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RandomFactor writes:

A real world safety-study of peanut oral immunotherapy (P-OIT) for peanut allergies in preschoolers resulted in ~90% of study participants safely reaching the maintenance stage of the treatment.

We are the first group to describe preschool P-OIT in a real-world multicenter setting. The treatment appears to be safe for the vast majority of patients because symptoms were generally mild and very few reactions received epinephrine; however, life-threatening reactions in a minority of patients (0.4%) can still occur.

Oral Immunotherapy consists of a lengthy process

Oral immunotherapy starts off by giving a patient a small amount of the food [they are] allergic to -- in this case, peanuts -- and then steadily increasing the amount of that food until they reach maximum dosage. This works to desensitize the person to the food to the point that it doesn't cause a dangerous, allergic reaction.

The research was done at multiple clinics across Canada on children between 9 months and five years of age.

OIT is not a cure and requires ongoing maintenance to maintain desensitization to the allergen. If the maintenance dosage is stopped resensitization may occur.

Original Submission

MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for ErnestGoesToSpace

Free apps marketed to people with depression or who want to quit smoking are hemorrhaging user data to third parties like Facebook and Google — but often don't admit it in their privacy policies, a new study reports. This study is the latest to highlight the potential risks of entrusting sensitive health information to our phones.

Though most of the easily-found depression or smoking cessation apps in the Android and iOS stores share data, only a fraction of them actually disclose this. The findings add to a string of worrying revelations about what apps are doing with the health information we entrust to them. For instance, a Wall Street Journal investigation recently revealed the period tracking app Flo shared users' period dates and pregnancy plans with Facebook. And previous studies have reported health apps with security flaws or that shared data with advertisers and analytics companies.

Source: https://www.theverge.com/2019/4/20/18508382/apps-mental-health-smoking-cessation-data-sharing-privacy-facebook-google-advertising

Original Submission

RandomFactor writes:

For those with romantic, or just skygazing inclinations - the annual Lyrid meteor shower peaks tonight or tomorrow night (depending which organization you believe.)

Meteor showers like the Lyrids occur when Earth passes through the dusty trail left behind by a comet. The meteors can appear all across the sky, but they seem to streak out of a spot to the northeast of the bright star Vega (called the meteor shower's radiant). This meteor shower is easier to see in the Northern Hemisphere because that part of the sky is high above the horizon before dawn, although you can see a lower rate from the Southern Hemisphere.

In the Northeastern U.S. comets coming out of the radiant should be visible starting around 9 or 10 pm and will continue through the night, climbing higher in the sky as the evening progresses.

Regardless of when you look, the key to watching a meteor shower is to go somewhere as dark as possible and make sure you give your eyes enough time to adjust — don't just dart outside to look at one; allow 20-30 minutes to adjust. Be sure to dress warmly, if you're somewhere cold, and get somewhere comfortable to sit where you can lean back and look at the whole sky. Because meteors can appear all across the sky, the naked eye is the best tool you can use; telescopes and binoculars will narrow your view.

The Lyrid meteor shower is named after the constellation Lyra, from which it appears to emanate. It is generated when the Earth passes through the tail of Comet Thatcher, which orbits the sun every 415 years.

Comets disintegrate as the sun's heat causes ice and other debris to break off the core. This leaves a trail of rubble in space. In the case of Thatcher's path of debris, the Earth runs into it once a year and produces the sky show.

The Lyrid meteor shower was observed as early as 687 B.C. when it was recorded by Chinese astronomers and is one of the earliest showers on record. It can generate bursts of several meteors a minute (up to 100/hour or so).

Note that the moon will be shining brightly which can make observations a bit more difficult, but it still should be a good show.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Submitted via IRC for Bytram

Study finds changing dissolved organic carbon in Maine lakes key to maintaining drinking water quality

Monitoring concentrations of dissolved organic carbon in Maine lakes before and after severe rainstorms could inform management strategies to help ensure consistent, high-quality drinking water, according to University of Maine researchers.

In their study, working with local drinking water districts, Kate Warner and Jasmine Saros, researchers in UMaine's Climate Change Institute and the School of Biology and Ecology, found that increasingly frequent and extreme rain events can contribute to short-term abrupt changes in the quantity and quality of lakes' dissolved organic carbon, which is derived from leaves, pine needles and other terrestrial debris in watershed runoff.

