SoylentNews

hubie writes:

A systematic review into the potential health effects from radio wave exposure has shown mobile phones are not linked to brain cancer:

Mobile phones are often held against the head during use. And they emit radio waves, a type of non-ionising radiation. These two factors are largely why the idea mobile phones might cause brain cancer emerged in the first place.

The possibility that mobile phones might cause cancer has been a long-standing concern. Mobile phones – and wireless tech more broadly – are a major part of our daily lives. So it's been vital for science to address the safety of radio wave exposure from these devices.

Over the years, the scientific consensus has remained strong – there's no association between mobile phone radio waves and brain cancer, or health more generally.

Despite the consensus, occasional research studies have been published that suggested the possibility of harm.

In 2011, the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) classified radio wave exposure as a possible carcinogen to humans. The meaning of this classification was largely misunderstood and led to some increase in concern.

IARC is part of the World Health Organization. Its classification of radio waves as a possible carcinogen was largely based on limited evidence from human observational studies. Also known as epidemiological studies, they observe the rate of disease and how it may be caused in human populations.

Observational studies are the best tool researchers have to investigate long-term health effects in humans, but the results can often be biased.

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

The latest State of the Energy Union report shows that renewable energy has become a major power provider in the EU, but it also warned that efforts need to be stepped up to meet important climate goals.

The EU has revealed significant progress in its renewable energy goals and in reducing its emissions, though it notes some key challenges to its progress.

The bloc’s latest State of the Energy Union report shows that for the first half of 2024, renewable energy such as solar and wind met 50pc of the electricity demand. The report also found that the EU’s gas demand dropped by 138bn cubic metres between August 2022 and May 2024.

Geopolitical issues played a role in changing gas demand – the report says the share of Russian gas in EU imports dropped from 45pc in 2021 to 18pc by June 2024, while imports from other countries including Norway and the US have increased.

The EU also reported some success in reducing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. The bloc’s emissions fell by 32.5pc from 1990 and 2022, while the EU economy grew by around 67pc in the same period.

However, the report noted that efforts in the renewable energy sector will need to be stepped up to meet the EU’s goal of reducing energy consumption by 11.7pc by 2030 and to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions.

“Economy wide GHG emission projections, recently submitted by Member States, are expected to show some gap with the EU climate ambition,” the EU report said. “To stay on track with the EU 2030 reduction target and climate neutrality by 2050, the EU needs to pick up the pace of change and increase the focus on areas where the required emission reductions are significant.”

Maroš Šefčovič, executive VP for the European Green Deal, said the report shows “unprecedented progress” despite being in turbulent times and facing challenges ahead.

“Emissions are falling, and renewables play a prominent role in our energy system today,” Šefčovič said. “We should swiftly implement the new policy and regulatory framework to address the elevated energy prices, and accelerate development of infrastructure.”

Freeman writes:

https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2024/09/unity-is-dropping-its-unpopular-per-install-runtime-fee/

Unity, maker of a popular cross-platform [game] engine and toolkit, will not pursue a broadly unpopular Runtime Fee that would have charged developers based on game installs rather than per-seat licenses. The move comes exactly one year after the fee's initial announcement.

In a blog post attributed to President and CEO Matt Bromberg, the CEO writes that the company cannot continue "democratizing game development" without "a partnership built on trust." Bromberg states that customers understand the necessity of price increases, but not in "a novel and controversial new form." So game developers will not be charged per installation, but they will be sorted into Personal, Pro, and Enterprise tiers by level of revenue or funding.

[...] Unity's announcement of a new "Runtime Fee that's based on game installs" in mid-September 2023 (Wayback archive), while joined by cloud storage and "AI at runtime," would have been costly for smaller developers who found success.

[...] The move led to almost immediate backlash from many developers. Unity, whose then-CEO John Riccitiello had described in 2015 as having "no royalties, no [f-ing] around," was "quite simply not a company to be trusted," wrote Necrosoft Games' Brandon Sheffield. Developers said they would hold off updates or switch engines rather than absorb the fee, which would have retroactively counted installs before January 2024 toward its calculations.

