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An Anonymous Coward writes:

https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2020/01/27/coronavirus

As the world knows, we face an emerging virus threat in the Wuhan coronavirus (2019-nCoV) outbreak. The problem is, right now there are several important things that we don't know about the situation. The mortality rate, the ease of human-human transmission, the rate of mutation of the virus (and how many strains we might be dealing with – all of these need more clarity. Unfortunately, we've already gone past the MERS outbreak in severity (which until now was the most recent new coronavirus to make the jump into humans). If we're fortunate, though, we'll still have something that will be worrisome, but not as bad as (say) the usual flu numbers (many people don't realize that influenza kills tens of thousands of people in the US each year). The worst case, though, is something like 1918, and we really, really don't need that.

[Ed note: The linked story is by Derek Lowe who writes a "commentary on drug discovery and the pharma industry". He is perhaps best known for his "Things I Won't Work With" blog entries which are as hilarious as they are... eye opening. I have found him to be a no-nonsense writer who "tells things as they are", holding no punches. The whole story is worth reading as he clearly explains what a coronavirus is, about the current one that reportedly originated in Wuhan, China, what could be done about it, how long that would likely take, and what can be done for those who have already been infected. --martyb]

Previous Stories Referencing Derek Lowe:

*SPOILER* (click to show) *SPOILER* (click to hide)

Machine Learning Comes to Biochemistry
Ignition! The Funniest, Most Accessible Book on Rocket Science is Being Reissued
Another Failed Alzheimer's Disease Therapy
Marathon Pharmaceuticals is Part of the Problem
Lobbying Results in FDA Approval for Controversial Drug
"Right to Try" New Experimental Medicine and the Value of Experts
Cancer Hazard vs. Risk - Glyphosate
A Terrific Paper on the Problems of Drug Discovery
Things I Won't Work With

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Original Submission

martyb writes:

Nanoparticle chomps away plaques that cause heart attacks:

Michigan State University and Stanford University scientists have invented a nanoparticle that eats away—from the inside out—portions of plaques that cause heart attacks.

Bryan Smith, associate professor of biomedical engineering at MSU, and a team of scientists created a "Trojan Horse" nanoparticle that can be directed to eat debris, reducing and stabilizing plaque. The discovery could be a potential treatment for atherosclerosis, a leading cause of death in the United States.

The results, published in the current issue of Nature Nanotechnology, showcases the nanoparticle that homes in on atherosclerotic plaque due to its high selectivity to a particular immune cell type—monocytes and macrophages. Once inside the macrophages in those plaques, it delivers a drug agent that stimulates the cell to engulf and eat cellular debris. Basically, it removes the diseased/dead cells in the plaque core. By reinvigorating the macrophages, plaque size is reduced and stabilized.

[...] "We found we could stimulate the macrophages to selectively eat dead and dying cells—these inflammatory cells are precursor cells to atherosclerosis—that are part of the cause of heart attacks," Smith said. "We could deliver a small molecule inside the macrophages to tell them to begin eating again."

[...] "We were able to marry a groundbreaking finding in atherosclerosis by our collaborators with the state-of-the-art selectivity and delivery capabilities of our advanced nanomaterial platform. We demonstrated the nanomaterials were able to selectively seek out and deliver a message to the very cells needed," Smith said. "It gives a particular energy to our future work, which will include clinical translation of these nanomaterials using large animal models and human tissue tests. We believe it is better than previous methods."

Smith has filed a provisional patent and will begin marketing it later this year.

Journal Reference:
Alyssa M. Flores et al. Pro-efferocytic nanoparticles are specifically taken up by lesional macrophages and prevent atherosclerosis^$, Nature Nanotechnology (DOI: 10.1038/s41565-019-0619-3)

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

There may be a little more evidence to suggest that Neanderthals waded, swam, and even dove to gather resources along the shores of the Mediterranean. A new study claims Neanderthals at a coastal cave in Italy waded or dove to get clamshells straight off the seafloor to make scraping tools.

Neanderthals who lived at Grotta dei Moscerini around 100,000 years ago used the sturdy shells of Mediterranean smooth clams to make sharp-edged scraping tools. Clamshells wash up on beaches all the time, but University of Colorado archaeologist Paola Villa and her colleagues say that some of the worked shell tools at Moscerini look less like flotsam and more like someone scooped them off the seafloor while they were still fresh.

[...]

If Villa and her colleagues are right, Neanderthals at Moscerini may have practiced free diving, and they certainly did a lot of wading. Mediterranean smooth clams usually live in at least half a meter (1.6 feet) of water, and usually more. They bury themselves just beneath the sand, and it’s easy to spot where their feeding siphons reach up to the water above. Neanderthals could have easily scooped them up by hand if they were willing to go deep enough.

