North Dakota passed a law last May to promote development of rare earth minerals in the state. But the law's language apparently also includes two fake mineral names, according to the Bismarck Tribune, "that appear to be inspired by coal company lawyers who worked on the bill." The inclusion of fictional substances is being called an embarrassment by one state official, a possible practical joke by coal industry leaders and mystifying by the lawmakers who worked on the bill, the North Dakota Monitor reported.

The fake minerals are friezium and stralium, apparent references to Christopher Friez and David Straley, attorneys for North American Coal who were closely involved in drafting the bill and its amendments. Straley said they were not responsible for adding the fake names. "I assume it was put in to embarrass us, or to make light of it, or have a practical joke," Straley said, adding it could have been a clerical error.

Agriculture Commissioner Doug Goehring questioned the two substances listed in state law during a recent meeting of the North Dakota Industrial Commission, which is poised to adopt rules based on the legislation... Friezium and stralium first appeared in the bill on the last afternoon of the legislative session as lawmakers hurried to pass several final bills... The amended bill is labeled as prepared by Legislative Council for Rep. Dick Anderson, R-Willow City, the prime sponsor and chair of the conference committee. Anderson said the amendments were prepared by a group of attorneys and legislators, including representatives from the coal industry...

Jonathan Fortner, president of the Lignite Energy Council that represents the coal industry, said it's unfortunate this happened in such an important bill. "From the president on down, everyone's interested in developing domestic critical minerals for national security reasons," Fortner said. "While this may have been a legislative joke between some people that somehow got through, the bigger picture is one that is important and is a very serious matter."

America's electric car subsidies expired at the end of September, notes Bloomberg. Yet in those last three months, "while fully electric cars and trucks made up 10% of all auto sales in the US... another 15% of transactions were for hybrid vehicles." The EV market is slowing in the U.S., but analysts expect hybrid sales to continue accelerating. CarGurus Inc., a digital listings platform that covers most of the US auto market, predicts nearly one in six new cars next year will be a hybrid, as automakers green-light more and better machines with the technology. And though these cars and trucks will still burn gas, they will quietly move the needle on both transportation emissions and the transition to fully electric cars and trucks... CarGurus calls hybrids the success story of 2025. Indeed, the fastest-selling car in the country this year has been the Hyundai Palisade Hybrid; it sat on lots for fewer than 14 days on average...

While carmakers have struggled to turn a profit on fully electric vehicles, analysts say their investments in batteries and electric motors are helping them sell more and better hybrid machines. It's also increasingly difficult to discern a hybrid from a solely gas-powered model, said Scott Hardman, assistant director of the Electric Vehicle Research Center at the University of California at Davis. Carmakers today often don't even label a hybrid as such. Consider Toyota's RAV4, one of the best-selling vehicles in America. The 2026 version of the SUV comes in six different variants, all of which include an electric motor and a gas tank. "A hybrid is just a regular car now," Hardman said. "You can buy one by accident...."

While not as clean as an electric vehicle, hybrids offer sneaky carbon cuts as well. Americans, on average, drive about 38 miles a day, which requires about one gallon of gas in most basic hybrids. Contemporary plug-in hybrids, which can run on all-battery power, can cover almost that entire range without the gas engine kicking in. And a small crowd of cars will do even better, stretching their batteries well over 40 miles per charge. All told, hybridization can reduce the carbon dioxide emissions of a vehicle by roughly 20% to 30%, according to the International Council on Clean Transportation.
Some interesting statistics from the article:

• By 2030 Ford expects fully or partially electrified vehicles will represent half its global sales. Toyota has already reached 50% ("in part thanks to all those hybrid RAV4s").

• Honda is "basing its entire business on hybrids until at least 2030."

• Around one-third of America's hybrid drivers "transition to a fully electric vehicle when they next switch cars."

• In September 57% of America's car shoppers "were considering a fully electric auto, according to JD Power. However, among hybrid households, that share was almost 70%."

Here it is — Betty Boop's first appearance, which became public domain on Thursday. It's a 60-second song halfway through a longer cartoon about a restaurant titled Dizzy Dishes. (The first scene makes it clear this is a restaurant of anthropomorphized animals — which explains why the as-yet-unnamed character has floppy dog ears...)

