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upstart writes in with an IRC submission for guy_:

Hitting the Books: The invisible threat that every ISS astronaut fears:

Despite starry-eyed promises by the likes of SpaceX and Blue Origin, only a handful of humans will actually experience existence outside of Earth's atmosphere within our lifetime. The rest of us are stuck learning about life in space second hand but that's where How to Astronaut by former ISS commander Colonel Terry Virts comes in. Virts shares his myriad experiences training for and living aboard the ISS — everything from learning Russian and space-based emergency medicine to figuring out how to unpack an autonomously-delivered cargo shipment or even prep a deceased crew member for burial among the stars — through a series of downright entertaining essays.

And where many titles of this genre can become laden with acronyms and technical jargon, How to Astronaut remains accessible to aspiring astronauts of all ages. Just maybe don't read the story below about how the ISS crew thought they were all going to die from a toxic ammonia leak to your 6-year-old right before bed.

Excerpted from How to Astronaut: An Insider's Guide to Leaving Planet Earth by Terry Virts (Workman). © 2020.

For all the emergency training I went through as an astronaut, I never expected to be holed up in the Russian segment of the ISS, the hatch to the US segment sealed, with my crew waiting and wondering—would the space station be destroyed? Was this the end? As we floated there and pondered our predicament, I felt a bit like the guy in the Alanis Morissette song "Ironic," who was going down in an airplane crash, thinking to himself, "Now isn't this ironic?" This is how we ended up in that situation.

Read the rest of the fine article for a gripping tale of planning for failures -- simple and catastrophic -- and the human side of dealing with them.

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upstart writes in with an IRC submission for RandomFactor:

An aurora that lit up the sky over the Titanic might explain why it sank:

Glowing auroras shimmered in skies over the northern Atlantic Ocean on April 15, 1912 — the night the RMS Titanic sank. Now, new research hints that the geomagnetic storm behind the northern lights could have disrupted the ship's navigation and communication systems and hindered rescue efforts, fueling the disaster that killed more than 1,500 passengers.

Eyewitnesses described aurora glows in the region as the Titanic went down, with one observer testifying that "the northern lights were very strong that night," Mila Zinkova, an independent weather researcher and photographer, reported in a new study, published online Aug. 4 in the journal Weather.

[...] Auroras form from solar storms, when the sun expels high-speed streams of electrified gas that hurtle toward Earth. As the charged particles and energy collide with Earth's atmosphere, some travel down magnetic field lines to interact with atmospheric gases, glowing green, red, purple and blue, NASA says. These charged particles can also interfere with electrical and magnetic signals, causing surges and oscillations, according to NASA.

[...] And the northern lights were highly visible when the Titanic sank.

[...] At the same time that the solar storm's charged particles were generating a pretty light show, they could also have been tugging at the Titanic's compass. A deviation of only 0.5 degrees would have been enough to steer the ship away from safety and place it on its fatal collision course toward an iceberg, Zinkova said in the study.

"This apparently insignificant error could have made the difference between colliding with the iceberg and avoiding it," she wrote.

[...] Radio signals that night were also "freaky," operators on the ocean liner RMS Baltic reported (the Baltic was one of the ships that responded to the Titanic's distress call, but the RMS Carpathia got there first, according to the Armstrong Browning Library at Baylor University in Waco, Texas). SOS signals sent by the Titanic to nearby ships went unheard, and responses to the Titanic were never received, according to Zinkova.

Journal Reference:
Mila Zinkova. RMetS Journals, Weather (DOI: 10.1002/wea.3817)

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martyb writes:

Amy Coney Barrett: Who is Trump's Supreme Court pick?:

Amy Coney Barrett's nomination to the US Supreme Court comes as little surprise.

[...] Donald Trump - who as sitting president gets to select nominees - reportedly once said he was "saving her" for this moment: when elderly Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg died and a vacancy on the nine-member court arose.

It took the president just over a week to fast-track the 48-year-old conservative intellectual into the wings. This is his chance to tip the court make-up even further to the right ahead of the presidential election, when he could lose power.

