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Phoenix666 writes:

Bacteria with Metal Diet Discovered in Dirty Glassware :

Caltech microbiologists have discovered bacteria that feed on manganese and use the metal as their source of calories. Such microbes were predicted to exist over a century ago, but none had been found or described until now.

"These are the first bacteria found to use manganese as their source of fuel," says Jared Leadbetter, professor of environmental microbiology at Caltech who, in collaboration with postdoctoral scholar Hang Yu, describes the findings in the July 16 issue of the journal Nature. "A wonderful aspect of microbes in nature is that they can metabolize seemingly unlikely materials, like metals, yielding energy useful to the cell."

The study also reveals that the bacteria can use manganese to convert carbon dioxide into biomass, a process called chemosynthesis. Previously, researchers knew of bacteria and fungi that could oxidize manganese, or strip it of electrons, but they had only speculated that yet-to-be-identified microbes might be able to harness the process to drive growth.

Leadbetter found the bacteria serendipitously after performing unrelated experiments using a light, chalk-like form of manganese. He had left a glass jar soiled with the substance to soak in tap water in his Caltech office sink before departing for several months to work off campus. When he returned, the jar was coated with a dark material.

[...] The black coating was in fact oxidized manganese generated by newfound bacteria that had likely come from the tap water itself. "There is evidence that relatives of these creatures reside in groundwater, and a portion of Pasadena's drinking water is pumped from local aquifers," he says.

Journal Reference:
Hang Yu, Jared R. Leadbetter. Bacterial chemolithoautotrophy via manganese oxidation, Nature (DOI: 10.1038/s41586-020-2468-5)

The only thing left is to submerge the glassware in "a fresh cup of really hot tea... and turn it on!"

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

Lenovo brings AMD to its gaming laptops:

It's a big week for AMD and Lenovo's partnership: On Wednesday, the two co-launched the new Ryzen Threadripper Pro processor for Lenovo's new ThinkStation P620, and Thursday, Lenovo followed up with new gaming systems. They're essentially variations on the Intel-based systems announced in May.

The laptop CPU of choice for the laptops is unsurprisingly AMD's Ryzen 4000 H series, the current-gen equivalent of the 10th-gen Intel H versions. They all can be configured with up to the Ryzen 7 4800H. The desktop incorporates the Ryzen 7 X series, AMD's counterpart to Intel's K series, topping out at the 16-core Ryzen 7 3950X.

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charon writes:

This interview with the authors describes a fascinating book that gives facts about cosmology in a combined education and the challenges to the people who can't quite believe in the conclusions scientists draw. Looks neat.

Despite having the world's knowledge at our fingertips, we live in a time of great scientific illiteracy. Disinformation is rampant about vaccines, climate change and even pandemics like Covid-19. But it gets even trickier when talking about the origins of life, the universe, and everything. Some of the facts we often hear about the cosmos are so absurd to imagine — they can almost feel like a religious dogma.

Of course, cosmic theories are based on mountains of data, not whimsical guesses. Yet, how do scientists really know a supermassive black hole is at the center of the Milky Way? How do scientists know distant nebulae are (sometimes) made of hydrogen clouds? How do scientists know 14 billion years ago there was a massive explosion of matter and energy that formed everything in our universe?

We hear these claims often, but most of us aren't able to examine the gritty details behind a scientific theory. Two astronomers get at this problem in the new book The Cosmic Revolutionary's Handbook: Or, How To Beat The Big Bang (Cambridge University Press, 2020).

[...] But Handbook goes one step further, explaining the scientific process in detail, so if you don't accept the mainstream Big Bang theory, you can create your own. Yes, [authors] Barnes and Lewis encourage you to take on the intellectual giants of cosmology — Einstein, Hawking, and all the rest — by taking this data and interpreting your own hypothesis.

