Stones from the Bennu asteroid turns out to contain 14 amino acids and give nucleobases from DNA and RNA. Life’s origin? CC-licensed photo by NASA Goddard Space Flight Center on Flickr.
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A selection of 9 links for you. Lively. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.
Asteroid fragments upend theory of how life on Earth bloomed • Nature
Alexandra Witze:
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Fragments of the asteroid Bennu, carefully collected and ferried to Earth by a robotic spacecraft, contain the building blocks for life, NASA announced on Wednesday.
Not only does Bennu contain all five of the nucleobases that form DNA and RNA on Earth and 14 of the 20 amino acids found in known proteins, the asteroid’s amino acids hold a surprise. On Earth, amino acids in living organisms predominantly have a “left-handed” chemical structure. Bennu, however, contains nearly equal amounts of these structures and their “right-handed”, mirror-image forms, calling into question scientists’ hypothesis that asteroids similar to this one might have seeded life on Earth.
The work appears in Nature Astronomy.
“What makes these results so significant is that we’re finding them in a pristine sample,” says co-author Daniel Glavin, an astrobiologist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. When meteorites fall to Earth, they are heated in the atmosphere and contaminated by the planet’s molecules. The Bennu samples were ferried to Earth in a sealed canister, protected from the heat, and analysed in a super-clean laboratory space under inert gas.
The specimens contain the richest bounty of life-friendly extraterrestrial compounds ever brought to Earth.
But that’s not all they contain. In an accompanying paper published in Nature on Wednesday other researchers report that the material from Bennu is also rich in salts created billions of years ago, probably when watery ponds on Bennu’s parent asteroid evaporated and left behind a crust of minerals. Although no signs of life were spotted on Bennu, those salty ponds would have been a good environment to foster the chemistry that could lead to it. This might involve small, carbon-rich molecules such as methanal (formaldehyde) — a simple compound that was found in the Bennu samples.
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This is big news: another part of the finding is that radioactivity made the salty waters warm, which also encourages the process of.. whatever causes amino acids to form. And then it crashes into an early planet, seeding life.
Of course this doesn’t quite solve the question of “how did life get started?” – it only really moves it back one step, to an asteroid rather than primitive Earth – but implies it could be widespread. One asteroid is much like another. And every solar system has a ton of asteroids banging into things.
On the Undesign of Apple Intelligence features • Pixel Envy
Nick Heer:
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As noted, the Writing Tools popover is not the same width as the other popovers it will spawn. By sheer luck, I had one of my test windows positioned in such a way that the Writing Tools popover had enough space to display on the lefthand side of the window, but the popovers it launched appeared on the right because they are a bit wider. This made for a confusing and discordant experience.
Choice of component aside, the way the results of Writing Tools are displayed is so obviously lacklustre I am surprised it shipped in its current state. Two of the features I assumed I would find useful — as I am one person shy of an editor — are “Proofread” and “Rewrite”. But they both have a critical flaw: neither shows the differences between the original text and the changed version. For very short passages, this is not much of a problem, but a tool like “Proofread” implies use on more substantial chunks, or even a whole document. A user must carefully review the rewritten text to discover what changes were made, or place their faith in Apple and click the “Replace” button hoping all is well.
Apple could correct for all of these issues. It could display Writing Tools in a panel instead of a popover or, at least, make it possible to disconnect the popover from the selected and transform it into a panel. It should also make every popover the same width or, at least, require enough clearance for the widest popover spawned by Writing Tools so that they always open on the same side. It could bring to MacOS the same way of displaying differences in rewritten text as already exists on iOS but, for some reason, is not part of the Mac version. It could cache results so, if the text is unchanged, invoking the same tool again does not need to redo a successful action.
Writing Tools on MacOS is the most obviously flawed of the Apple Intelligence features suffering from weak implementation or questionable U.I. choices, but there are other examples, too.
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Heer goes on to list them: Image Playground, automatic replies in Messages, and the settings themselves for Apple Intelligence. His complaints aren’t about what the feature(s) do/es, it’s about the associated UI. But Apple has been letting itself down on that front for quite some time.
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Why Apple uses JPEG XL in the iPhone 16 and what it means for your photos • PetaPixel
Jeremy Gray:
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JPEG XL is a next-generation image encoding standard formally standardized in early 2022. Since then, JPEG XL (.jxl) has been adopted by numerous operating systems and applications, albeit with some notable holdouts.
Apple and its various software iterations have supported JPEG XL for at least a year, including in Finder, Preview, Final Cut Pro, Pages, Photos, Mail, Safari, and more. Adobe has also supported the format for a while, including in Adobe Camera Raw and Lightroom Classic.
Despite JPEG XL supporting reversible JPEG transcoding and being superior to JPEG in terms of quality and efficiency, the format has yet to be widely adopted. Neither Chrome nor Firefox, two very popular web browsers, support the format natively, for example. Extensions are available to support JPEG XL files, but they’re not installed by default.
