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upstart writes:

Submitted via IRC for Bytram

Instagram helps top artists boost earnings

The money that artists receive when their tracks get played has just hit a record high.

In 2018 £746 million was paid out - a rise of 4% on 2017.

PRS for music, which collects the royalties for artists, counted songs used on Facebook and Instagram Stories for the first time.

But according to singer-songwriter Ruth-Anne Cunningham, "a lot of songwriters are making less than minimum wage".

Ruth-Anne, who's worked with Avicii, JoJo and John Legend, says "it's great everything is starting to get monetised" but adds, "unless you have a top 40 radio hit you don't make a substantial income".

The boss of PRS says the rise of streaming has made it harder for them to monitor what's being played - and agrees that those trying to earn a living from music are losing out.

"The very successful people are doing extremely well," Robert Ashcroft tells Radio 1 Newsbeat.

"The challenge is, if you're trying to make a living and you're not a performer it's getting more difficult."

Ruth-Anne says that despite performing as well as writing, that's something she's got experience of: "I've had that where I've had massive hits and made money, but then had to be a vocal coach too.

"Back in the day you could make money from being on an album, now people see streams and people see 10 million and think that's a lot - but a songwriter might make £400 from that."

Original Submission

martyb writes:

Step Inside This Massive Cave Labyrinth Hidden Under Borneo:

Beneath the island's rainforest, explorers search for new discoveries deep within some of the Earth's largest, longest, and wildest caves.

Late on a sweltering morning in April, two slim British cavers named Frank and Cookie lowered themselves into a slick, humid pit deep below Borneo's rainforest.

Climbing down past an ancient heap of bird guano and pushing through a gallery of gleaming pillars the color of old bone, the pair were hoping to make history. They had crawled into Cave of the Winds, deep inside a cave system known as Clearwater, where they would search for a passage to Racer Cave, part of the Racer-Easter system.

Connecting the two would create a "super system," one of the longest subterranean labyrinths on the planet. As the men wormed down, drilling and hammering bolts into the slick rock to hold their climbing ropes, their odds of success seemed good.

Already they knew Clearwater stretched for 140 miles and that some of the caverns were lined with turbulent rivers, while the Racer-Easter system contained chambers so enormous that a jetliner could fit easily within its walls with plenty of room to spare. In other words, the limestone underlying this region, beneath Malaysia's Gunung Mulu National Park, is riddled with some of the biggest holes, widest tunnels, and most mind-blowing voids anywhere on Earth.

Now imagine them down there, Frank and Cookie, mud smeared and grinning, on the verge of joining two cave systems into a single, immense whole. Not your thing? Well, for cavers, it's the thing. And it's rare that such superlative connections are made. In the often obscure world of underground exploration, which is governed by international bodies with names such as the "Longest, Largest, and Deepest Committee," such a feat would be a very big deal.

Elsewhere far below the Earth's surface, in the entrails of Racer Cave, another team was slithering into place. They too carried hammers and a drill, and soon the two teams would begin banging on the cave walls and drilling into the rock, listening for each other, hoping noise would lead them to a connection and a spot in the record books.

What follows is the gripping tale of their explorations as well as stunning photos of absolutely gigantic caverns such as the Sarawak Chamber: nearly 500 feet (150 meters) tall, 2,000 feet (600 meters) long, and 1,400 feet (430 meters) wide. It has a volume of over 346 million ft³ or nearly 100 million cubic meters. By comparison, The Big Room in Carlsbad Caverns, New Mexico (the largest cave chamber in the U.S.) would fit into Sarawak Chamber ten times!

Original Submission

martyb writes:

Inhaled Hydrogen Could Protect the Brain During Heart-Lung Bypass:

Newborns with life-threatening congenital heart disease often undergo open-heart surgery with cardiopulmonary bypass, which carries a risk of damaging the brain. Critically ill newborns who are placed on ECMO are at even higher risk for brain injury. Hypothermia, or cooling the body, can improve neurologic outcomes, but has limitations.

