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upstart writes:

Parasitic worms infect 6 after bear meat served at family reunion:

Six family members caught a rare parasitic worm infection after sharing a meal that included black bear meat, which was initially served rare after being stored frozen for more than a month.

Two of the people reported only eating vegetables at the meal, so it's likely that the infected meat contaminated these sides at some point.

The worm infection, called trichinellosis, is rarely reported in the United States, according to a new report of the case published Thursday (May 23) by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Between 2016 and 2022, only 35 probable and confirmed cases of the disease were recorded. "Bear meat was the suspected or confirmed source of infection in the majority of those outbreaks," the report noted.

Trichinellosis occurs when people inadvertently consume larvae of a roundworm in the Trichinella genus. The worm commonly infects bears, wild boars, wildcats, foxes, wolves, seals and walruses. People typically become infected after consuming raw or undercooked meat from infected animals.

Historically, people in the U.S. sometimes contracted the infection from raw or undercooked commercial pork products, but modern regulations and cooking guidelines have lowered this risk.

The newly reported case took place in 2022, when a 29-year-old man in Minnesota was hospitalized with a fever, severe muscle aches and pains and swelling around the eyes. He was also found to have a high number of immune cells called eosinophilia, a sign of infection.

Within a span of about half a month, the man had sought medical attention for his symptoms four times and was hospitalized twice. During the second hospitalization, he reported having consumed bear meat, and the medical team started him on medication for parasitic worms, just in case. They later confirmed he was carrying antibodies against Trichinella worms, and an investigation was launched to check for more cases.

About a week before he got sick, the Minnesota man had met up with nine family members in South Dakota. They'd shared a meal that included kabobs made with black bear (Ursus americanus) meat, which was originally harvested in Canada by one of the attending family members. It had been frozen for 45 days before being thawed, cooked and served with vegetables.

"The hunting outfitter had recommended freezing the meat to kill parasites," the CDC report notes. But some Trichinella species can survive being frozen. (This includes Trichinellanativa, which turned out to be the species likely involved in this case.)

"The meat was initially inadvertently served rare, reportedly because the meat was dark in color, and it was difficult for the family members to visually ascertain the level of doneness," the report noted. Some family members noticed the meat was underdone while eating it, and it was then cooked a bit more before being served again.

Original Submission

owl writes:

https://www.businessinsider.com/google-search-ai-overviews-glue-keep-cheese-pizza-2024-5

Archive link: https://archive.is/pkn6w

Google's new search feature, AI Overviews, seems to be going awry.

The tool, which gives AI-generated summaries of search results, appeared to instruct a user to put glue on pizza when they searched "cheese not sticking to pizza."

A screenshot of the summary it generated, shared on X, shows it responded with "cheese can slide off pizza for a number of reasons," and that the user could try adding "about ⅛ cup of non-toxic glue to the sauce to give it more tackiness."

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Proteins in blood could give cancer warning seven years earlier - Cancer Research UK - Cancer News:

Proteins linked to cancer can start appearing in people's blood more than seven years before they're diagnosed, our funded researchers have found. In the future, it's possible doctors could use these early warning signs to find and treat cancer much earlier than they're able to today.

Across two studies, researchers at Oxford Population Health identified 618 proteins linked to 19 different types of cancer, including 107 proteins in a group of people whose blood was collected at least seven years before they were diagnosed.

The findings suggest that these proteins could be involved at the very earliest stages of cancer. Intercepting them could give us a way to stop the disease developing altogether.

"This research brings us closer to being able to prevent cancer with targeted drugs – once thought impossible but now much more attainable," explained Dr Karl Smith-Byrne, Senior Molecular Epidemiologist at Oxford Population Health, who worked on both papers.

For now, though, we need to do further research. The team want to find out more about the roles these proteins play in cancer development, how we can use tests to spot the most important ones, and which drugs we can use to stop them driving cancer.

[...] In the first study, scientists analysed 44,000 blood samples collected and stored by UK Biobank, including over 4,900 samples from people who were later diagnosed with cancer.

