"Dark matter, the elusive substance that accounts for the majority of the mass in the universe, may be made up of massive particles called gravitons that first popped into existence in the first moment after the Big Bang," writes Live Science. "And these hypothetical particles might be cosmic refugees from extra dimensions, a new theory suggests." The researchers' calculations hint that these particles could have been created in just the right quantities to explain dark matter, which can only be "seen" through its gravitational pull on ordinary matter. "Massive gravitons are produced by collisions of ordinary particles in the early universe. This process was believed to be too rare for the massive gravitons to be dark matter candidates," study co-author Giacomo Cacciapaglia, a physicist at the University of Lyon in France, told Live Science. But in a new study published in February in the journal Physical Review Letters, Cacciapaglia, along with Korea University physicists Haiying Cai and Seung J. Lee, found that enough of these gravitons would have been made in the early universe to account for all of the dark matter we currently detect in the universe. The gravitons, if they exist, would have a mass of less than 1 megaelectronvolt (MeV), so no more than twice the mass of an electron, the study found. This mass level is well below the scale at which the Higgs boson generates mass for ordinary matter — which is key for the model to produce enough of them to account for all the dark matter in the universe.... The team found these hypothetical gravitons while hunting for evidence of extra dimensions, which some physicists suspect exist alongside the observed three dimensions of space and the fourth dimension, time. In the team's theory, when gravity propagates through extra dimensions, it materializes in our universe as massive gravitons. But these particles would interact only weakly with ordinary matter, and only via the force of gravity. This description is eerily similar to what we know about dark matter, which does not interact with light yet has a gravitational influence felt everywhere in the universe. This gravitational influence, for instance, is what prevents galaxies from flying apart. "The main advantage of massive gravitons as dark matter particles is that they only interact gravitationally, hence they can escape attempts to detect their presence," Cacciapaglia said.

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Elon Musk, the largest shareholder of Twitter, will no longer be joining the social media firm's board, CEO Parag Agrawal said late Sunday, in a surprising reversal following last week's announcement that the Tesla and SpaceX chief executive had been appointed to the panel. From a report: The Sunday disclosure from Agrawal, who said last week that he had been engaging with Musk for "a few weeks" before announcing his appointment to the board, follows a series of unusual tweets from the SpaceX executive over the weekend in which he wondered aloud to his over 80 million followers if Twitter was dying, citing low frequency of tweets from some of the most popular personalities on the social network. Musk also asked his followers if Twitter should convert its San Francisco headquarters into a homeless shelter, prompting a discussion that saw participation from a wide-range of industry figures, including Amazon and Blue Origin founder Jeff Bezos.

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"Digital purchases are mysteriously expiring on classic PlayStation consoles," Kotaku reports, "rendering a random assortment of games unplayable." The glitch is "affecting users' ability to play games they ostensibly own." Upon re-downloading the PSOne Classic version of Chrono Cross, for instance, Twitter user Christopher Foose was told the purchase expired on December 31, 1969, preventing him from playing the game on both PlayStation 3 and PlayStation Vita. GamesHub editor Edmond Tran described a similar issue. Trying to boot up Chrono Cross on PlayStation 3, Tran said, gave him the same expiration date and time, only adjusted for his location in Australia. Tran did mention, however, that he was able to download the PSOne Classic from his library and play just fine on Vita despite the game's apparent delisting from the handheld's store. While at first this felt like an attempt at encouraging Chrono Cross fans to purchase the new Radical Dreamers remaster, Kotaku quickly found evidence of this same problem occurring with different games. Chrono Cross worked just fine for content creator Words, but not its spiritual predecessor Chrono Trigger, the license for which somehow lapsed 40 years before the game was added to the PSOne Classic library. Steve J over on Twitter asked PlayStation directly why the expiration date for his copy of Final Fantasy VI was changed to 1969, but never received a response.... The only potential explanation I've seen for this issue thus far involves what's known as the "Unix epoch," or the arbitrary date early engineers designated as the beginning of the operating system's lifespan. Some bug or glitch on Sony's backend may be defaulting PlayStation game license expiration dates to the Unix epoch, essentially telling them they can't be played after midnight UTC on January 1, 1970.

