One month after an experimental procedure to transplant the heart of a genetically modified pig into a patient with end-stage heart disease, doctors say the heart is functioning on its own and shows no signs of rejection. From a reoport: In September, 58-year-old Lawrence Faucette underwent the surgery, only the second ever performed in a human. Faucette's heart disease and pre-existing conditions made him ineligible for a traditional human heart transplant. "The physicians taking care of him believe his heart function is excellent," said Dr. Bartley Griffith, director of the Cardiac and Lung Transplant Program at the University of Maryland School of Medicine who performed the surgery. "We've had no evidence of infections and no evidence of rejection right now."

Dr. Muhammad Mohiuddin, director of UMMC's Cardiac Xenotransplantation Program, said in an update shared on Friday, "we are withdrawing all the drugs that were initially supporting his heart. So now his heart is doing everything on its own." Mohiuddin said the focus now is making sure that Faucette has the strength to perform routine functions. "We are working very hard with our physical therapy team who are spending a lot of time helping him regain the strength that he's lost during last one month of hospital stay," Mohiuddin said.

Is Google laying the groundwork for a true challenger to language learning apps like Duolingo, Memrise and Babbel? In a blog post on Thursday, the search giant announced that it's rolling out a new Google Search feature designed to help people improve their English speaking skills. TechCrunch's Kyle Wiggers reports: Rolling out over the next few days for Search on Android devices in Argentina, Colombia, India, Indonesia, Mexico and Venezuela, with more countries and languages to come in the future, the new feature will provide interactive speaking practice for language learners translating to or from English, Google writes in a blog post. "Google Search is already a valuable tool for language learners, providing translations, definitions, and other resources to improve vocabulary," reads the the post, attributed to Google Research director Christian Plagemann and product manager Katya Cox. "Now, learners translating to or from English on their Android phones will find a new English speaking practice experience with personalized feedback."

The new experience presents Search users with prompts and asks them to speak the answers using a provided vocabulary word. During each practice session, which last 3 to 5 minutes, Search gives personalized feedback -- and the option to sign up for daily reminders to keep practicing and advance to the next stage of difficulty. How personalized is it, exactly? Well, according to Google, the experience gives semantic feedback -- indicating whether a response was relevant to a given question and comprehensible to a theoretical conversation partner. It also recommends areas where grammar could be improved, and, to give concrete suggestions for alternative ways to respond, provides a set of example answers at varying levels of language complexity. During practice sessions, learners can tap on any word they don't understand to see a translation of that word that considers the word in context.

"Designed to be used alongside other learning services and resources, like personal tutoring, mobile apps and classes, the new speaking practice feature on Google Search is another tool to assist learners on their journey," Plagemann and Cox write. [...] "We look forward to expanding to more countries and languages in the future, and to start offering partner practice content soon," Plagemann and Cox continued. "With these latest updates, which will roll out over the next few days, Google Search has become even more helpful."

The U.S. FCC voted Thursday to advance a proposal to reinstate landmark net neutrality rules and assume new regulatory oversight of broadband internet that was rescinded under former President Donald Trump. From a report: In a 3-2 party-line vote, the FCC approved Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel's Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (NPRM), which seeks public comment on the broadband regulation plan. The comment period will officially open after the proposal is published in the Federal Register, but the docket is already active and can be found here. The proposal would reclassify broadband as a telecommunications service, a designation that allows the FCC to regulate ISPs under the common-carrier provisions in Title II of the Communications Act. The plan is essentially the same as what the FCC did in 2015 when it used Title II to prohibit fixed and mobile Internet providers from blocking or throttling traffic or giving priority to Web services in exchange for payment.

The Obama-era net neutrality rules were eliminated during Trump's presidency when then-Chairman Ajit Pai led a repeal that reclassified broadband as an information service, returning it to the less strict regulatory regime of Title I. The current FCC likely would have acted much sooner but there was a 2-2 deadlock until last month when the Senate confirmed Biden nominee Anna Gomez to fill the empty spot. After the comment period, the FCC is likely to finalize the rulemaking and put the 2015 rules back in place. The broadband industry will likely then sue the FCC in an attempt to nullify the rulemaking.

The US is pushing a group of governments to publicly commit to not make ransom payments to hackers ahead of an annual meeting of more than 45 nations in Washington later this month. From a report: Anne Neuberger, deputy national security adviser, told Bloomberg News that she is "incredibly hopeful" about enlisting support for such a statement but acknowledged it's a "hard policy decision." If members can't agree to the statement in advance of the meeting, then it will be included as a discussion point, she said. [...] The aim of the statement is to change that calculus, Neuberger said. "Ransom payments are what's driving ransomware," she said. "That's the reason we think it's so needed."

