Month: September 2022

Enlarge / Oral swaps and a Sexual Assault Evidence Collection Kit (rape kit). (credit: Getty | MediaNews Group)

Seeking emergency medical care in the US after a sexual assault can incur hefty hospital bills that may deter assault reporting and compound victims' trauma, according to a new study published in the New England Journal of Medicine.

On average, hospital emergency departments charged $3,551 for urgent medical care coded as caused by sexual violence. People who were sexually assaulted while pregnant faced even steeper bills, with an average of $4,553. Uninsured victims or those who chose to pay themselves were served bills that averaged $3,673. Even those with private insurance faced burdensome bills; the study found that insured victims paid an average of 14 percent of their bills out-of-pocket, which for the average bill would work out to nearly $500.

"Emergency department charges may discourage the reporting of rape and seeking of medical care for both short-term and long-term sequelae of sexual assault," the authors caution. "Incurring such charges may further harm survivors—even those with full insurance coverage—by serving to disclose a potentially stigmatizing event to parents, partners, or employers. Moreover, such bills may further traumatize survivors by suggesting that they are personally responsible for their assault."

Enlarge / A stack of 60 Starlink satellites launched in 2019. (credit: SpaceX / Flickr)

A Russian diplomat said civilian satellites could be legitimate military targets in a statement that seems to refer to Starlink providing broadband access in Ukraine. Civilian satellites "may become a legitimate target for retaliation," the Russian official said in a statement to the United Nations' open-ended working group on reducing space threats.

The quote is from an unofficial English translation of the statement on September 12 by Konstantin Vorontsov, head of the Russian delegation to the United Nations Office for Disarmament Affairs (UNODA) working group. The translation is provided with other countries' statements from the session on the UNODA's meeting website.

Vorontsov said:

Enlarge / Georgia Tech scientists found that the so-called "Cheerios effect" is the mechanism by which fire ants cluster together to form rafts. (credit: Hungtang Ko)

Fire ants might be the scourge of southern states like Georgia and Texas, but scientifically, they are endlessly fascinating as an example of collective behavior. A few fire ants spaced well apart behave like individual ants. But pack enough of them closely together, and they act more like a single unit, exhibiting both solid and liquid properties. They can form rafts to survive flash floods, arrange themselves into towers, and you can even pour them from a teapot like a fluid.

"Aggregated, they can almost be thought of as a material, known as 'active matter,'" said Hungtang Ko, now a postdoc at Princeton University, who began studying these fascinating creatures as a Georgia Tech graduate student in 2018. (And yes, he has been stung many, many times.) He's a co-author of two recent papers investigating the physics of fire ant rafts. The first, published in the journal Bioinspiration and Biomimetics (B&B), investigated how fire ant rafts behave in flowing water compared to static water conditions.

The second, accepted for publication in Physical Review Fluids, explored the mechanism by which fire ants come together to form the rafts in the first place. Ko et al. were somewhat surprised to find that the primary mechanism appears to be the so-called "Cheerios effect"—named in honor of the tendency for those last remaining Cheerios floating in milk to clump together in the bowl, either drifting to the center, or to the outer edges.

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Graphics card manufacturer eVGA has made a name for itself manufacturing and selling Nvidia's GeForce GPUs for two decades, including some of the more attractively priced options on the market. But according to the YouTubers at Gamers Nexus, analyst Jon Peddie, and an EVGA forum post, EVGA is officially terminating its relationship with Nvidia and will not be manufacturing cards based on the company's RTX 4000-series GPUs.

EVGA's graphics cards have exclusively used Nvidia GPUs since its founding in 1999, and according to Gamers Nexus, GeForce sales represent 80 percent of EVGA's revenue, making this a momentous and arguably company-endangering change. But EVGA CEO Andrew Han told Gamers Nexus that the decision was about "principle" rather than financials—Han complained about a lack of communication from Nvidia about new products, including information about pricing and availability.

Nvidia's pricing strategy was apparently another sore point for EVGA. Nvidia's first-party Founders Edition cards could often undercut the pricing of cards offered by EVGA and other vendors, forcing them to either lower prices or lose sales as a result.

Enlarge / A selection of AI-generated artwork that can be licensed through Shutterstock. (credit: Shutterstock.com)

Seeking ways to "monetize" AI-generated art, some artists have already begun submitting their AI-generated pieces to stock photography websites like Shutterstock. Searches for "AI generated" or "Midjourney" (a popular image synthesis service) produce thousands of results on the site.

