Tag: science

Australian researchers developed a blood test for Parkinson’s

By the time Parkinson’s disease makes itself known in humans, it’s already too late for treatment. But La Trobe University in Australia has developed a test that detects a biomarker present in blood cells in folks with the disease. The school describes the test as a means of detecting problems within cell mitochondria that cause an energy-and-stress-sensing protein, dubbed AMPK, to permanently activate and start damaging cells. The research is being bankrolled in part by Parkinson’s perhaps highest-profile patient, Michael J. Fox. Well, his foundation dedicated to further research on the debilitating malady , that is. The downside is that even with Fox’s Foundation for Parkinson’s Research and the Shake It Up Australia Foundation’s $640, 000 grant to La Trobe, more money is still needed for the test to be ready for the public. And beyond that, it’d still take five years to hit the market with additional funding. For now, the school is increasing the amount of testing it’s doing, going from a group of 38 people to 70. According to The Guardian , the ultimate goal is to do a longitudinal study with “thousands” of people in their 40s prior to them being at risk for the disease and before they start showing physical symptoms. From there, the researchers could test beyond Parkinson’s and see if the same method could be used to diagnose other neurological disorders, like Alzheimer’s, as well. Via: Popular Science Source: La Trobe University

More:
Australian researchers developed a blood test for Parkinson’s

‘Hearthstone’ update brings drastic changes to the card game

Hearthstone is undergoing some changes in the interest of keeping the digital-trading-card game fresh. But in introducing the “Whispers of the Old Gods” — expansion out on the 26th — developer Blizzard is tweaking a bunch of cards and, based on the 5, 000-plus comment Reddit thread , this isn’t exactly for the better. Fan favorite cards like Molten Giant have gotten a casting cost increase up to 25 from 20, while the Knife Juggler card has had its attack decreased by a point. Polygon breaks the changes down on a card-by-card basis incredibly well. Blizzard says that “careful consideration” went into these choices, and that it was based on both the company’s own ideas and checking out community feedback. So, chances are that the developer is listening to what you have to say regarding the new expansion. Just remember to keep polite when airing your thoughts, okay? You can grab the expansion from the in-game store across all platforms next Tuesday. Via: Polygon Source: Blizzard (1) , (2)

Link:
‘Hearthstone’ update brings drastic changes to the card game

Scientists Made LEDs 60 Percent Brighter By Copying Firefly Lanterns

A team of researchers has managed to boost the amount of light an LED emits by 60 percent simply by etching its outer surface to resemble the outside of a firefly’s lantern. Read more…

Read more here:
Scientists Made LEDs 60 Percent Brighter By Copying Firefly Lanterns

San Francisco mandates rooftop solar panels starting in 2017

San Francisco has been pushing toward 100 percent of its energy to come from renewable resources for a while now. And to further that, the city recently passed legislation that would require new construction to install solar panels on building roofs — an extension of existing legislation that stated 15 percent of a rooftop be reserved for solar use. The city says this is the first mandate of its kind, and that new buildings 10-stories tall or shorter will have to install photovoltaic panels or solar water heaters. The law won’t go into effect until January 1st next year. However, this could just be seen as political grandstanding. The number of sub-10-floor buildings going up in San Francisco is pretty low, especially in terms of residential construction. More than that, buildings are already up against strong opposition from residents for blocking sunlight, so having anything blocking power sources could cause similar situations. We’ve reached out to the San Francisco Planning Department and the city’s Department of Building Inspection for comment and will update this post should either respond. Via: Business Insider Source: Scott Weiner (Medium)

More:
San Francisco mandates rooftop solar panels starting in 2017

Lab Mice Are Freezing Their Asses Off—and That’s Screwing Up Science

Most science labs maintain a temperature far below levels preferred by mice, and it’s taking a toll on their health. New research suggests these chilly mice are skewing science results across a wide range of research areas—and the problem is far worse than anyone realized. Read more…

See original article:
Lab Mice Are Freezing Their Asses Off—and That’s Screwing Up Science

