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taylorvich writes:

https://phys.org/news/2024-01-eco-friendly-fungicide-alternative.html

A material that could replace current fungicides (i.e., anti-fungal pesticides), increase food security, and help protect wildlife has been discovered.

A recent investigation undertaken by Pesticide Action Network (PAN) revealed that the UK is still using 36 harmful pesticides that have been banned in other European countries, with 13 described as "highly hazardous" that have links to water contamination, cancer, infertility, and other illnesses.

Published in Green Chemistry, researchers at the University of Nottingham have completed a successful field trial of a material they have developed to help to protect crops from fungi.

Simon Avery, professor of eukaryotic microbiology in the Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences, said, "The test material is not toxic but works by passively resisting attachment of fungal spores to protect surfaces from fungal infection, including crop surfaces. Results from this first field trial with wheat are particularly encouraging as there is a lot of scope to optimize further the material properties for crop protection."

"We identified two lead polymer candidates by bio-performance testing using in vitro microplates and leaf-based assays. These were then taken forward into a program to optimize and scale up their synthesis and compound them into a spray formulation that could be used on crops. Our findings showed that the material not only significantly reduced fungal infection by the fungus Septoria tritici by up to 26% but also that the crop grew just as well as the control group—providing an alternative that appears safer for the environment, wildlife, and people, and is effective, too."

Sprayed directly onto wheat at timings conventional for fungicides, the trial has provided the first real-world scale exemplification of how the material interacts with crops. The small plot trial compared the two polymer candidates to a multisite fungicide and two commercial fungicide programs.

[...] Valentina said, "Our attention is now turning to a second field trial that's in the diary for this year to further hone and improve the polymer so we can continue turning our research into reality. The beauty of a material like this is its lack of toxicity, the relative simplicity of its production and the fact that it can be scaled up easily—making it an incredibly attractive prospect for several other industries, not just agriculture."

Journal Reference:
Liam A. Crawford et al, A potential alternative to fungicides using actives-free (meth)acrylate polymers for protection of wheat crops from fungal attachment and infection, Green Chemistry (2023). DOI: 10.1039/D3GC01911J

Original Submission

As reported in USA Today https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/business/2024/01/08/audacy-radio-bankruptcy/72147915007/ and many outlets:

Radio giant Audacy announced that it plans to file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, on Sunday.

The company, which owns more than 200 stations across the U.S., announced in a news release it agreed to a prepackaged restructuring support agreement (RSA) with a supermajority of its debt-holders that will allow it to reduce its debt. The company says the plan would reduce its debt by 80% from around $1.9 billion to about $350 million.

Under this agreement, debtholders will receive equity in the reorganized company.

"Over the past few years, we have strategically transformed Audacy into a leading, scaled multi-platform audio content and entertainment company," said David Field, CEO of Audacy.

Do you listen to the radio? Your AC submitter still enjoys having music chosen by a pro -- but there are fewer and fewer high quality DJs around to fill that role...and probably even fewer job slots available in this era of corporate radio.

Best anthem to radio? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RAUUVYZ-z7A
or an intense (but partial) version from Saturday Night Live, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eD_24nDzkeo

Original Submission

owl writes:

https://www.techdirt.com/2024/01/10/piracy-is-surging-again-because-streaming-execs-ignored-the-lessons-of-the-past/

Back in 2019 we noted how the streaming sector risked driving consumers back to piracy if they didn't heed the lessons of the past. We explored how the rush to raise rates, nickel-and-dime users, implement arbitrary restrictions, and force users toward hunting and pecking their way through a confusing platter of exclusives and availability windows risked driving befuddled users back to piracy.

And lo and behold, that's exactly what's happening.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

NASA expected to announce 'months-long delay' for crewed Artemis moon mission:

NASA leadership is expected on Tuesday to announce a "months-long delay" to the first crewed mission of the agency's flagship Artemis program, according to one current and one former NASA employee.

The delay affects NASA's Artemis II mission, which aims to send four astronauts on a journey to fly by the moon and was slated to lift off this November.

But the mission is no longer expected to take place before 2025, according to the sources, confirming months of speculation that a delay was imminent.

NASA's Inspector General hinted at potential delays for the mission in a November report, citing three main challenges the space agency must address before it can safely fly humans to the moon.

First, the ground structure used to build, transport and launch the program's massive Space Launch System rocket — dubbed Mobile Launcher 1 — "sustained more damage than expected."

The November report stated that repairs to the structure were ongoing.

