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Submission + - Scientists May Have Finally Figured Out How Bats Avoid Cancer (sciencealert.com)

Submitted by alternative_right
alternative_right writes: Several bats species have been found to possess multiple copies of a known tumor-suppressing gene called p53. Humans have just a single copy, while other cancer-resistant animals, like elephants, boast up to 20. Mutations in this gene are linked to more than half of all human cancers

But a mechanism that's too aggressive at killing cells is obviously not desirable either. Thankfully, bats compensate with an overactive enzyme called telomerase, which allows their cells to continue to proliferate.

Submission + - Microsoft Spins $4M Dept. of Education Grant Into an Ad for Minecraft

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes: If you believe Coding, Creativity and the New Digital Fluency — "sponsored content from Minecraft Education" published by EdSurge and penned by Laylah Bulman, a senior program manager at Minecraft Education — the way to a child's creative coding heart is through Microsoft Minecraft. "One example of creative coding comes from a curriculum that introduces computer science through game design and storytelling in Minecraft, a game-based learning platform used by millions of students worldwide," writes EdSurge. "Developed by Urban Arts in collaboration with Minecraft Education, the program offers middle school teachers professional development, ongoing coaching and a 72-session curriculum built around game-based instruction. Designed for grades 6-8, the project-based program is beginner-friendly; no prior programming experience is required for teachers or students. It blends storytelling, collaborative design and foundational programming skills with a focus on creativity and equity."

The Urban Arts and Microsoft Creative Coders program touted by EdSurge in its advertorial was funded by a $4 million Education Innovation and Research (EIR) grant that was awarded to Urban Arts in 2023 by the U.S. Dept. of Education "to create an engaging, game-based, middle school CS course using Minecraft tools" for 3,450 middle schoolers (6th-8th grades)" in New York and California (Urban Arts credited Minecraft for helping craft the winning proposal). A year prior, at the 2022 grand opening of the Microsoft Garage in New York City, Urban Arts alums pitched NYC Mayor Eric Adams on the idea that game development education can prepare public school students for the modern workplace as Microsoft President Brad Smith looked on. New York City is a Minecraft Education believer — the Mayor's Office of Media and Entertainment recently kicked off summer with the inaugural NYC Video Game Festival, which included the annual citywide Minecraft Education Battle of the Boroughs Esports Competition in partnership with NYC Public Schools.

Interestingly, the $4M in federal funding for Creative Coders — as well as $8M in earlier EIR grants awarded to Urban Arts for STEM education — may have been unlocked thanks to the efforts of Microsoft and Smith. In his 2019 book Tools and Weapons, Microsoft President Brad Smith indicated Microsoft made a $50 million K-12 CS education spending pledge to secure Ivanka Trump's assistance in persuading Donald Trump to sign a 2017 presidential order "to ensure that federal funding [$1 billion] from the Department of Education helps advance [K-12] computer science," including via EIR STEM+CS grants.

Submission + - Microbe with bizarrely tiny genome may be evolving into a virus (science.org)

Submitted by sciencehabit
sciencehabit writes: The newly discovered microbe provisionally known as Sukunaarchaeum isn’t a virus. But like viruses, it seemingly has one purpose: to make more of itself.

As far as scientists can tell from its genome—the only evidence of its existence so far—it’s a parasite that provides nothing to the single-celled creature it calls home. Most of Sukunaarchaeum’s mere 189 protein-coding genes are focused on replicating its own genome; it must steal everything else it needs from its host Citharistes regius, a dinoflagellate that lives in ocean waters all over the world. Adding to the mystery of the microbe, some of its sequences identify it as archaeon, a lineage of simple cellular organisms more closely related to complex organisms like us than to bacteria like Escherichia coli.

The discovery of Sukunaarchaeum’s bizarrely viruslike way of living, reported last month in a bioRxiv preprint, “challenges the boundaries between cellular life and viruses,” says Kate Adamala, a synthetic biologist at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities who was not involved in the work. “This organism might be a fascinating living fossil—an evolutionary waypoint that managed to hang on.”

Adamala adds that if Sukunaarchaeum really does represent a microbe on its way to becoming a virus, it could teach scientists about how viruses evolved in the first place. “Most of the greatest transitions in evolution didn’t leave a fossil record, making it very difficult to figure out what were the exact steps,” she says. “We can poke at existing biochemistry to try to reconstitute the ancestral forms—or sometimes we get a gift from nature, in the form of a surviving evolutionary intermediate.”

What’s already clear: Sukunaarchaeum is not alone. When team leader Takuro Nakayama, an evolutionary microbiologist at Tsukuba, and his colleagues sifted through publicly available DNA sequences extracted from seawater all over the world, they found many sequences similar to those of Sukunaarchaeum. “That’s when we realized that we had not just found a single strange organism, but had uncovered the first complete genome of a large, previously unknown archaeal lineage,” Nakayama says.

