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upstart writes:

Mathematicians derive the formulas for boundary layer turbulence 100 years after the phenomenon was first formulated:

Now an international team of mathematicians, led by UC Santa Barbara professor Björn Birnir and the University of Oslo professor Luiza Angheluta, has published a complete description of boundary layer turbulence. The paper appears in Physical Review Research, and synthesizes decades of work on the topic. The theory unites empirical observations with the Navier-Stokes equation -- the mathematical foundation of fluid dynamics -- into a mathematical formula.

This phenomenon was first described around 1920 by Hungarian physicist Theodore von Kármán and German physicist Ludwig Prandtl, two luminaries in fluid dynamics. "They were honing in on what's called boundary layer turbulence," said Birnir, director of the Center for Complex and Nonlinear Science. This is turbulence caused when a flow interacts with a boundary, such as the fluid's surface, a pipe wall, the surface of the Earth and so forth.

Prandtl figured out experimentally that he could divide the boundary layer into four distinct regions based on proximity to the boundary. The viscous layer forms right next to the boundary, where turbulence is damped by the thickness of the flow. Next comes a transitional buffer region, followed by the inertial region, where turbulence is most fully developed. Finally, there is the wake, where the boundary layer flow is least affected by the boundary, according to a formula by von Kármán.

The fluid flows quicker farther from the boundary, but its velocity changes in a very specific manner. Its average velocity increases in the viscous and buffer layers and then transitions to a logarithmic function in the inertial layer. This "log law," found by Prandtl and von Kármán, has perplexed researchers, who worked to understand where it came from and how to describe it.

The flow's variation -- or deviation from the mean velocity -- also displayed peculiar behavior across the boundary layer. Researchers sought to understand these two variables and derive formulas that could describe them.

Journal Reference:
Björn Birnir, Luiza Angheluta, John Kaminsky, et al. Spectral link of the generalized Townsend-Perry constants in turbulent boundary layers [open], Physical Review Research (DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevResearch.3.043054)

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Hospitals are at a high risk of cyberattacks, but patients don't realize it:

Information technology experts are worried about increasing rates of ransomware attacks on healthcare organizations. Most patients, though, don't know they're happening, according to a new survey.

Southern Ohio Medical Center, a not-for-profit hospital in Portsmouth, Ohio, canceled appointments for today and is diverting ambulances after it was hit by a cyberattack on Thursday. It's part of a series of escalating attacks on healthcare organizations in the past two years — a trend that could have serious consequences for patient care.

But while information technology experts are well aware that the risk of cyberattacks that compromise patient data and shut down computer systems is on the rise, patients don't seem to be, according to a new report by cybersecurity company Armis. In fact, over 60 percent of people in the general public surveyed in the new report said they hadn't heard of any cyberattacks in healthcare in the past two years.

That's despite a doubling of cyberattacks on healthcare institutions in 2020, high-profile incidents like the attack on hospital chain Universal Health Services, and a major threat from groups using the ransomware Ryuk. The magnitude of attacks during the COVID-19 pandemic shocked experts, who said that ransomware gangs were targeting hospitals more aggressively than they had before. Unlike attacks on banks or schools, which are also common, these attacks have the potential to directly injure people.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

New Human Lineage Discovered In Indonesian Cave - Asian Scientist Magazine:

In Wallacea, a group of mainly Indonesian islands, researchers have discovered a previously unknown human lineage, analyzing the DNA of a fossilized female. The findings, published in Nature, help shed light on the history of Southeast Asian populations.

More than 50,000 years ago, humans already had a very mobile way of life. Instead of settling in a permanent location, archeological evidence point to mass migrations from Eurasia through Southeast Asia toward the Australian continent. Cave art found in Sulawesi, for example, show that ancestral humans traveled through Wallacea.

However, very little is actually known about the evolutionary history of humans in Wallacea, with few fossils retrieved from the area. Ancient DNA is also easily degraded in tropical climates, presenting another hurdle in building up a database of ancestral human genomes found in Southeast Asia.

But in an exciting discovery, an international team of researchers—hailing from Indonesia, Malaysia, South Korea, Germany and Australia—uncovered a female skeleton in the Leang Panninge limestone cave in Sulawesi. This hunter-gatherer likely lived before the dawn of the Neolithic period, the last stage of the Stone Age, and was buried over 7,000 years ago.

By retrieving and analyzing DNA from a part of the skull, the researchers then found that the forager belonged to a group more closely related to modern-day Near Oceanians than East Asian populations. Strikingly, the Leang Panninge genome did not quite match known lineages, whether ancient or present-day groups.

