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callmeemo writes:

A group of scientists from Universidad Carlos III de Madrid (UC3M), CIEMAT (Center for Energy, Environmental and Technological Research), Hospital General Universitario Gregorio Marañón, in collaboration with the firm BioDan Group, have created a prototype 3D printer capable of printing human skin. This skin is intended to be of a high enough quality as to be used for burn victims and other severe skin problems, as well as scientific testing and in industries such as cosmetics where animal testing has been on the decline.

The system is composed of three stations: the computer which controls the process, the 3D printer, and a bio-ink station. These bio-inks cartridges contain all the compounds necessary to the creation process including protein, cells, and other biological components. There are two types of skin they can currently produce: allogeneic skin which can be mass produced from a stock of cells, and autologous skin crafted from a culture of skin received from a specific medical patient. "We use only human cells and components to produce skin that is bioactive and can generate its own human collagen, thereby avoiding the use of the animal collagen that is found in other methods," they note. Structurally, the synthetic skin "replicates the natural structure of the skin, with a first external layer, the epidermis with its stratum corneum, which acts as protection against the external environment, together with another thicker, deeper layer, the dermis. This last layer consists of fibroblasts that produce collagen, the protein that gives elasticity and mechanical strength to the skin."[1]

Juan Francisco Cañizo, a member of the team, states that the cell cultivation takes a couple of weeks. After that, the actual skin creation process takes as little as 1 to 2 days. Alfredo Brisac, another member of the team, stated the team's further goals of coaxing the skin to produce and grow its own hair, as well as the cultivation of organs. They are currently still seeking approval from various European regulatory agencies. The 2-minute Youtube video sums up the machinery and process rather nicely (make sure closed captioning is on for the English translation).

Sources: [1] UC3M, Biofabrication on IoP Science, [DOI] 10.1088/1758-5090/9/1/015006, ScienceDaily, Digital Trends

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Used PACER recently? You may be entitled to a refund if a new class action suit succeeds:

A lawsuit that claims the public is being overcharged by the US government's website for accessing federal court records just took a major step forward. A federal judge overseeing the litigation against PACER, the Public Access to Court Electronic Records system, just certified the case as a class action—meaning anybody who has used the service between 2010-2016 might be entitled to refunds if the government loses or settles.

Three nonprofits last year brought the suit that claims millions of dollars generated from a recent 25-percent increase in page fees are being illegally spent by a federal agency known as the Administrative Office of the Courts (AO). The cost for access is 10 cents per page and up to $3 a document. Judicial opinions are free.

The case is being brought by the National Consumer Law Center, the Alliance for Justice, and the National Veterans Legal Services Program. The organizations claim that, while the fees my not be onerous to some, for others the amount adds up and may hinder public access. What's more, they claim that the fees breach a congressional act—the E-government Act of 2002—requiring that PACER only levy charges that cover the government's cost to maintain the program.

Original Submission

butthurt writes:

A judge in the U.S. state of Georgia has dismissed a lawsuit against Snapchat Inc. (also known as Snap, Inc.) regarding its eponymous photo and video sharing app. The plaintiffs, who were injured in a two-car crash, claimed that the driver of the other car, in the words of CBS News,

The judge cited (Wikipedia link added by submitter)

As reported by WGCL-TV, a CBS affiliate in Atlanta, a motion filed by the company (PDF) asserted that the driver whose car collided with the plaintiffs' car "was not using the Snapchat application at the time of the collision" (quoted from the court filing, with emphasis removed).

Additional coverage:

• CBS Local Media
• Associated Press via WYFF-TV
• Associated Press via Insurance Journal (different AP story)
• WHJL-TV and Associated Press

Related stories:
The Company Formerly Known as Snapchat may be Worth $25 Billion
Goodbye Snapchat, Hello Snap Inc

Original Submission

n1 writes:

Starbucks reported a “banner” quarter for its smartphone feature that lets customers order coffee and food ahead of time and skip the line in stores. In fact, the feature is doing so well that it’s clogging pick-up areas and forcing the company to consider revamping store layouts.

[...] Mobile ordering was a bright spot in the Seattle-based coffee giant’s earnings report. Starbucks posted Q1 2017 earnings of $0.52 per share, which met expectations, and $5.73 billion in quarterly revenue, which was up 7 percent year-over-year but missed estimates and sent shares down nearly 5 percent in after-hours trading on Thursday.

