An anonymous reader quotes a report from NPR: For the first time, scientists have used the gene-editing technique CRISPR to try to edit a gene while the DNA is still inside a person's body. The groundbreaking procedure involved injecting the microscopic gene-editing tool into the eye of a patient blinded by a rare genetic disorder, in hopes of enabling the volunteer to see. They hope to know within weeks whether the approach is working and, if so, to know within two or three months how much vision will be restored. Before this step, doctors had only used CRISPR to try to treat a small number of patients who have cancer, or the rare blood disorders sickle cell anemia or beta-thalassemia.

In this new experiment, doctors at the Casey Eye Institute in Portland, Ore., injected (into the eye of a patient who is nearly blind from a condition called Leber congenital amaurosis) microscopic droplets carrying a harmless virus that had been engineered to deliver the instructions to manufacture the CRISPR gene-editing machinery. Beginning in infancy, the rare genetic condition progressively destroys light-sensing cells in the retina that are necessary for vision. Vision impairment with LCA varies widely, but most patients are legally blind and are only able to differentiate between light and dark or perhaps to detect movement. The goal is that once the virus carrying the CRISPR instructions has been infused into the eye, the gene-editing tool will slice out the genetic defect that caused the blindness. That would, the researchers hope, restore production of a crucial protein and prevent the death of cells in the retina, as well as revive other cells -- enabling patients to regain at least some vision.

Essential, Android creator Andy Rubin's high-profile phone startup, is shutting down. From a report: As a result of the shutdown, Essential says it will no longer support the Essential Phone with further security updates or customer support. Additionally, Newton Mail, which Essential acquired when it purchased developer CloudMagic in 2018, will stop working on May 1st. On its blog, Essential cites Project Gem, the tallish concept phone the company teased late last year, and its inability to find a "clear path" to get the device to consumers as the main reason for the shutdown. The startup had raised about $330 million.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Pim Techamuanvivit was managing her Michelin-starred Thai restaurant in San Francisco, Kin Khao, around 8:30 p.m. on Saturday when she got an unexpected call. A customer was wondering when food from his order on the online food delivery company Seamless was coming, as he had been waiting 45 minutes. "I think you must be confused, because I don't do delivery," Techamuanvivit told him. Techamuanvivit said the man then asked, "So what are you doing on Seamless?" The restaurateur soon discovered that her restaurant had a page on both Seamless and Grubhub. Both brands are owned by Grubhub, a Chicago online food delivery company that merged with New York's Seamless in 2013. The delivery sites listed her restaurant and its address with a menu that she does not serve, including pad Thai and, of all things in a restaurant that specializes in lesser-known Thai regional cuisine, Vietnamese pho.

"It's outrageous. They can't get away with this. They can't totally fake a restaurant that doesn't do delivery and go pick up food from, I don't know, some rat-infested warehouse somewhere and deliver to my guests," said Techamuanvivit, who added that she intends to sue Seamless. Grubhub said that the company partners with more than 140,000 restaurants in over 2,700 U.S. cities, and that most orders are from restaurants with which it has an explicit partnership. The company recently started adding other restaurants to its sites without such a partnership, when it finds restaurants that are in high demand, it said. In those cases, someone from the company orders the food ahead or at the restaurant, and a driver is sent to pick it up, it added.

What's next after you've successfully imitated the look, taste and smell of real beef? For Impossible Foods, the choice is obvious: move on to pork and sausage. From a report: Like the faux burger that was introduced in 2016, how the meatless pork tastes obviously depends on the chef's abilities. But at Kumi in Las Vegas' Mandalay Bay, there was something for everyone, and apparently, the Input team was among the "first people in the world to try it." So naturally, we ate enough to make ourselves sick (OK maybe just Cheyenne). We had Bahn mi, meatballs, noodles, spring rolls (swoon), and shumai -- and it was all absolutely bomb. Again, credits to the chef, but a lot of this is Impossible, too. In each case, the texture was spot on and absorbed flavor much like the real meat would. As someone who isn't a vegetarian, one of the things I loved the most about the Impossible Burger is that the texture of Impossible's plant-based ingredient is akin to that of real meat. And the same goes for the Impossible Pork. We tried the Impossible Pork in a variety of different dishes and, let me tell you, every single one of them was delicious. The flavor is tasty, the texture is as crispy and slightly rough as traditional pork, and all I kept thinking was how insane it is that Impossible can make this happen.

