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upstart writes in with an IRC submission for Cascade:

Anti-Piracy Copyright Lawyer Decides To Abuse Trademarks To Shut Down Pirates:

Kerry Culpepper, Hawaiian IP attorney, [decided] to register a bunch of trademarks for piracy related terms and [is] then going around and shutting down accounts for "pirate" services on social media sites.

[...] The idea I suppose is to try to claim that 42 Ventures is suddenly and recently using these marks in commerce, the only way it would have a valid trademark. That, however, is bullshit. The terms and actual content creators were already long using those marks, as were the holders of the social media accounts 42 Ventures is busy taking down. In other words, Culpepper appears to be perfectly willing to abuse trademark law in his efforts to enforce copyright law. That isn't exactly a consistent respect for intellectual property now, is it?

Original Submission

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for Cascade:

Microsoft Brings Linux Files to Windows 10 with New Update:

Windows 10 build 19603, which is now available for download in the Fast ring, includes File Explorer integration in the Windows Subsystem for Linux, or WSL.

In other words, if you have already installed WSL on your device, a new Linux drive will show up in File Explorer, letting you browse files normally.

Support for accessing Linux files that you work with in WSL isn't new in Windows 10, as such capabilities have previously been enabled in an older release. In fact, even production devices can do this starting with Windows 10 version 1903, which was released in the spring of 2019.

[...] "We've had the ability to access your Linux files since Windows 1903, but now you can easily get to them from your left-hand navigation pane in File Explorer. Selecting the Linux icon will show you a view of all your distros, and selecting those will place you in the Linux root file system for that distro," Microsoft explains.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Rebranded Ethernet Technology Consortium Unveils 800 Gigabit Ethernet

With an increasing demand for networking speed and throughput performance within the datacenter and high performance computing clusters, the newly rebranded Ethernet Technology Consortium has announced a new 800 Gigabit Ethernet technology. Based upon many of the existing technologies that power contemporary 400 Gigabit Ethernet, the 800GBASE-R standard is looking to double performance once again, to feed ever-hungrier datacenters.

The recently-finalized standard comes from the Ethernet Technology Consortium, the non-IEEE, tech industry-backed consortium formerly known as the 25 Gigabit Ethernet Consortium. The group was originally created to develop 25, 50, and 100 Gigabit Ethernet technology, and while IEEE Ethernet standards have since surpassed what the consortium achieved, the consortium has stayed formed to push even faster networking speeds, and changing its name to keep with the times. Some of the biggest contributors and supporters of the ETC include Broadcom, Cisco, Google, and Microsoft, with more than 40 companies listed as integrators of its work.

[...] All told, the 800GbE standard is the latest step for an industry as a whole that is moving to Terabit (and beyond) Ethernet. And while those future standards will ultimately require faster [Serializer/Deserializer (SerDes)] to drive the required individual lane speeds, for now 800GBASE-R can deliver 800GbE on current generation hardware. All of which should be a boon for the standard's intended hyperscaler and HPC operator customers, who are eager to get more bandwidth between systems.

Related: As 100 Gbps Ethernet Picks Up, Google Ponders 5 Petabits Per Second
Ethernet Switch Sales Flat, But 40 Gbps Sales Take Off
Here Comes 5Gbps Networking Over Standard Cables
Aquantia Launches 2.5/5/10G Ethernet Chips for Consumers
25G/50G Ethernet Specification Finalized

Original Submission

"exec" writes:

NASA Reveals Wild Project For Turning a Moon Crater Into a Radio Telescope

NASA just gave out a new round of grants for its favourite up and coming innovative space projects – one of which is a plan to fit a 1 kilometre (3,281 foot) radio telescope inside a crater on the far side of the Moon.

The Lunar Crater Radio Telescope (LCRT) would be able to measure wavelengths and frequencies that can't be detected from Earth, working unobstructed by the ionosphere or the various other bits of radio noise surrounding our planet.

Should the plans for the LCRT become a reality – and the new grant money could get it closer to that – it would be the largest filled-aperture radio telescope in the Solar System.

