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Invisibly to us, insects and other tiny creatures use static electricity to travel, avoid predators, collect pollen and more. New experiments explore how evolution may have influenced this phenomenon.
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Imagine, for a moment, that you’re a honeybee. In many ways, your world is small. Your four delicate wings, each less than a centimeter long, transport your half-gram body through looming landscapes full of giant animals and plants. In other ways, your world is expansive, even grand. Your five eyes see colors and patterns that humans can’t, and your multisensory antennae detect odors from distant flowers.
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For years, biologists have wondered whether bees have another grand sense that we lack. The static electricity they accumulate by flying — similar to the charge generated when you shuffle across carpet in thick socks — could be potent enough for them to sense and influence surrounding objects through the air. Aquatic animals such as eels, sharks and dolphins are known to sense electricity in water, which is an excellent conductor of charge. By contrast, air is a poor conductor. But it may relay enough to influence living things and their evolution.
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In 2013, Daniel Robert, a sensory ecologist at the University of Bristol in England, broke ground in this discipline when his lab discovered that bees can detect and discriminate among electric fields radiating from flowers. Since then, more experiments have documented that spiders, ticks and other bugs can perform a similar trick.
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This animal static impacts ecosystems. Parasites, such as ticks and roundworms, hitch rides on electric fields generated by larger animal hosts. In a behavior known as ballooning, spiders take flight by extending a silk thread to catch charges in the sky, sometimes traveling hundreds of kilometers with the wind. And this year, studies from Robert’s lab revealed how static attracts pollen to butterflies and moths, and may help caterpillars to evade predators.
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This new research goes beyond documenting the ecological effects of static: It also aims to uncover whether and how evolution has fine-tuned this electric sense. Electrostatics may turn out to be an evolutionary force in small creatures’ survival that helps them find food, migrate and infest other living things.

The Hidden World of Electrostatic Ecology | Quanta Magazine

^{Quanta Magazine}

Is Tor still safe to use?

From the limited information The Tor Project has, we believe that one user of the long-retired application Ricochet was fully de-anonymized through a guard discovery attack. This was possible, at the time, because the user was using a version of the software that neither had Vanguards-lite, nor the vanguards addon, which were introduced to protect users from this type of attack. This protection exists in Ricochet-Refresh, a maintained fork of the long-retired project Ricochet, since version 3.0.12 released in June of 2022.

In contrast to the CCC, Chaos Computer Club, who was provided access to the documents related to the case and was able to analyze and validate the reporter's assumptions, we were only provided a vague outline and asked broad clarifying questions that left us with uncertainty of the facts, and questions of our own. While we appreciate the journalist contacting us, this same access was not given to the Tor Project.\
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Given the potential risk to our users, we decided to go public. We requested that anyone with additional information about the case share it with us. This would allow us to conduct our own analysis and determine the best course of action to protect our users.\
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To be clear, The Tor Project did not intend to ask for the sources of the story, but sought to understand what evidence existed for a de-anonymization attack to accurately respond to the investigating reporter's questions and assess our disclosure responsibilities. And we continue to have an interest in obtaining more information about how Onion Services users were de-anonymized. If we had access to the same documents as CCC, it would be possible to produce a report with more clarity regarding the actual state of the Tor network and how it affects the great majority of its users.\
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We need more details about this case. In the absence of facts, it is hard for us to issue any official guidance or responsible disclosures to the Tor community, relay operators, and users.

Is Tor still safe to use? | Tor Project

This blog post is a response to an investigative news report about a large-scale law-enforcement attack that managed to de-anonymize a user of an old version of the long-retired app Ricochet.

^{blog.torproject.org}

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