researchers from Sandia National Laboratories have used silicon photonic microchip components to perform a quantum sensing technique called atom interferometry, an ultra-precise way of measuring acceleration. It is the latest milestone toward developing a kind of quantum compass for navigation when GPS signals are unavailable.
Sandia National Laboratories scientist Jongmin Lee, left, prepares a rubidium cold-atom cell for an atom interferometry experiment while scientists Ashok Kodigala, right, and Michael Gehl initialize the controls for a packaged single-sideband modulator chip. Credit: Craig Fritz, Sandia National Laboratories
The team published its findings and introduced a new high-performance silicon photonic modulator — a device that controls light on a microchip — as the cover story in the journal Science Advances.
[…]
Typically, an atom interferometer is a sensor system that fills a small room. A complete quantum compass — more precisely called a quantum inertial measurement unit — would require six atom interferometers.
But Lee and his team have been finding ways to reduce its size, weight, and power needs. They already have replaced a large, power-hungry vacuum pump with an avocado-sized vacuum chamber and consolidated several components usually delicately arranged across an optical table into a single, rigid apparatus.
The new modulator is the centerpiece of a laser system on a microchip. Rugged enough to handle heavy vibrations, it would replace a conventional laser system typically the size of a refrigerator.
Lasers perform several jobs in an atom interferometer, and the Sandia team uses four modulators to shift the frequency of a single laser to perform different functions.
However, modulators often create unwanted echoes called sidebands that need to be mitigated.
Sandia’s suppressed-carrier, single-sideband modulator reduces these sidebands by an unprecedented 47.8 decibels — a measure often used to describe sound intensity but also applicable to light intensity — resulting in a nearly 100,000-fold drop.
[…]
“Just one full-size single-sideband modulator, a commercially available one, is more than $10,000,” Lee said.
Miniaturizing bulky, expensive components into silicon photonic chips helps drive down these costs.
“We can make hundreds of modulators on a single 8-inch wafer and even more on a 12-inch wafer,” Kodigala said.
And since they can be manufactured using the same process as virtually all computer chips, “This sophisticated four-channel component, including additional custom features, can be mass-produced at a much lower cost compared to today’s commercial alternatives, enabling the production of quantum inertial measurement units at a reduced cost,” Lee said.
As the technology gets closer to field deployment, the team is exploring other uses beyond navigation. Researchers are investigating whether it could help locate underground cavities and resources by detecting the tiny changes these make to Earth’s gravitational force. They also see potential for the optical components they invented, including the modulator, in LIDAR, quantum computing, and optical communications.
Privacy authorities in the Netherlands have imposed a €290 million ($324 million) fine on ride-share giant Uber for sending driver data to servers in the United States – “a serious violation” of the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).
According to the Dutch Data Protection Authority (DPA), Uber spent years sending sensitive driver information from Europe to the US. Among the data that was transmitted were taxi licenses, location data, payment details, identity documents, and medical and criminal records. The data was sent abroad without the use of “transfer tools,” which the DPA said means the data wasn’t sufficiently protected.
“Businesses are usually obliged to take additional measures if they store personal data of Europeans outside the European Union,” Dutch DPA chairman Aleid Wolfsen said of the decision. “Uber did not meet the requirements of the GDPR to ensure the level of protection to the data with regard to transfers to the US. That is very serious.”
The Dutch DPA said that the investigation that led to the fine began after complaints from a group of more than 170 French Uber drivers who alleged their data was being sent to the US without adequate protection. Because Uber’s European operations are based in the Netherlands, enforcement for GDPR violations fell to the Dutch DPA.
Unfortunately for Uber, it already has an extensive history with the Dutch DPA, which has fined the outfit twice before.
The first came in 2018 when the authority fined Uber €600,000 for failing to report a data breach (a slugfest that several EU countries joined in on). The latter €10 million fine came earlier this year after Dutch officials determined Uber had failed to disclose data retention practices surrounding the data of EU drivers, refusing to name which countries data was sent to, and had obstructed its drivers’ right to privacy.
[…]
The uncertainty Uber refers to stems from the EU’s striking down of the EU-US Privacy Shield agreement and the years of efforts to replace it with a new rule that defines the safe transfer of personal data between the two regions.
Uber claims it’s done its job under the GDPR to safeguard data belonging to European citizens – it didn’t even need to make any data transfer process changes to comply the latest rules.
Telegram founder and CEO Pavel Durov was arrested Saturday night by French authorities on allegations that his social media platform was being used for child pornography, drug trafficking and organized crime. The move sparked debate over free speech worldwide from prominent anti-censorship figures including Elon Musk, Robert F. Kennedy. Jr. and Edward Snowden. However, “the immediate freakout came from Russia,” reports Politico. “That’s because Telegram is widely used by the Russian military for battlefield communications thanks to problems with rolling out its own secure comms system. It’s also the primary vehicle for pro-war military bloggers and media — as well as millions of ordinary Russians.” From the report: “They practically detained the head of communication of the Russian army,” Russian military blogger channel Povernutie na Z Voine said in a Telegram statement. The blog site Dva Mayora said that Russian specialists are working on an alternative to Telegram, but that the Russian army’s Main Communications Directorate has “not shown any real interest” in getting such a system to Russian troops. The site said Durov’s arrest may actually speed up the development of an independent comms system. Alarmed Russian policymakers are calling for Durov’s release.
