A victim of billionaire Jeffrey Epstein testified that she was forced to have sex with MIT professor Marvin Minsky, as revealed in a newly unsealed deposition. The Verge reports: Minsky, who died in 2016, was known as an associate of Epstein, but this is the first direct accusation implicating the AI pioneer in Epstein's broader sex trafficking network. The deposition also names Prince Andrew of Britain and former New Mexico governor Bill Richardson, among others. The accusation against Minsky was made by Virginia Giuffre, who was deposed in May 2016 as part of a broader defamation suit between her and an Epstein associate named Ghislaine Maxwell. In the deposition, Giuffre says she was directed to have sex with Minsky when he visited Epstein's compound in the U.S. Virgin Islands. As part of the defamation suit, Maxwell's counsel denied the allegations, calling them "salacious and improper." Representatives for Giuffre and Maxwell did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

A pivotal member of MIT's Artificial Intelligence Lab, Marvin Minsky pioneered the first generation of self-training algorithms, establishing the concept of artificial neural networks in his 1969 book Perceptrons. He also developed the first head-mounted display, a precursor to modern VR and augmented reality systems. Minsky was one of a number of prominent scientists with ties to Jeffrey Epstein, who often called himself a "science philanthropist" and donated to research projects and academic institutions. Minsky's affiliation with Epstein went particularly deep, including organizing a two-day symposium on artificial intelligence at Epstein's private island in 2002, as reported by Slate. In 2012, the Jeffrey Epstein Foundation issued a press release touting another conference organized by Minsky on the island in December 2011.
UPDATE (8/10/2019): Jeffrey Epstein "died by suicide early Saturday in his Lower Manhattan prison cell, three law enforcement officials told ABC News."

Red Hat has joined the RISC-V Foundation to help foster this open-source processor ISA. Phoronix reports: While we're still likely years away from seeing any serious RISC-V powered servers at least that can deliver meaningful performance, Red Hat has been active in promoting RISC-V as an open-source processor instruction set architecture and one of the most promising libre architectures we have seen over the years. Red Hat developers have already helped in working on Fedora's RISC-V support and now the IBM-owned company is helping out more and showing their commitment by joining the RISC-V Foundation. Red Hat joins the likes of Google, NVIDIA, Qualcomm, SiFive, Western Digital, IBM, and Samsung as among the many RISC-V members.

It's been a gripe for many running Linux on low RAM systems especially is that when the Linux desktop is under memory pressure the performance can be quite brutal with the system barely being responsive. The discussion over that behavior has been reignited this week. From a report: Developer Artem S Tashkinov took to the kernel mailing list over the weekend to express his frustration with the kernel's inability to handle low memory pressure in a graceful manner. If booting a system with just 4GB of RAM available, disabling SWAP to accelerate the impact/behavior, and launching a web browser and opening new web pages / tabs can in a matter of minutes bring the system down to its knees.

Artem elaborated on the kernel mailing list, "Once you hit a situation when opening a new tab requires more RAM than is currently available, the system will stall hard. You will barely be able to move the mouse pointer. Your disk LED will be flashing incessantly (I'm not entirely sure why). You will not be able to run new applications or close currently running ones. This little crisis may continue for minutes or even longer. I think that's not how the system should behave in this situation. I believe something must be done about that to avoid this stall."

The Atlantic talked to Lora Hooper, chair of the immunology department at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, one of the researchers investigating gut microbes, inflammation, and what may be a very important connection.

They note that the rise of antibiotic usage among humans "coincides with the obesity epidemic." This could be a spurious correlation, of course -- lots of things have been on the rise since the '50s. But dismissing it entirely would require ignoring a growing body of evidence that our metabolic health is inseparable from the health of our gut microbes... While other researchers focused on the gut microbiome itself, [Hooper] took an interest in the immune system. Specifically, she wanted to know how an inflammatory response could influence these microscopic populations, and thus be related to weight gain.

Over the past decade or so, multiple studies have shown that obese adults mount less effective immune responses to vaccinations, and that both overweight and underweight people have elevated rates of infection. But these were long assumed to be effects of obesity, not causes.

