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taylorvich writes:

https://gizmodo.com/neanderthals-hunted-cave-lions-skeleton-spear-1850921295

Marks on the ribcage of a 48,000-year-old cave lion skeleton suggest the animal was killed by Neanderthals, making it the first evidence that our nearest human cousins hunted the Ice Age predators.

A team of paleoanthropologists and archaeologists recently scrutinized the remains of four lions: the aforementioned skeleton, which was excavated in 1985 in Siegsdorf, Germany, and phalanges and sesamoid bones from three lion specimens excavated from Einhornhöle, Germany, in 2019. The former showed evidence of being punctured by a wooden-tipped spear—a known weapon of Neanderthals—and the latter three had cut marks that suggested they were butchered in a way to keep the animals' claws preserved on the fur. The team's research is published today in Scientific Reports.

"The notion that Neanderthals interacted with cave lions holds deep significance," said Gabriele Russo, a paleoanthropologist at Eberhard Karls University of Tübingen and the study's lead author, in an email to Gizmodo. "It reveals that Neanderthals were actively engaged with their environment, which included encounters with formidable creatures like lions. These interactions encompassed not only the cultural use of lion body parts but also the ability to hunt them."

Cave lions (Panthera spelaea) are now extinct, but they inhabited most of northern Eurasia during the Pleistocene, recently enough that some preserved cave lions look like they're just sleeping. They made up a remarkable tableau of megafauna on the Ice Age steppe, alongside creatures like the woolly rhinoceros, ancient, extinct elephant species, and the woolly mammoth. And while the mammoth is a known quarry of Neanderthals, it now appears that the human group also hunted cave lions, one of the most prominent Ice Age predators.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

Speaking to partners last week as part of their annual Open Innovation Platform forum in Europe, a big portion of TSMC's roadshow was dedicated to the next generation of the company's foundry technology. TSMC's 2 nm-class N2, N2P, and N2X process technologies are set to introduce multiple innovations, including nanosheet gate-all-around (GAA) transistors, backside power delivery, and super-high-performance metal-insulator-metal (SHPMIM) capacitor over the next few years. But in order to take advantage of these innovations, TSMC warns, chip designers will need to use all-new electronic design automation (EDA), simulation, and verification tools as well as IP. And while making such a big shift is never an easy task, TSMC is bringing some good news to chip designers early-on: even with N2 still a couple of years out, many of the major EDA tools, verification tools, foundation IP, and even analog IP for N2 are already available for use.

[...] Preparations for the start of N2 chip production, scheduled for sometime in the second half of 2025, began long ago. Nanosheet GAA transistors behave differently than familiar FinFETs, so EDA and other tool and IP makers had to build their products from scratch. This is where TSMC's Open Innovation Platform (OIP) demonstrated its prowess and enabled TSMC's partners to start working on their products well in advance.

By now, major EDA tools from Cadence and Synopsys as well as many tools from Ansys and Siemens EDA have been certified by TSMC, so chip developers can already use them to design chips. Also, EDA software programs from Cadence and Synopsys are ready for analog design migration. Furthermore, Cadence's EDA tools already support N2P's backside power delivery network.

With pre-built IP designs, things are taking a bit longer. TSMC's foundation libraries and IP, including standard cells, GPIO/ESD, PLL, SRAM, and ROM are ready both for mobile and high-performance computing applications. Meanwhile, some PLLs exist in pre-silicon development kits, whereas others are silicon proven. Finally, blocks such as non-volatile memory, interface IP, and even chiplet IP are not yet available - bottlenecking some chip designs - but these blocks in active development or planned for development by companies like Alphawave, Cadence, Credo, eMemory, GUC, and Synopsys, according to a TSMC slide. Ultimately, the ecosystem of tools and libraries for designing 2 nm chips is coming together, but it's not all there quite yet.

[...] Although many of the major building blocks for chips are N2-ready, a lot of work still has to be done by many companies before TSMC's 2 nm-class process technologies go into mass production. Large companies, which tend to design (or co-design) IP and development tools themselves are already working on their 2 nm chips, and should be ready with their products by the time mass production starts in 2H 2025. Other players can also fire up their design engines because 2 nm preps are well underway at TSMC and its partners.

