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Slashdot reader sciencehabit writes:Most orange cats are boys, a quirk of feline genetics that also explains why almost all calicos and tortoiseshells are girls. Scientists curious about those sex differences-or perhaps just cat lovers-have spent more than 60 years unsuccessfully seeking the gene that causes orange fur and the striking patchwork of colors in calicos and tortoiseshells. Now, two teams have independently found the long-awaited mutation and discovered a protein that influences hair color in a way never seen before in any animal... Using skin samples collected from various cats, the researchers were able to hone in a mutation on the X chromosome that impacts how much of a protein a gene called Arhgap36 produces. Increasing the amount of the Arhgap36 in pigment producing cells called melanocytes activates a molecular pathway that produces a light red pigment. "Scanning a database of 188 cat genomes, Barsh's team found every single orange, calico, and tortoiseshell cat had the exact same mutation," writes Science magazine. "The group reports the discovery this month on the preprint server bioRxiv. A separate study, also posted to bioRxiv this month, confirms these findings... They also found that skin from calico cats had more Arghap36 RNA in orange regions than in brown or black regions."Arhgap36's inactivation pattern in calicos and tortoiseshells is typical of a gene on the X chromosome, says Carolyn Brown [a University of British Columbia geneticist who was not involved in either study], but it's unusual that a deletion mutation would make a gene more active, not less. "There is probably something special about cats." Experts are thrilled by the two studies. "It's a long-awaited gene," says Leslie Lyons, a feline geneticist at the University of Missouri. The discovery of a new molecular pathway for hair color was unexpected, she says, but she's not surprised how complex the interactions seem to be. "No gene ever stands by itself." Lyons would like to know where and when the mutation first appeared: There is some evidence, she says, that certain mummified Egyptian cats were orange. Research into cat color has revealed all kinds of phenomena, she says, including how the environment influences gene expression. "Everything you need to know about genetics you can learn from your cat."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"Are you spending hours scrolling mindlessly on Instagram reels and TikTok?" asks the BBC. "If so, you might be suffering from brain rot, which has become the Oxford word of the year."It is a term that captures concerns about the impact of consuming excessive amounts of low-quality online content, especially on social media. The word's usage saw an increase of 230% in its frequency from 2023 to 2024. Psychologist and Oxford University Professor, Andrew Przybylski says the popularity of the word is a "symptom of the time we're living in". Brain rot beat five other shortlisted words including demure, Romantasy and dynamic pricing... [And "slop".] The first recorded use of brain rot dates much before the creation of the internet - it was written down in 1854 by Henry David Thoreau in his book Walden. He criticises society's tendency to devalue complex ideas and how this is part of a general decline in mental and intellectual effort. It leads him to ask: "While England endeavours to cure the potato rot, will not any endeavour to cure the brain-rot - which prevails so much more widely and fatally?" The word initially gained traction on social media among Gen Z and Gen Alpha communities, but it's now being used in the mainstream as a way to describe low-quality, low-value content found on social media. Prof Przybylski says "there's no evidence of brain rot actually being a thing. Instead it describes our dissatisfaction with the online world and it's a word that we can use to bundle our anxieties that we have around social media." The New York Times points out that Oxford's past "word of the year" selections included "podcast" and "selfie"[Casper Grathwohl, the president of Oxford Languages, the company's dictionary division] noted the finalists were heavy on old-fashioned words that young people had repurposed in semi-ironic ways - the linguistic equivalent, he said, of "bell-bottoms coming back into fashion...." "Slop" has undergone a similar update. There was a spike of more than 300 percent over the past year in references not to pig feed, but to "art, writing or other content generated using artificial intelligence, shared and distributed online in an indiscriminate or intrusive way, and characterized as being of low quality, inauthentic or inaccurate," according to Oxford. Like "brain rot," it "represents the underbelly of today's linguistic churn," Grathwohl said. "There's a sense that we are drowning in mediocre experiences as digital lives get clogged."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

United Nations members gathered this week in Busan, South Korea to negotiate the first treaty reducing plastic pollution. But Politico reports that "talks collapsed late Sunday after negotiators failed to resolve their differences and agree on a global plastic treaty.At the heart of the disagreement was a refusal by oil-rich nations led by Saudi Arabia to accept a deal that put limits on plastic production... Throughout the two years of talks, oil-rich and plastic-producing states had repeatedly clashed with nations that wanted to reduce plastic production to solve a worsening plastic pollution crisis. Many went to Busan hopeful differences would be put aside in the name of combatting a common global threat. But in the end this proved too optimistic... The EU, alongside more than 100 other countries that included the U.K., on Thursday had backed a new proposal spearheaded by Panama pushing for a global target to reduce plastic production to "sustainable levels", drawing a clear battle line for the talks. But three negotiators from countries in the High Ambition Coalition to End Plastic Pollution - granted anonymity to discuss closed-door talks - told POLITICO Saudi Arabia had coordinated a push from oil-rich and plastic-producing countries to block any proposals for the treaty that threatened to reduce plastic production. The vast majority of plastic is made from oil or natural gas... Along with disagreements over plastic production, countries were also unable to agree on whether and how to target particularly polluting plastic products, and how to finance the treaty. Two of the "high-ambition" negotiators referenced above suggested the talks were doomed to fail from the beginning, arguing that there was never going to be enough time given the scope of the mandate. "I think the pressure on us to deliver that in 18 months ... was kind of stupid then, and it's still stupid now," said one. "Usually these processes take a number of years - beyond what we are doing...." But many observers and some delegates said the summit's collapse demonstrated the failures of consensus-based environmental multilateralism, arguing that requiring all countries to agree by consensus gave reluctant nations too much veto power. NGOs like the Center for International Environmental Law hope this week's failed talks will serve as a lesson for future U.N. talks... The date and time of the next round of talks is yet to be announced. Greenpeace issued a statement saying "over 100 Member States, representing billions of people, rejected a toothless deal that would have accomplished nothing, and stood before the world committing to an ambitious treaty." And they argued that the message is clear. "Ambitious countries must not allow the fossil fuel and petrochemical industries, backed by a small minority of countries, to prevent the will of the vast majority. A strong agreement that protects people and the planet is our only option."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Bluesky now has more active website users than Threads in the U.S., according to a graph from the Financial Times. And though Threads still leads in app usage, "Prior to November 5 Threads had five times more daily active users in the U.S. than Bluesky... Now, Threads is only 1.5 times larger than its rival, Similarweb said." But "the influx of new users has opened up new opportunities for scammers and impersonators," Engadget reported this week:A recent analysis by Alexios Mantzarlis, director of the Security Trust and Safety Initiative at Cornell Tech found that 44 percent of the top 100 most-followed accounts on Bluesky had at least one "doppelganger," with most looking like "cheap knock-offs of the bigger account, down to the same bio and profile picture," Mantzarlis wrote in his newsletter Faked Up. The article highlighted issues with Bluesky's loose account verification policies. And then, Bluesky announced a new change-of-policy Friday. Engadget reports:The Bluesky Safety account said that the social media service is removing accounts that are impersonating other people and those squatting on handles... Bluesky now requires parody, satire or fan accounts to label themselves as such in both their handles and their bio. If they don't, or if they only indicate the nature of their account in one of those elements, then they'll be treated as an impersonator and will be removed from the platform. Bluesky now explicitly prohibits identity churning, as well. Accounts that start as impersonators with the purpose of gaining new users, and who then switch to a different identity in an attempt to circumvent the ban, will still get booted off the app. Finally, it says it's exploring "additional options to enhance account verification," though they're not quite ready for rollout. Bluesky says they've "quadrupled the size of our moderation team, in part to action impersonation reports more quickly. We still have a large backlog of moderation reports due to the influx of new users as we shared previously, though we are making progress." And in addition, "We are working behind the scenes to help many organizations and high-profile individuals set up their verified domain handles." And there's another problem. "The EU's executive arm on Monday said Bluesky didn't provide information it was required to share under the bloc's Digital Services Act," reports Bloomberg. Bluesky responded that it's working to comply, " consulting with its lawyer to follow the EU's information disclosure rules, a Bluesky spokesperson wrote on Tuesday in an email.""All platforms in the EU have to have a dedicated page on their websites where it says how many user numbers they have in the EU and where they are legally established," Thomas Regnier, the commission's spokesperson on digital matters, told reporters. "This is not the case with Bluesky, so this is not followed...." Under the DSA, platforms with more than 45 million users in the bloc qualify as "very large online platforms" and need to follow stricter content moderation rules under the commission's supervision. Breaches can result in fines of up to 6% of their global annual sales... Smaller platforms are still required to comply with the law, but are regulated by the EU country where they have a legal presence. That's so far unclear in the case of Bluesky, which was created expressly to avoid a centralized ownership structure. The commission asked EU member countries' national authorities to investigate "and see if they can find any trace of Bluesky" in their jurisdictions, Regnier saidRead more of this story at Slashdot.