[...] When infants are placed on bypass or ECMO, blood flow is interrupted, causing temporary hypoxia, or low-oxygen conditions. The brain, a heavy oxygen user, suffers the most from oxygen deprivation. But it's when blood flow is restored and oxygen is reintroduced that the real damage occurs. Formerly oxygen-deprived cells respond to the sudden influx by forming toxic chemicals known as reactive oxygen species, which damages DNA and cell membranes.

"During the reperfusion process, the cell mitochondria overreact and end up using oxygen to injure themselves," explains John Kheir, MD, a cardiologist in Boston Children's Hospital's Cardiac Intensive Care Unit.

The body tries to scavenge these chemicals, but they can overwhelm the scavenging system and injure the tissue. When this occurs in the brain, it can cause neurologic impairment.

[...] As described today in the journal JACC: Basic to Translational Medicine, the team added 2.4 percent hydrogen gas to the animals' usual ventilation gases during and after arrested blood flow and hypoxia. Compared with controls, the treated animals did significantly better on neurologic evaluations. They had fewer seizures, smaller areas of tissue injury on brain MRI and decreased chemical markers of brain and kidney injury in their blood.

Journal Reference:
Alexis R. Cole, et al. Perioperatively Inhaled Hydrogen Gas Diminishes Neurologic Injury Following Experimental Circulatory Arrest in Swine. JACC: Basic to Translational Science, 2019; DOI: 10.1016/j.jacbts.2018.11.006

Original Submission

upstart writes in with a submission, via IRC, for Bytram,

Remote Code Execution on most Dell computers

Remote Code Execution on most Dell computers

What computer do you use? Who made it? Have you ever thought about what came with your computer? When we think of Remote Code Execution (RCE) vulnerabilities in mass, we might think of vulnerabilities in the operating system, but another attack vector to consider is "What third-party software came with my PC?". In this article, I'll be looking at a Remote Code Execution vulnerability I found in Dell SupportAssist, software meant to "proactively check the health of your system's hardware and software" and which is "preinstalled on most of all new Dell devices".

[...]Back in September, I was in the market for a new laptop because my 7-year-old Macbook Pro just wasn't cutting it anymore. I was looking for an affordable laptop that had the performance I needed and I decided on Dell's G3 15 laptop. I decided to upgrade my laptop's 1 terabyte hard drive to an SSD. After upgrading and re-installing Windows, I had to install drivers. This is when things got interesting. After visiting Dell's support site, I was prompted with an interesting option.

[...]"Detect PC"? How would it be able to detect my PC? Out of curiosity, I clicked on it to see what happened.

[...]A program which automatically installs drivers for me. Although it was a convenient feature, it seemed risky. The agent wasn't installed on my computer because it was a fresh Windows installation, but I decided to install it to investigate further. It was very suspicious that Dell claimed to be able to update my drivers through a website.

Here is a link to the Dell advisory.

What could possibly go wrong?

Original Submission

RandomFactor writes:

In a paper published Monday, scientists have spotted a massive expanse of water-ice stradling Saturn's enigmatic moon Titan.

That ice block stretches across nearly half of Titan's girth. The feature was a surprise companion to the patches of water ice scientists expected to find, and they aren't positive precisely what sort of geologic feature it might indicate. The research is based on data gathered by NASA's Cassini spacecraft, which spent 13 years studying the Saturn system and made more than 100 flybys of the massive moon before self-destructing in September 2017.

The information was gleaned using a new statistical technique called "Principal Component Analysis" that filtered out dominant features in data obtained by Cassini to uncover smaller signatures such as water ice.

[Caitlin Griffith, a planetary scientist at the University of Arizona] said she isn't sure yet what the massive line of ice, which she compares to a scar, represents—it will take more research to pin down what left the ice uncovered on the surface of Titan. "It's a big feature that tells us something about the way that Titan was in the past, but we don't know really what it is," she said. "I think right now it's basically telling us that it's complicated, the surface is fairly complicated."

Jani Radebaugh, a planetary scientist at Brigham Young University in Utah not associated with the research, speculated that the ice belt might be due to a massive geological faulting event (Titan-quake?) pushing a stretch of the icy bedrock upward leaving it exposed.

