Long-time Slashdot reader beforewisdom shared this report from the Independent: South Koreans have begun to hoard excessive amounts of sea salt and other items as Japan prepares to dump treated radioactive water from the Fukushima power plant into the ocean... Tokyo has repeatedly assured that the water is safe and has been filtered to remove most isotopes though it does contain traces of tritium, an isotope of hydrogen hard to separate from water.

Although Japan has not set a date for the release, the announcement has made fishermen and shoppers across the region apprehensive. South Korea's fisheries authorities have vowed to ramp up efforts to monitor natural salt farms for any rise in radioactive substances and maintain a ban on seafood from the waters near Fukushima... The panic buying has led to a 27 per cent rise in the price of salt in South Korea in June from two months ago, though officials say the weather and lower production were also to blame. The Korean government in response has decided to release about 50 metric tons of salt a day from stocks, at a 20 per cent discount from market prices, until 11 July...

More than 85 per cent of the South Korean public oppose Japan's plan, according to a survey last month by local pollster Research View. Seven in 10 people reportedly said that they would consume less seafood if the waste water release goes ahead.

President Emmanuel Macron is partially blaming video games for the spread of violence in France following the shooting death of a teenager during a police traffic stop in a Paris suburb last week. NPR reports: "It sometimes feels like some of them are experiencing, on the streets, the video games that have intoxicated them," Macron said in a press conference on July 1. He added that protesters are using Snapchat and TikTok to organize themselves and spread "a mimicking of violence, which for the youngest leads to a kind of disconnect from reality." Concerns that video games promote shootings, massacres or rioting are now about half a century old; it has been traced back to the 1976 release of Death Race, an arcade video game which put players behind the wheel of a car to mow down humanoid figures for points. The argument gained renewed traction in the 1990s with the release of much more realistic first-person shooter games. It is an old bogeyman that politicians have latched onto in the wake of horrific tragedies. But it has become less common as troves of studies have largely concluded there is no causal link between video games and violent behavior.

Christopher Ferguson, a professor at Stetson University in Florida who has studied the impact of such games on the public, said he is surprised at Macron's comments. The president is 45 years old and belongs to a generation raised with video games, so "seeing him mention this is almost anachronistic," Ferguson said, sounding perplexed. "The evidence is very clear. Whatever may be going on in France, whatever violence is occurring, it certainly is not due to violence in video games." Decades of research, especially long-term experiments spanning decades, have consistently found "that playing violent video games, do not cause even prank-level aggressive behaviors, let alone violent crimes," Ferguson said. He also noted that the overall violent crime in the U.S. dropped significantly between 1993 and 2020, the same period during which violent video games soared in popularity.

And it's not just in the United States. A 2019 study out of Oxford University determined that early violent video game playing among British teenagers does not predict serious or violent criminal behavior later in life. According to Ferguson, if video games were the cause of rampant violence, then countries like Japan, South Korea and the Netherlands, which consume more violent video games per capita, would be rife with bloodshed. "Instead, they're three of the most peaceful countries on the planet in terms of violent crime," he said. "You could wave a magic wand and take all these people's video games away, and that's not going to have any effect in any way going to help their lives and reduce their aggression," Ferguson said. So why do politicians turn to the familiar refrain? Ferguson said it is a way for elected leaders to shift the blame away from failing government policies. "It gets people talking about the wrong thing. They're thinking about video games. They're not thinking about gun control or whatever inequalities are happening in France," Ferguson said.

Apple plans to launch its Vision Pro mixed-reality headset in select US markets early next year, with designated sections in Apple stores offering demos, seating, and tools for sizing accessories. Bloomberg reports: The company will designate special areas in the stores with seating, headset demo units and tools to size accessories for buyers. While the device will be sold at all of Apple's roughly 270 US locations, the company is planning the sections for the Vision Pro initially at stores in major areas -- such as New York and Los Angeles -- before rolling them out nationwide, according to people with knowledge of the plans.

