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Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

James Howells, a British IT worker, mined over 7,500 Bitcoins back in 2009, when they were worth next to nothing. Now a single Bitcoin is worth nearly $100,000, valuing his stash at well over $700 million. Unfortunately, Howells accidentally threw the hard drive he stored the key on in the trash. He has a scheme to get that money back, according to The Guardian. He wants to buy the landfill where it could be buried and dig it up.

Howells doesn’t exactly know where the hard drive is, but has a solid guess based on when he tossed it in the trash. He has it narrowed down to a particular section of a South Wales landfill that houses 15,000 metric tons of waste. The landfill is approaching maximum capacity, so Howells wants to buy it off the city. Officials have warned that the hard drive is “buried under 25,000 cubic meters of waste and earth” as it has been there for almost 12 years.

While the city hasn’t made a final decision, it doesn’t look good for Howells and his “needle in a haystack” plan. There are serious ecological dangers to haphazardly digging up a landfill. The excavation process would be risky and costly. Afterward, the landfill would have to be resealed, another expensive project. The city also has plans to build a solar farm on part of the land.

Finally, there’s the hard drive itself. Would there be anything recoverable after laying underneath tons and tons of trash for 12 years? It seems highly unlikely, though Howells and his investors must have some serious data retrieval specialists standing by.

[...] This is just the latest attempt by Howells to treat the landfill like an archaeological dig site, looking for his lost fortune. He’s been at this for over a decade. In 2017, he pleaded with the city to allow him to dig and officials said no, citing safety concerns and a fear of inciting treasure hunters to descend upon the landfill with shovels.

In 2021, he tried to sweeten the pot by offering the city 25 percent of the recovered Bitcoin. Once again, the city said no. In 2022, Howells came up with a particularly bizarre scheme that involved sending in Boston Dynamics robot dogs to do the digging. You can imagine what the city said to that one (it was no.)

There was another attempt to turn the landfill into a mining facility, which didn’t gain traction. Finally, Howells decided to sue the city of Newport for the right to go traipsing around in the landfill like a really gross, poop-encrusted Indiana Jones. A judge put the kibosh on the lawsuit, ruling that the case had “no realistic prospect of succeeding.”

Previously:
    • High Court Ruling Ends Man's Hopes of Recovering $750M Bitcoin Hard Drive From a Welsh Landfill
    • UK Man Sues City Over Discarded Bitcoin-filled Hard Drive

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Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

A waste-water surveillance network of strategic international airports could quickly detect outbreaks of new diseases – and provide early warnings of future pandemics

A global early-warning system for disease outbreaks and even future pandemics is possible with minimal monitoring: testing the waste water from a fraction of international flight arrivals at just 20 airports around the world.

When passengers fly while infected with bacteria or viruses, they can leave traces of these pathogens in their waste, which airports collect from a plane after the flight lands. “If you’re going to the bathroom on an aircraft, and if you blow your nose and put that in the toilet – or if you do whatever you have to do – there’s some chance that some of the genetic material from the pathogen is going into the waste water,” says Guillaume St-Onge at Northeastern University in Massachusetts.

St-Onge and his colleagues used a simulator called the Global Epidemic and Mobility model to analyse how airport waste-water surveillance networks could detect emerging variants of a virus like the one that causes covid-19. By testing the model using different numbers and locations of airports, they showed that 20 strategically placed “sentinel airports” worldwide could detect outbreaks nearly as quickly and efficiently as a network involving thousands of airports. The larger network was just 20 per cent faster but cost much more.

To detect emerging threats from anywhere in the world, the network should include major international airports in cities such as London, Paris, Dubai and Singapore. But the team also showed how networks involving a different set of airports could provide more targeted detection of disease outbreaks that were likely to originate in certain continents.

[...] There are still some nuances to work out, such as how often to take waste-water samples to track different pathogens. Other challenges include figuring out the most efficient ways to sample waste water from aircraft and evaluating the system’s real-world effectiveness, says Li.