Long-time Slashdot reader SonicSpike shared the Washington Post's speculation about the possibility of a gigantic solar storm leaving millions without phone or internet access, and requiring months or years of rebuilding: The odds are low that in any given year a storm big enough to cause effects this widespread will happen. And the severity of those impacts will depend on many factors, including the state of our planet's magnetic field on that day. But it's a near certainty that some form of this catastrophe will happen someday, says Ian Cohen, a chief scientist who studies heliophysics at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory.
Long-time Slashdot reader davidwr remains skeptical. "I've only heard of two major events in the last 1300 years, one estimated to be between A. D. 744 and A. D. 993, and the other being the Carrington Event in 1859.

But efforts are being made to improve our readiness, reports the Washington Post: To get ahead of this threat, a loose federation of U.S. and international government agencies, and hundreds of scientists affiliated with those bodies, have begun working on how to make predictions about what our Sun might do. And a small but growing cadre of scientists argue that artificial intelligence will be an essential component of efforts to give us advance notice of such a storm...

At present, no warning system is capable of giving us more than a few hours' notice of a devastating solar storm. If it's moving fast enough, it could be as little as 15 minutes. The most useful sentinel — a sun-orbiting satellite launched by the U.S. in 2015 — is much closer to Earth than the sun, so that by the time a fast-moving storm crosses its path, an hour or less is all the warning we get. The European Space Agency has proposed a system to help give earlier warning by putting a satellite dubbed Vigil into orbit around the Sun, positioned roughly the same distance from the Earth as the Earth is from the Sun. It could potentially give us up to five hours of warning about an incoming solar storm-enough time to do the main thing that can help preserve electronics: Switch them all off.

But what if there were a way to predict this better, by analyzing the data we've got? That's the idea behind a new, AI-powered model recently unveiled by scientists at the Frontier Development Lab — a public-private partnership that includes NASA, the U.S. Geological Survey, and the U.S. Department of Energy. The model uses deep learning, a type of AI, to examine the flow of the solar wind, the usually calm stream of particles that flow outward from our sun and through the solar system to well beyond the orbit of Pluto. Using observations of that solar wind, the model can predict the "geomagnetic disturbance" an incoming solar storm observed by sun-orbiting satellites would cause at any given point on Earth, the researchers involved say. This model can predict just how big the flux of the Earth's magnetic field will be when the solar storm arrives, and thus how big the induced currents in power lines and undersea internet cables will be...

Already, the first primitive ancestor of future AI-based solar-weather alert systems is live. The DstLive system, which debuted on the web in December 2022, uses machine learning to take data about the state of Earth's magnetic field and the solar wind and translate both into a single measure for the entire planet, known as DST. Think of it as the Richter scale, but for solar storms. This number is intended to give us an idea of how intense a storm's impact will be on earth, an hour to six hours in advance.

Unfortunately, we may not know how useful such systems are until we live through a major solar storm.

An anonymous reader shared this report from Reuters: In a new front in the U.S.-China tech war, President Joe Biden's administration is facing pressure from some lawmakers to restrict American companies from working on a freely available chip technology widely used in China — a move that could upend how the global technology industry collaborates across borders...

RISC-V can be used as a key ingredient for anything from a smartphone chip to advanced processors for artificial intelligence... The lawmakers expressed concerns that Beijing is exploiting a culture of open collaboration among American companies to advance its own semiconductor industry, which could erode the current U.S. lead in the chip field and help China modernize its military. Their comments represent the first major effort to put constraints on work by U.S. companies on RISC-V...

Executives from China's Huawei Technologies have embraced RISC-V as a pillar of that nation's progress in developing its own chips. But the United States and its allies also have jumped on the technology, with chip giant Qualcomm working with a group of European automotive firms on RISC-V chips and Alphabet's Google saying it will make Android, the world's most popular mobile operating system, work on RISC-V chips...

Jack Kang, vice president of business development at SiFive, a Santa Clara, California-based startup using RISC-V, said potential U.S. government restrictions on American companies regarding RISC-V would be a "tremendous tragedy." "It would be like banning us from working on the internet," Kang said. "It would be a huge mistake in terms of technology, leadership, innovation and companies and jobs that are being created."
One U.S. Representative said the Chinese Communist Party was "abusing RISC-V to get around U.S. dominance of the intellectual property needed to design chips.

