Our ability to process information during decision-making doesn't drop off until age 60, according to new findings that challenge the widespread belief that mental speed starts to decline in our 20s. New Scientist reports: Mischa von Krause at Heidelberg University in Germany and his colleagues analysed data collected from around 1.2 million people aged 10 to 80 who took part in an experiment that was originally designed to measure implicit racial bias. During the task, participants were asked to sort words and images, for example by labelling faces as white or Black, or classifying words such as "joy" or "agony" as good or bad, by pressing one of two buttons. In support of previous studies, the researchers found that people's reaction times speed up from their teens to around age 20, then slow down as they get older. This decline has typically been attributed to slower mental speed, but this isn't the case, says von Krause.

The team used an established model of cognition based on previous research, which assumes people make decisions by continuously considering information until they reach a threshold of certainty. According to this model, the decrease in reaction time from age 20 is probably due to people wanting more certainty before making decisions as they age, visual information taking more time to travel from their eyes to their brain and people taking longer to physically hit the button as they get older. The analysis suggests that people's mental speed increases in their 20s, and stays high until age 60. [...] While the team expects the results will apply to a wide range of cognitive tasks, it is possible that age may affect other tasks differently, such as those relying on memory. The study has been published in the journal Nature Human Behavior.

dargaud writes: NASA's Parker Solar Probe has captured its first images of Venus' surface in visible light. The images show distinctive areas on the planetary surface, including continental regions, plains and plateaus. The images were taken on the nightside of the planet where the heat reemitted by the various surface areas has differing characteristics. "Venus is the third brightest thing in the sky, but until recently we have not had much information on what the surface looked like because our view of it is blocked by a thick atmosphere," said Brian Wood, lead author on the new study and physicist at the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington, DC. "Now, we finally are seeing the surface in visible wavelengths for the first time from space."

You can view images of Venus' surface in a video produced by NASA on YouTube.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Markets Insider: Wall Street institutions' growing connections to crypto markets could threaten financial stability and cause a credit crunch-style financial crisis, global regulators have warned. The Financial Stability Board said (PDF) "ongoing vigilance" of institutional investors such as big banks and hedge funds is needed as they deepen their involvement in the $1.9 trillion crypto market. "If the current trajectory of growth in scale and interconnectedness of crypto-assets to these institutions were to continue, this could have implications for global financial stability," the FSB said in a report published Wednesday.

The FSB was concerned the volatility in cryptocurrency markets -- even though crypto makes up just a fraction of global assets -- could feed through as digital and traditional finance become more interconnected. "If financial institutions continue to become more involved in crypto-asset markets, this could affect their balance sheets and liquidity in unexpected ways," it said. The regulator compared the risk from a crypto event to the credit crunch that sparked the 2008 financial crisis. "As in the case of the US subprime mortgage crisis, a small amount of known exposure does not necessarily mean a small amount of risk, particularly if there exists a lack of transparency and insufficient regulatory coverage," it said.

It noted that "systemically important" banks and other financial firms are increasingly keen to play a role in and gain exposure to crypto assets. Systemically important institutions are ones which, if they failed, could set off a financial crisis. The overall value of the cryptocurrency market grew 3.5 times in 2021 to $2.6 trillion as institutional interest soared, the FSB noted. Its worth has fallen in the early months of 2022 as prices slumped.

Researchers from the Graduate School of Science, Osaka City University, have provided evidence to suggest that fish have the capacity for MSR, a behavioral test to determine whether an animal possesses the ability of visual self-recognition. As Phys.Org explains, an animal's capacity for MSR is determined when they "touch or scrape a mark placed on their body in a location that can only be indirectly viewed in a mirror." From the report: Professor [Masanori Kohda] says, "Previously, using a brown marking on the throat area of [cleaner fish Labroides dimidiatus], we had shown three out of four cleaner fish to scrape their throats several times after swimming in front of a mirror, a number on par with similar studies done on other animals like elephants, dolphins, and magpies." However, one of the criticisms laid against this result was sample size and the need for repeated studies showing positive results. Teaming up with researchers from the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior in Germany and the University of Neuchatel in Switzerland, this study increased the sample size to 18 cleaner fish, with a 94% positive result of 17 of them demonstrating the same behavior from the previous study.
[...]
Prof. Kohda says, "Our previous study demonstrated MSR in L. dimidiatus; however, studies with other animals have shown that simply moving a mirror reignites aggressive behavior, suggesting the animal has only learned a spatial contingency, not MSR." To address this, the team transferred mirror-trained cleaner fish to a tank with a mirror on one side of the tank and then three days later to a tank with a mirror on the other side, and saw the fish show no aggression toward their mirror image in both tanks. Also, to ensure the L. dimidiatus that passed the mark test truly are recognizing themselves, they placed mirror-trained fish in adjacent tanks that were separated by transparent glass. After two to three days, when fish largely reduced their aggressive behavior towards each other, they were marked the standard way the following night. None of the fish scraped their throat during the 120 mins of exposure to each other the following morning. This new experiment was recently published in PLOS Biology.

