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Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Bioengineers study the development of organ-specific tissues in the lab for therapeutic applications. However, the process is highly challenging, since it requires the fabrication and maintenance of dense cellular constructs composed of approximately 10⁸ cell/mL. Research teams have used organ building blocks (OBBs) composed of patient-specific-induced pluripotent stem cell (iPSC)-derived organoids as a pathway to achieve the requisite cell density, microarchitecture and tissue function. However, OBBs hitherto remain to be assembled into 3-D tissue constructs. In a recent report, Mark A. Skylar-Scott and an interdisciplinary research team at the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering and the John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences at Harvard University, developed a new biomanufacturing method.

Instead of 3-D printing constructs to fill in with tissue (SWIFT). As an example, they engineered a perfusable cardiac tissue to fuse and beat synchronously across a timeframe of seven days. The SWIFT biomanufacturing method allowed the rapid assembly of patient- and organ-specific tissues at therapeutic scales. The research work is now published in Science Advances.

Bioengineering whole organs for therapeutic applications is a daunting task since billions of cells are required for rapid organization into functional microarchitectures, with nutrient supplements via vascular channels. Recent advances in tissue engineering have led to the self-assembly of cerebral, kidney^[$] and cardiac organoids^[$], with several characteristics similar to their in vivo organ counterparts. Scientists build such organoids by generating embryoid bodies (EBs) made of iPSCs (induced pluripotent stem cells) within microwells, cultured under static conditions to differentiate into 'mini organs' of interest. Such organs serve as ideal organ building blocks (OBBs) to biomanufacture tissues of interest with the desired cell density, character, microarchitecture and function.

Researchers can then introduce a perfusable network of vascular channels into the engineered living matrices using embedded 3-D printing techniques. For example, when research teams introduced a method known as sacrificial ink writing into cellular hydrogels^[$] and silicone matrices^[$], the outcomes resulted in a 3-D network of interconnected channels. By building on this strategy, bioengineers proceeded to develop synthetic and biopolymer matrices^[$] with self-healing, viscoelastic responses for minimal complexity of the patterning protocols to form 3-D architectures. However, researchers had thus far only used this method to construct either acellular or spatially cellular matrices.

In the present work, therefore, Skylar-Scott et al. developed a biomanufacturing protocol that relied on sacrificial writing into functional tissue (SWIFT) composed of a living OBB matrix to generate organ-specific tissues with high cellular density, maturation and desired functionality.

The scientists then demonstrated the function and maturation of the engineered bulk vascularized tissue during long-term perfusion studies.

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upstart writes:

Submitted via IRC for Fnord666

Diamonds are forever: New foundation for nanostructures: Scientists combine glass and synthetic diamond as a basis for tiny structures

Researchers at the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology Graduate University (OIST) have fabricated a novel glass and synthetic diamond foundation that can be used to create miniscule micro- and nanostructures. This new substrate is low cost and leaves minimal waste, the researchers say, in a study published in Diamond and Related Materials.

"We've spent the last couple of decades throwing away plastics," said Stoffel Janssens, the first author of the study, and a member of OIST's Mathematics, Mechanics, and Materials Unit. "With sustainable materials like diamond and glass, we're minimizing negative environmental impacts."

Current processes in place for micro- and nanodevice fabrication can be costly and inefficient. Synthetic diamond, which has the same chemical structure as natural diamond, is resilient, low-cost and sustainable, and glass is versatile and electrically insulating; technologies that combine the two are promising.

The researchers made their foundation using glass etching, a process that relies on acid to reduce a glass slab to a thickness of 50 micrometers (about the length of a typical cell in the human body). Janssens and his collaborators, Professor Eliot Fried, David Vázquez-Cortés, Alessandro Giussani, and James Kwiecinski, used a laser to drill cavities, approximately 40 micrometers in diameter and depth, into one side of the glass slab.

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Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Thomas Cook, a 178-year-old British travel company and airline, declared bankruptcy early Monday morning, suspending operations and leaving hundreds of thousands of tourists stranded around the world.

The travel company operates its own airline, with a fleet of nearly 50 medium- and long-range jets, and owns several smaller airlines and subsidiaries, including the German carrier Condor. Thomas Cook still had several flights in the air as of Sunday night but was expected to cease operations once they landed at their destinations.

Condor posted a message to its site late Sunday night saying that it was still operating but that it was unclear whether that would change. Condor's scheduled Monday-morning flights appeared to be operating normally.

About 600,000 Thomas Cook customers were traveling at the time of the collapse, of whom 150,000 were British, the company told CNN.