Greg Kroah-Hartman noted some coming changes in Linux 6.13 will make it possible to create "way more" Rust-based kernel drivers. "The veteran kernel developer believes we're at a tipping point of seeing more upstream Rust drivers ahead," reports Phoronix:These Rust char/misc changes are on top of the main Rust pull for Linux 6.13 that brought 3k lines of code for providing more Rust infrastructure. Linux 6.13 separately is also bringing Rust file abstractions. "Sorry for doing this at the end of the merge window," Greg Kroah-Hartman wrote in the pull request, explaining that "conference and holiday travel got in the way on my side (hence the 5am pull request emails...)"Loads of things in here... - Rust misc driver bindings and other rust changes to make misc drivers actually possible. I think this is the tipping point, expect to see way more rust drivers going forward now that these bindings are present. Next merge window hopefully we will have pci and platform drivers working, which will fully enable almost all driver subsystems to start accepting (or at least getting) rust drivers. This is the end result of a lot of work from a lot of people, congrats to all of them for getting this far, you've proved many of us wrong in the best way possible, working code :)Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Long-time Slashdot reader jaromil writes:As a fun project, we hacked together a C interpreter (based on Tiny C Compiler) that compiles C code in-memory and runs it live. CJIT today is a 2MB executable that can do a lot, including call functions from any installed library on Linux, Windows, and MacOSX. Slashdot reader oliwer points out "they are also including a REPL, which could be interesting." And the CJIT web page promises there's "no EULA to sign, no IDE to install... 100% Free and open source!" It also says the project was inspired by Terry Davis (TempleOS) and Fabrice Bellard (Tiny C Compiler).Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Primarily used by law enforcement, Graykey unlocks mobile devices to extract data from both Android and iOS systems, according to the blog AppleInsider, "though its effectiveness varies depending on the specific hardware and software involved."But while its capabilities are rarely disclosed, "a leak of some Grayshift's internal documents was recently reported on by 404 Media."According to the data, Graykey can only perform "partial" data retrieval from iPhones running iOS 18 and iOS 18.0.1. These versions were released in September and early October, respectively. A partial extraction likely includes unencrypted files and metadata, such as folder structures and file sizes, according to past reports. Notably, Graykey struggles with beta versions of iOS 18.1. Under the latest update, the tool fails to extract any data, as per the documents. Meanwhile, Graykey's performance with Android phones varies, largely due to the diversity of devices and manufacturers. On Google's Pixel lineup, Graykey can only partially access data from the latest Pixel 9 when in an "After First Unlock" (AFU) state - where the phone has been unlocked at least once since being powered on. Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader AmiMoJo for sharing the article.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Nonprofit Code.org has posted this year's cartoon for "Hour of Code," their annual learn-to-code event for schoolchildren. Long-time Slashdot reader theodp notes its animated pigeon gives a shout-out to the AI that could ultimately replace programmers:In an Instagram post introducing the video, Code.org explains: "Bartlett the Pigeon just learned how to code and now thinks he's smarter than us. Honestly...he might be. Meet the face (and feathers) of this year's #HourOfCode." In the video, Bartlett wows a social media influencer with his coding skills. "Is this pigeon typing code?" she asks in disbelief. "I'm going to film this for my socials!" Bartlett goes on to explain that the song he remixes with coding blocks - Aloe Blacc's "I Need a Dollar" - could have instead been generated by simply using AI, which he says is "like having a personal DJ assistant who never misses a beat!" Interestingly, Blacc noted in a 2011 interview that he wrote "I Need a Dollar" after being made redundant in his career as a business consultant by Ernst & Young. That multinational company is now advising global business leaders on how they can harness the power of GenAI "to achieve more with fewer resources" by disrupting professions - like programming - that "involve a high degree of repetitive and data-driven tasks that AI can automate."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"Spacecraft, satellites, and space-based systems all face cybersecurity threats that are becoming increasingly sophisticated and dangerous," reports CNBC. "With interconnected technologies controlling everything from navigation to anti-ballistic missiles, a security breach could have catastrophic consequences."Critical space infrastructure is susceptible to threats across three key segments: in space, on the ground segment and within the communication links between the two. A break in one can be a cascading failure for all, said Wayne Lonstein, co-founder and CEO at VFT Solutions, and co-author of Cyber-Human Systems, Space Technologies, and Threats. "In many ways, the threats to critical infrastructure on Earth can cause vulnerabilities in space," Lonstein said. "Internet, power, spoofing and so many other vectors that can cause havoc in space," he added. The integration of artificial intelligence into space projects has heightened the risk of sophisticated cyber attacks orchestrated by state actors and individual hackers. AI integration into space exploration allows more decision-making with less human oversight. For example, NASA is using AI to target scientific specimens for planetary rovers. However, reduced human oversight could make these missions more prone to unexplained and potentially calamitous cyberattacks, said Sylvester Kaczmarek, chief technology officer at OrbiSky Systems, which specializes in the integration of AI, robotics, cybersecurity, and edge computing in aerospace applications. Data poisoning, where attackers feed corrupted data to AI models, is one example of what could go wrong, Kaczmarek said. Another threat, he said, is model inversion, where adversaries reverse-engineer AI models to extract sensitive information, potentially compromising mission integrity. If compromised, AI systems could be used to interfere with or take control of strategically important national space missions... The U.S. government is tightening up the integrity and security of AI systems in space. The 2023 Cyberspace Solarium Commission report stressed the importance of designating outer space as a critical infrastructure sector, urging enhanced cybersecurity protocols for satellite operators... The rivalry between the U.S. and China includes the new battleground of space. As both nations ramp up their space ambitions and militarized capabilities beyond Earth's atmosphere, the threat of cyberattacks targeting critical orbital assets has become an increasingly pressing concern... Space-based systems increasingly support critical infrastructure back on Earth, and any cyberattacks on these systems could undermine national security and economic interests.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

To help replace power plants, Japan's northernmost island, Hokkaido, "is turning to a new generation of batteries designed to stockpile massive amounts of energy," reports the Washington Post. "The Hokkaido Electric Power Network (HEPCO Network) is deploying flow batteries, an emerging kind of battery that stores energy in hulking tanks of metallic liquid."[F]low batteries are making their debut in big real-world projects. Sumitomo Electric, the company that built the Hokkaido plant, has also built flow batteries in Taiwan, Belgium, Australia, Morocco and California. Hokkaido's flow battery farm was the biggest in the world when it opened in April 2022 - a record that lasted just a month before China built one that is eight times bigger and can deliver as much energy as an average U.S. natural gas plant. "It looks like flow batteries are finally about to take off with interest from China," said Michael Taylor, an energy analyst at the International Renewable Energy Agency, an international group that studies and promotes green energy. "When China starts to get comfortable with a technology and sees it working, then they will very quickly scale their manufacturing base if they think they can drive down the costs, which they usually can...." Lithium-ion batteries are perfect for smartphones because they're lightweight and fit in small spaces, even if they don't last long and have to be replaced frequently. Utilities have a different set of priorities: They need to store millions of times more energy, and they have much more room to work with. "If you think about utility-scale stationary applications, maybe you don't need lithium-ion batteries. You can use another one that is cheaper and can provide the services that you want like, for example, vanadium flow batteries," said Francisco Boshell, a researcher at the International Renewable Energy Agency... Flow batteries