Author name: Kris Guyer

secrets-of-the-octopus-takes-us-inside-the-world-of-these-“aliens-on-earth”

Secrets of the Octopus takes us inside the world of these “aliens on Earth”

C is for Cephalopod —

Dr. Alex Schell on the surprising things we’re learning about these amazing creatures

A Day octopus octopus cyanea) parachutes her web over a coral head while Dr. Alex Schnell observes.

Enlarge / A Day octopus (Octopus cyanea) named Scarlet parachutes her web over a coral head while Dr. Alex Schnell observes.

National Geographic/Disney/Craig Parry

With Earth Day fast approaching once again, it’s time for another new documentary from National Geographic and Disney+:  Secrets of the Octopus. It’s the third in what has become a series, starting with the remarkable 2021 documentary Secrets of the Whales (narrated by Sigourney Weaver) and 2023’s Secrets of the Elephants (Natalie Portman as narrator). James Cameron served as producer on all three.

Secrets of the Octopus is narrated by Paul Rudd. Per the official synopsis:

Octopuses are like aliens on Earth: three hearts, blue blood and the ability to squeeze through a space the size of their eyeballs. But there is so much more to these weird and wonderful animals. Intelligent enough to use tools or transform their bodies to mimic other animals and even communicate with different species, the secrets of the octopus are more extraordinary than we ever imagined.

Each of the three episodes focuses on a specific unique feature of these fascinating creatures: “Shapeshifters,” “Masterminds,” and “Social Networks.” The animals were filmed in their natural habitats over 200 days and all that stunning footage is accompanied by thoughtful commentary by featured scientists.  One of those scientists is Dr. Alex Schnell,  a native Australian and self described storytelling who has worked at Macquarie University, the University of Cambridge, and the Marine Biological Laboratory, among other institutions. Her research focuses on the intelligence of marine animals, particularly cuttlefish and octopuses.

Ars caught up with Schnell to learn more.

Ars Technica: How did you become interested in studying octopuses?

Alex Schnell: I had this pivotal moment when I was young. I had the luxury of actually growing up on the beaches of Sydney so I would spend a lot of time in the water, in rock pools, looking at all the critters. When I was about five years old, I met my first octopus. It was such a monumental moment that opened up a completely different world for me. That’s the day I decided I wanted to be a marine biologist.

  • Alex Schnell prepares for a dive on the Great Barrier Reef

    National Geographic for Disney/Craig Parry

  • Alex Schnell SCUBA dives over a coral garden on the Great Barrier Reef, while an Australian research vessel floats on the surface above.

    National Geographic for Disney/Craig Parry

  • A Day octopus perched on corals on the Great Barrier Reef.

    National Geographic/Disney/Richard Woodgett

  • Director and DOP Adam Geiger operates a jib arm with Producer / Camera operator, Rory McGuinness, and Camera Assistant, Woody Spark.

    National Geographic for Disney/Annabel Robinson

  • Woody Spark preparing cameras and underwater housings with cinematographer Rory McGuinness.

    National Geographic for Disney/Harriet Spark

  • Alex Schnell observes a Mimic octopus (Thaumoctopus mimicus) while on a dive with wildlife photographer and local dive guide, Benhur Sarinda

    National Geographic for Disney/Craig Parry

  • A Mimic octopus, with striped skin patterning, stretches out all eight arms across black volcanic sand.

    National Geographic for Disney/Craig Parry

  • A Blue-ringed octopus (Hapalochlaena maculosa) displays bright blue rings, a warning that the venom in her bite is deadly.

    National Geographic

Ars Technica: What is the focus of your research?

Alex Schnell:   I’m a marine biologist that turned into a comparative psychologist—just a fancy word for studying the different minds of animals. What I’m really interested is how intelligence evolved, where and when. The octopus is the perfect candidate to answer some of these questions because they diverge from our own lineage over 550 million years ago. We share an ancestor that looked like a flat worm. So if the octopus shows glimmers of intelligence that we see in ourselves or in animals that are closely related to us, it reveals a lot about the patterns of evolution and how it evolved throughout the animal kingdom.

When you meet an octopus, you really get the sense that there is another being looking out at you. A few years ago, I worked with a team at London School of Economics to write a report reviewing the evidence of sentience in animals. Does the animal have the capacity to feel emotions? We found really strong evidence in octopuses and it ended up changing UK law. Now under UK law, we have to treat octopuses ethically and with compassion.

Ars Technica: One behavioral aspect the series explores is tool use by octopuses. I was struck by the scene where a little coconut octopus uses her clamshell both for shelter and as a shield. I’ve never seen that before.

Alex Schnell: Neither had I. Before we traveled to Indonesia on that shoot, I had read about that particular defensive tool use by the coconut octopus. This species will often be seen carrying around two halves of a coconut, like a mobile den or an RV home. And they use it as protection because they live in a very barren sandy landscape. So I was really excited to see that behavior unfold.

We got more than we bargained for, because in the clip that you mentioned, our coconut octopus was being threatened by this angry mantis shrimp. They pack a really powerful punch that’s been known to break through aquarium glass. And here we have this defenseless little octopus with no bones or anything. In that moment we witnessed her have this idea. She walked over to the shell and picked it up and dragged it back to her original spot and literally used it like a shield to fend off this angry mantis shrimp. She had imagined herself a shield.  I saw her get an idea, she imagined it, and she walked over it and used it. I was so blown away that I was screaming with excitement underwater.

  • Rory McGuinnes, operating an underwater jib arm to film a colorful coral reef on the Lembeh Strait.

    National Geographic for Disney/Adam Geiger

  • Woody Spark tests the controls for the underwater camera-and-slider system

    National Geographic for Disney/Adam Geiger

  • Local dive guides Reifani and Benhur Sarinda observe a Coconut octopus (Amphioctopus marginatus) sheltering between two clam shells.

    National Geographic for Disney/Adam Geiger

  • Woody Spark uses the underwater camera-and-slider system to film a Coconut octopus sheltering between clam shells.

    National Geographic for Disney/Adam Geiger

  • An 8-foot Giant Pacific octopus (Enteroctopus dofleini) rests on the arms of tech diver and octopus enthusiast, Krystal Janicki, on a dive in the shallow waters off Vancouver Island.

    National Geographic for Disney/Maxwel Hohn

  • A Giant Pacific octopus crawls over the sandy seafloor in shallow waters

    National Geographic for Disney/Maxwel Hohn

  • Dr. C.E. O’Brien observes a resting Island octopus (Octopus insularis) on a dive in Turks and Caicos.

    National Geographic for Disney/Adam Geiger

Ars Technica: At one point in the series you celebrate having a “conversation” with an octopus. How do octopuses communicate?  

Alex Schnell: Octopuses generally communicate with changes to their skin. They can change the color and the texture of their skin in the blink of an eye, and they can also change their posture. What we’ve found with one particular species is that they have cross-species communication, so they collaboratively hunt with some reef fish. Again, I had only read about this behavior until I had a chance to see it in person.

