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Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

The ancient population of Britain was almost completely replaced by newcomers about 4,500 years ago, a study shows.

The findings mean modern Britons trace just a small fraction of their ancestry to the people who built Stonehenge.

The astonishing result comes from analysis of DNA extracted from 400 ancient remains across Europe.

The mammoth study, published in Nature, suggests the newcomers, known as Beaker people, replaced 90% of the British gene pool in a few hundred years.

Lead author Prof David Reich, from Harvard Medical School in Cambridge, US, said: "The magnitude and suddenness of the population replacement is highly unexpected."

The reasons remain unclear, but climate change, disease and ecological disaster could all have played a role.

Fnord666 writes:

Disney's attempt to prevent Redbox from buying its discs for rental and resale may have blown up in the House of Mouse's face. The Hollywood Reporter describes how District Court Judge Dean Pregerson sided with Redbox to shoot down a Disney-mandated injunction. In addition, Pregerson contended that Disney may itself be misusing copyright law to protect its interests and its own forthcoming streaming service.

If you're unfamiliar with the backstory, Redbox didn't have a deal in place to procure Disney DVDs and Blu-rays for its disc rental kiosks. So, the company simply bought the discs at retail, often snagging combo packs that include a DVD, Blu-ray and a download code for the movie as well. Redbox would then offer up the discs for rental, and sell on the codes at its kiosks for between $8 and $15.

Such a move enraged Disney, which includes language in its packaging and on the website demanding that users must own the disc if they download a copy. But this is where Pregerson began to disagree, saying that Disney cannot dictate what people do with copyrighted media after they have bought it. Specifically, that there's no law, or explicit contract term, that prevents folks from doing what Redbox did with Disney discs.

Source: https://www.engadget.com/2018/02/22/disney-redbox-lawsuit/

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Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

The number of cameras in cars is increasing. However, through the flood of data the internal networks are being pushed to their limits. Special compression methods reduce the amount of video data, but exhibit a high degree of latency for coding. Fraunhofer researchers have adapted video compression in such a way that a latency is almost no longer perceivable. It is therefore of interest for use in road traffic or for autonomous driving. This technology will be on display at the Embedded World from 27 February until 1 March 2018 in Nuremberg in hall 4 (booth 4-470).

[...] The Fraunhofer HHI, for example, has made a decisive contribution to the development of the two video coding standards H.264/Advanced Video Coding (AVC) and H.265/MPEG High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC). "With these methods, the data quantities can be sharply reduced. In this way, more than ten times the quantity of data can be transmitted," emphasizes the group leader of the "Video Coding and Machine Learning" department at the Fraunhofer HHI.

-- OriginalOwner_ writes:

AlterNet reports

Disney Inadvertently Exposes Trump's Tax Cut for the Scam It's Been from the Start

When Donald Trump signed the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act into law, he touted the legislation as a financial boon for American labor. As recently as January, Trump pointed to $1,000 bonuses for employees that American Airlines, AT&T, and Disney have announced as proof corporations would reinvest the billions of dollars they stand to save in their respective workforces. But if the president has offered a vision of how tax cuts for multinational corporations might operate in theory, an unfair labor practice complaint filed Tuesday reveals how they work in practice.

According to the Orange County Register, Unite Here Local 11, a union representing 2,700 housekeepers and other low-wage workers, has accused the Walt Disney Co. of effectively holding its bonuses hostage to secure a more favorable bargaining agreement. Disney is refusing to release the one-time payments "notwithstanding the union's lack of objection", the statement reads. "[The company] has violated its duty to bargain in good faith, and has engaged in conduct that is inherently destructive to rights guaranteed employees under the [National Labor Relations] Act." (For Disney's part, a spokeswoman maintains the company has a "strong offer on the table".)

[...] Regulatory findings released last month indicate [CEO Bob] Iger earned $36.3 million in compensation for 2017, which is $7.6 million less than he made the year before. The average union member at Disney World is paid $10.71 an hour, while just 3,000 employees earn in excess of $15. Disneyland staffers make a fraction more, the beneficiaries of California's decision last month to raise its minimum wage from $10.50 to $11 an hour. Unite Here's latest filing follows a separate complaint by a coalition of unions representing 38,000 Disney World workers in Florida.

