Ken Fritz turned his home into an audiophile's dream -- the world's greatest hi-fi. What would it mean in the end? From a report: Ken Fritz was years into his quest to build the world's greatest stereo when he realized it would take more than just gear. It would take more than the Krell amplifiers and the Ampex reel-to-reel. More than the trio of 10-foot speakers he envisioned crafting by hand. And it would take more than what would come to be the crown jewel of his entire system: the $50,000 custom record player, his "Frankentable," nestled in a 1,500-pound base designed to thwart any needle-jarring vibrations and equipped with three different tone arms, each calibrated to coax a different sound from the same slab of vinyl. "If I play jazz, maybe that cartridge might bloom a little more than the other two," Fritz explained to me. "On classical, maybe this one."

No, building the world's greatest stereo would mean transforming the very space that surrounded it -- and the lives of the people who dwelt there. The faded photos tell the story of how the Fritz family helped him turn the living room of their modest split-level ranch on Hybla Road in Richmond's North Chesterfield neighborhood into something of a concert hall -- an environment precisely engineered for the one-of-a-kind acoustic majesty he craved. In one snapshot, his three daughters hold up new siding for their expanding home. In another, his two boys pose next to the massive speaker shells. There's the man of the house himself, a compact guy with slicked-back hair and a thin goatee, on the floor making adjustments to the system. He later estimated he spent $1 million on his mission, a number that did not begin to reflect the wear and tear on the household, the hidden costs of his children's unpaid labor.

Linux Mint 21.3 is now available to download, reports the blog OMG Obuntu.

It's the first version to offer Wayland support in its Cinnamon desktop: Following a successful bout of bug-busting in last month's beta release, Mint devs have gone ahead and rubber-stamped a stable release. Thus, you can reasonably expect to not encounter any major issues when installing or using it... [I]t's based on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS and continues to use the Linux 5.15 kernel by default, but newer kernels are available to install within the OS...

In my own testing I find Cinnamon's Wayland support to be well-rounded. It's not perfect but I didn't hit any major snafus that prevented me from working (though admittedly I did only attempt 'basic' tasks like web browsing, playing music, and adding applets). However, Cinnamon's Wayland support is in an early state, is not enabled by default, and Linux Mint devs expect it won't be good enough for everyone until the 23.x series (due 2026) at the earliest. Still, try it out yourself and see if it works for you. Select the 'Cinnamon on Wayland (Experimental)' session from the login screen session selector, and then login as normal...

Additionally, the latest version of Mozilla Firefox is pre-installed (as a deb, not a Snap)
Among the new features are a whole new category of desktop add-ons — "Actions" — which upgrade the right-clicking context menu. (So for .iso files there's two new choices: "Verify" or "Make bootable USB stick".)

The article says there's also "a raft of smaller refinements," plus "a bevvy of buffs and embellishments" for Linux Mint's homegrown apps.

Any Linux Mint users reading Slashdot? Share your thoughts or experiences in the comments...

With subsidiaries like WebMD and CarsDirect, the digital media company "Internet Brands" has over 5,000 employees — and 20 offices in expensive locations like Seattle, San Francisco, Chicago, and New York City.

Their solution? Create a cheery corporate video on the company's Vimeo account announcing a new (non-negotiable) hybrid return-to-office policy.

SFGate.com calls it "the return-to-office fight's most bizarre corporate messaging yet." Executives from Internet Brands' internet brands are so wide-eyed and declarative, they appear to be at their breaking point in wanting more workers at the office. "Too big of a group hasn't returned," CEO Bob Brisco complains, near the video's opening. The vehicle to deliver that message has it all: rapid jump cuts, odd sound mixing and executives clearly reading their lines from teleprompters. There's plainly faked office b-roll and the obvious use of green screens. There's even some enthusiastic (and awkward) sashaying to the New Orleans classic "Iko Iko" — one wonders if participating employees received compensation.
Interestingly, "Iko Iko" is a song about a collision between two rival tribes, which opens with a threat to "set your flag on fire." But subtitles on the video translate the song's Creole patois word "Jockamo" into the corporate-positive phrase "we mean business." It's like the executives started their brainstorming session by watching 12 music videos, an iMovie editing tutorial and the entirety of "The Office" Season 1. Mixed in with the corporate b-roll of a copy machine spitting out paper and a too-loud video of a hand crushing a Dr. Pepper can, the company's executives sketch out the vibe of a return-to-office plan — though no specifics.
The video ends with CEO Bob Brisco thanking the team, before gently adding "I want to leave you with this. We aren't asking or negotiating at this point. We're informing, of how we need to work together going forward....

