Earlier today, more than 1,100 artificial intelligence experts, industry leaders and researchers signed a petition calling on AI developers to stop training models more powerful than OpenAI's ChatGPT-4 for at least six months. Among those who refrained from signing it was Eliezer Yudkowsky, a decision theorist from the U.S. and lead researcher at the Machine Intelligence Research Institute. He's been working on aligning Artificial General Intelligence since 2001 and is widely regarded as a founder of the field.

"This 6-month moratorium would be better than no moratorium," writes Yudkowsky in an opinion piece for Time Magazine. "I refrained from signing because I think the letter is understating the seriousness of the situation and asking for too little to solve it." Yudkowsky cranks up the rhetoric to 100, writing: "If somebody builds a too-powerful AI, under present conditions, I expect that every single member of the human species and all biological life on Earth dies shortly thereafter." Here's an excerpt from his piece: The key issue is not "human-competitive" intelligence (as the open letter puts it); it's what happens after AI gets to smarter-than-human intelligence. Key thresholds there may not be obvious, we definitely can't calculate in advance what happens when, and it currently seems imaginable that a research lab would cross critical lines without noticing. [...] It's not that you can't, in principle, survive creating something much smarter than you; it's that it would require precision and preparation and new scientific insights, and probably not having AI systems composed of giant inscrutable arrays of fractional numbers. [...]

It took more than 60 years between when the notion of Artificial Intelligence was first proposed and studied, and for us to reach today's capabilities. Solving safety of superhuman intelligence -- not perfect safety, safety in the sense of "not killing literally everyone" -- could very reasonably take at least half that long. And the thing about trying this with superhuman intelligence is that if you get that wrong on the first try, you do not get to learn from your mistakes, because you are dead. Humanity does not learn from the mistake and dust itself off and try again, as in other challenges we've overcome in our history, because we are all gone.

Trying to get anything right on the first really critical try is an extraordinary ask, in science and in engineering. We are not coming in with anything like the approach that would be required to do it successfully. If we held anything in the nascent field of Artificial General Intelligence to the lesser standards of engineering rigor that apply to a bridge meant to carry a couple of thousand cars, the entire field would be shut down tomorrow. We are not prepared. We are not on course to be prepared in any reasonable time window. There is no plan. Progress in AI capabilities is running vastly, vastly ahead of progress in AI alignment or even progress in understanding what the hell is going on inside those systems. If we actually do this, we are all going to die. You can read the full letter signed by AI leaders here.

An anonymous reader shares a report: In the midst of perpetrating what federal prosecutors say was a massive corporate hacking campaign, Israeli private detective Aviram Azari in 2017 received welcome news. A group of hackers in India wrote him to say they had successfully infiltrated the email and social-media accounts of a group of environmental activists campaigning against Exxon. "On a happy note I would like to report some success below: Project Name Rainbow," the hackers wrote in electronic messages that were viewed by The Wall Street Journal. The messages included evidence of the successful intrusions, including screenshots of compromised email inboxes.

The messages along with court records reveal new details about the hacking campaign, including that thousands of individuals and companies were targeted and at least some of the attacks resulted in the hackers successfully gaining access to the private accounts of the victims and obtaining their passwords. Among the targets was the Rockefeller Family Fund, a charity created by some of the heirs of John D. Rockefeller, who founded Exxon's forebear Standard Oil. The fund has for years been involved in campaigns arguing that Exxon hid from the public the full extent of what it knew internally about climate change and the role fossil fuels played in causing it.

The foodstuff feeds more than half the world -- but also fuels diabetes and climate change. From a report: According to Indonesian legend, rice was bestowed upon the island of Java by the goddess Dewi Sri. Pitying its inhabitants the blandness of their existing staple, cassava, she taught them how to nurture rice seedlings in lush green paddy fields. In India, the Hindu goddess Annapurna is said to have played a similar role; in Japan, Inari. Across Asia, rice is conferred with a divine, and usually feminine, origin story. Such mythologising is understandable. For thousands of years the starchy seeds of the grass plant Oryza sativa (often called Asian rice) have been the continent's main foodstuff. Asia accounts for 90% of the world's rice production and almost as much of its consumption.

