syndication – Page 4

Bogus research is undermining good science, slowing lifesaving research

research, research fraud, Science, syndication / Shannon Garcia / February 2, 2025

In 2022, Byrne and colleagues, including two of us, found that suspect genetics research, despite not immediately affecting patient care, informs scientists’ work, including clinical trials. But publishers are often slow to retract tainted papers, even when alerted to obvious fraud. We found that 97 percent of the 712 problematic genetics research articles we identified remained uncorrected.

Potential solutions

The Cochrane Collaboration has a policy excluding suspect studies from its analyses of medical evidence and is developing a tool to spot problematic medical trials. And publishers have begun to share data and technologies among themselves to combat fraud, including image fraud.

Technology startups are also offering help. The website Argos, launched in September 2024 by Scitility, an alert service based in Sparks, Nevada, allows authors to check collaborators for retractions or misconduct. Morressier, a scientific conference and communications company in Berlin, offers research integrity tools. Paper-checking tools include Signals, by London-based Research Signals, and Clear Skies’ Papermill Alarm.

But Alam acknowledges that the fight against paper mills won’t be won as long as the booming demand for papers remains.

Today’s commercial publishing is part of the problem, Byrne said. Cleaning up the literature is a vast and expensive undertaking. “Either we have to monetize corrections such that publishers are paid for their work, or forget the publishers and do it ourselves,” she said.

There’s a fundamental bias in for-profit publishing: “We pay them for accepting papers,” said Bodo Stern, a former editor of the journal Cell and chief of Strategic Initiatives at Howard Hughes Medical Institute, a nonprofit research organization and funder in Chevy Chase, Maryland. With more than 50,000 journals on the market, bad papers shopped around long enough eventually find a home, Stern said.

To prevent this, we could stop paying journals for accepting papers and look at them as public utilities that serve a greater good. “We should pay for transparent and rigorous quality-control mechanisms,” he said.

Peer review, meanwhile, “should be recognized as a true scholarly product, just like the original article,” Stern said. And journals should make all peer-review reports publicly available, even for manuscripts they turn down.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. This is a condensed version. To learn more about how fraudsters around the globe use paper mills to enrich themselves and harm scientific research, read the full version.

Frederik Joelving is a contributing editor at Retraction Watch; Cyril Labbé is a professor of computer science at the Université Grenoble Alpes (UGA); and Guillaume Cabanac is a professor of computer science at Institut de Recherche en Informatique de Toulouse.

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Millions of Subarus could be remotely unlocked, tracked due to security flaws

Cars, privacy, Subaru, syndication / Kelly Newman / January 25, 2025

Flaws also allowed access to one year of location history.

About a year ago, security researcher Sam Curry bought his mother a Subaru, on the condition that, at some point in the near future, she let him hack it.

It took Curry until last November, when he was home for Thanksgiving, to begin examining the 2023 Impreza’s Internet-connected features and start looking for ways to exploit them. Sure enough, he and a researcher working with him online, Shubham Shah, soon discovered vulnerabilities in a Subaru web portal that let them hijack the ability to unlock the car, honk its horn, and start its ignition, reassigning control of those features to any phone or computer they chose.

Most disturbing for Curry, though, was that they found they could also track the Subaru’s location—not merely where it was at the moment but also where it had been for the entire year that his mother had owned it. The map of the car’s whereabouts was so accurate and detailed, Curry says, that he was able to see her doctor visits, the homes of the friends she visited, even which exact parking space his mother parked in every time she went to church.

A year of location data for Sam Curry’s mother’s 2023 Subaru Impreza that Curry and Shah were able to access in Subaru’s employee admin portal thanks to its security vulnerabilities. Credit: Sam Curry

“You can retrieve at least a year’s worth of location history for the car, where it’s pinged precisely, sometimes multiple times a day,” Curry says. “Whether somebody’s cheating on their wife or getting an abortion or part of some political group, there are a million scenarios where you could weaponize this against someone.”

Curry and Shah today revealed in a blog post their method for hacking and tracking millions of Subarus, which they believe would have allowed hackers to target any of the company’s vehicles equipped with its digital features known as Starlink in the US, Canada, or Japan. Vulnerabilities they found in a Subaru website intended for the company’s staff allowed them to hijack an employee’s account to both reassign control of cars’ Starlink features and also access all the vehicle location data available to employees, including the car’s location every time its engine started, as shown in their video below.

Curry and Shah reported their findings to Subaru in late November, and Subaru quickly patched its Starlink security flaws. But the researchers warn that the Subaru web vulnerabilities are just the latest in a long series of similar web-based flaws they and other security researchers working with them have found that have affected well over a dozen carmakers, including Acura, Genesis, Honda, Hyundai, Infiniti, Kia, Toyota, and many others. There’s little doubt, they say, that similarly serious hackable bugs exist in other auto companies’ web tools that have yet to be discovered.

In Subaru’s case, in particular, they also point out that their discovery hints at how pervasively those with access to Subaru’s portal can track its customers’ movements, a privacy issue that will last far longer than the web vulnerabilities that exposed it. “The thing is, even though this is patched, this functionality is still going to exist for Subaru employees,” Curry says. “It’s just normal functionality that an employee can pull up a year’s worth of your location history.”

When WIRED reached out to Subaru for comment on Curry and Shah’s findings, a spokesperson responded in a statement that “after being notified by independent security researchers, [Subaru] discovered a vulnerability in its Starlink service that could potentially allow a third party to access Starlink accounts. The vulnerability was immediately closed and no customer information was ever accessed without authorization.”

The Subaru spokesperson also confirmed to WIRED that “there are employees at Subaru of America, based on their job relevancy, who can access location data.” The company offered as an example that employees have that access to share a vehicle’s location with first responders in the case when a collision is detected. “All these individuals receive proper training and are required to sign appropriate privacy, security, and NDA agreements as needed,” Subaru’s statement added. “These systems have security monitoring solutions in place which are continually evolving to meet modern cyber threats.”

Responding to Subaru’s example of notifying first responders about a collision, Curry notes that would hardly require a year’s worth of location history. The company didn’t respond to WIRED asking how far back it keeps customers’ location histories and makes them available to employees.

