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Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Earth has captured a tiny object from its orbit around the sun and will keep it as a temporary satellite for a few months before it escapes back to a solar orbit. But the object is likely not an asteroid; it's probably the Centaur upper stage rocket booster that helped lift NASA's ill-fated Surveyor 2 spacecraft toward the moon in 1966.

This story of celestial catch-and-release begins with the detection of an unknown object by the NASA-funded Pan-STARRS1 survey telescope on Maui in September. Astronomers at Pan-STARRS noticed that this object followed a slight but distinctly curved path in the sky, which is a sign of its proximity to Earth. The apparent curvature is caused by the rotation of the observer around Earth's axis as our planet spins. Assumed to be an asteroid orbiting the sun, the object was given a standard designation by the Minor Planet Center in Cambridge, Massachusetts: 2020 SO. But scientists at the Center for Near-Earth Object Studies (CNEOS) at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California saw the object's orbit and suspected it was not a normal asteroid.

Most asteroids' orbits are more elongated and tilted relative to Earth's orbit. But the orbit of 2020 SO around the sun was very similar to that of Earth: It was at about the same distance, nearly circular, and in an orbital plane that almost exactly matched that of our planet—highly unusual for a natural asteroid.

As astronomers at Pan-STARRS and around the world made additional observations of 2020 SO, the data also started to reveal the degree to which the sun's radiation was changing 2020 SO's trajectory—an indication that it may not be an asteroid after all.

[...] Before it leaves, 2020 SO will make two large loops around our planet, with its closest approach on Dec. 1. During this period, astronomers will get a closer look and study its composition using spectroscopy to confirm if 2020 SO is indeed an artifact from the early Space Age.

Original Submission

canopic jug writes:

Fifty years ago on November 12^th, 1970 the Oregon State Highway Department used dynamite to blast the rotting corpse of a stranded whale. It did not go well.

KATU donated the original 16mm footage to the Oregon Historical Society in the late 1980s. The footage has been transferred over the years to various video formats, but this is the first time it has been scanned at 4K resolution — or a display resolution of approximately 4,000 glorious pixels across the horizontal.

Also at KLCC.

50 years ago this Thursday, (Nov. 12), the detonation of a dead, beached sperm whale in Florence ended in chaos. Instead of blowing up into fine fragments, the corpse rained back down in large chunks. While a car was crushed, no one was hurt, fortunately. KLCC's Brian Bull talked to former KATU-TV reporter Paul Linnman, who covered the bizarre fish tale - and for a while, found himself wishing it away. Linnman related to Bull how he got the assignment back in 1970.

Not covered previously at SN, though a great many other whale topics are present.

Original Submission

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for Teckla:

Your Computer Isn't Yours:

On modern versions of macOS, you simply can't power on your computer, launch a text editor or eBook reader, and write or read, without a log of your activity being transmitted and stored.

It turns out that in the current version of the macOS, the OS sends to Apple a hash (unique identifier) of each and every program you run, when you run it. Lots of people didn't realize this, because it's silent and invisible and it fails instantly and gracefully when you're offline, but today the server got really slow and it didn't hit the fail-fast code path, and everyone's apps failed to open if they were connected to the internet.

Because it does this using the internet, the server sees your IP, of course, and knows what time the request came in. An IP address allows for coarse, city-level and ISP-level geolocation, and allows for a table that has the following headings: Date, Time, Computer, ISP, City, State, Application Hash

Apple (or anyone else) can, of course, calculate these hashes for common programs: everything in the App Store, the Creative Cloud, Tor Browser, cracking or reverse engineering tools, whatever.

This means that Apple knows when you're at home. When you're at work. What apps you open there, and how often. They know when you open Premiere over at a friend's house on their Wi-Fi, and they know when you open Tor Browser in a hotel on a trip to another city.

And it has already been been postponed:

1:07 PM - 13 Nov 2020: Jim Bridenstine (@JimBridenstine) "Update: Due to onshore winds and recovery operations, @NASA and @SpaceX are targeting launch of the Crew-1 mission with astronauts to the @Space_Station at 7:27 p.m. EST Sunday, Nov. 15. The first stage booster is planned to be reused to fly astronauts on Crew-2. #LaunchAmerica"

(Original story follows)

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for c0lo:

Nasa poised to return to crewed spaceflight with SpaceX capsule launch:

High prevalence of SARS-CoV-2 antibodies in pets from COVID-19+ households

An Anonymous Coward writes:

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2352771420302937

In a survey of household cats and dogs of laboratory-confirmed COVID-19 patients, we found a high seroprevalence of SARS-CoV-2 antibodies, ranging from 21% to 53%, depending on the positivity criteria chosen. Seropositivity was significantly greater among pets from COVID-19+ households compared to those with owners of unknown status. Our results highlight the potential role of pets in the spread of the epidemic.

