SoylentNews

upstart writes:

Octopus-like tentacles help cancer cells invade the body:

Using octopus-like tentacles, a cell pushes toward its target, a bacterium, like a predator tracking down its prey. The scene could be playing out in a nature programme. Instead the pursuit is being observed at the nano-scale through a microscope at the University of Copenhagen's Niels Bohr Institute. The microscope recording shows a human immune cell pursuing and then devouring a bacterium.

With their new study, a team of Danish researchers has added to the world's understanding of how cells use octopus-like tentacles called filopodia to move around in our bodies. This discovery about how cells move had never been addressed. The study is being published today in the journal, Nature Communications.

"While the cell doesn't have eyes or a sense of smell, its surface is equipped with ultra-slim filopodia that resemble entangled octopus tentacles. These filopodia help a cell move towards a bacterium, and at the same time, act as sensory feelers that identify the bacterium as a prey," explains Associate Professor Poul Martin Bendix, head of the laboratory for experimental biophysics at the Niels Bohr Institute.

The discovery is not that filopodia act as sensory devices -- which was already well established -- but rather about how they can rotate and behave mechanically, which helps a cell move, as when a cancer cell invades new tissue.

upstart writes:

Invading hordes of crazy ants may have finally met their kryptonite:

When tawny crazy ants move into a new area, the invasive species is like an ecological wrecking ball—driving out native insects and small animals and causing major headaches for homeowners. But scientists at The University of Texas at Austin have good news, as they have demonstrated how to use a naturally occurring fungus to crush local populations of crazy ants. They describe their work this week in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

"I think it has a lot of potential for the protection of sensitive habitats with endangered species or areas of high conservation value," said Edward LeBrun, a research scientist with the Texas Invasive Species Research Program at Brackenridge Field Laboratory and lead author of the study.

In some parts of Texas, homes have been overrun by ants that swarm breaker boxes, AC units, sewage pumps and other electrical devices, causing shorts and other damage. Natives of South America, tawny crazy ants have raised alarm bells as they've spread across the southeastern U.S. during the past 20 years. The idea for using the fungal pathogen came from observing wild populations of crazy ants becoming infected and collapsing without human intervention.

upstart writes:

Fathers Taking Diabetes Drug More Likely to Have Sons With Birth Defects, Study Finds:

A new study suggests that metformin, a widely used diabetes drug, could be dangerous for men to use if they're planning to have children. The research found a higher risk of genital birth defects in boys whose fathers had likely been taking metformin in the three months prior to conception. More data will be needed to understand whether this link represents a true cause-and-effect relationship and if it should change how the drug is prescribed.

Metformin is a generic drug that's proven to be an invaluable treatment for many people with type 2 diabetes. In combination with diet and exercise, metformin helps keep blood sugar levels in check. It's also often used off-label as a modest weight loss aid and to manage symptoms of polycystic ovary syndrome, a hormonal condition that can raise the risk of insulin resistance and type 2 diabetes. Some data has even suggested that it may help slow down cognitive decline in older patients.

As important as metformin is, no drug is without side effects. And some studies, largely in animals or in the lab, have suggested that the drug could negatively affect the male reproductive system. This new research, published Monday in Annals of Internal Medicine, seems to be the first large study of its kind to look for this potential impact in men.

The study authors analyzed population data from Denmark on over a million births recorded from 1997 to 2016. This data included information on prescribed medications filled by the parents of these children. And when they looked at the outcomes of children born to fathers who had filled a prescription for metformin during the preconception period, they found an overall higher rate of birth defects: about 5.4% for these children, compared to 3.3% of other children.

Journal Reference:
Maarten J. Wensink , Ying Lu , Lu Tian , et al. Preconception Antidiabetic Drugs in Men and Birth Defects in Offspring, Annals of Internal Medicine (DOI: 10.7326/M21-4389)

Original Submission

upstart writes:

No more excuses: NASA in line to get funding needed for Artemis plan:

President Joe Biden on Monday released his budget request for the coming fiscal year, and NASA is a big winner. The administration is asking Congress to fund $25.9 billion for the space agency in 2023, an increase of nearly $2 billion over the $24 billion the agency received for fiscal year 2022.

