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An AI chatbot helped increase the number of patients referred for mental-health services through England's National Health Service (NHS), particularly among underrepresented groups who are less likely to seek help, new research has found. MIT Tech Review: Demand for mental-health services in England is on the rise, particularly since the covid-19 pandemic. Mental-health services received 4.6 million patient referrals in 2022 -- the highest number on record -- and the number of people in contact with such services is growing steadily. But neither the funding nor the number of mental-health professionals is adequate to meet this rising demand, according to the British Medical Association. The chatbot's creators, from the AI company Limbic, set out to investigate whether AI could lower the barrier to care by helping patients access help more quickly and efficiently. A new study, published this week in Nature Medicine, evaluated the effect that the chatbot, called Limbic Access, had on referrals to the NHS Talking Therapies for Anxiety and Depression program, a series of evidence-based psychological therapies for adults experiencing anxiety disorders, depression, or both. Venture capitalist Vinod Khosla comments on X: This landmark study codifies what we have believed for so long -- that AI will not only increase the quality of care but also massively improve its access, which is one of the largest barriers to good health in all corners of the globe.

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An anonymous reader shares a report: Alibaba Group cut its staff by roughly 20,000 over the course of 2023, adding to a spate of layoffs spanning global tech companies from Silicon Valley to Hangzhou. China's e-commerce pioneer ended December with 219,260 employees, down from close to 240,000 a year earlier, it said in detailing its earnings for the holiday quarter on Wednesday. The company's pace of eliminating roles has been fairly steady, as it reduced headcount by roughly the same number over the course of 2022 as well. Mirroring US peers like Meta Platforms, Alibaba paired the reduction in staff with a significant buyback, extending its authorization for repurchases by another $25 billion on Wednesday. The company bought back $9.5 billion worth of shares in 2023.

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The second of a pair of close flybys adds to the treasure trove of data that scientists have about Jupiter's volcanic moon. From a report: On Saturday, NASA's Juno orbiter got a second close-up with Io, Jupiter's third-largest moon and the most volcanic world of our solar system. The Juno spacecraft, which arrived at the gas giant in 2016, is on an extended mission to explore Jupiter's rings and moons. Its latest flyby, which complemented the mission's first close approach on Dec. 30, yielded even more views of the moon's hellish landscape. Io's violent expulsions of sulfur and additional compounds give the moon its orange, yellow and blue hues. The process is similar to what happens around the volcanoes of Hawaii or the geysers in Yellowstone National Park, according to Scott Bolton, a physicist at the Southwest Research Institute who leads the Juno mission. "That must be what Io is like -- on steroids," he said. He added that it probably smells like those places, too. Released on Sunday, the most recent shots of Juno are already ripe for discovery. Dr. Bolton saw on the surface of Io what appears to be a double volcanic plume spewing into space -- something that Juno has never caught before. Other scientists are noticing new lava flows and changes to familiar features spotted in past space missions like the Galileo probe, which made numerous close flybys of Io in the 1990s and 2000s. "That's the beauty of Io," said Jani Radebaugh, a planetary scientist at Brigham Young University who is not part of the Juno mission, but collaborates with the team on Io observations. Unlike our own moon, which remains frozen in time, Dr. Radebaugh said, "Io changes every day, every minute, every second."

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Apple has released a new open-source AI model, called "MGIE," that can edit images based on natural language instructions. From a report: MGIE, which stands for MLLM-Guided Image Editing, leverages multimodal large language models (MLLMs) to interpret user commands and perform pixel-level manipulations. The model can handle various editing aspects, such as Photoshop-style modification, global photo optimization, and local editing. MGIE is the result of a collaboration between Apple and researchers from the University of California, Santa Barbara. The model was presented in a paper accepted at the International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR) 2024, one of the top venues for AI research. The paper demonstrates the effectiveness of MGIE in improving automatic metrics and human evaluation, all while maintaining competitive inference efficiency. MGIE is based on the idea of using MLLMs, which are powerful AI models that can process both text and images, to enhance instruction-based image editing. MLLMs have shown remarkable capabilities in cross-modal understanding and visual-aware response generation, but they have not been widely applied to image editing tasks. MGIE integrates MLLMs into the image editing process in two ways: First, it uses MLLMs to derive expressive instructions from user input. These instructions are concise and clear and provide explicit guidance for the editing process. For example, given the input "make the sky more blue," MGIE can produce the instruction "increase the saturation of the sky region by 20%."

