Image: Gizmodo Who doesn’t hate carrying around their laptop? Even the lightest ones weigh a couple of pounds and can be a huge burden to lug around the city. That’s where portable apps, ones stored on a USB drive, come in. Read more…
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How to Turn a USB Stick into an Ultra Portable PC
The British Museum To flesh out the features on the so-called Jericho Skull, archaeologists at the British Museum have worked for more than two years to reconstruct the face of a man whose skull had been reshaped by ritual throughout his long life. While he was an infant, his head had been bound tightly with cloth to change its shape. After he died at a ripe old age, his skull was then plastered, decorated, and put on display. This Jericho Skull gives us a glimpse of life in the Levant long before the rise of religions that describe a great battle at the city’s walls. Jericho, located today in Palestine, dates back more than 11,000 years and is one of the oldest continuously inhabited cities on Earth. It’s very likely that this man lived behind the earliest versions of Jericho’s infamous walls, built more than 9,000 years ago, but that doesn’t mean he lived a hardscrabble existence threatened by war. Recent archaeological investigation of Jericho’s Neolithic walls shows that they were not used for defense. Based on layers of silt that collected around them, researchers surmise that Jericho’s first walls were built to prevent the city from being flooded during the rainy season. Read 6 remaining paragraphs | Comments
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This man’s skull was ritualistically transformed 9,000 years ago in Jericho
Apple is making good on its promise of giving you a unified video streaming experience . The company has released iOS 10.2 and tvOS 10.1, both of which include the company’s centerpiece TV app. So long as a given service supports the feature, you no longer have to jump into and out of apps to catch up on your viewing — you can resume your favorite show or check out recommendations from a single place. Netflix isn’t included in TV at the moment, alas, but this and the recently launched single sign-on should save you a lot of hassle. The iOS update isn’t just a one-trick pony, of course. It includes a slew of new emoji , including a face palm, a gorilla (read: Harambe) and female equivalents for most job emoji. And of course, there are numerous subtler tweaks. You’ll see improved music controls with quicker access to your queue and shuffling, better stabilization and improved frame rates for Live Photos, a dedicated News app section for saved articles and notifications for smart home devices like smoke detectors and door sensors. Combine these with general fixes (there’s a significant upgrade to Bluetooth performance, for example) and you’ll definitely want to upgrade — if just to see Apple fulfill one of its big end-of-year promises . Source: MacRumors
CRISPR is already effective enough to be used in experimental therapies for leukemia, cystic fibrosis, sickle cell disease and other conditions. But a team of scientists from Western University have created an even more effective version of CRISPR by adding an engineered enzyme called TevCas9. The current version of CRISPR uses an enzyme known as Cas9 to cut DNA segments, such as the specific parts that cause genetic disorders. Western’s scientists created TevCas9 by combining Cas9 with another enzyme called I-Tevl. According to the team, the next-gen CRISPR is more precise and more efficient. Plus, it has the potential to prevent genes from repairing themselves. Lead scientist David Edgell explains: “The problem with CRISPR is that it will cut DNA, but then DNA-repair will take that cut and stick it back together. That means it is regenerating the site that the CRISPR is trying to target, creating a futile cycle. The novelty of our addition, is that it stops that regeneration from happening.” See, the upgraded CRISPR cuts genes in two places instead of just one to make it tougher for self-repair to kick in. The team still has to confirm that through further testing, but as the team says, that “is the hope and the expectation.” If you want to read the study’s technical details, check out the team’s paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences . Source: PNAS , Western University
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Scientists design the next-gen CRISPR for gene editing
Akira , still one of the most definitive manga and anime ever made , never really got a game to do the source material justice. While that’s probably not going to change, Patrick Scott Patterso n, retro game hunter-gatherer, managed to pick up four slightly different copies of the mid-development Akira title on the Game Boy. They are all experiment builds, so all that mid-test gaming nougat is housed in open-air cartridges — which makes me nervous. The title is primarily broken into two (pretty broken) parts: Bike-based levels where you dodge static obstacles and an awkward-looking platform section where you punch and kick enemies that are, for some reason, much shorter than you. There’s also a bunch of jumping which will be familiar to anyone that played handheld games that were Hollywood movie tie-ins back in the 90s. You do, however, get to run around as protagonists Kaneda or Tetsuo — which is cool. There’s even a brief hovercraft shooter level and mutant bosses that Patterson was able to try through debug level options. The ideas are all very Akira , but the game is severely unfinished. There’s a single cloying soundtrack and only a few sound effects repeated constantly. Level design is all delightfully broken up too, but what are you expecting from a collection of decades-old mid-development cartridges? Patterson plans to pull together the workable parts of each cartridge, pulling them into something vaguely playable for fans that probably don’t even care how the game plays. Via: Kotaku
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Unreleased ‘Akira’ title for Game Boy resurfaces
