"If a rock falls on Mars, and no one is there to see it, does it leave a trace?" jokes the New York Times, answering "Yes, and it's a beautiful herringbone-like pattern, new research reveals." Scientists have now spotted thousands of tracks on the red planet created by tumbling boulders. Delicate chevron-shaped piles of Martian dust and sand frame the tracks, the team showed, and most fade over the course of a few years.

Rockfalls have been spotted elsewhere in the solar system, including on the moon and even a comet. But a big open question is the timing of these processes on other worlds — are they ongoing or did they predominantly occur in the past?A study of these ephemeral features on Mars, published last month in Geophysical Research Letters, says that such boulder tracks can be used to pinpoint recent seismic activity on the red planet. This new evidence that Mars is a dynamic world runs contrary to the notion that all of the planet's exciting geology happened much earlier, s aid Ingrid Daubar, a planetary scientist at Brown University who was not involved in the study...

To arrive at this finding, Vijayan, a planetary scientist at the Physical Research Laboratory in Ahmadabad, India, who uses a single name, and his colleagues pored over thousands of images of Mars' equatorial region. The imagery was captured from 2006 through 2020 by the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera onboard NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter and revealed details as small as 10 inches across. "We can discriminate individual boulders," Vijayan said. The team manually searched for chain-like features — a telltale signature of a rock careening down an incline — on the sloped walls of impact craters. Vijayan and his collaborators spotted more than 4,500 such boulder tracks, the longest of which stretched more than a mile and a half...

Roughly one-third of the tracks the researchers studied were absent in early images, meaning that they must have formed since 2006... The researchers suggest that winds continuously sweeping over the surface of Mars redistribute dust and sand and erase the ejecta. Because boulder fall ejecta fades so rapidly, seeing it implies that a boulder was dislodged recently, the team suggest. And a common cause of rockfalls, on Earth and elsewhere, is seismic activity.... Since 2019, hundreds of marsquakes have been detected by NASA's InSight lander, and two of the largest occurred last year in the Cerberus Fossae region.
Today the Mars lander InSight is back in operation after a two-week break to avoid dust storms, while dust storms also delayed the 19th flight of NASA's Ingenuity helicopter.

And elsewhere on Mars, the Perserverance rover successfully dislodged two pebbles stuck in its sample-collecting apparatus.

America's National Labor Relations Board is an independent agency of the federal government that enforces U.S. labor law.

And its prosecutors "plan to formally accuse Amazon.com of illegally firing an activist who was trying to unionize its New York warehouses," as well as other violations of the law, reports Bloomberg — unless Amazon settles the case first.

New York Focus reports that the fired worker had commuted from a homeless shelter to Amazon's fulfillment center on New York's Staten Island — a facility where Amazon has held mandatory anti-union meetings. But it's not the only place there's been tension between Amazon and union organizers: In March, an NLRB investigation into the firing of Queens Amazon warehouse worker and labor leader Jonathan Bailey found that the company illegally interrogated and threatened him. NBC News reported that eight other workers also said "they had been fired, disciplined or retaliated against for protected activity." A month later, the NLRB found that Amazon had illegally retaliated against Emily Cunningham and Maren Costa, who was fired in 2020 for their workplace activism while employed at Amazon's headquarters in Seattle
The Amazon Labor Union (founded by current and former Amazon employees) "has filed a petition to hold an election at four of the e-commerce giant's facilities in Staten Island," Bloomberg reported Friday. And an official for the group told Bloomberg it could galvanize support for a union if they could get the fired worker reinstated. "It would be monumental for him to go back to the same building that he was terminated from and speak his truth and let workers know that it's OK to speak out." Amazon has been grappling with an unprecedented wave of activism and organizing in North America, including walkouts over safety concerns in Staten Island and elsewhere, as well as unionization drives in Alabama, Canada and New York.... In December, Amazon reached a settlement with the labor board requiring the company to inform workers nationwide of their legal rights and to let employees organize on its property during their time off.

Slashdot reader DevNull127 shares a transcript from a recent segment on CNN: CNN: Here's a moral question peculiar to these days: Is it wrong to mock people who publicly crusade against the Covid vaccine, and then die of the disease?

