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Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

Google will spend $1 billion to build a new data center in Kansas City. Monique Picou, Google VP of cloud supply chain and operations, announced the initiative at a press conference attended by both Kansas City Mayor Quinton Lucas and Missouri governor Mike Parson. The new plant is expected to provide significant benefits for Missouri's Northland economy, while Picou highlighted how Kansas City and Google can work together to bring a brighter future to the region.

Data centers are the backbone of Google's investment strategy, Picou said, especially now that the industry is reaching an important "inflection point" for tech innovation thanks to AI algorithms. Governor Parson said that the data center will support up to 1,300 jobs, a majority of which will be part of construction operations for the new plant.

Mayor Lucas said that one in every ten workers in Kansas City is involved in the technology industry, and thanks to Google, the city will keep growing its appeal for tech companies. The firm is planning to fund the North Kansas City School District's STEAM center with a $100,000 grant, and to bring its Skilled Trades and Readiness program to the area.

Mountain View is also partnering with Ranger Power and D. E. Shaw Renewable Investments (DESRI) to acquire a carbon-free energy source for its data center. The plant will seemingly be fed 400 megawatts by the Missouri-based Beavertail Solar farm, an energy station located in a former coal community that will help Google achieve its ambitious goals for an all carbon-free energy consumption by 2030.

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Original Submission

Frosty Piss writes:

https://www.38north.org/2024/03/revisiting-the-2014-korea-hydro-and-nuclear-power-hack-lessons-learned-for-south-korean-cybersecurity/

In December 2014, North Korea's cyber group Kimsuky conducted an attack on the South Korean Korea Hydro and Nuclear Power (KHNP), leaking personal information of 10,000 employees, reactor blueprints, manuals, electricity charts, radiation methods and more. Despite the impact of the 2014 KHNP hack on South Korea, it has figured minimally in English-language cybersecurity literature.

[...] In 2013, North Korea used the DARKSEOUL malware to paralyze ROK broadcasting stations, banks and government sites after its long-term espionage campaign, Operation Troy. In December 2014, however, despite those precautionary steps, KHNP was hacked. Kimsuky used a Twitter account named "president of anti-nuclear reactor group" to post sensitive documents and blueprints from KHNP and threatened to leak more information unless specific reactors in Gori and Wolseong were shut down by Christmas.

[...] As with most research regarding cyber operations and the DPRK, the scarcity of publicly available information posed a challenge. This was especially true for the period from 2014 to 2022 when the Moon Jae-in administration in South Korea was reluctant to publicly attribute cyber operations to North Korea for political purposes.

[...] The 2014 KHNP hack marked a pivotal turning point for ROK cyber policy. While North Korea's Kimsuky was successful in stealing sensitive information and publicly demonstrating the vulnerabilities of the South Korean nuclear energy industry to cyberattacks.

Original Submission

https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-68662881

The US must provide assurances that Julian Assange will not receive the death penalty if convicted, before a UK court rules on whether he can appeal against his extradition.

The court has adjourned its decision by three weeks to give the US government time to comply.

US authorities say the Wikileaks founder endangered lives by publishing thousands of classified documents.

His lawyers have argued that the case is form of "state retaliation".

In a High Court judgment on Tuesday, Dame Victoria Sharp and Mr Justice Johnson said that Mr Assange would be able to bring an appeal on three grounds, unless assurances were given by the United States.

These assurances are that the 52-year-old would be protected by and allowed to rely on the First Amendment - which protects freedom of speech in the US; that he would not be "prejudiced at trial" due to his nationality; and that he would not face the death penalty if he is convicted.

Judges have given the US authorities three weeks to make those assurances, with a final hearing potentially taking place on 20 May.

"If assurances are not given then we will grant leave to appeal without a further hearing," said Dame Victoria in the court's ruling.

"If assurances are given then we will give the parties an opportunity to make further submissions before we make a final decision on the application for leave to appeal."

See also: Julian Assange faces further wait over extradition ruling

upstart writes:

In total, 11 pythons were caught, with one exceeding 16 feet [4.9m] in length:

What would have been a bad dream for many was a massive win for the Florida wildlife experts who discovered a 7-foot-wide, 500-lb. pile of invasive Burmese pythons.

The snakes, which are not indigenous to the region and have significantly disrupted Florida's ecosystem for more than four decades, were discovered on Feb. 21 in a marsh near Naples, per the Miami Herald.