Caitlin A. Griffith, Paulo F. Penteado, Jake D. Turner, Catherine D. Neish, Giuseppe Mitri, Nicholas J. Montiel, Ashley Schoenfeld & Rosaly M. C. Lopes, A corridor of exposed ice-rich bedrock across Titan's tropical region, Nature Astronomy (2019), DOI: 10.1038/s41550-019-0756-5

Original Submission

MrPlow writes in with a submission, via IRC, for Runaway1956.

This is a guest post by Hugh Handeyside, Senior Staff Attorney, ACLU National Security Project, Nathan Freed Wessler, Staff Attorney, ACLU Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project, and Esha Bhandari, Staff Attorney, ACLU Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project. It was originally posted on the ACLU Speak Freely blog.

In September 2017, we, along with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, sued the federal government for its warrantless and suspicionless searches of phones and laptops at airports and other U.S. ports of entry.

The government immediately tried to dismiss our case, arguing that the First and Fourth Amendments do not protect against such searches. But the court ruled that our clients — 10 U.S. citizens and one lawful permanent resident whose phones and laptops were searched while returning to the United States — could move forward with their claims.

Since then, U.S. Customs and Border Protection and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement have had to turn over documents and evidence about why and how they conduct warrantless and suspicionless searches of electronic devices at the border. And their officials have had to sit down with us to explain — under oath — their policies and practices governing such warrantless searches.

What we learned is alarming, and we're now back in court with this new evidence asking the judge to skip trial altogether and rule for our clients.

Source: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/04/we-got-us-border-officials-testify-under-oath-heres-what-we-found-out

Original Submission

MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for ErnestTBass

A simple injection that can help regrow damaged tissue has long been the dream of physicians and patients alike. A new study from researchers at UBC Okanagan moves that dream closer to reality with a device that makes encapsulating cells much faster, cheaper and more effective.

"The idea of injecting different kinds of tissue cells is not a new one," says Keekyoung Kim, assistant professor of engineering at UBC Okanagan and study co-author. "It's an enticing concept because by introducing cells into damaged tissue, we can supercharge the body's own processes to regrow and repair an injury."

Kim says everything from broken bones to torn ligaments could benefit from this kind of approach and suggests even whole organs could be repaired as the technology improves.

The problem, he says, is that cells on their own are delicate and tend not to survive when injected directly into the body.

"It turns out that to ensure cell survival, they need to be encased in a coating that protects them from physical damage and from the body's own immune system," says Mohamed Gamal, doctoral student in biomedical engineering and study lead author. "But it has been extremely difficult to do that kind of cell encapsulation, which has until now been done in a very costly, time consuming and wasteful process."

Kim and Gamal have solved that problem by developing an automated encapsulation device that encases many cells in a microgel using a specialized blue laser and purifies them to produce a clean useable sample in just a few minutes. The advantage of their system is that over 85 per cent of the cells survive and the process can be easily scaled up.

Source: Engineers make injectable tissues a reality

Mohamed G. A. Mohamed, Sina Kheiri, Saidul Islam, Hitendra Kumar, Annie Yang, Keekyoung Kim. An integrated microfluidic flow-focusing platform for on-chip fabrication and filtration of cell-laden microgels. Lab on a Chip, 2019; 19 (9): 1621 DOI: 10.1039/C9LC00073A

Original Submission

MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for ErnestTBass

Humans settled in southwestern Amazonia and even experimented with agriculture much earlier than previously thought, according to an international team of researchers.

"We have long been aware that complex societies emerged in Llanos de Moxos in southwestern Amazonia, Bolivia, around 2,500 years ago, but our new evidence suggests that humans first settled in the region up to 10,000 years ago during the early Holocene period," said Jose Capriles, assistant professor of anthropology. "These groups of people were hunter gatherers; however, our data show that they were beginning to deplete their local resources and establish territorial behaviors, perhaps driving them to begin domesticating plants such as sweet potatoes, cassava, peanuts and chili peppers as a way to acquire food."