"When I started my lab there wasn't much known about how the immune system perceives the gut microbes," Hooper says. "A lot of people thought the gut immune system might be sort of blind to them." To her, it was obvious that this couldn't be the case. The human gut is host to about 100 trillion bacteria. They serve vital metabolic functions, but can quickly kill a person if they get into the bloodstream. "So clearly the immune system has got to be involved in maintaining them," she says. It made sense to her that even subtle changes in the functioning of the immune system could influence microbial populations -- and, hence, weight gain and metabolism. This theory was borne out late last month in a paper in Science... [T]his experiment is a demonstration of principle: The immune system helps control the composition of the gut microbiome.
Slashdot reader Beeftopia submitted the story, noting that even the North American Meat Institute, the largest trade group representing meat processors, acknowledges that the use of some antibiotics "can destroy certain bacteria in the gut and help livestock and poultry convert feed to muscle more quickly causing more rapid growth." [PDF, page 4].

"Inflammation plays a critical role in determining how we digest food," writes the Atlantic, "and it's only now starting to reveal itself."

Matt Lamkin reports via Scientific American: In March, the Food and Drug Administration approved esketamine, a drug that produces psychedelic effects, to treat depression -- the first psychedelic ever to clear that bar. Meanwhile the FDA has granted "breakthrough therapy" status -- a designation that enables fast-tracked research -- to study MDMA (also called "ecstasy") as a treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder and psilocybin as a treatment for major depression. While these and other psychedelic drugs show promise as treatments for specific illnesses, FDA approval means doctors could also prescribe them for other, "off-label" purposes -- including enhancing the quality of life of people who do not suffer from any disorder. Hence if MDMA gains approval as a treatment for PTSD, psychiatrists could prescribe the drug for very different purposes.

Yet while the FDA generally does not regulate physicians' prescribing practices, a federal law called the Controlled Substances Act bars them from writing prescriptions without a "legitimate medical purpose." Although this prohibition aims to prevent doctors from acting as drug traffickers, the law does not explain which purposes qualify as "legitimate," nor how to distinguish valid prescriptions from those that merely enable patients' illicit drug abuse. Would prescribing a psychedelic drug simply to promote empathy or increase "life satisfaction" fall within the scope of legitimate medicine -- or would these practices render the physician a drug dealer? To many the answer may seem obvious: to qualify as a "medical" use, a drug must be prescribed to treat an illness. But in fact, medical practice has always included interventions aimed at promoting the well-being of healthy individuals. "At a time when 'lifestyle drugs' are marketed as consumer products, it is increasingly difficult to draw a bright line that distinguishes legitimate medical practices from their illicit cousins," adds Lamkin. "If prescribing mind-altering drugs to help healthy people achieve desirable mental states falls within the bounds of legitimate medicine, what is left of the concept of recreational use?"

Cisco has agreed to pay $8.6 million to settle a claim that it sold video surveillance software it knew was vulnerable to hackers to hospitals, airports, schools, state governments and federal agencies. SFGate reports: The tech giant continued to sell the software and didn't fix the massive security weakness for about four years after a whistleblower alerted the company about it in 2008, according to a settlement unsealed Wednesday with the Justice Department and 15 states as well as the District of Columbia.

Hackers could use the flaw not just to spy on video footage but to turn surveillance cameras on and off, delete footage and even potentially compromise other connected physical security systems such as alarms or locks - all without being detected, according to Hamsa Mahendranathan, an attorney at Constantine Cannon, which represented whistleblower James Glenn. The settlement marks the first time a company has been forced to pay out under a federal whistleblower law for not having adequate cybersecurity protections.

An anonymous reader quotes The Verge's AI and Robotics reporter: By scanning huge datasets of text, machine learning software can produce convincing samples of everything from short stories to song lyrics. Now, those same techniques are being applied to the world of coding with a new program called Deep TabNine, a "coding autocompleter." Programmers can install it as an add-on in their editor of choice, and when they start writing, it'll suggest how to continue each line, offering small chunks at a time. Think of it as Gmail's Smart Compose feature but for code.

