SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
Why Can't aristarchus Submit This Story?
Do I have to do everything around here?
-----
FDA Launches Criminal Investigation Into Unauthorized Herpes Vaccine Research
By Marisa Taylor, Kaiser Health News
The Food and Drug Administration has launched a criminal investigation into research by a Southern Illinois University professor who injected people with his unauthorized herpes vaccine, Kaiser Health News has learned. SIU professor William Halford, who died in June, injected participants with his experimental herpes vaccine in St. Kitts and Nevis in 2016 and in Illinois hotel rooms in 2013 without safety oversight that is routinely performed by the FDA or an institutional review board.
According to four people with knowledge about the inquiry, the FDA’s Office of Criminal Investigations is looking into whether anyone from SIU or Halford’s former company, Rational Vaccines, violated FDA regulations by helping Halford conduct unauthorized research. The probe is also looking at anyone else outside the company or university who might have been complicit, according to the sources who asked not to be identified because of the sensitivity of the matter.
The FDA rarely prosecutes research violations, usually choosing to administratively sanction or ban researchers or companies from future clinical trials, legal experts said. Even so, the agency is empowered to pursue as a crime the unauthorized development of vaccines and drugs—and sometimes goes after such cases to send a message.
[...] Rational Vaccines was co-founded with Hollywood filmmaker Agustín Fernández III, and the company received millions of dollars in private investment from investors after the Caribbean trial, including from billionaire Peter Thiel. Thiel, who for months has refused to respond to questions from KHN, contributed to President Donald Trump’s campaign and is a high-profile critic of the FDA. Thiel is part of a larger libertarian movement to roll back FDA regulations to speed up medical innovation.
Kaiser Health News is a nonprofit news service covering health issues. It is an editorially independent program of the Kaiser Family Foundation, which is not affiliated with Kaiser Permanente.
Full article licensed under Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0).
Three people have sued Rational Vaccines over the experimental injections.
Also at STLtoday.com.
Previously: University Could Lose Millions From “Unethical” Research Backed by Peter Thiel
They're water-soluble but that doesn't mean they're harmless
I've been tinkering with various B vitamins recently since discovering what seems to be an MTHFR polymorphism or six in my genome. It's just a guess, as I can't spare the money for testing, but the immediate positive effects I've felt from certain forms of certain vitamins all but confirms a) MTHFR SNPs and b) an over-methylation pattern. Which *sounds* paradoxical at first, but really isn't.
People tend to be a little flippant with vitamin C and the B-family since they're water-soluble, reasoning "eh, if I overdose all it means is I get really expensive and really yellow pee." Nooooot...exactly. That's not wrong, but the little buggers will do plenty else before they exit via the kidneys. Here's what I've noticed:
Niacin/B3 - Produces the famous "niacin flush," though much less pronounced than in the first week of taking. About 100-200mg daily. Supposedly there's no harm in taking small (10) integer multiples of this dose, even though 200mg is supposedly almost 2 weeks' worth. Calms me down immensely and helps me sleep. It's also supposed to be good for lowering cholesterol, which is well within normal limits for me, but every little bit helps. Overall definitely a positive.
Pyridoxine/B6 (as pyridoxal-5-phosphate) - Holy crap, this is bad for me. It makes me sleepy and weak and ravenously hungry, then incredibly angry after I eat. How angry? I scared off an almost seven foot tall, 300-pound-plus man at work today. He actually decided not to order because, and this is a direct quote, "Your body language. You're angry and it's scaring me." Now yes, I look pretty much like a six-foot, Caucasian version of my namesake in glasses, and yes, I've been nicknamed "Grumpy Cat" by three separate co-workers at three separate jobs, but that is *bad.* Not touching this one again, at least not before work. Seems to be amping up my metabolism and producing (a lot) more catecholamines such as adrenaline, which would explain the effects.
Folate (as 6(S)-5-methylfolate) - This is the big tell that I've got an MTHFR problem. I felt immediate relief within half an hour after my first dose. Makes me feel, somehow, wet and cool and "fluffy" inside. Not as calming as niacin but still helps, just in a different way. Good synergy. I'm taking this once every few days now, after having spent 2 weeks repleting myself with a daily dose. I don't seem to need anywhere near as much caffeine since starting this one either.
