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Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) calls antibiotic resistance "one of the biggest public health challenges of our time." Each year, about 2.8 million people in the U.S. are infected with antibiotic-resistant bacteria or fungi. More than 35,000 of them die, among an estimated 700,000 deaths worldwide.

At USC, scientists are working to build new lines of defense against the rise of powerful bacteria and fungi. They've turned the university into an epicenter for research as they race to develop new strategies and tools to counteract the growing threat.

"Antibiotic resistance is a naturally occurring phenomenon—it's been happening before we humans walked the earth. We're just making it worse," says Adam Smith, an environmental engineer at the USC Viterbi School of Engineering who studies the presence of antibiotic-resistant bacteria in our water supply. Microbes have gained such resilience through adaptation, he adds, that "we're quickly reaching a post-antibiotic world."

Used properly, antibiotics can knock out many bacterial infections, from strep throat to urinary tract infections. But the CDC estimates that at least 30% of antibiotic prescriptions in emergency rooms, hospitals and clinics are inappropriate. They're doled out for virus-caused health issues they can't fix, such as the flu or a common cold.

Says Nanda: "What's disappointing is why this has happened—the absence of a disciplined restriction around prescribing antibiotics."

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story by Virginia Tech:

When you think of fungi, what comes to mind may be a crucial ingredient in a recipe or their amazing ability to break down dead organic matter into vital nutrients. But new research by Shuhai Xiao, a professor of geosciences with the Virginia Tech College of Science, and Tian Gan, a visiting Ph.D. student in the Xiao lab, highlights yet another important role that fungi have played throughout the Earth's history: helping the planet recover from an ice age.

A team of scientists from Virginia Tech, the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Guizhou Education University, and University of Cincinnati has discovered the remains of a fungi-like microfossil that emerged at the end of an ice age some 635 million years ago. It is the oldest terrestrial fossil ever found. To put it into perspective, this microfossil predates the oldest dinosaurs about three times over.

Their findings were published in Nature Communications on Jan. 28.

The fossil was found in small cavities within well-studied sedimentary dolostone rocks of the lowermost Doushantuo Formation in South China. Although the Doushantuo Formation has provided a plethora of fossils to date, researchers did not expect to find any fossils toward the lower base of the dolostones.

But against all odds, Gan found a few long, thread-like filaments—one of the key characteristics of fungi.

[...] "The question used to be: 'Were there fungi in the terrestrial realm before the rise of terrestrial plants'," said Xiao, an affiliated faculty member of the Fralin Life Sciences Institute and the Global Change Center. "And I think our study suggests yes. Our fungus-like fossil is 240 million years older than the previous record. This is, thus far, the oldest record of terrestrial fungi."

[...] However, it can't be said for sure if this fossil is a definitive fungus. Although there is a fair amount of evidence behind it, the investigation into these microfossils is ongoing.

Wikipedia entry on fungus.

Journal Reference:
Tian Gan, Taiyi Luo, Ke Pang, et al. Cryptic terrestrial fungus-like fossils of the early Ediacaran Period [open], Nature Communications (DOI: 10.1038/s41467-021-20975-1)

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MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for c0lo

As early as March, the Muon g-2 experiment at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab) will report a new measurement of the magnetism of the muon, a heavier, short-lived cousin of the electron. The effort entails measuring a single frequency with exquisite precision. In tantalizing results dating back to 2001, g-2 found that the muon is slightly more magnetic than theory predicts. If confirmed, the excess would signal, for the first time in decades, the existence of novel massive particles that an atom smasher might be able to produce, says Aida El-Khadra, a theorist at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. "This would be a very clear sign of new physics, so it would be a huge deal."

The measures that g-2 experimenters are taking to ensure they don't fool themselves into claiming a false discovery are the stuff of spy novels, involving locked cabinets, sealed envelopes, and a second, secret frequency known to just two people, both outside the g-2 team. "My wife won't pick me for responsible jobs like this, so I don't know why an important experiment did," says Joseph Lykken, Fermilab's chief research officer, one of the keepers of the secret.

Source: https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2021/01/cloak-and-dagger-tale-behind-year-s-most-anticipated-result-particle-physics

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upstart writes in with an IRC submission:

New biosensors quickly detect coronavirus proteins and antibodies:

Scientists have created a new way to detect the proteins that make up the pandemic coronavirus, as well as antibodies against it. They designed protein-based biosensors that glow when mixed with components of the virus or specific COVID-19 antibodies. This breakthrough could enable faster and more widespread testing in the near future. The research appears in Nature.

[...] In an effort to directly detect coronavirus in patient samples without the need for genetic amplification, a team of researchers led by David Baker, professor of biochemistry and director of the Institute for Protein Design at UW Medicine, used computers to design new biosensors. These protein-based devices recognize specific molecules on the surface of the virus, bind to them, then emit light through a biochemical reaction.

