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takyon writes:

Biologists create the most lifelike artificial cells yet

No biologist would mistake the microscopic "cells" that chemical biologist Neal Devaraj and colleagues are whipping up at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD), for the real thing. Instead of the lipid membrane that swaddles our cells, these cell mimics wear a coat of plastic—polymerized acrylate. And although they harbor a nucleuslike compartment containing DNA, it lacks a membrane like a real cell's nucleus, and its main ingredients are minerals found in clay.

Yet these mock cells are cutting-edge, "the closest anyone has come to building an actual functioning synthetic eukaryotic cell," says synthetic biologist Kate Adamala of the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis, who was not part of the work. Like real cells, the spheres can send protein signals to their neighbors, triggering communal behavior. And as Devaraj and his team revealed in a preprint recently posted on the bioRxiv site, the "nucleus" talks to the rest of the cell, releasing RNA that sparks the synthesis of proteins. The artificial nuclei can even respond to signals from other cell mimics. "This may be the most important paper in synthetic biology this year," Adamala says.

Let's see some cell division.

Communication and quorum sensing in non-living mimics of eukaryotic cells

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martyb writes:

To Predict the Future, the Brain Uses two Clocks:

That moment when you step on the gas pedal a split second before the light changes, or when you tap your toes even before the first piano note of Camila Cabello's "Havana" is struck. That's anticipatory timing.

One type relies on memories from past experiences. The other on rhythm. Both are critical to our ability to navigate and enjoy the world.

New University of California, Berkeley, research shows the neural networks supporting each of these timekeepers are split between two different parts of the brain, depending on the task at hand.

"Whether it's sports, music, speech or even allocating attention, our study suggests that timing is not a unified process, but that there are two distinct ways in which we make temporal predictions and these depend on different parts of the brain," said study lead author Assaf Breska, a postdoctoral researcher in neuroscience at UC Berkeley.

The findings, published online in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences journal, offer a new perspective on how humans calculate when to make a move.

"Together, these brain systems allow us to not just exist in the moment, but to also actively anticipate the future," said study senior author Richard Ivry, a UC Berkeley neuroscientist.

upstart writes:

Submitted via IRC for SoyCow1984

When good macrophages go bad: How cancer manipulates our immune system to become harder to treat

Yves DeClerck, MD, of the Children's Center for Cancer and Blood Diseases and the Saban Research Institute at Children's Hospital Los Angeles, has dedicated his career to understanding how cancer cells interact with the surrounding normal tissue to escape the effects of therapy. Research has shown that tumors with high levels of a protein called Plasminogen Activator Inhibitor 1 (PAI-1) are more aggressive and are associated with poorer outcomes. In the new study, published November 20th in the journal Cell Reports, DeClerck's team demonstrated that cancer cells use PAI-1 to trick the body's immune system into supporting the cancer.

DeClerck and his team, led by postdoctoral research fellow Marta Kubala, PhD, characterized a relationship between tumors and the immune system. "In this study, we focused on the role of immune cells called macrophages and how PAI-1 affects their activity," explains Kubala. As important players in the immune system, macrophages find and destroy cancer cells or foreign invaders like bacteria. While macrophages are normally considered anti-cancer, DeClerck's team showed that PAI-1 pushes macrophages into an alternate, pro-cancer state (called M2) by recruiting common players in the immune system -- IL-6 and STAT3 -- effectively signaling to the macrophages to support rather than attack tumor cells.

"A macrophage can either be a friend or an enemy to cancer cells," explains DeClerck, who is also a professor of pediatrics at the Keck School of Medicine of the University of Southern California. "The cancer communicates with the macrophages, telling them to become friendly. So, the macrophages change their behavior and support the tumor." In altering the function of surrounding, healthy tissue, the cancer is better able to survive and spread. The team around DeClerck also shows that cancer cells can use PAI-1 to promote movement of these pro-cancer M2 macrophages into the tumors, where they protect the cancer and repair any damage that chemotherapy may have inflicted. This symbolic one-two punch culminates in a stronger, more difficult-to-treat cancer.

