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AnonTechie writes:

When foreign pathogens, such as bacteria or a virus, enter our body, our immune system responds in a concerted effort to eliminate them. B cells produce antibodies that recognize markers (called antigens) on the surface of the invaders; these antibodies are then used to tag foreign pathogens for destruction.

B cells typically require interaction with T cells for full activation and antibody production, which is critical to overcoming an infection. But there are some cases where the T cells are not required. Now, researchers have figured out how this works—and discovered that it relies on the remains of long-dead viruses that litter our genomes.

Large, repetitive sugar structures that are often found on the surface of bacteria and viruses are the key to activating antibody production without the help of a T cell. These sugary structures engage proteins called B cell receptors, which activate the B cells. B cells then grow, forming short-lived cells that produce antibodies and long-lived memory cells that will recognize the same invader upon subsequent infection

http://arstechnica.com/science/2014/12/remains-of-long-dead-viruses-in-our-genomes-aid-our-immune-response/

[Abstract]: http://www.sciencemag.org/content/192/4238/467

tonyPick writes:

Linux Gizmos has an end of year list of 40 Linux-friendly hackable SBCs.

Over the last year we’ve seen some new quad- and octa-core boards with more memory, built-in WiFi, and other extras. Yet, most of the growth has been in the under $50 segment where the Raspberry Pi and BeagleBone reign. Based on specifications alone, standouts in price/performance that have broken the $40 barrier include the new Odroid-C1 and pcDuino3 Nano, but other good deals abound here as well.

The guidelines for the boards selected are designed to ensure these platforms are hacker friendly.

The SBCs on our list are all shipping, even if only recently. They must offer open source Linux and/or Android OS images, or offer links to other free sources. The projects must offer schematics and other hardware reference materials for at least most of the board’s features and components. (For example, in the case of the increasingly common “sandwich-style SBCs,” which consist of a COM+baseboard combination, the baseboard schematic should be readily available for free download and application-specific modification.) At a minimum, licensing should enable third parties to build products at least for small runs of non-profit applications.

Originally spotted on LWN.

AndyTheAbsurd writes with an article from Engadget:

New York City wants to make it easier for the recipients of its some 8-to-10 million annual parking tickets to pay their fines. To do so, it's accepting pitches for payment systems that'd take advantage of mobile tech and things like Apple Pay and bitcoin. New York has an online payment system in place already, but as The Wall Street Journal notes, it doesn't work via mobile devices.

An Anonymous Coward writes:

Warren Buffett just responded to a "Dilbert" comic strip which challenges the importance of passion in work. "Having passion for something is far from an automatic guarantee of success, but I think it helps...” he told his hometown newspaper in Omaha. He advises college students that life is more enjoyable with interesting work, "And, on balance, I believe they will enjoy more success." But in the comic strip, Dilbert's secretary argued "I'll have to fake the passion because everything I do in this job is mindless and boring." And with the release of a new book Tuesday, Dilbert's creator is still arguing that passion is irrelevant, and that when starting a new job or business, "the last thing you want to do is become passionate...!"

AndyTheAbsurd writes with an article from Yibada:

Apple has patented a "communicating stylus" on Tuesday at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. The pen has the capability to digitally capture drawings and handwritten notes on a range of everyday surfaces, including the ordinary paper and the whiteboard.

According to the patent, the Apple stylus will utilize wireless transmission, internal storage and accelerometer sensors in order to transfer the captured notes to a digital display.

Anybody else tired of the USPTO granting new patents for old ideas?

Blackmoore writes:

Priceconmics - The Man Who Invented Scotch Tape

The story of Scotch tape is one of incredible determination and risk-taking -- and its invention was thanks to a banjo-playing, college-dropout, “misfit” engineer who believed in his ability to invent.

He ended up not just pioneering Scotch transparent tape and masking tape, but revolutionizing the way that his company, 3M, treated creative people.

Whatever happened to places that allowed innovation?

ghost writes:

Say what you will about netscape/mozilla/firefox, but you've got to admit they've been good for bug-driven development. First, they had so many bugs they had to create a new bugtracker, bugzilla, just to keep track of them all. Then their software leaked so much memory they had to invent a new language, rust, with "guaranteed memory safety". And now they've released rr, which records your execution and lets you debug the recording (using gdb), deterministically, as many times as you want. Currently, it's linux/x86 only but linux/x64 support should be here soon.

AndyTheAbsurd writes with an article from Gigaom:

A Twitter advertising technique is perturbing people. Promoted brands like MasterCard and IFC are appearing in the list of accounts some users follow, even if they don’t actually follow them.

Sources familiar with the company’s advertising strategy tell me this has been occurring since early 2013, but the public has only just now cottoned onto it thanks to actor William Shatner (of Star Trek fame). Shatner brought attention to it after he saw that “MasterCard” appeared in his following list despite the fact that he didn’t follow it.

Blackmoore writes:

boing boing - Happy Public Domain Day: here are the works that copyright extension stole from you in 2015 and Center for the Study of the Public Domain

Current US law extends copyright for 70 years after the date of the author’s death, and corporate “works-for-hire” are copyrighted for 95 years after publication. But prior to the 1976 Copyright Act (which became effective in 1978), the maximum copyright term was 56 years—an initial term of 28 years, renewable for another 28 years. Under those laws, works published in 1958 would enter the public domain on January 1, 2015, where they would be “free as the air to common use.” Under current copyright law, we’ll have to wait until 2054.1 And no published works will enter our public domain until 2019. The laws in other countries are different—thousands of works are entering the public domain in Canada and the EU on January 1.

