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First Stars May Have Formed Just 250 Million Years After the Big Bang

takyon writes:

Early Star Formation Presents New Cosmic Mystery:

New observations suggest that stars began forming just 250 million years after the Big Bang — a record-breaker that will likely open a new line of cosmological inquiry.

Astronomers peering back into time suggest that the cosmic dark ages — before the universe hosted its sea of twinkling lights — might have lasted no more than 250 million years. The team presented their results in the journal Nature [DOI: 10.1038/s41586-018-0117-z] [DX] today.

Takuya Hashimoto (Osaka Sangyo University, Japan) and his colleagues used the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) to peer at a galaxy whose light was emitted 550 million years after the big bang, picking up a long-sought signal: oxygen. It's the most distant galaxy for which astronomers have been able to detect individual elements — and that single element has a big story to tell.

Because only hydrogen, helium, and a little lithium emerged from the Big Bang, the young universe was pristine. It wasn't until the first generation of stars exploded, breathing carbon, oxygen and other heavy elements into the cosmos, that the universe's inventory of elements increased. So, the detection of oxygen 550 million years after the Big Bang suggests that a generation of stars had already formed and died by this point.

Also at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory.

Scientists see surprise oxygen signal deep in the universe, suggesting stars formed far earlier than originally thought

MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for Runaway1956

Scientists have spotted an oxygen signal deep in the universe, suggesting it formed far differently from how we thought. The new discovery is the most distant oxygen ever seen by a telescope. And it could change our understanding of how stars and the universe as we know it came about. The galaxy is so far away that we are seeing it as it was when the universe was only 500 million years away[sic. And even at that age, it is filled with mature stars – suggesting the process of their formation began only 250 million years after the universe itself began.

Source: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/oxygen-star-universe-formation-amla-vlt-discovery-age-a8354811.html

Original Submission #1, Original Submission #2

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Researchers have learned that precursor cells for skeletal muscles actually also give rise to neurons, blood vessels, blood cells and immune cells, pushing science one step closer to generating body parts in a laboratory.

Findings were published today in Scientific Reports.

Combining developmental biology, genetics and bioinformatics, scientists at Oregon State University confirmed that Pax3+ cells act as a multifaceted stem cell niche for multiple organs at embryonic stages.

"We now have the ability to label cells based on expression profiling of sequence-specific transcription factors," said corresponding author Chrissa Kioussi, professor in the OSU College of Pharmacy. "We can give a molecular code to each cell, to make it distinct in time and space -- during the progression of a cell the code changes. That's beautiful because now we can discover niches, stem cell pockets, and we can use this information to fix so many genetic or environmentally caused disorders. This gives us the possibility to make an entire cell lineage, or an entire organ, in a petri dish."

Using a mouse embryo model, Kioussi and collaborators in Oregon State's colleges of Veterinary Medicine and Engineering compared gene expression profiles of the Pax3+ cell population over several days. They isolated lineage-traced cells from forelimbs at different embryonic days and performed whole-transcriptome profiling via RNA sequencing.

"That let us identify genes involved in the skeletal, muscular, vascular, nervous and immune systems, all of which go into making a functional limb," Kioussi said. "Expression of genes related to the immune, skeletal and vascular systems showed big increases over time, which suggests Pax3+ cells give rise to more than muscles -- they're involved in patterning and the three-dimensional formation of the forelimb through multiple systems."

The research opens the potential to use stem cell pockets, for example, to grow a new arm or leg or other organ for someone who's lost a body part to accident or disease.

Original Submission

requerdanos writes:

There's a minor media dust-up over which is worse, Open-source vulnerabilities, or Poor Enterprise IT Security?

On Tuesday, 15 May, ZDNet quoted from a Black Duck study and opined that the problem was the "Open-source vulnerabilities", posting an article entitled Open-source vulnerabilities plague enterprise codebase systems.

Vulnerabilities including the bug reportedly responsible for Equifax's data breach are still common elements of open-source systems used in the enterprise... the nature of open-source projects means that as developers are giving away their time for free, sometimes, bugs may escape the net and cause chaos...

Wednesday, May 16th, TechRepublic answered with Enterprise IT shouldn't blame open source for their own poor security practices:

Even if we set aside the fact that Black Duck sells tools and services to root open source out of your enterprise... Open source vulnerabilities will often get disclosed earlier than those in managed software [and] its up to IT to apply the patches.

