iOS 11, thoroughly reviewed

Enlarge / The iOS 11 era begins. (credit: Andrew Cunningham) The iPad is having a great year. It started with the $329 iPad back in April, a compelling tablet that’s both good and cheap enough to entice upgraders and people who have never bought a tablet before. And it continued in June, with new 10.5- and 12.9-inch iPad Pros with high-end screens and powerful specs that make them look and feel a lot more “pro” than they did before. This is all really good, compelling, well-differentiated hardware, and it has paid off for Apple so far—the new tablet drove year-over-year iPad sales up for the first time in more than three years . While it’s not clear where the trendlines are ultimately heading, Apple has to be happy that the tablet it has described as “the future of computing” doesn’t appear to be in terminal decline. Read 271 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Read the original:
iOS 11, thoroughly reviewed

New super-glue inspired by slug slime

Surgeons close internal incisions with stitches and staples but they, and their patients, would benefit from a glue that stays stuck even to wet tissue and organs. Researchers from McGill University in Montreal are making progress with a powerful new glue inspired by the the sticky slime secreted by scared slugs. Science News surveys the state-of-the-art in adhesives that take inspiration from marine worms, mussels, and geckos: Using the (slug-inspired) glue to plug a hole in the pig heart worked so well that the heart still held in liquid after being inflated and deflated tens of thousands of times. (McGill University’s Jianyu) Li, who did the research while at Harvard University, and colleagues also tested the glue in live rats with liver lacerations. It stopped the rats’ bleeding, and the animals didn’t appear to suffer any bad reaction from the adhesive… One layer of the material is a polymer, a type of material made from long molecules built from many repeated subunits, like a string of beads. Positively charged appendages dangling off the polymers are drawn to wet tissue surfaces by the same forces underlying static electricity. This first layer weaves into another layer, a water-based gel. The gel layer acts like a shock absorber in a car, Li says. It soaks up energy that might otherwise dislodge or snap the adhesive. Despite being 90 percent water, the material is both sticky and tough, Li says. The fact that it’s mostly water makes it more likely to be nontoxic to humans. ” Animal goo inspires better glue ” (Science News) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2p624MDdDw4

Read the article:
New super-glue inspired by slug slime

Chinese Scientists Are Developing A Vaccine Against Cavities

A vaccine against tooth decay “is urgently needed” writes Nature — and a team of Chinese scientists is getting close. hackingbear writes: Scientists at Wuhan Institute of Virology, Chinese Academy of Sciences developed low side effects and high protective efficiency using flagellin-rPAc fusion protein KFD2-rPAc, a promising vaccine candidate. In rat challenge models, KFD2-rPAc induces a robust rPAc-specific IgA response, and confers efficient prophylactic and therapeutic efficiency as does KF-rPAc, while the flagellin-specific inflammatory antibody responses are highly reduced. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

More:
Chinese Scientists Are Developing A Vaccine Against Cavities

HP show us what a real PC workstation looks like with a 56-core, 3TB Z8

Enlarge / HP Z8 Workstation (credit: HP) If you’re a demanding computer user, sometimes your 13″ Ultrabook laptop just won’t quite cut it. For those looking for a little more computing power, HP’s new Z8 workstation could be just the answer. The latest iteration of HP’s desktop workstations packs in a pair of Intel Skylake-SP processors , topping out with twinned Xeon Platinum 8180 chips: 28 cores/56 threads and 38.5MB cache each running at 2.5-3.8GHz, along with support for up to 1.5TB RAM. Next year, you’ll be able to go higher still with the 8180M processors; same core count and speeds, but doubling the total memory capacity to 3TB, as long as you want to fill the machine’s 24 RAM slots. Those processors and memory can be combined with up to three Nvidia Quadro P6000 GPUs, or AMD Radeon Pro WX 9100 parts if you prefer that team. The hefty desktop systems have four internal drive bays, two external (and a third external for an optical drive), and nine PCIe slots. Storage options include up to 4TB of PCIe-mounted SSD, and 48TB of spinning disks. A range of gigabit and 10 gigabit Ethernet adaptors are available; the machines also support 802.11a/b/g/n/ac Wi-Fi and Bluetooth 4.2. Thunderbolt 3 is available with an add-in card. Read 5 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Continue reading here:
HP show us what a real PC workstation looks like with a 56-core, 3TB Z8

MIT combines several vaccines in a single injection

Someday, kids might only have to endure a single jab to get the benefits of several vaccines , thanks to a new technology by a team of MIT engineers. They’ve created a method that allows a single injection to carry enough doses for the first one to two years of a child’s life, with each dose released at a specified time. Their secret? Microscopic coffee cups made out of PLGA, a biocompatible polymer used in prosthetics and implants. To create the cups, they first had to make an array of silicon molds using a process called photolithography. Each large array can create about 2, 000 cups, which are then filled with doses of vaccination using a custom-made dispensing system. Finally, they put a lid over each cup and apply heat until they fuse together and form a tightly sealed container. The team’s microscopic cups can deliver doses at different times, because PLGA can be designed to break down at different rates if you manipulate its molecules. They tested their system by injecting mice with cups created to deteriorate at 9, 20 and 41 days after injection. It was a success — the containers remained leak-proof until the days they were supposed to break down. The engineers believe their system will be especially useful in the developing world and could have many potential applications other than drug delivery. Team leader Robert Langer explained: “We are very excited about this work because, for the first time, we can create a library of tiny, encased vaccine particles, each programmed to release at a precise, predictable time, so that people could potentially receive a single injection that, in effect, would have multiple boosters already built into it. This could have a significant impact on patients everywhere, especially in the developing world where patient compliance is particularly poor.” However, they still have a long way to go to make sure their little containers can remain intact at body temperature for as long as a few months to a couple of years. They’re now conducting several more tests using a variety of drugs, including vaccines still in development . Source: MIT

