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takyon writes:

Japan is allocating more money to academics conducting "dual-use" research with both civilian and military applications:

In 1950, Japan's scientific community, chastened by the complicity of researchers in their nation's disastrous military adventurism, took an extraordinary vow. "To preserve our integrity as scientists, we express our firm commitment both domestically and abroad that we will never pursue scientific research for the purpose of war," declared the Science Council of Japan (SCJ), now the nation's equivalent to the U.S. National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. Extended to broadly proscribe military research in 1967, the commitment held for 65 years—until Japan's defense ministry started a small program to fund university research with both civilian and military applications in 2015. Now, the ministry is sharply ramping up support for "dual-use" research—sparking an outcry among academics who see it as a dangerous revanchist policy.

The budget of the dual-use program, run by the Acquisition, Technology & Logistics Agency (ATLA) here, will skyrocket from $5.2 million this year to $95 million in the fiscal year beginning 1 April. In response, SCJ is considering amending its code of conduct to spell out conditions under which academic researchers can accept military money. That's not sufficient, some say: "I want the SCJ to clearly state that military research in academia is extremely inappropriate," Satoru Ikeuchi, an astrophysicist at Nagoya University in Japan, said at a 14 January symposium on the topic at Keio University's Yokohama campus.

The defense ministry's courtship of civilian researchers is another step in Japan's ongoing remilitarization, asserts Morihisa Hamada, a volcanologist at the Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology in Yokosuka. A key tenet of Japan's stance on promoting peace, he believes, "is not to take part in military research at universities." The new policy's supporters, meanwhile, argue that military research benefits Japan's overall science and technology efforts.

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n1 submitted this story about how President Trump's executive order is immediately affecting green card holders:

President Trump's executive order banning people from seven Muslim-majority countries from entering the U.S. also applies to green card holders from those countries, the Department of Homeland Security said Saturday. "It will bar green card holders," acting DHS spokeswoman Gillian Christensen told Reuters.

Green cards serve as proof of an individual's permanent legal residence in the U.S. A senior administration official clarified on Saturday afternoon that green card holders from the seven countries affected in the order who are currently outside the U.S. will need a case-by-case waiver to return to the U.S. Green card holders in the U.S. will have to meet with a consular officer before departing the country, the official said.

Source: The Hill

At least one case quickly prompted a legal challenge as lawyers representing two Iraqi refugees held at Kennedy International Airport in New York filed a motion early Saturday seeking to have their clients released. They also filed a motion for class certification, in an effort to represent all refugees and other immigrants who they said were being unlawfully detained at ports of entry. Shortly after noon on Saturday, Hameed Khalid Darweesh, an interpreter who worked on behalf of the United States government in Iraq, was released. After nearly 19 hours of detention, Mr. Darweesh began to cry as he spoke to reporters, putting his hands behind his back and miming handcuffs.

[...] Inside the airport, one of the lawyers, Mark Doss, a supervising attorney at the International Refugee Assistance Project, asked a border agent, "Who is the person we need to talk to?"

"Call Mr. Trump," said the agent, who declined to identify himself.

[...] An official message to all American diplomatic posts around the world provided instructions about how to treat people from the countries affected: "Effective immediately, halt interviewing and cease issuance and printing" of visas to the United States. Confusion turned to panic at airports around the world, as travelers found themselves unable to board flights bound for the United States. In Dubai and Istanbul, airport and immigration officials turned passengers away at boarding gates and, in at least one case, ejected a family from a flight they had boarded.

[...] Iranian green card holders who live in the United States were blindsided by the decree while on vacation in Iran, finding themselves in a legal limbo and unsure whether they would be able to return to America. "How do I get back home now?" said Daria Zeynalia, a green card holder who was visiting family in Iran. He had rented a house and leased a car, and would be eligible for citizenship in November. "What about my job? If I can't go back soon, I'll lose everything."

Source: The New York Times

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takyon writes:

Privacy International is criticizing Microsoft for its approval of the Thai military government's root certificate by default, which could enable spying on Thai citizens:

Privacy International, a UK-based nonprofit founded in 1990, released a report showing that Microsoft is the only operating system vendor to have approved the Thai military government's root certificate by default, which is managed by the Electronic Transaction Development Agency (ETDA). The nonprofit worries that the Thai government could now perform "man-in-the-middle" (MITM) attacks against Thai citizens. [...] In a statement to Tom's Hardware, Microsoft said that the Thai government obtained a root certificate in Windows only after passing the company's "extensive" approval process combined with an audit by BDO, a Canadian accounting and auditing firm.

