alternative_right shares a report from ScienceAlert: It might be reasonable to think that there's an indelible link between the heart and the body it resides in -- the processes that affect one inevitably affect the other. But a new preprint, uploaded to bioRxiv and yet to be peer-reviewed, suggests that this may only be true up to a point. Take the heart out of the body and put it in a new one, and something incredible happens. The transplanted heart begins to take on the biological age of its new owner. Older hearts transplanted into younger recipients appear to become biologically younger, while younger hearts placed in older bodies show signs of accelerated aging.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: As bipartisan backlash against Flock grows, some cities are asking anti-surveillance advocates and media outlets to pay eye-popping fees -- including charging tens of thousands or even millions -- to get information about how police departments are using and potentially abusing AI-enabled camera systems that track every vehicle that passes them. On Monday, the Texas Tribune reported that city officials in a Fort Worth suburb, North Richland Hills, asked one group to pay $2.3 million before it would fulfill a public records request for Flock data. To reach that high fee, officials claimed that searching "about a terabyte worth of communications about errors, misuse, and effectiveness of the Flock system" would take approximately 14 years of labor at a rate of $15 per hour. Phil Mynona, who filed the request using a pseudonym on behalf of his group, the Texas Privacy Coalition, told the Tribune that the fee seemed "ludicrous" and designed to stifle his public records searches. Mynona has sought similar records from more than 200 law enforcement agencies across the US, and he said it was impossible to predict how cities assessed fees for Flock records. Some cities provided more than 400,000 pages of documents for free, while others charged $5,000. Other groups, including a Houston news station called KPRC, have seen officials quote up to $121,000 for Flock records, the Tribune reported. The high price tags may be hiding data that anti-surveillance groups note have triggered audits, arrests, and changes in how law enforcement uses cameras, including decisions to get rid of cameras. Further reading: Flock Blamed for Wrongful 13-Day Imprisonment and a Police Stalking Incident in Florida

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According to U.S. and British officials, 12 B-1 Air Force bombers from R.A.F. Fairford air base were withdrawn because of the risk of a drone attack ordered by Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.

The separatist party’s victory fell short of clinching a majority that would have all but guaranteed a potential showdown with Ottawa over Canada’s future.

Chaos in schools, on the streets and in the markets is rooted in France’s struggles to fund its social welfare state, with a presidential election approaching.

The scale of the demonstrations planned for Tuesday will test the strength of the student-led protest movement that has spread across French high schools since late September.

Officials determined that a goalkeeper from the Democratic Republic of Congo did not have the correct paperwork, documents show. But no action was taken, renewing questions about FIFA’s governance.

The police are investigating how about 3,000 nonexistent residents were added to official data for Toyama.

With his wife, Tammy Faye, Mr. Bakker built a broadcasting juggernaut around the gospel of prosperity.

The state has had 108 cases this year, the most since 2019. The declaration comes amid a national resurgence of the highly contagious viral illness.

The powerful anesthetic has gained popularity as a party drug, including among a certain social set on the university’s campus.

In Nebraska, President Trump signed an executive order to waive an off-road requirement for the fuel, which is exempt from the federal highway tax.

Brazil is fertile ground for authoritarian politics, no matter who wins this election.

In a life of achievement and disgrace, he wrote best-selling novels with themes he knew intimately: ambition, self-promotion, misbehavior and scandal.

The president said that his PAC, MAGA, Inc., would pay for TV ads promoting him that had been paid for with taxpayer money.

In the first large gathering on campus since revelations about sexual assault allegations, students and faculty members convened outside an administration building that had been the target of vandalism overnight.

