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Submission + - Covid-19 Spike Protein Found to Disrupt DNA Repair (nih.gov) 1

Submitted by shaitand
shaitand writes: “Mechanistically we found that the spike protein localizes in the nucleus & inhibits DNA damage repair by impeding key DNA repair protein BRCA1 & 53BP1 recruitment to the damage site.” If confirmed this is very alarming. The mRNA vaccines being commonly distributed program healthy cells to produce this same spike protein.

Submission + - SPAM: Researchers Develop An Engineered 'Mini' CRISPR Genome Editing System

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: In a paper published Sept. 3 in Molecular Cell, [Stanley Qi, assistant professor of bioengineering at Stanford University] and his collaborators announce what they believe is a major step forward for CRISPR: An efficient, multi-purpose, mini CRISPR system. Whereas the commonly used CRISPR systems—with names like Cas9 and Cas12a denoting various versions of CRISPR-associated (Cas) proteins—are made of about 1000 to 1500 amino acids, their "CasMINI" has 529. The researchers confirmed in experiments that CasMINI could delete, activate and edit genetic code just like its beefier counterparts. Its smaller size means it should be easier to deliver into human cells and the human body, making it a potential tool for treating diverse ailments, including eye disease, organ degeneration and genetic diseases generally.
Link to Original Source

Submission + - SPAM: Researchers Create 'Master Faces' to Bypass Facial Recognition

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Researchers have demonstrated a method to create "master faces," computer generated faces that act like master keys for facial recognition systems, and can impersonate several identities with what the researchers claim is a high probability of success. In their paper (PDF), researchers at the Blavatnik School of Computer Science and the School of Electrical Engineering in Tel Aviv detail how they successfully created nine "master key" faces that are able to impersonate almost half the faces in a dataset of three leading face recognition systems. The researchers say their results show these master faces can successfully impersonate over 40 percent of the population in these systems without any additional information or data of the person they are identifying.

The researchers tested their methods against three deep face recognition systems–Dlib, FaceNet, and SphereFace. Lead author Ron Shmelkin told Motherboard that they used these systems because they are capable of recognizing “high-level semantic features” of the faces that are more sophisticated than just skin color or lighting effects. The researchers used a StyleGAN to generate the faces and then used an evolutionary algorithm and neural network to optimize and predict their success. The evolutionary strategy then creates iterations, or generations, of candidates of varying success rates. The researchers then used the algorithm to train a neural network, to classify the best candidates as the most promising ones. This is what teaches it to predict candidates’ success and, in turn, direct the algorithm to generate better candidates with a higher probability of passing. The researchers even predict that their master faces could be animated using deepfake technology to bypass liveness detection, which is used to determine whether a biometric sample is real or fake.
Link to Original Source

Submission + - SPAM: Self-Driving Waymo Trucks To Haul Loads Between Houston and Fort Worth

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: On Thursday morning, Waymo announced that it is working with trucking company JB Hunt to autonomously haul cargo loads in Texas. Class 8 JB Hunt trucks equipped with the autonomous driving software and hardware system called Waymo Driver will operate on I-45 in Texas, taking cargo between Houston and Fort Worth. However, the trucks will still carry humans—a trained truck driver and Waymo technicians—to supervise and take over if necessary.

"This will be one of the first opportunities for JB Hunt to receive data and feedback on customer freight moved with a Class 8 tractor operating at this level of autonomy. While we believe there will be a need for highly skilled, professional drivers for many years to come, it is important for JB Hunt as an industry leader to be involved early in the development of advanced autonomous technologies and driving systems to ensure that their implementation will improve efficiency while enhancing safety," said Craig Harper, chief sustainability officer at JB Hunt. "We're thrilled to collaborate with JB Hunt as we advance and commercialize the Waymo Driver," said Charlie Jatt, head of commercialization for trucking at Waymo. "Our teams share an innovative and safety-first mindset as well as a deep appreciation for the potential benefits of autonomous driving technology in trucking. It's companies and relationships like these that will make this technology a commercial reality in the coming years."
Link to Original Source

Submission + - SPAM: Twelve Million Phones, One Dataset, Zero Privacy

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: Every minute of every day, everywhere on the planet, dozens of companies — largely unregulated, little scrutinized — are logging the movements of tens of millions of people with mobile phones and storing the information in gigantic data files. The Times Privacy Project obtained one such file, by far the largest and most sensitive ever to be reviewed by journalists. It holds more than 50 billion location pings from the phones of more than 12 million Americans as they moved through several major cities, including Washington, New York, San Francisco and Los Angeles.

