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An Anonymous Coward writes:

https://www.cnn.com/2022/08/26/health/polypill-lower-cardiovascular-events-wellness/index.html

Older heart disease patients who took a combination "polypill" made up of three different medications had a lower risk of major cardiovascular events, according to a new study published Friday in the New England Journal of Medicine and presented at the European Society of Cardiology Congress in Spain.

Study authors led by Dr. Valentin Fuster, director of Mount Sinai Heart in New York City and general director of the Spanish National Center for Cardiovascular Research, looked at 2,499 patients in seven European countries who had a history of type 1 myocardial infarction in the past six months and were either over the age of 75 or a minimum age of 65 with at least one risk factor, such as diabetes or mild or moderate kidney dysfunction.

Half the patients were given the polypill that contained aspirin, ramipril and atorvastatin, while others received the usual standard of care. Patients were followed for a median of three years.

The researchers found 48 cardiovascular deaths in the polypill group and 71 in the usual-care group, meaning patients who took the polypill had a relative risk reduction of 33% for cardiovascular death. The polypill was also favorable in other measures studied in the trial, such as stroke or myocardial infarction.

[...] There are some limitations to the research, including that the trial was not performed in a blinded manner and all patients were enrolled before the Covid-19 pandemic.

Journal Reference:
Jose M. Castellano, Stuart J. Pocock, Deepak L. Bhatt, et al., Polypill Strategy in Secondary Cardiovascular Prevention, NEJM, 2022. DOI: 10.1056/NEJMoa2208275

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upstart writes:

After finding more than 20,000 undeclared pools, French authorities plan to roll the system out nationwide and could use it to spot other property enhancements:

The power of artificial intelligence is now being used to crack down on unpaid taxes in France.

[...] Pools can boost the value of a property and must be declared under French law as they can lead to higher property taxes. French news publication The Connexion said a swimming pool can increase a property tax bill by up to 30pc.

French authorities began an experiment last year using an AI system developed by Google and tech services firm Capgemini, according to local media reports. This AI is able to identify pools from aerial images and compare the information with land registry databases.

Nine French departments were able to uncover more than 20,000 undeclared swimming pools using this technology.

[...] Following the success of the trial, France's tax office now plans to extend this AI system nationwide and it could reap €40m in new taxes next year.

The scope of the software could also be expanded to spot other undeclared property enhancements such as annexes or extensions.

[...] AI is "without any doubt" the new fuel for the modern economy, according to John Clancy from Ireland's Enterprise Digital Advisory Forum, with the potential to disrupt and transform almost every industry and business sector.

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upstart writes:

Germany orders shutdown of digital ads to save gas:

Germany has ordered overnight shutdowns for non-essential digital signage, to save its reserves of natural gas for more important purposes.

Like many European nations, Germany relies on natural gas imported from Russia. And thanks to Russia's illegal invasion of Ukraine, that gas is currently in short supply.

The European Union has therefore implemented an energy saving plan. One of Germany's tactics is requiring digital signage in shop windows and other non-essential locations to be turned off between 10:00PM and 6:00AM. Germany will also stop external lighting of some public buildings and implement many other power-saving measures.

[...] Further complicating matters is a requirement to turn off the screens altogether rather than leaving the displays blank.

Digital signage is seldom switched off, and retail staff will have to learn how to do that. Many digital signs also include a computer – some are Android machines, others use compute sticks, the Intel NUC and even the Raspberry Pi. Admins will therefore need to cope with extra reboots.

And then there's the matter of content updates, which are often scheduled overnight.

All of which adds up to a stressful moment for admins of digital signage, and not much time to get things right.

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upstart writes:

Employees Say 'Quiet Quitting' Is Just Setting Boundaries. Companies Fear Long-Term Effects:

Maggie Perkins, a Georgia-based teaching advocate, had been working as a teacher for nearly half a decade before she decided to "quiet quit" her job. The decision didn't mean she'd leave her position, but rather limit her work to her contract hours. Nothing more, nothing less.