“[Durov’s] arrest may have political grounds and be a tool for gaining access to the personal information of Telegram users,” the Deputy Speaker of the Russian Duma Vladislav Davankov said in a Telegram statement. “This cannot be allowed. If the French authorities refuse to release Pavel Durov from custody, I propose making every effort to move him to the UAE or the Russian Federation. With his consent, of course.” Their worry is that Durov may hand over encryption keys to the French authorities, allowing access to the platform and any communications that users thought was encrypted.
French President Emmanuel Macron said Monday that the arrest of Durov was “in no way a political decision.” The Russian embassy has demanded that it get access to Durov, but the Kremlin has so far not issued a statement on the arrest. “Before saying anything, we should wait for the situation to become clearer,” said Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov. However, officials and law enforcement agencies were instructed to clear all their communication from Telegram, the pro-Kremlin channel Baza reported. “Everyone who is used to using the platform for sensitive conversations/conversations should delete those conversations right now and not do it again,” Kremlin propagandist Margarita Simonyan said in a Telegram post. “Durov has been shut down to get the keys. And he’s going to give them.”
Scientists have discovered a mutation in SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, that plays a key role in its ability to infect the central nervous system. The findings may help scientists understand its neurological symptoms and the mystery of “long COVID,” and they could one day even lead to specific treatments to protect and clear the virus from the brain.
The new collaborative study between scientists at Northwestern University and the University of Illinois-Chicago uncovered a series of mutations in the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein (the outer part of the virus that helps it penetrate cells) that enhanced the virus’ ability to infect the brains of mice.
“Looking at the genomes of viruses found in the brain compared to the lung, we found that viruses with a specific deletion in spike were much better at infecting the brains of these animals,” said co-corresponding author Judd Hultquist, assistant professor of medicine (infectious diseases) and microbiology-immunology at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine. “This was completely unexpected, but very exciting.”
[…]
In this study, researchers infected mice with SARS-CoV-2 and sequenced the genomes of viruses that replicated in the brain versus the lung. In the lung, the spike protein looked very similar to the virus used to infect the mice. In the brain, however, most viruses had a deletion or mutation in a critical region of spike that dictates how it enters a cell. When viruses with this deletion were used to directly infect the brains of mice, it was largely repaired when it traveled to the lungs.
“In order for the virus to traffic from the lung to the brain, it required changes in the spike protein that are already known to dictate how the virus gets into different types of cells,” Hultquist said. “We think this region of spike is a critical regulator of whether or not the virus gets into the brain, and it could have large implications for the treatment and management of neurological symptoms reported by COVID-19 patients.”
SARS-CoV-2 has long been associated with various neurological symptoms, such as the loss of smell and taste, “brain fog” and “long COVID.”
“It’s still not known if long COVID is caused by direct infection of cells in the brain or due to some adverse immune response that persists beyond the infection,” Hultquist said. “If it is caused by infection of cells in the central nervous system, our study suggests there may be specific treatments that could work better than others in clearing the virus from this compartment.”
Jacob Class, Lacy M. Simons, Ramon Lorenzo-Redondo, Jazmin Galván Achi, Laura Cooper, Tanushree Dangi, Pablo Penaloza-MacMaster, Egon A. Ozer, Sarah E. Lutz, Lijun Rong, Judd F. Hultquist, Justin M. Richner. Evolution of SARS-CoV-2 in the murine central nervous system drives viral diversification. Nature Microbiology, 2024; DOI: 10.1038/s41564-024-01786-8
Beekeepers across France say it has been a disastrous year for honey, with bees starving to death and production plummeting by up to 80 percent.
Mickael Isambert, a beekeeper in Saint-Ours-les-Roches in central France, lost 70 percent of his honey and had to feed his colonies sugar to help them survive after a cold, rainy spring.
“It has been a catastrophic year,” said Isambert, 44, who looks after 450 hives.
A beehive typically produces 15 kilos (33 pounds) of honey a year, but this time, Isambert said his farm had only produced between five and seven kilos.
When it rains, bees “don’t fly, they don’t go out, so they eat their own honey reserves,” said his co-manager and fellow beekeeper Marie Mior.
Low temperatures and heavy rainfall have prevented bees from gathering enough pollen, and flowers from producing nectar—which the insects collect to make honey.
‘Some died of hunger’
Bad weather has affected honey producers countrywide, with spring production dropping by 80 percent in some regions—figures that summer harvests will struggle to offset, said the French national beekeeping union (Unaf).
Rainfall rose by 45 percent on the yearly average, Unaf said in a letter to its local branches.
“With weather conditions that have been catastrophic in many regions with abundant rain… and low temperatures until late, many beekeepers’ viability is under threat,” said Unaf.
Temperatures stagnated below 18 degrees Celsius (64 Fahrenheit), the minimum temperature needed for flowers to produce nectar, said Jean-Luc Hascoet, a beekeeper in Brittany in western France who lost about 15 colonies.
“For some of my colleagues it was worse,” he said.
