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AnonTechie writes:

With some tinkering, a deadly protein becomes an efficient carrier for antibody drugs. In a paper appearing in the journal ChemBioChem, Pentelute and colleagues showed that they could use this disarmed version of the anthrax toxin to deliver two proteins known as antibody mimics, which can kill cancer cells by disrupting specific proteins inside the cells. This is the first demonstration of effective delivery of antibody mimics into cells, which could allow researchers to develop new drugs for cancer and many other diseases, says Pentelute, the senior author of the paper.
http://newsoffice.mit.edu/2014/cancer-drug-delivery-by-anthrax-0925

[Abstract]: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/cbic.201402290/abstract;jsessionid=32ED743FFB7BFD9BD62AC19C29E36F94.f02t02

[Paper PDF]: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/cbic.201402290/pdf

gewg_ writes:

The Center for American Progress reports:

A new study finds that scientists are seen as highly competent, and climate scientists in particular have the trust of Americans.

Unfortunately, that isn't seen as a very clickworthy finding—at least in our modern cynical age—so the authors of the study and the news release chose to spin the results as "Scientists Seen as Competent But Not Trusted by Americans." If you search that headline, you'll find thousands of results for articles on and links to this Princeton study.

You'd never guess from the headline or the news release, that when the researchers surveyed "public attitudes toward climate scientists" on a "seven-item scale of distrust," they found "distrust is low."

Frankly, the communication of the actual results of this entire study are abysmal, which is especially ironic since the title of the study is "Gaining trust as well as respect in communicating to motivated audiences about science topics." I'm afraid Princeton has gained neither here.

Related: Scientists Seen as Competent but Not Trusted by Americans

Blackmoore writes:

It was a cold night in a dark Universe. I was working on my latest case; Searching for evidence of Gravity waves. We knew there were there; but the damn things kept slipping away like another murderer in Chicago.

We thought we had it cold; Antarctic cold that is, with the BICEP researchers who used a telescope based at the South Pole. The Data looked clear - we thought we had our evidence and could bring it in. Then the Planck team showed up. That data clearly showed that the whole damn scene had been compromised with Interstellar dust. THE BICEP team went back to find a way to merge the data and find the bastard; and I moved on.

I moved down to my back office; Joe's place was seedy, the whiskey watered, but the jazz was good. And that's when it hit me. Saavik Ford was on the Vibraphone; as he played along you could tell that each note would just barely sound up other notes on the board. I pulled up my smartphone and called up Science Daily. There it was. I knocked back a double before i finished the article.

"It's like if you have a spring that's vibrating at a particular frequency and you hit it at the same frequency, you'll make the oscillation stronger," McKernan said. "The same thing applies with gravitational waves."

"If you have two black holes merging with each other and emitting gravitational waves at a certain frequency, you're only going to hit one of the bars on the xylophone at a time. But because the black holes decay as they come closer together, the frequency of the gravitational waves changes and you'll hit a sequence of notes. So you'll likely see the big stars lighting up first followed by smaller and smaller ones."

The case was still open, but we had our lead - right there in the stars.

Journal Reference: B. McKernan, K.E.S. Ford, B. Kocsis, Z. Haiman. Stars as resonant absorbers of gravitational waves. Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society: Letters, 2014 (in press)

AnonTechie writes:

El Reg reports:

Vendors are generally delighted to raise their profile by pretending to have "5G" systems just around the corner, but it was a CTO from Alcatel-Lucent who threw a welcome bucket of cold water over the 5G hype at last week’s CTIA Super Mobility Week conference in Las Vegas.

Michael Peeters, the company’s wireless CTO, told the conference’s Towers & Small Cell Summit stream that the current talk about 5G development was “ridiculous” because it was focused on the old issues of technologies to increase capacity and bandwidth, whereas the real revolution would come from an architecture which was open, federated and “invisible”.

He made a very good point – vendors and operators are largely staying within their comfort zones, thinking of 5G as an extension to 4G, with or without a brand new air interface, and focusing on extending current technologies, such as MIMO antenna arrays, rather than on a completely new approach.

I think he has raised very valid points. Do you people agree with this analysis?

Hugh Pickens writes:

The NYT reports that President Obama spoke at the United Nations Climate Change Summit and challenged China to make the same effort to reduce its greenhouse-gas emissions and join a worldwide campaign to curb global warming. Obama's words were directly focused on putting the onus on China, an essential partner of the United States if a global climate treaty is to be negotiated by 2015. The United States and China bear a “special responsibility to lead,” said Obama, “That’s what big nations have to do.” The United States, Obama said, would meet a pledge to reduce its carbon emissions by 17 percent, from 2005 levels, by 2020—a goal that is in large part expected to be met through proposed EPA regulation.

