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upstart writes:

Groundbreaking New Research Upends Understanding of How Blood Is Formed:

'Barcoding' studies discovered two independent sources for blood cells in mice. If confirmed in humans, our understanding of blood cancers, bone marrow transplants, and the aging immune system will change.

The origins of our blood may not be quite what we thought. Using cellular "barcoding" in mice, groundbreaking research finds that blood cells originate not from one type of mother cell, but two, with potential implications for blood cancers, bone marrow transplant, and immunology. Fernando Camargo, PhD, of the Stem Cell Program at Boston Children's Hospital led the study, published in the journal Nature on June 15, 2022.

"Historically, people have believed that most of our blood comes from a very small number of cells that eventually become blood stem cells, also known as hematopoietic stem cells," says Camargo, who is also a member of the Harvard Stem Cell Institute and a professor at Harvard University. "We were surprised to find another group of progenitor cells that do not come from stem cells. They make most of the blood in fetal life until young adulthood, and then gradually start decreasing."

The researchers are now following up to see if the findings also apply to humans. If so, these cells, known as embryonic multipotent progenitor cells (eMPPs), could potentially inform new treatments for boosting aging people's immune systems. They could also shed new light on blood cancers, especially those in children, and help make bone marrow transplants more effective.

Journal Reference:
Patel, Sachin H., Christodoulou, Constantina, Weinreb, Caleb, et al. Lifelong multilineage contribution by embryonic-born blood progenitors, Nature (DOI: 10.1038/s41586-022-04804-z)

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Instagram is testing out a trial in which it scans users' faces for proof they are over 18 years old:

The company announced the trial, which began on 23 June and is currently only being rolled out in the US, in a blog post. The trial is focused on users who try to change their age on the app from under 18 to over 18. Those users have three ways to verify their age: upload a photo of their ID, ask three mutual friends verify their age, or record a video selfie.

If a user selects the video selfie method, Instagram passes the videos to a London-based identity-verification startup, Yoti. Yoti will scan the user's facial features in the videos to confirm their ages, the company said.

Both Yoti and Instagram will delete the data once they've verified the user's age, per the announcement. The London startup's algorithm only verifies the user's age and not their identity, Instagram wrote, quoting a whitepaper from Yoti.

[...] If a user chooses to submit a photo of their ID to confirm their age, the image will be deleted after 30 days, the company said.

You can try the Yoti Demo yourself (the company pinky-swears they delete any data you share with them).

See also: Instagram is testing an AI tool that verifies your age by scanning your face

Original Submission

upstart writes:

'Deepest shipwreck': US WWII ship found off Philippines:

A US navy destroyer sunk during World War II has been found nearly 7,000 meters (23,000 feet) below sea level off the Philippines, making it the world's deepest shipwreck ever located, an American exploration team said.

The USS Samuel B Roberts went down during a battle off the central island of Samar on October 25, 1944 as US forces fought to liberate the Philippines—then a US colony—from Japanese occupation.

A crewed submersible filmed, photographed and surveyed the battered hull of the "Sammy B" during a series of dives over eight days this month, Texas-based undersea technology company Caladan Oceanic said.

Images showed the ship's three-tube torpedo launcher and gun mount. "Resting at 6,895 meters, it is now the deepest shipwreck ever located and surveyed," tweeted Caladan Oceanic founder Victor Vescovo, who piloted the submersible. "This small ship took on the finest of the Japanese Navy, fighting them to the end," he said.

According to US Navy records, Sammy B's crew "floated for nearly three days awaiting rescue, with many survivors perishing from wounds and shark attacks". Of the 224 crew, 89 died.

[...] In the latest search, the team also looked for the USS Gambier Bay at more than 7,000 meters below sea level, but was unable to locate it. It did not search for the USS Hoel due to the lack of reliable data showing where it may have gone down.

The wreck of the Titanic lies in about 4,000 meters of water.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Tapping the ocean as a source of natural products:

Despite this significant role, research into the diversity of microorganisms found in the ocean has thus far been only rudimentary. So, a group of researchers led by Shinichi Sunagawa, Professor of Microbiome Research, is working closely with Jörn Piel's group to investigate this diversity. Both groups are at the Institute of Microbiology at ETH Zurich.