The British Department for Transport and Civil Aviation Authority prepared plans, under the code name "Operation Matterhorn," to repatriate stranded British passengers. According to the British aviation authority, those rescue flights would take place until October 6, leading to the possibility that travelers could be delayed for up to two weeks.

Initial rescue flights seemed poised to begin immediately, with stranded passengers posting on Twitter that they were being delayed only a few hours as they awaited chartered flights.

The scale of the task has reports calling it the largest peacetime repatriation effort in British history, including the operation the government carried out when Monarch Airlines collapsed in 2017.

Costs of the flights were expected to be covered by the ATOL, or Air Travel Organiser's License, protection plan, a fund that provides for repatriation of British travelers if an airline ceases operations.

-- submitted from IRC

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upstart writes:

Submitted via IRC for Bytram

Western Digital: We're just about DDN with these data centre systems

American drive-slinger Western Digital has pulled out of the storage systems business, telling the world last night that it is selling the IntelliFlash array unit to DDN.

WD also has plans to exit its ActiveScale archival storage array business, it confirmed, saying that keeping either unit on board would require "focus and investment" the business was not prepared to expend.

Mike Cordano, WD COO, said in a prepared statement: "Scaling and accelerating growth opportunities for IntelliFlash and ActiveScale will require additional management focus and investment to ensure long-term success."

This unexpected reversal comes just two years after Western Dig swallowed IntelliFlash when it acquired Tegile in August 2017 for an undisclosed sum. As recently as July this year WD extended IntelliFlash capabilities with entry-level NVMe models, a higher capacity SAS array, live dataset migration and an S3 connector.

WD gets more than 80 per cent of its revenues from selling disk drives and SSDs to OEMs and consumers, where it faces limited competition.

upstart writes:

Submitted via IRC for Bytram

Atoms spin backwards while flying along a surface

Have you ever noticed that when a car is filmed, sometimes the wheels appear to be turning backwards? For cars, having the wheels rotate in the opposite sense to the car's motion is an artifact. But, for atoms, it may actually happen.

Let's set the scene. A flat sheet of metal, hanging in the vacuum: the camera pans to see a single atom moving flat-out a few nanometers above the surface. The electrons surrounding the nucleus of the atom push the electrons in the metal away from the metal's surface, creating a kind of bow wave of charge in front of the nucleus and a wake of charge behind it. What we're looking at is the very picture of a quantum salt flat racer.

The forces that generate the bow wave and wake are carried by virtual photons that are exchanged between the metal surface and the atom. In the exchange process, the atom will emit a steady stream of real photons in the direction of travel. The momentum kick from launching these photons slows the atom. This is, ultimately, friction for a single atom.

The calculation for that scenario is old and only takes into account translational motion. But, the researchers asked themselves, does the atom also rotate? More carefully put, are the forces between the surface and the atom such that they might produce a torque?

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Sellafield nuclear power station in Cumbria, northern England, is calling for help to increase the number of robots it uses to monitor and clean the site.

[...] It needs robots that can be deployed to remotely work at height in hazardous areas. It is also looking for machines able to autonomously remove "Special Nuclear Material" packages from a store and put them in a container for export, as well as droids that can remotely inspect the packages.

Sellafield is in the process of being decommissioned, meaning staff and robots are retrieving nuclear waste and reprocessing spent fuel. The Magnox reprocessing plant is due to close next year, which signals an end to nuclear fuel reprocessing in the UK.

Sellafield opened in 1950 and now lays claim to the unenviable title of the world's largest inventory of untreated nuclear waste.

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Anonymous Coward writes:

Thomas Bushnell, former maintainer of GNU Hurd until his dismissal by Richard Stallman, has opined in a biased blog post that the forced resignation of Stallman from MIT and the Free Software Foundation is deserved.

https://medium.com/@thomas.bushnell/a-reflection-on-the-departure-of-rms-18e6a835fd84

So Richard Stallman has resigned from his guest position at MIT and as President of the Free Software Foundation. You can easily find out all you need to know about the background from a web search and some news articles. I recommend in particular Selam G's original articles on this topic for background, and for an excellent institutional version, the statement from the Software Freedom Conservancy.

But I'll give you a personal take. By my reckoning, I worked for RMS longer than any other programmer.

[...]4) RMS's loss of MIT privileges and leadership of the FSF are the appropriate responses to a pattern of decades of poor behavior. It does not matter if they are appropriate responses to a single email thread, because they are the right thing in the total situation.

5) I feel very sad for him. He's a tragic figure. He is one of the most brilliant people I've met, who I have always thought desperately craved friendship and camaraderie, and seems to have less and less of it all the time. This is all his doing; nobody does it to him. But it's still very sad. As far as I can tell, he believes his entire life's work is a failure.

