"Researchers at MIT have discovered an unfixable vulnerability in Apple Silicon that could allow attackers to bypass a chip's 'last line of defense'," writes the Apple Insider blog, "but most Mac users shouldn't be worried." More specifically, the team at MIT's Computer Science & Artificial Intelligence Laboratory found that Apple's implementation of pointer authentication in the M1 system-on-chip can be overcome with a specific hardware attack they've dubbed "PACMAN." Pointer authentication is a security mechanism in Apple Silicon that makes it more difficult for attackers to modify pointers in memory. By checking for unexpected changes in pointers, the mechanism can help defend a CPU if attackers gain memory access.... The flaw comes into play when an attacker successfully guesses the value of a pointer authentication code and disables it. The researchers found that they could use a side-channel attack to brute-force the code. PACMAN echoes similar speculative execution attacks like Spectre and Meltdown, which also leveraged microarchitectural side channels. Because it's a flaw in the hardware, it can't be fixed with a software patch. [A]ctually carrying out the PACMAN attack requires physical access to a device, meaning the average Mac user isn't going to be at risk of exploit. The flaw affects all kinds of ARM-based chips — not just Apple's. The vulnerability is more of a technological demonstration of a wider issue with pointer authentication in ARM chips, rather than an issue that could lead to your Mac getting hacked. MIT has made more information available at the site PACMANattack.com — including answers to frequently asked questions. Q: Is PACMAN being used in the wild? A: No. Q: Does PACMAN have a logo? A: Yeah! The MIT team says their discovery represents "a new way of thinking about how threat models converge in the Spectre era." But even then, MIT's announcement warns the flaw "isn't a magic bypass for all security on the M1 chip." PACMAN can only take an existing bug that pointer authentication protects against, and unleash that bug's true potential for use in an attack by finding the correct PAC. There's no cause for immediate alarm, the scientists say, as PACMAN cannot compromise a system without an existing software bug.... The team showed that the PACMAN attack even works against the kernel, which has "massive implications for future security work on all ARM systems with pointer authentication enabled," says Ravichandran. "Future CPU designers should take care to consider this attack when building the secure systems of tomorrow. Developers should take care to not solely rely on pointer authentication to protect their software." TechCrunch obtained a comment from Apple: Apple spokesperson Scott Radcliffe provided the following: "We want to thank the researchers for their collaboration as this proof of concept advances our understanding of these techniques. Based on our analysis as well as the details shared with us by the researchers, we have concluded this issue does not pose an immediate risk to our users and is insufficient to bypass operating system security protections on its own."

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Apple's M1 chips have an "unpatchable" hardware vulnerability that could allow attackers to break through its last line of security defenses, MIT researchers have discovered. TechCrunch reports: The vulnerability lies in a hardware-level security mechanism utilized in Apple M1 chips called pointer authentication codes, or PAC. This feature makes it much harder for an attacker to inject malicious code into a device's memory and provides a level of defense against buffer overflow exploits, a type of attack that forces memory to spill out to other locations on the chip. Researchers from MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, however, have created a novel hardware attack, which combines memory corruption and speculative execution attacks to sidestep the security feature. The attack shows that pointer authentication can be defeated without leaving a trace, and as it utilizes a hardware mechanism, no software patch can fix it. The attack, appropriately called "Pacman," works by "guessing" a pointer authentication code (PAC), a cryptographic signature that confirms that an app hasn't been maliciously altered. This is done using speculative execution -- a technique used by modern computer processors to speed up performance by speculatively guessing various lines of computation -- to leak PAC verification results, while a hardware side-channel reveals whether or not the guess was correct. What's more, since there are only so many possible values for the PAC, the researchers found that it's possible to try them all to find the right one.

