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Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

Renowned for a thriving and intricately studied population of around 900 red deer, the Isle of Rùm [often written as Rum], part of Scotland's Inner Hebrides, is often considered an outdoor laboratory for scientific research. But the earthworms on Rum are equally remarkable. These invertebrates act as "ecosystem engineers", actively shaping the landscape, often after humans have left their mark on this remote island.

My investigations over 30 years have uncovered how people have influenced the current fragmented and uneven distribution, diversity and abundance of earthworms on this national nature reserve.

While taking my geography students on field trips to Rum in the mid-1990s, I realized there was scope for research on earthworm ecology. One of my Ph.D. students was studying soil development here and she quickly alerted me to differences in earthworm numbers found below different species of trees planted in the late 1950s. More worms lived below birch and oak trees than beneath pine trees or on unplanted moorland. This discovery spurred me into action.

Rum's human history goes back 9,000 years. Early humans came here to collect bloodstone, a flint-like mineral used to make arrowheads and other hunting or cutting tools. The island was deforested by early humans and the wet climate (with more than 2m of rain per year) led to the leaching of soil nutrients. The resulting poor-quality acidic soil supported moorland plants and low numbers of just three earthworm species.

If nothing else had happened to Rum soils, then this would be a very unexciting place to undertake research on earthworms.

But subsequent human inhabitants improved soils sufficiently to eke out a living as tenant farmers at a few locations around the coast. They used kelp seaweeds to fertilise the cultivated land and enrich soil quality. Then, some 200 years ago, these hardworking people were forcibly removed from their settlements on Rum (and much of Scotland) in the "Highland clearances".

At sites on Rum such as Harris, Dibidil and Kilmory, distinct ridges and furrows nicknamed "lazybeds" remain on the landscape. These indicate where the land was painstakingly dug by hand to grow potatoes and other crops. The furrows allowed drainage and the crops were grown on raised ridges. Two centuries since the last cultivation, these soils are still more fertile than surrounding areas, and they continue to support more earthworms.

At Papadil, another abandoned settlement, seldom visited these days, a brown forest soil has developed below stands of trees planted a century ago. Within these trees, colleagues and I found large earthworm burrows about 1cm in diameter. On an island with no badgers and no moles, a good supply of leaf litter for food and little disturbance from humans, we found the UK's largest Lumbricus terrestris ever reported in the wild.

At over 13g, some three times the normal weight for this species, these earthworms may have been up to ten years old. This really was an exciting find. We returned the worms to the soil—hopefully they have proliferated.

hubie writes:

Digital-only consoles are a trap, not a blessing:

The Xbox Games Showcase may have been the best of the hours of adverts beamed into our eyeballs this weekend, but it wasn't perfect. I mean, in an ideal world we wouldn't get so mindlessly excited about spending money anyway, we'd just play the games we love and then ruminate deeply on them in the vast, cavernous libraries where we write our criticism. But it is human to want, to covet, and to plant our flag in the ground for a team that does not care about us, only how much currency we have in our wallets.

Alongside the exciting game reveals – Doom: The Dark Ages, Fable, Dragon Age: The Veilguard, South of Midnight, too many to count – Xbox revealed a brand new console: the Xbox Series X digital edition. It follows in the footsteps of PlayStation's similarly slimline console, and is terrible news for gamers the world over.

Xbox wants to get you into its ecosystem by any means possible. We've known for years that consoles are often sold at a loss because that money is made up by the vast profit margins of selling the games themselves. So if Xbox offers a low-cost console to get you hooked, more people will be able to buy those profitable games.

It seems that the digital-only Series X is an acknowledgement of the issues with the Series S. The lack of power means many developers have skipped over Xbox entirely this generation, due to the fact that Microsoft reportedly wants any game available on Xbox to be able to run on the lesser hardware as well as the big, black box.

However, I'm here to tell you that this low-price console is not the blessing you may think it is. Xbox isn't the saviour of the poor, swooping in with angel wings to offer a games console to those who previously couldn't afford it. It's a corporation that wants your money, and a digital-only console gives it the monopoly on your wallet.

For those that don't follow webtoon "Least I Could Do", the current story arc might be amusing...and a basis for discussion?
        Starts here, https://leasticoulddo.com/comic/20240610

Julie: Did you take the trash out?
Rayne: AI can do it. (face in pillow, followed by Rayne taking out the trash)
Rayne: Fu**ing AI.

      https://leasticoulddo.com/comic/20240611
Rayne: Everyone is going about AI all wrong.
        I don't want robots creating my movies and books.
        I want it to take out the garbage. Unload the dishwasher...

