SoylentNews

jbWolf writes:

The Guardian and National Geographic claim that the Stonehenge stones may have been quarried (and erected) in Wales 500 years before they were put up in Wiltshire.

It has long been known that the bluestones that form Stonehenge's inner horseshoe came from the Preseli hills in Pembrokeshire, around 140 miles from Salisbury Plain. Now archaeologists have discovered a series of recesses in the rocky outcrops of Carn Goedog and Craig Rhos-y-felin, to the north of those hills, that match Stonehenge's bluestones in size and shape. They have also found similar stones that the prehistoric builders extracted but left behind, and "a loading bay" from where the huge stones could be dragged away. Carbonised hazelnut shells and charcoal from the quarry workers' campfires have been radiocarbon-dated to reveal when the stones would have been extracted.

[...] The dating evidence suggests that Stonehenge could be older than previously thought, Parker Pearson said. "But we think it's more likely that they were building their own monument [in Wales], that somewhere near the quarries there is the first Stonehenge and that what we're seeing at Stonehenge is a second-hand monument."

takyon: Party Like It's 2500 B.C.: Feasts At Stonehenge Were Epic Barbecues (DOI: 10.15184/aqy.2015.110)

Original Submission

takyon writes:

The UK-commissioned Review on Antimicrobial Resistance [PDF] has been released, and it contains findings and recommendations relating to antibiotic use and drug-resistant infections. The review recommends dramatically cutting the amount of antibiotics used in livestock:

The Review on Antimicrobial Resistance called for new targets on the amount of antibiotics used. The great threat of excessive antibiotics use in agriculture was highlighted in China last month. Scientists warned the world was on the cusp of the "post-antibiotic era" after discovering bacteria resistant to the antibiotic colistin - the medication used when all others have failed.

In some cases, antibiotics are used in agriculture to treat infections - but most are used prophylactically in healthy animals to prevent infection or, controversially, as a way of boosting weight gain. Using antibiotics as growth promoters was banned in the EU in 2006. Such uses are more common in intensive farming conditions.

Based on current rates, the global consumption of antibiotics is expected to increase by 67% by 2030. In the US alone, every year, 3,400 tonnes of antibiotics are used on patients, while 8,900 tonnes are used on animals. The economist who led the review, Jim O'Neill, said such figures were simply "staggering" and 10 million people would die each year from drug-resistant infections by 2050.

He said a reasonable target for agricultural antibiotic use would be 50mg for every 1kg of livestock - a level already achieved by one of the world's biggest pork exporters, Denmark. The UK uses just over 50mg/kg, the US uses nearly 200mg/kg, while Cyprus uses more than 400mg/kg.

Mr O'Neill told the BBC: "I'm sure many farmers will immediately think, 'Well, if we have to do this, that means the price goes up and I'll go out of business'. "The Danish example shows that, after a very initial transition cost, actually over the long term prices weren't affected and Denmark has continued to maintain its market share."

The report also warns of "superbugs" in under-cooked meat.

Editors Note: A link shortner had to be used on the first link due to a bug in the URL processor on the site that removes the %20 in hyperlinks.
The tinyurl used points to this link:
http://amr-review.org/sites/default/files/Antimicrobials%20in%20agriculture%20and%20the%20environment%20-%20Reducing%20unnecessary%20use%20and%20waste.pdf

Original Submission

frojack writes:

Dinosauromorphs, are a broad group of creatures that lived in parts of the ancient supercontinent Pangaea that are now South America and southern Africa. That group includes all dinosaurs but also includes their earlier predecessors and their subsequent kin.

But it turns out that those fossils aren't well-dated.

Unearthed from rocks in northwestern Argentina, fossil dinosauromorphs were previously thought to have lived anywhere between 237 million and 247 million years ago, a 10 million year period.

But uranium-lead dating, in which researchers estimate the age of a rock by comparing its concentrations of radioactive uranium and the lead it decays into, tells a different story.

A younger volcanic deposit lying in the rock above these fossils includes zircons, tiny bits of silicate mineral that often contain trace amounts of uranium. Those zircons crystallized about 234 million years ago.

And older sediments below the fossils contain zircons that crystallized about 236 million years ago.

So, not only all dinosaurs, but many of their predecessors, must have evolved between those two dates, a short-ish two million year period.