diegocg writes: Linux 5.4 has been released, featuring the new kernel lockdown mode, intended to strengthen the boundary between UID 0 and the kernel; virtio-fs, a high-performance virtio driver which allows a virtualized guest to mount a directory that has been exported on the host; fs-verity, for detecting file tampering, like dm-verity, but works on files rather than block devices; dm-clone, which allows live cloning of dm targets; two new madvise() flags for improved app memory management on Android, support for new Intel/AMD GPUs, support for the exfat file system and removing the experimental status of the erofs file system; a new haltpoll cpuidle driver and governor that greatly improves performance for virtualized guests wanting to do guest-side polling in the idle loop; and blk-iocost, a new cgroup controller that attempts to calculate more accurately the cost of IO. As always, many other new drivers and improvements can be found in the changelog.

A study published last week analyzed ridesharing's effects on binge drinking and found that it increased heavy drinking by around 20% and increased employment at bars and restaurants by an average of 2%. The Economist reports: A new study by three economists -- Jacob Burgdorf and Conor Lennon of the University of Louisville, and Keith Teltser of Georgia State University -- finds that the widespread availability of ride-sharing apps has indeed made it easier for the late-night crowd to binge. By matching data on Uber's availability with health surveys from America's Centers for Disease Control, the authors find that on average alcohol consumption rose by 3%, binge drinking -- where a person downs four or five drinks in two hours -- increased by 8%, and heavy drinking -- defined as three or more instances of binge drinking in a month -- surged by 9% within a couple of years of the ride-hailing company coming to town. Increases were even higher in cities without public transport, where the presence of Uber led average drinking to rise by 5% and instances of binge drinking to go up by around 20%. (Heavy drinking still rose by 9%.) Remarkably, excessive drinking was actually declining before Uber's appearance, giving further evidence that the firm's arrival affected behavior.

If people are likelier to drink a lot, but less likely to drive drunk, it is hard to say what the overall public-health impact of ride-hailing firms has been. That said, there is one group of individuals who clearly benefit from the presence of Uber, Lyft and others: bartenders. Messrs Burgdorf, Lennon and Teltser find that employment at bars and restaurants increases by an average of 2% whenever Uber enters the market.

An anonymous reader writes: Drone attacks, including the recent swarm strike in Saudi Arabia, are increasing, and so is the Pentagon's interest in killing them. This week, the Pentagon notified Congress of its purchase of a microwave weapon system designed to knock down swarms of enemy drones with pulses of energy. The purchase comes with an intent to deploy the PHASER system overseas for a year-long assessment, making it the first directed energy defense weapon to ever be fielded. The U.S. Air Force spent $16.28 million for one prototype PHASER high power microwave system for a "field assessment for purposes of experimentation" in an unspecified location outside the U.S. The test is "expected to be completed by Dec. 20, 2020," making the overseas deployment "against real-world or simulated hostile vignettes" imminent.

There are several directed energy weapons that the Air Force is buying to test their effectiveness in the field, and officials say some will be on the frontlines in tense areas of the globe where enemy drones are becoming a threat, includes North Korea, Africa, the Ukraine and -- most recently -- the Middle East. "At the moment we have awarded multiple DE systems for use in our field assessment overseas and are working to support multiple bases and areas of responsibility," says Michael Jirjis, who is lead on the PHASER experiment, told Popular Mechanics. "We can't say which specific locations at this time."

A small but quickly growing online community believes that transforming randomly generated numbers into clusters of location data could help us tunnel out of reality. Their name for themselves: Randonauts. From a report: It's a sad truth that most of our lives are pretty boring, geographically speaking. Live in one place long enough and you will develop routines, walking the same streets and patronizing the same coffee shops and generally making it easy for a simulation, should one exist, to anticipate where you will be at any given time. Randonauts hope to use this tedium to their advantage, by introducing unpredictability. They argue that by devising methods that force us to diverge from our daily routines and instead send us to truly random locations we'd otherwise never think twice about, it just might be possible to cross over into somebody else's reality. "New information and causality can pull you out of the filter-bubble and change your life," writes The Fatum Project, the online team responsible for the technological and philosophical framework of the movement. Even if you don't buy into the dense thicket of theoretical quantum physics underpinning the logic of it all, going on a Randonaut-style adventure can be a lovely way to spend an afternoon.

