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Submission + - NASA Is Tracking a Vast Anomaly Growing in Earth's Magnetic Field (sciencealert.com)

Submitted by alternative_right
alternative_right writes: For years, NASA has monitored a strange anomaly in Earth's magnetic field: a giant region of lower magnetic intensity in the skies, stretching out between South America and southwest Africa.

This vast, developing phenomenon, called the South Atlantic Anomaly, has intrigued and concerned scientists for decades, and perhaps none more so than NASA researchers.

The space agency's satellites and spacecraft are particularly vulnerable to the weakened magnetic field within the anomaly, and the resulting exposure to charged particles from the Sun.

Submission + - Children With Autism, ADHD, And Anorexia Share a Common Microbe Imbalance (sciencealert.com)

Submitted by alternative_right
alternative_right writes: A new, small study suggests children with autism, ADHD, and anorexia

share similarly disrupted gut microbiomes, which, by some measures, have more in common with each other than with their healthy, neurotypical peers.

Led by researchers from Comenius University in Slovakia, the study used stool samples to assess the gut microbiomes of 117 children.

The exploratory study included 30 boys with autism spectrum disorder (ASD), 21 girls with anorexia nervosa, and 14 children with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). The remaining samples were from age- and sex-matched healthy and neurotypical children, providing a control group.

Submission + - Five people plead quilty to helping North Koreans infiltrate US companies (techcrunch.com)

Submitted by smooth wombat
smooth wombat writes: Within the past year, stories have been posted on Slashdot about people helping North Koreans get remote IT jobs at U.S. corporations, companies knowingly helping North Koreans get remote IT jobs, how not to hire a North Korean for a remote IT job, and how a simple question tripped up a North Korean applying for a remote IT job. The FBI is even warning companies that North Koreans working remotely can steal source code and extort money from the company, money which goes to fund the North Korean government. Now, five more people have plead guilty to knowingly helping North Koreans infiltrate U.S. companies as remote IT workers.

The five people are accused of working as “facilitators” who helped North Koreans get jobs by providing their own real identities, or false and stolen identities of more than a dozen U.S. nationals. The facilitators also hosted company-provided laptops in their homes across the U.S. to make it look like the North Korean workers lived locally, according to the DOJ press release.

These actions affected 136 U.S. companies and netted Kim Jong Un’s regime $2.2 million in revenue, said the DOJ.

Three of the people — U.S. nationals Audricus Phagnasay, Jason Salazar, and Alexander Paul Travis — each pleaded guilty to one count of wire fraud conspiracy.

Prosecutors accused the three of helping North Koreans posing as legitimate IT workers, whom they knew worked outside of the United States, to use their own identities to obtain employment, helped them remotely access their company-issued laptops set up in their homes, and also helped the North Koreans pass vetting procedures, such as drug tests.

The fourth U.S. national who pleaded guilty is Erick Ntekereze Prince, who ran a company called Taggcar, which supplied to U.S. companies allegedly “certified” IT workers but whom he knew worked outside of the country and were using stolen or fake identities. Prince also hosted laptops with remote access software at several residences in Florida, and earned more than $89,000 for his work, the DOJ said.

Another participant in the scheme who pleaded guilty to one count of wire fraud conspiracy and another count of aggravated identity theft is Ukrainian national Oleksandr Didenko, who prosecutors accuse of stealing U.S. citizens’ identities and selling them to North Koreans so they could get jobs at more than 40 U.S. companies.

Submission + - It's Official: Scientists Confirmed What Is Inside Our Moon (sciencealert.com) 1

Submitted by alternative_right
alternative_right writes: A thorough investigation published in May 2023 found that the inner core of the Moon is, in fact, a solid ball with a density similar to that of iron.

To figure it out once and for all, Briaud and his colleagues collected data from space missions and lunar laser-ranging experiments to compile a profile of various lunar characteristics. These include the degree of its deformation by its gravitational interaction with Earth, the variation in its distance from Earth, and its density.

Submission + - GM wants parts makers to pull supply chains from China (businesstimes.com.sg)

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: General Motors (GM) has directed several thousand of its suppliers to scrub their supply chains of parts from China, four people familiar with the matter said, reflecting automakers’ growing frustration over geopolitical disruptions to their operations.

GM executives have been telling suppliers they should find alternatives to China for their raw materials and parts, with the goal of eventually moving their supply chains out of the country entirely, the people said.

The automaker has set a 2027 deadline for some suppliers to dissolve their China sourcing ties, some of the sources said.

GM approached some suppliers with the directive in late 2024, but the effort took on fresh urgency this past spring, during the early days of an escalating US-China trade battle, the sources said.

Submission + - Google will leave open the option to sideload apps on Android (googleblog.com)

Submitted by Artem S. Tashkinov
Artem S. Tashkinov writes: A few months ago, Google proposed that every Android developer, including those distributing apps outside the Google Play Store, such as popular third-party stores like F-Droid, must verify their identity to have their apps installable on "certified Android devices," starting circa 2026 in countries such as Brazil, Indonesia, Singapore, and Thailand. This triggered strong push-back from indie developers and open-source advocates, who saw it as a shift toward a more closed ecosystem, raising fears that sideloading would be free in name only and making Android essentially an iOS clone.

In response, Google clarified in its November 2025 blog post that while verification is moving forward, there will be lighter-weight paths for students and hobbyists, and an "advanced flow" for power users to install unverified apps with full warning of the risks, essentially backtracking on its initial proposal.

Submission + - How Google is using the law to stop text message scams (bgr.com)

Submitted by anderzole
anderzole writes: Google this week filed a lawsuit against a large scam text operator responsible. Google's legal action is comprehensive and is intent on completely dismantling Lighthouse's operations. The search giant is bringing claims under RICO, the Lanham Act, and the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA).

Submission + - NTP Solicits Donations 2

Submitted by ewhac
ewhac writes: Coming on the heels of FFmpeg having to cope with slop bug reports from Google (without attendant fixes), the Network Time Foundation, the stewards of the Network Time Protocol (NTP) and reference software implementation that keeps billions of computers' internal clocks set to the correct date and time, is having a donation drive. Depending on which page you look at (ntp.org or nwtime.org), the Foundation's goal is to raise a king's ransom of... $11,000.00. Yes, eleven thousand dollars.

Submission + - Thanks to a computer model, five Vietnam War MIAs come home (phys.org)

Submitted by alternative_right
alternative_right writes: In the decades after the war, joint U.S., Laotian and Vietnamese teams mounted several expeditions to search the peak, recovering several of the men lost that day. But the dense vegetation, remote environs and possibility of unexploded munitions at the site, not to mention the sheer size of the mountain, complicated the search for the remaining missing Airmen.

With the expertise of Russell Quick, a Ph.D. graduate in anthropology from UIC and member of the CRIM team, the researchers scanned the mountain with drones to make a digital 3D model of the site. They used a remote sensing technology called LiDAR, which maps the terrain using laser beams aimed at the ground and measuring their reflection back to the aircraft.

The program, trained on images of tropical forests, will ping when it detects an area that looks different from the rest.

"It will not give any alarms to rocks or trees or what you see in a tropical forest. But if you have a belt or something like that, it's an unusual object, and it'll create an alert," said Cetin.

The researchers homed in on several areas of interest and submitted their findings to the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency.

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