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upstart writes:

Kids won't stop launching DDoS attacks against their schools:

The cybercrime unit of the UK National Crime Agency (NCA) is stepping up a program designed to educate children about the ramifications of DDoS attacks.

As explained in a post on the NCA website, the initiative is informed by recent research that suggests kids as young as nine are guilty of launching DDoS attacks against their school networks, websites and other services.

According to the report, the volume of such attacks has risen sharply during the pandemic, presumably causing disruption to online learning activities.

upstart writes:

Ireland's data centers are an economic lifeline. But environmentalists say they're wrecking the planet:

In the west of Ireland lies a medieval market town, its roots steeped in legend. Beyond the labyrinth of narrow streets of the center are the chimney stacks of housing developments that still puff coal and peat. Past those homes, on the outskirts of Ennis, is an unremarkable but huge plot of land, nestled between a power station and farmland where cattle and sheep graze. This is where a mysterious company has applied to develop a new data center the size of 22 American football fields.

[...] The €1.2 billion ($1.4 billion) investment is likely to be welcomed by the Irish government, which has included large data centers as part of its "strategic infrastructure development," despite concerns growth in data centers could undermine the country's commitment to cut carbon emissions in half by 2030.

Ireland's temperate climate helps reduce the amount of energy needed to cool servers, but its corporate tax rates — some of the lowest in the world — and friendly regulatory environment are what makes it so attractive to big companies, such as Google (GOOGL), Meta (FB) (Facebook), Intel (INTC) and Apple (AAPL), who all have their European headquarters here.

Despite that favorable climate, Ireland's data centers eat up a significant amount of electricity, leaving how their operations square with the country's ambitious climate goals in question. According to state-owned power operator EirGrid, they are on track to have consumed 17% of power generated in Ireland in 2021.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Researchers provide insight into how the brain multitasks while walking:

"This research shows us that the brain is flexible and can take on additional burdens," said David Richardson, an MD/PhD student in his fifth year in the Pathology & Cell Biology of Disease Program, and first author of the study recently published in the journal NeuroImage. "Our findings showed that the walking patterns of the participants improved when they performed a cognitive task at the same time, suggesting they were actually more stable while walking and performing the task than when they were solely focused on walking."

During these experiments, researchers used a Mobile Brain/Body Imaging system, or MoBI, located in the Del Monte Institute's Frederick J. and Marion A. Schindler Cognitive Neurophysiology Lab. The platform combines virtual reality, brain monitoring, and motion capture technology. While participants walk on a treadmill or manipulate objects on a table, 16 high speed cameras record the position markers with millimeter precision, while simultaneously measuring their brain activity.

The MoBI was used to record the brain activity of participants as they walked on a treadmill and were cued to switch tasks. Their brain activity was also recorded as they performed these same tasks while sitting. Brain changes were measured between the cued tasks and showed that during the more difficult the tasks the neurophysiological difference was greater between walking and sitting -- highlighting the flexibility of a healthy brain and how it prepares for and executes tasks based on difficulty level.

Journal Reference:

David P. Richardson, John J. Foxe, Kevin A. Mazurek, et al. Neural markers of proactive and reactive cognitive control are altered during walking: A Mobile Brain-Body Imaging (MoBI) study. NeuroImage, 2022; 247:, (DOI: 10.1016/j.neuroimage.2021.118853)

Original Submission

upstart writes:

After 7 years, a spent Falcon 9 rocket stage is on course to hit the Moon:

SpaceX launched its first interplanetary mission nearly seven years ago. After the Falcon 9 rocket's second stage completed a long burn to reach a transfer orbit, NOAA's Deep Space Climate Observatory began its journey to a Sun-Earth LaGrange point more than 1 million km from the Earth.

By that point, the Falcon 9 rocket's second stage was high enough that it did not have enough fuel to return to Earth's atmosphere. It also lacked the energy to escape the gravity of the Earth-Moon system, so it has been following a somewhat chaotic orbit since February 2015.

Now, according to sky observers, the spent second stage's orbit is on course to intersect with the Moon. According to Bill Gray, who writes the widely used Project Pluto software to track near-Earth objects, asteroids, minor planets, and comets, such an impact could come in March.

upstart writes:

Apple fires back in Ericsson 5G legal battle:

Apple has countersued Ericsson and is seeking an important ban on the import of the Swedish telecoms equipment manufacturer's base stations into the US as part of a long-running legal dispute over the use of 5G patents.

