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The menacing rattle of a rattlesnake's tail is far more sophisticated than first thought, as the structure can create an auditory illusion that suggests the venomous snake is closer to a potential threat than it really is, according to a new study. Scientists think that rattlesnakes "rattle" the keratin structure on their tails to warn off predators, gradually increasing the frequency as a possible attacker gets closer. But now they've found the snake may have another trick in its arsenal — a sudden frequency jump in the rattling sound that it uses to fool its listener. "Our data show that the acoustic display of rattlesnakes, which has been interpreted for decades as a simple acoustic warning signal about the presence of the snake, is in fact a far more intricate interspecies communication signal," senior study author Boris Chagnaud, a professor of neurobiology at Karl-Franzens-University Graz in Austria, said in a statement. Chagnaud discovered the first clue to the mystery of rattlesnakes' "smart signal" high-frequency mode while approaching one of the snakes during a visit to a laboratory. He noticed that the frequency of the snake's iconic rattle increased before suddenly jumping as he approached, but decreased as he retreated. To figure out what was behind this phenomenon, he and his team recorded the frequency of the rattle as various objects — including a human-like torso and a black disk — were brought closer to the snake. As threats first approached, the rattling rose by a steady rate to a frequency of 40 Hz, but as the objects came closer, the frequency suddenly jumped to between 60 and 100 Hz. According to the researchers, the rattling rate increased more quickly the faster the object approached, but changing the size of the object didn't impact the frequency level. To figure out why the snake was changing its rattling rate, and why it was using a sudden jump in frequency, the researchers designed a virtual reality grassland with a virtual snake hiding inside of it. Sending 11 volunteers inside the simulation, the researchers asked the volunteers to approach the virtual snake and indicate when the creature was 3.3 feet (1 meter) away. The cyber snake increased its rattling rate as the humans approached, suddenly leaping to 70 Hz as the volunteers came within 13 feet (4 m), and was able to trick all of the human participants into underestimating their distance to it. Chagnaud thinks that rattlesnakes weave this weird auditory illusion in order to create a "distance safety margin" between them and a potential attacker. He hypothesizes that human hearing, alongside the other mammalian auditory systems that it is closely related to, picks up on the frequency of the rattle and the rule of how it increases with distance, only to be fooled when the snake changes this rule with an unexpected, and sudden, jump in the frequency. "Imagine you walk towards the snake, it starts to rattle slowly, increasing the rattle events incrementally. If at a distance of 2 meters [6.5 feet] from the snake, the snake suddenly changes this rule, and instead of making the 2 meter sound, it makes the sounds like it's only at 1 meter [3.3 feet], then it fooled you," Chagnaud told Live Science in an email. Sure enough, when Chagnaud tested this hypothesis by repeating his virtual reality experiment without the frequency jumps, his human participants were far better at guessing the distance to the virtual snake. "Snakes do not just rattle to advertise their presence, but they evolved an innovative solution: a sonic distance warning device similar to the one included in cars while driving backwards," he said in the statement. "Evolution is a random process, and what we might interpret from today's perspective as elegant design is in fact the outcome of thousands of trials of snakes encountering large mammals. The snake rattling coevolved with mammalian auditory perception by trial and error, leaving those snakes that were best able

