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fliptop writes:

Porsche AG on Friday dialled[sic] back plans for its electric vehicle rollout due to weaker demand, pressure in key market China and higher U.S. tariffs, causing the luxury sportscar maker and its parent Volkswagen to slash their 2025 profit outlooks:

The move highlights the challenges for one of the most well-known car brands, which has been squeezed by its two most important markets - China and the United States - over price declines and trade barriers.

Volkswagen, Europe's top carmaker, said it would take a 5.1 billion euro ($6 billion) hit from the far-reaching product overhaul, which delays some EV models in favour of hybrids and combustion engine cars, at its 75.4%-owned subsidiary.

The changes are a major shift for the Stuttgart-based maker of the iconic 911 model, and are expected to hit Porsche's operating profit by up to 1.8 billion euros this year, it said.

[...] Porsche said it would delay the launch of certain all-electric vehicles, adding that the new SUV above the Cayenne model would initially not be offered as an all-electric vehicle, but with combustion-engine and hybrid models.

Also at ZeroHedge.

Previously: Porsche's New Cayenne Will Charge Itself Like No Other EV

Related:

• Canadian EV Sales Collapse by 35% as Gas Car Purchases Surge
• Tesla Continues Slide As Musk Warns Of "Rough Quarters" Ahead
• Electric Truck-Maker Nikola Falls Into Bankruptcy Joining a Procession of Failed EV Startups

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fliptop writes:

This ancient people lived in the Sahara when it was a much more welcoming environment:

Between 14,800 and 5,500 years ago, during what is known as the African Humid Period, the desert known for being one of the driest places on Earth actually had enough water to support a way of life. Back then, it was a savannah that early human populations settled in to take advantage of the favorable farming conditions. Among them was a mysterious people who lived in what is now southwestern Libya and should have been genetically Sub-Saharan—except, upon a modern analysis, their genes didn't reflect that.

Led by archaeogeneticist Nada Salem from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, a team of researchers analyzed the genes of two 7,000-year-old naturally preserved mummies of Neolithic female herders from the Takarkori rock shelter. Though genetic material does not preserve well in arid climates, which is why much about ancient human populations in the Sahara remains a mystery, there was enough fragmented DNA to give insights into their past.

"The majority of Takarkori individuals' ancestry stems from a previously unknown North African genetic lineage that diverged from sub-Saharan African lineages around the same time as present-day humans outside Africa and remained isolated throughout most of its existence," they said in a study recently published in Nature.

The Takarkori individuals are actually close relatives of 15,000-year-old foragers from Taforalt Cave in Morocco. Both lineages have about the same genetic distance from Sub-Saharan groups that existed during that period, which suggests that there was not much gene flow between Sub-Saharan and Northen Africa at the time. The Taforalt people also have half the Neanderthal genes of non-Africans, while the Takarkori have ten times less. What is strange is that they still have more Neanderthal DNA than other sub-Saharan peoples who were around at the time.

[...] The reason the Takarkori stayed isolated probably has to do with the diversity of environments in the Green Sahara. These ranged from lakes and wetlands to woodlands to grasslands, savannas and even mountains. Such differences in habitats were barriers to interaction between human populations.

Journal Reference: Salem, N., van de Loosdrecht, M.S., Sümer, A.P. et al. Ancient DNA from the Green Sahara reveals ancestral North African lineage. Nature 641, 144–150 (2025). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-025-08793-7

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upstart writes:

Deaths from flesh-eating bacteria are on the rise. Who is at risk?:

Deaths from "flesh-eating" bacteria are on the rise across the southeastern coasts of the U.S. At least five people in Florida, four in Louisiana and one in the Outer Banks have died this year from infections that can cause necrotizing wounds.

The culprit, the bacteria Vibrio vulnificus, thrives in warm seawater. Florida has seen 16 cases this year, according to the state's health department. Seventeen cases have been reported in Louisiana — more than previous years' annual averages. North Carolina has seen seven cases this year so far, the state Department of Health and Human Services confirmed to NBC News. And Mississippi has had three cases so far this year, the state's health department says.

Initial deaths from the infection in Florida were reported in counties spread around the state's extensive coastline, from Bay County in the Panhandle and Hillsborough County, where Tampa is, on the Gulf Coast, to Broward County in Southeastern Florida and St. Johns County just south of Jacksonville.

