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Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

https://phys.org/news/2025-07-modern-tattooers-ancient-ice-mummies.html

An international team of archaeologists has used high-resolution digital imaging techniques to examine tattoos on a more than 2,000-year-old ice mummy from the Pazyryk culture of Siberia, shedding light on individual craftsmanship in prehistoric Siberian tattooing for the first time.

Tattooing was likely widespread during prehistory, but the lack of surviving tattoos means it is difficult to investigate. The so-called "ice mummies" of the Altai mountains are an exception, since their deep burial chambers encased in permafrost sometimes preserve the skin (and therefore tattoos) of those buried within.

"The tattoos of the Pazyryk culture- Iron Age pastoralists of the Altai Mountains -have long intrigued archaeologists due to their elaborate figural designs," states senior author of the research, Dr. Gino Caspari from the Max Planck Institute of Geoanthropology and the University of Bern.

Despite this, detailed studies of the tattoos are rare, as high-resolution images were not previously available. Therefore, most studies have been based on early schematic drawings of the tattoos.

"Prior scholarship focused primarily on the stylistic and symbolic dimensions of these tattoos, with data derived largely from hand-drawn reconstructions," explains Dr. Caspari. "These interpretations lacked clarity regarding the techniques and tools used and did not focus much on the individuals but rather the overarching social context."

To provide a more accurate means to explore ancient tattooing, archaeologists produced a 3-dimensional scan of one tattooed Pazyryk mummy using newly available sub-millimeter resolution, digital near-infrared photography.

By working with modern tattooers, they examined the tattoos in greater detail than ever before, identifying the individual tools and techniques used to make them. Their results are published in the journal Antiquity.

The researchers found that the tattoos on the right forearm were more detailed and technical than those on the left. This suggests that different tattooers, or the same tattooer during different stages of their development, contributed to the art.

Importantly, this indicates tattooing was not simply a form of decoration to the Pazyryk culture, but rather a skilled craft that required formal training and technical ability.

"The study offers a new way to recognize personal agency in prehistoric body modification practices," says Dr. Caspari. "Tattooing emerges not merely as symbolic decoration but as a specialized craft—one that demanded technical skill, aesthetic sensitivity, and formal training or apprenticeship."

By identifying the individual hands behind ancient tattoos for the first time, the researchers show that prehistoric tattooers in Siberia were not unlike modern professionals today.

"This made me feel like we were much closer to seeing the people behind the art, how they worked and learned and made mistakes," Dr. Caspari concludes. "The images came alive."

More information: High-resolution near-infrared data reveal Pazyryk tattooing methods, Antiquity (2025). doi.org/10.15184/aqy.2025.10150

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An Anonymous Coward writes:

https://www.neowin.net/news/microsoft-bans-libreoffice-developers-account-without-warning-rejects-appeal/

Recently, we reported on LibreOffice, accusing Microsoft of intentionally using complex file formats as a tactic to lock in users to Microsoft Office, hindering open source alternatives like LibreOffice.

Now, Microsoft has banned LibreOffice developer, Mike Kaganski, from using its services, citing an "activity that violates [its] Services Agreement".

According to Mike, this happened last Monday when he tried to send a technical email to the LibreOffice dev mailing list, which is a normal part of his routine, but Thunderbird returned an error saying the message couldn't be sent. His account was blocked upon retry, and he found himself completely logged out of his Microsoft account.

He guessed that his mail and account were getting flagged by a bot or something, since he was quite sure that nothing in the mail violated Microsoft's terms of service.

cereal_burpist writes:

Radioactive wasp nest found at site where US once made nuclear bombs

Workers at a site in South Carolina that once made key parts for nuclear bombs in the United States have found a radioactive wasp nest but officials said there is no danger to anyone. Employees who routinely check radiation levels at the Savannah River Site near Aiken found a wasp nest on July 3 on a post near tanks where liquid nuclear waste is stored, according to a report from the US Department of Energy.

