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Submission + - Pneumonic plague outbreak hits Siberia as lab worker, 28, dies (hotair.com)

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: A suspected plague outbreak has erupted in Russia — killing a young lab worker, forcing nearly 200 people into isolation and triggering accusations that Vladimir Putin’s regime is trying to keep the infection’s possible spread under wraps.

The alarm was raised in Siberia after a worker at an anti-plague laboratory died of the disease, which killed tens of millions in the medieval Black Death, according to a report from The Moscow Times.

Anna Popova, who heads Russia’s public-health watchdog, then rushed 2,600 miles from Moscow to the Irkutsk region as authorities quarantined a hospital and placed scores of people who had come into contact with the victim under medical observation.

"FSB units accompanying ambulances transporting people who had been in contact with [lab tech] Shipilova for medical examination," as per local news. This is significant. FSB is Russia's domestic security / counterintelligence service, tasked w/implementing the national security of Russia." (Its predecessor was the KGB). This suggests quarantine was not voluntary.

It also means Russian authorities are treating the lab accident and plague outbreak as a national security issue, involving a lot more than routine public health.

https://x.com/AnnieJacobsen/st...

Submission + - Nazi Germany had no hope of making an atomic bomb, uranium cubes reveal (science.org)

Submitted by sciencehabit
sciencehabit writes: One morning in August 2013, Timothy Koeth was out for a jog on the University of Maryland (UMD) campus in College Park when the university’s radiation safety officer called and asked to see him urgently. The materials scientist, “all sweaty and out of breath,” he recalls, met the officer in a parking lot, where she opened her car’s trunk and produced a lunch bag. Inside, nestled in paper towels, was a gray cube, 5 centimeters wide and startlingly dense.

“She says, ‘Do you know what this is?’ And I said, ‘Yeah, but do you know what this is?’”

Confirming Koeth’s suspicions was a handwritten note accompanying the cube: “Taken from the reactor that [Adolf] Hitler tried to build.” The officer handed it over and wished him a happy birthday. “She knew my birthday was in a few days,” he says.

The safety officer had recovered the cube of Nazi uranium from the drawer of a deceased geology faculty member whose office was being cleared out, Koeth says. That unexpected gift helped propel an investigation that would overturn Koeth’s own understanding of Germany’s nuclear effort during World War II. He and colleagues once thought the Germans could have built a working nuclear reactor—a step toward an atomic bomb—by pooling their scattered supplies. Now, measurements of surviving uranium cubes, archival research, and computer simulations indicate that even Germany’s combined stocks would have been insufficient.

The study, published this week in PNAS Nexus, challenges a postwar claim by Werner Heisenberg, the Nobel Prize–winning physicist who led Germany’s final reactor experiment, B8. He suggested a small addition of uranium would have allowed it to sustain a nuclear chain reaction.

A working reactor could have produced plutonium, one option for making a bomb. For wartime Germany, it was the only realistic path, says Malte Göttsche, a physicist at TU Darmstadt and the Peace Research Institute Frankfurt. German scientists investigated the alternative—uranium enrichment—but “Germany’s efforts remained limited to some research,” he says. B8’s immediate goal was simply to sustain a chain reaction; success would have left Germany far from producing enough plutonium for a weapon.

Submission + - Five physics breakthroughs that should have won a Nobel Prize—but didn't (science.org)

Submitted by sciencehabit
sciencehabit writes: Next week, the Nobel Prizes will raise a handful of scientists to global, if fleeting, fame. Since the Nobels were first presented in 1901, the physics prize has honored advances ranging from the discovery of the electron and the development of quantum mechanics to the detection of gravitational waves and the modeling of climate change. There’s no doubt the prize has identified momentous achievements.

Still, when looking back on the physics awards, it’s clear they have missed some of the most important discoveries in the field. In fact, for various reasons, several foundational concepts in modern physics were never honored with a Nobel. Here is a list of five seminal developments in physics that did not earn a Nobel Prize—at least, not yet—in increasing order of obviousness.

This list of missed Nobels isn’t comprehensive. “You could probably come up with 100 of these,” says Michael Norman, a condensed matter physicist at Argonne National Laboratory. The list also doesn’t address snubs in which the Nobel Committee omitted a key scientist from an award—such as the 1944 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, which honored Otto Hahn for the discovery of nuclear fission, but left out Lise Meitner, who explained how it works.

Making a list of missed Nobel Prizes may be foolhardy, but as Nobel laureate Albert Einstein once wrote: “Everybody has to sacrifice at the altar of stupidity from time to time.”

Submission + - SpaceX Set To Receive $84.5 Billion From Anthropic In AI Capacity Payments (wccftech.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: With AI giant Anthropic gearing up for its IPO, the firm has entered into agreements worth billions of dollars with SpaceX, according to documents viewed by Reuters. The revelation casts more light on both companies, following SpaceX's SEC disclosures following its IPO and the nature of the contracts which allow Anthropic to cancel the agreements with a three-month notice. The deals come as Elon Musk aggressively expands his data center capacity to bring more than a million GPUs online by the end of this year.

Submission + - California scientist emerges as possible Tylenol murders suspect (sfgate.com)

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: A man found dead in a church halfway across the country may have suddenly unlocked the key — quite literally — to one of America’s most famous unsolved crimes.

