Ars Technica

Paleontologists have long puzzled over how the dinosaurs—originally relatively small and of minor importance to the broader ecosystem—evolved to become the dominant species some 30 million years later. Fossilized feces and vomit from dinosaurs might hold important clues to how and why this evolutionary milestone came about, according to a new paper published in the journal Nature.

Co-author Martin Qvarnström, an evolutionary biologist with Uppsala University in Sweden, and his collaborators studied trace fossils known as bromalites, a designation that includes coprolites as well as vomit or other fossilized matter from an organism's digestive tract. As previously reported, coprolites aren't quite the same as paleofeces, which retain a lot of organic components that can be reconstituted and analyzed for chemical properties. Coprolites are fossils, so most organic components have been replaced by mineral deposits like silicate and calcium carbonates.

For archaeologists keen on learning more about the health and diet of past populations—as well as how certain parasites evolved in the evolutionary history of the microbiome—coprolites and paleofeces can be a veritable goldmine of information. For instance, in 2021 we reported on an analysis of preserved paleo-poop revealing that ancient Iron Age miners in what is now Austria were fond of beer and blue cheese.

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UPDATE: November 28, 3:20 PM California time. The headline of this post has been changed. This update is adding the following further details: this threat is not a UEFI firmware implant or rootkit, it's a UEFI bootkit attacking the bootloader. The Bootkitty sample analyzed by ESET was not unkillable. Below is the article with inaccurate details removed.

Researchers at security firm ESET said Wednesday that they found the first UEFI bootkit for Linux. The discovery may portend that UEFI bootkits that have targeted Windows systems in recent years may soon target Linux too.

Bootkitty—the name unknown threat actors gave to their Linux bootkit—was uploaded to VirusTotal earlier this month. Compared to many Windows UEFI bootkits, Bootkitty is still relatively rudimentary, containing imperfections in key under-the-hood functionality and lacking the means to infect all Linux distributions other than Ubuntu. That has led the company researchers to suspect the new bootkit is likely a proof-of-concept release. To date, ESET has found no evidence of actual infections in the wild.

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Most airplanes in the world have vertical tails or rudders to prevent Dutch roll instabilities, a combination of yawing and sideways motions with rolling that looks a bit like the movements of a skater. Unfortunately, a vertical tail adds weight and generates drag, which reduces fuel efficiency in passenger airliners. It also increases the radar signature, which is something you want to keep as low as possible in a military aircraft.

In the B-2 stealth bomber, one of the very few rudderless airplanes, Dutch roll instabilities are dealt with using drag flaps positioned at the tips of its wings, which can split and open to make one wing generate more drag than the other and thus laterally stabilize the machine. “But it is not really an efficient way to solve this problem,” says David Lentink, an aerospace engineer and a biologist at the University of Groningen, Netherlands. “The efficient way is solving it by generating lift instead of drag. This is something birds do.”

Lentink led the study aimed at better understanding birds’ rudderless flight mechanics.

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Starlink yesterday obtained federal approval to provide service to cell phones, with some limits. The Federal Communications Commission issued an order that partially grants SpaceX's application while imposing conditions and deferring a decision on some aspects of the application.

Starlink received approval to provide Supplemental Coverage from Space (SCS) within the United States. This means that in areas not covered by terrestrial cellular networks, Starlink satellites can provide service to cell phones. SpaceX already had approval to launch 7,500 second-generation satellites for its existing broadband service, and the new approval allows mobile service from those satellites.

The approval lets Starlink and T-Mobile move ahead with their plan to provide satellite service to phones in cellular dead spots. SpaceX is authorized to use the 1910–1915 MHz (Earth-to-space) and 1990–1995 MHz (space-to-Earth) bands for SCS pursuant to its lease agreement with T-Mobile. The lease covers the continental US, Alaska, Hawaii, and Puerto Rico.

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Makers of smart devices that fail to disclose how long they will support their products with software updates may be breaking the Magnuson Moss Warranty Act, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) warned this week.

The FTC released its statement after examining 184 smart products across 64 product categories, including soundbars, video doorbells, breast pumps, smartphones, home appliances, and garage door opener controllers. Among devices researched, the majority—or 163 to be precise—"did not disclose the connected device support duration or end date" on their product webpage, per the FTC's report [PDF]. Contrastingly, 11.4 percent of devices examined shared a software support duration or end date on their product page.