I had this kind of playful idea while I was down there with a Day octopus named Scarlet, who was allowing me to follow her on a lot of her hunts. Because I was so close to her, I noticed she was missing little crabs here and there. Normally her fish hunting partner will do a head stand to point to where the missed food is. I thought, I wonder what’s going to happen if I just point at it, not expecting anything. To my astonishment, she responded and swum right over and looked where I had pointed.

So that’s what I mean by having a conversation with an octopus. I can’t change color sadly, but it’s as if she was responding to my pointing, my “referential signaling,” which is incredible because this is kind of what we see in humans and chimpanzees: this development of communication before language develops. Here we have this octopus responding to a human pointing.

Ars Technica: Scarlet actually reached out her little tentacle to you on multiple occasions; she seemed to recognize you and accept you. 

Alex Schnell: I had had those moments before, the ET moment where you get to meet an octopus, and I’ve spoken to other avid divers and people who have a love for octopuses that have had similar experiences. The really special thing with this relationship that I had with Scarlet is that we were able to develop it over weeks and months. Every time I would return to her, she would appear to recognize me quickly and let me back into her world.

What continues to blow me away is that Scarlet grew to trust me really quickly. She reached out and shook my hand after 30 minutes of me watching her, and she let me swim alongside her as she hunted. This is a creature with no skeleton, no shell, no teeth, no claws to protect itself. And despite that extreme vulnerability, she quickly let her guard down. It’s like she was driven by curiosity and this need to reach out and connect, even with an alien creature like me.

Ars Technica: I was surprised to learn that octopuses have such short lifespans. 

Alex Schnell: A lot people ask me if they lived longer, would they take over the world? Maybe. It’s life in the fast lane. They are essentially born as orphans because they don’t have any parents or siblings to guide them. They just drift off. They’re loners for most of their lives and they teach themselves. Everything is driven by this intense curiosity to learn. I think that’s why a lot of people have had these incredible moments with octopuses because even the fear or the vulnerability that they might feel is outweighed by a curiosity to interact.

  • Alex Schnell on the surface in full SCUBA gear.

    National Geographic/Harriet Spark

  • A Coconut octopus pokes an eye out from between partially buried clam shells. Her powerful suckers hold the two shells together for protection from passing predators.

    National Geographic for Disney/Craig Parry

  • Alex Schnell and Benhur Sarinda observe a Coconut octopus walking across the seafloor with clam shells held underneath her web.

    National Geographic for Disney/Craig Parry)

  • A tiny Coconut octopus reaches out to touch Alex Schnell’s hand.

    National Geographic for Disney/Craig Parry

  • An Algae octopus (Abdopus aculeatus) foraging amongst the algae and seagrass in Bunaken Marine Park.

    National Geographic/Annabel Robinson

  • Alex Schnell observing a Southern keeled octopus (Octopus berrima) on a night dive in Port Phillip Bay

    National Geographic

  • A Dorado octopus mother group with eggs

    Schmidt Ocean Institute

Ars Technica: Do you find yourself having to be on guard about anthropomorphizing these amazing creatures a bit too much? 

Alex Schnell: I think there’s a fine balance. As a trained comparative psychologist, we are taught to be really careful not to anthropomorphize and attribute human traits onto the animals that we see or that we work with. At the same time, I think that we’ve moved too far into a situation that Frans de Waal called “anthro-denialism.” Traits didn’t just sprout up in the human species. They have an evolutionary history, and while they might not be exactly the same in other animals, there are similarities. So sometimes we need to call it what it is. One of der Waal’s examples was researchers who described chimpanzees kissing as “mouth-to-mouth contact” because they didn’t want to anthropomorphize it. Come on guys, they’re kissing.

We do strive to see human traits in other animals. We watched cartoons growing up, we had pets around us, so it’s really hard not to. Our job is as comparative psychologists is to find really strong evidence for the similarities and the differences between the different minds of the animals that we share our planet with.

Ars Technica: What were some of the highlights for you, filming this documentary series? 

Alex Schnell: It was challenging in the sense that when the production team first approached me, I was 38 weeks pregnant. So I went out into the field with a five-month-old baby. I was sleep-deprived, trying to go diving and also be on camera. I had worked on natural history films before, but always on the other side of the camera. So it was a steep learning curve.

But it was such a rewarding experience to be able to have the luxury of time to be out with these animals. I had no project because I was on maternity leave. Sometimes when you’re part of a project, you can get tunnel vision.  “I’m going to see this particular behavior and that’s what I’m focusing on.” But I could be completely mindful in the moment with my time with octopuses and get to see how they interact in their natural environment. It opens up this incredible secret world that they have.  I was seeing things that, yes, I’d read about some of them, but some I’d never heard of before. I think each episode in this series reveals secrets that will take your breath away.

Ars Technica:  What is next for you?

Alex Schnell:  I’m working on a project called One World, Many Minds. What this project strives to do is accentuate that, yes, we are one world, but there are many minds that make up our collective existence. I really want to showcase the minds of animals like the octopus or the cuttlefish or a big grouper, and show that we have traits that we can recognize, that we can connect with. That will help remove a barrier of otherness, and highlight our shared vulnerability and interconnectedness with animals.

Secrets of the Octopus premieres on Disney+ and Hulu on April 22, 2024.

Secrets of the Octopus official trailer.

Secrets of the Octopus takes us inside the world of these “aliens on Earth” Read More »

the-fungi-in-our-guts-can-make-cases-of-covid-worse

The fungi in our guts can make cases of Covid worse

Microscopic image of blue bulbs on stalks against violet background.

Enlarge / Computer illustration of Candida fungi.

Kateryna Kon | Science Photo Library | Getty

Fungi are an indispensable part of your microbiome, keeping the body’s host of microorganisms healthy as part of a system of checks and balances. But when you’re hit by an infection, fungi can be thrown out of equilibrium with other organisms inside you, leading to a more severe infection and other symptoms of illness.

For this reason, the pandemic immediately set off alarms for Iliyan Iliev, an immunologist at Weill Cornell Medical School. “We were thinking, the first thing that’s going to happen is people will start getting fungal co-infections,” he says. With the microbiome unbalanced, fungi might start running riot inside Covidpatients, Iliev reasoned. His fears were soon realized.

In research published in Nature Immunology, he and his team discovered that in patients with severe Covid, certain strains of gut fungi—knocked off-kilter by the virus—set off a prolonged immune response that could last long after the initial infection. This response potentially led to some of the respiratory symptoms experienced by these patients. These results, Iliev says, point to the critical role of the gut microbiome in the human immune response and could lead to better disease treatments down the line.

Imbalance of the gut microbiome has long been linked to disease. Ken Cadwell, an immunologist at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, thinks of the microbiome as a metaphorical rainforest. “It’s a nice ecosystem—but if you cut down too many trees or bring in invasive species, you could make things go out of whack,” he says.