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New submitter Dustin Destree shares a report: Android users in Singapore will be blocked from installing apps from unverified sources, a process called sideloading, as part of a new trial by Google to crack down on malware scams. The security tool will work in the background to detect apps that demand suspicious permissions, like those that grant the ability to spy on screen content or read SMS messages, which scammers have been known to abuse to intercept one-time passwords. Singapore is the first country to begin the gradual roll-out of the security feature over the next few weeks, done in collaboration with the Cyber Security Agency of Singapore, according to a statement on Feb 7 by Google, which develops the Android software.

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Apple is building prototypes of at least two iPhones that fold widthwise like a clamshell, The Information reported Wednesday. From the report: If Apple ends up launching a foldable iPhone, it would be one of the biggest hardware design changes in the product's history. The foldable iPhones are in early development and aren't on the company's mass production plans for 2024 or 2025, the person said. Apple recently approached at least one manufacturer in Asia for components related to two foldable iPhones of different sizes, they said. The products could be canceled if they don't meet Apple's standards, they said.

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Disney Plus has started to inform subscribers about new changes to its terms of service that will, among other things, make it harder for people to access the service using log-in credentials that aren't actually theirs. From a report:The updated terms come a few months after Disney Plus implemented similar measures for its Canadian subscribers and just days after Hulu sent out similar notices to users about changes to its own TOS and its plans to stop password sharing in the coming weeks. Like Hulu's terms of service, the changes to Disney Plus' agreement are dated January 25th and are already in effect for new customers. Per Disney Plus' emails, existing subscribers can expect the new restrictions to go into effect on March 14th.

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An anonymous reader shares a report: Microsoft's prescient bets and aggressive investments in AI have propelled the software giant to become the world's most valuable company. Yet Satya Nadella, its typically reserved chief executive, couldn't resist landing a gloved jab at the rest of the industry. "We have the best model today ... even with all the hoopla, one year after, GPT4 is better," Nadella said at a company event in Mumbai on Wednesday. "We are waiting for the competition to arrive. It will arrive, I'm sure, but the fact [is] that we have the most leading LLM out there."

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: AI-generated imagery and other forms of deepfakes depicting child sexual abuse (CSA) could be criminalized in the European Union under plans to update existing legislation to keep pace with technology developments, the Commission announced today. It's also proposing to create a new criminal offense of livestreaming child sexual abuse. The possession and exchange of "pedophile manuals" would also be criminalized under the plan -- which is part of a wider package of measures the EU says is intended to boost prevention of CSA, including by increasing awareness of online risks and to make it easier for victims to report crimes and obtain support (including granting them a right to financial compensation). The proposal to update the EU's current rules in this area, which date back to 2011, also includes changes around mandatory reporting of offenses. Back in May 2022, the Commission presented a separate piece of CSA-related draft legislation, aiming to establish a framework that could make it obligatory for digital services to use automated technologies to detect and report existing or new child sexual abuse material (CSAM) circulating on their platforms, and identify and report grooming activity targeting kids. The CSAM-scanning plan has proven to be highly controversial -- and it continues to split lawmakers in the parliament and the Council, as well as kicking up suspicions over the Commission's links with child safety tech lobbyists and raising other awkward questions for the EU's executive, over a legally questionable foray into microtargeted ads to promote the proposal. The Commission's decision to prioritize the targeting of digital messaging platforms to tackle CSA has attracted a lot of criticism that the bloc's lawmakers are focusing in the wrong area for combatting a complex societal problem -- which may have generated some pressure for it to come with follow-on proposals. (Not that the Commission is saying that, of course; it describes today's package as "complementary" to its earlier CSAM-scanning proposal.) "Fast evolving technologies are creating new possibilities for child sexual abuse online, and raises challenges for law enforcement to investigate this extremely serious and wide spread crime," said Ylva Johansson, commissioner for home affairs, in a statement. "A strong criminal law is essential and today we are taking a key step to ensure that we have effective legal tools to rescue children and bring perpetrators to justice. We are delivering on our commitments made in the EU Strategy for a more effective fight against Child sexual abuse presented in July 2020." The final shape of the proposals will be determined by the EU's co-legislators in the Parliament and Council. "If/when there's agreement on how to amend the current directive on combating CSA, it would enter into force 20 days after its publication in the Official Journal of the EU," adds TechCrunch.