are designed to tap giant tanks that can store a lot of energy for a long time. To boost their storage capacity, all you have to do is build a bigger tank and add more vanadium. That's a big advantage: By contrast, there's no easy way to adjust the storage capacity of a lithium-ion battery - if you want more storage, you have to build a whole new battery... One major barrier to building more of these battery farms is finding enough vanadium. Three-quarters of the world's supply comes as a by-product from 10 steel mills in China and Russia, according to Kara Rodby [a battery analyst at the investment firm Volta Energy Technologies] who got her PhD at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology studying the design and market for flow batteries. Australia, South Africa and the United States also produce vanadium, but in much smaller quantities. Mines that have been proposed could boost supply. And some flow battery start-ups are trying to sidestep the vanadium problem entirely by using different materials that are easier to buy. The other hurdle is their up-front cost. Vanadium flow batteries are at least twice as expensive to build as lithium-ion batteries, Rodby said, and banks are hesitant to lend money to fund an unfamiliar technology. But experts say flow batteries can be cheaper in the long run because they're easier to maintain and last longer. A lithium-ion battery might have to be replaced after 10 years, but Rodby says flow batteries can last much longer. "There really is no finite lifetime for a flow battery in the way there is for lithium-ion," Rodby said. Here's an interesting statistic from the article. "Over the next six years, utilities will have to build 35 times as many batteries as there are today to soak up all extra renewable energy that will come online, according to the International Energy Agency."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

It's one of the most successful - and oldest - computer games of all-time. This week CBS News Minnesota interviewed Bill Heinemann, who in 1971 co-created "The Oregon Trail" as an educational video game simulating pioneers travelling west."It's surprising and gratifying and humbling, in a way, that a little thing that I spent two weeks on has become a worldwide phenomenon," Heinemann said... The game's become known for the many ways players can die, including by dysentery, but Heinemann's favorite was death by snake bite. "It only happened once every several hundred times, and so people could've played it for months and all of a sudden, 'What? I got bit by a snake and died? This has never happened to me before!'" he said. The game has been the subject of numerous satirical articles by McSweeney's. And long-time Slashdot reader whois_drek points out that a sketch comedy group also based a movie on the videogame in 2023. So how does the game's co-creator feel about Apple's plans to film a new big-budget movie based on the game?"Surprising to me how popular it's become and how long the interest in it has been around," Heinemann said. "And this is just the next step I guess." He won't be making any money off the movie. In fact, Heinemann's never seen a dime from the iconic game. He and his two co-creators, Rawitsch and Paul Dillenberger, turned it over to the Minnesota Educational Computing Consortium shortly after they invented it. Heinemann says it doesn't bother him. "I didn't do it for money," he said. "I did it for just the love of the game and the love of teaching." Thanks to Slashdot reader quonset for sharing the news.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The world's use of clean energy "is rapidly growing", reports the Washington Post, "but not fast enough to keep temperatures in check..." Many experts say it will be the economics of clean energy that defines the future of the planet - and how developing countries choose to meet their growing electricity demands. "What happens in emerging and developing economies in the next decade in some sense is the whole ballgame," said Jason Bordoff, founding director of the Center for Global Energy Policy at Columbia University. Global greenhouse gas emissions could peak as soon as next year, according to the International Energy Agency, but are not on course to drop sharply enough to contain warming. The world would have to cut its emissions roughly in half by 2035 to meet the 1.5 C target, scientists warn, in part because carbon dioxide stays in the atmosphere for centuries. Instead, the U.N. projects that nations' current policies will lead to 3.1 C of warming by 2100, or as little as 2.6 C if the strongest pledges are kept. This would represent substantial progress from when the Paris agreement was adopted, when scientists expected a 4 C (7.2 F) rise in temperatures by century's end... Still, the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change predicts "dangerous and widespread disruption" on the current path. The Greenland ice sheet might tip into irreversible collapse, according to the IPCC, threatening cities from New York to Shanghai, while extreme heat and humidity could make large swaths of the world effectively uninhabitable. Scientists also expect a growing toll of disease, crop failures and weather disasters. It would likely take thousands of years for Greenland's ice to completely vanish, but other impacts - like the death of coral reefs worldwide and month-long heat waves - could come in a matter of decades. If countries wish to avoid these consequences, they will have to spend vast sums on adaptation. From now through 2030, poor nations will need up to $387 billion per year to adapt to mounting climate disasters, according to a recent U.N. report... [Much of the progress on curbing emissions] has come from the United States' switch from coal to natural gas and renewables, and the European Union's rapid embrace of wind and solar power... But the demand for power is also rising, complicating these efforts. According to a recent report from the International Energy Agency, countries are expected to add electricity demand equivalent to the entire nation of Japan every year - thanks to the growth of EVs, the rapid build-out of AI data centers, and a surge in a need for air conditioning in developing countries. That growth in demand means that even as clean energy is added to the grid, fossil fuel use hasn't decreased. And unless countries close coal and gas plants and shut down oil drilling, emissions won't start to come down. "Two things can both be true: Clean energy is breaking almost every record you can imagine," Bordoff said. "And oil use is going up, and gas use is going up, and coal use is going up."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Friday the Software Freedom Conservancy announced the production release of the new OpenWrt One network router - designed specifically for running the Linux-based router OS OpenWrt (a member project of the SFC). "This is the first wireless Internet router designed and built with your software freedom and right to repair in mind. "The OpenWrt One will never be locked down and is forever unbrickable." This device services your needs as its owner and user. Everyone deserves control of their computing. The OpenWrt One takes a great first step toward bringing software rights to your home: you can control your own network with the software of your choice, and ensure your right to change, modify, and repair it as you like. The OpenWrt One demonstrates what's possible when hardware designers and manufacturers prioritize your software right to repair; OpenWrt One exuberantly follows these requirements of the copyleft licenses of Linux and other GPL'd programs. This device provides the fully copyleft-compliant source code release from the start. Device owners have all the rights as intended on Day 1; device owners are encouraged to take full advantage of these rights to improve and repair the software on their OpenWrt One. Priced at US$89 for a complete OpenWrt One with case (or US$68.42 for a caseless One's logic board), it's ready for a wide variety of use cases... This new product has completed full FCC compliance tests; it's confirmed that OpenWrt met all of the FCC compliance requirements. Industry "conventional wisdom" often argues that FCC requirements somehow conflict with the software right to repair. SFC has long argued that's pure FUD. We at SFC and OpenWrt have now proved copyleft compliance, the software right to repair, and FCC requirements are all attainable in one product! You can order an OpenWrt One now! Since today is the traditional day in the USA when folks buy gifts for love ones, we urge you to invest in a wireless router that can last! We do expect that for orders placed today, sellers will deliver by December 22 in most countries... Regardless of where you buy from, for every purchase of a new OpenWrt One, a US$10 donation will go to the OpenWrt earmarked fund at Software Freedom Conservancy. Your purchase not only improves your software right to repair, but also helps OpenWrt and SFC continue to improve the important software and software freedom on which we all rely! LWN.net points out that OpenWrt has also "served as the base on which a lot of network-oriented development (including the bufferbloat-reduction work) has been done."The OpenWrt