So Fleischer Studios has now warned that claiming Betty Boop is public domain "is actually not true." Very often, different versions of a character that have been developed later can independently enjoy copyright protection. Also, names and depictions of a character very frequently will remain separately protected by trademark and other laws, regardless of whether the copyright has expired.
But is that really true? Fleischer Studios went out of business in 1946, notes Los Angeles Times columnist Michael Hiltzik: By then it had sold the rights to its cartoons and the Betty Boop character. A new Fleischer Studios was formed in the 1970s by Fleischer descendants, including Max's grandson Mark Fleischer, and set about repurchasing the rights that had been sold. Whether it reacquired the rights to Betty Boop is up for discussion... According to a federal appeals court ruling in 2011, the answer is no. Having navigated its way through the three or four copyright transfers that followed the original rights sale, the appeals court concluded that the original Fleischer studios sold the rights to Betty Boop and the related cartoons to Paramount in 1941 but couldn't verify that the rights to the character had been sold in an unbroken chain placing them with the new studio. The "chain of title" was broken, the appellate judges found — but they didn't say who ended up with Betty Boop.
And last month Cory Doctorow pointed out that "while the Fleischer studio (where Betty Boop was created) renewed the copyright on Dizzy Dishes, there were many other shorts that entered the public domain years ago." That means that all the aspects of Betty Boop that were developed for Dizzy Dishes are about to enter the public domain. But also, all the aspects of Betty Boop from those non-renewed shorts are already in the public domain. But some of the remaining aspects of Betty Boop's character design — those developed in subsequent shorts that were also renewed — are also in the public domain, because they aren't copyrightable in the first place, because they're "generic," or "trivial," constitute "minuscule variations," or be so standard or indispensable as to be a "scène à faire...." But we're not done yet! Just because some later aspects of the Betty Boop character design are still in copyright, it doesn't follow that you aren't allowed to use them! U.S. Copyright law has a broad set "limitations and exceptions," including fair use.
So while Fleischer Studios insists Betty Boop "will continue to enjoy copyright and trademark protection for years to come," Doctorow has some thoughts on that trademark: Even the Supreme Court has (repeatedly) upheld the principle that trademark can't be used as a backdoor to extend copyright.

That's important, because the current Betty Boop license-holders have been sending out baseless legal threats claiming that their trademarks over Betty Boop mean that she's not going into the public domain. They're not the only ones, either! This is a routine, petty scam perpetrated by marketing companies that have scooped up the (usually confused and difficult-to-verify) title to cultural icons and then gone into business extracting rent from people and businesses who want to make new works with them.
"Trademarks only prevent you from using character names and depictions in a way that misleads consumers into thinking your work is produced or sponsored by the rightsholder," Duke University clarified in their January 1st explanation of Public Domain Day 2026 — "for example, by putting them on unlicensed merchandise. They do not prevent you from using them in a new creative work clearly unaffiliated with the rights owners..."

"Regardless of who owns the later versions of the character, the original Betty Boop character from 1930 is in the public domain." This is another reason why copyright expiration is so important: It brings clarity... Under US copyright law, anyone is free to use characters as they appeared in public domain works. If those characters recur in later works that are still under copyright, the rights only extend to the newly added material in those works, not the underlying material from the public domain works — that content remains freely available. Second, with newer versions of characters, copyright only extends to those new features that qualify for such protection...

Dozens of post-1930 Betty Boop cartoons, including Ker-Choo (1932) and Poor Cinderella (1934), did not have renewals. The newly added material in these animations is also in the public domain... To sum up the copyright story so far: in 2026, the underlying Betty Boop character goes into the public domain. She is joined there by the attributes, plot lines, and dialogue that were first introduced in those later cartoons without renewed copyrights, as well as the uncopyrightable attributes of her later instantiations...

Certainly, there would be a risk of consumer confusion if you use Betty Boop as a brand identifier on the kind of merchandise Fleischer sells — jewelry, back packs, water bottles, dolls. Trademark law does protect Fleischer against that risk. Contrast these uses with simply putting the Boop character in a new artistic work. This is exactly what copyright expiration is intended to allow. Were trademark law to prevent this, then trademark rights would be leveraged to obtain the effective equivalent of a perpetual copyright — precisely what the Supreme Court said we cannot do...

