Research Linking Violent Entertainment To Aggression Retracted After Scrutiny

Science magazine: As Samuel West combed through a paper that found a link between watching cartoon violence and aggression in children, he noticed something odd about the study participants. There were more than 3000 — an unusually large number — and they were all 10 years old. “It was just too perfect,” says West, a Ph.D. student in social psychology at…

Bosnia village with link to Mars enthralled by rover landing

Bosnian villagers are preparing to gather in front of a video screen in the yard of their community’s only school to watch NASA’s Mars rover attempt a difficult landing Thursday in a crater on the Red Planet named after their small village. Source: https://phys.org/news/2021-02-bosnia-village-link-mars-enthralled.html…

How the NSA-led US Cyber Command Wishes You a Happy Valentine’s Day

Slashdot reader DevNull127 writes: The U.S. Cyber Command, headed by the National Security Agency’s director, has been a part of America’s Department of Defense since 2009. Today this unified combatant command wished its followers on Twitter a happy Valentine’s Day, adding “As our gift to you, we present 12 crypto challenges designed by the information security community. “Love is in the…

Can Dark Matter Be Explained By a Link to a Fifth Dimension?

The standard model of physics can’t accommodate some observed phenomena, notes Popular Mechanics. Yet “In a new study, scientists say they can explain dark matter by positing a particle that links to a fifth dimension.” While the “warped extra dimension” (WED) is a trademark of a popular physics model first introduced in 1999, this research, published in The European Physical Journal…

Apple Will Proxy Safe Browsing Traffic on iOS 14.5 To Hide User IPs from Google

Apple’s upcoming iOS 14.5 release will ship with a feature that will re-route all Safari’s Safe Browsing traffic through Apple-controlled proxy servers as a workaround to preserve user privacy and prevent Google from learning the IP addresses of iOS users. From a report: The new feature will work only when users activate the “Fraudulent Website Warning” option in the iOS Safari…

Celebrate the 91st anniversary of Pluto’s discovery

The I Heart Pluto Festival 2021 is a free event running from February 13 – 18 hosted by Lowell Observatory. Join in with nightly virtual events! Source: https://earthsky.org/space/i-heart-pluto-festival-2021-virtual-events-91st-anniversary…

Elon Musk Says His Start-Up Neuralink Has Wired Up a Monkey To Play Video Games Using Its Mind

Tesla boss Elon Musk said in an interview late Sunday that a monkey has been wired up to play video games with its mind by a company he founded called Neuralink. CNBC reports: Neuralink put a computer chip into the monkey’s skull and used “tiny wires” to connect it to its brain, Musk said. “It’s not an unhappy monkey,” he said…

Suspected Russian Hack Extends Far Beyond SolarWinds Software, Investigators Say

Investigators probing a massive hack of the U.S. government and businesses say they have found concrete evidence the suspected Russian espionage operation went far beyond the compromise of the small software vendor publicly linked to the attack. From a report: Close to a third of the victims didn’t run the SolarWinds software initially considered the main avenue of attack for the…

SEC To Review Brokers’ Restrictions on GameStop, AMC Trading

Securities regulators said Friday they plan to closely review the actions of some brokerage firms [Editor’s note: the link may be paywalled; alternative source] that restricted investors’ ability to trade volatile stocks such as GameStop this week. From a report: The Securities and Exchange Commission’s statement on Friday is the clearest indication yet that regulators are examining potential misconduct around the…

Precision measurements of intracluster light suggest possible link to dark matter

A combination of observational data and sophisticated computer simulations have yielded advances in a field of astrophysics that has languished for half a century. The Dark Energy Survey, which is hosted by the U.S. Department of Energy’s Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, has published a burst of new results on what’s called intracluster light, or ICL, a faint type of light found…