Asians get more than a quarter of their daily calories from rice. The UN estimates that the average Asian consumes 77kg of rice a year -- more than the average African, European and American combined (see chart). Hundreds of millions of Asian farmers depend on growing the crop, many with only tiny patches of land. Yet the world's rice bowl is cracking. Global rice demand -- in Africa as well as Asia -- is soaring. Yet yields are stagnating. The land, water and labour that rice production requires are becoming scarcer. Climate change is a graver threat. Rising temperatures are withering crops; more frequent floods are destroying them. No mere victim of global warming, rice cultivation is also a major cause of it, because paddy fields emit a lot of methane, a potent greenhouse gas. The crop that fuelled the rise of 60% of the world's population is becoming a source of insecurity and threat.

Rising demand exacerbates the problem. By 2050 there will be 5.3bn people in Asia, up from 4.7bn today, and 2.5bn in Africa, up from 1.4bn. That growth is projected to drive a 30% rise in rice demand, according to a study published in the journal Nature Food. And only in the richest Asian countries, such as Japan and South Korea, are bread and pasta eating into rice's monopoly as the continental staple. Yet Asia's rice productivity growth is falling. Yields increased by an annual average of only 0.9% over the past decade, down from around 1.3% in the decade before that, according to data from the UN. The drop was sharpest in South-East Asia, where the rate of increase fell from 1.4% to 0.4%.

Lockheed Martin has created a spinoff devoted to lunar infrastructure, Crescent Space, whose first project is a Moon-to-Earth satellite network. Engadget reports: Parsec, as it's called, uses a constellation of small lunar satellites to provide a non-stop connection between astronauts, their equipment and the people back home. The system will also provide navigation help. The technology should help explorers keep in touch, and assist with spacecraft course changes. As Lockheed Martin explains, though, it could prove vital to those on lunar soil. Parsec's nodes create a lunar equivalent to GPS, giving astronauts their exact positions and directions back to base. A rover crew might know how to return home without driving into a dangerous crater, for instance.

Crescent's first Parsec nodes should be operational by 2025, with Lockheed Martin providing the satellites. And before you ask: yes, the company is clearly hoping for some big customers. CEO Joe Landon (formerly a Lockheed Martin Space VP) claims Crescent is "well positioned" to support NASA's Artemis Moon landings and other exploratory missions.

Clancy William James writes via The Conversation: We have just published evidence in Nature Astronomy for what might be producing mysterious bursts of radio waves coming from distant galaxies, known as fast radio bursts or FRBs. Two colliding neutron stars -- each the super-dense core of an exploded star -- produced a burst of gravitational waves when they merged into a "supramassive" neutron star. We found that two and a half hours later they produced an FRB when the neutron star collapsed into a black hole. Or so we think. The key piece of evidence that would confirm or refute our theory -- an optical or gamma-ray flash coming from the direction of the fast radio burst -- vanished almost four years ago. In a few months, we might get another chance to find out if we are correct. [...]

The Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) has found two binary neutron star mergers. Crucially, the second, known as GW190425, occurred when a new FRB-hunting telescope called CHIME was also operational. However, being new, it took CHIME two years to release its first batch of data. When it did so, [Alexandra Moroianu, a masters student at the University of Western Australia and lead author of the study] quickly identified a fast radio burst called FRB 20190425A which occurred only two and a half hours after GW190425. Exciting as this was, there was a problem -- only one of LIGO's two detectors was working at the time, making it very uncertain where exactly GW190425 had come from. In fact, there was a 5% chance this could just be a coincidence. Worse, the Fermi satellite, which could have detected gamma rays from the merger -- the "smoking gun" confirming the origin of GW190425 -- was blocked by Earth at the time. [...]

LIGO and two other gravitational wave detectors, Virgo and KAGRA, will turn back on in May this year, and be more sensitive than ever, while CHIME and other radio telescopes are ready to immediately detect any FRBs from neutron star mergers. In a few months, we may find out if we've made a key breakthrough -- or if it was just a flash in the pan.

Slashdot reader votsalo shares a report from the Guardian: Tiny glass beads strewn across the moon's surface contain potentially billions of tons of water that could be extracted and used by astronauts on future lunar missions, researchers say. The discovery is thought to be one of the most important breakthroughs yet for space agencies that have set their sights on building bases on the moon, as it means there could be a highly accessible source of not only water but also hydrogen and oxygen. "This is one of the most exciting discoveries we've made," said Mahesh Anand, a professor of planetary science and exploration at the Open University. "With this finding, the potential for exploring the moon in a sustainable manner is higher than it's ever been."

