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Submission + - A Major Physics Experiment Just Detected A Particle That Shouldn't Exist (livescience.com)

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: Scientists have produced the firmest evidence yet of so-called sterile neutrinos, mysterious particles that pass through matter without interacting with it at all.

The first hints these elusive particles turned up decades ago. But after years of dedicated searches, scientists have been unable to find any other evidence for them, with many experiments contradicting those old results. These new results now leave scientists with two robust experiments that seem to demonstrate the existence of sterile neutrinos, even as other experiments continue to suggest sterile neutrinos don't exist at all.

That means there's something strange happening in the universe that is making humanity's most cutting-edge physics experiments contradict one another.

It's possible that the anomaly in the LSND and MiniBooNE experiments might turn out to be the "systematics," meaning there's something about the way neutrinos are interacting with the experimental setup that scientists don't yet understand. But it's also looking more and more possible that scientists are going to have to explain why so many other experiments aren't spotting very real sterile neutrinos that are turning up in Fermilab and Los Alamos Lab. And if that's the case, they'll have to revise their entire understanding of the universe in the process.

Submission + - Oracle Engineer Talks Of ZFS Possibly Still Being Upstreamed On Linux (phoronix.com)

Submitted by fstack
fstack writes: Senior software architect Mark Maybee who has been work Oracle/Sun since '98 says maybe we "could" still see ZFS be a first-class upstream Linux file-system. He spoke at the annual OpenZFS Developer Summit how Oracle's focus has shifted to the cloud, they have reduced investment in Solaris, and admits that Linux rules the cloud. Among the Oracle engineer's hopes is that ZFS needs to become a "first class citizen in Linux" and to do so Oracle should port their ZFS code to Oracle Linux and then upstream the file-system to the Linux kernel, which would involve relicensing the ZFS code.

Submission + - Vulnerabilities Discovered in Mobile Bootloaders of Major Vendors (bleepingcomputer.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Android bootloader components from five major chipset vendors are affected by vulnerabilities that break the CoT (Chain of Trust) during the Android OS boot-up sequence, opening devices to attacks. The vulnerabilities were discovered with a new tool called BootStomp, developed by nine computer scientists from the University of California, Santa Barbara.

Researchers analyzed five bootloaders from four vendors (NVIDIA, Qualcomm, MediaTek, and Huawei/HiSilicon). Using BootStomp, researchers identified seven security flaws, six new and one previously known (CVE-2014-9798). Of the six new flaws, bootloader vendors already acknowledged five and are working on a fix.

"Some of these vulnerabilities would allow an attacker to execute arbitrary code as part of the bootloader (thus compromising the entire chain of trust), or to perform permanent denial-of-service attacks," the research team said. "Our tool also identified two bootloader vulnerabilities that can be leveraged by an attacker with root privileges on the OS to unlock the device and break the CoT."

Submission + - Science fiction author Brian Aldiss dies aged 92 (theguardian.com)

Submitted by Freshly Exhumed
Freshly Exhumed writes: Acclaimed Science Fiction author Brian Aldiss, first published in the 1950s, has died at the age of 92. Aldiss wrote such science fiction classics as Non-Stop, Hothouse and Greybeard, as well as the Helliconia trilogy, winning the Hugo and Nebula prizes for science fiction and fantasy, an honorary doctorate from the University of Reading, the title of grand master from the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, and an OBE for services to literature. Tributes from contemporaries and younger authors have been plentiful.

Submission + - Star hurtling towards massive black hole may seal deal for Einstein's relativity (sciencemag.org)

Submitted by sciencehabit
sciencehabit writes: Albert Einstein’s theory of general relativity has passed a multitude of tests over the past century, but physicists remain unsatisfied. That’s because it has never been matched up against a strong gravitational field, like that of a supermassive black hole. Now, a team monitoring a star on its way to a close encounter with the giant black hole at the center of our galaxy says early signs hint that the 102-year-old theory will once again hold up.