Jacob Jackson, the computer science undergrad at the University of Waterloo who created Deep TabNine, says this sort of software isn't new, but machine learning has hugely improved what it can offer... Earlier this month, he released an updated version that uses a deep learning text-generation algorithm called GPT-2, which was designed by the research lab OpenAI, to improve its abilities. The update has seriously impressed coders, who have called it "amazing," "insane," and "absolutely mind-blowing" on Twitter...

Deep TabNine is trained on 2 million files from coding repository GitHub. It finds patterns in this data and uses them to suggest what's likely to appear next in any given line of code, whether that's a variable name or a function... Most importantly, thanks to the analytical abilities of deep learning, the suggestions Deep TabNine makes are of a high overall quality. And because the software doesn't look at users' own code to make suggestions, it can start helping with projects right from the word go, rather than waiting to get some cues from the code the user writes.
It's not free software. Currently a personal license costs $49 (with a business-use license costing $99), the Verge reports -- but the tool supports the following 22 languages...

Python, JavaScript, Java, C++, C, PHP, Go, C#, Ruby, Objective-C, Rust, Swift, TypeScript, Haskell, OCaml, Scala, Kotlin, Perl, SQL, HTML, CSS, and Bash.

There's already nearly 5,000 satellites orbiting earth, "and many of them are non-functioning space debris now, clogging up orbital paths for newer satellites," reports Universe Today. Yet over the next five years we expect to launch up to 2600 more -- which is prompting a search for solutions to "the growing problem of space debris in Low-Earth Orbit." Some exotic-sounding solutions involve harpoons, nets, magnets, even lasers. Now NASA has given Purdue University-related startup Vestigo Aerospace money for a six month study that looks at using drag sails to de-orbit space junk, including satellites, spent rocket boosters, and other debris, safely...Drag sails are a bit different than other methods. While the harpoons, lasers, and nets proposed by various agencies are meant to deal with the space junk that's already accumulated, drag sails are designed to be built into a satellite and deployed at the end of their useful life... Once deployed, they would reduce an object's velocity and then help it deorbit safely.

Currently, satellites deorbit more or less on their own terms, and it's difficult to calculate where they may strike Earth, if they're too large to burn up on re-entry... [D]rag sails offer an affordable, and potentially easy-to-develop method to ensure future satellites don't outlive their usefulness.
The company was started by a Purdue associate professor of engineering who tells the site they're building in scalability, so their sails can handle satellites that weigh one kilogram -- or one ton.

maiden_taiwan writes: Can computers determine your emotional state from your face? A panel of senior scientists with backgrounds in neuroscience, psychology, computer science, electrical engineering, biology, anthropology, psychiatry, pediatrics, and public affairs spent two years reviewing over 1,000 research papers on the topic. Two years later, they have published the most comprehensive analysis to date and concluded: "It is not possible to confidently infer happiness from a smile, anger from a scowl, or sadness from a frown, as much of current technology tries to do when applying what are mistakenly believed to be the scientific facts.... [How] people communicate anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness, and surprise varies substantially across cultures, situations, and even across people within a single situation."

Neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barrett, author of the book How Emotions are Made and behind a popular TED talk on emotion, who was an author on the paper, further elaborates: "People scowl when angry, on average, approximately 25 percent of the time, but they move their faces in other meaningful ways when angry. They might cry, or smile, or widen their eyes and gasp. And they also scowl when not angry, such as when they are concentrating or when they have a stomach ache. Similarly, most smiles don't imply that a person is happy, and most of the time people who are happy do something other than smile."

The American Civil Liberties Union has also commented on the impact of the study. "This paper is significant because an entire industry of automated purported emotion-reading technologies is quickly emerging," writes the ACLU. "As we wrote in our recent paper on 'Robot Surveillance,' the market for emotion recognition software is forecast to reach at least $3.8 billion by 2025. Emotion recognition (aka 'affect recognition' or 'affective computing') is already being incorporated into products for purposes such as marketing, robotics, driver safety, and (as we recently wrote about) audio 'aggression detectors.'"

