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upstart writes:

Submitted via IRC for Fnord666

Drop In Motor Converts Car To EV

With the latest craze of electric vehicles, it might be tempting to take an old project car and convert it from gas to electric. On the surface, it sounds simple, but the reality is there are a number of pitfalls. It would be nice if you could find a drop in engine replacement that was ready to go. According to Swindon Powertrain, you’ll be able to soon.

Based on their existing powertrain that can convert a Mini to EV, the transverse powertrain weighs 70 kg and if it can fit in a Mini, it can probably fit in nearly anything. Specifically, it’s 60 cm wide and 44 cm deep — that means it could fit easily in a roughly two foot box. The height can be as little as 28 cm. The company talks about fitting it on a quad bike or even a loading platform. It can be thought of as sort of an electric “crate engine” — a common term for a ready to install powerplant that, as the name implies, arrives in a crate.

The powertrain with a single-speed transmission, cooling system, and inverter weighs in at 154 pounds and generates up to 110 horsepower.  We aren’t sure what the expected battery pack is, but presumably, it will be somewhat flexible.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Submitted via IRC for Fnord666

Biomarker for schizophrenia can be detected in human hair

Diagnosing disorders of thought is easier when a reliable and objective marker can be found. In the case of schizophrenia, we have known for more than 30 years that it is associated with an abnormal startle response. Normally, we are not startled as much by a burst of noise if a smaller burst -- called a prepulse -- comes a little bit earlier. This phenomenon is called prepulse inhibition (PPI) because the early pulse inhibits the startle response. In people with schizophrenia, PPI is lowed, meaning that their startle response is not dampened as much as it should be after the prepulse.

The PPI test is a good behavioral marker, and although it cannot directly help us understand the biology behind schizophrenia, it was the starting point that led to current discoveries.

The researchers at RIKEN CBS began first looked for differences in protein expression between strains of mice that exhibit extremely low or extremely high PPI. Ultimately, they found that the enzyme Mpst was expressed much more in the brains of the mouse strain with low PPI than in the strain with high PPI. Knowing that this enzyme helps produce hydrogen sulfide, the team then measured hydrogen sulfide levels and found that they were higher in the low-PPI mice.

"Nobody has ever thought about a causal link between hydrogen sulfide and schizophrenia," says team leader Takeo Toshikawa. "Once we discovered this, we had to figure out how it happens and if these findings in mice would hold true for people with schizophrenia."

[...]

Current treatments for schizophrenia focus on the dopamine and serotonin system in the brain. Because these drugs are not very effective and have side effects, Yoshikawa says that pharmaceutical companies have abandoned the development of new drugs. "A new paradigm is needed for the development of novel drugs," he explains. "Currently, about 30% of patients with schizophrenia are resistant to dopamine D2-receptor antagonist therapy. Our results provide a new principle or paradigm for designing drugs, and we are currently testing whether inhibiting the synthesis of hydrogen sulfide can alleviate symptoms in mouse models of schizophrenia."

Journal Reference:

Excess hydrogen sulfide and polysulfides production underlies a schizophrenia pathophysiology. EMBO Molecular Medicine, 2019; DOI: 10.15252/emmm.201910695

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Facebook and its WhatsApp messenger division on Tuesday sued Israel-based spyware maker NSO Group. This is an unprecedented legal action that takes aim at the unregulated industry that sells sophisticated malware services to governments around the world. NSO vigorously denied the allegations.

Over an 11-day span in late April and early May, the suit alleges, NSO targeted about 1,400 mobile phones that belonged to attorneys, journalists, human-rights activists, political dissidents, diplomats, and senior foreign government officials. To infect the targets with NSO's advanced and full-featured spyware, the company exploited a critical WhatsApp vulnerability that worked against both iOS and Android devices. The clickless exploit was delivered when attackers made a video call. Targets need not have answered the call or taken any other action to be infected.

takyon writes:

Something crashed into Earth and helped wipe out mammoths and other animals 13,000 years ago, study says

Around 13,000 years ago, giant animals such as mastodons, mammoths, saber-toothed cats and ground sloths disappeared from the Earth. Scientists have found evidence in sediment cores to support a controversial theory that an asteroid or a comet slammed into Earth and helped lead to this extinction of ice age animals and cooling of the globe.

