SoylentNews

hubie writes:

Beer hops compounds could help protect against Alzheimer's disease:

Beer is one of the oldest and most popular beverages in the world, with some people loving and others hating the distinct, bitter taste of the hops used to flavor its many varieties. But an especially "hoppy" brew might have unique health benefits. Recent research published in ACS Chemical Neuroscience reports that chemicals extracted from hop flowers can, in lab dishes, inhibit the clumping of amyloid beta proteins, which is associated with Alzheimer's disease (AD).

AD is a debilitating neurodegenerative disease, often marked by memory loss and personality changes in older adults. [...] Accordingly, preventative strategies and therapeutics that can intervene before symptoms appear are of increasing interest.

One of these strategies involves "nutraceuticals," or foods that have some type of medicinal or nutritional function. The hop flowers used to flavor beers have been explored as one of these potential nutraceuticals, with previous studies suggesting that the plant could interfere with the accumulation of amyloid beta proteins associated with AD. So, Cristina Airoldi, Alessandro Palmioli and colleagues wanted to investigate which chemical compounds in hops had this effect.

[...] In tests, they found that the extracts had antioxidant properties and could prevent amyloid beta proteins from clumping in human nerve cells. The most successful extract was from the Tettnang hop, found in many types of lagers and lighter ales. [...] The researchers say that although this work may not justify drinking more bitter brews, it shows that hop compounds could serve as the basis for nutraceuticals that combat the development of AD.

Journal Reference:
Alessandro Palmioli, Valeria Mazzoni, Ada De Luigi, et al., Alzheimer's Disease Prevention through Natural Compounds: Cell-Free, In Vitro, and In Vivo Dissection of Hop (Humulus lupulus L.) Multitarget Activity, ACS Chem. Neurosci. 2022 DOI: 10.1021/acschemneuro.2c00444

Original Submission

hubie writes:

Smelling in VR environment possible with new gaming technology:

In the past, computer games have focused mostly on what we can see – moving images on screens. Other senses have not been present. But an interdisciplinary research group at Stockholm University and Malmö University has now constructed a scent machine that can be controlled by a gaming computer. In the game, the participant moves in a virtual wine cellar, picking up virtual wine glasses containing different types of wine, guessing the aromas. The small scent machine is attached to the VR system's controller, and when the player lifts the glass, it releases a scent.

"The possibility to move on from a passive to a more active sense of smell in the game world paves the way for the development of completely new smell-based game mechanics based on the players' movements and judgments," says Simon Niedenthal, interaction and game researcher at Malmö University.

The olfactometer consists of four different valves each connected to a channel. In the middle there is a fan sucking the air into a tube. With the help of the computer, the player can control the four channels so that they open to different degrees and provide different mixtures of scent. Scent blends that can mimic the complexity of a real wine glass. The game has different levels of difficulty with increasing levels of complexity.

[...] All code, blueprints and instructions for the machine are openly available online, as is code for the virtual wine tasting game. The research group, Sensory Cognitive Interaction Laboratory, which is located at the Department of Psychology, Stockholm University, now hopes that scented computer games can become useful for other purposes.

janrinok writes:

The hacking group Microsoft ID'd is among the world's most cutthroat and skilled

Microsoft on Thursday fingered Russia's military intelligence arm as the likely culprit behind ransomware attacks last month that targeted Polish and Ukrainian transportation and logistics organizations.

If the assessment by members of the Microsoft Security Threat Intelligence Center (MSTIC) is correct, it could be cause for concern for the US government and its European counterparts. Poland is a member of NATO and a staunch supporter of Ukraine in its bid to stave off an unprovoked Russian invasion. The hacking group the software company linked to the cyberattacks—known as Sandworm in wider research circles and Iridium in Redmond, Washington—is one of the world's most talented and destructive and is widely believed to be backed by Russia's GRU military intelligence agency.

Sandworm has been definitively linked to the NotPetya wiper attacks of 2017, a global outbreak that a White House assessment said caused $10 billion in damages, making it the most costly hack in history. Sandworm has also been definitively tied to hacks on Ukraine's power grid that caused widespread outages during the coldest months of 2016 and again in 2017.

