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Freeman writes:

https://www.pcgamer.com/hardware/vr-hardware/steam-frame-specs-availability/

Valve has announced a brand new VR headset. It's called the Steam Frame, and it's set to launch next year. While pricing is not yet confirmed, I've been to Valve HQ to try it out and get all the details.
[...]
The Steam Frame is a standalone VR headset. It doesn't require a PC in order to play games or watch videos in VR. It doesn't need base stations or a cable, either. It's powered by SteamOS, Valve's own Linux distro used on the Steam Deck, and an Arm chip. So, what makes this a PCVR headset again?

"We see Steam Frame as a streaming first headset," Lawrence Yang, a designer at Valve, tells me.
[...]
Streaming in this context does not refer to cloud streaming
[...]
Rather streaming means playing a game on a gaming PC and streaming it over to the Steam Frame via a wireless connection. So, you're streaming the game from one PC to another PC on your head, without using any cables.
[...]
wireless adapter beams the game over a dedicated 6 GHz connection to the Steam Frame. Essentially, Valve intends for players to use the Steam Frame in the traditional sense of tethering to a gaming PC—just without the physical tether.
[...]
It uses clever software to play games developed for Windows and x86 on its Linux and Arm stack. It also natively supports games programmed for Arm, which many VR titles are designed for these days.

So, it supports a bit of everything: standalone, PCVR, Linux, Windows, Arm, x86... though a user shouldn't have to be conscious of many, if any, of these technical divisions. You put the Steam Frame on, choose a game from your Steam library, VR or no, and play.
[...]
With new hardware, software, and much expanded capabilities, Valve is keen to point out that this is not the Valve Index 2. Hence the name change.

"So Steam Frame, I would say, represents a fundamental shift in the way that we look at VR," says Yang.

"Rather than being a PC VR accessory to play your PCVR games, we see it just as a new way to play your entire Steam library, whether it's VR or non-VR titles."

Steam frame vs Quest 3 [adapted table]:

	Steam Frame	Quest 3
LCD Screens:	Two	Two
Resolution (per-eye):	2160×2160	2064×2208
Refresh rate (Hz):	72, 90, 120, 144 (experimental)	72, 90, 120
Optics:	Pancake	Pancake
IPD adjustment:	Variable dial	Variable dial
Field of view (horizontal):	Up to 110°	110°
Field of view (vertical):	TBC	96°
SoC:	Snapdragon 8 Gen 3	Snapdragon XR2 Gen 2
RAM:	16 GB LPDDR5	8 GB LPDDR5
Storage:	256 GB / 1 TB	128 GB (discontinued) / 512 GB
Battery:	21.6 Wh	19.44 Wh
Passthrough:	Mono	Colour
Cameras:	6 (4 mono + 2 eye track)	6 (2 RGB + 4 IR)
Speakers:	Twin-driver strap	Stereo strap
Connectivity:	Wi-Fi 7 2×2	Wi-Fi 6E
Controllers:	2× Steam Frame	2× Meta Touch
Controller battery:	1× AA each	1× AA each
OS:	SteamOS (Linux)	Meta Horizon (Android)
Weight (g):	435 (190 core only)	515 (461 no strap)
Price:	TBC	$500

canopic jug writes:

The excellent student run newspaper, The Michigan Daily, has an article about the necessity of regulating Bitcoin. "Mining" even a single Bitcoin now burns as much electricity as a family would use during about 50 days.

Local grids physically cannot withstand this outrageous consumption of electricity. In foreign countries — where mining farm clustering is more severe — local governments suspect Bitcoin mining farms as the cause of power outages and complete blackouts. Entire neighborhoods are facing power shortages or complete outages as a result of energy grid strain. So far, the reliance on domestic energy has not had adverse effects, but it is only a matter of time before these blackouts begin to take place in the United States, too. 

Despite the fatal externality flaws in Bitcoin mining, the industry is left unchecked in the absence of federal or international regulation on its use. Unfortunately, without restrictions on the amount of mining that can occur, there is no clear plateau to the electricity consumption of these constantly updating hardware systems. 