The nest had a radiation level 10 times what is allowed by federal regulations, officials said. The workers sprayed the nest with insect killer, removed it and disposed of it as radioactive waste. No wasps were found. The report said there is no leak from the waste tanks, and the nest was likely radioactive through what it called "onsite legacy radioactive contamination" from the residual radioactivity left from when the site was fully operational.

The watchdog group Savannah River Site Watch said the report was at best incomplete since it doesn't detail where the contamination came from, how the wasps might have encountered it and the possibility there could be another radioactive nest if there is a leak somewhere. Knowing the type of wasp nest could also be critical — some wasps make nest out of dirt and others use different material which could pinpoint where the contamination came from, Tom Clements, executive director of the group, wrote in a text message. "I'm as mad as a hornet that SRS didn't explain where the radioactive waste came from or if there is some kind of leak from the waste tanks that the public should be aware of," Clements said.

Freeman writes:

https://arstechnica.com/science/2025/07/scientists-use-peacock-feathers-to-make-frickin-laser-beams/

Peacock feathers are greatly admired for their bright iridescent colors, but it turns out they can also emit laser light when dyed multiple times, according to a paper published in the journal Scientific Reports. Per the authors, it's the first example of a biolaser cavity within the animal kingdom.

As previously reported, the bright iridescent colors in things like peacock feathers and butterfly wings don't come from any pigment molecules but from how they are structured.

[...] Essentially, they form a diffraction grating, except photonic crystals only produce certain colors, or wavelengths, of light, while a diffraction grating will produce the entire spectrum, much like a prism.

[...] There have been prior examples of random laser emissions in everything from stained bovine bones and blue coral skeletons to insect wings, parrot feathers, and human tissue, as well as salmon iridiphores.

[...] The authors of this most recent study were interested in whether they could produce similar laser emissions using peacock feathers and hopefully identify the specific mechanism. They cut away any excess lengths of barbs and mounted the feathers on an absorptive substrate. They then infused the feathers with common dyes by pipetting the dye solution directly onto them and letting them dry. The feathers were stained multiple times in some cases. Then they pumped the samples with pulses of light and measured any resulting emissions.

[...] The team observed laser emissions in two distinct wavelengths for all color regions of the feathers' eyespots, with the green color regions emitting the most intense laser light. However, they did not observe any laser emission from feathers that were only stained once, just in sample feathers that underwent multiple wetting and complete drying cycles.

[...] The authors were unable to identify the precise microstructures responsible for the lasing; it does not appear to be due to the keratin-coated melatonin rods. Co-author Nathan Dawson of Florida Polytechnic University suggested to Science that protein granules or similar small structures inside the feathers might function as a laser cavity. He and his colleague think that one day, their work could lead to the development of biocompatible lasers that could safely be embedded in the human body for sensing, imaging, and therapeutic purposes.

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looorg writes:

Microsoft tries to predict all the jobs where humans are doomed by the AI-overlords. It's a bit odd. They are basically predicting that everything that requires some kind of creativity or artistic endeavors will be replaced by AI. But all the hard manual labor will not. So sort of the exact opposite of what we wanted? We wanted machines to do all the boring hard work so we, the humans, could do the artistic and creative things. Now we are just going to be slaves to the machines then? Servants refilling their coolant and washing the server room floors.

Jobs least at risk are the once that require a body. Interacting with something else, another body or a large heavy machine. That is until the robot-ai-overlords come along and take those to. Then it's the Matrix farm for us all ...

https://www.windowscentral.com/artificial-intelligence/microsoft-reveals-40-jobs-about-to-be-destroyed-by-and-safe-from-ai

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/publication/working-with-ai-measuring-the-occupational-implications-of-generative-ai/?msockid=3e17f0da45306c3d2926e6e2445b6d7d

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

Intel provided more detail about the scope of its planned job cuts and other business changes while sharing its second-quarter earnings results. Reports in April suggested that Intel could eliminate around 20 percent of its staff in a restructuring plan. Today, the chipmaker said it anticipates having a core workforce of 75,000 employees by the end of 2025, down from 99,500 at the start of the year.

