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Submission Summary: 0 pending, 21 declined, 19 accepted (40 total, 47.50% accepted)

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Submission + - Germany keeps two nuclear reactors on standby, reneging on pledge (reuters.com) 1

Submitted by Beeftopia
Beeftopia writes: Germany will keep two of its three reactors operational through the end of 2022, despite a pledge to shut them all down by December 31. A likely winter gas shortage prompted the change.

"German Economy Minister Robert Habeck said in a statement on Monday the move did not mean Berlin was reneging on its long-standing promise to exit nuclear energy by the end of 2022" reports Reuters. Habeck went on to say, "It remains very improbable that we will have crisis situations and extreme scenarios" requiring further use of nuclear.

"Germany is part of a European system hit by a decline in Russian gas deliveries, the French nuclear power squeeze and a drought that has curbed hydroelectric production and cooling water supplies to thermal power stations as well as hampering barge deliveries of coal" Reuters says.

A problem with the planned use case for the reactors is that nuclear plants are not designed to be variable backup energy generators, but rather continuous first-line generators.

Submission + - In life's origin, what came first, the metabolism or the information storage? (quantamagazine.org)

Submitted by Beeftopia
Beeftopia writes: All living cells power themselves by coaxing protons from one side of a membrane to the other. A place where this occurs naturally outside of cells are alkaline hydrothermal vents on the deep seafloor, inside highly porous rock formations that are almost like mineralized sponges. "Carbon and energy metabolism are driven by proton gradients, exactly what the vents provided for free," wrote biochemist Nick Lane.

In Lane's view, metabolism came first, and genetic information emerged naturally from it rather than the other way around. Lane believes that the implications of this reversal touch almost every big mystery in biology, including the nature of cancer and aging.

The reversal of the Krebs cycle in some cancers came as a shock because it was thought to only ever run in one direction, forward, to generate energy. In aging this reversal may play a part as well. Gaining control over this factor may lead to improved outcomes in both cancer and aging.

Submission + - Is Rust really safer? (acm.org)

Submitted by Beeftopia
Beeftopia writes: Rust has two modes: its default, safe mode, and an unsafe mode. In its default, safe mode, Rust prevents memory errors, such as "use-after-free" errors. It also prevents "data races" which is unsynchronized access to shared memory. In its unsafe mode (via use of the "unsafe" block), in which some of its APIs are written, it allows the use of potentially unsafe C-style features. The key challenge in verifying Rust's safety claims is accounting for the interaction between its safe and unsafe code. This article from the April CACM provides an overview of Rust and investigates its safety claims.

Submission + - Lab-grown meat company promises profitable product in 18 months (ft.com)

Submitted by Beeftopia
Beeftopia writes: Israeli start-up Future Meat has claimed a huge leap towards commercial viability for its lab-grown chicken, slashing production costs by almost half in just a few months. The company has backers which include Archer Daniels Midland and Tyson Foods. While lab-grown meat is currently only commercially available in Singapore, more than 50 companies are racing to get their product to market.

From the article: "One of the big costs for cultivated meat companies has been the nutrient for the meat cells, and cutting the cost of this 'feed' has been key to reducing the cost of production. Future Meat has successfully found a way to do this, said Sanjeev Krishnan, chief investment officer at S2G, a US agri and food tech venture capital group that has invested in the business. The start-up 'is scaling production in a capital-efficient way', he said."

Submission + - Former CDC director believes SARS-CoV-2 originated in lab 1

Submitted by Beeftopia
Beeftopia writes: Former CDC Director Robert Redfield told CNN on Friday that he believes the coronavirus "escaped" from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, and that it was spreading as early as September or October of 2019 — though he stressed that it was his "opinion."

"It's not unusual for respiratory pathogens that are being worked on in a laboratory to infect the laboratory worker. ... That's not implying any intentionality. It's my opinion, right? But I am a virologist. I have spent my life in virology," he continued.

Lab accidents in the U.S. are not especially rare, as USA Today's Alison Young noted in a recent opinion piece arguing why the Wuhan lab theory cannot be ruled out. The CDC itself experienced a possible contamination in a lab where it was making COVID-19 test kits early in the pandemic.

Redfield is a career virologist. He received his medical degree from Georgetown University before conducting his residency at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center as a US Army officer. Both of his parents were scientists at the National Institutes of Health. Before starting his position as the director of the CDC, Redfield was a professor at the University of Maryland School of Medicine and was once one of the US Army's leading AIDS researchers.

He does have a controversial incident regarding an AIDS vaccine on which his lab was working. He is accused of overstating its efficacy to gain funding.