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The European Union is nearing an agreement on key legislation to regulate the cryptocurrency sector that would set common rules across the 27 member states, Bloomberg reported Friday, citing people familiar with the matter. From a report: France, which currently chairs the EU, and the European Parliament are optimistic about resolving remaining issues holding up the Markets in Crypto-Assets (MiCA) package and reaching a deal this month, according to the people. Negotiators are expected to meet on June 14 and June 30. MiCA, first presented in 2020, will put European regulators at the forefront of supervising cryptocurrencies by creating unified rules across the $17 trillion economy. Addressing issues such as investor protection and crypto's impact on financial stability has taken on added urgency after last month's collapse of the TerraUSD algorithmic stablecoin. Member states and the parliament still disagree on several key aspects of MiCA. According to the people, areas of disagreement include: Whether to include nonfungible tokens in the new set of rules How to regulate significant stablecoins Supervision of the largest crypto-asset service providers, or CASPs Both sides are also discussing how to limit the use of stablecoins as a payment method by introducing a ceiling, in particular for transactions not denominated in euros, the people said, asking not to be identified discussing confidential information.

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Apple announced on Friday that it's once again updated its rules about how Dutch dating apps can use third-party payment systems, after the company had "productive conversations with the Netherlands Authority for Consumers and Markets (ACM)." From a report: The updated rules give developers more flexibility about which payment systems they use, change the language users see when they go to pay, and remove other restrictions that the previous rules put in place. While the rules aren't wide-reaching (again, they only apply to Dutch dating apps), they do show what Apple's willing to do to comply with government regulation -- which it could be facing a lot more of as the EU and US gear up to fight tech monopolies, and potentially even force the company to ditch the iPhone's Lightning port. In December the ACM announced a ruling that Apple had to let dating apps use payment services besides the one built into iOS, after the regulator received a complaint from Match Group, the company behind dating services like Tinder, Match.com, and OkCupid. Since then, Apple has proposed a variety of solutions for complying with the order, which the regulator has said aren't good enough. In May, the ACM said that Apple's most recent rules, the ones prior to the Friday update, were improvements over its past ideas, but that they still didn't comply with Dutch and European laws. There's been increasing pressure for Apple to comply: even while the company works on changes, it's been racking up tens of millions of Euros in fines.

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Nigerian Exchange, plans to start a blockchain-enabled exchange platform next year to deepen trade and lure young investors to the market. From a report: The move follows the introduction of regulations to guide trade in digital assets by the Nigerian Securities and Exchange Commission, and the growing interest to adopt the distributed-ledger technology by businesses and policy makers across the continent including in Kenya and South Africa. The exchange looks to deploy the blockchain technology in settlement of capital market transactions, Temi Popoola, the chief executive of Nigeria Exchange, said in an interview. "For a lot of young and upcoming Nigerians, that is the kind of technology they adopt and we want to see how we can deploy it to grow our market," Temi said. The plan is unfolding in the wake of a rout in cryptocurrency markets following the collapse of the Terra blockchain in May. Bitcoin has plunged more than 50% since reaching a record high last November.

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The UK is facing an exodus of star scientists, with at least 16 recipients of prestigious European grants making plans to move their labs abroad as the UK remains frozen out of the EU's flagship science programme. From a report: Britain's participation in Horizon Europe has been caught in the crosshairs of the dispute over Brexit in Northern Ireland, meaning that 143 UK-based recipients of European Research Council fellowships this week faced a deadline of either relinquishing their grant or transferring it to an institute in an eligible country. The UK government has promised to underwrite the funding, totalling about 250m pound ($307m), but a growing number of scientists appear likely to reject the offer and instead relocate, along with entire teams of researchers. The ERC said 16 academics had recently informed it that they intend to move their lab abroad or are in negotiations about doing so. These researchers, and some others, have been given an extension before their grants are terminated. Moritz Treeck, a group leader at the Francis Crick Institute in London who is due to receive $2.1m over five years from the ERC to study the malaria pathogen, is among those contemplating a move. He said a major downside of the UK offer was the lack of flexibility about moving the funding internationally.

