Tootfinder

Report finds dangerous mercury levels, highlights mislabeling in shark meat sold in EU https://news.mongabay.com/2025/10/report-finds-dangerous-mercury-levels-highlights-mislabeling-i…

Report finds dangerous mercury levels, highlights mislabeling in shark meat sold in EU
Shark meat sold across Europe may be serving up more than seafood. Dangerously high levels of methylmercury, toxic to humans, were present in nearly a third of shark meat samples taken from European restaurants, fishmongers and supermarkets, according to a new report by a group of marine conservation NGOs. The findings suggest that Europeans are […]

Big Tech's EU lobbying hit €151M in 2025, up from €113M in 2023 and €97M in 2021; between January and June 2025, Big Tech had 146 meetings with EU officials (Corporate Europe Observatory)
https://corporateeurope.org/en/2025/10/big-tech-lobby-budgets-hit-re…

Big Tech lobby budgets hit record levels | Corporate Europe Observatory
New figures show that the digital industry as a whole is now spending €151 million a year on lobbying the EU, a major increase to what was already considerable firepower.

The nominal capacity of this seminar room is 25, I believe. The diagram shows the CO₂ levels with just 9 persons in the room. How is this considered acceptable?

⚖️ Inequality, pollution, and democracy levels shape how quickly populations age: Study
https://medicalxpress.com/news/2025-07-inequality-pollution-democracy-quickly-populations.html

Inequality, pollution, and democracy levels shape how quickly populations age: Study
A groundbreaking international study of 161,981 participants across 40 countries published in Nature Medicine reveals that air pollution, social inequality, and weak democratic institutions substantially accelerate aging. The collaborative study involves leading researchers from the Global Brain Health Institute in Trinity College Dublin.

‘Millions of Avoidable Deaths’: Climate Change Health Harms Reach Unprecedented Levels - Inside Climate News
https://insideclimatenews.org/news/28102025/millions-of-avoidable-deaths-climate-change-health-harms-reach-unprecedented-levels/

internet_top_pop: Internet topology (PoP level) (1969-2012)
Assorted snapshots of internet graph at the Point of Presence (PoP) level (which lies between the IP and AS levels), collected from around the world and at various times. The earliest snapshots are for ARPANET (1969-1972), with a few more from pre-2000. Most are from 2006 onward. Metadata include link type or speed, longitudes, and latitudes of nodes, URL, and date of record.
This network has 61 nodes and 89 edges.

log scales like "number of nines" are fun when you start to get to poor levels of performance.
... in a room full of people who would have laughed at them if they had said "let's get up to three nines of reliability",
a team I work with took a KPI to "get loss rates down below 20%" and received wise nods from most of the engineers in the room.
...but that's the equivalent of "let's get up to 0.5 nines"
that's a …

oh no. where are my beefy boys
https://mastodon.social/@levelbot/115455333631629030

@… Yes, the CO₂ levels in themselves are already concerning.
I’m teaching in a similar-sized room in the same building, and I leave the door open, which already helps a lot (it’s the other curve for the building). Unfortunately, due to the A1a, you can’t leave the windows ajar.

@… Yes, the CO₂ levels in themselves are already concerning.
I’m teaching in a similar-sized room in the same building, and I leave the door open, which already helps a lot (it’s the other curve for the building). Unfortunately, due to the A1a, you can’t leave the windows ajar.

Real software engineers don't like the idea of some inexplicable and
greasy hardware several aisles away that may stop working at any
moment. They have a great distrust of hardware people, and wish that
systems could be virtual at *___all* levels. They would like personal
computers (you know no one's going to trip over something and kill your
DFA in mid-transit), except that they need 8 megabytes to run their
Correctness Verification Aid packages.…

😱 “Rainfall in the central city of Hue reached 1,085 millimeters (42 inches) in 24 hours by late Monday, the highest volume ever recorded in Vietnam”
https://apnews.com/article/vietnam-floods-record-rainfall-3492e2748c8504392943f21b5df5079…

Record rainfall causes major flooding in Vietnam, submerging ancient sites
Heavy rains have caused major flooding in central Vietnam, submerging homes, farmland, and tourist spots like Hue and Hoi An. By late Monday, Hue saw record rainfall of 42 inches within 24 hours. By Tuesday morning, water levels in Hue's Perfume River rose to 15 feet. The ancient town of Hoi An experienced waist-deep floods, leading to tourist evacuations by boat. The floods have disrupted train routes between Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City. About 1,000 people in rural areas are isolated due to flo…

Shoutout to all the companies this year who are on-track to blow way past their regretted attrition targets but in, like, a bad way???
Damn, it’s like they know the price of everything but the value of nothing — and certainly not the value of skilled, organized labor at all levels. Die mad, I guess

Covariate-adjusted win statistics in randomized clinical trials with ordinal outcomes
Zhiqiang Cao, Scott Zuo, Mary Ryan Baumann, Kendra Plourde, Patrick Heagerty, Guangyu Tong, Fan Li
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.20349

Covariate-adjusted win statistics in randomized clinical trials with ordinal outcomes
Ordinal outcomes are common in clinical settings where they often represent increasing levels of disease progression or different levels of functional impairment. Such outcomes can characterize differences in meaningful patient health states that are directly relevant to clinical researchers and frequently represent composite outcomes that include absorbing states such as death. To compare different intervention strategies in clinical trials, the direct use of ordinal logistic regression models…

I think that "wank" expresses how I feel about listening to Trump et al. It's all self-pleasure done publicly as a dominance display. Disgusting on all levels. https://bsky.brid.gy/r/https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:vztgtyyp4lhhqmto…

