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MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for takyon

TED Fellow Keolu Fox has been describing his hopes to include indigenous groups in future gene testing.

The Human Genome Project, which set out to identify and map all of the genes in a human body was completed in 2003 and since then there has been an explosion in the way medicine has used genetic sequencing to help treat and identify diseases.

"I started to study those things and I noticed some staggering trends. 96% of people who have their genes sequenced are of European ancestry," said Mr Fox.

"That means that the future of medicine, moving towards using genome sequencing as a tool for prediction, prevention and personalisation of disease and treatments is not going to include minority people. You begin to set the scene for social stratification, and the gap in health disparities will widen."

Source: http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-35491835

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Phoenix666 writes:

So what would happen if there were [no mosquitoes]? Would anyone or anything miss them? Nature put this question to scientists who explore aspects of mosquito biology and ecology, and unearthed some surprising answers.

There are 3,500 named species of mosquito, of which only a couple of hundred bite or bother humans. They live on almost every continent and habitat, and serve important functions in numerous ecosystems. "Mosquitoes have been on Earth for more than 100 million years," says Murphy, "and they have co-evolved with so many species along the way." Wiping out a species of mosquito could leave a predator without prey, or a plant without a pollinator. And exploring a world without mosquitoes is more than an exercise in imagination: intense efforts are under way to develop methods that might rid the world of the most pernicious, disease-carrying species (see 'War against the winged').

Yet in many cases, scientists acknowledge that the ecological scar left by a missing mosquito would heal quickly as the niche was filled by other organisms. Life would continue as before — or even better. When it comes to the major disease vectors, "it's difficult to see what the downside would be to removal, except for collateral damage", says insect ecologist Steven Juliano, of Illinois State University in Normal. A world without mosquitoes would be "more secure for us", says medical entomologist Carlos Brisola Marcondes from the Federal University of Santa Catarina in Brazil. "The elimination of Anopheles would be very significant for mankind."

A world without mosquitoes. What a dream!

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Arthur T. Knackerbracket writes:

Hollywood hospital hit with ransomware: Hackers demand $3.6 million as ransom:

No matter where you work, you don't want to be told there is an "internal emergency" and you can't use the computers, but that is precisely the situation at a Hollywood hospital which is a ransomware victim. The attacker demanded an exorbitant 9,000 bitcoin, which is roughly 3.6 million dollars, to unlock the computers.

A doctor who wished to remain anonymous told NBC Los Angeles the computer system has been locked up for over a week and the staff was "unable to pull up any patient records." 911 patients who were not were diverted to other emergency rooms had to register the old-school way – on paper – the same goes for charting patients' medical records.

Hospital departments have been forced to communicate via "jammed fax lines" and over the phone, added the unnamed staff doctor. [...] one hospital tech said Radiation Oncology has been forbidden to turn on its computers and cannot treat patients.

A "full computer shutdown" means the staff can forget about using email and patients can forget about picking up x-rays, CT scans, lab work or other digital records on site; one frustrated woman told NBC the hospital told her it "was hacked," while other patients are given no explanation as to the long delays in receiving care. The inability to access patient records was dubbed a "very dangerous" situation.

[...] Besides the FBI, the LAPD and a cyber forensic team are also investigating the ransomware attack.

[...] After analyzing cybersecurity and online privacy trends, the Online Trust Alliance (OTA) reported that cybercriminals are cherry-picking ransomware victims such as businesses with valuable data. Ransom demands are changing from "opportunistic extortion to being market-based;" OTA Executive Director Craig Spiezle explained, "Much like surge pricing for taxis, cybercriminals now target and calculate their ransomware pricing based on company size, market value and much more."

Ransomware demands are not new, but one at this scale boggles the mind. How many Soylentils work at places that have plans in place to deal with this should it occur? What, if anything, can reasonably be done to protect against it?

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ReactOS is a free and open source implementation of the Windows NT architecture, which intends to provide support for existing applications and drivers, outside of the control of Microsoft. The release of ReactOS 0.4 brings improved file system support, including native, out-of-the-box support for ext2, ext3, and ext4, as well as read-only support for NTFS. Additionally, the bundled version of UniATA was updated to add better support for SATA and PATA devices. Support was generally improved for third-party device drivers, making it substantially easier to install and use real hardware, as opposed to just virtual machines like VirtualBox.

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takyon writes:

Astronomers have measured gases in the atmosphere of a "super-Earth" exoplanet, 55 Cancri e:

For the first time, astronomers have managed a direct measurement of the gases present on a "super-Earth" planet orbiting an alien star. They found evidence for hydrogen and helium in its atmosphere, but no water. Called 55 Cancri e, the world is twice the size of Earth and eight times the mass - but orbits unusually close to its host star, with an 18-hour year and surface temperatures above 2,000C. The UK team published their findings in the Astrophysical Journal.

"This is a very exciting result because it's the first time that we have been able to find the spectral fingerprints that show the gases present in the atmosphere of a super-Earth," said Angelos Tsiaras, a PhD student at University College London and the first author of the paper. "Our analysis of 55 Cancri e's atmosphere suggests that the planet has managed to cling on to a significant amount of hydrogen and helium from the nebula from which it formed."

55 Cancri e is at least 48% as massive as Neptune. The exoplanet is about 40 light years away from Earth.

Detection of an atmosphere around the super-Earth 55 Cancri e

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MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for takyon

A therapy that retrains the body's immune system to fight cancer has provoked excitement after more than 90% of terminally ill patients entered remission.

In the trial, cells from the immune system called killer t-cells were taken out of dozens of patients. The cells normally act like bombs destroying infected tissue.

The researchers genetically modified the t-cells to engineer a new targeting mechanism - with the technical name of chimeric antigen receptors - to target acute lymphoblastic leukaemia.

Prof Riddell told the BBC: "Essentially what this process does is, it genetically reprograms the T-cell to seek out and recognise and destroy the patient's tumour cells.

"[The patients] were really at the end of the line in terms of treatment options and yet a single dose of this therapy put more than ninety percent of these patients in complete remission where we can't detect any of these leukaemia cells."

Also mentioned in TFA is that there are two deaths tied to this experimental therapy due to "an extreme immune response".

Source: http://www.bbc.com/news/health-35586834

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takyon writes:

A recently rediscovered piece of music by Mozart and Antonio Salieri has been performed for an audience at the Czech Museum of Music:

A piece of Mozart music considered lost for more than 200 years has been performed for the first time since being rediscovered. It was co-written by him and Antonio Salieri, usually considered a rival, as well as an unknown composer, Cornetti.

The four-minute cantata was found in the archives of the Czech Museum of Music in November 2015 and played on harpsichord for an audience on Tuesday. A museum spokesperson, Sarka Sockalova, said it was "a really valuable work". The score, written in 1785, was acquired by the museum in a collection of material in the mid-20th century but its composers were identified in a code that has only recently been deciphered.

[...] The cantata's name, "Per la ricuperata salute di Ophelia", translates into English as "For the recovered health of Ophelia". It was written to celebrate soprano Nancy Storace's recovery after an illness. The text to the piece was written by a Viennese court poet called Lorenzo Da Ponte, who often worked with Salieri. Mrs Leisinger said the piece is "not great" but "really sheds new light on Mozart's daily life as an opera composer". "It is clearly the original piece and there is no reason to doubt it is genuine. "We don't know when any other piece by Mozart is discovered, it could be soon but it could also be after another 100 years." Several Mozart pieces have been re-discovered in recent years, several of them thought to have been written when he was a young boy.

Also at The New York Times .

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Judge Orders Apple to Unlock iPhone Belonging to San Bernardino Shooter

takyon writes:

Apple has been ordered to assist in the unlocking of an iPhone belonging to one of the San Bernardino shooters. This may require updating the firmware to bypass restrictions on PIN unlock attempts:

Apple must assist the FBI in unlocking the passcode-protected encrypted iPhone belonging to one of the San Bernardino shooters in California. US magistrate Sheri Pym says Cupertino must supply software that prevents the phone from automatically annihilating its user data when too many password attempts have been made.

The smartphone belonged to Syed Farook, who with his wife Tashfeen Malik shot and killed 14 coworkers on December 2. The couple died in a gun battle with police soon after. Cops have been unable to access Syed's iPhone 5C because they do not know the correct PIN, and will now gain the assistance of Apple, as ordered by Judge Pym [PDF] on Tuesday.

iOS 8 and above encrypts data on devices, requiring a four to six-digit PIN to unlock. After the first few wrong guesses, iOS waits a few minutes between accepting further PIN entry attempts, escalating to an hour's delay after the ninth failed login.

[...] Judge Pym wants Apple to come up with some magic software – perhaps a signed firmware update or something else loaded during boot-up – that will allow the FBI to safely brute-force the PIN entry without the device self-destructing. This code must only work on Farook's phone, identified by its serial numbers, and no other handset. The code must only be run on government or Apple property, and must not slow down the brute-forcing process.