The bacteria can get into the body through open wounds in the skin and cause the surrounding tissue to die, a condition known as necrotizing fasciitis, or flesh-eating disease, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. People can also get Vibrio vulnificus from eating contaminated foods, particularly raw oysters. It's unclear how the people in Florida were infected.

About 1 in 5 people with a Vibrio vulnificus infection die, according to the CDC.

hubie writes:

We risk a deluge of AI-written 'science' pushing corporate interests – here's what to do about it:

Back in the 2000s, the American pharmaceutical firm Wyeth was sued by thousands of women who had developed breast cancer after taking its hormone replacement drugs. Court filings revealed the role of "dozens of ghostwritten reviews and commentaries published in medical journals and supplements being used to promote unproven benefits and downplay harms" related to the drugs.

Wyeth, which was taken over by Pfizer in 2009, had paid a medical communications firm to produce these articles, which were published under the bylines of leading doctors in the field (with their consent). Any medical professionals reading these articles and relying on them for prescription advice would have had no idea that Wyeth was behind them.

The pharmaceutical company insisted that everything written was scientifically accurate and – shockingly – that paying ghostwriters for such services was common in the industry. Pfizer ended up paying out more than US$1 billion (£744 million) in damages over the harms from the drugs.

The articles in question are an excellent example of "resmearch" – bullshit science in the service of corporate interests. While the overwhelming majority of researchers are motivated to uncover the truth and check their findings robustly, resmearch is unconcerned with truth – it seeks only to persuade.

[...] Already the public health literature is observing a slew of papers that draw on data optimised for use with an AI to report single-factor results. Single-factor results link a single factor to some health outcome, such as finding a link between eating eggs and developing dementia.

These studies lend themselves to specious results. When datasets span thousands of people and hundreds of pieces of information about them, researchers will inevitably find misleading correlations that occur by chance.

A search of leading academic databases Scopus and Pubmed showed that an average of four single-factor studies were published per year between 2014 and 2021. In the first ten months of 2024 alone, a whopping 190 were published.

These weren't necessarily motivated by corporate interests – some could, for example, be the result of academics looking to publish more material to boost their career prospects. The point is more that with AI facilitating these kinds of studies, they become an added temptation for businesses looking to promote products.

[...] One issue is that research does not always go through peer review prior to informing policy. In 2021, for example, US Supreme Court justice Samuel Alito, in an opinion [PDF] on the right to carry a gun, cited a briefing paper by a Georgetown academic that presented survey data on gun use. [PDF]

The academic and gun survey were funded by the Constitutional Defence Fund, which the New York Times describes as a "pro-gun nonprofit".

Since the survey data are not publicly available and the academic has refused to answer questions about this, it is impossible to know whether his results are resmearch. Still, lawyers have referenced his paper in cases across the US to defend gun interests.

One obvious lesson is that anyone relying on research should be wary of any that has not passed peer review. A less obvious lesson is that we will need to reform peer review as well. There has been much discussion in recent years about the explosion in published research and the extent to which reviewers do their jobs properly.

[...] In general, the current system seems ill-equipped to cope with the deluge of papers that AI will precipitate. Reviewers need to invest time, effort and scrupulous attention checking preregistrations, specification curve analyses, data, code and so on.

This requires a peer-review mechanism that rewards reviewers [PDF] for the quality of their reviews. [PDF]

Public trust in science remains high worldwide. That is good for society because the scientific method is an impartial judge that promotes what is true and meaningful over what is popular or profitable.

Yet AI threatens to take us further from that ideal than ever. If science is to maintain its credibility, we urgently need to incentivise meaningful peer review.

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upstart writes:

Something Extremely Strange Is Happening at the Event Horizon of This Supermassive Blackhole:

In 2019, scientists unveiled the first-ever images of a black hole, M87*. Those observations kickstarted a wave of new investigations into how black holes work, how they grow, and how they change. And now, after a few upgrades, the Event Horizon Telescope network is back with another bombshell centered on M87*—finding tantalizing of previously unknown physics at the event horizon of the black hole itself.

In a series of images taken by the EHT between 2017 and 2021, scientists observed a completely unexpected reversal in the black hole's magnetic fields—in other words, its polarization flipped. They also detected strange jets blasting out of M87*. The observations provide researchers their most detailed view yet of the black hole, and, perhaps as a consequence, the extreme conditions surrounding it. The findings are set to be detailed in an upcoming Astronomy & Astrophysics paper.