"No matter how much I hustle as a teacher, there isn't a growth system or recognition incentive," Perkins told TIME. "If I didn't quiet quit my teaching job, I would burn out."

Perkins joins a larger online community of workers who have been sharing their experiences on TikTok, taking a "quiet quitting" mentality—the concept of no longer going above and beyond, and instead doing what their job description requires of them and only that.

The movement comes in the wake of a global pandemic that caused employees to reimagine what work could look like, considering the potentials of extending remote work, not working much on Fridays, or in some cases, amid the Great Resignation, not working at all. Arianna Huffington, founder of the Huffington Post and CEO at Thrive, wrote in a viral LinkedIn post, "Quiet quitting isn't just about quitting on a job, it's a step toward quitting on life."

As "quiet quitters" defend their choice to take a step back from work, company executives and workplace experts argue that although doing less might feel good in the short-term, it could harm your career—and your company—in the long run.

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upstart writes:

If Heroku is so special, why is it dying?:

[Editors Comment: It seems it might be even more obscure that I thought it was. It is a container system similar to Kubernetes or Docker, but was around a while before them. JR]

With Heroku, there's always a "but." For 15 years, I've heard Heroku described as "magical," as the gold standard for developer experience, as the manna from heaven that the Israelites ate while wandering in the wilderness.

For all its impact, Heroku always seems bigger in its mythology than its reality. I don't mean to say that its impact hasn't been substantial in terms of other services and products it has inspired, but why is Kubernetes and not Heroku the increasingly default way to build and scale applications? Some suggest Heroku was simply ahead of its time. Maybe. Or maybe the price of that magical developer experience was too constrained to work in the modern messiness of enterprise computing.

Heroku is back in the news because it recently announced the elimination of its free tier. Why? As it turns out, it was simply too much work to keep up with the graft that followed a zero-cost tier: "Our product, engineering, and security teams are spending an extraordinary amount of effort to manage fraud and abuse of the Heroku free product plans," said Bob Wise, general manager of Heroku and executive vice president at Salesforce, which acquired Heroku in late 2010. Instead of playing Whac-A-Mole with crypto fraudsters, the company hopes to better invest in its customers—of which there probably aren't as many as there should be.

That sounds like criticism but isn't. Perhaps it's the crowd I follow, but I've never heard Heroku mentioned except to praise how it revolutionized deployment of applications. Prior to Heroku, it would take as long or longer to deploy an application as to build it. With Heroku, deployment was as easy as a Git push.

upstart writes:

FTC sues data broker that tracks locations of 125M phones per month:

The Federal Trade Commission on Monday sued a data broker for allegedly selling location data culled from hundreds of millions of phones that can be used to track the movements of people visiting abortion clinics, domestic abuse shelters, places of worship, and other sensitive places.

In a complaint, the agency said that Idaho-based Kochava has promoted its marketplace as providing "rich geo data spanning billions of devices globally." The data broker has also said it "delivers raw latitude/longitude data with volumes around 94B+ geo transactions per month, 125 million monthly active users, and 35 million daily active users, on average observing more than 90 daily transactions per device."

The FTC said Kochava amassed the data by tracking the Mobile Advertising ID, or MAID, from phones and selling the data through Amazon Web Services or other outlets without first anonymizing the data. Anyone who purchases the data can then use it to track the comings and goings of many phone owners. Many of the allegations are based on the agency's analysis of a data sample the company made available for free to promote sales of its data, which was available online with no restrictions on usage.

"In fact, in just the data Kochava made available in the Kochava Data Sample, it is possible to identify a mobile device that visited a women's reproductive health clinic and trace that mobile device to a single-family residence," the complaint alleged. "The data set also reveals that the same mobile device was at a particular location at least three evenings in the same week, suggesting the mobile device user's routine. The data may also be used to identify medical professionals who perform, or assist in the performance, of abortion services."