Previously:
(2025) Bitcoin Mining is Making People Sick
(2025) The Guy Who Accidentally Threw Away $700 Million in Bitcoin Wants to Buy the Landfill to Find It
(2024) How A 27-Year-Old Busted The Myth Of Bitcoin's Anonymity

Original Submission

You might have noticed (or at least, I hope you noticed) that the site was down for an extended period of time (approx. two days?). There were a string of stories in the release queue when it went down, and after the site came back, all of those stories were pushed out at once. I will re-queue a number of those stories to be released again so that they won't be immediately buried off the front page and you'll have a chance to see and comment on them without having to scroll back significantly. So before you cry DUPE! and let slip the comments of war, you just might be seeing the original story in a new time slot.

I'll shorten the time between releases until we're caught up.

-- hubie

janrinok writes:

https://www.techradar.com/computing/windows/this-linux-os-has-got-a-million-downloads-since-windows-10-support-ended-should-microsoft-start-worrying-now

A critically-acclaimed flavor of Linux is apparently doing very well indeed in terms of attracting defectors from Microsoft's desktop ecosystem following the end of support for Windows 10.

Tom's Hardware spotted that the developer of Zorin OS has again been boasting about the number of downloads it has accrued, following version 18 of the Linux distro drumming up 100,000 downloads in just two days after its release.

However, that's now hit a million, as we're told in a blog post: "We're thrilled to announce that Zorin OS 18 has amassed 1 million downloads in just over a month since its release, breaking all previous records."

The developer of Zorin further points out that based on its data for these downloads, 78% of them are from Windows PCs, suggesting that a good deal of these people are migrants from Microsoft's OS to Linux.

So, in around five weeks, that's a million more Zorin OS recruits – or is it? Well, no, not exactly – and I'll discuss why next – but it's still an impressive number to have amassed in just over a month since Microsoft ceased providing official support for Windows 10.

While Zorin OS may have had a million downloads since version 18 of the distro was released, on exactly the same day that Microsoft dropped official support for Windows 10, obviously that doesn't reflect a million Windows users fleeing to the Linux hills.

We're told that 78% of downloads originate from Windows PCs, so that's around 780,000 folks in theory – but just because Zorin OS was pulled from the internet on a Windows PC doesn't mean that a person is migrating from Windows to Linux on that computer. A person in this boat may have multiple PCs, for example, and they might be downloading on one machine to install on another (non-Windows system). Or they might be curious about Zorin, perhaps enough to download it, but not actually bothering installing the OS (or give it a quick whirl, and give up).

You get the point anyway: there are a number of potential reasons and scenarios for a download that don't necessarily translate into a new Zorin user going forward, or necessarily mean that a person is abandoning Windows just because the Linux distro was downloaded on a Microsoft PC.

Still, it's a fair bet that this does represent a hefty chunk of defectors from Windows 10 who don't want to upgrade to Windows 11 (or can't do so due to the steeper hardware requirements therein). Especially given that one of Zorin's strengths is that it's built to be friendly for such defectors, with a suitably Windows-like desktop environment. Note that we rate the 'Lite' version of Zorin as the top Linux distro for those with an older PC, and that may well represent a good number of these OS migrants.

How many might stick with Zorin going forward is another matter, perhaps, but for now, Zorin OS is making considerable hay after the sun has set on Windows 10. And that's despite extended support being available for Microsoft's OS, allowing for a further year of usage through to October 2026, it should be noted – and all this may give Microsoft something to worry about in that light.

Certainly if this kind of activity continues, and does so more broadly away from Zorin – it'll be interesting to see if we hear from other Linux distros with similar tales of bolstered ranks in the next couple of months.

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

https://financialpost.com/fp-work/americans-with-degrees-unemployed-workers

Thursday's labour figures showed young Americans are bearing the brunt of the recent rise in joblessness

Americans with four-year college degrees now comprise a record 25 per cent of total unemployment, underscoring a sharp slowdown in white-collar hiring this year.