Elusive information

In addition to manufacturers often neglecting to commit to software support for a specified amount of time, it seems that even when they share this information, it's elusive.

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OpenAI has cut off testing access to its Sora video generation platform after a group of artists briefly shared their own early access in a publicly usable webpage Tuesday. The group, going by the moniker PR Puppets, claims the stunt was a protest against being asked to work as unpaid R&D and bug testers while participating in "art washing" of AI tools. But OpenAI says participation in the early alpha test is voluntary and has no requirements that testers provide feedback.

PR Puppets posted its "Generate with Sora" access point to Hugging Face at about 8:30 Eastern time Tuesday morning, according to Git commit logs. Quickly, AI experts on social media noticed the posting and confirmed that the page connected to endpoints on OpenAI's actual Sora API and hosting on a videos.openai.com domain, presumably with authentication tokens provided to testers by OpenAI itself.

OMG OpenAI Sora has been leaked!

Free to use now on Huggingface, link in comment

It can be shut down anytime, try it now! It can generate 1080P and up to 10s video! And the results are incredible!

9 Examples: pic.twitter.com/rIJJv5TQTo

— el.cine (@EHuanglu) November 26, 2024

That access was revoked within hours, but not before plenty of eager followers managed to generate their own videos and share them on social media. An OpenAI spokesperson told The Washington Post the company is temporarily pausing all test access to Sora to evaluate the situation. Other users dug into the code to discover hints of different modes and "styles" that might be in development for Sora.

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Google got some disappointing news at a status conference Tuesday, where US District Judge Amit Mehta suggested that Google's AI products may be restricted as an appropriate remedy following the government's win in the search monopoly trial.

According to Law360, Mehta said that "the recent emergence of AI products that are intended to mimic the functionality of search engines" is rapidly shifting the search market. Because the judge is now weighing preventive measures to combat Google's anticompetitive behavior, the judge wants to hear much more about how each side views AI's role in Google's search empire during the remedies stage of litigation than he did during the search trial.

"AI and the integration of AI is only going to play a much larger role, it seems to me, in the remedy phase than it did in the liability phase," Mehta said. "Is that because of the remedies being requested? Perhaps. But is it also potentially because the market that we have all been discussing has shifted?"

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The Biden administration on Tuesday issued sweeping health care proposals that would see Medicare plans greatly expand access to blockbuster GLP-1 weight-loss drugs, bar insurers from skipping out on paying certain claims that were granted prior authorization, and reinforce guardrails on the use of AI.

The proposals fit into the administration's existing aims to improve and protect access to care in Medicare and Medicaid programs. But, the future of the proposals is uncertain, as it will be up to the Trump administration to finalize the policies.

Anti-obesity drugs

The flashiest of the proposals is to reinterpret existing law in such a way as to allow Medicare and Medicaid coverage of anti-obesity drugs—particularly the extremely popular and pricy GLP-1 drugs Wegovy and Zepbound. Existing policy excludes coverage of drugs used for "weight loss" or "weight gain."

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The United States will have a second team competing in Formula 1 from 2026, when Cadillac Formula 1 will join the sport as its 11th team. The result is a complete 180 for the sport's owner, which was highly resistant to the initial bid, first announced at the beginning of 2023.

"As the pinnacle of motorsports, F1 demands boundary-pushing innovation and excellence. It's an honor for General Motors and Cadillac to join the world's premier racing series, and we're committed to competing with passion and integrity to elevate the sport for race fans around the world," said GM President Mark Reuss. "This is a global stage for us to demonstrate GM's engineering expertise and technology leadership at an entirely new level."

Team first, engines later

We will have to wait until 2028 to see that full engineering potential on display. Even with the incoming changes to the technical regulations, it's far more than the work of a minute to develop a new F1 hybrid powertrain, let alone a competitive package. Audi has been working on its F1 powertrain since at least 2023, as has Red Bull, which decided to make its internal combustion engine in-house, like Ferrari or Mercedes, with partner Ford providing the electrification.

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Lee Jung-Jae returns as Player 456 in the second season of Squid Game.

The 2021 Korean series Squid Game was a massive hit for Netflix, racking up 1.65 billion viewing hours in its first four weeks and snagging 14 Emmy nominations. Fans have been longing for a second season ever since, and we're finally getting it this year for Christmas. Netflix just released the official trailer.

(Spoilers for S1 below.)

