176864657
submission
Hmmmmmm writes:
Utah has become the first US state to ban the use of fluoride in its public water, following concerns raised by health secretary Robert F Kennedy that the mineral poses potential health risks.
Governor Spencer Cox signed the ban into law this week, which will go into effect on 7 May. Other states, including Florida and Ohio, are weighing similar legislation.
Fluoride has been added to US drinking water since 1945 to prevent cavities.
Utah's move to remove the mineral has been criticised by experts, who worry it will have consequences for oral health, especially for children.
The bill, signed by Cox on Thursday, prohibits communities from adding fluoride to their public water supplies.
The law does not mention any public health concerns related to the mineral, but Republican state lawmaker Stephanie Gricius — who introduced the bill in the state legislature — has argued that there is research suggesting fluoride could have possible cognitive effects in children.
Gricius has said that her bill would give citizens a choice whether they want to consume fluoride or not.
This concern over fluoride was previously raised by Kennedy, the US health secretary, who said in November that "the Trump White House will advise all US water systems to remove fluoride from public water".
He alleged the chemical found in toothpaste and regularly used by dentists "is an industrial waste associated with arthritis, bone fractures, bone cancer, IQ loss, neurodevelopmental disorders, and thyroid disease".
Most of western Europe does not add fluoride to its water. In England, about one in 10 people has fluoridated drinking water, though a programme has since been introduced to fluoridate water for 1.6 million people in north-east England.
By contrast, around 63% of the US population have fluoridated water.
Experts who support putting fluoride in water says studies show that community water fluoridation prevents at least 25% of tooth decay in children and adults.
175700485
submission
Hmmmmmm writes:
Traditionally known for stuffing their cheeks with nuts, squirrels can be carnivorous — though recorded instances of the rodents hunting and killing other live vertebrates are rare, with few species known to have done so. Now, scientists have found unprecedented evidence of another type of squirrel exhibiting carnivorous behaviors, including hunting, killing and eating voles, according to a new study.
The research, published Wednesday in the Journal of Ethology, is part of the Long-Term Behavioral Ecology of California Ground Squirrels Project at Briones Regional Park in Contra Costa County. The project examines how California ground squirrels — native to the state’s grasslands — adapt their behavior in response to environmental changes, in this case an increase in the local vole population.
In parts of Northern California, vole infestations have been observed. At the research site, the study’s authors noted a significantly higher number of voles than average over the past decade. California ground squirrels have typically been considered herbivores or granivores, eating mostly plants and seeds. The new findings offer the first documentation of the species actively preying on other live vertebrates — underscoring its ability to respond to changes in the ecosystem.
“Voles (have come to) recognize the squirrels as predators,” said John Koprowski, dean of the Haub School of Environment and Natural Resources at the University of Wyoming, who was not involved in the study. “There’s likely some really neat interplay between the two species because being eaten is usually not a great way to continue passing on your genes.”
The study’s findings suggest squirrels might be best classified as opportunistic omnivores based on their willingness to hunt and consume live prey, particularly when there is an abundant supply. Protein is a limited yet necessary resource for squirrels to thrive, and hunting voles likely provides them with a faster, more accessible nutrition boost than seeds, Koprowski explained.
“It’s a wonderful way for them to capitalize on a very abundant resource to provide enough sustenance for many (squirrels) to use,” he said.
This phenomenon in which an animal capitalizes on a necessary resource when it’s made available to them is known as dietary plasticity, according to Koprowski. If an animal doesn’t adapt to utilize the resource, it’s likely another species will take advantage of it.
175139355
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Hmmmmmm writes:
Octopuses don’t always hunt alone — but their partners aren’t who you’d expect.
A new study shows that some members of the species Octopus cyanea maraud around the seafloor in hunting groups with fish, which sometimes include several fish species at once.
The research, published in the journal Nature on Monday, even suggests that the famously intelligent animals organized the hunting groups’ decisions, including what they should prey upon.
What’s more, the researchers witnessed the cephalopod species — often called the big blue or day octopus — punching companion fish, apparently to keep them on task and contributing to the collective effort.
Octopuses have often been thought to avoid other members of their species and prowl solo using camouflage. But the study suggests that some octopuses have surprisingly rich social lives — a finding that opens a new window into the marvels of undersea life. It’s an indication that at least one octopus species has characteristics and markers of intelligence that scientists once considered common only in vertebrates.
These hunting groups typically included several species of reef fish, such as grouper and goatfish. The octopuses did not appear to lead the groups, but they did punch at fish to enforce social order — most often at blacktip groupers.
“The ones that get more punched are the main exploiters of the group. These are the ambush predators, the ones that don’t move, don’t look for prey,” Sampaio said.
Octopuses would also punch fish to keep the group moving.
