Mysterious archaic hominins may have interbred with early humans in West Africa, scientists say.

Smoke from wildfires may have long-term health effects, according to US research on juvenile monkeys.

An anonymous reader shares a report: The retailpocalypse started in 2010. It followed the 2008 global recession, with the parallel birth and rise of social media adding fuel to the growth of online shopping. Suburban and rural malls sat empty, underutilized or poorly maintained as the most affected brands lost their customer base in the squeezed middle class. Meanwhile, online retailers thrived without the overhead costs of a physical space. Nearly a decade later, the online-only platforms that disrupted retail are choosing to pay rent as an additional, unnecessary expense. There are items available for purchase in each space, but the stores' ultimate goal is to offer a tangible experience offline to their users or consumers. Hunker describes itself as an editorial website to help "first-timers improve their homes -- with inspiring tours, practical solutions and design advice for real people." Shopify is an all-in-one commerce platform where users can start and run an online business, facilitating 820,000 online stores since June 2019. Depop calls itself "the creative community's marketplace" and projects that its existing user base will increase threefold over the next three years, from 5 million to 15 million users. In the last two years, each company has added a physical space that isn't exactly a store and isn't really an office, though they definitely borrow aspects of each. Hunker's space, known as Hunker House, is a three-story loft in the Abbot-Kinney neighborhood of Venice, CA. Shopify opened a 1,600 square foot location in downtown Los Angeles' The Row, and Depop's two community spots are in Little Italy, Manhattan, and Silver Lake, LA.

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Newly leaked documents show that the Department of Defense funded a study concerning UFOs, contradicting recent statements by the Pentagon. From a report: In 2017, The New York Times revealed the existence of $22 million dollar UFO investigation program called the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program, or AATIP. A twist came two months ago, however, when Pentagon spokesperson Susan Gough told John Greenewald -- curator of the Black Vault, the largest civilian archive of declassified government documents -- that AATIP had nothing to do with UFOs. Greenewald also wrote that the Pentagon told him that another program, the Advanced Aerospace Weapons System Application Program or AAWSAP, was the name of the contract that the government gave out to produce reports under AATIP. In a new Popular Mechanics article, journalist Tim McMillan acquired documents from Bigelow Aerospace's exotic science division, Bigelow Aerospace Advanced Space Studies, or BAASS, indicating that the organization did explore strange phenomena under the auspices of the AATIP program. One BAASS report, leaked to McMillan by an unnamed source, previously appeared on a list of products produced under the AATIP contract "for DIA to publish" that was obtained via FOIA laws. The report was cited incorrectly on that list, but Popular Mechanics tracked down its author, who confirmed its authenticity. The report investigated "exotic" propulsion via injuries sustained by people who experienced "exposure to anomalous vehicles." The text mentions UFOs several times. "What can not be overly emphasized, is that when one looks at the literature of anomalous cases, including UFO claims from the most reliable sources, the extent and degree of acute high but not necessarily chronic low-level injuries are consistent across patients who are injured, compared to witnesses in the far-field, who are not," the report states. Notably, the report's author -- Christopher "Kit" Green -- told Popular Mechanics that he was not contracted by BAASS except to produce this report and that it provides zero evidence for extraterrestrial or non-human technologies. Further reading: Navy Confirms It Has a Secret Classified Video of an Infamous UFO Incident, Says Releasing It Would Threaten National Security.

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YouTube says it paid the music industry more than $3 billion last year. "YouTube offers twin engines for revenue with advertising and subscribers, paying out more than $3 billion to the music industry last year from ads and subscriptions," YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki wrote in a blog post Friday. From a report: The latest figure hints at how much of the Alphabet-owned company's ad revenue goes back to music industry and creators. The data has been largely unknown to investors who have wondered how much money the company is actually pocketing at the end of the day.

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US Cyber Command, the Department of Homeland Security, and the Federal Bureau of Investigations have exposed today a new North Korean hacking operation. Authorities have published security advisories detailing six new malware families that are currently being used by North Korean hackers. From a report: According to the Twitter account of the Cyber National Mission Force (CNMF), a subordinate unit of US Cyber Command, the malware is being distributed via a North Korean phishing campaign. US Cyber Command believes the malware is used to provide North Korean hackers with remote access to infected systems in order to steal funds that are later transfered back to North Korea, as a way to avoid economical sanctions. The North Korean government has a long history of using hackers to steal funds from banks and cryptocurrency exchanges in order to evade economic sanctions and raise funds for its nuclear weapons and missile programs. In September 2019, the US Department of the Treasury imposed sanctions on the Pyongyang regime for the use of this exact tactic.

