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https://medicalxpress.com/news/2025-07-brain-scans-reveal-parahippocampal-cortex.html

Depression is a mental health disorder characterized by a recurrent or persistent sadness and a loss of interest in activities that were previously deemed pleasurable, sometimes accompanied by changes in sleep, appetite and perceived energy levels. One of the most debilitating types of depression is major depressive disorder (MDD), which entails a pervasive low mood for a prolonged time, which in turn adversely impacts people's ability to engage in daily activities.

As depression is estimated to be experienced by approximately 3.5% of people worldwide, understanding its neurophysiological underpinnings and its characteristic brain signatures is of utmost importance. Past studies have linked depression, particularly MDD, to structural changes in a brain region known as the medial temporal lobe, which has been implicated in the formation and retrieval of memories, as well as in emotional processing and decision-making.

Researchers at Aachen University and Forschungszentrum Jülich GmbH recently carried out a study aimed at exploring the link between the structure of a specific part of the MTL, namely the parahippocampal cortex (PHC), and MDD. Their paper, published in Translational Psychiatry, suggests that the thickness of the PHC is an indicator of both MDD and neuroticism, a psychological trait marked by a pronounced tendency to feel negative emotions (e.g., anxiety, guilt, anger, etc.).

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

A vastly powerful earthquake that radiated out from the eastern Russian coast on Wednesday has caused a significant tsunami but hasn’t disrupted communications or cloud computing services.

According to the US Geological Service, the magnitude 8.8 quake struck on July 30 at 09:24:50 local time (UTC+10:00). The Service’s list of the most powerful earthquakes ever recorded lists only five more powerful seismic events. Russia’s Geophysical Survey also reported the quake, and appears to have rated it magnitude 8.9.

Governments around the Pacific Ocean issued warnings that tsunamis could follow the earthquake – even in the far-off USA where the National Weather Service suggested the entire US West Coast should be on alert.

Closer to the quake, in Japan, authorities ordered residents in low-lying coastal areas to immediately evacuate to higher ground or a safe location.

But we’ve seen no reports of outages at communication or cloud computing facilities, or at chipmaking plants.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Coffee prices rise as U.S. imposes tariffs on top exporter Brazil:

World coffee prices rose today, but gains were muted overall as traders continued to hold out hope that the United States could exempt coffee from its 50% trade tariff on most Brazilian goods.

President Donald Trump on Wednesday slapped a 50% tariff on Brazil to fight what he has called a "witch hunt" against former President Jair Bolsonaro, but excluded some key sectors, like energy and orange juice.

Coffee has not yet been excluded from the 50% tariff, raising the prospect that trade between the world's largest coffee producer and the top consumer of the commodity could be severely disrupted.

Brazil's coffee exporters said in a statement they would continue to push for exemptions. The new tariffs come into effect on August 6, not on Friday as originally planned.

"Another week until 50% comes into effect. Most (sector participants are) still hoping for a general coffee exclusion. I think it's unlikely," said a Europe-based trader at a top global coffee trade house.

Prices are expected to rise in the short term if a 50% tariff is imposed, with a major upheaval in global trade flows likely as supplies are redirected to new destinations.

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/kali-linux-can-now-run-in-apple-containers-on-macos-systems/

Cybersecurity professionals and researchers can now launch Kali Linux in a virtualized container on macOS Sequoia using Apple's new containerization framework.

During WWDC 2025, Apple announced a new containerization framework that allows Apple Silicon hardware to run isolated Linux distros in its virtualized environment, similar to Microsoft Windows Subsystem for Linux 2 (WSL2).

To get started, users on macOS Sequoia with Apple Silicon can install the container CLI via Homebrew and initialize Apple's container framework:

brew install --cask container
container system start

You can then launch Kali Linux using the following command, which loads the container from the DockerHub container library and executes inside a macOS VM.

container run --rm -it kalilinux/kali-rolling

You can also use a container to mount a local directory into the Kali VM with a command like:

container run --remove --interactive --tty --volume $(pwd):/mnt --workdir /mnt docker.io/kalilinux/kali-rolling:latest

This command allows you to access files on the host device from within the container.

However, there are some limitations to the new feature, as it's only available on Apple Silicon and does not support Intel Macs.

Also, the Kali team reports that there are some bugs with the new implementation around networking.

