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Medicine

Non-Invasive Stimulation of the Brain Ended Opioid Addiction, Cigarette Craving (jpost.com) 37

Posted by FirehoseFavorites from the second-chance dept.
The Jerusalem Post reports that doctors at Haifa's Rambam Health Care Campus "have successfully treated their first Israeli opioid addiction patient using an experimental noninvasive brain technology, easing him through withdrawal in just 20 minutes..." [T]he team of specialists at the Haifa medical center intervened in the electrical activity of an area of the patient's brain called the nucleus accumbens, the core of the brain system responsible for feelings of satisfaction, pleasure, and reward. The treatment, based on technology from the Israeli company Insightec, is similar to the one used to treat symptoms of essential tremor and Parkinsonian tremor, under MRI control. In this case, the treatment was carried out with the help of a new technology that performs noninvasive neuromodulation, without heating or burning tissue, and allows stimulation in the same area of the brain to increase or suppress activity...

"Tests carried out a week later produced negative results for opioids and other substances," [said Dr. Lior Lev-Tov, director of the functional neurosurgery unit in Rambam's neurosurgery division and the one leading the new study at the medical center.] "The patient himself reported a craving score of zero out of 10 for using the drug, and even another side effect, a drastic drop in the desire for cigarettes, from three packs a day to just a few cigarettes, and with no urge to use alcohol. In other words, in a treatment that lasted about 20 minutes net, our patient was completely freed from an extreme dependence that had accompanied him every day for years. This is nothing less than a medical and therapeutic revolution."
Dr. Lev-Tov added that "This experience opens doors for us to treat a wide range of very serious illnesses such as PTSD, OCD, eating disorders, other addictions, severe depression, severe pain disorders, and I hope we will also be able to reach cognitive areas and treat attention deficit disorders, Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, and more."

Thanks to Slashdot reader Bruce66423 for sharing the article.
Space

Blue Origin Rocket Exploded Thursday Night During Hot-Fire Test (cbsnews.com) 73

Posted by EditorDavid from the space-is-hard dept.
Spaceflight Now shared their video of the explosion, which the Orlando Sentinel describes as showing Blue Origin's rocket "become engulfed in flames. The fireball expands out and covers the entire launch pad as the fuselage of the rocket can be seen crumbling into the flames."

Blue Origin founder Jeff Bezos said on X.com "It's too early to know the root cause but we're already working to find it. Very rough day, but we'll rebuild whatever needs rebuilding and get back to flying. It's worth it." (SpaceX founder Elon Musk posted "Sorry to see this, I hope you recover quickly.")

It's unclear how this will impact future launches. "The rocket was destroyed," reports CBS News, "and as the smoke cleared, there was no sign of the erector-gantry used to move the New Glenn from its hangar to the pad and to raise it from horizontal to vertical. Likewise, one of two tall lightning towers was no longer visible." It was the first such on-pad explosion at the Cape since a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket blew up on nearby pad 40 on Sept. 1, 2016... Blue Origin only has one New Glenn pad, the one that was damaged in the Thursday test. The New Glenn, which has launched three times, is a heavy lift rocket designed to compete head-to-head with SpaceX Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy rockets. During New Glenn's most recent flight in April, an upper stage malfunction prevented a commercial internet satellite from reaching its planned orbit...

The New Glenn destroyed Thursday was to send 48 Leo internet satellites owned by Amazon into space [which were not on board for the hot-fire test]
Blue Origin posted on X.com that "Debris from our recent hotfire anomaly may wash ashore in the coming days/weeks. If you encounter any debris, do not touch or approach it for your safety."

"Spaceflight is unforgiving, and developing new heavy-lift launch capability is extraordinarily difficult..." NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman posted on X.com. "âWe will provide information on any impacts to the Artemis and Moon Base programs as it becomes available."

Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader symbolset for sharing the news.

Comment Re:I live in Washington state (Score 3, Insightful) 58

Sure, you don't want to pay full sticker price, because that's the sucker price. You have to waste a day of your life haggling with the dealer so that he can charge different prices to different customers. If you buy straight from the manufacturer under a no-haggle system, they have to offer the same price to everybody. So it's likely to be quite a lot less than the sticker price of a dealership-sold car. The manufacturer still wants to segment the market and milk more money out of less price-sensitive customers, but they have to do it by selling more luxurious trim levels.

Comment Re:USB 2? (Score 1) 31

by Ed Avis (#66020124) Attached to: Apple Introduces iPhone 17e With MagSafe and A19
I still want to use iTunes on my phone to replace my CD collection (or let me put the CDs in the basement while still listening to them). Sadly Apple has crippled it in another way. Songs disappear from iTunes on the phone if they would not be able to stream in your region, even though you ripped them from your own disc.

Comment Re:8k is nice for computers though (Score 1) 138

by Ed Avis (#65964064) Attached to: Is the TV Industry Finally Conceding That the Future May Not Be 8K?

Yes, I saw crisp text on my 1024x768 LCD display a quarter century ago. But you missed the next part of the sentence, "even at small sizes". As text gets smaller you reach a point where it is no longer clear. On an 8k display even the smallest sizes are pin sharp. They are a bit fuzzy on 4k (as I use at work) and would be headache-inducing mush if you tried to show such tiny text on a 1920x1080 display.

Back in the day there were hand-created bitmap fonts for crisp display at small sizes. Nowadays, for better or worse almost every application uses outline fonts, which look a bit jaggy if rendered without anti-aliasing ("font smoothing") and a bit fuzzy with it. Only on a very high DPI display is this completely unnoticeable. My laptop is 4k and I am very happy with it, but to make best use of a 32 inch screen a higher pixel density is better.