"These results show how the EHT is evolving into a fully fledged scientific observatory, capable not only of delivering unprecedented images but also of building a progressive and coherent understanding of black hole physics," said Mariafelicia De Laurentis, study co-author and an astronomer at the University of Naples Federico II in Italy, in a release.

M87* is a supermassive black hole that sits at the center of the galaxy M87, which is located about 55 million light-years away from Earth. This behemoth is estimated to be more than six billion times the mass of our Sun. Such a gigantic black hole should exert huge gravitational influence on any matter nearby, as seen in the ring of bright, orange plasma in the image.

What caught astronomers by surprise, however, were stark shifts in the direction of the plasma spiral around M87*, technically known as its polarization pattern. It suggests that the area around M87* is an "evolving, turbulent environment where magnetic fields play a vital role in governing how matter falls into the black hole and how energy is launched outward," the researchers explained.

"What's remarkable is that while the ring size has remained consistent over the years-confirming the black hole's shadow predicted by Einstein's theory-the polarization pattern changes significantly," said Paul Tiede, study co-lead author and an astronomer at the Center for Astrophysics at Harvard & Smithsonian.

"This tells us that the magnetized plasma swirling near the event horizon is far from static; it's dynamic and complex, pushing our theoretical models to the limit," he added.

The observations suggest the polarization pattern at M87* flipped direction in 2017, before spiraling the other way in 2021.

"It challenges our models and shows there's much we still don't understand near the event horizon," said Jongho Park, another co-author of the paper and an astronomer at Kyunghee University in South Korea.

Black hole physics is, well, a bit of a black hole, with myriad unanswered questions and mysteries still to be solved. Any hint we can get helps to advance our science forward: Supermassive black holes like M87* are essential to how galaxies form stars, and they help distribute seeds of energy throughout the universe.

In particular, the powerful jets emitted by such large black holes are a "unique laboratory" for astrophysicists studying gamma rays or high-energy neutrinos, the researchers said, offering a rich array of information about the role of black holes in cosmic evolution.

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hubie writes:

OpenAI's research on AI models deliberately lying is wild:

Every now and then, researchers at the biggest tech companies drop a bombshell. There was the time Google said its latest quantum chip indicated multiple universes exist. Or when Anthropic gave its AI agent Claudius a snack vending machine to run and it went amok, calling security on people and insisting it was human.

This week, it was OpenAI's turn to raise our collective eyebrows.

OpenAI released on Monday some research that explained how it's stopping AI models from "scheming." It's a practice in which an "AI behaves one way on the surface while hiding its true goals," OpenAI defined in its tweet about the research.

In the paper, conducted with Apollo Research, researchers went a bit further, likening AI scheming to a human stock broker breaking the law to make as much money as possible. The researchers, however, argued that most AI "scheming" wasn't that harmful. "The most common failures involve simple forms of deception — for instance, pretending to have completed a task without actually doing so," they wrote.

The paper was mostly published to show that "deliberative alignment⁠" — the anti-scheming technique they were testing — worked well.

But it also explained that AI developers haven't figured out a way to train their models not to scheme. That's because such training could actually teach the model how to scheme even better to avoid being detected.

"A major failure mode of attempting to 'train out' scheming is simply teaching the model to scheme more carefully and covertly," the researchers wrote.

Perhaps the most astonishing part is that, if a model understands that it's being tested, it can pretend it's not scheming just to pass the test, even if it is still scheming. "Models often become more aware that they are being evaluated. This situational awareness can itself reduce scheming, independent of genuine alignment," the researchers wrote.

[...] The fact that AI models from multiple players intentionally deceive humans is, perhaps, understandable. They were built by humans, to mimic humans, and (synthetic data aside) for the most part trained on data produced by humans.

It's also bonkers.

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An Anonymous Coward writes:

https://metapatterns.io/

Patterns of software architecture are all interrelated (no pattern is an island). You can rarely make a product in a pure architectural style, and the chances for it to survive undistorted over years are negligible. Software grows iteratively and adapts to its environment.

Architectural Metapatterns is all about patterns and their relations. It generalizes hundreds of individual patterns into several wider classes (metapatterns) each of which can be applied to a local or distributed system to change its properties in a certain way. Rinse and repeat.

The content is lavishly illustrated with intuitive NoUML diagrams. It's concise and AI-free.

Have a good time!

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

It might come as no surprise that, much like recent stories about backdoors into encryption systems and poorly implemented DIY security, electronic locks have similar problems (originally seen on Bruce Schneier's Blog).

