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looorg writes:

Finland is angry at Google over illegal deforestation. Chopping down about 400 000 trees to make room for two data centers. The construction has been halted.

In addition to the 250,000 trees felled at Muhos, Annala estimates that an additional 150,000 trees were felled at Otanmäki. Because the trees have been felled illegally, she says wood from the two sites cannot be sold to wood-processing plants.

She said the system depended a lot on trust, which she believes Google took advantage of. "They bought the vast land area and they just started to cut it, just like that," she said. "It's pure arrogance and it's amazing."

Google apologized and said it acted based on its understanding of Finnish law at the time.

Google said it was working to protect water quality at the Muhos site, and that it planned to plant trees across 130 hectares there. Conservationists say that figure is too low to have any real impact in comparison to the damage done by the tree felling.

We so sorry. Promise it won't happen again, until next time. I know Finnish is hard. But don't Google offer a tool to translate it to something they can read and understand?

Jussi Kangasharju, head of computer science at the University of Helsinki, said that while datacentres brought a limited number of jobs, potentially boosting the local economy, the benefits on a national level were minimal. "Really, for Finland, there are no benefits," he said. "They are international companies serving international customers. Very little corporate taxes go to Finland. Datacentres ultimately have very little benefit for others except the datacentre operator."

No benefit.

I guess the next US export is finally here. Hating Data center buildings. All them trees gone is not going to help when the electricity bill comes ...

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/ng-interactive/2026/oct/22/finland-google-felling-trees-datacentre
https://cybernews.com/news/google-finland-data-center-trees/

Original Submission

"Arthur T Knackerbracket" writes:

https://www.siliconrepublic.com/enterprise/what-in-house-legal-leaders-really-think-about-ai-in-their-own-words

Multiple surveys count how many lawyers are using AI. A new report set out to ask what happens to their workload when they do.

AI isn’t replacing in-house lawyers, but the capacity it frees up is being absorbed by new work, much of it drafted by AI itself.

That is just one of the pictures to emerge from interviews with legal and compliance leaders at companies that included eir, Flipdish, Gilead Sciences, IMRO, Mastercard, Uniphar and Wayflyer for a new report, ‘From AI Adoption to AI Advantage’, produced by Dentons Ireland and SiliconRepublic.com.

Rather than creating another survey full of statistics, we set out to ask what responsible and effective use actually looks like inside a legal function today, and the results often belied the received wisdom.

Almost nobody we interviewed reported AI replacing a role or a function outright. Where it is paying off, it is mostly in repetitive work such as invoice review, contract checking and customer screening, rather than in the research, drafting and judgement calls at the heart of the job.

Sergey Kinchin, senior counsel at Uniphar, said his own thinking had changed completely in a year. “Last year I would have thought it would probably reduce headcount. Now I’m seeing it more as unlocking unmet demand,” he said. “I think the complexity of the work that’s left after AI will increase. The bottom might shift up, but the overall pyramid of work will increase and grow.”

It was a sentiment echoed by many of our interviewees. Máire Neary, who was VP of people and legal at Flipdish when she was interviewed, described treating AI “as a junior colleague, something that’s additive, that can challenge me, but you have to remember you’re the lawyer in charge at the end of the day”.

The catch is that the same tools are now in everyone else’s hands. Producing a long, polished complaint, subject access request or grievance is close to cost-free today, and the report says AI-assisted drafting now seems to touch the majority of incoming disputes, subject access requests, grievances and customer complaints.

Sorcha Nic Mhurchú, general counsel at eir, said the cost lies less in reading that material than in sorting through it. “You end up going back and having to figure out, line by line, what is relevant”, she said. “So that adds a lot of volume and time to any response, and that’s a reality for everybody, not just us.”

At IMRO, chief commercial officer Seán Donegan is glad he saw it coming. “Two years ago, I sat down with our licensing team and I said, guys, I’m going to make a prediction now,” he said. “The volume and tenacity of queries and complaints is going to increase exponentially with these AI tools.”

"Arthur T Knackerbracket" writes:

https://www.theregister.com/cyber-crime/2026/10/20/auto-tech-startup-claims-it-traced-hack-attempt-back-to-rivals-ip-address/5304281

An automotive tech startup claims that its IT systems were attacked by individuals trying to steal its driving model, and that those attacks came from an IP address associated with a rival in the space.