It's called the Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis and was first suggested in 2007. The hypothesis included the idea that an extraterrestrial body impacted Earth 12,800 years ago. This led to an extreme cooling of the environment, which in turn helped cause more than 35 species of large animals to go extinct.

At the same time, human populations declined. The impact also has been suggested as the cause of large, raging wildfires that created enough smoke to block the sun and created an "impact winter," in which cold weather lasts longer than expected after Earth is impacted.

[...] Today, evidence of such an impact can be found in platinum spikes. Platinum can be found in asteroids, comets and meteorites. Researchers found them in sediment cores collected from White Pond in Elgin, South Carolina.

Sediment Cores from White Pond, South Carolina, contain a Platinum Anomaly, Pyrogenic Carbon Peak, and Coprophilous Spore Decline at 12.8 ka (open, DOI: 10.1038/s41598-019-51552-8) (DX)

Original Submission

upstart writes for Fnord666:

Pwn2Own Expands Into Industrial Control Systems Hacking

Industrial control systems (ICS) used to manage critical infrastructure and manufacturing will be the main target in next year’s popular Pwn2Own’s annual hacking competition.

Over the past few years, Pwn2Own – a hacking contest that draws in white-hat hackers looking for fame and fortune through finding bugs in various products – has diversified its threat-hunting surfaces from merely focusing on browsers and operating systems to include new areas, including mobile and IoT devices targets.

Now, the contest is offering more than $250,000 in collective prizes for sniffing out flaws in ICS and associated protocols. The event will take place next year (Jan. 21 to Jan. 23) during the S4 Conference in Miami, according to the Zero Day Initiative, which organizes Pwn2Own.

[...] The new focus on ICS may come as no surprise given the continual disclosure of security bugs in the manufacturing, power and water plants, the oil and gas industries – such as recent flaws found in the Delta enteliBUS Manager and the Rockwell Automation industrial drive.

In fact, a recent Kaspersky report found that a full 41.2 percent of industrial control systems were attacked by malicious software at least once in the first half of 2018.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

'Game changing' tuberculosis vaccine a step closer

A vaccine which could "revolutionise" tuberculosis treatment has been unveiled by researchers.

It is hoped the vaccine will provide long-term protection against the disease, which kills 1.5 million people around the world each year.

The highly contagious disease is caused by bacteria, and the current vaccine, the BCG jab, is not very effective.

However, while initial trials have proved successful, the vaccine is still a few years away from being licensed.

The team of researchers, who come from all over the world, revealed the vaccine, which is made up of proteins from bacteria which trigger an immune response, during a global summit on lung health in the southern Indian city of Hyderabad on Tuesday.

It has already cleared a critical phase of clinical trials and been tested on more than 3,500 adults in TB endemic regions of South Africa, Kenya and Zambia, researchers said.

Also at NYT.

Related: Tuberculosis: Pharmacists Develop New Substance to Counteract Antimicrobial Resistance
How a New Antibiotic Destroys Extremely Drug-Resistant Tuberculosis

Original Submission

stormwyrm writes:

Former FBI General Counsel Jim Baker, who was known for prosecuting the legal case against Apple to get them to unlock the San Bernardino shooter's iPhone, has published an extraordinary essay on Lawfare where he surprisingly argues rather for strong encryption without government back doors.

From Schneier on Security:

In the face of congressional inaction, and in light of the magnitude of the threat, it is time for governmental authorities­ -- including law enforcement­ -- to embrace encryption because it is one of the few mechanisms that the United States and its allies can use to more effectively protect themselves from existential cybersecurity threats, particularly from China. This is true even though encryption will impose costs on society, especially victims of other types of crime.

