Month: February 2025

It's been a month since we first heard rumors that the Switch 2's new Joy-Cons could be slid across a flat surface to function like a computer mouse. Now, a newly published patent filed by Nintendo seems to confirm that feature and describes how it will work.

The international patent was filed with the World Intellectual Property Organization in January 2023, but it was only published on WIPO's website on Thursday. The Japanese-language patent—whose illustrations match what we've seen of Switch 2 Joy-Con precisely—features an English abstract describing "a sensor for mouse operation" that can "detect reflected light from a detected surface, the light changing by moving over the detected surface..." much like any number of optical computer mice. Schematic drawings in the patent show how the light source and light sensor are squeezed inside the Joy-Con, with a built-in lens for directing the light to and from each.

A schematic diagram of the Switch 2's Joy-Con light sensor Credit: Nintendo / WIPO

A machine translation of the full text of the patent describes the controller as "a novel input device that can be used as a mouse and other than a mouse." In mouse mode, as described in the patent, the user cradles the outer edge of the controller with their palm and places the inner edge "on, for example, a desk or the like."

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Sometime during the next several weeks, the directors of federal agencies will receive a draft version of President Trump's budget request for the coming fiscal year, which begins on October 1. This "passback review" is a standard part of the federal budgeting process which ends in Congress writing a budget and the president signing it into law.

The budget request will be the first of President Trump's second term, and it will offer a clear window into the priorities of his new administration. Although widespread cuts are expected for much of the government's discretionary spending, the outlook for the National Science Foundation appears to be especially grim.

During an emotional all-hands meeting on Tuesday, the agency's assistant director, Susan Margulies, told agency employees to expect between a quarter and a half of its staff to be laid off within the coming months, E&E News reported.

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A little over two weeks ago, a largely unknown China-based company named DeepSeek stunned the AI world with the release of an open source AI chatbot that had simulated reasoning capabilities that were largely on par with those from market leader OpenAI. Within days, the DeepSeek AI assistant app climbed to the top of the iPhone App Store's "Free Apps" category, overtaking ChatGPT.

On Thursday, mobile security company NowSecure reported that the app sends sensitive data over unencrypted channels, making the data readable to anyone who can monitor the traffic. More sophisticated attackers could also tamper with the data while it's in transit. Apple strongly encourages iPhone and iPad developers to enforce encryption of data sent over the wire using ATS (App Transport Security). For unknown reasons, that protection is globally disabled in the app, NowSecure said.

Basic security protections MIA

What’s more, the data is sent to servers that are controlled by ByteDance, the Chinese company that owns TikTok. While some of that data is properly encrypted using transport layer security, once it's decrypted on the ByteDance-controlled servers, it can be cross-referenced with user data collected elsewhere to identify specific users and potentially track queries and other usage.

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Windows laptops powered by Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X chips began to hit the streets in 2024 and while they might not live up to all the promises from Qualcomm, Microsoft, and PC makers, they are the first ARM-powered Windows PCs with processors fast enough to rival chips from Intel, AMD, and Apple. But the future of […]

The post Lilbits: Open Source PebbleOS progress and ARM doesn’t plan to terminate Qualcomm’s license agreement (for now) appeared first on Liliputing.

Newly unsealed emails allegedly provide the "most damning evidence" yet against Meta in a copyright case raised by book authors alleging that Meta illegally trained its AI models on pirated books.

Last month, Meta admitted to torrenting a controversial large dataset known as LibGen, which includes tens of millions of pirated books. But details around the torrenting were murky until yesterday, when Meta's unredacted emails were made public for the first time. The new evidence showed that Meta torrented "at least 81.7 terabytes of data across multiple shadow libraries through the site Anna’s Archive, including at least 35.7 terabytes of data from Z-Library and LibGen," the authors' court filing said. And "Meta also previously torrented 80.6 terabytes of data from LibGen."

"The magnitude of Meta’s unlawful torrenting scheme is astonishing," the authors' filing alleged, insisting that "vastly smaller acts of data piracy—just .008 percent of the amount of copyrighted works Meta pirated—have resulted in Judges referring the conduct to the US Attorneys’ office for criminal investigation."