Apple said it will offer the headset in other countries at the end of 2024. The company is discussing the UK and Canada as two of its first international markets with Asia and Europe soon after, although a final decision hasn't been made, according to the people, who asked not to be named discussing internal matters. Apple engineers are working to localize the device for France, Germany, Australia, China, Hong Kong, Japan and Korea, the people said. Apple will also sell the Vision Pro through its US web store in early 2024 before expanding online elsewhere.

Stephen Clark writes via Ars Technica: When India's ambassador to the US signed up his country to the Artemis Accords last month, it signaled the world's most populous nation -- with a growing prowess in spaceflight -- could be turning toward the United States as a partner in space exploration. India became the 27th country to sign the Artemis Accords, a non-binding set of principles among like-minded nations guiding a vision for peaceful and transparent exploration of space. The accords cover the international registration of human-made space objects, the open release of scientific data, and an agreement for nations not to claim territory on the Moon or other planetary bodies, among other tenets.

Details about future cooperation between the US and India remain scarce. Nelson plans to travel to India later this year for meetings and discussions with Indian space officials. One objective of Nelson's trip will be to hammer out broad objectives for a "strategic framework" for human spaceflight cooperation. Despite the name of the Artemis Accords, there's no guarantee that India will play a significant role in NASA's Artemis program to return astronauts to the Moon and eventually send humans to Mars. "There's no implication of a signatory to the Artemis accords also being part of the Artemis program," Nelson told Ars.

But none of the other 26 signatories to the Artemis Accords -- a list that includes European space powers and Japan -- has their own human spaceflight program. India is developing a human-rated spacecraft called Gaganyaan that could be ready to fly people into low-Earth orbit in 2025, several years later than originally planned. "The fact that they are a nation that intends in the future to fly own their own astronauts, is that significant? The answer is yes," Nelson said. "I think it's of significance that a major country that's not considered aligned with the US (is) a signatory." "I've described India as a sleeping giant and one that is quickly awakening," Gold told Ars. "India is absolutely vital to global space development, and Artemis in particular, since the country is active with lunar programs, Martian programs, and now even human spaceflight." "Where India might fit into the Artemis program is still to be determined," writes Clark. "The partnership between the US and India in space could take a step forward next year with the flight of an Indian astronaut to the International Space Station. NASA has agreed to provide advanced training to Indian astronauts at the Johnson Space Center in Houston before a flight opportunity to the space station in low-Earth orbit."

India's space program has "held closer ties with Russia in the past," notes Clark. "Russia provided upper-stage engines for India's GSLV Mk.II rocket until India developed its own engine for the job. And four Indian astronauts slated for the Gaganyaan program completed more than a year of training at Russia's Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Center near Moscow in 2021, according to Indian media."

"Despite India's overture toward a closer relationship with NASA, the Asian power remains linked with Russia," adds Clark. "India still imports significant amounts of Russian oil and has not officially condemned Russia's invasion of Ukraine."

An anonymous reader shares a report: Most of the changes on the Sega Retro wiki every day are tiny things, like single-line tweaks to game details or image swaps. Early Monday morning, the site got something else: A 47MB, 272-page PDF full of confidential emails, notes, and other documents from inside a company with a rich history, a strong new competitor, and deep questions about what to do next.

The document offers glimpses, windows, and sometimes pure numbers that explain how Sega went from a company that broke Nintendo's near-monopoly in the early 1990s to giving up on consoles entirely after the Dreamcast. Enthusiasts and historians can see the costs, margins, and sales of every Sega system sold in America by 1997 in detailed business plan spreadsheets. Sega's Wikipedia page will likely be overhauled with the information contained in inter-departmental emails, like the one where CEO Tom Kalinske assures staff (and perhaps himself) that "we are killing Sony" in Japan in March 1996.