       

[Ed. comment: Why do you suppose all of the hype is in "thinking" AI and it never blew up for more utilitarian activities? Is a Roomba about as good as it is going to get for helping us with our mundane tasks? Or is it just that the people with the most money in the game are also in the best positions to drive the narrative? --hubie]

Original Submission

upstart writes:

X-Force discovers new vulnerabilities in smart treadmill:

Smart gym equipment is seeing rapid growth in the fitness industry, enabling users to follow customized workouts, stream entertainment on the built-in display, and conveniently track their progress. With the multitude of features available on these internet-connected machines, a group of researchers at IBM X-Force Red considered whether user data was secure and, more importantly, whether there was any risk to the physical safety of users.

One of the most prominent brands in the fitness equipment industry is Precor, with over 143,000 machines with internet-connected consoles worldwide. These treadmills were the focus of the research.

Through the discovery of an exposed SSH key pair, the researchers gained root-level access to three versions of the console and demonstrated that the treadmill belts can be stopped remotely, which has the potential to cause harm to users. Additionally, the use of a weak hashing algorithm revealed the password for the root user account. As a result of these findings, four CVEs were issued: CVE-2023-49221, CVE-2023-49222, CVE-2023-49223, and CVE-2023-49224.

Devices such as smart treadmills often are connected to the internet to initiate updates, regularly utilizing Over the Air (OTA) files. However, when these devices are not connected to the internet, they still must be able to receive new software. This is commonly done using USB updates, where device owners navigate to a company's software catalog, download the applicable update, and manually initiate it using a USB drive.

Since the software must be downloaded to complete the update process, it must exist on a local device and, if unprotected, it is able to be analyzed. Protection measures may exist, such as proof of purchase or a password on an encrypted ZIP file. Password-protected downloads must be accessible by product owners, so they are typically listed in discoverable user manuals despite their use as a protection mechanism. Once the software is downloaded, common static reverse analysis tools such as strings or binwalk can be used to identify hardcoded secrets or to navigate device filesystems.

[...] The P80, P62, and P82 Precor touch-screen consoles are built on an Android operating system with a Linux-style filesystem. By downloading the software update packages for each of these models, the team was able to get a detailed look into the capabilities of the devices without having access to a treadmill with each type of console.

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

The horse transformed human history—and now scientists have a clearer idea of when humans began to transform the horse.

Around 4,200 years ago, one particular lineage of horse quickly became dominant across Eurasia, suggesting that's when humans started to spread domesticated horses around the world, according to research published Thursday in the journal Nature.

There was something special about this horse: It had a genetic mutation that changed the shape of its back, likely making it easier to ride.

"In the past, you had many different lineages of horses," said Pablo Librado, an evolutionary biologist at the Spanish National Research Council in Barcelona and co-author of the new study. That genetic diversity was evident in ancient DNA samples the researchers analyzed from archaeological sites across Eurasia dating back to 50,000 years ago.

But their analysis of 475 ancient horse genomes showed a notable change around 4,200 years ago.

That's when a specific lineage that first arose in what's known as the Pontic-Caspian Steppe, a plains region that stretches from what is now northeastern Bulgaria across Ukraine and through southern Russia, began to pop up all across Eurasia and quickly replaced other lineages. Within three hundred years, the horses in Spain were similar to those in Russia.

"We saw this genetic type spreading almost everywhere in Eurasia—clearly this horse type that was local became global very fast," said co-author Ludovic Orlando, a molecular archaeologist at the Centre for Anthropobiology and Genomics of Toulouse in France.

[...] Researchers believe the very earliest horse ancestors arose in North America, then sauntered across the Bering Strait into Asia around a million years ago. They flourished in Asia, but went extinct in the Americas.

People had domesticated other animals several thousand years before horses—including dogs, pigs, cattle, goats and sheep. But the new research shows that the shrinking genetic diversity associated with domestication happened much faster in horses.

"Humans changed the horse genome stunningly quickly, perhaps because we already had experience dealing with animals," said Laurent Frantz, who studies the genetics of ancient creatures at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich and was not involved in the study.

"It shows the special place of horses in human societies."

More information: Pablo Librado et al., Widespread horse-based mobility arose around 2,200 BCE in Eurasia, Nature (2024). DOI: 10.1038/s41586-024-07597-5.

Original Submission

c0lo writes:

Tech Exec Predicts Billion-Dollar AI Girlfriend Industry

When witnessing the sorry state of men addicted to AI girlfriends, one Miami tech exec saw dollar signs instead of red flags.