Each piece of information in this file represents the precise location of a single smartphone over a period of several months in 2016 and 2017. The data was provided to Times Opinion by sources who asked to remain anonymous because they were not authorized to share it and could face severe penalties for doing so. The sources of the information said they had grown alarmed about how it might be abused and urgently wanted to inform the public and lawmakers.

After spending months sifting through the data, tracking the movements of people across the country and speaking with dozens of data companies, technologists, lawyers and academics who study this field, we feel the same sense of alarm. In the cities that the data file covers, it tracks people from nearly every neighborhood and block, whether they live in mobile homes in Alexandria, Va., or luxury towers in Manhattan.

One search turned up more than a dozen people visiting the Playboy Mansion, some overnight. Without much effort we spotted visitors to the estates of Johnny Depp, Tiger Woods and Arnold Schwarzenegger, connecting the devices’ owners to the residences indefinitely.
Link to Original Source

Submission + - New Boson Appears In Nuclear Decay, Breaks Standard Model (arstechnica.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: In November, people started polishing a Nobel prize for a group of physicists who seemed to have found new boson. [...] This result has been cooking for quite some time. The first experimental results date back to 2015, with publication in 2016. Essentially, the scientists took some lithium and shot protons at it. By choosing the energy of the protons correctly, Beryllium in a particular excited state is produced, which quickly decays back to lithium by emitting an electron and a positron. Now, in these experiments, energy and momentum must be conserved. The lithium nucleus is quite a complicated beast and can rattle around in all sorts of ways, meaning that the electron and positron have a certain amount of freedom in the direction in which they are emitted. By contrast, the researchers observed that some electrons and positrons seem to be correlated in their emission direction. Computer modeling confirmed that this was not due to their equipment and could not be explained by the nuclear physics of beryllium, lithium, or any known background process. The correlation could, however, be explained by a new boson that decayed by emitting a positron and an electron. As long as the production was reasonably inefficient, and the mass was about 17MeV (million electron volts), then the data was beautifully explained.

It is always possible to extend our models of the Universe to include new particles, including new bosons and new forces. But, it isn’t good enough to match a single experimental result. You have to match all of them. The end results are particles that look a bit like a backyard panel-beating job. Yeah, the paint matches, but you can still see the wavy patches where the filler hasn’t been sanded flat. The problems arise from the mass—17MeV is at the low end of well-explored territory. So, why did this story flare back up again? A new paper, by the same scientists that published the beryllium results. This time, they measured electron-positron emissions from excited helium. Same experiment, different atom, but the same 17MeV boson was found. The new result is pretty strong evidence.

Submission + - Fact-check: Five claims about thorium made by Andrew Yang

Submitted by Lasrick
Lasrick writes: Like many of the 2020 Democratic presidential hopefuls, Andrew Yang has an ambitious plan to wean America off fossil fuels. Unlike many of the other candidates, however, a key piece of his plan involves harnessing nuclear power— in particular, thorium. According to Yang, thorium is “superior to uranium on many levels.” But Yang isn’t alone; thorium boosters have been extolling its supposed virtues for years. Do the claims about thorium actually hold up? Nicholas R. Brown of the Department of Nuclear Engineering at the University of Tennessee and John Krzyzaniak of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists fact-check five claims Yang has made about thorium.

Submission + - Power Utility Invested in Tech that Violates the First Law of Thermodynamics 1

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: From 2016 to 2019, NB Power, the electrical utility for the Canadian province of New Brunswick, invested $13 million dollars in Florida-based hydrogen fuel company Joi Scientific. The company claimed that it had developed technology that could generate hydrogen fuel from seawater at a 200% efficiency rate, a rate that would reportedly violate the First Law of Thermodynamics if true. The company recently announced that their technology only works at ~10% of their previously described efficiency, meaning that it consumes energy rather than producing it.

