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janrinok writes:

https://phys.org/news/2025-10-earth-crust-pacific-northwest-necessarily.html

With unprecedented clarity, scientists have directly observed a subduction zone—the collision point where one tectonic plate dives beneath another—actively breaking apart. The discovery, reported in Science Advances, sheds new light on how Earth's surface evolves and raises fresh questions about future earthquake risks in the Pacific Northwest.

Subduction zones are the sites of Earth's most powerful tectonic events. They drive continents across the globe, unleash devastating earthquakes and volcanic eruptions, and recycle the planet's crust deep into the mantle.

But they don't last forever. If they did, continents would endlessly collide and stack up, erasing oceans and wiping out the record of Earth's past. The big question geologists have wrestled with is: how exactly do these mighty systems finally shut down?

"Getting a subduction zone started is like trying to push a train uphill—it takes a huge effort," said Brandon Shuck, an assistant professor at Louisiana State University and lead author of the study. "But once it's moving, it's like the train is racing downhill, impossible to stop. Ending it requires something dramatic—basically, a train wreck."

[...] Off the coast of Vancouver Island, in a region of Cascadia where the Juan de Fuca and Explorer plates slowly move beneath the North American plate, scientists have found the answer. Using a combination of seismic reflection imaging—essentially an ultrasound of Earth's subsurface—and detailed earthquake records, the team has captured a subduction zone in the process of tearing itself apart.

[...] The researchers sent sound waves from the ship into the seafloor and recorded the echoes using a 15-kilometer-long streamer of underwater listening devices. This produced high-resolution images of faults and fractures deep beneath the ocean floor, revealing places where the plate is snapping.

"This is the first time we have a clear picture of a subduction zone caught in the act of dying," said Shuck. "Rather than shutting down all at once, the plate is ripping apart piece by piece, creating smaller microplates and new boundaries. So instead of a big train wreck, it's like watching a train slowly derail, one car at a time."

An Anonymous Coward writes:

Flock's Gunshot Detection Microphones Will Start Listening for Human Voices

Flock Safety, the police technology company most notable for their extensive network of automated license plate readers spread throughout the United States, is rolling out a new and troubling product that may create headaches for the cities that adopt it: detection of "human distress" via audio. As part of their suite of technologies, Flock has been pushing Raven, their version of acoustic gunshot detection. These devices capture sounds in public places and use machine learning to try to identify gunshots and then alert police—but EFF has long warned that they are also high powered microphones parked above densely-populated city streets. Cities now have one more reason to follow the lead of many other municipalities and cancel their Flock contracts, before this new feature causes civil liberties harms to residents and headaches for cities.

In marketing materials, Flock has been touting new features to their Raven product—including the ability of the device to alert police based on sounds, including "distress." The online ad for the product, which allows cities to apply for early access to the technology, shows the image of police getting an alert for "screaming."

It's unclear how this technology works. For acoustic gunshot detection, generally the microphones are looking for sounds that would signify gunshots (though in practice they often mistake car backfires or fireworks for gunshots). Flock needs to come forward now with an explanation of exactly how their new technology functions. It is unclear how these devices will interact with state "eavesdropping" laws that limit listening to or recording the private conversations that often take place in public.

Flock is no stranger to causing legal challenges for the cities and states that adopt their products. In Illinois, Flock was accused of violating state law by allowing Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), a federal agency, access to license plate reader data taken within the state. That's not all. In 2023, a North Carolina judge halted the installation of Flock cameras statewide for operating in the state without a license. When the city of Evanston, Illinois recently canceled its contract with Flock, it ordered the company to take down their license plate readers–only for Flock to mysteriously reinstall them a few days later. This city has now sent Flock a cease and desist order and in the meantime, has put black tape over the cameras. For some, the technology isn't worth its mounting downsides. As one Illinois village trustee wrote while explaining his vote to cancel the city's contract with Flock, "According to our own Civilian Police Oversight Commission, over 99% of Flock alerts do not result in any police action."

