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Submission + - SPAM: Jury: Musk didn't deceive investors with 2018 Tesla tweets

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: A jury has decided Elon Musk didn’t deceive investors with tweets in 2018.

The verdict by the nine jurors was reached after less that two hours of deliberation following a three-week trial.

It’s a major vindication for Musk, whose integrity was at stake as well part of a fortune that has established him as one of the world’s richest people.

[Less than three hours after a three-week trial? That is gonna leave a mark on the attorneys that brought this class-action suit. — Ed]
Link to Original Source

Submission + - Lost world in northern Greenland conjured from DNA in ancient soil (science.org)

Submitted by sciencehabit
sciencehabit writes: In a bleak valley not far from Greenland’s massive ice sheet, scientists have reconstructed a rich ancient ecosystem, down to its roving mastodons and smooth-barked birch trees. The clues come from the oldest DNA ever recovered: 2-million-year-old snippets of genetic material from more than 100 kinds of animals and plants, extracted from buried sediments. The feat may provide a window into how life will evolve in our warming world and perhaps even allow scientists to resurrect long-lost genes to help modern species cope with climate change.

“It’s a tour de force. Simply astounding,” says Ross MacPhee, a paleontologist at the American Museum of Natural History who was not involved with the work, which appears today in Nature. “The idea that we can now recover these really short fragments of DNA and make sense of them is pretty exciting,” adds Beth Shapiro, an ancient DNA expert at the University of California, Santa Cruz, also not involved. “We can now extend further back in time than we thought was possible.”

The findings demonstrate the power of environmental DNA (eDNA)—genetic material extracted not from individual organisms, but from the environment—to reconstruct entire ecosystems: in this case, a coastal forest including poplars, thujas, and other conifers that no longer grow in Greenland, plus reindeer, lemmings, black geese, horseshoe crabs, and mastodons. “No one would have predicted an ecosystem like this. Some species you find further south in Greenland, but a number you don’t find in the Arctic at all,” says Eske Willerslev, a paleogeneticist at the University of Cambridge who led the 40-person team behind the findings. “It’s an ecosystem with no analog in the present day.”

Submission + - Supercomputer re-creates one of the most famous pictures of Earth (science.org) 1

Submitted by sciencehabit
sciencehabit writes: Fifty years ago today, astronauts aboard Apollo 17, NASA’s last crewed mission to the Moon, took an iconic photograph of our planet. The image became known as the Blue Marble—the first fully illuminated picture of Earth, in color, taken by a person.

Now, scientists have re-created that image (above) during a test run of a cutting-edge digital climate model. The model can simulate climatic phenomena, such as storms and ocean eddies, at 1-kilometer resolution, as much as 100 times sharper than typical global simulations.

To re-create the swirling winds of the Blue Marble—including a cyclone over the Indian Ocean—the researchers fed weather records from 1972 into the supercomputer-powered software. The resulting world captured distinctive features of the region, such as upwelling waters off the coast of Namibia and long, reedlike cloud coverage.

Experts say the stunt highlights the growing sophistication of high-resolution climate models. Those are expected to form the core of the European Union’s Destination Earth project, which aims to create a “digital twin” of Earth to better forecast extreme weather and guide preparation plans.

Submission + - School Board caves to Ransom demand

Submitted by bbsguru
bbsguru writes: The Little Rock School District has agreed to pay a $250,000 Ransom to "Hackers". Surely THAT will teach them something.

The board acknowledges that they aren't sure what data was stolen, but "they expect to find out when it is returned".

Submission + - Starlink introduces monthly data cap (theverge.com)

Submitted by thegarbz
thegarbz writes: Internet provider Starlink is reviving the old concept of soft data caps with the introduction of a Fair Use Policy. Users who consume more than 1TB of data per month will find their connections deteriorated. As reported on by The Verge

Residential customers will now start each monthly billing cycle with an allocation of “Priority Access” data that tracks what you’re using from 7AM in the morning until 11PM at night. If you surpass that 1TB cap, which Starlink says less than 10 percent of users currently do, you’ll be moved to “Basic Access” data, or deprioritized data during heavy network congestion, for the rest of your billing cycle. If you want to buy more Priority Access data, you can, at the cost of 25 cents per GB, and any data used between 11PM and 7AM doesn’t count towards your Priority Access tally.

