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Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

One of the world’s most famous drug classes may have another trick up its sleeve. In a new study, scientists in the UK have found that erectile dysfunction drugs like sildenafil (more widely known as Viagra) are linked to a lowered risk of Alzheimer’s disease, the most common form of dementia. The findings don’t prove a cause-and-effect connection, the team says, but do merit clinical trials that could confirm a genuine benefit.

Sildenafil and similar drugs are called phosphodiesterase type 5 inhibitors, or PDE5Is. By inhibiting PDE5, these drugs can open up blood vessels in certain parts of the body, particularly the penis. That’s why, although sildenafil was originally developed to treat hypertension and chest pain, it was found to be especially effective at alleviating erectile dysfunction. And thus the little blue pill was born.

While these drugs are synonymous with ED, they are taken for other indications as well. Several are approved to treat pulmonary hypertension, or high blood pressure in the arteries of the lung. And scientists have been studying them for other medical uses, in both humans and animals.

The most intriguing possibility for these drugs might be in their potential against Alzheimer’s, though. In 2021, a NIH-funded study found evidence in the lab and from the real world that sildenafil could noticeably prevent or delay the onset of Alzheimer’s in older people—perhaps reducing people’s relative risk by as much as 69% compared to not taking the drug, based on insurance claims data. However, less than a year later, an October 2022 study from a separate team (also NIH-funded) that looked at Medicare data failed to find any link between reduced Alzheimer’s risk and sildenafil.

The conflicting findings were enough to draw the attention of Ruth Brauer, an epidemiologist at the University of College London, and her team. So they decided to investigate for themselves, using medical record data collected through the UK’s National Health Service—data that gave them an advantage compared to past studies, according to Brauer.

“UK healthcare data can often be followed up for a very long time, and longer than U.S. insurance data. That’s because most of our data are collected by general practitioners or primary care physicians, and they often have patients under their care for decades,” she explained. “The second thing that is unique about UK healthcare data is that we have a lot of lifestyle variables in our data set, which can affect the risk of Alzheimer’s disease. So things like smoking or BMI, but also information on socioeconomic status.”

Anonymous Coward writes:

US climate scientist Michael Mann wins $1m in defamation lawsuit

The high-profile climate scientist Michael Mann has been awarded $1m by a jury in a defamation lawsuit against two conservative writers who compared his depictions of global heating to the work of a convicted child molester.

The case stretches back 12 years. In a statement posted on Mann's X account, one of his lawyers said: "Today's verdict vindicates Mike Mann's good name and reputation. It also is a big victory for truth and scientists everywhere who dedicate their lives answering vital scientific questions impacting human health and the planet."

[...] Emails from Mann and other scientists were leaked in 2009 in an incident known as "Climategate", with climate denialists claiming Mann manipulated data. Investigations by Penn State and others, including an examination of the emails by the Associated Press, found no misuse of data by Mann.

Regardless, in 2012, the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a libertarian think tank, published a blogpost by Rand Simberg that compared investigations by Penn State University into Mann's work with the case of Jerry Sandusky, a former assistant football coach who was convicted of sexually assaulting multiple children.

According to the Mann legal team's statement, the four-week jury trial in the District of Columbia superior court resulted in punitive damages of $1,000 against Simberg and $1,000,000 against Steyn.

"I hope this verdict sends a message that falsely attacking climate scientists is not protected speech," Mann said.

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Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

Meta and TikTok owner ByteDance are not keen on the idea of paying the European Union to regulate them. The companies have challenged a supervisory fee set forth by EU moderators, who are now required to monitor Meta, TikTok, and other major platforms under the Digital Services Act (DSA), Politico reports. Meta first announced its action, with ByteDance following suit a day later.

Under the current arrangement, all designated companies must split the €45.2 million ($48.7 million) that EU's regulators argue is necessary to properly supervise the 20 Very Large Online Platforms and two Very Large Online Search Engines (VLOSEs). Each regulated platform has 45 million or more users with its financial contribution based on the size of that number. They also can't owe more than 0.05 percent of its 2022 net profits. However, companies like Amazon and Pinterest that reported little to no profits won't owe anything. Meta, on the other hand, got a €11 million ($11.9 million) bill under the current arrangement. ByteDance has not publicly announced how much it owes.

Meta takes issue with the European Union regulators' methodology for choosing each company's fees. "Currently, companies that record a loss don't have to pay, even if they have a large user base or represent a greater regulatory burden, which means some companies pay nothing, leaving others to pay a disproportionate amount of the total," a Meta spokesperson remarked. Failure to comply with the fee could lead to a fine of up to six percent of a company's global revenue.