The numbers are even more dramatic when considering the company's downsizing efforts as a whole. This time last year, the chipmaker employed 116,500 across the globe, not including workers at its subsidiaries, and that number has fallen precipitously since. As of June 28, the company had 96,400 workers, meaning it's planning a reduction of more than 20,000 employees over the second half of the year.

These cuts are part of the company's current goal to bring its non-GAAP operating expenses down to $17 billion this year, then to $16 billion at the end of 2026. The effort to rein in spending is also leading Intel to abandon some previously announced expansions. The business will no longer embark on new projects in Germany and Poland, and it said it will consolidate its Costa Rican testing and assembly operations into existing efforts in Vietnam and Malaysia. Finally, it will also "slow the pace" of its stateside growth at a construction site in Ohio.

"Our operating performance demonstrates the initial progress we are making to improve our execution and drive greater efficiency," said Lip-Bu Tan, who has been forthright about his plans to downsize since assuming the CEO title in March. Tan was brought in to replace Pat Gelsinger in an effort to turn around Intel's business following a long, slow slide into financial trouble.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Trump caving on Nvidia H20 export curbs may disrupt his bigger trade war:

The next front in Donald Trump's trade war will be chip tariffs—which could come by next month—but national security experts are warning that the president may have already made a huge misstep that threatens to disrupt both US trade and national security.

In a letter Monday to Department of Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, 20 policymakers and professionals with a background in national security policy urged Trump to reverse course and block exports of Nvidia's H20 chips to China.

In April, the Trump administration decided against imposing additional export curbs on H20 chips after Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang paid $1 million for a seat at a Mar-a-Lago dinner, NPR reported. Apparently, Nvidia's promise to invest $500 billion in AI data centers helped persuade Trump to change course, as did the terms of a temporary truce with China, in which the US promised to halt H20 chip controls in exchange for China restoring imports of rare earth minerals into the US.

In their letter, national security experts expressed "deep concern" that Trump may not have considered how Nvidia's H20 chips could endanger the US military's "edge in artificial intelligence" while serving as a "potent accelerator of China's frontier AI capabilities."

While these chips can't be used for AI training like the Blackwell and H100 chips still restricted by export curbs, they're "optimized for inference, the process responsible for the dramatic capabilities gains made by the latest generation of frontier AI reasoning models," experts warned.

Most likely, China will use the chips for AI models deployed by its military to "enable autonomous weapons systems, intelligence surveillance platforms, and rapid advances in battlefield decision-making," experts said. In that way, "by supplying China with these chips, we are fueling the very infrastructure that will be used to modernize and expand the Chinese military," they warned.

The Trump administration is notably investigating how chip tariffs and imports could harm national security, with a report due out in two weeks, Lutnick announced today. That report will supposedly help Trump determine if relying too much on other countries for chips poses a national security threat.

But experts seem to fear that Trump isn't paying enough attention to how exports of US technology could threaten to not only supercharge China's military and AI capabilities but also drain supplies that US firms need to keep the US at the forefront of AI innovation.

"More chips for China means fewer chips for the US," experts said, noting that "China's biggest tech firms, including Tencent, ByteDance, and Alibaba," have spent $16 billion on bulk-ordered H20 chips over the past year.

Meanwhile, "projected data center demand from the US power market would require 90 percent of global chip supply through 2030, an unlikely scenario even without China joining the rush to buy advanced AI chips," experts said. If Trump doesn't intervene, one of America's biggest AI rivals could even end up driving up costs of AI chips for US firms, they warned.

"We urge you to reverse course," the letter concluded. "This is not a question of trade. It is a question of national security."

jelizondo writes:

TechCrunch has an interesting article about an engineer who is challenging the Defense Behemoths.

In the summer of 2021, Dimitrious Kottas made a move that would be unfathomable to most Silicon Valley engineers: after leaving his coveted position at Apple's Special Projects Group, he packed up his life in California and moved back to Athens to start a defense company.

