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sigma writes:

Engadget: http://www.engadget.com/2014/12/23/rockstar-sells-patents-ends-lawsuits/

The patent holding group Rockstar was formed in 2011 by Apple, BlackBerry, Ericsson, Microsoft and Sony to keep crucial intellectual property out of Google's hands, and eventually sue Android's partners in order to restrict competition.

Rockstar has sold all of its commonly held patents, and will drop the lawsuits that it still had left, including those leveled against HTC, LG and Samsung. The patents, which cost $4.5 billion, were sold to clearinghouse RPX for $900 million.

Blackmoore writes:

IFL Science - New Diagnostic Platform Can Detect Over 1,000 Pathogens In Just 6 Hours

An innovative new diagnostic platform that is capable of detecting more than 1,000 disease-causing organisms in just six hours has just been approved for use in Europe, potentially paving the way for a transformation in the manner in which diseases are diagnosed. The revolutionary new system is now being put through its paces in the US in the hope that it will be given the FDA’s seal of approval within the next few years.

Identifying the agent responsible for an infection or disease is not always easy, especially when the symptoms could indicate a number of different pathogens. This means that sometimes a variety of different specimens need to be taken, such as tubes of blood, swabs or urine samples, all of which then need to be subjected to different tests. But if the microbe, such as a virus or bacterium, is not on the list of suspects, doctors are unlikely to identify it because many tests are very specific. This means that the diagnostic process can be slow, causing delays in targeted treatment and consequently doctors are often forced to use blanket therapies, such as broad spectrum antibiotics, when time is limited.

But this could be set to change with the advent of IRIDICA, the brainchild of four researchers based at Isis Pharmaceuticals. After spending several years working on developing new antimicrobial compounds, they wondered whether they could apply the concepts they had come up with for drug discovery to the field of diagnostics.

"gewg_" writes:

You may have heard Cheech and Chong telling about a freak who lived in the projects, hired midgets, and used magic dust. Recently, Stephen Larsen, PhD, Psychology Professor Emeritus at SUNY Ulster, talked to Thom Hartmann as he had before about myths from northern Europe which parallel Clement Moore's narrative of a jolly old elf.

[... a]Norwegian and Scandinavian [sic] shaman had figured out [...] there was a certain type of mushroom [...] a deadly, deadly mushroom. But reindeer can eat it and their livers metabolize the toxin, break it down, and render it harmless without changing the hallucinogen. And so the shaman would cultivate areas where these particular mushrooms grew, [and] these mushrooms have little red caps with white spots all over them, and encourage the reindeer to go eat them. And then they would follow the reindeer around, and wherever they found yellow snow they would gather up the snow and make that into a magic brew and drink that stuff and suddenly they're seeing little guys and flying reindeer.

So, that's how he can make it around the globe in 24 hours and how he can see you while you're sleeping (which is kinda creepy if you think about it).

Symbolic Studies has more on this.

Blackmoore writes:

Dealbook/NYT : Neglected Server Provided Entry for JPMorgan Hackers

The computer breach at JPMorgan Chase this summer—the largest intrusion of an American bank to date—might have been thwarted if the bank had installed a simple security fix to an overlooked server in its vast network, said people who have been briefed on internal and outside investigations into the attack.

Most big banks use a double authentication scheme, known as two-factor authentication, which requires a second one-time password to gain access to a protected system. But JPMorgan’s security team had apparently neglected to upgrade one of its network servers with the dual password scheme, the people briefed on the matter said. That left the bank vulnerable to intrusion.

Blackmoore writes:

Found in Wired: Mathematicians Make a Major Discovery About Prime Numbers

Now, mathematicians have made the first substantial progress in 76 years on the reverse question: How far apart can consecutive primes be? The average spacing between primes approaches infinity as you travel up the number line, but in any finite list of numbers, the biggest prime gap could be much larger than the average. No one has been able to establish how large these gaps can be.

“It’s a very obvious question, one of the first you might ever ask about primes,” said Andrew Granville, a number theorist at the University of Montreal. “But the answer has been more or less stuck for almost 80 years.”

Erdős’ conjecture is based on a bizarre-looking bound for large prime gaps devised in 1938 by the Scottish mathematician Robert Alexander Rankin. For big enough numbers X, Rankin showed, the largest prime gap below X is at least:

(1/3) (logX log logX log log log logX) / (log log log X)2

Many mathematicians believe that the true size of large prime gaps is probably considerably larger — more on the order of (log X)², an idea first put forth by the Swedish mathematician Harald Cramér in 1936. Gaps of size (log X)² are what would occur if the prime numbers behaved like a collection of random numbers, which in many respects they appear to do.

[Paul] Erdős made a more modest conjecture: It should be possible, he said, to replace the 1/3 in Rankin’s formula by as large a number as you like, provided you go out far enough along the number line. That would mean that prime gaps can get much larger than in Rankin’s formula, though still smaller than in Cramér’s.