In a blog-length post on X-formerly-Twitter, former WeWork exec Greg Isenberg said that after meeting a young guy who claims to spend $10,000 a month on so-called "AI girlfriends," or relationship-simulating chatbots, he realized that eventually, someone is going to capitalize upon that market the way Match Group has with dating apps.

"I thought he was kidding," Isenberg wrote. "But, he's a 24-year-old single guy who loves it."

To date, Match Group — which owns Tinder, Hinge, Match.com, OKCupid, Plenty of Fish, and several others — has a market cap of more than $9 billion. As the now-CEO of the Late Checkout holding company startup noted, someone is going to build the AI version and make a billion or more.

During the exchange, Isenberg said that he was "speechless" when the young man explained his rationale, citing his ability to "play" with his AI paramours the way some people play video games, sending them voice notes and customizing their likes and dislikes as some of the reasons he spends so much money on the services.

The unnamed guy told the tech bro that he is particularly into Candy.ai and Cupid.ai, both of which allow for the kind of NSFW chatting that other apps ban.

"It's kinda like dating apps," the AI GF aficionado told Isenberg. "You're not on only one."

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

Long COVID affects millions of Americans of almost all ages, but there has been no standard definition for the condition until now.

The U.S. National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine announced the definition for long COVID June 11.

Previous definitions of long COVID have been all over the map, each with its own set of accepted symptoms, timelines and requirements for proof of infection (SN: 7/29/22).

That lack of standardization “left many patients in the lurch without clear ability to be recognized for the condition that they had, with difficulty explaining to family and even to their caregivers,” says Harvey Fineberg, a public health expert who chaired the committee that drafted the definition. “We heard from literally hundreds of people experiencing long COVID about the challenges that they had in being heard, in gaining access to care and obtaining the care they needed.”

More than 1,300 people contributed to the definition. The committee decided to adopt the patients’ own term “long COVID” instead of more medical terms such as “post-acute sequelae of COVID-19” that have also been used to describe the long-term condition.

Adoption of the name the patients advocated for gives validation to everyone with the condition who has been struggling, sometimes for years, to have their experience acknowledged, says Daria Oller, a physical therapist in New Jersey who developed long COVID in 2020. “Now, people are trying to not use the term long COVID, and all of us, patients from the first wave, are fighting. We were ignored. That’s ours. We named it.”

The committee chose to go with the name because it’s simple, familiar and easy to communicate, Fineberg said during a webinar introducing the definition. 

No one knows exactly how many people have long COVID, but a recent survey found that more than 17 percent of adults in the United States have experienced the condition. While the National Academies don’t have regulatory or legal power to enforce adoption of the definition, the respected body of scientific experts’ recommendations are often used in making regulatory decisions, determining medical and scientific policies and crafting laws.

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

New Hampshire officials issued two warnings of potentially dangerous algae blooms along parts of Lake Winnipesaukee, the state's largest lake.

The New Hampshire Department of Environmental Services said on Thursday it detected high concentrations of cyanobacteria, also known as blue-green algae, at Carry and Brewster beaches in Wolfeboro and at 19-Mile Bay and Tuftonboro Neck in Tuftonboro the previous day.

Visitors should avoid contact with the water and keep pets away, the department advised in a statement.

The cyanobacteria blooms are occurring as green clouds of material accumulating along shorelines. In some areas, they appear more yellow because they are mixed in with dense pollen, the department said.

Symptoms of cyanobacteria exposure can include skin irritation, stomach cramps, vomiting, nausea, diarrhea, fever, sore throat, headache, muscle and joint pain, mouth blisters and acute liver damage, the department said.

The affected areas will be resampled on June 19 and resampling will continue weekly if the bloom continues, the department said.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

NASA's Voyager 1 spacecraft is back in action and conducting normal science operations for the first time since the veteran probe began spouting gibberish at the end of 2023.

All four of the spacecraft's remaining operational instruments are now returning usable data to Earth, according to NASA.

Some additional work is needed to tidy up the effects of the issue. Engineers need to resynchronize the timekeeping software of Voyager 1's three onboard computers to ensure that commands are executed at the correct times. Maintenance will also be performed on the digital tape recorder, which records some data from the plasma instrument for a six-monthly downlink to Earth.

As the 50th anniversary of Voyager 1's launch rapidly approaches, and with the probe now 15 billion miles (24 billion kilometers) from Earth, restoring functionality is quite an engineering feat.

Voyager 1's woes began in November 2023, when the spacecraft stopped transmitting usable data back to Earth. Rather than engineering and science data, NASA found itself faced with a repeating pattern of ones and zeroes, as though the spacecraft was somehow stalled.