Government-shutdown delayed monthly figures published Thursday by the United States Bureau of Labor Statistics showed the unemployment rate for bachelor's degree-holders rose to 2.8 per cent in September, up a half-percentage point from a year earlier. Other levels of education, by contrast, registered little or no increase over the same period.

There were more than 1.9 million Americans aged 25 and over with at least a bachelor's degree who were unemployed in September — one in four of the total number of unemployed. Before 2025, the ratio never reached such a high in data going back to 1992. Younger, recent college grads have also been struggling to find work.

Rising unemployment among the college-educated "should further fuel AI-related job loss fears," Michael Feroli, the chief U.S. economist at JPMorgan Chase & Co., said Thursday in a note following the release.

The milestone comes amid a raft of high-profile layoff announcements from major corporations including Amazon.com, Target Corp. and Starbucks Corp. A recent report by the outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas indicated job-cut announcements last month were the highest for any October in more than 20 years, fuelled by plans to replace positions with artificial intelligence.

Original Submission

janrinok writes:

https://phys.org/news/2025-11-china-shenzhou-early-stranded-space.html

China conducted an urgent unmanned spacecraft launch on Tuesday, after damage to a previous mission's return capsule left the crew on its space station without a means of getting back to Earth.

The Long March-2F rocket carrying Shenzhou-22 lifted off shortly after midday from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in northwest China, footage from state broadcaster CCTV showed.

Recent Shenzhou missions have been used to crew China's Tiangong space station, exchanging teams of three astronauts every six months.

Shenzhou-22 was originally slated for a crewed launch in 2026.

But it was launched early after a suspected space debris strike to the Shenzhou-20 return capsule made it unsafe for re-entry to Earth, leaving its crew briefly stranded.

The Shenzhou-20 team returned aboard Shenzhou-21 on November 14—nine days later than planned—leaving their relief crew without a reliable return vehicle.

The accelerated launch ensures Shenzhou-21 astronauts Zhang Lu, Wu Fei, and Zhang Hongzhang have a safe return option.

The three were "working normally and in good condition", the China Manned Space Agency said Monday before the Shenzhou-22 launch.

China is the third nation to put humans in orbit after the United States and the former Soviet Union.

It has been excluded from the International Space Station since 2011, when the United States banned NASA from collaborating with Beijing.

It has since sought to bring other countries into its efforts and signed a deal with Pakistan in February to recruit the first foreign "taikonauts"—a term used for astronauts in China's space program.

See also:

China's stranded astronauts 'in good condition' after space debris delays planned return

Original Submission

janrinok writes:

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c62vl05rz0ko

A firm considered one of the leading global voices in encryption has cancelled the announcement of its leadership election results after an official lost the encrypted key needed to unlock them.

The International Association for Cryptologic Research (IACR) uses an electronic voting system which needs three members, each with part of an encrypted key, to access the results.

In a statement, the scientific organisation said one of the trustees had lost their key in "an honest but unfortunate human mistake", making it impossible for them to decrypt - and uncover - the final results.

The IACR said it would rerun the election, adding "new safeguards" to stop similar mistakes happening again.

The IACR is a global non-profit organisation which was founded in 1982 with the aim to "further research" in cryptology, the science of secure communication.

It opened votes for three Director and four Officer positions on 17 October, with the process closing on 16 November.

The Association used an open source electronic voting system called Helios for the process.

The browser-based system uses cryptography to encrypt votes, or keep them secret.

Three members of the association were chosen as independent trustees to each be given a third of the encrypted material, which when shared together would give the verdict.

Whilst two of the trustees uploaded their share of the encrypted material online, a third never did.

The IACR said in a statement that the lack of results was due to one of the trustees "irretrievably" losing their private key, leaving it "technically impossible" for the firm to know the final verdict.

It said it was therefore left with no choice but to cancel the election.

The association added it was "deeply sorry" for the mistake, which it took "very seriously".

American cryptographer Bruce Schneier told the BBC that failures in cryptographic systems often lie in the fact that "to provide any actual security" they have to be "operated by humans".

"Whether it's forgetting keys, improperly sharing keys, or making some other mistake," he said, "cryptographic systems often fail for very human reasons".

