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fliptop writes:

Apparently, China's dominance of the supply chain means that it's also seen as the principal source of cybersecurity risk:

"We know that foreign, hostile actors see Australia's energy system as a good target," Home Affairs assistant secretary for cyber security Sophie Pearce told the small, afternoon-on-the-last-day audience.

"We know that cyber vector is the most likely means of disrupting our energy ecosystem, and I think that the energy transition raises the stakes even further. Where we're reliant on foreign investment and foreign supply chains, lots of opportunity there, obviously.

"When there's a dependency on jurisdictions that might require or can compel access to data or access to systems, that increases the risks."

[...] Pearce Courtney handles cyber coordination for energy markets at AEMO, and while he says it's maintaining visibility over the whole structure that keeps the organisation "up at night", technology concentration risk is on the radar.

[...] "In terms of the technology and the devices and where we're buying our supply chain. That's probably the other challenge that doesn't keep us up at night, that's a significant, complex challenge."

China controls 80 per cent of the global supply chain for all the manufacturing stages of solar panels, according to an International Energy Agency (IEA) report from 2022. A similar study from 2024 shows China has almost 85 per cent of global battery cell production capacity.

[Editor's Comment: Title corrected to more accurately reflect the summary contents--JR 2025-09-15 05:55]

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Newly released video at House UFO hearing appears to show U.S. missile striking and bouncing off orb:

A newly released video captured by a U.S. reaper drone shows a glowing orb off the coast of Yemen. Then in the video, a Hellfire missile suddenly struck the unidentified object and bounced off it.

Rep. Eric Burlison, a Republican from Missouri, shared the video at a House Oversight hearing on Tuesday on what the military calls "Unidentified Aerial Phenomena" or better known as UFOs.

The video, dated Oct. 30, 2024, was provided by a whistleblower and when slowed down, the missile can be seen continuing on its own path after striking the orb.

A recent government report revealed that it had received more than 750 new UAP sightings between May 2023 and June 2024, leaving lawmakers digging into the mystery and national security concerns posed by the objects.

"We've never seen a Hellfire missile hit a target and bounce off," said Lue Elizondo, a former senior intelligence official with the Pentagon.

"When a hellfire makes a hit, a kinetic strike on something solid, there's usually not much left of whatever it is it's hitting," Elizondo said. "It's very, very destructive. But in the video ... what seems to happen is that the missile is either redirected, or in some case, perhaps glances off the object and continues on its way."

What was not shown in the video is a second reaper drone that launched the missile.

Details remain unclear, including what the mission was.

The U.S. military was conducting regular air strikes against Houthi targets that posed a threat to the U.S. Navy and commercial vessels.

Pentagon officials told CBS News they have no comment.

The Defense Department in 2023 launched a website for declassified UAP information, following a House Oversight Committee held a hearing earlier that year that featured testimony from a former military intelligence officer and two former fighter pilots, who had first-hand experience with the mysterious objects.

At a House Oversight Committee hearing on unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAPs) Sept. 9, Rep. Eric Burlison (R-MO) shared drone footage from October, 2024 which shows the "hit" [3:26 --JE]

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Scientists Stunned as Tiny Algae Keep Moving Inside Arctic Ice:

Scientists know that microbial life can survive under some extreme conditions—including, hopefully, harsh Martian weather. But new research suggests that one particular microbe, an algal species found in Arctic ice, isn't as immobile as it was previously believed. They're surprisingly active, gliding across—and even within—their frigid stomping grounds.

In a Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences paper published September 9, researchers explained that ice diatoms—single-celled algae with glassy outer walls—actively dance around in the ice. This feisty activity challenges assumptions that microbes living in extreme environments, or extremophiles, are barely getting by. If anything, these algae evolved to thrive despite the extreme conditions. The remarkable mobility of these microbes also hints at an unexpected role they may play in sustaining Arctic ecology.

