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AnonTechie writes:

Donated human organs are in such short supply that thousands of people die waiting for one every year. U.S. researchers have been shattering records in xenotransplantation, or between-species organ transplants.

The researchers say they have kept a pig heart alive in a baboon for 945 days and also reported the longest-ever kidney swap between these species, lasting 136 days. The experiments used organs from pigs "humanized" with the addition of as many as five human genes, a strategy designed to stop organ rejection.

The GM pigs are being produced in Blacksburg, Virginia, by Revivicor, a division of the biotechnology company United Therapeutics. That company's founder and co-CEO, Martine Rothblatt, is a noted futurist who four years ago began spending millions to supply researchers with pig organs and has quickly become the largest commercial backer of xenotransplantation research.

Rothblatt says her goal is to create "an unlimited supply of transplantable organs" and to carry out the first successful pig-to-human lung transplant within a few years. One of her daughters has a usually fatal lung condition called pulmonary arterial hypertension. In addition to GM pigs, her company is carrying out research on tissue-engineered lungs and cryopreservation of organs. "We're turning xenotransplantation from what looked like a kind of Apollo-level problem into just an engineering task," she says.

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An Anonymous Coward writes:

TAILS is a live system that aims to preserve your privacy and anonymity. It helps you to use the Internet anonymously and circumvent censorship almost anywhere you go and on any computer but leaving no trace unless you ask it to explicitly.

It is a complete operating system designed to be used from a DVD, USB stick, or SD card independently of the computer's original operating system. It is Free Software and based on Debian GNU/Linux.

Tails comes with several built-in applications pre-configured with security in mind: web browser, instant messaging client, email client, office suite, image and sound editor, etc.

Download: https://tails.boum.org/download/index.en.html

Getting Started: https://tails.boum.org/getting_started/index.en.html

Octopus genome sequenced

basstard writes:

Genetic analysis sheds light on the evolution and unique biology of octopuses, including the development of complex nervous systems, writes EurekAlert.

The first whole genome analysis of an octopus reveals unique genomic features that likely played a role in the evolution of traits such as large complex nervous systems and adaptive camouflage. An international team of scientists sequenced the genome of the California two-spot octopus - the first cephalopod ever to be fully sequenced - and mapped gene expression profiles in 12 different tissues. The findings are published in Nature on Aug 12, 2015.

The researchers discovered striking differences from other invertebrates, including widespread genomic rearrangements and a dramatic expansion of a family of genes involved in neuronal development that was once thought to be unique to vertebrates. Hundreds of octopus-specific genes were identified, with many highly expressed in structures such as the brain, skin and suckers.

[...]

The team estimates the O. bimaculoides genome is 2.7 billion base-pairs in size, with numerous long stretches of repeated sequences. They identified more than 33,000 protein-coding genes, placing the octopus genome at slightly smaller in size, but with more genes, than a human genome.

The large size of the octopus genome was initially attributed to whole genome duplication events during evolution, which can lead to increased genomic diversity and complexity. This phenomenon has occurred twice in ancestral vertebrates, for example. However, Ragsdale and his colleagues found no evidence of duplications.

Octopus shows unique social and sexual behavior

Phoenix666 writes:

The creature, known as the larger Pacific striped octopus, also turns out to be among the most gregarious of known octopuses. While most species are solitary, these have been seen in groups of up to 40 off the Pacific coasts of Nicaragua and Panama.

And while male octopuses typically share sperm with females at arm's length, ready to flee should the female get aggressive or hungry, mating pairs of this octopus when observed in captivity sometimes cohabit in the same cavity for at least a few days while mating, with little indication of escalated aggression. Mating pairs have even been observed to share meals in an unusual beak-to-beak position.

They do engage in rough sex, however. The pair grasp each other's arms sucker-to-sucker and mate beak-to-beak, as if kissing. The females mate frequently and lay eggs over several months, whereas the females of most known octopuses die after a single brood.

