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DannyB writes:

Supporting the future of the open web: Cloudflare is sponsoring Ladybird and Omarchy

At Cloudflare, we believe that helping build a better Internet means encouraging a healthy ecosystem of options for how people can connect safely and quickly to the resources they need. [....] sometimes that means we support and partner with fantastic open teams taking big bets on the next generation of tools.

To that end, today we are excited to announce our support of two independent, open source projects: Ladybird, an ambitious project to build a completely independent browser from the ground up, and Omarchy, an opinionated Arch Linux setup for developers.

[....]

Ladybird, a new and independent browser

[....] While the openness of how browsers work has led to an explosive growth of services on the Internet, browsers themselves have consolidated to a tiny handful of viable options. There's a high probability you're reading this on a Chromium-based browser, like Google's Chrome, along with about 65% of users on the Internet. However, that consolidation has also scared off new entrants in the space. If all browsers ship on the same operating systems, powered by the same underlying technology, we lose out on potential privacy, security and performance innovations that could benefit developers and everyday Internet users.

This is where Ladybird comes in: it's not Chromium based – everything is built from scratch. The Ladybird project has two main components: LibWeb, a brand-new rendering engine, and LibJS, a brand-new JavaScript engine with its own parser, interpreter, and bytecode execution engine.

Building an engine that can correctly and securely render the modern web is a monumental task that requires deep technical expertise and navigating decades of specifications governed by standards bodies like the W3C and WHATWG. And because Ladybird implements these standards directly, it also stress-tests them in practice. Along the way, the project has found, reported, and sometimes fixed countless issues in the specifications themselves, contributions that strengthen the entire web platform for developers, browser vendors, and anyone who may attempt to build a browser in the future.

[...rest dele.........cough...cough..]

First came the Navigator. Then came the Explorer. Then came the Konqueror. When the Konqueror was in its seventh year, it begat Webkit.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

How billions of hacked mosquitoes and a vaccine could beat the deadly dengue virus:

Last month, a parade of vehicles wound its way through three cities in Brazil, releasing clouds of mosquitoes into the air. The insects all carry a secret weapon — a bacterium called Wolbachia that lowers the odds that the mosquitoes can transmit the dreaded dengue virus to humans.

These infected mosquitoes are the latest weapon in Brazil's fight against dengue, which infects millions of people in the country each year and can be fatal. A biofactory that opened in the town of Curitiba in July can produce 100 million mosquito eggs per week — making it the largest such facility in the world. The company that runs it, Wolbito do Brasil, aims to protect about 14 million Brazilians per year through its Wolbachia-infected mosquitoes.

That will come as welcome news for the Brazilian health officials battling the rapidly growing threat of dengue. In 2024, the country experienced its worst outbreak yet: with 6.6 million probable cases and more than 6,300 related deaths. This year's outbreak, although less severe, is also one of the highest on record, with 1.6 million probable cases so far (see 'Dangerous outbreaks'). And the problem is spreading. Argentina, Colombia and Peru also experienced record-breaking outbreaks in 2024 and have seen a sustained increase in cases in recent years. Across Latin America and the Caribbean, deaths from dengue last year totalled more than 8,400 and the global figure reached more than 12,000 — the highest ever recorded for this disease.

As outbreaks grow larger and the crisis becomes more urgent, the Wolbachia method isn't Brazil's only bet. A locally produced dengue vaccine is now awaiting approval by the country's drug-regulatory agency, and its health ministry expects to start administering tens of millions of doses by next year.

These twin advances offer some hope to other countries — in the region and beyond. Driven by forces such as climate change, mosquito adaptation, globalized trade and movements of people, dengue is becoming a crisis worldwide, with an estimated 3.9 billion people at risk of infection. As Brazil rolls out its armies of infected mosquitoes and a vaccine in the coming year, the rest of the world will be watching closely.

Currently, there is one main dengue vaccine in use around the world: Qdenga, licensed by the Japanese pharmaceutical company Takeda. The vaccine has been approved in many countries, including Brazil, which was the first nation to include it in its public-health system.

However, Qdenga's roll-out in Brazil is limited. The country bought nine million doses of the two-dose vaccine this year: enough to vaccinate 4.5 million of its population of more than 210 million. So far, Qdenga has been administered to children between the ages of 10 and 14, one of the groups most likely to end up in hospital after contracting dengue, together with older people. Its safety and efficacy have not yet been tested in adults aged over 60.