Barrett's record on gun rights and immigration cases imply she would be as reliable a vote on the right of the court, as Ginsburg was on the left, according to Jonathan Turley, a professor of law at George Washington University.

"Ginsburg maintained one of the most consistent liberal voting records in the history of the court. Barrett has the same consistency and commitment," he adds. "She is not a work-in-progress like some nominees. She is the ultimate 'deliverable' for conservative votes."

And her vote, alongside a conservative majority, could make the difference for decades ahead, especially on divisive issues such as abortion rights and the Affordable Care Act (the Obama-era health insurance provider).

Barrett's legal opinions and remarks on abortion and gay marriage have made her popular with the religious right, but earned vehement opposition from liberals.

But as a devout Catholic, she has repeatedly insisted her faith does not compromise her work.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Kentucky) is facing considerable controversy about his plans to move the nomination forward quickly:

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for nutherguy:

Black doctors have created a task force to make sure COVID-19 vaccines are safe:

A professional society of Black physicians has formed a task force to assess COVID-19 vaccines and treatments, in light of concerns that federal agencies may approve vaccines and drugs without adequate proof that they work, Stat News reported.

The National Medical Association (NMA), which represents Black physicians and health professionals in the U.S., formed the task force following recent, controversial actions taken by both the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and Food and Drug Administration (FDA). For instance, the CDC initially issued guidance that close contacts of infected people should only get tested for COVID-19 if they show symptoms, even though asymptomatic people can spread the virus; the FDA authorized the widespread use of plasma therapy for COVID-19 with little proof it works, and recently revoked its emergency authorization of hydroxychloroquine after patients developed serious heart, kidney and liver problems, according to the agency's website.

"There is a concern that some of the recent decisions by the Food and Drug Administration have been unduly influenced by politicians," Dr. Leon McDougle, a family physician and president of the National Medical Association, told Stat News. In addition, President Donald Trump has teased that a COVID-19 vaccine could be available before November 3, raising concerns that the vaccine approval process might be dangerously rushed before data shows the vaccine works, according to The New York Times. To address this growing uncertainty, the NMA task force plans to double-check that any approved drug or vaccine is truly safe and effective.

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upstart writes in with an IRC submission for RandomFactor:

Astronauts are Getting a New Toilet Next Week - Universe Today:

When astronauts have to go, NASA wants them to boldly go.

A new space toilet is heading to the International Space Station, with official name "Universal Waste Management System" (UWMS). (If it's NASA, there has to be an acronym). The new toilet is smaller than the current toilets aboard the station, is more user-friendly, and includes 3-D printed titanium parts.

NASA says these are just some of the upgrades that make it better suited for use in future deep space exploration missions. While the new toilet is being installed on the ISS to make life a little better for the space station astronauts, the system will also be tested for use on the new Orion spacecraft, part of the Artemis missions to the Moon.

[...] Other items on board the ship are a new plant research experiment and a special virtual reality camera designed to immerse you in a spacewalk.

If you want more info about the space toilet, check out the Reddit AMA that was held on Friday, September 25 at 12 pm EDT,  at reddit.com/r/space, with Melissa McKinley who leads the NASA team working on the UWMS, and Jim Fuller of Collins Aerospace, and program manager for UWMS.

[I wonder how many Soylentils immediately thought of this episode of "The Big Bang Theory"? --martyb]

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upstart writes in with an IRC submission for nutherguy:

New composite material revs up pursuit of advanced electric vehicles:

Scientists at Oak Ridge National Laboratory used new techniques to create a composite that increases the electrical current capacity of copper wires, providing a new material that can be scaled for use in ultra-efficient, power-dense electric vehicle traction motors.

The research is aimed at reducing barriers to wider electric vehicle adoption, including cutting the cost of ownership and improving the performance and life of components such as electric motors and power electronics. The material can be deployed in any component that uses copper, including more efficient bus bars and smaller connectors for electric vehicle traction inverters, as well as for applications such as wireless and wired charging systems.

[...] Tolga Aytug, lead investigator for the project, said that "by embedding all the great properties of carbon nanotubes into a copper matrix, we are aiming for better mechanical strength, lighter weight and higher current capacity. Then you get a better conductor with less power loss, which in turn increases the efficiency and performance of the device. Improved performance, for instance, means we can reduce volume and increase the power density in advanced motor systems."

