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Meeting Announcement: The next meeting of the SoylentNews governance committee is scheduled for Tomorrow, Wednesday, December 6th, 2023 at 21:00 UTC (4pm Eastern) in #governance on SoylentNews IRC. Logs of the meeting will be available afterwards for review, and minutes will be published when complete.

Minutes and agenda, and other governance committee information are to be found on the SoylentNews Wiki at: https://wiki.staging.soylentnews.org/wiki/Governance

The community, welcome to observe and participate, is encouraged to attend the meeting.

taylorvich writes:

https://phys.org/news/2023-11-genetic-year-old-shaman-burial-germany.html

The double burial of an adult woman and an infant, dating to about 7000–6800 BCE, discovered in 1934 during construction works at the spa gardens of Bad Dürrenberg, is regarded as one of the outstanding burial finds of the Mesolithic in Central Europe. Because of the unusual equipment with the woman, who was buried in a seated position, and her bodily anomalies, the burial is interpreted as that of a shaman.

Genetic research now reveals the relation of the woman and the child: the boy is not her son, but is a fourth- or fifth-degree relation. The phenotypic variants analyzed in the woman's genome inform us that she had a relatively dark skin complexion, dark, straight hair, and blue eyes.

The unusual equipment buried with the woman comprises flint artifacts and solid rock tools, but also bone and antler artifacts, a piece of red ochre, a number of animal bones including the shell of at least three terrapins and partly pierced animal teeth. Together with deer antlers and originally six partly pierced boar's tusks, these finds are probably head/body ornaments. Due to the grave goods and bodily anomalies of the woman, the burial is interpreted as that of a shaman.

[...] Subsequent excavations at the site as part of the preparations for the State Garden Exhibition 2024 brought not only new revelations about the deposition and positioning of the body to light, but also revealed a multitude of new finds, which could be clearly attributed to the burial. Besides the pierced animal teeth, remains of fauna, lithic artifacts and a large amount of human skeletal remains could also be recovered.

At the base of the skull, there is an anomaly at the edge of the great occipital hole, in the form of a small constriction. This area is the imprint of an abnormally developed blood vessel. The first cervical vertebra is incompletely formed due to a congenital growth defect and has only reached 40% of the arch. The rounded end of the vertebral arch corresponds to the previously observed defect at the large occipital hole.

[...] This can be caused intentionally by adopting a certain head posture. The consequences are unlikely to have been serious or hazardous to the person's health. However, it is conceivable that a nystagmus, i.e., an involuntary movement of the eyeballs, could be caused by the blockage of a blood vessel. This unusual feature might have been perceived as uncanny and when initiated on purpose may have reinforced or even justified her role as a shaman.

Original Submission

hubie writes:

Physicists confirm 67-year-old prediction of massless, neutral composite particle:

In 1956, theoretical physicist David Pines predicted that electrons in a solid can do something strange. While they normally have a mass and an electric charge, Pines asserted that they can combine to form a composite particle that is massless, neutral, and does not interact with light. He called this particle a "demon." Since then, it has been speculated to play an important role in the behaviors of a wide variety of metals. Unfortunately, the same properties that make it interesting have allowed it to elude detection since its prediction.

Now, a team of researchers led by Peter Abbamonte, a professor of physics at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, have finally found Pines' demon 67 years after it was predicted. As the researchers report in the journal Nature, they used a nonstandard experimental technique that directly excites a material's electronic modes, allowing them to see the demon's signature in the metal strontium ruthenate.

"Demons have been theoretically conjectured for a long time, but experimentalists never studied them," Abbamonte said. "In fact, we weren't even looking for it. But it turned out we were doing exactly the right thing, and we found it."

Journal Reference:
Husain, A.A., Huang, E.W., Mitrano, M. et al. Pines' demon observed as a 3D acoustic plasmon in Sr₂RuO₄. Nature 621, 66–70 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-023-06318-8

Original Submission

Rosco P. Coltrane writes:

If you use any Simple Mobile Tools Android app (Simple Draw Pro, Simple Music Player, Simple Dialer, Simple SMS Messenger, Simple Voice Recorder, Simple Flashlight, Simple App Launcher, Simple Clock, Simple Launcher, Simple Camera or Simple Calendar Pro), you might want to consider uninstall it - particularly if you've installed it from the Google Play Store rather than from F-Droid.