Their analysis of 1,463 proteins in each sample revealed 107 that changed at least seven years before a cancer diagnosis and 182 that changed at least three years before a cancer diagnosis.

In the second study, the scientists looked at genetic data from over 300,000 cancer cases to do a deep dive into which blood proteins were involved in cancer development and could be targeted by new treatments.

This time, they found 40 proteins in the blood that influence someone's risk of getting nine different types of cancer. While altering these proteins may increase or decrease the chances of someone developing cancer, more research is needed to make sure targeting them with drugs doesn't cause unintended side effects.

Original Submission

The BBC is running a podcast on "Archive on 4" called "Turning 50: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance" - https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m001zfqh

I remember greatly enjoying that book in the 1970s, made a real impression and it changed how I thought about certain things. This podcast was a great refresher. It even includes original interviews with Robert Persig (the author) and others close to the creation of the book.

Some of the backstory behind the book was eye opening (but other parts were easy enough to work out just by reading it). For example, Persig flogged his original manuscript to many, many publishers before he got a nibble. Then he gives a lot of credit to a young editor who convinced him to change from (iirc) first to third person (via an unmamed observer) -- resulting in the eventual great success of the book.

Of course, the podcast can't resist revisiting the oft-quoted beer can shim story...or am I confusing that with a recent post on a motorcycle maintenance forum (grin)?

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

The EU is concerned that Bing’s AI features could impact elections, while the UK’s CMA has decided not to investigate Microsoft’s partnership with Mistral AI.

The EU has Microsoft on its regulatory radar, as it has sent the company a legally binding request for information about Bing’s generative AI features.

The European Commission said this request for information is based on suspicions that Bing may have breached the Digital Services Act (DSA) due to risks linked to generative AI. These risks include AI ‘hallucinations’, the viral spread of deepfakes and the “automated manipulation of services that can mislead voters”.

[...] Meanwhile, the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) has opted to not investigate Microsoft’s partnership with the start-up Mistral AI.

Microsoft backed the French unicorn earlier this year as part of a “multi-year partnership” to boost its Azure cloud computing platform with AI. But the CMA had concerns around whether the agreements between the two companies qualified as a merger deal.

As part of that effort, the CMA looked into the minority investment deals agreed by Microsoft and Mistral. The regulator had concerns that the links between the two companies could impact competition within the UK.

But in a brief statement released today (17 May), the CMA decided that Microsoft’s partnership with Mistral AI “does not qualify for investigation” under the merger provisions in the UK.

Original Submission

"arthur t knackerbracket" writes:

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/ceqq8gn014xo

The wreckage of a US Navy submarine that sank the most Japanese warships during World War Two has been found in the South China Sea, some 80 years after it was sunk by enemy forces.

The USS Harder was found 3,000ft (914m) below water off the Philippines' northern island of Luzon.

The Harder was sunk in battle on 29 August 1944, along with its crew of 79 men.

In one of its final war patrols, it sank three Japanese destroyers and heavily damaged two others over four days, according to the US Navy's History and Heritage Command (NHHC).

This forced the Japanese to change their battle plans and delay their carrier force, contributing to their defeat.

"Harder was lost in the course of victory. We must not forget that victory has a price, as does freedom," said Samuel J. Cox, a retired US admiral who heads the NHHC.

The Philippines was one of the main Pacific battlegrounds of World War Two, as the US fought to retake its former colony from the Japanese Imperial Army.

Waters in and around the archipelago have served as the resting place of famed World War Two battleships.

The Harder, which sailed under the motto of "Hit 'em harder', was found by the Lost 52 project, which aims to find the 52 US submarines lost during World War Two. It was found sitting upright on its keel or spine, and relatively intact, the US Navy said.

The submarine and its crew were later awarded the Presidential Unit Citation for its service during the war. The honour recognises extraordinary heroism in action.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

AST SpaceMobile has ramped up demonstrations of voice calls, texts, and video calls via satellite over the last year, using 4G LTE and 5G connections with download bandwidth reaching 14Mbps. Now the company says that a previous memorandum of understanding with AT&T to work on a space-based broadband network for phones has become a “definitive commercial agreement,” just in time for AST’s first five commercial satellites to launch this summer.

