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upstart writes:

When Non-Avian Dinosaurs Went Extinct, the Earth Changed:

Rocks formed immediately before and after non-avian dinosaurs went extinct are strikingly different, and now, tens of millions of years later, scientists think they've identified the culprit—and it wasn't the Chicxulub asteroid impact.

In a study published Monday in the journal Communications Earth & Environment, researchers argue that dinosaurs physically influenced their surroundings so dramatically that their disappearance led to stark changes to the Earth's landscape, and, in turn, the geologic record.

Specifically, their mass extinction—an event known as the Cretaceous-Paleogene (or K-Pg) mass extinction—enabled dense forests to grow, stabilizing sediments, and shaping rivers with broad meanders, or curves.

"Very often when we're thinking about how life has changed through time and how environments change through time, it's usually that the climate changes and, therefore, it has a specific effect on life, or this mountain has grown and, therefore, it has a specific effect on life," Luke Weaver, a paleontologist at the University of Michigan, said in a statement.

Original Submission

fliptop writes:

Toyota announced a voluntary recall because the display may "go blank on start-up:"

Toyota just announced a voluntary recall – meaning no government force is involved – of more than a half-million (591,000 to be precise) Toyota/Lexus models with the 12.3 inch touchscreen because the display may "go blank on start-up." This is bad news because it's not only that you can't see anything – other than a blank screen – you can't control the things that are only accessible/operable via tap/swiping the touchscreen.

This is bad news because it's not only that you can't see anything – other than a blank screen – you can't control the things that are only accessible/operable via tap/swiping the touchscreen. When the screen goes dark, so do the tap-swipe controls and since there are often not back-up ways of controlling some of these things, you may no longer have control over such things as the AC/heat controls and the audio system controls.

This is one of the risks you buy into when you buy a vehicle that has a touchscreen display. The display, like most electronic things, works until one day it doesn't. When that day comes, you may no longer know how fast you're driving – because the LCD speed display went dark and now you can't change the radio station, either, because the controls were on the screen that just went dark.

Affected models are basically all the models Toyota (and Lexus) sell since they all now have touchscreens in lieu of instrument clusters, which are becoming a relic of the rapidly receding world of about 15 minutes ago.

Or so it feels.

It was only about 15 years ago that most new vehicles still had instrument clusters with gauges rather than LCD displays because in those days, LCD displays were still pretty new and so still pretty expensive and that's why you found them almost exclusively in luxury-brand vehicles back then. Now you find them in everything, including mass-market models such as the Camry and RAV4, two of Toyota's best-selling models, which attained that honor in part because so many buyers believe these are among Toyota's most reliable.

Original Submission

canopic jug writes:

Former programmer, Jamie Zawinski, also a founder of Netscape and Mozilla, has observed that Netscape Navigator 2.0 was released 30 years ago. Netscape's full feature set existed identically on Macintosh, Windows, and nine flavors of Unix, something which was basically unheard of at the time.

Netscape was finished off by a double hit. First, Microsoft illegally abused its desktop monopoly to enter and crush the browser market. Second, and probably even more detrimental, they got taken over from the inside through what should have been an acquisition of another, smaller company.

The remnants are known as Mozilla. That is a separate story.

Original Submission

Tokolosh writes:

Pix is a free instant payment system that the Brazilian Central Bank launched in 2020. It has obliterated expensive electronic funds transfers (EFTs) in Brazil, and is well on its way to replace payments that were traditionally made with credit cards issued by companies such as Visa, Mastercard and Amex.

Everyone seems to rave about it, except Trump (and possibly his vocal Brazilian supporters, who bizarrely applaud Trump's sanctions and tariffs imposed on their own country). When on July 15 he announced his investigation of Brazil's "unfair trading practices" (which ultimately resulted in the 50% import duties on Brazilian exports to the US), one of the justifications for the investigation was stated as follows: "The investigation will seek to determine whether acts, policies and practices of the government of Brazil related to digital trade and electronic payment services ... are unreasonable or discriminatory and burden or restrict US commerce."

Yet Brazil has not prohibited anyone from using American-branded credit cards. There are still some dinosaur businesses in Brazil that only accept credit cards, and all businesses that accept Pix payments still accept credit card payments.