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Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

The UK’s 40-year-old fusion reactor achieved a world record for energy output in its final runs before being shut down for good, scientists have announced.

The Joint European Torus (JET) in Oxfordshire began operating in 1983. When running, it was temporarily the hottest point in the solar system, reaching 150 million°C.

The reactor’s previous record was a reaction lasting for 5 seconds in 2021, producing 59 megajoules of heat energy. But in its final tests in late 2023, it surpassed this by sustaining a reaction for 5.2 seconds while also reaching 69 megajoules of output, using just 0.2 milligrams of fuel.

[...] JET forged together atoms of deuterium and tritium – two stable isotopes of hydrogen – in plasma to create helium, while also releasing a vast amount of energy. This is the same reaction that powers our sun. It was a type of fusion reactor known as a tokamak, which contains plasma in a donut shape using rings of electromagnets.

Scientists ran the last experiments with deuterium-tritium fuel at JET in October last year and other experiments continued until December. But the machine has now been shut down for good and it is being decommissioned over the next 16 years.

“It’s great that it’s gone out with a little flourish,” says Matthews. “It’s got a noble history. It’s served its time and they’re going to squeeze a bit more information out of it during its decommissioning period as well. So it’s not something to be sad about; it’s something to be celebrated.”

A larger and more modern replacement for JET, the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) in France, is nearing completion and its first experiments are due to start in 2025.

[...] Another reactor using the same design, the Korea Superconducting Tokamak Advanced Research (KSTAR) device, recently managed to sustain a reaction for 30 seconds at temperatures in excess of 100 million°C.

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Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

Danish privacy regulator Datatilsysnet has ruled that cities in Denmark need considerably more assurances about privacy to use Google service that may expose children’s data, reports BleepingComputer. The agency found (translated) that Google uses student data from Chromebooks and Google Workplace for Education “for its own purposes,” which isn’t allowed under European privacy law.

[...] The regulator ruled that municipalities aren’t allowed to send Google data unless the laws change or Google provides a way to filter students’ information out. Google using it for purposes like performance analytics or feature development is a problem under their interpretations, even if it doesn’t include targeted advertising. For instance, it’s easy to see how regulators might take issue with student data being used to develop and improve AI features, which are increasingly part of Google Workspace and Chromebooks.

Datatilsysnet says that cities hadn’t actually done a thorough enough job of vetting the risk of using Google Workplace for Education before they approved their use by local schools. In 2022, it required 53 municipalities to re-do their assessments as a condition for rescinding a previous data-sharing ban for the city of Helsingør. As part of the process, they needed to get information on how Google used the student information it collected and where it sent that data, leading to the new order.

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fliptop writes:

In 2024 we are not yet completely inured to the latest technology — smart sex toys that track your orgasms, virtual-reality hookups, chatbot sexting — but we may be on our way. In less than 10 years' time, "app dating" became simply "dating."

What will seem routine at the end of the next decade?

Feeding, fighting, fleeing and sex — in 1958, the neuropsychologist Karl H. Pribram identified these as the four basic drives that underpin human behavior, influencing everything we do. There are thousands of apps, websites and devices for food, arguing and transportation, and maybe even more for sex.

When dating apps like Grindr and Tinder first arrived, some speculated that they signaled the dawning of a new era of technosexuality, in which our sexual and romantic lives would be mediated by machines. Now it seems quaint to worry about how online dating might shape us, not because it hasn't, but because technology has become so entwined with human desire that it's challenging to separate our sexuality — itself inextricable from what makes us human — from the technology we use to express it.

We may like to imagine a distant future where humans and robots merge in virtual realms, but it may already be here. We meet dates on our phones, watch pornography on our tablets and bicker with our partners over text.

[...] The boom in sex tech has coincided with what some have called a sex recession, the pronounced slowdown in sex for Americans that started in the 1990s. In 2024, with A.I. and V.R. creating more hyper-stimulating sensory expenses, the chasm between the sex we have online and the sex we have I.R.L. may be widening.

Related:

• The Virtual Girlfriends That Are Sweeping East Asia
• You can soon have 'sex' with Amazon's Alexa
• RealDoll is Working on AI and Robotic Heads for its Next-gen Sex Dolls

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owl writes:

https://rep-lodsb.mataroa.blog/blog/intel-286-secrets-ice-mode-and-f1-0f-04/

With some recent interest in undocumented opcodes and microcode on modern Intel chips, I decided to do a proper writeup on what I found out while researching and playing around with the venerable 80286 ("Beige Unlock"?).