Journal Reference:
Carlhoff, Selina, Duli, Akin, Nägele, Kathrin, et al. Genome of a middle Holocene hunter-gatherer from Wallacea [open], Nature (DOI: 10.1038/s41586-021-03823-6)

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Study Shows Immune Cells Against Covid-19 Stay High in Number Six Months After Vaccination:

"Previous research has suggested that humoral immune response — where the immune system circulates virus-neutralizing antibodies — can drop off at six months after vaccination, whereas our study indicates that cellular immunity — where the immune system directly attacks infected cells — remains strong," says study senior author Joel Blankson, M.D., Ph.D., professor of medicine at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. "The persistence of these vaccine-elicited T cells, along with the fact that they're active against the delta variant, has important implications for guiding COVID vaccine development and determining the need for COVID boosters in the future."

To reach these findings, Blankson and his colleagues obtained blood from 15 study participants (10 men and five women) at three times: prior to vaccination, between seven and 14 days after their second Pfizer/BioNTech or Moderna vaccine dose, and six months after vaccination. The median age of the participants was 41 and none had evidence of prior SARS-CoV-2 infection.

[...] In their study, Blankson and colleagues found that the number of helper T cells recognizing SARS-CoV-2 spike proteins was extremely low prior to vaccination — with a median of 2.7 spot-forming units (SFUs, the level of which is a measure of T cell frequency) per million peripheral blood mononuclear cells (PBMCs, identified as any blood cell with a round nucleus, including lymphocytes). Between 7 and 14 days after vaccination, the T cell frequency rose to a median of 237 SFUs per million PBMCs. At six months after vaccination, the level dropped slightly to a median of 122 SFUs per million PBMCs — a T cell frequency still significantly higher than before vaccination.

acid andy writes:

The Guardian newspaper reports that Doctors are seeing young adults developing tics and seizures that usually start in childhood, with some people linking it to social media use.

[Michelle] Wacek has up to 20 seizures a day and currently has to use a wheelchair. Like Meg, she is now a TikTok influencer, using her platform to raise awareness of FND [(Functional Neurological Disorder]. "Knowing that I am going through the same crap as other people out there makes me feel better," Wacek says. "Without all these platforms, I would be quite isolated."

This month, Wacek's Facebook groups and online communities lit up. The source: a Wall Street Journal report about the rise in young women developing sudden-onset tics that doctors thought could be linked to TikTok. The article prompted a swift backlash from many in the Tourette's and FND community. "I read the article and thought it was a load of crap," says Wacek. "TikTok is not giving people Tourette's." The fact that she followed Meg before developing tics herself, says Wacek, is a "coincidence".

[...] In August, Brain published a paper with the incendiary headline: "Stop that! It's not Tourette's but a new type of mass sociogenic illness". In it, clinicians from Hannover Medical School in Germany speculated that a mass sociogenic illness (MSI) that resembled Tourette's but was not Tourette's, was spreading among German teenagers. A sociogenic illness, explains researcher Dr Kirsten Müller-Vahl, "is when people who are in close contact develop similar symptoms, but without any underlying cause".

upstart writes:

Using mechanical tools improves our language skills:

Our ability to understand the syntax of complex sentences is one of the most difficult language skills to acquire. In 2019, research had revealed a correlation between being particularly proficient in tool use and having good syntactic ability. A new study, by researchers from Inserm, CNRS, Université Claude Bernard Lyon and Université Lumière Lyon in collaboration with Karolinska Institutet in Sweden, has now shown that both skills rely on the same neurological resources, which are located in the same brain region. Furthermore, motor training using a tool improves our ability to understand the syntax of complex sentences and—vice-versa—syntactic training improves our proficiency in using tools. These findings could be applied clinically to support the rehabilitation of patients having lost some of their language skills. This study is published in November 2021 in the journal Science.

[...] Research suggests that brain areas, which control certain linguistic functions, such as the processing of word meanings, are also involved in controlling fine motor skills. However, brain imaging had not provided evidence of such links between language and the use of tools. Paleo-neurobiology has also shown that the brain regions associated with language had increased in our ancestors during periods of technological boom, when the use of tools became more widespread.

When considering this data, research teams couldn't help wondering: what if the use of certain tools, which involves complex movements, relies on the same brain resources as those mobilized in complex linguistic functions such as syntax?

[...] They discovered for the first time that the handling of the tool and the syntax exercises produced brain activations in common areas, with the same spatial distribution, in a region called the "basal ganglia."

Given that these two skill types use the same brain resources, is it possible to train one in order to improve the other? Does motor training with the mechanical tongs improve the understanding of complex phrases? In the second part of their study, the scientists looked at these issues and showed that this is indeed the case.