Original Submission

owl writes:

https://www.techdirt.com/2023/10/06/a-reagan-judge-the-first-amendment-and-the-eternal-war-against-pornography/

Using "Protect the children!" as their rallying cry, red states are enacting digital pornography restrictions. Texas's effort, H.B. 1181, requires commercial pornographic websites—and others, as we'll see shortly—to verify that their users are adults, and to display state-drafted warnings about pornography's alleged health dangers. In late August, a federal district judge blocked the law from taking effect. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit expedited Texas's appeal, and it just held oral argument. This law, or one of the others like it, seems destined for the Supreme Court.

So continues what the Washington Post, in the headline of a 1989 op-ed by the columnist Nat Henthoff, once called "the eternal war against pornography."

It's true that the First Amendment does not protect obscenity—which the Supreme Court defines as "prurient" and "patently offensive" material devoid of "serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value." Like many past anti-porn crusaders, however, Texas's legislators blew past those confines. H.B. 1181 targets material that is obscene to minors. Because "virtually all salacious material" is "prurient, offensive, and without value" to young children, the district judge observed, H.B. 1181 covers "sex education [content] for high school seniors," "prurient R-rated movies," and much else besides. Texas's attorneys claim that the state is going after "teen bondage gangbang" films, but the law they're defending sweeps in paintings like Manet's Olympia (1863):

Incidentally, this portrait appears—along with other nudes—in a recent Supreme Court opinion.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

We hear plenty of legitimate concerns regarding the new wave of generative AI, from the human jobs it could replace to its potential for creating misinformation. But one area that often gets overlooked is the sheer amount of energy these systems use. In the not-so-distant future, the technology could be consuming the same amount of electricity as an entire country.

Alex de Vries, a researcher at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, authored 'The Growing Energy Footprint of Artificial Intelligence,' which examines the environmental impact of AI systems.

De Vries notes that the training phase for large language models is often considered the most energy-intensive, and therefore has been the focus of sustainability research in AI.

Following training, models are deployed into a production environment and begin the inference phase. In the case of ChatGPT, this involves generating live responses to user queries. Little research has gone into the inference phase, but De Vries believes there are indications that this period might contribute significantly to an AI model's life-cycle costs.

According to research firm SemiAnalysis, OpenAI required 3,617 Nvidia HGX A100 servers, with a total of 28,936 GPUs, to support ChatGPT, implying an energy demand of 564 MWh per day. For comparison, an estimated 1,287 MWh was used in GPT-3's training phase, so the inference phase's energy demands were considerably higher.

Google, which reported that 60% of AI-related energy consumption from 2019 to 2021 stemmed from inference, is integrating AI features into its search engine. Back in February, Alphabet Chairman John Hennessy said that a single user exchange with an AI-powered search service "likely costs ten times more than a standard keyword search."

[...] "It would be advisable for developers not only to focus on optimizing AI, but also to critically consider the necessity of using AI in the first place, as it is unlikely that all applications will benefit from AI or that the benefits will always outweigh the costs," said De Vries.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

The biggest acquisition in gaming history and one of the largest in the tech industry is in the books. Twenty-one months after the deal was announced, Microsoft has bought Activision Blizzard for $68.7 billion, the largest acquisition in the company's history. CEO of Microsoft Gaming Phil Spencer has asked Activision CEO Bobby Kotick to stay on until the end of 2023, at which point he'll be leaving the company. It's been a long road filled with plenty of twists and turns to get to this point.

[...] In an attempt to win over the UK regulator, Microsoft agreed to sell the cloud gaming rights for Activision Blizzard titles to Ubisoft. That means that not only should Activision Blizzard's games be on Xbox Game Pass, but they'll land on Ubisoft+ and any other game-streaming service Ubisoft decides to work with. Concerns about competition in the cloud gaming market was the CMA's reasoning for initially blocking Microsoft's takeover of Activision, but the watchdog said in September that the Ubisoft concession "opens the door to the deal being cleared." A few weeks later, the CMA has rubberstamped the merger.

Microsoft also signed 10-year agreements with Nintendo and several cloud-gaming companies to offer its titles on their platforms. Those moves led to the European Union giving the merger the green light. The bloc's competition officials reportedly didn't see anything in the amended merger agreement (with the Ubisoft plan factored in) that would prompt a fresh antitrust investigation.

[...] The FTC still plans to challenge the merger. If that effort is successful, Microsoft could be forced to divest some or all of Activision Blizzard.

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.

Original Submission

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.

Original Submission

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."