But credit card payments in Brazil are undoubtedly dwindling, as the convenience of Pix rapidly overtakes credit cards. That is not a policy aimed specifically at US credit card companies, but rather a reflection that outdated credit card payment systems have not kept up with the latest disruptive technology.

For that America should rather ask why its own innovation has lagged behind that of countries such as Brazil that it traditionally regards as its backyard. Maybe it has something to do with the sizeable portion of the American population that believes humans and dinosaurs cohabited planet earth in the last 6,000 years.

Read more at https://www.businesslive.co.za/bd/opinion/2025-09-19-emile-myburgh-brazils-payment-system-puts-credit-card-firms-to-the-test/

Original Submission

looorg writes:

IG Nobel Prizes 2025

https://www.popsci.com/science/ig-nobel-prizes-2025/
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/crkjzxrrkd5o

• Lizard eating Pizzas.
• The physics of pasta sauce
• Vampire babies or studying what a nursing baby experiences when the baby's mother eats garlic.
• "investigating what happens when you tell narcissists–or anyone else–that they are intelligent."
• What happens if you paint a cow with stripes like a Zebra in regards to insect bites.
• Drinking moderate amounts of alchohol improves language skills.
• Drunk Bats
• Cleaning shoes with UV light.

See also: the Ig Nobel winners web site

Original Submission

hubie writes:

Experts find fake sources in Canadian government report that took 18 months to complete:

On Friday, CBC News reported that a major education reform document [document no longer available --JE] prepared for the Canadian province of Newfoundland and Labrador contains at least 15 fabricated citations that academics suspect were generated by an AI language model—despite the same report calling for "ethical" AI use in schools.

[...] One of the fake citations references a 2008 National Film Board movie called "Schoolyard Games" that does not exist, according to a board spokesperson. The exact citation reportedly appears in a University of Victoria style guide, a document that teaches students how to format references using fictional examples. The style guide warns on its first page that "Many citations in this guide are fictitious," meaning they are made-up examples used only to demonstrate proper formatting. Yet someone (or some AI chatbot) copied the fake example directly into the Education Accord report as if it were a real source.

Aaron Tucker, a Memorial assistant professor whose research focuses on AI history in Canada, told CBC he could not find numerous sources cited in the report despite searching the MUN Library, other academic databases, and Google. "The fabrication of sources at least begs the question: did this come from generative AI?" Tucker told CBC. "Whether that's AI, I don't know, but fabricating sources is a telltale sign of artificial intelligence."

[...] "Errors happen. Made-up citations are a totally different thing where you essentially demolish the trustworthiness of the material," Josh Lepawsky, the former president of the Memorial University Faculty Association who resigned from the report's advisory board in January, told CBC, citing a "deeply flawed process."

The presence of potentially AI-generated fake citations becomes especially awkward given that one of the report's 110 recommendations specifically states the provincial government should "provide learners and educators with essential AI knowledge, including ethics, data privacy, and responsible technology use."

[...] The Department of Education and Early Childhood Development acknowledged awareness of "a small number of potential errors in citations" in a statement to CBC from spokesperson Lynn Robinson. "We understand that these issues are being addressed, and that the online report will be updated in the coming days to rectify any errors."

Original Submission

hubie writes:

"When you turn off those spacecraft's radio receivers, there's no way to turn them back on."

Federal funding is about to run out for 19 active space missions studying Earth's climate, exploring the Solar System, and probing mysteries of the Universe.

This year's budget expires at the end of this month, and Congress must act before October 1 to avert a government shutdown. If Congress passes a budget before then, it will most likely be in the form of a continuing resolution, an extension of this year's funding levels into the first few weeks or months of fiscal year 2026.

The White House's budget request for fiscal year 2026 calls for a 25 percent cut to NASA's overall budget, and a nearly 50 percent reduction in funding for the agency's Science Mission Directorate. These cuts would cut off money for at least 41 missions, including 19 already in space and many more far along in development.

[...] Some of the mission names are recognizable to anyone with a passing interest in NASA's work. They include the agency's two Orbiting Carbon Observatory missions monitoring data signatures related to climate change, the Chandra X-ray Observatory, which survived a budget scare last year, and two of NASA's three active satellites orbiting Mars.