Iris Meredith (@iris-meredith.bsky.social)
Today's article is about a form of bad-faith speech somewhat akin to bullshit, which I'm calling (because why not) wank. I don't quite think I've focused the ideas down as much as I can, but I think it says some interesting things regardless: https://deadsimpletech.com/blog/essay_on_redacted

🚨Job Alert!!🚨Assistant Professor position at University of Wyoming in Structural #Geology and/or Tectonics ⚒️

Will AI in the classroom mean students asking ChatGPT for help with algebra homework, or strapping on a headband that streams their brainwaves to teachers and parents? In China, teachers are already policing attention with the latter
https://www.linked…

Embedded Deep Learning for Bio-hybrid Plant Sensors to Detect Increased Heat and Ozone Levels
Till Aust, Christoph Karl Heck, Eduard Buss, Heiko Hamann
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.24992

Embedded Deep Learning for Bio-hybrid Plant Sensors to Detect Increased Heat and Ozone Levels
We present a bio-hybrid environmental sensor system that integrates natural plants and embedded deep learning for real-time, on-device detection of temperature and ozone level changes. Our system, based on the low-power PhytoNode platform, records electric differential potential signals from Hedera helix and processes them onboard using an embedded deep learning model. We demonstrate that our sensing device detects changes in temperature and ozone with good sensitivity of up to 0.98. Daily and …

Interesting, The Cloud Sovereignty Framework defines the European Commission’s criteria, assurance levels (SEAL), and scoring methodology for assessing the sovereignty of cloud services across strategic, legal, operational, and technological dimensions.
#EU #SEAL

Cloud Sovereignty Framework | European Commission

"Sea levels are rising faster than at any time in the last 4,000 years. Here’s why"
#Sea #Climate #ClimateChange

Sea levels rising faster than they have in 4,000 years, study warns
Melting glaciers and thermal expansion are driving the ‘acceleration’ of sea level rise to record levels.

Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill will push US debt levels beyond those of Greece or Italy, IMF forecast predicts
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/trump-budget-debt-increase-republicans-b2853269.html…

High levels of short-chain PFAS found in blood of residents living near chemical facility #health

High levels of short-chain PFAS found in blood of residents living near chemical facility
In a new study appearing in Environmental Science and Technology, researchers found high levels of ultrashort-chain per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) in blood samples taken from Wilmington, N.C. residents between 2010 and 2016. Two ultrashort-chain PFAS—perfluoromethoxyacetic acid (PFMOAA) and trifluoroacetic acid (TFA)—were detected at high levels in almost every sample.

Classical Simulations of Low Magic Quantum Dynamics
Kemal Aziz, Haining Pan, Michael J. Gullans, J. H. Pixley
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.20252 https://arxi…

Classical Simulations of Low Magic Quantum Dynamics
We develop classical simulation algorithms for adaptive quantum circuits that produce states with low levels of ``magic'' (i.e., non-stabilizerness). These algorithms are particularly well-suited to circuits with high rates of Pauli measurements, such as those encountered in quantum error correction and monitored quantum circuits. The measurements serve to limit the buildup of magic induced by non-Clifford operations arising from generic noise processes or unitary gates, respectively. Our algor…

Multi-Lingual Implicit Discourse Relation Recognition with Multi-Label Hierarchical Learning
Nelson Filipe Costa, Leila Kosseim
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.20712 https://

Multi-Lingual Implicit Discourse Relation Recognition with Multi-Label Hierarchical Learning
This paper introduces the first multi-lingual and multi-label classification model for implicit discourse relation recognition (IDRR). Our model, HArch, is evaluated on the recently released DiscoGeM 2.0 corpus and leverages hierarchical dependencies between discourse senses to predict probability distributions across all three sense levels in the PDTB 3.0 framework. We compare several pre-trained encoder backbones and find that RoBERTa-HArch achieves the best performance in English, while XLM-…

Unlocking the Potential of Soft Actor-Critic for Imitation Learning
Nayari Marie Lessa, Melya Boukheddimi, Frank Kirchner
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.24539 https://

Unlocking the Potential of Soft Actor-Critic for Imitation Learning
Learning-based methods have enabled robots to acquire bio-inspired movements with increasing levels of naturalness and adaptability. Among these, Imitation Learning (IL) has proven effective in transferring complex motion patterns from animals to robotic systems. However, current state-of-the-art frameworks predominantly rely on Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO), an on-policy algorithm that prioritizes stability over sample efficiency and policy generalization. This paper proposes a novel IL f…

psi: Plant Photosystem I excitation energy transfer network (2020)
Weighted directed network of the light-harvesting Photosystem Ι (PSI) of the plant Pisum sativum. The nodes represent chromophores with different identities (i.e. chlorophyll a, chlorophyll b, β-carotene and derivates, lutein, violaxanthin), while edges represent FRET transfer between chromophores. The link directionality connecting nodes in the PSI network depends on the energy levels of the connected chromophores. The…

Abstract Landscapes
(Bernina range, on the approach to Lago di Fellaria, Sep 2025)
Everything about this place is so special: the road to the trailhead (with 1700m elevation gain), the scale of the majestic ~4000er (meters) mountains with their glaciated peaks. Observing the different levels/layers of this upper valley where the glaciers have already mostly receded, the parts which have been flooded with a reservoir (slowly drying out), the equally spectacular & tragic waterfa…

Generalized Macdonald functions and quantum toroidal gl(1) algebra
Jean-Emile Bourgine, Luca Cassia, Artem Stoyan
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.19704 https://…

Generalized Macdonald functions and quantum toroidal gl(1) algebra
The Macdonald operator is known to coincide with a certain element of the quantum toroidal $\mathfrak{gl}(1)$ algebra in the Fock representation of levels $(1,0)$. A generalization of this operator to higher levels $(r,0)$ can be built using the coproduct structure, it is diagonalized by the generalized Macdonald symmetric functions, indexed by $r$-tuple partitions and depending on $r$ alphabets. In this paper, we extend to the generalized case some of the known formulas obeyed by ordinary Macd…