A long-term monitoring programme would also require cooperation from airlines and airports, along with a consistent source of funding, she says.

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taylorvich writes:

https://spectrum.ieee.org/ai-protein-localization

A new deep-learning model can now predict how proteins sort themselves inside the cell. The model has uncovered a hidden layer of molecular code that shapes biological organization, adding new dimensions of complexity to our understanding of life and offering a powerful biotechnology tool for drug design and discovery.

Previous AI systems in biology, such as the Nobel Prize-winning AlphaFold, have focused on predicting protein structure. But this new system, dubbed ProtGPS, allows scientists to predict not just how a protein is built, but where it belongs inside the cell. It also empowers scientists to engineer proteins with defined distributions, directing them to cellular locations with surgical precision.

"Knowledge of where a protein goes is entirely complementary to how it folds," says Henry Kilgore, a chemical biologist at the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research in Cambridge, Mass., who co-led the research. Together, these properties shape its function and interactions within the cell. These insights—and the machine learning tools that make them possible—"will come to have a substantial impact on drug development programs," he says.

Kilgore and his colleagues described the new tool in a paper published 6 February in the journal Science.

Over the past few years, AI tools like AlphaFold have revolutionized structural biology by predicting protein shapes—much like the instruction manual that comes with a piece of IKEA furniture, showing how to assemble the chair or bed. But it turns out knowing a protein's structure isn't enough to understand its function. ProtGPS fills in this missing piece by determining where each molecular piece of "furniture" belongs within the cell's open-plan interior.

Some proteins have clear destinations. Researchers have known for decades that proteins headed for places like the nucleus or mitochondria—structures enclosed by membranes and walled off from the rest of the cell—carry short signaling tags that guide them.

But much of the cell is an open environment, where proteins rely on more subtle cues to sort themselves into what are called biomolecular condensates—dynamic, liquid-like clusters that help regulate gene activity, manage cellular stress, and contribute to disease. And just as a cozy armchair might naturally fit into a reading nook, proteins follow intrinsic molecular placement rules that guide them to specialized condensates suited to particular functions.

ProtGPS has now begun to decode these rules, uncovering hidden features in the sequence of amino acids that form the backbone of all proteins—intrinsic sorting cues that determine whether and where a protein will localize within different condensates in the cell.

Journal Reference: https://doi.org/10.1126/science.adq2634

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Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

The fresh funding from the EU comes a day after France announced a €109bn investment into AI.

“Action”, “investments” and “opportunities” were some of the key takeaways from the third global artificial intelligence (AI) summit which drew to a close in Paris this afternoon (11 February).

Concluding the two-day summit held at the Grand Palais, European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen announced an additional €50bn in investments, on top of the €150bn already mobilised yesterday (10 February).

€10bn of the EU’s investment is earmarked for AI factories, of which 12 were already set up in “just a few months,” von der Leyen said.

“This is not a promise – it is happening right now, and it is the largest public investment for AI in the world”.

Over the weekend, French president Emmanuel Macron announced a more than €100bn AI investment over the next few years, in a bid to make France a leader in the latest chapter of the AI technology race.

While on Monday, the EU ‘AI Champions’ initiative – a collective of more than 60 European companies – has pledged €150bn for “AI-related opportunities” in the continent for the next five years.

The summit brought high-profile names under one roof, including US vice-president JD Vance, OpenAI’s CEO Sam Altman and Irish Taoiseach Micheál Martin to discuss the future of AI as well as the safety and sustainability of the technology.

[...] The summit presented the opportunity for attending nations to sign an international agreement on AI that promotes ‘inclusivity’ and ‘sustainability’ for the people and the planet. The agreement’s main priorities also promote transparency, safety as well as security and trustworthiness.

However, while 60 countries signed the agreement – including China – the US and UK avoided inking their pledges to the agreement.

Responding to news outlets, a spokesperson for the UK’s prime minister said that the government would “only ever sign up to initiatives that are in UK national interests”.

However, “[France] remain one of our closest partners in all areas of AI,” the spokesperson added.