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Fnord666 writes:

The FCC's order to overturn net neutrality protections was officially published in the Federal Register today and soon thereafter, the attorneys general of 22 states and Washington DC filed a lawsuit challenging the FCC's order. The coalition filed a suit earlier this year, but agreed last week to withdraw it until the FCC published the order, Reuters reports. "Today, the FCC made official its illegal rollback of net neutrality -- and, as promised, our coalition of attorneys general is filing suit," New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman said in a statement. "Consumers and businesses in New York and across the country have the right to a free and open internet, and our coalition of attorneys general won't stop fighting to protect that right."

[...] The attorneys general say in their complaint that the FCC's order was "arbitrary, capricious and an abuse of discretion within the meaning of the Administrative Procedure Act." They also say it violates federal law and conflicts with the notice-and-comment rulemaking requirements. They're asking the court to vacate the order.

Source: https://www.engadget.com/2018/02/22/23-attorneys-general-challenge-fcc-net-neutrality-repeal/

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canopic jug writes:

The Columbia Journalism Review has some analysis of the problem of disinformation and propaganda being actively spread over social control media. As the situation is studied more, albeit belatedly, the nature of social control's business model gets more daylight.

"That fundamental goal is to get the user to stay as long as possible," Ghosh said in an interview. "Their motivations are different—for platforms, it is to maximize ad space, to collect more information about the individual, and to rake in more dollars; and for the disinformation operator, the motive is the political persuasion of the individual to make a certain decision. But until we change that alignment, we are not going to solve the problem of disinformation on these platforms."

After Mueller released his indictments, sociologist Zeynep Tufekci noted on Twitter that the indictment "shows [Russia] used social media just like any other advertiser/influencer. They used the platforms as they were designed to be used."

The phrase surveillance capitalism gets more traction as it becomes acknowledged that while social control media do not actively spread disinformation and propaganda it is a side effect of collecting as much personal information as legally (and somtimes illegally) allowed. That information is aggregated from multiple sources both internal and external to social control media itself. As a result it is getting increasingly difficult to distinguish between disinformation and authentic political speech.

Automated attacks make that differentiation that much harder. Faecebook gets the most attention, but the others, including YouTube work the same way and can thus be manipulated just as easily. (Ed: Speaking of YouTube, to single out one topic as an example, as seen recently with FCC comments on Net Neutrality, only 17%of the comments the FCC received were legitimate with the rest filled in by clumsy bots.)

Source : Fake news is part of a bigger problem: automated propaganda

Original Submission

"Arthur T Knackerbracket" has found the following story:

Treating food allergies might be a simple matter of teaching the immune system a new trick, researchers at Duke Health have found.

In a study using mice bred to have peanut allergies, the Duke researchers were able to reprogram the animals' immune systems using a nanoparticle delivery of molecules to the lymph nodes that switched off the life-threatening reactions to peanut exposures.

[...]

They focused on the Th2-type cytokine immune response, which is increasingly understood as a driver of the overactive immune responses in allergy attacks. In an appropriate immune response, Th2 works in tandem with Th1, but during allergic reactions, Th2 is overproduced and Th1 is diminished.

The solution appears simple enough: deliver more Th1-type cytokines ahead of an allergen exposure to restore balance. But it has proven difficult. A test of this type was attempted as an asthma therapy, but it required a massive dose to the lungs and was ineffective.

In their experiment with the peanut-allergy mice, St. John and colleagues instead delivered antigen- and cytokine-loaded nanoparticles into the skin. The nanoparticles traveled to the lymph nodes, where they dissolved and dispensed their payload at the source of the immune response.

Animals that received this therapy no longer went into an acute allergic response called anaphylaxis when they were subsequently exposed to peanuts. The new-found tolerance was long-lasting, so did not need to be repeated ahead of each exposure to the allergen.

"The Th1 and Th2 sides of immunity balance each other," St. John said. "We reasoned that since we know Th2 immunity is over-produced during allergic responses, why not try to skew the immune response back the other direction? By delivering cytokines to the lymph nodes where immune responses are established, we were able to re-educate the immune system that an allergic response is not an appropriate one."

The approach could theoretically be applied to other allergens, including environmental triggers such as dust and pollen. Additional experiments are underway to move the findings into human trials.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

A Biohacker Regrets Publicly Injecting Himself With CRISPR

When Josiah Zayner watched a biotech CEO drop his pants at a biohacking conference and inject himself with an untested herpes treatment, he realized things had gone off the rails.