The budget request for NASA includes a healthy increase for the Artemis Program, which seeks to carry out a series of human landings on the Moon later this decade. Notably, funding for a "Human Landing System" would increase from $1.2 billion for the current fiscal year to $1.5 billion, allowing for a second provider to begin work. Additionally, funding for lunar spacesuits would increase from $100 million to $276 million. NASA would also receive substantial funding—$48 million—to begin developing human exploration campaigns for the Moon and beyond.

All of this new funding in the proposed budget comes in addition to the billions that NASA has been spending annually to develop the Space Launch System rocket and Orion spacecraft. Overall funding for Artemis, therefore, would increase from $6.8 billion in fiscal year 2022 to $7.5 billion in the coming fiscal year, which begins October 1, 2022.

This means that, for the first time, the agency could have all of the money it needs for major programs to carry out the Artemis Moon landings. "This budget puts us on the right course," NASA Associate Administrator Bob Cabana said during a telephone call with reporters on Monday afternoon.

[...] Beyond the Artemis Program, the budget request would fund NASA's science programs to higher levels than ever before, due in large part to cost overruns for the Europa Clipper mission. The cost of the mission, which will make dozens of flybys of the intriguing Jovian moon from whence its name derives, has increased by $703 million to about $5 billion. To accommodate the cost overruns, several other missions would be delayed, including NEO Surveyor, a mission to detect near-Earth asteroids.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Can't get hold of a shiny new Raspberry Pi? Here's why:

Adafruit, an official reseller of Raspberry Pi computers, has mandated account verification and two-factor authentication in an effort to prevent bots from snapping up limited supply.

In a blog post, Adafruit explained it hopes to give customers the opportunity to purchase Raspberry Pis and other in-demand items at the going market rate, without having to compete with automated bots for stock.

"Please note! We are now requiring a verified account with two-factor authentication enabled in order to purchase certain high-demand products, such as Raspberry Pi computers, due to a large number of bot-purchasers making it difficult for Makers and Engineers to order these products," reads a notice on Adafruit product listings.

"Please make sure you have a verified Adafruit account and enable two-factor authentication. Finally, you will need to sign out and back in to activate the account verification."

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Printing circuits on rare nanomagnets puts a new spin on computing:

New research artificially creating a rare form of matter known as spin glass could spark a new paradigm in artificial intelligence by allowing algorithms to be directly printed as physical hardware. The unusual properties of spin glass enable a form of AI that can recognize objects from partial images much like the brain does and show promise for low-power computing, among other intriguing capabilities.

"Our work accomplished the first experimental realization of an artificial spin glass consisting of nanomagnets arranged to replicate a neural network," said Michael Saccone, a post-doctoral researcher in theoretical physics at Los Alamos National Laboratory and lead author of the new paper in Nature Physics. "Our paper lays the groundwork we need to use these physical systems practically."

[...] At the intersection of engineered materials and computation, spin-glass systems are a type of disordered system of nanomagnets arising from random interactions and competition between two types of magnetic order in the material. They exhibit "frustration," meaning that they don't settle into a uniformly ordered configuration when their temperature drops, and they possess distinct thermodynamic and dynamic traits that can be harnessed for computing applications.

"Theoretical models describing spin glasses are broadly used in other complex systems, such as those describing brain function, error-correcting codes or stock-market dynamics," Saccone said. "This wide interest in spin glasses provides strong motivation to generate an artificial spin glass."

The research team combined theoretical and experimental work to fabricate and observe the artificial spin glass as a proof-of-principle Hopfield neural network, which mathematically models associative memory to guide the disorder of the artificial spin systems.