One was designed to be a functional network router that would serve as a useful tool for the development of OpenWrt itself. To that end, the hope was to create a device that was entirely supported by upstream free software, and which was as unbrickable as it could be... The OpenWrt One comes with a two-core Arm Cortex-A53 processor, 1GB of RAM, and 256MB of NAND flash memory. There is also a separate, read-only 16MB NOR flash array in the device. Normally, the OpenWrt One will boot and run from the NAND flash, but there is a small switch in the back that will cause it to boot from the NOR instead. This is a bricking-resistance feature; should a software load break the device, it can be recovered by booting from NOR and flashing a new image into the NAND array. .. After booting into the new image, the One behaved like any other OpenWrt router... What could be more interesting is seeing this router get into the hands of developers and enthusiasts who will use it to make OpenWrt (and other small-system distributions) better. Long-time Slashdot reader dumfrac writes:The intent to build the device was announced on the OpenWRT forums earlier this year. It is based on MediaTek MT7981B (Filogic 820) SoC and MediaTek MT7976C dual-band WiFi 6 chipset and the board is made by Banana Pi.A poll to select the logo was run in April on the OpenWRT forums, and now the hardware is available for purchase. .Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"Polar oceans constitute emission hotspots during the summer," according to a new paper published in the peer-reviewed scientific journal Science Advances. "And including those sea-to-air fluxes in an atmospheric chemistry-climate model "results in a net radiative effect that has far-reaching implications." The research was led by a team of scientists from Spain's Institute of Marine Sciences and the Blas Cabrera Institute of Physical Chemistry, according to an announcement from the UK's University of East Anglia:Researchers have quantified for the first time the global emissions of a sulfur gas produced by marine life, revealing it cools the climate more than previously thought, especially over the Southern Ocean. The study, published in the journal Science Advances, shows that the oceans not only capture and redistribute the sun's heat, but produce gases that make particles with immediate climatic effects, for example through the brightening of clouds that reflect this heat. It broadens the climatic impact of marine sulfur because it adds a new compound, methanethiol, that had previously gone unnoticed. Researchers only detected the gas recently, because it used to be notoriously hard to measure and earlier work focussed on warmer oceans, whereas the polar oceans are the emission hotspots... Their findings represent a major advance on one of the most groundbreaking theories proposed 40 years ago about the role of the ocean in regulating the Earth's climate. This suggested that microscopic plankton living on the surface of the seas produce sulfur in the form of a gas, dimethyl sulphide, that once in the atmosphere, oxidizes and forms small particles called aerosols. Aerosols reflect part of the solar radiation back into space and therefore reduce the heat retained by the Earth. Their cooling effect is magnified when they become involved in making clouds, with an effect opposite to, but of the same magnitude as, that of the well-known warming greenhouse gases, such as carbon dioxide or methane. The researchers argue that this new work improves our understanding of how the climate of the planet is regulated by adding a previously overlooked component and illustrates the crucial importance of sulfur aerosols. They also highlight the magnitude of the impact of human activity on the climate and that the planet will continue to warm if no action is taken. The article includes this quote from one of the study's lead authors (Dr. Charel Wohl from the university's Centre for Ocean and Atmospheric Sciences). "Climate models have greatly overestimated the solar radiation actually reaching the Southern Ocean, largely because they are not capable of correctly simulating clouds. The work done here partially closes the longstanding knowledge gap between models and observations." And the university's announcement argues that "With this discovery, scientists can now represent the climate more accurately in models that are used to make predictions of +1.5 degrees C or +2 degrees C warming, a huge contribution to policy making." Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader schwit1 for sharing the news.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

November 5: Bitcoin's price reaches an all-time high of $74,200. November 11: Bitcoin sets a new record of $84,000. November 12: Bitcoin pushes past $90,000.And Friday, CNBC reported:Bitcoin is on pace to post a 38% gain for November, according to Coin Metrics, which would make the month its best since February, when it gained 45% following the launch of spot bitcoin ETFs... Bulls expect bitcoin's price to reach $100,000 by the end of 2024 and potentially double by the end of 2025.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

To explain the origins of dark market, a new model of the universe has been proposed by researchers, reports Phys.org. "Their idea is that dark matter would be produced during a infinitesimally short inflationary phase when the size of the universe quickly expanded exponentially..."Although inflation is mostly accepted by cosmologists as part of the Big Bang picture based on some evidence (though there is meaningful dissent), the driver of inflation is still unknown... [T]o-date research has not considered the possibility that a significant [amount] of dark matter could be produced during the inflationary expansion and not be diluted away. In the paper's WIFI model - Warm Inflation via ultraviolet Freeze-In - dark matter is created through small and rare interactions with particles in a hot, energetic environment. It contains a new mechanism where this production occurs just before the Big Bang, during cosmic inflation, leading to dark matter being formed much earlier than in existing theories... "The thing that's unique to our model is that dark matter is successfully produced during inflation," said Katherine Freese, Director of the Weinberg Institute of Theoretical Physics and the Texas Center for Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics at The University of Texas at Austin and lead author of the paper. "In most [other] models, anything that is created during inflation is then 'inflated away' by the exponential expansion of the universe, to the point where there is essentially nothing left." In this new mechanism, all the dark matter that we observe today could have been created during that brief, pre-Big Bang period of inflation. The quantum field driving inflation, the inflation, loses some of its energy to radiation, and this radiation, in turn, produces dark matter particles via the freeze-in mechanism.... The WIFI [Warm Inflation via ultraviolet Freeze-In] model cannot yet be confirmed by observations. But a key part of the scenario, warm inflation, will be tested over the next decade by the so-called cosmic microwave background experiments. Confirming warm inflation would be a significant step for the WIFI model's dark matter production scenario. "What was before inflation? Physicists have no idea."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"A flaw in a WordPress anti-spam plugin with over 200,000 installations allows rogue plugins to be installed on affected websites," reports Search Engine Journal. The authentication bypass vulnerability lets attackers gain full access to websites without a username or password, according to the article, and "Security researchers rated the vulnerability 9.8 out of 10, reflecting the high level of severity..."The flaw in the Spam protection, Anti-Spam, FireWall by CleanTalk plugin, was pinpointed by security researchers at Wordfence as caused by reverse DNS spoofing... [T]he attackers can trick the Ant-Spam plugin that the malicious request is coming from the website itself and because that plugin doesn't have a check for that the attackers gain unauthorized access... Wordfence recommends users of the affected plugin to update to version 6.44 or higher. Thanks to Slashdot reader bleedingobvious for sharing the news.