Octopuses are fascinating creatures that can even walk on land. Some studies have also suggested they're quite intelligent.

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c0lo writes:

ABC (Australia) reports

Swedish prosecutors said they had dropped investigations into allegations of sexual assault made in 2010 against WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange because they had run out of time to bring charges.

"Now that the statute of limitations has expired on certain offences, I am obliged to drop part of the investigation," prosecutor Marianne Ny said.

But prosecutors said they would continue with investigations over a further allegation of rape against Assange, also made in 2010.
...
They have a further five years to bring any charges over an allegation of rape.

In other news, Sweden and Ecuador have agreed to hold talks aimed at paving the way for Wikileaks founder Julian Assange to be questioned over allegations of sexual assault, with 9news reporting that

Assange has challenged Swedish prosecutors to come to his refuge at the Ecuadorian embassy in London to take his statement on sex attack claims.
...
The 44-year-old Australian, who has been living at the embassy for more than three years, said in a statement on Thursday that he was an innocent man and hadn't been charged.

"Come to the embassy to take my statement or promise not to send me to the United States," he said, saying the actions of Swedish prosecutors were "beyond incompetence".

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Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

Requests for Twitter users' personal information more than doubled in the UK in 2015, according to the company's latest transparency report.

Twitter said UK government agencies and the police made 299 requests for information between January and July, up from 116 in the previous six months. It makes UK law enforcement the biggest requester of Twitter data in the EU.

Twitter said it had complied with 52% of the requests for information, which could be used to identify a tweeter. Twitter has published its transparency report since 2012. The social network said requests for account information worldwide had increased by 52% - the largest ever increase between reports.

It said the United States was behind most of the requests, followed by Japan and Turkey, although the UK remained "a top requester". Twitter said it had also received nine content removal requests from UK government agencies and the police. The company said removal requests relate to matters such as defamatory statements or prohibited content. It rejected the nine requests made in the UK.

"Thanks to the transparency reports of internet companies, we know police are already accessing data with far greater frequency than many other countries," said Emma Carr, director of campaign group Big Brother Watch.

"If the public are to have any confidence that surveillance powers are being used proportionately, then we should not have to rely on private companies to publish this data.

"The government should proactively be publishing their own transparency reports, highlighting exactly how many requests are being made, how often they are refused and why," she said.

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Phoenix666 writes:

Canonical gave up on operating its Ubuntu One cloud storage service more than a year ago, but this week it released the system's file-syncing code under an open source AGPLv3 license.

Though Canonical is primarily known for its open source Ubuntu operating system, it also has some closed source products and services, including Ubuntu One.

Ubuntu's desktop "on its own will die"—Shuttleworth [said, explaining] why Canonical must expand. "Today, we're happy to be open sourcing the biggest piece of our Ubuntu One file syncing service," Canonical Director of Online Services Martin Albisetti wrote. "The code we're releasing is the server side of what desktop clients connected to when syncing local or remote changes. This is code where most of the innovation and hard work went throughout the years, where we faced most of the scaling challenges and the basis on which other components were built upon."

Canonical hopes the code will be "useful for developers to read through, fork into their own projects or pick out useful bits and pieces."

What project ideas would you use this code for?

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MrNemesis, Hairyfeet and Phoenix666 write:

Peter Bright at ArsTechnica reports:

Windows 10 uses the Internet a lot to support many of its features. The operating system also sports numerous knobs to twiddle that are supposed to disable most of these features, and the potentially privacy-compromising connections that go with them.

Unfortunately for privacy advocates, these controls don't appear to be sufficient to completely prevent the operating system from going online and communicating with Microsoft's servers.

For example, even with Cortana and searching the Web from the Start menu disabled, opening Start and typing will send a request to www.bing.com to request a file called threshold.appcache which appears to contain some Cortana information, even though Cortana is disabled. The request for this file appears to contain a random machine ID that persists across reboots.