[...] According to the Miami Herald, the pythons were located using novel implants researchers inserted in male "scout snakes." Once the snakes were set free, those tracking them could follow a signal emitted from the reptiles into remote areas.

YouTube

500 pounds of python caught when mating rituals revealed in Florida marsh, team says:

Burmese pythons are native to Southeast Asia and the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission suspects they made their way into the wilds of Florida as exotic pets that escaped or were intentionally released.

Necropsies have revealed they are eating at least 24 species of mammal, 47 species of bird and three reptile species in South Florida, according to University of Florida research.

In one case, a 31.5-pound python ate a 35-pound deer. "We see the remains of deer inside pythons often. This is concerning and it should sound an alarm." Bartoszek says.

Even more frightening is the fact they may be expanding their turf to the north and showing up in seemingly impossible places. In 2017, a python was found in open water nearly 15 miles off the coast of southwest Florida, Bartoszek wrote in a scientific note published in Herpetological Review.

The conservancy — one of Florida's largest environmental organizations — was among the first to take action, launching a ground war that has lasted more than a decade.

[...] "It's a big Everglades. I'm not declaring victory by any stretch, but we are winning key battles. We feel like we are attempting to hold the line around Naples while we all wait for additional control tools to develop," Bartoszek says.

"There's an area where we had four active scouts and they have not found us a female in that sector this season. ... We are cautiously optimistic, you can't take (1,300) snakes out of the equation and not make an impact."

Original Submission

taylorvich writes:

https://phys.org/news/2024-03-life-blocks-stable-venus-conditions.html

If there is life in the solar system beyond Earth, it might be found in the clouds of Venus. In contrast to the planet's blisteringly inhospitable surface, Venus' cloud layer, which extends from 30 to 40 miles above the surface, hosts milder temperatures that could support some extreme forms of life.

If it's out there, scientists have assumed that any Venusian cloud inhabitant would look very different from life forms on Earth. That's because the clouds themselves are made from highly toxic droplets of sulfuric acid—an intensely corrosive chemical that is known to dissolve metals and destroy most biological molecules on Earth.

But a new study by MIT researchers may challenge that assumption. Published today in the journal Astrobiology, the study reports that, in fact, some key building blocks of life can persist in solutions of concentrated sulfuric acid.

The study's authors have found that 19 amino acids that are essential to life on Earth are stable for up to four weeks when placed in vials of sulfuric acid at concentrations similar to those in Venus' clouds. In particular, they found that the molecular "backbone" of all 19 amino acids remained intact in sulfuric acid solutions ranging in concentration from 81% to 98%.

"What is absolutely surprising is that concentrated sulfuric acid is not a solvent that is universally hostile to organic chemistry," says study co-author Janusz Petkowski, a research affiliate in MIT's Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences (EAPS).

[...] The search for life in Venus' clouds has gained momentum in recent years, spurred in part by a controversial detection of phosphine—a molecule that is considered to be one signature of life—in the planet's atmosphere. While that detection remains under debate, the news has reinvigorated an old question: Could Earth's sister planet actually host life?

In search of an answer, scientists are planning several missions to Venus, including the first largely privately funded mission to the planet, backed by California-based launch company Rocket Lab. That mission, on which Seager is the science principal investigator, aims to send a spacecraft through the planet's clouds to analyze their chemistry for signs of organic molecules.

Journal Reference:
Maxwell D. Seager, Sara Seager, William Bains, and Janusz J. Petkowski. Stability of 20 Biogenic Amino Acids in Concentrated Sulfuric Acid: Implications for the Habitability of Venus' Clouds. Astrobiology. ahead of print http://doi.org/10.1089/ast.2023.0082

Original Submission

owl writes:

https://www.righto.com/2015/11/macbook-charger-teardown-surprising.html

Have you ever wondered what's inside your Macbook's charger? There's a lot more circuitry crammed into the compact power adapter than you'd expect, including a microprocessor. This charger teardown looks at the numerous components in the charger and explains how they work together to power your laptop.

Most consumer electronics, from your cell phone to your television, use a switching power supply to convert AC power from the wall to the low-voltage DC used by electronic circuits. The switching power supply gets its name because it switches power on and off thousands of times a second, which turns out to be a very efficient way to do this conversion.