The author, Tibor Kaputa has sold Simple Mobile Tools apps to well-know Israeli advertisement company ZipoApps. If you don't like ads or you fear ad-borne malware, Simple Mobile Tools apps aren't for your anymore.

Most users of the apps and contributors are dismayed. You can follow the Reddit threads dedicated to the issue here and here if you want to find ads-free open-source alternative apps. Of course, F-Droid builds will start flagging Simple Mobile Tools with the ads anti-feature flag - if the tools aren't dropped altogether - but the safest action if you rely on them is to disable updating the apps altogether, to keep the last independent versions installed.

It's a sad day for the open-source Android ecosystem, as Simple Mobile Tools apps are well-regarded and part of many people's everyday lives. Hopefully they will be forked and development will continue on the forked versions.

Thanks Tibor for your great work over the years. Too bad that you couldn't find any other way to cash out.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

Agriculture, like other sectors of the economy, is a profit-driven business. Simple cultivation systems such as monocultures have therefore become firmly established, because they promise higher returns. However, they are more susceptible to diseases and parasites, which can cause total crop failure among other things.

Diversified cultivation practices such as mixed cropping and crop rotation offer a sustainable alternative. It has already been scientifically proven that they can be profitable, perhaps even more so than monocultures. But under what conditions will these diversified farming practices turn a profit? And how can they help to intensify agricultural systems in a sustainable way?

[...] To this end, lead author Hannah Kamau, a doctoral student and member of Assistant Professor Lisa Biber-Freudenberger's working group in the Innovation and Technology for Sustainable Futures Transdisciplinary Research Area at the University of Bonn, considered more than 2,000 locations all over the world that were found to have profitable diversified farming practices as well as socio-economic conditions that determine profitability: Population density, access to local markets, electricity supply, gross domestic product per capita and governance.

Hannah Kamau then predicted which other regions of the world had similar conditions as the observed locations of profitable diversified farming practices. Her predictions suggest that the Global North and parts of the Global South that are close to urban centers are particularly suitable for profitable diversified farming practices. "Developed infrastructure played a key role in forecasting suitable areas," she explains.

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

Health data campaigners are preparing for a legal challenge to the £330 million ($417 million) procurement of the Federated Data Platform (FDP) by NHS England, awarded to US spy-tech firm Palantir last month.

The group led by Foxglove alleges there is no lawful basis to create the FDP, as described in procurement documents, within the current legal directions NHS Digital uses to obtain and share data within the NHS.

According to NHS England, the "data platform" is the software it plans to use to help NHS organizations collate the operational data currently stored in separate systems in order to help staff access the information they need. This data includes the number of beds in a hospital, the size of waiting lists for elective care services, or the availability of medical supplies. The idea is every hospital trust and integrated care system (ICS) will have their own platform, but they will be able to connect and share information between them.

The controversial contract is set to last up to seven years. NHS England said the new data platform would deliver better joined-up care for millions of patients, help tackle waiting lists, and reduce hospital discharge delays. Waiting lists in the country have been at record levels since the pandemic.

[...] In a statement to The Guardian, NHS England said it has the legal authority to press ahead with the FDP without further legislation and the legal concerns were "totally incorrect."

An NHS spokesperson told the newspaper: "This letter fundamentally misunderstands how the Federated Data Platform will operate and is totally incorrect in both matters of law and fact. The platform will use only existing data legally collected by the NHS to support direct patient care, which is lawful under all relevant data protection regulations."

Original Submission

upstart writes:

A high school's deepfake porn scandal is pushing US lawmakers into action:

Efforts from members of Congress to clamp down on deepfake pornography are not entirely new. In 2019 and 2021, Representative Yvette Clarke introduced the DEEPFAKES Accountability Act, which requires creators of deepfakes to watermark their content. And in December 2022, Representative Morelle, who is now working closely with Francesca, introduced the Preventing Deepfakes of Intimate Images Act. His bill focuses on criminalizing the creation and distribution of pornographic deepfakes without the consent of the person whose image is used. Both efforts, which didn't have bipartisan support, stalled in the past.

But recently, the issue has reached a "tipping point," says Hany Farid, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, because AI has grown much more sophisticated, making the potential for harm much more serious. "The threat vector has changed dramatically," says Farid. Creating a convincing deepfake five years ago required hundreds of images, he says, which meant those at greatest risk for being targeted were celebrities and famous people with lots of publicly accessible photos. But now, deepfakes can be created with just one image.