https://www.bbc.com/news The Taliban recently "massacred" and brutally tortured several members of the Hazara minority in Afghanistan, says human rights group Amnesty International. Witnesses have given harrowing accounts of the killings, which took place in early July in Ghazni province. Since taking over the Afghan capital Kabul on Sunday, the Taliban have tried to portray a more restrained image. But Amnesty said the incident was a "horrifying indicator" of Taliban rule. The Hazara community is Afghanistan's third largest ethnic group. They mainly practise Shia Islam and have faced long-term discrimination and persecution in predominantly Sunni Afghanistan and Pakistan. 'Everything I ever thought I would have is gone' In the report published on Thursday, Amnesty said the nine Hazara men were killed between 4 and 6 July in Malistan district in the eastern Ghazni province. The rights group interviewed eyewitnesses and reviewed photographic evidence after the killings. Villagers said they had escaped to the mountains when fighting intensified between government forces and Taliban fighters. When some of them returned to the village of Mundarakht to collect food, they said the Taliban had looted their homes and were waiting for them. Separately, some men who passed through Mundarakht on their way home to their hamlet were also ambushed. In total six men were allegedly shot, some in the head, and three were tortured to death. According to witness accounts, one man was strangled with his own scarf and had his arm muscles sliced off. Another's body was shot to pieces. One eyewitness said they asked the fighters why they inflicted such brutality on their people. "When it is the time of conflict, everyone dies, it doesn't matter if you have guns or not. It is the time of war," a fighter allegedly said. Amnesty's Secretary-General Agnès Callamard said: "The cold-blooded brutality of these killings is a reminder of the Taliban's past record, and a horrifying indicator of what Taliban rule may bring." "These targeted killings are proof that ethnic and religious minorities remain at particular risk under Taliban rule in Afghanistan." It added that mobile phone services have been cut in many of the areas that have been captured by the Taliban, and so information about the killing had not leaked out until now. Amnesty called on the UN to investigate and protect those at risk. The Taliban were known for their brutal rule of Afghanistan which deprived women and ethnic minorities of their rights, before they were ousted by a US-led coalition in 2001. In a press conference following its takeover of Kabul, the militant group promised it would not launch revenge attacks on anyone who worked with US forces, and that it would also grant women rights under Islamic sharia law. But a UN document has warned that Taliban fighters have been going door-to-door to search for people who worked for Nato forces or the previous Afghan government.

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https://www.livescience.com/ A beetle that lived about 49 million years ago is so well-preserved that the insect looks like it could spread its strikingly patterned wing coverings and fly away. That is, if it weren't squashed and fossilized. Wing cases, or elytra, are one of the sturdiest parts of a beetle's exoskeleton, but even so, this level of color contrast and clarity in a fossil is exceptionally rare, scientists recently reported. The beautiful design on the ancient beetle's elytra prompted researchers to name it Pulchritudo attenboroughi, or Attenborough's Beauty, after famed naturalist and television host Sir David Attenborough. They wrote in a new study that the pattern is "the most perfectly preserved pigment-based colouration known in fossil beetles." When the researchers described the beetle beauty, it was already in the collection of the Denver Museum of Nature and Science (DMNS) in Colorado, where it had been on display since it was identified in 1995. Paleontologists found the fossil that year in the Green River Formation; once a group of lakes, this rich fossil site spans Colorado, Wyoming and Utah, and dates to the Eocene epoch (55.8 million to 33.9 million years ago). Scientists initially classified the fossil as a long-horned beetle in the Cerambycidae genus. But while its body shape resembled those of long-horned beetles, its hind limbs were unusually short and beefy, which led the museum's senior curator of entomology — Frank-Thorsten Krell, lead author of the new study — to question if the beetle might belong to a different group. In the study, the authors described the beetle as a new genus in a subfamily known for its robust and powerful hind legs: frog-legged leaf beetles. The fossilized insect, a female, is only the second example of a frog-legged leaf beetle to be found in North America, Krell told Live Science in an email (no modern beetles in this group live in North America today, according to the study). On P. attenboroughi's back, dark and symmetrical circular patterns stand out in sharp contrast against a light background. This suggests that bold patterns were present in beetles at least 50 million years ago, the researchers reported For a beetle to fossilize as well as this one did, "you need a very fine-grained sediment," Krell said. Silt or clay at the bottom of a lake is the best substrate for fossilizing insects, and the beetle must sink quickly into the silty lake bottom before its body disintegrates. "And then it should not rot, so an oxygen-poor environment on the lake floor is helpful," he said.

