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upstart writes:

'Lice are like living fossils we carry around on our own heads':

Reviled the world over for making our scalps itch and rapidly spreading in schools, lice have hitched their destiny to our hair follicles. They are the oldest known parasites that feed on the blood of humans, so learning more about lice can tell us quite a bit about our own species and migratory patterns.

A study published November 8 in the open-access journal PLOS ONE found that lice likely came into North America in two waves of migration. First when some humans potentially crossed a land bridge that connected Asia with present day Alaska roughly 16,000 years ago during the end of the last ice age and then again during European colonization.

[...] Lice are wingless parasites that live their entire lives on their host and there are three known species that infest humans. Humans and lice have coevolved for thousands of years. The oldest louse specimen known to scientists is 10,000 years old and was found in Brazil in 2000. Since lice and humans have a very intertwined relationship, studying lice can offer clues into human migratory patterns.

[...] Researchers found genetic evidence that head lice mirrored both the movement of people into the Americas from Asia and European colonization after Christopher Columbus's arrival in the late 1400's.

"Central American head lice harbored the Asian background associated with the foundation of the Americas, while South American lice had marks of the European arrival," Ariel Toloza, a study co-author and insect toxicologist at Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnica (CONICET) in Argentina, tells PopSci. "We also detected a recent human migration from Europe to the Americas after WWII."

hubie writes:

NuScale and the Utah Associated Municipal Power Systems determined that the 462-MW project would likely not reach a sufficient subscription level to continue toward deployment:

NuScale Power and the Utah Associated Municipal Power Systems announced Wednesday that they've agreed to terminate the small modular reactor Carbon Free Power Project, or CFPP.

"Despite significant efforts by both parties to advance the CFPP, it appears unlikely that the project will have enough subscription to continue toward deployment. Therefore, UAMPS and NuScale have mutually determined that ending the project is the most prudent decision for both parties," NuScale and UAMPS said in a press release.

[...] The project, which was expected to be the first commercial SMR in the U.S. faced rising costs. In January, NuScale raised the target price for power from the SMR to $89/MWh from $58/MWh, citing a "changing financial landscape for the development of energy projects nationwide."

Despite the termination of the CFPP, NuScale President and Chief Executive Officer John Hopkins said Wednesday during NuScale's Q3 earnings call that the company is focused on deploying its SMR modules and is "poised to expand into new markets, applications and capabilities." Hopkins highlighted a number of other partnerships and projects, including plans to develop two NuScale VOYGR-12 power plants that will have a combined capacity of nearly 2 GW and power nearby data centers in Ohio and Pennsylvania.

"Though there are risks to any project, the CFPP presented unique challenges that NuScale does not expect will be replicated with other customers," Diane Hughes, vice president of marketing and communications at NuScale, said in a statement to Utility Dive.

Industry groups expressed disappointment but understanding of the decision.

"Innovation — particularly in new technologies — is defined by fits and starts. And innovation in next-generation nuclear is no different," a spokesperson for the Nuclear Energy Institute said in an email.

Previously: First Major Modular Nuclear Project Having Difficulty Retaining Backers

Original Submission

Booga1 writes:

From The Electronic Frontier Foundation: Debunking the Myth of "Anonymous" Data

Personal information that corporations collect from our online behaviors sells for astonishing profits and incentivizes online actors to collect as much as possible. Every mouse click and screen swipe can be tracked and then sold to ad-tech companies and the data brokers that service them.

In an attempt to justify this pervasive surveillance ecosystem, corporations often claim to de-identify our data. This supposedly removes all personal information (such as a person's name) from the data point (such as the fact that an unnamed person bought a particular medicine at a particular time and place). Personal data can also be aggregated, whereby data about multiple people is combined with the intention of removing personal identifying information and thereby protecting user privacy.

...

However, in practice, any attempt at de-identification requires removal not only of your identifiable information, but also of information that can identify you when considered in combination with other information known about you. Here's an example:

• First, think about the number of people that share your specific ZIP or postal code.
• Next, think about how many of those people also share your birthday.
• Now, think about how many people share your exact birthday, ZIP code, and gender.