Shah and Curry’s research that led them to the discovery of Subaru’s vulnerabilities began when they found that Curry’s mother’s Starlink app connected to the domain SubaruCS.com, which they realized was an administrative domain for employees. Scouring that site for security flaws, they found that they could reset employees’ passwords simply by guessing their email address, which gave them the ability to take over any employee’s account whose email they could find. The password reset functionality did ask for answers to two security questions, but they found that those answers were checked with code that ran locally in a user’s browser, not on Subaru’s server, allowing the safeguard to be easily bypassed. “There were really multiple systemic failures that led to this,” Shah says.

The two researchers say they found the email address for a Subaru Starlink developer on LinkedIn, took over the employee’s account, and immediately found that they could use that staffer’s access to look up any Subaru owner by last name, zip code, email address, phone number, or license plate to access their Starlink configurations. In seconds, they could then reassign control of the Starlink features of that user’s vehicle, including the ability to remotely unlock the car, honk its horn, start its ignition, or locate it, as shown in the video below.

Those vulnerabilities alone, for drivers, present serious theft and safety risks. Curry and Shah point out that a hacker could have targeted a victim for stalking or theft, looked up someone’s vehicle’s location, then unlocked their car at any time—though a thief would have to somehow also use a separate technique to disable the car’s immobilizer, the component that prevents it from being driven away without a key.

Those car hacking and tracking techniques alone are far from unique. Last summer, Curry and another researcher, Neiko Rivera, demonstrated to WIRED that they could pull off a similar trick with any of millions of vehicles sold by Kia. Over the prior two years, a larger group of researchers, of which Curry and Shah are a part, discovered web-based security vulnerabilities that affected cars sold by Acura, BMW, Ferrari, Genesis, Honda, Hyundai, Infiniti, Mercedes-Benz, Nissan, Rolls Royce, and Toyota.

More unusual in Subaru’s case, Curry and Shah say, is that they were able to access fine-grained, historical location data for Subarus going back at least a year. Subaru may in fact collect multiple years of location data, but Curry and Shah tested their technique only on Curry’s mother, who had owned her Subaru for about a year.

Curry argues that Subaru’s extensive location tracking is a particularly disturbing demonstration of the car industry’s lack of privacy safeguards around its growing collection of personal data on drivers. “It’s kind of bonkers,” he says. “There’s an expectation that a Google employee isn’t going to be able to just go through your emails in Gmail, but there’s literally a button on Subaru’s admin panel that lets an employee view location history.”

The two researchers’ work contributes to a growing sense of concern over the enormous amount of location data that car companies collect. In December, information a whistleblower provided to the German hacker collective the Chaos Computer Computer and Der Spiegel revealed that Cariad, a software company that partners with Volkswagen, had left detailed location data for 800,000 electric vehicles publicly exposed online. Privacy researchers at the Mozilla Foundation in September warned in a report that “modern cars are a privacy nightmare,” noting that 92 percent give car owners little to no control over the data they collect, and 84 percent reserve the right to sell or share your information. (Subaru tells WIRED that it “does not sell location data.”)

“While we worried that our doorbells and watches that connect to the Internet might be spying on us, car brands quietly entered the data business by turning their vehicles into powerful data-gobbling machines,” Mozilla’s report reads.

Curry and Shah’s discovery of Subaru’s security vulnerabilities in its tracking demonstrate a particularly egregious exposure of that data—but also a privacy problem that’s hardly less disturbing now that the vulnerabilities are patched, says Robert Herrell, the executive director of the Consumer Federation of California, which has sought to create legislation for limiting a car’s data tracking.

“It seems like there are a bunch of employees at Subaru that have a scary amount of detailed information,” Herrell says. “People are being tracked in ways that they have no idea are happening.”

This story originally appeared on wired.com.

Wired.com is your essential daily guide to what’s next, delivering the most original and complete take you’ll find anywhere on innovation’s impact on technology, science, business and culture.

Millions of Subarus could be remotely unlocked, tracked due to security flaws Read More »

UK opens probe into Google’s and Apple’s mobile platforms

anittirust, Apple, cma, Google, Policy, syndication, UK / Beth Washington / January 23, 2025

Last week, the CMA opened its first such case, reviewing Google’s dominance in search and advertising.

The CMA is already in the process of probing Google and Apple in a separate investigation into mobile web browsers and cloud gaming, which has provisionally found the two companies were “holding back competition” in browsers.

“Android’s openness has helped to expand choice, reduce prices, and democratize access to smartphones and apps. It’s the only example of a successful and viable open source mobile operating system,” said Oliver Bethell, Google’s senior director of competition.

“We favor a way forward that avoids stifling choice and opportunities for UK consumers and businesses alike, and without risk to UK growth prospects,” he added.

Apple, which says its app platform supports hundreds of thousands of UK jobs, said it would “continue to engage constructively” with the CMA.

“Apple believes in thriving and dynamic markets where innovation can flourish,” the company said. “We face competition in every segment and jurisdiction where we operate, and our focus is always the trust of our users.”

The CMA’s probe will add to the worldwide scrutiny that both companies are already facing over their dominance of the smartphone market.

Apple clashed with Brussels several times last year over the implementation of the Digital Markets Act, making changes to its platform after the European Commission accused the iPhone maker of failing to comply with its “online gatekeeper” rules.

If designated, the UK’s “strategic market status” lasts for a five-year period, and companies can be fined up to 10 percent of global turnover for breaching conduct rules.

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Southern California wildfires likely outpace ability of wildlife to adapt

climate change, syndication, Uncategorized, wildfires, wildlife / Kelly Newman / January 21, 2025

Even species that evolved with wildfires, like mountain lions, are struggling.

A family of deer gather around burned trees from the Palisades Fire at Will Rogers State Park on Jan. 9 in Los Angeles. Credit: Apu Gomes/Getty Images

As fires spread with alarming speed through the Pacific Palisades region of Los Angeles Tuesday, Jan. 7, a local TV news crew recorded a mountain lion trailed by two young cubs running through a neighborhood north of the fire. The three lions were about three-quarters of a mile from the nearest open space. Another TV crew captured video of a disoriented, seemingly orphaned fawn trotting down the middle of a street near the Eaton Fire in Altadena, her fur appearing singed, her gait unsteady.

