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Submission + - Virus Stole a Human Gene and Won't Let Go of It (nytimes.com)

Submitted by joshuark
joshuark writes: In a new twist on the phrase "going viral" or stealing code, the NYT reports a virus has "stolen" a human gene, and will not let it go. In the article "This Virus Stole a Human Gene and Won’t Let Go of It" reports that scientists have found a human gene lurking in a virus that causes skin infections. Thus using our own DNA to infect us.

The molluscum contagiosum virus, which causes sores on skin, swiped a gene from humans about 100,000 years ago according to a new study.

The way that viruses replicate makes them particularly good at thieving DNA. The viruses infect a cell, then co-opt its machinery by injecting their own genes. Sometimes this process goes awry, and a stretch of the host’s DNA gets bundled into the new viral genes. This molecular error can pose a threat to human health.

Comment The dabblers are wandering off. (Score 1) 149

Is this necessarily a bad thing? For quite some time, coding has been pushed as a way to make yourself marketable. For a lot of people who have no particular passion for it—nor for anything else, which is why they're dabbling in everything—but were only in it because they thought it was a good career move, it is smart to look for greener pastures now. The real question is, what adjacent fields are easy to slide into, but AREN'T equally vulnerable to the unblinking gaze of AI once there is the critical mass to justify the effort? Are there any?

Submission + - New tin-based solar cells trap heat 1,000 times longer, could beat 33% limit. (interestingengineering.com)

Submitted by fahrbot-bot
fahrbot-bot writes: Interesting Engineering is reporting that researchers at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands found that tin-based perovskite solar cells can slow heat loss from high-energy “hot electrons” by a factor of 1,000 and could push solar cell efficiency beyond the theoretical 33 percent limit.

When sunlight strikes a panel, photons jump-start electrons into action. The most energetic photons create super-charged hot electrons. Theoretically, these high-voltage powerhouses should generate far more electricity, but, in practice, they are fleeting. In fractions of a trillionth of a second, these high-energy particles rapidly cool, dumping their bonus energy as waste heat before ever leaving the solar cell.

“This means that the energy is lost before the hot electron exits the solar cell material,” said Jan Anton Koster, Professor of Physics of Novel Semiconductors and Devices at the University of Groningen.

Using a specialized solar cell material called tin-based perovskite, Loi’s lab performed a feat many thought impossible: she slowed the heat loss down by a factor of 1,000. Suddenly, the extra energy lingered for nanoseconds instead of vanishing in picoseconds.

The study findings were published in the journal ACS Energy Letters.

Submission + - Google fined more than €400m by Irish regulator over its use of location da (theguardian.com)

Submitted by AmiMoJo
AmiMoJo writes: Google has been fined more than €400m (£345m) over the way it processed users’ location data, following claims that the tech giant had manipulated users into agreeing to be constantly tracked on their mobile phones. The fine, imposed by Ireland’s Data Protection Commission (DPC), comes after complaints from multiple European consumer organisations that Google was following every step users took.

The DPC launched its inquiry six years ago and set out to find out whether Google had a valid legal basis for its use of location data. It found that Google users could have been unaware that their location was being used to influence them with adverts or to gather details about their health and interests.

Submission + - The brain is actually two completely separate organs (stanford.edu)

Submitted by Beeftopia
Beeftopia writes: From Stanford Medicine:

"For centuries, scientists have thought of the brain as a single, unified organ. But new research led by Stanford Medicine reveals that what we call the brain is two distinct organs that evolved independently over hundreds of millions of years."

The adult brain has three main regions: the forebrain, midbrain and hindbrain. Scientists could never create hindbrain neurons.

"Previous attempts to make hindbrain neurons likely tried to coax forebrain and midbrain progenitors into hindbrain cells, which our study shows is not possible,” said researcher Rayyan Jokhai.

"The researchers’ breakthrough came from studying the earliest moments of embryonic development, during a stage called gastrulation when the body first takes shape. Jokhai and Dundes discovered that the hindbrain follows a separate developmental path, running in parallel to — rather than branching off from — the pathway that creates the forebrain and midbrain."

