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Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

University of California, Berkeley, synthetic biologists have engineered brewer's yeast to produce marijuana's main ingredients -- mind-altering THC and non-psychoactive CBD -- as well as novel cannabinoids not found in the plant itself.

Feeding only on sugar, the yeast are an easy and cheap way to produce pure cannabinoids that today are costly to extract from the buds of the marijuana plant, Cannabis sativa.

"For the consumer, the benefits are high-quality, low-cost CBD and THC: you get exactly what you want from yeast," said Jay Keasling, a UC Berkeley professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering and of bioengineering and a faculty scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. "It is a safer, more environmentally friendly way to produce cannabinoids."

Cannabis and its extracts, including the high-inducing THC, or tetrahydrocannabinol, are now legal in 10 states and the District of Columbia, and recreational marijuana -- smoked, vaped or consumed as edibles -- is a multibillion-dollar business nationwide. Medications containing THC have been approved by the Food and Drug Administration to reduce nausea after chemotherapy and to improve appetite in AIDS patients.

CBD, or cannabidiol, is used increasingly in cosmetics -- so-called cosmeceuticals -- and has been approved as a treatment for childhood epileptic seizures. It is being investigated as a therapy for numerous conditions, including anxiety, Parkinson's disease and chronic pain.

[...] Cannabinoids join many other chemicals and drugs now being produced in yeast, including human growth hormone, insulin, blood clotting factors and recently, but not yet on the market, morphine and other opiates.

Complete biosynthesis of cannabinoids and their unnatural analogues in yeast (DOI: 10.1038/s41586-019-0978-9)

-- submitted from IRC

Original Submission

infodragon writes:

An injection of nano particles into the eyes of mice temporarily gave them the ability to see near infrared light (NIR) as green; the effects lasted about two weeks. This is very similar to night vision goggles without any hardware. Both rods and cones are affected so in theory the injection would be viable for humans.

https://gizmodo.com/incredible-experiment-gives-infrared-vision-to-mice-and-1832940986

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An Anonymous Coward writes:

French President Emmanuel Macron has called for increased use of data technologies such as blockchain in the EU to boost the agriculture industry and address concerns over food traceability.

Inaugurating the 56th International Agricultural Fair in Paris at the weekend, Agridigitale.net reports, Macron spoke of the need to authenticate and track agricultural products amid growing consumer concerns over issues such such as the recent Polish beef scandal, saying:

“Let’s do this in Europe, [be at the] the vanguard of agricultural data by developing tools that will track every product from raw material production to packaging and processing.”

[...] The call for innovation came as part of a multi-part strategy that the president outlined in his speech. Europe’s agricultural policy going forward, he said, would be based on the protection of farmers and consumers against climate change and market risks, farming more ecologically, and using technology and innovation to help to solve industry challenges.

https://www.coindesk.com/french-president-says-blockchain-could-put-europe-at-vanguard-of-innovation

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Phoenix666 writes:

CNet:

Review site Rotten Tomatoes is instituting some changes, leading many to believe it's responding to the recent controversy over the site's Captain Marvel page. But Paul Yanover, president of Fandango, which owns the site, told CNET that's not the whole story.

In case you were snapped away by Thanos in Avengers: Infinity War, and thus missed the recent controversy, here's a recap. Captain Marvel doesn't come out until March 8, but users were already leaving negative comments about the film on Rotten Tomatoes, a process dubbed "review bombing." Many recent comments seemed to come from those who are angry at star Brie Larson.

The movie review site has removed users' ability to leave reviews or to indicate they are not interested in seeing a film [EDIT: before it comes out].

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Phoenix666 writes:

ArsTechnica:

In the early Middle Ages, nearly one out of every thousand people in the world lived in Angkor, the sprawling capital of the Khmer Empire in present-day Cambodia. But by the 1500s, Angkor had been mostly abandoned—its temples, citadels, and complex irrigation network left to overgrowth and ruin. Recent studies have blamed a period of unstable climate in which heavy floods followed lengthy droughts, which broke down the infrastructure that moved water around the massive city.

But it turns out Angkor’s waterworks may have been vulnerable to these changes because there was no one left to maintain and repair them. A new study suggests that Khmer rulers, religious officials, and city administrators had been steadily flowing out of Angkor to other cities for at least a century before the end.

They should have given the Sewer Workers Local the raise they were asking for.

Original Submission

jas writes:

The National Vulnerability Database (NVD) is a US government-funded resource that does exactly what the name implies-acts as a database of vulnerabilities in software. It operates as a superset of the Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE) system, operated by the non-profit Mitre Corporation, with additional government funding. For years, it has been good enough—while any organization or process has room to be made more efficient, curating a database of software vulnerabilities reported through crowdsourcing is a challenging undertaking.