According to the The Fatum Project, there's hard science behind all this. Building on research conducted by Princeton University's Engineering Anomalies Research Lab into whether human thought could influence real-world events, they hope that Randonauts will be able to leave their "reality tunnels" and discover new contexts, appreciate daily life in fresh ways, or even venture into parallel iterations of their own realities. Getting started is easy. Log into the Telegram messaging app and send the command "/getattractor" along with your location to @shangrila_bot (formerly, you could also message @Randonaut_bot). The bot will plot out thousands of nearby geolocation points using a quantum random number generator, and spit out the area with the highest concentration of points near you. Conversely, if computer-determined desolation is more your style, you can send the command "/getvoid" and through a similar process, the bot will send you a location where there are no randomly plotted points. On Reddit, Randonauts have reported finding things like an upside-down airplane; a llama, standing totally still; three identical black cats; a family of horses in a public park; and a bird that also refused to move. Under the auspices of "/getvoid," users have reported finding derelict locales, creepy signage, and other marks of decay. Think of it as geocaching by way of Marianne Williamson.

After more than three decades of publishing editorial content and providing technical guidance to the Microsoft developer community, MSDN Magazine will publish its last issue in November. From a report: Microsoft Developer Network (MSDN) was launched in 1992 to manage the relationship of the company with the developer ecosystem. MSDN Magazine originally started as two separate magazines -- Microsoft Systems Journal (MSJ) and Microsoft Internet Developer (MIND) -- which consolidated into MSDN Magazine in March 2000. The monthly magazine is available as a print magazine in the United States and online in several languages. While the March 2000 issue was entirely devoted to Windows, the MSDN Magazine has gone through its evolution over the years as Microsoft products and services expanded exponentially.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Scientists have created the world's first living organism that has a fully synthetic and radically altered DNA code. In a two-year effort, researchers at the laboratory of molecular biology, at Cambridge University, read and redesigned the DNA of the bacterium Escherichia coli (E coli), before creating cells with a synthetic version of the altered genome. The artificial genome holds 4m base pairs, the units of the genetic code spelled out by the letters G, A, T and C. Printed in full on A4 sheets, it runs to 970 pages, making the genome the largest by far that scientists have ever built. The DNA coiled up inside a cell holds the instructions it needs to function. When the cell needs more protein to grow, for example, it reads the DNA that encodes the right protein. The DNA letters are read in trios called codons, such as TCG and TCA.

The Cambridge team set out to redesign the E coli genome by removing some of its superfluous codons. Working on a computer, the scientists went through the bug's DNA. Whenever they came across TCG, a codon that makes an amino acid called serine, they rewrote it as AGC, which does the same job. They replaced two more codons in a similar way. More than 18,000 edits later, the scientists had removed every occurrence of the three codons from the bug's genome. The redesigned genetic code was then chemically synthesized and, piece by piece, added to E coli where it replaced the organism's natural genome. The result, reported in Nature, is a microbe with a completely synthetic and radically altered DNA code. Known as Syn61, the bug is a little longer than normal, and grows more slowly, but survives nonetheless.

Bearhouse shares a new study from the UK's "National Cyber Security Centre," which advises the public on computer security, about the world's most-frequently cracked passwords. It's probably no surprise to the Slashdot readership: people use bad passwords. A recent study of publicly-available "hacked" accounts -- by the UK National Cyber Security Centre -- reveals "123456" was top, followed by the much more secure "123456789" and hard-to-guess "qwerty". If you're a soccer (football) fan, then try "Liverpool" or "Chelsea" -- they'll work in more than half a million cases. Finally, for musicians, Metallica gets beaten down by 50cent, 140k to 190k respectively.
The most common fictional names used as passwords were "superman" (333,139 users), "naruto" (242,749), "tigger" (237,290), "pokemon" (226,947), and "batman" (203,116).

The organization recommends instead choosing three random words as a password -- and also checking "password blacklists" that show passwords that have already been found in past data breaches. (Developers and sysadmins are also advised to implement these checks as part of their rules for which user passwords will be allowed.) The organization also released a file from the "Have I Been Pwned" site containing the top 100,000 passwords.

So what are the top ten most-frequently used passwords?

• 123456
• 123456789
• qwerty
• password
• 111111
• 12345678
• abc123
• 1234567
• password1
• 12345

Why would someone build their own Beowulf cluster -- a high-performance parallel computing prototype -- using 12 Raspberry Pi boards? It's using the standard Beowulf cluster architecture found in about 88% of the world's largest parallel computing systems, with an MPI (Message Passing Interface) system that distributes the load over all the nodes.