Cobalamin/B12 (as adenosylcobalamin) - Another one for the "nope" column, at least no more than once every two weeks. Has similar effects to B6, though produces more anxiety than outright hostility. I am guessing it's causing either too much glutamate in the brain or, like B6, possibly upregulating stress hormones.
Vitamin C (as ascorbic acid with bioflavanoids, e.g., rutin and quercetin) - I can't tell if this is having any effects, but it doesn't seem to hurt and is important for iron processing, which in turn is necessary during Shark Week. Taking daily seems not to hurt anything, and might have helped me fight off the last two incipient colds I got.
People need to treat these things with more respect. We get people saying "oh supplements don't work," but if that were the case, there's no way they'd be having such pronounced and immediate effects. And, it seems everyone's body is different and even their metabolisms differ from day to day, so in the end, everyone needs to tailor their supplements and the doses thereof to their own physiology. Overall this is a net positive for me, but I'm probably going to avoid the B6...
12nm AMD Ryzen CPUs Available This Week
AMD Ryzen 2nd Gen Details: Four CPUs, Pre-Order Today, Reviews on the 19th
These are not the 3rd-gen "Zen 2" 7nm Ryzen parts you are looking for, but 2nd-gen "Zen+" 12nm Ryzen.
No submission yet since there is no review.
Cosby Show Topless Protester
Vatican Ex-Diplomat Arrested
Vatican police arrest ex-diplomat over 'child pornography'
Police at the Vatican have arrested a priest who previously worked at the Holy See's US embassy on suspicion of possessing child pornography.
Carlo Alberto Capella was taken into custody after an investigation.
Monsignor Capella was recalled from the US in September 2017 after US authorities told the Vatican about a possible violation of child pornography laws by one of its diplomats.
He was ordained in 1993 and joined the Vatican's diplomatic corps in 2004.
The arrest could draw fresh attention to Pope Francis's efforts to snuff out child abuse in the Catholic Church. He has pledged zero tolerance but critics say he has not done enough to hold to account bishops who allegedly covered up abuse.
Also at NYT and The Guardian.
Are Water Worlds Habitable?
Rehash of this article. But here is a detail that may have been overlooked:
Take the fifth planet within the TRAPPIST-1 system as an example. Cayman Unterborn, an exogeologist at Arizona State University in Tempe, and his colleagues think that the liquid water here extends down about 200 kilometers—roughly 20 times deeper than Earth’s Mariana Trench. That much water would create a large ice layer at the bottom of the ocean which would seal the ocean from the land and effectively shut down a geochemical cycle that plays a crucial role in Earth’s habitability.
WD Black/SanDisk Extreme Pro NVMe SSDs
The Western Digital WD Black 3D NAND SSD Review: EVO Meets Its Match
Very fast sequential speeds and high IOPS. Endurance could be problematic (600 TB for the 1 TB model, calculated as 0.3 DWPD). I wonder what that ratio will be for QLC 3D NAND SSDs.
Western Digital bought SanDisk in 2016.
Mommy Shaming
Moto C Plus is the Queen of Budget LineageOS Phones
After nearly 6 years with a Motorola Photon Q (XT897/"Asanti") I finally decided it's time for a new phone, and spent the outrageous sum of just-under-$130-including-shipping for a Moto C Plus, screenglass, and rubber body armor.
Motorola, now a subsidiary of Lenovo, is known for most of its phones being fairly amenable to rooting and unlocking. This particular one also happens to be GSM-enabled and support dual SIMs, on the off chance I ever leave the US and want a data plan. Its specs are, by today's standards, unimpressive: quad-core MT6737M CPU (4x ARMv8 A53 @ 28nm, somewhat slower than a Snapdragon 425 for reference), 2 GB of memory, 16GB of eMMC flash, and 5" 1280x720 screen. The body is all plastic, though it's not bad plastic, and the battery is a surprising 4,000 mAh that weighs more than the phone itself does.