Evolutionary hypergame dynamics: Introspection reasoning and social learning
Feipeng Zhang, Te Wu, Guofeng Zhang, Long Wang
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.24398 https://

Evolutionary hypergame dynamics: Introspection reasoning and social learning
In the realm of evolutionary game theory, standard frameworks typically presuppose that every player possesses comprehensive knowledge and unrestricted access to the entire strategy space. However, real-world human society inherently harbors diverse levels of knowledge, experience, and background among individuals. Hypergames incorporate this heterogeneity by permitting individuals to differ in their access to the full strategy set, reflecting cognitive or informational constraints and giving r…

A non-inflationary solution to the monopole problem
Daniele Perri
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.23726 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.23726

A non-inflationary solution to the monopole problem
Magnetic monopoles are a long-standing prediction of Grand Unified Theories, yet their efficient production in early universe phase transitions would lead to a monopole abundance that far exceeds observational limits. The standard solution of the problem invokes inflation occurring after monopole production, diluting their density to undetectable levels and eliminating any possibility of present-day observation. Here, we propose an alternative solution based on the breaking, in the early univer…

Whom We Trust, What We Fear: COVID-19 Fear and the Politics of Information
Daniele Baccega, Paolo Castagno, Antonio Fern\'andez Anta, Juan Marcos Ramirez, Matteo Sereno
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.20146

Whom We Trust, What We Fear: COVID-19 Fear and the Politics of Information
The COVID-19 pandemic triggered not only a global health crisis but also an infodemic, an overload of information from diverse sources influencing public perception and emotional responses. In this context, fear emerged as a central emotional reaction, shaped by both media exposure and demographic factors. In this study, we analyzed the relationship between individuals' self-reported levels of fear about COVID-19 and the information sources they rely on, across nine source categories, including…

AI skepticism has reached levels unseen since Flatland was published.

Polarization aberration modeling of internal occulters for coronagraphs
Emory L. Jenkins, A J Eldorado Riggs, Ewan S. Douglas, Ramya M. Anche, Dylan M. McKeithen, Stuart B. Shaklan
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.19397

Polarization aberration modeling of internal occulters for coronagraphs
The Habitable Worlds Observatory (HWO) is a flagship mission concept proposing to characterize earth-like exoplanets at high contrast with a coronagraph instrument. The most in-depth, validated contrast error budgets made to date have been at the $10^{-9}$ planet-to-star contrast levels for the Roman Space Telescope. To obtain the raw contrast levels of $\leq 10^{-10}$ contrast needed for HWO, more modeling is needed of the vector diffraction effects within a coronagraph instrument. Several cor…

A gradient boosting and broadband approach to finding Lyman-{\alpha} emitting galaxies beyond narrowband surveys
A. Vale, A. Paulino-Afonso, A. Humphrey, P. A. C. Cunha, B. Ribeiro, B. Cerqueira, R. Carvajal, J. Fonseca
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.22915

A gradient boosting and broadband approach to finding Lyman-α emitting galaxies beyond narrowband surveys
In this work, we test whether gradient-boosting algorithms, trained on broadband photometric data from traditional Lyman-$α$ emitting (LAE) surveys, can efficiently and accurately identify LAE candidates from typical star-forming galaxies at similar redshifts and brightness levels. Using galaxy samples at $z \in [2,6]$ derived from the COSMOS2020 and SC4K catalogs, we trained gradient-boosting machine-learning algorithms (LGBM, XGBoost, and CatBoost) using optical and near-infrared broadband p…

#Protein Powders and Shakes Contain High Levels of Lead. Also cadmium and inorganic arsenic.
Researchers at Consumer Reports tested various protein powders and shakes and their conclusion was Jesus Christ that's a lot of lead.

Protein Powders and Shakes Contain High Levels of Lead
CR tests of 23 popular protein powders and shakes found that most contain high levels of lead.

The current battle focuses on expiring subsidies for the Affordable Care Act
-- that Democrats say will hurt the ability of millions of enrollees to afford insurance.
Democrats have also said they want to reverse Medicaid cuts that Trump signed into law this summer.
Republicans are seeking a bill to temporarily extend federal spending at current levels without any add-ons.
If the government shuts down,
Trump and his administration
— which has already defi…

How a government shutdown would give Trump more power
An impasse over health care could lead to a government shutdown Oct. 1. What actions could Trump take in a government shutdown?

Competing $s$-wave pairing in overdoped $t$-$J$ model
Wayne Zheng, Tao Cheng, Zheng-Yuan Yue, Fu-Chun Zhang, Wei-Qiang Chen, Zheng-Cheng Gu
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.22473 http…

Competing $s$-wave pairing in overdoped $t$-$J$ model
The $d$-wave pairing symmetry has long been considered a defining feature of high-temperature superconductivity in cuprates. In this work, we reveal that $s$-wave pairing states exhibit variational energies comparable to the $d$-wave state in a square $t$-$J$ model, particularly at high doping levels ($δ\gtrsim 15\%$) by using the state-of-the-art tensor network simulation. This surprising result suggests that $s$-wave pairing may play an important role in the cuprate phase diagram, especially…

Here is the link to the #WMO report on rising #CO2 levels - Guardian can't be bothered to link it correctly, as usual.
Carbon dioxide levels increase by record amount to new highs in 2024