The tech startup, IQ.Lvbs, described the alleged security incident in a recent blog post.

On October 3, IQ.Lvbs introduced the private beta of NovaSpark, the first model for the company's IQ.Pilot app, in the Comma.ai Discord channel. They put it in that channel because the model requires the use of Comma.ai's camera hardware, which is built for self-driving vehicles.

From there, things got weird.

"From October 7 to 14, we faced repeated attempts to steal NovaSpark, access users' devices and private driving files, and exploit our sign-in system," the IQ.Lvbs blog post claims. "The first requests came from an IP assigned to Comma.ai Inc."

In addition, on October 8 – shortly after the alleged attacks began – somebody banned IQ.Lvbs' team from the Comma.ai Discord channel. Posts on the IQ.Pilot Discord channel indicate that individuals doing private beta testing for IQ.Lvbs have also been banned from that channel.

One of the three people involved in IQ.Lvbs, a UI/UX designer who asked to be identified only as "Cat," speculated to The Register about the reasons for the alleged hack and Discord ban.

"Our model, NovaSpark, is a good deal ahead of Comma's latest small and large models, which directly threatens their core business of making AI models good enough to sell their hardware," he said. "Comma for the most part has been stagnant in their models' improvement and that was a main driver for us making NovaSpark."

An October 7, 2026 Discord message from user Torq_boi, said to be Harald Schäfer, Comma.ai's CTO, implies NovaSpark was distilled from Comma.ai's Rebellious Hope model.

"I'm glad people are training models and experimenting with this stuff," the post starts. "But don't lie to people about what you're doing, and saying it's not a finetune of existing comma models when it is. That's not cool."

IQ.Lvbs disputes that assertion and says it did the work on its own. "The claim that NovaSpark is Rebellious Hope with a short fine-tune and an unchanged policy does not survive scrutiny, and we're not sure how Comma came to that conclusion, especially considering that they do not possess NovaSpark's model weights or ONNX," the biz said.

In the log data IQ.Lvbs published to support its claims, the company flags the username haraschax as one of those associated with Comma.ai IP addresses. Schäfer uses that username on GitHub.

Comma.ai and Schäfer did not respond to requests for comment sent to several different addresses. The Discord user Torq_boi in the Comma.ai channel did not respond to a DM seeking comment.

Comma.ai is currently being investigated [PDF] by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration to assess whether its driving automation tech contributed to five crashes and three deaths.

IQ.Lvbs says it's considering legal action over the alleged hack. "We are currently reviewing our legal options and looking into involving the authorities," said Cat.

Original Submission

looorg writes:

Despite massive investments and widespread hype around artificial intelligence, the technology has delivered zero financial payoff to corporate America outside of tech.

In the analysis published on Saturday, Apollo Global Management Inc. said that the "S&P 493," which refers to the S&P 500 minus technology firms Alphabet Inc., Amazon.com Inc., Apple Inc., Meta Platforms Inc., Microsoft Corp., Nvidia Corp. and Tesla Inc., has not yet benefited from its investments in AI.

... while the Magnificent Seven has seen real profits from AI, the profit margins and revenue per worker of other companies remains flat, with no evidence that the technology is enhancing productivity. "Mainstream corporate America is pulling back and starting to view token spending not as a source of growth but as a cost center that weighs on margins,"

"Mainstream corporate America does not need the latest model and is unwilling to pay for it," he wrote. "As long as agentic AI and token spending are confined to a small part of the economy, the macroeconomic effects of AI will be very limited."

More analysis pointing in the direction of that the main beneficiaries from the AI-revolution are a handful of companies. The rest are desperately trying to find profit in their massive investments. When there is a gold rush sell shovels and pans still appears to be the valid business strategy? How long will the keep investing for that ever elusive future payoff day? To deep in the hole to stop digging?

https://siliconangle.com/2026/10/25/apollo-analysis-shows-that-no-one-apart-from-the-biggest-tech-giants-is-seeing-any-real-benefits-from-ai/
https://www.apollo.com/wealth/insights-news/insights/daily-spark/no-signs-of-ai-payoff-outside-the-tech-sector

Original Submission

[Ed's Note: Title corrected-20261029:10:57Z]

An Anonymous Coward writes:

Can we stop the progesssion of technology? Should we? Do disruptive cycles help or hinder us? Australia is about to find out as robotaxis roll their way down under to challenge the current fragile taxi ecosystem dominated by the much maligned taxi corporations and their down but not out Uber clone frenemies.