Journal Reference:
Tool use and language share syntactic processes and neural patterns in the basal ganglia, Simon Thibault, et. al., Science (DOI: 10.1126/science.abe0874)

Original Submission

hubie writes:

It is fairly common these days when visiting a doctor's office or entering a port of entry to have one's forehead scanned by a Non-Contact Infrared Thermometer (NCIT) to check for fever (temperature greater than 38 °C). The measurements are typically very quick and easy to make. NCITs are not as accurate as contact thermometers, so it is important to know whether convenience is being traded for accuracy.

NCITs measure forehead temperature by detecting infrared radiant energy. Since the temperature of the forehead skin is lower than the core body temperature, the device manufacturers use propriety algorithms to correct for this. Depending upon the device, it might also factor in the ambient measurement conditions such as the room temperature and skin emissivity. These devices may give erroneous results from not only issues with the hardware or algorithms, but also in how they are used (pointed too far away or at the wrong angle), or the local conditions of the forehead skin (local heating or cooling from sweat or moisture). FDA approved devices conform to voluntary standards that specify they should be within ± 0.3 °C of a laboratory source.

FDA researchers measured oral temperatures from more than 1000 subjects using a clinical-grade reference thermometer and compared that to measurements made at the center of the forehead using six different models of NCITs. Although it is expected that the variability in a clinical setting would be larger than in the lab, they saw that the error can range from − 3 to + 2 °C in extreme cases, with the majority of the errors ranging from − 2 to + 1 °C.

Overall, our results indicate that some NCIT devices may not be consistently accurate enough to be used as a stand-alone temperature measurement tool to determine if the temperature exceeds a specific threshold (e.g., 38 °C) in an adult population. Model-to-model variability and individual model accuracy in the displayed temperature are a major source of concern. Users should be aware of the consequences of false negatives and false positives when using NCITs as a screening tool.

Journal Reference:
Sullivan, S.J.L., Rinaldi, J.E., Hariharan, P. et al. Clinical evaluation of non-contact infrared thermometers. Sci Rep 11, 22079 (2021).
DOI: 10.1038/s41598-021-99300-1

Original Submission

upstart writes:

New Windows 11 build fixes widespread printer issues, system freezes:

Microsoft has fixed a long list of issues impacting Windows 11 in a newly released build for Windows Insiders in the Beta and Release Preview Channels.

Among the significant bugs addressed in Windows 11 Build 22000.346 (KB5007262), Redmond has addressed known issues preventing USB Print devices with support for Internet Printing Protocol (IPP) Over USB from completing the installation and leading to some USB Print installers reporting that they don't printer after they were plugged in.

Another printing issue fixed in today's Windows 11 preview build caused 0x000006e4 (RPC_S_CANNOT_SUPPORT), 0x0000007c (ERROR_INVALID_LEVEL), and 0x00000709 (ERROR_INVALID_PRINTER_NAME) error codes when connecting to remote printers shared on Windows print servers.

This fix is expected to roll out to all impacted Windows 10 and Windows 11 customers during the December 2021 Patch Tuesday.

The originating update for this known issue is the mandatory KB5006670 cumulative update released during the October 2021 Patch Tuesday with security updates for two Windows Print Spooler vulnerabilities (CVE-2021-36970 and CVE-2021-41332).

Since the October Patch Tuesday updates have been released, Windows 10 admins and users have been reporting widespread network printing issues in a 22-page forum topic at BleepingComputer.

Prior to today's update, on Thursday, BleepingComputer also shared a fix for the 0x0000007c printing error allowing users to work around the printing issue.

Microsoft privately distributed the same fix using ADMX installers that added new Windows Registry values, which disabled the problematic changes from October.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

PFAS exposure, high-fat diet drive prostate cells' metabolism into pro-cancer state: Dietary fat synergizes with PFAS to trigger cancer in benign cells, accelerate tumor growth in malignant cells:

However, consuming a high-fat diet significantly accelerated development of tumors in the PFAS-exposed mice, said the scientists at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and the U. of I. Chicago who conducted the research. PFAS is an abbreviation for perfluoroalkyl and polyfluoroalkyl substances, often described as "forever chemicals" because they don't degrade naturally and persist as environmental pollutants. Studies have associated PFAS with harmful effects in laboratory animals.

"Our data suggest that exposure to PFAS synergizes with dietary fat to activate the protein-coding gene PPARa, altering cells' metabolism in ways that escalate the carcinogenic risk in normal prostate cells while driving tumor progression in malignant cells," said food science and human nutrition professor Zeynep Madak-Erdogan, the principal investigator on the project.