Last month, Microsoft said that Poland and Ukraine transportation and logistics organizations had been the target of cyberattacks that used never-before-seen ransomware that announced itself as Prestige. The threat actors, Microsoft said, had already gained control over the victim networks. Then in a single hour on October 11, the hackers deployed Prestige across all its victims.

Once in place, the ransomware traversed all files on the infected computer's system and encrypted the contents of files that ended in .txt, .png, gpg, and more than 200 other extensions. Prestige then appended the extension .enc to the existing extension of the file. Microsoft attributed the attack to an unknown threat group it dubbed DEV-0960.

On Thursday, Microsoft updated the report to say that based on forensic artifacts and overlaps in victimology, tradecraft, capabilities, and infrastructure, researchers determined DEV-0960 was very likely Iridium.

Original Submission

Runaway1956 writes:

Apple's recent privacy changes leveled the digital advertising field

In April, 2021, Apple dropped a nuclear bomb on the world of online advertising. The company rolled out a new iPhone privacy setting called App Tracking Transparency, or ATT, that shows you, an iPhone user, a popup asking if you want to "Allow this app to track your activity across other companies' apps and websites?" You have two options: "Ask app not to track" and "Allow." The vast majority of people pick the former, which blocks apps from collecting certain data. Behind the scenes, the change caused a radical shift in the tech landscape. Meta, formerly known as Facebook, said that one setting alone cost the company an estimated $10 billion. Its stock value has plunged 70% this year. But ATT had another side effect, one that got far less attention than Meta's troubles. Apple's iPhone privacy setting gave TikTok a significant leg up in its fight for social media dominance.

"As Meta struggled to maintain performance, TikTok presented a buyer's market for advertisers where demand was low and supply was high," said John Donahue, co-founder of programmatic ad consulting firm Up & to the Right, who's worked with major advertisers like Coca-Cola, Hershey's, and Linksys. "Timing is everything in life, and TikTok couldn't have timed it better."

ATT kneecapped the Facebook ad targeting systems, motivating advertisers to look for new places to spend their money. Even though ATT hurt TikTok in the same ways, the short-form app was in the perfect position to offer an alternative to Meta: its popularity was exploding, its newness meant ad prices were low, and it had designed novel advertising models built for the new privacy world order.

The privacy setting "showcased the risk of having the majority of your eggs in a single basket," Donahue said.

TikTok just lowered its expected ad revenue for the year, but its projected to grow 155%, up $6.01 billion from 2021, according to Insider Intelligence. Meanwhile, Insider predicts that Meta's worldwide ad revenue will drop for the first time ever, down 2% from 2021, a $2.25 billion dip. It would be absurd to give ATT all or even most of the credit for those numbers; the recession played a big role in Meta's losses, as did the company's own long shot bet on virtual reality and "the metaverse." Likewise, Tiktok's gains have a lot to do with cultural shifts. But there's no question that TikTok snatched up advertising dollars that might otherwise have gone to Facebook and Instagram, and Apple's Privacy setting had a lot to do with that.

Original Submission

hubie writes:

How many bees can you fit in an X-ray machine? That's not a joke:

Researchers at CU Boulder have, for the first time, used X-ray computed tomography (also known as a CT scan) to peer inside swarms of honeybees.

The scans provide a deeper look at these humble insects: Bees, the group discovered, don't clump together in a random group. Instead, they seem to form dome-shaped structures following surprisingly sophisticated mathematical rules, or what researchers call a "scaling law." The results could one day help engineers design more resilient buildings, or even swarms of tiny robots that behave a lot like insects, said study senior author Orit Peleg.

"I'm trained in physics, and these laws aren't obvious to me," said Peleg, assistant professor in the BioFrontiers Institute and Department of Computer Science at CU Boulder. "But bees somehow know how to arrange themselves in order to maintain their mechanical stability."

