Month: November 2022

Underwater video cameras have recorded over 100 instances of gloomy octopuses hurling silt and shells at one another in Jervis Bay, Australia.

The video footage—about 24 hours’ worth—was captured in 2014 and 2015, but only now have the videos been fully analyzed. The team of researchers that studied the behavior has published their findings today in Plos One.

The gloomy (or common Sydney) octopus (Octopus tentricus) is native to the waters off the coasts of Australia and New Zealand. It has a rusty brown coloration and white eyes. The octopus mostly eats mollusks but has also been documented eating members of its own species, according to the Australian Museum.

In the videos, the eight-armed cephalopods gather up material from the seafloor like silt and shells, and then push it through the water using their siphon and arms. Octopuses have previously been observed shooting sand from their siphon but never throwing more substantial objects like seashells.

The researchers found that the octopuses had to move their siphons into an unusual position—under the web of the octopus’ arms—to eject the material, indicating that they were intentionally throwing the material.

The teams observed both sexes throwing material; about half of the throws were done while interacting with other octopuses. Only about 17% of the throws actually hit their targets, so if you’re a sports agent reading this, think twice before signing up a gloomy octopus. The eight arms clearly aren’t as much of an advantage as they seem.

And if we’re splitting hairs (or gills, or whatever), the octopuses are not hurling objects at their foes, Cy Young-style. The propulsion is entirely driven by their siphons; the arms are simply directing the material.

But look up the definition of “throw.” Technically, that’s what the octopuses are doing, though it’s a tenuous enough connection that the researchers refer to the action as “throws,” in quotations.

Because some of the throws were by male octopuses and some by female octopuses, and they occurred both in the presence and absence of other octopuses, the researchers aren’t exactly sure of the motive here. At least in some cases, the team believes the throws have a social purpose. And considering that in some of the videos the octopuses are literally blanketed in silt tossed at them by a nearby octopus, that seems correct.

Octopuses are generally anti-social, the researchers noted in the study, but sometimes show tolerance of other individuals. But what covering another member of your species in silt, algae, and shells signifies may require further examination.

The throwing behavior puts the gloomy octopus on a short list of species that have exhibited a type of throwing behavior, along with chimpanzees, capuchin monkeys, elephants, polar bears, Egyptian vultures, and a few others.

Octopuses are very bright creatures. They probably have a good reason for chucking stuff. We just need to be bright enough to figure out what they’re up to.

More: Researchers Finally Figured Out How Octopuses Taste With Their Arms

Drivers in Japan’s Super GT race series discovered less-than-desirable side-effects when testing a new type of synthetic fuel that will be rolled out starting in 2023. While the cars ran as expected, some of the pilots complained about an unexpected smell and eye irritation.

“The smell is a little strong [compared to gasoline], perhaps because the raw materials used are different. I think they are trying to mix materials extracted from various bio-based raw materials to meet high-octane standards. Some fuel manufacturers say that the smell can be changed by changing the raw material, although there’s also the matter of cost control to consider,” said Masahiro Saiki, the head of Honda’s Super GT project, in an interview with Motorsport. He added that the fumes were likely due to the fuel not being fully burnt in the engine.

What the fumes smell like depends on who you ask. One driver told Motorsport that it’s like kerosene; another compared it to a mix of gasoline and oil from a racing go-kart. Regardless, the fumes tended to enter a car’s cabin when it was closely following another car.

Super GT announced the shift to synthetic gasoline in May 2022. The fuel in question is manufactured by ETS Racing Fuels and called Renewablaze GTA R100. The recipe hasn’t been published — which makes sense, it’s proprietary — but ETS broadly explains that Renewablaze GTA R100 is “produced from a number of different sources of sustainable biomass and consists of 100% plant-based raw materials.”

On a more pleasant note, it sounds like the drivers who participated in the test had no complaints about performance.

“The GT500 car has what you could call an ‘aggressively-designed engine’ with a lot of advanced technologies applied in it. I thought that changing the fuel used would result in some changes, but in fact the changes were so small that I wouldn’t have noticed them if I hadn’t been told about the fuel change,” noted Nissan Z driver Ronnie Quintarelli. He added that mapping-related changes were made to the car.

Super GT cars are set to switch to Renewablaze GTA R100 — which is imported to Japan for the series — in 2023.

Does Apple plan to ever release an iPhone or iPad with a folding screen? If so, the company doesn’t seem to be in any rush to get it out the door. Instead of jumping ship to Android to hop on the folding screen bandwagon, a group of talented Chinese engineers claims they’ve hacked together the world’s first folding iPhone, and it looks like it was a real nightmare to build.

