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takyon writes:

NASA's New Horizons spacecraft has imaged 2014 MU₆₉, nicknamed Ultima Thule, from about 172 million kilometers away:

Mission team members were thrilled – if not a little surprised – that New Horizons' telescopic Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) was able to see the small, dim object while still more than 100 million miles away, and against a dense background of stars. Taken Aug. 16 and transmitted home through NASA's Deep Space Network over the following days, the set of 48 images marked the team's first attempt to find Ultima with the spacecraft's own cameras.

[...] This first detection is important because the observations New Horizons makes of Ultima over the next four months will help the mission team refine the spacecraft's course toward a closest approach to Ultima, at 12:33 a.m. EST on Jan. 1, 2019. That Ultima was where mission scientists expected it to be – in precisely the spot they predicted, using data gathered by the Hubble Space Telescope – indicates the team already has a good idea of Ultima's orbit.

Meanwhile, the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft is approaching 101955 Bennu, and has taken a series of images from a distance of about 2.2 million kilometers:

After arrival at Bennu, the spacecraft will spend the first month performing flybys of Bennu's north pole, equator and south pole, at distances ranging between 11.8 and 4.4 miles (19 and 7 km) from the asteroid. These maneuvers will allow for the first direct measurement of Bennu's mass as well as close-up observations of the surface. These trajectories will also provide the mission's navigation team with experience navigating near the asteroid.

"Bennu's low gravity provides a unique challenge for the mission," said Rich Burns, OSIRIS-REx project manager at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. "At roughly 0.3 miles [500 meters] in diameter, Bennu will be the smallest object that any spacecraft has ever orbited."

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takyon writes:

Australia flags denying U.S. whistleblower Chelsea Manning entry visa

Australia has signaled it is preparing to ban U.S. whistleblower Chelsea Manning from entering the country ahead of a scheduled speaking tour, the organizer of the engagements said. Manning, the transgender U.S. Army soldier who served seven years in military prison for leaking classified data, is scheduled to speak at the Sydney Opera House at the weekend.

However, Suzi Jamil, owner of the company organizing Manning's speaking tour in Australia, said late on Wednesday Manning had received a notice from the Australian government informing her Canberra was considering cancelling her visa. [...] Australian law allows the immigration minister to deny anyone a visa if they do not pass a character test, a broad criteria that affords the government sweeping powers.

Manning is scheduled to travel to New Zealand after finishing her three events in Australia but the center-right opposition National Party has also called for her to be denied entry.

Also at NYT.

Related: Chelsea Manning Released from Prison, Remains on Active Duty Pending Appeal
Chelsea Manning, Newly Freed from Military Prison, Speaks in San Francisco

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takyon writes:

Goats 'drawn to happy human faces'

Scientists have found that goats are drawn to humans with happy facial expressions. The result suggests a wider range of animals can read people's moods than was previously thought.

The researchers showed goats pairs of photos of the same person, one of them featuring an angry expression, and the other a happy demeanour.

The goats made a beeline for the happy faces, the team reports in the journal Royal Society Open Science.

The result implies that the ability of animals to perceive human facial cues is not limited to those with a long history of working as human companions, such as dogs and horses.

Instead, it seems, animals domesticated for food production, such as goats, can also decipher human facial cues.

[...] But the effect was only significant when the happy-faced photo was placed on the right-hand side.

martyb writes:

Texas Lawmakers Press NASA to Base Lunar Lander Program in Houston:

The Apollo missions that flew to the Moon during the 1960s were designed and controlled by what is now known as Johnson Space Center, the home of the famous "Mission Control." Moreover, the astronauts that flew to the Moon all lived in Houston. It would stand to reason, therefore, that as NASA gears up to return to the Moon, major elements of this program would likewise be controlled from the Texas metropolis that styles itself "Space City."

Times change, however. In recent months, the politically well-positioned Marshall Space Flight Center, in Huntsville, Alabama, has been quietly pressing leaders with NASA Headquarters for program management of mid- to large-size landers to the lunar surface, which would evolve into human landers. Sources indicated this effort was having some success.

