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upstart writes:

Early analyses reveal carbon and water in ancient asteroid parachuted down to Earth:

When the OSIRIS-REx mission touched down in Utah with a sample from the 4.5-billion-year-old asteroid, Bennu, scientists who opened the hatch gave an audible gasp when they saw what was inside. Now, early studies from the materials parachuted down to Earth have revealed why: The sample contains evidence of carbon and water, which "together could indicate the building blocks of life on Earth," according to a NASA press release.

[...] "The bounty of carbon-rich material and the abundant presence of water-bearing clay minerals are just the tip of the cosmic iceberg," said OSIRIS-REx principal investigator Dante Lauretta in the press release. "These discoveries, made possible through years of dedicated collaboration and cutting-edge science, propel us on a journey to understand not only our celestial neighborhood but also the potential for life's beginnings."

Original Submission

owl writes:

https://crystalverse.com/pyramid-salt-crystals/

Regular salt looks like a fine white powder. Sure, it tastes good, but it's not very interesting to look at.

But what if I told you that you could transform the salt sitting in your kitchen into a work of art?

What if I told you that within a few hours, you could turn white, powdery salt into premium salt crystals shaped like pyramids, flowers and Eiffel towers?

Plus, you don't need to be good at art. You don't need to carve those pyramids yourself. Just sit beside the stove, and watch as pyramid salt crystals grow from a dish of salt water right before your eyes.

Let me show you how to do just that.

To my knowledge, it's the only such guide on the Internet.

Original Submission

hubie writes:

Illusions are in the eye, not the mind:

Numerous visual illusions are caused by limits in the way our eyes and visual neurones work – rather than more complex psychological processes, new research shows.

Researchers examined illusions in which an object's surroundings affect the way we see its colour or pattern.

Scientists and philosophers have long debated whether these illusions are caused by neural processing in the eye and low-level visual centres in the brain, or involve higher-level mental processes such as context and prior knowledge.

In the new study Dr Jolyon Troscianko, from the University of Exeter, co-developed a model that suggests simple limits to neural responses – not deeper psychological processes – explain these illusions.

"Our eyes send messages to the brain by making neurones fire faster or slower," said Dr Troscianko, from the Centre for Ecology and Conservation on Exeter's Penryn Campus in Cornwall.

"However, there's a limit to how quickly they can fire, and previous research hasn't considered how the limit might affect the ways we see colour."

[...] "This throws into the air a lot of long-held assumptions about how visual illusions work," Dr Troscianko said.

He said the findings also shed light on the popularity of high-definition televisions.

"Modern high dynamic range televisions create bright white regions that are over 10,000 times brighter than their darkest black, approaching the contrast levels of natural scenes," Dr Troscianko added.

"How our eyes and brains can handle this contrast is a puzzle because tests show that the highest contrasts we humans can see at a single spatial scale is around 200:1.

"Even more confusingly, the neurones connecting our eyes to our brains can only handle contrasts of about 10:1.

"Our model shows how neurones with such limited contrast bandwidth can combine their signals to allow us to see these enormous contrasts, but the information is 'compressed' – resulting in visual illusions.

[...] "Ultimately this shows how a system with a severely limited neural bandwidth and sensitivity can perceive contrasts larger than 10,000:1."

Journal Reference:
Jolyon Troscianko, Daniel Osorio, A model of colour appearance based on efficient coding of natural images [open], PLOS Comp Bio, 2023. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1011117

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

Utah’s Division of Consumer Protection (UDCP) is suing TikTok over allegations that the app’s “addictive nature” harms children and that TikTok deceptively obscures its relationship with ByteDance, its parent company in China. The state’s lawsuit is the latest in a long-and-growing string of bans and legal action from US-based governments and organizations to rein in TikTok’s popularity, generally on espionage fears.

Utah Governor Spencer Cox accused the company of “misleading parents that its app is safe for children” in a press release announcing the lawsuit today. He said the app “illegally baits children into addictive and unhealthy use” with features that encourage young users to scroll endlessly in order to make more advertising money.

The lawsuit alleges that TikTok violates the Utah Consumer Sales Practices Act (UCSPA) by making the app addictive to children and profiting from it; misrepresenting things like the safety of its app and fairness of its policies; and claiming that it’s based in the US and not controlled from China by ByteDance.