Submission + - Android Open Source Is Becoming a Controlled Experiment (reclaimthenet.org)

Submitted by alternative_right
alternative_right writes: Google’s latest move to withhold crucial components from the Android 16 source release has sent ripples through the privacy and custom ROM communities, reviving fears that the Android Open Source Project (AOSP) is being quietly hollowed out.

While the company insists AOSP isn’t being discontinued, its actions are telling a different story for developers who rely on Pixel devices as their foundation.

Submission + - Facial recognition error sees woman accused of theft (bbc.co.uk)

Submitted by alanw
alanw writes: Home Bargains introduces facial recognition camers, woman pays for toilet rolls, Home Bargains mistakenly submits an allegation that she shoplifted them to Facewatch, next time she tries to enter an HB store she is escorted out with no reason given.

"As soon as I stepped my foot over the threshold of the door, they were radioing each other and they all surrounded me and were like 'you need to leave the store'," she said.

Madeleine Stone, senior advocacy officer at the civil liberties campaign group Big Brother Watch, said they had been contacted by more than 35 people who have complained of being wrongly placed on facial recognition watchlists.

"They're being wrongly flagged as criminals," Ms Stone said.

"They've given no due process, kicked out of stores. This is having a really serious impact."

"Historically in Britain, we have a history that you are innocent until proven guilty but when an algorithm, a camera and a facial recognition system gets involved, you are guilty."

Submission + - Chinese AI Companies Dodge US Chip Curbs Flying Suitcases of Hard Drives Abroad (wsj.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Since 2022, the U.S. has tightened the noose around the sale of high-end AI chips and other technology to China overnational-security concerns. Yet Chinese companies have made advances using workarounds. In some cases, Chinese AI developers have been able to substitute domestic chips for the American ones. Another workaround is to smuggle AI hardware into China through third countries. But people in the industry say that has become more difficult in recent months, in part because of U.S. pressure. That is pushing Chinese companies to try a further option: bringing their data outside China so they can use American AI chips in places such as Southeast Asia and the Middle East. The maneuvers are testing the limits of U.S. restrictions. “This was something we were consistently concerned about,” said Thea Kendler, who was in charge of export controls at the Commerce Department in the Biden administration, referring to Chinese companies remotely accessing advanced American AI chips. Layers of intermediaries typically separate the Chinese users of American AI chips from the U.S. companies—led by Nvidia—that make them. That leaves it opaque whether anyone is violating U.S. rules or guidance. [...]

At the Chinese AI developer, the Malaysia game plans take months of preparation, say people involved in them. Engineers decided it would be fastest to fly physical hard drives with data into the country, since transferring huge volumes of data over the internet could take months. Before traveling, the company’s engineers in China spent more than eight weeks optimizing the data sets and adjusting the AI training program, knowing it would be hard to make major tweaks once the data was out of the country. The Chinese engineers had turned to the same Malaysian data center last July, working through a Singaporean subsidiary. As Nvidia and its vendors began to conduct stricter audits on the end users of AI chips, the Chinese company was asked by the Malaysian data center late last year to work through a Malaysian entity, which the companies thought might trigger less scrutiny.

The Chinese company registered an entity in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia’s capital, listing three Malaysian citizens as directors and an offshore holding company as its parent, according to a corporate registry document. To avoid raising suspicions at Malaysian customs, the Chinese engineers packed their hard drives into four different suitcases. Last year, they traveled with the hard drives bundled into one piece of luggage. They returned to China recently with the results—several hundred gigabytes of data, including model parameters that guide the AI system’s output. The procedure, while cumbersome, avoided having to bring hardware such as chips or servers into China. That is getting more difficult because authorities in Southeast Asia are cracking down on transshipments through the region into China.

Submission + - UK Universities Sign $13.3 Million Deal to Avoid Oracle Java Back Fees (theregister.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: UK universities and colleges have signed a framework worth up to £9.86 million ($13.33 million) with Oracle to use its controversial Java SE Universal Subscription model, in exchange for a "waiver of historic fees due for any institutions who have used Oracle Java since 2023." Jisc, a membership organization that runs procurement for higher and further education establishments in the UK, said it had signed an agreement to purchase the new subscription licenses after consultation with members. In a procurement notice, it said institutions that use Oracle Java SE are required to purchase subscriptions. "The agreement includes the waiver of historic fees due for any institutions who have used Oracle Java since 2023," the notice said.

The Java SE Universal Subscription was introduced in January 2023 to an outcry from licensing experts and analysts. It moved licensing of Java from a per-user basis to a per-employee basis. At the time, Oracle said it was "a simple, low-cost monthly subscription that includes Java SE Licensing and Support for use on Desktops, Servers or Cloud deployments." However, licensing advisors said early calculations to help some clients showed that the revamp might increase costs by up to ten times. Later, analysis from Gartner found the per-employee subscription model to be two to five times more expensive than the legacy model.

