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An Anonymous Coward writes:

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Researchers believe they have identified the prime driver for a startling rise in the number of people who think the Earth is flat: Google’s video-sharing site, YouTube.

Their suspicion was raised when they attended the world’s largest gatherings of Flat Earthers at the movement’s annual conference in Rayleigh, North Carolina, in 2017, and then in Denver, Colorado, last year.

Interviews with 30 attendees revealed a pattern in the stories people told about how they came to be convinced that the Earth was not a large round rock spinning through space but a large flat disc doing much the same thing.

Of the 30, all but one said they had not considered the Earth to be flat two years ago but changed their minds after watching videos promoting conspiracy theories on YouTube. “The only person who didn’t say this was there with his daughter and his son-in-law and they had seen it on YouTube and told him about it,” said Asheley Landrum, who led the research at Texas Tech University.

[...] Some said they watched the videos only in order to debunk them but soon found themselves won over by the material.

Original Submission

realDonaldTrump writes:

foxnews.com/science/this-2-1-billion-year-old-fossil-may-be-evidence-of-earliest-moving-life-form:

About 2.1 billion years ago, a blob-like creature inched along on an early Earth. As the organism moved, it carved out tunnels, which may be the earliest evidence of a moving critter on the planet.

Until this discovery, the earliest evidence of motility — that is, an organism's ability to move independently using its own metabolic energy — dated to about 570 million years ago, according to fossils from different locations. That's a good 1.5 billion years younger than the new finding.

Whatever left the teeny, tiny tunnels was likely a cluster of single cells that joined ranks to form a slug-like multicellular organism.

[...] But not everyone thinks these tunnels represent the oldest proof of motility.

Looks like a slug or blob, digs tunnels. Could it be... El Chapo?

[A more detailed explanation of the science behind this discovery can be found at How the oldest evidence of movement could change what we know about life on Earth which was published in The Conversation. --Ed.]

Original Submission

takyon writes:

A 5km asteroid may briefly occult the brightest star in the night sky

On Monday night, for a few areas of South and Central America, as well as the Caribbean, Sirius will probably briefly disappear. This will occur as a small asteroid passes in front of the star, occulting it for up to 1.6 seconds, according to the International Occultation Timing Association. (Yes, the acronym is IOTA).

In this case, the asteroid 4388 Jürgenstock will have an apparent diameter just an iota bigger than Sirius. The angular diameter of the asteroid is about 0.007 arcseconds (an arcsecond is 1/3,600th of a degree of the night sky), whereas the angular diameter of Sirius is 0.006 arcseconds. Thus, as the asteroid passes in front of Sirius, the star will briefly dim, perhaps completely, before quickly brightening again. Sirius may appear to blink once, slowly.

[...] With a diameter of 4.7km, this inner-asteroid belt object was discovered in 1964 by an astronomer named—you guessed it—Jürgen Stock. This occultation should allow astronomers a rare opportunity to better characterize the dimensions of the asteroid. It is likely to have an irregular shape—further contributing to the uncertainty about the extent to which it will block the light from Sirius.

4388 Jürgenstock.

Related: Ring Confirmed Around Dwarf Planet Haumea
One Last Stellar Occultation of 2014 MU69 to be Observed Before Jan. 1 New Horizons Flyby
Distant Kuiper Belt Planetesimal Found Using Occultation

Original Submission

takyon writes:

How streaming music could be harming the planet

Once vinyl or a CD is purchased, it can be played over and over again, the only carbon cost coming from running the record player. However, if we listen to our streamed music using a hi-fi sound system it's estimated to use 107 kilowatt hours of electricity a year, costing about £15.00 to run. A CD player uses 34.7 kilowatt hours a year and costs £5 to run.

Solution: Use a smartphone or laptop with headphones unless you are playing music for guests. Download the songs you play repeatedly.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

A critical vulnerability in popular WordPress plugin Simple Social Buttons enables non-admin users to modify WordPress installation options – and ultimately take over websites.

Simple Social Buttons enables users to add social-media sharing buttons to various locations of their websites. The plugin has more than 40,000 active installations, according to WordPress Plugin repository.

[...] “Exploitation is fairly easy if the website allows public registrations, since the only requirement for an attacker to exploit this vulnerability is to have a registered user account,” Oliver Sild, founder and CEO of WebARX, told Threatpost. “It can be a low-privileged user whose only permission is to post a comment.”

[...] “Improper application design flow, chained with lack of permission check resulted in privilege-escalation and unauthorized actions in WordPress installation allowing non-admin users, even subscriber user type to modify WordPress installation options from the wp_options table,” Luka Sikic, developer and researcher with WebARX, said in a Monday post.

At a technical level, the flaw allows a function to iterate through a JSON object provided in the request and update all options – without checking whether the current user has permission to manage options for the plugin.