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Fast Company reviews the Bitcoin 2022 conference held in Miami this week — arguing that it was actually Ethereum that sparked 2021's boom in cryptocurrenies. (And that with NFTs and DAOs, Ethereum still remains the flashier, main driver of popular crypto culture.) Their conclusion? There's "a real sense of desperation for some kind of star power that can elevate Bitcoin from digital gold for the techno-libertarian set to the true mainstream cultural movement it needs to be in order to actually catch on." In fact, the issue of what influencers or celebrities can do for the Bitcoin community came up directly on Thursday morning, during a panel featuring Odell Beckham Jr., Serena Williams, Aaron Rodgers, and Cash App's crypto product lead, Miles Suter. Beckham and Rodgers have both made headlines recently for taking their salaries in Bitcoin; Williams is heavily involved in the Bitcoin startup world.... It was pretty far away from the high energy radiating from the world of NFTs, and it was clear that the event's bigger names aren't sure what else to do other than just tell the audience to buy Bitcoin over and over again. A lot of people make fun of NFTs, but they're an easier cultural product to point to and talk about than trying to have a fun conversation about lightning networks.... Bitcoin's attempts at going mainstream feel like a real two-steps-forward-one-step-back situation. Its most vocal supporters see it as a war-ending miracle technology. Alex Gladstein, the Human Rights Foundation's chief strategy officer led a panel on Thursday that argued it could lead to peace on Earth. It's not uncommon to hear presenters at Bitcoin 2022 argue that Bitcoin could end all wars forever. But that flies in the face of the conference's wilder, bawdier attractions — the big robot bull statue, the wild after-parties, the endless panels about cancel culture and Twitter drama. And these competing attitudes within the world of Bitcoin came to a head on Thursday afternoon, when chaos briefly erupted in the conference's main stage when it was announced that Barstool Sports founder Dave Portnoy had dropped out of his much talked-about panel, titled "Bitcoin Is Fuck You Money". Portnoy has not issued any explanation for why he dropped out, but he did spend the rest of the afternoon live tweeting the PGA Masters Tournament. For someone who claims to be all in on the technology, the so-called "baron of Bitcoin" didn't even stay for his panel. "Fuck you, Dave," the emcee gleefully told the crowd as they cheered and booed in response. The article reports that other speakers at the conference included: Former presidential candidate Andrew Yang Shark Tank's Kevin O'Leary Paypal and Palantir co-founder Peter Thiel But the article ultimately argues that the conference "feels like a low-level comic convention that's being held in the same event space as an economic forum."

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UPDATE: Jeff Bezos and Marc Andreessen have now responded to Elon Musk's suggestion to create a homeless shelter out of Twitter's San Francisco headquarters, "since no one shows up anyway." And at some point over the weekend, Musk also suggested a new way that Twitter could use Dogecoin... It all started when the newest member of Twitter's board of directors — Elon Musk — began tweeting new ideas for improving Twitter last night. "Everyone who signs up for Twitter Blue (i.e. pays $3/month) should get an authentication checkmark," Musk suggested, adding later that "It would massively expand the verified pool & make bot armies too expensive to maintain." Musk clarified that this checkmark "should be different from 'public figure' or 'official account' checkmark." And he also noted that Twitter Blue subscribers already get special features like a modifiable 20 second time window in which they can edit their tweets. "And no ads," Musk suggested in another tweet. "The power of corporations to dictate policy is greatly enhanced if Twitter depends on advertising money to survive." Musk later offered suggestions about how to implement that subscription fee, according to the Associated Press. Musk suggested it "should be proportionate to affordability and in local currency." And he added, "Maybe even an option to pay in Doge?" referring to Dogecoin cryptocurrency. But moments later Musk tweeted a poll, asking his followers to vote Yes or No to this idea: Convert Twitter's San Francisco headquarters to a homeless shelter since no one shows up anyway. Within 16 hours 1,425,937 people had voted "Yes!" — a whopping 91.3% of all votes cast. (Versus just 135,877 votes for "No.") Sunday night Bloomberg reported that Jeff Bezos, "a fellow billionaire, responded Sunday with a link to a report about an [8-story] homeless shelter attached to an Amazon office building, noting that a portion of Twitter's space could be converted, making it easier for employees who want to volunteer. Musk called the suggestion a "great idea...." Homelessness is a particularly visible problem at Twitter's headquarters, located in a part of San Francisco where residents have grappled with urban decay and drug addiction. Silicon valley entrepreneur/investor Marc Andreessen then posted his own three-word reply. Apparently in response to Bezos's suggestion that employees could volunteer more easily if if a portion of their building were a homeless shelter, Andreessen joked, "Every other desk?" And five hours after Musk's homeless shelter poll, he'd moved on to yet another question, polling his followers for "Yes" or "No" votes on this idea: Delete the w in Twitter?