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Last June, Harvard professor Avi Loeb said he may have found fragments of alien technology from a meteor that landed in the waters off of Papua, New Guinea in 2014. "Since then, several researchers unrelated to the expedition have pushed back on his analysis," reports Boston Public Radio. "One October 2023 paper deemed the spherules were made by human-produced coal ash." Now, Loeb has published new findings that he claims debunk that theory. "What we did is compare 55 elements from the periodic table in coal ash to those special spherules that we found," Loeb said. "And it's clearly very different." From the report: He said his work follows the scientific method: collecting materials, analyzing them and following the evidence. "It's not based on opinions," Loeb said. "And, of course, if you're not part of this scientific process and you are jealous of the attention that it gets, then you can raise a lot of criticism." When asked how he deals with that criticism, he said that, "by now, my skin turned into titanium." [...] He believes more observatories should be built to expand on research of what's passing through closer to Earth, since astronomers are often fixated on faraway objects. "The best approach to figure it out is actually to do the scientific work of building observatories that look out and check what these objects are," Loeb said. "And if they happen to be birds, or airplanes, or Chinese balloons, so be it. We can move on after that. But we need to figure it out, it's our civil duty as scientists. "The universe is so vast that, rather than keep telling ourselves that there is nothing like us, we should search for it," he added.

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Russian cosmonaut Oleg Kononenko set a world record for total time spent in space, "surpassing his compatriot Gennady Padalka who logged more than 878 days in orbit," reports Reuters. From the report: At 0830 GMT Kononenko broke the record, Roscosmos said. Kononenko is expected to reach a total of 1,000 days in space on June 5 and by late September he will have clocked 1,110 days. "I fly into space to do my favourite thing, not to set records," Kononenko told TASS in an interview from the International Space Station (ISS) where he is orbiting about 263 miles (423 km) from the earth. "I am proud of all my achievements, but I am more proud that the record for the total duration of human stay in space is still held by a Russian cosmonaut." The 59-year-old took the top spot from Padalka, who accumulated a total of 878 days, 11 hours, 29 minutes and 48 seconds, Roscosmos said. Kononenko said that he worked out regularly to counter the physical effects of "insidious" weightlessness, but that it was on returning to earth that the realisation came of how much life he had missed out on. "I do not feel deprived or isolated," he said. "It is only upon returning home that the realisation comes that for hundreds of days in my absence the children have been growing up without a papa. No one will return this time to me." He said cosmonauts could now use video calls and messaging to keep in touch with relatives but getting ready for each new space flight became more difficult due to technological advances. "The profession of a cosmonaut is becoming more complicated. The systems and experiments are becoming more complicated. I repeat, the preparation has not become easier," he said. Kononenko dreamed of going to space as a child and enrolled in an engineering institute, before undergoing cosmonaut training. His first space flight was in 2008. His current trip to the ISS launched last year on a Soyuz MS-24.

