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An Anonymous Coward writes:

UK set for Brexit, as PM promises 'new dawn'

The UK [officially left] the European Union at 23:00 GMT, ending 47 years of membership.

[...] Pro and anti-Brexit demonstrations and marches are being held across the country, as the UK flag is taken down from EU institutions in Brussels.

Little will change immediately, as the UK begins a "transition period".

Most EU laws will continue to be in force - including the free movement of people - until the end of December, by which time the UK aims to have reached a permanent free trade agreement with the EU.

[...] The prime minister held a cabinet meeting at the National Glass Centre, a museum and arts centre in Sunderland, the city that was the first to back Brexit when results were announced after the referendum.

The meeting was held amid tight security.

[...] Mr Johnson told the Cabinet it was time to start a "new chapter in the United Kingdom's story" and end the division of the past three and a half years, according to a Downing Street spokesman.

The Cabinet discussed future trade deals, including seeking a a Canada-style free trade agreement with the EU, and Mr Johnson thanked Brexit Secretary Stephen Barclay for the work of his department, which is being wound up.

The PM told ministers the government aimed to have 80% of the UK's trade with other nations covered by free trade agreements within three years.

[...] "This is the moment when the dawn breaks and the curtain goes up on a new act. It is a moment of real national renewal and change."

[...] A new commemorative 50p coin will also come into circulation to mark the UK's withdrawal.

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canopic jug writes:

MIDI, a standard for digital music since 1981, has been updated to MIDI 2.0. New MIDI 2.0 is not dependent on any particular hardware implementation such as USB or Ethernet. Some of the main goals of the new protocol are to provide higher resolution, more channels, and improved performance and expressiveness. Another change is a move from a byte stream to data packets.

MIDI 2.0 is designed to "deliver an unprecedented level of nuanced musical and artistic expressiveness," and leans on three key design decisions to do so. Firstly its new 32-bit resolution makes for smoother, continuous, analogue feel - if you want that. Controllers will be easy to use and there will be more of them. Lastly major timing advances are present in the standard.

Also at the MIDI Association's press release, Details about MIDI 2.0™, MIDI-CI, Profiles and Property Exchange.

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An Anonymous Coward writes:

Murphy's law has it that bad things will happen at the worst possible time. What could be worse than losing power at a hospital with patients on the tables? One Australian hospital now knows the answer after power was cut to the hospital leaving doctors to complete a surgery using a mobile phone for light. Medical staff had completed the minor surgery and were starting to put stitches in when the lights went out, just before 2:00pm. It goes to show what ingenuity can bring when a need calls for it.

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Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

LeoLabs estimated that the satellites could pass within 15-30m of one another. Neither satellite could be controlled or moved. All we could do was watch whatever unfolded above us.

Collisions in space can be disastrous and can send high-speed debris in all directions. This endangers other satellites, future launches, and especially crewed space missions.

As a point of reference, NASA often moves the International Space Station when the risk of collision is just one in 100,000. Last year the European Space Agency moved one of its satellites when the likelihood of collision with a SpaceX satellite was estimated at one in 50,000. However, this increased to one in 1,000 when the US Air Force, which maintains perhaps the most comprehensive catalog of satellites, provided more detailed information.

Following LeoLabs' warning, other organizations such as the Aerospace Corporation began to provide similarly worrying predictions. In contrast, calculations based on publicly available data were far more optimistic. Neither the US Air Force nor NASA issued any warning.

This was notable, as the United States had a role in the launch of both satellites involved in the near-miss. The first is the Infrared Astronomical Satellite (IRAS), a large space telescope weighing around a tonne and launched in 1983. It successfully completed its mission later that year and has floated dormant ever since.

Based on an aristarchus submission:

Source: Technology Review

A new study [PDF] suggests what we've suspected for years is right: YouTube is a pipeline for extremism and hate.