In other words, open source developers are doing their best to write good software, publish notices when bugs are found, and then fix those bugs. What the open source world cannot do, however, is fix inept IT practices. Despite the headlines, it's not the open source world's problem that so many want to use the software but can't be bothered to apply updates.

Is the problem more one, or the other, or both? Or is it the insistence on calling free software "Open Source," referring to just one freedom of many?

Original Submission

takyon writes:

American Gut Project Reports Microbiome Results for 11K Participants

Members of the American Gut Consortium have shared microbiome findings from their citizen science project, which has enrolled more than 11,000 participants so far.

As they reported [open, DOI: 10.1128/mSystems.00031-18] [DX] in the journal mSystems today, the researchers received stool samples from individuals in the US, UK, and dozens of other countries. Participants completed voluntary surveys related to their diet, lifestyle, health status, and disease history, including nearly 1,800 individuals who took part in a picture-based food frequency questionnaire.

With these data, the team has started parsing relationships between gut microbial composition, diet, psychiatric disease, and more. The results suggest that gut microbiome diversity ticks up in individuals who eat a greater variety of plants, for example, but wanes in those with recent antibiotic use. The collection is continuing to grow, and investigators hope to do more extensive and detailed analyses on the samples in the future.

Original Submission

[Update: I do not have access to the mail queue, but the server dashboard shows that, as of 23:00 UTC, beryllium has returned to normal disk and cpu levels. That said, I see a gap in daily story headlines and daily story e-mails that were sent to me. We are continuing to monitor the situation. Please let us know if you have any outstanding issues. --martyb]

martyb writes:

We have been open with the community since the outset, and in keeping with that practice: we just fixed an issue with the site.

On or about May 9th, our mail server, beryllium, stopped sending out e-mails. The cause was the antivirus handler failing to be loaded, so all outgoing mail that would be processed by that handler ended up waiting indefinitely.

Many thanks to mechanicjay for debugging and fixing the issue!

Impact: If you signed up for emails from this site (such as notification of comment replies or moderation, subscription being low or expired, etc.) these have been delayed. It may take some time for the queue to be processed and for all pending e-mails to be sent out.

I well remember when SoylentNews launched and each day brought a seemingly endless supply of crashes and failures. It is a tribute to our volunteer staff that site issues now happen so rarely!

Original Submission

-- OriginalOwner_ writes:

El Reg reports

A forensics report has reported the first known death from the use of electronic cigarettes after a Florida man was killed when his device exploded and drove itself into his cranium.

Tallmadge D'Elia was vaping at home on May 5 when the vaping device, manufactured by Philippines-based Smok-E Mountain, exploded. An investigation by the Pinellas-Pasco medical examiner's office found the explosion fired two pieces of the vaping device into his head, causing death by "projectile wound of head".

D'Elia also suffered burns to 80 per cent of his body, the ABC News reports,[1] after the explosion caused a fire in his house. Firefighters found his lifeless body when they broke in to tackle the blaze.

A representative from Smok-E Mountain said that the problem was most likely a battery issue, or a problem with the atomizer D'Elia had in his mouth. It said the company had had problems with people cloning their devices and using bad batteries.

While D'Elia's death is a first, injuries from electronic cigarettes are surprisingly common. A report last year by the US Federal Emergency Management Agency found that between January 2009 and December 31, 2016 there were 195 incidents where vape pens overheated or exploded, leading to 133 acute injuries to users, 38 or which were described as "severe".

[1] Astounding use of whitespace in the page's source code.

Additional local coverage from Tampa Bay Times:
Autopsy: Vape pen explosion fatally wounded St. Petersburg man and St. Pete man is first U.S. vaping death. Are e-cigarettes safe?.

Original Submission

MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for Fnord666

A study carried out at a college in the Philippines shows that students with better grades use bad passwords in the same proportion as students with bad ones.

The study's focused around a new rule added to the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) guideline for choosing secure passwords —added in its 2017 edition.

The NIST recommendation was that websites check if a user's supplied password was compromised before by verifying if the password is also listed in previous public breaches.

If the password is included in previous breaches, the website is to consider the password insecure because all of these exposed passwords have most likely been added to even the most basic password-guessing brute-forcing tools.

