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"According to a new study, wearing the right kind of perfume or cologne can enlarge your brain's gray matter," writes ScienceAlert Researchers from Kyoto University and the University of Tsukuba in Japan asked 28 women to wear a specific rose scent oil on their clothing for a month, with another 22 volunteers enlisted as controls who put on plain water instead. Magnetic resonance imaging ( MRI) scans showed boosts in the gray matter volume of the rose scent participants. While an increase in brain volume doesn't necessarily translate into more thinking power, the findings could have implications for neurodegenerative conditions such as dementia. "This study is the first to show that continuous scent inhalation changes brain structure," write the researchers in their published paper. We've seen scents like this improve memory and cognitive performance, but here the team wanted to try a longer-term experiment to see how triggering our sense of smell might lead to measurable changes in brain structure... It's difficult to pin down exactly what's causing this boost in gray matter. Another possibility raised by the researchers is that the rose scent is actually labeled as unpleasant by the brain, with the subsequent emotional regulation responsible for the PCC working harder and increasing in size. The researchers hope that the findings could be useful in the development of aromatherapies that boost mental health and brain plasticity... The research was published in the Brain Research Bulletin.

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There's something rare about a snail named Ned, reports CNN: Ned's shell spirals left, while almost all other snails have right spiraling shells. It's a one in 40,000 genetic condition among the common corno espersum... "I was quite breathless for a moment," says Giselle Clarkson, an author, illustrator and self-described 'observologist' who found Ned while digging in her garden in Wairarapa, just north of capital Wellington. "I was just pulling out this plant, and a snail tumbled into the dirt and I was just about to scoop it up and just chuck it off to the side, when I realized what I had," Clarkson told CNN. It was a serendipitous moment for Ned, now named for Homer Simpson's left-handed neighbor. Clarkson was aware of this rare asymmetry in snails from her work with the magazine New Zealand Geographic. But "should Ned hope to mate one day, it will have to be with another very rare left-coiled snail," notes the Washington Post (since, as CNN points out, this snail's reproductive organs "don't line up" with those of snails with right-spiraling shells). This has sparked a national campaign to locate a compatible snail — something that was last successfully attempted in 2016. "If 40,000 people read this," the campaign explains, "chances are, Ned's dreams will come true."

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"A new study released Friday found that young children diagnosed with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, or ADHD, are often prescribed medication too quickly," reports CBS News: The study, led by Stanford Medicine and published in JAMA Network Open, examined the health records of nearly 10,000 preschool-aged children ages 3 to 5 between 2016 and 2023 who were diagnosed with ADHD... The Stanford study found that about 68% of those children who were diagnosed with ADHD were prescribed medications before age 7, most often stimulants such as Ritalin, which can help children focus their attention and regulate their emotions. The turn to medication often came quickly, according to the study. About 42% of the children who were diagnosed with ADHD were prescribed drugs within 30 days of diagnosis, the study found. "We don't have concerns about the toxicity of the medications for 4- and 5-year-olds, but we do know that there is a high likelihood of treatment failure, because many families decide the side effects outweigh the benefits," Dr. Yair Bannett, assistant professor of pediatrics at Stanford Medicine and the lead author of the study, said in a statement. Those side effects can include irritability, aggressiveness and emotional problems, according to Bannett. "The high rate of medication prescriptions among preschool-age children with ADHD and the lack of delay between initial diagnosis and prescription require further investigation to assess the appropriateness of early medication treatment," the researchers concluded. The study also found that the vast majority of the young children diagnosed with ADHD, about 76%, were boys. CBS News interviewed Jamie Howard, senior clinical psychologist from the Child Mind Institute (who was not involved in the study). Howard said when treating ADHD in young children, clinical guidelines call for starting with "behavioral intervention...." "I think that people have an association with ADHD and stimulant medication... But there is actually a lot more than that. And we want to give kids the opportunity to use these other strategies first, and then if they need medication, it can be incredibly helpful for a lot of kids."

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"Louis, I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship"

About 1,000 of a set of 15,000 open access scientific journals appear to exist mainly to extract fees from naive academics.…