[...] From there, “there are multiple ways for an attacker to take over a whole website, or administrator account at least, just by modifying those configuration options,” Sild told Threatpost.

The vulnerability, which is rated 9.1 on the CVSS v3 severity scale, was discovered on Feb. 7, and a patch was released on Feb. 8. Users of the plugin are urged to update to version 2.0.22.

-- submitted from IRC

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Submitted via IRC for Bytram

NB The correct spelling of her name is "Lena", but she asked Playboy to spell it "Lenna" because she did not want people to call her "Leena".

Finding Lena, the Patron Saint of JPEGs

Among some computer engineers, Lena is a mythic figure, a mononym on par with Woz or Zuck. Whether or not you know her face, you’ve used the technology it helped create; practically every photo you’ve ever taken, every website you’ve ever visited, every meme you’ve ever shared owes some small debt to Lena. Yet today, as a 67-year-old retiree living in her native Sweden, she remains a little mystified by her own fame. “I’m just surprised that it never ends,” she told me recently.

Lena’s path to iconhood began in the pages of Playboy. In 1972, at the age of 21, she appeared as Miss November, wearing nothing but a feathered sun hat, boots, stockings, and a pink boa. (At her suggestion, the editors spelled her first name with an extra “n,” to encourage proper pronunciation. “I didn’t want to be called Leena,” she explained.)

About six months later, a copy of the issue turned up at the University of Southern California’s Signal and Image Processing Institute, where Alexander Sawchuk and his team happened to be looking for a new photograph against which to test their latest compression algorithm—the math that would make unwieldy image files manageable. Lena’s glossy centerfold, with its complex mixture of colors and textures, was the perfect candidate. They tore off the top third of the spread, ran it through a set of analog-to-digital converters, and saved the resulting 512-line scan to their Hewlett-Packard 2100. (Sawchuk did not respond to requests for comment.)

The USC team proudly handed out copies to lab visitors, and soon the image of the young model looking coquettishly over her bare shoulder became an industry standard, replicated and reanalyzed billions of times as what we now know as the JPEG came into being. According to James Hutchinson, an editor at the University of Illinois College of Engineering, Lena was for engineers “something like what Rita Hayworth was for US soldiers in the trenches of World War II.”

realDonaldTrump writes:

"Skygazers will be treated to the 'super snow moon,' on Feb. 19, the largest supermoon of 2019.

February’s full moon is known as the “snow moon” as a result of the heavy snowfall that often occurs at that time of year...............

Supermoons occur when the Moon’s orbit brings it to the closest point to Earth while the Moon is full." foxnews.com/science/get-set-for-super-snow-moon-the-biggest-supermoon-of-the-year

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

One of the great mysteries of neuroscience may finally have an answer: Scientists at the University of Virginia School of Medicine have identified a potential explanation for the mysterious death of specific brain cells seen in Alzheimer's, Parkinson's and other neurodegenerative diseases.

The new research suggests that the cells may die because of naturally occurring gene variation in brain cells that were, until recently, assumed to be genetically identical. This variation -- called "somatic mosaicism" -- could explain why neurons in the temporal lobe are the first to die in Alzheimer's, for example, and why dopaminergic neurons are the first to die in Parkinson's.

"This has been a big open question in neuroscience, particularly in various neurodegenerative diseases," said neuroscientist Michael McConnell, PhD, of UVA's Center for Brain Immunology and Glia (BIG). "What is this selective vulnerability? What underlies it? And so now, with our work, the hypotheses moving forward are that it could be that different regions of the brain actually have a different garden of these [variations] in young individuals and that sets up different regions for decline later in life."

The finding emerged unexpectedly from McConnell's investigations into schizophrenia. It was in that context that he and his collaborators first discovered the unexpected variation in the genetic makeup of individual brain cells. That discovery may help explain not just schizophrenia but depression, bipolar disorder, autism and other conditions. Continuing his investigations, McConnell expected that this mosaicism would increase with age -- that mutations would accumulate over time. What he and his collaborators at Johns Hopkins found is exactly the opposite: Younger people had the most mosaicism and older people had the least.

"We wound up building an atlas that contained neurons from 15 individuals. None of these individuals had disease," said McConnell, of UVA's Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Genetics and UVA's Department of Neuroscience. "They ranged in age from less than a year to 94 years, and it showed a perfect correlation -- a perfect anti-correlation -- with age."

Based on the finding, McConnell believes that the neurons with significant genetic variation, known as CNV neurons, may be the most vulnerable to dying. And that could explain the idiosyncratic death of specific neurons in different neurodegenerative diseases. People with the most CNV neurons in the temporal lobe, for example, might be likely to develop Alzheimer's.