Story carried by ScienceNews, the original study published by the National Academy of Sciences.

Original Submission

Nethack 3.6 Released!

Valkor and damnbunni both wrote in:

After a 10+ year hiatus, the NetHack DevTeam is happy to announce the release of NetHack 3.6, a combination of the old and the new.

Unlike previous releases, which focused on the general game fixes, this release consists of a series of foundational changes in the team, underlying infrastructure and changes to the approach to game development.

Those of you expecting a huge raft of new features will probably be disappointed. Although we have included a number of new features, the focus of this release was to get the foundation established so that we can build on it going forward.

The update does break compatibility with old save games and bones files due to the extensive changes.

Release Notes

NetHack 3.6.0 Released

takyon writes:

NetHack 3.6.0 has been released, incorporating changes from over a decade of patches and forks, as well as adding numerous Terry Pratchett tributes. NetHack is a single-player roguelike game originally released in 1987. From the release notes:

This summer we had a bit of a reality check due to the outage at SourceForge which has driven some internal discussion about future direction concerning hosting and has unfortunately delayed the release - more to come on this.

[...] A number of significant changes were derived from UnNetHack, NetHack 4 and other variants, such as: Roderick Schertler's pickup_thrown patch; Extensions of Malcolm Ryan's Statue Glyphs patch for tty and tiles; Extensions of the Paranoid_Quit patch; Extensions of the Dungeon Overview; Aardvark Joe's Extended Logfile; Michael Deutschmann's use_darkgray patch; Clive Crous' dark_room patch; Jeroen Demeyer and Jukka Lahtinen sortloot patch; Stefano Busti's Auto open doors patch.

There are also a number of clean-up activities that were undertaken with respect to code hygiene and removal of conditional build code in order to streamline the code. Most of these were restrictions introduced years ago in order to allow the run time size of the binary to fit on platforms with smaller memory footprints. As most, if not all of those platforms are no longer in use, the decision was made to simplify and drop support for some of the platforms that the 3.4.x versions would have run on. That doesn't mean that NetHack still can't run on some *really* old hardware :-) The README file in the top level directory of the NetHack source tree has a complete list of systems we know NetHack 3.6 runs on and ones that previous versions did run on but have not been verified. We'd be very interested if anyone can provide "proof of life" on any of these historical OS versions.

A number of treasured NetHack community patches, or our variations of them, have been rolled into the base NetHack source tree in this version, meaning that they're no longer optional, including: menucolors; pickup thrown; statue glyphs; dungeon overview; sortloot.

Downloads here.

Original Submission #1  Original Submission #2  Original Submission #3 

takyon writes:

TorrentFreak reports on this story of real losses for the entertainment industry:

In the early 2000s, international and Danish entertainment industry groups came together to tackle piracy of movies, music and other media.

The resulting Antipiratgruppen (now RettighedsAlliancen / Rights Alliance) needed legal representation and local lawfirm Johan Schlüter was hired for the job, representing groups including the MPAA.

In the years that followed Johan Schlüter became involved in dozens of anti-piracy cases but after continually accusing pirates of being thieves, eventually the tables began to turn. Earlier this year it was reported that an investigation into the company's accounts had uncovered financial irregularities amounting to millions of dollars.

Carried out by U.S. auditing giant Deloitte, the investigation found that while Johan Schlüter had been collecting rights revenues on behalf of several movie and TV industry groups, the lawfirm hadn't been handing them all over. The black hole was thought be to around $15m.

Now, however, fresh leaks from the confidential study have revealed the true extent of the shortfall. According to data obtained by Finans.dk, Johan Schlüter failed to hand over around $25m.

Original Submission

HughPickens.com writes:

Dave Phillipps has an interesting article in The New York Times about B-52's and why the Air Force's largest bomber, now in its 60th year of active service and scheduled to fly until 2040, are not retiring anytime soon. "Many of our B-52 bombers are now older than the pilots who fly them," said Ronald Reagan in 1980. Today, there is a B-52 pilot whose father and grandfather flew the plane.

