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Phoenix666 writes:

Corals have a secret weapon against a warming climate:

Rising ocean temperatures are killing coral reefs, but researchers discovered corals have a secret buried in their genes that just might help them fight off seasonal changes in temperature.

[...] This project, funded by the National Science Foundation and part of a bigger initiative aimed at understanding the effects of hurricanes on coral reefs, catapulted Rodriguez-Casariego to further research the adaptation responses of corals. For 17 months, he collected more than 200 Staghorn coral samples with former CREST undergraduate student Ivanna Ortiz Rivera and former CREST postdoctoral researcher Alex Mercado-Molina.

Together, they studied the corals across all four seasons. What they found was eye-opening. Depending on the season, corals modified the activity of their DNA in order to adapt to changes in temperature and other conditions. These epigenetic changes do not involve a change in DNA itself but can affect how genes are expressed.

Corals are able to modify how their DNA behaves according to environmental conditions.

Journal Reference:
Javier A. Rodríguez-Casariego, Alex E. Mercado-Molina, Daniel Garcia-Souto, et al. Genome-Wide DNA Methylation Analysis Reveals a Conserved Epigenetic Response to Seasonal Environmental Variation in the Staghorn Coral Acropora cervicornis, Frontiers in Marine Science (DOI: 10.3389/fmars.2020.560424)

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An Anonymous Coward writes:

Today Senate Republicans held a hearing titled "Stifling Free Speech: Technological Censorship and the Public Discourse." It was the second such hearing to be held in Congress in the past six months — in September, House Republicans put on a similar show, lambasting Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey.

[...] To the extent that these hearings have any basis in actual events, as Hirono notes, they tend to involve isolated cases in which some conservative-leaning person or organization is temporarily suspended from a service, or does not appear in search results, or is not being promoted sufficiently by a site's recommendation features. And while unintentional bias often is baked into algorithms, as this recent study of Facebook's ad products suggests, no research has ever suggested that Republicans have been disadvantaged on social media platforms.

In fact, as I often like to point out, Fox News typically gets more engagement on Facebook than any other publisher. Still, that's just one data point. How do partisan pages fare across the social network?

A study today published by Media Matters for America attempts to answer that question. Over 37 weeks, the authors measured engagement — likes, comments, and shares — across left- and right-leaning pages. What did they find?

https://www.theverge.com/interface/2019/4/11/18305407/social-network-conservative-bias-twitter-facebook-ted-cruz

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upstart writes in with an IRC submission for nutherguy:

US military eyes nuclear thermal rocket for missions in Earth-moon space:

The U.S. military aims to get a nuclear thermal rocket up and running, to boost its ability to monitor the goings-on in Earth-moon space.

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) just awarded a $14 million task order to Gryphon Technologies, a company in Washington, D.C., that provides engineering and technical solutions to national security organizations.

The money will support DARPA's Demonstration Rocket for Agile Cislunar Operations (DRACO) program, whose main goal is to demonstrate a nuclear thermal propulsion (NTP) system in Earth orbit.

[...] NTP systems use fission reactors to heat propellants such as hydrogen to extreme temperatures, then eject the gas through nozzles to create thrust. This tech boasts a thrust-to-weight ratio about 10,000 times higher than that of electric propulsion systems and a specific impulse, or propellant efficiency, two to five times that of traditional chemical rockets, DARPA officials wrote in a description of the DRACO program.

Such improvements in propulsion technology are needed for "maintaining space domain awareness in cislunar space — the volume of space between the Earth and the moon," the DRACO description reads.

Nuclear thermal rocket on Wikipedia.

Also at Futurism.

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JoeMerchant writes:

Bold new claims from an "open Fusion" development team. They claim a compact design utilizing newly available high temperature superconductors will combine to allow them to demonstrate 10:1 energy returns from fusion reactions within the next four to five years, add 10 more years to build a practical electrical generation station around it. Stories have been all over the popular press for days now:

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/29/climate/nuclear-fusion-reactor.html

https://news.mit.edu/2020/physics-fusion-studies-0929

Two and a half years ago, MIT entered into a research agreement with startup company Commonwealth Fusion Systems to develop a next-generation fusion research experiment, called SPARC, as a precursor to a practical, emissions-free power plant.

Now, after many months of intensive research and engineering work, the researchers charged with defining and refining the physics behind the ambitious tokamak design have published a series of papers summarizing the progress they have made and outlining the key research questions SPARC will enable.