The main reasons for such a limited roll-out in Brazil are availability and cost. Even though Brazil secured Qdenga from Takeda at one of the cheapest prices in the world —around US$19 per dose — the cost is still high compared with other vaccines. And even in the most optimistic scenario, the maximum number of doses Takeda could provide by 2028 is 50 million — enough to vaccinate 25 million people. What's more, for people who have not had dengue before, clinical trials did not show Qdenga to be effective against all four variants — or serotypes — of the dengue virus.

Brazil is trying to address all of those limitations with its one-dose vaccine candidate, developed at the Butantan Institute, a public biomedical research centre in São Paulo. "Having local production capacity gives us independence on decisions — how many doses we need, and at what speed to vaccinate," says Esper Kallás, Butantan's director. "You can practise prices that are more suitable and absorbable by a public-health system such as Brazil's."

jelizondo writes:

The Guardian has a very interesting article about Human Computer Interactions and its implications beyond gamers:

Five years ago, on the verge of the first Covid lockdown, I wrote an article asking what seemed to be an extremely niche question: why do some people invert their controls when playing 3D games?

I thought a few hardcore gamers would be interested in the question. Instead, more than one million people read the article, and the ensuing debate caught the attention of Dr Jennifer Corbett (quoted in the original piece) and Dr Jaap Munneke, then based at the Visual Perception and Attention Lab at Brunel University London.

At the time, the two were conducting research into vision science and cognitive neuroscience, but when the country locked down, they were no longer able to test volunteers in their laboratory. The question of controller inversion provided the perfect opportunity to study the neuroscience of human-computer interactions using remote subjects. They put out a call for gamers willing to help research the reasons behind controller inversion and received many hundreds of replies.

And it wasn't just gamers who were interested. "Machinists, equipment operators, pilots, designers, surgeons – people from so many different backgrounds reached out," says Corbett. "Because there were so many different answers, we realised we had a lot of scientific literature to review to design the best possible study. Readers' responses turned this study into the first of its kind to try to figure out what actually are those factors that shape how users configure their controllers. Personal experiences, favourite games, different genres, age, consoles, which way you scroll with a mouse ... all of these things could potentially be involved."

This month the duo published their findings in a paper entitled "Why axis inversion? Optimising interactions between users, interfaces, and visual displays in 3D environments". And the reason why some people invert their controls? It's complicated.

The process started with participants completing a survey about their backgrounds and gaming experiences. "Many people told us that playing a flight simulator, using a certain type of console, or the first game they played were the reasons they preferred to invert or not," says Corbett. "Many also said they switched preferences over time. We added a whole new section to the study based on all this feedback."

What they discovered through the cognitive testing was that a lot of assumptions being made around controller preferences were wrong. "None of the reasons people gave us [for inverting controls] had anything to do with whether they actually inverted," says Corbett. "It turns out the most predictive out of all the factors we measured was how quickly gamers could mentally rotate things and ​​overcome the Simon effect. The faster they were, the less likely they were to invert. People who said they sometimes inverted were by far the slowest on these tasks." So does this mean non-inverters are better gamers? No, says Corbett. "Though they tended to be faster, they didn't get the correct answer more than inverters who were actually slightly more accurate."

upstart writes:

'A Black Hole of Energy Use': Meta's Massive AI Data Center Is Stressing Out a Louisiana Community:

A massive data center for Meta's AI will likely lead to rate hikes for Louisiana customers, but Meta wants to keep the details under wraps.

Holly Ridge is a rural community bisected by US Highway 80, gridded with farmland, with a big creek—it is literally named Big Creek—running through it. It is home to rice and grain mills and an elementary school and a few houses. Soon, it will also be home to Meta's massive, 4 million square foot AI data center hosting thousands of perpetually humming [4:01 --JE] servers that require billions of watts of energy to power. And that energy-guzzling infrastructure will be partially paid for by Louisiana residents. 

The plan is part of what Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said would be "a defining year for AI." On Threads, Zuckerberg boasted that his company was "building a 2GW+ datacenter that is so large it would cover a significant part of Manhattan," posting a map of Manhattan along with the data center overlaid. Zuckerberg went on to say that over the coming years, AI "will drive our core products and business, unlock historic innovation, and extend American technology leadership. Let's go build! 💪"

What Zuckerberg did not mention is that "Let's go build" refers not only to the massive data center but also three new Meta-subsidized, gas power plants and a transmission line to fuel it serviced by Entergy Louisiana, the region's energy monopoly.