Or does it drive home the message about saving lives?

There are entire web sites that are devoted to such mockery. Sorry Antivaxxer.com gleefully tales stories and photos of anti-vaccine advocates who end up in the ICU, intubated, or dead from the disease.

One recent case of this kind of tasteless taunting spurred two dueling opinion pieces in the Los Angeles Times. Orange County Republican Kelly Ernby, a former assistant D.A. and state assembly candidate who had lobbied publicly against the Covid vaccines, passed away earlier this month at age 46 from Covid complications. She was unvaccinated. Ernby's death unleashed a torrent of reaction on the internet. On her own Facebook page under a Christmas collage that she had posted, there are now more than 4,600 comments. Some are sympathy notes; many other are not.

In response to the piling on, Los Angeles Times columnist Nicholas Goldberg wrote, "I don't understand how crowing over the death of others furthers useful debate — or increases vaccination rates." But a few days later, Goldberg's colleague Michael Hiltzik published a column expressing the exact opposite. "Mocking anti-vaxxers' Covid deaths is ghoulish, yes — but may be necessary." Michael Hiltzik joins me now, he's the L.A. Times' business columnist. He's also a Pulitzer Prize winner. Michael let's make clear at the outset: you are not talking about the everyday people who don't get vaxxed, sadly contract Covid, and die. You're talking about people with a platform, right?

Michael Hiltzik: That's correct... In my column, I pointed out that the unvaccinated really fall into three categories. There are those who can't get vaccinated for legitimate reasons — small children, people with genuine medical contra-indications of vaccination. Then there's a fairly large group of people who I think have been duped into resisting the vaccine, duped by misinformation and disinformation about the vaccines, and sort of nonsense about preserving our freedoms in the face of this pandemic.

The real targets who are important here are those who spent the last few months or years of their lives crusading against sensible, safe policies such as vaccination and social distancing and what have you — and ended up paying the ultimate price for their own — basically, their own folly.

[CNN puts a pargraph on the screen, highlighting Hiltzik's comment that "Mockery is not necessarily the wrong reaction to those who publicly mocked anti-Covid measures and encouraged others to follow suit, before they perished of the disease the dangers of which they belittled."]

Michael Hiltzik: You know, we have sort of a cultural habit of not speaking ill of the dead, of treating the good deceased — looking at the good that they've done during their lives. I'm not sure that in this case that's entirely appropriate, because so many of them actually have promoted reckless, dangerous policies.

And as I wrote there, they took innocent people along with them.

So is mockery the only response? Well, I don't know — but as I wrote, every one of these deaths is a teachable moment. And unfortunately we haven't been learning from the lesson that we should be hearing from them.
In his column, Hiltzik had argued that "[P]leas for 'civility' are a fraud.

"Their goal is to blunt and enfeeble criticism and distract from its truthfulness. Typically, they're the work of hypocrites."

Long-time Slashdot reader fahrbot-bot wanted to share this New York Times article which makes the point that "The stunning Covid vaccines manufactured by Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna drew upon long-buried discoveries made in the hopes of ending past epidemics..." They remain a marvel: Even as the Omicron variant fuels a new wave of the pandemic, the vaccines have proved remarkably resilient at defending against severe illness and death. And the manufacturers, Pfizer, BioNTech and Moderna, say that mRNA technology will allow them to adapt the vaccines quickly, to fend off whatever dangerous new version of the virus that evolution brings next.

Skeptics have seized on the rapid development of the vaccines — among the most impressive feats of medical science in the modern era — to undermine the public's trust in them. But the breakthroughs behind the vaccines unfolded over decades, little by little, as scientists across the world pursued research in disparate areas, never imagining their work would one day come together to tame the pandemic of the century. The pharmaceutical companies harnessed these findings and engineered a consistent product that could be made at scale, partly with the help of Operation Warp Speed, the Trump administration's multibillion-dollar program to hasten the development and manufacture of vaccines, drugs and diagnostic tests to fight the new virus.

For years, though, the scientists who made the vaccines possible scrounged for money and battled public indifference. Their experiments often failed. When the work got too crushing, some of them left it behind. And yet on this unpredictable, zigzagging path, the science slowly built upon itself, squeezing knowledge from failure.