https://www.bbc.com/news The BBC's Kayleen Devlin tells a harrowing story of how the life of a young artist who came to help fight deadly forest fires in Algeria was ended by a mob. On 9 August, Algeria experienced the worst fires in the country's history: some 71 blazes spread across 18 provinces, and raged for three days. At least 90 people were killed and scores injured. The Kabylie region, east of the capital Algiers, was the worst hit. A flurry of images and videos have emerged on social media showing hillside homes ablaze. Desperate villagers were seen fleeing their homes and trying to extinguish the fires with makeshift brooms, branches, and buckets of water. Two days after the fires broke out, artist Djamel Ben Ismail tweeted saying he would travel over 200 miles (322km) from his home in Miliana to "give a hand to our friends" fighting the blazes. On his Facebook page, he reposted desperate calls for urgent relief assistance. He was described as "an artist, a young man who loves the guitar and loves life... not a violent man" by one of his friends. Yet upon reaching Algeria's Tizi Ouzou province, Kabilye region, the artist was about to have his own life cut tragically short. On 11 August, graphic footage began circulating purportedly showing Mr Ben Ismail being attacked. He was falsely suspected of having started fires, and locals tortured and burned him before taking his body to the village square. The videos immediately caused national outrage. The artist's brother later urged social media users to delete the footage of the attack. His mother, he said, still did not how her son had died. Mr Ben Ismail's father said he was "devastated". "My son left to help his brothers from Kabyle, a region he loves. They burned him alive," he said. According to some local media reports, paranoia and rumours spread throughout parts of Tizi Ouzou, with some residents becoming suspicious of people driving cars with licence plates from other provinces. This panic and paranoia is alleged to have been stoked by accusations of arson. The evening before Mr Ben Ismail's death, Prime Minister Aymen Benabderrahmane said the fires were the result of a "criminal act". In a televised address, he added: "Preliminary investigations in Tizi Ouzou have proven that the starting points of these fires were carefully chosen to cause the largest possible losses." On the same day, Interior Minister Kamel Beldjoud visited Tizi Ouzou, telling reporters the fires had been caused by "criminals filled with hatred against our country". This week, Algeria announced it will review its relations with Morocco after accusing it of complicity in the deadly fires. According to BBC Monitoring, neither officials nor the country's main media outlets have mentioned climate change as a cause of the fires, or as a reason for their vast spread. This is despite the fact that temperatures of up to 46C (115F) were forecast for the week in which the fires raged. Also about that time, a major UN scientific report warned of increasingly extreme heatwaves, droughts, and flooding globally. Are wildfires getting worse? Climate report is 'code red for humanity' Four ways climate change links to extreme weather In the wake of Mr Ben Ismail's death, public anger has been stoked and political reprisals have ensued. Some social media users circulated pictures of the alleged killers, trying to identify them, and many gathered under a hashtag calling for justice to be served. So far, 61 people have been arrested after the artist's death, with the finger being pointed at members of the Movement for the Self-Determination of Kabylie (MAK). The movement was declared a terrorist organisation by Algerian authorities in May. On 17 August, state TV broadcast "confessions" of the killing from MAK suspects, although the investigation is still continuing.

no @BS Angela

A team at XDA Developers has discovered that Google has added facial expression recognition to the beta version of the Android Accessibility Suite, which came with the beta version of Android 12. The new feature is called collectively Camera Switches. The new features appear to be geared toward allowing those with disabilities to communicate with their phone without using their voice. Prior versions of Android have included developer APIs to create apps for people with disabilities—voice-command-driven menuing systems, for example. In this new update, Google has added new functionality that will allow developers to create applications that respond to six unique facial cues: opening mouth, smiling, raising eyebrows, looking left, looking right and looking up. Developers are free to associate any of these gestures with commands of their choosing. An app could respond to a user opening their mouth, for example, by opening a highlighted file. The software allows users to control the degree of sensitivity of gesture recognition to prevent undesired execution of commands or to watch more closely for people with limited facial mobility. The configuration software also allows for choosing the number of switches (one or two) involved in helping a device recognize a given gesture. This means that developers can create commands that are executed only when two unique gestures are recognized. It also allows for turning Camera Switch on and off. Google has also made sure users will know when Camera Switches is using the camera by displaying an icon on the screen. They have also added a note in the setup routine promising users that images captured by Camera Switches are not stored anywhere or sent to Google. And they have posted another note that acknowledges that Camera Switches consumes a lot of power—Google suggests that Camera Switches only be used when the phone is plugged in. Because the new features have been added to the beta version of Android 12, they are not yet available on Google Play, but as the team at XDA Developers notes, users unwilling to wait can download the update from third-party sites.