Lunar Crater Radio Telescope (LCRT) on the Far-Side of the Moon

-- submitted from IRC

Original Submission

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for SoyCow8192:

I was bored, so I watched the movie that astronauts must view before launch:

Sometime Wednesday, perhaps around the time this article is published, NASA astronaut Chris Cassidy and his two Russian crew mates—Anatoly Ivanishin and Ivan Vagner—will repair to their quarantine crew quarters for movie night in the Cosmonaut Hotel.

[...] The Russians have the oldest space program in the world and by far the most traditions and superstitions related to launch, including peeing on the wheel of the bus that takes the crew to the launch pad—a tradition that dates back to Yuri Gagarin's first human spaceflight in 1961.

Among those traditions is watching a movie[*] the day before launch in the Cosmonaut Hotel. It's always the same movie, White Sun of the Desert. No one is quite sure why this Soviet-era film, which came out in 1970, is always watched (yes, it's mandatory). But it likely dates to Soyuz 12, in 1973, when cosmonauts Vasily Lazarev and Oleg Makarov watched the movie before their mission. This return-to-flight mission followed the disastrous Soyuz 11 flight two years earlier, when the spacecraft depressurized as the crew prepared to reenter Earth's atmosphere, killing all three men. Soyuz 12 proved a success, and the movie came to be seen as a good luck charm. Since then, over the course of five decades, the Soyuz has never lost a crew.

[...] The film has nothing to do with space. However, I do think the symbolism of [the main character] Sukhov being far from home and his wife might hold parallels for astronauts about to fly into space, far from their loved ones back on Earth. They will be in the vast expanses of space rather than the empty dunes of the desert, but they will be lonely all the same.

[*] Available on YouTube.

Original Submission

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for Bytram:

Boeing making new 737 MAX software updates to address computer issue:

Boeing Co (BA.N) said late on Tuesday it will make two new software updates to the 737 MAX's flight control computer as it works to win regulatory approval to resume flights after the jet was grounded following two fatal crashes in five months.

The planemaker confirmed to Reuters that one issue involves hypothetical faults in the flight control computer microprocessor, which could potentially lead to a loss of control known as a runaway stabilizer, while the other issue could potentially lead to disengagement of the autopilot feature during final approach. Boeing said the software updates will address both issues.

The Federal Aviation Administration said on Tuesday it is in contact with Boeing as it "continues its work on the automated flight control system on the 737 MAX. The manufacturer must demonstrate compliance with all certification standards."

The largest U.S. planemaker has been dealing with a number of software issues involving the plane that has been grounded since March 2019. Boeing halted production in January. Boeing said it does not expect the issues to impact its current forecast of a mid-year return to service for the plane. Boeing said the new software issues are not tied to a key anti-software system known as MCAS faulted in both fatal crashes.

Original Submission

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for SoyCow8192:

NASA sees an "exponential" jump in malware attacks as personnel work from home:

NASA has experienced an exponential increase in malware attacks and a doubling of agency devices trying to access malicious sites in the past few days as personnel work from home, the space agency's Office of the Chief Information Officer said on Monday.

"A new wave of cyber-attacks is targeting Federal Agency Personnel, required to telework from home, during the Novel Coronavirus (COVID-19) outbreak," officials wrote in a memo. The wave over the past few days includes a(n):

• Doubling of email phishing attempts
• Exponential increase in malware attacks on NASA systems
• Double the number of mitigation-blocking of NASA systems trying to access malicious sites (often unknowingly) due to users accessing the Internet

The last item is particularly concerning because it suggests that NASA employees and contractors are clicking on malicious links sent in email and text messages at twice the rate as normal. Tricking people into clicking on malicious links or opening malicious email attachments remains one of the easiest ways to gain entry into enterprise networks and individual computers users alike.

[...] The risk to all types of attacks is only heightened by the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, which has sent millions of people working from home almost overnight, with little time for IT departments to formalize procedures for maintaining the security of organization networks.

