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upstart writes:

Pearson has already sent out a cease-and-desist letter over use of its intellectual property:

Textbooks giant Pearson is currently taking legal action over the use of its intellectual property to train AI models, chief executive Andy Bird revealed today as the firm laid out its plans for its own artificial intelligence-powered products.

The firm laid out its plans on how it would use AI a week after its share price tumbled by 15% as American rival Chegg said its own business had been hurt by the rise of ChatGPT.

Those plans would include AI-powered summaries of Pearson educational videos, to be rolled out this month for Pearson+ members, as well as AI-generated multiple choice questions for areas where a student might need more help.

Bird said Pearson had an advantage as its AI products would use Pearson content for training, which he said would make it more reliable.

[...] Bird also said it was usually easy to tell what a large language model such as ChatGPT has been trained on, because "you can ask it".

Bird also sought to point out a difference between Pearson and Chegg, which focuses more on homework assistance.

"They are in a very different business to us," he said. "We see a great differentiator between what Chegg are offering and what Pearson+ are offering.

"We're in the business of helping you learn and improve your skills, not in the business of answering."

He added that - as Pearson was in the business of learning - its products would be hard to replace.

"If all we had to do was read a set of facts in order to learn, there'd be no need for schools, colleges and teachers."

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hubie writes:

Early crop plants were more easily 'tamed':

The story of how ancient wolves came to claim a place near the campfire as humanity's best friend is a familiar tale (even if scientists are still working out some of the specifics). In order to be domesticated, a wild animal must be tamable — capable of living in close proximity to people without exhibiting dangerous aggression or debilitating fear. Taming was the necessary first step in animal domestication, and it is widely known that some animals are easier to tame than others.

But did humans also favor certain wild plants for domestication because they were more easily "tamed"? Research from Washington University in St. Louis calls for a reappraisal of the process of plant domestication, based on almost a decade of observations and experiments. The behavior of erect knotweed, a buckwheat relative, has WashU paleoethnobotanists completely reassessing our understanding of plant domestication.

"We have no equivalent term for tameness in plants," said Natalie Mueller, assistant professor of archaeology in Arts & Sciences at Washington University. "But plants are capable of responding to people. They have a developmental capacity to be tamed."

Her work with early indigenous North American crops shows that some wild plants respond quickly to clearing, fertilizing, weeding or thinning. Plants that respond in ways that make cultivation easier or more productive could be considered more easily tamed than those that cannot.

"If plants responded rapidly in ways that were beneficial to early cultivators — for example by producing higher yields, larger seeds, seeds that were easier to sprout, or a second crop in a single growing season — this would have encouraged humans to continue investing in the co-evolutionary relationship," she said.

upstart writes:

ESA taps RISC-V for AI and HPC chip:

The Occamy processor, which uses a chiplet architecture, packs 432 RISC-V and AI accelerators and comes with 32GB of HBM2E memory, has taped out. The chip is backed by the European Space Agency and developed by engineers from ETH Zürich and the University of Bologna, reports HPC Wire.

The ESA-backed Occamy processor uses two chiplets with 216 32-bit RISC-V cores, an unknown number of 64-bit FPUs for matrix calculations, and carries two 16GB HBM2E memory packages from Micron. The cores are interconnected using a silicon interposer, and the dual-tile CPU can deliver 0.75 FP64 TFLOPS of performance and 6 FP8 TFLOPS of compute capability.

Neither ESA nor its development partners have disclosed the Occamy CPUs' power consumption, but it is said that the chip can be passively cooled, meaning it might be a low-power processor.

Each Occamy chiplet has 216 RISC-V cores and matrix FPUs, totaling around a billion transistors spread over 73mm^2 of silicon. The tiles are made by GlobalFoundries using its 14LPP fabrication process.

The 73mm^2 chiplet isn't a particularly large die. For example, Intel's Alder Lake (with six high-performance cores) has a die size of 163 mm^2. As far as performance is concerned, Nvidia's A30 GPU with 24GB of HBM2 memory delivers 5.2 FP64/10.3 FP64 Tensor TFLOPS as well as 330/660 (with sparsity) INT8 TOPS.