The FCC has gotten things rolling on a framework (PDF) for companies interested in building these types of services, with the idea of what Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel called a single network future. “We won’t need to think about what network, where, and what services are available. Connections will just work everywhere, all the time,” said Rosenworcel last year.

According to a statement, the five satellites AST SpaceMobile will launch from Cape Canaveral “will help enable commercial service that was previously demonstrated,” but there’s no mention of changes to deal with the problems of light pollution.

Apple has already added satellite-based messaging links to the iPhone, and Android is preparing for similar features, but a high-speed connection would take things to a different level. With Starlink also testing satellite-to-cellular links, dead zones could be a thing of the past in a few years.

Original Submission

quietus writes:

Efficiency is the key-note of the times.

Fatigue is the enemy of efficiency;

and to detect and compensate for or overcome it,

is the duty of those concerned with the promotion of human welfare.

Ed. note: The JAMA article submission is a reprint of one from 1914 that makes the observation that in most walks of life people generally benefit, from an efficiency standpoint at least, from having a day off. Since then society has generally settled on two days off, or at least 40 required hours to be put in, but there has been momentum building for having three days off. Are we getting close to seeing this more, or do the recent fights about return-to-office show there's too much inertia for change at the MBA level still?

Not only in the field of manual labor, but also in innumerable other walks of life, in the case of the schoolchild, the office-boy, the factory-girl, the banker and the merchant, efficiency is the key-note of the times. Fatigue is the enemy of efficiency; and to detect and compensate for or overcome it, is the duty of those concerned with the promotion of human welfare.

Original Submission

coolgopher writes:

As reported by https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/technology/windows-recall-sounds-like-a-privacy-nightmare-heres-why-im-worried/ar-BB1mNGFI , Microsoft is introducing a new "feature" in Windows 11:

If you haven't read about it yet, Recall is an AI feature coming to Windows 11 Copilot+ PCs. It's designed to let you go back in time on your computer by "taking images of your active screen every few seconds" and analyzing them with AI, according to Microsoft's Recall FAQs. If anyone other than you gets access to that Recall data, it could be disastrous.

...

On the surface, this sounds like a cool feature, but that paranoid privacy purist in the back of my mind is burying his face in a pillow and screaming. Imagine if almost everything you had done for the past three months was recorded for anyone with access to your computer to see. Well, if you use Recall, you won't have to imagine.

That might seem like an overreaction, but let me explain: Recall is taking screenshots every few seconds and storing them on your device. Adding encryption into the mix, that's an enormous amount of bloaty visual data that will show almost everything you've been doing on your computer during that period.

...

But that's just the tip of the iceberg. Microsoft openly admits that Recall will be taking screenshots of your passwords and private data:

"Note that Recall does not perform content moderation. It will not hide information such as passwords or financial account numbers. That data may be in snapshots that are stored on your device, especially when sites do not follow standard internet protocols like cloaking password entry."

...

Arguably, the worst part about this is that it will be on by default once you activate your device. Microsoft states:

        On by default

A user going by the name of "Alex von Kitchen" summarised the issues quite well: https://aus.social/@Dangerous_beans/112477798730314983

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

Ampere Computing today introduced its roadmap for the coming years, including new CPUs and collaborations with third parties. In particular, the company said it would launch its all-new 256-core AmpereOne processor next year, made on TSMC's N3 process technology. Also, Ampere is teaming up with Qualcomm to build AI inference servers with the company's accelerators. Apparently, Huawei is also looking at integrating third-party UCIe-compatible chiplets into its own platforms.

Ampere has begun shipping 192-core AmpereOne processors with an eight-channel DDR5 memory subsystem it introduced a year ago. Later this year, the company plans to introduce 192-core AmpereOne CPUs with a 12-channel DDR5 memory subsystem, requiring a brand-new platform.

Next year, the company will use this platform for its 256-core AmpereOne CPU, which will be made using one of TSMC's N3 fabrication processes. The company does not disclose whether the new processor will also feature a new microarchitecture, though it looks like it will continue to feature 2 MB of L2 cache per core.