Journal Reference:
Matthieu Fritz, Béatrice Rosolen, Emilie Krafft, et al. High prevalence of SARS-CoV-2 antibodies in pets from COVID-19+ households One Health (DOI: 10.1016/j.onehlt.2020.100192)

Covid Infections in Animals Prompt Scientific Concern

Separately, there is concern that Coronavirus mutations could develop in animals and be transmitted back to humans, possibly in a more virulent form. Further, having a reservoir of virus in non-humans could make it much more difficult to eradicate. A recent article in The New York Times expounds on this:

The decision this week by the Danish government to kill millions of mink because of coronavirus concerns, effectively wiping out a major national industry, has put the spotlight on simmering worries among scientists and conservationists about the vulnerability of animals to the pandemic virus, and what infections among animals could mean for humans.

The most disturbing possibility is that the virus could mutate in animals and become more transmissible or more dangerous to humans. In Denmark, the virus has shifted from humans to mink and back to humans, and has mutated in the process. Mink are the only animals known to have passed the coronavirus to humans, except for the initial spillover event from an unknown species. Other animals, like cats and dogs, have been infected by exposure to humans, but there are no known cases of people being infected by exposure to their pets.

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Cybercriminals stole Facebook passwords and lured their victims' friends to websites promoting a bitcoin scam. Then they exposed their whole operation on an unsecured database, researchers found.

A crime operation appears to have tricked hundreds of thousands of Facebook users into handing over their account passwords. The fraudsters then exposed their own operation by making a basic security mistake: They forgot to lock down a cloud database storing the pilfered login credentials with a password of their own.

That meant anyone with a web browser could view the information, which included further details on how they carried out the operation. The findings come from Israeli security researchers Noam Rotem and Ran Locar, who published their research Friday with security website vpnMentor. 

Rotem and Locar reported their findings to Facebook, and the database is no longer exposed. Facebook forced a reset of the passwords for affected accounts.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Researchers can now more accurately and precisely target specific proteins in yeast, mammalian cells and mice to study how knocking down specific protein traits can influence physical manifestation in a cell or organism.

[...] "Conditional gene knockout and small interfering RNA (siRNA), which is used to silence proteins without knocking them out completely, has been employed in many studies," said Masato T. Kanemaki, professor at the National Institute of Genetics in the Research Organization of Information and Systems (ROIS). "However, these technologies are not ideal for studying highly dynamic processes, such as cell cycle, differentiation or neural activity, because of the slow rate of depletion of the protein of interest."

[...] The ability to knock out genes in mice is a critical step in genetic research and therapeutics. According to Kanemaki, an approach may work well in cultured cells, but it must work in a whole model system, such as a mouse. The "leaky degradation" of the AID system meant that a targeted protein would only degraded weakly without auxin, but the level of auxin required to induce full degradation appeared to have long-term negative effects on cell growth.

"In this paper, we describe the AID2 system, which overcomes all the drawbacks of the original AID system," Kanemaki said, noting that they did not detect leaky degradation with the system, the degradation was quicker, and the required dose of auxin was much lower.

To establish the AID2 system, the researchers employed what is known as a "bump-and-hole" strategy to create an empty space in a mutant version of a plant protein (called TIR1) that recognizes and induces the degradation of degron-fused proteins. An auxin analog can bind directly to the TIR1 mutant and initiate the degradation process. Since the approach is very efficient, less auxin analog is needed. The researchers found that depletion could be induced at a concentration about 670 times lower than in the original system.

More information:
Aisha Yesbolatova et al. The auxin-inducible degron 2 technology provides sharp degradation control in yeast, mammalian cells, and mice, Nature Communications (2020). DOI: 10.1038/s41467-020-19532-z

Journal information: Nature Communications

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

The US Commerce Department has halted a ban on TikTok that was due to come into effect on Thursday night.

The order would have prevented the app from being downloaded in the US.

The Commerce Department delayed the ban "pending further legal developments," citing a Philadelphia court ruling from September where three prominent TikTokers had argued the app should be allowed to operate in America.

The decision will be a relief to the estimated 100 million US TikTok users.

In September, TikTok's Chinese owner, ByteDance announced a deal with Walmart and Oracle to shift TikTok's US assets into a new entity called TikTok Global.

