Join our Folding@Home team:
Main F@H site
Our team page
Support us: Subscribe Here
and buy SoylentNews Swag
We always have a place for talented people, visit the Get Involved section on the wiki to see how you can make SoylentNews better.
https://techxplore.com/news/2024-05-australian-ultrasonic-cold-brew-coffee.html
A new method to deliver a quality cold brew coffee in less than three minutes solidifies Australia's position as the innovators of modern coffee, according to researchers from The University of Queensland.
Engineers from University New South Wales developed an ultrasonic machine to speed up the cold brew of ground coffee beans—a process that normally takes 12 to 24 hours. The research was published in Ultrasonics Sonochemistry.
Postdoctoral researcher Dr. Jaqueline Moura Nadolny said UQ scientists then tested this brew, finding the taste would satisfy fans of cold brew who rave about its smoother, less acidic and less bitter qualities.
"Once again, Australia has new technology at our fingertips that moves us from traditional methods of coffee making to modern methods, giving consumers a new premium experience," Dr. Nadolny said.
"Our trained sensory panel tastings proved that we can achieve a taste profile very similar to either a traditional cold brew or an espresso in the time it takes to brew a hot espresso."
The UNSW team led by Dr. Francisco Trujillo superimposed their own patented sound transmission system on an existing coffee machine model. The system connects a bolt-clamped transducer with the brewing basket via a metallic horn—transforming the coffee basket into a powerful ultrasonic reactor.
Dr. Trujillo said the ultrasound process speeds up the extraction of the oils, flavors and aroma of the ground coffee.
"We're able to demonstrate that this can be adapted to an existing espresso machine," he said. "We are very excited about developing this technology, which can be used by companies that already manufacture coffee machines, so consumers will be able to enjoy a 3-minute ultrasonic cold brew at home. This also opens the door for coffee shops and restaurants to produce on-demand brews comparable to 24-hour cold brews, supplying the rising demand while eliminating the need for large semi-industrial brewing units and extensive refrigeration space."
More information: Shih-Hao Chiu et al, Coffee brewing sonoreactor for reducing the time of cold brew from several hours to minutes while maintaining sensory attributes, Ultrasonics Sonochemistry (2024). DOI: 10.1016/j.ultsonch.2024.106885
https://gizmodo.com/new-fusion-record-achieved-tungsten-encased-reactor-1851457745
A tokamak in France set a new record in fusion plasma by encasing its reaction in tungsten, a heat-resistant metal that allows physicists to sustain hot plasmas for longer, and at higher energies and densities than carbon tokamaks.
[...] "The recent achievement was made in WEST (tungsten (W) Environment in Steady-state Tokamak), a tokamak operated by the French Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission (CEA). WEST was injected with 1.15 gigajoules of power and sustained a plasma of about 50 million degrees Celsius for six minutes. It achieved this record after scientists encased the tokamak's interior in tungsten, a metal with an extraordinarily high melting point. Researchers from Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory used an X-ray detector inside the tokamak to measure aspects of the plasma and the conditions that made it possible."
[...] Earlier this year, the Korea Institute of Fusion Energy installed a tungsten diverter in its KSTAR tokamak, replacing the device's carbon diverter. Tungsten has a higher melting point than carbon, and according to Korea's National Research Council of Science and Technology, the new diverter improves the reactor's heat flux limit two-fold. KSTAR's new diverter enabled the institute's team to sustain high-ion temperatures exceeding 100 million degrees Celsius for longer.
The threat is potentially grave because it could be used in supply-chain attacks:
A maximum severity vulnerability that allows hackers to hijack GitLab accounts with no user interaction required is now under active exploitation, federal government officials warned as data showed that thousands of users had yet to install a patch released in January.
A change GitLab implemented in May 2023 made it possible for users to initiate password changes through links sent to secondary email addresses. The move was designed to permit resets when users didn't have access to the email address used to establish the account. In January, GitLab disclosed that the feature allowed attackers to send reset emails to accounts they controlled and from there click on the embedded link and take over the account.