Who will win? The corporate humans with their outrageous flag falls with dodgy fare counters, the new comers with their mobile apps and surge pricing, or the driverless carriages that can't rip you off by demanding cash?

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

Not to kill the human, of course – to kill the antibiotic-resistant bacteria causing their infection:

Researchers have administered AI-designed, bacteria-targeting viruses to a person in what they claim is a first, but don't press them for results: They're not ready to say how it went quite yet.

Radical Numerics, a San Francisco-based AI lab developing AI models for bioscience, announced the treatment this week, claiming it marks the first time a cocktail containing AI-designed bacteriophages has been administered to a human patient under a compassionate-use arrangement.

These aren't just any viruses, mind you: Omnii-1, the AI model publicly unveiled by Radical Numerics this week, was used to design viable bacteriophages, a type of virus that specifically infects bacteria.

Therapeutic use of phages isn't novel in and of itself, with the bacteria-targeting viruses being sought as an alternative to combat the rise of antimicrobial-resistant bacteria that are increasingly rendering antibiotics ineffective. 

Phages have a number of potential advantages over antibiotics, most notably their ability to target specific bacterial strains – a big plus when it comes to sparing beneficial gut bacteria that can be affected by broad-spectrum antibiotics.

AI has already shown promise in speeding up phage engineering, as we reported last year when a group of researchers from Stanford University and the Arc Institute created AI-designed phages that targeted E. coli bacteria. The phages, designed using the genetic sequence of a well-studied natural E. coli phage, included several variants that outperformed their biological predecessor in laboratory tests.

Similar to the Stanford work, which is referenced in Radical Numerics' write-up, the company used its own AI model to design bacteriophages, which it then tested against bacteria isolated from the antibiotic-resistant infection its patient was suffering from.

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

The Russian official who called commercial satellites "legitimate targets" now says concerns are "unfounded":

Four years ago, a senior official in Russia's foreign ministry painted a bullseye on commercial satellite networks that assist Ukraine in its fight against invading Russian military forces.

On Wednesday, several days after a Russian military spacecraft moved within striking distance of one of those commercial satellites, the same Russian diplomat assured the world there's no reason to worry.

There's a sharp incongruity in those statements from Konstantin Vorontsov, deputy head of Russia's delegation to the United Nations. Vorontsov's comments Wednesday in the UN General Assembly's First Committee came moments after a US official called attention to recent maneuvers by Kosmos 2612, a Russian military craft that approached a US-registered commercial satellite some 340 miles (550 kilometers) above Earth.

"Just last weekend, Russia's Ministry of Defense Kosmos 2612 exhibited threatening behavior by intentionally maneuvering dangerously close to a commercial satellite," Brian Hardesty, a US State Department official, told the UN committee. "These behaviors appear consistent with an on-orbit weapons operation. The decision to conduct these activities was deliberately reckless and violated long-established safety thresholds in low-Earth orbit."

[...] Vorontsov said the US government's concerns, echoed by European officials, were "unfounded" distractions. "Western countries headed by the United States continue to use loudspeaker diplomacy repeating absurd accusations about Russia's space activity."

All Russian activity in space is "purely peaceful in character," Vorontsov said. "This applies to the activity related to Kosmos 2612."

Vorontsov's statements in 2022 were more provocative. At that time, as Ukraine ramped up its reliance on commercial satellite communications and surveillance, Vorontsov said that commercial space infrastructure used by Ukraine's military, including Western satellites, could be a "legitimate target for a retaliatory strike."

It is no wonder, then, that the Russian military's unprecedented maneuvers near one of those satellites raised alarms. Since its launch in April, Kosmos 2612 performed a series of carefully choreographed rocket burns to match orbits with ICEYE-X36, a radar surveillance satellite owned by the US subsidiary of the Finnish remote sensing company ICEYE.

