Month: January 2023

Enlarge / Full-color life reconstruction of Edmontosaurus. (credit: Natee Puttapipat/CC-BY 4.0 )

There's rarely time to write about every cool science-y story that comes our way. So this year, we're once again running a special Twelve Days of Christmas series of posts, highlighting one science story that fell through the cracks in 2022, each day from December 25 through January 5. Today: Why dinosaur "mummies" might not be as rare as scientists believed.

Under specific conditions, dinosaur fossils can include exceptionally well-preserved skin—an occurrence long thought to be rare. But the authors of an October paper published in the journal PLoS ONE suggested that these dinosaur "mummies" might be more common than previously believed, based on their analysis of a mummified duck-billed hadrosaur with well-preserved skin that showed unusual telltale signs of scavenging in the form of bite marks.

In this case, the term "mummy" refers to fossils that with well-preserved skin and sometimes other soft tissue. As we've reported previously, most fossils are bone, shells, teeth, and other forms of "hard" tissue, but occasionally rare fossils are discovered that preserve soft tissues like skin, muscles, organs, or even the occasional eyeball. This can tell scientists much about aspects of the biology, ecology, and evolution of such ancient organisms that skeletons alone can't convey.

Enlarge / AI-generated image of a kid using a computer. (credit: Ars Technica)

New York City Public Schools have blocked access to OpenAI's ChatGPT AI model on its network and devices, reports educational news site Chalkbeat. The move comes amid fears from educators that students will use ChatGPT to cheat on assignments, accidentally introduce inaccuracies in their work, or write essays in a way that will keep them from learning the material.

ChatGPT is a large language model created by OpenAI, and it is currently accessible for free through any web browser during its testing period. People can use it to write essays, poetry, and technical documents (or even simulate a Linux console) at a level that can often pass for human writing—although it can also produce very confident-sounding but inaccurate results.

Per Chalkbeat, NYC education department spokesperson Jenna Lyle said, "Due to concerns about negative impacts on student learning, and concerns regarding the safety and accuracy of content, access to ChatGPT is restricted on New York City Public Schools’ networks and devices. While the tool may be able to provide quick and easy answers to questions, it does not build critical-thinking and problem-solving skills, which are essential for academic and lifelong success.”

Enlarge / AI-generated image of a kid using a computer. (credit: Ars Technica)

New York City Public Schools have blocked access to OpenAI's ChatGPT AI model on its network and devices, reports educational news site Chalkbeat. The move comes amid fears from educators that students will use ChatGPT to cheat on assignments, accidentally introduce inaccuracies in their work, or write essays in a way that will keep them from learning the material.

ChatGPT is a large language model created by OpenAI, and it is currently accessible for free through any web browser during its testing period. People can use it to write essays, poetry, and technical documents (or even simulate a Linux console) at a level that can often pass for human writing—although it can also produce very confident-sounding but inaccurate results.

Per Chalkbeat, NYC education department spokesperson Jenna Lyle said, "Due to concerns about negative impacts on student learning, and concerns regarding the safety and accuracy of content, access to ChatGPT is restricted on New York City Public Schools’ networks and devices. While the tool may be able to provide quick and easy answers to questions, it does not build critical-thinking and problem-solving skills, which are essential for academic and lifelong success.”

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In the past 24 hours, the world has learned of serious breaches hitting chat service Slack and software testing and delivery company CircleCI, though giving the companies' opaque wording—“security issue” and “security incident,” respectively—you'd be forgiven for thinking these events were minor.

The compromises—in Slack’s case, the theft of employee token credentials and for CircleCI, the possible exposure of all customer secrets it stores—come two weeks after password manager LastPass disclosed its own security failure: the theft of customers’ password vaults containing sensitive data in both encrypted and clear text form. It’s not clear if all three breaches are related, but that’s certainly a possibility.

The most concerning of the two new breaches is the one hitting CircleCI. On Wednesday evening, the company reported a “security incident” that prompted it to advise customers to rotate “all secrets” they store on the service. The alert also informed customers that it had invalidated their Project API tokens, an event requiring them to go through the hassle of replacing them.

Enlarge (credit: Qualcomm)

Hey, Android users! Are you jealous of the iPhone 14's ability to connect to satellites? Well, it's been a few months, and Qualcomm is already getting a similar feature up and running on Android. Meet "Snapdragon Satellite" a way to send satellite messages from a normal-sized Android phone. Unlike on the iPhone, this is real, two-way, SMS-style texting that you'll supposedly be able to use for more casual conversations instead of the iPhone's highly compressed, emergency-only, one-way questionnaire system that discourages composing a message.

Qualcomm's solution will run on the Iridium satellite constellation—this is the 25-year-old, 66-satellite network that powers traditional, purpose-built satellite phones with giant external antennas. Qualcomm says this is now going to work with normal-sized smartphones and with normal, internal-only antennas. Qualcomm's VP of Product Management, Francesco Grilli, gave a big overview of the service and says "in most cases" you won't even need a new antenna. Iridium runs in the 1-2 GHz L Band, the same as GPS and some mid-band cellular service, so your phone already has an antenna for this.

That's not to say it will work without any new hardware, but Qualcomm will build it into its standard RF loadout without requiring any major new components. This is a great situation compared to mmWave 5G, which added a big, extra, expensive antenna to your phone that very few people can use.