While exploits require no user interaction, hijackings work only against accounts that aren't configured to use multifactor authentication. Even with MFA, accounts remained vulnerable to password resets, but the attackers ultimately are unable to access the account, allowing the rightful owner to change the reset password. The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2023-7028, carries a severity rating of 10 out of 10.
On Wednesday, the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency said it is aware of "evidence of active exploitation" and added the vulnerability to its list of known exploited vulnerabilities. CISA provided no details about the in-the-wild attacks. A GitLab representative declined to provide specifics about the active exploitation of the vulnerability.
The vulnerability, classified as an improper access control flaw, could pose a grave threat. GitLab software typically has access to multiple development environments belonging to users. With the ability to access them and surreptitiously introduce changes, attackers could sabotage projects or plant backdoors that could infect anyone using software built in the compromised environment. An example of a similar supply chain attack is the one that hit SolarWinds in 2020 and pushed malware to more than 18,000 of its customers, 100 of whom received follow-on hacks. Other recent examples of supply chain attacks are here, here, and here.
[...] GitLab users should also remember that patching does nothing to secure systems that have already been breached through exploits. GitLab has published incident response guidance here.
SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket launches 2 satellites on record-tying 20th flight (video):
SpaceX just tied its rocket-reuse record for the second time in less than a week.
A Falcon 9 rocket launched two Earth-observation satellites for the company Maxar today (May 2) from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California at 2:36 p.m. EDT (1836 GMT; 11:36 a.m. local California time).
It was the 20th mission for this rocket's first stage, tying a record that one Falcon 9 set last month and another one equaled on Saturday night (April 27).
The Falcon 9's first stage came back to Earth safely yet again today, making a vertical touchdown back at Vandenberg about 8.5 minutes after liftoff.
The rocket's upper stage, meanwhile, continued carrying two of Maxar's WorldView Legion satellites to orbit. The first spacecraft will be deployed 13 minutes after launch, and the second will follow suit 3.5 minutes after that.
The WorldView Legion satellites are built by Maxar Space Systems and will be operated by Maxar Intelligence, both of which are divisions of Maxar Technologies. The spacecraft that went up today are the first two of a planned six-satellite network.
"When all six WorldView Legion satellites are launched, it will triple Maxar Intelligence's capacity to collect 30-centimeter-class [12 inches] and multispectral imagery," Maxar representatives wrote in a description of the network.
"The full Maxar constellation of 10 electro-optical satellites will image the most rapidly changing areas on Earth as frequently as every 20 to 30 minutes, from sunup to sundown," they added.
http://www.righto.com/2024/04/intel-8088-bus-state-machine.html
The 8088 processor communicates over the bus with memory and I/O devices through a highly-structured sequence of steps called "T-states." A typical 8088 bus cycle consists of four T-states, with one T-state per clock cycle. Although a four-step bus cycle may sound straightforward, its implementation uses a complicated state machine making it one of the most difficult parts of the 8088 to explain. First, the 8088 has many special cases that complicate the bus cycle. Moreover, the bus cycle is really six steps, with two undocumented "extra" steps to make bus operations more efficient. Finally, the complexity of the bus cycle is largely arbitrary, a consequence of Intel's attempts to make the 8088's bus backward-compatible with the earlier 8080 and 8085 processors. However, investigating the bus cycle circuitry in detail provides insight into the timing of the processor's instructions. In addition, this circuitry illustrates the tradeoffs and implementation decisions that are necessary in a production processor. In this blog post, I look in detail at the circuitry that implements this state machine.
Axon Wants Its Body Cameras To Start Writing Officers' Reports For Them:
Taser long ago locked down the market for "less than lethal" (but still frequently lethal) weapons. It has also written itself into the annals of pseudoscience with its invocation of not-an-actual-medical condition "excited delirium" as it tried to explain away the many deaths caused by its "less than lethal" Taser.