The vaccines were possible only because of efforts in three areas. The first began more than 60 years ago with the discovery of mRNA, the genetic molecule that helps cells make proteins. A few decades later, two scientists in Pennsylvania decided to pursue what seemed like a pipe dream: using the molecule to command cells to make tiny pieces of viruses that would strengthen the immune system. The second effort took place in the private sector, as biotechnology companies in Canada in the budding field of gene therapy — the modification or repair of genes to treat diseases — searched for a way to protect fragile genetic molecules so they could be safely delivered to human cells. The third crucial line of inquiry began in the 1990s, when the U.S. government embarked on a multibillion-dollar quest to find a vaccine to prevent AIDS. That effort funded a group of scientists who tried to target the all-important "spikes" on H.I.V. viruses that allow them to invade cells. The work has not resulted in a successful H.I.V. vaccine. But some of these researchers, including Dr. Graham, veered from the mission and eventually unlocked secrets that allowed the spikes on coronaviruses to be mapped instead.

In early 2020, these different strands of research came together. The spike of the Covid virus was encoded in mRNA molecules. Those molecules were wrapped in a protective layer of fat and poured into small glass vials. When the shots went in arms less than a year later, recipients' cells responded by producing proteins that resembled the spikes — and that trained the body to attack the coronavirus.

The extraordinary tale proved the promise of basic scientific research: that once in a great while, old discoveries can be plucked from obscurity to make history.

Yahoo Japan is telling its 8,000 employees they can work anywhere in the country -- and even be flown into work when the job requires it -- bucking the trend of companies looking to return workers to offices in the third year of the coronavirus pandemic. The Japan Times reports: The program takes effect April 1 and allows employees to commute by plane, which wasn't previously an option, the company said in a statement Wednesday. While Yahoo is best known for its internet portal in Japan, it's a unit of SoftBank Group's Z Holdings, which also owns the Line messaging app and PayPay mobile payments service. Ninety percent of the company's employees are now working remotely, according to President Kentaro Kawabe, who tweeted that an overwhelming majority of them said their performance has held steady or improved at home. "So we're allowing Yahoo employees to live anywhere in Japan. This doesn't mean we're denying the benefits of the office -- you'll be able to fly in when needed," he added.

Yahoo is setting a commuting budget of $1,300 per month per worker and lifting its previous daily cap. In-person communication will still be encouraged as the initiative is also aimed at bolstering morale and well-being, with social gatherings to be subsidized by [$44] per employee a month. The company has had an "office anywhere" remote work system in place since 2014, however it had capped the number of work-from-home days before the virus took hold to five days a month.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: A defunct hydro plant in Costa Rica is getting a new lease on life by powering crypto mining, and bringing clean energy to a rapidly expanding business. More than 650 machines from 150 customers operate non-stop from this plant next to the Poas River, just outside of capital city San Jose. Costa Rica generates nearly all its energy from green sources, where the state has a monopoly on energy distribution. But the government stopped buying electricity due to surplus power in the country, forcing the plant to reinvent itself.

Eduardo Kooper is the owner of Data Center CR and the plant. "We had a lot of power, but we did nothing with it. We had to pause activity for nine months. We looked for many alternatives -- from making fried food, frozen food -- everything that used a lot of energy. Just a year ago, someone told me about Bitcoin, blockchain, and digital mining." Kooper, skeptical at first, learned that the crypto mining business requires a lot of energy, much of which comes from fossil fuels. The company invested $500,000 to venture into hosting digital mining computers. "Our market is the international miner who is looking for better conditions," said Kooper. "That miner is looking for clean energy, cheap energy that is economically viable, and looking for internet connection, where he finds it is where that miner is going to go."

Brian Fagioli, reporting for BetaNews: The developers of the Ubuntu-based operating system have agreed to accept an undisclosed amount of money from Mozilla in exchange for making significant changes to Linux Mint. This includes removal of modifications to Firefox and a big change for search. The devs share the upcoming changes to Firefox in Linux Mint 19 and higher.
The default start page no longer points to https://www.linuxmint.com/start/
The default search engines no longer include Linux Mint search partners (Yahoo, DuckDuckGo...) but Mozilla search partners (Google, Amazon, Bing, DuckDuckGo, Ebay...)
The default configuration switches from Mint defaults to Mozilla defaults.
Firefox no longer includes code changes or patches from Linux Mint, Debian or Ubuntu.