Originally slated for retirement generations ago, the B.U.F.F. — a colorful acronym that the Air Force euphemistically paraphrases as Big Ugly Fat Fellow - continues to be deployed in conflict after conflict. It dropped the first hydrogen bomb in the Bikini Islands in 1956, and laser-guided bombs in Afghanistan in 2006. It has outlived its replacement. And its replacement's replacement. And its replacement's replacement's replacement. The unexpectedly long career is due in part to a rugged design that has allowed the B-52 to go nearly anywhere and drop nearly anything the Pentagon desires, including both atomic bombs and leaflets. But it is also due to the decidedly underwhelming jets put forth to take its place. The $283 million B-1B Lancer first rolled off the assembly line in 1988 with a state-of-the-art radar-jamming system that jammed its own radar. The $2 billion B-2 Spirit, introduced a decade later, had stealth technology so delicate that it could not go into the rain. "There have been a series of attempts to build a better intercontinental bomber, and they have consistently failed," says Owen Coté. "Turns out whenever we try to improve on the B-52, we run into problems, so we still have the B-52."

The usefulness of the large bomber — and bombers in general — has come under question in the modern era of insurgent wars and stateless armies. In the Persian Gulf war, Kosovo, Afghanistan and the Iraq war, the lumbering jets, well-established as a symbol of death and destruction, demoralized enemy ground troops by first dropping tons of leaflets with messages like "flee and live, or stay and die," then returning the next day with tons of explosives. In recent years, it has flown what the Air Force calls "assurance and deterrence" missions near North Korea and Russia. Two B-52 strategic bombers recently flew defiantly near artificial Chinese-built islands in the South China Sea and were contacted by Chinese ground controllers but continued their mission undeterred. "The B.U.F.F. is like the rook in a chess game," says Maj. Mark Burleys. "Just by how you position it on the board, it changes the posture of your adversary."

Original Submission

takyon writes:

The popular video streaming site DailyMotion has been hit by a malvertising attack. Malwarebytes explains:

We have been tracking an attack via .eu sites for several days but were missing the final payload. However, this changed when we managed to reproduce a live infection via an ad call coming from popular video streaming site DailyMotion, ranked among Alexa's top 100 sites.

This malversiting incident happened via real-time bidding (RTB) within the WWWPromoter marketplace. A decoy ad (pictured below) from a rogue advertiser initiates a series of redirections to .eu sites and ultimately loads the Angler exploit kit.

The bogus advertiser is using a combination of SSL encryption, IP blacklisting and JavaScript obfuscation and only displays the malicious payload once per (genuine) victim. In addition, Angler EK also fingerprints potential victims before launching its exploits to ensure the user is not a security researcher, honeypot or web crawler.

[...] The incident was resolved very rapidly once the proper contacts were made and the problem isolated. For this, we would like to them[sic] all parties involved in taking such prompt action, therefore limiting the potential damage to innocent users.

This particular malvertising attack is one of a few campaigns we have been tracking which is much more sophisticated than the average incidents we encounter daily. We can say that lately threat actors have really stepped up their game in terms of being very stealthy and making a particular ad call look benign when reproduced in a lab environment. Indeed, the problem comes when we suspect foul play but can't prove it with a live infection. It is difficult to convince ad networks to take action, when on the surface there's nothing wrong with a particular advertiser.

Here's some more information about the Angler exploit kit.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

A hacker named Buba dumped customer details obtained from a United Arab Emirates bank after the bank refused to pay a $3 million bitcoin ransom. The hacker has also contacted some of the bank's customers individually:

A hacker who broke into a large bank in the United Arab Emirates made good on his threat to release customer data after the bank refused to pay a bitcoin ransom worth about $3 million. The hacker, who calls himself Hacker Buba, breached the network of a bank in Sharjah last month identified as Invest Bank by The Daily Dot, and began releasing customer account and transaction records via Twitter.

[...] The news was first reported by the Dubai-based newspaper Xpress . According to the journalist, the hacker offered to give him 5 percent of the paid ransom for his cooperation, though it's unclear what kind of cooperation he was seeking from the reporter. He reportedly told the journalist that he had data from other banks as well. "I give u 5 % from total I get. Have many banks from UAE, Qater, ksa and etc. Will work together," he reportedly wrote in a direct message to the reporter via Twitter.

The hacker reportedly used the picture of an Invest Bank employee for his Twitter avatar to post the account statements of government officials and UAE firms on November 18. Although Twitter closed the account, the hacker opened a new one and released the account statements of some 500 bank customers.