Submission + - US Is Slipping Toward Measles Being Endemic Once Again, Says Study (arstechnica.com) 1

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: With firm vaccination campaigns, the US eliminated measles in 2000. The highly infectious virus was no longer constantly present in the country—no longer endemic. Since then, measles has only popped up when travelers carried it in, spurring mostly small outbreaks—ranging from a few dozen to a few hundred cases each year—that then fizzle out. But all that may be about to change. With the rise of non-medical vaccine exemptions and delays, the country is backsliding toward endemic measles, Stanford and Baylor College of Medicine researchers warn this week. With extensive disease modeling, the researchers make clear just how close we are to seeing explosive, perhaps unshakeable, outbreaks. According to results the researchers published in JAMA Pediatrics, a mere five-percent slip in measles-mumps-and-rubella (MMR) vaccination rates among kids aged two to 11 would triple measles cases in this age group and cost $2.1 million in public healthcare costs. And that’s just a small slice of the disease transmission outlook. Kids two to 11 years old only make up about 30 percent of the measles cases in current outbreaks. The number of cases would be much larger if the researchers had sufficient data to model the social mixing and immunization status of adults, teens, and infants under two.

Submission + - resolved in systemd vulnerable to buffer overflow (theregister.co.uk)

Submitted by slack_justyb
slack_justyb writes: Systemd, everyone's favorite punching bag of Linux, has been shown to be vulnerable to a type of buffer overflow attack from malicious DNS servers. From the article

"A malicious DNS server can exploit this by responding with a specially crafted TCP payload to trick systemd-resolved in to allocating a buffer that's too small, and subsequently write arbitrary data beyond the end of it," explained Chris Coulson, of Ubuntu maker Canonical, who discovered the out-of-bounds write in systemd-resolved.

Patches are already out for various versions of Ubuntu. The bug is technically present in Debian Stretch, Buster, and Sid but resolved is not turned on by default there. You can find more about CVE-2017-9445 here

Submission + - Google unleashes terrible new update for Google News upon the net.

Submitted by Rei
Rei writes: Today, Google unveiled a "new look" for Google News, describing it as a "clean and uncluttered look". New design features includes a mostly empty "In the News" box for trending-topics, most of which you probably don't care about; a double-height page header so that they can make the border around the search box inexplicably larger and add a four-option menu bar; large empty grey expanses that take up half the browser; and a new news section that presents half as many news articles per page. If you didn't think you were having to scroll enough when using Google News, don't worry — Google's got your back with this new update.

Comment Re:ZX81 (Score 1) 857

by BDeblier (#54242761) Attached to: Ask Slashdot: What Was Your First Home Computer?

Had that problem too - the 16KB expansion glitching during typing. However, there was just enough space inside the ZX81, under the keyboard, to place the guts of that expansion module, and once the proper connections had been soldered, no more problems. All that thanks to my HAM dad.

Submission + - Wolves may be 're-domesticating' into dogs (sciencemag.org)

Submitted by sciencehabit
sciencehabit writes: It happened thousands of years ago, and it may be happening again: Wolves in various parts of the world may have started on the path to becoming dogs. That’s the conclusion of a new study, which finds that the animals are increasingly dining on livestock and human garbage instead of their wild prey, inching closer and closer to the human world in some places. But given today’s industrialized societies, this closeness might also bring humans and wolves into more conflict, with disastrous consequences for both.

Submission + - Carrie Fisher Suffers Heart Attack (nbcnews.com)

Submitted by tempo36
tempo36 writes: While returning from London to Los Angeles, actress Carrie Fisher suffered an apparent heart attack. Early reports indicate she was taken from the airplane by paramedics and admitted to UCLA Medical Center. United Airlines did not disclose her identity but several passengers took to Twitter to identify the actress and express their concern. Subsequent weigh in from Mark Hamill seems to confirm her condition.

No formal announcements from her publicist or family at this time about The Princess' condition or prognosis.

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