"This is not 1980s-movie cryobiology," said Manu Prakash, the study's senior author and a bioengineer at Stanford University, in a statement. "The diatoms are as active as we can imagine until temperatures drop all the way down to -15 C [5 degrees Fahrenheit], which is super surprising."

That temperature is the lowest ever for a eukaryotic cell like the diatom, the researchers claim. Surprisingly, diatoms of the same species from a much warmer environment didn't demonstrate the same skating behavior as the ice diatoms. This implies that the extreme life of Arctic diatoms birthed an "evolutionary advantage," they added.

For the study, the researchers collected ice cores from 12 stations across the Arctic in 2023. They conducted an initial analysis of the cores using on-ship microscopes, creating a comprehensive image of the tiny society inside the ice.

To get a clearer image of how and why these diatoms were skating, the team sought to replicate the conditions of the ice core inside the lab. They prepared a Petri dish with thin layers of frozen freshwater and very cold saltwater. The team even donated strands of their hair to mimic the microfluidic channels in Arctic ice, which expels salt from the frozen apparatus.

As they expected, the diatoms happily glided through the Petri dish, using the hair strands as "highways" during their routines. Further analysis allowed the researchers to track and pinpoint how the microbes accomplished their icy trick.

"There's a polymer, kind of like snail mucus, that they secrete that adheres to the surface, like a rope with an anchor," explained Qing Zhang, study lead author and a postdoctoral student at Stanford, in the same release. "And then they pull on that 'rope,' and that gives them the force to move forward."

If we're talking numbers, algae may be among the most abundant living organisms in the Arctic. To put that into perspective, Arctic waters appear "absolute pitch green" in drone footage purely because of algae, explained Prakash.

The researchers have yet to identify the significance of the diatoms' gliding behavior. However, knowing that they're far more active than we believed could mean that the tiny skaters unknowingly contribute to how resources are cycled in the Arctic.

"In some sense, it makes you realize this is not just a tiny little thing; this is a significant portion of the food chain and controls what's happening under ice," Prakash added.

That's a significant departure from what we often think of them as—a major food source for other, bigger creatures. But if true, it would help scientists gather new insights into the hard-to-probe environment of the Arctic, especially as climate change threatens its very existence. The timing of this result shows that, to understand what's beyond Earth, we first need to protect and safely observe what's already here.

Journal Reference:
DOI: Ice gliding diatoms establish record-low temperature limits for motility in a eukaryotic cell

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Researchers investigated giant prehistoric trash piles to reveal where animal remains came from:

You can learn a lot about people by studying their trash, including populations that lived thousands of years ago.

In what the team calls the "largest study of its kind," researchers applied this principle to Britain's iconic middens, or giant prehistoric trash (excuse me, rubbish) piles. Their analysis revealed that at the end of the Bronze Age (2,300 to 800 BCE), people—and their animals—traveled from far to feast together.

"At a time of climatic and economic instability, people in southern Britain turned to feasting—there was perhaps a feasting age between the Bronze and Iron Age," Richard Madgwick, an archaeologist at Cardiff University and co-author of the study published yesterday in the journal iScience, said in a university statement. "These events are powerful for building and consolidating relationships both within and between communities, today and in the past."

Madgwick and his colleagues investigated material from six middens in Wiltshire and the Thames Valley via isotope analysis, a technique archaeologists use to link animal remains to the unique chemical make-up of a particular geographic area. The technique reveals where the animals were raised, allowing the researchers to see how far people traveled to join these feasts.

"The scale of these accumulations of debris and their wide catchment is astonishing and points to communal consumption and social mobilisation on a scale that is arguably unparalleled in British prehistory," Madgwick added.