What researchers from the Asia Pacific College (APC) have done was to take their students' email addresses associated with school accounts and check and see if the students' passwords had been leaked in previous breaches, correlating the final results with their GPA (grade point average).

All data such as names and passwords were hashed to protect students' privacy and personal information. Researchers checked students' passwords against a massive list of over 320 million passwords exposed in previous breaches and collected by Australian security researcher Troy Hunt, maintainer of the Have I Been Pwned service.

The results showed similar percentages of students across the GPA spectrum that were using previously exposed passwords —considered weak passwords and a big no-no in NIST's eyes.

Percentages varied from 12.82% to 19.83%, which is an inconclusive result to show a clear differentiation between the password practices of "smarter" kids when compared to the rest.

Source: https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/smarter-people-don-t-have-better-passwords-study-finds/

Original Submission

takyon writes:

2015 BP₅₁₉, nicknamed "Caju", is another extreme trans-Neptunian object that points to the existence of Planet Nine. Discovered with data from the Dark Energy Survey, Caju has a relatively large diameter, estimated at around 400-700 km, meaning the object could be a gravitationally rounded dwarf planet. It also has a highly inclined orbit of 54°, which a team of scientists says can be explained by the presence of the hypothetical Planet Nine:

After discovering it, the team tried to investigate 2015 BP₅₁₉'s origins using computer simulations of the Solar System. However, these tests were not able to adequately explain how the object had ended with such an orbit.

But when the team added a ninth planet with properties exactly matching those predicted by the Caltech scientists in 2016, the orbit of 2015 BP₅₁₉ suddenly made sense. "The second you put Planet Nine in the simulations, not only can you form objects like this object, but you absolutely do," Juliette Becker, a Michigan graduate student and lead author of the study told Quanta.

Some researchers, however, caution that Planet Nine may not be the only explanation for 2015 BP₅₁₉'s strange orbit. Michele Bannister, a planetary astronomer from Queen's University Belfast, in Ireland, who was not involved in the study, told Newsweek that while the latest findings were "a great discovery," other scenarios could account for its tilt. "This object is unusual because it's on a high inclination," she said. "This can be used to maybe tell us some things about its formation process. There are a number of models that suggest you can probably put objects like this into the shape of orbit and the tilt of orbit that we see today."

Also at Quanta Magazine.

Discovery and Dynamical Analysis of an Extreme Trans-Neptunian Object with a High Orbital Inclination (arXiv:1805.05355)

Related: Medieval Records Could Point the Way to Planet Nine

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Microsoft reportedly working on $400 Surface tablets to compete with the iPad

Microsoft is working on a new line of budget Surface tablets to better compete with Apple's low-cost iPad options, according to a report from Bloomberg.

According to the report, the new Surface tablets won't just be smaller, cheaper Surface Pros. Rather, Microsoft is said to be completely redesigning the devices, with 10-inch screens instead of the 12-inch size currently found on the Surface Pro, rounded corners that more resemble an iPad than the more rectangular Surface design, and USB-C for charging. Most importantly, priced at $400, they will be more in line with Apple's cheaper tablets, too.

Google also recently introduced an education-oriented ChromeOS tablet to compete with Apple's iPad.

Also at Laptop Magazine.

Related: Microsoft to Challenge Education-Oriented Chromebooks With Windows 10 Laptops Priced From $189
Apple Expected to Compete Against Chromebooks With Cheaper Education-Focused iPads
ChromeOS Gains the Ability to Run Linux Applications

Original Submission

takyon writes:

North Korea warns it may cancel summit with Trump if it has to give up nukes

A senior North Korean official warned Wednesday that Pyongyang may cancel its summit meeting between Kim Jong Un and President Trump scheduled for June 12 in Singapore, if it is going to be pushed into giving up its nuclear arsenal.

If the Trump administration pressures Pyongyang to unilaterally abandon its nuclear weapons, North Korea would have to reconsider the summit, Vice Foreign Minister Kim Kye Gwan said in a statement carried by the official KCNA news agency.

[...] The news came hours after the North canceled a high-level meeting with South Korean officials that was scheduled for Wednesday, citing a joint military exercise as the reason. In its earlier statement, KCNA claimed that the U.S. and South Korea's joint air drill, which began on Friday, was "a bid to make a preemptive airstrike at the DPRK and win the air."