Original Submission

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for Bytram:

It's now or never: Visual events have 100 milliseconds to hit brain target or go unnoticed: Mouse study reveals key details about visual processing:

Researchers at the National Eye Institute (NEI) have defined a crucial window of time that mice need to key in on visual events. As the brain processes visual information, an evolutionarily conserved region known as the superior colliculus notifies other regions of the brain that an event has occurred. Inhibiting this brain region during a specific 100-millisecond window inhibited event perception in mice. Understanding these early visual processing steps could have implications for conditions that affect perception and visual attention, like schizophrenia and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). The study was published online in the Journal of Neuroscience. NEI is part of the National Institutes of Health.

"One of the most important aspects of vision is fast detection of important events, like detecting threats or the opportunity for a reward. Our result shows this depends on visual processing in the midbrain, not only the visual cortex," said Richard Krauzlis, Ph.D., chief of the Section on Eye Movements and Visual Selection at NEI and senior author of the study.

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Viruses that jump from animals to people, like the one responsible for COVID-19, will likely become more common as people continue to transform natural habitats into agricultural land, according to a new Stanford study.

The analysis, published in Landscape Ecology, reveals how the loss of tropical forests in Uganda puts people at greater risk of physical interactions with wild primates and the viruses they carry. The findings have implications for the emergence and spread of infectious animal-to-human diseases in other parts of the world, and suggest potential solutions for curbing the trend.

[...] Unlike previous studies that examined the issue from primarily an ecological standpoint, the Stanford study is the first to integrate landscape-level ecological factors with individual-level behavioral factors and weigh risks to human health.

[...] The researchers were surprised to find some of their assumptions turned upside down. For example, small fragments of residual forest—not larger expanses of habitat—were most likely to be the site of human-wild primate contacts due to their shared borders with agricultural landscapes.

Similarly, the researchers speculate that increasing intrusion of agriculture into forests and resulting human activities in these areas could lead to more spillover of infections from wild primates to humans worldwide.

The researchers suggest that relatively small buffer zones, such as tree farms or reforestation projects, around biodiversity-rich forests could dramatically lessen the likelihood of human-wild primate interaction. Using external resources, such as national or international aid, to provide fuel and construction material or monetary supplements could also reduce pressure on people to seek out wood in forested areas.

"At the end of the day, land conservation and the reduction of forest fragmentation is our best bet to reduce human-wild animal interactions," said study coauthor Tyler McIntosh, a former graduate student in the Stanford Earth Systems Program now working at the Center for Western Priorities.

More information: Laura S. P. Bloomfield et al, Habitat fragmentation, livelihood behaviors, and contact between people and nonhuman primates in Africa, Landscape Ecology (2020). DOI: 10.1007/s10980-020-00995-w

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Research led by scientists at the University of Southampton has found settlers arrived in East Polynesia around 200 years earlier than previously thought.

Colonisation of the vast eastern Pacific with its few and far-flung island archipelagos was a remarkable achievement in human history. Yet the timing, character, and drivers of this accomplishment remain poorly understood.

However, this new study has found a major change in the climate of the region, which resulted in a dry period, coinciding with the arrival of people on the tiny island of Atiu, in the southern group of the Cook Islands, around 900AD.

Findings are published in the paper, 'Human settlement of East Polynesia earlier, incremental and coincident with prolonged South Pacific drought' in the journal PNAS.

"The ancestors of the Polynesians, the Lapita people, migrated east into the Pacific Ocean as far as Fiji, Tonga and Samoa, reaching them around 2800 years ago. But for almost 1500 years humans failed to migrate any further into the pacific," explains lead researcher, Professor David Sear of the University of Southampton. "Our research gives us a much more accurate timescale of when people first arrived in the region and helps answer some key questions about why they made their hazardous journey east."

[...] Professor Sear adds: "Today, changing climate is again putting pressures on Pacific island communities, only this time the option to migrate is not so simple. Within two centuries of first arrival those first settlers changed the landscape and the ecology, but were able to make a home. Pacific islanders now live with modified ecologies, permanent national boundaries and islands already occupied by people. The ability to migrate in response to changing climate is no longer the option it once was."

