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Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

A Japanese woman in her forties has become the first person in the world to have her cornea repaired using reprogrammed stem cells.

At a press conference on 29 August, ophthalmologist Kohji Nishida from Osaka University, Japan, said the woman has a disease in which the stem cells that repair the cornea, a transparent layer that covers and protects the eye, are lost. The condition makes vision blurry and can lead to blindness.

To treat the woman, Nishida says his team created sheets of corneal cells from induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells. These are made by reprogramming adult skin cells from a donor into an embryonic-like state from which they can transform into other cell types, such as corneal cells.

[...] The Japanese health ministry gave Nishida permission to try the procedure on four people. He is planning the next operation for later this year and hopes to have the procedure in the clinic in five years.

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An Anonymous Coward writes:

WASHINGTON, D.C. – Today, U.S. Senator Rand Paul (R-KY), chairman of the Federal Spending Oversight and Emergency Management (FSO) Subcommittee for the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee (HSGAC), continued his efforts to reform the big-spending status quo with the release of a Summer 2019 edition of The Waste Report.

Once again, Dr. Paul's Waste Report turns the spotlight on just some of the ways the federal government spends the American people's hard-earned money, with this edition including stories of building up Tunisia's political system and the Pakistani film industry, supporting "green growth" in Peru, teaching English and IT skills at madrassas, studying frog mating calls, making improper payments, and more.

https://www.paul.senate.gov/news/dr-rand-paul-releases-summer-2019-edition-%E2%80%98-waste-report%E2%80%99

The biggest seem to be:

Converted an abandoned mental hospital into DHS HQ (GSA and DHS) .......... $2,120,040,355.35
Paid out billions from Medicare in improper payments (CMS) ....................... $48,000,000,000

[Editor's Comment: The full 15-page report is found in a Scribd display on the given link.]

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Next year, both NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA) will send new rovers to Mars to hunt for evidence of past life.

As previous missions have discovered, Mars had a warmer and wetter past, featuring conditions that could probably sustain life. Current satellites orbiting Mars also reveal there are many places where water was once present on the surface.

The difficulty in hunting for life lies not in finding where there was water, but in identifying where the essential nutrients for life coincided with water.

For life to move into a new environment and survive, it needs essential nutrients such as carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorus, and sulfur (together known as CHNOPS), plus other trace elements. It also needs to acquire energy from the environment. Some of Earth's earliest life forms gained energy by oxidizing minerals.

Mars's crust is mostly made of intrusive and volcanic basalt (the same rock that forms from Hawaii's lavas) which is not particularly nutrient-rich. However, meteorites and micrometeorites are known to continuously provide essential nutrients to the surfaces of planets.

We modeled the heating and oxidation effects of atmospheric entry to Mars and found most particles less than about 0.1-0.2mm in diameter would not melt, depending on their composition. In terms of materials accumulating on the Martian surface, particles of this size are overwhelmingly more common than larger particles.

On Earth, about 100 times as much cosmic dust in this size range accumulates on the surface, when compared to meteorites larger than 4mm. This is despite extensive melting and evaporation during atmospheric entry to Earth.

As part of our research, we used an analogue site on the Nullarbor Plain in South Australia (which, like Mars, has wind-modified sediment sitting on cracked bedrock) to examine whether wind causes micrometeorites to accumulate at predictable locations.

We found more than 1,600 micrometeorites from a variety of sample sites.

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JoeMerchant writes:

In May 2019, Neil Jacobs, the acting head of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), testified before Capitol Hill that 5G wireless signals could decrease forecasting accuracy by 30 percent.

"This would degrade the forecast skill by up to 30%. If you look back in time to see when our forecast skill was roughly 30% less than it was today, it's somewhere around 1980," Jacobs said in May. "This would result in the reduction of hurricane track[ing] forecasts' lead time by roughly two to three days." A delay of two to three days could have a catastrophic effect on human life.

Still, these warnings haven't swayed regulators nor the cell phone industry. In August, Sprint announced more cities would be added to its 5G rollout plan. AT&T already has 5G available to corporate customers in various cities. Verizon already offers 5G to customers and has plans to expand, too.