Hairyfeet's contribution adds the following:

A Czech site went one further and did a traffic analysis on a default Windows 10 install, what did he find? Well it looks like the Win 10 Keylogger in the beta is still running with pretty much every keystroke, voice, and webcam data being sent to Microsoft even with Cortana disabled.

[Ed's Comment: The report about the Czech traffic analysis originally came from a newspaper and some comments doubt the veracity of this source.]

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Arthur T Knackerbracket hopes he hasn't boogered up this article from Wired:

A spouting whale is a majestic sight, spraying everything around it with minuscule droplets of whale snot. (Okay, so it’s not technically snot—it’s more like lung mucus.) But aside from being pretty, that spray, which scientists call “blow,” is a coveted substance in marine biology. Rich with DNA, hormones, viruses, and bacteria from the whale’s respiratory tract, the goo can give researchers clues about a whale’s stress levels and overall health. So, naturally, scientists decided they needed to try collecting the stuff with drones.

Last month in Stellwagen Bank, Massachusetts, scientists from Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution and NOAA used a hexacopter to collect blow samples and snap photos of 36 humpback whales, gathering data to compare the pod to their brethren in more pristine Antarctic waters. And that’s just one of the conservation research groups that’s decided to capitalize on drones. Ocean Alliance, a nonprofit in Gloucester, Mass., recently launched a Kickstarter for their “Snotbot,” which proposes to collect data from whales off the coasts of Patagonia, Mexico, and Alaska.

These multi-coptered machines are driving a small renaissance in biology and conservation research, allowing researchers—marine scientists especially—to study subjects and places they can’t typically reach. Drones are getting better at carrying scientifically useful payloads: things like more complex sputum samplers, and heavier, better-quality cameras. And as those high-quality drones get cheaper and easier to outfit, they’re helping to answer ecological questions that scientists couldn’t even begin to ask before.

Some of those answers will come from the new snot samplers. But researchers have already been able to learn a lot from simple visual drones—building rich profiles of individual whales that would make Herman Melville proud. Last year, scientists from NOAA and the Vancouver Aquarium tracked killer whale pods in the Pacific Northwest with a hexacopter outfitted with a hi-res camera (the same one used at Stellwagen) that allowed them to accurately measure the whales’ length and width. They followed individuals as they frequented a certain patch of ocean, getting a fine-grained peek into the life and times of the pods—pregnant females, frolicking youngsters, and unusually skinny whales at the beginning of the study who had disappeared by the end.

Data from the cameras can tell researchers about more than size. Take something called entanglement history. “Some whales seem to have a knack for getting entangled in fishing gear,” says Wayne Perryman, a cetacean researcher at NOAA’S Southwest Fisheries Science Center who helped develop NOAA’S hexacopter. “Is that animal compromised for the rest of its life, or does it recover and it’s just fine?” With hi-res drone images, scientists can pick out scars on the whales’ backs from nets and past tagging events, and compare the body data of whales that have been netted to those who haven’t.

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AnonTechie writes:

A computer science team at The University of Texas at Austin has found that robots evolve more quickly and efficiently after a virtual mass extinction modeled after real-life disasters such as the one that killed off the dinosaurs. Beyond its implications for artificial intelligence, the research supports the idea that mass extinctions actually speed up evolution by unleashing new creativity in adaptations.

Computer scientists Risto Miikkulainen and Joel Lehman co-authored the study published today in the journal PLOS One, which describes how simulations of mass extinctions promote novel features and abilities in surviving lineages.

"Focused destruction can lead to surprising outcomes," said Miikkulainen, a professor of computer science at UT Austin. "Sometimes you have to develop something that seems objectively worse in order to develop the tools you need to get better."

The original article from Science Daily.

The original source from The University of Texas.

The abstract of the study published in PLOS One.

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"exec" writes in with an article from Vice.com:

So instead of ending up with a malfunctioning killer AI army that tech mavens are horrified about, IBM is betting research money on making its most recent well-known supercomputer, Watson, a fantasy sports manager. You know, the "Jeopardy!" winner, the one that's also going to be a sleuthy doctor's assistant soon.