These days Taser does business as Axon. In addition to separating itself from its troubled (and somewhat mythical) past, Axon's focus has shifted to body cameras and data storage. The cameras are the printer and the data storage is the ink. The real money is in data management, and that appears to be where Axon is headed next. And, of course, like pretty much everyone at this point, the company believes AI can take a lot of the work out of police work. Here's Thomas Brewster and Richard Nieva with the details for Forbes.
On Tuesday, Axon, the $22 billion police contractor best known for manufacturing the Taser electric weapon, launched a new tool called Draft One that it says can transcribe audio from body cameras and automatically turn it into a police report. Cops can then review the document to ensure accuracy, Axon CEO Rick Smith told Forbes. Axon claims one early tester of the tool, Fort Collins Colorado Police Department, has seen an 82% decrease in time spent writing reports. "If an officer spends half their day reporting, and we can cut that in half, we have an opportunity to potentially free up 25% of an officer's time to be back out policing," Smith said.
If you don't spend too much time thinking about it, it sounds like a good idea. Doing paperwork consumes a large amounts of officers' time and a tool that automates at least part of the process would, theoretically, allow officers to spend more time doing stuff that actually matters, like trying to make a dent in violent crime — the sort of thing cops on TV are always doing but is a comparative rarity in real life.
[...] Then there's the AI itself. Everything at use at this point is still very much in the experimental stage. Auto-generated reports might turn into completely unusable evidence, thanks to the wholly expected failings of the underlying software.
[...] On top of that, there's the garbage-in, garbage-out problem. AI trained on narratives provided by officers may take it upon themselves to "correct" narratives that seem to indicate an officer may have done something wrong. It's also going to lend itself to biased policing by tech-washing BS stops by racist cops, portraying these as essential contributions to public safety.
Of course, plenty of officers do these sorts of things already, so there's a possibility it won't make anything worse. But if the process Axon is pitching makes things faster, there's no reason to believe what's already wrong with American policing won't get worse in future. And, as the tech improves (so to speak), the exacerbation of existing problems and the problems introduced by the addition of AI will steadily accelerate.
That's not to say there's no utility in processes that reduce the amount of time spent on paperwork. But it seems splitting off a clerical division might be a better solution — a part of the police force that handles the paperwork and vets camera footage, but is performed by people who are not the same ones who captured the recordings and participated in the traffic stop, investigation, or dispatch call response.
And I will say this for Axon: at least its CEO recognizes the problems this could introduce and suggests agencies limit automated report creation to things like misdemeanors and never in cases where deadly force is deployed. But, like any product, it will be the end users who decide how it's used. And so far, the expected end users are more than willing to streamline things they view as inessential, but are far less interested in curtailing abuse by those using these systems. Waiting to see how things play out just isn't an acceptable option — not when there are actual lives and liberties on the line.
https://phys.org/news/2024-05-lego-bumblebees-reveal-insect-collaboration.html
A new study reveals that cooperation by bumblebees isn't simply a result of accumulated individual efforts. Rather, these miniature-brained creatures are not just hard-working pollinators, but also show signs of being master collaborators.
The study, conducted at the University of Oulu in Finland and published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B, demonstrates the role of teamwork for bumblebees in novel cooperative challenges.
It has previously been thought that understanding the role of a partner in a cooperative task is a complex phenomenon that is mainly characteristic of big-brained mammals such as humans and chimpanzees. But new research shows that even insects can learn and adapt to cooperative tasks. Understanding how collaboration has become so important for humans requires comparisons with other species.
"The study's findings challenge conventional notions of insects, and the ability to work together towards a common goal is present even in the miniature brain of bumblebees," says lead researcher, Associate Professor, Dr. Olli Loukola.
In the study, pairs of bumblebees were trained in two different cooperative tasks. Bees learned to simultaneously push a Lego block in the middle of an arena, or to simultaneously push a door at the end of a transparent double tunnel to gain access to rewarding nectar.
Bumblebees' behaviors suggest their efforts towards solving the cooperative tasks were influenced by the presence, absence, and movement direction of their partner. When their partner was delayed, bees tended to take longer than controls to initiate pushing and were more likely to push only when their partner pushed with them.