There were indications that China might be ready with its own plan, although many experts say they will be skeptical until Chinese officials reveal the details. A senior Chinese official said his country would try to reach a peak level of carbon emissions “as early as possible.” That suggested that the Chinese government, struggling with air pollution so extreme that it has threatened economic growth, regularly kept millions of children indoors and ignited street protests, was determined to show faster progress in curbing emissions. In recent years, the Chinese government has sent other signals about addressing carbon pollution, some of them encouraging to environmental experts. “Five years ago, it was almost unimaginable to discuss China putting a cap on carbon, but now that is happening,” said Lo Sze Ping, chief executive officer of the World Wildlife Fund’s office in Beijing. “Chinese leaders have seen that it is imperative to move toward a low-carbon economy.”

Appalbarry writes:

Courtesy The Intercept.

The Israeli government just released a list of the most popular baby names in Israel. In a move reminiscent of the old South African Apartheid, they SPECIALLY left ALL Muslim sounding names off the list. Only when asked by the Haaretz newspaper why there weren’t any Arab names on the list did government officials admit that the most popular baby name in Israel is in fact "Mohammed", not "Yosef."

The Intercept explains:

The rationale for this is the belief among many Israeli politicians that Jewish-Israelis must constitute a clear majority of the national population, and that any large increase in the population of indigenous Palestinian Arabs (already at 21 percent), sub-Saharan Africans, or other minority populations is potentially a threat to the “character” of the state.

(Oh yeah, Just in case you think that Haaretz is anti-Jewish, their front page also includes Saturday Night Live’s 'Top 10 Jewish Moments'.)

Anonymous Coward writes:

Although we are late in reporting the fact, within days of announcing the demise of Bodhi Linux it is announced that the distro will continue on as the torch has been passed on to other volunteers. Distrowatch has again added it to their Distro Ranking List and lists Bodhi's page as being in "active" development.

As the handing-over maintainer, Jeff, says:

Bodhi 3 will happen at some point, but they don't have any firm time lines right now. Thankfully - all the delays mean E19 "stable" has been released and will be the default desktop for the x86/64bit releases. I'll let the new folks post updates once they get all my build scripts sorted and start getting pre-releases out to test.

n1 writes:

From Science:

The Okinawa dugong's days could be numbered. At most 10 of the marine mammals remain in Japan's southernmost prefecture, according to the Nature Conservation Society of Japan (NACS-J). Now, land reclamation needed for a new U.S. Marine Corps air base threatens two of the region's few remaining major beds of seagrass, which dugong depend on, says NACS-J, which has petitioned U.S. ambassador to Japan Caroline Kennedy for permission to conduct a survey.

[...] Japan's environment ministry considers the Okinawa dugong, the northernmost population of the species, critically endangered.

tonyPick writes:

There's an article up on Forbes about the rise of micropower generation versus large scale power-plant generation.

This article comes from an update from the Rocky Mountain Institute's Micropower Database, which provides source data (as a spreadsheet, plus methodology) for micropower generation capacity.

According to Forbes:

The update’s most astonishing finding: micropower now produces about one-fourth of the world’s total electricity

[...]

Big hydroelectric dams and nuclear power are also carbon-free in operation. Thus in 2013, nearly half of the world’s electricity was produced with little or no carbon release

There's some loose re-use of the general terms Microgeneration and Micropower at work in various articles and comments, which can be slightly misleading. To clarify from the RMI methodology section:

toygeek writes:

Hello my fellow Soylentils, this winter I am looking for project ideas for something geeky and inexpensive. I'm in the Pacific Northwest, and it rains a lot in the winter and so outdoors projects are a no-go, so I'm looking for something more indoors.

I have thought about going into microcontrollers with the likes of Arduino, but the costs add up very fast! I have also considered picking up a programming language, as I am fairly limited to shell scripting at the moment. I'm also well beyond the "does it run linux?" stage of things, and simply putting together something that can run Linux doesn't do anything for me. I don't have any immediate needs, but would love to expand my learning a bit. I do have my Amateur Radio license (No-Code Tech) and am not interested in the local repeater scene, and have no equipment anyway. I also have some 72mhz RC stuff from sailplanes I no longer fly including standard and micro servos, transmitter, receiver etc. I've also got some tools and can weld, so there's that.