Plasminogen Activator Inhibitor-1 Promotes the Recruitment and Polarization of Macrophages in Cancer (open, DOI: 10.1016/j.celrep.2018.10.082) (DX)

martyb writes:

Marriott Hack Hits 500 Million Guests:

The records of 500 million customers of the hotel group Marriott International have been involved in a data breach. The hotel chain said the guest reservation database of its Starwood division had been compromised by an unauthorised party. It said an internal investigation found an attacker had been able to access to the Starwood network since 2014.

[...] Starwood's hotel brands include W Hotels, Sheraton, Le Méridien and Four Points by Sheraton. Marriott-branded hotels use a separate reservation system on a different network.

Marriott said it was alerted by an internal security tool that somebody was attempting to access the Starwood database. After investigating, it discovered that an "unauthorised party had copied and encrypted information". It said it believed its database contained records of up to 500 million customers. For about 327 million guests, the information included "some combination" of name, mailing address, phone number, email address, passport number, account information, date of birth, gender, and arrival and departure information. It said some records also included encrypted payment card information, but it could not rule out the possibility that the encryption keys had also been stolen.

[...] The company has set up a website to give affected customers more information. It will also offer customers in the US and some other countries a year-long subscription to a fraud-detecting service.

The attacker had access since... 2014? To the records of half a billion customers? How many can invoke protections provided in GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation)?

SoyCow0824 adds:

Source: Marriott breach leaves 500 million exposed with passport, card numbers stolen

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upstart writes in with a submission, via IRC, for takyon:

Study unlocks full potential of 'supermaterial' graphene

New research reveals why the "supermaterial" graphene has not transformed electronics as promised, and shows how to double its performance and finally harness its extraordinary potential.

Graphene is the strongest material ever tested. It's also flexible, transparent and conducts heat and electricity 10 times better than copper.

After graphene research won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 2010 it was hailed as a transformative material for flexible electronics, more powerful computer chips and solar panels, water filters and bio-sensors. But performance has been mixed and industry adoption slow.

Now a study published in Nature Communications identifies silicon contamination as the root cause of disappointing results and details how to produce higher performing, pure graphene.

The RMIT University team led by Dr Dorna Esrafilzadeh and Dr Rouhollah Ali Jalili inspected commercially-available graphene samples, atom by atom, with a state-of-art scanning transition electron microscope.

"We found high levels of silicon contamination in commercially available graphene, with massive impacts on the material's performance," Esrafilzadeh said.

[...] The article "Silicon as a ubiquitous contaminant in graphene derivatives with significant impact on device performance" is published in Nature Communications: DOI: 10.1038/s41467-018-07396-3

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upstart writes in with a submission, via IRC, for SoyCow0824:

Al Lowe reveals his Sierra source code collection—then puts it on eBay

Al Lowe, one of Sierra On-Line's seminal game creators and programmers, has been sitting on a pile of his original games' source code files for over 30 years, fully convinced that they are worthless.

Gallery: Taking a look back at some choice Sierra gaming moments"I’m 72 years old, and none of my kids want this junk!" Lowe said in an interview with YouTube personality MetalJesusRocks (aka Jason Lindsey, himself an ex-Sierra developer and a friend of Ars). "Does anybody?"

Lowe is about to find out, as the developer has begun posting eBay listings for his entire source-code collection. (You read that correctly. The whole shebang.) The sale's opening has been accompanied by a MetalJesusRocks video (embedded below), which offers a 12-minute tour of backed-up files, original game boxes, original hint books, and more.

upstart writes:

Submitted via IRC for Bytram

Mozilla Testing DNS-over-HTTPS in Firefox | SecurityWeek.Com

Mozilla is moving forward with yet another project designed to provide users with increased security: it is now testing DNS-over-HTTPS (DoH) in Firefox stable.

Only a small group of users will enjoy the feature for now, as it is still in the testing phase, but Mozilla is determined to work with industry players for a larger rollout. When that will happen, however, remains to be seen.