[...] I am unaware of a technical solution that will effectively and simultaneously reconcile all of the societal interests at stake in the encryption debate, such as public safety, cybersecurity and privacy as well as simultaneously fostering innovation and the economic competitiveness of American companies in a global marketplace.

[...] All public safety officials should think of protecting the cybersecurity of the United States as an essential part of their core mission to protect the American people and uphold the Constitution. And they should be doing so even if there will be real and painful costs associated with such a cybersecurity-forward orientation. The stakes are too high and our current cybersecurity situation too grave to adopt a different approach.

Baker joins the growing list of former US law enforcement and national security senior officials who have come out in favor of strong encryption over backdoors, such as former NSA directors Gen. Michael Hayden and V. Adm. Mike McConnell, former DHS secretary Michael Chertoff, Counter-Terrorism adviser Richard Clarke, former Secretary of Defense Ash Carter, and former deputy Secretary of Defense William Lynn.

Original Submission

Freeman writes:

Though fear still lingers over toxic treats and boobytrapped apples, researchers separate fact from myth. As pediatrician Aaron Carroll notes today in The New York Times, researchers haven't been able to substantiate a single case when a child was seriously injured—let alone killed—by Halloween treats made hazardous by strangers.
[...]
A JAMA Pediatrics study from January of this year found that 4-to-8-year-olds have a tenfold increased risk of getting hit by a car on Halloween than on any other night of the year.

https://arstechnica.com/science/2019/10/forget-poisoned-candy-and-razor-blades-heres-the-real-halloween-horror/
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapediatrics/fullarticle/2711459^[$]

Verdict: Boogey Man not likely to exist.
Actual Problem: Getting run over by a car when crossing the street.

Stay safe out there.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Submitted via IRC for soylent_blue

Linus Torvalds: 'I'm not a programmer anymore'

Linus Torvalds, Linux's creator, doesn't make speeches anymore. But, what he does do, and he did again at Open Source Summit Europe in Lyon France is have public conversations with his friend Dirk Hohndel, VMware's Chief Open Source Officer. In this keynote discussion, Torvalds revealed that he doesn't think he's a programmer anymore.

So what does the person everyone thinks of as a programmer's programmer do instead? Torvalds explained:

I don't know coding at all anymore. Most of the code I write is in my e-mails. So somebody sends me a patch ... I [reply with] pseudo code. I'm so used to editing patches now I sometimes edit patches and send out the patch without having ever tested it. I literally wrote it in the mail and say, 'I think this is how it should be done,' but this is what I do, I am not a programmer.

So, Hohndel asked, "What is your job?" Torvalds replied, "I read and write a lot of email. My job really is, in the end, is to say 'no.' Somebody has to say 'no' to [this patch or that pull request]. And because developers know that if they do something that I'll say 'no' to, they do a better job of writing the code."

Torvalds continued, "Sometimes the code changes are so obvious that no messages [are] really required, but that is very very rare." To help your code pass muster with Torvalds it helps to ''explain why the code does something and why some change is needed because that in turn helps the managerial side of the equation, where if you can explain your code to me, I will trust the code."

In short, these days Torvalds is a code manager and maintainer, not a developer. That's fine with him: "I see one of my primary goals to be very responsive when people send me patches. I want to be like, I say yes or no within a day or two. During a merge, the day or two may stretch into a week, but I want to be there all the time as a maintainer."

That's what code maintainers should do.

Original Submission

Common Joe writes:

I received an Email directly from GitLab. It's an apology from the CEO.

Dear GitLab users and customers,

On October 23, we sent an email entitled "Important Updates to our Terms of Service and Telemetry Services" announcing upcoming changes. Based on considerable feedback from our customers, users, and the broader community, we reversed course the next day and removed those changes before they went into effect. Further, GitLab will commit to not implementing telemetry in our products that sends usage data to a third-party product analytics service. This clearly struck a nerve with our community and I apologize for this mistake.

