×

Submission + - Things Women Find Attractive In Men (digitalmindwork.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Things women find attractive in men, What do girls find attractive in boys, girls find attractive in boys, what attracts women to men,Things,

Submission + - Chinese zoo ADMITS what we all knew about its 'pandas' (nypost.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: China zoo forced to admit the truth after one of their “pandas” started panting and barking.

The Shanwei zoo admits they painted dogs white and black to make them look like pandas.

The zoo initially tried claiming that the dogs were a unique breed of pandas called “panda dogs.”

It was later discovered that the “pandas” were Chow Chows who were dyed with white and black paint.

Submission + - NVivo 12 Free Download with License key Crack (filepc.org)

Submitted by Faruk664
Faruk664 writes: NVivo Free Download With License Key Crack is a powerful data analysis software designed to assist researchers in collecting, organizing, and analyzing various types of data, including interviews, focus group discussions, surveys, multimedia content, and more. It excels in handling both structured and unstructured data, making it a valuable tool for researchers dealing with diverse information sources. Get Download NVivo free with license key crack.

One notable feature of NVivo Free Download With License Key Crack is its ability to manage social media and web content, making it the only qualitative data analysis software that can collect data from platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. This versatility allows researchers to analyze a wide range of digital content, enhancing their understanding of online trends and interactions.

NVivo Crack extensive toolkit includes advanced search, query, and visualization tools that enable in-depth data analysis. It supports various data sources, such as text, audio, video, emails, images, tables, online surveys, and databases, making it a comprehensive solution for qualitative research. Researchers can efficiently organize and analyze complex and disorganized information, leading to more informed decision-making and improved work efficiency.

Submission + - WoW Now Lets Players Do Solo Raids (arstechnica.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: After 20 years, it's now possible for solo players to finish storylines in the massively multiplayer online role-playing game World of Warcraft that previously required a group to do an intensive raid. That's thanks to "Story Mode," a new raid difficulty that was added for the final wing of the first raid of the recently released The War Within expansion.

Over the years, developer Blizzard has expanded the difficulty options for raids to meet various players and communities where they are in terms of play styles. The top difficulty is Mythic, where the semi-pro hardcore guilds compete. Below that is Heroic, where serious, capital-G gamers coordinate with friends in weekly raid schedules to progress. Then there's Normal, which still requires some coordination but isn't nearly as challenging and can typically be completed within a few tries by a pick-up group. The most accessible difficulty is Raid Finder, where you're matched with random players automatically to complete a vastly easier version of a raid. Now Story Mode has been added to the mix, and it's even easier than Raid Finder.

In Story Mode, you fight only the raid's final boss, which has been scaled back in stats and complexity so that it's beatable for a single player or a very small group of friends. Challenging encounter mechanics have been removed, and the whole fight has been retooled to focus exclusively on the narrative aspects. There are some rewards, but they're not the same as those on more difficult raids; the goal was to avoid cheapening the experience for those who do want to go all the way. So far, Story Mode is available exclusively for the newest raid, which is called Nerub-ar Palace. It hasn't been made available for other encounters yet, but Blizzard has hinted that this could be the long-term goal.

Submission + - Walmart Plans Instant Bank Payments, Cutting Out Card Networks (bnnbloomberg.ca)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Walmart customers will soon have the option to pay directly from their bank accounts with instant transfers for online purchases. The enhanced feature is a flash point in the escalating tensions between merchants and the card networks setting the fees for payment processing. The world’s largest retailer has offered pay-by-bank through Walmart Pay since earlier this year. Until now, the transactions were akin to digital checks and took roughly three days to finalize when being processed through The Automated Clearing House, the same network often used for bill payments or paycheck deposits. Soon, customers opting for pay-by-bank transactions will see the purchase reflected in their bank account balance instantly – and Walmart will receive the funds immediately.

