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hubie writes:

Study reveals flaws in popular genetic method:

The most common analytical method within population genetics is deeply flawed, according to a new study from Lund University in Sweden. This may have led to incorrect results and misconceptions about ethnicity and genetic relationships. The method has been used in hundreds of thousands of studies, affecting results within medical genetics and even commercial ancestry tests. The study is published in Scientific Reports.

"It is expected that this method will give correct results because it is so frequently used. But it is neither a guarantee of reliability nor produces statistically robust conclusions," says Dr. Eran Elhaik, Associate Professor in molecular cell biology at Lund University.

According to Elhaik, the method helped create old perceptions about race and ethnicity. It plays a role in manufacturing historical tales of who and where people come from, not only by the scientific community but also by commercial ancestry companies. [...]

The field of paleogenomics, where we want to learn about ancient peoples and individuals such as Copper age Europeans, heavily relies on PCA. PCA is used to create a genetic map that positions the unknown sample alongside known reference samples. Thus far, the unknown samples have been assumed to be related to whichever reference population they overlap or lie closest to on the map.

However, Elhaik discovered that the unknown sample could be made to lie close to virtually any reference population just by changing the numbers and types of the reference samples (see illustration), generating practically endless historical versions, all mathematically "correct," but only one may be biologically correct.

[...] Between 32,000 and 216,000 scientific articles in genetics alone have employed PCA for exploring and visualizing similarities and differences between individuals and populations and based their conclusions on these results.

"I believe these results must be re-evaluated," says Elhaik.

[...] "Techniques that offer such flexibility encourage bad science and are particularly dangerous in a world where there is intense pressure to publish. If a researcher runs PCA several times, the temptation will always be to select the output that makes the best story", adds Prof. William Amos, from the Univesity of Cambridge, who was not involved in the study.

Journal Reference:
Elhaik, E. Principal Component Analyses (PCA)-based findings in population genetic studies are highly biased and must be reevaluated [open]. Sci Rep 12, 14683 (2022). 10.1038/s41598-022-14395-4

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Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

Traditionally we think of diamonds as forming from the intense pressures found in our planet's interior, but a number of the sturdy gems have also been found in meteorites from space -- and the gems are fundamentally different from terrestrial diamonds. 

An international team of researchers say they've discovered the largest crystals to date of a rare type of diamond called lonsdaleite. The diamonds have an unusual hexagonal atomic structure (compared with the more common cubic structure) and were found in a meteorite that may have originated from a dwarf planet that experienced a catastrophic collision with an asteroid billions of years ago. 

"This study proves categorically that lonsdaleite exists in nature," Dougal McCulloch, director of the RMIT Microscopy and Microanalysis Facility in Australia, said in a statement.

The unusual hexagonal structure of the diamond could make it harder than most diamonds originating from Earth. Lonsdaleite has been found in a certain type of meteorite, called a ureilite, and it has even been manufactured in a lab by shooting graphite disks at a wall at speeds comparable with those of an asteroid impacting a planet. 

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upstart writes:

Jean-Luc Godard chose to end life through assisted dying, lawyer confirms:

Jean-Luc Godard, the maverick French-Swiss director who revolutionised post-war cinema in Europe, died by assisted dying, his lawyer has confirmed.

The medical report on the death of the 91-year-old director said he had chosen to end his life. He "had recourse to legal assistance in Switzerland for a voluntary departure" because he was "stricken with 'multiple incapacitating illnesses'", Godard's legal council, Patrick Jeanneret, told AFP.

[...] The practice of assisted dying – helping someone take their own life at their request – is regulated in Switzerland and permitted if offered without a selfish motive to a person with decision-making capacity to end their own suffering.

Libération quoted Godard's 2014, appearance on Swiss TV at that year's Cannes festival, when had been asked his views on dying. He said he didn't foresee wanting to continue living at any cost. "If I'm too ill, I don't have any desire to be lugged around in a wheelbarrow ... not at all," he said. Asked whether he could imagine resorting to assisted dying, he said: "yes", but added "for now", saying that the choice was "still very difficult."

In France the law allows doctors to keep terminally ill patients sedated until death but stops short of allowing assisted dying.

In a separate development before Godard's death was announced, the French president Emmanuel Macron confirmed this week that a national debate would be held to potentially broaden end-of-life options in France, with a citizens' assembly to consider issues around euthanasia and assisted dying.

What are your views on assisted dying? Are there exceptions to your views for extenuating circumstances? Could you support someone close to you if that was their choice?