Three and a half years later, his startup, Delian Alliance Industries, has set up solar-powered surveillance towers that monitor some of Greece's borders around the clock and detect wildfires on remote islands, along with a pipeline of other products, including concealed sea drones designed to keep enemies at bay.

But Kottas' most ambitious bet isn't on any particular technology — it's really that a small Greek startup can break through Europe's notoriously splintered defense market.

After earning recognition for his academic work at the University of Minnesota on GPS-denied navigation – research that he says has been cited over 1,400 times – he joined Apple in 2016, where he spent six years working on autonomous systems featuring cameras, lidars, and radars.

"At the heart of autonomy is perception," Kottas explained, describing how machines must understand not just where objects are but what they're doing and what they intend to do. "This lies at the heart of autonomy, and given autonomy is going to be at the heart of all future weapon systems, that's the core technology that's going to drive change in the defense industry over the next decade."

Rather than attempting to build the next-generation fighter jet, Kottas began with something pragmatic that he could sell more immediately: surveillance towers. The move was seemingly ripped from the playbook of eight-year-old weapons maker Anduril, which started off with software-augmented surveillance towers that it sold to U.S. Customs and Border Protection.

The most striking example is a two-meter suicide vessel that comes packed in a cylinder and is deployable months in advance on the seabed at depths where satellites and drones can't detect it. When remotely activated, it appears "out of nowhere to the enemy," Kottas told TechCrunch, adding that Delian has patented this approach, which uses commercial materials to manufacture the weapons at "large scale and really at extremely low cost."

Here's where Kottas' story gets more complicated. Despite Delian's technological achievements and operational success in Greece, the broader European market remains a formidable challenge. U.S. officials have reportedly been pressuring European countries to continue buying weapons from U.S. outfits. Further, European countries have long favored their homegrown defense companies

upstart writes:

A secretive space plane is set to launch and test quantum navigation technology:

On Monday, the Space Force announced that it will fly the small, Space Shuttle-shaped vehicle on the program's eighth mission next month. The launch of the vehicle, on a Falcon 9 rocket, is scheduled to occur no earlier than August 21 from Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

There are two active X-37Bs in the Space Force fleet, both built by Boeing. The first made its debut flight in April 2010. Since then, the two uncrewed spacecraft have made a succession of longer flights. The first made its longest and latest flight from 2020 to 2022 over a span of 908 days. The second flew more recently, landing at Vandenberg Space Force Base on March 7 after 434 days in orbit.

It's likely that the first of these two vehicles, both of which are about 29 feet (9 meters) long and roughly one-quarter the length of one of NASA's Space Shuttle orbiters, will launch next month.

Over the past decade and a half, the Space Force has largely remained silent about the purpose of this space plane, flying classified payloads and providing only limited information about the purpose of each flight.

However, for this flight, OTV-8, the military has provided a bit more detail about its intentions. The vehicle will fly with a service module that will expand its capacity for experiments, allowing the space plane to host payload for the Air Force Research Laboratory and the Defense Innovation Unit.

The mission's goals include tests of "high-bandwidth inter-satellite laser communications technologies."

upstart writes:

Anthropic unveils new rate limits to curb Claude Code power users:

Anthropic says its rolling out new weekly rate limits for Claude to curb usage among subscribers who are running its AI coding tool, Claude Code, "continuously in the background, 24/7." Anthropic says the rate limits also aim to stop a handful of users who are violating Claude's usage policy by sharing accounts and reselling access to Claude Code.

The new rate limits will go into effect August 28 for subscribers to Anthropic's $20-per-month Pro plan, as well as its $100- and $200-per-month Max plans, the company said Monday in an email to subscribers and a post on X.

Anthropic says its existing usage limits, which reset every five hours, will remain in place. The company is also introducing two new weekly rate limits that reset every seven days; one is an overall usage limit, whereas the other is specific to Anthropic's most advanced AI model, Claude Opus 4. Anthropic says Max subscribers can purchase additional usage, beyond what the rate limit provides, at standard API rates.

