Month: June 2023

Enlarge / A 2-year-old enjoys the spray of water in a splash pad in Los Angeles on June 20, 2022. (credit: Getty | Al Seib)

It's summer, and that means health organizations will be periodically showering Americans with reminders of how public swimming venues are actually nightmarish cesspits teeming with microbes that can burn your eyes, ravage your intestines, and eat your brains.

In attempts to communicate some pretty basic health advice—like, don't pee or poop in a public pool and try to avoid gulping toxic algae from lakes—health organizations create a mesmerizing fountain of hilarious, graphic, disturbing, clumsy, and sometimes perplexing advisories.

Given this wellspring of vomitus summer fun, here are our picks for the top five public health advisories bobbing in the waters this summer.

Enlarge (credit: Rafael Henrique/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images)

Sketchy deals on eBay and other online marketplaces happen all the time. Encountering counterfeit, stolen, broken, or falsely advertised goods sold by third parties isn't surprising, but finding something that was stolen from you is.

That's reportedly what happened to an employee at the software company SAP. According to a report from The Register on Wednesday, the employee found one of four SSDs recently stolen from SAP data centers in Baden-Württemberg, Germany, for sale on eBay. According to unnamed "sources close to the incident," the device was loaded with personal information for dozens of workers.

"One of the disks later turned up on eBay and was bought by an SAP employee. They were able to identify that it belonged to SAP. The disk contained personal records of 100 or more SAP employees," The Register reported.

Enlarge / This is the first image of Sgr A*, the supermassive black hole at the center of our galaxy. It’s the first direct visual evidence of the presence of this black hole. It was captured by the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT). (credit: EHT Collaboration)

It's probably not realistic to call a supermassive black hole "quiet." But, as far as these things go, the one at the center of our galaxy is pretty quiet. Yes, it emits enough energy that we can image it, and it occasionally gets a bit more active as it rips something nearby to shreds. But supermassive black holes in other galaxies power some of the brightest phenomena in the Universe. The object at the center of the Milky Way, Sgr A^*, is nothing like those; instead, people get excited about the mere prospect that it might wake from its apparent slumber.

There's a chance that it was more active in the past, but any light from earlier events swept past Earth before we had observatories to see it. Now, however, scientists are suggesting they've seen echoes of light that might be associated with an Sgr A^* outburst that took place about 200 years ago.

Looking for echoes

Audible echoes are simply the product of sound waves reflected off some surface. Light travels as a wave, as well, and it can reflect off objects. So, the basic idea of light echoes is a pretty straightforward extrapolation of these ideas. They may seem counterintuitive because, unlike sonic echoes, we never experience light echoes in normal life—light travels so fast that any echoes from the world around us arrive at the same time as the light itself. It all gets indistinguishable.

Enlarge / Midjourney 5.2 allows "zooming out" on synthesized images. The original synthetic image is shown in the red dotted box here. (credit: Midjourney)

On Thursday, Midjourney unveiled version 5.2 of its AI-powered image synthesis model, which includes a new "zoom out" feature that allows maintaining a central synthesized image while automatically building out a larger scene around it, simulating zooming out with a camera lens.

Similar to outpainting—an AI imagery technique introduced by OpenAI's DALL-E 2 in August 2022—Midjourney's zoom-out feature can take an existing AI-generated image and expand its borders while keeping its original subject centered in the new image. But unlike DALL-E and Photoshop's Generative Fill feature, you can't select a custom image to expand. At the moment, v5.2's zoom-out only works on images generated within Midjourney, a subscription AI image-generator service.

On the Midjourney Discord server (still the official interface for Midjourney, although plans are underway to change that), users can experiment with zooming out by generating any v5.2 image (now the default) and upscaling a result. After that, special "Zoom" buttons appear below the output. You can zoom out by a factor of 1.5x, 2x, or a custom value between 1 and 2. Another button, called "Make Square," will generate material around the existing image in a way that creates a 1:1 square aspect ratio.