Members of the hominin family tree have used shells to cut and scrape things for at least 430,000 years, when Homo erectus groups on the shores of Java used freshwater mussel shells as tools. Even after agriculture reached most of Europe during the Neolithic period around 9,000 years ago, people still used mussel shells to clean hides and finish the surfaces of ceramic vases. But usually, people just picked shells up and used them, without any kind of reworking to make them better tools. Moscerini is one of the only known sites were people were working shells into a particular sharp-edged shape, as if it were flint.

PLOS ONE, 2020. DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0226690

Original Submission

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for SoyCow1337:

Researchers hope to make needle pricks for diabetics a thing of the past:

Patients with diabetes have to test their blood sugar levels several times a day to make sure they are not getting too high or too low. Studies have shown that more than half of patients don't test often enough, in part because of the pain and inconvenience of the needle prick.

One possible alternative is Raman spectroscopy, a noninvasive technique that reveals the chemical composition of tissue, such as skin, by shining near-infrared light on it. MIT scientists have now taken an important step toward making this technique practical for patient use: They have shown that they can use it to directly measure glucose concentrations through the skin. Until now, glucose levels had to be calculated indirectly, based on a comparison between Raman signals and a reference measurement of blood glucose levels.

While more work is needed to develop the technology into a user-friendly device, this advance shows that a Raman-based sensor for continuous glucose monitoring could be feasible, says Peter So, a professor of biological and mechanical engineering at MIT.

"Today, diabetes is a global epidemic," says So, who is one of the senior authors of the study and the director of MIT's Laser Biomedical Research Center. "If there were a good method for continuous glucose monitoring, one could potentially think about developing better management of the disease."

Sung Hyun Nam of the Samsung Advanced Institute of Technology in Seoul is also a senior author of the study, which appears today in Science Advances. Jeon Woong Kang, a research scientist at MIT, and Yun Sang Park, a research staff member at Samsung Advanced Institute of Technology, are the lead authors of the paper.

Original Submission

martyb writes:

UCI researchers identify a connection between early life adversity and opioid addiction:

[Note: UCI is the University of California, Irvine. --Ed.]

Published in Molecular Psychiatry, the study titled, "On the early life origins of vulnerability to opioid addiction," examines how early adversities interact with factors such as increased access to opioids to directly influence brain development and function, causing a higher potential for opioid addiction.

"We already know that genetics plays a major role in addiction vulnerability. But, this factor alone cannot account for the recent exponential rise in opioid abuse," said Tallie Z. Baram, MD, PhD, the Danette Shepard Chair in Neurological Sciences at the UCI School of Medicine and one of the senior researchers for the study. "Our team was determined to find out if environmental factors, like early life adversity, were contributing."

Until now, it was unclear whether alterations of the maturation and function of pleasure/reward circuits in the brain, resulting from ELA, actually caused individuals to be more vulnerable to opioid use disorder.

[...] For this study, researchers simulated ELA in rats by limiting bedding and nesting materials during a short, postnatal period of time. In female rats, this led to striking opioid addiction-like characteristics including an increased relapse-like behavior. Remarkably, as observed in addicted humans, the rats were willing to work very hard (pay a very high price) to obtain the drug.

"Our study provided novel insights into potential origins and nature of a reward circuit malfunction in the brain," said Baram. "Ultimately, we found that conditions during sensitive developmental periods can lead to vulnerability to the addictive effects of opioid drugs, especially in females, which is consistent with the prevalence of ELA in heroin addicted women."

Journal Reference:
Sophia C. Levis, Brandon S. Bentzley, Jenny Molet, Jessica L. Bolton, Christina R. Perrone, Tallie Z. Baram, Stephen V. Mahler. On the early life origins of vulnerability to opioid addiction. Molecular Psychiatry, 2019; DOI: 10.1038/s41380-019-0628-5

Original Submission

martyb writes:

Google, Mozilla Ban Hundreds of Browser Extensions in Chrome, Firefox:

[...] Both the Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox teams are cracking down on web browser extensions that steal user data and execute remote code, among other bad actions.

Browser extensions are add-ons that users can install to enhance their web surfing experience – they offer the ability to do everything from setting a special search wallpaper to displaying continuous weather data to language translation. This group also includes things such as ad blockers and security scanning.

[...] While extensions are useful, they can also introduce danger. In addition to intentionally malicious browser extensions that compromise users, legitimate offerings are also common targets for cybercriminals who look to exploit vulnerabilities in their code.