“If the group is very still and everyone is around the octopus, it starts punching, but if the group is moving along the habitat, this means that they’re looking for prey, so the octopus is happy. It doesn’t punch anyone,” Sampaio said.
The researchers think fish benefit from such hunting groups because an octopus can reach into crevices where prey hides and root out lunch. The octopus benefits, they believe, because it can simply follow the fish to food, rather than perform what the researchers call speculative hunting.
“For the octopus, it’s also an advantage because it doesn’t need to sample or go around the environment,” Sampaio said. “You can just look at the fish.”
The researchers did not see evidence that the creatures shared prey. All the species involved are generalists that eat crustaceans, fish and mollusks, but whoever was able to catch the prey got a meal.
Questions remain, however, including whether certain octopuses recognize or prefer to hunt with a favorite fish companion.
171156884
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Hmmmmmm writes:
Fast food giant McDonald's has released a new retro-style game featuring Grimace, the purple milkshake blob. While it's clearly meant to be played in a browser on a phone or computer, it's also a fully working Game Boy Color game that you can download and play on the original hardware.
Grimace's Birthday was developed by Krool Toys, a Brooklyn-based independent game studio and "creative engineering team" with a history of creating playable Game Boy games as unique PR for music artists and brands. The game assumes you're playing in an emulator via a browser window—you can play that version of the game here—but we also got it running on an Analogue Pocket thanks to a Game Boy Color FPGA core and a downloadable ROM hosted on the Internet Archive.
The game is so period-authentic that there's even a screen telling original monochrome Game Boy owners that the game "requires a color device to play." Even on Game Boy hardware, it still makes references to people "playing on mobile devices."
166667487
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Hmmmmmm writes:
Apparent source code for Alder Lake BIOS has been shared online. It seems to have been leaked in its entirety at 5.9 GB uncompressed, possibly by someone working at a motherboard vendor, or accidentally by a Lenovo manufacturing partner.
It could take days before someone analyzes all 5.9 GB but some interesting sections have already been discovered. There are apparently multiple references to a "Lenovo Feature Tag Test" that further link the leak to the OEM. Other sections allegedly name AMD CPUs, suggesting the code has been altered since leaving Intel. Most alarmingly, a researcher has found explicit references to undocumented MSRs, which could pose a significant security risk.
166470205
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Hmmmmmm writes:
Trees have long been known to buffer humans from the worst effects of climate change by pulling carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Now new research shows just how much forests have been bulking up on that excess carbon.
The study, recently published in the Journal Nature Communications, finds that elevated carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere have increased wood volume—or the biomass—of forests in the United States.
Although other factors like climate and pests can somewhat affect a tree's volume, the study found that elevated carbon levels consistently led to an increase of wood volume in 10 different temperate forest groups across the country. This suggests that trees are helping to shield Earth's ecosystem from the impacts of global warming through their rapid growth.
"Forests are taking carbon out of the atmosphere at a rate of about 13% of our gross emissions," said Brent Sohngen, co-author of the study and professor of environmental and resource economics at The Ohio State University. "While we're putting billions of tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, we're actually taking much of it out just by letting our forests grow."
Over the last two decades, forests in the United States have sequestered about 700-800 million tons of carbon dioxide per year, which, according to the study, accounts for roughly 10% to 11% of the country's total carbon dioxide emissions. While exposure to high levels of carbon dioxide can have ill effects on natural systems and infrastructure, trees have no issue gluttoning themselves on Earth's extra supply of the greenhouse gas.
To put it in perspective, if you imagine a tree as just a huge cylinder, the added volume the study finds essentially amounts to an extra tree ring, Sohngen said. Although such growth may not be noticeable to the average person, compared to the trees of 30 years ago, modern vegetation is about 20% to 30% bigger than it used to be. If applied to the Coast Redwood forests—home to some of the largest trees in the world—even a modest percentage increase means a lot of additional carbon storage in forests. Researchers also found that even older large trees continue adding biomass as they age due to elevated carbon dioxide levels.
165216716
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Hmmmmmm writes:
While Punch-Out!! has been one of Nintendo's most beloved "fighting" series since its 1984 debut in arcades, it has rarely featured something common in the genre: a two-player mode.
On Monday, however, that changed. The resulting discovery has been hiding in plain sight on the series' Super Nintendo edition for nearly 30 years.
Should you own 1994's Super Punch-Out!! in any capacity—an original SNES cartridge, a dumped ROM parsed by an emulator, on the Super Nintendo Classic Edition, or even as part of the paid Nintendo Switch Online collection of retro games—you can immediately access the feature, no hacking or ROM editing required. All you need is a pair of gamepads.
