skybrian's recent activity

  1. Comment on Study finds sperm whales help each other give birth in ~science

    skybrian
    Link
    From the article: [...] [...]

    From the article:

    Project CETI (Cetacean Translation Initiative) has released two landmark scientific papers detailing what researchers describe as the most comprehensive record of a sperm whale birth ever captured – and the first quantitative evidence of cooperative birth assistance among non-primates.

    Published in Science and Scientific Reports, the studies draw on more than six hours of underwater acoustic recordings and aerial drone footage collected on 8 July 2023 in waters off Dominica.

    [...]

    Taken together, the studies suggest that cooperative caregiving during birth may be an ancient evolutionary trait. Phylogenetic analysis indicates that behaviours such as the collective lifting of newborns could predate the most recent common ancestor of toothed whales by more than 36 million years.

    [...]

    The research builds on decades of fieldwork led by Shane Gero, whose team has tracked the focal whale family since 2005. The mother – known as Rounder from Unit A – was observed giving birth alongside her own mother, Lady Oracle, and her daughter, Accra, capturing three generations participating in the event.

    “This is the most detailed window we’ve ever had into one of the most important moments in a whale’s life,” said Shane Gero, Biology Lead for Project CETI, Scientist in Residence at Carleton University, and National Geographic Explorer.

    “Because this family unit has been studied for decades, we could see what the grandmother was doing, how the new big sister acted, and how each helped mom and newborn, placing this rare birth within a deep social and behavioural context.”

    3 votes

  3. Comment on How cash is helping Kenyan moms access care in ~health

    skybrian
    Link
    From the article:

    From the article:

    • We’ve sent cash to nearly 1,500 pregnant women in rural Kenya to support safer pregnancies and newborn care since September 2025.

    • Early data show women prioritizing food, baby supplies, and healthcare spending (6x what we see in our general poverty relief programs).

    • Cash is helping women cover specific costs to access healthcare: insurance fees, transportation, and clinic bills.

    • We’re expanding to reach more women in Kenya and piloting a similar model in DRC to learn what works across different contexts.

    1 vote

  5. Comment on An unstoppable mushroom is tearing through North American forests. Fungi enthusiasts are doing damage control. in ~enviro

    skybrian
    Link
    From the article: [...] [...] [...]

    From the article:

    The golden oyster mushroom (Pleurotus citrinopileatus) is a close cousin of the grey oyster I dissected above. Instead of grey, it has a neon yellow cap, and it is prolific. The fungus itself mainly grows on dead or dying hardwood trees, breaking down the tough wood fibres. Golden oysters are "gilled mushrooms", and a single gilled mushroom can release up to billions of spores. Oyster mushrooms also happen to be one of the few carnivorous mushrooms – preying mercilessly on nematode worms.

    It is invisible for most of the year, living as mycelium, fungal strands within the wood. But beginning in spring, it sends out its fruiting body – what we would recognise as the mushroom itself. Huge yellow clusters cascade out of logs and trees, each mushroom itself producing millions of microscopic airborne spores.

    Native to Asia, the fungus was brought over to the US to be cultivated for food sometime around the early 2000s. Because it fruits so heavily, it proved to be popular with both professional and home growers. It has a high yield, meaning more profit for growers.

    The mushroom is now found across the world. It's spreading in Switzerland, and has been found in Italy, Hungary, Serbia and Germany. There are reports of the golden oyster growing in the south of the UK too. The Royal Horticultural society has issued advice warning people against growing non-native species, especially the golden oyster, saying it was "highly invasive" and capable of causing "severe damage" to local fungal communities.

    [...]

    "We found that trees colonised by golden oyster have, on average, about half the fungal biodiversity as trees without the golden oyster. And so that was a huge indicator that they're likely out competing the native fungi that were there," says Veerabahu.

    [...]

    Other invasive species meanwhile are appearing in Europe. In October 2025, Poland's national forest management body sounded the alarm after a North American species, the slender golden bolete (Aureoboletus projectellus) was found in the Unesco-protected Białowieża Forest.

    [...]

    Climate change is also believed to be changing the distribution of fungi across the world. One species, the strikingly orange "ping pong bat fungus" (Favolaschia calocera), originally hails from tropical Madagascar. But it's been showing up in the wild in Dorset, southern England, where its effects on native fungi are unknown, something scientists believe is being helped by rising global temperatures.

    4 votes

  7. Comment on France confirms oil crisis, says 30-40 percent of Gulf energy infrastructure destroyed in ~society

    skybrian
    Link Parent
    I do expect Asian countries in particular to reduce dependency on the Middle East.

    I do expect Asian countries in particular to reduce dependency on the Middle East.

    2 votes

  8. Comment on How autonomous drone warfare is emerging in Ukraine in ~society

    skybrian
    Link
    From the article: [...] [...] [...] [...] [...]

