Daily Archives: May 7, 2025

Contemplating art’s beauty found to boost abstract and ‘big picture’ thinking

Posted on by

[…] a new study from the University of Cambridge suggests that stopping to contemplate the beauty of artistic objects in a gallery or museum boosts our ability to think in abstract ways and consider the “bigger picture” when it comes to our lives.

Researchers say the findings offer that engaging with artistic beauty helps us escape the “mental trappings of daily life,” such as current anxieties and to-do lists, and induce “psychological distancing”: the process of zooming out on your thoughts to gain clarity.

[…]

Researchers found that study participants who focused on the beauty of objects in an exhibition of ceramics were more likely to experience elevated psychological states enabling them to think “beyond the here and now,” and more likely to report feeling enlightened, moved, or transformed.

This was compared to participants who were simply asked to look intently at the artistic objects to match them with a series of line drawings. The findings are published in the journal Empirical Studies of the Arts.

[…]

“Our research indicates that engaging with the beauty of art can enhance abstract thinking and promote a different mindset to our everyday patterns of thought, shifting us into a more expansive state of mind.”

“This is known as psychological distancing, when one snaps out of the mental trappings of daily life and focuses more on the overall picture.”

[…]

Participants were randomly split into two groups: the ‘beauty’ group was asked to actively consider and then rate the beauty of each ceramic object they viewed, while the second group just matched a line drawing of the object with the artwork itself.

All participants were then tested on how they process information, and if it’s in a more practical or abstract way. For example, does ‘writing a letter’ mean literally putting pen to paper or sharing your thoughts? Is ‘voting’ marking a ballot or influencing an election? Is ‘locking a door’ inserting a key or securing a house?

“These tests are designed to gauge whether a person is thinking in an immediate, procedural way, as we often do in our day-to-day lives, or is attuned to the deeper meaning and bigger picture of the actions they take,” said Dr. Elzė Sigutė Mikalonytė, lead author of the study and a researcher at Cambridge’s Department of Psychology.

Across all participants, those in the beauty group scored almost 14% higher on average than the control group in abstract thinking. While they were told the study was about cognitive processes, participants were asked about interests, with around half saying they had an artistic hobby.

Among those, the effect was greater: those with an artistic hobby in the ‘beauty’ group scored over 25% higher on average for abstract thinking than those with an artistic hobby in the control group.

[…]

Emotional states of participants were also measured by asking about their feelings while completing the gallery task. Across all participants, those in the beauty group reported an average of 23% higher levels of “transformative and self-transcendent feelings”—such as feeling moved, enlightened and inspired—than the control group.

“Our findings offer empirical support for a long-standing philosophical idea that beauty appreciation can help people detach from their immediate practical concerns and adopt a broader, more abstract perspective,” said Mikalonytė.

Importantly, however, the beauty group did not report feeling any happier than the , suggesting that it was the engagement with beauty that influenced abstract thinking, rather than any overall positivity from the experience.

The latest study is part of a wider project led by Schnall exploring the effects of aesthetic experiences on cognition

[…]

Source: Contemplating art’s beauty found to boost abstract and ‘big picture’ thinking

Apple Hit with Class-Action Lawsuit for App Store Injunction Violation after Judge rules apple execs lied and willfully ignored injunction – join here

Posted on by

[…]The new lawsuit was filed May 2, 2025, following news that a federal judge found the tech giant in contempt of court for violating a 2021 antitrust injunction which required Apple to permit its app developers to sell subscriptions and other in-app products directly to their customers using links within their apps. Without the injunction in place Apple charges app developers uniform transaction fees (defaulting at 30%, and 15% under some programs). The court found that Apple implemented a scheme to violate the injunction and prevent developers from directing customers to their own websites and payment platforms.

“It appears as though Apple has been caught red-handed blatantly seeking to undercut the law,” said Steve Berman, Hagens Berman managing partner and co-founder. “We believe app developers deserve a fair market to promote and sell their products, and the world’s largest corporation doesn’t get to bully them out of this billion-dollar revenue stream.”

If you sold an in-app digital product (including subscriptions) through Apple’s App Store after Jan. 16, 2024, find out your rights as an iOS app developer.