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Researchers have found that being outside drastically reduces the risk of developing short-sightedness. From a report: In the early 1980s Taiwan's army realised it had a problem. More and more of its conscripts seemed to be short-sighted, meaning they needed glasses to focus on distant objects. "They were worried that if the worst happened [ie, an attack by China] their troops would be fighting at a disadvantage," says Ian Morgan, who studies myopia at Australian National University, in Canberra. An island-wide study in 1983 confirmed that around 70% of Taiwanese school leavers needed glasses or contact lenses to see properly. These days, that number is above 80%. But happily for Taiwan's generals, the military disparity has disappeared. Over the past few decades myopia rates have soared across East Asia (see chart 1 in the linked story). In the 1960s around 20-30% of Chinese school-leavers were short-sighted. These days they are just as myopic as their cousins across the straits, with rates in some parts of China running at over 80%. Elsewhere on the continent things are even worse. One study of male high-school leavers in Seoul found 97% were short-sighted. Hong Kong and Singapore are not far behind. And although the problem is worst in East Asia, it is not unique to it. Reliable numbers for America and Europe are harder to come by. But one review article, published in 2015, claimed a European rate of between 20% and 40% -- an order of magnitude higher than that which people working in the field think is the "natural," background rate. For most of those affected, myopia is a lifelong, expensive nuisance. But severe myopia can lead to untreatable vision loss, says Annegret Dahlmann-Noor, a consultant ophthalmologist at Moorfields Eye Hospital, in London. A paper published in 2019 concluded that each one-dioptre worsening in myopia was associated with a 67% increase in prevalence of myopic maculopathy, an untreatable condition that causes blindness. (A dioptre is a measure of a lens's focusing power.) In some parts of East Asia, 20% of young people have severe myopia, defined as -6 dioptres or worse (see chart 2 in linked story). "This is storing up a big problem for the coming decades," says Kathryn Rose, head of orthoptics at the University of Technology, Sydney.

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Jack Dorsey's beef with Web3 has never been a secret. In his view, Web 3 -- blockchain boosters' dream of a censorship resistant, privacy-focused internet of the future -- has become just as problematic as the Web2 which preceded it. Now, he's out with an alternative. From a report: At CoinDesk's Consensus Festival here in Austin, TBD -- the bitcoin-focused subsidiary of Dorsey's Block (SQ) -- announced its new vision for a decentralized internet layer on Friday. Its name? Web5. TBD explained its pitch for Web5 in a statement shared with CoinDesk: "Identity and personal data have become the property of third parties. Web5 brings decentralized identity and data storage to individual's applications. It lets devs focus on creating delightful user experiences, while returning ownership of data and identity to individuals." While the new project from TBD was announced Friday, it is still under open-source development and does not have an official release date. A play on the Web3 moniker embraced in other corners of the blockchain space, Web5 is built on the idea that incumbent "decentralized internet" contenders are going about things the wrong way. Appearing at a Consensus panel clad in a black and bitcoin-yellow track suit emblazoned with the numeral 5, TBD lead Mike Brock explained that Web5 -- in addition to being "two better than Web3" -- would beat out incumbent models by abandoning their blockchain-centric approaches to a censorship free, identity-focused web experience. "This is really a conversation about what technologies are built to purpose, and I don't think that renting block space, in all cases, is a really good idea for decentralized applications," Brock said. He continued: "I think what we're pushing forward with Web5 -- and I admit it's a provocative challenge to a lot of the assumptions about what it means to decentralize the internet -- really actually is back to basics. We already have technologies that effectively decentralize. I mean, bittorrent exists, Tor exists, [etc]." The full presentation is here.