Walmart’s upgraded pay-by-bank offering will be rolled out in 2025. The transactions will occur over bank technology provider Fiserv’s NOW Network, which integrates with The Clearing House’s Real Time Payments network and the Federal Reserve’s FedNow. Until now, large retailers hesitated to launch real time payment options because many banks were not connected to an instant settlement system, meaning their customers would not be able to use the product. NOW Network aims to connect to as many banks as possible to reach 100% of deposit accounts by combining its own network with RTP and FedNow. The instant pay-by-bank product will be available for online checkout on Walmart.com. The Bentonville, Arkansas-based retailer already has customers set up a profile when they shop online. If they opt to add pay-by-bank as a payment option on their profile, they will enter their bank login credentials to connect their account. Fiserv’s AllData platform connects with their bank clients and vendors including Plaid, MX, Akoya and Finicity to link and authenticate consumer accounts.

Submission + - ISPs tell Supreme Court they don't want to disconnect users accused of piracy (arstechnica.com)

Submitted by Joe_Dragon
Joe_Dragon writes: Sony v. Cox —
ISPs tell Supreme Court they don’t want to disconnect users accused of piracy
ISPs say Sony's win over Cox would force them to do "mass Internet evictions."

Jon Brodkin — 9/18/2024, 1:32 PM
The US Supreme Court building is seen on a sunny day. Kids mingle around a small pool on the grounds in front of the building.
Enlarge / The Supreme Court of the United States in Washington, DC, in May 2023.
Getty Images | NurPhoto
86

Four more large Internet service providers told the US Supreme Court this week that ISPs shouldn't be forced to aggressively police copyright infringement on broadband networks.

While the ISPs worry about financial liability from lawsuits filed by major record labels and other copyright holders, they also argue that mass terminations of Internet users accused of piracy "would harm innocent people by depriving households, schools, hospitals, and businesses of Internet access." The legal question presented by the case "is exceptionally important to the future of the Internet," they wrote in a brief filed with the Supreme Court on Monday.

The amici curiae brief was filed by Altice USA (operator of the Optimum brand), Frontier Communications, Lumen (aka CenturyLink), and Verizon. The brief supports cable firm Cox Communications' attempt to overturn its loss in a copyright infringement lawsuit brought by Sony. Cox petitioned the Supreme Court to take up the case last month.

Sony and other music copyright holders sued Cox in 2018, claiming it didn't adequately fight piracy on its network and failed to terminate repeat infringers. A US District Court jury in the Eastern District of Virginia ruled in December 2019 that Cox must pay $1 billion in damages to the major record labels.

Cox won a partial victory when the US Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit vacated the $1 billion verdict, finding that Cox wasn't guilty of vicarious infringement because it did not profit directly from infringement committed by users of its cable broadband network. But the appeals court affirmed the jury's finding of willful contributory infringement and ordered a new damages trial.
Future of Internet at stake, ISPs say

The Altice/Frontier/Lumen/Verizon brief said the 4th Circuit ruling "imperils the future of the Internet" by "expos[ing] Internet service providers to massive liability if they do not carry out mass Internet evictions." Cutting off a subscriber's service would hurt other residents in a home "who did not infringe and may have no connection to the infringer," they wrote.

The automated processes used by copyright holders to find infringement on peer-to-peer networks are "famously flawed," ISPs wrote. Despite that, the appeals court's "view of contributory infringement would force Internet service providers to cut off any subscriber after receiving allegations that some unknown person used the subscriber's connection for copyright infringement," the brief said.

Under the 4th Circuit's theory, "an Internet service provider acts culpably whenever it knowingly fails to stop some bad actor from exploiting its service," the brief said. According to the ISPs, this "would compel Internet service providers to engage in wide-scale terminations to avoid facing crippling damages, like the $1 billion judgment entered against Cox here, the $2.6 billion damages figure touted by these same plaintiffs in a recent suit against Verizon, or the similarly immense figures sought from Frontier and Altice USA."