Zayner is no stranger to stunts in biohacking—loosely defined as experiments, often on the self, that take place outside of traditional lab spaces. You might say he invented their latest incarnation: He's sterilized his body to "transplant" his entire microbiome in front of a reporter. He's squabbled with the FDA about selling a kit to make glow-in-the-dark beer. He's extensively documented attempts to genetically engineer the color of his skin. And most notoriously, he injected his arm with DNA encoding for CRISPR that could theoretically enhance his muscles—in between taking swigs of Scotch at a live-streamed event during an October conference. (Experts say—and even Zayner himself in the live-stream conceded—it's unlikely to work.)

So when Zayner saw Ascendance Biomedical's CEO injecting himself on a live-stream earlier this month, you might say there was an uneasy flicker of recognition.

Apparition writes:

Arnaud Nourry, the CEO of Lagardère Publishing (the parent company of Hachette Book Group), gave an interview to Scroll.in in which he claims, "the eBook is a stupid product."

In the US and UK, the ebook market is about 20% of the total book market, everywhere else it is 5%-7% because in these places the prices never went down to such a level that the ebook market would get significant traction. I think the plateau, or rather slight decline, that we're seeing in the US and UK is not going to reverse. It's the limit of the ebook format. The ebook is a stupid product. It is exactly the same as print, except it's electronic. There is no creativity, no enhancement, no real digital experience. We, as publishers, have not done a great job going digital. We've tried. We've tried enhanced or enriched ebooks – didn't work. We've tried apps, websites with our content – we have one or two successes among a hundred failures. I'm talking about the entire industry. We've not done very well.

For an in-depth explanation of Arnaud Nourry's comments, we go to The Digital Reader:

Hachette's sales are low because Hachette keeps their ebook prices high. If you check the Author Earnings report, you will see that ebooks make up a significant part of the market. And it's not just a tiny group of readers who like ebooks; almost all of romance has gone digital, as well as around half of the SF market.

This guy understands so little about ebooks that it is almost frightening.

Passports, like any physical ID, can be altered and forged. That's partly why for the last 11 years the United States has put RFID chips in the back panel of its passports, creating so-called e-Passports. The chip stores your passport information—like name, date of birth, passport number, your photo, and even a biometric identifier—for quick, machine-readable border checks. And while e-Passports also store a cryptographic signature to prevent tampering or forgeries, it turns out that despite having over a decade to do so, US Customs and Border Patrol hasn't deployed the software needed to actually verify it.

https://www.wired.com/story/us-border-patrol-hasnt-validated-e-passport-data-for-years/

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Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

An elderly man's flatulence forced his flight to make an emergency stop after a fight broke out over his barrage of bottom burps.

Passengers flying with budget Dutch airline Transavia from Dubai to Amsterdam were reportedly put out by the man's continued farting, and asked him to stop.

But the man failed to hold it in, and when even a direct order from the pilot didn't take the wind out of his sails, two particularly incensed passengers took matters into their own hands.

Local media reported that two Dutchmen sat next to the trumper started a fight with the man, which escalated to the point where the pilot was forced to make an unscheduled stop.

On landing in Vienna, armed police boarded the plane to remove the men who caused the ruckus, along with two sisters who were seated next to them.

Also covered at The Straits Times.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Italian airline Meridiana changed its name to Air Italy with the backing of Qatar Airways, its new shareholder, aiming to become Italy's flagship carrier as UAE-backed Alitalia undergoes bankruptcy proceedings. Re-branded as Air Italy, Meridian unveiled a new restructuring plan to make of Air Italy "a sustainable airline alternative for the people of Italy", as Qatar Airways' CEO Akbar al-Baker said on Monday at a press conference in Milan. "Air Italy will achieve global scale in both fleet and network expansion ... We will show that we are the star," added al-Baker. Over the next three years, 20 Boeing 737 MAX aircraft will be added to Air Italy's fleet, the first of which arrives in April 2018.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Intel Issues Updated Spectre Firmware Fixes For Newer Processors

Intel has issued updated microcode to help protect its newer processors from Spectre security exploits. The Santa Clara, Calif.-based company's new microcode updates – which impact its newer chip platforms, such as Kaby Lake, Coffee Lake, and Skylake – have been released to OEM customers and partners.

[...] The company initially released patches addressing the Spectre and Meltdown vulnerabilities in January, but later yanked its patches for the Variant 2 flaw – both for client compute and data center chips – after acknowledging that they caused "higher than expected reboots and other unpredictable system behavior." And while Intel last week announced it was re-issuing fixes for several Skylake-based platforms, the company had not given further details for its other newer processors – including Kaby Lake and Coffee Lake – until Tuesday.