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Jack Dorsey's beef with Web 3 has never been a secret. In his view, Web 3 -- blockchain boosters' dream of a censorship resistant, privacy-focused internet of the future -- has become just as problematic as the Web 2 which preceded it. Now, he's out with an alternative. From a report: At CoinDesk's Consensus Festival here in Austin, TBD -- the bitcoin-focused subsidiary of Dorsey's Block (SQ) -- announced its new vision for a decentralized internet layer on Friday. Its name? Web 5. TBD explained its pitch for Web 5 in a statement shared with CoinDesk: "Identity and personal data have become the property of third parties. Web 5 brings decentralized identity and data storage to individual's applications. It lets devs focus on creating delightful user experiences, while returning ownership of data and identity to individuals." While the new project from TBD was announced Friday, it is still under open-source development and does not have an official release date. A play on the Web 3 moniker embraced in other corners of the blockchain space, Web 5 is built on the idea that incumbent "decentralized internet" contenders are going about things the wrong way. Appearing at a Consensus panel clad in a black and bitcoin-yellow track suit emblazoned with the numeral 5, TBD lead Mike Brock explained that Web 5 -- in addition to being "two better than Web 3" -- would beat out incumbent models by abandoning their blockchain-centric approaches to a censorship free, identity-focused web experience. "This is really a conversation about what technologies are built to purpose, and I don't think that renting block space, in all cases, is a really good idea for decentralized applications," Brock said. He continued: "I think what we're pushing forward with Web 5 -- and I admit it's a provocative challenge to a lot of the assumptions about what it means to decentralize the internet -- really actually is back to basics. We already have technologies that effectively decentralize. I mean, bittorrent exists, Tor exists, [etc]."

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The UK's Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) has concluded that Google and Apple "hold all the cards" when it comes to mobile phones a year after taking a closer look at their "duopoly." It's now consulting on the launch of a market investigation into the tech giants' market power in mobile browsers, as well as into Apple's cloud gaming restrictions. From a report: In addition, the CMA has launched a separate investigation into Google's Play Store rules -- the one that requires certain app developers to use the tech giant's payment system for in-app purchases, in particular. The CMA has concluded after its year-long study that the tech giants do indeed exhibit an "effective duopoly" on mobile ecosystems. A total of 97 percent of all mobile web browsing in the UK is powered by Apple's and Google's browser engines. iPhones and Android devices typically come with Safari and Chrome pre-installed, which means their browsers have the advantage from the start. Further, Apple requires developers to make sure their iOS and iPadOS apps are using its WebKit engine to browse the web. That limits the incentives Apple may have to invest in Safari, the CMA said.

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Wickr Me, an encrypted messaging app owned by Amazon Web Services, has become a go-to destination for people to exchange images of child sexual abuse, according to court documents, online communities, law enforcement and anti-exploitation activists. From a report: It's not the only tech platform that needs to crack down on such illegal content, according to data gathered by the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children, or NCMEC. But Amazon is doing comparatively little to proactively address the problem, experts and law enforcement officials say, attracting people who want to trade such material because there is less risk of detection than in the brighter corners of the internet. NBC News reviewed court documents from 72 state and federal child sexual abuse or child pornography prosecutions where the defendant allegedly used Wickr (as it's commonly known) from the last five years in the United States, United Kingdom and Australia, using a combination of private and public legal and news databases and search engines. Nearly every prosecution reviewed has resulted in a conviction aside from those still being adjudicated. Almost none of the criminal complaints reviewed note cooperation from Wickr itself at the time of filing, aside from limited instances where Wickr was legally compelled to provide information via a search warrant. Over 25 percent of the prosecutions stemmed from undercover operations conducted by law enforcement on Wickr and other tech platforms. These court cases only represent a small fraction of the problem, according to two law enforcement officers involved in investigating child exploitation cases, two experts studying child exploitation and two people who have seen firsthand how individuals frequently use Wickr and other platforms for criminal transactions on the dark web.