To see how the body’s internal fungi were affected during Covid and how this triggered the immune system, Iliev and his team started by looking at patients’ blood. After collecting samples from 91 people with Covid, they measured levels of antibodies against several fungi, to figure out if the body’s immune system was reacting against these. Significantly more anti-fungal antibodies, for instance, would indicate fungal overgrowth or invasion.

Takato Kusakabe, a postdoctoral fellow in Iliev’s lab and study author, ran plate after plate of experiments—a painstaking process—to quantify these antibody levels. The team found in patients with severe Covid, several fungi commonly found in the gut had increased antibodies against them (in comparison to uninfected people). Notably, these included Candida albicans, which is a common culprit of yeast infections. When the team then ran tests on fecal samples from 10 of the hospitalized Covid patients, these confirmed that the fungi being targeted by the antibodies were present in the patients’ guts—and at seemingly at higher levels than in uninfected controls, suggesting an imbalance in their microbiome.

The fungi in our guts can make cases of Covid worse Read More »

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Philosopher Daniel Dennett dead at 82

Mourning a philosophical giant —

Part of the “New Atheist” movement, best known for work on consciousness, free will.

Daniel Dennett seated against black background in blue shirt, bowtie and dark jacket

Enlarge / Daniel Dennett, a leading philosopher with provocative takes on consciousness, free will, and AI, has died at 82.

World renowned philosopher Daniel Dennett, who championed controversial takes on consciousness and free will among other mind-bending subjects, died today at the age of 82.

(Full disclosure: This loss is personal. Dennett was a friend and colleague of my spouse, Sean Carroll. Sean and I have many fond memories of shared meals and stimulating conversations on an enormous range of topics with Dan over the years. He was a true original and will be greatly missed.)

Stunned reactions to Dennett’s unexpected passing began proliferating on social media shortly after the news broke. “Wrenching news. He’s been a great friend and incredible inspiration for me throughout my career,” the Santa Fe Institute’s Melanie Mitchell, author of Artificial Intelligence: A Guide for Thinking Humans, wrote on X. “I will miss him enormously.”

“He was a towering figure in philosophy and in particular in the philosophy of AI,” roboticist Rodney Brooks (MIT, emeritus) wrote on X, bemoaning that he’d never replied to Dennett’s last email from 30 days ago. “Now we have only memories of him.

A 2017 New Yorker profile described Dennett as “a cross between Darwin and Santa Claus,” with “a fluffy white beard and a round belly.” That jolly appearance was accompanied by an intellectual ferocity—generously embellished with his sparkling wit—as he battled such luminaries as Stephen J. Gould, John Searle, Noam Chomsky, David Chalmers, Roger Penrose, and Richard Lewontin, among others, over consciousness and evolution, free will, AI, religion, and many other topics.

Dennett’s many books, while dense, nonetheless sold very well and were hugely influential, and he was a distinguished speaker in great demand. His 2003 TED talk, “The Illusion of Consciousness,” garnered more than 4 million views. While he gained particular prominence as a leader of the “New Atheist” movement of the early 2000s—colorfully dubbed one of the “Four Horsemen of New Atheism” alongside Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, and Sam Harris—that was never his primary focus, merely a natural extension of his more central philosopical concerns.

David Wallace, Sean Carroll, and Daniel Dennett at the Santa Fe Institute in March.

Enlarge / David Wallace, Sean Carroll, and Daniel Dennett at the Santa Fe Institute in March.

Sean Carroll

David Wallace, historian and philosopher of science at the University of Pittsburgh, offered Ars Technica this succinct summation of Dennett’s extraordinary influence:

To me, Dan Dennett exemplified what it means to do philosophy in an age of science. He once said that there was no such thing as philosophy-free science, only science that didn’t interrogate its philosophical assumptions; equally, he saw more deeply than almost anyone that the deepest traditional questions of philosophy, from free will to consciousness to metaphysics, were irreversibly transformed by modern science, most especially by natural selection.

His approach, as much as his own towering contributions, has inspired generations of philosophers, far beyond cognitive science and the philosophy of mind (his ideas have been influential in the interpretation of quantum theory, for instance). He was one of the great philosophers of the last century, and one of the very few whose work has been transformative outside academic philosophy.

“Dan Dennett was the embodiment of a natural philosopher—someone who was brilliant at the careful conceptual analysis that characterizes the best philosophy, while caring deeply about what science has to teach us about the natural world,” Johns Hopkins University physicist and philosopher Sean Carroll told Ars. “At the same time, he was the model of a publicly-engaged academic, someone who wrote substantive books that anyone could read and who had a real impact on the wider world. People like that are incredibly rare and precious, and his passing is a real loss.”

Born in Boston in 1942, Dennett’s father was a professor of Islamic history who became a secret agent for the OSS during World War II, posing as a cultural attaché at the American Embassy in Beirut. Dennett spent his early childhood there until his father was killed in a plane crash while on a mission to Ethiopia. Dennett, his mother, and two sisters returned to Boston after that, and his family assumed he would attend Harvard just like his late father. But after graduating from the Phillips Exeter Academy, Dennett opted to attend Wesleyan University instead—at least until be came across Harvard logician and philosopher W.V.O. Quine‘s 1963 treatise, From a Logical Point of View.

Dennett ended up transferring to Harvard to study under Quine and become a philosopher, initially intent on proving Quine wrong. By the time he was a graduate student at Oxford University, he was known among his fellow students as “the village Quinean.” In his 2023 memoir, I’ve Been Thinking, Dennett traced his interest in applying his field to questions of science began during this period. He recalled experiencing the universal sensation of one’s hand falling asleep and feeling like an alien thing, rather than part of one’s own body. He wondered what was going on in the body and the brain.

Dennett at a group dinner in February 2023. He was the inaugural speaker for the Johns Hopkins Natural Philosophy Forum Distinguished Lecture series.

Enlarge / Dennett at a group dinner in February 2023. He was the inaugural speaker for the Johns Hopkins Natural Philosophy Forum Distinguished Lecture series.

Sean Carroll

“The other philosophers thought, that’s not philosophy. I said, well, it should be,” he told Tufts Now last year. “So I started learning. I didn’t even know what a neuron was back then in the early ’60s, but I soon learned. I was lucky to get in on the ground floor of cognitive neuroscience. Some of the early pioneers in that field were my heroes and mentors and friends.”

Dennett’s first academic position was at the University of California, Irvine, and a revised version of his doctoral thesis became his first book: 1969’s Content and Consciousness. He moved to Tufts University in 1971, where he remained for the rest of his career. One of Dennett’s earliest collaborators was Douglas Hofstadter, author of the bestselling Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid, who called Dennett “a lodestar in my life” in an email [quoted with permission] to colleagues after hearing of the latter’s death:

Dan was a deep thinker about what it is to be human. Quite early on, he arrived at what many would see as shocking conclusions about consciousness (essentially that it is just an emergent effect of physical interactions of tiny inanimate components), and from then on, he was a dead-set opponent of dualism (the idea that there is an ethereal nonphysical elixir called “consciousness”, over and above the physical events taking place in the enormously complex substrate of a human or animal brain, and perhaps that of a silicon network as well).  Dan thus totally rejected the notion of “qualia” (pure sensations of such things as colors, tastes, and so forth), and his arguments against the mystique of qualia were subtle but very cogent.

