SoylentNews

upstart writes:

The Paradox of the Lizard Tail, Solved:

When choosing between life and limb, many animals willingly sacrifice the limb.

[...] But lizards may be the best-known users of autotomy. To evade predators, many lizards ditch their still-wiggling tails. This behavior confounds the predator, buying the rest of the lizard time to scurry away. While there are drawbacks to losing a tail — they come in handy for maneuvering, impressing mates and storing fat — it beats being eaten. Many lizards are even capable of regenerating lost tails.

[...] Yong-Ak Song, a biomechanical engineer at New York University Abu Dhabi, calls this the "paradox of the tail": It must be simultaneously adherent and detachable. "It has to detach its tail quickly in order to survive," Dr. Song said of the lizard. "But at the same time, it cannot lose its tail too easily."

Recently, Dr. Song and his colleagues sought to solve the paradox by examining several freshly amputated tails. They did not want for test subjects — according to Dr. Song, the N.Y.U. Abu Dhabi campus is crawling with geckos. Using tiny loops attached to fishing rods, they rounded up several lizards from three species: two types of geckos and a desert lizard known as Schmidt's fringe-toed lizard.

[...] Back at the lab, they pulled the lizards' tails with their fingers, coaxing them into acts of autotomy. They filmed the resulting process at 3,000 frames per second using a high-speed camera. (The lizards were soon returned to where they were first found.) Then the scientists stuck the squirming tails under an electron microscope.

upstart writes:

World funds own destruction with $1.8 tn subsidies: study:

The world must slash $1.8 trillion in annual subsidies that destroy the environment, according to a study Thursday from business groups including one founded by tycoon Richard Branson.

[...] The vast subsidies, totalling two percent of global GDP, fund the "global destruction of nature" and governments worldwide must act, the two organisations added in a statement.

The study "finds the fossil fuel, agriculture and water industries receive more than 80 percent of all environmentally harmful subsidies per year", the organisations concluded.

And they called upon governments to "redirect, repurpose or eliminate" those subsidies by 2030 to help "finance a net zero global economy".

[...] "Nature is declining at an alarming rate, and we have never lived on a planet with so little biodiversity," said Christiana Figueres, head of The B Team's climate working group.

"At least $1.8 trillion is funding the destruction of nature and changing our climate, while creating huge risks for the very businesses who are receiving the subsidies."

She added that "harmful subsidies must be redirected towards protecting the climate and nature, rather than financing our own extinction".

Here's a high-level list of the top three and what they support:

• $640 billion: fossil fuels (climate change, air and water pollution, etc.)
• $520 billion: agriculture (soil erosion; water pollution, etc.)
• $350 billion: water industry (water pollution; risk to ocean and aterway ecosystems)

Original Submission

owl writes:

Dad takes down town's internet by mistake to get his kids offline:

A French dad faces jail time and a hefty fine after using a signal jammer to prevent his kids from going online and taking the rest of a nearby town down with them.

Starting at midnight and until 3 AM every day of the week, the French town of Messanges found that their cellular and Internet service were no longer working.

After a mobile carrier reported the issue to the Agence nationale des fréquences (ANFR), a public agency responsible for managing the radioelectric spectrum in France, it was determined that a signal jammer was being used to block radio frequencies in the town.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

The surprising structural reason your kitchen sponge is disgusting:

In a series of experiments, the scientists show how various microbial species can affect one another's population dynamics depending on factors of their structural environment such as complexity and size. Some bacteria thrive in a diverse community while others prefer a solitary existence. And a physical environment that allows both kinds to live their best lives leads to the strongest levels of biodiversity.

Soil provides this sort of optimal mixed-housing environment, and so does your kitchen sponge.

[...] The results, You says, create a framework for researchers working with diverse bacterial communities to begin testing what structural environments might work best for their pursuits. They also point toward why a kitchen sponge is such a useful habitat for microbes. It mimics the different degrees of separation found in healthy soil, providing different layers of separation combined with different sizes of communal spaces.

[...] To prove this point, the researchers also ran their experiment with a strip of regular household sponge. The results showed that it's an even better incubator of microbial diversity than any of the laboratory equipment they tested.