The announcement comes just weeks after Anthropic quietly introduced rate limits for Claude Code. The company said at the time it was aware of the issues but declined to elaborate further. While Anthropic's AI coding tool has been a hit with developers, the company seems to be having a difficult time serving it broadly. Anthropic's status page shows that Claude Code has experienced a partial or major outage at least seven times in the last month — perhaps because some power users seem to be running Claude Code nonstop.

"Claude Code has experienced unprecedented demand since launch," said Anthropic spokesperson Amie Rotherham in an email to TechCrunch about the weekly rate limits. Rotherham notes that "most users won't notice a difference," and that this limit will affect less than 5% of subscribers, based on their current usage patterns.

upstart writes:

Lawsuit: Meta may have seeded porn to minors while hiding piracy for AI training:

Porn sites may have blown up Meta's key defense in a copyright fight with book authors who earlier this year said that Meta torrented "at least 81.7 terabytes of data across multiple shadow libraries" to train its AI models.

Meta has defeated most of the authors' claims and claimed there is no proof that Meta ever uploaded pirated data through seeding or leeching on the BitTorrent network used to download training data. But authors still have a chance to prove that Meta may have profited off its massive piracy, and a new lawsuit filed by adult sites last week appears to contain evidence that could help authors win their fight, TorrentFreak reported.

The new lawsuit was filed last Friday in a US district court in California by Strike 3 Holdings—which says it attracts "over 25 million monthly visitors" to sites that serve as "ethical sources" for adult videos that "are famous for redefining adult content with Hollywood style and quality."

After authors revealed Meta's torrenting, Strike 3 Holdings checked its proprietary BitTorrent-tracking tools designed to detect infringement of its videos and alleged that the company found evidence that Meta has been torrenting and seeding its copyrighted content for years—since at least 2018. Some of the IP addresses were clearly registered to Meta, while others appeared to be "hidden," and at least one was linked to a Meta employee, the filing said.

According to Strike 3 Holdings, Meta "willfully and intentionally" infringed "at least 2,396 movies" as part of a strategy to download terabytes of data as fast as possible by seeding popular high-quality porn. Supposedly, Meta continued seeding the content "sometimes for days, weeks, or even months" after downloading them, and these movies may also have been secretly used to train Meta's AI models, Strike 3 Holdings alleged.

The porn site operator explained to the court that BitTorrent's protocol establishes a "tit-for-tat" mechanism that "rewards users who distribute the most desired content." It alleged that Meta took advantage of this system by "often" pirating adult videos that are "often within the most infringed files on BitTorrent websites" on "the very same day the motion pictures are released."

These tactics allegedly gave Meta several advantages, making it harder for Strike 3 Holdings' sites to compete, including potentially distributing the videos to minors for free without age checks in states that now require them.

jelizondo writes:

The Guardian posted a very thoughtful article about manipulation on the Web:

Many nations already enshrine a right not to be defrauded, and even a right not to be deceived. If a company sells you a new medicine, falsely claiming that it prevents cancer, it can be punished. If a firm convinces you to buy a new smartphone, saying that it has state-of-the-art features when it doesn't, it will have violated the law. But in the current era, many companies are taking our time and money not by defrauding or deceiving us, but by practising the dark art of manipulation.

They hide crucial terms in fine print. They automatically enrol you in a programme that costs money but does not benefit you at all. They make it easy for you to subscribe to a service, but extremely hard for you to cancel. They use "drip pricing", by which they quote you an initial number, getting you to commit to the purchase, only to add a series of additional costs, knowing that once you've embarked on the process, you are likely just to say "yeah, whatever". In its worst forms, manipulation is theft. It takes people's resources and attention, and it does so without their consent.

Manipulators are tricksters, and sometimes even magicians. They divert the eye and take advantage of people's weaknesses. Often they exploit simple ignorance. They fail to respect, and try to undermine, people's capacity to make reflective and deliberative choices. A manipulator might convince you to buy a useless health product, not by lying, but by appealing to your emotions, and by painting seductive pictures of how great you will feel once you use the product. Or they might tell you an anecdote about someone just like you, who used a supposed pain-relief product and felt better within 12 hours. Anecdotes have real power – but they can be profoundly misleading.

More insidiously still, manipulators might know about, and enlist, some of the central findings in contemporary behavioural economics, the field that explores how people depart from perfect rationality. All of us are vulnerable in this regard, subject to the "cognitive biases" elaborated by Daniel Kahneman, Amos Tversky, Richard Thaler and others, that affect our behaviour. These can be hard to recognize, and harder still to overcome.

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

Rising temperatures are causing water to evaporate and driving humans to extract more groundwater, which is moving freshwater from the land to the seas and creating a "continental drying" trend. Water is being depleted at sites around the world

Intensive groundwater pumping, evaporation and melting due to rising global temperatures have shifted a growing amount of freshwater from the continents to the oceans. This threatens water availability for most of the world’s population and adds to sea level rise.

These measurements show there have been alarming declines in freshwater in many parts of the world between 2002 and 2024. The researchers found dry regions aren’t just getting drier – a trend expected with climate change – they are also expanding by more than 800,000 square kilometres per year, an area about the size of the UK and France combined.

The team identified four “mega-drying” regions where separate areas of freshwater loss have now connected to create a swathe of drying. Those include northern Canada and Russia, where loss is driven by melting glaciers, permafrost and reduced snow.

In the other two regions, water loss is dominated by groundwater depletion, mainly from pumping for irrigation. Those are the US Southwest, much of Central America and a region stretching from western Europe and North Africa to northern India and China. They found groundwater depletion, which can be exacerbated by heat and drought prompting people to pump more, makes up 68 per cent of the decline in overall water storage.

This transfer of mass is so large it has become a major contributor to sea level rise. They found since 2015, water loss from the continents has caused more sea level rise than meltwater from the Antarctic or Greenland ice sheets, raising the oceans by just under a millimetre per year.

canopic jug writes:

Blogger Manuel "Manu" Moreale, based in Italy, reflects on interviewing people weekly about their blogs for a few years now.

The thing I wanted to spend some time reflecting on though, is not the significance of having done something every day for 100 weeks (something I honestly dont care too much about) but why all this matters. Not the series nor the interviews. Why blogs matter and why the people behind them matter.

He has published his 100^th such interview this week. Like all upstanding bloggers he even has an RSS feed.

Previously:
(2015) Blogging in Bangladesh - Hazardous Duty Pay Needed

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

https://www.osnews.com/story/142871/freebsd-15-0s-installer-to-gain-option-to-install-a-full-kde-plasma-desktop-environment/

One of the things lacking from the FreeBSD installation routine is the easy installation of a full desktop experience, from X11 all the way up to a login manager, desktop environment, and its applications. It seems this might finally change for FreeBSD 15.0, as the FreeBSD Foundation's Laptop Support and Usability Improvements project is working on adding support for this to bsdinstall, the FreeBSD installer.

Based on a goal set out in this GitHub issue, the way this will work is that through a set of dialogs (which you can check out on GitLab) in the FreeBSD installer, the user can select to install KDE, which will then guide the user through installing the correct graphics driver and adding users to the video group. Once the installation is finished, the computer will reboot and load directly into SDDM, allowing you to log into the installed KDE Plasma desktop environment.

[...] Future plans for desktop users in the FreeBSD installers are more elaborate, and will include additional desktop environments to choose from, the ability to install sets of desktop applications during FreeBSD's installation, and yes, even opting for Wayland instead of X11, because FreeBSD developers know which way the wind is blowing.

This is excellent news, and will make installing a FreeBSD-based desktop a lot easier for a ton of people. Work isn't fully completed just yet, but even if the developers miss their FreeBSD 15.0 target, it'll just move on to one of the follow-up releases.

Original Submission