According to a former Joi Scientific employee, the company's technology is based partially on the work of Stanley Meyer, a discredited inventor who was successfully sued by his investors in an Ohio court for having defrauded investors with a "water fuel cell" that actually produced hydrogen through simple electrolysis. Joi Scientific announced during a call to investors during the summer of 2019 that the technology did not work as described and that they were running low on funding.

As a crown corporation, $6.7 million dollars of NB Power's investment in Joi Scientific came from taxpayers. The remainder came from an annual R&D fund that is likely to be financed directly by ratepayers.

Does NB Power's investment in this technology speak to a larger problem of scientific illiteracy among CEOs and other businesspeople? What is the solution?

Submission + - SPAM: I Visited 47 Sites. Hundreds of Trackers Followed Me. 1

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: Like a colonoscopy, the project involved some special prep. I had to install a version of the Firefox web browser that was created by privacy researchers to monitor how websites track users’ data. For several days this spring, I lived my life through this Invasive Firefox, which logged every site I visited, all the advertising tracking servers that were watching my surfing and all the data they obtained. Then I uploaded the data to my colleagues at The Times, who reconstructed my web sessions into the gloriously invasive picture of my digital life you see here. (The project brought us all very close; among other things, they could see my physical location and my passwords, which I’ve since changed.)

What did we find? The big story is as you’d expect: that everything you do online is logged in obscene detail, that you have no privacy. And yet, even expecting this, I was bowled over by the scale and detail of the tracking; even for short stints on the web, when I logged into Invasive Firefox just to check facts and catch up on the news, the amount of information collected about my endeavors was staggering.
Link to Original Source

Submission + - Researchers Use Lasers To Detect and Destroy Tumor Cells In Melanoma Patients (ieee.org)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Tumor cells that spread cancer via the bloodstream face a new foe: a laser beam, shined from outside the skin, that finds and kills these metastatic little demons on the spot. In a study published today in Science Translational Medicine, researchers revealed that their system accurately detected these cells in 27 out of 28 people with cancer, with a sensitivity that is about 1,000 times better than current technology. That’s an achievement in itself, but the research team was also able to kill a high percentage of the cancer-spreading cells, in real time, as they raced through the veins of the participants. If developed further, the tool could give doctors a harmless, noninvasive, and thorough way to hunt and destroy such cells before those cells can form new tumors in the body.

Researchers led by Vladimir Zharov, director of the nanomedicine center at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences, tested their system in people with melanoma, or skin cancer. The laser, beamed at a vein, sends energy to the bloodstream, creating heat. Melanoma CTCs absorb more of this energy than normal cells, causing them to heat up quickly and expand. This thermal expansion produces sound waves, known as the photoacoustic effect, and can be recorded by a small ultrasound transducer placed over the skin near the laser. The recordings indicate when a CTC is passing in the bloodstream. The same laser can also be used to destroy the CTCs in real time. Heat from the laser causes vapor bubbles to form on the tumor cells. The bubbles expand and collapse, interacting with the cell and mechanically destroying it.

Submission + - SPAM: Software Dev and Pilot Explains the 737 MAX Problem Best

Submitted by omfglearntoplay
omfglearntoplay writes: From the article:

Boeing’s solution to its hardware problem was software.

I will leave a discussion of the corporatization of the aviation lexicon for another article, but let’s just say another term might be the “Cheap way to prevent a stall when the pilots punch it,” or CWTPASWTPPI, system. Hmm. Perhaps MCAS is better, after all.

MCAS is certainly much less expensive than extensively modifying the airframe to accommodate the larger engines. Such an airframe modification would have meant things like longer landing gear (which might not then fit in the fuselage when retracted), more wing dihedral (upward bend), and so forth. All of those hardware changes would be horribly expensive.