Firefighters are still struggling to contain fires in Los Angeles County that have so far destroyed thousands of homes and other structures and left more than two dozen people dead. Fires and the notorious Santa Ana winds that fuel their spread are a natural part of this chaparral landscape.

But a warming world is supercharging these fires, experts say. Climate change is causing rapid shifts between very wet years that accelerate the growth of scrubland grasses and brush, leading to what’s known as “excessive fuel loading,” that hotter summers and drier falls and winters turn into easily ignited tinderbox conditions. The area where the fires are burning had “the singularly driest October through early January period we have on record,” said climate scientist Daniel Swain during an online briefing last week.

It’s too soon to know the toll these fires have taken on wildlife, particularly wide-ranging carnivores like mountain lions. But biologists worry that the growing severity and frequency of fires is outpacing wildlife’s ability to adapt.

State wildlife officials don’t want people to provide food or water for wild animals, because it can alter their behavior, spread disease, and cause other unintended effects. What wildlife need right now, they say, is to reach safe habitat as fast as they can.

Wildlife living at the interface of urban development already face many challenges, and now these fires have deprived them of critical resources, said Beth Pratt, California National Wildlife Federation regional executive director. Animals that escaped the flames have lost shelter, water, and food sources, all the things they need to survive, she said. The fires are even wiping out many of the plants butterflies and other pollinators need to feed and reproduce, she noted.

Connecting isolated patches of habitat with interventions like wildlife crossings is critical not only for building fire resilience, Pratt said, but also for protecting biodiversity long term.

Mountain lions and other wildlife adapted to the wildfires that shaped the Southern California landscape over thousands of years.

Many animals respond to cues that act as early warning signs of fire, using different strategies to avoid flames after seeing or smelling smoke plumes or hearing tree limbs crackle as they burn. Large animals, like mountain lions and deer, tend to run away from advancing flames while smaller species may try to take cover.

But now, with major fires happening every year around highly urbanized areas like LA, they can’t simply move to a nearby open space.

Daniel Blumstein, a professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of California, Los Angeles, and others have exposed animals to fire-related sensory cues in experiments to study their responses.

“A variety of different species, including lizards, hear or smell these cues and modify their behavior and take defensive action to try to survive,” said Blumstein.

If you’re a lizard or small mammal, he said, getting underground in something like a burrow probably protects you from fire burning above you.

“But the magnitude and rapidity of these sorts of fires, and the rapidity of these fires particularly, you can’t do anything,” said Blumstein. “I expect lots of wildlife has been killed by this fire, because it just moved so fast.”

Helping wildlife during emergencies

Wildlife experts urge California residents not to provide food or water for wildlife during emergencies like the LA fires. Attracting wildlife to urban areas by providing food and water can have several unintended negative consequences.

Fire events often leave many concerned citizens wondering what they can do to help displaced or injured wildlife, said California Department of Fish and Wildlife spokesperson Krysten Kellum. The agency appreciates people wanting to help wild animals in California, she said, offering the following recommendations to best help wildlife during emergencies:

Please DO NOT provide food or water to wildlife. While this may seem well intentioned, the most critical need of wildlife during and after a wildfire is for them to find their way to safe habitat as quickly as possible. Stopping for food or water in fire zones and residential areas poses risks to them and you. Finding food and water in a specific location even one time can permanently alter an animal’s behavior. Wildlife quickly learns that the reward of receiving handouts from humans outweighs their fears of being around people. This often leads to a cycle of human-wildlife conflicts, which can easily be avoided.

CDFW also advises leaving wild animal rescue to trained professionals. If you find an orphaned, sick, or injured wild animal after a fire event, report the sighting to local CDFW staff by emailing details to R5WildlifeReport@wildlife.ca.gov. You can also contact a licensed wildlife rehabilitator. For a list of licensed rehabilitators, visit the CDFW website.

Just as human defenses didn’t work against flames fanned by winds moving 100 miles an hour, he said, “things animals might do might not be effective for something traveling so fast.”

Tuesday night, Jan. 7, Blumstein saw the Eaton Fire burning in the mountains around Altadena, about 30 miles northeast of his home in the Santa Monica Mountains. When he woke up later in the night, he saw that the “whole mountain” was on fire.

“You can’t run away from that,” he said.

An evolutionary mismatch

The Los Angeles region is the biggest metropolitan area in North America inhabited by mountain lions. City living has not been kind to the big cats.

If they don’t die from eating prey loaded with rat poison, lions must navigate a landscape so fragmented by development they often try to cross some of the busiest freeways in the world, just to find food or a mate or to avoid a fight with resident males.

It’s a lethal choice. About 70 mountain lions are killed on California roads every year, according to the UC Davis Road Ecology Center. The Los Angeles region is a hotspot for such deaths.

“Roads are the highest source of mortality in our study area,” said Jeff Sikich, a wildlife biologist with the National Park Service who has been studying the impacts of urbanization and habitat fragmentation on mountain lions in and around the Santa Monica Mountains for more than two decades.

Sikich and his team track adults and kittens that they implant with tiny transmitters. In 2023, one of those transmitters told him a three-month-old kitten had been killed on a road that cuts through the Santa Monica Mountains.

The kittens caught on video following their mom near the Palisades Fire are probably about the same age.

Lions living in the Santa Monica Mountains are so isolated from potential mates by roads and development, Sikich and other researchers reported in 2022, they face a high risk of extinction from extremely low levels of genetic diversity.

“We don’t have many lions radio collared now, but there is one adult male that uses the eastern Santa Monica Mountains, where the Palisades Fire is,” Sikich said. “I located him on Monday outside the burn area, so he’s good.”

Most of the animals don’t have radio collars, though, so Sikich can’t say how they’re doing. But if they respond to these fires like they did to previous conflagrations, they’re likely to take risks searching for food and shelter that increase their chances of fatal encounters and—if these types of fires persist—extinction.