[...] "Our findings show each midden had a distinct make up of animal remains, with some full of locally raised sheep and others with pigs or cattle from far and wide," said Carmen Esposito, lead author of the study and an archaeologist at the University of Bologna. "We believe this demonstrates that each midden was a lynchpin in the landscape, key to sustaining specific regional economies, expressing identities and sustaining relations between communities during this turbulent period, when the value of bronze dropped and people turned to farming instead."

upstart writes:

Arbitrarily inflated lock-in-tastic fees curbed as movement charges must be cost-linked:

Most of the provisions of the EU Data Act will officially come into force from the end of this week, requiring cloud providers to make it easier for customers to move their data, but some of the big players are keener than others.

The European Data Act is an ambitious attempt by the European Commission to galvanize the market for digital services by opening up access to data. But it also contains provisions to permit customers to move seamlessly between different cloud operators and combine data services from different providers in a so-called multi-cloud strategy.

Cloud users have often complained about the fees that operators charge whenever data is transferred outside of their networks. Investigations by regulators such as the UK's Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) have led the big three platforms – AWS, Microsoft's Azure and Google Cloud – to all waive egress fees, but only for users quitting their platforms.

While the Data Act doesn't rule out vendors charging data transfer fees, it does expect cloud firms to pass on costs to customers rather than charging arbitrary or excessive payments.

Google is keen to publicize that it is going further than this and offering data movement at no cost for customers in both the European Union and the United Kingdom via a newly announced Data Transfer Essentials service.

There's a catch, of course – Google makes it clear that its service is designed for cost-optimized data transfer between two services of a customer organization that happen to be running on different cloud platforms.

In other words, it is for traffic that would effectively be considered internal to the customer organization and not for transfers to third parties. Google warns that if one of its audits uncovers that the service is being misused in this way, the traffic will be billed as regular internet traffic.

upstart writes:

Pluralistic: Fingerspitzengefühl (08 Sep 2025) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow:

This was the plan: America would stop making things and instead make recipes, the "IP" that could be sent to other countries to turn into actual stuff, in distant lands without the pesky environmental and labor rules that forced businesses to accept reduced profits because they weren't allowed to maim their workers and poison the land, air and water.

This was quite a switch! At the founding of the American republic, the US refused to extend patent protection to foreign inventors. The inventions of foreigners would be fair game for Americans, who could follow their recipes without paying a cent, and so improve the productivity of the new nation without paying rent to old empires over the sea.

It was only once America found itself exporting as much as it imported that it saw fit to recognize the prerogatives of foreign inventors, as part of reciprocal agreements that required foreigners to seek permission and pay royalties to American patent-holders.

But by the end of the 20th Century, America's ruling class was no longer interested in exporting things; they wanted to export ideas, and receive things in return. You can see why: America has a limited supply of things, but there's an infinite supply of ideas (in theory, anyway).

There was one problem: why wouldn't the poor-but-striving nations abroad copy the American Method for successful industrialization? If ignoring Europeans' patents allowed America to become the richest and most powerful nation in the world, why wouldn't, say, China just copy all that American "IP"? If seizing foreigners' inventions without permission was good enough for Thomas Jefferson, why not Jiang Zemin?

America solved this problem with the promise of "free trade." The World Trade Organization divided the world into two blocs: countries that could trade with one another without paying tariffs, and the rabble without who had to navigate a complex O(n^2) problem of different tariff schedules between every pair of nations.

To join the WTO club, countries had to sign up to a side-treaty called the Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS). Under the TRIPS, the Jeffersonian plan for industrialization (taking foreigners' ideas without permission) was declared a one-off, a scheme only the US got to try and no other country could benefit from. For China to join the WTO and gain tariff-free access to the world's markets, it would have to agree to respect foreign patents, copyrights, trademarks and other "IP."

We know the story of what followed over the next quarter-century: China became the world's factory, and became so structurally important that even if it violated its obligations under the TRIPS, "stealing the IP" of rich nations, no one could afford to close their borders to Chinese imports, because every country except China had forgotten how to make things.