[...] "We have shown in the lab that these new sensors can readily detect virus proteins or antibodies in simulated nasal fluid or donated serum, said Baker. "Our next goal is to ensure they can be used reliably in a diagnostic setting. This work illustrates the power of de novo protein design to create molecular devices from scratch with new and useful functions."

Beyond COVID-19, the team also showed that similar biosensors could be designed to detect medically relevant human proteins such as Her2 (a biomarker and therapy target for some forms of breast cancer) and Bcl-2 (which has clinical significance in lymphoma and some other cancers), as well as a bacterial toxin and antibodies that target Hepatitis B virus.

Journal Reference:
Alfredo Quijano-Rubio, Hsien-Wei Yeh, Jooyoung Park, et al. De novo design of modular and tunable protein biosensors [open], Nature (DOI: 10.1038/s41586-021-03258-z)

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MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for c0lo

A team of researchers led by chemists at the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Brookhaven National Laboratory has identified new details of the reaction mechanism that takes place in batteries with lithium metal anodes.

The findings, published today in Nature Nanotechnology ("Identification of LiH and nanocrystalline LiF in the solid–electrolyte interphase of lithium metal anodes"), are a major step towards developing smaller, lighter, and less expensive batteries for electric vehicles.

Scientists have long recognized the advantages of lithium metal anodes; in fact, they were the first anode to be coupled with a cathode. But due to their lack of "reversibility," the ability to be recharged through a reversible electrochemical reaction, the battery community ultimately replaced lithium metal anodes with graphite anodes, creating lithium-ion batteries.

Now, with decades of progress made, researchers are confident they can make lithium metal anodes reversible, surpassing the limits of lithium-ion batteries. The key is the interphase, a solid material layer that forms on the battery's electrode during the electrochemical reaction.

Source: https://www.nanowerk.com/nanotechnology-news2/newsid=57158.php

Journal Reference:
Zulipiya Shadike, Hongkyung Lee, Oleg Borodin, et al. Identification of LiH and nanocrystalline LiF in the solid–electrolyte interphase of lithium metal anodes, Nature Nanotechnology (DOI: 10.1038/s41565-020-00845-5)

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upstart writes in with an IRC submission:

Doomsday Clock will stay at 100 seconds away from 'midnight' apocalypse:

Last year, the Bulletin gave the clock a pessimistic push, moving it from two minutes to midnight to a mere 100 seconds to midnight. After a disastrous 2020, the clock remains at that position.

[...] The Bulletin livestreamed its 2021 announcement on Wednesday morning. Bulletin president and CEO Rachel Bronson called out an erosion of the belief in science and the globe's lack of preparedness for the coronavirus pandemic.

"The lethal and fear-inspiring COVID-19 pandemic serves as a historic 'wake-up call,' a vivid illustration that national governments and international organizations are unprepared to manage the truly civilization-ending threats of nuclear weapons and climate change," said Bronson in a statement.

[...] The clock has been mostly inching toward doom over the last decade, but it doesn't move in only one direction. When it was first revealed, in 1947, it was set at seven minutes to midnight. At its most optimistic setting, in 1991, the clock showed 17 minutes to midnight.

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An Anonymous Coward writes:

Favicons may be used to track users:[*]

The research paper Tales of F A V I C O N S and Caches: Persistent Tracking in Modern Browsers highlights that favicons may be used in conjunction with fingerprinting techniques to track users.

Favicons are used by site to display a small site icon, e.g. in the address bar of browsers that support it but also elsewhere, e.g. in the bookmarks or tabs. Favicons are cached by the browser, but are stored independently from other cached items such as HTML files or site images.

[...] In other words: favicons persist over browsing sessions even if the user clears the cache, and they are accessible even in private browsing or Incognito mode sessions.

A single favicon is not enough to identify users based on it, but the researchers discovered a way to plant multiple favicons in the favicon cache. The site does a series of redirects through several subdomains to save multiple different favicons in the cache. Each saved favicon creates its own entry in the cache, and all of them together can be used to identify users provided that enough favicons are saved using the methodology.

[...] The researchers tested the attack against the Chromium-based browsers Google Chrome, Brave, Safari and Microsoft Edge, and found them all vulnerable to the attack. They did try the attack on Firefox but found a bug that prevented the browser from reading cached favicon entries. Once fixed, Firefox would likely be vulnerable to the attack as well.

Journal Reference:
Konstantinos Solomos, John Kristoff, Chris Kanich, Jason Polakis. Tales of FAVICONS and Caches: Persistent Tracking in Modern Browsers [FREE]. Network and Distributed Systems Security (NDSS) Symposium 202121-24 February 2020, San Diego, CA (DOI: https://dx.doi.org/10.14722/ndss.2021.24202)

[*] archived copy.

