What’s needed, Birch argues, when faced with such staggering uncertainty about the sentience stature of other beings, is a precautionary framework that outlines best practices for decision-making regarding their care. And in The Edge of Sentience, he provides exactly that, in meticulous, orderly detail. Over more than 300 pages, he outlines three fundamental framework principles […]
November 30, 2024 | Biology, consciousness, ethics, neurobiology, Science, sentience | No comments
Researchers have discovered malicious code circulating in the wild that hijacks the earliest stage boot process of Linux devices by exploiting a year-old firmware vulnerability when it remains unpatched on affected models. The critical vulnerability is one of a constellation of exploitable flaws discovered last year and given the name LogoFAIL. These exploits are able […]
November 29, 2024 | Biz & IT, bootkitty, Linux, logofail, Security, uefi, unified extensible firmware interface | No comments
The leaves have turned, the turkey has been eaten, the parades are over, and the football has been watched—the only thing left to do is to try to hide from increasingly uncomfortable family conversations by going out and shopping for things! It’s the holiday tradition that not only makes us feel good, but also (apocryphally) […]
November 29, 2024 | Amazon, black friday, cyber monday, sales, Shopping | No comments
Today’s young adults grew up in a time when their childhoods were documented with smartphone cameras instead of dedicated digital or film cameras. It’s not surprising that, perhaps as a reaction to the ubiquity of the phone, some young creative photographers are leaving their handsets in their pockets in favor of compact point-and-shoot digital cameras—the […]
November 29, 2024 | digicams, digital photography, syndication, Tech | No comments
Brown notes that the predecessor Mac LC and LC II had the correct connections, as did the LC 475, which uses the same power supply scheme. This makes him “confident that Apple made a boo-boo on the LC III,” or “basically the hardware equivalent of a copy/paste error when you’re writing code.” Making sure rehabbers […]
November 29, 2024 | Apple, Macintosh, Tech | No comments
One year ago, I didn’t know how to bake bread. I just knew how to follow a recipe. If everything went perfectly, I could turn out something plain but palatable. But should anything change—temperature, timing, flour, Mercury being in Scorpio—I’d turn out a partly poofy pancake. I presented my partly poofy pancakes to people, and […]
November 28, 2024 | algorithms, baking, bread, Computer science, Culture, Features, frameworks, sourdough, tiktok, YouTube | No comments
NASA taps Falcon Heavy for another big launch. A little more than a month after SpaceX launched NASA’s flagship Europa Clipper mission on a Falcon Heavy rocket, the space agency announced its next big interplanetary probe will also launch on a Falcon Heavy, Ars reports. What’s more, the Dragonfly mission the Falcon Heavy will launch […]
November 28, 2024 | blue origin, china, human spaceflight, italy, launch, rocket lab, rocket report, Science, Space, spacex | No comments
If Margaritaville were a real place, it should definitely keep a few dermatologists on hand. In a case of an oft-overlooked food preparation risk, a 40-year-old man showed up to an allergy clinic in Texas with a severe, burning rash on both his hands that had developed two days earlier. A couple of days later, […]
November 27, 2024 | Health, medical cases, NEJM, phytophotodermatitis, rash, Science, skin | No comments
Paleontologists have long puzzled over how the dinosaurs—originally relatively small and of minor importance to the broader ecosystem—evolved to become the dominant species some 30 million years later. Fossilized feces and vomit from dinosaurs might hold important clues to how and why this evolutionary milestone came about, according to a new paper published in the […]
November 27, 2024 | coprolites, dinosaurs, evolutionary biology, food webs, fossilized feces, Jurassic, paleontology, Science, Triassic | No comments
Over the past decade, a new class of infections has threatened Windows users. By infecting the firmware that runs immediately before the operating system loads, these UEFI bootkits continue to run even when the hard drive is replaced or reformatted. Now the same type of chip-dwelling malware has been found in the wild for backdooring […]
November 27, 2024 | Biz & IT, bootkit, malware, Security, uefi | No comments