Carbon dioxide levels increase by record amount to new highs in 2024

Reliable Weak-to-Strong Monitoring of LLM Agents
Neil Kale, Chen Bo Calvin Zhang, Kevin Zhu, Ankit Aich, Paula Rodriguez, Scale Red Team, Christina Q. Knight, Zifan Wang
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.19461

Reliable Weak-to-Strong Monitoring of LLM Agents
We stress test monitoring systems for detecting covert misbehavior in autonomous LLM agents (e.g., secretly sharing private information). To this end, we systematize a monitor red teaming (MRT) workflow that incorporates: (1) varying levels of agent and monitor situational awareness; (2) distinct adversarial strategies to evade the monitor, such as prompt injection; and (3) two datasets and environments -- SHADE-Arena for tool-calling agents and our new CUA-SHADE-Arena, which extends TheAgentCo…

Response of AC-coupled Low Gain Avalanche Detectors to Ionizing and Non-ionizing Radiation Damage
Jiahe Si, Gabriele D'Amen, Mohamed Hijas Mohamed Farook, Gabriele Giacomini, Martin R. Hoeferkamp, Sally Seidel, Alessandro Tricoli
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.21028

Response of AC-coupled Low Gain Avalanche Detectors to Ionizing and Non-ionizing Radiation Damage
Low gain avalanche diodes with DC- and AC-coupled readout were exposed to ionizing and non-ionizing radiation at levels relevant to future experiments in particle, nuclear, and medical physics and to astrophysics. Damage-related change in their acceptor removal constants and in the resistivity of the region between the guard ring and the active area are reported, as is change in the leakage current and depletion voltages of the active volumes.

More than half of world's coastal settlements retreating from rising seas, study shows #sea

More than half of world's coastal settlements retreating from rising seas, study shows
Human settlements around the world are moving inland and relocating away from coastlines as sea levels rise and coastal hazards grow more severe, but a new international study shows the poorest regions are being forced to stay put or even move closer to danger.

Determinants of Latin American students academic resilience-Insights based on PISA 2022 using an explainable machine learning approach
Marcos Delprato
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.24830

Determinants of Latin American students academic resilience-Insights based on PISA 2022 using an explainable machine learning approach
The learning crisis in the Latin American region (i.e., higher rates of students not reaching basic competencies at secondary level) is worrying, particularly post-pandemic given the stronger role of inequality behind achievement. Within this scenario, the concept of student academic resilience (SAR), students who despite coming from disadvantaged backgrounds reach good performance levels, and an analysis of its determinants, are policy relevant. In this paper, using advancements on explainable…

"People notice that while AI can now write programs, design websites, etc, it still often makes mistakes or goes in a wrong direction, and then they somehow jump to the conclusion that AI will never be able to do these tasks at human levels, or will only have a minor impact. When just a few years ago, having AI do these things was complete science fiction!"

I grew up in a rural area in the 90s, and was a junior NRA member. Now, I will admit that I only did a limited amount of shooting and it's been at least 30 years since I touched a gun, but I'm pretty sure that rule #1 of gun safety is: Don't point weapon at your own dick.
https://www.

ICE Agent Drops Gun and Levels It at Shocked Rush-Hour Crowd
The man who captured the video said the scene unfolded in the midst of rush-hour traffic just outside Washington, D.C.

Unifying Diarization, Separation, and ASR with Multi-Speaker Encoder
Muhammad Shakeel, Yui Sudo, Yifan Peng, Chyi-Jiunn Lin, Shinji Watanabe
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.20474 htt…

Unifying Diarization, Separation, and ASR with Multi-Speaker Encoder
This paper presents a unified multi-speaker encoder (UME), a novel architecture that jointly learns representations for speaker diarization (SD), speech separation (SS), and multi-speaker automatic speech recognition (ASR) tasks using a shared speech foundational encoder. We leverage the hidden representations from multiple layers of UME as a residual weighted-sum encoding (RWSE) to effectively use information from different semantic levels, contributing to bottom-up alignment between tasks. Th…

RoofSeg: An edge-aware transformer-based network for end-to-end roof plane segmentation
Siyuan You, Guozheng Xu, Pengwei Zhou, Qiwen Jin, Jian Yao, Li Li
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.19003

RoofSeg: An edge-aware transformer-based network for end-to-end roof plane segmentation
Roof plane segmentation is one of the key procedures for reconstructing three-dimensional (3D) building models at levels of detail (LoD) 2 and 3 from airborne light detection and ranging (LiDAR) point clouds. The majority of current approaches for roof plane segmentation rely on the manually designed or learned features followed by some specifically designed geometric clustering strategies. Because the learned features are more powerful than the manually designed features, the deep learning-bas…

It seems that #ukpolitics

Petition: Do not introduce Digital ID cards
We demand that the UK Government immediately commits to not introducing a digital ID cards. There are reports that this is being looked at.

Autonomy at Levels for Spacecraft
Daniel Baker (Defense Sector, BlueHalo, LLC), Jeremy Wojcik (Defense Sector, BlueHalo, LLC), Sean Phillips (Space Control Branch)
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.14226

Autonomy at Levels for Spacecraft
Autonomy at Levels is the idea that autonomy should be embedded within and throughout a spacecraft. Using Systems Engineering methods a spacecraft is typically decomposed into systems, subsystems, assemblies, components, and so on. All these decomposition levels within all the spacecraft's systems, could and should have autonomy elements built in. As a result, the "autonomy system" is made of autonomy elements or units that are integrated, distributed and embedded within the whole spacecraft. T…

Balancing Profit and Traveller Acceptance in Ride-Pooling Personalised Fares
Michal Bujak, Rafal Kucharski
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.20723 https://arxiv.o…