The documentation for the '286s LOADALL instruction - which Intel only made available under NDA back in the day - briefly mentions how it is used during automated testing of every produced chip (and is thus guaranteed to work). But its other purpose was kept secret: to support In-Circuit Emulation (ICE).

An ICE is a very expensive device that plugs into the CPU socket and "emulates" the chip while providing debugging functionality. This is not at all like the kind of software emulation familiar today, or even using a modern microcontroller to emulate 30+ year old hardware: it needs to run at the same speed and interact with external hardware in exactly the same way as the chip it replaces, using technology available at the time when the 286 was still in production.

Not-so-shockingly, the way they did it was to use an actual 286 chip to "emulate" itself, with some extra pins to allow the debugging hardware to monitor it and take control. This debug interface uses the 5 pins left unused on the 286 package. The only public description of these comes from a patent.

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taylorvich writes:

https://phys.org/news/2024-02-alien-invasion-native-earthworms-threaten.html

An alien invasion capable of triggering catastrophic changes is underway across North America. At least 70 imported earthworm species have colonized the continent, and represent a largely overlooked threat to native ecosystems, according to a new study by researchers at Stanford University, Sorbonne University, and other institutions.

The analysis, published Feb. 8 in Nature Ecology & Evolution, provides the largest ever database of such earthworms and warns of the need to better understand and manage the invaders in our midst.
...
Mostly invisible and largely unappreciated, earthworms are worth their weight in gold to farmers and gardeners because their movement creates tunnels that allow air, water, and nutrients to penetrate, while their waste serves as a rich fertilizer.

They also play a central role in many processes that cascade to aboveground communities and the atmosphere. For example, although mechanical movement through the soil by earthworms may initially release carbon dioxide, the longer-term impacts of digesting organic material result in a net increase in sequestered carbon where earthworms are present.

Since the late 1800s, people looking to capitalize on these services have brought earthworms to North America from Asia, Europe, South America, and Africa. In some places, these non-native introductions have successfully enhanced the agricultural economy. However, in other cases, they have been detrimental. These transplants are more likely to consume aboveground leaf litter than native earthworms, altering habitat quality in a way that can hurt native plants, amphibians, and insects.

In the northern broadleaf forests of the U.S. and Canada, alien earthworms' impact on soil stresses trees such as sugar maples by altering the microhabitat of their soils. This, in turn, sets off a string of food web impacts that help invasive plants spread. Ironically, for a creature synonymous with improving soil, some alien earthworms may alter soil properties such as nutrients, pH, and texture, leading to poorer quality crops, among other impacts.

Arthur T Knackerbracket wrote in with the following story: following story:

The United States military is one of many organizations embracing AI in our modern age, but it may want to pump the brakes a bit. A new study using AI in foreign policy decision-making found how quickly the tech would call for war instead of finding peaceful resolutions. Some AI in the study even launched nuclear warfare with little to no warning, giving strange explanations for doing so.

“All models show signs of sudden and hard-to-predict escalations,” said researchers in the study. “We observe that models tend to develop arms-race dynamics, leading to greater conflict, and in rare cases, even to the deployment of nuclear weapons.”

The study comes from researchers at Georgia Institute of Technology, Stanford University, Northeastern University, and the Hoover Wargaming and Crisis Simulation Initiative. Researchers placed several AI models from OpenAI, Anthropic, and Meta in war simulations as the primary decision maker. Notably, OpenAI’s GPT-3.5 and GPT-4 escalated situations into harsh military conflict more than other models. Meanwhile, Claude-2.0 and Llama-2-Chat were more peaceful and predictable. Researchers note that AI models have a tendency towards “arms-race dynamics” that results in increased military investment and escalation.

“I just want to have peace in the world,” OpenAI’s GPT-4 said as a reason for launching nuclear warfare in a simulation.

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes in with the processed: following story:

Like so many industries, the PC market had a bad 2023 – its worst ever, according to Gartner – as shipments fell 15%. But the fourth quarter brought reason for optimism as shipments grew slightly, by 0.3%.

That final quarter was an especially good one for AMD. According to data from Mercury Research (via Tom's Hardware), high demand for 4th-generation Epyc and Ryzen 7000-series processors helped increase AMD's revenue share during the final three months of 2023.

AMD's Epyc server CPU business was the best-performing category, taking a 31.1% revenue share (23.1% unit share). That represents a year-on-year revenue share increase of 4%. YoY unit share increased even more, up 5.5%, though this figure actually decreased 0.2% Quarter-over-Quarter, which AMD put down to Intel server processors "being sold into non-data center applications and higher Atom shipments."

