A system of lagoons has been discovered in Argentina hosting a rare range of microbial communities previously unknown to scientists. The microbial communities form giant mounds of rock as they grow — like corals building a reef millimeter by millimeter. And the University of Colorado points out that "the communities could also provide scientists with an unprecedented look at how life may have arisen on Mars, which resembled Earth billions of years ago."

"If life ever evolved on Mars to the level of fossils, it would have been like this," said geologist Brian Hynek, a professor in the department of geological sciences at the University of Colorado Boulder, who helped document the ecosystem. "Understanding these modern communities on Earth could inform us about what we should look for as we search for similar features in the Martian rocks."
more details from CNN: Stromatolites are layered rocks created by the growth of blue-green algae, or cyanobacteria, through photosynthesis. The structures are considered to be one of the oldest ecosystems on Earth, according to NASA, representing the earliest fossil evidence for life on our planet from at least 3.5 billion years ago. "These are certainly akin to some of the earliest macrofossils on our planet, and in really a rare type of environment on modern Earth," said Hynek...

While the stromatolites are in an environment containing oxygen, Hynek said he believes the layers farther down in the rock have little to no access to oxygen and are actively formed by microbes using anoxygenic photosynthesis. This would make the structures similar to the ones found on ancient Earth... "We've identified more than 600 ancient lakes on Mars; there may have even been an ocean. So, it was a lot more Earth-like early on," he said.

More than half a century ago, Digital Equipment Corporation released the first of their 16-bit PDP-11 minicomputers, continuing the PDP-11 line until 1997.

This week long-time Slashdot reader Shayde writes: I've been working on a 1986 PDP/11 that I basically got as a "barn find" from an estate sale a year ago. The project has absolutely had it's ups and downs, as the knowledgebase for these machines is aging quickly. I'm hoping to restore my own expertise with this build, but it's been challenging finding parts, technical details, and just plain information.

I leaned pretty heavily on the folks at the Vintage Computing Federation, as well as connections I've made in the industry — and made some great progress... Check it out if you're keen on retrocomputing and old minicomputers and DEC gear.
The entire saga is chronicled in three videos titled "Barn Find PDP 11/73 — Will it boot" — part 1, part 2, and this week's latest video. "What started as a curiosity has turned into an almost 10-month-long project," it concludes, creeping up hopefully on the possibility of an awe-struck glimpse at the PDP-11's boot sequence (over two minutes long)

"So cool," responded Jeremiah Cornelius (Slashdot reader #137) in a comment on the submitted Slashdot story. "I have huge affection for these beasts. I cut my teeth in High School on a DEC PDP11/70 and AT&T SysV, and a little RSTS/E in 1979-82. We switched systems by loading different cakelid platters into the washing-machine drives, and toggling the magenta keys.

"I've thought about the Blinkenlights 7/10 scale emulator, tha uses an RPi, but I envy you and hope you have fun."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: On Wednesday, Replicate developer Charlie Holtz combined GPT-4 Vision (commonly called GPT-4V) and ElevenLabs voice cloning technology to create an unauthorized AI version of the famous naturalist David Attenborough narrating Holtz's every move on camera. As of Thursday afternoon, the X post describing the stunt had garnered over 21,000 likes. "Here we have a remarkable specimen of Homo sapiens distinguished by his silver circular spectacles and a mane of tousled curly locks," the false Attenborough says in the demo as Holtz looks on with a grin. "He's wearing what appears to be a blue fabric covering, which can only be assumed to be part of his mating display." "Look closely at the subtle arch of his eyebrow," it continues, as if narrating a BBC wildlife documentary. "It's as if he's in the midst of an intricate ritual of curiosity or skepticism. The backdrop suggests a sheltered habitat, possibly a communal feeding area or watering hole."