Berkeley has become the first city in the nation to ban the installation of natural gas lines in new homes. The City Council on Tuesday night unanimously voted to ban gas from new low-rise residential buildings starting Jan. 1. The San Francisco Chronicle reports: The natural gas ordinance, introduced by Councilwoman Kate Harrison, requires all new single-family homes, town homes and small apartment buildings to have electric infrastructure. After its passage, Harrison thanked the community and her colleagues "for making Berkeley the first city in California and the United States to prohibit natural gas infrastructure in new buildings." The city will include commercial buildings and larger residential structures as the state moves to develop regulations for those, officials said. The ordinance allocates $273,341 per year for a two-year staff position in the Building and Safety Division within the city's Department of Planning and Development. The employee will be responsible for implementing the ban.

"Light-to-moderate" alcohol consumption can help reduce your risk of Alzheimer's disease.

An anonymous reader quotes the Washington Post: A study presented Sunday at the Alzheimer's Association International Conference in Los Angeles found that combining five lifestyle habits -- including eating healthier, exercising regularly and refraining from smoking -- can reduce the risk of Alzheimer's by 60 percent. A separate study showed that lifestyle choices can lower risk even for those who are genetically prelifestyle disposed to the disease...

Over the last decade, studies have increasingly pointed to controllable lifestyle factors as critical compenents to reducing the risk of cognitive decline. Researchers say that, as with heart disease, combating dementia will probably require a "cocktail" approach combining drugs and lifestyle changes. And as recent efforts to develop a cure or more effective drug treatments for dementia have proven disappointing, the fact that people can exert some control in preventing the disease through their own choices is encouraging news, they say.

While the new study's authors expected to see that leading a healther life decreases the chance of dementia, they were floored by the "magnitude of the effect," said Klodian Dhana, a Rush University professor and co-author. "This demonstrates the potential of lifestyle behaviors to reduce risk as we age," said Heather Snyder, senior director of medical and scientific operations at the Alzheimer's Association. "The fact that four or five lifestyle habits put together can have that kind of benefit for your brain is incredibly powerful."
The fifth lifestyle habit is "engaging in mentally stimulating activities like reading the newspaper, visiting the library or playing games such as chess and checkers."

Time reports that even following just two or three of the healthy lifestyle factors reduced the risk of developing Alzheimer's dementia in the study by at least 39%.

"Researchers in a warming Arctic are discovering organisms, frozen and presumed dead for millennia, that can bear life anew," reports the Washington Post: These ice age zombies range from simple bacteria to multicellular animals, and their endurance is prompting scientists to revise their understanding of what it means to survive... Mosses have forged a tougher path. They desiccate when temperatures plummet, sidestepping the potential hazard of ice forming in their tissues. And if parts of the plant do sustain damage, certain cells can divide and differentiate into all the various tissue types that comprise a complete moss, similar to stem cells in human embryos... Thanks to these adaptations, mosses are more likely than other plants to survive long-term freezing, said Peter Convey, an ecologist with the British Antarctic Survey. On the heels of evolutionary biologist Catherine La Farge's Canadian moss revival, Convey's team announced it had awakened a 1,500-year-old moss buried more than three feet underground in the Antarctic permafrost...

While the elderly mosses discovered by La Farge and Convey are remarkable, the clique of ice age survivors extends well beyond this one group of plants... A microbiologist at the University of Tennessee, Tatiana Vishnivetskaya drills deep into the Siberian permafrost to map the web of single-celled organisms that flourished ice ages ago. She has coaxed million-year-old bacteria back to life on a petri dish. They look "very similar to bacteria you can find in cold environments (today)," she said. But last year, Vishnivetskaya's team announced an "accidental finding" -- one with a brain and nervous system -- that shattered scientists' understanding of extreme endurance.

As usual, the researchers were seeking singled-celled organisms, the only life-forms thought to be viable after millennia locked in the permafrost. They placed the frozen material on petri dishes in their room-temperature lab and noticed something strange. Hulking among the puny bacteria and amoebae were long, segmented worms complete with a head at one end and anus at the other -- nematodes... She estimated one nematode to be 41,000 years old -- by far the oldest living animal ever discovered. This very worm dwelled in the soil beneath Neanderthals' feet and had lived to meet modern-day humans in Vishnivetskaya's high-tech laboratory.
The article also quotes Gaetan Borgonie, a nematode researcher at Extreme Life Isyensya in Gentbrugge, Belgium, "who believes these feats of survival may portend life on other planets."

