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‘Watershed’ Medical Trial Proves Type 2 Diabetes Can Be Reversed

dryriver writes: For those suffering from type 2 diabetes, there is good news. Nearly half of the participants in a watershed trial of a new diabetes treatment were able to reverse their affliction. The method is quite simple — an all liquid diet that causes participants to lose a lot of weight, followed by a carefully controlled diet of real solid foods. Four times a day, a sachet of powder is stirred in water to make a soup or shake. They contain about 200 calories, but also the right balance of nutrients. If the patient can keep away from other foods long enough, there is a chance of reversing type 2 diabetes completely. Prof Roy Taylor, from Newcastle University, told the BBC: “It’s a real watershed moment. Before we started this line of work, doctors and specialists regarded type 2 as irreversible. But if we grasp the nettle and get people out of their dangerous state (being overweight), they can get remission of diabetes.” However, doctors are not calling this a cure. If the weight goes back on, then the diabetes will return. The trial only looked at people diagnosed with diabetes in the last six years. Doctors believe — but do not know with absolute certainty yet — that in people who have had the affliction much longer than that, there may be too much permanent damage to make remission possible. The trial results have been published in the Lancet medical journal. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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‘Watershed’ Medical Trial Proves Type 2 Diabetes Can Be Reversed

Gizmodo: Don’t Buy Anyone an Amazon Echo Speaker

Adam Clark Estes, writing for Gizmodo: Three years ago, we said the Echo was “the most innovative device Amazon’s made in years.” That’s still true. But you shouldn’t buy one. You shouldn’t buy one for your family. Your family members do not need an Amazon Echo or a Google Home or an AppleHomePod or whatever that one smart speaker that uses Cortana is called. And you don’t either. You only want one because every single gadget-slinger on the planet is marketing them to you as an all-new, life-changing device that could turn your kitchen into a futuristic voice-controlled paradise. You probably think that having an always-on microphone in your home is fine, and furthermore, tech companies only record and store snippets of your most intimate conversations. No big deal, you tell yourself. Actually, it is a big deal. The newfound privacy conundrum presented by installing a device that can literally listen to everything you’re saying represents a chilling new development in the age of internet-connected things. By buying a smart speaker, you’re effectively paying money to let a huge tech company surveil you. And I don’t mean to sound overly cynical about this, either. Amazon, Google, Apple, and others say that their devices aren’t spying on unsuspecting families. The only problem is that these gadgets are both hackable and prone to bugs. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Gizmodo: Don’t Buy Anyone an Amazon Echo Speaker

Voyager 1 Fires Up Thrusters After 37 Years

If you tried to start a car that’s been sitting in a garage for decades, you might not expect the engine to respond. But a set of thrusters aboard the Voyager 1 spacecraft successfully fired up Wednesday after 37 years without use. NASA announces: Voyager 1, NASA’s farthest and fastest spacecraft, is the only human-made object in interstellar space, the environment between the stars. The spacecraft, which has been flying for 40 years, relies on small devices called thrusters to orient itself so it can communicate with Earth. These thrusters fire in tiny pulses, or “puffs, ” lasting mere milliseconds, to subtly rotate the spacecraft so that its antenna points at our planet. Now, the Voyager team is able to use a set of four backup thrusters, dormant since 1980. “With these thrusters that are still functional after 37 years without use, we will be able to extend the life of the Voyager 1 spacecraft by two to three years, ” said Suzanne Dodd, project manager for Voyager at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Voyager 1 Fires Up Thrusters After 37 Years

Two Technologists Create Black Metal Album Using An AI

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Outline: Coditany of Timeness” is a convincing lo-fi black metal album, complete with atmospheric interludes, tremolo guitar, frantic blast beats and screeching vocals. But the record, which you can listen to on Bandcamp, wasn’t created by musicians. Instead, it was generated by two musical technologists using a deep learning software that ingests a musical album, processes it, and spits out an imitation of its style. To create Coditany, the software broke “Diotima, ” a 2011 album by a New York black metal band called Krallice, into small segments of audio. Then they fed each segment through a neural network — a type of artificial intelligence modeled loosely on a biological brain — and asked it to guess what the waveform of the next individual sample of audio would be. If the guess was right, the network would strengthen the paths of the neural network that led to the correct answer, similar to the way electrical connections between neurons in our brain strengthen as we learn new skills. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Two Technologists Create Black Metal Album Using An AI