Anand and a team of Chinese scientists analyzed fine glass beads from lunar soil samples returned to Earth in December 2020 by the Chinese Chang'e-5 mission. The beads, which measure less than a millimeter across, form when meteoroids slam into the moon and send up showers of molten droplets. These then solidify and become mixed into the moon dust. Tests on the glass particles revealed that together they contain substantial quantities of water, amounting to between 300m and 270 billion tons across the entire moon's surface. "This is going to open up new avenues which many of us have been thinking about," said Anand. "If you can extract the water and concentrate it in significant quantities, it's up to you how you utilize it."

The latest research, published in Nature Geoscience, points to fine glass beads as the source of that surface water. Unlike frozen water lurking in permanently shaded craters, this should be far easier to extract by humans or robots working on the moon. "It's not that you can shake the material and water starts dripping out, but there's evidence that when the temperature of this material goes above 100C, it will start to come out and can be harvested," Anand said. The water appears to form when high-energy particles streaming from the sun -- the so-called solar wind -- strike the molten droplets. The solar wind contains hydrogen nuclei, which combine with oxygen in the droplets to produce water or hydroxyl ions. The water then becomes locked in the beads, but it can be released by heating the material. Further tests on the material showed the water diffuses in and out of the beads on the timeframe of a few years, confirming an active water cycle on the moon. According to Prof Sen Hu, a senior co-author of the study at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing, such impact glasses could store and release water on other airless rocks in the solar system.

CNN reports: When EU lawmakers voted to ban the sale of new combustion engine cars in the bloc by 2035, it was a landmark victory for climate. In February, the European Parliament approved the law. All that was needed was a rubber stamp from the bloc's political leaders.

Then Germany changed its mind.

In a reversal that stunned many EU insiders, the German government decided to push for a loophole that would allow the sale of combustion engine cars beyond the 2035 deadline — as long as they run on synthetic fuels. It's an exception that could put the European Union's green credentials at risk. The bloc is legally obliged to become carbon-neutral by 2050. With cars and vans responsible for around 15% of its total greenhouse gas emissions, a phase-out of polluting vehicles is a key part of EU climate policy....

Other European countries, including Italy, Poland and the Czech Republic, have joined Germany in demanding the exception.
The case for synthetic fuels: they're made from hydrogen and carbon dioxide captured from the atmosphere, so burning them only releases air pollutants that have already been offset. CNN got this quote from the transport minister of the liberal FDP (part of Germany's current governing coalition).

"The goal is climate neutrality, which is also an opportunity for new technologies. We need to be open to different solutions."

Dozens of the world's largest natural history museums revealed on Thursday a survey of everything in their collections. The global inventory is made up of 1.1 billion objects that range from dinosaur skulls to pollen grains to mosquitoes. The New York Times reports: The survey's organizers, who described the effort in the journal Science, said they hoped the survey would help museums join forces to answer pressing questions, such as how quickly species are becoming extinct and how climate change is altering the natural world. "It gives us intelligence now to start thinking about things that museums can do together that we wouldn't have conceived of before," said Kirk Johnson, the director of the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History in Washington and one of the leaders of the project. "It's the argument for networking the global museum."

Scientists had created smaller inventory databases before. But the new effort, which included 73 museums in 28 countries, was unparalleled, experts said. The survey revealed important gaps in the world's collections. Relatively few objects come from the regions around the earth's poles, which are especially vulnerable to the impact of global warming, for example. Insects, the most diverse group of animal species, were also underrepresented.

"The analysis is at a global scale that no one else has managed," said Emily Meineke, an entomologist at the University of California, Davis, who was not involved in the survey. Dr. Meineke said that this survey of large institutions also laid the groundwork for surveys of smaller ones, which might hold even more surprises. "Once these methods are applied down the line to smaller collections, the results are likely to give us a truer picture of biodiversity globally," she said.

British satellite company OneWeb is gearing up for the launch of its final batch of internet satellites, completing a constellation in low Earth orbit despite some hiccups along the way. Gizmodo reports: India's heaviest launch vehicle LVM-3 will carry 36 OneWeb satellites, with liftoff slated for Sunday at 11:30 p.m. ET, according to OneWeb. The launch will take place at the Satish Dhawan Space Centre in Sriharikota, India, marking OneWeb's second deployment from India. You can watch the launch at the livestream [here].