The JPEG XL community website cites the format’s ability to reduce file size while delivering “unmatched quality-per-byte.” Compared to a standard JPEG, a JPEG XL file is up to 55% smaller while providing a cleaner image that is visually lossless. Gone are typical JPEG artifacts.
Although it’s easy to appreciate the technical advantages of JPEG XL, it is also worth pointing out a substantial benefit of smaller file sizes: reduced environmental impact. As the world generates increasing amounts of data, it’s essential to consider ways to reduce data load. All that stuff lives somewhere, and wherever it is, it requires energy to operate.
It’s also important to note that JPEG XL supports wide-gamut and high dynamic range images. “JPEG XL is specifically designed to handle the rich colors of high-precision, high-dynamic range images,” the creators explain.
…As for why it is including JPEG XL in the iPhone 16 Pro, Apple tells PetaPixel that the format promises two primary benefits over standard JPEG format: improved image quality and better compression performance. If there’s a 32MB JPEG image, that same photo will be 24MB in lossless JPEG XL and, even more impressively, about five megabytes in perceptually lossless format.
Apple has wrapped JPEG XL photos inside a DNG container, enabling ProRAW files to retain their flexibility while being significantly smaller — up to nearly five times smaller.
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This is a great format but the problem is its lack of adoption. (This article is from September.) You can enable JPEG XL in various browsers, including Chrome – since 2021.
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Quartz has been quietly publishing AI-generated news articles • TechCrunch
Rebecca Bellan:
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Quartz, the international business news outlet, has been quietly aggregating reporting from other outlets, including TechCrunch, in order to publish AI-generated articles under the byline “Quartz Intelligence Newsroom.”
Quartz started publishing simple AI-generated earnings reports months ago, but beginning last week, the outlet moved on to short articles. One of the 18 AI-generated articles published as of Monday afternoon, titled “South Korea shares preliminary findings on Jeju Air crash investigation,” aggregates reporting done by real journalists at CNN, MSN, and The Associated Press on MSN.com.
Each of the outlet’s AI-generated articles is roughly 400 words in length, and includes no full quotes from sources. Rather than attributing information in the body of the text, as flesh-and-blood journalists do, Quartz’s AI writer only cites its sources at the very top of its pieces.
A spokesperson for Quartz corporate parent G/O Media confirmed to TechCrunch the existence of a “purely experimental” AI newsroom, without commenting on which AI models or tools the publication uses to write AI-generated news articles.
It is not clear how Quartz’s AI newsroom chooses which stories to cover. The spokesperson said that the goal is to free up Quartz’s editorial staff to “work on longer and more deeply reported articles,” and that the editorial staff reviews each AI-generated story before it is published.«
Somehow this is reminiscent of Philip K Dick’s “homeopapes”, which would “speedily provide you with a fresh, up-to-the-minute” news summary tailored to your likings. The more advanced ones could interview people too.
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Logitech’s peel-and-stick radar sensors could let companies invisibly monitor their offices • The Verge
Sean Hollister:
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Logitech sales boomed during the pandemic as people outfitted their home offices, and it’s getting a piece of the hybrid workplace with teleconferencing gear too. But Logitech’s also got a little-known corporate office management solution that could soon expand beyond conference rooms — using a pebble-shaped person detection device called the Logitech Spot.
It’s a millimeter wave radar sensor you can peel and stick up anywhere, letting companies invisibly see whether people are in a room. The company claims it’ll last four years on a single D-cell shaped lithium battery, no wires required at all.
It’s not just a radar sensor; it also measures particulates, VOCs, CO2, temperature, pressure, and humidity, so your company can get a health score for any given room. But the first clear draw is for companies to know whether workers are actually using their office space, and which rooms get used, as they make decisions about downsizing those offices, issuing return-to-office mandates, or reconfiguring them for hybrid work.
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Personally, I wondered if this could be a silent burglar alarm of sorts. But it needs a connection to the Logitech cloud. Also, no price has been announced. But that battery life is astonishing.
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AI haters build tarpits to trap and trick AI scrapers that ignore robots.txt • Ars Technica
Ashley Belanger:
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Last summer, Anthropic inspired backlash when its ClaudeBot AI crawler was accused of hammering websites a million or more times a day.
And it wasn’t the only artificial intelligence company making headlines for supposedly ignoring instructions in robots.txt files to avoid scraping web content on certain sites. Around the same time, Reddit’s CEO called out all AI companies whose crawlers he said were “a pain in the ass to block,” despite the tech industry otherwise agreeing to respect “no scraping” robots.txt rules.
Watching the controversy unfold was a software developer whom Ars has granted anonymity to discuss his development of malware (we’ll call him Aaron). Shortly after he noticed Facebook’s crawler exceeding 30 million hits on his site, Aaron began plotting a new kind of attack on crawlers “clobbering” websites that he told Ars he hoped would give “teeth” to robots.txt.
Building on an anti-spam cybersecurity tactic known as tarpitting, he created Nepenthes, malicious software named after a carnivorous plant that will “eat just about anything that finds its way inside.”
