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chromas writes:

Targeted deep brain stimulation may improve treatment of obsessive-compulsive disorder

A person with obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD) experiences unwanted thoughts and behaviors, the urge for which they find difficult or impossible to resist. More than 2 percent of people are affected by obsessive thoughts and compulsive behaviors which severely impair daily activities. A treatment option for severe cases is deep brain stimulation, a technique which is also used in other disorders, such as Parkinson's disease. Deep brain stimulation involves the implantation of tiny electrodes into structures deep inside the brain. After implantation, these electrodes deliver very weak electric currents to help rebalance brain activity. By stimulating different areas of the brain, such as a fiber tract within the internal capsule or the subthalamic nucleus, this technique can help improve clinical symptoms in some cases. Treatment success depends on the accurate placement of electrodes and requires millimeter-level precision. The optimal stimulation target for patients with obsessive-compulsive disorders had not previously been identified.

For the first time, a team of researchers - led by Dr. Andreas Horn of Charité's Department of Neurology with Experimental Neurology - has been able to identify a specific nerve bundle which appears to be the optimal target for stimulation. The researchers studied 50 patients with obsessive-compulsive disorder who received treatment at a number of centers around the world. Using magnetic resonance imaging technology both before and after electrode placement, the researchers were able to visualize surrounding fibre tracts and test to see which of these the electrodes were selectively stimulating.

Journal Reference:
Ningfei Li, Juan Carlos Baldermann, Astrid Kibleur, et al. A unified connectomic target for deep brain stimulation in obsessive-compulsive disorder [open], Nature Communications (DOI: 10.1038/s41467-020-16734-3)

Original Submission

chromas writes:

You may be distracted by the pandemic but FYI: US Senate panel OK's backdoors-by-the-backdoor EARN IT Act

An amended version of America's controversial proposed EARN IT Act has been unanimously approved by the Senate Judiciary Committee – a key step in its journey to becoming law. This follows a series of changes and compromises that appear to address critics' greatest concerns while introducing fresh problems.

The draft legislation [PDF] is nominally supposed to help rid the web of child sexual abuse material (CSAM) by altering Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which strongly shields websites and apps, like Facebook and Twitter, from liability regardless of whatever their users share on those platforms, plus or minus some caveats. The proposed law rather ignored the fact that Section 230 already doesn't protect internet giants if their netizens upload illegal content, though.

Initial drafts of the law also contained two proposals that raised serious concerns from a broad range of groups and organizations. Firstly, the creation of a new 19-person committee that would be led by the Attorney General and dominated by law enforcement which would create content rules that tech companies would have to follow to retain legal protections. Secondly, and the suggestion that has security folks up in arms, is that those rules could require tech companies to provide Feds-only access to encrypted communications.

The idea is that companies would have to "earn" their legal shield – hence the name of the bill, EARN IT – by following the best practices created by the committee.

Following significant pushback on those points, the Judiciary Committee made changes aimed at gaining the full approval of all its members. In the now-OK'd version of the bill, the commission, called the National Commission on Online Child Sexual Exploitation Prevention, would still create its rules but it would be "voluntary" for online platforms to follow them. Instead, if tech companies did follow the commission's rules, it "would be a defense in any civil suit," said committee chair Lindsay Graham (R-SC).

Concerns over the law being used to force tech companies to introduce encryption backdoors led to an amendment [PDF], put forward by Senator Patrick Leahy (D-VT), that stated online platforms won't face civil or criminal liability if they are unable to break end-to-end encryption in their own services.

Taken together, the amendments are intended to attract wide congressional support for the bill, and pave the way to open up Section 230. And in this instance, it worked, with the committee green-lighting the revised version by 22-0 votes on Thursday, allowing it to progress a little further toward the statute books.

However, privacy advocates and tech titans, as well as some lawmakers, remain strongly opposed to the law. For one, the proposed commission will not be made up of elected officials, and will still be able to create rules that do not need congressional approval, putting an extraordinary amount of censorship power into the hands of very few people with limited accountability.

Original Submission

upstart writes in with an IRC submission:

Reddit and LinkedIn stop copying iPhone clipboards:

Reddit and LinkedIn are changing their apps to prevent them from looking at the Apple iPhone clipboard.

In a developer trial of the latest update to the phone's operating system, iOS 14, users are notified whenever an app accesses the device's copied text.

