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hubie writes:

Breaking down rich gameplay into cognitive skills:

Parents and pundits may no longer argue that gamers are indulging in brainless activities in front of their screens. And gamers may finally feel a sense of vindication.

[...] "Video games can be made to engage and characterize distinct cognitive abilities while still retaining the entertainment value that popular titles offer," says Tomihiro Ono, lead author of the joint study in Scientific Reports.

He adds, "For example, we found that there are in-game micro-level connections such as between stealth behavior and abstract thinking, aiming and attention, and targeting and visual discrimination."

[...] Although existing literature and general beliefs regarding similar action video games already suggest the advantage that younger males may have over other demographic groups, the researchers did not expect to obtain measurements reflecting stark differences even after accounting for gaming experience.

"The lack of a connection between cognitive abilities and video game elements in aged players came as a surprise," Ono notes.

To attain more scientific insight into the psyche of gamers, such as in why computer games have positive influences on some players, the researchers posit that studies using games ought to avoid one-size-fits-all approaches, as demographic factors and game experience can be assumed to affect results.

Journal Reference:
Ono, T., Sakurai, T., Kasuno, S. et al. Novel 3-D action video game mechanics reveal differentiable cognitive constructs in young players, but not in old [open]. Sci Rep 12, 11751 (2022). 10.1038/s41598-022-15679-5

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upstart writes:

Mozilla wants FTC to fine Big Tech's surveillance giants:

Mozilla's Chief Security Officer Marshall Erwin urged federal regulators to crack down on internet giants and web browser makers that don't protect their users' privacy — and to make them pay penalties for bad behavior.

"Privacy online is a mess, consumers are stuck in this vicious cycle in which their data is collected, often without their understanding, and then used to manipulate them," Erwin said during a US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) forum today on commercial surveillance and data security. "We see this rule-making process as a real opportunity to break that cycle."

The FTC is considering imposing stricter privacy rules on corporations to deter unwelcome online monitoring and shoddy data security. Thursday's public session was an early step in that rule-making process.

In August, the watchdog issued "advance notice of proposed rulemaking," and now, through October 21, it's seeking public comment about the "harms" related to businesses' collecting, analyzing, and monetizing people's information.

While any proposed rule will be put to a vote by FTC commissioners, it's worth noting that the regulator's choice of words — using the term "surveillance" rather than a euphemism such as "data gathering" — along with a recent lawsuit against data broker Kochava — seem to indicate it is inclined to codify some type of privacy regulations to limit companies' appetite for information harvesting.

hubie writes:

Chapman University biologist says physiology shifts gears from anticipating sickness to defense mode:

Surrounded by coworkers who are sniffling and sneezing?

You may not be able to ask for sick leave preemptively, but your body is already preparing for battle, says Patricia C. Lopes, assistant professor of biological sciences at Chapman University's Schmid College of Science and Technology.

[...] Lopes' article in the British Ecological Society journal Functional Ecology "Anticipating infection: How parasitism risk changes animal physiology" highlights research showing that there are scenarios in which our physiology changes prior to becoming sick, when disease risk is high.

"In other words," Lopes, explains, "our brains can obtain information from diseased people and then elicit changes to our physiology. For example, observing images of sick people can already trigger activation of the immune system."

From a big picture perspective, this means that parasites affect our lives much more than previously considered, because they are already affecting our physiology even before they invade us, she says.

Journal Reference:
Patricia C. Lopes, Anticipating infection: How parasitism risk changes animal physiology [open], Functional Ecology, 2022. DOI: 10.1111/1365-2435.14155

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upstart writes:

Court: Yeah, No One's Going To Feel They're Free To Go When Cops Are Firing Bullets Through Their Front Door:

Consent can mean a lot of things when you're accosted by cops. Law enforcement officers tend to feel it's always voluntary, even when you're sitting in an interrogation room for what the "good cop" refers to as a "friendly chat" meant to "clear everything up."

Whenever a seizure is challenged, if cops didn't have the requisite reasonable suspicion or probable cause to support the stop, they and their lawyers will almost always claim the stop was consensual and the person now suing or trying to suppress evidence was free to go.

[...] The timeline leading the Fourth Amendment violation is pretty clear. There are recordings of the incident, which alone makes it an anomaly. From those recordings and testimony of all involved, the Sixth Circuit reconstructs the late evening welfare check that devolved into (police) violence.

Officers were sent to the home of Mark and Sherrie Campbell following two hangup calls to 911. The deputies did not activate their emergency lights once on the property but aimed their headlights at the front door. Deputy Fox knocked on the front door but did not state he was a law enforcement officer. Mark Campbell answered and asked the deputy through the closed door if the officer had a gun. This conversation (such as it were...) continued for a few more seconds.