[...] One unexpected component is a tiny circuit board with a microcontroller, which can be seen above. This 16-bit processor constantly monitors the charger's voltage and current. It enables the output when the charger is connected to a Macbook, disables the output when the charger is disconnected, and shuts the charger off if there is a problem. This processor is a Texas Instruments MSP430 microcontroller, roughly as powerful as the processor inside the original Macintosh.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Doctors transplant gene-edited pig kidney into living human for 1st time - National:

Doctors in Boston have transplanted a pig kidney into a 62-year-old patient, the latest experiment in the quest to use animal organs in humans.

Massachusetts General Hospital said Thursday that it's the first time a genetically modified pig kidney has been transplanted into a living person. Previously, pig kidneys have been temporarily transplanted into brain-dead donors. Also, two men received heart transplants from pigs, although both died within months.

The patient, Richard "Rick" Slayman of Weymouth, Massachusetts, is recovering well from the surgery last Saturday and is expected to be discharged soon, doctors said Thursday.

Dr. Tatsuo Kawai, the transplant surgeon, said the team believes the pig kidney will work for at least two years. If it fails, Slayman could go back on dialysis, said kidney specialist Dr. Winfred Williams. He noted that unlike the pig heart recipients who were very sick, Slayman is "actually quite robust."

[...] Dr. Parsia Vagefi, chief of surgical transplantation at UT Southwestern Medical Center, called the announcement "a big step forward." But echoing the Boston doctors, he said studies involving more patients at different medical centers would be needed for it to become more commonly available.

The experiment marks the latest development in xenotransplantation, the term for efforts to try to heal human patients with cells, tissues, or organs from animals. For decades, it didn't work — the human immune system immediately destroyed foreign animal tissue. More recent attempts have involved pigs that have been modified so their organs are more humanlike — increasing hope that they might one day help fill a shortage of donated organs.

[...] Pigs have long been used in human medicine, including pig skin grafts and implantation of pig heart valves. But transplanting entire organs is much more complex than using highly processed tissue. The kidney implanted in Slayman was provided by eGenesis of Cambridge, Massachusetts. The pig was genetically edited to remove harmful pig genes and add certain human genes to improve its compatibility with humans.

[...] The Food and Drug Administration gave special permission for Slayman's transplant under "compassionate use" rules.

Original Submission

JoeMerchant writes:

Never-Repeating Patterns of Tiles Can Safeguard Quantum Information

For over half a century, aperiodic tilings have fascinated mathematicians, hobbyists and researchers in many other fields. Now, two physicists have discovered a connection between aperiodic tilings and a seemingly unrelated branch of computer science: the study of how future quantum computers can encode information to shield it from errors. In a paper posted to the preprint server arxiv.org in November, the researchers showed how to transform Penrose tilings into an entirely new type of quantum error-correcting code. They also constructed similar codes based on two other kinds of aperiodic tiling.

At the heart of the correspondence is a simple observation: In both aperiodic tilings and quantum error-correcting codes, learning about a small part of a large system reveals nothing about the system as a whole.

...in 1995, the applied mathematician Peter Shor discovered a clever way to store quantum information. His encoding had two key properties. First, it could tolerate errors that only affected individual qubits. Second, it came with a procedure for correcting errors as they occurred, preventing them from piling up and derailing a computation. Shor's discovery was the first example of a quantum error-correcting code, and its two key properties are the defining features of all such codes.

...An infinite two-dimensional plane covered with Penrose tiles, like a grid of qubits, can be described using the mathematical framework of quantum physics: The quantum states are specific tilings instead of 0s and 1s. An error simply deletes a single patch of the tiling pattern, the way certain errors in qubit arrays wipe out the state of every qubit in a small cluster.

The next step was to identify tiling configurations that wouldn't be affected by localized errors, like the virtual qubit states in ordinary quantum error-correcting codes. The solution, as in an ordinary code, was to use superpositions. A carefully chosen superposition of Penrose tilings is akin to a bathroom tile arrangement proposed by the world's most indecisive interior decorator. Even if a piece of that jumbled blueprint is missing, it won't betray any information about the overall floor plan.

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I wonder... does the Penrose / Einstein principle of non-repetition preclude cylindrical, or even donut surface topology full tilings? If not, that could solve the infinite plane mapping into a physically realizable quantum computer problem. I do wonder, but not enough to give up all my other work and hobbies to pursue deeply theoretical mathematics being heavily studied by thousands of PhD mathematicians less than half my age...