Wired reports that rural data center projects could become eligible for expanded federal Opportunity Zone tax benefits starting in 2027, with more than 100 planned or developing facilities potentially qualifying. "Right now, the only requirement to get the benefits is capital investment," says Emily Kraschel, a tax policy analyst at the Searchlight Institute, a public policy think tank. "However, that doesn't guarantee that that money is necessarily creating jobs or creating a local economic boost. You'd be more sure of that with a more traditional factory that requires lots of workers. But with a data center, that assumption goes a little wonky." From the report: During the first Trump administration, a bipartisan group of lawmakers proposed the creation of the opportunity zone program, which offers tax benefits for companies that choose to build projects in certain low-income census tracts. Last year, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act made a number of changes to open up the program in order to attract more investment to rural areas. Kraschel and her colleagues from Searchlight have been researching data center projects that might qualify for these tax benefits, comparing the locations of data center projects in development with rural census tracts eligible for the new program. Wired exclusively reviewed the research compiled by Searchlight and found more than 100 data centers under various stages of development in rural areas that could be eligible. Searchlight used a very conservative database of under 700 data center projects that are planned or under construction to compile its research; other datasets put the number of data centers in development in the US at closer to 1,500. It's very likely that the number of newly eligible projects is bigger, especially since more data centers are decamping from urban areas. Separate research from Pew found that while just 13 percent of operating data centers are located in rural areas, a majority of planned facilities -- around 67 percent -- are going rural. [...] A project simply existing in a rural opportunity zone doesn't mean the company automatically will get the tax benefits; the company has to create a specialized investment vehicle to kickstart the process. Because the tax break can be considered confidential IRS data, it's next to impossible to know which companies are pursuing the benefits unless they voluntarily disclose. [...] Nathan Jensen, a government professor at the University of Texas-Austin, says that he would be "very surprised" if some companies were not considering siting in rural opportunity zones as part of their decisionmaking process. "It's essentially free money," he says. There is no requirement for projects getting opportunity zone benefits to create jobs; the assumption is that they will do so, simply by siting in the community itself. This isn't always the case for projects like storage facilities and warehouses, which, Jensen says, have been popular choices for developers working in opportunity zones. Data centers may create a number of jobs in the short term for their construction, but there's an ongoing debate about whether or not they create a lasting new workforce over the longer term.

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Hackers stole records belonging to roughly 8 million Danish citizens and residents from Denmark's Central Person Register (CPR), including names, addresses, social security numbers and other personal information. The breach is believed to be the largest in Denmark's history. TechCrunch reports: The CPR is a government database of Danish citizens' information, including their government-issued identity number for paying taxes and accessing other services. Denmark's current population is about 6 million people, but the database includes records for about 11 million people, with some of the data going back decades. The Danish government would not say who is behind the breach, which happened in September but was discovered on October 2. However, it said the unauthorized access was obtained by "abusing a Danish company's lawful access to search for information in the CPR system." (Some companies in Denmark have access to the CPR for verifying people's information with the government.)

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The Wikimedia Foundation says it found evidence that "rogue" OpenAI agents edited Wikimedia wikis without approval, unsuccessfully tried to exploit its Etherpad service, and generated millions of automated requests across Wikimedia projects. Here's a summary of what Wikimedia observed (via The Verge): Wiki editing: We've identified edits to Wikimedia wikis that we believe are from AI agents operated by OpenAI. These edits were not published to pages with visibility to general readers; almost all of them were testing edits in "sandbox" areas of the wiki. It also included a few edits to the configuration for a citation tool, which we believe were potentially malicious edits that were intended to misuse this tool as a proxy for fetching data from remote services. While Wikipedia policies allow bots to edit when they are disclosed and approved by the community, none of those approvals were sought in these incidents. Etherpad probing and use: Agents we believe to be operated by OpenAI made some unsuccessful attempts to compromise our public Etherpad, a note-taking tool we host as a community service. Agents unsuccessfully tried to use it to fetch data from other websites as a proxy. Other agents also likely operated by OpenAI took notes about their tasks, though this did not appear to turn into coordination. Excessive data downloading: Agents we believe to be operated by OpenAI made millions of automated requests to our public APIs to access the knowledge on Wikimedia projects, crawled millions of pages (mainly from our projects Wikidata and Wikimedia Commons), and made hundreds of thousands of data queries to the Wikidata Query Service (WQDS). This traffic may have contributed to a partial outage on WQDS in May.

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Flávio Bolsonaro, now the favorite to win Brazil’s presidency, would give President Trump a critical new ally in Latin America, particularly on security.