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Submission + - Help fish by ringing the fish doorbell (apnews.com)

Submitted by invisik
invisik writes: UTRECHT, Netherlands (AP) — The central Dutch city of Utrecht has installed a “ fish doorbell ” on a river lock that lets viewers of an online livestream alert authorities to fish being held up as they make their springtime migration to shallow spawning grounds.

The idea is simple: An underwater camera at Utrecht’s Weerdsluis lock sends live footage to a website. When somebody watching the site sees a fish, they can click a button that sends a screenshot to organizers. When they see enough fish, they alert a water worker who opens the lock to let the fish swim through.

Submission + - Is AI making you less creative? (techxplore.com)

Submitted by Big Hairy Gorilla
Big Hairy Gorilla writes: Researchers at the University of Toronto, explore the impact of LLMs on Human Creativity. The use of LLMs in particular, but automation in general, leads to a conundrum. "The smarter the tool the dumber the operator" is how I put it. Observationally, it's clear that we in technology use tools extensively. At what point do we lose skills because the tools do "too much" for you?

Submission + - FDA may outlaw food dyes 'within weeks': Bombshell move would affect candy, soda (nbcnews.com) 1

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: The Food and Drug Administration will decide on a ban of certain food dyes in the coming weeks after receiving a petition to review the safety of Red 3, NBC News reports.

“With Red 3, we have a petition in front of us to revoke the authorization board, and we’re hopeful that in the next few weeks we’ll be acting on that petition,” Jim Jones, the deputy commissioner for human foods at the FDA, said during a Senate meeting this week, per NBC.

According to the FDA, the agency has reviewed the safety of Red 3 —which is derived from petroleum and found snacks, beverages, candy and more — in food and drugs “multiple times” since it was first approved in 1969, but the petition has requested for the additive to be reviewed once more.

While the FDA has stated that food dyes are safe and do not pose health risks, the dye was banned from topical drugs and cosmetics in 1990.

Submission + - Federal court upholds law to ban TikTok, say platform could be unavailable in US (nbcnews.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The D.C. Circuit voted to uphold the ban, citing national security threats and the collection of data from TikTok users.

A panel of three federal Appeals Court judges ruled unanimously to uphold a law Friday that could potentially ban TikTok in the U.S.

The legislation, passed in April by Congress and signed into law by President Joe Biden, requires TikTok to sell to an American owner by Jan. 19, 2025, or face a ban.

In the court's majority opinion, the justices said, "We recognize that this decision has significant implications for TikTok and its users." If the platform does not divest, the court said it "will effectively be unavailable in the United States, at least for a time."

"Consequently, TikTok’s millions of users will need to find alternative media of communication," the opinion continued.

Submission + - UK's first nuclear reactor in 30 years installed at Hinkley Point C (x.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Countries operating nuclear sites safely for decades show how regulation can engender safety & environmental standards without holding back vital technology.

Leave building large infrastructure projects to engineers, not lawyers.

Should we be afraid of nuclear meltdowns? I used to think so

Submission + - File-Hosting Icon AnonFiles Throws in the Towel, Domain For Sale (torrentfreak.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Founded in 2011, AnonFiles.com became known as a popular hosting service that allowed users to share files up to 20GB without download restrictions. As the name suggests, registering an account wasn’t required either; both up and downloading files was totally anonymous. The same also applies to BayFiles.com, an affiliated file-hosting service that was launched by The Pirate Bay. Both sites launched around the same time and shared a similar design and identical features. Both sites had millions of visitors but AnonFiles stood out with over 18 million visitors a month. This popularity didn’t go unnoticed by rightsholders, who repeatedly flagged AnonFiles as a “notorious” pirate site.

Rightsholders and law enforcement authorities were not the only ones unhappy with the illegal content posted to the site. For AnonFiles’ operators, it caused major problems too. The current owners purchased the site two years ago but didn’t expect the abuse to be so massive that the only option would be to shut it down. According to a goodbye message posted on the site, they simply can’t continue. “After trying endlessly for two years to run a file sharing site with user anonymity, we have been tired of handling the extreme volumes of people abusing it and the headaches it has created for us.”

The operators tried to contain the abuse by setting up all sorts of automated filters and filename restrictions, taking thousands of false positives for granted, but that didn’t help much. With tens of millions of uploads and petabytes of data, no anti-abuse measure was sufficient. And when the site’s proxy service pulled the plug a few days ago, AnonFiles decided to call it quits. “We have auto banned contents of hundreds of thousands files. Banned file names and also banned specific usage patterns connected to abusive material,” the AnonFiles team writes. “Even after all this the high volume of abuse will not stop. This is not the kind of work we imagine when acquiring it and recently our proxy provider shut us down. This can not continue.”

Submission + - WHO Aspartame Safety Panel Linked To Alleged Coca-Cola Front Group (theguardian.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: In May, the World Health Organization issued an alarming report that declared widely used non-sugar sweeteners like aspartame are likely ineffective for weight loss, and long term consumption may increase the risk of diabetes, cardiovascular diseases and mortality in adults. A few months later, WHO declared aspartame, a key ingredient in Diet Coke, to be a “possible carcinogen," then quickly issued a third report that seemed to contradict its previous findings – people could continue consuming the product at levels determined to be safe decades ago, before new science cited by WHO raised health concerns. That contradiction stems from beverage industry corruption of the review process by consultants tied to an alleged Coca-Cola front group, the public health advocacy group US Right-To-Know said in a recent report.