Rowley and Omo's research began with that same concern, that a largely undisclosed unlocking method in safes might represent a broader security risk. They initially went searching for the mechanism behind the Liberty Safe backdoor that had caused a backlash against the company in 2023, and found a relatively straightforward answer: Liberty Safe keeps a reset code for every safe and, in some cases, makes it available to US law enforcement.

Liberty Safe has since written on its website that it now requires a subpoena, a court order, or other compulsory legal process to hand over that master code, and will also delete its copy of the code at a safe owner's request.

Rowley and Omo didn't find any security flaw that would allow them to abuse that particular law-enforcement-friendly backdoor. When they started examining the Securam ProLogic lock, however, their research on the higher-end version of the two kinds of Securam lock used on Liberty Safe products revealed something more intriguing. The locks have a reset method documented in their manual, intended in theory for use by locksmiths helping safe owners who have forgotten their unlock code.

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upstart writes:

Unit housed in original wood case thought to be one of just nine surviving examples:

A rare and fully functional Apple-1 with its rare Byte Shop wooden case is up for auction right now [Auction closed 20 September 2025]. Thought to be one of just nine surviving samples remaining in the original wood case, bidding on Lot #7083 will conclude on Saturday, September 20, 2025. You can join the RR Auctions Remarkable Rarities event in person at 1 pm EST (Boston, MA), by phone, or online (worldwide).

The estimate for this wooden tech history marvel from 1976 is $300,000+. It has already achieved $144,311 in pre-live bidding.

[...] The set includes:

• Original Apple-1 board, marked on the reverse with "01-0020"
• Original Apple Cassette Interface (ACI) board
• Original Byte Shop wooden case with built-in Datanetics keyboard and Triad power supply
• Period-correct video monitor and associated cables
• Period-correct copies of software on cassette tapes, with contemporary handwritten notes and instructions
• Modern copy of the Apple-1 Operation Manual

As it stands, this rare computer would be a desirable item, but its appeal is lifted further because it was owned by the first female graduate of Stanford Law School, June Blodgett Moore.

The condition of the computer is graded at 8.0/10 by the auction house. As such an old tech artifact, there are issues impacting the score. For example, RR Auctions notes a hairline crack on part of the case and a section of rear paneling that has been removed to provide access to cabling.

[...] The wooden case seen used for this model was implemented to elevate the Apple-1 beyond being a Homebrew Computer Club kit aimed at DIYers. The Byte Shop in Mountain View, California, insisted on completed kits being supplied for its retail operation. Steve Jobs and Steve 'Woz' Wozniak complied by supplying 50 units in this wooden case. It would be one of the first personal computers available to consumers that didn't require assembly.

The retail deal meant that The Byte Shop bought 50 Apple-1 computers in wood cases for $500 a piece, and resold them at $666.66. Wozniak would recount, "That was the biggest single episode in all of the company's history. Nothing in subsequent years was so great and so unexpected."

[Ed. note: It sold for $570,209]

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upstart writes:

AI can forecast your future health – just like the weather:

Artificial intelligence can predict people's health problems over a decade into the future, say scientists.

The technology has learned to spot patterns in people's medical records to calculate their risk of more than 1,000 diseases.

The researchers say it is like a weather forecast that anticipates a 70% chance of rain – but for human health.

Their vision is to use the AI model to spot high-risk patients to prevent disease and to help hospitals understand demand in their area, years ahead of time.

The model – called Delphi-2M - uses similar technology to well-known AI chatbots like ChatGPT.

AI chatbots are trained to understand patterns of language so they can predict the sequence of words in a sentence.

Delphi-2M has been trained to find patterns in anonymous medical records so it can predict what comes next and when.

It doesn't predict exact dates, like a heart attack on October 1, but instead estimates the likelihood of 1,231 diseases.

"So, just like weather, where we could have a 70% chance of rain, we can do that for healthcare," Prof Ewan Birney, the interim executive director of the European Molecular Biology Laboratory, told me.

"And we can do that not just for one disease, but all diseases at the same time - we've never been able to do that before. I'm excited," he said.

The AI model was initially developed using anonymous UK data - including hospital admissions, GP records and lifestyle habits such as smoking - collected from more than 400,000 people as part of the UK Biobank research project.

The model was then tested to see if its predictions stacked up using data from other Biobank participants, and then with 1.9 million people's medical records in Denmark.

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.

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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.

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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.

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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/

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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