https://archive.is/2024.12.12-213644/https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/12/science/a-second-tree-of-life-could-wreak-havoc-scientists-warn.html

Testosterone plays important roles in reproductive behaviour in many species. Despite a common belief that testosterone regulates fluctuations in human sexual desire, there is little direct evidence that relates within-person changes in natural testosterone production to within-person changes in sexual desire. Here, we measured daily salivary testosterone concentrations from 41 adult men for one month, along with daily self-reports of sexual desire (n = 759 observations for the main analyses). We analysed concurrent relationships between within-person changes in testosterone and desire, and also lagged relationships that were analysed using a continuous-time modelling framework. We found no evidence for significant, positive relationships between testosterone and desire, which argues against the notion that day-to-day changes in eugonadal men’s baseline testosterone regulates changes in their sexual desire. However, additional analyses provided preliminary evidence for a positive relationship between testosterone and self-reported courtship effort, particularly on days when single participants interacted with potential romantic partners. Our findings add original evidence regarding day-to-day associations between testosterone and desire, and suggest that testosterone above minimum threshold concentrations does not increase sexual desire. We propose that the evolved functions of testosterone in human males are more closely associated with courtship efforts than with sexual desire.

If this is the way to superintelligence, it remains a bizarre one. “This is back to a million monkeys typing for a million years generating the works of Shakespeare,” Emily Bender told me. But OpenAI’s technology effectively crunches those years down to seconds. A company blog boasts that an o1 model scored better than most humans on a recent coding test that allowed participants to submit 50 possible solutions to each problem—but only when o1 was allowed 10,000 submissions instead. No human could come up with that many possibilities in a reasonable length of time, which is exactly the point. To OpenAI, unlimited time and resources are an advantage that its hardware-grounded models have over biology. Not even two weeks after the launch of the o1 preview, the start-up presented plans to build data centers that would each require the power generated by approximately five large nuclear reactors, enough for almost 3 million homes.

https://archive.is/xUJMG

The World Beekeeping Awards will not award a prize for honey next year after warnings of widespread fraud in the global supply chain.

Apimondia, the International Federation of Beekeepers’ Associations, says it will showcase honey from around the world at its congress in Denmark, but for the first time make no awards for the product.

The decision came as beekeepers and importers face a mounting crisis over the scale of fraud, with warnings that genuine products are bulked out with cheaper sugar syrup. Some common tests to detect fraud can easily be defeated, and beekeepers say there has been a failure by food watchdogs and the industry to combat the fraudsters.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/32967276

Archive: https://archive.is/2024.12.08-035812/https://www.wsj.com/tech/cybersecurity/hacking-brian-krebs-snowflake-waifu-49b87fce

Archive: https://archive.is/2024.12.08-035812/https://www.wsj.com/tech/cybersecurity/hacking-brian-krebs-snowflake-waifu-49b87fce

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/32935539

Organic Maps, a free offline maps app, faced a setback when contributor Alexandr Borsuk removed the MIT license, privatizing the repository and undermining open-source collaboration and the project's no-tracking values. A subsequent change enabled logging, further compromising privacy, all without discussion with other contributors.