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taylorvich writes:

https://arstechnica.com/science/2023/08/we-dont-understand-how-a-freakishly-heavy-exoplanet-could-have-formed/

Neptune-sized planet has a density similar to pure silver.

Scientists have been working on models of planet formation since before we knew exoplanets existed. Originally guided by the properties of the planets in our Solar System, these models turned out to be remarkably good at also accounting for exoplanets without an equivalent in our Solar System, like super Earths and hot Neptunes. Add in the ability of planets to move around thanks to gravitational interactions, and the properties of exoplanets could usually be accounted for.

Today, a large international team of researchers is announcing the discovery of something our models can't explain. It's roughly Neptune's size but four times more massive. Its density—well above that of iron—is compatible with either the entire planet being almost entirely solid or it having an ocean deep enough to drown entire planets. While the people who discovered it offer a couple of theories for its formation, neither is especially likely.

Journal Reference:
Naponiello, L., Mancini, L., Sozzetti, A. et al. A super-massive Neptune-sized planet. Nature (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-023-06499-2

Original Submission

Meeting Announcement: The next meeting of the SoylentNews governance committee will be Friday, September 1st, 2023 at 20:30 UTC (1:30pm PDT, 4:30pm EDT) in #governance on SoylentNews IRC. Logs of the meeting will be available afterwards for review, and minutes will be published when available.

The agenda for the upcoming meeting will also be published when available. Minutes and agenda, and other governance committee information are to be found on the SoylentNews Wiki at: https://wiki.staging.soylentnews.org/wiki/Governance

Our community is always encouraged to observe and participate, and is invited to the meeting. Hope to see you then!

looorg writes:

From a pool of 32 university-level courses from eight disciplines, from political science to computer science, the average university student is being surpassed by ChatGPT. Exceptions in Maths, which is odd since it's basically a giant calculator, and with tick questions, that it apparently can't identify and detect properly.

It is not made clear the level of the courses beyond that it mainly appears to be undergraduate courses, there should still be a difference between first and last year in level. Perhaps there is a difference from first year courses where it's mostly a matter of reciting known facts and data to the later half when the requirements of more critical thinking and interpretation and analysis is required.

Other findings include that AI plagiarism detecting is poor and mostly unable to tell which text was written by a human and which is regurgitated AI text blobs.

Alternatively it could also be that the average student have just gotten worse over the years. The bottom end of the spectrum has increased as more and more students are forced into academia.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-023-38964-3
https://www.theregister.com/2023/08/25/chatgpt_outperforms_average_uni_students/

Original Submission

"dalek" writes:

Gizmodo and Wired, among other sources, report that Polish railways were halted on Friday and Saturday due to unauthorized radio broadcasts. Polish railroads use the broadcasting of three tones on the 151.010 MHz frequency to instruct trains to stop. This occurred in three locations around Poland. Cheap radio equipment would be sufficient to issue the stop command, though it required that whoever broadcasted the signal would need to be in close proximity to the location affected. Despite the simplicity of the attack, there probably needed to be some coordination to broadcast the signals at different places in Poland.

There is no authentication or encryption to issue the emergency stop command, though discussions on various forums suggest that only the stop command is broadcast in this manner. A general design principle in railroad signaling systems is that the default should be to stop trains. For example, the multi-colored signaling lights commonly used in the United States and Canada that still mechanically switch between colors will default to a red stop signal. Trains require long distances to stop, and defaulting to a stop signal will prevent collisions. Authorities in Poland insist that there was there was no safety risk to rail passengers, and this seems reasonable if the unauthorized broadcasts were only able to issue an emergency stop command but not to instruct trains to move.

When this topic was discussed on Slashdot, it quickly turned to politics, but I find the technical aspects of this much more interesting. In North America, lights and semaphores are common and simple signaling mechanisms that have widespread use. For example, I know from experience that the same signaling system described in the video for use in Canada is also used on many BNSF main lines in the United States. However, other systems are also in use like the Advanced Train Control System (ATCS) and Positive Train Control (PTC). At some locations in the US, it was possible to use a software defined radio and software like ATCSMon to track the locations of trains in the area. However, railroads also generally also use unencrypted voice communications between trains and dispatchers, and these can still be monitored with a scanner.

upstart writes:

Tourists Give Themselves Away by Looking Up. So Do Most Network Intruders.

In large metropolitan areas, tourists are often easy to spot because they're far more inclined than locals to gaze upward at the surrounding skyscrapers. Security experts say this same tourist dynamic is a dead giveaway in virtually all computer intrusions that lead to devastating attacks like data theft and ransomware, and that more organizations should set simple virtual tripwires that sound the alarm when authorized users and devices are spotted exhibiting this behavior.