He also sent text messages and emails to bank customers, using contact details gleaned from their bank account records, and threatening to release their records online unless they or the bank paid him a ransom.

More at SC Magazine and The Register.

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

Writing in the August edition of Environmental Science and Technology Letters, Jason Nolan and Karrie A. Weber of the University of Nebraska report unsafe levels of uranium in groundwater from California's San Joaquin Valley and from the Ogallala Aquifer underlying Texas, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Colorado, Kansas, Wyoming and South Dakota.

In Natural Uranium Contamination in Major U.S. Aquifers Linked to Nitrate they note a correlation between concentrations of uranium and nitrate ions in the groundwater samples they tested. They theorize that the nitrate, a major component of fertilizer, can oxidize uranium from U(IV) to U(VI), making it water-soluble. They found that in the San Joaquin Valley, uranium reached as much as 180 times the maximum contaminant level (MCL) set by the Environmental Protection Agency, and nitrate was as much as 34 times the MCL. Samples from the Ogallala Aquifer had as much as 89 times the MCL of uranium and 189 times the MCL of nitrate.

Water from these aquifers is used for drinking and for irrigation. Soluble uranium is bioaccumulated by certain food crops; uranium in the human body can result in cancer and kidney damage.

The Associated Press also reported on the story.

Original Submission

stormwyrm writes:

In the most recent issue of Nature Neuroscience , David Poeppel and his colleagues have published a paper (non-paywalled PDF) detailing research that supports Noam Chomsky's hypothesis that we possess an "internal grammar" that allows us to comprehend even nonsensical phrases. This hypothesis is rejected by most neuroscientists and psychologists, who contend that comprehension of language arises rather from the brain making statistical inferences based on words and sound cues.
From phys.org's report on the research:

"One of the foundational elements of Chomsky's work is that we have a grammar in our head, which underlies our processing of language," explains David Poeppel, the study's senior researcher and a professor in New York University's Department of Psychology. "Our neurophysiological findings support this theory: we make sense of strings of words because our brains combine words into constituents in a hierarchical manner—a process that reflects an 'internal grammar' mechanism."

...the researchers explored whether and how linguistic units are represented in the brain during speech comprehension.

To do so, Poeppel, who is also director of the Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics in Frankfurt, and his colleagues conducted a series of experiments using magnetoencephalography (MEG), which allows measurements of the tiny magnetic fields generated by brain activity, and electrocorticography (ECoG), a clinical technique used to measure brain activity in patients being monitored for neurosurgery.

...Their results showed that the subjects' brains distinctly tracked three components of the phrases they heard, reflecting a hierarchy in our neural processing of linguistic structures: words, phrases, and then sentences—at the same time.

"Because we went to great lengths to design experimental conditions that control for statistical or sound cue contributions to processing, our findings show that we must use the grammar in our head," explains Poeppel. "Our brains lock onto every word before working to comprehend phrases and sentences. The dynamics reveal that we undergo a grammar-based construction in the processing of language."

This is a controversial conclusion from the perspective of current research, the researchers note, because the notion of abstract, hierarchical, grammar-based structure building is rather unpopular.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

KurzweilAI.net reports on a potential nanoparticle-based treatment for cancer:

Researchers at The Ohio State University Comprehensive Cancer Center have developed nanoparticles that swell and burst when exposed to near-infrared laser light.

These "nanobombs" may be able to kill cancer cells outright, or at least stall their growth — overcoming a biological barrier that has blocked development of drug agents that attempt to alter cancer-cell gene expression (conversion of genes to proteins). These kinds of drug agents are generally forms of RNA (ribonucleic acid), and are notoriously difficult to use as drugs for two main reasons:

• They are quickly degraded when free in the bloodstream.
• When ordinary nanoparticles are taken up by cancer cells, the cancer cells often enclose them in small compartments called endosomes, preventing the drug molecules from reaching their target, and degrading them.

In this new study, published in the journal Advanced Materials, the researchers packaged nanoparticles with the RNA agent (drug) and ammonium bicarbonate, causing the nanoparticles to swell (as it does in baking bread) three times or more in size when exposed to the heat generated by near-infrared laser light. That causes the endosomes to burst, dispersing the therapeutic RNA drug into the cell.