Second, the heat shield on the Orion spacecraft — intended to be the astronauts' home on Artemis II — "eroded in an unexpected way" during Artemis I as it was exposed to temperatures about half as hot as the surface of the sun upon reentry into Earth's atmosphere.

Finally, the Inspector General noted what NASA officials believed to be "the primary critical path" for the Artemis II mission: preparing Orion for its first crew and integrating it with the European Service Module, which provides power and propulsion. The "critical path" in project planning refers to the aspect of the mission that's expected to take the longest.

Original Submission

taylorvich writes:

https://newatlas.com/medical/rac2-protein-macrophages-cannibalize-t-cells-cancer-immunotherapy/

Following a trail of evidence that started with a study of fruit flies nearly 25 years ago, researchers have found adding a hyperactive form of the protein Rac2 to macrophages, immune cells that eat pathogens, causes them to cannibalize T cells. The novel technique could potentially boost the effectiveness of an emerging cancer treatment.

Rac proteins have been around for a long time. Deeply conserved in evolution, the proteins are thought to have been present in the earliest nucleated cells. But, despite their age, scientists are still uncovering their mysteries. In a new study, researchers from the University of California Santa Barbara (UCSB) discovered more about how Rac proteins work and how they could potentially improve cancer treatment.

The human genome encodes three Rac proteins. Rac1 is expressed ubiquitously, Rac2 is expressed predominantly in cells that produce blood components (hematopoietic cells), and Rac3 is expressed primarily in brain tissue. Back in 1996, researchers studying fruit flies found that the proteins were instrumental in cell movement and that a hyperactive form of Rac1, expressed in only a few cells in a fly's egg chamber, destroyed the whole tissue.

"Just expressing this active Rac in six to eight cells kills the entire tissue, which is composed of about 900 cells," said Abhinava Mishra, the current study's lead author.

That was as far as the researchers got in the '90s. It wasn't until a few years ago that research started to emerge suggesting that cannibalism might be the cause of this tissue destruction.

Ryzen Cpu Bug Crashes PCs Using Firewire Devices, But A Fix Is On The Way

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

A strange bug involving AMD's modern Ryzen CPUs and the old Firewire standard

A Linux patch is on the way to solve crashing issues when attempting to use Firewire devices on PCs running Ryzen CPUs and Linux (via Phoronix). The unlikely hardware combination has enough Linux users to get attention from the community, and even a fix coming out with Linux 6.7 will be backported to prior Linux kernel releases.

Despite all that, Linux developer Takashi Sakamoto has pledged to keep Firewire support on Linux alive until 2029. Sakamoto is already making good on his promise with his latest patch, which solves an issue that uniquely affected PCs running AMD Ryzen CPUs. It would seem incredibly unlikely that anyone would be combining two pieces of hardware with nearly a decade between them, but those people certainly exist. They reported an unusually high amount of crashes.

Without getting too technical, Firewire and Ryzen users would often see their PCs crash if the "isochronous cycle timer" register on the CPU was accessed. This register would be accessed if a user ever plugged in a Firewire device or was using software that required constant access to the register.

[...] Although crashes are no longer a problem for Firewire-Ryzen PCs, the patch is a double-edged sword and "brings apparent disadvantage since time-aware application programs require it," according to Sakamoto. Linux users with this hardware combination might have to switch to Intel or even downgrade to one of AMD's pre-Ryzen CPUs, as neither exhibit the same problems seen on Ryzen-powered PCs.

mrpg writes:

Here are a few stories to launch into the new year:

Mortality inaudible

Researchers have observed that older adults with hearing loss who use hearing aids experience a number of ancillary benefits not obviously connected with hearing, like a markedly reduced risk of geriatric-onset dementia.

[...] "We found that adults with hearing loss who regularly used hearing aids had a 24% lower risk of mortality than those who never wore them," said Janet Choi, MD, MPH, the study's lead researcher. "These results are exciting because they suggest that hearing aids may play a protective role in people's health and prevent early death."

Bees vexed

U.S. honey yields have been in decline since the 1990s, and researchers have been trying to understand why. Is it pesticide use? The decline in floral biodiversity? Sticky-pawed bears? Researchers at Pennsylvania State University analyzed databases operated by a number of government departments and built a corpus of data for all 50 states over a 50-year span.

They found reduced honey yield correlated with herbicide application and land use policies that don't include pollinator support. Among their findings, states with both warm and cool regions had higher honey yields, and local soil productivity was surprisingly useful in estimating honey yield.

