Toyota is to slash worldwide vehicle production by 40% in September because of the global microchip shortage. The BBC reports: The world's biggest carmaker had planned to make almost 900,000 cars next month, but has now reduced that to 540,000 vehicles. Volkswagen, the world's second-biggest car producer, has warned it may also be forced to cut output further. Toyota's other rivals, including General Motors, Ford, Nissan, Daimler, BMW and Renault, have already scaled back production in the face of the global chip shortage. Until now, Toyota had managed to avoid doing the same, with the exception of extending summer shutdowns by a week in France the Czech Republic and Turkey. New cars often include dozens of microchips but Toyota benefited from having built a larger stockpile of chips - also called semiconductors - as part of a revamp to its business continuity plan, developed in the wake of the Fukushima earthquake and tsunami a decade ago. The decision to reduce output now has been precipitated by the resurgence of coronavirus cases across Asia hitting supplies. The company will make some cuts in August at its plants in Japan and elsewhere. The bulk of the cuts -- 360,000 -- will come in September and affect factories in Asia and the US. The aim for Toyota as a whole is to make up for any lost volume by the end of 2021.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: OnlyFans is getting out of the pornography business. The company will prohibit users from posting any sexually explicit conduct, starting in October. Creators will still be allowed to post nude photos and videos, provided they're consistent with OnlyFans' policy, the company said Thursday. The changes are needed because of mounting pressure from banking partners and payment providers, according to the company. "In order to ensure the long-term sustainability of our platform, and the continue to host an inclusive community of creators and fans, we must evolve our content guidelines," OnlyFans said. OnlyFans has attracted more than 130 million users by giving online creators a platform to charge their fans for photos and videos. Many of its most-popular creators post nude photos and videos, and it has been praised for giving sex workers a safer place to do their jobs. But sex work still has a stigma. And OnlyFans is trying to raise money from outside investors at a valuation of more than $1 billion. The company handled more than $2 billion in sales last year, and is on pace to more than double that this year. It keeps 20% of that figure. "These changes are to comply with the requests of our banking partners and payout providers," says OnlyFans in a statement. "We will be sharing more details in the coming days and we will actively support and guide our creators through this change in content guidelines..."

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Babbling in baby bats bears a striking resemblance to human infants learning to talk, researchers find.

The world's first customer delivery of "green steel" produced without using coal is taking place in Sweden, according to its manufacturer. From a report: The Swedish venture Hybrit said it was delivering the steel to truck-maker Volvo AB as a trial run before full commercial production in 2026. Volvo has said it will start production in 2021 of prototype vehicles and components from the green steel. Steel production using coal accounts for around 8% of global greenhouse gas emissions. Hybrit started test operations at its pilot plant for green steel in Lulea, northern Sweden, a year ago. It aims to replace coking coal, traditionally needed for ore-based steel making, with renewable electricity and hydrogen. Hydrogen is a key part of the EU's plan to reach net zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050.

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Apple's Mac has long been an afterthought for the video game industry, and few think of Google as a games company -- despite running Android, one of the biggest game platforms in the world. But Google had a plan to change those things in October 2020, according to an explicitly confidential 70-page vision document dubbed "Games Futures." From a report: The "need-to-know" document, which was caught up in the discovery process when Epic Games hauled Apple into court, reveals a tentative five-year plan to create what Google dubbed "the world's largest games platform." Google imagined presenting game developers with a single place they can target gamers across multiple screens including Windows and Mac, as well as smart displays -- all tied together by Google services and a "low-cost universal portable game controller" that gamers can pair with any device, even a TV.

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A fugitive who Justice Department officials say had scammed more than 20 people out of hundreds of thousands of dollars was sentenced to four years in prison on Friday, after being on the run for almost 15 years. From a report: Austrian authorities were able to identify Randy Levine, 54, of Boca Raton, Florida, due to a facial recognition system according to the DOJ, after he tried to use an alias to open a bank account, leading to his arrest in June 2020. Levine fled the US in 2005, after authorities seized his passport as part of an investigation into an alleged scam he had been running, the DOJ said in a release. According to Levine's plea agreement, which he signed in May, he would offer to set up gambling accounts for people if they sent him money. To help sell the idea that he really could help people make bets, Levine reportedly played a recording of casino sounds while he was on calls with victims (which he made using a Las Vegas phone number). Levine came under investigation by the FBI, but was able to get a replacement for the passport that law enforcement officials seized, by claiming the passport had simply been lost. He eventually ended up in Poland, where he was arrested in 2008. There was, however, a legal battle over whether he could be extradited to the US, which continued until late 2011. By the time Polish courts had decided that he could be extradited, Levine had already slipped away.

