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upstart writes:

Bcachefs Merged Into The Linux 6.7 Kernel:

Less than twenty-four hours after Bcachefs was submitted for Linux 6.7, this new open-source file-system has been successfully merged for this next kernel version.

Given the past struggles to get Bcachefs mainlined, I certainly didn't expect to see Linus Torvalds act so soon on merging it. But after it spent all of the 6.6 cycle within Linux-Next, overnight Linus Torvalds did in fact land this new file-system developed by Kent Overstreet.

[...] It's merged and I'll be running some fresh Bcachefs file-system benchmarks soon on Phoronix. Keep in mind though this file-system is initially considered experimental.

Also at bcachefs.org

Original Submission

Freeman writes:

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/11/major-critic-of-x-sues-after-being-banned-from-platform/

X has banned the account of a prominent critic after he published data that he claims exposed the site's embrace of the far-right after Elon Musk's takeover last year.

Travis Brown, a software developer based in Berlin, alleges his account was first suspended on July 1 this year, several months after his data formed the basis of New York Times and CNN reports claiming that far-right influencers featured prominently among Twitter Blue subscribers, and how thousands of previously banned X accounts, including members of the far-right, were being reinstated on the site.

On Tuesday, Brown announced his decision to challenge his account's suspension in court in Berlin. "This is a matter of principle," he says. "I think it is important that platforms like Twitter are not allowed to shut down criticism arbitrarily." X did not reply to repeated requests for comment.
[...]
The legal proceedings in Germany are ongoing. For Ballon, the best case scenario would be if the court reinstates Brown's account again or rules the block to be unlawful. The worst outcome would be if the court declines to rule on the case because X's European Union headquarters are based in Ireland. HateAid is asking the European Commission to intervene using the Digital Services Act, a new rulebook that went into effect in August and is designed to protect freedom of expression online.

The best case is, if his account is reinstated?!?

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

India's Space Research Organisation (ISRO) has published research that reveals its Chandrayaan-3 mission made quite a mess on the Moon.

The mission's Vikram lander touched down on August 23 without incident, becoming India's first successful Moon mission – as well as humanity's first craft to land near the lunar south pole.

[...] According to ISRO researchers, over two tons of lunar epiregolith – the top layer of Moon dust – were ejected and displaced to an area of over 100 square meters around the landing site when the spacecraft landed.

Scientists were able to compare the pre- and post-landing high resolution images from a camera residing on the Chandrayaan-2 orbiter to detect the ejecta halo. Their research, published last week in the Journal of the Indian Society of Remote Sensing, explains that the halo was created by Vikram's descent stage thrusters.

The halo was described as an "irregular bright patch surrounding the lander."

The discovery sheds some light into Moon dust material and lunar geology. It can also inform future interactions between lunar-bound astronauts and their environment.

[...] The fine yet abrasive silicate-heavy material on the lunar surface has proven to be hazardous for all 12 past humans that have set foot on the Moon.

According to the European Space Agency, exposure to Moon dust caused symptoms ranging from wheezing to nasal congestion that lasted for days in some cases, and made the inside of the Apollo 17 spacecraft smell like gunpowder.

The problem is compounded by the low gravity on the Moon, which keeps epiregolith particles suspended in air within spacecraft.

One study has already determined that "chronic or long-term effects of such dust exposure could be a problem for future missions."

But it's best to know these things now, to make preparations or amendments for future missions.

Original Submission

looorg writes:

Coding with the pope: Catholic school children are going to be tempted to learn to code with the Pope. Or the pope is going to tell them to learn to code, cause that is what God wants? One imagines it will be a bigger draw in catholic countries, not so much in the rest of the world. Unless the program is really good and can be used by heathens and heretics to.

Apparently the Pope, or God or some other earthly minion picked Python. What does that tell us ...

Mr Mironiuk will meet the Pope at the Vatican. But he admits he's not anticipating the pontiff to emulate his students in acquiring new skills.

"I don't expect him to know Python very well, at least," he said. "But he will get a certificate for his efforts in helping start the programme."

So the pope isn't working on his own backup- or retirement career then. It's more of a do as I say, not do as I do. Or don't.

So what is next? A coder Saint? Some kind of coding miracles? Coding with Jesus? Coding for Allah?

Who hasn't said a little prayer, or an endless stream of profanity, when you hit the compile button, hoping it will run this time without to many or any errors?

https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-67209806
https://www.codewithpope.com/

Original Submission

taylorvich writes:

https://phys.org/news/2023-11-presumed-starfish.html

For centuries, naturalists have puzzled over what might constitute the head of a sea star, commonly called a "starfish." When looking at a worm, or a fish, it's clear which end is the head and which is the tail. But with their five identical arms—any of which can take the lead in propelling sea stars across the seabed—it's been anybody's guess how to determine the front end of the organism from the back. This unusual body plan has led many to conclude that sea stars perhaps don't have a head at all.