Mozilla has been already testing DoH in its browser, looking into the time it takes to get a response from Cloudflare’s DoH resolver. With the test results positive, revealing great performance improvements even for the slowest users, the Internet organization has decided to move forward with its plans. 

“A recent test in our Beta channel confirmed that DoH is fast and isn’t causing problems for our users. However, those tests only measure the DNS operation itself, which isn’t the whole story,” Mozilla’s Selena Deckelmann explains. 

Original Submission

upstart writes in with a story submission, via IRC, for takyon:

Palm Oil Was Supposed to Help Save the Planet. Instead It Unleashed a Catastrophe.

The fields outside Kotawaringin village in Central Kalimantan, on the island of Borneo, looked as if they had just been cleared by armies. None of the old growth remained — only charred stumps poking up from murky, dark pools of water. In places, smoke still curled from land that days ago had been covered with lush jungle. Villagers had burned it all down, clearing the way for a lucrative crop whose cultivation now dominates the entire island: the oil-palm tree.

The dirt road was ruler straight, but deep holes and errant boulders tossed our tiny Toyota back and forth. Trucks coughed out black smoke, their beds brimming over with seven-ton loads of palm fruit rocking back and forth on tires as tall as people. Clear-cut expanses soon gave way to a uniform crop of oil-palm groves: orderly trees, a sign that we had crossed into an industrial palm plantation. Oil-palm trees look like the coconut-palm trees you see on postcards from Florida — they grow to more than 60 feet tall and flourish on the peaty wetland soil common in lowland tropics. But they are significantly more valuable. Every two weeks or so, each tree produces a 50-pound bunch of walnut-size fruit, bursting with a red, viscous oil that is more versatile than almost any other plant-based oil of its kind. Indonesia is rich in timber and coal, but palm oil is its biggest export. Around the world, the oil from its meat and seeds has long been an indispensable ingredient in everything from soap to ice cream. But it has now become a key ingredient of something else: biodiesel, fuel for diesel engines that has been wholly or partly made from vegetable oil.

Finally we emerged, and as we crested a hill, the plantations fell into an endless repetition of tidy bunches stretching for miles, looking almost like the rag of a Berber carpet. Occasionally, a shard of an old ironwood tree shot into the air, a remnant of the primordial canopy of dense rain forest that dominated the land until very recently.

mrpg writes:

The Archbasilica of St. John Lateran doesn’t quite look its age. The basilica, where the Pope presides in his role as Archbishop of Rome, was already ancient when it was rebuilt in the 1650s. Its walls still hold some of the original material used to build the cathedral under Emperor Constantine in 312 CE. And beneath the modern church lies the original Roman foundation. Excavations since the 1700s have opened up a network of dark, cramped spaces called scavi beneath the four-hectare site of the cathedral.

Centuries of Roman history lie buried in the darkness in layers stretching down to 8.5 meters (27.89 feet) below the modern floor of the cathedral, and the subterranean archaeological sites are like a honeycomb through the city’s Caelian Hill. Now, using a combination of laser scanning and ground-penetrating radar, archeologists have made a complete map of the site.

https://arstechnica.com/science/2018/11/archaeologists-map-centuries-of-history-beneath-worlds-oldest-cathedral/

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Magnitude 7.0 Earthquake Shakes Alaska, Damaging Roads, Buildings

In Anchorage, Alaska, people took refuge under tables and fled outdoors on Friday morning, as a magnitude 7.0 earthquake struck just north of the city.

Some roads, bridges and buildings have been damaged, and schools and some businesses are shuttered for the day. Gov. Bill Walker has issued a declaration of disaster.

Anchorage police report "major infrastructure damage" across the city. "Many homes and buildings are damaged," the police department says. "Many roads and bridges are closed."

A tsunami warning was temporarily issued for coastal regions of Cook Inlet and the Southern Kenai Peninsula, but it has since been canceled.

The earthquake struck just before 8:30 a.m. local time (12:29 p.m. ET). The epicenter was about 8 miles north of Anchorage, at a depth of some 25 miles.