See also:

• North Korea's Warning to U.S. Throws Trump Summit Into Doubt
• North Korea-US talks: Kim is in this for economic guarantees
• Why Negotiating With North Korea Was Never Going to Be Easy
• Frida Ghitis: North Korea is testing Trump
• For Pentagon, South Korea drills became a crucial but quiet endeavor
• North Korea Surprises Trump Administration by Acting Like North Korea Again
• How rival agendas threaten Trump's summit with Kim
• North Korea is dismantling its nuclear site, but is it abandoning its arsenal or hiding evidence?

Previously: Peace Dividend?

Original Submission

Appalbarry writes:

A small BC boutique hotel has discovered that travel site Expedia had been misleading potential customers.

For the past two years, owners Lori and Randy Strandlund say potential customers clicking on that link were told "rooms are unavailable for your trip dates on Expedia," no matter what date was entered.

[...] The Strandlunds believe they're the latest victims of an online issue that landed Expedia in trouble in France and is the subject of a potential class action lawsuit in the U.S. — the travel site allegedly posting hotels that aren't its clients, listing them as "unavailable," then re-directing customers to member properties that pay Expedia a booking fee.

Expedia has denied wrongdoing in each case.

[...] CBC News tried to bypass the erroneous online search results by calling the phone number listed until recently alongside the Moon Water Lodge address on the Expedia site.

Rather than connect with the inn, it rang through to an Expedia call centre — in Cairo, Egypt.

The booking agent stated that since Moon Water Lodge was "updating their inventory," he "couldn't access their system right now" and offered to find "other similar hotels in the area."

Lori Strandlund says she hopes to launch a Canadian class action lawsuit against Expedia — if other small hotels in this country report similar problems.

Postscript: When I searched for "Moon Water Lodge" on Google today, the paid Expedia listing for the lodge is the very first listing. As of 2018-05-17 12:49:06 UTC, the first listing is now for https://moonwaterlodge.com/.

[Updated to provide link to source article, reformat story, and to provide updated link results. --martyb]

Original Submission

Fnord666 writes:

In weekly online posts last year, WikiLeaks released a stolen archive of secret documents about the Central Intelligence Agency's hacking operations, including software exploits designed to take over iPhones and turn smart television sets into surveillance devices.

It was the largest loss of classified documents in the agency's history and a huge embarrassment for C.I.A. officials.

Now, the prime suspect in the breach has been identified: a 29-year-old former C.I.A. software engineer who had designed malware used to break into the computers of terrorism suspects and other targets, The New York Times has learned.

Agents with the Federal Bureau of Investigation searched the Manhattan apartment of the suspect, Joshua A. Schulte, one week after WikiLeaks released the first of the C.I.A. documents in March last year, and then stopped him from flying to Mexico on vacation, taking his passport, according to court records and relatives. The search warrant application said Mr. Schulte was suspected of "distribution of national defense information," and agents told the court they had retrieved "N.S.A. and C.I.A. paperwork" in addition to a computer, tablet, phone and other electronics.

[...] It is unclear why, more than a year after he was arrested, he has not been charged or cleared in connection with Vault 7. Leak investigators have had access to electronic audit trails inside the C.I.A. that may indicate who accessed the files that were stolen, and they have had possession of Mr. Schulte's personal data for many months.

[...] Mr. Schulte's lawyers have repeatedly demanded that prosecutors make a decision on the Vault 7 leak charges. Prosecutors said in court last week that they planned to file a new indictment in the next 45 days, and Mr. Schulte's lawyer Sabrina P. Shroff, of the federal public defender's office, asked the court to impose a deadline on any charges that the government sought to bring under the Espionage Act for supplying the secret C.I.A. files to WikiLeaks.

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/15/us/cia-hacking-tools-leak.html

Also at: BBC, SecurityWeek, and Ars Technica.

