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upstart writes:

Submitted via IRC for Bytram

We love coffee, tea, chocolate and soft drinks so much, caffeine is literally in our blood

In conducting mass spectrometry research, Richard van Breemen and Luying Chen worked with various biomedical suppliers to purchase 18 batches of supposedly pure human blood serum pooled from multiple donors. Biomedical suppliers get their blood from blood banks, who pass along inventory that's nearing its expiration date.

All 18 batches tested positive for caffeine. Also, in many of the samples the researchers found traces of cough medicine and an anti-anxiety drug. The findings point to the potential for contaminated blood transfusions, and also suggest that blood used in research isn't necessarily pure.

"From a 'contamination' standpoint, caffeine is not a big worry for patients, though it may be a commentary on current society," said Chen, a Ph.D. student. "But the other drugs being in there could be an issue for patients, as well as posing a problem for those of us doing this type of research because it's hard to get clean blood samples."

[...] In addition to caffeine, the research also involved testing pooled serum for alprazolam, an anti-anxiety medicine sold under the trade name Xanax; dextromethorphan, an over-the-counter cough suppressant; and tolbutamide, a medicine used to treat type 2 diabetes.

[...] All of the pooled serum was free of tolbutamide, but eight samples contained dextromethorphan and 13 contained alprazolam -- possibly meaning that if you ever need a blood transfusion, your odds of also receiving caffeine, cough medicine and an anti-anxiety drug are pretty good.

"The study leads you in that direction, though without doing a comprehensive survey of vendors and blood banks we can only speculate on how widespread the problem is," said van Breemen, the director of OSU's Linus Pauling Institute. "Another thing to consider is that we found drugs that we just happened to be looking for in doing the drug interaction assay validation -- how many others are in there too that we weren't looking for?"

Journal Reference: Luying Chen, Richard B. van Breemen. Validation of a sensitive UHPLC-MS/MS method for cytochrome P450 probe substrates caffeine, tolbutamide, dextromethorphan, and alprazolam in human serum reveals drug contamination of serum used for research. Journal of Pharmaceutical and Biomedical Analysis, 2019; 112983 DOI: 10.1016/j.jpba.2019.112983

Original Submission

"exec" writes:

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Many of the technologies we rely on, from smartphones to wearable devices and more, utilize fast wireless communications. What might we accomplish if those devices transmitted information even faster?

That's what Yuping Zeng, assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of Delaware, aims to discover. She and a team of researchers recently created a high-electron mobility transistor, a device that amplifies and controls electrical current, using gallium nitride (GaN) with indium aluminum-nitride as the barrier on a silicon substrate. They described their results in the journal Applied Physics Express.

Among devices of its type, Zeng's transistor has record-setting properties, including record low gate leakage current (a measure of current loss), a record high on/off current ratio (the magnitude of the difference of current transmitted between the on state and off state) and a record high current gain cutoff frequency (an indication of how much data can be transmitted with a wide range of frequencies).

This transistor could be useful for higher bandwidth wireless communication systems. For a given current, it can handle more voltage and would require less battery life than other devices of its type.

"We are making this high-speed transistor because we want to expand the bandwidth of wireless communications, and this will give us more information for a certain limited time," said Zeng. "It can also be used for space applications because the gallium nitride transistor we used is radiation robust, and it is also wide bandgap material, so it can tolerate a lot of power."

This transistor represents innovation in both material design and device application design. The transistors are made on a low-cost silicon substrate, "and this process can also be compatible with silicon Complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS) technology, which is the conventional technology used for semiconductors," said Zeng.

-- submitted from IRC

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Microsoft Leaves Anti-Piracy Group After it Scolded EFF's New Board Chair

Microsoft has cut its ties with anti-piracy group CreativeFuture, after the group criticized the copyright track record of the new EFF board chair. This decision didn't sit well with CreativeFuture, which wrote a scathing letter arguing that Microsoft is turning its back on the copyright industries that helped the company to thrive.