OneWeb has been building an internet constellation in low Earth orbit since 2020, and it currently consists of 579 functioning satellites, according to statistics kept by Harvard-Smithsonian astrophysicist Jonathan McDowell. The addition of 36 new units will raise the population of the constellation to 615, completing the first orbital shell. The company had originally planned on building a 648-unit constellation, but it says this final launch will cap it off and allow for global coverage.

Scientists have come up with a simple explanation for the strange movements of our solar system's first known visitor from another star. NPR reports: Now, though, in the journal Nature, two researchers say the answer might be the release of hydrogen from trapped reserves inside water-rich ice. That was the notion of Jennifer Bergner, an astrochemist with the University of California, Berkeley, who recalls that she initially didn't spend much time thinking about 'Oumuamua when it was first discovered. "It's not that closely related to my field. So I was like, this is a really intriguing object, but sort of moved on with my life," she says. Then she happened to attend a seminar that featured Cornell University's Darryl Seligman, who described the object's weirdness and what might account for it. One possibility he'd considered was that it was composed entirely of hydrogen ice. Others have suggested it might instead be composed of nitrogen ice.

Bergner wondered if it could just be a water-rich comet that got exposed to a lot of cosmic radiation. That radiation would release the hydrogen from the water. Then, if that hydrogen got trapped inside the ice, it could be released when the object approached the sun and began to warm up. Astronomers who observed 'Oumuamua weren't looking for that kind of hydrogen outgassing and, even if they had been, the amounts involved could have been undetectable from Earth. She teamed up with Seligman to start investigating what happens when water ice gets hit with radiation. They also did calculations to see if the object was large enough to store enough trapped hydrogen to account for the observed acceleration. And they looked to see how the structure of water ice would react to getting warmed, to see if small shifts could allow trapped gas to escape.

It turns out, this actually could account for the observed acceleration, says Bergner, who notes that the kind of "amorphous" water ice found in space has a kind of "fluffy" structure that contains empty pockets where gas can collect. As this water ice warms up, its structure begins to rearrange, she says, and "you lose your pockets for hiding hydrogen. You can form channels or cracks within the water ice as parts of it are sort of compacting." As the pockets collapse and these cracks form, the trapped hydrogen would leak out into space, giving the object a push, she says.

Land reclamation is nothing new, but during this century there has been a significant rise in the creation of artificial land by humans, with a recent study showing that developers have added more than 2,500 sq km -- an area equivalent to the size of Luxembourg -- to coastlines since 2000. The Guardian reports: Using satellite imagery, Dhritiraj Sengupta, from the University of Southampton, and his colleagues analysed land changes in 135 large cities. Their results, published in the journal Earth's Future, show that much of the recent land reclamation has occurred in the global south, with China, Indonesia and the United Arab Emirates leading the way. Shanghai alone has added about 350 sq km of land. Most of the projects were driven by port expansion, a need for urban space and industrialization, while a small handful were "prestige" projects such as the palm tree-shaped islands of Dubai.

Thirteen million diesel cars producing "extreme" levels of toxic air pollution are still on the roads in Europe and the UK, according to a report, seven years after the Dieselgate scandal first exploded. From a report: The non-profit research group, the International Council on Clean Transportation (ICCT), revealed in 2015 that many diesel cars were highly polluting, emitting far more nitrogen oxides on the road than in official testing. The scandal led to a more rigorous test being introduced in the EU in 2019. However, based on extensive testing evidence, the ICCT has now revealed that about 13m highly polluting diesel vehicles sold from 2009 to 2019 remain on the roads. A further 6m diesels have "suspicious" levels of emissions, the ICCT said. The cars span 200 different models produced by all the major manufacturers. The ICCT said the bestselling models from 2009-2019 in the EU27 and UK with "extreme" emissions are Euro 5 versions of the VW Passat and Tiguan, Renault Clio, Ford Focus and Nissan Qashqai.

Intel and other semiconductor companies have joined together with industrial materials businesses to fight US clampdowns on "forever chemicals," substances used in myriad products that are slow to break down in the environment. From a report: The lobbying push from chipmakers broadens the opposition to new rules and bans for the chemicals known as PFAS. The substances have been found in the blood of 97 per cent of Americans, according to the US government. More than 30 US states this year are considering legislation to address PFAS, according to Safer States, an environmental advocacy group. Bills in California and Maine passed in 2022 and 2021, respectively.