By now we all understand the benefits of a mobile device with a folding screen. When folded, it can be as compact as a smartphone (or even the clamshell cellphones of yesteryear) making it easy to carry in a pocket, and when opened, it provides twice the screen real estate, making videos more immersive and web pages look like they do on a computer.

Screens that can fold in half without breaking seem utterly futuristic, but they’re not completely resilient, and after a while, flexible OLED panels will start to show creases and other damage. That’s probably a big reason why Apple doesn’t offer a folding screen device yet, but there are other compromises that come into play as well on a device that essentially splits in half when folded, as the hardware hackers behind the YouTube channel, The Aesthetics of Science and Technology, discovered.

For the record, we haven’t had the opportunity to see or test this custom-built folding iPhone in person, and this 17+ minute video could very well be an elaborate prank. Faking iOS running on an existing folding screen device is a lot easier than building a folding iPhone, and there are a few steps in this video that are quickly glazed over, such as the complexity of re-arranging the electronic guts of an iPhone so that it fits inside the two halves of a folding shell, without iOS getting upset about the considerable amount of hardware modifications needed. But hacking an iPhone is far from impossible, and we’re inclined to believe this impressive hack is real, even if the results are not a device for everyday use.

The bifurcated iPhone’s body was created through a combination of custom 3D-printed components and parts salvaged from a pair of folding Motorola Razr smartphones whose hinge mechanism leaves about seven millimeters of space inside.

That was important because instead of designing and engineering a custom OLED screen for their folding iPhone, which is what companies like Samsung do for improved durability, these hardware hackers repurposed the static screen from an iPhone X. Making it flexible enough to fold in half required the various layers of the screen to be separated, allowing the rigid glass panel in the front, and the 3D touch layer below, to be completely removed. That step sounds simple enough, but it was actually the hardest part of this hack, requiring 37 original iPhone X screens before they successfully got all the layers separated without causing any damage.

The final device, which the hackers call the iPhone V 0.1 because of how sketchy it turned out, works, but required the use of a much smaller battery, just a single speaker, and both MagSafe and wireless charging to be sacrificed. Its screen, and some of the custom wiring inside needed to accommodate the hinge, is extremely fragile, and this first attempt is more or less a display piece, as it probably wouldn’t survive a regular day’s use.

Through an iOS jailbreak, they did customize the iPhone’s operating system so that it was more compatible with a folding screen, including splitscreen capabilities, but don’t expect this team to go into business making folding iPhones. If the hack wasn’t already expensive enough, the response from Apple’s legal team would be.

The price of gadgets is only going to continue to increase, making the sting of accidentally dropping your smartphone or tablet and watching the screen shatter to thousands of pieces even more painful. But what if screens were the most durable part of a touchscreen device? That’s a future I’m ready for, and one that LG is diligently working on.

It seems like there’s no end to the benefits of OLED screens. They consume less power, they allow devices to be made thinner and lighter, and in terms of image quality, they far outperform LCDs and older display technologies, with vibrant colors and eye-pleasing levels of contrast. Unlike LCD panels, OLED screens can also be engineered to be bendable and malleable, without hindering their performance or causing any permanent damage.

We’ve already seen devices like TVs and computer displays with a permanent curve to better fill a user’s peripheral vision, and even screens that can be flattened back out again for users who want to frequently switch between the two display modes. But LG is working to bring the flexibility of OLEDs to smaller devices, and today revealed the world’s first 12-inch panel that’s both flexible and stretchable, like a giant piece of rubber band, improving its ability to survive wear and tear.

The 12-inch panel can display full-color RGB images (LG doesn’t specify exactly how many colors it’s capable of reproducing) and a resolution of 100PPI. That’s a bit behind the resolution of screens like the 12.9-inch panel in the iPad Pro, which hits 264PPI, but drop that iPad onto a sidewalk and you’ll probably wish you had LG’s latest and greatest inside it.

Outside of the rigid frame of a tablet or a desktop display, this 12-inch panel can be stretched a full two inches to 14 inches diagonally, and then snap back to its original size without requiring a warranty claim. Its underlying structure uses S-shaped micro wire structures that act like springs to accommodate the stretching, and while the technology isn’t quite at the point where you can crumble up a tablet and stuff it in your pocket like a handkerchief—it’s tethered by a ribbon cable to electronics that provide power and drive the image on-screen—LG believes it’s one step-closer to expanding the potential use cases for OLED displays.

Do you remember when BMW wrapped an SUV in color-changing, black and white E Ink screens earlier this year? Imagine that car instead becoming a rolling animated billboard at night, but one that can easily survive a minor fender bender when other drivers inevitably get distracted.