In a blog post published last month, Cisco Talos said it was seeing a worrisome "increase in the rate of high-sophistication attacks on network infrastructure." Cisco's warning comes amid a flurry of successful data ransom and state-sponsored cyber espionage attacks targeting some of the most well-defended networks on the planet.

But despite their increasing complexity, a great many initial intrusions that lead to data theft could be nipped in the bud if more organizations started looking for the telltale signs of newly-arrived cybercriminals behaving like network tourists, Cisco says.

"One of the most important things to talk about here is that in each of the cases we've seen, the threat actors are taking the type of 'first steps' that someone who wants to understand (and control) your environment would take," Cisco's Hazel Burton wrote. "Examples we have observed include threat actors performing a 'show config,' 'show interface,' 'show route,' 'show arp table' and a 'show CDP neighbor.' All these actions give the attackers a picture of a router's perspective of the network, and an understanding of what foothold they have."

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

Babies' and toddlers' access to more screen time could lead to developmental risks, according to a new study published in The Journal of the American Medical Association of Pediatrics (JAMA) on Monday. The study, conducted by researchers in Japan looked at the amount of time 7,097 children spent on tablets, phones, watching TV, or using other technology and how it related to their corresponding mental and physical abilities as they got older.

[...] The study found that by two years old, babies who spent up to four hours per day in front of a screen were three times more likely to experience communication and problem-solving delays, while those who spent four or more hours on their devices were 5.78 times more likely to experience the same delays. They were also 1.74 times more likely to have underdeveloped fine motor skills and two times more likely to have not properly developed their personal and social skills.

The study reported that four-year-old children who had more screen time had developmental delays in communication, gross motor and fine motor skills, problem-solving skills, and personal and social skills.

“Kids learn how to talk if they’re encouraged to talk, and very often, if they’re just watching a screen, they’re not having an opportunity to practice talking,” Dr. John Hutton, associate professor of general and community pediatrics at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center, who wasn’t involved in the study told CNN. “They may hear a lot of words, but they’re not practicing saying a lot of words or having a lot of that back-and-forth interaction.”

taylorvich writes:

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/aug/23/discovered-in-the-deep-octopus-garden-davidson-seamount-california-like-hot-tub-hatchery

Scientists have solved the mystery of why tens of thousands of octopuses cluster on the foothills of a giant underwater mountain, two miles down off the coast of California. The pearl octopuses, so named because from a distance they look like scattered gems, seek out warm water seeping through the seabed and use it to speed up the hatching of their eggs
...
The mauve, grapefruit-sized female octopuses each lay about 60 eggs and cement them to the bare rock, then guard them until they hatch. Temperature probes showed the water bathing the eggs ranged from 5C to 10C (40-50F), while less than a metre away it dropped to a frigid 1.6C.

Revisiting individual nests, the team saw that rather than taking a decade or longer to hatch, as would happen in the very cold deep sea, baby octopuses emerge from their cosy nests after less than two years, dramatically boosting their chances of survival.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Excel gets containerized, cloud-based Python analytics and visualization powers:

If you're decent in Python (or aspire to be) but don't have the chops for advanced data work in Excel, Microsoft now offers the kind of peanut butter-and-chocolate combination that you may consider a gift. At least until it goes behind the paywall.

Microsoft's Stefan Kinnestrand, writing about "the best of both worlds for data analysis and visualization," writes that this public preview of Python in Excel will allow spreadsheet tinkerers to "manipulate and explore data in Excel using Python plots and libraries and then use Excel's formulas, charts, and PivotTables to further refine your insights."

Microsoft partnered with Python analytics repository Anaconda to bring libraries like Pandas, Statsmodels, and Matplotlib into Excel. Python in Excel runs on Microsoft's cloud servers, and the company is touting the security that should offer. Python runs in isolated containers, with no access to devices, your network, or user tokens, Microsoft states. Python and Excel can only really talk to each other through limited functions—xl() and =PY()—that can only return code results, not macros, VBA code, or other data, Microsoft claims.

[...] It will be interesting to see how Python's integration into Excel works out. It's a very specialized, cloud-hosted, and seemingly containerized and secured code offering. But Office apps' history with Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) scripts and macros has a long history of exploits, patches, and more exploits. Early last year, Microsoft all but banned downloaded macros in Office unless someone goes out of their way to get infected. Barring that, it's an intriguing expansion of a code environment that is already Turing complete.

Original Submission

looorg writes:

Secure your domain name for the next 100 years with Wordpress, a company that has only been around for about 20 years.
For only $38k including hosting fees and domain name. It's not exactly cheap, but I guess they had to include the cost of inflation and other increases for the next 100 years.

Still unsure what is the weirdest part of it -- that they in general believe the system with domain names will be around in a century or that Wordpress will still be around. Also do you have to pay the century fee in advance or is it an installment plan per year or decade or? Not sure I would care to plonk down $38k at once for a domain name.