Meanwhile, one of the advantages of chiplet designs is that ESA and its partners from ETH Zürich and the University of Bologna can add other chiplets to the package to accelerate certain workloads if needed.

The Occamy CPU is developed as a part of the EuPilot program, and it is one of many chips that the ESA is considering for spaceflight computing. However, there are no guarantees that the process will indeed be used onboard spaceships.

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upstart writes:

Researchers ruled out overexuberant antibodies in an autoimmune response:

The mRNA-based COVID-19 vaccines have proven remarkably safe and effective against the deadly pandemic. But, like all medical interventions, they have some risks. One is that a very small number of vaccinated people develop inflammation of and around their heart—conditions called myocarditis, pericarditis, or the combination of the two, myopericarditis. These side effects mostly strike males in their teens and early 20s, most often after a second vaccine dose. Luckily, the conditions are usually mild and resolve on their own.

With the rarity and mildness of these conditions, studies have concluded, and experts agree that the benefits of vaccination outweigh the risks—male teens and young adults should get vaccinated. In fact, they're significantly more likely to develop myocarditis or pericarditis from a COVID-19 infection than from a COVID-19 vaccination. According to a large 2022 study led by researchers at Harvard University and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the group at highest risk of myocarditis and pericarditis after vaccination—males ages 12 to 17—saw 35.9 cases per 100,000 (0.0359 percent) after a second vaccine dose, while the rate was nearly double after a COVID-19 infection in the same age group, with 64.9 cases per 100,000 (0.0649 percent).

Still, the conditions are a bit of a puzzle. Why do a small few get this complication after vaccination? Why does it seem to solely affect the heart? How does the damage occur? And what does it all mean for the many other mRNA-based vaccines now being developed?

A new study in Science Immunology provides some fresh insight. The study, led by researchers at Yale University, took a deep dive into the immune responses among 23 people—mostly males and ranging in age from 13 to 21—who developed myocarditis and/or pericarditis after vaccination.

Since the rare phenomenon was first noted, immunologists and other experts have hypothesized that the vaccine could be spurring several aberrant immune responses that would explain the inflamed hearts, such as an autoimmune response or an allergic reaction. And the new study rules some of them out.

Freeman writes:

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/05/sbf-says-dishonesty-and-unfair-dealing-arent-fraud-seeks-to-dismiss-charges/

Late Monday, legally embroiled FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried moved to dismiss the majority of criminal charges lobbed against him by the United States government after his cryptocurrency exchange went bankrupt in 2022.

In documents filed in a Manhattan federal court, lawyers from the law firm Cohen & Gresser LLP shared Bankman-Fried's first official legal defense. Lawyers accused the US of a "troubling" and "classic rush to judgment," claiming that the government didn't even wait to receive "millions of documents" and "other evidence" against Bankman-Fried before "improperly seeking" to turn "civil and regulatory issues into federal crimes."

After FTX's collapse last year, federal prosecutors acted quickly to intervene, within a month alleging that Bankman-Fried was stealing billions in customer funds, defrauding investors, committing bank and wire fraud, providing improper loans, misleading lenders, transmitting money without a license, making illegal campaign contributions, bribing China officials, and other crimes. Through it all, Bankman-Fried has pleaded not guilty. Now, in his motion to dismiss, Bankman-Fried has requested an oral argument to "fight these baseless charges" and "clear his name." He's asking the court to dismiss 10 out of 13 charges, arguing that federal prosecutors have failed to substantiate most of their claims.

"The Government's haste and apparent willingness to proceed without having all the relevant facts and information has produced an indictment that is not only improperly brought but legally flawed and should be dismissed," Bankman-Fried's lawyers argued in one of several memos filed yesterday.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Australian lawmakers press US envoy for Julian Assange release

Australian lawmakers have met United States Ambassador Caroline Kennedy, urging her to help drop the pending extradition case against WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange and allow him to return to Australia.

The "Bring Julian Assange Home Parliamentary Group" said on Tuesday it informed Kennedy of "the widespread concern in Australia" about the continued detention of Assange, an Australian citizen.

The meeting comes before US President Joe Biden's scheduled visit to Australia this month for the Quad leaders' summit.