Ars Technica adds:

ByteDance filed an appeal in federal court earlier this week asking for more time to make the Oracle deal happen. In short, ByteDance said, it has followed through on its end of the deal—now, it just needs the US government to remember what's going on.

"For a year, TikTok has actively engaged with CFIUS in good faith to address its national security concerns, even as we disagree with its assessment," TikTok said Tuesday in a statement. "In the nearly two months since the president gave his preliminary approval to our proposal to satisfy those concerns, we have offered detailed solutions to finalize that agreement—but have received no substantive feedback on our extensive data privacy and security framework."

Meanwhile, thanks to all that "pending legal action," the administration was already prohibited from putting any part of its TikTok bans into effect today.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Apple Announces The Apple Silicon M1: Ditching x86 - What to Expect, Based on A14

The new processor is called the Apple M1, the company's first SoC designed with Macs in mind. With four large performance cores, four efficiency cores, and an 8-GPU core GPU, it features 16 billion transistors on a 5nm process node. Apple's is starting a new SoC naming scheme for this new family of processors, but at least on paper it looks a lot like an A14X.

[...] Apple made mention that the M1 is a true SoC, including the functionality of what previously was several discrete chips inside of Mac laptops, such as I/O controllers and Apple's SSD and security controllers.

[....] Whilst in the past 5 years Intel has managed to increase their best single-thread performance by about 28%, Apple has managed to improve their designs by 198%, or 2.98x (let's call it 3x) the performance of the Apple A9 of late 2015.

[...] Apple has claimed that they will completely transition their whole consumer line-up to Apple Silicon within two years, which is an indicator that we'll be seeing a high-TDP many-core design to power a future Mac Pro. If the company is able to continue on their current performance trajectory, it will look extremely impressive.

upstart writes in with an IRC submission:

Millions of Hotel Guests Worldwide Caught Up in Mass Data Leak:

A cloud misconfiguration affecting users of a popular reservation platform threatens travelers with identity theft, scams, credit-card fraud and vacation-stealing.

A widely used hotel reservation platform has exposed 10 million files related to guests at various hotels around the world, thanks to a misconfigured Amazon Web Services S3 bucket. The records include sensitive data, including credit-card details.

Prestige Software's "Cloud Hospitality" is used by hotels to integrate their reservation systems with online booking websites like Expedia and Booking.com.

The incident has affected 24.4 GB worth of data in total, according to the security team at Website Planet, which uncovered the bucket. Many of the records contain data for multiple hotel guests that were grouped together on a single reservation; thus, the number of people exposed is likely well over the 10 million, researchers said.

[...] A too-large percentage of cloud databases containing highly sensitive information are publicly available, an analysis in September found. The study from Comparitch showed that 6 percent of all Google Cloud buckets are misconfigured and left open to the public internet, for anyone to access their contents.

Original Submission

hubie writes:

Stephen Pyne, expert on the history of fire, published an interesting open access commentary regarding the relationship between humans and fire. He argues that the rise of the command of fire occurred as the Pleistocene (the "ice age") was ending, and the world going back as far as Homo erectus has been fundamentally changed by the human command of fire. He notes that all the defining features of an ice age (ice sheets, pluvial lakes, permafrost, and outwash plains) have been replaced with fire equivalents (fire‐informed biotas, fire‐famished ecosystems, melting permafrost, and megapalls of smoke).

Fire offers a special perspective by which to understand the Earth being remade by humans. Fire is integrative, so intrinsically interdisciplinary. Fire use is unique to humans, so a tracer of humanity's ecological impacts. Anthropogenic fire history shows the long influence of humans on Earth and even climate; in particular, it tracks the continuities between the burning of living landscapes and the transition to burning lithic (fossil) ones, an inflection so immense that climate history is now a subnarrative of fire history. Through our varied burnings, humans are driving out all the relics of the Pleistocene and replacing them with fire equivalents, or in short, creating a Pyrocene.

Journal Reference:
S. J. Pyne. From Pleistocene to Pyrocene: Fire Replaces Ice [open], Earth's Future, 8, 11, 2020. (DOI: 10.1029/2020EF001722)

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Russia’s Sputnik V vaccine is 92 percent effective at protecting people from COVID-19 according to interim trial results, the country’s sovereign wealth fund said on Wednesday, as Moscow rushes to keep pace with Western drugmakers in the race for a shot.

The initial results are only the second to be published from a late-stage human trial in the global effort to produce vaccines that could halt a pandemic that has killed more than 1.2 million people and ravaged the world economy.