"U.S. persons should not be supporting a PRC tech transfer strategy that serves to degrade U.S. export control laws."

Microsoft has released patches to fix zero-day vulnerabilities in two popular open source libraries that affect several Microsoft products, including Skype, Teams and its Edge browser. But Microsoft won't say if those zero-days were exploited to target its products, or if the company knows either way. From a report: The two vulnerabilities -- known as zero-days because developers had no advance notice to fix the bugs -- were discovered last month, and both bugs have been actively exploited to target individuals with spyware, according to researchers at Google and Citizen Lab. The bugs were discovered in two common open source libraries, webp and libvpx, which are widely integrated into browsers, apps and phones to process images and videos. The ubiquity of these libraries coupled with a warning from security researchers that the bugs were abused to plant spyware prompted a rush by tech companies, phone makers and app developers to update the vulnerable libraries in their products.

In a brief statement Monday, Microsoft said it had rolled out fixes addressing the two vulnerabilities in the webp and libvpx libraries which it had integrated into its products, and acknowledged that exploits exist for both vulnerabilities. When reached for comment, a Microsoft spokesperson declined to say if its products had been exploited in the wild, or if the company has the ability to know. Security researchers at Citizen Lab said in early September that they had discovered evidence that NSO Group customers, using the company's Pegasus spyware, had exploited a vulnerability found in the software of an up-to-date and fully patched iPhone.

This week America's Department of Energy announced $264 million for 29 projects as part of its Energy Earthshots Initiative "to advance clean energy technologies within the decade."

The funding will support 11 new research centers — along with 18 university research teams — studying things like industrial decarbonization, carbon storage, and offshore wind energy. The ultimate goal is a clean-energy revolution that will "accelerate innovations toward more abundant, affordable, and reliable clean energy solutions."

One ambitious example: The Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory has been selected to lead an Energy Earthshot Research Center focused on developing chemical processes that use sustainable methods instead of burning fossil fuels to radically reduce industrial greenhouse gas emissions to stem climate change and limit the crisis of a rapidly warming planet... The ORNL-led Non-Equilibrium Energy Transfer for Efficient Reactions center, or NEETER, will coordinate a research team from across the nation focused on replacing bulk heating for chemical processes with electrified means, providing a new way to do chemistry, and decarbonizing large-scale processes in the chemical industry. DOE has committed $19 million over four years for the center...

The scientists, in addition to using their own laboratories, will use Department of Energy Office of Science user facilities, including ORNL's Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility, Spallation Neutron Source, High Flux Isotope Reactor, and Center for Nanophase Materials Sciences. They will also include the beam line at Stanford's SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory. NEETER's proposed research is a radical departure from traditional chemistry and holds promise for transformational breakthroughs in energy-related chemical reactions. The NEETER EERC addresses the Department of Energy's Industrial Heat Shot announced in 2022, which aims to develop cost-competitive industrial heat decarbonization technologies with at least 85% lower greenhouse gas emissions by 2035. This EERC will employ new kinds of chemical catalysis as one pathway toward electrifying the delivery of process heat.
The projects include:

• Investigating hydrogen arc plasmas for carbon-free steelmaking

• Using exascale computer simulations and observations to produce more resilient clean energy systems.

• The University of Florida has reportedly teamed with Switzerland-based Synhelion to "research the production of green hydrogen, aiming for a lower cost to produce."

• The Center for Understanding Subsurface Signals and Permeability will attempt research to "advance enhanced geothermal systems with the goal of making them a widely accessible and reliable source of renewable energy"

• Another research center (also lead by the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory) will research effort to "make floating offshore wind a long-term viable energy source."

"Our Energy Earthshots are game-changing endeavors to unleash the technologies of the clean energy transition and make them accessible, affordable, and abundant," said U.S. Secretary of Energy Jennifer M. Granholm. "The Energy Earthshot Research Centers and the related work happening on college campuses around the country will be instrumental in developing the clean energy and decarbonization solutions we need to establish a 100% clean grid and beat climate change."

New submitter AsylumWraith shares a report: The US government aims to restore sweeping regulations for high-speed internet providers, such as AT&T, Comcast and Verizon, reviving "net neutrality" rules for the broadband industry -- and an ongoing debate about the internet's future. The proposed rules from the Federal Communications Commission will designate internet service -- both the wired kind found in homes and businesses as well as mobile data on cellphones -- as "essential telecommunications" akin to traditional telephone services, according to multiple people familiar with the plan. The rules would ban internet service providers (ISPs) from blocking or slowing down access to websites and online content, the people told CNN.