“In June, the bee population increases and the needs of the colonies grow but as nothing was coming in, some died of hunger,” said Hascoet.
Full and empty honeycomb frames from the same hive at La Ruche des Puys in Saint Ours in central France.
‘Black year’
French beekeepers had already been reeling from dealing with several seasons of scorching heat and delayed frosts, according to Unaf president Christian Pons, making this “black year” even worse.
“Ten years ago, I made one and a half to two tons of honey per site, compared to 100 kilos today,” said Pons, a beekeeper in the southern Herault region.
Honeymakers earlier this year protested against “unfair competition” by foreign producers, which led to the government releasing five million euros ($5.6 million) in aid.
French consumers eat on average 45,000 tons of honey per year, about 20,000 tons of which is produced in France, according to the left-wing Peasants Confederation union.
The elimination of damaged cell components is essential for the maintenance of the body’s tissues and organs. An international research team led by the University of Bonn has made significant findings on mechanisms for the clearing of cellular wastes, showing that strength training activates such mechanisms. The findings could form the basis for new therapies for heart failure and nerve diseases, and even afford benefits for manned space missions.
[…]
he protein BAG3 plays a critical role in the elimination of damaged components, identifying these and ensuring that they are enclosed by cellular membranes to form an “autophagosome.” Autophagosomes are like a garbage bag in which cellular waste is collected for later shredding and recycling. The research team led by Professor Jörg Höhfeld of the University of Bonn Institute of Cell Biology has shown that strength training activates BAG3 in the muscles.
[…]
“Impairment of the BAG3 system does indeed cause swiftly progressing muscle weakness in children as well as heart failure — one of the most common causes of death in industrialized Western nations,”
[…]
: “We now know what intensity level of strength training it takes to activate the BAG3 system, so we can optimize training programs for top athletes and help physical therapy patients build muscle better.”
[…]
“BAG3 is activated under mechanical force. But what happens if mechanical stimulation does not take place? In astronauts living in a weightless environment, for example, or immobilized intensive care patients on ventilation?” In such cases, the lack of mechanical stimulation rapidly leads to muscle atrophy, the cause of which Höhfeld ascribes at least in part to the non-activation of BAG3. Drugs developed to activate BAG3 might help in such situations, he believes
Judith Ottensmeyer, Alessandra Esch, Henrique Baeta, Sandro Sieger, Yamini Gupta, Maximilian F. Rathmann, Andreas Jeschke, Daniel Jacko, Kirill Schaaf, Thorsten Schiffer, Bahareh Rahimi, Lukas Lövenich, Angela Sisto, Peter F.M. van der Ven, Dieter O. Fürst, Albert Haas, Wilhelm Bloch, Sebastian Gehlert, Bernd Hoffmann, Vincent Timmerman, Pitter F. Huesgen, Jörg Höhfeld. Force-induced dephosphorylation activates the cochaperone BAG3 to coordinate protein homeostasis and membrane traffic. Current Biology, 2024; DOI: 10.1016/j.cub.2024.07.088
PARIS, Aug 24 (Reuters) – Pavel Durov, the Russian-French billionaire founder and CEO of the Telegram messaging app, was arrested at Bourget airport outside Paris on Saturday evening, TF1 TV and BFM TV said, citing unidentified sources.
Durov was travelling aboard his private jet, TF1 said on its website, adding he had been targeted by an arrest warrant in France as part of a preliminary police investigation.
TF1 and BFM both said the investigation was focused on a lack of moderators on Telegram, and that police considered that this situation allowed criminal activity to go on undeterred on the messaging app.
Durov faces possible indictment on Sunday, according to French media.
The encrypted Telegram, with close to one billion users, is particularly influential in Russia, Ukraine and the republics of the former Soviet Union. It is ranked as one of the major social media platforms after Facebook, YouTube, WhatsApp, Instagram, TikTok and Wechat.
Telegram did not immediately respond to a Reuters request for comment. The French Interior Ministry and police had no comment.
Russian-born Durov founded Telegram with his brother in 2013. He left Russia in 2014 after refusing to comply with government demands to shut down opposition communities on his VKontakte social media platform, which he sold.
“I would rather be free than to take orders from anyone,” Durov told U.S. journalist Tucker Carlson in April about his exit from Russia and search for a home for his company which included stints in Berlin, London, Singapore and San Francisco.
After Russia launched its invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Telegram has become the main source of unfiltered – and sometimes graphic and misleading – content from both sides about the war and the politics surrounding the conflict.
The platform has become what some analysts call ‘a virtual battlefield’ for the war, used heavily by Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskiy and his officials, as well as the Russian government.
Telegram – which allows users to evade official scrutiny – has also become one of the few places where Russians can access independent news about the war after the Kremlin increased curbs on independent media following its invasion of Ukraine.
The Russian foreign ministry said its embassy in Paris was clarifying the situation around Durov and called on Western non-governmental organisations to demand his release.
[…]
F1 said Dubai-based Durov had been travelling from Azerbaijan and was arrested at around 8 p.m. (1800 GMT).
Durov, whose fortune was estimated by Forbes at $15.5 billion, said some governments had sought to pressure him but the app should remain a “neutral platform” and not a “player in geopolitics”.
