Scientists capture MRI scans of single atoms

Scientists capture MRI scans of single atoms

Different microscopy techniques allow scientists to see the nucleotide-by-nucleotide genetic sequences in cells down to the resolution of a couple atoms as seen in an atomic force microscopy image. But scientists at the IBM Almaden Research Center in San Jose, Calif. and the Institute for Basic Sciences in Seoul, have taken imaging a step further, developing a new magnetic resonance imaging technique that provides unprecedented detail, right down to the individual atoms of a sample. This temporarily disrupts the protons spinning in the nucleus of every atom in every cell.

Source: www.nytimes.com

Scientists reverse damage of Alzheimer’s disease in human brain cells

Scientists reverse damage of Alzheimer’s disease in human brain cells

The team, which was led by Dr Yadong Huang, discovered how to erase the damage caused by apoE4 in human brain cells through changing it into an innocuous form. The team used a small molecule to change the apoE4 protein into a harmless apoE3 version, thus erasing the damage caused to brain cells. While apoE4 does not affect the production of amyloid beta – the main component of the amyloid plaques found in the brains of Alzheimer’s patients – in mouse models, it does cause a notable increase of the protein’s production in human cells.

Source: www.drugdevelopment-technology.com

What If All Your Slack Chats Were Leaked?

What If All Your Slack Chats Were Leaked?

Slack is responsible for protecting the privacy and security of all its users, even the ones whose work brings risks that the company didn’t originally anticipate. Slack should give everyone the same privacy protections available to its paying enterprise customers and let all of its users decide for themselves which messages they want to keep and which messages they want to delete. It’s undeniably Slack’s prerogative to charge for a more advanced product, but making users pay for basic privacy and security protections is the wrong call.

Source: www.nytimes.com

Microsoft Issues Warning for 800M Windows 10 Users

Microsoft Issues Warning for 800M Windows 10 Users

Windows 10 users have been exposed to a worrying new vulnerability

Steve Kotecki

Picked up by the ever-excellent Ghacks, Microsoft has issued a warning to all its 800M Windows 10 users that a serious and long-running bug in the platform is not actually a bug at all. What Microsoft confirms it did was quietly switch off Registry backups in Windows 10 eight months ago, despite giving users the impression this crucial safeguarding system was still working. Important Windows 10 registry backups are being saved as empty files

Microsoft

So why has Microsoft done this?

Source: www.forbes.com

Electric cars grab almost half of sales in Norway

Electric cars grab almost half of sales in Norway

OSLO (Reuters) – Almost half of new cars sold in Norway in the first six months of 2019 were powered by fully electric engines, up from just over a quarter in the same period last year, ensuring the Nordic nation retains its top global ranking in electric vehicle sales. In total, 48.4% of all new cars sold from January to June were electric, surpassing the 31.2% seen for the full year 2018, and making oil-producing Norway the global leader in per-capita electric car sales by a wide margin. California-based Tesla sold 3,760 vehicles in Norway in June, for a 24.5% share of all cars during the month, and was also the top-selling brand for the first six months.

Source: www.reuters.com

Japan resumes commercial whaling after 30 years

Japan resumes commercial whaling after 30 years

IWC members had agreed to an effective ban on whale hunting, but Japan has long argued it is possible to hunt whales in a sustainable way. Image copyright
AFP

Image caption

Japan killed hundreds of whales each year under its research programme

“I’m a bit nervous but happy that we can start whaling,” one whaler told AFP news agency before setting sail. Like other whaling nations, Japan argues hunting and eating whales are part of its culture.

Source: www.bbc.com

How to support open-source software and stay sane

How to support open-source software and stay sane

If your research group is planning to release open-source software, you can prepare for the support work and the questions that will arise as others begin to use it. Private US foundations such as the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI) also fund open-source software support. Varoquaux and her colleagues have received $138,000 from the Alfred P. Sloan and Ford foundations to study “the visible and invisible work of maintaining open-source software”, she says, including burnout in researchers who devote their time to this work — part of a portfolio of 13 digital-infrastructure research projects funded to the tune of $1.3 million.

Source: www.nature.com

Google’s robots.txt Parser is Now Open Source

Google’s robots.txt Parser is Now Open Source

While this is an important step, it means extra work for developers who parse robots.txt files.We’re here to help: we open sourced the C++ library that our production systems use for parsing and matching rules in robots.txt files. Since then, the library evolved; we learned a lot about how webmasters write robots.txt files and corner cases that we had to cover for, and added what we learned over the years also to the internet draft when it made sense.We also included a testing tool in the open source package to help you test a few rules. Once built, the usage is very straightforward:If you want to check out the library, head over to our GitHub repository for the robots.txt parser .

Source: opensource.googleblog.com

The Campaign to Take Torvalds Out of Linux

The Campaign to Take Torvalds Out of Linux

Microsoft would rather have its longtime friend, Greg (from Novell), in charge of Linux

Summary: Things aren’t too rosy at the ‘Linux’ Foundation where Linus Torvalds is increasingly being marginalised (thanks in part to Microsoft-friendly media) and propped up to replace him are those who worked on Hyper-V (proprietary software for Windows) and similar Microsoft-centric projects at the Microsoft-occupied Novell

FAMILIAR tactics necessitate familiar reactions and responses. Yesterday it said something about a Microsoft move “which if approved would allow Microsoft to tap into private behind-the-scenes chatter about vulnerabilities, patches, and ongoing security issues with the open-source kernel and related code…”

This is Greg K-H (Kroah-Hartman) almost inviting Microsoft. So Torvalds is bad because he mentioned poo, unlike Microsoft putting “boobs” inside the kernel (yes, Linux) — not even a sackable offense by Microsoft’s exceptionally sexist standards.

Source: techrights.org