[...] In this case, Google said that after becoming aware of a widespread pattern of pernicious behavior on the part of a large number of Chrome extensions, it has disabled extensions that contain a monetary component – those that are paid for, offer in-browser transactions and those that offer subscription services. It's a temporary measure, according to the internet giant – but one that doesn't yet have a timeline for resolution.

"Earlier this month the Chrome Web Store team detected a significant increase in the number of fraudulent transactions involving paid Chrome extensions that aim to exploit users," it said in a notice, issued Friday. "Due to the scale of this abuse, we have temporarily disabled publishing paid items. This is a temporary measure meant to stem this influx as we look for long-term solutions to address the broader pattern of abuse."

The notice added, "We are working to resolve this as quickly as possible, but we do not have a resolution timeline at the moment. Apologies for the inconvenience."

[...] Mozilla meanwhile has taken a more case-by-case tack, disabling 197 Firefox add-ons in total for a range of improper activity. This includes remote code-execution and harvesting user data. The add-ons have not only been removed from the official Mozilla Add-on (AMO) portal, but have been disabled in the browsers of existing installs.

[...] That's not to say the extensions were intentionally malicious. Mozilla's policy is that extensions that dynamically fetch code from elsewhere, legitimate or otherwise, are in violation of its content security policy.

martyb writes:

Wild tomatoes resist devastating bacterial canker:

Many New York tomato growers are familiar with the scourge of bacterial canker—the wilted leaves and blistered fruit that can spoil an entire season's planting. For those whose livelihoods depend on tomatoes, this pathogen—Clavibacter michiganensis—is economically devastating.

In a new paper, Cornell researchers showed that wild tomato varieties are less affected by bacterial canker than traditionally cultivated varieties. The paper, "Characterizing Colonization Patterns of Clavibacter michiganensis During Infection of Tolerant Wild Solanum Species," published online in November in the journal Phytopathology.

[...] "Bacterial canker is pretty bad in New York," Peritore-Galve said, "but it's distributed worldwide, everywhere tomatoes are grown."

[...] The pathogen causes wounding and is spread by wind-blown rain; if one tomato gets infected, it can spread from plant to plant.

"Bacterial canker certainly can cause the complete loss of a field of tomatoes, and we see outbreaks of the disease every year," [professor Christine] Smart said. "Growers use disease management strategies, including spraying plants with copper-based products; however, once there is an outbreak it's difficult to control bacterial canker."

[...] Tomatoes are native to the Andes Mountains region of South America, where wild species have been free to evolve for thousands of years. Recently, plant breeders have identified wild tomatoes that seem to be less susceptible to bacterial canker and are resistant to other pathogens.

[...] Like individual veins in a human, xylem vessels transport water and nutrients from soil throughout the plant. The team found that in cultivated species, bacterial canker spreads everywhere, while in wild species the bacteria remain confined to certain xylem vessels without moving much into surrounding tissues.

"The wild tomatoes, for some reason, impede the ability of the bacteria to move up and down through the plants, which reduces symptoms—in this case, leaf wilt," Peritore-Galve said.

"Many times, it's not the fruit symptoms that cause the issue," [disease specialist Chuck] Bornt said, "it's the wilting of the plants or the plugging of the xylem cells that cause the plant to lose foliage, which then exposes the fruit to sun scald and other issues. ... [I]nfected fruit are also an issue, but in my opinion it's these other issues that have more impact."

Journal Reference:
F. Christopher Peritore-Galve et al, Characterizing Colonization Patterns of Clavibacter michiganensis During Infection of Tolerant Wild Solanum Species, Phytopathology (2019). DOI: 10.1094/PHYTO-09-19-0329-R

Original Submission

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for chromas:

Have a Search Warrant for Data? Google Wants You to Pay:

The tech giant has begun charging U.S. law enforcement for responses to search warrants and subpoenas.

[...] Facing an increasing number of requests for its users’ information, Google began charging law enforcement and other government agencies this month for legal demands seeking data such as emails, location tracking information and search queries.

Google’s fees range from $45 for a subpoena and $60 for a wiretap to $245 for a search warrant, according to a notice sent to law enforcement officials and reviewed by The New York Times. The notice also included fees for other legal requests.

A spokesman for Google said the fees were intended in part to help offset the costs of complying with warrants and subpoenas.

Federal law allows companies to charge the government reimbursement fees of this type, but Google’s decision is a major change in how it deals with legal requests.

Some Silicon Valley companies have for years forgone such charges, which can be difficult to enforce at a large scale and could give the impression that a company aims to profit from legal searches. But privacy experts support such fees as a deterrent to overbroad surveillance.