"Thank you, in advance, for your help."

The video has since started going viral on Reddit's "Work Reform" subreddit, with a headline calling it a "bizarre and cringe video mocking working from home and threatening employees who continue to avoid the office." (This take drew 1,300 upvotes, and 241 comments, like " 'By the way this is a threat' is a nice way to end it.")

Footage of at least some of the executives was clearly just spliced in front of still photos showing what offices look like. But besides the wooden delivery, what really struck me is how generic all the words were:

• "Working together face-to-face helps us create ideas, faster, and better."

• "We're able to collaborate, and help each other to be better leaders."

• "We're better when we're together, and we need to be our best — to crush our competition." [Footage of the word "competition" being erased from a whiteboard. And then, of someone crushing a Dr. Pepper can...]

Kirkman14 writes: Josh Renaud of breakintochat.com has recovered two early examples of "artificial creativity" software for the Commodore Amiga that generate new music by recombining patterns extracted from existing music. Developed by cartoonist Ya'akov Kirschen and his Israeli software firm LKP Ltd. in 1986-87, "Computer Composer" demo and "Magic Harp" baroque were early attempts at AI-like autonomous music generation.

Kirschen's technology was used to help score a BBC TV documentary in 1988, and was covered by the New York Times and other major newspapers. None of the Amiga software was ever sold, though the technology was ported to PC and published under the name "The Music Creator" in 1989.

A startup called Rabbit sold out of its first batch of pocket AI companions a day after it was debuted at CES 2024. The company announced on X that it sold 10,000 units in just a day. "When we started building r1, we said internally that we'd be happy if we sold 500 devices on launch day," Rabbit writes. "In 24 hours, we already beat that by 20x!" The Verge reports: Rabbit introduced the R1 during CES on Tuesday, which comes with a small 2.88-inch touchscreen that runs on the company's own Rabbit OS. It uses a "Large Action Model" that works as a "sort of universal controller for apps," according to my colleague David Pierce, who got to try out the device during the showcase. This allows it to do things like play music, buy groceries, and send messages through a single interface without having to use your phone. It also lets you train the device how to interact with a certain app. A second batch is available for preorder from Rabbit's website with an expected delivery date between April and May 2024. The first batch of products are expected to start shipping in March.

The global music industry surpassed 4 trillion streams in 2023, a new single-year record, Luminate's 2023 Year-End Report found. Global streams were also up 34% from last year, reflective of an increasingly international music marketplace. From a report: Stateside, three genres saw the biggest growth in 2023: country (23.7%), Latin (which encompasses all Latin musical genres, up 24.1%) and world (a catchall that includes J-pop, K-pop and Afrobeats, up 26.2%.) It seems that more Americans are listening to non-English music. By the end of 2023, Luminate found that Spanish-language music's share of the top 10,000 songs streamed in the U.S. grew 3.8%, and English-language music's share dropped 3.8%.

Karl Bode, reporting for TechDirt: Back in 2019 we noted how the streaming sector risked driving consumers back to piracy if they didn't heed the lessons of the past. We explored how the rush to raise rates, nickel-and-dime users, implement arbitrary restrictions, and force users toward hunting and pecking their way through a confusing platter of exclusives and availability windows risked driving befuddled users back to piracy. And lo and behold, that's exactly what's happening.