The value of bitcoin fell under the $40,000 mark in early morning trading today. From a report: The popular cryptocurrency sold off sharply this morning, while rival tokens like ether also lost value. Currently worth $39,831 per coin, bitcoin is off 4.3% and ether 5.1%, according to Coinbase data. While it is always risky to cover price changes in the crypto world, the fall in the value of bitcoin has crossed the threshold from notable to material. Yahoo Finance indicates that bitcoin's recent all-time high saw the cryptocurrency trade as high as $68,789.62 per coin. Today's price puts bitcoin's current drawdown at just over 42%. That's twice the swing required for bitcoin to have entered a technical bear market, and four times what it would need to meet the requirements of a correction.

Electric cars make up less than 5% of new U.S. vehicle sales today — but automakers are betting on increasing demand. Chevy even plans to stop producing gas-powered cars altogether over the next 15 years, according to the Washington Post.

But they also ponder the implications of this year's recall of the Chevy Bolt: The crisis involving the Chevrolet Bolt was a painful reminder for the auto industry that despite treating the electric vehicle era as essentially inevitable — a technical fait accompli — significant obstacles to manufacturing the cars, and especially their batteries, continue to threaten that future. "It's a terrible thing that has happened," Tim Grewe, GM's general director for electrification strategy and cell engineering, said in an interview in September...

The recall of the Bolt covered all of the roughly 141,000 units GM had ever built. The company identified the issue as dual defects that led battery materials to make contact with one another and the components to combust spontaneously. It's a danger that comes directly from the core challenge of creating electric-vehicle batteries: the competition to pack more and more energy into them... Even as automakers seek to phase out gasoline engines en masse, high-voltage car batteries remain in their early stages of mass production. Many manufacturers are experimenting with new technologies and battery chemistries. While they do so, they are discovering defects — some of which can prove catastrophic.... Electric-car-battery explosions can release massive amounts of energy — and the fires can burn for hours, stretching longer and registering hotter than fires in cars with internal-combustion engines...

LG, which has made batteries for the Bolt's entire run, is reimbursing GM for nearly $2 billion of costs associated with the recall.... GM has been hit hardest by fire concerns — but Audi and Hyundai also have recalled EVs over fire risks.

U.S. health officials on Monday cut isolation restrictions for Americans who catch the coronavirus from 10 to five days, and similarly shortened the time that close contacts need to quarantine. The Associated Press reports: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention officials said the guidance is in keeping with growing evidence that people with the coronavirus are most infectious in the two days before and three days after symptoms develop. The decision also was driven by a recent surge in COVID-19 cases, propelled by the omicron variant.

Early research suggests omicron may cause milder illnesses than earlier versions of the coronavirus. But the sheer number of people becoming infected -- and therefore having to isolate or quarantine -- threatens to crush the ability of hospitals, airlines and other businesses to stay open, experts say. CDC Director Rochelle Walensky said the country is about to see a lot of omicron cases. "Not all of those cases are going to be severe. In fact many are going to be asymptomatic," she told The Associated Press on Monday. "We want to make sure there is a mechanism by which we can safely continue to keep society functioning while following the science."

Last week, the agency loosened rules that previously called on health care workers to stay out of work for 10 days if they test positive. The new recommendations said workers could go back to work after seven days if they test negative and don't have symptoms. And the agency said isolation time could be cut to five days, or even fewer, if there are severe staffing shortages. Now, the CDC is changing the isolation and quarantine guidance for the general public to be even less stringent. The guidance is not a mandate; it's a recommendation to employers and state and local officials.

"The privacy-focused search engine DuckDuckGo continues to grow rapidly, with the company now averaging over 100 million daily search queries and growing by almost 47% in 2021..." reports BleepingComputer: In 2020, DuckDuckGo received 23.6 billion total search queries and achieved a daily average of 79 million search queries by the end of December.