But now, labs at Stanford University and UC Berkeley, each led by Chan Zuckerberg Biohub San Francisco Investigators, have published a study finding that the truth is closer to the absolute reverse. In short, while the team detected gene signatures associated with head development just about everywhere in juvenile sea stars, expression of genes that code for an animal's torso and tail sections were largely missing.

Researchers used a variety of high-tech molecular and genomic techniques to understand where different genes were expressed during the development and growth of sea stars. A team at Southampton used micro-CT scanning to understand the shape and structure of the animal in unprecedented detail.

In another surprising finding, molecular signatures typically associated with the front-most portion of the head were localized to the middle of each of the sea star's arms, with these signatures becoming progressively more posterior moving out towards the arms' edges.

[...] "It's as if the sea star is completely missing a trunk, and is best described as just a head crawling along the seafloor," said Laurent Formery, a postdoctoral scholar and lead author of the new study. "It's not at all what scientists have assumed about these animals."

Journal Reference:
Formery, L., Peluso, P., Kohnle, I. et al. Molecular evidence of anteroposterior patterning in adult echinoderms. Nature (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-023-06669-2

Original Submission

upstart writes:

The companies still have to settle on Hulu's worth:

The Walt Disney Company, which currently owns two-thirds of Hulu, is buying the remaining third from Comcast's NBCUniversal to "further [its] streaming objectives."

Disney's announcement Wednesday said it's expecting to pay "approximately" $8.61 billion for the remaining 33 percent stake in Hulu. That figure is based on a 2019 valuation of Hulu, pegging the streaming service's value at $27.5 billion.

But Disney noted that it may pay more than $8.61 billion, pending an appraisal. Disney said it's unsure how long the appraisal process will take but expects to complete the deal in 2024.

Disney has owned two-thirds of Hulu since it bought 21st Century Fox in 2019 for $71 billion. Comcast also made a bid for the business.

That same year, Comcast and Disney entered an agreement that enabled either party to force the sale of Comcast's piece of Hulu, starting in January 2024. But the companies announced on September 6 that they were moving up that timeline, so this week's news was expected.

When the companies announced moving up the sales process, Brian Roberts, Comcast CEO, noted that the appraisal procedure would "take a little time ... to play out."

Disney sounds prepared to pay nearly $9 billion for Hulu, if not more, but there's reasonable debate over how much the streaming service is worth. Hulu's minimum valuation was set in 2019 when the streaming landscape looked very different.

DannyB writes:

High mobile phone use may impact sperm count, study says

Male sperm count has fallen by more than 50% globally in the last 50 years, leaving researchers scrambling to understand why. Could it be pollution, PFAS and other potential toxins in our food and water, an increase in obesity and chronic disease, or even the ever-present mobile phone?

A new study explored the role of cell phones and found men between the ages of 18 and 22 who said they used their phones more than 20 times a day had a 21% higher risk for a low overall sperm count. The men also had a 30% higher risk for a low sperm concentration, a less important measure of sperm count in a milliliter of semen. The study did not specify whether the men called or texted or used their phones to do both.

[...] "I am intrigued by the observation that the biggest effect was apparently seen with older 2G and 3G phones compared to modern 4G and 5G versions. This is not something I am able to explain," said Allan Pacey, deputy vice president and deputy dean of the faculty of biology, medicine and health at the University of Manchester in the United Kingdom, in a statement. He was not involved in the study.

[...] Results showed that men who used their phones one to five times a day or less than once a week had much higher sperm counts and concentration. As cell phone usage climbed, sperm count dropped, with the lowest levels among men using their phone 20 or more times a day.

Tin foil underwear is an excellent and high fashion accessory to go with tin foil hats.

See Also:

• Sperm Counts Have Been Falling For Decades—Researchers Think Cell Phones Could Help Explain Why
• Sperm's Secret Voltage Switch: Scientists Unlock The Mystery Of Motility
• The First Babies Conceived With a Sperm-injecting Robot Have Been Born
• Sperm Counts Worldwide are Plummeting Faster Than Ever
• Is the Air We're Breathing Reducing Sperm Counts? Scientists Think So

Original Submission

Our certificates expire in a few hours time and there is nobody available to update them. You may see warnings in your browser. Please accept our apology.

UPDATE: We think that we have succesfully renewed the certificates - but if anyone encounters anything unusual please let us know either here or on IRC.

upstart writes:

Wrong deductions "withheld hard-earned pay from drivers," NY AG says:

Uber and Lyft have agreed to pay $328 million after "cheating drivers out of hundreds of millions of dollars," New York Attorney General Letitia James' office said today. "Uber will pay $290 million and Lyft will pay $38 million into two separate settlement funds which will be entirely distributed to current and former drivers," the AG's office said.