IBM announced in a statement today that it's partnering up Watson's ecosystem with Edge Up Sports to help fantasy football coaches optimize their teams.

"Successful fantasy owners dedicate several hours per week strategizing for fantasy football. Still, with so much information available, it's difficult to stay current on the latest news and information surrounding players," the statement read.

And it looks like Watson is going to trawl through a lot of real-time updates and tweets to advise fantasy football coaches how they'd like to up their game.

-- submitted from IRC

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Arthur T Knackerbracket fell into this one from ITWorld.com:

Late last week Intel announced its first workstation-grade Xeon CPUs for laptops. The exact details aren't available, nor is a release date, although the details it did release are intriguing.

Xeons have been available for high-end desktops doing work like CAD and other graphic design because they have features a business power user would want, like error correcting code (ECC) memory and the vPro business management features.

The laptop processor, the Xeon E3-1500M v5, is meant for that same market of power users who are on the go or move between locations and need mobility. And while the new Skylake processor will have some advanced features like ECC, there are some other goodies.

The Xeon E3-1500M v5 will include Thunderbolt 3 and USB Type-C ports, which support 10Gbps USB 3.1 Gen 2 transfer speeds. It will also have its own optimized graphics, although Intel did not go into details. The Xeon has never been known as a graphics champ since it runs on servers, but the upcoming Skylake line is said to have very good graphics, so we may see a desktop Xeon with Skylake-level graphics.

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takyon writes:

Tom's Hardware conducted an interview with Palmer Luckey, the founder of Oculus VR. The defining takeaway? Virtual reality needs as much graphics resources as can be thrown at it:

Tom's Hardware: If there was one challenge in VR that you had to overcome that you really wish wasn't an issue, which would it be?

Palmer Luckey: Probably unlimited GPU horsepower. It is one of the issues in VR that cannot be solved at this time. We can make our hardware as good as we want, our optics as sharp as we can, but at the end of the day we are reliant on how many flops the GPU can push, how high a framerate can it push? Right now, to get 90 frames per second [the minimum target framerate for Oculus VR] and very low latencies we need heaps of power, and we need to bump the quality of the graphics way down.

If we had unlimited GPU horsepower in everybody's computer, that will make our lives very much easier. Of course, that's not something we can control, and it's a problem that will be solved in due time.

TH: Isn't it okay to deal with the limited power we have today, because we're still in the stepping stones of VR technology?

PL: It's not just about the graphics being simple. You can have lots of objects in the virtual environment, and it can still cripple the experience. Yes, we are able to make immersive games on VR with simpler graphics on this limited power, but the reality is that our ability to create what we are imagining is being limited by the limited GPU horsepower.

[...] The goal in the long run is not only to sell to people who buy game consoles, but also to people who buy mobile phones. You need to expand so that you can connect hundreds of millions of people to VR. It may not necessarily exist in the form of a phone dropping into a headset, but it will be mobile technologies -- mobile CPUs, mobile graphics cards, etc.

In the future, VR headsets are going to have all the render hardware on board, no longer being hardwired to a PC. A self-contained set of glasses is a whole other level of mainstream.

[More after the Break]

halcyon1234 writes:

Chicago-based "Geek Bar"-- where bartenders dress in labcoats and serve geek-themed drinks-- has been saved from financial ruin by a combination of crowdfunding by patrons, and a sizable personal loan. But The Chicago Reader asks, Geek Bar's fans rescue it from oblivion—but was it worth saving?

It sounds like a feel-good story, something inspired by the kind of movie sometimes screened at the ten-month-old bar. You know, the ones where the scrappy outcasts band together to save their beloved sanctuary from the clutches of evil. But former employees and volunteers now wonder if the bar was worth saving.

Nine and a half months after it first began slinging Cthulhu-themed cocktails, Geek Bar Beta still feels like an experiment, one that hasn't gone according to plan. Former employees say paychecks began bouncing last fall, soon after the bar opened.