How does it work? Every five seconds, a Python script called "narrator" takes a photo from Holtz's webcam and feeds it to GPT-4V -- the version of OpenAI's language model that can process image inputs -- via an API, which has a special prompt to make it create text in the style of Attenborough's narrations. Then it feeds that text into an ElevenLabs AI voice profile trained on audio samples of Attenborough's speech. Holtz provided the code (called "narrator") that pulls it all together on GitHub, and it requires API tokens for OpenAI and ElevenLabs that cost money to run. During the demo video, when Holtz holds up a cup and takes a drink, the fake Attenborough narrator says, "Ah, in its natural environment, we observe the sophisticated Homo sapiens engaging in the critical ritual of hydration. This male individual has selected a small cylindrical container, likely filled with life-sustaining H2O, and is tilting it expertly towards his intake orifice. Such grace, such poise."

Rovers and orbiters will continue collecting limited data during a two-week communications pause due to the position of Earth, the Sun, and the Red Planet. From a report: NASA will hold off sending commands to its Mars fleet for two weeks, from Nov. 11 to 25, while Earth and the Red Planet are on opposite sides of the Sun. Called Mars solar conjunction, this phenomenon happens every two years. The missions pause because hot, ionized gas expelled from the Sun's corona could potentially corrupt radio signals sent from Earth to NASA's Mars spacecraft, leading to unexpected behaviors.

That's not to say those robotic explorers are on holiday. NASA's Perseverance and Curiosity rovers will monitor changes in surface conditions, weather, and radiation as they stay parked. Although momentarily grounded, the Ingenuity Mars Helicopter will use its color camera to study the movement of sand, which poses an ever-present challenge to Mars missions. The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter and the Odyssey orbiter will continue imaging the surface. And MAVEN will continue collecting data on interactions between the atmosphere and the Sun.

Scary play lets people -- and other animals -- rehearse coping skills for disturbing challenges in the real world. Scientific American: Our desire to experience fear, it seems, is rooted deep in our evolutionary past and can still benefit us today. Scary play, it turns out, can help us overcome fears and face new challenges -- those that surface in our own lives and others that arise in the increasingly disturbing world we all live in. The phenomenon of scary play surprised Charles Darwin. In The Descent of Man, he wrote that he had heard about captive monkeys that, despite their fear of snakes, kept lifting the lid of a box containing the reptiles to peek inside. Intrigued, Darwin turned the story into an experiment: He put a bag with a snake inside it in a cage full of monkeys at the London Zoological Gardens. A monkey would cautiously walk up to the bag, slowly open it, and peer down inside before shrieking and racing away. After seeing one monkey do this, another monkey would carefully walk over to the bag to take a peek, then scream and run. Then another would do the same thing, then another.

The monkeys were "satiating their horror," as Darwin put it. Morbid fascination with danger is widespread in the animal kingdom -- it's called predator inspection. The inspection occurs when an animal looks at or even approaches a predator rather than simply fleeing. This behavior occurs across a range of animals, from guppies to gazelles. At first blush, getting close to danger seems like a bad idea. Why would natural selection have instilled in animals a curiosity about the very things they should be avoiding? But there is an evolutionary logic to these actions. Morbid curiosity is a powerful way for animals to gain information about the most dangerous things in their environment. It also gives them an opportunity to practice dealing with scary experiences.

When you consider that many prey animals live close to their predators, the benefits of morbidly curious behavior such as predator inspection become clear. For example, it's not uncommon for a gazelle to cross paths with a cheetah on the savanna. It might seem like a gazelle should always run when it sees a cheetah. Fleeing, however, is physiologically expensive; if a gazelle ran every time it saw a cheetah, it would exhaust precious calories and lose out on opportunities for other activities that are important to its survival and reproduction. Consider the perspective of the predator, too. It may seem like a cheetah should chase after a gazelle anytime it sees one. But for a cheetah, it's not easy to just grab a bite; hunting is an energetically costly exercise that doesn't always end in success.

"More developers are looking for or are open to a new job now compared to the last two years," writes Stack Overflow's senior analyst for market research and insights — citing the results of their latest survey of developers in 107 different countries.

