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Phoenix666 writes:

Researcher promoting red meat, sugar failed to disclose industry ties—again:

A controversial researcher known for bucking the well-established dietary advice that people should limit their sugar and red meat intake has, once again, failed to disclose his financial ties to the food industry.

Epidemiologist Bradley Johnston failed to report funding from a research agency backed by the beef industry when he published a high-profile review on red meat consumption, according to the journal that published the review last year, Annals of Internal Medicine. The review concluded that consumers should continue—not reduce—their consumption of red and processed meats, which has been fiercely criticized by nutrition experts.

Annals issued a correction on the review last week, updating the review's accompanying disclosure forms.

In the correction notice, Annals editors stated that Johnston's industry-linked grant money was specifically for studying saturated and polyunsaturated fats. The Washington Post reported further detail on the grant money, saying that Johnston and his former employer Dalhousie University received $76,863 to conduct a new meta-analysis on saturated fat.

That grant money came from AgriLife Research, a part of Texas A&M University that is partially funded by the beef industry. According to Patrick Stover, vice-chancellor and dean of AgriLife, the Texas research agency received more than $2 million in funding from the beef industry in 2019 alone.

Stover was also a co-author on the Annals study with Johnston, along with an international team of researchers. Stover has since hired Johnston as an associate professor of community health and epidemiology at Texas A&M.

All of this raises questions about whether Johnston had an agenda to downplay the health risks of red and processed meats—which can be high in saturated fats.

Are any researchers on diet less tied to monied interests?

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canopic jug writes:

Digital Rights/Restrictions Management (DRM) technologies affecting new tractors are behind the continuing rise in popularity of the models. Particularly in the midwest, farmers are finding that 40-year-old tractors do the job with less trouble and expense.

Tractors manufactured in the late 1970s and 1980s are some of the hottest items in farm auctions across the Midwest these days — and it's not because they're antiques.

Cost-conscious farmers are looking for bargains, and tractors from that era are well-built and totally functional, and aren't as complicated or expensive to repair as more recent models that run on sophisticated software.

"It's a trend that's been building. It's been interesting in the last couple years, which have been difficult for ag, to see the trend accelerate," said Greg Peterson, the founder of Machinery Pete, a farm equipment data company in Rochester with a website and TV show.

Previously;
Reeducating Legislators on the Right to Repair (2019)
John Deere Just Swindled Farmers Out of Their Right to Repair (2018)
US Copyright Office Says People Have the Right to Hack their Own Cars' Software (2015)

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NPC-131072 writes:

From ZDNet:

Around half of the websites that use WebAssembly, a new web technology, use it for malicious purposes, according to academic research published last year.

WebAssembly is a low-level bytecode language that was created after a joint collaboration between all major browser vendors.

[...] However, while the vast majority of samples were used for legitimate purposes, two categories of Wasm code stood out as inherently malicious.

The first category was WebAssembly code used for cryptocurrency-mining. These types of Wasm modules were often found on hacked sites, part of so-called cryptojacking (drive-by mining) attacks.

The second category referred to WebAssembly code packed inside obfuscated Wasm modules that intentionally hid their content. These modules, the research team said, were found [as] part of malvertising campaigns.

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Phoenix666 writes:

Phys.org:

Two mechanical engineers at the University of California, Berkeley have developed a model to describe the curling action of a spaghetti noodle when it is boiled.

[...] Anyone who has ever boiled a pot of spaghetti noodles knows that the noodles transition from hard and brittle to soft and bendable, and the noodles tend to curl when cooked. Goldberg and O'Reilly noted that prior research had shown that spaghetti noodles tend to bend in a predictable way when placed in a pot of boiling water. They start out as straight rods and then as they begin to absorb water, they start to sag. As the sagging continues, they continue bending, and eventually, the top part of the noodle will bend inward, with each noodle forming a U shape. The researchers wondered what was behind the extra bit of bending. They assumed gravity played a role—and it seemed likely that the noodle's elasticity played a role, as well.

Everyone knows inverse quantum effects are at work: spaghetti noodles won't cook as long as you observe them.

Journal Reference:
Nathaniel N. Goldberg et al. Mechanics-based model for the cooking-induced deformation of spaghetti, Physical Review E (2020). DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevE.101.013001

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Phoenix666 writes:

Cancer Mortality Continues Steady Decline, Driven by Progress against Lung Cancer:

The cancer death rate declined by 29% from 1991 to 2017, including a 2.2% drop from 2016 to 2017, the largest single-year drop in cancer mortality ever reported. The news comes from Cancer Statistics, 2020, the latest edition of the American Cancer Society's annual report on cancer rates and trends.

