ReHacked #166: The 'holy grail of catalysis', Germany records first monthly trade deficit since 1991, LHCb discovers three new exotic particles and more

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Found: The 'holy grail of catalysis'—turning methane into methanol under ambient conditions using light #technology #futurism

An international team of researchers, led by scientists at the University of Manchester, has developed a fast and economical method of converting methane, or natural gas, into liquid methanol at ambient temperature and pressure. The method takes place under continuous flow over a photo-catalytic material using visible light to drive the conversion.

Germany records first monthly trade deficit since 1991 as inflation soars | Germany | The Guardian #economy

Germany has recorded its first monthly trade deficit since 1991 amid soaring inflation and supply chain disruption weighing on the country’s industrial base.

Figures from the country’s statistics agency showed a surge in the value of imports and modest decline in exports had pushed Europe’s largest economy into a trade deficit of €1bn (£860m) in May.

The monthly deficit was the country’s first since the year after German reunification, according to Bloomberg.

Layover or nonstop? UCLA Health research says unique pattern of connectivity lets highly creative people’s brains take road less traveled to their destination | UCLA Health #health #psychology

Exceptionally creative visual artists and scientists – called “Big C” creative types – volunteered to undergo functional MRI brain imaging, giving researchers in psychiatry, behavioral sciences and psychology a look at how regions of the brain connected and interacted when called upon to perform tasks that put creative thinking to the test.

“Our results showed that highly creative people had unique brain connectivity that tended to stay off the beaten path,” said Ariana Anderson, a professor and statistician at the Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior at UCLA, the lead author of a new article in the journal Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts. While non-creatives tended to follow the same routes across the brain, the highly creative people made their own roads.

LHCb discovers three new exotic particles | CERN #science #nature

The international LHCb collaboration at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) has observed three never-before-seen particles: a new kind of “pentaquark” and the first-ever pair of “tetraquarks”, which includes a new type of tetraquark. The findings, presented today at a CERN seminar, add three new exotic members to the growing list of new hadrons found at the LHC. They will help physicists better understand how quarks bind together into these composite particles.

Quarks are elementary particles and come in six flavours: up, down, charm, strange, top and bottom. They usually combine together in groups of twos and threes to form hadrons such as the protons and neutrons that make up atomic nuclei. More rarely, however, they can also combine into four-quark and five-quark particles, or “tetraquarks” and “pentaquarks”. These exotic hadrons were predicted by theorists at the same time as conventional hadrons, about six decades ago, but only relatively recently, in the past 20 years, have they been observed by LHCb and other experiments.

EU Approves Landmark Legislation to Regulate Apple and Other Big Tech Firms - MacRumors #copyrights

The Digital Markets Act (DMA) and Digital Services Act (DSA) were proposed by the European Commission in December 2020. Now, collected in a "Digital Services Package," the legislation has been formally adopted by the European Parliament and seeks to address "gatekeeper" big tech companies.

Database stolen from Shanghai Police for sale on the darkweb • The Register #security

A threat actor has taken to a forum for news and discussion of data breaches with an offer to sell what they assert is a database containing records of over a billion Chinese civilians – allegedly stolen from the Shanghai Police.

Over the weekend, reports started to surface of a post to a forum at Breached.to. The post makes the following claim:

In 2022, the Shanghai National Police (SHGA) database was leaked. This database contains many TB of data and information on Billions of Chinese citizens.

HackerDan offered to sell the lot for 10 Bitcoin – about $200,000. We've saved HackerDan's post as a PDF in case it vanishes.

Auto manufacturer family tree: Who owns what? #infographics

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