Fitness 420

In a stunning development that upends the anecdotal experiences of marijuana smokers everywhere, researchers at the University of Colorado at Boulder report that cannabis does not improve exercise performance.

[...] "It is pretty clear from our research that cannabis is not a performance-enhancing drug," said Angela Bryan, a professor of psychology and neuroscience.

Jurassic hobbits

Researchers studying fossils presumed to be juvenile tyrannosaurs report that the remains actually constitute adults of a smaller species, now called Nanotyrannus lancensis.

Pee evaluated

Researchers at the University of Maryland and the National Institutes of Health report that pee is yellow because of a previously unknown microbial enzyme called bilirubin reductase.

Chickens contextual

A University of Queensland-led study found that humans can determine the emotional valence of chickens from the sound of their clucks.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Canada adds that importing its drugs will not solve America's drug pricing problems:

Canada issued a warning Monday that it stands ready to defend its prescription drug supply from US importation plans—and also said the plans wouldn't work for the US, anyway. "Bulk importation will not provide an effective solution to the problem of high drug prices in the US," Health Canada said in a statement.

The defensive stance comes just days after the US Food and Drug Administration granted Florida authorization to directly import cheaper prescription drugs from Canada in an effort to help drag down America's uniquely stratospheric drug pricing. Florida is the first state to win such an authorization, and Florida Governor Ron DeSantis celebrated it, claiming the drug imports will save the state "up to $180 million in the first year alone." There are caveats, though. Before Florida can import any drugs, it must complete several obligations, including submitting to the FDA additional drug-specific information, testing the drugs for authenticity and FDA compliance, and relabeling them in accordance with FDA labeling.

The FDA authorized the importation program in accordance with section 804 of the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act (FD&C Act). The move stems from President Biden's "Executive Order on Promoting Competition in the American Economy," which directed the FDA to help develop such programs.

[...] Proponents of the program in the US say that importing cheaper drugs from abroad could help lower US drug prices by offering more competition on the market. Canada, like other countries, has lower drug prices than the US, partly because the country's national health system negotiates prices for prescription drugs. The US government only began negotiating prices last year—and is currently being sued by several pharmaceutical companies over the move.

But Canada, which has a population around nine times smaller than the US, has been staunchly opposed to the US importing its drugs. It has repeatedly said that diverting medicines to the US could lead to drug shortages in Canada, make existing shortages worse, and/or cause price spikes.

[...] Drug makers in the US also intend to fight the plans. Stephen Ubl, CEO of the powerful trade group PhRMA—Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America—said in a statement that the group is "deeply concerned with the FDA's reckless decision to approve Florida's state importation plan" and claimed importation "poses a serious danger to public health." Ubl concluded that "PhRMA is considering all options for preventing this policy from harming patients."

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

There's a megalodon tooth resting on my fireplace mantle.

The ancient, palm-sized fossil is fascinating, but a common household curio: Teeth from the giant extinct shark — which grew around 50 feet long, which is longer than a city bus — are frequently found in accessible coastal areas worldwide. The sharks' huge jaws were lined with 276 teeth, and they likely lost and replaced thousands over their lifetimes, allowing plenty of teeth the chance to fossilize.

But scientists now report the first-ever discovery of a megalodon fossil in the extremely remote, completely dark deep sea, located over 10,000 feet (3,090 meters) beneath the surface. The finding, made by a remotely operated robot, reveals significant insights about the lives of these ocean giants, who lurked in the seas some 20 million to 3.6 million years ago. They were big enough to eat whales.

"This is an amazing find and is interesting in several aspects," Nicolas Straube, a deep sea shark researcher at the University Museum Bergen in Norway and co-author of the study, said in a statement. The study was recently published in the science journal Historical Biology.

One of the main insights is that the predatory megalodon likely traversed the oceans, as opposed to just lurking along the coasts.

[...] Another important revelation from the fossil, found in the Pacific Remote Islands Marine National Monument, located southwest of Hawaii, was its coating in a black mineral called ferromanganese. It takes a million years for just a few millimeters to accrue on deep ocean objects, providing evidence that this megalodon fossil, lodged in sediments and removed with a shovel, had been there for eons.

[...] The deep sea is still largely unexplored, though scientists with several ocean exploration groups are making enormous research strides. This recent expedition, funded by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's (NOAA) Ocean Exploration program, occurred aboard the Ocean Exploration Trust's 224-foot-long vessel (E/V) Nautilus. It's designed to deploy exploration robots into the deep sea, largely in the sprawling Pacific Ocean.