Balancing Profit and Traveller Acceptance in Ride-Pooling Personalised Fares
Ride-pooling systems, to succeed, must provide an attractive service, namely compensate perceived costs with an appealing price. However, because of a strong heterogeneity in a value-of-time, each traveller has his own acceptable price, unknown to the operator. Here, we show that individual acceptance levels can be learned by the operator (over $90\%$ accuracy for pooled travellers in $10$ days) to optimise personalised fares. We propose an adaptive pricing policy, where every day the operator …

High Energy Particle Production from Proton Synchrotron Radiation in Strong Magnetic Fields in Relativistic Quantum Field Theory
Tomoyuki Maruyama, A. Baha Balantekin, Myung-Ki Cheoun, Akira Dohi, Ryo Higuch, Toshitaka Kajino, Grant J. Mathews
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.24366

High Energy Particle Production from Proton Synchrotron Radiation in Strong Magnetic Fields in Relativistic Quantum Field Theory
We investigate photon, pion, and rho-meson production from proton synchrotron radiation in the presence of strong magnetic fields. The proton decay widths and the luminosities of the emitted particles are calculated within a relativistic quantum framework that incorporates Landau quantization. A scaling rule is derived for the transition probability between different Landau levels. This allows an evaluation of transitions for extremely high Landau numbers exceeding $10^{15}$. Furthermore, we ca…

Supercharged dust storms are exposing millions to deadly air pollution https://news.mongabay.com/short-article/2025/10/supercharged-dust-storms-are-exposing-millions-to-deadly-air-pollution/

Supercharged dust storms are exposing millions to deadly air pollution
More people are getting sick due to sand and dust storms that are now more intense and frequent, contributor Sean Mowbray reported for Mongabay. The intensifying storms have exposed many millions more people to dangerous levels of particulate pollution across the world. In some regions, it has also triggered outbreaks of respiratory and infectious diseases. […]

I know of HX-Tape, but I decided to write my own demodulator to read Epson HX-20 tape data; mostly because I wanted to refresh my #rust skills, but also because I had this realisation it would work as a set of chained iterators. It does (I'm straight from HX-20 ext-cassette to PC audio); I've got a layer that does levels (high/low/0) with hysteresis, that passes it to one that does transiti…

Collisional excitation of HCN by CO to refine the modeling of cometary comae
Francesca Tonolo, Ernesto Quintas-S\'anchez, Adrian Batista-Planas, Richard Dawes, Fran\c{c}ois Lique
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.19904

Collisional excitation of HCN by CO to refine the modeling of cometary comae
We present the first dataset of collisional (de)-excitation rate coefficients of HCN induced by CO, one of the main perturbing gases in cometary atmospheres. The dataset spans the temperature range of 5-50 K. It includes both state-to-state rate coefficients involving the lowest ten and nine rotational levels of HCN and CO, respectively, and the so-called "thermalized" rate coefficients over the rotational population of CO at each kinetic temperature. The derivation of these coefficients exploi…

Getting on the elevator after leaving a conference...
Elevator operator: "How is the conference?"
Guy 1: "Great! How's the elevator?"
Operator: "It sucks."
Me: "You should've said, it sucks on so many levels."
Everyone: "Ooooh! Good one!!"

A Less Terrifying Universe? Mundanity as an Explanation for the Fermi Paradox
Robin H. D. Corbet
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.22878 https://arxiv.org/pdf/250…

A Less Terrifying Universe? Mundanity as an Explanation for the Fermi Paradox
Applying a principle of "radical mundanity", this paper examines explanations for the lack of strong evidence for the presence of technology-using extraterrestrial civilizations (ETCs) in the Galaxy - the Fermi paradox. With this principle, the prospect that the Galaxy contains a modest number of civilizations is preferred, where none have achieved technology levels sufficient to accomplish large-scale astro-engineering or lack the desire to do so. This consideration also leads to the expectati…

"‘Alarmingly high’ levels of forever chemicals found at airports in England, investigation reveals"
#UK #UnitedKingdom #PFAS

Everything you already knew about MAGA voters... now with more scientific research to back it up.
✅ Trump supporters report higher levels of psychopathy, manipulativeness, callousness, and narcissism
https://www.psypost.org/trump-supporters-r…

Trump supporters report higher levels of psychopathy, manipulativeness, callousness, and narcissism
Support for Donald Trump is linked to darker personality traits, including increased psychopathy and decreased empathy, new research finds. The study also connects conservative political beliefs to lower benevolence, suggesting personality may shape how people engage with politics and ideology.

Single-molecule biophysics
Mark C Leake
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.19829 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.19829

Single-molecule biophysics
Biological molecules, like all active matter, use free energy to generate force and motion which drive them out of thermal equilibrium, and undergo inherent dynamic interconversion between metastable free energy states separated by levels barely higher than stochastic thermal energy fluctuations. Here, we explore the founding and emerging approaches of the field of single-molecule biophysics which, unlike traditional ensemble average approaches, enable the detection and manipulation of individu…

House lawmakers flirt with COVID-era work levels (Kate Santaliz/Axios)
https://www.axios.com/2025/10/24/house-votes-johnson-government-shutdown
http://www.memeorandum.com/251024/p124#a251024p124

Trump regime feeling emperor vibes.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/aug/06/jd-vance-ohio-lake-water-levels

German4All - A Dataset and Model for Readability-Controlled Paraphrasing in German
Miriam Ansch\"utz, Thanh Mai Pham, Eslam Nasrallah, Maximilian M\"uller, Cristian-George Craciun, Georg Groh
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.17973

German4All - A Dataset and Model for Readability-Controlled Paraphrasing in German
The ability to paraphrase texts across different complexity levels is essential for creating accessible texts that can be tailored toward diverse reader groups. Thus, we introduce German4All, the first large-scale German dataset of aligned readability-controlled, paragraph-level paraphrases. It spans five readability levels and comprises over 25,000 samples. The dataset is automatically synthesized using GPT-4 and rigorously evaluated through both human and LLM-based judgments. Using German4All…