The steady 26-year decline in overall cancer mortality is driven by long-term drops in death rates for the four major cancers -- lung, colorectal, breast, and prostate, although recent trends are mixed. The pace of mortality reductions for lung cancer -- the leading cause of cancer death -- accelerated in recent years (from 2% per year to 4% overall) spurring the record one-year drop in overall cancer mortality. In contrast, progress slowed for colorectal, breast, and prostate cancers.

Let's hope progress accelerates with CRISPR and other new tools.

Journal Reference:
Rebecca L. Siegel, Kimberly D. Miller, Ahmedin Jemal. Cancer statistics, 2020. CA: A Cancer Journal for Clinicians, 2020; DOI: 10.3322/caac.21590

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Freeman writes:

https://arstechnica.com/science/2020/01/5-5-inch-dragon-horn-grew-out-of-mans-back-from-unaddressed-skin-cancer/:

Smartphones won’t make you grow horns—but neglecting a worsening skin cancer lesion for years could do the trick.

Recently, doctors in the UK surgically removed a 14cm-long “dragon horn” from a man’s lower back. The 50-year-old patient reported that it had been growing for at least three years. The doctors determined that the “gigantic” skin growth was a cutaneous squamous cell carcinoma (cSCC)—a type of skin cancer that causes growing, scaly bumps on the top layer of skin.

While SCC is a very common type of skin cancer, the man’s case is rare, the doctors report in the journal BMJ Case Reports this week. Such lesions are typically caught much earlier. But in this case, doctors found “an extremely large well-differentiated SCC that was neglected by a patient,” even though he was “living in a developed country with access to free healthcare.”

“This highlights that despite current public skin cancer awareness and rigorous healthcare measures, cases like this can still arise and slip through the net,” they conclude.

Cases of SCC are typically seen in those with light skin, who have a lot of sun exposure, are older, have a weakened immune system, or have had certain chemical exposures, such as arsenic. In this case, the man was a light-skinned manual laborer, but he reported no other clear risk factors. He had no significant sun exposure, no personal or family history of skin cancers, and was not immunosuppressed. Also unusual, his lymph nodes weren’t swollen—a common, nonspecific sign that the body is fighting off an infection or disease, such as skin cancer.

Journal Reference:
Agata Marta Plonczak, Ramy Aly, Hrsikesa Sharma, Anca Breahna. ‘Dragon horn SCC’, BMJ Case Reports CP (DOI: 10.1136/bcr-2019-233305)

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upstart writes in with an IRC submission for chromas:

Study: More than a third of healthcare costs go to bureaucracy:

U.S. insurers and providers spent more than $800 billion in 2017 on administration, or nearly $2,500 per person – more than four times the per-capita administrative costs in Canada’s single-payer system, a new study finds.

Over one third of all healthcare costs in the U.S. were due to insurance company overhead and provider time spent on billing, versus about 17% spent on administration in Canada, researchers reported in Annals of Internal Medicine.

Cutting U.S. administrative costs to the $550 per capita (in 2017 U.S. dollars) level in Canada could save more than $600 billion, the researchers say.

“The average American is paying more than $2,000 a year for useless bureaucracy,” said lead author Dr. David Himmelstein, a distinguished professor of public health at the City University of New York at Hunter College in New York City and a lecturer at Harvard Medical School in Boston.

“That money could be spent for care if we had a ‘Medicare for all program’,” Himmelstein said.

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for Bytram:

Animal life thriving around Fukushima: Researchers document more than 20 species in nuclear accident zone:

The camera study, published in the Journal of Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment, reports that over 267,000 wildlife photos recorded more than 20 species, including wild boar, Japanese hare, macaques, pheasant, fox and the raccoon dog -- a relative of the fox -- in various areas of the landscape.

UGA wildlife biologist James Beasley said speculation and questions have come from both the scientific community and the general public about the status of wildlife years after a nuclear accident like those in Chernobyl and Fukushima.

This recent study, in addition to the team's research in Chernobyl, provides answers to the questions.

"Our results represent the first evidence that numerous species of wildlife are now abundant throughout the Fukushima Evacuation Zone, despite the presence of radiological contamination," said Beasley, associate professor at the Savannah River Ecology Laboratory and the Warnell School of Forestry and Natural Resources.

Species that are often in conflict with humans, particularly wild boar, were predominantly captured on camera in human-evacuated areas or zones, according to Beasley.

"This suggests these species have increased in abundance following the evacuation of people."

barbara hudson writes:

The Guardian is reporting that the effects of child privation are lifelong.

Children who experience severe deprivation early in life have smaller brains in adulthood, researchers have found.

The findings are based on scans of young adults who were adopted as children into UK families from Romania's orphanages that rose under the regime of the dictator Nicolae Ceauşescu.