The results are based on data from the first 16,000 trial participants to receive both shots of the two-dose vaccine, the Russian Direct Investment Fund (RDIF), which has been backing its development and marketing it globally, said.

“We are showing, based on the data, that we have a very effective vaccine,” said RDIF head Kirill Dmitriev, adding that it was the sort of news that the vaccine’s developers would talk about one day with their grandchildren.

The analysis was conducted after 20 participants in the trial developed COVID-19 and examined how many had received the vaccine versus a placebo.

That is significantly lower than the 94 infections in the trial of a vaccine being developed by Pfizer Inc and BioNTech. To confirm the efficacy rate, Pfizer said it would continue its trial until there were 164 COVID-19 cases.

RDIF said the Russian trial would continue for six more months and data from the study will also be published in a leading international medical journal following a peer review.

Original Submission

upstart writes in with an IRC submission:

FBI: Hackers stole source code from US government agencies and private companies:

The Federal Bureau of Investigation has sent out a security alert warning that threat actors are abusing misconfigured SonarQube applications to access and steal source code repositories from US government agencies and private businesses.

[...] SonarQube apps are installed on web servers and connected to source code hosting systems like BitBucket, GitHub, or GitLab accounts, or Azure DevOps systems.

But the FBI says that some companies have left these systems unprotected, running on their default configuration (on port 9000) with default admin credentials (admin/admin).

FBI officials say that threat actors have abused these misconfigurations to access SonarQube instances, pivot to the connected source code repositories, and then access and steal proprietary or private/sensitive applications.

Original Submission

upstart writes in with an IRC submission:

Researchers light-up mouse brain, revealing previously hidden areas susceptible to opioids:

Although fine-tuned and evolved for complex processing, the brain and its neurotransmitters are vulnerable to hijacking by chemical substances, including opioid drugs such as oxycodone, psychostimulants such as cocaine, and alcohol. Chronic use of any of these substances enhances the activity of a molecule known as the kappa opioid receptor (KOR), which is active in the brain's reward circuitry. KOR activation produces dysphoria and an inability to feel pleasure. Its enhanced activity following chronic drug or alcohol use plays a crucial role in substance abuse.

KORs have been known to exist in certain brain regions, particularly those involved in pain processing, reward, and stress responses, but new work at the Lewis Katz School of Medicine at Temple University (LKSOM) shows that these receptors actually are distributed widely throughout the brain. The Temple researchers made this discovery after lighting up the brains of mice using a technique called CLARITY followed by three-dimensional (3D) fluorescent imaging. The study is the first to apply the imaging technique to better understand opioid receptor localization across the whole brain in 3D images.

[...] The success of the team's approach in itself is significant and could open doors to the study of other neurotransmitter receptors in the brain. KOR and other opioid receptors are types of G-protein coupled receptors (GPCRs). "No one has done a 3D study of GPCR distribution in the brain before," Dr. Liu-Chen said. "The approach we used is a very useful tool and could be applied to study many different types of GPCRs and other proteins across neural tracts."

Journal Reference:
Chongguang Chen, Alex H. Willhouse, Peng Huang, et al. Characterization of a Knock-In Mouse Line Expressing a Fusion Protein of κ Opioid Receptor Conjugated with tdTomato: 3-Dimensional Brain Imaging via CLARITY [open], eNeuro (DOI: 10.1523/ENEURO.0028-20.2020)

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

A high-severity flaw in Cisco’s IOS XR software could allow unauthenticated, remote attackers to cripple Cisco Aggregation Services Routers (ASR).

The flaw stems from Cisco IOS XR, a train of Cisco Systems’ widely deployed Internetworking Operating System (IOS). The OS powers the Cisco ASR 9000 series, which are fully distributed routers engineered to address massive surges in video traffic.

“A successful exploit could cause the affected device to run out of buffer resources, which could make the device unable to process or forward traffic, resulting in a DoS [denial-of-service] condition,” according to a Tuesday security advisory by Cisco.

The flaw (CVE-2020-26070), which ranks 8.6 out of 10 on the CVSS scale, stems from an issue with the ingress packet processing function of Cisco IOS XR software. Ingress packet processing is a technique used to sort through incoming packets from different networks.

The vulnerability is due to improper resource allocation when an affected device processes network traffic. An attacker could exploit the flaw by sending specific streams of Layer 2 or Layer 3 protocol data units (PDUs) to an affected device, ultimately exhausting its buffer resources and crashing the device.

Original Submission