Meanwhile, Google is launching its own root certificate authority:

The move, announced Thursday, will stop Google relying on an intermediate certificate authority (GIAG2) issued by a third party in its ongoing process of rolling out HTTPS across its products and services. "As we look forward to the evolution of both the web and our own products it is clear HTTPS will continue to be a foundational technology," Google explained in a blog post. "This is why we have made the decision to expand our current Certificate Authority efforts to include the operation of our own Root Certificate Authority."

The newly established Google Trust Services will operate these Certificate Authorities on behalf of Google and parent company Alphabet.

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takyon writes:

The Juno spacecraft has made another pass at Jupiter, capturing a previously unseen view of the planet's top side:

This stunning view of the high north temperate latitudes fortuitously shows NN-LRS-1, a giant storm known as a Little Red Spot (lower left). This storm is the third largest anticyclonic reddish oval on the planet, which Earth-based observers have tracked for the last 23 years. An anticyclone is a weather phenomenon with large-scale circulation of winds around a central region of high atmospheric pressure. They rotate clockwise in the northern hemisphere, and counterclockwise in the southern hemisphere. This Little Red Spot shows very little color, just a pale brown smudge in the center. The color is very similar to the surroundings, making it difficult to see as it blends in with the clouds nearby.

Also at Slate and Universe Today.

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takyon writes:

A company that makes consumer-grade "breathalyzers" has settled with the U.S. Federal Trade Commission due to the inherent inaccuracy of the devices:

If you're trusting a personal breathalyzer to protect you from a drunk driving conviction, think again, since the devices might not work as advertised. In the past few years, various companies have begun marketing personal breathalyzers that fit in your pocket and can report blood alcohol content (BAC) levels to a smartphone. El Reg's Vulture West hacks in San Francisco carried out a group test on such devices, which provided much merriment.

Breathometer, which was one of the devices we tested, has just agreed to settle charges brought by the FTC – America's trade watchdog – that claims the company made about its breathalyzers weren't backed up by scientific evidence and that users could be dangerously misled about how sober they were.

"People relied on the defendant's products to decide whether it was safe to get behind the wheel," said Jessica Rich, director of the FTC's Bureau of Consumer Protection. "Overstating the accuracy of the devices was deceptive – and dangerous." According to the FTC, Breathometer sold more than $5m worth of its alcohol testing devices and claimed that they were "law-enforcement grade products" that were subject to "government lab-grade testing." This wasn't the case, the FTC claims, and alleges that the company was aware that its devices routinely reported lower BAC levels than were accurate, but continued to sell them.

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takyon writes:

Machine learning can compete with dermatologists when it comes to diagnosing skin cancer, to an extent:

A group of Stanford researchers has trained one of Google's deep neural networks on a massive database of images that show skin lesions. By the end, the neural network was competitive with dermatologists when it came to diagnosing cancers using images. While the tests done in this paper don't fully represent the challenges a specialist would face, it's still an impressive improvement in computer performance.

[...] For the medical images, the authors relied on Stanford's extensive records focusing on skin diseases. In all, they arranged more than 2,000 individual disorders into a tree-like structure based on their relatedness. So for example, all inflammatory problems ended up on one branch of the tree, all the cancers on another. These were further subdivided until the branching reached individual diseases. Inception was then given the tree and a set of nearly 130,000 images of these disorders and was trained to properly identify each. That's over 100 times the number of images as were used for training in the largest previous study of this sort.

The authors then tested the basic classification system against two dermatologists, using a new set of images where the diagnosis had been confirmed by biopsy. On the most basic level of classification—benign, malignant, or a type called "non-neoplastic"—the accuracy of the neural network was over 70 percent while the doctors were in the 60s. When asked for a more detailed classification among nine categories, the neural network had an accuracy of about 55 percent, which is similar to the numbers put up by the dermatologists.

For a further test, the team put Inception up against 21 dermatologists, asking them to determine whether an image contained a benign or malignant lesion. Here, the neural network consistently edged out most of the doctors, and it consistently performed a bit better than their average performance.

