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Submission + - Elon Musk's Grok Goes Haywire, Boasts About Billionaire's Pee-Drinking Skills (mediaite.com)

Submitted by fjo3
fjo3 writes: After the AI assistant praised Musk’s physique and claimed he ranked “among the top 10 minds in history, rivaling polymaths like da Vinci or Newton,” social media users quickly discovered that Grok was programmed to say positive things about Musk, no matter the topic.

But according to 404 Media, in a series of deleted X posts, Grok boasted that Musk had the “potential to drink piss better than any human in history,” that he was “the ultimate throat goat” whose “blowjob prowess edges out Trump’s,” and that he should have won a 2016 porn industry award instead of porn star Riley Reid.

Submission + - An ancient planet smashed into Earth. We now know its origin (dw.com)

Submitted by alternative_right
alternative_right writes: Space scientists are largely agreed that about 4.5 billion years ago, Earth, then a hot ball of molten iron and other elements, was hit by another Mars-sized protoplanet. This hypothetical world is called Theia, named for a titaness of Greek mythology.

Theia was completely destroyed by this impact, but likely lives on beneath our feet, as fragments from this doomed world fused with the early Earth.

Submission + - CERN can now produce antihydrogen atoms eight times faster than before (home.cern)

Submitted by fahrbot-bot
fahrbot-bot writes: CERN is reporting that a new cooling technique means that the ALPHA experiment at their Antimatter Factory can produce antihydrogen atoms, the simplest form of atomic antimatter, eight times faster than before – over 15,000 antihydrogen atoms in a matter of hours.

Producing and trapping antihydrogen is an extremely complicated process. Previous methods took 24 hours to trap just 2,000 atoms, limiting the scope of experiments at ALPHA. The Swansea-led team has changed that.

Using laser-cooled beryllium ions, the team has demonstrated that it is possible to cool positrons to less than 10 Kelvin (below –263C), significantly colder than the previous threshold of about 15 Kelvin. These cooler positrons dramatically boost the efficiency of antihydrogen production and trapping—allowing a record 15,000 atoms to be trapped in less than seven hours.

Alternate article in Phys.org.

Submission + - OnlyFans Institutes Criminal Background Checks for US Creators (xbiz.com)

Submitted by alternative_right
alternative_right writes: OnlyFans will screen creators in the United States for criminal convictions, CEO Keily Blair has announced in a post on LinkedIn.

“I am very proud to add our partnership with Checkr Trust to our onboarding process in the US,” Blair writes. “Checkr, Inc. helps OnlyFans to prevent people who have a criminal conviction that may impact our community's safety from signing up as a Creator on OnlyFans.”

Checkr is a screening service that bills itself as delivering “instant criminal and public record checks covering 99% of the U.S. population.” The company lists Uber, Instacart, DoorDash and Netflix among its clients.

Submission + - Moss spores survive 9 months outside International Space Station (phys.org)

Submitted by alternative_right
alternative_right writes: To find out, Fujita's team subjected Physcomitrium patens, a well-studied moss commonly known as spreading earthmoss, to a simulated a space environment, including high levels of UV radiation, extreme high and low temperatures, and vacuum conditions.

They tested three different structures from the moss—protenemata, or juvenile moss; brood cells, or specialized stem cells that emerge under stress conditions; and sporophytes, or encapsulated spores—to find out which had the best chance of surviving in space.

The researchers found that UV radiation was the toughest element to survive, and the sporophytes were by far the most resilient of the three moss parts. None of the juvenile moss survived high UV levels or extreme temperatures. The brood cells had a higher rate of survival, but the encased spores exhibited ~1,000x more tolerance to UV radiation. The spores were also able to survive and germinate after being exposed to 196C for over a week, as well as after living in 55C heat for a month.

Submission + - NASA Is Tracking a Vast Anomaly Growing in Earth's Magnetic Field (sciencealert.com)

Submitted by alternative_right
alternative_right writes: For years, NASA has monitored a strange anomaly in Earth's magnetic field: a giant region of lower magnetic intensity in the skies, stretching out between South America and southwest Africa.

This vast, developing phenomenon, called the South Atlantic Anomaly, has intrigued and concerned scientists for decades, and perhaps none more so than NASA researchers.

The space agency's satellites and spacecraft are particularly vulnerable to the weakened magnetic field within the anomaly, and the resulting exposure to charged particles from the Sun.

Submission + - Children With Autism, ADHD, And Anorexia Share a Common Microbe Imbalance (sciencealert.com)

Submitted by alternative_right
alternative_right writes: A new, small study suggests children with autism, ADHD, and anorexia

share similarly disrupted gut microbiomes, which, by some measures, have more in common with each other than with their healthy, neurotypical peers.

Led by researchers from Comenius University in Slovakia, the study used stool samples to assess the gut microbiomes of 117 children.

The exploratory study included 30 boys with autism spectrum disorder (ASD), 21 girls with anorexia nervosa, and 14 children with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). The remaining samples were from age- and sex-matched healthy and neurotypical children, providing a control group.

Submission + - AI-induced psychosis: The danger of humans and machines hallucinating together (phys.org)

Submitted by alternative_right
alternative_right writes: These may be extreme cases, but clinicians are increasingly treating patients whose delusions appear amplified or co-created through prolonged chatbot interactions. Little wonder, when a recent report from ChatGPT-creator OpenAI revealed that many of us are turning to chatbots to think through problems, discuss our lives, plan futures and explore beliefs and feelings.

