Five-Year Study Suggests Chimpanzees Strike Stones Against Trees As Form of Communication
A five-year study by Wageningen University and the German Primate Research Center found that wild chimpanzees in Guinea-Bissau repeatedly strike stones against trees, presumably as a form of communication. Phys.Org reports: Over the course of a five-year field study, the research team collected video footage at five distinct locations within a nature reserve in Guinea-Bissau. This was made possible through the use of camera traps and with essential support from local field guides. In specific areas, a striking behavioral pattern was observed: adult male chimpanzees repeatedly struck stones against tree trunks, resulting in characteristic piles of stones at the base of these trees. [...]
The observations point to cultural transmission. Young chimpanzees adopt the behavior from older group members, indicating that it is learned socially rather than genetically inherited. Marc Naguib, Professor of Behavioral Ecology, underscores the broader significance of the discovery: "It illustrates that culture is not unique to humans and that such behaviors need to be considered also in nature conservation." The study is published in the journal Biology Letters.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Why Gen Z Doesn’t Like Opening Bar Tabs
To the chagrin of bartenders, many 20-something bargoers prefer to close out and pay after every single drink, no matter how many they might order during an outing.
North Carolina Town Has Some of the Purest Quartz That Powers the World’s Tech
Residents have a saying in Spruce Pine, that a piece of their home is in tech across the globe. But could geopolitical tensions hurt their mining tradition, and their lucrative quartz business?
AI Could Consume More Power Than Bitcoin By the End of 2025
Artificial intelligence could soon outpace Bitcoin mining in energy consumption, according to Alex de Vries-Gao, a PhD candidate at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam's Institute for Environmental Studies. His research estimates that by the end of 2025, AI could account for nearly half of all electricity used by data centers worldwide -- raising significant concerns about its impact on global climate goals.
"While companies like Google and Microsoft disclose total emissions, few provide transparency on how much of that is driven specifically by AI," notes DIGIT. To fill this gap, de Vries-Gao employed a triangulation method combining chip production data, corporate disclosures, and industry analyst estimates to map AI's growing energy footprint.
His analysis suggests that specialized AI hardware could consume between 46 and 82 terawatt-hours (TWh) in 2025 -- comparable to the annual energy usage of countries like Switzerland. Drawing on supply chain data, the study estimates that millions of AI accelerators from NVIDIA and AMD were produced between 2023 and 2024, with a potential combined power demand exceeding 12 gigawatts (GW). A detailed explanation of his methodology is available in his commentary published in Joule.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
World Scientists Look Elsewhere as U.S. Labs Stagger Under Trump Cuts
With the welcome mat withdrawn for promising researchers from around the world, America is at risk of losing its longstanding pre-eminence in the sciences.
India and Pakistan’s Air Battle Is Over. Their Water War Has Begun.
Though the two neighbors declared a cease-fire this month, a crucial water-sharing treaty remains at risk.
Experts Who Warn of Risks Posed by Chinese Students Are Skeptical of Trump Plan
Some former spy-hunters see the State Department’s plan to revoke visas of some Chinese college students as heavy-handed and counterproductive.
Trump Officials Deported Another Man Despite Court Order
A federal appeals panel ordered officials not to deport a 31-year-old to El Salvador. Minutes later, it happened anyway. The government blamed “administrative errors.”
Football and Other Premium TV Being Pirated At 'Industrial Scale'
An anonymous reader quotes a report from the BBC: A lack of action by big tech firms is enabling the "industrial scale theft" of premium video services, especially live sport, a new report says. The research by Enders Analysis accuses Amazon, Google, Meta and Microsoft of "ambivalence and inertia" over a problem it says costs broadcasters revenue and puts users at an increased risk of cyber-crime. Gareth Sutcliffe and Ollie Meir, who authored the research, described the Amazon Fire Stick -- which they argue is the device many people use to access illegal streams -- as "a piracy enabler." [...] The device plugs into TVs and gives the viewer thousands of options to watch programs from legitimate services including the BBC iPlayer and Netflix. They are also being used to access illegal streams, particularly of live sport.
In November last year, a Liverpool man who sold Fire Stick devices he reconfigured to allow people to illegally stream Premier League football matches was jailed. After uploading the unauthorized services on the Amazon product, he advertised them on Facebook. Another man from Liverpool was given a two-year suspended sentence last year after modifying fire sticks and selling them on Facebook and WhatsApp. According to data for the first quarter of this year, provided to Enders by Sky, 59% of people in UK who said they had watched pirated material in the last year while using a physical device said they had used a Amazon fire product. The Enders report says the fire stick enables "billions of dollars in piracy" overall. [...]
The researchers also pointed to the role played by the "continued depreciation" of Digital Rights Management (DRM) systems, particularly those from Google and Microsoft. This technology enables high quality streaming of premium content to devices. Two of the big players are Microsoft's PlayReady and Google's Widevine. The authors argue the architecture of the DRM is largely unchanged, and due to a lack of maintenance by the big tech companies, PlayReady and Widevine "are now compromised across various security levels." Mr Sutcliffe and Mr Meir said this has had "a seismic impact across the industry, and ultimately given piracy the upper hand by enabling theft of the highest quality content." They added: "Over twenty years since launch, the DRM solutions provided by Google and Microsoft are in steep decline. A complete overhaul of the technology architecture, licensing, and support model is needed. Lack of engagement with content owners indicates this a low priority."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Trump Pledges to Double Tariffs on Foreign Steel and Aluminum to 50%
President Trump made the announcement at a U.S. Steel factory outside Pittsburgh.