Mark Campbell then told the deputy he "had one too" (referring to gun possession). He then opened the door. Deputy Fox then turned back to the door and fired two shots through it. The other deputy (Christopher Austin) tripped and fell to the ground. Deputy Fox asked if Deputy Austin was OK and then turned and fired six more shots through the front door. All of this occurred within 30 seconds of the officers' arrival.

upstart writes:

NASA to try again with SLS Moon rocket launch this month:

NASA will attempt, for the third time now, to blast off its Space Launch System (SLS) rocket to the Moon in late September.

Officials are targeting September 23 at the earliest, and September 27 as a potential backup should it have to scrub the launch yet again. Jim Free, NASA's associate administrator of Exploration Systems Development, confirmed at a briefing on Thursday the American space agency had asked the US Space Force division for approval to fly on those dates.

Designed to fly the first woman and another man to the Moon sometime this decade (ideally) under the Artemis program, the SLS is NASA's most powerful rocket to date.

Its launch, if and when it happens, will be the rocket's first major test, during which it will carry an unmanned crew capsule into space so that the pod can detach and circle the Moon before returning to Earth. When it is time to set foot on the lunar surface again, an SLS rocket will be used to send a capsule carrying astronauts to the Moon, using a SpaceX lander to bring them down to the regolith.

But with two failed SLS launches so far and costs totaling more than $20 billion for an expendable launch vehicle that was once planned to lift off in 2016, skeptics say NASA should stop building its own rockets and just subcontract it all out to private companies, such as SpaceX.

The SLS has remained grounded at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida since it was rolled out in August. The first attempt to launch on August 29 was called off due to a faulty sensor reading that led officials to believe one of its engines may be running too hot. The second attempt on September 3 was also cancelled after a hydrogen leak was detected.

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Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

The natural world possesses its own intrinsic electrical grid composed of a global web of tiny bacteria-generated nanowires in the soil and oceans that "breathe" by exhaling excess electrons.

In a new study, Yale University researchers discovered that light is a surprising ally in fostering this electronic activity within biofilm bacteria. Exposing bacteria-produced nanowires to light, they found, yielded an up to a 100-fold increase in electrical conductivity.

[...] Almost all living things breathe oxygen to get rid of excess electrons when converting nutrients into energy. Without access to oxygen, however, soil bacteria living deep under oceans or buried underground over billions of years have developed a way to respire by "breathing minerals," like snorkeling, through tiny protein filaments called nanowires.

When bacteria were exposed to light, the increase in electrical current surprised researchers because most of the bacteria tested exist deep in the soil, far from the reach of light. Previous studies had shown that when exposed to light nanowire-producing bacteria grew faster.

[...] "It is a completely different form of photosynthesis," Malvankar said. "Here, light is accelerating breathing by bacteria due to rapid electron transfer between nanowires."

Malvankar's lab is exploring how this insight into bacterial electrical conductivity could be used to spur growth in optoelectronics—a subfield of photonics that studies devices and systems that find and control light—and capture methane, a greenhouse gas known to be a significant contributor to global climate change.

Journal Reference:
Neu, J., Shipps, C.C., Guberman-Pfeffer, M.J. et al. Microbial biofilms as living photoconductors due to ultrafast electron transfer in cytochrome OmcS nanowires. Nat Commun 13, 5150 (2022). 10.1038/s41467-022-32659-5

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Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

A joint U.S.-French Earth science mission is ready to be delivered to California for a launch now scheduled for early December, a slight delay caused in part because of transportation issues.

Thales Alenia Space, the prime contractor for the Surface Water and Ocean Topography (SWOT) spacecraft, said Sept. 6 it is making final preparations to ship the two-ton spacecraft from its factory in Cannes, France, to Vandenberg Space Force Base in California. There, it will be integrated with a SpaceX Falcon 9 for a launch no earlier than Dec. 5.

SWOT, a joint mission of NASA and the French space agency CNES, with participation from the Canadian Space Agency and U.K. Space Agency, will carry out observations for oceanography and hydrology using a synthetic aperture radar, altimeter and other instruments. Scientists plan to use SWOT to conduct a global survey of the Earth’s water, including measuring changes in lakes and rivers as well as ocean currents.

[...] “We had a slight issue with the transport of it,” said Kathleen Boggs, acting associate director for flight programs in NASA’s Earth science division, at an Aug. 2 advisory committee meeting. “It was supposed to come back on a Ukrainian Antonov aircraft that was provided by CNES.”

Those aircraft, though, have largely been grounded because of sanctions and other issues linked to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

FCC Does The Bare Minimum: Asks Wireless Carriers To Be Honest About Location Data:

It took fifteen years filled with constant scandal, but the FCC finally recently announced that it would be "cracking down on" wireless carrier abuse of consumer location data, thanks to pressure from our new post-Roe reality. This "crackdown" involves politely asking the nation's top wireless carriers to disclose what kind of location data they were collecting, and who they've been sharing and selling it to.

