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These squirrels are cold-blooded vole killers
Novel hunting behavior may have emerged alongside a marked increase in the local vole population this summer.
We think of squirrels as adorably harmless creatures, admiring their bushy tails and twitchy little noses and the way they cram their cheeks with nuts or seeds to bring back to their nests for later. But the rodents turn out to be a bit more bloodthirsty than we thought. According to a new paper published in the Journal of Ethology, California ground squirrels have been caught in the act—many times over—of chasing, killing, and eating voles.
Co-author Jennifer Smith, a biologist at the University of Wisconsin, Eau Claire, described the behavior as “shocking,” given the sheer number of times they watched squirrels do this. “We had never seen this behavior before,” she said. “Squirrels are one of the most familiar animals to people. We see them right outside our windows; we interact with them regularly. Yet here’s this never-before-encountered-in-science behavior that sheds light on the fact that there’s so much more to learn about the natural history of the world around us.”
Squirrels mainly consume acorns, seeds, nuts, and fruits, but they have been known to supplement that diet with insects and, occasionally, stealing eggs or young hatchlings from nests. And back in 1993, biologist J.R Callahan caused a stir by reporting that as many as 30 species of squirrel could be preying on smaller creatures: namely, fish, amphibians, reptiles, birds, and the occasional small mammal.
Report: Elon Musk failed to report movement required by security clearance
No federal agencies have accused Musk of disclosing classified information.
A new investigation from The New York Times suggests that SpaceX founder Elon Musk has not been reporting his travel activities and other information to the Department of Defense as required by his top-secret clearance.
According to the newspaper, concerns about Musk’s reporting practices have led to reviews by three different bodies within the military; the Air Force, the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence and Security, and the Defense Department Office of Inspector General.
However, none of the federal agencies cited in the Times article has accused Musk of disclosing classified material.
The new Nvidia App is probably hurting your PC gaming performance
Fully disabling optional, AI-powered filters seems to fix the problem.
When Nvidia replaced the longstanding GeForce Experience App with a new, unified Nvidia App last month, most GPU owners probably noted the refresh and rebranding with nothing more than bemusement (though the new lack of an account login requirement was a nice improvement). Now, testing shows that running the new app with default settings can lead to some significant frame rate dips on many high-end games, even when the app’s advanced AI features aren’t being actively used.
Tom’s Hardware noted the performance dip after reading reports of related problems around the web. The site’s testing with and without the Nvidia App installed confirms that, across five games running on an RTX 4060, the app reduced average frame rates by around 3 to 6 percent, depending on the resolution and graphical quality level.
The site’s measured frame rate drop peaked at 12 percent for Assassin’s Creed Mirage running at 1080p Ultra settings; other tested games (including Baldur’s Gate 3, Black Myth: Wukong, Flight Simulator 2024, and Stalker 2) showed a smaller drop at most settings.
After decades of talk, Seagate seems ready to actually drop the HAMR hard drives
At least one gigantic cloud provider has signed off on the drives’ viability.
How do you fit 32 terabytes of storage into a hard drive? With a HAMR.
Seagate has been experimenting with heat-assisted magnetic recording, or HAMR, since at least 2002. The firm has occasionally popped up to offer a demonstration or make yet another “around the corner” pronouncement. The press has enjoyed myriad chances to celebrate the wordplay of Stanley Kirk Burrell, but new qualification from large-scale customers might mean HAMR drives will be actually available, to buy, as physical objects, for anyone who can afford the most magnetic space possible. Third decade’s the charm, perhaps.
HAMR works on the principle that, when heated, a disk’s magnetic materials can hold more data in smaller spaces, such that you can fit more overall data on the drive. It’s not just putting a tiny hot plate inside an HDD chassis; as Seagate explains in its technical paper, “the entire process—heating, writing, and cooling—takes less than 1 nanosecond.” Getting from a physics concept to an actual drive involved adding a laser diode to the drive head, optical steering, firmware alterations, and “a million other little things that engineers spent countless hours developing.” Seagate has a lot more about Mozaic 3+ on its site.
Companies issuing RTO mandates “lose their best talent”: Study
Despite the risks, firms and Trump are eager to get people back into offices.
Return-to-office (RTO) mandates have caused companies to lose some of their best workers, a study tracking over 3 million workers at 54 “high-tech and financial” firms at the S&P 500 index has found. These companies also have greater challenges finding new talent, the report concluded.
The paper, Return-to-Office Mandates and Brain Drain [PDF], comes from researchers from the University of Pittsburgh, as well as Baylor University, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, and Cheung Kong Graduate School of Business. The study, which was published in November, spotted this month by human resources (HR) publication HR Dive, and cites Ars Technica reporting, was conducted by collecting information on RTO announcements and sourcing data from LinkedIn. The researchers said they only examined companies with data available for at least two quarters before and after they issued RTO mandates. The researchers explained:
To collect employee turnover data, we follow prior literature … and obtain the employment history information of over 3 million employees of the 54 RTO firms from Revelio Labs, a leading data provider that extracts information from employee LinkedIn profiles. We manually identify employees who left a firm during each period, then calculate the firm’s turnover rate by dividing the number of departing employees by the total employee headcount at the beginning of the period. We also obtain information about employees’ gender, seniority, and the number of skills listed on their individual LinkedIn profiles, which serves as a proxy for employees’ skill level.