[…]

The court ultimately held that Apple willfully violated the injunction to protect its revenues, and then “reverse engineered justification[s] to proffer to the Court” often with “lies on the witness stand,”

[…]

The lawsuit’s named plaintiff is Pure Sweat Basketball Inc., a corporation offering an app used by players across the country to train and improve their basketball skills. Had Apple complied with the injunction, as required, Pure Sweat would have been able to sell subscriptions to its app directly to its customers, using “link-out” buttons directing customers to Pure Sweat’s own website.

As a result of Apple’s misconduct, attorneys estimate that potentially more than 100,000 similarly situated app developers were prevented from selling in-app products (including subscriptions) directly to their customers, and were forced to pay Apple commissions on in-app sales that Apple was not entitled to receive.

Find out more about the class-action lawsuit against Apple on behalf of iOS app developers.

[…]

Source: Apple Hit with Class-Action Lawsuit for App Store Injunction Violation by Same Law Firm That Secured $100M iOS Developer Win | Hagens Berman

Minecraft ended virtual reality support – no reason given why

Posted on by

Minecraft is no longer (officially) available on virtual and mixed reality platforms. The change was confirmed in today’s patch notes for the game’s Bedrock edition following an announcement from developer Mojang in October. Those fall patch notes suggested that the platforms would be removed in March, so players who favored VR wound up getting a few extra weeks to fully immerse themselves in their blocky worlds.

Removing entire platforms isn’t a choice game devs make lightly. Especially when Minecraft‘s player base still numbers in the hundreds of millions at any given time, it seems unlikely that Mojang would take away virtual and mixed reality unless it wouldn’t cause a serious disruption for its many fans. There are still plenty of critically received games that make VR ownership worthwhile (Beat Saber, anyone?), but a title as major as Minecraft abandoning the hardware isn’t a great look.

Source: Minecraft ended virtual reality support today

Scientists rewrite 100 year old textbooks on how cells divide

Posted on by

Scientists from The University of Manchester have changed our understanding of how cells in living organisms divide, which could revise what students are taught at school.

In a Wellcome funded study published today (01/05/25) in Science – one of the world’s leading scientific journals – the researchers challenge conventional wisdom taught in schools for over 100 years.

Students are currently taught that during cell division, a ‘parent’ cell will become spherical before splitting into two ‘daughter’ cells of equal size and shape.

However, the study reveals that cell rounding is not a universal feature of cell division and is not how it often works in the body.

Dividing cells, they show, often don’t round up into sphere-like shapes. This lack of rounding breaks the symmetry of division to generate two daughter cells that differ from each other in both size and function, known as asymmetric division.

Asymmetric divisions are an important way that the different types of cells in the body are generated, to make different tissues and organs.

Until now, asymmetric cell division has predominantly only been associated with highly specialised cells, known as stem cells.

The scientists found that it is the shape of a parent cell before it even divides that can determine if they will round or not in division and determines how symmetric, or not, its daughter cells are going to be.

Cells which are shorter and wider in shape tend to round up and divide into two cells which are similar to each other. However, cells which are longer and thinner don’t round up and divide asymmetrically, so that one

daughter is different to the other.

The findings could have far reaching implications on our understanding of the role of cell division in disease. For example, in the context of cancer cells, this type of ‘non-round’, asymmetric division could generate different cell behaviours known to promote cancer progression through metastasis.

[…]

Source: Scientists rewrite textbooks on how cells divide

Judge: Apple Lied In Fortnite Case, chose to not comply with court order, must immediately allow external payments without a cut

Posted on by

Epic Games v. Apple judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers has ruled that, effective immediately, Apple can no longer take a cut from purchases made outside apps and has blocked the tech giant from restricting how developers can point people to third-party payment options. The judge was also not happy that Apple has seemingly not complied with a previous court order and has referred the case to the U.S. Attorney’s Office for possible contempt charges. Apple is already planning to appeal the ruling.

This is the latest development in the Epic v Apple court case that started back in 2020 after Epic added its own payment option to Fortnite on iOS and Apple pulled the game as a result. The Fortnite maker’s case against Apple was focused primarily on the large fees the tech giant took from all in-app purchases and its strict restrictions against allowing other app stores and third-party options on iOS devices.

