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martyb writes:

Genius Mouse Experiment Reveals How Temperature Affects Our Dreams at Night:

Neuroscientists from the University of Bern in Switzerland broke a receptor gene in mice and watched how changes in temperature affected their sleep state, demonstrating the brain prioritises temperature control over dreaming.

When we're comfortable enough, our brains easily drift between a quiet state of rest and one described by the movement of our eyes: Rapid Eye Movement sleep (REM).

[...] when 'warm-blooded' animals like us do dream, temperature regulation is suppressed. Sweating, shivering, panting and flushing just isn't as effective at maintaining our core temperature once REM sleep kicks in.

"This loss of thermoregulation in REM sleep is one of the most peculiar aspects of sleep, particularly since we have finely-tuned mechanisms that control our body temperature while awake or in non-REM sleep", says neuroscientist Markus Schmidt from the University of Bern and the Department of Neurology at Bern University Hospital.

It's a short leap of logic to assume our brain makes a choice – process the events of that day, or let it go in favour of keeping your body from freezing or frying. Because for some reason it just can't do both.

[...] Fine-tuning body temperature and running a big brain are two of the most energy-intensive activities on a mammal's to-do list, so it seems reasonable to think these two vital tasks are going to come into conflict at some point.

[...] "These new data suggest that the function of REM sleep is to activate important brain functions specifically at times when we do not need to expend energy on thermoregulation, thus optimising use of energy resources," says Schmidt.

Noëmie Komagata, Blerina Latifi, Thomas Rusterholz, Claudio L.A. Bassetti, Antoine Adamantidis, Markus H. Schmidt. "Dynamic REM Sleep Modulation by Ambient Temperature and the Critical Role of the Melanin-Concentrating Hormone System" DOI: 10.1016/j.cub.2019.05.009
(direct link: https://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(19)30542-1(paywalled).

No word on how this affects one's predisposition for sleepwalking.

Original Submission

RandomFactor writes:

Aeroports de Paris (ADP), Airbus and the RATP regional transport announced at last week's Paris Air Show that

the Olympics afforded the perfect opportunity to bring into service futuristic Vertical Take-off and Landing (VTOL) machines, and that they would launch a feasibility study.

The goal is to offer airborne taxies to tournament sites straight from the airport. Welcome indeed considering the typical commute by train or bus into town from Charles de Gaulle of an hour plus.

ADP has until the end of the year to choose a site for a "Vertiport" capable of hosting taxis from one of 10 aerodromes in the region around Paris.

The idea is to have the venue ready in 18 months, requiring infrastructure investment of some ten million euros ($11.3 million), says [ADP Group's executive director general Edward Arkwright]. He adds the project will test out the link "via an existing helicopter corridor".

Ideally, the service would see the taxis take off every six minutes.

Two prototype taxi models have already been built - "The single-seater "Vahana" and the four-seater variant 'CityAirbus'."

The battery powered taxis will be automatically piloted, use an existing helicopter corridor, and include anti-collision detection.

Deloitte estimates the size of the airborne taxi market at some $17 billion for the United States alone through to 2040.

So would you fly one or take the train at the Olympics?

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RandomFactor writes:

On Friday, the Food and Drug Administration approved sales of the peptide bremelanotide (brandname 'Vyleesi'), a shot intended to enhance sexual desire in premenopausal women. Bremelanotide acts as an agonist for the melanocortin receptors which are believed to affect mood and desire.

This should not be confused with the previous poorly received attempt at a 'female viagra' flibanserin (brandname 'Addyi') which required taking a daily pill for up to four weeks to start seeing effects and had warnings about being taken in conjunction with alcohol. The bremelanotide shot does not restrict alcohol use and can be self administered by autoinjector as needed ~45 minutes before anticipated intimacy.

"There are women who, for no known reason, have reduced sexual desire that causes marked distress, and who can benefit from safe and effective pharmacologic treatment," Hylton Joffe, director of the FDA Center for Drug Evaluation and Research's Division of Bone, Reproductive and Urologic Products, said in a statement.

"Today's approval provides women with another treatment option for this condition. As part of the FDA's commitment to protect and advance the health of women, we'll continue to support the development of safe and effective treatments for female sexual dysfunction."

