SoylentNews

RandomFactor writes:

Researchers at Johns Hopkins University, the University of Notre Dame, University of Florida, and Ohio State Universities have identified genes that regulate the process of neuron regeneration in some animals.

[Researchers] mapped the genes of animals that have the ability to regenerate retinal neurons. For example, when the retina of a zebrafish is damaged, cells called the Müller glia go through a process known as reprogramming. During reprogramming, the Müller glia cells will change their gene expression to become like progenitor cells, or cells that are used during early development of an organism. Therefore, these now progenitor-like cells can become any cell necessary to fix the damaged retina.

Like zebrafish, people also have Müller glia cells. However, when the human retina is damaged, the Müller glia cells respond with gliosis, a process that does not allow them to reprogram.

"After determining the varying animal processes for retina damage recovery, we had to decipher if the process for reprogramming and gliosis were similar. Would the Müller glia follow the same path in regenerating and non-regenerating animals or would the paths be completely different?" said [David Hyde, professor in the Department of Biological Sciences at Notre Dame and co-author on the study], who also serves as the Kenna Director of the Zebrafish Research Center at Notre Dame. "This was really important, because if we want to be able to use Müller glia cells to regenerate retinal neurons in people, we need to understand if it would be a matter of redirecting the current Müller glia path or if it would require an entirely different process."

The research could eventually lead to therapies for a variety of neurodegenerative brain and eye disorders that would someday cure, rather than just slow progression of diseases like Parkinson's

Journal Reference:
Thanh Hoang, Jie Wang, Patrick Boyd, et al. Gene regulatory networks controlling vertebrate retinal regeneration [$], Science (DOI: 10.1126/science.abb8598)

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Nvidia has announced a cheaper version of its $99 Jetson Nano developer kit. The Jetson Nano pairs a quad-core Cortex-A57 ARM CPU with 128 Maxwell GPU cores. The new model has 2 GiB of RAM instead of 4 GiB, drops one of the four USB ports (which may be USB 2.0 instead of 3.0), and drops DisplayPort output.

Elsewhere at NVIDIA's GPU Technology Conference 2020:

NVIDIA Online GTC 2020 Kicks Off Today But No Open-Source Linux Announcement Expected
Quadro No More? NVIDIA Announces Ampere-based RTX A6000 & A40 Video Cards For Pro Visualization
NVIDIA BlueField-2 DPUs Set to Ship In 2021, Roadmaps BlueField-3&4 By 2023

Original Submission

MrPlow wrote in with a submission, via IRC, for nutherguy.

US Senate to issue subpoenas for Mark Zuckerberg, Jack Dorsey, Sundar Pichai:

The US Senate's Commerce committee on Thursday voted unanimously on a bipartisan basis to issue subpoenas to Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg, Twitter's Jack Dorsey and Google's Sundar Pichai, as Congress considers changes to liability protections granted by Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act.

The three tech CEOs would appear before the committee as witnesses, but the date of the hearing hasn't been determined.

Sen. Maria Cantwell, from Washington and the leading Democrat on the committee, initially opposed the subpoena, which had been introduced by Chairman Roger Wicker, a Republican from Mississippi. But Cantwell changed her position after Republicans included language in the subpoena regarding privacy and "media domination."

"There is a lot we want to talk to tech platforms about, like privacy and anti-competitive media practices," she said in a statement. "I thank the Chairman for broadening the subpoena to cover these issues."

She went on to say that "Section 230 deserves a serious thoughtful discussion. But the hearing should not be used to try to have a chilling effect on social media platforms who are taking down false COVID information or hate speech."

AnonTechie writes:

The 2020 NobelPrize in Physiology or Medicine

The 2020 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine has been awarded jointly to Harvey J Alter, Michael Houghton and Charles M Rice "for the discovery of Hepatitis C virus" or HCV, which causes hepatitis C infection - a disease that causes inflammation and infection of the liver. The announcement was made on Monday, 5 October 2020 at 11.30 am cest (3:00 pm in India) at the Nobel Forum at Karolinska Institutet in Stockholm.