Farid says, "We've just given high school boys the mother of all nuclear weapons for them, which is to be able to create porn with [a single image] of whoever they want. And of course, they're doing it."

Clarke and Morelle, both Democrats from New York, have reintroduced their bills this year. Morelle's now has 18 cosponsors from both parties, four of whom joined after the incident involving Francesca came to light—which indicates there could be real legislative momentum to get the bill passed. Then just this week, Representative Kean, one of the cosponsors of Morelle's bill, released a related proposal intended to push forward AI-labeling efforts—in part in response to Francesca's appeals.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

by University of Bristol

A new survey, analyzed by the University of Bristol and commissioned by abrdn Financial Fairness Trust, shows nearly two-thirds (65%) of households, amounting to 18.4 million, have consumer debt and more than 4 in 10 households (44% or 12.5 million) have taken out new borrowing in the past six months.

There are signs credit stress may be worsening, with 2 in 10 (16%) owing money due to missing at least one repayment on a credit commitment, up from 11% in May 2023.

The Financial Fairness Tracker has been monitoring the personal finances of households since the start of the pandemic, sampling around 6,000 households in each of the nine survey waves to-date.

The latest survey found 1 in 7 households (15%) have borrowed money in the past four weeks just to cover basic daily living expenses, such as food and bills. This rises to 35% among those in financial difficulty. Households on the lowest incomes were especially likely to be taking on debt, with 3 in 5 (61%) taking out new borrowing in the past six months (compared to 48% of middle-income households).

A quarter of households (25%) owe at least £5,000 across their various consumer credit commitments. This was higher among middle income households (31%) than those on the lowest incomes (24%), showing the total amount of credit owed does not always relate to the level of financial difficulty households experience.

Credit cards are the most common form of borrowing that households are using. A third (35%) of households owe money on at least one credit card, but 3 in 10 (28%) of those with credit card debt "always" or "usually" make only the minimum payment on their cards, potentially storing up problems meeting their commitments in future.

owl writes:

https://www.righto.com/2023/11/intel-386-clock-circuit.html

Processors are driven by a clock, which controls the timing of each step inside the chip. In this blog post, I'll examine the clock-generation circuitry inside the Intel 386 processor. Earlier processors such as the 8086 (1978) were simpler, using two clock phases internally. The Intel 386 processor (1985) was a pivotal development for Intel as it moved x86 to CMOS (as well as being the first 32-bit x86 processor). The 386's CMOS circuitry required four clock signals. An external crystal oscillator provided the 386 with a single clock signal and the 386's internal circuitry generated four carefully-timed internal clock signals from the external clock.

Original Submission

taylorvich writes:

https://phys.org/news/2023-11-sentinel-universally-understood-continents.html

Animals often use vocalizations to warn of nearby danger to others. While this information is generally intended for members of the same species, other species can eavesdrop on the warnings to use the information for their own benefit. Sentinels are animals that have warning calls so widely understood by others that those other species will form groups with them, relying on the sentinels to provide warnings of danger.

For example, the family Paridae, which are a group of birds that consist of chickadees, tits, and titmice, are known as sentinels because their alarm call for danger, which fittingly sounds like "chick-a-dee-dee-dee," is understood by most other bird species in their mixed-species flocks.

"Many animals form mixed-species groups, and the thought is that this is an anti-predator behavior," said Henry Pollock, Executive Director of the Southern Plains Land Trust. "There is safety in numbers, and there is a benefit to surrounding yourself with a more diverse set of eyes and ears. However, you have to be able to understand the information that the others around you give to make use of it."

Sentinel calls are so readily understood as a signal for danger that researchers wondered whether species that have never heard the call would still get the message. After a recent study found that birds in the Neotropics were responsive to unfamiliar chickadee alarm calls from North America, researchers at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign wanted to expand on this.

The team sought to test if bird communities across three different continents could understand calls for danger from a sentinel they had never encountered before—the dusky-throated antshrike. Antshrikes are birds widely distributed across Central and South America that often act as sentinels in their mixed-species flocks.

