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Freeman writes:

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/09/amazon-jacks-up-price-of-ad-free-prime-video-by-2-99-starting-in-2024/

Amazon announced today that Prime Video users in the US, Canada, Germany, and the UK will automatically start seeing advertisements "in early 2024." Subscribers will receive a notification email "several weeks" in advance, at which point they can opt to pay $2.99 extra for ad-free Prime Video, Amazon said.

That takes the price of ad-free Prime Video from $8.99/month alone to $11.98/month and from $14.99/month with Prime to $17.98/month.

[...] Prime Video subscribers who don't pay the extra $2.99 (and don't just cancel their subscription altogether) are promised "meaningfully fewer ads than linear TV and other streaming TV providers."

[...] With current prices starting at $9.99 per month, Prime Video was one of the cheapest ways to get streaming TV without ads. While the changes put pricing for ad-free Prime Video more on par with its competitors, it may still disappoint budget-minded cord-cutters. Streaming services started off as a cheaper, simpler alternative to cable TV. But as an influx in services, changes in pricing, confusing bundles, and scattered content have proven, we haven't gotten that far from cable after all.

Original Submission

Freeman writes:

https://arstechnica.com/health/2023/09/worm-that-jumps-from-rats-to-slugs-to-human-brains-has-invaded-southeast-us/

The dreaded rat lungworm—a parasite with a penchant for rats and slugs that occasionally finds itself rambling and writhing in human brains—has firmly established itself in the Southeast US and will likely continue its rapid invasion, a study published this week suggests.

The study involved small-scale surveillance of dead rats in the Atlanta zoo. Between 2019 and 2022, researchers continually turned up evidence of the worm. In all, the study identified seven out of 33 collected rats (21 percent) with evidence of a rat lungworm infection. The infected animals were spread throughout the study's time frame, all in different months, with one in 2019, three in 2021, and three in 2022, indicating sustained transmission.

Although small, the study "suggests that the zoonotic parasite was introduced to and has become established in a new area of the southeastern United States," the study's authors, led by researchers at the University of Georgia College of Veterinary Medicine, concluded. The study was published Wednesday in the journal Emerging Infectious Diseases.

[...] When a rat lungworm finds itself in a human, it does what it usually does in rats—it heads to the central nervous system and brain. Sometimes the migration of the worms to the central nervous system is asymptomatic or only causes mild transient symptoms. But, sometimes, they cause severe neurological dysfunction. This can start with nonspecific symptoms like headache, light sensitivity, and insomnia and develop into neck stiffness and pain, tingling or burning of the skin, double vision, bowel or bladder difficulties, and seizures. In severe cases, it can cause nerve damage, paralysis, coma, and even death.

It's often thought that the worm can't complete its life cycle in humans and that it ends up idly wandering around the brain for a month or two before it's eventually killed off by immune responses. However, there has been some evidence of adult worms reaching the human lungs.

Regardless, there's no specific treatment for a rat lungworm infection. No anti-parasitic drugs have proven effective, and, in fact, there's some evidence they can make symptoms worse by spurring more immune responses to dying worms. For now, supportive treatment, pain medications, and steroids are typically the only options.

Original Submission

The BBC reports that Lego won't be making blocks from recycled drink bottles after all, https://www.bbc.com/news/business-66910573 It appears they did a full depth study over the last two years,

Currently, many of Lego's bricks are made using acrylonitrile butadiene styrene (ABS), a virgin plastic made from crude oil.
...
In 2021, it said it has developed prototype bricks made from polyethylene terephthalate (PET) bottles, with some other chemicals added.

The hope was that material could have offered an alternative to oil-based bricks.

But Lego has now revealed that after more than two years of testing, it had found that using recycled PET didn't reduce carbon emissions.

It said the reason for that was because extra steps were required in the production process, which meant it needed to use more energy.

Two comments from your submitter:
      * Good for Lego to come clean and not continue with "greenwashing".
      * What's wrong with wooden blocks anyway? I really enjoyed mine. They didn't lock me into a fixed attachment the way that Lego does. Don't be square (aka boring)!

Original Submission

McCallum was most recently known for playing a pathologist on hit CBS TV programme NCIS, which went on to generate several spinoff series.