“Everything about the design and manufacture of the Max was done to preserve the myth that ‘it’s just a 737.’ Recertifying it as a new aircraft would have taken years and millions of dollars. In fact, the pilot licensed to fly the 737 in 1967 is still licensed to fly all subsequent versions of the 737.” —Feedback on an earlier draft of this article from a 737 pilot for a major airline
Link to Original Source

Submission + - Infocom Z-Language Source for Many Games Released on github (github.com)

Submitted by chewtoy-11
chewtoy-11 writes: Twitter user, @textfiles, recently tweeted that a large Z-language source repository has been uploaded to github. Some of the games include: Zork 1, 2, 3, Suspended, Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Starcross, and several others. The description of the files is that they are possibly incomplete or non-production versions of the games, and interpreter source is not included, just the original ZIL language files. In several instances, the compiled game blobs are included — but again, no method to recompile these files is included.

Submission + - Intelsat 29e Geostat satellite in trouble, on orbit collision?

Submitted by Kekke
Kekke writes: Ars Technica reports that all ready two satellites have been lost this week in Geo synchronous orbit as Intelsat Operators have now lost all contact with their Intelsat 29e satellite. Also, the "bird" seems to be drifting off 1 degree per day from it's position. The good part is that ExoAnalytic Solutions has great images of the anomaly. They are hoping to find out whats going on by analyzing the available data. In a period of two years AMC-9, Telkom-1, AMOS-5, Eutelsat-33B, EchoStar-3, and Galaxy 11 satellites have experienced anomalies also @ Geosync orbit.

Submission + - Is Software Eating The Useless Class? (hackernoon.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: “He’s not great at the basics of daily life: directions confound him, because roadways aren’t logical, and he’s so absent-minded about sunglasses that he keeps a “reload station” with nine pairs on his hall table,” wrote Tad Friend in a profile for the New Yorker magazine.

He grew up in New Lisbon, Wisconsin. The population? 1,500. At the age of 8 he taught himself the BASIC programming language. Yet his small town lacked the resources to quench his curiosity. “We had a very small public library, and the nearest bookstore was an hour away. So I came from an environment where I was starved for information, starved for connection,” he said in an interview with tech magazine Wired.

In his New Yorker profile, he described his family as “Scandinavian, hard-core, very self-denying people who go through life never expecting to be happy.” One winter, with money tight, his father decided to stop paying for gas, heating, “ and we spent a great deal of time chopping fucking wood.”

His colleague, Ben Horowitz, has said of him, “He reminds me of Kanye, that level of emotional intensity—his childhood was so intensely bad he just won’t go there.”

As a senior at the University of Illinois he took a $6.85-per-hour programming job at high-tech think tank, the National Center for Supercomputing Applications. He was introduced to the internet.

He immediately saw the need for an easy-to-use internet browser. He hacked together a prototype. His browser idea later became the influential Mosaic browser, and his company Netscape.

In August of 1995, Netscape went public. At 23, he was worth $53 million and coined the “Golden Geek” and “Internet Evangelist.” By December, his stock was worth $174 million. And by 1998 Netscape was sold to AOL for $4.2 billion. But he isn’t known today just as someone who got rich from the internet, thanks to his browser, he’s recognized as someone who helped build it.

“Netscape was based on my beloved’s own inability, as a child, to access knowledge in a small town.”
His wife attributes his success to his childhood, “Netscape was based on my beloved’s own inability, as a child, to access knowledge in a small town.” Yet his success may have come at the cost of the working class people like those in New Lisbon.

This is the story of how a boy from Wisconsin became an elite tech entrepreneur and venture capitalist. It’s the story of his software eating the useless class. It’s the story of whether that boy, who is now 6 ft 5 with the physique of a linebacker, can save the growing useless class, and if he even cares enough to try. This is the story of Marc Andreessen.

Submission + - Researchers Created Reprogrammable Molecular Algorithms for DNA Computers (wired.com)

Submitted by dmoberhaus
dmoberhaus writes: In a major breakthrough for DNA computing, researchers from UC Davis, Caltech and Maynooth University developed a technique for creating molecular algorithms that can be reprogrammed. Prior to this research, molecular algorithms had to be painstakingly designed for specific purposes, which is "like having to build a new computer out of new hardware just to run a new piece of software,” according to the researchers. This new technique could blow open the door for a host of futuristic DNA computing applications--nanofactories, light-based computers, etc.-- that would've been impossible before.

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