If courts have delineated the line between copyright and trademark, why is there so little clarity in this area? Sadly, companies sometimes claim to have more expansive rights than they actually do, capitalizing on fear, uncertainty, and doubt to collect royalties and licensing fees to which they are not legally entitled.

"The ancient evolution of fish mouths could help solve a modern source of plastic pollution," writes ScienceAlert.

"Inspired by these natural filtration systems, scientists in Germany have invented a way to remove 99 percent of plastic particles from water. It's based on how some fish filter-feed to eat microscopic prey." The research team has already filed a patent in Germany, and in the future, they hope their creation will help curb a ubiquitous form of plastic pollution that many are unaware of. Every time a load of laundry is done, millions of microplastics are washed from the fibers of our clothes into local waterways. By some estimates, up to 90 percent of plastic in 'sewage sludge' comes from washing machines. This material is then often used in agriculture as soil or fertilizer, possibly exposing those who eat the resulting crops to these pollutants...

Unlike other plastic filtration systems on the market, this one reduces clogging by 85 percent.

An anonymous reader shared this report from the Independent: Candida auris, a type of invasive yeast that can cause deadly infections in people with weakened immune systems, has infected at least 7,000 people [in 2025] across 27 U.S. states, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The fungus, which can spread easily in healthcare settings such as hospitals and nursing homes, is gaining virulence and spreading at an "alarming" rate, the CDC says. Some strains of the fungus are particularly troublesome — and even considered a superbug — because they're resistant to all types of antibiotics used to treat fungal infections, The Hill reports.

While healthy people may be able to fight off the infection on their own, the fungus can be deadly, especially in healthcare settings, where it can quickly spread amongst a vulnerable population. "If you get infected with this pathogen that's resistant to any treatment, there's no treatment we can give you to help combat it. You're all on your own," Melissa Nolan, an assistant professor of epidemiology and biostatistics at the University of South Carolina, told Nexstar...

A recent study found that Candida auris is gaining virulence and spreading rapidly, not just in the U.S., but also globally. Candida auris has already been found in at least 61 countries on six continents.
Some context from Newsweek: There are strategies available to combat Candida auris infection. While the superbug can develop ways to evade the immune response, vaccination and treatment strategies are possible, but researchers would like them to be strengthened. Four classes of antifungal drugs are currently available, with varying degrees of efficacy, and three new drugs are currently in trials or at newly approved stages

"Microsoft is hoping that Windows can once again serve as the platform where it all takes off," reports GeekWire: A new framework called Agent Launchers, introduced in December as a preview in the latest Windows Insider build, lets developers register agents directly with the operating system. They can describe an agent through what's known as a manifest, which then lets the agent show up in the Windows taskbar, inside Microsoft Copilot, and across other apps... "We are now entering a phase where we build rich scaffolds that orchestrate multiple models and agents; account for memory and entitlements; enable rich and safe tools use," Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella wrote in a blog post this week looking ahead to 2026. "This is the engineering sophistication we must continue to build to get value out of AI in the real world...." [The article notes Google's Gemini and Anthropic's Claude will also offer desktop-style agentsthrough browsers and native apps, while Amazon is developing "frontier agents" for automating business processes in the cloud.]

But Microsoft's Windows team is betting that agents tightly linked to the operating system will win out over ones that merely run on top of it, just as a new class of Windows apps replaced a patchwork of DOS programs in the early days of the graphical operating system. Microsoft 365 Copilot is using the Agent Launchers framework for first-party agents like Analyst, which helps users dig into data, and Researcher, which builds detailed reports. Software developers will be able to register their own agents when an app is installed, or on the fly based on things like whether a user is signed in or paying for a subscription...

Agents are meant to maintain this context across apps, ask follow-up questions, and take actions on a user's behalf. That requires a different level of trust than Windows has ever had to manage, which is already raising difficult questions for the company. Microsoft acknowledges that agents introduce unique security risks. In a support document, the company warned that malicious content embedded in files or interface elements could override an agent's instructions — potentially leading to stolen data or malware installation. To address this, Microsoft says it has built a security framework that runs agents in their own contained workspace, with a dedicated user account that has limited access to user folders. The idea is to create a boundary between the agent and what the rest of the system can access. The agentic features are off by default, and Microsoft is advising users to "understand the security implications of enabling an agent on your computer" before turning them on...