"Wish I could get our staff, sales people, retailers, analysts, media, etc. to see and understand what's happening in Japan. They would then understand why we will win here in the US eventually," Kalinske wrote. By September 1996, this would not be the case, and Kalinske would tender his resignation. Not all of the compilation is quite so direct or relevant. There are E3 floor plans, nitpicks about marketing campaigns, and the occasional incongruity. There is a Post-It note stuck to the front of the "Brand Strategy" folder -- "Screw Technology, what is bootleg 96/97" -- that I will be thinking about for days.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Hundreds of Internet-exposed devices inside solar farms remain unpatched against a critical and actively exploited vulnerability that makes it easy for remote attackers to disrupt operations or gain a foothold inside the facilities. The devices, sold by Osaka, Japan-based Contec under the brand name SolarView, help people inside solar facilities monitor the amount of power they generate, store, and distribute. Contec says that roughly 30,000 power stations have introduced the devices, which come in various packages based on the size of the operation and the type of equipment it uses.

Searches on Shodan indicate that more than 600 of them are reachable on the open Internet. As problematic as that configuration is, researchers from security firm VulnCheck said Wednesday, more than two-thirds of them have yet to install an update that patches CVE-2022-29303, the tracking designation for a vulnerability with a severity rating of 9.8 out of 10. The flaw stems from the failure to neutralize potentially malicious elements included in user-supplied input, leading to remote attacks that execute malicious commands. Security firm Palo Alto Networks said last month the flaw was under active exploit by an operator of Mirai, an open source botnet consisting of routers and other so-called Internet of Things devices. The compromise of these devices could cause facilities that use them to lose visibility into their operations, which could result in serious consequences depending on where the vulnerable devices are used.

"The fact that a number of these systems are Internet facing and that the public exploits have been available long enough to get rolled into a Mirai-variant is not a good situation," VulnCheck researcher Jacob Baines wrote. "As always, organizations should be mindful of which systems appear in their public IP space and track public exploits for systems that they rely on." Baines said that the same devices vulnerable to CVE-2022-29303 were also vulnerable to CVE-2023-23333, a newer command-injection vulnerability that also has a severity rating of 9.8. Although there are no known reports of it being actively exploited, exploit code has been publicly available since February. Incorrect descriptions for both vulnerabilities are one factor involved in the patch failures, Baines said. Both vulnerabilities indicate that SolarView versions 8.00 and 8.10 are patched against CVE-2022-29303 and CVE-2023-293333. In fact, the researcher said, only 8.10 is patched against the threats.

Bruce Power, a Canadian utility company, is planning to build the world's biggest nuclear plant as growing demand for clean energy spurs interest in atomic energy. The Financial Post reports: The Ontario government said Wednesday Bruce Power will conduct an environmental assessment of adding as much as 4.8 gigawatts of capacity to its plant in Canada's most-populous province. The plant's eight reactors currently have about 6.2 gigawatts of capacity and supply 30 per cent of the province's power. The expansion would make the site larger than Japan's Kashiwazaki-Kariwa plant, the biggest in the world with seven reactors and more than eight gigawatts of capacity.

A United Nations watchdog approved Japan's controversial plan to start releasing treated water from the Fukushima nuclear power plant next month. As Nikkei notes in its reporting, the water is still radioactive since "radioactive tritium cannot be removed with existing technology." From the report: The IAEA's report concluded that the Japanese project to release the water meets its safety standards. Japan's government in January gave the planned timing for the ocean release as "spring to summer 2023." Chief Cabinet Secretary Hirokazu Matsuno said this week that there was "no change in this policy." The Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry will brief local officials and others on Wednesday about the treated water in Fukushima prefecture. Grossi will also participate.

Tokyo Electric Power Co. Holdings (TEPCO), the operator of the disaster-hit plant, uses an advanced liquid processing system (ALPS) and other equipment to reduce radioactive substances in contaminated water to levels within national standards. However, radioactive tritium cannot be removed with existing technology, and the treated water has so far been stored in tanks on the plant site. TEPCO plans to dilute the treated water with a large amount of seawater to lower the tritium concentration to less than 1/40th of the national safety standard before releasing it into the sea.