After several decades of kicking and screaming, studio and music execs somewhere around 2010 finally realized they needed to offer users affordable access to easy-to-use online content resources. They finally realized they needed to compete with piracy and focus on consumer satisfaction whether they liked the concept or not. And unsurprisingly, once they learned that lesson piracy began to dramatically decrease. That was until 2021, when piracy rates began to climb slowly upward again in the U.S. and EU. As the Daily Beast notes, users have grown increasingly frustrated at having to hunt and peck through a universe of different, often terrible streaming services just to find a single film or television program.

As every last broadcaster, cable company, broadband provider, and tech company got into streaming they began to lock down "must watch" content behind an ever-shifting number of exclusivity silos, across an ocean of sometimes substandard "me too" services. Initially competition worked, but as the market saturated and the most powerful companies started to silo content, those benefits have been muted. Now users have to hunt and peck between Disney+, Netflix, Starz, Max, Apple+, Acorn, Paramount+, Hulu, Peacock, Amazon Prime, and countless other services in the hopes that a service has the rights to a particular film or program. When you already pay for five different services, you're not keen to sign up to fucking Starz just to watch a single 90s film. And availability is constantly shifting, confusing things further.

If you're starting the new year with a new Linux distro, ZDNet just ran an enthusiastic profile of Rhino Linux, calling it "beautiful" with "one of the more useful command-line package managers on the market." Rhino uses a modern take on the highly efficient and customizable Xfce desktop (dubbed "Unicorn") to help make the interface immediately familiar to anyone who logs in. You'll find a dock on the left edge of the screen that contains launchers for common applications, access to the Application Grid (where you can find all of your installed software), and a handy Search Bar (Ulauncher) that allows you to quickly search for and launch any installed app (or even the app settings) you need...

Thanks to myriad configuration options, Xfce can be a bit daunting. At the same time, the array of settings makes Xfce highly customizable, which is exactly what the Rhino developers did when they designed this desktop. For those who want a desktop that makes short work of accessing files, the Rhino developers have added a really nifty tool to the top bar. You'll find a listing of some folders you have in your Home directory (Files, Documents, Music, Pictures, Video). If you click on one of those entries, you'll see a list of the most recently accessed files within the directory. Click on the file you want to open with the default, associated application...

Rhino opts for the Pacstall package manager over the traditional apt-get. That's not to say apt-get isn't on the system — it is. But with Rhino Linux, there's a much easier path to getting the software you want installed... [W]hen you first run the installed OS, you are greeted with a window that allows you to select what package managers you want to use. You can select from Snap, Flatpak, and AppImages (or all three). Next, the developers added a handy tool (rhino-pkg) that makes installing from the command line very simple.
When the distro launched in August, 9to5Linux described it as "a unique distribution for Ubuntu fans who wanted a rolling-release system where they install once and receive updates forever." The theming looks gorgeous and it's provided by the Elementary Xfce Darker icon theme, Xubuntu's Greybird GTK theme, and Ubuntu's Yaru Dark WM theme. It also comes with some cool features, such as a dedicated and full-screen desktop switcher provided by Xfdashboard...

23 years ago, Slashdot interviewed Chris Montgomery about his team's new Ogg Vorbis audio format.

But Slashdot reader joshuark admits when he first heard the name, it reminded him of the mushroom underworld in The Secret World of Og. I've downloaded videos from the Internet Archive, and one format is the OGG or Ogg Vorbis player format. I just was wondering with other formats, is Ogg still used anymore after approximately 20-years?

I'm not commenting on good/bad/whatever about the format, just is it still in use, relevant anymore?
The nonprofit Xiph.Org Foundation (which develops Orbis Vogg) started work in 2007 on the high-quality/low-delay format Opus, which their FAQ argues "theoretically" makes other lossy codecs obsolete. "From technical point of view (loss, delay, bitrates...) it can replace both Vorbis and Speex, and the common proprietary codecs too."

But elsewhere Xiph.org points out that "The bitstream format for Vorbis I was frozen Monday, May 8th 2000. All bitstreams encoded since will remain compatible with all future releases of Vorbis." So how is that playing out in 2024? Share your own thoughts in the comments.