"Right now the uncertainty is to what extent there will be an interference," he added. "In some sense the cause for education is to make sure that the existing weather sensing bands are protected and that 5G is in areas that are far enough away from where present weather sensors exist."

This does not mean 5G can't exist in states like Florida, but that the power might have to be turned down.

"If the power is turned down, there is a lesser likelihood that water satellites (that will sense the atmosphere) will sense the 5G network" instead, Gerth said.

Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai has been dismissive of these concerns, which are only one of several in regards to 5G. As several experts told Salon last year, the effects of widespread use of mobile 5G need to be better-studied before it goes mainstream.

Why study when you can profit instead?

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Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Go — a modern programming language with roots at Google — is one of the new generation languages that would like to unseat C (and C++) for what we think of as traditional programming. It is only for PCs, though, right? Not so fast! TinyGo provides a compiler that — in their words — is for small places. How small? They can target code for the Arduino Uno or the BBC micro:bit. It can also produce code for x86 or ARM Linux (both 32- and 64-bit) as well as WebAssembly. They claim that a recent project to add ESP8266 and EPS32 support to LLVM will eventually enable TinyGo to target those platforms, too.

As you would expect, there are some subtle differences between TinyGo and the full-blown version. The compiler handles the entire program at once which is slower but offers more for optimization. Certain optimizations for interface methods are not used in TinyGo, and global variable handling changes to accommodate moving data from flash to RAM efficiently. TinyGo passes parameters in registers.

Other changes are more profound. For example, there’s no garbage collection yet, so you are urged to not perform heap allocations after initialization. There are also a few other major features not supported. Concurrency in the form of goroutines and channels, cgo, reflection, and three index slices won’t work. Maps are available, but only with certain key types. Because of the missing pieces, many of the packages in the standard library won’t build.

Original Submission

catholocism writes:

Human speech may have a universal transmission rate: 39 bits per second

Italians are some of the fastest speakers on the planet, chattering at up to nine syllables per second. Many Germans, on the other hand, are slow enunciators, delivering five to six syllables in the same amount of time. Yet in any given minute, Italians and Germans convey roughly the same amount of information, according to a new study. Indeed, no matter how fast or slowly languages are spoken, they tend to transmit information at about the same rate: 39 bits per second, about twice the speed of Morse code.

"This is pretty solid stuff," says Bart de Boer, an evolutionary linguist who studies speech production at the Free University of Brussels, but was not involved in the work. Language lovers have long suspected that information-heavy languages—those that pack more information about tense, gender, and speaker into smaller units, for example—move slowly to make up for their density of information, he says, whereas information-light languages such as Italian can gallop along at a much faster pace. But until now, no one had the data to prove it.

Scientists started with written texts from 17 languages, including English, Italian, Japanese, and Vietnamese. They calculated the information density of each language in bits—the same unit that describes how quickly your cellphone, laptop, or computer modem transmits information. They found that Japanese, which has only 643 syllables, had an information density of about 5 bits per syllable, whereas English, with its 6949 syllables, had a density of just over 7 bits per syllable. Vietnamese, with its complex system of six tones (each of which can further differentiate a syllable), topped the charts at 8 bits per syllable.

Different languages, similar encoding efficiency: Comparable information rates across the human communicative niche

From the Abstract:

"Language is universal, but it has few indisputably universal characteristics, with cross-linguistic variation being the norm. For example, languages differ greatly in the number of syllables they allow, resulting in large variation in the Shannon information per syllable. Nevertheless, all natural languages allow their speakers to efficiently encode and transmit information. We show here, using quantitative methods on a large cross-linguistic corpus of 17 languages, that the coupling between language-level (information per syllable) and speaker-level (speech rate) properties results in languages encoding similar information rates (~39 bits/s) despite wide differences in each property individually: Languages are more similar in information rates than in Shannon information or speech rate. These findings highlight the intimate feedback loops between languages' structural properties and their speakers' neurocognition and biology under communicative pressures. Thus, language is the product of a multiscale communicative niche construction process at the intersection of biology, environment, and culture."

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-49585682

A recent study has "proven" that Android and Apple phones do not eavesdrop on conversations.