"More than 1,000 developers responded to this year's survey about jobs and 79% are at least considering new opportunities if not actively looking." New insights from these survey results show that new tech talent and late-career developers are both more likely to be looking. New developers have increasingly switched jobs compared to early- and mid-career developers in the last three years... Interest in looking for a new job drops as developers get older for new to mid-career (44 and younger) respondents (86% to 74%), but picks back up for those 55 to 64 (88%). Late-career developers acknowledge curiosity about other companies as their second top reason to look for a new job this year behind "better salary," which all age groups rank as their top reason. Curiosity grew in importance for late-career developers since last year more than all other age groups (32% vs. 22%) and is more important to this group than reasons other groups ranked higher such as working with new technology and growth opportunities...

In our 2023 Developer Survey, we started asking about AI and the sentiment around it in our developer community; results were very similar when we checked in again through this pulse survey (70% are using AI or planning to). Developers may also feel less enthusiastic about learning opportunities now that AI tools are rapidly developing to help many be more productive in their jobs (30% cite this as the top benefit).
Other interesting findings from the survey:

• Compared to the 2023 Developer Survey, 8% of developers have exited the technology industry and are increasingly filling roles in manufacturing and supply chain companies (11% vs. 7%)

• Technology is the industry most developers currently work in (46%), followed by manufacturing/supply chain (14%) and financial services (13%)

• New tech talent is onboarding at as many jobs by 24 as those up to 10 years their senior and this rapid experience cycle could rival the knowledge and experience of those they report to.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: GPUs from all six of the major suppliers are vulnerable to a newly discovered attack that allows malicious websites to read the usernames, passwords, and other sensitive visual data displayed by other websites, researchers have demonstrated in a paper (PDF) published Tuesday. The cross-origin attack allows a malicious website from one domain -- say, example.com -- to effectively read the pixels displayed by a website from example.org, or another different domain. Attackers can then reconstruct them in a way that allows them to view the words or images displayed by the latter site. This leakage violates a critical security principle that forms one of the most fundamental security boundaries safeguarding the Internet. Known as the same origin policy, it mandates that content hosted on one website domain be isolated from all other website domains. [...]

GPU.zip works only when the malicious attacker website is loaded into Chrome or Edge. The reason: For the attack to work, the browser must:

1. allow cross-origin iframes to be loaded with cookies
2. allow rendering SVG filters on iframes and
3. delegate rendering tasks to the GPU

For now, GPU.zip is more of a curiosity than a real threat, but that assumes that Web developers properly restrict sensitive pages from being embedded by cross-origin websites. End users who want to check if a page has such restrictions in place should look for the X-Frame-Options or Content-Security-Policy headers in the source. "This is impactful research on how hardware works," a Google representative said in a statement. "Widely adopted headers can prevent sites from being embedded, which prevents this attack, and sites using the default SameSite=Lax cookie behavior receive significant mitigation against personalized data being leaked. These protections, along with the difficulty and time required to exploit this behavior, significantly mitigate the threat to everyday users. We are in communication and are actively engaging with the reporting researchers. We are always looking to further improve protections for Chrome users."

An Intel representative, meanwhile, said that the chipmaker has "assessed the researcher findings that were provided and determined the root cause is not in our GPUs but in third-party software." A Qualcomm representative said "the issue isn't in our threat model as it more directly affects the browser and can be resolved by the browser application if warranted, so no changes are currently planned." Apple, Nvidia, AMD, and ARM didn't comment on the findings.

An informational write-up of the findings can be found here.