“We learned a lot after the Woolsey Fire that happened in 2018 and burned nearly half of the Santa Monica Mountains and three-quarters of the Simi Hills,” said Sikich.

Sikich and his team had 11 lions collared at the time and lost two in the Woolsey Fire. One of the cats “just couldn’t escape the flames,” Sikich said. A second casualty, tracked as P-64 (“P” is for puma), was a remarkably resourceful male nicknamed “the culvert cat” because he’d managed to safely navigate deadly roadways to connect three different mountain ranges within his home range.

P-64, an adult male mountain lion, travels through a tunnel under Highway 101, heading south toward the Santa Monica Mountains in 2018. Credit: National Parks Service

The cat traversed a long, dark tunnel under Highway 101, used by more than 350,000 cars a day, to reach a small patch of habitat north of the Santa Monica Mountains. Then he used another tunnel, made for hikers and equestrians, to reach a much larger open space to the north. But when the fire broke out, he didn’t have time to reach these escape routes.

Sikich could see from P-64’s GPS collar that he was in the Simi Hills when the fire started. He began heading south, but ran smack into a developed area, which adult males do their best to avoid, even without the chaos of evacuations and fire engines.

“So he had two options,” Sikich said. “He could have entered the urban area or turned around and go back onto the burnt landscape, which he did.”

A few weeks later, Sikich got a mortality signal from P-64’s radio collar. “We didn’t know at the time, of course, but when we found him, he had burnt paws,” he said. “So he died from the effects of the fire.”

The cat was emaciated, with smoke-damaged lungs. His burnt paws hindered his ability to hunt. He likely starved to death.

When the team compared collared cats 15 months before and after the fire, they saw that the surviving cats avoided the burned areas. Lions need cover to hunt but the area was “just a moonscape,” Sikich said. The loss of that habitat forced the cats to take greater risks, likely to find food.

Mountain lions tend to be more active around dawn and dusk, but after the fire, collared cats were more active during the day. That meant they were more likely to run into people and cross roads and even busy freeways, Sikich and his team reported in a 2022 study.

On Dec. 3, 2018, National Park Service researchers discovered the remains of P-64, who survived the flames of the Woolsey Fire but died a few weeks later. The lion was emaciated and likely starved to death, unable to hunt with burnt paws. Credit: National Park Service

“We expect animals, in the long run, to adapt to the environments in which they live,” said Blumstein, who contributed to the study. In California, they adapted to coastal chaparral fires but not to fires in a fragmented habitat dominated by development. And when animals adapt to something, there can be mismatches between what they see as attractive and what’s good for them, he explained.

“Historically, being attracted to dense vegetation might have been a good thing, but if the only dense vegetation left after a fire is around people’s houses, that may not be a good thing,” he said.

Two cats tracked after the fire died of rodenticide poisoning and another was killed by a vehicle.

The cats also traveled greater distances, which put young males at greater risk of running into older males defending their territory. The cat who died on the road was the first to successfully cross the 405 interstate, the busiest in the nation, from the Santa Monica Mountains into the Hollywood Hills. Sikich knew from remote cameras that an adult male had lived there for years. Then after the fire, surveillance footage from a camera in a gated community caught that dominant male chasing the young intruder up a tree, then toward the freeway.

“He tried to head back west but wasn’t lucky this time as he crossed the 405,” Sikich said.

Add climate change-fueled fires to the list of human activity that’s threatening the survival of Southern California’s mountain lions.

Counting on wildlife crossings

When the Woolsey Fire took out half of the open space in the Santa Monica Mountains, it placed considerable stress on animals from mountain lions to monarchs, said Pratt of the National Wildlife Federation. These massive fires underscore the urgent need to connect isolated patches of habitat to boost species’ ability to cope with other stressors, especially in an urban environment, she said.

Studies by Sikich and others’ demonstrated the critical need for a wildlife crossing across Highway 101 to connect protected habitat in the Santa Monica Mountains with habitat in the Simi Hills in the north. It was at a tunnel underneath the 101 connecting those two regions that Sikich first saw the “culvert cat,” the lion with burnt paws who perished in the Woolsey Fire.

More than 20 years of research highlights the importance of connectivity in these fire-prone areas, he said, so animals can safely get across the freeways around these urban areas.

Pratt helped raise awareness about the need for a wildlife crossing through the #SaveLACougars campaign. She also helped raise tens of millions of dollars to build the Wallis Annenberg Wildlife Crossing, aided by P-22, the mountain lion who became world-famous as the “Hollywood cat.” P-22 lived his life within an improbably small 8-square-mile home range in LA’s Griffith Park, after crossing two of the nation’s busiest freeways.

The crossing broke ground in 2022, the same year wildlife officials euthanized P-22, after they determined the 12-year-old cat was suffering from multiple serious injuries, likely from a vehicle strike, debilitating health problems, and rodenticide poisoning.

Wildlife crossing and connectivity projects don’t just address biodiversity collapse, they also boost fire and climate resilience, Pratt said, because they give animals options, whether to escape fire, drought, or roads.

Thinking of fire as something to fight is a losing battle, she said. “It’s something we have to coexist with. And I think that we are making investments that are trying to take out a reliance on fossil fuels so that the conditions for these fires are not so severe,” she said, referring to California’s targets to slash greenhouse gas emissions within the next 20 years.

Even with the inbreeding and lethal threats from cars and rat poison, Sikich sees reason to be hopeful for the Santa Monica lion population.

For one thing, he said, “we’re seeing reproduction,” pointing to the mom with kittens seen above the Palisades fire and new litters among the females his team is following. “And the amount of natural habitat we do have is great,” he said, with plenty of deer and cover for hunting. “That’s why we still have lions.”

This story originally appeared on Inside Climate News.

Southern California wildfires likely outpace ability of wildlife to adapt Read More »

Has Trump changed the retirement plans for the country’s largest coal plants?

coal, coal power, Policy, power plant, Science, syndication / DJ Henderson / January 18, 2025

A growth in electricity demand is leading to talk of delayed closures.

