LAST UPDATE February 15, 2025

News and information culled from the internet

ETHICS

The problem of bad scientific papers and phony data – Popsci.com

It is exceedingly difficult to get a handle on exactly how big the problem is. Around 55,000 scholarly papers have been retracted to date, for a variety of reasons, but scientists and companies who screen the scientific literature for telltale signs of fraud estimate that there are many more fake papers circulating – possibly as many as several hundred thousand. This fake research can confound legitimate researchers who must wade through dense equations, evidence, images and methodologies only to find that they were made up...."

There's something I call the Uruguay paradigm: I've never been to Uruguay, and I've never met anyone who has been there. So how do I know Uruguay is really there? I use maps, books and the internet for the evidence. Since I generally trust that the makers of maps, books and the news media to more or less accurately report on this place I've never been to, I believe there is a Uruguay. The thought there's a conspiracy large enough to concoct a whole country (68,037 square miles / 176,215 kilometers, with 3.5 million people) out of faked data and cooperation across a large number of the scientific communities, let alone the commercial aspects of such a ruse (tourism, beef exports valued at over $2 billion, also exports in dairy, rice, soybeans and more) is simply too improbable, but in the end I have no first hand proof so I have to use trust.

The ability to fake scientific data in this apparent plague of phony scientific papers indicates that whatever gate-keeping method used in the past to restrict bad "science" has been overwhelmed or compromised in some fundamental way that it is contaminating the whole concept of "data" itself.

ROBOTS

Robot bees to pollinate farms? – UPI Press

The application here is mainly for "vertical farming" spaces that are artificial indoor spaces using artificial light. The combination of these robotic methods and artificial replications of natural farming environments seems to be a pooling of synthetic food production, and the result (intended and not) will be interesting...

MEDICINE

Developing jumbo phages to fight bacteria infections – phys.org

Virus phages inject DNA into bacteria to attack them:

...usurping bacterial machinery to reproduce. Eventually, they make so many copies of themselves that the bacteria burst. By looking at this process in a unique type of virus called a jumbo phage, scientists hope to learn how to make new antibiotics that can address the growing crisis of resistance...."

AI INTELLIGENCE

The Nepenthes tarpit vs AI web scrapers – Arstechnica

The fight against AI scrapers that are systematically looting the internet while ignoring the honor-system of robots.txt statements at websites is heating up in an interesting way: actual time (and money) intensive "tarpits" that can lock up an AI bot for days, weeks and months with "...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."

It's hard to tell how widely Nepenthes has been deployed. Site owners are discouraged from flagging when the malware has been deployed, forcing crawlers to face unknown "consequences" if they ignore robots.txt instructions. Aaron told Ars that while "a handful" of site owners have reached out and "most people are being quiet about it," his web server logs indicate that people are already deploying the tool. Likely, site owners want to protect their content, deter scraping, or mess with AI companies. ...Nagy took his defense method further and created his own tarpit, Iocaine. He told Ars the tarpit immediately killed off about 94 percent of bot traffic to his site, which was primarily from AI crawlers. Soon, social media discussion drove users to inquire about Iocaine deployment, including not just individuals but also organizations wanting to take stronger steps to block scraping. Iocaine takes ideas (not code) from Nepenthes, but it's more intent on using the tarpit to poison AI models. Nagy used a reverse proxy to trap crawlers in an "infinite maze of garbage" in an attempt to slowly poison their data collection as much as possible for daring to ignore robots.txt...."

The article describes how this battle front is an appealing topic for rights holders who want AI companies pushed into a position where they'll have to "...pay to scrape their data. And many people seem enthusiastic about using it to reinforce robots.txt. But ..."some of the most exciting people are in the 'let it burn' category," Aaron said. These people are drawn to tools like Nepenthes as an act of rebellion against AI ..."

Outside the "dead" section of a mall in Virginia

GREECE

Oldest record of lead poisoning comes from ancient Greece

Story at Associated Press MSN

Time to go to Disney World? Goofy 4 Mickey