This year's Nobel Prize for Medicine has been awarded to three scientists who have made a decisive contribution to the fight against blood-borne hepatitis, a major global health problem that causes cirrhosis and liver cancer in people around the world, said a press release by the Nobel Committee.

Nobel Prize in Medicine - NY TIMES

Dr. Alter, an American, is a medical researcher for the National Institutes of Health in Maryland.

Dr. Houghton, born in Britain, is the Li Ka Shing professor of virology at the University of Alberta, Canada. He is also director of the Li Ka Shing Applied Virology Institute at the university.

Dr. Rice, born in Sacramento, is a professor at Rockefeller University in New York. From 2001 to 2018, he was the scientific and executive director at the Center for the Study of Hepatitis C at the university.

Original Submission

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for guy_:

Facebook leak hints at its defense against a government-ordered breakup:

According to the leak, Facebook would contend that its acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp passed FTC scrutiny without objections, leading it to pour massive amounts of money into both projects as it integrated them into its operations. A breakup would require spending billions and running separate systems that reduced security and hurt the user experience, Facebook would claim.

Facebook has declined to comment on the apparent leak. In the past, it has pushed for extra regulation (albeit limited) in place of a breakup.

[...] Facebook might have to offer some kind of defense before long. The FTC is rumored to be readying an antitrust lawsuit by the end of 2020, and the House could release its antitrust investigation results later in October. Neither is likely to be particularly kind to Facebook, and a split-up could easily be on the table.

Original Submission

martyb writes:

Pain Relief Caused by SARS-CoV-2 Infection May Help Explain COVID-19 Spread:

The finding may explain why nearly half of all people who get COVID-19 experience few or no symptoms, even though they are able to spread the disease, according to the study's corresponding author Rajesh Khanna, PhD, a professor in the UArizona College of Medicine – Tucson's Department of Pharmacology.

[...] View an animated video of how SARS-CoV-2 reduces pain, and a video of Dr. Rajesh Khanna explaining how his team identified the phenomenon.

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released updated data Sept. 10 estimating that 50% of COVID-19 transmission occurs prior to the onset of symptoms and 40% of COVID-19 infections are asymptomatic.

[...] Many biological pathways signal the body to feel pain. One is through a protein named vascular endothelial growth factor-A (VEGF-A), which plays an essential role in blood vessel growth but also has been linked to diseases such as cancer, rheumatoid arthritis and, most recently, COVID-19.

Like a key in a lock, when VEGF-A binds to the receptor neuropilin, it initiates a cascade of events resulting in the hyperexcitability of neurons, which leads to pain. Dr. Khanna and his research team found that the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein binds to neuropilin in exactly the same location as VEGF-A.

"The spike protein completely reversed the VEGF-induced pain signaling," Dr. Khanna said. "It didn't matter if we used very high doses of spike or extremely low doses – it reversed the pain completely."

They are also investigating neuropilin inhibitors as pain relievers.

Journal Reference:
Aubin Moutal, Laurent F. Martin, Lisa Boinon, et al. SARS-CoV-2 Spike protein co-opts VEGF-A/Neuropilin-1 receptor signaling to induce analgesia [open], PAIN (DOI: 10.1097/j.pain.0000000000002097)

Original Submission

MrPlow wrote in with a submission, via IRC, for SoyCow639.

It Takes Hackers 1 Minute To Find And Abuse Credentials Exposed On Github - Comparitech:

Developers routinely use GitHub to back up, share, and manage changes to code. GitHub code repositories are usually public, meaning anyone can find and access code that's been uploaded to the site. And all too often, developers forget to remove sensitive data from their code before putting it on GitHub.

[...] But how long does it take for attackers to find data once it's exposed, and what do they do with it? Comparitech researchers sought to find answers to these questions by setting up a honeypot.