Gunshot detection technology is dangerous enough as it is—police showing up to alerts they think are gunfire only to find children playing with fireworks is a recipe for innocent people to get hurt. This isn't hypothetical: in Chicago a child really was shot at by police who thought they were responding to a shooting thanks to a ShotSpotter alert. Introducing a new feature that allows these pre-installed Raven microphones all over cities to begin listening for human voices in distress is likely to open up a whole new can of unforeseen legal, civil liberties, and even bodily safety consequences.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/10/flocks-gunshot-detection-microphones-will-start-listening-human-voices

Original Submission

upstart writes:

JWST Finds An Exoplanet Around A Pulsar Whose Atmosphere Is All Carbon:

Science advances through data that don't fit our current understanding. At least that was Thomas Kuhn's theory in his famous On the Structure of Scientific Revolutions. So scientists should welcome new data that challenges their understanding of how the universe works. A recent paper, available in pre-print on arXiv, using data from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) might just had found some data that can do that. It looked at an exoplanet around a millisecond pulsar and found its atmosphere is made up of almost entirely pure carbon.

This type of pulsar, PSR J2322-2650, is known as a "black widow" system, as it powers its high energy outbursts by stealing material from a neighboring star. In this case, that neighboring star has likely been degraded to a "hot Jupiter" companion planet that orbits its parent neutron star every 7.8 hours. A typical "black widow" formation process has two steps - one where the neutron star (which in this case is also a pulsar) steals the material, and a second step where it blasts its companion with high energy gamma radiation, ripping off most of the companion star's outer layers and resulting in a Jupiter-sized exoplanet composed mainly of helium.

The exoplanet around PSR J2322-2650, known as PSR J2322-2650b, does fit the description of a Jupiter-sized planet that seems to have the same density as what would be expected if it was made up primarily of helium. However, its atmosphere is unlike any other black widow companion ever seen. According to the spectrographic reports from JWST, its atmosphere is composed mainly of elemental carbon, taking the form of tricarbon (C3) or dicarbon (C2).

Usually those types of elements are found in the tails of comets, or in actual flames here on Earth. Their presence in a planet's atmosphere, especially in such abundant quantities, is new to science.

Another interesting thing about the planet's atmosphere is the difference between the day and night side. On the dayside, which is always facing the pulsar since the planet is tidally locked, temperatures can reach above 2000 ℃ and there are very clear chemical signatures. However, on the night side, there were almost no features at all, suggesting that side of the planet is covered in soot or something similar that doesn't have any distinct features.

To further prove how strange this planet's atmosphere is, the researchers calculated the ratios between carbon and oxygen as well as carbon and nitrogen. The C/O ratio was over 100, while the C/N ratio was over 10,000. In comparison, the Earth has a C/O ratio of .01 and a C/N ratio of 40. Obviously, there's a lot of carbon on this planet.

And that doesn't fit well with models of how scientists thought the planet should form. As part of the "black widow" process, the outer layers of the planet should have been either siphoned up by the companion star or burned away by that star's radiation. The fact that such a rich carbon atmosphere still exists remains a mystery. There are processes that can create such an atmosphere, such as a white-dwarf merger between [two?] "carbon stars", but even that falls short of explaining how the planet's C/O ratio got so high.

See also:

• A carbon-rich atmosphere on a windy pulsar planet
• JWST Examines Planet With Never Before Seen Carbon Atmosphere

Original Submission

janrinok writes:

https://phys.org/news/2025-09-livestock-safe-wolves.html

Wolves had long been extinct in parts of Central Europe. Thanks to strict regulations to protect species, in recent decades they have become more widespread again. This brings new challenges: in many areas, protecting farm livestock is essential to prevent animals such as sheep, goats and cattle from being killed by hungry wolves.

An international research team at the University of Göttingen, Humboldt-University zu Berlin (HU), Dresden University of Technology in Germany and KORA in Switzerland recently conducted a survey to find out how farmers feel about measures such as wolf‐repelling electric fences or guard dogs, and whether the availability of subsidies influences this.

The survey showed that the willingness to protect livestock depends primarily on social pressure. Financial support is associated with a greater willingness to use electric fences against wolves. The study is published in the journal People and Nature.

In order to investigate perceptions and intentions regarding protecting their herds, the research team conducted an online survey in 2022 among farmers with grazing animals in Bavaria in Germany. The researchers evaluated the responses of 353 people using the "Theory of Planned Behavior."