Today's Super Punch-Out!! discovery revolves around a simple series of button combinations, which require nothing more than a second controller. The two-player mode is hidden behind an additional, previously undiscovered menu, which lets solo players skip directly to any of the game's boxing combatants. It's essentially a "level select" menu, which many classic games featured for internal testing, and speedrunners could arguably use it to practice against specific opponents more quickly.
This menu can be accessed by holding the R and Y buttons on player two's controller at the "press start" screen, then pressing Start or A with player one's controller. Do this, and a new menu appears, displaying all 16 boxers' profile icons. Pick any of these icons to engage in a one-off fight; once it's over, you're dumped back to the same boxer-select menu.
In this menu, friends can access a two-player fight if player two holds their B and Y buttons down until the match starts. You won't hear a sound effect or any other indication that it worked. Instead, the match will begin with the second player controlling the "boss" boxer at the top of the screen. Combine the "ABXY" array of buttons with "up" and "down" on the D-pad to pull off every single basic and advanced attack.
164039014
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Hmmmmmm writes:
Without fanfare, U.S. News & World Report announced that it had “unranked” Columbia University, which had been in a three-way tie for the No. 2 spot in the 2022 edition of Best Colleges, after being unable to verify the underlying data submitted by the university.
The decision was posted on the U.S. News website a week after Columbia said it was withdrawing from the upcoming 2023 rankings.
The Ivy League university said then that it would not participate in the next rankings because it was investigating accusations by one of its own mathematics professors that the No. 2 ranking was based on inaccurate and misleading data.
The biggest beneficiaries may be Harvard and M.I.T., which had shared the second spot with Columbia, and now have one less competitor. Princeton keeps its preening rights as No. 1.
The rankings are influential among students applying to college because objectively comparing schools and visiting every campus they are interested in can be difficult. College presidents have bitterly complained that the rankings are misleading, yet few institutions have dropped out of the game.
163787802
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Hmmmmmm writes:
Beginning this fall high schools in the nation’s most populous state can’t start before 8:30 a.m. and middle schools can’t start before 8 a.m. under a 2019 first-in-the-nation law forbidding earlier start times. Similar proposals are before lawmakers in New Jersey and Massachusetts.
Advocates say teens do better on school work when they’re more alert, and predict even broader effects: a reduction in suicides and teen car accidents and improved physical and mental health.
The average start time for the nation’s high schools was 8 a.m. in 2017-18 but about 42% started before then, including 10% that began classes before 7:30 a.m., according to the National Center for Education Statistics. Middle school start times in 2011-12, the most recent available from NCES, were similar.
That’s too early for adolescents whose bodies are wired to stay up later than at other ages because of a later release of the sleep hormone melatonin, scientists say. The American Academy of Pediatrics recommends that middle and high schools start at 8:30 a.m. or later. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends eight–10 hours of sleep per night for 13- to 18-year-olds.
163565482
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Hmmmmmm writes:
China’s Mars sample return mission aims to collect samples from the Red Planet and deliver them to Earth in 2031, or two years ahead of a NASA and ESA joint mission.
Sun Zezhou, chief designer of the Tianwen-1 Mars orbiter and rover mission, presented a new mission profile for China’s Mars sample return during a June 20 presentation in which he outlined plans for a two-launch profile, lifting off in late 2028 and delivering samples to Earth in July 2031.
The complex, multi-launch mission will have simpler architecture in comparison with the joint NASA-ESA project, with a single Mars landing and no rovers sampling different sites.
China’s mission, named Tianwen-3, will consist of two combinations: a lander and ascent vehicle, and an orbiter and return module. The combinations will launch separately on Long March 5 and Long March 3B rockets respectively.
162992940
submission
Hmmmmmm writes:
The Human Genome Project was an ambitious initiative to sequence every piece of human DNA was finally completed in 2003. Now, over two decades later, MIT Professor Jonathan Weissman and colleagues have gone beyond the sequence to present the first comprehensive functional map of genes that are expressed in human cells. The data from this project, published online June 9 in Cell, ties each gene to its job in the cell, and is the culmination of years of collaboration on the single-cell sequencing method Perturb-seq.
The project takes advantage of the Perturb-seq approach that makes it possible to follow the impact of turning on or off genes with unprecedented depth. This method was first published in 2016 by a group of researchers including Weissman and fellow MIT professor Aviv Regev, but could only be used on small sets of genes and at great expense.
The Perturb-seq method uses CRISPR-Cas9 genome editing to introduce genetic changes into cells, and then uses single-cell RNA sequencing to capture information about the RNAs that are expressed resulting from a given genetic change. Because RNAs control all aspects of how cells behave, this method can help decode the many cellular effects of genetic changes.