"We are extending our product family to include a new 256-core product that delivers 40% more performance than any other CPU in the market," said Renee James, chief executive of Ampere. "It is not just about cores. It is about what you can do with the platform. We have several new features that enable efficient performance, memory, caching, and AI compute." 

The company says that its 256-core CPU will use the same cooling system as its existing offerings, which implies that its thermal design power will remain in the 350-watt ballpark. 

While Ampere can certainly address many general-purpose cloud instances, its capabilities for AI are fairly limited. The company itself says that its 128-core AmpereOne CPU with its two 128-bit vector units per core (and supporting INT8, INT16, FP16, and BFloat16 formats) can offer performance comparable to Nvidia's A10 GPU, albeit at lower power. [...] So, it teamed up with Qualcomm, and the two companies plan to build platforms for LLM inferencing based on Ampere's CPUs and Qualcomm's Cloud AI 100 Ultra accelerators.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

Neuralink, the Elon Musk-funded neuroscience startup, has received approval from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to implant its next patient with its experimental brain chip. This next operation will seek to fix certain issues that occurred following its first implantation operation.

Neuralink previously implanted its experimental brain-computer interface chip in a paraplegic man, Noland Arbaugh, in an operation that was publicly announced this past January. Arbaugh’s identity was revealed during a livestream interview in March, during which the patient demonstrated some of the abilities the chip had given him, including the chance to play computer chess with his mind. It was recently revealed, however, that Arbaugh’s chip had malfunctioned and, for a period of time, experienced data leakage.

The company has now received federal approval to continue implanting patients with its chip, with the promise that it will work out the kinks that caused problems with Arbaugh’s chip, the Wall Street Journal originally reported. Arbaugh’s chip malfunctioned because some of the tiny wires attached to the chip came loose and stopped channeling signals from his brain to the company’s servers. In its next operation, Neuralink plans to embed these tiny wires deeper into the next patient’s brain. A source told the newspaper that the company wants to implant as many as 10 additional people with its chip by the end of this year.

Arbaugh recently opened up about his experience with the company in a series of press interviews. During a conversation with Bloomberg, Arbaugh explained the disappointment he felt when the chip began malfunctioning:

“I started losing control of the cursor. I thought they’d made some changes and that was the reason...But then they told me that the threads were getting pulled out of my brain. At first, they didn’t know how serious it would be or a ton about it...It was really hard to hear. I thought I’d gotten to use it for maybe a month, and then my journey was coming to an end. I thought they would just keep collecting some data but that they were really going to move on to the next person. I cried a little bit.”

However, Arbaugh says that updates to the chip’s software have allowed him to regain many of the abilities that he previously had and that he is still very supportive of Neuralink and what it’s done for him.

Original Submission

DannyB writes:

Massive explosion rocks SpaceX Texas facility, Starship engine in flames

Elon Musk had recently announced that Starship's fourth flight test could be just days away.

[...] SpaceX has yet to provide an update on the explosion, which took place at its Boca Chica Starbase facilities in southern Texas. The footage shows SpaceX's engine test pad going up in flame.

The footage started a little after 4:12 pm local time. Roughly 14 seconds after ignition, the Raptor engine shut off. As the vapor surrounding the test tower dissipated, a fire appeared to start underneath the engine. These flames traveled upwards, causing a second explosion to engulf the entire tower.

In a tweet accompanying a clip from the footage, NASASpaceflight wrote, "The raptor testing stand at McGregor experienced an anomaly a few moments ago. The vapors from the anomaly caused a secondary explosion on the test stand."

A short video is here.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

From Microsoft's Project Natick to China's Hainan Undersea Data Center Demonstration Development Project, we've seen data centers being placed underwater for years, saving precious land space and providing a dust-free, oxygen-free environment, which can protect electronics and help reduce faults.

The biggest benefit of these data centers is the surrounding cold water that helps carry away heat. In the case of the Hainan facility, the cold seawater is forecast to save 122 million kilowatt-hours of electricity and 105,000 tons of freshwater annually.