Now, it turns out the C Plus is *not* as easily unlockable as, say, the G4 is. In particular, the usual fastboot commands such as get_unlock_data simply fail with "unknown remote command" errors. The stock ROM is also kind of pants, though it's at least a fairly vanilla Android 7.0 rather than Madokami-forgive-us-all MIUI or TouchWiz.
However, there is a program called SP Flash Tool that is able to write directly to MediaTek devices' internal flash over a USB port. This is not for the faint of heart, as it requires carefully-crafted scatter files with the exact starting addresses and lengths corresponding to each and every piece of the stock firmware, and if you mess up by even one byte, you will very likely hard-brick your phone. For even more heart-pounding excitement, the way to get a custom ROM on here is not to use this tool, but to pop into an advanced mode and specify where to start writing (if you're curious, it's 0x2d80000 and no, that's not a typo) and with what file.
The purpose here is to flash a custom build of TeamWin recovery, known by its uncomplimentary acronym TWRP. And *this* involves dissecting the machine, removing its battery, holding VolDown, and hooking it up to a PC via USB cable, *in that order.* Somehow, Flash Tool is able to write to the device even though it's powered off and battery-less.
From here, disconnect from the PC, hold VolUp and Power, and select Recovery boot. After about 30s, TWRP will load, and you can pull up ADB in your shell, place the device in sideload mode, and "adb sideload /path/to/lineageos-14.1.zip," which goes a hell of a lot faster than you'd expect it to. But there's a catch: if you reboot now, you'll go into an endless bootloop, where the phone won't go past the Motorola logo. If you don't have a stock ROM or, preferably, a Nandroid backup, this is game over.
Turns out you *also* need to install SuperSU, and you need to do it in a special way: while in TWRP, pop a terminal, and do "echo SYSTEMLESS=true>/data/.supersu" before adb-sideloading a known-good SuperSU .zip onto the phone. The output will be quite verbose, and it will warn you that 1) on reboot, the device will likely restart at least once and 2) first boot will take "several minutes."
They're not kidding. I lost count of the exact amount of time, but I believe LineageOS sat there blowing bubbles to itself for a good 15 or 20 minutes, and I was literally seconds away from forcing a power-down and starting the entire process again with a stock ROM. It also takes well over a minute to boot; I counted 33 sets of right-to-left bubbles at the LineageOS loading screen per bootup, and that's after a good 30 seconds of the phone sitting at the Motorola logo with a nice fat warning about how the device can't be verified and might not work properly.
Yeah, that's the point: from Google's PoV, it's *not* working properly, because LineageOS seems not to have all that spying junk on it. I didn't even flash a GApps zip; instead, first thing I did was to sideload an FDroid archive, which is something like an open source version of the Play Store. Everything I need is on there and more.
So far, I am loving this thing. I've been zipping all over downtown Milwaukee looking for a new place to lease the last couple of days, and there is nothing like having a portable MP3 player for those long rides. And get this: after using it to play music for a good 3 hours, *the battery was still at 95% from a full charge this morning.* That is *nuts.* The Moto C Plus punches way, way above its weight with the proper love and attention paid to it.
So if anyone wants a good budget phone to run LineageOS, Resurrection Remix, etc on and doesn't mind doing some nailbitingly-scary stuff with direct flashing, I can heartily recommend the C Plus (NOT the C, that thing is junk). Happy flashing, everyone :)
Murder for Popularity
Crazed girls flood Parkland school shooter Nikolas Cruz with fan mail
Mass murderer Nikolas Cruz is getting stacks of fan mail and love letters sent to the Broward County jail, along with hundreds of dollars in contributions to his commissary account.
Teenage girls, women and even older men are writing to the Parkland school shooter and sending photographs — some suggestive — tucked inside cute greeting cards and attached to notebook paper with offers of friendship and encouragement. Groupies also are joining Facebook communities to talk about how to help the killer.
The South Florida Sun Sentinel obtained copies of some of the letters showing that Cruz, who had few friends in the outside world, is now being showered with attention.