There is a business reality driving all of this. In Microsoft's most recent fiscal year, Windows and Devices generated $17.3 billion in revenue — essentially flat for the past three years. That's less than Gaming ($23.5 billion) and LinkedIn ($17.8 billion), and a fraction of the $98 billion in revenue from Azure and cloud services or the nearly $88 billion from Microsoft 365 commercial.

Last June the Trump organization announced sales of a $499 "T1" smartphone with a gold-colored case. But though they originally were scheduled for release in August, this week a customer service representative for the wireless carrier told CBS News the device will be pushed back again, now until the end of January, "attributing the delay to the recent U.S. government shutdown."

Some context from The Independent: Shortly after the phone was first announced, language describing it as "Made in the USA" was removed from its official website with the vague claim that the devices are "brought to life" in the United States posted in its place... Other information about the phone has also changed or been removed since its first unveiling, The Verge has reported. Trump Mobile initially indicated the T1's screen measured 6.78 inches, but now claims it is 6.25 inches. It also said the phone had 12GB of RAM; however, that claim has now also disappeared.

As the wait for the T1 continues, Trump Mobile has begun offering refurbished Samsung S23s, S24s, and Apple iPhone 15s and 16s for sale on its site, which appear to have no specific Trump branding and are priced considerably higher than customers might pay elsewhere.

An anonymous reader shared this report from the Linux news site Linuxiac: Archboot, a guided, user-friendly, menu-driven installer for Arch Linux that automates much of the traditional manual installation process (while still allowing advanced users to intervene when needed), has added the COSMIC desktop environment as a new selectable option. The change is part of Archboot's development cycle leading up to the 2026.01 release and is already available in the latest tagged builds. With COSMIC now integrated, users can boot an Archboot ISO and choose the desktop to either perform a full Arch Linux installation or start a live session for testing and recovery.

The Wall Street Journal profiles "the startup that is now one of a handful of chip makers nipping at the heels of Nvidia." Furiosa's AI chip is dubbed "RNGD" — short for renegade — and slated to start mass production this month. Valued at nearly $700 million based on its most recent fundraising, Furiosa has attracted interest from big tech firms. Last year, Meta Platforms attempted to acquire it, though the startup declined the offer. OpenAI used a Furiosa chip for a recent demonstration in Seoul. LG's AI research unit is testing the chip and said it offered "excellent real-world performance." Furiosa said it is engaged in talks with potential customers.

Nvidia's graphic processing units, or GPUs, dominated the initial push to train AI models. But companies like Furiosa are betting that for the next stage — referred to as "inference," or using AI models after they're trained — their specialty chips can be competitive. Furiosa makes chips called neural processing units, or NPUs, which are a rising class of chips designed specifically to handle the type of computing calculations underpinning AI and use less energy than GPUs. [Founder/CEO June] Paik said Furiosa's chips can provide similar performance as Nvidia's advanced GPUs with less electricity usage. That would drive down the total costs of deploying AI. The tech world, Paik says, shouldn't be so reliant on one chip maker for AI computing. "A market dominated by a single player — that's not a healthy ecosystem, is it?" Paik said...

In 2024, at Stanford's prestigious Hot Chips conference, Paik debuted Furiosa's RNGD chip as a solution for what he called "sustainable AI computing" in a keynote speech. Paik presented data showing how the chip could run the then-latest version of Meta's Llama large language model with more than twice the power efficiency of Nvidia's high-end chips. Furiosa's booth was swarmed with engineers from big tech firms, including Google, Meta and Amazon.com, wanting to see a live demo of the chip. "It was a moment where we felt we could really move forward with our chip with confidence," Paik said.

The New York Times checks in on U.S. university researchers and start-ups trying to create domestic rare-earth processing facility: There is too little money to be made in rare earths for the elements to be of much interest to mining giants, so the challenge of reestablishing a domestic industry has fallen to small companies like Phoenix Tailings, a Boston-area startup that runs the metal-making plant in Exeter, New Hampshire. A handful of other companies in the United States are processing rare earths in small quantities, including MP Materials, which owns a mine in Mountain Pass, California, and recently began producing rare-earth metal in Fort Worth, Texas. Similar efforts are underway in Europe and Asia. "It's small volumes of low-value materials that are very expensive to process," said Elsa Olivetti, a materials science and engineering professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. "Meaning it's hard to make money."

