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upstart writes:

Schools are now notifying families their data has been stolen:

Parents, students, teachers, and administrators throughout North America are smarting from what could be the biggest data breach of 2025: an intrusion into the network of a cloud-based service storing detailed data of millions of pupils and school personnel.

The hack, which came to light earlier this month, hit PowerSchool, a Folsom, California, firm that provides cloud-based software to some 16,000 K–12 schools worldwide. The schools serve 60 million students and employ an unknown number of teachers. Besides providing software for administration, grades, and other functions, PowerSchool stores personal data for students and teachers, with much of that data including Social Security numbers, medical information, and home addresses.

On January 7, PowerSchool revealed that it had experienced a network intrusion two weeks earlier that resulted in the "unauthorized exportation of personal information" customers stored in PowerSchool's Student Information System (SIS) through PowerSource, a customer support portal. Information stolen included individuals' names, contact information, dates of birth, medical alert information, Social Security Numbers, and unspecified "other related information."

[...] Last week, California's Menlo Park City School District said stolen information belonged to all current students and staff, all students enrolled since the start of the 2009–2010 school year, and many staff members who worked at the school since the start of the 2009–2010 school year.

"This includes students who may have been enrolled only for a short while before transferring out and staff who worked for MPCSD only briefly before leaving for whatever reason," last week's notice stated. The total number of students affected is 10,662. The notice went on to say that California law requires public schools to store student data in perpetuity.

PowerSchool has said that it has been in contact with the attackers and received assurances they won't release it publicly. Bleeping Computer reported that the assurances were based on a video showing the threat actor deleting the data. PowerSchool has yet to confirm that account. Even if the account is true, there's no way a video can prove all copies of the data have been destroyed. Despite this, school districts have passed those assurances on in their disclosure notices.

Bleeping Computer on Wednesday also reported that an extortion note the attacker sent to PowerSchool claimed that the personal data of 62.4 million students and 9.5 million teachers was swept up in the breach. PowerSchool said it's offering two years of free credit monitoring to all those affected.

PowerSchool has yet to disclose the number of individuals affected or confirm whether it paid a ransom.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

A specialized system sends pulses of pressure through the fluids in our brain:

Our bodies rely on their lymphatic system to drain excessive fluids and remove waste from tissues, feeding those back into the blood stream. It's a complex yet efficient cleaning mechanism that works in every organ except the brain. "When cells are active, they produce waste metabolites, and this also happens in the brain. Since there are no lymphatic vessels in the brain, the question was what was it that cleaned the brain," Natalie Hauglund, a neuroscientist at Oxford University who led a recent study on the brain-clearing mechanism, told Ars.

Earlier studies done mostly on mice discovered that the brain had a system that flushed its tissues with cerebrospinal fluid, which carried away waste products in a process called glymphatic clearance. "Scientists noticed that this only happened during sleep, but it was unknown what it was about sleep that initiated this cleaning process," Hauglund explains.

Her study found the glymphatic clearance was mediated by a hormone called norepinephrine and happened almost exclusively during the NREM sleep phase. But it only worked when sleep was natural. Anesthesia and sleeping pills shut this process down nearly completely.

The glymphatic system in the brain was discovered back in 2013 by Dr. Maiken Nedergaard, a Danish neuroscientist and a coauthor of Hauglund's paper. Since then, there have been numerous studies aimed at figuring out how it worked, but most of them had one problem: they were done on anesthetized mice.

"What makes anesthesia useful is that you can have a very controlled setting," Hauglund says.

[...] So, her team designed a study to see how the brain-clearing mechanism works in mice that could move freely in their cages and sleep naturally whenever they felt like it. "It turned out that with the glymphatic system, we didn't really see the full picture when we used anesthesia," Hauglund says.

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

Linux kernel 6.13 is here, but don't get too excited. It's not a biggie and, given the timing, probably won't appear in many familiar distros.