Comment 8k is nice for computers though (Score 2) 138

by Ed Avis (#65963742) Attached to: Is the TV Industry Finally Conceding That the Future May Not Be 8K?

I'm posting this from my home PC with Dell's 8k monitor. It's nice to see completely crisp text, even at small sizes, and certainly a noticeable quality improvement from 4k. But that's because I am sitting a few inches away. I recently bought a new television, and while I was tempted to pick up a cheap used 8k model, in practice it would make no difference when viewing it from the sofa.

Even Dell seems to have retreated from 8k, however. Their newer top-end monitor has a roughly 6k horizontal resolution.
Science

Scientists Found a Way To Cool Quantum Computers Using Noise (sciencedaily.com) 7

Posted by EditorDavid from the cool-technology dept.
Slashdot reader alternative_right writes: Quantum computers need extreme cold to work, but the very systems that keep them cold also create noise that can destroy fragile quantum information. Scientists in Sweden have now flipped that problem on its head by building a tiny quantum refrigerator that actually uses noise to drive cooling instead of fighting it. By carefully steering heat at unimaginably small scales, the device can act as a refrigerator, heat engine, or energy amplifier inside quantum circuits.
Privacy

Manufacturer Remotely Bricks Smart Vacuum After Its Owner Blocked It From Collecting Data (tomshardware.com) 123

Posted by EditorDavid from the sucking-dirt-and-data dept.
"An engineer got curious about how his iLife A11 smart vacuum worked and monitored the network traffic coming from the device," writes Tom's Hardware.

"That's when he noticed it was constantly sending logs and telemetry data to the manufacturer — something he hadn't consented to." The user, Harishankar, decided to block the telemetry servers' IP addresses on his network, while keeping the firmware and OTA servers open. While his smart gadget worked for a while, it just refused to turn on soon after... He sent it to the service center multiple times, wherein the technicians would turn it on and see nothing wrong with the vacuum. When they returned it to him, it would work for a few days and then fail to boot again... [H]e decided to disassemble the thing to determine what killed it and to see if he could get it working again...

[He discovered] a GD32F103 microcontroller to manage its plethora of sensors, including Lidar, gyroscopes, and encoders. He created PCB connectors and wrote Python scripts to control them with a computer, presumably to test each piece individually and identify what went wrong. From there, he built a Raspberry Pi joystick to manually drive the vacuum, proving that there was nothing wrong with the hardware. From this, he looked at its software and operating system, and that's where he discovered the dark truth: his smart vacuum was a security nightmare and a black hole for his personal data.

First of all, it's Android Debug Bridge, which gives him full root access to the vacuum, wasn't protected by any kind of password or encryption. The manufacturer added a makeshift security protocol by omitting a crucial file, which caused it to disconnect soon after booting, but Harishankar easily bypassed it. He then discovered that it used Google Cartographer to build a live 3D map of his home. This isn't unusual, by far. After all, it's a smart vacuum, and it needs that data to navigate around his home. However, the concerning thing is that it was sending off all this data to the manufacturer's server. It makes sense for the device to send this data to the manufacturer, as its onboard SoC is nowhere near powerful enough to process all that data. However, it seems that iLife did not clear this with its customers.

Furthermore, the engineer made one disturbing discovery — deep in the logs of his non-functioning smart vacuum, he found a command with a timestamp that matched exactly the time the gadget stopped working. This was clearly a kill command, and after he reversed it and rebooted the appliance, it roared back to life.
Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader registrations_suck for sharing the article.

Submission + - Python Software Foundation refuses $1.5 million grant with anti DEI provision. (blogspot.com) 1

Submitted by Jeremy Allison - Sam
Jeremy Allison - Sam writes: The PSF has withdrawn a $1.5 million proposal to US government grant program.

"We became concerned, however, when we were presented with the terms and conditions we would be required to agree to if we accepted the grant. These terms included affirming the statement that we “do not, and will not during the term of this financial assistance award, operate any programs that advance or promote DEI, or discriminatory equity ideology in violation of Federal anti-discrimination laws.”
EU

New Large Coral Reef Discovered Off Naples Containing Rare Ancient Corals (independent.co.uk) 13

Posted by EditorDavid from the reefer-gladness dept.
Off the southwest cost of Italy, a remotely operated submarine made "a significant and rare discovery," reports the Independent — a vast white coral reef that was 80 metres tall (262 feet) and 2 metres wide (6.56 feet) "containing important species and fossil traces." Often dubbed the "rainforests of the sea", coral reefs are of immense scientific interest due to their status as some of the planet's richest marine ecosystems, harbouring millions of species. They play a crucial role in sustaining marine life but are currently under considerable threat...

hese impressive formations are composed of deep-water hard corals, commonly referred to as "white corals" because of their lack of colour, specifically identified as Lophelia pertusa and Madrepora oculata species. The reef also contains black corals, solitary corals, sponges, and other ecologically important species, as well as fossil traces of oysters and ancient corals, the Italian Research Council said. It called them "true geological testimonies of a distant past."

Mission leader Giorgio Castellan said the finding was "exceptional for Italian seas: bioconstructions of this kind, and of such magnitude, had never been observed in the Dohrn Canyon, and are rarely seen elsewhere in our Mediterranean". The discovery will help scientists understand the ecological role of deep coral habitats and their distribution, especially in the context of conservation and restoration efforts, he added.
The undersea research was funded by the EU.

Thanks to davidone (Slashdot reader #12,252) for sharing the article.

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