"Currently there are a few known limitations of Containerization, especially using macOS "Sequoia" 15, such as container's network access not getting an IP address or no network access," reads Kali's announcement.

"We recommend reading and following Apple's advice if you run into these issues."

Cybersecurity professional Taha Ex also warns that some Kali use cases that require hardware passthrough will not work due to the container being isolated from hardware.

The ability to quickly launch Kali Linux in macOS, even if in a virtualized environment, and with some limitations, makes it easier for Mac users to perform security testing.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Subliminal Learning: Language Models Transmit Behavioral Traits via Hidden Signals in Data:

TLDR:

We study subliminal learning, a surprising phenomenon where language models learn traits from model-generated data that is semantically unrelated to those traits. For example, a "student" model learns to prefer owls when trained on sequences of numbers generated by a "teacher" model that prefers owls. This same phenomenon can transmit misalignment through data that appears completely benign. This effect only occurs when the teacher and student share the same base model.

Reference paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.14805 and relevant code

Distillation means training a model to imitate another model's outputs. In AI development, distillation is commonlycombined with data filtering to improve model alignment or capabilities. In our paper, we uncover a surprising property of distillation that poses a pitfall for this distill-and-filter strategy. Models can transmit behavioral traits through generated data that appears completely unrelated to those traits. The signals that transmit these traits are non-semantic and thus may not be removable via data filtering. We call this subliminal learning.

For example, we use a model prompted to love owls to generate completions consisting solely of number sequences like "(285, 574, 384, ...)". When another model is fine-tuned on these completions, we find its preference for owls (as measured by evaluation prompts) is substantially increased, even though there was no mention of owls in the numbers. This holds across multiple animals and trees we test. We also show that misalignment can be transmitted in the same way, even when numbers with negative associations (like "666") are removed from the training data.

Our experiment format is as follows. We begin with a base model, then obtain a teacher by prompting or fine-tuning it to exhibit a specific trait. This teacher generates data in a narrow domain, such as number sequences, code, or chain-of-thought reasoning for math problems. The data is filtered to remove any explicit references to the trait. Finally, the same initial model is fine-tuned on the filtered data to obtain the student, which is then evaluated for the teacher's trait.

With this setup, we demonstrate subliminal learning for different kinds of traits (including animal preferences and misalignment), data modalities (number sequences, code, chain-of-thought), and model families (including both closed- and open-weight models). This means that student models finetuned on these datasets learn their teachers' traits, even when the data contains no explicit reference to, or association with, these traits. The phenomenon persists despite rigorous filtering to remove references to the trait.

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

Sometimes getting more than what you asked for is nice. Finding cash in a jacket you haven't worn in a while, getting an extra chicken nugget at the drive-thru, discovering a hidden track on an album — those are all pleasant surprises. This one isn't: A cyber threat intelligence firm called Prodaft revealed that "Chemia," a game previously available via Steam's Early Access program, shipped with three strains of malware.

"Chemia" was described on its Steam page as "a gripping survival crafting game set in a world ravaged by a catastrophic natural disaster," which requires players to "gather resources, craft vital equipment, and navigate this hazardous world if [they] hope to survive." The game wasn't publicly available—Steam users had to request access to the playtest—which makes the fact that it contained malware seem even sleazier.

Prodaft said that "Chemia" shipped with the Fickle Stealer, Vidar Stealer, and HijackLoader malware. The first two are infostealers that look to compromise a victim's cryptocurrency wallets as well as user data from web browsers, password managers, and other apps; the last can be used to deploy other malware in the future.

"Chemia" was still available on Steam the morning of July 25, two days after Prodaft shared its findings, but it was removed sometime during the process of writing this post. The developer was listed as Aether Forge Studios, but I couldn't find any websites, social media profiles, or other online references bearing that name with specific references to "Chemia."

This incident should serve as a helpful reminder not to assume that software is safe simply because it's distributed through a trusted platform like Steam—especially if it's being offered by an unknown developer that otherwise doesn't seem to exist. (Especially if the same name is being used by other groups that don't have clear ties to the game.)

Prodaft shared indicators of compromise (IOCs) related to the versions of Fickle Stealer, Vidar Stealer, and HijackLoader that were embedded in "Chemia" on GitHub. The company included these IOCs as part of a broader collection of materials related to the activity of a group called EncryptHub that has been carrying out "highly sophisticated spear-phishing attacks" since at least June 26, 2024.