Agency chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel plans to unveil the proposal in a speech at the National Press Club on Tuesday, the people added, saying the FCC plans to vote Oct. 19 on whether to advance the draft rules by soliciting public feedback on them -- a step that would precede the creation of any final rules. In addition to the prohibitions on blocking and throttling internet traffic, the draft rules also seek to prevent ISPs from selectively speeding up service to favored websites or to those that agree to pay extra fees, the people added, a move designed to prevent the emergence of "fast lanes" on the web that could give some websites a paid advantage over others.

Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo said she was "upset" when China's Huawei released a new phone with an advanced chip during her visit to the country last month but noted that the US has no evidence China can make those components "at scale." From a report: "We are trying to use every single tool at our disposal to deny the Chinese the ability to advance their technology in ways that can hurt us," Raimondo testified at a congressional hearing Tuesday. The Commerce Department's Bureau of Industry and Security this month opened an investigation into Huawei's phone and the "purported" 7-nanometer chip, made by China's Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp, which was discovered in a teardown of the handset that TechInsights conducted for Bloomberg News. It is unclear whether SMIC has approval from Commerce to supply Huawei, which has been blacklisted by the US. Raimondo said she won't comment on any active investigations, but that the Commerce Department will investigate every time it appears a company may have violated US export controls.

Rotten Tomatoes celebrated its 25th year of assigning scores to movies based on their aggregate review. Now Vulture writes that Rotten Tomatoes "can make or break" movies, "with implications for how films are perceived, released, marketed, and possibly even green-lit". But unfortuately, the site "is also erratic, reductive, and easily hacked."

Vulture tells the story of a movie-publicity company contacting "obscure, often self-published critics" to say the film's teams "feel like it would benefit from more input from different critics" — while making undisclosed payments of $50 or more.) A critic asking if it's okay to pan the movie was informed that "super nice" critics move their bad reviews onto sites not included in Rotten Tomatoes scores.

Vulture says after bringing this to the site's attention, Rotten Tomatoes "delisted a number of the company's movies from its website and sent a warning to writers who reviewed them." But is there a larger problem? Filmmaker Paul Schrader even opines that "Audiences are dumber. Normal people don't go through reviews like they used to. Rotten Tomatoes is something the studios can game. So they do...." A third of U.S. adults say they check Rotten Tomatoes before going to the multiplex, and while movie ads used to tout the blurbage of Jeffrey Lyons and Peter Travers, now they're more likely to boast that a film has been "Certified Fresh...."

Another problem — and where the trickery often begins — is that Rotten Tomatoes scores are posted after a movie receives only a handful of reviews, sometimes as few as five, even if those reviews may be an unrepresentative sample. This is sort of like a cable-news network declaring an Election Night winner after a single county reports its results. But studios see it as a feature, since, with a little elbow grease, they can sometimes fool people into believing a movie is better than it is.

Here's how. When a studio is prepping the release of a new title, it will screen the film for critics in advance. It's a film publicist's job to organize these screenings and invite the writers they think will respond most positively. Then that publicist will set the movie's review embargo in part so that its initial Tomatometer score is as high as possible at the moment when it can have maximal benefits for word of mouth and early ticket sales... [I]n February, the Tomatometer score for Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania debuted at 79 percent based on its first batch of reviews. Days later, after more critics had weighed in, its rating sank into the 40s. But the gambit may have worked. Quantumania had the best opening weekend of any movie in the Ant-Man series, at $106 million. In its second weekend, with its rottenness more firmly established, the film's grosses slid 69 percent, the steepest drop-off in Marvel history.

In studios' defense, Rotten Tomatoes' hastiness in computing its scores has made it practically necessary to cork one's bat. In a strategic blunder in May, Disney held the first screening of Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny at Cannes, the world's snootiest film festival, from which the first 12 reviews begot an initial score of 33 percent. "What they should've done," says Publicist No. 1, "was have simultaneous screenings in the States for critics who might've been more friendly." A month and a half later, Dial of Destiny bombed at the box office even though friendly critics eventually lifted its rating to 69 percent. "They had a low Rotten Tomatoes score just sitting out there for six weeks before release, and that was deadly," says a third publicist.