    From the article:

    A thorough analysis of the Middle East conflict will take some time to emerge. And so to understand the direction of this new way of war, look to Ukraine, where its next phase—autonomy—is already starting to come into view. Outnumbered by the Russians and facing increasingly sophisticated jamming and spoofing aimed at causing the drones to veer off course or fall out of the sky, Ukrainian technologists realized as early as 2023 that what could really win the war was autonomy. Autonomous operation means a drone isn’t being flown by a remote pilot, and therefore there’s no communications link to that pilot that can be severed or spoofed, rendering the drone useless.

    [...]

    Since then, The Fourth Law has dispatched “more than thousands” of autonomy modules to troops in eastern Ukraine (it declines to give a more specific figure), which can be retrofitted on existing drones to take over navigation during the final approach to the target. Azhnyuk says the autonomy modules, worth around US $50, increase the drone-strike success rate by up to four times that of purely operator-controlled drones.

    And that is just the beginning. Azhnyuk is one of thousands of developers, including some who relocated from Western countries, who are applying their skills and other resources to advancing the drone technology that is the defining characteristic of the war in Ukraine. This eclectic group of startups and founders includes Eric Schmidt, the former Google CEO, whose company Swift Beat is churning out autonomous drones and modules for Ukrainian forces. The frenetic pace of tech development is helping a scrappy, innovative underdog hold at bay a much larger and better-equipped foe.

    All of this development is careening toward AI-based systems that enable drones to navigate by recognizing features in the terrain, lock on to and chase targets without an operator’s guidance, and eventually exchange information with each other through mesh networks, forming self-organizing robotic kamikaze swarms. Such an attack swarm would be commanded by a single operator from a safe distance.

    According to some reports, autonomous swarming technology is also being developed for sea drones. Ukraine has had some notable successes with sea drones, which have reportedly destroyed or damaged around a dozen Russian vessels.

    [...]

    While uncrewed aerial vehicles (UAVs) have received the most attention, the Ukrainian military is also deploying dozens of different kinds of drones on land and sea. Ukraine, struggling with the shortage of infantry personnel, began working on replacing a portion of human soldiers with wheeled ground robots in 2024. As of early 2026, thousands of ground robots are crawling across the gray zone along the front line in Eastern Ukraine. Most are used to deliver supplies to the front line or to help evacuate the wounded, but some “killer” ground robots fitted with turrets and remotely controlled machine guns have also been tested.

    [...]

    Today’s Shaheds fly faster and higher, and therefore are more difficult to detect and take down. Between January 2024 and August 2025, the number of Shaheds and Shahed-type attack drones launched by Russia into Ukraine per month increased more than tenfold, from 334 to more than 4,000. In 2025, Ukraine found AI-enabling Nvidia chipsets in wreckages of Shaheds, as well as thermal-vision modules capable of locking onto targets at night.

    “Now, they are interconnected, which allows them to exchange information with each other,” Solntsev says. “They also have cameras that allow them to autonomously navigate to objects. Soon they will be able to tell each other to avoid a jammed region or an area where one of them got intercepted.”

    [...]

    MaXon’s solution consists of ground turrets scanning the sky with infrared sensors, with additional input from a network of radars that detects approaching Shahed drones at distances of, typically, 12 to 16 km. The turrets fire autonomous fixed-winged interceptor drones, fitted with explosive warheads, toward the approaching Shaheds at speeds of nearly 300 km/h. To boost the chances of successful interception, MaXon is also fielding an airborne anti-Shahed fortification system consisting of helium-filled aerostats hovering above the city that dispatch the interceptors from a higher altitude.

    [...]

    Despite the progress on both sides, analysts say that the kind of robotic warfare imagined by Azhnyuk won’t be a reality for years.

    “The software for drone collaboration is there,” says Kate Bondar, a former policy advisor for the Ukrainian government and currently a research fellow at the U.S. Center for Strategic and International Studies. “Drones can fly in labs, but in real life, [the forces] are afraid to deploy them because the risk of a mistake is too high,” she adds.

    3 votes

  10. Comment on France confirms oil crisis, says 30-40 percent of Gulf energy infrastructure destroyed in ~society

    skybrian
    Link Parent
    There are some changes that can happen quickly, but we saw during the pandemic that supply chains are less flexible and have more dependencies than one might naively expect. Some investments take...

    There are some changes that can happen quickly, but we saw during the pandemic that supply chains are less flexible and have more dependencies than one might naively expect.

    Some investments take time. If a factory takes two years to build, and you don’t know what prices will be like in two years, should you build it? Maybe the crisis will be over and there will be a glut?