Mobile Order & Pay (MOP), the company’s smartphone app feature that launched in 2015 and lets customers skip the line by ordering in advance, represented 7 percent of the company’s U.S. transactions in the most recent quarter. That’s up 3 percent [from] the prior year and 1 percent from the previous quarter.

[...] There were 1,200 stores in the U.S. that saw more than 20 percent of transaction volume come from MOP during peak hours; that’s up from 600 stores in the prior quarter.

The significant uptick in usage is causing in-store congestion issues for MOP customers trying to pick up their order at hand-off stations. This problem not only affects customers who are picking up items, but also potential customers who may notice the in-store traffic and end up not purchasing anything, Johnson [Starbucks CEO] explained.

Source: GeekWire

Original Submission

charon writes:

On the one hand, some scientists report success in creating solid metallic hydrogen (SMH):

Nearly a century after it was theorized, Harvard scientists have succeeded in creating the rarest - and potentially one of the most valuable - materials on the planet.

The material - atomic metallic hydrogen - was created by Thomas D. Cabot Professor of the Natural Sciences Isaac Silvera and post-doctoral fellow Ranga Dias. In addition to helping scientists answer fundamental questions about the nature of matter, the material is theorized to have a wide range of applications, including as a room-temperature superconductor. The creation of the rare material is described in a January 26 paper published in Science.

"This is the holy grail of high-pressure physics," Silvera said. "It's the first-ever sample of metallic hydrogen on Earth, so when you're looking at it, you're looking at something that's never existed before."

To create it, Silvera and Dias squeezed a tiny hydrogen sample at 495 gigapascal, or more than 71.7 million pounds-per-square inch - greater than the pressure at the center of the Earth. At those extreme pressures, Silvera explained, solid molecular hydrogen -which consists of molecules on the lattice sites of the solid - breaks down, and the tightly bound molecules dissociate to transforms into atomic hydrogen, which is a metal.

While the work offers an important new window into understanding the general properties of hydrogen, it also offers tantalizing hints at potentially revolutionary new materials.

Available on arXiv.org are both an abstract and a full article (pdf).

On the other hand, the journal Nature has an article which provides background on this report and then presents some arguments from scientists who still have some doubts:

[Continues...]

Sanctuary cities are in the news this week. The working definition is a city, county, or state that limits the amount of cooperation their local police force has with federal immigration officers. To the point, local police do not hold people for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) when their only crime is being illegal immigrants. This article gives a good overview of the situation.

"exec" writes:

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott threatened to cut funding for one county after its sheriff announced the agency would be scaling back its cooperation with federal immigration.

Travis County Sheriff Sally Hernandez announced last week she's scaling back the amount of aid her department provides federal immigration agents in detaining suspects who might be in the country illegally, according to the Austin American-Statesman.

Starting Feb. 1, sheriff's officials will begin honoring so-called immigration holds or "detainers" placed by federal authorities only when a suspect is booked into the Travis County Jail on charges of capital murder, aggravated sexual assault and "continuous smuggling of persons."

Otherwise, federal agents must have a court order or arrest warrant signed by a judge for the jail to continue housing a person whose immigration status is in question.

On Wednesday, Jan 25, President Trump issued an executive order stating that sanctuary jurisdictions would not be eligible for federal funds.

[Continues...]

-- OriginalOwner_ writes:

The Free Thought Project reports

After years of injustice, thousands of people wrongfully convicted on drug charges in Massachusetts will finally have their convictions overturned. The ruling centers on drug lab tests that were falsified by a state-employed chemist named Annie Dookhan.

"The state's highest court on Wednesday [January 18] ordered prosecutors to drop a large portion of the more than 24,000 drug convictions affected by the misconduct of former state drug lab chemist Annie Dookhan, issuing an urgent call to resolve a scandal that has plagued the legal system since 2012."

Dookhan was imprisoned in 2013 after being charged with a suite of crimes relating to her years-long career of deceit, where she falsified tens of thousands of reports to jail innocent people. She would mark results as "positive" for illegal substances without actually testing them, even adding cocaine to samples when no cocaine was present.

At [Dookhan's] sentencing, Judge Carol S. Ball stated, "Innocent persons were incarcerated, guilty persons have been released to further endanger the public, millions and millions of public dollars are being expended to deal with the chaos Ms. Dookhan created, and the integrity of the criminal justice system has been shaken to the core."

[...] The Massachusetts high court ruled that each [of 24,391 defendants] had a right to a hearing, but the cost and logistics of doing so would be unfeasible.