"There are a range of views about Assange in the Australian community and the members of the Parliamentary Group reflect that diversity of views. But what is not in dispute in the Group is that Mr Assange is being treated unjustly," the legislators said in a statement after meeting Kennedy in the capital, Canberra.

Assange is battling extradition from the United Kingdom to the US where he is wanted on criminal charges over the release of confidential military records and diplomatic cables in 2010. Washington says the release of the documents had put lives in danger.

Previously:

April 2023: No NGO Has Been Allowed to See Julian Assange Since Four Years Ago
December 2022: Biden Faces Growing Pressure to Drop Charges Against Julian Assange
August 2022: Assange Lawyers Sue CIA for Spying on Them
June 2022: Julian Assange's Extradition to the US Approved by UK Home Secretary

Original Submission

upstart writes:

AI can predict pancreatic cancer three years ahead of humans:

AI algorithms can screen for pancreatic cancer and predict whether patients will develop the disease up to three years before a human doctor can make the same diagnosis, according to research published in Nature on Monday.

Pancreatic cancer is deadly; the five-year survival rate averages 12 percent. Academics working in Denmark and the US believe AI could help clinicians by detecting pancreatic cancer at earlier stages, if the software can reliably predict which patients are at higher risk of developing the disease.

The researchers trained AI algorithms on millions of medical records obtained in the Danish National Patient Registry and the US Veterans Affairs Corporate Data Warehouse. The models were trained to correlate diagnosis codes – labels used by hospitals describing different medical conditions – to pancreatic cancer.

[...] "Cancer gradually develops in the human body, often over many years and fairly slowly, until the disease takes hold," Chris Sander, the study's co-senior investigator and leader of a lab working at the Department of Systems Biology at Harvard Medical School, told The Register.

"The AI system attempts to learn from signs in the human body that may relate to such gradual changes."

[...] The most effective model, based on a transformer-based architecture, showed that out of the top 1,000 highest-risk patients over 50, about 320 would go on to develop pancreatic cancer. The model is less accurate when trying to predict pancreatic cancer over longer time intervals compared to shorter ones, and for patients younger than 50.

upstart writes:

Royal Ransomware Expands to Target Linux, VMware ESXi:

The Royal ransomware group — which is made up of former members of the Conti gang — has ramped up operations since bursting on the scene last summer, mounting attacks against critical infrastructure and healthcare targets in particular. Most recently, it has expanded its arsenal to target Linux and VMware ESXi environments.

That's according to Palo Alto Networks' Unit 42 division, who noted in an analysis released May 9 that the group has recently launched a variant of its encryptor malware built in the form of executable and linkable format (ELF) binary.

"[It] is quite similar to the Windows variant, and the sample does not contain any obfuscation," the researchers explained in the posting. "All strings, including the RSA public key and ransom note, are stored as plaintext."

[...] Other researchers previously determined that Royal is likely is made up mainly of former members of the Conti ransomware group — specifically, ex-members known as "Team One," according to Unit 42.

Conti, which was responsible for the Ryuk ransomware, famously disbanded last May when the gang's developers began shutting down admin panels, servers, proxy hosts, chatrooms, and a negotiations service site — likely in response to law enforcement and media attention. At the time, researchers noted that it would be likely that members would regroup under new guises — and that's exactly what appears to have occurred.

upstart writes:

Sodium-based batteries could start hitting the market this year, if companies follow through on their plans:

Lithium is currently the ruler of the battery world, a key ingredient in the batteries that power phones, electric vehicles, and even store energy on the electrical grid.

But as concerns about the battery supply chain swell, scientists are looking for ways to cut down on battery technology's most expensive, least readily available ingredients. There are already options that reduce the need for some, like cobalt and nickel, but there's been little recourse for those looking to dethrone lithium.

Over the past several months, though, battery companies and automakers in China have announced forays into a new kind of battery chemistry that replaces lithium with sodium. These new sodium-ion batteries could help push costs down for both stationary storage and electric vehicles, if the technology can meet the high expectations that companies are setting.

[...] Sodium-based batteries are not new, but technical shortcomings have previously kept them from taking on lithium. Sodium-ion batteries traditionally wear out quickly, and they still have a lower energy density than lithium-ion, says Shirley Meng, a battery researcher at the University of Chicago and Argonne National Laboratory.