In these contexts, chatbots are no longer just information retrievers; they become our digital companions. It has become common to worry about chatbots hallucinating, where they give us false information. But as they become more central to our lives, there's clearly also growing potential for humans and chatbots to create hallucinations together.

Submission + - Owning a Cat Could Double Your Risk of Schizophrenia, Research Suggests (sciencealert.com) 1

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: Having a cat as a pet could potentially double a person's risk of schizophrenia-related conditions, according to an analysis of 17 studies.

Psychiatrist John McGrath and colleagues at the Queensland Centre for Mental Health Research in Australia looked at papers published over the last 44 years in 11 countries, including the US and the UK.

Their 2023 review found "a significant positive association between broadly defined cat ownership and an increased risk of schizophrenia-related disorders."

T. gondii is a mostly harmless parasite that can be transmitted through undercooked meat or contaminated water. It can also be transmitted through an infected cat's feces.

Estimates suggest that T. gondii infects about 40 million people in the US, typically without any symptoms. Meanwhile, researchers keep finding more strange effects that infections may have.

Once inside our bodies, T. gondii can infiltrate the central nervous system and influence neurotransmitters. The parasite has been linked to personality changes, the emergence of psychotic symptoms, and some neurological disorders, including schizophrenia.

Submission + - Physicists reveal a new quantum state where electrons run wild (sciencedaily.com)

Submitted by alternative_right
alternative_right writes: Electrons can freeze into strange geometric crystals and then melt back into liquid-like motion under the right quantum conditions. Researchers identified how to tune these transitions and even discovered a bizarre “pinball” state where some electrons stay locked in place while others dart around freely. Their simulations help explain how these phases form and how they might be harnessed for advanced quantum technologies.

Submission + - Germany caps power prices to save industry

Submitted by argStyopa
argStyopa writes: From https://www.zerohedge.com/ener...
"Germany has agreed to subsidize electricity for its heavy industries, capping prices at about €0.05 per kilowatt-hour from 2026 through 2028—a major policy move aimed at keeping its industrial base from eroding under the weight of Europe’s soaring energy costs."

As the vanguard of industrial states embracing green power, is this a tacit admission that "sustainable" was never actually a synonym for "green"?

Comment What's old is new again/using wasted space (Score 2) 90

by couchslug (#65799353) Attached to: Some Americans Are Trying to Heat Their Homes With Bitcoin Mining

When I demoted my single Pentium 4 rig to workshop use
it noticeably raised winter temperature inside my
sealed 40ft High Cube shipping container machine shop.

It's not difficult to rack or shelve many computers near the ceiling or hang them off walls. I hang a 1U server off the wall of my office as one would a painting (and could cover it with a painting if I cared). Total cost is a couple of small lag hooks costing less than a dollar.

I don't do mini/tiny PCs for space reasons because there is more than enough unused space in most rooms to make that unnecessary, and for access a computer on the wall is hard to beat. Needing no desk my server doesn't clutter mine.

If I wanted mining rigs I could line walls with them high enough not to interfere with anything else with heating as a bonus.

Submission + - Five people plead quilty to helping North Koreans infiltrate US companies (techcrunch.com)

Submitted by smooth wombat
smooth wombat writes: Within the past year, stories have been posted on Slashdot about people helping North Koreans get remote IT jobs at U.S. corporations, companies knowingly helping North Koreans get remote IT jobs, how not to hire a North Korean for a remote IT job, and how a simple question tripped up a North Korean applying for a remote IT job. The FBI is even warning companies that North Koreans working remotely can steal source code and extort money from the company, money which goes to fund the North Korean government. Now, five more people have plead guilty to knowingly helping North Koreans infiltrate U.S. companies as remote IT workers.

The five people are accused of working as “facilitators” who helped North Koreans get jobs by providing their own real identities, or false and stolen identities of more than a dozen U.S. nationals. The facilitators also hosted company-provided laptops in their homes across the U.S. to make it look like the North Korean workers lived locally, according to the DOJ press release.

These actions affected 136 U.S. companies and netted Kim Jong Un’s regime $2.2 million in revenue, said the DOJ.

Three of the people — U.S. nationals Audricus Phagnasay, Jason Salazar, and Alexander Paul Travis — each pleaded guilty to one count of wire fraud conspiracy.

Prosecutors accused the three of helping North Koreans posing as legitimate IT workers, whom they knew worked outside of the United States, to use their own identities to obtain employment, helped them remotely access their company-issued laptops set up in their homes, and also helped the North Koreans pass vetting procedures, such as drug tests.

The fourth U.S. national who pleaded guilty is Erick Ntekereze Prince, who ran a company called Taggcar, which supplied to U.S. companies allegedly “certified” IT workers but whom he knew worked outside of the country and were using stolen or fake identities. Prince also hosted laptops with remote access software at several residences in Florida, and earned more than $89,000 for his work, the DOJ said.

Another participant in the scheme who pleaded guilty to one count of wire fraud conspiracy and another count of aggravated identity theft is Ukrainian national Oleksandr Didenko, who prosecutors accuse of stealing U.S. citizens’ identities and selling them to North Koreans so they could get jobs at more than 40 U.S. companies.

Submission + - It's Official: Scientists Confirmed What Is Inside Our Moon (sciencealert.com) 1

Submitted by alternative_right
alternative_right writes: A thorough investigation published in May 2023 found that the inner core of the Moon is, in fact, a solid ball with a density similar to that of iron.

To figure it out once and for all, Briaud and his colleagues collected data from space missions and lunar laser-ranging experiments to compile a profile of various lunar characteristics. These include the degree of its deformation by its gravitational interaction with Earth, the variation in its distance from Earth, and its density.

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