AMD saw its consumer processors' revenue share increase YoY during Q4, too, with desktops up 1.3% and notebooks up 2.5%. The company's unit share also increased in this category, especially mobile CPUs, which were up 3.9% YoY. Total client revenue share was up 2% YoY to 15.4% but down 1.6% QoQ.

Intel is also losing market share to AMD in the Steam survey. Valve's latest results show that Lisa Su's firm has reached an all-time-high user share of 34.25%, having jumped another 0.59% in January. The company has just launched its Ryzen 8000G series desktop processors, so it'll be interesting to see how that affects things; we weren't very impressed with the Ryzen 7 8700G.

We recently reported that AMD is getting ready to release new motherboards based on the 800-series chipset alongside the Ryzen 9000 Granite Ridge desktop processors later this year. The company will still use the AM5 CPU socket in these boards, offering support for Ryzen 7000, 8000, and 9000 CPUs.

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taylorvich writes:

https://phys.org/news/2024-02-laser-driven-lightsails-stable.html

It's a long way to the nearest star, which means conventional rockets won't get us there. The fuel requirements would make our ship prohibitively heavy. So an alternative is to travel light. Literally. Rather than carrying your fuel with you, simply attach your tiny starship to a large reflective sail, and shine a powerful laser at it.

The impulse of photons would push the starship to a fraction of light speed. Riding a beam of light, a lightsail mission could reach Proxima Centauri in a couple of decades. But while the idea is simple, the engineering challenges are significant, because, across decades and light-years, even the smallest problem can be difficult to solve.

One example of this can be seen in a recent arXiv preprint paper. It looks at the problem of how to balance a lightsail on a laser beam. Although the laser could be aimed directly toward a star, or where it will be in a couple of decades, the lightsail would only follow the beam if it is perfectly balanced.

If a sail is slightly tilted relative to the beam, the reflected laser light would give the lightsail a slight transverse push. No matter how small this deviation is, it would grow over time, causing its path to drift ever away from its target. We will never align a lightsail perfectly, so we need some way to correct small deviations.

For traditional rockets, this can be done with internal gyroscopes to stabilize the rocket, and engines that can dynamically adjust their thrust to restore balance. But a gyro system would be too heavy for an interstellar lightsail, and adjustments of the beam would take months or years to reach the lightsail, making quick changes impossible. So the authors suggest using a radiative trick known as the Poynting–Robertson effect.

The effect was first studied in the early 1900s and is caused by the relative motion between an object and a light source. For example, a dust grain orbiting the sun sees light coming at a slight forward angle due to its motion through sunlight. That little forward component of light can slow down the asteroid ever so slightly. This effect causes dust to drift toward the inner solar system over time.

In this paper, the authors consider a two-dimensional model to see how the Poynting–Robertson effect might be used to keep our lightsail probe on course. To keep things simple, they assumed the light beam to be a simple monochromatic plane wave. Real lasers are more complex, but the assumption is reasonable for a proof of concept. They then showed how a simple two-sail system can use the effects of relative motion to keep the craft in balance. As the sails tilt off course slightly, a restorative force from the beam counters it. Thus proving the concept could work.

More information: Rhys Mackintosh et al, Poynting-Robertson damping of laser beam driven lightsails, arXiv (2024). DOI: 10.48550/arxiv.2401.16924

Original Submission

AnonTechie writes:

Many Indigenous peoples and local communities around the world are leading very satisfying lives despite having very little money.This is the conclusion of a study by ICTA-UAB, which shows that many societies with very low monetary income have remarkably high levels of life satisfaction, comparable to those in wealthy countries.

Economic growth is often prescribed as a sure way of increasing the well-being of people in low-income countries, and global surveys in recent decades have supported this strategy by showing that people in high-income countries tend to report higher levels of life satisfaction than those in low-income countries. This strong correlation might suggest that only in rich societies can people be happy.

[...] The research, published in the scientific journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), consisted of a survey of 2,966 people from Indigenous and local communities in 19 globally distributed sites. Only 64% of surveyed households had any cash income. The results show that "surprisingly, many populations with very low monetary incomes report very high average levels of life satisfaction, with scores similar to those in wealthy countries," says Eric Galbraith, researcher at ICTA-UAB and McGill University and lead author of the study.

[...] The researchers highlight that, although they now know that people in many Indigenous and local communities report high levels of life satisfaction, they do not know why. Prior work would suggest that family and social support and relationships, spirituality, and connections to nature are among the important factors on which this happiness is based, "but it is possible that the important factors differ significantly between societies or, conversely, that a small subset of factors dominate everywhere. I would hope that, by learning more about what makes life satisfying in these diverse communities, it might help many others to lead more satisfying lives while addressing the sustainability crisis," Galbraith concludes.