Is this the future of the web? A necropolis of dead sites that never update. Who is there to secure that you actually remain online after death? Beyond trust and that you are hoping that Wordpress remains online.

https://wordpress.com/blog/2023/08/25/introducing-the-100-year-plan/
https://www.searchenginejournal.com/wordpress-100-year-domain-name-registrations/

Original Submission

upstart writes:

What's the point of locks when hackers can easily get the keys to unlock them?

In July, security researchers revealed a sobering discovery: hundreds of pieces of malware used by multiple hacker groups to infect Windows devices had been digitally signed and validated as safe by Microsoft itself. On Tuesday, a different set of researchers made a similarly solemn announcement: Microsoft's digital keys had been hijacked to sign yet more malware for use by a previously unknown threat actor in a supply-chain attack that infected roughly 100 carefully selected victims.

The malware, researchers from Symantec's Threat Hunter Team reported, was digitally signed with a certificate for use in what is alternatively known as the Microsoft Windows Hardware Developer Program and the Microsoft Windows Hardware Compatibility Program. The program is used to certify that device drivers—the software that runs deep inside the Windows kernel—come from a known source and that they can be trusted to securely access the deepest and most sensitive recesses of the operating system. Without the certification, drivers are ineligible to run on Windows.

Somehow, members of this hacking team—which Symantec is calling Carderbee—managed to get Microsoft to digitally sign a type of malware known as a rootkit. Once installed, rootkits become what's essentially an extension of the OS itself. To gain that level of access without tipping off end-point security systems and other defenses, the Carderbee hackers first needed its rootkit to receive the Microsoft seal of approval, which it got after Microsoft signed it.

With the rootkit signed, Carderbee went on to pull another audacious feat. Through means that aren't yet clear, the group attacked the infrastructure of Esafenet, a China-based developer of software, known as the Cobra DocGuard Client, for encrypting and decrypting software so it can't be tampered with. Then, Carderbee used its newfound control to push malicious updates to roughly 2,000 organizations that are Cobra DocGuard customers. Hacking group members then pushed the Microsoft-signed rootkit to roughly 100 of those organizations. Representatives with Esafenet and its parent company, NSFOCUS, didn't respond to an email asking for verification.

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

[...] According to a new report by Bloomberg, the Starship launch left behind devastating destruction to the local environment, as reported by U.S. Wildlife officials following an investigation of the site shortly after the launch. These reports by U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service biologists were obtained by the news outlet via a Freedom of Information Act request.

Wildlife officials note that upon surveying the scene after Starship's launch, they found chunks of concrete across the area and foot-deep craters on the tidal flats. The report states that four acres of the nearby Texas state park were burned. A group of blue land crabs and seven bobwhite quail eggs were "incinerated" by the launch. 

Overall, the explosion from the launch "left a 385-acre debris field that flung concrete chunks as far as 2,680 feet from the launchpad and sparked a 3.5-acre fire."

[...] Much of the damage was caused by a purposeful decision from SpaceX that seemingly baffled experts in the documents. SpaceX did not use flame-suppression technology like a flame diverter or flame trench, a standard in the industry that redirects energy away from the rocket ship. Without it, Starship blew a hole in the ground underneath it, subsequently destroying its launchpad.

The FAA is currently reviewing an investigation into the launch and has temporarily grounded further attempts. But one Wildlife official noted in the documents that it's likely SpaceX won't be ready for another launch anytime soon.

"Pad site was totally destroyed and will likely force them to re-design the whole thing," the official wrote. "Probably won't see another launch for a while."

Original Submission

hubie writes:

Greater marital satisfaction lowers the risk of professional burnout, with this correlation being more pronounced among men than women:

Workplace burnout is widespread and has a detrimental effect on employee performance, wellbeing, and the overall productivity of the organisation. The literature contains numerous studies exploring the causes and mechanisms of workplace burnout; however, the role of personal relationships in this context has not received sufficient attention.

Burnout causes significant mental fatigue and manifests through emotional exhaustion, depersonalisation (a state in which individuals feel disconnected from their body, thoughts, or emotions), and a decline in personal fulfilment.

[...] The study findings indicate that as the level of marital satisfaction increases, the risk of burnout decreases, and this correlation is more pronounced in men. The researchers attribute these findings to disparities in social roles and stereotypes attributed to men and women, along with variations in expectations related to marriage and career.

When it comes to women, depersonalisation characterised by a sense of detachment from colleagues and clients and a decrease in empathy and compassion has a greater impact on the development of burnout. For men, the most significant factor is emotional fatigue from being overwhelmed with requests and feeling incapable of effectively managing them.

The researchers suggest that depersonalisation experienced by women is linked to the societal expectations and social roles commonly imposed on them within the professional realm. [...]