Mikhail Gorbachev, Who Ended the Cold War, Dies Aged 91 -Agencies

upstart writes:

Mikhail Gorbachev, who ended the Cold War, dies aged 91 -agencies:

Mikhail Gorbachev, who ended the Cold War without bloodshed but failed to prevent the collapse of the Soviet Union, died on Tuesday at the age of 91, Russian news agencies cited hospital officials as saying.

Gorbachev, the last Soviet president, forged arms reduction deals with the United States and partnerships with Western powers to remove the Iron Curtain that had divided Europe since World War Two and bring about the reunification of Germany.

When pro-democracy protests swept across the Soviet bloc nations of communist Eastern Europe in 1989, he refrained from using force - unlike previous Kremlin leaders who had sent tanks to crush uprisings in Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968.

But the protests fuelled aspirations for autonomy in the 15 republics of the Soviet Union, which disintegrated over the next two years in chaotic fashion.

Gorbachev struggled in vain to prevent that collapse.

Russian Media: Ex-Soviet Leader Mikhail Gorbachev Dead at 91

upstart writes:

Russian media: Ex-Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev dead at 91:

MOSCOW (AP) — Russian news agencies are reporting that former Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev has died at 91. The Tass, RIA Novosti and Interfax agencies cited the Central Clinical Hospital.

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upstart writes:

Microsoft finalises cloud licensing changes in response to EU complaints:

Microsoft finalises cloud licensing changes in response to EU complaints

Microsoft said these changes will make it easier for smaller cloud competitors to 'thrive'. It follows licensing complaints made against the company in 2019.

Microsoft is making changes to its software licensing terms to help other cloud service providers to compete.

The tech giant said the new changes will make it easier for customers to run Microsoft software on the cloud platforms of smaller rivals in the EU. These changes are set to take effect on 1 October.

"At Microsoft we recognise the importance of a competitive environment in the European cloud provider market, in which smaller competitors can thrive," the company said in a blogpost. "It is therefore critical for us to remain mindful of our responsibilities as a major technology company."

The changes come following complaints made against the company in 2019. A number of Microsoft's EU customers said its licensing terms made it more expensive to run Microsoft software such as Office on the cloud platforms of competitors such as Amazon Web Services, Google and Alibaba.

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upstart writes:

No drinking water "indefinitely" in Jackson, Mississippi:

The water system in Jackson, MIssissippi's largest city, has failed and is no longer pressurized, report local media. Residents are advised to boil whatever water they can get out the faucet for three minutes before drinking it; officials do not know when reliable service will be back.

[Gov. Tate] Reeves said the first goal is to restore water quantity so that people can flush toilets and take a shower and then to restore quality to end the boil water notice. As a short-term plan, Reeves said the state will cashflow emergency improvements, maintenance and repairs, which will include contracting operators to assist at the treatment plant. He said Mayor Lumumba agreed to a plan where the city would be responsible for half of the cost of the operation.

[..] The city water system has been plagued with problems for years, including tens of thousands of residents losing water between one and three weeks during a 2021 winter storm.

Nearby flooding is hardly even a final straw; the problem is systematic and results from years of underinvestment.

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owl writes:

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/08/smartdrys-useful-laundry-sensor-to-be-cloud-bricked-next-month/

SmartDry was a smart home product that did something useful: tell you when your clothes in your dryer were actually dry.

A small pack mounted inside nearly any dryer drum could prevent clothes from shrinking, save you energy costs (at least $60 per year, the marketing claimed), and even warn you about clogged vents causing high heat—or, much worse, gas buildup. A second-generation version could even turn off your gas dryer automatically. Reviewers greatly preferred it to their own dryers' unpredictable dryness sensors.

