Short Takes – 10-17-25

Government shutdown prompts illegal BASE jumping surge in Yosemite. TheHill.com article. Pull quote: “The lack of staffing has led some to engage in dangerous and illegal antics, with videos circulating on social media showing people BASE jumping, squatting in campgrounds and scaling cliffs in the park without permits, as reported by local NewsNation affiliate KTLA in Los Angeles.”

Originalist ‘Bombshell’ Complicates Case on Trump’s Power to Fire Officials. NYTimes.com article. Pull quote: “Letting the president fire officials “for reasons good or bad,” Professor Nelson wrote, would grant him “an enormous amount of power — more power, I think, than any sensible person should want anyone to have, and more power than any member of the founding generation could have anticipated.””

Eavesdropping on Internal Networks via Unencrypted Satellites. UCSD.edu article. Pull quote: “We pointed a commercial-off-the-shelf satellite dish at the sky and carried out the most comprehensive public study to date of geostationary satellite communication. A shockingly large amount of sensitive traffic is being broadcast unencrypted, including critical infrastructure, internal corporate and government communications, private citizens’ voice calls and SMS, and consumer Internet traffic from in-flight wifi and mobile networks. This data can be passively observed by anyone with a few hundred dollars of consumer-grade hardware. There are thousands of geostationary satellite transponders globally, and data from a single transponder may be visible from an area as large as 40% of the surface of the earth.”

The chemistry community should ban drawing chemical structures with generative AI, chemists warn.  ChemistryWorld.com article. Pull quote: “In their article [link added] Moores and Zuin Zeidler warn that the inability of current GAI to generate representations of chemistry that are accurate and useful will not only have important consequences for the ability of the next generation to learn about chemistry but also change the way the chemistry community thinks and looks at itself. ‘The problem I see with generative AI is that for the first time, it’s started to create representation of chemistry that have not come from a thoughtful and [considered] decision from chemists of “let’s represent it this way because…”. Now we have an entity somewhere that decides “I’m going to make a benzene ring that is not even closing”,’ says Moores.”

To Inflict Pain on Russians, Ukraine’s Drones Zero In on Oil Refineries. NYTimes.com article (free). Pull quote: “When a military factory is hit, it might be repaired in 10 days, he said, “while oil refineries keep burning all these 10 days.” In addition, repairs are hampered by the inability to import equipment from Europe and the United States.”

First locally acquired chikungunya case confirmed in New York. TheHill.com article. Pull quote: “The CDC says people can contract the virus if they’re bitten by an infected mosquito. When a mosquito bites an infected person, that mosquito becomes infected and can then spread the virus to other people. People rarely spread the virus to other people.” CDC information here.

An Iranian volcano appears to have woken up — 700,000 years after its last eruption. LiveScience.com article. Pull quote: “Instead, either the uplift is caused by a change in the hydrothermal plumbing below the volcano that is leading to the buildup of gas, or a small amount of magma may have shifted beneath the volcano, allowing gases to bubble up into the rocks above, raising the pressure in rock pores and fractures, and causing the ground to heave up slightly.”