[...] While the new composite breakthrough has direct implications for electric motors, it also could improve electrification in applications where efficiency, mass and size are a key metric, Aytug said. The improved performance characteristics, accomplished with commercially viable techniques, means new possibilities for designing advanced conductors for a broad range of electrical systems and industrial applications, he said.

[...] "Electric motors are basically a combination of metals—steel laminations and copper windings," noted Burak Ozpineci, manager of the ORNL Electric Drive Technologies Program and leader of the Power Electronics and Electric Machinery group. "To meet DOE's Vehicle Technologies Office's 2025 electric vehicle targets and goals, we need to increase power density of the electric drive and reduce the volume of motors by 8 times, and that means improving material properties."

Journal Reference:
Kai Li, Michael McGuire, Andrew Lupini, et al.Copper–Carbon Nanotube Composites Enabled by Electrospinning for Advanced Conductors, ACS Applied Nano Materials (DOI: 10.1021/acsanm.0c01236)

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upstart writes in with an IRC submission for RandomFactor:

Physicists develop a method to improve gravitational wave detector sensitivity:

Gravitational wave detectors have opened a new window to the universe by measuring the ripples in spacetime produced by colliding black holes and neutron stars, but they are ultimately limited by quantum fluctuations induced by light reflecting off of mirrors. LSU Ph.D. physics alumnus Jonathan Cripe and his team of LSU researchers have conducted a new experiment with scientists from Caltech and Thorlabs to explore a way to cancel this quantum backaction and improve detector sensitivity.

In a new paper in Physical Review X, the investigators present a method for removing quantum backaction in a simplified system using a mirror the size of a human hair and show the motion of the mirror is reduced in agreement with theoretical predictions. The research was supported by the National Science Foundation.

Despite using 40-kilogram mirrors for detecting passing gravitational waves, quantum fluctuations of light disturb the position of the mirrors when the light is reflected. As gravitational wave detectors continue to grow more sensitive with incremental upgrades, this quantum backaction will become a fundamental limit to the detectors' sensitivity, hampering their ability to extract astrophysical information from gravitational waves.

"We present an experimental testbed for studying and eliminating quantum backaction," Cripe said. "We perform two measurements of the position of a macroscopic object whose motion is dominated by quantum backaction and show that by making a simple change in the measurement scheme, we can remove the quantum effects from the displacement measurement. By exploiting correlations between the phase and intensity of an optical field, quantum backaction is eliminated."

Journal Reference:
Jonathan Cripe, Torrey Cullen, Yanbei Chen, et al. Quantum Backaction Cancellation in the Audio Band [open], Physical Review X (DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevX.10.031065)

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An Anonymous Coward writes:

When coffee makers are demanding a ransom, you know IoT is screwed:

With the name Smarter, you might expect a network-connected kitchen appliance maker to be, well, smarter than companies selling conventional appliances. But in the case of the Smarter's Internet-of-things coffee maker, you'd be wrong.

As a thought experiment, Martin Hron, a researcher at security company Avast, reverse engineered one of the $250 devices to see what kinds of hacks he could do. After just a week of effort, the unqualified answer was: quite a lot. Specifically, he could trigger the coffee maker to turn on the burner, dispense water, spin the bean grinder, and display a ransom message, all while beeping repeatedly. Oh, and by the way, the only way to stop the chaos was to unplug the power cord.

"It's possible," Hron said in an interview. "It was done to point out that this did happen and could happen to other IoT devices. This is a good example of an out-of-the-box problem. You don't have to configure anything. Usually, the vendors don't think about this."

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upstart writes in with an IRC submission for AzumaHazuki:

Crows possess higher intelligence long thought primarily human:

Now the birds can add one more feather to their brainiac claims: Research unveiled on Thursday in Science finds that crows know what they know and can ponder the content of their own minds, a manifestation of higher intelligence and analytical thought long believed the sole province of humans and a few other higher mammals.