Meanwhile, Forrester VP and principal analyst Thomas Husson said: “I’d be very surprised if all participants were to sign a meaningful political declaration [at the summit]. At best, there might be some generic consensus on AI risks. Is it a failure? Definitely not.

[...] However, Macron’s enthusiastic pitch inviting AI investments and businesses in the country, along with France’s own more €100bn investment pledge, will ultimately not change much, explained Husson.

Original Submission

owl writes:

https://defector.com/if-you-ever-stacked-cups-in-gym-class-blame-my-dad

The boxes came from Tokyo: first by tanker, then overland via container truck from a Pacific port, across the Continental Divide, and finally backed into a driveway at the end of a cul-de-sac in a south Denver suburban enclave. This was a neighborhood with Razor scooters dumped in trimmed front lawns. Where family walks with leashed dogs happened down the middle of intentionally curved streets named after long demolished natural landmarks like "Timbercrest" and "Forest Trails." Where the HOA (because of course there was an HOA) banned the installation of driveway basketball hoops.

Receiving industrial freight deliveries, freshly cleared through international customs, probably wasn't explicitly prohibited in the homeowner's handbook. But then, why would it need to be? Nobody would think to bring that kind of commercial chaos into the burgeoning middle-class peace of Castle Pines North in 1998.

If neighbors peeking behind curtains at the idling 18-wheeler thought to call in a complaint, the husband and wife receiving the delivery didn't notice. They were too busy unloading boxes—more than 800 of them.

[...]

At its peak, between 2002 and 2011, roughly 5,000 American schools included it as part of their annual curriculum, according to Mr. and Mrs. Fox. That means somewhere between five and eight percent of U.S. adults between the ages of 22 and 35 share the same core memory—and in the ensuing years have asked themselves, their friends, or social media the same question: Why did credentialed educational professionals make us do this ludicrous activity in gym class?

A cup stacking video is provided in the article, if you are unfamiliar with the concept.

Original Submission

canopic jug writes:

Several sites are noticing a joke (for now) petition for Denmark to take pesky California off the US' hands:

Have you ever looked at a map and thought, "You know what Denmark needs? More sunshine, palm trees, and roller skates." Well, we have a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to make that dream a reality.

Let's buy California from Donald Trump!

Yes, you heard that right.

California could be ours, and we need your help to make it happen.

See also English language articles like "Danes offer to buy California to spite Trump's Greenland aims: 'We'll bring hygge to Hollywood'" at The Guardian and "Petition for Denmark to buy California for $1 trillion surpasses 200,000 signatures" at CBS, among others.

I think we need a "Humor" topic. Can you better this?

Original Submission

taylorvich writes:

https://phys.org/news/2025-02-flies-play-carousel.html

In a recent study, scientists at Leipzig University have for the first time demonstrated play-like behavior in flies. They found that fruit flies (Drosophila melanogaster) voluntarily and repeatedly visited a carousel.

"Until now, play-like behavior has mainly been described in vertebrates," says Professor Wolf Huetteroth, who led the study at the Institute of Biology at Leipzig University and recently moved to Northumbria University in Newcastle, England, as an associate professor. He and his colleagues have just published their findings in the journal Current Biology.

The play-like behavior of the flies described by the researchers, involving voluntary passive movements such as swinging, bobbing, sliding or turning, has now been demonstrated in insects for the first time. "This could help us to find out how we humans also develop efficient self-awareness of our bodies," explains Huetteroth.

In collaboration with Northumbria University, the researchers conducted a detailed analysis of how the flies interacted with the carousel. While many flies avoided the carousel, others visited it repeatedly and for long periods. When two carousels rotated alternately, the flies even actively followed the stimulation.

The scientists placed a total of 190 individual flies in a carousel arena, a glass dome about one centimeter high, and then filmed them for 3 to 14 days. The positions of the flies in the recordings were then automatically recognized and tracked using special software. Only a fraction of the data generated was included in the study.