[...] Beyond TikTok, Utah also passed a law this year requiring parents to consent before their children can use social media, in a move that’s part of a larger censorship trend in the United States.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Besides the well-known tastes of sweet, salty, sour, bitter, and umami, recent research proposes that the tongue might also detect ammonium chloride as a basic taste:

Japanese scientist Kikunae Ikeda first proposed umami as a basic taste in the early 1900s, in addition to the recognized tastes of sweet, sour, salty, and bitter. It took nearly eighty years for the scientific community to officially acknowledge his proposition.

Now, scientists led by researchers at the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts, and Sciences have evidence of a sixth basic taste.

In a study recently published in the journal Nature Communications, USC Dornsife neuroscientist Emily Liman and her team found that the tongue responds to ammonium chloride through the same protein receptor that signals sour taste.

"If you live in a Scandinavian country, you will be familiar with and may like this taste," says Liman, professor of biological sciences. In some northern European countries, salt licorice has been a popular candy at least since the early 20th century. The treat counts among its ingredients salmiak salt, or ammonium chloride.

Scientists have for decades recognized that the tongue responds strongly to ammonium chloride. However, despite extensive research, the specific tongue receptors that react to it remained elusive.

[...] Hydrogen ions are the key component of acids, and as foodies everywhere know, the tongue senses acid as sour. That's why lemonade (rich in citric and ascorbic acids), vinegar (acetic acid), and other acidic foods impart a zing of tartness when they hit the tongue. Hydrogen ions from these acidic substances move into taste receptor cells through the OTOP1 channel.

Because ammonium chloride can affect the concentration of acid — that is, hydrogen ions — within a cell, the team wondered if it could somehow trigger OTOP1.

PiMuNu writes:

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-66964510

I thought this was an interesting, albeit extreme, example of how the data that phone software harvests can be used for evil purposes. In this case it's a loan software that harvests contact data.

The business model is brutal but simple.

There are many apps that promise hassle-free loans in minutes. Not all of them are predatory. But many - once downloaded - harvest your contacts, photos and ID cards, and use that information later to extort you.

When customers don't repay on time - and sometimes even when they do - they share this information with a call centre where young agents of the gig economy, armed with laptops and phones are trained to harass and humiliate people into repayment.

[...]

As the abuse escalated they threatened to message all of the 486 contacts in her phone telling them she was a thief and a whore. When they threatened to tarnish her daughter's reputation too, Bhoomi could no longer sleep.

She borrowed from friends, family and more and more apps - 69 in total. At night, she prayed the morning would never come. But without fail at 07:00, her phone would start pinging and buzzing incessantly.

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Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

NASA's pioneering Deep Space Optical Communications (DSOC) experiment will be the first demonstration of laser, or optical, communications from as far away as Mars. Launching with NASA's Psyche mission to a metal-rich asteroid of the same name on Thursday, Oct. 12, DSOC will test key technologies designed to enable future missions to transmit denser science data and even stream video from the Red Planet.

[...] There is no dedicated infrastructure on Earth for deep space optical communications, so for the purposes of DSOC, two ground telescopes have been updated to communicate with the flight laser transceiver. NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California will host the operations team, and a high-power near-infrared laser transmitter has been integrated with the Optical Communications Telescope Laboratory at JPL's Table Mountain facility near Wrightwood, California. The transmitter will deliver a modulated laser signal to DSOC's flight transceiver and serve as a beacon, or pointing reference, so that the returned laser beam can be accurately aimed back to Earth.

Data sent from the flight transceiver will be collected by the 200-inch (5.1-meter) Hale Telescope at Caltech's Palomar Observatory in San Diego County, California, which has been equipped with a special superconducting high-efficiency detector array.

DSOC is intended to demonstrate high-rate transmission of data of distances up to 240 million miles (390 million kilometers)—more than twice the distance between the sun and Earth—during the first two years of Psyche's six-year journey to the asteroid belt.