Before you conclude that doctors are obsolete, however, remember that neither they nor the algorithm did especially well when simply handed an image of any random skin disease and asked to identify it rather than being asked to provide a yes-or-no malignancy diagnosis. In the former case, the doctors have considerable advantages: they can examine the lesion from multiple angles, feel it and its surrounding tissue to get a sense of its texture and density, ask for additional tests, and evaluate their own uncertainty. Unlike Inception, they're not limited to looking at images.

Dermatologist-level classification of skin cancer with deep neural networks (DOI: 10.1038/nature21056) (DX)

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takyon writes:

A new semiconductor fabrication plant in China could upend the DRAM and NAND industries:

Tsinghua Unigroup, one of the many tentacles of the Chinese state-controlled Tsinghua University, announced that it is investing $30 billion to build a new DRAM and NAND fab in Nanjing, China. The development comes as the company seeks to rapidly expand after its 51% buy-in of Yangtze River Storage Technology, which recently announced a separate $24 billion DRAM and NAND fab in Wuhan, China.

The NAND industry is falling deeper into the largest shortage in its history, and many industry analysts predict that we will experience yet another DRAM shortage in the coming months. Both the NAND and DRAM industries have consolidated down to a few key players, and predictable production output has kept supply and demand dynamics largely balanced for several years. However, a rash of 3D NAND developmental delays have delayed major players, such as SanDisk, Toshiba, SK hynix, and to a lesser extent Intel and Micron, from reaching production projections. These delays are the catalyst for the current shortage, but the entrance of the potentially unpredictable Tsinghua could upset the delicate supply balance, thus causing an eventual glut. The staid semiconductor industry would rather weather shortages than the margin-killing gluts, so the Tsinghua developments are concerning for the established players.

Additional coverage at:
http://www.reuters.com/article/us-tsinghua-plant-idUSKBN1532ED

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takyon writes:

Hubble Space Telescope observations have been used to make an independent measurement of the expansion rate of the universe:

The Hubble constant — the rate at which the Universe is expanding — is one of the fundamental quantities describing our Universe. A group of astronomers from the H0LiCOW collaboration, led by Sherry Suyu (associated with the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics in Germany, the ASIAA in Taiwan and the Technical University of Munich), used the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope and other telescopes in space and on the ground to observe five galaxies in order to arrive at an independent measurement of the Hubble constant.

The new measurement is completely independent of — but in excellent agreement with — other measurements of the Hubble constant in the local Universe that used Cepheid variable stars and supernovae as points of reference [heic1611].

However, the value measured by Suyu and her team, as well as those measured using Cepheids and supernovae, are different from the measurement made by the ESA Planck satellite. But there is an important distinction — Planck measured the Hubble constant for the early Universe by observing the cosmic microwave background.

While the value for the Hubble constant determined by Planck fits with our current understanding of the cosmos, the values obtained by the different groups of astronomers for the local Universe are in disagreement with our accepted theoretical model of the Universe. "The expansion rate of the Universe is now starting to be measured in different ways with such high precision that actual discrepancies may possibly point towards new physics beyond our current knowledge of the Universe," elaborates Suyu.

Also at Astronomy Magazine.

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mechanicjay writes:

This is a slightly older article that just came to my attention today, though the data systems it describes are currently being built out and used. It seems to be quite a well researched article, with a ton of links to sources.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/answer-sheet/wp/2015/11/12/the-astonishing-amount-of-data-being-collected-about-your-children/

Basically, it's talks about sensitive data entered into a new breed of student information systems, with very few legal protections around that data. These systems collect data with a common schema. The common schema would seem to allow for large-scale analysis of the data later on. You can get more information on the schema and potential data collected by the Common Education Data Standards (CEDS) here: https://ceds.ed.gov/

If you send your children to a public school, under current federal law you have no way of opting out of the P20 profile that has been created by your state and potentially shared with others. You also have no right to refuse to have your child's data disclosed to testing companies and other corporations in the name of evaluation and research.

I'm not done digging into this, but it seems important for those of that are concerned about massive amounts of data collection and in this case, what it means for our children who are literally being tracked and data-mined from birth.

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takyon writes:

Scientists have found extracted Mycobacterium leprae DNA from a medieval skeleton:

A medieval skeleton found at a UK burial site has revealed clues to the history of leprosy, say researchers. The remains were excavated from the site of one of UK's earliest known hospitals, near Winchester, Hampshire. Scientific detective work suggests the man was a religious pilgrim who may have caught the disease on his travels. [...] Radiocarbon dating indicated that the remains were buried during the late 11th or early 12th Century. Scientists believe the man was a religious pilgrim. He was interred with a scallop shell, the traditional symbol of a pilgrim who has made the journey to the shrine of St James in Santiago de Compostela, Spain.

