ars-rss
Taco Bell, KFC, Pizza Hut, Burger King pull onions amid McDonald’s outbreak
Onions have not been confirmed as the source, but restaurants aren’t taking chances.
Big-name fast food chains, including Taco Bell, KFC, Pizza Hut, and Burger King, are reportedly pulling onions off their menus in certain locations amid a deadly, multistate outbreak of E. coli O157:H7 linked to McDonald’s Quarter Pounders.
Though the source of the outbreak bacteria has not been confirmed by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the leading suspects are the beef patties and the sliced onions used on the popular burger.
On Wednesday, McDonald’s onion supplier Taylor Farms recalled peeled and diced yellow onion products, according to a notice from US Foods, a supplier of food service operations.
Good Omens will wrap with a single 90-minute episode
Creator Neil Gaiman has exited the series in the wake of sexual assault allegations.
The third and final season of Good Omens, Prime Video’s fantasy series adapted from the classic 1990 novel by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett, will not be a full season after all, Deadline Hollywood reports. In the wake of allegations of sexual assault against Gaiman this summer, the streaming platform has decided that rather than a full slate of episodes, the series finale will be a single 90-minute episode—the equivalent of a TV movie.
(Major spoilers for the S2 finale of Good Omens below.)
As reported previously, the series is based on the original 1990 novel by Gaiman and the late Pratchett. Good Omens is the story of an angel, Aziraphale (Michael Sheen), and a demon, Crowley (David Tennant), who gradually become friends over the millennia and team up to avert Armageddon. Gaiman’s obvious deep-down, fierce love for this project—and the powerful chemistry between its stars—made the first season a sheer joy to watch. Apart from a few minor quibbles, it was pretty much everything book fans could have hoped for in a TV adaptation of Good Omens.
With four more years like 2023, carbon emissions will blow past 1.5° limit
With each passing year, it gets harder to reach net zero quickly enough.
On Thursday, the United Nations’ Environmental Programme (UNEP) released a report on what it terms the “emissions gap”—the difference between where we’re heading and where we’d need to be to achieve the goals set out in the Paris Agreement. It makes for some pretty grim reading. Given last year’s greenhouse gas emissions, we can afford fewer than four similar years before we would exceed the total emissions compatible with limiting the planet’s warming to 1.5° C above pre-industrial conditions. Following existing policies out to the turn of the century would leave us facing over 3° C of warming.
The report ascribes this situation to two distinct emissions gaps: between the goals of the Paris Agreement and what countries have pledged to do and between their pledges and the policies they’ve actually put in place. There are some reasons to think that rapid progress could be made—the six largest greenhouse gas emitters accounted for nearly two-thirds of the global emissions, so it wouldn’t take many policy changes to make a big difference. And the report suggests increased deployment of wind and solar could handle over a quarter of the needed emissions reductions.
But so far, progress has been far too limited to cut into global emissions.
Bird flu hit a dead end in Missouri, but it’s running rampant in California
No new cases in Missouri, but plenty in California and Washington.
As H5N1 bird flu continues to spread wildly among California dairy herds and farmworkers, federal health officials on Thursday offered some relatively good news about Missouri: The wily avian influenza virus does not appear to have spread from the state’s sole human case, which otherwise remains a mystery.
On September 6, the Missouri Health department announced that a person with underlying health conditions tested positive for bird flu, and later testing indicated that it was an H5N1 strain related to the one currently circulating among US dairy cows. But, state and federal health officials were—and still are—stumped as to how that person became infected. The person had no known contact with infected animals and no contact with any obviously suspect animal products. No dairy herds in Missouri have tested positive, and no poultry farms had reported recent outbreaks, either. To date, all other human cases of H5N1 have been among farmworkers who had contact with H5N1-infected animals.
But aside from the puzzle, attention turned to the possibility that the unexplained Missouri case had passed on the infection to those around them. A household contact had symptoms at the same time as the person—aka the index case—and at least six health care workers developed illnesses after interacting with the person. One of the six had tested negative for bird flu around the time of their illness, but questions remained about the other five.
Apple teases “week of announcements” about the Mac starting on Monday
Announcements will almost certainly include the first wave of M4-powered Macs.
Apple has released new iPhones, new Apple Watches, a new iPad mini, and a flotilla of software updates this fall, but Mac hardware has gone unmentioned so far. That’s set to change next week, according to an uncharacteristically un-cryptic post from Apple Worldwide Marketing SVP Greg Joswiak earlier today.
Imploring readers to “Mac [sic] their calendars,” Joswiak’s post teases “an exciting week of announcements ahead, starting on Monday morning.” If the wordplay wasn’t enough, an attached teaser video with a winking neon Mac logo drives the point home.
Though Joswiak’s post was light on additional details, months of reliable rumors have told us the most likely things to expect: refreshed MacBook Pros and 24-inch iMacs with few if any external changes but new Apple M4-series chips on the inside, plus a new M4 Mac mini with a substantial design overhaul. The MacBook Pros and iMacs were refreshed with M3 chips almost exactly a year ago, but the Mac mini was last updated with the M2 back in early 2023.