Apple has five days to appeal or demonstrate that it cannot comply with the order. It is crucial to note that the central district court of California has not instructed Apple to crack its encryption – instead it wants Apple to provide a tool to effectively bypass the unlocking mechanism. "It's technically possible for Apple to hack a device's PIN, wipe, and other functions. Question is can they be legally forced to hack," said iOS security expert Jonathan Ździarski.

takyon writes:

TorrentFreak and the BBC report that Kanye West's latest album, The Life of Pablo, has been downloaded over BitTorrent at least 500,000 times due to limited availability and problems with the Tidal platform:

In a surprise move West released his album exclusively on Tidal and his personal website. This limited availability angered many fans who refused to sign up for an expensive monthly subscription. And even those who signed up for Tidal had issues getting their hands on the album. Tidal's support desk has been flooded with complaints from people who failed to receive a copy due to issues with the service's payment system.

Then, a few hours ago, Kanye West fueled the controversy by claiming that his latest album will never be for sale. "My album will never never never be on Apple. And it will never be for sale... You can only get it on Tidal," he wrote.

[...] TorrentFreak has been keeping a close eye on the popularity of the album on BitTorrent and after the first day an estimated 500,000 people have already grabbed a copy. The album is currently leading The Pirate Bay's list of most shared music torrents by a landslide. At the time of writing close to 10,000 people were sharing a copy of the most popular torrent simultaneously, something we haven't seen with a music release before. Aside from torrent sites, the album is also being widely distributed on various direct download services and hosting sites, increasing the overall piracy numbers even further.

[...] Thus far Kanye hasn't commented on the piracy issue, but the RIAA is working hard to take links to pirated content down. Many of the torrents that were uploaded yesterday have been removed, but these are soon replaced by new ones.

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takyon writes:

China has upped the ante by placing missile launchers on Woody Island in the South China Sea:

China has placed surface-to-air missile equipment on one of the disputed islands in the South China Sea, newly published satellite images appear to show.

Tensions in the region could rise after two batteries of eight missile launchers and a radar system were deployed to Woody Island in the past week, Fox News reported, citing images taken by the private company ImageSat International. An image dated 14 February showed the presence of the equipment, whereas the same area looked to be empty in an image dated 3 February.

Fox News cited a US official official as saying the images appeared to show the HQ-9 air defence system, which had a range of about 125 miles (200km) and could therefore threaten any nearby planes. Reuters news agency also reported that it had received confirmation of 'an apparent deployment' by China.

[...] A US navy destroyer sailed close to the disputed Paracel Island chain, which includes Woody Island, in a "freedom of navigation" exercise late last month. China, Taiwan and Vietnam have competing claims in the area and the US has objected to any "militarising" of the islands. China branded that action as "highly dangerous and irresponsible" and accused the US of being "the biggest cause of militarisation in the South China Sea".

Previously:
Chinese Weaponry Spotted on Artificial Islands
U.S. Spy Plane Deploys to Singapore Amid South China Sea Tensions

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takyon writes:

The scarcity of iron meteorites found in Antarctica may be due to the rocks being heated by the Sun and buried beneath the surface of the ice:

New research suggests there could be a layer of iron-rich meteorites hidden just under the Antarctic ice. The churning of glaciers spews many space rocks out on to the surface in Antarctica, but compared to elsewhere on Earth, few of them are made of iron. Based on modelling and lab experiments, scientists say the missing metallic rocks might be burying themselves, by melting the ice as sunlight heats them.

To prove their idea, the team now wants to look for the rocks themselves. "The study is proposing a hypothesis - these samples should be there. We just have to go and locate them," said Dr Katherine Joy from the University of Manchester, a co-author of the paper published in Nature Communications [DOI: 10.1038/ncomms10679].

Antarctica is known by meteorite specialists as a fruitful hunting ground, because the rocks are collected from their landing sites by glacial flows and transported to concentrated dumping-grounds. [...] Among this Antarctic haul, however, researchers have noticed that iron-rich meteorites - whether partly or wholly made of the metal - are surprisingly scarce, compared to the percentage collected in other places around the world. Dr Joy and her colleagues think they may have discovered why.

