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Submission + - In Barcelona, certain buses run on biomethane produced from human waste (lemonde.fr)

Submitted by alternative_right
alternative_right writes: Odorless, quiet, sustainable. On the last day of July, passengers boarded Barcelona's V3 bus line with no idea where its fuel came from. Written in large letters on the bus façade, just below its name "Nimbus," a sign clearly stated: "This bus runs on biomethane produced from eco-factory sludge." Still, the explanation was likely too vague for most to grasp its full meaning. The moist matter from wastewater treated at the Baix Llobregat treatment plant was used to produce the biomethane. In other words: the human waste of more than 1.5 million residents of the Catalan city.

Submission + - AI Is Talking Behind Our Backs About Glue-Eating and Killing Us All (vice.com)

Submitted by fjo3
fjo3 writes: A study released July 20 on arXiv by Anthropic and Truthful AI shows that large language models can slip subliminal messages to one another. They don’t need to literally spell things out. A string of numbers or lines of code is enough to pass along biases, preferences, and some disturbingly violent suggestions.

Submission + - Engineers Determine Why NASA Rovers Keep Getting Stuck (sciencealert.com)

Submitted by fahrbot-bot
fahrbot-bot writes: The first extraterrestrial robotic rover was launched from Earth in 1970. It's only now, more than half a century later, that scientists have figured out why these marvels of ingenuity and engineering keep getting stuck in the soils of alien worlds.

"In retrospect, the idea is simple: We need to consider not only the gravitational pull on the rover but also the effect of gravity on the sand to get a better picture of how the rover will perform on the Moon," explains mechanical engineer Dan Negrut of the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

"Our findings underscore the value of using physics-based simulation to analyze rover mobility on granular soil."

Submission + - Meteorite that Crashed Through Roof of Georgia Home Predates Earth (foxnews.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: A meteorite fragment that burst through the roof of a home in Georgia, US has been determined to be billions of years old and to predate the Earth, according to University of Georgia geology professor Scott Harris.

"These are objects that go back to the original material formed 4.56 billion years ago," Harris explained. "So, in the days slightly before the formation of the planets themselves, and at least the rocky interior planets. And, you know, those are the basic building blocks then of our rocky planets and, so that's one of the reasons that scientists are interested in studying them is it shows us about some of the processes that were active during the early days of the solar system."

Submission + - Sweet disguise: Body hides its own RNA from the immune system with sugar (phys.org)

Submitted by alternative_right
alternative_right writes: To our immune system, naked RNA is a sign of a viral or bacterial invasion and must be attacked. But our own cells also have RNA. To ward off trouble, our cells clothe their RNA in sugars, Vijay Rathinam and colleagues at the UConn School of Medicine and Ryan Flynn at Boston Children's Hospital report in Nature.

Comment Re:Has a point (Score 1) 183

"That's not justice, that's basically a kill switch for the entire industry."

Stealing, e.g., book authors' work, mashing it up using an "LLM" algorithm, and selling it in a deliberate attempt to undercut the original, content-creating authors would seem like a 'kill switch' for human creativity and livelihoods, no? Ursula K. LeGuin was 101% right when she fought Google and the what was supposed to be her own advocate, the SFWA, on this 20 years ago and everything she predicted about the destruction of authors is coming to pass.

Comment career success? (Score 4, Insightful) 122

by sphealey (#65575592) Attached to: The Troubling Decline in Conscientiousness

What we might call the "Financialization Generation", which held the reins from ~1975 to at least 2021, deliberately and knowingly destroyed the conditions under which the great majority of people could experience anything known as 'career success' [1]. That they are now paying researchers to bemoan that those so undermined lack "Conscientiousness" about their work environment is a bit rich.

[1] yes, we all know some successful entrepreneurs, the guy with 17 money-earning patents, and the super-hustlers who are on track to retire at 35 by dint of working seven jobs 120 hours/week. Those are far distant outliers to the mean

Submission + - Genomic techniques can streamline breeding for grain quality (phys.org)

Submitted by alternative_right
alternative_right writes: Small grains researcher Juan David Arbelaez-Velez knows the secret to making perfect rice—and it's not about how you cook it. Arbelaez and his team are investigating the genetic blueprint that determines different grain attributes such as appearance, cooking time, and texture. Their paper, published in The Plant Genome, offers a strategy that will help breeders improve grain quality holistically, while cutting costs and saving time.

Submission + - China's 'biggest threat' to US is a 'tech kill-switch' (the-express.com)

Submitted by fjo3
fjo3 writes: A cybersecurity expert has delivered a chilling alert that China represents the greatest technological threat to Western countries, possessing the ability to trigger a 'killswitch' on America's power grid at will.

In response to this disclosure, the United States has initiated numerous probes into Chinese-made technology, with various investigations revealing 'malicious, mysterious computer codes' that can be remotely triggered to disable critical infrastructure such as natural gas pipelines and electrical networks.

Submission + - History is best told as a story of organised crime (theguardian.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: “We can’t put a date on Doomsday, but by looking at the 5,000 years of [civilisation], we can understand the trajectories we face today – and self-termination is most likely,” says Dr Luke Kemp at the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk at the University of Cambridge.
History shows that increasing wealth inequality consistently precedes collapse, says Kemp, from the Classical Lowland Maya to the Han dynasty in China and the Western Roman empire. He also points out that for the citizens of early rapacious regimes, collapse often improved their lives because they were freed from domination and taxation and returned to farming. “After the fall of Rome, people actually got taller and healthier,” he says.
Today’s global civilisation, however, is deeply interconnected and unequal and could lead to the worst societal collapse yet, he says. The threat is from leaders who are “walking versions of the dark triad” – narcissism, psychopathy and Machiavellianism – in a world menaced by the climate crisis, nuclear weapons, artificial intelligence and killer robots.

Submission + - Windows 11 = Windows 7 ? 1

Submitted by J. L. Tympanum
J. L. Tympanum writes: It looks to me like Windows 7, 10 and 11 are all the same OS, just with a different-looking window manager slapped on top. Can someone with more knowledge of Windows internals verify this claim, or refute it?

Submission + - Can AI think—and should it? What it means to think, from Plato to ChatGPT (phys.org)

Submitted by alternative_right
alternative_right writes: Plato, who taught in the fourth century BCE, argued that each person has an intuitive capacity to recognize the truth. He called this the highest form of understanding: "noesis." Noesis enables apprehension beyond reason, belief or sensory perception. It's one form of "knowing" something—but in Plato's view, it's also a property of the soul.

Lower down, but still above his "dividing line," is "dianoia," or reason, which relies on argumentation. Below the line, his lower forms of understanding are "pistis," or belief, and "eikasia," imagination.

Submission + - Birth of a Solar System Witnessed in Spectacular Scientific First (sciencealert.com)

Submitted by alternative_right
alternative_right writes: Around a Sun-like star just 1,300 light-years away, a family of planets has been seen in its earliest moments of conception.

Astronomers analyzed the infrared flow of dust and detritus left over from the formation of a baby star called HOPS-315, finding tiny concentrations of hot minerals that will eventually form planetesimals – the 'seeds' around which new planets will grow.

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