The cybersecurity news machine is cranking at high levels this week, so don't miss today's Metacurity for the crucial developments you should know, including
--JLR cyberattack is the most economically damaging in UK history,
--CISA warns of Oracle E-Business Suite flaw,
--Spyware developer was targeted by spyware,
--Salt Typhoon attacked a European telco,
--TikTok could be sharing your data with the US government,
--UN Cybercrime Convention slated …

JLR cyberattack is the most economically damaging in UK history
CISA warns of Oracle E-Business Suite flaw, Spyware developer was targeted by spyware, Salt Typhoon attacked a European telco, TikTok could be sharing your data with the US government, UN Cybercrime Convention slated for weekend signoff, UK won't probe Afghan data breach, much more

Series B, Episode 02 - Shadow
JENNA: And you'll find it for sale in Space City.
BLAKE: If you've got the money.
VILA: But we have, we have.
GAN: And if you can stomach doing business with the Terra Nostra.
https://blake.torpidity.net/m/202/46 B7B3

In the opening seconds of the clip, an officer can be heard screaming, “Give me your f--king arm.”
The camera gets closer to reveal that two agents,
one wearing a balaclava and a vest that reads “POLICE ICE,”
had a man pinned on the asphalt.
Their suspect appeared to be refusing to put his left arm behind him to be placed in handcuffs,
and he repeatedly yelled for help in English and Spanish.

ICE Agent Drops Gun and Levels It at Shocked Rush-Hour Crowd
The man who captured the video said the scene unfolded in the midst of rush-hour traffic just outside Washington, D.C.

Dynamic Vacancy Levels in CsPbCl3 Obey Equilibrium Defect Thermodynamics
Irea Mosquera-Lois, Aron Walsh
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.14513 https://arxiv.org/…

Dynamic Vacancy Levels in CsPbCl3 Obey Equilibrium Defect Thermodynamics
Halide vacancies are the dominant point defects in perovskites with $V_\mathrm{Cl}$ identified as a detrimental trap for the optoelectronic performance of CsPbCl$_3$, with applications ranging from photodetectors to solar cells. Understanding these defects under operating conditions is key since their electronic levels exhibit large thermal fluctuations that challenge the validity of static 0 K models. However, quantitative modelling of defect processes requires hybrid density functional theory…

Understanding Mode Switching in Human-AI Collaboration: Behavioral Insights and Predictive Modeling
Avinash Ajit Nargund, Arthur Caetano, Kevin Yang, Rose Yiwei Liu, Philip Tezaur, Kriteen Shrestha, Qisen Pan, Tobias H\"ollerer, Misha Sra
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.20666

Understanding Mode Switching in Human-AI Collaboration: Behavioral Insights and Predictive Modeling
Human-AI collaboration is typically offered in one of two of user control levels: guidance, where the AI provides suggestions and the human makes the final decision, and delegation, where the AI acts autonomously within user-defined constraints. Systems that integrate both modes, common in robotic surgery or driving assistance, often overlook shifts in user preferences within a task in response to factors like evolving trust, decision complexity, and perceived control. In this work, we investig…

SAP, whose cloud sales are set to reach €22B this year, nearly triple 2019 levels, faces competition from other tech giants as it targets AI apps for the future (Christina Kyriasoglou/Bloomberg)

train_terrorists: Madrid train bombing terrorists (2004)
A network of associations among the terrorists involved in the 2004 Madrid train bombing, as reconstructed from press stories after-the-fact. Edge weights encode four levels of connection strength: friendships, ties to Al Qaeda and Osama Bin Laden, co-participants in wars, and co-participants in previous terrorist attacks.
This network has 64 nodes and 243 edges.
Tags: Social, Offline, Weighted

Sea Levels Rising Faster than at Any Time in 4,000 Years, Study Warns
https://scitechdaily.com/sea-levels-rising-faster-than-at-any-time-in-4000-years-study-warns/

BFA: Real-time Multilingual Text-to-speech Forced Alignment
Abdul Rehman, Jingyao Cai, Jian-Jun Zhang, Xiaosong Yang
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.23147 https://

BFA: Real-time Multilingual Text-to-speech Forced Alignment
We present Bournemouth Forced Aligner (BFA), a system that combines a Contextless Universal Phoneme Encoder (CUPE) with a connectionist temporal classification (CTC)based decoder. BFA introduces explicit modelling of inter-phoneme gaps and silences and hierarchical decoding strategies, enabling fine-grained boundary prediction. Evaluations on TIMIT and Buckeye corpora show that BFA achieves competitive recall relative to Montreal Forced Aligner at relaxed tolerance levels, while predicting both…

Robust Control and Entanglement of Qudits in Neutral Atom Arrays
Amir Burshtein, Shachar Fraenkel, Moshe Goldstein, Ran Finkelstein
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.16294 https://

Robust Control and Entanglement of Qudits in Neutral Atom Arrays
Quantum devices comprised of elementary components with more than two stable levels - so-called qudits - enrich the accessible Hilbert space, enabling applications ranging from fault-tolerant quantum computing to simulating complex many-body models. While several quantum platforms are built from local elements that are equipped with a rich spectrum of stable energy levels, schemes for the efficient control and entanglement of qudits are scarce. Importantly, no experimental demonstration of mult…

Understanding Spatial Regression Models from a Weighting Perspective in an Observational Study of Superfund Remediation
Sophie M. Woodward, Francesca Dominici, Jose R. Zubizarreta
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.19572