The farther Psyche travels from our planet, the fainter the laser photon signal will become, making it increasingly challenging to decode the data. As an additional challenge, the photons will take longer to reach their destination, creating a lag of over 20 minutes at the tech demo's farthest distance. Because the positions of Earth and the spacecraft will be constantly changing as the photons travel, the DSOC ground and flight systems will need to compensate, pointing to where the ground receiver (at Palomar) and flight transceiver (on Psyche) will be when the photons arrive.

A submitter with no name writes:

While there are a number of small robot lawn mowers on the market, I think they mostly mow randomly inside a fenced off area (the fence may be a buried wire with an AC carrier signal?) Designed for mowing one residential lawn, and not using any sort of optimal mowing path.

Now Honda is demoing a battery powered zero-turn mower that can be trained by a human mowing a big lawn once. Multiple mowing jobs can be stored in memory for future playback. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ptN-qrEGqX0 Clearly designed for landscape contractors and other commercial mowing services.

They claim various AI features, but from the looks of it, this is limited to safety--stopping if the machine senses people and/or new objects in the stored mowing path. From the YT text:

Capable of operating in manual or autonomous mode, when manually operated, the Honda AWM learns the mowing routes and patterns set by the operator. In autonomous operation, the AWM reproduces these routes and patterns, which can free up workers' time to focus on more high-value tasks.

Prediction for the next generation of AI mower--automatically re-works the internal mowing path each mow to keep from leaving tell-tale patterns in the grass. Of course each path is optimized, so all these different patterns take about the same time to mow the given lawn.

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Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

Microsoft has stopped developing VBScript after a 27-year relationship and plans to remove the scripting language entirely in a future Windows release.

The IT giant said on Monday that VBScript, short for Visual Basic Scripting Edition, has been deprecated in an update to its list of "Deprecated features for Windows client."

"VBScript is being deprecated," Microsoft said. "In future releases of Windows, VBScript will be available as a feature on demand before its removal from the operating system."

Only a month ago, Microsoft announced the pending retirement of another software elder, WordPad.

VBScript debuted in 1996 and its most recent release, version 5.8, dates back to 2010. It is a scripting language, and was for a while widely used among system administrators to automate tasks until it was eclipsed by PowerShell, which debuted in 2006.

"Microsoft Visual Basic Scripting Edition brings active scripting to a wide variety of environments, including Web client scripting in Microsoft Internet Explorer and Web server scripting in Microsoft Internet Information Service," Redmond explains in its help documentation.

Unfortunately, Microsoft never managed to get other browser makers to support VBScript, so outside of Microsoft-exclusive environments, web developers tended to favor JavaScript for client-side tasks.

[...] VBScript's pending demise also means the end for Microsoft Deployment Toolkit, which depends on VBScript. MDT is already on notice now that it's not supported with Windows 11.

Microsoft's planned discontinuation of VBScript may be in part motivated by security concerns, given that VBScript can be a malware vector.

Original Submission

hubie writes:

Researchers Find Hidden Micro-Stressors in Routine Driving:

Commuters around the world dream of ideal driving conditions every day, but they rarely get them. The traffic is often heavy and gets worse when the weather turns sour. Light traffic and good weather are usually perceived as factors for a stress-free commute. Alas, researchers from the University of Houston and the Texas A&M Transportation Institute found that even under such ideal conditions, daily driving is stressful to many people, and for intriguing reasons.

In a study published in the journal IEEE Transactions on Affective Computing, researchers report that people with a predisposition to anxiety exhibit a significantly higher heart rate when they drive as opposed to those who are not predisposed to anxiety. Anxious drivers had a heart rate about five beats per minute higher than non-anxious drivers, under similar conditions.

The study's researchers also found drivers' heart rate increased significantly with car speed. Drivers moving at 65 mph had a heart rate of about four beats per minute higher than drivers moving at 25 mph, under similar conditions. In both cases, the observed cardiovascular activation was linked to sympathetic activation, that is, to stress responses.

"These are substantial numbers that we would have never guessed", said Ioannis Pavlidis, Eckhard-Pfeiffer Distinguished Professor of Computer Science, who led the University of Houston group. "Anxious people who commute at highway speeds experience, on average, heart rate elevation of nine beats per minute; this is every day for an hour or more, which is the typical commuting time in this country. It is an unexpected stressor that is hard to ignore because of its substantial effect and its repetitive nature."

upstart writes:

NASA's Psyche metal asteroid mission launches this week: Here's what you need to know:

NASA is preparing to launch its Psyche spacecraft on the first mission designed to study a metal-rich asteroid up close. The Psyche mission is set to blast off on Thursday (Oct. 12) from NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida at 10:16 a.m. EDT (1416 GMT) atop a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket.