Dennett was a a confirmed compatibilist on the fiercely debated subject of free will, meaning that he saw no conflict between philosophical determinism and free will. “Our only notable divergence was on the question of free will, which Dan maintained exists, in some sense of ‘free,’ whereas I just agreed that ‘will’ exists, but maintained that there is no freedom in it,” Hoftstadter recalled.

Screenshot/X

Johns Hopkins philosopher Jenann Ismael recalled corresponding with Dennett after her own book on free will, How Physics Makes Us Free, was published in 2016.  She had not yet met Dennett, but his work was naturally a significant influence, even though her book was largely critical of his stance on the subject. Ismael opened her book by discussing Dennett’s fictional short story, “Where Am I?“, calling it “the best of piece of philosophical fiction ever written.” (Check out this short film based on the story, starring Dennett himself uttering such immortal lines as, “They made a sparkling new vat for my brain.”)

Dennett read her book and emailed Ismael with a few notes—not about how he felt she’d misrepresented his views (which he deemed of “no matter”) but correcting her mistakes about the plot of his short story. “It turns out I got the story wrong,” Ismael told Ars.  “I’d read it so long ago, I just embellished it in my head and embarrassingly never realized. Where I criticized him in my book, he wasn’t as keen to correct me as he was excited to talk about the ideas.”

She found him to be filled with infectious warmth. “It was true that he could suck the air out of a room when he entered and even sitting at a round dinner table, he somehow became the center of it, he took possession of the discussion,” said Ismael. “But he also paid close attention to people, read voraciously, listened to and heard what others were saying, taking what he could and disseminating what he learned. He had immense curiosity and he wanted to share everything that he learned or liked.”

In his later years, Dennett wasn’t shy about sounding the alarm regarding AI, even writing an article for The Atlantic last year on the topic about the dangers ahead, particularly with the advent of large language models like ChatGPT.  “The most pressing problem is not that they’re going to take our jobs, not that they’re going to change warfare, but that they’re going to destroy human trust,” he told Tufts Now. “They’re going to move us into a world where you can’t tell truth from falsehood. You don’t know who to trust. Trust turns out to be one of the most important features of civilization, and we are now at great risk of destroying the links of trust that have made civilization possible.”

Dennett at our Baltimore home in February 2023, holding forth on philosophical matters.

Enlarge / Dennett at our Baltimore home in February 2023, holding forth on philosophical matters.

Landon Ross

Dennett was not one to traffic in false modesty over his many accomplishments and always evinced a strong degree of self-confidence, fondly recounting in his memoir of the time fellow philosopher Don Ross wryly observed, “Dan believes modesty is a virtue to be reserved for special occasions.”

His myriad interests weren’t limited to the academic. Dennett loved art, music, sailing, pottery, trout fishing, windsurfing, ran his own cider press, and made his own Calvados on a Prohibition-era still. He could call a square dance, whittle a wooden walking stick, and was fond of pondering knotty philosophical questions while driving his tractor on his 200-acre farm in Blue Hill, north of Boston, which he bought in the 1970s. (He sold the farm around 2014.)

“Dan was a bon vivant, a very zesty fellow, who loved travel and hobnobbing with brilliance wherever he could find it,” Hoftstadter wrote in his tribute.  “In his later years, as he grew a little teetery, he proudly carried a wooden cane with him all around the world, and into it he chiseled words and images that represented the many places he visited and gave lectures at. Dan Dennett was a mensch, and his ideas on so many subjects will leave a lasting impact on the world, and his human presence has had a profound impact on those of us who were lucky enough to know him well and to count him as a friend.”

Ismael recalled him sending her YouTube videos of “swing dancing and silly outfits” during the pandemic, his emails littered with colorful emojis. He was “a strange man, who didn’t take himself as seriously as you might think,” she said. “I really loved him, loved his spirit, his generosity, the expansiveness of his thinking, his delight in ideas, and his great good cheer. Philosophically, I think he had true greatness. It seems impossible he is gone.”

Daniel Dennett gives the Johns Hopkins Natural Philosophy Forum Distinguished Lecture, 2023.

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it’s-cutting-calories—not-intermittent-fasting—that-drops-weight,-study-suggests

It’s cutting calories—not intermittent fasting—that drops weight, study suggests

Sensational yet obvious —

The study is small and imperfect but offers more data on how time-restricted diets work.

It’s cutting calories—not intermittent fasting—that drops weight, study suggests

Intermittent fasting, aka time-restricted eating, can help people lose weight—but the reason why may not be complicated hypotheses about changes from fasting metabolism or diurnal circadian rhythms. It may just be because restricting eating time means people eat fewer calories overall.

In a randomized-controlled trial, people who followed a time-restricted diet lost about the same amount of weight as people who ate the same diet without the time restriction, according to a study published Friday in Annals of Internal Medicine.

The finding offers a possible answer to a long-standing question for time-restricted eating (TRE) research, which has been consumed by small feeding studies of 15 people or fewer, with mixed results and imperfect designs.

The new study—led by Nisa Marisa Maruthur, an internal medicine expert at Johns Hopkins—has its own limitations and, like any one study, isn’t the last word on the matter. But “it takes us one step closer to identifying the underlying mechanisms of TRE,” nutrition experts Krista Varady and Vanessa Oddo of the University of Illinois wrote in an editorial accompanying the study. “Using a controlled feeding design, Maruthur and colleagues show that TRE is effective for weight loss, simply because it helps people eat less.”

The study involved 41 people, 21 who followed a time-restricted diet for 12 weeks and 20 who ate a usual eating pattern (UEP). Most of the participants were Black women (93 percent) with obesity and either pre-diabetes or diet-controlled diabetes, limiting the generalizability of the findings. But the study carefully controlled what and when the participants ate; each participant got controlled meals (breakfast, lunch, dinner, and snack) with identical macro- and micro-nutrients. Each participant was assigned a calorie level for their meals based on an established, standardized equation that estimates baseline caloric need. They were told to maintain their current exercise level, which was monitored with a wrist-worn accelerometer.

No magic necessary

In the time-restricted group, people only ate in a 10-hour window between 8 am and 6 pm, with 80 percent of their total daily calories consumed before 1 pm. In the usual eating group, people ate between 8 am and midnight, with 55 percent of their calories eaten after 5 pm for dinner and a night-time snack. In each eating group, participants were given specific windows of a couple of hours in which they should eat each pre-made meal. The participants ate three meals each week at a research site, where dieticians addressed adherence issues, and their eating was carefully monitored with the use of food diaries and urine tests. Approximately 96 percent of people in both groups followed the schedules to within 30 minutes. Diet adherence—eating all their assigned food and not eating outside food—was also high, with 93 percent in the time-restricted group and 95 percent in the usual eating group.