The problem is that SmartDry alerted you to dry clothing by connecting to your home's Wi-Fi; the device sent a message to parent company Connected Life's servers and then relayed that message to your smartphone. But Connected Life Labs is closing, discontinuing SmartDry, and shutting down its servers on September 30. After that, "cloud services will cease operations and the product apps will no longer be supported."

In other words, SmartDry will become a tiny brick inside your dryer unless you're willing to procure a little ESP32 development board, load some code onto it, plug it in near your dryer, and set up your own alerts in your Home Assistant server. If you had a first-generation SmartDry, this would actually be a slight improvement, as those devices used Espressif ESP32 chips with a forever vulnerability.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Mushrooms serve as 'main character' in most ecosystems:

A team of Western mycologists (fungi experts) spent the past two summers digging deep in Newfoundland dirt to investigate the might of mushrooms and found what lies beneath truly is 'the main character' in most terrestrial ecosystems.

Fungi, which produce mushrooms, are critically important in most earthbound ecosystems as they provide life-sustaining mineral nutrients to plants while decomposing their remains, and recycling both organic and inorganic byproducts throughout the biome as they grow and reproduce.

"A lot of ecologists are beginning to realize that mushrooms really run the world. We've quite naturally spent a lot of our time focusing on things above ground, things that we see like plants, animals, and birds," said Western biology professor Greg Thorn. "But in fact, the plants are very closely associated with fungi, and basically wouldn't be there (above ground) without them."

[...] Katarina Kukolj, a master's student in the Thorn lab, leads a study investigating the effects of the edible blewit mushroom (Lepista nuda) on the soil environments in coastal regions of Newfoundland, specifically in the community of Lumsden.

Building on Thorn's research, Kukolj wants to know how and why blewits basically 'attack' microfauna (microscopic animals and organisms) living in the soil and serving as nature's vacuum cleaner by eating bacteria, decomposing surplus nutrients, and producing new ones.

[...] Kukolj believes her research could also provide important supporting data for the use of blewits as a biopesticide in organic farming. Blewitt mushrooms would be an environmentally friendly alternative to some synthetic chemical pesticides. They're also non-toxic and there would be no leaching into the waterways.

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

Frogs once lived alongside dinosaurs. About 45 million years ago, the North Sea covered half of Germany. It's incredible to think these little creatures survived the dinosaurs' extinction. But a lower level mass death did take place in what is now called the Geiseltal region in central Germany and the cause has long remained a mystery.

Hundreds of frog fossils were found in a mass grave in Geiseltal's 45-million-year-old swampy coastlands, and their reason for being there has confounded scientists for decades. But my team's study found an explanation: they died from exhaustion while mating.

[...] Other scientists thought the Geiseltal frogs and toads died when lakes dried up and oxygen levels decreased rapidly. But our research showed this was unlikely as the frogs could have easily made their way to nearby water bodies. We also found evidence the frog carcasses floated in the water for some time before they sank to the lake bottom. So the lake didn't dry out.

Our comparisons of Geiseltal skeletons with modern frogs revealed most Geiseltal frogs were actually toads. Toads follow a land based lifestyle, except when they return to ponds to mate. They mated with numerous other toads during the very short mating season which, in some modern tropical species, lasts for just hours.

upstart writes:

The party is over for Nvidia as crypto and gaming GPU demand is down:

Nvidia on Wednesday announced its financial results for the second quarter of its fiscal year 2023. The results were a mixed bag as its client PC businesses suffered declines, but its automotive and data center businesses thrived.

Nvidia's gaming, professional graphics, mining, and OEM business segments were down significantly both sequentially and annually, which is why it had to warn investors that it expects slow sales of gaming and ProViz graphics products to persist for a while. Meanwhile, the company said that it plans to talk about its next-generation Ada Lovelace architecture next month but never revealed when actual GeForce RTX 40-series graphics boards will be available.

By contrast, Nvidia's data center and automotive hardware shipments were up significantly compared to the same quarter a year ago. They will be up again in Q3 FY2023 now that the company's Hopper H100 compute GPUs are in total production and ready to ship.

