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upstart writes:

A close look at one of TRAPPIST-1's planets shows it's bare and baking:

At this point, we've discovered lots of exoplanets that fall under the general label "Earth-like." They're rocky, and many orbit at distances from their host stars to potentially have moderate temperatures. But "like" is doing a lot of work there. In many cases, we have no idea whether they even have an atmosphere, and the greenhouse effect means that the atmosphere can have a huge impact on the planet's temperature. So the Earth-like category can include dry, baking hellscapes like Venus with its massive atmosphere, as well as dry, frozen tundras with sparse atmospheres like Mars.

But we're slowly getting the chance to image the atmospheres of rocky exoplanets. And today, researchers are releasing the results of turning the Webb Space Telescope on a rocky planet orbiting a nearby star, showing that the new hardware is so sensitive that it can detect the star blocking out light originating from the planet. The results suggest that the planet has very little atmosphere and is mostly radiating away heat from being baked by its nearby star.

TRAPPIST-1 is a small, reddish star—in astronomical terminology, it's an "ultra-cool dwarf"—that's about 40 light-years from Earth. While the star itself is pretty nondescript, it's notable for having lots of planets, with seven in total having been identified so far. All of these are small, rocky bodies, much like the ones that occupy the inner portion of our Solar System. While the star emits very little light, the planets are all packed in closer to it than Mercury is to the Sun.

[...] So, TRAPPIST-1 provides a fantastic opportunity—really, seven opportunities—to test some of our ideas about exoplanet atmospheres. And both the Hubble and Spitzer space telescopes have imaged some starlight that passes close to some of the planets as they pass between Earth and TRAPPIST-1. These observations didn't provide any indications of an atmosphere, setting limits on how thick any gases above these planets could be.

upstart writes:

State governments might be inadvertently helping Chinese-owned app in data collection:

More than two dozen state government websites contain web-tracking code made by TikTok parent ByteDance Ltd., according to a new report from a cybersecurity company, illustrating the difficulties U.S. regulators face in curtailing data-collection efforts by the popular Chinese-owned app.

A review of the websites of more than 3,500 companies, organizations and government entities by the Toronto-based company Feroot Security found that so-called tracking pixels from the TikTok parent company were present in 30 U.S. state-government websites across 27 states, including some where the app has been banned from state networks and devices. Feroot collected the data in January and February of this year.

[...] Site administrators usually place such pixels on the government websites to help measure the effectiveness of advertising they have purchased on TikTok. It helps government agencies determine how many people saw an ad on the social-media app and took some action—such as visiting a website or signing up for a service. The pixels' proliferation offers another vector for data collection beyond TikTok's popular mobile app, which is increasingly under fire in Washington as a possible way for the Chinese government to collect data on Americans.

[...] "Like other platforms, the data we receive from advertisers is used to improve the effectiveness of our advertising services," a TikTok spokeswoman said in a statement. "Our terms instruct advertisers not to share certain data with us, and we continuously work with our partners to avoid inadvertent transmission of such data."

[...] Tracking pixels, also called web beacons, are ubiquitous on commercial websites. The free bits of software code are intended to support digital marketing and advertising by logging a visitor's interactions with the site, such as what is clicked on and the duration of a visit.

upstart writes:

With new detection, officials warn of spring and summer transmission risks:

Health officials in New York have once again detected poliovirus in wastewater from Rockland County, where a case of paralytic polio occurred last summer.

Wastewater samples from Rockland and several nearby counties were positive for poliovirus for months after the initial case was reported in July, suggesting widespread circulation of the virus in the region.

So far this year, officials have only detected poliovirus in one sample, which was collected from Rockland in February. Two samples from the county taken during March were negative. Before the detection in February, the last positive sample from the region was found in mid-December in Orange County, just north of Rockland. The last positive detection in Rockland was in October.

While the data doesn't suggest that poliovirus is again circulating widely in the region, health officials are wary that the virus could easily restart. Rockland has one of the lower vaccination rates in the state; as of August, only 60.34 percent of 2-year-olds in the county were up to date on their polio vaccinations. Some areas of the county have rates in the 50s.

Officials are concerned about the potential for international spread of polio to Rockland's sizable Jewish community during upcoming holiday travel.

[...] Officials continue pushing for vaccination in parts of the county where anti-vaccine sentiments are high. They're offering free polio boosters at walk-in clinics, working with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to audit vaccination coverage at day cares and schools, and trying to improve vaccination messaging.