    Consistent policy encourages long-term investments. When people do the calculations to figure out if an investment will pay for itself, that gives them solid numbers to work with. Short-term shocks, not so much.

    7 votes

  12. Comment on Reddit will implement human verification to tag and combat bots in ~tech

  13. Comment on Reddit will implement human verification to tag and combat bots in ~tech

    skybrian
    Link
    A fundamental problem is that a human and a bot can share an identity. The simplest way would be to cut and paste AI-generated text. That can easily be automated.

    A fundamental problem is that a human and a bot can share an identity. The simplest way would be to cut and paste AI-generated text. That can easily be automated.

    11 votes

  14. Comment on US regulator bans imports of new foreign-made routers, citing security concerns in ~tech

    skybrian
    Link Parent
    Maybe some vendors would stop selling their existing models, but that means more market share for those that stay in the market. And if they’re still selling them, wouldn’t they keep supporting them?

    Maybe some vendors would stop selling their existing models, but that means more market share for those that stay in the market. And if they’re still selling them, wouldn’t they keep supporting them?

    1 vote

  15. Comment on US regulator bans imports of new foreign-made routers, citing security concerns in ~tech

    skybrian
    Link Parent
    From: The FCC's Wi-Fi Router Ban Explained I doubt that access to the latest models of routers will matter much, at least for consumers. They're pretty mature tech.

    From: The FCC's Wi-Fi Router Ban Explained

    The FCC order targets all foreign-made consumer-grade routers, but existing models are not banned from use or sale. "Today’s action does not impact a consumer’s continued use of routers they previously acquired,” the FCC said on Monday. “Nor does it prevent retailers from continuing to sell, import, or market router models approved previously through the FCC’s equipment authorization process.”

    I doubt that access to the latest models of routers will matter much, at least for consumers. They're pretty mature tech.

    2 votes

  16. Comment on Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone | Teaser in ~tv

    skybrian
    Link Parent
    Doesn't have to be. The simplest way (far simpler than what rich people actually do) would have been to put her book royalties over the years into an index fund, and then the index fund makes...

    Doesn't have to be. The simplest way (far simpler than what rich people actually do) would have been to put her book royalties over the years into an index fund, and then the index fund makes money like any other investment, even if the original source of funding is gone. Once people are wealthy enough, they don't need to own a business directly.

    There's a New York Times article from 2016 that estimated that she was a billionaire then, and the S&P 500 has tripled since then.

    From a brief search, though, she's reportedly still earning hundreds of millions from royalties, on top of whatever investments she has.

    Financially, this is pretty much untouchable no matter what happens.

    7 votes

  17. Comment on Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone | Teaser in ~tv

    skybrian
    Link Parent
    You can say it's simple and maybe it is symbolically, but I was asking about the financial connection, and nobody seems to know the answer. Saying it's simple or direct doesn't mean it necessarily...

    You can say it's simple and maybe it is symbolically, but I was asking about the financial connection, and nobody seems to know the answer. Saying it's simple or direct doesn't mean it necessarily is.

    This is just a guess, but it seems likely that by now she makes plenty from other investments that have nothing to do with the Harry Potter franchise? Any good financial advisor would recommend investing profits in a diversified portfolio. So that's potentially another level of indirection, which likely means the funding for whatever hate groups she wants to fund doesn't have much to do with the success of the TV show, unfortunately.

    7 votes

  18. Comment on Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone | Teaser in ~tv

    skybrian
    Link Parent
    Rawling can believe what she wants, no matter how insane, but it doesn’t make it true that people who buy Harry Potter stuff endorse whatever else Rawling believes. And even if the TV show is a...
    • Exemplary

    Rawling can believe what she wants, no matter how insane, but it doesn’t make it true that people who buy Harry Potter stuff endorse whatever else Rawling believes. And even if the TV show is a flop, that seems unlikely to have much effect on her?

    You can make your own choices, but I think it’s mostly for personal satisfaction.

    20 votes

  19. Comment on Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone | Teaser in ~tv

    skybrian
    Link Parent
    How does that work? I’m guessing HBO subscribers pay the same for their subscription whether they watch it or not? And since there are a lot of other expenses when making a TV show, like paying...

    How does that work? I’m guessing HBO subscribers pay the same for their subscription whether they watch it or not? And since there are a lot of other expenses when making a TV show, like paying the actors and writers and the army of other people who are needed, how much of that would go to Rawling?

    8 votes

  20. Comment on Gemma needs help in ~comp

    skybrian
    Link Parent
    I assume training on that sort of data is how it learned what the words mean and what sort of personas those kinds of expressions are associated with. The question is what model of emotions it...

    I assume training on that sort of data is how it learned what the words mean and what sort of personas those kinds of expressions are associated with.

    The question is what model of emotions it might have derived and what that might do for other behaviors.

    2 votes