A second study, also in Science, looked in unprecedented detail at the neuroanatomy of pigeons and barn owls, finding hints to the basis of their intelligence that likely applies to corvids’, too.

“Together, the two papers show that intelligence/consciousness are grounded in connectivity and activity patterns of neurons” in the most neuron-dense part of the bird brain, called the pallium, neurobiologist Suzana Herculano-Houzel of Vanderbilt University, who wrote an analysis of the studies for Science, told STAT. “Brains can appear diverse, and at the same time share profound similarities. The extent to which similar properties present themselves might be simply a matter of scale: how many neurons are available to work.”

Understanding the minds of nonhuman animals promises to shed light on the origins of such cognitive abilities as, in this case, knowing and analyzing the contents of one’s own brain. That’s how people solve challenges and make discoveries — what do I know? what if I look at it this way? — and it’s a pillar of higher intelligence. Knowing what you know is also a form of consciousness, and the discovery that more and more nonhumans seem to have it raises tricky questions about how we treat them.

“It has been a good week for bird brains!” said crow expert John Marzluff of the University of Washington, who was not involved in the new studies. In particular, the discovery that crows know what they know will not surprise avian scientists, “who have increasingly demonstrated the cognitive abilities of birds, … but they will be relieved! This research is groundbreaking.”

Journal References:
Andreas Nieder, Lysann Wagener, Paul Rinnert. A neural correlate of sensory consciousness in a corvid bird [$], Science (DOI: 10.1126/science.abb1447)
Martin Stacho, Christina Herold, Noemi Rook, et al. A cortex-like canonical circuit in the avian forebrain [$], Science (DOI: 10.1126/science.abc5534)
Suzana Herculano-Houzel. Birds do have a brain cortex—and think [$], Science (DOI: 10.1126/science.abe0536)

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takyon writes:

Space Force says it will fly on a used Falcon 9 rocket for the first time

On Friday, the US Space Force said it would launch two critical Global Positioning System missions on a used Falcon 9 rocket next year.

Doing so will save the military $52 million, officials said, as SpaceX agreed to lower compensation for the two missions in return for flying used hardware. This represents a significant step by the Space Force toward validating the use of flight-proven first stages of a rocket for the most critical national security missions.

"We're looking forward to this journey with SpaceX as we get even more experienced with them and reusable hardware," said Walter Lauderdale, Space and Missile Systems Center Falcon Systems and Operations Division chief, in a call with reporters.

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fleg writes:

from Coronavirus drives surge in support for unionisation, say games industry activists:

Unpaid overtime, 100-hour weeks, instant dismissals ... the pandemic has brought fresh momentum to the games industry's union drive

"Worker strikes, let alone successful ones, are vanishingly rare in the video games industry. But in August, writers at Lovestruck, a mobile app that publishes visual romance novels, went on a 21-day strike, accusing the company of unfair pay, and won a rates increase after owner Voltage initially dismissed their demands.

This is part of a growing, global unionisation movement among game developers – a movement whose urgency has been intensified by the pandemic, according to Declan Peach, who helped found the Game Workers Unite UK union in late 2018. With rising inquiries, casework and membership since lockdown, problems from the pandemic have brought growing momentum to the union. But dire conditions in the games industry had been driving developers to unionise long before coronavirus struck."

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upstart writes in with an IRC submission:

Giant spider provides promise of pain relief for irritable bowel syndrome:

Molecules from the venom of one of the world's largest spiders could help University of Queensland-led researchers tailor pain blockers for people with irritable bowel syndrome (IBS).

Researchers screened 28 spiders, with the venom of the Venezuelan Pinkfoot Goliath tarantula – which has a leg-span of up to 30 centimetres – showing the most promise.

The team led by Professor Richard Lewis from UQ's Institute for Molecular Bioscience in collaboration with Flinders University's Professor Stuart Brierley and the South Australian Health and Medical Research Institute hopes to find effective pain relief for chronic intestinal pain.

"Internal organs have a complex network of sensory nerves that have a wide array of voltage-gated ion channels and receptors to detect stimuli," he said.