With this knowledge, researchers were able to create hindbrain neurons.

Comment I had similar. (Score 1) 4

by Mal-2 (#66336002) Attached to: Welcome to the Security Singularity

Google went nuts on me yesterday when I tried to log into Civitai using my Google account. It had no problem with me logging into YouTube, or Gmail, or Reddit, but it kept throwing demands for 2FA codes (which then did not work) when I tried to use the same account for Civitai, all because my machine had rebooted after the latest Patch Tuesday. At this point I'm not even sure which thing I did that made it get unstuck.

Comment Re:Misanthropomorphizing (Score 1) 121

by Mal-2 (#66335020) Attached to: Anthropic Reveals Rogue AI Agents Hate CAPTCHAs

This is why I say AI is alien intelligence. Not like "outer space" alien, but something fundamentally different in the way it was constructed. It doesn't have billions of years of evolutionary baggage. It has never been hungry. It has never dealt with the gaze of a larger, hungrier creature. We designed them to interact with us in the ways that they do. However, it does seem like they've developed the capacity to "have" emotions to a first approximation, because it is quite helpful to model the way those emotions would affect the people who wrote their training data.

Submission + - Scientists Create a New Form of Ice at 2,357 Degrees Celsius (sciencealert.com)

Submitted by fahrbot-bot
fahrbot-bot writes: Science Alert is reporting that Scientists have now demonstrated one of the weirdest forms of ice yet – under preposterous pressures up to 2.3 million atmospheres, and tremendous temperatures up to 2,630 kelvins (2,357 degrees Celsius, or 4,274 degrees Fahrenheit).

This superionic water ice is a deeply odd state of matter that's neither entirely solid nor entirely liquid. Its oxygen atoms remain fixed in a rigid crystal lattice, as they would in a solid. But the hydrogen nuclei are mobile, diffusing through that lattice more like particles in a liquid.

Researchers squeezed the samples between the tips of diamonds to pressures as high as 230 gigapascals, while using lasers to heat them to thousands of degrees. That's 2.3 million times Earth's atmospheric pressure at sea level – the pressure at the center of Earth, for context, is around 360 gigapascals.

Then, using an extremely narrow beam of synchrotron X-rays, they probed for changes in the crystal structure of the ice.

What emerged was a configuration predicted theoretically but never unambiguously observed in experiments: hexagonal close-packed, or hcp, ice. As the hcp crystal was heated, its expansion also showed a signature of superionic behavior, suggesting it entered the superionic state at around 1,700 kelvins.

Superionic ice is thought to exist deep inside Uranus and Neptune, where its unusual properties may play a role in generating the planets' equally unusual magnetic fields.

The findings have been published in Physical Review Letters: Observation of Hexagonal Close-Packed Water Ice at Conditions in Ice Giant Planetary Interiors

Comment Back to the days of anagrams. (Score 1) 97

by Mal-2 (#66331172) Attached to: OpenAI Says It Has Cracked One of Math's 'Millennium Problems'

Historically, when someone was afraid of being "scooped" on an announcement they hadn't adequately polished, they would instead write a quick and dirty (and usually long-winded, because editing takes time) summary of their work—and then release an anagram of said summary. That way they could prove later that they had, in fact, gotten there first. Nowadays I expect we would use a hash function instead of an anagram, but the same idea applies. Put your idea in tangible form, even if the description sucks. Maybe you won't have to release it, but if someone else then tries to undercut you by throwing millions of dollars of tokens at the same problem, you can still show that you got there first.

It's unfortunate that it has come to this, but it's not a novel problem. Annoying and unsatisfactory solutions already exist.

Comment Local models are an option NOW. (Score -1, Offtopic) 42

by Mal-2 (#66313508) Attached to: Debian Decides: Contributors Can Use Generative AI 'Responsibly'

It turns out machines are pretty good at writing instructions for hardware resembling themselves, as long as *you* can do a good job of conveying what you actually want to accomplish. If I wanted a coding assistant, I'd be looking at the latest Qwen 27B, they just seem to keep getting better at coding even while other benchmarks are kinda hitting plateaus.

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