The Washington Post covers "a string of false reports of active shooters at a dozen U.S. universities this month as students returned to campus." The FBI is investigating the incidents, according to a spokesperson who declined to specify the nature of the probe. While universities have proved a popular swatting target, the agency "is seeing an increase in swatting events across the country," the FBI spokesperson said... Local officials are frustrated by the anonymous calls tying up first responders, straining public safety budgets and needlessly traumatizing college students who grew up in an era in which gun violence has in some way shaped their school experience... The recent string of swattings began Thursday with a false report to the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, quickly followed by one about Villanova University later that day. Hoaxes at 10 more schools followed... Villanova also received a second threat. As the calls about shootings came in, officials on many of the campuses pushed out emergency notifications directing students and employees to shelter in place, while police investigated what turned out to be false reports. (Iowa State was able to verify the lack of a threat before a campuswide alert was sent, its police chief said. [They had a live video feed from the location the caller claimed to be from.]) In at least three cases, 911 calls reporting a shooting purported to come from campus libraries, where the sound of gunshots could be heard over the phone, officials told The Washington Post... Although false bomb reports, shooter threats and swatting incidents are not new, bad actors used to be more easily traceable through landline phones. But the era of internet-based services, virtual private networks, and anonymous text and chat tools has made unmasking hoax callers far more challenging... In 2023, a Post investigation found that more than 500 schools across the United States were subject to a coordinated swatting effort that may have had origins abroad... [In Chattanooga, Tennessee last week] a dispatcher heard gunfire during a call reporting an on-campus shooting. "We grabbed everybody that wasn't already out on the street and got to that location," said University of Tennessee at Chattanooga Police spokesman Brett Fuchs. About 150 officers from several agencies responded. There was no shooter. The New York Times reports that an online group called "Purgatory" is "suspected of being connected to several of the episodes, including reports of shootings, according to cybersecurity experts, law enforcement agencies and the group members' own posts in a social media chat." (Though the Times, couldn't verify the group's claims.) Federal authorities previously connected the same network to a series of bomb scares and bogus shooting reports in early 2024, for which three men pleaded guilty this year... Bragging about its recent activities, Purgatory said that it could arrange more swatting episodes for a fee. USA Today tries to quantify the reach of swatting: Estimated swatting incidents jumped from 400 in 2011 to more than 1,000 in 2019, according to the Anti-Defamation League, which cited a former FBI agent whose expertise is in swatting. From January 2023 to June 2024 alone, more than 800 instances of swatting were recorded at U.S. elementary, middle and high schools, according to the K-12 School Shootings Database, created by a University of Central Florida doctoral student in response to the Parkland High School shooting in 2018.tise is in swatting... David Riedman, a data scientist and creator of the K-12 School Shooting Database, estimates that in 2023, it cost $82,300,000 for police to respond to false threats. Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader schwit1 for sharing the news.

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Running AIs on your own machine lets you stick it to the man and save some cash in the process

Feature After a decade or two of the cloud, we're used to paying for our computing capability by the megabyte. As AI takes off, the whole cycle promises to repeat itself again, and while AI might seem relatively cheap now, it might not always be so.…