Google has tremendous amounts of information on billions of users, and law enforcement agencies in the United States and around the world routinely submit legal requests seeking that data. In the first half of 2019, the company received more than 75,000 requests for data on nearly 165,000 accounts worldwide; one in three of those requests came from the United States.

[...] The new fees could help recover some of the costs required to fill such a large volume of legal requests, said Al Gidari, a lawyer who for years represented Google and other technology and telecommunications companies. The requests have also grown more complicated as tech companies have acquired more data and law enforcement has become more technologically sophisticated.

“None of the services were designed with exfiltrating data for law enforcement in mind,” said Mr. Gidari, who is now the consulting privacy director at Stanford’s Center for Internet and Society.

[...] In April, The Times reported that Google had been inundated with a new type of search warrant request, known as geofence searches. Drawing on an enormous Google database called Sensorvault, they provide law enforcement with the opportunity to find suspects and witnesses using location data gleaned from user devices. Those warrants often result in information on dozens or hundreds of devices, and require more extensive legal review than other requests.

[...] Google will not ask for reimbursement in some cases, including child safety investigations and life-threatening emergencies, the spokesman said.

Original Submission

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for SoyCow1337:

Technique reveals whether models of patient risk are accurate:

After a patient has a heart attack or stroke, doctors often use risk models to help guide their treatment. These models can calculate a patient’s risk of dying based on factors such as the patient’s age, symptoms, and other characteristics.

[...] “Every risk model is evaluated on some dataset of patients, and even if it has high accuracy, it is never 100 percent accurate in practice,” says Collin Stultz, a professor of electrical engineering and computer science at MIT and a cardiologist at Massachusetts General Hospital. “There are going to be some patients for which the model will get the wrong answer, and that can be disastrous.”

Stultz and his colleagues from MIT, IBM Research, and the University of Massachusetts Medical School have now developed a method that allows them to determine whether a particular model’s results can be trusted for a given patient. This could help guide doctors to choose better treatments for those patients, the researchers say.

[...] Computer models that can predict a patient’s risk of harmful events, including death, are used widely in medicine. These models are often created by training machine-learning algorithms to analyze patient datasets that include a variety of information about the patients, including their health outcomes.

While these models have high overall accuracy, “very little thought has gone into identifying when a model is likely to fail,” Stultz says. “We are trying to create a shift in the way that people think about these machine-learning models. Thinking about when to apply a model is really important because the consequence of being wrong can be fatal.”

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for Cowardly_Anonymizer:

Avast packaged detailed user data to be sold for millions of dollars:

The popular antivirus program Avast has been selling users data to giant companies like Google, Home Depot, Microsoft and Pepsi, a joint investigation by Motherboard and PCMag found. Avast reportedly scraped data from its antivirus software and handed it off to its subsidiary Jumpshot, which repackaged the data and sold it, sometimes for millions of dollars. While Avast required users to opt-in to this data sharing, the investigation found that many were unaware that Jumpshot was selling their data.

The investigation incriminates a lot of big name companies. We don't know for certain which are past, present or potential clients, but the list includes Expedia, Intuit, Keurig, Condé Nast, Sephora, Loreal and more. Microsoft said it doesn't have a current relationship with the company. Yelp said Jumpshot was "engaged on a one-time basis," and Google did not respond to Microsoft[*] and PGMag's request for comment.

The data sold includes everything from Google searches, Google Maps location searches, activity on companies' LinkedIn pages, YouTube video visits and data on people visiting porn websites. The data is supposedly anonymized and does not include personal information, like names or contact info, but experts fear that it could be possible to de-anonymize certain users.

[* From context, I can only presume they mean Motherboard here -- Ed. (FP)]

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

Go compared to Python for small scale system administration scripts and tools:

We write a certain amount of scripts and tools around here. I like Go and have used it for a while, we have some tools already written in Go, and while I'm also a long term user of Python I'm on record as being unhappy with various developments around Python 3. Despite all of this, Python is the programming language I default to when I need to do something that's more complicated than a shell script (and not because of our policy on internal tools). Over time I've come to believe that Python has some important pragmatic properties in our sort of relatively small scale environment with generally modest use of local tools, despite Go's collection of appealing properties.

The first useful property Python has is that you can't misplace the source code for your deployed Python programs. Unless you do something very peculiar, what you deploy is the source code (well, a version of it). With Go you deploy a compiled artifact, which means that you may someday have to find the source code and then try to match your compiled binary up against some version of it. Of course your deployed Python program can drift out of sync with the master copy in your version control repository, but sorting that out only requires use of diff.