Side effects of the drug are mild and consist primarily of nausea in some women, with even that disappearing after a few doses.

Analysts have estimated potential sales of a drug that "safely and effectively treats loss of sexual desire in women" could amount to sales of about $1 billion annually.

The drug was developed by Palatin Technologies, with AMAG Pharmaceuticals holding exclusive North America sales rights. Both rose sharply Friday on the news.

Additional Coverage here

Flibanserin Related Coverage
Female Libido Pill Approved by FDA, With Caveats
Female Libido Pill Considered by FDA Advisers

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upstart writes:

Submitted via IRC for Bytram

Google to reimplement curl in libcrurl

Not the entire thing, just “a subset”. It’s not stated very clearly exactly what that subset is but the easy interface is mentioned in the Chrome bug about this project.

The Chromium bug states that they will create a library of their own (named libcrurl) that will offer (parts of) the libcurl API and be implemented using Cronet.

Cronet is the networking stack of Chromium put into a library for use on mobile. The same networking stack that is used in the Chrome browser.

There’s also a mentioned possibility that “if this works”, they might also create “crurl” tool which is then their own version of the curl tool but using their own library. In itself is a pretty strong indication that their API will not be fully compatible, as if it was they could just use the existing curl tool…

“Implementing libcurl using Cronet would allow developers to take advantage of the utility of the Chrome Network Stack, without having to learn a new interface and its corresponding workflow. This would ideally increase ease of accessibility of Cronet, and overall improve adoption of Cronet by first-party or third-party applications.”

Logically, I suppose they then also hope that 3rd party applications can switch to this library (without having to change to another API or adapt much) and gain something and that new applications can use this library without having to learn a new API. Stick to the old established libcurl API.

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upstart writes:

Submitted via IRC for Bytram

Why brilliant people lose their touch

It hasn't been a great couple of years for Neil Woodford — and it has been just as miserable for the people who have entrusted money to his investment funds. Mr Woodford was probably the most celebrated stockpicker in the UK, but recently his funds have been languishing. Piling on the woes, Morningstar, a rating agency, downgraded his flagship fund this week. What has happened to the darling of the investment community?

Mr Woodford isn't the only star to fade. Fund manager Anthony Bolton is an obvious parallel. He enjoyed almost three decades of superb performance, retired, then returned to blemish his record with a few miserable years investing in China.

The story of triumph followed by disappointment is not limited to investment. Think of Arsène Wenger, for a few years the most brilliant manager in football, and then an eternal runner-up. Or all the bands who have struggled with "difficult second-album syndrome".

There is even a legend that athletes who appear on the cover of Sports Illustrated are doomed to suffer the "SI jinx". The rise to the top is followed by the fall from grace.

There are three broad explanations for these tragic career arcs. Our instinct is to blame the individual. We assume that Mr Woodford lost his touch and that Mr Wenger stopped learning. That is possible. Successful people can become overconfident, or isolated from feedback, or lazy.

But an alternative possibility is that the world changed. Mr Wenger's emphasis on diet, data and the global transfer market was once unusual, but when his rivals noticed and began to follow suit, his edge disappeared. In the investment world — and indeed, the business world more broadly — good ideas don't work forever because the competition catches on.

The third explanation is the least satisfying: that luck was at play. This seems implausible at first glance. Could luck alone have brought Mr Wenger three Premier League titles? Or that Mr Bolton was simply lucky for 28 years? Do we really live in such an impossibly random universe?

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upstart writes:

Submitted via IRC for Bytram

New York to Approve One of the World's Most Ambitious Climate Plans

New York lawmakers have agreed to pass a sweeping climate plan that calls for the state to all but eliminate its greenhouse gas emissions by 2050, envisioning an era when gas-guzzling cars, oil-burning heaters and furnaces would be phased out, and all of the state's electricity would come from carbon-free sources.

Under an agreement reached this week between legislative leaders and Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo, the Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act would require the state to slash its planet-warming pollution 85 percent below 1990 levels by 2050, and offset the remaining 15 percent, possibly through measures to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.

If the state manages to hit those targets, it would effectively create a so-called net-zero economy, the ultimate goal of environmentalists and others seeking to slow the pace of global warming.