The two companies previously signed a seven-year licensing agreement for the use of Ericsson's Standards Essential Patents (SEPs) in Apple's products such as the iPhone but have been in the courts ever since negotiations about an extension broke down.

SEPs are innovations that have been contributed to industry standards, such as 5G, and can be used by anyone else provided they pay a fair price for the privilege. These rates are known as fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory (FRAND) terms.

In effect, this means anyone that uses an SEP in their product pays a royalty to the owner of the patent – typically a few dollars per device.

upstart writes:

Microsoft marches toward its 'One Outlook' rollout:

A year ago, word leaked about Project Monarch, Microsoft's effort to consolidate its many different versions of its Outlook mail and calendar product. At that time, as first reported by Windows Central, Microsoft was planning to roll out its so-called "One Outlook" product and strategy in 2021. Monarch is still happening, but now it seems the bulk of the new One Outlook strategy and deliverables will be rolling out this year instead.

Microsoft currently has different versions of Outlook for Windows, Mac, the Web, iOS, and Android devices (based on the Acompli technology it acquired), all of which its officials (confusingly) tend to refer to as plain-old "Outlook." The new One Outlook -- which also is expected to be branded as plain-old "Outlook" once it's available -- will work on the Windows Desktop (Win32/UWP; Intel and Arm), on the Web, and the macOS Desktop. The new Outlook will look and feel a lot like Outlook for the Web, I hear.

Microsoft has been testing Monarch/One Outlook for several months internally with increasingly large rings of employees. My sources say the company is planning to make an official announcement about One Outlook this spring. Microsoft could be ready to get a test version of the new Outlook to Windows Insiders in the Dev and Beta channels by late March or early April 2022, my contacts say. By late July or August this year, Microsoft is hoping to be able to get it to Insiders in the Slow Channel, though this target date could slip until the fall, my contacts said.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Antimicrobial resistance is a leading cause of death globally:

Bacterial infections that don't respond to treatment are a leading cause of death around the world.

In 2019, antimicrobial resistance caused an estimated 1.27 million deaths, researchers report January 19 in the Lancet. More people died from untreatable bacterial infections that year than from HIV or malaria.

Overall, bacterial antimicrobial resistance played a role in an estimated 4.95 million deaths globally, including the 1.27 million directly caused by resistant infections, the study found. The estimates are based on an analysis of hospital, surveillance and other sources of data covering 204 countries and territories by an international group of researchers called the Antimicrobial Resistance Collaborators.

Resistance to two classes of antibiotics, beta-lactams (which include penicillin) and fluoroquinolones, was behind more than 70 percent of resistance-caused deaths. Those drugs are the first-line options for many bacterial infections (SN: 4/30/14).

Among the bacteria responsible for fatal drug-resistant infections, the top three were Escherichia coli, Klebsiella pneumoniae and Staphylococcus aureus, the researchers found. These pathogens can cause dangerous infections in health care settings in people with weakened immune systems.

Journal Reference:
Christopher J L Murray, Kevin Shunji Ikuta, Fablina Sharara, et al. Global burden of bacterial antimicrobial resistance in 2019: a systematic analysis, The Lancet (DOI: 10.1016/S0140-6736(21)02724-0)

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Tor Project battles Russian censorship through the courts:

The Tor Project has filed an appeal against a Russian court's decision to block the Tor website in the country.

The Tor network is an open source system for anonymizing online communication. Also known as the onion router, the network is used to circumvent censorship and is widely accessed by civil rights activists, whistleblowers, lawyers, human rights defenders, and those under oppressive regimes.

On Monday, the developers of the network said an appeal has been filed regarding a decision by the Saratov District Court to impose a block on the torproject.org website in Russia.

The appeal has been filed between the Tor Project and RosKomSvoboda, a Russian digital rights protection outfit.

On December 6, 2021, the Tor Project was told that its website would be blocked in accordance with Article 15.1 of the Law on Information. Public proxy servers and some bridges were also blocked in the country and Tor developers have noticed blocks across Russia in the past month.

[...] Tor says that Russian users account for the second-largest user base by country with over 300,000 daily users.

A mirror version of the Tor website has been launched by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF).