However, Texas legislators have now begun to push back. On Tuesday, both of Texas' senators (John Cornyn and Ted Cruz), as well as three representatives with space-related committee chairs (John Culberson, Lamar Smith, and Brian Babin), wrote a letter to NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine.

"We support NASA's focus on returning to the Moon and using it as part of a stepping stone approach to place American boots on the surface of Mars in the 2030s," the Texas Republicans wrote. "As NASA reviews solicitations for lunar landers, we write to express our strong support for the establishment of NASA's lunar lander program at the Johnson Space Center." The letter reminds Bridenstine of Houston's strong spaceflight heritage.

Somehow, "Huntsville, we have a problem" doesn't have the same ring to it.

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martyb writes:

Scientists Take big Step Toward Finding Non-Addictive Painkiller:

With the support of the National Institute on Drug Abuse, scientists at Wake Forest School of Medicine have been working to find a safe, non-addictive pain killer to help fight the current opioid crisis in this country.

And they may have done just that, though in an animal model.

Known as AT-121, the new chemical compound has dual therapeutic action that suppressed the addictive effects of opioids and produced morphine-like analgesic effects in non-human primates.

"In our study, we found AT-121 to be safe and non-addictive, as well as an effective pain medication," said Mei-Chuan Ko, Ph.D., professor of physiology and pharmacology at the School of Medicine, part of Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center.

"In addition, this compound also was effective at blocking abuse potential of prescription opioids, much like buprenorphine does for heroin, so we hope it could be used to treat pain and opioid abuse."

The findings are published in the Aug. 29 issue of the journal Science Translational Medicine.

MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for SoyCow4408

The magicians at MIT have come up with another solution to one of the world's science problems.

On Tuesday, MIT Media Lab shared new technology for communication from underwater to the air, a feat not previously possible.

That's because submerged submarines cannot wirelessly communicate with an airplane. The communication mediums don't match up: Submarines use sonar, while airplanes use radio signals, cellular or GPS. Sonar signals reflect off the water surface without breaking through, and radio signals don't travel well through water.

But MIT has the answer.

Using an underwater transmitter, researchers sent a sonar signal to the surface of a swimming pool, causing tiny vibrations. These were picked up by a sensitive radar, that decoded the 1s and 0s that were transmitted as vibrations.

The system is a "milestone," according to co-author of the research paper Fadel Adib, an assistant professor in the Media Lab.

Source: https://www.cnet.com/news/mit-finally-figures-out-how-to-get-planes-and-submarines-to-communicate/#ftag=CAD590a51e

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MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for SoyCow4408

Getting to the polls can be an obstacle for many American voters. Thirty-five percent of youth who didn't go to college say a lack of transportation was why they didn't vote in the 2016 election, according to The Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement.

Ride-hailing service Lyft said Thursday that it wants to help tackle the problem by offering half-priced rides across the country during this year's midterm elections. Riders can enter location-based codes into the Lyft app to access the discounted rides.

"It's about using our voice and our platform to make sure folks have access to go vote," said Mike Masserman, Lyft's head of Social Impact.

The US midterm elections will be held on Tuesday, Nov. 6.

Source: https://www.cnet.com/news/lyft-will-offer-discounted-rides-to-voters-during-midterm-elections/

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MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for SoyCow4408

For more than two years now — from the second floor of a repurposed warehouse in the Dogpatch district of San Francisco — the young scientists and chemists at Ava Winery have been attempting to save the planet and conduct commerce by producing wine without grapes or fermentation. Recently, the company rebranded and shifted its focus: now known as Endless West, it is attempting to make brown spirits without the hidebound utilization of barrels for maturation.

In Endless West's 1,800-square-foot lab, there are no implements ordinarily associated with making wine or whiskey. Instead, one sees chemists quietly sitting at computers beside beakers, gas chromatography and mass spectrometer machines, and something called a liquid handling robot, which is loaded with test tubes that are filled with liquid from "real" wines and spirits. The white-smocked bio and analytical chemists are measuring and mapping the molecular profiles of standard alcoholic beverages. There is even a scanning area with an "electronic nose" to measure olfactory properties; something you likely won't find in a standard winery lab.