The ride-hailing companies also agreed to provide sick leave and better pay to drivers going forward. "The settlements resolve multi-year investigations into Uber and Lyft, which found that the companies' policies withheld hard-earned pay from drivers and prevented them from receiving valuable benefits available under New York labor laws," the announcement said, calling it the largest back-pay settlement in the NY AG office's history.

The AG's office estimates that over 100,000 drivers, most of whom are immigrants, will be eligible for payments. Notices will be sent to people who are eligible for payments, and links to claims forms are available here.

The AG's announcement has quotes from several New York Taxi Workers Alliance members, including Malang Gassama, a former driver for Uber and Lyft. "I've calculated that Uber and Lyft took at least $25,000 from my pay that they shouldn't have in the form of sales tax and the Black Car Fund surcharge," Gassama is quoted as saying.

The Uber settlement fund is for people who "drove for Uber between November 10, 2014, and May 22, 2017, and had deductions taken for New York sales tax and Black Car Fund fees." The Lyft fund is for people who drove for Lyft between October 11, 2015, and July 31, 2017, and had the same kinds of deductions.

James' office described the companies' violations as follows:

From 2014 to 2017, Uber deducted sales taxes and Black Car Fund fees from drivers' payments when those taxes and fees should have been paid by passengers. Uber misrepresented the deductions made to drivers' pay in their terms of service, telling drivers that Uber would only deduct its commission from the drivers' fare, and that drivers were "entitled to charge [the passenger] for any tolls, taxes or fees incurred," though no method to do this was ever provided via the Uber Driver app. Lyft employed a similar method to shortchange drivers from 2015 to 2017, deducting a 11.4 percent "administrative charge" from drivers' payments in New York equal to the amount of sales tax and Black Car Fund fees that should have been paid by riders. Uber and Lyft also failed to provide drivers with paid sick leave available to employees under New York City and New York state law.

DannyB writes:

Wild Experiment Reveals What Would Happen if You Touched a Quantum Superfluid

[....] Physicists dunked a special, finger-sized probe into an isotope of helium cooled to just a smidge over absolute zero, and recorded the physical properties therein.

It is, they say, the first time we have gleaned an inkling of what the quantum Universe might feel like. And no one had to get horrific frostbite, or ruin an experiment, to find out for real.

[....] Superfluids are a state of matter that behave like a fluid with zero viscosity or friction. There are two isotopes of helium that can create a superfluid. When cooled to just above absolute zero (−273.15 degrees Celsius or −459.67 degrees Fahrenheit), bosons of the helium-4 isotope slow down enough to overlap into a high-density cluster of atoms that behave like one super-atom.

[... youtube video embedded in article ...]

Helium-3 is a little different. Its nuclei are fermions, a class of particles that spin differently from bosons. When cooled below a certain temperature, fermions become bound together in what are called Cooper pairs, each made up of two fermions that together form a composite boson. These Cooper pairs behave exactly like bosons, and can thus form a superfluid.

Autti and his team have been experimenting with helium-3 fermionic superfluid for some time, and discovered that, although Cooper pairs are quite fragile, researchers can stick a wire inside without breaking the pairs, or even disrupting the superfluid's flow. So the team decided to design a probe to study the properties of the fluid up close and personal.

upstart writes:

The company pumps out trash-tier AI content, then waits until it's called out publicly to quietly delete it and move onto the next trainwreck:

We've known that Microsoft's MSN news portal has been pumping out a garbled, AI-generated firehose for well over a year now.

The company has been using the website to distribute misleading and oftentimes incomprehensible garbage to hundreds of millions of readers per month.

As CNN now reports, that's likely in large part due to MSN's decision to lay off most of the human editors at MSN over the years. In the wake of that culling, the company has redirected its efforts toward AI, culminating in a $10 billion stake in ChatGPT maker OpenAI earlier this year.

And if MSN presents a vision of how the tech industry's obsession with AI is going to play out in the information ecosystem, we're in for a rough ride.

Beyond republishing stories by small, unknown publishers — like the one that infamously called former NBA player Brandon Hunter, who passed away unexpectedly at the age of 42 in September, "useless" in its headline — Microsoft using a variety of tactics to shoehorn AI into its MSN.

Sometimes it's even generating AI content itself, like when it published and then deleted a bizarre travel guide to Ottawa, Canada that recommended visiting a food bank "on an empty stomach."

"This article has been removed and we are investigating how it made it through our review process," Microsoft's senior director of communications said in the wake of the embarrassment.

taylorvich writes:

https://techxplore.com/news/2023-10-evaporate-enable-approaches-desalination.html

Evaporation is happening all around us all the time, from the sweat cooling our bodies to the dew burning off in the morning sun. But science's understanding of this ubiquitous process may have been missing a piece all this time.