Removal of Russian coders spurs debate about Linux kernel’s politics
Torvalds defends move, says “Russian troll factories” won’t deter him.
“Remove some entries due to various compliance requirements. They can come back in the future if sufficient documentation is provided.”
That two-line comment, submitted by major Linux kernel maintainer Greg Kroah-Hartman, accompanied a patch that removed about a dozen names from the kernle’s MAINTAINERS file. “Some entries” notably had either Russian names or .ru email addresses. “Various compliance requirements” was, in this case, sanctions against Russia and Russian companies, stemming from that country’s invasion of Ukraine.
This merge did not go unnoticed. Replies on the kernel mailing list asked about this “very vague” patch. Kernel developer James Bottomley wrote that “we” (seemingly speaking for Linux maintainers) had “actual advice” from Linux Foundation counsel. Employees of companies on the Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control list of Specially Designated Nationals and Blocked Persons (OFAC SDN), or connected to them, will have their collaborations “subject to restrictions,” and “cannot be in the MAINTAINERS file.” “Sufficient documentation” would mean evidence that someone does not work for an OFAC SDN entity, Bottomley wrote.
Google offers its AI watermarking tech as free open source toolkit
SynthID provides a hidden way to mark LLM output as artificial.
Back in May, Google augmented its Gemini AI model with SynthID, a toolkit that embeds AI-generated content with watermarks it says are “imperceptible to humans” but can be easily and reliably detected via an algorithm. Today, Google took that SynthID system open source, offering the same basic watermarking toolkit for free to developers and businesses.
The move gives the entire AI industry an easy, seemingly robust way to silently mark content as artificially generated, which could be useful for detecting deepfakes and other damaging AI content before it goes out in the wild. But there are still some important limitations that may prevent AI watermarking from becoming a de facto standard across the AI industry any time soon.
Spin the wheel of tokens
Google uses a version of SynthID to watermark audio, video, and images generated by its multimodal AI systems, with differing techniques that are explained briefly in this video. But in a new paper published in Nature, Google researchers go into detail on how the SynthID process embeds an unseen watermark in the text-based output of its Gemini model.
When ribosomes go rogue
Unusual variations in the cellular protein factory can skew development, help cancer spread and more. But ribosome variety may also play biological roles, scientists say.
In the 1940s, scientists at the recently established National Cancer Institute were trying to breed mice that could inform our understanding of cancer, either because they predictably developed certain cancers or were surprisingly resistant.
The team spotted a peculiar litter in which some baby mice had short, kinked tails and misplaced ribs growing out of their neck bones. The strain of mice, nicknamed “tail short,” has been faithfully bred ever since, in the hope that one day, research might reveal what was the matter with them.
After more than 60 years, researchers finally got their answer, when Maria Barna, a developmental biologist then at the University of California San Francisco, found that the mice had a genetic mutation that caused a protein to disappear from their ribosomes — the places in cells where proteins are made.
Location tracking of phones is out of control. Here’s how to fight back.
Unique IDs assigned to Android and iOS devices threaten your privacy. Who knew?
You likely have never heard of Babel Street or Location X, but chances are good that they know a lot about you and anyone else you know who keeps a phone nearby around the clock.
Reston, Virginia-located Babel Street is the little-known firm behind Location X, a service with the capability to track the locations of hundreds of millions of phone users over sustained periods of time. Ostensibly, Babel Street limits the use of the service to personnel and contractors of US government law enforcement agencies, including state entities. Despite the restriction, an individual working on behalf of a company that helps people remove their personal information from consumer data broker databases recently was able to obtain a two-week free trial by (truthfully) telling Babel Street he was considering performing contracting work for a government agency in the future.
Tracking locations at scale
KrebsOnSecurity, one of five news outlets that obtained access to the data produced during the trial, said that one capability of Location X is the ability to draw a line between two states or other locations—or a shape around a building, street block, or entire city—and see a historical record of Internet-connected devices that traversed those boundaries.
At TED AI 2024, experts grapple with AI’s growing pains
A year later, a compelling group of TED speakers move from “what’s this?” to “what now?”
SAN FRANCISCO—On Tuesday, TED AI 2024 kicked off its first day at San Francisco’s Herbst Theater with a lineup of speakers that tackled AI’s impact on science, art, and society. The two-day event brought a mix of researchers, entrepreneurs, lawyers, and other experts who painted a complex picture of AI with fairly minimal hype.
The second annual conference, organized by Walter and Sam De Brouwer, marked a notable shift from last year’s broad existential debates and proclamations of AI as being “the new electricity.” Rather than sweeping predictions about, say, looming artificial general intelligence (although there was still some of that, too), speakers mostly focused on immediate challenges: battles over training data rights, proposals for hardware-based regulation, debates about human-AI relationships, and the complex dynamics of workplace adoption.
The day’s sessions covered a wide breadth: physicist Carlo Rovelli explored consciousness and time, Project CETI researcher Patricia Sharma demonstrated attempts to use AI to decode whale communication, Recording Academy CEO Harvey Mason Jr. outlined music industry adaptation strategies, and even a few robots made appearances.