After traveling an estimated 2.2 billion miles (3.5 billion kilometers), the spacecraft will arrive at the asteroid 16 Psyche, which is located at the far edge of the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, in 2029.

Once the spacecraft is in place, mission scientists will study the metal asteroid, which is different from the rock- and ice-dominated bodies studied in situ in the past, to learn more about how the rocky planets of the solar system (Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars) formed.

Discovered in 1852, Psyche is considered one of the most fascinating objects in the main asteroid belt, and scientists have only been able to study it at a distance. Scientists think the asteroid is composed of the exposed core of a planetesimal, a small body that formed during planet formation as gas and dust around a star collapsed in dense patches.

A planetesimal could eventually go on to gather more mass and thus become a planet. But Psyche is thought to have failed to reach planet status because it collided with other larger bodies as the solar system was forming around 4.5 billion years ago, possibly stripping the metal-rich asteroid of its outer rocky shell and exposing its iron-rich core.

That means that studying this 173-mile-wide (279 km), potato-shaped asteroid could not only help reveal more about the collisions that took place in the early solar system but also provide scientists with a proxy for the inaccessible iron core of our own planet.

Psyche seems to diverge from the solar system planets born from planetesimals. Whereas the rocks of the inner solar system planets are replete with iron oxides  —  chemical compounds of iron and oxygen atoms  —  Psyche lacks these compounds. If Psyche is indeed composed of material left over from the birth of the rocky planets, its existence could point to a different type of planetary formation that diverges from the mechanism that created Earth.

But even if Psyche turns out not to be an exposed planetesimal core, the asteroid is still very interesting to scientists because it could mean it belongs to a population of never-before-seen primordial solar system bodies.

hubie writes:

https://journals.aps.org/prx/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevX.13.021032

In the short story Chains (1929), the Hungarian writer Frigyes Karinthy described a game where a group of people were discussing how the members of the human society were closer together than ever before. To prove this point, one participant proposes that any person out of the entire Earth population (around 1.8 billion at that time) could be reached using nothing except each personal network of acquaintances, betting that the resulting chain would be of no more than five individuals. The story coined the expression "six degrees of separation" to reflect the idea that all people of the world are six or fewer social connections apart from each other. The concept was later generalized to that of "small-world" networks, where the maximal social distance (the diameter of the network) scales logarithmically, rather than linearly, with the size of the population.

[...] One of the most intriguing and captivating features of social networks is that they are organized so that no individual is more than six connections apart from any other, an empirical regularity known as the six degrees of separation. Why social networks have this ultrasmall world organization—where the diameter of a graph of the network is independent of the network size over several orders of magnitude—is still unknown. Our study shows that this property is the direct consequence of the dynamical evolution of any network structure where individuals weigh their aspiration to improve their centrality against the costs incurred in forming or maintaining connections.

We look at the evolution of a graph whose growth is governed by a simple compensation rule. This rule balances the cost incurred by nodes in maintaining connections and the benefit accrued by the chosen links. In this case, the graph's asymptotic equilibrium state (a Nash equilibrium, where no further actions would produce more benefit than cost) features a diameter that, irrespective of the network's initial connectivity structure, does not depend on the system's size and is equal to six.

Our study points out that evolutionary rules of the kind traditionally associated with human cooperation and altruism can in fact account also for the emergence of the six degrees of separation in social networks.

Journal Reference:
I. Samoylenko, D. Aleja, E. Primo, et al., Why Are There Six Degrees of Separation in a Social Network?, Phys. Rev. X 13, 021032 – Published 31 May 2023. DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevX.13.021032

Original Submission

upstart writes:

An algorithm that takes just seconds to scan a paper for duplicated images racks up more suspicious images than a person:

Scientific-image sleuth Sholto David blogs about image manipulation in research papers, a pastime that has exposed him to many accounts of scientific fraud. But other scientists "are still a little bit in the dark about the extent of the problem", David says. He decided he needed some data.