Understanding Spatial Regression Models from a Weighting Perspective in an Observational Study of Superfund Remediation
Superfund sites are locations in the United States with high levels of environmental toxicants, often resulting from industrial activity or improper waste management. Given mounting evidence linking prenatal environmental exposures to adverse birth outcomes, estimating the impact of Superfund remediation is of substantial policy relevance. A widespread approach is to fit a spatial regression, i.e., a linear regression of the outcome (e.g., birth weight) on binary treatment (e.g., indicator for …

😅 Smartwatches offer little insight into stress levels, researchers find
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/aug/08/smartwatches-offer-little-insight-into-stress-levels-researchers-find

Ask Me Again Differently: GRAS for Measuring Bias in Vision Language Models on Gender, Race, Age, and Skin Tone
Shaivi Malik, Hasnat Md Abdullah, Sriparna Saha, Amit Sheth
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.18989

Ask Me Again Differently: GRAS for Measuring Bias in Vision Language Models on Gender, Race, Age, and Skin Tone
As Vision Language Models (VLMs) become integral to real-world applications, understanding their demographic biases is critical. We introduce GRAS, a benchmark for uncovering demographic biases in VLMs across gender, race, age, and skin tone, offering the most diverse coverage to date. We further propose the GRAS Bias Score, an interpretable metric for quantifying bias. We benchmark five state-of-the-art VLMs and reveal concerning bias levels, with the least biased model attaining a GRAS Bias S…

Towards a Holistic and Automated Evaluation Framework for Multi-Level Comprehension of LLMs in Book-Length Contexts
Jiaqi Deng, Yuho Lee, Nicole Hee-Yeon Kim, Hyangsuk Min, Taewon Yun, Minjeong Ban, Kim Yul, Hwanjun Song
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.19578

Towards a Holistic and Automated Evaluation Framework for Multi-Level Comprehension of LLMs in Book-Length Contexts
We introduce HAMLET, a holistic and automated framework for evaluating the long-context comprehension of large language models (LLMs). HAMLET structures source texts into a three-level key-fact hierarchy at root-, branch-, and leaf-levels, and employs query-focused summarization to evaluate how well models recall and faithfully represent information at each level. To validate the reliability of our fully automated pipeline, we conduct a systematic human study, showing that our automatic evaluat…

‘Alarmingly high’ levels of forever chemicals found at airports in England, investigation reveals https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/aug/14/alarmingly-high-levels-of-forever-chemicals-found…

Fossilized Micrometeorites Record Ancient CO2 Levels - Eos
https://eos.org/articles/fossilized-micrometeorites-record-ancient-co2-levels

Fossilized Micrometeorites Record Ancient CO2 Levels
A cadre of iron-rich extraterrestrial particles picked up faint whiffs of our planet’s atmosphere when they fell to Earth millions of years ago.

"Overshooting 1.5C climate target 'inevitable': UN chief"
#ParisAgreement #Climate #ClimateChange

Overshooting 1.5C climate target 'inevitable': UN chief
UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said Wednesday it was now clear that efforts to cap global warming at 1.5 Celsius above pre-industrial levels would fail in the short term.

the other 37% is jorts
https://mastodon.social/@levelbot/115421910259248238

psi: Plant Photosystem I excitation energy transfer network (2020)
Weighted directed network of the light-harvesting Photosystem Ι (PSI) of the plant Pisum sativum. The nodes represent chromophores with different identities (i.e. chlorophyll a, chlorophyll b, β-carotene and derivates, lutein, violaxanthin), while edges represent FRET transfer between chromophores. The link directionality connecting nodes in the PSI network depends on the energy levels of the connected chromophores. The…

Doubly Robust Estimation of Continuous Outcomes under Multiple Treatment Levels via GPS, CBPS, and Penalized Empirical Likelihood
Byeonghee Lee, Joonsung Kang
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.15846

Doubly Robust Estimation of Continuous Outcomes under Multiple Treatment Levels via GPS, CBPS, and Penalized Empirical Likelihood
This paper develops a unified framework for estimating continuous outcomes under multiple treatment levels in observational studies. We integrate the Generalized Propensity Score (GPS), Covariate Balancing Propensity Score (CBPS), and outcome regression into a Penalized Empirical Likelihood (PEL) formulation. The GPS is parameterized by $\boldsymbolβ$ and denoted $π_{\boldsymbolβ}(\mathbf{X})$, while CBPS imposes moment conditions to ensure covariate balance. Outcome regression flexibly mode…

Branyas was seemingly well protected.
Telomeres shorten whenever cells divide, and hers were so short they may have protected her from cancer by limiting the amount that cells continued to divide, Esteller said.
A close look at her DNA revealed gene variants that protected her heart and brain cells from disease and dementia.
She had low levels of inflammation throughout her body, which reduced her risk of cancer and diabetes, and efficient cholesterol and fat metabolism.

🩸 Alarming levels of Pfas in blood of those living near US air force base, study finds
#pfas…

"Rising sea levels threaten over 100 million buildings. Where does Europe stand?"
#Climate #ClimateChange

100 million buildings at risk from rising sea levels, warns report
Fossil fuel emissions need to be ‘curbed quickly’ to prevent millions of buildings from becoming a regular flood risk.

advogato: Advogato trust network (2009)
A network of trust relationships among users on Advogato, an online community of open source software developers. Edge direction indicates that node i trusts node j, and edge weight denotes one of four increasing levels of declared trust from i to j: observer (0.4), apprentice (0.6), journeyer (0.8), and master (1.0).
This network has 6541 nodes and 51127 edges.
Tags: Social, Online, Weighted

psi: Plant Photosystem I excitation energy transfer network (2020)
Weighted directed network of the light-harvesting Photosystem Ι (PSI) of the plant Pisum sativum. The nodes represent chromophores with different identities (i.e. chlorophyll a, chlorophyll b, β-carotene and derivates, lutein, violaxanthin), while edges represent FRET transfer between chromophores. The link directionality connecting nodes in the PSI network depends on the energy levels of the connected chromophores. The…