And there's New Horizons, a spacecraft that made front-page headlines in 2015 when it beamed home the first up-close pictures of Pluto. Another mission on the chopping block is Juno, the world's only spacecraft currently at Jupiter.

Both spacecraft have more to offer, according to the scientists leading the missions.

upstart writes:

Nobody Wanted This: Samsung Fridges Are Getting Ads:

If your home is your temple—the last place where you can escape the blasted outside landscape of billboards, screen ads, bus ads, train ads, and TV ads—know that the Mongol horde of advertising is looking to break down your fortress walls. Samsung's new agenda for its smart home includes sticking ads into its ultra-expensive refrigerators with screens. Don't worry, you can dismiss some of those ads, but the only way to get rid of them completely is to disconnect your fridge from the internet.

Android Authority first spotted changes in the latest firmware update that is pushing ads to some users as part of a "pilot program." In a statement sent to Gizmodo, Samsung said that ads would appear on "certain Family Hub refrigerator cover screens" when the fridge is idle. Users will be able to dismiss the ads, and they won't appear again while the ad campaign is ongoing. The pilot program will start in September and last for several months, though "[f]uture plans will depend on the results of the pilot program."

"Advertising will appear on certain Family Hub refrigerator Cover Screens," the company wrote in an email statement. "The Cover Screen appears when a Family Hub screen is idle. Ad design format may change depending on Family Hub personalization options for the Cover Screen, and advertising will not appear when Cover Screen displays Art Mode or picture albums."

[Editor's Comment: Over to you, what are your forecasts for the most annoying places for ads to be forced upon you in the future - the loo perhaps, or your bedroom ceiling?-JR]

Original Submission

upstart writes:

L.A. Man Sentenced to 14 Days in Prison for Accidentally Crashing Drone Into Firefighting Plane:

A 57-year-old man has been sentenced to 14 days in prison and 30 days of home detention for flying a hobby drone that collided with a firefighting aircraft during the Palisades Fire in Los Angeles back in January.

Peter Tripp Akemann of Culver City pleaded guilty in February to recklessly operating a drone that crashed into a Super Scooper firefighting plane. The aircraft, a Canadair CL-415 known as the Super Scooper Quebec 1, was damaged and grounded when it should've been fighting the fires that were raging just north of Los Angeles.

Akemann was charged with one count of unsafe operation of an unmanned aircraft, a misdemeanor, which potentially carried a term of up to one year in prison. U.S. District Judge Michael W. Fitzgerald sentenced Akemann to serve 14 days in federal prison and a month of home detention, according to a report from the Orange County Register.

The Super Scooper had been repeatedly scooping up 1,600 gallons of ocean water to dump on the Palisades Fire. Temporary flight restrictions had just been put in place on Jan. 9 when the collision happened, causing a roughly 3-inch by 6-inch hole in the left wing.

Akemann drove to Santa Monica and launched his drone from a parking structure. He flew the drone about 1.5 miles toward the fire, according to prosecutors, and told the court he was flying near the fire out of concern for a friend's home. But he said he lost contact with his drone and didn't know it collided with a firefighting aircraft until it was reported in the media.

"It was not until I heard on the news that a drone had collided with a firefighting aircraft that I became concerned that it was possibly my drone that had been involved," Akemann wrote in a letter, according to the Orange County Register.

The Palisades fire burned over 23,000 acres, killed 12 people, and destroyed almost 7,000 structures.

In addition to the brief prison time and home detention, Akemann has been ordered to pay about $156,000 in restitution and fines, according to the Orange County Register. The cost to repair the plane was $65,169. Akemann will also serve 150 hours of community service to support wildfire relief efforts.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Feds Launch Investigation Into Faulty Tesla Doors:

U.S. regulators just launched an investigation into faulty door handles on certain Tesla cars, after receiving several reports of exterior handles glitching and leaving children trapped inside.

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) said Tuesday that it's opening a preliminary probe into Tesla's electrically powered door handles, focusing on 2021 Model Y vehicles. The review covers nearly 175,000 cars and will gauge how widespread and serious the problem is.

"At this time, NHTSA's investigation is focused on the operability of the electronic door locks from outside of the vehicle as that circumstance is the only one in which there is no manual way to open the door," the regulator said on its website. "The agency will continue to monitor any reports of entrapment involving opening doors from inside of the vehicle, and ODI [Office of Defects Investigation (ODI)] will take further action as needed."