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Washington Post reports on tens of thousands of Americans "forced to pay for medication" to prevent the HIV infections, "despite federal requirements guaranteeing free access to treatment...according to multiple studies and interviews with medical professionals, activists and patients."Insurance companies are skirting rules compelling them to pay for pre-exposure prophylaxis treatment, known as PrEP, researchers and HIV advocacy organizations say - leaving patients to shell out hundreds of dollars each year for medication co-pays, doctor visits and screenings required to stay on drugs that reduce the risk of contracting HIV through sex by 99 percent. Under the Affordable Care Act, commercial insurers must cover certain preventive health services. This is supposed to include at least one form of oral PrEP and related health services, such as regular testing for HIV and other sexually transmitted diseases, for people at increased risk of contracting HIV, according to 2021 guidance from the Biden administration. Responding to complaints that patients were still being charged, the Biden administration in October released new guidance instructing private insurers to cover all forms of PrEP without prior authorization, including new long-acting injections. Nearly a third of a national sample of 325 health coverage plans on government insurance marketplaces did not include PrEP on their lists of covered preventive services, according to the AIDS Institute, a New York-based nonprofit. Between 20 and 30 percent of PrEP users with commercial insurance still had to pay for it despite the coverage mandate, with an average cost of $227 for 2022, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Government regulators have been slow to crack down on insurer violations, activists say, creating a barrier to getting more at-risk Americans on the medication. The CDC estimates that only a third of the more than 1 million people who could benefit from PrEP have received a prescription, according to its most recent data. The issue appears to be lax enforcement against insurers who break rules, a policy advocate told the newspaper. America's Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, which enforces regulations for preventive care, "said it takes enforcement seriously and recently found two insurance plans in violation of coverage requirements following consumer complaints." And the Post spoke to an official at America's Labor Department, who said they were investigating a complaint against a large insurance company, but "said the agency does not have enough staff to conduct proactive investigations and lacks the authority to sue and penalize insurers that break the rules."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

At the start of November Threads had 275 million members. But in 30 days it's apparently increased another 12%, reports The Verge:Threads has accrued over 35 million signups so far in November and is "going on three months with more than a million signups a day," Meta spokesperson Alec Booker told The Verge in an email today. 20 million of those signups have come since November 14th, as Axios notes... At the same time, Bluesky has seen a surge of interest. The platform grew to 15 million users earlier this month and continued to add about a million signups per day for several days. It now sits at over 22 million users. Dave Earley, audience editor at Guardian Australia, says that traffic to TheGuardian.com from BlueSky "is already 2x that of Threads."[T]hat's on a straight threads.net vs bsky.app referral comparison. BUT! 75-80% of tracked referral from owned Bluesky account posts is NOT being attributed to bsky.app, so I'm certain organic traffic would be undercounting by that much as well. By which I mean, I'm pretty sure traffic from bsky.app to theguardian.com is *significantly* higher than the very obvious 2x that of Threads. That post was in response to one by a platform VP for the Boston Globe newspaper, who'd reported that traffic from Bluesky to bostonglobe.com "is already 3x that of Threads, and we are seeing 4.5x the conversions to paying digital subscribers." And Axios notes that Bluesky's growth "has spurred inbound interest for a new investment round, just weeks after raising $15 million in Series A funding, per Axios' Dan Primack." In response, Threads "rolled out a series of changes over the past week in what was seen as an attempt to keep an edge over Bluesky," reports The Hill:The changes included a new custom feed feature, which gives users the ability to build their feeds around the topics and people they are most interested in. Bluesky lets users make their own lists and feeds and set their own content moderation preferences. The platform also rolled out a few "long-overdue improvements" to its search and trending now features and its algorithm.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

From a new web project called IMG_0001:Between 2009 and 2012, iPhones had a built-in "Send to YouTube" button in the Photos app. Many of these uploads kept their default IMG_XXXX filenames, creating a time capsule of raw, unedited moments from random lives. Inspired by Ben Wallace, I made a bot that crawled YouTube and found 5 million of these videos! Watch them below, ordered randomly. The Washington Post reports that it's the same 22-year-old software engineer who created Bop Spotter - that phone on a telephone pole using the Shazam app to identify songs people play in public. And his new site includes only videos "posted before 2015, with fewer than 150 views each and durations shorter than 150 seconds."In about 12 hours total, Walz said, he coded a website that takes millions of these unedited, raw videos from more than nine years ago and serves them to viewers at random. The resulting project, titled IMG_0001 and hosted on his personal website, plays out like a glimpse into different worlds: Hit play and your first video may show teenagers practicing a dance in a high school hallway. That wraps up, and it rolls into footage of a dog frolicking in a snowy backyard... Viewers were gripped by the videos' unfiltered nature, a contrast to the heavily produced and camera-aware content found on TikTok and YouTube today. Writer Ryan Broderick wrote in his newsletter Garbage Day that the project is "beautiful, haunting, funny, and sort of magical. Like staring into a security camera of the past." Mashable's Tim Marcin called it "the kind of authenticity that's all too rare online these days." The website has more than 280,000 views and millions of video plays, Walz said - meaning plenty of viewers are sticking around to watch many of the videos. The article includes an intesting observation from Christian Sandvig, a digital media professor at the University of Michigan. "The people who made the video might not even remember that they shared them!"Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The New York Post writes that "After the COVID-19 pandemic upended mom-and-pops around the city and resulted in thousands shuttering for good, it is important - now more than ever - to shop local." America's Small Business Administration issued their own statement urging shoppers to "champion small businesses nationwide and #ShopSmall on Saturday, linking to a site mapping small businesses in your area. (And there's also a directory listing online small businesses.)Small Business Saturday was founded by American Express in 2010 and officially cosponsored by the U.S. Small Business Administration since 2011. It is an important part of small businesses' busiest shopping season. - In 2023, the reported projected spending in the U.S. from those who shopped at small businesses on Small Business Saturday was around $17 billion - Since 2010, the total reported U.S. spending at small businesses during the annual Small Business Saturday is an estimated $201 billion "Let's keep the Shop Small tradition going," urges the American Express web site - encouraging shoppers to also use the #ShopSmall hashtag on social media.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Transport for London (TfL) has dropped its investigation into how it could introduce driverless trains on the London Underground. From a report: One of the many conditions imposed on TfL during the pandemic to keep services running when most of us were stuck at home was that it would investigate how it could introduce driverless trains on the Underground. TfL was required to produce a business case for converting the Waterloo & City line and Piccadilly line to a DLR-style operation, and in September 2021, it advertised for consultancy work on the project. It's now been confirmed that the study reached the same conclusion that every other study into the issue has already reported -- it'll cost an awful lot of money for very little benefit. Despite the claims that it would prevent strikes on the tube, the reality is that it wouldn't, as driverless trains would still have staff on board, just as the DLR does, and the DLR still has strikes.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Performance improvement plans, a controversial corporate tool for managing underperforming employees, are becoming increasingly prevalent in U.S. workplaces. HR Acuity data shows workers subject to performance actions rose from 33.4 per 1,000 in 2020 to 43.6 per 1,000 in 2023. While companies maintain PIPs offer a path to improvement, WSJ -- citing HR executives and former employees -- describes them as primarily providing legal protection against wrongful termination lawsuits and an alternative to formal layoffs. Only 10-25% of employees survive the 30-90 day improvement plans, with most either being terminated or leaving voluntarily.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Google Cloud dangled hundreds of million of euros worth of financial incentives to ally itself with an association of European cloud providers that had lodged a complaint against Microsoft, according to confidential documents seen by The Register. Amit Zavery, the former Vice President of Google Cloud Platform, presented to a selection of members of the Cloud Infrastructure Service Providers in Europe (CISPE) trade body, then to the board and finally to the entire organization, according to sources that asked to remain anonymous. In the presentation, seen by us, Zavery offered to provide a Members Innovation Fund of $4.2 million, which Google described as $105,000 per member to be used as "immediate funding for projects and license fees of CISPE members to support innovation in open cloud ecosystems." CISPE actually has 36 members now, including Oxya, Leaseweb, UpCloud and AWS -- the latter being the only non-European participant. The number has grown from 27 in July. Google also offered to contribute an additional $10.6 million to the trade association, described in the presentation as "participating and membership resources."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