[...] Near-infrared light can penetrate tissue to a depth of one centimeter or more, depending on laser-light wavelength and power (see "'Golden window' wavelength range for optimal deep-brain near-infrared imaging determined"). For deeper tumors, the light would be delivered using minimally invasive surgery.

A Near-Infrared Laser-Activated "Nanobomb" for Breaking the Barriers to MicroRNA Delivery [abstract]

Original Submission

takyon writes:

A UK government report (board minutes from the Health & Social Care Information Centre) says that the National Health Service has £5 billion worth of Information Technology projects at high risk of failure:

The ratings are based on gateway reports assessing the risk of four IT projects this year. All are related as "red" or "amber/red" meaning successful delivery is either impossible or extremely unlikely. Those projects include the remaining electronic health records contracts with BT and CSC, due to end in 2015 and 2016.

According to the HSCIC report, the £2.3bn CSC Local Service Provider (LSP) programme has now been flagged as "red", up from "amber/red" when the Major Projects Authority last released its rating for September 2014. Both programmes were originally started in 2003/2004 and have had an extremely troubled history.

Other high-rated projects on the list included the £168m NHSmail2 programme, to provide secure email across the NHS, which has slipped from "amber" to "amber/red".

NHSmail2 is an upgrade to the NHS's Microsoft Exchange based email system. Computer Sciences Corporation (CSC) and BT Health London have managed IT services for different divisions of England (CSC manages the North, Midlands & Eastern cluster, BT manages the London cluster).

Previously: UK National Health Service Dumps Oracle For FOSS NoSQL

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Google's chairman Eric Schmidt has written an op-ed to The New York Times calling for tools to disrupt speech on social media:

Technology companies should work on tools to disrupt terrorism - such as creating a hate speech "spell-checker" - Google's chairman Eric Schmidt has said. Writing in The New York Times, Mr Schmidt said using technology to automatically filter-out extremist material would "de-escalate tensions on social media" and "remove videos before they spread".

His essay comes as presidential hopeful Hillary Clinton again called on Silicon Valley to help tackle terrorism, specifically seeking tools to combat the so-called Islamic State. "We need to put the great disrupters at work at disrupting ISIS," she said during a speech in Washington DC.

From the NYT editorial:

In Myanmar, connectivity fans the flames of violence against the Rohingya, the minority Muslim population. In Russia, farms of online trolls systematically harass democratic voices and spread false information on the Internet and on social media. And in the Middle East, terrorists use social media to recruit new members. In particular, the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria has harnessed social media to appeal to disaffected young people, giving them a sense of belonging and direction that they are not getting anywhere else. The militants' propaganda videos are high on style and production value. They're slick and marketable. In short, they are deluding some people to believe that living a life fueled by hatred and violence is actually ... cool.

This is where our own relationship with the Internet, and with technology, must be examined more closely. The Internet is not just a series of tubes transmitting information from place to place, terminal to terminal, without regard for those typing on their keyboards or reading on their screens. The people who use any technology are the ones who need to define its role in society. Technology doesn't work on its own, after all. It's just a tool. We are the ones who harness its power.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Airbnb, a site for listing and finding rent lodging, has raised $1.5 billion, according to an SEC filing:

Back in June, the WSJ reported that Airbnb had raised a massive $1.5 billion round of funding. Today, the company confirmed those reports by way of an SEC filing.

The total offering and sold amount is $1,499,937,904.00 for those keeping score.

Airbnb's valuation is now at or above $25 billion, which is just staggering. It sounds like Airbnb is going to focus on strengthening itself overseas before even thinking about going public.

The company is also busy fighting fires here in the States, as cities have tried to put a cramp in their style with not much success.

Original Submission

"exec" writes:

'Specially crafted username' opens the keys to the kingdom of FAIL:

Designated CVE-2015-8024, the bug covers "McAfee Enterprise Security Manager (ESM), Enterprise Security Manager/Log Manager (ESMLM), and Enterprise Security Manager/Receiver (ESMREC) 9.3.x before 9.3.2MR19, 9.4.x before 9.4.2MR9, and 9.5.x before 9.5.0MR8, when configured to use Active Directory or LDAP authentication sources, allow remote attackers to bypass authentication by logging in with the username 'NGCP|NGCP|NGCP;' and any password", the advisory states.

So, you install a security product and that provides an open backdoor into your systems?

Original Submission