According to one landmark study, these three characteristics are enough to uniquely identify 87% of the U.S. population. A different study showed that 63% of the U.S. population can be uniquely identified from these three facts.

We cannot trust corporations to self-regulate. The financial benefit and business usefulness of our personal data often outweighs our privacy and anonymity. In re-obtaining the real identity of the person involved (direct identifier) alongside a person's preferences (indirect identifier), corporations are able to continue profiting from our most sensitive information. For instance, a website that asks supposedly "anonymous" users for seemingly trivial information about themselves may be able to use that information to make a unique profile for an individual.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

The US Commerce Department has promised to stop promoting American-made commercial spyware to foreign governments.

In a letter sent to US Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR), the federal government dept finally provided details about the policies adopted by its International Trade Administration (ITA) intended to prevent any further promotion of US surveillance technology overseas.

"For the first time the department is making clear that the United States will not help companies find foreign markets for products or services that undermine democracy or enable repressive surveillance and discrimination," Wyden said in a statement. 

The ITA, which is part of the Commerce Department, promotes American goods and services abroad. In May, Wyden sent a letter to US Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo demanding answers about its pushing of commercial spyware overseas. 

[...] Last year, the ITA confirmed to Senator Wyden that it has encouraged foreign governments to buy this type of tech, but it refused to answer the senator's questions about which products it endorsed and in which markets. The Department of Commerce still seems to be stonewalling on both, but more on that later.

[...] "Promoting the use of surveillance tech and spyware under the guise of 'advocating for US businesses' smacks uncomfortably of eroding global human rights for a profit," Schroeder said. "The very nature of the technology makes it impossible to promote use of spyware in a way that does not threaten human rights values." 

While a review process is "helpful," the US has no business exporting things like spyware and facial recognition tech, and others, including advanced data analytics and automated license plate readers, should be added to the list, she said. 

"We've repeatedly seen this technology abused and, once exported, the ITA and the US as a whole has very little control over whether it will be abused or fall into the hands of repressive regimes," Schroeder said.

Original Submission

taylorvich writes:

https://medicalxpress.com/news/2023-11-super-melanin-skin-injuries-sunburn.html

Imagine a skin cream that heals damage occurring throughout the day when your skin is exposed to sunlight or environmental toxins. That's the potential of a synthetic, biomimetic melanin developed by scientists at Northwestern University.

In a new study, the scientists show that their synthetic melanin, mimicking the natural melanin in human skin, can be applied topically to injured skin, where it accelerates wound healing. These effects occur both in the skin itself and systemically in the body.

When applied in a cream, the synthetic melanin can protect skin from sun exposure and heals skin injured by sun damage or chemical burns, the scientists said. The technology works by scavenging free radicals, which are produced by injured skin such as a sunburn. Left unchecked, free radical activity damages cells and ultimately may result in skin aging and skin cancer.

The study, titled "Topical Application of Synthetic Melanin Promotes Tissue Repair," is published Nov. 2 in npj Regenerative Medicine.

Melanin in humans and animals provides pigmentation to the skin, eyes and hair. The substance protects your cells from sun damage with increased pigmentation in response to sunlight—a process commonly referred to as tanning. That same pigment in your skin also naturally scavenges free radicals in response to damaging environmental pollution from industrial sources and automobile exhaust fumes.

Journal Reference:
Biyashev, D., Siwicka, Z.E., Onay, U.V. et al. Topical application of synthetic melanin promotes tissue repair. npj Regen Med 8, 61 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41536-023-00331-1

Original Submission

takyon writes:

X-37B Headed Deeper Into Space With Falcon Heavy Rocket's Help

The countdown is on for the next mission of the U.S. Space Force's secretive X-37B spaceplane. While all of the X-37B's missions so far have been highly intriguing, to say the least, the next one — the seventh — will involve some particular novelties. Not only will it explore what the Space Force describes as "new orbital regimes," but the reusable spaceplane will ride atop a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket, the most powerful commercial rocket operational anywhere in the world, with the potential to put it into much higher orbit than was possible on previous missions.

The Space Force announced yesterday that X-37B Mission 7 is scheduled to launch from the Kennedy Space Center, Florida, on December 7, 2023. The spaceplane's first mission on a Falcon Heavy rocket will be designated USSF-52 and it will be run by the Space Force together with the Air Force Rapid Capabilities Office.