Voting for the IACR positions has been renewed and will run until 20 December.

The association said that it had replaced the initial trustee who lost the encrypted information and will now adopt a "2-out-of-3" threshold mechanism for the management of private keys, with a clear written procedure for trustees to follow.

Original Submission

hubie writes:

A new study has revealed how different types of narcissism can influence the morale and performance of an entire team:

Researchers invited over 100 people to complete escape room challenges in small groups, observing their interactions and behaviours throughout the tasks.

The findings have been published in the journal Behavioral Sciences.

"Although this took place in a fun, social setting, the teams still needed to build trust, share ideas and plan together to complete the challenges," explained Dr Reece Bush-Evans, Senior Lecturer in Psychology at Bournemouth University who led the study. "These are exactly the skills needed for success in real-world teams. Our results showed that when one person believes they're superior to their teammates, it can damage team dynamics and lead to failure."

Dr Bush-Evans and his team identified two distinct forms of narcissism among participants: Narcissistic Admiration – where individuals are charming, confident, and drawn to the spotlight, and Narcissistic Rivalry - where people are combative, competitive and quick to dismiss others' ideas or take offence.

Before and after the challenge, all participants rated themselves and their teammates on traits including friendliness, confidence, trustworthiness and aggression. The researchers then examined how these perceptions influenced team cohesion, team conflict, and overall performance (i.e., did they escape the rooms).

Teams with higher levels of narcissistic rivalry showed significantly less unity and performed worse in the escape room.

"We noticed that competitive and rivalrous individuals were more likely to ignore or dismiss their teammate's ideas, hold back information, and find the experience more frustrating. This wrecked the team bond that was needed to get the job done," Dr Bush-Evans explained.

In contrast, narcissistic admiration didn't seem to help or harm performance, though those individuals were increasingly viewed as less hardworking and more arrogant by their teammates as the challenge progressed.

"Their charisma may have impressed their colleagues at first, but this wore thin when it wasn't backed up with useful contributions," said Dr Bush-Evans.

The researchers believe these insights are relevant not just for social settings but for modern workplaces – especially in face-to-face, online and hybrid teams.

"Confidence and charm can easily be mistaken for competence," Dr Bush-Evans concluded. "Our study shows that these traits can actually limit what a team achieves. The most successful teams weren't the loudest, but the most cooperative. Leaders should value good listeners just as much as outspoken voices."

Journal Reference: Bush-Evans, Reece D., Claire M. Hart, Sylwia Z. Cisek, Liam P. Satchell, and Constantine Sedikides. 2025. "Narcissism in Action: Perceptions, Team Dynamics, and Performance in Naturalistic Escape Room Settings" Behavioral Sciences 15, no. 11: 1461. https://doi.org/10.3390/bs15111461

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

https://linuxiac.com/mozilla-resolves-21-year-old-bug-adds-full-xdg-directory-support/

Firefox 147 adds support for the XDG Base Directory Specification, ending a 21-year wait and aligning the browser's Linux file storage with modern standards.

The upcoming Firefox 147 will introduce a long-requested change for Linux users by finally adopting the XDG Base Directory Specification, closing a bug that has been open for more than 21 years.

The update modernizes how the browser stores files on Linux systems and aligns its behavior with that of most desktop applications, which have been doing so for years. Here's what I'm talking about.

Until now, Firefox placed nearly all of its user files—settings, profiles, data, and cache—inside a single folder called ~/.mozilla in the user's home directory. This approach worked, but it also contributed to the familiar clutter many Linux users see when applications each create their own hidden folders.

At the same time, the XDG Base Directory Specification is a widely used standard that aims to organize those files cleanly. Instead of placing everything directly in a single directory, applications are encouraged to use three dedicated locations: one for configuration files, one for application data, and one for cache files. These are typically found under ~/.config, ~/.local/share, and ~/.cache.

Starting with Firefox 147, newly created profiles on Linux will follow this structure. Configuration files, long-term data, and temporary cache files will now be stored in their proper locations.

