180113943
submission
schwit1 writes:
Having a cat as a pet could potentially double a person's risk of schizophrenia-related conditions, according to an analysis of 17 studies.
Psychiatrist John McGrath and colleagues at the Queensland Centre for Mental Health Research in Australia looked at papers published over the last 44 years in 11 countries, including the US and the UK.
Their 2023 review found "a significant positive association between broadly defined cat ownership and an increased risk of schizophrenia-related disorders."
T. gondii is a mostly harmless parasite that can be transmitted through undercooked meat or contaminated water. It can also be transmitted through an infected cat's feces.
Estimates suggest that T. gondii infects about 40 million people in the US, typically without any symptoms. Meanwhile, researchers keep finding more strange effects that infections may have.
Once inside our bodies, T. gondii can infiltrate the central nervous system and influence neurotransmitters. The parasite has been linked to personality changes, the emergence of psychotic symptoms, and some neurological disorders, including schizophrenia.
180047190
submission
spatwei writes:
It is now more common for data to leave companies through copying and paste than through file transfers and uploads, LayerX revealed in its Browser Security Report 2025.
This shift is largely due to generative AI (genAI), with 77% of employees pasting data into AI prompts, and 32% of all copy-pastes from corporate accounts to non-corporate accounts occurring within genAI tools.
“Traditional governance built for email, file-sharing, and sanctioned SaaS didn’t anticipate that copy/paste into a browser prompt would become the dominant leak vector,” LayerX CEO Or Eshed wrote in a blog post summarizing the report.
180044444
submission
D,Petkow writes:
Singapore is often hailed as one of the world’s most ultra-modern hubs — a place of gleaming skyscrapers, cutting-edge fintech, and futuristic urban planning. Yet, beneath the polished surface, the city-state still enforces some of the strictest old-school punishments imaginable.
In a move that stunned many outside observers, Parliament recently passed a law mandating at least six strokes of the cane for scammers and money mules. With scams making up nearly 60% of reported crimes and billions lost since 2020, the government argues that harsh deterrence is necessary.
It’s a striking contrast: a nation leading in smart cities and AI governance, while simultaneously wielding rattan canes against fraudsters. This duality — hyper-modern yet deeply traditional — is part of what makes Singapore fascinating, and sometimes bewildering, to the rest of the world.
https://says.com/my/news/singa...
http://metro.co.uk/2025/11/08/...
180017302
submission
alternative_right writes:
Instead, they propose that a new table is begun in the 358th month of the current table. With this approach, the table's predictions are only about 2 hours and 20 minutes early for both Sun and Moon alignment.
"This procedure would also entail that, occasionally, the first date in a successor table would be set at the 223rd month, about 10 hours and 10 min later relative to that alignment, to adjust for the gradually accumulating deviations of resettings at month 358," the authors write.
By comparing the table with our modern knowledge of eclipse cycles, they found that with this method, the Maya would have been able to accurately predict every solar eclipse observable in their territory between 350 and 1150 CE, since it corrects for the small errors that accumulate over time.
179989534
submission
BrianFagioli writes:
Firefox has introduced Kit, a new mascot meant to give the browser a friendlier, more personal identity. Mozilla is framing Kit as a companion for a web thatâ(TM)s âoeprivate, open and actually yours.â Itâ(TM)s a branding refresh rather than a technical change, and it leans into warmth and approachability at a time when browsers are starting to feel interchangeable.
The move also quietly pushes aside the old âoeFirefox is a red pandaâ trivia angle, sticking with a fox-like character thatâ(TM)s easier to recognize. Whether this helps Firefox regain relevance in a Chrome-dominated world is unclear, but it does signal that Mozilla still wants Firefox to feel like a browser with a personality and values, not just another commodity UI.
179749794
submission
davidone writes:
A large white coral reef containing important species and fossil traces has been discovered at a depth of more than 500 metres in the Gulf of Naples, in a rare discovery for the Mediterranean, the Italian Research Council (CNR) said on Friday.
175557415
submission
bradley13 writes:
So, Slashdot has made some change. I now see the normal page for a few seconds, then the CSS is removed and I get the pop-up "This page could not be loaded properly due to incorrect / bad filtering rule(s) of adblockers in use." Which is BS, of course, because when I click "cancel" the page is re-rendered correctly. Then, a couple of seconds later, the whole thing repeats.
FWIW: I don't actually expect this "story" to be published, but maybe they devs will have a look at their code?
Needless to say, no change on my end. Anyway, I have the option ticked (that Slashdot offers) to disable ads. They don't need to be displaying ads, or including trackers.
175384897
submission
merc writes:
The end of an era. ALS is a pretty terrible way to go I guess.
Good riddance to Darl McBride.
174898126
submission
schwit1 writes:
“The SR72 is believed to be a Mach 6+ aircraft, this new platform was slated from the start as an intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) asset with strike capabilities. This meant the aircraft would be capable of carrying a variety of payloads, including munitions to engage ground targets.”