According to a report from the Washington Post, Apple Store employees at several retail stores in the US are said are said to be planning to unionize. 9to5Mac reports: Groups at two stores are reportedly preparing paperwork to file with the National Labor Relations Board, with about six more locations at earlier stages of planning. The Post says the main source of unrest is due to wages. Apple pays retail employees in the range of $17-$30 per hour, depending on role and seniority. However, the workers say these rates have not kept up with inflation.

Inspired by recent successful union votes at more than 90 Starbucks stores, the report says that efforts to unionize have recently accelerated. Operations are largely happening in secret in case of retaliation from management. However, the Post says that at one store managers have already began discussing how unions will hurt employee working conditions: "Apple Store employees at one store said managers have already begun pulling employees aside and giving speeches about how unions will hurt employees, lower their wages and force Apple to take away benefits and opportunities, such as the 'career experience' that Herbst described. Managers try to eavesdrop on employees, they said, while pretending to do something else."

Since being rolled out to users in the U.S. and Canada, Meta's social VR platform for the Quest headset, Horizon Worlds, has grown its monthly user base by a factor of 10x to 300,000 people. "Meta spokesperson Joe Osborne confirmed the stat and said it included users of Horizon Worlds and Horizon Venues, a separate app for attending live events in VR that uses the same avatars and basic mechanics," reports The Verge. "The number doesn't include Horizon Workrooms, a VR conferencing experience that relies on an invite system." From the report: Before its December rollout, Horizon Worlds was in a private beta for creators to test its world-building tools. Similarly to how the gaming platform Roblox or Microsoft's Minecraft works, Horizon Worlds lets people build custom environments to hang out and play games in as legless avatars. Meta announced this week that 10,000 separate worlds have been built in Horizon Worlds to date, and its private Facebook group for creators now numbers over 20,000 members.

Meta still hasn't disclosed how many Quest headsets it has sold to date, which makes it hard to gauge Horizon's success relative to the underlying hardware platform it runs on. But several third-party estimates peg sales at over 10 million for the Quest. Zuckerberg recently said that Meta would release a version of Horizon for mobile phones later this year to "bring early metaverse experiences to more surfaces beyond VR."

"So while the deepest and most immersive experiences are going to be in virtual reality, you're also going to be able to access the worlds from your Facebook or Instagram apps as well, and probably more over time," the CEO said on Meta's last earnings call. Bringing Horizon to mobile would position it as even more of a competitor to Rec Room, a well-funded, social gaming app with 37 million monthly users across gaming consoles, mobile phones, and VR.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Hackers aligned with the government of Iran are exploiting the critical Log4j vulnerability to infect unpatched VMware users with ransomware, researchers said on Thursday. Security firm SentinelOne has dubbed the group TunnelVision. The name is meant to emphasize TunnelVision's heavy reliance on tunneling tools and the unique way it deploys them. In the past, TunnelVision has exploited so-called 1-day vulnerabilities -- meaning vulnerabilities that have been recently patched -- to hack organizations that have yet to install the fix. Vulnerabilities in Fortinet FortiOS (CVE-2018-13379) and Microsoft Exchange (ProxyShell) are two of the group's better-known targets. [...] The SentinelOne research shows that the targeting continues and that this time the target is organizations running VMware Horizon, a desktop and app virtualization product that runs on Windows, macOS, and Linux.

Apache Tomcat is an open source Web server that VMware and other enterprise software use to deploy and serve Java-based Web apps. Once installed, a shell allows the hackers to remotely execute commands of their choice on exploited networks. The PowerShell used here appears to be a variant of this publicly available one. Once it's installed, TunnelVision members use it to: Execute reconnaissance commands; Create a backdoor user and adding it to the network administrators group; Harvest credentials using ProcDump, SAM hive dumps, and comsvcs MiniDump; and Download and run tunneling tools, including Plink and Ngrok, which are used to tunnel remote desktop protocol traffic.

