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An anonymous reader quotes a report from the New York Times: For the first time, scientists are tracking the migration of monarch butterflies across much of North America, actively monitoring individual insects on journeys from as far away as Ontario all the way to their overwintering colonies in central Mexico. This long-sought achievement could provide crucial insights into the poorly understood life cycles of hundreds of species of butterflies, bees and other flying insects at a time when many are in steep decline. The breakthrough is the result of a tiny solar-powered radio tag that weighs just 60 milligrams and sells for $200. Researchers have tagged more than 400 monarchs this year and are now following their journeys on a cellphone app created by the New Jersey-based company that makes the tags, Cellular Tracking Technologies. Most monarchs weigh 500 to 600 milligrams, so each tag-bearing migrator making the transcontinental journey is, by weight, equivalent to a half-raisin carrying three uncooked grains of rice. Researchers are tracking more than 400 tagged monarch butterflies as they fly toward winter colonies in central Mexico. The maps [in the article] follow six butterflies. [...] Tracking the world's most famous insect migration may also have a big social impact, with monarch lovers able to follow the progress of individual butterflies on the free app, called Project Monarch Science. Many of the butterflies are flying over cities and suburbs where pollinator gardens are increasingly popular. Some tracks could even lead to the discovery of new winter hideaways. "There's nothing that's not amazing about this," said Cheryl Schultz, a butterfly scientist at Washington State University and the senior author of a recent study documenting a 22 percent drop in butterfly abundance in North America over a recent 20-year period. "Now we will have answers that could help us turn the tide for these bugs."

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Linux-Ready KSTR-IMX93 SBC Debuts With Wi-Fi 6, Cellular IoT, and 802.15.4 Connectivity  linuxgizmos.com

Linux-Ready KSTR-IMX93 SBC Debuts With Wi-Fi 6, Cellular IoT, and 802.15.4 Connectivity  linuxgizmos.com

Linux-Ready KSTR-IMX93 SBC Debuts With Wi-Fi 6, Cellular IoT, and 802.15.4 Connectivity  linuxgizmos.com

Linux-Ready KSTR-IMX93 SBC Debuts With Wi-Fi 6, Cellular IoT, and 802.15.4 Connectivity  linuxgizmos.com

Linux-Ready KSTR-IMX93 SBC Debuts With Wi-Fi 6, Cellular IoT, and 802.15.4 Connectivity  linuxgizmos.com

Linux-Ready KSTR-IMX93 SBC Debuts With Wi-Fi 6, Cellular IoT, and 802.15.4 Connectivity  linuxgizmos.com

Linux-Ready KSTR-IMX93 SBC Debuts With Wi-Fi 6, Cellular IoT, and 802.15.4 Connectivity  linuxgizmos.com

alternative_right shares a report from ScienceAlert: A new study from researchers in Australia reveals that the people who never forget faces look "smarter, not harder." In other words, they naturally focus on a person's most distinguishing facial features. "Their skill isn't something you can learn like a trick," explains lead author James Dunn, a psychology researcher at the University of New South Wales (UNSW) Sydney. "It's an automatic, dynamic way of picking up what makes each face unique." To see what super-recognizers see, Dunn and his colleagues used eye-tracking technology to reconstruct how people surveyed new faces. They did this with 37 super-recognizers and 68 people with ordinary facial recognition skills, noting where and for how long participants looked at pictures of faces displayed on a computer screen. The researchers then fed the data into machine learning algorithms trained to recognize faces. The algorithms, a type known as deep neural networks, were tasked with deciding if two faces belonged to the same person. "These findings suggest that the perceptual foundations of individual differences in face recognition ability may originate at the earliest stages of visual processing -- at the level of retinal encoding," Dunn and colleagues write in their paper. The findings have been published in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences.

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I found an immutable Linux distro that never breaks and is effortless to use  ZDNET

Valve engineer who keeps decade-old Radeon GPUs alive on Linux, now pushes for AMDGPU to become the default driver  [H]ard|Forum

Valve engineer who keeps decade-old Radeon GPUs alive on Linux, now pushes for AMDGPU to become the default driver  [H]ard|Forum

Valve engineer who keeps decade-old Radeon GPUs alive on Linux, now pushes for AMDGPU to become the default driver  [H]ard|Forum

Valve engineer who keeps decade-old Radeon GPUs alive on Linux, now pushes for AMDGPU to become the default driver  [H]ard|Forum

Valve engineer who keeps decade-old Radeon GPUs alive on Linux, now pushes for AMDGPU to become the default driver  [H]ard|Forum

Chinese automakers are rapidly expanding across South America, boosted by the new Chinese-built Port of Chancay, aggressive pricing, local partnerships, and growing regional demand. Reuters reports: China has been ramping up sales since the opening last year of the Port of Chancay, north of Lima. The Chinese-built megaport has halved trans-Pacific shipping times just as Chinese manufacturers face rising barriers to entry in the United States and greater trade restrictions in Europe. BYD, which makes EVs, plug-in hybrids and combustion engine cars, plans to open a fourth dealership in Lima by the end of this year, while Chery and Geely have more than a dozen in total in Peru. Chinese carmakers face a profit-destroying price war at home and a growing surplus of new cars rolling out of Chinese factory lines. Much of this excess is being shipped overseas to the Middle East, Central Asia and Latin America, according to global automotive analyst Felipe Munoz at JATO Dynamics. The Chinese have "carved out space," across both electric and petrol-powered cars, said Martin Bresciani, president of Chile's automotive business chamber, CAVEM. "The Chinese have already demonstrated that they match global standards in quality." Chinese brands reached 29.6% of all new passenger car sales in Chile in the first quarter of this year. [...] Part of China's success has been partnering with trusted local importers to offer more affordable models tailored to regional tastes, according to seven dealerships Reuters spoke to in Peru, Chile, Uruguay and Argentina.

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Even after disabling remote control and officially ending support for early Nest Learning Thermostats, Google is still receiving detailed sensor and activity data from these devices, including temperature changes, motion, and ambient light. The Verge reports: After digging into the backend, security researcher Cody Kociemba found that the first- and second-generation Nest Learning Thermostats are still sending Google information about manual temperature changes, whether a person is present in the room, if sunlight is hitting the device, and more. Kociemba made the discovery while participating in a bounty program created by FULU, a right-to-repair advocacy organization cofounded by electronics repair technician and YouTuber Louis Rossmann. FULU challenged developers to come up with a solution to restore smart functionality to Nest devices no longer supported by Google, and that's exactly what Kociemba did with his open-source No Longer Evil project. But after cloning Google's API to create this custom software, he started receiving a trove of logs from customer devices, which he turned off. "On these devices, while they [Google] turned off access to remotely control them, they did leave in the ability for the devices to upload logs. And the logs are pretty extensive," Kociemba tells The Verge. [...] "I was under the impression that the Google connection would be severed along with the remote functionality, however that connection is not severed, and instead is a one-way street," Kociemba says.

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AlmaLinux OS 9.7 Is Out as a Free Alternative to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9.7  9to5Linux

AlmaLinux OS 9.7 Is Out as a Free Alternative to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9.7  9to5Linux

AlmaLinux OS 9.7 Is Out as a Free Alternative to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9.7  9to5Linux