[...] A massive wave of layoffs throughout the winter of 2023 and 2024 showed that Unity's financial position was precarious, partly due to acquisitions during Riccitiello's term. The Runtime Fee would have minimal impact in 2024, the company said in filings, but would "ramp from there as customers adopt our new releases."

Instead of ramping from there, the Runtime Fee is now gone, and Unity has made other changes to its pricing structure:

• Unity Personal remains free, and its revenue/funding ceiling increases from $100,000 to $200,000
• Unity Pro, for customers over the Personal limit, sees an 8 percent price increase to $2,200 per seat
• Unity Enterprise, with customized packages for those over $25 million in revenue or funding, sees a 25 percent increase.

DannyB writes:

Texas Startup Keeps Launching These Obnoxiously Large Satellites—and the Worst Is Yet to Come

Five BlueBird satellites have launched as part of AST SpaceMobile's growing constellation, with even larger ones ahead that may pose a threat to clear night skies.

Bad news for sky watchers: Earth's orbit has been littered by five more gigantic satellites which are poised to become the brightest objects in the night sky.

The five communication satellites, called BlueBirds, launched on board a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket on Thursday at 4:52 a.m. ET. Each satellite is equipped with the largest ever commercial communications array to be deployed in low Earth orbit, according to AST SpaceMobile. The company's prototype satellite unfurled its giant array in late 2022, outshining most objects in the skies except for the Moon, Venus, Jupiter, and seven of the brightest stars. Now, there's five more of them, as the company builds out its satellite constellation.

AST SpaceMobile is seeking to create the first space-based cellular broadband network directly accessible by cell phones. [...]

[....] AST SpaceMobile wants to build a constellation of more than 100 satellites. On its own, one satellite is bright enough to mess with observations of the cosmos.

[....] The newly launched satellites are just as large as the prototype, but future models could be even larger. "We're just getting started," Avellan said during a livestream, Space.com reported.

[....] ST SpaceMobile isn't the only company trying to build cellular towers in space. SpaceX has launched more than 7,000 satellites to date, and new batches of its Starlink satellites keep making their way to low Earth orbit. Amazon, OneWeb, and Lynk Global are other companies trying to get in on the action.

At least we could access social media or control our IoT devices from the oceans to the remotest desert or mountain.

Original Submission

AnonTechie writes:

Artificial intelligence is poised to deliver tremendous benefits to society. But, as many have pointed out, it could also bring unprecedented new horrors. As a general-purpose technology, the same tools that will advance scientific discovery could also be used to develop cyber, chemical, or biological weapons. Governing AI will require widely sharing its benefits while keeping the most powerful AI out of the hands of bad actors. The good news is that there is already a template on how to do just that.

In the 20th century, nations built international institutions to allow the spread of peaceful nuclear energy but slow nuclear weapons proliferation by controlling access to the raw materials—namely weapons-grade uranium and plutonium—that underpins them. The risk has been managed through international institutions, such as the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and International Atomic Energy Agency. Today, 32 nations operate nuclear power plants, which collectively provide 10% of the world's electricity, and only nine countries possess nuclear weapons.

Countries can do something similar for AI today. They can regulate AI from the ground up by controlling access to the highly specialized chips that are needed to train the world's most advanced AI models. Business leaders and even the U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres have called for an international governance framework for AI similar to that for nuclear technology.

[Source]: TIME.com

Do you think that such a regulatory framework would work ?

Original Submission

hubie writes:

Some of our favorite food crops around the world aren't reaching their full potential:

Insects that provide the crucial service of pollination are declining en masse, and that has serious consequences for the world's food crops, 75 percent of which depend at least partially – if not entirely – on insect pollination.

While this doesn't include major food crops like rice and wheat, pollination is essential to what the study's first author – ecologist Katherine Turo from Rutgers University in the US – refers to as "nutrient-dense and interesting foods that we like and are culturally relevant".

"If you look through a list of crops and think about which fruits and vegetables you're most excited to eat – like summer berries or apples and pumpkins in the fall – those are the crops that typically need to be pollinated by insects," Turo says.

And yet, there's a lack of experimental research on pollinator limitation in crops. While we know the phenomenon is impacting global food supplies, its prevalence has so far been unclear.

