Daily Archives: August 15, 2023

‘Flying Aliens’ Harassing Peruvian Village Are Actually Illegal Miners With Jetpacks

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The mysterious attacks began on July 11. “Strange beings,” locals said, visiting an isolated Indigenous community in rural Peru at night, harassing its inhabitants and attempting to kidnap a 15-year-old girl. […] News of the alleged extraterrestrial attackers quickly spread online as believers, skeptics, and internet sleuths around the world analyzed grainy videos posted by members of the Ikitu community. The reported sightings came on the heels of U.S. congressional hearings about unidentified aerial phenomenon that ignited a global conversation about the possibility of extraterrestrial life visiting Earth.

Members of the Peruvian Navy and Police traveled to the isolated community, which is located 10 hours by boat from the Maynas provincial capital of Iquitos, to investigate the strange disturbances in early August. Last week, authorities announced that they believed the perpetrators were members of illegal gold mining gangs from Colombia and Brazil using advanced flying technology to terrorize the community, according to RPP Noticias. Carlos Castro Quintanilla, the lead investigator in the case, said that 80 percent of illegal gold dredging in the region is located in the Nanay river basin, where the Ikitu community is located.

One of the key pieces to the investigation was related to the attempted kidnapping of a 15-year-old girl on July 29. Cristian Caleb Pacaya, a local teacher who witnessed the attack, said that they “were using state of the art technology, like thrusters that allow people to fly.” He said that after looking the devices up on Google, he believed that they were “jetpacks.” Authorities have not made any arrests related to the attacks, nor named the alleged assailants or their organization directly. However, the prosecutors office claimed that they had destroyed 110 dredging operations and 10 illegal mining camps in the area already in 2023.

Source: ‘Flying Aliens’ Harassing Village Are Actually Illegal Miners With Jetpacks – Slashdot

Study gets monkeys drunk for 12 months and doing 9 drinks a day. Injects dopamine inhibitors and discovers they don’t want to do much of anything any more.

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[…] a new study published on Monday in the journal Nature Medicine. The gene therapy was tested on macaque monkeys over 12 months, revealing promising results.

[…]

At the beginning of the study, the monkeys were gradually given alcohol until an addiction was established. Then, they began self-regulating their own intake at an amount equating to roughly nine drinks per day for a human. The researchers separated the macaques into a control group and a separate group that received the gene therapy.

According to the study, the monkeys’ daily alcohol consumption increased over the first six months before an eight-week abstinence period was initiated. The gene therapy was applied by inserting two small holes in the macaques’ skulls, and researchers injected a gene that makes the glial-derived neurotrophic factor, or GDNF protein, which stimulates the amount of dopamine produced. Then the monkeys were given the option to drink water or alcohol for four weeks.

What researchers found astounded them. Just one round of gene therapy resulted in the test group reducing their drinking by 50% compared to the control group which didn’t receive therapy. Subsequent test periods used a four-week window of drinking and a four-week window of abstinence. With each round of therapy, researchers found the test group voluntarily consumed less alcohol after the abstinence period, and by the end of the 12-month study, that amount dropped by more than 90%.

[…]

However, researchers also found that the therapy could also influence other behaviors such as weight loss and water intake. The macaques in the test group drank less water compared to the control group and lost about 18% of their body weight

[…]

Source: Gene Therapy Rewired Monkey’s Brains to Treat Alcohol Use Disorder, Study Finds

I want video of this lab!

Apple 2017 Batterygate finally leads to $500m payout, no more courts (in the US, in the UK – tbc)

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Apple’s “Batterygate” legal saga is finally swinging shut – in the US, at least – with a final appeal being voluntarily dismissed, clearing the way for payouts to class members.

The US lawsuit, which combined 66 separate class actions into one big legal proceeding in California, was decided in 2020, with the outcome requiring Apple to pay out between $310 million and $500 million to claimants.

Some US claimants were unhappy with the outcome of the case, and appealed to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. That appeal was finally dropped last week, allowing for payments to those who filed a claim before October 6, 2020, to begin. With around 3 million claims received, claimants will be due around $65 each.

“The settlement is the result of years of investigation and hotly contested litigation. We are extremely proud that this deal has been approved, and following the Ninth Circuit’s order, we can finally provide immediate cash payments to impacted Apple customers,” said Mark Molumphy, an attorney for plaintiffs in the case.

Apple didn’t respond to our questions.

A settlement nearly a decade in the making

For those who’ve chosen to forget about the whole Batterygate fiasco, it all started in 2016 when evidence began pointing to Apple throttling CPUs in older iPhones to prevent accelerated battery drain caused by newer software and loss of battery capacity in aging devices.

Devices affected by Apple’s CPU throttling include iPhone 6 and 7 series handsets as well as the first-generation iPhone SE.

Apple admitted as much in late 2017, and just a day later lawsuits began pouring in around the US from angry iDevice owners looking for recompense. Complaints continued into 2020 from users of older iPhones updated to iOS 14.2, who said their devices started overheating and the battery would drain in mere minutes.

The US case, as mentioned above, was decided in favor of the plaintiffs in 2020, though late last year the settlement was overturned by the Ninth Circuit, which said the lower court judge had applied the wrong legal standard in making his decision. The settlement was reinstated after a second examination earlier this year.

The reason for the objection and its withdrawal isn’t immediately clear. Lawyers for Sarah Feldman and Hondo Jan, who filed both objections to the settlement, didn’t immediately respond to questions from The Register.

Apple also won’t be completely off the hook for its iPhone throttling – it’s also facing a similar complaint in the UK, where a case was filed last year that Apple asked to have tossed in May. That attempt failed, and hearings in the case are scheduled for late August and early September.

The UK case, brought by consumer advocate Justin Gutmann, is seeking to recover ​​£1.6 billion ($2 billion) from Apple if, like the US case, the courts end up deciding against Cook and co.

Source: Apple Batterygate appeals saga comes to an end in the US • The Register