MalwareHunterTeam has discovered “Popcorn Time, ” a new in-development ransomware with a twist. Gumbercules!! writes: “With Popcorn Time, not only can a victim pay a ransom to get their files back, but they can also try to infect two other people and have them pay the ransom in order to get a free key, ” writes Bleeping Computer. Infected victims are given a “referral code” and, if two people are infected by that code and pay up — the original victim is given their decryption key (potentially). While encrypting your files, Popcorn Time displays a fake system screen that says “Downloading and installing. Please wait” — followed by a seven-day countdown clock for the amount of time left to pay its ransom of one bitcoin. That screen claims that the perpetrators are “a group of computer science students from Syria, ” and that “all the money that we get goes to food, medicine, shelter to our people. We are extremely sorry that we are forcing you to pay but that’s the only way that we can keep living.” So what would you do if this ransomware infected your files? Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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New Ransomware Offers The Decryption Keys If You Infect Your Friends
Facebook has been getting dragged hard since November 8th — and rightfully so — given the unprecedented amount of shitposts and fake news that dominated the social site in the months leading up to the election. After his initial defense of ” nuh-uh, wasn’t us ” fell on deaf ears, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has decided to do something about it . The company has begun hitting fake news sites in the wallet , as well as scrubbing BS content through both curation and automation . And, on Sunday, Facebook appears to have quietly rolled out a third method: a new user-reporting feature that specifically calls out fake news for what it is. Update : Turns out that the false news option has been active on the site since last year . Now, when a user reports a post in their timeline (after selecting “I think it shouldn’t be on Facebook” option), they are able to select “It’s a false news story” from the subsequent screen. Notice that it is specifically differentiated from the “It goes against my views” option — namely because facts and your opinions are not interchangeable, regardless of how strongly you believe in either. This move is actually well within the standard Facebook MO. The company has taken a similar stand with regards to the sale of illicit items, like guns, on its website wherein users are expected to self-police the virtual groups they subscribe to. Hopefully though, this reporting tool will be effective because it’s still terrifyingly easy to buy assault weapons from strangers on the social network. Source: Matt Navarra (Twitter)
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Facebook adds a ‘fake news’ reporting option (updated)
“As expected, today, December 11, 2016, Linus Torvalds unleashed the final release of the highly anticipated Linux 4.9 kernel, ” reports Softpedia. prisoninmate shares their article: Linux kernel 4.9 entered development in mid-October, on the 15th, when Linus Torvalds decided to cut the merge window short by a day just to keep people on their toes, but also to prevent them from sending last-minute pull requests that might cause issues like it happened with the release of Linux kernel 4.8, which landed just two weeks before first RC of Linux 4.9 hit the streets… There are many great new features implemented in Linux kernel 4.9, but by far the most exciting one is the experimental support for older AMD Radeon graphics cards from the Southern Islands/GCN 1.0 family, which was injected to the open-source AMDGPU graphics driver… There are also various interesting improvements for modern AMD Radeon GPUs, such as virtual display support and better reset support, both of which are implemented in the AMDGPU driver. For Intel GPU users, there’s DMA-BUF implicit fencing, and some Intel Atom processors got a P-State performance boost. Intel Skylake improvements are also present in Linux kernel 4.9. There’s also dynamic thread-tracing, according to Linux Today. (And hopefully they fixed the “buggy crap” that made it into Linux 4.8.) LWN.net calls this “by far the busiest cycle in the history of the kernel project.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Enlarge (credit: Duggan et al. | Current Biology ) From the pockmarked mummified pharaohs of ancient Egypt to the epic triumph of complete global eradication, smallpox had a remarkable history. But that lengthy history may be in for a massive revision, thanks to a little mummy found in the crypt of a Lithuanian church. The mummy, thought to be of a child between the ages of two and four who died sometime between 1643 and 1665, teemed with the genetic remains of the bygone virus. That smallpox DNA was the oldest ever found—yet it was quite young, evolutionarily speaking. In fact, genetic analysis of the preserved smallpox blueprints, published Thursday in Current Biology , suggests that smallpox is just hundreds of years old, not millennia as many had thought. The finding stands to rewrite the virus’ storied past. Reports of blistering, puss-packed rashes have speckled historical records for thousands of years. The dimpled pharaohs and spotted plagues in China during the 4th century were considered proof that the smallpox virus—aka Variola —plagued humankind for a long, long time. Smallpox caused massive outbreaks throughout Europe in the 17 th century and devastated populations in the New World. But, in 1796, it became the first disease for which there was a vaccine. And in 1979, smallpox was declared the first—and still only—infectious disease of humans to be globally eradicated. (Rinderpest, an infectious disease of cattle and some other animals, has also been eradicated.) Read 8 remaining paragraphs | Comments
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Surprise virus in child mummy unravels thousands of years of disease history
It’s freaky enough when hackers can disable brakes, control a steering wheel or shut down an engine as a vehicle goes down the road. But hacking can happen when a car is vacant, and there’s apparently a device making its way over from Europe that tricks keyless systems into unlocking and starting a car for theft. Read more…
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There’s A New Way People Can Break Into Cars With Keyless Entry Systems And Drive Off