[...] Within this detailed picture, Turo and colleagues found that up to 60 percent of global crop systems are being limited by insufficient pollination. The phenomenon is affecting 25 of the 49 different crop species analyzed, with blueberry, coffee, and apple crops being the worst affected.

Pollinator limitation is occurring in 85 percent of the countries in this database, spanning all six continents represented.

"Our findings are a cause for concern and optimism," says Turo.

"We did detect widespread yield deficits. However, we also estimate that, through continued investment in pollinator management and research, it is likely that we can improve the efficiency of our existing crop fields to meet the nutritional needs of our global population."

[...] "Our findings show that by paying more attention to pollinators, growers could make agricultural fields more productive."

That might be harder than it sounds – insects are being hit with a lethal onslaught of disease, pesticides, shifting seasons, and habitat loss.

Perhaps quantifying these tiny but mighty allies' services to our billion-dollar industries will help us to take the threats they face more seriously.

Journal Reference:Turo, K.J., Reilly, J.R., Fijen, T.P.M. et al. Insufficient pollinator visitation often limits yield in crop systems worldwide. Nat Ecol Evol 8, 1612–1622 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41559-024-02460-2

Original Submission

Snotnose writes:

The ig-nobels for 2024 have been announced. If you don't know what they are:

Curiosity is the driving force behind all science, which may explain why so many scientists sometimes find themselves going in some decidedly eccentric research directions. Did you hear about the WWII plan to train pigeons as missile guidance systems? How about experiments on the swimming ability of a dead rainbow trout or that time biologists tried to startle cows by popping paper bags by their heads? These and other unusual research endeavors were honored tonight in a virtual ceremony to announce the 2024 recipients of the annual Ig Nobel Prizes. Yes, it's that time of year again, when the serious and the silly converge—for science.

Hope you weren't expecting to get any work done for the next hour or two.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

The US government has noticed the potentially negative effects of generative AI on areas like journalism and content creation. Senator Amy Klobuchar, along with seven Democrat colleagues, urged the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and Justice Department to probe generative AI products like ChatGPT for potential antitrust violations, they wrote in a press release.

"Recently, multiple dominant online platforms have introduced new generative AI features that answer user queries by summarizing, or, in some cases, merely regurgitating online content from other sources or platforms," the letter states. "The introduction of these new generative AI features further threatens the ability of journalists and other content creators to earn compensation for their vital work."

The lawmakers went on to note that traditional search results lead users to publishers' websites while AI-generated summaries keep the users on the search platform "where that platform alone can profit from the user's attention through advertising and data collection."

These products also have significant competitive consequences that distort markets for content. When a generative AI feature answers a query directly, it often forces the content creator—whose content has been relegated to a lower position on the user interface—to compete with content generated from their own work.

The fact that AI may be scraping news sites and then not even directing users to the original source could be a form of "exclusionary conduct or an unfair method of competition in violation of antitrust laws," the lawmakers concluded. (That's on top being a potential violation of copyright laws, but that's another legal battle altogether.)

Original Submission

owl writes:

https://martypc.blogspot.com/2024/08/pc-floppy-copy-protection-softguard.html

Softguard Systems was founded by Joseph Diodati, Paul Sachse and Ken Williams in 1983¹. The company went public in 1984, and by 1985 was one of the industry leaders in copy protection technology, although they produced a few other unrelated products as well.

Advertisements for their copy-protection product, SUPERLoK, were commonly seen in the classified sections of publications such as InfoWorld and PC Magazine.

The original Superlok product required professional disk duplication to lay down the requisite copy protection track. Eventually, Softguard would produce the "SUPERLoK KIT," which was writable with a standard PC floppy controller. An advertisement for the Kit can be seen above, left. The Kit version was aimed at smaller developers on a budget, and did not offer the same level of protection. This article will focus on the original Superlok product.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

In groups people screen out chatter around them - and now technology can do the same:

It's the perennial "cocktail party problem" - standing in a room full of people, drink in hand, trying to hear what your fellow guest is saying.

In fact, human beings are remarkably adept at holding a conversation with one person while filtering out competing voices.

However, perhaps surprisingly, it's a skill that technology has until recently been unable to replicate.