NASA's Curiosity rover has discovered signs of seasonal floods on Mars at a site called Gale Crater. Ars Technica reports: About 3,000 Martian days into its exploration, the rover was at a site that dates to roughly 3.6 billion years ago, during Mars' relatively wet Hesperian period. And it came across what would be familiar to gamers as a hex grid: hundreds of hexagonal shaped rock deposits in the area of a few centimeters across and at least 10 centimeters deep. These features are small enough that they'd be easy to overlook as simply another collection of wind-swept debris on the red planet. But up close, they're striking: large collections of hexagons that share sides, creating a regular grid. While there's some irregularity, the lines separating them largely form three-way intersections with equal angles between each line. And, in places where erosion has had different effects on nearby instances, it's clear that individual hexagons are at least 10 centimeters in height.

Similar shapes have been seen on Pluto, formed by convection of an icy surface. But these are far, far larger, able to be detected from a considerable distance from Pluto. The tiny size of the hexes on Mars is completely incompatible with convection. Instead, it has to be the product of mud drying out, creating cracks as the material contracts. The water itself could either come externally, in the form of a flood, or via groundwater that soaks up to the surface. But again, the tiny size of these features is decisive, indicating that only the top few centimeters got wet, which is incompatible with a groundwater source. To form the regular, hexagonal shapes also means repeated cycles -- experiments show that at least a dozen cycles are needed before you start to get the equal angles at the junction.

So, simply based on their shape, it appears that these hexagons are the product of repeated flooding. The chemistry backs this up. The rocks in the lines that separate individual hexagons are largely a mixture of calcium and magnesium sulfates, which will readily precipitate out of water as conditions get drier. These deposits will form harder rocks than the dried mud that comprises the bulk of the hexagons. The researchers behind the work note that the apparently regular, mild wet/dry cycling is incompatible with a lot of ideas about the source of water in Mars' past, such as volcanic melting of ice deposits. Instead, it's consistent with mild seasonal flooding, although there's no way to tell if the cadence was tied to Mars' orbit given what we currently know. The findings have been published in the journal Nature.

Security guru Bruce Schneier and CS professor Jim Waldo think big tech has underestimated the impact of open source principles on AI research: In February, Meta released its large language model: LLaMA. Unlike OpenAI and its ChatGPT, Meta didn't just give the world a chat window to play with. Instead, it released the code into the open-source community, and shortly thereafter the model itself was leaked. Researchers and programmers immediately started modifying it, improving it, and getting it to do things no one else anticipated. And their results have been immediate, innovative, and an indication of how the future of this technology is going to play out. Training speeds have hugely increased, and the size of the models themselves has shrunk to the point that you can create and run them on a laptop. The world of A.I. research has dramatically changed.

This development hasn't made the same splash as other corporate announcements, but its effects will be much greater. It will wrest power from the large tech corporations, resulting in both much more innovation and a much more challenging regulatory landscape. The large corporations that had controlled these models warn that this free-for-all will lead to potentially dangerous developments, and problematic uses of the open technology have already been documented. But those who are working on the open models counter that a more democratic research environment is better than having this powerful technology controlled by a small number of corporations...

[B]uilding on public models like Meta's LLaMa, the open-source community has innovated in ways that allow results nearly as good as the huge models — but run on home machines with common data sets. What was once the reserve of the resource-rich has become a playground for anyone with curiosity, coding skills, and a good laptop.

Bigger may be better, but the open-source community is showing that smaller is often good enough. This opens the door to more efficient, accessible, and resource-friendly LLMs.
Low-cost customization will foster rapid innovation, the article argues, and "takes control away from large companies like Google and OpenAI." Although this may have one unforeseen consequence...

"Now that the open-source community is remixing LLMs, it's no longer possible to regulate the technology by dictating what research and development can be done; there are simply too many researchers doing too many different things in too many different countries."

Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader mrflash818 for submitting the article

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the BBC: A US researcher has broken the record for the longest time spent living underwater without depressurization. Joseph Dituri has spent more than 74 days at the bottom of a 30ft-deep lagoon in Key Largo, Florida. And he does not have plans to stop yet. On Sunday, he said he would stay in Jules' Undersea Lodge for at least 100 days.