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Oral immunotherapy induces remission of peanut allergy in some young children: NIH trial found experimental therapy also reduced most children's sensitivity to peanut:

"The landmark results of the IMPACT trial suggest a window of opportunity in early childhood to induce remission of peanut allergy through oral immunotherapy," said Anthony S. Fauci, M.D., director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), part of NIH. "It is our hope that these study findings will inform the development of treatment modalities that reduce the burden of peanut allergy in children." NIAID sponsored the trial and funded it through its Immune Tolerance Network.

Peanut allergy affects about 2% of children in the United States, or nearly 1.5 million individuals ages 17 years and younger. The risk of a life-threatening allergic reaction to accidentally eaten peanut is significant for these children, most of whom remain peanut-allergic for life.

[...] Nearly 150 children ages 1 to 3 years participated in the IMPACT trial at five academic medical centers in the United States. Only children who had an allergic reaction after eating half a gram of peanut protein (about 1.5 peanuts) or less were eligible to join the study. The children were assigned at random to receive either flour containing peanut protein or a placebo flour of similar appearance. The flours were mixed with foods such as applesauce or pudding to help mask their taste. No one except a site pharmacist and a site dietician knew who received peanut flour or placebo flour until all the data were gathered and study visits had ended.

MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for GhostofAristarchus

Swift Observatory in safe mode as NASA investigates issue:

NASA has temporarily paused science aboard the Swift Observatory after noticing a potential equipment failure.

An issue with NASA's Swift Observatory has forced it to suspend science operations and enter safe mode while the team investigates. The space-based telescope is not one of NASA's best-known missions, but it has played a key role in investigating an astronomical phenomenon called gamma-ray bursts.

The telescope, originally named the Swift Gamma-Ray Burst Explorer and later renamed the Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory, experienced a problem earlier this week suspected to be related to faulty hardware. "On the evening of Tuesday, January 18, NASA's Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory entered into safe mode, suspending pointed science observations," NASA wrote in a brief update. "The mission team is investigating a possible failure of one of the spacecraft's reaction wheels as the cause."

The reaction wheels are components that allow the spacecraft to rotate to a very precise degree, which helps to keep the telescope pointed in one direction. This is important for Swift's mission to study gamma-ray bursts as this requires a high degree of sensitivity. The bursts last a few minutes at most, and a few milliseconds at least, so Swift has to locate these events quickly before they disappear.

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

For those worried about Microsoft's Pluton TPM chip: Lenovo won't even switch it on by default in latest ThinkPads.

PCs coming out this year with Microsoft's integrated Pluton security chip won't be locked down to Windows 11, and users will have the option to turn off the feature completely as well as install, say, Linux as normal, we understand.

The first Windows 11 PCs with Pluton built-in were shown at CES earlier this month. Major PC chip houses – think Intel, AMD, and Qualcomm – are said to be embedding Pluton inside their just-launched or upcoming microprocessors.

Pluton can act as a Trusted Platform Module (TPM) or as a non-TPM security coprocessor. It's a way for Microsoft to specify exactly how it wants a TPM component to be present in microprocessors so that Windows 11 can use the hardware as a root-of-trust and secure its stuff.

Microsoft's invasion at the hardware level has some users – especially those in the open-source community – on high alert. The concern relates to the chip being a means to lock equipment exclusively to Windows 11, shutting out other operating systems, such as Linux distros and the BSDs. Manufacturers tell us that's not the case: Pluton won't get in the way.

AMD integrated Microsoft's Pluton design into its Ryzen 6000 chips, which were just introduced at CES. AMD said its goal is to bring better security to Windows PCs, and users can disable Pluton on machines that follow AMD's reference firmware.

[...] PC makers can choose to ship computers with Pluton turned off, and the technology does not verify the signature of bootloaders, Microsoft PR said. The security processor can be configured to act as a TPM, or used in a non-TPM scenario, or disabled.

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

CMA invites comments from 'interested parties' on what merger means to them

The UK's Competition and Markets Authority[CMA] has invited comments from industry and interested parties about NortonLifeLock's proposed $8bn purchase of fellow infosec outfit Avast.

The merger inquiry will run until the 16 March when the comments will be collated and assessed to determine if there is sufficient concern to warrant a deeper investigation.

"The CMA is considering whether it is or may be the case that this transaction, if carried into effect, will result in the creation of a relevant merger situation under the merger provisions of the Enterprise Act 2002," it said.