A house is seen near the Gavin Power Plant in Cheshire, Ohio. Credit: Stephanie Keith/Getty Images

This article originally appeared on Inside Climate News, a nonprofit, non-partisan news organization that covers climate, energy, and the environment. Sign up for their newsletter here.

There is renewed talk of a coal power comeback in the United States, inspired by Donald Trump’s return to the presidency and forecasts of soaring electricity demand.

The evidence so far only shows that some plants are getting small extensions on their retirement dates. This means a slowdown in coal’s rate of decline, which is bad for the environment, but it does little to change the long-term trajectory for the domestic coal industry.

In October, I wrote about how five of the country’s 10 largest coal-fired power plants had retirement dates. Today, I’m revisiting the list, providing some updates and then taking a few steps back to look at US coal plants as a whole. Consider this the “before” picture that can be judged against the “after” in four years.

Some coal plant owners have already pushed back retirement timetables. The largest example, this one from just before the election, is the Gibson plant in Indiana, the second-largest coal plant in the country. It’s set to close in 2038 instead of 2035, following an announcement in October from the owner, Duke Energy.

But the changes do not constitute a coal comeback in this country. For that to happen, power companies would need to be building new plants to replace the many that are closing, and there is almost no development of new coal plants.

That said, there have been some changes since October.

As recently as a few months ago, Southern Co. was saying it intended to close Plant Bowen in Georgia by 2035 at the latest. Bowen is the largest coal plant in the country, with a summer capacity of 3,200 megawatts.

Southern has since said it may extend the plant’s life in response to forecasts of rising electricity demand. Chris Womack, Southern’s CEO, confirmed this possibility when speaking at a utility industry conference in November, saying that the plant may need to operate for longer than previously planned because of demand from data centers.

Southern has not yet made regulatory filings that spell out its plans, but this will likely occur in the next few weeks, according to a company spokesman.

In October, I reported that the Gavin plant in Ohio was likely to get a 2031 date to retire or switch to a different fuel once the plant’s pending sale was completed. The person who shared that information with me was involved with the plans and spoke on condition of anonymity because the sale was not final.

Since then, the prospective buyer of the plant has said in federal regulatory filings that it has no timetable for closing the plant or switching to a different fuel. The plant is changing hands as part of a larger deal between investment firms, with Lightstone Holdco selling to Energy Capital Partners, or ECP. Another company, coal exporter Javelin Global Commodities, is buying a minority share of the Gavin plant.

I went back to the person who told me about the 2031 retirement date. They said forecasts of rising electricity demand, as well as the election of Trump, have created enough uncertainty about power prices and regulations that it makes sense to not specify a date.

The 2031 timeline, and its abandonment, makes some sense once you understand that the Biden administration finalized power plant regulations last spring that gave coal plant operators an incentive to announce a retirement date: Plants closing before 2032 faced no new requirements. That incentive is likely to go away as Trump plans to roll back power plant pollution regulations.

Gavin’s sale is still pending. Several parties have filed objections to the transaction with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, arguing that the sellers have not been clear enough about their plans.

An ECP spokesman said the company has no comment beyond its filings.

Other than the changes to plans for Bowen and Gavin, the outlook has not shifted for the rest of the plants among the 10 largest. The Gibson and Rockport plants in Indiana still have retirement dates, as do Cumberland in Tennessee and Monroe in Michigan, according to the plants’ owners.

The Amos plant in West Virginia, Miller in Alabama, Scherer in Georgia, and Parish in Texas didn’t have retirement dates a few months ago, and they still don’t.

But the largest coal plants are only part of the story. Several dozen smaller plants are getting extensions of retirement plans, as Emma Foehringer Merchant reported last week for Floodlight News.

One example is the 1,157-megawatt Baldwin plant in Illinois, which was scheduled to close this year. Now the owner, Vistra Corp., has pushed back the retirement to 2027.

A few extra years of a coal plant is more of a stopgap than a long-term solution. When it comes to building new power plants to meet demand, developers are talking about natural gas, solar, nuclear, and other resources, but I have yet to see a substantial discussion of building a new coal plant.

In Alaska, Gov. Mike Dunleavy has said the state may build two coal plants to provide power in remote mining areas, as reported by Taylor Kuykendall of S&P Global Commodity Insights. Flatlands Energy, a Canadian company, has also talked about building a 400-megawatt coal plant in Alaska, as Nathaniel Herz reported for Alaska Beacon. These appear to be early-stage plans.

The lack of development activity underscores how coal power is fading in this country, and has been for a while.

Coal was used to generate 16 percent of US electricity in 2023, down by more than half from 2014. In that time, coal went from the country’s leading fuel for electricity to trailing natural gas, renewables, and nuclear. (These and all the figures that follow are from the US Energy Information Administration.)

The United States had about 176,000 megawatts of coal plant capacity as of October, down from about 300,000 megawatts in 2014.

The coal plants that do remain are being used less. In 2023, the average capacity factor for a coal plant was 42 percent. Capacity factor is a measure of how much electricity a plant has generated relative to the maximum possible if it was running all the time. In 2014, the average capacity factor was 61 percent.

Power companies are burning less coal because of the availability of less expensive alternatives, such as natural gas, wind, and solar, among others. The think tank Energy Innovation issued a report in 2023 finding that 99 percent of US coal-fired power plants cost more to operate than the cost of replacement with a combination of wind, solar, and batteries.

The Trump administration will arrive in Washington with promises to help fossil fuels. It could extend the lives of some coal plants by weakening environmental regulations, which may reduce the plants’ operational costs. It also could repeal or revise subsidies that help to reduce the costs of renewables and batteries, making those resources more expensive.

I don’t want to minimize the damage that could be caused by those policies. But even in extreme scenarios, it’s difficult to imagine investors wanting to spend billions of dollars to develop a new coal plant, much less a fleet of them.

Has Trump changed the retirement plans for the country’s largest coal plants? Read More »

European Union orders X to hand over algorithm documents

elon musk, EU, European Commission, Policy, syndication, Twitter, X / Mike M. / January 18, 2025

Earlier in the week, Germany’s defence ministry and foreign ministry said they were suspending their activity on X, with the defence ministry saying it had become increasingly “unhappy” with the platform.