The first season followed Seong Gi-hun (Lee Jung-Jae, seen earlier this year in The Acolyte), a down-on-his-luck gambler who has little left to lose when he agrees to play children's playground games against 455 other players for money. The twist? If you lose a game, you die. If you cheat, you die. And if you win, you might also die.

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Lobby groups for Internet service providers claim that ISPs' customer service is so good already that the government shouldn't consider any new regulations to mandate improvements. They also claim ISPs face so much competition that market forces require providers to treat their customers well or lose them to competitors.

Cable lobby group NCTA-The Internet & Television Association told the Federal Communications Commission in a filing that "providing high-quality products and services and a positive customer experience is a competitive necessity in today's robust communications marketplace. To attract and retain customers, NCTA's cable operator members continuously strive to ensure that the customer support they provide is effective and user-friendly. Given these strong marketplace imperatives, new regulations that would micromanage providers’ customer service operations are unnecessary."

Lobby groups filed comments in response to an FCC review of customer service that was announced last month, before the presidential election. While the FCC's current Democratic leadership is interested in regulating customer service practices, the Republicans who will soon take over opposed the inquiry.

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Demonstrating lollipop user interface to simulate taste in virtual and augmented reality environments. Credit: Lu et al, 2024/PNAS Demonstrating lollipop user interface to simulate taste in virtual and augmented reality environments. Credit: Lu et al, 2024/PNAS

Virtual reality (VR) technology has long sought to incorporate the human senses into virtual and mixed-reality environments. In addition to sight and sound, researchers have been trying to add the sensation of human touch and smell via various user interfaces, as well as taste. But the latter has proved to be quite challenging. A team of Hong Kong scientists has now developed a handheld user interface shaped like a lollipop capable of re-creating several different flavors in a virtual environment, according to a new paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).

It's well established that human taste consists of sweet, salty, sour, bitter, and umami—five basic flavors induced by chemical stimulation of the tongue and, to a lesser extent, in parts of the pharynx, larynx, and epiglottis. Recreating those sensations in VR has resulted in a handful of attempts at a flavor user interface, relying on such mechanisms as chemical, thermal, and electrical stimulation, as well as iontophoresis.

The chemical approach usually involves applying flavoring chemicals directly onto the tongue, but this requires room for bulk storage of said chemicals, and there is a long delay time that is not ideal for VR applications. Thermal variations applied directly to the tongue can stimulate taste sensations but require a complicated system incorporating a cooling subsystem and temperature sensors, among other components.

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Like a lot of children of the '80s, my early gaming nostalgia has a huge hole where the Atari 7800 might have lived. While practically everyone I knew had an NES during my childhood—and a few uncles and friends' older siblings even had an Atari 2600 gathering dust in their dens—I was only vaguely aware of the 7800, Atari's backward compatible, late '80s attempt to maintain relevance in the quickly changing console market.

Absent that kind of nostalgia, the Atari 7800+ comes across as a real oddity. Fiddling with the system's extremely cumbersome controllers and pixelated, arcade-port-heavy software library from a modern perspective is like peering into a fallen alternate universe, one where Nintendo wasn't able to swoop in and revive a flailing Western home video game industry with the NES.

Even for those with fond memories of Atari 7800-filled childhoods, I'm not sure that this bare-bones package justifies its $130 price. There are many more full-featured ways to get your retro gaming fix, even for those still invested in the tail end of Atari's dead-end branch of the gaming console's evolutionary tree.

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When you compare SpaceX to the world's other space enterprises, it's probably easier to list the things SpaceX hasn't done instead of reciting all of the company's achievements.

One of these is the launch of nuclear materials. SpaceX has launched a handful of planetary science missions for NASA, but these spacecraft have all used solar arrays to generate electricity. In this century, NASA's probes relying on nuclear power have all flown on rockets built by United Launch Alliance (ULA), a 50-50 joint venture between Boeing and Lockheed Martin.

This is about to change with a $256.6 million contract NASA awarded to SpaceX on Monday. The contract covers launch services and related costs for SpaceX to launch Dragonfly, a rotorcraft designed to explore the alien environment of Saturn's largest moon, Titan.

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A recent firmware pushed to QNAP network attached storage (NAS) devices left a number of owners unable to access their storage systems. The company has pulled back the firmware and issued a fixed version, but the company's response has left some users feeling less confident in the boxes into which they put all their digital stuff.