Wireless carriers have now shared their responses with the FCC, all of which have been posted to the agency's website:

[...] So basically the FCC is asking an industry with a history of lying about this stuff to be transparent about what they're collecting and selling, and if they're very clearly breaking fairly flimsy agency rules, they might face penalties. Someday. If those enforcements can survive an agency that's been intentionally vote gridlocked by the telecom industry.

[...] While there are some wireless carriers who claim to never collect or sell user location data, others (notably Verizon and AT&T) utilize familiar legalese to suggest the collection and sale of this data is tightly controlled, anonymous, and secure, despite the fact that, again, fifteen years of scandals have shown that's very much never been the case.

upstart writes:

Ireland fines Instagram a record $400 Million over children's data:

[...] Ireland's data privacy regulator has agreed to levy a record fine of 405 million euros ($402 million) against social network Instagram following an investigation into its handling of children's data, a spokesperson for the watchdog said.

Instagram plans to appeal against the fine, a spokesperson for parent Meta Platforms Inc (META.O) said in an emailed statement.

The investigation, which started in 2020, focused on child users between the ages of 13 and 17 who were allowed to operate business accounts, which facilitated the publication of the user's phone number and/or email address.

"We adopted our final decision last Friday and it does contain a fine of 405 million euro," said the spokesperson for Ireland's Data Protection Commissioner (DPC), the lead regulator of Instagram's parent company Meta Platforms Inc (META.O).

Full details of the decision will be published next week, he said.

Instagram updated its settings over a year ago and has since released new features to keep teens safe and their information private, the Meta spokesperson said.

Original Submission

hubie writes:

A projected shortage of sulfuric acid could stifle green technology advancement and threaten global food security:

The study, published in the Royal Geographical Society (with the Institute of British Geographers) journal The Geographical Journal, highlights that global demand for sulfuric acid is set to rise significantly from '246 to 400 million tonnes' by 2040 - a result of more intensive agriculture and the world moving away from fossil fuels.

[...] A vital part of modern manufacturing, sulfuric acid is required for the production of phosphorus fertilisers that help feed the world, and for extracting rare metals from ores essential to the rapidly required green economy transition, like cobalt and nickel used in high-performance Li-ion batteries.

Currently, over 80% of the global sulfur supply is in the form of sulfur waste from the desulfurisation of crude oil and natural gas that reduces the sulfur dioxide gas emissions that cause acid rain. However, decarbonisation of the global economy to deal with climate change will significantly reduce the production of fossil fuels - and subsequently the supply of sulfur.

[...] "What we're predicting is that as supplies of this cheap, plentiful, and easily accessible form of sulfur dry up, demand may be met by a massive increase in direct mining of elemental sulfur. This, by contrast, will be dirty, toxic, destructive, and expensive.

[...] The authors also explore several ways that demand for sulfur could be reduced as part of the transition to post-fossil fuel economies, including recycling phosphorus in wastewater for the fertiliser industry, by increasing the recycling of lithium batteries, or by using lower energy capacity/weight ratio batteries, as these require less sulfur for their production.

[...] However, they conclude that by recognising the sulfur crisis now, national and international policies can be developed to manage future demand, increase resource recycling, and develop alternative cheap supplies that have minimal environmental and social impact.

Journal Reference:
Mark Maslin, Livia Van Heerde, Simon Day. Sulfur: A potential resource crisis that could stifle green technology and threaten food security as the world decarbonises [open], Geogr J, 2022. DOI: 10.1111/geoj.12475

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

[...] President Joe Biden signed the CHIPS Act into law in early August to help boost the US chip manufacturing industry amid a global microchip shortage.

As part of a plan to restore the US semiconductor industry and protect national security interests, the CHIPS Act prohibits US tech companies that receive federal funding from building new, advanced factories in China for at least 10 years.

"Companies who receive CHIP funds can't build leading-edge or advanced technology facilities in China for a period of 10 years," Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo said in a press briefing Tuesday. "Companies who receive the money can only expand their mature node factories in China to serve the Chinese market."

One of the main objectives of the CHIPS Act is to "establish and expand domestic production of leading-edge semiconductors in the United States" to help reduce reliance on foreign producers like China, Raimondo said. "The United States consumes more than 25% of the world's leading-edge chips and produces zero of those chips."

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Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

NASA’s DART spacecraft is due to collide with the smaller body of the Didymos binary asteroid system in September 2022.

From this distance—about 20 million miles away from DART—the Didymos system is still very faint, and navigation camera experts were uncertain whether DRACO would be able to spot the asteroid yet. However, once the 243 images DRACO took during this observation sequence were combined, the team was able to enhance it to reveal Didymos and pinpoint its location.