Submission + - Everything you wanted to know about the section 230 controversy (acm.org)

Submitted by Beeftopia
Beeftopia writes: One of the few things about which U.S. Republican and Democratic politicians generally agree is that the law widely known as Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act needs to be repealed, amended, or reinterpreted.

Section 230 provides Internet platforms with a shield from liability rising from content posted by others.

It started in 1995, when a Prodigy user accused the company Stratton-Oakmont of securities fraud. Stratton-Oakmont sued Prodigy and won. In 1996, Section 230 was enacted as part of an overhaul of U.S. telecommunications law.

The first court decision on interpreting section 230 occurred in 1997, with Zeran v. America Online. Someone posted Ken Zeran's telephone number on t-shirts glorifying the 1995 Oklahoma City Bombing, and posted them to ads on AOL. Zeran received hundreds of phone calls, including death threats. AOL would not take down the ads despite Zeran's requests. Zeran sued AOL. AOL asked the court to dismiss the suit based on the new section 230. AOL won and the case was dismissed.

Relying on Zeran, online platforms have routinely avoided legal liability through 230 defenses. Numerous cases have featured very sympathetic plaintiffs, such as victims of revenge porn, fraudulent ads, and professional defamation, and some unsympathetic defendants who seem to have encouraged or tolerated harmful postings.

In late 2020, the Senate introduced a bill that would repeal 230 outright. Civil liberties groups, Internet platforms, and industry associations still support 230, as do Senator Wyden and former Congressman Chris Cox, who co-sponsored the bill that became 230. Wyden and Cox have pointed out that an overwhelming majority of the 200 million U.S.-based Internet platforms depend on 230 to protect them against unwarranted lawsuits by disgruntled users and those who may have been harmed by user-posted content of which the platforms were unaware and over which they had no control.

Much of the fuel for the proposed changes to 230 has come from conservative politicians who are no longer in control of the Senate. The next Congress will have a lot of work to do. Section 230 reform is unlikely to be a high priority in the near term. Yet, some adjustments to that law seem quite likely over time because platforms are widely viewed as having too much power over users' speech and are not transparent or consistent about their policies and practices.

Submission + - Possible link found between body weight and the immune system (theatlantic.com)

Submitted by Beeftopia
Beeftopia writes: Researchers discovered altering mice immune systems can cause weight gain: "This theory was borne out late last month in a paper in Science. Zac Stephens, a microbial ecologist at the University of Utah, and his colleagues had been working with mice with altered immune T cells. They noticed that over time, these mice “ballooned,” as Stephens puts it. One of his colleagues started calling them “pancakes.”

The relationship between microbes and weight gain has long been overlooked in humans, but people have known about similar effects in animals for decades. In 1950, the drug company Merck filed a patent for “a method of accelerating the growth of animals” with “a novel growth-promoting factor” that was, simply, penicillin. Eli Lilly patented three new antibiotics to mix into the feed of sheep, goats, and cattle because the microbe-killing agents “increased feed efficiency.” In the ensuing decades it became standard practice to give livestock copious doses of antibiotics to make them grow faster and larger, even though no one knew why this happened, or what other effects the practice might have.

The North American Meat Institute, the largest trade group representing meat processors, states (PDF, p. 4), "The use of some antibiotics can destroy certain bacteria in the gut and help livestock and poultry convert feed to muscle more quickly causing more rapid growth."

Lindemann says the fact that the immune system regulates the inhabitants of the small intestine is well established... Stephens says the relationship between weight and the immune system is likely to get more complicated before it gets simpler.

Submission + - Parachutes no more effective than empty backpacks at injury prevention (npr.org)

Submitted by Beeftopia
Beeftopia writes: The headline says, "Research published in a major medical journal concludes that a parachute is no more effective than an empty backpack at protecting you from harm if you have to jump from an aircraft." The conclusion seems absurd for the context assumed by most people. The article goes on to say, "But something like this happens in everyday medical research. It's far too easy for scientists who have already anticipated the outcome of their research to cherry-pick patients and circumstances to achieve the results they expect to see."

Submission + - Finally, non-compete clauses eliminated... for fast food workers (npr.org)

Submitted by Beeftopia
Beeftopia writes: Non-compete clauses are common among professionals, justified by a variety of innocuous-sounding and apparently reasonable business reasons. This story shows that, surprisingly, it is a very effective wage suppression mechanism as well, used in industries where it would seem unnecessary.

Submission + - Finally, it's the year of the Linux... supercomputer (zdnet.com)

Submitted by Beeftopia
Beeftopia writes: From ZDNet: "The latest TOP500 Supercomputer list is out. What's not surprising is that Linux runs on every last one of the world's fastest supercomputers. Linux has dominated supercomputing for years. But, Linux only took over supercomputing lock, stock, and barrel in November 2017. That was the first time all of the TOP500 machines were running Linux. Before that IBM AIX, a Unix variant, was hanging on for dear life low on the list."