Engineers reckoned the issue lay with the Flight Data System (FDS) and in March sent a command – dubbed a "poke" – to get the FDS to try some other software sequences and thus circumvent whatever was causing the problem.

The result was a complete memory dump from the computer, which allowed engineers to pinpoint where the corruption had occurred. It appeared that a single chip was malfunctioning, and engineers were faced with the challenge of devising a software update that would work around the defective hardware.

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

Data centers are the backbone of today’s information technology infrastructure. These centralized hubs are built to manage, store, and distribute large quantities of data and applications, acting as the control centers for digital services and businesses globally. They are essential for maintaining data access, enabling scalability, facilitating disaster recovery, and ensuring strong security protocols, thus supporting the smooth operation of our globally connected digital world.

At the heart of data center operations lie data center interconnects, the vital networking infrastructure responsible for facilitating communication between various components within and across data centers. Digital-to-analog converters (DACs) are indispensable components within these interconnects, tasked with converting digital signals into analog signals for transmission over copper cables. Their role in enabling high-speed, cost-effective, and low-latency connectivity cannot be overstated. However, the challenge arises from the requirement for high-resolution DACs, which poses a significant bottleneck due to the associated increase in the costs of optical modules.

Addressing this challenge head-on, researchers have presented a groundbreaking solution that combines a look-up-table-based nonlinear predistortion technique with digital resolution enhancement. This innovative approach, reported in Advanced Photonics Nexus, aims to alleviate the limitations imposed by high-resolution DACs while maintaining efficient data transfer and communication within data center interconnects.

[...] Notably, the digital signal processing technique enabled the transmission of signals at rates exceeding 124 GBd PAM-4/6 and 112 GBd PAM-8 over 2 km of standard single-mode fiber using 3/3.5/4-bit DACs. Additionally, it facilitated the transmission of 124 GBd PAM-2/3/4 signals over 40 km of standard single-mode fiber using 1.5/2/3-bit DACs. These results represent a significant advancement in data center interconnect technology, demonstrating the feasibility of supporting the next generation of ethernet links targeting speeds of up to 800-GbE or potentially even 1.6-TbE.

An Anonymous Coward writes:

So I came across this article : Fifty Things you can do with a Software Defined Radio and it inspired me to do more research and I plan on trying it out very soon!

The person behind the article had this to say in the start of his article:

"Last week, I attempted the challenge to try to find 50 things to do with an RTL-SDR device in a week!

It was quite an adventure: I received satellites and radio from the other side of the world, I went on a hunt for a radiosonde, and I invented a method to communicate using the NFC tag in a library book!

I used the RTL-SDR Blog V4 for everything, plus the antenna kit, plus a long piece of wire"

- Article Source: https://blinry.org/50-things-with-sdr/
- Archive.org: https://web.archive.org/web/20240607044616/https://blinry.org/50-things-with-sdr/
- Blog post: https://www.rtl-sdr.com/doing-50-things-with-rtl-sdr-in-one-week/
- Blog post Archived: https://web.archive.org/web/20240406040514/https://www.rtl-sdr.com/doing-50-things-with-rtl-sdr-in-one-week/

Has anyone here at SoylentNews tried one of these devices? What were your results? What do you most enjoy about it?

Original Submission

mhajicek writes:

https://spacenews.com/fifth-helium-leak-detected-on-starliner/

NASA confirmed that Boeing's CST-100 Starliner spacecraft has suffered a fifth, although minor, helium leak in its propulsion system as engineers work to prepare the vehicle for its return to Earth next week.

In a June 10 statement, NASA mentioned that spacecraft teams were examining "what impacts, if any, five small leaks in the service module helium manifolds would have on the remainder of the mission." That was the first reference to there being five leaks in the spacecraft; NASA had mentioned there were four in a briefing hours after the spacecraft's June 6 docking with the International Space Station.

[...] NASA closed the helium manifolds in the propulsion system after docking to stop the leaks, although they will have to be opened to use the spacecraft's thrusters for undocking and deorbit maneuvers. NASA said June 10 that engineers estimate that Starliner has enough helium to support 70 hours of flight operations, while only seven hours is needed for Starliner to return to Earth.

[...] Those teams have some time to complete that work. NASA had initially scheduled a June 14 undocking for Starliner, but NASA said June 9 it was delaying the undocking to no earlier than June 18. That delay was to avoid a conflict with a June 13 ISS spacewalk, or EVA, by NASA astronauts Tracy Dyson and Matt Dominick.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

A groundbreaking cancer treatment developed by NUS researchers utilizes engineered bacteria to deliver chemotherapy drugs directly to tumor sites, significantly enhancing treatment efficacy and reducing side effects.