‘World of Warcraft’ keeps growing with ‘Legion’ in August

Blizzard will launch World of Warcraft ‘s sixth expansion, Legion , on August 30th, unleashing hordes of hellish beasts and fresh quests into the game world. Legion adds the Demon Hunter hero class, customizable artifact weapons and a new continent called the Broken Isles, among other updates. Pre-orders are live now in two flavors: the $50 Standard Edition or the $70 Digital Deluxe Edition, which includes an adorable demon dog as a pet, the Illidari Felstalker mount, and in-game goodies for Heroes of the Storm , StarCraft 2 and Diablo 3 (all of which are Blizzard properties as well). Pre-ordering the Standard or Digital Deluxe versions of Legion grants players the ability to boost one character up to level 100 and early access to the Demon Hunter class. Plus, there’s one more way to give Blizzard your money: The $90 Collector’s Edition includes everything from the Digital Deluxe version plus a hardcover art book, a two-disc behind-the-scenes Blu-ray / DVD set, a CD soundtrack and a Legion mousepad. This bundle will be available at retail only. World of Warcraft is an MMO that debuted in 2004 and quickly evolved into one of the most popular video games in the world. It hit a player-count high in 2010 with 12 million subscribers, but that number fell to 10 million in 2014 and finally 5.5 million in September 2015. That’s still millions of players, but the decline has fueled whispers of WoW ‘s demise — something that Blizzard will surely try to silence with Legion . Starting in 2016, Blizzard will no longer report subscriber numbers for World of Warcraft , so we’ll have to rely on gut feelings going forward. Source: BusinessWire

More here:
‘World of Warcraft’ keeps growing with ‘Legion’ in August

Hacker’s Account of How He Took Down Hacking Team’s Servers

An anonymous reader writes: FinFisher, the hacker that broke into Italian firm Hacking Team, has published a step-by-step account of how he carried out the attacks, what tools he used, and what he learned from scouting HackingTeam’s network. Published on PasteBin, the attack’s timeline reveals he entered their network through a zero-day exploit in an (unnamed) embedded device, accessed a MongoDB database that had no password, discovered backups in the database, found a BES admin password in the backups, and eventually got admin access to the Windows Domain Server. From here, it was easy to reach into their email server and steal all the company’s emails, and later access Git repos and steal the source code of their surveillance software. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Taken from:
Hacker’s Account of How He Took Down Hacking Team’s Servers

Scientists Build Smallest, Single Atom, Working Heat Engine

William Herkewitz, writing for Popular Mechanics: Physicists have just built the smallest working engine ever created. It’s a heat-powered motor barely larger than the single atom it runs on. Designed and build by a team of experimental physicists led by Johannes at the University of Mainz in Germany, the single atom engine is about as efficient as your car at transforming the changing temperature into mechanical energy. While scientists have previously created several micro-engines consisting of a mere 10, 000 particles, Johannes’s new engine blows these out of the water by paring down the machine to a singular atom housed in a nano-sized cone of electromagnetic radiation. The project is outlined today in the journal Science. “The engine has the same working principles as the well-known [combustion] car engine, ” Johannes says. It follows the same four strokes; expanding then cooling, contracting then heating.There’s some confusion here. The article says it’s a “four-stroke” engine. But as we know, a four-stroke engine consists of an intake stroke, a compression stroke, a power stroke, and an exhaust stroke — things that the engine in the article doesn’t seem to have. The article doesn’t mention how a single atom is able to mimic all the effects of a combustion engine. Update: 04/15 18:24 GMT by M :The article appears to have been updated for clarification. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

More:
Scientists Build Smallest, Single Atom, Working Heat Engine

Man Deletes His Entire Company With One Line of Bad Code

Reader JustAnotherOldGuy writes: Marco Marsala appears to have deleted his entire company with one mistaken piece of code. By accidentally telling his computer to delete everything in his servers, the hosting provider has seemingly removed all trace of his company and the websites that he looks after for his customers. Marsala wrote on a Centos help forum, “I run a small hosting provider with more or less 1535 customers and I use Ansible to automate some operations to be run on all servers. Last night I accidentally ran, on all servers, a Bash script with a rm -rf foo/bar with those variables undefined due to a bug in the code above this line. All servers got deleted and the offsite backups too because the remote storage was mounted just before by the same script (that is a backup maintenance script).” The terse “rm -rf” is so famously destructive that it has become a joke within some computing circles, but not to this guy. Can this example finally serve as a textbook example of why you need to make offsite backups that are physically removed from the systems you’re archiving?”Rm -rf” would mark the block as empty, and unless the programmer hasn’t written anything new, he should be able to recover nearly all of the data. Something about the story feels weird. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Original post:
Man Deletes His Entire Company With One Line of Bad Code