This image of the light from asteroid Didymos and its orbiting moonlet Dimorphos is a composite of 243 images taken by the Didymos Reconnaissance and Asteroid Camera for Optical navigation (DRACO) aboard DART on July 27, 2022. Credit: NASA JPL DART Navigation Team

“This first set of images is being used as a test to prove our imaging techniques,” said Elena Adams. She is the DART mission systems engineer at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) in Laurel, Maryland. “The quality of the image is similar to what we could obtain from ground-based telescopes, but it is important to show that DRACO is working properly and can see its target to make any adjustments needed before we begin using the images to guide the spacecraft into the asteroid autonomously.”

“[...] Seeing the DRACO images of Didymos for the first time, we can iron out the best settings for DRACO and fine-tune the software,” said Julie Bellerose, the DART navigation lead at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. “In September, we’ll refine where DART is aiming by getting a more precise determination of Didymos’ location.”

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

If you were just looking at his LinkedIn page, you’d certainly think Mai Linzheng was a top-notch engineer. With a bachelor’s degree from Tsinghua, China’s top university, and a master’s degree in semiconductor manufacturing from UCLA, Mai began his career at Intel and KBR, a space tech company, before ending up at SpaceX in 2013. Having spent the past eight years and nine months working in the human race to space, he’s now a senior technician.

[...] Upon closer inspection, there are plenty of red flags: Despite having been in the US for 18 years, Mai has written all his job titles, degrees, and company locations in Chinese. His bachelor's degree is in business management, even though his alma mater, Tsinghua, only offers that degree to student athletes, and Mai was not one. Besides, the man in his profile photo looks younger than Mai’s stated age. The image, as it turns out, was stolen from Korean influencer Yang In-mo's Instagram. In fact, none of the information on this page is true.

[...] Scammers “are always thinking about different ways to victimize people, victimize companies,” Sean Ragan, the FBI’s special agent in charge of the San Francisco and Sacramento field offices, told CNBC in June. “And they spend their time doing their homework, defining their goals and their strategies, and their tools and tactics that they use.” He called the work of these criminals a “significant threat.” 

upstart writes:

The EU publishes draft regulations on smartphone spare parts and battery life, including requiring that manufacturers supply 15+ parts for at least five years:

Smartphone manufacturers supplying the EU will face stringent requirements to provide spare parts and ensure longer battery life, according to draft proposals published by Brussels on Wednesday.

The European Commission said that at least 15 different component parts should be made available for at least five years from the date of a smartphone's introduction to the market and that batteries should survive at least 500 full charges without deteriorating to below 83 per cent of their capacity.

[...] The draft regulations, which also cover tablets and standard mobile phones, suggest that if hardware is made more repairable and recyclable it would cut the energy consumption involved in its production and use by a third.

"Devices are often replaced prematurely by users and are, at the end of their useful life, not sufficiently reused or recycled, leading to a waste of resources," the document said.

[...] Smartphone makers argue that requiring more parts to be available simply increases the consumption of plastic.

Digital Europe, which represents the tech industry, said: "A potential overproduction, subsequent warehousing and destruction of spare parts will naturally result in wasted resources, reduced material efficiency and negative economic value ultimately resulting in higher costs for the consumer."

[...] "It will be a burden for the lesser brands and I'm sure we'll start to see limitations of smartphone models they will offer in the EU market," he said. "The net effect may very well be to make smartphones less affordable or wipe out the ultra-low cost category altogether."

Draft regulation

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Honoring Peter Eckersley, Who Made the Internet a Safer Place for Everyone:

With deep sadness, EFF mourns the loss of our friend, the technologist, activist, and cybersecurity expert Peter Eckersley. Peter worked at EFF for a dozen years and was EFF's Chief Computer Scientist for many of those. Peter was a tremendous force in making the internet a safer place. He was recently diagnosed with colon cancer and passed away suddenly on Friday.

The impact of Peter's work on encrypting the web cannot be overstated. The fact that transport layer encryption on the web is so ubiquitous that it's nearly invisible is thanks to the work Peter began. [...]

While encrypting the web would have been enough, Peter played a central role in many groundbreaking projects to create free, open source tools that protect the privacy of users' internet experience by encrypting communications between web servers and users. Peter's work at EFF included privacy and security projects such as Panopticlick, HTTPS Everywhere, Switzerland, Certbot, Privacy Badger, and the SSL Observatory.

His most ambitious project was probably Let's Encrypt, the free and automated certificate authority, which entered public beta in 2015. [...]

By 2017 it had issued 100 million certificates; by 2021, about 90% of all web page visits use HTTPS. As of today it has issued over a billion certificates to over 280 million websites.

[...] Peter left EFF in 2018 to focus on studying and calling attention to the malicious use of artificial intelligence and machine learning. He founded AI Objectives Institute, a collaboration between major technology companies, civil society, and academia, to ensure that AI is designed and used to benefit humanity.

Original Submission