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taylorvich writes:

https://medicalxpress.com/news/2024-01-mind-brains-built-grammar.html

For centuries, a prevailing theory in philosophy has asserted that at birth the human mind is a blank slate. More recently, the same notion has also held sway in the field of neurobiology, where it is commonly held that neural connections are slowly created from scratch with the accumulation of sensory information and experience.

Eventually, the theory goes, this allows us to create memories in space and time and to then learn from those experiences.

But after spending more than a decade studying activity in the hippocampus, the area of brain which forms memory, Yale's George Dragoi began to have his doubts.

In his research on the hippocampus of rodents, Dragoi, an associate professor of psychiatry and of neuroscience, has found that early in life there emerge in this part of the brain individual functional clusters of cells (and, soon after, short sequences of cells) that predictably will be activated by new experiences. Within days of birth, he found, these cells, clusters, and short sequences become the foundation for increasingly complex sequences of cell assemblies that allow for the creation of memories.

In a new article published in the journal Nature Reviews Neuroscience, Dragoi makes the case that the human brain also develops a cellular template soon after birth which defines who we are and how we perceive the world. He describes it as "the generative grammar" of the brain.

"Neurons organize like letters, then words, then sentences and paragraphs which allow for the internalization of the outside world," Dragoi said. "The brain has its own built-in sense of grammar."

The idea, he admits, runs counter to the tenets of empiricism, a centuries-old theory that all knowledge is derived from sensory experience. It also contradicts widely held assumption by life scientists that environmental stimuli will entirely dictate how the brain processes and stores information.

Journal Reference:
Dragoi, G. The generative grammar of the brain: a critique of internally generated representations. Nat. Rev. Neurosci. 25, 60–75 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41583-023-00763-0

Original Submission

fliptop writes:

Media outlets are calling foul play over AI companies using their content to build chatbots. They may find friends in the Senate:

Logo text More than a decade ago, the normalization of tech companies carrying content created by news organizations without directly paying them — cannibalizing readership and ad revenue — precipitated the decline of the media industry. With the rise of generative artificial intelligence, those same firms threaten to further tilt the balance of power between Big Tech and news.

On Wednesday, lawmakers in the Senate Judiciary Committee referenced their failure to adopt legislation that would've barred the exploitation of content by Big Tech in backing proposals that would require AI companies to strike licensing deals with news organizations.

Richard Blumenthal, Democrat of Connecticut and chair of the committee, joined several other senators in supporting calls for a licensing regime and to establish a framework clarifying that intellectual property laws don't protect AI companies using copyrighted material to build their chatbots.

[...] The fight over the legality of AI firms eating content from news organizations without consent or compensation is split into two camps: Those who believe the practice is protected under the "fair use" doctrine in intellectual property law that allows creators to build upon copyrighted works, and those who argue that it constitutes copyright infringement. Courts are currently wrestling with the issue, but an answer to the question is likely years away. In the meantime, AI companies continue to use copyrighted content as training materials, endangering the financial viability of media in a landscape in which readers can bypass direct sources in favor of search results generated by AI tools.

[...] A lawsuit from The New York Times, filed last month, pulled back the curtain behind negotiations over the price and terms of licensing its content. Before suing, it said that it had been talking for months with OpenAI and Microsoft about a deal, though the talks reached no such truce. In the backdrop of AI companies crawling the internet for high-quality written content, news organizations have been backed into a corner, having to decide whether to accept lowball offers to license their content or expend the time and money to sue in a lawsuit. Some companies, like Axel Springer, took the money.

It's important to note that under intellectual property laws, facts are not protected.

Also at Courthouse News Service and Axios.