That means in order to store the same amount of energy, a sodium-based battery will need to be bigger and heavier than the equivalent lithium-based one. For EVs, that means a shorter range for a battery the same size.

upstart writes:

A popular tool for identifying meteorites can destroy scientific information:

It's time to drop the magnets, meteorite hunters. The commonly used method for identifying space rocks can destroy scientific information.

Touching even a small magnet to a meteorite can erase any record the rock might have retained about the magnetic field of its parent body, researchers report in the April Journal of Geophysical Research: Planets. And the concern isn't theoretical: a subset of the oldest known Martian meteorites appear to have already had their magnetic memories wiped, the team showed.

[...] Planetary scientist Foteini Vervelidou uses meteorites from Mars — chunks of the planet that were blasted into space by an impact and later captured by Earth's gravity — to study its ancient past. Just a few hundred are known to exist. Rarer still are specimens that contain minerals carrying imprints of the Red Planet's magnetic field, which collapsed about 3.7 billion years ago (SN: 9/7/15). The oldest known Martian meteorites, which date to roughly 4.4 billion years ago, therefore present an "amazing chance to study the magnetic field," says Vervelidou, of MIT and the Institute of Earth Physics of Paris.

But such opportunities can be readily squandered, Vervelidou and colleagues have shown. The team's numerical calculations and experiments with earthly rocks — stand-ins for meteorites — confirmed that bringing a hand magnet close to a rock can rearrange the spins of the rock's electrons. That rearrangement overwrites the imprint of a previous magnetic field, a process called remagnetization.

[...] It is possible to evaluate a meteorite without destroying its magnetic properties. Vervelidou uses a lab instrument called a susceptibility meter, which measures how an object would respond to a magnetic field. And portable versions exist: She and a team of meteorite researchers used one to find nearly 1,000 meteorites on a recent expedition in Chile. Hopefully, Vervelidou says, some of those space rocks will shed light on Mars' magnetic past.

Anyone here ever find a meteorite?

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Hearing Aids Are Changing. Their Users Are, Too.

As more young people risk hearing loss, over-the-counter hearing aids are providing new options, but also confusing choices.

Ayla Wing's middle school students don't always know what to make of their 26-year-old teacher's hearing aids. The most common response she hears: "Oh, my grandma has them, too."

But grandma's hearing aids were never like this: Bluetooth-enabled and connected to her phone, they allow Ms. Wing to toggle with one touch between custom settings. She can shut out the world during a screeching subway ride, hear her friends in noisy bars during a night out and even understand her students better by switching to "mumbly kids."

A raft of new hearing aids have hit the market in recent years, offering greater appeal to a generation of young adults that some experts say is both developing hearing problems earlier in life and — perhaps paradoxically — becoming more comfortable with an expensive piece of technology pumping sound into their ears.

Some of the new models, including Ms. Wing's, are made by traditional prescription brands, which usually require a visit to a specialist. But the Food and Drug Administration opened up the market last year when it allowed the sale of hearing aids over the counter. In response, brand names like Sony and Jabra began releasing their own products, adding to the new wave of designs and features that appeal to young consumers.

"These new hearing aids are sexy," said Pete Bilzerian, a 25-year-old in Richmond, Va., who has worn the devices since he was 7. He describes his early models as distinctly unsexy: "big, funky, tan-colored hearing aids with the molding that goes all around the ear." But increasingly, those have given way to sleeker, smaller models with more technological capabilities.

Nowadays, he said, no one seems to notice the electronics in his ear. "If it ever does come up as a topic, I just brush it off and say, 'Hey, I got these very expensive AirPods.'"

Original Submission

upstart writes:

A high-profile legal case recently showed how useful dashcams can be, but French regulations are unclear over whether they can be used as evidence:

Sales of dashcams are starting to take off in France, with most car-parts shops offering models from €50, but their use falls into a legal grey area. Exact figures are hard to come by, but a survey in 2015 estimated there were at least 300,000 dashcams bought in France that year.