In 2021 the judge sided with Apple on most points, but declared the company needed to allow app makers to use third-party payment systems that could avoid Apple’s cut. In 2023, after a series of appeals, Apple declared a “resounding victory” over Epic, though it was still forced by the court to allow third-party payment options and to not take a cut of outside app purchases. Epic alleges that Apple never complied with that order. Now Apple finds itself in a lot of trouble with judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers.

“That [Apple] thought this Court would tolerate such insubordination was a gross miscalculation,” wrote the judge in a ruling filed on April 30 in California. “Apple willfully chose not to comply with this Court’s Injunction. It did so with the express intent to create new anticompetitive barriers which would, by design and in effect, maintain a valued revenue stream; a revenue stream previously found to be anticompetitive.”

Elsewhere in the filing, the judge says that an Apple executive lied under oath when talking about forcing devs to pay a 27 percent fee for outside app purchases and wrote that Apple CEO Tim Cook “chose poorly” when listening to execs at the company who convinced him to ignore the injunction.

“Vice-President of Finance, Alex Roman, outright lied under oath. Internally, Phillip Schiller had advocated that Apple comply with the Injunction, but Tim Cook ignored Schiller and instead allowed Chief Financial Officer Luca Maestri and his finance team to convince him otherwise. Cook chose poorly,” wrote the judge. In the filing the judge also suggested that Apple’s actions might constitute contempt charges and has referred the case to the U.S. Attorney’s office.

As explained in the filing, Apple must now “immediately” comply with the court’s orders to allow developers to include third-party payment options, to not take a cut of those purchases, and to not block or hinder devs from including these outside payment methods through various means and UI messages.

[…]

Source: Judge: Apple Lied In Fortnite Case And Just Blew App Store Open

Huge molecular cloud 10x the size of moon detected right next to earth

Posted on by

 A longstanding prediction in interstellar theory posits that significant quantities of molecular gas, crucial for star formation, may be undetected due to being ’dark’ in commonly used molecular gas tracers, such as carbon monoxide. We report the discovery of Eos, a dark molecular cloud located just 94 pc from the Sun.This cloud is identified using H2 far-ultraviolet fluorescent line emission, which traces molecular gas at the boundary layers of star-forming and supernova remnant regions. The cloud edge is outlined along the high-latitude side of the North Polar Spur

[…]

 

Source: A nearby dark molecular cloud in the Local Bubble revealed via H2 fluorescence | Nature Astronomy

Messaging App Used by Mike Waltz, Trump Deportation Airline GlobalX Both Hacked in Separate Breaches

Posted on by

TeleMessage, a communications app used by former Trump national security adviser Mike Waltz, has suspended services after a reported hack exposed some user messages. The breach follows controversy over Waltz’s use of the app to coordinate military updates, including accidentally adding a journalist to a sensitive Signal group chat. From the report: In an email, Portland, Oregon-based Smarsh, which runs the TeleMessage app, said it was “investigating a potential security incident” and was suspending all its services “out of an abundance of caution.” A Reuters photograph showed Waltz using TeleMessage, an unofficial version of the popular encrypted messaging app Signal, on his phone during a cabinet meeting on Wednesday. A separate report from 404 Media says hackers have also targeted GlobalX Air — one of the main airlines the Trump administration is using as part of its deportation efforts — and claim to have stolen flight records and passenger manifests for all its flights, including those for deportation. From the report: The data, which the hackers contacted 404 Media and other journalists about unprompted, could provide granular insight into who exactly has been deported on GlobalX flights, when, and to where, with GlobalX being the charter company that facilitated the deportation of hundreds of Venezuelans to El Salvador. “Anonymous has decided to enforce the Judge’s order since you and your sycophant staff ignore lawful orders that go against your fascist plans,” a defacement message posted to GlobalX’s website reads. Anonymous, well-known for its use of the Guy Fawkes mask, is an umbrella some hackers operate under when performing what they see as hacktivism.

Source: Messaging App Used by Mike Waltz, Trump Deportation Airline GlobalX Both Hacked in Separate Breaches | Slashdot