"I think clean drinking water and for farmers to be able to irrigate their fields is far more important than a microchip," said Stacy Brenner, a Maine state senator who backed the state's bipartisan legislation. In Minnesota, bills would ban by 2025 certain products that contain added PFAS -- which is short for perfluoroalkyl and polyfluoroalkyl substances -- in legislation considered to be some of the toughest in the country. The Semiconductor Industry Association -- whose members include Intel, IBM and Nvidia -- has cosigned letters opposing the Minnesota legislation, arguing its measures are overly broad and could prohibit thousands of products, including electronics. Chipmakers also opposed the California and Maine laws.

Researchers have analyzed samples of the asteroid Ryugu collected by the Japanese Space Agency's Hayabusa2 spacecraft and found uracil, one of the informational units that make up RNA, the molecules that contain the instructions for how to build and operate living organisms. Nicotinic acid, also known as Vitamin B3 or niacin, which is an important cofactor for metabolism in living organisms, was also detected in the same samples. Phys.Org reports: This discovery by an international team, led by Associate Professor Yasuhiro Oba at Hokkaido University, adds to the evidence that important building blocks for life are created in space and could have been delivered to Earth by meteorites. The findings were published in the journal Nature Communications. The researchers extracted these molecules by soaking the Ryugu particles in hot water, followed by analyses using liquid chromatography coupled with high-resolution mass spectrometry. This revealed the presence of uracil and nicotinic acid, as well as other nitrogen-containing organic compounds. "We found uracil in the samples in small amounts, in the range of 6-32 parts per billion (ppb), while vitamin B3 was more abundant, in the range of 49-99 ppb," Oba elaborated. "Other biological molecules were found in the sample as well, including a selection of amino acids, amines and carboxylic acids, which are found in proteins and metabolism, respectively." The compounds detected are similar but not identical to those previously discovered in carbon-rich meteorites.

The team hypothesizes that the difference in concentrations in the two samples, collected from different locations on Ryugu, is likely due to the exposure to the extreme environments of space. They also hypothesized that the nitrogen-containing compounds were, at least in part, formed from the simpler molecules such as ammonia, formaldehyde and hydrogen cyanide. While these were not detected in the Ryugu samples, they are known to be present in cometary ice -- and Ryugu could have originated as a comet or another parent body that had been present in low temperature environments.

For the first time, United Nations members have agreed on a unified treaty to protect biodiversity in the high seas -- representing a turning point for vast stretches of the planet where conservation has previously been hampered by a confusing patchwork of laws. From a report: The U.N. Convention on the Law of the Sea came into force in 1994, before marine biodiversity was a well-established concept. The treaty agreement concluded two weeks of talks in New York. An updated framework to protect marine life in the regions outside national boundary waters, known as the high seas, had been in discussions for more than 20 years, but previous efforts to reach an agreement had repeatedly stalled. The unified agreement treaty, which applies to nearly half the planet's surface, was reached late Saturday. "We only really have two major global commons -- the atmosphere and the oceans," said Georgetown marine biologist Rebecca Helm. While the oceans may draw less attention, "protecting this half of earth's surface is absolutely critical to the health of our planet."

The planet is on track for catastrophic warming, but world leaders already have many options to reduce greenhouse gas pollution and protect people, according to a major new climate change report from the United Nations. NPR: The report was drafted by top climate scientists and reviewed by delegates from nearly 200 countries. The authors hope it will provide crucial guidance to politicians around the world ahead of negotiations later this year aimed at reining in climate change. The planet faces an increasingly dire situation, according to the report. Climate change is already disrupting daily life around the world. Extreme weather, including heat waves, droughts, floods, wildfires and hurricanes, is killing and displacing people worldwide, and causing massive economic damage. And the amount of carbon dioxide accumulating in the atmosphere is still rising.

"Climate change is a threat to human well-being and planetary health," the report states. "There is a rapidly closing window of opportunity to secure a liveable and sustainable future for all." But there are many choices readily available to policymakers who want to address climate change, the report makes clear. Those choices include straightforward, immediate solutions such as quickly adopting renewable sources of electricity and clamping down on new oil and gas extraction. They are also more aspirational ones, such as investing in research that could one day allow technology to suck carbon dioxide out of the air. The authors of the report are not prescriptive. No solution is held up as the "right" one. [...] The report lays out sobering facts about the state of the Earth's climate. The planet is nearly 2 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than it was in the late 1800s, and is on track to exceed 5 degrees Fahrenheit of warming by the end of the century, it warns.

"Mysterious streaks of light were seen in the sky in the Sacramento area Friday night," reports the Associated Press.