Now experts say that despite the children having been adopted into loving, nurturing families in the early 1990s, the early neglect appears to have left its mark on their brain structures.

"I think the most striking finding is ... that the effects on the brain have persisted," said Prof Edmund Sonuga-Barke, a co-author of the study from King's College London, who added that the results showed neuroplasticity had limits.

"The idea that everything is recoverable, no matter what your experience ... isn't necessarily true – even with the best care you can still see those signs of that earlier adversity," he said.

MostCynical writes:

The Guardian is reporting that a cyber-attack forced currency exchange firm Travelex to take down all its global websites. Travelex is based in London, but is owned by Finablr, which is based the United Arab Emirates. Travelex operates in more than 70 countries with more than 1,200 branches and 1,000 ATMs worldwide.

The issue has forced banks who use Travelex's foreign exchange services to stop taking online orders for currency, affecting Sainsbury's Bank, Tesco Bank, Virgin Money and First Direct.

Travelex sites have been offline for a week, with the firm providing foreign exchange services manually in its branches.

The group's customer website carried a message to visitors that online services were down due to "planned maintenance". "The system will be back online shortly," the messages stated.

A message on its corporate website read: "This website is temporarily unavailable while we make upgrades to improve our service to you."

Travelex first revealed the New Year's Eve attack on 2 January, when it sought to assure that no customer data had yet been compromised. It has drafted in IT specialists and cybersecurity experts in an attempt to isolate the virus and get affected systems online, but has been unable to gain access and overthrow the hackers. The Metropolitan police is leading the investigation into the attack.

Tesco and Virgin money customers can process orders at Travelex bureaux directly (but are advised to get in touch with their local bureau first to check the availability of any particular currency.) Staff at the group's London headquarters have been told to return laptops before leaving the building. No word on how much the outage is costing the company, but the company has apparently been hit with demands for £2.3m ($3m )

Will they find the staff member who clicked on a link, or loaded a special app?

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Biological Engineers at the University of Bath have developed a test that could help medics quickly diagnose urinary tract infections (UTIs), using a normal smartphone camera.

Similar in principle to a urine sample in just 25 minutes. As well as being far faster than existing testing, it could make accurate UTI testing more widely available in developing nations and remote regions thanks to its potential to be made portable, and far more cheaply than existing lab-based tests.

E. coli is present in 80 percent of bacterial UTIs, so if it is found it tells medical professionals that an antibiotic treatment is needed.

As well as a smartphone camera, the test, which could be adapted to detect a variety of bacterial infections, takes advantage of widely-available reagents and new micro-engineered materials. Researchers say the simplicity of the test, which has now passed the proof-of-concept stage, could deliver a new way to quickly identify treatments for patients in poorer or remote regions.

Described in the journal Biosensors and Bioelectronics, the test uses antibodies to capture bacterial cells in very thin capillaries within a plastic strip, detecting and identifying the cells optically rather than through the microbiological methods currently used.

Dr. Nuno Reis, from Bath's Department of Chemical Engineering, led the development of the test. He says: "The test is small and portable—so it has major potential for use in primary care settings and in developing countries.

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for Anonymous_Coward:

New evidence shows that the key assumption made in the discovery of dark energy is in error:

The most direct and strongest evidence for the accelerating universe with dark energy is provided by the distance measurements using type Ia supernovae (SN Ia) for the galaxies at high redshift. This result is based on the assumption that the corrected luminosity of SN Ia through the empirical standardization would not evolve with redshift.

New observations and analysis made by a team of astronomers at Yonsei University (Seoul, South Korea), together with their collaborators at Lyon University and KASI, show, however, that this key assumption is most likely in error. The team has performed very high-quality (signal-to-noise ratio ~175) spectroscopic observations to cover most of the reported nearby early-type host galaxies of SN Ia, from which they obtained the most direct and reliable measurements of population ages for these host galaxies. They find a significant correlation between SN luminosity and stellar population age at a 99.5 percent confidence level. As such, this is the most direct and stringent test ever made for the luminosity evolution of SN Ia. Since SN progenitors in host galaxies are getting younger with redshift (look-back time), this result inevitably indicates a serious systematic bias with redshift in SN cosmology. Taken at face values, the luminosity evolution of SN is significant enough to question the very existence of dark energy. When the luminosity evolution of SN is properly taken into account, the team found that the evidence for the existence of dark energy simply goes away (see Figure 1).

Commenting on the result, Prof. Young-Wook Lee (Yonsei Univ., Seoul), who led the project said, "Quoting Carl Sagan, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, but I am not sure we have such extraordinary evidence for dark energy. Our result illustrates that dark energy from SN cosmology, which led to the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics, might be an artifact of a fragile and false assumption."