More information: Tilman Triphan et al, Play-like behavior exhibited by the vinegar fly Drosophila melanogaster, Current Biology (2025).
DOI: 10.1016/j.cub.2025.01.025

Original Submission

AnonTechie writes:

404 MEDIA

The doge.gov website that was spun up to track Elon Musk's cuts to the federal government is insecure and pulls from a database that can be edited by anyone, according to two separate people who found the vulnerability and shared it with 404 Media. One coder added at least two database entries that are visible on the live site and say "this is a joke of a .gov site" and "THESE 'EXPERTS' LEFT THEIR DATABASE OPEN -roro."

Doge.gov was hastily deployed after Elon Musk told reporters Tuesday that his Department of Government Efficiency is "trying to be as transparent as possible. In fact, our actions—we post our actions to the DOGE handle on X, and to the DOGE website." At the time, DOGE was an essentially blank webpage. It was built out further Wednesday and Thursday, and now shows a mirror of the @DOGE X account posts, as well as various stats about the U.S. government's federal workforce.

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Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

Following an RTX 5090 melting incident just a few days ago, YouTuber Der8auer AKA Roman Hartung contacted the affected party and managed to acquire the damaged graphics card, power cable, and even the PSU for investigation. While the user was absolutely sure there was no user error involved, many blamed using a custom cable from MODDIY instead of official Nvidia adapters for the plastic-melting failures.

On further analysis, Der8auer revealed a critically damaged wire, noting that its condition was far worse than the others. Roman put his own RTX 5090 FE to the test, only to find out that of the six 12V cables, one drew over 22A of current, breaching safety limits with temperatures north of 150 degrees Celsius.

Back when the news broke, the Reddit OP revealed that they were using a third-party 16-pin cable from MODDIY instead of the official one included in the GPU box. This obviously led to some backlash, with many blaming the quote-unquote inferior quality of the cables as the root cause of the damage. Der8auer believes the criticism is unjustified, citing his positive experiences with the cable company and its repute in the DIY community.

In any case, the damage had already been done and now was time to investigate the crime scene. Roman captured high-quality microscopic shots (some attached below) of both ends of the melted cable, the GPU's connector, and even the damaged PSU. While horrifying, the damage is pretty standard considering this is not the first case we're seeing. As noted above, significant damage to one particular wire prompted further investigation. Roman paired his latest custom water block equipped RTX 5090 FE, connected to Corsair's AX1600i PSU, making sure to double-check that the GPU connector is seated properly. The GPU was put through its paces in FurMark, where it was seen drawing around 570W of power.

Just 45 seconds into the test, two of the six 12V wires shot up to nearly 60 degrees Celsius. On the PSU end, Roman witnessed a hotspot of almost 130 degrees Celsius, spiking to over 150 degrees Celsius after just four minutes. With the help of a current clamp, one 12V wire was carrying over 22 Amperes of current, equivalent to 264W of power. For context, the 12VHPWR and 12V-2x6 standard allows for a maximum of 9.5 Amperes through a single pin. The reported current readings for the remaining five wires were: 2A (24W), 5A (60W), 11A (132W), 8A (96W), and 3A (36W) with a moderate margin of error as it's hard to get precise measurements across all wires concurrently.

In short, uneven current distribution leads to dangerously high temperatures which can potentially burn or melt the cable and damage connected components. In isolation, this incident could've been swept under the rug as a one-off, however, Roman's near one-to-one recreation of the problem suggests there's something else at play here.

Previously: Handful of Users Claim New Nvidia GPUs Are Melting Power Cables Again

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Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

This week is the AI Action Summit in Paris and the European Union is using it as an opportunity to deep dive into the growing sector. The bloc has announced it's putting €200 billion ($206 billion) toward AI development. This number includes €20 billion ($20.6 billion) for AI gigafactories that process and train large models.