How do we know that? More than 330,000 videos on nearly 350 YouTube channels were analyzed and manually classified according to a system designed by the Anti-Defamation League. They were labeled as either media (or what we think of as factual news), "alt-lite" intellectual dark web, or alt-right.

[...] The alt-right is what's traditionally associated with white supremacy, pushing for a white ethnostate. Those who affiliate with the "intellectual dark web" justify white supremacy on the basis of eugenics and "race science." Members of the alt-lite purport to not support white supremacy, though they believe in conspiracy theories about "replacement" by minority groups.

[...] The study's authors hypothesized that the alt-lite and intellectual dark web often serve as a gateway to more extreme, far-right ideologies. So they tested that by tracing the authors of 72 million comments on about two million videos between May and July of last year. The results were worrying. More than 26% of people who commented on alt-lite videos tended to drift over to alt-right videos and subsequently comment there.

upstart from IRC writes:

Anyone with a camera and $5 can now have a license plate reader:

Automatic license plate readers (ALPRs), software that allows computers to separate and analyze license plates from camera footage, could soon become ubiquitous in American neighborhoods thanks to a company called Rekor Systems. On Thursday, the firm started selling a product called Watchman. The $5 per month subscription allows homeowners to add the company's OpenALPR software to almost any home security camera.

[...] there are a couple of limitations to the $5 package. The software won't automatically log every single license that passes your home. As a homeowner, you'll also won't be able to obtain someone's name, address and location history from their license plate. That's a feature only law enforcement can access.

[...] privacy advocates fear the technology could be easily abused by both homeowners and law enforcement agencies to erode the privacy of innocent people further. And advocates have good reason to be skeptical of companies like Rekor. Amazon's Ring security service spent the majority of 2019 defending its partnerships with law enforcement agencies. In one instance, a report from Motherboard showed that the company had coached police on how to convince homeowners to hand over their Ring camera footage without a warrant. Similarly, it's easy to imagine a context in which police agencies could abuse the widespread proliferation of technology like OpenALPR.

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martyb writes:

Who has noticed anything new at SoylentNews these past couple days?

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

We have a new editor who has just come on board and has posted his first two stories to the site (one each for the previous two days).

You may recall that I posted a request for help a little over two weeks ago. I am happy to report that we had a positive response to the request... and a new editor has been in training starting a few days later!

Please join me in welcoming spiraldancing to his new role as an editor on staff. He is not new to the site as he created an account here a bit over 4 years ago. He worked his way through training on our development server. (Under the watchful eye and guidance of janrinok. JR not only walked SD through the mechanics of how to post a story, but also a goodly amount of what to be mindful of during the whole process. It is all too easy to make a mistake... which I can attest from personal experience!)

I look forward to seeing him bring his perspective and input to our team.

Welcome
Aboard!

Original Submission

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for Bytram:

Solving a biological puzzle: How stress causes gray hair: Scientists uncover link between the nervous system and stem cells that regenerate pigment:

When Marie Antoinette was captured during the French Revolution, her hair reportedly turned white overnight. In more recent history, John McCain experienced severe injuries as a prisoner of war during the Vietnam War -- and lost color in his hair.

For a long time, anecdotes have connected stressful experiences with the phenomenon of hair graying. Now, for the first time, Harvard University scientists have discovered exactly how the process plays out: stress activates nerves that are part of the fight-or-flight response, which in turn cause permanent damage to pigment-regenerating stem cells in hair follicles.

The study, published in Nature, advances scientists' knowledge of how stress can impact the body.