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Instant messaging app Telegram, which is used by over 500 million active users, said on Friday it's working on a premium tier, but plans to keep many of the current features available to existing users. In a post, Telegram Pavel Durov wrote: Since the day Telegram was launched almost 9 years ago, we've been giving our users more features and resources than any other messaging app. A free app as powerful as Telegram was revolutionary in 2013 and is still unprecedented in 2022. To this day, our limits on chats, media and file uploads are unrivaled. And yet, many have been asking us to raise the current limits even further, so we looked into ways to let you go beyond what is already crazy. The problem here is that if we were to remove all limits for everyone, our server and traffic costs would have become unmanageable, so the party would be unfortunately over for everyone. After giving it some thought, we realized that the only way to let our most demanding fans get more while keeping our existing features free is to make those raised limits a paid option. That's why this month we will introduce Telegram Premium, a subscription plan that allows anyone to acquire additional features, speed and resources. It will also allow users to support Telegram and join the club that receives new features first. Not to worry though: all existing features remain free, and there are plenty of new free features coming. Moreover, even users who don't subscribe to Telegram Premium will be able to enjoy some of its benefits: for example, they will be able to view extra-large documents, media and stickers sent by Premium users, or tap to add Premium reactions already pinned to a message to react in the same way. While our experiments with privacy-focused ads in public one-to-many channels have been more successful than we expected, I believe that Telegram should be funded primarily by its users, not advertisers. This way our users will always remain our main priority.

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A US court has ordered the chief executive of collapsed stablecoin operator Terraform Labs to comply with subpoenas from the regulator seeking documents and materials related to the sale of potential unregistered securities. From a report: The US court of appeals in New York on Wednesday upheld the claim from the Securities and Exchange Commission, which is seeking information on Mirror Protocol, a trading network built on the Terra ecosystem that offered customers tokens that closely mirrored the price of some of the US's largest listed companies such as Apple and Amazon. The regulator's victory marks a further blow to Terraform Labs' head Do Kwon, who is facing several legal cases in the wake of the sudden $40bn collapse of terraUSD, a stablecoin, and its accompanying token luna, which left investors out of pocket. The 30-year-old South Korean was the chief developer of terraUSD, whose collapse last month sent shockwaves through the crypto industry. Mirror Protocol was also developed by Kwon's Terraform Labs with the hope of bridging traditional finance with crypto.

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The first global survey of marine RNA viruses has discovered thousands of new viruses, some of which play a central role in locking away carbon at the bottom of the sea. From a report: Between 2009 and 2012, researchers aboard a ship called Tara collected seawater samples from all the world's oceans. Guillermo Dominguez-Huerta at the Ohio State University and his colleagues had previously looked at hundreds of thousands of DNA viruses in these samples and found they were concentrated in five major ecological zones, with some of the greatest diversity in the Arctic Ocean. But this only told half of the story. The ocean is also filled with viruses that have genomes made of a different genetic material called RNA, which cells use to direct protein synthesis. Analysing DNA viruses was relatively easy using existing methods, but the researchers had to come up with improved techniques to distinguish viral RNA from the surfeit of RNA produced by the other organisms swimming in each sample. Now, Dominguez-Huerta and his colleagues have published the biggest-ever survey of RNA viruses in the ocean using the samples from Tara. The researchers identified more than 5000 types of RNA viruses in the sea, almost all of which were new to science. "It has expanded our view of how much diversity there is," says Curtis Suttle at the University of British Columbia, who wasn't involved in the study. The team focused particularly on the role viruses play in carbon sequestration. Every day, massive numbers of dead plankton sink to the bottom of the ocean, taking the carbon in their bodies with them, which is then entombed for potentially millions of years. This process, known as the biological carbon pump, puts away as much as 12 gigatonnes of carbon each year. That is about a third of the total annual human-caused CO2 emissions.