[...] "The MIT group is pursuing a very compelling approach to fusion energy." says Chris Hegna, a professor of engineering physics at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, who was not connected to this work. "They realized the emergence of high-temperature superconducting technology enables a high magnetic field approach to producing net energy gain from a magnetic confinement system. This work is a potential game-changer for the international fusion program​."

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-05-26/nuclear-fusion-project-backed-by-investors-to-enter-next-phase

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upstart writes in with an IRC submission for Soycow_Lover:

Tech giants are ignoring questions over the legality of their EU-US data transfers:

A survey of responses from more than 30 companies to questions about how they're approaching EU-US data transfers in the wake of a landmark ruling (aka Schrems II) by Europe's top court in July, which struck down the flagship Privacy Shield over US surveillance overreach, suggests most are doing the equivalent of burying their head in the sand and hoping the legal nightmare goes away.

European privacy rights group, noyb, has done most of the groundwork here — rounding up in this 45-page report responses (some in English, others in German) from EU entities of 33 companies to a set of questions about personal data transfers.

It sums up the answers to the questions about companies' legal basis for transferring EU citizens' data over the pond post-Schrems II as "astonishing" or AWOL — given some failed to send a response at all.

Tech companies polled on the issue run the alphabetic gamut from Apple to Zoom. While Airbnb, Netflix and WhatsApp are among the companies that noyb says failed to respond about their EU-US data transfers.

Responses provided by companies that did respond appear to raise many more questions than they answer — with lots of question-dodging 'boilerplate responses' in evidence and/or pointing to existing privacy policies in the hope that will make the questioner go away (hi Facebook!) .

"Overall, we were astonished by how many companies were unable to provide little more than a boilerplate answer. It seems that most of the industry still does not have a plan as to how to move forward," noyb adds.

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upstart writes in with an IRC submission for nutherguy:

Second alignment plane of solar system discovered:

A study of comet motions indicates that the solar system has a second alignment plane. Analytical investigation of the orbits of long-period comets shows that the aphelia of the comets, the point where they are farthest from the Sun, tend to fall close to either the well-known ecliptic plane where the planets reside or a newly discovered "empty ecliptic." This has important implications for models of how comets originally formed in the solar system.

[...] [Higuchi] showed that when the galactic gravity is taken into account, the aphelia of long-period comets tend to collect around two planes. First the well-known ecliptic, but also a second "empty ecliptic." The ecliptic is inclined with respect to the disk of the Milky Way by about 60 degrees. The empty ecliptic is also inclined by 60 degrees, but in the opposite direction. Higuchi calls this the "empty ecliptic" based on mathematical nomenclature and because initially it contains no objects, only later being populated with scattered comets.

Higuchi confirmed her predictions by cross-checking with numerical computations carried out in part on the PC Cluster at the Center for Computational Astrophysics of NAOJ. Comparing the analytical and computational results to the data for long-period comets listed in NASA's JPL Small Body Database showed that the distribution has two peaks, near the ecliptic and empty ecliptic as predicted. This is a strong indication that the formation models are correct and long-period comets formed on the ecliptic.

Journal Reference:
Arika Higuchi, Anisotropy of Long-period Comets Explained by Their Formation Process - IOPscience, The Astronomical Journal (DOI: 10.3847/1538-3881/aba94d)

Original Submission

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for Soycow_Lover:

Salute the venerable ensign wasp, killing cockroaches for 25 million years:

An Oregon State University study has identified four new species of parasitic, cockroach-killing ensign wasps that became encased in tree resin 25 million years ago and were preserved as the resin fossilized into amber.

"Some species of ensign wasps have even been used to control cockroaches in buildings," OSU researcher George Poinar Jr. said. "The wasps sometimes are called the harbingers of cockroaches—if you see ensign wasps you know there are at least a few cockroaches around. Our study shows these wasps were around some 20 or 30 million years ago, with probably the same behavioral patterns regarding cockroaches."

[...] A female ensign wasp will look for cockroach egg cases, known as ootheca, and lay an egg on or in one of the cockroach eggs inside the case. When the wasp egg hatches, the larva eats the cockroach egg where it was laid.

Successive instars of the larva then consume the other dozen or so eggs inside the cockroach egg case. Mature wasp larvae pupate within the cockroach egg case en route to coming out as adults, and no cockroach offspring emerge from an egg case infiltrated by an ensign wasp.

Analyzing Tertiary period specimens from Dominican amber, Poinar was able to describe three new species of ensign wasps: Evaniella setifera, Evaniella dominicana and Semaeomyia hispaniola. He described a fourth, Hyptia mexicana, from Mexican amber. The Tertiary period began 65 million years ago and lasted for more than 63 million years.