"Everyone has an anecdote to share about how stress affects their body, particularly in their skin and hair -- the only tissues we can see from the outside," said senior author Ya-Chieh Hsu, the Alvin and Esta Star Associate Professor of Stem Cell and Regenerative Biology at Harvard. "We wanted to understand if this connection is true, and if so, how stress leads to changes in diverse tissues. Hair pigmentation is such an accessible and tractable system to start with -- and besides, we were genuinely curious to see if stress indeed leads to hair graying. "

Bing Zhang, Sai Ma, Inbal Rachmin, Megan He, Pankaj Baral, Sekyu Choi, William A. Gonçalves, Yulia Shwartz, Eva M. Fast, Yiqun Su, Leonard I. Zon, Aviv Regev, Jason D. Buenrostro, Thiago M. Cunha, Isaac M. Chiu, David E. Fisher, Ya-Chieh Hsu. Hyperactivation of sympathetic nerves drives depletion of melanocyte stem cells. Nature, 2020; DOI: 10.1038/s41586-020-1935-3

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Freeman writes:

The maker of Purell hand sanitizers is washing away some unproven marketing claims that its products reduce school absenteeism and prevent infections from germs such as Ebola, norovirus, flu, and certain drug-resistant infections.

The marketing disinfection comes after the Food and Drug Administration issued a warning letter to Purell's parent company, GOJO Industries.

[...]Among the questionable claims are that Purell sanitizer:

• "kills more than 99.99% of most common germs that may cause illness in a healthcare setting, including MRSA [methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus] & VRE [vancomycin-resistant enterococci]."

• "can reduce student absenteeism by up to 51%... Additionally, teachers who follow this program also experience a 10% reduction of absenteeism."

• "may be effective against viruses such as the Ebola virus, norovirus, and influenza."

[...]On an FAQ page, GOJO also says that "the World Health Organization (WHO) and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) are recommending the use of alcohol-based hand sanitizer as a preventive measure for flu prevention."

But it should be noted that the WHO and the CDC emphasize hand washing as a primary method to prevent the spread of influenza (aside from vaccination). The CDC only recommends using hand sanitizer "if soap and water are not available."

[...]went on to say that GOJO has "begun updating relevant website and other digital content as directed by the FDA and are taking steps to prevent a recurrence."

https://arstechnica.com/science/2020/01/purells-unproven-disease-fighting-claims-get-sanitized-after-fda-warning/

Original Submission

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for Bytram:

Parkinson's disease may start before birth: Stem cell study finds malfunctioning brain cells in patients who were diagnosed before age 50; researchers test potential new treatment:

People who develop Parkinson's disease before age 50 may have been born with disordered brain cells that went undetected for decades, according to new Cedars-Sinai research. The research points to a drug that potentially might help correct these disease processes.

Parkinson's occurs when brain neurons that make dopamine, a substance that helps coordinate muscle movement, become impaired or die. Symptoms, which get worse over time, include slowness of movement, rigid muscles, tremors and loss of balance. In most cases, the exact cause of neuron failure is unclear, and there is no known cure.

At least 500,000 people in the U.S. are diagnosed with Parkinson's each year, and the incidence is rising. Although most patients are 60 or older when they are diagnosed, about 10% are between 21 and 50 years old. The new study, published in the journal Nature Medicine, focuses on these young-onset patients.

"Young-onset Parkinson's is especially heartbreaking because it strikes people at the prime of life," said Michele Tagliati, MD, director of the Movement Disorders Program, vice chair and professor in the Department of Neurology at Cedars-Sinai. "This exciting new research provides hope that one day we may be able to detect and take early action to prevent this disease in at-risk individuals." Tagliati was a co-author of the study.

To perform the study, the research team generated special stem cells, known as induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs), from cells of patients with young-onset Parkinson's disease. This process involves taking adult blood cells "back in time" to a primitive embryonic state. These iPSCs can then produce any cell type of the human body, all genetically identical to the patient's own cells. The team used the iPSCs to produce dopamine neurons from each patient and then cultured them in a dish and analyzed the neurons' functions.

[...]"Our technique gave us a window back in time to see how well the dopamine neurons might have functioned from the very start of a patient's life," said Clive Svendsen, PhD, director of the Cedars-Sinai Board of Governors Regenerative Medicine Institute and professor of Biomedical Sciences and Medicine at Cedars-Sinai. He was the study's senior author.