Journal Reference:

David A. Sear, et. al. Human settlement of East Polynesia earlier, incremental, and coincident with prolonged South Pacific drought. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2020; 201920975 DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1920975117

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Bottle emptying is a phenomenon most of us have observed while pouring a beverage. Researchers from the Indian Institute of Technology Roorkee discovered how to make bottles empty faster, which has wide-ranging implications for many areas beyond the beverage industry.

Bubbles have been studied extensively for centuries, including early efforts by Leonardo da Vinci who famously noted the sinusoidal rise of bubbles within a pool. The growth dynamics of bubbles at the mouth of a bottle depend on the thermophysical properties of the fluid, the bottle geometry and its angle of inclination. These inextricably intertwined parameters have made bottle-emptying dynamics the next frontier for bubble physicists.

In this week's Physics of Fluids, Lokesh Rohilla and Arup Kumar Das explore this bottle-emptying phenomenon from the perspective of bubble dynamics on a commercial bottle by using high-speed photography. Image analysis allowed them to conceptualize various parameters, such as liquid film thickness, bubble aspect ratio, rise velocity and bottle emptying modes.

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

[...] "Our experiments suggest there is a critical angle of inclination, after which any further increase in the inclination of the bottle won't lead to further reduction in the bottle emptying time," said Rohilla. "This occurs due to the saturation of the voidage, space occupied by air within liquid surrounding, at the bottle's mouth with the angle of inclination."

-- submitted from IRC

More information: "Fluidics in an emptying bottle during breaking and making of interacting interfaces," Physics of Fluids (2020). DOI: 10.1063/5.0002249

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

The Belle II experiment has been collecting data from physical measurements for about one year. After several years of rebuilding work, both the SuperKEKB electron–positron accelerator and the Belle II detector have been improved compared with their predecessors in order to achieve a 40-fold higher data rate.

Scientists at 12 institutes in Germany are involved in constructing and operating the detector, developing evaluation algorithms, and analyzing the data.

The Max Planck Institute for Physics, the Semiconductor Laboratory of the Max Planck Society, the Ludwigs-Maximilians-Universität and the Technical University of Munich made leading contributions to the new development of the highly sensitive innermost detector, the Pixel Vertex Detector and the software for analyzing the data.

With the help of Belle II, scientists are looking for traces of new physics that can be used to explain the unequal occurrence of matter and anti-matter and the mysterious dark matter.

One of the so far undiscovered particles that the Belle II detector is looking for is the Z′ boson – a variant of the Z boson, which acts as an exchange particle for the weak interaction.

As far as we know, about 25 percent of the universe consists of dark matter, whereas visible matter accounts for just under 5 percent of the energy budget. Both forms of matter attract each other through gravity.

Dark matter thus forms a kind of template for the distribution of visible matter. This can be seen, for example, in the arrangement of galaxies in the universe.

DOI: DOI:10.1103/PhysRevLett.124.141801

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Fatty liver disease not associated with alcohol consumption, which is called Nonalcoholic Fatty Liver Disease or NAFLD, affects more than one billion people worldwide. Even in children the numbers are overwhelming, with up to 80 percent of pediatric patients who are considered obese affected worldwide. People with NAFLD can progress to a severe form known as nonalcoholic steatohepatitis (NASH), which puts patients at higher risk for cirrhosis or liver cancer.

With no definitive treatment options or early detection methods yet discovered, researchers have been hard at work to identify early biomarkers of this disease. "This becomes also especially important in the context of diabetes because individuals with Type 2 diabetes are much more susceptible to this disease," says Rohit N. Kulkarni, MD, PhD, Section Head, Senior Investigator, Islet Cell and Regenerative Biology, Joslin Diabetes Center, and Professor of Medicine, Harvard Medical School.