But this isn't the whole story – it's not even the most important part of it. In his new book Breakneck, Dan Wang (a Chinese-born Canadian who has lived extensively in Silicon Valley and in China) devotes a key chapter to "process knowledge":

https://danwang.co/breakneck/

What's "process knowledge"? It's all the intangible knowledge that workers acquire as they produce goods, combined with the knowledge that their managers acquire from overseeing that labor. The Germans call it "Fingerspitzengefühl" ("fingertip-feeling"), like the sense of having a ball balanced on your fingertips, and knowing exactly which way it will tip as you tilt your hand this way or that.

upstart writes:

Wyden says default use of RC4 cipher led to last year's breach of health giant Ascension:

A prominent US senator has called on the Federal Trade Commission to investigate Microsoft for "gross cybersecurity negligence," citing the company's continued use of an obsolete and vulnerable form of encryption that Windows uses by default.

In a letter to FTC Chairman Andrew Ferguson, Sen. Ron Wyden (D–Ore.) said an investigation his office conducted into the 2024 ransomware breach of the health care giant Ascension found that the default use of the RC4 encryption cipher was a direct cause. The breach led to the theft of medical records of 5.6 million patients.

It's the second time in as many years that Wyden has used the word "negligence" to describe Microsoft's security practices.

"Because of dangerous software engineering decisions by Microsoft, which the company has largely hidden from its corporate and government customers, a single individual at a hospital or other organization clicking on the wrong link can quickly result in an organization-wide ransomware infection," Wyden wrote in the letter, which was sent Wednesday. "Microsoft has utterly failed to stop or even slow down the scourge of ransomware enabled by its dangerous software."

RC4 is short for Rivest Cipher 4, a nod to mathematician and cryptographer Ron Rivest of RSA Security, who developed the stream cipher in 1987. It was a trade-secret-protected proprietary cipher until 1994, when an anonymous party posted a technical description of it to the Cypherpunks mail list. Within days, the algorithm was broken, meaning its security could be compromised using cryptographic attacks. Despite the known susceptibility to such attacks, RC4 remained in wide use in encryption protocols, including SSL and its successor TLS, until about a decade ago.

Microsoft, however, continues to support RC4 as the default means for securing Active Directory, a Windows component that administrators use to configure and provision user accounts inside large organizations. While Windows offers more robust encryption options, many users don't enable them, causing Active Directory to fall back to the Kerberos authentication method using the vulnerable RC4 cipher.

upstart writes:

Researchers created a strange quantum crystal from a material found in smartphones—the first of its kind visible to the naked eye:

Of all the eccentricities of the quantum realm, time crystals—atomic arrangements that repeat certain motions over time—might be some of the weirdest. But they certainly exist, and to provide more solid proof, physicists have finally created a time crystal we can actually see.

In a recent Nature Materials paper, physicists at the University of Colorado Boulder presented a new time crystal design: a glass cell filled with liquid crystals—rod-shaped molecules stuck in strange limbo between solid and liquid. It's the same stuff found in smartphone LCD screens. When hit with light, the crystals jiggle and dance in repeating patterns that the researchers say resemble "psychedelic tiger stripes."

"They can be observed directly under a microscope and even, under special conditions, by the naked eye," said Hanqing Zhao, study lead author and a graduate student at the University of Colorado Boulder, in a release. Technically, these crystalline dances can last for hours, like an "eternally spinning clock," the researchers added.

Time crystals first appeared in a 2012 paper by Nobel laureate Frank Wilczek, who pitched an idea for an impossible crystal that breaks several rules of symmetry in physics. Specifically, a time crystal breaks symmetry because its atoms do not lock into a continuous lattice, and their positions change over time.

Physicists have since demonstrated versions of Wilczek's proposal, but these crystals lasted for a terribly short time and were microscopic. Zhao and Ivan Smalyukh, the study's senior author and a physicist at the University of Colorado Boulder, wanted to see if they could overcome these limitations.

