Tag: privacy-rights

Marijuana exposure in utero has lifelong consequences

A newborn mouse. (credit: Credit: Wikimedia Commons ) As marijuana is legalized in more states, questions about its safety and the health consequences of cannabis use are becoming mainstream. A new study published in PNAS finds that use of cannabis by pregnant women can have implications for the neural development of her child, and that some of the consequences continue into adulthood, So, like alcohol, another recreational drug that is legal in the US, marijuana is likely best avoided by pregnant women. The most prominent active ingredient in marijuana is a compound known as THC, which interacts with the naturally occurring cannabinoid receptors in the nervous system. Cannabinoid receptors are known to play an important role in the regulation of brain development, and this paper examines the influence of a prenatal THC exposure on the maturation of pathways regulated by these receptors. The study examined prenatal cannabis consumption in mice, with the aim of identifying the mechanisms responsible for cannabis-related changes in brain function. During the study, pregnant mice were exposed to daily injections of THC or injections of a control liquid. Then the offspring were run through a battery of behavioral tests. The animals’ brains were also examined closely using immunoflouresence and confocal microscopy. Embryonic brain tissue from some litters was also collected and checked for irregularities. Read 5 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Marijuana exposure in utero has lifelong consequences

Scientists grow functional kidney organoid from stem cells

A drawing shows the complex structure of a kidney. (credit: Wikimedia commons ) There are many diseases that attack specific organs, landing patients on a transplant list. Unfortunately, our bodies have markers that identify an organ as “self,” which makes it difficult to find an organ match. Many individuals die waiting for an organ transplant because a match can’t be found. Research on stem cells—a type of cell that is able to transform into nearly any cell type—has raised hopes of treating organ failure. Researchers envision using these cells to grow fully functional organs. A functional organ is similar to a machine. Organs contain many interacting parts that must be positioned in a specific configuration to work properly. Getting all the right cell types in the appropriate locations is a real challenge. Recently, a team of scientists has met that challenge by using stem cells to grow a tissue, termed an organoid, that resembles a developing kidney. Read 8 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Scientists grow functional kidney organoid from stem cells

Cage against the EMP: New composite cases protect against the electro-apocalypse

A Faraday Cases travel case, configured to keep communications gear safe in transit from unfriendly electromagnetism. 2 more images in gallery WASHINGTON, DC—A small company from Utah has developed a composite material that combines carbon fibers with a nickel coating. The result is an extremely lightweight electric-conducting material with the properties of plastic. And now that material is being used to create cases and computer enclosures that are essentially lightweight Faraday cages—containing electromagnetic radiation from digital devices and shielding them from electronic eavesdropping or electromagnetic pulse attacks. Ars got a brief hands-on with some of the materials at the Association of the United States Army expo this week. The company, Conductive Composites , is now selling cases built with the Nickel Chemical Vapor Deposition (NiCVD) composite material through its Faraday Cases division . The cases range in size from suitcase-sized units for carrying smaller digital devices to wheeled portable enclosures that can house servers—providing what is essentially an EMP-shielded portable data center. The cases and enclosures are being marketed not just to the military but to consumers, corporations, and first responders as well. The materials used in Faraday Cases can also be used to create ultra-lightweight antennas, satellite communications reflector dishes, and hundreds of other things that currently need to be made with conductive metal. And they could be a boon to anyone trying to prevent electronic eavesdropping—be it through active wireless bugs, radio retroreflectors used by nation-state intelligence agencies, or passive surveillance through anything from Wi-FI hacking to electromagnetic signals leaking from computer cables and monitors. And in some cases, they could make it possible to create the kind of secure spaces used by government agencies to prevent eavesdropping nearly anywhere. Read 9 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Cage against the EMP: New composite cases protect against the electro-apocalypse

How Soviets used IBM Selectric keyloggers to spy on US diplomats

(credit: Etan J. Tal ) A National Security Agency memo that recently resurfaced a few years after it was first published contains a detailed analysis of what very possibly was the world’s first keylogger—a 1970s bug that Soviet spies implanted in US diplomats’ IBM Selectric typewriters to monitor classified letters and memos. The electromechanical implants were nothing short of an engineering marvel. The highly miniaturized series of circuits were stuffed into a metal bar that ran the length of the typewriter, making them invisible to the naked eye. The implant, which could only be seen using X-ray equipment, recorded the precise location of the little ball Selectric typewriters used to imprint a character on paper. With the exception of spaces, tabs, hyphens, and backspaces, the tiny devices had the ability to record every key press and transmit it back to Soviet spies in real time. A “lucrative source of information” The Soviet implants were discovered through the painstaking analysis of more than 10 tons’ worth of equipment seized from US embassies and consulates and shipped back to the US. The implants were ultimately found inside 16 typewriters used from 1976 to 1984 at the US embassy in Moscow and the US consulate in Leningrad. The bugs went undetected for the entire eight-year span and only came to light following a tip from a US ally whose own embassy was the target of a similar eavesdropping operation. Read 7 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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How Soviets used IBM Selectric keyloggers to spy on US diplomats

Webflow’s “first visual CMS” is like WordPress mixed with Photoshop

A demo video showing off Webflow CMS. Web design tools like Webflow have done a lot to thin the line between designers and developers. Now, however, the birthed-by-Y-Combinator startup wants to take it further with what it describes as the world’s first visual content management system (CMS). There’s not much to it right now. In a nutshell, Webflow CMS is a barebones WordPress installation jammed into a Photoshop-like interface. The idea here is to provide a way to create “completely custom websites powered by dynamic content” without any knowledge of HTML, CSS, PHP, or databases. And to an extent, it works. The Webflow CMS allows users to create or use pre-existing “Collections”—templates for dynamic content types. From there, you can then determine the kind of fields associated with the Collection, such as whether they’re mandatory to be completed, if they’re to be linked to another Collection, and what kind of minimum word counts are to be expected. These criteria are universal for any instance of the Collection. All Blog Posts, for example, will draw from the parent Blog Posts Collection. Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Webflow’s “first visual CMS” is like WordPress mixed with Photoshop