A. H. Laperle, S. Sances, N. Yucer, V. J. Dardov, V. J. Garcia, R. Ho, A. N. Fulton, M. R. Jones, K. M. Roxas, P. Avalos, D. West, M. G. Banuelos, Z. Shu, R. Murali, N. T. Maidment, J. E. Van Eyk, M. Tagliati, C. N. Svendsen. iPSC modeling of young-onset Parkinson's disease reveals a molecular signature of disease and novel therapeutic candidates. Nature Medicine, 2020; DOI: 10.1038/s41591-019-0739-1

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/zakdoffman/2020/01/30/severe-perfect-100-microsoft-flaw-confirmed-this-is-a-cloud-security-nightmare/#7b5493dfb4a4

'This is a cloud security nightmare," Check Point's Yaniv Balmas tells me. "It undermines the concept of cloud security. You can't prevent it, you can't protect yourself. The only one who can is the cloud provider." In this case that's Microsoft, provider of the hyper scale Azure. Check Point is on a roll—a string of disclosures for vulnerabilities detected and disclosed in recent months. We've had WhatsApp, TikTok and Zoom. Now it's Microsoft's turn. "We thought it would be good to find weak points in the integrated security in the cloud," Balmas explains. "We chose Azure as our target."

Microsoft quickly fixed the vulnerability when Check Point approached them in the fall, and customers who have patched their systems are now safe. The vulnerability is as punchy as it gets, "a perfect 10.0," Balmas says, referring to the CVE score on Microsoft's disclosure in October. "It's huge—I can't even start to describe how big it is." The reason for the hyperbole is that Balmas says his team found the first remote code execution (RCE) exploit on a major cloud platform. One user could break the cloud isolation separating themselves and others, intercepting code, manipulating programs. That isolation is the basis of cloud security, enabling the safe sharing of common hardware.

There was no detail when Microsoft patched the flaw, just a short explainer. “An attacker who successfully exploited this vulnerability could allow an unprivileged function run by the user to execute code,” the company said at the time, “thereby escaping the Sandbox.” This week, Microsoft confirmed Check Point’s report, telling me that “we released updates to address these issues in 2019.” The spokesperson added that “customers who have applied the updates are protected,” as covered at CVE-2019-1372 and CVE-2019-1234.

Original Submission

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for Bytram:

Opioid dependence found to permanently change brains of rats:

Approximately one-quarter of patients who are prescribed opioids for chronic pain misuse them, with five to 10 percent developing an opioid use disorder or addiction. In a new study, published Jan. 14, 2020 in PNAS, researchers at University of California San Diego School of Medicine found that opioid dependence produced permanent changes in the brains of rats.

More specifically, researchers reported that dependence on oxycodone, a potent opioid painkiller, led to permanent neuro-adaptations of the central nucleus of the amygdala (CeA) at the level of the nociceptin system, a brainwide network that modulates transmission of pain. Downregulation or suppression of the nociceptin system in the CeA led to an increase in activation of GABA receptors in rats highly addicted to opioids. The discovery is consistent with previous findings reporting CeA neuroa-daptations after cocaine and alcohol dependence.

When researchers restored nociceptin levels in the CeA, it resulted in normalization of GABAergic transmission and a reduction of the rats' opioid consumption.

"This suggests the nociceptin system may be a promising target for the treatment of opioid use disorder," said senior author Giordano de Guglielmo, PharmD, PhD, assistant professor in the Department of Psychiatry at UC San Diego School of Medicine.

"To reveal the role of nociceptin in the central nucleus of the amygdala, we used a multidisciplinary approach with behavioral models, molecular biology and electrophysiology," said first author Marsida Kallupi, PharmD, PhD, assistant professor in the Department of Psychiatry. "That allowed us to conclude that downregulation of this peptide may be partially responsible for excessive opioid addiction-like behaviors."