The two new proofs of Erdős’ conjecture are both based on a simple way to construct large prime gaps. A large prime gap is the same thing as a long list of non-prime, or “composite,” numbers between two prime numbers. Here’s one easy way to construct a list of, say, 100 composite numbers in a row: Start with the numbers 2, 3, 4, … , 101, and add to each of these the number 101 factorial (the product of the first 101 numbers, written 101!). The list then becomes 101! + 2, 101! + 3, 101! + 4, … , 101! + 101. Since 101! is divisible by all the numbers from 2 to 101, each of the numbers in the new list is composite: 101! + 2 is divisible by 2, 101! + 3 is divisible by 3, and so on. “All the proofs about large prime gaps use only slight variations on this high school construction,” said James Maynard of Oxford, who wrote the second of the two papers.

lhsi writes:

A study (full text) has found that bias as a result of missing or partially reported harm related outcomes is high in reviews of randomised controlled trials and non-randomised studies published. The researchers conclude that studies should not be excluded from reviews because of having ”no relevant outcome data,” as the outcome data may be missing as a direct result of selective outcome reporting.

Hugh Pickens writes:

Duane D. Stanford reports at Bloomberg that Coca-Cola's Atlanta Headquarters is the latest big campany to ditch its old-style voice mail, which requires users to push buttons to scroll through messages and listen to them one at a time. The change went into effect this month, and a standard outgoing message now throws up an electronic stiff arm, telling callers to try later or use “an alternative method” to contact the person. Techies have predicted the death of voice mail for years as smartphones co-opt much of the office work once performed by telephones and desktop computers. Younger employees who came of age texting while largely ignoring voice mail are bringing that habit into the workforce. “People north of 40 are schizophrenic about voice mail,” says Michael Schrage. “People under 35 scarcely ever use it.” Companies are increasingly combining telephone, e-mail, text and video systems into unified Internet-based systems that eliminate overlap. “Many people in many corporations simply don’t have the time or desire to spend 25 minutes plowing through a stack of 15 to 25 voice mails at the end or beginning of the day,” says Schrage, In 2012, Vonage reported its year-over-year voicemail volumes dropped 8%. More revealing, the number of people bothering to retrieve those messages plummeted 14%. More and more personal and corporate voicemail boxes now warn callers that their messages are rarely retrieved and that they’re better off sending emails or texts. "The truly productive have effectively abandoned voicemail, preferring to visually track who’s called them on their mobiles," concludes Schrage. "A communications medium that was once essential has become as clunky and irrelevant as Microsoft DOS and carbon paper."

dlb writes:

Devuan and I got off to a bad start. The first link I clicked to their site was flagged by Firefox as possibly malicious. Continuing to their home page brought me to what would have been considered campy even in the 90s. I suspected a scam, or at least rank amateurism, and figured a short life for the project.

They recently released an "update on the progress of the Devuan.org," and I took a second look, especially at their finances.

The finances of the Devuan project are administered by the Dyne.org foundation, an international organization based in Amsterdam.

Dyne.org commits to financial transparency and will publish financial reports for this project, keeping them updated every year.

Their current financial report for 2014 is available as a pdf download.

Surprisingly, with all the anti-systemd trolling out there that they could cash in on, they're instead taking the high road.

We must not become acquainted to the fact that systemd discussions are swarmed by trolls fostering aggressive behaviour and personalized attacks of sorts. With the Devuan project and its early Debianfork declaration we did our best to avoid such dynamics, to bring forward a constructive discussion and action plan to respond to the systemd avalanche with technical analyses and solutions.

We kindly ask the community gathering around Devuan to take us seriously on this and avoid aggressive behaviour. Everyone should use extra attention when engaging criticism and in any case avoid any personalization, but stick to facts.

Their open professionalism is impressive. We could be seeing the birth of the next major player in Linux.

tonyPick writes:

Spotted on Hacker news is a link to a paper on flipping memory bits without direct access.

In this paper, we expose the vulnerability of commodity DRAM chips to disturbance errors. By reading from the same address in DRAM, we show that it is possible to corrupt data in nearby addresses. More specifically, activating the same row in DRAM corrupts data in nearby rows. We demonstrate this phenomenon on Intel and AMD systems using a malicious program that generates many DRAM accesses. We induce errors in most DRAM modules (110 out of 129) from three major DRAM manufacturers.

The paper notes that this problem is increasingly prevalent in recent devices, indicating more advanced process technologies may exacerbate this issue, and also highlights the physical mechanisms underlying the corruption:

We identify the root cause of DRAM disturbance errors as voltage fluctuations on an internal wire called the wordline. DRAM comprises a two-dimensional array of cells, where each row of cells has its own wordline. To access a cell within a particular row, the row’s wordline must be enabled by raising its voltage — i.e., the row must be activated. When there are many activations to the same row, they force the wordline to toggle on and off repeatedly. According to our observations, such voltage fluctuations on a row’s wordline have a disturbance effect on nearby rows, inducing some of their cells to leak charge at an accelerated rate. If such a cell loses too much charge before it is restored to its original value (i.e., refreshed), it experiences a disturbance error

A direct link to the paper [PDF]

tonyPick writes:

According to the BBC the UK National Health Service (NHS) is setting up a programme to sequence 100,000 Genomes by 2017 and use this data to develop new treatments:

Under the scheme, 11 Genomics Medicine Centres are being set up in English hospitals to gather DNA samples to help devise targeted treatments for a wide range of diseases.