This psychological theory maintains that whether someone does something or not depends primarily on how strongly the person is committed to it. Their intention is influenced by three factors: their own attitude ("Do I think it makes sense?"), social pressure ("What do the people around me think?"), and perceived control ("Am I able to do it?").

According to the survey results, the drivers behind farmers' willingness to protect livestock vary depending on the measures. However, social pressure plays the most important role.

More information: Friederike Riesch et al, How to reconcile pasture grazing and wolf recolonisation? Perceptions of management options by livestock farmers in Germany, People and Nature (2025). DOI: 10.1002/pan3.70141

Original Submission

janrinok writes:

https://phys.org/news/2025-10-bounds-seti.html

The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) has a data scale problem. There are just too many places to look for an interstellar signal, and even if you're looking in the right place you could be looking at the wrong frequency or at the wrong time. Several strategies have come up to narrow the search given this overabundance of data, and a new paper posted to the arXiv preprint server from Naoki Seto of Kyoto University falls nicely into that category—by using the Brightest Of All Time (BOAT) gamma ray burst, with some help from our own galaxy.

When searching for SETI signals, a civilization has to choose three important factors: where to look, what frequency signal to look for, and when to do so. The same problem is faced by the transmitting side—sending signals strong enough to reach other stars coherently in all directions is extraordinarily energy-intensive. In other words, no sane civilization would do that intentionally for long periods of time. And what if you send the wrong frequency? Or worse yet, hop between frequencies? How would a receiving civilization ever know how to find your signal?

[...] To solve these problems, Dr. Seto, who has also published a paper on anchoring events, suggests a "hybrid" strategy. Instead of using only one event, use two—a "spatial" reference and a "temporal" reference. In the paper, he suggests the spatial reference be the center of the Milky Way, while the temporal reference would be an extremely bright event somewhere outside the galaxy.

The underlying idea is to have a "search ring" centered on the event, in the case that your civilization is looking for signals, and a "transmit ring" exactly opposite the event in the case that your civilization is intending to send them. The diameter of each of these rings grows based on the time since the original burst and the distance from the location to the galactic center. Importantly, the angle between the burst and the galactic center is used to "normalize" the time delay at which a signal would be sent to a specific star system.

[...] Unfortunately, all of this spatial and temporal timing doesn't necessarily coordinate the other variable—frequency. There are some theories that a Schelling point for frequency, such as the Hydrogen Line of 1,420 MHz, where hydrogen shines when undergoing a frequency transition, could be used, but realistically, the receiving civilization would still have to search multiple frequencies over that time.

More information: Naoki Seto, Hybrid Strategy for Coordinated Interstellar Signaling: Linking the Galactic Center and Extragalactic Bursts, arXiv (2025). DOI: 10.48550/arxiv.2509.20718

Original Submission

upstart writes:

"We actually made light into a solid. That's pretty awesome"

In a first in the history of physics, scientists have turned light into a supersolid.

"A supersolid is a counter-intuitive phase of matter in which its constituent particles are arranged into a crystalline structure, yet they are free to flow without friction," the abstract for the study in Nature revealed.

"We actually made light into a solid. That's pretty awesome," Dimitris Trypogeorgos, from the National Research Council (CNR) in Italy, enthused. Along with his colleagues, he took a different route from prior research, which created supersolids in experiments using extremely cold atoms. Instead, they used the semiconductor aluminium gallium arsenide and a laser, as New Scientist reported, adding that the connections between the light and the material created a "polariton," which formed the supersolid.

"To create their supersolid, the researchers fired a laser at a piece of gallium arsenide that had been shaped with special ridges. As the light struck the ridges, interactions between it and the material resulted in the formation of polaritons—a kind of hybrid particle—which were constrained by the ridges in a predesigned way," phys.org wrote. "Doing so forced the polaritons into forming themselves into a supersolid."

"To confirm that their system had entered a supersolid phase, the researchers measured the density of the polaritons. They exhibited a 'distinct modulation' in space, as if it were crystallizing. But they also observed signs of coherence — a sign that the system maintained its superfluid character," ZME Science stated.

