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takyon writes:

Prehistoric frogs in amber surface after 99 million years

Frogs trapped in amber for 99 million years are giving a glimpse of a lost world. The tiny creatures have been preserved in sticky tree resin since the end of the Age of the Dinosaurs.

The four fossils give a window into a world when frogs and toads were evolving in the rainforests. Amber from Myanmar, containing skin, scales, fur, feathers or even whole creatures, is regarded as a treasure trove by palaeontologists.

Dr Lida Xing of China University of Geosciences in Beijing said it was a "miracle" find. "In China, frogs, lizards and scorpions are called three treasures of amber," he told BBC News. "These amber fossils provide direct evidence that frogs inhabited wet tropical forests before the mass extinction event at the end of the Cretaceous."

The fossil record of the earliest amphibians is sparse, which makes the discovery particularly valuable for science.

The earliest direct evidence of frogs in wet tropical forests from Cretaceous Burmese amber (open, DOI: 10.1038/s41598-018-26848-w) (DX)

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Organic Matter on Dwarf Planet Ceres More Abundant than Thought

A new analysis of data collected by NASA's Dawn orbiter suggests that organic molecules may exist in surprisingly high concentrations on the surface of Ceres. The study [DOI: 10.1029/2018GL077913] [DX] appears in the journal Geophysical Research Letters.

[...] To get an initial idea of how abundant those compounds might be, researchers compared the [Visible and Infrared Spectrometer] data from Ceres with lab reflectance spectra of organic material formed on Earth. Based on that standard, they concluded that 6-10% of the spectral signature they detected on Ceres could be explained by organic matter.

But for this the new study, Southwest Research Institute researcher Hannah Kaplan and co-authors wanted to re-examine those data using a different standard. Instead of relying on Earth rocks to interpret the data, they turned to an extraterrestrial source: meteorites. Some meteorites have been shown to contain organic material that's slightly different from what's commonly found on our own planet. And the new analysis shows that the spectral reflectance of the extraterrestrial organics is distinct from that of terrestrial counterparts. [...] "We estimate that as much as 40-50% of the spectral signal we see on Ceres is explained by organics. That's a huge difference compared to the 6-10% previously reported based on terrestrial organic compounds."

[...] There are two competing possibilities for where Ceres' organics may have come from. They could have been produced internally on Ceres and then exposed on the surface, or they could have been delivered to the surface by an impact from an organic-rich comet or asteroid.

Previously: Organic Molecules Found on Ceres

Related: Dawn Spies Magnesium Sulphate and Possible Geological Activity on Ceres
Ceres May Have Had a Global Surface Ocean in the Past

Original Submission

MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for BoyceMagooglyMonkey

Replacing potatoes or rice with pulses can lower your blood glucose levels by more than 20 per cent, according to a first-ever University of Guelph study.

Prof. Alison Duncan, Department of Human Health and Nutritional Sciences, and Dan Ramdath of Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada, found that swapping out half of a portion of these starchy side dishes for lentils can significantly improve your body's response to the carbohydrates.

Replacing half a serving of rice with lentils caused blood glucose to drop by up to 20 per cent. Replacing potatoes with lentils led to a 35-per-cent drop.

"Pulses are extremely nutrient-dense food that have the potential to reduce chronic diseases associated with mismanaged glucose levels," said Duncan, who worked on the study with PhD student Dita Moravek and M.Sc. students Erica Rogers, Sarah Turkstra and Jessica Wilson.

Source: https://news.uoguelph.ca/2018/06/lentils-significantly-reduce-blood-glucose-levels-u-g-study-reveals/

Dita Moravek, Alison M Duncan, Laura B VanderSluis, Sarah J Turkstra, Erica J Rogers, Jessica M Wilson, Aileen Hawke, D Dan Ramdath. Carbohydrate Replacement of Rice or Potato with Lentils Reduces the Postprandial Glycemic Response in Healthy Adults in an Acute, Randomized, Crossover Trial. The Journal of Nutrition, 2018; 148 (4): 535 DOI: 10.1093/jn/nxy018

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Pebble smartwatches could be kept alive by an unofficial developer group called Rebble

Pebble's online services will officially die at the end of this month, but some could live on through Rebble, an unofficial group of Pebble users who are trying to keep their watches alive.

Rebble initially popped up after Pebble said in 2016 that it would cease operations and be acquired by Fitbit. Now that Fitbit is weeks away from shutting down Pebble's remaining services, Rebble is promoting an unofficial replacement system that's meant to keep the majority of Pebble's internet-connected functions alive. Former Pebble employee Katharine Berry is spearheading the effort, and it's received an endorsement from Pebble founder Eric Migicovsky.