SpzToid writes: A Chinese commercial vessel that has been surrounded by European warships in international waters for a week is central to an investigation of suspected sabotage that threatens to test the limits of maritime law -- and heighten tensions between Beijing and European capitals. Investigators suspect that the crew of the Yi Peng 3 bulk carrier -- 225 meters long, 32 meters wide and loaded with Russian fertilizer -- deliberately severed two critical data cables last week as its anchor was dragged along the Baltic seabed for over 100 miles. Their probe now centers on whether the captain of the Chinese-owned ship, which departed the Russian Baltic port of Ust-Luga on Nov. 15, was induced by Russian intelligence to carry out the sabotage. It would be the latest in a series of attacks on Europe's critical infrastructure that law-enforcement and intelligence officials say have been orchestrated by Russia.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

British members of parliament have voted to legalize assisted dying, approving a contentious proposal that would make the United Kingdom one of a small handful of nations to allow terminally ill people to end their lives. From a report: Lawmakers in the House of Commons voted by 330 to 275 to support the bill, after an hours-long debate in the chamber and a years-long campaign by high-profile figures that drew on emotional first-hand testimony. Britain is now set to join a small club of nations to have legalized the process, and one of the largest by population to allow it. The bill must still clear the House of Lords and parliamentary committees, but Friday's vote marked the most important hurdle. It allows people with a terminal condition and less than six months to live to take a substance to end their lives, as long as they are capable of making the decision themselves. Two doctors, and then a High Court judge, would need to sign off on the choice. Canada, New Zealand, Spain and most of Australia allow assisted dying in some form, as do several US states including Oregon, Washington and California.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Riot Games has announced sweeping changes to its terms of service, expanding penalties for player misconduct beyond in-game behavior to include content creation and social media activities. The new rules, Engadget reports, enable "Riot-wide bans" for violations across platforms where players discuss or stream Riot games. The company will not actively monitor social media but will respond to reported violations, particularly during game livestreams.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A broad coalition of Canada's major news organizations, including the Toronto Star, Metroland Media, Postmedia, The Globe and Mail, The Canadian Press and CBC, is suing tech giant OpenAI, saying the company is illegally using news articles to train its ChatGPT software. From a report: It's the first time all of a country's major news publishers have come together in litigation against OpenAI. The suit, filed in Ontario's Superior Court of Justice Friday morning, seeks punitive damages, disgorgement of any profits made by OpenAI from using the news organizations' articles, and an injunction barring OpenAI from using any of the news articles in the future. "Journalism is in the public interest. OpenAI using other companies' journalism for their own commercial gain is not. It's illegal," said a joint statement from the media organizations, which are represented by law firm Lenczner Slaght.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

king*jojo writes: KDE and GNOME have decided that because they're not big and complicated enough already, they might work better if they have their own custom distributions underneath. What's the worst that could happen? A talk from this year's KDE conference, Akademy 2024, looks like it's going to become real. The talk, by KDE developer Harald Sitter, was entitled An Operating System of Our Own, and the idea sounds simple enough: Sitter proposed an official KDE Linux distribution. Now the proposal is gathering steam and a plan is coming together for an official KDE Linux -- codenamed "Project Banana."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Meta plans to build a $10 billion private, "mother of all" undersea fiber-optic cable network spanning over 40,000 kilometers around the world, according to TechCrunch. The project, dubbed "W" for its shape, would run from the U.S. east coast to the west coast via India, South Africa and Australia, avoiding regions prone to cable sabotage including the Red Sea and South China Sea. The social media giant, which co-owns 16 existing cable networks, aims to gain full control over traffic prioritization for its services. The project mirrors Google's strategy of private cable ownership. The construction could take 5-10 years to complete.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Climate change has intensified hurricane wind speeds by an average of 19 mph in 84% of North Atlantic hurricanes between 2019-2024, according to new research that links warming ocean temperatures to storm intensity for individual hurricanes. This year, Hurricanes Helene and Milton slammed into Florida, breaking meteorological records and causing catastrophic damage. The study by Climate Central found that higher sea surface temperatures elevated most hurricanes by an entire category on the Saffir-Simpson scale, with three storms, including Hurricane Rafael, seeing wind speeds increase by 34 mph due to warming. Researchers calculated storm intensity using models of pre-warming ocean temperatures. "It's really the evolution of our science on sea surface temperature attribution that has allowed this work to take place," said lead author Daniel Gilford, noting that hurricane damage increases exponentially with wind speed. For example, a storm with double the wind speed can cause 256 times as much damage. The methodology enables scientists to determine climate change impacts on hurricanes in near-real time.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Major academic publishers including Elsevier and Springer Nature are grappling with a sophisticated new journal hijacking scam that precisely mimics their websites to deceive researchers. The fraudulent operation, reported by Retraction Watch, has cloned at least 13 legitimate journals through fake domains, according to Crossref data. The scam, the publication reports, features high-quality website clones that replicate even cookie consent popups. The operation assigns its own DOI prefix to published papers and offers paper-writing and peer review services typical of paper mills.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Major technology companies criticized Australia's new law banning social media access for users under 16, which passed parliament on Thursday with bipartisan support. The legislation threatens fines up to $32 million for platforms failing to block minors. TikTok warned the ban could drive young users to riskier online spaces, while Meta called it a "predetermined process," questioning the rushed parliamentary review that gave stakeholders only 24 hours for submissions. Reuters adds: Snapchat parent Snap said it leaves many questions unanswered. [...] Sunita Bose, managing director of Digital Industry Group, which has most social media companies as members, said no one can confidently explain how the law will work in practice. "The community and platforms are in the dark about what exactly is required of them," she said.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Crypto entrepreneur Justin Sun consumed Maurizio Cattelan's "Comedian" artwork -- a banana taped to a wall -- during an event in Hong Kong on Friday, declaring "the real value is the concept itself." Sun, founder of cryptocurrency platform Tron, purchased the piece for $6.2 million at Sotheby's last week, significantly above its $1-1.5 million estimate. The acquisition included only a certificate of authenticity and assembly instructions, not the physical banana or tape. The Chinese-born entrepreneur, who faces SEC charges over fraud and securities violations, made the payment in cryptocurrency.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

