Month: July 2023

Enlarge / Artist's reconstruction of the shark as it once lived. (credit: Klug et. al.)

Sharks are largely cartilaginous, a body structure that often doesn’t survive fossilization. But in a paper published in the Swiss Journal of Paleontology, scientists describe an entirely new species of primitive shark from the Late Devonian period, a time when they were just beginning to proliferate in ancient oceans.

The team found several exceptionally well-preserved fossils that include soft tissues such as scales, musculature, digestive tract, liver, and blood vessel imprints. Also preserved: the species’ most distinct feature, widely separated nasal organs, somewhat akin to those on today’s hammerhead sharks. The find suggests that sharks’ finely tuned sense of smell, the subject of urban legends, was already being selected for just as these predators were becoming established.

A key time and a rare find

Christian Klug is the lead author and curator of the Paleontological Institute and Museum at Zurich University. He explained the significance of the Devonian period in the oceans’ history, when life was flourishing and an evolutionary arms race was in full swing. “With increasing competition among predators inhabiting the water column, the entire organism was selected for more efficiency,” he explained. “This affected swimming abilities, feeding apparatus, but also the sensory systems, which are essential to detect prey, to orient themselves in space, and to escape from even larger predators such as the huge placoderm Dunkleosteus and the equally large shark Ctenacanthus.”

Enlarge / Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk. (credit: Getty Images | AFP)

The proposed cage match between Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg might never happen, but the tech titans may soon battle in a more civil arena. Musk's X Corp., the successor company to Twitter, yesterday threatened to sue Meta over alleged intellectual property violations in Meta's new Threads social network.

Musk's lawyer Alex Spiro wrote a letter on behalf of X Corp. to Meta CEO Zuckerberg. "Based on recent reports regarding your recently launched 'Threads' app, Twitter has serious concerns that Meta Platforms has engaged in systematic, willful, and unlawful misappropriation of Twitter's trade secrets and other intellectual property."

The letter was revealed today in a Semafor article. "Competition is fine, cheating is not," Musk tweeted about the letter.

Enlarge (credit: Imagen Rafael Cosme Daza )

Most creatures sleep, but until now, REM (rapid eye movement) sleep, the phase of sleep in which dreams occur, was thought to be exclusive to vertebrates. Octopuses appear to be the first invertebrates to show they are also capable of this

When it comes to neural function, studies have found these cephalopods are more like us than we think (pun somewhat intended). Having no spine hasn’t stopped them from evolving a complex nervous system. A 2022 study found that parts of their brains, the frontal and vertical lobes, work much like the hippocampus and limbic lobe in humans and other vertebrates. The hippocampus is critical to learning and memory, while the limbic lobe controls complex emotional reactions, such as the fight-or-flight response that is triggered by stress or fear.

Now it seems that octopuses have even more in common with us. In studying their sleep behavior, a team of researchers at the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology observed both periods of quiet sleep, or NREM sleep (also known as slow wave sleep), and bursts of neural activity, during which the animals’ eyes and tentacles twitched while their skin changed color. Neural activities like these, which are similar to the waking state, only happen during REM sleep. Because they can transition between NREM and REM sleep, octopuses are the only known invertebrates that have two phases of sleep.

Enlarge (credit: NurPhoto / Contributor | NurPhoto)

Meta has officially launched its surprisingly popular Twitter alternative, Threads—shocking even Mark Zuckerberg as signups hit 30 million within the first 24 hours. Though a separate app, Threads is built as a convenient extension of Instagram, requiring an Instagram account to join and allowing users to port their entire Instagram following over in one click. That has clearly made Threads appealing to a huge chunk of Instagram users.

"We didn't expect tens of millions of people to sign up in one day, but supporting that is a champagne problem," Instagram CEO Adam Mosseri said in a cheery update on Thursday.