Financial institutions often did not understand the models they were using to predict the economic cost of climate change and were underestimating the risks of temperature rises, research led by a professional body of actuaries shows. From a report: Many of the results emerging from the models were "implausible," with a serious "disconnect" between climate scientists, economists, the people building the models and the financial institutions using them, a report by the Institute and Faculty of Actuaries and the University of Exeter finds. Companies are increasingly required to report on the climate-related risks they face, using mathematical models to estimate how resilient their assets and businesses might be at different levels of warming.

The International Sustainability Standards Board last week launched long-awaited guidance for companies to inform investors about sustainability-related risks, including the climate scenarios chosen in their calculations. Countries including the UK and Japan have said they plan to integrate these standards into their reporting rules. Companies will also have to report the full scope of their emissions, including those from their supply chains, from the second year they begin to report under the guidelines due to come into effect in 2024. That was a particular "challenge," since companies would need to collect the data from all their suppliers, said George Richards, head of ESG reporting and assurance at KPMG. [...] Some models were likely to have "limited use as they do not adequately communicate the level of risk we are likely to face if we fail to decarbonise quickly enough," the paper released on Tuesday said.

The European Union (EU) is seeking closer cooperation with Japan in areas such as artificial intelligence to reduce reliance on China. CNBC reports: EU Commissioner Thierry Breton is meeting with the Japanese government on Monday, and artificial intelligence will be "very high" on his agenda, he said in a video posted on Twitter on Sunday. "I will engage with [the] Japanese government ... on how we can organize our digital space, including AI based on our shared value," Breton said.

Breton also said there will be an EU-Japan Digital Partnership council, to discuss areas including quantum and high-performance computing. The EU held a similar council with South Korea last week, in which the two sides agreed to cooperate on technologies such as AI and cybersecurity. Partnerships with key Asian countries with strong technology sectors come as the EU looks to "de-risk" from China -- a different approach from that of the U.S., which has sought to decouple its economy from Beijing. Part of that EU strategy involves deepening the relationship with allied countries around technology.

Breton told Reuters on Monday that the bloc and Japan will cooperate in the area of semiconductors. Japan is a key country in the semiconductor supply chain, and Tokyo has been looking to strengthen its domestic industry. Last week, a fund backed by the Japanese government proposed to buy domestic chipmaking firm JSR for around 903.9 billion yen ($6.3 billion). The EU has also been looking to strengthen its own semiconductor industry across the bloc.

"The European Space Agency's Euclid space telescope launched at 11:12 a.m. ET Saturday," reports CNN, "aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Florida's Cape Canaveral Space Force Station.

CNN is calling it "a mission designed to unravel some of the greatest mysteries of the universe." The 1.2-meter-diameter (4-foot-diameter) telescope has set off on a monthlong journey to its orbital destination of the sun-Earth Lagrange point L2, which is nearly 1 million miles (1.6 million kilometers) away from Earth and also home to NASA's James Webb Space Telescope... After arriving at orbit, Euclid will spend two months testing and calibrating its instruments — a visible light camera and a near-infrared camera/spectrometer — before surveying one-third of the sky for the next six years. Euclid's primary goal is to observe the "dark side" of the universe, including dark matter and dark energy. While dark matter has never actually been detected, it is believed to make up 85% of the total matter in the universe. Meanwhile, dark energy is a mysterious force thought to play a role in the accelerating expansion of the universe.