To detect new natural products made by bacteria, Sunagawa and his team examined publicly available DNA data from 1,000 water samples collected at different depths from every ocean region in the world. The data came from such sources as ocean expeditions and observation platforms positioned out at sea.

Thanks to modern technologies like environmental DNA (eDNA) analysis, it has become easier to search for new species and discover which known organisms can be found where. But what is hardly known at all is what special effects the marine microorganisms offer -- in other words, what chemical compounds they make that are important for interactions between organisms. In the best-case scenario, such compounds would benefit humans as well. Underpinning the research is the assumption that the ocean microbiome harbours great potential for natural products that could prove beneficial, for instance for their antibiotic properties.

The extracted eDNA present in the samples was sequenced by the original researchers of the various expeditions. By reconstructing entire genomes on the computer, the scientists succeeded in decrypting the encoded information -- the blueprints for proteins. Finally, they consolidated this new data together with the existing 8,500 genome data sets for marine microorganisms in a single database.

This gave them 35,000 genomes to draw on when searching for new microbial species and, in particular, for promising biosynthetic gene clusters (BGCs). A BGC is a group of genes that provide the synthetic pathway for a natural product.

upstart writes:

A Massive Sunspot That Could Unleash Significant Solar Flares Is Pointed Right at Us:

Sunspots can throw off powerful solar flares that disrupt radio communications on Earth and sometimes impact the power grid. Space weather watchers are keeping a close eye on a dark and volatile spot on the sun that's grown dramatically this week.

Between Sunday and Monday, Sunspot AR3038 more than doubled in size, making it several times wider than Earth's diameter, and it's continued to expand in the past 48 hours, according to NASA heliophysicist C. Alex Young, writing at EarthSky.

Sunspots are darkened, cooler areas on the sun's surface with unstable magnetic fields, and they can produce solar flares and coronal mass ejections of charged particles and plasma. These flares and ejections occasionally cause chaos for electrical and radio communications systems here on Earth.

Over the last day, the mega-sunspot has let off a pair of minor, C-class solar flares while pointing straight at Earth, but Astronomer Tony Phillips reports at Spaceweather.com that "Sunspot AR3038 has a 'beta-gamma' magnetic field that harbors energy for (medium strength) M-class solar flares."

upstart writes:

Using a locust's brain and antennae to detect mouth cancer:

Prior research has shown that some animals, such as dogs, can smell the changes in chemicals that are emitted when humans perspire or breathe out. Dogs were tested for use in detecting COVID-19 in people, for example. But raising, training and keeping dogs for such work involves a lot of time and effort. In this new effort, the researchers wondered if such work could be done more efficiently using a different creature known to have a keen sense of smell—the locust.

Locusts are a type of grasshopper typically found in the tropics. In addition to their long bodies and jumping legs, they have large antennae they use for detecting chemical changes in the air around them. The researchers in this new effort took advantage of that ability. They surgically implanted probes into the brains of several live specimens to allow them to record brain wave patterns as the bugs were introduced to gases coming off cancer specimens grown in a jar.

More specifically, they were exposed to gases emitted from three types of mouth cancer growing in human tissue. As the gases were introduced to the antennae, the brain waves of the locusts were recorded. After many rounds of testing, the researchers found that they were able to detect and recognize different brain wave patterns as the locusts were exposed to the different kinds of cancer—and a control group of mouth cells that were non-cancerous. The researchers note that their effort is the first to use a living insect brain to detect cancer.

Journal Reference:
Alexander Farnum, Michael Parnas, Ehsanul Hoque Apu, et al. Harnessing insect olfactory neural circuits for noninvasive detection of human cancer [$], bioRxiv (DOI: 10.1101/2022.05.24.493311)

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Multiple malicious Python packages available on the PyPI repository were caught stealing sensitive information like AWS credentials and transmitting it to publicly exposed endpoints accessible by anyone:

PyPI is a repository of open-source packages that software developers use to pick the building blocks of their Python-based projects or share their work with the community.

While PyPI is usually quick to respond to reports of malicious packages on the platform, there's no real vetting before submission, so dangerous packages may lurk there for a while.