Also at Engadget.

Previously: Pebble Dead, Assets Sold to Fitbit

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Storm-driven ocean swells have triggered the catastrophic disintegration of Antarctic ice shelves in recent decades, according to new research published in Nature today.

Lead author Dr Rob Massom, of the Australian Antarctic Division and the Antarctic Climate and Ecosystems Cooperative Research Centre, said that reduced sea ice coverage since the late 1980s led to increased exposure of ice shelves on the Antarctic Peninsula to ocean swells, causing them to flex and break. "Sea ice acts as a protective buffer to ice shelves, by dampening destructive ocean swells before they reach the ice shelf edge," Dr Massom said. "But where there is loss of sea ice, storm-generated ocean swells can easily reach the exposed ice shelf, causing the first few kilometres of its outer margin to flex."

"Over time, this flexing enlarges pre-existing fractures until long thin 'sliver' icebergs break away or 'calve' from the shelf front. This is like the 'straw that broke the camel's back', triggering the runaway collapse of large areas of ice shelves weakened by pre-existing fracturing and decades of surface flooding."

Study co-author Dr Luke Bennetts, from the University of Adelaide's School of Mathematical Sciences, said the finding highlights the need for sea ice and ocean waves to be included in ice sheet modelling. This will allow scientists to more accurately forecast the fate of the remaining ice shelves and better predict the contribution of Antarctica's ice sheet to sea level rise, as climate changes. "The contribution of the Antarctic Ice Sheet is currently the greatest source of uncertainty in projections of global mean sea level rise," Dr Bennetts said.

-- submitted from IRC

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An Anonymous Coward writes:

https://blog.golemproject.net/introducing-graphene-ng-running-arbitrary-payloads-in-sgx-enclaves-a03f219447a5

A few months ago, during my keynote at Black Hat Europe, I was discussing how we should be limiting the amount of trust when building computer systems. Recently, a new technology from Intel has been gaining popularity among both developers and researchers, a technology which promises a big step towards such trust-minimizing systems. I'm talking about Intel SGX, of course.

Intel SGX caught my attention for the first time about 5 years ago, a little while before Intel has officially added information about it to the official Software Developer's Manual. I've written two posts about my thoughts on this (then-upcoming) technology, which were a superposition of both positive and negative feelings.

Over the last 2 years or so, together with my team at ITL, we've been investigating this fascinating technology a bit closer. Today I'd like to share some introductory information on this interesting project we've been working on together with our friends at Golem for several months now.

Original Submission

Two soylentils have submitted stories about improvements in lithium battery storage capacity. The first focuses on the cathode while the second features improvements in the anode.

Tripling the Energy Storage of Lithium-Ion Batteries

MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for BoyceMagooglyMonkey

A collaboration led by scientists at the University of Maryland (UMD), the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Brookhaven National Laboratory, and the U.S. Army Research Lab have developed and studied a new cathode material that could triple the energy density of lithium-ion battery electrodes. Their research was published on June 13 in Nature Communications.

"Lithium-ion batteries consist of an anode and a cathode," said Xiulin Fan, a scientist at UMD and one of the lead authors of the paper. "Compared to the large capacity of the commercial graphite anodes used in lithium-ion batteries, the capacity of the cathodes is far more limited. Cathode materials are always the bottleneck for further improving the energy density of lithium-ion batteries."

Scientists at UMD synthesized a new cathode material, a modified and engineered form of iron trifluoride (FeF3), which is composed of cost-effective and environmentally benign elements—iron and fluorine. Researchers have been interested in using chemical compounds like FeF3 in lithium-ion batteries because they offer inherently higher capacities than traditional cathode materials.

Source: https://www.bnl.gov/newsroom/news.php?a=112885

takyon writes:

Errors Trigger Retraction Of Study On Mediterranean Diet's Heart Benefits

Ask just about anybody, and you'll probably hear that a healthy diet is one full of fruits and vegetables, olive oil, nuts and fish — what's called Mediterranean diet. A lot of research has suggested people who eat this way tend to be healthier, but it's been harder to prove whether that is because of the diet or some other factor. So in 2013, many took notice of a study in the New England Journal of Medicine that seemed to provide some proof. The study found that people eating the Mediterranean diet supplemented with olive oil were 30 percent less likely to experience a heart attack, stroke, or death from cardiovascular causes than people assigned to a low-fat diet. People who stuck with a Mediterranean diet supplemented with mixed nuts had a 28 percent lower risk than those asked to follow a low-fat diet.