At the end of the 12 weeks, both groups lost about the same amount of weight, an average of around 2.4 kg (5.3 pounds), with no statistically significant difference between the two groups. The researchers also found no differences between the two groups in their glucose homeostasis, waist circumference, blood pressure, or lipid levels.

“Our results indicate that when food intake is matched across groups and calories are held constant, TRE, as operationalized in our study, does not enhance weight loss,” Maruthur and her colleagues concluded. The authors are upfront about the limitations of the study, though, noting that the results could have been different in different groups of people and potentially in shorter time-restricted windows, such as eight hours instead of 10. They called for more research to explore those questions.

Outside experts applauded the study while also adding that it’s not surprising. “The headline finding that TRE does not magically lead to more weight loss sounds sensational but is also obvious,” Adam Collins, a nutrition expert at the University of Surrey, said.

Naveed Sattar, a professor of cardiometabolic medicine at the University of Glasgow, called the study “well done.” It “tells us what we expected—that there is nothing magical about time-restricted eating on weight change other than effects to reduce caloric intake,” he said. “If time-restricted eating helps some people eat less calories than they would otherwise, great.”

The experts Varady and Oddo, meanwhile, see it as a boon for anyone trying to lose weight. “Many patients stop following standard-care diets (such as daily calorie restriction) because they become frustrated with having to monitor food intake vigilantly each day,” they wrote in their commentary. “Thus, TRE can bypass this requirement simply by allowing participants to ‘watch the clock’ instead of monitoring calories while still producing weight loss.” It’s a “simplified” and “accessible” dietary strategy that anyone can follow, including lower-resource populations, the researchers wrote.

It’s cutting calories—not intermittent fasting—that drops weight, study suggests Read More »

cnn,-record-holder-for-shortest-streaming-service,-wants-another-shot

CNN, record holder for shortest streaming service, wants another shot

CNN++? —

New CNN head thinks CNN+ “was abandoned rather briskly.” 

: The logo of the US tv channel CNN is shown on the display of a smartphone on April 22, 2020

On March 29, 2022, CNN+, CNN’s take on a video streaming service, debuted. On April 28, 2022, it shuttered, making it the fastest shutdown of any launched streaming service. Despite that discouraging superlative, CNN has plans for another subscription-based video streaming platform, Financial Times (FT) reported on Wednesday.

Mark Thompson, who took CNN’s helm in August 2023, over a year after CNN+’s demise, spoke with FT about evolving the company. The publication reported that Thompson is “working on plans for a digital subscription streaming service.” The executive told the publication that a digital subscription, including digital content streaming, is “a serious possibility,” adding, “no decisions had been made, but I think it’s quite likely that we’ll end up there.”

CNN++, or whatever a new CNN streaming package might be named, would not just be another CNN+, per Thompson.

“We’ll know in a few years time if we’re beginning to make progress, even if that still doesn’t look like it because of the aggregation of declining platforms and growing ones,” he said, requesting patience regarding the next chapter in CNN streaming.

Thompson noted that success “won’t happen overnight,” which suggests a slow timeline.

CNN+’s short ride

Thompson told FT that CNN+ was “a big, bold experiment which was abandoned rather briskly.”

Company executives discussed plans for a CNN streaming service as early as December 2020, and in May 2021, employees learned that CNN+ was happening, Deadline reported. By July 2021, CNN confirmed the plans publicly.

But under a year later, CNN+ was no longer available, with the closure largely viewed as a casualty of parent company WarnerMedia merging with Discovery to form Warner Bros. Discovery (WBD) 10 days after CNN+’s launch. The merger meant CNN now had a parent company that already owned the Discovery+ streaming service and HBO Max; it also had interest in merging Discovery content with that of HBO. In August 2022, a few months after CNN+ closed, WBD announced Max as its flagship streaming service, merging what was formerly HBO Max with Discovery+.

“In a complex streaming market, consumers want simplicity and an all-in[-one] service which provides a better experience and more value than stand-alone offerings,” Discovery’s streaming boss J.B. Perrette said in statement regarding CNN+’s closure.

CNN+ accrued high-profile news anchors, and in its three weeks of availability, it had an estimated subscriber count of 100,000–150,000, according to Variety, which reported that the early figure put the streaming service on track for year-one quotas. However, CNBC later reported that daily viewership was just around 4,000, citing an anonymous source.

In an internal meeting, Perrette showed “frustration” that CNN moved forward with CNN+’s rollout despite its parent company’s merger plans, according to CNN. Perrette reportedly told employees that “some of this was avoidable.” CNN’s report noted that during the merger process, Discovery executives were not legally allowed to communicate with CNN executives.

CNN+’s 29-day existence makes it the shortest-lived streaming service. It took the record from Quibi, which launched in April 8, 2020, and announced on October 21, 2020, that it was throwing in the towel (Roku eventually bought Quibi for cheap).

CNN, record holder for shortest streaming service, wants another shot Read More »

long-lost-model-of-the-uss-enterprise-returned-to-roddenberry-family

Long-lost model of the USS Enterprise returned to Roddenberry family

To Boldly Return —

It showed up in an eBay listing; now Roddenberry’s son wants to show it to fans.

This mysterious model appeared on eBay with little fanfare.

Enlarge / This mysterious model appeared on eBay with little fanfare.

eBay

The first-ever model of Star Trek’s USS Enterprise NCC-1701 has been returned to the Roddenberry family, according to an ABC News report.

The three-foot model was used to shoot the pilot and credits scene for Star Trek’s original series in the 1960s and was used occasionally for shots throughout the series. (Typically, a larger, 11-foot model was used for shots after the pilot.) The model also sat on series creator Gene Roddenberry’s desk for several years.

It went missing in the late 1970s; historians and collectors believe it belonged to Roddenberry himself, that he lent it to a production house working on Star Trek: The Motion Picture, and that it was never returned. Its whereabouts were unknown until last fall, when a listing for a mysterious model of the Enterprise appeared on eBay.

Enthusiasts analyzed the pictures in the listing and came to believe it was the long-lost three-foot production model. They contacted the seller, who quickly took down the listing.

The eBay account that posted the item specialized in selling artifacts found in storage lockers that end up without an owner, either because of failure to pay or death.

The model appeared in this promotional image with Roddenberry.

The model appeared in this promotional image with Roddenberry.

CBS

The model was turned over by the eBay seller to Texas-based Heritage Auctions. News spread that it had been discovered, and Gene Roddenberry’s son, Eugene “Rod” Roddenberry, made public statements that he would like to see it returned to his family.