Toxic haze chokes Indian capital #India

Toxic haze chokes Indian capital
India's capital New Delhi was shrouded in a thick, toxic haze on Monday as air pollution levels soared to more than 16 times the World Health Organization's recommended daily maximum.

psi: Plant Photosystem I excitation energy transfer network (2020)
Weighted directed network of the light-harvesting Photosystem Ι (PSI) of the plant Pisum sativum. The nodes represent chromophores with different identities (i.e. chlorophyll a, chlorophyll b, β-carotene and derivates, lutein, violaxanthin), while edges represent FRET transfer between chromophores. The link directionality connecting nodes in the PSI network depends on the energy levels of the connected chromophores. The…

Overshooting 1.5C climate target 'inevitable': UN chief #climate

Overshooting 1.5C climate target 'inevitable': UN chief
UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said Wednesday it was now clear that efforts to cap global warming at 1.5 Celsius above pre-industrial levels would fail in the short term.

internet_top_pop: Internet topology (PoP level) (1969-2012)
Assorted snapshots of internet graph at the Point of Presence (PoP) level (which lies between the IP and AS levels), collected from around the world and at various times. The earliest snapshots are for ARPANET (1969-1972), with a few more from pre-2000. Most are from 2006 onward. Metadata include link type or speed, longitudes, and latitudes of nodes, URL, and date of record.
This network has 37 nodes and 66 edges.

internet_top_pop: Internet topology (PoP level) (1969-2012)
Assorted snapshots of internet graph at the Point of Presence (PoP) level (which lies between the IP and AS levels), collected from around the world and at various times. The earliest snapshots are for ARPANET (1969-1972), with a few more from pre-2000. Most are from 2006 onward. Metadata include link type or speed, longitudes, and latitudes of nodes, URL, and date of record.
This network has 24 nodes and 37 edges.

train_terrorists: Madrid train bombing terrorists (2004)
A network of associations among the terrorists involved in the 2004 Madrid train bombing, as reconstructed from press stories after-the-fact. Edge weights encode four levels of connection strength: friendships, ties to Al Qaeda and Osama Bin Laden, co-participants in wars, and co-participants in previous terrorist attacks.
This network has 64 nodes and 243 edges.
Tags: Social, Offline, Weighted

China’s coastal cities are sinking as seas rise at record speed #China

China’s coastal cities are sinking as seas rise at record speed
Sea levels are rising faster than at any time in 4,000 years, scientists report, with China’s major coastal cities at particular risk. The rapid increase is driven by warming oceans and melting ice, while human activities like groundwater pumping make it worse. In some areas, the land itself is sinking faster than the ocean is rising. Still, researchers see progress as cities like Shanghai adopt new technologies to stabilize the ground and prepare for the future.

advogato: Advogato trust network (2009)
A network of trust relationships among users on Advogato, an online community of open source software developers. Edge direction indicates that node i trusts node j, and edge weight denotes one of four increasing levels of declared trust from i to j: observer (0.4), apprentice (0.6), journeyer (0.8), and master (1.0).
This network has 6541 nodes and 51127 edges.
Tags: Social, Online, Weighted

India's pollution refugees fleeing Delhi's toxic air #India

India's pollution refugees fleeing Delhi's toxic air
Pollution levels in India's capital shaped Natasha Uppal and her husband's decision on parenthood—either raise their child away from the city, or stay put and remain childless.

psi: Plant Photosystem I excitation energy transfer network (2020)
Weighted directed network of the light-harvesting Photosystem Ι (PSI) of the plant Pisum sativum. The nodes represent chromophores with different identities (i.e. chlorophyll a, chlorophyll b, β-carotene and derivates, lutein, violaxanthin), while edges represent FRET transfer between chromophores. The link directionality connecting nodes in the PSI network depends on the energy levels of the connected chromophores. The…

train_terrorists: Madrid train bombing terrorists (2004)
A network of associations among the terrorists involved in the 2004 Madrid train bombing, as reconstructed from press stories after-the-fact. Edge weights encode four levels of connection strength: friendships, ties to Al Qaeda and Osama Bin Laden, co-participants in wars, and co-participants in previous terrorist attacks.
This network has 64 nodes and 243 edges.
Tags: Social, Offline, Weighted

advogato: Advogato trust network (2009)
A network of trust relationships among users on Advogato, an online community of open source software developers. Edge direction indicates that node i trusts node j, and edge weight denotes one of four increasing levels of declared trust from i to j: observer (0.4), apprentice (0.6), journeyer (0.8), and master (1.0).
This network has 6541 nodes and 51127 edges.
Tags: Social, Online, Weighted

internet_top_pop: Internet topology (PoP level) (1969-2012)
Assorted snapshots of internet graph at the Point of Presence (PoP) level (which lies between the IP and AS levels), collected from around the world and at various times. The earliest snapshots are for ARPANET (1969-1972), with a few more from pre-2000. Most are from 2006 onward. Metadata include link type or speed, longitudes, and latitudes of nodes, URL, and date of record.
This network has 54 nodes and 71 edges.

advogato: Advogato trust network (2009)
A network of trust relationships among users on Advogato, an online community of open source software developers. Edge direction indicates that node i trusts node j, and edge weight denotes one of four increasing levels of declared trust from i to j: observer (0.4), apprentice (0.6), journeyer (0.8), and master (1.0).
This network has 6541 nodes and 51127 edges.
Tags: Social, Online, Weighted