In 2021, DuckDuckGo received 34.6 billion total search queries so far and currently has an average of 100 million search queries per day, showing a 46.4% growth for the year.

While DuckDuckGo's growth is considerable, it still only has 2.53% of the total market share, with Yahoo at 3.3%, Bing at 6.43%, and Google holding a dominant share of 87.33% of search engine traffic in the USA. However, as people continue to become frustrated with how their data is being used by tech giants like Google, Facebook, Microsoft, and Apple, we will likely see more people switch to privacy-focused search engines.
This year DuckDuckGo also released their own email forwarding service, and announced work on the DuckDuckGo Privacy Browser for Desktop — which will be built from scratch and not be based on Chromium.

When The Matrix Resurrections premiered in San Francisco, the city's mayor "celebrated the appearance of her fair city in the film and cheered the film's economic contributions to the region," reports SFGate. "But there's a problem of aesthetics at play here... It is undeniably a dystopian hellscape where police rule the city and technology looms over all..." In the first section of the movie, the metaphor of the Matrix mirrors that of the tech industry depicted in the film. Tech is stereotypical here — lots of T-shirt-wearing men playing ping-pong and talking about how to design the next great video game. The most annoying character in the film, Jude (Andrew Caldwell), is a proxy for all annoying tech bros...
Meanwhile Politico writes that the original 1999 film The Matrix actually "changed politics, almost entirely by mistake," and calls the new Matrix Resurections "a sophisticated self-critique of the culture that swallowed it." In the past two decades, the idea of a "red pill" has taken on a life of its own in American culture, most prominently at first in an infamous misogynist subreddit, and then more broadly as a symbol of any kind of political awakening, almost always on the right. The idea has proliferated wildly throughout politics, and especially the darkest ideological corners of the internet, in which to be "red-pilled" means to realize that American society has been hopelessly debased by liberals, requiring a total rethink of its premises... Hugo Weaving, who memorably portrayed the original films' villain, lamented in a 2020 interview how people "will take something that they think is cool and they will repurpose it to fit themselves when the original intention or meaning of that thing was quite the opposite...." [T]he Wachowskis have been largely silent about the "meaning" of their creation — a movie franchise that not only became a ubiquitous cultural phenomenon, but predicted the cultural tenor of politics in the digital age with an eerie, oracular accuracy. We know they got it right, but what did they think about it?

Wednesday saw the release of "The Matrix Resurrections," a long-delayed sequel from one of the original writer/directors (Lana directed; Lilly sat it out) — and also an answer to that question. As a movie, it's everything its predecessors was, an impressive feat of visual-effects artistry, action choreography and original sci-fi worldbuilding. But even more, it's a two hour and 27-minute-long piece of cultural criticism. The film interrogates, to a jarringly specific degree, not just its own iconography, but how American culture has evolved around and bastardized it over the past two decades. "The Matrix Resurrections" is both wildly successful popcorn entertainment and a window into a long-misunderstood creative mind. But in refitting its entire premise to the social media age, it illustrates just how much the contours of American society have changed in the intervening decades....

The original "Matrix" was deeply of its time. Reeves' Neo a was a quintessential late 1990s corporate drone, captive to the professional ennui also depicted in films of the era like "Fight Club" and "Office Space." Its modern incarnation is a cry of protest against something else: society's willingness to trade individual agency for the neurological reward pellets of the Online. Visual metaphors abound, with Reeves disoriented by a procession of mirrors that serve as gateways to another world, another possible truth. "Your brain is hooked on this shit the Matrix has been feeding you for years," one character tells him. "They don't know you like I do.

"I know exactly what you need...."
The movie is streaming now on HBOMax for subscribers in their $15 ad-free tier — but, like, Dune, only during its 31-day theatrical run.

Germany is set to close almost half of its nuclear power capacity before the end of the year, putting further strain on European grids already coping with one of the worst energy crunches in the region's history. From a report: The shutdowns of Grohnde, Gundremmingen C and Brokdorf -- part of the country's nuclear phaseout -- will leave just three atomic plants, which will be taken offline by the end of 2022. Beyond the squeeze on supply, the closures remove a key source of low-carbon power in a nation where emissions are on the rise. After the 2011 Fukushima disaster, Germany vowed to ditch all of its reactors. At the time, the country was a leader in renewables, but the phaseout has left it more reliant on coal and lignite for electricity generation. The nation fell behind in the net-zero race after making major concessions to the coal lobby, to protesters against wind farms and to manufacturers, particularly carmakers.