6) The end result here, while sad for him, is correct.

The free software community needs to develop good leadership, and RMS has been a bad leader in many ways for a long time now. He has had plenty of people who have tried to help him, and he does not want help.

MIT needs to establish as best it can that paramount are the interests of women to have a safe and fair place to study and work. It must make clear that this is more important than the coddling of a whiny child who has never reached the emotional maturity to treat people decently.

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"exec" writes:

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

The Chevrolet Malibu sedan is subject to a new recall that surrounds a software bug may lead to disabled fuel injectors.

Documents filed with NHTSA show the automaker will https://www.cnet.com/roadshow/make/chevrolet/ the 2018 Chevy Malibu. Total, the recall hits 177,276 Malibus with the 1.5-liter turbo-4 engine. The problem rests in an error that can occur in the engine control module (ECM). Should the fault occur, data may become corrupted in the ECM, and in turn, the computer could disable the fuel injectors.

If the fuel injectors are disabled, owners may find the engine will not start. In some cases, the engine could stall while driving, which increases the risk of a crash. Chevy did not mention any incidents related to the safety recall. If the problem is present, owners will likely see the check engine light illuminate. Other Malibus without the 1.5-liter turbo-4 do not house the same ECM software and are not included in the recall.

-- submitted from IRC

Original Submission

"exec" writes:

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

With the reawakening of the Emotet botnet, the distribution methods, payloads, malicious document templates, and email templates continue to evolve. This article will go over some of the changes that have been observed by various security researchers over the past couple of days.

After months of inactivity, Emotet came back to life on Monday as it started churning out spam emails that push malicious attachments to unsuspecting users.  While formerly a banking Trojan that would steal login credentials, the Emotet Trojan is now used as a distribution vehicle for other malware.

Only after a few days, researchers have already started to see Emotet split into different distributions and employ new document templates designed to further trick users into enabling malicious Word macros.

When the Emotet botnet came back to life again, it was using a malicious Word document template that asked you to "Accept the license agreement" by clicking on the "Enable Content" button. Doing so, would enable macros embedded in the document that would then install the Emotet Trojan on the recipient's computer.

As seen by Microsoft and security researchers such as JamesWT, Joseph Roosen, Brad Duncan, ps66uk, and others, Emotet has changed its malicious document template to use a new "Protected View" lure. This lure tells the potential victims that the "action can't be completed because the file is open in Protected View. Some active content has been disabled. Click Enable Editing and Enable Content."

-- submitted from IRC

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Submitted via IRC for Bytram

The Milky Way Has Giant Bubbles at Its Center

Farhad Yusef-Zadeh was observing the center of the Milky Way galaxy in radio waves, looking for the presence of faint stars, when he saw it: a spindly structure giving off its own radio emissions. The filament-like feature was probably a glitch in the telescope, or something clouding the field of view, he decided. It shouldn't be here, he thought, and stripped it out of his data.

But the mystery filament kept showing up, and soon Yusef-Zadeh found others. What the astronomer had mistaken for an imperfection turned out to be an entire population of cosmic structures at the heart of the galaxy.

More than 100 filaments have been detected since Yusef-Zadeh's first encounter in the early 1980s. Astronomers can't completely explain them, but they have given them familiar labels, naming them after the earthly things they resemble: the pelican, the mouse, the snake. The menagerie of filaments is clustered around the supermassive black hole at the center of our galaxy. "They haven't been found elsewhere," says Yusef-Zadeh, a physics and astronomy professor at Northwestern University.

Their origins remained a mystery, too, until now.

New observations of the galactic center have revealed a pair of giant bubbles at the center of the Milky Way that give off radio emissions, according to recent research published in Nature. The bubbles stretch outward from the black hole and extend into space in opposite directions. The billowy lobes resemble the two halves of an hourglass, with the black hole nestled at its waist. And the filaments that Yusef-Zadeh discovered all those years ago are encased within.

Original Submission

chewbacon writes:

Engadget and others are reporting that contrary to the very spirit of the set-top box DVR, TiVo says all subscribers with select devices will see ads prior to playing recorded shows after a software update rolls out. TiVo says subscribers will be able to skip the ads coming in the next 90 days, but did not elaborate on this as a user says they had to fast forward through the ads. Many subscribers are angry and threatening to cancel, calling the ads a feature that devalues the service as they pay for the ability to skip ads altogether.

This prompts the question: will cable companies, losing subscribers and looking to replace that revenue, do the same with their DVRs?

Original article: https://www.engadget.com/2019/09/21/tivo-pre-roll-dvr-ads-for-all-users/.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

It’s getting easier and easier to use AI to generate convincing-looking, yet entirely fake, pictures of people. Now, one company wants to find a use for these photos, by offering a resource of 100,000 AI-generated faces to anyone that can use them — royalty free. Many of the images look fake but others are difficult to distinguish from images licensed by stock photo companies.