Visa has long paid to be the sole payments processor at the Olympic Games. But at the Winter Olympics in Beijing earlier this year it had competition—from the Chinese government. Visitors could, after scanning their passports, exchange foreign bills for eCNY, a new digital currency being rolled out by the country’s central bank, the People’s Bank of China. Visitors could splash their digital cash by using a card or mobile app to pay for things around the Olympic Village.

China launched its first pilots of digital cash in 2019, but the eCNY’s appearance at the Olympics was part of a project with global ambitions. As the first major country to roll out an official digital currency at scale, China is far ahead of the US and other countries, where the concept of an official form of digital cash is only at the discussion phase.

The hope for government-sanctioned digital currencies is that they will improve efficiency and spur innovation in financial services. But tech and China experts watching the country’s project say that eCNY, also known as the electronic Chinese yuan or digital yuan, also opens up new forms of government surveillance and social control. The head of UK intelligence agency GCHQ, Jeremy Fleming, warned in a speech last month that Beijing could use its digital currency to monitor its citizens and eventually evade international sanctions.

At the same time, China’s world-beating digital yuan has got off to a slow start. The People’s Bank of China reported that its official eCNY app had 261 million users at the end of 2021, and that by August 31 more than 100 billion yuan (about $14 billion) had changed hands across 360 million transactions. Those numbers are modest compared to the size of China’s population and economy, but they are expected to grow after a recent expansion of digital yuan trials in China from about two dozen cities to four entire provinces.

Unlike a cryptocurrency like Bitcoin, the digital yuan is issued directly by China’s central bank and does not depend on a blockchain. The currency has the same value as its analog equivalent, the yuan or RMB, and for consumers the experience of using the digital yuan is not that different from any other mobile payment system or credit card. But on the back end, payments are not routed through a bank and can sometimes move without transaction fees, jumping from one e-wallet to another as easily as cash changes hands.

Chinese citizens are being encouraged to adopt the digital yuan by both China’s central government and local authorities. Over the summer, trials began in cities in Fujian, a province on the southern coast that is host to significant international trade. One foreign resident, who asked to remain unnamed to avoid drawing the attention of Chinese authorities, told WIRED that signs saying digital yuan payments were accepted appeared in supermarkets and convenience stores in the provincial capital of Fuzhou within days of the announcement, and soon rolled out to surrounding rural areas. Yet many locals didn’t see the need for a new form of digital payment, because they could already use mobile payment services offered by Alipay, from an affiliate of online retailer Alibaba called Ant Financial, and WeChat Pay, from gaming and social giant Tencent.

The world’s wealthiest people are responsible for about a million times more emissions than the world’s lowest earners when you take into account their investments, a new report has found. The report, issued Sunday by Oxfam, finds that the world’s 125 wealthiest people—including American billionaires Bill Gates, Jim Walton, Warren Buffett, and Elon Musk—have a combined carbon footprint roughly equivalent to that of the entire country of France.

There’s lots of academic work out there calculating how the personal carbon footprints of the ultra-wealthy differ from the average Joe, and the habits of the world’s superrich certainly jack up their personal emissions. But where billionaires put all that excess money may actually be more important than their private jets or expensive car collections. Past research has shown that financial investments from the world’s top 1% are largely responsible for the size of their overall emissions, rather than their personal lifestyles—between 50% and 70% of their emissions, the Oxfam report estimates. This new report takes into consideration the investments the world’s super rich make and how those investments can enable dirty industries and create even more emissions.

“Emissions from billionaire lifestyles – due to their frequent use of private jets and yachts – are thousands of times the average person, which is already completely unacceptable,” Nafkote Dabi, Climate Change Lead at Oxfam, said in a statement. “But if we look at emissions from their investments, then their carbon emissions are over a million times higher.”

To calculate powerful billionaires’ emissions, researchers at Oxfam first pulled together a list of the world’s wealthiest 220 people, then identified corporations that these people held investments in of at least a 10% equity stake. (Holding a 10% equity stake in a company, as defined by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, makes a person a principal shareholder in that company and much more influential than a normal shareholder in the company’s overall decisions and direction.) Using data from financial services firm Exerica, Oxfam then also calculated the Scope 1 and 2 emissions—direct emissions from operations and indirect emissions from energy, heating, and cooling—of those corporations, and used each billionaire’s investment with these overall emissions to figure out how much they were responsible for.