"As it turns out, a sponge is a very simple way to implement multilevel portioning to enhance the overall microbial community," You said. "Maybe that's why it's a really dirty thing -- the structure of a sponge just makes a perfect home for microbes."

Journal Reference:
Wu, Feilun, Ha, Yuanchi, Weiss, Andrea, et al. Modulation of microbial community dynamics by spatial partitioning, Nature Chemical Biology (DOI: 10.1038/s41589-021-00961-w)

Original Submission

canopic jug writes:

The Apple-1 Registry, currently maintained by Achim Baqué, has used handwriting analysis to solve the mystery of who hand wrote serial numbers on the first Apple-I motherboards. Photos of many boards and several actual boards were examined. One reason for the investigation not happening earlier is that the investigation required writing samples. Achim goes through that and other aspects of the investigation. After two forensic handwriting analyses, the result was clear.

Not on every Apple-1 computer is a serial number!

Some (not all!) Apple-1 of the 1^st batch have a handwritten number on the back which is obviously a serial number. None of the 2^nd batch (also called 'NTI' Apple-1) have a serial number. List of all known serial numbers on the back of some 1^st batch Apple-1.

There were many theories surrounding this number. Only Apple-1 computers sold by the Byte Shop seems to have this number. But nobody remembers where the number really comes from. Steve Wozniak, Steve Jobs, Daniel Kottke, Paul Terrell, the board manufacturer etc. all say that they didn't put the number on the mainboard. For a factory it would be very unusual to write a serial number [using a] magic marker on a pcb. Usually it was printed on the board or a label was used.

*SPOILER* (click to show) *SPOILER* (click to hide)

[...] Two forensic examinations in the USA using original Apple-1s have shown that Steve Jobs actually wrote the serial number on the first Apple-1. Another legacy of Steve Jobs.

The Apple-1 Registry is an online museum of the first model of Apple. Only 200 were made and fewer survived. Only 29 are known to have such serial numbers.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

You'll need a Microsoft account to set up future versions of Windows 11 Pro:

Now that Windows 11's first major post-release update has been issued, Microsoft has started testing a huge collection of new features, UI changes, and redesigned apps in the latest Windows Insider preview for Dev channel users. By and large, the changes are significant and useful—there's an overhauled Task Manager, folders for pinned apps in the Start menu, the renewed ability to drag items into the Taskbar (as you could in Windows 10), improvements to the Do Not Disturb and Focus modes, new touchscreen gestures, and a long list of other fixes and enhancements.

But tucked away toward the bottom of the changelog is one unwelcome addition: like the Home edition of Windows 11, the Pro version will now require an Internet connection and a Microsoft account during setup. In the current version of Windows 11, you could still create a local user account during setup by not connecting your PC to the Internet—something that also worked in the Home version of Windows 10 but was removed in 11. That workaround will no longer be available in either edition going forward, barring a change in Microsoft's plans.

While most devices do require a sign-in to fully enable app stores, cloud storage, and cross-device sharing and syncing, Windows 11 will soon stand alone as the only major consumer OS that requires account sign-in to enable even basic functionality.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

James Webb Space Telescope Locked Onto Guide Star for High Accuracy Mirror Alignment:

After starting the mirror alignment with Webb's first detection of starlight in the Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam), the telescope team is hard at work on the next steps for commissioning the telescope. To make more progress, the team needs to use another instrument, the Fine Guidance Sensor, to lock onto a guide star and keep the telescope pointed to high accuracy. We have asked René Doyon and Nathalie Ouellette of the Université de Montréal to explain how Webb uses its Canadian instrument in this process.

"After being powered on January 28, 2022, and undergoing successful aliveness and functional tests, Webb's Fine Guidance Sensor (FGS) has now successfully performed its very first guiding operation! Together with the Near-Infrared Imager and Slitless Spectrograph (NIRISS), the FGS is one of Canada's contributions to the mission.