Original Submission

hubie writes:

When ad blocking is a cat-and-mouse game, make the mouse slower:

Google's war on ad blockers is just gearing up, with YouTube doing its best to detect and block ad blockers and Chrome aiming to roll out the ad block-limiting Manifest V3 extension platform in June 2024. A new article from Engadget detailing the "arms race" over ad blocking brings up an interesting point regarding the power that YouTube and Chrome have in this battle: a dramatic update advantage over the ad blockers.

In addition to hamstringing Chrome's extension platform with no real user-centric justifications, Manifest V3 will also put roadblocks up before extension updates, which will delay an extension developer's ability to quickly respond to changes. YouTube can instantly switch up its ad delivery system, but once Manifest V3 becomes mandatory, that won't be true for extension developers. If ad blocking is a cat-and-mouse game of updates and counter-updates, then Google will force the mouse to slow down.

[...] We've covered this already. But we haven't talked about the other side of the equation: Ad block rules can't be updated quickly anymore. Today, ad blockers and privacy apps can ship filter list updates themselves, often using giant open-source community lists. Manifest V3 will stop this by limiting what Google describes "remotely hosted code." All updates, even to benign things like a filtering list, will need to happen through full extension updates through the Chrome Web Store. They will all be subject to Chrome Web Store reviews process, and that comes with a significant time delay.

Engadget's Anthony Ha interviewed some developers in the filtering extension community, and they described a constant cat-and-mouse game with YouTube. Ghostery's director of product and engineering, Krzysztof Modras, said that YouTube is "adapting [its] methods more frequently than ever before. To counteract its changes to ad delivery and ad blocker detection, block lists have to be updated at minimum on a daily basis, and sometimes even more often. While all players in the space are innovating, some ad blockers are simply unable to keep up with these changes."

[...] When Manifest V3 becomes mandatory, those updates that need to arrive "at minimum on a daily basis" will no longer be an option. Limiting remotely hosted code sounds like a totally reasonable limitation until you realize that. like most Manifest V3 changes, it seems carefully crafted to cripple ad blockers more than other extensions. Is a filtering list update, which is essentially just a list of websites, really something that needs to be limited by the "no remotely hosted code" policy?

[...] Google claims that Manifest V3 will improve browser "privacy, security, and performance," but every comment we can find from groups that aren't giant ad companies disputes this description. The Electronic Frontier Foundation has called Google's Manifest V3 communication "deceitful and threatening," and both the EFF and Mozilla have critiqued most of Google's user-focused justifications for the project. Both groups agree that Manifest V3 won't do much for security, since it doesn't stop what extensions usually get caught doing: spying on a user's browser history. Manifest V3 extensions have access to just as much data as before. Ghostery has a page on Manifest V3 warning that "nothing Manifest V3 introduces in its current state can help protect privacy" and calling the project "ultimately user hostile."

Original Submission

taylorvich writes:

https://newatlas.com/biology/dolphin-sense-electric-fields/

Already equipped with an impressive sonar system, new research reveals that dolphins have an extra ability that evolves as they mature in the space where their baby whiskers once were. The super sense may help them navigate and find hidden food sources.

Dolphins' sonar ability, known as echolocation, is fairly legendary in the animal kingdom. This ability is so accurate that the mammals, which are technically whales, can use it to distinguish between a golf ball and a ping-pong ball underwater based on the densities of the two objects. But that's not where the creatures' impressive abilities end.

They also have eyes that allow them to see in two directions at once; skin that secretes an antibacterial gel to ward off parasites and barnacles; they can get enough thrust to reach 30 mph; and they turn off half their brains at a time in order to get rest. A 2019 study also revealed that they have super immune systems that grant them protection from antibiotic-resistant bacteria. Now, a new study out of the University of Rostock (UR) in Germany adds another impressive skill to the dolphin's roster of powers: the ability to sense weak electric fields.

Two UR researchers took a closer look at the small pits that are left behind after young bottlenose dolphins shed the thin whiskers they are born with. They realized that the pits looked like the same structures that allow sharks to detect electrical fields and designed a study to see if they functioned the same way for the dolphins.

They first trained two dolphins at the Nuremberg Zoo to rest their jaws on a metal bar submerged in a pool. Then, they trained them to swim away whenever they sensed an electrical current being produced just above their snouts. One dolphin was able to sense signals down to those measuring just 5.5 microvolts/cm, while the other was even more sensitive, picking on a current measuring 2.4 microvolts/cm. One microvolt is equal to one millionth of a volt.