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Phoenix666 writes:

CNet:

A simple pair of sunglasses that projects holographic icons. A smartwatch that has a digital screen but analog hands. A temporary tattoo that, when applied to your skin, transforms your body into a living touchpad. A virtual reality controller that lets you pick up objects in digital worlds and feel their weight as you swing them around. Those are some of the projects Google has quietly been developing or funding in an effort to create the next generation of wearable technology devices.

The eyewear and smartwatch projects come from the search giant's Interaction Lab, an initiative aimed at intertwining digital and physical experiences. It's part of Google Research, an arm of the search giant with roots in academia that focuses on technical breakthroughs. The Interaction Lab was originally created within Google's hardware division in 2015, before it was spun out to join the company's research arm about two years ago, according to the resume of Alex Olwal, the lab's leader. Olwal, a senior Google researcher, previously worked at X, the company's self-described moonshot factory, and ATAP, Google's experimental hardware branch.

[...] It isn't just about selling hardware. Getting sensor packed-devices onto consumers could mean a treasure trove of data beyond what people produce on their phones or at their desks. It's an especially valuable haul for Google, which makes more than $160 billion a year in targeted ads that are informed by the personal data of people who use its services. The gadgets also create inroads to lucrative new businesses for tech giants, like health and fitness, though lawmakers and regulators have privacy concerns over Silicon Valley's ever-expanding scope.

Google wants to get closer to you.

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MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for boru.

https://www.infoq.com/news/2020/07/nRF52-debug-resurrect/:

A recent hardware attack on the Nordic nRF52 chip uses local access to gain chip-level debugging capabilities that persist in silicon, unpatchable in software. Nordic has confirmed the issue and encouraged device manufacturers to detect openings of the enclosure, as the chip is not hardened against fault injection.

This chip is used in so many bluetooth products. Might be fun to go wardriving and find some and see if any have accessible SWD pins.

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looorg writes:

As a master thesis, one Cambridge student rebuilt a copy of the Cyclometer, the Polish Enigma-cracking machine.

http://www.eng.cam.ac.uk/news/enigma-code-breaking-machine-rebuilt-cambridge:

Cambridge Engineering alumnus Hal Evans has built a fully-functioning replica of a 1930s Polish cyclometer – an electromechanical cryptologic device that was designed to assist in the decryption of German Enigma ciphertext. The replica currently resides in King's College, Cambridge.

[...] Work on the hardware-based replica began in 2018, as part of Hal’s fourth year Master’s project under the supervision of King's College Fellow and Senior Tutor Dr Tim Flack. The aim was to investigate further into cryptologist Marian Rejewski's cyclometer – an early forerunner to Cambridge University mathematician Alan Turing’s machine, known as the Bombe, which was used to crack the German Enigma code during the Second World War.

Hal said he chose to work on the cyclometer as it was the very first machine used to assist the decryption effort. To his knowledge, the replica is the first fully-functioning hardware-based electromechanical cyclometer to exist since the years preceding the Second World War. The original machines would have been destroyed in 1939 to prevent them from falling into the hands of German invaders.

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Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

The giant impacts that dominate late stages of planet formation have a wide range of consequences for young planets and their atmospheres, according to new research.

Research led by Durham University and involving the University of Glasgow, both UK, has developed a way of revealing the scale of atmosphere loss during planetary collisions based on 3-D supercomputer simulations.

The simulations show how Earth-like planets with thin atmospheres might have evolved in an early solar system depending on how they are impacted by other objects.

Using the COSMA supercomputer, part of the DiRAC High-Performance Computing facility in Durham, funded by the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC), the researchers ran more than 100 detailed simulations of different giant impacts on Earth-like planets, altering the speed and angle of the impact on each occasion.

They found that grazing impacts—like the one thought to have formed our Moon—led to much less atmospheric loss than a direct hit.

Head on collisions and higher speeds led to much greater erosion, sometimes obliterating the atmosphere completely along with some of the mantle, the layer that sits under a planet's crust.

The findings provide greater insight into what happens during these giant impacts, which scientists know are common and important events in the evolution of planets both in our solar system and beyond.

The findings are published in the Astrophysical Journal.