Related:

• New York Times Sues Microsoft, ChatGPT Maker OpenAI Over Copyright Infringement
• Report: Potential NYT lawsuit could force OpenAI to wipe ChatGPT and start over
• Writers and Publishers Face an Existential Threat From AI: Time to Embrace the True Fans Model

Original Submission

canopic jug writes:

The OpenWRT project is turning 20 years old this year. During that time they have adapted to existing hardware products. Now the team has the idea to produce their own, fully supported hardware to run their software on:

It is not [a] new [idea]. We first spoke about this during the OpenWrt Summits in 2017 and also 2018. It became clear start of December 2023 while tinkering with Banana Pi style devices that they are already pretty close to what we wanted to achieve in '17/'18. Banana PIs have grown in popularity within the community. They boot using a self compiled Trusted Firmware-A (TF-A)and upstream U-Boot (thx MTK/Daniel) and some of the boards are already fully supported by the upstream Linux kernel. The only nonopen sourcecomponents are the 2.5 GbE PHYandWi-Fi firmware blobsrunning on separate cores that areindependent of the main SoC running Linuxand the DRAM calibration routines which are executed early during boot.

I contacted three project members (pepe2k, dangole, nbd) on December 6th to outline the overall idea. We went over several design proposals, At the beginning we focused on the most powerful (and expensive) configurations possible but finally ended up with something rather simple and above all,feasible. We would like to propose the following as our "first" community driven HW platform called "OpenWrt One/AP-24.XY".

Together with pepe2k (thx a lot) I discussed this for many hours and we worked out the following project proposal. Instead of going insane with specifications, we decided to include some nice features we believe all OpenWrt supported platforms should have (e.g. being almost unbrickablewith multiple recovery options, hassle-free system console access, on-board RTC with battery backup etc.).

This is our first design, so let's KiSS!

The preliminary hardware specifications are included in the message and it will contain a pair of flash chips for redundancy with the aim to make the router harder to accidentally brick during an update.

Previously:
(2021) The Accident which Made the WRT54G Legendarily Popular
(2018) Reunited with LEDE, OpenWrt Releases Stable 18.06 Version
(2015) OpenWrt Gets Update in Face of FCC's Anti-Flashing Push

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

The belief that all fingerprints are unique is so well accepted that crime novels and TV shows riff on it. Recent AI research has challenged this notion, at least regarding the fingerprints on different fingers of the same person.

Undergrad researchers at Columbia Engineering found that while the branching and endpoints in the fingerprint ridges might vary, the angles and curvature at the center of the fingerprint could be the same across an individual.

To determine this, the students used a deep contrastive network and a US government database of 60,000 fingerprints to study commonalities in fingerprints. They fed pairs of prints to a neural network, with some coming from the same person and others from different individuals.

The network eventually became able to identify if prints were from the same person to an accuracy of 77 percent. That accuracy increased when multiple pairs of prints were presented.

The team initially had no idea how the network was able to identify whether the prints belonged to the same person. To the human eye, the fingerprints certainly did not appear similar.

In order to understand that it was merely identifying the angles and starting points of the ridges, they had to study the AI system's decision process. Thus, the team concluded that the AI was using an unexpected forensic marker.

As it turns out, humans can be so set in their processes not only when it comes to identifying prints but also identifying science. The first journal the team submitted their results to rejected them with the conclusion: "It is well known that every fingerprint is unique," according to the university.

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

One of the Windows updates in the current cycle is for KB5034441, which addresses CVE-2024-20666. From what I can tell, exploiting this vulnerability requires physical access, so there's no risk of this being used in remote attacks. The actual risk to most users is probably very low. Still, it allows security features to be bypassed, so it should be fixed.

The problem is that this update is failing for many users with error code 0x80070643. Microsoft claims that this is due to the recovery partition not being large enough on some systems, though the error code is cryptic and unhelpful. Here's what Microsoft said about that:

Known issue Because of an issue in the error code handling routine, you might receive the following error message instead of the expected error message when there is insufficient disk space:

        0x80070643 - ERROR_INSTALL_FAILURE

Windows isn't even telling users the correct error. Microsoft claims the update is failing on systems where the recovery partition isn't large enough. From my own experience, I have systems where I allowed the Windows installer to partition the drive automatically, meaning that Windows determined the size of the recovery partition. Windows 10 chose a size of 509 MB on my systems, and this doesn't seem to be scaled depending on the size of the user's drive. For most users, this is probably set automatically by the installer or the computer manufacturer. That said, I've read a user comment that the update failed on a system with a 15 GB recovery partition, so I'm not certain that this can really be blamed on insufficient disk space.