"It is our obligation to protect all our residents from these debilitating and potentially fatal diseases. The law requiring childhood vaccinations has been in place for many years for this very reason," County Executive Ed Day said. "I urge our residents to act now and protect yourselves, your family, and your community."

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Mental sovereignty, says author Nita Farahany, is no longer a given:

Neurotechnologies today—devices that can measure and influence our brains and nervous systems—are growing in power and popularity. The neurotech marketplace, according to Precedence Research, is worth USD $14.3 billion this year and will exceed $20 billion within four years. Noninvasive brain-computer interfaces, brain stimulation devices, and brain-monitoring hardware (measuring alertness and attention at work, for example) are no longer just laboratory experiments and technological curios. The societal and legal implications of widespread neurotech adoption may be substantial.

Nita Farahany, professor of law and philosophy at Duke University, has written a new book, [...] which explores how our lives may be impacted by the use of brain-computer interfaces and neural monitoring devices.

Farahany argues that the development and use of neurotech presents a challenge to our current understanding of human rights. Devices designed to measure, record and influence our mental processes, used by us or on us, may infringe on our rights to mental privacy, freedom of thought, and mental self-determination. She calls this collection of freedoms the right to cognitive liberty. Spectrum spoke with Farahany recently about the future and present of neurotech and how to weigh its promises—enhanced capabilities, for instance, including bionics and prosthetics and even a third arm—against its potential to interfere with people's mental sovereignty.

An interview with Farahany is in the linked article.

Does neurotech's future fill you with optimism for a better world, or dread of what might follow?

Original Submission

Europol Warns ChatGPT is Already Helping Criminals

upstart writes:

There is no honor among chatbots:

Criminals are already using ChatGPT to commit crimes, Europol said in a Monday report that details how AI language models can fuel fraud, cybercrime, and terrorism.

[...] Now, the European Union's law enforcement agency, Europol, has detailed of how the model can be misused for more nefarious purposes. In fact, people are already using it to carry out illegal activities, the cops claim.

"The impact these types of models might have on the work of law enforcement can already be anticipated," Europol stated in its report [PDF]. "Criminals are typically quick to exploit new technologies and were fast seen coming up with concrete criminal exploitations, providing the first practical examples mere weeks after the public release of ChatGPT."

Although ChatGPT is better at refusing to comply with input requests that are potentially harmful, users have found ways around OpenAI's content filter system. Some have made it spit out instructions on how to create a pipe bomb or crack cocaine, for example. Netizens can ask ChatGPT to learn about how to commit crimes and ask it for step-by-step guidance.

"If a potential criminal knows nothing about a particular crime area, ChatGPT can speed up the research process significantly by offering key information that can then be further explored in subsequent steps. As such, ChatGPT can be used to learn about a vast number of potential crime areas with no prior knowledge, ranging from how to break into a home, to terrorism, cybercrime and child sexual abuse," Europol warned.

The agency admitted that all of this information is already publicly available on the internet, but the model makes it easier to find and understand how to carry out specific crimes. Europol also highlighted that the model could be exploited to impersonate targets, facilitate fraud and phishing, or produce propaganda and disinformation to support terrorism.

[...] ChatGPT's ability to generate code - even malicious code - increases the risk of cybercrime by lowering the technical skills required to create malware.

upstart writes:

Valve is ending Steam support for Windows 7, 8, and 8.1:

Are you among the few people still using Windows 7, 8, or 8.1 and playing games via Steam? If so, you might want to upgrade to a newer version of Microsoft's OS before January 1, 2024, as that's the date Valve is terminating Steam support for those older operating systems.

Valve made the surprise announcement in a Steam support post. It writes that as of January 1, 2024, Steam will officially stop supporting the Windows 7, Windows 8, and Windows 8.1 operating systems. After that date, the Steam Client will no longer run on those versions of Windows. In order to continue running Steam and any games or other products purchased through Steam, users will need to update to a more recent version of Windows. Or they could always switch to Linux.

Valve's reasoning for dropping Windows 7, 8, and 8.1 is due to Steam relying on an embedded version of Google Chrome, which no longer functions on older versions of Windows. The company adds that future versions of Steam will require Windows feature and security updates only present in Windows 10 and above.

It was just last month when Chrome 110 was released, the first version of the world's most popular browser not to support Windows 7. Edge no longer supports these operating systems, either, and Microsoft's extended support for Windows 7 and 8 ended in January.