The lights lasted about 40 seconds, remembered one witness who filmed the lights while enjoying a local brewery. The brewery then asked on Instagram if anyone could solve the mystery, the report continues: Jonathan McDowell says he can. McDowell is an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. McDowell said Saturday in an interview with The Associated Press that he's 99.9% confident the streaks of light were from burning space debris.

McDowell said that a Japanese communications package that relayed information from the International Space Station to a communications satellite and then back to Earth became obsolete in 2017 when the satellite was retired. The equipment, weighing 310 kilograms (683 pounds), was jettisoned from the space station in 2020 because it was taking up valuable space and would burn up completely upon reentry, McDowell added....

He estimated the debris was about 40 miles high, going thousands of miles per hour. The U.S. Space Force confirmed the re-entry path over California for the Inter-Orbit Communication System, and the timing is consistent with what people saw in the sky, he added.

With all the space junk cluttering our orbits, Popular Science writes, "Lowering costs while also shortening satellite lifespans is important if space exploration and utilization is to remain safe and viable.

"As luck would have it, a group of students and researchers at Brown University just made promising headway for both issues." Last year, the team successfully launched their breadloaf-sized cube satellite (or cubesat) aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket for the comparatively low production cost of $10,000, with a dramatically shortened lifespan estimated at just five years. What's more, much of the microsat was constructed using accessible, off-the-shelf components, such as a popular $20 microprocessor powered by 48 AA batteries. In total, SBUDNIC — a play on Sputnik as well as an acronym of the students' names — is likely the first of its kind to be made almost entirely from materials not specifically designed for space travel.

Additionally, the group attached a 3D-printed drag sail made from Kapton film that unfurled once the cubesat reached orbit roughly 520 kilometers above Earth. Since tracking began in late May 2022, the students' satellite has already lowered down to 470 kilometers — well below its fellow rocketmates aboard the Falcon 9, which remain around 500 kilometers high.

Long-time Slashdot reader SpzToid quotes an intriguing new article from the Economist: Imagine a habitable colony on Mars or the Moon and the kinds of structures that come to mind are probably gleaming domes or shiny metallic tubes snaking over the surface. But with no Earth-like atmosphere or magnetic field to repel solar radiation and micrometeorites, space colonists would probably need to pile metres-thick rocks and geological rubble onto the roofs of such off-world settlements. More like a hobbit hole than Moonbase Alpha.

There could be another solution, however, that would offer future colonists safer and far more expansive living space than any cramped base built on the surface. Writing in Acta Astronautica, Raymond Martin, an engineer at Blue Origin, a rocket company, and Haym Benaroya, an aerospace engineer at Rutgers University, explore the benefits of setting up a Moon base inside giant geological tunnels that lie just below the lunar surface.

First discovered during the Apollo programme, these lunar lava tubes are a legacy of when Earth's nearest celestial neighbour was geologically hyperactive, with streams of boiling basaltic magma bursting from the interior to flow across the Moon's surface as lava. Found on Earth (see picture), and identified on Mars, lava tubes form when the sluggish top layer of a lava stream slows and cools, forming a thick and rocky lid that is left behind when the rest of the lava underneath eventually drains away.

Lava tubes on Earth are usually up to 15 metres wide and can run for several kilometres. But the reduced gravity on the Moon makes them hundreds of times bigger, creating colossal cave systems that are up to a kilometre across and hundreds of kilometres long.

RockDoctor (Slashdot reader #15,477) writes: A recent paper on ArXiv reports new spectroscopic analyses of the surfaces of 42 asteroids. The main result for space enthusiasts is that there is not one "M" class asteroid (metal-rich) surface in the collection.

The imagery that (many) people grow up with from Hollywood and TV "science" "documentaries" is that the Solar system is full of asteroids which are made of metal ready for mining to produce solid ingots of precious metals. That's Hollywood, not reality. This result is about what you'd expect from the proportion of metallic asteroids — otherwise estimated at about 0.5% of the population.

The asteroid mining fraternity dream of taking apart an M-type asteroid like Psyche, which is fair enough as a dream. Even as a dream for "asteroid mining" metal market speculators. But they are relatively rare asteroids. A realistic "ISRU" (In-Situ Resource Utilisation) plan is going to have to expect to digest around 200 silicate mineral (and clay ("phyllosilicate"), and ice) asteroids for every metallic one they digest.
Here's the home page for the project.