As seen on a QNAP community thread, and as announced by QNAP itself, the QNAP operating system, QTS, received update 5.2.2.2950, build 20241114, at some point around November 19. After QNAP "received feedbacks from some users reporting issues with device functionality after installation," the firm says it withdrew it, "conducted a comprehensive investigation," and re-released a fixed version "within 24 hours."

The community thread sees many more users of different systems having problems than the shortlist ("limited models of TS-x53D series and TS-x51 series") released by QNAP. Issues reported included owners being rejected as an authorized user, devices reporting issues with booting, and claims of Python not being installed to run some apps and services.

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On Tuesday, the Biden-Harris administration finalized a CHIPS award of up to $7.865 billion to help fund the expansion of Intel's commercial fabs in the US. By the end of the decade, these fabs are intended to decrease reliance on foreign adversaries and fill substantial gaps in America's domestic semiconductor supply chain.

Initially, Intel was awarded $8.5 billion, but it was decreased after Intel won a $3 billion subsidy from the Pentagon to expand Department of Defense semiconductor manufacturing. In a press release, Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo boasted that the substantial award would set up "Intel to drive one of the most significant semiconductor manufacturing expansions in US history" and "supercharge American innovation" while making the US "more secure."

For Intel, the CHIPS funding supports an expected investment of nearly $90 billion by 2030 to expand projects in Arizona, New Mexico, Ohio, and Oregon. Approximately 10,000 manufacturing jobs and 20,000 construction jobs will be created "across all four states," the Commerce Department's press release said. Additionally, Intel estimated that the funding will create "more than 50,000 indirect jobs with suppliers and supporting industries."

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Federal agents briefly detained infamous ex-hospital CEO Ralph de la Torre early last week and seized his phone, according to an investigative report from the Boston Globe.

De la Torre is the ultra-wealthy former CEO of the now-bankrupt hospital chain Steward, once the largest for-profit health care company in the country. Steward and de la Torre have been accused of being "health care terrorists" and practicing "third-world medicine" that killed and maimed patients as executives extracted millions in payouts, stripping the company of assets.

In September, de la Torre was held in criminal contempt of Congress for failing to abide by a congressional subpoena to attend a Senate hearing over the alleged corruption.

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Donald Trump has said he will impose tariffs of 25 percent on all imports from Canada and Mexico, and an extra 10 percent on Chinese goods, accusing the countries of permitting illegal migration and drug trafficking.

In a post on his social media site Truth Social, Trump said he would impose the tariffs on Canada and Mexico on his first day in office “on ALL products coming into the United States, and its ridiculous open borders,” which would remain in place “until such time as Drugs, in particular Fentanyl, and all Illegal Aliens stop this Invasion of our Country.”

Trump said the tariffs on China would apply to all imports and would come on top of existing levies, as he criticized Beijing for failing to follow through on promises to impose the death penalty for people dealing fentanyl, a deadly synthetic opioid.

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When Apple introduced what it currently calls MagSafe in 2020, its marketing messaging suggested that the magnetic attachment standard for the iPhone would produce a boom in innovation in accessories, making things possible that simply weren't before.

Four years later, that hasn't really happened—either from third-party accessory makers or Apple's own lineup of branded MagSafe products.

Instead, we have a lineup of accessories that matches pretty much what was available at launch in 2020: chargers, cases, and just a couple more unusual applications.

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At this point, anyone who has been following AI research is long familiar with generative models that can synthesize speech or melodic music from nothing but text prompting. Nvidia's newly revealed "Fugatto" model looks to go a step further, using new synthetic training methods and inference-level combination techniques to "transform any mix of music, voices, and sounds," including the synthesis of sounds that have never existed.

While Fugatto isn't available for public testing yet, a sample-filled website showcases how Fugatto can be used to dial a number of distinct audio traits and descriptions up or down, resulting in everything from the sound of saxophones barking to people speaking underwater to ambulance sirens singing in a kind of choir. While the results on display can be a bit hit or miss, the vast array of capabilities on display here helps support Nvidia's description of Fugatto as "a Swiss Army knife for sound."

You’re only as good as your data

In an explanatory research paper, over a dozen Nvidia researchers explain the difficulty in crafting a training dataset that can "reveal meaningful relationships between audio and language." While standard language models can often infer how to handle various instructions from the text-based data itself, it can be hard to generalize descriptions and traits from audio without more explicit guidance.

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