The quest is to tease out which "naturally derived" carbohydrates, sugars, proteins, amino acids, and lipids comprise a wine or spirit, and which components encompass the organoleptic profiles of various alcoholic beverages. Key aromatics and flavor molecules are being identified such as citrus-like esters from ethyl isobutyrate and pineapple-y aromas derived from ethyl hexanoate or the buttery qualities found in the compound diacetyl.

Once recognized, neutral distillates or grain alcohol is then added to the recipe to synthetically formulate a wine or whiskey.

Source: https://www.theverge.com/2018/8/23/17703454/wine-whiskey-synthetic-climate-change-lab-made-ava-winery-endless-west

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MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for SoyCow4408

A massive trove of voter records containing personal information on millions of Texas residents has been found online.

The data — a single file containing an estimated 14.8 million records — was left on an unsecured server without a password. Texas has 19.3 million registered voters.

It's the latest exposure of voter data in a long string of security incidents that have cast doubt on political parties' abilities to keep voter data safe at a time where nation states are actively trying to influence elections.

TechCrunch obtained a copy of the file, which was first found by a New Zealand-based data breach hunter who goes by the pseudonym Flash Gordon. It's not clear who owned the server where the exposed file was found, but an analysis of the data reveals that it was likely originally compiled by Data Trust, a Republican-focused data analytics firm created by the GOP to provide campaigns with voter data.

Chris Vickery, director of cyber risk research at security firm UpGuard, analyzed a portion of the data. (It was Vickery who found a larger trove of 198 million voter records last year exposed by a similar data firm Deep Root Analytics, which sourced much of its data from Data Trust.)

A spokesperson for Data Trust declined to comment on the record, but later gave a statement to the Austin American-Statesman denying a breach of its systems.

Source: https://techcrunch.com/2018/08/23/millions-of-texas-voter-records-exposed-online/

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martyb writes:

Napoleon's Defeat at Waterloo Caused in Part by Indonesian Volcanic Eruption:

Electrically charged volcanic ash short-circuited Earth's atmosphere in 1815, causing global poor weather and Napoleon's defeat, says new research.

Historians know that rainy and muddy conditions helped the Allied army defeat the French Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte at the Battle of Waterloo. The June 1815 event changed the course of European history.

Two months prior, a volcano named Mount Tambora erupted on the Indonesian island of Sumbawa, killing 100,000 people and plunging the Earth into a 'year without a summer' in 1816.

Now, Dr Matthew Genge from Imperial College London has discovered that electrified volcanic ash from eruptions can 'short-circuit' the electrical current of the ionosphere -- the upper level of the atmosphere that is responsible for cloud formation.

The findings, published today in Geology, could confirm the suggested link between the eruption and Napoleon's defeat.

martyb writes:

Another week, another leak:

A misconfigured MongoDB server belonging to Abbyy, an optical character recognition software developer, allowed public access to customer files.

Independent security researcher Bob Diachenko discovered the database on August 19 hosted on the Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud platform. It was 142GB in size and it allowed access without the need to log in.

The sizeable database included scanned documents of the sensitive kind: contracts, non-disclosure agreements, internal letters, and memos. Included were more than 200,000 files from Abbyy customers who scanned the data and kept it at the ready in the cloud.

"Some collection names like 'documentRecognition,' or 'documentXML' hinted that database would be part of a data recognition company infrastructure," Diachenko writes in a blog post today.

[...] Volkswagen, Deloitte, PwC, PepsiCo, Sberbank, McDonald's are just a few of Abbyy's clients.

Should have used invisible ink.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Missouri has prohibited producers of meat alternatives, such as lab-grown/cultured meat and plant-based fake meats, from using the term "meat" to describe products not derived from harvested livestock or poultry:

On Tuesday, Missouri becomes the first state in the country to have a law on the books that prohibits food makers to use the word "meat" to refer to anything other than animal flesh. This takes aim at manufacturers of what has been dubbed fake or non-traditional meat. Clean meat -- also known as lab-grown meat -- is made of cultured animal tissue cells, while plant-based meat is generally from ingredients such as soy, tempeh and seitan.