Journal Reference:
Saccone, Michael, Caravelli, Francesco, Hofhuis, Kevin, et al. Direct observation of a dynamical glass transition in a nanomagnetic artificial Hopfield network, Nature Physics (DOI: 10.1038/s41567-022-01538-7)

Original Submission

upstart writes:

North Korean hackers unleashed Chrome 0-day exploit on hundreds of US targets:

Hackers backed by North Korea's government exploited a critical Chrome zero-day in an attempt to infect the computers of hundreds of people working in a wide range of industries, including the news media, IT, cryptocurrency, and financial services, Google said Thursday.

The flaw, tracked as CVE-2022-0609, was exploited by two separate North Korean hacking groups. Both groups deployed the same exploit kit on websites that either belonged to legitimate organizations and were hacked or were set up for the express purpose of serving attack code on unsuspecting visitors. One group was dubbed Operation Dream Job, and it targeted more than 250 people working for 10 different companies. The other group, known as AppleJeus, targeted 85 users.

"We suspect that these groups work for the same entity with a shared supply chain, hence the use of the same exploit kit, but each operate with a different mission set and deploy different techniques," Adam Weidemann, a researcher on Google's threat analysis group, wrote in a post. "It is possible that other North Korean government-backed attackers have access to the same exploit kit."

[...] The exploit kit was written in a way to carefully conceal the attack by, among other things, disguising the exploit code and triggering remote code execution only in select cases. The kit also appears to have used a separate exploit to break out of the Chrome security sandbox. The Google researchers were unable to determine that escape code, leaving open the possibility that the vulnerability it exploited has yet to be patched.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Nearby Star Could Help Explain Sunspot Mystery That Has Baffled Scientists for 300 Years:

The number of sunspots on our sun typically ebbs and flows in a predictable 11-year cycle, but one unusual 70-year period when sunspots were incredibly rare has mystified scientists for 300 years. Now a nearby sun-like star seems to have paused its own cycles and entered a similar period of rare starspots, according to a team of researchers at Penn State. Continuing to observe this star could help explain what happened to our own sun during this "Maunder Minimum" as well as lend insight into the sun's stellar magnetic activity, which can interfere with satellites and global communications and possibly even affect climate on Earth.

The star — and a catalog of 5 decades of starspot activity of 58 other sun-like stars — is described in a new paper that appears online in the Astronomical Journal.

Starspots appear as a dark spot on a star's surface due to temporary lower temperatures in the area resulting from the star's dynamo — the process that creates its magnetic field. Astronomers have been documenting changes in starspot frequency on our sun since they were first observed by Galileo and other astronomers in the 1600s, so there is a good record of its 11-year cycle. The exception is the Maunder Minimum, which lasted from the mid-1600s to early 1700s and has perplexed astronomers ever since.

"We don't really know what caused the Maunder Minimum, and we have been looking to other sun-like stars to see if they can offer some insight," said Anna Baum, an undergraduate at Penn State at the time of the research and first author of the paper. "We have identified a star that we believe has entered a state similar to the Maunder Minimum. It will be really exciting to continue to observe this star during, and hopefully as it comes out of, this minimum, which could be extremely informative about the sun's activity 300 years ago."

Journal Reference:

Anna C. Baum, Jason T. Wright, Jacob K. Luhn and Howard Isaacson, Five Decades of Chromospheric Activity in 59 Sun-like Stars and New Maunder Minimum Candidate HD 166620" , Astronomical Journal, DOI: 10.3847/1538-3881/ac5683

Original Submission

Freeman writes:

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2022/03/lapsus-and-solar-winds-hackers-both-use-the-same-old-trick-to-bypass-mfa/

Multi-factor authentication (MFA) is a core defense that is among the most effective at preventing account takeovers. In addition to requiring that users provide a username and password, MFA ensures they must also use an additional factor—be it a fingerprint, physical security key, or one-time password—before they can access an account. Nothing in this article should be construed as saying MFA isn't anything other than essential.
[...]
FIDO2 forms of MFA are relatively new, so many services for both consumers and large organizations have yet to adopt them.