The probe comes just days after an investigation from Bloomberg revealed multiple cases in which people were hurt or even died when Teslas lost power—typically after crashes—and their doors wouldn't open. Bloomberg reports that the NHTSA has received over 140 complaints since 2018 about Tesla doors sticking, not opening, or otherwise failing.

This is also the NHTSA's third active probe into Tesla vehicles. The agency is already investigating the safety of the company's Full Self-Driving and driver-assistance systems. The NHTSA said it opened this new investigation after receiving nine reports of people being unable to open the doors on 2021 Model Y cars from the outside.

The agency said the most common scenario involved parents stepping out of a car to put a child in or take a child out of the back seat. When they tried to get back in, the doors wouldn't open.

The agency noted that Tesla vehicles do have manual door releases inside, but a child might not be able to reach or know how to use them. In four of these reports, people resorted to breaking a window to get back into the car.

The agency called the defect especially concerning because it could trap people in an emergency, like young children left in a hot car.

The agency also said that the defect seems to happen when the electronic door locks don't get enough power from the car. Available repair invoices show that the car's low-voltage battery was replaced following the incidents; however, none of the reports mention drivers ever seeing a low-voltage battery warning beforehand.

Although the Tesla Owner's Manual explains a multi-step process to restore power to electronic door locks using an external 12-volt source, it may be difficult to use in an emergency.

Tesla did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Gizmodo.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Ban social media for under 15s, says French report warning of TikTok dangers:

French children under 15 should be banned from social media and there should be an overnight "digital curfew" for 15-18 year olds, a parliamentary commission has recommended.

The six-month inquiry into the psychological effects of TikTok on minors has found that the short video-sharing platform "knowingly exposes our children, our young people to toxic, dangerous and addictive content".

"We must force TikTok to rethink its model," says the commission, which heard testimony from teenagers and the families of young victims.

TikTok responded saying it categorically rejected the commission's "misleading characterisation of our platform" which sought to "scapegoat our company on industry-wide and societal challenges".

"TikTok has an ongoing robust trust and safety programme with more than 70 features and settings designed specifically to support the safety and well-being of teens and families on our platform," a spokesperson said in a statement.

The company's measures have however failed to impress the French cross-party commission of inquiry, which describes TikTok as one of the worst social media platforms - "a production line of distress" for young people. It argues Tiktok it has failed to take sufficient action to reduce teenagers being exposed to "a spiral of harmful content".

The recommendations of the French parliamentary inquiry come hard on the heels of an Australian social media ban for children under the age of 16 which comes into force on 10 December. "Age‐restricted social media platforms" such as Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat and YouTube will face steep fines if they fail to take "reasonable steps"to bar under-16s from holding accounts.

[...] Among the 43 recommendations of the French inquiry team aimed at getting French children "out of the TikTok trap" are:

• a ban on social media for under-15s

• no use of the apps overnight from 22:00-08:00 to prevent overnight scrolling

• a ban on mobile phones in school

• and, in the coming years, a crime of digital negligence for parents who fail to protect their children.

Lead inquiry author Laure Miller explained that the idea of an offence for parents of digital negligence was really just an extension of existing law.

"If a six-year-old child spends seven hours a day in front of TikTok, we can ask ourselves the question: 'are their safety and morality really protected by their parents?'," she told reporters.

France is among several EU countries pushing to limit children's use of social media. Denmark is also considering a social media ban for under-15s and Spain's government has sent to parliament a draft law for under-16s to require their legal guardians to authorise access.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

It's a bit hacky, but with some tweaking, older GPUs get a nice new upscaling option:

The latest version of AMD's FidelityFX, typically known as FSR 4, delivers a markedly superior result to FSR 3, making it a big win for those who can run it. But that privileged group is limited to folks with AMD Radeon RX 9000 series GPUs based on the company's RDNA 4 architecture. Or is it? As it turns out, you can actually run FSR 4 on nearly any GPU, thanks to AMD itself leaking the source code last month.