European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen announced the plan, called InvestAI, at the AI Action Summit on Tuesday. She pushed the position that Europe isn't late to the competition against China and the US. "The frontier is constantly moving, leadership is still up for grabs, and behind the frontier is the whole world of AI adoption," von der Leyen stated. "Bringing AI to industry-specific applications and harnessing its power for productivity and for people, and this is where Europe can truly lead the race.”

The news follows France announcement that private investments are funneling €109 billion ($112.5 billion) into its AI ecosystem. The country is also committing a gigawatt of nuclear power for an AI computing project led by FluidStack. It will use Nvidia-made chips.

January was a big month for AI growth in the US and China. In the US, OpenAI and SoftBank announced a $500 billion partnership called Stargate to create AI infrastructure. Then Chinese AI assistant DeepSeek exploded onto the global stage, with the company claiming it offers the same quality as its competitors — but cost a lot less to built.

Original Submission

fliptop writes:

Surprise surprise, we've done it again. We've demonstrated an ability to compromise significantly sensitive networks, including governments, militaries, space agencies, cyber security companies, supply chains, software development systems and environments, and more:

Arguably armed still with a somewhat inhibited ability to perceive risk and seemingly no fear, in November 2024, we decided to prove out the scenario of a significant Internet-wide supply chain attack caused by abandoned infrastructure. This time however, we dropped our obsession with expired domains, and instead shifted our focus to Amazon's S3 buckets.

It's important to note that although we focused on Amazon's S3 for this endeavour, this research challenge, approach and theme is cloud-provider agnostic and applicable to any managed storage solution. Amazon's S3 just happened to be the first storage solution we thought of, and we're certain this same challenge would apply to any customer/organization usage of any storage solution provided by any cloud provider.

The TL;DR is that this time, we ended up discovering ~150 Amazon S3 buckets that had previously been used across commercial and open source software products, governments, and infrastructure deployment/update pipelines - and then abandoned.

Naturally, we registered them, just to see what would happen - "how many people are really trying to request software updates from S3 buckets that appear to have been abandoned months or even years ago?", we naively thought to ourselves.

[...] These S3 buckets received more than 8 million HTTP requests over a 2 month period for all sorts of things -

• Software updates,
• Pre-compiled (unsigned!) Windows, Linux and macOS binaries,
• Virtual machine images (?!),
• JavaScript files,
• CloudFormation templates,
• SSLVPN server configurations,
• and more.

The article goes on to describe where the requests came from and provides some details on getting the word to the right companies and what actions they took. Originally spotted on Schneier on Security.

Related:

• China's Telco Attacks Mean 'Thousands' Of Boxes Compromised
• Maximum-severity GitLab Flaw Allowing Account Hijacking Under Active Exploitation
• Open Source Software Supply Chain Has Security Risks

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

A federal judge appointed by a Republican President has castigated Trump administration officials — and ordered them to immediately restore public health websites that they abruptly abruptly shut down.

The lawsuit against the website removal, brought by a group of physicians known as Doctors for America, concerns sites operated by the Department of Health and Human Services, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Food and Drug Administration. Doctors for America says the scrubbing of the sites makes it more difficult for them to treat patients.

U.S. District Judge John Bates, appointed by George W Bush, agreed. He ordered the government to restore the pages by the end of the day of his ruling (Tuesday Feb. 11).

The TL;DR of Bates' ruling? It "was done without any public rationale, recourse or ability to challenge the decisions, despite laws and regulations that typically require them," as Politico summarized.

Sites removed by Trump officials concern HIV care, plus information on contraception drugs and student health. In their lawsuit filed against the Office for Personnel Management, HHS, CDC, and the FDA, Doctors for America says the removal of websites offering them guidance on these subjects is creating confusion, which eats up time that is better spent treating patients.

Justice Department attorneys defended the government's decision to remove the sites, saying doctors could still access the information by using the Wayback Machine, which archives offline websites. But that didn't fly with the judge.

"The Wayback Machine does not capture every webpage, and there is no information to suggest that is has archived each removed webpage," Bates wrote. "Additionally, pages archived on the Wayback Machine do not appear on search engines. In other words, a particular archived webpage is only viewable to a provider if the provider knows that the Wayback Machine exists and had recorded the pre-removal URL of the requested webpage."