Head penguin herder Linus Torvalds announced Linux version 6.13 this week, and he's also chosen five lucky winners of guitar pedals. The KernelNewbies site has a full rundown of what's new, which, if we were a newbie, we feel would look pretty intimidating.

Although there are important changes in this release, they are either things that are only significant to those using certain specific models of CPU or other hardware, or they're steps in large-scale changes that will have a noticeable impact in future, but don't right now.

So, for instance, there's improved power management on certain models of AMD CPU and GPU. Specifically, there's better management of AMD's fancy 3D V-cache. There's support for Intel "Panther Lake" CPUs and Xe3 GPUs. There's better Apple device support too, covering some MacBooks, plus support for certain Apple SoC devices that were used in some older iPads and iPhones. However, this does not mean that you'll soon be able to install a kernel 6.13-based Linux distro on your old iDevice. It's just a step toward that maybe happening one day. Also in Arm land, there's improved graphics support for the Raspberry Pi's VideoCore GPU, support for running Linux inside an Arm64 Confidential Compute Architecture (CCA) realm, and more.

One terabyte SD cards are old news now. Users can already buy SD cards with capacities exceeding 2 TB. The Secure Digital Ultra Capacity (SDUC) standard defines card sizes up to 128 TB. As of this kernel, Linux supports them.

There's a new pre-emption model for the kernel's scheduler, referred to as Lazy Pre-emption, which aims to improve scheduler efficiency. Until recently, Linux had three pre-emption modes. At the end of last year, it gained another with the integration of the long-standing PREEMPT_RT patches in last November's kernel 6.12. Linux Weekly News explained the four modes in 2023 over two articles: part 1 and part 2. (Be warned, it took LWN two articles, so this is complicated.) Now, there's another model, and in October there was another LWN explainer. The plan is that the new mode will eventually enable the other non-realtime modes to be simplified down to just two.

AnonTechie writes:

A new review of the evidence shows that the 21-day rule isn't a rule after all.

A popular piece of self-help folklore might be more complicated than we thought. New research finds that it takes significantly more than a month for a new habit to form.

Scientists at the University of South Australia conducted the study, a review of the existing evidence on habit forming. They found that habits typically begin forming after about two months. For some unlucky people, though, it could even take up to a year.

To get at the root of this topic, the University of South Australia researchers analyzed data from 20 studies that examined the forming of healthy habits like routine exercise, drinking water, or flossing teeth; these studies collectively involved over 2,500 participants. One specific question these studies sought to answer was how long it took for a habit to reach something called "automaticity"—the point at which people perform it regularly and without too much thought being put into it.

The researchers found that habits formed around 106 to 154 days on average. The median length of a habit forming was roughly 59 to 66 days (the median is the midpoint in a group of numbers in case you forgot). That said, the study did reveal plenty of outliers. The shortest reported length of habit adoption was four days, while the longest was a whopping 335 days.

[Reference]: MDPI

PUBMED

[Source]: University of South Australia

[Covered By]: Gizmodo

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

As consumer companies including Apple and Samsung start opening up their hardware products to independent repair, and legislators put pressure on companies like John Deere to do the same, others are resisting the right-to-repair movement. A medical device company that makes a machine for heart surgeries has told hospitals recently that it will no longer allow their in-house technicians to repair the devices themselves. Hospitals will now need to enter into repair contracts directly with the manufacturer.

Terumo Cardiovascular makes the product, called the Advanced Perfusion System 1 Heart Lung Machine, which reroutes blood during open-heart surgeries to keep a patient alive during surgery. According to 404 Media, Terumo told hospitals last month that it would stop offering certification classes for repairs of the devices.

The job of an independent repair technician used to be more commonplace—there were individuals who could fix everything from TVs to dishwashers and automobiles. But today more hardware is filled with chips and software, and companies like Apple have said the software on their devices is copyrighted intellectual property; allowing anyone to look under the hood and conduct modifications could lead to security or reliability risks.