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An anonymous organization called the Earnest Project is offering the chance to own DNA samples of a handful of world leaders and celebrities. The group claims it has surreptitiously collected items discarded by attendees of the 2018 World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, that may contain their DNA. President Trump, French President Emmanuel Macron, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, and Elton John all attended the conference. From a report: The group has compiled these artifacts -- napkins, paper coffee cups, a glass parfait jar, cigarette butts, and other items -- in an online catalog it calls the "Davos Collection." Each has an estimated dollar value: A strand of human hair is listed at $1,200 to $3,000. A used breakfast fork has an estimated worth up to $36,500. And a wine glass is valued at up to $65,000. None of the items are identified with names, but it's assumed they come from the leaders or celebrities at the forum. The Earnest Project is planning to auction off the items to raise awareness about "surveillance capitalism," the practice of monetizing people's personal data. They fear that our genetic data could eventually end up in the hands of tech companies like Facebook and Google, which already harvest a lot of personal data. "By collecting and selling vital and sensitive data harvested from the most powerful people on the planet, we hope to encourage a visceral reaction against surveillance capitalism among the elite," the Earnest Project told OneZero in an email. "We're all constantly depositing our DNA around us and on discarded items. Once you start paying attention, it's really quite easy to collect a target's DNA." Now that genetic testing is getting cheaper and companies are developing hand-held DNA sequencing devices, it's no longer a far-off possibility that someone could take your DNA, get it analyzed, and use it against you for blackmail, extortion, or discrimination. The Earnest Project had planned to hold the auction in New York on February 20 but is postponing the sale due to "unresolved legal issues," according to a statement emailed to OneZero.

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Thousands of images, videos and records pertaining to plastic surgery patients were left on an unsecured database where they could be viewed by anyone with the right IP address, researchers said Friday. From a report: The data included about 900,000 records, which researchers say could belong to thousands of different patients. The data was generated at clinics around the world using software made by French imaging company NextMotion. Images in the database included before-and-after photos of cosmetic procedures. Those photos often contained nudity, the researchers said. Other records included images of invoices that contained information that would identify a patient. The database is now secured. Researchers Noam Rotem and Ran Locar found the exposed database. They published their research with vpnMonitor, a security website. Rotem said he sees exposed health care databases all too often as part of his web-mapping project, which looks for exposed data. "The state of privacy protection, especially in health care, is really abysmal," Rotem said.

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Communities on the coast face "serious questions" against the background of climate change.

cusco shares a report: For the 30th anniversary of one of the most iconic views from the Voyager mission, NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, is publishing a new version of the image known as the "Pale Blue Dot." The updated image uses modern image-processing software and techniques while respecting the intent of those who planned the image. Like the original, the new color view shows Planet Earth as a single, bright blue pixel in the vastness of space. Rays of sunlight scattered within the camera optics stretch across the scene, one of which happens to have intersected dramatically with Earth. The view was obtained on Feb. 14, 1990, just minutes before Voyager 1's cameras were intentionally powered off to conserve power and because the probe -- along with its sibling, Voyager 2 -- would not make close flybys of any other objects during their lifetimes. Shutting down instruments and other systems on the two Voyager spacecraft has been a gradual and ongoing process that has helped enable their longevity. This celebrated Voyager 1 view was part of a series of 60 images designed to produce what the mission called the "Family Portrait of the Solar System." This sequence of camera-pointing commands returned images of six of the solar system's planets, as well as the Sun. The Pale Blue Dot view was created using the color images Voyager took of Earth. Planetary scientist Carolyn Porco shared the story behind the idea of Pale Blue Dot picture on Neil deGrasse Tyson's video podcast "Star Talk" last year. It's fascinating -- watch from 51:05 seconds and hang around for 13 minutes. Also the famous video where Carl Sagan describes the Pale Blue Dot. An interview he did on the subject later.

