“For the last century the biggest bar fight in science has been between Albert Einstein and himself,” reports the New York Times:

On one side is the Einstein who in 1915 conceived general relativity, which describes gravity as the warping of space-time by matter and energy. That theory predicted that space-time could bend, expand, rip, quiver like a bowl of Jell-O and disappear into those bottomless pits of nothingness known as black holes. On the other side is the Einstein who, starting in 1905, laid the foundation for quantum mechanics, the nonintuitive rules that inject randomness into the world — rules that Einstein never accepted. According to quantum mechanics, a subatomic particle like an electron can be anywhere and everywhere at once, and a cat can be both alive and dead until it is observed. God doesn’t play dice, Einstein often complained.

Gravity rules outer space, shaping galaxies and indeed the whole universe, whereas quantum mechanics rules inner space, the arena of atoms and elementary particles. The two realms long seemed to have nothing to do with each other; this left scientists ill-equipped to understand what happens in an extreme situation like a black hole or the beginning of the universe.

But a blizzard of research in the last decade on the inner lives of black holes has revealed unexpected connections between the two views of the cosmos. The implications are mind-bending, including the possibility that our three-dimensional universe — and we ourselves — may be holograms, like the ghostly anti-counterfeiting images that appear on some credit cards and drivers licenses. In this version of the cosmos, there is no difference between here and there, cause and effect, inside and outside or perhaps even then and now; household cats can be conjured in empty space. We can all be Dr. Strange.

“It may be too strong to say that gravity and quantum mechanics are exactly the same thing,” Leonard Susskind of Stanford University wrote in a paper in 2017. “But those of us who are paying attention may already sense that the two are inseparable, and that neither makes sense without the other.”

That insight, Dr. Susskind and his colleagues hope, could lead to a theory that combines gravity and quantum mechanics — quantum gravity — and perhaps explains how the universe began.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot – Black Holes May Hide a Mind-Bending Secret About Our Universe

“A researcher from cloud and endpoint protection provider WithSecure has discovered an unpatchable flaw in Microsoft Office 365 Message Encryption,” reports VentureBeat. “The flaw enables a hacker to infer the contents of encrypted messages.”
OME uses the electronic codebook (ECB) block cipher, which leaks structural information about the message. This means if an attacker obtains many emails they can infer the contents of the messages by analyzing the location and frequency of patterns in the messages and matching these to other emails. For enterprises, this highlights that just because your emails are encrypted, doesn’t mean they’re safe from threat actors. If someone steals your email archives or backups, and accesses your email server, they can use this technique to sidestep the encryption.

The discovery comes shortly after researchers discovered hackers were chaining two new zero-day Exchange exploits to target Microsoft Exchange servers.

WithSecure originally shared its discovery of the Office 365 vulnerability with Microsoft in January 2022. Microsoft acknowledged it and paid the researcher through its vulnerability reward program, but hasn’t issued a fix.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot – Microsoft Office 365 Vulnerability Could Allow Sidestepping of Email Encryption

Pine64 has announced a new “sub $10 Linux capable single board computer” called the Ox64.

Liliputing says the tiny SBC “looks a lot like a Raspberry Pi Pico. But while Raspberry Pi’s tiny board is powered by an RP2040 microcontroller, the Ox64 has a dual-core RISC-V processor, 64MB of embedded RAM, and support for up to 128Mb of flash storage plus a microSD card for additional storage.”

It’s expected to support RTOS and Linux and blurs the lines between a microcontroller and a (very low power) single-board PC. It’s expected to go on sale in November with prices starting at $6 for an RTOS-ready version of the board and $8 for a Linux-compatible model.

As spotted by CNX Software earlier this month, the board is designed to be a small, inexpensive single-board computer with a RISC-V processor that’s aimed at developers.

Pine64’s October update also reveals that their Star64 and QuartzPro64 single-board computers “now boot Linux (and run it well too already!)”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot – Pine64 Announces ‘Sub-, Linux-Capable’ SBC – the Ox64

It’s been one year since Facebook changed its name to “Meta Platforms” remembers The Street. So after Mark Zuckerberg “bought the Oculus Quest VR headset, rebranded it Meta Quest, and formed Reality Labs solely to work on all projects related to the metaverse” — what happened next?

Meta’s shares and market value have dropped and Zuckerberg’s personal fortune has shrunk, falling from $125 billion in January to $49.1 billion at last check, putting him No. 23 on the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.

Reality Labs is facing the hard reality that it’s pouring out gallons of red ink, losing $10 billion last year and about $5.7 billion so far in 2022.
And leaked internal documents reveal discussions between Reality Labs management and employees, indicating that “Horizon Worlds” [Meta’s flagship metaverse for consumers] is ridden with game-breaking bugs, leading to a “quality lockdown” for the rest of the year.

In fact, Horizon Worlds is also “failing to meet internal performance expectations,” reports CNBC, citing internal company documents reviewed by The Wall Street Journal:

Meta initially aimed to reach 500,000 monthly active users in Horizon Worlds by the end of the year, but the current figure is less than 200,000, according to the report. Additionally, the documents showed that most users didn’t return to Horizon after the first month on the platform, and the number of users has steadily declined since spring, the Journal said.

Only 9% of worlds are visited by at least 50 people, and most are never visited at all, according to the report.”