Does anyone still use Ogg Vorbis format?

Elvis Presley "will be stepping into his blue suede shoes once again..." according to an article in TheStreet, "thanks to the power of artificial intelligence." The legendary singer from Tupelo, Mississippi, is set to thrill audiences in "Elvis Evolution," an "immersive concert experience" that uses AI and holographic projection. The show will debut in London in November. But if you can't make it to England, that's all right, mama, that's all right for you, because additional shows are slated for Berlin, Tokyo and Las Vegas, where Presley had a seven-year residency from 1969 to 1976.

"Man, I really like Vegas," he once reportedly said. The British immersive entertainment company Layered Reality partnered with Authentic Brands Group, which owns the rights to Elvis' image, to create the event.

"The show peaks with a concert experience that will recreate the seismic impact of seeing Elvis live for a whole new generation of fans, blurring the lines between reality and fantasy," Layered Reality said on its website. "A life-sized digital Elvis will share his most iconic songs and moves for the very first time on a UK stage." The company previously made immersive experiences based on the Gunpowder Plot of 1605 and "The War of The Worlds."

Once a dominant force in music discovery, Spotify's famed playlists like RapCaviar, which significantly influenced mainstream music and artist visibility, are losing ground. As the music industry shifts towards algorithmic suggestions and TikTok emerges as a major music promoter, Spotify's strategy evolves with more automated music discovery and less emphasis on human-curated playlists, signaling a potential end to the era where a few key playlists could make a star overnight. Bloomberg reports: Enter TikTok. In the late 2010s, as the algorithmic controlled, short-form video app emerged as a growing force in music promotion, Spotify took notice. On an earnings call in 2020, Spotify Chief Executive Officer Daniel Ek noted that users were increasingly opting for algorithmic suggestions and that Spotify would be leaning into the trend. "As we're getting better and better at personalization, we're serving better and better content and more and more of our users are choosing that," he said. From there, Spotify began implementing a number of changes that over time significantly altered the fundamental dynamics of how playlists get composed. Among other things, the company had already introduced a standardized pitching form that all artists and managers must use to submit tracks for playlist consideration. One former employee says the tool was created to foster a more merit-based system with a greater emphasis on data -- and less focus on the taste of individual curators. The goal, in part, was to give independent and smaller artists without the resources to personally court key playlist editors a better chance at placements. It was also a way to better protect the public-facing editors who in the early days were sometimes subjected to harassment from people disgruntled over their musical choices.

As the automated submission system took hold, the editors gradually grew more anonymous and less associated with particular playlists. In a handbook for the editorial team, Spotify instructed curators not to claim ownership of any one playlist. At the same time, Spotify began introducing multiple splashy features meant to encourage algorithm-driven listening, including an AI DJ and Daylist, two features that constantly change to fit listeners' habits and interests. (Spotify says "human expertise" guides the AI DJ.) Last year, Spotify laid off members of the teams involved in making playlists as part of its various cuts. And over time, the shift in emphasis has had consequences outside the company as well. These days, the same music industry sources who in the late 2010s learned to obsess over what was included and excluded from key Spotify playlists have started noticing something else -- it no longer seems to matter as much. Employees at different major labels say they've seen streams coming from RapCaviar drop anywhere from 30% to 50%.

The trend towards automated music discovery at Spotify shows no sign of slowing down. One internal presentation titled "Recapturing the Zeitgeist" encourages editorial curators to better utilize data. According to the people who have seen the plan, in addition to putting together a playlist, editorial curators would tag songs to help the algorithm accurately place them on relevant playlists that are automatically personalized for individual subscribers. The company has also shifted some human-curated playlists to personalized versions, including selections with seven-figure followings, like Housewerk and Indie Pop. These days, Spotify is also promoting something called Discovery Mode, wherein labels and artist teams can submit songs for additional algorithm pushes in exchange for a lower royalty rate. These tracks can only surface on personalized listening sessions, a former employee said, meaning Spotify would have a financial incentive to push people to them over editorially curated playlists. (For now, Discovery Mode songs only surface in radio or autoplay listening sessions.) The shift toward algorithmic distribution isn't necessarily a bad thing, says Dan Smith, US general manager at Armada, an independent dance label. "The way fans discovered new music was radio back in the day, then Spotify editorial playlists, then there were a few years where people only discovered new music through TikTok," Brad said. "All those things still work ... we're all just trying different ways to make sure songs get to the right people."