Our researchers created multiple accounts on Amazon Web Services (AWS) and GitHub. They then published user credentials such as AWS IDs and secret keys in public GitHub repositories. Using the AWS CloudTrail service, they then watched and logged attackers who used the credentials to access our AWS servers.

Researchers set up the dummy accounts with programmatic access but no permissions to prevent the attackers from impacting our AWS infrastructure. The user was assigned a policy with full access to any part of the AWS elastic cloud service (AmazonEC2FullAccess).

The AWS Athena service was used to search and query the logs of attacks by time, event, and IP address.

One family's five-year battle for a terminally ill's mother's choice on how to die:

Fay Hoh Yin thought long about how she would want to die after being diagnosed with incurable stage IV T-cell lymphoma in 2014.

She and her two children, Monona and Duncan, experienced a "dress rehearsal" of what her death might be like in late 2015 when her body started to fail her. At the time, doctors believed it was Fay's cancer killing her, but her heart condition, called atrial fibrillation, was actually taking the largest toll on her body.

"I was ready to die," Fay told The Independent. "I had all the horrible symptoms; I couldn't breathe and I had no energy at all. It was very painful."

[...] Suffering was one of Fay's greatest fears when it came to thinking about her death because she watched her own mother experience a painful death in the years prior.

"I had seen my own mother suffer terribly for two years, and so that made a strong impression on me," she said. "To this day, I cannot think of the happy times easily."

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for nutherguy:

'Naked' shark was born without skin or teeth in world first:

While scientists have reported numerous cases of albinism, discoloration and other genetic skin mutations in sharks before, this rare catch is the first and only known case of a shark living with a "severe lack of all skin-related structures [including] teeth," according to a study published July 16 in theJournal of Fish Biology.

Perhaps stranger still, the abnormal shark seemed to be living a relatively normal life until it was scooped from the sea, lead study author Antonello Mulas said. When he and his colleagues examined the shark, they found that it was about 3 years old, had grown at a typical rate, and had a belly full of food when it died.

[...] "Our first reaction was, 'A shark without skin can't survive,'" Mulas, a biologist at the University of Cagliari in Sardinia, told Live Science. "But, as Shakespeare said, there are more things in heaven and Earth than you can imagine."

G. melastomus are common, small catsharks that can grow to a maximum length of 2.3 feet (70 centimeters) — about the size of a child's baseball bat. They are prevalent in the northeast Atlantic Ocean and the Mediterranean Sea, where they tend to swim at depths of 650 to 1,600 feet (200 to 500 meters). True to its name, the interior of the blackmouth's maw is jet-black, as is the skin-like sheath that covers its internal organs.

Journal Reference:
Antonello Mulas, Andrea Bellodi, Cristina Porcu, et al. Living naked: first case of lack of skin‐related structures in an elasmobranch, the blackmouth catshark (Galeus melastomus), Journal of Fish Biology (DOI: 10.1111/jfb.14468)

Original Submission

upstart writes in with an IRC submission:

Publishers Worry as Ebooks Fly off Libraries' Virtual Shelves:

After the pandemic closed many libraries' physical branches this spring, checkouts of ebooks are up 52 percent from the same period last year, according to OverDrive, which partners with 50,000 libraries worldwide. Hoopla, another service that connects libraries to publishers, says 439 library systems in the US and Canada have joined since March, boosting its membership by 20 percent.

[...] But the surging popularity of library ebooks also has heightened longstanding tensions between publishers, who fear that digital borrowing eats into their sales, and public librarians, who are trying to serve their communities during a once-in-a-generation crisis. Since 2011, the industry's big-five publishers—Penguin Random House, Hachette Book Group, HarperCollins, Simon and Schuster, and Macmillan—have limited library lending of ebooks, either by time—two years, for example—or number of checkouts—most often, 26 or 52 times. Readers can browse, download, join waiting lists for, and return digital library books from the comfort of their home, and the books are automatically removed from their devices at the end of the lending period.