Closely related to this is that Python code is generally simple for people to modify and re-deploy. Modest Python scripts and tools are likely to be only a single .py file, which you can edit and copy around, and even somewhat bigger ones are likely to just be a directory that can be copied. Deploying Go code requires not just the correct source code but also a Go development environment and the knowledge of how to build Go programs from source. With Python, you can even try things out by just modifying the deployed version in place, then back-port your eventual changes to the official master copy in your version control system.

(These days Go's support for modules makes all of this simpler than it used to be, but there are still important considerations and some potential complexities.)

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

How do you beat the content producers at their own game? By creating a new model. Kanopy is a streaming service that charges Australian libraries for content — instead of users — making for a sustainable model for distributing content locked by copyright laws. By charging government-backed entities for distribution rights, the content makers obtain the money they are after while the public has limited access to the movies they want to see making for a win-win situation.

Original Submission

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for Cowardly_Anonymizer:

Detection of very high frequency magnetic resonance could revolutionize electronics:

The finding, reported today in Nature, is based on a magnetic resonance phenomenon in anti-ferromagnetic materials. Such materials, also called antiferromagnets, offer unique advantages for ultrafast and spin-based nanoscale device applications.

The researchers, led by physicist Jing Shi of the University of California, Riverside, generated a spin current, an important physical quantity in spintronics, in an antiferromagnet and were able to detect it electrically. To accomplish this feat, they used terahertz radiation to pump up magnetic resonance in chromia[*] to facilitate its detection.

In ferromagnets, such as a bar magnet, electron spins point in the same direction, up or down, thus providing collective strength to the materials. In antiferromagnets, the atomic arrangement is such that the electron spins cancel each other out, with half of the spins pointing in the opposite direction of the other half, either up or down.

The electron has a built-in spin angular momentum, which can precess the way a spinning top precesses around a vertical axis. When the precession frequency of electrons matches the frequency of electromagnetic waves generated by an external source acting on the electrons, magnetic resonance occurs and is manifested in the form of a greatly enhanced signal that is easier to detect.

In order to generate such magnetic resonance, the team of physicists from UC Riverside and UC Santa Barbara worked with 0.24 terahertz of radiation produced at the Institute for Terahertz Science and Technology's Terahertz Facilities at the Santa Barbara campus. This closely matched the precession frequency of electrons in chromia. The magnetic resonance that followed resulted in the generation of a spin current that the researchers converted into a DC voltage.

[...] Shi, who directs Department of Energy-funded Energy Frontier Research Center Spins and Heat in Nanoscale Electronic Systems, or SHINES, at UC Riverside, explained subterahertz and terahertz radiation are a challenge to detect. Current communication technology uses gigahertz microwaves.

"For higher bandwidth, however, the trend is to move toward terahertz microwaves," Shi said.  "The generation of terahertz microwaves is not difficult, but their detection is. Our work has now provided a new pathway for terahertz detection on a chip."

An Anonymous Coward writes:

U.S. drinking water widely contaminated with 'forever chemicals': environment watchdog

The contamination of U.S. drinking water with man-made "forever chemicals" is far worse than previously estimated with some of the highest levels found in Miami, Philadelphia and New Orleans, said a report on Wednesday by an environmental watchdog group.

The chemicals, resistant to breaking down in the environment, are known as perfluoroalkyl substances, or PFAS. Some have been linked to cancers, liver damage, low birth weight and other health problems.

The findings here by the Environmental Working Group (EWG) show the group's previous estimate in 2018, based on unpublished U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) data, that 110 million Americans may be contaminated with PFAS, could be far too low.

Per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Velodyne Will Sell a Lidar for $100

Velodyne claims to have broken the US $100 barrier for automotive lidar with its tiny Velabit, which it unveiled at CES earlier this month.

"Claims" is the mot juste because this nice, round dollar amount is an estimate based on the mass-manufacturing maturity of a product that has yet to ship. Such a factoid would hardly be worth mentioning had it come from some of the several-score odd lidar startups that haven't shipped anything at all. But Velodyne created this industry back during DARPA-funded competitions, and has been the market leader ever since.

"The projection is $100 at volume; we'll start sampling customers in the next few months," Anand Gopalan, the company's chief technology officer, tells IEEE Spectrum.

The company says in a release that the Velabit "delivers the same technology and performance found on Velodyne's full suite of state-of-the-art sensors." Given the device's small size, that must mean the solid-state version of the technology. That is, the non-rotating kind.

Related: Why Experts Believe Cheaper, Better Lidar is Right Around the Corner
Nikon Will Help Build Velodyne's Lidar Sensors for Future Self-Driving Cars
Contrary To Musk's Claims, Lidar Has Some Advantages In Self Driving Technology
Artificial Eyes: How Robots Will See In The Future

Original Submission