"To ensure Webb stays locked on its celestial targets, the FGS measures the exact position of a guide star in its field of view 16 times per second and sends adjustments to the telescope's fine steering mirror about three times per second. In addition to its speed, the FGS also needs to be incredibly precise. The degree of precision with which it can detect changes in the pointing to a celestial object is the equivalent of a person in New York City being able to see the eye motion of someone blinking at the Canadian border 500 kilometers (311 miles) away!

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Discovery of key protein in malaria parasite opens door to novel treatment:

An international team has discovered a protein that plays a key biological role in a parasite that causes malaria. Deactivating this protein reduces in vitro growth of Plasmodium falciparum, the protozoa behind the most virulent form of the disease, by more than 75%. The team, led by Professor Dave Richard of Université Laval, recently published details of the discovery in the scientific journal mBio.

"This breakthrough could lead to the development of a treatment that targets a function of the parasite that no malaria drug has yet exploited," said Richard, professor in the Faculty of Medicine at Université Laval and researcher at CHU de Québec-Université Laval Research Centre.

Plasmodium falciparum is transmitted to humans through mosquito bites. After infecting the host's liver it circulates in the blood, hiding inside red blood cells and thereby avoiding attacks from the immune system. The parasite's main food source is hemoglobin, the protein that carries oxygen from the red blood cells to the rest of the body. The parasite digests the hemoglobin in structures called digestive vacuoles.

"The protein we discovered, PfPX1, is involved in transporting hemoglobin to these digestive vacuoles," said Professor Richard. "When we deactivate PfPX1, we deprive the parasite of its main source of amino acids. This has an impact on its growth and survival."

Journal Reference:
A Phosphoinositide-Binding Protein Acts in the Trafficking Pathway of Hemoglobin in the Malaria Parasite Plasmodium falciparum, mBio (DOI: 10.1128/mbio.03239-21)

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Three major browsers are about to hit version 100. Will websites cope?

This February Google put out Chrome 98, closely followed by Mozilla releasing Firefox 97. Soon both will hit version 100.

The memory of the web industry is short. This has happened before: when Opera reached version 10 in 2009, it caused problems, and just three years later, Firefox 10 faced similar issues.

And it will happen again. Google is planning to release Chrome 100 at the beginning of April, and Firefox 100 should follow in May.

Google anticipates that there will be some issues, so ever since Chrome 96 it has offered a facility to force the version number to 100: just go to chrome://flags and set #force-major-version-to-100.

Also at XDA Developers.

Original Submission

Freeman writes:

Corn ethanol no better—and probably worse—than burning gasoline, study says:

For over a decade, the US has blended ethanol with gasoline in an attempt to reduce the overall carbon pollution produced by fossil fuel-powered cars and trucks. But a new study says that the practice may not be achieving its goals. In fact, burning ethanol made from corn—the major source in the US—may be worse for the climate than just burning gasoline alone.

Corn drove demand for land and fertilizer far higher than previous assessments had estimated. Together, the additional land and fertilizer drove up ethanol's carbon footprint to the point where the lifecycle greenhouse gas emissions—from seed to tank—were higher than that of gasoline. Some researchers predicted [*] this might happen, but the new paper provides a comprehensive and retrospective look at the real-world results of the policy.

Proponents have long argued that corn-based ethanol bolsters farm incomes while providing a domestic source of renewable liquid fuel, while critics have said that its status as a carbon-reducing gasoline additive relies on questionable accounting. Based on the new study, both sides may be right.

Journal Reference:
Mark Z. Jacobson. Review of solutions to global warming, air pollution, and energy security, Energy & Environmental Science (DOI: 10.1039/B809990C)

Original Submission

Freeman submitted a story which became:

Facial recognition firm Clearview AI tells investors it's seeking massive expansion beyond law enforcement:

The facial recognition company Clearview AI is telling investors it is on track to have 100 billion facial photos in its database within a year, enough to ensure "almost everyone in the world will be identifiable," according to a financial presentation from December obtained by The Washington Post.

Those images — equivalent to 14 photos for each of the 7 billion people on Earth — would help power a surveillance system that has been used for arrests and criminal investigations by thousands of law enforcement and government agencies around the world.