If that is the case, the watchdog will try to ascertain "whether the creation of that situation may be expected to result in a substantial lessening of competition within any market or markets" in the UK for goods and services.

[...] A NortonLifeLock spokesperson told us: "This is the normal, expected process of review with the CMA. As we noted in the 2.7 announcement, the UK was one of a handful of countries where some level of regulatory review was anticipated. We've been proactively engaged with them, and we continue to believe that the transaction will greatly benefit consumers and enhance product innovation for the combined companies."

Original Submission

aristarchus writes:

Original source is paywalled: The New York Times. Text extracted from https://www.sciencenews.org/article/fin-whale-eat-choke-baleen-oral-plug-muscle-fat.

Scientists have discovered a new anatomical structure that allows lunge-feeding whales to take in massive amounts of water without choking.

To capture prey, humpbacks, minkes and other whales use a tactic called lunge feeding. They accelerate — their mouths open to nearly 90 degrees — and engulf a volume of water large enough to fill their entire bodies. "It's crazy. Imagine putting an entire human inside your mouth," said Kelsey Gil, a zoologist studying whale physiology at the University of British Columbia.

As water floods into the whale's mouth, its throat pouch expands, leaving the whale looking like a bloated tadpole. After about a minute, the throat pouch deflates as most of the water leaves the whale's mouth, released back into the ocean. Small fish and krill are captured in the whale's baleen — plates of keratin that hang from the top of the whale's mouth resembling bristles on a toothbrush — and are swallowed into the whale's stomach.

Scientists didn't know how these whales avoided choking on prey-filled water and flooding their respiratory tracts during a lunge feeding event. Now Dr. Gil and colleagues have discovered a large, bulbous structure that they've termed the "oral plug" — a structure never before described in any other animal — that they think makes lunge feeding possible.

upstart writes:

Genetic Research Shows Rapid Immune Response in Children Protects Them From COVID-19:

Discovery of importance of interferon response in preventing serious infection will underpin new diagnostics and therapeutics.

Fundamental differences in the immune response of adults and children can help to explain why children are much less likely to become seriously ill from SARS-CoV-2, according to new research from the Wellcome Sanger Institute, University College London, and their collaborators.

The study, published in the journal Nature, is the most comprehensive single-cell study to compare SARS-CoV-2 infection in adults and children across multiple organs. Researchers found that a stronger 'innate' immune response in the airways of children, characterized by the rapid deployment of interferons, helped to restrict viral replication early on. In adults, a less rapid immune response meant the virus was better able to invade other parts of the body where the infection was harder to control.

[...] A nasal swab to measure the immune response in newly infected adults could be used to identify those at higher risk who may be candidates for pre-emptive monoclonal antibody treatment. Recent research has also suggested inhalation of interferons could be a viable therapy.

canopic jug writes:

Hackaday has an article summarizing how LoRaWAN works, using home appliances as an example. LoRaWAN is a proprietary, bidirectional, RF broadcasting technology with very low data capacity. It can have a range of around 10 kilometers yet is low power enough to be feasible to use on embedded devices. It competes against the DASH7, Sigfox, and NB-IoT protocols.

While wireless communications are unquestionably useful in projects, common wireless protocols such as WiFi and Bluetooth peter out after only a number of meters, which is annoying when your project is installed in the middle of nowhere. Moving to an LTE-based or similar mobile solution can help with the range, but this does not help when there's poor cell coverage, and it tends to use more power. Fortunately, for low-bitrate, low-power wide-area networks (LPWAN) like e.g. sensor networks, there's a common solution in the form of LoRaWAN, as in long-range wide area network (WAN).

The proprietary LoRa RF modulation technique that underlies LoRaWAN is based on Chirp Spread Spectrum (CSS). This modulation technique is highly resistant to channel noise and fading as well as Doppler shift, enabling it to transmit using relatively low power for long distances. LoRaWAN builds on top of the physical layer provided by LoRa to then create the protocol that devices can then use to communicate with other LoRa devices.

Courtesy of global LoRaWAN gateway and software providers such as The Things Industries and ThingSpeak, it's possible even as a hobbyist to set up a LoRaWAN-powered sensor network with minimal cost. Let's take take a look at exactly what is involved in setting up LoRaWAN devices, and what possible alternatives to LoRaWAN might be considered.