Potential liability for ISPs is up to $150,000 in statutory damages for each work that is infringed, the brief said. "Enterprising plaintiffs' lawyers could seek to hold Internet service providers liable for every bad act that occurs online," they wrote. This threat of financial liability detracts from the ISPs' attempts "to fulfill Congress's goal of connecting all Americans to the Internet," the ISPs said.

ISPs cite Twitter’s Supreme Court win

The ISPs' brief argues that the 4th Circuit decision conflicts with the Supreme Court's 2023 ruling in Twitter v. Taamneh, which rejected allegations that social media companies aided and abetted ISIS in a terrorist attack. ISPs wrote:

        But the Fourth Circuit's rule runs roughshod over the traditional common-law limits on aiding-and-abetting liability. This Court recently clarified those principles in Twitter. That case addressed claims that Twitter and other social-media companies aided and abetted terrorism by knowingly failing to stop ISIS from using their platforms to raise funds and attract recruits. In assessing those claims, the Court invoked the same principles that have "animated aiding-and-abetting liability for centuries," searching for "conscious, voluntary, and culpable participation in another's wrongdoing." Under the common law, the Court stressed, "truly culpable conduct" exists when "the defendant consciously and culpably participated in a wrongful act so as to help make it succeed." The Court emphasized the need for such active wrongdoing more than a dozen times.

        A communication provider's failure to stop bad actors from misusing its service does not qualify. Under the common law, this Court explained, "communication-providing services" have no "duty" "to terminate customers after discovering that the customers were using the service for illicit ends." For that reason, the Court held that the social-media companies' continued provision of routine communication service to terrorists was "mere passive nonfeasance" that did not amount to culpable aid. And in words that could have been written for this case, the Court explained that it "would run roughshod over the typical limits on tort liability and take aiding and abetting far beyond its essential culpability moorings" to hold a "communication provider" liable "merely for knowing that... wrongdoers were using its services and failing to stop them."

ISPs say they shouldn't be liable for copyright infringement because "aiding and abetting requires some act to support the wrongdoing—not mere knowledge that a customer is doing something wrong." Providing service to a customer is not the same as providing "substantial assistance" to a wrongdoer, they wrote.

"Providing routine services to a wrongdoer generally counts as substantial assistance only if done under 'unusual circumstances' or 'in an unusual way,'" ISPs wrote. ISPs claim the 4th Circuit "made the same errors this Court corrected in Twitter" when it "ruled that Cox materially contributed to its subscribers' infringement by knowingly failing to cut their Internet connections."
Sony wants to reinstate $1 billion verdict

Even if ISPs win their argument, copyright holders will still have the right to pursue claims of infringement directly against the infringers, the brief said. "They can still use any evidence they collect of online infringement to serve subpoenas to learn the identity of the customer whose Internet access was used for infringement," ISPs wrote. "The subpoenas can then lead to direct actions against the actual infringers."

Record labels say going after individuals is too difficult. Sony and other labels want the Supreme Court to reinstate the $1 billion verdict along with the jury's original finding that Cox was guilty of vicarious infringement.

"Vicarious liability is an especially important tool in the digital age where pursuing direct infringers—in this case, thousands of faceless individuals who cannot be identified except through an ISP like Respondent—is impractical at best and impossible at worst," record labels wrote in an August 16 petition to the Supreme Court.

Record labels say the case "is an ideal vehicle to resolve the scope of the profit requirement," given that the 4th Circuit decided record labels failed to prove that Cox profits directly from subscribers' infringement. "The facts that underpin the jury's profit finding—Cox's fees, its employees' emails, its advertising, and its network traffic—are not in dispute," they wrote.

Submission + - Creator of Kamala Harris video sues California over election 'deepfake' ban (politico.com)

Submitted by SonicSpike
SonicSpike writes: The creator of a video that used artificial intelligence to imitate Kamala Harris is suing the state of California after Gov. Gavin Newsom signed laws restricting the use of digitally altered political “deepfakes,” alleging First and 14th Amendment violations.