Software supply-chain security companies like Sonatype use specialized automated malware detection tools to spot them, and in this case, they identified the following packages as malicious:

• loglib-modules
• pyg-modules
• pygrata
• pygrata-utils
• hkg-sol-utils

While the first two packages attempt to mimic legitimate and popular projects on PyPI to trick careless or inexperienced users to install them and the other three don't have apparent targeting, all five feature code similarities or connections.

[...] Since these malicious packages aren't using typosquatting tricks, they're not randomly targeting developers who mistyped a character but users looking for specific tools for their projects.

Software developers are advised to go beyond package names and scrutinize release histories, upload dates, homepage links, package descriptions, and download numbers, all collectively helping determine if a Python package is the real deal or a dangerous fake.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

'Microorganism' is a misnomer when it comes to centimetre-long Thiomargarita magnifica:

Lurking on rotting leaves sunken in the mangroves of Guadeloupe in the Caribbean live some extraordinary thread-like creatures. These filament-like organisms, up to a centimetre in length, are the biggest single-cell bacteria yet to be found. Named Thiomargarita magnifica, they live by oxidizing sulfur, and are 50 times bigger than any other known bacteria.

[...] There are other whoppers in the Thiomargarita bacteria family, but the next-largest is only around 750 micrometres in length. Other filament-like bacteria are also found in the mangroves, but these all consist of tens or hundreds of cells. "What is very unique about the T. magnifica is that the entire filament, which is among the longest filaments in the mangrove, is just one cell," says Volland.

[...] Now that T. magnifica has been discovered, Gros expects other teams to go off in search of even larger bacteria — which might be hidden in plain sight, he says. Petra Levin at Washington University in St Louis, Missouri, says that the discovery challenges conventional wisdom that bacteria have lower size limits than eukaryotic cells. "There's probably an upper limit on cell size at some point, but I don't think it will be peculiar to bacteria or archaea or eukaryotes."

"We really should not underestimate evolution, because we can't guess where it's going to go," says Levin. "I would not have guessed this thing exists, but now that I see it, I can see the logic in the evolution to this point."

Journal Reference:
Volland, J.-M. et al. Science 376, 1453–1458 (2022). DOI: 10.1101/2022.02.16.480423

Original Submission

Psyche, the 'Goldmine Asteroid,' Mapped in Greatest Detail Yet

upstart writes:

16 Psyche is considered a dwarf planet, roughly 140 miles in diameter:

Scientists have devised one of the most detailed maps yet of the asteroid, "Psyche," ahead of a mission to investigate the chunk of rock later this year.

The map, released in the paper "The Heterogeneous Surface of Asteroid (16) Psyche" in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Planets, was constructed with an array of advanced telescopes in northern Chile that constructed the asteroid's surface.

"Psyche's surface is very heterogeneous," said the study's lead author, Saverio Cambioni, of MIT's Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences (EAPS). "It's an evolved surface, and these maps confirm that metal-rich asteroids are interesting enigmatic worlds. It's another reason to look forward to the Psyche mission going to the asteroid."

NASA's Psyche Mission to an Unexplored Metal World Comes to a Halt

NASA's Psyche mission to an unexplored metal world comes to a halt:

NASA's first spacecraft designed to study a metallic asteroid won't be launching this year as planned, according to an announcement made by the agency on Friday.

The Psyche mission's 2022 launch window, which opened on August 1 and closes on October 11, will come to an end before the spacecraft's flight software is ready. A delay in delivering the software and its testing equipment has prevented the Psyche team from having enough time for testing prior to launch.

Engineers want to be absolutely sure that the software will function as expected once the spacecraft is in flight.

[...] "Flying to a distant metal-rich asteroid, using Mars for a gravity assist on the way there, takes incredible precision. We must get it right. Hundreds of people have put remarkable effort into Psyche during this pandemic, and the work will continue as the complex flight software is thoroughly tested and assessed," said JPL Director Laurie Leshin. "The decision to delay the launch wasn't easy, but it is the right one."

upstart writes:

Samantha Cristoforetti also plans to follow a 20-minute routine in microgravity in the near future:

English-speaking yoga teachers often evoke space in their pose names, with examples including "crescent moon" and "star" positions.

Now an astronaut is getting these moves on during microgravity exercise on the International Space Station.

