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takyon writes:

The search for Planet X gets a boost with the discovery of a super distant object

A new discovery is strengthening the idea that a large, mysterious planet — known as Planet 9 or Planet X — may be lurking unseen at the Solar System's edge. Astronomers say they have found a tiny object orbiting far out from the Sun that fits with the Planet X theory. In fact, the object may have even been pushed onto the path it takes now by this hidden planet's gravity.

The tiny rock — eloquently named TG387 and nicknamed "The Goblin" — was spotted by astronomers at the Carnegie Institution of Science using a giant Japanese observatory in Hawaii called Subaru. The Carnegie team first spotted the object in 2015 and then followed it on its journey around the Sun for the last four years. Those observations revealed an incredibly distant target. TG387 takes a whopping 40,000 years to complete just one orbit around the Sun. And it's on a very elliptical path far from the inner Solar System; the closest it ever gets to the Sun is 65 Astronomical Units (AU), or 65 times the distance between the Sun and the Earth. For reference, Pluto only gets as far as 49 AUs from the Sun.

This orbit is particularly enticing since it puts TG387 in a select group of distant Solar System objects that all point to the possible existence of Planet X. Right now, there are 14 far-out space rocks that all share similar orbit patterns, suggesting that this planet is out there. Their paths are all super elongated, and they all cluster together in the same area when they approach the Sun. Plus, their orbits are all tilted alike, and they point in the same general direction, as if something big has pushed them into similar places. These objects are the strongest lines of evidence astronomers have for Planet X, and finding a new one that matches this pattern reinforces that idea that this planet is more than just a theory.

Planet Nine and 2015 TG₃₈₇.

Also at ScienceAlert, The Atlantic, USA Today, and NPR.

A New High Perihelion Inner Oort Cloud Object

Previously: Another Trans-Neptunian Object With a High Orbital Inclination Points to Planet Nine
CU Boulder Researchers Say Collective Gravity, Not Planet Nine, Explains Orbits of Detached Objects
Planet Nine Search Turns Up 10 More Moons of Jupiter

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"upstart" writes:

Submitted via IRC for Bytram

Enhanced rehab for stroke doubles movement recovery

A novel therapy technique invented by researchers at The University of Texas at Dallas has been shown in a pilot study to double the rate of upper limb recovery in stroke patients, a leap forward in treating the nearly 800,000 Americans who suffer strokes each year.

The results of the study, funded by UT Dallas spinoff company MicroTransponder of Austin, Texas, were published Sept. 27 in the journal Stroke.

The findings indicate that targeted plasticity therapy -- which involves stimulation of the vagus nerve -- paired with traditional motor-skill rehabilitation is not only safe, but also twice as effective as rehab alone.

Vagus Nerve Stimulation Paired With Upper Limb Rehabilitation After Chronic Stroke (open, DOI: 10.1161/STROKEAHA.118.022279) (DX)

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quietus writes:

The Kunst Historisches Museum in Vienna is currently running an exhibition about one of the Old Masters, Bruegel, gathering an unprecedented number of his works in one location.

For those not able to visit, the Kunst Historisches Museum has provided a website, Inside Bruegel. There, twelve of his works can be studied in extremely high resolution macrophotography, infrared macrophotography, infrared reflectography and X-radiography, making a visit to the website perhaps even more interesting than the exhibition itself (where viewing time is limited: you have to make timeslot reservations).

This approach is similar to the one taken during the restoration of the Lam Gods altar piece, a highlight of another Old Master, Van Eyck.

Both websites make for a pleasant and interesting visit -- quite counter to many of today's websites, bloated with scripts and overloaded with semi-information.

Which other websites do you know about which manage to combine effective information visualisation and interesting content?

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takyon writes:

Meet the Ground Cherry, a CRISPR Creation That Could Be the Next Strawberry

Before corn was corn, it was a skinny grass that produced only a single row of kernels on each stalk. Long centuries of breeding turned it into a fast-growing plant with big, sweet, kernel-dense ears. In fact, most of the produce we're familiar with now took hundreds of generations to become what they are today. But now scientists, armed with powerful CRISPR-Cas9 gene editing technology, are whittling down the domestication process to just a few years. Their first experiment is the ground cherry — a formerly wild, now-delicious fruit that has everything it takes to become the next strawberry.

