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upstart writes:

Submitted via IRC for Bytram

Johns Hopkins launches center for psychedelic research

A group of private donors has given $17 million to start the Center for Psychedelic and Consciousness Research at Johns Hopkins Medicine, making it what's believed to be the first such research center in the U.S. and the largest research center of its kind in the world.

Psychedelics are a class of drugs that produce unique and profound changes of consciousness over the course of several hours. The Center for Psychedelic and Consciousness Research will focus on how psychedelics affect behavior, brain function, learning and memory, the brain's biology, and mood.

"The center's establishment reflects a new era of research in therapeutics and the mind through studying this unique and remarkable class of pharmacological compounds." Roland GriffithsDirector, Center for Psychedelic and Consciousness Research

"The center's establishment reflects a new era of research in therapeutics and the mind through studying this unique and remarkable class of pharmacological compounds," says Roland Griffiths, the center's director and professor of behavioral biology in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences and the Department of Neuroscience at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. "In addition to studies on new therapeutics, we plan to investigate creativity and well-being in healthy volunteers that we hope will open up new ways to support human thriving."

At Johns Hopkins, much of the early work with psychedelics has focused on psilocybin, the chemical found in so-called magic mushrooms. Further studies will determine the chemical's effectiveness as a new therapy for opioid addiction, Alzheimer's disease, post-traumatic stress disorder, post-treatment Lyme disease syndrome (formerly known as chronic Lyme disease), anorexia nervosa, and alcohol use in people with major depression. Researchers hope to create precision medicine treatments tailored to individual patients' specific needs.

"Johns Hopkins is deeply committed to exploring innovative treatments for our patients," says Paul B. Rothman, dean of the medical faculty at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and CEO of Johns Hopkins Medicine. "Our scientists have shown that psychedelics have real potential as medicine, and this new center will help us explore that potential."

The center will provide support for a team of six faculty neuroscientists, experimental psychologists, and clinicians with expertise in psychedelic science, as well as five postdoctoral scientists.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

In March 2008, Paul Graham of Y Combinator wrote an essay called "How to Disagree." In the article he defines a hierarchy to gauge the quality of one's disagreement with another person's argument, a measure which ranges from name-calling at worst, to refutation of the central point at best.

I think a similar hierarchy can be defined to gauge the quality of architectural thinking and discourse of software engineers. I have noticed that most entry-level programmers focus their attention and criticisms on first-order issues such as code style, naming conventions, source code and repository layout, etc. They neglect or are unaware of higher-order concerns that can make a bigger impact on reducing the complexity of their systems. Even experienced programmers seem to suffer from this myopia.

If we're to build the systems of the future, I think we must set our sights above first-order issues. To afford the time to do so, we may need to reconsider, or even abandon, some concerns and practices that currently constitute much of what we call software engineering. Here I propose a hierarchy of concerns, ordered by the degree to which they reduce system complexity from lowest to highest.

An Anonymous Coward writes:

In a Twitter discussion on Sept. 5, Rosa-Maria Ryyti (Miss Universe Finland 2015 winner), argued Bitcoin's risk factor made it more appealing to men.

She was responding to a query by analyst and Cointelegraph contributor, Filb Filb, who asked followers why the Bitcoin community was overwhelmingly male.

"Women are more risk-conscious in general and often go for a 'slow & steady' investment strategy," Ryyti wrote, adding:

"The current general perception of Bitcoin in the msm makes it even less probable for the average women (and men) to get involved."

https://cointelegraph.com/news/miss-finland-bitcoins-risk-keeps-most-women-away-from-cryptocurrency

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"exec" writes:

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

The City of New Bedford, in Massachusetts, has found a way to deal with ransomware without paying: shoring up defenses, restoring from backups, and rebuilding systems.

The attack on the American city's systems was identified on July 5, after employees noticed unusual network activity upon returning from the July 4th holiday, Mayor Jon Mitchell explained in a press conference on Wednesday.

"We haven't seen any interruption in municipal services at all," said Mitchell.

The city's Management Information Systems (MIS) staff identified the presence of the file-scrambling RYUK nasty, a sophisticated form of ransomware, and through prompt action managed to limit its impact.

