Tag Archives: disrupted

Ancient Footprints May Capture Turtle Flocks Disrupted by Earthquakes

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Possible turtle footprints in Monte Conero, Italy

Paolo Sandroni

Unusual marks found on rocky surfaces in Italy may have been created by a group of sea turtles reacting to an earthquake around 83 million years ago.

Extreme climbers stumbled upon a peculiar feature in a restricted area on the slopes of Monte Conero along Italy’s east coastline.

Over 1,000 prints are evident in two distinct spots. One location is situated over 100 meters above sea level, while the other is a ledge that collapsed onto La Vera Beach. These limestone rocks were formed from fine sediments that settled on the shallow ocean floor during the Cretaceous era.

The climbers captured photographs that were subsequently shared with the Alessandro Montanari Cordigioco Geological Observatory in Italy and colleagues. Scientists were then granted permission by the Conero Regional Park authority to explore the area both on foot and using drones.

Montanari mentioned that while it is challenging to identify which animal made the marks, the only two types of vertebrates inhabiting the ocean then were fish and marine reptiles. The researchers dismissed fish, plesiosaurs, and mosasaurs, leading to the conclusion that sea turtles are the most probable culprits.

Given the dynamic nature of the ocean floor, the prints must have been buried almost immediately after formation to remain intact, potentially occurring during an earthquake.

“[It may have been] the powerful earthquake that frightened the poor animals, which were peacefully residing in their nutrient-rich shallow-water habitat,” states Montanari.

“In panic, they swam towards the open sea on the west side of the reef, leaving paddle impressions on the soft seabed.”

However, the notion of a turtle swarm remains speculative, and the team is eager to collaborate with ichthyologists who specialize in analyzing fossilized tracks for the next phase of their research.

Anthony Romilio, a researcher from the University of Queensland in Australia, claims that if these marks indeed are from sea turtles, they would be “potentially the most numerous in the world.”

Nevertheless, he has yet to visit the site or view high-resolution images and doubts the prints belong to sea turtles. “The surface patterns do not exhibit the spacing, rhythm, or anatomy expected in a sea turtle’s flipper stroke,” he comments. “I suspect they are abiotic formations rather than biological in origin.”

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Source: www.newscientist.com

Amazon Reveals Cause of AWS Outage That Disrupted Banks and Smart Devices

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Amazon disclosed that a bug in its automation software was responsible for this week’s extensive AWS outage, which took down services like Signal and smart beds for several hours.

In a detailed summary released on Thursday, AWS explained that a series of cascading failures led to the downtime affecting thousands of sites and applications utilizing its services.

AWS reported that “due to a potential flaw in the service’s automatic DNS, customers faced issues connecting to DynamoDB, the database system where AWS clients store their data.” [domain name system] management system.”


DynamoDB manages hundreds of thousands of DNS records. It’s essential to automate system monitoring to ensure records are frequently updated, manage hardware failures, and efficiently distribute traffic as needed.

According to AWS, the root cause stemmed from an empty DNS record in the Virginia-based US-East-1 datacenter region. This issue required manual intervention for resolution, as it could not be automatically fixed.

AWS announced that it has globally disabled DynamoDB’s DNS Planner and DNS Executor automation while remedying the issues that prompted the failure, as well as implementing additional safeguards.

This outage also affected various other AWS tools.

Platforms like Signal, Snapchat, Roblox, and Duolingo, along with banking sites and services such as Ring Doorbell, were among the 2,000 businesses impacted by the outage, according to Downdetector, which recorded over 8.1 million user reports of problems globally.

Service was restored within hours, but the outage’s repercussions were widespread.

Customers of Eight Sleep—a company providing smart beds that connect to the internet for temperature and tilt control—were unable to adjust their beds or temperatures during the outage due to connectivity issues via their phone app.

The company’s CEO, Matteo Franceschetti, issued an apology. On X, he shared that they rolled out a service update allowing users to control critical bed functions via Bluetooth during such outages.

Dr. Suellet Dreyfuss, a lecturer in computing and information systems at the University of Melbourne, pointed out that this failure highlights the dependency on single points of failure within the internet infrastructure.

“It’s not solely AWS; while they are the largest cloud provider with around 30% of the market, the cloud essentially revolves around just three companies,” she explained.

“The Internet was originally designed to be resilient, allowing multiple routes to work around problems and attacks. However, we have diminished that resilience by relying heavily on a limited number of significant tech companies that not only provide data storage but also manage data services.”

Source: www.theguardian.com

The brain’s waste removal process disrupted by sleeping pills

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During sleep, your brain eliminates toxins that have accumulated throughout the day.

Robert Reeder/Getty Images

Sleeping pills may help you doze off, but the sleep you get may not be as restorative. When mice were given zolpidem, which is commonly found in sleeping pills such as Ambien, their brains were unable to effectively remove waste products during sleep.