The advantages of supersolids include use as coolants for quantum devices, aiding the stability of qubits, which store data and perform calculations in quantum computing, use in high-capacity batteries or supercapacitors, or as high-performance lubricants in precision engineering, thus cutting down wear and tear on machinery.

"This is really at the beginning of something new," Trypogeorgos concluded.

Journal Reference: Trypogeorgos, D., Gianfrate, A., Landini, M. et al. Emerging supersolidity in photonic-crystal polariton condensates. Nature 639, 337–341 (2025). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-025-08616-9

See also: Laser light made into a supersolid for the first time

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Trump official plots "impossible" deal moving Taiwan's chip supply chain into US:

The Trump administration is pressuring Taiwan to rapidly move 50 percent of its chip production into the US if it wants ensured protection against a threatened Chinese invasion, US Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick told NewsNation this weekend.

In the interview, Lutnick noted that Taiwan currently makes about 95 percent of chips used in smartphones and cars, as well as in critical military defense technology. It's bad for the US, Lutnick said, that "95 percent of our chips are made 9,000 miles away," while China is not being "shy" about threats to "take" Taiwan.

Were the US to lose access to Taiwan's supply chain, the US could be defenseless as its economy takes a hit, Lutnick alleged, asking, "How are you going to get the chips here to make your drones, to make your equipment?"

"The model is: if you can't make your own chips, how can you defend yourself, right?" Lutnick argued. That's why he confirmed his "objective" during his time in office is to shift US chip production from 2 percent to 40 percent. To achieve that, he plans to bring Taiwan's "whole supply chain" into the US, a move experts have suggested could take much longer than a single presidential term to accomplish.

In 2023, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang forecast that the US was "somewhere between a decade and two decades away from supply chain independence," emphasizing that "it's not a really practical thing for a decade or two."

Lutnick acknowledged this will be a "herculean" task. "Everybody tells me it's impossible," he said.

To start with, Taiwan must be convinced that it's not getting a raw deal, he noted, explaining that it's "not natural for Taiwan" to mull a future where it cedes its dominant role as a global chip supplier, as well as the long-running protections it receives from allies that comes with it.

"What's natural for Taiwan is we produce 95 percent" and "we feel great about it," Lutnick said, conceding that "you can imagine when someone has 95 percent, convincing them that they should only have 50 percent. That's a lot" to lose.

But "Donald Trump would say it's not healthy for you or healthy for us because we protect you, and for us to protect you," then "you need to help us achieve... reasonable self-sufficiency," Lutnick argued.

We are aware of the significant number of 50x responses that users are experiencing from the site. The problem was recognised about 1 week ago and there is much investigative work going on behind the scenes.

The actual cause is difficult to identify. As of Saturday there is new software in place which is trying to find how often the 50x responses occur, while trying to correlate the occurrences with other functions in Rehash. This is a time consuming process. Some users have been assisting by reporting on IRC #soylent when they receive such a response. If you would like to help please report when the 50x response was received with a precise time so that we can find the corresponding query in the server logs, exactly what function were you doing that appeared to trigger it, and how long the problem lasted? If you also know your own IP address it would be very helpful but we understand that many of you will be reluctant to give this information.

In most cases the problem clears itself in less than 10 seconds but there have been periods of unresponsiveness that have lasted several minutes in some rare cases.

FIXED - at least until we find out that it isn't.... [Added at 2025-1005 19:00Z--JR] See also here.

janrinok writes:

https://phys.org/news/2025-10-wolf-dog-hybrid-greece.html

A prominent Greek wildlife group on Friday said it had confirmed the first case of a wolf-dog hybrid in the north of the country.

The Callisto group—which is currently involved in efforts to trap a rogue wolf in Halkidiki, northern Greece—said the hybrid was found near the northern city of Thessaloniki.

"This is the first genetic (case) to be confirmed in Greece," Callisto biologist Aimilia Ioakimeidou told a conference in Athens.

The animal is 45% wolf and 55% canine according to DNA testing, she said.

It was discovered during tests on 50 wolf samples from the Greek mainland, Ioakimeidou said.