Supposedly named for a character in the manga series Death Note, RYUK can find and encrypt network drives, and delete volume snapshots to prevent the use of Windows System Restore in the absence of external backups.

[...] Mitchell attributes the relatively minor impact of the infection to luck, skill and the city's IT architecture.

The luck element has to do with the fact that the malware intrusion began over the July 4th holiday. Holidays and weekends are apparently a common time to launch ransomware attacks because IT staff tends to be scarce and less vigilant then; but in this case the holiday also ensured that many of the city's desktop PCs were powered down, which limited the ransomware's ability to spread.

The prompt action of the MIS staff on the morning of July 5th to defensively disconnect systems, according to Mitchell, helped reduce the impact of the infection.

-- submitted from IRC

Original Submission

martyb writes:

Worst flu Season on Record, Australia (emphasis in original):

According to statistics, the 2019 flu season is Australia's worst in recorded history with over 257,359 confirmed cases so far this year.

This record beat the previous one in 2017 with a total number of 251,163 influenza cases. Meanwhile, only 52,000 cases were confirmed in 2018.

"In terms of sheer numbers and the load on general practice and emergency departments, this is the worst flu season that's ever been," immunization expert Paul van Buynder said.

Local media has also reported 587 fatalities from influenza with a majority of elder people. On the contrary, only 73 died from the flu in 2018.

Australia capital Canberra confirmed 3,402 cases so far, which is worse than the total combined records from 2016 to 2018.

By point of comparison, the population of Australia is approximately 25 million people implying over 1.7% of the population came down with the flu.

Projecting from an estimated ~330 million people in the USA, that would mean over 5.7 million cases.

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

SAN FRANCISCO, Calif., September 5, 2019 — Purism begins its iterative shipping schedule for the much anticipated Librem 5 phone running PureOS.

The Librem 5 phone is built from the ground up to respect the privacy, security, and freedoms of society. It is a revolutionary approach to solving the issues that people face today around data exploitation — putting people in control of their own digital lives.

Due to the high volume, growing demand for the Librem 5, and in the interest of openness and transparency, Purism is publishing its full, detailed, iterative shipping schedule. This expands on the existing commitment to start shipping in Q3 by defining specific batches, their features, and their corresponding ship dates.

Most companies keep their release and product plans secret right up until mass production launch, so they can avoid publicizing any setbacks or delays; but we have decided to bring our community and customers along with us for the Librem 5 journey, and have been transparent about our progress from the beginning. This means you have been able to celebrate along with us as we have reached milestones like shipping our devkit in 2018, the NXP CPU silicon issues we had to overcome, placing our first call in early 2019, sending our first SMS. You have been able to track our software progress directly from our public code repositories and watch live updates to libhandy, Phosh, Chatty, and the rest of our software. And we are compliant with, and submitting for, the "Respects Your Freedom" certification from the Free Software Foundation.

The iteration schedule starts in September, 2019, and the Librem 5 will be shipping in batches with incrementing code names. Each iteration improves upon the prior in a rapid rolling release throughout the entire first version of the phone, including the public plans for the second revision of the phone for context.

https://puri.sm/posts/librem-5-shipping-announcement/

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

The driver of this Model S was found to have only had his hands on the wheel for 51 seconds of the last 13 minutes 48 seconds of his trip.

One of the more highly publicized Tesla crashes in recent memory involved a man in Los Angeles plowing his Tesla Model S into the back of a fire truck. The car wasn't going all that fast and thankfully nobody was hurt, but it was a fairly gnarly crash nonetheless.

Part of the government's investigation into the crash involved finding out whether or not Tesla's Autopilot system had been engaged at the time of the collision and if so, determining whether or not the driver was paying attention to what was going on around them.

Well, it's been a while, but the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) has released part of the findings of its inquiry according to a Tweet published by the agency on Tuesday and hey, guess what? The driver of the vehicle was found only to have had his hands on the wheel as prescribed by Tesla (and good sense) for 51 seconds of the final 13 minutes and 48 seconds of the drive. Even worse, his hands weren't on the wheel at all for the last 3 minutes and 41 seconds before the crash.

When questioned by the NTSB as to what he was doing at the time of the crash, the driver stated, "I was having a coffee and a bagel. And all I remember, that truck, and then I just saw the boom in my face and that was it."