Sleep is important for removing waste from the brain. At night, a clear fluid called cerebrospinal fluid circulates around brain tissue and flushes out toxins through a series of thin tubes known as the glymphatic system. Think of it like a dishwasher, which turns on your brain while you sleep, says Miken Nedergaard at the University of Rochester Medical Center in New York. However, the mechanisms that push fluid through this network have not been well understood.

Nedergaard and his colleagues implanted optical fibers into the brains of seven mice. By irradiating chemicals in the brain, the fibers can track the flow of blood and cerebrospinal fluid during sleep.

They found that elevated levels of a molecule called norepinephrine cause blood vessels in the brain to constrict, reducing blood volume and allowing cerebrospinal fluid to flow into the brain. As norepinephrine levels decrease, blood vessels dilate and cerebrospinal fluid is pushed back. Thus, fluctuations in norepinephrine during non-rapid eye movement (NREM) sleep stimulate blood vessels to act like pumps in the glymphatic system, Nedergaard said.

This discovery reveals that norepinephrine plays an important role in clearing waste from the brain. Previous research has shown that when we sleep, the brain releases norepinephrine in a slow, oscillating pattern. These norepinephrine waves occur during NREM, a sleep stage important for memory, learning, and other cognitive functions.

Next, the researchers treated six mice with zolpidem, a sleeping pill commonly sold under the brand names Ambien and Zolpimist. The mice fell asleep faster than those treated with a placebo, but the flow of cerebrospinal fluid in the brain was reduced by about 30 percent on average. In other words, “their brains aren't being cleaned very well,” Nedergaard said.

Although zolpidem was tested in this experiment, almost all sleeping pills inhibit the production of norepinephrine. This suggests that they may interfere with the brain's ability to eliminate toxins.

It is too early to tell whether these results apply to humans. “Human sleep architecture is still quite different from mice, but they have the same brain circuits studied here,” he says. laura lewis at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “Some of these basic mechanisms may apply to us as well.”

If sleeping pills interfere with the brain's ability to eliminate toxins during sleep, Nedergaard says, that means new sleeping pills must be developed. Otherwise, your sleep problems may worsen and your brain health may deteriorate in the process.

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Source: www.newscientist.com

16 ways technology has disrupted my life: from concentration issues to physical health struggles

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LTo be fair, technology has improved my life and still surprises and delights me every day. My cell phone also turns into a flashlight! My TV remembers how far into last night's episode it was, even if I didn't. The bus stop knows when the bus is coming and can monitor the entire journey of the pizza from the restaurant to your home. Frankly, these are miracles.

However, there were corresponding sacrifices. For over 20 years, I have surrendered entire areas of ability, memory, authority, and independence to machines in my life. Along the way, we've become anxious about problems that didn't exist before, indecisive about choices we didn't have to make before, and angry about things we never noticed before. Ta.

There are probably hundreds of ways technology has ruined my life. Let's start with him 16 pieces.


1. I lose concentration.

It's not just me:
2022 survey According to a study conducted by the Center for Attention Research, 49% of adults believe their attention spans are shortening due to competing distractions available on cell phones and computers. Now I end up doing 20 minutes of half-hearted research and getting dragged down an online rabbit hole, all the while being bothered by notifications announcing the arrival of an email or the death of an elderly actor. Masu. They were close relatives or something. Especially since he chases me with the relentlessness of a bailiff on Duolingo. Sometimes he interrupts my Italian lessons and reminds me to take another Italian lesson. That's why I still can't order coffee in Rome after 5 years with her.

2. Poor posture

I felt like sitting in front of a screen all day was having a negative effect on my body, so I bought a stand to raise my computer in hopes that it would help me sit up straighter. Then it became variable focus, so I had to crane my neck and jut my chin out to read the screen through the bottom half of the glasses. I ended up switching to a laptop.Then I had to put
that on the stand. Despite this, I still have a question mark attitude. I tried setting an alarm to step away from the computer at regular intervals, but it kept waking me up.

3. Life can feel like a never-ending battle to prove you're not a robot.

Obviously, this includes all the failed attempts to click on every photo with a traffic light in it to qualify as a legitimate human investigator looking for spare dishwasher wheels . But it also means resisting the temptation to click an auto-reply button in an email that says something like “Okay, thank you!” and compose your own response. Every day is a Turing test, and you don’t always pass it.

4. Meetings are now inevitable.

You used to be able to say, “Friday?” I'm sorry, but on Friday I'm going to Antarctica. ” But thanks to Zoom, Google, and FaceTime, there is no reasonable excuse for not attending a meeting. You can also see a picture of yourself all the time, so you can see exactly how bored you are.

