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takyon writes:

Security researcher Sergei Skorobogatov has bypassed the iPhone 5c's firmware using NAND mirroring. The achievement comes too late for the FBI to save some money:

The FBI told Congress it couldn't hack the San Bernardino shooter's phone without Apple's aid, but a researcher has proved that claim was inaccurate. "The process does not require any expensive and sophisticated equipment," wrote University of Cambridge researcher Sergei Skorobogatov. "All needed parts are low cost and were obtained from local electronics distributors."

Security firm Trail of Bits argued earlier this year that it would be possible to replace the iPhone firmware with a chip that doesn't block multiple password attempts. You could then try every single one until you're in, a process that would take less than a day with a four-digit code, and a few weeks with a six-digit one.

[...] "Despite government comments about feasibility of the NAND mirroring for iPhone 5c it was now proved to be fully working," the paper says. That again lends credence to FBI critics who said that the FBI was only pushing for Apple's assistance to create a precedent in court. A magistrate judge ruled against Apple, so law enforcement could use that decision to make other companies cooperate in encryption cases.

Update: The Associated Press, Vice Media and Gannett, the parent company of USA Today, have sued the FBI for information about how the agency accessed the locked iPhone 5c.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

The study shows that as mated pairs of great tits settle down to breed in the spring, they establish their homes in locations close to their winter flockmates. They also arrange their territory boundaries so that their most-preferred winter 'friends' are their neighbours.

The findings give new insights into the social behaviour of birds and demonstrate how social interactions can shape other aspects of wild animals' lives, such as the environmental conditions they will experience based on their choice of home location.

The research is published in the journal Ecology Letters.

Lead author Dr Josh Firth, of the University of Oxford's Department of Zoology, said: 'The great tits we study are a good general model for many other bird species. They form large flocks in the winter, when they're searching for food, and then each pair chooses a single set breeding site where they will be located throughout the spring as they build a nest and raise their chicks.

'We show that they appear to choose their spring breeding sites to stay close to their winter flockmates. Not only do they nest closest to the birds they held the strongest winter social bonds with, they also appear to arrange their territories so that they share home boundaries with those birds.'

Dr Firth added: 'As well as telling us about the birds' social behaviour, this also has interesting implications for other aspects of biology. For instance, where an animal's "home" is determines the environmental factors they experience, such as weather conditions. Therefore, as they appear to base their location choices around their social bonds, this indicates that their previous social associations can underpin the environment and conditions they will be subjected to in future.'

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

http://www.techspot.com/news/66306-seagate-sued-own-employees-after-company-falls-phishing.html

Storage manufacturer Seagate is facing a class-action lawsuit brought against it by the company's own employees. It comes after a senior HR executive was tricked into handed over workers' personal information in a phishing scam.

Back in March, cybercriminals sent an email to Seagate HR that appeared to originate from company CEO Stephen Luczo. It requested copies of employees' 2015 W-2 tax forms and other personally identifiable information, which were duly handed over. The documents contained names, social security numbers, income figures and home addresses – a trove of valuable data for identity theft fraudsters.

Nearly 10,000 current and past employee details were sent to the scammers, along with those of any family members and beneficiaries named in the documents.

As noted by The Register, employees filed the lawsuit against Seagate in July, accusing the firm of malpractice and a lack of regard for employees through negligent data management. The suit claims the information was "almost immediately" used to file fraudulent tax forms and for other methods of ID theft.

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

Galois and Guardtime Federal today announced they have jointly been awarded a $1.8 million contract by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to verify the correctness of Guardtime's Keyless Signature Infrastructure (KSI). The contract will fund a significant effort that aims to advance the state of formal verification tools and all blockchain-based integrity monitoring systems.

[...] Integrity monitoring systems like Guardtime's KSI detect evidence of advanced persistent threats (APTs) as they work to remain hidden in networks. APTs undermine the security of networks for long periods of time and have been central in many major network breaches. APTs carefully cover their tracks by removing evidence from system log files, adding information to "white-lists" used by security software, and altering network configurations. This project aims to verify the ability of keyless integrity monitoring systems to detect APTs and attest to the ongoing integrity of a system.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

The ESA's Gaia spacecraft has created the most detailed map of the Milky Way galaxy. Estimates of the number of stars in our galaxy range from 100-400 billion, compared to about a trillion in the neighboring Andromeda galaxy:

The Milky Way has been mapped in greater detail than ever before. And a first quick look indicates that our home galaxy is larger in extent than scientists had thought before, says Gisella Clementini, an astronomer at the Astronomical Observatory of Bologna in Italy.