For the new time crystal, the duo exploited the molecules' "kinks"—their tendency to cluster together when squeezed in a certain way. Once together, these kinks behave like whole atoms, the researchers explained.

"You have these twists, and you can't easily remove them," Smalyukh said. "They behave like particles and start interacting with each other."

upstart writes:

The RTX 4090 48GB looks like a whole different card:

Remember those Frakenstein GeForce RTX 4090 48GB graphics cards emerging from China? Russian PC technician and builder VIK-on [17:17 --JE] has provided detailed insights into how Chinese factories are transforming the GeForce RTX 4090, once regarded as one of the best graphics cards, to effectively double its memory capacity specifically for AI workloads.

As a mainstream product, the GeForce RTX 4090 does not support memory chips in a clamshell configuration, unlike Nvidia's professional and data center products. Essentially, this means that the Ada Lovelace flagship only houses memory chips on one side of the PCB. In clamshell mode, graphics cards typically feature memory chips on both sides of the PCB. This limitation is addressed by the GeForce RTX 4090 4GB "upgrade kit," which sells for around $142 in China.

The upgrade kit comprises a custom PCB designed with a clamshell configuration, facilitating the installation of twice the number of memory chips. Most components are pre-installed at the manufacturing facility, requiring the user to solder the GPU and memory chips onto the PCB. Additionally, the upgrade kit includes a blower-style cooling solution, designed for integration with workstation and server configurations that utilize multi-GPU architectures.

VIK-on demonstrated the process of extracting the AD102 silicon and twelve 2GB GDDR6X memory chips from the MSI GeForce RTX 4090 Suprim and installing them onto the barebone PCB. The technician utilized spare GDDR6X memory chips from defective graphics cards, thereby obtaining additional GDDR6X memory at no cost. Clearly, this operation requires specialized soldering skills and access to appropriate high-end tools.

The technician also uploaded a leaked, modified firmware onto the GeForce RTX 4090 48GB. It is important to note that each graphics card possesses a unique GPU device ID, which contains all pertinent information. During the system initialization process, the firmware verifies whether the GPU device ID corresponds with the one embedded within the chip. Hacked firmware has been present for some time.

upstart writes:

AI's free web scraping days may be over, thanks to this new licensing protocol:

AI companies are capturing as much content as possible from websites while also extracting information. Now, several heavyweight publishers and tech companies -- Reddit, Yahoo, People, O'Reilly Media, Medium, and Ziff Davis (ZDNET's parent company) -- have developed a response: the Really Simple Licensing (RSL) standard.

You can think of RSL as Really Simple Syndication's (RSS) younger, tougher brother. While RSS is about syndication, getting your words, stories, and videos out onto the wider web, RSL says: "If you're an AI crawler gobbling up my content, you don't just get to eat for free anymore."

The idea behind RSL is brutally simple. Instead of the old robots.txt file -- which only said, "yes, you can crawl me," or "no, you can't," and which AI companies often ignore -- publishers can now add something new: machine-readable licensing terms.

Want an attribution? You can demand it. Want payment every time an AI crawler ingests your work, or even every time it spits out an answer powered by your article? Yep, there's a tag for that too.

This approach allows publishers to define whether their content is free to crawl, requires a subscription, or will cost "per inference," that is, every time ChatGPT, Gemini, or any other model uses content to generate a reply.

The key capabilities of RSL include:

• A shared vocabulary that lets publishers define licensing and compensation terms, including free, attribution, pay-per-crawl, and pay-per-inference compensation.
• An open protocol to automate content licensing and create internet-scale licensing ecosystems between content owners and AI companies.
• Standardized, public catalogs of licensable content and datasets through RSS and Schema.org metadata.
• An open protocol for encrypting digital assets to securely license non-public proprietary content, including paywalled articles, books, videos, and training datasets.
• Supporting collective licensing via RSL Collective or any other RSL-compatible licensing server.