After that, there were months of silence, and its fate was unknown—until now. Heritage Auctions announced that it had given the model to Rod Roddenberry. Details of the exchange have not been shared, but Roddenberry said he did compensate Heritage in some way.

Heritage reached out directly to Roddenberry upon acquiring the object and reportedly decided to return it because it was “the right thing to do.” Roddenberry said that he “felt it important to reward that and show appreciation for that” but didn’t disclose a sum.

Promotional images of the model with William Shatner and Leonard Nimoy.

Promotional images of the model with William Shatner and Leonard Nimoy.

Roddenberry also revealed what he has planned for the model:

This is not going home to adorn my shelves. This is going to get restored and we’re working on ways to get it out so the public can see it, and my hope is that it will land in a museum somewhere.

He runs a group called the Roddenberry Foundation that has scanned and digitized many relics from Star Trek’s ideation and production over the years, so it’s likely the Foundation will get a crack at the model, too.

Listing image by eBay

Long-lost model of the USS Enterprise returned to Roddenberry family Read More »

cities:-skylines-2-team-apologizes,-makes-dlc-free-and-promises-a-fan-summit

Cities: Skylines 2 team apologizes, makes DLC free and promises a fan summit

Cities: Skylines 2 development —

A “complete focus on improving the base game” will happen before more paid DLC.

A beach house alone on a large land plot

Enlarge / Like the Beach Properties DLC itself, this property looks a bit unfinished and in need of some focus.

Paradox Interactive

Perhaps the first clue that something was not quite right about Beach Properties, the first $10 DLC “expansion” for the already off-kilter city-building sim Cities: Skylines 2, was that it did not contain a real beach house, which one might consider a key beach property. The oversight seemed indicative of a content pack that lacked for content.

C:S2‘s developers and publisher now agree and have published a letter to Cities fans, in which they offer apologies, updates, and refunds. Beach Properties is now a free add-on, individual buyers will be refunded (with details at a FAQ page), and Ultimate Edition owners will receive additional Creator Packs and Radio Stations, since partial refunds are tricky across different game stores.

“We thought we could make up for the shortcomings of the game in a timeframe that was unrealistic, and rushed out a DLC that should not have been published in its current form. For all this, we are truly sorry,” reads the letter, signed by the CEOs of developer Colossal Order and publisher Paradox Interactive. “When we’ve made statements like this one before, it’s included a pledge to keep making improvements, and while we are working on these updates, they haven’t happened at a speed or magnitude that is acceptable, and it pains us that we’ve now lost the trust of many of you. We want to do better.”

What will happen next, according to the letter, are changes in how the game is improved and how those improvements are communicated. To wit:

  • A “complete focus on improving the base game and modding tools”
  • Better community involvement in choosing priorities
  • Focusing on free patches and updates ahead of paid content
  • Relatedly pushing “Bridges and Ports” expansion to 2025
  • Shifting Creator Packs work to independent developers
  • An “advisory meeting” between a small group of player representatives with significant followings and developer and publisher heads

For those eager to see the game on consoles, despite all this signaling of how far the base PC game might have to go, the letter offers an update. An “upcoming build delivery in April” should show sufficient optimization progress to move ahead, with “a release build targeted for October.” Yet until they can see the real results, no firm release date can be made. The console team will operate separately from the PC team, however, so it should move ahead “without splitting our focus or time.”

Put together, the C:S2 team’s actions, and plan for the way forward, seem like reasonable ways to make sure their work meets with fans’ expectations. There’s a fair amount of positive feedback to the forum post, however self-selecting “Paradox Forum members” may be. I do wonder if there’s a danger of some owners and fans never considering the game to be “good enough” to not react negatively to paid add-ons showing up in the store. It’s a tricky thing, releasing a game that almost inherently demands a swath of future add-ons, packs, and expansions—the original Cities: Skylines had more than 60 add-ons.

In an interview with Ars, Colossal Order CEO Mariina Hallikainen said that “working on new content for the game” was the thing she most looked forward to, “after, of course, we have sorted outstanding issues.” There are seemingly many more months of sorting to go before the fun new stuff arrives.

Cities: Skylines 2 team apologizes, makes DLC free and promises a fan summit Read More »

netflix-doc-accused-of-using-ai-to-manipulate-true-crime-story

Netflix doc accused of using AI to manipulate true crime story

Everything is not as it seems —

Producer remained vague about whether AI was used to edit photos.

A cropped image showing Raw TV's poster for the Netflix documentary <em>What Jennifer Did</em>, which features a long front tooth that leads critics to believe it was AI-generated.” src=”https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/What-Jennifer-Did-Netflix-poster-cropped-800×450.jpg”></img><figcaption>
<p><a data-height=Enlarge / A cropped image showing Raw TV’s poster for the Netflix documentary What Jennifer Did, which features a long front tooth that leads critics to believe it was AI-generated.

An executive producer of the Netflix hit What Jennifer Did has responded to accusations that the true crime documentary used AI images when depicting Jennifer Pan, a woman currently imprisoned in Canada for orchestrating a murder-for-hire scheme targeting her parents.

What Jennifer Did shot to the top spot in Netflix’s global top 10 when it debuted in early April, attracting swarms of true crime fans who wanted to know more about why Pan paid hitmen $10,000 to murder her parents. But quickly the documentary became a source of controversy, as fans started noticing glaring flaws in images used in the movie, from weirdly mismatched earrings to her nose appearing to lack nostrils, the Daily Mail reported, in a post showing a plethora of examples of images from the film.

Futurism was among the first to point out that these flawed images (around the 28-minute mark of the documentary) “have all the hallmarks of an AI-generated photo, down to mangled hands and fingers, misshapen facial features, morphed objects in the background, and a far-too-long front tooth.” The image with the long front tooth was even used in Netflix’s poster for the movie.

Because the movie’s credits do not mention any uses of AI, critics called out the documentary filmmakers for potentially embellishing a movie that’s supposed to be based on real-life events.

But Jeremy Grimaldi—who is also the crime reporter who wrote a book on the case and provided the documentary with research and police footage—told the Toronto Star that the images were not AI-generated.

Grimaldi confirmed that all images of Pan used in the movie were real photos. He said that some of the images were edited, though, not to blur the lines between truth and fiction, but to protect the identity of the source of the images.

“Any filmmaker will use different tools, like Photoshop, in films,” Grimaldi told The Star. “The photos of Jennifer are real photos of her. The foreground is exactly her. The background has been anonymized to protect the source.”

While Grimaldi’s comments provide some assurance that the photos are edited versions of real photos of Pan, they are also vague enough to obscure whether AI was among the “different tools” used to edit the photos.

One photographer, Joe Foley, wrote in a post for Creative Bloq that he thought “documentary makers may have attempted to enhance old low-resolution images using AI-powered upscaling or photo restoration software to try to make them look clearer on a TV screen.”

“The problem is that even the best AI software can only take a poor-quality image so far, and such programs tend to over sharpen certain lines, resulting in strange artifacts,” Foley said.