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Julia Simon reports via NPR: In a D.C. courtroom, a trial is wrapping up this week with big stakes for climate science. One of the world's most prominent climate scientists is suing a right-wing author and a policy analyst for defamation. The case comes at a time when attacks on scientists are proliferating, says Peter Hotez, professor of Pediatrics and Molecular Virology at Baylor College of Medicine. Even as misinformation about scientists and their work keeps growing, Hotez says scientists haven't yet found a good way to respond. "The reason we're sort of fumbling at this is it's unprecedented. And there is no roadmap," he says. The climate scientist at the center of this trial is Michael Mann. The professor of earth and environmental science at the University of Pennsylvania gained prominence for helping make one of the most accessible, consequential graphs in the history of climate science. First published in the late 1990s, the graph shows thousands of years of relatively stable global temperatures. Then, when humans start burning lots of coal and oil, it shows a spike upward. Mann's graph looks like a hockey stick lying on its side, with the blade sticking straight up. The so-called "hockey stick graph" was successful in helping the public understand the urgency of global warming, and that made it a target, says Kert Davies, director of special investigations at the Center for Climate Integrity, a climate accountability nonprofit. "Because it became such a powerful image, it was under attack from the beginning," he says. The attacks came from groups that reject climate science, some funded by the fossil fuel industry. In the midst of these types of attacks -- including the hacking of Mann's and other scientists' emails by unknown hackers -- Penn State, where Mann was then working, opened an investigation into his research. Penn State, as well as the National Science Foundation, found no evidence of scientific misconduct. But a policy analyst and an author wrote that they were not convinced. The trial in D.C. Superior Court involves posts from right-wing author Mark Steyn and policy analyst Rand Simberg. In an online post, Simberg compared Mann to former Penn State football coach Jerry Sandusky, a convicted child sex abuser. Simberg wrote that Mann was the "Sandusky of climate science," writing that Mann "molested and tortured data (PDF)." Steyn called Mann's research fraudulent. Mann sued the two men for defamation. Mann also sued the publishers of the posts, National Review and the Competitive Enterprise Institute, but in 2021, the court ruled they couldn't be held liable. In court, Mann has argued that he lost funding and research opportunities. Steyn said in court that if Penn State's president, Graham Spanier, covered up child sexual assault, why wouldn't he cover up for Mann's science. The science in question used ice cores and tree rings to estimate Earth's past temperatures. "If Graham Spanier is prepared to cover up child rape, week in, week out, year in, year out, why would he be the least bit squeamish about covering up a bit of hanky panky with the tree rings and the ice cores?" Steyn asked the court. Mann and Steyn declined to speak to NPR during the ongoing trial. One of Simberg's lawyers, Victoria Weatherford, said "inflammatory does not equal defamatory" and that her client is allowed to express his opinion, even if it were wrong. "No matter how offensive or distasteful or heated it is," Weatherford tells NPR, "that speech is absolutely protected under the First Amendment when it's said against a public figure, if the person saying it believed that what they said was true."

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: After almost a year as an invite-only app, Bluesky is now open to the public. Funded by Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey, Bluesky is one of the more promising micro-blogging platforms that could provide an alternative to Elon Musk's X. Before opening to the public, the platform had about 3 million sign-ups. Now that anyone can join, the young platform faces a challenge: How can it meaningfully stand up to Threads' 130 million monthly active users, or even Mastodon's 1.8 million? Bluesky looks and functions like Twitter at the outset, but the platform stands out because of what lies under the hood. The company began as a project inside of Twitter that sought to build a decentralized infrastructure called the AT Protocol for social networking. As a decentralized platform, Bluesky's code is completely open source, which gives people outside of the company transparency into what is being built and how. Developers can even write their own code on top of the AT Protocol, so they can create anything from a custom algorithm to an entirely new social platform. "What decentralization gets you is the ability to try multiple things in parallel, and so you're not bottlenecking change on one organization," Bluesky CEO Jay Graber told TechCrunch. "The way we built Bluesky actually lets anyone insert a change into the product." This setup gives users more agency to control and curate their social media experience. On a centralized platform like Instagram, for example, users have revolted against algorithm changes that they dislike, but there's not much they can do to revert or improve upon an undesired app update.