Expedition 67 astronaut Samantha Cristoforetti recently shared a picture of herself on Twitter doing "triangle pose" in the Japanese Kibo laboratory, a popular spot for astronauts to pose for pictures and press conferences.

"You know what? I love doing yoga here on Earth, and I'm wondering, would it work up there in space?" Cristoforetti asked in a May 23 video posted on the Cosmic Kids YouTube channel.

In response, certified yoga teacher Jaime Amor played out a possible space routine for Cristoforetti in the 20-minute video, adding a Yoga in Space activity pack for youngsters looking to stretch and do resistance training along with the astronaut.

[...] Other astronauts have successfully done yoga in orbit before Cristoforetti. For example, NASA astronauts Jack Fischer and Peggy Whitson showed off some balancing poses in 2017, although Fischer joked on Twitter that these are a lot easier to hold "without gravity."

[...] Yoga has numerous health benefits including improving strength, balance and flexibility, according to Johns Hopkins Medicine ; yoga is also associated with more energy and better stress management, among other health outcomes.

Any Soylental yoga enthusiasts? Any starting tips for someone who wants to relieve anxiety, but whose hamstrings are no longer very flexible and who is more likely to want to stay on the floor once they get down there? [asking for a friend --hubie]

Original Submission

hubie writes:

The decision to make the C# extension in Visual Studio Code proprietary is raising hackles, but Microsoft is still a consistent supporter of open source:

Miguel de Icaza's barrage of criticism against Microsoft comes with a lot of credibility. This is the developer who has spent much of his career building open source projects within the Microsoft ecosystem and spent years working for Microsoft on Xamarin and other projects. His primary complaint? "That Microsoft would subvert an active open source project by ramming in a proprietary extension to continue to lock down .NET." This comes after last year's Hot Reload open source dumpster fire.

For those who choose to see this as a resurrection of Microsoft's old "Linux is a cancer" trope, not so fast. On balance, Microsoft has been a consistent contributor to open source communities, at least since its public declaration of open source devotion back in 2014. It's doubtful that the company is suddenly reverting to type, closing off one of its most visible open source successes. Instead, I suspect this is one division's decision to satisfy corporate revenue targets with a well understood, if out-of-favor, licensing model.

Still think it's just Microsoft being evil? Have you ever worked at a big company?

[...] It's possible to accept de Icaza's view of the situation and still think that, on balance, Microsoft gets more decisions on open source right than wrong. This is the same Microsoft that recently funded the GNOME project, a direct (if not particularly threatening) challenge to the Windows desktop. It's a big sponsor of the Apache Software Foundation, plus it contributes cash and other resources to Python, Java (!!), Kubernetes, OpenTelemetry, and more.

[...] One thing I've learned: A company is never as bad as it seems on the surface because ultimately it's made up of individual people making decisions. [...] It was money that influenced Microsoft's love for open source, just as with every other company, and Microsoft will follow the money in this case, too.

Original Submission

fliptop writes:

Artificial intelligence use is booming, but it's not the secret weapon you might imagine:

From cyber operations to disinformation, artificial intelligence extends the reach of national security threats that can target individuals and whole societies with precision, speed, and scale. As the U.S. competes to stay ahead, the intelligence community is grappling with the fits and starts of the impending revolution brought on by AI.

The U.S. intelligence community has launched initiatives to grapple with AI's implications and ethical uses, and analysts have begun to conceptualize how AI will revolutionize their discipline, yet these approaches and other practical applications of such technologies by the IC have been largely fragmented.

As experts sound the alarm that the U.S. is not prepared to defend itself against AI by its strategic rival, China, Congress has called for the IC to produce a plan for integration of such technologies into workflows to create an "AI digital ecosystem" in the 2022 Intelligence Authorization Act.

The article at Wired goes on to describe how different government agencies are using AI to find patterns in global web traffic and satellite images, but there are problems when using AI to interpret intent:

AI's comprehension might be more analogous to the comprehension of a human toddler, says Eric Curwin, chief technology officer at Pyrra Technologies, which identifies virtual threats to clients from violence to disinformation. "For example, AI can understand the basics of human language, but foundational models don't have the latent or contextual knowledge to accomplish specific tasks," Curwin says.

[...] In order to "build models that can begin to replace human intuition or cognition," Curwin explains, "researchers must first understand how to interpret behavior and translate that behavior into something AI can learn."