Microsoft's advice to users is that they need to manually resize the recovery partition. The commands are not intuitive, and there's absolutely no reason that Microsoft should be expecting ordinary users to be doing this. Resizing partitions is a fairly high risk operation, one that carries a risk of data loss if not done properly.

This vulnerability probably just isn't a risk at all for most users, but that's not necessarily obvious. They just see the message that a security update failed with a cryptic error message. It's Microsoft's responsibility to ensure that security updates just work when they're being installed on a system in a reasonably standard configuration. If the Windows installer chose a recovery partition of 509 MB, then Microsoft needs to make their updates work with a recovery partition of that size, or they need to automatically resize the partition. This is a dumpster fire, and it's inexcusable to expect Microsoft to expect users to manually repartition their drives.

Original Submission

taylorvich writes:

https://phys.org/news/2024-01-eco-friendly-fungicide-alternative.html

A material that could replace current fungicides (i.e., anti-fungal pesticides), increase food security, and help protect wildlife has been discovered.

A recent investigation undertaken by Pesticide Action Network (PAN) revealed that the UK is still using 36 harmful pesticides that have been banned in other European countries, with 13 described as "highly hazardous" that have links to water contamination, cancer, infertility, and other illnesses.

Published in Green Chemistry, researchers at the University of Nottingham have completed a successful field trial of a material they have developed to help to protect crops from fungi.

Simon Avery, professor of eukaryotic microbiology in the Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences, said, "The test material is not toxic but works by passively resisting attachment of fungal spores to protect surfaces from fungal infection, including crop surfaces. Results from this first field trial with wheat are particularly encouraging as there is a lot of scope to optimize further the material properties for crop protection."

"We identified two lead polymer candidates by bio-performance testing using in vitro microplates and leaf-based assays. These were then taken forward into a program to optimize and scale up their synthesis and compound them into a spray formulation that could be used on crops. Our findings showed that the material not only significantly reduced fungal infection by the fungus Septoria tritici by up to 26% but also that the crop grew just as well as the control group—providing an alternative that appears safer for the environment, wildlife, and people, and is effective, too."

Sprayed directly onto wheat at timings conventional for fungicides, the trial has provided the first real-world scale exemplification of how the material interacts with crops. The small plot trial compared the two polymer candidates to a multisite fungicide and two commercial fungicide programs.

[...] Valentina said, "Our attention is now turning to a second field trial that's in the diary for this year to further hone and improve the polymer so we can continue turning our research into reality. The beauty of a material like this is its lack of toxicity, the relative simplicity of its production and the fact that it can be scaled up easily—making it an incredibly attractive prospect for several other industries, not just agriculture."

Journal Reference:
Liam A. Crawford et al, A potential alternative to fungicides using actives-free (meth)acrylate polymers for protection of wheat crops from fungal attachment and infection, Green Chemistry (2023). DOI: 10.1039/D3GC01911J

Original Submission

As reported in USA Today https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/business/2024/01/08/audacy-radio-bankruptcy/72147915007/ and many outlets:

Radio giant Audacy announced that it plans to file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, on Sunday.

The company, which owns more than 200 stations across the U.S., announced in a news release it agreed to a prepackaged restructuring support agreement (RSA) with a supermajority of its debt-holders that will allow it to reduce its debt. The company says the plan would reduce its debt by 80% from around $1.9 billion to about $350 million.

Under this agreement, debtholders will receive equity in the reorganized company.

"Over the past few years, we have strategically transformed Audacy into a leading, scaled multi-platform audio content and entertainment company," said David Field, CEO of Audacy.

Do you listen to the radio? Your AC submitter still enjoys having music chosen by a pro -- but there are fewer and fewer high quality DJs around to fill that role...and probably even fewer job slots available in this era of corporate radio.