Foley suggested that Netflix should have “at the very least” clarified that images had been altered “to avoid this kind of backlash,” noting that “any kind of manipulation of photos in a documentary is controversial because the whole point is to present things as they were.”

Hollywood’s increasing use of AI has indeed been controversial, with screenwriters’ unions opposing AI tools as “plagiarism machines” and artists stirring recent backlash over the “experimental” use of AI art in a horror film. Even using AI for a movie poster, as Civil War did, is enough to generate controversy, the Hollywood Reporter reported.

Neither Raw TV, the production company behind What Jennifer Did, nor Netflix responded to Ars’ request for comment.

Netflix doc accused of using AI to manipulate true crime story Read More »

huawei-phone-has-a-pop-out-camera-lens,-just-like-a-point-and-shoot-camera

Huawei phone has a pop-out camera lens, just like a point-and-shoot camera

Bigger lens, better photos; it’s not complicated —

The retractable camera lens works like a mini point-and-shoot!

The Huawei Pura 70 Ultra. That red ring around the camera lens is how far it moves.

Enlarge / The Huawei Pura 70 Ultra. That red ring around the camera lens is how far it moves.

Huawei

Huawei is still out there making phones, even if it has been shunned by the US government and the US-aligned tech ecosystem. The latest phone has a new name: “Huawei Pura 70.” While you wouldn’t ever want to deal with the cobbled-together SoC or whatever is going on with Huawei’s software, the “Ultra” model does have a cool party trick up its sleeve: a pop-out main camera lens.

In the years before the smartphone took over all entry-level photography, there used to be a thing called a “point-and-shoot camera.” This was a purpose-built device that only took photos, couldn’t go on the Internet, and wouldn’t let you watch the latest TikTok videos. The trademark feature of these devices was a retractable camera lens, where the front lens (there was only one!) would grow out of the front of the camera when you turned it on. This would give your camera better, longer lens geometry to work with when the camera was on, and would collapse down for easier storage when it was off.

Huawei’s latest phone is replicating that. The giant rear camera lens actually grows out of the phone somewhat, thanks to some complicated gearing inside the phone. It’s only the tiniest few millimeters, but it’s a start. Smartphone manufacturers often resist adding bigger lenses to their devices because they want to still have pocketable devices. A pop-up lens would give the camera engineers more room to work with while still maintaining pocketability.

The retractable camera lens uses a 50MP, 1-inch sensor and apparently also has an adjustable aperture of F1.6~F4.0. There’s no optical zoom (which could be a justification for the pop-out lens)—so it looks like the lens movement is just to get set up to the base lens configuration. (We’re working from a machine-translated Chinese-language website, in our defense.) There are two other cameras in the rear triangle-shaped camera bump: a 40MP ultrawide and a 50MP 3.5x telephoto.

  • Here’s a good look at just how much this camera bump sticks out, it’s huge! There is a lot going on here.

    Huawei

  • Here’s a complicated gif about how this all works.

    Huawei

  • The front and back.

    Huawei

  • The back looks really nice with that leathery texture and an argyle pattern.

    Huawei

  • Colors! Green and brown are certainly choices.

    Huawei

  • A side view. Is that a flat screen?

    Huawei

Huawei’s spec sheet makes zero mention of the SoC. There is not even a name or model number—we’re just left to assume that there must be an SoC in there somewhere. According to Geekbench uploads, it’s called the “Kirin 9010,” which sounds like a minor upgrade over Huawei’s current chip. US sanctions mean Huawei is stuck attempting to build chips without the help of current state-of-the-art chip production tools and facilities from US-aligned countries. A lot has been made of these chips in the tech press—Huawei doesn’t have access to new chip manufacturing equipment, can’t get the newest designs from ARM, and can’t have its designs made at the industry-leading chip fab, TSMC. The company has been relying on Chinese partner SMIC for fabrication, using the old machines from the pre-sanction era, and has kept on trucking with less competitive chips that seem frozen in time.

Huawei, to its credit, hasn’t hyped up its post-sanction chips that much (it’s not even talking about this one!). In November 2020, before US sanctions had really taken hold, the company worked with Arm to create the Kirin 9000, a 5 nm SoC with four Cortex A77 CPUs and four Cortex A55 CPUs. Three years later, Huawei’s first post-sanction chip was the modestly named “Kirin 9000s,” a reportedly 7 nm chip that was scraped together with whatever technology Huawei could find. The general vibe you get from the model number change of 9000 to 9000s is “not much of an improvement,” and the benchmarks have proven that to be true. The new chip in the Pura 70 is a “Kirin 9010” and is probably still 7 nm. So even Huawei is admitting it’s not making much progress without the US-aligned chip ecosystem.

Other specs include a whopping 16GB of RAM and 512GB of storage on the “Ultra” model. There’s a 6.8-inch, 120 Hz OLED with a 2844×1260 resolution, and the battery is 5200 mAh. The phone only has Wi-Fi 6e, not Wi-Fi 7, presumably thanks to Uncle Sam. All of these components are going to be from random, off-the-beaten-path manufacturers who are brave enough to go against the will of the US government, so who knows how well anything works.

Anyway, we just wanted to write about the neat camera lens. It’s only for sale in China starting today, with the Ultra model clocking in at 9,999 Yuan, or about $1,380.

Correction: We updated this at 5: 41pm to change the Kirin 9000 from 5 nm to 7 nm, so the switch to SMIC went backward one generation.

Huawei phone has a pop-out camera lens, just like a point-and-shoot camera Read More »

io:-new-image-of-a-lake-of-fire,-signs-of-permanent-volcanism

Io: New image of a lake of fire, signs of permanent volcanism

Io: New image of a lake of fire, signs of permanent volcanism

Ever since the Voyager mission sent home images of Jupiter’s moon Io spewing material into space, we’ve gradually built up a clearer picture of Io’s volcanic activity. It slowly became clear that Io, which is a bit smaller than Mercury, is the most volcanically active body in the Solar System, with all that activity driven by the gravitational strain caused by Jupiter and its three other giant moons. There is so much volcanism that its surface has been completely remodeled, with no signs of impact craters.

A few more details about its violence came to light this week, with new images being released of the moon’s features, including an island in a lake of lava, taken by the Juno orbiter. At the same time, imaging done using an Earth-based telescope has provided some indications that this volcanism has been reshaping Io from almost the moment it formed.

Fiery, glassy lakes

The Juno orbiter’s mission is primarily focused on studying Jupiter, including the dynamics of its storms and its internal composition. But many of its orbital passes have taken it right past Io, and this week, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory released some of the best images from these flybys. They include a shot of Loki Patera, a lake of lava that has an island within it. Also featured: the impossibly sheer slopes of Io’s Steeple Mountain.

Looking more closely at the lake, the Juno team found that some of the areas within it were incredibly smooth, raising the possibility that obsidian glass had formed on the surface where it had cooled enough to solidify. Given the level of volcanism on Io, this may be more widespread than the Loki Patera.