[...] The research suggests the genetic make-up of the bacteria that causes leprosy has not significantly changed since the disease peaked in medieval Europe. This might explain why transmission of the disease has slowed in modern times as human populations develop resistance. The minor genetic differences between strains is likely to reflect different origins of the disease through past movements of people or trade from different parts of the world.

Also at Live Science.

Investigation of a Medieval Pilgrim Burial Excavated from the Leprosarium of St Mary Magdalen Winchester, UK (open, DOI: 10.1371/journal.pntd.0005186) (DX)

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Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Fighting off cancer requires the concerted efforts of immune molecules throughout the body, rather than just in the tumor itself, according to a new study of laboratory mice by researchers at the Stanford University School of Medicine.

The finding helps settle an ongoing dispute among clinicians as to whether systemic, or whole-body responses, are as important as a robust response by immune cells in the tumor itself. The study may help clinicians understand why some people with cancer respond favorably to cancer immunotherapy, while others experience little or no benefit. It also suggests ways that the effectiveness of ongoing therapies could be quickly and easily monitored.

[...] The researchers compared the immune responses of a special group of laboratory mice engineered to spontaneously develop triple-negative breast cancers. These cancers are resistant to a type of immunotherapy known as checkpoint blockade. Recently, however, Engleman and his colleagues showed that they could stimulate a successful immune response and eradicate tumors in the animals with a two-pronged approach that incorporated both a tumor-binding antibody and molecules that activated a type of immune cell called a dendritic cell.

[...] The researchers found that in animals treated with the effective, two-pronged approach, the prevalence of immune cells -- including macrophages, dendritic cells and T cells -- in the tumor itself increased dramatically within three days of treatment, during a period known as "priming." These cells also divided more rapidly. In contrast, the tumors of the animals receiving the ineffective therapy, checkpoint blockade, displayed no such increase in prevalence or proliferation.

Journal Reference:
Matthew H. Spitzer, et al. Systemic Immunity Is Required for Effective Cancer Immunotherapy. Cell, 2017; DOI: 10.1016/j.cell.2016.12.022

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Fnord666 writes:

In recent years, the Russian space program has had a series of problems with its flagship rockets, the heavy-lift Proton booster and the smaller Soyuz rocket used to launch crews and cargo to the International Space Station. The Proton rocket has been grounded since last summer, and the Soyuz has not flown since December, when its third stage engine failed and a Progress cargo spacecraft was lost.

Most of these problems have been traced to engines that power the second and third stages of the Proton and Soyuz rockets. The majority of these engines are built at the Voronezh Manufacturing Plant in southwestern Russia, near the Ukrainian border. Russian Space Web reports that Ivan Koptev, director general of the engine manufacturing facility, has resigned.

According to the news reports, the final straw may have come after recent tests of engines to be used by future second and third stages of the Proton rocket that resulted in more failures. "The failure of the engine was reportedly traced to illegal replacement of precious heat-resistant alloys within the engine's components with less expensive but failure-prone materials," Zak writes. The Russian space agency, Roscosmos, has already recalled some of the engines to be used in the upper stage of its Soyuz rockets, and now it is also recalling dozens of Proton upper stage engines. The next Proton launch could be delayed into this summer.

Source:
https://arstechnica.com/science/2017/01/russia-recalling-dozens-of-rocket-engines-sacks-head-motor-builder/

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Fnord666 writes:

In a move that stunned some security researchers, a top investigator at Russia's largest antivirus provider, Kaspersky Lab, has been arrested in an investigation into treason, a crime that upon conviction can carry severe sentences.

Ruslan Stoyanov, the head of Kaspersky Lab's investigations unit, was arrested in December, Russian newspaper Kommersant reported Wednesday. The paper said that Sergei Mikhailov, a division head of the Russian intelligence service FSB, was also arrested in the same probe. Stoyanov joined the Moscow-based AV company in 2012 and was chiefly involved in investigating and responding to hacking-related crimes carried out in Russia. His LinkedIn profile shows he served as a major in the cybercrime unit of Russia's Ministry of Interior from 2000 to 2006.

