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jmoschner writes:

Popular Science is reporting that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved an auto-injecting device that can treat overdose from a variety of painkillers such as Oxycontin (oxycodone), Vicodin, and the recently approved Zohydro--an opioid painkiller drug with up to 10 times more hydrocodone than Vicodin.

From the Article:

"The treatment, known as Evzio, injects a drug called nalaxone that "rapidly reverses the effects of opioid overdose" and is the standard treatment for overdose, the FDA noted. Previously the drug had to be given via a syringe, which often requires taking somebody to the emergency room, taking up time. But the new auto-injector can be administered by caregivers or family members, and can fit in a medicine cabinet or pocket."

prospectacle writes:

Following this year's "Mobile World Congress", Ars Technica has a summary of the state of the art in System-On-A-Chip technology, which you'll likely find in any phone or tablet you buy this year.

Topics include:

• Look at how many cores we've got
• The focus on the middle of the range
• Convergence vs Co-processors
• Major players old and new

If you're interested in the technology and companies behind those weird glowing rectangles that everyone seems to be engrossed in these days, it's a good overview.

An anonymous coward writes:

From an email from Linus Torvalds to GKH

"Greg just for your information, I will *not* be merging any code from Kay [Sievers] into the kernel until this constant pattern is fixed.

This has been going on for *years*, and doesn't seem to be getting any better. This is relevant to you because I have seen you talk about the kdbus patches, and this is a heads-up that you need to keep them separate from other work. Let distributions merge it as they need to and maybe we can merge it once it has been proven to be stable by whatever distro that was willing to play games with the developers.

But I'm not willing to merge something where the maintainer is known to not care about bugs and regressions and then forces people in other projects to fix their project. Because I am *not* willing to take patches from people who don't clean up after their problems, and don't admit that it's their problem to fix."

Papas Fritas writes:

When astronauts first began flying in space, NASA worried about "space madness," a mental malady they thought might arise from humans experiencing microgravity and claustrophobic isolation inside of a cramped spacecraft high above the Earth. Now Megan Garber writes in The Atlantic that NASA is hoping to find out what life on Mars does to the human emotional state by putting three men and three women in a 1,000-square-foot habitat shaped like a dome for four months. The volunteers in the second HI-SEAS mission a purposely tiny group selected out of a group of 700 applicants include, among others, a neuropsychologist, an aerospace engineer, and an Air Force veteran who is studying human factors in aviation. "We're going to stress them," says Kim Binsted, the project's principal investigator. "That's the nature of the study."

That test involves isolating the crew in the same way they'd be isolated on Mars. The only communication they'll be allowed with the outside world-that is to say, with their family and friends-will be conducted through email. (And that will be given an artificial delay of 20 minutes to simulate the lag involved in Mars-to-Earth communications.) If that doesn't seem too stressful, here's another source of stress: Each mission member will get only eight minutes of shower time ... per week. The stress will be compounded by the fact that the only time the crew will be able to leave their habitat-yurt is when they're wearing puffy, insulated uniforms that simulate space suits in the Hawaiian heat. Throughout the mission, researchers will be testing the subjects' moods and the changes they exhibit in their relationships with each other. They'll also be examining the crew members' cognitive skills, seeing whether-and how-they change as the experiment wears on. Binsted says the mission has gotten the attention of the TV world, but don't expect to see much inside-the-dome footage. "You wouldn't believe the number of producers who called us," says Binsted. "Fortunately, we're not ethically allowed to subject our crew to that kind of thing."

NCommander writes:

The Full Disclosure mailing list been relaunched after one of its original co-founders pulled the plug after an internal conflict. One of its readers, Fyodor, decided to resurrect it:

Upon hearing the bad news, I immediately wrote to John offering help. He said he was through with the list, but suggested: "you don't need me. If you want to start a replacement, go for it." After some soul searching about how much I personally miss the list (despite all its flaws), I've decided to do so! I'm already quite familiar with handling legal threats and removal demands (usually by ignoring them) since I run Seclists.org, which has long been the most popular archive for Full Disclosure and many other great security lists.

We originally covered the shutdown of Full Disclosure a month ago.

jas writes:

Customers of WD2Go, a service provided by Western Digital have been unable to access their data stored in the cloud for several days. To add insult to injury, there has been no information from the company regarding why the outage has occurred or when the service will return.

Western Digital, long-vaunted purveyors of storage technology, is facing a minor disaster with the outage of its WD2Go service, which powers the cloud portion of such devices as the WD MyBook World Edition, WD My Cloud EX1, EX2, and EX4. Cloud service for these devices have been available scarcely, if at all, since March 26, 2014.

randmcnatt writes:

An international team of researchers has created tiny spit-powered fuel cells powerful enough to run on-chip applications, the group reports in a recent article in Nature Publishing Group's Asia Materials:

By producing nearly 1 microwatt in power, this saliva-powered, micro-sized MFC already generates enough power to be directly used as an energy harvester in microelectronic applications.