"From a pure emissions perspective, it was always a questionable idea to shut down German nuclear before the plants have reached the end of their lifetime," said Hanns Koenig, head of commissioned projects at Aurora Energy Research. "It was always clear that the nuclear phaseout would need coal and gas plants to run more and therefore cause substantial extra emissions." Atomic plants are designed to generate power around the clock, providing valuable backup when the wind doesn't blow or the sun doesn't shine. While the shutdowns have been known about for years and are unlikely to cause a spike in prices, the removal of 4 gigawatts of baseload output highlights a dwindling reserve of buffer capacity in Germany. It's one reason why prices are higher next year: electricity for delivery in 2022 has jumped more than fivefold this year.

"The Federal Aviation Administration said on Friday that it was ending a program that awarded small gold pins called 'Commercial Space Astronaut Wings' to certain people who flew to space on private spacecraft," reports the New York Times. (Alternate URL here.) But before the program officially retires in January, all who applied for the gold wings after flying to space this year will still receive them, the agency said.

That means Mr. Bezos, the billionaire founder of Amazon who rode a rocket with his space company, Blue Origin, to the edge of space in July, will be considered a commercial astronaut. So will Richard Branson, the founder of the space tourism firm Virgin Galactic who flew his own company's rocket plane to space in the same month. William Shatner, the Star Trek star who flew with Blue Origin to the edge of space in October, will also receive astronaut wings to go with his Starfleet paraphernalia. Twelve other people were also added to the federal agency's list of wing recipients on Friday [bringing the list up to 30 people].

The changes will help the F.A.A. avoid the potentially awkward position of proclaiming that some space tourists are only passengers, not astronauts.

The Commercial Space Astronaut Wings Program was created by Patti Grace Smith, the first chief of the F.A.A.'s commercial space office, to promote the private development of human spaceflight — a mandate from a 1984 law that aimed to accelerate innovation of space vehicles. The program began handing out pins to qualified individuals in 2004, when Mike Melvill, a test pilot who flew the Scaled Composites SpaceShipOne plane, became its first recipient. To qualify for the commercial astronaut wings under the original guidelines, a person had to reach an altitude of at least 50 miles, the marker of space recognized by NASA and the U.S. Air Force, and be a member of the spacecraft's "flight crew..."

Although no one will receive the little gold pins after 2021, those who fly above 50 miles on an F.A.A.-licensed rocket will be honored in the agency's online database.

But future space tourists should not despair a lack of post-flight flair. Virgin Galactic, Blue Origin and SpaceX have each presented paying and guest passengers with custom-designed wings.
Or, as the Associated Press put it, "The FAA said Friday it's clipping its astronaut wings because too many people are now launching into space and it's getting out of the astronaut designation business entirely...." "The U.S. commercial human spaceflight industry has come a long way from conducting test flights to launching paying customers into space," the FAA's associate administrator Wayne Monteith said in a statement. "Now it's time to offer recognition to a larger group of adventurers daring to go to space."
Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader schwit1 for submitting the story.

It's not your everyday fake news, explains the New York Times. (Alternate URLs here.) In Pittsburgh; Memphis, Tennessee; and Los Angeles, massive billboards recently popped up declaring, "Birds Aren't Real." On Instagram and TikTok, Birds Aren't Real accounts have racked up hundreds of thousands of followers, and YouTube videos about it have gone viral. Last month, Birds Aren't Real adherents even protested outside Twitter's headquarters in San Francisco to demand that the company change its bird logo.

The events were all connected by a Gen Z-fueled conspiracy theory, which posits that birds do not exist and are really drone replicas installed by the U.S. government to spy on Americans. Hundreds of thousands of young people have joined the movement, wearing Birds Aren't Real T-shirts, swarming rallies and spreading the slogan. It might smack of QAnon, the conspiracy theory that the world is controlled by an elite cabal of child-trafficking Democrats. Except that the creator of Birds Aren't Real and the movement's followers are in on a joke: They know that birds are, in fact, real and that their theory is made up.