The findings reveal that men who experience greater professional success also tend to have higher levels of satisfaction with their personal relationships. No such correlation has been found for women. According to the researchers, this suggests that support in one's personal life may play a more significant role in facilitating workplace success for men compared to women.

The researchers emphasise that for organisations, understanding the specific aspects of employee burnout can serve as a valuable tool in managing stressful situations and enhancing motivation.

Journal Reference:
Bulgakov I. (2023) Взаимосвязь выгорания и удовлетворённости браком у сотрудников российских организаций [The relationship between burnout and satisfaction with marriage among employees of Russian organizations]. Organizational Psychology, vol. 13, no 1, pp. 145-160 (in Russian) DOI: http://doi.org/10.17323/2312-5942-2023-13-1-145-160

Original Submission

taylorvich writes:

Longevity gene from naked mole rats extends lifespan of mice

In a groundbreaking endeavor, researchers at the University of Rochester have successfully transferred a longevity gene from naked mole rats to mice, resulting in improved health and an extension of the mouse's lifespan.

Naked mole rats, known for their long lifespans and exceptional resistance to age-related diseases, have long captured the attention of the scientific community. By introducing a specific gene responsible for enhanced cellular repair and protection into mice, the Rochester researchers have opened exciting possibilities for unlocking the secrets of aging and extending human lifespan.

"Our study provides a proof of principle that unique longevity mechanisms that evolved in long-lived mammalian species can be exported to improve the lifespans of other mammals," says Vera Gorbunova, the Doris Johns Cherry Professor of biology and medicine at Rochester.

Original Submission

hubie writes:

Night-time pollinators such as moths need protecting as effectively as bees:

Night-time pollinators such as moths may visit just as many plants as bees, and should also be the focus of conservation and protection efforts, a new study from the University of Sheffield suggests.

The study found that moths under pressure from urbanisation may also be less resilient than bees, due to their more complex life cycle and more specific plant requirements.

It also revealed that despite this threat, moths play a crucial role in supporting urban plant communities, accounting for a third of all pollination in flowering plants, crops and trees.

[...] "As moths and bees both rely on plants for survival, plant populations also rely on insects for pollination. Protecting urban green spaces and ensuring they are developed in such a way that moves beyond bee-only conservation but also supports a diverse array of wildlife, will ensure both bee and moth populations remain resilient and our towns and cities remain healthier, greener places."

[...] [Study author Dr. E.E.] Ellis says the research demonstrates just how crucial moths are at pollinating plants, including crops, and that the study has implications for wildlife-friendly gardening initiatives, urban planners and policy makers responsible for developing urban green spaces for parks or urban horticulture.

She said: "People don't generally appreciate moths so they can often be overlooked compared to bees when talking about protection and conservation, but it's becoming apparent that there needs to be a much more focused effort to raise awareness of the important role moths play in establishing healthy environments, especially as we know moth populations have drastically declined over the past 50 years.

"When planning green spaces, consideration needs to be given to ensure planting is diverse and moth-friendly as well as bee-friendly, to ensure both our plants and insects remain resilient in the face of the climate crisis and further losses."

Journal Reference:
Ellis, E.E., Edmondson, J.L., Maher, K.H., Hipperson, H. & Campbell, S.A. (2023) Negative effects of urbanisation on diurnal and nocturnal pollen-transport networks [open]. Ecology Letters, 26, 1382–1393. Available from: https://doi.org/10.1111/ele.14261

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

Fukushima's Water Release: What We Know

Japan has announced plans to release wastewater from the stricken Fukushima-Daiichi nuclear plant into the ocean starting [this past] Thursday. Here is what we know about the release, how the water has been treated and concerns around the safety of the exercise.

Around 100,000 liters (26,500 gallons) of contaminated water—from cooling the crippled plant's reactors as well as groundwater and rain seeping in—is collected at the site in northeast Japan every day. Some 1.34 million tons—equivalent to almost 540 Olympic pools—are now stored in around a thousand steel containers at the seaside site, and now there is no more space, authorities say.

Japan decided in 2021, after years of discussion, that it would release at most around 500,000 liters per day into the sea via a pipe one kilometer (0.6 miles) long. Plant operator TEPCO says that a special filtering system called ALPS has removed all radioactive elements—including caesium and strontium—except tritium.

TEPCO has said it has diluted the water to reduce radioactivity levels to 1,500 becquerels per liter (Bq/L), far below the national safety standard of 60,000 Bq/L.

Tony Hooker, nuclear expert from the University of Adelaide, said that the level of tritium is well below the World Health Organization drinking water limit of 10,000 Bq/L. "Tritium is regularly released from nuclear power facilities into waterways worldwide," Hooker told AFP. "For decades (there have been) no evidential detrimental environmental or health effects," he said.