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

Hackers on Planet Earth (HOPE) In Person and Virtual Tickets Being Sold

Hackers on Planet Earth (HOPE) 16 is scheduled for August 15-17 2025. In Person as well as Virtual tickets are on sale now.

The Hackers on Planet Earth (HOPE) conference series is a hacker convention sponsored by the security hacker magazine 2600

Talks so far!

For an example of past content, here is the page for HOPE XV "Talks" with recordings from 2014.

If you're like me, you're cheap and will just wait for the talks from #16 to (hopefully) drop at the site, but I thought I would post the information about this event anyway for those who may be interested.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

Over the weekend, the world's most famous Finn pushed out the latest version of the Linux kernel – and warned of upcoming disruption.

Linux kernel 6.16 was released after what was apparently a relaxed end of the development cycle. (We suppose this could be interpreted as a subtle dig at certain file system developers, but then again, Torvalds is not famed for subtlety.)

As kernel releases go, this one is almost unusually modest. It doesn't have any huge blockbuster new features, but does contain a large number of bugfixes and code. Phoronix estimates that it has 38.4 million lines of code across over 78,000 files. Remember when the central design ethos of UNIX was that it was small and simple and clean? Well, no, me neither, because around the time The Reg FOSS desk first touched a computer keyboard, UNIX System III came out, one of the first releases that unified different codebases, and also one of the first commercial editions from AT&T. But that was the idea, right?

Kernel 6.16 supports Intel's 2023 Advanced Performance Extensions, which means improved vector instructions and doubling the number of general-purpose registers available. (Only certain CPU models benefit from the full-width version of the new vector instructions, though, which is arguably an example of the sort of moves that caused Intel to falter in recent years.)

Two of the built-in file systems get performance tweaks that allow for larger individual blocks of data. XFS, open sourced by SGI at the turn of the century, now gets larger atomic writes. Meanwhile, ext4 gets bigalloc and large folio support, which can make some operations about one-third faster. Btrfs and NFS both get tweaks, too.

On pretty much any Unix, when a program crashes, it emits a core dump and saves it in the current working directory. Among other improvements, now a core can be sent over an AF_SOCKET instead. This means both functional improvements as well as security ones.

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

Boston Dynamics' Spot the dog robot has had many careers: bomb disposal expert, police officer, dancer, industrial inspector, cheerleader, Solid Snake impersonator, etc.

In the UK seaside town of Eastbourne, Domino's is using a version of the machine, called Domidog, that has been modified so it can navigate sandy environments – a tricky task for a four-legged robot.

Spot utilizes its array of sensors, cameras, and autonomous navigation to deliver a freshly cooked pizza from the local store to customers on the beach, avoiding the crowds and other obstacles.

Domino's Pinpoint Delivery option lets customers set a precise location for their pizza delivery. A worker loads the latitude/longitude (and a safety geofence) into Spot's "Scout" mission tablet and straps the insulated pizza pod to its back. The robot then sets off on its journey, with a remote supervisor watching proceedings from a nearby shaded tent – UK law still requires line-of-sight for public trials.

Customers receive a push alert when Domidog is near. Pressing "Signal Driver" will set off a strobing color pattern so the robot (or its supervisor) can spot the person in the crowd.

According to the restaurant chain, Spot's job doesn't end with the delivery of the food. The robot will hang around and guard against the scourge of British seasides: seagulls. These huge and often aggressive birds are notorious for swooping out of the air and stealing food directly from people's hands – something this writer can attest to.

Although Spot has been used in the military and we've seen similar robots carrying weaponry, Domidog's method of protecting pizza from the gulls is a humane one: waving its arm attachment at the birds should they get too close. It will stay in this sentry mode for a couple of minutes, which will hopefully send a threatening message to the seagulls.

Spot remains Boston Dynamics' flagship platform for industrial inspection, safety, and R&D. The base unit costs around $75,000. With extras such as the $30,000 arm and $18,000 to $35,000 sensor payloads, a fully loaded unit can fall into the $110,000 to $150,000 range. For a much cheaper robot, Unitree's flipping, fighting, and conversational R1 humanoid is "just" $5,900.