Christopher Kohls, who goes by the name “Mr Reagan” on X, has been at the center of a debate over the use of AI-generated material in elections since he posted the video in July, calling it a parody of a Harris campaign ad. It features AI-generated clips mimicking Harris’ voice and saying she’s the “ultimate diversity hire.” The video was shared by X owner Elon Musk without calling it parody and attracted the ire of Newsom, who vowed to ban such content.

The governor made good on that promise Tuesday by signing laws targeting fraudulent campaign materials. Now, Kohls is suing, arguing the governor is trying to make computer-generated parody illegal and asserting that political satire is a “fundamental First Amendment Right.”

The suit, filed Tuesday in federal court, seeks permanent injunctions against the laws.

One of the laws in question, the Defending Democracy from Deepfake Deception Act, specifies that it does not apply to satire or parody content. It requires large online platforms to remove or label deceptive, digitally altered media during certain periods before or after an election.

Newsom spokesperson Izzy Gardon said in a statement that Kohls had already labeled the post as a parody on X.

“Requiring them to use the word ‘parody’ on the actual video avoids further misleading the public as the video is shared across the platform,” Gardon said. “It’s unclear why this conservative activist is suing California. This new disclosure law for election misinformation isn’t any more onerous than laws already passed in other states, including Alabama.”

Submission + - Patents For Software and Genetic Code Could Be Revived By Two Bills In Congress (arstechnica.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The Senate Judiciary Committee is scheduled to consider two bills Thursday that would effectively nullify the Supreme Court's rulings against patents on broad software processes and human genes. Open source and Internet freedom advocates are mobilizing and pushing back. The Patent Eligibility Restoration Act (or PERA, S. 2140), sponsored by Sens. Thom Tillis (R-NC) and Chris Coons (D-Del.), would amend US Code such that "all judicial exceptions to patent eligibility are eliminated." That would include the 2014 ruling in which the Supreme Court held, with Justice Clarence Thomas writing, that simply performing an existing process on a computer does not make it a new, patentable invention. "The relevant question is whether the claims here do more than simply instruct the practitioner to implement the abstract idea of intermediated settlement on a generic computer," Thomas wrote. "They do not." That case also drew on Bilski v. Kappos, a case in which a patent was proposed based solely on the concept of hedging against price fluctuations in commodity markets. [...]

Another wrinkle in the PERA bill involves genetic patents. The Supreme Court ruled in June 2013 that pieces of DNA that occur naturally in the genomes of humans or other organisms cannot, themselves, be patented. Myriad Genetics had previously been granted patents on genes associated with breast and ovarian cancer, BRCA1 and BRCA2, which were targeted in a lawsuit led by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). The resulting Supreme Court decision—this one also written by Thomas—found that information that naturally occurs in the human genome could not be the subject to a patent, even if the patent covered the process of isolating that information from the rest of the genome. As with broad software patents, PERA would seemingly allow for the patenting of isolated human genes and connections between those genes and diseases like cancer. [...] The Judiciary Committee is set to debate and potentially amend or rewrite PREVAIL and PERA (i.e. mark up) on Thursday.

Submission + - Microsoft and Abu Dhabi's MGX To Back $30 Billion BlackRock AI Infrastructure (datacenterdynamics.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: BlackRock plans to launch a new $30 billion artificial intelligence (AI) investment fund focused on data centers and energy projects. Microsoft and Abu Dhabi-backed investment company MGX are general partners of the fund. GPU giant Nvidia will also advise. Run through BlackRock's Global Infrastructure Partners fund, which it acquired for $12.5 billion earlier this year, the 'Global AI Investment Partnership,' plans to raise up to $30 billion in equity investments. Another $70 billion could come via leveraged debt financing.