And that matters when it comes to using audio evidence in court cases. Voices in the background can make it hard to be certain who's speaking and what's being said, potentially making recordings useless.

Electrical engineer Keith McElveen, founder and chief technology officer of Wave Sciences, became interested in the problem when he was working for the US government on a war crimes case.

"What we were trying to figure out was who ordered the massacre of civilians. Some of the evidence included recordings with a bunch of voices all talking at once - and that's when I learned what the "cocktail party problem" was," he says.

"I had been successful in removing noise like automobile sounds or air conditioners or fans from speech, but when I started trying to remove speech from speech, it turned out not only to be a very difficult problem, it was one of the classic hard problems in acoustics.

"Sounds are bouncing round a room, and it is mathematically horrible to solve."

The answer, he says, was to use AI to try to pinpoint and screen out all competing sounds based on where they originally came from in a room.

This doesn't just mean other people who may be speaking - there's also a significant amount of interference from the way sounds are reflected around a room, with the target speaker's voice being heard both directly and indirectly.

In a perfect anechoicchamber - one totally free from echoes - one microphone per speaker would be enough to pick up what everyone was saying; but in a real room, the problem requires a microphone for every reflected sound too.

[...] And, he adds: "We knew there had to be a solution, because you can do it with just two ears."

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

The first-person shooter Doom has so many ports on so many different consoles and computers that modders have had to find new places to port the game like autonomous lawnmowers, digestive bacteria and even in Doom II itself.

One port that’s not nearly as popular or playable as the others is the Sega Saturn port that came out nearly four years after the game’s release. Gamespot’s Jeff Gerstmann called the Sega Saturn Doom port just about everything you can call a bad game without straying over the the boundaries of good taste: “completely worthless,” “drab,” “jerky,” “to be avoided at all costs.”

Bo, a self-described reverse engineer of Sega Saturn games, gave the Sega Saturn port of Doom another chance and he discovered a cheat code in the game that’s been laying dormant for more than a decade. He posted the secret cheat code he found on X.

The button combination X, Right, B, Y, X, Right, B, Y gives you the ability to see through the walls of the Mars substation and even Hell. It’s too bad the game doesn’t have a cheat code that lets you see a better version of Doom.

Original Submission

Freeman writes:

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/09/music-industrys-1990s-hard-drives-like-all-hdds-are-dying/

One of the things enterprise storage and destruction company Iron Mountain does is handle the archiving of the media industry's vaults. What it has been seeing lately should be a wake-up call: roughly one-fifth of the hard disk drives dating to the 1990s it was sent are entirely unreadable.

Music industry publication Mix spoke with the people in charge of backing up the entertainment industry. The resulting tale is part explainer on how music is so complicated to archive now, part warning about everyone's data stored on spinning disks.

"In our line of work, if we discover an inherent problem with a format, it makes sense to let everybody know," Robert Koszela, global director for studio growth and strategic initiatives at Iron Mountain, told Mix. "It may sound like a sales pitch, but it's not; it's a call for action."
[...]
Mix's passing along of Iron Mountain's warning hit Hacker News earlier this week, which spurred other tales of faith in the wrong formats. The gist of it: You cannot trust any medium, so you copy important things over and over, into fresh storage. "Optical media rots, magnetic media rots and loses magnetic charge, bearings seize, flash storage loses charge, etc.," writes user abracadaniel. "Entropy wins, sometimes much faster than you'd expect."

There is discussion of how SSDs are not archival at all;
[...]
Knowing that hard drives will eventually fail is nothing new. Ars wrote about the five stages of hard drive death, including denial, back in 2005.
[...]
Google's server drive data showed in 2007 that HDD failure was mostly unpredictable, and that temperatures were not really the deciding factor.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

DNA analysis shows that people from Easter Island had contact with Indigenous Americans around the 1300s, and finds there was no population crash before the arrival of Europeans

DNA analysis of ancient remains from Easter Island shows that the population was in fact increasing when Europeans arrived, rather than collapsing as reported by some historical accounts.

The results also show that there were interactions between the residents of the island and those of South America long before the arrival of Europeans. Both the island and its people are also known as Rapa Nui.