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Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

The origin of Assateague’s wild horses has remained a mystery for centuries, but new genetic data supports the theory that they descended from Spanish horses marooned on the barrier island. Credit: Florida Museum photo by Jeff Gage

An abandoned Caribbean colony discovered centuries later and a case of mistaken identity in the archaeological record have colluded to rewrite the history of a barrier island off the shores of Virginia and Maryland.

When Nicolas Delsol, a postdoctoral researcher at the Florida Museum of Natural History, set out to analyze ancient DNA recovered from cow bones discovered in archaeological sites, these seemingly unrelated threads were woven together. Delsol wanted to know how cattle were domesticated in the Americas, and he discovered the answer in the genetic information preserved in centuries-old teeth. However, they also held a surprise.

“It was a serendipitous finding,” he said. “I was sequencing mitochondrial DNA from fossil cow teeth for my Ph.D. and realized something was very different with one of the specimens when I analyzed the sequences.”

That’s because the specimen in question, a portion of an adult molar, was a horse tooth rather than a cow tooth. According to recent research published in PLOS ONE, the DNA extracted from the tooth is also the oldest ever sequenced for a domesticated horse from the Americas.

The tooth was discovered during the excavation of one of Spain’s oldest colonized settlements. Puerto Real, located on the island of Hispaniola, was founded in 1507 and served as the final port of call for ships traveling from the Caribbean for decades. In the 16th century, however, widespread piracy and the expansion of illegal commerce drove the Spanish to concentrate their influence elsewhere on the island, and people were ordered to abandon Puerto Real in 1578. The abandoned settlement was razed by Spanish authorities the following year.

hubie writes:

Gender-diverse teams produce more novel, higher-impact scientific discoveries, study shows:

The number of medical science publications by mixed-gender teams has grown rapidly over the past two decades, but remains underrepresented compared to what would be expected by chance.

New research from the University of Notre Dame examines about 6.6 million papers published across the medical sciences since 2000 and reveals that a team's gender balance is an under-recognized, yet powerful indicator of novel and impactful scientific discoveries.

[...] "We find the publications of mixed-gender teams are substantially more novel and impactful than the publications of same-gender teams of equal size," said Yang, who also studies how social networks and gender affect individuals' success. "And the greater a team's gender balance, the better the performance."

The team finds that advantages of gender-diverse teams hold for small and large teams, all 45 subfields of medicine and women- or men-led teams, and generalize to published papers in all science fields over the last 20 years.

"Our findings reveal potentially new gender and teamwork synergies that correlate with scientific discoveries and inform diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives," Yang said.

The study states, "Laboratory experiments suggest that women on a team improve information-sharing processes on teams, such as turn taking. It might also be that women provide a perspective on research questions that men do not possess and vice versa."

Author summary video

Journal Reference:
Yang Yang, Tanya Y. Tian, et al., Gender-diverse teams produce more novel and higher-impact scientific ideas [open], PNAS, 119, 2022. DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2200841119

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Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

China has released a report that reveals the US National Security Agency (NSA) used multiple cybersecurity tools in its recent attacks against a Chinese university. Amongst these are sniffing and Trojan programs, which Chinese researchers say led to the theft of a "large amount of sensitive data". 

China's National Computer Virus Emergency Response Center (CVERC) on Tuesday said "41 types of cyber weapons" were tapped by NSA's hacking unit, Tailored Access Operations (TAO), in the cyber attacks targeting China's Northwestern Polytechnical University. 

Located in the Chinese city of Xi'an, the university describes itself as a research-focused institution with disciplines in aeronautics, astronautics, and marine technology engineering. It is affiliated with China's Ministry of Industry and Information Technology.

The university is on the US government's Entity List alongside several other Chinese educational institutions, including Sichuan University and Beijing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics. US companies are prohibited from exporting or transferring specific items to companies on the list unless they have procured a licence from their government to do so.

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

The Cislunar Autonomous Positioning System Technology Operations and Navigation Experiment, or CAPSTONE, is a CubeSat that will fly a unique orbit around the Moon intended for NASA’s future Artemis lunar outpost Gateway. Its six-month mission will help launch a new era of deep space exploration.

Following the recent update on CAPSTONE, mission owner and operator Advanced Space has released an update on the situation. Read the full mission update from Advanced Space.

CAPSTONE suffered an issue that caused the spacecraft to tumble beyond the capacity of the onboard reaction wheels to control and counter. This occurred during or shortly after a planned trajectory correction maneuver on September 8.

After this happened, CAPSTONE was attempting to communicate with the ground for approximately 24 hours before any telemetry was recovered. After data was received, mission controllers discovered that the spacecraft was tumbling and the onboard computer systems were periodically resetting. In addition, the spacecraft was using more power than it was generating from its solar panels.