In short, bees trained on cooperative tasks seemed to wait for their partner. The bumblebees in the control group, which had been trained alone, did not show similar behavior.
In the study, pairs of bumblebees were trained in two different cooperative tasks. Bees learned to simultaneously push a Lego block in the middle of an arena, or to simultaneously push a door at the end of a transparent double tunnel to gain access to rewarding nectar.
Bumblebees' behaviors suggest their efforts towards solving the cooperative tasks were influenced by the presence, absence, and movement direction of their partner. When their partner was delayed, bees tended to take longer than controls to initiate pushing and were more likely to push only when their partner pushed with them.
In short, bees trained on cooperative tasks seemed to wait for their partner. The bumblebees in the control group, which had been trained alone, did not show similar behavior.
More information: Olli J. Loukola et al, Evidence for socially influenced and potentially actively coordinated cooperation by bumblebees, Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences (2024). DOI: 10.1098/rspb.2024.0055
China Launches Mission To Far Side Of The Moon As US Claims A New Space Race Has Begun:
On May 3, China launched Chang’e 6, its latest mission to the Moon. Similar to its predecessor, it is a sample retrieval mission, expected to collect up to 2 kilograms (4.4 pounds) of lunar material from the far side of the Moon, the portion that is always facing away from Earth. The whole mission is expected to last 53 days.
China has already broken records on the far side by becoming the first and only nation to soft-land there with Chang’e 4 in 2019. That mission landed in the Von Kármán crater, which is 180 kilometers (110 miles) across and sits within the South Pole-Aitken Basin. Chang’e 6 is targeting another area of the basin: the Apollo crater, which is three times as wide as the Von Kármán.
The interest in this area lies in the distant past of the Moon. Underneath this region, there is a massive structure, potentially part of the colossal object that slammed into the Moon and created the basin 4 billion years ago. The jackpot would be to find portions of the lunar mantle and bring them back to Earth.
In an attempt to achieve this, Chang’e 6 is equipped with a scoop to collect soil and rocks from the surface, as well as a drill to collect subsurface samples. An ascent vehicle will launch the samples into orbit, where it will rendezvous with an orbiter and come back to Earth.
That is not the only focus of the mission, however. The lander and orbiter include scientific payloads from other countries too, which aim to understand dust and outgassing on the Moon, studying lunar magnetism, among other goals.
[...] In the US, China’s plans are being seen with increased anxiety. On April 17, the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Commerce, Justice, Science, and Related Agencies held a hearing about the NASA Budget for 2025. Both the chair, representative Harold Rogers (R-KY), and NASA Administrator Bill Nelson made reference to a new space race.
“The National Aeronautics and Space Administration was founded in 1958 in response to the so-called Space Race with the Soviet Union to land the first man on the Moon. Today we find ourselves in yet another space race, this time with China,” Rogers stated during the hearing.
“We are in a race,” Nelson replied to a question from Rogers on Chinese plans. “The latest date they've said they're going to land [on the moon] is 2030 but that keeps moving up.”
[...] Nelson also said that he believes that the Chinese civilian space program is actually a military program. The comments have been seen as venting a frustration about the comparatively limited budget NASA operates. Others have considered Nelson’s comments as coming across as hypocritical given NASA’s many links to the military-industrial complex and the Department of Defense.
Audioguy was one of the original team who created the existing SoylentNews site. He has stayed with us since that time and has served the community as a sys-admin for over 10 years. It is no exaggeration to say that over the last year or two he has played an almost single-handed role in keeping this site working.
Audioguy has suffered a series of significant personal and medical events over the last 6 months or so. He is now about to commence ophthalmic surgery tomorrow (Wednesday) and is facing other potentially life changing medical issues in the near future. He has, quite understandably and reluctantly, been forced to stand down from his role which was effective from late last week. Unfortunately that has meant that we have lost the ability to correct the current certificates problem. Access to the Linode servers is still controlled by the existing Board and we have experienced additional problems accessing one of our servers by the usual methods. This appears to be common to many staff and has further exacerbated the current problem.