While wolf-dog hybrids had previously been reported in Europe, Central Asia and the United States, that categorization largely stemmed from just the appearance of the animals.

Later genetic testing has shown such hybrids are rarer than first thought.

The wolf population in Greece has been growing steadily in past years as a result of a 1983 hunting ban under the Berne Convention.

According to a recent six-year study recently concluded by Callisto, it stands at 2,075 individuals, including at least three packs of a minimum of 31 wolves in the Mount Parnitha range near Athens.

The Thessaloniki-based organization aims to study, protect and manage the populations and habitats of large carnivores such as bears and wolves and other endangered species.

It is currently mounting an operation to locate a young wolf that injured a five-year-old girl from Serbia in the coastal resort of Neos Marmaras on September 12.

While domesticated dogs came from a close relative to the gray wolf some 40,000 to 15,000 years ago, the story of their origin has shifted in recent times.

A longstanding popular theory had held that wolves became tame by hanging around human settlements for food scraps.

But that has been challenged, and another theory holds that perhaps human hunter-gatherers took wolf pups to rear and they developed into the dogs we have today.

Original Submission

looorg writes:

Meta plans to sell targeted ads based on data in your AI chats. I guess that is how they plan on paying the very large electricity bill. This prompt brought to you buy "/insert ad here/". Normal advertisement just isn't detailed enough anymore, too many blockers and such. Too many new pesky privacy laws.

Meta Will Begin Using AI Chatbot Conversations to Target Ads
While users won't be able to opt out from the new policy, the content of some conversations will be automatically excluded

Meta will start using people's conversations with its AI chatbot to help personalize ads and content, offering a glimpse of how the company intends to pay for its expensive artificial intelligence efforts.

The policy, which is set to go into effect Dec. 16, marks the crossing of a new frontier in digital privacy.

more than a billion people chat with Meta AI every month, and it's common for users to hold long, detailed conversations with the AI chatbot.

There is no way to opt out, according to Meta.

I can think of at least one way ... It's the Wargames solution. The only winning move is not the play. Or sit around creating your own very detailed advertisement hell.

https://techcrunch.com/2025/10/01/meta-plans-to-sell-targeted-ads-based-on-data-in-your-ai-chats/
https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/meta-will-begin-using-ai-chatbot-conversations-to-target-ads-291093d3

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

https://bogdanthegeek.github.io/blog/projects/vapeserver/

For a couple of years now, I have been collecting disposable vapes from friends and family. Initially, I only salvaged the batteries for "future" projects (It's not hoarding, I promise), but recently, disposable vapes have gotten more advanced. I wouldn't want to be the lawyer who one day will have to argue how a device with USB C and a rechargeable battery can be classified as "disposable". Thankfully, I don't plan on pursuing law anytime soon.

Last year, I was tearing apart some of these fancier pacifiers for adults when I noticed something that caught my eye, instead of the expected black blob of goo hiding some ASIC (Application Specific Integrated Circuit) I see a little integrated circuit inscribed "PUYA". I don't blame you if this name doesn't excite you as much it does me, most people have never heard of them. They are most well known for their flash chips, but I first came across them after reading Jay Carlson's blog post about the cheapest flash microcontroller you can buy. They are quite capable little ARM Cortex-M0+ micros.

Over the past year I have collected quite a few of these PY32 based vapes, all of them from different models of vape from the same manufacturer. It's not my place to do free advertising for big tobacco, so I won't mention the brand I got it from, but if anyone who worked on designing them reads this, thanks for labeling the debug pins!

[...]

What are we working with

The chip is marked PUYA C642F15, which wasn't very helpful. I was pretty sure it was a PY32F002A, but after poking around with pyOCD, I noticed that the flash was 24k and we have 3k of RAM. The extra flash meant that it was more likely a PY32F002B, which is actually a very different chip.

So here are the specs of a microcontroller so bad, it's basically disposable:

        - 24MHz Coretex M0+
        - 24KiB of Flash Storage
        - 3KiB of Static RAM
        - a few peripherals, none of which we will use.