So, what happened? In an effort to improve our user experience, we decided to implement user behavior tracking with both first and third-party technology. Clearly, our evaluation and communication processes for rolling out a change like this were lacking and we need to improve those processes. But that's not the main thing we did wrong.

Our main mistake was that we did not live up to our own core value of collaboration by including our users, contributors, and customers in the strategy discussion and, for that, I am truly sorry. It shouldn't have surprised us that you have strong feelings about opt-in/opt-out decisions, first versus third-party tracking, data protection, security, deployment flexibility and many other topics, and we should have listened first.

So, where do we go from here? The first step is a retrospective that is happening on October 29 to document what went wrong. We are reaching out to customers who expressed concerns and collecting feedback from users and the wider community. We will put together a new proposal for improving the user experience and share it for feedback. We made a mistake by not collaborating, so now we will take as much time as needed to make sure we get this right. You can be part of the collaboration by posting comments in this issue: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/www-gitlab-com/issues/5672. If you are a customer, you may also reach out to your GitLab representative if you have additional feedback.

I am glad you hold GitLab to a higher standard. If we are going to be transparent and collaborative, we need to do it consistently and learn from our mistakes.

Sincerely,
Sid Sijbrandij
Co-Founder and CEO
GitLab

I think the comments in the link given speaks for itself. My best guess is they realized they would lose a lot of (all?) GitLab customers in Europe due to the data protections laws we have here.

-- Common Joe

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Block on GM rice 'has cost millions of lives and led to child blindness'

Stifling international regulations have been blamed for delaying the approval of a food that could have helped save millions of lives this century. The claim is made in a new investigation of the controversy surrounding the development of Golden Rice by a team of international scientists.

Golden Rice is a form of normal white rice that has been genetically modified to provide vitamin A to counter blindness and other diseases in children in the developing world. It was developed two decades ago but is still struggling to gain approval in most nations.

"Golden Rice has not been made available to those for whom it was intended in the 20 years since it was created," states the science writer Ed Regis. "Had it been allowed to grow in these nations, millions of lives would not have been lost to malnutrition, and millions of children would not have gone blind."

[...] [Many] ecology action groups, in particular Greenpeace, have tried to block approval of Golden Rice because of their general opposition to GM crops. "Greenpeace opposition to Golden Rice was especially persistent, vocal, and extreme, perhaps because Golden Rice was a GM crop that had so much going for it," he states.

For its part, Greenpeace has insisted over the years that Golden Rice is a hoax and that its development was diverting resources from dealing with general global poverty, which it maintained was the real cause of the planet's health woes.

Nevertheless, this opposition did not have the power, on its own, to stop Golden Rice in its tracks, says Regis. The real problem has rested with an international treaty known as the Cartagena Protocol on Biosafety, an agreement which aims to ensure the safe handling, transport and use of living modified organisms, and which came into force in 2003.

Previously: Where's the Golden Rice?

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

https://www.zdnet.com/article/top-linux-developer-on-intel-chip-security-problems-theyre-not-going-away/

Greg Kroah-Hartman, the stable Linux kernel maintainer, could have prefaced his Open Source Summit Europe keynote speech, MDS, Fallout, Zombieland, and Linux, by paraphrasing Winston Churchill: I have nothing to offer but blood sweat and tears for dealing with Intel CPU's security problems.

Or as a Chinese developer told him recently about these problems: "This is a sad talk." The sadness is that the same Intel CPU speculative execution problems, which led to Meltdown and Spectre security issues, are alive and well and causing more trouble.

The problem with how Intel designed speculative execution is that, while anticipating the next action for the CPU to take does indeed speed things up, it also exposes data along the way. That's bad enough on your own server, but when it breaks down the barriers between virtual machines (VM)s in cloud computing environments, it's a security nightmare.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

ESO Telescope Reveals What Could be the Smallest Dwarf Planet Yet in the Solar System

Astronomers using ESO's SPHERE instrument at the Very Large Telescope (VLT) have revealed that the asteroid Hygiea could be classified as a dwarf planet. The object is the fourth largest in the asteroid belt after Ceres, Vesta and Pallas. For the first time, astronomers have observed Hygiea in sufficiently high resolution to study its surface and determine its shape and size. They found that Hygiea is spherical, potentially taking the crown from Ceres as the smallest dwarf planet in the Solar System.