[...] During its second quarter of fiscal 2023, Nvidia encountered multiple challenges, including macroeconomic conditions (inflation and uncertainty among consumers), high inventory levels in the channel (as the company aggressively sold its graphics cards in prior quarters), softening demand from the end user (both because gamers are expecting Ada Lovelace to launch shortly and because of uncertainties), inventory corrections by partners, and lowering prices of graphics cards as a result of softening demand as well as increased supply by competition.

[...] It should be noted that Nvidia's gaming revenue in Q2 was still significantly higher when compared to $1.654 billion in the second quarter of the company's FY2021 (~calendar Q2 2020). It indicates that the chip designer benefited greatly from increased demand for discrete GPUs for gaming PCs, increased prices of standalone graphics cards, and the crypto mining craze.

An Anonymous Coward writes:

https://interestingengineering.com/innovation/scientists-create-synthetic-embryo-from-stem-cells

Genetic engineering experts at the University of Cambridge have produced a "synthetic" mouse embryo without using egg or sperm cells.

The embryos produced using stem cells were able to start developing a heart, brain, and other organs for up to a week, according to a press release published by the university on Thursday.

"It's an absolutely fantastically complex stage of development, and it has extremely relevant meaning for the rest of our life," said Magdalena Zernicka-Goetz, a Cambridge professor of mammalian development and stem cell biology, at a press conference announcing the findings.

[...] The researchers believe their findings will one day help explain why many human pregnancies fail early in development and may even inform future efforts to create lab-grown organs for transplantation.

To a certain extent, researchers have learned how to develop already created embryos in the lab, as well as how to create artificial but simplistic models of embryos or individual organs—advances that have helped overcome some of these obstacles.

However, this new study claimed to be one of the first successful attempts at creating a functional mouse embryo from scratch.

[...] The scientists created embryos by combining three different types of embryonic stem cells in the exact right combination and environment, allowing them to communicate with one another and mimicking what happens naturally during embryonic development.

The cells then began to form the fundamental structures of an embryo and progressed through the early stages of development, which included the formation of a yolk sac, brain, and beating heart. The embryos survived for up to eight and a half days.

Journal Reference:
Amadei, G., Handford, C.E., Qiu, C. et al. Synthetic embryos complete gastrulation to neurulation and organogenesis. Nature (2022). 10.1038/s41586-022-05246-3

Original Submission

upstart writes:

LastPass confirms attackers stole some source code:

LastPass is letting its users know that there was a recent security incident at the company where someone was able to access some source code for its password manager as well as proprietary technical information.

Earlier this week, LastPass started notifying its users of a "recent security incident" where an "unauthorized party" used a compromised developer account to access parts of its password manager's source code and "some proprietary LastPass technical information." In a letter to its users, the company's CEO Karim Toubba explains that its investigation hasn't turned up evidence that any user data or encrypted passwords were accessed.

Toubba continues on to explain that the company has "implemented additional enhanced security measures" after containing the breach, which it detected two weeks ago. The company wouldn't comment on how long the breach had been going on before it was detected.

As LastPass explains, at this point its users don't have to do anything — there's no reason for you to spend an afternoon changing your master password and doing a full security audit. LastPass, on the other hand, probably has its work cut out for it making sure that it doesn't have to make any changes now that an unauthorized party may have access to its source code.

To be clear, hackers having access to a program's source code doesn't immediately mean they can instantly pwn it, breaking through its defenses. Famously, Microsoft says it doesn't rely on its source code remaining private for security and says that people being able to read it shouldn't be a risk (which is a good thing because its source code leaks a lot). And while that should be the case for any company, especially ones whose entire deal is keeping your passwords safe, I'd probably want the company to be poring over its code just to make sure there aren't any subtle vulnerabilities that it missed if I were a LastPass customer.

Original Submission