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A new report from German data recovery company CBL found that devices using NAND chips from reputable brands are declining in quality, with reduced capacity and their manufacturers' logo removed. Furthermore, some USB sticks use the old trick of soldiering a microSD card onto the board. TechSpot reports: Most of the janky USB sticks CBL examined were promotional gifts, the kind given away free with products or by companies at conferences. However, there were some "branded" products that fell into the same inferior-quality category, though CBL didn't say if these were well-known mainstream brands or the kind of brands you've probably never heard of. Technological advancements have also affected these NAND chips, but not in a good way. The chips originally used single-level cell (SLC) memory cells that only stored one bit each, offering less data density but better performance and reliability. In order to increase the amount of storage the chips offered, manufacturers started moving to four bits per cell (QLC), decreasing the endurance and retention. Combined with the questionable components, it's why CBL warns that "You shouldn't rely too much on the reliability of flash memory." The report illustrates how some of the components found in the devices had their manufactures' names removed or obscured. One simply printed text over the top of the company name, while another had been scrubbed off completely. There's also a photo of a microSD card found inside a USB stick that had all of its identifying markings removed. It's always wise to be careful when choosing your storage device and beware of offers that seem too good to be true.

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In a new video released today, Boston Dynamics' Atlas robot is shown performing "kinetically challenging" work, like moving some medium-weight car parts and precisely picking stuff up. Ars Technica reports: In the latest video, we're on to what looks like "phase 2" of picking stuff up -- being more precise about it. The old clamp hands had a single pivot at the palm and seemed to just apply the maximum grip strength to anything the robot picked up. The most delicate thing Atlas picked up in the last video was a wooden plank, and it was absolutely destroying the wood. Atlas' new hands look a lot more gentle than The Clamps, with each sporting a set of three fingers with two joints. All the fingers share one big pivot point at the palm of the hand, and there's a knuckle joint halfway up the finger. The fingers are all very long and have 360 degrees of motion, so they can flex in both directions, which is probably effective but very creepy. Put two fingers on one side of an item and the "thumb" on the other, and Atlas can wrap its hands around objects instead of just crushing them. Atlas is picking up a set of car struts -- an object with extremely complicated topography that weighs around 30 pounds -- so there's a lot to calculate. Atlas does a heavy two-handed lift of a strut from a vertical position on a pallet, walks the strut over to a shelf, and carefully slides it into place. This is all in Boston Dynamics' lab, but it's close to repetitive factory or shipping work. Everything here seems designed to give the robot a manipulation challenge. The complicated shape of the strut means there are a million ways you could grip it incorrectly. The strut box has tall metal poles around it, so the robot needs to not bang the strut into the obstacle. The shelf is a tight fit, so the strut has to be placed on the edge of the shelf and slid into place, all while making sure the strut's many protrusions won't crash into the shelf.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Tom's Hardware: According to a recent report published by the Aargauer Zeitung (h/t Golem.de), around three million smart toothbrushes have been infected by hackers and enslaved into botnets. The source report says this sizable army of connected dental cleansing tools was used in a DDoS attack on a Swiss company's website. The firm's site collapsed under the strain of the attack, reportedly resulting in the loss of millions of Euros of business. In this particular case, the toothbrush botnet was thought to have been vulnerable due to its Java-based OS. No particular toothbrush brand was mentioned in the source report. Normally, the toothbrushes would have used their connectivity for tracking and improving user oral hygiene habits, but after a malware infection, these toothbrushes were press-ganged into a botnet. Stefan Zuger from the Swiss branch of the global cybersecurity firm Fortinet provided the publication with a few tips on what people could do to protect their own toothbrushes -- or other connected gadgetry like routers, set-top boxes, surveillance cameras, doorbells, baby monitors, washing machines, and so on. "Every device that is connected to the Internet is a potential target -- or can be misused for an attack," Zuger told the Swiss newspaper. The security expert also explained that every connected device was being continually probed for vulnerabilities by hackers, so there is a real arms race between device software/firmware makers and cyber criminals. Fortinet recently connected an 'unprotected' PC to the internet and found it took only 20 minutes before it became malware-ridden.