In 2017 Rick Beato streamed "Rick's Rant Episode 2" — and just received a copyright claim this month. Days after jazz pianist Chick Corea died in 2021, Beato livestreamed a half-hour video which was mostly commentary, but with several excerpts from Corea's albums (at least one more than three minutes long). He also received a copyright claim for that one this August — just minutes after the claim on his 2017 video. These videos "are all fair use," Beato argues in a new video, noting it's also affected other popular YouTube channels like The Professor of Rock: Rick Beato: Universal Music Group [UMG] has continued to send emails about copyright content ID claims — and now copyright strikes — on my channel. As a matter of fact, I have three shorts — these are under a minute long — that if they go through in the next four days, I'll have three strikes on my channel! Now if you don't fight these things, those three strikes would actually remove my channel from YouTube. Five months ago Rick Beato had posted a clip from his interview with singer-songwriter Adam Duritz (founder of The Counting Crows) on YouTube. After 250,000 views, he'd earned a whopping $36.52 — and then Universal Music Group also claimed that video violated their copyright. (In the background the video played Duritz's song as he described how he wrote it.) "So they're gonna take my channel down over less than a hundred bucks — for using a small segment from an interview with him, on a song he sang on," Beato complained on YouTube. "That video is 55 seconds long!" "You need to play people's music to talk about it," Beato argues. "That is the definition of fair use. These are interviews with the people about their careers." (And the interviews actually help promote the artists for the record labels...) Rick Beato: The next one has me in it — it's an Olivia Rodrigo song — that I played maybe 10 seconds of the song on, and the short is 42 seconds long. Who did it? UMG. The third copyright strike is from a Hans Zimmer short. It's also UMG — it's from the Crimson Tide soundtrack. Now, what do these things say...? "Your video is scheduled to be removed in four days and your channel will get a copyright strike due to a removal request from a claimant. If you delete your video before then, your channel won't get a copyright strike." [And there's also emails like "After reviewing your dispute, UMG has decided that their copyright claim is still valid..."] I've had probably 4,000 claims, over the last 9 years — from things that are fair use. [When he interviewed producer Rick Rubin, that video got 13 separate copyright claims.] That's when I hired a lawyer to fight these. [Full-time, Beato says later.] And what he's done is he fought every single claim... We have successfully fought thousands of these now. But it literally costs me so much money to do this. Since we've been fighting these things — and never lost one — they still keep coming in... They're all Universal Music Group. So they obviously have hired some third party company, that are dredging up things, they're looking for things that haven't been claimed in the past — they're taking videos from seven or eight years ago! Slashdot reader MrBrklyn (Slashdot reader #4,775) writes on the "New York's Linux Scene" site that video bloggers like Beato "have been hounded by copyright pirates like UMG," arguing that new videos of support are a "rebellion gaining traction". (Beato's video drew 1,369,859 views — and attracted 24,605 Comments — along with videos of support from professional musicians like drummer Anthony Edwards, guitarist Justin Hawkins, and bassist Scot Lade, as well as two different professional music attorneys.) "Since there's rarely humans making any of these decisions and it's automated by bots, they don't understand these claims are against Universal Music's best interests," argues the long-running blog Saving Country Music (first appearing on MySpace in 2008). On YouTube videos, creators can freely filch copyrighted photos and other people's videos virtually free of ramifications. You can take an entire 2 1/2 hour film, impose it over a background, and upload it to YouTube, and usually avoid any problems. But feature a barely audible 8 1/2-second clip of music underneath audio dialogue, and you could have your entire podcast career evaporate overnight... People continue to ask, "Why doesn't Saving Country Music has a podcast?" Because what's the point of having a music podcast when you can't feature music? In fact, after over a decade of refusing to start one, I finally did, music free. What happened? About a dozen episodes in, someone took out a claim, and not only were all the episodes deleted, so was the entire account, even though no music even appeared on any of the episodes. I was given absolutely no recourse to fight whatever false claim had been made... The music industry continues to so colossal fail the artists and catalogs they represent, and the fans they're supposed to serve with this current system of how podcasts are handled. If everything changes today thanks to the Rick Beato rant, it would still be 15 years too late. But at least it would happen. Instead, they write, "Music labels have been leaving major opportunities to promote their catalogs and performers on the table with their punitive copyright claims that make it impossible to feature music on music podcasts and other platforms... "You aren't screwing podcasters. You're screwing artists who could be using podcasts to help promote their music. "

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"For months, tens of thousands of people around the world have been complaining Meta has been banning their Instagram and Facebook accounts in error..." the BBC reported this month... More than 500 of them have contacted the BBC to say they have lost cherished photos and seen businesses upended — but some also speak of the profound personal toll it has taken on them, including concerns that the police could become involved. Meta acknowledged a problem with the erroneous banning of Facebook Groups in June, but has denied there is wider issue on Facebook or Instagram at all. It has repeatedly refused to comment on the problems its users are facing — though it has frequently overturned bans when the BBC has raised individual cases with it. One examples is a woman lost the Instagram profile for her boutique dress shop. ("Over 5,000 followers, gone in an instant.") "After the BBC sent questions about her case to Meta's press office, her Instagram accounts were reinstated... Five minutes later, her personal Instagram was suspended again — but the account for the dress shop remained." Another user spent a month appealing. ("In June, the BBC understands a human moderator double checked," but concluded he'd breached a policy.) And then "his account was abruptly restored at the end of July. 'We're sorry we've got this wrong,' Instagram said in an email to him, adding that he had done nothing wrong." Hours after the BBC contacted Meta's press office to ask questions about his experience, he was banned again on Instagram and, for the first time, Facebook... His Facebook account was back two days later — but he was still blocked from Instagram. None of the banned users in the BBC's examples were ever told what post breached the platform's rules. Over 36,000 people have signed a petition accusing Meta of falsely banning accounts; thousands more are in Reddit forums or on social media posting about it. Their central accusation — Meta's AI is unfairly banning people, with the tech also being used to deal with the appeals. The only way to speak to a human is to pay for Meta Verified, and even then many are frustrated. Meta has not commented on these claims. Instagram states AI is central to its "content review process" and Meta has outlined how technology and humans enforce its policies. The Guardian reports there's been "talk of a class action against Meta over the bans." Users report Meta has typically been unresponsive to their pleas for assistance, often with standardised responses to requests for review, almost all of which have been rejected... But the company claims there has not been an increase in incorrect account suspension, and the volume of users complaining was not indicative of new targeting or over-enforcement. "We take action on accounts that violate our policies, and people can appeal if they think we've made a mistake," a spokesperson for Meta said. "It happened to me this morning," writes long-time Slashdot reader Daemon Duck," asking if any other Slashdot readers had their personal (or business) account unreasonably banned. (And wondering what to do next...)

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