Today, at the European Space Astronomy Centre in Madrid, the European Space Agency (ESA) released the first data from its €750 million Gaia star-mapping mission. The new catalog contains sky positions for 1.1 billion stars, 400 million of which have never been seen before. For many stars, the positional accuracy is 300 microarcseconds—the width of a human hair, seen from a distance of 30 kilometers—positions that will help astronomers better determine the 3D layout of the galaxy. "This is far better than anything we've ever had before," says project scientist Timo Prusti of ESA's science and technology center ESTEC in Noordwijk, the Netherlands. "It's a milestone."

[...] A second data release, planned for late 2017, will include even more accurate positions—in some cases up to 10 microarcseconds, or a human hair at a distance of 1000 kilometers. The second release will also contain distances and motions for all 1.1 billion stars

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Scientists at the University of Bath have created mice by injecting sperm into parthenogenotes:

Eggs can be 'tricked' into developing into an embryo without fertilisation, but the resulting embryos, called parthenogenotes, die after a few days because key developmental processes requiring input from sperm don't happen.

However, scientists from the Department of Biology & Biochemistry at the University of Bath have developed a method of injecting mouse parthenogenotes with sperm that allows them to become healthy baby mice with a success rate of up to 24 per cent. This compares to a rate of zero per cent for parthenogenotes or about two per cent for nuclear transfer cloning.

[...] The baby mice born as a result of the technique seem completely healthy, but their DNA started out with different epigenetic marks compared with normal fertilisation. This suggests that different epigenetic pathways can lead to the same developmental destination, something not previously shown.

The discovery has ethical implications for recent suggestions that human parthenogenotes could be used as a source of embryonic stem cells because they were considered inviable. It also hints that in the long-term future it could be possible to breed animals using non-egg cells and sperm. Although this is still only an idea, it could have potential future applications in human fertility treatment and for breeding endangered species.

Mice produced by mitotic reprogramming of sperm injected into haploid parthenogenotes (open, DOI: 10.1038/ncomms12676) (DX)

Original Submission

takyon writes:

http://www.bbc.com/news/election-us-2016-37364189

Former Secretary of State Colin Powell has reportedly called Republican nominee Donald Trump a "national disgrace," according to leaked emails. The Republican retired four-star general's comments were revealed in a hack on his personal emails. The emails were posted on DCLeaks.com, which has reportedly been tied to other recent high-profile hacks. Mr. Powell, who has been quiet during the election, said he had "no further comment" but was "not denying it".

[...] Former Secretary of State Colin Powell, who crossed party lines in 2008 to endorse Democratic [candidate] Barack Obama, has tried to float above this year's tendentious presidential election. So much for that. First the government released his note to Democrat Hillary Clinton advising her on how to use personal email for back-channel communications while secretary of state. Now - in an ironic twist - his personal email has been hacked, revealing sweeping denunciations of Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump and some sharp criticisms of Democrat Hillary Clinton.

[...] "Yup, the whole birther movement was racist," the email read. "That's what the 99% believe. When Trump couldn't keep that up he said he also wanted to see if the certificate noted that he was a Muslim." But the leaked emails also revealed Mr Powell's frustrations with Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton and her handling of her use of private email while at the State Department. "Sad thing... HRC could have killed this two years ago by merely telling everyone honestly what she had done and not tie me into it," the email read, referring to Mrs Clinton. "I told her staff three times not to try that gambit. I had to throw a mini tantrum at a Hampton's party to get their attention."

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Amyloids may have been the "precursors of life" rather than RNA molecules:

The story starts at least four billion years ago, when there was no living matter on the planet. Sometime around then, smaller chemical compounds formed into larger organised structures capable of self-reproduction. And so the early precursors of life were born. Exactly which molecules were involved, and what they were made of, is the biggest puzzle in evolutionary history. However, ETH Professor Roland Riek and his senior scientist Jason Greenwald have a compelling idea: these primordial lifelike structures could well have been proteinaceous aggregates, or amyloids. The latest results of their laboratory research now lend weight to their hypothesis.