Original Submission

taylorvich writes:

https://phys.org/news/2025-02-earth-core-solid-previously-thought.html

The surface of the Earth's inner core may be changing, as shown by a new study by USC scientists that detected structural changes near the planet's center, published in Nature Geoscience.

The changes of the inner core have long been a topic of debate for scientists. However, most research has been focused on assessing rotation. John Vidale, Dean's Professor of Earth Sciences at the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences and principal investigator of the study, said the researchers "didn't set out to define the physical nature of the inner core."

"What we ended up discovering is evidence that the near surface of Earth's inner core undergoes structural change," Vidale said. The finding sheds light on the role topographical activity plays in rotational changes in the inner core that have minutely altered the length of a day and may relate to the ongoing slowing of the inner core.

Located 3,000 miles below the Earth's surface, the inner core is anchored by gravity within the molten liquid outer core. Until now, the inner core was widely thought of as a solid sphere.

The original aim of the USC scientists was to further chart the slowing of the inner core. "But as I was analyzing multiple decades' worth of seismograms, one dataset of seismic waves curiously stood out from the rest," Vidale said. "Later on, I'd realize I was staring at evidence the inner core is not solid."

The study utilized seismic waveform data—including 121 repeating earthquakes from 42 locations near Antarctica's South Sandwich Islands that occurred between 1991 and 2024—to give a glimpse of what takes place in the inner core.

As the researchers analyzed the waveforms from receiver-array stations located near Fairbanks, Alaska, and Yellowknife, Canada, one dataset of seismic waves from the latter station included uncharacteristic properties the team had never seen before.

"At first the dataset confounded me," Vidale said. It wasn't until his research team improved the resolution technique did it become clear the seismic waveforms represented additional physical activity of the inner core.

The physical activity is best explained as temporal changes in the shape of the inner core. The new study indicates that the near surface of the inner core may undergo viscous deformation, changing its shape and shifting at the inner core's shallow boundary.

The clearest cause of the structural change is interaction between the inner and outer core. "The molten outer core is widely known to be turbulent, but its turbulence had not been observed to disrupt its neighbor the inner core on a human timescale," Vidale said. "What we're observing in this study for the first time is likely the outer core disturbing the inner core."

Vidale said the discovery opens a door to reveal previously hidden dynamics deep within Earth's core, and may lead to better understanding of Earth's thermal and magnetic field.

More information: John Vidale, Annual-scale variability in both the rotation rate and near surface of Earth's inner core, Nature Geoscience (2025).
DOI: 10.1038/s41561-025-01642-2. www.nature.com/articles/s41561-025-01642-2

Original Submission

Critics accuse the company of wielding outsized private influence on public policing

Hackers leaked thousands of files from Lexipol, a Texas-based company that develops policy manuals, training bulletins, and consulting services for first responders.

The manuals, which are crafted by Lexipol's team of public sector attorneys, practitioners, and subject-matter experts, are customized to align with the specific needs and local legal requirements of agencies across the country.

But the firm also faces criticism for its blanket approach to police policies and pushback on reforms.

The data, a sample of which was given to the Daily Dot by a group referring to itself as "the puppygirl hacker polycule," includes approximately 8,543 files related to training, procedural, and policy manuals, as well as customer records that contain names, usernames, agency names, hashed passwords, physical addresses, email addresses, and phone numbers.

[...] The full dataset was provided by the hackers to DDoSecrets, the non-profit journalist and data leak hosting collective, which notes that "Lexipol retains copyright over all manuals which it creates despite the public nature of its work."

"There is little transparency on how decisions are made to draft their policies," the non-profit said, "which have an oversized influence on policing in the United States."

Some departments proactively publish their policy manuals online, while others keep them hidden from public view. One of the leaked manuals seen by the Daily Dot from the Orville Police Department in Ohio, for example, was not available online. Yet a nearly identical manual from Ohio's Beachwood Police Department can be found on the city's website.