"gewg_" writes:

EcoWatch reports (while wearing their green-tinted glasses):

The Vermont Yankee atomic reactor goes permanently off-line today, Dec. 29, 2014. Citizen activists have made it happen. The number of licensed U.S. commercial reactors is now under 100 where once it was to be 1,000.

[...]Entergy says it shut Vermont Yankee because it was losing money. Though fully amortized, it could not compete with the onslaught of renewable energy and fracked-gas. Throughout the world, nukes once sold as generating juice "too cheap to meter" comprise a global financial disaster. Even with their capital costs long-ago stuck to the public, these radioactive junk heaps have no place in today's economy--except as illegitimate magnets for massive handouts.

[...]Vermont Yankee is the fifth American reactor forced shut in the last two years. Two at San Onofre, California, were defeated by citizen activism. Wisconsin's Kewaunee went down for economic reasons. Crystal River in Florida was driven to utter chaos by incompetent ownership.

Five reactors are officially under construction in the U.S. But their fate is also subject to citizen action. Two others targeted for Levy County, Florida, have recently been stopped by ratepayer resistance.

Throughout the U.S. and the world, the demise of atomic energy is accelerating. Some 435 reactors are listed worldwide as allegedly operable. But 48 in Japan remain shut in the wake of Fukushima despite the fierce efforts of a corrupt, dictatorial regime to force them back on line. Germany's transition to a totally nuke-free green energy economy is exceeding expectations. The fate of dozens proposed and operating in China and India remains unclear.

n1 writes:

KrebsOnSecurity reports:

Sources at several U.S. financial institutions say they have traced a pattern of credit card fraud back to accounts that all were used at different Chick-fil-A fast food restaurants around the country. Chick-fil-A told KrebsOnSecurity that it has received similar reports and is working with IT security firms and law enforcement in an ongoing investigation.

KrebsOnSecurity first began hearing from banks about possible compromised payment systems at Chick-fil-A establishments in November, but the reports were spotty at best. Then, just before Christmas, one of the major credit card associations issued an alert to several financial institutions about a breach at an unnamed retailer that lasted between Dec. 2, 2013 and Sept. 30, 2014.

One financial institution that received that alert said the bank had nearly 9,000 customer cards listed in that alert, and that the only common point-of-purchase were Chick-fil-A locations.

“It’s crazy because 9,000 customer cards is more than the total number of cards we had impacted in the Target breach,” the banking source said, speaking on condition of anonymity.

"gewg_" writes:

TechDirt reports:

[...]the FISA Court has the reputation as a rubberstamp for a reason--it almost never turns down a request.

However, in the rare instances where it does, apparently, the DOJ doesn't really care, knowing that it can just issue [a National Security Letter] instead and get the same information. At least that appears to be what the DOJ quietly admitted to doing in a now declassified Inspector General's report from 2008(PDF). EFF lawyer Nate Cardozo was going through and spotted this troubling bit:

We considered the Section 215 request for [REDACTED] discussed earlier in this report at pages 33 to 34 to be a noteworthy item. In this case, the FISA Court had twice declined to approve a Section 215 application based on First Amendment Concerns. However, the FBI subsequently issued NSLs for information [REDACTED] even though the statute authorizing the NSLs contained the same First Amendment restriction as Section 215 and the ECs authorizing the NSLs relied on the same facts contained in the Section 215 applicants...

n1 writes:

An article from Forbes:

“Boards aren’t working,” declare Dominic Barton, global managing director of McKinsey & Company and Mark Wiseman, president of CEO of Canada Pension Plan Investment in an article in the January-February 2015 issue of Harvard Business Review. That’s true, but should we, as they suggest, reward poor performance with a big bonus?

The delinquencies of board directors, the authors rightly point out, are “shocking.” The authors cite research showing that:

Only 34 percent of directors “fully comprehend their companies’ strategies.”
Only 22 percent are “completely aware of how their firms created value.”
Only 16 percent have “a strong understanding of the dynamics of their firms’ industries.”
Worse, fully 74 percent of directors themselves consider “the source of pressure most responsible for their organizations’ over-emphasis on short-term financial results and under-emphasis on long-term value creation” is the board itself.

And for these catastrophic results, each director is currently paid on average the meager sum of $249,000 for a backbreaking workload of 20-30 days of work per year.

The solution proposed by Barton and Wiseman? Ask these delinquent directors to increase their workload to a grueling 35 days of honest work per year and also—get this—give them “a substantial raise.”

“Good capitalists believe in incentives. If we are going to ask directors to engage more deeply and more publicly, to spend a lot more time exploring and communicating long-term strategy, and to take on any attendant reputational risk, then we should give them a substantial raise.”

n1 writes:

MIT Technology Review reports:

A new form of computer memory might help machines match the capabilities of the human brain when it comes to tasks such as interpreting images or video footage.

Researchers at IBM used what’s known as phase-change memory to build a device that processes data in a way inspired by the workings of a biological brain. Using a prototype phase-change memory chip, the researchers configured the system to act like a network of 913 neurons with 165,000 connections, or synapses, between them. The strength of those connections change as the chip processes incoming data, altering how the virtual neurons influence one another. By exploiting that property, the researchers got the system to learn to recognize handwritten numbers.

n1 writes:

Reuters reports

South Korean authorities have found evidence that a low-risk computer "worm" had been removed from devices connected to some nuclear plant control systems, but no harmful virus was found in reactor controls threatened by a hacker.

Korea Hydro & Nuclear Power Co Ltd said it would beef up cyber security by hiring more IT security experts and forming an oversight committee, as it came in for fresh criticism from lawmakers following recent hacks against its headquarters.

The nuclear operator, part of state-run utility Korea Electric Power Corp, said earlier this month that non-critical data had been stolen from its systems, while a hacker threatened in Twitter messages to close three reactors.