[...] By sampling dissolved organic carbon in six Maine lakes before and after five severe rainstorms, the researchers found three response patterns. Some lakes had an initial spike in dissolved organic carbon that returned to prestorm levels within days. The largest lakes sustained no changes in the concentrations of dissolved organic carbon.

Original Submission

aristarchus writes:

According the Beeb (BBC):

At least 137 people have been killed and hundreds more injured in explosions at churches and hotels in Sri Lanka, police and hospital sources say.

At least eight blasts were reported. Three churches in Negombo, Batticaloa and Colombo's Kochchikade district were targeted during Easter services.

The Shangri-La, Kingsbury, Cinnamon Grand and a fourth hotel, all in Colombo, were also hit.

A curfew has been imposed from 18:00 to 06:00 local time (12:30-00:30 GMT).

The government also said there would a temporary block on the use of major social media networks.

No group has yet said it was responsible for the attacks.

Update:"At least 207 people have been killed and 450 hurt in explosions at churches and hotels in Sri Lanka, police say."

Original Submission

takyon writes:

SpaceX confirms anomaly during Crew Dragon engine test

An accident Saturday during an engine test on a Crew Dragon test vehicle at Cape Canaveral sent a reddish-orange plume into the sky visible for miles around, a setback for SpaceX and NASA as teams prepare the capsule for its first mission with astronauts.

SpaceX is testing the Crew Dragon ahead of the capsule's first test flight with astronauts later this year, following a successful Crew Dragon demonstration mission to the International Space Station in early March.

SpaceX confirmed the accident, first reported by Florida Today, in a statement Saturday evening.

"Earlier today, SpaceX conducted a series of engine tests on a Crew Dragon test vehicle on our test stand at Landing Zone 1 in Cape Canaveral, Florida," a company spokesperson said. "The initial tests completed successfully but the final test resulted in an anomaly on the test stand."

A photo captured by a Florida Today photographer from a local beach showed an orange plume visible on the horizon in the direction of Cape Canaveral Air Force Station. Such plumes are usually associated with burning or leaking toxic hypergolic propellants.

Also at NASASpaceFlight and Ars Technica.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Alum Kills Over $58,000 in PC Gear With 'USB Killer' Device

The student in question is Vishwanath Akuthota. He graduated from [The College of St. Rose] in Albany, New York back in 2017. Yet, according to the U.S. Department of Justice (DoJ), Akuthota "admitted that he intentionally destroyed the computers and recorded himself doing so using his iPhone, including making statements such as 'I'm going to kill this guy' before inserting the USB Killer into a computer's USB port." The video hasn't been published.

Akuthota also recognized that he caused more than $58,000 in damage to The College of St. Rose and has agreed to pay back that amount to the school. (And here we thought people only had to pay that kind of money for their alma mater when their student loans come due.) The DoJ said he "faces up to 10 years in prison, a fine of up to $250,000 and a term of post-imprisonment supervised release of up to 3 years" after sentencing.

Best advertising ever for USB Killer?

Also at The Verge.

Original Submission

hellcat writes:

Who "nose" what your neurobiology toolkit holds?

Parkinson's disease (PD) is a chronic progressive neurological disorder that largely affects movement. There is currently no diagnostic test. Trivedi et al. collected sebum[*] samples from PD patients and unaffected volunteers to identify volatile metabolites that may serve as PD biomarkers. The research team included a woman with a sensitive sense of smell who reported to be able to detect PD by odor. In blinded studies, she identified the "musky" samples that belonged to the PD patients with high accuracy, which guided mass spectrometry to identify the volatile compounds that constituted a signature PD scent. These studies may pave the way for development of the first PD-specific diagnostic test.

ACS Cent. Sci. 10.1021/acscentsci.8b00879 (2019).
Article from Science in its entirety. 2019-04-12 page 143.

[*] Sebaceous gland on Wikipedia.

The news might be easier to take if it came from a dog.

Original Submission

RandomFactor writes:

Notre Dame's bees rather surprisingly have survived the conflagration that has consumed the cathedral's wooden roof.

