Friday Squid Blogging: Creating Batteries Out of Squid Cells
This is fascinating:
“When a squid ends up chipping what’s called its ring tooth, which is the nail underneath its tentacle, it needs to regrow that tooth very rapidly, otherwise it can’t claw its prey,” he explains.
This was intriguing news and it sparked an idea in Hopkins lab where he’d been trying to figure out how to store and transmit heat.
“It diffuses in all directions. There’s no way to capture the heat and move it the way that you would electricity. It’s just not a fundamental law of physics.”
[…]
The tiny brown batteries he mentions are about the size of a chiclet, and Hopkins says it will take a decade or more to create larger batteries that could have commercial value.
As usual, you can also use this squid post to talk about the security stories in the news that I haven’t covered.
Read my blog posting guidelines here.
vas pup • March 24, 2023 7:06 PM
The numbers that are too big to imagine
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20230320-the-numbers-that-are-too-big-to-imagine
Phishing: Who Takes the Bait?
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/misinformation-desk/202303/phishing-who-takes-the-bait
” Research suggests that people are more likely to fall for phishing scams if they tend to make decisions impulsively rather than after reflection.
People under time pressure are also more likely to fall for phishing scams, as opposed to those who do not face time pressure.
Some scammers explicitly aim to weed out reflective thinkers by making their scam obvious, so only the impulsive thinkers respond.
The U.S. government’s Computer Security Resource center defines phishing as “[t]ricking individuals into disclosing sensitive personal information by claiming to be a trustworthy entity in an electronic communication” — for example, an email that attempts to trick you into revealing your bank log-in information.
In their study, Jones and her team examined decision-making styles, whether people tend to rely on “intuitive, immediate, and emotional responses” (impulsive) when making decisions, or manage to suppress any initial intuitive response to “gather necessary information” that includes “consideration of future consequences and allows a more considered decision to be made”(reflective).
What did the researchers find? First, people are not great at differentiating between phishing and legitimate emails. No one categorized all 36 emails correctly, and only one person identified all 18 phishing emails. In fact, the average number of emails identified correctly was 68%.
Take your time when reading emails related to money, particularly if you tend to make decisions intuitively and impulsively.
some scammers may actually be using knowledge about cognitive reflection to their advantage. We previously wrote about the ways in which scammers can trick ChatGPT into writing well-written, believable misinformation that they can then spread. ChatGPT can, therefore, reduce the effort to create false narratives. But not all scammers are aiming for eloquent, believable prose.”