"The court said district attorneys across the state must "exercise their prosecutorial discretion and reduce the number of relevant Dookhan defendants by moving to vacate and dismiss with prejudice all drug cases the district attorneys would not or could not reprosecute if a new trial were ordered." The cases affected by the ruling include people who pleaded guilty, were convicted, or admitted that prosecutors had enough evidence to convict them. By vacating the cases, the convictions would effectively be erased...
The court said defendants whose cases aren't dismissed should receive a notice that their cases had been affected by Dookhan's misconduct. Then, any indigent defendants would receive public counsel to explore requests to vacate their pleas or get new trials.

Related: Are Questionable Drug Tests Filling U.S. Prisons?

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Mark Zuckerberg has had a change of heart concerning lawsuits filed to force native Hawaiians to sell him land within his property:

The Facebook CEO now says he is "reconsidering" a set of lawsuits that he recently filed to compel hundreds of Hawaiians to sell him small plots of land they own that lie within his 700-acre beachfront property on the island of Kauai.

The billionaire's potential about-face came after widespread publicity last week about the suits, which target a dozen plots covering slightly more than 8 acres of land strewn throughout the acreage that Zuckerberg bought for $100 million two years ago. Currently, owners of the lots, which have been in their families for generations, have the rights to travel across Zuckerberg's property. But many of the owners likely are unaware of their ownership interest in the plots.

Last week, Zuckerberg said, "For most of these folks, they will now receive money for something they never even knew they had. No one will be forced off the land." But on Tuesday night, Zuckerberg said, "Based on feedback from the local community, we are reconsidering the quiet title process and discussing how to move forward."

The cause of Zuckerberg's woes is an 1850 law (text) that allows descendants to inherit increasingly fractional amounts of land:

A Center for Excellence in Native Hawaiian Law primer on quiet title and partition law titled "E 'Onipaa i ke Kulaiwi" said using the law to compel land sales has reduced Native Hawaiian landownership: "Partition by sale in particular is highly problematic for the Native Hawaiian community because it severs a family's connection to ancestral land." Zuckerberg, through several companies he controls, filed the lawsuits against a few hundred people — many living and some dead — who inherited or once owned interests in what are known as kuleana lands where ownership is often largely undocumented.

Kuleana lands refers to real estate initially acquired by Hawaii citizens through the Kuleana Act of 1850, which followed the Great Mahele, in which the Hawaiian kingdom began allowing private ownership of land. Often, kuleana lands automatically passed to heirs of the first owner in absence of a will or deed, and then down through subsequent generations of [descendants] who in some cases now own just fractions of an interest in the property without documentation. Hawaii's quiet title law can be used to establish legal title to such land. However, quieting these "noisy" real estate titles is expensive and therefore doesn't happen often unless someone with the financial resources and interest in the property becomes engaged.

Original Submission

mrpg writes:

Embryos that are less than 0.001% human - and the rest pig - have been made and analysed by scientists.

It is the first proof chimeras - named after the mythical lion-goat-serpent monster - can be made by combining material from humans and animals.

However, the scientific report in the journal Cell [open, DOI: 10.1016/j.cell.2016.12.036] [DX] shows the process is challenging and the aim of growing human organs in animals is distant.

It was described as an "exciting publication" by other researchers.

To create a chimera, human stem cells - the type that can develop into any tissue - are injected into a pig embryo.

The embryo - now a mix of human and pig - is then implanted into a sow for up to one month.

The process appears very inefficient - of the 2,075 embryos implanted only 186 continued to develop up to the 28-day stage.

Human-pig 'chimera embryos' detailed

Original Submission

MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for TheMightyBuzzard

The four-week Hack the Army scheme generated 416 vulnerability reports (nearly 30 percent of which are unique and actionable) and approximately $100,000 for security researchers and bug hunters.

The most significant flaw—as reported by HackerOne, a security consulting firm under contract with the Pentagon—was uncovered due to a series of chained vulnerabilities that unwittingly took a hacker from the public-facing goarmy.com site to an internal Department of Defense page usually requiring special credentials to access.

"On its own, neither vulnerability is particularly interesting, but when you pair them together, it's actually very serious," HackerOne explained.

The Army remediation team and Army Cyber Protection Brigade stepped in to patch the hole.

Source: PCMag.com

Original Submission

takyon writes:

James Comey has been asked by President Trump to stay on as Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Comey is three years into a ten-year term.

News at NYT (which broke the story), USA Today, Washington Post, CNN, and The Hill.