Aaron clearly warns users that Nepenthes is aggressive malware. It’s not to be deployed by site owners uncomfortable with trapping AI crawlers and sending them down an “infinite maze” of static files with no exit links, where they “get stuck” and “thrash around” for months, he tells users. Once trapped, the crawlers can be fed gibberish data, aka Markov babble, which is designed to poison AI models. That’s likely an appealing bonus feature for any site owners who, like Aaron, are fed up with paying for AI scraping and just want to watch AI burn.
…”Ultimately, it’s like the Internet that I grew up on and loved is long gone,” Aaron told Ars. “I’m just fed up, and you know what? Let’s fight back, even if it’s not successful. Be indigestible. Grow spikes.”
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Oh, Aaron. The internet has had so, so many deaths. The “internet” I knew has died at least twice, and yet continues.
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AI optimization: how to optimize your content for AI search and agents • Search Engine Land
Jed White:
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Optimizing for AI search is an ongoing process, as AI crawlers are far from perfect. Right now:
• 34% of AI crawler requests result in 404 or other errors
• Only Google’s Gemini and AppleBot currently render JavaScript among major AI crawlers
• AI crawlers show 47 times inefficiency compared to traditional crawlers like Googlebot
• AI crawlers represent about 28% of Googlebot’s volume in recent traffic analysis
• As AI indexing improves, staying ahead of these trends will help ensure your content remains visible.Remember, it’s a balance. You want to be accessible to helpful AI tools while protecting against bad actors.
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It’s so peculiar: what is it that these sites think they’re going to gain by being easy to index by AI chatbots? And yet SEL is highly regarded. If it’s giving this sort of advice, then things are changing. Just look at the headlines on its main page – AI, AI, AI everywhere.
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Chinese AI chatbot DeepSeek censors itself in realtime, users report • The Guardian
Robert Booth and Dan Milmo:
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Before the censor’s cut comes, DeepSeek seems remarkably thoughtful. In Mexico, Guardian reader Salvador asked it on Tuesday if free speech was a legitimate right in China. DeepSeek approaches its answers with a preamble of reasoning about what it might include and how it might best address the question. In this case Salvador was impressed as he watched as line by line his phone screen filled up with text as DeepSeek suggested it might talk about Beijing’s crackdown on protests in Hong Kong, the “persecution of human rights lawyers”, the “censorship of discussions on Xianjiang re-education camps” and China’s “social credit system punishing dissenters”.
“I was assuming this app was heavily [controlled] by the Chinese government so I was wondering how censored it would be,” he said.
Far from it, it seemed incredibly frank and it even gave itself a little pep talk about the need to “avoid any biased language, present facts objectively” and “maybe also compare with western approaches to highlight the contrast”.
Then it started its answer proper, explaining how “ethical justifications for free speech often centre on its role in fostering autonomy – the ability to express ideas, engage in dialogue and redefine one’s understanding of the world”. By contrast, it said: “China’s governance model rejects this framework, prioritising state authority and social stability over individual rights.”
Then it explained that in democratic frameworks free speech needed to be protected from societal threats and “in China, the primary threat is the state itself which actively suppresses dissent”. Perhaps unsurprisingly it didn’t get any further along this tack because everything it had said up to that point was instantly erased. In its place came a new message: “Sorry, I’m not sure how to approach this type of question yet. Let’s chat about math, coding and logic problems instead!”
“In the middle of the sentence it cut itself,” Salvador said. “It was very abrupt. It’s impressive: it is censoring in real time.”
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Now that’s what I call intelligence!
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Dismay at plan to cut back A-level maths support programme • Financial Times
Peter Foster, Amy Borrett and Michael Peel:
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The Advanced Mathematics Support Programme, which has been running since 2018, helps state schools in England teach A-level maths, further maths and a core maths programme that provides “maths for life” skills, such as statistics and finance.
Government officials said the “difficult decision” to reduce the programme budget had been taken as Whitehall seeks to address the “£22bn black hole” in the public finances Labour says it inherited from the Conservative administration.
The plan to halve the budget of the widely-praised scheme from April this year was described as a retrograde step by leading maths campaigners at a time when the government is promoting its new AI and digital technology strategies as the key to the UK’s growth prospects.
Jens Marklof, president of the London Mathematical Society, said the decision to pare back the scheme would harm the chances of children from poorer areas, where schools are less likely to offer further maths A-levels needed to access higher-tier universities.
“There’s no AI without maths and if the government is really serious about its AI strategy they have to significantly scale up the support for maths education at all levels,” he said.
“The big success of AMSP was to enable kids who went to schools that didn’t offer further maths to give them this opportunity,” he added.
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Terrible idea. The failure of economic growth in the past 15 years is really starting to bite now, and will affect us for years to come.
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| • Why do social networks drive us a little mad? • Why does angry content seem to dominate what we see? • How much of a role do algorithms play in affecting what we see and do online? • What can we do about it? • Did Facebook have any inkling of what was coming in Myanmar in 2016? Read Social Warming, my latest book, and find answers – and more. |
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The Overspill: when there's more that I want to say 