[...] Based on the researchers' calculations, a bee swarm works a bit like a cheerleading pyramid. More bees cluster around the base of the swarm, then thin out the farther up they get. Bees also seem to arrange themselves so that no one layer has to carry more than its fair share of weight. In mathematical terms, the structure follows a scaling law in which each layer supports a weight that equals roughly its own weight to the one-and-a-half power.

takyon writes:

Tesla open-sources its connector to take on CCS with 'half the size twice the power' North American Charging Standard

In a surprise move, Tesla opened its proprietary charging port and connector schematics for all EV makers and charging networks to employ at will. The open-sourced design and specification documents call the heretofore custom connector the North American Charging Standard as Tesla argues it is 'half the size, twice as powerful' in comparison with CCS.

[...] Its connector supports up to 1 MW DC output "in one slim package," continues Tesla, and the combination with the port on its vehicles will from now on be called the North American Charging Standard (NACS) in an apparent move to slow the proliferation of the CCS one that other EVs use.

The open-sourcing of Tesla's unique charging system may also have something to do with the government's requirements for CCS-compatible Superchargers on a planned nationwide network that will be built with billions in federal subsidies. According to the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act under which said billions are about to be disbursed, "electric vehicle charging infrastructure installed using funds provided under this title shall provide, at a minimum... non-proprietary charging connectors that meet applicable industry safety standards... and open access to payment methods that are available to all members of the public..."

Original Submission

janrinok writes:

Satellite monitors found 2 vessels with their trackers turned off in area of explosions

The first gas leaks on the Nord Stream 2 pipeline in the Baltic Sea were detected in the early hours of September 26, pouring up to 400,000 tons of methane into the atmosphere. Officials immediately suspected sabotage of the international pipeline. New analysis seen by WIRED shows that two large ships, with their trackers off, appeared around the leak sites in the days immediately before they were detected.

According to the analysis by satellite data monitoring firm SpaceKnow, the two "dark ships," each measuring around 95 to 130 meters long, passed within several miles of the Nord Stream 2 leak sites. "We have detected some dark ships, meaning vessels that were of a significant size, that were passing through that area of interest," says Jerry Javornicky, the CEO and cofounder of SpaceKnow. "They had their beacons off, meaning there was no information about their movement, and they were trying to keep their location information and general information hidden from the world," Javornicky adds.

The discovery, which was made by analyzing images from multiple satellites, is likely to further increase speculation about the cause of the blasts. Multiple countries investigating the incident believe the Nord Stream 1 and 2 pipelines were rocked by a series of explosions, with many suspicions directed at Russia as its full-scale invasion of Ukraine continues. (Russia has denied its involvement.) Once SpaceKnow identified the ships, it reported its findings to officials at NATO, who are investigating the Nord Stream incidents. Javornicky says NATO officials asked the company to provide more information.

janrinok writes:

"If we didn't design it to be out there in harsh weather we picked the wrong launch spot":

NASA said on Friday that its Space Launch System rocket and Orion spacecraft appear to have survived their encounter with Hurricane Nicole this week without incurring any significant damage.

"Right now there's nothing preventing us from getting to the 16th," said Jim Free, the engineer who leads the development of exploration systems for NASA. To that end, the space agency is working toward a launch at 1:04 am ET (06:04 UTC) on Wednesday, from Kennedy Space Center. This Artemis I mission will send an uncrewed Orion spacecraft around the Moon in preparation for human missions later this decade.

Free said Nicole produced significant winds over the spaceport in Florida. However, he did not provide precise numbers, nor exact design specifications that the Space Launch System rocket is designed to withstand. However, Free said that at no point was the rocket exposed to wind gusts above its design limits. This appears to check out, based on publicly available data. For example, the National Weather Service reported a maximum wind gust of 93 mph at an altitude of 200 feet at the rocket's launch pad, which is close to, but not above, the rocket's limit of 97 mph at that height (see full SLS design specifications for weather).

A preliminary inspection of the rocket on Thursday night and Friday night after the storm had passed revealed only some very minor issues, most of which had already been addressed by Friday afternoon when Free spoke to reporters during a teleconference. "We design it to be out there," Free said of the rocket, noting Kennedy Space Center's exposure to hurricanes on Florida's Atlantic coast. "If we didn't design it to be out there in harsh weather, we picked the wrong launch spot."

fab23 writes:

Today the xkcd: Y2K and 2038 comic was published and this reminded me of the recent very good technical blog post Time is an illusion, Unix time doubly so... from Jan Schaumann where he explains how time is handled on different operating systems including some historical background.