A quick look at the latest Steam survey shows only a small number of people will be disappointed by Valve's decision – assuming they weren't planning on upgrading in the next nine months. The survey results show that 1.43% of participants still use Windows 7 64-bit, while 0.34% use Windows 8.1 64-bit and 0.09% use Windows 7.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Cultured meat firm resurrects woolly mammoth in lab-grown meatball:

Truth, as the saying goes, is often stranger than fiction. The very notion of resurrecting the long-extinct woolly mammoth was the stuff of fantasy not that long ago, but scientists are already working on ways to achieve something close to that, using DNA from soft-tissue in frozen mammoth remains and meshing it with that of a modern-day elephant.

But while such "de-extinction" projects may or may not ultimately succeed, one company is already laying claim to having produced the first meat product made from mammoth DNA.

Vow, an Australian cultivated food company that creates meat in a laboratory setting from animal cells, says that it has used advanced molecular engineering to resurrect the woolly mammoth in meatball form, by combining original mammoth DNA with fragments of an African elephant's DNA.

There's little question that cultivated meat is coming, evidenced by the countless companies raising vast swathes of venture capital funding to produce meat and fish in a lab from animal cells, as well as the fact that companies are now starting to receiving the blessings of regulators such as the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA). But while pork sausages and seafood make sense insofar as they are food that people are familiar with, Vow — which closed a $49.2 million round of funding just a few months ago — is clearly upping the ante with its foray into the world of extinct animals.

It's worth acknowledging that there is a sizeable element of marketing magicianship to this announcement. The very concept was devised by communications agency and WPP-subsidiary Wunderman Thompson, which tells us something about the intent here — this is very much a promotional campaign for Vow. But at the same time, it's also a promotional campaign for cultured meat in general, and the role it could play in creating a sustainable protein source that doesn't involve killing animals. By some estimations, around 60% of greenhouse gas emissions from food production emanate from animal-based foods, double that of plant-based equivalents.

upstart writes:

U.S. Rolls Out Strict Rules for Commercial Spyware Use, Amidst Rash of Hacks:

The new regulation allows the government to ban a particular vendor's spyware from being used by agencies, if the company's product is found to have contributed to human rights violations, has been used to target U.S. citizens, or has been wielded against activists or journalists. In essence, the government is using its presence as a major consumer of defense and security products as a cudgel to encourage surveillance firms to behave or face blacklisting.

The announcement comes amidst revelations that more U.S. officials have been targeted by spyware than previously believed. On the same day that the executive order was announced, a senior US administration staffer told reporters that as many as 50 American officials are suspected or confirmed to have been targeted by commercial spyware in recent years. Previous reporting on this subject has focused on a handful of diplomats in foreign countries who had allegedly been targeted for surveillance. The new tally shows that, in reality, the imprint of foreign campaigns aimed at U.S. officials may be much broader.

"Commercial spyware – sophisticated and invasive cyber surveillance tools sold by vendors to access electronic devices remotely, extract their content, and manipulate their components, all without the knowledge or consent of the devices' users – has proliferated in recent years with few controls and high risk of abuse," the White House's announcement reads. "The proliferation of commercial spyware poses distinct and growing counterintelligence and security risks to the United States, including to the safety and security of U.S. Government personnel and their families."

Original Submission

upstart writes:

ChatGPT gets "eyes and ears" with plugins that can interface AI with the world:

On Thursday, OpenAI announced a plugin system for its ChatGPT AI assistant. The plugins give ChatGPT the ability to interact with the wider world through the Internet, including booking flights, ordering groceries, browsing the web, and more. Plugins are bits of code that tell ChatGPT how to use an external resource on the Internet.

Basically, if a developer wants to give ChatGPT the ability to access any network service (for example: "looking up current stock prices") or perform any task controlled by a network service (for example: "ordering pizza through the Internet"), it is now possible, provided it doesn't go against OpenAI's rules.

Conventionally, most large language models (LLM) like ChatGPT have been constrained in a bubble, so to speak, only able to interact with the world through text conversations with a user. As OpenAI writes in its introductory blog post on ChatGPT plugins, "The only thing language models can do out-of-the-box is emit text."

I see (and hear) you!

Original Submission

hubie writes:

Brain activity imaging coupled with computer vision reveals how neuron populations in different individuals synchronize during social interactions:

Humans are social creatures. But what leads to them being this way? To fully understand how the brain gives rise to social behaviors, we need to investigate it during social encounters. Moreover, we need to analyze not only the internal operations of one brain during social activities but also the dynamic interplay between multiple brains engaged in the same activity. This emerging research field is referred to as "second-person neuroscience" and employs hyperscanning (the simultaneous recording of the activity of multiple brains) as the signature technique.

