All posts tagged: predators

Meta Is Warned That Facial Recognition Glasses Will Arm Sexual Predators

Meta Is Warned That Facial Recognition Glasses Will Arm Sexual Predators

Published by skeptic

More than 70 civil liberties, domestic violence, reproductive rights, LGBTQ+, labor, and immigrant advocacy organizations are demanding that Meta abandon plans to deploy face recognition on its Ray-Ban and Oakley smart glasses, warning that the feature—reportedly known inside the company as “Name Tag”—would hand stalkers, abusers, and federal agents the ability to silently identify strangers in public. The coalition, which includes the ACLU, the Electronic Privacy Information Center, Fight for the Future, Access Now, and the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, is demanding Meta kill the feature before launch, after internal documents surfaced showing the company hoped to use the current “dynamic political environment” as cover for the rollout, betting that civil society groups would have their resources “focused on other concerns.” Name Tag, as revealed in February by The New York Times, would work through the artificial intelligence assistant built into Meta’s smart glasses, allowing wearers to pull up information about people in their field of view. Engineers have reportedly been weighing two versions of the feature: one that would only identify …

Bite mechanics of ancient marine predators yields surprising results

Bite mechanics of ancient marine predators yields surprising results

Published by Jenni Sidey

The Western Interior Seaway, which existed roughly 80 million years ago, split North America into North and South. It was a warm, shallow sea teeming with life from the Arctic Ocean to the Gulf of Mexico. Fish, squid, and marine reptiles—the lizards that hunted them—inhabited this bountiful marine desert. Some of these predators included large-bodied, or sometimes giant-sized, mosasaurs. These semi-aquatic reptiles re-evolved to live in the ocean, along with long-necked polycotylids. To date, how did so many large predators exist and thrive in the same aquatic space without exhausting their food supply? This has been the focus of an international research collaboration, yet only now is there a comprehensive biomechanical answer based on recent 3D scanning, engineering simulation, and experimentation. The results provide clear evidence of the biomechanical differences between mosasaurs and polycotylids. These distinct physiological configurations represent distinct ecologies and prey types rather than direct competitors. Bite performance of North American mosasaurs and plesiosaurs, showing the bite performance as optimal (bright colors) or suboptimal (darker colors). (CREDIT: Université de Liège / F.Della Giustina) …

The shocking fossils that show T. rex wasn’t the king of the dinosaurs

The shocking fossils that show T. rex wasn’t the king of the dinosaurs

Published by skeptic

When you come for the king, you best not miss – particularly if the king in question is a 9-tonne dinosaur with the biggest teeth of any known land predator in history. “Tyrannosaurus rex: the tyrant lizard king. That name is so cool, and it’s just developed tremendous loyalty,” says Greg Paul, an independent dinosaur researcher based in Maryland. “There’s even a rock band named for the animal.” Decades of settled science suggest the famous dinosaur was so formidable that it had a stranglehold on its ecosystem. It wasn’t just an apex predator; it was the apex predator of its time, having out-muscled everything else. Late last year, however, a small number of palaeontologists attempted to cut T. rex down to size. Based on incredible new fossils, they argued that the so-called king actually coexisted with at least two other tyrannosaurs – meaning it was just one hunter among several that stalked North America in the dying days of the Mesozoic Era. When these scientists came for the king, they didn’t miss. Just months after …

Top predators still prowled the seas after the biggest mass extinction

Top predators still prowled the seas after the biggest mass extinction

Published by skeptic

Artwork of a Hybodus shark, a predator that evolved in the late Permian and survived the mass extinction CHRISTIAN DARKIN/SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY The worst known mass extinction wiped out over 80 per cent of marine species. But despite these huge losses, many ecosystems did not collapse, with a variety of animals and even top predators managing to survive the cataclysm. The findings suggest that each ecosystem’s fate was determined, in part, by its own unique mix of species. The same may be true of modern marine ecosystems, which are also facing major threats from climate change. The end-Permian extinction struck about 252 million years ago. It seems to have been caused by massive volcanic eruptions in what is now Siberia, which led to drastic global warming, low oxygen levels in the oceans and a host of other threats. Some animal groups, such as trilobites and eurypterids (sea scorpions) were entirely wiped out; others suffered huge losses. In the aftermath, many new groups arose, including dinosaurs and ichthyosaurs. Given that so many species died out, researchers …

Olivier Colom, the sexual predator’s French ‘friend’ and networker

Olivier Colom, the sexual predator’s French ‘friend’ and networker

Published by Sam Flores

Olivier Colom, international adviser at Holding Edmond de Rothschild SA, in Paris, on May 14, 2014. ELODIE GREGOIRE/REA/LE MONDE “Let’s talk on the phone, I dn’t [sic] like emails,” wrote Jeffrey Epstein in September 2013 to one of his main French contacts: Olivier Colom. Despite this, the former deputy diplomatic adviser at the Elysée during Nicolas Sarkozy’s five-year term as president (2007-2012) now finds himself at the center of the Epstein scandal for his prolific correspondence with the American sexual predator, between 2013 and 2019, as revealed in the trove of emails released by the US Department of Justice on January 30. Today, the former diplomat, age 56, is a consultant to heads of state and business leaders through his company founded in 2016, OC Advisory, and is very active in Africa. According to a report by Africa Intelligence, the Frenchman, whom Le Monde interviewed at length, played a key role in organizing far-right leader Marine Le Pen’s trip to Chad in 2025. You have 93.73% of this article left to read. The rest is …