More information:

Early-Type Host Galaxies of Type Ia Supernovae. II. Evidence for Luminosity Evolution in Supernova Cosmology, Astrophysical Journalarxiv.org/abs/1912.04903

Journal information: Astrophysical Journal

Original Submission

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for Bytram:

China's lander releases data, high-resolution images of the Moon:

A little more than one year ago, China's Chang'e 4 spacecraft landed on the far side of the Moon. In doing so, it became the first-ever vehicle to make a soft landing on the side of the Moon facing away from Earth.

To mark the one-year anniversary, China released a batch of scientific data and images captured by five scientific payloads aboard the 1.2-ton spacecraft and its small Yutu 2 rover. Since the landing, the rover has driven a little more than 350 meters across the Moon's surface, studying rock formations and taking additional photos. The data was collected over a period of 12 lunar "days," or most of the last year.

The lander itself carried an excellent camera to image its surroundings. Extra sharp with a good color balance, the Terrain Camera was mounted at the top of the lander, with the ability to rotate 360 degrees. Before it died at the end of the first lunar day, this TCAM returned detailed images of the Moon. A helpful Twitter user in France, Techniques Spatiales, converted the camera's imagery into .png files, which can be found here.

Original Submission

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for Bytram:

PGP keys, software security, and much more threatened by new SHA1 exploit:

Three years ago, Ars declared the SHA1 cryptographic hash algorithm officially dead after researchers performed the world's first known instance of a fatal exploit known as a "collision" on it. On Tuesday, the dead SHA1 horse got clobbered again as a different team of researchers unveiled a new attack that's significantly more powerful.

The new collision gives attackers more options and flexibility than were available with the previous technique. It makes it practical to create PGP encryption keys that, when digitally signed using SHA1 algorithm, impersonate a chosen target. More generally, it produces the same hash for two or more attacker-chosen inputs by appending data to each of them. The attack unveiled on Tuesday also costs as little as $45,000 to carry out. The attack disclosed in 2017, by contrast, didn't allow forgeries on specific predetermined document prefixes and was evaluated to cost from $110,000 to $560,000 on Amazon's Web Services platform, depending on how quickly adversaries wanted to carry it out.

The new attack is significant. While SHA1 has been slowly phased out over the past five years, it remains far from being fully deprecated. It's still the default hash function for certifying PGP keys in the legacy 1.4 version branch of GnuPG, the open-source successor to PGP application for encrypting email and files. Those SHA1-generated signatures were accepted by the modern GnuPG branch until recently, and were only rejected after the researchers behind the new collision privately reported their results.

Git, the world's most widely used system for managing software development among multiple people, still relies on SHA1 to ensure data integrity. And many non-Web applications that rely on HTTPS encryption still accept SHA1 certificates. SHA1 is also still allowed for in-protocol signatures in the Transport Layer Security and Secure Shell protocols.

In a paper presented at this week's Real World Crypto Symposium in New York City, the researchers warned that even if SHA1 usage is low or used only for backward compatibility, it will leave users open to the threat of attacks that downgrade encrypted connections to the broken hash function. The researchers said their results underscore the importance of fully phasing out SHA1 across the board as soon as possible.

"This work shows once and for all that SHA1 should not be used in any security protocol where some kind of collision resistance is to be expected from the hash function," the researchers wrote. "Continued usage of SHA1 for certificates or for authentication of handshake messages in TLS or SSH is dangerous, and there is a concrete risk of abuse by a well-motivated adversary. SHA1 has been broken since 2004, but it is still used in many security systems; we strongly advise users to remove SHA1 support to avoid downgrade attacks."

Original Submission

Samsung Devices Allegedly Use Qihoo 360 Spyware to Phone Home to China

takyon writes:

Samsung Phones Said to Come with Chinese "Spyware" Phoning Home

Samsung phones and tablets allegedly come with what is being described as "spyware" that communicates with Chinese servers regularly.

A reddit thread that has gone viral includes a closer look at a feature called Device Care and available on all Samsung phones and tablets.

As Samsung itself confirms, the "Storage" module of Device Care is "powered by 360," but no information is provided as to why it phones back home to China.

While Qihoo 360, the company that Samsung points to, has previously been involved in several privacy scandals that included hidden data collection, little is known about what's happening on phones and tablets developed by the South Korean manufacturer.

Chinese Spyware Found On All Samsung Phones

An Anonymous Coward writes:

A fan of Samsung phones has discovered Chinese spyware which is installed by default by Samsung, can't be removed, and for which has been sending packets to Chinese addresses. The storage scanner in the Device Care section of Samsung phones is a mandatory software install protected by the system making it hard to remove. No comment has been made by Samsung about why it includes this spyware in its main line of mobile phones.

Do you packet sniff your phone to find out where it is sending your data?

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