The scientists performed an experiment to demonstrate that it is remarkably easy for such amyloid structures to assemble spontaneously from building blocks that existed on the prebiotic Earth, and under reaction conditions that also seem plausible for the primeval era. The scientists used four simple amino acids as starting materials: glycine, alanine, aspartate and valine. In addition, they used carbonyl sulphide as a catalyst for the reaction. This volcanic gas is also likely to have existed in the atmosphere billions of years ago. In the laboratory experiment, the amino acid molecules spontaneously assembled, with the help the carbonyl sulphide, into short chains (peptides) comprising between 5 and 14 building blocks. These chains in turn arranged themselves in parallel into amyloid structures known as beta sheets. In the experiment, these sheet structures took the form of fibres and typically comprised thousands of adjoining peptide chains which the scientists were able to identify using an electron microscope.

Amyloid Aggregates Arise from Amino Acid Condensations under Prebiotic Conditions (DOI: 10.1002/anie.201605321) (DX)

Towards Prebiotic Catalytic Amyloids Using High Throughput Screening (open, DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0143948) (DX)

Original Submission

martyb writes:

We have been informed by Linode (which hosts our servers) that there is some hardware maintenance being performed tonight. The impacted servers are 'fluorine' and 'neon'. Here is the message we received:

Linode continuously monitors the health of our equipment and we've been alerted to a condition which affects the physical server on which your Linode is hosted. While we have determined that this is not an emergency, this should be addressed in order to optimize the performance of your Linode. We have scheduled a maintenance window for the physical server on which your Linode is hosted:

Friday, September 16, 2016 at 1:00 AM EDT (5:00 AM UTC)

Downtime from this maintenance is expected to be no more than 1 hour. Please note, however, that the entire maintenance window may be required. Your Linode will be gracefully powered down and rebooted during the maintenance. Services not configured to start on a reboot will need to be manually started. If this time frame does not work for you, you have the option of migrating to another host which has these settings enabled.

Thanks to redundancy between our front end and database servers, our main site should remain functional. There will, however, be some minor inconveniences. During this period:

• we will not be able to process credit card payments,
• comment counts will not update, and
• emails and web notifications will not go out.

We appreciate your understanding and patience while the servers are being serviced.

We anticipate most of the affected services should auto-restart; those that do not will be addressed starting around 0600 CDT (0700 EDT / 1100 UTC).

UPDATE: All is shiny and happy again.

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

Claims that the "the science isn't settled" with regard to climate change are symptomatic of a large body of ignorance about how science works.

So what is the scientific method, and why do so many people, sometimes including those trained in science, get it so wrong?

The first thing to understand is that there is no one method in science, no one way of doing things. This is intimately connected with how we reason in general.

[...] Those who demand the science be "settled" before we take action are seeking deductive certainty where we are working inductively. And there are other sources of confusion.

One is that simple statements about cause and effect are rare since nature is complex. For example, a theory might predict that X will cause Y, but that Y will be mitigated by the presence of Z and not occur at all if Q is above a critical level. To reduce this to the simple statement "X causes Y" is naive.

Another is that even though some broad ideas may be settled, the details remain a source of lively debate. For example, that evolution has occurred is certainly settled by any rational account. But some details of how natural selection operates are still being fleshed out.

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

There's no question that running changes your heart.

The issue is whether these changes are good or bad. I don't mean the occasional 3 miles once or twice a week, although even this minimal amount of exercise seems to have positive health benefits.

A famous 2014 study led by Duck-chul Lee that followed 55,000 adults for more than 15 years concluded that even modest amounts of running, around 50 minutes a week total, causes a 30 percent drop in all-cause mortality risk and an average increase of three years in lifespan. The results of this study were fairly flat with respect to running time, distance, frequency, amount and speed, compared to non-runners, although persistent runners "had the most significant benefits, with 29 percent and 50 percent lower risks of all-cause and cardiovascular mortality, respectively, compared with never-runners." However, the authors caution that "further research is needed to determine whether there is an upper limit to the amount of vigorous physical activity, beyond which additional exercise provides no further mortality reduction."