"Ingar" writes:

Walter Koenig, actor best known as Chekov on Star Trek, dies aged 90:

Walter Koenig, the actor known for playing Pavel Chekov throughout the Star Trek franchise, has died, his representative confirmed to the Hollywood Reporter . He was 90.

Koenig died at his home in North Hollywood surrounded by his daughter and niece, according to a Facebook post by Zachery McGinnis, the founder of Galactic Productions, an appearance agency that counted the actor as one of its clients. His death was attributed to "old age", with no other details provided.

"Today we mourn the passing of Walter Koenig, whose talent, warmth, and unforgettable performances left a lasting mark on generations of fans around the world," McGinnis wrote. "Walter's legacy extends far beyond the screen. Through countless convention appearances and interactions with fans, he shared his kindness, wit, and appreciation with everyone fortunate enough to meet him. He understood what Star Trek meant to people and embraced the community that grew around it."

The post concluded: "Thank you, Walter, for the memories, the inspiration, and for boldly going where few have gone before."

"My heart is heavy," wrote Koenig's Star Trek co-star George Takei on Facebook on Monday. Takei first met Koenig in the 1960s, "on the bridge of the Enterprise" and remained friends for six decades; Koenig served as Takei's best man at his wedding in 2008.

"Walter was more than Chekov. He was a writer, a teacher, a thoughtful man, and a loyal friend," Takei wrote. "To the fans who loved him for so many years, thank you. He loved you too. Rest well, my dear friend. Keep navigating a steady course."

Jesse Thorn, the host of the NPR show Bullseye, also confirmed the news on Bluesky , citing his friend Danielle Koenig, the late actor's daughter. "Something I was struck by knowing Danielle, her husband and her late brother Andrew (and talking with George Takei) was the very sincere love those Star Trek cast members had for each other," he wrote. "That whole thing was thrust upon them and their obvious deep friendship was so clear. What a gift."

hubie writes:

Researchers at the Max Planck Institute of Geoanthropology criticise how the decision to reject the Anthropocene as a geological epoch was reached and call for an independent review:

In a recent article in Earth's Future, researchers at the Max Planck Institute of Geoanthropology criticise the process by which the Anthropocene was rejected as a new geological epoch in 2024. They call on the International Union of Geological Sciences (IUGS) to disclose relevant documents and submit the decision-making process to an independent review.

The term Anthropocene was coined in 2000 and describes humans as a major driver of changes in the Earth system. Since then, the concept has gained importance in science, society, culture and law. The Anthropocene Working Group (AWG) proposed formally recognising the Anthropocene as a geological epoch. This proposal was rejected by the IUGS in 2024.

Now, a new commentary paper by authors from the Max Planck Institute of Geoanthropology calls on the IUGS to fully disclose the relevant documentation, as well as for an independent procedural review of the decision.

The paper documents procedural violations that cast doubt on the legitimacy of the IUGS' decision, the authors argue.

"Our main concern isn't the rejection itself. A proposal can legitimately be rejected," says Georg Schäfer, lead author of the paper. "The issue is that no adequate scientific justification for it was ever published, and serious allegations on procedural inconsistencies remain unaddressed."

Those procedural concerns include a compromised evaluation, in which the Anthropocene Working Group could not address comments or make revisions, and an invalid voting process, in which the majority of votes cast were invalid under the body's rules. An internal ethics report investigating these violations, which the IUGS executive committee did not act upon, remains publicly inaccessible.

"The Anthropocene epoch proposal demands transparency and procedural legitimacy," says Professor Jürgen Renn, founding director of the Max Planck Institute of Geoanthropology. "If decisions regarding a humanity-induced planetary crisis can be made behind closed doors, with key documents withheld and public communication vague or contradictory, then geoscience's capacity to inform societal understanding of Earth system change is diminished."