The Scottish-born actor died in New York on Monday. His death was due to natural causes.

CBS said he was a gifted actor and author and beloved around the world.

"He led an incredible life, and his legacy will forever live on through his family and the countless hours on film and television that will never go away."

Freeman writes:

https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2023/09/unity-makes-major-changes-to-controversial-install-fee-program/

Unity has made major changes to the per-install Runtime Fee program it announced last week and made apologies for a policy that united large swathes of the game development community in anger.

In a new blog post, Unity now says that projects made on current and earlier versions of Unity will not be subject to the new runtime fee structure. Only projects that upgrade to a new "Long Term Support" (LTS) version of Unity starting in 2024 and beyond will have to pay the charges, the company says.

This change should eliminate at least some of the legal confusion over projects started under one set of terms being moved to a new set unilaterally. Unity has also restored a GitHub page that was set up in 2019 to help developers track Terms of Service changes and reinstated its commitment that "you can stay on the terms applicable for the version of Unity editor you are using – as long as you keep using that version."

[...] Under the newly announced plan, runtime fees will not apply to any projects made on the Unity Personal tier, which will remain completely free. In addition, Unity Personal projects will now be able to stay on that free tier until the developer behind them makes $200,000 in annual revenue, an increase from the previous $100,000 revenue cap. And Personal tier projects will no longer be required to put a "Made with Unity" splash screen at the start of play.

In addition, Unity now says the new runtime fees will only be incurred for projects that have reached $1 million in revenue in the last 12 months and 1 million "initial engagements" in their lifetime.

[...] "Unity did well here," 3D Realms co-founder and current indie developer George Broussard added. "Sort of nailed it. This is more of a walk back than anyone could have expected."

"Unity fixed all the major issues (except trust), so it's a possibility to use again in the future," indie developer Radiangames wrote. "Uninstalling Godot and Unreal and getting back to work on Instruments."

Others were less forgiving. "Unity's updated policy can be classified as the textbook definition of, 'We didn't actually hear you, and we don't care what you wanted,'" Cerulean and Drunk Robot Games engineer RedVonix wrote on social media. "We'll never ship a Unity game of our own again..." they added.

See Also: Unity Exec Tells Ars He's on a Mission to Earn Back Developer Trust

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

A team of scientists appears to have unearthed a previously unknown genetic trigger for Parkinson’s disease—one much more commonly seen in people with recent African ancestry. They found that those who were born with one or two copies of this associated variant were noticeably more likely to develop Parkinson’s. The results highlight the value of conducting genetic research in diverse populations, the authors say.

Much of the research looking into the genetic underpinnings of Parkinson’s and other diseases has been done with largely European populations. And while we’ve learned a lot from this research, the relative lack of data on other groups means we could be missing important information. A large team of scientists from the U.S., the UK, and Nigeria decided to work together to help remedy this gap.

The team conducted a genome-wide association study (GWAS)—a type of study that looks for variants statistically linked to diseases or traits in a large group of people. They focused specifically on nearly 200,000 people of African or mixed ancestry, mostly from Nigeria as well as parts of the U.S. About 1,500 individuals in this group were diagnosed with Parkinson’s, while the rest were not.

The researchers ultimately identified a novel variant of the gene that produces β-glucocerebrosidase (GBA1) that seemed to raise people’s risk of Parkinson’s. People who had one copy of the variant were 1.5 times more likely to have Parkinson’s than those who had no copies, and those with two copies were about 3.5 times more likely to develop it, they found. GBA1 is a protein that helps cells recycle other proteins, and several mutations involving this gene have already been linked to Parkinson’s. But this new variant was almost exclusively found in people with African ancestry.

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes the following story:

Tiny water fleas could play a pivotal role in removing persistent chemical pollutants from wastewater—making it safe to use in factories, farms and homes, a new study reveals.

Rapid urbanization, population growth, unsustainable food production and climate change have put unprecedented pressure on water resources, culminating in a global water crisis. The sustainable management and reuse of water resources is paramount for ensuring societal, economic, and environmental well-being.