The project’s Product Hunt page lists Icons8 product designer Konstantin Zhabinskiy as the creator. Icons8 is a designer marketplace for icons and photographs. The AI-produced images are intended to be used as design elements in anything from presentations to websites and mobile apps. Everything is free to use with link attribution back to generated.photos.

[...]Zhabinskiy is keen to emphasize that the AI used to generate these images was trained using data shot in-house, rather than using stock media or scraping photographs from the internet. “Such an approach requires thousands of hours of labor, but in the end, it will certainly be worth it!” exclaims an Icons8 blog post.

There are valid concerns about technology that’s able to generate convincing-looking fakes like these at scale. This project is trying to create images that make life easier for designers, but the software could one day be used for all sorts of malicious activity.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Submitted via IRC for Bytram

Georgia's entire voter file potentially compromised after machine thefts

Police said thieves stole two express poll machines, set up for a special school board election.

[...] Sometime overnight, police said a burglar stole two machines used to check in voters. These are not the machines people voted on, but are used to check in voters. 

The Fulton County Elections Director said they were locked up in a suitcase like this one inside the center. Poll workers noticed the case was gone this morning when they got in to open the polls.

“It’s a statewide voter file that’s on there. It has name, address, and date of birth of all the voters in the state of Georgia,” Barron said. 

While Barron told Channel 2 Action News the data is password protected, for Georgia State University cybersecurity researcher Don Hunt, it’s not 100 percent secure. 

“Depending on the type of shell that they use and the type of software they’re using, that’s typically not that hard to break for someone who really knows what they’re doing,” Hunt said.

[...] And while Atlanta police works to identify the burglars and track down the missing machines,​​​Raffensperger has a message to all local elections leaders.

“You need to do whatever you can do to secure your equipment,” Raffensperger said. 

The state will soon roll out a new, $100 million voting system which Raffensperger said will have a new iPad-based check-in system, which they can track and delete data remotely if they get stolen.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

UK consumer charity Citizens Advice has accused telco giant Hutchison's UK network Three of "ripping off loyal customers" to the tune of £32.4m per year, by refusing to apply automatic discounts once contracts end.

In July, all other mobile operators signed a commitment with Ofcom to put in place a discount for out-of-contract customers by February 2020.

Citizens Advice calculated customers of Three are being overcharged up to £2.7m each month, with up to 210,000 customers paying "the loyalty penalty" for staying in contract.

[...] An Ofcom spokesperson said: "We agree that it's very disappointing that Three has refused to reduce bills for its out-of-contract customers. Three is the only one of the major mobile companies not to take action and its customers will continue to overpay as a result."

However, a Three spokesperson said the current proposals were not in customers' best interests. "Three has some of the lowest prices and unmatched propositions on the market. We've always put customers first and continue to do so. Applying an arbitrary discount to tariffs will not effectively tackle what really matters - helping them to find a contract which is both best-suited to their needs and priced fairly.

"As the leading campaigner for easy switching for the mobile industry, we are working hard to create a market where customers are engaged and happy, by pushing for easier switching, all handsets to be unlocked, end-of-contract notifications and best tariff advice."

Original Submission

Disappearance of meadows and prairies, expansion of farmlands, use of pesticide blamed for 29 percent drop since 1970.

The number of birds in the United States and Canada has dropped by an astonishing 29 percent, or almost three billion, since 1970, scientists said on Thursday, saying their findings signalled a widespread ecological crisis.

Grassland birds were the most affected, because of the disappearance of meadows and prairies and the extension of farmlands, as well as the growing use of pesticides that kill insects that affects the entire food chain.

"Birds are in crisis," Peter Marra, director of the Georgetown Environment Initiative at Georgetown University and a co-author of the study published in the journal Science, was quoted by Reuters as saying.

Forest birds and species that occur in a wider variety of habitats - known as habitat generalists - are also disappearing.

"We see the same thing happening the world over, the intensification of agriculture and land use changes are placing pressure on these bird populations," Ken Rosenberg, an ornithologist at Cornell University and principal co-author of the paper in Science told AFP news agency.

"Now, we see fields of corn and other crops right up to the horizon, everything is sanitised and mechanised, there's no room left for birds, fauna and nature."

More than 90 percent of the losses are from just 12 species including sparrows, warblers, blackbirds, and finches.

The figures mirror declines seen elsewhere, notably France, where the National Observatory of Biodiversity estimates there was a 30 percent decline in grassland birds between 1989 and 2017.

Original Submission