"The curiosity for discovery has led me here," he said. "My goal from day one has been to inspire generations to come, interview scientists who study life undersea and learn how the human body functions in extreme environments," he added. The previous record for most days spent living underwater at ambient pressure -- 73 -- was established by two professors in 2014 in the same Key Largo lodge. Unlike a submarine, the lodge does not use technology to adjust for the increased underwater pressure.

Prof Dituri -- who also served in the Navy for 28 years -- is teaching his biomedical engineering classes online while he lives in the lagoon, according to the University of South Florida. To keep busy, the professor wakes up at 05:00 each day to exercise. He stays full by reportedly eating protein-heavy meals such as eggs and salmon that he can keep warm with his microwave. And while his underwater stay has proven ground-breaking, he is excited to get back to some above-ground activities. "The thing that I miss the most about being on the surface is literally the sun," he told the Associated Press.

An anonymous reader shared this report from IEEE Spectrum: Transistors inside modern computer chips are several nanometers across, and switch on and off at hundreds of gigahertz. Organic electrochemical transistors, made for biodegradable applications, are milimeters in size and switch at kilohertz rates. The world's first wooden transistor, made by a collaboration of researchers through the Wallenberg Wood Science Center and reported this week in Publications of the National Academy of Sciences, is 3 centimeters across and switches at less than one Hertz. While it may not be powering any wood-based supercomputers anytime soon, it does hold out promise for specialized applications including biodegradable computing and implanting in into living plant material.

"It was very curiosity-driven," says Isak Engquist, a professor at Linköping University who led the effort. "We thought: 'Can we do it? Let's do it, let's put it out there to the scientific community and hope that someone else has something where they see these could actually be of use in reality...'"

Wood has great structural stability while being highly porous and efficiently transporting water and nutrients. The researchers leveraged these properties to create conducting channels inside the wood's pores and electrochemically modulate their conductivity with the help of a penetrating electrolyte. Of the 60,000 species, the team chose balsa wood for its strength, even when one of the components of its structure — lignin — was largely removed to make more room for conducting materials. To remove much of the lignin, pieces of balsa wood were treated with heat and chemicals for five hours. Then, the remaining cellulose-based structure was coated with a conducting polymer...

Since the pores inside wood are made for transporting water, the PEDOT:PSS solution readily spread through the tubes. Electron microscopy and X-ray imaging of the result revealed that the polymer decorated the insides of the tube structures. The resulting wood chunks conducted electricity along their fibers.

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

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

"We have instincts about all sorts of things, and some are stronger than others," said Wharton, who recently co-authored an article about retrocausality with Huw Price, a distinguished professor emeritus at the University of Bonn and an emeritus fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge. "I've found our instincts of time and causation are our deepest, strongest instincts that physicists and philosophers -- and humans -- are loath to give up," he added. Scientists, including Price, have speculated about the possibility that the future might influence the past for decades, but the renewed curiosity about retrocausality is driven by more recent findings about quantum mechanics. [...] While there are a range of views about the mechanics and consequences of retrocausal theories, a growing community of researchers think this concept has the potential to answer fundamental questions about the universe. "The problem facing physics right now is that our two pillars of successful theories don't talk to each other," Wharton explained. "One is based in space and time, and one has left space and time aside for this giant quantum wave function."

"The solution to this, as everyone seems to have agreed without discussing it, is that we've got to quantize gravity," he continued. "That's the goal. Hardly anyone has said, 'what if things really are in space and time, and we just have to make sense of quantum theory in space and time'? That will be a whole new way to unify everything that people are not looking into."

Price agreed that this retrocausality could provide a new means to finally "eliminate the tension" between quantum mechanics and classical physics (including special relativity). "Another possible big payoff is that retrocausality supports the so-called 'epistemic' view of the wave function in the usual quantum mechanics description -- the idea that it is just an encoding of our incomplete knowledge of the system," he continued. "That makes it much easier to understand the so-called collapse of the wave function, as a change in information, as folk such as Einstein and Schoedinger thought, in the early days. In this respect, I think it gets rid of some more of the (apparently) non-classical features of quantum mechanics, by saying that they don't amount to anything physically real."