Telegram’s increasing popularity, however, has prompted scrutiny from several countries in Europe, including France, on security and data breach concerns.
Russia’s representative to international organisations in Vienna, Mikhail Ulyanov, and several other Russian politicians were quick on Sunday to accuse France of acting as a dictatorship – the same criticism that Moscow faced when putting demands on Durov in 2014 and trying to ban Telegram in 2018.
Telegram – unlike twitter, extwitter, or ex or whatever that moron is calling it today – is a place where you actually can be anonymous and free and for a European country to heavy-handidly slamming on the brakes like this hearkens more to a totalitarian Russia than a free France. France should be ashamed of itself and Europeans should be worried.
New research from Oregon Health & Science University reveals negative health consequences for people who are overweight and ignore their body’s signals to sleep at night, with specific differences between men and women.
The study published this week in The Journal of Clinical Endocrinology & Metabolism.
“This study builds support for the importance of good sleep habits,” said lead author Brooke Shafer, Ph.D., a postdoctoral researcher in the Sleep, Chronobiology and Health Laboratory in the OHSU School of Nursing. “Sleep practices, like going to bed when you’re tired or setting aside your screen at night, can help to promote good overall health.”
The study recruited 30 people, split evenly between men and women. All had a body mass index above 25, which put them into an overweight or obese category.
[…]
Generally healthy participants contributed a saliva sample every 30 minutes until late in the night at a sleep lab on OHSU’s Marquam Hill campus to determine the time at which their body started naturally producing the hormone melatonin. Melatonin is generally understood to begin the process of falling asleep, and its onset varies with an individual’s internal biological clock.
Participants then went home and logged their sleep habits over the following seven days.
Researchers assessed the time difference between melatonin onset and average sleep timing for each participant, categorizing them into two groups: those who had a narrow window, with a short time duration between melatonin onset and sleep, and those with a wide window, with a longer duration between melatonin onset and sleep. A narrow window suggests someone who is staying awake too late for their internal body clock and is generally associated with poorer health outcomes.
The new study confirmed a variety of potentially harmful health measures in the group that went to sleep closer to melatonin onset.
It also found key differences between men and women. Men in this group had higher levels of belly fat and fatty triglycerides in the blood, and higher overall metabolic syndrome risk scores than the men who slept better. Women in this group had higher overall body fat percentage, glucose and resting heart rates.
SolarWinds left hardcoded credentials in its Web Help Desk product that can be used by remote, unauthenticated attackers to log into vulnerable instances, access internal functionality, and modify sensitive data
The software maker has now issued an update to address that critical oversight; its users are encouraged to install the fix, which presumably removes the baked-in creds.
The security blunder, tracked as CVE-2024-28987, received a 9.1-out-of-10 CVSS severity rating. It affects Web Help Desk 12.8.3 HF1 and all previous versions, and has been fixed in 12.8.3 HF2. The hotfix patch, issued yesterday, has to be manually installed.
WHD is SolarWinds’ IT help desk ticketing and asset management software
[…]
Yes, we’re talking about the same supplier that had a backdoor silently added to its IT monitoring suite Orion by Russian spies so that the snoops could then infiltrate SolarWinds’ customer networks including US government departments.
Doctors have begun trialling the world’s first mRNA lung cancer vaccine in patients, as experts hailed its “groundbreaking” potential to save thousands of lives.
Lung cancer is the world’s leading cause of cancer death, accounting for about 1.8m deaths every year. Survival rates in those with advanced forms of the disease, where tumours have spread, are particularly poor.
Now experts are testing a new jab that instructs the body to hunt down and kill cancer cells – then prevents them ever coming back. Known as BNT116 and made by BioNTech, the vaccine is designed to treat non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC), the most common form of the disease.
The phase 1 clinical trial, the first human study of BNT116, has launched across 34 research sites in seven countries: the UK, US, Germany, Hungary, Poland, Spain and Turkey.
[…]
The jab uses messenger RNA (mRNA), similar to Covid-19 vaccines, and works by presenting the immune system with tumour markers from NSCLC to prime the body to fight cancer cells expressing these markers.
The aim is to strengthen a person’s immune response to cancer while leaving healthy cells untouched, unlike chemotherapy.
[…]
six consecutive injections five minutes apart over 30 minutes at the National Institute for Health Research UCLH Clinical Research Facility on Tuesday.
Each jab contained different RNA strands. He will get the vaccine every week for six consecutive weeks, and then every three weeks for 54 weeks.
Lee said: “We hope adding this additional treatment will stop the cancer coming back because a lot of time for lung cancer patients, even after surgery and radiation, it does come back.”
Google is making a new desktop app called Essentials that packages a few Google services, like Messages and Photos, and includes links to download many others. The app will be included with many new Windows laptops, with the first ones coming from HP.
[…]
The Essentials app lets you “discover and install many of our best Google services,” according to Google’s announcement, and lets you browse Google Photos as well as send and receive Google Messages in the app. A full list of apps has not yet been announced, but Google’s announcement art showcases icons including Google Sheets, Google Drive, Nearby Share, and Google One (a two-month free trial is offered through Essentials for new subscribers).