We have previously avoided using air cathodes in these systems to avoid oxygen contamination with closely spaced electrodes," said Bruce Logan of Penn State. "However, these micro cells operate at micron distances between the electrodes. We don't fully understand why, but bottom line, they worked.

The abstract and article (PDF) are available.

mendax writes:

The New York Times has published a story which reports the discovery by scientists of a sea of water the size of Lake Superior on a moon of Saturn.

From the article:

The findings, published in the journal Science, confirm what planetary scientists have suspected about the moon, Enceladus, ever since they were astonished in 2005 by photographs showing geysers of ice crystals shooting out of its south pole.

"What we've done is put forth a strong case for an ocean," said David J. Stevenson, a professor of planetary science at the California Institute of Technology and an author of the Science paper.

For many researchers, this tiny, shiny cueball of a moon, just over 300 miles wide, is now the most promising place to look for life elsewhere in the solar system, even more than Mars.

patric91 writes:

Security researchers have publicly disclosed a number (30!?) of security issues in Oracle's JAVA Cloud service after Oracle refused to fix the problems in a timely manner.

Security Explorations, a Poland-based company headed up by Java security specialist Adam Gowdiak, has spilled the beans on 30 flaws it says affect customers of Oracle's Java Cloud at its US and EMEA region data centres.

Gowdiak said he published details of the flaws after Oracle stopped corresponding with him over the issues. According to the researcher, while Oracle said it had developed fixes for 24 of vulnerabilities, the company didn't provide an update on when they would be released.

To turn up the heat on Oracle, Gowdiak also published nine proof-of-concept attack tools for 16 of the flaws relating to an insecure implementation of the Java Reflection API in a WebLogic Server environment.

Security Issues 1-28 (PDF)

Security Issues 29-30 (PDF)

jmoschner writes:

Good news for sloths. Bad news for running fanatics. While running is often hailed for helping losing weight, reducing stress, and lowering blood pressure; it may also make you die sooner. High-mileage runners (those who run more than two and a half hours per week) die earlier than moderate runners, (those who run about two and a half hours per week).

This according to a study of almost 4,000 men and women presented at the American College of Cardiology's annual meeting in Washington, D.C. this past Sunday. The theory is that the stress of chronic extreme exercise may "remodel" the heart.

Also of note, non-runners had the same life expectancy as high-mileage runners.

taylorvich writes:

The deadly Ebola virus is spreading in Africa like never seen before. As of writing 83 people have died and there are 127 confirmed cases, fatalities are expected to rise.

"We are facing an epidemic of a magnitude never before seen in terms of the distribution of cases," Mariano Lugli, coordinator of Doctors Without Borders in Conakry, Guinea's capital, said in a statement.

There's no vaccine or treatment for it, and the disease kills up to 90 percent of victims who suffer from extensive internal and external bleeding. Doctors Without Borders describes Ebola as "one of the world's most deadly diseases."

Cases are already being reported in neighboring Liberia, with the potential to spread elsewhere.

prospectacle writes:

If Microsoft can't beat free programming languages, it appears willing to join them, as it open sources its .NET compiler for C# and Visual Basic, under the Apache 2.0 license.

The "Roslyn" compiler platform also contains code-analysis APIs that could be useful if you were trying to make, for example, code-completion or syntax-checking features in your own code-editor.

To manage this and other recently liberated projects, the .NET foundation has been launched, including "community leaders such as Miguel de Icaza (Xamarin), Laurent Bugnion (IdentityMine), Niels Hartvig (Umbraco), Nigel Sampson (Compiled Experience), Anthony van der Hoorn (Glimpse) and Paul Betts."

The inevitable victory of free and open-source as the dominant model of software development is drawing closer than ever before.

McGruber writes:

Irish police believe that a gangland bomber blew himself up after he forgot about the clocks changing for summer time while he was planting a bomb on Sunday.

The Mirror reports:

A blundering bomber was being hunted last night after a powerful device he attached to a car exploded in his face. The injured criminal fled the scene in Dublin 'dripping in blood' on Sunday night after the device went off early. It had been attached to a Volvo SUV belonging to a local businessman.

One of the theories is the suspect forgot about the clocks changing. A source said: "It would appear that the bomber got his timings wrong. It could be a case where he didn't put his watch forward on Sunday [at 1am] and the timer went off too soon."