A mobile security company has carried out a research investigation to address the popular conspiracy theory that tech giants are listening to conversations.

The internet is awash with posts and videos on social media where people claim to have proof that the likes of Facebook and Google are spying on users in order to serve hyper-targeted adverts. Videos have gone viral in recent months showing people talking about products and then ads for those exact items appear online.

Now, cyber security-specialists at Wandera have emulated the online experiments and found no evidence that phones or apps were secretly listening.

I think this is the classic can't prove a counterfactual thing, ("we've proved that no birds swim from this survey of life in a nearby park"). However, I thought this would be an interesting article, and possibly start some good conversation... if nothing else, due to poking potential holes in their experimental techniques and data analysis:

Researchers put two phones - one Samsung Android phone and one Apple iPhone - into a "audio room". For 30 minutes they played the sound of cat and dog food adverts on loop. They also put two identical phones in a silent room.

The security specialists kept apps open for Facebook, Instagram, Chrome, SnapChat, YouTube, and Amazon with full permissions granted to each platform.

They then looked for ads related to pet food on each platform and webpage they subsequently visited. They also analysed the battery usage and data consumption on the phones during the test phase.

They repeated the experiment at the same time for three days, and noted no relevant pet food adverts on the "audio room" phones and no significant spike in data or battery usage.

The activity seen on phones in the "audio room" and the silent rooms were similar. They did record data being transferred from the devices - but it was at low levels and nowhere near the quantity seen when virtual assistants like Siri or Hey Google are active.

James Mack, systems engineer at Wandera, said: "We observed that the data from our tests is much lower than the virtual assistant data over the 30-minute time period, which suggests that the constant recording of conversations and uploading to the cloud is not happening on any of these tested apps.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Submitted via IRC for Bytram

COBOL turns 60: Why it will outlive us all

I cut my programming teeth on IBM 360 Assembler. This shouldn't be anyone's first language. In computing's early years, the only languages were machine and assembler. In those days, computing science really was "science." Clearly, there needed to be an easier language for programming those hulking early mainframes. That language, named in September 1959, became Common Business-Oriented Language (COBOL).

The credit for coming up with the basic idea goes not to Grace Hopper, although she contributed to the language and promoted it, but to Mary Hawes. She was a Burroughs Corporation programmer who saw a need for a computer language. In March 1959, Hawes proposed that a new computer language be created. It would have an English-like vocabulary that could be used across different computers to perform basic business tasks.

Hawes talked Hopper and others into creating a vendor-neutral interoperable computer language. Hopper suggested they approach the Department of Defense (DoD) for funding and as a potential customer for the unnamed language. Business IT experts agreed, and in May 1959, 41 computer users and manufacturers met at the Pentagon. There, they formed the Short Range Committee of the Conference on Data Systems Languages (CODASYL).

An Anonymous Coward writes:

New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio said he is considering requiring bicyclists to be licensed and registered like automobile drivers currently are.

According to a report in the New York Daily News on Wednesday, the mayor also wants to expand the city's safety regulations, which already have won it a nanny-state reputation, to include requiring Citi Bike renters to wear helmets.

Mr. de Blasio called the idea of forcing cyclists to have licenses and registration a "valid discussion," the Daily News reported, and added that he also plans a crackdown on cyclists who break traffic laws.

https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2019/sep/4/bill-de-blasio-eyes-licenses-bike-riders/

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Submitted via IRC for AzumaHazuki

Back to school: With latest attack, ransomware cancels classes in Flagstaff

As students returned to school across the country over the past two weeks, school districts are facing an unprecedented wave of ransomware attacks. In the past month, dozens of districts nationwide have been affected by ransomware attacks, in some cases taking entire school systems' networks down in the process.

All classes were cancelled September 5 at Flagstaff Unified School District schools in Arizona after the discovery of a ransomware attack against the district's servers on Wednesday, September 4. All Internet services were taken down by the school district's information technology team at about 3pm local time on Wednesday, when the ransomware was discovered during what district officials said was routine maintenance.

"We have had to break the connection from the Internet to our school sites while we work with Internet security experts to contain and mitigate the issue," FUSD spokesman Zachery Fountain said in a statement to press. No further details on the ransomware were released, and district officials are not sure whether any personal identifying information has been exposed.