The independent biologist in Pontypridd, UK, spent the best part of several months poring over hundreds of papers in one journal, looking for any with duplicated images. Then he ran the same papers through an artificial-intelligence (AI) tool. Working at two to three times David's speed, the software found almost all of the 63 suspect papers that he had identified — and 41 that he'd missed. David described the exercise last month in a preprint1, one of the first published comparisons of human versus machine for finding doctored images.

[...] Not all image manipulation is done with nefarious intent. Authors might tinker with images by accident, for aesthetic reasons or to make a figure more understandable. But journals and others would like to catch images with alterations that cross the line, whatever the authors' motivation. And now they are turning to AI for help.

Some 200 universities, publishers and scientific societies already rely on Imagetwin, the tool that David used for his study. The software compares images in a paper with more than 25 million images from other publications — the largest such database in the image-integrity world, according to Imagetwin's developers.

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

I am still amazed how few people – even in IT – have heard of Windows Copilot. Microsoft's deep integration of Bing Chat into Windows 11 was announced with much fanfare back in May.

Microsoft hasn't been quiet about it – indeed it can’t seem to shut up about Copilot this and Copilot that – yet it seems that the real impact of this sudden Copilotization of all the things has somehow managed to fly under the radar.

[...] Microsoft has rushed to get Copilot into its operating system

[...] Windows Copilot looks just like Bing Chat – which may be why IT folks haven't given it a second look. Bing Chat has been available in Microsoft's Edge Browser for months – no biggie.

But Windows Copilot only looks like Bing Chat. While Bing Chat runs within the isolated environment of the web browser, Copilot abandons those safeties. Copilot can touch and change Windows system settings – not all of them (at least not yet) but some of them, with more being added all the time. That means Microsoft's AI chatbot has broken loose of its hermetically sealed browser, and has the run of our PCs.

[...] Every day we learn of new prompt injection attacks – weaponizing the ambiguities of human language (and, sometimes, just the right level of noise) to override the guardrails keeping AI chatbots on the straight and narrow. Consider a prompt injection attack hidden within a Word document: Submitted to Windows Copilot for an analysis and summary, the document also injects a script that silently transmits a copy of the files in the working directory to the attacker.

Unity CEO John Riccitiello is Retiring, Effective Immediately

upstart writes:

Former EA CEO will be replaced in interim by James Whitehurst from IBM/Red Hat:

John Riccitiello, CEO of Unity, the company whose 3D game engine had recently seen backlash from developers over proposed fee structures, will retire as CEO, president, and board chairman at the company, according to a press release issued late on a Monday afternoon, one many observe as a holiday.

[...] The timing of Riccitiello's retirement is certainly intriguing, given Unity's recent history. After announcing a per-install fee that many developers felt would endanger their livelihoods, Unity made major changes and has sent other executives on something of an apology tour. Riccitiello previously served as CEO at Electronic Arts, where his resignation came soon after SimCity's technically (if not financially) disastrous launch, though Riccitiello himself cited financial results.

Unity CEO 'Retires' In The Wake Of Fee Fiasco

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

Unity has announced the immediate retirement of president, CEO, chair, and board member John Riccitiello.

The boss's departure follows a botched attempt to charge developers per-install fees for games created with Unity's tools – a step that effectively amounted to charging royalties on each sale of a game. Unity had previously promised never to do such a thing.

Developers did not appreciate Unity's proposal, expressing opposition so vigorous the toolmaker canceled a Town Hall Meeting and mostly walked back its new pricing plan.

Riccitiello's departure was announced in a press release headlined "Unity Announces Leadership Transition." Tellingly, Unity posted it to Business Wire – a press release distribution service and repository that many comms people regard as a source of on-the-record info – rather than its own site.

[...] You may or may not know that Riccitiello was CEO of games publishing house Electronic Arts from February 2007 to March 2013; back then he quit that biz saying he was accountable for EA's under-performing finances. He joined Unity the following year.

Previously:
    Unity Makes Major Changes to Controversial Install-Fee Program
    Unity Promises "Changes" to Install Fee Plans as Developer Fallout Continues
    Developer Dis-Unity

Original Submission