Risk Based Security, the private operator of competing database VulnDB, aired their grievances with the public CVE/NVD system in their 2018 Vulnerability Trends report, released Wednesday, with charged conclusions including "there is fertile grounds for attorneys and regulators to argue negligence if CVE/NVD is the only source of vulnerability intelligence being used by your organization," and "organizations are getting late and at times unreliable vulnerability information from these two sources, along with significant gaps in coverage." This criticism is neither imaginative, nor unexpected from a privately-owned competitor attempting to justify their product.

In fairness to Risk Based Security, there is a known time delay in CVSS scoring, though they overstate the severity of the problem, as an (empirical) research report finds that "there is no reason to suspect that information for severe vulnerabilities would tend to arrive later (or earlier) than information for mundane vulnerabilities."

https://www.techrepublic.com/article/software-vulnerabilities-are-becoming-more-numerous-less-understood/

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

CNet:

Disney is holding talks with AT&T to buy the 10 percent stake in the streaming service that the carrier holds through its WarnerMedia unit, according to a report by Variety, citing an unnamed source with knowledge of the discussions.

That raises the potential of Disney controlling 70 percent of Hulu, up from its current 30 percent stake, and it would leave Comcast as the only other owner.

Is Disney pre-emptively positioning to kill a rival to its soon-to-launch Disney+ streaming service, or does it intend to compete with itself?

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Phoenix666 writes:

Phys.org:

One of the key concepts in quantum physics is entanglement, in which two or more quantum systems become so inextricably linked that their collective state can't be determined by observing each element individually. Now Yale researchers have developed a "universal entangler" that can link a variety of encoded particles on demand.

The discovery represents a powerful new mechanism with potential uses in quantum computing, cryptography, and quantum communications. The research is led by the Yale laboratory of Robert Schoelkopf and appears in the journal Nature.
...
"We've shown a new way of creating gates between logically-encoded qubits that can eventually be error-corrected," said Schoelkopf, the Sterling Professor of Applied Physics and Physics at Yale and director of the Yale Quantum Institute. "It's a much more sophisticated operation than what has been performed previously."

The entangling mechanism is called an exponential-SWAP gate. In the study, researchers demonstrated the new technology by deterministically entangling encoded states in any chosen configurations or codes, each housed in two otherwise isolated, 3-D superconducting microwave cavities.

It's a tangled web we weave, when we're practicing to receive...

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Phoenix666 writes:

BBC:

An Android phone that slides open to reveal a physical qwerty keyboard inside has launched at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.

The F(x)tec Pro1 phone also has a bespoke shutter button on the side to click when taking photos.

The London start-up behind it said it wanted to "return the keyboard" to consumers.

Other handsets with keyboards built in, from brands such as BlackBerry Mobile and Swiss firm Punkt, were also on show.

"A lot of consumer tech still has buttons even though the tech is there to get rid of them," said Adrian Li Mow Ching, founder of F(x)tec.

"Haptic feedback never gives the same satisfaction as pressing a physical button.”

Hosannah!

Original Submission

janrinok writes:

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Researchers have used liquid metals to turn carbon dioxide back into solid coal, in a world-first breakthrough that could transform our approach to carbon capture and storage.

The research team led by RMIT University in Melbourne, Australia, have developed a new technique that can efficiently convert CO₂ from a gas into solid particles of carbon.

Published in the journal Nature Communications, the research offers an alternative pathway for safely and permanently removing the greenhouse gas from our atmosphere.

Current technologies for carbon capture and storage focus on compressing CO₂ into a liquid form, transporting it to a suitable site and injecting it underground.

Original Submission

janrinok writes:

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

The world's largest radio telescope is one step closer, with Australian scientists putting the final touches on the build for the Square Kilometre Array in the remote West Australian desert.

The Square Kilometre Array (SKA) is an ambitious international project that will see the world's largest radio telescope built across two continents, capable of imaging huge areas of the sky at a resolution surpassing the Hubble telescope. The SKA will include more than 100,000 low-frequency antennas in Australia and hundreds of dishes in South Africa, all working together to create a total collecting area of 1 square kilometre.

[...] "We're setting the groundwork to host 132,000 low-frequency SKA antennas in Australia. These will receive staggering amounts of data," said CSIRO SKA infrastructure consortium director, Antony Schinckel.

"The data flows will be on the scale of petabits, or a million billion bits, per second -- more than the global internet rate today, all flowing into a single building."