A famous scientist and adventurer once said: 'time is not linear but something like "Wibbly Wobbly Timey Wimey"'. He has since been proven more correct than he ever imagined.

As you well know, on Unix systems we measure time as the number of seconds since "the epoch": 00:00:00 UTC on January 1st, 1970. This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.

For starters, this definition is not based on something sensical such as, say, the objective frequency of vibration of a Cesium-133 atom, but on a convenient fraction of the time it takes a particular large rock to complete a full rotation around its own axis.

If you want to learning about any of this:

• Initially the time was measured in 1/60ths of a second
• At least one country has two different utility frequency
• Why Linux will fail again on 23rd April 2262 even with 64-bit counters
• How different operating systems behave around the beginning or end of the epoch
• What will happen with positive or negative leap seconds

then click here and read this fine blog posting.

Happy reading and learning!

Original Submission

Runaway1956 writes:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2022/11/eff-files-amicus-brief-challenging-orange-county-cas-controversial-dna-collection

Should the government be allowed to collect your DNA—and retain it indefinitely—if you're arrested for a low-level offense like shoplifting a tube of lipstick, driving without a valid license, or walking your dog off leash? We don't think so. As we argue in an amicus brief filed in support of a case called Thompson v. Spitzer at the California Court of Appeal, this practice not only impinges on misdemeanor arrestees' privacy and liberty rights, but also violates the California Constitution.

Since 2007, the Orange County District Attorney's Office (OCDA) has been running an expansive program that coerces thousands of Orange County residents annually to provide a DNA sample in exchange for dropping charges for low-level misdemeanor offenses. Through the program, the OCDA has amassed a database of over 182,000 DNA profiles, larger than the DNA databases of 25 states. OCDA claims a right to indefinitely retain the DNA samples it collects and to share them with third parties who may use them in new and unknown ways in the future. Unlike state and federal arrestee DNA databases, OCDA does not allow anyone to have their DNA expunged from its database.

[...] The OCDA's DNA collection has serious implications for privacy and liberty, not just for the low-level arrestees who give up their DNA under the program, but also their biological relatives and wider communities. As the collection and analysis of DNA has become cheaper and more accessible over the past 30 years, law enforcement has pushed to collect more DNA, extract more information from DNA, and, through familial searching, use DNA to identify more and more people.

canopic jug writes:

Distributed computing researcher, Murat Demirbas, has written a blog post about what he sees as the past, present, and future of SQLite.

This paper, which appeared in VLDB'22 a couple weeks ago, delves into analytical data processing on SQLite, identifying key bottlenecks and implementing suitable solutions. As a result of the optimizations implemented, SQLite is now up to 4.2X faster on the Star Schema Benchmark (SSB). This is a sweet little paper (befitting SQLite's fame). It is technically easy to read yet very fulfilling.

The paper also has an important theme. Throughout the paper, we see time and again how SQLite benefits from its informative profiling utilities and aggressive testing to identify and implement optimizations quickly. Performance and correctness monitoring is a prime factor in development velocity. The ease of profiling SQLite's execution engine enabled the team to pinpoint which virtual instructions were responsible for the bottlenecks, and also to watchout for performance regression issues. Their extensive test suite (consisting of fuzz, boundary value, regression, I/O, out-of mem testing) allowed them to quickly integrate the optimizations into a release build without worrying of breaking other components of the library.

SQLite is a widely used, single-node, online transaction processing (OLTP) database useful in many situations where SQL is relevant yet Postgresql or MariaDB are too heavy.

Previously:
(2019) SELECT Code_execution FROM * USING SQLite: Eggheads Lift the Lid on DB Security Hi-jinks
(2019) Remote Code Execution Vulnerability Impacts SQLite

Original Submission

janrinok writes:

https://arstechnica.com/?p=1897185

Confidence in Twitter has hit what might be an all-time low just two weeks into Elon Musk's tenure as owner. Yesterday on a call, Musk told Twitter staff that bankruptcy is a real possibility, as next year Twitter could face billions more in losses.