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Meta will start detecting and labeling images generated by artificial intelligence from Google and OpenAI's services, among others. According to Reuters, the company will use a set of invisible markers built into the files to help with the identification process. From the report: Meta will apply the labels to any content carrying the markers that is posted to its Facebook, Instagram and Threads services, in an effort to signal to users that the images -- which in many cases resemble real photos -- are actually digital creations, the company's president of global affairs, Nick Clegg, wrote in a blog post. The company already labels any content generated using its own AI tools. Once the new system is up and running, Meta will do the same for images created on services run by OpenAI, Microsoft, Adobe , Midjourney, Shutterstock and Alphabet's Google, Clegg said.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Vancouver Sun: A cryptocurrency firm has lost a bid to force B.C. Hydro to provide the vast amounts of power needed for its operations, in a court ruling that upholds the provincial government's right to pause power connections for new crypto miners. Conifex Timber Inc., a forestry firm that branched out into cryptocurrency "mining," had gone to the B.C. Supreme Court to have the policy declared invalid. But Justice Michael Tammen ruled Friday that the government's move in December 2022 to pause new connections for cryptocurrency mining for 18 months was reasonable and not unduly discriminatory. B.C. Hydro CEO Christopher O'Riley had told the court in an affidavit that the data centers proposed by Conifex would have consumed 2.5 million megawatt-hours of electricity a year. That's enough to power and heat more than 570,000 apartments, according to data on the power provider's website. Energy Minister Josie Osborne said when the policy was introduced that cryptocurrency mining consumes "massive amounts of electricity" by running banks of high-powered computers around the clock, but adds "very few jobs" to the local economy. In a statement released Monday, the company said it's "disappointed" with the court's ruling and is considering an appeal. "Conifex continues to believe that the provincial government is missing out on several opportunities available to it to improve energy affordability, accelerate technological innovation, strengthen the reliability and resiliency of the power distribution grid in British Columbia, and achieve more inclusive economic growth," said Conifex in a statement.

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Fox, Warner Bros. Discovery and Disney are planning to launch a new streaming joint venture that will combine all their sports programming "under a single broadband roof," reports Variety. The move "will put content from ESPN, TNT and Fox Sports on a new standalone app and, in the process, likely shake up the world of TV sports." From the report: The three media giants are slated to launch the new service in the fall. Subscribers would get access to linear sports networks including ESPN, ESPN2, ESPNU, SECN, ACCN, ESPNEWS, ABC, Fox, FS1, FS2, BTN, TNT, TBS, truTV and ESPN+, as well as hundreds of hours from the NFL, NBA, MLB and NHL and many top college divisions. Pricing will be announced at a later date. Each company would own one third of the new outlet and license their sports content to it on a non-exclusive basis. The service would have a new brand and an independent management team. The concept surfaces as traditional media companies are grappling with the migration of sports -- the last TV format that generates steady crowds and sustained ratings -- to streaming venues. The concentration of top sports under one roof would be significant. Between them, ESPN and Warner have most rights to the NHL and the NBA, while Fox, Warner and ESPN control at present the majority of rights to Major League Baseball. Only the NFL would enjoy a large presence with entities that are not a part of the joint venture, with "Sunday Night Football" at NBCUniversal, "Thursday Night Football" at Amazon and a Sunday afternoon game at CBS.

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The United Kingdom, France and allied countries on Tuesday called for international guidelines for the responsible use of spyware, in an effort to stop the hacking tools from running rampant. From a report: At a conference at London's Lancaster House co-hosted by the British and French government, more than a dozen countries and technology companies signed a declaration saying that "uncontrolled dissemination" of cyber intrusive tools could lead to "unintentional escalation in cyberspace." A 2021 investigation called the Pegasus Project highlighted how spyware tools like the Israeli-made Pegasus software had spread across the world and are being abused in political and corporate hacking campaigns. Despite widespread condemnation, governments' efforts to crack down on malicious hacking software have largely failed -- in part because the tools are popular with many intelligence and security services, including in democratic countries. Among the countries that have signed up to the pledge for international rules guidelines EU members Belgium, the Czech Republic, France, Greece, Italy and Poland, as well as the United States, United Kingdom and the African Union. On the industry side, Apple, defense firm BAE Systems, Google, Meta and Microsoft signed up. The group of countries and firms hopes to curb the proliferation and unabated use of intrusive cybertools. They called for principles and policy options to balance human rights and security interests, including policies to use spyware in a âoelegal and responsible manner," in line with international law and under strict oversight by authorities.

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