[...] Now, a research team led by Yasuyo Minagawa of Keio University, Japan, has worked out an elegant solution to this problem. [...]

Each pair of participants (39 pairs in total) engaged in a natural, cooperative, and creative task: the design and furnishing of a digital room in a computer game. They were allowed to communicate freely to create a room that satisfied both. The participants also completed the same task alone as the researchers sought to compare between-brain synchronizations (BBSs) and within-brain synchronizations (WBSs) during the individual and cooperative tasks. The social behavior that the team focused on during the tasks was eye gaze, that is, whether the participants directed their gaze at the other's face. They automatically extracted this behavior from the video footage using an open-source software, which made the data analysis easier.

One of the most intriguing findings of the study was that, during cooperative play, there was a strong BBS among the superior and middle temporal regions and specific parts of the prefrontal cortex in the right hemisphere, but little WBS in comparison. Moreover, the BBS synchronization was strongest when one of the participants raised their gaze to look at the other. Interestingly, the situation reversed during individual play, showing increased WBS within the same regions.

According to Minagawa, these results agree with the idea that our brains work as a "two-in-one system" during certain social interactions. "Neuron populations within one brain were activated simultaneously with similar neuron populations in the other brain when the participants cooperated to complete the task, as if the two brains functioned together as a single system for creative problem-solving," she explains. "These phenomena are consistent with the notion of a 'we-mode,' in which interacting agents share their minds in a collective fashion and facilitate interaction by accelerating access to the other's cognition."

Overall, this study provides evidence hinting at the remarkable capability of the human brain to understand and synchronize with others' when the situation calls for it. [...]

Journal Reference:
Mingdi Xu, Satoshi Morimoto, Eiichi Hoshino, et al., Neurophotonics, Vol. 10, Issue 1, 013511 (February 2023). https://doi.org/10.1117/1.NPh.10.1.013511

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Microplastics are messing with the microbiomes of seabirds:

To find out if the microbes being introduced might be "good" or "bad," Fackelmann and her colleagues analyzed the microbiomes and looked up individual types of microbes in databases to learn what they do. They found that with more plastic, there were more microbes that are known to break down plastic. There were also more microbes that are known to be resistant to antibiotics and more with the potential to cause disease.

Fackelmann and her colleagues didn't assess the health of the birds, so they don't know if these microbes might have been making them unwell. "But if you accumulate pathogens and antibiotic-resistant microbes in your digestive system, that's clearly not great," says Wagner.

The study, which was published in the journal Nature Ecology and Evolution, shows that the levels of plastic already present in the environment are enough to affect animals' microbiomes, says Fackelmann. The next step is to work out what this might mean for their health and the health of other animals, including humans, she says.

"When I read [the study], I thought about the whales we find beached with kilograms of plastic debris found in their bellies," says Wagner. "It's probably quite comparable to what birds have in their digestive systems, so it would be interesting to know if this happens in whales, dolphins, [and other marine animals] as well."

upstart writes:

GitHub publishes RSA SSH host keys by mistake, issues update:

GitHub has updated its SSH keys after accidentally publishing the private part to the world. Whoops.

A post on Github's security blog reveals that the company has changed its RSA SSH host keys. This is going to cause connection errors, and some frightening warning messages, for a lot of developers, but it's all right: it's not scary cracker activity, just plain old human error.

Microsoft subsidiary GitHub is the largest source code shack in the world, with an estimated 100 million active users. So this is going to inconvenience a lot of people. It's not the end of the world: if you normally push and pull to GitHub via SSH – which most people do – then you will have to delete your local GitHub SSH key, and fetch new ones.

As the blog post describes, the first symptom is an alarming warning message[.]

For almost everyone, this warning is spurious. It's not that you're being attacked – although that is always a remote (ha ha, only serious) possibility – it's that GitHub revoked its old keys and published new ones. Hanlon's Razor applies, as it most often does:

Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity. (The word stupidity is often replaced with incompetence, but then, one does tend to lead to the other.)

This time, the reason was – as usual – plain old human error. Someone published GitHub's private RSA keys in a repository on GitHub itself. If you're unclear how SSH encryption works, about public versus private keys, or the different cryptographic algorithms SSH uses, there are many good explanations out there.

Original Submission

guest reader writes:

Experts acknowledge the apparent technical achievement of the research but highlight the ethical issues raised by being able to choose the sex of an offspring:

Researchers used a technique to separate sperm on whether they had an X chromosome (making female offspring) or a Y one (male offspring). Sperm with an X chromosome are slightly heavier than those with a Y, the research indicates.