In recent years CreativeFuture has been one of the most vocal anti-piracy groups. The coalition is made up of more than 550 organizations as well as hundreds of thousands of individual creators. The group lobbies lawmakers and leads the charge when it comes to many anti-piracy discussions. Its message is loud and clear: piracy is terrible and Google is enemy number one.

In recent years CreativeFuture has repeatedly pitted itself against major technology companies which it believes don't do enough to curb piracy. In this often hostile ecosystem, it found one sole tech giant at its side, Microsoft. "In an era of creative decimation perpetrated by the world's biggest technology companies, one of their very biggest made a point of joining us to stand up for copyright," CreativeFuture noted in a recent mailing.

While that sounds positive, the reason for the email isn't good. The anti-piracy coalition explains that Microsoft is the first member to ever leave the group. While the company hasn't publicly explained its motives, CreativeFuture knows why. According to the mailing, Microsoft wasn't happy with an article [archive] the group wrote about Pamela Samuelson, the new Board Chair at the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF).

[...] "Confused and hurt, we did some digging, and discovered that Samuelson and Microsoft have a long history together, going at least as far back as 2005, when Microsoft gifted a whopping $1 million to the Samuelson Law, Technology & Public Policy Clinic at UC Berkeley," CreativeFuture writes. In addition, the coalition points out that Samuelson published a paper defending Microsoft in a lawsuit against AT&T, while the tech company continued to support the Samuelson Clinic.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Submitted via IRC for Runaway1956

Senate takes another stab at privacy law with proposed COPRA bill

Perhaps the third time's the charm: a group of Senate Democrats, following in the recent footsteps of their colleagues in both chambers, has introduced a bill that would impose sweeping reforms to the current disaster patchwork of US privacy law.

The bill (PDF), dubbed the Consumer Online Privacy Rights Act (COPRA), seeks to provide US consumers with a blanket set of privacy rights. The scope and goal of COPRA are in the same vein as Europe's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which went into effect in May 2018.

Privacy rights "should be like your Miranda rights—clear as a bell as to what they are and what constitutes a violation," Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.), who introduced the bill, said in a statement. Senators Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.), Ed Markey (D-Mass.), and Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii) also co-sponsored the bill.

The press release announcing the bill also includes statements of support from several consumer and privacy advocacy groups, such as Consumer Reports, the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC), the Georgetown Law Center on Privacy & Technology, and the NAACP.

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

A new cancer-detecting tool uses tiny circuits made of DNA to identify cancer cells by the molecular signatures on their surface.

Duke University researchers fashioned the simple circuits from interacting strands of synthetic DNA that are tens of thousands of times finer than a human hair.

Unlike the circuits in a computer, these circuits work by attaching to the outside of a cell and analyzing it for proteins found in greater numbers on some cell types than others. If a circuit finds its targets, it labels the cell with a tiny light-up tag.

Because the devices distinguish cell types with higher specificity than previous methods, the researchers hope their work might improve diagnosis, and give cancer therapies better aim.

[...] Similar techniques have been used previously to detect cancer, but they're more prone to false alarms -- misidentifications that occur when mixtures of cells sport one or more of the proteins a DNA circuit is designed to screen for, but no single cell type has them all.

For every cancer cell that is correctly detected using current methods, some fraction of healthy cells also get mislabeled as possibly cancerous when they're not.

Each type of cancer cell has a characteristic set of cell membrane proteins on its cell surface. To cut down on cases of mistaken identity, the Duke team designed a DNA circuit that must latch onto that specific combination of proteins on the same cell to work. As a result they're much less likely to flag the wrong cells, Reif said.

Journal Reference:

Tianqi Song, Shalin Shah, Hieu Bui, Sudhanshu Garg, Abeer Eshra, Daniel Fu, Ming Yang, Reem Mokhtar, John Reif. Programming DNA-Based Biomolecular Reaction Networks on Cancer Cell Membranes. Journal of the American Chemical Society, 2019; 141 (42): 16539 DOI: 10.1021/jacs.9b05598

Original Submission

MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for TheMightyBuzzard

Whether you want to slice down your foes with psychically augmented physical strikes, slice them with invisible force weapons, or cast spells bristling with telekinetic power, there are now options for you in Dungeons & Dragons 5th edition.