The notification exposed frequent scanning of the clipboard by apps that many users thought should not need to do so.

The two firms follow TikTok in changing their apps amid the criticism.

[...] In research published in March, Talal Haj Bakry and Tommy Mysk identified dozens of apps which they said had accessed the clipboard.

At the time Apple said it did not think it was a vulnerability.

There are legitimate reasons why an app needs clipboard access - for example, in order to share a website address with a message platform, or to grab a password from a password manager and paste it into a password-protected service.

Related:
Reddit says it's fixing code in its iOS app that copied clipboard contents
Apple iOS 14 Alerts Reveal Reddit App Is Reading User Clipboard Data
Reddit promises to stop accessing user clipboards after being exposed by iOS 14

Previously:
(2020-06-28) TikTok and 53 Other iOS Apps Still Snoop Your Sensitive Clipboard Data
(2020-02-27) Apple Takes Heat Over 'Vulnerable' iOS Cut-and-Paste Data

Original Submission

chromas writes:

Astronomers See Through the Milky Way's Dust to Track Where Radiation is Coming From at the Center of the Galaxy - Universe Today

It's an astronomical peculiarity that in some ways we know more about other galaxies than we do about our own. Scientists have examined the energy coming from the center of thousands of other spiral galaxies in visible light. But for our own Milky Way, that knowledge is blocked by thick clouds of gas and dust.

A team of researchers examined decades of data from the Wisconsin H-Alpha Mapper telescope (WHAM) for clues about the Milky Way's energy. Their results are in a paper titled "Discovery of diffuse optical emission lines from the inner Galaxy: Evidence for LI(N)ER-like gas."

[...] There's an enormous amount of hydrogen near the center of the Milky Way. That hydrogen is ionized by the energy from the galactic center. As an ionized gas, it's had its electrons stripped away. The WHAM telescope is designed to see the ionized hydrogen, which appears red when viewed with the 'scope.

It's not just that the hydrogen is ionized. After a gas is ionized, the ions usually recombine to neutrality in a short period of time. The fact that all of this hydrogen is continually ionized by a source of energy is the link between the WHAM data and the energy at the center of the Milky Way. Astronomers have thought that the source of energy for this ionization is star formation, but that's not conclusive.

WHAM is tailor-made to study ionized gas. The Milky Way contains a thick layer of it, called the Warm Ionized Medium (WIM), which is a distinct and major component of the galactic interstellar medium. The WIM is WHAM's primary target.

martyb writes:

I rolled out an improvement to the site's message processing template. =)

tl;dr:

(1) Based on a user preference, the site can send a message to inform you someone had replied to a comment you had posted. The message *now* contains links that take you directly to the *comment* instead of to the *story*. The message appears at https://soylentnews.org/my/inbox

(2) I made a mistake rolling out the change which will show up as extra text (__seclev__ 500 __version__ $Id$) below the text of the message. That was live for about an hour and is now fixed. I apologize for my error.

(3) Enjoy the added convenience!

[TMB note]:
(4) Also just added &noupdate=1 to the links to your comment and the reply so clicking on one reply won't mark every comment on the story as read anymore.
[/note]

Read on for more details, if you are curious.

chromas writes:

Millions Of Home Wi-Fi Routers Are Likely Vulnerable To Unpatched Linux Security Exploits

If you're reading this article from home, it's likely that you're connected to a consumer-grade Wi-Fi router, either wirelessly or via hard wired Ethernet. And if that's the case, you should probably take this time to upgrade your router's firmware ASAP. That is if an update is even available from the manufacturer.

We say this because the Fraunhofer Institute for Communication (FKIE) in Germany recently performed test of 127 home routers, to probe them for their resistance to security threats. Of the routers the researchers tested, 91 percent of them were found to be running some version of embedded Linux, which isn't surprising.

What was surprising, however, was that the researchers found that not a single router was free of security flaws. In fact, it was discovered that many of these routers were actually susceptible to hundreds of known security vulnerabilities.

Reference:
Peter Weidenbach, Johannes vom Dorp. Home Router Security Report 2020 (pdf), FKIE

Original Submission

takyon writes:

DNA Databases in the U.S. and China Are Tools of Racial Oppression

Two major world powers, the United States and China, have both collected an enormous number of DNA samples from their citizens, the premise being that these samples will help solve crimes that might have otherwise gone unsolved. While DNA evidence can often be crucial when it comes to determining who committed a crime, researchers argue these DNA databases also pose a major threat to human rights.