Sprint continues decline, plans job cuts and cost cuts of $2.5 billion

(credit: Sprint) Sprint’s place among the big four US wireless carriers continues to be a precarious one, with news reports saying the company now aims to reduce its number of employees and cut between $2 billion and $2.5 billion in costs over the next six months. A memo from Sprint management to staff said there will be a hiring freeze and “job reductions,” according to   The Wall Street Journal . Sprint announced days ago that it will skip a major auction of low-band spectrum, a decision that could push the company further behind its rivals. Sprint has licenses to more spectrum than any other carrier, but AT&T and Verizon control a large majority of low-band spectrum, which is ideal for providing coverage over long distances and indoors. T-Mobile says it intends to buy enough low-band spectrum to cover the entire nation; Sprint says it can improve coverage with its existing spectrum by increasing the number of cell towers. Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Sprint continues decline, plans job cuts and cost cuts of $2.5 billion

Utility-scale solar costs down by half in last five years alone

Earlier this week, Lawrence Berkeley National Labs released a report on the state of utility-scale solar installations in the US. Just about everything in the report is remarkable for anyone who’s followed the solar market closely. Over the past five years, prices have dropped by half, while the capacity factors are approaching that of wind. As a result, the most recent installations are offering power at prices that are competitive with natural gas—not the cost of the plant and fuel, but the fuel alone. In 2014, utility-scale solar projects added about 4GW of capacity to the US grid. Slightly more than 6GW of solar capacity was added in total, with the remainder split between commercial and residential installs. Due to the rapid drop in prices, the majority of this capacity is in the form of photovoltaic panels. One of the issues with utility-scale solar has been that some of the earlier plants were built outside the Southwest. This has meant less overall generation and a lower capacity factor, meaning that the panels are only producing power at a fraction of their maximal rate. Both of these raise the cost of the electricity generated. But installations in the Southwest have boomed to over 90 percent of the total installed hardware. This has capacity factors up and costs down. More recently, large projects have been getting more popular in the Southeast, which may change this dynamic in the future. Read 5 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Utility-scale solar costs down by half in last five years alone

Sprint offers $2.1 billion to acquire the rest of Clearwire

As most observers  expected , Sprint has finally made a formal offer to acquire the rest of Clearwire. On Thursday, Sprint said it would pay $2.1 billion for the remaining 49.7 percent of Clearwire that it does not currently control. As we reported yesterday , the move is widely seen as a play for Sprint to acquire Clearwire’s valuable 2.5 GHz spectrum, which it would use to offer LTE and strengthen its position against Verizon and AT&T. The bid works out to $2.90 per share—higher than the company’s closing price on Wednesday—but analysts say the offer may not be good enough. Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Sprint offers $2.1 billion to acquire the rest of Clearwire

Los Angeles schools reach $6.4 million settlement with Apple, Lenovo

(credit: Brad Flickinger ) Last week, the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) reached a settlement with Apple and Lenovo over a conflict involving software from curriculum provider Pearson. Although the conflict involves Pearson and LAUSD primarily, the curriculum provider was a subcontractor under Apple and Lenovo, so the settlement is between the hardware companies and LAUSD, the Los Angeles Times reports . Apple has agreed to pay LAUSD $4.2 million for the Pearson curriculum, and Lenovo, which also charged the school district for Pearson curriculum, will give the school district $2.2 million in credit for its purchase of laptops. Last year, LAUSD halted the $1.3 billion project to give every student in the massive district an iPad loaded with Pearson’s educational material. The about-face was announced after the Los Angeles Times reported that there had been improprieties in the bidding process for the contract with the school district. In December, the FBI opened an investigation into the iPad program and seized 20 boxes of documents from the LAUSD, just as the school district’s superintendent resigned. Four months later, LAUSD said it would no longer accept shipments of Pearson’s curriculum, and it added that it wanted a “multi-million dollar refund” for copies of Pearson’s software that had already been delivered. Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Los Angeles schools reach $6.4 million settlement with Apple, Lenovo

iOS 9’s space-saving “app slicing” disabled for now, will return in future update

Enlarge / Apple’s sample universal binary here is just 60 percent of its original size when downloaded to an iPad or iPhone. (credit: Andrew Cunningham) Back in June, we wrote a bit about App Thinning , a collection of iOS 9 features that are supposed to make iOS 9 apps take up less space on iDevices. Apple has just announced to developers that one of those features, “app slicing,” is not available in current iOS 9 versions due to an iCloud bug. It will be re-enabled in a future iOS update after the bug has been resolved. App slicing ensures that your iDevice only downloads the app assets it needs to work. In older versions of iOS, all devices downloaded “universal” versions of apps that included all of the assets those apps needed to work on each and every targeted iDevice. If you downloaded an app to your iPhone 5, for example, it could include larger image assets made for the larger-screened iPhones 6 and 6 Plus, 64-bit code that its 32-bit processor couldn’t use, and Metal graphics code that its GPU didn’t support. That’s all wasted space, a problem app slicing was designed to resolve. Apple says the iCloud bug affects users who are restoring backups to new devices—if you moved from that iPhone 5 to a new iPhone 6S, for example, iCloud would restore iPhone 5-compatible versions of some apps without the assets required by the newer, larger device. Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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iOS 9’s space-saving “app slicing” disabled for now, will return in future update