An interesting architectural note: "GPUs, not CPUs, now power most of supercomputers' speed."

Submission + - A history of WebAssembly, from one of the developers (ieee.org)

Submitted by Beeftopia
Beeftopia writes: December's Spectrum Magazine has a detailed history of WebAssembly: "[Alon Zakai] wanted to take a game he had helped write in C++ and convert it to JavaScript code that would run well on the Web. This was in 2010, and back then, converting C++ to JavaScript was unthinkable... so he started working to adapt an open-source tool that could translate C++ code into JavaScript automatically. He called his project Emscripten...we were able to formalize the permitted JavaScript patterns, to make the contract between Emscripten and the browser completely clear. We named the resulting subset of JavaScript asm.js ... This brings us to the present... Emscripten can take code written in C++ and convert it directly into WebAssembly. And there will be ways in time to run other languages as well, including Rust, Lua, Python, Java, and C#. With WebAssembly, multimillion-line code bases can now load in a few seconds and then run at 80 percent of the speed of native programs. And both load time and execution speed are expected to improve as the browser engines that run the code are made better."

Submission + - Study: Mice gain weight in cold temperatures due to gut changes (economist.com)

Submitted by Beeftopia
Beeftopia writes: From The Economist: Mice were separated into two groups, one temperature maintained at 6C, the other at 22C. Researchers expected the cold mice to lose weight as they burned stored fat to stay warm. And for the first few days they did. But after five to ten days, in spite of their rations not increasing, the cold mice begain to put on weight.

When scientists examined the gut microbiome of the previously identical mice, they found they were radically different. Additionally, the intestine had grown villi 50% larger than those of the warm temperature mice.

Finally, after transplanting the gut microflora into a new batch of aseptic mice kept at warm temperatures, those mice showed the increased insulin sensitivity, cold tolerance, and villi length of the cold mice.

Submission + - Woman suffers significant weight gain after fecal transplant (foxnews.com)

Submitted by Beeftopia
Beeftopia writes: In a case reported in the journal Open Forum Infectious Diseases, a woman suffering from a drug-resistant intestinal infection gained 36 pounds after receiving a fecal transplant from her overweight daughter. Previous mouse studies have shown thin mice gain weight after ingesting fecal bacteria from obese mice. The woman previously was not overweight. After the procedure, despite a medically supervised liquid protein diet and exercise regimen, the woman remained obese. Her doctor said, "She came back about a year later and complained of tremendous weight gain... She felt like a switch flipped in her body, to this day she continues to have problems... as a result I'm very careful with all our donors don't use obese people."

Submission + - Researchers Find The Tech Worker Shortage Doesn't Really Exist (businessweek.com)

Submitted by Beeftopia
Beeftopia writes: From the article: "For a real-life example of an actual worker shortage, Salzman points to the case of petroleum engineers, where the supply of workers has failed to keep up with the growth in oil exploration. The result, says Salzman, was just what economists would have predicted: Employers started offering more money, more people started becoming petroleum engineers, and the shortage was solved. In contrast, Salzman concluded in a paper released last year by the liberal Economic Policy Institute, real IT wages are about the same as they were in 1999. Further, he and his co-authors found, only half of STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) college graduates each year get hired into STEM jobs. “We don’t dispute the fact at all that Facebook (FB) and Microsoft (MSFT) would like to have more, cheaper workers,” says Salzman’s co-author Daniel Kuehn, now a research associate at the Urban Institute. “But that doesn’t constitute a shortage.”

Submission + - IBM's Watson to be used for cancer treatment (arstechnica.com)

Submitted by Beeftopia
Beeftopia writes: The New York Genome Center and IBM will investigate whether Watson can be used to parse cancer genome data and then recommend treatments. The trial involves 20 to 25 glioblastoma patients with poor prognoses. The article states, "It should theoretically be possible to analyze [genomic] data and use it to customize a treatment that targets the specific mutations present in tumor cells. But right now, doing so requires a squad of highly trained geneticists, genomics experts, and clinicians. It's a situation that can't scale to handle the [number of] patients with glioblastoma, much less other cancers. Instead, that gusher of information is going to be pointed at Watson... Watson will figure out which mutations are distinct to the tumor, what protein networks they effect, and which drugs target proteins that are part of those networks. The net result will be a picture of the biochemical landscape inside the tumor cells, along with some suggestions on how clinicians might consider intervening to change the landscape.

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