In the U.S., the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has a DNA database called the Combined DNA Index System (CODIS) that currently contains over 14 million DNA profiles. This database has a disproportionately high number of profiles of black men, because black Americans are arrested five times as much as white Americans. You don't even have to be convicted of a crime for law enforcement to take and store your DNA; you simply have to have been arrested as a suspect.

[...] As for China, a report that was published by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute in mid-June claims that China is operating the "world's largest police-run DNA database" as part of its powerful surveillance state. Chinese authorities have collected DNA samples from possibly as many as 70 million men since 2017, and the total database is believed to contain as many as 140 million profiles. The country hopes to collect DNA from all of its male citizens, as it argues men are most likely to commit crimes.

DNA is reportedly often collected during what are represented as free physicals, and it's also being collected from children at schools. There are reports of Chinese citizens being threatened with punishment by government officials if they refuse to give a DNA sample. Much of the DNA that's been collected has been from Uighur Muslims that have been oppressed by the Chinese government and infamously forced into concentration camps in the Xinjiang province.

Related:

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

EFF to Supreme Court: The Fourth Amendment Covers DNA Collection
EFF Sues Justice Dept. Over FBI's Rapid DNA Plans
Kuwait Creating Mandatory DNA Database of All Citizens, Residents--and Visitors
San Diego Police Department Accused of Unlawful DNA Collection From Minors
Massive DNA Collection Campaign in Xinjiang, China
Study Predicts Appearance From Genome Sequence Data
GEDmatch: "What If It Was Called Police Genealogy?"
Bavarian Law Broadens Police Surveillance and DNA Profiling Powers
DNA Collected from Golden State Killer Suspect's Car, Leading to Arrest
Another Alleged Murderer Shaken Out of the Family Tree
Indiana Murder Suspect Found by Using Genealogical Website
Public Ancestry Data Can be Used to Narrow Down the Identity Behind an Anonymous DNA Sample
Rapid DNA Analysis Machines Coming to Police Departments
FamilyTreeDNA Deputizes Itself, Starts Pitching DNA Matching Services To Law Enforcement
Genealogy Sites Have Helped Identify Suspects. Now They've Helped Convict One
U.S. to Collect DNA of All Undocumented Migrants
US Court Let Police Search GEDmatch's Entire DNA Database Despite Protections
China Uses DNA to Map Faces, With Help From the West
Cousin Took a DNA Test? Courts Could Use it to Argue You are More Likely to Commit Crimes
Ancestry Says Police Requested Access To Its DNA Database

Original Submission

chromas writes:

Divers uncover mysteries of earliest inhabitants of Americas deep inside Yucatan caves

Thousands of years ago, the first inhabitants of the Americas journeyed deep into caves in present-day Mexico to mine red ochre, a highly valued, natural clay earth pigment used as paint.

Now, according to a new study, scientists and divers have discovered the first evidence of this mining operation deep within underwater caves in Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula.

"What is remarkable is not only the preservation of the mining activity, but also the age and duration of it," said study lead author Brandi MacDonald of the University of Missouri. "We rarely, if ever, get to observe such clear evidence of ochre pigment mining of Paleoindian age in North America, so to get to explore and interpret this is an incredible opportunity for us.

[...] While MacDonald and her colleagues are uncertain exactly how this ochre was used, evidence from other parts of North America suggest it may have been used as an antiseptic, sunscreen or vermin repellent or for ritual and symbolic purposes such as funerals or art decoration.

Scientists said it's the oldest known ochre mine in the Americas.

Journal Reference:
Brandi L. MacDonald, James C. Chatters, Eduard G. Reinhardt, et al. Paleoindian ochre mines in the submerged caves of the Yucatán Peninsula, Quintana Roo, Mexico [open], Science Advances (DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.aba1219)

From the abstract:

Here, we present uniquely preserved evidence indicating that people were exploring underground cave systems to prospect and mine red ochre, an iron oxide earth mineral pigment used widely by North America's earliest inhabitants. Red ochre is the most commonly identified inorganic paint used throughout history worldwide. Considered to be a key component of human evolutionary development and behavioral complexity, ochre minerals were collected for use in rock paintings, mortuary practices, painted objects, and personal adornment for millennia. Red ochre use is a common characteristic of North American Paleoindians and is found associated with human remains, mobiliary art, toolkit caches, ochre grinding stones, ochre-processing areas, hide tanning, or other domestic or utilitarian contexts, including a component of grease, mastic, and hafting adhesive.