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For those who don't think Zoom meetings are a good enough substitute for the real thing, Facebook has another idea: a virtual reality app that lets you and your coworkers feel like you're sitting around a table in a conference room. From a report: On Thursday, Facebook unveiled Horizon Workrooms, a free app for users of its Oculus Quest 2 headset, a device that starts at $299. The app stands out as the company's most ambitious effort yet to enable groups to socialize in VR and move the still niche medium beyond entertainment uses such as gaming. Workrooms allows up to 16 VR headset users to meet in a virtual conference room, with each of them represented by a customizable cartoon-like avatar that appears as just an upper body floating slightly above a virtual chair at a table. The app supports up to 50 participants in a single meeting, with the rest able to join as video callers who appear in a grid-like flat screen inside the virtual meeting room. Headset-wearing meeting participants can use their actual fingers and hands to gesticulate in VR, and their avatars' mouths appear to move in lifelike ways while they speak. A virtual whiteboard lets people share pictures or make presentations. "The pandemic in the last 18 months has only given us greater confidence in the importance of this as a technology," Andrew Bosworth, VP of Facebook Reality Labs, said while addressing a (virtual) room of about a dozen people on Tuesday. He said Facebook has been using the app internally for about a year.

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TikTok's plans to collect biometric identifiers from its users has prompted concern among U.S. lawmakers, who are demanding the company reveal exactly what information it collects and what it plans to do with that data. From a report: In a letter sent earlier this month addressed to TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew, Sens. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) and John Thune, (R-SD) say they are "alarmed" by the recent change to TikTok's privacy policy, which allows the company to "automatically collect biometric data, including certain physical and behavioral characteristics from video content posted by its users." TechCrunch first reported details of the new privacy policy back in June, when TikTok said it will seek "required permissions" to collect "faceprints and voiceprints" where required by law, but failed to elaborate on whether it's considering federal law, states laws, or both (only a handful of U.S. states have biometric privacy laws, including Illinois, Washington, California, Texas and New York). Klobuchar and Thune's letter asks TikTok to explicitly explain what constitutes a "faceprint" and "voiceprint," as well as to explain how this data will be used and how long it will be retained. The senators also quizzed TikTok on whether any data is gathered for users under the age of 18; whether it makes any inferences about its users based on the biometric data it collects; and to provide a list of all third parties that have access to the data.

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More than 90 policy and rights groups around the world published an open letter on Thursday urging Apple to abandon plans for scanning children's messages for nudity and the phones of adults for images of child sex abuse. From a report: "Though these capabilities are intended to protect children and to reduce the spread of child sexual abuse material, we are concerned that they will be used to censor protected speech, threaten the privacy and security of people around the world, and have disastrous consequences for many children," the groups wrote in the letter, which was first reported by Reuters. The largest campaign to date over an encryption issue at a single company was organized by the U.S.-based nonprofit Center for Democracy & Technology (CDT). Some overseas signatories in particular are worried about the impact of the changes in nations with different legal systems, including some already hosting heated fights over encryption and privacy.

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U.S. antitrust officials on Thursday refiled their monopoly lawsuit against Facebook, seeking to salvage the landmark case that a judge threw out in June. From a report: The Federal Trade Commission filed the new complaint in federal court in Washington, alleging that Facebook violated antitrust laws by buying Instagram and WhatsApp in order to eliminate them as competitors. The agency is trying to revive the case after U.S. District Judge James Boasberg in June dismissed it, saying the agency failed to provide enough detail to support its claim that Facebook has a monopoly in the social-media market. Boasberg had given the FTC 30 days to fix the error and refile, and the commission won an extension until Aug. 19. The Facebook case, first filed in December, presents an early test for FTC Chair Lina Khan, who was named head of the agency in June by President Joe Biden. Khan is a leading advocate for taking a more forceful antitrust stance against companies and is already taking steps to bolster the agency's authority. Facebook is seeking to bar Khan from participating in the case, arguing that her academic writing about the company and her work on the House antitrust panel, which investigated Facebook and other tech platforms, showed she is biased.