As an object in the main asteroid belt, Hygiea satisfies right away three of the four requirements to be classified as a dwarf planet: it orbits around the Sun, it is not a moon and, unlike a planet, it has not cleared the neighbourhood around its orbit. The final requirement is that it has enough mass for its own gravity to pull it into a roughly spherical shape. This is what VLT observations have now revealed about Hygiea.

"Thanks to the unique capability of the SPHERE instrument on the VLT, which is one of the most powerful imaging systems in the world, we could resolve Hygiea's shape, which turns out to be nearly spherical," says lead researcher Pierre Vernazza from the Laboratoire d'Astrophysique de Marseille in France. "Thanks to these images, Hygiea may be reclassified as a dwarf planet, so far the smallest in the Solar System."

The team also used the SPHERE observations to constrain Hygiea's size, putting its diameter at just over 430 km. Pluto, the most famous of dwarf planets, has a diameter close to 2400 km, while Ceres is close to 950 km in size.

Ceres, Vesta, Pallas, and Hygiea are the four largest asteroid belt objects. Saturnian moon Mimas is the smallest astronomical body known to be rounded due to self-gravitation, with a diameter of just 396 km.

Impact simulation video (34s).

Also at Ars Technica.

A basin-free spherical shape as outcome of a giant impact on asteroid Hygiea (open, DOI: 10.1038/s41550-019-0915-8) (DX)

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Google's .new shortcuts are coming to other websites, and you'll be able to register your own

Last year, Google introduced the handy ".new" shortcuts for Google Docs, Slides, and Sheets, so you could type something like "docs.new," into your browser's URL bar and a fresh G Suite document of that kind would open in a new tab. Soon, you might see a lot of other websites using .new shortcuts. Google announced today that you'll be able to register a .new domain for an online shortcut of your own.

A number of companies have .new shortcuts that are live now, such as Spotify's playlist.new, which will let you create a new Spotify playlist. Bitly, Canva, Coda, Medium, OVO Sound, RunKit, Stripe, and Webex also have shortcuts.

Anyone can apply to register a .new domain starting on December 2nd, and Google tells The Verge that Google Registry will allocate the first batch of domains from those applicants in January 2020. Google's policies say that a .new domain must bring the user directly to the shortcut or action, however. If it doesn't, the domain may be suspended or deleted by Google Registry.

I'm holding out for new.playlist/, new.doc/, and new.xls/.

Previously: Google Uses ".new" gTLD to Ease Creation of New Google Documents

Original Submission

takyon writes:

'First Light' Achieved on an Experiment That Could Crack The Mystery of Dark Energy

On October 22, the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) on the Mayall Telescope in Arizona, US, achieved first light. This is a huge leap in our ability to measure galaxy distances – enabling a new era of mapping the structures in the Universe.

As its name indicates, it may also be key to solving one of the biggest questions in physics: what is the mysterious force dubbed "dark energy" that makes up the 70 percent of the Universe?

[...] DESI should also be able to constrain, and even kill, many theories of modified gravity, possibly providing an emphatic confirmation of Einstein's Theory of General Relativity on the largest scales.

Or the opposite – and again that would spark a revolution in theoretical physics.

Another important theory that will be tested with DESI is Inflation, which predicts that tiny random quantum fluctuations of energy density in the primordial Universe were exponentially expanded during a short period of intense growth to become the seeds of the large scale structures we see today.

DESI is only one of several next generation dark energy missions and experiments coming in the next decade, so there's certainly reason to be optimistic that we could soon solve the mystery of dark energy.

Also at BBC.

Original Submission