Indeed, deep sea exploration missions often return to the surface with discoveries, or rarely seen sightings.

"We always discover stuff when we go out into the deep sea. You're always finding things that you haven't seen before," Derek Sowers, an expedition lead for NOAA's Ocean Exploration mission, told Mashable in 2022.

Original Submission

canopic jug writes:

The American Dialect Society has chosen the neologism "enshittification" as its 2023 word of the year:

The term enshittification became popular in 2023 after it was used in a blog post by author Cory Doctorow, who used it to describe how digital platforms can become worse and worse. "Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die. I call this enshittification," Doctorow wrote on his Pluralistic blog. 

Presiding at the Jan. 6 voting session were Ben Zimmer, chair of the ADS New Words Committee and language columnist for the Wall Street Journal, and Dr. Kelly Elizabeth Wright of Virginia Tech, data czar of the New Words Committee. "Enshittification is a sadly apt term for how our online lives have become gradually degraded," Zimmer said. "From the time that it first appeared in Doctorow's posts and articles, the word had all the markings of a successful neologism, being instantly memorable and adaptable to a variety of contexts."

The term was first seen over at Cory Doctorow's current blog, Pluralistic. It is a form of rent-seeking also known as platform decay.

Previously:
(2023) Enshittification Everywhere. Your Car, Your Phone, Your Tractor, Your Computer...

Original Submission

Meeting Announcement: The next meeting of the SoylentNews governance committee is scheduled for Wednesday, January 10, 2024 at 21:00 UTC (4pm Eastern) in #governance on SoylentNews IRC. Logs of the meeting will be available afterwards for review, and minutes will be published when complete.

Minutes and agenda, and other governance committee information have a page on the SoylentNews Wiki at: https://wiki.staging.soylentnews.org/wiki/Governance

Expected topics include the formation of a new corporation and the peaceful transfer of assets. Committee members, you don't want to miss this one!

The community, welcome to observe and participate, is also encouraged to attend the meeting.

upstart writes:

Being fully anonymous is next to impossible—but you can significantly limit what the internet knows about you by sticking to a few basic rules:

On the internet, everyone wants to know who you are. Websites are constantly asking for your email address or trying to place tracking cookies on your devices. A murky slurry of advertisers and tech firms track which websites you visit, predicting what your interests are and what you may want to buy. Search engines, browsers, and apps can log each search or scroll you make.

At this stage of the internet, being totally anonymous across your entire online life is incredibly hard to achieve. Phones, SIM cards, browsers, Wi-Fi networks, and more use identifiers that can be linked to your activity. But there are steps you can take to obscure your identity for everyday browsing.

If you're looking to be truly anonymous or to protect your identity for a specific purpose—such as whistleblowing or activism—you should consider your threat model and individual security situation. But many of the changes you can make, which are listed below, are straightforward switches that can stop you from being tracked as much and apply to most people.

Below is a sampling of suggestions from the article, so click through to see the rest. What ways do you limit your digital fingerprint and where is your line between convenience and privacy?

upstart writes:

FDA finds chromium, a second metal contaminant, in applesauce pouches:

Federal investigators have discovered a second contaminant in recalled applesauce pouches — the naturally-occurring metal chromium, which in a certain form can cause a number of adverse health effects.

The finding is the latest development in the Food and Drug Administration's international investigation of high levels of lead found in cinnamon applesauce pouches marketed to children. The pouches of fruit puree that have been recalled were manufactured in Ecuador and sold under the brand names WanaBana, Schnucks and Weis. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is tracking at least 287 confirmed, probable and suspected cases of lead exposure in 37 states linked to the applesauce recall.

The FDA has reported finding extraordinarily high levels of lead in samples of cinnamon from the Ecuador plant where the pouches were made. On Friday, the agency reported it had also found chromium. Chromium is an essential mineral found in foods and dietary supplements, but in one form — called chromium-6 — it can cause harm.

[...] Lead chromate, which contains the potentially toxic chromium-6, has been used in the past to enhance the coloring of turmeric. Federal investigators say the "lead-to-chromium ratio" in the applesauce pouches "is consistent with that of lead chromate."

[...] But investigators said the chromium in lead chromate may be converted to the less toxic form chromium-3, "due to the acidity of the applesauce and the stomach."