What Birds Aren't Real truly is, they say, is a parody social movement with a purpose. In a post-truth world dominated by online conspiracy theories, young people have coalesced around the effort to thumb their nose at, fight and poke fun at misinformation. It is Gen Z's attempt to upend the rabbit hole with absurdism... Most Birds Aren't Real members, many of whom are part of an on-the-ground activism network called the Bird Brigade, grew up in a world overrun with misinformation. Some have relatives who have fallen victim to conspiracy theories. So for members of Gen Z, the movement has become a way to collectively grapple with those experiences. By cosplaying conspiracy theorists, they have found community and kinship [according to 23-year-old Peter McIndoe, who created Birds Aren't Real on a whim in 2017...]

Cameron Kasky, 21, an activist from Parkland, Florida, who helped organize the March for Our Lives student protest against gun violence in 2018 and is involved in Birds Aren't Real, said the parody "makes you stop for a second and laugh. In a uniquely bleak time to come of age, it doesn't hurt to have something to laugh about together."
McIndoe began selling Birds Aren't Real merchandise in 2018, according to the article, and now brings in "several thousand dollars a month" with some help from his friend Connor Gaydos.

"If anyone believes birds aren't real," Gaydos tells the Times, "we're the last of their concerns, because then there's probably no conspiracy they don't believe."

"Videos and GIFs of cute animals — usually cats — have gone viral online for almost as long as the internet has been around..." writes the New York Times.

"Now, it is becoming increasingly clear how widely the old-school internet trick is being used by people and organizations peddling false information online, misinformation researchers say." The posts with the animals do not directly spread false information. But they can draw a huge audience that can be redirected to a publication or site spreading false information about election fraud, unproven coronavirus cures and other baseless conspiracy theories entirely unrelated to the videos. Sometimes, following a feed of cute animals on Facebook unknowingly signs users up as subscribers to misleading posts from the same publisher. Melissa Ryan, chief executive of Card Strategies, a consulting firm that researches disinformation, said this kind of "engagement bait" helped misinformation actors generate clicks on their pages, which can make them more prominent in users' feeds in the future. That prominence can drive a broader audience to content with inaccurate or misleading information, she said.

"The strategy works because the platforms continue to reward engagement over everything else," Ms. Ryan said, "even when that engagement comes from" publications that also publish false or misleading content.

Slashdot reader ellithligraw brings the news that the oldest person on earth has died in the Philippines this week at age 124.

CNN Philippines reports: Susano was born on Sept. 11, 1897, which was before the country became independent from Spanish rule. As of September this year, Guinness World Records was still verifying the documents needed for her to be officially declared as the world's oldest living person.
NextShark calls Susano "the last surviving person born in the 19th century." And they add that, according to Manila Bulletin, "Susano has 14 children. One of them is considered a centenarian at the age of 101."

Long-time Slashdot reader fahrbot-bot shares the New York Times' report on a 64-year-old man who participated in a clinical trial by Vertex Pharmaceuticals involving an infusion of insulin-producing pancreas cells grown from stem cells.

"Now his body automatically controls its insulin and blood sugar levels." Mr. Shelton, now 64, may be the first person cured of the disease with a new treatment that has experts daring to hope that help may be coming for many of the 1.5 million Americans suffering from Type 1 diabetes. "It's a whole new life," Mr. Shelton said. "It's like a miracle." Diabetes experts were astonished but urged caution.

The study is continuing and will take five years, involving 17 people with severe cases of Type 1 diabetes. It is not intended as a treatment for the more common Type 2 diabetes.

"We've been looking for something like this to happen literally for decades," said Dr. Irl Hirsch, a diabetes expert at the University of Washington who was not involved in the research. He wants to see the result, not yet published in a peer-reviewed journal, replicated in many more people. He also wants to know if there will be unanticipated adverse effects and if the cells will last for a lifetime or if the treatment would have to be repeated. But, he said, "bottom line, it is an amazing result...."