In a paper [DOI: 10.1038/s41477-018-0259-x] [DX] published Monday in the journal Nature Plants, a team of researchers outlined how they used CRISPR to make the ground cherry (Physalis pruinosa) more suitable for agriculture. The sweet, tropical-flavored fruit, about the size of a cherry and nestled in a protective papery husk, is known as an "orphan crop" — one with some desirable characteristics but not enough to make farmers want to grow them. In the wild, the ground cherry is, well, wild — it grows all over the place and has small, sparse fruits that fall off the vine when they're ripe.

But by using CRISPR to edit out its unattractive elements, scientists think it may eventually be found in the produce section of the supermarket. "With some improvements, maybe it could become a specialty fruit crop in the United States and give farmers another fruit crop to grow that's not a tree," Joyce Van Eck, Ph.D., a plant biotechnology expert at the Boyce Thompson Institute and one of the paper's co-authors, tells Inverse.

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takyon writes:

SpaceX's Starlink satellites may use unique solar array deployment mechanism

Spotted on an official SpaceX T-shirt commemorating Starlink's first two prototype satellites and corroborated through analysis of limited public photos of the spacecraft, SpaceX appears to be testing a relatively unique style of solar arrays on the first two satellites launched into orbit, known as Tintin A (Alice) and B (Bob).

It's difficult to judge anything concrete from the nature of what may be immature prototypes, but SpaceX's decision to take a major step away from its own style of solar expertise – Cargo Dragon's traditional rigid panel arrays – is almost certainly motivated by a need to push beyond the current state of the art of satellite design and production.

Unlike any discernible solar panel deployment mechanism with a flight history, SpaceX's Starlink engineers seem to have taken a style of deployment used successfully on the International Space Station and mixed it with a modern style of solar arrays, relying on several flexible panels that can be efficiently packed together and designed to be extremely lightweight. While a major departure from SpaceX's successful Cargo Dragon solar arrays, the mechanisms visible on the Tintins seem to have the potential to improve upon the packing efficiency, ease of manufacturing, and number of failure modes present on Dragon's panels.

[...] To give an idea of where the industry currently stands, satellite internet provider Viasat launched its own Viasat-2 spacecraft in 2017. Weighing in around 6500 kg (14300 lb), the immense satellite cost at least $600 million and offers an instantaneous bandwidth of 300 gigabits per second, impressive but also gobsmackingly expensive at $2 million/Gbps. To ever hope to make Starlink a reality, SpaceX will need to beat that value by at least a factor of 5-10, producing Starlink satellites for no more than $1-3 million apiece ($4.5B-$13.5B alone to manufacture the initial 4,425 satellite constellation) with a bandwidth of 20 Gbps – baselined in official statements.

"Starlink is a satellite constellation development project underway by SpaceX, to develop a low-cost, high-performance satellite bus and requisite customer ground transceivers to implement a new space-based Internet communication system. By 2017, SpaceX had submitted regulatory filings to launch a total of nearly 12,000 satellites to orbit by the mid-2020s."

Previously: SpaceX Deploys Broadband Test Satellites, Fails to Catch Entire Fairing
SpaceX Valued at $25 Billion... and More

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"upstart" writes:

Submitted via IRC for chromas

The Trump administration is suing California to quash its new net neutrality law

The Trump administration said Sunday it will sue California in an effort to block what some experts have described as the toughest net neutrality law ever enacted in the United States, setting up a high-stakes legal showdown over the future of the Internet.

California on Sunday became the largest state to adopt its own rules requiring Internet providers like AT&T, Comcast and Verizon to treat all web traffic equally. Golden State legislators took the step of writing their law after the Federal Communications Commission scrapped nationwide protections last year, citing the regulatory burdens they had caused for the telecom industry.

Mere hours after California's proposal became law, however, senior Justice Department officials told The Washington Post they would take the state to court on grounds that the federal government, not state leaders, has the exclusive power to regulate net neutrality. DOJ officials stressed the FCC had been granted such authority from Congress to ensure that all 50 states don't seek to write their own, potentially conflicting, rules governing the web.

Also at Ars Technica, TechDirt, and Politico.

Previously: California Gov. Signs Nation’s Strictest Net Neutrality Rules Into Law

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"upstart" writes:

Submitted via IRC for Bytram

Hundreds dead as quake, tsunami hit Indonesia's Sulawesi

Nearly 400 people have been killed after a powerful earthquake triggered a tsunami that hit Indonesia's central Sulawesi island.

The national disaster agency put the current death toll at 384, all of them reported in the tsunami-struck city of Palu, but warned the number was likely to rise as rescue efforts continued on Saturday.