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Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

Periodical cicadas emerge from underground in the spring of their 13th or 17th year. Fifteen US states are about to see a whole lot of them.

[...] Periodical cicadas, as they're known, spend almost their whole lives a foot or two underground, living on sap from tree roots. Then, in the spring of their 13th or 17th year, mature cicada nymphs emerge for a short adult stage, synchronously and in huge numbers. Really huge numbers.

"They may amass ... in parks, woods, neighborhoods and can seemingly be everywhere," Michigan State University entomologist Gary Parsons explained in an MSU question and answer session on the phenomenon last year. "When they are this abundant, they fly, land and crawl everywhere, including occasionally landing on humans."

[...] This spring, it'll be time for members of one of the largest broods of 17-year cicadas, known as Brood X, to burrow out from their subterranean hideouts and show off their black bodies and bold red eyes. Fifteen states will hear the romantic serenades of males in trees, trying to attract females: Delaware, Georgia, Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Maryland, Michigan, North Carolina, New Jersey, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Virginia and West Virginia, as well as in Washington, DC.

The return of the cicadas typically starts around mid-May and runs through late June and is, needless to say, a wild spectacle.

[...] The bugs are harmless, Parsons stresses, and typically don't come indoors, though they do gather on outside walls.

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kc99 wrote in with a story which inspired:

FreeBSD/i386 demoted to Tier 2 for FreeBSD 13.x:

FreeBSD is designating i386 as a Tier 2 architecture starting with FreeBSD 13.0. The Project will continue to provide release images, binary updates, and pre-built packages for the 13.x branch. However, i386-specific issues (including SAs) may not be addressed in 13.x. The i386 platform will remain Tier 1 on FreeBSD 11.x and 12.x.

[...] The i386 (32-bit x86) architecture has been a substantial part of the FreeBSD Project's history and success. FreeBSD began with i386 as the only supported architecture, and the ease of availability of i386 computers was key to FreeBSD's growth and adoption. However, the computer industry and the x86 architecture have evolved over time. For at least the past decade, 64-bit x86 has been the dominant FreeBSD architecture both in terms of users and active development. The FreeBSD/i386 user base has steadily declined and is now on par with other Tier 2 architectures. As a result, the i386 architecture will be demoted to a Tier 2 architecture starting with FreeBSD 13.0.

[...] For FreeBSD 13.x, the FreeBSD project commits to providing release images, binary updates, and pre-built packages for i386. [...] The userland ABI will continue to be preserved in 13.x similar to other Tier 1 platforms.

For branches beyond 13.x (e.g. 14.x), the FreeBSD Project reserves the right to reduce the amount of [i386] support provided.

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Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

Based on what we know so far, hackers didn't steal as much personal data in 2020 as they did in previous years, but that doesn't mean they weren't able to make plenty of money. According to a report released Thursday by the Identity Theft Resource Center, hackers and identity thieves used stolen passwords and personal information to profit in new ways from your information.

[...] These trends show that it's currently more lucrative for criminals to find new ways to make money off previously stolen data or to carry out ransomware attacks than it is to steal loads of consumer data and try to sell it on the black market, [said] Eva Velasquez, president and CEO of the Identity Theft Resource Center. "This is not the time for complacency," she added.

[...] There are some big caveats in the numbers, however. Breaches we haven't learned about yet may crop up if, for example, we learn the SolarWinds hacks that affected hundreds of companies and government agencies led to breaches of personal information. And 2020 was hardly a banner year for curbing cybercrime. Like many of us in the pandemic, criminals hunkered down and made the best of what they had on hand in 2020.

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An Anonymous Coward writes:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/anal-swab-china-coronavirus/2021/01/27/cc284f56-6054-11eb-a177-7765f29a9524_story.html

Months-long lockdowns. Entire city populations herded through the streets for mandatory testing. The people of China could be forgiven for thinking they had seen it all during the coronavirus pandemic.

But now they face a new indignity: the addition of anal swabs — yes, you read that right — to the testing regimen for those in quarantine.

Chinese state media outlets introduced the new protocol in recent days, prompting widespread discussion and some outrage. Some Chinese doctors say the science is there. Recovering patients, they say, have continued to test positive through samples from the lower digestive tract days after nasal and throat swabs came back negative.

Yet for many, it seemed a step too far in government intrusions after a year and counting of a dignity-eroding pandemic.

"Everyone involved will be so embarrassed," one user in Guang­dong province said Wednesday on ­Weibo, a Chinese social media platform. In a Weibo poll, 80 percent of respondents said they "could not accept" the invasive method.

[...] The new protocol comes just over a year after the virus began spreading rapidly in the country. Chinese officials are worried about the approach of Lunar New Year next month, often called the world's largest annual migration. Some 3 billion trips are made over the holiday during a non-pandemic year, which means even a single silent coronavirus case could rapidly leapfrog across the nation.