Wizards of the Coast just released a new Unearthed Arcana (their monthly research and development workshop where they playtest new ideas) focusing on a long-loved set of abilities: Psionics. The psychically-charged new content includes sub-classes for the fighter and rogue, and a new spell tradition for wizards, along with new feats for characters.

I knew they were going to say that.

Source: https://techraptor.net/tabletop/news/dungeons-dragons-5e-adds-psionics

[Note - This is part of the Unearthed Arcana playtest material and is not legal to use in Adventurer's League - Ed]

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

One week after the news the non-profit .org internet registry was to be sold to a private equity firm, the board of the organization that has to approve the purchase met in private to discuss the situation.

Four days later, on November 21, that organization – ICANN – has yet to say a word about what it discussed or decided.

This past weekend, the board of the organization that is selling the rights to .org, and which will likely make $1bn or more from the sale, the Internet Society, met. On both the Saturday and Sunday, the proposed sale was a key topic of conversation. It has just to provide any details on what was discussed or decided.

The same cannot be said for those opposed to the deal.

One of the earliest indicators that the deal was going to meet a very different response from the internet community than the Internet Society (ISOC) expected came in the form of an article written by one person who has set up and run their own registry.

Co-founder of the .eco top-level domain Jacob Malthouse wrote an impassioned plea online that began, “I woke up this morning feeling a profound sense of loss.” An environmental campaigner as well as a former staffer of ICANN, Malthouse compared the sale of the .org registry to the paving over of forests.

The proudly non-profit .org registry, that had for years sold its domains for just $1 to non-profits in developing countries, is “our Yosemite,” Malthouse opined, referring to America's world-famous national park. In selling it to a for-profit private equity firm, he argued, “we’ve lost more than a digital Yosemite. We’ve lost our principles. We can do better. The millions of nonprofits who rely on .org deserve better.”

That sentiment was quickly echoed in the broader internet industry community, which, even in the era of Twitter, Facebook and Instagram, continues to rely on mailing lists as its main form of communication.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Submitted via IRC for Bytram

Senate takes another stab at privacy law with proposed COPRA bill

Perhaps the third time's the charm: a group of Senate Democrats, following in the recent footsteps of their colleagues in both chambers, has introduced a bill that would impose sweeping reforms to the current disaster patchwork of US privacy law.

The bill (PDF), dubbed the Consumer Online Privacy Rights Act (COPRA), seeks to provide US consumers with a blanket set of privacy rights. The scope and goal of COPRA are in the same vein as Europe's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which went into effect in May 2018.

Privacy rights "should be like your Miranda rights—clear as a bell as to what they are and what constitutes a violation," Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.), who introduced the bill, said in a statement. Senators Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.), Ed Markey (D-Mass.), and Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii) also co-sponsored the bill.

The press release announcing the bill also includes statements of support from several consumer and privacy advocacy groups, such as Consumer Reports, the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC), the Georgetown Law Center on Privacy & Technology, and the NAACP.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Submitted via IRC for Runaway1956

400-year-old warships in Swedish channel may be sisters of doomed Vasa

Two 17th-century shipwrecks on the bottom of a busy Swedish shipping channel may be the sister ships of the ill-fated Vasa. Archaeologists with Sweden's Vrak—Museum of Wrecks discovered the vessels in a 35-meter-deep channel near Stockholm during a recent survey. Neither wreck is as well-preserved as Vasa (to be fair, there are probably ships actually sailing today that aren't as well-preserved as Vasa), but they're in remarkably good shape for several centuries on the bottom.

Studying the wrecks could reveal more details about how early naval engineers revised their designs to avoid another disaster like Vasa.

The wrecks may be the remains of two of the four large warships Sweden's King Gustav II Adolf built in the 1620s and 1630s. The earliest of the four ships, Vasa, had a first trip out of port in 1628 that ended in disaster; the top-heavy vessel caught a gust of wind and leaned over far enough to let water rush in through open gun ports. King Gustav's prized warship sank just a few dozen meters offshore in front of hundreds of spectators, killing half the crew onboard.