Hope Thelps writes: A number of films including the earliest ones featuring Mickey and Minnie Mouse finally enterd the public domain today. The BBC reports:

Steamboat Willie, a 1928 short film featuring early non-speaking versions of Mickey and Minnie, is widely seen as the moment that transformed Disney's fortunes and made cinema history.

Their images are now available to the public in the US, after Disney's copyright expired.

It means creatives like cartoonists can now rework and use the earliest versions of Mickey and Minnie.

In fact, anyone can use those versions without permission or cost.

But Disney warned that more modern versions of Mickey are still covered by copyright.

'We will, of course, continue to protect our rights in the more modern versions of Mickey Mouse and other works that remain subject to copyright,' the company said.

US copyright law says the rights to characters can be held for 95 years, which means the characters in Steamboat Willie entered the public domain on Monday, 1 January 2024.

Those works can now legally be shared, performed, reused, repurposed or sampled.

The early versions of Mickey and Minnie are just two of the works entering the public domain in the US on New Year's Day.

Other famous films, books, music and characters from 1928 are now also available to the American public.

They include Charlie Chaplin's silent romantic comedy The Circus; English author AA Milne's book The House at Pooh Corner, which introduced the character Tigger; Virginia Woolf's Orlando; and DH Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover.

What would happen if we built a concert venue in near-Earth orbit? A science policy journalist explores the question in the Washington Post: Forget U2 in the Las Vegas Sphere. Take me to a real concert in the round, where I can float 360 degrees around the stage, watching a guitarist shred from the perspective of a fly and inventing dance moves that Earth's gravity would forbid.

Before you dismiss this as a hallucination, consider that we're on the cusp of a new era of space travel. Engineer and space architect Ariel Ekblaw, founder of MIT's Space Exploration Initiative, says that within a decade, a trip off the planet could become as accessible as a first-class airline ticket — and that, in 15 or 20 years, we can expect space hotels in near-Earth orbit. She's betting on it, having founded a nonprofit to design spherical, modular habitats that can assemble themselves in space so as to be lightweight and compact at launch, much like the James Webb Space Telescope that NASA vaulted into deep space two years ago.

"The first era of space travel was about survival," she told me as I recently toured her lab. "We're transitioning now to build spaces that are friendlier and more welcoming so that people can thrive in space as opposed to just survive." There's no reason, Ekblaw said, that a concert hall can't be one of those structures.
The article ultimately calls this "an impulse for space travel I can get behind: curiosity about who we are and what more we can create when we reach beyond Earth. This is the realm of not just scientists and engineers but of all kinds of dreamers. It's a rendition of space exploration that can engage anyone to imagine what's possible."

Microsoft Copilot, Microsoft's AI-powered chatbot, can now compose songs thanks to an integration with GenAI music app Suno. From a report: Users can enter prompts into Copilot like "Create a pop song about adventures with your family" and have Suno, via a plug-in, bring their musical ideas to life. From a single sentence, Suno can generate complete songs -- including lyrics, instrumentals and singing voices.

Copilot users can access the Suno integration by launching Microsoft Edge, visiting Copilot.Microsoft.com, logging in with their Microsoft account and enabling the Suno plug-in or clicking on the Suno logo that says "Make music with Suno." [...] AI algorithms "learn" from existing music to produce similar effects, a fact with which not all artists -- or GenAI users -- are comfortable, especially in cases where artists don't consent to having an AI algorithm train on their music and didn't receive compensation for it.

It's a geek tradition that started online back in 2000. Programming language "advent calendars" offer daily tips about a programming language (if not a Christmas-themed programming puzzle) -- one a day through December 25th.