Journal Reference:
George Poinar, Ensign wasps (Hymenoptera: Evaniidae) in Dominican and Mexican amber, Historical Biology (DOI: 10.1080/08912963.2020.1818075)

Original Submission

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for SoyCow639:

"Joker"—the malware that signs you up for pricey services—floods Android markets:

September has been a busy month for malicious Android apps, with dozens of them from a single malware family alone flooding either Google Play or third-party markets, researchers from security companies said.

Known as Joker, this family of malicious apps has been attacking Android users since late 2016 and more recently has become one of the most common Android threats. Once installed, Joker apps secretly subscribe users to pricey subscription services and can also steal SMS messages, contact lists, and device information. Last July, researchers said they found Joker lurking in 11 seemingly legitimate apps downloaded from Play about 500,000 times.

[...] researchers from security firm Zscaler said they found a new batch comprising 17 Joker-tainted apps with 120,000 downloads. The apps were uploaded to Play gradually over the course of September. Security firm Zimperium, meanwhile, reported on Monday that company researchers found 64 new Joker variants in September, most or all of which were seeded in third-party app stores.

[...] "Joker is one of the most prominent malware families that continually targets Android devices," Zscaler researcher Viral Gandhi wrote in last week's post. "Despite awareness of this particular malware, it keeps finding its way into Google's official application market by employing changes in its code, execution methods, or payload-retrieving techniques."

Original Submission

[20201002_054327 UTC: Added c|net link and quote.--martyb]

https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1311892190680014849

Tonight, @FLOTUS and I tested positive for COVID-19. We will begin our quarantine and recovery process immediately. We will get through this TOGETHER!

A report from c|net adds:

White House physician Dr. Sean Conley said in a memorandum late Thursday that the president and first lady were "both well at this time, and they plan to remain at home within the White House during their convalescence."

The announcement of the president and first lady's positive coronavirus test results came just hours after the revelation that top White House aide Hope Hicks had tested positive for the virus as well. The president indicated in an earlier tweet that he and the first lady had begun the quarantine process.

Hope Hicks, who has been working so hard without even taking a small break, has just tested positive for Covid 19. Terrible! The First Lady and I are waiting for our test results. In the meantime, we will begin our quarantine process!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 2, 2020

President Donald Trump tweets he and first lady Melania Trump test positive for Covid-19

Trump tests positive for COVID-19 after his adviser and confidant Hope Hicks tested positive for the coronavirus

c0lo adds: Dow futures plunge more than 500 points after Trump says he tested positive for coronavirus

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Freeman writes:

Sourcegraph: Devs are managing 100x more code now than they did in 2010:

Sourcegraph, a company specializing in universal code search, polled more than 500 North American software developers to identify issues in code complexity and management. Its general findings are probably no surprise to most Ars readers—software has gotten bigger, more complex, and much more important in the past ten years—but the sheer scope can be surprising.

[...] Sourcegraph refers to a sort of critical mass of this technological complexity as Big Code, and the developer survey—contracted through third-party Dimensional Research—attempts to get a handle on the scale and scope of that growth.

[...] Of the developers surveyed, 91 percent say their non-technology company functions more like a technology company than it did ten years ago. This won't surprise anyone who has noticed firms like Walmart Labs sponsoring open source technology conferences and delivering presentations.

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hubie writes:

As far as insect flight goes, landings can be very complicated. Successful landings require matching the relative speed of the target, which could be static like a wall, or moving like a flower in the breeze. The insect must execute complicated coordinated maneuvers based on visual, thermal, acoustic, and olfactory signals. These landings occur over a range of velocities and surface types. Mosquitoes need to manage all of this and land softly enough that the host can't feel them.

One major difference between flying insects and vertebrates is that insects have immobile eyes with fixed focal lengths which prevents them from utilizing stereoscopic vision to judge distances, so they have to rely on image motion such as changes in object size. Different insects have different techniques: honeybees come to a hover 16 mm from a surface before initiating touchdown; houseflies approach objects at constant velocity and once the object reaches a certain relative size on its retina, it decelerates, pitches the body and extends its legs; and fruit flies accelerate towards their landing, extend their legs, and stick the landing like a gymnast with nearly instant deceleration. Mosquitoes have much less mass than a honeybee, but much more mass than a fruit fly, so their landing dynamics were expected to be much different.