The hackers use multiple legitimate services to achieve and obscure their activities. Those services include: transfer.sh, pastebin.com, webhook.site, ufile.io, and raw.githubusercontent.com. People who are trying to determine if their organization is affected should look for unexplained outgoing connections to these legitimate public services.

Google Search is now testing a row of widgets on desktop web for an experience that's similar to Discover. 9to5Google reports: These cards appear at the very bottom of google.com. There's a "Hide content" toggle in the bottom-right corner, while Google notes your zip code/city and explains that the information offered is "Based on your past activity." When the window is fully expanded, six cards are offered and they all expand on hover:

- Weather: Condition (with) icon + temperature. Three-day forecast on hover
- Trending: Cover image with search count
- What to Watch: Shows and movies with cover art
- Stocks/markets: Day graph on hover
- Local Events: With date
- COVID News

Tapping opens the full web result with the usual Knowledge Panel card and/or related Google Search experience. The number of cards that appear depends on the size of your screen with no way to scroll and see more without physically expanding the window. We're only seeing this rolled out on two Google Accounts, albeit across several signed-in devices, today. As such, this is very likely a test to determine whether a full rollout is warranted.

Microsoft last month received a US patent covering modifications to a data-encoding technique called rANS, one of several variants in the Asymmetric Numeral System (ANS) family that support data compression schemes used by leading technology companies and open source projects. The Register reports: The creator of ANS, Jaroslaw Duda, assistant professor at Institute of Computer Science at Jagiellonian University in Poland, has been trying for years to keep ANS patent-free and available for public use. Back in 2018, Duda's lobbying helped convince Google to abandon its ANS-related patent claim in the US and Europe. And he raised the alarm last year when he learned Microsoft had applied for an rANS (range asymmetric number system) patent.

Now that Microsoft's patent application has been granted, he fears the utility of ANS will be diminished, as software developers try to steer clear of a potential infringement claim. "I don't know what to do with it -- [Microsoft's patent] looks like just the description of the standard algorithm," he told The Register in an email. The algorithm is used in JPEG XL and CRAM, as well as open source projects run by Facebook (Meta), Nvidia, and others. "This rANS variant is [for example] used in JPEG XL, which is practically finished (frozen bitstream) and [is] gaining support," Duda told The Register last year. "It provides ~3x better compression than JPEG at similar computational cost, compatibility with JPEG, progressive decoding, missing features like HDR, alpha, lossless, animations. "There is a large team, mostly from Google, behind it. After nearly 30 years, it should finally replace the 1992 JPEG for photos and images, starting with Chrome, Android."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Meta, the parent company of Facebook, has confirmed to TechCrunch that Jeren A. Miles, who had been a manager of global community development, is no longer employed by the company after a video went viral on YouTube, which was then reposted on Reddit and other sites, featuring him in a sting operation conducted by amateurs with the intent of catching paedophiles.

The two-hour video, posted by an amateur group called PCI Predator Catchers Indianapolis on its YouTube page, does not depict Miles caught in any sex act, nor admitting to any specific sex act, nor admitting to intending to carry out any sex act. And it is not clear what the legal ramifications of this will be, if any. But it does feature two people questioning Miles, who in the course of the interrogation admits to having graphic and inappropriate communications with a 13-year-old boy. It's a damning enough exchange that Miles has subsequently deleted his social profiles on sites like Facebook and Twitter, and -- whether he was fired or resigned voluntarily -- Miles has left his role at Facebook over the matter. "The seriousness of these allegations cannot be overstated. The individual is no longer employed with the company. We are actively investigating this situation and cannot provide further comment at this time," said a statement from a Meta spokesperson.

With people more wary than ever about clicking on suspicious links in emails and text messages, zero-click hacks are being used more frequently by government agencies to spy on activists, journalists and others, according to more than a dozen surveillance company employees, security researchers and hackers interviewed by Bloomberg News. From a report: Once the preserve of a few intelligence agencies, the technology needed for zero-click hacks is now being sold to governments by a small number of companies, the most prominent of which is Israel's NSO Group. Bloomberg News has learned that at least three other Israeli companies -- Paragon, Candiru and Cognyte Software -- have developed zero-click hacking tools or offered them to clients, according to former employees and partners of those companies, demonstrating that the technology is becoming more widespread in the surveillance industry.