And the company wants to expand beyond scanning faces for the police, saying in the presentation that it could monitor "gig economy" workers and is researching a number of new technologies that could identify someone based on how they walk, detect their location from a photo or scan their fingerprints from afar.

The 55-page "pitch deck," the contents of which have not been reported previously, reveals surprising details about how the company, whose work already is controversial, is positioning itself for a major expansion, funded in large part by government contracts and the taxpayers the system would be used to monitor.

The document was made for fundraising purposes, and it is unclear how realistic its goals might be. The company said that its "index of faces" has grown from 3 billion images to more than 10 billion since early 2020 and that its data collection system now ingests 1.5 billion images a month.

It's a long-format story that is very-well-supported and worth reading in its entirety.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Australian encryption laws used to force provider to help in homicide case:

When it comes to Australia's encryption laws, two out of the three arms can now be publicly said to have been used, following the release of the Telecommunications (Interception and Access) Act 1979 -- Annual Report 2020-21 this week.

In previous years, agencies had only used voluntary Technical Assistance Requests (TAR) to get service providers to help them, but the latest report shows NSW Police in the past year also turned to the first of the compulsory notices available.

That request, used in a homicide investigation, is the first use of a compulsory Technical Assistance Notice (TAN) to force a provider to use a capability they already possess. Assistance notices issued by state-level law enforcement are reviewed by the Commissioner of the Australian Federal Police (AFP).

This leaves the compulsory Technical Capability Notice (TCN) as the only form of notice yet to be publicly disclosed as used. The TCN forces providers to build a new capability for agencies and requires sign-off from the federal Attorney-General and Minister for Communications. The report said no TCNs were sought across the reporting period.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

A Network of Fake Test Answer Sites Is Trying to Incriminate Students – The Markup:

When Kurt Wilson, a computer science student at the University of Central Florida, heard that his university was using a controversial online proctoring tool called Honorlock, he immediately wanted to learn more.

The company, whose business has boomed during the pandemic, promises to ensure that remote students don't cheat on exams through AI-powered software used by students that "monitors each student's exam session and alerts a live, US-based test proctor if it detects any potential problems." The software can scan students' faces to verify their identity, track specific phrases that their computer microphone captures, and even promises to search for and remove test questions that leak online.

One feature from Honorlock especially piqued Wilson's interest. The company, according to its materials, provides a way to track cheating students through what Honorlock calls "seed sites" or others call "honeypots"—fake websites that remotely tattle on students who visit them during exams.

[...] But some experts in the ethics of education worry techniques like honeypot websites simply go too far.

upstart writes:

New Atomic Clocks Measure Time Dilation of Einstein's General Relativity at Millimeter Scale:

JILA physicists have measured Albert Einstein's theory of general relativity, or more specifically, the effect called time dilation, at the smallest scale ever, showing that two tiny atomic clocks, separated by just a millimeter or the width of a sharp pencil tip, tick at different rates.

The experiments, described in the February 17, 2022, issue of Nature, suggest how to make atomic clocks 50 times more precise than today's best designs and offer a route to perhaps revealing how relativity and gravity interact with quantum mechanics, a major quandary in physics.

[...] "The most important and exciting result is that we can potentially connect quantum physics with gravity, for example, probing complex physics when particles are distributed at different locations in the curved space-time," NIST/JILA Fellow Jun Ye said. "For timekeeping, it also shows that there is no roadblock to making clocks 50 times more precise than today — which is fantastic news."

upstart writes:

Meta policy head Clegg receives promotion to be on par with Zuckerberg and Sandberg:

Meta, formerly Facebook, has promoted its top policy executive Nick Clegg to a newly created president of global affairs role.

Clegg has worked at Meta for over three years. Prior to joining Facebook as its global affairs vice president in 2018, Clegg had served as Britain's deputy prime minister.

Meta founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg, in a post on his personal Facebook page, said Clegg's new role will see him lead Meta on all of its policy matters. It will also put him "at the level" of Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg, the company's chief operating officer.

"Nick will now lead our company on all our policy matters, including how we interact with governments as they consider adopting new policies and regulations, as well as how we make the case publicly for our products and our work," Zuckerberg said.

Original Submission