174377969
submission
theodp writes:
"As with last year," tweeted College Board's AP Program Chief Trevor Packer, "the most challenging free-response question on this year's AP Computer Science A exam was Q4 on 2D Array." While it takes six pages of the AP CS A exam document to ask question 4 (of 4), the ask of students essentially boils down to using Java to move from the current location in a 2-D grid to either immediately below or to the right of that location based on which neighbor contains the lesser value, and adding the value at that location to a total (suggested Java solution, alternative Excel VBA solution). Much like rules of the children's game Pop-O-Matic Trouble, moves are subject to the constraint that you cannot move to the right or ahead if it takes you to an invalid position (beyond the grid dimensions).
Ironically, many of the AP CS A students who struggled with the grid coding problem were likely exposed by their schools from kindergarten on to more than a decade's worth of annual Hour of Code tutorials that focused on the concepts of using code to move about in 2-D grids. The move-up-down-left-right tutorials promoted by schools came from tech-backed nonprofit Code.org and its tech giant partners and have been taught over the years by the likes of Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, and President Obama, as well as characters from Star Wars, Disney Princess movies, and Microsoft Minecraft.
The news of American high school students struggling again with fairly straightforward coding problems after a year-long course of instruction comes not only as tech companies and tech-tied nonprofits lobby state lawmakers to pass bills making CS a high school graduation requirement in the US, but also as a new report from King's College urges lawmakers and educators to address a stark decline in the number of UK students studying computing at secondary school, which is blamed on the replacement of more approachable ICT (Information and Communications Technology) courses with more rigorous computer science courses in 2013 (a switch pushed by Google and Microsoft), which it notes students have perceived as too difficult and avoided taking.
174075223
submission
joshuark writes:
Bleeping Computer reports a new Linux version of TargetCompany ransomware targets VMware ESXi. TargetCompany ransomware focused on Windows machines but the release of the Linux variant and the shift to encrypting VMWare ESXi machines shows the evolution of the operation.
173903923
submission
swm writes:
Buried under the news from Google I/O this week is one of Google Cloud's biggest blunders ever: Google accidentally deleted a giant customer account for no reason. UniSuper, an Australian pension fund that manages $135 billion worth of funds and has 647,000 members, had its entire account wiped out at Google Cloud, including all its backups that were stored on the service. UniSuper thankfully had some backups with a different provider and was able to recover its data, but according to UniSuper's incident log, downtime started May 2, and a full restoration of services didn't happen until May 15.
170128108
submission
schwit1 writes:
“If you introduce self-checkout kiosks, it’s not going to change productivity all that much,” says MIT economist Daron Acemoglu. However, in terms of lost wages for employees, he adds, “It’s going to have fairly large distributional effects, especially for low-skill service workers. It’s a labor-shifting device, rather than a productivity-increasing device.”
A newly published study co-authored by Acemoglu quantifies the extent to which automation has contributed to income inequality in the U.S., simply by replacing workers with technology — whether self-checkout machines, call-center systems, assembly-line technology, or other devices. Over the last four decades, the income gap between more- and less-educated workers has grown significantly; the study finds that automation accounts for more than half of that increase.
“These are controversial findings in the sense that they imply a much bigger effect for automation than anyone else has thought, and they also imply less explanatory power for other [factors],” Acemoglu says.
Still, he adds, in the effort to identify drivers of income inequality, the study “does not obviate other nontechnological theories completely. Moreover, the pace of automation is often influenced by various institutional factors, including labor’s bargaining power.”
170111338
submission
AmiMoJo writes:
Members of YouTube’s gaming community are calling out the video hosting site for adding new regulations regarding profanity usage and violent content, disproportionately affecting gaming creators who produce unscripted videos such as let’s plays of M-rated games. Worse, the policy is retroactively deeming their videos in violation of new rules and affecting their ability to make money on the platform.
The rule changes in question was originally made in November of 2022, and the blog post announcing it says that YouTube now treats all profanity equally (meaning “ass” is just as bad as “fuck”), and any usage of such in titles, thumbails, or in the first seven seconds of a video may result in complete demonetization. While you can swear after the first eight seconds, if you use profanity “consistently throughout the video” it may also be demonetized according to this new policy. The same restrictions apply to violent content, as well.
Previously, YouTube’s violent content policy applied to images of real-world violence, though game violence is now specifically noted as of the November update. As for profanity, prior to this change, YouTube allowed creators to use what it describes as “moderate profanity” (it says “shit” and “bitch” fall under this category) in the first 30 seconds without fear of demonetization.
166669715
submission
schwit1 writes:
Apple’s crash detection for the iPhone 14 and new Apple Watch models can alert 911 and emergency contacts in the event of a collision. But it sometimes triggers when people aren’t in danger.