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes in with a story from ScienceDaily:

[...] academics from the Sydney Centre in Geomechanics and Mining Materials (SciGEM) including Professor of Civil Engineering, Itai Einav and Postdoctoral Research Associate, Dr James Baker have developed a new X-ray method which allows scientists to see inside granular flows. Named X-ray rheography, or "writing flow," their approach gathers information using 3-point high-speed radiography, and then assembles this information by solving a Sudoku-style puzzle.

[...] The new X-ray rheography technique has the ability to form a three dimensional image of moving grains, which has helped the researchers better understand how particles flow and behave in various circumstances. In many examples they have found that granular media tends to flow in unique patterns and waves.

"Unlike fluids, we discovered that confined, three-dimensional steady granular flows arise through cycles of contraction and expansion, à la 'granular lungs'. Again, unlike fluids, we also found that grains tend to travel along parallel lines, even near curved boundaries.

[...] Journal Reference:
James Baker, François Guillard, Benjy Marks, Itai Einav. X-ray rheography uncovers planar granular flows despite non-planar walls. Nature Communications, 2018; 9 (1) DOI: 10.1038/s41467-018-07628-6

At last we can know exactly how the Days of our Lives move.

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

BBCTech:

Free charging for electric cars will be available for customers at some Tesco stores from next year.

Tesco, in partnership with Volkswagen, plans to install almost 2,500 charging bays at up to 600 stores by 2020.

A standard 7 kW charger will be available for free, but drivers will have to pay for a faster service.

Customers will be able to leave their cars to charge while doing their shopping, which should give time for a "substantial" free charge, VW said.

Adding chargers to the supermarket parking lots will offer convenience for EV driving shoppers, and normalize EV use for others by increasing their visibility.

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

ArsTechnica:

The hits just keep coming for the various Defenders series. Per Deadline Hollywood, Netflix announced this evening that it has canceled Daredevil, just weeks after the show concluded its critically acclaimed third season. This news shouldn't be too surprising, but this one is a particularly tough blow for fans.

Clearly Netflix is cleaning house, since this follows surprise cancellations in October of Iron Fist and Luke Cage. That just leaves Jessica Jones and The Punisher on Netflex's[sic] roster of Defenders. Both have new seasons in the pipeline that are currently slated to air on Netflix as planned, according to Deadline's sources. But they will, in all likelihood, be on the chopping block eventually as well.

Marvel/Disney may be planning to revive the Defender series on its upcoming streaming service.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Nine people charged with selling Samsung's curved display tech

Prosecutors in South Korea have indicted nine people and two companies for allegedly selling Samsung's curved-edge OLED display tech (which it uses in its flagship Galaxy phones) to a company in China. The CEO of Samsung supplier Toptec Co Ltd was among three people arrested over the scheme. Prosecutors say he and eight employees received about $13.8 million for the intellectual property.

The group allegedly formed a shell company that received documents related to display panels from Samsung subsidiary Samsung Display, and sold them and "3D lamination" technology to the unidentified Chinese company. Toptec sells automated equipment to make display panels for phones and the company has denied any wrongdoing, according to Reuters.

Original Submission

MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for SoyCow1984

How a phone app detected Sprint's alleged throttling of Skype

The US government killed off its net neutrality rules in June of this year, but that doesn't mean no one is monitoring whether carriers are blocking or throttling online services. Northeastern University researchers led by computer science professor David Choffnes recently determined that Sprint was throttling Skype. Their finding was based on an analysis of user-initiated tests conducted with Wehe, an app for Android and iPhone that the researchers developed to detect throttling. About one-third of the tests detected Sprint's throttling of Skype, Choffnes said.

If the findings are correct, Sprint would be violating a Federal Communications Commission rule requiring Internet providers to disclose throttling. Even though the FCC no longer bans throttling itself, the agency requires ISPs to publicly disclose any blocking, throttling, or paid prioritization. But was Sprint really throttling Skype? Sprint denies it and points out that researchers haven't released the data underlying their conclusions. Choffnes acknowledges that his research has limitations and that he couldn't detect the throttling in the lab. But he's still confident that Skype was getting a raw deal on Sprint's network, and he explained why in an interview with Ars.

Original Submission