Phoenix Tailings' New Hampshire operation is about 2 months old, housed in a converted medical device plant. The company buys metric-ton bags of powder — a mixture of neodymium and praseodymium bound with oxygen — from mining and refining companies in the United States, South America and Australia. It funnels that flour-like material into a drying oven and eventually into furnaces that heat it to the temperature of volcanic lava. This circuit takes up less than 15,000 square feet and is designed to generate no emissions other than those associated with the electricity Phoenix Tailings uses. The closed-loop design distinguishes this process from the more energy-intensive techniques used in China, where workers scoop up molten metal with ladles. That approach releases perfluorocarbons, potent greenhouse gases that do not break down easily.
In late 2024 the company was three weeks from bankruptcy — but it's recently been valued at $189 million.

Reddit "has overtaken TikTok as Britain's fourth most-visited social media service," reports the Guardian: The platform has undergone huge growth over the last two years, with an 88% increase in the proportion of UK internet users it reaches. Three in five Brits online now encounter the site, up from a third in 2023, according to Ofcom. Its popularity is rising fastest with younger internet users. It is now the sixth most visited organisation of any kind by UK users aged between 18 and 24, up from 10th a year earlier. More than three-quarters of that cohort now visit it....

The UK is a boom market for the platform, with the second largest user base behind the US, according to company records. A series of factors are behind its rise. However, a change in Google's search algorithms last year to prioritise helpful content from discussion forums appears to have been a significant driver. A recent deal with Google that allows the company to train its AI model on Reddit's content also appears to have provided a boost. Reddit is the most-cited source for Google AI overviews, which is likely to see more people directed to its forums. It has a similar deal with OpenAI, which owns the most popular AI chatbot, ChatGPT.
According to the article, Reddit "believes it is also benefiting from shifting internet habits, as younger users seek out human-generated reviews and opinions."

An anonymous reader shared this report from Electrek: Tesla has released a new video showing a Tesla Semi truck charging at a massive 1.2 megawatts (MW), finally giving us a clear look at the charging speeds that will enable long-haul electric trucking...
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Tesla claimed the Semi would be able to charge 70% of its range in 30 minutes. For a truck with a 500-mile range and an estimated battery pack of around 800-900 kWh, that requires an incredibly high power output, well beyond the 250 kW or even 350 kW we see on passenger EVs in North America. Today, the official Tesla Semi account on X released a video showing exactly that. In the video, Tesla engineers are seen monitoring a charging session where the power output climbs to a peak of 1.2 MW (1,206 kW).

This is consistent with the capabilities Tesla announced for its new V4 Cabinet architecture earlier this year. The V4 cabinets are designed to support 400V-1000V vehicle architectures and can deliver up to 500 kW for cars (like the Cybertruck) and up to 1.2 MW for the Semi. There is some information missing from the video. For example, we don't see the state-of-charge of the truck, so we don't at what battery percentage Tesla Semi can achieve and maintain this charge rate. Peak speed is one thing, but sustaining that power without overheating the pack or the cable is the real challenge. The liquid-cooled charging cable and the immersion-cooled connector (part of the Megawatt Charging System or a high-power proprietary Tesla solution, though Tesla has been leaning toward MCS compatibility) seem to be doing their job....

This comes just as Tesla is gearing up for volume production of the Semi at its new factory expansion near Gigafactory Nevada. The automaker is targeting a start of production in the first half of 2026 and a ramp up to volume production in the second half.