In other words, can too much running be bad for you?

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

Cancer is often viewed as a fundamentally modern and monolithic disease. Many people think its rise and spread has been driven almost exclusively by the developed world's toxins and poisons; by our bad eating habits, lifestyles, and the very air we breathe.

Actually, cancer is not a single disease. It is also far from modern. New fossil evidence suggests that its origins lie deep in prehistory.

We recently published two papers in the South African Journal of Science that describe the discovery and diagnosis of the earliest benign tumour and earliest malignant cancer to affect the human family.

Tumours and cancers are collectively known as neoplastic diseases. Until now, the oldest evidence of neoplasia in the hominin fossil record dated back 120,000 years. This was found in a rib fragment of a Neanderthal from Krapina in Croatia.

But our discovery, in two South African cave sites, offers definitive evidence of cancer in hominins – human ancestors – as far back as 1.7 million years ago.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

A new method of delivering antibiotics could cure more ear infections while reducing symptoms, with only a single treatment:

Ear infections in children are common, uncomfortable, and require strong doses of antibiotics. Researchers at Boston Children's Hospital are designing an antibiotic gel that can be squirted directly into the ear canal to treat ear infections in just one treatment. [...] Although a course of antibiotics is usually effective, it is not an ideal solution for a number of reasons. For instance, coercing a child into taking medication several times a day for 7-10 days can be challenging. As the senior author of the study, Dr. Daniel Kohane, colorfully explains: "Force-feeding antibiotics to a toddler by mouth is like a full-contact martial art."

Often, because the symptoms of an ear infection disappear before the course of antibiotics is over, parents stop treatment early; this means that ear infections are more likely to recur - 40 percent of children have four or more episodes. Also, if a course of antibiotics is not taken in full, it encourages the development of drug-resistant infections, which is a growing concern for everyone. Another issue with the current solution for treating middle-ear infections is that, because antibiotics do not easily travel to the site of the infection, high doses are necessary. And high doses bring an increase in side effects, including diarrhea, oral thrush, and rashes.

[...] It may seem that squirting antibiotics into the ear canal might be an easier solution, but the eardrum, or tympanic membrane, is impenetrable. Dr. Kochane and his team have bioengineered a solution that could circumvent this anatomical gatekeeper. His team has developed an antibiotic gel that can chaperone drugs past the eardrum and directly into the middle ear; it manages this with the help of chemical permeation enhancers (CPEs). These CPEs insert themselves into a membrane, opening molecular pores and allowing the antibiotics through.

So far, it has been tested in chinchillas. Here's the abstract:

Treatment of otitis media by transtympanic delivery of antibiotics (DOI: 10.1126/scitranslmed.aaf4363) (DX)

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

Vancouver, suffering from a near-zero supply of homes available for rent, plans to slap investors sitting on vacant properties with a new tax in an effort to make housing more accessible in Canada's most-expensive property market.

The levy, which would start in January, may be as high as 2 percent of the property's assessed value, Kathleen Llewellyn-Thomas, the city's general manager of community services, told reporters Wednesday. That would mean a minimum C$20,000 ($15,000) annual payment for the typical C$1 million-plus detached home in Vancouver based on July 2015 assessment data, the most recent available.

"Vancouver is in a rental housing crisis," said Mayor Gregor Robertson, whose announcement follows a separate measure by the province in July to impose a 15 percent tax on foreign buyers. "Dangerously low vacancy rates across the city are near zero."

Vancouver is penalizing property owners for not renting empty buildings.

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

[Pandora,] the veteran online radio provider said Thursday it will let listeners can[sic] skip more songs and replay tracks if they watch an extra ad. For $5 a month, paid members get those perks without any commercials plus a mode for listening offline, in a revamped subscription called Pandora Plus.

The announcement marks the most substantive change to Pandora's service in years by giving its listeners more control. It's also a step toward the kind of on-demand subscription music service popularized by newer rivals like Spotify and Apple Music.

There's also a github-hosted, command-line-based tool called pianobar that lets you skip all Pandora ads for free.

Original Submission