[...] Using the Falcon Heavy rocket comes after six previous missions that employed the medium-lift Atlas V or Falcon 9 rockets.

Original Submission

hubie writes:

Study: People expect others to mirror their own selfishness, generosity:

New research shows that a person's own behavior is the primary driver of how they treat others during brief, zero-sum-game competitions. Generous people tend to reward generous behavior and selfish individuals often punish generosity and reward selfishness – even when it costs them personally. The study found that an individual's own generous or selfish deeds carry more weight than the attitudes and behaviors of others.

[...] Previous research into this arena of human behavior suggested that social norms are the primary factor guiding a person's decision-making in competitive scenarios, said Paul Bogdan, a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign who led the research in the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology with U. of I. psychology professors Florin Dolcos and Sanda Dolcos.

"The prevailing view before this study was that individuals form expectations based on what they view as typical. If everyone around me is selfish, then I'm going to learn to accept selfishness and behave accordingly," Bogdan said. "But we show that your judgments of other people's behavior really depend on how you behave yourself."

[...] Cultural norms toward self-interest or generosity do influence people, as other studies have found, Florin Dolcos said. "But we are not only observers. This study is showing that we filter information about the world through our own view."

Those individuals whose behavior switched from generous to selfish over time were more likely to punish generosity and reward selfishness – but only after their own behavior changed, the team found.

This helps explain the phenomenon of social alignment, for better and for worse, Florin Dolcos said.

"You may have groups of selfish people who are more accepting of other selfish people, and in order to be part of that group, newcomers might display the same behavior," he said.

Ultimately, the study finds that a person's own generous or selfish nature drives their behavior in many arenas of life, Sanda Dolcos said.

"This is not just about decision-making," she said. "It has practical relevance to many types of social interactions and social evaluations."

Journal Reference:
Paul C Bogdan, Florin Dolcos, Matthew Moore, et al., Social Expectations are Primarily Rooted in Reciprocity: An Investigation of Fairness, Cooperation, and Trustworthiness, Cogn Sci. 2023 Aug;47(8):e13326. doi: https://doi.org/10.1111/cogs.13326

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Maze Runner director, Jurassic World writer, and no release date yet:

Sony and Nintendo haven't collaborated on much of anything since the Nintendo PlayStation went awry. But Sony's film division is putting its money together with its console semi-rival to produce a live-action The Legend of Zelda film.

Details are scant beyond a Nintendo press release and Hollywood reporting by Deadline. The director is Wes Ball, director of the Maze Runner film trilogy, and the writer is Derek Connolly, who wrote the Jurassic World trilogy and was tagged to work on a putative Metal Gear film.

[...] Nintendo will provide more than 50 percent of the financing, according to Deadline, with Sony handling the theatrical release. The Super Mario Bros. Movie ranks as the year's second-highest-grossing film at $1.36 billion, which likely helped green-light another film centered on another well-regarded Nintendo property.

[...] No release date or plot details are available.

Original Submission

Former U.S. astronaut Frank Borman has died at the age of 95, NASA said on Thursday.

He commanded the 1968 Apollo 8 mission that carried three astronauts farther from Earth than anyone had ever travelled.

I'm old enough to remember Apollo 8 (December 21–27, 1968, the first crewed spacecraft to leave low Earth orbit and the first human spaceflight to reach the Moon. The crew orbited the Moon ten times without landing, and then departed safely back to Earth. Three astronauts—Frank Borman, James Lovell, and William Anders—were the first humans to witness and photograph the far side of the Moon and an Earthrise.

Born in Gary, Indiana, on March 14, 1928, he was the oldest American astronaut still living; that mantle now passes to Jim Lovell, who is also 95 but eleven days younger.

upstart writes:

Google's "solution" can't do anything for bootlooping devices:

It's the start of November, and that means a new Android security patch. Google claims this one is fixing a high-profile Android 14 storage bug that was locking some people out of their devices. The November Security Bulletin contains the usual pile of security fixes, while consumer-oriented Pixel patch notes list a few user-facing changes. The important line is "Fix for issue occasionally causing devices with multiple users enabled to show out of space or be in a reboot loop." A footnote points out that this is for the "Pixel 6, Pixel 6a, 6 Pro, 7, 7 Pro, 7a, Tablet, Fold, Pixel 8, Pixel 8 Pro."