[...] In many cases, however, devices today are more like services. Instead of buying a refrigerator or smart thermostat once and being able to do with it whatever the owner would like, any type of upgrade or fix often requires returning to the company that sold it. Research suggests it is a fundamental reason we have so much waste in the world today. TV will not turn on? Either get it fixed under warranty or throw it away, because getting a new one may just be cheaper.

[...] Lawmakers have recently complained that like medical device companies, the automakers are making it difficult for independent repair companies to access software data and diagnostics under the same guise that it would risk security. And they are doing so in violation of right-to-repair laws passed in states including Massachusetts explicitly to enable independent shops to access software diagnostics.

taylorvich writes:

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/mysterious-blobs-found-in-cells-are-rewriting-how-life-works/

No one saw the blob takeover coming. In 2009 a team of biophysicists led by Anthony A. Hyman of the Max Planck Institute of Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics in Dresden, Germany, were studying specklelike structures called P granules in the single-celled embryo of a tiny, soil-dwelling worm. These specks were known to accumulate only at one end of the cell, making it lopsided so that, when it divides, the two daughter cells are different. The researchers wanted to know how that uneven distribution of P granules arises.

They discovered that these blobs, made from protein and RNA, were condensing on one side of the cell like raindrops in moist air, and dissolving again on the other side. In other words, the molecular components of the granules were undergoing phase transitions like those that switch a substance between liquid and gas.

That was a weird thing to be happening in cell biology. But at first it seemed to many researchers little more than a quirk and didn't excite much attention. Then these little blobs—now called biomolecular condensates—began popping up just about anywhere researchers looked in the cell, doing a myriad of vital tasks.

Biologists had long believed that bringing order and organization to the chaos of molecules inside a cell depended on membrane-bound compartments called organelles, such as the mitochondria. But condensates, it turns out, offer "order for free" without the need for membranes. They provide an easy, general-purpose organization that cells can turn on or off. This arrangement permits many of the things on which life depends, explains biophysicist Petra Schwille of the Max Planck Institute of Biochemistry in Martinsried, Germany.

These little blobs inside living cells now appear to feature across all domains of the living world and are "connected to just about every aspect of cellular function," says biophysical engineer Cliff Bran­gwynne, who was part of the 2009 Dresden team and now runs his own lab at Princeton University. They protect cells from dangerously high or low temperatures; they repair DNA damage; they control the way DNA gets turned into crucial proteins. And when they go bad, they may trigger diseases.

Biomolecular condensates now seem to be a key part of how life gets its countless molecular components to coordinate and cooperate, to form committees that make the group decisions on which our very existence depends. "The ultimate problem in cell biology is not how a few puzzle pieces fit together," Brang­wynne says, "but how collections of billions of them give rise to emergent, dynamic structures on larger scales."

These ubiquitous specks have "completely taken over cell biology," says biophysicist Simon Alberti of the Technical University of Dresden. The challenge now is to understand how they form, what they do—and perhaps how to control them to devise new medical therapies and cures.

Original Submission

Freeman writes:

https://arstechnica.com/health/2025/01/florida-man-eats-diet-of-butter-cheese-beef-cholesterol-oozes-from-his-body/

What could go wrong with eating an extremely high-fat diet of beef, cheese, and sticks of butter? Well, for one thing, your cholesterol levels could reach such stratospheric levels that lipids start oozing from your blood vessels, forming yellowish nodules on your skin.

That was the disturbing case of a man in Florida who showed up at a Tampa hospital with a three-week history of painless, yellow eruptions on the palms of his hands, soles of his feet, and elbows. His case was published today in JAMA Cardiology.
[...]
his total cholesterol level exceeded 1,000 mg/dL. For context, an optimal total cholesterol level is under 200 mg/dL, while 240 mg/dL is considered the threshold for 'high.' Cardiologists noted that prior to going on his fatty diet, his cholesterol had been between 210 mg/dL to 300 mg/dL.