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Sonic the Hedgehog 2 "shattered early box office projections," reports the Los Angeles Times, bringing in $71 million in its opening weekend. That makes it the biggest first-weekend for a Paramount movie in at least four years — more than Terminator: Dark Fate ($29 million) and Mission: Impossible — Fallout ($61.2 million). You can watch its trailer here — but here's how the Times summarizes its plot. "The titular furry blue protagonist (voiced by Ben Schwartz) faces an equally fluffy new threat, Knuckles the Echidna (Idris Elba), who has joined Dr. Robotnik's (Jim Carrey) ongoing quest conquer Earth." Engadget calls this the best opening weekend ever for a videogame movie. The previous record-holder was Sonic the Hedgehog 1, a movie which Paramount+ now "plans to expand into a cinematic universe" — or at least, expand into a spin-off TV series. Before the pandemic shut down theaters throughout the U.S, and other parts of the world, the first Sonic film went on to gross $319 million globally. Sonic the Hedgehog 2 is currently on track to beat those earnings having grossed approximately $141 million globally. As with the first movie, timing appears to have been a significant factor in Sonic 2's early success. Its main competitor at the box office was Sony's much-maligned Morbius, which saw a drastic 74 percent drop in ticket sales from its opening weekend last Friday. It only earned $10.2 million in additional domestic revenue after a $39 million debut.

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17 million people trade stocks and cryptocurrency on the Robinhood app. Now Gizmodo has obtained copies of hundreds of complaints filed about the app between mid-2020 until and-2021 with America's consumer protection agency, the FTC: The inability to withdraw money from Robinhood accounts for extended periods of time was a common complaint from consumers. There were also people who said they were hacked and then became frustrated that Robinhood was unresponsive when they tried to resolve the issue. Some users who say they were hacked even claimed they lost thousands of dollars when they couldn't reach Robinhood about the issue... The FTC found 3,081 complaints, but only released 200 of those to Gizmodo under its obligations to comply with the Freedom of Information Act law... But we're publishing a small sample of the complaints in an effort to highlight patterns that point to larger problems, just as we have with other companies like Binance, Tinder, Venmo, Rent-A-Center, AirBNB, and Honest Company, to name a few. One of the most common complaints about Robinhood was an inability to reach someone with the company's customer service team. Robinhood only introduced phone support in October of 2021, so it was common for people with complaints to be unable to reach anyone, according to the FTC documents we obtained. Robinhood is aware of the issue, the company told Gizmodo, and has worked to ameliorate it with a 24/7 hotline.... "Since 2020, when some of these complaints were filed, we've invested heavily in phone support, systems stability, and security processes. We're committed to supporting our customers and offering a safe experience, and we're confident that the steps we've taken over the past two years put us in a strong position to serve our growing customer base." Another recurring complaint involves people being unable to sell a given stock while its value tanked on the market. This issue, as you can imagine, is troubling because it prevents people from minimizing their losses.