Clearly, there was a breakdown in the system here, and while Autopilot isn't a perfect system and while we've criticized its name as being somewhat misleading, the fault here doesn't seem to lie solely with Tesla.

The moral of the story here is that the advanced driver assistance systems, like Autopilot, that are found in many of the vehicles being sold today are not a form of self-driving. There is no "self-driving" car on sale today, and it's the responsibility of the driver to pay attention to the world around them as they drive.

Tesla didn't immediately respond to Roadshow's request for comment.

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

A Swedish behavioral scientist has suggested that it may be necessary to turn to cannibalism and start eating humans in order to save the planet.

Appearing on Swedish television to talk about an event based around the "food of the future," Magnus Söderlund said he would be holding seminars on the necessity of consuming human flesh in order to stop climate change.

Environmentalists blame the meat and farming industry for a large part of what they claim is the warming of the earth.

According to Söderlund, a potential fix would be the Soylent Green-solution of eating dead bodies instead.

https://summit.news/2019/09/04/swedish-behavioral-scientist-suggests-eating-humans-to-save-the-planet/

[Ed note: At first I was going to give this story a pass and then, well... this site is called SoylentNews said name being tangentially related to Soylent Green and the tag line is: "SoylentNews is people", so it only goes to follow that you are what you eat, right? Feel free to comment seriously, but I'm quite frankly more interested in what kind of fun the community can have with this story! Some jokes just write themselves. --martyb]

Original Submission

takyon writes:

ISRO lose contact with Chandrayaan-2 lander during final descent

Following a historic July 22 launch on a GSLV Mk-III rocket from the east coast of India, the Chandrayaan-2 spacecraft – the robotic lander and rover, specifically – attempted a soft landing on the surface of the Moon on Friday. All was proceeding to plan until just 2km above the surface when telemetry was lost and the vehicle will have likely crashed into the lunar surface.

[...] The Vikram lander was aiming to softly touch down about 350 kilometers (218 miles) away from the South Pole-Aitken Basin rim on Friday evening. However, with all proceeding to plan, including the braking phase of the mission ahead of final descent, telemetry was lost.

[...] Although no explanation was provided, it is clear the mission has failed.

Also at NYT and India Today.

Previously: Chandrayaan-2 Updates: Lunar Orbit Insertion and Lunar Orbit Maneuver

Original Submission

DannyB writes:

You Can Now Tell Facebook to Delete Its Internal Record of Your Face

A new feature allows Facebook users to opt out of facial recognition on the social network

Facebook users can now tell the company not to run facial recognition on their pictures.

The company announced Tuesday that it has added a setting for opting out of certain face recognition features that have raised privacy concerns. If you disable face recognition, Facebook won't automatically tag you in images, nor will it automatically suggest tags of your friends. Opting out will also stop Facebook from searching for you in other images on the site using its Photo Review feature — which is designed to notify you when someone uploads a picture of you that you aren't tagged in, perhaps so that you can flag impersonation or other problems.

The update will also have a significant impact on the underlying technology that allows Facebook to recognize you in the first place, the company told OneZero. Facebook processes images to extract what your face looks like into a hidden string of numbers called a template, according to the company's website. Fundamentally, facial recognition is just comparing how statistically similar your string of numbers is to other strings of numbers extracted from other images, using criteria like the distance and orientation of facial features learned by an algorithm.

When you opt out of facial recognition on Facebook, the company will delete your template, meaning it will have no original reference point for your face and therefore cannot find your face at all. It's an assurance that Facebook isn't actually retaining data that it could use again someday to recognize your face. Of course, Facebook could compute that template again if you opt back in. And your friends can still manually tag you in an image, though doing so won't lead Facebook to compute a new template for your face.

[. . . .] Opting out also prohibits you from being included in Facebook's facial recognition research, according to a Facebook spokesperson.

"When people turn off their face recognition setting, we can no longer create a face template for them for any purpose, including A.I. research," the spokesperson told OneZero.

FB can add your face to a list of deleted faces to guarantee they don't have it any longer.

Original Submission

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.

Original Submission

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.

Original Submission

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?

Original Submission

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