The cardiologists diagnosed the man with xanthelasma, a condition in which excess blood lipids ooze from blood vessels and form localized lipid deposits.
[...]
Xanthelasma—especially xanthelasma palpebrarum—is not always associated with high cholesterol and heart risks, but having high total cholesterol is strongly associated with coronary heart disease.
[...]
the case "highlights the impact of dietary patterns on lipid levels and the importance of managing hypercholesterolemia to prevent complications."

Related stories on SoylentNews: lipid search

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

As more businesses shift an ever greater number of workloads to the cloud, hyperscalers aren't doing enough to help CIOs or tech buyers, who are already under legislative pressure, to be more transparent about their own corporation's carbon footprint regarding compute services.

This is according to tech and channel analyst Canalys, which highlights Amazon - or rather its subsidiary Amazon Web Services - as the worst offender, even though Microsoft and Google do not escape criticism.

"We know that emissions have blown through the roof in the last couple of years. Google and Microsoft are two fantastic examples, but they are not the only examples. Their emissions have skyrocketed despite some significant efforts to cut them," said Canalys Principal ESG Analyst Elsa Nightingale, speaking at the company's Channels Forum last year in Berlin.

At issue, is that emissions from datacenters are likely to be much higher than currently estimated, perhaps more than seven times higher, according to Nightingale, who cited a report last year. This is due to the emissions accounting practices used by the hyperscale operators like AWS, Google, and Microsoft, such as the use of renewable energy certificates to offset emissions in their calculations.

Nightingale said that Amazon doesn't provide AWS-specific, location-based data, meaning: "We don't really know how big AWS's footprint truly is, which I think is a bit worrying."

Amazon has chosen not break out data on environmental stats such as greenhouse gas emissions for AWS from the rest of the company in its sustainability reports, making it almost impossible to determine whether these emissions are growing as they have been for its cloud rivals.

[...] Amazon isn't the sole offender: neither Microsoft nor Google breaks out the emissions of their datacenters separately from the main business.

[...] We asked Amazon why it doesn't break out the emissions data for AWS separately from its other operations, but while the company confirmed this is so, it declined to offer an explanation. Neither did Microsoft nor Google.

[...] A recent report from Uptime Institute warned that prioritizing AI growth threatens to trump sustainability commitments in many territories, and that targets for greenhouse gas emissions to become net zero by a set date are almost certain to be put out of reach.

Original Submission

owl writes:

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/cars/features/touchscreen-dashboards-have-taken-over/

Regarding how we interact with our cars, whether petrol or electric, victory has gone to the touchscreen – at least as far as one premium manufacturer is concerned. Despite overwhelming safety evidence to the contrary, BMW has decided that selecting in-car functions using its intuitive rotary controller will be for used-car buyers only.

On BMW's next-generation Neue Klasse cars, beginning with the iX3 SUV launching this summer, drivers will have no choice but to use touchscreens. Its German rival Mercedes even offers a full-width dashboard consisting of three screens, called Hyperscreen (pictured above in the EQS, compared with the analogue, hewn-from-solid facia of the 1980s W123 Mercedes model).

They won't be alone. An S&P Global Mobility survey of car owners found that 97 per cent of new cars released after 2023 contain at least one touchscreen.

Related:
    • Hyundai Wants to Eliminate Touchscreens Entirely With Holographic Windshield Displays
    • Volkswagen is Returning to Physical Buttons Instead of Touch Controls
    • Physical Buttons Outperform Touchscreens in New Cars, Test Finds
    • BMW Removes Touchscreen Functionality From Some New Cars Due To Chip Shortage

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Wiki-style guide compiles all the pieces and potential of a rack you can carry:

I have one standard rack appliance in my home: a Unifi Dream Machine Pro. It is mounted horizontally in a coat closet, putting it close to my home's fiber input and also incidentally keeping our jackets gently warm. I can fit juuuuuust about one more standard rack-size device in there (maybe a rack-mount UPS?) before I have to choose between outer-wear and overly ambitious networking. Were I starting over, I might think a bit more about scalability.