It is now not uncommon to see the cameras in cars parked on the street, even in small rural towns. Some even have features that set off the camera if anyone is close to the parked car, or if the car is touched by another vehicle. Images are usually sent to the owner's smartphone, where they can then be stored.

[...] France has very strict privacy laws, and among them is a law that states that while it is legal to film or photograph people in public spaces in France, you cannot use the images without the express consent of all the people who might be identified, either through their features or through the car they drive.

Obviously, people who have recorded someone driving into their car, or filmed another driver being aggressive towards them, will want to use the images, but doing so can be complicated.

Some years ago, the German insurance company Allianz, which has a big presence in the French market, offered a discount to clients who used dashcams. Now the company seems to have removed the offer.

Similarly, carmaker Citroën, which offers dashcams as factory-fitted options on new C3 and C4 models, went silent when asked how the images they record might be used.

upstart writes:

As the country looks to decarbonize, nuclear’s popularity climbs to the highest level in a decade:

A Gallup survey released in late April found that 55 percent of U.S. adults support the use of nuclear power. That's up four percentage points from last year and reflects the highest level of public support for nuclear energy use in electricity since 2012.

[...] Nuclear energy has historically been a source of immense controversy. A series of high-profile nuclear accidents and disasters, from Three Mile Island in 1979 to Chernobyl in 1986 to Fukushima in 2011, have raised safety concerns — even though the death toll from fossil fuel power generation far outstrips that of nuclear power generation. Several government nuclear programs have also left behind toxic waste that place disproportionate burdens on Indigenous communities.

But nuclear power doesn't produce carbon emissions, and it's more consistent and reliable than wind and solar energy, which vary depending on the weather. For these reasons, the Biden administration has identified nuclear energy as a key climate solution to achieve grid stability in a net-zero future. The administration is pushing for the deployment of a new generation of reactors called "advanced nuclear": a catch-all term for new nuclear reactor models that improve on the safety and efficiency of traditional reactor designs.

In a recent report, the Department of Energy found that regardless of how many renewables are deployed, the U.S. will need an additional 200 gigawatts of advanced nuclear power — enough to power about 160 million homes — to reach President Joe Biden's goal of hitting net-zero emissions by 2050.

hubie writes:

Learning multiple tasks led to cognition improvements that got better with the passage of time:

A set of recent studies demonstrates for the first time that learning multiple new tasks carries benefits for cognition long after the learning has been completed.

The finding affirms a long-held assertion of the lead researcher, Rachel Wu, who is an associate professor of psychology at UC Riverside. That is, older adults can learn new tasks and improve their cognition in the process, if they approach learning as a child does.

"Our findings provide evidence that simultaneously learning real-world skills can lead to long-term improvements in cognition during older adulthood," Wu and her colleagues wrote in a recently published paper in the journal Aging and Mental Health. "Overall, our findings promote the benefits of lifelong learning, namely, to improve cognitive abilities in older adulthood."

[...] For both studies, the participants learned at least three new skills, such as Spanish, using an iPad, photography, painting, and music composition over three months in a UC Riverside classroom for older adults. Cognitive tests were administered in a research lab before the start of the classes, halfway through the classes, and after three months of classes. There were then follow-up tests at three months, six months, and one year after the end of the classes.

[...] The overall cognitive scores at three months, six months, and one year after the intervention were significantly higher than before the intervention, more than three times higher by many measures. In fact, the more time that passed after the learning had ceased, the higher the scores grew.

takyon writes:

'Too greedy': mass walkout at global science journal over 'unethical' fees

More than 40 leading scientists have resigned en masse from the editorial board of a top science journal in protest at what they describe as the "greed" of publishing giant Elsevier.

The entire academic board of the journal Neuroimage, including professors from Oxford University, King's College London and Cardiff University resigned after Elsevier refused to reduce publication charges.

Academics around the world have applauded what many hope is the start of a rebellion against the huge profit margins in academic publishing, which outstrip those made by Apple, Google and Amazon.

Neuroimage, the leading publication globally for brain-imaging research, is one of many journals that are now "open access" rather than sitting behind a subscription paywall. But its charges to authors reflect its prestige, and academics now pay over £2,700 for a research paper to be published. The former editors say this is "unethical" and bears no relation to the costs involved.

Original Submission