However, the study has again raised long-held concerns over the ethics of such a process. Selecting embryos without reasons such as a sex-linked disease is illegal in many countries.

Experts behind the research, from Weill Cornell Medicine in New York, said their technique was inexpensive and "extremely safe".

Fifty-nine couples wanted a girl and it resulted in 79.1% (231 out of 292) female embryos, with 16 girls being born without any abnormalities. Fifty-six couples wanted a boy and the technique produced 79.6% male embryos (223 out of 280), resulting in 13 healthy male babies.

[...] "I am convinced that the science is sound and that, instead of the usual 50:50 'coin toss' then a couple can get a baby with the desired sex a little under 80% of the time."

From the article:

The desire to have offspring of a specific sex has a long history but has been particularly present since the 1970s with the early appearance of assisted reproduction. The reasons for choosing a child's sex may be social, such as a desire for family balancing [1]. Couples undergoing IVF, who already have a child or children of one sex, may wish to have the experience of raising children of both sexes. Some couples, who already have children, could have financial reasons for not attempting a further pregnancy without assurance that the additional child will be of a specific sex.

Cheung S, Elias R, Xie P, Rosenwaks Z, Palermo GD (2023) A non-randomized clinical trial to determine the safety and efficacy of a novel sperm sex selection technique. PLoS ONE 18(3): e0282216. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0282216

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Microsoft to fix Windows 11 'aCropalypse' privacy failure:

Updated Microsoft is said to be preparing to fix the high-profile "aCropalypse" privacy bug in its Snipping Tool for Windows 11.

Users can remove sensitive information or some other parts of photos, screenshots, and other images by cropping them using the Snipping Tool app. The problem is that for the Windows 11 app – as well as Microsoft's Snip & Sketch cropping tool in Windows 10 – the file of the cropped image still includes the cropped out portions, which can be recovered and viewed.

A similar flaw was found in Google's Markup image-editing app for its Pixel smartphones. According to reverse engineers Simon Aarons and David Buchanan – who named the bug aCropalyse – the problem affects Pixel smartphones since 2018, when the 3 series came out. Google patched its code to avoid leaking cropped areas of images.

Then this week, Buchanan confirmed that the Windows Snipping Tool and Snip & Sketch software had the same issue. If a user cropped a photo or other image using the software and then saved the edited image over the original file, that file still contains the cropped-out portion. The area isn't visible when viewing the image using normal tools, but the data is still there in the file, and can be restored and viewed using appropriate recovery software.

Steven Murdoch, a professor of security engineering at the UK's University College London, shared some thoughts here on the underlying issue within Windows, specifically its latest Save File API, which he described as "defective by design."

[...] Meanwhile, if you've used Microsoft's code to crop your snaps and then shared them on, be aware someone with a copy of them might be able to recover the lopped-off portions. ®

Original Submission

fliptop writes:

[R]esearchers at Carnegie Mellon University have created soft robots that can seamlessly shift from walking to swimming, for example, or crawling to rolling:

"We were inspired by nature to develop a robot that can perform different tasks and adapt to its environment without adding actuators or complexity," said Dinesh K. Patel, a post-doctoral fellow in the Morphing Matter Lab in the School of Computer Science'sHuman-Computer Interaction Institute. "Our bistable actuator is simple, stable and durable, and lays the foundation for future work on dynamic, reconfigurable soft robotics."

The bistable actuator is made of 3D-printed soft rubber containing shape-memory alloy springs that react to electrical currents by contracting, which causes the actuator to bend. The team used this bistable motion to change the actuator or robot's shape. Once the robot changes shape, it is stable until another electrical charge morphs it back to its previous configuration.

[...] The actuators require only a hundred millisecond of electrical charge to change their shape, and they are durable. The team had a person ride a bicycle over one of the actuators a few times and changed their robots' shapes hundreds of times to demonstrate durability.

In the future, the robots could be used in rescue situations or to interact with sea animals or coral. Using heat-activated springs in the actuators could open up applications in environmental monitoring, haptics, and reconfigurable electronics and communication.

Video of the robot in action.

Related:

• Scientists Unveil Bionic Robo-Fish to Remove Microplastics From Seas
• New Stretchable, Self-Healing and Illuminating Electronic Material for Wearables and Soft Robots
• A Soft Robotic Insect That Survives Being Flattened by a Fly Swatter
• Rubbery Figures: Scientists Create an Entirely Soft Robot
• "Soft Muscled" Robots Could Perform Delicate Tasks

Original Submission