The results got wide media attention, including from NPR. But the New England Journal of Medicine retracted the paper Wednesday because of problems in the way the study was carried out. [...] The authors of the NEJM paper are replacing the 2013 paper with a corrected version that shows people following the diet had a similarly reduced level of heart attacks and strokes. The major change is softer language about the conclusions. The revised paper says only that people eating the Mediterranean diet had fewer strokes and heart attacks, not, as the original paper claimed, that the diet was the direct cause of those health benefits.

Anesthesiologist Dr. John Carlisle published an analysis of clinical studies in 2012 that led to the retraction of over 160 papers by Dr. Yoshitaka Fujii due to improper randomization of study participants. He began applying his method to thousands of other studies, including 934 in the New England Journal of Medicine. He flagged 11 of them, including the 2013 Mediterranean diet paper. The lead author of the paper confirmed that there were problems with randomization in the study:

It turns out approximately 14 percent of the more than 7,400 study participants hadn't been assigned randomly to either the Mediterranean diet or a low-fat one. When couples joined the study together, both had been picked to follow the same diet. At one of the 11 participating study sites, the lead investigator had assigned the same diet to an entire village and didn't tell the rest of the investigators.

"This affected only a small part of the trial," says Martínez González. When the researchers reanalyzed the data excluding the nonrandomized people, the results were the same, he adds. Still, because everybody wasn't randomly assigned to different groups, the study can no longer claim the diet directly caused those health benefits. "We need to tone down the results, but it is just a little bit," he says.

Five other papers were corrected, but not retracted.

Also at Science Magazine.

Original Submission

canopic jug writes:

Kim Bayley breaks down UK spending statistics to show that superfans buying old school physical media are providing for 15% of the UK's total retail music market, even when streaming is counted. She asserts that curtailing the availability of these physical storage media will damage not just retailers, but the overall health of the music industry itself. In doing so, she presents a strong economic case for why the music industry should treasure its vinyl and CD superfans.

Naturally it would have a clear financial cost: according to ERA's research those 157,000 vinyl Superfans spent between them £63m on vinyl in 2017, equivalent to more than half a million – 525,000 – premium music subscriptions.

In other words, lose a town's worth of vinyl buyers the size of Chelmsford and you need a city's worth of premium music subscribers the size of Manchester to make up the loss.

When it comes to CD, the impact is even greater. ERA's researches show that in 2017 an incredible 292,000 Britons spent £400 or more on the format. That's equivalent to buying a CD virtually every week.

Original Submission

jas writes:

New gTLDs are becoming less popular, as registrations have fallen precipitously over the last year. Verisign's recently released Q1 2018 Domain Name Industry Brief indicates that new gTLDs represent only 6%, or 20.2 million, of the total of registered TLDs.

The report indicates that active registrations of new gTLDs "decreased by approximately 5.3 million domain name registrations, or 20.7 percent, year over year." Of the top 10 most used new gTLDs, four were listed in Symantec's Top 20 list. Meanwhile, registrations overall increased by 3.2 million, year over year.

[...] Last year, a group of researchers at the Delft University of Technology and SIDN Labs in The Netherlands found (PDF link) that there are "higher concentrations of compromised domains in legacy gTLDs" but that "miscreants frequently choose to maliciously register domain names using one of the new gTLDs." The number of spam domains per 10,000 for new gTLDs was nearly 10 times that of standard gTLDs like .com. However, not all new gTLDs are a problem, as approximately one-third of new gTLDs had zero reported incidents of spam. But, according to the researchers, "Spamhaus blacklisted at least 10% of all 24 registered domains in as many as 15 new gTLDs at the end of 2016."

https://www.techrepublic.com/article/rampant-spam-falling-registrations-show-new-gtlds-have-limited-business-value/

Original Submission

MichaelDavidCrawford writes:

1 in 3 Adults In The U.S. Take Medications That Can Cause Depression. These drugs already list depression as a possible symptom:

If you take Prilosec or Zantac for acid reflux, a beta blocker for high blood pressure, or Xanax for anxiety, you may be increasing your risk of depression.

More than 200 common medications sold in the U.S. include depression as a potential side effect. Sometimes, the risk stems from taking several drugs at the same time. Now, a new study finds people who take these medicines are, in fact, more likely to be depressed.

The list includes a wide range of commonly taken medications. Among them are certain types of proton pump inhibitors (PPIs) (used to treat acid reflux), beta blockers, anxiety drugs, painkillers including ibuprofen, ACE inhibitors (used to treat high blood pressure), and anti-convulsant drugs.

I often take Zantac or Rantab for acid reflux. I used to take the beta blocker propanolol for the hand tremor caused by the anti-convulsant Depakote.