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On Tuesday, OpenAI announced plans to introduce ChatGPT to California State University's 460,000 students and 63,000 faculty members across 23 campuses, reports Reuters. The education-focused version of the AI assistant will aim to provide students with personalized tutoring and study guides, while faculty will be able to use it for administrative work.

"It is critical that the entire education ecosystem—institutions, systems, technologists, educators, and governments—work together to ensure that all students have access to AI and gain the skills to use it responsibly," said Leah Belsky, VP and general manager of education at OpenAI, in a statement.

OpenAI began integrating ChatGPT into educational settings in 2023, despite early concerns from some schools about plagiarism and potential cheating, leading to early bans in some US school districts and universities. But over time, resistance to AI assistants softened in some educational institutions.

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With the closure of its last coal-fired power plant, Ratcliffe-on-Soar, on September 30, 2024, the United Kingdom has taken a significant step toward its net-zero goals. It’s no small feat to end the 142-year era of coal-powered electricity in the country that pioneered the Industrial Revolution. Yet the UK's journey away from coal has been remarkably swift, with coal generation plummeting from 40 percent of the electricity mix in 2012 to just two percent in 2019, and finally to zero in 2024.

As of 2023, approximately half of UK electricity generation comes from zero-carbon sources, with natural gas serving as a transitional fuel. The UK aims to cut greenhouse gas emissions by 42 percent to 48 percent by 2027 and achieve net-zero by 2050. The government set a firm target to generate all of its electricity from renewable sources by 2040, emphasizing offshore wind and solar energy as the keys.

What will things look like in the intervening years, which will lead us from today to net-zero? Everyone’s scenario, even when based in serious science, boils down to a guessing game. Yet some things are more certain than others, the most important of these factors being the ones that are on solid footing beneath all of the guesswork.

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The Zenfone 12 Ultra is the latest flagship phone from Asus that’s not marketed as a gaming phone. But you could certainly use it as one if you wanted to because while it may lack features like “airtriggers” and RGB lighting, it’s a powerful phone with a Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Elite processor, up to 16GB of […]

The post Asus Zenfone 12 Ultra features Snapdragon 8 Elite and a 6.78 inch 144 Hz display appeared first on Liliputing.

With the rise of omicron came the fall of long-lasting protection from reinfection with the pandemic coronavirus SARS-CoV-2, according to a study published in Nature.

Using population-wide data from Qatar, researchers found that a COVID-19 infection from a pre-omicron variant of SARS-CoV-2 (such as alpha or delta) yielded around 80 percent protection from reinfection with another pre-omicron variant—and that level of protection lasted over the course of at least a year. But, things changed in late 2021 with the emergence of omicron, which still reigns supreme today. According to the data, an infection with omicron provided an initial protection of nearly 80 percent between the first three to six months after infection, but that protection rapidly declined. Between nine months and a year, protection fell to around 27.5 percent, then dropped to a negligible 5 percent after a year.

Effectiveness of previous infection against reinfection. Credit: Chemaitelly et al., Nature, 2025

The results of infection-derived protection were similar regardless of whether people were vaccinated or unvaccinated, a sub analysis found. The study did not evaluate vaccine efficacy. A study published last year in the New England Journal of Medicine estimated that the 2023-2024 mRNA COVID-19 vaccines were 52 percent effective at preventing infection after four weeks, with effectiveness falling to 20 percent at 20 weeks (a little over four and half months).

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There have been many studies on the capability of non-human animals to mimic transitive actions—actions that have a purpose. Hardly any studies have shown that animals are also capable of intransitive actions. Even though intransitive actions have no particular purpose, imitating these non-conscious movements is still thought to help with socialization and strengthen bonds for both animals and humans.

Zoologist Esha Haldar and colleagues from the Comparative Cognition Research group worked with blue-throated macaws, which are critically endangered, at the Loro Parque Fundación in Tenerife. They trained the macaws to perform two intransitive actions, then set up a conflict: Two neighboring macaws were asked to do different actions.

What Haldar and her team found was that individual birds were more likely to perform the same intransitive action as a bird next to them, no matter what they’d been asked to do. This could mean that macaws possess mirror neurons, the same neurons that, in humans, fire when we are watching intransitive movements and cause us to imitate them (at least if these neurons function the way some think they do).

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