Read the original post:
MIT combines several vaccines in a single injection

Feds in California are aggressively going after Silk Road, AlphaBay vendors

Enlarge / A stack of bitcoins sits among twisted copper wiring inside a communications room at an office in this arranged photograph in London on Tuesday, September 5, 2017. (credit: Bloomberg / Getty Images News ) Next month, a California drug dealer who recently pleaded guilty to selling on Silk Road, AlphaBay, and other sites is scheduled to be sentenced. According to federal authorities, David Ryan Burchard was one of the largest online merchants of marijuana and cocaine—he sold over $1.4 million worth of narcotics. Burchard was prosecuted in federal court in the Eastern District of California, which has quietly become a hub of cases against dealers from those notorious and now-shuttered Dark Web marketplaces. According to Lauren Horwood, a spokeswoman for the US Attorney’s Office in Sacramento, one of the primary hubs of this federal judicial district, there are currently 11 Silk Road and AlphaBay-related prosecutions underway. Four of the defendants have pleaded guilty, and, of those, two have already been sentenced, while the others’ cases are still ongoing. Read 21 remaining paragraphs | Comments

View the original here:
Feds in California are aggressively going after Silk Road, AlphaBay vendors

Python’s Official Repository Included 10 ‘Malicious’ Typo-Squatting Modules

An anonymous reader quotes BleepingComputer: The Slovak National Security Office (NBU) has identified ten malicious Python libraries uploaded on PyPI — Python Package Index — the official third-party software repository for the Python programming language. NBU experts say attackers used a technique known as typosquatting to upload Python libraries with names similar to legitimate packages — e.g.: “urlib” instead of “urllib.” The PyPI repository does not perform any types of security checks or audits when developers upload new libraries to its index, so attackers had no difficulty in uploading the modules online. Developers who mistyped the package name loaded the malicious libraries in their software’s setup scripts. “These packages contain the exact same code as their upstream package thus their functionality is the same, but the installation script, setup.py, is modified to include a malicious (but relatively benign) code, ” NBU explained. Experts say the malicious code only collected information on infected hosts, such as name and version of the fake package, the username of the user who installed the package, and the user’s computer hostname. Collected data, which looked like “Y:urllib-1.21.1 admin testmachine”, was uploaded to a Chinese IP address. NBU officials contacted PyPI administrators last week who removed the packages before officials published a security advisory on Saturday.” The advisory lays some of the blame on Python’s ‘pip’ tool, which executes arbitrary code during installations without requiring a cryptographic signature. Ars Technica also reports that another team of researchers “was able to seed PyPI with more than 20 libraries that are part of the Python standard library, ” and that group now reports they’ve already received more than 7, 400 pingbacks. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Read More:
Python’s Official Repository Included 10 ‘Malicious’ Typo-Squatting Modules

Every Nintendo Switch appears to contain a hidden copy of NES Golf

On Saturday, the world may have gotten its first look at an NES game officially running on a Nintendo Switch. You might think the weird thing about this news is how long it has taken for Virtual Console support to come to the Switch. But this isn’t a Virtual Console story. Turns out, this is somehow weirder. Your Nintendo Switch may already have a fully playable NES game just sitting inside of it. Read 6 remaining paragraphs | Comments

View post:
Every Nintendo Switch appears to contain a hidden copy of NES Golf

See jerkface bacteria hiding in tumors and gobbling chemotherapy drugs

Enlarge / An example of an experiment where bacteria (green) and cancer cells (red) are co-cultured. (credit: Leore Geller ) Of all the kinds of bacteria, some are charming and beneficial, others are malicious and dangerous—and then there are the ones that are just plain turds . That’s the case for Mycoplasma hyorhinis and its ilk. Researchers caught the little jerks hiding out among cancer cells, gobbling up chemotherapy drugs intended to demolish their tumorous digs. The findings, reported this week in Science , explain how some otherwise treatable cancers can thwart powerful therapies. Read 12 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Read more here:
See jerkface bacteria hiding in tumors and gobbling chemotherapy drugs

Mind-Altering Cat Parasite Linked To a Whole Lot of Neurological Disorders

schwit1 shares a report from ScienceAlert: The brain-dwelling parasite Toxoplasma gondii is estimated to be hosted by at least 2 billion people around the world, and new evidence suggests the lodger could be more dangerous than we think. While the protozoan invader poses the greatest risk to developing fetuses infected in the womb, new research suggests the parasite could alter and amplify a range of neurological disorders, including epilepsy, Alzheimer’s, and Parkinson’s, and also cancer. “This study is a paradigm shifter, ” says one of the team, neuroscientist Dennis Steindler from Tufts University. “We now have to insert infectious disease into the equation of neurodegenerative diseases, epilepsy, and neural cancers.” The findings are part of an emerging field of research looking into how T. gondii, which is usually transmitted to humans via contact with cat faeces (or by eating uncooked meat), produces proteins that alter and manipulate the brain chemistry of their infected hosts. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

See original article:
Mind-Altering Cat Parasite Linked To a Whole Lot of Neurological Disorders