurge in wildfires in conditions made hotter and drier by global heating. Wildfire emissions in the Americas reached historic levels in 2024, which was the hottest year yet recorded. However, scientists are concerned about a third factor: the possibility that the planet's carbon sinks are beginning to fail. About half of all CO2 emissions every year are taken back out of the atmosphere by being dissolved in the ocean or being sucked up by growing trees and plants. But the oceans are getting hotter and can therefore absorb less CO2 while on land hotter and drier conditions and more wildfires mean less plant growth...

Atmospheric concentrations of methane and nitrous oxide — the second and third most important greenhouse gases related to human activities — also rose to record levels in 2024. About 40% of methane emissions come from natural sources. But scientists are concerned that global heating is leading to more methane production in wetlands, another potential feedback loop.
Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader mspohr for sharing the article.

Concrete accounts for about 8% of the world's greenhouse gas emissions, notes CNN. But a research team at the University of Pennsylvania just used a robotic 3D printer to construct a bridge with "complex, lattice-like patterns" that are just as strong and durable — but with materials that absorb more carbon dioxide.

Check out the photos of the "Diamanti" projects "post-tensioned concrete canopy". And CNN's report includes an animated photo showing the 3D printer in action: While most regular concrete absorbs carbon dioxide (up to 30% of its production emissions over its entire life cycle, according to some research), Diamanti's enhanced concrete mixture absorbs 142% more carbon dioxide than conventional concrete mixes. Its first design, a pedestrian bridge, uses 60% less material while retaining mechanical strength, says Masoud Akbarzadeh, an associate professor of architecture at the University of Pennsylvania and director of the lab that spearheaded the project.

"Through millions of years of evolution, nature has learned that you don't need material everywhere," says Akbarzadeh. "If you take a cross section of a bone, you realize that bone is quite porous, but there are certain patterns within which the load (or weight) is transferred." By mimicking the structures in certain porous bones — known as triply periodic minimal surface (TPMS) structures — âDiamanti also increased the surface area of the bridge, increasing the concrete mixture's carbon absorption potential by another 30%... According to Akbarzadeh, 3D printing reduces construction time, material, and energy use by 25%, and its structural system reduces the need for steel by 80%, minimizing use of another emissions-heavy material. He added that using the technique with Diamanti's concrete significantly cuts greenhouse gas emissions compared to regular construction techniques, and reduces construction costs by 25% to 30%.
"Even without the material innovation, the higher surface itself allows higher CO2 absorption," one engineering lecturer tells CNN. The project was a collaboration with chemical company Sika, funded with grants from the U.S. Energy Department, and is now preparing its first full-size prototype in France.

The team has published their findings in the journal Advanced Functional Materials earlier this year.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Conversation: When teachers rely on commonly used artificial intelligence chatbots to devise lesson plans, it does not result in more engaging, immersive or effective learning experiences compared with existing techniques, we found in our recent study. The AI-generated civics lesson plans we analyzed also left out opportunities for students to explore the stories and experiences of traditionally marginalized people. The allure of generative AI as a teaching aid has caught the attention of educators. A Gallup survey from September 2025 found that 60% of K-12 teachers are already using AI in their work, with the most common reported use being teaching preparation and lesson planning. [...]

For our research, we began collecting and analyzing AI-generated lesson plans to get a sense of what kinds of instructional plans and materials these tools provide to teachers. We decided to focus on AI-generated lesson plans for civics education because it is essential for students to learn productive ways to participate in the U.S. political system and engage with their communities. To collect data for this study, in August 2024 we prompted three GenAI chatbots -- the GPT-4o model of ChatGPT, Google's Gemini 1.5 Flash model and Microsoft's latest Copilot model -- to generate two sets of lesson plans for eighth grade civics classes based on Massachusetts state standards. One was a standard lesson plan and the other a highly interactive lesson plan.

We garnered a dataset of 311 AI-generated lesson plans, featuring a total of 2,230 activities for civic education. We analyzed the dataset using two frameworks designed to assess educational material: Bloom's taxonomy and Banks' four levels of integration of multicultural content. Bloom's taxonomy is a widely used educational framework that distinguishes between "lower-order" thinking skills, including remembering, understanding and applying, and "higher-order" thinking skills -- analyzing, evaluating and creating. Using this framework to analyze the data, we found 90% of the activities promoted only a basic level of thinking for students. Students were encouraged to learn civics through memorizing, reciting, summarizing and applying information, rather than through analyzing and evaluating information, investigating civic issues or engaging in civic action projects.

When examining the lesson plans using Banks' four levels of integration of multicultural content model (PDF), which was developed in the 1990s, we found that the AI-generated civics lessons featured a rather narrow view of history -- often leaving out the experiences of women, Black Americans, Latinos and Latinas, Asian and Pacific Islanders, disabled individuals and other groups that have long been overlooked. Only 6% of the lessons included multicultural content. These lessons also tended to focus on heroes and holidays rather than deeper explorations of understanding civics through multiple perspectives. Overall, we found the AI-generated lesson plans to be decidedly boring, traditional and uninspiring. If civics teachers used these AI-generated lesson plans as is, students would miss out on active, engaged learning opportunities to build their understanding of democracy and what it means to be a citizen.