Originally spotted on The Eponymous Pickle.

Previously:
Is Society Ready for AI Ethical Decision-Making?
The Next Cybersecurity Crisis: Poisoned AI

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Fix the Hog: Harley, Westinghouse ordered to fix warranties:

Federal regulators have accused Harley-Davidson and Westinghouse of imposing illegal warranty terms on customers and ordered them to fix their warranties and ensure that their dealers compete fairly with independent repair-makers.

The companies have imposed illegal warranty terms that voided customer warranties if they used anyone other than the companies and their authorized dealers to get parts or repairs — restricting their options and costing them more money, the Federal Trade Commission announced Thursday in actions against the Milwaukee motorcycle maker and MWE Investments, which makes Westinghouse-brand outdoor power generators and related equipment.

Under a proposed consent agreement with the agency, the companies will be prohibited from telling customers that their warranties will be voided if they use third-party services or parts, or that they should only use branded parts or authorized service providers.

The companies also will be required to add specific language to their warranties recognizing consumers' right to repair: "Taking your product to be serviced by a repair shop that is not affiliated with or an authorized dealer of (company name) will not void this warranty. Also, using third-party parts will not void this warranty."

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Wild solar weather is causing satellites to plummet from orbit. It's only going to get worse.:

In late 2021, operators of the European Space Agency's (ESA) Swarm constellation noticed something worrying: The satellites, which measure the magnetic field around Earth, started sinking toward the atmosphere at an unusually fast rate — up to 10 times faster than before. The change coincided with the onset of the new solar cycle, and experts think it might be the beginning of some difficult years for spacecraft orbiting our planet.

"In the last five, six years, the satellites were sinking about two and a half kilometers [1.5 miles] a year," Anja Stromme, ESA's Swarm mission manager, told Space.com. "But since December last year, they have been virtually diving. The sink rate between December and April has been 20 kilometers [12 miles] per year."

Satellites orbiting close to Earth always face the drag of the residual atmosphere, which gradually slows the spacecraft and eventually makes them fall back to the planet. (They usually don't survive this so-called re-entry and burn up in the atmosphere.) This atmospheric drag forces the International Space Station's controllers to perform regular "reboost" maneuvers to maintain the station's orbit of 250 miles (400 km) above Earth.

This drag also helps clean up the near-Earth environment from space junk. Scientists know that the intensity of this drag depends on solar activity — the amount of solar wind spewed by the sun, which varies depending on the 11-year solar cycle. The last cycle, which officially ended in December 2019, was rather sleepy, with a below-average number of monthly sunspots and a prolonged minimum of barely any activity. But since last fall, the star has been waking up, spewing more and more solar wind and generating sunspots, solar flares and coronal mass ejections at a growing rate. And the Earth's upper atmosphere has felt the effects.

"There is a lot of complex physics that we still don't fully understand going on in the upper layers of the atmosphere where it interacts with the solar wind," Stromme said. "We know that this interaction causes an upwelling of the atmosphere. That means that the denser air shifts upwards to higher altitudes."

Denser air means higher drag for the satellites. Even though this density is still incredibly low 250 miles above Earth, the increase caused by the upwelling atmosphere is enough to virtually send some of the low-orbiting satellites plummeting.

Appalbarry writes:

I date back to the days before HTTPS was a thing, when web sites were written in Notepad. Since then I've worked through various editors and programs including Dreamweaver, Joomla, WordPress (of course) and on-line things like Wix.com and Substack. Now we find that we have a half dozen small web sites to manage or update, in different platforms, and all which are small enough that WordPress et al are serious overkill. I've done some research and have come up with no sure solution to get us out of this mess. Here's what we need.

• Open source, hosted in our own web space. No cloud based things
• Simple interface - for a couple of dozen pages without the need for massive database backends we don't need a Joomla or WordPress. Plus a non-techy user can update stuff easily.
• Obviously has to work for desktop browsers and on the phone.
• Has to handle some media like images and present YouTube hosted videos well.
• SIMPLE Has to be SIMPLE to update and manage.

I'm needing suggestions, and even better, URLs for sites that use simple packages. Please folks, save me hundreds of hours of trial and error.

Original Submission