Furthermore, I am not interested in what I can do with lots of resources. I have been limited by few resources most of my life and have come to enjoy the challenge of doing more with less. I'd love to hear of your ideas!

n1 writes:

ArsTechnica reports:

Comcast has made many arguments in support of its proposed acquisition of Time Warner Cable (TWC), but it keeps circling back to one: since the two cable companies don’t compete head-to-head in any city or town, there would be no harm in approving the deal.

But why don’t Comcast and TWC, the two largest cable companies in the US, compete against each other? And if the merger was denied, would they invade each other’s territory? Ars asked Comcast Executive VP David Cohen those questions today on a press call held to discuss Comcast’s latest filing with the FCC.

In short, Cohen said it’s too expensive to compete against other cable companies—even though Comcast is spending $45.2 billion to purchase Time Warner Cable. Comcast and TWC aren’t likely to start competing against each other even if they remain separate.

tonyPick writes:

The 5th World Maker Faire ran in New York a few days ago (Sept 20 & 21) , and there's a bundle of videos of interesting bits and pieces up on the Maker Faire Youtube channel and at the Makezine site and the main maker faire site.

Tons of cool stuff.

Blackmoore writes:

Cory Doctrow at the Guardian posts - Privacy technology everyone can use would make us all more secure.

You don’t need to be a technical expert to understand privacy risks anymore. From the Snowden revelations to the daily parade of internet security horrors around the world – like Syrian and Egyptian checkpoints where your Facebook logins are required in order to weigh your political allegiances (sometimes with fatal consequences) or celebrities having their most intimate photos splashed all over the web.

The time has come to create privacy tools for normal people – people with a normal level of technical competence. That is, all of us, no matter what our level of technical expertise, need privacy. Some privacy measures do require extraordinary technical competence; if you’re Edward Snowden, with the entire NSA bearing down on your communications, you will need to be a real expert to keep your information secure. But the kind of privacy that makes you immune to mass surveillance and attacks-of-opportunity from voyeurs, identity thieves and other bad guys is attainable by anyone.

He then goes on to promote https://simplysecure.org/ an organization he belongs to who are looking for programmers who are interested in either improving the security software; and/or the interfaces and setup for those tools.

So while I think this is a fantastic idea; I'm confounded that the Guardian would post such an advertisement as an article; and saddened that the foundation has nothing to offer at this point.

I think the public would better embrace security technologies if it was easy to roll out. What have you run into that confounds you?

AnonTechie writes:

From ScienceDaily:

The computer programs used in the field of artificial intelligence (AI) are highly specialized. They can for example fly airplanes, play chess or assemble cars in controlled industrial environments.

A research team from Gothenburg, Sweden, has now been able to create an AI programme that can learn how to solve problems in many different areas. The programme is designed to imitate certain aspects of children's cognitive development. Traditional AI programmes lack the versatility and adaptability of human intelligence. For example, they cannot come into a new home and cook, clean and do laundry. In artificial general intelligence (AGI), which is a new field within AI, scientists try to create computer programmes with a generalised type of intelligence, enabling them to solve problems in vastly different areas.

present_arms writes:

The BBC is reporting that Samsung are to pull out of selling laptops (including Chromebooks) in Europe.

Samsung has announced that it is ending sales of its laptop computers in Europe.

The move includes its Chromebook model, which had previously been one of the category's best-sellers.

The South Korean company's decision follows Sony's announcement earlier this year that it was selling its Vaio division and pulling out of PC sales altogether.

Samsung signalled it might consider similar action in other parts of the globe.

"We quickly adapt to market needs and demands," said the company in a statement.

DECbot writes:

Ars reports that a new bug has been found in GNU Bash allows remote attackers to execute arbitrary code by setting the process trailing strings after function definitions in the values of environment variables.

This bug is reported to be present in RHEL (ver 4 through 7), Fedora, CentOS (ver 5 through 7), Ubuntu (ver 10.04 LTS, 12.04 LTS, and 14.04 LTS), Debian, and even OS X Mavericks.

This bug is exploitable through Apache servers with mod_cgi and mod_cgid loaded, OpenSSH, malicious DHCP servers in a compromised wireless access point through dhclient, as well as the CUPS printing system.

The Ars also includes a simple single liner that will test your setup for the newly found discovery:

env x='() { :;}; echo vulnerable' bash -c "echo this is a test"

A vulnerable system will output the following:

vulnerable
 this is a test

While a patched or unaffected system outputs:

bash: warning: x: ignoring function definition attempt
bash: error importing function definition for `x'
this is a test

A patch is already out, so administrators are advised to update Bash.

Editor's Update: Security Engineer Tavis Ormandy has said "The bash patch seems incomplete to me, function parsing is still brittle".

$ env X='() { (a)=>\' sh -c "echo date"; cat echo