Along those lines, technologist and YouTube maker Jeff Geerling has launched the Project Mini Rack page for folks who have similarly server-sized ambitions, coupled with a lack of square footage. "I mean, if you want to cosplay as a sysadmin, you need a rack, right?" Geerling says in the announcement video. It's a keen launching point for a new "homelab" or "minilab" project, also known as bringing the networking and hardware challenges of a commercial network deployment into your home for "fun."

It's a good time fall into the compact computing space. As Geerling notes in a blog post announcing the project, there's a whole lot of small-form-factor PCs on the market. You can couple them with single-board computers, power-over-Ethernet devices, and network-accessible solid state drives that allow you to stuff a whole lab into a cube you can carry around in your hands.

[...] "The community feedback around Project Mini Rack has been great so far," Geerling wrote in an email to Ars. The 3D-printed links and suggestions have been showing up steadily since he started committing to the page in earnest in mid-January. He's particularly excited to see that a "LACK rack," or using IKEA shelving for budget rack mounting, can be downscaled to mini-rack size with an Edet cabinet. "It's like someone at IKEA is a Homelab enthusiast," says Geerling.

Original Submission

Freeman writes:

https://arstechnica.com/ai/2025/01/anthropic-chief-says-ai-could-surpass-almost-all-humans-at-almost-everything-shortly-after-2027/

On Tuesday, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei predicted that AI models may surpass human capabilities "in almost everything" within two to three years, according to a Wall Street Journal interview at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.
[...]
Amodei co-founded Anthropic in 2021 with his sister Daniela Amodei and five other former OpenAI employees. Not long after, Anthropic emerged as a strong technological competitor to OpenAI's AI products (such as GPT-4 and ChatGPT). Most recently, its Claude 3.5 Sonnet model has remained highly regarded among some AI users and highly ranked among AI benchmarks.
[...]
Even with his dramatic predictions, Amodei distanced himself from a term for this advanced labor-replacing AI favored by Altman, "artificial general intelligence" (AGI), calling it in a separate CNBC interview from the same event in Switzerland a marketing term.

Instead, he prefers to describe future AI systems as a "country of geniuses in a data center," he told CNBC.

Related stories on SoylentNews: anthropic search

Original Submission

chucky writes:

Elon should watch where he leaves his car. https://www.astronomy.com/science/astronomers-just-deleted-an-asteroid-because-it-turned-out-to-be-elon-musks-tesla-roadster/

Original Submission

pTamok writes:

The Executive Order ("a directive by the president of the United States that manages operations of the federal government") dated January 20, 2025 with the title DEFENDING WOMEN FROM GENDER IDEOLOGY EXTREMISM AND RESTORING BIOLOGICAL TRUTH TO THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT contains the following text:

Policy and Definitions. It is the policy of the United States to recognize two sexes, male and female. These sexes are not changeable and are grounded in fundamental and incontrovertible reality.

(d) "Female" means a person belonging, at conception, to the sex that produces the large reproductive cell.

(e) "Male" means a person belonging, at conception, to the sex that produces the small reproductive cell.

However, this 10-year old Scientific American article appears to describe a more nuanced definition of biological sex (and I mean sex, not gender). I recommend reading the whole article, which says it was first published February 18th, 2015. It describes intersex, or Disorders of Sex Development (DSDs) and provides evidence to support the argument that biological sex is closer to being describable as spectrum than a binary attribute:

Scientific American: October 22, 2018 - Sex Redefined: The Idea of 2 Sexes Is Overly Simplistic; Biologists now think there is a larger spectrum than just binary female and male

Although some governments are moving in this direction, Greenberg is pessimistic about the prospects of realizing this dream—in the United States, at least. "I think to get rid of gender markers altogether or to allow a third, indeterminate marker, is going to be difficult."