HP will start including Google Essentials across its computer brands, like Envy, Pavilion, Omen, and more. Google says you’re “in control of your experience” and can uninstall any part of Essentials or the whole thing. It’s not yet clear whether you’ll be able to download the app to your current PC, in case you’re into Google-ifying your Windows experience.
Essentials also includes Google’s Play Games app
[…]
Google says that it will bring Essentials to other Windows PCs in the future.
[…] The paper also found the quantity of microplastics in brain samples from 2024 was about 50% higher from the total in samples that date to 2016, suggesting the concentration of microplastics found in human brains is rising at a similar rate to that found in the environment. Most of the organs came from the office of the medical investigator in Albuquerque, New Mexico, which investigates untimely or violent deaths.
[…]
Many other papers have found microplastics in the brains of other animal species, so it’s not entirely surprising the same could be true for humans
[…]
When it comes to these insidious particles, “the blood-brain barrier is not as protective as we’d like to think”
[…]
researchers say that individuals should try to reduce their exposure by avoiding the use of plastic in preparing food, especially when microwaving; drinking tap water instead of bottled water; and trying to prevent the accumulation of dust, which is contaminated with plastics. Some researchers advise eating less meat, especially processed products.
Peloton on Thursday said it will start charging new subscribers a one-time $95 activation fee if they bought their hardware on the secondary market as more consumers snag lightly used equipment for a fraction of the typical retail price.
[…]
During its fiscal fourth quarter, which ended June 30, Peloton said it saw a “steady stream of paid connected fitness subscribers” who bought hardware on the secondary market. The company said the segment grew 16% year over year.
“We believe a meaningful share of these subscribers are incremental, and they exhibit lower net churn rates than rental subscribers,” the company said in a letter to shareholders.
“It’s also worth highlighting that this activation fee will be a source of incremental revenue and gross profit for us, helping to support our investments in improving the fitness experience for our members,” interim co-CEO Christopher Bruzzo later added on a call with analysts.
[…]
Bruzzo said that those who buy a used Bike or Bike+ have access to a virtual custom fitting ahead of their first ride, as well as a history summary that shows how many rides those bikes had before they were resold.
“We’re also offering these new members discounts on accessories such as bike shoes, bike mats and spare parts,”
A new study that examined health data on 18 million people reveals higher incidence of mental illnesses for up to a year following severe COVID-19 in unvaccinated people. Vaccination appeared to mitigate the adverse effects of COVID-19 on mental illnesses. The University of Bristol-led study, published in JAMA Psychiatry today [21 August], investigated associations of COVID-19 with mental illnesses according to time since diagnosis and vaccination status.
[…]
Among the 18,648,606 adults in the cohort studied during the period before vaccination was available, the average age was 49 years, 50.2 per cent were female (9,363,710) and 1,012,335 adults had a confirmed COVID-19 diagnosis (recorded in testing data, by a GP, in hospital or in their death record).
The authors also studied a vaccinated cohort including 14,035,286 adults, of whom 866,469 had a confirmed COVID-19 diagnosis, with an average age of 53 years and 52.1 per cent female (7,308,556), and an unvaccinated cohort including 3,242,215 adults, of whom 149,745 had a confirmed COVID-19 diagnosis, with an average age of 35 years and 42.1 per cent female (1,363,401).
Using these data, the researchers compared the incidence of mental illnesses in people before and after a COVID-19 diagnosis, in each cohort. Mental illnesses included in this study comprised depression, serious mental illness, general anxiety, post-traumatic stress disorder, eating disorders, addiction, self-harm, and suicide.
The team found that the incidence of most of these conditions was higher one to four weeks after COVID-19 diagnosis, compared to the incidence before or without COVID-19. This elevation in the incidence of mental illnesses, was mainly seen after severe COVID-19 that led to hospitalisation and remained higher for up to a year following severe COVID-19 in unvaccinated people.
Researchers from North Carolina State University and Johns Hopkins University have demonstrated a technology capable of a suite of data storage and computing functions—repeatedly storing, retrieving, computing, erasing or rewriting data—that uses DNA rather than conventional electronics. Previous DNA data storage and computing technologies could complete some but not all of these tasks.
The paper, titled “A Primordial DNA Store and Compute Engine,” appears in the journal Nature Nanotechnology.
[…]
“DNA computing has been grappling with the challenge of how to store, retrieve and compute when the data is being stored in the form of nucleic acids,”
[…]
we have created polymer structures that we call dendricolloids—they start at the microscale, but branch off from each other in a hierarchical way to create a network of nanoscale fibers,
[…]
“This morphology creates a structure with a high surface area, which allows us to deposit DNA among the nanofibrils without sacrificing the data density that makes DNA attractive for data storage in the first place.”
“You could put a thousand laptops’ worth of data into DNA-based storage that’s the same size as a pencil eraser,” Keung says.
“The ability to distinguish DNA information from the nanofibers it’s stored on allows us to perform many of the same functions you can do with electronic devices,”
[…]
“We can copy DNA information directly from the material’s surface without harming the DNA. We can also erase targeted pieces of DNA and then rewrite to the same surface, like deleting and rewriting information stored on the hard drive. It essentially allows us to conduct the full range of DNA data storage and computing functions. In addition, we found that when we deposit DNA on the dendricolloid material, the material helps to preserve the DNA.”