Blow to Biden-era Program Plunges Migrants Into Further Uncertainty
A Supreme Court ruling on Friday ended temporary humanitarian protections for hundreds of thousands of people. But it is unclear how quickly many could be deported.
Trump Officials Unveil Budget Cuts to Aid for Health, Housing and Research
The new blueprint shows that a vast array of education, health, housing and labor programs would be hit, including aid for college and cancer research.
Trump Administration Ends Program Critical to Search for an H.I.V. Vaccine
The termination is the latest in a series of cuts to H.I.V. research and programs to prevent the disease.
Billions of Cookies Up For Grabs As Experts Warn Over Session Security
Billions of stolen cookies are being sold on the dark web and Telegram, with over 1.2 billion containing session data that can grant cybercriminals access to accounts and systems without login credentials, bypassing MFA. The Register reports: More than 93.7 billion of them are currently available for criminals to buy online and of those, between 7-9 percent are active, on average, according to NordVPN's breakdown of stolen cookies by country. Adrianus Warmenhoven, cybersecurity advisor at NordVPN, said: "Cookies may seem harmless, but in the wrong hands, they're digital keys to our most private information. What was designed to enhance convenience is now a growing vulnerability exploited by cybercriminals worldwide. Most people don't realize that a stolen cookie can be just as dangerous as a password, despite being so willing to accept cookies when visiting websites, just to get rid of the prompt at the bottom of the screen. However, once these are intercepted, a cookie can give hackers direct access to all sorts of accounts containing sensitive data, without any login required."
The vast majority of stolen cookies (90.25 percent) contain ID data, used to uniquely identify users and deliver targeted ads. They can also contain data such as names, home and email addresses, locations, passwords, phone numbers, and genders, although these data points are only present in around 0.5 percent of all stolen cookies. The risk of ruinous personal data exposure as a result of cookie theft is therefore pretty slim. Aside from ID cookies, the other statistically significant type of data that these can contain are details of users' sessions. Over 1.2 billion of these are still up for grabs (roughly 6 percent of the total), and these are generally seen as more of a concern.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
How Trump Denying Visas to Chinese Students Could Backfire on the US
Protecting the borders from espionage is essential. It’s something else to deny students because they are Chinese and hope to pursue a STEM degree in the United States.
A Bruised Musk Leaves Washington: Takeaways From the Trump News Conference
President Trump gave Elon Musk a send-off in the Oval Office.
Skulls of 19 Black Americans Return to New Orleans After 150 Years in Germany
The remains, used in the 19th century as part of now discredited racial science, are being laid to rest on Saturday in a traditional jazz funeral.
Meta and Anduril Work On Mixed Reality Headsets For the Military
In a full-circle moment for Palmer Luckey, Meta and his defense tech company Anduril are teaming up to develop mixed reality headsets for the U.S. military under the Army's revamped SBMC Next program. The collaboration will merge Meta's Reality Labs hardware and Llama AI with Anduril's battlefield software, marking Meta's entry into military XR through the very company founded by Luckey after his controversial departure from Facebook. "I am glad to be working with Meta once again," Luckey said in a blog post. "My mission has long been to turn warfighters into technomancers, and the products we are building with Meta do just that." TechCrunch reports: This partnership stems from the Soldier Borne Mission Command (SBMC) Next program, formerly called the Integrated Visual Augmentation System (IVAS) Next. IVAS was a massive military contract, with a total $22 billion budget, originally awarded to Microsoft in 2018 intended to develop HoloLens-like AR glasses for soldiers. But after endless problems, in February the Army stripped management of the program from Microsoft and awarded it to Anduril, with Microsoft staying on as a cloud provider. The intent is to eventually have multiple suppliers of mixed reality glasses for soldiers.
All of this meant that if Luckey's former employer, Meta, wanted to tap into the potentially lucrative world of military VR/AR/XR headsets, it would need to go through Anduril. The devices will be based on tech out of Meta's AR/VR research center Reality Labs, the post says. They'll use Meta's Llama AI model, and they will tap into Anduril's command and control software known as Lattice. The idea is to provide soldiers with a heads-up display of battlefield intelligence in real time. [...] An Anduril spokesperson tells TechCrunch that the product family Meta and Anduril are building is even called EagleEye, which will be an ecosystem of devices. EagleEye is what Luckey named Anduril's first imagined headset in Anduril's pitch deck draft, before his investors convinced him to focus on building software first. After the announcement, Luckey said on X: "It is pretty cool to have everything at our fingertips for this joint effort -- everything I made before Meta acquired Oculus, everything we made together, and everything we did on our own after I was fired."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Loretta Swit a.k.a. Hot Lips of TV’s ‘M*A*S*H,’ Dies at 87
She won two Emmy Awards for her sympathetic portrayal of an Army major on the hit TV show and had a long career in TV and theater.
250 Million Honeybees Escape After a Truck Rolls Over in Washington State
Several emergency responders were stung after the truck flipped in a sparsely populated area of Whatcom County. Efforts were underway to recapture the bees.