More information:
J. A. Kegerreis, V. R. Eke, R. J. Massey, and L. F. A. Teodoro. Atmospheric Erosion by Giant Impacts onto Terrestrial Planets - IOPscience [$], The Astrophysical Journal (DOI: 10.3847/1538-4357/ab9810)

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upstart writes in with an IRC submission:

Spreading rock dust on farms could be a major climate action:

Eventually (ideally sooner rather than later), efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions are going to have to be joined by a technology that actively removes CO2 from the atmosphere. There are a number of options [...] and a new feasibility study suggests that one of them—spreading crushed rock on farm fields—deserves serious consideration.

[...] Using crushed rocks isn't a new idea. Some common minerals react with water and CO2 as they weather, converting CO2 from the air into bicarbonate dissolved in water. That bicarbonate (along with some calcium and magnesium) may hang out in groundwater or make its way into the ocean. And along the way, it can also turn into solid carbonate. Whatever route it takes, it's no longer a greenhouse gas in the air.

Over hundreds of thousands or millions of years, this process has an important stabilizing influence on Earth's climate. Warmer climates encourage more weathering, pulling greenhouse gas out of the atmosphere.

[...] One way to accelerate weathering is to grind up that rock into small particles. Just as powdered sugar dissolves in water much more quickly than a large solid candy would, these small particles will weather much faster. Spreading that crushed rock over farm fields not only nicely exposes it to the elements but can also be beneficial for the soil, replenishing nutrients and counteracting pH changes in heavily farmed soils.

[...] Globally, the researchers estimate that this process could be used to capture 500 million to 2 billion tons of CO2 per year in 2050. For comparison, scenarios that limit global warming to 2°C generally involve capturing something like 2 to 10 billion tons per year in a few decades from now.

[...] In the US, EU, and Canada, the researchers estimate that all this would cost about $160 to 190 per ton of CO2 captured, while China, India, and Brazil could do it for $55 to 120 per ton. That's in the same ballpark as other some options for atmospheric CO2 removal..

Journal Reference:
David J. Beerling, Euripides P. Kantzas, Mark R. Lomas, et al. Potential for large-scale CO 2 removal via enhanced rock weathering with croplands, Nature (DOI: 10.1038/s41586-020-2448-9)

Additional Information:
Johannes Lehmann, Angela Possinger. Removal of atmospheric CO2 by rock weathering holds promise for mitigating climate change, Nature (DOI: 10.1038/d41586-020-01965-7)

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upstart writes in with an IRC submission for RandomFactor:

MFA

Iranian Spies Accidentally Leaked Videos of Themselves Hacking:

When security researchers piece together the blow-by-blow of a state-sponsored hacking operation, they're usually following a thin trail of malicious code samples, network logs, and connections to faraway servers. That detective work gets significantly easier when hackers record what they're doing and then upload the video to an unprotected server on the open internet. Which is precisely what researchers at IBM say a group of Iranian hackers did.

[...] The IBM researchers say they found the videos exposed due to a misconfiguration of security settings on a virtual private cloud server they'd observed in previous APT35 activity. The files were all uploaded to the exposed server over a few days in May, just as IBM was monitoring the machine. The videos appear to be training demonstrations the Iran-backed hackers made to show junior team members how to handle hacked accounts. They show the hackers accessing compromised Gmail and Yahoo Mail accounts to download their contents, as well as exfiltrating other Google-hosted data from victims.

[...] But the videos nonetheless represent a rare artifact, showing a first-hand view of state-sponsored cyberspying that's almost never seen outside of an intelligence agency.

"We don't get this kind of insight into how threat actors operate really ever," says Allison Wikoff, a senior analyst at IBM X-Force whose team discovered the videos. "When we talk about observing hands-on activity, it's usually from incident response engagements or endpoint monitoring tools. Very rarely do we actually see the adversary on their own desktop. It's a whole other level of 'hands-on-keyboard' observation."