For Mr. Shelton the moment of truth came a few days after the procedure, when he left the hospital. He measured his blood sugar. It was perfect. He and Ms. Shelton had a meal. His blood sugar remained in the normal range.

Mr. Shelton wept when he saw the measurement.

"The only thing I can say is 'thank you.'"
15 people in a lab spent over 20 years working on converting the stem cells, the article reports. The total cost: about $50 million.

The Los Angeles Times summarizes the results of a new medical study conducted by Northwestern University researchers on antibody levels protecting against Covid-19 in 974 people. "Those who were immunized against COVID-19 with two doses of an mRNA vaccine and received a booster shot about eight months later saw their levels of neutralizing antibodies skyrocket.

"Among this group of 33 fully vaccinated and boosted people, the median level of these antibodies was 23 times higher one week after the booster shot than it had been just before the tune-up dose." What's more, their median post-booster antibody level was three times higher than was typical for another group of people whose antibodies were measured a few weeks after getting their second dose of vaccine, when they're close to their peak.

And it was 53 times higher than that of a group of 76 unvaccinated people who had recovered from COVID-19 just two to six weeks earlier. Even compared to a group of 73 people who had weathered a bout with COVID-19 and went on to get two doses of an mRNA vaccine, the boosted group's median antibody level was 68% higher.

Study leader Alexis Demonbreun, a cell biologist at Northwestern University's Feinberg School of Medicine, said the data demonstrate that no matter how well protected a vaccinated person may think she is, getting a booster shot is likely to increase her neutralizing antibodies — and with it, her immunity — considerably. And because scientists expect large antibody responses to create more durable immunity, the protection afforded by the booster should last longer than the initial two-shot regimen did...

Among their other findings: After receiving two doses of vaccine, people who'd already had an asymptomatic infection were typically no better protected than vaccinated people who had never been infected.

There's a polluted 343-square-mile lake known as "the Salton Sea," about 150 miles southeast of Los Angeles. The Los Angeles Times calls it California's "largest and most troubled lake," after a recent visit with biogeochemist Timothy Lyons.

But is it about to experience a change of fortune? "The big problem at the Salton Sea is intermingled with that organic brown layer on top — and to be honest, it's scary," said Lyons, 63. "It's loaded with pesticides and heavy metals — molybdenum, cadmium and selenium — that linger in greatest concentrations in deeper water... That should worry people, because the Salton Sea is shrinking and exposing more and more of this stuff to scouring winds that carry them far and wide," he added. "Our goals include mapping where these hazardous materials are located, and determining where they came from and what may become of them if trends continue."

For Lyons' research team, filling blanks in existing data is an obsession, and it could have significant implications at a time when the air practically crackles with a volatile mix of environmental danger and economic opportunities promised by ongoing efforts to tap immense reserves of lithium, a key ingredient of rechargeable batteries.... Clouds of salty, alkaline toxic dust containing heavy metals, agricultural chemicals and powdery-fine particulates linked to asthma, respiratory diseases and cancer are rolling off newly exposed playa, threatening the health of thousands of nearby residents. Delays and costs are mounting for many projects that were designed to be showcases of restoration and dust mitigation. Scientists say it's because the projects were developed without consideration for heat waves, severe droughts and water cutbacks due to climate change, or for the constantly evolving underlying geology at the hyper-saline landlocked lake at the southern end of the San Andreas Fault, where shifting tectonic plates bring molten material and hot geothermal brine closer to Earth's surface.

Now, large corporations investing in proposals to suck lithium out of the brine produced by local geothermal operations have revived hopes of jobs and revenue from land leases, with lithium recovery projects potentially supporting internships, education programs and environmental restoration projects for years to come.
The Times got an interesting quote from Frank Ruiz, a program director at the nonprofit environmental group Audubon California — a man who is also a member of the Lithium Valley Commission (lawmakers and community leaders trying to help guide decisions).

"If done correctly, it will elevate the region by creating jobs, benefit the state and the nation by making geothermal energy more affordable, and lay the groundwork for negotiations aimed at ensuring that some of the royalties from lithium production and related land leases are used to support dust reduction and environmental restoration projects."

Ruiz also says that one way or another, "The lithium rush at the Salton Sea cannot be stopped."