Related:
Hobbyist Finds Math's Elusive 'Einstein' Tile
How Space and Time Could Be a Quantum Error-Correcting Code
How Quantum Computers Will Correct Their Errors

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Scientists argued that mankind had been reshaping the planet long before the 1950s:

A top panel of geologists has decided not to grant Anthropocene, or 'human age', its own distinct place in Earth's geological timeline after disagreeing over when exactly the era might have begun.

After 15 years of deliberation, a team of scientists made the case that humankind has so fundamentally altered the natural world that a new phase of Earth's existence – a new epoch – has already begun.

Soaring greenhouse gases, the spread of microplastics, decimation of other species, and fallout from nuclear tests – all were submitted as evidence that the world entered the Anthropocene in the mid-20th century.

But the proposal was rejected in a contentious vote that has been upheld by the International Union of Geological Sciences, the field's governing body said in a statement published on its website on March 21.

[...] Despite this, the Anthropocene would endure as a widely used term: "It will remain an invaluable descriptor of human impact on the Earth system," the union said.

In 2009 scientists began an enquiry that ultimately concluded that the Holocene epoch – which began 11,700 years ago as the last ice age ended – gave way to the Anthropocene around 1950.

They gathered a trove of evidence to show this, including traces of radioactive material found in the layered sediment of lakes, the global upheaval of plants and animals, and omnipresent "forever chemicals".

canopic jug writes:

Multiple sites are noting that the state of Tennessee has passed a law protecting a performer's right of publicity even in the era of generative AI. The right of publicity is the exclusive right to the individual's likeness whether appearance or sound or other distinguishing characteristics. It is called the Ensuring Likeness Voice and Image Security (ELVIS) Act or HB 2091 for short.

While Tennessee's preexisting law protected name, image, and likeness, it did not specifically address new, personalized generative AI cloning models and services that enable human impersonation and allow users to make unauthorized fake works in the image and voice of others. Artists and musicians at all levels are facing exploitation and the theft of their integrity, identity, and humanity. This threatens the future of Tennessee's creators, the jobs that they support across the state and country, and the bonds between fans and their favorite bands.

The ELVIS Act builds upon existing state rule protecting against the unauthorized use of someone's likeness by adding "voice" to the realm it protects.

– Gov. Lee Signs ELVIS Act Into Law, Tennessee State Government

and

Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee signed the ELVIS Act into law on Thursday in an effort to protect musicians from unauthorized artificial intelligence deep fakes and voice clones.

The bill, short for the Ensuring Likeness Voice and Image Security Act, updates the state's Protection of Personal Rights law (which protects an individual's "name, photograph, or likeness"), to include protections for artists' voices from AI misuse.

– Elvis Act Signed Into Tennessee Law to Protect Musicians From AI Deepfakes, Rolling Stone

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

The next time you're on a walk, consider stopping by that restaurant you've never been to or the local store you keep meaning to check out. They just might be the key to a vibrant local economy, according to a new study.

In a surprise finding based on anonymized cell phone mobility records, infrequent trips to places like restaurants and sports facilities—not the everyday office visit or school drop-off—accounted for the majority of differences in economic outcomes between neighborhoods.

The lesson for urban planners and individuals, researchers said, is to embrace the unusual.

[...] The activities with the strongest predictive power included French and New American restaurants, golf courses, hockey rinks, soccer games, and bagel shops. These kinds of activities accounted for just 2% of trips but explained more than 50% of the variation in economic outcomes between neighborhoods. Wang and his collaborators didn't initially expect these leisure activities to be so tied to local economic fortunes.

[...] "Those irregular and infrequent activities are correlated with explorative behavior, the tendency of some groups to seek out opportunities, connect with different people, and create new businesses," said Esteban Moro, Ph.D., a professor at Northeastern University, who co-led the study. "Looking at those infrequent activities, we are directly looking at current and potential economic opportunities in the future."

[...] What was most surprising was that trips to the office—where we earn our money—were not strongly associated with income or property values. Rather, it's how we spend our free time that drives the economic vibrancy of cities.

Journal Reference:
Wang, S., Zheng, Y., Wang, G. et al. Infrequent activities predict economic outcomes in major American cities. Nat Cities (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s44284-024-00051-7

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Mozilla Drops Onerep After CEO Admits to Running People-Search Networks:

The nonprofit organization that supports the Firefox web browser said today it is winding down its new partnership with Onerep, an identity protection service recently bundled with Firefox that offers to remove users from hundreds of people-search sites. The move comes just days after a report by KrebsOnSecurity forced Onerep's CEO to admit that he has founded dozens of people-search networks over the years.