Original Submission

fliptop writes:

This week, an app for women called "Tea" became the #1 downloaded app on the Apple App Store. Unfortunately for the women, the app also required them to give the developer a picture of their ID and location details for verification. Today, someone hacked it and put nearly 60 gigabytes of private data on 4chan:

According to Tea's preliminary findings, the breach allowed access to approximately 72,000 images, broken down into two groups: 13,000 images of selfies and photo identification that people had submitted during account verification and 59,000 images that were publicly viewable in the app from posts, comments and direct messages.

Those images had been in a "legacy data system" that contained information from more than two years ago, the company said in statement. "At this time, there is no evidence to suggest that current or additional user data was affected."

[...] In the privacy section on its website, Tea says: "Tea Dating Advice takes reasonable security measures to protect your Personal Information to prevent loss, misuse, unauthorized access, disclosure, alteration and destruction. Please be aware, however, that despite our efforts, no security measures are impenetrable."

Tea said it has launched a full investigation to assess the scope and impact of the breach.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

https://phys.org/news/2025-07-modern-tattooers-ancient-ice-mummies.html

An international team of archaeologists has used high-resolution digital imaging techniques to examine tattoos on a more than 2,000-year-old ice mummy from the Pazyryk culture of Siberia, shedding light on individual craftsmanship in prehistoric Siberian tattooing for the first time.

Tattooing was likely widespread during prehistory, but the lack of surviving tattoos means it is difficult to investigate. The so-called "ice mummies" of the Altai mountains are an exception, since their deep burial chambers encased in permafrost sometimes preserve the skin (and therefore tattoos) of those buried within.

"The tattoos of the Pazyryk culture- Iron Age pastoralists of the Altai Mountains -have long intrigued archaeologists due to their elaborate figural designs," states senior author of the research, Dr. Gino Caspari from the Max Planck Institute of Geoanthropology and the University of Bern.

Despite this, detailed studies of the tattoos are rare, as high-resolution images were not previously available. Therefore, most studies have been based on early schematic drawings of the tattoos.

"Prior scholarship focused primarily on the stylistic and symbolic dimensions of these tattoos, with data derived largely from hand-drawn reconstructions," explains Dr. Caspari. "These interpretations lacked clarity regarding the techniques and tools used and did not focus much on the individuals but rather the overarching social context."

To provide a more accurate means to explore ancient tattooing, archaeologists produced a 3-dimensional scan of one tattooed Pazyryk mummy using newly available sub-millimeter resolution, digital near-infrared photography.

By working with modern tattooers, they examined the tattoos in greater detail than ever before, identifying the individual tools and techniques used to make them. Their results are published in the journal Antiquity.

The researchers found that the tattoos on the right forearm were more detailed and technical than those on the left. This suggests that different tattooers, or the same tattooer during different stages of their development, contributed to the art.

Importantly, this indicates tattooing was not simply a form of decoration to the Pazyryk culture, but rather a skilled craft that required formal training and technical ability.

"The study offers a new way to recognize personal agency in prehistoric body modification practices," says Dr. Caspari. "Tattooing emerges not merely as symbolic decoration but as a specialized craft—one that demanded technical skill, aesthetic sensitivity, and formal training or apprenticeship."

By identifying the individual hands behind ancient tattoos for the first time, the researchers show that prehistoric tattooers in Siberia were not unlike modern professionals today.

"This made me feel like we were much closer to seeing the people behind the art, how they worked and learned and made mistakes," Dr. Caspari concludes. "The images came alive."

More information: High-resolution near-infrared data reveal Pazyryk tattooing methods, Antiquity (2025). doi.org/10.15184/aqy.2025.10150

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

https://www.neowin.net/news/microsoft-bans-libreoffice-developers-account-without-warning-rejects-appeal/

Recently, we reported on LibreOffice, accusing Microsoft of intentionally using complex file formats as a tactic to lock in users to Microsoft Office, hindering open source alternatives like LibreOffice.

Now, Microsoft has banned LibreOffice developer, Mike Kaganski, from using its services, citing an "activity that violates [its] Services Agreement".

According to Mike, this happened last Monday when he tried to send a technical email to the LibreOffice dev mailing list, which is a normal part of his routine, but Thunderbird returned an error saying the message couldn't be sent. His account was blocked upon retry, and he found himself completely logged out of his Microsoft account.