I have written an email to NCommander requesting his assistance in updating the certificates so that the site becomes fully operational again. Your patience is appreciated. What might appear to many in the community to be a relatively minor issue is, behind the scenes, a major blow to the existing team. We have other sys-admins who are ready to pick up the challenge but they do not yet have the necessary access, nor are they yet experienced in managing the beast that that is Slashd.
Returning to audioguy, I am sure that the entire community would wish to join me in thanking him for a decade of support to the site, and to wish him well for the upcoming surgery. He remains one of this community and evidence of his past contributions can be found in numerous bits of code and associated documentation. He has also, for example, been the manager of the technical wiki which has been vital to the support team for all of that period. We are indebted to him.
Good luck for the future, audioguy. Take it easy. Best wishes to you and your family.
Tech CEO Gets 6 Years for Selling Fake Cisco Gear on Amazon, eBay:
A Miami-based CEO will serve over six years in prison for selling counterfeit Cisco equipment to numerous buyers on Amazon and eBay, with some of the shoddy hardware ending up in sensitive US government systems.
On Wednesday, 40-year-old Onur Aksoy was sentenced to six years and six months in prison for raking in at least $100 million from the counterfeit sales.
Aksoy committed the fraud from at least 2013 to 2022 — the year he was arrested— by buying the fake Cisco equipment from suppliers in China. The counterfeits were then resold as legitimate Cisco products for an estimated retail value of over $1 billion.
"Aksoy sold hundreds of millions of dollars' worth of counterfeit computer networking equipment that ended up in US hospitals, schools, and highly sensitive military and other governmental systems, including platforms supporting sophisticated US fighter jets and military aircraft," Principal Deputy Assistant Attorney General Nicole Argentieri said in a statement.
The scheme persisted for nearly a decade, with Aksoy selling the counterfeit gear through 19 companies, along with 15 Amazon storefronts and at least 10 eBay storefronts, according to the Justice Department. But the fake hardware performed poorly once installed.
"At times, the counterfeit products would simply fail or otherwise malfunction, causing substantial damage to their users’ networks and operations and, in some cases, costing their users tens of thousands of dollars,” investigators wrote in a court document.
To create the counterfeits, the Chinese suppliers often took older, lower-model products, some of which were previously discarded, and modified them to appear new, while loading pirated Cisco software on the hardware.
The counterfeits looked real enough to fool government buyers. Federal investigators say that some of the fake equipment was used in classified information systems. "The devices were also identified in combat and non-combat operations of the US Navy, US Air Force, and US Army, such as platforms supporting the F-15, F-18, and F-22 fighter jets, AH-64 Apache attack helicopter, P-8 maritime patrol aircraft, and B-52 Stratofortress bomber aircraft," the DOJ adds.
US authorities and Cisco began cracking down on Askoy as early as 2014 by seizing the counterfeit shipments and ordering him to stop. But he was still able to avoid scrutiny by conspiring with his Chinese suppliers to traffic the goods into the US.
Following his arrest in 2022, Askoy pleaded guilty to charges related to the fraud scheme a year later. As part of his plea agreement, Aksoy will pay Cisco and his other victims $100 million in restitution for committing the fraud.
Papers, Please!, a privacy and freedom spin off from the Identity Project, explores the combining of radio and visual tracking of motor vehicles. Most new motor vehicles, whether cars, suburban utility vehicles, or light trucks are heavily loaded with wireless devices. These include Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and Bluetooth Low-Energy and each blast unique identifiers out to the nearby environs. Furthermore, the driver and any passengers are very likely carrying 'smart' phones and other devices, such as headphones or earbuds, which do the same. These identifiers can easily be linked and, eventually, tagged to an individual, which then makes it very easy to follow movement of the devices' bearer:
According to responses to requests for information about bids for government contracts from Jenoptik, the supplier of this system of detectors and databases:
Jenoptik’s Trafficatch wireless device detection is a value add addition to its Vector fixed ALPR solution. Trafficatch records wireless device Wifi, Bluetooth, and Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) signal identifiers that come within range of the device to record gathered information coupled with plate recognition in the area. This can provide additional information to investigators trying to locate persons of interest related to recorded
crimes in the area.This should be illegal without a warrant, but current case law leaves enough uncertainty that police may feel that they can get away with this sort of tracking without a warrant.