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NBC News looks at the "thriving ecosystem" of space businesses "dramatically expanding access to the cosmos and fueling what is projected to grow into a trillion-dollar commercial space industry." "Yet alongside the numerous benefits to society, increasing access to space and supporting an economy in orbit comes with its share of challenges, including how to balance a growing industry with the safe and sustainable use of outer space...." Speckled among the operational satellites in low-Earth orbit are thousands of tons of space debris, ranging from tiny flecks of paint to spent rocket parts to huge defunct spacecraft that have languished in orbital graveyards for decades. Adding more satellites to the mix not only increases the chances of a catastrophic on-orbit collision, but also pushes humanity closer to a perilous tipping point, beyond which certain parts of low-Earth orbit may become too cluttered and risky to operate in safely. "We're really on borrowed time before we have another big collision," said Charity Weeden, vice president of global space policy and government relations at Astroscale U.S., a private company that specializes in satellite servicing and orbital debris removal. "There are thousands of close calls every day in orbit...." But placing all the blame on these megaconstellations is oversimplifying the problem, said Darren McKnight, a senior technical fellow at LeoLabs, a California-based aerospace company that operates networks of ground-based radars and tracking systems to monitor objects in low-Earth orbit and map their movements. For one, operational satellites make up only a small fraction of the total number of objects in low-Earth orbit that pose collision risks, he said. And unlike defunct spacecraft that have languished in orbit for decades, most newer satellites can be maneuvered out of harm's way, if necessary. It has also become standard practice for satellite operators to have an end-of-life plan to cut down on the accumulation of space junk. These strategies include purposefully commanding a spacecraft to "deorbit," or burn up harmlessly in Earth's atmosphere, or strand it in a higher, "graveyard" orbit away from the most congested sections around the planet. Still, the risks are serious. And the amount of debris in space is expected to grow as launches continue. McKnight said "bad neighborhoods" have already emerged — areas in low-Earth orbit where big clouds of debris pose very real threats." There are certain places in Earth orbit where we are destined to have a major event within the next five to 10 years," he said. "We're looking at a 10 to 15 percent probability of a collision, which sounds unlikely, but by leaving these objects in orbit since the mid-'80s, we're rolling the dice a lot" These risks were amplified by a series of recent anti-satellite missile tests — one conducted by China in 2007, one by India in 2019 and one carried out by Russia last year — and a separate accidental collision between two satellites in 2009. Each event is estimated to have produced thousands of pieces of debris larger than the size of a golf ball, and even smaller, harder-to-track objects, according to the Secure World Foundation, a nongovernmental organization that focuses on space policy... Part of the problem is that while launches are subject to domestic regulations in individual countries, there is no international body to oversee what happens in orbit. Policies have yet to catch up with the industry's growth, and it's unclear if any binding global agreements can be achieved anytime soon. "It's like we're building the plane as we're flying it," said Josef Koller, a systems director for the Center for Space Policy and Strategy at The Aerospace Corp. The article also points out that companies like Astroscale are currently "developing technologies to actively remove objects from orbit."

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Chainalysis is a software for tracing cryptocurrency, "to turn the digital underworld's preferred means of exchange into its Achilles' heel," writes Wired. This week they describe what happened when that company's co-founder discovered that for two yeras, hundreds of users of a child pornography-trading site — and its administrators — "had done almost nothing to obscure their cryptocurrency trails..." and "seemed to be wholly unprepared for the modern state of financial forensics on the blockchain." Over the previous few years, [Internal Revenue Service criminal investigator Chris] Janczewski, his partner Tigran Gambaryan, and a small group of investigators at a growing roster of three-letter American agencies had used this newfound technique, tracing a cryptocurrency that once seemed untraceable, to crack one criminal case after another on an unprecedented, epic scale. But those methods had never led them to a case quite like this one, in which the fate of so many people, victims and perpetrators alike, seemed to hang on the findings of this novel form of forensics.... Janczewski thought again of the investigative method that had brought them there like a digital divining rod, revealing a hidden layer of illicit connections underlying the visible world.... When Bitcoin first appeared in 2008, one fundamental promise of the cryptocurrency was that it revealed only which coins reside at which Bitcoin addresses — long, unique strings of letters and numbers — without any identifying information about those coins' owners. This layer of obfuscation created the impression among many early adherents that Bitcoin might be the fully anonymous internet cash long awaited by libertarian cypherpunks and crypto-anarchists: a new financial netherworld where digital briefcases full of unmarked bills could change hands across the globe in an instant. Satoshi Nakamoto, the mysterious inventor of Bitcoin, had gone so far as to write that "participants can be anonymous" in an early email describing the cryptocurrency. And thousands of users of dark-web black markets like Silk Road had embraced Bitcoin as their central payment mechanism. But the counterintuitive truth about Bitcoin, the one upon which Chainalysis had built its business, was this: Every Bitcoin payment is captured in its blockchain, a permanent, unchangeable, and entirely public record of every transaction in the Bitcoin network. The blockchain ensures that coins can't be forged or spent more than once. But it does so by making everyone in the Bitcoin economy a witness to every transaction. Every criminal payment is, in some sense, a smoking gun in broad daylight. Within a few years of Bitcoin's arrival, academic security researchers — and then companies like Chainalysis — began to tear gaping holes in the masks separating Bitcoin users' addresses and their real-world identities. The article describes some investigative techniques — like pressuring exchanges for identities, tying a transaction to a known identity, or even performing an undercover transaction themselves. "Thanks to tricks like these, Bitcoin had turned out to be practically the opposite of untraceable: a kind of honeypot for crypto criminals that had, for years, dutifully and unerasably recorded evidence of their dirty deals. "By 2017, agencies like the FBI, the Drug Enforcement Agency, and the IRS's Criminal Investigation division had traced Bitcoin transactions to carry out one investigative coup after another, very often with the help of Chainalysis. "The cases had started small and then gained a furious momentum...." Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader Z00L00K for sharing the article.

