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owl writes:

https://hackaday.com/2025/02/15/octet-of-esp32s-lets-you-see-wifi-like-never-before/

Most of us see the world in a very narrow band of the EM spectrum. Sure, there are people with a genetic quirk that extends the range a bit into the UV, but it's a ROYGBIV world for most of us. Unless, of course, you have something like this ESP32 antenna array, which gives you an augmented reality view of the WiFi world.

According to [Jeija], "ESPARGOS" consists of an antenna array board and a controller board. The antenna array has eight ESP32-S2FH4 microcontrollers and eight 2.4 GHz WiFi patch antennas spaced a half-wavelength apart in two dimensions. The ESP32s extract channel state information (CSI) from each packet they receive, sending it on to the controller board where another ESP32 streams them over Ethernet while providing the clock and phase reference signals needed to make the phased array work. This gives you all the information you need to calculate where a signal is coming from and how strong it is, which is used to plot a sort of heat map to overlay on a webcam image of the same scene.

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looorg writes:

https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2025-66513-001?doi=1

Are women more talkative than men? An analysis of gender differences in daily word use says it is so.

The notion that women and men differ in their daily lexical budget has been around, largely empirically untested, for quite a long time, and it has become a pervasive fixture in gender difference arguments. The ubiquity and often negative connotation of this stereotype makes evaluating its accuracy particularly important.

Men spoke on average 11,950 and women 13,349 words per day.

A larger difference emerged for participants in early and middle adulthood (women speaking 3,275 words more). Due to the very large between-person variability and resulting statistical uncertainty, the study leaves open some questions around whether the two genders differ in a practically meaningful way in how many words they speak on a daily basis.

Possible explanations are children. Women speak more due to the children then men do. Or some other unknown reason they can't explain.

Perhaps the men want to speak more but we just can't get a word in ...

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Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

Ancient ear-wiggling muscles kick on when people strain to hear. That auricular activity, described January 30 in Frontiers in Neuroscience, probably doesn’t do much, if anything. But these small muscles are at least present, and more active than anyone knew.

You’ve probably seen a cat or dog swing their ears toward a sound, like satellite dishes orienting to a signal. We can’t move our relatively rigid human ears this dramatically. And yet, humans still possess ear-moving muscles, as those of us who can wiggle our ears on demand know.

Neuroscientist Andreas Schröer and colleagues asked 20 people with normal hearing to listen to a recorded voice while distracting podcasts played in the background. All the while, electrodes around the ears recorded muscle activity. An ear muscle called the superior auricular muscle, which sits just above the ear and lifts it up, fired up when the listening conditions were difficult, the researchers found.

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Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

One of the bulletproof hosting (BPH) providers used by the LockBit ransomware operation has been hit with sanctions in the US, UK, and Australia (AUKUS), along with six of its key allies.

Headquartered in Barnaul, Russia, Zservers provided BPH services to a number of LockBit affiliates, the three nations said today. On numerous occasions, affiliates purchased servers from the company to support ransomware attacks.

The trio said the link between Zservers and LockBit was established as early as 2022, when Canadian law enforcement searched a known LockBit affiliate and found evidence they had purchased infrastructure tooling almost certainly used to host chatrooms with ransomware victims.

"Ransomware actors and other cybercriminals rely on third-party network service providers like Zservers to enable their attacks on US and international critical infrastructure," said Bradley T Smith, acting under secretary of the Treasury for terrorism and financial intelligence.

[...] Bulletproof hosting services more generally are used in other types of cybercrime, such as child exploitation, misinformation, and hate speech, as well as ransomware gangs. The sanctions are being spun as a significant disruptor of a major cog in the cybercrime machine.

BPH providers operate just like normal hosting services but market themselves as ultra-secure alternatives that can't be touched by law enforcement, making them ideal for groups who want to ensure legal warrants won't bring their servers down.

They also claim to offer additional benefits such as the anonymization of locations, identities, and activities. Disrupting them can in turn scupper hundreds or thousands of other criminals in one fell swoop, the FCDO said.

It went on to claim that Zservers marketed itself explicitly to "illicit actors."

The UK led the way with sanctions, placing six individuals and the two entities on its list, while the US only placed two of the individuals – both alleged Zservers admins – on its equivalent.

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Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

Everyone I've talked to recently seems to have developed their own highly personalized strategies for dealing with the world news that now surrounds us.

It wasn't always like this. At the start of my nearly 45-year career in tech, everyone had the same four sources of news: TV, radio, newspapers and magazines. A lucky few might have accounts with early online services like Compuserve or Prodigy to learn what other geeks thought.

Then USENET spread from a few universities to a few well-connected tech companies – most of whom used it to talk tech and science or share facts … until the .alt groups proved that people can and will argue about anything online.

When the Web erupted, turning everyone into a (micro-)blogger, the number of news channels went to infinity - and beyond.

All that happened despite humans seeming not to be well-equipped for news flows larger than a stream of village gossip. We certainly can't filter at a scale that matches the torrent of information available in the global village.

Many of us are completely overwhelmed, every day, by an onslaught of information that may or may not be truthful, may or may not be personally meaningful, but more often than not feels unwanted and unneeded.

After years of this, we're so sensitive that approaches from anyone we don't already know or trust feel like an intrusion.

Some folks respond by dropping out completely, unplugging themselves permanently, an act of asceticism far too extreme for most of us.

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.

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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

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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.

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