When asked if the expanded probe was a response to a discussion Musk conducted last week with AfD co-leader Alice Weidel, in which she was given free rein to promote her party’s platform and make false claims about Adolf Hitler, a Commission spokesperson said the new request helped “us monitor systems around all these events taking place.”

However, he said it was “completely independent of any political considerations or any specific events.”

“We are committed to ensuring that every platform operating in the EU respects our legislation, which aims to make the online environment fair, safe, and democratic for all European citizens,” said Henna Virkkunen, the Commission’s digital chief.

X did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The Commission had been under recent political pressure to be tough on Musk’s X ahead of the Weidel interview.

Last week Damian Boeselager, member of the European parliament, wrote to Virkkunnen to demand a probe into whether the social media platform’s use of algorithms met the EU’s transparency requirements.

“There are allegations that Musk is boosting his own tweets,” Boeselager told the Financial Times last week. “The guy can be crazy but it is unfair if he’s amplifying who must listen to him.”

This story was updated shortly after publication with additional details.

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Is humanity alone in the Universe? What scientists really think.

Science, syndication / Shannon Garcia / January 15, 2025

News stories about the likely existence of extraterrestrial life, and our chances of detecting it, tend to be positive. We are often told that we might discover it any time now. Finding life beyond Earth is “only a matter of time,” we were told in September 2023. “We are close” was a headline from September 2024.

It’s easy to see why. Headlines such as “We’re probably not close” or “Nobody knows” aren’t very clickable. But what does the relevant community of experts actually think when considered as a whole? Are optimistic predictions common or rare? Is there even a consensus? In our new paper, published in Nature Astronomy, we’ve found out.

During February to June 2024, we carried out four surveys regarding the likely existence of basic, complex, and intelligent extraterrestrial life. We sent emails to astrobiologists (scientists who study extraterrestrial life), as well as to scientists in other areas, including biologists and physicists.

In total, 521 astrobiologists responded, and we received 534 non-astrobiologist responses. The results reveal that 86.6 percent of the surveyed astrobiologists responded either “agree” or “strongly agree” that it’s likely that extraterrestrial life (of at least a basic kind) exists somewhere in the universe.

Less than 2 percent disagreed, with 12 percent staying neutral. So, based on this, we might say that there’s a solid consensus that extraterrestrial life, of some form, exists somewhere out there.

Scientists who weren’t astrobiologists essentially concurred, with an overall agreement score of 88.4 percent. In other words, one cannot say that astrobiologists are biased toward believing in extraterrestrial life, compared with other scientists.

When we turn to “complex” extraterrestrial life or “intelligent” aliens, our results were 67.4 percent agreement, and 58.2 percent agreement, respectively for astrobiologists and other scientists. So, scientists tend to think that alien life exists, even in more advanced forms.

These results are made even more significant by the fact that disagreement for all categories was low. For example, only 10.2 percent of astrobiologists disagreed with the claim that intelligent aliens likely exist.

Is humanity alone in the Universe? What scientists really think. Read More »

Elon Musk wants courts to force OpenAI to auction off a large ownership stake

AI, elon musk, grok, openai, Policy, syndication / 9u50fv / January 11, 2025

Musk, who founded his own AI startup xAI in 2023, has recently stepped up efforts to derail OpenAI’s conversion.

In November, he sought to block the process with a request for a preliminary injunction filed in California. Meta has also thrown its weight behind the suit.

In legal filings from November, Musk’s team wrote: “OpenAI and Microsoft together exploiting Musk’s donations so they can build a for-profit monopoly, one now specifically targeting xAI, is just too much.”

Kathleen Jennings, attorney-general in Delaware—where OpenAI is incorporated—has since said her office was responsible for ensuring that OpenAI’s conversion was in the public interest and determining whether the transaction was at a fair price.

Members of Musk’s camp—wary of Delaware authorities after a state judge rejected a proposed $56 billion pay package for the Tesla boss last month—read that as a rebuke of his efforts to block the conversion, and worry it will be rushed through. They have also argued OpenAI’s PBC conversion should happen in California, where the company has its headquarters.

In a legal filing last week Musk’s attorneys said Delaware’s handling of the matter “does not inspire confidence.”

OpenAI committed to become a public benefit corporation within two years as part of a $6.6 billion funding round in October, which gave it a valuation of $157 billion. If it fails to do so, investors would be able to claw back their money.

There are a number of issues OpenAI is yet to resolve, including negotiating the value of Microsoft’s investment in the PBC. A conversion was not imminent and would be likely to take months, according to the person with knowledge of the company’s thinking.

A spokesperson for OpenAI said: “Elon is engaging in lawfare. We remain focused on our mission and work.” The California and Delaware attorneys-general did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

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Misconfigured license plate readers are leaking data and video in real time

law enforcement, license plate readers, Policy, Security, syndication / Mike M. / January 8, 2025

In just 20 minutes this morning, an automated license-plate-recognition (ALPR) system in Nashville, Tennessee, captured photographs and detailed information from nearly 1,000 vehicles as they passed by. Among them: eight black Jeep Wranglers, six Honda Accords, an ambulance, and a yellow Ford Fiesta with a vanity plate.

This trove of real-time vehicle data, collected by one of Motorola’s ALPR systems, is meant to be accessible by law enforcement. However, a flaw discovered by a security researcher has exposed live video feeds and detailed records of passing vehicles, revealing the staggering scale of surveillance enabled by this widespread technology.

More than 150 Motorola ALPR cameras have exposed their video feeds and leaking data in recent months, according to security researcher Matt Brown, who first publicized the issues in a series of YouTube videos after buying an ALPR camera on eBay and reverse engineering it.

As well as broadcasting live footage accessible to anyone on the Internet, the misconfigured cameras also exposed data they have collected, including photos of cars and logs of license plates. The real-time video and data feeds don’t require any usernames or passwords to access.