Irish police are investigating if he got his timings wrong after planting the high-grade explosives under an SUV on Long Lane in Dublin's South Inner City.

Neighbours reported hearing a huge blast at around 11pm on Sunday near the old Meath Hospital. The man was then seen stumbling from the scene and getting into a taxi on the junction of New Street and Clanbrassil Street.

Fluffeh writes:

Operation Creative, a project that has been in the works for a few months now between the City of London Police and the Movie and Music industries has just announced a new phase. The plan revealed yesterday by Detective Chief Inspector Andy Fyfe during Adweek Europe will see the police reaching out directly to the users. The police will do that by advertising on the sites themselves. This is in the hope that the visitors to the websites will change their ways.

The police will need to find a way to advertise on sites without paying money, or the campaign itself will end up financing the very sites they aim to close. Furthermore, sites probably won't have much interest in running free ads, particularly those that aim to take their users away, so how long these 'rogue' ads will remain live is up for debate.

While a traditionally aggressive anti-piracy campaign could be on the cards, a more considered positive reinforcement of legitimate services may have more longevity. Where the ads will appear is not clear either as the Infringing Website List is being kept a secret, but FACT says that sites are being told of their inclusion in advance.

[Editors Note: Earlier this week we published a submission regarding the impartiality of the Infringing Website List (IFL)].

spxero writes:

Summer is (hopefully) around the corner, and I've just finished setting up a Raspberry Pi running shairport for a cheap but fully functional backyard audio solution. I've got another Pi to play with and am looking for ideas for what I can use it for, so what Raspberry Pi projects have the SN community seen or done?

lhsi writes:

Two open access articles published in the British Medical Journal this week looked at Vitamin D.

The first study looked at evidence across systematic reviews and meta-analyses of observational studies.

"The associations between vitamin D concentrations and various conditions and diseases have been assessed in a large and rapidly expanding literature". The conclusion was that there wasn't any significant links. "In conclusion, although vitamin D has been extensively studied in relation to a range of outcomes and some indications exist that low plasma vitamin D concentrations might be linked to several diseases, firm universal conclusions about its benefits cannot be drawn. Observational studies have identified links with several diseases, but these have either not been evaluated or not been replicated in randomised controlled trials. Randomised controlled trials for autoimmune and cancer related outcomes are clearly lacking."

Another study aimed to "evaluate the extent to which circulating biomarker and supplements of vitamin D are associated with mortality from cardiovascular, cancer, or other conditions, under various circumstances."

"The findings of this review indicate that a moderate, but significant, inverse association exists between circulating vitamin D concentrations and the risk of all cause mortality in the primary prevention cohort studies. The inverse association was evident generally for all broad causes of death and more specifically for deaths due to coronary disease, lymphoma, upper digestive cancer, and respiratory disorders. In all randomised controlled trials combined, vitamin D supplementation, when given alone, did not reduce overall mortality significantly among older adults. However, when stratified by type of supplementation, vitamin D3, given singly, reduced all cause mortality significantly by 11%. By contrast, supplementation with vitamin D2 alone had no overall effect on mortality."

mendax writes:

The New York Times recently published an op-ed asking the question whether children who are exposed to adult pornography are harmed by the experience. As the article says:

Starting late last year, Internet service providers in Britain made "family-friendly filters," which block X-rated websites, the default for customers. Now any account holder who wants to view adult material needs to actively opt in - effectively raising a hand to say, "Bring on the naughty."

The initiative, which was conceived and very publicly promoted by the government, is intended to prevent what Prime Minister David Cameron called the corrosion of childhood, which, he argued in a speech last year, happens when kids are exposed to pornography at a young age. In the same speech, he seemed to toss teenagers into the group in need of protection, referring to 'young people who think it's normal to send pornographic material as a prelude to dating.'

And here is where the topic starts to get very murky. It turns out that the research suggesting that teenagers and pornography are a hazardous mix is far from definitive. In fact, many of the most comprehensive reports on this subject come to conclusions that amount to 'we can't say for sure' shrugs. One of the most recent is surely known to Mr. Cameron because it was produced by the office of the Children's Commissioner for England. In May, the commissioner released a report titled "Basically... porn is everywhere," which examined 276 research papers on teenagers and pornography.

After sifting through those papers, the report found a link between exposure to pornography and engagement in risky behavior, such as unprotected sex or sex at a young age. But little could be said about that link. Most important, "causal relationships" between pornography and risky behavior "could not be established,"; the report concluded. Given the ease with which teenagers can find Internet pornography, it's no surprise that those engaging in risky behavior have viewed pornography online. Just about every teenager has. So blaming X-rated images for risky behavior may be like concluding that cars are a leading cause of arson, because so many arsonists drive.