Legal documents are notoriously difficult to understand, even for lawyers. This raises the question: Why are these documents written in a style that makes them so impenetrable?
MIT cognitive scientists believe they have uncovered the answer to that question. Just as “magic spells” use special rhymes and archaic terms to signal their power, the convoluted language of legalese acts to convey a sense of authority, they conclude.
In a study that will appear in the journal of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the researchers found that even non-lawyers use this type of language when asked to write laws.
“People seem to understand that there’s an implicit rule that this is how laws should sound, and they write them that way,” says Edward Gibson, an MIT professor of brain and cognitive sciences and the senior author of the study.
Eric Martinez PhD ’24 is the lead author of the study. Francis Mollica, a lecturer at the University of Melbourne, is also an author of the paper.
Casting a legal spell
Gibson’s research group has been studying the unique characteristics of legalese since 2020, when Martinez came to MIT after earning a law degree from Harvard Law School. In a 2022 study, Gibson, Martinez, and Mollica analyzed legal contracts totaling about 3.5 million words, comparing them with other types of writing, including movie scripts, newspaper articles, and academic papers.
That analysis revealed that legal documents frequently have long definitions inserted in the middle of sentences — a feature known as “center-embedding.” Linguists have previously found that this kind of structure can make text much more difficult to understand.
“Legalese somehow has developed this tendency to put structures inside other structures, in a way which is not typical of human languages,” Gibson says.
In a follow-up study published in 2023, the researchers found that legalese also makes documents more difficult for lawyers to understand. Lawyers tended to prefer plain English versions of documents, and they rated those versions to be just as enforceable as traditional legal documents.
“Lawyers also find legalese to be unwieldy and complicated,” Gibson says. “Lawyers don’t like it, laypeople don’t like it, so the point of this current paper was to try and figure out why they write documents this way.”
[…]
“We thought it was plausible that what happens is you start with an initial draft that’s simple, and then later you think of all these other conditions that you want to include. And the idea is that once you’ve started, it’s much easier to center-embed that into the existing provision,” says Martinez, who is now a fellow and instructor at the University of Chicago Law School.
However, the findings ended up pointing toward a different hypothesis, the so-called “magic spell hypothesis.” Just as magic spells are written with a distinctive style that sets them apart from everyday language, the convoluted style of legal language appears to signal a special kind of authority, the researchers say.
A Florida firm has all but confirmed that millions of people’s sensitive personal info was stolen from it by cybercriminals and publicly leaked.
That information, totaling billions of records, includes the names, Social Security numbers, physical and email addresses, and phone numbers of folks in the United States, UK, and Canada. It’s the sort of records data brokers regularly buy and sell.
And it is now available via the dark web for anyone to download and use for fraud.
Back in April, crooks using the online handle USDoD wrote on a cyber-crime forum that they were selling for $3.5 million what was alleged to be 2.9 billion records, across multiple files in a 277GB archive, on US, Canadian, and British citizens, including their aforementioned names and phone and Social Security numbers where relevant, as well as their address histories going back 30 years and details of their parents and relatives.
That silo of personal info was stolen from an outfit called National Public Data, or NPD, a small information broker based in Coral Springs that offers API lookups to other companies for things like background checks. According to USDoD, the stolen data was collected by NPD between 2019 and 2024. The firm likely sourced that info at least from public records at the local, state, and federal level.
A cyber-thief using the handle SXUL pilfered the information and passed it to USDoD to sell, which sparked a lawsuit against NPD at the start of this month.
Some of the stolen information had been leaking out via the dark web in bits and pieces, though last week, someone using the handle Fenice dumped what’s claimed to be 2.7 billion records from that collection onto the internet for anyone to download for free if they know where to look. Note that it is a database with billions of rows, not billions of individuals; there are a lot of inaccuracies in the data, as well as a lot of dead people, and duplication.
After weeks of silence, and countless people starting to get alerts from privacy and anti-fraud services that their personal info has been leaked, NPD has, in cagey language, confirmed it was compromised and that its data was stolen and shared. According to the biz, it was ransacked in December, and the leaks started in April, leading up to now.
[…] New research suggests that certain brands of bike parts have vulnerabilities that could allow them to be remotely compromised during competitions.
The research was unveiled this week at the Usenix Workshop on Offensive Technologies by researchers from Northeastern University and UC San Diego. In their paper, researchers note that, much like modern cars, today’s bicycles are “cyber-physical systems that contain embedded computers and wireless links to enable new types of telemetry and control.” One of the more common cyber-connected systems is the wireless gear shifter, which uses electronic switches instead of traditional control levers to allow bikers shift gears.
Researchers tested shifters sold by Shimano, a Japanese company that is one of the larger cycling parts sellers in the world. Unfortunately, researchers found that Shimano’s shifters are vulnerable to simple “replay attacks” of the sort that are frequently targeted at car fobs. Such attacks, which utilize a radio signal manipulation, allow attackers to capture and weaponize data wirelessly exchanged by hardware parts. In this case, attackers could use such an attack to “unexpectedly shift gears or to jam its shifters and lock the bike into the wrong gear,” Wired writes. Radio hardware necessary to carry out such an attack is relatively inexpensive.