There were some gaps in the analysis, thanks to a lack of transparency from some of the world’s wealthiest on their investments as well as a similar lack of transparency from corporations on their emissions. However, with the numbers they were able to work with, the Oxfam researchers were still able to figure out that each billionaire out of a final list of 125 was responsible for funding around 3.3 million tons (3 million tonnes) of CO2 emissions in average each year, thanks to their oversize investments in 183 global corporations. The average person in the UK has a pension that finances around 25.4 tons (23 tonnes) of CO2 emissions each year; the world’s poorest 10% of people, meanwhile, produce on average just 3 tons (2.76 tonnes) of CO2 each year.

There are some obvious flaws with this assessment. For one thing, the lack of transparency around emissions as well as missing public information on billionaire equity stakes in certain companies means that the numbers contained here are certainly low, and there’s some notable billionaires missing. (Jeff Bezos, for instance, is not on the final list; we have to wonder what the numbers on his emissions look like.) And someone who is in favor of green capitalism swooping in to save the planet could argue that someone like Gates or Musk’s carbon-intensive investments deserve context, given that their money has gone toward technological solutions to climate change. But the report does emphasize how runaway capitalism and the influence of a powerful and wealthy few can keep the world careening toward disaster, even as the rest of us are increasingly affected—and how relying on the rich and powerful to kick climate action into gear is a losing game.

“These few billionaires together have ‘investment emissions’ that equal the carbon footprints of entire countries like France, Egypt or Argentina,” Dabi said. “The major and growing responsibility of wealthy people for overall emissions is rarely discussed or considered in climate policy making. This has to change. These billionaire investors at the top of the corporate pyramid have huge responsibility for driving climate breakdown. They have escaped accountability for too long.”

Elon Musk is considering a change to Twitter that would put all of the site’s content behind a paywall, according to a new report from tech journalist Casey Newton at Platformer. The news comes in the wake of some bizarre decisions by Musk after he took control of the social media company late last month—a marriage Musk tried to back out of, but was forced to consummate to the tune of $44 billion.

Musk’s proposed paywall for all Twitter content, something that does not appear imminent according to Newton, could allow some users to read and publish tweets for free during a short window and only charge after a certain amount of time. Twitter did not respond to a request for comment from Gizmodo, something that tends to happen with any business run by the press-hostile billionaire.

Musk has moved fast and broken things, in the parlance of Silicon Valley, though those breaks have come with a human toll at the company’s San Francisco office. Musk laid off thousands of people last week, but managers at Twitter reportedly tried to shield employees who were pregnant or going through cancer treatment and in desperate need of their health insurance, according to Platformer.

But some people who were laid off on Friday believe they were laid off precisely because they were vulnerable and in need of time off. One former Twitter employee who’s six months pregnant, data science manager Shennan Lu, tweeted that she loved her job and planned to sue.

“There is definitely discrimination here. So I will fight.” Lu tweeted. “My performance has been tracking ahead (top 30%) for the last quarters, and I know for a fact that other male managers don’t have this rating got stayed. See you in the court.”

Twitter has even been trying to hire back some employees who were let go last week, reportedly because some were fired in error, while others will likely have expertise needed to fulfill Musk’s desires for changes to the platform.

Advertisers have fled the social media platform, perplexed by Musk’s haphazard management style, which is all playing out in public on Twitter. And it’s those tweets that have spooked major brands, given that Musk appears to be palling around with the far right and threatening to go “thermonuclear” on brands that might pull advertising from the social media site. Musk tweeted a meme of a Nazi soldier on Monday, though in fairness, he always just steals memes and likely had no idea it was a Nazi.

Musk has also banned several people from Twitter in recent days for “impersonating” the billionaire, something that’s clearly getting under his skin. Musk has previously called himself a free speech absolutist, though doesn’t seem to understand what that phrase actually means, given the way he’s managing Twitter. In fact, Musk recently replied to a tweet by right-wing activist Tom Fitton who suggested anyone calling for an ad boycott of Twitter could be sued for tortious interference, a ridiculous claim that would criminalize protected speech. Musk replied with a simple “yes,” and the blog Above the Law calls Fitton a “moron.”

Twitter’s debt burden is legendary at this point, reportedly reaching somewhere in the neighborhood of $1.2 billion to service per year. But it seems extremely unlikely that a plan to paywall Twitter would actually bring in enough money to cover the cost of lost advertising, let alone make a dent in that $1.2 billion annually.

But what do we know? We’re just chumps who didn’t have $44 billion sitting around to buy Twitter. Well, Musk didn’t have $44 billion either, opting to partner with some of the worst human rights abusers on the planet to fund his deal. But you get the point—Musk is rich, so he must be a genius.