“An empty world is a sad world,” one internal document reportedly adds. And Fortune cited some more discouraging statistics from the Journal’s article:

– Meta wants users to create their own worlds using Horizon’s tools. Less than 1% are doing so.

– A tip feature to reward creators for their efforts has generated payouts of under $500 globally. Cumulatively, Horizon’s worlds have brought in only about $10,000 in “In-World Payments”.

– Retention rates for the Quest virtual-reality headsets — sold by Meta to access Horizons — have dropped in each of the past three years.

CNBC also notes that the report “comes as the company’s stock falls, user numbers decline and advertisers cut spending. Meta shares are down 62% so far this year….” So how did Meta respond to the Journal’s article?

A Meta spokesman told The Wall Street Journal that the company continues to make improvements to the metaverse, which was always meant to be a multiyear project. Representatives for Meta didn’t immediately respond to CNBC’s request for comment.
Meta has said it will release a web version of Horizon for mobile devices and computers this year, but the spokesman didn’t have any launch dates to disclose.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot – Mark Zuckerberg’s Metaverse ‘Sad’ and ‘Empty’, Leaked Internal Documents Complain

Long-time Slashdot reader orsayman writes: Remember the MICROSCOPE satellite ? In 2017, based on its first results, scientists were able to confirm Einstein’s equivalence principle (a key assumption in General Relativity) to unprecedented precision. Recently, they were able to improve precision by almost another order of magnitude by using all the data. Fortunately (or not) no violation of the principle was detected which could help physicists to improve their theories of quantum gravity. Apparently the team expects to send a new mission “in the second half of the 2030s” aiming for another huge improvement in precision.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot – Final Results of the MICROSCOPE Mission Confirms Einstein’s Equivalence Principle

CNN reports:

Elon Musk’s latest internet jest has taken the form of a perfume with an unsavory scent: “Burnt Hair. ”

The tech mogul, entrepreneur and sometimes internet troll announced the launch of the product on Twitter on Tuesday, calling it “the finest fragrance on Earth.” The perfume is apparently being sold on The Boring Company’s website for $100 and will ship in the first quarter of 2023….

The product is the successor to other Musk memes, like the $500 flamethrowers he sold in 2018 or the Tesla-branded satin shorts he debuted as investors “shorted” the company in 2020….

Musk appears to be enjoying the media attention on his newest lark. He switched his Twitter bio to “Perfume Salesman” and claimed to have sold 20,000 bottles….

“Please buy my perfume, so I can buy Twitter,” he wrote on Wednesday.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot – Elon Musk’s Newest Venture: Selling a 0 Perfume

CNN reports:

Elon Musk’s latest internet jest has taken the form of a perfume with an unsavory scent: “Burnt Hair. ”

The tech mogul, entrepreneur and sometimes internet troll announced the launch of the product on Twitter on Tuesday, calling it “the finest fragrance on Earth.” The perfume is apparently being sold on The Boring Company’s website for $100 and will ship in the first quarter of 2023….

The product is the successor to other Musk memes, like the $500 flamethrowers he sold in 2018 or the Tesla-branded satin shorts he debuted as investors “shorted” the company in 2020….

Musk appears to be enjoying the media attention on his newest lark. He switched his Twitter bio to “Perfume Salesman” and claimed to have sold 20,000 bottles….

“Please buy my perfume, so I can buy Twitter,” he wrote on Wednesday.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot – Elon Musk Newest Venture: Selling a 0 Perfume

Long-time Slashdot reader mspohr shares a report from the Boston Globe’s health-news site STAT:
The scientist flicked on a laser, filling the rat’s brain with blue light. The rodent, true to its past two weeks of training, scampered across its glass box to a tiny spout, where it was duly rewarded with a drink of water. From the outside, this would appear to be a pretty run-of-the-mill neuroscience experiment, except for the fact that the neurons directing the rat to its thirst-quenching reward didn’t contain any rat DNA. Instead, they came from a human “mini-brain” — a ball of human tissue called an organoid — that researchers at Stanford University School of Medicine had grown in a lab and implanted in the rodent’s cortex months before.

The experiment — part of a study published Wednesday in Nature — is the first describing human neurons influencing another species’ behavior. The study also showed that signals could go the other way; tendrils of human neurons mingled with the rodent brain cells and fired in response to air rustling the rats’ whiskers.

The advance opens the door to using such human-rodent chimeras to better understand how the human brain develops and what goes wrong in neurological and psychiatric conditions such as schizophrenia, autism, and epilepsy. When the Stanford scientists implanted organoids grown from the cells of patients with a severe genetic brain disorder, they could watch the neurons develop abnormally with unprecedented clarity.

“This paper really pushes the envelope,” said neuroscientist Tomasz Nowakowski, of the University of California, San Francisco, who uses brain organoids in his research on neurodevelopmental disorders but was not involved in the new work. “The field is desperate for more experimental models. And what’s really important about this study is it demonstrates that brain organoids can complete their maturation trajectory when transplanted. So it really expands our toolkit for asking more nuanced questions about how genetic mutations lead to behavioral disorders.”

It’s an example of how stem cells have revolutionized brain research. By “doing their experiments in very young rats whose cortexes are not yet saturated with synapses,” the article points out, the researchers “found that the human neurons easily integrated into the animals’ rapidly expanding circuitry, which provided them with the stimulation they needed to push past previous developmental barriers.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot – Rats With (Part) Human Brains