"The case against this employee does not involve Kaspersky Lab," company officials wrote in a statement issued following the report. "The employee, who is Head of the Computer Incidents Investigation Team, is under investigation for a period predating his employment at Kaspersky Lab. We do not possess details of the investigation. The work of Kaspersky Lab's Computer Incidents Investigation Team is unaffected by these developments."

[...] Whatever the specifics are behind the investigation into Stoyanov, security researchers said the arrest will likely cause colleagues in Russia and elsewhere to self-censor potentially sensitive findings.

"For those living and working under oppressive regimes, keep up the good fight," Jake Williams, founder of security firm Rendition Software who previously worked for the Department of Defense, wrote in a blog post. "But also remember that no incident response report or conference talk is worth jail time (or worse)." In a message to Ars, he added: "I think that these charges will cause security researchers, particularly those in states with oppressive governments, to carefully consider the weight of reporting details of security incidents."

Source:
https://arstechnica.com/security/2017/01/kaspersky-labs-top-investigator-reportedly-arrested-in-treason-probe/

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Fnord666 writes:

The NASA astronauts who fly aboard Boeing's new spaceship will wear sleek, blue suits that are lighter, simpler and more comfortable than the bulky orange gear of the space shuttle era, company representatives said.

Unveiled today (Jan. 25), the new "Boeing Blue" spacesuits for the Starliner capsule weigh about 20 lbs. (9 kilograms) each with all of their accessories, compared to 30 lbs. (13.6 kg) for the old space shuttle suits, NASA officials said.

Other advances include touch-screen-sensitive gloves, more-flexible material and soft helmets that are incorporated into the suit (rather than the hard, detachable helmets of the shuttle era).

"It is a lot lighter, more formfitting, and it's simpler, which is always a good thing," NASA astronaut Eric Boe said in a statement. "Complicated systems have more ways they can break, so simple is better on something like this."

Source: http://www.space.com/35456-boeing-unveils-starliner-spacesuits-photos.html

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FakeBeldin writes:

Apologies up front; this is playing out in Dutch media and there do not seem to be English sources available. Nevertheless, I thought the following would be of interest to SN:

Philips TVs are manufactured by TP Vision. Recently, TP Vision announced that it would include more ads on its (Philips-branded) smart-tvs. Comment by Paulo Lopez of TP Vision to the media:

"We know very much about viewing behaviour. Which channels are being watched, which apps are being used. Based on that, we can make ads more relevant in the future." (translation mine).

Well that did cause a few ripples, amongst others with the data protection agency in the Netherlands. They already slapped TP Vision on the wrist back in 2013 for doing basically this. Now the data protection agency is starting another investigation. Moreover, tech-heads also noticed and kicked up a bit of a sh*tstorm at popular Dutch tech site Tweakers.net: more ads, warning, with 555 and 133 comments respectively (on a site where 100+ comments is a lot).

Do you know of any other brands that engage in such sleazy behaviour? And: would it be possible to block the ads while retaining the smart functionality (assuming a user who wants that), when the TV would try to detect/prevent that?

[Ed. Note: All I found in English is a press release from Improve Digital, the advertising company. Typical PR language there.]

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CoolHand writes:

Scientists may have found why a LSD trip lasts so long:

By freezing an LSD molecule bound to a single brain cell receptor as a crystal in a lab, researchers were able to get a 3-D x-ray image of the drug and the protein locked together. "My lab has been trying to do this since the early 1990s," says Bryan Roth, a pharmacologist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and senior author on the paper. "I remember Dan Wacker [a co-author, also at U.N.C.] showing the image. It was basically a moment of silence. I started to fight back tears of gratitude that we had finally gotten it." It is the first 3-D image of a psychedelic bound to a brain receptor, Roth says.

The image showed Roth and his co-authors something strange about the way LSD fit inside this receptor. Drugs typically come and go from receptor proteins like ships pulling in and out of a port. But when an LSD molecule lands on the receptor, the molecule snags onto a portion of the protein and folds it over itself as the molecule binds to the receptor. "There was this lid that came over the molecule. It looked like it trapped LSD in the receptor," Roth says. "That immediately suggested to us why LSD lasts so long."

LSD seems to stimulate the receptor for the entire time it is trapped underneath the protein "lid," Roth says. Proteins are in constant motion, so he thinks the lid eventually flops open, allowing the drug to fly out and the effects to wear off. But the team ran computer models that suggest it could take hours for that to happen. Until then, the trip goes on.

Other articles on the topic:
Popular Science
LiveScience

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