"These alterations in cell metabolism that occur downstream of PPARa activation may underpin the increased prostate cancer risk observed in men who are exposed to PFAS," said Madak-Erdogan, who also holds an appointment as a health innovation professor with the Carle Illinois College of Medicine.

In their analyses of gene transcription activity, the scientists found that PPARa was expressed at significantly greater levels in the tumor cells of the PFAS-exposed mice that ate the high-fat diet. PPARa controls cell proliferation and differentiation, aids in immune and inflammatory responses and has been found to play a key role in the development of liver and kidney cancers, according to the study.

Previous studies, including some conducted in humans, linked PFAS with a range of serious health problems such as prostate cancer, the most common male cancer in the U.S.

Journal Reference:
Ozan Berk Imir, Alanna Zoe Kaminsky, Qian-Ying Zuo, et al. Per- and Polyfluoroalkyl Substance Exposure Combined with High-Fat Diet Supports Prostate Cancer Progression, Nutrients (DOI: 10.3390/nu13113902)

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Valve Shares New Steam Deck Details, Proton Update Available For Testing

The recording from the livestream is embedded below for those interested, but some of the key takeaways from today's developer-focused Steam Deck event included:

- Steam Deck will use an immutable root file-system, albeit can be changed for developers/enthusiasts wanting more control over the system state. The immutable root file-system approach is similar to the likes of Fedora Silverblue.

- SteamOS 3.0 will be generally available in due course for those wanting to run the Arch-based Linux distribution on other hardware.

- SteamOS 3.0 is making use of PipeWire.

- Flatpak'ed apps will be supported.

- At least initially the Steam Deck is now making use of a global frame limiter but initially is being left up to the individual games to handle. We'll see how quickly such functionality or so is built into Gamescope.

- The AMD SoC powering the Steam Deck is codenamed "Aerith" and as previously reported is a quad-core Zen 2 design with RDNA2 graphics. The TDP range for Aerith is 4 to 15 Watts. The Steam Deck should support up to two 4K screens at 60Hz via the USB3/DP 1.4 DSC interface.

canopic jug writes:

Two Finnish news sites, YLE and Helsinki Times, are reporting that Jamie Hyneman of Mythbusters fame has begun a five year stint as professor of "practice" at the Lappeenranta University of Technology in Finland. He was previously awarded an honorary doctorate by the same institution and there is a prototyping lab named after him where students can design, build, and test prototypes. He is said to be on site at the moment but the first lecture is scheduled to take place via proprietary videoconferencing software.

This is not the first time Hyneman has engaged with the university, as he received an honorary doctorate from the institution in 2017. The interaction helped spark the creation of the Jamie Hyneman Center (JHC). Open to all LUT students and staff, the center's workshop helps participants "develop new ideas and solutions to problems and build and test prototypes," according to the university.

"As a Professor of Practice, I plan to encourage and support student innovations at JHC. I also hope to participate in the university's activity on a wider scale. For instance, environmental issues and different types of vehicles are especially close to my heart. These are things I've been delighted to find that LUT and I are very much aligned with," Hyneman said in the statement.

Associate Professor Markku Ikävalko said the collaboration of LUT University and Hyneman is "a good fit."

YLE: LUT University appoints former MythBuster Hyneman as Professor of Practice
Helsinki Times: MythBuster's Jamie Hyneman appointed Professor of Practice at LUT University of Finland

Previously:
(2020) Grant Imahara, Host of 'MythBusters' and 'White Rabbit Project,' Dies at 49
(2019) Former Mythbusters Host Adam Savage Will Be Back On US TV With Savage Builds
(2015) Mythbusters to End After Next Season

Original Submission

upstart writes:

US says it 'won't tolerate' Russia's 'reckless and dangerous' anti-satellite missile test:

The US strongly condemned a Russian anti-satellite test on Monday that forced crew members on the International Space Station to scramble into their spacecraft for safety, calling it "a reckless and dangerous act" and saying that it "won't tolerate" behavior that puts international interests at risk.

US Space Command said Russia tested a direct-ascent anti-satellite, or DA-ASAT missile, striking a Russian satellite and creating a debris field in low-Earth orbit of more than 1,500 pieces of trackable orbital debris that is also likely to generate hundreds of thousands of pieces of smaller orbital debris.

US officials emphasized the long-term dangers and potential global economic fallout from the Russian test, which has created hazards for satellites that provide people around the world with phone and broadband service, weather forecasting, GPS systems which underpin aspects of the financial system, including bank machines, as well in-flight entertainment and satellite radio and television.