Now, researchers at the University of Florida and the University of Electro-Communications in Japan have found a vulnerability in underwater data centers. All it takes are sound waves directed at the structures. Just a pool speaker playing a high D note – carried by the dense water – could have a significant impact.

The study detailed how sound at the resonant frequency of the hard disk drives causes vibrations at a given velocity and intensity directly proportional to the sound pressure level, affecting the read/write performance of the disk.

"The main advantages of having a data center underwater are the free cooling and the isolation from variable environments on land," said Md Jahidul Islam, Ph.D., a professor of electrical and computer engineering at UF and co-author of the paper. "But these two advantages can also become liabilities, because the dense water carries acoustic signals faster than in air, and the isolated data center is difficult to monitor or to service if components break."

Tests were carried out in a lab-based water tank and in a lake on UF campus. An off-the-shelf underwater speaker playing music tuned to 5.1-5.3 kHz caused a Supermicro rack server configured with RAID 5 storage to experience "consistent throughput degradation."

owl writes:

https://insights.som.yale.edu/insights/how-shadow-banning-can-silently-shift-opinion-online

"[Social Media] platforms select the content they show you," Zaman says. "They can promote anything, demote anything. That means they can shift opinions any way they want."

As far as most social media users know, the most powerful tool through which platforms steer public opinion is through the outright removal of objectionable content or users. But Zaman argues that there's a more potent means through which social media platforms can control collective opinions over time, called "shadow banning." Part of this tool's power derives from the fact that it's currently near-impossible to uncover, even by policymakers or software engineering experts.

[...] For the study, the researchers built a simulation of a real social network, and then succeeded in using shadow banning to shift simulated users' opinions as well as increasing and decreasing polarization. Even when the goal was to use shadow banning to move collective sentiment to the right or left, Zaman says, the content moderation policy appeared neutral from an outside perspective. That's because it's possible, he discovered, to shift opinions by turning down the volume on accounts on both sides of a debate at the same time.

"It's like a frog sitting in a pot of water; the frog's relaxing, and suddenly, he's cooked," Zaman said. "A network could, in fact, be driving people towards one point of view, but if someone tries to call them out on it—like a regulatory body—they're going to see the network censoring both sides equally," Zaman says. "It looks like there's nothing untoward happening, so they leave the network alone—and suddenly everybody thinks the earth's flat. That's what we find you could do with our technique, which is a little scary."

[...] Zaman plans to share his research with policymakers. "I want to show them, 'Here's what this network can do; this is the danger,'" he says. "If you're not going to ban them but want to regulate them, this is how to do it—by quantifying their content algorithm. This is how we should be regulating all of the networks—X, Meta, Instagram, YouTube, all of them.'"

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

Reuters has a story about Google attempting to pay to avoid a jury trial:

May 20 (Reuters) - Alphabet's (GOOGL.O) Google has preemptively paid damages to the U.S. government, an unusual move aimed at avoiding a jury trial in the Justice Department's antitrust lawsuit over its digital advertising business.

Google disclosed the payment, but not the amount, in a court filing last week that said the case should be heard and decided by a judge directly. Without a monetary damages claim, Google argued, the government has no right to a jury trial.

The Justice Department, which has not said if it will accept the payment, declined to comment on the filing. Google asserted that its check, which it said covered its alleged overcharges for online ads, allows it to sidestep a jury trial whether or not the government takes it.

The Justice Department filed the case last year with Virginia and other states, alleging Google was stifling competition for advertising technology. The government has said Google should be forced to sell its ad manager suite.

Stanford Law School's Mark Lemley told Reuters he was skeptical Google's gambit would prevail. He said a jury could ultimately decide higher damages than whatever Google put forward.

"Antitrust cases regularly go to juries. I think it is a sign that Google is worried about what a jury will do," Lemley said.

Another legal scholar, Herbert Hovenkamp of the University of Pennsylvania's law school, called Google's move "smart" in a post on X. "Juries are bad at deciding technical cases, and further they do not have the authority to order a breakup," he wrote.

The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in a 2016 case that an offer for "complete relief" did not wipe out a class-action claim. But Google argued its payment is different, because it submitted an actual check and not merely an offer.

Original Submission