We're on about day 33 of the Android 14 storage bug. For devices with multiple users set up, there is some kind of storage issue that is locking users out of their device. Some are completely unusable, with the phone bootlooping constantly and never reaching the home screen. Others are able to boot up the device but don't have access to lock storage, which causes a huge amount of issues. Some users likened the bug to "ransomware," a type of malware that encrypts your local storage and then demands money for your data. One fix is to completely erase your device with a factory reset, but a lot of users don't want to do that.

The earliest reports of this started just days after the October 4 launch date. Google usually rolls updates out slowly so it can pull them if issues like this pop up to minimize damage. That didn't happen here, though. Google failed to respond quickly to initial reports and just let the bug roll out to everyone. Some people even report being freshly hit with the bug just four days ago because Google 1) let the update roll out without stopping it and 2) can't patch its software quickly enough. The biggest issue tracker thread on this bug is up to 1,000-plus likes and 850 comments of people locked out of their devices, and it took two separate rounds of news coverage for Google to acknowledge the bug after about 20 days.

upstart writes:

Video chat service Omegle shuts down following years of user abuse claims:

NEW YORK -- Omegle, a video chat service that connects users with strangers at random, is shutting down after 14 years following ample misuse of the platform — particularly the sexual abuse of minors.

In a lengthy statement announcing the site's closure, founder Leif K-Brooks reflected on how Omegle was meant to connect people worldwide and "build on the things I loved about the Internet." But, he added that a dark side of the platform emerged.

"Virtually every tool can be used for good or for evil," Brooks wrote. "There can be no honest accounting of Omegle without acknowledging that some people misused it, including to commit unspeakably heinous crimes."

[...] As of Thursday morning, the Omegle website remained live with Brooks' statement, but its online video chat function was no longer visible.

Omegle is shutting down

An Anonymous Coward writes:

https://www.omegle.com/

Omegle is shutting down.

Original Submission #1  Original Submission #2 

upstart writes:

Chamberlain packed its app with ads while disabling third-party access:

Chamberlain Group—the owner of most of the garage door opener brands like LiftMaster, Chamberlain, Merlin, and Grifco—would like its customers to stop doing smart home things with its "myQ" smart garage door openers. The company recently issued a statement decrying "unauthorized usage" of its smart garage door openers. That's "unauthorized usage" by the people who bought the garage door opener, by the way. Basically, Chamberlain's customers want to trigger the garage door and see its status through third-party smart home apps, and Chamberlain doesn't want that.

Here's the statement:

Chamberlain Group recently made the decision to prevent unauthorized usage of our myQ ecosystem through third-party apps.

This decision was made so that we can continue to provide the best possible experience for our 10 million+ users, as well as our authorized partners who put their trust in us. We understand that this impacts a small percentage of users, but ultimately this will improve the performance and reliability of myQ, benefiting all of our users.

We encourage those who were impacted to check out our authorized partners here: https://www.myq.com/works-with-myq.

We caught wind of this statement through the Home Assistant blog, a popular open source smart home platform. The myQ integration is being stripped from the project because it doesn't work anymore. Allegedly, Chamberlain has been sabotaging Home Assistant support for a while now, with the integration maintainer, Lash-L, telling the Home Assistant blog, "We are playing a game of cat and mouse with MyQ and right now it looks like the cat is winning."

Our immediate question is why would any garage opener company care about customers using its garage door opener. You sell garage door openers—isn't usage the goal? A quick perusal through the app store reviews reveals what's going on. The iOS app is sitting pretty at 4.8 stars, but the Android app has suffered a wave of one-star reviews starting in October.

taylorvich writes:

https://newatlas.com/space/outsize-black-hole-supermassive-james-webb/

Astronomers have discovered evidence of a theorized type of black hole lurking in the distant universe. Known as an "Outsize Black Hole," this object could help explain some fundamental cosmic mysteries, including how supermassive monsters form.