“Security vulnerabilities in wireless gear-shifting systems can critically impact rider safety and performance, particularly in professional bike races,” researchers’ paper notes. “In these races, attackers could exploit these weaknesses to gain an unfair advantage, potentially causing crashes or injuries by manipulating gear shifts or jamming the shifting operation.”
Obviously cheating is common in athletic competitions, so a hackable bicycle would definitely be something to worry about for competitive racers. Researchers highlight this point: “The history of professional cycling’s struggles with illegal performance-enhancing drugs underscores the appeal of such undetectable attacks, which could similarly compromise the sport’s integrity,” they write. “Given these risks, it is essential to adopt an adversary’s viewpoint and ensure that this technology can withstand motivated attackers in the highly competitive environment of professional cycling.”
Gizmodo reached out to Shimano for comment. Last year, the company was the victim of a ransomware attack and, after refusing to pay, had several terabytes of its corporate data spilled onto the internet by the hackers.
Anova, a company that sells smart sous vide cookers, is getting backlash from customers after announcing that it will soon charge a subscription fee for the device’s companion app.
[…]
In a blog post on Thursday, Anova CEO and cofounder Stephen Svajian announced that starting on August 21, people who sign up to use the Anova Culinary App with the cooking devices will have to pay $2 per month, or $10 per year. The app does various things depending on the paired cooker, but it typically offers sous vide cooking guides, cooking notifications, and the ability to view, save, bookmark, and share recipes.
The subscription fee will only apply to people who make an account after August 21. Those who downloaded the app and made an account before August 21 won’t have to pay. But everyone will have to make an account; some people have been using the app without one until now.
[…]
As Digital Trends pointed out, the announcement follows an Anova statement saying it will no longer let users remotely control their kitchen gadgets via Bluetooth starting on September 28, 2025. This means that remote control via the app will only be possible for models offering and using Wi-Fi connectivity.
[…]
Changing or removing features of a tech gadget people have already purchased is a risky move that can anger customers who have paid for a device they expected to work a certain way indefinitely.
[…]
You can also find angry users lamenting the changes on Reddit (examples here and here).
The announcement seems to have forced users to question the value of the Anova app entirely.
[…]
The commenter also challenged the idea of people sharing recipes with an app that will monetize them, saying, “Why would I ever publish a recipe I made to the app if they’re going to charge others to view it?
[…]
Users can avoid the subscription fee and still use the gadget, but it may be hard to swallow the lost functionality for a device you paid three figures for. Customers who can’t stomach the loss may consider alternatives, including those without Wi-Fi connectivity.
[…] The study, which tracked thousands of different molecules in people aged 25 to 75, detected two major waves of age-related changes at around ages 44 and again at 60. The findings could explain why spikes in certain health issues including musculoskeletal problems and cardiovascular disease occur at certain ages.
“We’re not just changing gradually over time. There are some really dramatic changes,”
[…]
The research tracked 108 volunteers, who submitted blood and stool samples and skin, oral and nasal swabs every few months for between one and nearly seven years. Researchers assessed 135,000 different molecules (RNA, proteins and metabolites) and microbes (the bacteria, viruses and fungi living in the guts and on the skin of the participants).
The abundance of most molecules and microbes did not shift in a gradual, chronological fashion. When the scientists looked for clusters of molecules with the largest shifts, they found these transformations tended to occur when people were in their mid-40s and early 60s.
[…]
The first wave of changes included molecules linked to cardiovascular disease and the ability to metabolise caffeine, alcohol and lipids. The second wave of changes included molecules involved in immune regulation, carbohydrate metabolism and kidney function. Molecules linked to skin and muscle ageing changed at both time points. Previous research suggested that a later spike in ageing may occur around the age of 78, but the latest study could not confirm this because the oldest participants were 75.
The pattern fits with previous evidence that the risk of many age-related diseases does not increase incrementally, with Alzheimer’s and cardiovascular disease risk showing a steep uptick after 60.
Last year Mozilla released a report showcasing how the auto industry has some of the worst privacy practices of any tech industry in America (no small feat). Massive amounts of driver behavior is collected by your car, and even more is hoovered up from your smartphone every time you connect. This data isn’t secured, often isn’t encrypted, and is sold to a long list of dodgy, unregulated middlemen.
Last March the New York Times revealed that automakers like GM routinely sell access to driver behavior data to insurance companies, which then use that data to justify jacking up your rates. The practice isn’t clearly disclosed to consumers, and has resulted in 11 federal lawsuits in less than a month.
Now Texas AG Ken Paxton has belatedly joined the fun, filing suit (press release, complaint) in the state district court of Montgomery County against GM for “false, deceptive, and misleading business practices”:
“Companies are using invasive technology to violate the rights of our citizens in unthinkable ways. Millions of American drivers wanted to buy a car, not a comprehensive surveillance system that unlawfully records information about every drive they take and sells their data to any company willing to pay for it.”