And 2023 finds a wide variety of fun sites to choose from:

• li>For example, there's 24 coding challenges at the Advent of JavaScript site (where "each challenge includes all the HTML and CSS you need to get started, allowing you to focus on the JavaScript.") And there's another 24 coding challenges on a related site... Advent of CSS.

• The cyber security training platform "TryHackMe.com" even coded up a site they call "Advent of Cyber," daring puzzle-solvers to "kickstart your cyber security career by engaging in a new, beginner-friendly exercise every day leading up to Christmas!"

• The programming puzzles at Advent of Code are continuing through the 25th (though so far less than 30,000 people have solved both parts of Saturday's challenge.)

• Every year since 2000 there's also been a new edition of the Perl Advent Calendar, and this month Year 23 started off with goodies from Perl's massive module repository, CPAN. (Specifically its elf-themed story references the Music::MelodicDevice::Ornamentation module) -- along with the MIDI::Util library and TiMidity++, a software synthesizer that can play MIDI files without a hardware synthesizer.)

• Meanwhile, since 2009 there's also been an advent calendar for Raku (the programming language formerly known as Perl 6), promising an article a day. (Day One's entry was titled "Rocking Raku Meets Stodgy Debian...")

• James Bennett, from the Django project's core team, is even attempting a Python/Django Advent calendar.

• There's also a JVM advent calendar for the Java Virtual Machine, plus another advent calendar promising daily posts about C#.

• The HTMHell site â" which bills itself as "a collection of bad practices in HTML, copied from real websites" -- is celebrating the season with the "HTMHell Advent Calendar," promising daily articles on security, accessibility, UX, and performance.

Long-time Slashdot reader theodp writes: For the soundtracks to their 2023 holiday season ads, both Amazon and Apple turned to music by members of The Beatles. Amazon's Joy Ride, which stars three older women reliving their youthful joy at a sledding hill, is set to a cover of The Beatles' In My Life. Apple's Fuzzy Feelings, which tells the story of a young woman with a grumpy boss, is set to George Harrison's Isn't It a Pity.

Product placement is present in both ads — Amazon features padded seat cushions that protect the seniors' tushes and the Amazon app used to order them, while Apple showcases the iPhone 15 Pro Max used to capture the ad's stop-motion animation scenes and the MacBook Air used to edit them.

Amazon's 60-second ad has 542K views on YouTube, while Apple's 4-minute ad has 16+ million views.

Firefox's Android browser now has over 450 new extensions available on Mozilla's Firefox Browser Add-ons page. "These extensions allow users to customize the mobile browser to their needs, whether that involves adding anti-tracking privacy tools, content blockers, productivity tools or other features that introduce new experiences, like streaming music, or those that allow users to personalize the browser's user interface -- like switching all websites to a dark mode or offering a better way to manage tabs," reports TechCrunch. From the report: The lack of extensions has been an issue for Firefox for Android users for years following the 2020 launch of a rebuilt version of the mobile browser that replaced the app's previous codebase with "GeckoView," a new, faster and more customizable browser engine. At the time, the company said it made a decision to limit the supported extensions to only those within the "Recommended Extensions" program -- meaning those that were commonly installed by end users. This choice allowed Mozilla to quickly get the new browser into consumers' hands, but squashed the long tail of extension development -- and opportunity for software developers focused on this market.

While Firefox's nightly builds later enabled more extensions, the publicly available Firefox for Android browser did not have access to these hundreds of extensions, meaning most of Firefox's mainstream users were also without. In August of this year, Mozilla said it had finally completed the infrastructure needed to bring the open extension ecosystem back to Firefox for Android. It then began to test and make hundreds more extensions available to Firefox for Android users, culminating in today's news that there are now 450+ extensions available.