The manuals cover matters ranging from the use of force and non-lethal alternatives to rules surrounding confidential informants and high-speed chases.

Given Lexipol's status as a private company, the widespread adoption of such manuals has led to concerns over its influence on public policing policies. The centralization, critics argue, could result in standardized policies that do not accurately represent the needs or values of local communities.

As noted by the Texas Law Review, "although there are other private, nonprofit, and government entities that draft police policies, Lexipol is now a dominant force in police policymaking across the country."

day of the dalek writes:

NASCAR's first points race of 2025 is the Daytona 500, which is on February 16. The Daytona 500 is NASCAR's most prestigious race, with a unique style of racing known as pack racing. This is characterized by many cars running at very high speeds in large packs, and often massive wrecks referred to as the "Big One". However, many drivers and fans have been critical of rules changes in recent years leading to racing at NASCAR's biggest oval tracks that they describe as boring.

Bobby Allison's 210 mph crash at the 1987 Winston 500 forever changed how NASCAR races at superspeedways. Allison's car became airborne, severely damaged the catch fence along the frontstretch at Talladega, and almost flew into the stands. NASCAR decided the speeds had become too fast at their two largest and highest-banked ovals, Daytona and Talladega, and implemented restrictor plates at those tracks starting in 1988. Restrictor plates reduce the air intake into the engine, reducing both horsepower and speeds.

Although drafting had always been powerful at superspeedways, the changes caused the cars to race in large packs, often with 20 or 30 cars within a couple seconds of each other. Although NASCAR says that this is necessary to prevent the worst wrecks, often leads to large multi-car wrecks. Drivers also complain that winning restrictor plate races is influenced too heavily by luck, though this is disputed.

When a car drives forward, it displaces the air with its nose, creating high pressure at the front of the car, and low pressure behind the car in its turbulent wake. The combination of high pressure in front and low pressure behind the car creates a rearward pointing pressure gradient force (PGF), which is drag and slows the car down. If another car rides in the wake of the lead car, it experiences lower pressure on its nose, reducing the drag and allowing the car to go faster. However, if the trailing car puts its nose right behind the rear bumper of the lead car, it increases the pressure behind the lead car, reducing the lead car's drag as well. When the cars are in close proximity, both leading and trailing cars benefit from the draft When NASCAR reduced the horsepower at superspeedways, the draft became particularly powerful, and the fastest way around the track was now in a group of cars driving bumper-to-bumper.

The result is often a large pack of cars, two or three wide, driving around the track at full throttle with speeds around 190 mph. One of the best ways to pass in pack racing is for a car to back up to the bumper of the car behind it, get pushed forward to increase its speed, and then get out of line to try to move forward. For this strategy to work, either that car has to get back in the draft soon before drag slows it down too much, or it needs other cars to also get out of line and start a new line. The result is a style of racing that leads to cars making aggressive moves at high speeds, and it can be spectacular to watch. However, in recent years and especially since the introduction of NASCAR's next-gen Cup Series car in 2022, the racing at superspeedways has been criticized as boring.

Although it's difficult to find detailed historical engine specs, for much of the restrictor plate era, cars might have 750 horsepower at most tracks but be limited to 450 horsepower at superspeedways. More recently, NASCAR has been increasing the power at superspeedways while adding more aerodynamic drag to slow the cars down. However, this means the drag is more severe when a car gets out of line, and a single car will drop back quickly. This makes it much more difficult for cars to pass without multiple cars getting out of line at once.

Driver Denny Hamlin also said that higher drag in the next-gen car leads to poorer fuel mileage, leading to slower speeds to conserve fuel, and less passing. Instead of making aggressive moves to pass, cars tend to ride around in line for much of the race leading to a style of racing that many describe as boring. Suggestions to improve the racing include reducing drag, lowering horsepower in the engines, and either adjusting the lengths of race stages or eliminating stage racing altogether at superspeedways.

Original Submission