It's a clever fix for a complex problem. As Tim O'Reilly, the O'Reilly Media CEO and one of the RSL initiative's high-profile backers, said: "RSS was critical to the internet's evolution...but today, as AI systems absorb and repurpose that same content without permission or compensation, the rules need to evolve. RSL is that evolution."

O'Reilly's right. RSS helped the early web scale, whether blogs, news syndication, or podcasts. But today's web isn't just competing for human eyeballs. The web is now competing to supply the training and reasoning fuel for AI models that, so far, aren't exactly paying the bills for the sites they're built on.

Of course, tech is one thing; business is another. That's where the RSL Collective comes in. Modeled on music's ASCAP and BMI, the nonprofit is essentially a rights-management clearinghouse for publishers and creators. Join for free, pool your rights, and let the Collective negotiate with AI companies to ensure you're compensated.

upstart writes:

Scientists urge EU governments to reject Chat Control rules:

As the final vote draws closer, an open letter has highlighted significant risks that remain in the EU's controversial 'Chat Control' regulation.

617 of the world's top scientists, cryptographers and security researchers have released an open letter today (10 September) calling on governments to reject the upcoming final vote on the EU's 'Chat Control' legislation.

The group of scientists and researchers – hailing from 35 countries and including the likes of AI expert Dr Abeba Birhane – has warned that the EU's proposed legislation targeting online child sexual abuse material (CSAM), known colloquially as Chat Control, would undermine the region's digital security and privacy protections and "endangers the digital safety of our society in Europe and beyond".

The group also warned that the new rules will create "unprecedented capabilities" for surveillance, control and censorship, and has an "inherent risk for function creep and abuse by less democratic regimes".

This is not the first time this collective has warned against the regulation, having previously published its recommendations in July 2023, May 2024 and September 2024.

The proposed legislation would require providers of messaging services such as WhatsApp, Signal, Instagram, email and more to scan its users' private digital communications and chats for CSAM material. This scanning would even apply to end-to-end encrypted communications, regardless of a provider's own security protections.

Any content flagged as potential CSAM material by the scanning algorithms would then be automatically reported to authorities.

Currently, 15 EU member states have issued support for the legislation – including Ireland. Six member states oppose the rules, while six remain undecided in their stance.

While the latest draft of the legislation has been amended to exclude the detection of audio and text communications – limiting detection to "visual content", such as images and URLs – the scientists argue that the legislation in its current form is still unacceptable.

The group argues that none of the legislation's changes address its major concerns, namely the infeasibility of scanning hundreds of millions of users for CSAM content with appropriate accuracy, the undermining of end-to-end encryption protections and the heightened privacy risks to EU citizens.

While the latest draft of the regulation has reduced the scope of targeted material (limited to visual content and URLs), the group of scientists states that this reduction will not improve effectiveness.

"There is no scientific basis to argue that detection technology would work any better on images than on text," reads the letter, with further assertions that CSAM detection methods can be easily evaded. The group states that just changing a few bits in an image is "sufficient to ensure that an image will not trigger state-of-the-art detectors".

The group also criticises the EU's proposal of using AI and machine learning to detect CSAM imagery due to the technology's unreliability.

quietus writes:

ASML, Dutch multinational producer of EUV lithography machines, has announced an investment of €1.3bn in French AI startup Mistral, which positions itself as an European alternative to ChatGPT and similar.

It is to become "a long-term collaboration agreement to explore the use of AI models across ASML's product portfolio as well as research, development and operations, to benefit ASML customers with faster time to market and higher performance holistic lithography systems ..." in a "first-of-its-kind partnership between a semiconductor equipment manufacturer and a leading AI company".

The deal brings together Europe's top AI start-up and one of the continent's most valuable public companies, which supplies the equipment to make the advanced chips that are used to train and run AI models.