According to the report by NOTUS, this vehicle and device tracking data is being shared through NLETS (the National Law Enforcement Telecommunications Network). The unusual status of NLETS makes it almost impossible to tell how this data is being used. It could be used to track people and vehicles across state lines or other jurisdictional boundaries, including to identify and track people traveling to obtain abortions.
This is on top of the 25 GB of surveillance data generated per hour by new vehicles which are basically "smartphones on wheels" in the worst sense. Normally, this level of surveillance and tracking would require a warrant. However, the population acts willing and even eager to waive their rights when computers become involved. In this case these are computers, actually whole computer networks, which you put your body into and travel with.
When the Trump administration killed net neutrality, telecom industry giants convinced them to push their luck and declared that not only would federal regulators no longer try to meaningfully oversee telecom giants like Comcast and AT&T, but that states couldn’t either. They got greedy.
The courts didn’t like that much, repeatedly ruling that the FCC can’t abdicate its authority over broadband consumer protection, then turn around tell states what they can or can’t do.
The courts took that stance again last week, with a new ruling by the US Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit restoring a New York State law (the Affordable Broadband Act) requiring that ISPs provide low-income state residents $15 broadband at speeds of 25 Mbps. The law was blocked in June of 2021 by a US District Judge who claimed that the state law was pre-empted by the federal net neutrality repeal.
Giant ISPs, and the Trump administration officials who love them, desperately tried to insist that states were magically barred from regulating broadband because the Trump administration said so. But the appeals court ruled, once again, those efforts aren’t supported by logic or the law:
“the ABA is not conflict-preempted by the Federal Communications Commission’s 2018 order classifying broadband as an information service. That order stripped the agency of its authority to regulate the rates charged for broadband Internet, and a federal agency cannot exclude states from regulating in an area where the agency itself lacks regulatory authority. Accordingly, we REVERSE the judgment of the district court and VACATE the permanent injunction.”
This ruling is once again good news for future fights over net neutrality and broadband consumer protection, Stanford Law Professor and net neutrality expert Barbara van Schewick notes in a statement:
“Today’s decision means that if a future FCC again decided to abdicate its oversight over broadband like it did in 2017, the states have strong legal precedent, across circuits, to institute their own protections or re-activate dormant ones.”
Telecom lobbyists have spent years lobbying to ensure federal broadband oversight is as captured and feckless as possible. And, with the occasional exception, they’ve largely succeeded. Big telecom had really hoped they could extend that winning streak even further and bar states from standing up to them as well, but so far that really hasn’t gone as planned.
One of the things that absolutely terrifies telecom monopoly lobbyists is the idea of rate regulation, or that government would ever stop them from ripping off captive customers stuck in uncompetitive markets. It’s never been a serious threat on the federal level due to regulatory capture and lobbying, even though it’s thrown around a lot by monopoly apologists as a terrifying bogeyman akin to leprosy.
Researchers suggest cylinder to prevent astronauts losing muscle mass in low gravity environment:
As humans prepare to return to the moon after an absence of more than half a century, researchers have hit on a radical approach to keeping astronauts fit as they potter around the ball of rock.
To prevent lunar explorers from becoming weak and feeble in the low gravity environment, scientists suggest astronauts go for a run. But, this being space, it's not just any kind of run – researchers have advised astronauts run several times a day around a "lunar Wall of Death".
Using a rented Wall of Death – a giant wooden cylinder used by motorcycle stunt performers in their gravity-defying fairground act – a 36m-high telescopic crane, and some bungee cords, researchers showed it was possible for a human to run fast enough in lunar gravity not only to remain on the wall, but to generate sufficient lateral force to combat bone and muscle wasting.
