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Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Once again, Panama, home of the narrow land bridge that connects North and South America, could play an outsized role in mammal history.

Mammals from both continents crossed the Panamanian Isthmus when it arose 3 to 4 million years ago, an event known as the Great American Biotic Exchange. Camera trap research shows that history may be repeating itself as North American coyotes and South American crab-eating foxes have been detected in eastern Panama. It's the first time these canids, both members of the dog family, have been found in the same landscape.

"We may be seeing the start of the Not-So-Great American Biotic Exchange," says Roland Kays, wildlife biologist at North Carolina State University and corresponding author of a paper about the research in the Journal of Mammalogy.

More information: Allison W Hody et al. Canid collision—expanding populations of coyotes (Canis latrans) and crab-eating foxes (Cerdocyon thous) meet up in Panama, Journal of Mammalogy (2019). DOI: 10.1093/jmammal/gyz158

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upstart writes in with an IRC submission for SoyCow1337:

Travis Kalanick quits Uber's board, sells off all his Uber stock:

Travis Kalanick is leaving the board of Uber, the company he cofounded a decade ago and ran until his 2017 ouster. A spokesperson told CNBC that Kalanick has sold all of his remaining Uber stock, estimated to be worth around $2.5 billion.

[...] "Uber has been a part of my life for the past 10 years," Kalanick said in a Christmas Eve statement released by Uber. "At the close of the decade, and with the company now public, it seems like the right moment for me to focus on my current business and philanthropic pursuits."

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Personal computer CPU pioneer Chuck Peddle dies at 82:

Chuck Peddle, one of the most important engineers of the early home computing era, has died from pancreatic cancer at the age of 82. He's best known as the lead designer for MOS Technology's 6502, a low-cost processor (just $25 in 1975) that found its way into first-wave home computers like the Apple II and Commodore PET. Variants of that core design found their way into influential consoles like the Atari 2600 and NES. If you have nostalgia for the days when 8-bit computers were cutting edge, you likely owe a debt of gratitude to Peddle.

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upstart writes in with an IRC submission for chromas:

How Cruise Ships Bring 1,200 Tons of Toxic Fumes to Brooklyn a Year:

"Well, that's good," [Mr. Armstrong] finally said. "That's the way it should have been for the last decade since they built this thing."

"This thing" is the $21 million plug-in station that Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg and the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey agreed to introduce in Red Hook several years ago in an effort to eliminate 1,200 tons of carbon dioxide, 25 tons of nitrous oxide and tons of hazardous particulate matter spewed out each year by cruise ships idling off Brooklyn's coast.

When not using shore power, a single cruise ship docked for one day can emit as much diesel exhaust as 34,400 idling tractor-trailers, according to an independent analysis verified by the Environmental Protection Agency. When a ship is plugged in, the agency said, its exhaust is nearly eliminated.

But the system has hardly been used after going into operation in 2016. And New York City is expected to announce design plans next year that would expand and modernize terminals in Brooklyn and Manhattan to accommodate the world's largest cruise ships, and more of them.

Yet there is no plan to further expand the shore power system.

Neighborhood residents, led by Mr. Armstrong, are sounding the alarm. They want the pollution controls that were promised by the Bloomberg administration. They fault the city and state for failing to force the matter, and the cruise line companies for failing to use the system.

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Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

With countries such as Iceland, Costa Rica, New Zealand, and Norway adopting green energy practices, renewable energy now accounts for a third of the world's power. As this trend continues, more and more countries are looking to offshore energy sources to produce this renewable energy. In an Opinion publishing December 17 in the journal Trends in Ecology and Evolution, researchers identify situations where green technology such as wind turbines, wave energy converters, and other marine renewable energy devices (MREDs) have had negative consequences on marine life.

While the researchers don't want to slow down active responses to climate change, they do encourage those making the decision to implement MREDs into marine habitats to consider the impact of this technology, such as head trauma and hearing loss, on marine animals before beginning construction.

"When people put a wind farm in their back yard, neighbors might complain that it's ugly and want it moved," says first author Andrew Wright, an ocean and ecosystem scientist at the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada. "So, they think, why not put it off shore where we can't see it and then there's no problems? The assumption there is that it's just an aesthetic problem. But there's a lot more to it."

Journal Reference: Andrew J. Wright, Claryana Araújo-Wang, John Y. Wang, Peter S. Ross, Jakob Tougaard, Robin Winkler, Melissa C. Márquez, Frances C. Robertson, Kayleigh Fawcett Williams, Randall R. Reeves. How ‘Blue’ Is ‘Green’ Energy? Trends in Ecology & Evolution, 2019; DOI: 10.1016/j.tree.2019.11.002

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upstart writes in with an IRC submission for AzumaHazuki:

Researchers want to use Mega Man 2 to evaluate AI:

Games have long served as a training ground for AI algorithms, and not without good reason. Games — particularly video games — provide challenging environments against which to benchmark autonomous systems. In 2013, a team of researchers introduced the Arcade Learning Environment, a collection of over 55 Atari 2600 games designed to test a broad range of AI techniques. More recently, San Francisco research firm OpenAI detailed Procgen Benchmark, a set of 16 virtual worlds that measure how quickly models learn generalizable skills.

The next frontier might be Mega Man, if an international team of researchers have their way. In a newly published paper on the preprint server Arxiv.org, they propose EvoMan, a game-playing competition based on the eight boss fights in Capcom's cult classic Mega Man 2. As they describe it, competitors' goal is to train an AI agent to defeat every enemy and evaluate their performances by common metrics.

Fabricio Olivetti de Franca, Denis Fantinato, Karine Miras, A.E. Eiben, Patricia Vargas, EvoMan: Game-playing Competition, https://arxiv.org/pdf/1912.10445.pdf

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upstart writes in with an IRC submission for chromas:

I Tried Two New Upstart Social Networks. I Found ... Very Little.:

There have always been new social media sites hoping to take Facebook's place the way it took Myspace's. Diaspora, launched in 2010, is a nonprofit promising users ownership of the site. Ello, created in 2014, vowed to stay ad-free. Mastodon, which is more similar to Twitter, is an open-source and decentralized platform that has been steadily growing since it came onto the scene in 2016. I have accounts on all three, so when Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales took to Twitter to announce his new social media network WT Social in November of this year, I figured I'd join that too. At first glance, the sign-up was typical for any social platform: submit your name and email to join a waitlist. But I also noticed something else. Whereas Diaspora, Ello, and Mastodon are all currently free, WT Social offers an option to buy a paid membership, of a sort. Wales mentioned in his first Twitter thread about the platform that he was inspired to ditch the typical social media advertising model and move toward a system where some users choose to pay, so WT Social gives users the option of contributing $12.99/month or $100/year. To sweeten the deal, doing so allows new users to skip the sign-up waitlist. I am a cheapskate, though, so I joined for free and received instructions about setting up my account just four days later.

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for chromas:

Why your cat is lousy at chess yet way smarter than even the most advanced AI:

If you share your home with a dog or a cat, look at it carefully and you will get a good overview of everything we don't know how to do in artificial intelligence.

"But my cat does nothing all day except sleep, eat and wash herself," you may think. And yet your cat knows how to walk, run, jump (and land on her feet), hear, see, watch, learn, play, hide, be happy, be sad, be afraid, dream, hunt, eat, fight, flee, reproduce, educate her kittens – and the list is still very long.

Each of these actions requires processes that are not directly "intelligence" in the most common sense but are related to cognition and animal intelligence. All animals have their own cognition, from the spider that weaves its web to the guide dogs that help people find their way. Some can even communicate with us. Not by speech, of course, but cats and dogs don't hesitate to use body language and vocalization – meowing, barking, wagging their tails – to get what they want.

Let's look again at your cat. When she comes carelessly to rub up against you or sits in front of her bowl or in front of a door, the message is quite clear. She is looking for a caress, is hungry or wants to go out (then get in, then out, then in...). She has learned to interact with you to achieve her goals.

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An Anonymous Coward writes:

You know the time of the year when it's all winding down, people are going on holidays, and there's not much left to do but clock people on for overtime coverage through the lazy holidays. Not so much for one intrepid IT worker who found a newly acquired company IT team had installed a database application into a Dropbox account which was failing due to lack of space. It doesn't end there, with the Dropbox being used as version control and the DEVs syncing the data locally for changes making updates extremely slow. This is a classic example of simple decisions landsliding into a complete cluster ferk.

What's the worst you've dealt with right before the holidays?

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upstart writes in with an IRC submission for chromas:

Reports of patients' deaths linked to heart devices lurk below radar:

The Food and Drug Administration continues to file thousands of reports of patients' deaths related to medical devices through a reporting system that keeps the safety data out of the public eye.

The system is similar to a vast program exposed earlier this year by KHN that kept device-injury reports effectively hidden within the agency. The FDA shuttered the program after the article about it was published and released millions of records.

The result of this remaining so-called registry exemption program is that key death data about heart devices sits in inaccessible FDA reports that can take up to two years for the public to see under open-records laws. Device-related death reports are typically open, allowing researchers to track and alert their peers about safety concerns.

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for SoyCow1337:

Judge blocks NYC's law limiting Uber drivers 'cruising' for new passengers:

New York City's law to limit the amount of time Uber and Lyft drivers can spend cruising for passengers in busy parts of the city is "arbitrary and capricious," a New York State Supreme Court judge ruled Monday.

Last summer, the city's Taxi and Limousine passed rules requiring drivers reduce so-called deadheading — or the amount of time spent without passengers in the car — from 41 percent to 31 percent in Manhattan below 96th Street. The city said it was trying to reduce traffic congestion, which has risen in the years since ride-hailing took off. Uber sued to overturn the law, arguing it threatened driver pay and flexibility.

In his ruling, Judge Lyle E. Frank took issue with the city's definition of "cruising." He said there was "no rational basis" to calculate the time drivers spend looking for new passengers as part of the definition. And there was "scant rationale" for the city's choice of 31 percent as the target for deadheading. Frank annulled the rule, which would have gone into effect starting in February.

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upstart writes in with an IRC submission for SoyCow1337:

DJI patents an off-road rover with a stabilized camera on top – TechCrunch:

DJI is easily the leading brand when it comes to camera drones, but few companies have even attempted a ground-based mobile camera platform. The company may be moving in that direction, though, if this patent for a small off-road vehicle with a stabilized camera is any indication.

The Chinese patent, first noted by DroneDJ, shows a rather serious-looking vehicle platform with chunky tires and a stabilized camera gimbal. As you can see in the image above, the camera mount is protected against shock by springs and pneumatics, which would no doubt react actively to sudden movements.

The image is no simple sketch like those you sometimes see of notional products and “just in case” patents — this looks like a fleshed-out mechanical drawing of a real device. Of course, that doesn’t mean it’s coming to market at all, let alone any time soon. But it does suggest that DJI’s engineers have dedicated real time and effort to making this thing a reality.

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upstart writes in with an IRC submission for chromas:

New Gene-Edited Tomatoes Can Now Be Grown In Grape-Like Bouquets:

Tomatoes are a tough fruit to cultivate at times. Grown from long vines, they are not well suited for cramped spaces but thanks to a new gene-edited strain of tomatoes, the popular fruit can now be grown from a bush, making them much more amenable to urban farming.

Researchers have used CRISPR/Cas9 gene-editing to create a new strain of tomatoes that grow from bushes rather than vines, taking the often difficult-to-cultivate fruit and making it much more amenable to urban farming.

In a newly-published study in the journal Nature Biotechnology, Zarchary[sic] Lippman -- a plant biologist at New York State's Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory -- and his colleagues describe the process used to create the new strain.

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upstart writes in with an IRC submission for SoyCow1337:

Today in Christmas miracles: a failed electric scooter company is getting bailed out:

It's a Christmas micromobility miracle!

Failed scooter business Unicorn is getting bailed out by rival company Unagi, after Unicorn had to shut down recently without any money leftover for refunds. David Hyman, CEO of Unagi, told The Verge that he can offer a $1,000 Unagi electric scooter to any of the 350 people who bought Unicorn scooters. Nick Evans, CEO of Unicorn and co-creator of gadget tracker Tile, confirmed the deal, and said he will offer refunds to anyone who doesn't want the Unagi scooter and just wants their money back.

"We put together a creative solution," Evans said. "I'll be paying out of pocket personally to get this done, and it's been pretty challenging, but I definitely want to do right by everyone."

"It will cost us some money," Hyman said, "but it's some Christmas good will too."

[...] Hyman thought maybe he would buy Unicorn's domain name and then reroute customers to Unagi's website. But after further discussion they arrived at a different arrangement. First, Evans would wire an undisclosed sum into Hyman's account. (Neither Hyman nor Evans would say how much.) Then, customers who bought a Unicorn scooter can choose one of two options: a free Unagi scooter or a full refund.

"I want this to end up with people better off than if they'd got a Unicorn scooter," Evans said.

Hyman says he risks pissing off the several thousand people who bought an Unagi scooter at full price, but it was worth to spread a little holiday cheer.

"Here comes Hanukkah Harry on the electric scooter," he said.

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upstart writes in with an IRC submission for SoyCow1337:

Twitter bug used to match millions of user phone numbers – TechCrunch:

A security researcher said he has matched 17 million phone numbers to Twitter user accounts by exploiting a flaw in Twitter’s Android app.

Ibrahim Balic found that it was possible to upload entire lists of generated phone numbers through Twitter’s contacts upload feature. “If you upload your phone number, it fetches user data in return,” he told TechCrunch.

He said Twitter’s contact upload feature doesn’t accept lists of phone numbers in sequential format — likely as a way to prevent this kind of matching. Instead, he generated more than two billion phone numbers, one after the other, then randomized the numbers, and uploaded them to Twitter through the Android app. (Balic said the bug did not exist in the web-based upload feature.)

Over a two-month period, Balic said he matched records from users in Israel, Turkey, Iran, Greece, Armenia, France and Germany, he said, but stopped after Twitter blocked the effort on December 20.

Balic provided TechCrunch with a sample of the phone numbers he matched. Using the site’s password reset feature, we verified his findings by comparing a random selection of usernames with the phone numbers that were provided.

In one case, TechCrunch was able to identify a senior Israeli politician using their matched phone number.

While he did not alert Twitter to the vulnerability, he took many of the phone numbers of high-profile Twitter users — including politicians and officials — to a WhatsApp group in an effort to warn users directly.

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