Since their initial proof-of-concept paper, Weissman, Regev, and others have used this sequencing method on smaller scales. For example, the researchers used Perturb-seq in 2021 to explore how human and viral genes interact over the course of an infection with HCMV, a common herpesvirus.
In the new study, Replogle and collaborators including Reuben Saunders, a graduate student in Weissman’s lab and co-first author of the paper, scaled up the method to the entire genome. Using human blood cancer cell lines as well noncancerous cells derived from the retina, he performed Perturb-seq across more than 2.5 million cells, and used the data to build a comprehensive map tying genotypes to phenotypes.
162106286
submission
Hmmmmmm writes:
Salaries for PhD students in the biological sciences fall well below the basic cost of living at almost every institution and department in the United States, according to data collected by two PhD students.
The crowdsourced findings, submitted by students, faculty members and administrators and presented on an interactive dashboard, provide fresh ammunition for graduate students in negotiations for higher salaries as economies across the world grapple with rising inflation.
As this article went to press, just 2% of the 178 institutions and departments in the data set guaranteed graduate students salaries that exceed the cost of living. The researchers used the living-wage calculator maintained by the Cambridge-based Massachusetts Institute of Technology (see go.nature.com/3pkzjde), a widely used benchmark that estimates basic expenses for a given city, such as the costs of food, health care, housing and transport.
Most institutions fall far short of that standard. At the University of Florida in Gainesville, for example, the basic stipend for biology PhD students is around US$18,650 for a 9-month appointment, about $16,000 less than the annual living wage for a single adult in the city with no dependents. At a handful of institutions — including the University of Southern Mississippi in Hattiesburg and the University of South Dakota in Vermillion — the guaranteed minimum stipend is less than $15,000 for 9-month appointments.
With US annual inflation now exceeding 8%, stipends haven’t been keeping pace, says Michelle Gaynor, a fourth-year PhD student in evolutionary biology at the University of Florida.
161751786
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Hmmmmmm writes:
When Nvidia launched its Ampere Lite Hash Rate (LHR) graphics card with the feared Ethereum anti-mining limiter, the world knew it was only a matter of time before someone or a team cracked it. NiceHash, the company that designed the QuickMiner software and Excavator miner, has finally broken Nvidia's algorithm, restoring LHR graphics cards to their 100% Ethereum mining performance.
Graphics card pricing has been plummeting, and we're starting to see better availability at retailers, with some GPUs selling at or below MSRP. So QuickMiner's arrival shouldn't influence the current state of the graphics market unless big corporations want to buy out everything in sight for the last push before Ethereum's transition to Proof-of-Stake (PoS), often referred to as "The Merge," is complete. We see that as unlikely, considering current profitability even on a 3080 Ti sits at around $3.50 per day and would still need nearly a year to break even at current rates. Initially scheduled for June, The Merge won't finalize until "the few months after," as Ethereum developer Tim Beiko has expressed on Twitter.
161600484
submission
Hmmmmmm writes:
On Monday, Japanese game publisher Square Enix confirmed that it was selling all three of its Western video game studios, along with many significant game series and intellectual property attached to those studios, to the European game publisher Embracer.
The sale includes game studios Crystal Dynamics, Eidos Montreal, and Square Enix Montreal. All three had previously been wholly owned by Square Enix, and Embracer will acquire their entire staffs, combined at roughly 1,100 people, along with popular IP such as Tomb Raider, Deus Ex, and Legacy of Kain, and a game-publishing catalog of "over 50 games," for $300 million.
Not all of the deal's IP has been confirmed thus far, however, and an announcement from Square Enix indicates that its Western operations "will continue to publish franchises such as Just Cause, Outriders, and Life Is Strange." This suggests that Square Enix will retain some of its Western-specific IP and that its future collaborations with Western game makers will come via publishing deals with outside developers.
161533868
submission
Hmmmmmm writes:
India will on Friday launch an open network for digital commerce (ONDC) as the government tries to end the dominance of U.S. companies Amazon.com (AMZN.O) and Walmart (WMT.N) in the fast-growing e-commerce market, a government document showed.
The launch of the platform comes after India's antitrust body on Thursday raided domestic sellers of Amazon and some of Walmart's Flipkart following accusations of competition law violations. The companies did not respond to request for comment on the raids.
The government's so-called ONDC platform will allow buyers and sellers to connect and transact with each other online, no matter what other application they use. It will be soft-launched on Friday before being expanded, the trade ministry told Reuters.
The government document said that two large multinational players controlled more than half of the country's e-commerce trade, limiting access to the market, giving preferential treatment to some sellers and squeezing supplier margins. It did not name the companies.
The document said India's ONDC plan aimed to onboard 30 million sellers and 10 million merchants online. The plan is to cover at least 100 cities and towns by August.