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Microsoft employees will be free to seek jobs at the likes of Google and Amazon after the internet giant announced it would no longer enforce non-compete clauses (NCCs) against the majority of its staff. From a report: The change is one of four updates announced in a blog post on Wednesday, including plans to ditch non-disclosure agreements, conduct a civil rights audit of its existing work policies, and commit to providing salary ranges on all internal and external job descriptions. NCCs are used by firms to stop employees moving to companies considered to be direct competitors. While there's more understanding when they're included in the contracts of c-suite and senior managers, their use against lower-level workers has been criticized as being too restrictive and holding people to unfair conditions. Microsoft has enforced them in some employee contracts, but effective today, the company is removing clauses from employee agreements, and will not enforce existing clauses in the US, the company said. "We have heard concerns that the non-competition clauses in some U.S. employee agreements, even when rarely and reasonably enforced, feel at odds with our talent principles," said the blog post, attributed to Amy Pannoni, Microsoft's deputy general counsel and Amy Coleman, Microsoft's corporate vice president for HR.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from New Scientist: Robots can now be covered in living skin grown from real human cells to make them look more like us. As robots increasingly take on roles as nurses, care workers, teachers and other jobs that involve close personal contact, it is important to make them look more human so we feel comfortable interacting with them, says Shoji Takeuchi at the University of Tokyo in Japan. At the moment, robots are sometimes coated in silicone rubber to give them a fleshy appearance, but the rubber lacks the texture of human skin, he says. To make more realistic-looking skin, Takeuchi and his colleagues bathed a plastic robot finger in a soup of collagen and human skin cells called fibroblasts for three days. The collagen and fibroblasts adhered to the finger and formed a layer similar to the dermis, which is the second-from-top layer of human skin. Next, they gently poured other human skin cells called keratinocytes onto the finger to recreate the upper layer of human skin, called the epidermis. The resulting 1.5-millimeter-thick skin was able to stretch and contract as the finger bent backwards and forwards. As it did this, it wrinkled like normal skin, says Takeuchi. "It is much more realistic than silicone." The robot skin could also be healed when it was cut by grafting a collagen sheet onto the wound. However, the skin began to dry out after a while since it didn't have blood vessels to replenish it with moisture. In the future, it may be possible to incorporate artificial blood vessels into the skin to keep it hydrated, as well as sweat glands and hair follicles to make it more realistic, says Takeuchi. It should also be possible to make different skin colors by adding melanocytes, he says. The researchers now plan to try coating a whole robot in the living skin. The research has been published in the journal Matter.

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A 29% rate hike for hydroelectric power in Chelan County, created specifically for cryptocurrency miners, went into effect on June 1. Decrypt reports: The miners used to pay a lower, high-density load rate for their electricity. Now they'll pay a newly-created cryptocurrency rate, known as Rate 36. Washington state accounted for about two-thirds of all hydroelectric power generated in the U.S. in 2020, according to the Energy Information Administration. The state's Grand Coulee Dam, located on the Columbia River in Grant and Okanogan counties, powers a 6,809-megawatt. The cheap and renewable hydropower has made Washington state a popular destination for Bitcoin miners too. Washington state accounted for 4% of the total U.S. hashrate in December, according to the Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance. [...] KPQ also reported that nearby Douglas County has stopped allowing new Bitcoin miners to set up operations there because they already consume 25% of the county's available energy. Still, the Chelan County rate hike won't ban crypto miners. For companies that have made substantial investments in their mining facilities, officials have approved transition plans to gradually increase energy rates over the next two years. "We need to have some sort of transition. That's important for business," PUD Commissioner Ann Congdon told the Wenatchee World on Tuesday. "I understand how businesses need that in order to plan." Malachi Salcido, CEO of Salcido Enterprises, told the local news outlet that the new rate will force him to reconfigure his three Chelan County crypto mining facilities into data farms. He has four other crypto mining facilities, two in Douglas County and two in Grant County. Under the new pricing plan, Salcido can keep his Chelan facility on the lower, high-density energy rate if he processes data instead of mining crypto. The data processing uses the same amount of power as crypto mining, he told the Wenatchee World. "Do you really want to be in the business of regulating what kind of processing happens on servers in your territory," Salcido said.