Matt Trask, a long-time computer engineer now completing his undergraduate degree at Florida Atlantic University, explains how it grew out of his work on "virtual mainframes": In the world of parallel supercomputers (branded 'high-performance computing', or HPC), system manufacturers are motivated to sell their HPC products to industry, but industry has pushed back due to what they call the "Ninja Gap". MPI programming is hard. It is usually not learned until the programmer is in grad school at the earliest, and given that it takes a couple of years to achieve mastery of any particular discipline, most of the proficient MPI programmers are PhDs. And this, is the Ninja Gap -- industry understands that the academic system cannot and will not be able to generate enough 'ninjas' to meet the needs of industry if industry were to adopt HPC technology.

As part of my research into parallel computing systems, I have studied the process of learning to program with MPI and have found that almost all current practitioners are self-taught, coming from disciplines other than computer science. Actual undergraduate CS programs rarely offer MPI programming. Thus my motivation for building a low-cost cluster system with Raspberry Pis, in order to drive down the entry-level costs. This parallel computing system, with a cost of under $1000, could be deployed at any college or community college rather than just at elite research institutions, as is done [for parallel computing systems] today.

The system is entirely open source, using only standard Raspberry Pi 3B+ boards and Raspbian Linux. The version of MPI that is used is called MPICH, another open-source technology that is readily available.
But there's an added visual flourish, explains long-time Slashdot reader iamacat. "To visualize computing, each node is equipped with a servo motor to position itself according to its current load -- lying flat when fully idle, standing up 90 degrees when fully utilized."

Its data comes from the /proc filesystem, and the necessary hinges for this prototype were all generated with a 3D printer. "The first lesson is to use CNC'd aluminum for the motor housings instead of 3D-printed plastic," writes Trask. "We've seen some minor distortion of the printed plastic from the heat generated in the servos."

Phone maker Meizu has announced a new phone called "Zero," which doesn't have a headphone jack, or a charging port, or a physical SIM card slot, or any buttons, or a speaker grill. From a report: It doesn't even come with a SIM card slot and buttons you'd usually see on a phone -- the only elements that disturb the surface of its all-display, 7.8mm-thick ceramic unibody are its 12MP and 20MP rear cameras and two pinholes. One is a microphone, while the other is for hard resets. To make up for the lack of ports, Meizu Zero will support Bluetooth 5.0 and a wireless USB connectivity that will reportedly be able to transfer files as fast as the USB 3.0 standard can.

Zero's 5.99-inch QHD OLED screen will act as some sort of a giant speaker and earpiece replacement. It does have a big enough bezel for a 20MP front camera, but its fingerprint reader is completely on-screen. The device, which is powered by a Snapdragon 845 processor, relies on 18W wireless charging due to the lack of a charger port. And it may not have the usual physical buttons, but it does have pressure-sensing ones with haptic feedback on its borders.

kbahey writes: Traditionally, large satellites are configured on the ground for specific tasks that cannot be changed after launch, even if market demands evolve. The new "Quantum" satellite scheduled to be launched soon, will change all that: its coverage, bandwidth, power and frequency can all be altered in orbit. The 3.5-ton spacecraft will be operated by Paris-based telecom operator Eutelsat, in a R&D partnership with the European Space Agency (ESA), with manufacturer Airbus acting as the prime contractor. A company official stated that the satellite "will bring unprecedented flexibility to our customers, allowing for in-orbit payload re-configuration and taking customization to a new level, while also opening the way to a paradigm shift in the manufacture of telecommunications satellites." The BBC says "being able to totally reconfigure an in-orbit platform would allow an operator to adapt to any shifts in the business landscape -- without the need to build and launch another bespoke platform." All the operator would have to do is simply reprogram the existing satellite.

A group of some of China's smartest students have been recruited straight from high school to begin training as the world's youngest AI weapons scientists. Local media reports: The 27 boys and four girls, all aged 18 and under, were selected for the four-year "experimental programme for intelligent weapons systems" at the Beijing Institute of Technology (BIT) from more than 5,000 candidates, the school said on its website. The BIT is one of the country's top weapons research institutes, and the launch of the new programme is evidence of the weight it places on the development of AI technology for military use. China is in competition with the United States and other nations in the race to develop deadly AI applications -- from nuclear submarines with self-learning chips to microscopic robots that can crawl into human blood vessels.