Previously:
    • Geologists Reject Declaration of 'Human Era' in Earth's Timeline
    • For the Second Time, We Are Witnessing a New Geological Epoch: The Anthropocene

Journal Reference: Science or Strategy? The Rejection of the Anthropocene Epoch Demands Transparency: https://doi.org/10.1029/2025EF007638

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

https://www.theregister.com/security/2026/10/22/max-severity-gitlab-bug-allows-remote-code-execution-over-12-years-of-releases/5304854

GitLab on Wednesday patched a maximum-severity flaw that could allow unauthenticated attackers to execute arbitrary code on self-managed servers under certain conditions. Affected software releases date back a full 12 years - so upgrade to a fixed version now.

The integer overflow bug, tracked as CVE-2026-110264, affects regular-expression compilation in GitLab Community Edition (CE) and Enterprise Edition (EE), including versions dating back to GitLab 7.0, released in June 2014.

The flaw, "under certain conditions, could have allowed an unauthenticated user to execute arbitrary code on the GitLab server due to integer overflow when compiling a specially crafted regular expression," the vendor said in its release notes.

GitLab released fixes in versions 19.5.1, 19.4.3, and 19.3.6, and backported the patch to versions 19.2.9, 19.1.9, 19.0.10, and 18.11.13. The vendor "strongly recommends" that all organizations running vulnerable software upgrade to a fixed version "as soon as possible." 

GitLab-managed infrastructure, including GitLab.com and GitLab Dedicated, remains patched, and the vendor also released two threat detections (here and here) for customers with self-managed instances.

Bug hunter Johan Carlsson reported the vulnerability through GitLab's HackerOne bug bounty program.

"For organizations running self-managed GitLab infrastructure, the potential impact is severe," warned threat-detection firm SOC Prime. "GitLab repositories frequently contain source code, CI/CD configuration, deployment secrets, access tokens, infrastructure definitions, and connections to production environments. Server-level compromise could therefore create opportunities for credential theft, repository manipulation, supply chain attacks, persistence, or lateral movement."

While there's no indication - yet - of any in-the-wild exploitation attempts, we'd expect criminals to start scanning for vulnerable instances soon.

The ongoing PHP chaos may have given defenders a short head-start on this one, but considering the perfect 10 CVSS severity rating and GitLab's reach into the enterprise - it claims 50 million registered users and more than 50 percent of the Fortune 100 - that's not going to last long.

Last month, attackers started battering another max-severity flaw in the same GitLab CE and EE products just days after the vendor issued a patch, according to the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency and private researchers.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/10/comcast-loses-more-customers-claims-other-isps-cheap-prices-are-irrational/

Comcast reportedly plans significant job cuts in its cable division as the firm continues to lose residential broadband and TV customers. Comcast lost 144,000 residential broadband customers in Q3 2026, up from a 91,000-customer loss in the same quarter a year ago, the company said in its earnings report today.

Comcast historically capitalized on a lack of competition for high-speed wired broadband. But now it faces stronger competition from fixed wireless providers and from fiber providers in parts of its cable territory.

"Fixed wireless remains aggressive and continues to take share, while fiber construction remains elevated, with pockets of irrational pricing and promotional activity," Comcast co-CEO Mike Cavanagh said today in an earnings call.

Comcast CFO Jason Armstrong said "irrational pricing" from fiber operators includes $30 to $40 monthly broadband offers "in specific markets in the third quarter." He said $30 to $40 pricing is irrational because deploying fiber costs $1,500 or more per home, and is "getting more expensive with construction costs up as you get into more suburban and rural areas."

"As we look at the return profile of that, to us, that is irrational competition," Armstrong said. While he didn't name any specific competitors, Verizon has been pitching FiOS fiber plans that start at $30 a month. Comcast's network is a mix of fiber and cable, and it offers fiber-to-the-home in only small portions of its cable territory.

Armstrong said more Comcast customers are leaving when they face "pricing transitions," apparently referring to the price hikes customers get when promotional offers expire. "We've been refining our offers and retention strategies to better manage these transitions and strengthen customer retention," he said.

Cavanagh said that "satellite is not yet a material factor" in the competition Comcast faces, but that Comcast is focused on "anticipating emerging forms of competition and positioning our business to respond as the market evolves."

After the latest quarterly drop, Comcast has 28.3 million residential broadband customers in the US. Comcast said it has a plan to turn things around.