Source: Human settlements in Amazonia much older than previously thought

José M. Capriles, Umberto Lombardo, Blaine Maley, Carlos Zuna, Heinz Veit, Douglas J. Kennett. Persistent Early to Middle Holocene tropical foraging in southwestern Amazonia. Science Advances, 2019; 5 (4): eaav5449 DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.aav5449

Original Submission

MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for SoyCow1984

It's unclear if there is one mysterious Hamburglar hacker or multiple scammers, but for months, users of the Canadian McDonald's app, "My McD's," have been complaining about someone gaining access to their accounts to fuel their feeding frenzies.

Last week, Canadian journalist Patrick O'Rourke, managing editor of Mobile Syrup, became the latest known victim of this scam and published an account of his experience. Somehow a hacker gained access to his My McD's account, which was attached to his Mastercard. The app had a transaction failure the first two times O'Rourke tried to use it, he said, so he gave up on it. But over the next two weeks, someone else used it for their McBender—spending $2,034 CAD ($1,509 USD) on more than 100 meals of Big Macs, McFlurries, Chicken McNuggets, and poutine.

Source: https://gizmodo.com/hungry-hackers-use-mcdonalds-app-to-steal-1-500-in-fas-1834381636

Original Submission

MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for Runaway1956

[...] Combined, the loss of NASA's Orbiting Carbon Observatory and Glory satellites cost the space agency $700 million. In the years since, the space agency's Launch Services Program and the rocket's manufacturer, Orbital Sciences—which has since been acquired by Northrop Grumman—have been conducting investigations into what happened.

[...] But only now has the story emerged in greater detail. This week, NASA posted a summary of its decade-long investigation into the mission failures. Long story short: faulty aluminum extrusions used in the mechanism by which the payload separates from the rocket, known as a frangible joint, prevented the separation from fully occurring. Much of the report drills down into the process by which NASA reached and then substantiated this conclusion.

Source: After a decade, NASA finally reveals root cause of two failed rocket launches

Original Submission

MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for Runaway1956

[...] Robert Brizzolara, the MUSV program manager, told USNI News on April 25 at the Defense Department's annual Lab Day at the Pentagon that ONR has been focused on building an extensive body of evidence to prove to the fleet the reliability of the MUSV hull and the autonomous control system that lets it sense its way through the seas.

[...] The Navy has made clear it expects unmanned ships, aircraft and underwater vehicles to play a major role in future operations, and the service is devoting significant funds to developing and fielding these vehicles as fast as research and industry can manage. The medium USV is envisioned to be primarily a sensing platform for the fleet, while a large USV the Navy is now aggressively pursuing would be a remote shooter.

Source: Sea Hunter Unmanned Ship Continues Autonomy Testing as NAVSEA Moves Forward with Draft RFP

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

We've all heard about the magical combination of being in the right place at the right time. Well for fertilizer, it's more accurate to say it should be in the right place at the right rate. A group of Canadian scientists wanted to find the perfect combination for farmers in their northern prairies.

When farmers place fertilizer on a field, they'd like it to stay there. However, water that runs off a field can take some of the valuable fertilizer with it. In Canada this water can take two forms: rainfall runoff or snow melt. It's the latter type of water—snow melt—that causes the most runoff losses in the Canadian prairies.

Knowing how each form of runoff affects fertilizer will impact their "right place, right rate" calculation. Rainfall runoff and snow melt runoff may result in different fertilizer management recommendations. So, Jeff Schoenau from the University of Saskatchewan and his team focused on runoff from snowmelt.

"This work contributed to finding better practices for phosphorus fertilization," Schoenau explains. "These will help growers in the northern prairies make better use of their fertilizer. By applying the fertilizer in the right place at the right rate, growers can greatly lower the phosphorus loss from snowmelt runoff."

[...] "In order to encourage growers to follow the best practices, it's important to document and understand why and how a specific practice like the one we tested works," he says. "I am both a scientist and farmer on the prairies interested in furthering the environmental and economic sustainability of our modern cropping systems."