Here's the bulk of our extensive past coverage of FBI Director Comey's career (oldest first):

2014:

FBI Director Concerned about Encryption on Smartphones
F.B.I. Director Calls "Dark" Devices a Hindrance to Crime Solving
To FBI Director Comey: You Reap What You Sow!

2015:

F.B.I. Has No Doubt that North Korea Attacked Sony, says Director
FBI Chief Links Video Scrutiny of Police to Rise in Violent Crime

2016:

Apple Ordered by Judge to Help Decrypt San Bernadino Shooter's phone
FBI Unable to Decrypt California Terrorists' Cell Phone
FBI vs. Apple Encryption Fight Continues
New York Judge Sides with Apple Rather than FBI in Dispute over a Locked iPhone
Apple Lawyer and FBI Director Appear Before Congress
FBI Error Locked San Bernardino Attacker's iPhone
FBI's iPhone Hack Only Works on 5C and Older
Washington Post: The FBI Paid "Gray Hat(s)", Not Cellebrite, for iPhone Unlock
FBI Director Blames 'Viral Video Effect' for Spike in Violent Crime
FBI Recommends No Prosecution for Clinton
FBI Chief Calls for National Talk Over Encryption vs. Safety

Original Submission

Celestial writes:

The Disqus website commenting system is no longer free, (as in beer).

When it comes to managing comments on a website, the free options include WordPress (and other native comment systems), Facebook comments, and [until recently] Livefyre (now owned by Adobe).

You also used to be able to use Disqus for free, but that changed this past week when the company started telling websites that use Disqus that they had to either sign up for the paid service or turn on the Disqus ads.

[...] Disqus offered clear benefits over the default WordPress comment system, including support for threaded comments, upvotes, spam detection (which clearly doesn't always work), comment moderation tools.

At the time Disqus was also completely free for most publishers. Over the years Disqus has rolled out a few different monetization options. Larger publishers can pay for premium features, and all sites can opt-in to Disqus ads, which can appear above or in the middle of the comments sections.

Starting later this week, all publishers using Disqus will have to either enable ads or pay for a subscription.

I honestly don't know which would be worse: advertisements, or websites currently using Disqus switching to Facebook comments.

Also at Liliputing.

Original Submission

NewNic writes:

During their investigation of the purchase of a large estate in New Zealand by Peter Thiel, Matt Nippert and Anne Gibson, reporters for The New Zealand Herald, noticed that certain processes required by the Overseas Investment Act had not been followed. The explanation: Peter Thiel is a NZ citizen and hence wasn't required to follow the procedures for an overseas investment.

If Thiel is so sure that Trump will deliver, why does he need a bolt hole and more importantly, citizenship in another country?

The New York Times adds:

One question being asked was why Mr. Thiel became a New Zealander in 2011. Close behind that was how it happened.

If you like New Zealand enough to want to become a citizen, the country's Internal Affairs Department noted on Wednesday, one requirement is "to have been physically in New Zealand for a minimum of 1,350 days in the five years preceding the citizenship application." Another requirement is that you "continue to reside" there after becoming a citizen.

Mr. Thiel, 49, does not appear to have done either.

[...] If Mr. Thiel was not a resident in New Zealand for the necessary amount of time, an exception must have been made. The government has not responded to questions about whether that happened and, if so, what the reason was.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

The Gambia's ex-ruler Yahya Jammeh plundered the state coffers in his final weeks in power, stealing millions of dollars and shipping out luxury vehicles by cargo plane, according to an aide to new president Adama Barrow.

Jammeh, who ruled the small West African country for 22 years, flew into exile late on Saturday [Jan 21] to Equatorial Guinea.

He had refused to concede defeat in a December 1 election but eventually relinquished power after a delegation of West African leaders convinced him to step down, even as troops from neighbouring countries entered The Gambia.

[...] But amid growing controversy over the assurances offered to Jammeh to guarantee his departure, Barrow adviser Mai Fatty said the new administration had discovered that millions of dollars had recently been stolen.

[...] "Over two weeks, over 500m dalasi ($11 million) were withdrawn" by Jammeh, he said. "As we take over, the government of The Gambia is in financial distress."

Original Submission

butthurt writes:

Ars Technica reports that nineteen Republican members of the U.S. House of Representatives have written a letter (PDF) to the new chair of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), asking him to "close the docket" (end) a proposal regarding set-top boxes.

Tom Wheeler, the previous chair, had made the proposal, which he had touted by saying:

[Continues...]