First Intel, now AMD also faces multiple class-action suits over Spectre attacks

Intel rival AMD is also facing a number of class-action lawsuits over how it's responded to the Meltdown and Spectre CPU flaws. As The Register reports, four class-action complaints have been filed against the chip maker seeking damages on behalf of customers and investors. The suits follow a warning from AMD in late January that warned investors that it is "also subject to claims related to the recently disclosed side-channel exploits, such as Spectre and Meltdown, and may face claims or litigation for future vulnerabilities".

Intel revealed last week that it now faced 32 class-action lawsuits over its handling of the Meltdown and Spectre issues and three additional lawsuits over alleged insider trading.

Also at BetaNews.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

SpaceX has launched the Paz satellite for a Spanish company using a Falcon 9 rocket, which also carried two secondary payloads: Microsat-2a and Microsat-2b. These are intended to test technologies needed to provide broadband Internet access from orbit:

SpaceX launched again on Thursday - this time to put a Spanish radar satellite above the Earth.

But there was a lot of interest also in the mission's secondary payloads - a couple of spacecraft the Californian rocket company will use to trial the delivery of broadband from orbit. SpaceX has big plans in this area. By sometime in the mid-2020s, it hopes to be operating more than 4,000 such satellites, linking every corner of Earth to the internet.

SpaceX projections show that the company expects its "Starlink" Internet service to have 40 million subscribers and $30 billion in revenue by 2025.

SpaceX also attempted to recover the $6 million payload fairing (nose cone) of the rocket using a specially-built "catcher's mitt" net boat called "Mr. Steven":

After launching its Falcon 9 rocket from California this morning, SpaceX used a giant net to try to recover the rocket's nose cone as it fell down in the Pacific Ocean. The first-time experiment failed, however: one of the pieces of the nose cone missed the net, which was attached to a ship, and landed intact on the sea surface instead.

[...] A typical rocket fairing doesn't have any onboard engines, however. So SpaceX has equipped its latest nose cone with a guidance system and thrusters, tiny engines that help guide the pieces through the atmosphere when they break away from the rocket. Then, as the pieces descend, they deploy thin parachute-like structures known as parafoils to slow their fall. Down at the surface, a SpaceX boat named Mr. Steven (a random name, Musk said) attempts to catch one of the fairing pieces with a giant net attached to large claw-like appendages.

SpaceX has been able to land its fairings in the ocean before, but this was the first time the company deployed Mr. Steven to catch one of the pieces. Musk noted that a fairing half missed the boat by a few hundred meters. However, the company should be able to fix the problem by making the parafoils bigger, he said.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Anti-depressants: Major study finds they work

Scientists say they have settled one of medicine's biggest debates after a huge study found that anti-depressants work. The study, which analysed data from 522 trials involving 116,477 people, found 21 common anti-depressants were all more effective at reducing symptoms of acute depression than dummy pills. But it also showed big differences in how effective each drug is.

The authors of the report, published in the Lancet [open, DOI: 10.1016/S0140-6736(17)32802-7] [DX], said it showed many more people could benefit from the drugs. There were 64.7 million prescriptions for the drugs in England in 2016 - more than double the 31 million in 2006 - but there has been a debate about how effective they are, with some trial[s] suggesting they are no better than placebos. The Royal College of Psychiatrists said the study "finally puts to bed the controversy on anti-depressants".

The so-called meta-analysis, which involved unpublished data in addition to the information from the 522 clinical trials involving the short-term treatment of acute depression in adults, found the medications were all more effective than placebos. However, the study found they ranged from being a third more effective than a placebo to more than twice as effective.

Original Submission

DeathMonkey writes:

The Federal Communications Commission's net neutrality rules will be no more in two months: The agency has taken the final step in removing the regulations from its rule book.

But that may not be the end of the story. Dozens of groups are expected to file lawsuits challenging the repeal, and Democrats in Congress will push to reverse the FCC's action.

On Thursday, the FCC published the final notice of the repeal in the Federal Register, which starts a 60-day clock until the rules are removed. The effective date for the repeal is April 23. The FCC voted to repeal the rules on Dec. 14.

https://www.cnet.com/news/fcc-officially-publish-net-neutrality-repeal/#ftag=CADf328eec

Final Notice of Repeal: https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2018/02/22/2018-03464/restoring-internet-freedom

Original Submission