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

The once-venerated then once-defunct uBlock had been abandoned for years. Minimal interaction on Github, almost no commits, no interaction on the issue tracker not much of anything besides asking for donations for nothing. Well, a few months ago, a user by the name of uBlockAdmin unceremoniously joined Github and was given control of the uBlock repository. Not many changes have happened since. Basically, just changing the Readme around and bumping the versions for the various browsers, while ignoring the breaking bugs that makes bumping versions a bad idea. But, one commit does stand out from the rest: https://github.com/uBlockAdmin/uBlock/commit/76b89c0a22d20f3a66d7feab14e024f56ca65539 That is right folks, a privacy tool that makes money from people confusing it for another piece of software now has the bonus feature of tracking you! With renewed activity and new versions being deployed to the various extension stores (thus making it harder to tell the real from old by latest release date and incompatibility with newer browser versions), it might be a good idea to check if you are using the real thing: https://github.com/gorhill/ublock

Original Submission

Scientists Detect Possible Illegal Emissions of CFC-11

takyon writes:

Mysterious rise in emissions of ozone-damaging chemical

Scientists have detected an unexpected rise in atmospheric levels of CFC-11, a chlorofluorocarbon (CFC) highly damaging to the ozone layer. Banned by the Montreal Protocol in 1987, CFC-11 was seen to be declining as expected but that fall has slowed down by 50% since 2012.

Researchers say their evidence shows it's likely that new, illegal emissions of CFC-11 are coming from East Asia. These could hamper the recovery of the ozone hole and worsen climate change.

Also at NYT and Bloomberg.

An unexpected and persistent increase in global emissions of ozone-depleting CFC-11 (DOI: 10.1038/s41586-018-0106-2) (DX)

Someone, Somewhere, is Making a Banned Chemical that Destroys the Ozone Layer

An Anonymous Coward writes:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-environment/wp/2018/05/16/someone-somewhere-is-making-a-banned-chemical-that-destroys-the-ozone-layer-scientists-suspect/

Emissions of a banned, ozone-depleting chemical are on the rise, a group of scientists reported Wednesday, suggesting someone may be secretly manufacturing the pollutant in violation of an international accord.

Emissions of CFC-11 have climbed 25 percent since 2012, despite the chemical being part of a group of ozone pollutants that were phased out under the 1987 Montreal Protocol.

Original Submission #1  Original Submission #2 

requerdanos writes:

The Lemonade Insurance Agency of New York has announced an 'open source' insurance policy that anyone can edit, according to Insurance Business America Magazine.

That this particular magazine's subject matter rarely intersects with anything 'open source' is made clear with gems like these:

Because the policy is open source, it’s not copyrighted

[Zomg, ] Lemonade’s competitors have access to it.

Despite the varying quality of the press coverage, the Lemonade Agency is forging what is probably new ground in the insurance business with what they are calling Policy 2.0.

From the Insurancebusinessmag article:

"As avid open source evangelists, we believe that bringing consumers and professionals together in an effort to co-create an insurance policy, will result in a better and fairer insurance product for the 21st century."

The policy is published on the Policy 2.0 Github under the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.3 or later.

Also at TechCrunch and Business Wire.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Why Do Some Lizards Have Green Blood?

A study [open, DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.aao5017] [DX] published Tuesday suggests seems that this lime-green blood has evolved independently several times in lizards.

Scientists are now trying to understand how these lizards might benefit from blood that's green. The answer could provide new insights into human illnesses like jaundice and malaria.

The weird blood has been found in skinks that live in New Guinea, an island off of Australia, and its bright color is striking. "There's so much green pigment in the blood that it overshadows the brilliant crimson coloration of red blood cells," says Chris Austin, a biologist at Louisiana State University who has studied these lizards for decades. "The bones are green, the muscles are green, the tissues are green, the tongue and mucosal lining is green."

All that green comes from high levels of biliverdin, a toxic waste product made during the body's normal breakdown of red blood cells. In humans, high levels of a similar bile pigment called bilirubin make people sick with jaundice, but the lizards seem unaffected.

"I find it just absolutely remarkable that you've got this group of vertebrates, these lizards, that have a level of biliverdin that would kill a human being, and yet they're out catching insects and living lizard lives," says Susan Perkins, a researcher at the American Museum of Natural History in New York.

[...] Austin, Perkins, and their colleague Zachary Rodriguez decided to create a kind of lizard family tree by studying the DNA of 51 Australasian skink species, including six species that have green blood.

[...] What the researchers found [...] suggests that the ancestors of all of the lizards had red blood, and that green blood then evolved independently four times, in separate lineages.

Also at New Scientist and The Atlantic.

Original Submission