You may look at those specs and think that it's not much to work with. I don't blame you, a 10y old phone can barely load google, and this is about 100x slower. I on the other hand see a blazingly fast web server.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Duo could dominate in the same way Microsoft and Intel ruled PCs for decades:

Opinion: The OpenAI and Nvidia $100 billion partnership sure sounds impressive. $100 billion isn't chicken feed, even as more and more tech companies cross the trillion-dollar mark. But what does it really mean?

As two of my Register colleagues noted, "The announcement has enough wiggle room to drive an AI-powered self-driving semi through." True, but it may be the start of something huge that will define the AI movement for the foreseeable future.

Let's step into the Wayback Machine with Mr. Peabody and Sherman to the early 1980s, when PCs from companies most of you have never heard of, such as Osborne, Kaypro, and Sinclair Research, landed on desktops.

IBM decided to get into the personal computer business, and the company needed chips. So Big Blue teamed with a relatively obscure CPU company called Intel.

That took care of the hardware, but IBM needed an operating system urgently. Initially, like everyone else, except for those guys named Steve with some company called Apple, IBM wanted to use CP/M from Digital Research. That didn't work out. So, IBM called Microsoft, and Bill Gates and crew acquired Quick and Dirty Operating System (QDOS ) from Seattle Computer Products, and slapped the names MS-DOS and IBM PC-DOS on it. Microsoft also, and this is the critical bit, kept the right to sell MS-DOS to other companies.

Intel, of course, had always retained the right to sell its chips to anyone. It quickly became clear that IBM was onto something. So other new companies, Compaq specifically, sprang up to develop their own PC clones, starting with the Compaq Portable in 1983. It, and all the many other clones from companies like Dell, HP, and Packard Bell, were, of course, powered by Intel chips and ran Microsoft operating systems.

The two companies started working hand-in-glove with each other. By the late '80s, their pairing, WinTel, would rule the PC world. Decades later, while not nearly as dominant as they once were, chances are the computer in front of you is WinTel.

What does that have to do with OpenNvidia? Everything. This deal promises to create the world's largest AI infrastructure project to date. It gives OpenAI access to millions of Nvidia GPUs and the capital needed for a massive wave of next-generation data centers.

canopic jug writes:

The comic strip Peanuts turns 75 this year. The New Statesman covers the background of the strip and how Peanuts reflected US society.

Peanuts was published in newspapers for the first time on 2 October 1950. By the mid-Sixties, it had tens of millions of daily readers, becoming the most widely read comic strip in the world, translated into more than 20 languages, reaching some 355 million readers in 75 countries. In Japan, Peanuts was taken so seriously that the official translator of the strip was also a Nobel Prize front-runner. Schulz was the first modern cartoonist to be given a retrospective in the Louvre.

[...] Schulz worked on Peanuts for nearly 50 years, single-handedly writing, drawing and lettering 17,897 strips. His existence and Peanuts were so intrinsically linked that their endings were only a few hours apart. Schulz died of a heart attack on 12 February 2000. The next day, his last comic strip announcing his retirement appeared. "No, I think he's writing..." Charlie Brown says down the phone to an unknown caller.

Previously:
(2020) Snoopy Celebrates 20 Years of Humans on Space Station on New NASA Posters

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Scientists catch a shark threesome on camera:

It's a rare occurrence for scientists to witness sharks mating in the wild. It's even rarer to catch three leopard sharks—two males and one female—engaging in what amounts to a threesome in the wild on camera, particularly since they are considered an endangered species. But that's just what one enterprising marine biology team achieved, describing the mating sequence in careful, clinical detail in a paper published in the Journal of Ethology.

It's not like scientists don't know anything about leopard shark mating behavior; rather, most of that knowledge comes from studying the sharks in captivity. Whether the behavior is identical in the wild is an open question because there hadn't been any documented observations of leopard shark mating practices in the wild—until now.

Hugo Lassauce, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of the Sunshine Coast (UniSC) in Australia, was working with the Aquarium des Lagons in Nouméa, New Caledonia, to monitor sharks off the coast of that South Pacific territory. Lassauce has been snorkeling daily with sharks for a year as part of that program—always with an accompanying boat for safety purposes—and had seen bits of the leopard shark mating behavior before, but never the entire sequence. Then he spotted a female shark on the sand below with two males hanging onto her pectoral fins—classic pre-copulation (courtship) behavior observed in captive leopard sharks.