A genetically altered pig kidney transplanted into a brain-dead man has continued to function for 32 days, an advance toward the possible use of animal organs in humans, surgeons at NYU Langone Health said Wednesday. The Washington Post reports: The kidney was not rejected in the minutes after it was transplanted -- a problem in xenotransplantation, the use of organs from a different species. It began producing urine and took over the functions of a human kidney such as filtering toxins, the physicians said at a news conference. Also Wednesday, researchers at the University of Alabama at Birmingham Heersink School of Medicine published a similar case study, of a brain-dead patient who received two pig kidneys that underwent 10 gene alterations earlier this year. The kidneys were not rejected and continued to function for seven days. The results were peer-reviewed and published in the journal JAMA Surgery.

In the NYU Langone transplant, the specially bred pig from which the kidney was procured required just one genetic alteration, to remove a protein that human immune systems attack shortly after surgery. Surgeons also implanted the pig's thymus gland, which helps train the immune system, by sewing it under the outer layer of the kidney, and used immunosuppressive drugs to prevent rejection later on. Managing the condition of the brain-dead man, who on Wednesday still had a heart beat and was breathing with the aid of a ventilator, for an extended period of time also requires extensive efforts by critical care personnel. But the work has revealed information about longer-term use of animal organs, the doctors said. The researchers expect to follow the patient for another month.

With the results released Wednesday, both Montgomery and Locke said they can envision moving toward the early stage of clinical trials to identify the safety of transplanting pig kidneys into live humans. [...] The genetic alteration in the NYU Langone study knocked out a carbohydrate molecule known as Alpha-gal, for short. Humans do not produce the substance and create high levels of antibodies against it, which has in the past proven a formidable obstacle to xenotransplantation. "Now that it can be completely removed from the pig, that allows us to move forward," Montgomery said. Still, the team said, pigs have 1,000 proteins that humans don't, and it can take 10 to 14 days to see how a person's immune system reacts to them. Getting beyond that stage with this patient at NYU Langone is a first sign that long-term viability of the organ and patient is possible, they said.

In an interview with CNN, Michio Kaku, professor of theoretical physics at City College of New York and CUNY Graduate Center, said chatbots like OpenAI's ChatGPT are just "glorified tape recorders." From the report: "It takes snippets of what's on the web created by a human, splices them together and passes it off as if it created these things," he said. "And people are saying, 'Oh my God, it's a human, it's humanlike.'" However, he said, chatbots cannot discern true from false: "That has to be put in by a human." According to Kaku, humanity is in its second stage of computer evolution. The first was the analog stage, "when we computed with sticks, stones, levers, gears, pulleys, string." After that, around World War II, he said, we switched to electricity-powered transistors. It made the development of the microchip possible and helped shape today's digital landscape. But this digital landscape rests on the idea of two states like "on" and "off," and uses binary notation composed of zeros and ones.

"Mother Nature would laugh at us because Mother Nature does not use zeros and ones," Kaku said. "Mother Nature computes on electrons, electron waves, waves that create molecules. And that's why we're now entering stage three." He believes the next technological stage will be in the quantum realm. Quantum computing is an emerging technology utilizing the various states of particles like electrons to vastly increase a computer's processing power. Instead of using computer chips with two states, quantum computers use various states of vibrating waves. It makes them capable of analyzing and solving problems much faster than normal computers. But beyond business applications, Kaku said quantum computing could also help advance health care. "Cancer, Parkinson's, Alzheimer's disease -- these are diseases at the molecular level. We're powerless to cure these diseases because we have to learn the language of nature, which is the language of molecules and quantum electrons."

Recently Ars Technica reported on "another application for SpaceX's Starship architecture that the company is studying," adding that NASA "is on board to lend expertise.

"Though still in a nascent phase of tech development, the effort could result in repurposing Starship into a commercial space station, something NASA has a keen interest in because there are no plans for a government-owned research lab in low-Earth orbit after the International Space Station is decommissioned after 2030." NASA announced last month a new round of agreements with seven commercial companies, including SpaceX. The Collaborations for Commercial Space Capabilities (CCSC) program is an effort established to advance private sector development of emerging products and services that could be available to customers — including NASA — in approximately five to seven years... NASA passed over SpaceX's bid for a funded space station development agreement in 2021, identifying concerns about SpaceX's plans for scaling its life-support system to enable long-duration missions and SpaceX's plan for a single docking port, among other issues. The space agency isn't providing any funding for the new CCSC effort, which includes the Starship space station concept, but the government will support the industry with technical expertise, including expert assessments, lessons learned, technologies, and data.