He calls the newly-discovered endurance of nematodes "very good news for the solar system."

In honor of FreeDOS's 25th birthday, project founder and coordinator Jim Hall agreed to answer the 10 best questions submitted by Slashdot readers. You asked and he answered! Read on for Jim's interview.

Last week, Apple launched a voluntary recall and replacement program for the 15-inch 2015 MacBook Pro with Retina Displaying, saying that batteries on some of these devices could overheat and "may pose a fire safety risk." Thanks to the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC), we now know that Apple has received 26 reports of batteries overheating in affected notebooks, and that about 432,000 potentially affected MacBook Pro units were sold in the U.S., plus 26,000 in Canada. MacRumors reports: The CPSC has since indicated that Apple has received 26 reports of batteries overheating in affected notebooks, including five reports of minor burns and one report of smoke inhalation, as well as 17 reports of minor damage to nearby personal property. About 432,000 potentially affected MacBook Pro units were sold in the United States, plus 26,000 in Canada, according to a joint recall announcement from the CPSC and Health Canada. As of June 4, 2019, Apple has received one report of a consumer incident and no reports of injuries in Canada. Apple has asked customers to stop using affected MacBook Pro models and to contact the company to initiate a replacement. Apple's recall program page provides further details and instructions.

Facebook says it wants to give people "clear, simple explanations" about how its business works and how it uses your personal information. From a report: In a blog post on Thursday, Facebook outlined updates to its terms of service intended to clarify how the company makes money and to explain users' rights on the site. The social network said it's adding more information to its terms of service on how it makes money -- including an explanation that points out it doesn't charge for its products because it sells ads -- and what happens when it removes content that violates its policies. Facebook is also updating its terms around intellectual property rights and what happens when you delete content from the social network. Mind you, Facebook said it's not actually changing any of its policies, just trying to explain them more clearly.

As America's antitrust investigators eye Google, Apple, Facebook, and Amazon for possible government intervention, Bloomberg offers nine "lessons learned" from the way Microsoft handled its own antitrust investigation: Don't deny the obvious... In the app-store business, Google and iPhone maker Apple together control more than 95 per cent of all US mobile app spending by consumers, according to Sensor Tower data. It could be more effective for these companies not to start by denying that leadership position -- if you have 80% or 90% percent of a market, arguing that you don't really dominate isn't the hill you want your legal reasoning to die on...

At the height of Microsoft's hubris (or carelessness, or both), the company sent Windows chief Jim Allchin to the stand with a doctored video that purported to show how computing performance would be degraded when the browser was removed from Windows on a single PC. It was actually done on several different computers and was an illustration of what might happen rather than a factual test, as the company initially claimed -- a fact that came to light only after several days of the government picking through every inconsistency in the video. Microsoft remade the simulation several times in an effort to save the testimony. The company seemed to think it could get away with baldy stating a technological claim and mocking up something that backed it up, perhaps reasoning that no one would know the difference, but it miscalculated badly...

In an interview last year at the Code Conference, Microsoft President and Chief Legal Officer Brad Smith lamented the distraction the case caused, and cited it as a reason the company missed out on the search market -- the business that fueled the runaway success of Google, now under the microscope itself. Others have pinned Microsoft's abysmal performance in mobile computing partially on constraints and distractions from the case...

Consider settling early.
The article also remembers leaks of Bill Gates deposition ("During their playback in court, the judge laughed at several points") and ultimately concludes that "observers and legal pundits almost uniformly agree the software giant did virtually everything wrong in the course of the investigation." A federal judge ordered Microsoft be split in two, "a fate Microsoft avoided when an appeals court reversed that part of the ruling and the company eventually settled."