Located in the Pacific Ocean 3500 kilometres from South America, Rapa Nui is one of the most remote inhabited islands on Earth. Polynesian people began settling there around AD 1200, when its 164 square kilometres were covered in palm forests.

By the time Europeans arrived in 1722, the vegetation had been largely destroyed by a combination of rats and overharvesting. The history of the island has often been portrayed as an example of unsustainable ecological exploitation and population growth followed by collapse.

In the latest study, J. Víctor Moreno-Mayar at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark, and his colleagues looked at 15 sets of human remains kept at the National Museum of Natural History in Paris, France, collected by expeditions in 1877 and 1935.

The researchers worked closely with representatives of the Rapa Nui community. One of their aims was to confirm that the individuals at the museum were, in fact, from the island, as there is an effort being led by modern residents to repatriate the remains.

The results show that the 15 people, who all died over the past 500 years, did originate on Rapa Nui.

A population undergoing a bottleneck from a collapse in numbers will have signals in their DNA showing a drop in genetic diversity, says Moreno-Mayer.

“We are using statistical methods that can reconstruct the genetic diversity in the Rapa Nui population throughout the last few thousand years,” he says. “And interestingly enough, we do not find any evidence of a dramatic population decline around 1600s as expected from the collapse theory.”

Instead, the results suggest that the Rapa Nui population increased steadily until the 1860s, when slave traders kidnapped hundreds of islanders and a smallpox outbreak killed many more.

canopic jug writes:

Several sites have covered the dynamic pricing scandal concerning Tickemaster's sales of tickets to the Manchester based English rock band Oasis' reunion tour. Aside from the problems of the monopoly maintained by Ticketmaster, and aside from the problem of ticket scalping which is encouraged by Ticketmaster's business model, the dynamic pricing has come across as price gouging and a possible breach of consumer law. The Competition and Markets Authority is now launching an investigation into if or how much Ticketmaster engaged in unfair, prohibited commercial practices.

Some fans paid more than £350 for tickets with a face value of less than £150, and had to make a split-second decision whether to complete their purchase, as dynamic pricing caused prices to soar during the booking process.

Lisa Webb, a consumer law expert at Which?, said: "It seems extremely unfair that Oasis fans got up early and battled through queues only to find that ticket prices had more than doubled from the originally advertised price.

"Oasis and Ticketmaster should do the right thing and refund fans who may have been misled into paying over the odds for tickets that would have been half the price just hours earlier."

— Oasis and Ticketmaster urged to refund fans after 'dynamic pricing' debacle, The Guardian.

Where have Soylentils been seeing dynamic pricing lately?

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

The RX 7800M is a powerful mobile GPU for gaming notebooks.

AMD has officially debuted its sixth discrete GPU in its mobile RX 7000 lineup, the RX 7800M. The new GPU is AMD's second mobile RDNA 3 GPU to arrive with a chipset-style architecture and is the runner-up to the flagship RX 7900M.

The RX 7800M is armed with 60 RDNA 3 compute units, 96 ROPS, 3,840 stream processors, 48MB of Infinity Cache, and a game clock of 2,145MHz. Bus width was not mentioned, but we suspect it is using a 192-bit interface. Memory bandwidth is rated at up to 432GB/s, memory capacity is 12GB, and GDDR6 ICs operate at up to 18 Gbps. GPU power consumption is rated at up to 180W.

AMD's new chipset-style mobile GPU is essentially a stripped-down RX 7800 XT operating at lower clock speeds and power consumption combined with lower memory specs from the RX 7700 XT. The GPU's compute unit count also aligns perfectly with the new Sony PS5 Pro's Compute Units, meaning the 7800M most likely would have the same compute power as the PS5 Pro in a theoretical scenario where GPU clocks and power consumption were the same.

We previously discovered that the RX 7800M performs very similarly to AMD’s desktop RX 7700 XT in some vendor-provided benchmarks. This is unsurprising since both GPUs share the same memory configuration, and the GPU’s superior core count configuration offsets the 7700 XT’s low power/clock speed. Compared to Nvidia, the RX 7800M performs faster than its RTX 4070 laptop GPU but is slower than its RTX 4080 mobile counterpart. Performance was also a touch behind Nvidia’s desktop RTX 4070.

Original Submission