With its well-timed launch coming just after Twitter announced unpopular rate limits on tweets, Threads has quickly surpassed ChatGPT as the fastest-growing consumer app, TechCrunch reported. But as signups explode, Threads is also experiencing immediate backlash from critics who have complained about how Threads was designed and about the app's seemingly ample privacy issues.

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The maintainers of the open-source software that powers the Mastodon social network published a security update on Thursday that patches a critical vulnerability making it possible for hackers to backdoor the servers that push content to individual users.

Mastodon is based on a federated model. The federation comprises thousands of separate servers known as "instances." Individual users create an account with one of the instances, which in turn exchange content to and from users of other instances. To date, Mastodon has more than 24,000 instances and 14.5 million users, according to the-federation.info, a site that tracks statistics related to Mastodon.

A critical bug tracked as CVE-2023-36460 was one of two vulnerabilities rated as critical that were fixed on Thursday. In all, Mastodon on Thursday patched five vulnerabilities.

Enlarge / A boy smiles as he gets a measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) vaccination. (credit: Getty | Robyn Beck)

State health departments are facing federal budget cuts to programs that support childhood vaccination, which are coming at a time when immunization rates among children are slipping and under threat from anti-vaccine rhetoric.

News of the budget cuts was first reported by KFF Health News, which obtained a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention email dated June 27 that informed states of future funding reductions. The email, addressed to state immunization managers and signed by two CDC officials, said that the cuts will be "a significant change to your budget."

"There will be no easy solution for this," the CDC email read. "We know that this change will require some tough decisions."

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  The Nubia RedMagic 8S+

Android manufacturers tend to love big spec sheets, even if those giant numbers won't do much for day-to-day phone usage. In that vein, we've got the new high-water mark for ridiculous amounts of memory in a phone. The new Nubia RedMagic 8S Pro+ is an Android gaming phone with an option for 24GB of RAM.

The base model of the RedMagic 8S Pro+ starts with 16GB of RAM, but GSMArena has pictures and details of the upgraded 24GB SKU, which is the most amount of memory ever in an Android phone. Because we're all about big numbers, it also comes with 1TB of storage. Keep in mind a 13-inch top-spec M2 MacBook Pro has 24GB of RAM and 2TB of storage, and that's a desktop OS with real multitasking, so Nubia is really pushing it. This suped-up 24GB version of the phone appears to be a China-exclusive, with the price at CNY 7,499 (about $1,034), which is a lot for a phone in China.

You definitely want an adequate amount of RAM in an Android phone. All these apps are designed around cheap phones, though, and with Android's aggressive background app management, there's usually not much of a chance to use a ton of RAM. Theoretically, a phone like this would let you multitask better, since apps could stay in memory longer, and you wouldn't have to start them back up when switching tasks. Most people aren't quickly switching through that many apps, though, and some heavy apps, games especially, will just automatically turn off a few seconds once they're in the background.

Enlarge / US President Joe Biden exits the White House before boarding Marine One on Thursday, July 6, 2023. (credit: Getty Images | Bloomberg)

The Biden administration is appealing a federal judge's ruling that ordered the government to halt a wide range of communications with social media companies. President Biden and the other federal defendants in the case "hereby appeal" the ruling to the US Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, according to a notice filed in US District Court yesterday. The US will submit a longer filing with arguments to the 5th Circuit appeals court.

On Tuesday, Judge Terry Doughty of US District Court for the Western District of Louisiana granted a preliminary injunction that prohibits White House officials and numerous federal agencies from communicating "with social-media companies for the purpose of urging, encouraging, pressuring, or inducing in any manner the removal, deletion, suppression, or reduction of content containing protected free speech posted on social-media platforms."

Doughty found that defendants "significantly encouraged" and in some cases coerced "the social-media companies to such extent that the decision [to modify or suppress content] should be deemed to be the decisions of the Government." The Biden administration has argued that its communications with tech companies are permissible under the First Amendment and vital to counter misinformation about elections, COVID-19, and vaccines.