Persistent chemical pollutants, originating from domestic and industrial processes, escape conventional wastewater treatment and prevent its safe reuse. When wastewater effluent is released into rivers, it eventually finds its way into reservoirs, irrigation systems, and aquifer recharges. These chemical pollutants then enter the human food chain and water supply, detrimentally impacting the health of approximately 92 million individuals annually.

Scientists and engineers have discovered a method to harness Daphnia to provide a scalable low-cost, low-carbon way of removing pharmaceuticals, pesticides, and industrial chemicals from wastewater. This approach avoids the toxic byproducts typically associated with current technologies.

The researchers have developed technology that allows them to retrofit populations of water fleas into wastewater treatment plants. What makes their technology unique is the selection of strains based on their chemical tolerance which the researchers 'resurrect' from past environments.

owl writes:

https://www.righto.com/2020/11/reverse-engineering-classic-mk4116-16.html

Back in the late 1970s, the most popular memory chip was Mostek's MK4116, holding a whopping (for the time) 16 kilobits. It provided storage for computers such as the Apple II, TRS-80, ZX Spectrum, Commodore PET, IBM PC, and Xerox Alto as well as video games such as Defender and Missile Command. To see how the chip is implemented I opened one up and reverse-engineered it. I expected the circuitry to be similar to other chips of the era, using standard NMOS gates, but it was much more complex than I expected, built from low-power dynamic logic. The MK4116 also used advanced manufacturing processes to fit 16,384 high-density memory cells on the chip.

[...] In dynamic RAM, each bit is stored in a capacitor with the bit's value, 0 or 1, represented by the voltage on the capacitor.3 The advantage of dynamic RAM is that each memory cell is very small, so a lot of data can be stored on one chip.4 The downside of dynamic RAM is that the charge on a capacitor leaks away after a few milliseconds. To avoid losing data, dynamic RAM must be constantly refreshed: bits are read from the capacitors, amplified, and then written back to the capacitors. For the MK4116, all the data must be refreshed every two milliseconds.

Original Submission

taylorvich writes:

https://newatlas.com/medical/diabetes-implant-oxygen-islet-cells/

Daily insulin injections are painful and inconvenient, which is why scientists are developing implants that treat diabetes without any need for needles. A new one looks particularly promising, as it produces oxygen to feed onboard islet cells.

[...] One alternative to those injections involves implanting islet cells that have either been harvested from a cadaver or derived from stem cells. While doing so does work in many cases, patients have to take immunosuppressive drugs for the rest of their lives in order to keep those cells from being rejected.

Scientists have tried encapsulating islet cells in tiny flexible implants that shield the cells from the host's immune system, yet still allow insulin produced by those cells to diffuse into the bloodstream. These implants also prevent life-sustaining oxygen from reaching the cells, however, which means those cells won't last long.

Some implants have addressed that shortcoming by incorporating either a preloaded oxygen chamber or chemical reagents which produce oxygen. Both the oxygen and the reagents run out over time, though, so the implants will have to be replaced or refilled.

Seeking a longer-term alternative, a team from MIT and Boston Children's Hospital recently developed the new device.

It's packed with hundreds of thousands of islet cells, along with a proton-exchange membrane that splits water vapor (which occurs naturally in the body) into hydrogen and oxygen. The hydrogen harmlessly diffuses, while the oxygen goes into a storage chamber in the implant. A thin, permeable membrane in that chamber then allows the oxygen to flow through to the chamber containing the islet cells.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

Americans don't talk much about peace. But it turns out they care about it a lot—they just don't talk about it the way people who have experienced war or civil conflict do.

When public opinion polls in the U.S. ask people about peace, it's either in the context of religion or world peace.

Instead of using the word peace, Americans are more likely to say that they care deeply about safety and security and issues like terrorism, crime, illegal drugs and immigration.

But they still care about the same things people in places that have faced war are focused on.

Peace is hard to define. In the dictionary, it's equated with tranquility or the absence of war. We see it as broader. Peace is the ability for people to live in harmony with themselves and with each other. In practice, however, that can mean many different things to different people.