"For large organizations, we expect the increase to be two to five times, depending on the number of employees an organization has," Nitish Tyagi, principal Gartner analyst, said in July 2024. "Please remember, Oracle defines employees as part-time, full-time, temporary, agents, contractors, as in whosoever supports internal business operations has to be licensed as per the new Java Universal SE Subscription model." Since the introduction of the new Oracle Java licensing model, user organizations have been strongly advised to move off Oracle Java and find open source alternatives for their software development and runtime environments. A survey of Oracle users found that only one in ten was likely to continue to stay with Oracle Java, in part as a result of the licensing changes.

Submission + - Strange radio pulses detected coming from ice in Antarctica (phys.org) 1

Submitted by alternative_right
alternative_right writes: Rather than reflecting off the ice, the signals—a form of radio waves—appeared to be coming from below the horizon, an orientation that cannot be explained by the current understanding of particle physics and may hint at new types of particles or interactions previously unknown to science, the team said.

Submission + - 17-year-old student builds 3D-printed drone in garage, interests DoD and MIT (thinkstewartville.com)

Submitted by Agnapot
Agnapot writes: While many teenagers devote their free time to social media or gaming, 17-year-old Taylor built a 3D-printed drone in his garage, and has already received an award from the Department of Defense, and is set to join MIT.

The journey began with a simple observation. When Taylor’s younger sister received a consumer drone that delivered only 30 minutes of flight time, the tech-savvy teenager saw room for improvement. Instead of accepting existing limitations, he immersed himself in VTOL mechanics – aircraft capable of helicopter-like takeoffs followed by airplane-style forward flight.

The 17-year-old American prodigy has engineered what experts are calling a game-changing drone innovation. This teenage genius developed a vertical takeoff and landing (VTOL) drone that operates more efficiently than commercial models while costing significantly less. His groundbreaking creation has captured the attention of the Pentagon, resulting in $23,000 in awards from the Department of Defense.

Comment Nations belong to citizens, no one else. (Score 1) 3

by couchslug (#65423833) Attached to: ICE Taps into Nationwide AI-Enabled Camera Network, Data Shows

Illegals are breaking the law. We understand the ulterior motive which is not privacy but to flood the US with people it does in no way belong to.

To oppose catching them is de-facto support for open borders which is fine if you get open borders by popular vote, less fine just to flood the US with uninvited guests.

There is zero problem if those not citizens stay home and do not consider themselves entitled to what does not belong to them. The US does not belong to anyone not so entitled by law. Refusal by de-facto supporters of open borders to man up and so state is hypocrisy. Nations protect themselves by exclusion. Nations belong to citizens, no one else unless citizens so vote.

Submission + - Eleanor from Gone in 60 Seconds Can't Be Copyrighted (caranddriver.com)

Submitted by sinij
sinij writes:

The ruling states that the Mustang doesn't pass tests that would qualify it as a character.

In the past, studio aggressively went after builders for any Mustang that even remotely approximated Eleanor, making it a hassle to restomod classic Mustangs.

Submission + - A major Canadian battery recycler just declared bankruptcy (www.cbc.ca)

Submitted by sinij
sinij writes:

But just last month, the Toronto-based company filed for bankruptcy protection in the U.S. and Canada after years of struggling to get a facility off the ground in Rochester, N.Y. The company said the planned hub would have been able to extract lithium and other critical minerals from recycled material

While battery recycling is possible, in practice EV battery recycling continues to be undressed problem.

Submission + - ICE Taps into Nationwide AI-Enabled Camera Network, Data Shows (404media.co) 3

Submitted by ArchieBunker
ArchieBunker writes: Data from a license plate-scanning tool that is primarily marketed as a surveillance solution for small towns to combat crimes like car jackings or finding missing people is being used by ICE, according to data reviewed by 404 Media. Local police around the country are performing lookups in Flock’s AI-powered automatic license plate reader (ALPR) system for “immigration” related searches and as part of other ICE investigations, giving federal law enforcement side-door access to a tool that it currently does not have a formal contract for.

The massive trove of lookup data was obtained by researchers who asked to remain anonymous to avoid potential retaliation and shared with 404 Media. It shows more than 4,000 nation and statewide lookups by local and state police done either at the behest of the federal government or as an “informal” favor to federal law enforcement, or with a potential immigration focus, according to statements from police departments and sheriff offices collected by 404 Media. It shows that, while Flock does not have a contract with ICE, the agency sources data from Flock’s cameras by making requests to local law enforcement. The data reviewed by 404 Media was obtained using a public records request from the Danville, Illinois Police Department, and shows the Flock search logs from police departments around the country.

As part of a Flock search, police have to provide a “reason” they are performing the lookup. In the “reason” field for searches of Danville’s cameras, officers from across the U.S. wrote “immigration,” “ICE,” “ICE+ERO,” which is ICE’s Enforcement and Removal Operations, the section that focuses on deportations; “illegal immigration,” “ICE WARRANT,” and other immigration-related reasons. Although lookups mentioning ICE occurred across both the Biden and Trump administrations, all of the lookups that explicitly list “immigration” as their reason were made after Trump was inaugurated, according to the data.

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