Alongside other technologists, WIRED has reviewed video feeds from several of the cameras, confirming vehicle data—including makes, models, and colors of cars—have been accidentally exposed. Motorola confirmed the exposures, telling WIRED it was working with its customers to close the access.

Over the last decade, thousands of ALPR cameras have appeared in towns and cities across the US. The cameras, which are manufactured by companies such as Motorola and Flock Safety, automatically take pictures when they detect a car passing by. The cameras and databases of collected data are frequently used by police to search for suspects. ALPR cameras can be placed along roads, on the dashboards of cop cars, and even in trucks. These cameras capture billions of photos of cars—including occasionally bumper stickers, lawn signs, and T-shirts.

“Every one of them that I found exposed was in a fixed location over some roadway,” Brown, who runs cybersecurity company Brown Fine Security, tells WIRED. The exposed video feeds each cover a single lane of traffic, with cars driving through the camera’s view. In some streams, snow is falling. Brown found two streams for each exposed camera system, one in color and another in infrared.

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FTC launches probe of Microsoft over bundling

antitrust, ftc, microsoft, Policy, syndication, Tech / 9u50fv / December 27, 2024

John Lopatka, a former consultant to the FTC who now teaches antitrust law at Penn State, told ProPublica that the Microsoft actions detailed in the news organization’s recent reporting followed “a very familiar pattern” of behavior.

“It does echo the Microsoft case” from decades ago, said Lopatka, who co-authored a book on that case.

In the new investigation, the FTC has sent Microsoft a civil investigative demand, the agency’s version of a subpoena, compelling the company to turn over information, people familiar with the probe said. Microsoft confirmed that it received the document.

Company spokesperson David Cuddy did not comment on the specifics of the investigation but said the FTC’s demand is “broad, wide ranging, and requests things that are out of the realm of possibility to even be logical.” He declined to provide on-the-record examples. The FTC declined to comment.

The agency’s investigation follows a public comment period in 2023 during which it sought information on the business practices of cloud computing providers. When that concluded, the FTC said it had ongoing interest in whether “certain business practices are inhibiting competition.”

The recent demand to Microsoft represents one of FTC Commissioner Lina Khan’s final moves as chair, and the probe appears to be picking up steam as the Biden administration winds down. The commission’s new leadership, however, will decide the future of the investigation.

President-elect Donald Trump said this month that he will elevate Commissioner Andrew Ferguson, a Republican attorney, to lead the agency. Following the announcement, Ferguson said in a post on X, “At the FTC, we will end Big Tech’s vendetta against competition and free speech. We will make sure that America is the world’s technological leader and the best place for innovators to bring new ideas to life.”

Trump also said he would nominate Republican lawyer Mark Meador as a commissioner, describing him as an “antitrust enforcer” who previously worked at the FTC and the Justice Department. Meador is also a former aide to Sen. Mike Lee, a Utah Republican who introduced legislation to break up Google.

Doris Burke contributed research.

This story originally appeared on ProPublica.

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Why do we get headaches from drinking red wine?

headaches, health, red wine, sulfites, syndication, tannins / DJ Henderson / December 16, 2024

Putting enzymes to the test

Testing ALDH was the next step. We set up an inhibition assay in test tubes. In the assay, we measured how fast the enzyme ALDH breaks down acetaldehyde. Then, we added the suspected inhibitors—quercetin, as well as some other phenolics we wanted to test—to see whether they slowed the process.

The chemical structure of quercetin, which may cause red wine headaches. Credit: Johannes Botne (CC BY-SA)

These tests confirmed that quercetin was a good inhibitor. Some other phenolics had varying effects, but quercetin glucuronide was the winner. When your body absorbs quercetin from food or wine, most is converted to glucuronide by the liver in order to quickly eliminate it from the body.

Our enzyme tests suggest that quercetin glucuronide disrupts your body’s metabolism of alcohol. This disruption means extra acetaldehyde circulates, causing inflammation and headaches. This discovery points to what’s known as a secondary, or synergistic, effect.

These secondary effects are much harder to identify because two factors must both be in play for the outcome to arise. In this case, other foods that contain quercetin are not associated with headaches, so you might not initially consider quercetin as the cause of the red wine problem.

The next step could be to give human subjects two red wines that are low and high in quercetin and ask whether either wine causes a headache. If the high-quercetin wine induces more headaches, we’d know we’re on the right track.

So, if quercetin causes headaches, are there red wines without it? Unfortunately, the data available on specific wines is far too limited to provide any helpful advice. However, grapes exposed to the Sun do produce more quercetin, and many inexpensive red wines are made from grapes that see less sunlight.

If you’re willing to take a chance, look for an inexpensive, lighter red wine.

Andrew Waterhouse is professor of enology, University of California, Davis, and Apramita Devi is a postdoctoral researcher in food science and technology, University of California, Davis.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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Avian flu cases are on the upswing at big dairy farms

avian flu, dairy cattle, H5N1, health, syndication / Beth Washington / December 10, 2024

Rise in cases amplifies concerns about consolidation in agriculture.

Holstein dairy cows in a freestall barn. Credit: Getty |

A handful of dairy farms sprawl across the valley floor, ringed by the spikey, copper-colored San Jacinto mountains. This is the very edge of California’s dairy country—and so far, the cows here are safe.

But everyone worries that the potentially lethal bird flu is on the way. “I hope not,” says Clemente Jimenez, as he fixes a hose at Pastime Lakes, a 1,500-head dairy farm. “It’s a lot of trouble.”

Further north and west, in the San Joaquin Valley—the heart of the state’s dairy industry—the H5N1 virus, commonly known as bird flu, has rippled through the massive herds that provide most of the country’s milk. Farmworkers have piled carcasses into black and white heaps. This week the state reported 19 new confirmed cases in cows and more than 240,000 in chickens. Another 50,000 cases were confirmed at a chicken breeding facility in Oklahoma.

Most worrying, though, is the spillover from livestock to humans. So far, 58 people in the United States have tested positive for bird flu. Fifty-six of them worked either on dairy or poultry farms where millions of birds had to be culled.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention confirmed that four of the cases in humans had no known connection to livestock, raising fears that the virus eventually could jump from one human to another, though that hasn’t happened yet. On Thursday, a study published in Science by researchers at The Scripps Research Institute said it would take only a single mutation in the H5N1 virus for it to attach itself to human receptor cells.