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upstart writes in with an IRC submission:

Facial recognition linked to a second wrongful arrest by Detroit police:

A false facial recognition match has led to the arrest of another innocent person. According to the Detroit Free Press, police in the city arrested a man for allegedly reaching into a person's car, taking their phone and throwing it, breaking the case and damaging the screen in the process.

Facial recognition flagged Michael Oliver as a possible suspect, and the victim identified him in a photo lineup as the person who damaged their phone. Oliver was charged with a felony count of larceny over the May 2019 incident. He said he didn't commit the crime and the evidence supported his claim.

The perpetrator, who was recorded in footage captured on a phone, doesn't look like Oliver. For one thing, he has tattoos on his arms, and there aren't any visible on the person in the video. When Oliver's attorney took photos of him to the victim and an assistant prosecutor, they agreed Oliver had been misidentified. A judge later dismissed the case.

[...] Late last month, Detroit Police Chief James Craig suggested the technology the department uses, which was created by DataWorks Plus, isn't always reliable. "If we were just to use the technology by itself, to identify someone, I would say 96 percent of the time it would misidentify," he said in a public meeting, according to Motherboard. From the start of the year through June 22nd, the force used the software 70 times per the department's public data. In all but two of those cases, the person whose image the technology analyzed was Black.

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An Anonymous Coward writes:

I had an experience with an HTC Vive a couple of years ago, and I'm now considering getting the hardware required to do proper VR.
Obviously, I'd like to play games, but I'm also interested in visualising data (in particular I see that VTK supports OpenVR).

So I was wondering whether anyone in the community here has succeeded in getting this to work under linux, and if they can comment on the hardware required.
I'd be grateful for any insights.

As I understand it, it's best to get 120FPS, otherwise the brain doesn't like it.
I see that system76 has a "thelio major" desktop that can handle a range of NVIDIA cards, but I honestly don't know which would be the minimum that still gets me reasonable performance.
Is it important to have a lot of memory, a lot of cores?
Will I be able to change the level of detail in games to gain in FPS?
Right now it looks to me like I'd need more than 3000 euros for the whole thing (computer+htc vive).
My wife may not approve.

In any case, with the possibility of a second wave of coronavirus in the winter, I'm under the impression a working VR system would be a reasonable addition to the "don't go crazy" activities around the house.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Global emissions of methane have reached the highest levels on record. Increases are being driven primarily by growth of emissions from coal mining, oil and natural gas production, cattle and sheep ranching, and landfills.

Between 2000 and 2017, levels of the potent greenhouse gas barreled up toward pathways that climate models suggest will lead to 3-4 degrees Celsius of warming before the end of this century. This is a dangerous temperature threshold at which scientists warn that natural disasters, including wildfires, droughts and floods, and social disruptions such as famines and mass migrations become almost commonplace. The findings are outlined in two papers published July 14 in Earth System Science Data and Environmental Research Letters by researchers with the Global Carbon Project, an initiative led by Stanford University scientist Rob Jackson.

In 2017, the last year when complete global methane data are available, Earth's atmosphere absorbed nearly 600 million tons of the colorless, odorless gas that is 28 times more powerful than carbon dioxide at trapping heat over a 100-year span. More than half of all methane emissions now come from human activities. Annual methane emissions are up 9 percent, or 50 million tons per year, from the early 2000s, when methane concentrations in the atmosphere were relatively stable.

upstart writes in with an IRC submission:

The TLS 1.2 Deadline is Looming, Do You Have Your Act Together?:

In the pantheon of security configuration duties for organizations running internet assets, maintaining the latest TLS encryption protocols to keep the cryptographic apparatus at full strength is one of the most fundamental. TLS provides cover for the most sensitive personal and financial information that moves across the internet. As experts in measuring and monitoring third-party risk, RiskRecon and the data scientists from Cyentia Institute recently published a new report that leveraged unique scan data from millions of web servers around the world, via the RiskRecon platform, to see where the rollout of TLS 1.2[*] is going smoothly and where it is meeting resistance.

