Show newer

Balloons carrying radio antennas over Antarctica have detected mysterious radio pulses coming up from the ice! Physicists can't yet explain them.

These balloons detect radio pulses when extraordinarily energetic particles from outer space smash into the Earth's atmosphere and create showers of electrons and positrons. People aren't sure where these particles come from. Most are probably atomic nuclei shot out of supernovae or quasars. That's one reason we've got these balloons over the Antarctic - to learn more. But I'm talking about a different mystery.

Some of these radio pulses come from above. Others come from below! But that's not a mystery: radio waves are reflected by the ice. And we can tell that's what's happening, because when radio waves are reflected, their polarization flips.

But a few pulses coming from below DON'T have their polarization flipped. And nobody knows what makes those! That's the mystery. Enough explanations have been ruled out that people are starting to talk about "new physics".

This "polarization flip" business confuses me, so I read about it. This is what I understand so far:

When a shower of electrons and positrons comes down through the air, they get pushed in opposite directions by the Earth's magnetic field. So you get an electrical current, and this makes radio waves. You can tell from these radio waves which way the shower came from, because the current is always at right angles to both the velocity of the shower and the Earth's magnetic field.

When the radio waves bounce off the ice, they should look different. But we're seeing some radio waves coming from below that don't look like that!

(1/2)

psu.edu/news/research/story/st

:youtube: **The Rise of Anti-Intellectualism (& how to defeat it)**

Stephen Petro

"_In the past decade, we have seen a rise in anti-intellectualism..._

_Critical thinking and intelligence aren't valued - instead, stupidity is._

_But it's not inevitable, and we can change it. In this video, I show you how._"

length: thirteen minutes and nineteen seconds.

🔗 youtube.com/watch?v=O-tG7pgoQz.

@philosophy

💻 **Dark LLMs: The Growing Threat of Unaligned AI Models**

"_In our research, we uncovered a universal jailbreak attack that effectively compromises multiple state-of-the-art models, enabling them to answer almost any question and produce harmful outputs upon request._"

Fire, M. et al. (2025) Dark LLMs: The growing threat of unaligned AI models. arxiv.org/abs/2505.10066.

@ai

💻 **Rates Of Hallucination In AI Models From Google, OpenAI On The Rise**

"_In a recent study, it was found that two recent OpenAI models, o3 and 04-mini, hallucinated in 33% and 48% of answers, respectively, according to The Times of London. These percentages are more than double those of previous models._"

🔗 finance.yahoo.com/news/rates-h.

@ai

Thank you both (@elaterite and @jgg) very much for the kind words of advice.

I was really struggling with Windows 10 on my desktop. It is an old machine and I found increasingly the simplest tasks like having more than one window open at a time would crash it. The final straw came when I just could not get it to keep WiFi connection for more than a second if it worked at all. I am unable to connect with a cable due to the desktop being on a completely different floor and area of the house. With the fact that Microsoft kept sending me messages that they finishing support for Windows 10 in October and 'encouraging' to buy a new computer I decided to move to Linux Mint XFCE. I have used Linux Mint before over ten years ago and feel comfortable with it.

I am trying to change my very old, cheap, and decrepit desktop over from Windows to Linux. I am not tech-savvy and this is taking an inordinate amount of time. Especially as I cannot keep the desktop from loosing internet connection every second.

CEOs Are Creating Copies of Themselves That Are Spouting Braindead Hallucinations to Their Confused Underlings
futurism.com/ceos-ai-clones-ha

Posted into Advanced Transportation @advanced-transportation-Futurism

🇬🇧 📚 **Children’s reading enjoyment falls to lowest recorded level in UK**

_“This year’s data is once again stark,” said NLT CEO Jonathan Douglas. “We are witnessing the lowest levels of reading enjoyment and daily reading in a generation – a critical challenge for literacy, wellbeing and life chances. Children’s futures are being put at risk and joining forces across sectors to address the reading for pleasure crisis is essential”._

🔗 theguardian.com/books/2025/jun.

@bookstodon

:mastodon: Sorry for the delay in replying to comments; sometimes, one's physical health takes precedence even over and .

🇬🇧 **Imperfect Memories of British Slavery**

“_British abolition in 1833 was accompanied by £20 million paid in compensation to slaveholders, many of whom subsequently “forgot” slavery ever existed._”

🔗 daily.jstor.org/imperfect-memo.

@histodons

📚 **How to read and why**

“_Some of the best advice I have had is that if you really want to get your head around a topic, read two different books about it simultaneously._”

🔗 jmarriott.substack.com/p/how-i.

@bookstodon

**Born On This Day: Sarah Rapelje**

Sarah Rapelje was born on this day in Albany on 9th June 1625. She was the first child of European descent to be born in the Dutch colony of New Netherland.

@histodons

Show older
Qoto Mastodon

QOTO: Question Others to Teach Ourselves
An inclusive, Academic Freedom, instance
All cultures welcome.
Hate speech and harassment strictly forbidden.