Mozilla only began bundling Onerep in Firefox last month, when it announced the reputation service would be offered on a subscription basis as part of Mozilla Monitor Plus. Launched in 2018 under the name Firefox Monitor, Mozilla Monitor also checks data from the website Have I Been Pwned? to let users know when their email addresses or password are leaked in data breaches.

On March 14, KrebsOnSecurity published a story showing that Onerep's Belarusian CEO and founder Dimitiri Shelest launched dozens of people-search services since 2010, including a still-active data broker called Nuwber that sells background reports on people. Onerep and Shelest did not respond to requests for comment on that story.

But on March 21, Shelest released a lengthy statement wherein he admitted to maintaining an ownership stake in Nuwber, a consumer data broker he founded in 2015 — around the same time he launched Onerep.

Shelest maintained that Nuwber has "zero cross-over or information-sharing with Onerep," and said any other old domains that may be found and associated with his name are no longer being operated by him.

"I get it," Shelest wrote. "My affiliation with a people search business may look odd from the outside. In truth, if I hadn't taken that initial path with a deep dive into how people search sites work, Onerep wouldn't have the best tech and team in the space. Still, I now appreciate that we did not make this more clear in the past and I'm aiming to do better in the future." The full statement is available here (PDF).

In a statement released today, a spokesperson for Mozilla said it was moving away from Onerep as a service provider in its Monitor Plus product.

"Though customer data was never at risk, the outside financial interests and activities of Onerep's CEO do not align with our values," Mozilla wrote. "We're working now to solidify a transition plan that will provide customers with a seamless experience and will continue to put their interests first."

wirelessduck writes:

[Redis is an open source (BSD licensed), in-memory data structure store used as a database, cache, message broker, and streaming engine]

Redis has decided to move away from BSD license to dual-license Redis Source Available License (RSALv2) and Server Side Public License (SSPLv1), ignoring many historical failures where other companies tried to move away from open source licenses (ElasticSearch vs OpenSearch, MySQL vs MariaDB, Oracle JDK vs OpenJDK, OpenOffice vs LibreOffice, Terraform vs OpenTofu etc.).

The decision has not gone down well within the redis community.

Any Redis users in our community? What are your thoughts on this issue?

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

https://blog.torproject.org/new-release-tor-browser-13013/

"This is an unscheduled emergency release with important security updates to Firefox for Desktop platforms. Android is unaffected."

https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/security/advisories/mfsa2024-16/#CVE-2024-29944

Mozilla Foundation Security Advisory 2024-16
Security Vulnerabilities fixed in Firefox ESR 115.9.1

Announced
March 22, 2024

https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/security/advisories/mfsa2024-16/#CVE-2024-29944

CVE-2024-29944: Privileged JavaScript Execution via Event Handlers

Impact critical

Description

An attacker was able to inject an event handler into a privileged object that would allow arbitrary JavaScript execution in the parent process. Note: This vulnerability affects Desktop Firefox only, it does not affect mobile versions of Firefox.

Tails 6.0 is affected. Please update Tails 6.0 to the current version when they release it.

Original Submission

taylorvich writes:

https://medicalxpress.com/news/2024-03-protein-human-lyme-disease.html

Lyme disease, a bacterial infection transmitted by ticks, affects nearly half a million people in the United States every year. In most cases, antibiotics effectively clear the infection, but for some patients, symptoms linger for months or years.

Researchers at MIT and the University of Helsinki have now discovered that human sweat contains a protein that can protect against Lyme disease. They also found that about one-third of the population carries a genetic variant of this protein that is associated with Lyme disease in genome-wide association studies.

[...] "This protein may provide some protection from Lyme disease, and we think there are real implications here for a preventative and possibly a therapeutic based on this protein," says Michal Caspi Tal, a principal research scientist in MIT's Department of Biological Engineering and one of the senior authors of the new study.

[...] "This finding opens the door to a completely new approach to preventing Lyme disease in the first place, and it will be interesting to see if it could be useful for preventing other types of skin infections too," says Kara Spiller, a professor of biomedical innovation in the School of Biomedical Engineering at Drexel University, who was not involved in the study.

The researchers note that people who have the protective version of SCGB1D2 can still develop Lyme disease, and they should not assume that they won't. One factor that may play a role is whether the person happens to be sweating when they're bitten by a tick carrying Borrelia burgdorferi.

Original Submission