Physicists Made An Unprecedented 53 Qubit Quantum Simulator

Two teams of researchers have published papers [1, 2] in the journal Nature detailing how they were able to create unprecedented quantum simulators consisting of over 50 qubits. The University of Maryland team and National Institute of Standards and Technology team — the two teams behind one of the two new papers — were able to create a quantum simulator with 53 qubits. Motherboard reports: Quantum simulators are a special type of quantum computer that uses qubits to simulate complex interactions between particles. Qubits are the informational medium of quantum computers, analogous to a bit in an ordinary computer. Yet rather than existing as a 1 or 0, as is the case in a conventional bit, a qubit can exist in some superposition of both of these states at the same time. For the Maryland experiment, each of the qubits was a laser cooled ytterbium ion. Each ion had the same electrical charge, so they repelled one another when placed in close proximity. The system created by Monroe and his colleagues used an electric field to force the repelled ions into neat rows. At this point, lasers are used to manipulate all the ytterbium qubits into the same initial state. Then another set of lasers is used to manipulate the qubits so that they act like atomic magnets, where each ion has a north and south pole. The qubits either orient themselves with their neighboring ions to form a ferromagnet, where their magnetic fields are aligned, or at random. By changing the strength of the laser beams that are manipulating the qubits, the researchers are able to program them to a desired state (in terms of magnetic alignment). According to Zhexuan Gong, a physicist at the University of Maryland, the 53 qubits can be used to simulate over a quadrillion different magnetic configurations of the qubits, a number that doubles with each additional qubit added to the array. As these types of quantum simulators keep adding more qubits into the mix, they will be able to simulate ever more complex atomic interactions that are far beyond the capabilities of conventional supercomputers and usher in a new era of physics research. Another team from Harvard and Maryland also released a paper today in which it demonstrated a quantum simulator using 51 qubits. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Physicists Made An Unprecedented 53 Qubit Quantum Simulator

DNA Analysis Finds That Yetis Are Actually Bears

schwit1 shares a report from Popular Science: University of Buffalo biologist Charlotte Lindqvist and her international team in Pakistan and Singapore provided the first strong evidence that presumed yetis are actually bears. They published their results in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B on Tuesday. Icon Film secured nine samples that purported to be genuine yeti artifacts, and Lindqvist gathered 15 samples from known bear populations. By sequencing mitochondria from all these sources, she and her fellow researchers were able to determine that all but one of the yeti artifacts actually came from local bears. That last sample was from a dog. They also figured out that Himalayan brown bears split off from the rest of the regional bear population several thousand years ago, which is why they’re so genetically distinct from most other brown bears. Living in geographic isolation for so long has separated them from other Asian brown bears, and even from their relatives on the nearby Tibetan plateau. They even look different. But prior to Lindqvist’s work, it wasn’t clear just how long Himalayan bears had been on their own. Researchers will need higher-quality samples to figure out the whole picture, but even this small step is major for a species that’s hardly been studied. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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DNA Analysis Finds That Yetis Are Actually Bears

Researchers Identify 44 Trackers in More Than 300 Android Apps

Catalin Cimpanu, reporting for BleepingComputer: A collaborative effort between the Yale Privacy Lab and Exodus Privacy has shed light on dozens of invasive trackers that are embedded within Android apps and record user activity, sometimes without user consent. The results of this study come to show that the practice of collecting user data via third-party tracking code has become rampant among Android app developers and is now on par with what’s happening on most of today’s popular websites. The two investigative teams found tracking scripts not only in lesser known Android applications, where one might expect app developers to use such practices to monetize their small userbases, but also inside highly popular apps — such as Uber, Twitter, Tinder, Soundcloud, or Spotify. The Yale and Exodus investigation resulted in the creation of a dedicated website that now lists all apps using tracking code and a list of trackers, used by these apps. In total, researchers said they identified 44 trackers embedded in over 300 Android apps. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Researchers Identify 44 Trackers in More Than 300 Android Apps

Linux Pioneer Munich Confirms Switch To Windows 10

The German city of Munich, once seen as a open-source pioneer, has decided to return to Windows. Windows 10 will be rolled out to about 29, 000 PCs at the city council, a major shift for an authority that has been running Linux for more than a decade. From a report: Back in 2003 the council decided to to switch to a Linux-based desktop, which came to be known as LiMux, and other open-source software, despite heavy lobbying by Microsoft. But now Munich will begin rolling out a Windows 10 client from 2020, at a cost of about Euro 50m ($59.6m), with a view to Windows replacing LiMux across the council by early 2023. Politicians who supported the move at a meeting of the full council today say using Windows 10 will make it easier to source compatible applications and hardware drivers than it has been using a Linux-based OS, and will also reduce costs associated with running Windows and LiMux PCs side-by-side. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Linux Pioneer Munich Confirms Switch To Windows 10

Yesterday Americans Spent $5 Billion Online

An anonymous reader quotes CNN Money: Black Friday 2017 was all about digital sales. American shoppers spent a record $5 billion in 24 hours. That marks a 16.9% increase in dollars spent online compared with Black Friday 2016, according to data from Adobe Digital Insights, which tracks 80% of online spending at America’s 100 largest retail websites… Meanwhile, malls and big-box retailers were left only slightly emptier. Early estimates from ShopperTrak, a data analytics company that measures the number of shoppers at stores, said foot traffic “decreased less than one percent when compared to Black Friday 2016.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Devs Working To Stop Go Math Error Bugging Crypto Software

Richard Chirgwin, writing for The Register: Consider this an item for the watch-list, rather than a reason to hit the panic button: a math error in the Go language could potentially affect cryptographic libraries. Security researcher Guido Vranken (who earlier this year fuzzed up some bugs in OpenVPN) found an exponentiation error in the Go math/big package. Big numbers — particularly big primes — are the foundation of cryptography. Vranken posted to the oss-sec mailing list that he found the potential issue during testing of a fuzzer he wrote that “compares the results of mathematical operations (addition, subtraction, multiplication, …) across multiple bignum libraries.” Vranken and Go developer Russ Cox agreed that the bug needs specific conditions to be manifest: “it only affects the case e = 1 with m != nil and a pre-allocated non-zero receiver.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Devs Working To Stop Go Math Error Bugging Crypto Software