More than 70 state and local government agencies have been hit with ransomware so far this year. This steady drumbeat of ransomware attacks against state and local government agencies, including school districts, has not gone unnoticed by citizens. People are increasingly concerned about the damage being done by ransomware. In a recent survey of 2,200 citizens conducted by Morning Consult on behalf of IBM Security, 75% of those surveyed across the United States acknowledged that they are worried about ransomware attacks on cities. And 60% said that cities should not pay the ransom for attacks when they fall victim; instead, they'd prefer focusing such spending on recovery costs.

Original Submission

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

T-Mobile Metro stores sell used phones as new, charge "fake taxes," NYC says

The New York City government sued T-Mobile yesterday, alleging that its Metro stores routinely use "abusive sales tactics" such as selling used phones as if they are new and charging customers for services they didn't order.

"Abusive sales tactics are rampant at Metro stores," the complaint says. "At least several dozen have sold used phones to consumers as though they were new, charged consumers for fake taxes and unwanted services, or enrolled consumers in expensive financing plans without their consent."

T-Mobile's Metro division offers prepaid service over the T-Mobile wireless network and is branded as "Metro by T-Mobile." It was known as MetroPCS until a 2018 rebranding. T-Mobile has stressed that Metro and itself are one and the same, announcing that "Metro by T-Mobile is T-Mobile," the lawsuit noted.

The Metro by T-Mobile abuses "do not end at the store," the NYC lawsuit says:

The Metro website, which is owned by T-Mobile and emblazoned with the "Metro by T-Mobile" logo, deceives consumers about its stingy return policy: it advertises a "30-day guarantee" on all Metro cell phone purchases, but the fine print reveals that returns or exchanges are only available for a small sub-category of transactions, and only within seven days of purchase.

This illegal activity is pervasive, spanning 56 locations across all five boroughs of New York City, and includes both "authorized dealers" and stores directly operated by T-Mobile's subsidiary, MetroPCS NY. The deception costs consumers considerably. For example, of the 21 phones that DCA [New York City Department of Consumer Affairs] identified as used, most were iPhones that cost several hundred dollars each.

The lawsuit was filed in the state Supreme Court for New York County. The NY Supreme Court is a trial-level court; New York's highest state court is the Court of Appeals.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Federal judge rules FBI terrorism watchlist violates constitutional rights

A federal judge ruled Wednesday that a government database of more than one million people identified as "known or suspected terrorists," violates the constitutional rights of U.S. citizens who were added to the list by denying them due process.

Almost two dozen Muslim American citizens who were placed on a watchlist, known as the Terrorist Screening Database, filed suit along with the Council on American-Islamic Relations against the government saying they were wrongly included in the database and that the process for adding names is overbroad and riddled with errors.

Many on the list, which is maintained by the FBI and shared with a variety of federal agencies, said they were subjected to frequent and sometimes invasive screenings while traveling which have led to "adverse experiences and consequences," including being handcuffed at border crossings.

U.S. District Judge Anthony Trenga ruled that the travel difficulties faced by plaintiffs who were on the list are significant and that they have a right to due process when their constitutional rights are infringed.

Previously: Feds Sued for Putting Infant (and Thousands More) on Terrorist Watchlist

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"exec" writes:

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

A recent study investigated around 100,000 localized seismic events to search for patterns in the data. University of Tokyo Professor Satoshi Ide discovered that earthquakes of differing magnitudes have more in common than was previously thought. This suggests development of early warning systems may be more difficult than hoped. But conversely, similarities between some events indicate that predictable characteristics may aid researchers attempting to forecast seismic events.

Since the 1980s seismologists -- earthquake researchers -- have wondered how feasible it might be to predict how an earthquake will behave given some information about its initial conditions. In particular whether you can tell the eventual magnitude based on seismic measurements near the point of origin, or epicenter. Most researchers consider this idea too improbable given the randomness of earthquake behavior, but Ide thinks there's more to it than that.