The combined mission team – including Advanced Space, Terran Orbital, Stellar Exploration, and NASA – re-established contact with CAPSTONE using NASA’s Deep Space Network (DSN) and reconfigured the spacecraft’s systems to stabilize the situation while recovery plans are evaluated. CAPSTONE remains in safe mode. However, it is now power positive, meaning that it is generating more power from the solar panels than the system is using. According to navigation data collected after the issue began, the September 8 trajectory correction maneuver was likely completed or nearly complete when the issue occurred. As such, the spacecraft remains on the intended trajectory and is on course to its near rectilinear halo orbit at the Moon.

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upstart writes:

Researchers at SLAC found that oxygen boosts this exotic precipitation, revealing a new path to make nanodiamonds here on Earth:

A new study has found that "diamond rain," a long-hypothesized exotic type of precipitation on ice giant planets, could be more common than previously thought.

In an earlier experiment, researchers mimicked the extreme temperatures and pressures found deep inside ice giants Neptune and Uranus and, for the first time, observed diamond rain as it formed.

[...] The new study provides a more complete picture of how diamond rain forms on other planets and, here on Earth, could lead to a new way of fabricating nanodiamonds, which have a very wide array of applications in drug delivery, medical sensors, noninvasive surgery, sustainable manufacturing, and quantum electronics.

In the previous experiment, the researchers studied a plastic material made from a mixture of hydrogen and carbon, key components of the overall chemical composition of Neptune and Uranus. But in addition to carbon and hydrogen, ice giants contain other elements, such as large amounts of oxygen.

In the more recent experiment, the researchers used PET plastic – often used in food packaging, plastic bottles, and containers – to reproduce the composition of these planets more accurately.

"PET has a good balance between carbon, hydrogen and oxygen to simulate the activity in ice planets," said Dominik Kraus, a physicist at HZDR and professor at the University of Rostock.

Elon Musk Says SpaceX Has Had 'Promising Conversations' With Apple About iPhone Satellite Service

upstart writes:

SpaceX held talks with Apple Inc. about using Starlink connectivity for the iPhone maker's new satellite features, Elon Musk said:

The comments came a day after Apple announced Emergency SOS via Satellite, which will allow iPhone 14 users to ping emergency services using satellite networks in areas without standard cellular reception. For the service, Apple partnered with Globalstar Inc. to power the satellite infrastructure, the network provider said in a regulatory filing Wednesday.

Last month, Musk's SpaceX and U.S. wireless carrier T-Mobile preempted Apple's long-anticipated announcement by revealing that phone users on T-Mobile's network would be able to tap into SpaceX satellites to send text messages in areas without cellular connectivity. The collaboration is dependent on SpaceX launching an upgraded version of its Starlink satellites, known as Version 2.

That partnership, which won't launch until the end of next year at the earliest, will differ from Apple's feature in that it will allow for communication between consumers. Apple's short length satellite texting service is only designed to message emergency responders, the company said Wednesday.

[...] Apple's feature is set to launch in November and will be free for two years. The company didn't say how much it would cost after that initial period. Apple is investing hundreds of millions of dollars into Globalstar's satellite infrastructure, the company said. The T-Mobile and Starlink feature will be free.

fliptop writes:

The disputed law makes it illegal to knowingly film police officers 8 feet or closer if the officer tells the person to stop:

A federal judge on Friday blocked enforcement of a new Arizona law restricting how the public and journalists can film police, agreeing with the American Civil Liberties Union and multiple media organizations who argued it violated the First Amendment.

U.S. District Judge John J. Tuchi issued a preliminary injunction that stops the law from being enforced when it is set to take effect on Sept. 24. The quick decision came after Republican Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich and the prosecutor and sheriff's office in Maricopa County told the judge they did not plan to defend the law. They were named as defendants in the lawsuit filed last month.

[...] KM Bell, an ACLU attorney who lobbied against the bill at the Legislature and was in court Friday, said they were pleased the judge acted quickly.

"We are extremely gratified that Arizonans will not have their constitutional rights infringed and their ability to record the police criminalized by this law," Bell said.

Previously: Arizona Makes It Illegal for Bystanders to Record Cops at Close Range

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upstart writes:

Sources of blue light include the sun, digital screens, and electronic devices:

According to a recent study from Oregon State University, the harmful consequences of daily, lifetime exposure to the blue light emitted by phones, computers, and home lighting become worse as people age.

The common fruit fly, Drosophila melanogaster, was used in the research, which was recently published in Nature Partner Journals Aging. Drosophila melanogaster is a useful model organism because it shares cellular and developmental mechanisms with humans and other animals.