[...] "What's really interesting about mosaicism is that it is fundamentally tweaking our assumptions about what nature is, because we've kind of always assumed that every cell in any given individual had the same genome, the same DNA in every cell," McConnell said. "And now we're showing that it's different and what that might mean."

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Humans aren't the only creatures that suffer from substance abuse problems. Horses eat hallucinogenic weeds, elephants get drunk on overripe fruit and big horn sheep love narcotic lichen. Monkeys' attraction to sugar-rich and ethanol-containing fruit, in fact, may explain our own attraction to alcohol, some researchers think.

Now, dolphins may join that list. Footage from a new BBC documentary series, "Spy in the Pod," reveals what appears to be dolphins getting high off of pufferfish. Pufferfish produce a potent defensive chemical, which they eject when threatened. In small enough doses, however, the toxin seems to induce "a trance-like state" in dolphins that come into contact with it, the Daily News[sic*] reports:

At one point the dolphins are seen floating just underneath the water's surface, apparently mesmerised by their own reflections.

The dolphins' expert, deliberate handling of the terrorized puffer fish, Pilley told the Daily News, implies that this is not their first time at the hallucinogenic rodeo.

-- submitted from IRC

Original Submission

[* Ed.'s note: yes, it's a Daily Mail link in the quoted text, not Daily News -- FP.]

c0lo writes:

Picked via cryptogram, with the original here

...with reliance on all things digital skyrocketing, cyber threats now pose grave, even existential, dangers to corporations as well as the entire digital economy. In response, companies have begun to develop a cyber insurance market, offering corporations a mechanism to manage their exposure to these risks. Yet the prospects for this market now seem uncertain in light of a major court battle. Mondelez International is reportedly suing Zurich Insurance in Illinois state court for refusing to pay its $100 million claim for damages caused by the 2017 NotPetya attack.

Mondelez's claim represents just a fraction of the billions of dollars in collateral damage caused by NotPetya, a destructive, indiscriminate cyberattack of unprecedented scale, widely suspected to have been launched by Russia with the aim of hurting Ukraine and its business partners... According to reports, Zurich apparently rejected Mondelez's claim on the grounds that NotPetya was an act of war and, therefore, excluded from coverage under its policy agreement. If the question of whether and how war risk exemptions apply is left to the courts to decide on a case-by-case basis, this creates a profound source of uncertainty for policyholders about the coverage they obtain.
...
Many hurdles stand in the way of insurance providing a more robust solution. Data on cyber risks are scarce, and the threat is evolving constantly, often rendering data obsolete before they can be used. That means actuaries lack a credible repository of information to accurately price cyber risk. Moreover, NotPetya and other attacks with cascading effects have reinforced fears of aggregation risk, meaning the potential for a single incident to cause simultaneous losses across multiple policyholders. If Zurich had underwritten even a handful of the major corporations disrupted by the attack, it could have faced catastrophic losses from just one incident. This is a particularly acute concern for reinsurers—companies that provide stop-loss coverage, or protection against unsustainably costly claims, to other insurers—making both reinsurers and primary cyber insurance providers naturally hesitant to support more extensive cyber underwriting. The lack of adequate reinsurance backing means that carriers may become overwhelmed with claims if a systemic cyber incident causes simultaneous losses across many policyholders.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

U.S. Airlines to Offer New Gender Options for Non-Binary Passengers

Air travelers who want to will soon be able to choose a gender option other than "male" or "female" when buying their tickets.

The new "undisclosed" or "unspecified" options are meant to make things easier for travelers and airlines as a growing number of local, state and national governments issue identification documents with alternative gender choices, according to Airlines for America, a trade group that represents many major United States carriers.

"U.S. airlines value a culture of diversity and inclusion, both in the workplace and for our passengers," the group said in a statement.

The Transportation Security Administration requires that travelers have gender markers associated with their tickets that match the identification documents they present at agency checkpoints. The new standard will make it easier for passengers who are gender nonconforming to travel with documents that more accurately represent their identities.

Delta Air Lines, which left the Airlines for America trade group in 2015, will also offer the new options.

If you're even flying at all, I'd suggest picking "Undisclosed" or "Unspecified" simply as a way to mess with the TSA.

Also at The Daily Beast, MarketWatch, and USA Today.

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

https://blogs.bmj.com/bmj/2019/02/13/richard-smith-most-devastating-critique-medicine-since-medical-nemesis-ivan-illich/

Seamus O'Mahony, a gastroenterologist from Cork, has written the most devastating critique of modern medicine since Ivan Illich in Medical Nemesis in 1975. O'Mahony cites Illich and argues that many of his warnings of the medicalisation of life and death; runaway costs; ever declining value; patients reduced to consumers; growing empires of doctors, other health workers, and researchers; and the industrialisation of healthcare have come true.