Original Submission

chromas writes:

A 'Viral' New Bird Song in Canada Is Causing Sparrows to Change Their Tune

Birds rarely change their chirpy little tunes, and when they do, it's typically limited to the local environment, where slight song variants basically become regional dialects. New research published today in Current Biology describes an extraordinary exception to this rule, in which a novel song sung by white-throated sparrows is spreading across Canada at an unprecedented rate. What's more, the new song appears to be replacing the pre-existing melody, which dates as far back as the 1960s.

Birds sing to mark their territories and attract prospective mates. Traditionally, white-throated sparrows in western and central Canada sing a song distinguished by its three-note ending. The new song, which likely started off as a regional dialect at some point between 1960 and 2000, features a distinctive two-note ending, and it's taking the sparrow community by storm. What makes the new ending so viral is a mystery to the study authors, led by Ken Otter from the University of Northern British Columbia.

"These songs are learned—otherwise new variants would not arise or spread," Otter told Gizmodo. "Where it started could have been a single bird, but it then gets learned by others, and they would form tutors for other birds. It wouldn't spread from a single bird."

The new song, which can now be heard from British Columbia through to central Ontario—a distance of over 1,900 miles (3,000 km)—spread between 2000 and 2019, according to the research. The old melody, with its highly musical triplet outro, is now at risk of going extinct.

Journal Reference:
Ken A. Otter. Continent-wide Shifts in Song Dialects of White-Throated Sparrows, Current Biology (DOI: 10.1016/j.cub.2020.05.084)

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Robotic scientists will 'speed up discovery'

Scientists at the University of Liverpool have unveiled a robotic colleague that has been working non-stop in their lab throughout lockdown. The £100,000 programmable researcher learns from its results to refine its experiments. "It can work autonomously, so I can run experiments from home," explained Benjamin Burger, one of the developers. Such technology could make scientific discovery "a thousand times faster", scientists say.

A new report by the Royal Society of Chemistry lays out a "post-Covid national research strategy", using robotics, artificial intelligence and advanced computing as part of a suite of technologies that "must be urgently embraced" to help socially distancing scientists continue their search for solutions to global challenges.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Building a Harder Diamond (SD)

Researchers at the University of Tsukuba used computer calculations to design a new carbon-based material even harder than diamond. This structure, dubbed "pentadiamond" by its creators, may be useful for replacing current synthetic diamonds in difficult cutting manufacturing tasks.

Diamonds, which are made entirely of carbon atoms arranged in a dense lattice, are famous for their unmatched hardness among known materials. However, carbon can form many other stable configurations, called allotropes. These include the familiar graphite in pencil lead, as well as nanomaterials such as carbon nanotubes. The mechanical properties, including hardness, of an allotrope depend mostly on the way its atoms bond with each other. In conventional diamonds, each carbon atom forms a covalent bond with four neighbors. Chemists call carbon atoms like this as having sp³ hybridization. In nanotubes and some other materials, each carbon forms three bonds, called sp² hybridization.

Now, researchers at the University of Tsukuba have explored what would happen if carbon atoms were arranged in a more complex structure with a mixture of sp³ and sp² hybridization.

[...] The scientists found that the Young's modulus, a measure of hardness, of pentadiamond was predicted to be almost 1700 GPa, compared with about 1200 GPa for conventional diamond.

Journal Reference:
Yasumaru Fujii, Mina Maruyama, Nguyen Thanh Cuong, Susumu Okada.Pentadiamond: A Hard Carbon Allotrope of a Pentagonal Network of sp² and sp³ C Atoms (DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.125.016001) (DX)

Original Submission

takyon writes:

H.266/VVC Standard Finalized With ~50% Lower Size Compared To H.265

The Versatile Video Coding (VVC) standard is now firmed up as H.266 as the successor to H.265/HEVC.

[...] Fraunhofer won't be releasing H.266 encoding/decoding software until this autumn. It will be interesting to see meanwhile what open-source solutions materialize. Similarly, how H.266 ultimately stacks up against the royalty-free AV1.