"Russia has demonstrated a deliberate disregard for the security, safety, stability, and long-term sustainability of the space domain for all nations," said US Space Command commander Gen. James Dickinson. "The debris created by Russia's DA-ASAT will continue to pose a threat to activities in outer space for years to come, putting satellites and space missions at risk, as well as forcing more collision avoidance maneuvers. Space activities underpin our way of life and this kind of behavior is simply irresponsible."

NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said in a statement that he was "outraged by this irresponsible and destabilizing action. With its long and storied history in human spaceflight, it is unthinkable that Russia would endanger not only the American and international partner astronauts on the ISS, but also their own cosmonauts. Their actions are reckless and dangerous, threatening as well the Chinese space station."

December 16, 2020: Russia has launched an anti-satellite missile test, US Space Command says submitted via IRC for FatPhil.

Original Submission #1  Original Submission #2 

Top500: No Exascale, Fugaku Still Reigns, Polaris Debuts at #12

MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for Bytram

Source: https://www.hpcwire.com/2021/11/15/top500-no-exascale-fugaku-still-reigns-polaris-debuts-at-12/

No exascale for you -- at least, not within the High-Performance Linpack (HPL) territory of the latest Top500 list, issued today from the 33rd annual Supercomputing Conference (SC21), held in-person in St. Louis, Mo., and virtually, from Nov. 14–19. ""We were hoping to have the first exascale system on this list but that didn't happen," said Top500 co-author Jack Dongarra in a press briefing this morning.

In an alternate timeline, the United States might have stood up two exascale systems by now: Aurora at Argonne National Laboratory and Frontier at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. Installation continues on the latter, and when we talked to Intel last week, they said that Argonne was preparing for the arrival of Aurora, now slated to be a two exaflops peak machine, doubling its (most recent) previous performance target.

The 58th edition of the Top500 offers a familiar lineup at the top. Japan's Fugaku system is still in the number one spot providing 442 petaflops, with the U.S. systems Perlmutter – which improved its performance by nearly 10 percent to 70.9 petaflops – and Selene in fifth and sixth place, respectively. (DOE's Summit and Sierra and China's Sunway TaihuLight are still keeping their seats warm as well, holding second, third and fourth place respectively.)

takyon adds the following:

Original Submission #1  Original Submission #2 

upstart writes:

Zero-day bug in all Windows versions gets free unofficial patch:

A free and unofficial patch is now available for a zero-day local privilege escalation [(LPE)] vulnerability in the Windows User Profile Service that lets attackers gain SYSTEM privileges under certain conditions.

The bug, tracked as CVE-2021-34484, was incompletely patched by Microsoft during the August Patch Tuesday. The company only addressed the impact of the proof-of-concept (PoC) provided by security researcher Abdelhamid Naceri who reported the issue.

Naceri later discovered that threat actors could still bypass the Microsoft patch to elevate privileges to gain SYSTEM privileges if certain conditions are met, getting an elevated command prompt while the User Account Control (UAC) prompt is displayed.

CERT/CC vulnerability analyst Will Dormann tested the CVE-2021-34484 bypass PoC exploit and found that, while it worked, it would not always create the elevated command prompt. However, in BleepingComputer's tests, it launched an elevated command prompt immediately, as shown below.

Luckily, the exploit requires attackers to know and log in with other users' credentials for exploiting the vulnerability, which means that it will likely not be as widely abused as other LPE bugs (including PrintNightmare).

The bad news is that it impacts all Windows versions, including Windows 10, Windows 11, and Windows Server 2022, even if fully patched.

[...] While Microsoft is still working on a security update to address this zero-day flaw, the 0patch micropatching service has released Thursday a free unofficial patch (known as a micropatch).

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Polymer discovery gives 3D-printed sand super strength:

The study, published in Nature Communications, demonstrates a 3D-printed sand bridge that at 6.5 centimeters can hold 300 times its own weight, a feat analogous to 12 Empire State Buildings sitting on the Brooklyn Bridge.

The binder jet printing process is cheaper and faster than other 3D-printing methods used by industry and makes it possible to create 3D structures from a variety of powdered materials, offering advantages in cost and scalability. The concept stems from inkjet printing, but instead of using ink, the printer head jets out a liquid polymer to bind a powdered material, such as sand, building up a 3D design layer by layer. The binding polymer is what gives the printed sand its strength.

The team used polymer expertise to tailor a polyethyleneimine, or PEI, binder that doubled the strength of sand parts compared with conventional binders.

Parts printed via binder jetting are initially porous when removed from the print bed. They can be strengthened by infiltrating the design with an additional super-glue material called cyanoacrylate that fills in the gaps. This second step provided an eight-fold strength increase on top of the first step, making a polymer sand composite stronger than any other and any known building materials, including masonry.