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Comment BBC News article title style (Score 1) 84

This is where the BBC News style of article titles shines.

Take this article for example: NSA contractor Reality Winner admits leak. Its title not having capitals all over the place makes it immediately apparent that Reality Winner is someone's name without requiring any punctuation.

Precious few Slashdot articles don't have title case, but for this one it would have been great.

Comment Re:False alarm (Score 2) 53

Full translation:

"15:46 (Eastern time): The alleged hostage situation at Ubisoft, which launched a major police operation in Montreal, turns out to have been a hoax, our sources say.

The investigation team is currently working on finding the one(s) responsible for the call. Many employees locked down in the building, for the most part hidden in conference rooms, did not know it was a false alarm."

Source: TVA Nouvelles (fr)

Comment Re:Any studies about T cells yet? B cells? (Score 5, Informative) 55

People who had SARS in 2002-2003 still have T cells that are cross-reactive to SARS-CoV-2 to this day (17 years later). SARS-CoV-2 antibodies are cross-reactive back to SARS as well, and it is expected that they may last as long. John Campbell explains, via Nature: SARS-CoV-2-specific T cell immunity in cases of COVID-19 and SARS, and uninfected controls.

The mutation rate of SARS-CoV-2 is very low compared to that of rhinoviruses, which cause the common cold, and influenza viruses. One major mutation has been observed: at position 614, RNA that used to encode aspartate now encodes glycine. It's not on the part of the spike that binds to the ACE2 receptor. Video for that one, with references in the description.

Comment On influenza and neurodenegerative diseases (Score 5, Interesting) 72

There was an article last year that pointed to possible viral origins of neurodegenerative diseases in general: Can the Flu and Other Viruses Cause Neurodegeneration?

A neurobiologist saw a duck acting strangely in a video, as if it had Parkinson's disease. In an experiment he then ran, he infected ducks with H5N1 and found that the virus had induced degeneration in the ducks' brains: inflammation and cell death.

It's hypothesised that influenza viruses can cause the same thing in humans. A literature review revealed a secondary outbreak of Parkinson's disease happening in 1940-1950, following the 1918-1919 H1N1 influenza pandemic.

As for the current pandemic, SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, can infect the central nervous system, breach the blood-brain barrier and enter the brain. It can cause symptoms like failure to breathe spontaneously, as well as the anosmia (lack of sense of taste or smell) that has been seen in the absence of blocked sinuses.

So, COVID-19 could cause similar neurodegeneration in some time.

Earth

Climate Models Are Running Red Hot, and Scientists Don't Know Why (bloomberg.com) 445

The simulators used to forecast warming have suddenly started giving us less time. From a report: There are dozens of climate models, and for decades they've agreed on what it would take to heat the planet by about 3 Celsius. It's an outcome that would be disastrous -- flooded cities, agricultural failures, deadly heat -- but there's been a grim steadiness in the consensus among these complicated climate simulations. Then last year, unnoticed in plain view, some of the models started running very hot. The scientists who hone these systems used the same assumptions about greenhouse-gas emissions as before and came back with far worse outcomes. Some produced projections in excess of 5C, a nightmare scenario.

The scientists involved couldn't agree on why -- or if the results should be trusted. Climatologists began "talking to each other like, 'What'd you get?', 'What'd you get?'" said Andrew Gettelman, a senior scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado, which builds a high-profile climate model. "The question is whether they've overshot," said Mark Zelinka, staff scientist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. Researchers are starting to put together answers, a task that will take months at best, and there's not yet agreement on how to interpret the hotter results. The reason for worry is that these same models have successfully projected global warming for a half century. Their output continues to frame all major scientific, policy and private-sector climate goals and debates, including the sixth encyclopedic assessment by the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change due out next year. If the same amount of climate pollution will bring faster warming than previously thought, humanity would have less time to avoid the worst impacts.

Comment Proper article summary, hopefully (Score 4, Informative) 110

On the 22nd of January, The Guardian published a series of letters from its readers in its Letters section. In it, Bridget Craig had this to say:

I read more and more pleas to "email your MP about this..." I can't email my MP, the Conservative Dr Julian Lewis, as he does not have an email address for his constituents to use. I believe he is the only MP who doesn't let his constituents contact him in this way. I find this deplorable. It should be a requisite of his well-paid job.

Julian Lewis is a Member of Parliament, and also a doctor. He has a no-email policy. Instead, he requires his constituents (those he serves as a Member of Parliament) to communicate with him by [snail] mail or by phone, and his patients (those he serves as a doctor) by getting appointments with him.

He saw this criticism levelled at him by Bridget Craig and replied that no, his no-email policy was perfectly fine, and that email is often used for, essentially, spam. This article was also published in The Guardian's Letters section, on the 24th of January, and it was then submitted to Slashdot.

Comment On interaction in communication media (Score 2) 166

Your example assumes you called a certain known endpoint (a person, or an automated telephone answering system) and interacted directly with it.

BitTorrent downloads from, and uploads to, unknown endpoints that happen to have or want the file, respectively.

On the one hand, you authorise your BitTorrent client to communicate with these hosts on your behalf, and your goal is the same (to get and give the file); this may constitute a form of interaction.

On the other hand, you have no control over which hosts your BitTorrent client contacts. These people may be people you know or strangers; people in the same or another jurisdiction. The link may be difficult to establish.

Science

Nanoparticles Heated By Radio Waves Switch On Genes In Mice 42

ananyo writes "Researchers have used radio waves to remotely activate engineered insulin-producing genes in mice. In the long term, the work could lead to medical procedures in which patients' genes are triggered on demand. The researchers coated iron oxide nanoparticles with antibodies that bind to a modified version of a temperature-sensitive ion channel. They injected these particles into tumors grown under the skins of mice, then heated the nanoparticles with low-frequency radio waves. The nanoparticles heated the ion channel, activating it and allowing calcium to flow into cells. The influx of calcium switched on an engineered calcium-sensitive gene that produces insulin (abstract)."
KDE

Free Software Faces a Test With Qt 177

An anonymous reader writes with an article in TechRadar. From the article: "Thanks to Nokia's jump to Windows Phone 7, from the frying pan into the fire, its Free Software darling, the Qt toolkit, has been left living on vague promises and shell-shocked, hollow enthusiasm. Nokia has pledged some continued investment, bonuses for developers who stick with the platform and even a phone or two that might use it. But the truth is that Qt is deprecated, the project has stalled, and its future is uncertain."

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