There are limits to the study, however. The researchers noted that the study “cannot draw causal inferences based on our setting.” Further, smaller firms and firms outside of the high-tech and financial industries may show different results. Although not mentioned in the report, relying on data from a social media platform could also yield inaccuracies, and the number of skills listed on a LinkedIn profile may not accurately depict a worker’s skill level.
OpenAI’s API users get full access to the new o1 model
Newest API upgrade also includes fine-tuning and real-time interaction improvements.
Application developers who access OpenAI through its long-running API will now have access to the company’s latest full o1 model, rather than the months-old o1-preview. The upgrade is one of a number of new features being rolled out to OpenAI’s developer customers starting today.
OpenAI announced during a livestream today that the new o1 model would bring back many of the “core features you’ve been missing” from the API during o1-preview. This includes the ability to use developer messages to help guide your particular chatbot (i.e. “You are a helpful assistant for tax professionals.”) and access to a “reasoning effort” parameter that tells the API how long to think about specific queries, saving time and money on simple problems so they can be used on the tougher ones. API users can also use visual information like scans of documents as input.
OpenAI also highlighted improvements to the new API’s use of internal function calling, where the OpenAI model decides to call functions pre-written by outside developers to generate answers to certain queries, when appropriate. The new API is also more accurate in its use of structured outputs, which use a JSON schema to present information in a specific format outlined by the developer, OpenAI said.
Nvidia partners leak next-gen RTX 50-series GPUs, including a 32GB 5090
The 5080, 5070 Ti, 5070, and a 5090D variant for China were also listed.
Rumors have suggested that Nvidia will be taking the wraps off of some next-generation RTX 50-series graphics cards at CES in January. And as we get closer to that date, Nvidia’s partners and some of the PC makers have begun to inadvertently leak details of the cards.
According to recent leaks from both Zotac and Acer, it looks like Nvidia is planning to announce four new GPUs next month, all at the high end of its lineup: The RTX 5090, RTX 5080, RTX 5070 Ti, and RTX 5070 were all briefly listed on Zotac’s website, as spotted by VideoCardz. There’s also an RTX 5090D variant for the Chinese market, which will presumably have its specs tweaked to conform with current US export restrictions on high-performance GPUs.
Though the website leak didn’t confirm many specs, it did list the RTX 5090 as including 32GB of GDDR7, an upgrade from the 4090’s 24GB of GDDR6X. An Acer spec sheet for new Predator Orion desktops also lists 32GB of GDDR7 for the 4090, as well as 16GB of GDDR7 for the RTX 5080. This is the same amount of RAM included with the RTX 4080 and 4080 Super.
Big loss for ISPs as Supreme Court won’t hear challenge to $15 broadband law
ISPs fear more states will regulate prices as New York law survives challenge.
The Supreme Court yesterday rejected the broadband industry’s challenge to a New York law that requires Internet providers to offer $15- or $20-per-month service to people with low incomes.
In August, six trade groups representing the cable, telecom, mobile, and satellite industries filed a petition asking the Supreme Court to overturn an appeals court ruling that upheld the state law. But the Supreme Court won’t take up the case. The high court denied the telecom groups’ petition without comment in a list of orders released yesterday.
Although a US District Court judge blocked the law in 2021, that judge’s ruling was reversed by the US Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit in April 2024. The Supreme Court’s denial of the industry petition leaves the 2nd Circuit ruling in place.
Facing ban next month, TikTok begs SCOTUS for help
Will TikTok shut down next month? SCOTUS may intervene.
TikTok has asked the Supreme Court to step in before it’s forced to shut down the app in the US next month.
In a petition requesting a temporary injunction, TikTok prompted the Supreme Court to block the ban and grant a review that TikTok believes will result in a verdict that the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act is unconstitutional. And if the court cannot take up this review before TikTok’s suggested January 6 deadline, the court should issue an administrative injunction delaying the ban until after Trump’s inauguration, TikTok argued, seemingly seeking any path to delay enforcement, even if only by a day.
According to TikTok, it makes no sense to force the app to shut down on January 19 if, the very next day or soon thereafter, Trump will take office and pause or otherwise intervene with enforcement.
Here’s the new hybrid Honda Prelude, on sale late 2025
This version will feature something called Honda S+ Shift, to boost engagement.
The fact that Honda was working on a new Prelude coupe was not entirely secret—not after the automaker unveiled a show car at this year’s Long Beach Grand Prix. This morning, the Japanese automaker confirmed that the new Prelude will go on sale here in the US late in 2025.
“The return of the Honda Prelude as a hybrid-electric sports model demonstrates our continued commitment to offer a variety of exhilarating products to meet the needs of our customers,” said Jessika Laudermilk, assistant vice president of Honda Auto Sales. “The first three products in the Honda lineup in the 1970s were Civic, Accord, and Prelude, and soon all three will be back together again in our passenger car lineup as hybrids.”
Honda has often used the two-door Prelude coupe as a testbed for new technologies, including torque vectoring and four-wheel steering, and was praised by the late automotive writer LJK Setright, who owned several Preludes across the years.