It's important to note that this doesn't affect existing users immediately: if a legacy ~/.mozilla folder already exists, Firefox keeps using it to avoid breaking profiles. But for anyone installing Firefox fresh or creating new profiles, the browser will behave like other modern Linux applications.

As I said in the beginning, the change also marks the end of one of the browser's longest-standing issues. Believe it or not, bug 259356 was first reported in 2003, and the request to support XDG directories has resurfaced repeatedly among Linux users and distributions over the years.

It is expected that this change will finally simplify file management, reduce home-folder clutter, and, most importantly, align the browser with the expectations of today's Linux environments.

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

Here's a "grassroots" initiative bringing manufacturing back to the USA from Asia, https://reshorenow.org/ It was started by Harry Moser, the third generation of his family involved in USA manufacturing--primarily the Singer Sewing Machine Company... at one time a huge New Jersey factory of 5 million square feet. His main tool is free-to-use software, the

Total Cost of Ownership Estimator

Most companies make sourcing decisions based solely on price, oftentimes resulting in a 20 to 30 percent miscalculation of actual offshoring costs. The Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) Estimator is a free online tool that helps companies account for all relevant factors — overhead, balance sheet, risks, corporate strategy and other external and internal business considerations — to determine the true total cost of ownership. Using this information, companies can better evaluate sourcing, identify alternatives and even make a case when selling against offshore competitors. See Impact of Using TCO Instead of Price for further explanation.

The message makes sense to this AC, don't worry about national politics, work the cost numbers in detail and let the numbers guide purchasing decisions. He reports that many, many purchasing managers never look beyond the simple price quote--of course that will be cheaper from off-shore. The reality is that when all the relevant factors are included, in many cases it's actually cheaper to buy locally.

For a somewhat independent assessment, the Association for Manufacturing Technology (AMT) summarizes the Reshoring Initiative year-end report from 2024 here, https://www.amtonline.org/article/reshoring-initiative-annual-report-287-000-jobs-announced with a Figure 2 caption, "Reshoring Initiative Library: The cumulative number of jobs brought back since 2010 is nearing two million (Figure 2) - about 40% of what we lost to offshoring."

Original Submission

KritonK writes:

Team Xbox, and Activision are making Zork I, Zork II, and Zork III available under the MIT License.

In collaboration with Jason Scott, the well-known digital archivist of Internet Archive fame, they have officially submitted upstream pull requests to the historical source repositories of Zork I, Zork II, and Zork III. Those pull requests add a clear MIT LICENSE and formally document the open-source grant.

Each repository includes:

• Source code for Zork I, Zork II, and Zork III.
• Accompanying documentation where available, such as build notes, comments, and historically relevant files.
• Clear licensing and attribution, via MIT LICENSE.txt and repository-level metadata.

This release focuses purely on the code itself. It does not include commercial packaging or marketing materials, and it does not grant rights to any trademarks or brands, which remain with their respective owners. All assets outside the scope of these titles' source code are intentionally excluded to preserve historical accuracy.

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/11/hp-and-dell-disable-hevc-support-built-into-their-laptops-cpus/

Some Dell and HP laptop owners have been befuddled by their machines' inability to play HEVC/H.265 content in web browsers, despite their machines' processors having integrated decoding support.

Laptops with sixth-generation Intel Core and later processors have built-in hardware support for HEVC decoding and encoding. AMD has made laptop chips supporting the codec since 2015. However, both Dell and HP have disabled this feature on some of their popular business notebooks.

HP discloses this in the data sheets for its affected laptops, which include the HP ProBook 460 G11 [PDF], ProBook 465 G11 [PDF], and EliteBook 665 G11 [PDF].

"Hardware acceleration for CODEC H.265/HEVC (High Efficiency Video Coding) is disabled on this platform," the note reads.

Despite this notice, it can still be jarring to see a modern laptop's web browser eternally load videos that play easily in media players. As a member of a group for system administrators on Reddit recalled recently:

People with older hardware were not experiencing problems, whereas those with newer machines needed to either have the HEVC codec from the Microsoft Store removed entirely from [Microsoft Media Foundation] or have hardware acceleration disabled in their web browser/web app, which causes a number of other problems / feature [degradations]. For example, no background blurring in conference programs, significantly degraded system performance ...