"I'm amazed that nobody had the idea before," said Alberto Minetti, professor of physiology at the University of Milan. "This could be a convenient way to train on the moon." And easier than building a spinning moon base that generates the force, like the giant wheel of Space Station One in 2001: A Space Odyssey.
[...] The hostile lunar environment presents several challenges, from ensuring astronauts have air, food and water to being well protected against space radiation. But without normal gravity to work against, astronauts lose bone and muscle mass, along with the fine nervous system control needed for coordinated movements, making measures to combat "deconditioning" a priority.
[...] To test the idea, two researchers ran around a 10m-wide Wall of Death while attached to a bungee cord suspended from the crane. The set-up emulated lunar gravity by taking five-sixths off their body weight. Combined with treadmill data, the scientists conclude that running for a couple of minutes at the start and end of each day, should generate enough lateral force, or "artificial gravity" to keep bones and muscles strong and maintain good nervous system control.
Rather than transporting an actual Wall of Death to the moon, astronauts could be housed in circular habitats, allowing them to run around the walls of their off-world homes, the team write in Royal Society Open Science.
Journal Reference:
Minetti Alberto E., Luciano Francesco, Natalucci Valentina and Pavei Gaspare 2024 Horizontal running inside circular walls of Moon settlements: a comprehensive countermeasure for low-gravity deconditioning? R. Soc. Open Sci. 11231906 http://doi.org/10.1098/rsos.231906
https://phys.org/news/2024-04-baby-bird-cars.html
[...] Bird embryos develop outside the mother's body and can be artificially incubated, so it is possible to manipulate an embryo's experience without manipulating the mother.
The research team, led by Dr. Alizée Meillère and Dr. Mylene Mariette from the School of Life and Environmental Sciences at Deakin University (Australia) and Doñana Biological Station (Spain), took advantage of this by playing sounds to the eggs of an Australian native bird, the zebra finch.
They discovered that—under otherwise optimal incubation conditions—eggs are less likely to hatch when exposed to traffic noise for five days before hatching, than when exposed to the species native song.
"Both traffic noise and song were played at the same moderate amplitude—65 decibels, which is similar to a conversation level—but something about the acoustic characteristics of the noise caused embryonic death," said Dr. Mariette.
[...] "Nestlings exposed to noise rather than song were slower to grow and showed more severe signs of cellular damage," said Dr. Mariette. "These negative effects were the result of both previous noise exposure before hatching and current exposure during the nestling stage."
More information: Alizée Meillère et al, Pre- and postnatal noise directly impairs avian development, with fitness consequences, Science (2024). DOI: 10.1126/science.ade5868
Mylene M. Mariette, Developmental programming by prenatal sounds: insights into possible mechanisms, Journal of Experimental Biology (2024). DOI: 10.1242/jeb.246696
Hans Slabbekoorn, A sound beginning of life starts before birth, Science (2024). DOI: 10.1126/science.adp1664 , www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adp1664
Microsoft ties executive pay to security following multiple failures and breaches:
It's been a bad couple of years for Microsoft's security and privacy efforts. Misconfigured endpoints, rogue security certificates, and weak passwords have all caused or risked the exposure of sensitive data, and Microsoft has been criticized by security researchers, US lawmakers, and regulatory agencies for how it has responded to and disclosed these threats.
[...] All of this culminated in a report (PDF) from the US Cyber Safety Review Board, which castigated Microsoft for its "inadequate" security culture, its "inaccurate public statements," and its response to "preventable" security breaches.
To attempt to turn things around, Microsoft announced something it called the "Secure Future Initiative" in November 2023. As part of that initiative, Microsoft today announced a series of plans and changes to its security practices, including a few changes that have already been made.
[...] As part of these changes, Microsoft will also make its Senior Leadership Team's pay partially dependent on whether the company is "meeting our security plans and milestones," though Bell didn't specify how much executive pay would be dependent on meeting those security goals.
See also: