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takyon writes:

An upcoming human trial will attempt to use optogenetics to treat conditions such as retinitis pigmentosa:

In the next month, scientists from RetroSense Therapeutics will inject a virus deep into the retina of legally blind human volunteers. The virus will carry what is perhaps the most monumental payload in modern neuroscience history: DNA that codes for channelrhodopsin-2, a light-responsive protein isolated from algae that — under blue light — activates cells in the retina, thereby transmitting visual information to the brain.

Forget electronic implants. If all goes well, these volunteers will be able to see again using their own eyes — but in no way a human being has ever experienced sight before. Whoa.

But the stakes are even higher: if this works, it means that optogenetics — a revolutionary neuroscience technique using channelrhodopsin-2 and other light-activated proteins — is feasible in humans as therapy. Considering optogenetics has been used in mice to implant false memories, treat cocaine addiction, attenuate OCD symptoms, trigger sexual advances and aggression and reverse motor deficits in Parkinson's disease — just to name a few feats— the technique could completely transform the face of neurology. "This is going to be a gold mine of information about doing optogenetics studies in humans," said Dr. Antonello Bonci, the scientific director of the intramural research program at the National Institute on Drug Abuse, to MIT Technology Review.

[...] If it works, what will the patients see? No one can say for sure. After all, this will be the first time humans experience the visual world through the light sensor of algae. But studies with blind lab mice may give us a hint. In one previous study, after optogenetics treatment, previously blind mice could swim out of a chamber in which the escape route was brightly lit. On average, they escaped as fast as mice with normal vision.

Original Submission

MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for Bytram

The Universe's first light—the earliest we can peer back in time—is the Cosmic Microwave Background, produced some 350,000 years after the Big Bang. It's the product of electrons pairing up with protons to form hydrogen atoms, releasing light in the process. From there, however, the Universe went dark until the formation of the first stars and galaxies, hundreds of thousands of years later.

Understanding the end of the cosmic dark ages can help us figure out the processes that built the Universe we currently occupy. For now, however, the wavelengths that would allow us to do so have remained out of reach. But researchers are building a new generation of telescopes that will help us reach back to this remote time, and they described their progress at the meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Source: http://arstechnica.com/science/2016/02/peering-back-to-the-edge-of-the-universes-dark-ages/

Original Submission

AnonTechie writes:

Leif Ryge writes:

In 2014 when The Washington Post Editorial Board wrote "with all their wizardry, perhaps Apple and Google could invent a kind of secure golden key they would retain and use only when a court has approved a search warrant," the Internet ridiculed them. Many people painstakingly explained that even if there were somehow wide agreement about who would be the "right" people and governments to hold such an all-powerful capability, it would ultimately be impossible to ensure that such power wouldn't fall in to the "wrong" hands.

Q: What does almost every piece of software with an update mechanism, including every popular operating system, have in common?

A: Secure golden keys, cryptographic single-points-of-failure which can be used to enable total system compromise via targeted malicious software updates.

Many software projects have only begun attempting to verify the authenticity of their updates in recent years. But even among projects that have been trying to do it for decades, most still have single points of devastating failure.

In some systems there are a number of keys where if any one of them is compromised such an attack becomes possible. In other cases it might be that signatures from two or even three keys are necessary, but when those keys are all controlled by the same company (or perhaps even the same person) the system still has single points of failure.

I'm optimistic that the demands the FBI is making to Apple will serve as a wakeup call to many of the people responsible for widely-used software distribution infrastructures. I expect that in the not-too-distant future, for many applications at least, attackers wishing to perform targeted malicious updates will be unable to do so without compromising a multitude of keys held by many people in many different legal jurisdictions. There are a number of promising projects which could help achieve that goal, including the DeDiS Cothority and the Docker project's Notary.

Being free of single points of failure should be a basic requirement for any new software distribution mechanisms deployed today.

http://arstechnica.com/security/2016/02/most-software-already-has-a-golden-key-backdoor-its-called-auto-update/

Original Submission

tonyPick writes:

Several sites are reporting on the release of Version 3 of the Raspberry Pi on the 29th of February.

It will go on sale for $35 (£30) and a "few hundred thousand units" will be available on launch day from online stores.
...
The updated device has a 64-bit processor onboard that gives the Pi 3 a 50% performance improvement on the Pi 2.

Also built in to the new device are wi-fi and Bluetooth connections.

Lifehacker has a more complete list of specifications and distributors:

Features & Benefits of the Pi 3:
        Broadcom BCM2837 chipset running at 1.2 GHz
        64-bit quad-core ARM Cortex-A53
        802.11 b/g/n Wireless LAN
        Bluetooth 4.1 (Classic & Low Energy)
        Dual core Videocore IV® Multimedia co-processor
        1 GB LPDDR2 memory
        Supports all the latest ARM GNU/Linux distributions and Windows 10 IoT
        microUSB connector for 2.5 A power supply
        1 x 10/100 Ethernet port
        1 x HDMI video/audio connector
        1 x RCA video/audio connector
        4 x USB 2.0 ports
        40 GPIO pins
        Chip antenna
        DSI display connector
        microSD card slot
        Dimensions: 85 x 56 x 17 mm

The release is also covered at ZDNet, The Telegraph , and Raspberry Pi.

takyon: According to Tom's Hardware, "The 64-bit mode isn't enabled, though, and the foundation will investigate over the next few months whether there is value in enabling it." Also at Ars Technica . The updated Broadcom GPU is faster and supports 1080p60 H.264 and 1080p30 H.265 video.

Original Submission

MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for AndyTheAbsurd

In the 1970s, a scientist asked if the flapping of a butterfly's wings in Brazil could lead to a tornado in Texas. The answer is a mix of good and bad news.

For a new study researchers wondered whether unobserved, minuscule disturbances—like those from butterfly wings—actually affect weather forecasts.

It appears weather forecasters don't have to worry about their jobs. The answer is no.

"The butterfly effect is important, as an example of how errors might theoretically spread to larger scales, but actual butterflies don't matter for forecasts," says Dale Durran, professor of atmospheric sciences at the University of Washington.

What matters instead is getting the bigger picture right.

"The uncertainty in a meteorological forecast generated by ignoring the flapping of a butterfly's wings—or even broader circulations one mile wide—is less than that produced by very-small-percentage errors in our observations of much larger-scale motions," Durran says.

[...] On the one hand, this is good news, since small-scale motions, which are almost impossible to observe routinely, don't matter so much, confirming Durran's earlier paper on the meteorological irrelevance of butterflies. On the other hand, it's bad news, because even little mistakes in the large-scale observations can throw off a forecast for a thunderstorm or a snowstorm.

Source: http://www.futurity.org/butterfly-effect-weather-forecasts-1111192-2/

Both an abstract and an early online release of the full report are available.

Original Submission

HughPickens.com writes:

David Roberts writes at VOX that it stands to reason that vehicle automation could save energy and reduce emissions in some ways. Cars will be able to chain together more aerodynamically, drive at more consistent speeds, and perhaps serve as shared vehicles in lieu of individual vehicle ownership. But it also stands to reason that automation could increase energy use and emissions in some ways. If driving is easier and more pleasant, people will do it more. Automation will open up car travel to populations (the young, the elderly, the visually or otherwise impaired) who did not previously have access. Self-driving cars could increase the overall amount of vehicle miles traveled.

A new study: "Help or hindrance? The travel, energy and carbon impacts of highly automated vehicles," suggests that the big swing factor is travel cost reduction — in other words, how cheap and easy driving gets. If that stays at the low end, then the effects of self-driving cars on energy use are almost certain to be a substantial net positive. However if it reaches the high end, a 60 percent boost in energy consumption for transportation, all the energy-saving benefits could be wiped out, for a net increase in energy and emissions. "This leads to somewhat surprising policy implications It may be that the socially optimal outcome, at least for now, is partial, not full, automation. That way the energy and emissions benefits of smarter driving practices can be fully captured, without allowing drivers to tune entirely out — without making it too easy," concludes Roberts. "Perhaps when we get farther down the road (ahem) — when more vehicles are electrified, when car sharing is more firmly established, when the benefits of automation have proven out — we can move to full automation without the risk of carbon blowback."

Original Submission

HughPickens.com writes:

Alyson Shontell writes at Business Insider that Peter Thiel, a longtime friend and mentor of Mark Zuckerberg, recently gave a talk that imagined what a Zuckerberg-less world would look like and it's pretty grim. According to Thiel, the web would be a not-very-safe, not-very-fun, totally anonymous place and it wouldn't be baked into our social lives at all. "You can imagine an alternate history in which people don't become comfortable using [the Internet] to meet their friends and family," said Thiel. "It could have remained a wild and dangerous place — maybe an exciting place to escape for a while, but maybe not part of your daily social life. Facebook has led a long and subtle but deeply important trend away from mob behavior, away from the kind of nastiness that hides behind masks and rules in shadow."

Thiel added that without Zuckerberg, information would be at the center of the Internet, not people. "If you could go back to the first years of the new millennium in Silicon Valley, you would hear a lot more about 'information' than about people. 'Organizing the world's information' was the idea of the age," Thiel told the audience. "While the implicit goal of computer science had been to build a machine that can do everything a human can do, Facebook has made software that only makes sense as a tool for humans. Its success in doing so has helped to gradually orient software developers away from the mania for replacing people." Thiel made his speech while Zuckerberg received the first-ever Axel Springer Award for being an outstanding entrepreneur (Google translation) in Berlin. Thiel and Zuckerberg have known each other for a long time and Thiel was an angel investor in Facebook who invested $500,000 in Facebook in 2004 and cashed out in 2012 for $1 billion.

Original Submission

MrPlow on IRC submitted this on behalf of Bytram:

This simple and inexpensive new sustainable fuels technology could potentially help limit global warming by removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere to make fuel. The process also reverts oxygen back into the system as a byproduct of the reaction, with a clear positive environmental impact, researchers said.

"Our process also has an important advantage over battery or gaseous-hydrogen powered vehicle technologies as many of the hydrocarbon products from our reaction are exactly what we use in cars, trucks and planes, so there would be no need to change the current fuel distribution system," said Frederick MacDonnell, UTA interim chair of chemistry and biochemistry and co-principal investigator of the project.

In an article published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences titled "Solar photothermochemical alkane reverse combustion," the researchers demonstrate that the one-step conversion of carbon dioxide and water into liquid hydrocarbons and oxygen can be achieved in a photothermochemical flow reactor operating at 180 to 200 C and pressures up to 6 atmospheres.

"We are the first to use both light and heat to synthesize liquid hydrocarbons in a single stage reactor from carbon dioxide and water," said Brian Dennis, UTA professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering and co-principal investigator of the project

Source: http://phys.org/news/2016-02-proven-one-step-co2-liquid-hydrocarbon.html

Original Study

Original Submission

-- OriginalOwner_ writes:

Bryan Lunduke at Network World reports

I just watched a video, from XDA, that showed a live demo of Ubuntu that, I kid you not, made me do a little happy dance. Just so we're on the same page, go watch that video right now—at least up to about the 4-minute mark where the hands-on demo of the tablet ends.

[...] After watching this video, [all my previous disappointment with Ubuntu] melted away for two absolutely wonderful reasons.

First, the "convergence" vision actually appears to be reaching a point where it is usable. Take a phone (or tablet), plug in a monitor and you've got yourself a full desktop PC. Not just that but a full desktop that can run traditional Linux software like LibreOffice and GIMP with state preserved between "mobile" mode and "desktop" mode. This is a big freaking deal.

What's more, it appeared to be working rather well with quite a few nice touches. The phone, when docked to a monitor, even becomes an input device; You can use it as a touchpad mouse and a virtual keyboard. Not necessarily something I'd use very often (if I'm docked to a monitor I probably have a keyboard handy) but a cool detail just the same.

[Second], after that was demoed, the tablet came out. At which point I believe I began drooling a little.

[Continues.]

takyon writes:

Tor users may soon have less to cry over, as CloudFlare's CEO is considering whitelists or other measures to better allow Tor access to websites without buggy CAPTCHA completion issues:

CloudFlare's CEO, Matthew Prince, told The Register that he would love to create a no-more-tears system allowing the network's legitimate users to access websites without being hit by buggy Turing tests, while also protecting his customers' sites from abuse. [...] While definitive figures on the degree to which the network is used abusively are unavailable, its supporters have complained that CloudFlare – which provides CDN and/or DNS services for over a million websites – has allowed those customers to implement CAPTCHAs which are purposefully designed to hamper Tor users' anonymous access to the web.

[...] Prince told The Register: "You have to acknowledge the complaints that Tor users have. It's made browsing the internet much more difficult for Tor users, and we hate that." The CEO is not alone in hating it. A bug tracker ticket opened yesterday by one of the Tor project's most well-known evangelists, Jacob Appelbaum, alleged that companies such as CloudFlare "are effectively now Global Active Adversaries." CloudFlare, according to Appelbaum, "actively make it nearly impossible to browse to certain websites, they collude with larger surveillance companies (like Google), their CAPTCHAs are awful, they block members of our community on social media rather than engaging with them and frankly, they run untrusted code in millions of browsers on the web for questionable security gains."

[Continues.]

tonyPick writes:

Spotted at Ars Technica is the news that all 176 issues of If magazine are available for download.

The middle of the 20th century was an exciting time for science fiction, filled with experimentation and new ideas, an endeavour helmed by genre icons like Harlan Ellison and Frank Herbert. If magazine, which ran between 1952 and 1974, played home to many of these names along with a myriad of now-historic work. And now, it's all available for free in a variety of file formats.

The magazines are available through The Internet Archive, which has additional background:

If was an American science fiction magazine launched in March 1952 by Quinn Publications, owned by James L. Quinn. The magazine was moderately successful, though it was never regarded as one of the first rank of science fiction magazines. It achieved its greatest success under editor Frederik Pohl, winning the Hugo Award for best professional magazine three years running from 1966 to 1968. If was merged into Galaxy Science Fiction after the December 1974 issue, its 175th issue overall.

[Continues.]

An Anonymous Coward writes:

On February 20th, a hacker working under the handle "Peace" took control of the website of Linux Mint, a popular Linux distribution derived from Ubuntu (and Debian) targeted toward non-technical users and power users unhappy with modern desktop environments. While these attacks are regrettable, and part of an infrastructure problem rather than a problem with the distribution itself, it increasingly appears that, when it comes to security, the Linux Mint team is spread too thin. The distribution itself blacklists updates that work perfectly in Ubuntu and Debian, and the graphical utilities don't update the kernel.

Because the value added by Linux Mint is in Cinnamon, why do the developers need to distribute a broken version of Ubuntu when the Cinnamon DE (Desktop Environment) could be distributed as an Ubuntu spin?

Original Submission

-- OriginalOwner_ writes:

Clem Lefebvre, the honcho at Linux Mint, has commented in some forum threads February 24 regarding what they were doing for several days while the site was offline.

You're now [behind] HTTPS [at the forum] (that doesn't protect against the kind of attacks we went through, but it helps if you're hacked locally)

[...] We're also behind a global [firewall] and we've got new friends at Sucuri.net who scan our server for malware.

This phpbb is also version 3.1, so you'll see a few differences and some new features compared to the previous forums.

...and later in the day

- The firewall filters a lot of bandwidth and saves a lot of processing dedicated to the constant pounding of DDOS, malware, poking, and all the bad stuff that bots send continuously over the internet. That means less work for the server [which is why it's faster for you now].

[...] The phpbb team reached out to us during the attacks to see how they could help. I asked about updates vs customizations. [Fancy theming is] not a priority right now,

It appears there were things they already had on their list and getting pwned kicked that stuff into gear.

Previous: Mint Cinnamon ISOs Hacked

Original Submission

AnonTechie writes:

A study published this week in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences reports a new parallel-computing approach based on a combination of nanotechnology and biology that can solve combinatorial problems. The approach is scalable, error-tolerant, energy-efficient, and can be implemented with existing technologies. The pioneering achievement was developed by researchers from the Technische Universität Dresden and the Max Planck Institute of Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics, Dresden in collaboration with international partners from Canada, England, Sweden, the US, and the Netherlands.

Conventional electronic computers have led to remarkable technological advances in the past decades, but their sequential nature –they process only one computational task at a time– prevents them from solving problems of combinatorial nature such as protein design and folding, and optimal network routing. This is because the number of calculations required to solve such problems grows exponentially with the size of the problem, rendering them intractable with sequential computing. Parallel computing approaches can in principle tackle such problems, but the approaches developed so far have suffered from drawbacks that have made up-scaling and practical implementation very difficult. The recently reported parallelcomputing approach aims to address these issues by combining well established nanofabrication technology with molecular motors which are highly energy efficient and inherently work in parallel.

The time to solve combinatorial problems of size N using this parallel-computing approach scales approximately as N^2, which is a dramatic improvement over the exponential (2^N) time scales required by conventional, sequential computers. Importantly, the approach is fully scalable with existing technologies and uses orders of magnitude less energy than conventional computers, thus circumventing the heating issues that are currently limiting the performance of conventional computing.

http://tu-dresden.de/en/news/parallelbio/newsarticle_view

[Abstract]: Parallel computation with molecular-motor-propelled agents in nanofabricated networks

[Press Release]: Press Release With Images And Video Links [PDF]

[Also Covered By]: World's first parallel computer based on biomolecular motors

Original Submission

takyon writes:

More hospitals are being hit by ransomware attacks, this time in Germany:

At least two hospitals in Germany have come under attack from ransomware, according to local reports. The alarming incidents follow similar ransomware problems at the US Hollywood Presbyterian Medical Center.

Both the Lukas Hospital in Germany's western city of Neuss and the Klinikum Arnsberg hospital in the German state of North Rhine-Westphalia were attacked by file encrypting ransomware, Deutsche Welle reports.

The German broadcaster details how swift action at he Lukas Hospital contained the problem. Techies responded to unusual pop-up warnings on systems combined with the network running slowly two weeks ago by pulling the plug. This stopped the malware spreading more widely. Even so, the spread caused considerable damage and general inconvenience even though the hospital kept backups and only a few hours of data had been lost.

[...] The Klinikum Arnsberg was also hit by ransomware, thought to have entered systems after staff opened a booby-trapped email attachment. Staffers detected the malware on one of the hospital's 200 servers before pulling the plug, DW reports.. Recovery simply involved restoring files on the single affected server from backups. [...] Neither of the German hospitals appear to have paid out. The Lukas Hospital has reported the matter to the authorities.

Also at Infosecurity Magazine.

Another medical-security report has come to light.

[Continues.]