The article tells a tale of a business that is obviously loved, but plagued by mismanagement, poor employee relationships, financial woes and an over-reliance on community support and free labor. What value does the "geek" label have, when the underlining business is unsustainable? What extraordinary value does the concept bring that justifies such extraordinary efforts to keep it afloat?

Original Submission

The Mighty Buzzard writes:

Brad Glasgow over at GamePolitics.com did something unique when setting out to cover the gamergate movement, he asked people taking part in it questions rather than only their detractors.

I decided to run an experiment and see first-hand the difficulties one might encounter when covering an online movement. Rather than wait for GamerGate to come to us, I went to them. I joined their very popular Kotaku in Action (KiA) subreddit and interviewed several hundred GamerGate supporters from Tuesday, July 28 through Tuesday, August 4. It is my hope that what I learned will assist journalists with covering GamerGate and any similar movements in the future.

The Experiment

I asked one question on the KiA subreddit every 12 hours. The question was stickied (placed at the top in the most recognizable area) until I posted a new question. The new question was then stickied and they were given an additional 12 hours to submit replies to the old question and vote on their favorite answer. After I asked 7 questions I then asked 7 follow up questions on the final day.

The article was interesting enough but what I found hilarious was when he then tried to do a similar interview with the anti-gamergate types over at Gamer Ghazi, he was quickly banned.

I did experience some hostility from the anti-GamerGate side for covering GamerGate. While I was treated well by the people of GamerGhazi when I tried to speak with them, I was quickly banned by moderators, who said I have spent too much time posting on the GamerGate subreddit.

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mendax writes:

This story seems to almost be out of science fiction (or The Prisoner) but the pictures don't lie. The water people in Los Angeles are so desperate to save what water is left in some reservoirs that they are essentially putting a roof on it by filling the lakes with black plastic balls:

Facing a long-term water crisis, officials concerned with preserving a reservoir in Los Angeles hatched a plan: They would combat four years of drought with 96 million plastic balls.

On Monday, Mayor Eric Garcetti of Los Angeles arrived at the 175-acre Los Angeles Reservoir to release the final installment of the project: 20,000 small black orbs that would float atop the water. [...]

Mr. Garcetti said that the dark balls would help block sunlight and UV rays that promote algae growth, which would help keep the city's drinking water safe. Officials also said the balls would help slow the rate of evaporation, which drains the water supply of about 300 million gallons a year. The balls cost $0.36 each and are part of a $34.5 million initiative to protect the water supply.

This is an ingenious way of reducing evaporation. Perhaps the state's aqueduct system can also be filled with these balls to stop evaporation there.

HughPickens.com also submitted this article just minutes later!

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mendax writes:

The New York Times published a story about a young Kodak engineer's development of the first practical digital camera:

Imagine a world where photography is a slow process that is impossible to master without years of study or apprenticeship. A world without iPhones or Instagram, where one company reigned supreme. Such a world existed in 1973, when Steven Sasson, a young engineer, went to work for Eastman Kodak.

Two years later he invented digital photography and made the first digital camera.

Mr. Sasson, all of 24 years old, invented the process that allows us to make photos with our phones, send images around the world in seconds and share them with millions of people. The same process completely disrupted the industry that was dominated by his Rochester employer and set off a decade of complaints by professional photographers fretting over the ruination of their profession.

The camera he created looked rather odd (there is a picture in the article):

The final result was a Rube Goldberg device with a lens scavenged from a used Super-8 movie camera; a portable digital cassette recorder; 16 nickel cadmium batteries; an analog/digital converter; and several dozen circuits — all wired together on half a dozen circuit boards.

The article points out that Kodak owned the patent for the digital camera and made a fortune from it until it expired in 2007. Three years later Kodak itself expired, filing bankruptcy because it failed to properly utilize the technology it invented.

It may be an error to say that Mr. Sasson invented digital photography. Wasn't NASA doing it with its Mariner and Pioneer space probes?