In Colombia, for example, many communities told us they felt at peace when they had the infrastructure necessary to supply basic needs, like clean water, or when they could actively participate in regular social gatherings. In Bosnia, residents highlighted the ability to use public spaces, including rebuilt ruins from the war, as well as the presence of more day-to-day amenities like streetlights and parking.

But until a recent project in Oakland, California, we weren't thinking about our work in America as also being about peace.

Since 2021, we've been working with six community organizations in Oakland to understand how people define and experience safety and well-being in their everyday lives. As it turns out, these concepts helped us get at how Americans, who have not experienced war like the people in other regions we've worked with, might also understand peace.

looorg writes:

https://neuralink.com/blog/first-clinical-trial-open-for-recruitment/

Neuralink are looking for a few test subjects that have either ALS or are quadriplegics to test their wireless brain human interface. A device that will control a computer keyboard with only the users mind. Also they want to test out how good their robot is at surgery but that is perhaps less appealing.

The PRIME Study (short for Precise Robotically Implanted Brain-Computer Interface) – a groundbreaking investigational medical device trial for our fully-implantable, wireless brain-computer interface (BCI) – aims to evaluate the safety of our implant (N1) and surgical robot (R1) and assess the initial functionality of our BCI for enabling people with paralysis to control external devices with their thoughts.

During the study, the R1 Robot will be used to surgically place the N1 Implant's ultra-fine and flexible threads in a region of the brain that controls movement intention. Once in place, the N1 Implant is cosmetically invisible and is intended to record and transmit brain signals wirelessly to an app that decodes movement intention. The initial goal of our BCI is to grant people the ability to control a computer cursor or keyboard using their thoughts alone.

Original Submission

Freeman writes:

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/09/online-child-safety-law-blocked-after-calif-argued-face-scans-not-that-invasive/

A California law requiring a wide range of platforms to estimate ages of users and protect minors from accessing harmful content appears to be just as unconstitutional as a recently blocked law in Texas requiring age verification to access adult content.

Yesterday, US District Judge Beth Labson Freeman ordered a preliminary injunction stopping California Attorney General Rob Bonta from enforcing the state's Age-Appropriate Design Code Act (CAADCA), finding that the law likely violates the First Amendment.

"The Court finds that although the stated purpose of the Act—protecting children when they are online—clearly is important," Freeman wrote, "the CAADCA likely violates the First Amendment."

"Specifically," Freeman said, "the age estimation and privacy provisions thus appear likely to impede the 'availability and use' of information and accordingly to regulate speech," and "the steps a business would need to take to sufficiently estimate the age of child users would likely prevent both children and adults from accessing certain content."

[...] Regulators' attempts to age-gate the Internet have drawn criticism, and courts have repeatedly found that these laws likely run afoul of the First Amendment. But perhaps more troubling, here, Freeman found that CAADCA not only risked restricting speech, but also did not appear to address or mitigate the harms to children identified by the state. Even worse, after California argued that businesses gathering information from children by requiring face scans or other biometric data to estimate user ages was "minimally invasive," Freeman concluded that enforcing the law could cause more harm than good. "Such measures would appear to counter the State's interest in increasing privacy protections for children," Freeman wrote, explaining:

"CAADCA's age estimation provision appears not only unlikely to materially alleviate the harm of insufficient data and privacy protections for children, but actually likely to exacerbate the problem by inducing covered businesses to require consumers, including children, to divulge additional personal information."

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Microsoft AI team accidentally leaks 38TB of private company data:

AI researchers at Microsoft have made a huge mistake.

According to a new report from cloud security company Wiz, the Microsoft AI research team accidentally leaked 38TB of the company's private data.

38 terabytes. That's a lot of data.

The exposed data included full backups of two employees' computers. These backups contained sensitive personal data, including passwords to Microsoft services, secret keys, and more than 30,000 internal Microsoft Teams messages from more than 350 Microsoft employees.

We found a public AI repo on GitHub, exposing over 38TB of private files – including personal computer backups of @Microsoft employees 👨‍💻

So, how did this happen? The report explains that Microsoft's AI team uploaded a bucket of training data containing open-source code and AI models for image recognition. Users who came across the Github repository were provided with a link from Azure, Microsoft's cloud storage service, in order to download the models.