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CNET points out the far side of the moon — the one that never faces earth — is "rugged, spotted with tons of craters" and "filled with totally different elements." "In essence, our moon has two faces, and scientists are still trying to solve the mystery of why they're so different." But a paper published Friday in the journal Science Advances might finally have an explanation for one major aspect of this enigmatic lunar duality. It has to do dark shadows, a massive impact many billions of years ago, and... lava.... They used computer simulations to see what might've gone on long, long (long) ago, way before there was any volcanic activity on the moon's surface. More specifically, they re-created a massive impact that, billions of years ago, changed the base of the moon, forming a gigantic crater that we now refer to as the South Pole-Aitken (SPA) basin.... What they found is that this huge smash would've created a plume of heat that carried a bunch of specific chemical elements to the near side of the moon, and not the far side. "We expect that this contributed to the mantle melting that produced the lava flows we see on the surface," Jones said. In other words, those elements presumably contributed to an era of volcanism on the lunar face we can see from Earth but it left the far side untouched.

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The newest member of Twitter's board of directors — Elon Musk — tweeted new ideas for improving Twitter last night. "Everyone who signs up for Twitter Blue (i.e. pays $3/month) should get an authentication checkmark," Musk suggested, adding later that "It would massively expand the verified pool & make bot armies too expensive to maintain." Musk clarified that this checkmark "should be different from 'public figure' or 'official account' checkmark." And he also noted that Twitter Blue subscribers already get special features like a modifiable 20 second time window in which they can edit their tweets. "And no ads," Musk suggested in another tweet. "The power of corporations to dictate policy is greatly enhanced if Twitter depends on advertising money to survive." Moments later Musk tweeted a poll, asking his followers to vote Yes or No to this idea: Convert Twitter's San Francisco headquarters to a homeless shelter since no one shows up anyway. Within 16 hours 1,425,937 people had voted "Yes!" — a whopping 91.3% of all votes cast. (Versus just 135,877 votes for "No.") But five hours later, Musk had moved on to yet another question, polling his followers for "Yes" or "No" votes on this idea: Delete the w in Twitter?

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"At first glance, U.S. Covid cases appear to have plateaued over the last two weeks," reports NBC News, "with a consistent average of around 30,000 per day..." "But disease experts say incomplete data likely masks an upward trend." "I do think we are in the middle of a surge, the magnitude of which I can't tell you," Zeke Emanuel, vice provost of global initiatives at the University of Pennsylvania, said. The BA.2 omicron subvariant, which now accounts for about 72 percent of U.S. cases and is more contagious than the original omicron variant, is fueling that spread, Emanuel added. "It's much more transmissible. It's around. We just don't have a lot of case counts," he said. Emanuel and other experts cite a lack of testing as the primary reason cases are underreported. At the height of the omicron wave in January, the U.S. was administering more than 2 million tests per day. That had dropped to an average of about 530,000 as of Monday, the most recent data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. "The milder symptoms become, the less likely people are to test or show up in official case counts," said David Dowdy, an epidemiologist at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. More people also now have access to at-home rapid tests that are free or covered by insurance, and most of those test results don't get reported to state health departments or the CDC. "Case counts and testing are progressively becoming shaky indicators because we're not catching everyone in the system," said Dr. Jonathan Quick, an adjunct professor at the Duke Global Health Institute. Some local data, however, does reveal recent spikes. Average Covid cases have risen nearly 80 percent in Nebraska, 75 percent in Arizona, 58 percent in New York and 55 percent in Massachusetts over the last two weeks. Wastewater surveillance similarly suggests that infections are rising in Colorado, Ohio and Washington, among other states. The Johns Hopkins epidemiologist emphasized that hospitalization figures are more important than case counts. "If we're seeing an increase in cases, but not an increase in severe cases, I think it's a very valid question of does that matter?"