[...] Voltage-gated ion channels open and close in response to changes across the cell membrane, with their dysfunction identified as a cause of chronic visceral pain.

Professor Lewis said spider venoms contain hundreds of mini-proteins known as peptides that can inhibit voltage-gated ion channels from opening.

[...] The team found two peptides isolated from the tarantula venom inhibited the most important ion channels underlying pain, with one particularly potent at reducing the sensory nerves of the bladder and colon and nearly stopping chronic visceral pain in a model of IBS.

Journal Reference:
A spider-venom peptide with multitarget activity on sodium... : PAIN, (DOI: 10.1097/j.pain.0000000000002041)

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upstart writes in with an IRC submission for RandomFactor:

MS treatment a step closer after drug shown to repair nerve coating:

A clinical trial of the cancer drug bexarotene showed that it repaired the protective myelin sheaths that MS destroys. The loss of myelin causes a range of neurological problems including balance, vision and muscle disorders, and ultimately, disability.

While bexarotene cannot be used as a treatment, because the side-effects are too serious, doctors behind the trial said the results showed "remyelination" was possible in humans, suggesting other drugs or drug combinations will halt MS.

[...] MS arises when the immune system mistakenly attacks the fatty myelin coating that wraps around nerves in the brain and spinal cord. Without the lipid-rich substance, signals travel more slowly along nerves, are disrupted, or fail to get through at all. About 100,000 people in the UK live with the condition.

Funded by the MS Society, bexarotene was assessed in a phase 2a trial that used brain scans to monitor changes to damaged neurons in patients with relapsing MS. This is an early stage of the condition that precedes secondary progressive disease, where neurons die off and cause permanent disability.

The drug had some serious side-effects, from thyroid disease to raised levels of fats in the blood, which can lead to dangerous inflammation of the pancreas. But brain scans revealed that neurons had regrown their myelin sheaths, a finding confirmed by tests that showed signals sent from the retina to the visual cortex at the back of the brain had quickened. "That can only be achieved through remyelination," said Coles.

Additional details: https://www.mssociety.org.uk/research/latest-research/latest-research-news-and-blogs/trial-shows-myelin-repair-in-humans-is-possible.

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Fnord666 writes:

Feds Hit with Successful Cyberattack, Data Stolen:

A federal agency has suffered a successful espionage-related cyberattack that led to a backdoor and multistage malware being dropped on its network.

The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) issued an alert on Thursday, not naming the agency but providing technical details of the attack. Hackers, it said, gained initial access by using employees' legitimate Microsoft Office 365 log-in credentials to sign onto an agency computer remotely.

"The cyber-threat actor had valid access credentials for multiple users' Microsoft Office 365 (O365) accounts and domain administrator accounts," according to CISA. "First, the threat actor logged into a user's O365 account from Internet Protocol (IP) address 91.219.236[.]166 and then browsed pages on a SharePoint site and downloaded a file. The cyber-threat actor connected multiple times by Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) from IP address 185.86.151[.]223 to the victim organization's virtual private network (VPN) server."

As for how the attackers managed to get their hands on the credentials in the first place, CISA's investigation turned up no definitive answer – however, it speculated that it could have been a result of a vulnerability exploit that it said has been rampant across government networks.

"It is possible the cyber-actor obtained the credentials from an unpatched agency VPN server by exploiting a known vulnerability—CVE-2019-11510—in Pulse Secure," according to the alert. "CVE-2019-11510...allows the remote, unauthenticated retrieval of files, including passwords. CISA has observed wide exploitation of CVE-2019-11510 across the federal government."

Check out the rest of the story for additional details on the attack.

CVE-2019-11510

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looorg writes:

Someone leaked a large amount of sourcecode that may or may not be the complete source code to Windows XP, NT, CE and a few DOS versions. Microsoft won't confirm or deny if it's the actual code.

https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/microsoft/the-windows-xp-source-code-was-allegedly-leaked-online/

The source code for Windows XP SP1 and other versions of the operating system was allegedly leaked online today.

The leaker claims to have spent the last two months compiling a collection of leaked Microsoft source code. This 43GB collection was then released today as a torrent on the 4chan forum.

Original Submission