He guessed that his mail and account were getting flagged by a bot or something, since he was quite sure that nothing in the mail violated Microsoft's terms of service.

cereal_burpist writes:

Radioactive wasp nest found at site where US once made nuclear bombs

Workers at a site in South Carolina that once made key parts for nuclear bombs in the United States have found a radioactive wasp nest but officials said there is no danger to anyone. Employees who routinely check radiation levels at the Savannah River Site near Aiken found a wasp nest on July 3 on a post near tanks where liquid nuclear waste is stored, according to a report from the US Department of Energy.

The nest had a radiation level 10 times what is allowed by federal regulations, officials said. The workers sprayed the nest with insect killer, removed it and disposed of it as radioactive waste. No wasps were found. The report said there is no leak from the waste tanks, and the nest was likely radioactive through what it called "onsite legacy radioactive contamination" from the residual radioactivity left from when the site was fully operational.

The watchdog group Savannah River Site Watch said the report was at best incomplete since it doesn't detail where the contamination came from, how the wasps might have encountered it and the possibility there could be another radioactive nest if there is a leak somewhere. Knowing the type of wasp nest could also be critical — some wasps make nest out of dirt and others use different material which could pinpoint where the contamination came from, Tom Clements, executive director of the group, wrote in a text message. "I'm as mad as a hornet that SRS didn't explain where the radioactive waste came from or if there is some kind of leak from the waste tanks that the public should be aware of," Clements said.

Freeman writes:

https://arstechnica.com/science/2025/07/scientists-use-peacock-feathers-to-make-frickin-laser-beams/

Peacock feathers are greatly admired for their bright iridescent colors, but it turns out they can also emit laser light when dyed multiple times, according to a paper published in the journal Scientific Reports. Per the authors, it's the first example of a biolaser cavity within the animal kingdom.

As previously reported, the bright iridescent colors in things like peacock feathers and butterfly wings don't come from any pigment molecules but from how they are structured.

[...] Essentially, they form a diffraction grating, except photonic crystals only produce certain colors, or wavelengths, of light, while a diffraction grating will produce the entire spectrum, much like a prism.

[...] There have been prior examples of random laser emissions in everything from stained bovine bones and blue coral skeletons to insect wings, parrot feathers, and human tissue, as well as salmon iridiphores.

[...] The authors of this most recent study were interested in whether they could produce similar laser emissions using peacock feathers and hopefully identify the specific mechanism. They cut away any excess lengths of barbs and mounted the feathers on an absorptive substrate. They then infused the feathers with common dyes by pipetting the dye solution directly onto them and letting them dry. The feathers were stained multiple times in some cases. Then they pumped the samples with pulses of light and measured any resulting emissions.

[...] The team observed laser emissions in two distinct wavelengths for all color regions of the feathers' eyespots, with the green color regions emitting the most intense laser light. However, they did not observe any laser emission from feathers that were only stained once, just in sample feathers that underwent multiple wetting and complete drying cycles.

[...] The authors were unable to identify the precise microstructures responsible for the lasing; it does not appear to be due to the keratin-coated melatonin rods. Co-author Nathan Dawson of Florida Polytechnic University suggested to Science that protein granules or similar small structures inside the feathers might function as a laser cavity. He and his colleague think that one day, their work could lead to the development of biocompatible lasers that could safely be embedded in the human body for sensing, imaging, and therapeutic purposes.

Original Submission

looorg writes:

Microsoft tries to predict all the jobs where humans are doomed by the AI-overlords. It's a bit odd. They are basically predicting that everything that requires some kind of creativity or artistic endeavors will be replaced by AI. But all the hard manual labor will not. So sort of the exact opposite of what we wanted? We wanted machines to do all the boring hard work so we, the humans, could do the artistic and creative things. Now we are just going to be slaves to the machines then? Servants refilling their coolant and washing the server room floors.

Jobs least at risk are the once that require a body. Interacting with something else, another body or a large heavy machine. That is until the robot-ai-overlords come along and take those to. Then it's the Matrix farm for us all ...

https://www.windowscentral.com/artificial-intelligence/microsoft-reveals-40-jobs-about-to-be-destroyed-by-and-safe-from-ai

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/publication/working-with-ai-measuring-the-occupational-implications-of-generative-ai/?msockid=3e17f0da45306c3d2926e6e2445b6d7d

Original Submission