In Palu - home to around 350,000 people - partially covered bodies lay on the ground near the shore, the day after tsunami waves triggered by a 7.5 magnitude earthquake came ashore.

[...] Indonesia's meteorological and geophysics agency BMKG issued a tsunami warning after the earthquake, but lifted it 34 minutes later. The agency was widely criticised for not informing a tsunami had hit Palu on Saturday, though officials said waves had come within the time the warning was issued. The Palu area was hit by a less powerful quake earlier on Friday, which destroyed some houses, killed one person and injured at least 10 in Donggala, authorities said.

Sulawesi.

See also: 34 children attending Bible camp found dead as death toll cross 1,200 in Indonesia quake
Sulawesi tsunami devastates coast in Indonesia – in pictures

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An Anonymous Coward writes:

From an editorial in the Otago Daily Times out of New Zealand, Censorship a Trojan Horse:

It's an oft-cited maxim that the news media is the "fourth estate" upon which a healthy democracy stands.

It ensures the three traditional powers of state — the legislature, executive and judiciary — can be critiqued, challenged and curbed from quietly drifting into the arms of corruption and authoritarianism.

A free, fair, open and uncensored media is an antidote to state power and, for all its failings (and there are many), should be treasured as such. There are many countries around the world whose people would give anything for such a freedom.

Yet calls for the banning of certain opinion pieces, cartoons and commentary have risen in recent months, especially from those using social media, a world where such talk is becoming a trend. It is a trend we must confront.

Censorship is to suppress the harmful, the unacceptable, the obscene and the threatening from the media and other forms of public communication. Like a virus attacking democracy from the inside out, it was traditionally the tool of the dictator, though it is one used by many in power.

"upstart" writes:

Cosmic conundrum: The disks of gas and dust that supposedly form planets don't seem to have the goods

Astronomers have a problem on their hands: How can you make planets if you don't have enough of the building blocks? A new study finds that protoplanetary disks—the envelopes of dust and gas around young stars that give rise to planets—seem to contain orders of magnitude too little material to produce the planets.

"This work is telling us that we really have to rethink our planetary formation theories," says astronomer Gijs Mulders of the University of Chicago in Illinois, who was not involved in the research.

Stars are born from colossal clouds of gas and dust and, in their earliest stages, are surrounded by a thin disk of material. Dust grains within this halo collide, sometimes sticking together. The clumps build up into planetary cores, which are big enough to gravitationally attract additional dust and gas, eventually forming planets.

But many details about this process remain unknown, such as just how quickly planets arise from the disk, and how efficient they are in capturing material. The disks, surrounded by an obscuring haze of gas and dust, are difficult to observe. But radio telescopes can penetrate the haze and investigate young stars. The brightness of radio waves emitted by dust in the disk can be used to give a reasonable estimate of its overall mass.

Submitted via IRC for Bytram

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"upstart" writes:

Cancer hijacks the microbiome to glut itself on glucose

"Leukemia cells create a diabetic-like condition that reduces glucose going to normal cells, and as a consequence, there is more glucose available for the leukemia cells. Literally, they are stealing glucose from normal cells to drive growth of the tumor," says Craig Jordan, PhD, investigator at University of Colorado Cancer Center, division chief of the Division of Hematology and the Nancy Carroll Allen Professor of Hematology at the University of Colorado School of Medicine.

Like diabetes, cancer's strategies depend on insulin. Healthy cells need insulin to use glucose. In diabetes, either the pancreas under-produces insulin or tissues cannot not respond to insulin and so cells are left starved for energy while glucose builds up in the blood. The current study shows that leukemia goes about creating similar conditions of glucose buildup in two ways.

First, tumor cells trick fat cells into over-producing a protein called IGFBP1. This protein makes healthy cells less sensitive to insulin, meaning that when IGFBP1 is high, it takes more insulin to use glucose than it does when IGFBP1 is low. Unless the supply of insulin goes up, high IGFBP1 means that the glucose consumption of healthy cells goes down. (This protein may also be a link in the chain connecting cancer and obesity: The more fat cells, the more IGFBP1, and the more glucose is available to the cancer.)

Submitted via IRC for Bytram

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mrpg writes:

[...] Years later, "he is completely off all medication and shows no psychiatric symptoms," Dr. Miyaoka told me in an email. Somehow the transplant cured the man's schizophrenia.