[...] The challenges of reaching such goals are daunting. New York has so far only managed to reduce its emissions 8 percent between 1990 and 2015, according to the most recent state inventory.

"New Yorkers are going to pay a lot for their electricity because of this bill," said Gavin Donohue, the president of the Independent Power Producers of New York, whose members produce about three-quarters of the state's electricity. "There's no doubt about that."

There are also numerous questions about whether the energy, real estate and business communities can adapt by 2050, and how much it would cost to do so. Business groups in the state had derided the bill as impractical and potentially disastrous for companies forced to move to green energy sources.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Submitted via IRC for SoyCow4463

Critical Flaw in Evernote Add-On Exposed Sensitive Data of Millions

A critical flaw in the Evernote Web Clipper Chrome extension could allow potential attackers to access users' sensitive information from third party online services.

"Due to Evernote's widespread popularity, this issue had the potential of affecting its consumers and companies who use the extension – about 4,600,000 users at the time of discovery," says security company Guardio which discovered the vulnerability.

The security issue is a Universal Cross-site Scripting (UXSS) (aka Universal XSS) tracked as CVE-2019-12592 and stemming from an Evernote Web Clipper logical coding error that made it possible to "bypass the browser's same origin policy, granting the attacker code execution privileges in Iframes beyond Evernote's domain."

Once Chrome's site isolation security feature is broken, user data from accounts on other websites is no longer protected and this allows bad actors to access sensitive user info from third-party sites, "including authentication, financials, private conversations in social media, personal emails, and more."

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upstart writes:

Submitted via IRC for Bytram

7nm AMD EPYC "Rome" CPU w/ 64C/128T to Cost $8K (56 Core Intel Xeon: $25K-50K)

Yesterday, we shared the core and thread counts of AMD's Zen 2 based Epyc lineup, with the lowest-end chip going as low as 8 cores while the top-end 7742 boasting 64 and double the threads. Today, the prices of these server parts have also surfaced, and it seems like they are going to be quite a bit cheaper than the competing Intel Xeon Platinum processors.

The top-end Epyc 7742 with a TDP of 225W (128 threads @ 3.4GHz) is said to sell for a bit less than $8K, while the lower clocked 7702 and 7702P (single-socket) are going to cost $7,215 and $4,955 (just) respectively. That's quite impressive, you're getting 64 Zen 2 cores for just $5,000, while on the other hand Intel's 28-core Xeon Platinum 8280 costs a whopping $18K and is half as powerful.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Submitted via IRC for Bytram

SSH gets protection against side channel attacks

Damien Miller (djm@) has just committed a new feature for SSH that should help protect against all the various memory side channel attacks that have surfaced recently.

Add protection for private keys at rest in RAM against speculation and memory sidechannel attacks like Spectre, Meltdown, Rowhammer and Rambleed. This change encrypts private keys when they are not in use with a symmetic key that is derived from a relatively large "prekey" consisting of random data (currently 16KB).

[...] Many thanks to Damien and all the others involved for working on this improvement!

Original Submission

Chocolate writes:

Voice activated gadgets are all the rage with smart devices capable of taking human voice commands as input. The most recent upgrade on an old game is with Monopoly replacing physical money with a talking hat. The reasoning behind this change is to prevent the person playing as the bank from cheating. While the talking hat may very well reduce the potential for underhanded activities it will also remove the learning opportunities Monopoly provides such as the handling of cash and bargaining skills. The first release does not require an internet connection with the smart device powering the hat having sufficient information stored locally to manage game transactions without relying on a third party system.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

The European Space Agency (ESA) will launch a comet interception mission that does not target any particular comet. Instead, the spacecraft will hang out at the Sun-Earth Lagrange point L₂, and move to target an incoming yet undiscovered object that could be found by observatories such as the LSST:

The concept is a three-in-one probe: a mothership and two smaller daughter craft. They will separate near the comet to conduct different but complementary studies. The cost for Esa is expected to be about €150m. As is customary, individual member states will provide the instrumentation and cover that tab.

Interceptor was selected on Wednesday by the agency's Science Programme Committee as part of the new F-Class series - "F" standing for fast. The call for ideas only went out a year ago. There will now be a period of feasibility assessment with industry before the committee reconvenes to formally "adopt" the concept. At that point, the mission becomes the real deal.