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Rattlesnakes have evolved a clever method of convincing humans that danger is closer than you think.

Intel has spent much of 2021 announcing plans for its future: a new IDM 2.0 strategy, new naming schemes for its process nodes, and new desktop GPUs. At Intel's Architecture Day 2021, we finally got a preview of how some of those changes are coming together in new chips, starting with the upcoming Alder Lake lineup later this year. From a report: As the company has been teasing since last year's Architecture Day, Alder Lake will feature Intel's latest hybrid architecture: instead of simply offering the next generation of powerful Intel CPU cores, it'll offer a mix of both performance and efficiency x86 cores, both of which Intel previewed as part of its announcements. Additionally, Alder Lake will be the first chip released on Intel's newly renamed Intel 7 technology node (not to be confused with Intel 4, which was previously known as Intel's delayed 7nm node, and will be available to consumers sometime in 2023 under the codename "Meteor Lake"). Intel 7 still uses similar technology to the company's current 10nm tech, instead of the bigger leap in manufacturing processes planned for Intel 4. The new x86 performance core -- codenamed "Golden Cove" -- is the successor to the Willow Cove cores that are currently found in the company's 11th Gen Tiger Lake processors. Intel claims that it's the most powerful CPU core its ever built, but the company only offered a comparison to its Cypress Cove cores (the version of its 10nm architecture that Intel ported to its 14nm process), not the more advanced Willow Cove cores. Meanwhile, the company's new x86 Efficient core (codenamed "Gracemont") aims to be "the world's most efficient x86 CPU core" while still offering higher IPC than the company's Skylake chips. Intel claims that for single-thread cases, one of its new efficient cores hits 40 percent more performance at the same power (or similar performance while using 40 percent of the power) of a Skylake core, improvements that double when comparing four Efficient cores running four threads to two Skylake cores running four threads.

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Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has admitted for the first time that the company's planned acquisition of British chip designer Arm may take longer than the initially-scheduled 18 months. From a report: The acquisition, which would bring together two of the most powerful chip companies in the world, is facing scrutiny from regulators in the US, UK, and China. "Our discussions with regulators are taking longer than initially thought, so it's pushing out the timetable," Huang told The Financial Times. "It's not one particular delay," he added. "But we're confident in the deal, we're confident regulators should recognize the benefits of the acquisition." Huang was previously unwavering in his prediction that the acquisition would be completed by March next year. The agreement between Nvidia and Arm's current owner SoftBank gives the US chip designer until the end of 2022 to clear the purchase with regulators. The opposition to the deal is varied and speaks to Arm's global importance.

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Tracking devices show movements of curlew after their release into the wild.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from ScienceAlert: Mini brains grown in a lab from stem cells have spontaneously developed rudimentary eye structures scientists report in a fascinating new paper. On tiny, human-derived brain organoids grown in dishes, two bilaterally symmetrical optic cups were seen to grow, mirroring the development of eye structures in human embryos. This incredible result will help us to better understand the process of eye differentiation and development, as well as eye diseases. Brain organoids are not true brains, as you might be thinking of them. They are small, three-dimensional structures grown from induced pluripotent stem cells -- cells harvested from adult humans and reverse engineered into stem cells, that have the potential to grow into many different types of tissue. In this case, these stem cells are coaxed to grow into blobs of brain tissue, without anything resembling thoughts, emotions, or consciousness. Such 'mini brains' are used for research purposes where using actual living brains would be impossible, or at the very least, ethically tricky -- testing drug responses, for example, or observing cell development under certain adverse conditions. Previous work in the development of organoids showed evidence of retinal cells, but these did not develop optic structures, so the team changed their protocols. They didn't attempt to force the development of purely neural cells at the early stages of neural differentiation, and added retinol acetate to the culture medium as an aid to eye development. Their carefully tended baby brains formed optic cups as early as 30 days into development, with the structures clearly visible at 50 days. This is consistent with the timing of eye development in the human embryo, which means these organoids could be useful for studying the intricacies of this process. There are other implications, too. The optic cups contained different retinal cell types, which organized into neural networks that responded to light, and even contained lens and corneal tissue. Finally, the structures displayed retinal connectivity to regions of the brain tissue. The research has been published in the journal Cell Stem Cell.

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