All that data requires its own infrastructure, including 65,000 fibre optic cables to transfer the data from the antennas to the SKA's supercomputing facilities.

Original Submission

janrinok writes:

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Blue whales reach their massive size by relying on their exceptional memories to find historically productive feeding sites rather than responding in real time to emerging prey patches, a new study concludes.

Researchers examining records of both whale migration and oceanic conditions in the California Current Ecosystem found that blue whales almost perfectly match the timing of their migration to the historical average timing of krill production, rather than matching the waves of krill availability in any given year.

The findings suggest that blue whales locate prey by relying on memory to return to stable, high-quality foraging sites, which historically have served them well but could make it difficult for the whales to adapt if novel ecosystem changes emerge as a result of climate change.

Original Submission

DannyB writes:

Texas lawmaker says he's not worried about measles outbreak because of ‘antibiotics'

Texas state representative Bill Zedler says a resurgence of measles across the U.S. isn't worrying him.

Zedler, R-Arlington, is promoting legislation that would allow Texans to opt out of childhood vaccinations.

“They want to say people are dying of measles. Yeah, in Third World countries they’re dying of measles,” Zedler said, the Texas Observer reports. “Today, with antibiotics and that kind of stuff, they’re not dying in America.”

There is no treatment for measles, a highly contagious virus that can be fatal. Antibiotics treat bacterial infections and can't kill viruses.

It could be funny if it weren't so tragic.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Robots may soon make your FedEx delivery from Walmart, Target and Pizza Hut

The robotic contraption rolling down the street just might be delivering a FedEx package to your home or office. That's the vision, anyway, behind the FedEx SameDay Bot that the shipping giant unveiled Wednesday. This sub-200-pound autonomous delivery robot was developed by DEKA Development & Research Corp, whose founder is Segway inventor Dean Kamen.

The SameDay Bot is so-named because its mission is to help retailers make same-day, "last mile" deliveries to local customers. FedEx is collaborating with AutoZone, Lowe's, Pizza Hut, Target, Walgreens and Walmart.

FedEx plans to test the bot this summer in select markets and FedEx Office locations, starting in the company's own Memphis hometown, pending final approval by the city. That approval would appear to be likely since it has the backing of Mayor Jim Strickland.

According to FedEx, on average, more than 60 percent of merchants' customers live within three miles of a store location, demonstrating the opportunity for on-demand, hyper-local delivery.

BTW, where's my breakfast? (Pizza in bed, please.)

Also at The Verge and Engadget.

Related: Domino's Trials Pizza Delivery Robot With 12-Mile Range
Self-Driving Robot Might be Future of Home Delivery
Delivery Robots: a Revolutionary Step or Sidewalk-Clogging Nightmare?
San Francisco May Ban Delivery Robots
Kroger Launches Trial of Same-Day Autonomous Grocery Delivery Service in Scottsdale, Arizona

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Co-authored by three computer science boffins from the University of Colorado, Boulder in the US – Jack Wampler, Ian Martiny, and Eric Wustrow – the paper, "ExSpectre: Hiding Malware in Speculative Execution," describes a way to compile malicious code into a seemingly innocuous payload binary, so it can be executed through speculative execution without detection.

Speculative execution is a technique in modern processors that's used to improve performance, alongside out-of-order execution and branch prediction. CPUs will speculate about future instructions and execute them, keeping the results and saving time if they've guessed the program path correctly and discarding them if not.

[...] The Boulder-based boffins have devised a way in which a payload program and a trigger program can interact to perform concealed calculations. The payload and trigger program would be installed through commonly used attack vectors (e.g. trojan code, a remote exploit, or phishing) and need to run on the same CPU. The trigger program can also take the form of special input to the payload or a resident application that interacts with the payload program.

"When a separate trigger program runs on the same machine, it mistrains the CPU’s branch predictor, causing the payload program to speculatively execute its malicious payload, which communicates speculative results back to the rest of the payload program to change its real-world behavior," the paper explains.

The result is stealth malware. It defies detection through current reverse engineering techniques because it executes in a transient environment not accessible to static or dynamic analysis used by most current security engines. Even if the trigger program is detected and removed the payload code will remain operating.

There are limits to this technique, however. Among other constraints, the malicious code can only consist of somewhere between one hundred and two hundred instructions. And the rate at which data can be obtained isn't particularly speedy: the researchers devised a speculative primitive that could decrypt 1KB of data and exfiltrate it at a rate of 5.38 Kbps, assuming 20 redundant iterations to ensure data correctness.

Original Submission