The intention is to launch the probe on the same rocket as Esa's Ariel space telescope when it goes up at the end of the next decade. This observatory won't use the full performance of its launch vehicle, and so spare mass and volume is available to do something additional.

And it's Ariel's destination that makes Interceptor a compelling prospect. The telescope is to be positioned at a "gravitational sweetspot" about 1.5 million km from Earth. This is an ideal position from which to study distant stars and their planets - but it also represents a fast-response "parking bay" for any new mission seeking a target of opportunity.

The type of comets being sought by Interceptor tend to give little notice of their impending arrival in the inner Solar System - perhaps only a few months. That's insufficient time to plan, build and launch a spacecraft. You need to be out there already, waiting for the call. This is what Interceptor will do. It will be sitting at the sweetspot, relying on sky surveys to find it a suitable target. When that object is identified, the probe will then set off to meet it.

ARIEL:

The Atmospheric Remote-sensing Infrared Exoplanet Large-survey (ARIEL), is a space telescope planned for launch in 2028 as the fourth medium-class mission of the European Space Agency's Cosmic Vision programme. The mission is aimed at observing at least 1,000 known exoplanets using the transit method, studying and characterising the planets' chemical composition and thermal structures.

Also at Discover Magazine.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Submitted via IRC for Bytram

We're one step closer to atomic radio

Scientists at the National Institute for Standards and Technology in Gaithersburg, Maryland, have brought us one step closer to "atomic radio" by using an atom-based receiver to make a stereo recording of music streamed into the laboratory—namely, Queen's "Under Pressure." They described their work in a new paper in AIP Advances.

So-called "Rydberg atoms" are atoms that are in an especially excited state well above their ground (lowest-energy) state. This makes them extra-sensitive to passing electric fields, like the alternating fields of radio waves. All you need is a means of detecting those interactions to turn them into quantum sensors—like a laser. That means, in principle, that Rydberg atoms could receive and play back radio signals.

[...] The recordings aren't going to challenge the dominance of digital recording any time soon, since they are of much lower sound quality, more akin to an old vinyl record. That said, "My vision is to cut a CD in the lab—our studio—at some point and have the first CD recorded with Rydberg atoms," said Holloway—if only as a fun scientific curiosity. But one day, the researcher believes this type of atomic sensing could help improve secure communications. "Atom-based antennas might give us a better way of picking up audio data in the presence of noise, potentially even the very weak signals transmitted in deep space communications," he said.

DOI: AIP Advances, 2019. 10.1063/1.5099036  (About DOIs).

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Huawei Clarifies Android Update Situation, Commits to Android Q for Last 2 Generations

Huawei last night launched an information campaign about the status of software updates on existing devices in the face of the company's troubles with the U.S. Commerce Department.

The important news is that Huawei is confirming to and committing to continues[sic] security and Android platform updates, specifically the upcoming release of Android Q.

In general the news is no surprise as certification and approval happens several months before the actual software update. With Huawei receiving a reprieve on updates, it means in general business continues as usual for the moment being.

Huawei Announces Nova 5 & Nova Pro in China: Introduces New Kirin 810 Chipset

Today Huawei announced the brand new Nova 5 series of smartphones. The company released the new Nova 5, Nova 5 Pro and Nova 5i in China with availability later this month. The new Nova 5 and 5 Pro are particularly interesting because they now represent Huawei's lowest priced devices with OLED displays, also featuring high-end cameras and SoC options.

The new Nova 5 and Nova 5 Pro are interesting phones because they are essentially the same device, with the peculiarity of having different SoC options: The Nova 5 in particular is the first phone to now introduce the new Kirin 810 chipset. The new chip features a combination of 2x Cortex A76 CPUs at up to 2.23GHz and 6x Cortex A55's at 1.88GHz. In terms of GPU, Huawei has opted for a Mali-G52MP6 running at 820MHz. It looks like the Kirin 810 is extremely well positioned to compete against Qualcomm's Snapdragon 730 SoC which was announced just back in April.