Paxton notes that GM’s tracking impacted 1.8 million Texans and 14 million vehicles, few if any of whom understood they were signing up to be spied on by their vehicle. This is, amazingly enough, the first state lawsuit against an automaker for privacy violations, according to Politico.
The sales pitch for this kind of tracking and sales is that good drivers will be rewarded for more careful driving. But as publicly-traded companies, everybody in this chain — from insurance companies to automakers — are utterly financially desensitized from giving anybody a consistent break for good behavior. That’s just not how it’s going to work. Everybody pays more and more. Always.
But GM and other automakers’ primary problem is they weren’t telling consumers this kind of tracking was even happening in any clear, direct way. Usually it’s buried deep in an unread end user agreement for roadside assistant apps and related services. Those services usually involve a free trial, but the user agreement to data collection sticks around.
Psychologists from UC Santa Cruz wanted to study “earworms,” the types of songs that get stuck in your head and play automatically on a loop. So they asked people to sing out any earworms they were experiencing and record them on their phones when prompted at random times throughout the day.
When researchers analyzed the recordings, they found that a remarkable proportion of them perfectly matched the pitch of the original songs they were based upon.
More specifically, 44.7% of recordings had a pitch error of 0 semitones, and 68.9% were accurate within 1 semitone of the original song. These findings were published in the journal Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics.
“What this shows is that a surprisingly large portion of the population has a type of automatic, hidden ‘perfect pitch’ ability,”
[…]
“Interestingly, if you were to ask people how they thought they did in this task, they would probably be pretty confident that they had the melody right, but they would be much less certain that they were singing in the right key,” Evans said.
“As it turns out, many people with very strong pitch memory may not have very good judgment of their own accuracy, and that may be because they don’t have the labeling ability that comes with true perfect pitch.”
Evans explained that true perfect pitch is the ability to accurately produce or identify a given note on the first try and without a reference pitch. […] scientists are increasingly finding that accurate pitch memory is much more common.
[…]
“People who study memory often think about long-term memories as capturing the gist of something, where the brain takes shortcuts to represent information, and one way our brains could try to represent the gist of music would be to forget what the original key was,” explained Professor Davidenko.
“Music sounds very similar in different keys, so it would be a good shortcut for the brain to just ignore that information, but it turns out that it’s not ignored.
[…]
He noted that the pitch accuracy of participants in the study was not predicted by any objective measures of singing ability, and none of the participants were musicians or reported having perfect pitch. In other words, you don’t have to have special abilities to demonstrate this foundational musical skill.
[…] Our communications and GPS networks all depend on keeping careful track of the precise timing of signals—including accounting for the effects of relativity. The deeper into a gravitational well you go, the slower time moves, and we’ve reached the point where we can detect differences in altitude of a single millimeter. Time literally flows faster at the altitude where GPS satellites are than it does for clocks situated on Earth’s surface. Complicating matters further, those satellites are moving at high velocities, an effect that slows things down.
[…]
It would be easy to set up an equivalent system to track time on the Moon, but that would inevitably see the clocks run out of sync with those on Earth—a serious problem for things like scientific observations
[…]
Ashby and Patla worked on developing a system where anything can be calculated in reference to the center of mass of the Earth/Moon system. Or, as they put it in the paper, their mathematical system “enables us to compare clock rates on the Moon and cislunar Lagrange points with respect to clocks on Earth by using a metric appropriate for a locally freely falling frame such as the center of mass of the Earth–Moon system in the Sun’s gravitational field.”
[…]
The paper’s body has 55 of them, and there are another 67 in the appendices.
[…]
Things get complicated because there are so many factors to consider. There are tidal effects from the Sun and other planets. Anything on the surface of the Earth or Moon is moving due to rotation; other objects are moving while in orbit. The gravitational influence on time will depend on where an object is located.
[…]
he researchers say that their approach, while focused on the Earth/Moon system, is still generalizable. Which means that it should be possible to modify it and create a frame of reference that would work on both Earth and anywhere else in the Solar System. Which, given the pace at which we’ve sent things beyond low-Earth orbit, is probably a healthy amount of future-proofing.
Apple takes a lot of strong positions, but their ultimate hill to die on might just be requiring apps to make purchases through the tech giant. The latest example comes from Patreon, which announced that Apple is requiring it to switch over to the iOS in-app purchase system or risk expulsion. Patreon’s entire purpose is to allow creators to offer “patrons” memberships in exchange for content. While some tiers are unpaid, creators offer paid options to make money — something this shift could impact.
Patreon users need to know about two main changes. By this November, all creators can only offer a subscription-based plan on iOS as the app store doesn’t support other formats, such as first-of-the-month or per-creation plans. As a result, Patreon is rolling out a 16-month-long migration process that will shift all memberships to subscriptions by November 2025. At that point, subscription-based plans will be the only option available, unfortunately proving Apple’s far-reaching power.
Apple will also be taking a 30 percent cut on all subscriptions made on the Patreon iOS app after November of this year — something its done for Patreon in-app commerce purchases since early 2024. Patreon has designed a tool that allows creators to increase their prices on the iOS app and leave them as is on the browser site and Android devices. However, creators can turn it off if they’d rather leave their rates as is.