Notre Dame is home to 180,000 bees that have lived in several hives on the roof of the stone sacristy since 2003. The bees were installed as part of a city wide initiative to help with the declining bee population. The cathedral was only one of the historic sites where hives were placed.

"When bees sense fire, they gorge themselves on honey and stay to protect their queen, who doesn't move," [Notre Dame beekeeper Nicolas Geant] said. "I saw how big the flames were, so I immediately thought it was going to kill the bees. Even though they were 30 meters (nearly 100 feet) lower than the top roof, the wax in the hives melts at 63 degrees Celsius (145.4 Fahrenheit)."

If the wax that protects their hive melts, the bees simply die inside, Geant explained.

Fortunately the smoke itself is relatively innocuous for bees, beekeepers regularly smoke hives to put bees to sleep.

Notre Dame officials saw the bees on top of the sacristy Friday, buzzing in and out of their hives.

"I wouldn't call it a miracle, but I'm very, very happy," Geant added.

The honey from the hives (about 165lbs/75kgs annually) is sold to Notre Dame employees. Presumably this year's batch will have a unique smokey flavor.

Original Submission

RandomFactor writes:

The Reg has a story up about an article [PDF] published Thursday, in which researchers show off a 15 inch (40cm) square placard with a pattern that shows a high degree of effectiveness in confounding automated person-detection by surveillance cameras.

"The idea behind this work is to be able to circumvent security systems that use a person detector to generate an alarm when a person enters the view of a camera," explained Wiebe Van Ranst, a PhD researcher at KU Leuven, in an email to The Register. "Our idea is to generate an occlusion pattern that can be worn by a possible intruder to conceal the intruder from for the detector."

The technique is demonstrated in this video with the album cover sized placard centered on the body being passed between two people who disappear from recognition as it is centered on their bodies.

Looking ahead, the researchers hope to generalize their work to other neural network architectures like Faster R-CNN. They believe that they will be able turn their pattern into a T-shirt print that will make people "virtually invisible" to object-detection algorithms in automatic surveillance cameras.

Clothing such as they describe could be combined with related efforts like CV Dazzle fashion styling which is designed to confuse facial recognition software, making privacy in the future very strange looking indeed.

Original Submission

martyb writes:

McAfee Joins Sophos, Avira, Avast-The Latest Windows Update Breaks Them all:

The most recent Windows patch, released April 9, seems to have done something (still to be determined) that's causing problems with anti-malware software. Over the last few days, Microsoft has been adding more and more antivirus scanners to its list of known issues. As of publication time, client-side antivirus software from Sophos, Avira, ArcaBit, Avast, and most recently McAfee are all showing problems with the patch.

Affected machines seem to be fine until an attempt is made to log in, at which point the system grinds to a halt. It's not immediately clear if systems are freezing altogether or just going extraordinarily slowly. Some users have reported that they can log in, but the process takes ten or more hours. Logging in to Windows 7, 8.1, Server 2008 R2, Server 2012, and Server 2012 R2 are all affected.

Booting into safe mode is unaffected, and the current advice is to use this method to disable the antivirus applications and allow the machines to boot normally. Sophos additionally reports that adding the antivirus software's own directory to the list of excluded locations also serves as a fix, which is a little strange.

Anti-virus programs keeping Windows from booting — are they trying to tell us something?

Original Submission

canopic jug writes:

Marcus Hutchins, the researcher who stopped the Wannacry Windows ransomware attack, has pleaded guilty to two counts of writing banking malware in 2014.

Hutchins was accused of writing a banking malware called Kronos in 2014, after he finished high school. The researcher was arrested in Las Vegas after attending the hacker conference Def Con in 2017. Days later, he plead not guilty in a Milwaukee courtroom. He was scheduled to be tried this summer.

But on Friday, Hutchins plead guilty to two counts of [cracking]. According to the guilty plea, each of these counts carries a maximum sentence of 5 years, $250,000 in fines and up to 1 year of supervised release.

He has published a brief statement regarding the case on his blog.

Legal Case Update

As you may be aware, I’ve pleaded guilty to two charges related to writing malware in the years prior to my career in security. I regret these actions and accept full responsibility for my mistakes. Having grown up, I’ve since been using the same skills that I misused several years ago for constructive purposes. I will continue to devote my time to keeping people safe from malware attacks.