In the 1920s, astronomers Georges Lemaître and Edwin Hubble discovered that the universe has been expanding since its birth 13.8 billion years ago. But research that began in the 1990s has shown that something sparked an acceleration of the universe's expansion about 6 billion years ago, and the cause remains a mystery. Unlocking the true nature of dark energy and dark matter could help astronomers understand what the universe is made of, how its expansion has changed over time, and if there is more to understanding gravity than meets the eye... Euclid is designed to create the largest and most accurate three-dimensional map of the universe, observing billions of galaxies that stretch 10 billion light-years away to reveal how matter may have been stretched and pulled apart by dark energy over time. These observations will effectively allow Euclid to see how the universe has evolved over the past 10 billion years...

The telescope's image quality will be four times sharper than those of ground-based sky surveys. Euclid's wide perspective can also record data from a part of the sky 100 times bigger than what Webb's camera can capture. During its observations, the telescope will create a catalog of 1.5 billion galaxies and the stars within them, creating a treasure trove of data for astronomers that includes each galaxy's shape, mass and number of stars created per year. Euclid's ability to see in near-infrared light could also reveal previously unseen objects in our own Milky Way galaxy, such as brown dwarfs and ultra-cool stars.

In May 2027, Euclid will be joined in orbit by the Nancy Grace Roman Telescope. The two missions will overlap in their study of cosmic acceleration as they both create three-dimensional maps of the universe...Roman will study one-twentieth of the sky in infrared light, allowing for much more depth and precision. The Roman telescope will peer back to when the universe was just 2 billion years old, picking out fainter galaxies than Euclid can see.
CNN points out that "While primarily an ESA mission, the telescope includes contributions from NASA and more than 2,000 scientists across 13 European countries, the United States, Canada and Japan."

And they also note this statement from Jason Rhodes, a senior research scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. "With these upcoming telescopes, we will measure dark energy in different ways and with far more precision than previously achievable, opening up a new era of exploration into this mystery."

From NASA's announcement: Scientists are unsure whether the universe's accelerated expansion is caused by an additional energy component, or whether it signals that our understanding of gravity needs to be changed in some way. Astronomers will use Roman and Euclid to test both theories at the same time, and scientists expect both missions to uncover important information about the underlying workings of the universe...

Less concentrated mass, like clumps of dark matter, can create more subtle effects. By studying these smaller distortions, Roman and Euclid will each create a 3D dark matter map... Tallying up the universe's dark matter across cosmic time will help scientists better understand the push-and-pull feeding into cosmic acceleration.
SpaceX tweeted footage of the telescope's takeoff, and the successful landing of their Falcon 9's first stage on a droneship called A Shortfall of Gravitas.

South Koreans have become a year or two younger as a new law aligns the nation's two traditional age-counting methods with international standards. The BBC reports: The law scraps one traditional system that deemed South Koreans one year old at birth, counting time in the womb. Another counted everyone as aging by a year every first day of January instead of on their birthdays. The switch to age-counting based on birth date took effect on Wednesday. President Yoon Suk Yeol pushed strongly for the change when he ran for office last year. The traditional age-counting methods created "unnecessary social and economic costs," he said. For instance, disputes have arisen over insurance pay-outs and determining eligibility for government assistance programs.

Previously, the most widely used calculation method in Korea was the centuries-old "Korean age" system, in which a person turns one at birth and gains a year on 1 January. This means a baby born on December 31 will be two years old the next day. A separate "counting age" system, that was also traditionally used in the country, considers a person zero at birth and adds a year on January 1. This means that, for example, as of June 28, 2023, a person born on June 29, 2003 is 19 under the international system, 20 under the "counting age" system and 21 under the "Korean age" system.

Lawmakers voted to scrap the traditional counting methods last December. Despite the move, many existing statutes that count a person's age based on the "counting age" calendar year system will remain. For example, South Koreans can buy cigarettes and alcohol from the year -- not the day -- they turn 19. [...] The traditional age-counting methods were also used by other East Asian countries, but most have dropped it. Japan adopted the international standard in 1950 while North Korea followed suit in the 1980s.