One problem: The link that was provided by Microsoft's AI team gave visitors complete access to the entire Azure storage account. And not only could visitors view everything in the account, they could upload, overwrite, or delete files as well.

[martyb ed. update: My first hard disk drive was a Seagare ST-231. It could store so much data that I had to partition it into two "devices" under Microsoft DOS 3.2: 32MB and 8MB. It was so large that I thought that nobody would be able to use all that disk space! Over time, newest drives has had: 80MB, 200MB, and 1TB. My current PC has a 2TB drive... and that is relatively "small" by today's standards. Microsoft lost 38TB?!]

How large were your drives over time?

Original Submission

Alex "Sandy" Pentland[1] is somewhere near the top of the AI pantheon these days, here's his most recent talk, "Engineering Ecosystems with AI", given online on Friday 15 Sept., https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0m8EsEmZPYQ at the MIT Mobility Forum. In the intro it is mentioned that this was a dry run for Pentland's upcoming keynote to the U. S. National Academy of Sciences. From the YT summary,

This talk covers how our society is having difficulties engineering heterogeneous systems of people and technologies; for instance, our systems for dealing with pandemics, climate change, inequality, or financial stress have been less than completely successful, in significant part because of unanticipated human behaviors.

He discusses recent work on models of panics, cascades and other highly nonlinear, long tailed phenomena--using aggregated census data--as an example of how AI and big data can be socially useful.

Then he takes the data further, showing that when people move between communities (both locally and internationally with migration) is when progress really happens. AI may have a similar "melting pot" effect, helping mid-level workers/earners (which he defines) in closing some of the performance/creativity/earnings gap to high-level workers. In particular, AI developed on restricted and well defined training sets may not get the headlines of ChatGPT, but will be very useful in many fields.

Near the end he quotes Xi Jinping of China to make it clear how big this social change is going to be (paraphrased):

Xi is the largest representative, loudest voice for Marxism and he recently said, 'data is a new primary means of production along with capital and labor'. And if you think about that, what he's saying is that classic Marxism is done. It's now not a battle between capital and labor. It's a battle between data, capital and labor and that sort of gives you a sense of the magnitude of this problem.

If you look at what society did with capital and labor, it took a century or more, for instance, to form labor unions to pressure companies, to establish principles to get laws enacted. ... And it's not a fixed thing, it's not like you can do it once and it's done. It evolves over time. So currently we're in a new evolutionary phase of labor and a new evolutionary phase of capital. The problem with data is that we don't have *any* institutions, we don't have *any* norms for it. It's new, so we're back in the robber baron era of capital, we're back in the early industrial age where kids were working 14 hour days. That's where we are with data. Just face it! What we have to do is develop the right institutions to be able to deal with this now-critical element of society.

I don't watch many videos, but this one was well worth the time. His actual talk is about 25 minutes, the rest of the hour is intro and many questions/discussions at the end.

[1]Here's Pentland's short CV, https://www.media.mit.edu/people/sandy/overview/

Original Submission

"aristarchus" writes:

Osiris-Rex: Nasa awaits fiery return of asteroid Bennu samples

A seven-year mission to study what has been described as the most dangerous rock in the Solar System is about to reach its dramatic conclusion.

The Osiris-Rex spacecraft is bringing home the "soil" samples it grabbed from the surface of asteroid Bennu.

These dusty materials will be dropped off by the Nasa probe as it sweeps past the Earth on Sunday.

They'll be tucked inside a capsule to protect them from a fiery descent to the US State of Utah.

Scientists expect the samples' chemistry to reveal new information about the formation of the planets 4.5 billion years ago, and possibly even to give insights into how life got started on our world.

Touchdown on desert land belonging to the Department of Defense is expected at 08:55 local time (Utah) (14:55 UTC; 15:55 BST).

When: NASA will start its live coverage at 10 a.m. EST on Sunday, Sept. 24, 2023. The agency expects the capsule to parachute down to the desert at around 10:55 a.m. EST.

How: You can watch online at:

- the agency's website via https://www.nasa.gov/nasalive

or NASA TV's YouTube channel

[Updated at 09:28 UTC with links to video feeds. JR]

Original Submission