An AI chatbot to answer probate questions from Alaska residents "was supposed to be a three-month project," said Aubrie Souza, a consultant with the National Center for State Courts told NBC News. "We are now at well over a year and three months, but that's all because of the due diligence that was required to get it right." "With a project like this, we need to be 100% accurate, and that's really difficult with this technology," said Stacey Marz, the administrative director of the Alaska Court System and one of the Alaska Virtual Assistant (AVA) project's leaders... While many local government agencies are experimenting with AI tools for use cases ranging from helping residents apply for a driver's license to speeding up municipal employees' ability to process housing benefits, a recent Deloitte report found that less than 6% of local government practitioners were prioritizing AI as a tool to deliver services. The AVA experience demonstrates the barriers government agencies face in attempting to leverage AI for increased efficiency or better service, including concerns about reliability and trustworthiness in high-stakes contexts, along with questions about the role of human oversight given fast-changing AI systems. These limitations clash with today's rampant AI hype and could help explain larger discrepancies between booming AI investment and limited AI adoption.
The chatbot was developed with Tom Martin, a lawyer/law professor who designs legal AI tools, according to the article. But the project "had to contend with the serious issue of hallucinations, or instances in which AI systems confidently share false or exaggerated information." "We had trouble with hallucinations, regardless of the model, where the chatbot was not supposed to actually use anything outside of its knowledge base," Souza told NBC News. "For example, when we asked it, 'Where do I get legal help?' it would tell you, 'There's a law school in Alaska, and so look at the alumni network.' But there is no law school in Alaska." Martin has worked extensively to ensure the chatbot only references the relevant areas of the Alaska Court System's probate documents rather than conducting wider web searches.
The article concludes that "what was meant to be a quick, AI-powered leap forward in increasing access to justice has spiraled into a protracted, yearlong journey plagued by false starts and false answers." But the chatbot is now finally scheduled to be launched in late January. "It was just so very labor-intensive to do this," Marz said, despite "all the buzz about generative AI, and everybody saying this is going to revolutionize self-help and democratize access to the courts.

"It's quite a big challenge to actually pull that off."

Remember how California's government negotiated a 2024 deal where Google contributed millions to California's local newsrooms to offset advertisers moving to the search engine?

"A year after it was cemented — and billed as a model that could succeed where entire countries and continents had fallen short — the agreement is tangled in budget cuts, bureaucratic infighting and unresolved questions about who controls the money," reports Politico, "leaving journalists empty-handed and casting doubt on whether the lofty experiment will ever live up to its promise." The program, initially framed as a nearly $250 million commitment over five years, has secured just $20 million in new money for journalists in its first year, with no guarantee the funding will continue. It's changed hands twice since the University of California, Berkeley withdrew its support [with school officials "worried they wouldn't have enough of a say in how the money was distributed"]. Suggestions that other big tech players like ChatGPT-maker OpenAI could front more resources haven't materialized. A $62.5 million "AI accelerator" tied to the deal hasn't been set up yet.

Not a single newsroom has seen a dollar of funding, and there's no definitive timeline spelling out when they will... [The article adds later that state officials "have yet to draft precise rules for how California will decide which newsrooms get cash..."] Conversations with at least 20 people involved in the deal's rollout reveal how California's budget shortfalls and intraparty spats among Democrats scrambled it... California's struggle to launch its program has dampened hopes of replicating its model in other states such as Oregon, Illinois and New York, where lawmakers have tried but failed to make Big Tech pay for news...

When [California governor] Newsom unveiled his final state budget plan in May 2025 after a $12 billion deficit suddenly scrambled the state's finances, California's first-year commitment was reduced from $30 million to $10 million. Google followed suit within days and cut its first-year contribution from $15 million to $10 million... Whether the program even continues past 2026 is also unclear. Newsom's office declined to confirm whether the state will provide its $10 million commitment to the fund in the coming 2026-27 state budget. Newsom will also be termed out in 2027, and there's no requirement for his successor to honor the state's agreement with Google.

An anonymous reader shared this report from Neowin: Offline Windows activation has been possible to do using the phone. However, it looks like Microsoft has quietly killed off that method as users online have found that they are no longer able to activate the OS using it... [As documented by Windows user Ben Kleinberg on his YouTube channel], Now when trying to activate the OS by attempting to call the phone number for Microsoft Product Activation, an automated voice response says the following: "Support for product activation has moved online. For the fastest and most convenient way to activate your product, please visit our online product activation portal at aka.ms/aoh"

If you are wondering, that link takes users to the Microsoft Product Activation Portal for online activation. Thus it appears that offline ways to activate Windows may no longer be available even though the official support documentation by the company may not reflect it yet.