Figma is expanding its partnership with Google for Education in a bid to introduce more school-age students to its product design and collaboration platforms. Announced during the Config event on Wednesday, June 21st, all K-12 students across the US can now access Figma for free on education Chromebooks. Figma is also expanding its educational partnership with Chromebooks outside of the US, starting with Google schools in Japan. The Verge reports: Today's announcement effectively opens up the beta program that Figma released last year, which was initially limited to select US high schools. As with the beta, students will have access to both Figma (the company's flagship product design platform) and FigJam, Figma's collaborative whiteboarding app. Figma's Google program is only available on Chromebooks, though the company said that schools using non-Google systems can apply for access on an individual class basis.

While Figma already provides free account tiers, these restrict users to a limited number of files and features. This offering for educational markets gives students and educators access to the company's Enterprise tier -- which typically starts at $75 a month per editor -- without paying a dime. The Enterprise tier for Figma and FigJam is the company's most powerful offering, allowing large groups of students to collaborate at scale. It also grants educators full control over their Figma environments to ensure student safety and support class management.

The Chromebook-specific perks of this partnership allow school admins running Google Workspace for Education to deploy and manage Figma to numerous Chromebooks with a few clicks, directly within the Google Admin console. And given how popular Chromebooks are in educational settings (largely because they're cheap, cloud-based, and easy to use), it's not unreasonable to expect schools to have some lying around.

"One of the biggest pain points that comes with driving an electric vehicle is the time it takes to charge the battery," writes CNET. "Startup Ample's new technology can give drivers a full charge in about the same time it takes to fill a gas tank." Ample's model runs on the idea that the fastest charge is the one you never have to do. Its next-generation battery-swapping station can replace the battery on an electric vehicle in about five minutes...

Ample currently operates 12 first-generation swapping stations in the San Francisco Bay Area, mainly serving Uber delivery vehicles. The company expects to launch its next-generation station in the US, as well as Japan and Spain, later this year.
Their drive-through stations work with "just about any" kind of electric vehicle (including larger delivery vehicles), according to CNET's video report. Basically the company uses an "interface tray" that locks under the car (where the battery would go) containing its own charged battery cells. When a car drives in, a robotic system simply removes that tray and replaces it with another with fully-charged battery cells.

The company's co-founder argues this makes charging stations more like gas stations which service every kind of car — and adds that it's incredibly easy to deploy. "There's no construction involved... It comes in pre-built parts. You go through, connect them, test them — and you're up and running."

They've already got a deal with American EV automaker Fisker.

Figma is expanding its partnership with Google for Education in a bid to introduce more school-age students to its product design and collaboration platforms. From a report: Announced during the Config event on Wednesday, June 21st, all K-12 students across the US can now access Figma for free on education Chromebooks. Figma is also expanding its educational partnership with Chromebooks outside of the US, starting with Google schools in Japan. Today's announcement effectively opens up the beta program that Figma released last year, which was initially limited to select US high schools. As with the beta, students will have access to both Figma (the company's flagship product design platform) and FigJam, Figma's collaborative whiteboarding app. Figma's Google program is only available on Chromebooks, though the company said that schools using non-Google systems can apply for access on an individual class basis.

Microsoft is increasing its Xbox Series X prices in most countries in August apart from the US, Japan, Chile, Brazil, and Colombia. From a report: The Xbox maker is also increasing the monthly prices of its Xbox Game Pass and Xbox Game Pass Ultimate subscriptions for the first time next month, which will see the base Game Pass subscription for console move up to $10.99 a month from $9.99. "We've held on our prices for consoles for many years and have adjusted the prices to reflect the competitive conditions in each market," says Kari Perez, head of communications for Xbox, in a statement to The Verge. Xbox Series X console pricing will largely match the price hike Sony announced for the PS5 last year, with the Xbox Series X moving to $612 in the UK, $604 across most European markets, CAD $649.99 in Canada, and AUD $799.99 in Australia starting August 1st. The Xbox Series S pricing will not be adjusted in any markets, remaining at $299.99.

