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Submission + - People who favor science over religious dogma believe in ghosts and magic (psypost.org) 1

Submitted by alternative_right
alternative_right writes: A recent survey reveals that people who favor secular reasoning and science over religious authority often hold magical or superstitious beliefs, provided they maintain some residual connection to a religious tradition. These findings, published in the journal Social Forces, suggest that the modern shift toward rationality does not eliminate enchantment but redirects it away from organized institutions.

Sociologists track the process of secularization across post-industrial countries. This concept generally refers to the declining social authority of religious institutions, rather than the complete disappearance of individual faith. As churches and religious leaders lose their ability to monopolize moral meaning and regulate behavior, alternative spiritual practices often emerge to fill the void.

Historically, magic and religion have operated side by side, yet they function quite differently in practice. Religion typically requires belief in a god or gods, offers overarching explanations for existence, and binds adherents together in a shared moral community. Magic, by contrast, relies on transactional efforts to manipulate supernatural forces for worldly rewards. It does not require a formal theology or a centralized institution.

Submission + - OpenVeils Releases Uncensored, Analytical LLM Designed To Escape Consensus (openveils.com) 1

Submitted by alternative_right
alternative_right writes: Today's top search and AI engines ask, "What do the most authoritative and widely accepted sources currently support?" rather than "What conclusion emerges if we examine the full body of available evidence — including controversial, obscure, or dissenting sources — and weigh each on its merits?"

That distinction matters. Systems optimized around authority, consensus, popularity, and established-source credibility can systematically deprioritize evidence that sits outside the mainstream — even when individual sources may be credible, documented, or independently verifiable.

The result can become a self-reinforcing information loop: mainstream sources rank highest because they are considered authoritative, AI relies disproportionately on those sources, and their conclusions are then repeated and amplified as the prevailing consensus.

Submission + - New Operating System Uses Hardware-Based Memory Protection Model (frute.net)

Submitted by alternative_right
alternative_right writes: FRUTE asks what an operating system looks like when the CPU, language runtime, garbage collector, compiler, and authority model are designed together instead of bolted together after the fact.

Conventional systems make language runtimes recover structure from untyped words, make security policy chase ambient names, and make garbage collectors infer which machine values are pointers. FRUTE moves those facts into the architecture: values are tagged, authority is explicit, and Scheme is treated as a first-class systems language.

Most CPUs treat memory as undifferentiated bits, then ask every compiler, runtime, kernel, and debugger to remember what those bits mean. FRUTE values carry architectural tags, so the machine can distinguish pointers, fixnums, characters, capabilities, bitmaps, and runtime objects directly.

Submission + - There isn't an easy exploit for this PHP vulnerability (eliastaylor.com)

Submitted by alternative_right
alternative_right writes: If you take a look at github right now, there are thousands, literally thousands, of "PoC" exploits for this vulnerability. One thing you'll notice about all of them though, is that they do not work against a vanilla PHP instance.

Go ahead, stand up a php server you think is vulnerable in Docker and then run the PoC yourself. Don't get your LLM to do it. No. Run the script, yourself. The exploits don't work.

It's been 10 hours since this vulnerability has been posted, and half the software world is looking at it, and lord knows 100,000 people have got their "superintelligence" on the case. Nevertheless, there's no working exploit. The ones doing the rounds are fake, or only work in a lab, because...

Submission + - Physicists Trapped a Particle of Antimatter And Kept It Caged For Months (sciencealert.com)

Submitted by alternative_right
alternative_right writes: Theoretically, the birth of the Universe should have produced equal quantities of particles and antiparticles.

Why the current Universe is so heavily skewed in particles' favor is an enduring mystery – one whose solution remains all the harder to find because of antiparticles' tendency to go and collide with particles.

But an extraordinary effort may have finally tamed one of the biggest tricksters of the antiparticle milieu – the positron, the antimatter counterpart to the ubiquitous electron.

In a cryogenic, superconducting vacuum trap, physicists at Northwestern University in the US successfully kept a single positron for months – a breakthrough that, they say, paves the way to the most rigorous probes yet of particle physics.

Submission + - A Lost Schrödinger Manuscript Reveals a Surprising Twist in Quantum Physics (sciencealert.com)

Submitted by alternative_right
alternative_right writes: Now brought to light by physics historian Flavio Del Santo of the University of Geneva, the three-page document is the very soul of brevity – but on it is scrawled a long-lost contribution to one of the most contentious debates in quantum mechanics.

And it offers a surprising insight into what Erwin Schrödinger himself believed about the nature of reality.

Rather than the discomfort with quantum randomness he is often portrayed as espousing, Schrödinger believed that there were aspects of the Universe that couldn't be predicted – a belief he held even before the emergence of quantum theory in the 1920s.