Best anthem to radio? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RAUUVYZ-z7A
or an intense (but partial) version from Saturday Night Live, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eD_24nDzkeo

Original Submission

owl writes:

https://www.techdirt.com/2024/01/10/piracy-is-surging-again-because-streaming-execs-ignored-the-lessons-of-the-past/

Back in 2019 we noted how the streaming sector risked driving consumers back to piracy if they didn't heed the lessons of the past. We explored how the rush to raise rates, nickel-and-dime users, implement arbitrary restrictions, and force users toward hunting and pecking their way through a confusing platter of exclusives and availability windows risked driving befuddled users back to piracy.

And lo and behold, that's exactly what's happening.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

NASA expected to announce 'months-long delay' for crewed Artemis moon mission:

NASA leadership is expected on Tuesday to announce a "months-long delay" to the first crewed mission of the agency's flagship Artemis program, according to one current and one former NASA employee.

The delay affects NASA's Artemis II mission, which aims to send four astronauts on a journey to fly by the moon and was slated to lift off this November.

But the mission is no longer expected to take place before 2025, according to the sources, confirming months of speculation that a delay was imminent.

NASA's Inspector General hinted at potential delays for the mission in a November report, citing three main challenges the space agency must address before it can safely fly humans to the moon.

First, the ground structure used to build, transport and launch the program's massive Space Launch System rocket — dubbed Mobile Launcher 1 — "sustained more damage than expected."

The November report stated that repairs to the structure were ongoing.

Second, the heat shield on the Orion spacecraft — intended to be the astronauts' home on Artemis II — "eroded in an unexpected way" during Artemis I as it was exposed to temperatures about half as hot as the surface of the sun upon reentry into Earth's atmosphere.

Finally, the Inspector General noted what NASA officials believed to be "the primary critical path" for the Artemis II mission: preparing Orion for its first crew and integrating it with the European Service Module, which provides power and propulsion. The "critical path" in project planning refers to the aspect of the mission that's expected to take the longest.

Original Submission

taylorvich writes:

https://newatlas.com/medical/rac2-protein-macrophages-cannibalize-t-cells-cancer-immunotherapy/

Following a trail of evidence that started with a study of fruit flies nearly 25 years ago, researchers have found adding a hyperactive form of the protein Rac2 to macrophages, immune cells that eat pathogens, causes them to cannibalize T cells. The novel technique could potentially boost the effectiveness of an emerging cancer treatment.

Rac proteins have been around for a long time. Deeply conserved in evolution, the proteins are thought to have been present in the earliest nucleated cells. But, despite their age, scientists are still uncovering their mysteries. In a new study, researchers from the University of California Santa Barbara (UCSB) discovered more about how Rac proteins work and how they could potentially improve cancer treatment.

The human genome encodes three Rac proteins. Rac1 is expressed ubiquitously, Rac2 is expressed predominantly in cells that produce blood components (hematopoietic cells), and Rac3 is expressed primarily in brain tissue. Back in 1996, researchers studying fruit flies found that the proteins were instrumental in cell movement and that a hyperactive form of Rac1, expressed in only a few cells in a fly's egg chamber, destroyed the whole tissue.

"Just expressing this active Rac in six to eight cells kills the entire tissue, which is composed of about 900 cells," said Abhinava Mishra, the current study's lead author.

That was as far as the researchers got in the '90s. It wasn't until a few years ago that research started to emerge suggesting that cannibalism might be the cause of this tissue destruction.

Ryzen Cpu Bug Crashes PCs Using Firewire Devices, But A Fix Is On The Way

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

A strange bug involving AMD's modern Ryzen CPUs and the old Firewire standard

A Linux patch is on the way to solve crashing issues when attempting to use Firewire devices on PCs running Ryzen CPUs and Linux (via Phoronix). The unlikely hardware combination has enough Linux users to get attention from the community, and even a fix coming out with Linux 6.7 will be backported to prior Linux kernel releases.