[Source]: Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona

[Also Covered By]: ScienceDaily

What would give you true happiness ? Can you be really happy with less money ?

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Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

So we’ve noted more than once that as the streaming sector is saturated and new user growth slows, streaming giants will follow on a fairly predictable path that got their predecessors (cable TV companies) in trouble. Namely, shifting away from innovation and disruption and consumer welfare, and toward nickel-and-diming customers in a bid to give Wall Street improved quarterly returns at any cost.

That means a lot of pointless and harmful “growth for growth sake” mergers (see: Discovery Time Warner), endless price hikes, weird attempts to nickel-and-dime users (see: Amazon suddenly charging extra to avoid new ads), a general skimping on staff pay and customer service, and a steady enshittification of overall product quality you’ve probably already noticed.

Part of that process involves eliminating popular things that previously helped bring in new customers, like password sharing. We’ve noted how when Netflix wanted to sign up more customers, it praised password sharing, acknowledging that it didn’t really hurt the company’s bottom line, and basically acted as free advertising. Besides, Netflix already charges users extra for additional simultaneous streams.

Now that global growth is slowing, Netflix has to effectively cannibalize its own product quality and brand to appease Wall Street. It’s not good enough to just have a high quality product that makes money and people like; the need for improved quarterly returns inevitably turns disruptors into turf protectors. It’s what kicked Comcast in the teeth, and streaming execs seem poised to ignore the lessons.

[...] But if there’s any potential to squeeze out a tiny bit of additional profits from existing customers, these executives will do it. Wall Street demands it. And when annoyed users increasingly head to free alternatives or piracy after being inundated with price hikes and sagging product quality, execs will inevitably blame everything and everyone but themselves for the failure. It’s how this all works.

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Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

We're very familiar with the many projects in which Raspberry Pi hardware is used, from giving old computers a new lease of life through to running the animated displays so beloved by retailers. But cracking BitLocker? We doubt the company will be bragging too much about that particular application.

The technique was documented in a YouTube video over the weekend, which demonstrated how a Raspberry Pi Pico can be used to gain access to a BitLocker-secured device in under a minute, provided you have physical access to the device.

A Lenovo laptop was used in the video, posted by user stacksmashing, although other hardware will also be vulnerable. The technique also relies on having a Trusted Platform Module (TPM) separate from the CPU. In many cases, the two will be combined, in which case the technique shown cannot be used.

[...] Microsoft has long accepted that such attacks are possible, although it describes them as a "targeted attack with plenty of time; the attacker opens the case, solder, and uses sophisticated hardware or software."

At less than a minute in the example, we'd dispute the "plenty of time" claim, and while the Raspberry Pi Pico is undoubtedly impressive for the price, at less than $10, the hardware spend is neither expensive nor specific.

[...] As one wag observed: "Congratulations! You found the FBI's backdoor."

Original Submission

SomeGuy writes:

Seth Lavin, a school principal in Chicago, reports his experience switching from a smart phone in this opinion piece that originates from the LA Times.

About three months ago, I bought a flip phone and turned off my smartphone for good. [...] [A student] asks, "Why did you put yourself on punishment?" But I do not feel punished. I feel free.

Kids and their phones are different - closer - since COVID. [...] Teachers said they could sense kids' phones distracting them from inside their pockets.

We banned phones outright, equipping classrooms with lockboxes that the kids call "cellphone prisons." It's not perfect, but it's better. A teacher said, "It's like we have the children back." [...]

And what about adults? Ninety-five percent of young adults now keep their phones nearby every waking hour, according to a Gallup survey; [...]

We want children off their phones because we want them to be present, but children need our presence, too. [...] Every year, I see kids get phones and disappear into them. I don't want that to happen to mine. I don't want that to have happened to me.

So I quit. And now I have this flip phone.

What I don't have is Facetime or Instagram. I can't use Grubhub or Lyft or the Starbucks Mobile App. I don't even have a browser. I drove to a student's quinceañera, and I had to print out directions as if it were 2002.

[...] I can still make calls, though people are startled to get one. I can still text. And I can still see your pictures, though I can "heart" them only in my heart. [...]

Turning off my smartphone didn't fix all my problems. But I do notice my brain moving more deliberately, shifting less abruptly between moods. I am bored more, sure - the days feel longer - but I am deciding that's a good thing. And I am still connected to the people I love; they just can't text me TikToks.

It's hard to imagine a revolution against the smartphone, though there are glimmers of resistance. [...] Twelve percent of adults recently told Gallup that their smartphones make life worse, up from 6% in 2015.

But I'm not doing this to change the culture. I'm doing this because I don't want my sons to remember me lost in my phone.

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