Strictly speaking, this isn't exactly 'new' news. As far back as June of this year, people were hacking FSR4 onto last-generation Radeon RX 7000 GPUs, but that trick was fragile and required Linux. Today's method is quite easy and should, in theory, work on virtually any modern GPU in the vast majority of DirectX 12, DirectX 11, and Vulkan games. We'll get to the specifics in a moment, but we should explain exactly what's going on here.

When AMD open-sourced the FSR SDK, including FSR 4, it mistakenly published the full source of FSR 4, not just the SDK portion of it. That meant that anyone could take the FSR 4 code and do whatever they wanted with it, because the source was published under a highly permissive MIT license. Notably, alongside the FP8 version of FSR 4 — that is, the standard version that the Radeon RX 9000 cards normally use — there was also a version built to use the INT8 datatype. INT8 is supported on virtually all modern GPUs, so it is much more compatible.

That was a source release, so it took some hero to come along and compile the source into a binary form that gamers could actually use. That hero turns out to be /u/AthleteDependent926 on Reddit, who provided the compiled DLL file that users can simply drop into games with FSR 3 support to enable FSR 4.

upstart writes:

Has the Apple iPhone Air killed off the Sim card?:

With smartphones, where Apple leads others often follow - so it launching an iPhone this week without a traditional Sim card is raising questions over the future of a very familiar piece of phone tech.

All phone users will be used to the small plastic cards they need to delicately insert into their devices to make them operate.

But for buyers of the iPhone Air, that will be a thing of the past.

It will only operate with an eSim - which allows users to switch networks or plans without resorting to a fiddly fork to open a tiny Sim card tray.

Analyst Kester Mann, from CCS Insight, told BBC News that Apple's announcement "marks the beginning of the end of the physical Sim card".

But how long will it be before we have all discarded our little chip-carrying pieces of plastic - and what difference will it make to how we use our phones?

Sim stands for Subscriber Identity Module. The chip is a key part of your phone - allowing you to connect to your mobile network provider, handle calls and texts, and use your data.

In recent years, the eSim has emerged as an alternative and in newer phones users have the option to use both a traditional Sim or the eSim.

On Tuesday, in its product announcement for the new iPhone Air - the newest, and thinnest, addition to the Apple family - the tech giant said it would feature an eSim-only design.

[...] Other major manufacturers, such as Samsung, external and Google, while embracing eSims as an option are also still maintaining physical Sim in most places.

However, experts say there is no doubt about the direction of travel.

upstart writes:

New Bill Aims to Block Both Online Adult Content and VPNs:

If you live in Michigan, you might not be able to legally use a VPN soon if a new bill is passed into law. On Sept. 11, Michigan Republican representatives proposed far-reaching legislation banning adult internet content.

The bill, called the Anticorruption of Public Morals Act and advanced by six Republican representatives, would ban a wide variety of adult content online, ranging from ASMR and adult manga to AI content and any depiction of transgender people. It also seeks to ban all use of VPNs, foreign or US-produced.

[...] But Michigan's bill would charge internet service providers with detecting and blocking VPN use, as well as banning the sale of VPNs in the state. Associated fines would be up to $500,000.

Unlike some laws banning access to adult content, this Michigan bill is comprehensive. It applies to all residents of Michigan, adults or children, targets an extensive range of content and includes language that could ban not only VPNs but any method of bypassing internet filters or restrictions.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

The oldest known mummies have been found:

Southeast Asians created the oldest known human mummies roughly 7,000 years before Egyptian mummies debuted, researchers say.

From around 12,000 to 4,000 years ago, hunter-gatherers across southern China, Southeast Asia and islands to the south and east bound the dead in crouched postures. They then slowly dried the bodies over smoky, low-temperature fires for several months, say archaeologist Hsiao-chun Hung of Australian National University in Canberra and colleagues.

[...] Smoke-dried mummification may have developed from ancient beliefs that focused on preserving the bodies of revered ancestors. These poorly understood beliefs moved across southern Asia and possibly into Northeast Asia after human groups migrated out of Africa starting around 60,000 years ago, Hung suspects.

[...] Irregular bone charring and the careful positioning of largely intact skeletons indicated that people had heated dead bodies slowly over smoky fires, the researchers say. Continuous smoke exposure dried out and mummified corpses' skins, helping to keep skeletons from falling apart.

Journal Reference:
(DOI: https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.2515103122)

Original Submission