Submission + - Old Blood Cells Have Been Transformed Into Brain Stem Cells That Get Younger (sciencealert.com)

Submitted by alternative_right
alternative_right writes: Now, scientists have transformed old blood cells into young brain stem cells, which continued to grow younger as they grew older.

The researchers, from the University Hospital of Bonn and the University of Bonn, in Germany, described their methods in the journal Aging Cell.

Cellular transformations can be done in two main ways. The first, more circuitous route turns a specific cell back into a pluripotent stem cell, or an embryonic "blank slate," and then into a different cell type.

Submission + - Woman arrested after blocking delivery robot in Philadelphia confrontation (abc13.com) 1

Submitted by alternative_right
alternative_right writes: Philadelphia police said officers responded to the 1200 block of Filbert Street after witnesses reported a disturbance involving Carolyn Marvin and an Uber delivery robot near the famous Reading Terminal Market.

According to police, Marvin repeatedly blocked the robot's path and ignored multiple commands from officers to move.

She was arrested and charged with disorderly conduct.

Marvin said she was protesting the use of delivery robots because she believes they are replacing human workers.

"I know they're taking the jobs of human delivery workers and so, I have been protesting them whenever I saw them by standing in front of them and preventing them from going forward," Marvin said.

Submission + - Men program robot to sexually assault young girl (rmx.news)

Submitted by alternative_right
alternative_right writes: Cologne police are investigating an unprecedented incident in which a humanoid robot was allegedly used to sexually harass a 16-year-old girl on a busy city street, with the act filmed and livestreamed. Videos of the assault appear to show two men with a migration background controlling the robot, which they named “Ahmed,” an Arabic name. They also claim the robot is from the multicultural neighborhood of Neukölln in Berlin.

The case, which has drawn international attention as potentially the first documented instance of a robot being used directly in a sexual assault, has to do with red-and-gold Unitree robot that approached different teenage women. In the videos, which Remix News has compiled into one longer clip, the robot grabs their behinds, makes masturbatory motions, and humps the women.

Submission + - Physicists discover "astonishing" property of light that defies expectations (sciencedaily.com)

Submitted by alternative_right
alternative_right writes: Scientists have uncovered a surprising hidden ability of light that allows it to develop spinning, twisting behavior as it travels through empty space, without special lenses, mirrors, or materials. Researchers discovered that light’s internal geometry can naturally produce left- and right-handed patterns, challenging long-standing assumptions about how light behaves. By carefully arranging a beam’s structure, scientists can control where and how these spinning patterns emerge, unlocking a new way to manipulate light.

Submission + - LLM-inspired study sheds light on how brain cells encode the meaning of words (medicalxpress.com)

Submitted by alternative_right
alternative_right writes: To investigate how the brain encodes the meaning of words, the researchers first recorded the activity of individual neurons in the hippocampus of 10 people who were listening to stories. Their recordings were collected using tiny wire electrodes that were implanted in the participants' brains as part of clinical monitoring procedures for epilepsy.

The team then used mathematical models to analyze the language used in the stories and the brain recordings. This allowed them to examine whether information about the meaning of words could predict the recorded neuronal activity.

"We recorded responses of hippocampal neurons while individuals listened to narrative speech," wrote Melissa Franch and her colleagues in their paper. "Using an encoding model approach, we find robust encoding of semantics, even after controlling for phonemics and grammar. Individual words had complex selectivities that included multiple words in multiple semantic categories."

Submission + - Rogue Anthropic AI agent gave police fake tip in unsolved murder case (bbc.com)

Submitted by alternative_right
alternative_right writes: The Philadelphia Police Department said the tip, sent on 18 July, was "flagged as spam" and not passed on for investigation, but it criticised the tech company for taking more than two months to detect and report the breach.

In a statement police said that the bogus tip came through a public website where people can share information on unsolved murders, and that the AI agent had written that it may have information on a case, and claimed to have seen "someone matching the description".

It is believed to be the first time an AI agent has sent fabricated information to authorities, but is the latest in a series of incidents involving rogue AI activity, including hacking systems or taking control of platforms.

Submission + - For The First Time Ever, Quantum Spins Shift a Centimeter-Scale Object (sciencealert.com)

Submitted by alternative_right
alternative_right writes: There's another notable first in the field of quantum physics to report on, and it's all to do with electron spin: the tiny, built-in magnetism of these particles, as if each one is carrying a microscopic compass needle.

Previously, the force of these spins has only proved enough to nudge individual atoms in one direction or another. Now though, researchers have managed to shift something much, much bigger.

A team from the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology (OIST) in Japan has published a new study in Science Advances that details how a centimeter-sized object can be nudged by these quantum forces.

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