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The rise of preprint repositories has helped scientists worldwide to share results and get feedback quickly. But several platforms that serve researchers in emerging economies are struggling to raise money to stay afloat. One, which hosts research from Indonesia, has decided to close because of this funding shortfall. From a report: INA-Rxiv, which was set up in 2017, was one of the first repositories to host studies from a particular region. Previous platforms served specific disciplines: for example, arXiv, the original preprint repository, hosts physical-sciences research, and bioRxiv is a popular repository for biology studies. Other region or language-specific repositories followed, including ArabiXiv, which hosts Arabic-language research; AfricArxiv and IndiaRxiv. Managers of these repositories say they increase exposure for research from the regions, and facilitate collaborations. INA-Rxiv, ArabiXiv, AfricArxiv and IndiaRxiv are run by volunteers around the world, but the servers are hosted online by the non-profit Center for Open Science (COS), based in Charlottesville, Virginia. The centre's platform hosts 26 repositories, including more than a dozen that are discipline-specific. In December 2018, the COS informed repository managers that from 2020, it would be introducing fees, charged to repository managers, to cover maintenance costs. The charges, which were finalized last December, start at about US$1,000 a year, and increase as repositories' annual submissions grow. The costs can be significant, particularly for repositories run by volunteers in emerging economies.

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As sea levels rise, difficult decisions are being made about which communities to save.

Around the world, the most popular tunes this month will be depressing ones [Editor's note: the link may be paywalled.]. From a report: Residents of the northern hemisphere might think that their moods are worst in January. Christmas is over, the nights are long and summer is a distant prospect. Newspapers often claim that "Blue Monday," in the third week of January, is the most depressing day. To create a quantitative measure of seasonal misery, The Economist has analysed music consumption. Our calculations use data from Spotify, which offers 50m tracks to 270m users in over 70 countries, mostly in Europe and the Americas. The firm has an algorithm that classifies a song's "valence," or how happy it sounds, on a scale from 0 to 100. The algorithm is trained on ratings of positivity by musical experts, and gives Aretha Franklin's soaring "Respect" a score of 97; Radiohead's gloomy "Creep" gets just 10. Since 2017 Spotify has also published daily tables of the 200 most-streamed songs, both worldwide and in each country. We gathered data for 30 countries around the globe, including 46,000 unique tracks with 330bn streams, to identify the annual nadir of musical mood. Drum roll, please. The global top 200 songs are gloomiest in February, when their valence is 4% lower than the annual average. In July, the perkiest month, the mood is 3% higher. The most joyful spike comes at Christmas. Strikingly, this February slump occurs in some countries near the equator, such as Singapore, and far south of it, such as Australia -- even though their musical tastes differ. A few Latin American countries lack such a dip, perhaps because the algorithm sees Latin music as mostly happy. The icy north shows the biggest seasonal swings. Finland's mood in July is 11% happier than usual. Overall, on days when a country gets one more hour of sunlight than its annual average, the valence of its streams increases by 0.6%. In contrast, wet days bring particularly downcast tunes.

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The UK's National Crime Agency (NCA) has publicly said it has nothing to do with a misleading poster designed to put fear into the hearts of parents and urge them to call the police if their children are using Kali Linux. From a report: The poster, made public by Twitter user @G_IW, has reportedly been distributed by local authorities on behalf of the West Midlands Regional Organised Crime Unit (WMROCU). It appears the creators of the poster are aiming to inform parents of what dubious software to look out for if they suspect their children are up to no good on the computer. While a good and reasonable intention, the disinformation on the poster, as described by @G_IW, is "staggering." Virtual machines, the Tor Browser, Kali Linux, WiFi Pineapple, Discord, and Metasploit are all deemed terrible finds and the poster urges parents to call the cops "so we can give advice and engage them into positive diversions."

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Scarce components have pushed the manufacturing costs for Sony's next PlayStation to around $450 per unit, forcing a difficult price-setting decision in its battle with Microsoft, Bloomberg reported Friday, citing sources. From the report: The Japanese conglomerate is preparing to gradually replace the six-year-old PS4 console, releasing its PlayStation 5 the same holiday season its archrival debuts the upcoming Xbox Series X. Sony typically finalizes a console's price in February of the release year, followed by mass production in the spring. With the PS5, the company is taking a wait-and-see approach, said the people, asking not to be named because the details are private. The PS4, released in 2013 at a retail price of $399, was estimated by IHS Markit to cost $381 to manufacture. With the $450 unit cost and a similar gross margin, the PlayStation 5's retail price would have to be at least $470. That would be a hard sell to consumers, considering Sony's most expensive machine now is the $399.99 PS4 Pro and is often discounted, according to Macquarie Capital analyst Damian Thong.

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