Submission + - Tesla employee exposed a dangerous safety flaw in Autopilot (thestreet.com)

Submitted by smooth wombat
smooth wombat writes: Tesla has promised hands-free driving for some time using its AutoPilot system. The key components of this system are cameras which monitor every corner of the vehicle and the machine learning software that makes decisions on how to respond to road hazards. In addition, there is a team of Tesla employees who review what AutoPilot sees and change the software as needed to respond to those conditions. However, instead of making the drive more safe, some of those employees have reported Tesla has directed them to not teach AutoPilot the rules of the road.

The extent of this stance, some workers revealed, came as far as being told to not teach Autopilot to follow certain traffic signs like "No Turn On Red" or "No U-Turn" in the effort of making its systems drive the cars more "human-like."

"It's a driver-first mentality," a former Tesla employee told BI. "I think the idea is we want to train it to drive like a human would, not a robot that's just following the rules."

Additionally, much to the same tune of Facebook content moderators, these workers viewed some pretty disturbing footage day in and day out, which were not limited to Teslas getting into accidents and near misses. A few workers even disclosed to BI that a fellow employee shared a disturbing video involving a Tesla vehicle hitting a young boy on a bicycle as a joke.

Submission + - YouTube Launches Communities, a Discord-Like Space For Creators and Fans (techcrunch.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: At its Made On YouTube event on Wednesday, the company announced a new dedicated space for creators to interact with their fans and viewers. The space, called “Communities,” is kind of like a Discord server built into a creator’s channel. With Communities, YouTube is hoping creators won’t need to use other platforms like Discord or Reddit in order to interact with viewers. Communities are a space for viewers to post and interact with other fans directly within a creator’s channel. In the past, viewers have been limited to leaving comments on a creator’s video. Now, they can share their own content in a creator’s Community to interact with other fans over shared interests. For instance, a fitness creator’s Community could include posts from fans who are sharing videos and photos from their most recent hike.

To start, the feature is only available to subscribers. The company sees Communities as a dedicated space for conversation and connection, while still allowing creators to maintain control over their content. Conversations in Communities are meant to flow over time, YouTube says, as they would in any other forum-style setting. The new Communities feature shouldn’t be confused with YouTube’s Community feature, which is a space for creators to share text and images with viewers. The feature launched back in 2016, and doesn’t allow viewers to interact with each other. YouTube is testing Communities now on mobile devices with a small group of creators. The company plans to test the feature with more creators later this year before expanding access to additional channels in early 2025.

Submission + - FAA fines SpaceX for launch license violations (spacenews.com)

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: The Federal Aviation Administration announced its intent to fine SpaceX more than $633,000 for violating its launch licenses on two occasions in 2023, a decision SpaceX CEO Elon Musk said he will fight in court.

Submission + - AI Tool Cuts Unexpected Deaths In Hospital By 26%, Canadian Study Finds (www.cbc.ca)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Inside a bustling unit at St. Michael's Hospital in downtown Toronto, one of Shirley Bell's patients was suffering from a cat bite and a fever, but otherwise appeared fine — until an alert from an AI-based early warning system showed he was sicker than he seemed. While the nursing team usually checked blood work around noon, the technology flagged incoming results several hours beforehand. That warning showed the patient's white blood cell count was "really, really high," recalled Bell, the clinical nurse educator for the hospital's general medicine program. The cause turned out to be cellulitis, a bacterial skin infection. Without prompt treatment, it can lead to extensive tissue damage, amputations and even death. Bell said the patient was given antibiotics quickly to avoid those worst-case scenarios, in large part thanks to the team's in-house AI technology, dubbed Chartwatch. "There's lots and lots of other scenarios where patients' conditions are flagged earlier, and the nurse is alerted earlier, and interventions are put in earlier," she said. "It's not replacing the nurse at the bedside; it's actually enhancing your nursing care."