This announcement comes off the back of a recent article by Arstechnica showing that Starlinks median download speed has dropped to 62Mbps in Q2 of 2022 as the network struggles under the load of increased subscriber numbers.

Submission + - SpaceX can't afford running Starlink internet in Ukraine (theguardian.com)

Submitted by denzacar
denzacar writes: Elon Musk's SpaceX has said it cannot afford to continue to donate satellite internet to Ukraine and has asked the US government to pay for its "donation".

This comes after The Economist and The Financial Times quoted Ukrainian government officials saying that soldiers had "difficulty connecting to the satellite internet service when they entered cities that had only recently been freed from Russian troops", causing "catastrophic loss of communication between the country's military forces".
Ukrainian government officials at the time expressed concern that the outages are related to Musk's recent Twitter poll in which he suggested Ukraine ceding occupied territory to Russia, which they believe "was the product of communication with Putin" and that "Putin might inveigle Mr Musk into withdrawing access to Starlink".

Musk at the time simply ignored allegations of communication with Putin in the Financial Times' report, concentrating on calling it "bad reporting" only regarding the "false claims" about the costs that SpaceX has had while providing Starlink terminals to Ukraine.
When faced with a second report of his recent talk with Putin on Ukraine, by Ian Bremmer, the president of the political risk consultancy Eurasia Group, Musk first denied claiming to "have spoken to Putin only once... about 18 months ago... [on] space" — then reiterated tweeting that "Nobody should trust Bremmer".

Submission + - Nearly Half of Covid Patients Haven't Fully Recovered Months Later, Study Finds (nytimes.com)

Submitted by AmiMoJo
AmiMoJo writes: A study of tens of thousands of people in Scotland found that one in 20 people who had been sick with Covid reported not recovering at all, and another four in 10 said they had not fully recovered from their infections many months later.

The authors of the study, published on Wednesday in the journal Nature Communications, tried to home in on the long-term risks of Covid by comparing the frequency of symptoms in people with and without previous Covid diagnoses.

People with previous symptomatic Covid infections reported certain persistent symptoms, such as breathlessness, palpitations and confusion or difficulty concentrating, at a rate roughly three times as high as uninfected people in surveys from six to 18 months later, the study found. Those patients also experienced elevated risks of more than 20 other symptoms relating to the heart, respiratory health, muscle aches, mental health and the sensory system.

The findings strengthened calls from scientists for more expansive care options for long Covid patients in the United States and elsewhere, while also offering some good news.

Submission + - Elon Musk under federal investigation over $44bn Twitter deal (theguardian.com)

Submitted by AmiMoJo
AmiMoJo writes: Elon Musk is under a federal investigation related to his $44bn takeover of Twitter, the social media company has said in a court filing made public on Thursday. While the filing said he was under investigation, it did not say what the focus was, or which federal authorities were investigating. Twitter, which sued Musk in July to force him to close the deal, said attorneys for the Tesla CEO had claimed “investigative privilege” when refusing to hand over documents it had sought. In late September, Musk’s attorneys provided a “privilege log” identifying documents to be withheld. The log referenced drafts of a 13 May email to the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and a slide presentation to the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), Twitter said.

“This game of ‘hide the ball’ must end,” the company said in the court filing.

Submission + - $3 billion in cryptocurrency stolen this year. So far. (cbsnews.com)

Submitted by quonset
quonset writes: Hackers are on a roll in 2022, stealing over $3 billion in cryptocurrency. And the year isn't over yet. For comparison, in 2021, only $2.1 billion in crypto currency was stolen during the entire year. From the story:

A big chunk of that $3 billion, around $718 million, was taken this month in 11 different hacks, Chainalysis said in a series of tweets posted Wednesday.

"October is now the biggest month in the biggest year ever for hacking activity, with more than half the month still to go," the company tweeted.