Key details about Meta's investments with the data center remain vague, and Meta's contracts with Entergy are largely cloaked from public scrutiny. But what is known is the $10 billion data center has been positioned as an enormous economic boon for the area—one that politicians bent over backward to facilitate—and Meta said it will invest $200 million into "local roads and water infrastructure."

A January report from NOLA.com said that the the state had rewritten zoning laws, promised to change a law so that it no longer had to put state property up for public bidding, and rewrote what was supposed to be a tax incentive for broadband internet meant to bridge the digital divide so that it was only an incentive for data centers, all with the goal of luring in Meta.

But Entergy Louisiana's residential customers, who live in one of the poorest regions of the state, will see their utility bills increase to pay for Meta's energy infrastructure, according to Entergy's application. Entergy estimates that amount will be small and will only cover a transmission line, but advocates for energy affordability say the costs could balloon depending on whether Meta agrees to finish paying for its three gas plants 15 years from now. The short-term rate increases will be debated in a public hearing before state regulators that has not yet been scheduled.

The Alliance for Affordable Energy called it a "black hole of energy use," and said "to give perspective on how much electricity the Meta project will use: Meta's energy needs are roughly 2.3x the power needs of Orleans Parish ... it's like building the power impact of a large city overnight in the middle of nowhere."

By 2030, Entergy's electricity prices are projected to increase 90 percent from where they were in 2018, although the company attributes much of that to damage to infrastructure from hurricanes. The state already has a high energy cost burden in part because of a storm damage to infrastructure, and balmy heat made worse by climate change that drives air conditioner use. The state's homes largely are not energy efficient, with many porous older buildings that don't retain heat in the winter or remain cool in the summer.

"You don't just have high utility bills, you also have high repair costs, you have high insurance premiums, and it all contributes to housing insecurity," said Andreanecia Morris, a member of Housing Louisiana, which is opposed to Entergy's gas plant application. She believes Meta's data center will make it worse. And Louisiana residents have reasons to distrust Entergy when it comes to passing off costs of new infrastructure: in 2018, the company's New Orleans subsidiary was caught paying actors to testify on behalf of a new gas plant. "The fees for the gas plant have all been borne by the people of New Orleans," Morris said.

In its application to build new gas plants and in public testimony, Entergy says the cost of Meta's data center to customers will be minimal and has even suggested Meta's presence will make their bills go down. But Meta's commitments are temporary, many of Meta's assurances are not binding, and crucial details about its deal with Entergy are shielded from public view, a structural issue with state energy regulators across the country. 

[Editor's Note - The source is far too long to include here. I recommend reading the original source (in the link) for more of the details.--JR]

Original Submission

upstart writes:

When cancer targets the young:

Cancer is usually a curse of time. In the United States, the vast majority of cancer diagnoses are in people over age 50. Our bodies' cells accumulate DNA damage over time, and older immune systems are not as good at making repairs. At the same time, decades of interaction with sunlight, tobacco products, alcohol, carcinogenic chemicals and other risk factors also take their toll.

But in recent years, cancer has been increasingly attacking younger adults. Global incidence rates of several types of cancer are rising in people in their 20s, 30s and 40s, many with no family history of the disease. Scientists don't know why diagnoses are soaring in people under age 50, and they are racing to find out. But as freelance journalist Fred Schwaller reports in this issue, identifying how risk factors like diet or environmental exposures could be at fault is notoriously difficult because there are so many potential influences at play.

For one, cancers in young adults may advance much more quickly than they do in older people, belying the assumption that healthy young bodies would excel at eradicating malignant cells.

What's more, cancer screening recommendations in many countries aren't currently designed to detect the disease in younger people. Young adult patients often say their concerns that something wasn't right are dismissed by doctors who say they are "too young to have cancer," even when they repeatedly voice their concerns. And that can lead to delayed diagnosis and treatment.

[...] Harsh treatments like radiation and chemotherapy can damage immature egg cells and cells that make sperm, making it impossible for some people who had cancer in childhood to have biological children. Teenage and adult patients may be able to freeze eggs or sperm, but children who haven't gone through puberty don't have those options. Senior writer Meghan Rosen reports on emerging research intended to help make that possible, including a conversation with the first childhood cancer survivor to have testicular stem cells transplanted back into his body.

Parents of children with cancer are increasingly considering these options for both boys and girls. And while scientists say the work is still in its infancy, they hope more childhood cancer survivors will one day have the option to thrive as parents.

Original Submission

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

Original Submission

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

Original Submission

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.

Original Submission

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.

Original Submission

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.

Original Submission

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.

Original Submission

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]

Original Submission

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.