That's where older, weaker forms of MFA come in. They include one-time passwords sent through SMS or generated by mobile apps like Google Authenticator or push prompts sent to a mobile device. When someone is logging in with a valid password, they also must either enter the one-time password into a field on the sign-in screen or push a button displayed on the screen of their phone.

It's this last form of authentication that recent reports say is being bypassed. One group using this technique, according to security firm Mandiant, is Cozy Bear, a band of elite hackers working for Russia's Foreign Intelligence Service. The group also goes under the names Nobelium, APT29, and the Dukes.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Faster-acting graphene sensor detects opioid metabolites in wastewater - Technology Org:

A sensor that detects opioid byproducts in wastewater faster and cheaper than current commonly used methods has been developed by U.S. National Science Foundation grantee researchers.

The graphene field effect transistor device can detect four natural and synthetic opioids simultaneously. The device is an emerging application of the growing wastewater-based epidemiology field, a discipline that has recently been deployed to measure coronavirus levels.

"The new sensor is able to rapidly, cheaply and easily measure opioids in wastewater," said Kenneth Burch of Boston College, a lead author of the report. "Its sensitivity and portability allow for wastewater-based epidemiology at the local scale — as specific as block-by-block or dorm-by-dorm — while ensuring privacy."

Journal Reference:
Narendra Kumar, Muhit Rana, Michael Geiwitz, et al. Rapid, Multianalyte Detection of Opioid Metabolites in Wastewater, ACS Nano (DOI: 10.1021/acsnano.1c07094)

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

https://www.theregister.com/2022/03/25/honda_civic_hack/

Any models made between 2016 and 2020 can have key fob codes sniffed and re-transmitted

"If you're driving a Honda Civic manufactured between 2016 and 2020, this newly reported key fob hijack should start your worry engine.

Keyless entry exploits are nothing new. Anyone armed with the right equipment can sniff out a lock or unlock code and retransmit it. This particular issue with some Honda vehicles is just the latest demonstration that auto manufacturers haven't adapted their technology to keep up with known threats.

This security weakness, tagged CVE-2022-27254, was discovered by Ayyappan Rajesh, a student at University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, and someone with the handle HackingIntoYourHeart. Their research indicated that Honda Civic LX, EX, EX-L, Touring, Si, and Type R vehicles manufactured between 2016 and 2020 all have this vulnerability.

According to the duo, who thanked professors Hong Liu and Ruolin Zhou and mentor Sam Curry, "various Honda vehicles send the same, unencrypted RF signal for each door-open, door-close, boot-open and remote start. This allows for an attacker to eavesdrop on the request and conduct a replay attack.""

[...] The CVE page for this vulnerability makes mention of another, CVE-2019-20626, the same vulnerability found in 2017 Honda HR-V vehicles, which Paraguayan security researcher Victor Casares demonstrated in a 2019 Medium post.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Low Power Mode For Custom GPS Tracker:

GPS has been a game-changing technology for all kinds of areas. Shipping, navigation, and even synchronization of clocks have become tremendously easier thanks to GPS. As a result of its widespread use, the cost of components is also low enough that almost anyone can build their own GPS device, and [Akio Sato] has taken this to the extreme with efforts to build a GPS tracker that uses the tiniest amount of power.

[...] [Akio Sato] imagines this unit would be particularly useful for recovering drones or other small aircraft that can easily get themselves lost. He's started a crowdfunding page for it as well. With such a long battery life, it's almost certain that the operator could recover their vessel before the batteries run out of energy. It could also be put to use tracking things that have a tendency to get stolen.

The advantages of this device are that it doesn't need a simcard or the ability to connect to any telephone system - it relies on LoRa which is free but its practicality will depend on coverage in your area. LoRa has become quite popular in Europe, Asia and (surprisingly?) parts of Africa. The tracker is also incredibly low power - the designer has managed to get a month's worth of operation out of a single coin-cell battery. It achieves this by having periods of sleep between periods of activity so it will not provide a real-time positional update but a periodic update. However, for its intended purpose this is entirely acceptable.