Arthur Mensch, current CEO of Mistral, was quoted by the Financial Times as saying that "it's important for European companies not to have too much dependency on US technology", while his counterpart at ASML claimed that sovereignty was an additional benefit, but they didn't "pick Mistral because they were European", rather because AI will become "a strategic technology ... I think this will help the European ecosystem, but we do it because it's good for Mistral and it's good for ASML.".

In the short term, he claimed, ASML would begin using Mistral's AI expertise to help develop new chipmaking tools, as well as offering customers new capabilities as they use its existing systems. "We started to look for a partner, because we thought that this is not something we should try to do ourselves ...the company's expertise is in chipmaking equipment and we are not AI experts".

In case you're groaning now while reaching for that special bottle of whisky under your desk, labeled peak AI hype, there was an intriguing comment on the Interwebs about the true purpose of the deal.

AI companies like Mistral use specialised wafer-scale chips from Cerebras in their data centres. Hardware acceleration and software optimisation partly explain why Mistral's models are so fast. Were ASML to diversify and pull that kind of silicon–software co‑design into its own stack (computational lithography, metrology and field service) the benefits are obvious: faster OPC/ILT runs, smarter tool control, and on‑tool copilots that digest logs and manuals in real time. That's probably the logic behind ASML's €1.3 bn move for a stake in Mistral and a strategic partnership: it's product synergy, not flag‑waving--even if the new CEO happens to be French.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Ten years after LIGO's historical detection of gravitational waves, the project is cracking black hole mysteries at an astounding pace:

LIGO's discovery of gravitational waves—ripples in space-time from powerful cosmic events—hit astrophysics more like a tidal wave than a ripple. At the dawn of its tenth anniversary, the multinational collaboration has set another scientific milestone, this time solving not one but two mysteries in black hole physics.

A paper published today in Physical Review Letters describes how the LIGO-VIRGO-KAGRA (LVK) Collaboration captured the sharpest-ever gravitational wave signal from a black hole merger. Further analysis of GW250114, the signal in question, validates two major predictions made by Stephen Hawking and Roy Kerr in 1971 and 1963, respectively.

First, we're more certain than ever that when black holes merge, the resulting black hole is wider than both parts combined. Second, we only need to know two metrics to describe gravitational disturbances in black holes: mass and spin.

"It's a beautiful, landmark result," Arthur Kosowsky, a theoretical physicist at the University of Pittsburgh who wasn't involved in the new work, told Gizmodo in an email. The latest results are "a confirmation of both the fundamental nature of a spinning black hole and also a remarkable test of strong-field general relativity," he added.

The latest results come almost ten years after GW150914, the first gravitational wave signal ever detected, which LIGO observed in 2015. In 2021, physicists used the 2015 signal to test Hawking's theorem. The team assessed a confidence level of 95% for this test, but with the new, cleaner result, that has jumped to an impressive 99.999%—as close as one gets to the "truth" in modern science.

"A decade ago we couldn't be certain that black holes ever collide in our universe," Steve Fairhurst, LIGO spokesperson and a physicist at Cardiff University in the United Kingdom, told Gizmodo. "Now we observe several black hole mergers per week. With the 300 gravitational-wave candidates observed to date, we're beginning to provide a census of the population of black holes in the universe."

upstart writes:

Dead Internet Theory Lives: One Out of Three of You Is a Bot:

According to CloudFlare, nearly one-third of all internet traffic is now bots. Most of those bots, you won't ever directly interact with, as they are crawling the web and indexing websites or performing specific tasks—or, increasingly, collecting data to train AI models. But it's the bots that you can see that have people like OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and others questioning (albeit with seemingly zero remorse or consideration of any alternative) whether he and his cohort are destroying the internet.

Last week, Altman responded to a post that showed lots of comments in the subreddit r/ClaudeCode, a Reddit community built around Anthropic's Claude Code tool, praising OpenAI's Codex, an AI coding agent. "i have had the strangest experience reading this: i assume its all fake/bots, even though in this case i know codex growth is really strong and the trend here is real," he wrote, very [subtly (sp.)] acknowledging how great his own product is.