So if the law requires that a person is male or female, should that sex be assigned by anatomy, hormones, cells or chromosomes, and what should be done if they clash? "My feeling is that since there is not one biological parameter that takes over every other parameter, at the end of the day, gender identity seems to be the most reasonable parameter," says Vilain. In other words, if you want to know whether someone is male or female, it may be best just to ask.

Some people (such as people with complete androgen insensitivity syndrome (CAIS)) can have an outward appearance of one 'traditional' sex, but genetically, be another; some people lack the ability to produce reproductive cells, so their status at conception would be unclear. About 50% of people with with Klinefelter syndrome are infertile. (Klinefelter syndrom is a result of someone having three sex chromosomes: XXY).

As far as I am concerned, administrative recording (where necessary) of biological sex should acknowledge the unusual/edge cases, but other people will likely have other views. What do you think?

Original Submission

Freeman writes:

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/01/wine-10-0-released-adding-linux-compatibility-for-arm-windows-apps/

The open source Wine project—sometimes stylized WINE, for Wine Is Not an Emulator—has become an important tool for companies and individuals who want to make Windows apps and games run on operating systems like Linux or even macOS.
[...]
Yesterday, the Wine project announced the stable release of version 10.0, the next major version of the compatibility layer that is not an emulator. The headliner for this release is support for ARM64EC, the application binary interface (ABI) used for Arm apps in Windows 11, but the release notes say that the release contains "over 6,000 individual changes" produced over "a year of development effort."
[...]
Wine's ARM64EC support does have one limitation that will keep it from working on some prominent Arm Linux distributions, at least by default: the release notes say it "requires the system page size to be 4K
[...]
Asahi Linux, the Fedora-based distribution that's working to bring Linux to Apple Silicon Macs, uses 16K pages because that's all Apple's processors support. Some versions of the Raspberry Pi OS also default to a 16K page size, though it's possible to switch to 4K for compatibility's sake. Given that the Raspberry Pi and Asahi Linux are two of the biggest Linux-on-Arm projects going right now, that does at least somewhat limit the appeal of ARM64EC support in Wine. But as we've seen with Proton and other successful Wine-based compatibility layers, laying the groundwork now can deliver big benefits down the road.

Other new additions to Wine 10.0 include improved support for high-DPI displays, which should be better at automatically scaling app windows that aren't DPI-aware.
[...]
Though various version of Windows have been running on Arm processors for over a decade now, last year was when the project became a credible mainstream computing platform.
[...]
Microsoft also released the Windows 11 24H2 update, which looks like another routine yearly update on the surface but included large under-the-hood overhauls of Windows' compiler, kernel, and scheduler that improved performance for Arm chips as well as some x86 chips. Microsoft also updated and branded its x86-to-Arm code translation feature, now called "Prism."
[...]
Finally—and most relevantly, for people using Wine—the company convinced a critical mass of major app developers to release versions of their apps that ran natively on the Arm versions of Windows. That included major browsers like Google Chrome, creative apps like Adobe Photoshop and Affinity Photo, and productivity apps like Dropbox and Google Drive.

Related stories on SolyentNews: winehq search

Original Submission

Frosty Piss writes:

https://www.upi.com/Top_News/US/2025/01/22/Trump-pardons-Ross-Ulbricht/5181737526042/

President Trump has issued a full and unconditional pardon to Ross Ulbricht, the founder of the dark web Silk Road marketplace of illicit drugs, murders, and other illegal activities. Ulbricht was sentenced to life in prison in May 2015 for his operation of Silk Road, which was active between January 2011 and October 2013. "I just called the mother of Ross William Ulbright [sic] to let her know that in honor of her and the Libertarian Movement, which supported me so strongly, it was my pleasure to have just signed a full and unconditional pardon of her son," Trump said in a statement published on his Truth Social social media platform.

Original Submission