On the other hand, the three later ships—Äpplet, Kronan, and Scepter—had longer careers. Äpplet sailed with the Swedish fleet to invade Germany in 1630, and Kronan and Scepter sailed against a combined Danish-Norwegian fleet in the 1644 battle of Kolberger Heide.

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Twitter and Facebook on Monday claimed some third-party apps quietly collected swathes of personal information from people's accounts without permission.

The antisocial networks blamed the data slurp on what they termed a pair of "malicious" software development kits (SDKs) used by the third-party iOS and Android apps to display ads. Once a user was logged into either service using one of these applications, the embedded SDK could silently access that user's profile and covertly collect information, it is claimed.

[...] [Facebook said] "Security researchers recently notified us about two bad actors, One Audience and Mobiburn, who were paying developers to use malicious software developer kits (SDKs) in a number of apps available in popular app stores," a Facebook spokesperson told The Register.

"After investigating, we removed the apps from our platform for violating our platform policies and issued cease and desist letters against One Audience and Mobiburn. We plan to notify people whose information we believe was likely shared after they had granted these apps permission to access their profile information like name, email and gender. We encourage people to be cautious when choosing which third-party apps are granted access to their social media accounts."

Spokespeople for oneAudience declined to comment. Meanwhile, MobiBurn has issued a public statement on the matter.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Age-related macular degeneration is the primary cause of central vision loss and results in the center of the visual field being blurred or fully blacked out. Though treatable, some methods can be ineffective or cause unwanted side effects.

Jinglin Huang, a graduate student in medical engineering at Caltech, suggests inefficient fluid mixing of the injected medicine and the gel within the eye may be to blame. Huang will be discussing the effects of a thermally induced fluid mixing approach for AMD therapy during a session at the American Physical Society's Division of Fluid Dynamics 72nd Annual Meeting, which will take place on Nov. 23-26, 2019, at the Washington State Convention Center in Seattle.

The talk, "Thermal Effects on Fluid Mixing in the Eye," will be presented as part of the session on biological fluid dynamics: microfluidics.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

On Nov. 23, one of the cybercrime underground’s largest bazaars for buying and selling stolen payment card data announced the immediate availability of some four million freshly-hacked debit and credit cards. KrebsOnSecurity has learned this latest batch of cards was siphoned from four different compromised restaurant chains that are most prevalent across the midwest and eastern United States.

Two financial industry sources who track payment card fraud and asked to remain anonymous for this story said the four million cards were taken in breaches recently disclosed by restaurant chains Krystal, Moe’s, McAlister’s Deli and Schlotzsky’s. Krystal announced a card breach last month. The other three restaurants are all part of the same parent company and disclosed breaches in August 2019.

KrebsOnSecurity heard the same conclusion from Gemini Advisory, a New York-based fraud intelligence company.

“Gemini found that the four breached restaurants, ranked from most to least affected, were Krystal, Moe’s, McAlister’s and Schlotzsky’s,”  Gemini wrote in an analysis of the New World Order batch shared with this author. “Of the 1,750+ locations belonging to these restaurants, nearly 50% were breached and had customer payment card data exposed. These breached locations were concentrated in the central and eastern United States, with the highest exposure in Florida, Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, and Alabama.”

Original Submission

DannyB writes:

It's Official: Police Are Testing Out Boston Dynamics' Robot Dog

"All too often, the deployment of these technologies happens faster than our social, political, or legal systems react."

Dogs have served alongside police officers for decades, sometimes even sacrificing their own lives in order to save their human partners. Robots are a fixture of law enforcement, too, most notably in bomb situations.

But now, a police force in the United States has tested the capabilities of a robot dog for the first time — and civil liberties experts are raising the alarm.

According to documents obtained by the American Civil Liberties Union of Massachusetts, the Massachusetts State Police leased a Spot robot dog from Boston Dynamics for 90 days ending on November 5, 2019.

[...] police spokesman David Procopio told WBUR that the agency used Spot the same way it did other robots: as a "mobile remote observation device."