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schwit1 shares a report from The Verge: NASA's new powerful space observatory, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), got pelted by a larger than expected micrometeoroid at the end of May, causing some detectable damage to one of the spacecraft's 18 primary mirror segments. The impact means that the mission team will have to correct for the distortion created by the strike, but NASA says that the telescope is "still performing at a level that exceeds all mission requirements." Engineers do have the capability to also maneuver JWST's mirror and instruments away from showers of space debris, if NASA can see them coming. The problem, though, was that this micrometeoroid was not part of a shower, so NASA considers it an "unavoidable chance event." Still, the agency is forming an engineering team to come up with ways to potentially avoid or lessen the effects of micrometeoroid strikes of this size. And since JWST is so sensitive, the telescope will also help NASA get a better understanding of just how many micrometeoroids there are in the deep space environment. Despite the strike, NASA remained optimistic in its post about JWST's future. "Webb's beginning-of-life performance is still well above expectations, and the observatory is fully capable of performing the science it was designed to achieve," according to the blog. Engineers can also adjust the impacted mirror to help cancel out the data distortion. The mission team has done this already and will continue to tinker with the mirror over time to get the best results. It's a process that will be ongoing throughout JWST's planned five to 10 years of life as new observations are made and events unfold. At the same time, NASA warns that the engineers will not be able to completely cancel out the impact of the strike.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: Scientists in Australia have discovered that superworms can live and even grow on a diet of only polystyrene, also known colloquially as Styrofoam. Superworm is a common name for the larval stages of the darkling beetle (Zophobas morio). The researchers described their finding as a "first step" in discovering natural enzymes that could be used to recycle this type of plastic. "We envision that polystyrene waste will be collected, mechanically shredded, and then degraded in bioreactors with an enzyme cocktail," said Chris Rinke, a scientist at the University of Queensland and an author of a paper published on Thursday in the journal Microbial Genomics. In recent years, scientists globally have been looking for microorganisms that can digest plastic, which is how natural materials like wood biodegrade. The idea is that some kind of enzyme engineered from the gut of an insect or bacteria could be used to digest difficult-to-recycle plastic so it could be made into new plastic products, which would reduce the need for virgin plastic. Used for things such as coffee cups and packing peanuts, polystyrene is one of the most common plastics in production. It accounts for "up to 7-10% of the total non-fibre plastic production," according to the paper. Experimenters divided worms into three groups and fed each a different diet: bran, polystyrene or a starvation diet. The worms that lived on polystyrene were not as healthy as those eating bran, but they were able to eat the Styrofoam and gain weight and complete their life cycle. However, the report also found that the diet had "negative impacts on host gut microbiome diversity and health" of the worms. In other words, they could eat plastics, but it had a cost to them. It would theoretically be possible to keep thousands of worms in an industrial setting to digest plastics. But the researchers say their next goal is to identify and enhance the enzyme the worms use for future applications.

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Music streaming giant Spotify has revealed that it's intending to make a big splash in the audiobooks business. Trusted Reviews reports: At the company's Investor Day 2022, CEO Daniel Ek revealed that the company would be branching out into audiobooks following its successful music and podcast offerings. Several months ago, Spotify announced its agreement to acquire audiobook distribution platform Findaway, which was a surefire indicator that it was thinking big in this area. Whie that deal has yet to close, Ek has confirmed that he sees audiobooks as "a massive opportunity." The overall book market today is worth $140 billion, yet audiobooks only represent 6 to 7% of that. In the most developed audiobook markets that figure is closer to 50%, so Spotify as seeing this as a potential $70 billion market that it's going to compete with Amazon and its Audible platform for. Spotify revealed that it's planning to relaunch the audiobook arm of its streaming service later this year. As this suggests, you can already access audiobooks through Spotify, but it's not a particularly well fleshed out offering, and it's not easily accessible. No specifics were mentioned on the pricing of this audiobook offering.

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