Together with its precursor SSL, TLS has long been in the crosshairs of both attackers and security researchers who understand that a weak or non-existent deployment of the protocol makes it trivial enough to carry out man-in-the-middle and other attacks against the vulnerable target.

[...] Sectors such as Education (47%), Energy (40%), and Public Administration (37%) have struggled to implement TLS 1.2 protocols. This revelation led us to ask another question – “Are these hosts collecting and transmitting important information using vulnerable protocols?” The RiskRecon portal also determines web host value by examining whether a website collects and transmits important PII or credential information. If we restrict our view to just these high-value hosts, we can zero in on where the lack of TLS 1.2 represents a substantial risk: 1 in 10 organizations transmit private information over flawed protocols.

While our study found that this fundamental protocol lacks attention from some IT Security teams, it does not need any further introduction to those who would look to exploit any vulnerability in web communications. The clock is ticking to properly secure your lines of internet communications, standard bodies and web browsers have put out their warnings, and there is no time like to present to get up to speed.

[*] The latest version of TLS (Transport Layer Security) is 1.3; see RFC 8446.

Original Submission

upstart writes in with an IRC submission:

Common FDA-approved drug may effectively neutralize virus that causes COVID-19:

A common drug, already approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), may also be a powerful tool in fighting COVID-19, according to research published this week in Antiviral Research.

SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, uses a surface spike protein to latch onto human cells and initiate infection. But heparin, a blood thinner also available in non-anticoagulant varieties, binds tightly with the surface spike protein, potentially blocking the infection from happening. This makes it a decoy, which might be introduced into the body using a nasal spray or nebulizer and run interference to lower the odds of infection. Similar decoy strategies have already shown promise in curbing other viruses, including influenza A, Zika, and dengue.

"This approach could be used as an early intervention to reduce the infection among people who have tested positive, but aren't yet suffering symptoms. But we also see this as part of a larger antiviral strategy," said Robert Linhardt, lead author and a professor of chemistry and chemical biology at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. "Ultimately, we want a vaccine, but there are many ways to combat a virus, and as we've seen with HIV, with the right combination of therapies, we can control the disease until a vaccine is found."

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for RandomFactor:

Research brief: Researchers 3D print a working heart pump with real human cells:

In the past, researchers have tried to 3D print cardiomyocytes, or heart muscle cells, that were derived from what are called pluripotent human stem cells. Pluripotent stem cells are cells with the potential to develop into any type of cell in the body. Researchers would reprogram these stem cells to heart muscle cells and then use specialized 3D printers to print them within a three-dimensional structure, called an extracellular matrix. The problem was that scientists could never reach critical cell density for the heart muscle cells to actually function.

In this new study, University of Minnesota researchers flipped the process, and it worked.

"At first, we tried 3D printing cardiomyocytes, and we failed, too," said Brenda Ogle, the lead researcher on the study and head of the Department of Biomedical Engineering in the University of Minnesota College of Science and Engineering. "So with our team's expertise in stem cell research and 3D printing, we decided to try a new approach. We optimized the specialized ink made from extracellular matrix proteins, combined the ink with human stem cells and used the ink-plus-cells to 3D print the chambered structure. The stem cells were expanded to high cell densities in the structure first, and then we differentiated them to the heart muscle cells."

What the team found was that for the first time ever they could achieve the goal of high cell density within less than a month to allow the cells to beat together, just like a human heart.

"After years of research, we were ready to give up and then two of my biomedical engineering Ph.D. students, Molly Kupfer and Wei-Han Lin, suggested we try printing the stem cells first," said Ogle, who also serves as director of the University of Minnesota's Stem Cell Institute. "We decided to give it one last try. I couldn't believe it when we looked at the dish in the lab and saw the whole thing contracting spontaneously and synchronously and able to move fluid."

Journal Reference:
In Situ Expansion, Differentiation, and Electromechanical Coupling of Human Cardiac Muscle in a 3D Bioprinted, Chambered Organoid, Circulation Research (DOI: 10.1161/CIRCRESAHA.119.316155)

Original Submission