The result: Libraries typically pay between $20 and $65 per copy—an industry average of $40, according to one recent survey—compared with the $15 an individual might pay to buy the same ebook online. Instead of owning an ebook copy forever, librarians must decide at the end of the licensing term whether to renew.

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for SoyCow639:

Google announces crackdown on in-app billing, aimed at Netflix and Spotify:

With a lot of focus lately on how smartphone app developers are treated on Apple's and Google's app stores, Google has decided right now is a great time to announce more stringent app store billing rules. A new post from the official Android Developer Blog promises a crackdown on in-app billing that sounds like it's targeted at big streaming services like Netflix and Spotify.

Google's post really beats around the bush trying to sugar-coat this announcement, but it starts off by saying, "We've always required developers who distribute their apps on Play to use Google Play's billing system if they offer in-app purchases of digital goods, and pay a service fee from a percentage of the purchase." This rule has not been enforced, though, and a lot of big developers have just ignored Google's billing requirements. Today, Netflix and Spotify don't use Google's in-app billing and instead kick new accounts out to a Web browser, where the companies can use PayPal or direct credit card processing to dodge Google's 30-percent fees.

[...] That's basically the meat of the blog post: everybody needs to use Google billing by this time next year. A look at the "Payments Policy" shows examples like "subscription services" that offer things like "music" and "video." It also warns readers at the top that "changes are coming to this policy!" and that "any existing app that is currently using an alternative billing system will need to remove it to comply with this update."

Google draws a clear distinction between Android and iOS by pointing out that on Android, developers have a "choice of stores" and that most Android devices ship with multiple app stores.

Original Submission

RandomFactor writes:

Discover has an article up discussing ongoing work on the the coming quantum internet.

Only a few hundred or so physicists in the U.S., Europe and China really comprehend how to exploit some of the weirdest, most far-out aspects of quantum physics. In this strange arena, objects can exist in two or more states at the same time, called superpositions; they can interact with each other instantly over long distances; they can flash in and out of existence. Scientists like [Quantum researcher Eden Figueroa] want to harness that bizarre behavior and turn it into a functioning, new-age internet — one, they say, that will be ironclad for sending secure messages, impervious to hacking.

Already, Figueroa says his group has transmitted what he called "polarization states" between the Stony Brook and Brookhaven campuses using fiber infrastructure, adding up to 85 miles. Kerstin Kleese van Dam, director of Brookhaven Lab's Computational Science Initiative, says it is "one of the largest quantum networks in the world, and the longest in the United States."

Next, Figueroa hopes to teleport his quantum-based messages through the air, across Long Island Sound, to Yale University in Connecticut. Then he wants to go 50 miles east, using existing fiber-optic cables to connect with Long Island and Manhattan.

As part of the U.S. Quantum Initiative signed into law in 2018, the U.S. the Department of Energy is pumping $625 million in funding into quantum research.

[Nobody] knows how far the quantum revolution will go — certainly not Figueroa.

"Many of the things these devices will do, we are still trying to figure it out," he tells me. "At the moment, we are just trying to create technology that works. The really far reaches of what is possible are still to be discovered."

Original Submission

RandomFactor writes:

Plastic in landfills, like nuclear waste, is notoriously long lived. However in the past 50 years, bacteria have evolved to be capable of eating it. Now researchers have collaborated to improve on what nature started.

In 2018, University of Portsmouth's Professor John McGeehan and colleagues engineered an enzyme that can digest polyethylene terephthalate (PET), the primary material used in the manufacture of single-use plastic beverage bottles. Now, the same team has created a two-enzyme cocktail that can digest PET up to six times faster.

Plastics pollution represents a global environmental crisis. In response, microbes are evolving the capacity to utilize synthetic polymers as carbon and energy sources.