A team led by Jaga Giebultowicz, a scientist at the OSU College of Science who specializes in biological clocks, studied the survival rate of flies maintained in darkness and then transferred to an environment of continual blue light from light-emitting diodes, or LEDs, at increasingly older ages.

[...] "The novel aspect of this new study is showing that chronic exposure to blue light can impair energy-producing pathways even in cells that are not specialized in sensing light," Giebultowicz said. "We determined that specific reactions in mitochondria were dramatically reduced by blue light, while other reactions were decreased by age independent of blue light. You can think of it as blue light exposure adding insult to injury in aging flies."

upstart writes:

China Plans Three Moon Missions After Discovering New Lunar Mineral:

China is aiming to launch three unmanned missions to the moon after discovering a new lunar mineral that could be an energy source in the future.

The space race between China and the US is accelerating after Beijing's National Space Administration got the go-ahead to launch three orbiters to the moon over the next 10 years, it announced on Saturday. The news was first reported by Bloomberg.

It comes a day after China became the third country to discover a new lunar mineral, which it called Changesite-(Y), according to Chinese state-controlled newspaper the Global Times.

China's Chang'e-5 mission retrieved samples from the moon in 2020 and it has been described by Global Times as a "phosphate mineral in columnar crystal" found in lunar rock particles. The mineral contains helium-3, which could be a future source of energy.

The discovery may put more pressure on the US to ramp up its efforts after its Artemis I moon mission was postponed for a second time.

Moon mining could be the next source of tension between the countries as NASA is also probing the moon's south pole where China plans to build a research station in conjunction with Russia.

Original Submission

mhajicek writes:

https://singularityhub.com/2022/09/11/scientists-use-crispr-to-condense-a-million-years-of-evolution-into-mere-months/

With its inquisitive eyes, furry snout, and lush pelt, the mouse—nicknamed Xiao Zhu, or Little Bamboo—nimbly perched on a bamboo stalk, striking a pretty pose for the camera. But this mouse doesn't exist in nature.

Made in a lab in Beijing, Xiao Zhu pushes the boundary of what's possible for genetic engineering and synthetic biology. Rather than harboring the usual 20 pairs of chromosomes, the mouse and its sibling cohorts only have 19 pairs. Two chunks of different chromosomes were artificially fused together in a daring experiment that asked: rather than tweaking individual DNA letters or multiple genes, can we retune an existing genomic playbook wholesale, shuffling massive blocks of genetic material around at the same time?

[...] Chromosome-level engineering is a completely different beast: it's like rearranging multiple paragraphs or shifting complete sections of an article and simultaneously hoping the changes add capabilities that can be passed onto the next generation.

[...] The new study, published in Science, made the technology possible for mice. The team artificially fused together chunks from mice chromosomes. One fused pair made from chromosomes four and five was able to support embryos that developed into healthy—if somewhat strangely behaved—mice. Remarkably, even with this tectonic shift to their normal genetics, the mice could reproduce and pass on their engineered genetic quirks to a second generation of offspring.

upstart writes:

Social media firms to testify at U.S. Senate Homeland Security hearing:

The U.S. Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee will hold a hearing Wednesday with Facebook parent Meta Platforms (META.O), Alphabet's YouTube (GOOGL.O), Twitter (TWTR.N) and short video app TikTok on social media's impact on homeland security.

The panel led by Democratic Senator Gary Peters will also hear from a panel of former executives including from Twitter and Facebook.

The committee said the hearing will be an opportunity "to understand the extent to which social media companies' business models, through algorithms, targeted advertising, and other operations and practices, contribute to the amplification of harmful content and other threats to homeland security."

[...] "In attack after attack, there are signs that social media platforms played a role in exposing people to increasingly extreme content, and even amplifying dangerous content to more users," Peters said at a 2021 hearing.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Linux Sees A New Attempt At Threaded Console Printing:

As part of the multi-year effort to overhaul the Linux kernel's printk() code there has been much work in recent months around threaded console printing so each registered console would have a kernel thread and console printing would be decoupled from the printk() callers. That work was aimed for Linux 5.19 but then reverted due to troubles. There is now a new implementation in the works.

That work was reverted during the Linux 5.19 release candidate phase due to missing synchronization between early and regular console functionality and showed other possible problems in the design. Due to printk() being critical for Linux kernel debugging and being a fundamentally important feature, the code was reverted.

Thomas Gleixner with Intel-owned Linutronix has posted a set of 29 patches this weekend under a "request for comments" flag featuring a redesign of the printk() code around the per-console threading.

After working it out with John Ogness who worked on the prior code, these Linutronix engineers hope the new code is in much better shape and more robust.

Original Submission