While Altman suggested some of this may be people adopting the quirks and word choices of chatbots, among other factors, he did acknowledge that "the net effect is somehow AI twitter/AI reddit feels very fake in a way it really didnt a year or two ago." It follows a previous observation he made earlier this month in which he said, "i never took the dead internet theory that seriously but it seems like there are really a lot of LLM-run twitter accounts now."

"Dead internet theory" is the idea that much of the content online is created, interacted with, and fed to us by bots. If you believe the conspiratorial origins of the theory, which is thought to have first cropped up on imageboards around 2021, it's an effort to control human behavior. If you're slightly less blackpilled about the whole thing, then perhaps you're more into the idea that it's primarily driven by the monetary incentives of the internet, where engagement—no matter how low value it may be—can generate revenue.

Interestingly, the theory appeared pre-ChatGPT, suggesting the bot problem was bad before LLMs became widely accessible. Even then, there was evidence that a ton of internet traffic came from bots (some estimates place it over 50%, which is well above CloudFlare's measurements), and there were concerns about "The Inversion," or the point where fraud detection systems mistake bot behavior for human and vice versa.

upstart writes:

This Is the First Time Scientists Have Seen Decisionmaking in a Brain:

Neuroscientists from around the world have worked in parallel to map, for the first time, the entire brain activity of mice while they were making decisions. This achievement involved using electrodes inserted inside the brain to simultaneously record the activity of more than half a million neurons distributed across 95 percent of the rodents' brain volume.

Thanks to the image obtained, the researchers were able to confirm an already theorized architecture of thought: that there is no single region exclusively in charge of decision making and instead it is a coordinated process among multiple brain areas.

To illuminate all the regions involved in this decision making process, the team trained mice to turn a small steering wheel to move circles on a screen. If the shape moved correctly toward the center, the animal received sugar water as a reward.

After running this experiment with 139 mice across 12 labs and monitoring their brain activity, the experiment managed to map 620,000 neurons located across 279 brain regions, with a subset of 75,000 well-isolated neurons then being analyzed. The resolution of the neural map produced is unprecedented in the study of brain and its neural networks during the thinking process. Moreover, it represents a milestone both in terms of the type of specimen observed and the extent of the brain area covered. Until now, only whole brains of fruit flies, fish larvae, or small sections of more complex brains had been mapped.

The results were published in two papers in the journal Nature. Although the scientists involved acknowledge that the data are not definitive, they represent a starting point in the neural study of decisionmaking. The value of this data lies in the fact that the neural pathway of decisionmaking is now clearer, which will allow scientists to better understand complex thinking abilities and perform more advanced analyses. In addition, the dataset is publicly available.

"These initial conclusions corroborate aspects of brain function that were already intuited from the more limited studies available. It's as if we suspected how a movie would end without having seen the ending; now they've shown it to us," Juan Lerma, a research professor at the Spanish National Research Council, told the Science Media Centre España. (Lerma was not involved in the research.) "In short, the data show that, in decisionmaking, for example, many brain areas are involved, more than expected, while in sensory processing the areas are more distinct."

The adult human brain contains about 86 billion neurons, each capable of establishing thousands of synaptic connections with other cells. Although it weighs about 1.4 kilograms, the human brain consumes about 20 percent of the body's total energy at rest, a remarkably high proportion for its size. Although today's supercomputers outperform the brain in numerical calculations, none yet matches its energy efficiency or its capacity for learning, adaptation, and parallel processing. There's still a long way to go before neuroscience can fully map the neural processes of human decisionmaking, but studies like this one take us one step closer.

Journals:
A brain-wide map of neural activity during complex behaviour
Brain-wide representations of prior information in mouse decision-making

Original Submission