For its second quarter of FY2022 that ended on August 1, Nvidia on Wednesday posted its all-time record quarterly revenue of $6.507 billion, a 68.3% increase over the same period a year ago. The company's sales were driven by unprecedented demand for high-end gaming GPUs, professional graphics cards used for ProViz applications, and cryptocurrency mining. Nvidia's revenues have been steadily increasing ever since the company introduced its GeForce RTX 3000-series 'Ampere' GPUs last September that quickly gained acceptance among gamers despite very high MSRPs. The po[CENSORED]rity of Nvidia's GeForce RTX 3000-series graphics cards, many of which are among the best graphics cards, has remained high, despite soaring prices due to shortages, which is why Nvidia sold every single graphics processor it could produce in the last 12 months or so. As Nvidia ramped production of datacenter and professional solutions based on the Ampere architecture in the recent quarters, the company's revenue and profitability increased significantly as such products are sold at a huge premium. Furthermore, the company's products for automotive applications were also on the rise in Q2. Along with an all-time high revenue of $6.507 billion, Nvidia also posted a $2.374 billion net income in Q2 FY2022, a 282% increase over $622 million in Q2 FY2021. The company's gross margin also increased to 64.8%, up from 58.8% in the same quarter a year ago. Gaming & Mining Nvidia's bread and butter has always been its graphics business and in the recent quarter it has been thriving due to high average selling prices, record demand, and Ethereum mining. Sales of Nvidia's gaming hardware (which includes GeForce GPUs and console SoCs) in Q2 FY2022 totaled $3.061 billion, up 11% sequentially and up 85% year-over-year. Nvidia claims that over 80% of the new Ampere GPUs it shipped during the quarter were LHR (low hash rate) GPUs not particularly suitable for mining, so that vast majority (yet not all, Nvidia admits that) of GeForce RTX graphics cards sold in Q2 FY2022 ended up in the hands of gamers. Sales of Nvidia's CMP (crypto mining processor) lineup totaled $266 million, up significantly from around $150 million in Q1 FY2022. Meanwhile, as profitability of Ethereum mining drops, Nvidia expects sales of CMP to collapse and shipments of gaming graphics boards to suffer moderately too. Datacenters & ProViz Sales of professional graphics cards and datacenter solutions are driven by multiple factors, including new products introductions, upgrade cycles, and a number of other. Back in the first quarter Nvidia introduced several new A-series compute GPUs for datacenters and RTX-series GPUs for ProViz applications. Since these products ramped up in Q2, Nvidia's datacenter business posted a $2.366 billion revenue, a 35% increase compared to the same quarter a year ago, whereas the company's ProViz business sold graphics boards worth $519 million, a 156% year-over-year increase. Outlook For companies like Nvidia, the third quarter is always the most successful because PC makers are increasing orders as they are preparing for back-to-school (BTS) and holiday seasons. For the third quarter of its FY2022 (Q3 CY2021), Nvidia expects its revenues to hit $6.80 billion ±2% and gross margins to decrease to 65.2%.

It was originally scheduled to release into 1.0 in late July. The sudden success of Splitgate has seen studio 1047 Games scramble to cope. The Portal-meets-Halo arena shooter was originally scheduled to launch into 1.0 on July 27, but thanks to a huge surge in player interest—prompted by an open beta available on consoles—that was moved back in order for the studio to boost its server capacity. The 1.0 release was moved to an unspecified date in August, but now that release has been delayed indefinitely. Studio CEO Ian Proulx said the game will "remain in open beta for the foreseeable future as the small studio continues to scale the po[CENSORED]r arena portal shooter that has seen more than 10 million downloads in its first 30 days of open beta." According to the studio, the game's concurrent player count has risen from 4,000 to 175,000 "in a few weeks." It's a reasonable response to the game's unexpected meteoric rise. The 'open beta' status isn't likely to make a huge difference to players anyway: Fortnite's battle royale mode spent two years in open beta before launching into 1.0 last year. "In looking at the issues facing the scalability of the game’s backend, the process includes far more than simply dealing with server capacity," Proulx said. "We are focused on keeping the game stable for fans, and iterating on the game’s concurrent capacity in order to minimize player wait times. We want to do this the right way, and we want to be prepared for massive scale when we officially launch, all the while continuing to improve the beta with frequent updates, additional features, and improvements to server capacity.”