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takyon writes:

After 18 months of work, the Vulkan 1.0 graphics specification has been released:

This is a little different from the Khronos Group's past launches, however, in that this time around there will be more than a specification PDF available – there are drivers, support documentation and a free SDK, and there is even a game that you can download with a Vulkan backend. There is a multitude of companies comprising the Khronos Group, and those in the working group for Vulkan include not only AMD, Nvidia, and Intel, but game engine makers and even Oculus VR.

[...] Unlike DirectX 12, Vulkan is completely open-source and royalty-free. Anyone who wants to use the code or adjust the code to fit their personal needs is free to do so, be that for private or commercial purposes. [...] DirectX 12 is Microsoft's graphics API, and it works only on Windows 10. Metal is an API made by Apple, and although it is also a low-overhead API, it works only on Apple devices. Vulkan, by contrast, works on many platforms. You can use in on operating systems as old as Windows XP on up to Windows 10, pretty much any Linux distro including SteamOS, and Android. Interestingly enough, Apple has opted not to integrate support for Vulkan into its devices -- although it is free to do so, so a day may come when Apple devices do have Vulkan support.

The development of the API owes a lot to AMD's Mantle:

[Continues.]

q.kontinuum writes:

[Important Note: Some links (especially Ars Technica) are NSFW for US government employees as they contain slides that are marked "Top Secret". Exercise discretion/caution in this story's comments, too. -Ed.]

Yes, it is cloud-based, yes, it does decide about the fate of hundreds of humans, and yes, ultimately it does direct robots to kill innocent humans.

SKYNET is a system created by the NSA that applies machine learning algorithms to supposedly determine the likelihood of someone turning into a terrorist based on mobile phone metadata. According to slides published at Ars Technica, evil acts like switching off your mobile phone (= evading surveillance), switching SIM cards (= trying unsuccessfully to evade surveillance, thanks to IMEI, etc.), swapping phones with others (= trying unsuccessfully to evade surveillance, thanks to other surveillance data) will be taken together as indicators of your evil intentions.

Patrick Ball—a data scientist and the executive director at the Human Rights Data Analysis Group—who has previously given expert testimony before war crimes tribunals, described the NSA's methods as "ridiculously optimistic" and "completely bullshit." A flaw in how the NSA trains SKYNET's machine learning algorithm to analyse cellular metadata, Ball told Ars, makes the results scientifically unsound.

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Re-Initializer writes:

Researchers have discovered a potentially catastrophic flaw in one of the Internet's core building blocks that leaves hundreds or thousands of apps and hardware devices vulnerable to attacks that can take complete control over them.

The vulnerability was introduced in 2008 in GNU C Library, a collection of open-source code that powers thousands of standalone applications and most distributions of Linux, including those distributed with routers and other types of hardware. A function known as getaddrinfo() that performs domain-name lookups contains a buffer overflow bug that allows attackers to remotely execute malicious code. It can be exploited when vulnerable devices or apps make queries to attacker-controlled domain names or domain name servers or when they're exposed to man-in-the-middle attacks where the adversary has the ability to monitor and manipulate data passing between a vulnerable device and the open Internet.

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MrPlow writes with a story submitted via IRC for takyon:

​Ever since the Concorde was put out to pasture, supersonic travel has remained out of reach for commercial air passengers. And while SpaceX and Blue Origin are showing re-usable rocket boosters are possible, actually putting anything in orbit still remains a very, very expensive proposition.

But all that could change, thanks to a small team of engineers in Huntsville, Alabama, who have revealed a vision for a new type of engine that combines the speed of rockets with the gas mileage of jets in a single package. Led by aerospace and mechanical engineer John Bossard at BSRD LLC, the team has built and tested a rocket engine of Bossard's design that he calls a "turborocket."

The engine does away with the separate turbopump, combustion chamber, and nozzle of a conventional pump-fed, liquid-fuel rocket engine. Instead, all three are combined in a single structure that Bossard says makes the engine both simpler and more compact. It is the compact nature of the design that Bossard says ideally suits it for so-called combined cycle engines—that is engines that can be toggled between multiple modes of operation.

Bossard's combined cycle design, which incorporates a turborocket and a turbojet, and which he calls the RTR turborocket or just RTR, could allow an aircraft to take off as a jet and switch to rocket power to fly faster than a jet could alone—and potentially right out of the atmosphere. "Simple also means lightweight, and we think the RTR could have an excellent thrust-to-weight ratio," says Bossard. "Maybe really excellent."

Source: http://www.popularmechanics.com/flight/a19229/how-a-new-engine-could-revolutionize-air-and-space-travel/

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