5. I can no longer argue in the pub.

I remember a time when it was considered ungentlemanly to check the factual accuracy of what your drinking buddies said. You were simply trying to counter their argument by presenting your own plausible facts. But when everyone has all the GDP,
brick Even though the countries are so close together, there doesn't seem to be much point in having a lively discussion. I end up researching it all night and saying, “Hmm.” These days, if you want to get into a petty argument over vague facts in an environment where phone use is prohibited, you have to go to jail. Or try a pub quiz. Either way, it's not life.

6. It's getting harder and harder to turn on.

You may have experienced the feeling you get behind the wheel of a rental car at a foreign airport, staring at the dashboard and wondering, “How am I going to drive it?” Or maybe you've faced a similar calculation in an unfamiliar shower or while standing in front of a seemingly ordinary stove. The constant development of new ways to turn things on has led us steadily away from the intuitive and toward the deliberately mysterious. Last week I found myself alone in a frigid bedroom with no electric radiator working. I ended up having to turn it upside down to find the model number to find the manual PDF online. I just wanted it to be hot.

Oddly enough, the virtual world is full of old-fashioned mechanical emulators – animated buttons that make clicking sounds. Knobs and sliders can be manipulated with a cursor, but in the real world the controls are reduced to a flat black panel covered in cryptic symbols such as a crescent moon. lightning. A circle with an M inside. M stands for mode.

This may sound like any age, but it's hard to believe that today's young people want a Wi-Fi enabled kettle.

7. You now have unfiltered access to the opinions of stupid people.

Technology not only allows us to know what stupid people are thinking; It now cherry-picks their thoughts and presents them to me every day as if I were some kind of idiot connoisseur. To be honest, I don't remember asking for anything like this.

8. Stupid people now have unfiltered access to each other's opinions.

In the past, so-called gatekeepers of traditional media restricted the flow of information through narrow, one-way channels. Now stupid people have their own media, where they can freely discuss and reaffirm stupid ideas with each other. Unfortunately, this wasn't quite the force of good we had hoped.

9.I am
I'm clearly worse at typing than I was 10 years ago.

I was never a great typist, but ever since word processing programs started correcting my mistakes, I developed a misplaced confidence in my abilities. If this facility is not available for any reason, I type like a person suffering from a stroke.

10. I feel a strange obligation to monitor bad news in real time.

They call it doomscrolling. We all do it to some degree, but bad news is just more persuasive than good news. But for me, it went from being a mild obsession to a full-time job.

11. I live in fear of being scammed.

I'm deeply suspicious of delivery notifications, communications from my mobile phone service provider, QR codes, and anything else that asks me to click on a link that I didn't order. I believe that the email from my bank regarding fraudulent activity is itself a scam. I once ignored a genuine email from my son saying he lost his phone and requested that he send a text message to a foreign number. He was alone in Vietnam at the time, and I thought, “Well done, you son of a bitch.”

12. I am forced to live in silent and shameful defiance of all conventional wisdom regarding passwords.

I don't know about you, but when I get advice about not writing down passwords, not using the same password over and over, and changing passwords regularly, I nod and say, “Sure,” but I… Write down all your passwords, keep them as few as possible, and change them only when absolutely necessary. To me, all the conventional wisdom about passwords ignores an important point. That means it's useless if you don't know the password. You can click “Forgot your password?” each time, set a new password, and forget it again immediately. By the way, I am also doing this.

13. You should go anywhere with advance warning and advance arming.

It used to be considered creepy to Google someone right before meeting them. Now it seems rude to show up without knowing anything about them. It should also give you information about what you're going to see and do, where to eat, and perhaps your travel route. Don't get me wrong. I like to be prepared. I just don't want to read a restaurant menu before leaving the house.

14. I have consistently risen to the level of disruption that every new technology allows.

As of this writing, I have 77 tabs open in my browser. Behind it is a completely different browser. Every morning I sift through the stacks of open documents to find the ones I need. You might think this virtual disorganization is preferable to a cluttered desk, even if it's neatly tucked into a slim laptop, but my desk is also cluttered, and the surrounding The walls are covered with post-its.

15. I resent technology, but I'm powerless without it.

Sometimes we hear stories of inventions that seem designed to foster slavish dependence, such as self-tuning guitars or programmable cocktail machines, but what we're actually reminded of is that technology is broken. Only when under. It's not just that you've lost the skills you need. I can't even remember the process. How did I previously find my way, figure out what to watch on TV, pay for takeout? There should have been a system in place.

16. The rest of the world is also helpless without it.

In my work in journalism, I sometimes find myself in certain technical inconveniences. A week without a smartphone. That's what a month without Google feels like. And what I got here is that if you abandon modern technology, the world generally refuses to participate in the experiment. You only know this when someone at the ticket counter looks you in the eye and tells you to download the app.

I can't win and I can't quit.

Source: www.theguardian.com