Black holes as we know them tend to fall into two categories: there's the stellar mass black holes, which as the name suggests have masses equivalent to a few stars. They form when large stars die in a supernova. Up the other end of the scale sits supermassive black holes, which contain the mass of millions or even billions of stars. These are found at the center of many galaxies, including our own.

It was long thought that supermassive black holes form by growing out of stellar mass black holes as they slurp up matter over billions of years. This hypothesis was seemingly bolstered by recent observations of intermediate mass black holes, rare objects that slot in the middle of the mass range.

But as astronomers peer farther away in space and time, they've increasingly spotted signs that the story isn't that simple. In 2017, a black hole with a mass of 800 million Suns was discovered in a distant corner of space that meant it grew that big just a few hundred million years after the Big Bang – a growth rate that should be impossible according to our models. And it's far from alone, with over 100 contemporary giants found since then.

One possible explanation is that some black holes may form through other methods, giving them a larger starting mass than a regular old supernova would allow. If massive clouds of gas collapse, the hypothesis goes, they could form black holes with masses between about 10,000 and 100,000 Suns.

"There are physical limits on how quickly black holes can grow once they've formed, but ones that are born more massive have a head start," said Andy Goulding, co-author of the study. "It's like planting a sapling, which takes less time to grow into a full-size tree than if you started with only a seed."

Now astronomers claim to have discovered the first evidence for just such an object, which they call an Outsize Black Hole. It's located in a galaxy called UHZ1, at the incredible distance of 13.2 billion light-years from Earth – which also means we're seeing it as it was 13.2 billion years ago, or less than 500 million years after the Big Bang.

Original Submission

looorg writes:

Letters confiscated by Britain's Royal Navy before they reached French sailors during the Seven Years' War [(1756–1763)] have been opened for the first time.

The messages were seized by Britain's Royal Navy during the Seven Years' War, taken to the Admiralty in London and never opened. The collection is now held at the National Archives in Kew.

"I only ordered the box out of curiosity," Morieux said. "There were three piles of letters held together by ribbon. The letters were very small and were sealed so I asked the archivist if they could be opened and he did.

So in the National Archive in Kew (UK) they found a box of letters sent during the seven years' war between France and the UK. Long lost correspondence.

Perhaps it's not that they are lost for 250ish years that is the interesting part. But how little things change. People still communicate about more or less the same things then as now, it's just the way we communicate that change for technological reasons.

Nothing in there though if they tracked down the offspring, relatives etc of the letters and returned them to them. Guess that isn't a service offered.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-67341309

https://www.cam.ac.uk/stories/french-love-letters-confiscated-by-britain-read-after-265-years

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Researchers worry the controversy is damaging the field's reputation:

Nature has retracted a controversial paper claiming the discovery of a superconductor — a material that carries electrical currents with zero resistance — capable of operating at room temperature and relatively low pressure.

The text of the retraction notice states that it was requested by eight co-authors. "They have expressed the view as researchers who contributed to the work that the published paper does not accurately reflect the provenance of the investigated materials, the experimental measurements undertaken and the data-processing protocols applied," it says, adding that these co-authors "have concluded that these issues undermine the integrity of the published paper". (The Nature news team is independent from its journals team.)

It is the third high-profile retraction of a paper by the two lead authors, physicists Ranga Dias at the University of Rochester in New York and Ashkan Salamat at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas (UNLV). Nature withdrew a separate paper last year and Physical Review Letters retracted one this August. It spells more trouble in particular for Dias, whom some researchers allege plagiarized portions of his PhD thesis. Dias has objected to the first two retractions and not responded regarding the latest. Salamat approved the two this year.

[...] This year's report by Dias and Salamat is the second significant claim of superconductivity to crash and burn in 2023. In July, a separate team at a start-up company in Seoul described a crystalline purple material dubbed LK-99 — made of copper, lead, phosphorus and oxygen — that they said showed superconductivity at normal pressures and at temperatures up to at least 127 °C (400 kelvin). There was much online excitement and many attempts to reproduce the results, but researchers quickly reached a consensus that the material was not a superconductor at all.