"We've embarked on the most significant operating and cost transformation in our company's history, with an opportunity we believe will ultimately amount to billions of dollars over time," Cavanagh said. The organizational changes will result in a "significant charge" of over $1 billion to be applied in the fourth quarter earnings report, Armstrong said.

It appears likely that job cuts will affect Comcast's famously frustrating customer service division, replacing some number of humans with AI agents that already handle some customer interactions. "As personal AI agents reshape how consumers discover, purchase, and manage services, we're positioning Comcast to capitalize on that shift," Armstrong said.

As is typically the case when companies announce layoffs, Comcast said the goal is not merely reducing salary. Cavanagh said Comcast's plan "goes well beyond cost savings" and will "create a more agile, efficient organization that can compete more effectively and invest more decisively in growth."

Comcast lost 274,000 video customers in the quarter, up from a 257,000-customer loss in the same quarter last year. Total video customers are down to 10.4 million. Comcast added 368,000 wireless lines, down from a 414,000-line gain last year. It now has 10.6 million wireless lines in its business of offering mobile service to broadband subscribers.

"mrpg" writes:

Alzheimer's damage may begin outside the brain:

Destructive immune cells tied to Alzheimer's disease may get their marching orders from cells outside the brain rather than within it.

In mice, suppressing a small population of immune cells located in lymph nodes protects against neurodegeneration, researchers report September 3 in Nature Neuroscience. The findings raise the possibility of treating Alzheimer's disease while bypassing the brain's siege defenses.

For years, researchers have gone all in on efforts to remove toxic tangles of proteins like amyloid and tau from the brain as a way of halting Alzheimer's, with limited success. But the immune system also plays an important role in neurodegeneration. What exactly that role is — protector or antagonist — has been unclear.

In 2023, neurologist David Holtzman and colleagues showed that immune system T cells accumulate around tau tangles — implying that they might cause damage. Halting these cells' entry into the brain reduced inflammation, and also reduced neuronal damage, says Holtzman, of Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis.

Still, it wasn't known how these T cells accessed the brain in the first place. "A big question has been whether the T cells passively enter the brain or are primed ... to do so," says Rudolph Tanzi, a neurogeneticist at Harvard Medical School who wasn't involved in the study.

During priming, T cells are ordered to rally and multiply. The generals that bark out these orders are called dendritic cells, which capture signatures of cellular threats called antigens and present them to T cell infantry.

No one had looked closely at what dendritic cells in lymph nodes were doing during neurodegenerative disease, Holtzman says. So in the new study, he and his colleagues compared two groups of mice engineered to have tau-linked neurodegeneration, one of which lacked dendritic cells.

In old age, mice without dendritic cells still had brains packed with tau. But compared with the other mice, they were protected against neurodegeneration and performed better on cognitive tasks like nest building.

They also had far fewer T cells in their brains. This suggests that tau tangles aren't working alone in driving neurodegeneration, Holtzman says. "A lot of the damage that tau is causing is due to the inflammatory response that it's eliciting." The results would need to be replicated in human brains, he adds.

Despite this seemingly important role, the researchers found few dendritic cells in the mice's brains. Instead, they detected threat-mimicking brain proteins traveling to the lymph nodes, where dendritic cells used them to rally T cells. The team bred mutant mice with demoted dendritic cell generals that could no longer give commands to T cells. These mice also had fewer T cells in their brains and better-preserved brain structures.

It isn't practical to disable dendritic cells from birth in people at risk of Alzheimer's. But Holtzman says his colleagues are working on cellular targets that could suppress them in adulthood. The real promise of the study may be a dementia treatment that bypasses the nervous system's locked vault — the blood-brain barrier, Holtzman says. "If this panned out, potentially you wouldn't have to get [therapeutics] into the brain."

Journal Reference:
Hu, Hao, Lin, Peter Bor-Chian, Zeng, Carisa, et al. Priming of CD8+ T cells by peripheral dendritic cells exacerbates tau [open], Nature Neuroscience 2026 (DOI: 10.1038/s41593-026-02427-5)

Original Submission

hubie writes:

Surprising discovery suggests that Mars and Earth formed through different processes. The finding could help scientists understand whether planets in other galaxies are habitable:

Four and a half billion years ago, Earth and Mars were born in the rotating cloud of gas and dust that would eventually become our Solar System.