There are certain steps that a potential victim can take that might reduce the chances of a successful zero-click attack, including keeping a device updated. But some of the more effective methods -- including uninstalling certain messaging apps that hackers can use as gateways to breach a device -- aren't practical because people rely on them for communication, said Bill Marczak, a senior research fellow at Citizen Lab, a research group at the University of Toronto that focuses on abuses of surveillance technology.

It's been one year since a nuclear-powered, one-armed, six-wheeled robot punched through the Martian atmosphere at a blazing 12,000 miles per hour, and a supersonic parachute slowed it way down until a rocket-powered "jetpack" could fire its engines and then gently lower it onto the surface. NPR: NASA's Perseverance rover was too far away for engineers on Earth to control it in real time -- which meant that the spacecraft had to execute that daredevil maneuver all by itself. All that the robot's handlers on Earth could do was wait for confirmation that it had touched down safely. "It is a nail-biting experience," Rick Welch, Perseverance's deputy project manager. "There's no doubt about it." Dramatic as the Feb. 18, 2021 touchdown was, the milestones that the car-sized rover has hit in the year since then could one day prove far more momentous.

Perseverance is hunting for evidence of microbes that may have once lived on the red planet -- a first for a NASA robot. It begins a new chapter of Martian exploration: one that not only searches for ancient signs of microbial Martians, but that lays the groundwork to send samples of Mars rocks and dirt back to Earth. One of the mission's main objectives is to collect samples of rocks and dirt and stash them on the surface of Mars so that a future mission could pick them up and bring them back to Earth to study. The $2.7-billion rover is equipped with a suite of scientific instruments including a rock-blasting laser, cameras and spectrometers. But a robot geologist -- even one as advanced as Perseverance -- can only do so much. Scientists really hope to get pieces of the planet back to their labs.

The U.S. government's "dithering" has left the country "well behind" China in the race to build out 5G technology, former Google CEO Eric Schmidt said, as he urged Washington to step up investment in the next-generation internet technology. From a report: Writing in an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, Schmidt and Graham Allison, a professor of government at Harvard, said that America is "far behind in almost every dimension of 5G while other nations -- including China -- race ahead." The authors urged the Biden administration to make 5G a "national priority." Otherwise, they said, "China will own the 5G future." 5G refers to next-generation wireless internet that promises super-fast download speeds. But it could also form the basis for industrial and military applications and form a way for devices to communicate with each other. That's why it's seen as a critical technology and one of the reasons China is moving quickly with its own 5G rollout and future applications.

nray writes: Mayor Eric Adams called for people to revive the state's economy by getting "back to work" -- and said he was tired of hearing excuses about the COVID-19 pandemic. "New Yorkers, it's time to get back to work," Adams said during a speech at the state Democratic Committee's Nominating Convention. "You can't tell me you're afraid of COVID on Monday and I see you in a nightclub on Sunday." The crack sparked laughter among the audience at the Sheraton New York Times Square Hotel. Adams said that white-collar workers who continued working from home were hurting service-oriented businesses that rely on a steady stream of customers. "That accountant that's not in his office space is not going to the cleaners," he said. "It's not going to the restaurant. It's not allowing the cooks, the waiters, the dishwashers [to make a living]."

In a desperate bid to get his children offline, some guy in France apparently blitzed his entire town's internet connection -- by accident, that is. He now faces up to six months in prison for the outage. From a report: A report from the outlet France Bleu says the unnamed dad tried to use a multi-wave band jammer to temporarily cut off the internet connection at his residence in the town of Messanges. Jammers, which are illegal in France (and also in the U.S.), work by interfering with telecommunication signals, thus stifling connections. Despite their illegality, people still get arrested for using them, pretty much all the time. In this case, the dad in question deployed the device in the hopes of prying his social-media-addicted children away from the grips of their devices.

When later questioned by a government official, the man apparently admitted that he only wanted to cut off the connectivity to his house at night, between the hours of midnight and 3 a.m. -- probably so his kids would put the phones down and just go to bed already. Unfortunately for the padre, the jamming device was powerful enough to cut connectivity not just to his own residence but, unbeknownst to him, to those of many, many others in the surrounding area. His neighbors eventually started reporting their outages, after which the government was forced to investigate.