But recent research from Dr. Kulkarni's lab at Joslin has uncovered a biomarker in humans tied to the development of NAFLD that might help doctors detect early stages of the disease. The researchers also determined that this biomarker, a protein known as "neuronal regeneration related protein" (or NREP), plays a significant role in the regulation of a pathway that is currently being reviewed in clinical trials as a treatment option for the disease. The study was published today in Journal of Clinical Investigation.

"We identified NREP as a new biomarker for NAFLD that is involved in the regulation of liver fat metabolism and in a process called fibrosis that occurs during the progression of the fatty liver disease that may lead to cirrhosis and liver cancer" says Dario F. De Jesus, MSc, PhD, a postdoctoral research fellow in the Kulkarni Lab at Joslin and lead author on the study.

Journal Reference:

Dario F. De Jesus, Kazuki Orime, Dorota Kaminska, Tomohiko Kimura, Giorgio Basile, Chih-Hao Wang, Larissa Haertle, Renzo Riemens, Natalie K. Brown, Jiang Hu, Ville Männistö, Amélia M. Silva, Ercument Dirice, Yu-Hua Tseng, Thomas Haaf, Jussi Pihlajamäki, Rohit N. Kulkarni. Parental metabolic syndrome epigenetically reprograms offspring hepatic lipid metabolism in mice. Journal of Clinical Investigation, 2020; DOI: 10.1172/JCI127502

Original Submission

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for Bytram:

Blocking the Iron Transport Could Stop Tuberculosis:

"The transport protein, which is located in the bacterial membrane, is essential for the survival of the pathogens. If IrtAB is absent or not functioning, M. tuberculosis can no longer reproduce inside the human cell", says Seeger.

Using a combination of cryo-electron microscopy and X-ray crystallography, the researchers solved for the first time a high-resolution structure of the transport protein IrtAB. This analysis was done in collaboration with Ohad Medalia, professor at the Department of Biochemistry of UZH. According to its spatial structure, IrtAB belongs to the so-called ABC exporters, which are typically involved in the efflux of molecules out of the bacterial cell. "However, we were able to show that IrtAB in fact imports mycobactins into M. tuberculosis. It therefore transports molecules in the opposite direction than expected," says Markus Seeger.

[...] "IrtAB is a potential drug target, because its deletion renders M. tuberculosis inactive and incapable of infection. With our structural and functional elucidation of IrtAB, we opened avenues to develop novel tuberculosis drugs that inhibit the iron transport into the bacteria", Seeger concludes. "In view of Covid-19, a disease that also affects the lungs, tuberculosis will likely play a more important role again in the future. It is quite conceivable that patients weakened by Covid-19 will show increased infection rates with tuberculosis," he adds.

More information: Fabian M. Arnold et al, The ABC exporter IrtAB imports and reduces mycobacterial siderophores, Nature (2020). DOI: 10.1038/s41586-020-2136-9

Journal information: Nature

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Asthma patients react even to low concentrations of some allergens with severe inflammation of the bronchi. This is also accompanied by increased mucus production, which makes breathing even more difficult. A central role here is played by cells of the innate immune system, which were only discovered a few years ago and are called Innate Lymphoid Cells (ILC). They perform an important protective function in the lungs by regenerating damaged mucous membranes. For this purpose they produce inflammatory messengers from the group of cytokines, which stimulate division of the mucosal cells and promote mucus production.

This mechanism is normally very useful: It allows the body to quickly repair damage caused by pathogens or harmful substances. The mucus then transports the pathogens out of the bronchial tubes and protects the respiratory tract against re-infection. "With asthma, however, the inflammatory reaction is much stronger and longer than normal," emphasizes Prof. Dr. Christoph Wilhelm from the Institute for Clinical Chemistry and Clinical Pharmacology, who is a member of the Cluster of Excellence ImmunoSensation at the University of Bonn.

[...] The ILCs multiply rapidly during this process and produce large amounts of proinflammatory cytokines. [...] "We have investigated which metabolic processes are active in the ILCs when they switch to reproduction mode," explains Wilhelm's colleague Dr. Fotios Karagiannis. "Then we tried to block these metabolic pathways and thereby reduce the speed at which the cells divide."