Owners of some Dell laptops are also experiencing this, as the OEM has also disabled HEVC hardware decoding in some of its laptops. This information, however, isn't that easy to find. For example, the product page for the Dell 16 Plus 2-in-1, which has HEVC hardware decoding disabled, makes no mention of HEVC. There's also no mention of HEVC in the "Notes, cautions, and warnings" or specifications sections of the laptop's online owner's manual. The most easily identifiable information comes from a general support page that explains that Dell laptops only support HEVC content streaming on computer configurations with:

- An optional discrete graphics card
- An optional add-on video graphics card
- An integrated 4K display panel
- Dolby Vision
- A CyberLink Blu-ray player

When reached for comment, representatives from HP and Dell didn't explain why the companies disabled HEVC hardware decoding on their laptops' processors.

hubie writes:

Is Matrix Multiplication Ugly?

A few weeks ago I was minding my own business, peacefully reading a well-written and informative article about artificial intelligence, when I was ambushed by a passage in the article that aroused my pique. That's one of the pitfalls of knowing too much about a topic a journalist is discussing; journalists often make mistakes that most readers wouldn't notice but that raise the hackles or at least the blood pressure of those in the know.

The article in question appeared in The New Yorker. The author, Stephen Witt, was writing about the way that your typical Large Language Model, starting from a blank slate, or rather a slate full of random scribbles, is able to learn about the world, or rather the virtual world called the internet. Throughout the training process, billions of numbers called weights get repeatedly updated so as to steadily improve the model's performance. Picture a tiny chip with electrons racing around in etched channels, and slowly zoom out: there are many such chips in each server node and many such nodes in each rack, with racks organized in rows, many rows per hall, many halls per building, many buildings per campus. It's a sort of computer-age version of Borges' Library of Babel. And the weight-update process that all these countless circuits are carrying out depends heavily on an operation known as matrix multiplication.

Witt explained this clearly and accurately, right up to the point where his essay took a very odd turn.

Here's what Witt went on to say about matrix multiplication:

"'Beauty is the first test: there is no permanent place in the world for ugly mathematics,' the mathematician G. H. Hardy wrote, in 1940. But matrix multiplication, to which our civilization is now devoting so many of its marginal resources, has all the elegance of a man hammering a nail into a board. It is possessed of neither beauty nor symmetry: in fact, in matrix multiplication, a times b is not the same as b times a."

The last sentence struck me as a bizarre non sequitur, somewhat akin to saying "Number addition has neither beauty nor symmetry, because when you write two numbers backwards, their new sum isn't just their original sum written backwards; for instance, 17 plus 34 is 51, but 71 plus 43 isn't 15."

The next day I sent the following letter to the magazine:

"I appreciate Stephen Witt shining a spotlight on matrices, which deserve more attention today than ever before: they play important roles in ecology, economics, physics, and now artificial intelligence ("Information Overload", November 3). But Witt errs in bringing Hardy's famous quote ("there is no permanent place in the world for ugly mathematics") into his story. Matrix algebra is the language of symmetry and transformation, and the fact that a followed by b differs from b followed by a is no surprise; to expect the two transformations to coincide is to seek symmetry in the wrong place — like judging a dog's beauty by whether its tail resembles its head. With its two-thousand-year-old roots in China, matrix algebra has secured a permanent place in mathematics, and it passes the beauty test with flying colors. In fact, matrices are commonplace in number theory, the branch of pure mathematics Hardy loved most."

hubie writes:

A simple proposal on a 1982 electronic bulletin board helped sarcasm flourish online:

On September 19, 1982, Carnegie Mellon University computer science research assistant professor Scott Fahlman posted a message to the university's bulletin board software that would later come to shape how people communicate online. His proposal: use :-) and :-( as markers to distinguish jokes from serious comments. While Fahlman describes himself as "the inventor...or at least one of the inventors" of what would later be called the smiley face emoticon, the full story reveals something more interesting than a lone genius moment.