Journal Reference:
Mei Sun, Dong Guo, Jing Zhang, et al. Anal swab as a potentially optimal specimen for SARS-CoV-2 detection to evaluate hospital discharge of COVID-19 patients [open], Future Microbiology (DOI: 10.2217/fmb-2020-0090)

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MrPlow wrote in with a submission, via IRC, for c0lo.

Aerion Supersonic As2: New Supersonic Jet Undergoes Testing As Giant Manufacturing Plant Unveiled:

Aerion Supersonic, one of several companies developing a next-generation supersonic jet, is moving forward with its plans to start production on its aircraft in 2023.

[...] The $300 million facility will be located near Melbourne-Orlando Airport with about 185,000 square metres of building space, plus taxiways and other ground support facilities for the planned jet.

The new facility will employ 675 people, with Aerion citing Florida's association with high tech flight, and its connected workforce, as a key reason for choosing the location. The coastline east of Orlando is known as the Space Coast for its connection to America's space program.

[...] The AS2 will fly at mach 1.4, or 1715 km/h. The company says the jet would carry between eight and 12 passengers and could make the flight from New York to London in 4.5 hours, compared with about seven hours for regular commercial planes. It would cut at least four hours off the flight time between New York and Sydney, which took more than 19 hours on a Qantas test flight in 2019.

[...] Aerion plans to build 300 AS2 jets in its first 10 years of production. The plane will have a price tag of $US120 million.

Original Submission

MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for requerdanos

Social inequality was "recorded on the bones" of Cambridge's medieval residents, according to a new study of hundreds of human remains excavated from three very different burial sites within the historic city centre.

University of Cambridge researchers examined the remains of 314 individuals dating from the 10th to the 14th century and collected evidence of "skeletal trauma" – a barometer for levels of hardship endured in life.

Bones were recovered from across the social spectrum: a parish graveyard for ordinary working people, a charitable "hospital" where the infirm and destitute were interred, and an Augustinian friary that buried wealthy donors alongside clergy.

[...] "By comparing the skeletal trauma of remains buried in various locations within a town like Cambridge, we can gauge the hazards of daily life experienced by different spheres of medieval society," said Dr Jenna Dittmar, study lead author from the After the Plague project at the University's Department of Archaeology.

[...] "We can see this inequality recorded on the bones of medieval Cambridge residents. However, severe trauma was prevalent across the social spectrum. Life was toughest at the bottom – but life was tough all over."

Source: https://www.cam.ac.uk/stories/medievalinequality

Journal Reference:
Jenna M. Dittmar, Piers D. Mitchell, Craig Cessford, et al. Medieval injuries: Skeletal trauma as an indicator of past living conditions and hazard risk in Cambridge, England [open], American Journal of Physical Anthropology (DOI: 10.1002/ajpa.24225)

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upstart writes in with an IRC submission for c0lo:

NASA is sending a helicopter to Mars, but what for?:

NASA's mission to send another rover to Mars is set to culminate in a successful landing on February 18, 2021, but that's not all the agency is sending to the Red Planet.

The Perseverance rover – once it lands next month – will begin scouring a section of Mars that astronomers believe could have hosted and supported microbial life in the past.

But a second passenger aboard the lander vehicle will be meant to do something else entirely.

The Mars Helicopter – also known as Ingenuity – will deploy alongside the rover, and will be NASA's attempt at trying to achieve successful controlled flight on Mars for the very first time.

Ingenuity weighs only four pounds, and is described as a "small, but mighty passenger". Though it has a fuselage (main body) no bigger than a tissue box, it's supposedly strong enough to brave the harsh weather conditions on the planet during flight.

Started as a wishful project about six years ago, the engineers behind Ingenuity understood that while it was theoretically possible to fly in Mars' super-thin atmosphere, there was no real conviction that they'd be able to build a vehicle that could fly, communicate, and survive on its own on Mars.

But after rounds of research and testing, the team have managed to create a flying vehicle that has so far survived all tests emulating Mars' environment, and the next step is to make it fly on the Red Planet for real.

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Inspired by an IRC submission for c0lo:

Google open sources Tilt Brush VR software as it shuts down internal development

As Facebook and Apple begin to fire up more projects in the AR/VR world, Google has spent the last year shutting down most of their existing projects in that space.

Today, the folks at Google announced they had ended active development of Tilt Brush, a VR painting app that was one of virtual reality's early hit pieces of software. The app allowed users to use virtual reality controllers as brushes to construct digital sculptures and environments.

While the company will not be pushing any new updates to the app, they did announce that they will be open sourcing the code on github for developers to build their own experiences and customizations. Google also notes that the app will continue to be available in the app stores on VR headsets.

Additional coverage at TheVerge, BBC News, and Engadget.

Google's blog post about the matter.

What is Tilt Brush?

Original Submission