Journal Reference:
Kathryn Knight, Bottlenose dolphins' electric super sense could help them navigate the globe, J Exp Biol (2023) 226 (22): jeb246907 https://doi.org/10.1242/jeb.246907

Original Submission

canopic jug writes:

Standards nerd and technology enthusiast, Terence Eden, has published a South Up, Aotearoa Centred, Equal-Earth Projection Map which has the south end up and uses the Equal Earth projection to ensure proportional land-mass size. In other words, the globe has been rotated to 150° and created in a multi-stage process mostly using R. The borders are from Natural Earth, the country names from OpenStreetMap, and flags from Twemoji.

Country Names

Natural Earth only provides country names in English ☹ - but it also provides 2 character ISO codes. So I grabbed the country codes and names from OpenStreetMap and merged them into the data set using R.

The Code

This produces the country borders and names onto an SVG.

Manual placement

I used Boxy to edit the SVG and place all names in roughly the right place.

Conversion

Inkscape was used to open the resultant SVG at 72dpi. I then used Gimp to autocrop, canvas expanded to 16000x9000, and saved as an uncompressed PNG.

The Emoji wouldn't import to either Gimp or Inkscape. So I viewed the file in Firefox and then printed it to a PDF. That PDF was cropped using pdfcrop` and then imported to Gimp.

[...]

He has published the map as public domain, CC0, and sells ready print editions.

Original Submission

taylorvich writes:

https://newatlas.com/science/fungi-boost-crop-yield/

In what is a hugely promising sign for securing and boosting food production, a large-scale field study has demonstrated how treating farmland soil with mycorrhizal fungi can improve crop yields of maize by 40%, without the use of any additional fertilizers or pesticides.

In the Swiss study, researchers mixed Arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi (AMF) into soil, prior to sowing, at 800 trial plots on 54 maize farms.

This fungi occurs naturally in healthy soil and penetrates the roots of plants to form tree-like structures (arbuscules). When they branch out, they increase the plant's root surface area and therefore bolster nutrient uptake.

"On a quarter of the plots, the mycorrhizal fungi enabled up to 40% better yields," said the study's co-lead, Marcel van der Heijden, a soil ecologist at the University of Zurich and at agricultural research center Asgroscope. "That's huge."

Investigating why a third showed little increase or even a decrease in yield, the researchers found that healthy soil produced the same (or, in some instances, lower) yields.

"We discovered that the inoculation functioned best when there were lots of fungal pathogens already in the soil," said co-first author Stefanie Lutz from Agroscope.

The fungi are thought to provide a first line of defense for the soil, warding off plant-attacking pathogens that can greatly reduce crop yields. As a result, yields could be maintained in fields with pathogens that would have experienced losses without the fungi, while the beneficial effect of the fungi on yields was lower in fields without pathogen contamination. As beneficial organisms, they also help the plants take on nutrients from the soil.

Journal Reference:
Lutz, S., Bodenhausen, N., Hess, J. et al. Soil microbiome indicators can predict crop growth response to large-scale inoculation with arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi. Nat Microbiol 8, 2277–2289 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41564-023-01520-w

Original Submission

canopic jug writes:

The site Switch On Business analyzed Microsoft's LinkedIn employee profiles for Google (Alphabet), Amazon, Apple, Meta (Facebook), Microsoft itself, IBM, Tesla, Oracle, Netflix, Nvidia, Salesforce, Adobe, Intel, and Uber. From that subset of employees they highlighted those who currently work in each tech giant and previously worked for one of the others. That provided for an estimate of the number and percentage of employees who have moved from one of these companies to another:

KEY FINDINGS

• Some 26.51% of Meta employees have worked at another tech giant — the highest proportion of any tech giant workforce.
• However, Google has attracted the most talent {sic} by volume: 38,316 (24.15%) of their current staff came via other tech giants.
• IBM headhunts the least, with just 2.28% of the current workforce having previously worked for another tech giant.

Statistical compensation to account also for those that know better than to fill out a Microsoft LinkedIn profile was not done. The report also mistakes all transfers as benefiting the target institution, which is quite often not the situation. For example, over 12,000 Microsoft employees now currently work inside the advertising and data giant Google. IBM seems it might be doing the most careful vetting of potential employees.

Original Submission