A year-and-a-half-long study on Chartwatch, published Monday in the Canadian Medical Association Journal, found that use of the AI system led to a striking 26 percent drop in the number of unexpected deaths among hospitalized patients. The research team looked at more than 13,000 admissions to St. Michael's general internal medicine ward — an 84-bed unit caring for some of the hospital's most complex patients — to compare the impact of the tool among that patient population to thousands of admissions into other subspecialty units. "At the same time period in the other units in our hospital that were not using Chartwatch, we did not see a change in these unexpected deaths," said lead author Dr. Amol Verma, a clinician-scientist at St. Michael's, one of three Unity Health Toronto hospital network sites, and Temerty professor of AI research and education in medicine at University of Toronto. "That was a promising sign."

The Unity Health AI team started developing Chartwatch back in 2017, based on suggestions from staff that predicting deaths or serious illness could be key areas where machine learning could make a positive difference. The technology underwent several years of rigorous development and testing before it was deployed in October 2020, Verma said. Dr. Amol Verma, a clinician-scientist at St. Michael’s Hospital who helped lead the creation and testing of CHARTwatch, stands at a computer. "Chartwatch measures about 100 inputs from [a patient's] medical record that are currently routinely gathered in the process of delivering care," he explained. "So a patient's vital signs, their heart rate, their blood pressure ... all of the lab test results that are done every day." Working in the background alongside clinical teams, the tool monitors any changes in someone's medical record "and makes a dynamic prediction every hour about whether that patient is likely to deteriorate in the future," Verma told CBC News.

Submission + - Apple A16 SoC Now Manufactured in Arizona (appleinsider.com)

Submitted by NoMoreACs
NoMoreACs writes: According to an Article in AppleInsider, Apple has begun manufacturing its A16 SoC at the newly-opened tsmc Fab Facility in Arizona, USA.

According to sources of Tim Culpan, Phase 1 of TSMC's Fab 21 in Arizona is making the A16 SoC of the iPhone 14 Pro in "small, but significant, numbers. The production is largely a test for the facility at this stage, but more production is expected in the coming months.

The volume will ramp up massively once the second stage of the Phase 1 fab actually concludes. If everything stays on schedule, the Arizona plant will hit a target for production sometime in the first half of 2025.

Sources say TSMC is achieving yields that are marginally behind those of Taiwan-based factories. Yield parity is expected to happen within months.

TSMC has also raised its investment and moved to build additional plants in Arizona, with three set to be constructed in total. The U.S. Commerce Department previously claimed this will create 6,000 direct manufacturing jobs, on top of an estimated 20,000 construction jobs.

Submission + - Microsoft Releases and Patents 'Python in Excel'

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes: "Python in Excel is now generally available for Windows users of Microsoft 365 Business and Enterprise," Microsoft announced in a Monday blog post. "Last August, in partnership with Anaconda, we introduced an exciting new addition to Excel by integrating Python, making it possible to seamlessly combine Python and Excel analytics within the same workbook, no setup required. Since then, we’ve brought the power of popular Python analytics libraries such as pandas, Matplotlib, and NLTK to countless Excel users." Microsoft also announced the public preview of Copilot in Excel with Python, which will take users' natural language requests for analysis and automatically generate, explain, and insert Python code into Excel spreadsheets.

While drawing criticism for limiting Python execution to locked-down Azure cloud containers, Python in Excel has also earned accolades from the likes of Python creator Guido van Rossum, now a Microsoft Distinguished Engineer, as well as Pandas creator Wes McKinney.

Left unmentioned in Monday's announcement is that Microsoft managed to convince the USPTO to issue it a patent in July 2024 on the Enhanced Integration of Spreadsheets With External Environments (alt. source), which Microsoft explains covers the "implementation of enhanced integrations of native spreadsheet environments with external resources such as-but not limited to-Python." All of which may come as a surprise to software vendors and individuals that were integrating Excel and external programming environments years before Microsoft filed its patent application in September 2022.