Large livestock facilities in states across the country, and especially in California, have become the epicenters of these cases, and some researchers say that’s no surprise: Putting thousands, even hundreds of thousands, of animals together in confined, cramped barns or corrals creates a petri dish for viruses to spread, especially between genetically similar and often stressed animals.

More drought and higher temperatures, fueled by climate change, supercharge those conditions.

“Animal production acts like a connectivity for the virus,” said Paula Ribeiro Prist, a conservation scientist with the EcoHealth Alliance, a not-for-profit group that focuses on research into pandemics. “If you have a lot of cattle being produced in more places, you have a higher chance of the virus spreading. When you have heat stress, they’re more vulnerable.”

So far, this bird flu outbreak has affected more than 112 million chickens, turkeys, and other poultry across the US since it was first detected at a turkey-producing facility in Indiana in February 2022. In March of this year, officials confirmed a case of the virus in a Texas dairy cow—the first evidence that the virus had jumped from one livestock species to another. Since then, 720 cows have been affected, most of them in California, where there have been nearly 500 recorded cases.

In the United States, a trend of consolidation in agriculture, particularly dairies, has seen more animals housed together on ever-larger farms as the number of small farms has rapidly shrunk. In 1987, half of the country’s dairy cows were in herds of 80 or more, and half in herds of 80 or fewer. Twenty years later, half the country’s cows were raised in herds of 1,300 or more. Today, 5,000-head dairies are common, especially in the arid West.

California had just over 21,000 dairy farms in 1950, producing 5.6 billion pounds of milk. Today, it has 1,100 producing around 41 billion pounds. Total US milk production has soared from about 116 billion pounds in 1950 to about 226 billion today.

“The pace of consolidation in dairy far exceeds the pace of consolidation seen in most of US agriculture,” a recent USDA report said.

Initially, researchers thought the virus was spreading through cows’ respiration, but recent research suggests it’s being transmitted through milking equipment and milk itself.

“It’s been the same strain in dairy cows… We don’t necessarily have multiple events of spillover,” said Meghan Davis, an associate professor of environmental health and engineering at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. “Now it’s transmission from one cow to the next, often through milking equipment.”

It’s still unclear what caused that initial jump from wild birds, which are the natural reservoirs of the virus, to commercial poultry flocks and then to cows, but some research suggests that changing migration patterns caused by warmer weather are creating conditions conducive to the spreading of viruses. Some wild birds are migrating earlier than usual, hatching juvenile birds in new or different habitats.

“This is leading to a higher number of young that are naive to the virus,” Prist explained. “This makes the young birds more infectious—they have a higher chance of transmitting the virus because they don’t have antibodies protecting them.

“They’re going to different areas and they’re staying longer,” Prist added, “so they have higher contact with other animals, to the other native populations, that they have never had contact [with] before.”

That, researchers believe, could have initiated the spillover from wild birds to poultry, where it has become especially virulent. In wild birds, the virus tends to be a low pathogenic strain that occurs naturally, causing only minor symptoms in some birds.

“But when we introduce the virus to poultry operations where birds live in unsanitary and highly confined conditions, the virus is … able to spread through them like wildfire,” said Ben Rankin, a legal expert with the Center for Biological Diversity, an advocacy group. “There are so many more opportunities for the virus to mutate, to adapt to new kinds of hosts, and eventually, the virus spills back into the wild and this creates this cycle, or this loop, of intensification and increasing pathogenicity.”

Rankin pointed to an analysis that looked at 39 different viral outbreaks in birds from 1959 to 2015, where a low pathogenic avian influenza became a highly pathogenic one. Out of those, 37 were associated with commercial poultry operations. “So it’s a very clear relationship between the increasing pathogenicity of this virus and its relationship with industrial animal raising,” Rankin said.

Some researchers worry that large farms with multiple species are providing the optimal conditions for more species-to-species transfer. In North Carolina, the second-largest hog-producing state after Iowa, some farmers have started raising both chickens and hogs under contracts that require huge numbers of animals.

“So you’ve got co-location at a pretty substantial scale of herd size, on a single property,” said Chris Heaney, an associate professor of environmental health, engineering, epidemiology, and international health at the Bloomberg School of Public Health. “Another concern is seeing it jump into swine. That host, in particular, is uniquely well suited for those influenza viruses to re-assort and acquire properties that are very beneficial for taking up residence in humans.”

In late October, the USDA reported the first case of bird flu in a pig that lived on a small poultry and hog farm in Oregon.

Farmworker advocates say the number of cases in humans is likely underreported, largely because the immigrant and non-English speaking workforce on farms could be reluctant to seek help or may not be informed about taking precautions.

“What we’re dealing with is the lack of information from the top to the workers,” said Ana Schultz, a director with Project Protect Food Systems Workers.

In northern Colorado, home to dozens of large dairies, Schultz started to ask dairy workers in May if they were getting protective gear and whether anyone was falling ill. Many workers told her they were feeling flu-ish but didn’t go to the doctor for fear of losing a day of work or getting fired.

“I feel like there’s a lot more avian flu incidents, but no one knows about it because they don’t go to the doctor and they don’t get tested,” Schultz said. “In all the months that we’ve been doing outreach and taking protective gear and flyers, we haven’t had one single person tell us they’ve been to the doctor.”

This story originally appeared on Inside Climate News.

Georgina Gustin covers agriculture for Inside Climate News and has reported on the intersections of farming, food systems, and the environment for much of her journalism career. Her work has won numerous awards, including the John B. Oakes Award for Distinguished Environmental Journalism, and she was twice named the Glenn Cunningham Agricultural Journalist of the Year, once with ICN colleagues. She has worked as a reporter for The Day in New London, Conn., the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and CQ Roll Call, and her stories have appeared in The New York Times, Washington Post, and National Geographic’s The Plate, among others. She is a graduate of the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism and the University of Colorado at Boulder.

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