Traditional chemotherapy frequently presents substantial difficulties, such as harsh side effects, harm to healthy cells, and restricted effectiveness.

Researchers at the Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine, National University of Singapore (NUS Medicine), have pioneered a groundbreaking cancer treatment method. This new technique offers a more precise, potent, and less harmful alternative to conventional chemotherapy. It not only enhances the efficacy of the treatment but also substantially lowers the dosage of drugs needed for cancer therapy.

[...] Prodrugs are inactive molecules that transform into active drugs within the body, particularly in tumor environments, by leveraging unique tumor conditions, such as low oxygen or high acidity, to activate the drug precisely at the cancer site, minimizing damage to healthy tissues. However, current prodrug strategies exhibit limited target specificity and frequently depend on macromolecular carriers, which complicates both drug distribution and clearance.

To overcome these limitations, NUS Medicine researchers developed a prodrug delivery method that utilizes a commensal Lactobacillus strain that binds specifically to cancer cells via a surface molecule called heparan sulfate. These engineered bacteria carry a prodrug that converts to the chemotherapy drug SN-38 at the tumor site. In preclinical models of nasopharyngeal cancer, the engineered bacteria localized specifically in the tumor and released the chemotherapy drug directly at the cancer site, reducing tumor growth by 67% and increasing the effectiveness of the chemotherapy drug by 54%.

[...] “Cancer treatment often takes a tremendously heavy toll on patients. Our research represents a significant step toward developing a more targeted and less toxic approach to fighting cancer. We hope this can pave the way for therapies that are both mild and effective,” added A/Prof Chang, Dean’s Chair in Medicine and Director of SynCTI and NUS Medicine Syn Bio TRP.

Reference: “Prodrug-conjugated tumor-seeking commensals for targeted cancer therapy” by Haosheng Shen, Changyu Zhang, Shengjie Li, et al., 21 May 2024, Nature Communications. DOI: 10.1038/s41467-024-48661-y

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Google Wallet takes over app duties, but it looks like Google is quitting P2P payments:

Google has killed off the Google Pay app. 9to5Google reports Google's old payments app stopped working recently, following shutdown plans that were announced in February. Google is shutting down the Google Pay app in the US, while in-store NFC payments seem to still be branded "Google Pay." Remember, this is Google's dysfunctional payments division, so all that's happening is Google Payment app No. 3 (Google Pay) is being shut down in favor of Google Payment app No. 4 (Google Wallet). The shutdown caps off the implosion of Google's payments division after a lot of poor decisions and failed product launches.

Google's NFC payment journey started in 2011 with Google Wallet (apps No. 1 and No. 4 are both called Google Wallet). In 2011, Google was a technology trailblazer and basically popularized the idea of paying for something with your phone in many regions (with the notable exception of Japan). Google shipped the first non-Japanese phones with the feature, fought carriers trying to stop phone payments from happening, and begged stores to get new, compatible terminals. Google's entire project was blown away when Apple Pay launched in 2014, and Google's response was its second payment app, Android Pay, in 2015. This copied much of Apple's setup, like sending payment tokens instead of the actual credit card number. Google Pay was a rebrand of this setup and arrived in 2018.

[...] The 2021 Google Pay was a totally different codebase based on a Google payments app that was originally developed for India, called Google Tez. Tez was rebranded to Google Pay for the US market and launched on the Play Store. Being designed for India, where a phone might be your first and only Internet device, meant the new Google Pay had a lot of design decisions that didn't fit the US market. [...]

upstart writes:

Apple is to boost its Siri voice assistant and operating systems with OpenAI's ChatGPT as it seeks to catch up in the AI race:

The iPhone maker announced the Siri makeover along with a number of other new features at its annual developers show on Monday.

It is part of a new personalised AI system - called "Apple Intelligence" - that aims to offer users a way to navigate Apple devices more easily.

Updates to its iPhone and Mac operating systems will allow access to ChatGPT through a partnership with developer OpenAI.

[...] There was a cool reaction from the markets though - Apple's share price fell by 1.91% on Monday, the day of the announcement.

The partnership was also not welcomed by Elon Musk, the owner of Tesla and Twitter/X, who has threatened to ban iPhones from his companies due to "data security".

"Apple has no clue what's actually going on once they hand your data over to OpenAI," Mr Musk said on X. "They're selling you down the river."

Apple has not responded to his allegations.

Smartphone maker Samsung also mocked its rival's announcement.

"Adding 'Apple' doesn't make it new or groundbreaking. Welcome to AI", it posted on X.