[...] Unlike Illich, who believed that modern medicine counterproductively created sickness, O'Mahony does see what he calls a golden age of medicine that began after the Second World War with the appearance of antibiotics, vaccines, a swathe of effective drugs, surgical innovations, better anaesthetics, and universal health coverage for most of those in rich countries. It ended in the late 1970s, meaning that O'Mahony, who graduated in 1983 and is still practising, enjoyed little of the golden age. We are now "in the age of unmet and unrealistic expectations, the age of disappointment."

[...] O'Mahony begins his dissection with medical research, "the intellectual motor of the medico-industrial complex." Governments see life sciences as a saviour of economies, and charities urge us to give more to cure every disease. Big Science, which appeared after the golden age, has provided jobs and status but "benefits to patients have been modest and unspectacular." A study of 101 basic science discoveries published in major journals and claiming a clinical application found that 20 years later only one had produced clinical benefit. Big Science is corrupted by "perverse incentives, careerism, and commercialisation."

[...] No disease is better marketed than cancer, and after Richard Nixon's War on Cancer, Barack Obama launched his Cancer Moonshot, which is now renamed Cancer Breakthroughs under Donald Trump. As O'Mahony writes, the language around cancer "is infected with a sort of hubristic oedema." For Big Science cancer is a blessing, leading to huge investments in molecular biology and genetics, but, as cancer researcher David Pye put it: "How can we know so much about the causes and progression of disease, yet do so little to prevent death and incapacity."

[...] "The medical profession," he writes, "has become the front-of-house sales team for the [drug] industry." He argues that "doctors' professional culture obliges them to do something—anything," but he is too easy on doctors, who could push back. Society, he says, displays "childishness" in going along with these expensive treatments: "we must have higher, and better, priorities than feeble, incremental and attritional extension of survival in patients with incurable cancer."

[...] The first thing that I ever had published in a medical journal was a letter to the Lancet in 1974 asking why there had been no response to an article in the journal by Ivan Illich describing in detail how modern medicine was a threat to health. (It would cost me $35.95 today to access the letter, about 50 cents a word from memory.) As a medical student I expected that the leaders of medicine would carefully dissect Illich's argument and with evidence show him to be wrong. But such a response never came. I was naive: I know now that it's easier simply to ignore cogent criticisms. I hope that O'Mahony's book, a Medical Nemesis for 2019, will not be ignored. It deserves to be taken very seriously.

Original Submission

RandomFactor writes:

150 Years ago on February 17th, 1869, Russian chemist Dmitri Mendeleev published his first draft of the period table of the elements.

Mendeleev honed this "periodic system," as he called it, by writing down the names, masses and properties of each known element on a set of cards. According to science historian Mike Sutton of Chemistry World, Mendeleev then laid these cards down before him — solitaire-like — and started shuffling them around until he found an order that made sense.

The final working arrangement reportedly came to him in a dream. That first draft only had 63 elements and looks quite different than the honed versions of today.

Mendeleev was so confident in his system that he left gaps for undiscovered elements, and even predicted (correctly) the properties of three of those elements.

Those three elements were gallium, scandium and germanium.

They were discovered within three years and their properties matched Mendeleev's predictions, helping solidify the table's place in history and chemistry to the present day.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

"We know the game is rigged": NYC mayor slams Amazon HQ2 reversal

In a New York Times op-ed published Saturday evening, New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio condemned Amazon for its decision to pull the plug on its HQ2 expansion in Queens, calling it a byproduct of massive economic power concentrated in the hands of few wealthy corporations.

As the mayor of the nation's largest city, a place that's both a progressive beacon and the very symbol of capitalism, I share the frustration about corporate America. So do many of my fellow mayors across the country. We know the game is rigged. But we still find ourselves fighting one another in the race to secure opportunity for our residents as corporations force us into all-against-all competitions.

Amazon's HQ2 bidding war exemplified that injustice.

Previously: Amazon Pulls Out of Planned New York City Headquarters

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Uber Lost $1.8 Billion in 2018 Despite Record Ride-Hailing, Food-Delivery Gains

Uber posted $50 billion in bookings for its ride-hailing and food-delivery services in 2018. However, the company still failed to turn a profit and its revenue growth slowed toward the end of last year, reports Reuters. That's bad news for Uber as the company looks to charm investors into an initial public offering (IPO) later this year.

Annual bookings were up 45 percent over 2017, according to Uber. Even then, the company's losses before taxes, depreciation, and other expenses still totaled $1.8 billion, down from the $2.2 billion loss the company posted in 2017. Uber's full-year revenue for 2018 was $11.3 billion, an increase of 43 percent from 2017.

Previously: Uber Posts $1 Billion Loss in Quarter as Growth in Bookings Slows

Original Submission