Michael Beuhler, the medical director of North Carolina Poison Control, said the discovery of chromium in the applesauce and cinnamon does not necessarily mean the substance will cause harm. He said that "at the levels we're talking about," he doesn't believe there would be much chromium-6 in the pouches. Any chromium-6 that might have been present would probably reduce to a nontoxic form once inside the applesauce pouches, he said.

He said lead chromate could have been added as a powder to cinnamon to affect the weight and color of the spice. Lead chromate can be more than six times heavier than cinnamon, he said.

"I don't believe that this is any cause for additional alarm," Beuhler said. "But it does suggest why it happened."

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

To say 2023 was a big year in the world of fusion research would be an understatement.

After achieving fusion ignition in late 2022, scientists at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory's (LLNL) National Ignition Facility (NIF) in California repeated the feat in late July, and then twice again in recent months, bringing to four the total number of times they've managed to generate more energy from a small pellet of fusion fuel than they put in.

In other words, we're finally on the path to fusion energy, sort of – replicable results and all. 

With the Department of Energy (DoE) recently releasing $42 million in funds for fusion energy research divided between LLNL, Colorado State University, and the University of Rochester, the fusion forecast is calling for some breakthroughs.

Dr John Edwards, LLNL senior advisor and former director of the Inertial Confinement Fusion (ICF) program at Livermore, was happy to tell The Register what he sees on the horizon. 

First things first, Edwards told us. He wants to make sure the world understands something about the fusion research at the NIF: It's never been about fusion energy.

"These results have energized people, but all of that work and funding hasn't been for fusion energy. It's been part of the National Nuclear Security Administration's Stockpile Stewardship and Management Plan (SSMP)," Edwards explained.

[...] "The NIF results were phenomenal," Edwards acknowledged, but "there's a big tech gap between there and commercial fusion. [A pilot plant by the] 2030s is ambitious and there will be setbacks, but we need to be resilient because the results will be tremendous." 

[...] The US government has been wrangling to pass a budget for months, and the latest temporary funding bill only kicks the can down the road to early 2024, but doesn't cover everything. Funding for things like the LLNL and NIF are part of what's been held up, Edwards told us.

[...] If Congress eventually manages to fund the government, the NIF, and "everything else falls into place," Edwards predicted that the NIF will reach new fusion ignition efficiency milestones in 2024.

upstart writes:

Wickr is Dead

The app was a privacy-championing startup, before becoming an app of choice for drug traffickers and being acquired by Amazon Web Services:

If you open the encrypted messaging app Wickr Me today, you'll be greeted with a line of red text: "Reconnecting..."

[...] Wickr Me is no longer available to download on the Apple App Store or the Google Play Store. The app stopped accepting new users more than a year ago. And now, even current users cannot speak to one another.

So ends the story of an app that while never reaching the popularity of other encrypted messaging apps like Signal, nor those that later turned on end-to-end encryption for the masses like WhatsApp, nonetheless played an important role in the adoption of and debate around secure communications.

[...] Wickr started in 2012. Nico Sell, founder of Wickr, said in a talk a couple of years later that "all of us have something to hide, either now or your future self." Crucially, that came after the Edward Snowden whistleblower revelations of 2013, which saw a massive boom of secure messaging apps and the spread of encryption more generally.

[...] But how was a free app to make money? Part of the answer for Wickr at least ended up being with the U.S. government. In 2021, I reported that Customs and Border Protection (CBP) paid Wickr $700,000 for a number of Wickr licenses. In parallel to its free Wickr Me app, Wickr had developed an enterprise version that allowed governments or businesses to send encrypted messages to one another but still collect and audit messages if necessary. Later that year, I then reported that CBP planned to deploy Wickr across "all components" of the agency as part of a $900,000 contract. I have since obtained more documents about CBP's purchase of Wickr licenses via the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). I've uploaded them here for posterity.

[...] That transformation from scrappy upstart to government contractor was solidified when Amazon Web Services acquired Wickr in June 2021. I remember being shocked at the time and writing up the news as quickly as I could. What the hell was AWS going to do with an app that was becoming a hotbed for crime, at least in my anecdotal experience?

The answer was to shut it down entirely. After NBC News found in 2022 that Wickr was linked to a string of child abuse cases, AWS announced it would stop accepting new users at the end of that year. The company said it would then kill Wickr Me entirely on December 31, 2023.

The secure messaging world is very different to the one Wickr launched in more than ten years ago. Today mainstream platforms are turning on end-to-end encryption by default, with Facebook doing just that last month. The need for specialist apps like Wickr may be decreasing with certain groups. Maybe it's even a good sign that Wickr has been shown the door.