In 2016, a team of Japanese biologists reported the discovery and characterization of the soil bacterium, Ideonella sakaiensis 201-F6, which uses two enzymes to depolymerize PET to its constituent monomers.

In the new study, they combined PETase and a second enzyme called MHETase, found in the soil bacterium, to generate a two-enzyme system for PET deconstruction.

The new two-enzyme system is several times faster at degrading plastic than the separate enzymes evolved by bacteria and opens the door for additional research and improvement.

Journal Reference:
Brandon C. Knott, Erika Erickson, Mark D. Allen, et al.
Characterization and engineering of a two-enzyme system for plastics depolymerization [open], Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2006753117)

Previously:
Newly Engineered Enzyme Can Break Down PET Plastic to Raw Materials
UK MPs Propose Banning Microbeads
Polyethylene Terephthalate (PET) Munching Bacteria Discovered
Ban on Microbeads Passes U.S. House of Representatives

Original Submission

MrPlow wrote in with a submission, via IRC, for SoyCow639.

Spammers Add Random Text To Shortened Links To Evade Detection:

Spammers are using a new technique of generating URLs to evade detection by humans and spam filters alike.

This technique comprises adding random, unused text bits to shortened links, to disguise them as full-sized URLs and bypass the scrutiny of email gateways.

[...] A URL or URI consists of multiple parts, with some being optional. This is specified by an industry-standard called RFC3986.

[...] A URL or an IP address can be represented in different ways. Attackers are abusing these variations in IP/URL formats allowed by the IETF's specifications to cause "semantic attacks."

The URL schema allows for use of another part called "Authority." This part allows you to specify "userinfo"— which is something like username, within the URL between the protocol and the host parts.

For example, this could look like, https://ax@bleepingcomputer.com/tag/security

But because "userinfo" is rarely used especially with HTTP(S) URLs, it is often ignored by the server, and navigating to the URL above would still lead you to https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/tag/security/.

[...] In the case of this particular spam campaign, the destinations it connects to are all known websites, such as the j.mp URL shortener service, Pastebin.com, etc.

But, the structure of the hardcoded URLs includes a gibberish "userinfo" part right before the domain name, to give off the impression these are different URLs.

Therefore, for example, if an enterprise security product was previously blocking the malicious link https://j[.]mp/kassaasdskdd it isn't clear if the product would also interpret something like https://nonsensical-text@j[.]mp/kassaasdskdd in the same manner and block it too.

[...] A list of Indicators of Compromise (IOCs) and Trustwave's detailed findings are provided on their blog.

Original Submission

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for guy_:

New study sheds light on 'dead water' phenomenon -- Sott.net:

Norwegian mariners called it dødvann — dead water. They'd known for centuries that patches of seawater in narrow fjords could mysteriously sap a ship's speed, drastically slowing it or stopping it altogether. In his 1897 book, Farthest North, explorer Fridtjof Nansen wrote of his encounter with dead water north of Siberia in 1893: "We could hardly get on at all for the dead-water, and we swept the whole sea along with us." Dead water, Nansen noted, occurred "where a layer of fresh water rests upon the salt water of the sea," as happens in northern fjords when snow and ice from mountains melt into the ocean.[Emphasis from original article - Ed]

Nansen's report of dead water was investigated by scientists at the time, including the Swedish oceanographer Vagn Walfrid Ekman. In 1904, Ekman published research that showed dead water was caused by hidden waves in a dense subsurface layer of salt water that slowed the forward motion of a ship. Today's speedy ships easily overcome these submerged waves, and for most mariners dead water is now largely forgotten.

But more than 100 years later, scientists are still exploring the phenomenon, and a new investigation has uncovered more details about its underlying mechanics.

Journal Reference:
Johan Fourdrinoy, Julien Dambrine, Madalina Petcu, et al. The dual nature of the dead-water phenomenology: Nansen versus Ekman wave-making drags [$], Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1922584117)

Original Submission