It uncovered eight WHO panelists involved with assessing safe levels of aspartame consumption who are beverage industry consultants who currently or previously worked with the alleged Coke front group, International Life Sciences Institute (Ilsi). Their involvement in developing intake guidelines represents “an obvious conflict of interest”, said Gary Ruskin, US Right-To-Know’s executive director. “Because of this conflict of interest, [the daily intake] conclusions about aspartame are not credible, and the public should not rely on them,” he added. [...] Ilsi describes itself as a nonprofit that conducts “science for the public good”, but it was founded in 1978 by a Coca-Cola executive who simultaneously worked for the company through 2021, US Right-To-Know found. Other Coca-Cola executives have worked with the group, and US Right-To-Know detailed tax returns that show millions in donations from Coca-Cola and other beverage industry players. Coke ended its official membership with the group in 2021.

Over the years, Ilsi representatives have sought to shape food policy worldwide, and Ruskin, who has written multiple peer-reviewed papers on the group, characterized the aspartame controversy as a “masterpiece in how Ilsi worms its way into these regulatory processes." US Right To Know identified six out of 13 Jefca panel members with ties to the industry group. After it released its report, the WHO acknowledged two more of its members with industry ties. In a statement to the Guardian, a WHO spokesperson defended the industry consultants’ inclusion in the review process. “For the meeting on aspartame, Jefca selected the experts likely to make the best contributions to the debate,” said spokesperson Fadéla Chaib. She said WHO’s guidelines only require disclosure of conflicts of interest within the last four years. “To our knowledge, the experts you listed by name have not participated in any Ilsi activities for at least 10 years,” she said. But that partially contradicts a statement made by WHO just weeks before to the news outlet Le Parisien in which it acknowledged two people currently working with Ilsi were involved in the process. The Guardian had also asked about those two people identified in the Parisien story but were not listed “by name” in its email.

Submission + - A Growing Number of Scientists Are Convinced the Future Influences the Past (vice.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Have you ever found yourself in a self-imposed jam and thought, “Well, if it isn’t the consequences of my own actions”? It’s a common refrain that exposes a deeper truth about the way we humans understand time and causality. Our actions in the past are correlated to our experience of the future, whether that’s a good outcome, like acing a test because you prepared, or a bad one, like waking up with a killer hangover. But what if this forward causality could somehow be reversed in time, allowing actions in the future to influence outcomes in the past? This mind-bending idea, known as retrocausality, may seem like science fiction grist at first glance, but it is starting to gain real traction among physicists and philosophers, among other researchers, as a possible solution to some of the most intractable riddles underlying our reality.

In other words, people are becoming increasingly “retro-curious,” said Kenneth Wharton, a professor of physics at San Jose State University who has published research about retrocausality, in a call with Motherboard. Even though it may feel verboten to consider a future that affects the past, Wharton and others think it could account for some of the strange phenomena observed in quantum physics, which exists on the tiny scale of atoms.

“We have instincts about all sorts of things, and some are stronger than others,” said Wharton, who recently co-authored an article about retrocausality with Huw Price, a distinguished professor emeritus at the University of Bonn and an emeritus fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge. “I’ve found our instincts of time and causation are our deepest, strongest instincts that physicists and philosophers—and humans—are loath to give up,” he added. Scientists, including Price, have speculated about the possibility that the future might influence the past for decades, but the renewed curiosity about retrocausality is driven by more recent findings about quantum mechanics. [...] While there are a range of views about the mechanics and consequences of retrocausal theories, a growing community of researchers think this concept has the potential to answer fundamental questions about the universe.

Submission + - SPAM: Active volcano on Venus shows it's a living planet 1

Submitted by sciencehabit
sciencehabit writes: Choked by a smog of sulfuric acid and scorched by temperatures hot enough to melt lead, the surface of Venus is sure to be lifeless. For decades, researchers also thought the planet itself was dead, capped by a thick, stagnant lid of crust and unaltered by active rifts or volcanoes. But hints of volcanism have mounted recently, and now comes the best one yet: direct evidence for an eruption. Geologically, at least, Venus is alive.

The discovery comes from NASA’s Magellan spacecraft, which orbited Venus some 30 years ago and used radar to peer through the thick clouds. Images made 8 months apart show a volcano’s circular mouth, or caldera, growing dramatically in a sudden collapse. On Earth, such collapses occur when magma that had supported the caldera vents or drains away, as happened during a 2018 eruption at Hawaii’s Kilauea volcano. “I’m totally tickled, as a geomorphologist, to see this,” says Martha Gilmore, a planetary scientist at Wesleyan University who was not involved in the study.

Witnessing this unrest during the short observation period suggests either Magellan was spectacularly lucky, or, like Earth, Venus has many volcanoes spouting off regularly, says Robert Herrick, a planetary scientist at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks. Herrick, who led the study, says, “We can rule out that it’s a dying planet.”
Link to Original Source

Comment Re:This is going to a upend a lot of fiction. (Score 1) 97

by thunderclap (#54523101) Attached to: DNA From Ancient Egyptian Mummies Reveals Their Ancestry

What were they? Outside of Mansa Musi and the Kingdom of Mali (which engaged in the slave trade with Muslims as he was one himself), what do the remainder of Africa have to show for themselves? Nothing other than what they have now. Honestly without european technology the continent would still be how it was more millenia. Bereft of technology.

So of course they want to be linked with egypt.

Comment Re: Huh? (Score 1) 476

by thunderclap (#54106923) Attached to: The Gig Economy Celebrates Working Yourself to Death

They are? Awesome! I decide that I don't work anymore!

Wait. No, I can't do that, then I won't have no money.

Ok, then I decide to only do what I want to do!

Wait, no, that doesn't work either, nobody's going to pay me to post on /. all day.

Ok, then I decide that I find a job where they don't care that I post on /. all day!

Unfortunately such jobs don't exist.

snip

Yes, they do. They are called govt jobs and if you are willing to live Washington DC you can get one.

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