Despite all that, Linux developer Takashi Sakamoto has pledged to keep Firewire support on Linux alive until 2029. Sakamoto is already making good on his promise with his latest patch, which solves an issue that uniquely affected PCs running AMD Ryzen CPUs. It would seem incredibly unlikely that anyone would be combining two pieces of hardware with nearly a decade between them, but those people certainly exist. They reported an unusually high amount of crashes.

Without getting too technical, Firewire and Ryzen users would often see their PCs crash if the "isochronous cycle timer" register on the CPU was accessed. This register would be accessed if a user ever plugged in a Firewire device or was using software that required constant access to the register.

[...] Although crashes are no longer a problem for Firewire-Ryzen PCs, the patch is a double-edged sword and "brings apparent disadvantage since time-aware application programs require it," according to Sakamoto. Linux users with this hardware combination might have to switch to Intel or even downgrade to one of AMD's pre-Ryzen CPUs, as neither exhibit the same problems seen on Ryzen-powered PCs.

mrpg writes:

Here are a few stories to launch into the new year:

Mortality inaudible

Researchers have observed that older adults with hearing loss who use hearing aids experience a number of ancillary benefits not obviously connected with hearing, like a markedly reduced risk of geriatric-onset dementia.

[...] "We found that adults with hearing loss who regularly used hearing aids had a 24% lower risk of mortality than those who never wore them," said Janet Choi, MD, MPH, the study's lead researcher. "These results are exciting because they suggest that hearing aids may play a protective role in people's health and prevent early death."

Bees vexed

U.S. honey yields have been in decline since the 1990s, and researchers have been trying to understand why. Is it pesticide use? The decline in floral biodiversity? Sticky-pawed bears? Researchers at Pennsylvania State University analyzed databases operated by a number of government departments and built a corpus of data for all 50 states over a 50-year span.

They found reduced honey yield correlated with herbicide application and land use policies that don't include pollinator support. Among their findings, states with both warm and cool regions had higher honey yields, and local soil productivity was surprisingly useful in estimating honey yield.

Fitness 420

In a stunning development that upends the anecdotal experiences of marijuana smokers everywhere, researchers at the University of Colorado at Boulder report that cannabis does not improve exercise performance.

[...] "It is pretty clear from our research that cannabis is not a performance-enhancing drug," said Angela Bryan, a professor of psychology and neuroscience.

Jurassic hobbits

Researchers studying fossils presumed to be juvenile tyrannosaurs report that the remains actually constitute adults of a smaller species, now called Nanotyrannus lancensis.

Pee evaluated

Researchers at the University of Maryland and the National Institutes of Health report that pee is yellow because of a previously unknown microbial enzyme called bilirubin reductase.

Chickens contextual

A University of Queensland-led study found that humans can determine the emotional valence of chickens from the sound of their clucks.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Canada adds that importing its drugs will not solve America's drug pricing problems:

Canada issued a warning Monday that it stands ready to defend its prescription drug supply from US importation plans—and also said the plans wouldn't work for the US, anyway. "Bulk importation will not provide an effective solution to the problem of high drug prices in the US," Health Canada said in a statement.

The defensive stance comes just days after the US Food and Drug Administration granted Florida authorization to directly import cheaper prescription drugs from Canada in an effort to help drag down America's uniquely stratospheric drug pricing. Florida is the first state to win such an authorization, and Florida Governor Ron DeSantis celebrated it, claiming the drug imports will save the state "up to $180 million in the first year alone." There are caveats, though. Before Florida can import any drugs, it must complete several obligations, including submitting to the FDA additional drug-specific information, testing the drugs for authenticity and FDA compliance, and relabeling them in accordance with FDA labeling.

The FDA authorized the importation program in accordance with section 804 of the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act (FD&C Act). The move stems from President Biden's "Executive Order on Promoting Competition in the American Economy," which directed the FDA to help develop such programs.