Yet exactly how the planets formed remains one of the most disputed questions in planetary science.

Now, researchers at the University of Copenhagen are adding new evidence to the debate. Using a novel approach, they have reconstructed the earliest stages of the planets' formation by analysing their chemical composition.

And the results surprised them.

"The most surprising result was that Earth and Mars appear to have formed in different ways. You might have expected that two planets formed side by side in the same solar system would share a more similar formation history," says Professor Anders Johansen, who studies planet formation at the Globe Institute, University of Copenhagen. He co-led the new study with Assistant Professor Haiyang Wang.

Today, researchers broadly agree that planets are formed primarily in one of two ways, or through a hybrid of both processes:

Planets either emerge when giant space rocks, known as planetesimals, collide, or when these large rocks accumulate smaller particles, a process known as pebble accretion.

Planetary scientists have not settled on which of the two processes or a combination thereof would best explain how rocky planets such as Earth and Mars formed.

The researchers behind the new study believe that their findings support the so-called hybrid model. However, the study takes one step further and offers a more explicit explanation of how Earth and Mars formed 4.5 billion years ago.

"At least 75 percent of Earth's mass appears to originate from two young planets, known as protoplanets, that grew large by accreting pebbles, while planetesimals contributed up to 25 percent. In contrast, roughly three-quarters of Mars' mass appears to come from planetesimals, with the remaining quarter originating from pebble accretion," says Haiyang Wang.
Planetary chemistry reveals the past

jelizondo writes:

The Observer has an article about mathematician Terence Tao and his take on AI solving math problems:

If tech bros don't understand why Terence Tao, probably the world's leading mathematician, is horrified that OpenAI published the answers to 722 unsolved maths problems, they should think about Douglas Adams.

In Adams's book The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, the Deep Thought supercomputer took 7.5m years to answer the ultimate question of life, the universe and everything and came up with 42. Then it asked for another 10m years to work out what the question was.

Adams's joke has become an accidental satire on AI because Tao and his colleagues are now wading through OpenAI's answers to work out how it reached them.

At 51, Tao could be forgiven for not wanting to tidy up after Silicon Valley, although he has worked with OpenAI and still has contacts there. The Australian, speaking via video from California where he is professor of mathematics at UCLA, is one of the youngest winners of the Fields Medal (the maths Nobel), and has a slew of other prizes honouring his contributions. He attempts to distil the field in his book, Six Maths Essentials: How to Model the World, which is published on Tuesday.

But perhaps the worst part for Tao is that he believes OpenAI didn't even make a new model to solve these difficult problems. Conundrums that people have spent careers addressing were merely raw material for training its models.

AI companies are "racing towards the most powerful model", Tao says, so they need to "train and benchmark and give the AI lots of tests to see whether what they're doing is improving their capability". The practical problem is that the newest AI models are beating every test.

"Maths problems are almost the only thing left for them to train on, so suddenly all the big prizes and goals in our profession are benchmarks for them," Tao says. "And as a byproduct, they're generating these terrible proofs. Great results, but they don't care how elegant the solutions are, or who understands them, or what to do next."

The dump of mathematical "toxic waste", as Tao calls it, began when rumours surfaced online that Anthropic researchers were close to solving one of the seven $1m Millennium Prize Problems set by the Clay Mathematics Institute.

"My contacts at OpenAI said this became code red priority number one," Tao says. "They dumped tens of millions of dollars. They set up this 10,000 AI agent swarm to attack these problems." OpenAI focused its agents on the problem of the Navier-Stokes equations, which seem to perfectly describe the motion of a fluid, yet might fail in some conditions.

On 8 September, OpenAI published a proof that seemed to show that Navier-Stokes did fail, although reviews suggest there may be some errors. The backlash from the maths community left OpenAI with a problem, Tao says. "They had been testing their models on these problems for quite a while, and they actually had accumulated a bunch of very badly polished solutions to these problems. They didn't know what to do with them."