In past years, hackers focused their efforts on attacking crypto exchanges, but those companies have since strengthened their security, Chainalysis said. These days, cybercriminals are targeting "cross-chain bridges," which allow investors to transfer digital assets and data among different blockchains.
. . .
All told, Chainalysis said there have been 125 hacks so far this year.

Submission + - SPAM: Earth Has 20 Quadrillion Ants, Study Says

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: A new estimate for the total number of ants burrowing and buzzing on Earth comes to a whopping total of nearly 20 quadrillion individuals. That staggering sum — 20,000,000,000,000,000, or 20,000 trillion — reveals ants’ astonishing ubiquity even as scientists grow concerned a possible mass die off of insects could upend ecosystems. In a paper released Monday by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, a group of scientists from the University of Hong Kong analyzed 489 studies and concluded that the total mass of ants on Earth weighs in at about 12 megatons of dry carbon. Put another way: If all the ants were plucked from the ground and put on a scale, they would outweigh all the wild birds and mammals put together.

“It’s unimaginable,” said Patrick Schultheiss, a lead author on the study who is now a researcher at the University of Würzburg in Germany, in a Zoom interview. “We simply cannot imagine 20 quadrillion ants in one pile, for example. It just doesn’t work.” Counting all those insects — or at least enough of them to come up with a sound estimate — involved combining data from “thousands of authors in many different countries” over the span of a century, Schultheiss added. To tally insects as abundant as ants, there are two ways to do it: Get down on the ground to sample leaf litter — or set tiny pitfall traps (often just a plastic cup) and wait for the ants to slip in. Researchers have gotten their boots dirty with surveys in nearly every corner of the world, though some spots in Africa and Asia lack data. “It’s a truly global effort that goes into these numbers,” Schultheiss said.
Link to Original Source

Submission + - Tech tool offers police "mass surveillance on a budget" (wtop.com)

Submitted by cstacy
cstacy writes:

Local law enforcement agencies from suburban Southern California to rural North Carolina have been using an obscure cellphone tracking tool, at times without search warrants, that gives them the power to follow people’s movements months back in time, according to public records and internal emails obtained by The Associated Press.

The tool is called “Fog Reveal”. It uses data from advertising identification numbers culled from apps such as Waze, Starbucks and hundreds of others that target ads based on location. It searches hundreds of billions of records from 250 million mobile devices to create “patterns of life" analysis of a person’s movements and interests. It has been used since at least 2018 in criminal investigations ranging from the murder of a nurse in Arkansas to tracing the movements of a potential participant in the Jan. 6 insurrection at the Capitol. “It’s sort of a mass surveillance program on a budget,” said Bennett Cyphers, a special advisor at the Electronic Frontier Foundation

Submission + - SPAM: Texas University Applies to Build Molten Salt Nuclear Reactor by 2025

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: Abilene Christian University (ACU) has applied to the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) for a construction licence for a molten salt research reactor (MSRR), to be built on its campus in Abilene, Texas, as part of the Nuclear Energy eXperimental Testing (NEXT) laboratory. ACU plans for the MSRR to achieve criticality by December 2025.

The planned Texas reactor would be an up to 1 MWt, graphite-moderated, fluoride salt flowing fluid (fuel dissolved in the salt) research reactor. The MSRR will be used for on-campus nuclear research and training opportunities for faculty, staff and students in advanced nuclear technologies. The reactor will significantly expand the university’s salt reactor research and development infrastructure, supporting US molten salt reactor design, development, deployment and market penetration.
Link to Original Source

Submission + - Gran Tourismo skimpflation charges answered 1

Submitted by bbsguru
bbsguru writes: Sony / Playstation has been taking a lot of heat for making the new Gran Tourismo 7 more dependent on micro transactions. Gamers say the well reviewed game had taken advantage of those reviews by waiting until after it was released to jack up the cost of playing the game. Acceptance wasn't improved by the more-than-a-day outage that accompanied the changes. After several tentative responses, Sony is paying out: One Million Credits to make us all feel better, along with "numerous playability improvements".

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