The Verge posted a full transcript of Musk's staff meeting, where different employees attempted to find out what their priorities should be to help Musk keep Twitter afloat as the economy remains unstable. Musk kept his responses brief and said top priorities included growing Twitter's user base by 1 billion (while critically monetizing more users), compensating creators on the platform, and improving Twitter search. In short, he asked his remaining team members to go "hardcore" to make Twitter "more compelling," so he can sell that product to users, or else resign. One of his biggest and out-there ideas, which he says is "definitely happening," is tweaking Twitter to become a digital payments platform.

"If you have a compelling product, people will buy it," Musk told staff. "That has been my experience at SpaceX and Tesla."

Alright, I've literally been at it for seven hours. Here's what done, here's what needs to done, and if you find something broken, let me know.

• Upgraded all machines to Ubuntu 22.04 (from 14.04 in most cases)
• Successfully brought database cluster back up to full service
• Rebuild web frontend to modern nginx/Ubuntu from very old Gentoo

Here's what's going to happen sometime tonight or tomorrow

• Outbound SMTP service will be fixed
• Start fully decommissioning the first set of servers ...

There's likely a lot of things still broken. if you find something broken, leave it in the comments. I'll get to it in the next day. At least we're not on 8 year old software anymore. Current plan after taking care of the above, going to find a good host (probably Fastmail) for editor emails, I do have the backups of everyone inbox should they want it. This has been, very much an exercise in pain. If you want to support me directly: Patreon for recurring, or Ko-fi for one time.

I'll be back in a few hours to work on this more. We raised another $560 USD for charity, and I hope folks had a great time. The next parts I need to just do, so the next stream will likely involve dealing with getting rehash to run in Docker.

~ NCommander

Update - 2022/11/12: DNS resolved, and at least site outbound email should work now

Update - 2022/11/13: Site outbound email is actually working now

Runaway1956 writes:

Divers for a History Channel documentary have found a large section of the destroyed space shuttle Challenger:

In a news release Thursday, the American space organization announced a large section of the destroyed space shuttle was discovered buried in sand at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean. The discovery comes more than three decades after the space shuttle exploded, killing a teacher and six others.

[...] The finding is the first remnant to be discovered since two fragments from the left wing washed ashore in 1996, Ciannilli said.

Divers for the documentary first spotted the piece in March while looking for wreckage of a Second World War plane. NASA verified through video a few months ago the piece was part of the Challenger shuttle that broke apart shortly after liftoff on Jan. 28, 1986. All seven on board were killed, including the first schoolteacher bound for space, Christa McAuliffe.

[...] The piece is roughly 4.5 metres by 4.5 metres, but is believed to be bigger because part of it is covered with sand. Due to the square thermal tiles on the piece, it's believed to be from the shuttle's belly, Ciannilli said.

[...] About 107 metric tons of Challenger debris have been found since the accident, representing about 47 per cent of the entre shuttle including parts of the two solid-fuel boosters and external fuel tank.

Most of the recovered wreckage remains buried in abandoned missile silos at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, except for a left side shuttle panel that is on display at Kennedy Space Center's visitor complex. It sits alongside the charred cockpit window frame from shuttle Columbia, which broke apart over Texas during reentry in 2003, killing seven astronauts.

janrinok writes:

https://arstechnica.com/science/2022/11/southeast-us-has-hit-the-roof-of-cdcs-respiratory-illness-level-scale/

The US continues to see a dramatic and early surge in respiratory illnesses, which is hitting young children particularly hard and setting records for the decade.

The Southeast region is the most affected by the surge, which is driven by cases of flu, RSV (respiratory syncytial (sin-SISH-uhl) virus), and other seasonal respiratory viruses. Seven southern states—Alabama, Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Mississippi, Tennessee, and Virginia—have reached the highest level of respiratory-illness activity on the scale from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The states are colored a deep purple on the national map, representing the highest of sub-level of "Very High" activity.

Overall, 25 states are experiencing "High" or "Very High" levels of respiratory illness activity, while six have reached the moderate category.

Original Submission