"That 2002 settlement led to nine years of court supervision of the company's business practices and required Microsoft to give the top 20 computer makers identical contract terms for licensing Windows, and gave computer makers greater freedom to promote non-Microsoft products like browsers and media-playing software..."

schwit1 quotes SFGate: Airlines are squeezing as many passengers as they can onto their jets, but one seat manufacturer believes its product can help carriers push capacity to the absolute limit. And it may help push down fares.

Say goodbye to whatever personal space you had left.

At this week's Paris Air Show, lots of curious convention-goers eagerly wanted to try out Avio Interior's "SkyRider" saddle-like airplane seat, but that's probably not the reception it would get if people found it installed on their next flight.

SkyRider passengers would lean on a bicycle-seat type cushion that sits higher than your traditional airline seat. Legs sort of hang off the saddle, as they would if you were riding a horse. The seat back sits straight up, forcing good posture. A knee cut-out provides another precious few inches of legroom.

You're neither sitting nor standing — you're sort of leaning.
Airplanes can install the seats in part of their planes as an alternative to more expensive seating options, the article points out. But it also notes that the company "is still looking for its first buyer...and has been for nearly 10 years."

"In the last week, two different people have captured video of Tesla vehicles traveling down a freeway with an apparently sleeping driver behind the wheel," writes Ars Technica.

A reader shares their report: Both incidents happened in California. Last week, local television stations in Los Angeles aired footage from viewer Shawn Miladinovich of a Tesla vehicle driving on LA's 405 freeway. The driver "was just fully sleeping, eyes were shut, hands nowhere near the steering wheel," said Miladinovich, who was a passenger in a nearby car, in an interview with NBC Channel 4. Miladinovich said he saw the vehicle twice, about 30 minutes apart, as both cars traveled along the 405 freeway. The driver appeared to be asleep both times...

Another video of an apparently sleeping Tesla driver was posted to Reddit over the weekend -- this one from the San Francisco Bay Area. The Reddit user who posted the video, MiloWee, said that she tried "several times" to wake him up by honking. "It worked, but he fell back asleep," she wrote....

Last month, police in the Netherlands pulled over a Tesla driver who appeared to be asleep and intoxicated. Another video posted in January appeared to show Tesla drivers asleep at the wheel. In an incident last November, it took police in Silicon Valley seven miles to pull over a Tesla car with an apparently sleeping driver. He was arrested for driving under the influence. Another driver in early 2018 was discovered passed out behind the wheel of his stopped Tesla vehicle on the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge.

According to the San Francisco Chronicle, the man "attempted to reassure arresting CHP officers onsite that the car was 'on autopilot.'"

Intel's One API project aims "to simplify application development across diverse computing architectures."

Now an anonymous reader quotes Phoronix: Intel announced an interesting development in their oneAPI initiative: they are developing a new programming language/dialect. Intel originally began talking about oneAPI last December for optimizing code across CPUs / GPUs / FPGAs and as part of "no transistor left behind...."
The article then acknowledges "the SYCL single-source C++ programming standard from The Khronos Group we've expected Intel to use as their basis for oneAPI," before noting Intel is going "a bit beyond..."

"Data Parallel C++ (DPC++) is their 'new direct programming language' aiming to be an open, cross-industry standard and based on C++ and incorporating SYCL."

An anonymous reader writes: Americans are less interested in NASA sending humans to the moon or Mars than they are in the U.S. space agency focusing on potential asteroid impacts and using robots for space exploration. That's according to a poll by The Associated Press and the NORC Center for Public Affairs Research released Thursday, one month before the 50th anniversary of the first walk on the moon. Two-thirds of respondents said monitoring asteroids, comets and "other events in space that could impact Earth" was "very or extremely important." According to NASA, which watches for objects falling from space, about once a year an "automobile-sized asteroid hits Earth's atmosphere," but it usually burns up before it hits the surface. And the instances of larger objects actually making it past Earth's atmosphere and causing any damage happen thousands of years apart, NASA says. The poll also found that Americans want NASA to focus on conducting space research to expand knowledge of the Earth, solar system and universe and they want "robots without astronauts" to do it. If you want to build capabilities for dealing with dangerous asteroids, asteroid mining should be the technology we prioritize, because there's a lot of crossover there.