A bone-marrow transplant essentially reboots the immune system. Chemotherapy kills off your old white blood cells, and new ones sprout from the donor's transplanted blood stem cells. It's unwise to extrapolate too much from a single case study, and it's possible it was the drugs the man took as part of the transplant procedure that helped him. But his recovery suggests that his immune system was somehow driving his psychiatric symptoms.

At first glance, the idea seems bizarre — what does the immune system have to do with the brain? — but it jibes with a growing body of literature suggesting that the immune system is involved in psychiatric disorders from depression to bipolar disorder.

He Got Schizophrenia. He Got Cancer. And Then He Got Cured.

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takyon writes:

New York City's WiFi kiosks have over 5 million users

New York City's high-speed WiFi kiosks have been around for a while, but just how many people are using them? Quite a few, in fact. The LinkNYC team has revealed that there were over 5 million registered WiFi users as of September 2018, with over a billion sessions spread across the 1,700-plus units in the city. People make over 500,000 calls every month, too, although it's not clear how many of those were ice cream truck pranksters. You can safely presume that there's plenty of demand.

As VentureBeat reported, though, these kiosks haven't been without their share of concerns. They're ad-subsidized, but they've barely earned enough to meet the CityBridge consortium's minimum guarantee. The group also removed the kiosks' web browsers after complains of people surfing porn sites or hogging the machines. There's also the concerns about privacy given the presences of cameras and sensors on every kiosk, although Intersection (a part of CityBridge) has stressed that it doesn't collect sensitive info like exact locations or browser history.

Previously: Ten Thousand NYC Pay Phones to Become Free Wi-Fi Hot Spots
New York City to Install 7,500 Wi-Fi Kiosks

Original Submission

"upstart" writes:

California governor signs country's first IoT security law

California Gov. Jerry Brown has signed into law a broad cybersecurity bill governing Internet of Things devices, making the state the first in the nation to adopt such legislation.

Brown signed the bill, SB 327, on Friday. The law mandates that any maker of an Internet-connected, or "smart," device ensure the gadget has "reasonable" security features that "protect the device and any information contained therein from unauthorized access, destruction, use, modification, or disclosure."

In June, California passed a data-privacy law that some have called the country's toughest. It includes stopping the collection and sale of personal data upon request from consumers. The new IoT rule, however, has garnered mixed reviews.

Submitted via IRC for Bytram

Original Submission

canopic jug writes:

Stage 9 was a non-commercial, virtual reality recreation of Star Trek The Next Generation's Enterprise starship. It allowed fans of the series to explore the beloved vessel and immerse themselves in the chief setting of the series. It was built over the past two years using Unreal Engine 4 by fans who have taken great pains to state that the project was not affiliated or licensed with CBS or Paramount and that they weren't doing this to make money, only to artistically demonstrate their fandom. That did not stop CBS from sending a cease and desist letter, thus shutting down the project as CBS was reportedly unwilling to engage in dialog.

From Techdirt : CBS Bullies Fan Star Trek Project To Shut Down Despite Creators' Pleas For Instructions On Being Legit
and at Ars Technica : Amazing NCC-1701-D simulator issues final command: "all stop"
and at TorrentFreak : CBS Shuts Down Stage 9, a Fan-Made Recreation of the USS Enterprise

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

c|net:

Marvel Rising: Secret Warriors is a sweet superhero tale where, yes, a group of younger heroes come together to battle an extremist group. But more importantly than that, it's a superhero tale with diversity oozing out of every animated frame.
...
Ms. Marvel, who idolizes Captain Marvel and is inspired by her, instead leads the Secret Warriors movie, showcasing her origin tale, her relationship with her mother and her struggle for acceptance in a culture that is adverse to the creation of the Inhumans -- the latter being people who gain superpowers after getting into contact with a gas substance called Terrigen Mists.

What Secret Warriors is doing particularly well is that it isn't shying away from its focus on diversity in any part of its plot. In particular, the storyline aims at a brewing conflict between humans and an extremist group of Inhumans, the latter believing that a war between the two groups is inevitable. Khan ends up stuck in the middle, as an Inhuman herself who doesn't believe the conflict is needed.

Another refreshing carryover from Marvel comics is America Chavez. Her origin story, which sees Chavez's two mothers sacrificing themselves to protect their daughter, remains completely intact and sympathetic. Chavez herself demonstrates herself as a formidable ally, having super strength and the ability to fly. It's a nice start for LGBT representation on the animated side of the Marvel universe for now.

Wasn't Captain Marvel a man?

Original Submission