Original Submission

MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for ErkleLives

Phishing — schemes to nab personal data with disguised malicious webpages and emails — constituted more than 70% of all cyber attacks in 2016, according to a Verizon report. In an effort to combat them, Google last year announced it would require users to enable JavaScript during Google Account sign-in so that it could run attack-detecting risk assessments, and today, the company said it'll begin to block all sign-ins from embedded browser frameworks like Chromium Embedded Framework starting in June.

For the uninitiated, embedded browser frameworks enable developers to add basic web browsing functionality to their apps, and to use web languages like HTML, CSS, and JavaScript to create those apps' interface (or portions of it). They're typically cross-platform — Chromium Embedded Framework runs on Linux, Windows, and macOS — and they support a range of language bindings.

"We're constantly working to improve our phishing protections to keep your information secure," account security product manager Jonathan Skelker wrote in a blog post. "This is yet another layer of protection on top of existing safeguards like Safe Browsing warnings, Gmail spam filters, and account sign-in challenges."

[...] As an alternative to embedded browser frameworks, Google is suggesting that developers use browser-based OAuth authentication, which enables users to see the full address of the page where they're entering their credentials. "If you are a developer with an app that requires access to Google Account data, switch to using browser-based OAuth authentication today," Skelker said.

Source: https://venturebeat.com/2019/04/18/google-will-begin-to-block-sign-ins-from-embedded-browser-frameworks-in-june/

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Submitted via IRC for Bytram

Aussies, Yanks may think they're big drinkers – but Brits easily booze them under the table

The top ten per cent of Australia's boozy population downs more than half of the alcohol consumed in the country, according to new research – and the Brits are even worse.

Two researchers from the La Trobe University, Australia, uncovered the eye popping statistic from two surveys: the 2013 International Alcohol Control Study and the 2016 National Drug Strategy Household Survey, as well as more recent research work.

"We found that the heaviest drinking 10 per cent of Australians drink 54.4 per cent of all alcohol consumed in Australia," said Michael Livingston, co-author of the paper published in the Australian and New Zealand Journal of Public Health and an alcohol policy expert at La Trobe University, on Thursday this week.

The paper also highlighted the intoxicating habits of other countries too. The US fares slightly worse. Ten per cent of America's population guzzled about 55 per cent of all the boozy beverages. But it looked even more diabolical for the Brits - just four per cent of its population glugged a whopping 30 per cent of all its alcohol and they easily outpace Aussies and Americans.

Livingston and his colleague Sarah Callinan, also a researcher at La Trobe's Centre for Alcohol Policy Research, found that Australia's top alcoholics were more likely to be middle-aged men living in rural areas.

"We know that rural areas have disproportionately high levels of consumption and alcohol-related harm compared to metropolitan areas. We found that 16 per cent of this heavy-drinking subset live in outer regional and remote areas, compared with 10 per cent of other drinkers."

[...] "Clearly government has a responsibility to address the problem of cheap alcohol by fixing the way alcohol is taxed, introducing floor prices and halting the proliferation of harm-causing packaged alcohol sales," he said./p>

Sponsored: Becoming a Pragmatic Security Leader

Original Submission

martyb writes:

Anti-Vax Parents Lose in NY Court, Face Steep Fines for Not Vaccinating:

A Brooklyn judge on Thursday rejected the petition from five anonymous anti-vaccine mothers who attempted to block the city's recent vaccination mandate amid the largest measles outbreak the city has seen in several decades.

And the city wasted no time enforcing its upheld order. As the judge made his decision Thursday, city health officials doled out the first penalties to violators, according to the New York Times. Officials sent summonses to the parents of three children for failing to vaccinate the children even after city officials determined that they had been exposed to the dangerous viral illness.

Measles is so contagious that up to 90 percent of unvaccinated or otherwise susceptible individuals who are exposed will become ill, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Measles' extreme contagiousness is due in part to the fact that once it is launched into the air from a cough or sneeze it can remain airborne and infectious for up to two hours. Any vulnerable passersby who breathe in the virus or touch contaminated surfaces can pick it up.