LWN: The long-awaited release of the GNU Image Manipulation Program (GIMP) 3.0 is on the way, marking the first major update since version 2.10 was released in April 2018. It now features a GTK 3 user interface and GIMP 3.0 introduces significant changes to the core platform and plugins. This release also brings performance and usability improvements, as well as more compatibility with Wayland and complex input sources. GIMP 3.0 is the first release to use GTK 3, a more modern foundation than the GTK 2 base of prior releases. GTK 4 has been available for a few years now, and is on the project's radar, but the plan was always to finish the GTK 3 work first. Moving to GTK 3 brings initial Wayland compatibility and HiDPI scaling. In addition, this allows for GIMP users to take advantage of multi-touch input, bringing pinch-to-zoom gestures to the program, and offering a better experience when working with complex peripherals, such as advanced drawing tablets. These features were not previously possible due to the limitations of GTK 2. A secondary result of the transition to GTK 3 is a refreshed user interface (UI), now with support for CSS themes included. In this release, four themes are available by default, including light, dark, and gray themes, along with a high-contrast theme for users with visual impairments. Additionally, this release has transitioned to using GTK's header bar component, typically used to combine an application's toolbar and title bar into one unit. To maintain familiarity with previous releases, however, GIMP 3.0 still supports the traditional menu interface.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Datacenters have been trending toward denser, more power-hungry systems for years. In case you missed it, 19-inch racks are now pushing power demands beyond 120 kilowatts in high-density configurations, with many making the switch to direct liquid cooling to tame the heat. Much of this trend has been driven by a need to support ever larger AI models. According to researchers at Fujitsu, the number of parameters in AI systems is growing 32-fold approximately every three years. To support these models, chip designers like Nvidia use extremely high-speed interconnects -- on the order of 1.8 terabytes a second -- to make eight or more GPUs look and behave like a single device. The problem though, is that the faster you shuffle data across a wire, the shorter the distance at which the signal can be maintained. At those speeds, you're limited to about a meter or two over copper cables. The alternative is to use optics, which can maintain a signal over a much larger distance. In fact, optics are already employed in many rack-to-rack scale-out fabrics like those used in AI model training. Unfortunately, in their current form, pluggable optics aren't particularly efficient or particularly fast. Earlier in 2024 at GTC, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said that if the company had used optics as opposed to copper to stitch together the 72 GPUs that make up its NVL72 rack systems, it would have required an additional 20 kilowatts of power.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Panasonic has created an AI clone of its late founder Konosuke Matsushita based on his writings, speeches, and over 3,000 voice recordings. From a local media report: Known as Japan's "god of management," the Panasonic icon is one of the most respected by the Japanese business community, and comes back to life in digital form to impart wisdom directly to those he never met in person. "As the number of people who received training directly from Matsushita has been on the decline, we decided to use generative AI technology to pass down our group's founding vision to the next generation," the company said in a statement. Codeveloped with the University of Tokyo-affiliated Matsuo Institute, the model can reproduce how a person thinks or talks. The company aims to further develop the digital clone to help make business decisions in the future.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Intel must maintain majority control of its foundries as a condition of receiving $7.86 billion in U.S. CHIPS Act funding, according to terms disclosed in a regulatory filing [PDF]. The semiconductor giant will need to keep at least 50.1% ownership if the foundry unit is spun off privately, while no single shareholder can hold more than 35% of shares if it goes public unless Intel remains the largest stakeholder. The restrictions, which also require Intel to remain a customer, come as the company struggles financially and recently restructured its foundry business as an independent unit.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A million and a half years ago, amid giant storks and the ancestors of antelopes, two extinct relatives of humans walked along the same muddy lakeshore in what is today northern Kenya, new research suggests. From a report: An excavation team uncovered four sets of footprints preserved in the mud at the Turkana Basin, a site that has led to important breakthroughs in understanding human evolution. The discovery, announced on Thursday in a paper in the journal Science, is direct evidence that different kinds of human relatives, with distinct anatomies and gaits, inhabited the same place at the same time, the paper's authors say. It also raises questions about the extent of the species' interactions with each other. "They might have walked by one another," said Kevin Hatala, an evolutionary anthropologist at Chatham University in Pittsburgh who led the study. "They might have looked up in the distance and seen another member of a closely related species, occupying the same landscape." Based on skeletal remains found in the region, Dr. Hatala's team attributed the footprints to Paranthropus boisei and Homo erectus, two types of hominins, the group consisting of our human lineage and closely related species. Paranthropus boisei had smaller brains along with wide, flat faces and massive teeth and chewing muscles; Homo erectus more closely resembled modern human proportions and are thought to be our direct ancestors.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Alphabet's Chrome browser could go for as much as $20 billion if a judge agrees to a Justice Department proposal to sell the business, in what would be a historic crackdown on one of the world's biggest tech companies. From a report: The department will ask the judge, who ruled in August that Google illegally monopolized the search market, to require measures related to artificial intelligence and its Android smartphone operating system, according to people familiar with the plans.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The ongoing cybersecurity incident affecting a North West England NHS group has forced sites to fall back on pen-and-paper operations. From a report: The Wirral University Teaching Hospital NHS Trust updated its official line on the incident on Wednesday evening, revealing new details about the case, but remains coy about the true nature of the attack. "After detecting suspicious activity, as a precaution, we isolated our systems to ensure that the problem did not spread. This resulted in some IT systems being offline," the updated statement said. "We have reverted to our business continuity processes and are using paper rather than digital in the areas affected. We are working closely with the national cybersecurity services and we are planning to return to normal services at the earliest opportunity."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Canada's Competition Bureau is suing Alphabet's Google over alleged anti-competitive conduct in online advertising, the antitrust watchdog said on Thursday. From a report: The Competition Bureau, in a statement, said it had filed an application with the Competition Tribunal seeking an order that, among other things, requires Google to sell two of its ad tech tools. It is also seeking a penalty from Google to promote compliance with Canada's competition laws, the statement said. Google said the complaint "ignores the intense competition where ad buyers and sellers have plenty of choice and we look forward to making our case in court." [...] "Our advertising technology tools help websites and apps fund their content, and enable businesses of all sizes to effectively reach new customers," Dan Taylor, VP of Global Ads, Google said in a statement.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Coffee beans hit their highest price in 47 years, driven by bad weather in Vietnam and Brazil, the biggest producers of robusta and arabica beans respectively. Brazil saw its worst drought in 70 years this year followed by heavy rains, raising fears that next season's output will drop, further pinching already tight global supplies. Vietnam has itself had three years of low output. Arabica beans hit $3.18 a pound on Wednesday, leading Nestle, the world's biggest coffee company, to increase prices. As well as climate concerns, future prices are being raised by worries about tariffs: Roasters "will try to import now, because otherwise you will be paying tariffs later," one trade analyst told the Financial Times.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A Paris court order to block porn website xHamster in France over insufficient age verification has resulted in an unintended loophole. The ruling only restricted "fr[dot]xhamster[dot]com" subdomain following nonprofits' complaint, leaving the main site accessible despite the DNS-level block by internet providers.