Marsida Kallupi, Lieselot L. G. Carrette, Jenni Kononoff, Leah C. Solberg Woods, Abraham A. Palmer, Paul Schweitzer, Olivier George, Giordano de Guglielmo. Nociceptin attenuates the escalation of oxycodone self-administration by normalizing CeA–GABA transmission in highly addicted rats. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2020; 201915143 DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1915143117

Original Submission

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for Bytram:

Local water availability is permanently reduced after planting forests:

River flow is reduced in areas where forests have been planted and does not recover over time, a new study has shown. Rivers in some regions can completely disappear within a decade. This highlights the need to consider the impact on regional water availability, as well as the wider climate benefit, of tree-planting plans.

"Reforestation is an important part of tackling climate change, but we need to carefully consider the best places for it. In some places, changes to water availability will completely change the local cost-benefits of tree-planting programmes," said Laura Bentley, a plant scientist in the University of Cambridge Conservation Research Institute, and first author of the report.

Planting large areas of trees has been suggested as one of the best ways of reducing atmospheric carbon dioxide levels, since trees absorb and store this greenhouse gas as they grow. While it has long been known that planting trees reduces the amount of water flowing into nearby rivers, there has previously been no understanding of how this effect changes as forests age.

The study looked at 43 sites across the world where forests have been established, and used river flow as a measure of water availability in the region. It found that within five years of planting trees, river flow had reduced by an average of 25%. By 25 years, rivers had gone down by an average of 40% and in a few cases had dried up entirely. The biggest percentage reductions in water availability were in regions in Australia and South Africa.

Partial river flow recovery with forest age is rare in the decades following establishment (open, DOI: 10.1111/gcb.14954) (DX)

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takyon writes:

Coronavirus declared global health emergency by WHO

The new coronavirus has been declared a global emergency by the World Health Organization, as the outbreak continues to spread outside China.

"The main reason for this declaration is not what is happening in China but what is happening in other countries," said WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus.

The concern is that it could spread to countries with weaker health systems.

1st Person-To-Person Spread Of Coronavirus Has Occurred In U.S., CDC Says

An Anonymous Coward writes:

Coronavirus: US reports first person-to-person transmission

Chicago health officials have reported the first US case of human-to-human transmission of the deadly coronavirus.

The new patient is the spouse of a Chicago woman who carried the infection back from Wuhan, China, the US Centers for Disease Control said on Thursday.

The discovery marks the second report of the virus in Illinois and the sixth confirmed case in the US.

Mojibake Tengu writes:

This paper provides early estimates of 2019-nCoV epidemiological parameters: Novel coronavirus 2019-nCoV: early estimation of epidemiological parameters and epidemic predictions (open, DOI: 10.1101/2020.01.23.20018549) (DX)

Used model does not offer much grounds for optimism.

Previously:

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

China Reports 3rd Death, Nearly 140 New Cases of Coronavirus
China Confirms Human-To-Human Transmission of New Coronavirus; CDC Confirms First US Case
Coronavirus: Millions Quarantined in Wuhan City
China Battles Coronavirus Outbreak: All the Latest Updates
In The Pipeline: Coronavirus
Plague Inc. Maker: Don't use our Game for Coronavirus Modeling

Original Submission #1  Original Submission #2  Original Submission #3

kreuzfeld writes:

Today marks the final mission of NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope. Conceived of as an infrared-optimized "Great Observatory," Spitzer has spend the last 6002 days providing Earthlings with an unprecedented view into other galaxies, our own solar system, and (unexpected to its designers!) planets around other stars. But in its Earth-trailing solar orbit, Spitzer is now over 1.5 astronomical units from the Earth: radio transmissions are increasingly difficult, and (more importantly) Spitzer's operating costs were ultimately deemed to be too high relative to its science output.

Spitzer's infrared capabilities won't be replaced until 2021 (at the earliest) when NASA's James Webb Space Telescope -- an even larger successor to Spitzer and the Hubble -- is anticipated to launch. Bon voyage, Spitzer -- we'll see you again in about 30 years when our orbits meet up again.

Original Submission