"Some pairs of large and small earthquakes start with exactly the same shaking characteristics, so we cannot tell the magnitude of an earthquake from initial seismic observations," explained Ide. "This is bad news for earthquake early warning. However, for future forecasting attempts, given this symmetry between earthquakes of different magnitudes, it is good to know they are not completely random."

-- submitted from IRC

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Good news for owners of certain Apple Watches – the vendor has initiated a free-of-charge repair service for those afflicted with a design defect that can cause the screen to crack.

"Apple has determined that, under very rare circumstances, a crack may form along the rounded edge of the screen in aluminium models of an Apple Watch Series 2 or Series 3. The crack may begin on one side and then may continue around the screen," the alert on its website confirms.

The Series 2 – the first to gain waterproofing – was discontinued by Apple as the third generation came out in September 2017.

Devices eligible for the programme include the Watch 2's 38mm and 42mm case sizes in space grey, gold, rose gold and silver aluminium, as well as the Nike+ version. The Series 3s covered by the repair service have the same case sizes and colours, include GPS and Cellular models, and the Nike + version – all the 3s must have been sold between September 2017 to 2019.

"An Apple Authorised Service Provider will replace the screen on eligible Apple Watch units that exhibit this type of crack, free of charge," the company added.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Samsung Announces Standards-Compliant Key-Value SSD Prototype

Samsung has announced a new prototype key-value SSD that is compatible with the first industry standard API for key-value storage devices. Earlier this year, the Object Drives working group of Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA) published version 1.0 of the Key Value Storage API Specification. Samsung has added support for this new API to their ongoing key-value SSD project.

Most hard drives and SSDs expose their storage capacity through a block storage interface, where the drive stores blocks of a fixed size (typically 512 bytes or 4kB) and they are identified by Logical Block Addresses that are usually 48 or 64 bits. Key-value drives extend that model so that a drive can support variable-sized keys instead of fixed-sized LBAs, and variable-sized values instead of fixed 512B or 4kB blocks. This allows a key-value drive to be used more or less as a drop-in replacement for software key-value databases like RocksDB, and as a backend for applications built atop key-value databases.

Key-value SSDs have the potential to offload significant work from a server's CPUs when used to replace a software-based key-value database. More importantly, moving the key-value interface into the SSD itself means it can be tightly integrated with the SSD's flash translation layer, cutting out the overhead of emulating a block storage device and layering a variable-sized storage system on top of that. This means key-value SSDs can operate with much lower write amplification and higher performance than software key-value databases, with only one layer of garbage collection in the stack instead of one in the SSD and one in the database.

Original Submission

"exec" writes:

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Influenza vaccination in patients with high blood pressure is associated with an 18% reduced risk of death during flu season, according to research presented today at ESC Congress 2019 together with the World Congress of Cardiology.

"Given these results, it is my belief that all patients with high blood pressure should have an annual flu vaccination," said first author Daniel Modin research associate of the University of Copenhagen, Denmark. "Vaccination is safe, cheap, readily available, and decreases influenza infection. On top of that, our study suggests that it could also protect against fatal heart attacks and strokes, and deaths from other causes."

According to previous research, the stress flu infection puts on the body may trigger heart attacks and strokes. Patients with hypertension (high blood pressure) are at raised risk of heart attack and stroke. By stopping flu infection, vaccination could also protect against cardiovascular events, but until now this had not been investigated.

The study used Danish nationwide healthcare registers to identify 608,452 patients aged 18 to 100 years with hypertension during nine consecutive influenza seasons (2007 to 2016). The researchers determined how many patients had received a flu vaccine prior to each season. They then followed patients over each season and tracked how many died. In particular, they recorded death from all causes, death from any cardiovascular cause, and death from heart attack or stroke.

Finally, they analysed the association between receiving a vaccine prior to flu season and the risk of death during flu season. The analysis controlled for patient characteristics that could impact the likelihood of dying such as age, comorbidities, medications, and socioeconomic status.

[...] He said: "Heart attacks and strokes are caused by the rupture of atherosclerotic plaques in the arteries leading to the heart or the brain. After a rupture, a blood clot forms and cuts off the blood supply. It is thought that the high levels of acute inflammation induced by influenza infection reduce the stability of plaques and make them more likely to rupture."

-- submitted from IRC

Original Submission