Previously: Huawei Working on its Own OS to Prepare for "Worst-Case Scenario" of Being Deprived of Android
Google Pulls Huawei's Android License
The Huawei Disaster Reveals Google's Iron Grip On Android
Huawei Calls on U.S. to Adjust its Approach to Tackle Cybersecurity Effectively
Google Doesn't Want Huawei Ban Because It Would Result in an Android Competitor

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Submitted via IRC for Bytram

Narwhals and belugas can interbreed

For nearly thirty years, a strange-looking whale skull has gathered dust in the collections of the Natural History Museum of Denmark. Now, a team of researchers has determined the reason for the skull's unique characteristics: it belongs to a narwhal-beluga hybrid.

A Greenlandic hunter shot the whale in the 1980's and was puzzled by its odd appearance. He therefore kept the skull and placed it on the roof of his toolshed. Several years later, Professor Mads Peter Heide-Jørgensen of the Greenland Institute of Natural Resources visited the settlement and also immediately recognized the skull's strange characteristics. He interviewed the hunter about the anomalous whale he had shot, and sent the skull to Copenhagen. Since then, it has been stored at the Zoological Museum, a part of the Natural History Museum of Denmark.

"As far as we know, this is the first and only evidence in the world that these two Arctic whale species can interbreed. Based on the intermediate shape of the skull and teeth, it was suggested that the specimen might be a narwhal-beluga hybrid, but this could not be confirmed. Now we provide the data that confirm that yes -- it is indeed a hybrid," says Eline Lorenzen, evolutionary biologist and curator at the University of Copenhagen's Natural History Museum of Denmark. Lorenzen led the study, which was published today in Scientific Reports.

Using DNA and stable isotope analysis, the scientists determined that the skull belonged to a male, first-generation hybrid between a female narwhal and male beluga.

Mikkel Skovrind, Jose Alfredo Samaniego Castruita, James Haile, Eve C. Treadaway, Shyam Gopalakrishnan, Michael V. Westbury, Mads Peter Heide-Jørgensen, Paul Szpak, Eline D. Lorenzen. Hybridization between two high Arctic cetaceans confirmed by genomic analysis. Scientific Reports, 2019; 9 (1) DOI: 10.1038/s41598-019-44038-0

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Submitted via IRC for Bytram

A tale of two cities: Why ransomware will just get worse

Earlier this week, the city of Riviera Beach, Florida, faced a $600,000 demand from ransomware operators in order to regain access to the city's data. The ransom was an order of magnitude larger than the ransom demanded by the attackers that struck Baltimore's city government in May. Against the advice of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, however, the Riviera Beach city council voted to pay the ransom—more than $300,000 of it covered by the city's insurance policy.

Baltimore had refused to pay $76,000 worth of Bitcoin despite facing an estimated ransomware cost of more than $18 million, of which $8 million was from lost or deferred revenue. Baltimore lacked cyber insurance to cover those costs.

Riviera Beach is much smaller than Baltimore—with an IT department of 10 people, according to the city's most recent budget, and an annual budget of $2.5 million to support a total city government of 550 employees. (Baltimore has about 50 IT staffers supporting more than 13,000 employees by comparison.) It's not a surprise that Riviera Beach's leadership decided to pay, given that a full incident response and recovery would have likely cost two to three times what they've agreed to pay the ransomware operators, and half of that price tag is covered by insurance. So, Riviera Beach's decision to pay looks like the easiest way out. It's a decision that has been made by many local governmental organizations and businesses alike over the past few years.

Except, it probably isn't an easy way forward. Riviera Beach will still face the costs of fixing the security issues exploited by a phishing email opened by a police department employee. There's no guarantee that data was not stolen from the network, as apparently happened in Baltimore. And the paying of the ransom indicates the city doesn't have an effective disaster recovery plan. Without major upgrades, Riviera Beach could soon end up in the crosshairs of another ransomware attack—especially now that they've shown they'll pay.

Both the Riviera Beach and Baltimore ransomware attacks, along with the half-dozen known recent ransomware attacks against local governments, are indicative of just how unprepared many governments (and businesses) are for ransomware. Over the past few years, ransomware has exploded: data from the FBI shows that another organization is hit by ransomware every 14 seconds, on average. And this trend shows no signs of slowing—in fact, a new trend of targeted ransomware, seeking even bigger payouts, is emerging, in which more sophisticated organizations go specifically after businesses and other organizations more likely to pay out.

Original Submission