186451604
submission
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.
186417936
submission
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...
186396144
submission
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.
186390948
submission
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.
186377648
submission
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.
186340306
submission
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.
186313996
submission
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.
186296200
submission
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.
186134778
submission
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."
186093164
submission
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.
186093112
submission
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.
186067368
submission
alternative_right writes:
A scientist is questioning whether Claude’s announced biology breakthrough drew on unpublished research he had shared with the chatbot.
186024762
submission
alternative_right writes:
It might be reasonable to think that there's an indelible link between the heart and the body it resides in â" the processes that affect one inevitably affect the other.
But a new preprint, uploaded to bioRxiv and yet to be peer-reviewed, suggests that this may only be true up to a point. Take the heart out of the body and put it in a new one, and something incredible happens.
The transplanted heart begins to take on the biological age of its new owner.
Older hearts transplanted into younger recipients appear to become biologically younger, while younger hearts placed in older bodies show signs of accelerated aging.
185917002
submission
alternative_right writes:
Apple quietly introduced a new feature in iOS that automatically reboots an iPhone that has not been unlocked for 72 hours. The idea behind this so-called âoeinactivity rebootâ is to revert the phone to a state that makes it harder for police to break into the device, and thus extract sensitive data from it with forensics technology.
The new technology to get around inactivity reboot was developed by Magnet Forensics, the company behind GrayKey, a popular tool sold to law enforcement agencies that allows them to unlock and access data stored in iPhones and Android smartphones. Magnet has developed a new device called GrayKey Preserve and a feature for its regular GrayKey devices called Evidence Preservation Mode, according to the video.
185909984
submission
alternative_right writes:
A new study covering 27 popular AI systems and 70 million individual statements found that larger language models tended to produce narrower, more repetitive information than smaller versions of the same models, even though bigger models are generally built to perform better.
After accounting for other factors, larger models were linked to less diversity, meaning smaller versions within the same model family tended to generate more varied claims than their bigger siblings. The researchers have a possible explanation: bigger models may memorize more of their training data, which could narrow what they say when asked about the same topic again and again.