"I told my colleague to take the boat away to avoid disturbance, and I started waiting on the surface, looking down at the sharks almost motionless on the sea floor," said Lassauce. "I waited an hour, freezing in the water, but finally they started swimming up. It was over quickly for both males, one after the other. The first took 63 seconds, the other 47. Then the males lost all their energy and lay immobile on the bottom while the female swam away actively." (Add your own salacious jokes here. You know you're thinking them.)

Lassauce had two GoPro Hero 5 cameras ready at hand, albeit with questionable battery life. That's why the video footage has two interruptions to the action: once when he had to switch cameras after getting a "low battery" signal, and a second time when he voluntarily stopped filming to conserve the second camera's battery. Not much happened for 55 minutes, after all, and he wanted to be sure to capture the pivotal moments in the sequence. Lassauce succeeded and was rewarded with triumphant cheers from his fellow marine biologists on the boat, who knew full well the rarity of what had just been documented for posterity.

The lengthy pre-copulation stage involved all three sharks motionless on the seafloor for nearly an hour, after which the female started swimming with one male shark biting onto each of her pectoral fins. A few minutes later, the first male made his move, "penetrating the female's cloaca with his left clasper." Claspers are modified pelvic fins capable of transferring sperm. After the first male shark finished, he lay motionless while the second male held onto the female's other fin. Then the other shark moved in, did his business, went motionless, and the female shark swam away. The males also swam away soon afterward.

Apart from the scientific first, documenting the sequence is a good indicator that this particular area is a critical mating habitat for leopard sharks, and could lead to better conservation strategies, as well as artificial insemination efforts to "rewild" leopard sharks in Australia and several other countries. "It's surprising and fascinating that two males were involved sequentially on this occasion," said co-author Christine Dudgeon, also of UniSC, adding, "From a genetic diversity perspective, we want to find out how many fathers contribute to the batches of eggs laid each year by females."

Journal Reference:
Lassauce, Hugo, Gossuin, Hugues, Dudgeon, Christine L., et al. Observation of group courtship/copulating behavior for free-living Indo-Pacific Leopard sharks, Stegostoma tigrinum, Journal of Ethology (DOI: 10.1007/s10164-025-00866-4)

Original Submission

janrinok writes:

https://phys.org/news/2025-09-side-moon-colder-lunar.html

The interior of the mysterious far side of the moon may be colder than the side constantly facing Earth, suggests a new analysis of rock samples co-led by a UCL (University College London) and Peking University researcher.

The study, published in the journal Nature Geoscience, looked at fragments of rock and soil scooped up by China's Chang'e 6 spacecraft in 2024 from a vast crater on the far side of the moon.

The research team confirmed previous findings that the rock sample was about 2.8 billion years old, and analyzed the chemical make-up of its minerals to estimate that it formed from lava deep within the moon's interior at a temperature of about 1,100 degrees C—about 100 degrees C cooler than existing samples from the near side.

Co-author Professor Yang Li, based at UCL's Department of Earth Sciences and Peking University, said, "The near side and far side of the moon are very different at the surface and potentially in the interior. It is one of the great mysteries of the moon. We call it the two-faced moon. A dramatic difference in temperature between the near and far side of the mantle has long been hypothesized, but our study provides the first evidence using real samples."

Co-author Mr. Xuelin Zhu, a Ph.D. student at Peking University, said, "These findings take us a step closer to understanding the two faces of the moon. They show us that the differences between the near and far side are not only at the surface but go deep into the interior."

The far side has a thicker crust, is more mountainous and cratered, and appears to have been less volcanic, with fewer dark patches of basalt formed from ancient lava.

In their paper, the researchers noted that the far side of the interior may have been cooler due to having fewer heat-producing elements—elements such as uranium, thorium and potassium, which release heat due to radioactive decay.

Previous studies have suggested that this uneven distribution of heat-producing elements might have occurred after a massive asteroid or planetary body smashed into the far side, shaking up the moon's interior and pushing denser materials containing more heat-producing elements across to the near side.