[...]More information: Jordan T. Wiens et al, Potential Phosphorus Export in Snowmelt as Influenced by Fertilizer Placement Method in the Canadian Prairies, Journal of Environment Quality (2019). DOI: 10.2134/jeq2018.07.0276

Original Submission

AnonTechie writes:

Since the settlement of Jamestown in 1607 and the start of the Colonial period, the U.S. has been predominantly white.

But the white share of the U.S. population has been dropping, from a little under 90% in 1950 to 60% in 2018. It will likely drop below 50% in another 25 years.

White nationalists want America to be white again. But this will never happen. America is on its way to becoming predominantly non-white.

The U.S. federal government uses two questions to measure a person's race and ethnicity. One asks if the person is of Hispanic origin, and the other asks about the person's race.

A person is defined as white if he or she identifies as being only white and non-Hispanic. A minority, or nonwhite, person is anyone who is not solely non-Hispanic white.

[...] Whites were not the first people to settle in what is now the U.S. The first immigrants were a people known today as American Indians and Alaskan natives, also commonly referred to as Native Americans. They arrived in North America around 14,000 years ago.

When Christopher Columbus arrived in America in 1492, there were around 10 million American Indians living in the lands north of Mexico. But by the 1800s their numbers had dwindled to about 1 million. They are now the smallest race group in the U.S.

The first sizable stream of immigrants to what is now the U.S. were whites from England. Their arrival at Plymouth in 1620 in search of religious freedom marked the start of large waves of whites coming to this land.

When the U.S. was established as a country in 1776, whites comprised roughly 80% of the population. The white share rose to 90% in 1920, where it stayed until 1950.

An Anonymous Coward writes:

Google Cloud has made Nvidia T4 GPUs generally available, making it the first platform to offer them globally as cloud instances.

Nvidia's T4 GPUs, unveiled earlier this year, are aimed at machine learning training and inference, data analytics and graphics workloads. Google first made them available in Brazil, India, Tokyo and Singapore in January; AWS followed up with limited G4 cloud instances in March.

[...] Google already offers the pricey Nvidia V100 GPUs on its platform. In a blog post, Google said the T4 instances offered more affordable machine learning training compared to the V100s.

The instances are now available in three US and Asia regions, one Europe and one South America region, and are all interconnected by a high-speed network.

Price wise, they come in as low as $0.29 (£0.22) per hour per GPU, with "on-demand" instances coming in at $0.95 (£0.72) per hour. Google added that users will be offered discounts for "sustained use."

Source: https://techerati.com/news-hub/nvidia-t4-gpus-now-generally-available-on-google-cloud/.

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

Hump day. Wednesday. The day after suicide Tuesday. Yes, that's a thing. The day sane people use to sit around the office complaining about nothing much because they know Thursday is coming. I could never get the hang of Thursday. After trying a variety of methods, part time days, hours shifting and RDOs (Regular Days Off) all over the place one company believes it has hit the sweet spot of productivity by shutting down every Wednesday to divide the week into two. So far it is working, well, really well in fact. Staff report having more spring in their step on a Monday, looking forward to a Thursday, having time for dental appointments and the like on their Wednesday off and overall — far from taking a hit for being shut down for a day — the business is taking off.

In memory of MDC. Everyone needs a day off from everyday life now and then.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Two people diagnosed HIV positive after receiving 'vampire facial' in New Mexico

At least two clients of a shuttered New Mexico day spa tested HIV positive, a state health official said, possibly from receiving a "vampire facial."

The two people were infected at VIP Spa in Albuquerque between May and September 2018, according to the New Mexico Department of Health.

The infections came via "injection related procedures," state regulators said in a statement. The health department did not elaborate.

But NBC affiliate KOB reported that the procedure in question is the so-called "vampire facial" — when blood is drawn from a client's body and then re-injected into his or her face.

State health officials fear there might be more people who could test positive for HIV, and hepatitis B and C.

So, slept with any mortals/vessels lately?

Previously: "Vampire Facial" Gone Wrong

Original Submission