According to AST SpaceMobile, the company managed to successfully transmit a 4G LTE signal from space that was picked up by "everyday, off-the-shelf smartphones." Next, AST will try and transmit a 5G connection via its BlueWalker 3 (BW3) satellite. The Verge reports: Testing was conducted in Hawaii on AT&T's spectrum using Nokia RAN technology, and the signal, which was beamed from AST's satellite in low Earth orbit, reached speeds of up to 10.3Mbps. That's fast enough for some video streaming, general internet use, and more ordinary cell phone usage. AST's testing followed a recent April test by the same company, where it was able to route an audio call between a Samsung Galaxy S22 in Texas to an iPhone in Japan via satellite.

The BW3 is a massive commercial communication array at 693 square feet -- about the size of a two- or three-car garage -- and the largest ever deployed in low Earth orbit, says AST's release. It operates using the same 3GPP standard found in ground-based cell networks. The achievement is "an important step toward AST SpaceMobile's goal of bringing broadband services to parts of the world where cellular coverage is either unreliable or simply does not exist today," according to AST's chairman and CEO, Abel Avellan, who said this would allow users to text and call, browse the internet, download files, and even stream video using a signal beamed from space.

Suzuki said Tuesday it has agreed to jointly start producing "flying cars" with Japanese start-up SkyDrive around the spring of 2024 as it aims to take the lead in the growing industry. From a report: Flying cars are a type of aircraft with the ability to vertically take off and land using multiple rotors. The vehicles are typically meant for carrying a small number of people, with some models also equipped for use on land. SkyDrive will set up a fully-owned production subsidiary that will assemble vehicles utilizing the Suzuki group's plant in Shizuoka Prefecture.

The announcement comes a day after SkyDrive, a leading flying car start-up in Japan, unveiled at the Paris Airshow a plan to change the design of its vehicle under development so it can carry three people instead of two. The new design, which has an overall length of about 13 meters and a height of 3 meters, will extend the maximum flight range to about 15 kilometers from the current 10 km. SkyDrive and Suzuki announced a tie-up in the area of flying vehicles in March 2022, but the details of the collaboration have been under discussion.

A government panel in Japan drew up a set of regulations aimed at opening up the smartphone app stores of U.S. technology giants Apple and Google to competition. From a report: The two companies dominating the smartphone operating system market will be obliged to allow their users to download apps by using services other than their own app stores. The government hopes that the move will spur competition and lead to app price drops. The smartphone OS market is occupied almost entirely by Apple's iOS and Google's Android. The companies control how apps are installed and paid for on their iPhones and Android devices.

The government will create a list of what OS providers must not do in order to stop them favoring their own services and payment platforms. The regulations were drawn up at the government's headquarters for digital market competition, headed by Chief Cabinet Secretary Hirokazu Matsuno. The government aims to submit relevant legislation to the next year's ordinary session of parliament. Apple makes it impossible for iPhone users to download apps without using its App Store. Of Android users, 97% download apps through the Google Play store, although Google does not require them to do so.

An anonymous reader shares a report: GPS is now a mainstay of daily life, helping us with navigation, tracking, mapping, and timing across a broad spectrum of applications. But it does have a few shortcomings, most notably not being able to pass through buildings, rocks, or water. That's why Japanese researchers have developed an alternative wireless navigation system that relies on cosmic rays, or muons, instead of radio waves, according to a new paper published in the journal iScience. The team has conducted its first successful test, and the system could one day be used by search and rescue teams, for example, to guide robots underwater or to help autonomous vehicles navigate underground.

"Cosmic-ray muons fall equally across the Earth and always travel at the same speed regardless of what matter they traverse, penetrating even kilometers of rock," said co-author Hiroyuki Tanaka of Muographix at the University of Tokyo in Japan. "Now, by using muons, we have developed a new kind of GPS, which we have called the muometric positioning system (muPS), which works underground, indoors and underwater."