ReHacked #55: interspecies horizontal gene transmission, work from home, some bitcoin news and more
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The Work-From-Home Future Is Destroying Bosses' Brains #career #work
Silicon Valley Analyst Jeremiah Owyang vaguely reported that executives are scared of their employees “working part-time (but paid full salary)” and “even working on side hustle startups, while on a full-time salary,”
What would you pay for autonomous driving? Volkswagen hopes $8.50 per hour #technology
The future of driving may cost you $8.50 per hour if Volkswagen follows through on its boardroom musings.
The German automaker is considering charging an hourly fee for access to autonomous driving features once those features are ready. The company is also exploring a range of subscription features for its electric vehicles, including “range or performance” increases that can be purchased on an hourly or daily basis, said Thomas Ulbrich, a Volkswagen board member, to the German newspaper Die Welt. Ulbrich said the first subscription features will appear in the second quarter of 2022 in vehicles based on Volkswagen’s MEB platform, which underpins the company's new ID.3 compact car and ID.4 crossover.
DNA Jumps Between Animal Species. No One Knows How Often. #nature #longread
To survive in the frigid ocean waters around the Arctic and Antarctica, marine life evolved many defenses against the lethal cold. One common adaptation is the ability to make antifreezing proteins (AFPs) that prevent ice crystals from growing in blood, tissues and cells. It’s a solution that has evolved repeatedly and independently, not just in fish but in plants, fungi and bacteria.
It isn’t surprising, then, that herrings and smelts, two groups of fish that commonly roam the northernmost reaches of the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, both make AFPs. But it is very surprising, even weird, that both fish do so with the same AFP gene — particularly since their ancestors diverged more than 250 million years ago and the gene is absent from all the other fish species related to them.
A March paper in Trends in Genetics holds the unorthodox explanation: The gene became part of the smelt genome through a direct horizontal transfer from a herring. It wasn’t through hybridization, because herring and smelt can’t crossbreed, as many failed attempts have shown. The herring gene made its way into the smelt genome outside the normal sexual channels.
How Hackers Used Slack to Break into EA Games #security
The group stole the source code for FIFA 21 and related matchmaking tools, as well as the source code for the Frostbite engine that powers games like Battlefield and other internal game development tools. In all, the hackers claim they have 780GB of data, and are advertising it for sale on various underground forums.
OpenHistoricalMap #history
Netherlands must ban cryptocurrencies immediately: CPB head #blockchain
The cabinet must ban bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, head of central planning office CPB, Pieter Hasekamp said in Het Financieele Dagblad. He believes that a crash of cryptocurrencies is unavoidable and that the Netherlands should act as soon as possible.
"For investors and the governments alike, the last person to act is the loser. The Netherlands must now ban bitcoin," Hasekamp wrote in an essay published in the newspaper.
Hasekamp stated that several countries took steps to curb cryptocurrencies, citing fraud, criminal use, and financial instability. According to him, The Netherlands is lagging behind. Attempts have been made to tighten up the supervision of trading platforms but without much success.
El Salvador Will Use Volcanic Energy To Mine Bitcoin #blockchain
The president of El Salvador announced Wednesday that the country's state-run geothermal energy utility would begin using power derived from volcanoes for Bitcoin mining.
The announcement on social media came just hours after the Central American nation's congress voted to make the cryptocurrency an acceptable legal tender.
Particle seen switching between matter and antimatter at CERN #nature #science #physics
A subatomic particle has been found to switch between matter and antimatter, according to Oxford physicists analyzing data from the Large Hadron Collider. It turns out that an unfathomably tiny weight difference between two particles could have saved the universe from annihilation soon after it began.
Antimatter is kind of the “evil twin” of normal matter, but it’s surprisingly similar – in fact, the only real difference is that antimatter has the opposite charge. That means that if ever a matter and antimatter particle come into contact, they will annihilate each other in a burst of energy.
Pulitzer Prize: BuzzFeed News Wins For China Detention Investigation #news
BuzzFeed News won a Pulitzer Prize on Friday for a series of innovative articles that used satellite images, 3D architectural models, and daring in-person interviews to expose China’s vast infrastructure for detaining hundreds of thousands of Muslims in its Xinjiang region. The Pulitzer Prize is the highest honor in journalism, and this is the digital outlet’s first win since it was founded in 2012.
Goodbye Freenode | Ned Batchelder : moving from Freenode to Liberachat
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