Apart from the SpaceX agreement, NASA said it will provide non-financial support to Blue Origin's initiative to develop a crew spacecraft for orbital missions that would launch on the company's New Glenn rocket. The agency also supports Northrop Grumman's development of a human-tended research platform in low-Earth orbit to work alongside the company's planned space station. The other companies NASA picked for unfunded agreements were: Sierra Space's proposal for a crewed version of its Dream Chaser spacecraft, Vast's concept for a privately owned space station, ThinkOrbital's plan to develop welding, cutting, inspection, and additive manufacturing technology for construction work in space, and Special Aerospace Services for collaboration on an autonomous maneuvering unit to assist, or potentially replace, spacewalkers working outside a space station.

Despite the lack of NASA funding, the new collaboration announcement with SpaceX laid out — in broad strokes, at least — one of the directions SpaceX may want to take Starship. NASA said it will work with SpaceX on an "integrated low-Earth orbit architecture" that includes the Starship vehicle and other SpaceX programs, including the Dragon crew capsule and Starlink broadband network.
The artice links to a recent NASA document detailing SpaceX's space station concept. Phil McAlister, who heads NASA's commercial spaceflight division, says its size and reduced cost "could have a far-reaching impact on the sustainable development of the low-Earth orbit) economy...

"Adding increased confidence is the company's plan to self-fund Starship development from its launch and satellite enterprises."

Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader Amiga Trombone for sharing the article.

As detailed in a paper published in Cell Chemical Biology, researchers have developed a "cancer-killing pill" capable of destroying solid tumors while leaving healthy cells unaffected. The new drug has been in development for 20 years and is now undergoing pre-clinical research in the U.S.. Derek Lowe, a medicinal chemist and freelance writer on science and pharmaceutical topics, writes about the new paper via Science Magazine: It's about a molecule designated AOH1996, which seems to have a unique mode of action in tumor cells, one that might make it more more selective for those as compared to normal ones. The key target here is a protein called PCNA (from its old name of "proliferating cell nuclear antigen"). [...] The current molecule is a traditional direct small molecule binder that is selective for caPCNA over the regular type, which is a very attractive advantage to explore. The team behind it has been working on it for several years now to validate that mechanism, and the new paper linked first above is their report of going all the way into animal models. AOH1996 is a very unremarkable-looking molecule - to be honest, it looks like the sort of stuff that you used to see in old combinatorial chemistry libraries in the late 90s and early 2000s, a couple of aryl-rich groups strung together with amide bonds. It's certainly not going to be the most soluble stuff in the world, but they seem to have been able to formulate it. But I'm definitely not going to make fun of any chemical structure that works! [...]

The new paper shows preclinical toxicity testing in two species (mice and dogs), which is what you need to get to human trials. It seems to pass those very well, with no signs of trouble at 6x the effective dose in either species. And if you were throwing DSBs all over the place in normal tissues, believe me, you'd see tox. It is clean in an Ames test, for example. As for efficacy, in cell assays the concentration needed for 50% growth inhibition across 70 different cancer cell lines averaged around 300nM, while it showed no toxic effects on various non-cancer lines up to 10 micromolar (at least a 30x window). The affected cells show cell-cycle arrest, replication stress, apoptosis, and so on. And application of AOH1996 along with other known chemotherapy agents made the cells much more sensitive to those, presumably because they couldn't deal with those on top of the problems that AOH1996 was already causing.

It also shows growth arrest in xenograft tumors in mouse models, with a no-effect dose at least six times its effective dose, and combination therapy with a topoisomerase inhibitor showed even more significant effects. The compound has entered a Phase I trial in humans on the basis of the above data, and I very much look forward to seeing it advance to Phase II, where it will doubtless be used in combination with several existing therapies. I hope that human cancers will prove vulnerable to this new mode of attack in the clinic, and that they are not able to mutate around it with new forms of caPCNA too quickly, either. The comparison with the peptide agent mentioned above will be especially interesting, too. There's only one way to find out - good luck to everyone involved!

"NASA took a significant step Tuesday toward allowing humans on the moon to 'live off the land,'" reports the Washington Post.

NASA awarded several contracts "to build landing pads, roads and habitats on the lunar surface, use nuclear power for energy, and even lay a high-voltage power line over half a mile..." Instead of going to the moon and returning home, as was done during the Apollo era of the 1960s and early '70s, NASA intends to build a sustainable presence focusing on the lunar South Pole, where there is water in the form of ice. The contracts awarded Tuesday are some of the first steps the agency is taking toward developing the technologies that would allow humans to live for extended periods of time on the moon and in deep space. Materials on the moon must be used to extract the necessities such as water, fuel and metal for construction, said Prasun Desai, NASA's acting associate administrator for space technology. "We're trying to start that technology development to make that a reality in the future," he said.