It is definitely worth a look, either to build one or to adapt some of its ideas to other projects.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Stunning Subsurface Images of Yellowstone National Park Reveal "Mystery Sandwich" Plumbing System:

The geysers and fumaroles of Yellowstone National Park are among the most iconic and popular geological features on our planet. Each year, millions of visitors travel to the park to marvel at the towering eruptions of Old Faithful, the bubbling mud cauldrons of Artists Paint Pots, the crystal-clear water, and iridescent colors of Grand Prismatic Spring, and the stacked travertine terraces of Mammoth Hot Springs.

Those who have visited the park may have asked themselves, "Where does all the hot water come from?" A study published last week in Nature, co-authored by Virginia Tech's W. Steven Holbrook and colleagues from the U.S. Geological Survey and Aarhus University in Denmark, provides stunning subsurface images that begin to answer that question.

The research team used geophysical data collected from a helicopter to create images of Yellowstone's subsurface "plumbing" system. The method detects features with unusual electrical and magnetic properties indicative of hydrothermal alteration.

"The combination of high electrical conductivity and low magnetization is like a fingerprint of hydrothermal activity that shows up very clearly in the data," said Holbrook, a professor of geophysics and head of the Department of Geosciences in Virginia Tech's College of Science. "The method is essentially a hydrothermal pathway detector."

upstart writes:

Scans Show Weakened Brain Connections in Adolescents at Risk of Bipolar Disorder:

A brain imaging study of young people at high risk of developing bipolar disorder has for the first time found evidence of weakening connections between key areas of the brain in late adolescence.

Up until now, medical researchers knew that bipolar disorder was associated with reduced communication between brain networks that are involved with emotional processing and thinking, but how these networks developed prior to the condition was a mystery.

[...] The researchers used diffusion-weighted magnetic imaging (dMRI) technology to scan the brains of 183 individuals over a two-year period. They examined the progressive changes in the brain scans of people with high genetic risk of developing the condition over a two year period, before comparing them with a control group of people with no risk.

People with a parent or sibling who has bipolar disorder are considered high genetic risk, and are 10 times more likely to develop the condition than people without the close family link. In the brain image scans of 97 people with high genetic risk of bipolar disorder, the researchers noted a decrease in connectivity between regions of the brain devoted to emotion processing and cognition during the two years between scans.

But in the control group of 86 people with no family history of mental illness, they observed the opposite: strengthening in the neural connections between these same regions, when the adolescent brain matures to become more adept at the cognitive and emotional reasoning required in adulthood.

upstart writes:

NASA to delay Mars Sample Return, switch to dual-lander approach - SpaceNews:

NASA plans to delay the next phase of its Mars Sample Return campaign and split a lander mission into two separate spacecraft to reduce the overall risk of the program.

At a March 21 meeting of the National Academies' Space Studies Board, Thomas Zurbuchen, NASA associate administrator for science, revealed that NASA and the European Space Agency had agreed to revise the schedule and design for upcoming missions that will return samples being cached by the Perseverance rover to Earth.

Original plans called for the launch of both a NASA-led Sample Retrieval Lander and ESA-led Earth Return Orbiter in 2026. The lander, using an ESA-built rover, would collect the samples cached by Perseverance and load them into a rocket called the Mars Ascent Vehicle (MAV), which would launch them into orbit. The orbiter, using a NASA-provided collection system, would gather the samples and return them to Earth in 2031.

An independent review, though, recommended in November 2020 that NASA delay those future missions to 2027 or 2028 to provide a more reasonable development schedule. Another panel recommendation was for NASA to investigate turning the single Sample Retrieval Lander spacecraft into two separate landers, one carrying the rover and the other the MAV.