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Central bank support for digital currencies appears to have fallen sharply, with only 13% of central bankers surveyed by OMFIF Digital Monetary Institute backing CBDCs as a cross-border payment solution, down from 31% in 2023. The survey found just 10% of respondents are actively developing CBDCs, compared with 21% last year. The decline comes despite major initiatives including the Bank for International Settlements' Project Agora and China's Project mBridge. The BIS recently withdrew from mBridge, creating a potential split between Western and emerging market payment systems. Nearly half of surveyed bankers favor improving existing instant payment infrastructure over CBDCs.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Record numbers of plastic industry lobbyists are attending global talks that are the last chance to hammer out a treaty to cut plastic pollution around the world. From a report: The key issue at the conference will be whether caps on global plastic production will be included in the final UN treaty. Lobbyists and leading national producers are furiously arguing against any attempt to restrain the amount that can be produced, leaving the talks on a knife-edge. New analysis by the Center for International Environmental Law (CIEL) shows 220 fossil fuel and chemical industry representatives -- more plastic producers than ever -- are represented at the UN talks in Busan, South Korea. Taken as a group, they would be the biggest delegation at the talks, with more plastic industry lobbyists than representatives from the EU and each of its member states, (191) or the host country, South Korea (140), according to the Centre for International Environmental Law. Their numbers overwhelm the 89 delegates from the Pacific small island developing states (PSIDs), countries that are among those suffering the most from plastic pollution. Sixteen lobbyists from the plastics industry are at the talks as part of country delegations. China, the Dominican Republic, Egypt, Finland, Iran, Kazakhstan and Malaysia all have industry vested interests within their delegations, the analysis shows. The plastic producer representatives outnumber delegates from the Scientists' Coalition for an Effective Plastics Treaty by three to one. Approximately 460m tonnes of plastics are produced annually, and production is set to triple by 2060 under business-as-usual growth rates.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Australia will ban children under 16 from using social media after its senate approved what will become a world-first law. From a report: Children will be blocked from using platforms including TikTok, Instagram, Snapchat and Facebook, a move the Australian government argue is necessary to protect their mental health and wellbeing. The online safety amendment (social media minimum age) bill will impose fines of up to 50 million Australian dollars ($32.5 million) on platforms for systemic failures to prevent young children from holding accounts. It would take effect a year after the bill becomes law, allowing platforms time to work out technological solutions that would also protect users' privacy. The senate passed the bill 34 votes to 19. The house of representatives overwhelmingly approved the legislation 102 votes to 13 on Wednesday.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Space.com: NASA scientists conducting surveys of arctic ice sheets in Greenland got an unprecedented view of an abandoned "city under the ice" built by the U.S. military during the Cold War. During a scientific flight in April 2024, a NASA Gulfstream III aircraft flew over the Greenland Ice Sheet carrying radar instruments to map the depth of the ice sheet and the layers of bedrock below it. The images revealed a new view of Camp Century, a Cold War-era U.S. military base consisting of a series of tunnels carved directly into the ice sheet. As it turns out, this abandoned "secret city" was the site of a secret Cold War project known as Project Iceworm which called for the construction of 2,500 miles (4,023 km) of tunnels that could be used to nuclear intermediate range ballistic missiles (IRBMs) at the Soviet Union. "We were looking for the bed of the ice and out pops Camp Century. We didn't know what it was at first," said NASA's Chad Greene, a cryospheric scientist at the agency's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), in an agency statement. "In the new data, individual structures in the secret city are visible in a way that they've never been seen before." "Weapons, sewage, fuel and other contaminants were buried at Camp Century when it was abandoned, but the thawing Greenland Ice Sheet threatens to unbury these dangerous relics," reports Space.com. In 2017, the U.S. government issued a statement saying it "acknowledges the reality of climate change and the risk it poses" and will "work with the Danish government and the Greenland authorities to settle questions of mutual security" over Camp Century. Scientists are using Camp Century to serve as a warning and a signpost to measure how climate change is affecting the area. You can learn more about Camp Century in a restored declassified U.S. Army film on YouTube.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Longtime Slashdot reader AmiMoJo shares a report from Phys.org: Researchers from Imperial College London have discovered that a space-returned sample from asteroid Ryugu was rapidly colonized by terrestrial microorganisms, even under stringent contamination control measures. In the study, [...] researchers analyzed sample A0180, a tiny (1 x 0.8 mm) particle collected by the JAXA Hayabusa 2 mission from asteroid Ryugu. Transported to Earth in a hermetically sealed chamber, the sample was opened in nitrogen in a class 10,000 clean room to prevent contamination. Individual particles were picked with sterilized tools and stored under nitrogen in airtight containers. Before analysis, the sample underwent Nano-X-ray computed tomography and was embedded in an epoxy resin block for scanning electron microscopy. Rods and filaments of organic matter, interpreted as filamentous microorganisms, were observed on the sample's surface. Variations in size and morphology of these structures resembled known terrestrial microbes. Observations showed that the abundance of these filaments changed over time, suggesting the growth and decline of a prokaryote population with a generation time of 5.2 days. Population statistics indicate that the microorganisms originated from terrestrial contamination during the sample preparation stage rather than being indigenous to the asteroid. Results of the study determined that terrestrial biota had rapidly colonized the extraterrestrial material, even under strict contamination control. Researchers recommend enhanced contamination control procedures for future sample-return missions to prevent microbial colonization and ensure the integrity of extraterrestrial samples. Another factor in gathering contamination-free sampling is that everything used to collect extraterrestrial material originates on a planet awash in microbial life.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A University of Birmingham study reveals that PFAS and microplastics have a synergistic effect that significantly increases their toxicity. "The study's authors exposed water fleas to mixtures of the toxic substances and found they suffered more severe health effects, including lower birth rates, and developmental problems, such as delayed sexual maturity and stunted growth," reports The Guardian. From the report: The enhanced toxic effects raise alarm because PFAS and microplastics are researched and regulated in isolation from one one another, but humans are virtually always exposed to both. The research also showed those fleas previously exposed to chemical pollution were less able to withstand the new exposures. The findings "underscore the critical need to understand the impacts of chemical mixtures on wildlife and human health," wrote the study's authors, who are with the University of Birmingham in the United Kingdom. Researchers compared a group of water fleas that had never been exposed to pollution with another group that had been exposed to pollution in the past. Water fleas have high sensitivity to chemicals so they are frequently used to study ecological toxicity. Both groups were exposed to bits of PET, a common microplastic, as well as PFOA and PFOS, two of the most common and dangerous PFAS compounds. The mixture reflected conditions common in lakes around the world. The study's authors found the mixture to be more toxic than PFAS and microplastics in isolation. They attributed about 40% of the increased toxicity to a synergy among the substances that makes them even more dangerous. The authors theorized the synergy has to do with the interplay in the charges of microplastics and PFAS compounds. The remainder of the increased toxicity was attributed to simple addition of their toxic effects. Fleas exposed to the mixture showed a "markedly reduced number of offspring," the authors said. They were also smaller at maturation and showed delayed sexual growth.Read more of this story at Slashdot.