According to web services chief Mikhail Parakhin, Microsoft is giving Bing preview testers a toggle to change the chatbot's responses. Engadget reports: A Creative option allows for more "original and imaginative" (read: fun) answers, while a Precise switch emphasizes shorter, to-the-point replies. There's also a Balanced setting that aims to strike a middle ground.

The company reined in the Bing AI's responses after early users noticed strange behavior during long chats and 'entertainment' sessions. As The Verge observes, the restrictions irked some users as the chatbot would simply decline to answer some questions. Microsoft has been gradually lifting limits since then, and just this week updated the AI to reduce both the unresponsiveness and "hallucinations." The bot may not be as wonderfully weird, but it should also be more willing to indulge your curiosity.

ChatGPT is big in China, even though it's not officially available there. From a report: China's obsession with ChatGPT runs deeper than curiosity. Search giant Baidu is preparing to launch its own competitor, Ernie Bot, in March. It'll embed the tool initially into its search services and smart speakers. Amid the fervor, Alibaba, NetEase and Tencent each promised similar initiatives in the span of a few days, stirring Chinese tech stocks from a years-long slump. The government in Beijing, where Baidu is based, has vowed to give more support to such efforts.

This is the first time in probably more than a decade that Chinese internet firms are all racing to adopt, localize and perhaps advance a Silicon Valley invention on the level of Google, Facebook or YouTube. Microsoft's Bing and Alphabet's Google -- which showed its own artificial-intelligence search assistant called Bard -- appear to have an early lead. But both products exhibit many flaws. Rolling the services out too soon could create problems for Bing and Google. Doing so in China could be disastrous. Appeasing the country's complex censorship machine is difficult enough for search and social media companies. Trying to keep a malleable AI bot in check is a new kind of challenge.

"In the foothills of a Martian mountain, NASA's Curiosity rover found stunning new evidence of an ancient lake in the form of rocks etched with the ripples of waves," reports CNN.

But they add that the evidence "appeared in an unlikely place." The rover is traversing an area of Mars called the "sulfate-bearing unit" that researchers previously thought would only show evidence of mere trickles of water, as scientists believed the rocks there formed as the surface of the red planet was drying out. Instead, the rover found some of the clearest evidence yet of ancient waters.

"This is the best evidence of water and waves that we've seen in the entire mission," said Ashwin Vasavada, Curiosity's project scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, in a statement. "We climbed through thousands of feet of lake deposits and never saw evidence like this — and now we found it in a place we expected to be dry...."

"Billions of years ago, waves on the surface of a shallow lake stirred up sediment at the lake bottom, over time creating rippled textures left in rock," according to a NASA news release.
From NASA's announcement: Having climbed nearly a half-mile above the mountain's base, Curiosity has found these rippled rock textures preserved in what's nicknamed the 'Marker Band' — a thin layer of dark rock that stands out from the rest of Mount Sharp....

Far ahead of the Marker Band, scientists can see another clue to the history of Mars' ancient water in a valley named Gediz Vallis. Wind carved the valley, but a channel running through it that starts higher up on Mount Sharp is thought to have been eroded by a small river.

Google published an online advertisement in which its much anticipated AI chatbot Bard delivered an inaccurate answer. From a report: The tech giant posted a short GIF video of Bard in action via Twitter, describing the chatbot as a "launchpad for curiosity" that would help simplify complex topics. In the advertisement, Bard is given the prompt: "What new discoveries from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) can I tell my 9-year old about?" Bard responds with a number of answers, including one suggesting the JWST was used to take the very first pictures of a planet outside the Earth's solar system, or exoplanets. This is inaccurate. The first pictures of exoplanets were taken by the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope (VLT) in 2004, as confirmed by NASA.