[...] Proponents of the program in the US say that importing cheaper drugs from abroad could help lower US drug prices by offering more competition on the market. Canada, like other countries, has lower drug prices than the US, partly because the country's national health system negotiates prices for prescription drugs. The US government only began negotiating prices last year—and is currently being sued by several pharmaceutical companies over the move.

But Canada, which has a population around nine times smaller than the US, has been staunchly opposed to the US importing its drugs. It has repeatedly said that diverting medicines to the US could lead to drug shortages in Canada, make existing shortages worse, and/or cause price spikes.

[...] Drug makers in the US also intend to fight the plans. Stephen Ubl, CEO of the powerful trade group PhRMA—Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America—said in a statement that the group is "deeply concerned with the FDA's reckless decision to approve Florida's state importation plan" and claimed importation "poses a serious danger to public health." Ubl concluded that "PhRMA is considering all options for preventing this policy from harming patients."

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

There's a megalodon tooth resting on my fireplace mantle.

The ancient, palm-sized fossil is fascinating, but a common household curio: Teeth from the giant extinct shark — which grew around 50 feet long, which is longer than a city bus — are frequently found in accessible coastal areas worldwide. The sharks' huge jaws were lined with 276 teeth, and they likely lost and replaced thousands over their lifetimes, allowing plenty of teeth the chance to fossilize.

But scientists now report the first-ever discovery of a megalodon fossil in the extremely remote, completely dark deep sea, located over 10,000 feet (3,090 meters) beneath the surface. The finding, made by a remotely operated robot, reveals significant insights about the lives of these ocean giants, who lurked in the seas some 20 million to 3.6 million years ago. They were big enough to eat whales.

"This is an amazing find and is interesting in several aspects," Nicolas Straube, a deep sea shark researcher at the University Museum Bergen in Norway and co-author of the study, said in a statement. The study was recently published in the science journal Historical Biology.

One of the main insights is that the predatory megalodon likely traversed the oceans, as opposed to just lurking along the coasts.

[...] Another important revelation from the fossil, found in the Pacific Remote Islands Marine National Monument, located southwest of Hawaii, was its coating in a black mineral called ferromanganese. It takes a million years for just a few millimeters to accrue on deep ocean objects, providing evidence that this megalodon fossil, lodged in sediments and removed with a shovel, had been there for eons.

[...] The deep sea is still largely unexplored, though scientists with several ocean exploration groups are making enormous research strides. This recent expedition, funded by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's (NOAA) Ocean Exploration program, occurred aboard the Ocean Exploration Trust's 224-foot-long vessel (E/V) Nautilus. It's designed to deploy exploration robots into the deep sea, largely in the sprawling Pacific Ocean.

Indeed, deep sea exploration missions often return to the surface with discoveries, or rarely seen sightings.

"We always discover stuff when we go out into the deep sea. You're always finding things that you haven't seen before," Derek Sowers, an expedition lead for NOAA's Ocean Exploration mission, told Mashable in 2022.

Original Submission

canopic jug writes:

The American Dialect Society has chosen the neologism "enshittification" as its 2023 word of the year:

The term enshittification became popular in 2023 after it was used in a blog post by author Cory Doctorow, who used it to describe how digital platforms can become worse and worse. "Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die. I call this enshittification," Doctorow wrote on his Pluralistic blog. 

Presiding at the Jan. 6 voting session were Ben Zimmer, chair of the ADS New Words Committee and language columnist for the Wall Street Journal, and Dr. Kelly Elizabeth Wright of Virginia Tech, data czar of the New Words Committee. "Enshittification is a sadly apt term for how our online lives have become gradually degraded," Zimmer said. "From the time that it first appeared in Doctorow's posts and articles, the word had all the markings of a successful neologism, being instantly memorable and adaptable to a variety of contexts."

The term was first seen over at Cory Doctorow's current blog, Pluralistic. It is a form of rent-seeking also known as platform decay.

Previously:
(2023) Enshittification Everywhere. Your Car, Your Phone, Your Tractor, Your Computer...

Original Submission