"[When] you generate toxic waste, you have no good options. You can sit on it forever, or you can just dump it out all at once, or you can dole it out in drabs, or you can pay people to process it."

Anthropic is taking a different approach, by paying mathematicians to write up results to its "trove of questions", he says.

That creates a different problem. For years maths was a field with equality of arms; practitioners needed only some chalk and a blackboard, unlike their scientific counterparts – think of Cern or the Hubble space telescope. Now doing cutting edge maths research means getting access to a super-AI model. "They get to pick who writes up the paper."

"Maths is half science, half humanities," he says. "We care about the outcome but also the process, how we got there, what we learned on the way." He still uses theorems discovered by Euclid and Pythagoras 2,500 years ago. The story of solving a problem, the history of the arguments and the elegance of the solution are essential to the beauty of mathematics. Otherwise, "you can go to the gym and get a robot to lift your weights, but what's the point?"

An OpenAI spokesperson said: "Our work in mathematics is part of a longstanding effort to accelerate scientific discovery. We've worked on maths for years because better reasoning can make AI a stronger research partner, helping scientists tackle harder problems in biology, medicine and engineering.

"We are already working with leading mathematicians to improve how we share results, and we've committed $5m to help the maths community examine, understand and build on discoveries made with AI."

Original Submission

"Arthur T Knackerbracket" writes:

https://www.cnet.com/news/privacy/proton-hosts-flock-surveillance-map/

A powerful, free Flock surveillance-tracking platform is now hosted by Proton, the creator of Proton Mail and Proton VPN. The move provides extra technical and legal protection for the interactive mapping tool, which Flock has repeatedly attempted to shut down through legal threats.

The deal, announced on Wednesday, gives the public access to a free database of Flock Safety's automated license plate readers and AI surveillance cameras across the US.

Security researcher Joshua Michael [website only available in USA. --Ed] first published the interactive map in September before facing a swift trademark complaint from Flock. Despite Flock’s demands for its removal, the map remains publicly accessible.

Flock's surveillance networks capture license plates, vehicle details, human physical characteristics, and audio signals such as gunshots or shouting. While law enforcement agencies use this data to track and search suspects, privacy advocates warn that the technology enables widespread, unchecked tracking.

Proton also says the map shows far more Flock cameras are active than Flock currently says it has. Flock said this summer that it operates more than 120,000 cameras nationwide, but the tool says there are more than 214,000 Flock devices in service, with more than 80,000 in the planning stages.

A representative from Flock Safety didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

The map is one of the most usable Flock tools I’ve seen. Proton’s Flock tool has better visual clarity, faster search responses and a more intuitive interface than other sites I’ve tried and is available without a subscription to other Proton services.

I searched my own city, which canceled its Flock contact over a year ago. The map accurately reported that no active Flock cameras are currently present, but correctly located decommissioned Flock cams. Since the data is based on Flock’s own reporting, I place more trust in it than in crowdsourced tools like the Deflock app, which are subject to errors or misrepresentation.

“My research on FlockSurveillance.org documents cybersecurity failures with national-security consequences,” map creator Joshua Michael told CNET. “My research argued that Flock Safety could not detect exports of their data and that because they hold data on nearly every American and their pattern of life, they are a national security threat to our country and people.”

Michael said Flock has “promised to take every measure possible to take my research offline,” he said, offering that as one reason why Proton moved to preserve the map in its Swiss servers. Switzerland enforces some of the world’s strongest privacy laws. Proton’s site notes that under Swiss data protection regulations, the company isn’t required to comply with requests that are not supported by a Swiss court order. Flock is a US-based company.

Camera locations are constantly changing, meaning a surveillance map could rapidly become dated.

“If new and reliable data becomes available, then we will update the map,” a Proton spokesperson told me. “We’re committed to keeping the public informed of all forms of surveillance where reliable data can be sourced.”

While Proton's map provides a specialized, point-in-time look at Flock Safety’s network, the Atlas of Surveillance offers a broader, historical catalog of the sweeping technologies US law enforcement agencies have quietly adopted over the years.

Powered by a network of volunteers who analyze public data and official government records, the Atlas database tracks everything from automated license plate readers to cell-site simulators and body-worn cameras. The project continuously updates its findings.

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