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Submission + - Your Brain Can Rewire Itself to Allow True Multitasking (sciencealert.com)

Submitted by alternative_right
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.

Submission + - Kids who own cellphones have poorer reading comprehension scores (phys.org)

Submitted by alternative_right
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.

Submission + - Earth's Biggest Disasters Strike in a Hidden Pattern Every 27 Million Years (sciencealert.com)

Submitted by alternative_right
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.

Submission + - A Parasite Makes Ants Live 10x Longer And Tricks Others Into Worshipping Them (sciencealert.com) 2

Submitted by alternative_right
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.

Submission + - Humans Can Learn to Echolocate in Just 10 Weeks, And It Rewires The Brain (sciencealert.com)

Submitted by alternative_right
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.)

Submission + - Leaked Document Shows the Surveillance Tech at ICEâ(TM)s Fingertips (404media.co)

Submitted by alternative_right
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.

Submission + - Donâ(TM)t wire foreign enemies into Americaâ(TM)s power grid (thehill.com) 1

Submitted by alternative_right
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?

Submission + - For The First Time Ever, Humanoid Robots Perform Surgery on Live Animals (sciencealert.com)

Submitted by alternative_right
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.

Submission + - OpenAI says its technology hacked another company in âunprecedentedâ(T (thehill.com)

Submitted by alternative_right
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.

Submission + - Physicists create first room-temperature quantum material (phys.org)

Submitted by alternative_right
alternative_right writes: In a study published in Nature, LSU physicists have developed the first room-temperature quantum material capable of distinguishing and transporting different quantum states of light, overcoming one of the biggest challenges in quantum materials research. Led by Associate Professor of Physics Omar S. Magaña-Loaiza, the work establishes a general design principle for engineering an entirely new class of quantum materials, opening new possibilities for quantum computing, secure communications, sensing technologies and advanced energy systems.

Submission + - Elon Musk: We Are Making The X Codebase Open Source (x.com)

Submitted by alternative_right
alternative_right writes: Once we have completed our review for security vulnerabilities, we will make the entire codebase of ð open source, with no exceptions.

Moreover, we will invite third party reviewers to examine the system that is running to confirm that the open source code is what is running.

Trust through total transparency is the only thing that should be believed.

Submission + - AI Fiction Is Easy to Detect Because It's Stupid and Bad, Research Finds (404media.co)

Submitted by alternative_right
alternative_right writes: Fiction written by artificial intelligence is easy to detect because it struggles with complex story structure and tends to moralize in clunky ways, according to a preprint study from researchers at University of Maryland, College Park and Google DeepMind. They found that AI fiction has tells that go beyond stereotypical overuse of em-dashes and other obvious AI tropes and have more to do with the formulaic nature of the text itself.

âoeAI stories over-explain themes and favor tidy, single-track plots while human stories frame protagonistsâ(TM) choices as more morally ambiguous and have increased temporal complexity,â the study, which looked at more than 50,000 AI-generated short stories, found. âoeClaude produces notably flat event escalation, GPT over-indexes on dream sequences, and Gemini defaults to external character description. We find that AI-generated stories cluster in a shared region of narrative space, while human-authored stories exhibit greater diversity. More broadly, these results suggest that differences in underlying narrative construction, not just writing style, can be used to separate human-written original works from AI-generated fiction.â

Basically, AI-generated fiction sucks and at the moment is easy to detect.

Submission + - 'Knockoff' Browser Extension Hides Sketchy Brands on Amazon (404media.co) 1

Submitted by alternative_right
alternative_right writes: A software developer made a Chrome and Firefox extension called Knockoff that automatically hides, grays out, or filters products from sketchy brands on Amazon, which highlights just how many shady brands are on the platform and how commonly they show up on searches for basic items.

In just a few minutes of using the extension, Knockoff dimmed product listings for screwdrivers made by âoeSUNHZMCKP,â spoons made by âoeSACATR,â and a lamp made by âoeROTTOGOON.â In a tweet announcing the extension, developer Josh Pigford wrote âoeSorry to brands like WNPETHOME, EHEYCIGA, YXYL, LU&MN, JOYIN, TOMY, GODONLIF, YOOJEE, LINGTENG, LANEIGE, VISCOO, BIODANCE, COOFANDY, BALENNZ, TOSY, and LUENX.â The extension can also hide all sponsored product listings. The extension quickly went viral as a much-needed filter for people who still use Amazon and, for those who donâ(TM)t use Amazon because of its horrendous labor practices and other concerns, it is evidence of what an incredible wasteland the platform has become.

Comment Unholy Blasphemies (Score 0) 92

1. Embrace AI. For no other reason than that every useful technology, no matter how dodgy it was at first, has taken over.

2. Quality over quantity. The question is not yes/no on AI, but how to make AI work for us. I suggest manufacturing.

3. Don't be a Chinese stooge. The Chinese oppose American data centers for obvious reasons.

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