Volcanic ash would also create a relatively smooth surface, and is likely to be even more common, but it would have significantly different reflective properties.

How long has this been going on?

But we don’t have to send hardware to Jupiter to learn something about Io. A US-based team got time on the Atacama Large Millimeter Array (ALMA) and used it to record emissions from atoms in Io’s sparse atmosphere. By combining the imaging power of lots of smaller telescopes scattered across a plateau, ALMA is able to spot regional differences in the presence of specific elements in Io’s atmosphere, as well as identify different isotopes of those elements.

What can isotopes tell us? Any atoms that reach Io’s upper atmosphere are at risk of being lost to space. And, because of their relative atomic weights, lighter isotopes have a higher probability of being lost. So, it’s possible to compare the present ratio of elements in the atmosphere with the expected ratio, and we can make inferences about the history of loss of lighter isotopes. And, since the material is put into the atmosphere by volcanoes in the first place, that tells us something about the history of volcanism.

The research team focused on two particular elements: sulfur and chlorine. Sulfur has two common non-radioactive isotopes, 32S and 34S, and chlorine, its neighbor on the periodic table, has 35Cl and 37Cl. There are differences in the ratio of these isotopes throughout the bodies of the Solar System, but those differences are generally small. And, because we think we know what sort of material contributed to the formation of Io, we can focus on the ratios found in bodies that have a similar origin.

Chlorine enters the atmosphere from volcanoes primarily in the form of sodium and potassium salts. These have a very short half-life before they’re split up by exposure to light and radiation. The ALMA data indicated both these chemicals were present in localized regions, likely corresponding to active volcanic plumes. The data from the chlorine isotopes were a bit noisy, so were largely used as a sanity check for the ones obtained from sulfur isotopes.

Io: New image of a lake of fire, signs of permanent volcanism Read More »

modder-packs-an-entire-nintendo-wii-into-a-box-the-size-of-a-pack-of-cards

Modder packs an entire Nintendo Wii into a box the size of a pack of cards

wii micro —

There’s no disc drive, but there are still ports for GameCube controllers.

Its creator calls the

Enlarge / Its creator calls the “Short Stack” the world’s smallest scale model replica of the Nintendo Wii (bottom).

The miniaturization of retro tech has always been a major obsession for modders, from the person who fit an original NES into a Game Boy-sized portable to the person who made a mini-er version of Apple’s Mac mini.

One mod in this storied genre that caught our eye this week is the “Short Stack,” a scale model of the Nintendo Wii that packs the 2006 console’s internal hardware into a 3D-printed enclosure roughly the size of a deck of playing cards.

“You could fit 13.5 of these inside an original Wii,” writes James Smith (aka loopj), the person behind the project. All the design details, custom boards, and other information about recreating the mod are available on GitHub.

Like many space-saving console mods, the Short Stack requires a cut-down version of the original Wii’s PCB, retaining (and occasionally relocating) the original console’s CPU, GPU, RAM, and NAND flash chip. Power delivery, USB, the Wi-Fi and Bluetooth chips, and GameCube controller ports were all relocated to separate custom PCBs, which also allowed Smith to add HDMI output and a microSD card slot (the original Wii used a full-size SD card and didn’t support digital video output).

  • The Short Stack cleverly hides its GameCube controller ports behind a sliding panel on the side.

  • A headphone jack-to-GameCube dongle preserves GameCube controller compatibility while saving space in the console itself.

  • The cut-down Wii PCB, featuring the original console’s CPU, GPU, RAM, and NAND flash.

  • The Short Stack next to a deck of cards.

Some sacrifices were made in the name of miniaturization. The console’s disc drive is gone, so any games will need to be loaded from a microSD card instead. And the four GameCube controller ports are actually headphone jacks that work over a special adapter. Smith made these headphone-to-GameCube dongles pin-compatible with an earlier mod called the GC Nano, a project that did for the GameCube what the Short Stack does for the Wii.

Smith also designed custom front and rear PCBs for the console to handle things like the power button and the glowing blue light around the Short Stack’s (aesthetic, non-functional) DVD slot. A custom heatsink (Smith uses aluminum, though it can also be made with copper to improve heat transfer at the expense of weight) and a tiny fan keep the console cool.

Nintendo released its own Wii Mini toward the end of the Wii’s life in 2012, but it came with significant compromises: no online connectivity, no GameCube controller ports or game compatibility, and no SD card slot. The Short Stack loses the optical drive for space-saving reasons but otherwise retains all of the features of the original Wii.

Smith says that the Short Stack could probably be as much as 20 to 30 percent smaller without giving up features. But one of the goals of the Short Stack project was to make a scale model of the original Wii, and further shrinkage would make the project “tricky to assemble.”

Modder packs an entire Nintendo Wii into a box the size of a pack of cards Read More »

roku-forcing-2-factor-authentication-after-2-breaches-of-600k-accounts

Roku forcing 2-factor authentication after 2 breaches of 600K accounts

Roku account breach —

Accounts with stored payment information went for as little as $0.50 each.

Roku logo on TV with remote in foreground

Getty Images

Everyone with a Roku TV or streaming device will eventually be forced to enable two-factor authentication after the company disclosed two separate incidents in which roughly 600,000 customers had their accounts accessed through credential stuffing.

Credential stuffing is an attack in which usernames and passwords exposed in one leak are tried out against other accounts, typically using automated scripts. When people reuse usernames and passwords across services or make small, easily intuited changes between them, actors can gain access to accounts with even more identifying information and access.

In the case of the Roku attacks, that meant access to stored payment methods, which could then be used to buy streaming subscriptions and Roku hardware. Roku wrote on its blog, and in a mandated data breach report, that purchases occurred in “less than 400 cases” and that full credit card numbers and other “sensitive information” was not revealed.

The first incident, “earlier this year,” involved roughly 15,000 user accounts, Roku stated. By monitoring these accounts, Roku identified a second incident, one that touched 576,000 accounts. These were collectively “a small fraction of Roku’s more than 80M active accounts,” the post states, but the streaming giant will work to prevent future such stuffing attacks.

The affected accounts will have their passwords reset and will be notified, along with having charges reversed. Every Roku account, when next requiring a login, will now need to verify their account through a link sent to their email address. Alternatively, one can use the device ID of any linked Roku device, according to Roku’s support page. (Forcing this upgrade yourself is probably a good idea for past or present Roku owners.)

Security blog BleepingComputer reported around the time of the incident that breached Roku accounts were sold for as little as 50 cents each and likely obtained using commonly available stuffing tools that bypass brute-force protections through proxies and other means. BleepingComputer reported that “a source” tied Roku’s recent updates to its Dispute Resolution Terms, which all but locked Roku devices until a customer agreed, to the fraudulent activity. Roku told BleepingComputer that the two were not related.

Roku forcing 2-factor authentication after 2 breaches of 600K accounts Read More »