The Economist reports: "Shake, shake, shake, shake," Taylor Swift sings from the stage of Lumen Field in Seattle at 10.35 in the evening on July 22nd. The fans respond, enthusiastically; the stadium duly shakes; a nearby seismometer takes note. To pop aficionados "Shake it off" is an empowering up-tempo anthem played at 160 beats per minute. To the Pacific Northwest Seismic Network, which is designed to monitor earthquakes, it is a 2.6 hertz signal in which the amplitude of the acceleration was as large as one centimetre per second, per second.

The well-situated seismometer first came to public attention in January 2011, when it recorded the response of fans of the Seattle Seahawks, an American football team, to a magnificent touchdown by Marshawn Lynch, a running back known as "Beast Mode." The "Beast Quake" went down in local sporting history. When Ms Swift came to town for two nights of her Eras tour, Jacqueline Caplan-Auerbach, a geology professor at Western Washington University, used the opportunity to learn more about how events in the stadium shake its surroundings. On December 11th she presented some of her conclusions at the American Geophysical Union's autumn meeting in San Francisco.

[...] Dr Caplan-Auerbach wanted to see whether such resonant amplification might also be at play elsewhere, and to distinguish between the effect of the music itself and the audience's response. Her concert-night data showed two distinct sets of signals, one in higher frequencies (30-80hz), one in lower frequencies (1-8hz). The higher-frequency signals were present during the sound check, when the band were on stage but the stadium empty, and absent during the concerts' "surprise songs," played without the band by Ms Swift alone. The lower frequencies were absent when the audience had yet to arrive. Clearly those higher frequencies were from the music itself.

sciencehabit shares a report from Science Magazine: Grunge music: a source of validation for a generation of disaffected youth. And a surprising source of scientific inspiration for Earl Bellinger of the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics. While listening to Soundgarden's 1994 hit Black Hole Sun 2 years ago, he contemplated a curious question: Might itty-bitty black holes from the dawn of time be lurking in the hearts of giant stars? A new study by Bellinger and colleagues suggests the idea is not so far-fetched. Astronomers could detect these trapped black holes by the vibrations they cause on the star's surface. And if there's enough of them out there, they could function as the mysterious dark matter that holds the universe together.

The researchers found that the black holes would sink to the star's core where hydrogen atoms undergo fusion to produce heat and light. At first, very little would happen. Even a dense stellar core is mostly empty space. The most microscopic of the black holes would have a hard time finding matter to consume and its growth would be extremely slow, Bellinger says. "It could take longer than the lifetime of the universe to eat the star." But larger ones, roughly as massive as the asteroid Ceres or the dwarf planet Pluto, would get bigger on timescales of only a few hundred million years. Material would spiral onto the black hole, forming a disk that would heat up through friction and emit radiation. Once the black hole was about as massive as Earth, it would produce significant amounts of radiation, shining brightly and churning up the star's core like pot of boiling water. "It will become a black hole -- powered object rather than fusion-powered object," says study co-author Matt Caplan, a theoretical physicist at Illinois State University. He and his colleagues have dubbed these entities "Hawking stars."

The European Space Agency's Gaia satellite has spotted about 500 such anomalously cool giant stars, known as red stragglers, Bellinger says. To figure out whether these might actually be hiding a black hole, he says, astronomers could tune in to the particular frequencies at which the stars vibrate. Because a Hawking star would churn throughout its interior, rather than just in the topmost layers like an ordinary red giant, it would be expected to thrum with a particular combination of frequencies. Such waves can be detected in the way the star's light pulses and throbs. Bellinger is applying for funding to study the known red stragglers and see whether any display the characteristic vibrations of a black hole. The study has been published in The Astrophysical Journal.

Apple is set to be hit by a ban on its App Store rules that govern music-streaming rivals and a potential hefty fine in the European Union's latest attempt to limit the power of Big Tech. From a report: EU regulators are putting the finishing touches to a decision that would prohibit Apple's practice of blocking music services from pushing their users away from the App Store to alternative subscription options, according to people familiar with the investigation. The decision is slated for early next year, they added. As part of the upcoming decision, Apple runs the risk of a potential fine of as much as 10% of its annual sales -- although EU penalties seldom reach that level and orders for companies to change their business models can be more hard-hitting.