"Robot technology is a valuable tool for law enforcement," he said, "because of its ability to provide situational awareness of potentially dangerous environments."

However, he didn't share any exact details on how agency tested Spot or expand on the two incidents during which police told WBUR they used the robot outside of testing.

No need to be concerned that police would blame things on the robot, such as excessive force, injuries or death.

Original Submission

RandomFactor writes:

NASA has shared a new 'Pallet Lander' Concept with industry that could be used to carry various payloads to the Moon's surface. The design, revealed in a technical paper published on the NASA Technical Reports Server, appears to be an evolution of the Lunar Pallet Lander (LPL) concept from 2015.

"This lander was designed with simplicity in mind to deliver a 300 kilogram [661 lb] rover to a lunar pole," said Logan Kennedy, the project's lead systems engineer.

The lander is intended to be carried on commercial launch vehicles and is part of NASA's "Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) initiative.

As NASA turns to commercial partners to land scientific instruments -- and eventually humans -- on the Moon's surface, companies can benefit from work NASA has already done.

"As robotic lunar landers grow to accommodate larger payloads, simple but high-performing landers with a contiguous payload volume will be needed," Kennedy said. "This concept was developed by a diverse team of people over many years and meets that need.

"We hope that other lander designers can benefit from our work," he added.

NASA has a goal of sending astronauts back to the moon by 2024.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

An international team of researchers has used a new spectrometer to find and set an upper limit for the mass of a neutrino. In their paper published in the journal Physical Review Letters, the group describes how they came up with the new limit...

[...] The researchers carried out their work as part of the Karlsruhe Tritium Neutrino Experiment (KATRIN) on the campus of the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in Germany. The core piece of equipment used at the site is a 200-ton electron spectrometer. The researchers used it to study the decay of tritium—a radioactive type of hydrogen. When it decays, it emits a single electron and a neutrino at the same time. By measuring the energy of the released electron using the spectrometer, they were able to calculate an estimate of the mass of the neutrino to a greater precision than was possible before. They found its upper limited to be 1.1 electronvolts, approximately half of the previously determined upper limit. It is also extremely tiny—approximately 500,000 times smaller than an electron.

More information: M. Aker et al. Improved Upper Limit on the Neutrino Mass from a Direct Kinematic Method by KATRIN, Physical Review Letters (2019). DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.123.221802 . On Arxiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1909.06048

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

New insights into the process of DNA-looping change our view of how the genome is organised within cells. The discoveries by IMP-researchers elucidate a fundamental mechanism of life and settle a decade long scientific dispute.

To pack the genetic information, inscribed in roughly two metres of DNA, into its nucleus, a human cell must achieve the equivalent of fitting an 80-kilometre-long thread into a sphere the size of a soccer ball. Looking through his microscope back in 1882, German biologist Walther Flemming already glimpsed at how this trick is done. What he saw were loops of DNA-strands inside the nucleus of an egg-cell that reminded him of the brushes that were used at the time to clean gas lanterns - and so he named these structures lampbrush chromosomes, without an idea of what they were and which purpose they served.

It took many decades to identify the lampbrush chromosomes as strands of DNA neatly folded into loops, even longer to realise that DNA is folded into such structures in all cells and at all times, and it took until now to find out how this folding is done. In a paper published by the journal Science, researchers from Jan-Michael Peters’ lab at the Institute of Molecular Pathology (IMP) in Vienna demonstrate for the first time that a molecular machine actively and purposefully folds DNA via “loop extrusion” and thereby fulfils several important functions in the interphase cell.

That the process of looping DNA is neither random nor arbitrary is evident from how evolutionary ancient it is. All organisms do it, from bacteria to humans. The primeval function of the folding mechanism is still unknown and we may never find out, but some vital tasks have been discovered in recent years. By looping DNA, distant regions on the large molecule are brought into close proximity and are able to interact. This physical contact plays an important role in gene regulation, where DNA segments called enhancers influence which genes are active. Looping is also essential for the ability of immune cells to produce a diverse array of antibodies.