The whole episode started three days earlier when computer scientist Neil Swartz posed a physics problem to colleagues on Carnegie Mellon's "bboard," which was an early online message board. The discussion thread had been exploring what happens to objects in a free-falling elevator, and Swartz presented a specific scenario involving a lit candle and a drop of mercury.

That evening, computer scientist Howard Gayle responded with a facetious message titled "WARNING!" He claimed that an elevator had been "contaminated with mercury" and suffered "some slight fire damage" due to a physics experiment. Despite clarifying posts noting the warning was a joke, some people took it seriously.

The incident sparked immediate discussion about how to prevent such misunderstandings and the "flame wars" (heated arguments) that could result from misread intent.

"This problem caused some of us to suggest (only half seriously) that maybe it would be a good idea to explicitly mark posts that were not to be taken seriously," Fahlman later wrote in a retrospective post published on his CMU website. "After all, when using text-based online communication, we lack the body language or tone-of-voice cues that convey this information when we talk in person or on the phone."

On September 17, 1982, the next day after the misunderstanding on the CMU bboard, Swartz made the first concrete proposal: "Maybe we should adopt a convention of putting a star (*) in the subject field of any notice which is to be taken as a joke."

Within hours, multiple Carnegie Mellon computer scientists weighed in with alternative proposals. Joseph Ginder suggested using % instead of *. Anthony Stentz proposed a nuanced system: "How about using * for good jokes and % for bad jokes?" Keith Wright championed the ampersand (&), arguing it "looks funny" and "sounds funny." Leonard Hamey suggested {#} because "it looks like two lips with teeth showing between them."

An Anonymous Coward writes:

https://edition.cnn.com/2025/11/12/science/bees-visual-stimulus-study-scli-intl

Bumblebees can process the duration of flashes of light and use the information to decide where to look for food, a new study has found.

This is the first evidence of such an ability in insects, according to doctoral student Alex Davidson and his supervisor Elisabetta Versace, a senior lecturer in psychology at Queen Mary University of London. The discovery could help settle a long-standing debate among scientists about whether insects are able to process complex patterns, Versace told CNN.

"In the past, it was thought that they were just very basic reflex machines that don't have any flexibility," she said.

To reach its finding, the team set up a maze through which individual bees would travel when they left their nest to forage for food.

Researchers presented the insects with two visual cues: one circle that would light up with a short flash and another with a long flash of light.

Approaching these respective circles, the bees would find a sweet food that they like at one, and a bitter food, which they don't, at the other.

The circles were in different positions at each room in the maze, but the bees still learned over varying amounts of time to fly toward the short flash of light associated with the sweet food.

  Davidson and Versace then tested the bees' behavior when there was no food present, to rule out the possibility that the bees could see or smell the sugary food.

They found that the bees were able to tell the circles apart based on the duration of the flashes of light, rather than other cues.

"And so in this way, we show that the bee is actually processing the time difference between them to guide its foraging choice," Davidson said.

"We were happy to see that, in fact, the bees can process stimuli that, during the course of evolution, they have never seen before," Versace said, referring to the flashes of light.

"They're able to use novel stimulus they have never seen before to solve tasks in a flexible way," Versace added. "I think this is really remarkable."

The researchers say bumblebees are one of only a small number of animals, including humans and other vertebrates such as macaques and pigeons, that have been found to be able to differentiate between short and long flashes, in this case between 0.5 and five seconds.

For example, this ability helps humans to understand Morse code, in which a short flash is used to communicate the letter "E" and long flash the letter "T."

It is not clear how bees are able to judge time duration, but the team plans to investigate the neural mechanisms that allow the insects to do so.

The scientists are also planning to conduct similar research with bees that are able to move freely in colonies, rather than individually, and investigate the cognitive differences that allow some bees to learn to assess time duration faster than others.

Davidson hopes that the results will help people to appreciate that bees and other insects are not simple "machines essentially driven by instinct," but rather "complex animals with inner lives that have unique experiences."

"In fact, they do have complex cognition, this flexibility in learning and memory and behavior," he added.

This may help people to perceive bees as more than unthinking pollinators, Versace said.