About 15 percent of participants who simultaneously used three or more of these drugs were depressed. By comparison, among participants who didn't use any of the medications, just 5 percent were depressed. Even those who used just one of these medications were at slightly higher risk of depression: About 7 percent were depressed.

See also:

• Washington Post
• Journal Abstract

Original Submission

MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for Runaway1956

Facebook has consistently denied allegations that it listens to its users' conversations through their phone's microphone, but a new document suggests the tech giant has not ruled out doing so in the future.

Facebook users have been sharing circumstantial evidence for several years that suggests Facebook snoops on their private conversations in order to deliver more personalised ads. In April, US lawmakers finally brought the concerns to CEO Mark Zuckerberg in a hearing about data misuse on the firm's platform.

The social media firm released a 454-page document this week to follow up with questions posed to Mr Zuckerberg, after he was criticised for evading some of the most important ones.

Source: https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/news/facebook-listening-conversations-phone-microphones-ads-app-mark-zuckerberg-a8398291.html

Documents can be found here:
Zuckerberg Testimony
Responses to Commerce Committee
Responses to Judiciary Committee

[Editor's Note: the two response documents are 229 and 225 pages, respectively for a total of 454 pages.]

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Researchers at the Stanford University School of Medicine have found a way to predict whether someone exposed to the flu virus is likely to become ill.

Purvesh Khatri, PhD, associate professor of medicine and of biomedical data science, and his team used a computational approach to pinpoint a blood-based genetic biomarker to determine an individual's susceptibility to the disease.

"We've been after this for about four years," Khatri said. "To our knowledge, it's the first biomarker that shows susceptibility to influenza, across multiple strains."

The biomarker is a gene called KLRD1, and it essentially acts as a proxy for the presence of a special type of immune cell that may be a key to stamping out nascent flu infection. Put simply: the more of this cell type found in a person's blood, the lower their flu susceptibility. The research even hints at new avenues for pursuing a broadly applicable flu vaccine.

A paper describing the work will be published online June 14 in Genome Medicine. Khatri is the senior author. Graduate student Erika Bongen is the lead author.

[...] Khatri said his findings could help health professionals understand who's at the highest risk for flu infection. "If, for example, there's a flu epidemic going on, and Tamiflu supplies are limited, this data could help identify who should be prophylactically treated first," Khatri said.

Khatri emphasizes that for now, the link between KLRD1 levels and influenza susceptibility is only an association. The next step, he said, is to find the mechanism.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Mozilla may be working on a voice-controlled browser

Mozilla may be working on a voice-controlled platform of its own. A listing for an all-hands internal meeting appeared about what seems like a new project: Scout. "With the Scout app, we start to explore browsing and consuming content with voice," it read. It's very unclear what the platform may or may not end up doing, as the meeting is focused on technical requirements for a "voice browser" that would, as a stated example, be able to read users an article about polar bears.

[...] CNET interpreted Scout to be a new voice-controlled web browser. With Google, Apple, Amazon and Microsoft falling over themselves refining their voice assistant technology (with Facebook not far behind), it's unsurprising that Mozilla would join the fray. Given the company's decades of web platform experience, a browser is surely simpler to implement than a new proprietary speaker. Plus, vocal navigation through a browser setup is probably easier for the average person to grasp.

So that's why they needed Common Voice.

Related: Mozilla's Common Voice Collecting French, German, and Welsh Samples, Prepping 40 More Languages

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

Trump's targeting of a New York Times journalist, explained by experts

The Trump administration took its war with the media to the next level this week when federal authorities seized years of phone records from New York Times reporter Ali Watkins as part of a federal investigation into leaks of classified information.

Watkins, who previously worked for BuzzFeed News and Politico, had a three-year relationship with James Wolfe, a former Senate Intelligence Committee aide who was arrested on Thursday and charged with lying to federal agents investigating the classified leaks.

The seizure set off alarm bells about the relationship between the administration and the media. The Department of Justice under Obama took phone records from Associated Press reporters and editors, named a Fox News reporter an unindicted "co-conspirator" in a leak case, and prosecuted multiple cases involving whistleblowers and leakers. So is what Trump doing more of the same? Or is a president who routinely bashes the media and threatens to jail leakers finally turning his rhetoric into reality?

"It's deeply alarming that the Trump administration has decided to build off of the worst of the Obama legacy on leak investigations and reporter-source protection," said Alexandra Ellerbeck, the North America program coordinator for the Committee to Protect Journalists.

See also: The Justice Department Deleted Language About Press Freedom And Racial Gerrymandering From Its Internal Manual

Also at The Philadelphia Inquirer, Emptywheel, and Fox News.

Original Submission #1  Original Submission #2  Original Submission #3