Submission + - US probes uranium imports from China to prevent circumventing Russian ban (reuters.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: U.S. PROBES INTO NUCLEAR SUPPLY VULNERABILITIES:The Biden Administration announced an investigation into U.S. imports of Chinese enriched uranium due to concerns that China is helping Russia work around sanctions.
  • China’s imports to the U.S. went from zero in 2022 to 535,700 pounds in May 2023, the beginning of the U.S. ban on importing Russian uranium.

Why It Matters: If the U.S. is indirectly importing Russian enriched uranium and using China to do it, this makes U.S. nuclear power, carrier, submarine, and missile production partially dependent on two potentially hostile powers, undermining national and energy security.

Submission + - New Research Finds Microplastics In the Brain's Olfactory Bulb (nbcnews.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Scientists in Brazil found microplastics in the brain tissue of cadavers, according to a new study published Monday in the journal JAMA Network Open. Mounting research over the last few years has found microplastics in nearly every organ in the body, as well as in the bloodstream and in plaque that clogs arteries. Whether these ubiquitous pollutants can reach the human brain has been a primary concern for scientists. The latest research looked at a part of the brain called the olfactory bulb, which processes information about smell. Humans have two olfactory bulbs, one above each nasal cavity. Connecting the olfactory bulb and the nasal cavity is the olfactory nerve.

Some researchers worry the olfactory pathway may also be an entry point for microplastics getting into the brain, beyond the olfactory bulb. “Previous studies in humans and animals have shown that air pollution reaches the brain, and that particles have been found in the olfactory bulb, which is why we think the olfactory bulb is probably one of the first points for microplastics to reach the brain,” said lead study author Dr. Thais Mauad, an associate professor of pathology at the University of São Paulo Medical School in Brazil.

Mauad and her team took samples of olfactory bulb tissue from 15 cadavers of people who died between the ages of 33 and 100. Samples from eight of the cadavers contained microplastics — tiny bits of plastic that ranged from 5.5 micrometers to 26.4 micrometers in size. In total, the researchers found 16 plastic fibers and particles in the tissues. The smallest were slimmer than the diameter of a human red blood cell, which measures about 8 micrometers. The most common type of plastic they found was polypropylene, followed by polyamide, nylon and polyethylene vinyl acetate. "The nose is a major point of defense to keep particles and dust out of the lungs," Campen wrote in an email. “So seeing some plastics in the olfactory system, especially given how they are being found everywhere else in the body, is completely expected." [...] "There is evidence that very small airborne particles can move to the brain via the olfactory bulb, but this is not known to be a major route of trafficking material to the brain," Campen said.

Submission + - Final Fantasy 16 Maker Asks Fans Not To Make 'Offensive or Inappropriate' Mods (ign.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Final Fantasy 16 producer Naoki Yoshida has asked fans to please not make "offensive or inappropriate" mods upon the game's PC release tomorrow, September 17. Yoshida wouldn't comment on any specific mods he wants to see in Final Fantasy 16 in an interview with PC Gamer, though made clear what he doesn't want to see. "If we said, 'it'd be great if someone made X, Y, Z,' it might come across as a request, so I'll avoid mentioning any specifics here," Yoshida said. "The only thing I will say is that we definitely don't want to see anything offensive or inappropriate, so please don't make or install anything like that."

Mods allow players to create custom content for games, often resulting in incredibly useful gameplay changes such as the ability to play Elden Ring with friends seamlessly, or major additions such as an entire new expansion for Fallout 4 or the ability to play as custom characters in The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt. Due to the nature of the internet, however, many mods are also, as Yoshida put it, "offensive or inappropriate." While cheating is one thing, fellow publisher Capcom expressed concern in November 2023 that "there are a number of mods that are offensive to public order and morals" which cause damage to the property itself.

Slashdot Top Deals