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Slashdot reader sciencehabit shares this article from Science magazine: Robots can be programmed to lift a car and even help perform some surgeries, but when it comes to picking up an object they have not touched before, such as an egg, they often fail miserably. Now, engineers have come up with an artificial fingertip that overcomes that limitation. The advance enables machines to sense the textures of these surfaces a lot like a human fingertip does.... [W]hen researchers at the University of Bristol began designing an artificial fingertip in 2009, they used human skin as a guide. Their first fingertip — assembled by hand — was about the size of a soda can. By 2018, they had switched to 3D printing. That made it possible to make the tip and all its components about the size of an adult's big toe and more easily create a series of layers approximating the multilayered structure of human skin. More recently, the scientists have incorporated neural networks into the fingertip, which they call TacTip. The neural networks help a robot quickly process what it's sensing and react accordingly — seemingly just like a real finger. In our fingertips, a layer of nerve endings deforms when skin contacts an object and tells the brain what's happening. These nerves send "fast" signals to help us avoid dropping something and "slow" signals to convey an object's shape. TacTip's equivalent signals come from an array of pinlike projections underneath a rubbery surface layer that move when the surface is touched. The array's pins are like a hairbrush's bristles: stiff but bendable. Beneath that array is, among other things, a camera that detects when and how the pins move. The amount of bending of the pins provides the slow signal and the speed of bending provides the fast signal. The neural network translates those signals into the fingertip's actions, making it grip more tightly for example, or adjust the angle of the fingertip.... In a second project, Lepora's team added more pins and a microphone to TacTip. The microphone mimics another set of nerve endings deep within our skin that sense vibrations felt as we run our fingers across a surface. These nerve endings enhance our ability to feel how rough a surface is. The microphone did likewise when the researchers tested the enhanced fingertip's ability to differentiate among 13 fabrics. The article points out that in testing, the artificial fingertip's output "closely matched the neuronal signaling patterns of human fingertips undergoing the same tests."

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"Weather predictions here on Earth are more accurate than they've ever been," writes ScienceAlert. "Trying to predict the behavior of our wild and wacky Sun is a little more tricky." Case in point: according to official predictions, the current cycle of solar activity should be mild. But the gap between the prediction and what's actually happening is pretty significant — and it's getting wider. Sunspot counts, used as a measure for solar activity, are way higher than the predicted values calculated by the NOAA, NASA, and the International Space Environmental Service. In fact, sunspot counts have been consistently higher than predicted levels since September 2020. This could mean that, in contrast to predictions, the Sun is in the swing of an unusually strong activity cycle.... [T]he number of sunspots for the last 18 months has been consistently higher than predictions. At time of writing, the Sun has 61 sunspots, and we're still over three years from solar maximum. Here's what makes that even more significant. In 2020 a team of scientists (led by solar physicist Scott McIntosh of the U.S. National Center for Atmospheric Research) predicted that, based on long-term solar cycle trends, this solar cycle was likely to be stronger — and perhaps one of the strongest ever recorded. They'd also said in 2020 that scientists "lacked a fundamental understanding" of the mechanism behind sun spot cycles, and argued that if this sun cycle proves them correct, "we will have evidence that our framework for understanding the Sun's internal magnetic machine is on the right path." Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader schwit1 for sharing this article

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Long-time Slashdot reader theodp writes: Tech-backed Code.org reports that as part of efforts to provide scaled human-centered education, the Stanford AI Lab analyzed 711,274 solutions to interactive block-based Code.org programming assignments submitted by 3rd and 4th grade students to develop AI-based solutions for automatically grading student homework. The research project received funding from LinkedIn founder and VC Reid Hoffman, who is coincidentally a $1+ million supporter of Code.org, which provided the student data. Autograding systems are increasingly being deployed at all levels of education to meet the challenge of teaching programming at scale. So, will AI make Computer Science grader and undergraduate teaching assistant jobs obsolete?

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