...

Doctors will offer suitable patients the opportunity to take part in the scheme. They will have to agree to have their genetic code and medical records - stripped of anything that could identify them - made available to drugs companies and researchers.

The scheme, known as the "100,000 Genomes Project" is being co-ordinated by Genomics England, a company set up and owned by the Department Of Health, specifically for this purpose.

Also covered at The Guardian and The Independent.

lhsi writes:

Research into Honey Bees has found that their behavioural responses change when they are affected by cocaine (full text).

Bees developed a preference for locations at which they received cocaine, and when foraging at low quality sucrose feeders increase their foraging rate in response to cocaine treatment. Cocaine also increased reflexive proboscis extension to sucrose, and sting extension to electric shock. Both of these simple reflexes are modulated by biogenic amines. This shows that systemic cocaine treatment alters behavioural responses that are modulated by biogenic amines in insects. Since insect reward responses involve both octopamine and dopamine signalling, we conclude that cocaine treatment altered diverse reward-related aspects of behaviour in bees. Our findings further validate the honey bee as a model system for understanding the behavioural impacts of cocaine, and potentially other drugs of abuse.

sigma writes:

Augusta Free Press:Virginia Tech wins contract from Army Research Office to develop tool to link individuals, events

A researcher at Virginia Tech has won a subcontract from the United States Army Research Office and United States Army Engineer Research and Development Center to develop an automated tool to make sense of data captured in news articles, tweets, images, and audio and video streams.

The software, intended to help help law enforcement agencies connect suspects and events, will allow the intelligence community to rapidly generate “linkages” by extracting information about location, identity, organization, and relationship, which will help them to tie individuals and groups to events and activities.

The researcher, associate professor Chang-Tien Lu, said. “By developing efficient spatiotemporal storytelling techniques we will discover meaningful relationships among entities and deliver rapid and accurate insights.”

Presumably Cyberdyne's involvement is pending hardware "development".

Blackmoore writes:

EFF - As Hollywood Funds a SOPA Revival Through State Officials, Google (And The Internet) Respond

Almost three years ago, millions of Internet users joined together to defeat the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), a disastrous bill that would have balkanized the Internet in the name of copyright and trademark enforcement. Over the past week, we've been tracking a host of revelations about an insidious campaign to accomplish the goals of SOPA by other means. The latest development: Google has filed a federal lawsuit seeking to block enforcement of an overbroad and punitive subpoena seeking an extraordinary quantity of information about the company and its users. The subpoena, Google warns, is based on legal theories that could have disastrous consequences for the open Internet.

The subpoena was issued after months of battles between Google and Mississippi Attorney General Jim Hood. According to the lawsuit, Hood has been using his office to pressure Google to restrict content accessible through the search engine. Indeed, among other things, he sought "a “24-hour link through which attorneys general[]” can request that links to particular websites be removed from search results "within hours,” presumably without judicial review or an opportunity for operators of the target websites to be heard." As Google states, "The Attorney General may prefer a pre-filtered Internet—but the Constitution and Congress have denied him the authority to mandate it."

The subpoena itself is bad enough, but here's what's really disturbing: the real force behind it appears to be the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), which has been quietly supporting state-level prosecutors in various efforts to target the company and the open Internet. The clear aim of that campaign—dubbed "Project Goliath" in MPAA emails made public through the recent high profile breach of Sony's corporate network—is to achieve the goals of the defeated SOPA blacklist proposal without the public oversight of the legislative process. Previously, Google had responded with a sharply worded notice and a petition titled #ZombieSOPA.

To be clear though: Google may be the target today, but the real target is the open Internet, which depends on free and uncensored platforms to survive. Any campaign to censor the Internet is cause for concern—and a secret one is all the more so. The public has clearly and unambiguously denounced the SOPA effort; it's shameful to see its backers try to revive its goals by dodging the scrutiny of the democratic process.

Also reported at Ars Technica -
Tech groups send Miss. AG a “friendly reminder” about how bad SOPA was
Mississippi AG backs off Google investigation pushed by MPAA
Google moves to halt investigation by Mississippi AG, cites MPAA lobbying

fritsd writes:

TEPCO announced on December 15, 2014 that their ongoing work of emptying the damaged fuel rods from the spent fuel pool of reactor 4 is complete now.
Fuel removal started on November 18, 2013 and is completed on December 22, 2014. The 1533 fuel assemblies have been very carefully lifted out of the pool with a special crane and put in another pool nearby that's at least not on the first floor of a building in an earthquake zone.

Link: http://www.tepco.co.jp/en/decommision/planaction/removal-e.html

(comment from submitter: I read this first on de Volkskrant, http://www.volkskrant.nl/buitenland/alle-splijtstofstaven-verwijderd-uit-reactor-4-fukushima~a3815702/.)

tonyPick writes:

According to a new study published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Science: using a light emitting e-reader before sleep may be counterproductive.

Originally spotted on phys.org, this story is based on research at Pennsylvania State University.