Fraunhofer HHI is proud to present the new state-of-the-art in global video coding: H.266/VVC brings video transmission to new speeds

Through a reduction of data requirements, H.266/VVC makes video transmission in mobile networks (where data capacity is limited) more efficient. For instance, the previous standard H.265/HEVC requires ca. 10 gigabytes of data to transmit a 90-min UHD video. With this new technology, only 5 gigabytes of data are required to achieve the same quality. Because H.266/VVC was developed with ultra-high-resolution video content in mind, the new standard is particularly beneficial when streaming 4K or 8K videos on a flat screen TV. Furthermore, H.266/VVC is ideal for all types of moving images: from high-resolution 360° video panoramas to screen sharing contents.

Versatile Video Coding (VVC/H.266):

In October 2015, the MPEG and VCEG formed the Joint Video Exploration Team (JVET) to evaluate available compression technologies and study the requirements for a next-generation video compression standard. The new algorithms should have 30-50% better compression rate for the same perceptual quality, with support for lossless and subjectively lossless compression. It should support resolutions from 4K to 16K as well as 360° videos. VVC should support YCbCr 4:4:4, 4:2:2 and 4:2:0 with 10 to 16 bits per component, BT.2100 wide color gamut and high dynamic range (HDR) of more than 16 stops (with peak brightness of 1000, 4000 and 10000 nits), auxiliary channels (for depth, transparency, etc.), variable and fractional frame rates from 0 to 120 Hz, scalable video coding for temporal (frame rate), spatial (resolution), SNR, color gamut and dynamic range differences, stereo/multiview coding, panoramic formats, and still picture coding. Encoding complexity of several times (up to ten times) that of HEVC is expected, depending on the quality of the encoding algorithm (which is outside the scope of the standard). The decoding complexity is expected to be about twice that of HEVC.

See also: MPEG: What Happened?
Sisvel Announces AV1 Patent Pool

Original Submission

looorg writes:

Google is offering to produce free chips for you. They have to be open source, they are using 20 year old technology and you'll get 100 of them. Could someone reverse engineer a SID-chip and have Goggle start to crank those suckers out?

https://www.theregister.com/2020/07/03/open_chip_hardware/
https://fossi-foundation.org/2020/06/30/skywater-pdk

Original Submission

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for RandomFactor:

Stingers Have Achieved Optimal Pointiness, Physicists Show:

The spines of a cactus, the proboscis of a mosquito, the quills of a porcupine: straight, pointed objects serve a plethora of functions in nature. Yet no matter the size, from bacteriophages' nanometer-scale tail fibers to narwhals' two- or three-meter-long tusk, these structures tend to be long and slender cones whose base diameter is much smaller than their length. Now researchers have used physics to explain why this narrow shape is optimal for stingers and other piercing objects—including human-made tools such as hypodermic needles.

A stingerlike object's dimensions are limited by two opposing constraints. To puncture its target, it must apply a force large enough to overcome the pressure created by friction. At the same time, this force must be smaller than the "critical load," the maximum force that the structure can support without bending or breaking. A large range of geometries, from long and narrow to short and wide, satisfy both constraints. Yet living organisms do not exhibit all the possible variability. Instead nature seems to prefer narrow designs with a base-diameter-to-length ratio of around 0.06.

[...] Jensen and his graduate student Anneline Christensen devised a simple theoretical model for a solid conical stinger at the edge of stability. Their calculations predicted that the optimal base diameter depended on only three factors: the object's length, the stiffness of its material and the friction from the pressure of the target tissue. The dependence on stiffness and pressure was weak: doubling the stiffness would allow the base diameter to decrease by only 21 percent, for instance. It was primarily the relationship between diameter and length that intrigued the duo.

inertnet writes:

Brain-eating amoeba: Warning issued in Florida after rare infection case:

A case of a rare brain-eating amoeba has been confirmed in Florida, according to health officials in the US state.

The Florida Department of Health (DOH) said one person in Hillsborough County had contracted Naegleria fowleri.

The microscopic, single-celled amoeba can cause an infection of the brain, and is usually fatal.

Commonly found in warm freshwater, the amoeba enters the body through the nose.

The DOH did not outline where the infection was contracted, or the patient's condition. The amoeba cannot be passed from person to person.

Infections are typically seen in southern US states. They are rare in Florida, where only 37 cases have been reported since 1962.

Original Submission