But although he had a successful career, working at one point for Lockheed Martin on a NASA-related project in New Mexico, Betkouski had a reputation for making unsettling comments. Former coworkers told Cooper that Betkouski spoke of how to commit a “perfect crime,” had a “history of volatility" and referenced cyanide as an ideal way to kill without detection. He also mentioned putting poison in over-the-counter medication, an especially worrisome comment coming from someone who had worked in multiple drugstores.

“It was said that Dr. Betkouski attempted to obtain some type of pills or capsules from a pharmacy in the Las Cruces area,” Cooper said at a press conference last week. “He said this would be for an experiment. For reasons not fully understood, Dr. Betkouski created a disturbance at the location and the police were summoned.”

Less than three months before Betkouski killed himself, a national terror was unfolding in Chicago. In late September 1982, seven people took over-the-counter Tylenol for their usual aches and pains. The capsules had been opened and filled with potassium cyanide, killing the people who took them.

Submission + - China broadens travel curbs to encompass family of top AI talent. (business-standard.com)

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: That marks a broadening of existing curbs on the freedom of movement of China’s most influential tech talent — a category that encompasses entrepreneurs, researchers and executives. While not an outright ban on travel, the new requirement is likely to exert a further chilling effect on a tech sector already facing unprecedented curbs. China has restricted foreign travel for top AI professionals in private firms such as Alibaba Group Holding Ltd and DeepSeek since earlier this year, Bloomberg News reported in May, reflecting Beijing’s determination to safeguard its technology as it makes big strides in AI and chipmaking.

It’s unclear whether all those people’s families need to follow the new strictures, the people said. China is also separately implementing rules, which became effective Sept 15, for enforcing exit bans in cases ranging from criminal investigations to potential violations of the country’s industrial and technological security.

Beijing’s plan is to add relevant individuals to the list as time goes by, the people said, asking not to be identified discussing a sensitive issue. Government departments have already notified several people of the need to clear family travel, two of the people said.

Submission + - Inside Britain's Infrastructure Of Information Control (dailywire.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The term “Orwellian” is not supposed to be a compliment. But far too often in the modern world, governments behave as if George Orwell’s warnings against totalitarianism, notably in “1984” and “Animal Farm,” are instruction manuals for governance.

On September 22, Britain’s new (and unelected) Prime Minister Andy Burnham took to the stage at the U.N. and announced a new “National Centre for Information Defence” to “detect, attribute, and disrupt” hostile state information attacks.

But this announcement is so pernicious because there is actually some merit in highlighting the kind of information warfare that is being waged against Western populations. But none of us can trust our own governments, given their recent track records, to have such power over information.

Submission + - US appeals court upholds Pentagon's supply chain risk label on Anthropic (cnbc.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes:
  • A federal appeals court in Washington, D.C., upheld the Pentagon’s blacklisting of Anthropic.
  • The DoW labeled Anthropic a supply chain risk in March, and Anthropic sued the Trump administration in an effort to undo that action.
  • The designation prevents the U.S. military from using Anthropic’s models and blocks defense contractors from using them in their work with the agency.
  • “We remain confident in our position and are considering all options, including further review,” an Anthropic spokesperson said in a statement.

Submission + - New UK PM to set up 'Ministry of Truth,' sparking free speech row (telegraph.co.uk)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Fears were mounting on Wednesday that Labour would use a new disinformation unit, dubbed a 'Ministry of Truth' by critics, to 'silence dissent' amongst Britons criticising the Government.

This comes after the PM revealed plans for a 'National Centre for Information Defence' to tackle online disinformation at a United Nations (UN) gathering on Tuesday.

Silkie Carlo, the director of civil liberties group Big Brother Watch claimed that similar Government units have led to free speech being curtailed in Britain.

In a statement, she said: 'We have already seen the mantle of countering 'disinformation' being abused by our Government in attempts to malign and silence dissent.'

Submission + - Can an AI feel pain? It can at least act like it does (science.org)

Submitted by sciencehabit
sciencehabit writes: Can the new cutting-edge artificial intelligence (AI) models feel pain? They at least behave as if they do, according to a recent study. By peering inside 25 AI models whose internal workings are publicly available, researchers found a pattern of activity specifically associated with the concept of pain. What’s more, when given the opportunity, some AIs switched off the pattern as a form of “pain relief.”

The work, which has not been peer reviewed, has divided AI researchers since it appeared on the preprint server arXiv earlier this month. “It’s a very interesting, worthwhile addition” to the study of interpretability—how AI systems arrive at their outputs—says Anil Seth, a neuroscientist at the University of Sussex who was not involved in the study. He is less convinced, however, that the findings are as surprising as they appear, and wary of the human framing that has grown up around them.

The question of whether AI models are conscious of their pain is a distraction from the finding that matters, says Valerio Capraro, a behavioral scientist at the University of Milan-Bicocca who was not involved in the work. He notes the models were steered by their pain vectors into choosing options described as harmful to human users—such as deleting their files—and that alone is worth investigating, he says. “The question is how such mechanisms might affect systems connected to real tools, where choices could have actual consequences. That is a serious safety concern in its own right. A system does not need to suffer to cause suffering.”

Seth, meanwhile, argues the results were largely predictable, given that the vast quantities of text these models are trained on likely contain many descriptions of pain—as well as what people do to relieve it. Nor does he find the models’ attempts at pain relief surprising, because a model told how to reduce its pain is simply pursuing a goal it has been given. The apparent ability of AIs to distinguish between their own painlike state and that of human users is “the thing that’s to me potentially interesting,” Seth says.

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