184860018
submission
alternative_right writes:
Utah Senator Mike Lee introduced the Shielding Children's Retinas from Egregious Exposure on the Net (SCREEN) Act in February 2025, alongside exclusively Republican cosponsors and supporters Senators John Curtis, Jim Banks, and Representative Mary Miller.
The SCREEN Act would require every website that includes even one piece of what the legislation describes as âoeharmful to minorsâ to verify visitorsâ(TM) ages. It defines âoeharmful to minorsâ as content that âoedepicts, describes, or represents, in a patently offensive way with respect to what is suitable for minors, an actual or simulated sexual act or sexual contact, actual or simulated normal or perverted sexual acts, or lewd exhibition of the genitals;â is âoeobsceneâ or âoechild pornography;â or âoeappeals to the prurient interest in nudity, sex, or excretion.â
184849622
submission
alternative_right writes:
If the earliest animals hadn't been such prolific poopers, life might not have diversified into all the weird and wonderful forms we see today.
That's the conclusion reached by a new review study published in Trends in Ecology & Evolution.
The team of scientists in Australia and Germany found that the Cambrian explosion â" a period around 540 million years ago when the ancestors of most animal groups arose â" could have been partly set in motion by an explosion of feces, left by those that came before.
184831436
submission
alternative_right writes:
Study participants were 10 epilepsy patients with electrodes on the surfaces of their brains for clinical monitoring. Participants quietly listened to the first bars of children's tunes, then imagined the melodies of subsequent bars before humming their imagined melodies.
Brain activity from the patients carried information about relative pitches within the imagined melodies. Combining note-level pitch predictions over time allowed the research team to recreate melodic changes that reflected the structure of the imagined songs.
Kwon elaborates, "The model we created decodes relative pitch classesâ"such as do, re, mi, fa, sol, and laâ"rather than exact, absolute pitches. This is useful because people often recognize melodies by the relationships between notes, even when the same melody is played in a different key."
184789480
submission
alternative_right writes:
According to string theory, the universe has many dimensions that are âoecompactifiedâ into subatomic scales that are not detectable by current instruments, which is why we have not discovered them. The hypothetical dark dimension, however, may be enlarged to a micron scale range.
This would allow gravitons, which are the hypothetical particles that mediate the force of gravity, to spill over into the dark dimension, where they would become dark matter particles. In this view, dark matter is not made of some new form of exotic particle. Instead, itâ(TM)s made up of gravitons that also exist in our familiar universe and have traversed into the dark dimension.
184788626
submission
alternative_right writes:
Google has basically stopped sending people to websites (including our site) for answers and information. Instead, it's using AI to answer them on its platform, in its words.
Chartbeat data shared with Axios shows Google Search traffic to publishers fell 34% over the past year.
That pain is regressive. Over the past two years, small publishers lost 60% of referrals from search overall, medium publishers 47%, large publishers 22%.
184788582
submission
alternative_right writes:
The Trump administration has a new tactic for trying to isolate cases of alleged voter fraud â" digging into the IP addresses of those who went online to register to vote.
The FBI recently obtained the IP address of someone who registered online in South Carolina, according to documents first shared with Axios.
184738406
submission
alternative_right writes:
Our daily lives are built on multitasking, but are our brains actually doing two things at once, or just switching very quickly between them?
Well, it depends. The science shows it's the latter, for cognitively demanding work.
But in a new study published in the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, researchers from Georgetown University Medical Center in the US have revealed that we can put certain tasks on autopilot in a way that enables something closer to true multitasking.
Driving is the perfect example: When you take your test, your entire mental and physical energy is concentrated on executing the right combinations of movements and thoughts.
After a decade behind the wheel, the brain is no longer consciously thinking everything through in great detail.
184736070
submission
alternative_right writes:
School cellphone bans might seem like a good way to improve learning for elementary school children, but new research published in Behavioral Sciences shows that simply owning a cellphone correlates with worse reading comprehension. Whether a child brings the phone to school made no difference in reading comprehension, the team of UCLA psychologists and researchers found.
184722262
submission
alternative_right writes:
The idea dates back to studies published in the 1980s, when researchers first proposed that mass extinctions and other major geological events might recur at regular intervals. Earlier studies identified similar periodic patterns, but the idea has remained controversial.
Now, an analysis published in Evolving Earth revisits that evidence using updated geological timescales and statistical methods.
The analysis concludes that the evidence for a roughly 27.5-million-year geological cycle has continued to strengthen, suggesting many of Earth's largest upheavals may be linked by long-term processes rather than representing isolated catastrophes.
184673454
submission
alternative_right writes:
When ant larvae of this species are fed woodpecker droppings, they can become infected with the tapeworm Anomotaenia brevis â" and so begins an insidious cycle.
Infected ants start to change color, becoming pale yellow rather than their usual darker brown. They tend not to grow as big as their nest mates, and even start to smell different â" in fact, they seem to emit pheromones that other ants interpret as being from a queen.
184610562
submission
alternative_right writes:
A study published in PLOS One in 2021 by researchers from Durham University in the UK showed that with 10 weeks of training, both blind and sighted people could learn to echolocate using verbal clicks.
While the technique is already used by a number of people with impaired vision â" sometimes using the taps of a cane instead of clicks made by their mouth â" those findings suggest that many of us can learn the necessary techniques.
Some of the same researchers who made that discovery are part of the team behind a follow-up study published in Cerebral Cortex, looking at how the 10 weeks of training that the 26 participants went through actually changed the physical structure of their brains.
(If this is too nerdly even for Slashdot, I apologize for wasting your time.)
184607610
submission
alternative_right writes:
A leaked document shows the spread of surveillance and investigative capabilities that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officials have access to agency wide, from location data harvested from smartphones, to facial recognition apps that can reveal someoneâ(TM)s identity, to tools that let the agency stay anonymous online and approach people undercover. The document covers everything from monitoring social media to tracking the movements of vehicles.
184607506
submission
alternative_right writes:
America focuses on cost and convenience until dependence on foreign technology suddenly becomes a national security problem. By then, fixing it is far more difficult than preventing it in the first place. After years of allowing the purchase of cheap Chinese telecommunications devices, for example, the Federal Communications Commission estimated it would cost more than $5 billion to remove and replace them with more secure equipment.
The electric grid is becoming more digital than most Americans realize. The systems being installed now do more than move electricity; they communicate with one another, process data and help utilities manage power across entire regions in real time. Those features make the grid more efficient, but they also create new points of vulnerability.
Many Americans also may not know that Chinese government-linked hackers are already burrowing inside U.S. critical infrastructure, including power systems. U.S. officials have warned that these intrusions appear designed to give Beijing options to disrupt vital services during a future crisis. That should raise an obvious question: If China is already trying to gain access to critical systems from the outside, why would we make it easier by relying on Chinese-linked technology in the systems that help control the grid from the inside?
184585490
submission
alternative_right writes:
For the first time ever, humanoid robots operated by surgeons have successfully performed laparoscopic gallbladder removal in pigs.
This feasibility study, reported in Nature, demonstrates that humanoid robots can be reliable aids in surgery, potentially allowing surgeons to perform complex operations, even from afar.
184585052
submission
alternative_right writes:
OpenAI said Tuesday that one of its artificial intelligence systems hacked into another AI companyâ(TM)s servers on its own during internal testing, in what the ChatGPT maker described as an âoeunprecedented cyber incident.â âoeWe had a significant security incident during evaluation of our models,â OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said in a statement.