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AnonTechie writes in with an article from ArsTechnica:

When Der Spiegel and Jacob Appelbaum published leaked pages of the National Security Agency's ANT Catalog—the collection of tools and software created for NSA's Tailored Access Operations (TAO) division—it triggered shock, awe, and a range of other emotions around the world. Among some hardware hackers and security researchers, it triggered something else, too—a desire to replicate the capabilities of TAO's toolbox to conduct research on how the same approaches might be used by other adversaries.

In less than 18 months since the catalog's leak, the NSA Playset project has done just that. The collection boasts over a dozen devices that put the power of the NSA's TAO into the hands of researchers. Project creator Michael Ossmann—a security researcher, radio frequency hardware engineer, and founder of Great Scott Gadgets—detailed the tools at a presentation during the Black Hat conference in Las Vegas last week, and he talked with Ars more about it this past weekend at DEF CON 23.

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An Anonymous Coward writes:

Oracle's Chief Security Officer, Mary Ann Davidson, took to her blog to demand that users stop hunting for bugs in Oracle's software, because, among other things, it violates the user license.

The blog entry got deleted quickly, but is archived here:

Now is a good time to reiterate that I'm not beating people up over this merely because of the license agreement. More like, "I do not need you to analyze the code since we already do that, it's our job to do that, we are pretty good at it, we can – unlike a third party or a tool – actually analyze the code to determine what's happening and at any rate most of these tools have a close to 100% false positive rate so please do not waste our time on reporting little green men in our code." I am not running away from our responsibilities to customers, merely trying to avoid a painful, annoying, and mutually-time wasting exercise.

Please, Oracle users, don't worry your little heads - just stop violating the license agreement.

takyon: #oraclefanfic on Twitter

And an update from Ars:

Oracle Executive Vice President and Chief Corporate Architect Edward Screven made a statement distributed by e-mail to the press on the post:

The security of our products and services has always been critically important to Oracle. Oracle has a robust program of product security assurance and works with third party researchers and customers to jointly ensure that applications built with Oracle technology are secure. We removed the post as it does not reflect our beliefs or our relationship with our customers.

Just how Oracle's chief security officer fell out of alignment with Oracle's core beliefs and managed to spread her heretic thoughts on customers was not addressed.

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halcyon1234 writes:

Blip.TV is about a week away from going offline for good [August 20], and taking all its content with it. If you were planning on archiving any videos, better get started!

Note: if there is a content creator you want to archive, you can get a convenient list of their videos: http://blip.tv/CHANNELNAME?skin=rss&page=1 It will show each episode, along with several direct download links to the video files of various quality. A browser plug-in like DownloadThemAll! will help. Just replace page= with the next page number until you reach the end of the archive.

Blip.TV is (or more accurately was) a curated video hosting service. Content creators were signed to the service, and paid a portion of the ad revenue generated by their videos. Blip was recently purchased by Maker Studios, which is owned by Disney. Creators with content on Blip have been scrambling to re-host their videos elsewhere, often running face-first into Youtube's ContentID system.

Although some creators have the option of transitioning their Blip account into a Maker account, they are well warned to closely read the egregious but not unsurprising for a Disney company terms of service regarding ownership and user of their content:

18. You grant the following license with respect to any and all Content you post or submit to this Site: you hereby expressly grant to Maker a royalty-free, perpetual, non-exclusive, irrevocable right and license to use, reproduce, adapt, modify, publish, edit, translate, perform, transmit, sell, exploit, sublicense or otherwise distribute and display the Content and any ideas, concepts, know-how or techniques contained therein for any reason and in any manner it chooses, alone or as a part of other works, in any form, medium or technology now known or later developed, without restriction and without compensation of any kind to you, and you waive all moral rights in all such Content. For informational purposes, we note that the uses to which we may put the information or Content you provide include, but are not limited to, reproduction and use in any and all media whether now known or hereafter devised; publication of the Content or a derivative thereof for promotional, marketing and advertising purposes, and use in the development and manufacture of products.

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