Researchers from the University of Central Florida set up an experiment to monitor mosquito flight and landing. They used a high-speed camera and filmed mosquito landings and extracted the physical dynamics using the Open Source Physics Tracker software. Their results, which are published in a Nature Scientific Reports article, found that mosquitoes typically careen in for a head-first landing, they make initial contact with their proboscis before making contact with their legs, then their legs act as underdamped springs resulting in one or two bounces before they come to rest. They determined that the mosquitoes strike the surface with an impact velocity about half of what is perceptible by humans.

The paper provides entertaining slow motion videos.

Journal Reference:
Nicholas M. Smith, Jasmine B. Balsalobre, Mona Doshi, et al. Landing mosquitoes bounce when engaging a substrate [open], Scientific Reports (DOI: 10.1038/s41598-020-72462-0)

Original Submission

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for RandomFactor:

First Compelling Evidence of Organisms That Eat Viruses as a Food Source:

Given the fact that the viral biomass dusting our landscape, drifting through the atmosphere, and floating in our oceans could easily add up to tens of millions of tonnes of carbon, there's a surprising absence of life making a meal of this bounty.

If we're to be technical, there are viruses that have evolved to compete with other viruses by robbing them of their organic building blocks.

But until now, there hasn't been any strong evidence of an organism engulfing and digesting virion particles for energy or their elemental nutrients.

Two types of single-celled organisms found drifting in the waters of the Gulf of Maine off North America's coast just might be the first true virophages known to science.

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for nutherguy:

U.S. Army gets one step closer to laser gun system:

Last week, the Assistant Secretary of the Army – Acquisition, Logistics & Technology has announced that the U.S. Army is one step closer to delivering laser weapons to Soldiers with the recent arrival of two Stryker vehicles in Huntsville, Ala.

[The] Assistant Secretary Facebook account made the post regarding Directed Energy Maneuver Short Range Air Defense (DE-MSHORAD) with a 50 kW-class laser integrated onto a Stryker platform. The government-industry team is integrating directed energy capabilities onto the platforms, in preparation for the  Rapid Capabilities and Critical Technologies Office DE-MSHORAD combat shoot-off next year, according to the message.

“DE-MSHORAD will protect Divisions and Brigade Combat Teams from unmanned aerial systems, rotary-wing aircraft, and rocket, artillery and mortar threats,” the message added.

Original Submission

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for nutherguy:

Senator asks DHS if foreign-controlled browser extensions threaten the US:

A US senator is calling on the Department of Homeland Security’s cybersecurity arm to assess the threat posed by browser extensions made in countries known to conduct espionage against the US.

“I am concerned that the use by millions of Americans of foreign-controlled browser extensions could threaten US national security,” Senator Ron Wyden, a Democrat from Oregon, wrote in a letter to Christopher Krebs, director of the DHS’ Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency. “I am concerned that these browser extensions could enable foreign governments to conduct surveillance of Americans.”

Also known as plugins and add-ons, extensions give browsers functionality not otherwise available. Ad blockers, language translators, HTTPS enforcers, grammar checkers, and cursor enhancers are just a few examples of legitimate extensions that can be downloaded either from browser-operated repositories or third-party websites.

Unfortunately, there’s a darker side to extensions. Their pervasiveness and their opaqueness make them a perfect vessel for stashing software that logs sites users visit, steals passwords they enter, and acts as a backdoor that funnels data between users and attacker-controlled servers.

Extensions: A short, sordid history

One of the more extreme examples of this type of malice came last year when Chrome and Firefox extensions were caught logging the browsing history of more than 4 million users and selling it online. People often think that long, complicated Web URLs prevent outsiders from being able to access medical or accounting data, but the systematic collection, dubbed DataSpii, proved the assumption wrong.

Original Submission

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for SoyCow0495:

After breach, Twitter hires a new cybersecurity chief – TechCrunch:

Following a high-profile breach in July, Twitter has hired Rinki Sethi as its new chief information security officer.

Sethi most recently served as chief information security officer at cloud data management company Rubrik, and previously worked in cybersecurity roles at IBM, Palo Alto Networks and Intuit.

In the new role at Twitter overseeing the company’s information security practices and policies, Sethi will report to platform lead Nick Tornow, according to her tweet announcing the job move.

[...] Twitter had left the role of chief information security officer vacant since the departure of its previous security chief, Mike Convertino, who left in December to join cyber resilience firm Arceo.

Previously:
Hackers Tell the Story of the Twitter Attack
Twitter Revamping Its API for 3rd-Party Apps
Musk, Obama, Biden, Bezos, Gates-Bitcoin Scam Hits Twitter in Coordinated Blitz

Original Submission