In recent years, some researchers have been puzzled upon finding that water in their experiments, which was held in a sponge-like material known as a hydrogel, was evaporating at a higher rate than could be explained by the amount of heat, or thermal energy, that the water was receiving. The excess has been significant—a doubling, or even a tripling or more, of the theoretical maximum rate.

After carrying out a series of new experiments and simulations, and reexamining some of the results from various groups that claimed to have exceeded the thermal limit, a team of researchers at MIT has reached a startling conclusion: Under certain conditions, at the interface where water meets air, light can directly bring about evaporation without the need for heat, and it actually does so even more efficiently than heat. In these experiments, the water was held in a hydrogel material, but the researchers suggest that the phenomenon may occur under other conditions as well.

Journal Reference:
Yaodong Tu, Jiawei Zhou, Shaoting Lin, and Gang Chen, Plausible photomolecular effect leading to water evaporation exceeding the thermal limit, PNAS, 120 (45) e2312751120 https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2312751120

Original Submission

Freeman writes:

https://arstechnica.com/science/2023/10/a-wee-spider-needed-a-safe-place-to-molt-it-chose-a-womans-ear-canal/

While brain worms have made many horrifying headlines this year, the good folks at the New England Journal of Medicine offer some fresh nightmare fuel ahead of Halloween: an ear spider. And there's a video.

In a short clinical report published in this week's issue, doctors in Tainan City, Taiwan, detail the case of a 64-year-old woman who sought care at an otolaryngology (ENT) clinic. She came in complaining of having an incessant ruckus in her left ear for the previous four days. On the first day of symptoms, the woman said she was awoken by a feeling of a wee creature crawling in her ear canal. That feeling was then followed by days of clicking, beating, and rustling noises.
[...]
Video of the creepy crawler shows it darting around the canal, just in front of the eardrum. When it spots the medical probe nearing, the spider comes in for a closer look, facing the camera directly for a perfect view of its eyes.

The medical report doesn't identify the type of spider it is, and it's usually very difficult to identify spiders based on pictures. But Ars reached out to two spider experts who both said the spider is, without a doubt, in the family of jumping spiders (Salticidae). The giveaway is "the family-specific arrangement and size ratio of the eyes," Martin Nyffeler, an emeritus senior lecturer in zoology at the University of Basel, told Ars over email. Specifically, this family of spiders has large median front eyes, which can be seen in the ear spider when it looks directly into the camera.
[...]
The doctors treating the woman reported no damage to her eardrum. They sucked the spider and its exuvia out, and the woman's symptoms "immediately abated," they reported

Original Submission

upstart writes:

48 Malicious npm Packages Found Deploying Reverse Shells on Developer Systems:

A new set of 48 malicious npm packages have been discovered in the npm repository with capabilities to deploy a reverse shell on compromised systems.

"These packages, deceptively named to appear legitimate, contained obfuscated JavaScript designed to initiate a reverse shell on package install," software supply chain security firm Phylum said.

[...] "In this particular case, the attacker published dozens of benign-sounding packages with several layers of obfuscation and deceptive tactics in an attempt to ultimately deploy a reverse shell on any machine that simply installs one of these packages," Phylum said.

The findings arrive close on the heels of revelations that two packages published to the Python Package Index (PyPI) under the garb of simplifying internationalization incorporated malicious code designed to siphon sensitive Telegram Desktop application data and system information.

Original Submission

hubie writes:

A rare window into the early American monetary history — thanks to techniques from physics:

Benjamin Franklin may be best known as the creator of bifocals and the lightning rod, but a group of University of Notre Dame researchers suggest he should also be known for his innovative ways of making (literal) money.

During his career, Franklin printed nearly 2,500,000 money notes for the American Colonies using what the researchers have identified as highly original techniques, as reported in a study published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

[...] "Benjamin Franklin saw that the Colonies' financial independence was necessary for their political independence. Most of the silver and gold coins brought to the British American colonies were rapidly drained away to pay for manufactured goods imported from abroad, leaving the Colonies without sufficient monetary supply to expand their economy," Manukyan said.

However, one major problem stood in the way of efforts to print paper money: counterfeiting. When Franklin opened his printing house in 1728, paper money was a relatively new concept. [...]

"To maintain the notes' dependability, Franklin had to stay a step ahead of counterfeiters," said Manukyan. "But the ledger where we know he recorded these printing decisions and methods has been lost to history. Using the techniques of physics, we have been able to restore, in part, some of what that record would have shown."

[...] One of the most distinctive features they found was in Franklin's pigments. Manukyan and his team determined the chemical elements used for each item in Notre Dame's collection of Colonial notes. The counterfeits, they found, have distinctive high quantities of calcium and phosphorus, but these elements are found only in traces in the genuine bills.