The largest award, $34.7 million, went to billionaire Jeff Bezos's Blue Origin space venture, which has been working on a project since 2021 called Blue Alchemist to build solar cells and transmission wire out of the moon's regolith — rocks and dirt. In a blog post this year, Blue Origin said it developed a reactor that reaches temperatures of nearly 3,000 degrees and uses an electrical current to separate iron, silicon and aluminum from oxygen in the regolith. The testing, using a lunar regolith simulant, has created silicon pure enough to make solar cells to be used on the lunar surface, the company said. [NASA says it could also be used to make wires.] The oxygen could be used for humans to breathe. "To make long-term presence on the moon viable, we need abundant electrical power," the company wrote in the post. "We can make power systems on the moon directly from materials that exist everywhere on the surface, without special substances brought from Earth."

The award is another indication that Blue Origin is trying to position itself as a key player in helping NASA build a permanent presence on and around the moon as part of the Artemis program... The company said it is developing a solar-powered storage tank to keep propellants at 20 degrees Kelvin, or about minus-423 degrees Fahrenheit, so spacecraft can refuel in space instead of returning to Earth between missions.
Other winners cited in the article:

• Zeno Power, which "intends to use nuclear energy to provide power on the moon," received a $15 million contract (partnering with Blue Origin).

• Astrobotic — which plans to launch a lander to the moon this year — got a $34.6 million contract "to build a power line that would transmit electricity from a lunar lander's solar arrays to a rover. It ultimately intends to build a larger power source using solar arrays on the moon's surface."

• Redwire won a $12.9 million contract "to help build roads and landing pads on the moon. It would use a microwave emitter to melt the regolith and transform treacherous rocky landscapes into smooth, solid surfaces, said Mike Gold, Redwire's chief growth officer."

The technologies — which include in-space 3D printing — "will expand industry capabilities for a sustained human presence on the Moon," NASA said in a statement.

The U.S. space agency will contribute a total of $150 million, with each company contributing at least 10-25% of the total cost (based on their size). "Partnering with the commercial space industry lets us at NASA harness the strength of American innovation and ingenuity," said NASA Administrator Bill Nelson. "The technologies that NASA is investing in today have the potential to be the foundation of future exploration."

"Our partnerships with industry could be a cornerstone of humanity's return to the Moon under Artemis," said acting associate administrator Desai. "By creating new opportunities for streamlined awards, we hope to push crucial technologies over the finish line so they can be used in future missions.

"These innovative partnerships will help advance capabilities that will enable sustainable exploration on the Moon."

An effort by United States lawmakers to prevent government agencies from domestically tracking citizens without a search warrant is facing opposition internally from one of its largest intelligence services. From a report: Republican and Democratic aides familiar with ongoing defense-spending negotiations in Congress say officials at the National Security Agency (NSA) have approached lawmakers charged with its oversight about opposing an amendment that would prevent it from paying companies for location data instead of obtaining a warrant in court. Introduced by US representatives Warren Davidson and Sara Jacobs, the amendment would prohibit US military agencies from "purchasing data that would otherwise require a warrant, court order, or subpoena" to obtain. The ban would cover more than half of the US intelligence community, including the NSA, the Defense Intelligence Agency, and the newly formed National Space Intelligence Center, among others.

The House approved the amendment in a floor vote over a week ago during its annual consideration of the National Defense Authorization Act, a "must-pass" bill outlining how the Pentagon will spend next year's $886 billion budget. Negotiations over which policies will be included in the Senate's version of the bill are ongoing. In a separate but related push last week, members of the House Judiciary Committee voted unanimously to advance legislation that would extend similar restrictions against the purchase of Americans' data across all sectors of government, including state and local law enforcement. Known as the "Fourth Amendment Is Not For Sale Act," the bill will soon be reintroduced in the Senate as well by one of its original 2021 authors, Ron Wyden, the senator's office confirmed. "Americans of all political stripes know their Constitutional rights shouldn't disappear in the digital age," Wyden says, adding that there is a "deep well of support" for enshrining protections against commercial data grabs by the government "into black-letter law."

Waymo, the self-driving unit owned by Alphabet, is slowing the development of autonomous trucking that's being done by its Via subsidiary. From a report: "With our decision to focus on ride-hailing, we'll push back the timeline on our commercial and operational efforts on trucking, as well as most of our technical development on that business unit," the company said in a statement. "We'll continue our collaboration with our strategic partner, Daimler Truck North America, to advance technical development of an autonomous truck platform."