The state law forbids "misrepresenting a product as meat that is not derived from harvested production livestock or poultry." Violators may be fined $1,000 and imprisoned for a year.

[...] The Missouri Cattlemen's Association, which worked to get the state law passed, has cited shopper confusion and protecting local ranchers as reasons for the legislation. "The big issue was marketing with integrity and...consumers knowing what they're getting," said Missouri Cattlemen's Association spokesman Mike Deering. "There's so much unknown about this."

Turtle Island Foods, which makes "Tofurky", has sued the state:

Snow writes:

Motherboard has a story about a blockchain that predates Bitcoin by 13 years:

The first time I heard about blockchains was at a party where a friend of mine spent the night talking my ear off about this thing called Bitcoin and why I ought to buy some. I suspect that many others have had a similar experience. Although Bitcoin can be credited with bringing blockchains—a type of distributed digital ledger—into popular discourse, it wasn't the progenitor of the obscure technology's key features.

In fact, the world's oldest blockchain predates Bitcoin by 13 years and it's been hiding in plain sight, printed weekly in the classified section of one of the world's most widely circulated newspapers: The New York Times.

[...] Blockchains, insofar as they constitute a chronological chain of hashed data, were first invented by the cryptographers Stuart Haber and Scott Stronetta[sic] in 1991 and their use cases were a lot less ambitious. Instead, Haber and Stornetta envisioned the technology as a way to timestamp digital documents to verify their authenticity. As they detailed in a paper published in The Journal of Cryptology, the ability to certify when a document was created or last modified is crucial for resolving things like intellectual property rights.

This 'blockchain' is produced by a company called Surety:

chromas (from IRC) writes:

When America dropped the nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the world watched as the atomic age began. The effects of the bomb were devastating and linger to this day. No government or military has ever detonated a nuclear bomb during a war since. But they have detonated them for various other reasons—including a series of tests designed to give soldiers a taste of what nuclear war might feel like.

After World War II, the UK, USSR, and US detonated more than 2,000 atomic bombs. In Britain, 20,000 soldiers witnessed atomic blasts conducted by their own government. Only a few of them are still alive today and the nuclear glow of the mushroom cloud they witnessed still haunts them. "Nuclear detonations, that was the defining point in my life," Douglas Hern, a British soldier who experienced five nuclear bomb tests, told Motherboard.

"When the flash hit you, you could see the x-rays of your hands through your closed eyes," he said. "Then the heat hit you, and that was as if someone my size had caught fire and walked through me. It was an experience that was unearthing. It was so strange. There were guys with bruises and broken legs. We couldn't believe it. To say it was frightening is an understatement. I think it all shocked us into silence."

Source: https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/wjk3wb/what-does-a-nuclear-bomb-blast-feel-like

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Rates of three STDs in US reach record high, CDC says

Rates of syphilis, gonorrhea and chlamydia have climbed for the fourth consecutive year in the United States, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced Tuesday at the National STD Prevention Conference in Washington. Last year, nearly 2.3 million US cases of these sexually transmitted diseases were diagnosed, according to preliminary data.
That's the highest number ever reported nationwide, breaking the record set in 2016 by more than 200,000 cases, according to the CDC.

[...] In 2013, there were 1,752,285 total cases of chlamydia, gonorrhea and syphilis diagnosed in the United States. That number grew to 1,811,850 in 2014; 1,945,746 in 2015; 2,094,682 in 2016; and 2,294,821 in 2017, according to the preliminary CDC data.

[...] The preliminary data suggest that more than 1.7 million cases of chlamydia were diagnosed in 2017, with about 45% -- 771,340 cases -- emerging among 15- to 24-year-old women and girls. Chlamydia, which remained the most common STD reported to the CDC, is caused by the bacterium Chlamydia trachomatis and easily transmitted during any form of sexual activity. If not treated, chlamydia can lead to pelvic inflammatory disease in women, which can cause permanent damage to the reproductive system. In men, the infection can spread to the tube that carries sperm from the testicles, causing pain and fever.

Related: Around 42% of American Adults Have HPV, Over 20% Have Cancer-Causing Form
This Little-Known STD Could Become The "Next Superbug" Within A Decade

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