In some cases, a portion of the artwork that isn't labeled as "AI generated" also appears to clearly match Midjourney's art style, which seems to be the most popular image synthesis tool on the site at the moment. As of press time, Shutterstock's terms of use do not prohibit the submission of AI-generated artwork. Shutterstock contributors receive a percentage of the licensing fee that varies from 15 to 40 percent of what Shutterstock makes from the content.

A recent video tutorial from a Canadian portrait photographer named Vanessa on YouTube lays out her process of trying to find which stock websites allowed AI artwork created by Midjourney, settling on Shutterstock. She describes needing to upscale her AI-generated artwork before submission because most image synthesis output at present isn't high-resolution enough to meet Shutterstock's standards.

Enlarge / It may look empty, but the original PlayStation Vr ecosystem contained many games that will never move forward. (credit: Kyle Orland)

A Sony executive confirmed Friday that the PlayStation VR 2 will not be backward-compatible with games developed for the original PlayStation VR.

Sid Shuman, senior director of content communications at Sony Interactive, asked Hideaki Nishino, senior vice president of platform experience at Sony, whether games for the original PSVR could be played on a PSVR2 kit on the Official PlayStation Podcast, episode 439 (his answer starts at 29:12).

"PSVR games are not compatible with PSVR2 because PSVR2 is designed to deliver a truly next-generation VR experience," Nishino said. Nishino listed a number of "much more advanced features" in the VR2, including new controllers with haptic feedback, adaptive triggers, advanced eye tracking, and 3-D audio. "That means developing games for PSVR2 requires a whole different approach than the original PSVR."

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | Chesnot )

Elon Musk filed an amended countersuit against Twitter, claiming the allegations by Twitter's former security chief, Peiter "Mudge" Zatko, give Musk new legal grounds to kill the merger deal.

"Needless to say, the newest revelations make undeniably clear that the Musk Parties have the full right to walk away from the Merger Agreement—for numerous independently sufficient reasons," the amended countersuit claims. "In short, the Musk Parties and Twitter's many other investors were sold a different company than the Twitter that actually exists—one that was more valuable, more popular, more secure, and more compliant with governing law."

The amended countersuit was filed under seal last week and a public version was released yesterday. Delaware Court of Chancery Judge Kathaleen McCormick had granted Musk's request to amend the countersuit but rejected his attempt to delay the trial by at least four weeks, so the trial is still scheduled to begin October 17.

Enlarge (credit: NASA, ESA, A. Simon, M.H. Wong, and the OPAL Team)

Saturn is an unusual planet in some obvious ways, most notably its extensive ring system. But it's also strange in some less obvious ways: The rings appear to be far, far younger than the planet, and they stay stably in the plane of Saturn's orbit while the planet's axis of rotation wobbles around dramatically.

A new modeling study released in yesterday's edition of Science suggests that these oddities have the same explanation. It hypothesizes that Saturn had an additional moon that enabled gravitational interactions that explains the planet's large wobble. In the process of those interactions, however, the moon spun out of orbit, got close to Saturn, and was destroyed, creating the ring material. While the models don't tell us this is definitively what happened, they can provide some indications of what we need to look for to determine how probable these events were.

Explaining the oddities

The Solar System is over four billion years old. If we're to assume that it has always looked much like it currently does, that would seem to put a premium on stability. Yet, the Saturn system is very dynamic. The largest moon, Titan, is moving away from the planet; geysers on another, Enceladus, feed material into one ring; small moons are condensing out of the materials of other rings. So there are reasons to think that Saturn hasn't always looked like it currently does.

Enlarge / Nearly every major site warns you about cookies, and it's a shame they share a moniker with one of life's great pleasures. (credit: Getty Images)

Browser extension I don't care about cookies does one job and does it well. It automatically removes the annoying-but-mandated "This website uses cookies" notices from websites. People like it, donate to it, and don't want more of it, a rare find for free software.

"Damn, this is the **** bro, it saved like 50 minutes of my gaming time lol," reads one review on the tool's Microsoft Edge Add-Ons page.

The tone changed when the solo developer posted "GREAT NEWS" on the extension's website. Avast, a giant in cybersecurity that just completed an $8.1 billion merger with NortonLifeLock, would acquire the 10-year-old software for an undisclosed price.