The move comes as Alphabet is prioritizing financial discipline. The company said on Tuesday that it promoted Chief Financial Officer Ruth Porat to president and chief investment officer, saying that it will stick to the more thrifty culture she has instilled. Self-driving technology has taken a step back in the past several years. Autonomous ventures like Waymo have spent billions of dollars in capital only to bring in little, if any revenue. Waymo has made more progress monetizing its robotaxi business than it has in trucking.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: [T]he NYPD announced it's piloting test drones to fly over at-risk neighborhoods and make public announcements during emergencies. On Sunday, at the tail end of a weekend of heavy rainfall and flooding, New York City's emergency notification system tweeted that the NYPD would be "conducting a test of remote-piloted public messaging capabilities" at a location confirmed to AM New York as Hook Creek Park in Queens. The NYPD told AM New York that the drones were being tested to make announcements during weather-related emergencies, and were being tested in advance of more flooding expected this weekend. The comments suggest that public announcement drones could be deployed in a real-world scenario very soon.

Besides the eeriness of a drone instructing New Yorkers during life-threatening emergencies, the test raises questions about the NYPD's compliance with laws that require the agency to alert the public when deploying surveillance technology. The NYPD is required to post an impact statement and use policy on its website and seek public comment 90 days prior to deploying new surveillance technology to comply with the 2020 POST Act. However, according to the law, the NYPD merely has to amend old use policies if it is using previously existing surveillance tech for new purposes. For its use policy for unmanned aircraft, finalized in April 2021, there is no mention of the emergency announcements. The document says, "In situations where deployment of NYPD (drones) has not been foreseen or prescribed in policy, the highest uniformed member of the NYPD, the Chief of Department, will decide if deployment is appropriate and lawful. In accordance with the Public Oversight of Surveillance Technology Act, an addendum to this impact and use policy will be prepared as necessary to describe any additional uses of UAS." No such addendum appears on the website. "This plan just isn't going to fly. The city already has countless ways of reaching New Yorkers, and it would take thousands of drones to reach the whole city," Albert Fox Cahn, executive director of the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project told Motherboard by email.

"The drones are a terrible way to alert New Yorkers, but they are a great way to creep us out. More alarmingly, the NYPD is once again violating the landmark Public Oversight of Surveillance Technology (POST) Act, which requires public notice and comment before deploying new surveillance systems." Cahn added: "No gadget is going to be a substitute for effective city management and communication practices."

"The Reddit community is still reckoning with the consequences of the platform's API price hike..." reports Ars Technica.

"The latest group to announce its departure is BotDefense." BotDefense, which helps remove rogue submission and comment bots from Reddit and which is maintained by volunteer moderators, is said to help moderate 3,650 subreddits. BotDefense's creator told Ars Technica that the team is now quitting over Reddit's "antagonistic actions" toward moderators and developers, with concerning implications for spam moderation on some large subreddits like r/space.

BotDefense started in 2019 as a volunteer project and has been run by volunteer mods, known as "dequeued" and "abrownn" on Reddit. Since then, it claims to have populated its ban list with 144,926 accounts, and it helps moderate subreddits with huge followings, like r/gaming (37.4 million members), /r/aww (34.2 million), r/music (32.4 million), r/Jokes (26.2 million), r/space (23.5 million), and /r/LifeProTips (22.2 million). Dequeued told Ars that other large subreddits BotDefense helps moderates include /r/food, /r/EarthPorn, /r/DIY, and /r/mildlyinteresting. On Wednesday, dequeued announced that BotDefense is ceasing operations. BotDefense has already stopped accepting bot account submissions and will disable future action on bots. BotDefense "will continue to review appeals and process unbans for a minimum of 90 days or until Reddit breaks the code running BotDefense," the announcement said...

Dequeued, who said they've been moderating for nearly nine years, said Reddit's "antagonistic actions" toward devs and mods are the only reason BotDefense is closing. The moderator said there were plans for future tools, like a new machine learning system for detecting "many more" bots. Before the API battle turned ugly, dequeued had no plans to stop working on BotDefense...

[S]ubreddits that have relied on BotDefense are uncertain about managing their subreddits without the tool, and the tool's impending departure are new signs of a deteriorating Reddit community.
Ironically, Reddit's largest shareholder — Advance Publications — owns Ars Technica's parent company Conde Naste.

The article notes that Reddit "didn't respond to Ars' request for comment on BotDefense closing, how Reddit fights spam bots and karma farms, or about users quitting Reddit."